#I don't actually have any Iliad wips laying around since I've never intended to write for that specific era believe it or not

[gingermintpepper]

🌈!! :D

:D Thank you so much for participating 🥰 I had to think long and hard about what wip to pull from but ultimately, I went with one of my Asclepius/Epione scenes. Hopefully, you enjoy it ♡

“Epione.”  She doesn’t move. Not even to scratch her cheek where he poked her. Dead-sleeping like she always does whenever they share the bed. It’s such a dangerous habit but she can’t help it. She feels safe around him, she says. He’s so warm that she can’t help but sleep like a lamb wrapped in its mother’s wool. Cheeky woman. Gorgeous woman.  Asclepius sighs and resorts to plan B. It’s a bit harder when she’s bundled up in his good scarf and two of his down jackets but he manages to get the first one unbuttoned and rolls up the second. Her undershirt is thin, one of Machaon’s he thinks? They’re too far away from the firelight for him to discern the colour, but it’s much too flimsy to be one of his. He angles his face just right and can’t bite back the smile starting to rise past his lips, rubs the prickliest, coarsest of his beard hairs against her stomach until he’s damn near nuzzling her like an overgrown cat.  The effect is instantaneous. Her stomach flutters under his big old head and then her hands come up to squish him which just makes him press further into the soft of her belly. She gives an annoyed grunt, then a wet half-warble that could almost be interpreted as a name. Asclepius snickers and moves on to the second phase of the plan; sloppy, noisy kisses.  They’re less kisses than kissy-noises, really, but it does wonders for her ticklishness. She smacks him a few times, as though he were nothing more than a bug trying to worm its way beneath her garments. Then she wiggles, then she kicks. Finally, after Asclepius begins biting the sensitive swathes of skin beside her bellybutton, she makes a properly annoyed hum and digs her fingernails into the thick of his hair.  “No more children,” she grouses. Asclepius cannot see her eyes from this angle, the thick bulge of the scarf wound around her neck obscures most of her face, but he knows that her eyes are dewy with sleep, speckled and reflecting the flickering flames of their fire. He chuckles, helplessly fond and all sorts of warm. She smacks him again, open palmed and completely ineffective against the mane he likes to call hair, “I’m s’rus, too many mouths.”  He lays his cheek flat against her, basks in the hypnotic sensation of her fingertips scratch-scratch-scratching against the grain of his scalp. Her hands will be oil-stained when she pulls them away. She’ll rub them into her own hair because she always complains that he has the better oils. They both know she uses his.  “Who mentioned a thing about children,” he says. He takes her free hand, the one still bundled in three layers of wool and down and scatters kisses down the back of her cold palm, “Can’t a man simply wake his wife for a midnight romp? No ulterior motives?”  She snorts so hard it seems to echo, “Sure, a man could.”  He bites the loose skin between her knuckles, “But not me?”  A laugh, she’s fully awake now if she’s laughing like that, “Never you.”