Dancing with the Daffodils chapter 11/18

[marialayne.livejournal.com]

Title: Dancing with the Daffodils 11/18
Author: Maria Layne
Pairing: Viggo/Orlando (and others)
Rating: NC-17 ( for m/m sex)
Please see the warnings in chapter 1
Disclaimer: This is a fictional story with certain actors cast in the main roles. I am not claiming anything about their real life sexuality or making any money from this. I wish.


I'd really like to know if people are reading this.

Thank you to my most wonderful beta bluespirit_star who is one of the best people I know.

Past chapters are here:

chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 6, chapter 7, chapter 8, chapter 9, chapter 10

and the new chapter is here:

Chapter 11

Classes became unbearable. I couldn’t relax in the classroom, not knowing if the person who had reported me was sitting in front of me. I had to guard everything I said, every nuance in the way I looked or responded to the students. I lost my temper frequently. One incident brought the whole thing to a head. The heat was pouring in through the north facing windows, and the lazy fans simply moved the hot air around in the classroom. In my year ten class, everyone was making fans with the worksheets I had distributed and one of the little tartlets was being provocative in front of the boys, unbuttoning the top buttons of her blouse.
"Oh," she moaned, "I’m just so hot."
A testosterone driven young savage laughed out a standard response,
"Is that your own opinion or did someone tell you that?" and he looked at me for male backup. That day he was looking in the wrong direction. I was not about to play this game.
"That will be enough from you, Nathan!"
"Awwww! What crawled up your arse, Sir?"
"I’m just sick of your attitude towards the girls, Nathan."
"Spoken like a true poofter!"

I should have let it go, or said, as I would normally have done ‘And you would know all about that,’ or something equally amusing and effective in putting down the perpetrator while keeping the class on side. But I didn’t. I lost it. I yelled at him.
"That’s enough, Nathan! I’m sick of your constant heckling of other students, your constant stupid jokes, your constant innuendo!" He stood up at this point. "Sit down!" He screwed up the worksheet that I had handed out and threw it onto the floor.
"No way! I don’t have to listen to this!" He pushed over some desks and chairs on the way to the door,
"Pick that up! And pick up that furniture! And come back here immediately!" My voice could be heard through the whole department.
"I don’t have to listen to this! Fuck you!" He left the room and slammed the door, and the class was silent. I just looked at them and ran - not after Nathan - he could go to hell for all I cared. I ran into the staff room and sat at my desk, trying to keep away the tears of frustration and anger. I was hardly surprised when Anna came in a few minutes later.
"I’m sorry. I just lost it."
"I heard."
"Anna..."
"He’s being dealt with. We don’t have to put up with turds like him."
"But that’s the point, don’t you see? I can usually handle it. It’s just that I look round the classroom and I don’t know... I ask myself, who is it?" I stopped, because Jenny, one of the other teachers, came in at that point and collected some books from her desk. She looked at Anna and I, curiously, but didn’t say anything. I waited until she had gone. "See? I can’t even look my colleagues in the face. I can’t handle this, Anna." And it was the truth. I couldn’t bring myself to go into another classroom or even stay in the staffroom in case someone else came in. Anna put her hand on my shoulder.
"Perhaps you should talk to someone..."
"I did, I talked to Orlando."
"Orlando?" Her voice registered her surprise, and I realised I had said the wrong thing, the most wrong thing I could have said. A fucking stupid thing. "I meant a counsellor - but Orlando? Are you sure that was wise?"
"No, fuck it, I’m not sure about anything any more." She hesitated, and her hand on my shoulder stroked me gently, then paused.
"Viggo... There’s nothing between you and Orlando is there?"
I reacted instantly.
"Of course not! How could you think that? He’s a student, for Christ’s sake! What’s wrong - are you doubting me now? Suspecting me of being some sort of pervert?"
"No! No, of course not. Shit for brains, Anna! Sorry, Viggo. This whole thing is getting to me too. Look, why don’t you take a few sickies. Get yourself together?" But she had guessed it, and even though I had denied it and she had backed down, the suspicion had been there. And I knew that this was the decision point for me, too. If I got up and walked back into the classroom, there was a chance I could make it through the next few weeks. If I went home it would mean defeat. I stood outside the classroom door, closed my eyes and took a deep breath. The noise of the students yelling on the other side filtered through, washed over me like the sea at high tide. My hand reached towards the handle, and rested there. Why was I doing this? What did I hope to achieve by standing in front of those little shitheads and trying to keep them under control for forty minutes? Was it something I wanted to do? Was it important in the larger scheme of things? Would it matter ten years from now? Would anything I did here and now matter then? So was I going to go in or go home? The words ‘failure’ and ‘coward’ and ‘running away’ taunted me as my hand left the handle and fell back to my side. Then I turned and went home.

Well, actually, I went to the hospital. If anything was going to affect my future in any small way it was this tiny pencil of sunlight in the dark room of my life. Here was somewhere I wanted to be. Not in the hospital – I still hated it there – but warming myself in his love and friendship. I picked up some more flowers on the way, and felt a bit of an idiot standing there with them. A few girls from Orlando’s year were sitting on and around his bed. They scattered quickly when they saw me - they were, after all, supposed to be in school. After they had gone, Orlando reached for the flowers, playing it all campy,
"More flowers for me, darling? I think I might open a florist!" I cuffed him across the head; only remembering when he winced that there had been bandages there the day before.
"Sorry!" I felt his pain for him.
"S’okay!" And we were both quiet for a bit. Then he turned to me. "You’re not going to ask, are you?"
"Ask what?"
"What happened, stupid! Everyone else has asked it - but not you." I had been so grateful he was alive, and that had been more important. I didn’t want to hear how close I had come to losing him.
“I think Anna’s words concerning your reluctance to talk about it were, ‘like pushing shit up hill with a rubber fork.’ Not something I wanted to try.” He grinned. I breathed in his smile, overwhelmed by a sudden depth of affection. “I figured you’d tell me when you’re ready.”
"Well, so which version do you want to hear? The version I told the police or the version I told the family - or the school version?"
"How about the truth?"
"Yeah. Perhaps I can do that. You told me your secrets – well, some of them – so you deserve to hear mine. Anyway, I want to tell you."
"And I want to hear.” Not how close I came to losing him, but his secrets, his innermost thoughts, his truths, anything he wanted to share. I wanted to know him totally.

Orlando paused, then began to talk.
"I’ll start with what happened at Tae Kwon Do. You saw that Colin didn’t want to do those demonstrations with me - because of what happened the other day - and he’s been spreading it around since then that I’m queer, so I wasn’t too keen on working with him either. I guess I just wanted to beat his head in, actually." I smiled. "Anyway, Auntie Anna asked what was going on, so I told her. I think it shocked her at first, but she took it all right after a bit, told me to be careful who I told. Then said she thought she knew someone who would be a good person to talk to about it, and to leave it with her. I sort of knew she meant you." He grinned at me. "I figured that it would be a great excuse to talk with you and have her permission and all that."
"You’re wicked." I grinned at him and he grinned back.
"I know. Anyway, I went down the beach to think about things after training - you know, whether to tell my parents and all that. I saw Karl down there and he and I had a long chat. He invited me back to his place." Orlando waggled his eyebrows suggestively. He was gauging the effect of his words on me. I fell for it, reacting to the instant surge of possessive envy.
"You didn’t go, did you?" It was just the reaction he was aiming for.
"Jealous?" His lopsided grin teased me. Yes, I was. He screwed up his nose, smugly happy. But he put me out of my misery all the same. "No, I didn’t go with him. I told him thanks, but there was someone else, and he knew it was you I was talking about. Anyway, he told me to tell you, and I said I already had. Then he got all sarky and he goes, ‘oh well then, you tried, time to give up then. Time to lie down and cry. Suicide time.’ And he said you and I make a good pair with you mooning over a dead boyfriend..."
This wasn’t the way I wanted Orlando to hear about David. David was more than just a ‘dead boyfriend,’ and Karl had no right to reduce him to mere words in that way. How could I explain this to Orlando?
"It isn’t like that!" Well, that was articulate.
"No? Well Karl reckons - this is Karl saying it, not me - that you can’t get past this guy, David, not even in bed…” Orlando lowered his eyes, didn’t want to meet mine, but I detected the ghost of a smile on his lips. I visualized myself holding Karl against the wall and personally wringing his neck. How dare he discuss our… arrangement… whatever it was, with Orlando? How could I explain to Orlando so he would understand what Karl and I were or weren’t to one another?
“Orlando…” I started to explain, but I didn’t know what I was going to say. It didn’t matter, anyway. Orlando kissed his palm and put it over my mouth. He was saying he understood. He didn’t need explanations. He left it there until I was quiet, then removed all but one finger, which he left against my lips and waited. I kissed his finger.
"Do you want to hear this story or not?”
I nodded. He took his finger away and pressed it to his own lips. My throat tightened and the longing to kiss him, to take him in my arms and hold him, was suddenly overwhelming. Orlando, luckily, was oblivious to the effect of his simple, beautiful act of love. He continued with his story.
“Okay, so Karl said I should fight for what I want and not give up." He grinned. "Well I went home, and I thought I might tell Mum and Dad but we ended up having a “discussion” over Col’s eighteenth, and how I was seen in a fight. So I couldn’t say anything. Then Mum wanted me to take this stuff over to Auntie Anna’s, so I took the car. I stopped by your place first to see if you were home - do a bit of the fighting Karl was on about - but you weren’t so I left a note."
"Yeah, I got it." I could feel it in my shirt pocket, burning a hole through to my heart.
"Yeah. Anyway, then I went round to Auntie Anna’s and it turns out you two were having dinner, and Danielle was mighty pissed at that, I can tell you. She hates you, man, big time. Anyway, so Dani’s totally pissed that she’s grounded, and that she missed Colin’s party, so she gets out the port and says for me to stay and help her drink it and eat the lasagna she made. So I phone up Mum and say I’m staying at Auntie Anna’s and I’ll be home in the morning, and Mum’s out of it as usual, off her face, you know." I raised my eyebrows. So that was it. It explained a few of the things I had noticed, a few of Anna’s comments. It provided a new layer to the issues that my lovely boy had to live with and overcome. He answered my reaction by waving it away. "Yeah, well it’s a long story. But anyway, Dani and I get slowly shit faced, and Dani’s asking me which of her friends I fancy, and I’m getting totally pissed here, right, and I start talking about the boys. So she gets the idea, right, and at first she thinks its kinda cool, or whatever chicks think, I dunno. Anyway, we start to compare notes as to which boys are hot, and which are kinda cute and that. So then she asks if I’ve ever - you know - done it with anyone, and I tell her I haven’t. Then she reckons I must have kissed someone, and I sort of deny it, but she won’t have it, and she’s tickling me and trying to get it out of me, and saying all this stuff about telling people I’m gay if I won’t tell her, but like, she’s only joking. Anyway, then she says she’ll tell you not to go near me on the stage because I’m gay and she's tickling me, and I’m nearly pissing myself, so to get her off me I tell her."
"Tell her what?"
"That I kissed Colin, Dummy."
"Shit."
"Yeah. Shit. Anyway, she just loses it. She, like, goes off her head and starts screaming and yelling and throwing my shoes at me and I just grabbed my stuff and left. Well I was, as I said, totally shit faced. I think I must’ve peed against the house or the car, ‘cause I remember that I was busting. That’s right, ’cause I remember thinking all the rain would wash it all away, that I could somehow piss out all the pain. Then I must’ve got in the car and driven somewhere. I don’t remember much after that." I looked at him in sympathy and horror.
"So you don’t remember about the car crash."
"No. Dad reckoned I totalled the car, though. He was more pissed about the car - and about people hearing about it - than he was about me hurting myself."
"Don’t say that!" I protested. Surely that couldn’t be true. Martin was a man of God, wasn’t he? Then it struck me that Orlando’s observations were generally strikingly perceptive, and his simple acceptance of his parents as human beings with their own faults showed an incredible maturity. This lovely boy had had to grow up so fast. Maybe that is what drew me to him – his acceptance of people with all their faults, and his capacity for love in spite of them. He recognized my reaction and his first thought was to put my mind at rest.
"Hey, it’s okay. It’s true. And Mum hasn’t been in once – well, not since I woke up. You want to hear about my family? No, you don’t. And if they knew I was gay - I dunno what they’d say. Mum would probably just nod sweetly and have another drink, and Dad would send me away somewhere so nobody need know about it. You know what? I don’t think there’s one person in this whole world that really cares.” I could see that however he was dismissing this, it was really hurting him. And I did care. I did. I put my arms around him and held him, let him cry a bit. I told myself that it was to comfort him – and it was – but it wasn’t only for that, and there was no fooling anyone, really. This was something that I had ached to do. Every inch of skin longed to touch his, and I pulled him as close as I could. He clung tightly, moulded himself against me, and I showed him that there was someone who certainly did care for him, far, far, more than they should. But I didn’t say it, and I hated myself for that. I needed to say something, and I couldn’t. There was still all that baggage of fear that I dragged around with me. In fact my heart was beating so fast in case someone walked in and misinterpreted this that I pulled away at the slight scrape of a trolley on the corridor wall outside. Orlando smiled sadly up at me. I’m sure he knew what was going on in my head. The panic, after all, was written all over my face. He shook his head, as if he despaired that I would ever see what was in front of me, the unconditional love that he was offering. I still hadn’t said anything, but he answered me as if I had.
“I know you do.” He whispered. And I was so pathetically grateful to him for knowing that, because I still couldn’t bring myself to say the words.