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Title: Once Over Twice
Author: kiltsandlollies
Pairing: Dominic Monaghan/Exene Cervenka
Rating: PG–13ish
Note: Exene Cervenka is, among other fantastic things, Viggo Mortensen’s ex–wife and mother of their son Henry. Takes places during LOTR filming. 650 words of I don’t know what.

She throws down the gauntlet of an orange peel at dinner, flicking it in his direction, and Dominic takes it up without thinking, wondering if his eyes are as transparent as her smile. She’s quick to laugh, sharp and easy to like, and matches even Ian’s wit over the last of the wine before kissing her child and his father, wishing them good dreams and safe travel into the woods tonight where they’ll sleep. She’s only here for the week, for Henry, of course, and at no point does she believe she’ll want exposure to more of New Zealand’s brush and moss and thick, loamy summer than what she’s already inhaled from the air surrounding Viggo.

Nothing has surrounded Dominic for weeks beyond a feeling of marrow–deep exhaustion, and he thinks he could shake it off for her.

It’s her second visit to New Zealand, and it’s—she’s—so different from the first. Then, her hair had been the same length as Henry’s, her face and body tired. Now, she’s electrified somehow; stronger, fitter, and beautiful in an older, off–kilter way the others don’t seem to recognize. Dominic recognizes it, and then some. It hasn’t been long since she and Viggo separated, and the bond is still there, but Dominic knows that bond has expanded, opened to accept others. He knows because Viggo’s hands extend everywhere, and neither of them can expect hers not to do the same.

When Dominic finds her, she’s on her stomach across Viggo’s bed, a book open on the pillows and her feet in the air behind her. He falters a little, shoes scuffing in the doorway, but she only raises her eyes to the picture above the headboard. It takes Dominic a moment to realize she’s watching him in the glass of the frame, sizing him up—a picture at an exhibition for once not shared by another.

Dominic tells her that she makes him think of the word virago, though he’s not sure what the word means. She laughs, smile bright and wide, and says she’ll take that and anything else he can manage before the week’s up and she’s on the road, and Dominic thinks right back atcha in an echo of her voice, of her mild, cheerful rejoinder to some crass insult from Billy thrown across the table an hour before.

What gets him—what hits him low in his gut and narrows his eyes and shortens his breath—is that she hasn’t even turned over on the bed to face him, to really look at him. He’s staring at the back of her head, at tangled yellow (not blonde; there’s something too soft about the word when he tries to apply it to her) hair that curls past her shoulders, at the curve of her spine and at the swell of her ass just barely covered by a sunflower–dotted black dress that Dominic will swear he’s seen somewhere before. Which of course he has, in pictures plastered all over mirrors in the Cuntebago. In pictures with her son. In pictures.

There’s a lot, though, that he hasn’t seen of her, and (moving past the frustration of having to speak to her this way) Dominic’s still grateful for the perspective his perch at the end of the bed offers. He can advance at his own pace, can curl his hands around her ankles, just above the straps of her shoes, and slide his palms down and up her calves and watch her reaction in the glass of the frame. When she turns—if she turns, she will finally turn—when she turns, he will be ready. He’ll know better what to say and do. He’ll know what he wants, and if it comes anything close to what she wants and knows and is.

Coo coo ka–choo, Mrs. Mortensen, Dominic thinks, except she’s not, anymore, except in pictures.


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