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koulagirl666 - part 3/3
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viggorli_xmasIn Dreams (3/3)
Please see part 1 for warnings, authors notes &c.
Chapter 12
The room spun around Viggo so sudden and intense that he had to hold the bathroom sink to keep from falling down.
Orlando's blood was black.
Holy fuck, what the hell was going on?
Viggo looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. He'd only pulled on jeans after they'd come in from the fog. Goose flesh had pebbled his bare chest and arms. His face was pale, his eyes wide and hollow. He looked like he'd seen a ghost.
Was that what Orlando was? A mere ghost of the man Viggo loved?
That couldn't be true. The Orlando he'd held in his arms the night before, the Orlando who'd come back to him while they made love -- he was real, damn it. Viggo would stake his life on it. Last night Orlando had looked in Viggo's eyes and begged Viggo to believe in him one more time, and Viggo had.
No. Wait.
Not believe in him, just believe him.
And not don't let me go, but don't let me go alone.
Shit.
Viggo had let Orlando go alone, and he'd come back less than he was when he'd left. Orlando had begged him not to let that happen, and he had.
Whatever was sitting in his kitchen couldn't really be Orlando, could it? People didn't bleed black. Their eyes didn't turn black. They didn't disappear into nothingness and reappear again. Things like that just didn't happen.
Did they?
"You've lost your mind," Viggo muttered at his reflection. Too many years, too many drugs and too much booze, and far too much heartache had finally taken their toll.
Believe me one more time, Orlando had said.
Viggo had gone this far, hadn't he? He could believe one more time. There wasn't much more of him left to break.
He shook his head and concentrated on rinsing the black blood off his fingers, then retrieved the first aid supplies from his medicine cabinet. He walked back to the kitchen on legs that felt like they were made of wood.
Orlando still sat on the kitchen chair. His eyes were deeply shadowed, but his expression was nearly blank.
Viggo cleaned and wrapped the cut on the bottom of Orlando's foot without saying anything to him. When Viggo was done, he threw out the burned eggs and started over.
"I don't think I'm hungry," Orlando said.
The last thing in the world Viggo felt like doing was eating. "It's what people do," he said.
"What else do people do? What did we do?"
Viggo clenched his jaw against his frustration. How many more times would he have to relive their life together for someone who couldn't remember?
"We ate," he said. "We drank. We fucked and we made love, and we pulled pranks on our friends and they pulled pranks on us." He broke eggs in the pan and whisked them with a fork, his back to Orlando. "We traveled. We met new people, learned how they lived, made new friends. We learned things, thought about stuff we hadn't considered before. Painted. Drew. Created art and poetry." He took a deep breath. "We lived."
"Until I died."
"You didn't die."
Orlando's voice changed, and the room went dark. "But I did, luv."
Viggo whirled around. Orlando sat slumped on the kitchen chair. Behind him, the kitchen wall had disappeared into a pulsing blackness, the same dark, malevolent presence that had been outside the room last night.
Orlando's voice hadn't come from whatever sat on Viggo's kitchen chair. It had come from the dark presence in the room.
Don't run from it. Don't let me run from it.
Viggo thought he'd never been as scared as he'd been when he realized Orlando's blood was black, but he was wrong. He could barely breathe.
"You're not dead," he told the blackness. "I never believed it."
Orlando's voice seemed to come from Viggo's entire house. "Time to go."
The Orlando on Viggo's chair stirred. His eyes flew open wide when he saw the darkness. The look he threw Viggo was one of such frightened sadness that before Viggo realized what he was doing, he lunged across his kitchen and pulled Orlando from the chair and held him tight.
"If you're going again," Viggo murmured in his ear, "I'm not letting you go alone."
Orlando held on tight. "Thank you," he said, and then the room around them dissolved as the black cloud surged forward and took them both.
* * *
Chapter 13
Viggo was alone when he woke up.
He wasn't sure what he expected, but a gray metal room wasn't it.
He was sprawled out on what for a better word was a floor, but the features of the room were the same no matter where he looked -- up, down, to one side or the other. The room looked like the inside of a cube. The gray metal was featureless, neither smooth nor rough, but solid enough beneath him. He could see no lights but the room had the same soft illumination that fog did during the day.
Viggo sat up. Beneath him, the indentation in the floor made by his body smoothed away as the floor reformed itself into a flat surface.
Viggo raked his fingers through his hair and held on as if to reassure himself that he was still solid and his brain was still inside his head.
This wasn't a damn movie. The floor wasn't a special effect. That had really happened. Viggo poked at the floor with a finger and watched it dent in and then reform itself like a damn memory foam pillow.
Shit. He was well and truly fucked.
And he was alone.
"Orlando?" Viggo's voice cracked on the word. "What happened to Orlando?"
To the left of him, the gray wall became translucent. Viggo thought about backing away, but really, where could he go? He swallowed hard and waited.
"We didn't think you'd come." The voice sounded like Orlando's, but the being that stepped through the translucent wall looked less like Orlando and more like a wax sculpture. The eyes were solid black, the naked body milky white, hairless and sexless.
Viggo had to clear his throat. "Who are you?"
"What I was before your memories made me," the being said in the false Orlando voice that was as flat and featureless as the being that used it.
Tears pricked at Viggo's eyes. "You were never real."
"I have always been real."
But not Orlando. "Why?" Viggo managed to say.
Instead of Orlando's voice, the being answered with Viggo's. "We learned how they lived, made new friends. We learned things, thought about stuff we hadn't considered before."
What the hell? "You're telling me you were just visiting and decided to learn about people by tearing my life to shreds? Playing with me like I was a damn lab rat?"
Viggo got to his feet. His hands balled into fists without him even being aware of it. He'd taken two steps toward the being when a shout stopped him cold.
"Viggo, don't!"
This time the voice was the real Orlando's, and it hadn't come from the being in front of him.
It was all too much. "Stop! For fuck's sake, just stop!" The cry ripped up from deep inside Viggo and left him raw.
He collapsed on the spongy gray metal floor. He didn't see a new figure enter the rooms, didn't hear new footsteps approach. He shrank from the gentle touch at the back of his neck, scuttling away as far as he could get, hands covering his face. He didn't want to see what new cruelty waited for him.
"I need you to believe in me one more time, luv," a gentle voice said.
One more time. What could it hurt? They had already broken him.
Viggo opened his eyes.
Orlando was crouched before him, but it wasn't the Orlando of his memories. The hair was mostly gone, replaced on one side by something that shimmered and shifted like gray fog when Orlando tilted his head and grinned. That sunny grin was the same as Viggo remembered, and it was surrounded by the same wispy beard Orlando could never quite grow. There was a new scar that bisected one eyebrow, much like the scar on Viggo's lip, but Orlando's eyes...
"Orlando!" Viggo nearly bowled the both of them over with the force of his embrace. "Tell me you're real, I'm not dreaming."
Orlando choked back a sob. "I'm real. This time I swear to you that I'm real."
Orlando's hands cupped Viggo's head, and that, above all else, convinced Viggo that this was real. The other Orlando had never held him like that. His Orlando always had.
They stayed wrapped around each other in that gray cube of a room for so long that time seemed to stop. Orlando murmured nonsense in Viggo's ear and held him, and Viggo stroked his hands up and down Orlando's back. Only when Viggo came close to touching the ruined side of Orlando's skull did Orlando pull back.
"What happened to you?" Viggo asked. He couldn't seem to see that side of Orlando's head clearly.
Orlando took Viggo's hands in his own. "I was an unintended casualty," he said. "They visit. Observe. They never meant to harm."
"Casualty." Viggo couldn't make himself finish the thought.
"I died, Viggo," Orlando said it for him. "They took me from the sea and fixed me, and brought me back."
Orlando raised one of Viggo's hands to the shimmery gray stuff. Viggo's eyes told him that his fingers had disappeared into fog where Orlando's skull should be. His fingers told him that he was touching Orlando's curly hair.
"How?" Viggo asked.
Orlando shrugged and grinned. "I don't know. All I know is that they've given me my life back. At least for here."
Viggo moved his hand out of shimmering gray and cupped the side of Orlando's face. The stubble of Orlando's beard was scratchy against Viggo's palm. He thought he understood what Orlando was trying to tell him. "You can't go back."
"No."
Thoughts swirled inside Viggo's brain. He grabbed at them, trying to make sense of a situation so far outside reality, it would have been a nightmare if he wasn't actually living it.
"You can't come home," Viggo said again.
Orlando's expression confirmed the answer.
"What about me?"
Orlando looked off to the side. Viggo followed his gaze. The sexless being that wore Orlando's face was still in the room. It nodded.
"You can go," Orlando said. "But I can't follow, not even in that form. I wasn't supposed to be able to the first time, but it was the only way I could be with you again. I think they were surprised I worked it out. They've made 'alterations' since then."
Viggo thought he finally understood. Orlando had set it all up. He'd offered up his life -- their lives -- as the subject of study with the hope that they could be together one more time. As much as Viggo had believed that Orlando was still alive, Orlando had believed the two of them belonged together no matter what.
And if Orlando believed it enough to make it happen, could Viggo do otherwise?
"Can I stay?" Viggo asked.
Orlando blinked at him. "Do you realize what you'd be giving up? Everything. You could never go back. Never see Henry again. Anyone. They changed me, Viggo. They'd change you, too, if you stay."
The ache at the thought of never seeing Henry again was sharp, but not nearly as sharp as the thought of saying goodbye to Orlando forever. Henry would grieve for his dad, but even if Viggo went back, one day he would die and Henry would be alone. The rest of Viggo's friends would simply think he had run into the woods and never come back. The horses would be all right without him. TJ still remembered his tricks from the movies. He could open the pasture fence and raid the hay in the barn. He'd done it before.
Life would go on without Viggo. Viggo couldn't go on without Orlando.
"Will I still be me when they're done with me?" Viggo asked. "Will I remember us?"
Orlando's smile lit up the room. "Remembering us is why we're here."
* * *
Epilogue
Viggo ran.
He ran on a never-ending platform suspended over time and space. He ran between stars, around planets, across the black void and back again.
He ran until his legs ached and his throat burned with the memory of air he no longer needed to breathe. He ran to explore, and he ran to return back to arms that welcomed him to a home he had never imagined, not even in his wildest dreams.
His changes were all on the inside. He supposed if he were to cut himself open, he might see the same shimmery stuff that covered Orlando's skull where his own lungs used to be.
The hosts, as he'd come to think of them, seemed to look on their mostly-human traveling companions as something of an anomaly. If the hosts were continuing their study of the two of them, they were at least discrete about it. Viggo could live with that.
The hosts were mostly made of the shimmery gray stuff. The being that wore Orlando's face was a construct, little more than a study aid. If the hosts made more study aids for other civilizations, Viggo never saw them. From his point of view, he and Orlando were alone and free to explore the universe as they saw fit.
He'd experienced his only true regret when he stood with Orlando inside a clear dome and watched the Earth recede in the distance. They'd put their arms around each other for support and said goodbye to their world.
"I've never left either," Orlando said. "It seems odd to know I'm finally saying goodbye."
It had been five years. "You were there the whole time?"
Orlando nodded. "I watched. Sometimes. When I realized that you hadn't accepted that I was... what happened to me..." He shrugged. "I realized I needed to be with you, too, and decided I had to make that happen."
Sometimes Orlando came with him when Viggo ran. Viggo asked Orlando once if he could get the hosts to take their picture.
"Do you really need one?" Orlando asked in return.
No, Viggo didn't. He never had. Now, as then, all he had to do was close his eyes and he could see the two of them -- in dreams, and in reality, and in the gray space in between.
The End
Please see part 1 for warnings, authors notes &c.
Chapter 12
The room spun around Viggo so sudden and intense that he had to hold the bathroom sink to keep from falling down.
Orlando's blood was black.
Holy fuck, what the hell was going on?
Viggo looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. He'd only pulled on jeans after they'd come in from the fog. Goose flesh had pebbled his bare chest and arms. His face was pale, his eyes wide and hollow. He looked like he'd seen a ghost.
Was that what Orlando was? A mere ghost of the man Viggo loved?
That couldn't be true. The Orlando he'd held in his arms the night before, the Orlando who'd come back to him while they made love -- he was real, damn it. Viggo would stake his life on it. Last night Orlando had looked in Viggo's eyes and begged Viggo to believe in him one more time, and Viggo had.
No. Wait.
Not believe in him, just believe him.
And not don't let me go, but don't let me go alone.
Shit.
Viggo had let Orlando go alone, and he'd come back less than he was when he'd left. Orlando had begged him not to let that happen, and he had.
Whatever was sitting in his kitchen couldn't really be Orlando, could it? People didn't bleed black. Their eyes didn't turn black. They didn't disappear into nothingness and reappear again. Things like that just didn't happen.
Did they?
"You've lost your mind," Viggo muttered at his reflection. Too many years, too many drugs and too much booze, and far too much heartache had finally taken their toll.
Believe me one more time, Orlando had said.
Viggo had gone this far, hadn't he? He could believe one more time. There wasn't much more of him left to break.
He shook his head and concentrated on rinsing the black blood off his fingers, then retrieved the first aid supplies from his medicine cabinet. He walked back to the kitchen on legs that felt like they were made of wood.
Orlando still sat on the kitchen chair. His eyes were deeply shadowed, but his expression was nearly blank.
Viggo cleaned and wrapped the cut on the bottom of Orlando's foot without saying anything to him. When Viggo was done, he threw out the burned eggs and started over.
"I don't think I'm hungry," Orlando said.
The last thing in the world Viggo felt like doing was eating. "It's what people do," he said.
"What else do people do? What did we do?"
Viggo clenched his jaw against his frustration. How many more times would he have to relive their life together for someone who couldn't remember?
"We ate," he said. "We drank. We fucked and we made love, and we pulled pranks on our friends and they pulled pranks on us." He broke eggs in the pan and whisked them with a fork, his back to Orlando. "We traveled. We met new people, learned how they lived, made new friends. We learned things, thought about stuff we hadn't considered before. Painted. Drew. Created art and poetry." He took a deep breath. "We lived."
"Until I died."
"You didn't die."
Orlando's voice changed, and the room went dark. "But I did, luv."
Viggo whirled around. Orlando sat slumped on the kitchen chair. Behind him, the kitchen wall had disappeared into a pulsing blackness, the same dark, malevolent presence that had been outside the room last night.
Orlando's voice hadn't come from whatever sat on Viggo's kitchen chair. It had come from the dark presence in the room.
Don't run from it. Don't let me run from it.
Viggo thought he'd never been as scared as he'd been when he realized Orlando's blood was black, but he was wrong. He could barely breathe.
"You're not dead," he told the blackness. "I never believed it."
Orlando's voice seemed to come from Viggo's entire house. "Time to go."
The Orlando on Viggo's chair stirred. His eyes flew open wide when he saw the darkness. The look he threw Viggo was one of such frightened sadness that before Viggo realized what he was doing, he lunged across his kitchen and pulled Orlando from the chair and held him tight.
"If you're going again," Viggo murmured in his ear, "I'm not letting you go alone."
Orlando held on tight. "Thank you," he said, and then the room around them dissolved as the black cloud surged forward and took them both.
* * *
Chapter 13
Viggo was alone when he woke up.
He wasn't sure what he expected, but a gray metal room wasn't it.
He was sprawled out on what for a better word was a floor, but the features of the room were the same no matter where he looked -- up, down, to one side or the other. The room looked like the inside of a cube. The gray metal was featureless, neither smooth nor rough, but solid enough beneath him. He could see no lights but the room had the same soft illumination that fog did during the day.
Viggo sat up. Beneath him, the indentation in the floor made by his body smoothed away as the floor reformed itself into a flat surface.
Viggo raked his fingers through his hair and held on as if to reassure himself that he was still solid and his brain was still inside his head.
This wasn't a damn movie. The floor wasn't a special effect. That had really happened. Viggo poked at the floor with a finger and watched it dent in and then reform itself like a damn memory foam pillow.
Shit. He was well and truly fucked.
And he was alone.
"Orlando?" Viggo's voice cracked on the word. "What happened to Orlando?"
To the left of him, the gray wall became translucent. Viggo thought about backing away, but really, where could he go? He swallowed hard and waited.
"We didn't think you'd come." The voice sounded like Orlando's, but the being that stepped through the translucent wall looked less like Orlando and more like a wax sculpture. The eyes were solid black, the naked body milky white, hairless and sexless.
Viggo had to clear his throat. "Who are you?"
"What I was before your memories made me," the being said in the false Orlando voice that was as flat and featureless as the being that used it.
Tears pricked at Viggo's eyes. "You were never real."
"I have always been real."
But not Orlando. "Why?" Viggo managed to say.
Instead of Orlando's voice, the being answered with Viggo's. "We learned how they lived, made new friends. We learned things, thought about stuff we hadn't considered before."
What the hell? "You're telling me you were just visiting and decided to learn about people by tearing my life to shreds? Playing with me like I was a damn lab rat?"
Viggo got to his feet. His hands balled into fists without him even being aware of it. He'd taken two steps toward the being when a shout stopped him cold.
"Viggo, don't!"
This time the voice was the real Orlando's, and it hadn't come from the being in front of him.
It was all too much. "Stop! For fuck's sake, just stop!" The cry ripped up from deep inside Viggo and left him raw.
He collapsed on the spongy gray metal floor. He didn't see a new figure enter the rooms, didn't hear new footsteps approach. He shrank from the gentle touch at the back of his neck, scuttling away as far as he could get, hands covering his face. He didn't want to see what new cruelty waited for him.
"I need you to believe in me one more time, luv," a gentle voice said.
One more time. What could it hurt? They had already broken him.
Viggo opened his eyes.
Orlando was crouched before him, but it wasn't the Orlando of his memories. The hair was mostly gone, replaced on one side by something that shimmered and shifted like gray fog when Orlando tilted his head and grinned. That sunny grin was the same as Viggo remembered, and it was surrounded by the same wispy beard Orlando could never quite grow. There was a new scar that bisected one eyebrow, much like the scar on Viggo's lip, but Orlando's eyes...
"Orlando!" Viggo nearly bowled the both of them over with the force of his embrace. "Tell me you're real, I'm not dreaming."
Orlando choked back a sob. "I'm real. This time I swear to you that I'm real."
Orlando's hands cupped Viggo's head, and that, above all else, convinced Viggo that this was real. The other Orlando had never held him like that. His Orlando always had.
They stayed wrapped around each other in that gray cube of a room for so long that time seemed to stop. Orlando murmured nonsense in Viggo's ear and held him, and Viggo stroked his hands up and down Orlando's back. Only when Viggo came close to touching the ruined side of Orlando's skull did Orlando pull back.
"What happened to you?" Viggo asked. He couldn't seem to see that side of Orlando's head clearly.
Orlando took Viggo's hands in his own. "I was an unintended casualty," he said. "They visit. Observe. They never meant to harm."
"Casualty." Viggo couldn't make himself finish the thought.
"I died, Viggo," Orlando said it for him. "They took me from the sea and fixed me, and brought me back."
Orlando raised one of Viggo's hands to the shimmery gray stuff. Viggo's eyes told him that his fingers had disappeared into fog where Orlando's skull should be. His fingers told him that he was touching Orlando's curly hair.
"How?" Viggo asked.
Orlando shrugged and grinned. "I don't know. All I know is that they've given me my life back. At least for here."
Viggo moved his hand out of shimmering gray and cupped the side of Orlando's face. The stubble of Orlando's beard was scratchy against Viggo's palm. He thought he understood what Orlando was trying to tell him. "You can't go back."
"No."
Thoughts swirled inside Viggo's brain. He grabbed at them, trying to make sense of a situation so far outside reality, it would have been a nightmare if he wasn't actually living it.
"You can't come home," Viggo said again.
Orlando's expression confirmed the answer.
"What about me?"
Orlando looked off to the side. Viggo followed his gaze. The sexless being that wore Orlando's face was still in the room. It nodded.
"You can go," Orlando said. "But I can't follow, not even in that form. I wasn't supposed to be able to the first time, but it was the only way I could be with you again. I think they were surprised I worked it out. They've made 'alterations' since then."
Viggo thought he finally understood. Orlando had set it all up. He'd offered up his life -- their lives -- as the subject of study with the hope that they could be together one more time. As much as Viggo had believed that Orlando was still alive, Orlando had believed the two of them belonged together no matter what.
And if Orlando believed it enough to make it happen, could Viggo do otherwise?
"Can I stay?" Viggo asked.
Orlando blinked at him. "Do you realize what you'd be giving up? Everything. You could never go back. Never see Henry again. Anyone. They changed me, Viggo. They'd change you, too, if you stay."
The ache at the thought of never seeing Henry again was sharp, but not nearly as sharp as the thought of saying goodbye to Orlando forever. Henry would grieve for his dad, but even if Viggo went back, one day he would die and Henry would be alone. The rest of Viggo's friends would simply think he had run into the woods and never come back. The horses would be all right without him. TJ still remembered his tricks from the movies. He could open the pasture fence and raid the hay in the barn. He'd done it before.
Life would go on without Viggo. Viggo couldn't go on without Orlando.
"Will I still be me when they're done with me?" Viggo asked. "Will I remember us?"
Orlando's smile lit up the room. "Remembering us is why we're here."
* * *
Epilogue
Viggo ran.
He ran on a never-ending platform suspended over time and space. He ran between stars, around planets, across the black void and back again.
He ran until his legs ached and his throat burned with the memory of air he no longer needed to breathe. He ran to explore, and he ran to return back to arms that welcomed him to a home he had never imagined, not even in his wildest dreams.
His changes were all on the inside. He supposed if he were to cut himself open, he might see the same shimmery stuff that covered Orlando's skull where his own lungs used to be.
The hosts, as he'd come to think of them, seemed to look on their mostly-human traveling companions as something of an anomaly. If the hosts were continuing their study of the two of them, they were at least discrete about it. Viggo could live with that.
The hosts were mostly made of the shimmery gray stuff. The being that wore Orlando's face was a construct, little more than a study aid. If the hosts made more study aids for other civilizations, Viggo never saw them. From his point of view, he and Orlando were alone and free to explore the universe as they saw fit.
He'd experienced his only true regret when he stood with Orlando inside a clear dome and watched the Earth recede in the distance. They'd put their arms around each other for support and said goodbye to their world.
"I've never left either," Orlando said. "It seems odd to know I'm finally saying goodbye."
It had been five years. "You were there the whole time?"
Orlando nodded. "I watched. Sometimes. When I realized that you hadn't accepted that I was... what happened to me..." He shrugged. "I realized I needed to be with you, too, and decided I had to make that happen."
Sometimes Orlando came with him when Viggo ran. Viggo asked Orlando once if he could get the hosts to take their picture.
"Do you really need one?" Orlando asked in return.
No, Viggo didn't. He never had. Now, as then, all he had to do was close his eyes and he could see the two of them -- in dreams, and in reality, and in the gray space in between.
The End
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