FIC: SB/VM - 'I'M OKAY, YOU'RE OKAY'
Jun. 8th, 2004 01:12 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
childeproof.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
rugbytackleTITLE: ‘I’M OKAY, YOU’RE OKAY’
AUTHOR: childeproof
PAIRING: LOTRIPS, SB/VM, HOBBITPILE
WARNINGS: RPS, m/m sex, swearing, liberties with the shooting schedule.
SUMMARY: In which they shoot the Caradhras scenes, Sean hits the minibar at the crack of dawn to deal with Viggo and a helicopter, and the hobbits do Wagner.
NOTE: Can be read alone, but is also a sort-of sequel to the rest of the ‘Boiling Point’ series, which can be found here. http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=childeproof&keyword=LOTR+RPS&filter=all
DISCLAIMER: Out of the sick fastnesses of my own imagination. No disrespect to anyone intended.
The early light is up before them, but not entirely established yet, still a bit delicate. The cold strips him down to the skin in seconds, makes his eyes sting - lack of sleep, there’s nothing like it for making you raw.
Sean’s playing for time. He’s sucking the last out of a cigarette in the shelter of the hotel back entrance - the rest of them, drowsy, coats over costumes, are all packing themselves into the helicopter over the other side of the carpark - when one of the chefs emerges, wiping his hands on his overall, and hands him a ballpoint and the back of a menu.
‘Would ya mind?’ Amiable, slabby young Maori face, gapped teeth.
‘Not at all.’ I will write my name on every menu in your fine establishment if it means I don’t have to do this fucking awful thing. He can feel the smile ooze from his own face like the fake, greasepaint effort it is. It sometimes freaks him out that people know his face, the sharp way they examine it, like they’re checking his credentials.
But then, Sean’s never really got why people are so interested in actors. Rates of divorce, adultery, general insanity and addiction would suggest they are actually society’s freaks. His signature looks more than usually unreliable, like something a criminologist would produce in a courtroom drama, as evidence of anti-social tendencies. Like anyone who’s looking needs any more proof of his guaranteed ability to comprehensively fuck up anything he touches.
‘Cheers, mate.’ A shy grin, and he’s off through the swing doors, before Sean can stop him. Back to some sweaty kitchen where he’ll flip eggs for the proper breakfast brigade, after the Rings cast and crew have been flown up the Alps above Ranitanga for a short day’s snow shoot.
And that, of course, is the problem.
If he leans around the corner, there it is.
Shit.
The evil little chopper, black as a gun, looking far too small for the number of people who are going to fit in it, and at the same time too chunky and unaerodynamic to ever take off.
I’ll be sick.
He taps his forehead experimentally against the brick, then again, harder. Pain sprays colourfully behind his eyes and he guesses he’s bitten his cheek when his mouth begins to clot with the salty metal of himself.
Panic slithers on panic.
He gropes in his coat pocket for the bottle he’s lifted from the minibar.
The burn of the Glenlivet hits him, making him hack. You forget, mostly, how bloody awkward it was when you started drinking first, when all you wanted to be was older, to do older things, back when you were coughing yourself into adulthood on Marlboros and Buckfast. Then the burn gets to seem natural and you get used to it. It still tastes awful, really, but you don’t think about it.
A mouthful or two will just glaze him over, let him do what he needs. He knows, or he thinks he does, how much will keep him together, how to hold off before total anaesthesia.
‘Hey, Bean.’ Billy’s shoulders, in a grubby plaid jacket, are slumped with the weight of the morning. He looks watchful, pink-nosed, like a Dickens urchin. ‘Aren’t you goin’ to come an’ break sweat for the One Ring?’
‘Right.’ Sean grinds out his soggy butt underfoot, and stands the empty bottle on a window sill. He fights to sound reasonable, normal.’I woke up with so much enthusiasm to get up that fucking mountain I didn’t even get my breakfast.’
Because, as both you and I know but will never say, I would puke it up.
‘Uh huh.’ Billy is carefully looking at the ground, hands in pockets. ‘They’re looking for you all over.’
‘I fucking said all right. Jesus.’ He isn’t shouting, he’s only being clear, but the last word still splinters.
Billy doesn’t say anything.
He doesn’t have to. He’s all on display. All the hobbits are, it’s as though they have their feelings laid out like the toppings on a pizza. Sean understands that he should reach out and pat his shoulder, feels the gesture returned, and that makes them fine again, sorted out.
Sometimes he gets pissed off by his own redeeming features.
‘You should try vodka, Nightnurse and daytime TV sometime.’ Billy trots close to his side, grave in his hobbit feet. ‘You just stop giving a shit, I swear.’
The wind catches them as they cross the carpark towards the waiting helicopter. Crew are still stacking rolls of cable and containers alongside.
Impossibly, the helicopter looks smaller close up.
The thing Sean hates most about helicopters is their lack of all the things whose presence he hates about planes - the foldaway tables, reclining seats, call bells for the summoning of uniformed stewardesses. He knows, on planes, that these things won’t stop you being sucked out through a window breach, or getting hacked to bits by shards of flying metal, but their absence makes him feel uncomfortably vulnerable. Helicopters are naked. Helicopters are not going to cover up the fact of imminent death with inset individual tv screens.
Fear oils out from his belly, paints his armpits and neck, the soles of his feet.
Sean prays for sudden bad weather up on the heights, for generator failure, for the crew to be struck down by a instantaneous stomach bug. It occurs to him that he only ever contacts God to make complaints or beg favours. He brushes a sting of sweat away from his eyes. He is getting far too sober far too fast.
‘Morning.’ The sound of Viggo’s sleep-clogged voice brings on a rush of sour perspiration. He can no longer remember when he first realised he could tell where Viggo is without looking, without being told.
Leaning against the pull-down steps in his stained leathers and an old army parka, Viggo is worrying his hair out of his eyes and taking slugs of coffee out of his battered insulated carrycup. Narsil is propped against his leg.
The shock of him, every time, wrecks Sean’s co ordination. He lurches gracelessly over a coil of cable and slams into the sharp edge of the steps. Fuck, you stupid fuck. He sucks his breath in hard as he waits for the first, ugly snap of pain to hit.
‘Christ.’ Viggo gets a grimy gauntleted hand under his arm, eases him down onto the steps. Sean tries not to notice the cuts, the small wounds, the skinned knuckles under the spray-on Aragorn dirt. Anything involving pain in conjunction with Viggo makes him anxious.
He meets Viggo’s look in a slow flinch of pre-emptive shame, as his eyes tear over with the new, jangling, seam of hurt across his shins.
‘I’m all right.’ He almost believes himself, hoping nothing about him is shaking. ‘Not a bother.’
Viggo shovels back the lock of hair falling across his face. His mouth barely avoids a smile, trembles back into a frown of concern. ‘Lijah was suggesting we sedate you, like that guy with the mohawk on The A-Team.’
Viggo’s attention clamps his breath and he focuses on not feeling dizzy all over again. ‘I did a bit of self-medicating. Courtesy of the minibar.’
‘Uh huh.’ Viggo’s hand hasn’t gone away. After a couple of brief dabs at his shoulder, it slides round to rest in the small of his back, warm under his coat.
Viggo’s not long out of the shower, smells of soap, fabric, with only the faintest undertaste of new sweat. Unlike Sean who’s giving off the thin, ammoniac sweat of a night’s solitary drinking, and who couldn’t trust his hands with a razor.
The classy nocturnal pastimes of Sean Bean. Sad fuck Sean.
The step teeters uneasily below Sean, causing a matching rock behind his eyes.
You just can’t let it go, can you?
It’s like your body has memories in nerve endings. He flexes his shoulders, remembering the memory of Viggo’s sweat pressed to his face, of him braced and pinned against him, and wonders whether Viggo is thinking the same thing. Syringing in under his better judgement, under the panic, is the want to do it again, to know he is going to allow himself to do it again, that Viggo is going to allow him to do it again, those things that they know they like.
He rubs his cheek with the heel of one hand. Under his palm, a muscle begins to tick.
Ian coughs delicately from the interior behind them. ‘Are you gentlemen planning to join us any time soon?’
DUH DUH DUH DUH DUH
DUH DUH DUH DUH DUH
The Hobbit fucking Philharmonic breaks into a mangled, early-morning but all too recognisable version of ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, the soundtrack to Sean’s most lurid technicolour flying nightmares.
‘Shut the fuck up, little bastards.’ He’s swallowing rapidly to keep pace with his own saliva.
And, oddly enough, they do.
Viggo pinches the bridge of his nose, and looks briefly at Sean. The hardest part of him is his mouth, his jaw, the reasons he gets tough guy parts. His eyes, though, have a soft look, a flawed defence. He seems to be quite careful people don’t notice this.
‘Okay?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Sean swallows and closes his eyes, weakness climbing up the muscles of his throat. Against his will, and though he’s been trying not to move his arms in case they prove unreliable, he puts his hand out, blind, and catches Viggo’s wrist. He lets himself cling, only for a reasonable moment, only for a while.
‘You needn’t -’ Be so fucking kind? Possibly still want to fuck me, although this is probably increasingly unlikely? Alongside his unease, there oozes something equally familiar. The knowledge that he is being ridiculous.
Viggo lets him go with a flutter of carefulness over his palm.‘I know. I needn’t do anything. I want to, you fool.’
And fuck you and fuck you and fuck you and thanks.
As they climb inside, Dom is athletically sniffing his hobbit foot and declaring ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning.’
Lijah, strapped alongside like a solemn schoolchild, pats his shoulder soothingly, and looks across at Sean and Viggo.’It’s the foot glue. He’s harmless really.’
‘The gang’s all here,’ Orli, green bandana over his blonde wig, shouts helpfully to one of the crew.
Ian burrows his neck inside a massive scarf, amused. ‘One can’t help thinking it’s the start of one of those tacky disaster movies.’
The hobbits are about to enter into this idea with enthusiasm, but rein themselves back as soon as they look at Sean.
The helicopter whips in a way that makes Sean’s whole skin shiver with horrors.
They rise through a dense silvered air, nothing but blades of colour, horizon upon horizon, slicing away. Try as he might, Sean can’t find this anything but terrifying. The noise of the engine seems like a fairly comprehensively stupid intrusion into waiting emptiness.
‘Jesus. It looks like an ad for air freshener.’ Dom’s eyes slide sideways from the window to Sean, a quick check, and he manages some kind of grimace in return.
He thinks dying might possibly be like this view, a kind of cold official appointment with a large disinterest.
Sweat is running on his face again; he never knows when this is going to happen, and he can never stop it. His breath is coming in gasps like a giant hand is clamping round his chest - clench, release, clench.
He gets a vague impression of a row of hobbit faces entirely devoid of malice. Astin leaning over, shouting ‘My knee is your knee, Beanie.’ And even though he knows in a half hour he’ll be feeling nauseous with rage and wishing them all to go and fuck themselves in front of whom he’s made a total idiot of himself, he’s grateful.
Under their coats, he works his fingers wetly between Viggo’s and clings on.
There’s nothing up there but the snow-hush, whitened grass. Some gnarled birches down by the track they’d hauled the rig up, but hardly visible against the white. They’ve got Sean, Viggo and Lijah doing a walk-through of part of the first Caradhras scene, while the techies consult, low-voiced, about light meters in the snow.
Lijah’s on his mark down by Viggo, looking up the slope to Sean, shivering, red-cheeked, half-asleep still, the heel of his fist in his eye. Billy and Dom, further up the slope behind them, are getting ticked off by one of the crew for making footprints on the fresh snow the Fellowship isn’t supposed to have trodden on yet.
‘Fuck, I’m freezing.’ Dom, plaintive, hoarse with the desire to get back under a duvet.
‘Are your nipples all hard?’ Billy, with an audible leer.
‘Fuck off, you pervert.’
‘That’s not what you said last night, big boy.’
‘I thought I made you sign something.’ Dom is shrill with outrage. ‘Pillow talk is confidential, bastard.’
Astin, who’s been waiting for this, is happy. ‘Not with the walls in this hotel, I think you’ll find.’
‘Thank you, Samwise, the last known address of a thousand bagels.’
There’s a scuffle and a flurry of messy snow balls.
On other days, Sean would be enjoying along with Viggo the complex combination of obligatory rudeness and unofficial devotion that constitutes the rules of hobbit behaviour, but he doesn’t want to look at him now, after the flight. He knows he’ll have to, in the end, but he doesn’t want to cooperate.
‘Boromir.’ Viggo hitting his cue, with his Aragorn look pulled up over him, breath spurting white in the cold air.
‘It is a strange fate -’ Sean can’t concentrate, Boromir’s voice comes out more Sheffield housing estate than Gondorian aristocrat tempted by the Ring of Power. ‘That we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing.’
Viggo is narrow-eyed in the snow-glare, the splash of dark hair against his sharp jaw. Sean’s always liked the way Viggo acts, he’s a good, quiet studious actor.
‘Such a little thing.’ He concentrates on trying to cover up the slightly pissed look of a man pleasantly surprised by his own continuance.
‘Boromir, give the Ring to Frodo.’ Viggo’s dirty leather-gloved hand finds the hilt of Narsil. His hands are the thing Sean knows best about him, the way they can be confident with buttons and zips, the texture of cloth, skin. Curled shut on a sheet close by Sean’s face, all cuts and shiny patches of iodine, the blue push of veins at his wrist. The suicide’s favourite spot, the shy ribbing of tendons and blood all woven under the thinnest skin.
Sean is breathing through his teeth, trying to look away from the memory because this isn’t a time when he can afford to be disturbed. The effort of this bangs in his head. ‘As you wish. I care not.’
He crunches closer to Lijah and Viggo inside the bite of the snow.
Lijah, who hates getting his wig tousled, snaps out of Frodo with unnerving suddenness and sticks out his tongue.
‘Oh, good grief.’ Ian, pulling his Gandalf hat down over his ears, heads past for a chair.
‘Take five, ‘ says the continuity woman resignedly.
The morning light flattens out.
Someone gives Sean a cup of bad thermos coffee while his make-up is retouched. The new graze on his forehead is paused over, then covered up, and not mentioned, for which he is grateful. He wants to sit and smoke, pollute the clean air with his own nicotine and carbon dioxide, let the quiet sluice him down.
An uneasy tiredness drops close round him like an old coat. The backs of his eyes are still miserable with what is not quite yet a hangover. He presses experimentally at the tender place on his temple and is rewarded with a warming, tingling hurt. Nippy, but controllable enough to be almost pleasant if you’re a masochist.
Hobbit harmony has apparently been restored, and he’s been preparing for a hobbit stand-up comedy routine involving Boromir the Brave who only narrowly avoids pissing himself at two thousand feet. But some kind of unspoken policy decision has been taken, and all four are enjoyably tormenting Viggo, who’s been trying to sketch the view down the valley with a sort of hobbit sports commentary going on over his shoulder.
‘The modernity of it, Vig.’ Dom, serious as a seminarian with a Marlboro stuck to his lower lip.
Lijah assumes the kind of look that would stand him in good stead if he ever stood trial for murder. ‘What’s that scribble in the middle?’
Viggo mimes being shot through the heart, swats the nearest hobbit head amiably with his notebook. ‘Philistines.’ He’s like that with the hobbits, like some big family pet dog peaceably letting the toddlers pull his tail. ‘I’m just too good for this world.’
He gets to his feet, stretches. Then, just as Sean realises he’s staring unguardedly, Viggo’s eyes slide to his in a quick catch of enquiry.
‘Mind you put in Elfboy picking flowers in the middle,’ Billy shouts after him, ‘so’s we know which way up to hang it.’
Footsteps crunch on snow, then Viggo’s settling down next to Sean, close, but not unduly so, maybe being a bit careful, seeing how things are.
Sean kicks at nothing on the ground, a tangle of dirty cables in trodden slush. He sniffs, rubs his face where the cold’s starting to numb it.
For a bit, only Viggo’s attention is tangible, like a warm stroke on the side of Sean’s neck. After a minute, he tugs Sean’s hand up to his mouth, rough-palmed in his leather gauntlet, and takes a deep drag on Sean’s cigarette.
‘Given up again?’ The sudden soft scratch of Viggo’s smudgy charcoal jaw against his hand makes Sean hungry all down that arm.
‘Uh huh. A compromise between me and my conscience.’ Folding one arm behind his head, Viggo begins to palp at his shoulder and neck. He keeps talking but mostly to their feet. ‘I can’t buy a pack, I can only bum other people’s. The ones who haven’t wised up yet, anyway.’
‘Apart from Lijah, the soul of generosity.’ The back of Sean’s neck relaxes. ‘Because no else one in their right mind’d touch those crappy cloves.’ Happily, Sean’s own particular peace treaty with his lungs involves rolling his own, so he can’t offer Viggo one.
Anticipation milks him out. It’s sheltered enough where they are for him to hear Viggo haul in a breath and let it out again in a white billow. Chill air moving, someone shouting instructions, clattering from the camera track.
After a minute Viggo’s hand folds round his wrist again, cups it in close to his mouth as he inhales. The way Viggo sucks a cigarette, hungry, is like a kind of prayer, like he’s eating something delicious. It also makes Sean reluctantly, painfully hard, jammed, clenched against his costume.
He squeezes his eyes shut, blinks at the sky overhead.
‘C’mere.’ Viggo’s breathing is slow and quiet, and Sean can feel the sad little crumple of his resistance giving in. He lets himself lean in slightly against the steady drumming of Viggo’s heartbeat, surreptitiously breathe the hot metal smell of his neck reasserting itself under the soap. A nudge of lust is irritating the base of his belly and he wishes he would go away and leave himself the fuck alone.
In the snow-light, he’s noticed this morning where the dark Aragorn hair dye has faded slightly, where a slight shine of what must be Viggo’s own dirty gold is shading through on the temples. Make-up will touch it up again as soon as someone notices, of course, but Sean’s not going to be the one to point it out. Fuck continuity.
Viggo’s voice is low, almost too quiet to be heard. ‘You worried about going back down?’ The small push and heat of his words breathe against Sean’s cheek.
There are several things Sean usually says to this, all almost equally untrue, as he knows Viggo knows. But he just grunts. The desire to turn his head a few inches, push in and find the smooth heat of Viggo’s tongue, is making his throat ache, balancing the other stiffness.
‘You always - ’ Viggo might have been making a note of the time or the day of the week, no change of tone. He seems entirely preoccupied with the view down towards the tree-line as his hand finds and investigates the inside of Sean’s thigh, working a thumb along tensed cloth, stalking him until it finds him, palms him.
Sean can’t say anything, but he can buck upward into Viggo’s fist, and feel sweat gather on his face.
Then the PA crackles into life.
– PLACES EVERYONE, PLEASE.
Later, a modestly bloody sunset presses near the window of Sean’s room. The competing light of the tv billows and blinks on the ceiling, some MTV crap with the sound turned off.
Sean stands at the window and looks out at the gory stripes of cloud. Stacked above and below and to either side are other windows, and in front of him, caught in the glass of his own window, a reflected hotel bedroom shines, repeated palely in the double glazing.
Dom has the room next door, but Billy’s usually in there too, something Sean was made aware of several times during the night. Astin wasn’t joking about the thickness of the walls. Hobbit sex sounds like a happy variety of GBH is being committed. Or like one of those Batman fistfights. Bif! Pow! Bang! He’d have banged on the wall, only he’s fairly sure they’d have taken it as encouragement.
His body is filled with the cottony calm of total exhaustion, relief. That weird, more than usually naked sensation that stays on your skin when you’ve showered and shaved and dressed again straight away, denim and cotton feeling a bit stiff against warmed and bathed flesh.
He’d thought Viggo might knock on the door and stroll in, barefoot, buttoning his shirt.
He’d wanted to be a less sorry specimen than Viggo had seen this morning. Clean, sober and in his right mind. Dress the part. He’d cleaned himself down to an ache in the offensively shiny bathroom, with its usual collection of bottles and sachets. He’d even successfully repressed the desire to piss in the sink, or ask for the removal of the prissy paper toilet seat guard, designed to protect him from imaginary germs.
Dressed and combed so that the sore place on his forehead doesn’t show much - and clean underpants, equally well-prepared for road accidents or sex - he catches himself in the mirror. The face that gets him the kind of parts he gets, the reason casting directors called his agent when they thought of some tough nut with hidden depths, the reason he’s here.
Sean Bean, reeking with loneliness, eyes frozen for however many years in a kind of perpetual flinch, some kind of compensating fury around the mouth.
The trouble with lonely people is that some of us would prefer to stay untroubled by any more hope, thanks very much.
Because hope of that kind can unbalance you, and you’re right to be worried.
And he can’t think how long it’s been since he got what he was looking for.
Downstairs, the bar is heaving, semi-dark, humid with bodies. The Rings crowd is gatecrashing some kind of regular happy hour when the locals get smashed on cut-price cocktails. The noise level - more MTV crap - is high enough to thrum lightly in the skull and make conversation largely impossible.
Sean gets two beers for convenience’s sake, and heads for the hobbits’ waves and Orli’s growing-out mohawk in a crowd near the bar. Ian’s there, looking like a shark attempting the sunny, grandfatherly look, and even John’s playing pool with some crew over by the tv, but there’s no sign of Viggo.
Dom, all hair-gel and flamboyant shirt, is coming on to Billy with all the subtlety and charm of a snake oil salesman, like he hasn’t been fucking him senseless on a daily basis for nearly the entire shoot.
‘What was the first thing I ever said to you, Bills?’ To emphasise his sincerity, he knocks a drink over.
‘What are you drinking?’
‘Huh?’
‘That’s what you said, you dope.’
Lijah’s up on a chair bouncing like a beachball with his hands grasping imaginary braces in what Sean eventually recognises from the dailies as his Frodo dance from the Bilbo’s birthday party scenes, unanimously elected by the hobbits as the least cool dance move ever, including seventies disco. ‘Chew on that, Timberlake!’ he roars at MTV.
Several people prudently remove their drinks and themselves to a safer location.
‘Now, Lij - ’ Astin grabs the ass pocket of his jeans and pulls him down, tutting beerily. ‘You’ll get laughter lines, and you know you only get hired to look all soulful and big-eyed.’
Bills lifts his elbows out of the spilled beer. ‘Yeah, an’ Astin here’ll ditch you for a younger model.’
‘Are there younger models than our Mr Wood?’ Ian wonders, getting to his feet. ‘I fear I must be off to iron my jowls, gentlemen. Party on.’
‘Did you just use the word party as a verb, Ian?’
‘Don’t worry, petal, ‘ Billy says to Lijah. ‘You’re too beautiful to have to work. You should get a grant or something just for being.’
You would know they were together, the hobbits. It’s not even that they’re physically touching in any intimate way, not holding hands or anything, but you still would have known absolutely that they were together.
‘That beer mine, by any chance?’ A pair of hands come to rest on Sean’s shoulders and an immediate lick of nervous contentment traces the back of his neck. He recognises the weight and vibration of Viggo’s voice under the music, even if the touch is surprising, too definite and proprietorial for Viggo, and if he’s not used to him smelling of aftershave, of that particular kind of maleness.
He clears his throat. ‘Nicking my fags and my beer in one day? I think you might be taking this Steward stuff a bit too literally.’
Viggo slides in beside him, pushes clean hair behind his ear. The solid nudge of his presence is like a bandage on a wound. ‘So do I get a cigarette too?’
Sean fights relaxing into the utter foolishness of a grin, and fails.
And there’s clearly some kind of invisible signal he’s not noticed, some kind of unmistakable evidence of helpless contentment, because suddenly it’s open season on Sean again. The hobbits do their well-honed American newsreader routine.
‘Unbelievable! Brad, no one can quite believe it, what we’ve just seen is-’
’Yes, Simon, it’s true, a genuine smile from Sean Bean!’
‘Brad, this item is moving very fast.’
‘Simon, it’s unbelievable!’
Sean glowers, he hopes convincingly. ‘One more word, Monahan, and I’ll be selling bedroom tapes of you and Boyd on the internet.’
Billy, nonchalant, sends over his most pristine smile. ‘D’you fancy a threesome, then?’
Dom sighs. ‘I told you before, Bills, we have to drug them first.’
Viggo, reaching across for his beer, takes a moment to lean in on Sean’s shoulder, blows hot air through his shirt. And Sean understands they won’t be heading upstairs just yet, because they’re both liking the feeling of knowing they’re going to, the certainty of it, any time now.
‘Mine’s nearer,’ Viggo says levelly.
‘Uh huh.’ Sean’s too hungry to be dignified, following.
A glimpse of a pastel room identical to his own, bedside lamp left on, then Viggo kicking the door shut, pulling his shirt off over his head.
Viggo’s hands slide up and hold him along the jaw and beside his cheeks, tilt him to the right angle, keep him there a minute. Then they’re kissing, rough, stubble and slick wet jaws, teeth colliding, pressing hard, Viggo’s hand up the back of his shirt, his in the waistband of Viggo’s jeans, angling down. Sean is afraid to continue and desperate not to stop.
The reality of Viggo stripped to the waist - width of taut bare skin, lines of sinew, pale sunken nipples - his complete availability to Sean’s complete want, jack-knifes suddenly in him, loosening his limbs, letting him start to unwrap them both, sample Viggo’s different temperatures. The hot scent of him, his recognisable heat, sweat, metal, the unfamiliar tang of aftershave.
‘What?’ Viggo says, pulling back to work on Sean’s belt, breathing hard, brow furrowed with concentration. The pleasure of this flexes his stomach, low down.
Sean’s inhalations have become irregular. The hush of a zip, bland hotel room air lapping at his cock. ‘Nothing.’
‘Sure?’ Viggo’s sword-toughened palm is curved close, almost touching, teasing. Sean can hear the tensed rush of his breathing.
‘Yeah -’
‘So shut the fuck up.’ Viggo slips his cupped palm up until Sean shudders and bucks against his hand, and rolls Viggo over onto the bed, pinning him on his back on the rucked spread, knees on thighs and hands on wrists. They’re evenly matched for strength, and Viggo could probably throw him off, but he doesn’t seem unhappy to be trapped, or make more than a token protest. Sean bends and takes in a nipple, faintly salty and sour.
Viggo’s eyes tick open. Their pupils are huge, swallowing up the narrow blue. The bedside lamp cuts shadows into the line of his jaw.
Sean drags his mouth over skin, bites the sweat-glossy shoulder bone till he tastes metal and Viggo’s wrists twist under his hands.
Then Viggo’s face snaps sideways. ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘What’s your hurry?’ Sean angles himself, stretches for a condom from the locker top. ‘So you were fairly sure I was coming back with you, then? Or were these just in case you got lucky?’
‘Fuck -’
He covers Viggo’s mouth so the rest is inaudible, and Viggo’s freed hand comes up to dig into the flesh of his back.
Taking his time, Sean positions, pushes in, slippery, past the resistance, then an easier deepness, a slipping by steps, all the way. His widening entry slowly startles Viggo’s eyes. The shudder of his thighs, his throat and shoulders slick with the bloom of penetrated, tensing sweat, send the slap of lust stringing along Sean’s spine, force out his own whimper.
When Viggo comes, it sounds as though someone is beating the air out of him with a stick.
And later, with the start of a watery light beginning to be patted in around the edges of the curtains, Sean’s awake, rolled carefully up on one elbow, with the shape of Viggo dug deeply into his half of the mattress. Viggo is lying like he’s been hit by a sniper, spread, wet, still half-hard. The bunched denim of his shirt is tangled under the careless fan of his hair on the pillow.
Something breaks and folds in Sean’s chest; it’s the same each time, like a sheet taken and stretched and folded, then compacted into layers of heaviness, into layers of frightening, complicated heaviness. It shortens his breath.
It fucking baffles him.
Viggo grumbles, stirs, like Sean’s attention touches his skin.
His eyes open, palely blank for a moment, nearly hostile. ‘Stop looking so worried.’
‘I’m not worried.’
‘Well, you’re the only person I know who gets worried about not being worried.’ He cups Sean’s neck with one hand, rubbing reminding them both of how many times now they’ve been in this position, done these things to each other, for each other.
He turns and Sean lets him fold himself in again against his back, skin to skin, in one hot graft from neck to ankles.
Viggo’s arms are already clumsy again with drowsiness. ‘I swear, I’m going to buy you I’m Okay, You’re Okay.’
'Look, Vig. I did hypotherapy for the flying thing.' Sean ticks them off on his fingers. 'Then counselling when it didn't work. Acupuncture for smoking. Couple therapy before the first and divorces. I've a small library of books.'
Viggo's amusement heats the back of Sean's neck pleasantly. 'Jesus. A self-help junkie.'
Self-help is a completely unhelpful term. Sean isn’t able to help himself, which is why he’s here.
AUTHOR: childeproof
PAIRING: LOTRIPS, SB/VM, HOBBITPILE
WARNINGS: RPS, m/m sex, swearing, liberties with the shooting schedule.
SUMMARY: In which they shoot the Caradhras scenes, Sean hits the minibar at the crack of dawn to deal with Viggo and a helicopter, and the hobbits do Wagner.
NOTE: Can be read alone, but is also a sort-of sequel to the rest of the ‘Boiling Point’ series, which can be found here. http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=childeproof&keyword=LOTR+RPS&filter=all
DISCLAIMER: Out of the sick fastnesses of my own imagination. No disrespect to anyone intended.
The early light is up before them, but not entirely established yet, still a bit delicate. The cold strips him down to the skin in seconds, makes his eyes sting - lack of sleep, there’s nothing like it for making you raw.
Sean’s playing for time. He’s sucking the last out of a cigarette in the shelter of the hotel back entrance - the rest of them, drowsy, coats over costumes, are all packing themselves into the helicopter over the other side of the carpark - when one of the chefs emerges, wiping his hands on his overall, and hands him a ballpoint and the back of a menu.
‘Would ya mind?’ Amiable, slabby young Maori face, gapped teeth.
‘Not at all.’ I will write my name on every menu in your fine establishment if it means I don’t have to do this fucking awful thing. He can feel the smile ooze from his own face like the fake, greasepaint effort it is. It sometimes freaks him out that people know his face, the sharp way they examine it, like they’re checking his credentials.
But then, Sean’s never really got why people are so interested in actors. Rates of divorce, adultery, general insanity and addiction would suggest they are actually society’s freaks. His signature looks more than usually unreliable, like something a criminologist would produce in a courtroom drama, as evidence of anti-social tendencies. Like anyone who’s looking needs any more proof of his guaranteed ability to comprehensively fuck up anything he touches.
‘Cheers, mate.’ A shy grin, and he’s off through the swing doors, before Sean can stop him. Back to some sweaty kitchen where he’ll flip eggs for the proper breakfast brigade, after the Rings cast and crew have been flown up the Alps above Ranitanga for a short day’s snow shoot.
And that, of course, is the problem.
If he leans around the corner, there it is.
Shit.
The evil little chopper, black as a gun, looking far too small for the number of people who are going to fit in it, and at the same time too chunky and unaerodynamic to ever take off.
I’ll be sick.
He taps his forehead experimentally against the brick, then again, harder. Pain sprays colourfully behind his eyes and he guesses he’s bitten his cheek when his mouth begins to clot with the salty metal of himself.
Panic slithers on panic.
He gropes in his coat pocket for the bottle he’s lifted from the minibar.
The burn of the Glenlivet hits him, making him hack. You forget, mostly, how bloody awkward it was when you started drinking first, when all you wanted to be was older, to do older things, back when you were coughing yourself into adulthood on Marlboros and Buckfast. Then the burn gets to seem natural and you get used to it. It still tastes awful, really, but you don’t think about it.
A mouthful or two will just glaze him over, let him do what he needs. He knows, or he thinks he does, how much will keep him together, how to hold off before total anaesthesia.
‘Hey, Bean.’ Billy’s shoulders, in a grubby plaid jacket, are slumped with the weight of the morning. He looks watchful, pink-nosed, like a Dickens urchin. ‘Aren’t you goin’ to come an’ break sweat for the One Ring?’
‘Right.’ Sean grinds out his soggy butt underfoot, and stands the empty bottle on a window sill. He fights to sound reasonable, normal.’I woke up with so much enthusiasm to get up that fucking mountain I didn’t even get my breakfast.’
Because, as both you and I know but will never say, I would puke it up.
‘Uh huh.’ Billy is carefully looking at the ground, hands in pockets. ‘They’re looking for you all over.’
‘I fucking said all right. Jesus.’ He isn’t shouting, he’s only being clear, but the last word still splinters.
Billy doesn’t say anything.
He doesn’t have to. He’s all on display. All the hobbits are, it’s as though they have their feelings laid out like the toppings on a pizza. Sean understands that he should reach out and pat his shoulder, feels the gesture returned, and that makes them fine again, sorted out.
Sometimes he gets pissed off by his own redeeming features.
‘You should try vodka, Nightnurse and daytime TV sometime.’ Billy trots close to his side, grave in his hobbit feet. ‘You just stop giving a shit, I swear.’
The wind catches them as they cross the carpark towards the waiting helicopter. Crew are still stacking rolls of cable and containers alongside.
Impossibly, the helicopter looks smaller close up.
The thing Sean hates most about helicopters is their lack of all the things whose presence he hates about planes - the foldaway tables, reclining seats, call bells for the summoning of uniformed stewardesses. He knows, on planes, that these things won’t stop you being sucked out through a window breach, or getting hacked to bits by shards of flying metal, but their absence makes him feel uncomfortably vulnerable. Helicopters are naked. Helicopters are not going to cover up the fact of imminent death with inset individual tv screens.
Fear oils out from his belly, paints his armpits and neck, the soles of his feet.
Sean prays for sudden bad weather up on the heights, for generator failure, for the crew to be struck down by a instantaneous stomach bug. It occurs to him that he only ever contacts God to make complaints or beg favours. He brushes a sting of sweat away from his eyes. He is getting far too sober far too fast.
‘Morning.’ The sound of Viggo’s sleep-clogged voice brings on a rush of sour perspiration. He can no longer remember when he first realised he could tell where Viggo is without looking, without being told.
Leaning against the pull-down steps in his stained leathers and an old army parka, Viggo is worrying his hair out of his eyes and taking slugs of coffee out of his battered insulated carrycup. Narsil is propped against his leg.
The shock of him, every time, wrecks Sean’s co ordination. He lurches gracelessly over a coil of cable and slams into the sharp edge of the steps. Fuck, you stupid fuck. He sucks his breath in hard as he waits for the first, ugly snap of pain to hit.
‘Christ.’ Viggo gets a grimy gauntleted hand under his arm, eases him down onto the steps. Sean tries not to notice the cuts, the small wounds, the skinned knuckles under the spray-on Aragorn dirt. Anything involving pain in conjunction with Viggo makes him anxious.
He meets Viggo’s look in a slow flinch of pre-emptive shame, as his eyes tear over with the new, jangling, seam of hurt across his shins.
‘I’m all right.’ He almost believes himself, hoping nothing about him is shaking. ‘Not a bother.’
Viggo shovels back the lock of hair falling across his face. His mouth barely avoids a smile, trembles back into a frown of concern. ‘Lijah was suggesting we sedate you, like that guy with the mohawk on The A-Team.’
Viggo’s attention clamps his breath and he focuses on not feeling dizzy all over again. ‘I did a bit of self-medicating. Courtesy of the minibar.’
‘Uh huh.’ Viggo’s hand hasn’t gone away. After a couple of brief dabs at his shoulder, it slides round to rest in the small of his back, warm under his coat.
Viggo’s not long out of the shower, smells of soap, fabric, with only the faintest undertaste of new sweat. Unlike Sean who’s giving off the thin, ammoniac sweat of a night’s solitary drinking, and who couldn’t trust his hands with a razor.
The classy nocturnal pastimes of Sean Bean. Sad fuck Sean.
The step teeters uneasily below Sean, causing a matching rock behind his eyes.
You just can’t let it go, can you?
It’s like your body has memories in nerve endings. He flexes his shoulders, remembering the memory of Viggo’s sweat pressed to his face, of him braced and pinned against him, and wonders whether Viggo is thinking the same thing. Syringing in under his better judgement, under the panic, is the want to do it again, to know he is going to allow himself to do it again, that Viggo is going to allow him to do it again, those things that they know they like.
He rubs his cheek with the heel of one hand. Under his palm, a muscle begins to tick.
Ian coughs delicately from the interior behind them. ‘Are you gentlemen planning to join us any time soon?’
DUH DUH DUH DUH DUH
DUH DUH DUH DUH DUH
The Hobbit fucking Philharmonic breaks into a mangled, early-morning but all too recognisable version of ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, the soundtrack to Sean’s most lurid technicolour flying nightmares.
‘Shut the fuck up, little bastards.’ He’s swallowing rapidly to keep pace with his own saliva.
And, oddly enough, they do.
Viggo pinches the bridge of his nose, and looks briefly at Sean. The hardest part of him is his mouth, his jaw, the reasons he gets tough guy parts. His eyes, though, have a soft look, a flawed defence. He seems to be quite careful people don’t notice this.
‘Okay?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Sean swallows and closes his eyes, weakness climbing up the muscles of his throat. Against his will, and though he’s been trying not to move his arms in case they prove unreliable, he puts his hand out, blind, and catches Viggo’s wrist. He lets himself cling, only for a reasonable moment, only for a while.
‘You needn’t -’ Be so fucking kind? Possibly still want to fuck me, although this is probably increasingly unlikely? Alongside his unease, there oozes something equally familiar. The knowledge that he is being ridiculous.
Viggo lets him go with a flutter of carefulness over his palm.‘I know. I needn’t do anything. I want to, you fool.’
And fuck you and fuck you and fuck you and thanks.
As they climb inside, Dom is athletically sniffing his hobbit foot and declaring ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning.’
Lijah, strapped alongside like a solemn schoolchild, pats his shoulder soothingly, and looks across at Sean and Viggo.’It’s the foot glue. He’s harmless really.’
‘The gang’s all here,’ Orli, green bandana over his blonde wig, shouts helpfully to one of the crew.
Ian burrows his neck inside a massive scarf, amused. ‘One can’t help thinking it’s the start of one of those tacky disaster movies.’
The hobbits are about to enter into this idea with enthusiasm, but rein themselves back as soon as they look at Sean.
The helicopter whips in a way that makes Sean’s whole skin shiver with horrors.
They rise through a dense silvered air, nothing but blades of colour, horizon upon horizon, slicing away. Try as he might, Sean can’t find this anything but terrifying. The noise of the engine seems like a fairly comprehensively stupid intrusion into waiting emptiness.
‘Jesus. It looks like an ad for air freshener.’ Dom’s eyes slide sideways from the window to Sean, a quick check, and he manages some kind of grimace in return.
He thinks dying might possibly be like this view, a kind of cold official appointment with a large disinterest.
Sweat is running on his face again; he never knows when this is going to happen, and he can never stop it. His breath is coming in gasps like a giant hand is clamping round his chest - clench, release, clench.
He gets a vague impression of a row of hobbit faces entirely devoid of malice. Astin leaning over, shouting ‘My knee is your knee, Beanie.’ And even though he knows in a half hour he’ll be feeling nauseous with rage and wishing them all to go and fuck themselves in front of whom he’s made a total idiot of himself, he’s grateful.
Under their coats, he works his fingers wetly between Viggo’s and clings on.
There’s nothing up there but the snow-hush, whitened grass. Some gnarled birches down by the track they’d hauled the rig up, but hardly visible against the white. They’ve got Sean, Viggo and Lijah doing a walk-through of part of the first Caradhras scene, while the techies consult, low-voiced, about light meters in the snow.
Lijah’s on his mark down by Viggo, looking up the slope to Sean, shivering, red-cheeked, half-asleep still, the heel of his fist in his eye. Billy and Dom, further up the slope behind them, are getting ticked off by one of the crew for making footprints on the fresh snow the Fellowship isn’t supposed to have trodden on yet.
‘Fuck, I’m freezing.’ Dom, plaintive, hoarse with the desire to get back under a duvet.
‘Are your nipples all hard?’ Billy, with an audible leer.
‘Fuck off, you pervert.’
‘That’s not what you said last night, big boy.’
‘I thought I made you sign something.’ Dom is shrill with outrage. ‘Pillow talk is confidential, bastard.’
Astin, who’s been waiting for this, is happy. ‘Not with the walls in this hotel, I think you’ll find.’
‘Thank you, Samwise, the last known address of a thousand bagels.’
There’s a scuffle and a flurry of messy snow balls.
On other days, Sean would be enjoying along with Viggo the complex combination of obligatory rudeness and unofficial devotion that constitutes the rules of hobbit behaviour, but he doesn’t want to look at him now, after the flight. He knows he’ll have to, in the end, but he doesn’t want to cooperate.
‘Boromir.’ Viggo hitting his cue, with his Aragorn look pulled up over him, breath spurting white in the cold air.
‘It is a strange fate -’ Sean can’t concentrate, Boromir’s voice comes out more Sheffield housing estate than Gondorian aristocrat tempted by the Ring of Power. ‘That we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing.’
Viggo is narrow-eyed in the snow-glare, the splash of dark hair against his sharp jaw. Sean’s always liked the way Viggo acts, he’s a good, quiet studious actor.
‘Such a little thing.’ He concentrates on trying to cover up the slightly pissed look of a man pleasantly surprised by his own continuance.
‘Boromir, give the Ring to Frodo.’ Viggo’s dirty leather-gloved hand finds the hilt of Narsil. His hands are the thing Sean knows best about him, the way they can be confident with buttons and zips, the texture of cloth, skin. Curled shut on a sheet close by Sean’s face, all cuts and shiny patches of iodine, the blue push of veins at his wrist. The suicide’s favourite spot, the shy ribbing of tendons and blood all woven under the thinnest skin.
Sean is breathing through his teeth, trying to look away from the memory because this isn’t a time when he can afford to be disturbed. The effort of this bangs in his head. ‘As you wish. I care not.’
He crunches closer to Lijah and Viggo inside the bite of the snow.
Lijah, who hates getting his wig tousled, snaps out of Frodo with unnerving suddenness and sticks out his tongue.
‘Oh, good grief.’ Ian, pulling his Gandalf hat down over his ears, heads past for a chair.
‘Take five, ‘ says the continuity woman resignedly.
The morning light flattens out.
Someone gives Sean a cup of bad thermos coffee while his make-up is retouched. The new graze on his forehead is paused over, then covered up, and not mentioned, for which he is grateful. He wants to sit and smoke, pollute the clean air with his own nicotine and carbon dioxide, let the quiet sluice him down.
An uneasy tiredness drops close round him like an old coat. The backs of his eyes are still miserable with what is not quite yet a hangover. He presses experimentally at the tender place on his temple and is rewarded with a warming, tingling hurt. Nippy, but controllable enough to be almost pleasant if you’re a masochist.
Hobbit harmony has apparently been restored, and he’s been preparing for a hobbit stand-up comedy routine involving Boromir the Brave who only narrowly avoids pissing himself at two thousand feet. But some kind of unspoken policy decision has been taken, and all four are enjoyably tormenting Viggo, who’s been trying to sketch the view down the valley with a sort of hobbit sports commentary going on over his shoulder.
‘The modernity of it, Vig.’ Dom, serious as a seminarian with a Marlboro stuck to his lower lip.
Lijah assumes the kind of look that would stand him in good stead if he ever stood trial for murder. ‘What’s that scribble in the middle?’
Viggo mimes being shot through the heart, swats the nearest hobbit head amiably with his notebook. ‘Philistines.’ He’s like that with the hobbits, like some big family pet dog peaceably letting the toddlers pull his tail. ‘I’m just too good for this world.’
He gets to his feet, stretches. Then, just as Sean realises he’s staring unguardedly, Viggo’s eyes slide to his in a quick catch of enquiry.
‘Mind you put in Elfboy picking flowers in the middle,’ Billy shouts after him, ‘so’s we know which way up to hang it.’
Footsteps crunch on snow, then Viggo’s settling down next to Sean, close, but not unduly so, maybe being a bit careful, seeing how things are.
Sean kicks at nothing on the ground, a tangle of dirty cables in trodden slush. He sniffs, rubs his face where the cold’s starting to numb it.
For a bit, only Viggo’s attention is tangible, like a warm stroke on the side of Sean’s neck. After a minute, he tugs Sean’s hand up to his mouth, rough-palmed in his leather gauntlet, and takes a deep drag on Sean’s cigarette.
‘Given up again?’ The sudden soft scratch of Viggo’s smudgy charcoal jaw against his hand makes Sean hungry all down that arm.
‘Uh huh. A compromise between me and my conscience.’ Folding one arm behind his head, Viggo begins to palp at his shoulder and neck. He keeps talking but mostly to their feet. ‘I can’t buy a pack, I can only bum other people’s. The ones who haven’t wised up yet, anyway.’
‘Apart from Lijah, the soul of generosity.’ The back of Sean’s neck relaxes. ‘Because no else one in their right mind’d touch those crappy cloves.’ Happily, Sean’s own particular peace treaty with his lungs involves rolling his own, so he can’t offer Viggo one.
Anticipation milks him out. It’s sheltered enough where they are for him to hear Viggo haul in a breath and let it out again in a white billow. Chill air moving, someone shouting instructions, clattering from the camera track.
After a minute Viggo’s hand folds round his wrist again, cups it in close to his mouth as he inhales. The way Viggo sucks a cigarette, hungry, is like a kind of prayer, like he’s eating something delicious. It also makes Sean reluctantly, painfully hard, jammed, clenched against his costume.
He squeezes his eyes shut, blinks at the sky overhead.
‘C’mere.’ Viggo’s breathing is slow and quiet, and Sean can feel the sad little crumple of his resistance giving in. He lets himself lean in slightly against the steady drumming of Viggo’s heartbeat, surreptitiously breathe the hot metal smell of his neck reasserting itself under the soap. A nudge of lust is irritating the base of his belly and he wishes he would go away and leave himself the fuck alone.
In the snow-light, he’s noticed this morning where the dark Aragorn hair dye has faded slightly, where a slight shine of what must be Viggo’s own dirty gold is shading through on the temples. Make-up will touch it up again as soon as someone notices, of course, but Sean’s not going to be the one to point it out. Fuck continuity.
Viggo’s voice is low, almost too quiet to be heard. ‘You worried about going back down?’ The small push and heat of his words breathe against Sean’s cheek.
There are several things Sean usually says to this, all almost equally untrue, as he knows Viggo knows. But he just grunts. The desire to turn his head a few inches, push in and find the smooth heat of Viggo’s tongue, is making his throat ache, balancing the other stiffness.
‘You always - ’ Viggo might have been making a note of the time or the day of the week, no change of tone. He seems entirely preoccupied with the view down towards the tree-line as his hand finds and investigates the inside of Sean’s thigh, working a thumb along tensed cloth, stalking him until it finds him, palms him.
Sean can’t say anything, but he can buck upward into Viggo’s fist, and feel sweat gather on his face.
Then the PA crackles into life.
– PLACES EVERYONE, PLEASE.
Later, a modestly bloody sunset presses near the window of Sean’s room. The competing light of the tv billows and blinks on the ceiling, some MTV crap with the sound turned off.
Sean stands at the window and looks out at the gory stripes of cloud. Stacked above and below and to either side are other windows, and in front of him, caught in the glass of his own window, a reflected hotel bedroom shines, repeated palely in the double glazing.
Dom has the room next door, but Billy’s usually in there too, something Sean was made aware of several times during the night. Astin wasn’t joking about the thickness of the walls. Hobbit sex sounds like a happy variety of GBH is being committed. Or like one of those Batman fistfights. Bif! Pow! Bang! He’d have banged on the wall, only he’s fairly sure they’d have taken it as encouragement.
His body is filled with the cottony calm of total exhaustion, relief. That weird, more than usually naked sensation that stays on your skin when you’ve showered and shaved and dressed again straight away, denim and cotton feeling a bit stiff against warmed and bathed flesh.
He’d thought Viggo might knock on the door and stroll in, barefoot, buttoning his shirt.
He’d wanted to be a less sorry specimen than Viggo had seen this morning. Clean, sober and in his right mind. Dress the part. He’d cleaned himself down to an ache in the offensively shiny bathroom, with its usual collection of bottles and sachets. He’d even successfully repressed the desire to piss in the sink, or ask for the removal of the prissy paper toilet seat guard, designed to protect him from imaginary germs.
Dressed and combed so that the sore place on his forehead doesn’t show much - and clean underpants, equally well-prepared for road accidents or sex - he catches himself in the mirror. The face that gets him the kind of parts he gets, the reason casting directors called his agent when they thought of some tough nut with hidden depths, the reason he’s here.
Sean Bean, reeking with loneliness, eyes frozen for however many years in a kind of perpetual flinch, some kind of compensating fury around the mouth.
The trouble with lonely people is that some of us would prefer to stay untroubled by any more hope, thanks very much.
Because hope of that kind can unbalance you, and you’re right to be worried.
And he can’t think how long it’s been since he got what he was looking for.
Downstairs, the bar is heaving, semi-dark, humid with bodies. The Rings crowd is gatecrashing some kind of regular happy hour when the locals get smashed on cut-price cocktails. The noise level - more MTV crap - is high enough to thrum lightly in the skull and make conversation largely impossible.
Sean gets two beers for convenience’s sake, and heads for the hobbits’ waves and Orli’s growing-out mohawk in a crowd near the bar. Ian’s there, looking like a shark attempting the sunny, grandfatherly look, and even John’s playing pool with some crew over by the tv, but there’s no sign of Viggo.
Dom, all hair-gel and flamboyant shirt, is coming on to Billy with all the subtlety and charm of a snake oil salesman, like he hasn’t been fucking him senseless on a daily basis for nearly the entire shoot.
‘What was the first thing I ever said to you, Bills?’ To emphasise his sincerity, he knocks a drink over.
‘What are you drinking?’
‘Huh?’
‘That’s what you said, you dope.’
Lijah’s up on a chair bouncing like a beachball with his hands grasping imaginary braces in what Sean eventually recognises from the dailies as his Frodo dance from the Bilbo’s birthday party scenes, unanimously elected by the hobbits as the least cool dance move ever, including seventies disco. ‘Chew on that, Timberlake!’ he roars at MTV.
Several people prudently remove their drinks and themselves to a safer location.
‘Now, Lij - ’ Astin grabs the ass pocket of his jeans and pulls him down, tutting beerily. ‘You’ll get laughter lines, and you know you only get hired to look all soulful and big-eyed.’
Bills lifts his elbows out of the spilled beer. ‘Yeah, an’ Astin here’ll ditch you for a younger model.’
‘Are there younger models than our Mr Wood?’ Ian wonders, getting to his feet. ‘I fear I must be off to iron my jowls, gentlemen. Party on.’
‘Did you just use the word party as a verb, Ian?’
‘Don’t worry, petal, ‘ Billy says to Lijah. ‘You’re too beautiful to have to work. You should get a grant or something just for being.’
You would know they were together, the hobbits. It’s not even that they’re physically touching in any intimate way, not holding hands or anything, but you still would have known absolutely that they were together.
‘That beer mine, by any chance?’ A pair of hands come to rest on Sean’s shoulders and an immediate lick of nervous contentment traces the back of his neck. He recognises the weight and vibration of Viggo’s voice under the music, even if the touch is surprising, too definite and proprietorial for Viggo, and if he’s not used to him smelling of aftershave, of that particular kind of maleness.
He clears his throat. ‘Nicking my fags and my beer in one day? I think you might be taking this Steward stuff a bit too literally.’
Viggo slides in beside him, pushes clean hair behind his ear. The solid nudge of his presence is like a bandage on a wound. ‘So do I get a cigarette too?’
Sean fights relaxing into the utter foolishness of a grin, and fails.
And there’s clearly some kind of invisible signal he’s not noticed, some kind of unmistakable evidence of helpless contentment, because suddenly it’s open season on Sean again. The hobbits do their well-honed American newsreader routine.
‘Unbelievable! Brad, no one can quite believe it, what we’ve just seen is-’
’Yes, Simon, it’s true, a genuine smile from Sean Bean!’
‘Brad, this item is moving very fast.’
‘Simon, it’s unbelievable!’
Sean glowers, he hopes convincingly. ‘One more word, Monahan, and I’ll be selling bedroom tapes of you and Boyd on the internet.’
Billy, nonchalant, sends over his most pristine smile. ‘D’you fancy a threesome, then?’
Dom sighs. ‘I told you before, Bills, we have to drug them first.’
Viggo, reaching across for his beer, takes a moment to lean in on Sean’s shoulder, blows hot air through his shirt. And Sean understands they won’t be heading upstairs just yet, because they’re both liking the feeling of knowing they’re going to, the certainty of it, any time now.
‘Mine’s nearer,’ Viggo says levelly.
‘Uh huh.’ Sean’s too hungry to be dignified, following.
A glimpse of a pastel room identical to his own, bedside lamp left on, then Viggo kicking the door shut, pulling his shirt off over his head.
Viggo’s hands slide up and hold him along the jaw and beside his cheeks, tilt him to the right angle, keep him there a minute. Then they’re kissing, rough, stubble and slick wet jaws, teeth colliding, pressing hard, Viggo’s hand up the back of his shirt, his in the waistband of Viggo’s jeans, angling down. Sean is afraid to continue and desperate not to stop.
The reality of Viggo stripped to the waist - width of taut bare skin, lines of sinew, pale sunken nipples - his complete availability to Sean’s complete want, jack-knifes suddenly in him, loosening his limbs, letting him start to unwrap them both, sample Viggo’s different temperatures. The hot scent of him, his recognisable heat, sweat, metal, the unfamiliar tang of aftershave.
‘What?’ Viggo says, pulling back to work on Sean’s belt, breathing hard, brow furrowed with concentration. The pleasure of this flexes his stomach, low down.
Sean’s inhalations have become irregular. The hush of a zip, bland hotel room air lapping at his cock. ‘Nothing.’
‘Sure?’ Viggo’s sword-toughened palm is curved close, almost touching, teasing. Sean can hear the tensed rush of his breathing.
‘Yeah -’
‘So shut the fuck up.’ Viggo slips his cupped palm up until Sean shudders and bucks against his hand, and rolls Viggo over onto the bed, pinning him on his back on the rucked spread, knees on thighs and hands on wrists. They’re evenly matched for strength, and Viggo could probably throw him off, but he doesn’t seem unhappy to be trapped, or make more than a token protest. Sean bends and takes in a nipple, faintly salty and sour.
Viggo’s eyes tick open. Their pupils are huge, swallowing up the narrow blue. The bedside lamp cuts shadows into the line of his jaw.
Sean drags his mouth over skin, bites the sweat-glossy shoulder bone till he tastes metal and Viggo’s wrists twist under his hands.
Then Viggo’s face snaps sideways. ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘What’s your hurry?’ Sean angles himself, stretches for a condom from the locker top. ‘So you were fairly sure I was coming back with you, then? Or were these just in case you got lucky?’
‘Fuck -’
He covers Viggo’s mouth so the rest is inaudible, and Viggo’s freed hand comes up to dig into the flesh of his back.
Taking his time, Sean positions, pushes in, slippery, past the resistance, then an easier deepness, a slipping by steps, all the way. His widening entry slowly startles Viggo’s eyes. The shudder of his thighs, his throat and shoulders slick with the bloom of penetrated, tensing sweat, send the slap of lust stringing along Sean’s spine, force out his own whimper.
When Viggo comes, it sounds as though someone is beating the air out of him with a stick.
And later, with the start of a watery light beginning to be patted in around the edges of the curtains, Sean’s awake, rolled carefully up on one elbow, with the shape of Viggo dug deeply into his half of the mattress. Viggo is lying like he’s been hit by a sniper, spread, wet, still half-hard. The bunched denim of his shirt is tangled under the careless fan of his hair on the pillow.
Something breaks and folds in Sean’s chest; it’s the same each time, like a sheet taken and stretched and folded, then compacted into layers of heaviness, into layers of frightening, complicated heaviness. It shortens his breath.
It fucking baffles him.
Viggo grumbles, stirs, like Sean’s attention touches his skin.
His eyes open, palely blank for a moment, nearly hostile. ‘Stop looking so worried.’
‘I’m not worried.’
‘Well, you’re the only person I know who gets worried about not being worried.’ He cups Sean’s neck with one hand, rubbing reminding them both of how many times now they’ve been in this position, done these things to each other, for each other.
He turns and Sean lets him fold himself in again against his back, skin to skin, in one hot graft from neck to ankles.
Viggo’s arms are already clumsy again with drowsiness. ‘I swear, I’m going to buy you I’m Okay, You’re Okay.’
'Look, Vig. I did hypotherapy for the flying thing.' Sean ticks them off on his fingers. 'Then counselling when it didn't work. Acupuncture for smoking. Couple therapy before the first and divorces. I've a small library of books.'
Viggo's amusement heats the back of Sean's neck pleasantly. 'Jesus. A self-help junkie.'
Self-help is a completely unhelpful term. Sean isn’t able to help himself, which is why he’s here.
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Date: 2004-06-08 06:47 am (UTC)'I fear I must be off to iron my jowls, gentlemen. Party on.'
*howls* Hell of an image... *grin*
And the last line... somehow it feels bittersweet, and dark, and yet so perfect for their relationship. Wonderful, as is everything you write!
~Kris
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Date: 2004-06-09 04:47 am (UTC)My jowls are quivering with glee.
(What a nasty image...)
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Date: 2004-06-09 04:48 am (UTC)*satisfied sigh*
Date: 2004-06-09 06:36 am (UTC)This poor man, though. Usually the RL v. RPS thing doesn't get to me, but when I read a story this intense, I wonder if the "real" SB is this tortured and, whether or not, what he would make of the character people make of him?
Re: *satisfied sigh*
Date: 2004-06-10 04:48 am (UTC)No, think the memories order is out of sync, though I've never bothered to fix it. The 'order', although I'm not convinced it matters much, or that it's anything as organised as a series, is
'Boiling Point', 'Government Health Warning', 'No Harm Done', 'American Teeth' and 'I'm Okay, You're Okay'. There's also a remix set of interlinked drabbles 'How It Is' which probably happens roughly between the last two, and a hobbit fic 'Third Astronaut and Fourth Cop' which is independent.
Not sure about the RL SB. On the one hand, what little I've read about him suggests a reasonably peaceful bloke, likes his garden. On the other, I gather he was an extremely good Macbeth, and likes Nietzsche.
Boiling Point?
Date: 2004-06-09 01:01 pm (UTC)Re: Boiling Point?
Date: 2004-06-10 05:02 am (UTC)Re: Boiling Point?
Date: 2004-06-10 02:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-11 09:00 am (UTC)I've printed this out and tacked it up above my computer so I can look at it and marvel over it. (And hopefully learn from it.)
Amazing.
Thanks so much.
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Date: 2004-06-14 03:00 am (UTC)I hope you keep your computer well away from the eyes of the world in general...
But thank you - this is very kind.
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Date: 2004-06-11 09:40 pm (UTC)*sporfle!* I laughed rather immoderately over this (and when I get carried away by laughter, it's a pretty disturbing sight.)
I love how you've captured the bantering and bickering between the various Fellowship guys, and the weird sort of sexual tension that thrums underneath it all (even when Sean is morbidly uptight.) The sexually insatiable hobbits always make me grin.
*trots off to read the rest*
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Date: 2004-06-14 03:04 am (UTC)Though I do always feel an urge to write the hobbits after a bout of Morbid!Sean.
Thank you!