Love Song, part 4 of 4
Dec. 11th, 2005 04:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
watersword posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
vigorliTitle: The Love Song
Author: Élizabeth de l'Epée et du Mot de l'Eau![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
watersword
Fandom: RPF
Pairing, Characters: Viggo Mortensen/Orlando Bloom
Series: Love Song (I, II, III)
Rating: R
Archive: Only if you ask, please.
Warnings: Angst, slightly explicit homosexual coitus, Kate Bosworth.
Spoilers: None.
Timeframe: Oh god. Go to individual parts for that, okay? Please?
Summary: No comment.
Disclaimer: This work is complete and total fiction. The author does not know Viggo Mortensen, Orlando Bloom, or any other person mentioned herein, and is making no claims about their sexualities or relationship(s). No money is being made and no disrespect, copyright, or trademark infringement is intended. The poem used is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1927, quoted without permission, but with complete respect and admiration. Again, no money is being made and no disrespect, copyright, or trademark infringement is intended.
Crossposted to:watersword (friendsfiltered post) and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
vigorli.
Notes: Many thanks tohija_paloma for assistance and encouragement A and B the C of D.
Robin looks at him, and he doesn't move, tiredness bone-deep within him. She leans back against the couch in his suite, folds her hands in her lap, and narrows her eyes. "Orlando," she begins, and frowns. He closes his eyes against her disapproval, trying to remember why he let her in this time, after the shouting match a few nights ago. She's out for blood, and he doesn't think he has any left.
No blood in his veins, no blood in his cock, no blood in his life—he has no heart's-blood left in him, no heart at all. He doesn't like the feeling he has of slowly dy!ng, and wants to call someone, to tell someone who will understand, "I'm drowning."
He knows what he wants to hear in response, but doesn't let himself remember it even in the middle of night with the drapes closed. "There's oxygen in water, too. There's nothing wrong with breathing another element," said in a whisper with breath ghosting over his shaven skull. Breath that tastes of grass and whisky and lemon, or so he imagines.
But his hair grew back long ago, and the voice he hears is Robin's — "I really thought you understood what's at stake here, Orlando. You deliberately attract the wrong kinds of attention, and there's a limit to what I can do to put a positive spin on times like this weekend! If you value your career, you need to stop doing things like this. I don't make the rules, but you can't go on breaking them like this, and still expect—"
He knows why she stopped. For one, he pays her, and it would be a Very Bad Thing (thank you, Doodle, for teaching me to capitalize the Important Things) if it got out that he's changed representation, and for another, they've had this argument before.
She can't control him. If he doesn't care about what he's done to his career, there's nothing she can do about it — all she can do is pick up the pieces, and hope that she can make them seem beautiful. Of course, she's not an artist. Only an artist can make what's broken beautiful again, and Orlando is no more an artist than she is.
He knew an artist once, loved him once, and Robin tried to protect them both. But Orlando began to self-destruct, and the artist doesn't like watching things break. He doesn't mind what's been broken already, but the process makes him hurt. Orlando stopped him watching, and then found out that his gaze had been all that held him together. Now that Robin has to protect no one, she doesn't know what to do, except her job, and that's not going to save Orlando.
This isn't what she thought she was getting into — a flash in the pan British pretty boy in a fantasy movie based on a bunch of old English novels was not supposed to turn into this. It's not what either of them thought they were getting into.
"It's not enough."
And it's over. That's it. Orlando blinks. So easy. I love you it's not enough and cut cut cut cut cut that's a wrap.
Actors are not supposed to be the brightest creatures on God's green earth, and he didn't see this coming. He didn't see the beginning coming, either. He remembers them, but he didn't anticipate them.
Anticipation is overrated. Memory lasts.
Orlando remembers everything. He remembers wanting to reach out and lay his fingers along the edge of a lapel and curl them into the shirt collar and yank Viggo closer to him, so close that the golden, slanted light between them wouldn't be light at all. He remembers how cold the doorknob was that night in the rain and the way the path up to it was muddy and felt a thousand meters long, the way his car seemed to be watching him from the street, its windscreen streaked with moisture. He remembers the first time Viggo read out loud to him, not his own poetry, that came later, but Tolstoy, the bit where Levin and Kitty meet at the skating rink, and Viggo stopped in the middle of saying, "To the England or the Hermitage?" to take a sip of long-cold tea.
He remembers the way Viggo looked at the paparazzi photos and took a breath and said, "The balance is off. They should've cropped it about a centimeter on the left. Then you'd be—" and couldn't finish. There was a thumbprint over Kate's poufy, ankle-length skirt the next time he picked up the stack of snapshots, and that made it even prettier; shimmery with oils; because anything Viggo does is beautiful in Orlando's eyes. He finds that photograph reprinted in a Spanish tabloid, and sees himself turning away from the camera. Away from Viggo.
"What do you want?"
"This."
"This?"
Hair rough under the fingertip. Bump of vein against the palm. "This," he agreed, and bent his head. "This, and everything else."
"Everything?"
"Everything." Everything means everything, and everything's a lot. But he wasn't scared, not after waiting so long for this man. He wanted absolutely, positively, totally, everything.
His life, the best version of it, the version where he says what he means to say at the moment he means to say it with the words that he means to say, is lived in projected images against a silver screen. The trouble is, that's other people's words, and he says those wonderful words to the wrong people.
That's not him up there.
I'm over here, he says. Look. He taps his foot as he says it. He's not sure if he wants people to look at him, he just wants them to bloody well stop mixing him up with whoever they think he is.
L.A., London, Brazil, St. Vincent, New York, Japan, his life has acquired a pattern just like a bad screenplay: first act, second act, third. Hic et ubique: here, there, and everywhere, and never where he should be. He curls up with a pillow clutched in his arms, wishing it were—no, don't go there. It's better this way. Really it is. He'll get over it, it's only a broken heart, everyone has them. Like chickenpox.
The pillow is flat and defeated when he wakes up, and his mouth tastes of leftover curry and tears.
He can lie to everyone else, but he's always been fatally honest with himself. Everyone else can have complexes and repressions and suppress their emotions, why can't he? It would make his life so much easier, he thinks sometimes, except that every time he thinks that, he remembers that acting is lying with your soul open. The last thing he needs is to fulfill the sneering promises that his star will fade.
No. The last thing he needs is to be in love with the one, the one person he can't have. The very last thing he needs. The very last. Thing. He needs.
Oh, he needs so very badly.
It's so easy for interviewers to bring up Hamlet. Cheating, Viggo thinks. Denmark – actor – Hamlet. Too easy.
He's hardly Danish, anyway – grew up in South America and upstate New York, by the time he got to Denmark he was who he is. And Shakespeare wasn't Danish either, so how the fuck would he know from Scandinavia?
He's not Hamlet. He wouldn't want to be. He'd be terrible. He's a character actor. He's good at prompting Hamlet into doing something so incredibly stupid it'll end with a stage littered with corpses.
Aragorn was a mistake for him, in many ways, or rather, he was a mistake for Aragorn. Aragorn has killed before, will kill again, is surrounded by death, and Viggo—Viggo thinks death is inherently dumb. The whole concept's just messed up.
This is another reason he'd be a terrible Hamlet. Hamlet's in love with death. Viggo just thinks it's stupid. He knows it's a weird thing to think, especially as he grows older, but death doesn't make sense to him. If he were still six, he'd call it a poopyhead. But that's not how adults talk or think, and Viggo's supposed to be an adult. A grownup. A mature, smart, insightful man.
By most standards, if he said death's a poopyhead, he'd be an idiot.
"Um, Viggo?"
"Yeah?"
"How old were you when your hair started to grey?"
A small shuffle of blankets in the next room. "Why?"
"...no reason?"
"Find a grey hair, did we?"
"No, you tosser!"
"Around forty, I think. Maybe a few years before." A slight grunt as floorboards creaked with fresh weight on their night-cold surface. "Is my hair grey?"
"I know every inch of your body. Your hair is greying."
"Oh." The door opened a few inches. "You'll trip on those pants, you know."
"I know."
"Take them off."
"I'll cuff them when I leave."
"Take them off now."
"Try it this way," she said, and brushed her fingers through his hair. "Yeah, like that. Very sexy." One gelled lock fell over his eyes. It was longer than it had ever been; he'd barely needed extensions this time round. Helene had actually clipped some of them after he'd come back from New York the second time, and the strands had lain on the floor like murdered creatures.
Those who believe in voudou are very careful not to let pieces of themselves—hair clippings, nail clippings—fall into the hands of those who would do them harm. Orlando nearly asked Helene to burn the clippings, but stopped himself. It might be easy to almost believe in voudou here, where the air is like wet wool, but he's Not Allowed To Be Anything But Normal, and so he simply said "Thank you," and left, left hand gripping right wrist against his hipbone.
He could feel his bones, and it was almost reassuring; he still had a body. He was still human, still alive. He still needed to cut his hair, and wash his face (and behind his ears), and eat.
He was a vegan for six days, once. He was a vegetarian, an ovo-vegetarian, a pesca-vegetarian, a omnivore, a vegan for six hours again. Is there egg in this? Is there wheat in that? Does this have dairy in it? Questions are a bitch.
He longed for certainty.
The costume fittings meant that they didn’t look at him, at his face, and he was grateful. The pants were heavy, pale and smooth under his fingertips – please don't touch the cloth, the oils in your fingers will stain it – and the storyboard leaning against the wall showed a bareheaded man with a sword held upright in his hand, like a beacon, walking away from the camera with the waves on his left.
That would never be him, he knew, and he closed his eyes to let the girl with the curly brown hair, sunbleached to the colour of palest rum, stick her hands down the front of his trousers and adjust everything til it was snug and perfect.
Perfect.
The way Keira's eyelashes are perfect, the way he isn't. The way women swim; he doesn't understand women (women aren’t from Venus, women are from another galaxy, another dimension, as far as he can tell), but the way water flows over their breasts when they're underwater is like molten metal, and he knows molten metal a little more than a bloke from Kent should. The sea looks like silver sometimes, rocking endlessly like a cradle, and he wished, stepping out of the costume trailer and into the weight of the hot air outside, that he could sleep there and never come out. He’d never have to come out if he were a fish. He could wish he had scales. Or wings, that'd be cool. Wings with soft, dark brown feathers, like his hair when he's just washed it and it's not quite dry and not quite damp.
He wanted to have wings and a scaly tail and hair made of snakes. If he had that, if he weren’t human, he’d have swooped down and shrieked at them all, screamed at them, made them listen to his keening, to the sound his heart was making as they sang to him, sang him to sleep, but their lullabies were “poison, love,” Johnny said across set, running through the new pages or talking about the jellyfish that float fifty feet deep and have no bones to be crushed by the weight of the sea or expectation.
It was easy to fall in love. There were so many times when the crucial moment could have passed, but it didn't. Maybe we missed some, we probably did, but got the important ones. We got enough of them to be in love with each other.
I have never loved anyone the way I loved him. It sounds melodramatic, yeah, but it isn't. Every love is an individual one, and we can never love anyone in exactly the same way as anyone else.
He made me believe in the ocean; in the ocean's promises. I don't know that's altogether a good thing; the ocean's danger is its seduction and its beauty. He was the most beautiful man I had ever known, ever seen, and I know. That sounds melodramatic. He was beautiful because I loved him, and I loved him because he was beautiful.
It sounds shallow, and I'd like to think I'm not that. I probably am, but I don't just mean his eyes and his skin and his voice. Not just that; I loved the waves I saw in his eyes as much as the colour. I could drown in those waves, and it still sounds melodramatic, worse than that. Clichéd. He made me want all the clichés; he made me want the house and the kids and the dog (all right, yeah, I always wanted the dog). I loved the way he never promised me anything in ways I couldn't believe; it was all in the smooth, easy pull of his fingers through my hair and the way he let me blow loose strands out of his eyes so he could really see me.
His breath smelled like the horrible tea he drank by the cupful. God, that stuff was foul.
I loved the way it was so simple with him. I hated his tea, and his voice hovered at the edge of my dreams. It was just a walk on the beach. No pressure. It was so easy. It was so easy to fall in love with him, so easy to reach for his hand in the chill breeze of the ocean as the light seeped over the brim of the world.
I could have believed we were meant to be together. I could have believed in God blessing us. I could have believed we had a guardian angel, or some such shit. I could have; I could have missed every one of those silent, secret moments of communion, confession, compassion. I didn't.
I didn't miss those moments. I hoarded them in the secret cave of my heart, there at the bottom of the world, where I two people was, and both true, both me. I never looked at them, because I didn't need to. They were there, and I could always look at them. Now, I wanted to find more. I did not want to miss any of those simple, black-and-white like a photograph, jewels of moments.
But the world spins like a top, and we flew out, borne by centrifugal force and thin wings of steel.
We were no longer in the hidden crevice of the earth, where no one looks, where no one sees. It was not me who needed the privacy there to love him, not entirely. It was not he who wanted what he had always wanted more than he wanted me, not entirely.
That makes it too simple, and everything, once the beautiful women were all around us (seductive, threatening), was no longer simple. It could not be simple.
The night we said goodbye for the last time and understood that we had left those shores, I wept. There are cures for everything, and salt water is a good one: sweat, tears, or the sea. I wept an ocean and then threw myself into my work and bled my tears out.
They're calling me; I have to go. It's all right. Don't cry. Please don't. This is my life now. It could be worse. I could be dead. You know that, you know the story, you must. I could have drowned in the air I fell through, I could have drowned in my own lungs before anyone could help me. But I didn't. I'm here.
It could be easier, yeah, but it wasn't really part of everything when we were there, you know? It wasn't human.
I'm a man and I'll act like one. Even if I can't breathe for it. Even if it terrifies me.
Sometimes, my dreams are of falling. I just don't know where I'm falling from: a bridge, a balcony, an assumption, or where I'm going to land: the ocean, a sidewalk, someone's arms. When I wake, there are voices I can't quite hear, as though they spoke and fled. As though I'm underwater, and the waves have closed over me. I don't know whether to sink gladly into the warmth of the water's embrace or to fear drowning.
And then, sometimes, I open my eyes and his hand is grasping mine, and it doesn't matter. If he's there, I'll fall forever, I'll gladly drown.
Feedback would be adored, treasured, worshiped, and clung to.
Author: Élizabeth de l'Epée et du Mot de l'Eau
waterswordFandom: RPF
Pairing, Characters: Viggo Mortensen/Orlando Bloom
Series: Love Song (I, II, III)
Rating: R
Archive: Only if you ask, please.
Warnings: Angst, slightly explicit homosexual coitus, Kate Bosworth.
Spoilers: None.
Timeframe: Oh god. Go to individual parts for that, okay? Please?
Summary: No comment.
Disclaimer: This work is complete and total fiction. The author does not know Viggo Mortensen, Orlando Bloom, or any other person mentioned herein, and is making no claims about their sexualities or relationship(s). No money is being made and no disrespect, copyright, or trademark infringement is intended. The poem used is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1927, quoted without permission, but with complete respect and admiration. Again, no money is being made and no disrespect, copyright, or trademark infringement is intended.
Crossposted to:
watersword (friendsfiltered post) and vigorli.Notes: Many thanks to
hija_paloma for assistance and encouragement A and B the C of D.Timeframe: At the Toronto Film Festival, 2004.
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: `` I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all''—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: ``That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.''
Robin looks at him, and he doesn't move, tiredness bone-deep within him. She leans back against the couch in his suite, folds her hands in her lap, and narrows her eyes. "Orlando," she begins, and frowns. He closes his eyes against her disapproval, trying to remember why he let her in this time, after the shouting match a few nights ago. She's out for blood, and he doesn't think he has any left.
No blood in his veins, no blood in his cock, no blood in his life—he has no heart's-blood left in him, no heart at all. He doesn't like the feeling he has of slowly dy!ng, and wants to call someone, to tell someone who will understand, "I'm drowning."
He knows what he wants to hear in response, but doesn't let himself remember it even in the middle of night with the drapes closed. "There's oxygen in water, too. There's nothing wrong with breathing another element," said in a whisper with breath ghosting over his shaven skull. Breath that tastes of grass and whisky and lemon, or so he imagines.
But his hair grew back long ago, and the voice he hears is Robin's — "I really thought you understood what's at stake here, Orlando. You deliberately attract the wrong kinds of attention, and there's a limit to what I can do to put a positive spin on times like this weekend! If you value your career, you need to stop doing things like this. I don't make the rules, but you can't go on breaking them like this, and still expect—"
He knows why she stopped. For one, he pays her, and it would be a Very Bad Thing (thank you, Doodle, for teaching me to capitalize the Important Things) if it got out that he's changed representation, and for another, they've had this argument before.
She can't control him. If he doesn't care about what he's done to his career, there's nothing she can do about it — all she can do is pick up the pieces, and hope that she can make them seem beautiful. Of course, she's not an artist. Only an artist can make what's broken beautiful again, and Orlando is no more an artist than she is.
He knew an artist once, loved him once, and Robin tried to protect them both. But Orlando began to self-destruct, and the artist doesn't like watching things break. He doesn't mind what's been broken already, but the process makes him hurt. Orlando stopped him watching, and then found out that his gaze had been all that held him together. Now that Robin has to protect no one, she doesn't know what to do, except her job, and that's not going to save Orlando.
This isn't what she thought she was getting into — a flash in the pan British pretty boy in a fantasy movie based on a bunch of old English novels was not supposed to turn into this. It's not what either of them thought they were getting into.
Timeframe: After the filming of Troy.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
"It's not enough."
And it's over. That's it. Orlando blinks. So easy. I love you it's not enough and cut cut cut cut cut that's a wrap.
Actors are not supposed to be the brightest creatures on God's green earth, and he didn't see this coming. He didn't see the beginning coming, either. He remembers them, but he didn't anticipate them.
Anticipation is overrated. Memory lasts.
Orlando remembers everything. He remembers wanting to reach out and lay his fingers along the edge of a lapel and curl them into the shirt collar and yank Viggo closer to him, so close that the golden, slanted light between them wouldn't be light at all. He remembers how cold the doorknob was that night in the rain and the way the path up to it was muddy and felt a thousand meters long, the way his car seemed to be watching him from the street, its windscreen streaked with moisture. He remembers the first time Viggo read out loud to him, not his own poetry, that came later, but Tolstoy, the bit where Levin and Kitty meet at the skating rink, and Viggo stopped in the middle of saying, "To the England or the Hermitage?" to take a sip of long-cold tea.
He remembers the way Viggo looked at the paparazzi photos and took a breath and said, "The balance is off. They should've cropped it about a centimeter on the left. Then you'd be—" and couldn't finish. There was a thumbprint over Kate's poufy, ankle-length skirt the next time he picked up the stack of snapshots, and that made it even prettier; shimmery with oils; because anything Viggo does is beautiful in Orlando's eyes. He finds that photograph reprinted in a Spanish tabloid, and sees himself turning away from the camera. Away from Viggo.
Timeframe: During filming of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
And this, and so much more?—
And this, and so much more?—
"What do you want?"
"This."
"This?"
Hair rough under the fingertip. Bump of vein against the palm. "This," he agreed, and bent his head. "This, and everything else."
"Everything?"
"Everything." Everything means everything, and everything's a lot. But he wasn't scared, not after waiting so long for this man. He wanted absolutely, positively, totally, everything.
Timeframe: During publicity for the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow, or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
``That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.''
His life, the best version of it, the version where he says what he means to say at the moment he means to say it with the words that he means to say, is lived in projected images against a silver screen. The trouble is, that's other people's words, and he says those wonderful words to the wrong people.
That's not him up there.
I'm over here, he says. Look. He taps his foot as he says it. He's not sure if he wants people to look at him, he just wants them to bloody well stop mixing him up with whoever they think he is.
L.A., London, Brazil, St. Vincent, New York, Japan, his life has acquired a pattern just like a bad screenplay: first act, second act, third. Hic et ubique: here, there, and everywhere, and never where he should be. He curls up with a pillow clutched in his arms, wishing it were—no, don't go there. It's better this way. Really it is. He'll get over it, it's only a broken heart, everyone has them. Like chickenpox.
The pillow is flat and defeated when he wakes up, and his mouth tastes of leftover curry and tears.
He can lie to everyone else, but he's always been fatally honest with himself. Everyone else can have complexes and repressions and suppress their emotions, why can't he? It would make his life so much easier, he thinks sometimes, except that every time he thinks that, he remembers that acting is lying with your soul open. The last thing he needs is to fulfill the sneering promises that his star will fade.
No. The last thing he needs is to be in love with the one, the one person he can't have. The very last thing he needs. The very last. Thing. He needs.
Oh, he needs so very badly.
Timeframe: Post-publication of the gazillionth article calling VM a "Renaissance man."
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
It's so easy for interviewers to bring up Hamlet. Cheating, Viggo thinks. Denmark – actor – Hamlet. Too easy.
He's hardly Danish, anyway – grew up in South America and upstate New York, by the time he got to Denmark he was who he is. And Shakespeare wasn't Danish either, so how the fuck would he know from Scandinavia?
He's not Hamlet. He wouldn't want to be. He'd be terrible. He's a character actor. He's good at prompting Hamlet into doing something so incredibly stupid it'll end with a stage littered with corpses.
Aragorn was a mistake for him, in many ways, or rather, he was a mistake for Aragorn. Aragorn has killed before, will kill again, is surrounded by death, and Viggo—Viggo thinks death is inherently dumb. The whole concept's just messed up.
This is another reason he'd be a terrible Hamlet. Hamlet's in love with death. Viggo just thinks it's stupid. He knows it's a weird thing to think, especially as he grows older, but death doesn't make sense to him. If he were still six, he'd call it a poopyhead. But that's not how adults talk or think, and Viggo's supposed to be an adult. A grownup. A mature, smart, insightful man.
By most standards, if he said death's a poopyhead, he'd be an idiot.
Timeframe: Late 2009.
I grow old...I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
"Um, Viggo?"
"Yeah?"
"How old were you when your hair started to grey?"
A small shuffle of blankets in the next room. "Why?"
"...no reason?"
"Find a grey hair, did we?"
"No, you tosser!"
"Around forty, I think. Maybe a few years before." A slight grunt as floorboards creaked with fresh weight on their night-cold surface. "Is my hair grey?"
"I know every inch of your body. Your hair is greying."
"Oh." The door opened a few inches. "You'll trip on those pants, you know."
"I know."
"Take them off."
"I'll cuff them when I leave."
"Take them off now."
Timeframe: March 2005, during filming of Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
"Try it this way," she said, and brushed her fingers through his hair. "Yeah, like that. Very sexy." One gelled lock fell over his eyes. It was longer than it had ever been; he'd barely needed extensions this time round. Helene had actually clipped some of them after he'd come back from New York the second time, and the strands had lain on the floor like murdered creatures.
Those who believe in voudou are very careful not to let pieces of themselves—hair clippings, nail clippings—fall into the hands of those who would do them harm. Orlando nearly asked Helene to burn the clippings, but stopped himself. It might be easy to almost believe in voudou here, where the air is like wet wool, but he's Not Allowed To Be Anything But Normal, and so he simply said "Thank you," and left, left hand gripping right wrist against his hipbone.
He could feel his bones, and it was almost reassuring; he still had a body. He was still human, still alive. He still needed to cut his hair, and wash his face (and behind his ears), and eat.
He was a vegan for six days, once. He was a vegetarian, an ovo-vegetarian, a pesca-vegetarian, a omnivore, a vegan for six hours again. Is there egg in this? Is there wheat in that? Does this have dairy in it? Questions are a bitch.
He longed for certainty.
The costume fittings meant that they didn’t look at him, at his face, and he was grateful. The pants were heavy, pale and smooth under his fingertips – please don't touch the cloth, the oils in your fingers will stain it – and the storyboard leaning against the wall showed a bareheaded man with a sword held upright in his hand, like a beacon, walking away from the camera with the waves on his left.
That would never be him, he knew, and he closed his eyes to let the girl with the curly brown hair, sunbleached to the colour of palest rum, stick her hands down the front of his trousers and adjust everything til it was snug and perfect.
Perfect.
The way Keira's eyelashes are perfect, the way he isn't. The way women swim; he doesn't understand women (women aren’t from Venus, women are from another galaxy, another dimension, as far as he can tell), but the way water flows over their breasts when they're underwater is like molten metal, and he knows molten metal a little more than a bloke from Kent should. The sea looks like silver sometimes, rocking endlessly like a cradle, and he wished, stepping out of the costume trailer and into the weight of the hot air outside, that he could sleep there and never come out. He’d never have to come out if he were a fish. He could wish he had scales. Or wings, that'd be cool. Wings with soft, dark brown feathers, like his hair when he's just washed it and it's not quite dry and not quite damp.
He wanted to have wings and a scaly tail and hair made of snakes. If he had that, if he weren’t human, he’d have swooped down and shrieked at them all, screamed at them, made them listen to his keening, to the sound his heart was making as they sang to him, sang him to sleep, but their lullabies were “poison, love,” Johnny said across set, running through the new pages or talking about the jellyfish that float fifty feet deep and have no bones to be crushed by the weight of the sea or expectation.
Timeframe: 2003.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
It was easy to fall in love. There were so many times when the crucial moment could have passed, but it didn't. Maybe we missed some, we probably did, but got the important ones. We got enough of them to be in love with each other.
I have never loved anyone the way I loved him. It sounds melodramatic, yeah, but it isn't. Every love is an individual one, and we can never love anyone in exactly the same way as anyone else.
He made me believe in the ocean; in the ocean's promises. I don't know that's altogether a good thing; the ocean's danger is its seduction and its beauty. He was the most beautiful man I had ever known, ever seen, and I know. That sounds melodramatic. He was beautiful because I loved him, and I loved him because he was beautiful.
It sounds shallow, and I'd like to think I'm not that. I probably am, but I don't just mean his eyes and his skin and his voice. Not just that; I loved the waves I saw in his eyes as much as the colour. I could drown in those waves, and it still sounds melodramatic, worse than that. Clichéd. He made me want all the clichés; he made me want the house and the kids and the dog (all right, yeah, I always wanted the dog). I loved the way he never promised me anything in ways I couldn't believe; it was all in the smooth, easy pull of his fingers through my hair and the way he let me blow loose strands out of his eyes so he could really see me.
His breath smelled like the horrible tea he drank by the cupful. God, that stuff was foul.
I loved the way it was so simple with him. I hated his tea, and his voice hovered at the edge of my dreams. It was just a walk on the beach. No pressure. It was so easy. It was so easy to fall in love with him, so easy to reach for his hand in the chill breeze of the ocean as the light seeped over the brim of the world.
I could have believed we were meant to be together. I could have believed in God blessing us. I could have believed we had a guardian angel, or some such shit. I could have; I could have missed every one of those silent, secret moments of communion, confession, compassion. I didn't.
I didn't miss those moments. I hoarded them in the secret cave of my heart, there at the bottom of the world, where I two people was, and both true, both me. I never looked at them, because I didn't need to. They were there, and I could always look at them. Now, I wanted to find more. I did not want to miss any of those simple, black-and-white like a photograph, jewels of moments.
But the world spins like a top, and we flew out, borne by centrifugal force and thin wings of steel.
We were no longer in the hidden crevice of the earth, where no one looks, where no one sees. It was not me who needed the privacy there to love him, not entirely. It was not he who wanted what he had always wanted more than he wanted me, not entirely.
That makes it too simple, and everything, once the beautiful women were all around us (seductive, threatening), was no longer simple. It could not be simple.
The night we said goodbye for the last time and understood that we had left those shores, I wept. There are cures for everything, and salt water is a good one: sweat, tears, or the sea. I wept an ocean and then threw myself into my work and bled my tears out.
They're calling me; I have to go. It's all right. Don't cry. Please don't. This is my life now. It could be worse. I could be dead. You know that, you know the story, you must. I could have drowned in the air I fell through, I could have drowned in my own lungs before anyone could help me. But I didn't. I'm here.
It could be easier, yeah, but it wasn't really part of everything when we were there, you know? It wasn't human.
I'm a man and I'll act like one. Even if I can't breathe for it. Even if it terrifies me.
Sometimes, my dreams are of falling. I just don't know where I'm falling from: a bridge, a balcony, an assumption, or where I'm going to land: the ocean, a sidewalk, someone's arms. When I wake, there are voices I can't quite hear, as though they spoke and fled. As though I'm underwater, and the waves have closed over me. I don't know whether to sink gladly into the warmth of the water's embrace or to fear drowning.
And then, sometimes, I open my eyes and his hand is grasping mine, and it doesn't matter. If he's there, I'll fall forever, I'll gladly drown.
Feedback would be adored, treasured, worshiped, and clung to.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-12-11 09:18 pm (UTC)and thanks for the 2009 part, that balances the heart wrenching 2008 one..
so beautiful, thank you!
no subject
Date: 2005-12-12 03:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-11 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-12 03:10 pm (UTC)Thanks for letting me know you liked it!
no subject
Date: 2005-12-11 09:38 pm (UTC)I'll wish on a star for a 2009 ending.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-12 03:11 pm (UTC)