Five Things That Never Happened to Sean Bean
Five Things That Never Happened to Sean Bean
sort of SB/VM; PG
by Cherry (ink_stain)
1,026 words
Disclaimer
A/N: Like cee said when she posted hers, I think I did this wrong.
i.
Sean never picked up a knife he'd dropped on the floor -- an odd superstition he'd inherited from his father, handed down for generations. And like most other things in his life, Sean'd learned about it the hard way.
Five years old and helping his mum wash up after supper, standing on his faded and chipped red stepstool, his arms thrust elbow-deep in the warm, soapy water. His father listening to a football game on the radio and Sean tonguing the space where yesterday he'd lost his first tooth, exploring the hard-soft slickness of his gums, and the butter knife slipped from his chubby fingers, clattered to the floor. For a moment no one breathed.
"I'll get it," his mum said, but Sean hopped down off the stepstool, was reaching for the knife when his father's hand shot out, closed warm and tight around his wrist.
"Let your mum get it, Sean," and there was a sharpness in his voice, his eyes, a hint of danger, danger and Sean said stupidly,
"But I can get it."
"No," his father said, too quickly, and shook his head. "Bad luck to pick up a knife after you've dropped it. Have to leave it where it is until someone else picks it up for you, understand?"
And Sean nodded solemnly, not really understanding anything except that picking up a knife off the floor was somehow wrong and bad and utterly forbidden.
He knows now, after researching it years ago, that it dates back to days when men dueled not with guns but with swords, that a man who dropped his sword and bent to pick it up was as good as dead. One second of lost concentration, one wrong step, could cost a man his life. Turn your back and you give your enemy the upper hand, that was the lesson.
There's a knife on the floor of his kitchen, water-spotted, the point facing due East. It's been there for four days now, a sad reminder of his solitude.
iii.
Sean never regretted throwing that punch, the one that got him charged with bodily harm and fined fifty pounds. Sure he could laugh about it now, shake his head at his own hot-tempered stupidity, but the truth was that there was a certain satisfaction in the dull smack of skin on skin, of watching the other bloke stumble backwards, blood on his teeth.
His parents had been furious, and his father made him come home for the weekend to earn the fifty pounds for his fine, but Sean didn't mind. He thought it was a small price to pay to know his own power.
ii.
Sean never wore lipstick, not even at the height of his teenage glam-rebel phase. It was all about illusion, see, and image. And for Sean, the line between homage and parody was drawn in pink lipgloss, thick and sticky and shimmering.
It was enough to dye his hair violently red, to wear eyeliner and play guitar in a truly awful band, to sneak off to London whenever he could just to see Bowie or Lou Reed in concert with his mates, or the one time he'd gone alone and ended up pressed between a wall and a boy with Aladdin Sane's face, whose mouth tasted of lipstick and copper.
Nearly twenty-five years later and he's halfway around the world, the seasons are upside down and he's exchanging battle scar stories with Viggo on a freezing July night.
"I was seventeen," Viggo says, fingertip tracing the scar above his lip. Sean can't decide if Viggo's beard half-hides it or makes it stand out more sharply in pale shiny contrast. "Halloween and I was dressed as Aladdin Sane, you know, with the red lightning bolt across my face?"
He pauses, eyes squinting against the curl of smoke rising from his cigarette, and Sean swallows over his suddenly dry throat, and nods dumbly.
"...just stupid drunk; that kind of drunk where you're utterly shitfaced and you know it, and I got into it with another guy at the party. Ended up with my face in a barbed-wire fence. I was so drunk that the doctor didn't even have to numb me. If I didn't feel the barbed wire ripping me open, I wasn't going to feel him stitching me closed, right? It was a fucking mess, with the make-up and the glitter and the blood."
He laughs, then, that deep-low Viggo laugh, and Sean returns a shaky smile and bites down hard on his tongue, blinking back memories of fog and cold brick and the greasepaint smell of make-up.
v.
Sean never was a very good husband, not in a growing old together, happily ever after kind of way. Not in any kind of way that lasted, or meant something.
He was a damn good father, though, and he thought that was probably more important, anyway.
iv.
Sean never liked airplanes; he didn't go through that phase as a boy where he wanted to be an astronaut or a pilot or a jetfighter. It was as simple as liking the feel of solid ground, the sureness of dirt under his shoes, gravel under his tires. Sean liked tangible things, real things; he wasn't one to trust what he couldn't see.
He flies back and forth to New Zealand a dozen or more times during filming, and he hates it every time but he learns to deal with it. A pint or two in the airport bar, his favorite Bach CD, or Bowie if he's feeling nostalgic. Small comforts, but select ones.
He doesn't carry pictures of the girls on the plane with him; after all, the guy with the photo of his wife or his kids or his sweetheart back home is always the one to end up dead, and he doesn't need that particularly morbid thought layered in with all the rest.
The flights are bearable if only for what waits for him at either end -- at one, his family, home, a certain safety. And at the other, Viggo, who insists on meeting him at the airport every time he flies in, who is all and none of those things.
sort of SB/VM; PG
by Cherry (ink_stain)
1,026 words
Disclaimer
A/N: Like cee said when she posted hers, I think I did this wrong.
i.
Sean never picked up a knife he'd dropped on the floor -- an odd superstition he'd inherited from his father, handed down for generations. And like most other things in his life, Sean'd learned about it the hard way.
Five years old and helping his mum wash up after supper, standing on his faded and chipped red stepstool, his arms thrust elbow-deep in the warm, soapy water. His father listening to a football game on the radio and Sean tonguing the space where yesterday he'd lost his first tooth, exploring the hard-soft slickness of his gums, and the butter knife slipped from his chubby fingers, clattered to the floor. For a moment no one breathed.
"I'll get it," his mum said, but Sean hopped down off the stepstool, was reaching for the knife when his father's hand shot out, closed warm and tight around his wrist.
"Let your mum get it, Sean," and there was a sharpness in his voice, his eyes, a hint of danger, danger and Sean said stupidly,
"But I can get it."
"No," his father said, too quickly, and shook his head. "Bad luck to pick up a knife after you've dropped it. Have to leave it where it is until someone else picks it up for you, understand?"
And Sean nodded solemnly, not really understanding anything except that picking up a knife off the floor was somehow wrong and bad and utterly forbidden.
He knows now, after researching it years ago, that it dates back to days when men dueled not with guns but with swords, that a man who dropped his sword and bent to pick it up was as good as dead. One second of lost concentration, one wrong step, could cost a man his life. Turn your back and you give your enemy the upper hand, that was the lesson.
There's a knife on the floor of his kitchen, water-spotted, the point facing due East. It's been there for four days now, a sad reminder of his solitude.
iii.
Sean never regretted throwing that punch, the one that got him charged with bodily harm and fined fifty pounds. Sure he could laugh about it now, shake his head at his own hot-tempered stupidity, but the truth was that there was a certain satisfaction in the dull smack of skin on skin, of watching the other bloke stumble backwards, blood on his teeth.
His parents had been furious, and his father made him come home for the weekend to earn the fifty pounds for his fine, but Sean didn't mind. He thought it was a small price to pay to know his own power.
ii.
Sean never wore lipstick, not even at the height of his teenage glam-rebel phase. It was all about illusion, see, and image. And for Sean, the line between homage and parody was drawn in pink lipgloss, thick and sticky and shimmering.
It was enough to dye his hair violently red, to wear eyeliner and play guitar in a truly awful band, to sneak off to London whenever he could just to see Bowie or Lou Reed in concert with his mates, or the one time he'd gone alone and ended up pressed between a wall and a boy with Aladdin Sane's face, whose mouth tasted of lipstick and copper.
Nearly twenty-five years later and he's halfway around the world, the seasons are upside down and he's exchanging battle scar stories with Viggo on a freezing July night.
"I was seventeen," Viggo says, fingertip tracing the scar above his lip. Sean can't decide if Viggo's beard half-hides it or makes it stand out more sharply in pale shiny contrast. "Halloween and I was dressed as Aladdin Sane, you know, with the red lightning bolt across my face?"
He pauses, eyes squinting against the curl of smoke rising from his cigarette, and Sean swallows over his suddenly dry throat, and nods dumbly.
"...just stupid drunk; that kind of drunk where you're utterly shitfaced and you know it, and I got into it with another guy at the party. Ended up with my face in a barbed-wire fence. I was so drunk that the doctor didn't even have to numb me. If I didn't feel the barbed wire ripping me open, I wasn't going to feel him stitching me closed, right? It was a fucking mess, with the make-up and the glitter and the blood."
He laughs, then, that deep-low Viggo laugh, and Sean returns a shaky smile and bites down hard on his tongue, blinking back memories of fog and cold brick and the greasepaint smell of make-up.
v.
Sean never was a very good husband, not in a growing old together, happily ever after kind of way. Not in any kind of way that lasted, or meant something.
He was a damn good father, though, and he thought that was probably more important, anyway.
iv.
Sean never liked airplanes; he didn't go through that phase as a boy where he wanted to be an astronaut or a pilot or a jetfighter. It was as simple as liking the feel of solid ground, the sureness of dirt under his shoes, gravel under his tires. Sean liked tangible things, real things; he wasn't one to trust what he couldn't see.
He flies back and forth to New Zealand a dozen or more times during filming, and he hates it every time but he learns to deal with it. A pint or two in the airport bar, his favorite Bach CD, or Bowie if he's feeling nostalgic. Small comforts, but select ones.
He doesn't carry pictures of the girls on the plane with him; after all, the guy with the photo of his wife or his kids or his sweetheart back home is always the one to end up dead, and he doesn't need that particularly morbid thought layered in with all the rest.
The flights are bearable if only for what waits for him at either end -- at one, his family, home, a certain safety. And at the other, Viggo, who insists on meeting him at the airport every time he flies in, who is all and none of those things.