Work Text:
He loved looking up into the falling snow; watching the fragile crystals drift down in lazy spirals and feeling their bright sting against his skin. It seemed to him as if they fell from an unimaginable height; as if the world went on forever, and he could feel the weight of it, driving the breath from his chest and bringing him to his knees. It was almost like praying, he had said, laughing in embarrassment at his flights of fancy. And you smiled as you watched him and silently breathed a prayer of your own – a burst of formless longing that frightened you with its intensity.
Then he had buried his frozen hands in the warm darkness underneath your coat, and nuzzled his cold nose into the soft hollow of your neck, and you shut your eyes and pressed your cheek against his hair. “It’s beautiful, Sam,” he had whispered, and you nodded in agreement and hugged your Frodo close, your hands moving carefully over the curve of his back. You could never trust your voice to answer; afraid that the tenderness inside you would spill over and you didn’t know what would happen if it did.
There was snow again one morning, and a restless Fellowship at liberty in a place called Te Anau. He had looked very pale against the black he wore, ebony inlaid with ivory, and you filled your eyes with his beauty and your ears with the sigh of branches sieving the wind. And a soft voice had intruded, somewhere behind your shoulder, insistent and oddly mesmerizing.
“Call him, Sean. Call his name.”
At any other time you would have asked the reason why, but you were steeped in fantasy, and you obeyed your King.
He had turned, still on his knees on the rough ground, and there were snowflakes, sprinkled like drifts of sugar over the dark spikes of his hair. His lips had been red as cherries from the cold, his eyes soft and asking. You stared at him, and something changed for you; or else it had been there all along, a snowball rolling downhill, gathering mass and momentum as it came. Bringing at last, the avalanche.
It had crashed over you then – the incredible certainty that it wasn’t only Sam loves Frodo anymore; it was Sean in love with Elijah, and there already was a Rosie and an Elanor, waiting for her father to come home. And you knew the exhilaration of looking up at the light, knew the weight of the sky upon your back and the pain of a heart torn in two.
So you had put him away with the rest of your impossible dreams, though they paled and shrank before his glory. You summoned Sam Gamgee back, and you went on as you did before. And you could endure it, as long as he didn’t know.
The wanting kept pace with the rhythm of your life, fed by the endless premieres, the tandem sound bites, the brush of his body against yours and the stuttering puffs of his laughter warming your cheek. Your need for him didn’t go away, as you had half-hoped it would. Rather, it sat in your mind like a pot of something spicy simmering on the back of the stove, perfuming the air with the promise of heat.
You burned yourself on it, once or twice. When two towers went up in flames and you had searched the sky with tears pouring down your cheeks and his name trembling on your lips – that had been a third-degree burn, at least. It had hurt quite badly, and you knew that you would always bear the scars of it.
And that early morning call from Hannah that had sent you racing to the hospital without a word of explanation for your indignant wife – your heart caught in your throat and fear branded into your brain. The burn was bearable only because you were with him, though the bright spirit you loved was quenched by pain and his face almost as white as the bed in which he lay.
Just watching him breathe had been enough for you.
You tried to keep a lid on it, but it had been too late. Your world had settled into an eccentric orbit around its unlikely star, and its course was impossible to change, even if you wanted it to. And suddenly you had to touch him as often as you could, as if to reassure yourself that he was really there.
The envelope had arrived after the first movie's premiere, and you frowned at the sender’s name and wondered. Read the few words scrawled on it and didn’t understand. When you opened it you realized that the photographs of a beautiful boy kneeling in the snow hadn’t been the only ones he took, the devious bastard. Your heart sank as you gazed at your own face and saw your desire displayed for all the world to see.
And the only thought in your mind as you sat there staring was, How could *he* not know?
It was oddly liberating, once you had stopped running – the possibility that he knew how you felt and still hadn’t pushed you away, hadn’t allowed your friendship to fade. It gave you leave to expand your fantasies, to dream of things you'd avoided before. Things you wanted to do to him – and with him. Impossible dreams.
There had been snow again one evening, drifting softly over the old brownstones in a city that he called home. You were together on a balcony high above the busy streets because you had heard the loneliness in his voice from half a continent away and now the wind was singing through your hair and snowflakes danced through the haze of smoke that veiled his face.
He shivered in the thin shirt he wore, still so careless of his comfort. A sense of inevitability hung in the air as you held your coat open – and he had accepted your wordless invitation and come to you. His scent, released by the warmth of your body had flooded your senses; the years fell away as you stared at his face – the boy he had been still present in the young man he had become.
“It’s beautiful, Sean,” he had whispered and you still didn’t trust your voice, but it was so peaceful in the snowlight and the world had seemed so far away. So you kissed him. And – he kissed you back. You don’t remember much of that first time; wet heat and the sweetness of cloves and the strong beat of his heart against your chest, and his voice begging for more. Yes, please. Oh yes.
You’d seen him naked before. But never like this. Never for you.
Your fears and insecurities had started to fade with the taste of his swollen flesh on your tongue, eroding further with the press of his fingers on your skin and his lithe body writhing under your eager hands. Gone without a trace at the broken sounds he made, strung like prayer beads across the landscape of your soul.
“I’m glad I waited,” he had said when he could breathe again. And you held him close in your arms and agreed with all your heart.
The package had arrived on the first anniversary of the day when you had both decided that you could no longer live apart. You opened it together, and nestled in a makeshift padding of newspaper, you found two snowflakes fashioned of translucent glass. They caught the light and threw rainbows around the room, one delicately filigreed and fretted, the other of a more sturdy geometry, though no less graceful. He looked at you and smiled, knowing exactly what they meant. And you thought of the fragment of brown paper in your wallet, now soft and creased with many readings. Words you had received so long ago, written in Viggo’s oblique prose:
Clouds seed the snowflake
Winter’s merry mayfly dance
Sheltered in your hand.