FIC: 'THIS TIME, FOR VARIETY' (PART TWO)
Apr. 9th, 2005 02:13 pmFIC: 'THIS TIME, FOR VARIETY' (PART TWO)
AUTHOR: childeproof
PAIRING(S): SB/VM, OB, hobbitpile
DISCLAIMER: From the recesses of my own fevered imagination.
WARNING: WIP. Part two of an estimated four parts, to be posted over next day or two.
Part one is here.
Maybe Sean just watched too much television as a child, the kind that clearly demonstrated you should never travel in planes, boats, lifts, spaceships, trains, submarines, cars or buses. All of these would inevitably suffer gruesome accidents involving multiple casualties, death and anguish. The same could be said of any particularly peaceful or prosperous-looking towns, cities, skyscrapers, apartments, woods, streets, beaches, oceans, attics, cellars or national monuments. By the second reel they’d be smouldering ruins inhabited by shellshocked survivors. Birds, fish, children, toys, ventriloquist’s dummies are all liable to turn savagely on their keepers. Nothing is ever safe. Large assemblies of friends or family members are only assembled together to perish one by one at the hands of axe-murderers, zombies or the kind of epidemics that make their victims bleed their internal organs out through their eyes in glorious Technicolour.
The natural consequence of calm and security is Disaster. And it happens all the time, everywhere.
Sean learned that particular lesson so well, despite years of film sets, stunt teams and make-up artists, that he can never take any form of transport without considering the possibilities of escape. Can he smash the car window before icy water engulfs the interior? Will he be able to beat his way past the air hostess between him and the over-wing emergency exit? Can he get the hell out?
Equally, he knows perfectly well that if he’s allowed to roam about by himself for a while, and someone else gets involved in the roaming, that disaster isn’t just likely but inevitable. That it’ll teach him, inevitably, what happens when a trick of personalities, the nicely lopsided look of a grin, the gentleness of a bowed head, the specific shunting way a particular cock can be, when all these things encourage conjunctions he should not risk, that should not be risked.
But then, quite often, it’ll be him who starts it. He’ll hand Viggo a beer as he leans smoking against the kitchen counter, and snake a hand around the warm small of his back and into his waistband, feeling for the hot, clean beginning of the hair above his tensing cock.
But then, sometimes Sean can get ahead of himself without thinking. It can take him a while to catch up with himself, like jet-lag. So sometimes he can just be man in kitchen, man unbuttoning and unzipping, man licking his palm and sliding and curling a fist slow and rough on heated skin, and not kissing until Viggo gets a hand between his legs in turn, and his mouth opens helplessly against the rough angle of Viggo’s jaw.
He still gets a shock, though, afterwards, when he accidentally sets his feet in the imprints of damp warmth Viggo’s feet have left near the sink.
---
Sean never meant to see it. Anyway, it didn’t start off by being seeing, more like something he glimpsed out of the corner of his eye, so naturally his head turned, to look properly.
Maybe if Viggo’d been less intent, had seen Sean was back, it would never have happened. And Sean would never have found himself watching, with a greasy sweat oiling the palms of his hands, the back of his neck, found out.
From the doorstep, where he’s standing with the oily takeaway bag, Sean can see plainly into the lighted bedroom, his own. There are clothes on the floor, spilling out of drawers, some of them Viggo’s.
Viggo is standing with his back to him, shirtless and tousle-haired, by the bed, and at first Sean can’t see what he’s doing. It’s just the look of Viggo’s back that stops him rapping on the glass, the way his head is slightly bent, the slightly tense shoulders, the older and newer bruises and scrapes. There’s something still about him, something new, hesitant. And this is what stops Sean stepping over to bang on the glass, grin, be let in.
Then Viggo bends over the bed, puts his hand on the pillow still dented from Sean’s head. Slowly, he flattens his fist onto the creased cotton, traces the dip, lets the heat of his hand raise Sean’s temperature. After a minute, he lets himself down on the wreck of the bed, leans in and lays his face against the cloth, breathing Sean’s smell.
No. I thought –
Sean feels all his gathered solidity shudder and slip. The valves of his heart slam shut like doors.
Jesus.
He does.
Sean begins to put together the use of sentences involving the word we, a kind of tentative happiness in the way Viggo moves, his leaving of small things, shirts, pencils, small records of his taste and smell, in Sean’s house. And he thinks he could have avoided the inevitable. He really might have. It’s not like he hasn’t lived in full awareness of his own sparkling set of emotional deficiencies for any years. He should have stopped. He should have stopped Viggo.
Three marriages, that little fucker Dom said once, after he’d decided it was safe to take the piss. Three marriages. I haven’t had that many houseplants.
There’s wet on Sean’s face and the cling and tease of total cowardice along his spine.
And of course, if this isn’t enough in the way of monstrously damaging fiascos, Viggo would have to turn over, rubbing one eye, and see him, just as Sean’s starting to understand that he won’t shoulder open the front door and eat Chinese with Viggo and maybe fuck him in the wrappings afterwards on the sofa, in the flicker of bad TV. That he’ll put the bag down and back away like he’s trying to get out of range. Of course, that would have to be part of it, the exposed look on Viggo’s face as he starts to get it, the unguarded look slipping a few notches, tentative, then going completely, the expression going neutral.
Naturally, if you’re fucking someone, you will eventually be looking not at him but at what you’ve made of him.
Viggo pushes up off the bed, and something in his face damps and dies until he’s even standing formally, carefully fielding whatever Sean’s face is giving off. Whatever it is must be coming off him like radiation. After a minute, during which neither of them moves, Sean’s watching through the window the way Viggo must have been when he first saw him, in Costumes, a stranger, thin, reticent, scratching at the messy start of his Aragorn stubble.
Sean doesn’t know what there is about this that makes him so uneasy. Viggo’s just standing there, still, bending now to pick his shirt off the end of the bed, showing him the soft crown of his head, his bare neck. Maybe he’s got into the habit of reading the tilt of a body, anyway, Viggo reads all wrong to him.
‘It’s not – ‘ Sean says, knowing he can’t be heard through the glass. His hands are raking loose change around the inside of his coat pockets.
Viggo absolutely doesn’t move. Sean doesn’t think he’s even breathing. Then he shoves his hair out of his eyes, shrugs and smiles tiredly at somewhere behind Sean’s head. The next thing he does is click off the bedside light and throw the room into darkness.
Obviously, there are very few things Sean can really do after that, and all of them involve leaving, so he does.
---
Sean drives and drives and parks on a backstreet and then drives again and stops and waits a while outside a petrol station. He opens his cigarettes, pulls one out, grips it between his lips. He has to strike the match’s purple head against the rasp of sandpaper three times before it catches. He holds the smoke in his mouth, watching the tip of the cigarette glow orange in the darkening air, then allows it to curl down into his chest.
The smell mixes with the staling smell of the takeaway food, curdling, so he rolls down the window.
There’s the indifferent sound of the wind in the trees behind the petrol station.
A dog barks somewhere, a frayed sound.
In the wing mirror, Sean looks at himself smoking. The two deep grooves beside his mouth give him an unapproachable look. He put them there down the years by making sure his face is stony. Now he looks back at himself, truculent. After enough years, the look you put on your face becomes the kind of person you are.
He seems to have been cut loose and floating. Small bits of reality swim out to meet him and then sink out of sight. A lot of him remains unwilling to be anywhere, having an idea that being anywhere definite will involve it in the guaranteed discovery of pain.
Later, back in his empty house, Sean spends an hour getting increasingly drunk and hypnotised by satellite channel ice-skating, that sexless sequinned camp, because it’s so fucking awful when they fall. The grace, the training, all the pointless shiny athleticism, all their defences disappear in one instant when they slip and stumble like anyone else, because ice is fucking slippery, let’s face it. He watches over and over the bits where the automatic, synchronised swimmer’s smile flicks off, the arms start to flail, the balance goes, until he gets increasingly sick and nervous on their behalf. At the moment, it looks all too familiar, so he turns it off around three and stares at an irregular patch of carpet where the table lamp shines until he can turn it off because it’s getting daylight.
---
The morning’s call sheet is in league against him, unhelpfully scheduling one of Aragorn and Boromir’s manly heart to hearts, the Lorien one.
‘Have you ever seen it, Aragorn – the white tower of Ecthelion shining like a spike of pearl and silver, its banners caught high in the morning breeze?’ Sean’s throat flinches when he speaks, and a violent hangover makes blood tap in his head every time he moves. 'Have you ever been called home by the clear ringing of silver trumpets?' A digging sensation makes itself felt somewhere beneath his heart and his mouth fills up, inconveniently, with saliva.
Viggo lets the air gather back over Sean’s stupid lines before he speaks.
‘I have seen the White City, long ago.’ He’s so quiet he’s nearly inaudible. But he’s on his mark, close by Sean’s side. When you are – when you’ve been – too close to someone like that, you are very aware of their aliveness. All the time there are pulses, tensions, readjustments of muscle and breath.
Sean’s ready for this, he thinks he is, but it still catches him like a slap, Viggo’s robbed look. For the run-through he’s got on over his costume a jacket Sean is very used to. For some reason, seeing it today hurts, and it won’t keep him warm enough, not this morning when they can all see their breath in the huge, unheated set, it isn’t practical.
Still, things could be worse, Sean thinks. Things could definitely be worse. Viggo is being okay, not really any quieter than usual, if you weren’t paying attention, fine really. And if he thinks hard enough he’ll come up with something that’s worse than this – thing, whatever it is.
It would be stupid to feel disappointed, that this is all there’s going to be, it’s all done and dusted, with no shouting, no pleas, no unreasonable behaviour, so Sean feels relieved. Probably that’s what he is feeling.
---
The afternoon’s worse, because the hobbits are on set, like a four-headed, eight-legged infestation, doing a quick run-through of the emergence from Moria scenes, before they all get helicoptered up to the mountains the following day for shooting.
Sean finds himself watching, baffled, as Dom and Billy snap in and out of character apparently effortlessly, being two bewildered hobbits mourning Gandalf’s death - and they’re good, the little bastards, there’s no denying it - and then, the second after the cameras stop, going into an effortless medley of bits of dialogue from bloody Goldeneye.
‘For England, James!’
‘Oh, James - ’ Billy, camp personified, but recognisably 006, if Alec Trevelyan had a mullety wig and prosthetic feet - ‘You never could take a hint...’
And Lijah, casting off grief-stricken Frodo like he’s never been anything but the bright-eyed little shit he is self-evidently is, has worked up a passable imitation of the wiseacre American helper at the end. ‘Would you two like to debrief each other at Guantanamo?’ Half of this is, as usual aimed at Viggo, but Viggo’s gaze is firmly set on the bank of monitors behind the cameras, where Peter is conferring with John.
And Sean even manages a minor kind of grimace and a clout at the nearest hobbit head - which was probably Astin’s, which is unfair, come to think of it, but fuck it anyway.
Because what does it all amount to, anyway?
Cock + arse
Arse + cock
Cock + mouth
Mouth + cock
= All that other stuff.
That’s all.
But they notice, of course they notice. It becomes quite hard to concentrate and he begins to dislike the times when they have to hang around waiting for a set-up or a cue. Everyone’s noticed by the time they break.
What happens in the canteen, though, is more than averagely disturbing.
‘WHAT?’ Lijah and Astin together, incredulous and American.
‘Is this true, Beanie?’ Billy, studiedly calm.
Sean considers asking what the fuck they’re talking about, but ends up just nodding. ‘Yeah. What about it?’
Dom looks him carefully in the eye for a second and then looks away. ‘You fuckin’ idiot.’
Billy looks down at his polystyrene coffee cup. ‘I hope you’re happy. I really do.’
Sean’s got rage rising in his chest, hot like brandy fumes, up into his face. The muscles in his arm are getting ready, with a little extra load of blood, to smack his hand on the table. ‘Just fuck off.’
They fuck off, but not before Billy's given him a look he'd never have expected to get from a hobbit.
Then, surprisingly, someone drops down next to him, juggling a too-hot coffee and lid, swearing under his breath.
Orli, even more surprisingly, sitting down, flopping his head onto the table. He blows puffs of air up towards his dishevelled blonde wig. ‘Jesus.’
TBC ASAP
AUTHOR: childeproof
PAIRING(S): SB/VM, OB, hobbitpile
DISCLAIMER: From the recesses of my own fevered imagination.
WARNING: WIP. Part two of an estimated four parts, to be posted over next day or two.
Part one is here.
Maybe Sean just watched too much television as a child, the kind that clearly demonstrated you should never travel in planes, boats, lifts, spaceships, trains, submarines, cars or buses. All of these would inevitably suffer gruesome accidents involving multiple casualties, death and anguish. The same could be said of any particularly peaceful or prosperous-looking towns, cities, skyscrapers, apartments, woods, streets, beaches, oceans, attics, cellars or national monuments. By the second reel they’d be smouldering ruins inhabited by shellshocked survivors. Birds, fish, children, toys, ventriloquist’s dummies are all liable to turn savagely on their keepers. Nothing is ever safe. Large assemblies of friends or family members are only assembled together to perish one by one at the hands of axe-murderers, zombies or the kind of epidemics that make their victims bleed their internal organs out through their eyes in glorious Technicolour.
The natural consequence of calm and security is Disaster. And it happens all the time, everywhere.
Sean learned that particular lesson so well, despite years of film sets, stunt teams and make-up artists, that he can never take any form of transport without considering the possibilities of escape. Can he smash the car window before icy water engulfs the interior? Will he be able to beat his way past the air hostess between him and the over-wing emergency exit? Can he get the hell out?
Equally, he knows perfectly well that if he’s allowed to roam about by himself for a while, and someone else gets involved in the roaming, that disaster isn’t just likely but inevitable. That it’ll teach him, inevitably, what happens when a trick of personalities, the nicely lopsided look of a grin, the gentleness of a bowed head, the specific shunting way a particular cock can be, when all these things encourage conjunctions he should not risk, that should not be risked.
But then, quite often, it’ll be him who starts it. He’ll hand Viggo a beer as he leans smoking against the kitchen counter, and snake a hand around the warm small of his back and into his waistband, feeling for the hot, clean beginning of the hair above his tensing cock.
But then, sometimes Sean can get ahead of himself without thinking. It can take him a while to catch up with himself, like jet-lag. So sometimes he can just be man in kitchen, man unbuttoning and unzipping, man licking his palm and sliding and curling a fist slow and rough on heated skin, and not kissing until Viggo gets a hand between his legs in turn, and his mouth opens helplessly against the rough angle of Viggo’s jaw.
He still gets a shock, though, afterwards, when he accidentally sets his feet in the imprints of damp warmth Viggo’s feet have left near the sink.
---
Sean never meant to see it. Anyway, it didn’t start off by being seeing, more like something he glimpsed out of the corner of his eye, so naturally his head turned, to look properly.
Maybe if Viggo’d been less intent, had seen Sean was back, it would never have happened. And Sean would never have found himself watching, with a greasy sweat oiling the palms of his hands, the back of his neck, found out.
From the doorstep, where he’s standing with the oily takeaway bag, Sean can see plainly into the lighted bedroom, his own. There are clothes on the floor, spilling out of drawers, some of them Viggo’s.
Viggo is standing with his back to him, shirtless and tousle-haired, by the bed, and at first Sean can’t see what he’s doing. It’s just the look of Viggo’s back that stops him rapping on the glass, the way his head is slightly bent, the slightly tense shoulders, the older and newer bruises and scrapes. There’s something still about him, something new, hesitant. And this is what stops Sean stepping over to bang on the glass, grin, be let in.
Then Viggo bends over the bed, puts his hand on the pillow still dented from Sean’s head. Slowly, he flattens his fist onto the creased cotton, traces the dip, lets the heat of his hand raise Sean’s temperature. After a minute, he lets himself down on the wreck of the bed, leans in and lays his face against the cloth, breathing Sean’s smell.
No. I thought –
Sean feels all his gathered solidity shudder and slip. The valves of his heart slam shut like doors.
Jesus.
He does.
Sean begins to put together the use of sentences involving the word we, a kind of tentative happiness in the way Viggo moves, his leaving of small things, shirts, pencils, small records of his taste and smell, in Sean’s house. And he thinks he could have avoided the inevitable. He really might have. It’s not like he hasn’t lived in full awareness of his own sparkling set of emotional deficiencies for any years. He should have stopped. He should have stopped Viggo.
Three marriages, that little fucker Dom said once, after he’d decided it was safe to take the piss. Three marriages. I haven’t had that many houseplants.
There’s wet on Sean’s face and the cling and tease of total cowardice along his spine.
And of course, if this isn’t enough in the way of monstrously damaging fiascos, Viggo would have to turn over, rubbing one eye, and see him, just as Sean’s starting to understand that he won’t shoulder open the front door and eat Chinese with Viggo and maybe fuck him in the wrappings afterwards on the sofa, in the flicker of bad TV. That he’ll put the bag down and back away like he’s trying to get out of range. Of course, that would have to be part of it, the exposed look on Viggo’s face as he starts to get it, the unguarded look slipping a few notches, tentative, then going completely, the expression going neutral.
Naturally, if you’re fucking someone, you will eventually be looking not at him but at what you’ve made of him.
Viggo pushes up off the bed, and something in his face damps and dies until he’s even standing formally, carefully fielding whatever Sean’s face is giving off. Whatever it is must be coming off him like radiation. After a minute, during which neither of them moves, Sean’s watching through the window the way Viggo must have been when he first saw him, in Costumes, a stranger, thin, reticent, scratching at the messy start of his Aragorn stubble.
Sean doesn’t know what there is about this that makes him so uneasy. Viggo’s just standing there, still, bending now to pick his shirt off the end of the bed, showing him the soft crown of his head, his bare neck. Maybe he’s got into the habit of reading the tilt of a body, anyway, Viggo reads all wrong to him.
‘It’s not – ‘ Sean says, knowing he can’t be heard through the glass. His hands are raking loose change around the inside of his coat pockets.
Viggo absolutely doesn’t move. Sean doesn’t think he’s even breathing. Then he shoves his hair out of his eyes, shrugs and smiles tiredly at somewhere behind Sean’s head. The next thing he does is click off the bedside light and throw the room into darkness.
Obviously, there are very few things Sean can really do after that, and all of them involve leaving, so he does.
---
Sean drives and drives and parks on a backstreet and then drives again and stops and waits a while outside a petrol station. He opens his cigarettes, pulls one out, grips it between his lips. He has to strike the match’s purple head against the rasp of sandpaper three times before it catches. He holds the smoke in his mouth, watching the tip of the cigarette glow orange in the darkening air, then allows it to curl down into his chest.
The smell mixes with the staling smell of the takeaway food, curdling, so he rolls down the window.
There’s the indifferent sound of the wind in the trees behind the petrol station.
A dog barks somewhere, a frayed sound.
In the wing mirror, Sean looks at himself smoking. The two deep grooves beside his mouth give him an unapproachable look. He put them there down the years by making sure his face is stony. Now he looks back at himself, truculent. After enough years, the look you put on your face becomes the kind of person you are.
He seems to have been cut loose and floating. Small bits of reality swim out to meet him and then sink out of sight. A lot of him remains unwilling to be anywhere, having an idea that being anywhere definite will involve it in the guaranteed discovery of pain.
Later, back in his empty house, Sean spends an hour getting increasingly drunk and hypnotised by satellite channel ice-skating, that sexless sequinned camp, because it’s so fucking awful when they fall. The grace, the training, all the pointless shiny athleticism, all their defences disappear in one instant when they slip and stumble like anyone else, because ice is fucking slippery, let’s face it. He watches over and over the bits where the automatic, synchronised swimmer’s smile flicks off, the arms start to flail, the balance goes, until he gets increasingly sick and nervous on their behalf. At the moment, it looks all too familiar, so he turns it off around three and stares at an irregular patch of carpet where the table lamp shines until he can turn it off because it’s getting daylight.
---
The morning’s call sheet is in league against him, unhelpfully scheduling one of Aragorn and Boromir’s manly heart to hearts, the Lorien one.
‘Have you ever seen it, Aragorn – the white tower of Ecthelion shining like a spike of pearl and silver, its banners caught high in the morning breeze?’ Sean’s throat flinches when he speaks, and a violent hangover makes blood tap in his head every time he moves. 'Have you ever been called home by the clear ringing of silver trumpets?' A digging sensation makes itself felt somewhere beneath his heart and his mouth fills up, inconveniently, with saliva.
Viggo lets the air gather back over Sean’s stupid lines before he speaks.
‘I have seen the White City, long ago.’ He’s so quiet he’s nearly inaudible. But he’s on his mark, close by Sean’s side. When you are – when you’ve been – too close to someone like that, you are very aware of their aliveness. All the time there are pulses, tensions, readjustments of muscle and breath.
Sean’s ready for this, he thinks he is, but it still catches him like a slap, Viggo’s robbed look. For the run-through he’s got on over his costume a jacket Sean is very used to. For some reason, seeing it today hurts, and it won’t keep him warm enough, not this morning when they can all see their breath in the huge, unheated set, it isn’t practical.
Still, things could be worse, Sean thinks. Things could definitely be worse. Viggo is being okay, not really any quieter than usual, if you weren’t paying attention, fine really. And if he thinks hard enough he’ll come up with something that’s worse than this – thing, whatever it is.
It would be stupid to feel disappointed, that this is all there’s going to be, it’s all done and dusted, with no shouting, no pleas, no unreasonable behaviour, so Sean feels relieved. Probably that’s what he is feeling.
---
The afternoon’s worse, because the hobbits are on set, like a four-headed, eight-legged infestation, doing a quick run-through of the emergence from Moria scenes, before they all get helicoptered up to the mountains the following day for shooting.
Sean finds himself watching, baffled, as Dom and Billy snap in and out of character apparently effortlessly, being two bewildered hobbits mourning Gandalf’s death - and they’re good, the little bastards, there’s no denying it - and then, the second after the cameras stop, going into an effortless medley of bits of dialogue from bloody Goldeneye.
‘For England, James!’
‘Oh, James - ’ Billy, camp personified, but recognisably 006, if Alec Trevelyan had a mullety wig and prosthetic feet - ‘You never could take a hint...’
And Lijah, casting off grief-stricken Frodo like he’s never been anything but the bright-eyed little shit he is self-evidently is, has worked up a passable imitation of the wiseacre American helper at the end. ‘Would you two like to debrief each other at Guantanamo?’ Half of this is, as usual aimed at Viggo, but Viggo’s gaze is firmly set on the bank of monitors behind the cameras, where Peter is conferring with John.
And Sean even manages a minor kind of grimace and a clout at the nearest hobbit head - which was probably Astin’s, which is unfair, come to think of it, but fuck it anyway.
Because what does it all amount to, anyway?
Cock + arse
Arse + cock
Cock + mouth
Mouth + cock
= All that other stuff.
That’s all.
But they notice, of course they notice. It becomes quite hard to concentrate and he begins to dislike the times when they have to hang around waiting for a set-up or a cue. Everyone’s noticed by the time they break.
What happens in the canteen, though, is more than averagely disturbing.
‘WHAT?’ Lijah and Astin together, incredulous and American.
‘Is this true, Beanie?’ Billy, studiedly calm.
Sean considers asking what the fuck they’re talking about, but ends up just nodding. ‘Yeah. What about it?’
Dom looks him carefully in the eye for a second and then looks away. ‘You fuckin’ idiot.’
Billy looks down at his polystyrene coffee cup. ‘I hope you’re happy. I really do.’
Sean’s got rage rising in his chest, hot like brandy fumes, up into his face. The muscles in his arm are getting ready, with a little extra load of blood, to smack his hand on the table. ‘Just fuck off.’
They fuck off, but not before Billy's given him a look he'd never have expected to get from a hobbit.
Then, surprisingly, someone drops down next to him, juggling a too-hot coffee and lid, swearing under his breath.
Orli, even more surprisingly, sitting down, flopping his head onto the table. He blows puffs of air up towards his dishevelled blonde wig. ‘Jesus.’
TBC ASAP
no subject
Date: 2005-04-09 05:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-09 05:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-09 06:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-10 04:52 pm (UTC)I know this is annoying as hell to some writers, especially if they have very busy lives, but I'm going to whine and nudge here: I see "TBC ASAP" at the end of this installment, and yet ASAP has come and gone, and nothing's been continued! ::whines annoyingly for more::
no subject
Date: 2005-04-10 04:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-09 05:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-09 06:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-10 02:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-10 05:00 pm (UTC)