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It's a strange, strange thing to love a man.
There's a cup of tea in his hands, lukewarm and possibly bitter. The simmering heat from the day has cooled down likewise, the breeze soft in his hair, a languid moon hung high in the sky. He leans on the balustrade; the stone is chilled, and he feels the underside of his arms rapidly losing heat through the thin sleeves. He should have thrown on a robe. But the cold does not bother him (likely never will, again, after the Ice) and he likes the night air on his throat well enough to indulge in it for a while. The laces there are undone.
He knows, in fact, that the whole shirt is rumpled to the point where any effort to smooth it down will be useless - he idly wonders what the maids would have to say about it, should he throw it in the palace laundry bin. (They'd blame it to sparring, if anything. He shouldn't, anyways, it's unfair on the young ladies, and a practice he'd always admonished his soldiers for. Before.)
Rumpled, not removed, because though he may love, making it has been somewhat beyond his thoughts these days. The desire might return. But the edge of urgency, well, is something that he might never taste again, not in this lifetime, at least until the end of Arda comes and puts all ends to peaceful sleep. At least not now, not after Gondolin. Now it is enough to close his eyes, and open them again but half an hour later, to find arms around his waist and a solid weight at his back, warm breaths tingling the nape of his neck.
Enough. But not exactly pleasant, when he is trying to sleep, for Ulmo's sake.
And there he is again, nuzzling at his collarbone, a golden head bent over his shoulder - and humming an awful tune, to top it all off. Ecthelion chuckles and tilts his head slightly, pressing his ear against the man's skull, the sound muted to a bearable level. There's a floral scent about him (as always) and Ecthelion cannot quite put a name to it (which is unusual). But then Glorfindel wraps his arms lazily around him again, the palms resting on his stomach, and - Honestly? It reminds him all too much of innards ripped out. Still. He cranes his neck a bit more to land his lips somewhere over the mess of golden hair, and now Glorfindel's the one to laugh, the sound thrumming in the space between them.
"Nightmare?" Glorfindel asks, and worry sits under his tone like shattered glass, but Ecthelion takes a hand away from his cup to lay it above both of Glorfindel's. It surprises him, still, that these things do not offend him as they used to. He does not thank Namo, but his calm, shadow-loving brother... There are worse Valar than the lord of Lorien, after all.
"I needed some space. You weren't giving me any." He puts some force into his grip, delighting in the way Glorfindel's fingers squirm, and the man himself press tighter against his back. His answer lingers, neither yes nor no, because most nights he finds his dreams fairly difficult to distinguish. He adds, simply; "Bragollach. I was hitting that statue again."
They both remember the incident he speaks of. As do, no doubt, most of the former members of the Council. He had not exactly been discreet, and, it had been the first time he'd raised his voice at Turgon King. Also the first time he'd gone so close to sacrilege as to strike Manwe's cheekbone, albeit one made of unyielding stone.
The stone had won, in a manner of speaking. His knuckles were bruised for days.
"Huh. Did the statue come alive? They usually do, in my dreams," Glorfindel says lightly, gently. Ecthelion smiles, and thinks that Glorfindel must feel it, though he cannot possibly see it with the angle. There are worse things to dream about than living statues, and Glorfindel's dreams used to be far, far worse.
"No. But my limbs felt sluggish, as if I was moving through water, and it was hard to breathe. I didn't even manage to hit it that hard." And then he laughed, leaning back into Glorfindel. "That might have been you. Remind me why I keep you in my bed again?"
"'Cause I'm pretty and you like pretty things?"
Ecthelion sighs. "I need to replace you with a mirror. Jackass."
"Neh, you don't want to. Now come back to bed with me? It's cold without you."
When Glorfindel phrases it like that, he finds it hard to refuse. Not that he ever found it easy to refuse Glorfindel.
He wakes up the next morning with a horrible premonition. He reluctantly untangles himself from his lover, who mumbles a word or two in his sleep and goes back to snoring softly, and makes his way to the balcony. He groans.
There are shards of porcelain all over the floor.