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"Lots of planets have a North!"
`````````Dr. Who
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Shortly after he had landed in L.A. Viggo bought a used truck, threw his modest suitcase of clothes and the briefcase containing his few important documents into the front seat of the Chevy, and spent six weeks driving up and down the coast of California, determinedly *not* thinking about the now ex lover he'd recently left fucking someone else in the living room of their flat in Manhattan, and searching for a new place that felt like a good spot to settle and lick his wounds. Finally he decided on a small resort town somewhere in the middle, and started house-hunting.
What Viggo ended up closing escrow on wasn't so much a home as a project. The small, disheveled building squatted, flaking old pink paint and leaking a palpable, forlorn darkness out through broken windows, in a semi-industrial tide wash between the swank restaurants and hotels of the posh beachfront boulevard at the most southerly part of town, and the respectable cafes and boutiques further up the city map. Just a few streets north of him, before the real estate turns tidier and noticeably more expensive, Viggo can find such things as a hardware store, a flooring and carpet showroom, an artists' supply shop, and a small, elderly Russian Orthodox church building with a modest tower at the east corner, sporting a nifty blue onion-shaped cupola, with a shiny, gold double-armed cross at the top. Though Saint Vladimir's congregation these days is Unitarian Universal, no one has ever seriously considered changing the name.
Three buildings west of Viggo is Eric's auto repair. Tall, muscular and dark-eyed, Eric is a transplanted Australian, and among the first to welcome Viggo. It was, he said, a relief to have new people putting down roots. On a corner just east of him is a grocer's that appears not to have changed much since nineteen-fifty-something--though he suspects that in nineteen-fifty-something it wasn't likely owned by an excitable Jamaican ex-patriot, name of Edgar. This is not a fancy neighborhood, but it's got a certain something to it, and apparently unlike the Dior-clad youth from the real estate office, so very eager to sell him the sad little pink building at a remarkably affordable price, Viggo felt a thrill of promise, as he stood there on the broken sidewalk, that he had not expected to feel again nearly so soon.
The first things the sad little pink building needed were a new roof, and new windows. Viggo's a fair handyman, but he's no roofer, and he ended up contracting out for both roof and windows. While the work progressed he went shopping at the nearby art supply, and along with much-needed materials found himself a job, working Wednesdays through Fridays. He doesn't particularly need the income. What Viggo needs is a reason to get up in the morning, something to force him to get out and interact with other humans. Viggo has learned over the years that though his tendency to prefer solitude has its advantages when he's writing, or messing with a new painting, the drawback is that he tends to pull into himself, turn broody, forget to eat. His ability to focus helps him with his work; becoming malnourished and dizzy really doesn't.
Just now he's sitting in a lawn chair out in his back yard, smoking and thinking. This used to be a parking lot, but after the roofers had gone, and before he began renovating the battered interior of the little pink building--which looks markedly better already, with a spiffy new red tile roof and whole windows--he hired a couple of friends of Eric's to dig out what was left of the parking spaces. It was a simple enough job for two men with a heavy truck and a bobcat, since the lot had deteriorated into mostly a random pattern of potholes strung together with a maze of crumbling asphalt. At the moment Viggo can't quite call the new space a garden. It's a leveled dirt area with potential. A garden wannabe. Having lived most of his life in or around Manhattan, he's never had his very own garden before, aside from a few pots on a rooftop. Edgar has suggested Viggo add a patio, maybe a barbecue. It's certainly worth thinking about.
Viggo slouches in the dimming daylight, long, coltish legs splayed out in front of him and a beer bottle trickling condensation into a wet spot on the denim over his right thigh. He stubs out his cigarette on the ground. February in New York is freezing and icy, but here Viggo is comfortable in a worn flannel shirt over his t-shirt. He's had to wear shoes most of the time, which is kind of a drag, but even in California winter can be cold, and what with construction materials scattered all over the inside of his in-process living space, it's a logical safety measure.
He feels a nudge against his left shin, and glances down to see Miz rubbing her cheek against his leg. "Hey," he greets softly. As Viggo reaches down the little tabby turns and arches up under his hand, presenting her back for his scratching convenience. Viggo feeds her, she hangs around as she pleases, and she's filled out to a healthier weight since the beginning of their arrangement, so he guesses she must be his now. Or vice versa. Whatever. Miz rubs her cheek against Viggo's hand, blinks round amber eyes at him, and trots noiselessly off, tail high, shortly to disappear through the back door of the building. Viggo slaps a few bits of cat hair from his hand onto his thigh, spends another few minutes contemplating his back yard options, and decides to head on inside for the night.
The kitchen has a little distance to go before Viggo considers it finished, but it's comfortably functional, and he's standing in front of the open refrigerator, wondering what he wants for supper when that *thing* happens again, that creepy feeling that someone else is in the room with him, and this time it's not a small, opportunistic cat. About a week after he moved in--that makes it going on a couple of months, now--Viggo started having strange, fleeting visions out of the corner of his eye, feelings that someone was watching him, or passing by behind him, but though he turns quickly, grey eyes hunting in the dim evening, he never catches more than a shadow, a vague shifting of the light, and the odd sensation of wing beats. It's become more frequent lately, and it gives him the jitters.
Viggo spends most of this evening painting the downstairs bathroom. After supper he goes for a walk and has a smoke, finally settles down and reads for a while, flipping through the large, and slightly intimidating garden book he picked up at the hardware store. He contemplates the best spot for a compost pile, wonders if he's got enough earthworms, considering his yard used to be asphalt. His elder brother calls him from the east coast. The cheerful voice of someone who loves him bringing all the latest news of other people who love him is talismanic in the tense quiet. Still, when he heads for his bed at last, Viggo glances warily one last time into the corners and shadows of his bedroom before he clicks off the light.
He wakes crying out into the early morning, shuddering and thrashing after dreams that he doesn't clearly recall. The blurred memory of something biblical or possibly jurassic fades quickly while he flings away the bed linens and sprawls, gasping, in the middle of his bed, his come drying sticky and unexplained on his belly, his thighs, his sweaty sheets. This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened. In the past couple of weeks he has begun to dread falling to sleep. There is a small part of him though, there in the dark at the back of his mind, that can hardly wait for nightfall. He prefers not to examine the motivations there too closely right now.
Instead he rips the sodden sheets from his bed, and takes a quick shower, shaking off under the hot spray the unsettling effects from his restless night. He runs his comb through dark blond hair that has a tendency to stick up in back, same as when he was eight years old. These days he finds he's starting to go a little grey around the edges, there at that bit of a cowlick on the left of his forehead, there at his sideburns, if he were to let them grow. It shows in his beard when he doesn't bother to shave. He's always tended toward leanness, and any small weight loss immediately shows in the shadows beneath his cheekbones. What with one thing and another he knows he's dropped a few pounds over the past couple of months. Put that together with the grey in his hair, and the flat, tired grey of his eyes today, and this morning he's looking pretty damned worn. He wouldn't mind being here, on the near edge of his middle years, if he weren't doing it alone. He tries not to dwell on it, but there are days when his loneliness makes him feel grey right down to the bone...
...there was a time, a life time past it seems now, when he loved a girl... assumed she felt the same, found out after they'd graduated university that she had never planned to stay. She was genuinely surprised that Viggo had ever believed so. It's been a long time since Viggo has thought about that. It's not his favorite Kodak moment.
He's got work at the art supply shop this morning, for which he is grateful. It keeps him busy and distracted, and there is something soothing about the scents of linseed oil and fresh, stretched canvas. Lydia doesn't mind that Viggo steers the high school kids and the university students toward her low-end stock. She knows that because they're in classes they're using up lots of supplies on practice, and they'll make up in volume what they don't spend on expensive items.
"It's good will anyway," she says, as Viggo is re-stocking brushes while Lydia sorts tubes of watercolors. Her daughter Patty mans the register.
"They appreciate the advice, and they'll keep coming back, because they know we don't cheat them for a quick buck." She fishes in her trousers pocket and pulls out a small pendant. "Here, this is from my Nana."
Viggo watches the slender black rope puddle in the center of his extended palm. The enameled medallion is about the size of a silver dollar, and heavy.
"It's Saint George, the slayer of the Serpent on one side," Lydia explains. "A guardian angel on the other."
Viggo shivers. "Thank you."
"Nana had a feeling," Lydia tells him solemnly, and there's an expression in her pale blue eyes that makes Viggo wonder if he should be worried.
Viggo spends the late afternoon nailing up drywall in the upstairs room that will eventually become his living room. The evening catches him by surprise, a sudden realization that he's hungry and he can't see what he's doing very well, that he must turn on the light. He decides to call it a day. He heats up a can of soup. It's too salty and the vegetables are squishy, but he's tired and he's on edge, watching the night officially fall, his little pink fortress surrounded by darkness until the street lights flicker on, feeble puddles of yellowed light eked out from the gloom that shrouds the rest of the neighborhood. Viggo quits looking out the front window and shuts all the curtains in the building, nervous that he'll suddenly find eyes peering in at him. He berates himself for being a sissy, steps out into that darkness for a defiant cigarette on his front stoop, then brews a cup of herbal tea, and settles in to watch some television. The Arts and Entertainment channel is showing re-runs of Agatha Christie's Poirot mysteries. Viggo never figures out who done it, but he enjoys looking at the period architecture. Plus, the little Belgian guy is funny.
Sometime around two a.m. Viggo is forced to admit that he must go to bed. Installing drywall is tough going for one person, he's dozing off on the couch, and his shoulders are sore. He takes a long, hot shower, wondering briefly if it's moot point, if he'll end up needing another one in the morning, like he did today. And yesterday. And the morning before... He stands under the water, letting it scald his shoulders until it runs tepid.
A few hours later he wakes with a start into pre-dawn darkness. He doesn't remember dreaming, and he's not thrashing. He's not made a mess of himself this time, but he lies there on his right side in the dark, his heart pounding as his eyes adjust to the dim light filtering in through the sheer white curtains over his left shoulder. He realizes that he's listing back toward the left side of his bed. The mattress has tilted. Unless the legs on that side of his bed have inexplicably broken off during the night, Viggo is not alone. His heartbeat racks up painfully as he rolls left.
The silhouette is a fever dream. It can't be right. Then one black wing flexes, blotting out the pale light from the window for a moment before it resettles against the back of the man sitting at the edge of Viggo's bed. Viggo makes a small, embarrassing sound before he can get control of his voice. "Uh..."
The winged man offers up Nana's prayer medallion, the rope twisted around long fingers. "What did you think," he asks, "you'd scare me away with this?"
The man's soft, even voice catches at Viggo's mid-section, even as the amused tone annoys him into a sort of coherence. "I've bought a haunted house."
Green eyes glitter at him from a shadowed face. They seem to hold the light, like Miz's amber eyes in the headlights of Viggo's truck, except that this is unsettling instead of cute. "Not the house that's haunted." The smile is a flash of predatory white in the dark, and then the man stands, spreads monstrous wings behind him, and he's gone.
Where Viggo might expect to smell brimstone the strong scent of incense hangs in the air after him; maybe Japanese joss, Viggo thinks. The prayer medallion lies, guardian angel side up, gleaming on Viggo's bed. To his horror his body fairly screams with need. This is Viggo's last set of clean sheets, and with a curse and a flurry of bed linens he escapes to his bathroom, flicks on the light, and the hot water of the shower, and soon he's howling his release into the cold tiles, green eyes, a shadow and a voice in the dark more than enough to get him spectacularly off. At the last it all leaves him hollow, and he can't look at himself in the mirror afterward, for fear of the regret he won't find looking back at him. And ain't that a damn fool way to be.
Summary: When Viggo moves from the East to the West Coast, he finds it's even stranger than he expected.
Rated: NC-17
Categories: Actor RPS Pairing: Sean/Viggo
Warnings: AUChallenges:
Series: NonretractableChapters: 8 Completed: Yes
Word count: 20188 Read: 7014
Published: 31 Jul 2009 Updated: 31 Jul 2009