Back on the far side of this decade and all its strange coincidences, you used to live off of rich dark chocolate and hunks of thick, crusty bread. You mixed drinks that ran the gamut from brilliant to quite simply awful, but you drank them anyway and sometimes soaked them up with the ends of a loaf, because you were strange like that, because you always were a "mixer." Field peas and nacho cheese sauce, ketchup and scrambled eggs, didn't matter what it was; you would eat it.
These days, things aren't so different as they are the same, disturbingly the same. Fifty is coming up fast and the soft pink lips that you kissed so delicately, like the flutter of butterfly's wings on your ankle in the old hammock on the porch, seem far away now. It's not an age for making love to men who are barely out of their teenaged years, and it's not a time for surrealism a propos of nothing, for bread or dark chocolate.
The AARP is sending letters, now. The discount cards are piling up on the table, and the birthday card from Mom doesn't come anymore, because there is no more Mom, because she's in a better place and fuck if you know what that means. Though you sure as hell hope it's better than this, better than mate in a plain white ceramic mug, the handle slightly chipped, better than a microwave meal courtesy of Marie Callender, alfredo and moist, tasteless chicken.
The screen door bangs on his way in; you need to get that hinge fixed. And he is not young either, not like Orlando and his pink lips or Dominic and that one time in Dunedin. But he is strong in body and stronger in spirit; he is the diamond in the rough that can't see his own quality and you polish and polish, hoping to reveal it. You are persistent, relentless. He is beautiful, and one day he will see that.
You reach up for him from the kitchen table, not looking away from your tea and your stack of mail, but you can hear the smile in the rumble of his voice as he bends to kiss you. "Morning, Viggo. You know the storm's coming in, yeah? Did yeh roll the windows up?" His beard is slightly scratchy, and something stirs in your gut. He is beautiful.
Summary: Second ficlet of the evening of insomnia. This reads like a birthday fic, I realised after I wrote it and gave it a title, but it's not really. Just about aging, and time passing, and other melancholy things with a light at the end of the tunnel.
Rated: PG-13
Categories: Actor RPS Pairing: Sean/Viggo
Warnings: NoneChallenges:
Series: NoneChapters: 1 Completed: Yes
Word count: 400 Read: 647
Published: 16 Aug 2009 Updated: 16 Aug 2009