#engscot

Wrong idea about him, anon. Who do you think it organizes these... meetings?

Suggestive content under the cut

“You said to shower,” Arthur complains without heat.

“Aye, that I did.” Alasdair’s breath smells like mint, his stubble rough against the bare skin of Arthur’s cheek when he presses a lingering kiss on the corner of his mouth.

Arthur tilts his head when Alasdair tugs on his hair again, lenient under the familiar fractured brown of his eyes.

“Thank you,” he whispers for the second time in only so many hours. For the warmth, for his care. Their lips brush when Alasdair smiles and soften against each other until, easily, he guides them into a slow kiss, mouths parting with a quiet breath.

Arthur lets his eyes slip close and kisses him back, cradling Alasdair’s cheek and slipping a hand under his arm to feel the strength of his back. Hold him close enough to kiss again, soft but insistent when Alasdair tries to put some distance between them. Scotland lets him get away with it for a while longer, gripping his hip and circling his thumb under the waistband of his sweats to make him sigh. Taking advantage of it to suck on his bottom lip and deepen their kiss, taking more of Arthur’s weight when he leans into him reflexively.

“I thought you were tired,” he whispers, amused, finally breaking their kiss to buzz his lips against Arthur’s jaw and trail a line of wet kisses towards his throat.

He has to bow his head to do so and ends up wrapping an arm around Arthur’s waist to urge him a little higher, until Arthur is standing on the balls of his feet and they’re closer in height. Arthur tangles his hands in the thick tangle of Alasdair’s curls, trusting his arms to hold him steady.

A firm tug, and the tie holding his joggers up comes undone, callused fingers making quick work of the waistband, nudging it down his hips. The loose fabric slips easily down his legs and Arthur kicks them away without paying any mind as to where they end up.

of course! I’m still a little overrun with work but I’ve missed the werewolf AU so please have some thoughts on werewolves running hotter than humans and magic mushrooms <3

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It occurs to Arthur, as early as the first night that Ali knocks him on his back, that taking Ali might be… a challenge. And kitchen witch that he is (“Not a kitchen witch,” he corrects Francis through gritted teeth), he starts spending longer in his half-greenhouse-half-workshop.

It’s not a space Alasdair has felt comfortable breaching. Somehow it’s one thing to step into Arthur’s bedroom, share his bed, but standing by the threshold to the greenhouse, Alasdair feels the boundary like a physical force, almost. There are runes carves into the doorframe, redbrick and iron strewn under the single stone step, but it is more than a warding, the whisper of something that runs over Alasdair’s skin like electricity as he steps through.

Arthur’s hair smells like smoke, his fingertips like herbs, and Alasdair can smell the blend of it now; sharp and green, unnamable aside from the usual suspects. Thyme, rosemary, and sage. Mint, moss, and notes of amber.

Damp, dark earth too, and Alasdair can see why now, as the long central table comes into view. Arthur is bent over the worn, waxed wood, taking careful measures of whatever he keeps in his assortment of jars and mashing them carefully with a thin slice cut from a delicate, wide-brimmed mushroom barely bigger than his thumb.

(Francis is there just in case, Arthur… makes a little mistake. And needs air breathed back into his lungs. Alasdair doesn’t want to ask if they’ve done something like this before and incidentally gives Francis a wide berth. He smells like sweet-rot, almost imperceptibly, but when a full moon is close it itches at Alasdair’s nose. More so than incense even, the smell of death that hangs off of him.)

Alasdair very eloquently asks: “What in the fuck’s name are you doing?”

The real answer is: taking a gamble.

What Arthur is hoping is for something that will take him a little out of his own head; make it easier to tilt his hips and take it for hours, slick and loose enough to fit the thick base of Alasdair’s cock. Even just thinking about it makes him want to bend over in as much lust as apprehension. Being that he cannot spend the next fortnight locked in his room and that he couldn’t possibly discuss what’s coming with Ali himself, the next best (and most pragmatic) solution is to simply find a solution by himself.

It just so happens that in this case, the solution is psychotropic mushrooms.

While Francis and Ali are too busy bickering over something or another, he washes down a spoonful of with the bitter dregs of the cold cup of tea he’d brought into the workshop earlier. Grimaces, and opens his eyes to find Alasdair and Francis both looking at him.

A minute passes, nothing. Francis tries to take his pulse and Arthur bats his hands away.

Another, and Arthur starts feeling a little hot, undoes the first button of his shirt. Alasdair comes to stand closer to him (just in case he teeters off the high bench, he tells himself, just in case).

Another and— Arthur isn’t sure, really how many minutes pass. Only knows that Alasdair is carrying him upstairs and that his skin itches. And he needs, he needs, he needs—

He pushes Alasdair on the bed the moment he sets him down on the floor, climbs on top of him, and rips open the shirt he’s wearing with a single sharp tug. Alasdair lets him, looking a little bewildered, eyes dark, as Arthur gets rid of his own shirt, pulls at fabric until they are both mostly bare and he can finally touch him.

And that’s all he really wants, turns out. To touch Alasdair’s skin.

He runs his hands down his brother's chest, the dips of his arms. The cage of his ribs and over the softness of his stomach. Buries his nose in the thick hair on Alasdair’s chest, pressing his forehead against his collarbones. Arthur is only vaguely aware that he’s also babbling— being compulsively honest, unable to stop himself as he talks and talks of the things he has noticed. The way Alasdair’s skin burns hotter than a normal human’s now, and how it feels to have him pressed to his back when they sit out in the garden at night. How much he hates that Alasdair won’t hang his damp towel after he bathes, or how he never lines the dishes up correctly when it's his turn to wash them. How he’s gotten used to the sound of his breathing. How he excites him; how he frightens him. How much he missed him, and then mortified (when his chest clenches tight, like he could cry) Arthur confesses that he had hesitated; that he had stood on the path that led up to the group home where they grew up together and hesitated, and thought of turning around and climbing back upstairs to slip under the too-thin covers of Alasdair’s bed to whisper an apology into the nape of his neck for ever thinking that he could leave and not take him with him.

Alasdair lets himself be touched and pressed down and scratched, and listens.

hey <3 so many questions! thank you

Arthur and Alasdair are remarkably alike but one of the ways in which they are not is how they deal with jealousy.

Alasdair isn’t ashamed of how zealous he can be, and that certainly extends to jealousy. I don’t see nations as being particularly concerned with monogamy but Alasdair in particular is… focused. When it comes to Arthur especially. His jealousy is as possessive as it protective (and more than a little cocky).

I’ve talked a little before of how I see Alasdair as being the first one to accept what he feels for Arthur but I haven’t talked of this: when he realises that he loves Arthur, that’s it. He’s been had. He knows himself enough to know that even if Arthur never loves him back in the same way, he cannot change what he feels (and that deep down, he doesn’t want to). It’s one of the reasons why it takes Arthur much longer to catch on to what’s going on; Alasdair never fundamentally changes how he treats him and doesn’t pursue Arthur actively for a long time (or it’s more like he’s not pursuing Arthur in a way Arthur recognises. He’s not obvious like say, Francis or Alfred would be, but if Arthur had looked a little harder it would have spared them both a lot.)

Arthur internalises jealousy, lets it feed off insecurities which he would sooner die than admit to. He doubts and overthinks, and bristles at the suggestion that it could be easy, he could just let himself have this. It isn’t a ploy or a joke at his expense, it's not Alasdair having him on.

It makes Alasdair want to bury his fingers in Arthur’s hair and tug on his roots until he stops thinking. (And he does fist Arthur’s hair and give him a shake. Nudge his thigh. Bite the bend of his neck, when Arthur has been quiet for too long or looks troubled.)

As for confessions— it’s hard to say.

Because they have both confessed.

Multiple times.

Privately, in public, drunk, sober. Grand, angry declarations, quiet wordless confessions. It’s just that by a silent, unacknowledged agreement, sometimes they just pretend nothing happened. They are infuriatingly stubborn, BOTH of them. I could go on about that for ages. But for the official confession well, I think it’s nothing grand; if anything it's almost a little awkward.

ye can’t back out now