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Fëanor's chest was warm against his back. Fingolfin could easily lay his head back on his half-brother's shoulder to rest his eyes as his own warm blood trailed down his arm and over his bare thigh. Fëanor had always been curious about many things, some of which he had no ways to pursue. It had been easy to offer himself.
It had been terrifying at first, even though his reasoning made sense. The Eldar were nearly immortal, of course, but injury could still happen even in Valinor. Accidents happened; unknown damage, like what had taken Fëanor's mother from him, too. Fingolfin only had to close his eyes and resist the urge to look, to see his arm spread open, the skin pinned with fine needles onto itself, to open his body for his perusal.
He tried not to look, but he had seen it before. He knew it well enough to see and understand what it meant as he felt things move: as Fëanor pressed aside muscle to see veins, or veins to see bone, or cords of nerve that left his hand tingling or numb.
Instead, as his brother lost himself in his study, Fingolfin turned and pressed his lips to the skin of Fëanor's fine throat next to his face. The vein pulsed beneath his lips with his racing pulse. He could see the edge of his face, those dark eyes intent on his flesh and he felt a little triumph. He saw his brother so rarely. It felt good to hold his attention so.
Fingolfin swallowed and pressed his face closer to his neck, and his half-brother laughed, his throat jumping against his cheek. He tightened his left arm around Fingolfin's waist, where he held up his weight.
"Move your wrist," Fëanor said
Fingolfin obeyed, flexing it back even as he felt the skin twinge as something... something pressed in the way, holding some piece in place. He gasped weakly; the ache of his open skin had faded from his awareness, a state of affairs he'd learned to ignore, but this movement was different.
Fëanor clucked his tongue, like scolding a horse. "Again."
Fingolfin swallowed against the pain and made a fist, but he couldn't hold still as the strange pain persisted. He flexed his legs, digging heels into the bed on which they sat, naked and alone in the privacy of Fëanor's guest room at his mother's house. He came so rarely to their family home, normally off somewhere else, on some other task, with only the company of his wife and sons. Sometimes Fingolfin never even saw his face, and it hurt to be so ignored.
"That... There," Fëanor muttered. He moved his grip higher, to grasp Fingolfin's wrist in his hand and he folded his palm back, to expose the heel of his hand.
The other hand set aside the long metal rod with which he'd navigated inside his arm, and he pulled up instead one of his small knives. Fingolfin stared, in horrified fascination as he cut higher, through the layers of skin all the way into his palm.
He whimpered in fear, a terror gripping him of what could happen if his hands were to slip. He'd gotten very good at his own healing, but many... Many of his marks had begun to scar, the repetition too strong to ignore.
He might as well have not existed to him. Fëanor finished his cut and spread that skin as well, pinning it and rinsing the new blood from the wounds. As he did so, Fëanor's hand dropped and he pressed one finger into a band of white tissue high across his wrist.
"Move your hand," he commanded again.
Fingolfin swallowed hard and hesitantly he moved. The skin pulled... oddly, and Fëanor paused to reposition him to suit his needs, pinning that skin open as well. It stung, a constant agonizing pressure from wrist to arm and, as he pressed harder, a pain and tingling spread up his fingers as well.
"Brother, please..." Fingolfin whimpered.
Fëanor responded by sliding his hand down, off the white sheet to dig into the cords that ran up beneath it. Pain shot through his hand and Fingolfin gasped in horror. There was a long, agonized second as he feared he'd lose all feeling before, just as suddenly, it passed and Fëanor stroked his fingers over his open wounds like a bath of clean, warm water, his presence as all-consuming as he always was.
"There," he said, and he turned his face to him then. His mouth caught his in a searing kiss, a touch that stripped away all his fears. As awesome as his brother's works were, they were nothing but a shadow compared to his brother's presence himself.
He would suffer worse than this for even a breath of his attention. (He had suffered far worse, in fact, and Fingolfin hid the scars on his chest from all but his wife alone.)
Fëanor groaned into his mouth and dug his nail into the gap in the bones of his wrist. His legs wrapped around Fingolfin's, tucked under and around his own to support him, to support his arm against his thigh, held up for Fëanor's regard... To support them, tangled naked once more in his bed as he had been (would be) every night he was here. It was their one shared treasure: Fëanor's passionate regard, and Fingolfin's pliant submission to his needs whether it was sex or....
This, this one thing Fëanor could ask of no one else. The diagrams he could make only from studying his body open and vulnerable in every way.
Fëanor broke the kiss then, and turned away. "Would you...?"
Fingolfin moved without being told, switching his hand from flexed back to a fist, even as the pressure forced the cut skin of his palm to split, leaking blood that ran down that white sheet of tissue once more across his wrist.
He wet his lips. "What is it?" he asked.
"I'm not sure," Fëanor said. He picked up the metal rod once more and tried to force it beneath; it hurt, but it went, and Fingolfin mastered the pain for his sake, even as his fingers spasmed in pain. "I believe it's simply holding these in place."
"Ah." Fingolfin swallowed, audibly. He was trembling, uncontrollably, and after so long (so many times) Fëanor responded without needing to be asked. Still, he said aloud, "Forgive me, brother. I'm tired."
It was a different tired from one of sleep; it was a kind of exhaustion, a softening of the edge between soul and body that left him vulnerable. Fëanor grunted and kissed his forehead before he set aside his knives and other tools to begin washing and wrapping his arm.
Here, he was at his kindest: his most deft touch as he washed his drying blood from his skin. Fingolfin could simply watch as his skin closed and shut mostly, if not in full, under his hands. He could see and trace the line of today's cuts himself as Fëanor packed his tools to wash later
He wondered how deeply this mark would scar by morning, how soon it would become one more of the long, dark lines that marked his legs and thighs and back when he looked in the mirror. He had many, by now, the mark of years of study under his brother's intense, dark eyes.
But tonight Fëanor knelt at his side and pulled Fingolfin's hair from his face as his tools were set aside to be handled later. Those long, slender fingers instead turned, now to Fingolfin's face. He tilted his chin up to meet his eyes with his own dark gaze and Fingolfin drowned in the fires of his soul.
"Thank you," Fëanor said. "I am forever grateful to you."
Fingolfin cupped Fëanor's face in both hands uncaring of the tug of unhealed skin. He was drowning in him and he cared for nothing as long as he could stay there. "No," he breathed, "Thank you."