fic! Unreal Mockery [Slings & Arrows, Geoffrey/Oliver, Geoffrey/Ellen, prompt: teasing

[iamsab]

title: Unreal Mockery
author: Sabine // iamsab
fandom: Slings & Arrows
pairings: Geoffrey/Oliver, Geoffrey/Ellen
rating: r
length: 3319 words
acknowledgements: fixed by Punk.
summary: The Scottish King Play

Written for kink_bingo, row five, column one: teasing



Unreal Mockery

In between, he dreams he's somewhere by the pool in Hell, and he's surrounded by a dozen naked towel boys sucking him off and pouring him absinthe, and he cares.

But of course when he comes back he's wherever Geoffrey is, and he would give up a thousand poolboys for just that one magnificent sonofabitch.

"Why are you still here?" Geoffrey whines, stacking his folders and paperwork in irrelevant piles. "I have your notes. I have your drawings. I have over twenty hours of uncut interview footage where you provide, in detail, your plans for Henry Breedlove's Macbeth."

"You're not going to give up the ghost," Oliver says.

Geoffrey glares. "Oh, shut up."

Oliver pops up onto the desk and crosses his legs. Everything's so easy now he's dead, no pain anywhere except for Geoffrey. In that other place he goes, he gets off effortlessly, the boys all tight and waxed and absolutely precious, servicing his whims. But instead he stays here and rests a palm on the desk and leans back, rakishly.

"I'm serious, Geoffrey. This story is about the ghost. It's about Macbeth constantly haunted by his past, with very real and very terrifying hallucinations that drive him to madness."

"I can relate," says Geoffrey, rubbing a hand through his hair. He sighs. "Maybe Ellen's right and I am the scary kind of crazy."

Oliver nods.

"I used to be the charming kind of crazy," Geoffrey says. "I mean, after I stopped being the clinically paranoid and institutionalized kind of crazy."

"I don't see why it matters," Oliver says, because that's become his favorite way of saying 'we should be talking about menow.' "We both know it takes a certain kind of madness to direct this play, and with my help --"

"Exactly," says Geoffrey. "It takes a certain kind of madness to direct this play with your help."

He goes stubbornly back to his paperwork, and Oliver raps his fingernails -- now manicured perfectly and for eternity -- on the desktop. "You won't be able to do this without me," he says, after a while. "This play is cursed, you know."

Geoffrey pushes back from his desk and stands up. "It is not cursed, it's just extraordinarily difficult to stage, effectively."

"Which is precisely my point," Oliver says. "It's the relationship between man and ghost, present and past, that drives the play. And representing that struggle on stage takes a confident hand, and, it might even be said, a kind of genius. So don't dismiss me so quickly or I might not be around to help you later. When you need me."

And then, because he can't pass up a good exit, he leaves.

Geoffrey is still awake when Oliver gets back from his lecherous limbo, though it has to be far into the morning hours in real Earth time. He is lying on one of the sofas in the prop closet -- a garish period piece with torn upholstery and an indelible smell of pipe smoke -- staring up at the ceiling with a copy of the play lying open on his chest.

"It's hard," he says, like he senses it when Oliver appears. "This play. It's not easy."

Oliver sinks into an armchair. "It isn't," he says. "It takes a great deal of care to approach this play, and it's not for everyone."

"Not for me, you mean."

Oliver blinks. "Of course for you!" he says. Then he smiles. "If I could face it, I think it should be no trouble for you."

Geoffrey purses his lips and gives a little, practical nod. "I need your help," he says.

And this is one of those times, those rare, memorable times when Oliver's hungry ego doesn't get the better of him, where he doesn't gloat, or taunt, and instead says, "Anything you need. I'm yours." And it means he gets to stay here a while longer.

Late one summer night, Oliver comes in to find Geoffrey perspiring in his office, incongruously dressed in a sweater and shorts.

"Take that off," Oliver demands, before Geoffrey even realizes he's there. "You're making me sweat and I can't even feel heat anymore."

Geoffrey grumbles, leans back and pulls his sweater over his head, and his undershirt is soft and threadbare and slicked to his skin, and Oliver has to run a hand over his own chest, under his jacket, because he can't touch Geoffrey's.

"Yes," Geoffrey says. "It is hot. Very very hot. It is making it difficult to work, and thank you, yes, I was overdressed. I haven't been paying much attention, I admit, to personal hygiene lately, but I think you'd agree that with this play --"

Oliver can't smell anymore either, but he wrinkles his nose. "Let's continue this conversation in the shower," he says, waving a dismissive hand.

After an argument that started, "I have seen your naked body more times than I care to count," and ended with, "you really are a disaster, Geoffrey. Someone needs to make sure you clean up," Geoffrey leans back, naked under the cool spray.

Oliver sits on the toilet with his chin in his hands and orders himself not to do anything that might ruin this experience.

The fact that Geoffrey says "Ellen hates me" while he's soaping his groin is not suggestive, not at all. Oliver sits on his hands and just watches.

"You still here?" Geoffrey calls, through the steam.

"Still here," says Oliver, and his voice hits a dissonant falsetto. He claps a hand to his mouth. "Ew, sorry," he says. "I don't know what that was about."

"I said, Ellen hates me," Geoffrey says, a little louder this time.

Oliver coughs. "Her loss," he shrugs.

"That's what I said," Geoffrey says. "I mean, at first. Now?"

God, the thrill of that precarious ego, Oliver thinks. He flicks open the top button on his ghostly trousers.

"Ellen is a notoriously fickle woman," Oliver says. "One never knows what mood might strike her next."

Geoffrey's quiet for a while. "Maybe," he says. "Sometimes, though, I think we were just meant to be together."

Sometimes I think we were meant to be together, Oliver thinks.

"All those productions we did together," Geoffrey says.

"Yes," Oliver agrees.

"The fighting --"

Oliver laughs.

"The passion, god, I don't think I'll ever feel that way again. Is this how it happens?"

"How what happens?" Oliver asks, thinking he could drown the bastard in passion if that was what he wanted.

"When you, you know, get older. Is it never that electric anymore? That, I don't know. That spark of innocence, of perfect beauty?"

A draught of cold air spirals in the window and for a moment the steam clears and Oliver can see Geoffrey's pale silhouette behind the clear, mottled shower door. Geoffrey is leaning against the wall. His hands are in his hair, and the spray hits his chest and Oliver watches it trickle down Geoffrey's body.

"How should I know?" he snaps. "Half the time what I thought was passion turns out to be a bad hangover in the morning. I'd settle for some clumsy groping, at this point."

"Aren't there gay guys in heaven?" Geoffrey asks. "Couldn't you just, I don't know, stay there?"

There are two reasons Oliver can't quite stay in that place he's going, which isn't heaven, but he won't tell Geoffrey that. The second reason is that Macbeth must go on.

"Oh, hush," Oliver says.

Geoffrey casually steps out of the shower dressed in nothing but what god gave him, as if Oliver isn't even there. He swipes a hand across the foggy mirror and stares at himself.

Oliver aches for him, reaches out to touch him but his fingers pass coldly through Geoffrey's warm back. His cock strains at his trousers, but he won't go back, not yet, not till he's had all of Geoffrey he's allowed.

He gets up to the part where Geoffrey towels his hair, barechested, with a towel hooked precariously on his hipbones, before Oliver has to snap back to a luscious blowjob, poolside in the fire of Hell.

The first dress rehearsal, the one without the ghost, is breathtaking. Enough to scare a theater person to the soles of his shoes, a good dress for a play like Mackers just promised tragedy. Geoffrey is off again on some crusade to make the play more spectacular, but Oliver's too enthralled by Geoffrey's magic to challenge him on one crowd-pleaser sticking point.

"It's not a crowd pleaser," Geoffrey says, later that night when Oliver's giving him hell for the nude scene he wants to include. "And it's not a nude scene, either. It's simply to show that Macbeth has a human side. That he has vulnerabilities. That his bloodlust comes from some physical context -- the body exposes the man."

Oliver sits down, quite close to Geoffrey, on the sofa. He can't feel where their legs touch, but he can imagine it, Geoffrey's warmth, the cuff of his shorts, the top of his thigh. "The body exposes the man, does it?" he muses.

Geoffrey comes flying into Ellen's house, the night of the tech rehearsal and cue-to-cue. "I'm sorry," he says. "I miss you. I've been acting like a lunatic. Can I come in?"

"You're in," she says. "What happened to you?"

Oliver, wondering much the same thing, takes a seat at Ellen's kitchen table.

Geoffrey rubs his hands on his hair, wiping free leaves and mud. "I was in the woods," he says. "I went to the woods, you know, Birnam wood, for inspiration."

"You went to Birnam Wood?" Ellen asks, arching an eyebrow. "Was Oliver with you when you went there?"

Geoffrey peels off his jacket, hisses at Oliver, and turns back to Ellen. "Well, not Birnam Wood, exactly, that's in Scotland, that would be absurd. But out behind New Burbage, where that forest preserve is."

"And did the trees come marching toward you?" Oliver grins.

"It got quite dense, and the rain didn't help," Geoffrey says.

Ellen takes him by the shoulders and steers him to the chair across from Oliver's. "Well, here," she says, grabbing a dish towel. "Let me clean you up."

Geoffrey's shirt is soaked through, and Ellen carefully takes it off, and then lifts his undershirt up over his head. Oliver leans forward while she scrubs the back of his neck with a wet towel, and practically purrs when she moves around to wipe the mud off his chest.

Oliver tries to leave. Usually he can snap back and forth at will, when his emotions are right and he concentrates. Now, though he tries to want those poolboys again, that perfect bliss where he could touch and be touched, instead his cock stiffens as he watches Ellen, who doesn't even know he's there, clean and caress Geoffrey's gorgeous, imperfect, vulnerable human body.

"I have some ideas for Lady M," Geoffrey says, and Oliver sticks a hand down his pants.

Ellen's delicate ministrations and the subtle movements of Geoffrey's flesh under her touch, all to the tune of Shakespeare understood by a master, is enough to make Oliver mad with frustration. He catches himself on more than one occasion reaching out, as if he can touch Geoffrey, watching his cold hands slide through that live and trembling flesh.

"Oh, this is just not fair," Oliver says.

"Shut up!" Geoffrey says.

"What?" Ellen pushes away. Then she sighs. "Oh, Oliver again," she says.

Oliver's cock aches.

"Go. Away," Geoffrey says. "Leave me alone."

"Leave us alone!" Ellen shouts, to somewhere off vaguely near the cupbords.

Oliver laughs, a forced, choked gasp, closes his eyes, and lets one of the poolboys finish him off under Hell's blazing parody of a sun.

"Put the ghost back in," Oliver says. "Keep your nude scene if you like, but put the ghost back in."

He says it not only because it's right and because the play calls for it and because Henry needs someone to play against in that scene, but because he's seen how vulnerable Geoffrey is, how impressionable. And he's also seen him fight. Oliver wants to see where his absent passions lay this time.

"No!" shouts Geoffrey, loud enough that other people in the theater can probably hear him even from all the way here in the storage closet. "The ghost is out. Macbeth's madness is in his head, it isn't real. It can't really hurt him, but he's afraid of it just the same, because it symbolizes the evil in him."

"True," Oliver says. "It can't really hurt him. But if it is real, it can react, respond. Macbeth can hurt Banquo. Slay him and then betray him."

"Slay him then betray him," Geoffrey says. "It would be easier if I had a pig truck."

"You're absolutely unbelievable," Oliver says, beating Geoffrey to the stage one morning. "Are you trying to kill me again?"

"Yep, pretty much," Geoffrey says.

"Fine," Oliver surrenders. "Delete the ghost. Ignore the ghost. Ignore his needs."

Geoffrey sits up straight. "Banquo is dead, at this point in the play," he explains. "Any needs he may have had are long behind him now. What's important is how the murder affects Macbeth."

"Not if we give the ghost a chance to have a voice, to emote," Oliver says. "See how he yearned for Macbeth's friendship, see how the betrayal broke his heart. See, you know. Things. Secret things."

"Secret. Things?" Geoffrey raises an eyebrow. "Like what kind of secret things?"

"The ghost has no voice, you say, Geoffrey?" Oliver says, that night in the office. "Tell me that, then. Tell me, standing before you, that I have no voice. No needs of my own."

"You certainly seem to have a need to drive me crazy," Geoffrey agrees. "But your point is taken. We'll try it one night as a test run and see how it flies. I'll talk to Simon about some acting changes."

Oliver's quiet while Geoffrey scribbles notes on the back of an unfinished grant proposal, licking his lip occasionally and smiling at every exclamation point.

When he's done, he turns around and looks at Oliver.

"I don't want to kill you again, exactly," he says. "It's just that sometimes you make it too difficult to have you around. Your neediness transcended death, I think. Interesting."

Oliver laughs roughly. "You don't know a thing about my so-called neediness," he says. "For Christ's sake, Geoffrey, I followed you into the shower yesterday. Do you have any idea how it kills me not to touch you? To know that I can never, ah. Touch you again."

"Oh, god, Oliver," Geoffrey said. "Really?"

"Really?" Oliver says. "But yet I come here, every day, because your magnificence is worth more than a thousand gorgeous poolboys burning in Hell. And it seems I can't leave now."

"Because of me," Geoffrey says.

Oliver shrugs. "Now it's out in the open, I mean, why should I stick around? Some of those towel boys are really impressive on a canvas chaise, let me tell you."

"Okay," says Geoffrey, who looks like he's still hung up back on the 'I want you' part.

"So delete the ghost," Oliver says.

Geoffrey nods. "Delete the ghost," he agrees.

"It's Macbeth's show now," says Oliver.

Opening night, Henry Breedlove swanned out of the production, too scared to be seen as vulnerable in all his nakedness for Act One Scene Five, and this understudy, a stammering but sturdy swing player named Jerry, panicked his way through a brilliant production.

But it was Breedlove's Macbeth that made Oliver faint with surprise, and sentiment, and passion. It was his play, from his early sketches through his staging and comprehensive understanding of the character Breedlove should play. And all laced with Geoffrey. Unavoidable, unassailable Geoffrey, with his golden touch in every pie. Oliver doesn't know whether to be insulted or to bust with pride.

Oliver finds him backstage after the show. "Do me," he says. "The show, amazing; the cast superb. Ellen particulary shone, and I even welcomed the absence of the ghost."

"You were the absense of the ghost," Geoffrey hisses. "But thank you."

"So do me, fuck my brains out, just once before I go back to that place of endless orgasms under an endless sun, mocked up with cocktails and a pool for the scum of the earth."

"Oliver, really." Geoffrey says.

"My last thing. My only thing, Geoffrey. You. My only thing."

So, Oliver silent and Ellen unknowing, Geoffrey and Ellen tumble to the mattress, a mess of kisses and sprawling limbs.

Oliver's undressed to his skivvies, and with a slow and terrified walk he makes his way to Geoffrey's side of the bed and climbs up, tucking in behind Geoffrey's knees. His hands just pass unsensible on Geoffrey's pale, smooth skin. Geoffrey moans.

Ellen shimmies up to crouch at the head of the bed, and Geoffrey bends down to start chewing at her through her thong. Oliver can hear his teeth scrape on the lace, and he imagines Geoffrey's hand rubbing him off through his trousers, and sure enough he's hard as a rock. He doesn't touch, can't touch, not like it would do anything; he's lost physical pleasure up here; can yearn but can never obtain. Instead Oliver crawls up to Geoffrey's ass, and cups a cheek in his hands, then slides his hands over Geoffrey's straight hip. Then he walks his fingers over Geoffrey's thigh, ends with them twittering just inside Geoffrey's inner thigh. A maddeningly ticklish sweet spot.

"Oh, god," moans Geoffrey, and Oliver thinks for a minute that Geoffrey might be feeling his caresses too. But then Ellen gasps and moans and Oliver's forgotten she's here.

At a certain point the frustration of not being able to touch Geoffrey's long, lean body sends Oliver flying from the bed to the nearby armchair.

"Just want to watch, now?" Geoffrey asks.

"No," says Ellen. "I'd rather keep on doing what we're in the middle of doing, thank you very much."

"Yes," says Geoffrey. "Oh yes."

When Geoffrey comes, when Oliver gets to see Geoffrey's face in orgasmic bliss, he feels the fires of Hell reflected in his face and he nearly cries. Geoffrey pants, then surrenders to a completely satisfied smile.

"So?" Geoffrey asks. "Was that sufficient?"

"Oh, shut up," Ellen says. "You're always so obsessive about your performance, you read all your reviews, it's absurd."

Oliver croaks. "It can't ever be," he says. "But now I have something to bring with me, something they can't take, the pure knowledge of you."

Geoffrey looks at the floor. "Well, I'm glad," he says.

"Good that you are, anyway," says Ellen.

"And I'm in love with you, you obtuse maniac," Oliver puts in.

He can see Geoffrey panic, looking from Ellen to Oliver.

"I know I can be...strange," Geoffrey says.

"That's an understatement," Ellen says.

"Unawareness of social cues is a sign of insanity," Oliver says.

"But. And I know, I do know that I haven't shown it, but. I love you. Fiercely, passionately, I love you."

"Oh, Geoffrey," Ellen says suspiciously.

"Both," Geoffrey says. "Both of you."

Ellen tosses him a confused look, but Oliver's heart aches and cock twitches and he can't suppress what must be the world's most fatuous smile.

"However," Geoffrey says. "I have to go."

And he goes. And then Ellen goes. And Oliver says, "Marco, I could use a hot stone treatment!" And goes back to Hell a happy man.

The end.