Work Text:
There is a history between dwarves and elves. It consists of skullduggery and betrayal of various orders, the lust for gold and its subsequent disappearance, bargains brokered and broken, battles recorded as “ambushes” in the chronicles, and vice versa.
History is specific — this particular house of dwarves, that one grouping of elves — and yet its effects manifest broadly. Wholesale distrust and estrangement. And this is all very normal, and everyone knows about it, and a few lament it, though fewer truly care.
But there is still no reason, no reason at all, why one might not sample from the native wares and have a brief tumble when one is on holiday. Even if one is summering with the enemy. And after all, he is the grandson of the mountain-king, not just any dwarf.
These are retrospective justifications of a sudden-born whim, but Thranduil, the Elvenking of the Greenwood, is fully satisfied with them.
It will be easy work, for while the dwarves are surrounded by all that glitters under solid rock, they still lack another kind of polish. Call it style, perhaps. It can dazzle as easily as gold plate and is far less easy to obtain. Thranduil has it, and holds it like a knife.
*
The Elvenking wears flowers in his hair instead of a crown. Real flowers, you can tell, though how they do not fade, Thorin knows not.
And cares not, he tells Balin, but even so he knows a shut mouth would prove that better. But Balin simply grunts and reminds him to be civil at the feast, as if Thorin has ever once needed to be told his duty.
However prepared he may be to say “my lord” and answer insipid questions about what mining is, he is not prepared for the weight of the Elvenking’s gaze, which rests on him throughout the feast and all the merry-making that follows. Not ostentatiously, or without interruption — the Elvenking looks upon those with whom he speaks, and nods with courtesy, and seems to listen attentively, so much so that Balin will tell him, later, to model his own conduct more closely on that of their guest.
But in the gaps and holes, the rests that make up one-half of discourse, the Elvenking’s eyes travel to Thorin as if guided by lodestone.
It is a gaze that laughs at Thorin, and at all dwarves, and their fabled pomp and splendour. The king’s mouth is as straight as a sapling, but the eyes are alight with it, with mocking.
And yet they mock their owner too, Thorin thinks. For the gaze is frankly appreciative, and takes in all of him. He feels it move, like a bright light, over the solidity of his arms. It brushes over his lips in exploration. It unbuckles and unlaces, and probes.
Thorin’s words shuffle off into monotone, one-word responses and noncommittal grunts. Balin will scold him for unbecoming hostility, but will try to shield him from Thrain’s disgust at it, and never mention who put him up to his lecturing.
But hostility is Thorin’s best screen tonight for the discomfort that wants to make itself known — in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders, and in the unfortunate traitor-tightness of his breeches.
*
Thranduil sets a trap, as hunters do. He is not too modest to concede that he himself is the bait.
He absents himself from merry-making early one night — a sacrifice, but needs must — and loiters in the likeliest corridor for a young dwarf-prince to brood in. He’s been careful to notice movements, to distinguish footsteps.
When he hears the right ones approaching, he puts his face the way he wants it – pensive, downcast eyes, perhaps thinking of home. The dwarf-prince covers his clear interest with scowls and glares; Thranduil’s best road can only be to present him with vulnerability and dare him to scorn it.
“My lord?” he hears, and his eyes snap up to lock onto those of his quarry, dark within dark.
“Oh, I am sorry,” Thranduil says, affecting to be startled. “I didn’t hear your approach.” As if he could not have discerned a dwarf’s breathing at a mile’s distance.
“Seems unlikely,” Thorin grunts, and Thranduil silently applauds him for not being a total rustic.
“I am much abstracted. You must forgive me,” Thranduil says, quietly, and turns to go.
A pause, and: “Are you quite well, my lord?” Thorin asks. Thranduil, not turning yet, smiles in self-congratulation, just for a moment. It is over, and he has won.
He turns. “I wish that you would call me by my name,” he murmurs. “It would ease my loneliness to hear it.”
Thorin blushes like a boy behind his beard, and does not meet his eyes. By the Valar, Thranduil muses. A blusher. An image arises behind his eyes of larger expanses of flushed skin, rising and falling under his fingertips.
When he does not reply, Thranduil prompts again: “Or would you scorn my company, Thorin son of Thrain?”
When Thorin looks up, Thranduil can tell, with immediacy, that Thorin knows exactly what his “company” entails. But he meets his eyes boldly, and says, “If it falls to me to entertain our honoured guest, I cannot deny the obligation, my lord Thranduil.”
Wordless, he leads the way.
*
“The obligation,” Thranduil hisses, his nails raking down Thorin’s bare thighs, too much and not enough, as Thorin clenches his toes and tries to stay quiet.
“I must thank my honoured dwarven-princeling,” he breaks off to lick a stripe up Thorin’s rigid cock, “and my gracious host,” he licks again, hot and wet, “for the great courtesy he has shown in entertaining me.” And Thranduil closes his lips tight around Thorin’s head, and Thorin bucks up involuntarily, an arm thrown over his face to hide from the onslaught, from Thranduil’s burning, mocking gaze as he brings more and more of Thorin inside him and hums lustily against his very flesh.
Thorin is still trying to maneuver for leverage in an unequal negotiation. He wanted to affect indifference, but he has been steadily betrayed this day by his body, which has swelled and hardened under Thranduil’s relentless ambush and now moves without will or intent under his unbearable skill. But perhaps he can remain quiet, never make a sound, he thinks, irrationally, as if the sheets fisted in Thorin’s grip do not tell their own tale, nor the red flush of blood that Thranduil has called forth, nor the legs that curl around Thranduil’s body and try to pull him, urgently, into greater contact.
Thranduil raises his head and, paradoxically, Thorin comes closest to crying out when the Elvenking’s mouth is removed from Thorin’s straining cock. A string of saliva still connects them, and Thranduil’s lips are reddened and debauched, but his kingly assurance has not wavered.
“But tell me, Thorin,” he says, smiling archly, “are you not also entertained?”
It’s a deliberate provocation, and Thorin knows how he is expected to respond, and what Thranduil desires him to do, but that does not make the satisfaction less when he seizes the slender Elvenking in his smelter’s arms and throws him savagely back against the cushions. He storms towards the set of drawers to retrieve a pot of oil kept in the bottommost one, kept apart for darker purposes than his everyday possessions.
He slicks his hand, and Thranduil looks at him, and laughs with his eyes, and his mouth, and his body entire, laughs and laughs until he is entered, first by fingers and presently by cock, and then he still laughs his pleasure, shivers with it from head to foot. And Thorin, forgetting his resolution to be silent, growls his guttural moans, rocking himself deep into Thranduil’s delicate tight arse, attempting to cover a laughter that cannot cease until it has surfeited and had its fill from him.
*
Thorin may be a bit of rough, chosen to stave off boredom, but he is noble enough to warrant certain considerations, and Thranduil is not quick to leave Thorin’s chamber after the fun is over, lest it seem an insult. Not the first night, nor the subsequent ones they spend together, for their performance is repeated quite regularly. It is better to stay and sleep a while, and creep away with the dawn.
For the first few nights Thorin maintains an embarrassed silence for the minutes it takes him to fall asleep. Eventually, though, he works up to asking, “How do you sleep with your eyes closed? I thought you were dead this morning, checked you were still breathing.” The question heartily amuses Thranduil, as few things do not. He does not have an intelligent answer to the question, however.
He is better at answering questions about the Greenwood. Thorin is surprised to hear that his palace is underground, a network of caves. “I thought elves preferred to frolic in the sunlight, and to sleep in trees.”
“They do, I suppose,” Thranduil replies. “And that is how the bulk of my people live. But it is my duty to maintain a fortress in case of war, so the king gets locked up under the earth for the good of all.”
“Not that different than here, then.”
“Just as I was thinking,” Thranduil says, running a finger across the braids in Thorin’s beard. They are capped, and he enjoys touching where soft dark hair meets cold metal.
“Wood-elves,” Thranduil continues, “aren’t quite so fond of the light as you might think. We are creatures of the gloaming. At our best beneath the stars, and in dark places.”
Thorin nods, thoughtfully.
“All summer my people will make merry in the wood, from twilight to dawn,” Thranduil says, a bit absently, “and sleep through the heat of the sun.”
“An idle life.”
“We weren’t all born to create.” Thranduil tugs on a braid, not over-gently. “Some build, some enjoy.”
“Is there not more to existence than mere enjoyment?”
“If so, I have not yet found it out,” Thranduil says. “I came to Erebor to effect treaties and trade, and yet look at how efficient I have been in finding some pleasure for myself.”
Thorin grunts, but blushes.
“I suppose I should have maintained a single-minded focus on my business, and left the dwarven-princeling be,” Thranduil murmurs.
“Such folly,” Thorin agrees, and leans in to kiss him quiet.
*
The visit draws to its appointed close, and Thorin finds himself sorry at Thranduil’s departure — both the formal, ceremonious one that takes place at the gates of the Mountain, and the private one the night before, from which he can still feel the deep scratches down his back.
He is sorry, and a bit at loose ends, but there it is. Thranduil will likely be Elvenking all his life, barring accident — the benefit of a lover with immortality. Thorin has many such visits to expect: affairs of state and matters of trade by day, and Thorin’s bed by night, a pearlescent body splayed out willingly for him to worship and defile by turns.
Thorin pictures it often at his work, and feels himself able to wait.
Then the dragon came.
*
When the summons comes, Thranduil saddles his mount and calls his soldiers into ranks to investigate. The ink is not yet dry on the treaties he has signed with Thror that require such attention, after all.
But it is a dragon, and there is nothing for the elves of the Greenwood to do at Erebor but die valiantly in another race’s cause. Thranduil’s duty is clear. He marches his people home again, and they live, every one of them. That is how Thranduil defines success against such an enemy.
He remembers, occasionally, Thorin on that day, seen from a distance, beckoning to Thranduil on the hillside. He considers it an embarrassing moment, for both of them — Thorin’s frantic hope was touchingly silly, and Thranduil wishes they had been standing closer to each other. He would have told him to flee, to get to safety as quickly as possible, rather than all this posturing and trying for a heroic last stand.
His second-in-command had asked about the dwarf lord they’d seen gesturing to Thranduil, and whether they were friendly, and with a very slight blush of his own — honestly! He’s picked up bad habits — he’d denied anything but the briefest acquaintance. A holiday tumble or two is all very well, but there’s no need to advertise one’s indiscretions to the greater world.