Gift fic for salable_mystic

[rueckenfigur]

Title: Make a list of things you need
Author: to be revealed on January 1st
Written for: salable_mystic
Fandom: LOTRiPS
Pairing: Viggorli
Rating: Teen
Warnings: none
Disclaimer: This is a non-profit, non-commercial work of fiction using the names and likenesses of real individuals. This fictional story is not intended to imply that the events herein actually occurred, or that the attitudes or behaviors described are engaged in or condoned by the real persons whose names are used without permission.

Summary: In which our protagonists engage in wildlife activism, test their encyclopaedic knowledge of the rules and regulations governing use of the Royal Parks in London, meet a fox, practice solid negotiation skills, and find a second chance.

Notes: Title is from the song “Gamble Everything for Love”, composed by Ben Lee.

 

 

 

The PR handler smoothly moved Viggo on from the group of donors who had cornered him, hand on elbow inexorably directing him away, as she said, “Hate to interrupt, there’s someone…”

She dropped Viggo’s elbow, and said in a murmur, “Sorry for leaving you with that group too long. Hope it wasn’t terrible.”

“All good,” Viggo said. “I’m here to be friendly to people until they donate all their money.”

The fundraiser was for the Orangutan Foundation, and the room was plastered in huge posters of gentle orangutans in endangered forests. Viggo felt pretty good about doing tedious meet and greet work for an hour or so.

The front foyer, where he had walked in past a clutter of press a while ago, was still jumping, as more people arrived for the event. Someone exciting must have just arrived, judging by the buzz.

“The bar?” Viggo suggested to the handler. “Before I do the next round of politeness?”

A shot of whisky, as fortification.

Viggo made it to the bar and ordered a whisky, before the next group of enthusiastic potential donors grabbed his attention.

Viggo was signing autographs when he appeared in Viggo’s peripheral vision, shaking rain out of his hair and unwinding a scarf from around his neck.

Viggo changed position slightly and kept most of his attention on the very nice people who were chatting to him, but across the room, through the crowd, Orlando still gleamed, lit from within by the same light he’d always had.

It had been years since Viggo had seen Orlando in person, but it felt like it could have been seconds. Time was irrelevant.

Another group, more chatting about animal rights and habitat loss, and the minder was back, pressing a note into Viggo’s hand and smiling encouragingly at the donors.

<i>I’m contractually obliged to be here for another 17 minutes</i> the note said. <i>Meet me at the fire escape then?</i>

Unsigned, but unmistakeable.

The bartender let them out of the fire escape, into the wet winter early evening.

Viggo pulled the neck of his jacket up and his knit cap down.

Beside him, Orlando had almost disappeared into the folds of his own jacket. “The weather’s a bit, um, English,” Orlando admitted, following Viggo through the stationary traffic outside the venue, then pointing up a laneway. “That way, and left.”

“What I don’t get is how it can be both below freezing, and still raining,” Viggo said. “Shouldn’t it be sleet, or hail, or even snow?”

“It’s London,” Orlando said. “It is what it is.”

The sidewalk on the other side of the road, through more banks of cars, bordered on to wet and muddy ground and bare tree trunks.

“A park?” Viggo asked.

“Green Park,” Orlando said, ducking under the raining around the park and into a muddy quagmire. “Careful now, I’m pretty sure it’s an offense to walk on the landscaping.”

Viggo followed him into the mud. “Like this?”

“Oh, yes. All sorts of things you can’t do in a Royal Park. I reviewed the regulations recently, and they only specify offences by male persons, which is no use to us right now, but might come in handy if we ever want to incite someone else to illicitly fly a kite or operate a metal detector in a Royal Park.”

They climbed out of the other side of the garden bed, and on to a wide, unlit expanse of rain-sodden lawn.

“Choose our co-conspirators well?” Viggo suggested, and Orlando nodded, pushing wet hair out of his face.

“Theatrical displays are banned too, so we can’t work,” Orlando said. “Shall we walk?”

“Are we allowed to walk on the grass?” Viggo asked.

“Probably not. Certainly not allowed to climb a tree.”

In the darkness and rain, the city melted away, the streetlights distant fractured glimmers. No one else was in the park, as far as Viggo could see in the dark rain. The ground under his feet was so wet it sucked at his shoes, between the sods of grass. His jeans were soaked, and his feet.

He felt fucking fantastic, like he was seeing a secret underbelly of the city, a wildness that could only be accessed through cold rain.

“Look,” Orlando said, grabbing Viggo’s wrist, and a bedraggled rain-soaked fox streaked across the grass, about twenty paces in front of them.

“Run, Reynard, run,” Viggo said.

Orlando chuckled. “Bins to raid, burgers to steal, all very important fox business.”

When Viggo glanced at Orlando, the ambient glow of the city showed Orlando’s hair and beard slicked down and stuck to his face. Memories stirred, of New Zealand and forests and ridiculous amounts of rain.

“The beard and sideburns?” Viggo asked. “For a role, or a change of pace?”

“Role,” Orlando said. “Costume drama. ‘Please grow as much head and facial hair as possible for shooting, and we’ll fill in the gaps as needed’. I’m playing the untrustworthy and feckless heir to the baronetcy.”

“Feckless?” Viggo asked. “Not noble and honorable?”

Orlando snorted, which sounded more like a gurgle in the rain. “No good intentions.”

The muddy ground squelched under Viggo’s feet satisfyingly, and Viggo asked, “Did you imagine that you would have this career? Playing swashbuckling pirates and scoundrels?”

Orlando was silent for long enough that Viggo wondered if he hadn’t heard.

“No,” Orlando finally said. “I thought … I was persuaded that, if I did the right things, kept on trying… It’s not that I didn’t get the outcome I expected, it’s that I didn’t realise the value of what I was persuaded to give up.”

Well, fuck, that crater that Orlando had just opened up in Green Park was probably against the park rules too, right?

Orlando stopped walking, once he realised that Viggo wasn’t following, and turned around and came back, squelching through the mud.

“You tried to tell me,” Orlando said, and this time he was facing Viggo, through the fucking awful rain. “Not to compromise my relationships, that connecting with people was what mattered. I chose the wrong option.”

Viggo nodded. It had been a long time ago, but Viggo had not forgotten.

“I regret…” Orlando started, then shook his head.

“You’re shivering,” Viggo said, wrapping one hand around Orlando’s arm, where he had started to shake.

Orlando’s eyes were shuttered, and he looked bleak and cold when he shrugged wetly. “I’ve worked so hard on putting aside attachment.”

“Successfully?”

A flicker of a smile. “It’s a good aspiration.”

Viggo waited, rain soaking in around his neck.

“The door never closed,” Viggo said. “I have never shut off myself from this possibility. Tell me it’s not too late?”

“I’m twenty years too late.”

Viggo took hold of Orlando’s other shoulder. “Fuck time. All we have is now.”

Orlando nodded. “And any moment now, someone is going to bulldoze our jungle down to plant palm oil plantations?”

“Or we are going to drown in a London park,” Viggo added. “The past twenty years have gone by in the blink of an eye. The next twenty are going to go even faster, and then it will be over. Let’s not be strangers for those years.”

“Yes,” Orlando said.

“Yes, time flies by, or yes, the big yes?” Viggo asked.

Orlando pushed wet hair out of his eyes. “Both. Fuck time, as you said. Shall we get a cab or something?”

“Or something,” Viggo agreed. “This rain has stopped being atmospheric, and is now just cold.”

“Out of the park and somewhere dry,” Orlando said.

“Where are we going?” Viggo asked, as Orlando hailed a cab, outside the park gate.

“My place,” Orlando said. “Obviously.”

In the cab, Orlando said silent beside Viggo in the back, both of them dripping pools of water, but Orlando’s eyes were laughing at Viggo, when Viggo caught his gaze.

Orlando’s apartment was in a secure building, discreet and anonymous on the outside, blissfully warm in the lobby.

Inside the apartment, Orlando kicked off his muddy shoes and padded across the carpet in bare wet feet. “Back in a moment,” he said.

Viggo started pulling off sodden and muddy outer layers of clothing, dropping them beside the door, and Orlando returned with two bathrobes. “Put on a dry robe,” Orlando said, beginning to dump his own wet clothes on the floor. “And I’ll find the whisky.”

Orlando’s apartment living room was cluttered and comfortable, with a large, over-stuffed couch in front of a gas fire. Orlando cleared books and scripts off the couch, and Viggo sat on the couch, relieved to be out of his soggy clothes and in a warm robe, while Orlando flicked the gas fire on then found glasses and a bottle of whisky.

Viggo took the generous glass of single malt Orlando handed him and raised it in a toast, as Orlando sat beside him.

“To the orangutans.”

“To our great ape friends,” Orlando said.

Viggo sipped the whisky, and waited quietly. He was warming up, from the inside from the whisky, and the outside from the gas fire and whatever other heating Orlando had put on in the apartment.

“I have a question,” Orlando said, putting his glass down. “What about your partner? What happens?”

“Ah,” Viggo said. “What I know, and you don’t, is that every significant relationship I’ve had since, well, us, has been clearly negotiated to include this eventuality.”

“You told all of your girlfriends—"

“Not just girlfriends,” Viggo cut in.

“Partners,” Orlando corrected. “You told all your partners, that if I came back, you’d break up with them?”

“Not quite,” Viggo said. “Negotiated with all of my partners that, if the opportunity to reconcile with one my exes arose, I was free to pursue it. I made a quick call while waiting for you at the fire escape, and it’s all good.”

“What does ‘all good’ mean?” Orlando asked.

“She loves me, and wants me to have rewarding relationships, and that means not just with her.”

Orlando looked dubious.

“We’ll sort out any details later,” Viggo said. “I’m here in good faith. What other concerns do you have? If we’re doing this, are there things you want to talk about now?”

“Yeah,” Orlando said. “I guess the things we didn’t talk about last time.”

“We didn’t talk much at all,” Viggo admitted.

Orlando rested his fingers against the back of Viggo’s hand. “Things I like to negotiate with my partners now? If we can’t agree on something, then whoever is the happiest and wisest person at the time is the decision maker.”

Viggo’s laugh started as a chuckle, but it wound up being a full belly laugh of delight, and Orlando gripped his hand and laughed too.

“And, things need to be approximately even, whatever that winds up meaning and however we construct this,” Orlando added, when Viggo had recovered from laughing.

“I like these things,” Viggo said. “Also, I don’t have another ex who I might like to reconcile with, so I can let my requirement to include that arrangement lapse now.”

“Is it this easy?” Orlando asked. “To start again?”

“Does it have to be difficult?” Viggo asked, lifting Orlando’s hand to his mouth and pressing lips to knuckles.

Orlando grinned at him. “I’ve missed you forever.”

* * *

Sirens, police or ambulance, woke Viggo the next morning. The light around the edges of the drapes was muted, and rain pattered against the windows. He’d heard Orlando get up a while ago, use the bathroom, clatter in the kitchen, but had been too content to wake fully himself.

He found Orlando, in sweats, sitting on the couch again, working on a laptop.

Viggo poured himself a coffee from the coffee maker in the kitchen and sat on the couch as well, robe tucked around himself against the morning chill.

“I put your clothes in the washer,” Orlando said, looking up from his screen. “You can borrow some of mine, if you need to leave. Yours weren’t going to wearable, not after all of the mud.”

“Not in a rush,” Viggo said. “I’ve already missed my first meeting of the day, and will probably miss the rest. I’ll send some messages when I’ve had coffee. Are you dealing with work excuses too?”

Orlando shrugged. “Partly. And partly donating to Orangutan Foundation, to compensate for leaving early last night. I also checked on the specific rules and regulations for Green Park, just in case.”

“And?”

“We needed written permission to clamber across that landscaped part.”

“If we were caught on CCTV, let’s just pay the fine,” Viggo said.

“This is London, we will have been captured on CCTV,” Orlando said. “It’s possible the rain was too heavy for a clear image, or the constabulary too bored to track us down, but somewhere there is grainy footage of us and a fox blundering around in the mud.”

“It all sounds very English,” Viggo said. “I feel like I’ve passed a rite of passage by committing an offence in a Royal Park in the freezing rain that was only witnessed by a fox and an overweening surveillance state.”

“Welcome to London,” Orlando said. “Mind the gap.”

Viggo drank a mouthful of coffee and smiled to himself. Let the years unroll.

END