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fellowshippers2007-01-18 04:40 am
cat-latin.livejournal.com) wrote in fellowshippers2007-01-18 04:40 am
Entry tags:
Fic: "Muse" (VM/DM)
Title: Muse
Author: Cat Latin
Fandom: LOTR rps
Pairings: VM/? VM/DM
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 4771
Summary: Don’t abandon what inspires you.
Notes: Written for Shanalle’s 2 Lines Challenge, 2006
Disclaimer: Sadly, I do not know the lovely men. No profits were made; no harm is intended. This is a work of fiction.
2 Lines Assigned: I never took the smile away from anybody’s face,
And that’s a desperate way to look for someone who is still a child.
Viggo is lost in his own neighborhood again. Every sharp curve of the rural road looks the same; it seems to narrow before his eyes as he carefully navigates, high beams on. He drives, his neck stiff with tension, his hands tight and sweating on the wheel, hyper-focused, like someone fighting off a deep high, just trying to get home.
He’s done no drugs or drink, and wonders if this is what a panic attack feels like.
The sun has gone just behind the hills. In the flat, almost-light, the hues of the sky and the road blend into a grayish haze. The headlights leech the last of the color from the surroundings.
Viggo coasts past the red mailbox marking the long dirt trail of his driveway three times before he manages to swing in. The car’s interior feels like it’s shrinking. He parks, twists his keys from the ignition and scrambles out, the groceries forgotten. An automatic light winks on, creating more shadows.
Something is wrong.
Viggo wants to think that it’s all in his head, that he’s having one of his moments, the almost, but not quite out-of-body experience that marks the beginning of an exhausting, inspired bout of work. When this happens, it feels like his lens finds the perfect story, poetry unravels across the page like spools of silk and the paint flows like, like a very flowy thing.
It all feels like that, anyway. Viggo is experienced enough to understand that the work never really changes, just his attitude toward it.
Normally he welcomes this feeling, basks in its surreal warmth. He’d retreated to his little house by the lake, burned out from two years of backbreaking work on someone else’s project, to find just this. He’d been here for…how long?
The air is thick with energy. He becomes aware of the particles and pixels of everything he sees shimmering in the air, and around the car, around the house and the trees.
“Spokeadots,” Elijah had called them one night, months and months ago, after a bottle of SoCo and some kind bud.
“Speckadots,” Orlando had corrected with a snort.
The usual sounds of Viggo’s yard are absent. The bug-chorus, the peeper frogs, the small foraging things, rustling and snapping in the undergrowth, all on sabbatical. Summer is over but it’s still too early, too sudden.
The total absence of sound is a pressure deep in Viggo’s ears. A shiver comes from nowhere and crawls its way up his spine. He grits his teeth and takes a deep, nostril-flaring breath, his eyes stubbornly on nothing but his front door.
“I see dead people,” he mutters, and lets himself into the house.
Viggo shuts the door and stands silent in the living room for what seems like hours, observing, waiting. He doesn’t know what to expect, but he knows it’s coming, and he’s hoping he’ll be ready for it.
The commotion he hears in the studio is almost a relief. He climbs the half-dozen steps up to the darkened room and flips on the light.
Dom is leaning over a work table, investigating the contents of a box filled with erasers and exacto knives. He doesn’t look up when Viggo turns on the light, merely shifts his exploration to the shelves filled with dried-out tubes of paint, dusty paper, and found objects.
Dom is in ancient jeans covered in paint, torn to shreds at the knees, frayed at the bottoms. He’s shirtless and barefoot. Viggo notices a tattoo on the nape of Dom’s neck that wasn’t there the last time he saw him. From this distance it looks like a braided infinity symbol. His fingernails and toenails are polished black.
Viggo remains still. His mind is racing but it’s giving him information in quick, rational bytes:
--Dom is in LA. Viggo knows this.
--There was no other car in his driveway.
--Dom was poking around his studio in the dark as if lights were nothing more than a fringe benefit.
--How the hell did everything in here get so damn dusty?
--This can’t be Dom.
It occurs to Viggo that he heard sounds in his house and just went to investigate. He never thought to call the cops or reach for some convenient, blunt or sharpened object.
Dom tries to open the door to the darkroom, but it’s stuck. Instead he runs his fingers through the dust covering the easel Viggo bought in New Zealand, and the antique tripod Viggo found in Red Bank, his pride and joy.
Viggo opens his mouth but he instantly knows, “what are you doing here?” is not the right question.
Dom is…different. He’s illuminated in some way that has nothing to do with the overhead light. He moves with a liquid grace that, while Viggo is sure Dom could be capable of, it just wouldn’t be Dom—it would be Dom as somebody else.
Dom doesn’t stop his exploration. It’s as if he must touch and catalogue every item in the room, but his eyes occasionally flicker to Viggo briefly and he smiles, warm but strange. Viggo suspects he’s dreaming or hallucinating, but he’s still not fooled.
The right question becomes obvious.
“Who are you?”
Now he has Dom’s full attention. “Good. That’s good. You see me, you recognize me, but you refuse to believe in only your eyes. That’s the mark of a true-blue visionary.” Dom retrieves a tube of cerulean from the floor to examine it. “Mm, I like blue.”
The voice is Dom’s, low and edged with smoke or sleep or whiskey and Viggo recalls, with a little twinge of…something, that Dom doesn’t much indulge in any of the three.
Viggo repeats, “Who are you?”
“Don’t you know me?”
Dom removes the cap from the tube and sniffs its contents appreciatively. He squeezes out a wet, thick line of blue, and rubs at it until it coats his fingers. He tastes it, blissful, like he’s licking the juice from a ripened peach.
Rationality makes a final, weak volley in Viggo’s brain. Obviously someone’s dropped Dom off at his door and he’s ridiculously, dangerously high. “That’s—I’m gonna need to call Poison Control.”
Dom chuckles and comes close, almost touching. He smells wrong, like ink, turpentine, old paper, developing fluid, and long, busy nights. None of these scents are unpleasant, or out of place, but they are wrong.
Viggo’s throat goes tight. He shouldn’t remember what Dom smells like. But these scents, the sense, all of it is familiar.
His studio is a mausoleum, dusty and stagnant. It hits him then, sharp and heartbreaking. He misses it. It makes no sense, he’s right here, but the sense of loss is real. The shock steals his breath and burns his eyes.
Pressure builds in his chest. Viggo stands emptied: lungs, chest, heart, gut, all. He wavers where he stands, and the edges of his vision begin to gray.
The message comes from somewhere else, directly to his brain: Live or die. Right now.
Viggo is not ready to die. Dom chooses this moment to press close to Viggo and wind an arm around his neck. He pulls Viggo down for a kiss, and for a moment Viggo is staring into familiar eyes, but they shine with preternatural intent.
Viggo’s eyes slam shut and he expects the illusion to fade, for the pressure against his skin to fade, to taste nothing but the stale air of his neglected studio. Then Dom’s mouth is there on his, lush and warm and his breath, Viggo inhales his breath, greedy and desperate, a deep, perfect, full-body hit, better than caffeine or cold water.
Viggo is wide awake now, and it hurts.
Dom the unreal, Dom the illusion, stands there, looking up at him serenely. Viggo takes a step back and demands, “Who are you?”
Dom grins and gives a one-shouldered shrug. Viggo’s eyes move to his throat and chest, then he forces himself to look away.
“Call me what you will. Calliope? Thalia?” Dom’s grin turns to a smirk. “Though I’m not sporting the tits now, am I? Or maybe Himeros, yeah? That’s a good one.”
He reaches up and touches Viggo’s face, strokes his thumb across his mouth and Viggo fails to resist parting his lips. Dom says, low and confidential, “Don’t abandon what inspires you,” and right then, at Viggo’s most lucid moment of the evening, Dom vanishes in a blur of cerulean blue.
The next few hours are about looking for clues. Viggo is terrified to discover that he came to the house by the lake almost three months ago. Frantically he follows the paper trail, paging through his planner, checking his email and his phone messages. He makes a few quick calls and is quickly relieved when he discovers he’s been taking care of business. The child is safe with his mother, the animals are cared for, family and friends know where he is.
One friend in particular has left a number of emails and phone messages. Viggo hasn’t opened or listened to any of them.
At the bathroom mirror, Viggo carefully ignores the smears of blue on his neck, collarbone and chest, but he can’t help but notice and wonder that there is no paint on his mouth. He is not thinking about Dom, or Himeros, or whoever, whatever that was.
He goes back to his studio and looks at the opaque layer of dust covering everything, at the piles of junk littering the floor and climbing the walls. It looks like the room of a crazy shut-in.
After a lengthy search, he unearths his camera from a pile of old newspapers. It seems intact. He recalls a leather-bound book, filled with blank, creamy pages, that was once an extension of his arm. He recovers it, nestled amongst dust bunnies in the crack between his desk and the wall.
The last entry was dated June 23. He recognizes the handwriting as the uber-drunk version of his own:
I think I’d rather be lost than take that particular trip.
That way lies a madness not of my choosing.
Viggo gut turns in dismay; he remembers that date. He had experienced an epiphany. The wrong kind of epiphany.
He’s not happy to be caught in the concept of wrong. Viggo is not a religious man in the traditional sense, but he is a spiritual one. Instead of a confessional, he finds himself taking a serious inventory of his karmic debt. What might he have done in his life to come to a place of such confusion, such inner conflict?
What was he chasing?
The tomb-like studio is too much. He leaves it and gratefully, desperately, plunges into the most mindless tasks he can find. He wipes down the bathroom fixtures, sweeps the floors, and scrubs dishes covered in mold. By the time he’s ready to sleep, all evidence of his holiday from sanity are erased. Except for the studio.
In the morning, Viggo brings his coffee with him down the long, rickety staircase behind his house, to the dock. The sky is gray and the water churns fitfully against the posts, as if a motorboat passed, but it’s the off-season, and all of his already distant neighbors have left town.
The old wood is cool and damp under his bare feet. Viggo has a vague memory of taking pictures down here on the first day he arrived. His gut clenches at the idea of going in there to search for them. He sips his coffee and looks at the choppy water and waits for his curiosity to win the fight with his fear. Then he slowly climbs the stairs, back to the house.
The door to the darkroom is beyond stubborn. He considers carefully removing the hinges, but in the end he wrenches at the catch with a crowbar and applies his shoulder, with as much force as he can, again and again to the weather-damaged wood.
The door flies open with a bang. Viggo hears the knob punch a hole in the wall. Plaster and dust quickly find his nose and eyes as he stands, rubbing his shoulder.
Dom is perched on Viggo’s work table, perusing a stack of photos balanced on his knees. His toes flex and curl against the cracked leather seat of the stool. He did not flinch or look up at Viggo’s destructive entrance.
“Himeros,” Viggo says.
“If it pleases you,” Dom replies.
The photos are almost completely over-developed, but Dom studies them like they are rich with detail. The basins are dried of their fluids and the room smells stale.
“I really like this one.” Dom holds up what looks like an eight-by-ten glossy of a polar bear in a snowstorm. “It tells a complete story.”
He strokes long fingers across the damaged photo and blows lightly across its surface. The image emerges like a Polaroid. It’s a black and white of the old boat at the end of Viggo’s dock. The paint is cracked all over, revealing weather-smoothed wood. Nestled together, within the curved bottom of the boat, an empty bottle, an owl feather and some tangled rope make an accidental still-life.
Dom holds the photo up to the light and murmurs, almost chants, “What nourishes us. What binds us. What frees us. What guides us.”
Viggo shivers and rubs at the dust in his eyes. “What have I been doing these last three months?”
“Nothing. Watching TV. Trash-picking. Playing computer games. You made level fifty in City of Heroes. Elijah would be proud. Are you pleased with your accomplishments?”
Viggo is shaking all over with suppressed emotion. “I must have needed the rest.”
“You needed the escape.”
“I don’t like you,” Viggo announces loudly.
“No,” the disturbingly Dom-like thing agrees. “But you still want to touch me.” Dom’s eyes glitter up at Viggo from under his lashes. He stretches artfully, making his tattered low-riders dip lower, and Viggo’s eyes stroke across the shadows under his ribs and hips. The photos spill to the floor.
“So touch me.”
Viggo reaches out, he tells himself, to shove him, or maybe even punch him, but Dom grabs his wrist and draws him in, embraces him. Reason has completely left the building, because not only is Viggo immediately hard and grinding up against Dom as if the friction might keep him alive, he is also suddenly, inexplicably naked.
Dom’s embrace, his form, is changing, from something firm and organic, into something that pulsates and glows and feels just as real. The energy surrounds Viggo slowly, pressure spreading around his torso, down to his belly and around his aching cock, working its way out to his feet, arms and head.
Viggo has lost all sense of up or down, whether he’s still standing or has fallen to the floor. He could be levitating, for all he knows, but wherever he is, he is both terrified and aroused to the point of pain. As soon as he’s completely surrounded and unable to move, he immediately knows what will happen next. He opens his mouth to scream just as the energy pushes its way into every opening of his body.
When Viggo wakes up, he’s alone on the floor of the darkroom, sprawled out upon layers of crushed photographs. His belly is sticky; his cock is spent. His body is covered in plaster and dust, like another forgotten item in his studio.
The next thing to do, if Viggo were an average person, would be to pack and run, and never think of it again. But Viggo’s heart’s not in the charade, and he suspects this creature will follow him to every dusty, darkened studio he might ever enter, for as long as he lives.
More cleansing, then. Viggo begins with himself. He stalks naked down the long dock, not giving a fuck who sees him, and launches himself into the freezing water.
Goose-bumped and soaking, he drags the huge outside trash barrel into the studio and plants it in the center of the room.
The rest of the day is a blur of tearing down and building up.
He was sweating a little, working a lot, sneezing sometimes from the dust as he unearthed books and tools and supplies from mountains of laundry, newspapers and trash. A CD blared in the background, some thumping, eclectic mix Elijah mailed him weeks ago. Viggo works, and doesn’t notice that he’s dancing, too.
A creative space that’s gone to squalor can be heartbreaking, but one that has been cleaned, arranged and polished to perfection, that’s not just finished but ready, can be daunting as hell. Viggo looks around at the clean surfaces and neatly pigeonholed supplies and feels like he’s in the cockpit of a plane, with no instructions on how to fly.
He’s reassured himself in the past that he would never face a creative block because he already had enough ideas to last him until he died, not to mention the new ones that would continue to emerge. But that list in his head is locked right now.
“You won’t be able to work until you resolve this,” an almost-familiar voice says, somewhere behind Viggo.
“And I suppose you have something to do with that!” Viggo snaps.
“I’m trying to help you!” Dom steps into Viggo’s line-of-sight, glaring. “Christ, are you always so bloody stubborn?”
He grasps Viggo by the arms and shakes him a little, says softly, “Don’t abandon what inspires you.” Then softer still, the creature speaks the gentle, terrifying truth: “Don’t abandon who inspires you.”
The breath catches in Viggo’s throat; his shoulders stiffen, and after a moment, they slump. He shakes his head tiredly. “But…something like that…a creative catalyst…it should be something more universal.” Dom is silent. Viggo twists out of his grasp. “Well, shouldn’t it? It should be something less personal.”
“Fuck that! So what if it’s the Statue of Liberty or a gum wrapper or a man, when on earth did you become tangled in shoulds?”
“When I met you--when I met him.” Viggo sits down on the floor and tries to gather himself, but he’s begun to speak the truth and he can’t stop. “As soon as we kissed. When I stopped understanding what I was looking for.” He laughs a little then, feeling exhausted and slightly crazy. “You know, I used to be so sure of the path. What am I looking for?”
“What does it matter? Maybe you’ve found it. Who cares?” Dom--Himeros, sits down next to him, draping an arm around his shoulders. He kisses Viggo’s cheek, nuzzles at his neck, and Viggo lets him. “Do you think I chose this form just to torment you? You chose this form, whether you realize it or not. That’s how it works. And what would he say about all this? He’d tell you that life is too short, and to get the fuck over yourself. Wouldn’t he?”
This time, Viggo is ready for the embrace. He doesn’t struggle, and instead of an invasion, he gets the memories--this time without the pain.
Viggo can’t remember how it started, what made him believe that Dom should be treated like a precious antiquity, something to be placed behind velvet ropes and admired, but never touched. But Viggo couldn’t help himself, he needed some kind of outlet for what he was feeling, so he photographed Dom.
His lens captured Dom more than any of the others: cruising the streets of the city, full of hell and energy; hung-over on that huge, ugly sofa in Billy’s flat; gliding through his asanas on the beach at dawn.
Dom was elemental; he had an elegant simplicity, and a natural understanding of so many things that Viggo struggled to learn.
Then at that final party, after too many drinks, Viggo found himself pinning Dom against the wall of an empty room, clutching at his warm, solid body, tasting his mouth and inhaling as much of him as he possibly could, and Dom didn’t mind at all.
Then some demon in Viggo’s head shouted, wrong! And he stumbled away guilty, wiping Dom’s taste from his mouth with the back of his hand.
Worse, he apologized.
“Why?” Dom had asked, and, as always, he didn’t fuck around. “You straight?”
“No, well, sometimes. But that’s not why.”
“You think I’m too young?”
“No!”
“Then why not?”
Because you’re beautiful to me in too many ways, ways that I’ve only ever applied to other things in my life. Because we seem to share a silent, perfect language. Because it scares me.
But all of that was left unsaid, and by the end of the week, Viggo was on a plane to the house by the lake.
Himeros sits on the studio floor facing Viggo, wearing Dom’s skin again.
“I’ve been avoiding Dom for months,” Viggo tells him, like it’s a secret. “Why does he keep calling me?”
“He needs you. He’s wasting away on Elijah’s couch, waiting for something to happen. He’s forgotten that he’s what happens.” He flashes Viggo a lopsided grin, and Viggo almost forgets he’s not looking at Dom.
“Also, he keeps having these fucked-up encounters with some wretched creature who looks just like…someone he can’t stop thinking about.”
“Bastard.”
Himeros beams like it’s the best compliment he’s had in ages. “Yeah, I like you too, fuck-knows why. So just this once, I’ll make it easy for you.”
And with a final kiss, and a wink, he vanishes.
***
There’s a sound, made flat by water and distance, like someone shouting his name.
Viggo lies wrapped in a sleeping bag at the bottom of the little boat, half-dozing, half looking at the stars. He lifts his head, and all he sees in the dark is a small point of warm light, the peaceful shimmer of the hurricane lantern he’s set at the end of the dock.
He hears the rumble-thud of someone running fast down the stairs. Viggo mutters, “Shouldn’t you be in the studio eating pencils or something?”
Wait a minute.
Viggo sits up fast enough that the boat tilts precariously. In the dark, he can just make out the outline of Dom, standing tense at the end of the dock.
“I saw your car,” Dom says. “All the lights were on. I thought—”
Viggo scrambles for the tether and starts to haul himself to the dock.
“What did you do?”
“Got on a plane. Rented a car. You know the drill.”
Dom helps him out of the boat and Viggo hugs him tight enough to feel Dom’s back crack, and make him squeak. Then he’s stroking his thumbs across Dom’s jaw and kissing him hungrily until Dom tugs him by the hand and says, “Upstairs, where I can see you.”
When they walk past the studio to the bedroom, Viggo looks at the door uneasily, but he senses they’re alone.
No more pretense then, no more bullshit. Viggo sits on the edge of his bed and drags Dom’s face down to his and kisses him dizzy. Dom’s hanging on to Viggo’s shirt, gasping, talking as much as he can around Viggo’s lips and tongue and teeth, “can’t believe it, missed you every day, love you, want you so fucking bad,” and all Viggo can manage back is “yes, yes, yes, fuck yes.”
Dom straightens and Viggo nuzzles at the denim covering Dom’s erection, runs his hands up the backs of Dom’s legs, cups his ass. Dom swears and his hands go to Viggo’s head. Viggo mouths at the line of Dom’s cock through the jeans until Dom’s legs begin to tremble, and he goes down to the carpet on his knees. Viggo gathers Dom between his legs and Dom goes back to kissing him voraciously, biting Viggo’s lips and panting into his mouth.
Viggo wants Dom’s hands and mouth all over him, wants Dom’s cock in him now, wants Dom to fuck him into the mattress. Viggo must say some of this out loud, or his body says it, because Dom snarls some kind of affirmative that goes straight to Viggo’s cock and shoves him down on the bed.
He straddles Viggo and attacks his belt buckle. Before he knows it, Viggo is deftly removed of his shirt and jeans and Dom is standing up to quickly peel off his own. Then Dom’s warm skin is all over him.
This is no illusion, no sentient idea cloaked in skin. Viggo can feel Dom covering him, solid and satisfying, he can smell his sweat, can taste the bitter-salt tang of his desire, can feel Dom hard and leaking against his belly.
Viggo blindly gestures toward what he hopes is the direction of the bedside table and Dom gets it; he opens the drawer and scrambles for the bottle of lube. Viggo spreads his knees, lifts his hips and sighs when Dom’s fingers touch and find him, cool and slippery.
Dom runs another slippery hand around Viggo’s balls and up the shaft of his cock. Viggo’s back comes up off the mattress and he pumps his hips; desperate, pleading sounds carry on his breath. He’ll beg, he’ll fucking cry if he has to.
Dom strokes around Viggo’s hole with the head of his cock and pushes in carefully, too carefully, for Viggo. He pushes up, impatient, but Dom will only give him inch by excruciating inch. Once he’s in, balls deep, flush against Viggo’s body, hot and perfect, he doesn’t move.
Dom’s biting his lip, his brow is creased and he’s deliberately slowing his breathing. Viggo can feel the tremor in Dom’s body, can feel that he’s trying to rein in the instinctive thrust of his hips. He could be reciting baseball statistics in his head for all Viggo knows, but he’s beautiful, trying so hard to make it last. Viggo wants to see him come apart.
“Now,” Viggo bites out, and Dom laughs, the momentary tension eased.
“Please,” Viggo says, and Dom firms his grip on Viggo’s hips and rocks into him, slow, deep, thorough movement, with a wicked little shove at the end that hits the spot so sweetly. Then Dom’s shaking with restraint, and his movements become erratic.
“No,” he whispers, and his eyes squeeze shut.
“Yes, fuck, yes!”
Dom cries out, and shudders his release into Viggo, who’s writhing under him, still hard, and watching, rapt.
Then Dom is pulling out gently and sliding down Viggo’s sweaty body, coaxing his thighs apart again. He slides a couple fingers into Viggo’s ass and presses just so and swallows down his cock. Viggo arches up and comes violently.
When he recovers, Viggo realizes that Dom is already sleeping, his head pillowed on Viggo’s thigh. Jet lag must have finally kicked in, Viggo thinks with a smile and wrestles Dom into a more comfortable position. He pulls the blanket over both of them and has about five seconds to enjoy watching Dom sleep before he’s unconscious.
Viggo wakes with the sun in his eyes, and Dom dozing beside him.
There is a vague shimmer of something at the foot of his bed, unnatural, and sort of man-shaped, that is not sunlight. Himeros, Viggo presumes, paying a morning call.
Viggo asks, “So what happens now? Do I write poems celebrating his eyes, or the end of his nose? Or take pictures of him tangled in the sheets? Do we move to a garret in Paris so I can become tortured and misunderstood and he can waste the best years of his life supporting me?”
Dom is sitting up. His eyes are still heavy with sleep, his jaw dark with stubble. Bed head has completely flattened one side of his hair, and his face is a map of sheet wrinkles. He is the most exquisite thing Viggo has ever seen.
Dom is looking at the foot of the bed, sees what Viggo sees. Dom’s not the least bit afraid, and Viggo’s not surprised by that at all.
“Fucker,” Dom mutters, but he’s smiling. He rubs his face and yawns. “So, I don’t know about Paris, but how about some coffee? Maybe toast? Then we could see what happens next.”
The vision at the foot of the bed fades. Viggo smiles.
“That’s the best idea I’ve heard all week.”
He’s done no drugs or drink, and wonders if this is what a panic attack feels like.
The sun has gone just behind the hills. In the flat, almost-light, the hues of the sky and the road blend into a grayish haze. The headlights leech the last of the color from the surroundings.
Viggo coasts past the red mailbox marking the long dirt trail of his driveway three times before he manages to swing in. The car’s interior feels like it’s shrinking. He parks, twists his keys from the ignition and scrambles out, the groceries forgotten. An automatic light winks on, creating more shadows.
Something is wrong.
Viggo wants to think that it’s all in his head, that he’s having one of his moments, the almost, but not quite out-of-body experience that marks the beginning of an exhausting, inspired bout of work. When this happens, it feels like his lens finds the perfect story, poetry unravels across the page like spools of silk and the paint flows like, like a very flowy thing.
It all feels like that, anyway. Viggo is experienced enough to understand that the work never really changes, just his attitude toward it.
Normally he welcomes this feeling, basks in its surreal warmth. He’d retreated to his little house by the lake, burned out from two years of backbreaking work on someone else’s project, to find just this. He’d been here for…how long?
The air is thick with energy. He becomes aware of the particles and pixels of everything he sees shimmering in the air, and around the car, around the house and the trees.
“Spokeadots,” Elijah had called them one night, months and months ago, after a bottle of SoCo and some kind bud.
“Speckadots,” Orlando had corrected with a snort.
The usual sounds of Viggo’s yard are absent. The bug-chorus, the peeper frogs, the small foraging things, rustling and snapping in the undergrowth, all on sabbatical. Summer is over but it’s still too early, too sudden.
The total absence of sound is a pressure deep in Viggo’s ears. A shiver comes from nowhere and crawls its way up his spine. He grits his teeth and takes a deep, nostril-flaring breath, his eyes stubbornly on nothing but his front door.
“I see dead people,” he mutters, and lets himself into the house.
Viggo shuts the door and stands silent in the living room for what seems like hours, observing, waiting. He doesn’t know what to expect, but he knows it’s coming, and he’s hoping he’ll be ready for it.
The commotion he hears in the studio is almost a relief. He climbs the half-dozen steps up to the darkened room and flips on the light.
Dom is leaning over a work table, investigating the contents of a box filled with erasers and exacto knives. He doesn’t look up when Viggo turns on the light, merely shifts his exploration to the shelves filled with dried-out tubes of paint, dusty paper, and found objects.
Dom is in ancient jeans covered in paint, torn to shreds at the knees, frayed at the bottoms. He’s shirtless and barefoot. Viggo notices a tattoo on the nape of Dom’s neck that wasn’t there the last time he saw him. From this distance it looks like a braided infinity symbol. His fingernails and toenails are polished black.
Viggo remains still. His mind is racing but it’s giving him information in quick, rational bytes:
--Dom is in LA. Viggo knows this.
--There was no other car in his driveway.
--Dom was poking around his studio in the dark as if lights were nothing more than a fringe benefit.
--How the hell did everything in here get so damn dusty?
--This can’t be Dom.
It occurs to Viggo that he heard sounds in his house and just went to investigate. He never thought to call the cops or reach for some convenient, blunt or sharpened object.
Dom tries to open the door to the darkroom, but it’s stuck. Instead he runs his fingers through the dust covering the easel Viggo bought in New Zealand, and the antique tripod Viggo found in Red Bank, his pride and joy.
Viggo opens his mouth but he instantly knows, “what are you doing here?” is not the right question.
Dom is…different. He’s illuminated in some way that has nothing to do with the overhead light. He moves with a liquid grace that, while Viggo is sure Dom could be capable of, it just wouldn’t be Dom—it would be Dom as somebody else.
Dom doesn’t stop his exploration. It’s as if he must touch and catalogue every item in the room, but his eyes occasionally flicker to Viggo briefly and he smiles, warm but strange. Viggo suspects he’s dreaming or hallucinating, but he’s still not fooled.
The right question becomes obvious.
“Who are you?”
Now he has Dom’s full attention. “Good. That’s good. You see me, you recognize me, but you refuse to believe in only your eyes. That’s the mark of a true-blue visionary.” Dom retrieves a tube of cerulean from the floor to examine it. “Mm, I like blue.”
The voice is Dom’s, low and edged with smoke or sleep or whiskey and Viggo recalls, with a little twinge of…something, that Dom doesn’t much indulge in any of the three.
Viggo repeats, “Who are you?”
“Don’t you know me?”
Dom removes the cap from the tube and sniffs its contents appreciatively. He squeezes out a wet, thick line of blue, and rubs at it until it coats his fingers. He tastes it, blissful, like he’s licking the juice from a ripened peach.
Rationality makes a final, weak volley in Viggo’s brain. Obviously someone’s dropped Dom off at his door and he’s ridiculously, dangerously high. “That’s—I’m gonna need to call Poison Control.”
Dom chuckles and comes close, almost touching. He smells wrong, like ink, turpentine, old paper, developing fluid, and long, busy nights. None of these scents are unpleasant, or out of place, but they are wrong.
Viggo’s throat goes tight. He shouldn’t remember what Dom smells like. But these scents, the sense, all of it is familiar.
His studio is a mausoleum, dusty and stagnant. It hits him then, sharp and heartbreaking. He misses it. It makes no sense, he’s right here, but the sense of loss is real. The shock steals his breath and burns his eyes.
Pressure builds in his chest. Viggo stands emptied: lungs, chest, heart, gut, all. He wavers where he stands, and the edges of his vision begin to gray.
The message comes from somewhere else, directly to his brain: Live or die. Right now.
Viggo is not ready to die. Dom chooses this moment to press close to Viggo and wind an arm around his neck. He pulls Viggo down for a kiss, and for a moment Viggo is staring into familiar eyes, but they shine with preternatural intent.
Viggo’s eyes slam shut and he expects the illusion to fade, for the pressure against his skin to fade, to taste nothing but the stale air of his neglected studio. Then Dom’s mouth is there on his, lush and warm and his breath, Viggo inhales his breath, greedy and desperate, a deep, perfect, full-body hit, better than caffeine or cold water.
Viggo is wide awake now, and it hurts.
Dom the unreal, Dom the illusion, stands there, looking up at him serenely. Viggo takes a step back and demands, “Who are you?”
Dom grins and gives a one-shouldered shrug. Viggo’s eyes move to his throat and chest, then he forces himself to look away.
“Call me what you will. Calliope? Thalia?” Dom’s grin turns to a smirk. “Though I’m not sporting the tits now, am I? Or maybe Himeros, yeah? That’s a good one.”
He reaches up and touches Viggo’s face, strokes his thumb across his mouth and Viggo fails to resist parting his lips. Dom says, low and confidential, “Don’t abandon what inspires you,” and right then, at Viggo’s most lucid moment of the evening, Dom vanishes in a blur of cerulean blue.
The next few hours are about looking for clues. Viggo is terrified to discover that he came to the house by the lake almost three months ago. Frantically he follows the paper trail, paging through his planner, checking his email and his phone messages. He makes a few quick calls and is quickly relieved when he discovers he’s been taking care of business. The child is safe with his mother, the animals are cared for, family and friends know where he is.
One friend in particular has left a number of emails and phone messages. Viggo hasn’t opened or listened to any of them.
At the bathroom mirror, Viggo carefully ignores the smears of blue on his neck, collarbone and chest, but he can’t help but notice and wonder that there is no paint on his mouth. He is not thinking about Dom, or Himeros, or whoever, whatever that was.
He goes back to his studio and looks at the opaque layer of dust covering everything, at the piles of junk littering the floor and climbing the walls. It looks like the room of a crazy shut-in.
After a lengthy search, he unearths his camera from a pile of old newspapers. It seems intact. He recalls a leather-bound book, filled with blank, creamy pages, that was once an extension of his arm. He recovers it, nestled amongst dust bunnies in the crack between his desk and the wall.
The last entry was dated June 23. He recognizes the handwriting as the uber-drunk version of his own:
I think I’d rather be lost than take that particular trip.
That way lies a madness not of my choosing.
Viggo gut turns in dismay; he remembers that date. He had experienced an epiphany. The wrong kind of epiphany.
He’s not happy to be caught in the concept of wrong. Viggo is not a religious man in the traditional sense, but he is a spiritual one. Instead of a confessional, he finds himself taking a serious inventory of his karmic debt. What might he have done in his life to come to a place of such confusion, such inner conflict?
What was he chasing?
The tomb-like studio is too much. He leaves it and gratefully, desperately, plunges into the most mindless tasks he can find. He wipes down the bathroom fixtures, sweeps the floors, and scrubs dishes covered in mold. By the time he’s ready to sleep, all evidence of his holiday from sanity are erased. Except for the studio.
In the morning, Viggo brings his coffee with him down the long, rickety staircase behind his house, to the dock. The sky is gray and the water churns fitfully against the posts, as if a motorboat passed, but it’s the off-season, and all of his already distant neighbors have left town.
The old wood is cool and damp under his bare feet. Viggo has a vague memory of taking pictures down here on the first day he arrived. His gut clenches at the idea of going in there to search for them. He sips his coffee and looks at the choppy water and waits for his curiosity to win the fight with his fear. Then he slowly climbs the stairs, back to the house.
The door to the darkroom is beyond stubborn. He considers carefully removing the hinges, but in the end he wrenches at the catch with a crowbar and applies his shoulder, with as much force as he can, again and again to the weather-damaged wood.
The door flies open with a bang. Viggo hears the knob punch a hole in the wall. Plaster and dust quickly find his nose and eyes as he stands, rubbing his shoulder.
Dom is perched on Viggo’s work table, perusing a stack of photos balanced on his knees. His toes flex and curl against the cracked leather seat of the stool. He did not flinch or look up at Viggo’s destructive entrance.
“Himeros,” Viggo says.
“If it pleases you,” Dom replies.
The photos are almost completely over-developed, but Dom studies them like they are rich with detail. The basins are dried of their fluids and the room smells stale.
“I really like this one.” Dom holds up what looks like an eight-by-ten glossy of a polar bear in a snowstorm. “It tells a complete story.”
He strokes long fingers across the damaged photo and blows lightly across its surface. The image emerges like a Polaroid. It’s a black and white of the old boat at the end of Viggo’s dock. The paint is cracked all over, revealing weather-smoothed wood. Nestled together, within the curved bottom of the boat, an empty bottle, an owl feather and some tangled rope make an accidental still-life.
Dom holds the photo up to the light and murmurs, almost chants, “What nourishes us. What binds us. What frees us. What guides us.”
Viggo shivers and rubs at the dust in his eyes. “What have I been doing these last three months?”
“Nothing. Watching TV. Trash-picking. Playing computer games. You made level fifty in City of Heroes. Elijah would be proud. Are you pleased with your accomplishments?”
Viggo is shaking all over with suppressed emotion. “I must have needed the rest.”
“You needed the escape.”
“I don’t like you,” Viggo announces loudly.
“No,” the disturbingly Dom-like thing agrees. “But you still want to touch me.” Dom’s eyes glitter up at Viggo from under his lashes. He stretches artfully, making his tattered low-riders dip lower, and Viggo’s eyes stroke across the shadows under his ribs and hips. The photos spill to the floor.
“So touch me.”
Viggo reaches out, he tells himself, to shove him, or maybe even punch him, but Dom grabs his wrist and draws him in, embraces him. Reason has completely left the building, because not only is Viggo immediately hard and grinding up against Dom as if the friction might keep him alive, he is also suddenly, inexplicably naked.
Dom’s embrace, his form, is changing, from something firm and organic, into something that pulsates and glows and feels just as real. The energy surrounds Viggo slowly, pressure spreading around his torso, down to his belly and around his aching cock, working its way out to his feet, arms and head.
Viggo has lost all sense of up or down, whether he’s still standing or has fallen to the floor. He could be levitating, for all he knows, but wherever he is, he is both terrified and aroused to the point of pain. As soon as he’s completely surrounded and unable to move, he immediately knows what will happen next. He opens his mouth to scream just as the energy pushes its way into every opening of his body.
When Viggo wakes up, he’s alone on the floor of the darkroom, sprawled out upon layers of crushed photographs. His belly is sticky; his cock is spent. His body is covered in plaster and dust, like another forgotten item in his studio.
The next thing to do, if Viggo were an average person, would be to pack and run, and never think of it again. But Viggo’s heart’s not in the charade, and he suspects this creature will follow him to every dusty, darkened studio he might ever enter, for as long as he lives.
More cleansing, then. Viggo begins with himself. He stalks naked down the long dock, not giving a fuck who sees him, and launches himself into the freezing water.
Goose-bumped and soaking, he drags the huge outside trash barrel into the studio and plants it in the center of the room.
The rest of the day is a blur of tearing down and building up.
He was sweating a little, working a lot, sneezing sometimes from the dust as he unearthed books and tools and supplies from mountains of laundry, newspapers and trash. A CD blared in the background, some thumping, eclectic mix Elijah mailed him weeks ago. Viggo works, and doesn’t notice that he’s dancing, too.
A creative space that’s gone to squalor can be heartbreaking, but one that has been cleaned, arranged and polished to perfection, that’s not just finished but ready, can be daunting as hell. Viggo looks around at the clean surfaces and neatly pigeonholed supplies and feels like he’s in the cockpit of a plane, with no instructions on how to fly.
He’s reassured himself in the past that he would never face a creative block because he already had enough ideas to last him until he died, not to mention the new ones that would continue to emerge. But that list in his head is locked right now.
“You won’t be able to work until you resolve this,” an almost-familiar voice says, somewhere behind Viggo.
“And I suppose you have something to do with that!” Viggo snaps.
“I’m trying to help you!” Dom steps into Viggo’s line-of-sight, glaring. “Christ, are you always so bloody stubborn?”
He grasps Viggo by the arms and shakes him a little, says softly, “Don’t abandon what inspires you.” Then softer still, the creature speaks the gentle, terrifying truth: “Don’t abandon who inspires you.”
The breath catches in Viggo’s throat; his shoulders stiffen, and after a moment, they slump. He shakes his head tiredly. “But…something like that…a creative catalyst…it should be something more universal.” Dom is silent. Viggo twists out of his grasp. “Well, shouldn’t it? It should be something less personal.”
“Fuck that! So what if it’s the Statue of Liberty or a gum wrapper or a man, when on earth did you become tangled in shoulds?”
“When I met you--when I met him.” Viggo sits down on the floor and tries to gather himself, but he’s begun to speak the truth and he can’t stop. “As soon as we kissed. When I stopped understanding what I was looking for.” He laughs a little then, feeling exhausted and slightly crazy. “You know, I used to be so sure of the path. What am I looking for?”
“What does it matter? Maybe you’ve found it. Who cares?” Dom--Himeros, sits down next to him, draping an arm around his shoulders. He kisses Viggo’s cheek, nuzzles at his neck, and Viggo lets him. “Do you think I chose this form just to torment you? You chose this form, whether you realize it or not. That’s how it works. And what would he say about all this? He’d tell you that life is too short, and to get the fuck over yourself. Wouldn’t he?”
This time, Viggo is ready for the embrace. He doesn’t struggle, and instead of an invasion, he gets the memories--this time without the pain.
Viggo can’t remember how it started, what made him believe that Dom should be treated like a precious antiquity, something to be placed behind velvet ropes and admired, but never touched. But Viggo couldn’t help himself, he needed some kind of outlet for what he was feeling, so he photographed Dom.
His lens captured Dom more than any of the others: cruising the streets of the city, full of hell and energy; hung-over on that huge, ugly sofa in Billy’s flat; gliding through his asanas on the beach at dawn.
Dom was elemental; he had an elegant simplicity, and a natural understanding of so many things that Viggo struggled to learn.
Then at that final party, after too many drinks, Viggo found himself pinning Dom against the wall of an empty room, clutching at his warm, solid body, tasting his mouth and inhaling as much of him as he possibly could, and Dom didn’t mind at all.
Then some demon in Viggo’s head shouted, wrong! And he stumbled away guilty, wiping Dom’s taste from his mouth with the back of his hand.
Worse, he apologized.
“Why?” Dom had asked, and, as always, he didn’t fuck around. “You straight?”
“No, well, sometimes. But that’s not why.”
“You think I’m too young?”
“No!”
“Then why not?”
Because you’re beautiful to me in too many ways, ways that I’ve only ever applied to other things in my life. Because we seem to share a silent, perfect language. Because it scares me.
But all of that was left unsaid, and by the end of the week, Viggo was on a plane to the house by the lake.
Himeros sits on the studio floor facing Viggo, wearing Dom’s skin again.
“I’ve been avoiding Dom for months,” Viggo tells him, like it’s a secret. “Why does he keep calling me?”
“He needs you. He’s wasting away on Elijah’s couch, waiting for something to happen. He’s forgotten that he’s what happens.” He flashes Viggo a lopsided grin, and Viggo almost forgets he’s not looking at Dom.
“Also, he keeps having these fucked-up encounters with some wretched creature who looks just like…someone he can’t stop thinking about.”
“Bastard.”
Himeros beams like it’s the best compliment he’s had in ages. “Yeah, I like you too, fuck-knows why. So just this once, I’ll make it easy for you.”
And with a final kiss, and a wink, he vanishes.
***
There’s a sound, made flat by water and distance, like someone shouting his name.
Viggo lies wrapped in a sleeping bag at the bottom of the little boat, half-dozing, half looking at the stars. He lifts his head, and all he sees in the dark is a small point of warm light, the peaceful shimmer of the hurricane lantern he’s set at the end of the dock.
He hears the rumble-thud of someone running fast down the stairs. Viggo mutters, “Shouldn’t you be in the studio eating pencils or something?”
Wait a minute.
Viggo sits up fast enough that the boat tilts precariously. In the dark, he can just make out the outline of Dom, standing tense at the end of the dock.
“I saw your car,” Dom says. “All the lights were on. I thought—”
Viggo scrambles for the tether and starts to haul himself to the dock.
“What did you do?”
“Got on a plane. Rented a car. You know the drill.”
Dom helps him out of the boat and Viggo hugs him tight enough to feel Dom’s back crack, and make him squeak. Then he’s stroking his thumbs across Dom’s jaw and kissing him hungrily until Dom tugs him by the hand and says, “Upstairs, where I can see you.”
When they walk past the studio to the bedroom, Viggo looks at the door uneasily, but he senses they’re alone.
No more pretense then, no more bullshit. Viggo sits on the edge of his bed and drags Dom’s face down to his and kisses him dizzy. Dom’s hanging on to Viggo’s shirt, gasping, talking as much as he can around Viggo’s lips and tongue and teeth, “can’t believe it, missed you every day, love you, want you so fucking bad,” and all Viggo can manage back is “yes, yes, yes, fuck yes.”
Dom straightens and Viggo nuzzles at the denim covering Dom’s erection, runs his hands up the backs of Dom’s legs, cups his ass. Dom swears and his hands go to Viggo’s head. Viggo mouths at the line of Dom’s cock through the jeans until Dom’s legs begin to tremble, and he goes down to the carpet on his knees. Viggo gathers Dom between his legs and Dom goes back to kissing him voraciously, biting Viggo’s lips and panting into his mouth.
Viggo wants Dom’s hands and mouth all over him, wants Dom’s cock in him now, wants Dom to fuck him into the mattress. Viggo must say some of this out loud, or his body says it, because Dom snarls some kind of affirmative that goes straight to Viggo’s cock and shoves him down on the bed.
He straddles Viggo and attacks his belt buckle. Before he knows it, Viggo is deftly removed of his shirt and jeans and Dom is standing up to quickly peel off his own. Then Dom’s warm skin is all over him.
This is no illusion, no sentient idea cloaked in skin. Viggo can feel Dom covering him, solid and satisfying, he can smell his sweat, can taste the bitter-salt tang of his desire, can feel Dom hard and leaking against his belly.
Viggo blindly gestures toward what he hopes is the direction of the bedside table and Dom gets it; he opens the drawer and scrambles for the bottle of lube. Viggo spreads his knees, lifts his hips and sighs when Dom’s fingers touch and find him, cool and slippery.
Dom runs another slippery hand around Viggo’s balls and up the shaft of his cock. Viggo’s back comes up off the mattress and he pumps his hips; desperate, pleading sounds carry on his breath. He’ll beg, he’ll fucking cry if he has to.
Dom strokes around Viggo’s hole with the head of his cock and pushes in carefully, too carefully, for Viggo. He pushes up, impatient, but Dom will only give him inch by excruciating inch. Once he’s in, balls deep, flush against Viggo’s body, hot and perfect, he doesn’t move.
Dom’s biting his lip, his brow is creased and he’s deliberately slowing his breathing. Viggo can feel the tremor in Dom’s body, can feel that he’s trying to rein in the instinctive thrust of his hips. He could be reciting baseball statistics in his head for all Viggo knows, but he’s beautiful, trying so hard to make it last. Viggo wants to see him come apart.
“Now,” Viggo bites out, and Dom laughs, the momentary tension eased.
“Please,” Viggo says, and Dom firms his grip on Viggo’s hips and rocks into him, slow, deep, thorough movement, with a wicked little shove at the end that hits the spot so sweetly. Then Dom’s shaking with restraint, and his movements become erratic.
“No,” he whispers, and his eyes squeeze shut.
“Yes, fuck, yes!”
Dom cries out, and shudders his release into Viggo, who’s writhing under him, still hard, and watching, rapt.
Then Dom is pulling out gently and sliding down Viggo’s sweaty body, coaxing his thighs apart again. He slides a couple fingers into Viggo’s ass and presses just so and swallows down his cock. Viggo arches up and comes violently.
When he recovers, Viggo realizes that Dom is already sleeping, his head pillowed on Viggo’s thigh. Jet lag must have finally kicked in, Viggo thinks with a smile and wrestles Dom into a more comfortable position. He pulls the blanket over both of them and has about five seconds to enjoy watching Dom sleep before he’s unconscious.
Viggo wakes with the sun in his eyes, and Dom dozing beside him.
There is a vague shimmer of something at the foot of his bed, unnatural, and sort of man-shaped, that is not sunlight. Himeros, Viggo presumes, paying a morning call.
Viggo asks, “So what happens now? Do I write poems celebrating his eyes, or the end of his nose? Or take pictures of him tangled in the sheets? Do we move to a garret in Paris so I can become tortured and misunderstood and he can waste the best years of his life supporting me?”
Dom is sitting up. His eyes are still heavy with sleep, his jaw dark with stubble. Bed head has completely flattened one side of his hair, and his face is a map of sheet wrinkles. He is the most exquisite thing Viggo has ever seen.
Dom is looking at the foot of the bed, sees what Viggo sees. Dom’s not the least bit afraid, and Viggo’s not surprised by that at all.
“Fucker,” Dom mutters, but he’s smiling. He rubs his face and yawns. “So, I don’t know about Paris, but how about some coffee? Maybe toast? Then we could see what happens next.”
The vision at the foot of the bed fades. Viggo smiles.
“That’s the best idea I’ve heard all week.”
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"No," the disturbingly Dom-like thing agrees. "But you still want to touch me." Dom's eyes glitter up at Viggo from under his lashes. He stretches artfully, making his tattered low-riders dip lower, and Viggo's eyes stroke across the shadows under his ribs and hips. The photos spill to the floor. "So touch me."
This was so good, so very very good. The atmosphere, the blurred line between reality and hallucinations or fantasies, the visions of Dom who looked and behaved like Dom but not quite--contrasted with the real Dom. Fantastic story. And excellent writing. And it's one of my favorite pairings :).
PS. If I could offer a suggestion: it's much easier to read a story if there are blank lines between all paragraphs.
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Update: done. Hope that's easier on the eyes.
whoa
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Re: whoa
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Also? I completely agree with Viggo about the beautifulness and exquisiteness that is Dom. ♥ What I wouldn't give to see those photos and paitings. ;)
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Thanks!
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I found this story as indulgent and satisfactory as premium quality dark chocolate. Very cool subject.
Merci pour le beau tableau...
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(BTW, the formatting is still funky and missing paragraph spacer lines. If you're editing in LJ's Rich Text, try plain?)
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:-D