vigorli

Title: Chimeric.
Parts: Prologue; One, The Magic If of Method
Author:

ogreatitskate
Actors: Viggo, Orlando, Elijah.
Rating: R

Prologue.

Viggo and Orlando are fucking. By now, that's just another day-to-day fact floating around the set. Filming on Gondor tomorrow, there's an 80% chance of rain the rest of the week, tea breaks last fifteen minutes, and Viggo and Orlando are buggering the shit out of each other.

It used to be more tentative, more touch-and-go, a secret only shared when it was first figured out. But there's something in the New Zealand air that makes skin tingle and spark, that makes everything seem more and less, makes everything change shape, so stolen kisses between takes are as normal now as coffee at breakfast.

What isn't so ordinary, and what (Elijah prays) no one knows, least of all Viggo and Orlando, is that Elijah is envious. Elijah wants, he feels something pulling in his belly whenever Orli's fingertips linger on Viggo's shoulder or Viggo's eyes drop down to hold Orli's gaze. That electric spark, that tingling skin, the air here that makes nostrils flare -- Elijah fucking craves it.

Elijah knows these kinds of things are terrible for movie sets. They’re the kind of things that end up in tabloids, that make everyone sit on edge, that ruin atmospheres and cerate creativity-killing tension.

Elijah doesn’t know, however, that Orlando’s eyes wander.

And that Viggo’s follow his.

There are a lot of things Elijah does not know.

+++

Part One, The Magic If of Method.

Viggo hates being an actor. Loves it and hates it. Being an actor had never been the plan – it had always been painting, photography, poetry, a Bohemian lifestyle selling flowers on the street and sleeping on futons in friends’ apartments. The not-so-starving artist, just enough to get sinewy, stretched look. What got him involved in the so-called world of the paint and the motley was those same friends who did strange, experimental theatre in tiny venues attended by art critics. Women, completely naked and standing in unflinching profile for half an hour and simply breathing, men who would sit on stage and read the entire ‘S’ section of the dictionary, each word a different character. One particularly horrific theatre “experience” was a show where the house lights went down and suddenly the audience was being drenched by hoses carried by people in animal costumes bearing torches and shouting in Swedish. It wasn’t long before friends were casting him and people took notice of him and Viggo found that acting gigs paid the bills faster, and before he could catch up with himself, he was putting on a wig and sword and learning to love the name Aragorn, son of Arathorn.

Viggo loves acting and hates acting. He loves the ability to lose himself, to become someone else entirely, but he hates the slavery he has towards method, towards living out the character, towards completely wrapping your mind around someone and carrying his weight on you. The cast always joked that if Viggo were ever to play a baker, he’d show up for rehearsals with flour in his hair and dough under his fingernails. He laughed along with them, but he knew that in the end, there was quite a lot of truth to that statement.

So when Viggo became Aragorn, he did exactly that – transformed himself into someone different. The bruises and cuts that patterned his body were Aragorn’s battle injuries, the sword of Aragorn went with Viggo everywhere it possibly could, because Viggo was Aragorn and Aragorn was Viggo. It takes a while to disengage from that, he has learned, to unmake yourself when you have changed who you are. The way Viggo acted was respected and difficult, but ultimately, Viggo knew he would always have a little bit of Strider haunting around his rougher edges.

Viggo wasn’t quite sure, then, if he was in love with Legolas or with Orlando.

Orli didn’t act the same way. Viggo had seen his type back in his theatre days – actors who could give chair dances backstage with laughter and act-three martinis and two minutes later waltz onstage as mad Ophelia, broken Hedda. He had to admit that it was enviable, but also knew that something was lost with that ability, that it was almost a way to circumvent knowing who you yourself were. But Orlando was young, he’d been trained. Who knew what they were teaching in drama schools these days.

But Viggo still wasn’t sure why he loved Orlando. He loved him, certainly, but he wasn’t entirely sure why. He wanted to write it off easily as pure, simple, unexplainable love, but Viggo could never be certain if it was out of his own lust, his own loneliness, or Aragorn’s admiration of the elf, of his grace and sureness in battle.

Viggo didn’t like to think about that too much. And it was easy to forget, too. Easy to forget such questions when Orlando was licking white-hot at his nipples or was suffocating him with the scents waving off his skin.

It was also easy to forget whose fingers were tangled and knotted into his hair. Easy to mistake Orlando’s boyish hips for Elijah’s. Easy to cling tighter when he did, easier to come when he let himself forget.

Elijah.

Because Elijah was more enigmatic, harder to figure out. Elijah played Fordo with the depth and breath of an actor twice his age, but there was more to it than natural talent or growing up in the spotlights. There was something quite intangible about it, some indefinable, something chimeric. There was something entirely different about the way Frodo looked at Aragorn than Elijah looked at Viggo, but something even more different than the way Elijah looked at Dominic or Billy or Sean or Bean or anyone else.

Viggo doesn’t know Elijah’s method.

But he’s beginning to think he might know his reasons.

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