Work Text:
He doesn’t think of himself as warm, not like Ace is. Ace is a burning, white hot flame beside Smoker’s crumbling embers. Smoker drapes an arm across his face and breathes in the sharp air, half of him burning against Ace’s skin and the other half kissed by the icy air. Damn the winter islands.
“Thinking about me, hot stuff?” Ace sits up and flips his hair back, looking down at Smoker with a face that makes his heart smolder and his iron stomach do flips.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” He breathes in the hot air around the pirate as he leans down to kiss him. His thick hand winds into Ace’s black waves to pull him down. Ace tastes like ash, far more pungent than his strongest cigars.
Ace rolls away and stretches, leaving Smoker quiet and cold. He stares at Ace’s back like it were the mark of the devil. He reaches out to touch, deft fingers tracing over the grooves of Ace’s muscle.
It burns.
“If you didn’t want me to leave you could have just said so.” Ace is leaning back on his wrists, urging Smoker to touch more. He breathes in Ace’s scent deep, shifting until he molds against him from behind. “You’re nice and cool.”
“I thought you hated the cold.” He doesn’t think it’s sharp enough to be an accusation, but not lazy enough to be a statement. Smoker lets his eyes drop shut until he can feel Ace’s entire heat invading every corner of him. He presses his lips to the base of the pirate’s neck, tasting his pulse.
“You caught me.” Ace shifts, turning into Smoker’s embrace. “You’re not cold. You’re cool, like,” Ace pauses to breathe in as Smoker kisses his neck again, the skin prickling, “Like steam off a doused campfire.”
Everything is cold for you, Smoker thinks, closing his eyes again as he tried to ignore the tattoo coming into his peripheral vision. He can never stand to fuck Ace from behind, lest he be forced to stare at it the entire time. Ace seems to like facing him anyway.
Ace takes his hand and guides it over his body, down his chest, over his thighs, between his legs. The pirate keens into his touch and he has to breathe deep again to control himself. “We shouldn’t.”
“But we can.”
Smoker knows they can, he knows they could, he knows no one would even find out. But he has already indulged once since they met up on the island, and once is always one too many times. He knows Ace will not be deterred, until he finally tells him no.
Which he never does.
Ace settles below him and gives him a nudge. Smoker doesn’t hesitate, knows he will never hesitate where Ace is concerned. And he knows he should be hesitating; hesitating because Ace is not something he should feel so warm against.
But when Ace is writhing beneath him, hot in his mouth, he is damn glad he never hesitates.
Seeing Ace come undone, disheveled and breathless, Smoker feels his own heat, nothing borrowed from his on-again, off-again lover. When he sinks into Ace he feels just as hot as the pirate always is, white hot with no regrets and no thought other than to fulfill the heat. The cold doesn’t even bother him anymore.
When he’s done he rolls over, and Ace is breathing steady again. He closes his eyes and tries to forget that Ace will return to his wandering no matter how many times Smoker looks the other way. He tries to forget Ace will always slip through his fingers like smoke never does.
He gasps when Ace kisses his jaw and whispers into his ear promises to squirrel him off to some unknown island with little to no people. He tunes it out. Ace is always promising him stories of star crossed lovers; it never appeals to him.
“You’d better go, right now.” His tone betrays what little conviction he has. Ace just laughs at him, but he listens.
“I get it. Be-gone, foul beast, or I will smack my cuffs on you in two seconds. Better tell me where you stashed my pants.” His heart flutters as he hears Ace chuckle under his breath. He is almost tempted to shove Ace out the door naked and watch the snow melt around him like he’s an angel of fire. Ace is an angel of fire. Smoker wonders if that’s how demons are made.
Ace hops on one foot into his shorts. Smoker glances to his seastone cuffs, as if debating. Ace would always be within reach, but he had a feeling Ace wouldn’t acknowledge him no matter how in reach he always was.
He blinks and Ace is standing at the edge of the bed, holding out a cigar for him. Smoker takes it, waiting for Ace to flick the end to life.
“Make base somewhere warm next time. We can lay on the beach instead of in bed.” Like that would ever happen. Not with an entire crew at Smoker’s flanks. But he doesn’t dash Ace’s hopes, and instead inhaled his cigar.
“Better get out of here, before I arrest you,” he grunts, gripping the cigar between his teeth. Ace laughs again and leans down one last time to kiss the corner of his mouth. He clenches his jaw, feeling the heat trickle down his jaw like water.
“Stay warm, hot stuff.”