It’s a cold morning on set. Sean has someone’s puffa coat over his Boromir getup, and he’s still got gooseflesh inching up his spine.
The cast smokers are slouched out of the breeze at the back of the Council of Elrond set. Camera set-up is taking forever. Viggo is walking back and forth in his Rivendell costume and a grubby parka, with an insulated coffee mug in his hand, so the crew can work out how much camera track to lay. In his Aragorn gear he looks as remote as God.
Sean is hunched on a spool of cable in the shelter of the bickering, listless huddle of the hobbits. The theory is if he rolls his own cigarettes, he won’t be able to chain-smoke. It’s a good theory, but in practice he just rolls faster and stockpiles. If it wasn’t for the wind whipping away shreds of tobacco and Rizlas, he could probably supply the entire crew between takes. ‘Fuck.’
Rolling his own also means he can avoid the government health warnings on cigarette packets. SMOKING IS ADDICTIVE. He knows this, the whole world bloody knows this, it’s just the pious tone that pisses him off.
The pressing problem this morning, though, is that Viggo seems to have developed some kind of unconscious suction that is trying to drag Sean, careening, in his direction. ‘Shit.’
Sean edges closer to the hobbits, who are fractious after hours in Feet and Makeup.
Taken as a foursome, the hobbits are a bit like those posters of four fluffy kittens curled up nose to tail in a basket of knitting, cute as buttons. Only these particular kittens would have speech-bubbles coming out of their heads saying foul-mouthed smartarse things, and would break off being lovable at intervals to have noisy, athletic sex with one another, then start all over.
They wear each other’s clothes and read each other’s minds. They probably have secret masonic hobbit rituals. No one has ever heard a hobbit be publicly civil to another hobbit, yet they inhabit each other’s personal spaces like the tenderest of newly-weds, merging and overlapping at the edges.
They terrify Sean, who shrinks from this kind of thing like a dog from a blast of the hosepipe.
‘Think we could fit in second breakfast before they need us?’ Billy pats his stomach as if it’s a beloved pet. ‘Nature abhors a vacuum, and all that.’
Sean pinches together a cigarette, fragile as nothing. It’s a shame that Nature has these inclinations, because otherwise vacuums might live out their lives in safe obscurity.
‘Down, boy,’ Dom’s morning voice is scratchy. ‘I’ll buy you pancakes at that diner on the way home. The place with the enthusiastic American.’
‘What’s wrong with Americans?’ Astin is waspish, though his hand is lightly stroking Lijah’s curly head which is pillowed in his lap. This is one of their normal positions.
‘Can’t be doing with all that talk.’ Dom is somehow managing to share an outsize mac with Billy. ‘You go in looking for your breakfast and you get, like, the Gettysburg Address with the menu.’
‘Racial slur.’ Lijah blows smoke at Dom.
‘Ah, go an’ shite.’
Lamps are trolleyed in and the camera heaved onto the tracks.
Viggo heads in the general direction of Sean and the hobbits after a long time, without Sean doing a thing.
Sean licks the edge of a Rizla. ‘Fag?’ His voice comes out with the heartiness of a good loser.
Viggo pushes dangling hair behind his ear. ‘Uh, I quit.’
It takes three goes to make the lighter flicker into life.‘Well, you can stand upwind.’
This has to stop, the seasickness, the stomach tensed like a landed fish, every time.
After a while, Viggo ambles closer and filches a wizened rollie from Sean’s hoard. He slumps onto a crate, like a sack with nothing in it.
The sweet hot kick of nicotine hits Sean’s bloodstream. He exhales with care and passes over the lighter. ‘Surgeon General changed his mind all of a sudden, has he?’
There’s a ghost of a grin. Viggo lights up, takes a deep drag and releases it straight up, like a steam train blowing off pressure.‘What are you, my mother?’
Sean looks away from the place where Viggo’s hair springs from his temple. Viggo’s face has a habit of frowning which has nothing to do with what he is thinking. It’s not meant to be looked at. When Sean frowns, it’s because someone’s emotions have got out of hand.
Hugo smacks him on the shoulder as he passes them, eating an apple and talking into a mobile phone, with his Elrond braids held neatly off his face with hairclips. He puts his hand over the phone a moment. ‘Party at my place tonight, all right?’
Hugo is solid and uncomplicated, a known quantity, whereas Viggo is slippery and potentially clinging, like soap. If you touch him, some of him might come off on you.
Sean stubs out his cigarette hard. There’s something satisfying about even tiny acts of demolition. Then he lights another one.
The hobbits are whingeing about their nicotine habit.
‘Smoking accelerates the ageing process.’ Lijah looks twelve, and as pale as if he’s normally kept in a box underground.
Dom snorts, smoke billowing out of his nose. ‘Only started smoking in the first place so I’d get into over twenty-one clubs sooner.’
‘Shortarse.’ Billy’s face is scrunched wise-guy style around the cigarette.
‘Bastard.’ Dom is fidgeting like someone installed an Eveready battery in his rectum.
He shoots a sideways look at Sean and launches a minor offensive. ‘Dunno what you see in Vig myself.’
The other three check for reactions from Sean and Viggo, eyes ticking back and forth like alert spectators at a tennis match. Or maybe a nuclear war.
Billy helps out. ‘Well, can’t be the clothes, and it definitely isn’t the haircut.’
‘Mm, the kind of subtle natural look of a man who just got out of jail,’ Dom elaborates.
A pause. Dom’s face is developing the slightly baffled look of someone expecting more response than he’s getting.
Billy waggles his eyebrows lewdly. ‘Chateau Magic Potion, I’d say. Beer goggles. I mean, no one’s ugly after ten pints, right?’
Dom makes a stab at a North of England accent. ‘By ‘eck, we didn’t ‘alf sup las’ night.’
When neither Sean nor Viggo says anything, the hobbits snicker till they cough.
‘Ow, I think I broke something.’
Dom takes a breath and launches into one of a series of jokes with punchlines involving flat caps and ferrets, which require a lot of pints to be funny.
Sean stubs out his rollie so hard the butt breaks in half. ‘One more ferret joke and I’ll fucking go through you two for a shortcut.’
Dom and Billy freeze, a pair of those rabbits that dart this way and that in the headlights and are bound to end up as roadkill.
The other smokers within earshot begin to sidle away.
Astin does his best BBC nature-documentary voice. ‘Now, step lightly away from the human. But slowly, so we don’t agitate it further. They charge if disturbed.’
Dom slumps slightly, like a melted lead figure in an oven. Sean is abruptly sorry, as if he’s stepped on a small animal by accident.
Viggo runs a hand through his ragged Aragorn hair, as though he hasn’t noticed it before. ‘Believe it or not, I kind of like my hair this way.’
His eyes scramble to avoid Sean’s, after a small touching, a moment’s lock.
Sean briefly allows himself the private fantasy of slowly squeezing the Hobbit Collective’s beady little eyes out through its collective arse. Then he stuffs his pockets and slams off back towards the set.
Billy’s voice shouts after him. ‘I’m only five foot seven, if you hit me it’s murder.’
Heading out to the car park at the end of shooting, Sean needs a drink and a wank and sleep, in that order. He picks his way through the organised clutter of packing up, cables, generators, stray props. His jeans are clean and stiff, and there are traces of makeup hardening in the creases round his eyes.
He sucks on his umpteenth cigarette of the day and trudges through the weight of the unobtainable like he’s wading through water.
On the dusty tarmac his shadow is spilling away from him.
He clears his throat and spits. He is smoking too much and will drink too much later whether he goes to Hugo’s party or not, but too much in relation to what? Offhand, he can’t think of any yardstick.
Tired, aching and stupefied with nicotine, he closes his eyes and allows himself to think about getting Viggo stripped and into bed. He does this sometimes, they can’t touch you for it, harms no one.
When he opens them, Viggo is leaning against the bonnet of Sean’s car, shower-damp, straggle-haired, hands in pockets.
‘Want a lift?’
‘I was supposed to go with Orli, but it doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere for a while.’ Viggo rolls his eyes, surprising in a face usually still. ‘Fending off his Uruk-hai admirers.’
Sean risks a laugh. ‘I’d say he could collect himself a whole new harem at Hugo’s.’
‘Uh, I’m not going, stuff to do.’ Viggo folds himself into the passenger seat.
In the rear view mirror Sean meets his own eyes for a minute and looks away.
As they turn out of the studio lot, he turns on the radio, jabs through the frequencies, finally staying with one which is conducting its business solely in Maori. Tonight he wants news that doesn’t concern him, information he can’t understand.
Viggo is turned to look out his window at the darkening sprawl of suburbs, yawning, working his shoulders one way and then the other.
Sean watches his sharp profile, the shift of muscle in his bearded jaw, the sinews in his neck that stiffen against emotions Sean can never quite identify. An educated guess, that’s about all Sean can ever manage with Viggo.
A filming sweat of need nags at him, forehead, upper lip, both palms. It itches and nips at his concentration, itches again.
The road is a tunnel of dark trees sliding backwards.
As they bypass Takaka, Sean takes one hand off the wheel and lays it on Viggo’s leg, and Viggo doesn’t stop him, he lets him. All down that side of Sean is alight like sunburn. They are brushing and rubbing and everything together while the car takes corners and accelerations and nice little bends.
Sean is impatient against an unyielding button fly. This is all it takes to lift and stiffen him, to be stalking the inside seam of Viggo’s jeans, with the angles and callouses of Viggo’s knuckles against his.
‘You coming in a for a beer?’ Viggo is offhand as they turn onto the right street.
‘I’m not here for sodding beer. What else have you got?’
Sean thinks bloody-minded would be the right tone to develop. It’s a bit late now for the soft sell.
Viggo stares back at him, rubbing the bridge of his nose, considering.
Viggo shuts the front door behind them, with an odd, small stammer of hesitation. A pair of hiking boots lie where they were kicked off.
Sean feels the skin between his fingers moisten. His breathing scuffs against his windpipe, needy.
Then Viggo takes Sean’s wrists and reels him in hard.
Sean’s hands flatten against Viggo’s chest. The cotton of his shirt is washed out, dark blue darkening to black where drips from his hair have coloured it. Behind it is the muscle of Viggo’s body, its hard heat, the roughened movements of his breathing.
Sean finds himself foggily willing to have Viggo’s hand knead his neck, nudge him until he is full against Viggo’s sternum, its springy resilience under cloth, and the heavy private push of lower down.
Sean reacts predictably, because these things are instinct. He wants to pummel Viggo onto his back, force his wrists aside and drag his teeth down over the thick thread of hair running down his stomach.
He says, ‘I don’t -‘
’Shh,’ Viggo says beside his ear.
Viggo’s eyelashes scrape against his face, and he gets a shock like he’s laid hands on a badly wired appliance.
He leans into Viggo’s mouth, easing in the muscle of his tongue, his sour saliva, and recognises the menace and the gentleness. Viggo’s body is insistent as one side of an argument.
‘Will we...?’ They are shifting or wrestling each other along the hall.
‘Yeah.’
Then his hands can’t wait and start stuttering on Viggo’s buttons anyway.
In the bedroom, there is the rubber-glove smell of condoms. Bars of streetlight through the shutters swim over their bodies and the clothes on the floor.
On the bed, Viggo’s head with its sharp angles and rough beard skates heavily across Sean’s chest. His cheekbone grates on Sean’s clavicle.
Then the room goes out of focus.
There’s the usual brisk liquid business of greasing, and then the blunt heavy nudge of Viggo against Sean, and the stretching burn, as he pushes up into the hot space between flesh and flesh.
Sean puts his fist up to his mouth to keep from making a sound, but Viggo stops anyway and holds still for a while.
‘More,’ Sean says after a bit. His breath sucks and labours unevenly.
There are falls and oiling, tugging rises, and Sean is sliding along the length of Viggo. They push each other into a slow rock, and the bed creaks reluctantly.
Viggo’s breathing is a fast panic sound as though he is running.
‘Fuck.’ His voice twists. Then something different, like pure pain, clear as water.
With a few strokes he finishes, shudders, and holds Sean pinned.
He’s still for a couple of minutes, then he rolls up on an elbow and gets to work with the rough palm of his hand on Sean’s belly, cock and thighs.
Later, the dead square stretch of the ceiling has headlights striping across it.
Viggo has fallen asleep with his hand on Sean’s belly, so he has to lift the heavy arm, and unpeel himself from the adhesive skin of warm bones and muscle, to slide himself off the bed. The soft rasp of Viggo’s breath stops and then resumes.
As Sean gets into his clothes, sliding headlights show an especially frank arc of air-dried jism on the sheet.
Viggo asleep can look like Jesus wrapped in a bedsheet, only too knackered-looking for miracles. His face is in the pillow. What Sean can mostly see is the tender dip and curve of muscle in his neck, the string of his bone amulet sticking to the flesh just below the edges of his hair.
There is no particular revelation, not that Sean is in the habit of expecting them. It’s just like someone taking him by the shoulders and jerking him round from the window he was looking out to an entirely different view.
Fucking Viggo is a strong drug Sean wants more of, despite the government health warning.
He concentrates on fitting buttons into the right buttonholes. Viggo is a loan, not a present, something you have to give back.
Sean isn’t sure how to finish the evening. He is smoking on the back doorstep when Viggo saunters out, shirtless and fuzzy with sleep. There are huge-bodied moths banging themselves repeatedly against the sensor light overhead.
‘What you up to?’
‘Playing football,’ Sean grunts. ‘No, hang on. Solving third world debt.’
Viggo sits down next to him, making no sudden movements, like someone trying not to frighten an animal. ‘Is it too late to go over to Hugo’s?’
They are close enough together for Sean to brush against the grain of the black hairs on Viggo’s forearm. He doesn’t stir, though, and feels the small familiar satisfaction of that decision.
He considers several possible answers. Then he shrugs.
‘Well, I suppose I can still cancel the gigolo.’ Saying this produces a happy kind of pressure in his chest.
They study their four bare feet lined up on the step for a minute.
‘Will you get a refund?’ Viggo asks in his indefinite voice.
The breeze is blowing round them and Sean enjoys his sense of parting it, of blood reddening his cheeks. He rubs at his neck and finds a tiny scratch Viggo’s nails must have left there. Something near his brain opens, smiles.
‘Oh, I had a money-off coupon.’ He throws his rollie into a patch of dark weeds. ‘It came free with a box of cornflakes.’
There’s a small huff of amusement. Even with his head turned away he can feel the slight prickling sensation of Viggo’s glance, as though he is tracing him.
The party is like putting your head in a kettle. The heat and steam and noise are staggering.
There are Uruk-hai extras comparing tattoos round the beer cooler, and plainclothes elves sending themselves up doing queeny screams over the music. A pointy ear is stuck to the dartboard in the living room.
Viggo grabs Sean’s arm lightly and points. Orli and Craig Parker are swapping t-shirts in a large crowd of interested observers. Craig’s says LOOKING IS FREE, TOUCHING WILL COST YOU. Orli’s has a blurry picture of Nietzsche and says GOD IS DEAD BUT MY HAIR IS PERFECT.
When Viggo takes his hand back, Sean is cold where the pressure has lifted and gone.
Sometime around midnight, the hobbits are plastered and happy out by the barbecue. When Sean and Viggo show up they are welcomed with triumph like religious converts or political defectors. Billy and Dom are punctuating a complicated hobbit drinking game with duetting on Van Morrison’s little known masterpiece
HAVE AH TOLD YA LATELY
YOU’RE A SICK FUCK
‘Oh yeah,’ Viggo says, cracking open another beer. ‘I have that one. Double A-side. I forget what year.’
He is moving with the careless grace of the happily drunk.
Lijah beams. ‘Give us a clue, Vig. Was it before or after Prohibition?’
‘Did you have to play it on your, like, gramophone?’ Dom’s hair is sticking up in porcupine spikes.
Viggo does a Rip Van Winkle. ‘I need to knit myself a long grey beard this very second.’
You forget, what with Aragorn, son of Arathorn, and his painting and all, that Viggo, plus a few beers, can do goofy as to the manor born. That with suitable encouragement he will sing offensive or incredibly sad songs in five languages. That the Heir of Gondor can metamorphose into this genial hippie in beach sandals.
Sean holds a sweating beer can against his temple and watches the side of Viggo’s face and tries to think how he might really, actually, be, looking out from that particular inscrutable Viggo viewpoint.
Then he gives it up as a bad job. Drinking himself cretinous is a better idea.
Billy comes back from the barbecue with a plate of food and grease shining on his chin. ‘Hey, I never knew buffaloes had wings.’
Astin looks at him like he’s never seen him before. ‘You know, you’d have been perfect in Forrest Gump.’
Offence is taken. There’s a minor free-for-all.
Viggo dodges around the edge of it, and comes over to lean on Sean with vacant drunken composure. Viggo is being very good at being very happy. It is even frightening to see how happiness can get a grip on him, how it leaves him open, undefended against pain.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Viggo drinks out of a can that’s already empty and chucks it away.
‘Nothing.’ Sean puts down his beer and shivers. ‘Everything.’
Viggo smiles at something slightly behind Sean’s head. ‘Well, that narrows it down, then.’
After a while, their breathing synchronises.
Summary: The Council of Elrond and the One Ring? Nope, the real drama is happening round the back of the set during fag breaks, where Viggo has developed a strange kind of suction which is making Sean get all pissed off about government health warnings
Rated: NC-17
Categories: Actor RPS Pairing: Sean/Viggo
Warnings: NoneChallenges:
Series: NoneChapters: 1 Completed: Yes
Word count: 3403 Read: 843
Published: 31 Jul 2009 Updated: 31 Jul 2009