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Escanor didn’t know why Merlin seemed to like… lying against him… on him… cuddling him.
Touching him—tracing him—he could understand in a way. Merlin had always been interested in how his body changed with the sun—it was a logical progression really… sometimes he thought she was trying to commit his every line and plane at every time to memory. Something that was as flattering as it was flustering
But cuddling him…
Don’t get him wrong, he utterly and fully loved the idea that she did—that she wanted to be… be close. To him. It was amazing and wonderful and just… just great!
But he didn’t understand… why she would enjoy it.
He wasn’t… the most comfortable person to lie against after all.
At night he was bones and little else. Sharp elbows and hips, ribs that you could count with ease from a distance… he’d tried many times in the past to bulk up—even just gain fat, but nothing. It was part of his cur… his magic that was, that he was like this.
But during the day—during the day he was all hard, unyielding muscle. Better than sharp bones jarring into you—better than stone but… certainly there were more comfortable positions…
It wasn’t like…
Look he knew Merlin cared for him. He did. She told him so and he trusted her.
And wanting to be close to someone you care about was normal. He got that.
But so often… so often he’d wake up to Merlin having come in after him, her sleeping body right up against his back.
Or if he’d been reading and she came to join, she would curl up into his side, or even bully him into moving his arms until she was on his lap.
Or if she was the one reading—on more than one occasion she had teasingly tapped him with her foot, or even pulled on his shirt with magic or her hand if she could reach as he passed by. Not demanding but offering, even asking him to join her. He rarely could refuse.
(There were also the times where she pinched… actually never mind about those.)
Last week even they had run out of chairs at the table they had been playing cards at and instead of retrieve one from a neighboring table she had just plopped down onto his lap like it was no big deal.
(He had completely lost track of which cards had been played—losing for the first time in quite a while—but he certainly couldn’t say he was upset by it…)
And he loved it. He loved every bit of it. The feel of her warm against him. The fact she wanted to be so close to him…
He just… didn’t get it.
But maybe… maybe he didn’t need to…
Merlin liked touching Escanor.
Which really shouldn’t be considered strange. He was for all intents and purposes her lover. Ban always had an arm at least over or around Elaine, King and Diane were a little less overt, but they more than enjoyed simple gestures and touch. Meliodas…
Well the less to be said about Meliodas and touch the better really.
And she certainly saw other lovers, walking hand in hand, or arm in arm, kissing briefly in hello and goodbyes on a daily basis in Liones or Camelot.
Really it’s nothing odd at all.
She traces him—it’s almost a fascination she admits—a fascination in how his body—always changing—was. As always she wanted to know everything—even something as simple as how he looked at any given time. It was something of a silly want—a silly goal, he changed in micro ways every minute. It would take years likely to engrave them all to memory—some of them, when he approached Noon would require quite a bit of protection to even think of doing so—and even then if she could keep that knowledge in her memory for long…
But, well… she had already assured she… they would have that time as much as that thought still sent shocks of… nerves?… She honestly didn’t know, through her system.
And if she kept forgetting well then… she would just have to remind herself.
(And she still liked tracing his form at night—even though she had long committed that most used form of his to memory… it was simply… comforting.)
But it wasn’t just tracing him that she enjoyed… it was everything. Every touch. Every brush of skin. She didn’t know what about it but… she craved it.
Was it his warmth? She couldn’t deny that she enjoyed it. It was different than normal body heat, warm but rarely overheating, gentle, like standing in sunbeams on a temperate day. If she had to pick a single word for Escanor, it would likely be warmth.
But that wasn’t it… not exactly. It was more than that.
Touching Escanor made her feel… feel…feel…
As frustrating as it was, all she could come up with any real surety was feel.
It made her feel.
What she felt though… warmth… joy… safety…
L-love even…
She wasn’t sure…
Not yet…
She was still… working on that. As much as she didn’t like to admit it she was out of her depths here. There was a lot she still didn’t understand.
Like why she… craved touching Escanor and him touching her so much.
Perhaps it was a benefit of relationships that she had missed out on before now. Something she had missed in her experiments she had done in trying to understand the value, the draw of relationships. Sex she understood. It was fun, it felt good, but everything else—the poems and the songs, the stories and the sanguine glimpse of other’s relationships she caught as an outsider looking in… she had never understood those. It had seemed… false… over-exaggerated.
At least… she hadn’t before.
Logically, she knew now, that it could very well be she sabotaged her own experiments. Not open enough, or willing enough to actually form such a bond before now… but as she watches Escanor laugh as he and Ban try to teach Diane how to play different card games, she wonders…
She wonders and she doubts that even if she had been open enough… if it would feel like this…
This almost…
Whatever it is.
She still didn’t know but…
Maybe it didn’t matter.
(She still wants to find out though.)