Some nights he dreams of mustangs. He stands on a green hill in the sun and watches the herd flow past like a river below the hill. He can feel the thunder of their hooves, their living weight, rolling up through the ground into his feet, and up through his bones, into his chest. The sun gleams and slides over smooth hide, manes and tails flashing like whitewater in the light. His gaze always rests on one. The palomino. The herd, itself a collective thing of visceral beauty, surges past the curve of the hill, and then it’s gone, and Viggo watches the palomino disappear like sunlight flickering between his fingers.
On the way up to the shoot Sean white-knuckled it through the turbulence, crushing Orlando's leg in the same hand that wielded his sword, and the kid had been a trooper and a friend, no complaints, though he'd be bruised for days. Coming back, Viggo talked Sean down. He saw the panic rising in his friend's eyes, all the blood leaving his face, and caught Sean's face in his hands, went eye-to-eye with him. He suddenly didn't know what to say. The one thing he wanted to say was entirely inappropriate. He quoted song lyrics. Every song lyric he could think of. By the startled expression on Sean's face, Trent Reznor didn't go over especially well, but the rest of it seemed to work out alright, until they were just hovering to land, and Viggo finished Robert Plant's "Ship of Fools," which cut a bit close to home for him, and then there was… nothing. Viggo ran out of lyrics. In the silence between them Viggo imagined that the rock and sway of the chopper felt to Sean like the last moments of the Titanic and the whomp of the rotor blades sounded like the hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen… and then Sean smiled. Shaky, but he smiled, and he found his voice as the chopper lowered to the landing pad.
"Chuiris cros i lar an bhothair dom. Lamh na gcarad in am a' ghatair dom. Feach doimhin isteach id' shuile gorm," he said quietly, green eyes shining.
Then the chopper landed, and as Viggo was gathering his wits to ask Sean what all that had meant, the Yorkshireman turned his back and took off across the tarmac, his stride long and easy, as though the chopper ride had been entirely uneventful. They shared a wardrobe trailer, but if Sean didn't want to tell him now, he wouldn't tell him in the trailer. Viggo turned to Orlando, who stood at his elbow, squinting contemplatively after Sean's retreating back. Boromir's cloak caught the sun, billowing out behind Sean like dark, spilled blood.
"Irish," Orlando answered the unasked question. "Sounds a bit familiar. Want me to find out what it means?"
Viggo swallowed. "Please."
Orlando grinned and bounced on his toes, perhaps a little too eager, for Viggo's comfort. "Right. We're all still at your place tonight, yeah?"
"Yeah." Robert Plant's voice circled in his head uncomfortably. 'On waves of love my heart is breaking. Stranger still my self-control, I can't rely on anymore. New tides surprise, my world it's changing. Within this frame, an ocean swells…'
Music played, people drank, laughed and snacked, dropped crumbs and other bits and pieces onto the carpet, spilled out into the yard, such as it was. In the living room Elijah and Dom entertained themselves and others easily amused by playing "cookie-on-yer-nose," and, surrounded by burly stunt crew, somewhere in the back yard, Liv's giggle was wondrously infectious.
Viggo and Ian lurked in the kitchen like a couple of teenagers smokin' in the boys' room. Wine and beer bottles collected on the countertops, empty take-out boxes stacked on the kitchen table, a growing tower of babble; Indian food, Chinese, Thai, some that Viggo wasn't sure about, because he hadn't brought it. He beheld the carnage with a certain hostly satisfaction, but eyed the off-color puddle near the fridge with a healthy suspicion.
Orlando sauntered in, looking conspiratorial and pleased with himself. One might think he'd solved the Enigma code singlehandedly. He pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of a jeans pocket riding low on slender hips and handed it to Viggo. He bounced, grinning beautifully. "Got it, mate."
Viggo smiled back at him. Now all they needed were secret decoder rings. "Cool. Thanks, man. Grab a brew."
Orlando snagged a beer off the counter, but made no move to leave as he popped the cap. He glanced back and forth between Viggo and the wrinkled note.
Viggo drew down one eyebrow. "Dismissed, Private."
"Aw, c'mon, I want to see what you think."
"Push off."
The younger man made a face. "How come Ian gets to stay?"
"I," the older man informed him serenely, "am his commanding officer."
Viggo grinned.
Orlando rolled his eyes, made a disappointed noise, and bounced off to disappear into the friendly melee of the living room.
Viggo uncrumpled the paper, squinted at Orlando's ridiculous handwriting, and read aloud, "'You placed a sign on the road to guide me. A hand of friendship in a time of need. I look deep into your blue eyes.'"
Ian smiled. "Your eyes are grey."
"They're song lyrics, Ian."
"Gaelic, for God’s sake. Which song? Remarkable memory, young Orlando's got. I'd hate him for it, if he wasn't such a sweetheart."
"'Eireann'. That means Ireland, right?"
Ian peered over the rim of his beer glass. "Listen, Viggo, don't go making too much out of this. He was only thanking you for helping him, you know that."
They both glanced toward the living room, toward the sound of a particular voice rising--a rumbly sort of tenor, a rounded accent. He was laughing at something Billy had just said, from the sound of things. There was a boyish quality to it now, but Sean's voice could be sex-on-command, when he wanted it to be--or just as likely, when he simply wasn't paying attention. It would be a service to the general public, Viggo thought, if someone were kissing Sean right now, so that he couldn't talk. Yep. Someone…
Ian pulled him back to earth. “I am as eager as anybody to play the incurable romantic, but I’ve got too many years of harsh reality behind me not to advise caution now.”
"I won't do anything stupid," Viggo assured him distractedly.
The older man wasn't fooled. "What's been going through your fevered mind lately is a radical idea for him, and this is a volatile time in his life."
Viggo smirked, "Have you *seen* 'Caravaggio'? I am not the most radical place Sean's ever been. Not by a long shot."
Ian leaned in and made Viggo look him in the eye. "That was make-believe. You are reality. More or less. Watch your step, my boy. Don't end up losing a friend by trying to take a lover, eh?"
Something behind Ian's bright blue eyes, a 'been there, done that' sort of ache, made Viggo stop and take him seriously. He nodded. "Casual. I'm an actor, right? I can do casual."
Ian gripped his shoulder sympathetically. "Stiff upper lip. That's the English way."
Viggo pushed up his sleeves and took a swig of lager. "I can do casual for as long as it takes." He was a damned liar, and they both knew it.
He dreams of mustangs. He stands near the river at the bottom of the hill. The sky is blue. The herd passes slowly. Some of the horses dawdle in the river, snuffling, drinking, raising dripping muzzles, the water glittering from their velvety mouths in long strings of light. Large bodies surround and ease past Viggo, sleek, powerful and in no hurry, sun gleaming over muscle and satiny hide like the wind passing over the grasslands. Their life energy washes over him, enters him, yet leaves him melancholy for something, waiting. Then he sees the palomino, standing in the river, knee-deep in snow runoff. Looking at Viggo. The sun glitters brightly on the river. The herd passes, and the palomino disappears into the glitter of the sun.
“Think of yourself as Frank Buck,” Ian advised, raising his voice above the racket of the pub. “Bring ‘em back alive. But you know what that means,” he added, when Viggo laughed. “If you’re not willing to just shoot the beast you’re giving it a chance to gut you.”
Billy and Dom were making up a Hobbit Dance in the middle of the pub, and Elijah was pretending he didn’t know them.
“Ian, this is Sean we’re talking about.”
“Exactly.”
Viggo stared at him over an Irish coffee. “He’s the nicest guy on the planet.”
Ian’s eyebrows flickered, and his voice lowered with meaning. “I agree. But he has been wounded. Repeatedly. Keep that in mind.”
John sat at the bar, telling Sean Astin a story about filming one of the Indiana Jones adventures. Viggo couldn’t catch all the words, but Astin’s eyes were bugging out, so it had to be one of John’s better ones. The guy had been around. Seen things. Viggo could hear it in the way he laughed.
Orlando and Sean were playing pool. Orli was losing. Sean leaned over the table, upper body a low, elegant bridge from canted hips to the tips of long fingers resting on the green flannel, his face all angles and shadows in the overhead light. Viggo imagined he could see in the lines of Sean’s body his restraint, keeping everything under control, all tucked away inside, where it couldn’t ruin his bank shot. Where no one could see what he did not want them to see. Except that sometimes, when Sean let himself drift just a bit, perhaps when he’d had one over the top, or when Boromir got to him a little,Viggo saw things.
Orlando, Viggo’s lovely and willing Mata Hari, was too young to recognize what he was looking at, in those rare moments when he noticed Sean lose focus. He would learn, in time. Viggo frowned. The possibility of their enthusiastic Elf unbounced by bitter experience disturbed him.
“Viggo.” Ian’s voice.
“Hm?”
“You’re staring,” he chided gently.
Viggo took a long swig of coffee, winced at the dregs. “Sorry. Just seeing things.”
He glanced up to find Sean leaning a bit on his cue stick, waiting for Orli to quit fidgeting and figure out his next move, and looking at Viggo. Sean had a certain way of standing, a sort of Gary Cooper tilt to him, long and lean, a quick, smooth brush stroke. He smiled, an expression almost of relief, as though he had been checking to be sure Viggo was where he had left him. And Viggo smiled back in exactly the same way, because he couldn’t help it.
He dreams of mustangs. The sun shines on sleek hide, the surge of the herd is all around him, and the grass is green beneath his feet. The horizon stretches endlessly beyond the gleaming backs of the herd. Little yellow flowers and bright stalks of red splash into blue, white. The herd noses through them. The sun streaks through blue sky, blessing. The herd shifts, manes lift feathery in the wind sifting the prairie grass. The herd sighs, opens. The palomino is looking at him. He reaches out, and the palomino comes to him. Viggo lays the flat of his hand against the palomino’s neck. The smooth golden hide is like satin under his hand, sunlight walking, and it warms Viggo briefly. The palomino lifts its head abruptly. The herd surges. The palomino breaks contact, throws its head back, leaps backward into the river of the herd. Mustangs rush past Viggo, and the palomino disappears into the surge, into the warm, blessing sun.
Viggo wakes. He stares into the dim room, guessing it’s still before dawn, but the sun is rising, just. Warm. Viggo remembers, almost groans aloud with pleasure at the memory, and turns very, very gently to his right. He raises himself to his elbow with infinite care, and watches Sean sleep.
He would kiss him, but for fear of waking him, so he remains braced on one elbow, watching and remembering.
Shoving, joking, just kidding around, Viggo surprised himself, and grabbed Sean playfully by the back of the neck on the way out of the pub, right in front of God and Everybody, and kissed him soundly, as though it were no great thing. But it was. It was a great thing, and Sean kissed him just as thoroughly moments later in the car park, and hands lingered, and eyes met in a way they never had before, and then they went home.
'Sean, are you sure?'
'No. Never am, anymore.' And clothes came off from there.
Viggo's hands remember the comfortable scuff of Sean's beard stubble between them, the flushed softness of his lower lip under the brush of Viggo's thumb. Viggo recalls clear as sunrise the rush of Sean's skin growing hot beneath his touch, and the satin arch of his body, Sean's arms stretching back above his head, palms flattened against the wall, torquing his long spine into a curve that bared his throat and his belly for Viggo, Sean's legs opening in a gesture of surrender that was almost frightening in its thoughtlessness. Viggo might have done anything to him at that moment. Might have ridden him hard and fast, might have broken him in. But Viggo didn't, because even with such a vibrant possibility rippling like scarlet silk all over his nerves, he knew that Sean might scream and shake from the intensity of it all, he might wrap himself around Viggo and groan his release into Viggo's welcoming skin, but the implications of such an act would overwhelm Sean at some point the next day--this day--when he had time to think about it.
The scent of him, the taste of him, the sound and the feel of him, the recognition of how strong, and how fragile Sean is still makes Viggo dizzy; the rumble, and cry, and reel of the two of them, hands and mouths and intimate noises, and the open want in Sean's eyes. The memory of Sean's mouth on him, slow kisses in the shower… all of which Viggo could live on pretty much forever, but soon Sean will open his eyes, and he will begin to think.
As soon as Sean starts dissecting what he's done, what he got himself into last night, all the damage he has sustained over the past couple of decades will start to ache and bleed, and remind him of the high cost of giving himself over. He might, Viggo understands, leave and not come back.
Sean might look at Viggo suddenly with wide, fear-filled eyes, seeing nothing but an impulsive path that has led him from safe detachment onto dangerous ground, a place of scorching and regret. Sean might whirl and run, and disappear into the sun.
Viggo notices him stir, frowning in his waking. The coward's way out would be to lie back down beside Sean and pretend to be still asleep, to steal a few more moments of this time. But Viggo knows the only way to keep Sean is to risk him running. All Viggo can do now is reach. He touches Sean's hair, spiked softly against the pillow, and Sean's eyes open beneath the warm palm of Viggo's hand.
Summary: Sometimes when you reach for a dream it disappears. But sometimes it doesn't. Then what do you do?
Rated: R
Categories: Actor RPS Pairing: Sean/Viggo
Warnings: NoneChallenges:
Series: NoneChapters: 1 Completed: Yes
Word count: 2591 Read: 920
Published: 31 Jul 2009 Updated: 31 Jul 2009