Muruaneq
[ dm/ew, vm/ew . after Scratch and before Don't Look ] PG-13
It makes Dom think of the time he kissed Elijah at Te Anau with dry chapped lips, as Viggo took photographs he promised no one would ever see.
- from Scratch.
muruaneq, n. soft deep snow (origin: Yup'ik Eskimo, the language indigenous to the people of Central Alaska)
Viggo never told him, but he hated Elijah's eyes. Something about them offended his aesthetic sensibilities and looking into them made him feel cliched, like the tag lines in teen magazines. It was a little bit of Exene that had worn off onto himself, but Viggo had a general distaste for the trite and the overdone. Both words made him think of Elijah's eyes and it secretly frustrated him that something so beautiful could feel so hackneyed, and that something so young could feel so tired.
One morning, as the makeup woman applied the aftermath to Helm's Deep onto his bleary face, Viggo found himself considering the Eskimos. He realized that he had begun to understand the subtle nuances of the color in Elijah's eyes, the same way the Eskimos knew the differences between soft powder snow and tedious wet slush. The Eskimos have a ridiculous number of words for snow, Viggo thought. The same could be said for those eyes; only we don't have the language for them.
He drove himself home early that morning, heavy with the knowledge that the fault didn't lie in Elijah's eyes, but in some intrinsic deficiency of his own language and his insufficient mastery of it. For an hour, he wandered the house listlessly, drinking lukewarm water from the bathroom tap, exhausted and restless. He wasted another hour and a half sitting up naked in bed, making unsatisfying lists for paintings he would never start.
When Viggo finally went to sleep, he dreamt without noise. He could feel the familiar weight of his sword on his belt and the itch of fake blood drying on his hands and beneath his fingernails. For hours and without purpose, he picked his silent way through the broken bodies along the battlements of Helm's Deep, as a hundred different types of snow fell from the blackened sky.
:::
It snowed that day at Te Anau--large heavy flakes that floated on the tiny spikes of Elijah's hair and paused before melting against the skin on the backs of Viggo's hands. Viggo was done taking photographs for the day when he found them by accident behind one of the AD vans, with Dom's fingers desperately clawing at Elijah's hips. The knees to Dominic's jeans were dirty and discolored because of the cold, wet ground, and as Elijah heard Viggo's footsteps on the gravel, he didn't move to stop but only looked over with deep, darkening eyes. "Look, Dom," Elijah had said, a smirk blossoming in his voice, "it's Viggo." What Dom said next was lost inside Elijah's mouth as he kissed him; Viggo heard Elijah call Dominic a fucker quietly in his ear and could see the pink flash of his tongue as he pulled at Dominic's hair.
When Elijah stopped and pulled away for a moment, Dom made a small whining sound in the deep of his throat as he pawed at him with hungry hands. The blues of Elijah's eyes went faint and almost white as he reached out and lightly touched the metal of Viggo's camera. He smiled using only his mouth and whispered, "Take our picture, Viggo."
:::
In the shadow of the trees later that day, Elijah asked Viggo to never show anyone the photographs. He stood there in front of him unapologetically, fiddling with the ends of his sleeves and breathing steadily through his mouth. His lips and his jaw trembled imperceptibly as the wind picked up.
There was a small cut on Elijah's bottom lip, and every few breaths, he nudged at it using the same shiny tongue Viggo had seen earlier lick the shell of Dominic's ear. Something in the color of the surrounding trees or the pink in Elijah's cheeks made his eyes look slightly green. It reminded Viggo of the bottom of his pool back at home, with Exene sitting at the kitchen table with chipped nail polish and Henry in the bathroom lacing up his boots. Before he could react, Elijah was covering Viggo's hands with his own and tugging, and Viggo was letting himself be tugged.
Bark dug into the back of Viggo's neck and left livid red marks on his skin, but Viggo didn't pay it much attention. Elijah's eyes were pale as he looked up, paler than the sky above them but suddenly blue and white and green all at the same time. He meant to stop Elijah and say, Your eyes go gray when you're near him, but instead he said nothing. He just watched as Elijah made him promise, and then began promising things in return. And as Elijah used his dry, chapped lips to form the words, Viggo watched his indescribable lying eyes seal the bargain, and all Viggo could think was: There's no word for that.
