Catching Up
Recipient: queenbitter
Author: empy
Pairing: Viggo/Sean Bean
Rating: R
Author's Note: I've taken a few small liberties, such as assuming the actors would have stayed at the Festival Tower during the TIFF2005. Thanks to M for the quick and efficient beta.
---
Sean slid between the photographers, applying a subtle elbow here and there, ducking his head whenever he saw the spotlights glint off a camera lens. Had every photographer on the circut decided to convene in Toronto during the film festival?
Viggo lifted his gaze and looked directly at him, as if he'd known all along that Sean was there and as though it had been planned that Sean would stand there, three people to the left of the tall glass set down in front of Viggo.
He was sure they exchanged some trite greeting, but he didn't hear his own voice, nor did he hear Viggo's. Most of all he wanted to bypass all the formal introductions and false smiles and just slam Viggo down on the table. Just go at him, make the burn in his spine go away by filling the void with new fire.
Christ. He hadn't realised how fierce the feelings had been.
"Here," said Viggo, patting the seat next to him. "Let them have a Rings reunion photo, yeah? The Lords of Gondor reunite in 2005."
Sean obeyed, squeezing into the narrow space next to Viggo, settling a companionable arm around his shoulders. He felt his smile widen, and his hold on Viggo's shoulder tightened. The camera lenses stared at him like hungry eyes, but he met the gaze calmly. Viggo's hand was warm, burning through layers of fabric, and his thumb brushed back and forth. Sean could feel the strong muscles of Viggo's thigh flex, and he instinctively pressed his own leg closer. He was nearly sitting on Viggo's lap, for fuck's sake, but he wasn't going to deny that it felt good. The last time they'd been this close had been a lifetime ago.
It became what it always had been: a game of subtle hide-and-seek with the press, a dance in which he tried to avoid the microphone thrust under his nose. He went one way, Viggo the other, leaving the photographers and story-hunters to wonder which one of them was worth more to follow.
They reconvened at the bar, both nonchalantly shouldering their way forward toward the same gap. "Thank god we're actors," said Viggo, leaning in closer than was strictly necessary. "Means we can fake everything."
Sean lifted his pint, Viggo's eyes shaded for a second by malt-gold, and the mellow burn seemed fiercer as he swallowed. Hell, had it been a year and a half?
"It's been too damn long," said Viggo, and it was hard to tell what he meant; if he was resigned or satisfied.
Sean nodded. There was little he could do but agree, and it felt awkward and comfortable at the same time. The smaller back room was empty except for the two of them, and he picked at the peeling label of a beer bottle.
"Fuck this," said Viggo, the curse sounding soft, then rose and leaned over the low table, taking Sean by the chin. Sean rose, slamming his knee into the table, and he set his hand on the tabletop for support. *This* was the Viggo he knew. Lassitude when you expected speed, attack when you expected retreat. God, but he'd missed this, the soft ache of the kiss and the blessed lack of care.
He disentangled himself with a reluctance so keen he reeled, quickly turning his head to see if anyone had caught them. No one, thank god. "Much as I love when you do that, you daft wanker," he smiled, "this is a really bloody inappropriate place to do it."
He recognized the glitter-quick flicker in Viggo's sea-coloured eyes instantly. Calculating, that gaze, and the immediate prelude to something that might turn out to be either strange or enjoyable. Occasionally both. "Everyone is shacked up at the Festival Towers, right?" noted Viggo. "That almost makes it too easy."
**
That particular corridor was like a million others: dust-choked wall-to-wall carpet, dully gleaming brass door handles smeared full of fingerprints and lighting that made anyone walking down the corridor look jaundiced.
Sean found he had to force his gait, like he had had to force it as they walked through the high-ceilinged lobby. The night porter had barely raised his head as they passed, but his grip on the pen had tensed for a moment, and Sean had cuffed Viggo in the shoulder. "We're obviously VIP material," he'd noted, nodding back at the reception desk.
His mouth still burned.
**
Sean pushed Viggo up against the wall, initiated the pull and push that began as soon as they got through the door. It was a familiar clich... to melt into, so familiar he wondered if there ever even been a break in the routine.
Viggo swayed against his touch, setting one hand against a mirror Sean hadn't even known was there until he heard it jangle and saw a glint of his own blushed face. He could taste the salt of his own sweat on his lips, salt mixing with tart and bitter as he tasted Viggo's cologne on the warmed skin of his neck. Viggo's hands skimmed over his hair, pulling and combing at it, seeming to try to map the texture again. He was mumbling something in Danish, the softly rolling sounds somehow familiar to Sean, though he knew not to ask about it. He assumed it was nothing terribly important.
Viggo even tasted familiar, and it was a familiarity he didn't know he possessed. It's strange, he reflected, how deep you have to be buried in flesh to see what truly mattered. It didn't matter so much who topped who, who thrust and who arched, because it was only a snarl of limbs.
They could, of course, have attempted something else, but this was what it always ended up being: both of them lost in one another flesh-first. Words and catchings-up came so much later.
There were deeper crow's feet around Viggo's eyes this time around, and his hair was too short to tangle his fingers into. He set his hands on Viggo's shoulders instead, pushing him down onto the bed. There was much here that reminded him of the sweaty and frantic trysts they'd grabbed whenever they'd had an hour or even a moment to spare. He remembered those moments, remembered the lungfuls of unfamiliar air and the hot kisses of unfamiliar mouths. They'd been a bastion of lawless flesh back then, mixing and melding without guilt. Every inch of his body remembered the touches, the questing hands that mapped hollows and sinews to preserve them. There was never enough time for them, never, and every encounter was frantic and scrabbling.
"Dear Christ," he mumbled, trying to get his hands to obey him.
Viggo didn't have a beard this time and there was no long hair to slide on his skin, float like fluid, but the kiss felt the same, the hard jaw under his hands felt the same, and yes, yes and thousand times yes, the molten feel of Viggo's mouth was the same.
He could die like this, he reflected, sprawled crosswise over the still-made bed, one hand resting on the back of Viggo's head, the other beating a slow and ineffective cadence against the mattress. The soft lighting gleamed in a long sinuous line along Viggo's sweat-dappled back and glittered on the downy hairs on the arm he had slung over Sean's hip.
He could, offhand, name a dozen clich...s to fit that moment, that instant sharp stab of lust straight into his brain. And they were all true. His hip ached, the pain melding with the pain in his knee, both caused by furniture, and he wondered briefly how Viggo managed to circumnavigate all the tables and doorframes hell-bent on hurting him.
Viggo's fingers curled around flesh like they owned it, like they'd shaped it out of nothing, and his nails scraped long blissful reaches of cold burn down along Sean's sides.
"Viggo," murmured Sean, "focus on me." He tilted his head back as he tightened his grip on Viggo.
Viggo looked at him out of the corner of his eye, the green-blue gaze dark and saturated with lust. His chest was heaving with deep breaths, and his open mouth shaped into a smile. Make me, he seemed to challenge, cocking his head to the side.
Sean slid his fingers over Viggo's cheek, under his ear and around the back of his neck, his nails pressing into the skin just hard enough to show Viggo that he was serious. He opened his mouth, unsure of which command to voice, then found Viggo needed no verbal prompting.
His hold loosened, his fingers seizing up before growing lax, and he closed his eyes before leaning his head back against the headboard. Viggo's evening-stubble jaw scraped at the thin skin of Sean's inner thigh, mimicking the slow scrape of his nails tracing the curve of a buttock.
There wasn't enough oxygen in the air for him to breathe, it seemed, and he drew in a breath so deep his chest ached.
It was so terribly unfair, he reflected, so torturous, the way Viggo stopped just then, when his breathing was hysterical and gasping, when every muscle thrummed tense waiting for the final push.
"Bastard," he said, no, cursed at Viggo, keeping his hands fisted in the sheets. The crackle of foil was a rasp directly on his skin, cutting sharp in contrast to the silk-slick slide two aching seconds later.
Now his body was in on the conspiracy, keeping him there on the edge still, leading him over the first thrust, the second, the third so slow he bit his tongue. It was a small consolation that Viggo's arms shook and trembled where he leaned over Sean. He was bent nearly in half, his legs hooked over Viggo's shoulder in a position that only furthered the impression of a tangle of interlocked limbs.
He came first, finally falling and breaking into sated pieces, and Viggo's wild-eyed climax followed soon after, letting them melt slowly against each other.
**
"Isn't it a bit strange how we always seem to end up in bed when we meet?" he asked, picking at Viggo's hair and leaning out of the kiss just enough to let Viggo know he wanted an answer to his question.
"Are you complaining?" asked Viggo, his grin crinkling the corners of his eyes. "I think it's a rather satisfactory arrangement."
"It's bloody frustrating, too," noted Sean. He remembered how delirious Viggo had looked with his head canted back like he was boneless. His chest had risen and fallen, the bones widening outward for each breath, and it had been a replay of a hundred moments before that, a hundred stolen moments.
"Part of the charm," Viggo nearly leered, moving sinuously to straddle Sean. He bent close, capturing the soft lobe of Sean's ear in his teeth. "Are all your pent-up frustrations dealt with, or do you need them dispelled?"