vigorli

Title: The Road
Author: Élizabeth de l'Epée et du Mot de l'Eau

watersword
Fandom: RPF
Pairing, Characters: Orlando Bloom/Viggo Mortensen
Series: None.
Rating: PG-13.
Archive: Only if you ask, please.
Warnings: No happy ending.
Spoilers: None.
Timeframe: 1999-2000.
Summary: This is about roads and friendship.
Disclaimer: This work is complete and total fiction. The author does not know Orlando Bloom or Viggo Mortensen 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.
Notes: Many thanks to

hija_paloma for assistance and encouragement. For

dmb_dragonfly, who requested "new zealand fic, viggo and orlando really like each other, and are in love pretty much, but one problem... orlando is not at ALL sexually attracted to viggo. at all. awww. it kind of frustrates the both of them. and it gets solved in the end, somehow..." Written for the 2005

vo_xmas exchange.

The road to a friend's house is never long. ~Danish proverb
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
~J. R. R. Tolkien

Look, I'm not stupid. I may be pretty young, but I've been on my own since I was sixteen, I'm no innocent. I've been in love. I know what it feels like.

It doesn't feel like this.

Whatever this was.

This was a late-night dinner of scorching hot curry and rice, charcoal in a gray smear on his cheekbone and fingers of his left hand. I came over to go through the rewrites of the new pages for Two Towers, but he was in the other bedroom, where he keeps unfinished canvases and his newest photographs, and didn't hear my knock. He keeps a spare key in the fake bird's nest over the porch light, so I let myself in. "Vig?"

"One sec!"

"All right!" Orange juice nearly gone, I saw, so I found a clean glass in the cupboard and dumped some ice in. There were some t-shirts of his stacked on one of the chairs and I stretched my legs out across the table, tipping the chair back to balance on its back legs. He came out of the hallway, wearing a blue shirt, a photograph clenched in his teeth. His hands were full of dirty coffee mugs, a green scarf, two paintbrushes clogged with dried acrylics, and his wristwatch.

"This yours?" he asked, after spitting the photograph toward the table. It fluttered down next to my knee, and I stretched to pick it up.

"The scarf? Nope." The photograph was of John, standing next to a window, his swollen face in shadow, his pupils the only points of light in the darkness of his face.

"Damn." He dropped the cups in the sink with a clatter and left the brushes sticking out of them. "It's not mine, either."

"Lij's," I suggested. He shrugged, and I let the chair crash all the way forward to snag his wristwatch. "Ever seen it before?" It was six-thirty, still light out, and the leather band felt soft against my fingers.

"Nope." He took the wristwatch back and strapped it on. My ice was partly melted, and he picked up the glass and took a sip. My mouth was dry, and I took the glass out of his hand, the sharp edge of his nail grazing the pad of my thumb, and crunched on some ice.

It's only now, saying this, that I realize how vivid every moment with him was. Being around him heightened my awareness—of anything, of everything. I could pick out the spices in the curry, remember that his jeans were ripped to hell at the knees, close my eyes and trace the shape of the charcoal smudge on his face.

This was spending three months in knife-training, language classes, costume fittings, makeup workshops, and running lines, and being good at it. Really honestly being good at it, enjoying it, going out with the Hobbits most nights, sleeping with a few locals, getting to know Stuart, who was the first American I'd ever spent much time with, being introduced to obscure Scottish bands by Billy, drinking New Zealand beer with names like Speight's Gold Metal over lunch with Peter, when he got away from the chaos of pre-production to get to know us all. I was good at it, and it got so's it was hard to call mates in London going the audition route, hard to remember I'd ever lived any other way.

Then Elijah started us off with that closeup, Stuart got fired, and Viggo came. Four days, a week, maybe, of panic, and there he was, all messy blond hair and scarred lip, khaki pants creased from the flight over.

Meeting him wasn't a big thing; I think it was in the food tent, whilst jockeying for non-dairy creamer. "Name's Viggo Mortensen," he said, and I looked up and smiled, not even making the connection to Aragorn for a few seconds.

"Orlando Bloom – oh! You're, yeah, of course, hi."

"You'd be Legolas, I take it," he said, reaching past me for a cover for his cup.

"That's Prince Leggy to you," I retorted, and he chuckled a little. My coffee was the colour of bleached wood when I looked at it, and I dumped it in the bin, making a satisfying thunk.

Astin'd been quick to tell everyone about Indian Runner, and Dom had offered to spend "my entire day off, if necessary, searching Wellington for a video!" but when Billy pointed out that he seemed awfully interested in seeing a costar's cock, he deflated and turned a sort of mauve. I offered, just prolonging the joke, and Bill made a face at me, and led his fellow hobbit away.

After we'd shot a few scenes together, I mentioned it offhandedly, and he groaned. "Should've known someone would ask about that."

"Haven't seen it," I said. He crossed one of his boots over the other and rolled his shoulders. The bench wasn't clean enough for me to sit on, so I just shifted my weight back and forth. "So?"

"A lot like your experience, I imagine," he said. "Makeup for the tatts was a bitch."

"Ears," I pointed out.

"Hobbits have feet."

"Not a hobbit."

"Nope. Not a hobbit, elf."

I wasn't sure what he meant by that, and was about to ask, when someone yelled "Places, people!" and my question got swept away in watching him disappear.

I could never tell where Viggo went when he vanished and Aragorn appeared, but you could just tell the difference. I was kind of glad I didn't have to worry about losing screen presence next to him – I didn't have that many lines, and Leggy was not a major mover and shaker, plot-wise. "Besides," I would insist, "Leggy's cooler than he is. Leggy's all deadly and shiny."

"Right," a hobbit would agree solemnly. Somehow, they were always around when the subject came up, but that was probably because Viggo would never even consider it, and the hobbits delighted in the question.

I didn't have to worry about it, so I could concentrate on watching him, and I decided that was actually in character. Granted, I decided this when Pete caught me up one day, and asked why, in every shot, I – Legolas – was looking at Aragorn (and may I just add that I was a little peeved that PJ thought of Viggo as Aragorn and not of me as Legolas? Not that it wasn't justified, of course), and I started talking about the line in the books about how Legolas went on the quest for the Ring "for the love of the Lord of the White Tree" and in the script as it stood, only pledged his allegiance after Aragorn had, and I'd been thinking about how that meant that Leggy's commitment to the quest was a part of his, "his whole, sort of, relationship, friendship, whatever, with Aragorn, since he's the only one in the Fellowship he has a history, a commitment, so, it's –" and Pete cut me off.

"All right, then, we're good."

Good at it wasn't enough anymore, and I wasn't even trying for good anymore. I was trying for extraordinary, and now I was really making it to good. Before, I realised, I'd been adequate, and that wasn't good enough for Viggo.

I wanted to be good enough for Viggo. I was inexpressibly grateful to Peter for giving me the chance to be here, but when Viggo grinned at me and said, "That wasn't bad back there," it somehow meant more to me than Peter's slow nod and "Good job, everybody, that's a wrap. Nice work, Orlando, Brett. Amy, did you get the –"

This was Viggo trusting me with his son. Henry was visiting over his Christmas break from school, and Fran and Phillipa decided, for reasons known only to themselves, that Aragorn's speech in the Minas Trith sequence needed to be changed in some fundamental way.

And Viggo, of course, being Viggo, and being as deeply invested in Aragorn's, I don't know, psyche, as he was, ranted over the phone to me for twenty minutes and finished with, "So I need to go wave the sword at them, so I'll drop Henry off at your place for a few hours, okay?"

"Okay," I said, because it was Viggo asking, and I can't imagine ever saying no to him, somehow.

And then Henry was standing on my back deck, chewing his lip. Viggo'd clearly meant it when he'd said 'drop off' – when I asked, "So where's your dad?" Henry just shrugged, pointed a hand vaguely out toward the driveway, and skirted round me to go inside.

"Do you, uh, want something?" I asked, not sure whether to treat him like Colin's kids, or like a mate, or like Viggo himself.

"Soda?" he said, and sat down on the couch. I'd met him before, a chubby kid wearing a faded green-striped t-shirt, but he seemed oddly relaxed about being in my house. His gaze was level and certain.

"I don't have soda." Which, in Henry's eyes, was a moral failing on the level of kicking small furry kittens into the path of eighteen-wheel trucks carrying barrels of oil that the Governer of Texas had voodooed homeless people into drilling for without a living wage (you could tell he was Viggo's son), but somehow, he got past it. We ended up playing video games and I taught him about Whittard's hot cocoa mix. He told me to add some cinnamon to the milk, and my god, that kid's going to be a master chef when he grows up, because that was some good shit.

When Viggo came to pick him up, he grinned at me, a real grin, that crazy creased-up face and those teeth of his on full display. "Thanks," he said, and glanced over to where Henry was flipping through a marked-up copy of Oscar Wilde's Salome. "Wilde fan?" he asked, his fingers on my forearm.

Henry put the book down on top of the coffee table and wandered over to us. Viggo slung an arm around his shoulders, and even though Henry squirmed away a little – even I know that twelve is too old for your dad to hug you in public – the ease between them, the way Viggo just knew where his son was without looking, made me smile a little. His hand had never left the skin on my wrist, and he would have been able to tell if Henry had been upset. It had been okay, and a little huff of breath left my chest at the thought.

"Yeah," I said. "I always wanted to play Lady Bracknell in Earnest, but I'm not that good a comedian."

"I think you're pretty funny," he said, his eyes flicking toward my Mohawk, and I rolled my eyes. "Funny-looking," we said together, and the moment was over.

This was sitting with Elijah on a Saturday morning, waiting for the grips to straighten out which yellow electric cord was which, Dom and Billy playing four-handed solitaire across the way. Four-handed wasn't even the word for it, really. "It's just," I tried to explain, and making a muck of it, as usual, "I can't imagine having something happen to me, and not wanting to tell him about it. I can't imagine having anything bad happen to me and not, not needing to, I don't know. Have him help, even if it's just laughing at me. I can't think of a situation when I wouldn't be glad to see him."

"So explain to me how you're not in love with him," Elijah said, crushing out his clove.

I shrugged. It was just obvious to me, like explaining why I didn't drink flavoured coffee. "Because I'm not."

"You don't see him at the pub and want to sit down in his lap," Elijah said, disbelief clear in his voice.

"Lij, have you met me? I do sit in his lap. I sit in your lap! I'd sit in, in Ian's lap if he didn't bitch about his arthritis every time I tried!"

"And you don't –"

"Elijah Jordan Wood, on all that is holy, I swear I have never entertained the thought of shagging either you, Ian, or Viggo," I blurted, my face probably crimson under Leggy's pale skin. This wasn't even the first time that I'd had reason to thank Professor Tolkien for calling the prince of Mirkwood 'fair of face', but oh Christ was Elijah going to pay for this one.

"…That wasn't even my question, bitch," Elijah said. "I know you want me. Everyone does. Even inanimate objects."

"The camera loves you," I agreed, "but the camera can't put out. And I'm not going to."

"Wanker."

"Dude," I replied. He snickered. It had become a joke on the set, that with a cast as trans-Atlantic as the one Peter had assembled, it was no wonder that our everyday language had become a weird combination of London club slang, hippie talk, rock 'n' roll injokes, footie banter, and all of it utterly filthy, for which the blame should be laid squarely at Dom's furry feet.

The discussion devolved into Elijah and I whacking each other with packets of saltines from Billy's stash and getting crumbs in some very uncomfortable places. Dom won the game of solitaire – he cheats, and Billy lets him, I don't know why – and then Peter called, and we got back to work.

But that night, perched on the counter, waiting not-very-patiently for my rice noodles to soften, I did think about it. I went through the whole primary cast, and thought carefully about whether, in some other universe, I might possibly, under the influence of heavy drugs, want to sleep with any of my costars.

No.

Well, that was easy.

This was watching him take photographs for hours, and not being bored. I could curl up on a blanket with some magazines my mum had sent over, and just listen to him mumble nonsense words to himself, punctuated by the click of the shutter. I could never guess what he was going to look at next, but once he'd chosen something, I could look at it myself and see why he had.

I was eating a piece of carob cake, as neatly as I could, when he started looking at me. "What?" I said.

"Don't talk."

"Do I have cake on my face?"

"No. Now hush."

I shut up. He crouched on a patch of bare earth, the bright, pale sunlight casting his face into shadow, and looked at me. I glanced down at myself – exposed sliver of skin on my belly, jeans faded to an indeterminate grey, spike cuff on my left wrist – and had no idea what he was staring at so intensely.

He lifted the camera but didn't take any pictures. "Come on," he said, standing up. "Wind's kicking up."

I hadn't even noticed that the breeze was stronger and colder. "Yeah," I said vaguely, and brushed crumbs off my fingers. He helped me fold the blanket, and didn't object when I tuned the radio in his car to the station that was the least fuzzy, but had the most pop songs. We didn't talk much while he was driving. I sang along under my breath (will you still call me Superman, holding my hand, by my side), my head bouncing against the window as the road became bumpier. Viggo's house wasn't out in the middle of nowhere, or anything, but the street it was on hadn't been repaired since the eighties.

"Coming in?" he said.

"Sure," I said, unbelting myself. I hummed to the silent radio as I pulled the cooler out of the boot, and followed him inside. Something to do with you, I mumbled, and kicked the door shut behind me.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Song," I said, "on the radio?" He cocked his head. I almost started talking how, when I was little, I used to play Superman before my mum got home from her last class teaching, and how I'd jumped off the shed roof until Sam ratted me out when I was eight.

"What did you –" he said, and drew a breath. "Want some tea?" he said, and I nodded, not realising for a moment, until he'd gone into the kitchen, that he'd meant to say something else.

"Viggo?" I called, raising my voice a little, and moving to the doorway. I was still holding the cooler, and he was facing away from me, leaning one hip against the counter as he filled his kettle. I tilted enough to prop myself up on the jamb, and instead of asking what he'd wanted to say, said, "What do you want me to do with this?"

"Just –" he waved a hand around. "Stick it in a corner, we finished the beer, right?"

"Couple of bottles left," I said, taking a few steps in.

"Stick 'em in the fridge," he decided, turning the tap off.

"You like cold beer, mate?" I asked, moving across the kitchen. The refrigerator was covered, like his makeup mirror, in photos and clippings, everything from a snapshot of me in costume, listening to my mobile, hand braced against the wall of the trailer, to a listing for an estate sale in the Wellington suburbs three weeks ago.

"I can live with it," he said. "You want to try some maté?"

"Sure, sign me up," I said, and sat down as he rummaged in a drawer and found his gourds, with their straws. I smiled at him a little, and his eyes flicked away.

Usually the silences between us were comfortable, but this one felt more like an "awkward pause," and I was grateful when the kettle whistled.

"Viggo," I said, when my gourd was mostly empty. It tasted like green tea, sharp and grassy—he had offered me sugar, and I had declined. That might have been a mistake.

"Orlando," he said, and I looked up, startled at—I don’t know what. The way he said it, the way he shaped the vowels, the way he was saying more than just my name. My finger had been tracing a knot in the table, and my hand stilled. He held the gourd in front of his mouth, pressing it lightly against his lips, and swallowed.

Maybe the way he'd said "Orlando" had just been because he had tea in his mouth, but I didn't think so.

"I should—" I started, no idea of what to say next, but he nodded as if he knew. A bright spark of anger flared in my chest, but at what I didn't know.

When Poppy and I had finally stopped screaming at each other, my second year at Guildhall, and were just waiting for one of us to say goodbye, this was how it had felt to be alone in a room with her. As though we were speaking the same foreign language with different dictionaries, and every word I said meant something completely different to what I meant.

Were Viggo and I fighting? I couldn't imagine over what, and I had understood what had gone wrong with Poppy, sort of. He stood up, and came over to my side of the table – when had it become my side? When had it become habit to sit here, to crook my knee up against my chest, to be with Viggo whenever I could?

When had I missed that, and what else had I missed?

He brushed his hand against my shoulder, one of Aragorn's gestures, and the hot feeling in my chest grew a little. How could he think I wouldn't know when he let Aragorn take over, I thought, I'd only spent months watching the differences between them. "It's okay," he said. "I'll let you go," and his hand, still warm from the maté, slipped past my cheek and jaw, not quite, almost, almost, touching me, and I drew in a breath.

And stood up.

He reached past me to pick up my tea, and I was pinned against the table by his body. He smelled like maté, and crushed grass, and makeup remover. I leaned forward, and he turned to look at me, and instead of the quick buss on the cheek I'd meant to give him, I pressed my mouth against his dry lips.

But only for a second; he leaned back almost as soon as I'd realised.

"Later, yeah?" I said, my voice very quiet.

"I thought so too," he replied, and I felt cold as he moved away – only a half-step, but enough that the solid bulk of his body was no longer in my space. "But I'll be here."

This is everything between us. This is the best friendship I've ever had. This just is.

It's not love. I don't know what it is, but I know it's not love. It's nothing like love. It's me and Viggo; it doesn't have to be anything else.

Feedback is love.