It's Dry Cracked Hands Season, and who better to project onto but Legolas, whom I have already given a whole Hand Thing?
...
“What are you doing?”
Legolas looks up at the question – looks up almost guiltily, clenches his hands into separate fists and fights the urge to hide them behind his back, lest the motion draw Gimli’s observant eyes. It is a marvel to him, still, how those eyes can miss a hawk flying overhead, a tuft of new growth at the end of a branch, but can take in every quirk of Legolas’s mouth, every hair out of place, and fill in the lines of the story like the constellations whose lines he does not see even when Legolas traces them out for him on his own skin.
“Nothing,” he says weakly, but indeed the eyes do not miss his motion now, flickering down to where Legolas’s knuckles thrust out of the backs of his hands, threatening to split taut skin; the fingers hidden by the clench of his fists, where Legolas can feel blood drying sticky between them. Can Gimli see deeply enough to note even that?
“Nothing, you say, and yet there is something you are so eager to hide from me.” Gimli takes a step towards him, slow and deliberate. When did he learn to move in this way, cautious as any elf approaching a deer for a greeting – a promise of safety, of kind intentions? Gimli does not see the worth in conversation with woodland animals, but he sees them in Legolas, knows how to move towards a prey animal who fears being hunted. And – is he so wrong?
“Not to hide,” Legolas protests, though his words will not satisfy Gimli. He would have hidden it if he could – it is not fair to Gimli to know what his home does to Legolas, the cool dry under-mountain air leaching the moisture from his skin until it is taut and cracked as paper; the lightning rod of his height drawing attention that crackles into nervous energy beneath his fingers so they tear at one another until the skin itself gives way, exposed underside of his blood welling to the surface as though he is finally being turned inside out. Gimli cannot visit less frequently than he does; his worry for his aging father churns at Legolas’s own insides. He could not leave Gimli alone with this even if he did not also care – even if the breath of mortality in the air around him did not linger heavy like fog on his senses –
And then Gimli’s hands are wrapped around his own, and all the thought is gone.
“Let me see,” Gimli murmurs, and Legolas’s fists open under his fingers.
When he holds Legolas’s hands like this, Legolas feels he could disappear – lose the substance of his wavering step on the ground and dissolve into mist himself, light and weightless. Gimli’s hands too are dry, calluses hard on the skin of the palms, but his fingers the gentler for it, and he sweeps them lightly over Legolas’s own ravaged nails, cracked and bleeding. The calluses snag on the dry backs of his hands, and Legolas bites his chapped lower lip, worries a flap of skin with his teeth.
Gimli sighs, deep and sad, and Legolas wonders how much he can read of him solely from the skin of his hands. His body tells the truths he wishes he could keep from his husband. Gimli has enough to worry him these days without Legolas’s concerns as well – and he does not want to talk about it, does not want to go over and over the things for which nothing can be done.
But Gimli does not speak. He encloses Legolas’s hands in his own, a pile of long fingers and clammy palms pressed between those large, square dwarf-hands, expansive and protective, thrumming with Gimli’s own vitality. The mist of Legolas’s soul collects, re-forms, and he is himself again, huddled on the couch of Gimli’s rooms in Erebor, with his husband standing before him, there to make him real.
Their eyes meet, and Gimli’s flicker with enough love and understanding to make Legolas’s own well up.
“I have a cream for that,” is all Gimli says. He releases his clasp of Legolas’s hands at last, presses a kiss to the cracked knuckles, heedless of the bead of blood that wells up when his lips draw away. “Stay right there while I fetch it.”
“I go nowhere,” Legolas murmurs, and the truth of his own words settles in like a weight of melancholy over his shoulders, in his stomach. He will do nothing to leave this couch, this place, this mist of mortality that has claimed him too for its own. How could he ever, while Gimli is here? He has set his feet on the path and he will walk it, whatever the cost to his body and to his soul.
But as Gimli takes his hands again between his own, smooths them with a light salve that soothes the cracked skin nearly as much as his own touch, understanding passing between their hands with an ease that needs no words, he can remember that the pain is worth the reward.
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