Viggo was always the restless one," Viggo's mother still says when she talks of her sons. "Never able to rest, to be quiet." And it's true.
When Viggo was a small kid he would fall asleep late and wake up so early that the house and the streets would be frighteningly silent around him, making him stare into the shadows of his room waiting for the night's monsters, the bad men coming to take him.
Then, when he'd grown up, there'd been a time in which he was the bad man, hanging out with the cool people from high school, smoking pot and stealing cars and driving too fast and too drunk, trying to make sense of himself, to fit in.
And then, in college, there had been men taking him, except he had wanted them to, and had filled the lightless pre-dawn hours with sex and madness, forgetting sense.
Then Exene had come along, and Henry shortly after; and the early hours of day had been a baby crying in his arms, and watching from the window of their NYC apartment the newspapers being delivered to the newsagent across the street, a gray ghost of light promising a dawn still hours away.
When he and Exene had divorced, for a while he'd just slept: slept most of the day, and got up after midnight to wander around; not so much clubs anymore, but just walking the streets, or in the woods outside his newly-bought ranch in Idaho.
He doesn't remember when he'd started taking his camera along, when he'd started looking for sense in the darkness.
They call this time of night the 'small hours', and Viggo thinks it has to be because the world feels so small when people sleep, each one alone with their own dreams; like a frozen river of life, immobile and still while time stretches endless, passing it by unnoticed.
When everything is silent, eerily quiet, things look different, like they make a sense of their own, unperturbed by the common sense of daylight, irrelevant.
The people on set tease him because of his habit of wandering around at night; and that's all right. He walks the streets sometimes, the empty streets of Wellington, New Zealand, and he's fascinated by the shapes and angles of the city when the world is at rest and doesn't care, the occasional passerby like a dangerous, wary vision quickly approaching and soon gone, a blink of memory.
And sometimes, at night, when he's unable to rest, to just lie still and close his eyes, the forests call to him.
Viggo knows that outside the horizon is already graying with a false light; the air smells of night and earth, chilly and still except for a light breeze ruffling the tall grass and the leaves in the trees, the occasional call of an owl and the usual living noises of the wood amplified by the stillness, every sound alien in its familiarity.
Alien because he's never shared it before.
Tonight Viggo is lying in his tent, in a forest, and he watches Sean sleep
beside him.
Not really 'beside' him, because Sean brought his own sleeping bag with him when they went hiking that morning, and Viggo has his own; but the tent is small and 'beside' is close enough: enough for Viggo to watch him even in the darkness, Sean lying on his side facing him, Sean's mouth slackened in sleep, drooling a little, his stale breath brushing against Viggo's lips.
Viggo thinks he's never seen anything that made more sense than Sean snoring softly beside him; and it makes him smile, this new-found certainty, because it's such a nonsense; and it makes him reach out with a hand, fingers barely touching a cotton-covered shoulder, suddenly needing to touch, afraid to grow apart with the growing of light from darkness.
And in his sleep Sean makes a sound, a little, uncertain sound, and the arm he keeps folded over his stomach twitches and then unfolds, instinctively reaching for the source of the touch; and when he finds it he settles down, his sleep no more troubled, his hand warm and slightly damp on Viggo's hand, fingers loosely curled around Viggo's wrist, where the pulse is stronger.
And Viggo lies there, watching Sean while he smiles in his sleep and his hand simply rests over Viggo's hand near his chest, warm, alive; closer.
Viggo just lies there: thinking all his fears and his madness and his movies and his art and all the words he's ever had inside his head and all the people he'd slept with and the ones he has forgotten--all the things he'd looked for and never found--all that can't have been meaningless, because it has brought him here, in this small tent in the small hours of the night, sleeping beside a man who's not even a lover.
In the early hours of the day, when the darkness is about to fade and the light has yet to come, and the only sense that can be made out of it makes no sense at all, Viggo just lies beside Sean, and he's still; in the small hours, when the whole world is quiet, resting; and Viggo's heart is too.
Summary: Viggo was always restless.
Rated: G
Categories: Actor RPS Pairing: Sean/Viggo
Warnings: NoneChallenges:
Series: NoneChapters: 1 Completed: Yes
Word count: 874 Read: 1003
Published: 31 Jul 2009 Updated: 31 Jul 2009