fic: 'THIS TIME, FOR VARIETY' (5/5)
Apr. 21st, 2005 11:03 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}
rugbytackle'THIS TIME, FOR VARIETY' (PART 5)
Pairing: SB/VM, OB, hobbits
DISCLAIMER: Lies, all lies.
FEEDBACK: Please.
Previous four parts here.
Two days later, they manage a woeful read-through of Boromir and Aragorn’s Rivendell encounter over the shards of Narsil. Accents totally off, fluffing lines, both of them moving wrong, it reminds Sean of the kind of Euro-rubbish he did years ago, all kinds of nationalities trying to pull off some kind of BBC English for some hack director on a budget of sweet fuck all.
‘I am friend to Gandalf the Grey.’
The stuff people tell you, the stuff you know, it’s useless advice, rubbish. How to prune a tulip tree, how to die convincingly on stage in one of those old RSC dagger-in-armpit moves.
‘Then we are here for a common purpose – friend.’
He can feel the silence of the set congeal around them after they’ve stammered their way to a halt. It’s deadly, it’s so bad Pete thanks them flatly for doing it without even a shred of admonishment in his voice.
‘Straight to the back shelf in Blockbuster,’ Dom says, awed, after watching the dailies. ‘Are you, like, channelling your inner shit actor, or something?’
Sean thinks about losing his temper, letting it slide out of his grip and bounce away. Then he shrugs and says ‘Piss off.’
You know, I cannot bring myself to give one shit.
Sean does his best not to notice Dom’s sudden look of sympathy.
Because, at some point when he wasn’t looking, and despite them being like two pairs of fleeing convicts chained ankle to ankle and hip to hip by debilitating mutual lust, the hobbits have become reliably kind, in so far as he can detect kindness through the permanent fug of cigarette smoke and piss-taking. And he fucking hates it, and needs it like a hole in the head and a blanket on a cold night simultaneously.
It seems to be a known fact that nothing traumatic is allowed to happen to you without a follow-up helping of group therapy, without being plonked down into the inevitable grisly circle of plastic chairs and made to spew forth your most personal secrets and shames at intimate length for the benefit of a dozen or so emotional vampires. You get points for sharing, and more points for crying, and after enough sharing and crying for one session, you’re allowed tea and biscuits, and enough time for a fag break, during which you fantasise about bludgeoning to death the pacifying pastor with the name badge, the prissy little twitch every time you say fuck or cunt or cunting fuck as you get into it, and the endless, inexhaustible supply of sympathy and understanding.
Fortunately for Sean, though, none of the cast is encounter group material. Even though working on in a film like this means everyone is linked to all the rest of the cast by bands of strong elastic, hydraulics of sympathy and antagonism, and nothing affects one person only, no one requires that he unburden his soul. Small talk remains small. The same set of people – having a fag outside Costumes, sharing a lift to a location, losing props, having sex with each other – that accommodated him and Viggo wandering around, fucked out, raw and blinking with the newness, the surprise of it all, have seamlessly adjusted to the new situation. No one has a crack at excavating his head. Sometimes Sean is pretty sure it never happened, until it hits again, Viggo’s removal of himself, all of it fresh every morning, scoring the inside of his skull, delivered right to the door like milk or the paper.
Not that he doesn’t look, all the same, every day, on set – eyes trailing, casually picking through the crowd between scenes and finding Viggo all the time, finding the angle of a shoulder, a dirty coat, hair fanning in the uneven breeze. Every time it makes him falter, makes him stand considering a section of wall or a coil of wiring.
It’s like holding electricity, walking on water. An unbalanced kind of expectation that shadows him the entire time he’s on set. It’s not hope, though. Hope is of course admirable as an idea. But it does fuck all good. Sean’s hoped in the past at other times in his life in ways he remembers as being similar. The pain is unpleasant but what always kills him is the hope, that’s what makes it fucking truly unendurable. The tightness between what he has and what he hopes for inevitably frays and splits like a cheap shirt. That is the logical result of hope, the petty tyrant that won’t settle for anything but what it wants. It ruins the future, mortgages it, fills it full of badly-balanced disappointments ready to crash. Which means he doesn’t want hope, he wants a fucking break.
Not that this stops him trudging back and forth between how things are and how he wants them to be.
‘Our hobbits have such a – a Breughel quality, don’t you think?’ Ian has materialised next to him, without his wig, drinking tea out of a mug that says WHO’S YOUR DADDY?
Sean attempts a sociable half-smile. ‘If you say so.’ They’ve come out from one of the Moria sets for a breath of air. The hobbits are yawning, scratching and pestering each other. Orli is in full, pristine, Elf prince mode, six foot of pale, tapered limbs, with a half-eaten Snickers bar in one hand that Billy is enthusiastically fellating.
Ian glances across at Sean, drinks, jovial, malign. ‘You just know there was a lot of robust slap, tickle and incest going on behind haystacks in the Shire.’
Lijah puts his cigarette packet into the pocket of his shirt. ‘Look, I’ve got square tits.’
Sean coughs out cigarette smoke. ‘You’re not wrong there,’ he says to Ian.
There.
Viggo emerges from the set, looks around, squinting in the light, then ambles across to the hobbits. Sean is visited by a precise, tormenting memory of the exact tickle of Viggo’s hair and eyelashes, the way his fist used to fit itself to the nape of Sean’s neck as he got their mouths messily working together. Blood bays suddenly in his head and for a few seconds he closes his eyes and lets himself be a fierce sucking ache until he’s scared to continue. He curses himself for being the remembering type. He pays too much attention to every bloody thing.
Ian winks at Sean like a large and possibly peckish cat. ‘You know, Sean, a good cup of coffee is a dangerous thing, ‘ he says dreamily. ‘You grow up drinking instant, and then one day you have an espresso and the instant never tastes the same again.’
I am getting a coffee parable from Richard III. Jesus Christ.
‘Uh huh, ‘ Sean says. ‘Right.’ And his voice must be sounding odd, stiff, because Ian touches him briefly on the arm. ‘How are you? As though that isn’t the most gratuitous question.’
Sean looks up from his feet and sees Viggo listening to Orli, swallowing, fingers stalled on a forgotten sandwich. There’s times he wonders what sort of sad fuck he is, with this one obsession he nurtures to the exclusion of other, healthier, maybe even outdoor pursuits. There’s something completely wrong and pointless about this kind of thing, and he should get a life.
He breathes slowly for a bit. ‘Oh, the usual. Every time someone starts having sex with me I feel like phoning a psychiatrist. And then they stop, and I start wanting to phone the Samaritans.’
Ian nods, apparently unsurprised. ‘That we learn something as we get older is a nice, but untrue, idea.’
---
‘What’cha doing later, Beanie?’ Dom is freshly out of the shower, and not dressed very seriously. His ducklingish dirty blonde hair is in his eyes.
‘Oh, just stuff.’ The sun is beginning to lower itself over the car park, the light thickening into goldish grey.
‘Party at Orli’s place in a bit,’ Billy, minister to the misunderstood, says carefully, not looking anywhere in particular. ‘You should come.’
Hobbit code for ‘Viggo’ll be there and we’ll play drinking games that’ll try to get you both naked in a cupboard.’
‘I’m knackered.’
Dom’s face falls, like a game of Kerplunk when someone’s extracted the crucial straw, sending all the marbles tumbling. He puts his thumbs into his belt loops. ‘You’re such a dry shite.’
‘Oh, never mind, Dommie, he needs to finish lining up his shoes, and then renew all those wee pine-tree air fresheners in his car.’ Billy patters a kind of soft investigation around Dom’s hand, then stows it in the ass pocket of his jeans. He’s wearing Dom’s Ugg boots and also almost wearing Dom. Any act of God that could pick one off without the other would be an act of outstanding markmanship.
‘Make’em suck your cock and kick’em out in the gutter, that’s what I say.’ Dom does this in his much-admired Bean voice, with its suggestion of brown-toothed bigot in foetid northern working-man’s club.
Sean looks at them, busy inside their private round of hobbit rituals. Even though everyone, Sean included, treats them like front and hind legs of the same pantomime horse, there’s times when looking at them can make his chest hurt.
Women are lucky, they’re smaller. We grow, we lose the possibility of just getting surrounded by someone. We get alone.
Sean’s not built to support the cultivation of friends, because friendship is a potential source of pain, and pain is infectious, it requires contact and closeness to slip into you. If he minds, then he can get kicked in the guts whenever life chooses. He can get opened, gutted like a fish, with one simple movement, and he would prefer this did not happen.
Dom raises his eyebrows. ‘Beanie, are you falling in love with me? Cos I’m feeling a lot of attention here.’
‘Jeez, Dommie, ‘Billy says, ‘I’m not sure I like where this is going.’
Sean scrubs his face, has a go at sounding adequately angry. ‘Why are you such annoying little bollockses?’
Billy has a glint in his eye. ‘Oh Beanie, you’re deep after all.’
---
Sean ends up going to Orli’s party, of course. He never wants to go home, he doesn’t want to be alone with himself, closing his own front door on all his peace of mind.
By the time he gets there, it’s late, and the living room is dark except for a swarm of dancing cigarettes, the neon green face of the stereo and a lava lamp on the floor. The music is whinnying and shuddering through his shoes.
He gets himself a drink in the kitchen, where Orli is folded up against the fridge, breathing sleepily, delivering what sounds like a monologue on the state of the New Zealand road system at this historical juncture.
‘Seanie!’ One of his thin, flung out arms hits Sean. There are dead leaves smeared on the nape of his neck and stuck to the back of his shirt.
‘I hope you enjoyed getting yourself into that state.’ Sean empties the dregs of a bottle of vodka into a plastic cup.
Orli’s cockleshell ribcage is appallingly fragile against his as he leans on him. ‘I have a system going here, trust me.’
Looking at him makes Sean’s stomach cramp. It baffles him that Orli is a very good Legolas, working on a big film in New Zealand, because after listening to him drunk for five minutes, you’d judge him incapable of carrying out the following acts, let alone all of them in succession: getting an audition, showing up for it, getting to the airport.
Am I ever going to stop feeling like a puppy-killer? What the hell was going on in my head?
Orli’s limbs keep folding up, as he’s clearly past the stationary stage of drunkenness. He feels impossibly heavy when Sean gets his hands in the cornsilk hair under his armpits and props him on the draining board. ‘Are you still my friend, Sean?’
‘This is your friend Sean giving you a glass of water.’
‘Oh, OK.’ Orli’s long lashes fan down bluntly as he drinks.
‘Beanie.’ Sean finds himself clasped in a humid, unsteady embrace before he recognises Dom, who has daisy chains drawn in blue biro around both wrists. ‘What are you doing out of your hermit cave?’
Sean sucks in some more warm vodka, which is having about as much effect as fruit juice. ‘Came for the conversation.’
Dom releases him with a slap to his kidneys, sweat shining on his forehead. ‘Well, if you want to go and, like, ache in Viggo’s direction, he’s in there.’
Sean stays still for a breath, then breaks into busyness, searching his pockets for nothing much, rubbing his neck.
Of course he is.
So, you tell me, is it worse if I stay here and get rat-arsed and try not to shag Orli again, because we’ve established that’s definitely a bad thing when it’s not him I’m thinking of, or is it worse to go looking for Viggo and being ridiculous, waiting for something that won’t happen, that can’t be considered and which should for Christ’s sake be settled? Which of them is worse, really?
In fact, he does the second thing.
---
Viggo is laid out across an armchair with its back to the door, talking to Lijah, who’s hunkered down on the floor in front. One side of Viggo’s face is plush and pink in the glow from Orli’s lava lamp, the other is in shadow. He’s holding a can of beer in one battered hand and dangling the other over the carpet as if trailing it in the water from the side of a boat. Some of the small wounds are fresh (arc across the ball of the thumb), some mature (cloven end of right forefinger), some fading and ghostly (a V on the back of the wrist), and there are some few permanent scars, little crescents of shinier skin on the tanned surface of his skin.
This position is bad because Sean can get close, what with the humid, shouting crowd and the music and all, closer than he’s been since the Lorien scene, close enough to remember the intensity and consistency of Viggo’s personal atmosphere, the combination of menace and gentleness.
Then Lijah is looking up at Sean, huge-eyed, stoned and pleased. ‘You look weird, Beanie. You should drink more.’
Sean raises his glass. ‘I’m working on it.’
Viggo turns his head after a bit, nods, wary.
His voice is still hot in Sean’s mind, still hobbling his thoughts and translating them into bleak distances and unexpected bloodied hurts. Sean notices how his body has turned tentative, the whole shape of him ready to handle discovery, apologise again.
What the fuck am I doing, being invitingly, obviously, repellently sad, creeping with free-floating need?
Slick and supple, like some kind of mist against his skin, comes a sudden memory of being held, the daily, second-nature way of doing it, hauling in a breath and breathing Viggo’s hair, his skin, his soap and sweat, his denim and cotton warmth, catching in his throat with the unmistakable dab of his breath. Viggo isn’t like anyone else. Not like other, highly instructive, encounters he’s had, in which a succession of people presented themselves as quieter, cleaner, funnier, more tolerant, flexible and tender than they in fact turned out to be, until he eventually, puzzled, found himself waking up stomach to stomach with an incompatible stranger who is calling him by name and has rearranged his CD collection in alphabetical order.
Maybe this is equally instructive, only different.
You take a breath in and by the time you let it out, they’re someone and they’re more than you and they’re your life support and all you can think about is they’ll never come in your mouth again, ever.
Sean glances away and discovers he is feeling seasick and slightly unclean.
Then Dom’s beside him, slinging a sloppy arm around him. ‘Lij, do me a favour? Astin’s having a hypochondriac moment and Billy’s gonna suffocate him.’
Lijah helps himself up, using Viggo’s knees. ‘Jeez, we should never let him smoke dope. What’s wrong this time?’
Dom shrugs expansively. ‘Who knows? Probably a blood clot that turns out to be his wrist bone or something.’
When Sean looks up, he catches Viggo looking straight at him, then his eyes flick away with an odd, shadowed snap of emotion.
‘Jesus suffering Christ, ‘ Dom says, looking from Sean to Viggo. ‘You two.’
Sean decides to go home. He thinks he could easily turn into some kind of wino, garrulous and heartbroken, or the other, silent, species of drunk, with fuck-off eyes, putting empty bottles in the bin at 3 am, spinning his little autistic fictions of true love.
---
Susan, one of the assistants, knocks on his trailer door late on a day Sean’s been on his own, mostly, with a politely restive thoroughbred, getting the shots of Boromir riding through the gates of Rivendell.
At first he has no clue what she’s telling him, that the call sheet’s changed for tomorrow. Then that the reason it’s changed is that Viggo’s had an accident, and that’s when the usual turning of the day around Sean stops.
‘What happened?’ He swallows clumsily with a flustered little gulp.
Her eyes skim him, neutral, kind. ‘Something went wrong in the river. Unit two was shooting – that scene where Aragorn’s unconscious in the water after the warg battle, you know?’
The walls pitch uneasily in line with his rush of sour perspiration.
She seems to be expecting some kind of response from him, but when none comes, she looks down at her clipboard, taps a finger on it and goes on. ‘I mean, there were divers sent down it to okay it and stuff. No one’s that sure, but maybe it was the weight of the costume, or he got into a current or something, but he didn’t float down the way he was supposed to. He went under and got caught up under the bank. Took a while to come up. Gave everyone a nasty fright.’
Through the lining of his trouser pocket, Sean pinches his own leg, attempting to shock his thoughts into some kind of order. His eyes must be scalding because she says, quickly, ‘They only took him off for observation, a bit of a knock on the head, he’s OK.’
Something unwieldy starts to twist from his stomach to his throat.
‘Good, ‘ he says. ‘That’s good.’ Something ticks in his eyebrow and he reminds himself that there can be chance, not now, of his losing the slightest fragment of control over anything, especially his face.
After she’s left, he makes it to the toilet in time to vomit up a few mouthfuls of thin, bitter liquid that scorches his throat so he can only lie there for a while, curled, dragging in breaths. He hugs his arms around his ribcage, bending up his knees foetally, trying for comfort, to wait this thing out.
Just fucking like you, Viggo, leaving me here with all of this.
Sean lets his fingers close hard around nothing.
Just fucking like you, Viggo.
I’m going out of my mind. That’s all right, I’m not so gone on my fucking mind. It could be lovely and soothing, maybe a bit spacious, being out of my mind. At least it’d be getting a bit of fresh air.
The only problem with being out of your mind is your memories hog the best armchair, flick the TV over from whatever you’re watching to the programme they want, and sit there re-playing the stuff you don’t ever want to see again, not if your life depended on it. Because it’s like cutting off your own arm, slowly, with a pen-knife, like that American bloke stuck under the rockfall for a week.
Sean lets Viggo fumble out into his mind and work his way right out into the open, under the root of his brain, the deepest part. It’s amazing, really, the way your own memory can pull off this kind of tailor-made head-fuck, spreading you open, painstaking, taking its time with you, making sure you get the full benefit.
He closes his eyes and concentrates on the shape of the toilet, the sink, the line of the door. The bathroom does not invite nudity. The fittings are all made out of beige plastic which seems to be part of an attempt to pre-empt staining and yellowing by making everything look stained and yellow from the start.
Sean lifts one hand to his forehead, lightly, as if his skull might actually be as breakable as it felt. He thinks he remembers reading somewhere it was only the thickness of an eggshell.
He’s still there, two minutes or two hours later, when he hears footsteps in the trailer.
There’s just time to get to his feet, catch sight of himself in the mirror, chin stringy with saliva, hair sodden, face wet, when there’s Viggo suddenly in the doorway, tension putting a shallow rise in his chest, a fresh bruise patching his cheek, older grazes on his knuckles, keeping Sean eye to eye.
Viggo is the one to make the first assault on their silence, but it’s in no way a sentence. ‘I don’t think… I think I – ‘
Something about this cracks a sob through Sean, sets him clinging and wheezing around each breath. He looks at Viggo and it’s like those old maps explorers used to use on voyages. When they got to the edge of what they knew, they wrote ‘here be monsters’. And he turns towards him dumbly, catches him in hard until his face is in his neck, the live heat of his neck, then closes in his hold around the blood-heat and muscle and bone of his back. After a bit they manage some kind of a rocking motion, one of total safety.
And most of all, Sean realises, they are relieved. They are more relieved than he would have believed was possible.
Pairing: SB/VM, OB, hobbits
DISCLAIMER: Lies, all lies.
FEEDBACK: Please.
Previous four parts here.
Two days later, they manage a woeful read-through of Boromir and Aragorn’s Rivendell encounter over the shards of Narsil. Accents totally off, fluffing lines, both of them moving wrong, it reminds Sean of the kind of Euro-rubbish he did years ago, all kinds of nationalities trying to pull off some kind of BBC English for some hack director on a budget of sweet fuck all.
‘I am friend to Gandalf the Grey.’
The stuff people tell you, the stuff you know, it’s useless advice, rubbish. How to prune a tulip tree, how to die convincingly on stage in one of those old RSC dagger-in-armpit moves.
‘Then we are here for a common purpose – friend.’
He can feel the silence of the set congeal around them after they’ve stammered their way to a halt. It’s deadly, it’s so bad Pete thanks them flatly for doing it without even a shred of admonishment in his voice.
‘Straight to the back shelf in Blockbuster,’ Dom says, awed, after watching the dailies. ‘Are you, like, channelling your inner shit actor, or something?’
Sean thinks about losing his temper, letting it slide out of his grip and bounce away. Then he shrugs and says ‘Piss off.’
You know, I cannot bring myself to give one shit.
Sean does his best not to notice Dom’s sudden look of sympathy.
Because, at some point when he wasn’t looking, and despite them being like two pairs of fleeing convicts chained ankle to ankle and hip to hip by debilitating mutual lust, the hobbits have become reliably kind, in so far as he can detect kindness through the permanent fug of cigarette smoke and piss-taking. And he fucking hates it, and needs it like a hole in the head and a blanket on a cold night simultaneously.
It seems to be a known fact that nothing traumatic is allowed to happen to you without a follow-up helping of group therapy, without being plonked down into the inevitable grisly circle of plastic chairs and made to spew forth your most personal secrets and shames at intimate length for the benefit of a dozen or so emotional vampires. You get points for sharing, and more points for crying, and after enough sharing and crying for one session, you’re allowed tea and biscuits, and enough time for a fag break, during which you fantasise about bludgeoning to death the pacifying pastor with the name badge, the prissy little twitch every time you say fuck or cunt or cunting fuck as you get into it, and the endless, inexhaustible supply of sympathy and understanding.
Fortunately for Sean, though, none of the cast is encounter group material. Even though working on in a film like this means everyone is linked to all the rest of the cast by bands of strong elastic, hydraulics of sympathy and antagonism, and nothing affects one person only, no one requires that he unburden his soul. Small talk remains small. The same set of people – having a fag outside Costumes, sharing a lift to a location, losing props, having sex with each other – that accommodated him and Viggo wandering around, fucked out, raw and blinking with the newness, the surprise of it all, have seamlessly adjusted to the new situation. No one has a crack at excavating his head. Sometimes Sean is pretty sure it never happened, until it hits again, Viggo’s removal of himself, all of it fresh every morning, scoring the inside of his skull, delivered right to the door like milk or the paper.
Not that he doesn’t look, all the same, every day, on set – eyes trailing, casually picking through the crowd between scenes and finding Viggo all the time, finding the angle of a shoulder, a dirty coat, hair fanning in the uneven breeze. Every time it makes him falter, makes him stand considering a section of wall or a coil of wiring.
It’s like holding electricity, walking on water. An unbalanced kind of expectation that shadows him the entire time he’s on set. It’s not hope, though. Hope is of course admirable as an idea. But it does fuck all good. Sean’s hoped in the past at other times in his life in ways he remembers as being similar. The pain is unpleasant but what always kills him is the hope, that’s what makes it fucking truly unendurable. The tightness between what he has and what he hopes for inevitably frays and splits like a cheap shirt. That is the logical result of hope, the petty tyrant that won’t settle for anything but what it wants. It ruins the future, mortgages it, fills it full of badly-balanced disappointments ready to crash. Which means he doesn’t want hope, he wants a fucking break.
Not that this stops him trudging back and forth between how things are and how he wants them to be.
‘Our hobbits have such a – a Breughel quality, don’t you think?’ Ian has materialised next to him, without his wig, drinking tea out of a mug that says WHO’S YOUR DADDY?
Sean attempts a sociable half-smile. ‘If you say so.’ They’ve come out from one of the Moria sets for a breath of air. The hobbits are yawning, scratching and pestering each other. Orli is in full, pristine, Elf prince mode, six foot of pale, tapered limbs, with a half-eaten Snickers bar in one hand that Billy is enthusiastically fellating.
Ian glances across at Sean, drinks, jovial, malign. ‘You just know there was a lot of robust slap, tickle and incest going on behind haystacks in the Shire.’
Lijah puts his cigarette packet into the pocket of his shirt. ‘Look, I’ve got square tits.’
Sean coughs out cigarette smoke. ‘You’re not wrong there,’ he says to Ian.
There.
Viggo emerges from the set, looks around, squinting in the light, then ambles across to the hobbits. Sean is visited by a precise, tormenting memory of the exact tickle of Viggo’s hair and eyelashes, the way his fist used to fit itself to the nape of Sean’s neck as he got their mouths messily working together. Blood bays suddenly in his head and for a few seconds he closes his eyes and lets himself be a fierce sucking ache until he’s scared to continue. He curses himself for being the remembering type. He pays too much attention to every bloody thing.
Ian winks at Sean like a large and possibly peckish cat. ‘You know, Sean, a good cup of coffee is a dangerous thing, ‘ he says dreamily. ‘You grow up drinking instant, and then one day you have an espresso and the instant never tastes the same again.’
I am getting a coffee parable from Richard III. Jesus Christ.
‘Uh huh, ‘ Sean says. ‘Right.’ And his voice must be sounding odd, stiff, because Ian touches him briefly on the arm. ‘How are you? As though that isn’t the most gratuitous question.’
Sean looks up from his feet and sees Viggo listening to Orli, swallowing, fingers stalled on a forgotten sandwich. There’s times he wonders what sort of sad fuck he is, with this one obsession he nurtures to the exclusion of other, healthier, maybe even outdoor pursuits. There’s something completely wrong and pointless about this kind of thing, and he should get a life.
He breathes slowly for a bit. ‘Oh, the usual. Every time someone starts having sex with me I feel like phoning a psychiatrist. And then they stop, and I start wanting to phone the Samaritans.’
Ian nods, apparently unsurprised. ‘That we learn something as we get older is a nice, but untrue, idea.’
---
‘What’cha doing later, Beanie?’ Dom is freshly out of the shower, and not dressed very seriously. His ducklingish dirty blonde hair is in his eyes.
‘Oh, just stuff.’ The sun is beginning to lower itself over the car park, the light thickening into goldish grey.
‘Party at Orli’s place in a bit,’ Billy, minister to the misunderstood, says carefully, not looking anywhere in particular. ‘You should come.’
Hobbit code for ‘Viggo’ll be there and we’ll play drinking games that’ll try to get you both naked in a cupboard.’
‘I’m knackered.’
Dom’s face falls, like a game of Kerplunk when someone’s extracted the crucial straw, sending all the marbles tumbling. He puts his thumbs into his belt loops. ‘You’re such a dry shite.’
‘Oh, never mind, Dommie, he needs to finish lining up his shoes, and then renew all those wee pine-tree air fresheners in his car.’ Billy patters a kind of soft investigation around Dom’s hand, then stows it in the ass pocket of his jeans. He’s wearing Dom’s Ugg boots and also almost wearing Dom. Any act of God that could pick one off without the other would be an act of outstanding markmanship.
‘Make’em suck your cock and kick’em out in the gutter, that’s what I say.’ Dom does this in his much-admired Bean voice, with its suggestion of brown-toothed bigot in foetid northern working-man’s club.
Sean looks at them, busy inside their private round of hobbit rituals. Even though everyone, Sean included, treats them like front and hind legs of the same pantomime horse, there’s times when looking at them can make his chest hurt.
Women are lucky, they’re smaller. We grow, we lose the possibility of just getting surrounded by someone. We get alone.
Sean’s not built to support the cultivation of friends, because friendship is a potential source of pain, and pain is infectious, it requires contact and closeness to slip into you. If he minds, then he can get kicked in the guts whenever life chooses. He can get opened, gutted like a fish, with one simple movement, and he would prefer this did not happen.
Dom raises his eyebrows. ‘Beanie, are you falling in love with me? Cos I’m feeling a lot of attention here.’
‘Jeez, Dommie, ‘Billy says, ‘I’m not sure I like where this is going.’
Sean scrubs his face, has a go at sounding adequately angry. ‘Why are you such annoying little bollockses?’
Billy has a glint in his eye. ‘Oh Beanie, you’re deep after all.’
---
Sean ends up going to Orli’s party, of course. He never wants to go home, he doesn’t want to be alone with himself, closing his own front door on all his peace of mind.
By the time he gets there, it’s late, and the living room is dark except for a swarm of dancing cigarettes, the neon green face of the stereo and a lava lamp on the floor. The music is whinnying and shuddering through his shoes.
He gets himself a drink in the kitchen, where Orli is folded up against the fridge, breathing sleepily, delivering what sounds like a monologue on the state of the New Zealand road system at this historical juncture.
‘Seanie!’ One of his thin, flung out arms hits Sean. There are dead leaves smeared on the nape of his neck and stuck to the back of his shirt.
‘I hope you enjoyed getting yourself into that state.’ Sean empties the dregs of a bottle of vodka into a plastic cup.
Orli’s cockleshell ribcage is appallingly fragile against his as he leans on him. ‘I have a system going here, trust me.’
Looking at him makes Sean’s stomach cramp. It baffles him that Orli is a very good Legolas, working on a big film in New Zealand, because after listening to him drunk for five minutes, you’d judge him incapable of carrying out the following acts, let alone all of them in succession: getting an audition, showing up for it, getting to the airport.
Am I ever going to stop feeling like a puppy-killer? What the hell was going on in my head?
Orli’s limbs keep folding up, as he’s clearly past the stationary stage of drunkenness. He feels impossibly heavy when Sean gets his hands in the cornsilk hair under his armpits and props him on the draining board. ‘Are you still my friend, Sean?’
‘This is your friend Sean giving you a glass of water.’
‘Oh, OK.’ Orli’s long lashes fan down bluntly as he drinks.
‘Beanie.’ Sean finds himself clasped in a humid, unsteady embrace before he recognises Dom, who has daisy chains drawn in blue biro around both wrists. ‘What are you doing out of your hermit cave?’
Sean sucks in some more warm vodka, which is having about as much effect as fruit juice. ‘Came for the conversation.’
Dom releases him with a slap to his kidneys, sweat shining on his forehead. ‘Well, if you want to go and, like, ache in Viggo’s direction, he’s in there.’
Sean stays still for a breath, then breaks into busyness, searching his pockets for nothing much, rubbing his neck.
Of course he is.
So, you tell me, is it worse if I stay here and get rat-arsed and try not to shag Orli again, because we’ve established that’s definitely a bad thing when it’s not him I’m thinking of, or is it worse to go looking for Viggo and being ridiculous, waiting for something that won’t happen, that can’t be considered and which should for Christ’s sake be settled? Which of them is worse, really?
In fact, he does the second thing.
---
Viggo is laid out across an armchair with its back to the door, talking to Lijah, who’s hunkered down on the floor in front. One side of Viggo’s face is plush and pink in the glow from Orli’s lava lamp, the other is in shadow. He’s holding a can of beer in one battered hand and dangling the other over the carpet as if trailing it in the water from the side of a boat. Some of the small wounds are fresh (arc across the ball of the thumb), some mature (cloven end of right forefinger), some fading and ghostly (a V on the back of the wrist), and there are some few permanent scars, little crescents of shinier skin on the tanned surface of his skin.
This position is bad because Sean can get close, what with the humid, shouting crowd and the music and all, closer than he’s been since the Lorien scene, close enough to remember the intensity and consistency of Viggo’s personal atmosphere, the combination of menace and gentleness.
Then Lijah is looking up at Sean, huge-eyed, stoned and pleased. ‘You look weird, Beanie. You should drink more.’
Sean raises his glass. ‘I’m working on it.’
Viggo turns his head after a bit, nods, wary.
His voice is still hot in Sean’s mind, still hobbling his thoughts and translating them into bleak distances and unexpected bloodied hurts. Sean notices how his body has turned tentative, the whole shape of him ready to handle discovery, apologise again.
What the fuck am I doing, being invitingly, obviously, repellently sad, creeping with free-floating need?
Slick and supple, like some kind of mist against his skin, comes a sudden memory of being held, the daily, second-nature way of doing it, hauling in a breath and breathing Viggo’s hair, his skin, his soap and sweat, his denim and cotton warmth, catching in his throat with the unmistakable dab of his breath. Viggo isn’t like anyone else. Not like other, highly instructive, encounters he’s had, in which a succession of people presented themselves as quieter, cleaner, funnier, more tolerant, flexible and tender than they in fact turned out to be, until he eventually, puzzled, found himself waking up stomach to stomach with an incompatible stranger who is calling him by name and has rearranged his CD collection in alphabetical order.
Maybe this is equally instructive, only different.
You take a breath in and by the time you let it out, they’re someone and they’re more than you and they’re your life support and all you can think about is they’ll never come in your mouth again, ever.
Sean glances away and discovers he is feeling seasick and slightly unclean.
Then Dom’s beside him, slinging a sloppy arm around him. ‘Lij, do me a favour? Astin’s having a hypochondriac moment and Billy’s gonna suffocate him.’
Lijah helps himself up, using Viggo’s knees. ‘Jeez, we should never let him smoke dope. What’s wrong this time?’
Dom shrugs expansively. ‘Who knows? Probably a blood clot that turns out to be his wrist bone or something.’
When Sean looks up, he catches Viggo looking straight at him, then his eyes flick away with an odd, shadowed snap of emotion.
‘Jesus suffering Christ, ‘ Dom says, looking from Sean to Viggo. ‘You two.’
Sean decides to go home. He thinks he could easily turn into some kind of wino, garrulous and heartbroken, or the other, silent, species of drunk, with fuck-off eyes, putting empty bottles in the bin at 3 am, spinning his little autistic fictions of true love.
---
Susan, one of the assistants, knocks on his trailer door late on a day Sean’s been on his own, mostly, with a politely restive thoroughbred, getting the shots of Boromir riding through the gates of Rivendell.
At first he has no clue what she’s telling him, that the call sheet’s changed for tomorrow. Then that the reason it’s changed is that Viggo’s had an accident, and that’s when the usual turning of the day around Sean stops.
‘What happened?’ He swallows clumsily with a flustered little gulp.
Her eyes skim him, neutral, kind. ‘Something went wrong in the river. Unit two was shooting – that scene where Aragorn’s unconscious in the water after the warg battle, you know?’
The walls pitch uneasily in line with his rush of sour perspiration.
She seems to be expecting some kind of response from him, but when none comes, she looks down at her clipboard, taps a finger on it and goes on. ‘I mean, there were divers sent down it to okay it and stuff. No one’s that sure, but maybe it was the weight of the costume, or he got into a current or something, but he didn’t float down the way he was supposed to. He went under and got caught up under the bank. Took a while to come up. Gave everyone a nasty fright.’
Through the lining of his trouser pocket, Sean pinches his own leg, attempting to shock his thoughts into some kind of order. His eyes must be scalding because she says, quickly, ‘They only took him off for observation, a bit of a knock on the head, he’s OK.’
Something unwieldy starts to twist from his stomach to his throat.
‘Good, ‘ he says. ‘That’s good.’ Something ticks in his eyebrow and he reminds himself that there can be chance, not now, of his losing the slightest fragment of control over anything, especially his face.
After she’s left, he makes it to the toilet in time to vomit up a few mouthfuls of thin, bitter liquid that scorches his throat so he can only lie there for a while, curled, dragging in breaths. He hugs his arms around his ribcage, bending up his knees foetally, trying for comfort, to wait this thing out.
Just fucking like you, Viggo, leaving me here with all of this.
Sean lets his fingers close hard around nothing.
Just fucking like you, Viggo.
I’m going out of my mind. That’s all right, I’m not so gone on my fucking mind. It could be lovely and soothing, maybe a bit spacious, being out of my mind. At least it’d be getting a bit of fresh air.
The only problem with being out of your mind is your memories hog the best armchair, flick the TV over from whatever you’re watching to the programme they want, and sit there re-playing the stuff you don’t ever want to see again, not if your life depended on it. Because it’s like cutting off your own arm, slowly, with a pen-knife, like that American bloke stuck under the rockfall for a week.
Sean lets Viggo fumble out into his mind and work his way right out into the open, under the root of his brain, the deepest part. It’s amazing, really, the way your own memory can pull off this kind of tailor-made head-fuck, spreading you open, painstaking, taking its time with you, making sure you get the full benefit.
He closes his eyes and concentrates on the shape of the toilet, the sink, the line of the door. The bathroom does not invite nudity. The fittings are all made out of beige plastic which seems to be part of an attempt to pre-empt staining and yellowing by making everything look stained and yellow from the start.
Sean lifts one hand to his forehead, lightly, as if his skull might actually be as breakable as it felt. He thinks he remembers reading somewhere it was only the thickness of an eggshell.
He’s still there, two minutes or two hours later, when he hears footsteps in the trailer.
There’s just time to get to his feet, catch sight of himself in the mirror, chin stringy with saliva, hair sodden, face wet, when there’s Viggo suddenly in the doorway, tension putting a shallow rise in his chest, a fresh bruise patching his cheek, older grazes on his knuckles, keeping Sean eye to eye.
Viggo is the one to make the first assault on their silence, but it’s in no way a sentence. ‘I don’t think… I think I – ‘
Something about this cracks a sob through Sean, sets him clinging and wheezing around each breath. He looks at Viggo and it’s like those old maps explorers used to use on voyages. When they got to the edge of what they knew, they wrote ‘here be monsters’. And he turns towards him dumbly, catches him in hard until his face is in his neck, the live heat of his neck, then closes in his hold around the blood-heat and muscle and bone of his back. After a bit they manage some kind of a rocking motion, one of total safety.
And most of all, Sean realises, they are relieved. They are more relieved than he would have believed was possible.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-04-21 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 02:22 pm (UTC)Thank 'ee koindly, sir.
Although Sean nearly skidded in to the A and E, or heroically flew in a helicopter to V's bedside...?!
no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 02:17 am (UTC)He’s wearing Dom’s Ugg boots and also almost wearing Dom. Any act of God that could pick one off without the other would be an act of outstanding markmanship.
Brilliant story. Sean's throwing up on hearing about Viggo, such a gut wrenching moment, and then Viggo showing up, and them holding on, each being the other's safety.
Hoping for a reunion scene . . .
no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 02:23 pm (UTC)Lovely
Date: 2005-04-22 06:00 am (UTC)I will try to come up with more sentient feedback when i've been awake for longer, but for now I'll just sigh and say "lovely"
Re: Lovely
Date: 2005-04-22 02:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 07:06 am (UTC)that one made me spew coffee..
Dom shrugs expansively. ‘Who knows? Probably a blood clot that turns out to be his wrist bone or something.’
and that one shoved me out of my chair!
the funny bits are brilliant!! but i have no words to describe the love for those heartbreakingly sweet bits :D
thank you for the wonderful installment of my favorite ongoing series!
no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 02:25 pm (UTC)People have suggested that the only time they's fairly sure Sean's not going to launch himself down a well is when a hobbit heaves into sight. Glad you liked.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-23 10:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-24 05:33 pm (UTC)Thanks for reading.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-24 07:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-24 08:04 pm (UTC)I'm adding an epilogue to the fic, which might remove the sting or 'astringency' somewhat.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-24 10:26 pm (UTC)PS. Russian is the beautiful melodious language but they say very difficult to study. But I like to read in English. Hope I can understand a text properly.:))
no subject
Date: 2005-04-26 06:19 pm (UTC)