Work Text:
Adam is learning that Nigel is easy to convince.
His first suggestion that they go to the museum was met with a snort and a firm no, followed by Nigel turning to his other side in bed and pulling his pillow over his head.
His second suggestion was that they go the next day, if today isn’t good, and he’d gotten a grunt in return.
His third suggestion involved pressing kisses between Nigel’s shoulders and his hand between Nigel’s legs, and when a little while later he lifted his mouth from Nigel’s cock and asked Nigel to take him to the museum, wiping up a trail of saliva from his chin, Nigel said he would do fucking anything for him.
And that was that.
“Fucking hell,” Nigel sighs, finishing his second cigarette on the steps of the grand marble building before them. He’s girded himself in his favorite shirt, pale blue with little dachshunds, reading glasses grudgingly in his shirt pocket after a brief battle in which Adam informed him there would be cards to read, and Nigel cursed a string of oaths so long he was all but fucking breathless from it. “It’s fucking huge, Adam.”
"It is unrealistic to try and cover all of it in one day," Adam says, smiling at his reluctant partner before leading him in. Throngs of tourists, even on a weekday, pile in before them to have their bags checked. So many still looking shocked when they are asked to get rid of loose food or large water bottles. Adam and Nigel pass through unhindered, nothing in their pockets but keys and phones - Adam had systematically stripped Nigel’s hidden guns from him at home - and head towards the main, bright, echoing gallery.
Adam loves the Met. He loves most of the museums in the city, enormous and cavernous and filled with history and information. He could spend hours in one room, just watching, reading, and not call it a day wasted.
"We could start with the ancient civilization displays," Adam suggests, turning his head to look at Nigel with a smile. He passes a map to him to stick his eyes into as he mutters about Adam's clever mouth and the fucking audacity he has when manipulating with it.
Where Adam goes, Nigel follows. Keeping close to his heels, Nigel is more aware of the people around them than the art itself. Neither of them like crowds, Adam sometimes overwhelmed by them, Nigel constantly vigilant. It works out well - they spend time at home, together, and neither need worry about meltdowns or paranoia.
Nigel wonders if this is payback for the strip club.
“Start?” He asks, voice echoing and drawing a few looks. He returns them, narrow-eyed, as the tourists take him in with wariness, gazes drifting to his neck tattoo, his shirt. “What do you fucking mean, start?” He asks again, quieter this time.
“I don’t know what you’re asking, Nigel,” Adam replies, pausing in front of an arrangement of canopic jars, topped with sculpted animal heads. “Everyone has to start somewhere.”
“And then what?”
“And then we keep going,” Adam reasons, brows together and wondering why Nigel is being so difficult about this. He is far from stupid, no matter how petulantly he insists on acting that way on occasion. “We can start in the ancient worlds and make our way through as many halls as we can before stopping for a break.”
“And then fucking what?” Nigel asks, almost desperate now, and Adam just laughs.
“And then we keep going,” he reminds him.
With a gentle lean against his partner, Adam starts to walk, knowing Nigel will follow in his own time, his face buried in the map Adam had given him to peruse. There are weapons halls and entire temples here, there are paintings and sculptures, there are cathedrals and beautiful Victorian rooms. Surely there will be something in the museum that Nigel will not complain about as much as the rest.
They just have to find it.
In the areas of less interest to Nigel, he contents himself in listening to Adam. All it takes is a single question for Adam to share his mind with Nigel, a far more fascinating thing to him than any old pieces of pottery or bits of parchment. Nigel finds himself interested because Adam is interesting.
He also finds that they get relatively few looks - and those, easily quieted with a dour look - when he touches Adam. Nothing obscene, it’s a fucking museum, but he rests his hand against Adam’s back once in a while, or his chin on the kid’s shoulder to breathe him in while he reads his little cards. He’d rather be at home, of course, with Adam spread naked and smooth against his chest. Maybe Nigel would read, with Adam curled atop like a little cat. Maybe they would kiss. Maybe he would spread Adam’s lips with his fingers until he sucked them and made sweet little sounds that echoed all the way to Nigel’s cock.
He curses under his breath and puts space between them before he starts getting fucking hard in the Egyptian wing.
The temple, he has to admit, is impressive. Dragged here from fucking Egypt and just set up, as though it has its own holy mountain here, as people swarm it and take photos. In truth, Nigel isn’t bored so much as he would rather be elsewhere. It is interesting to see how much of history people had gathered and preserved, it is scary how much they managed to keep.
Adam plows on through, hall after hall, pointing out certain trimmings or stands, specific displays or eras they’re about to enter. He is like a kid at Christmas at the fucking museum and Nigel adores him. They make it through the medieval halls, the giant gate of some fucking cathedral standing near to the ceiling in height for people to walk through as they please. From there to the Victorian rooms, some that look a little like their apartment, and Adam spends a long time laughing - that sweet, bright sound - when Nigel considers how little the beds are and how it wouldn’t do for them, he’s happy to keep the one they have now.
Through that to Italian Renaissance, fountains and statues and rooms made entire out of wood mosaic, so intricate it’s a mind-fuck to imagine anyone spending time actually making it. Nigel would go insane with the splinters, and Adam points out that there were most likely several people working on it at once. Further and further they go, on their way to the cafe for something to eat before Adam drags them god knows where else, when Nigel stops at the entrance of a small alcove room housing a statue of a beautiful naked boy.
“Fucking hell,” Nigel mutters. His words draw a disapproving look from the little old lady beside him, and Nigel lifts a brow. “What?”
“This is a museum,” she answers, pulling her shoulders up straighter.
“Didn’t know they kept smut like this in a museum,” he agrees, feigning shock when her genuine alarm doesn’t ease. “What? You were looking at his fucking leaf there, too, don’t pretend like you weren’t.”
And with that, they’re left alone with the statue. A lithe young man, hip cocked and eyes skyward, an apple in his hand. A leaf covers his cock but he holds a the branch of a felled tree beside, fingers curled in a way that makes Nigel’s belly ache wonderfully. The statue’s full lips are parted just a little - an expression of desire, maybe, or boredom. And his ass...
His ass.
Nigel circles the sculpture like a jungle cat, stalking slow and taking in the curve of his calves, the sweep of his spine. He lifts a hand as though to touch, tempted by the cool, smooth marble, pale but not grey - rosy, in the way the light hits it.
“You’re fucking beautiful,” Nigel tells Adam.
He blinks.
“Look,” Nigel adds, “look at the little sign. Or that big fucking one back there. It says this is you.”
Adam turns his head, turns it back, and frowns at Nigel, who continues to shamelessly check out the statue in front of them.
“It’s a statue of Adam,” he says after a while, slowly. “Biblical Adam, depicting him eating the apple in the Garden of Eden. Nigel, that’s not me. It’s just another Adam.”
“You eat apples.”
Parting his lips, Adam draws a breath to respond, but Nigel’s grin widens. He lifts a hand to stop him speaking and steps closer, tracing his thumb over the bow of Adam’s mouth, pushing his lips gently out of place.
“See?” He insists, turning between Adam and the statue. “That’s the look. Pouting a little. Giving me a look of being vaguely fucking irritated. Equally a look of wanting me to fuck you speechless.” He grasps Adam’s hand and lifts it, in the manner of the marble Adam on the pedestal above. “Of course it’s fucking you, darling, there’s only one person in the fucking world who’s so beautiful as that. Even has your curls, sparrow, just here.”
Nigel releases Adam’s hand and skims a finger along his cheek, sweeping a curl behind his ear before he grins again.
“You never told me someone made a statue out of you. No wonder you wanted to fucking drag me here, you fucking show-off.”
Adam blinks at him, speechless and confused. He knows, as he knows well enough with everyone else, that there is something here he doesn’t understand. Either something metaphorical, or something ironic, but he can’t pick it up. He just knows it isn’t a cruelty because Nigel is grinning, and because Nigel is never cruel to him.
“I’m not,” Adam pouts, eyes to the statue again, back to Nigel. “It’s just another Adam. There is more than one Adam -”
“Fucking hardly,” Nigel laughs, drawing a hand through Adam’s hair until the other huffs out a reluctant laugh. “You’re my only Adam.”
“That’s not how it works,” Adam mumbles, but his blush says enough for how delighted he is by the words.
Nigel tugs his little bird closer to him, fingers wrapped around the back of his head. Alone for a moment, still, Nigel draws his lips against Adam’s brow, up to his hairline, russet curls tickling his nose before he kisses down the bridge of Adam’s nose. Beneath his eyes to taste his blush, Nigel moves lower, and finally catches the corner of Adam’s mouth before the younger man turns away, fighting down a smile.
“That’s exactly how it fucking works,” declares Nigel. “There’s only one Adam that fucking matters. Everything else is bullshit. So this must be you. Look,” he says, sticking his finger against the information card beneath the statue. “‘Epitome of male beauty’ - who the fuck else could that be?”
Before Adam can stop him, Nigel lifts a hand to a passing security guard, keeping wary eye on the noisy tattooed man so alarmingly close to the priceless work of art.
“Excuse me,” Nigel asks, and points to the statue, “could you confirm for my fri-... boy-... partner, here, please, that this is a statue of fucking Adam?”
“Nigel, no." Adam’s eyes are so wide, his lips parted. He looks so much younger, blushing furiously as the security guard regards both of them with a frown before nodding. The man is being loud but hardly disruptive, he isn’t doing the work damage nor is he asking anything offensive.
“It is, as the sign says," he grunts, and Nigel turns back to his boy with a smile and a wide gesture.
“It’s you,” he insists, and Adam brings a hand to his face to try and rub the blush away. He’s bewildered, confused why Nigel would be so enthusiastic about something he knows is not true, and still, still there is that feeling that none of this is in cruelty, none of it is meant to be anything but fun and softness as Nigel always is with him.
Adam makes a little sound as Nigel steps closer, and lifts his eyes to look at him, lips pressed into a smile and expression helpless. It can be him if Nigel wants, but that’s wrong, it can’t just magically become him. But perhaps in theory, in concept, like mathematics. Adam blinks. Like mathematics. Imagined numbers and imagined theories that make just as much sense as they should. It’s like that. His smile widens a little.
They are joined in the little room by others filtering in to observe the statue, and though Nigel steps aside for them, his attention is only on Adam. Dark eyes trace the warmth of his cheeks and the bend of his mouth, the awkward-sweet smile that shortens Nigel’s breath, lungs too big and ribs too small. And that smile, that gentle humor, is meant for him.
“Christ, I love you,” sighs Nigel. He brings a hand up to Adam’s hair and sweeps it from his brow, curving fingers under his chin as he leans closer. Warmly, he whispers close to Adam’s ear, “I was only joking, darling.”
Adam tilts his head against Nigel’s hand and his blush darkens. “I know.”
“Of course you do. No one in the fucking world’s as beautiful as you,” Nigel tells him, giving a nod to the statue over his shoulder. “Not even him.”
Adam snorts, and with a deliberate lean against Nigel, moves to lead them towards the already crowded cafe for something to eat. Everything is, as always, in places like this, prohibitively expensive. They manage to wrangle a table by the window and watch the park as they eat. Nigel finishes his sandwich in several large bites, his coffee in slower sips only because it’s too hot to swallow quickly, and Adam picks at his food as he keeps talking. About the statues and paintings, about the museum itself, about how his father had taken him here often as a child and he would spend hours enthralled.
They leave the cafe when it begins to fill further, and Adam takes Nigel’s hand, thoughtless and loving, and tugs him along. They do not stop in the first room they find, they do not stop in the second. They walk and weave through the labyrinth of priceless artifacts until they come upon an open, bright room, a party of knights caught in perpetual stillness on their molded mounts, around the walls, swords of every shape and age. Adam tilts his head to look at Nigel and squeezes their fingers together.
Nigel lifts Adam’s hand, and brushes a kiss across his knuckles, taking in the shining armor and bright colors of pennants and shields, the enormous lances for jousting and all manner of ancient weaponry. The halberds hold a special interest when Nigel grudgingly puts on his reading glasses to squint at one of the placards.
“Cut off a horse’s fuckin’ legs with those,” he observes. Narrow-eyed in thought, he glances to the mounted knights again. “I should get a motorcycle. Would you ride it with me?”
Adam spreads his fingers between Nigel’s, then closes them again with a simple shake of his head. “No.”
And that’s that. Too much fucking trouble to worry about ownership agreements and licenses and fucking insurance, considering the tangle of names they use, and Nigel’s interest immediately wanes when it would be something he’d have to do without Adam. Fuck it.
“But you should anyway,” Adam tells him. “You would suit a motorcycle. If you weren’t so stubborn, you would suit a horse, but you will complain that they smell and shift how you don’t want them to, and after a while your thighs will ache and you will complain about that as well.” Adam pauses, considering. “But you would look good on a horse.”
“Like a fucking knight?”
“If you like,” Adam smiles, turning to him. “Or like a cowboy, or a Roman soldier.”
Nigel lifts his chin, pleased not just by the idea of it, but that Adam has imagined him in that way. Brave and fierce - heroic even. He considers it for a moment, considering first the cowboy hat and twin revolvers, then a fucking toga or whatever Romans wore and a sword. Armor. Shields. He grins and leans down to press a kiss to Adam’s hair.
“Would you ride a horse with me?”
Adam creases his brow in thought, and then with a laugh, shakes his head. “No.”
“Fucking Adam,” Nigel mutters, as they pass between glass cases filled with arms and armor. “You ride me pretty fucking well though.”
“You’re - you’re not a horse.”
“I could be a cowboy though.”
Adam lets himself be tugged along with another laugh. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Nigel doesn’t answer, though. He stops, instead, at a dead halt and stares into a case. Inside, a set of crossbows, some of thick wood and iron fixtures, others intricately carved with ivory decoration. Beneath are a row of bolts, some with fanned shards of metal at the end, some blunted dull. Nigel sucks in a breath, eyes wide.
“Fucking hell. The hell with horses and fucking motorcycles, Adam.”
Adam turns, frowning to look at the weapons, and smiles when he sees the way Nigel’s eyes widen in utter awe of the things. They do, as well, when he watches documentaries about big wild cats. They do, as well, when he swears, impressed, at a book about Al Capone. Adam loves when Nigel gets involved, when he gets curious, when he lets himself let go of cynicism and enjoy himself.
He loves watching him take apart the gun, now, on the table, treating it as gently and carefully as he does Adam, loving them both, knowing both are dangerous, but not so in his hands - by their choice, not his.
Adam loves him.
“Bolts like that were made to pierce metal armor,” Adam tells him. “At close range they would break through any steel.”
“That,” Nigel mutters, casting a quick glance around them before stepping closer to the glass. “That’s what I fucking want.”
He starts to lift his free hand to the case but stops himself, fisting it at his side instead. He squeezes Adam’s hand with the other as Adam confirms, “You want a crossbow.”
“Wouldn’t have to worry about fucking PPE then, would we,” Nigel considers, gaze distant, scrutinizing. “No more bulletproof bullshit like in Vladivostok.”
“No,” Adam says, and Nigel turns slightly narrowed eyes to him. Adam’s lips quirk. “No. We won’t acquire any crossbows. Not to own or sell. They are too dangerous, they are archaic and they are too easy to trace.”
“Baby -”
“No,” Adam laughs, shaking his head and grinning when Nigel’s expression shifts from displeased to one of begging. He looks like a dog that way, wanting a treat and knowing if he begs for one outright it will be denied him. He has made Adam laugh from that face countless times, and he does now, as well. “No! No crossbows.”
“You watch,” Nigel says. He points a finger at Adam, and leans closer, arm around his shoulder, scruffy cheek to smooth. “You wait until you’ve got to bail me out of the fucking gulags for trying to smuggle in a crossbow into fucking Russia.”
“No Russia either,” Adam insists. He sets his hands to Nigel’s chest, warm through the thin fabric, and makes as though to push him away, only to feel Nigel tug him closer. “We’re done there.”
“Thank fuck for that. Are you sure, darling?”
“Yes, what few contacts might have still spoken to us, you debilitated so badly that -”
“Not fucking Russia,” snarls Nigel, grinning as he sinks a kiss against Adam’s cheek, just in front of his ear. “The crossbow. Take it out to the woods and fuck up some trees. You’d be so fucking sexy with that on your arm, darling…”
Adam laughs again, shaking his head. No. No, no, no. It will be no for as long as he can have the no, it will be no for as long as it takes Nigel to care less about it and know that he and Adam can be fine and happy without it. Only then will he consider, and by then they might, neither, want one.
“You can’t just shoot it into the trees -”
“Why not? We could get the fucking bolts back and everything. No waste. Environmentally friendly and all that shit.”
Adam laughs again, leaning back into Nigel and squirming when he hugs him. “No crossbows,” he says again.
Nigel hums against Adam’s cheek, still surveying the promising weaponry before him but mindless, truly, of anyone around them, of where they are, of anyone but Adam. Slight and slender against him, funny in a way no one else seems to understand - the morons - and beautiful in every way. Nigel sinks his arms deeper around Adam’s waist, and skims beneath his sweater and the shirt beneath with his thumb, teasing over the soft skin of his stomach.
“Maybe I can convince you,” Nigel suggests, his voice a rumble carrying from his chest to Adam’s back, and tugging a shiver through the younger man. “Like you convinced me this morning.”
“Nigel, I don’t - I don’t think any amount of sexual activity could convince me to find a crossbow -”
“Who asked you to find it?”
“Where would you get one?”
The question lingers, carried by the little laugh that fills it, and Nigel squints, lips twisting together in thought. He can get guns. He can get big guns. He can get all manner of knives and blades. And Nigel imagines for a moment asking any of those sources to procure a crossbow for him, and snorts.
Of course he doesn’t know where to get a fucking crossbow.
“At least let me try to convince you,” Nigel grins.
Adam shivers a little and squirms free. He loves when Nigel gets like this, but this is not the place or the time. There are other people here, young and old, children and parents, some of whom already frown at the two of them where they cuddle in front of the display.
"You can try," Adam tells him, raising an eyebrow. He tries not to smile when Nigel makes a soft growling sound deep in his chest. "Later."
From the crossbows they move to the guns, and Nigel is as giddy here as Adam is around anything to do with space. He points out makes and models, marvels at the intricacies of design, explains to Adam how some were used for duelling and others for hunting, some better for this or that. He pines over a revolver and presses close enough to the glass that the alarm blares for him to step back.
Adam is delighted, listening to Nigel with as much attentiveness as the man had listened to him in the other galleries and rooms. He loves him. He loves him a lot.
The list of weaponry Nigel would like to acquire expands. Beyond the crossbow and a fucking saber, try carrying that into a fucking meeting and see who runs their fucking mouths, Nigel adds to his wishlist a flintlock pistol, an Indian bank knife, and becomes particularly taken with a Winchester rifle made of ebony before Adam finally tugs his hand to pull him away.
It is happenstance that they met. Luck that their first job together went off beautifully. Sheer fucking God-sent fortune that when they kissed, presumably misguided at the time, it ended up being anything but. They fit together, the other’s imperfect qualities understood acutely, a give-and-take of reason and emotion that balances out what the other lacks. Nigel watches Adam more than the images and artifacts he points out. Adam listens to Nigel, but finds when he does stop to read a card, Nigel’s intuition is measurably accurate.
They laugh, until they’re asked to keep their voices down.
They keep their fingers interlaced, until Adam insists he needs to use the bathroom and even then Nigel only lets him go once he’s teased a kiss from him.
Nigel wanders as he waits, not far - only into the next gallery over. Far less comprehensible than beautiful things made to exemplify beauty, he hums as he passes through. Flags familiar but painted only in shades of white. Figures of red and black segmented through with lines into beings near-resembling humanity, and yet not. Splatters of paint in tangled browns and blacks that dizzy him to focus on too closely. Strange things. Curious things.
He stops in front of a square of black painted over red, a smaller rectangle in cobalt blue beneath. No, he frowns. Maybe the darkness isn’t painted over the light. Maybe the light is painted over the darkness. Fuck it. It’s both. It’s neither. Nigel reaches back to feel for the bench behind him and wait for Adam.
He doesn't know how long he waits, doesn't feel time at all, really, as he regards the furious blocking of color on color before him. Pushing for space, struggling for breath and so angry, the entire thing so entirely fucking angry. He jumps when Adam touches his shoulder, and the white noise with which the painting had filled his mind immediately fades to a hum again.
"Fucking look at this.” He gestures to the canvas again, and Adam obediently sits beside him to look. Nigel says nothing for a long time, brows furrowed and lips set in a line of distress. The tension radiates off of him and Adam sits closer, concerned, before Nigel quietly adds, "I've never seen a painting fucking scream before."
Adam blinks, cheeks warming a little. "A painting can't scream, Nigel. It isn’t alive."
"But this one fucking is," Nigel insists. "Just look at it - look."
So Adam does, turning his head to the Rothko once more and allowing himself to take the entire thing in, inch by inch. The tension rises quickly enough, just a feeling of discomfort, or displeasure radiating from the work. It is remarkable. Adam wonders if this is what Nigel meant.
So he asks.
Nigel nods, shifting until his side is pressed to Adam’s, until they care share the weight of the image. It’s suffocating, Nigel tells him, like being trapped under a blanket, and until you thrash it off, you’re smothered. Watching the painting balefully, he talks, in low voice and thoughtfully chosen words, about anger. Rage. Annoyance that builds until the only outlet breaks free like the red on the painting, there around the edges, and even that, swallowed whole into the void.
He talks about himself, and tells Adam that he is.
Adam listens, and though the emotions are not his to feel, he tries to understand.
They sit together and speak, pressed close, in attempts to explain one’s self to the other and to grasp the other’s intricacies. Under the oppressive weight of the painting, both still breathe, grasping fingers intertwined against the bench. They share. They listen. They steal kisses when the room briefly empties.
And they sit there until the announcement is made that the museum is closing, and Nigel blinks up at the woman from his reverie.
“We’re going, we’re going,” Nigel grumbles. Adam stands, but Nigel steps in front of him, and ducking with knees bent, he grasps Adam’s thighs and hoists him onto his back. “Been on your feet all fucking day.”
Adam makes an indignant sound and wraps his arms around Nigel’s neck, comfortable and warm, if a little embarrassed. They make their way to the open foyer and Nigel lowers Adam so he can walk on his own again, though he is reluctant to let him go.
Outside, it is overcast but warm, and Adam presses close as Nigel lights a cigarette and takes a drag with a near-orgasmic sound of pleasure.
"I didn't think you would like art," Adam tells him, and Nigel snorts, shaking his head.
"Like is a fucking relative term, darling."
"We can go see more," Adam ventures gently, smiling up at his partner as they both take the steps down to the street again. Nigel shakes his head and exhales a plume of grey into the air and Adam tries to stifle his disappointment.
"No, love, I promised to convince you to get a crossbow, I can't break that. 's fucking sacred." He takes another drag and feels the warmth of Adam’s grin as the other watches him. "Might take a few days to convince you, then -"
"Then?"
"Then we might have to scope out the fucking MOMA," Nigel tells him, ashing the cigarette to the street. "And I'll have to spend a week convincing you we should lift a fucking painting, for the apartment."
Adam says nothing, he just misses a step to slip behind Nigel and wrap his arms around his middle, marching in stride with him long enough for them both to laugh, stumble, misstep.
"You'll have to convince me," he tells Nigel.