Iceland sits on the wooded fencepost, crouched and colored grey like a pigeon, ruffled and unsettled by the wind. He deeply inhales, filling his lungs to maximum capacity, and then hums, his teeth vibrating together with the noise. High pitched, childish, and then suddenly dipping into a deep rumble, like that of the earth. Or bees.
The grass is long and ripe with spring, but the chilly wind of the mountains comes down and nips at Iceland's flesh through the cracks in the seams of his clothing. He clears his throat and traces his gloved fingers along the woodwork post, aged and dry like his cracked lips, skin breaking and peeling like an onion. At least he didn't smell like an onion.
He checks his breath, and through the half opened rims of his eyes he sees his brother walking towards him through the meadow, flattening the ribbon-like grass under his feet with the crunching of his thick, rustic boots.
Iceland wants to take flight, spread his arms and run in the opposite direction, but he remains frozen and ice cold, burying deeper within his checkered sweater.
Norway doesn't speak to him. He doesn't even nod. He just sits next to him pretends like nothing happened, like nothing is wrong, and like he isn't even here.
He gives Iceland a glance, but takes off one boot to shake the gravel out.
"What?" Iceland questions, and turns away.
"I'm lonely," Norway replies, his words quiet and stuffed back into his throat as the wind changes direction. He sounds sick, nauseated, as if he could empty his entire heart onto the ground, pouring out all the feelings and memories he's kept inside of him for his centuries upon centuries of existence. He's old, weighed down, and although his hair and skin remains as youthful and radiant as the midnight sun, internally he turned grey and white ages ago. His back creaks and aches, and all he wishes for is to lie down in this field in midsummer and sleep a good decade. Maybe then he'd wake up ready to face life again with new vigor.
Iceland doesn't understand, and although he's not as old, he's lost his vigor, too. But it may just be the winter that's gotten him down. It may just be the lack of sunlight.
No, maybe he does understand, he just doesn't want to admit it.
Norway searches to interlock his fingers with his brother, but Iceland swoops his hand away and repositions himself on the post, perched with bent legs and flat feet, arms folded over his knees. He just wants to scald his mouth with coffee and burn his tongue to prevent him from speaking words he'll later regret. Or run home and grab a roll of packaging tape and place a rectangular section over his mouth. He's done it before, usually when Denmark talks to him, but that's more out of spite than it is of concern of speaking something he means.
Which he finds funny. Most people are afraid of saying something they don't mean. Iceland is afraid of speaking what he really believes.
He feels the fires cracking within his heart, warming his insides as feeling washes over him, but he narrows his eyebrows and tries to prevent it from spreading. He fails, and no longer does he feel like he's an awkward pigeon, bumbling and stupid, but a brilliant parrot. Like the ones he read about that live in the tropics, adorned with red and blue with long sweeping tails.
He hates that feeling. It's like warm raindrops on his skin as his flesh tingles, but each splash of water is a splash of color, staining his skin and soaking through his pores. It's good, but it feels too good, being painted.
Maybe it's because he's so used to being painted on. First his brother, then Denmark, and then England, America. He can't name the others. But they all tried to mold him into something he wasn't.
His brother tried to make both of them the same shade of slate grey, with blue fingertips and black covering the most hidden parts of one another. He wanted him to become strong and sturdy like an evergreen tree, protective and able to fend for itself in the darkness of winter. But Norway wasn't even strong enough to paint himself, so he crumbled, and Iceland still remembers just watching him fracture with wet paint still on both their faces.
Denmark wanted to make him brilliant and multicolored, trying to transplant his dying happiness into the body of another so he could have someone to hold in the many months and years he spent alone and miserable within his own house as his positions and power was ripped from him, bit by bit, little by little. But Iceland was too young to understand and too stubborn and upset that everyone had left them, so he left Denmark to cry alone while he plugged his ears in the next room and tried not to cry himself.
England decided on the color of muddy blue, so Iceland could blend into background as just another deep stretch of open ocean, invisible and unwanted during the second great war. England thought about claiming the island in the name of his empire, but surely Denmark would storm into his house and rip him to shreds. The dream of Iceland becoming just another faded patch of blue, red, and white on his flag was—as were all things England dreamed about—nothing more than a delusion.
America dumped gallons of red, orange, and yellow onto him. He wanted pizazz, to bring the barren rocky land to live with neon and beauty, tall buildings and industry. But America was blinded by the fact that volcanic island was already alive and beautiful. So out of touch was America from his roots and nature that he nestled into Iceland's house and laid oriental rugs across the wooden floors, covering up the island's history and dusting it out the door.
But they all failed, and they all left him. Which is the way it should be, he thought.
He thought about what color he desired to be, but he could never decide. And the part of him that longed to be different, and individual apart from the rest, decided that he was a blank canvas devoid of color. But the more he thought about that, the part of him that really felt, realized that without color, he couldn't live. He'd dry up into a husk, like the cicada shells that a tourist had told him about.
Empty, alone, and covered in ash.
Did he want to be atomic tangerine? Bright and dangerous, wild, eccentric and eye-popping as the music he listened to when he wanted to detach from the world? He wasn't that flashy, not that sour-and-yet-oh-so-sweet, unripe and unpicked. He wasn't that exotic. But it was something he sometimes wished he were.
He could try on navy blue, the color of his tangled bed sheets, deep and understanding, strong and powerful, washing over all other colors with force. Battleships churned that color up with propeller blades, cold and bold. But he was neither bold nor strong, nor powerful, nor completely understanding.
He could mix yellow and blue to make green, but deepen it, making the color of the trees, rolling like the hills, like this field, like the streaks of the aurora above him, like nature and all things good. Like grass topped roofs and logos of organic products, smooth, chic, and soothing. Perhaps not, though.
Lust, a deep red and full of passion was one he hid from himself. He had it in him, what France called l'amore, the color and taste of sweet lipstick and candied apples, passionate and careless. Someone who sang too loudly and not at all well, but could still get applause through enthusiastic energy. Vibrant, beautiful, and fierce, he could feel the color rolling off of his hips sometimes. Iceland didn't have the confidence in himself to fully be that color, though.
What about something calm and soothing, subdued and fulfilling, like flax? The color of his brother's hair, smelling of vanilla and sea salt, like wheat and fresh rope, the color of someone who wasn't trying to hard. Warm, but not too warm, still alluring and mysterious. It was like sand, but it could never be sand from his beaches. His sand was black as night.
He could never be as graceful as the flaxen nature of his brother. He was more of beige. Second best, pushed off to the side, the last color to be used up in the crayon box. But he wasn't that color either. He knew he wasn't as defeated as some people thought he was. He was not second best. He was not the lesser, not the nobody. He had the capacity for so much more.
He considered the colors teal and lavender, but he stopped as he felt pressure on his fingertips, colder fingers than his wrapping and interlacing between his own. He felt a squeeze, and without thinking he squeezed back. He turned, and his brother had moved closer and softly leaned against his shoulder, eyes closed, but his expression was haunted.
"I'm cold," he said, shivering from something that they both knew wasn't cold.
"Go put more clothes on," Iceland said anyway, sharp like volcanic jet. "Go away, Halle."
Until he decided what exactly he was, he'd remain a monochrome rainbow of all shades of grey, just like his clothes and hair, with two specks of purple and a carpet of pale flesh. And for now, he'd have to accept that.
Norway reaches up, craning his neck, and kisses him on the cheek, and Iceland can feel the painted raindrops stop drizzling. Instead, they pour now, and he is internally washed over with color, the world itself becoming a song with the stringed wind, the percussion of his pulse, and the murmured crackling of his clothing as he shifts to allow his brother to hang off of him. All that was missing were the words.
"You should sing," Norway suggests—not demands. He knows that his brother is brighter than he ever could be.
Iceland opens his mouth. He's not original enough to come up with his own words. He borrows them.
"Go sing too loud, make your voice break—sing it out," he begins, but stops. Norway nods at him to continue.
"Go scream, do shout, make an earthquake…"
He stops again, but Norway sings in his place, smiling slightly. "You wish fire would die and turn colder. You wish your love could see you grow older."
They sing together.
"We should always know that we can do anything."
They both know that songs like these, beautiful and hopeful, are not their songs. They wish they could be as warming as these pieces, words wrapped around decibels of noise masterfully, but they can't hold onto the feeling once the sound ends from their lips.
"Go drum, do proud. Make your hands ache—play it out."
That doesn't stop them from singing.
"Go march through crowd, make your day break."
He was a decimal point between two numbers, an unmade elixir, a hot new star still malleable and not yet cooled.
"You wish silence released massive tremors. You wish, I know it, surrender to summers."
He was an untamed being, wild like a horse but as subdued as a rabbit, a chimera of many things.
"Go do, you'll learn to. Just let yourself, fall into landslide."
He tasted of wine, of winter, of defeat and of power. Like paint brushed lightening and soot-saturated sky, of busted balloons, complicated tongues, and slick rain boots.
"Go do, you'll learn to. Just left yourself, give into low tide."
He was as explosive as his volcanoes, as quiet as his wastelands, as violent as the sea but as soft as snow. A million contradictions and a thousand secrets, a meshing of all the modern things and of all the ancient ones.
"Go do!"
He had not quite figured himself out yet, and maybe he never would.
But maybe it was better that way, Iceland muses.
Song is Go Do by Jónsi.
This was a present to a very special someone, written on four hours of sleep.