“Try and escape now, orch-breath!” Elrohir chortled, throwing himself haphazardly across his brother’s back, pinning Elladan to the bed. “Your slow reflexes will be the end of you one day.”
“Indeed?” Elladan retorted, his tone quite smug for one in his admittedly weak position. “If my reactions are so sluggish, why is the sickly-sweet missive that you seek now in my possession rather than your own, hmm?”
A snicker of pure mirth burst past the elder twin’s lips. “Your voice is like the singing of birds, your eyes like the skies before a storm,” he quoted, his voice shaking with laughter. “Who...”
“If you must know,” Elrohir growled, his face coloring slightly, “’twas a maid friend of Arwen’s who wrote the thing. I could hardly throw it back at the youngling.”
“Robbing the nursery now, are you?” Elladan taunted, twisting and bucking in an effort to break his brother’s hold.
The teasing remark was lost on Elrohir, who was suddenly and viscerally aware of the lithe body beneath him, the starlit skin and sleek muscle and mass of shadow-dark hair that had always seemed little more than a reflection of his own being, until the very eve of the twins’ last begetting day, when Elrond’s gentle voice had shaken the foundations of the elf-knight’s world.
~One day your soul will demand unity and your body will follow. You need not fear, nor fret, ‘Rohir. Your bond will see to itself.~
Elrohir rubbed his cheek against the smoothly sculpted plane of his brother’s shoulder, entranced by the scent of Elladan’s skin, which was somehow both comfortingly familiar and oddly new. Strange. Arousing.
Elladan stilled abruptly, his focus narrowing to the velvet glide of Elrohir’s cheek on his skin and the heat of Elrohir’s palm on his hip, where it seemed to sear his flesh like a brand. The thin silk of his twin’s sleep pants hid nothing, and Elladan fought back a whimper as he felt the tension begin to coil in his own belly, as though in answer to some silent demand.
‘Not now,’ he thought, panic dancing at the edges of his consciousness, ‘not yet. I am not ready.’
The unmistakable brush of Elrohir’s lips across the nape of his neck stole Elladan’s breath, leaving his voice strained and hoarse. “Let me up, tôren,” he rasped.
Elrohir did not answer immediately, but lifted his head, his breath wafting warm and wet across his brother’s ear.
“Please, ‘Roh...”
The elf-knight paused, raising one hand to stroke Elladan’s hair soothingly as the trembling plea died away, leaving a silence broken only by the twinned pounding of their hearts.
“No.”