Pride - Part Twenty Three
Thank You as always to bee_ta_baby for being the bestest beta ever. She's a star and must be worshipped.
Title: Pride
Author: jenexell
Pairing/Characters: VigOrli with hints of Orlijah if you squint and tilt your head just so. Ian, Dom, Billy, Sean B.
Rating: R for some violence and bad language. NC-17 later.
Disclaimer: If this was real, I wouldn't share. As its not, I'm sharing with no personal gain or profit, other than perhaps to feed my attention whore complex. non-recognisable elements are mine! plagiarists will be eaten alive weasels. Distribution: My Journal, box_of_tales, and quite a few other places too. (attention whore complex). If you want it, ask me.
Warnings: Some violent imagery. Cats. I'm serious. CATS!
Summery: It was so mind bending, but it was real, and it was happening to him, so one way or another he would have to get his act together and cope. Because if he didn’t? Well if he didn’t he would probably end up some kind of whacked out nervous wreck, who lived alone, jumped at shadows and turned into a screaming loony at the sight of his auntie’s cats.
AN: I’m going to be drastically rearranging reality for the purposes of this chapter, in particular in regard to the filming of “Walk on the Moon” I couldn’t find out a whole lot of information about the making of this film, but given that it was released in 1999, I think it’s safe to assume it was made 1998, when my fic is set. So, seeing as I’d already decided that Viggo wasn’t going to make Psycho, (it’s for his own good. Really) I couldn’t pull this one out as well and leave the poor guy with an empty resume. I know a little about the movie making process, and I know that it is possible to complete principle photography on a reasonable budget feature length movie in a eight weeks. The reason I’m saying this is that I don’t want you Viggo nuts out there to turn round and say… but this happened then, and that didn’t happen then or there. I know it probably took longer to film, and I also know it was filmed in Canada. I know, all right? It just didn’t fit with my story so I messed with it. On that note, I’ll say now, in reference to chapter 1 and later that yes I also know Sean and Viggo never worked together in the late 80’s, and that Sean didn’t start off wanting to be an actor. Shoot me, its fiction.
Part Twenty Three - My Boy, My Self
Viggo stared into the flames of the campfire, his mind adrift on the hiss-crackle of the damp wood and the chirp of cicadas in the trees. The sun had long since set, and this far out from LA, up in the hills, the stars twinkled brightly above his head. Behind him, his sensitive feline hearing could just pick out the sound of Henry’s steady breathing inside the tent. Viggo lowered his head to his front paws and continued to stare. He was exhausted. He felt like he’d been running at full steam for weeks, and now, finally, he could stop, breathe, and think. Think about the future and the past; think about what had made him to return to LA in the first place. Think about going back.
March had turned to April, now May, and the jobs Lynne had pestered him to come out here for were almost at an end. He had a gallery showing next week, a studio session to record an audio CD of his latest poems practically the day he got back from this trip, and maybe a little ADR for A walk on the Moon as well. He also had a preliminary meeting with a Spanish director about something possibly coming up later in the year, but he was putting that off for now; he had enough on his plate. So with Lynne finally off his case enough for him to breathe, he seriously had to think about things. As much as he was enjoying the time he had with Henry, there were reasons to go back. Sean, his pride. He missed them, felt the separation like an ache. It wasn’t distracting or unbearable, but in the dark of night, he felt the distance from his pride. He knew from experience that months could turn to years and that bond would eventually sever and fade, but he didn’t want it to. He’d done the lone male thing before. It wasn’t fun. Although, saying that, thinking of lone males and prides, there was another reason to leave. Exene’s pride.
Like the fathers of all their children - well those who were shifters too - now that he and Exene were no longer together, his presence was tolerated but only for so long, especially since, with his pride in London, whilst in LA, technically he was a lone male, and female prides with adolescents in their midst got edgy with lone males in their territory.
It was actually quite funny. They weren’t rude or aggressive, or in any way obvious with it, not one of them thought for a moment he was about to go chasing after their daughters, but they simply could not help but be ‘aware’ of him, and the longer he stayed the more obvious it became. Much like he hadn’t been able to help being aware of Sean the first time they met, back in the late eighties when they were both lone males in their prime. Things had been tricky at first back then, and the half the crew on the film thought they’d both come down with a stomach bug in that first week, what with neither them being able to walk past the men’s room without going in to cover the scent of the other. Funny now, embarrassing as hell back then. It was all about instinct, and the animal inside, that although was never in control if it could be helped, usually leaked through into everyday life. Little things normal-people didn’t notice, but other shifters would. Well, anyway. He was noticing, and Exene’s pride were definitely giving him all the signals that he was beginning to outstay his welcome.
It was better actually, if he flitted in and out. Never stay for more than a couple of weeks, but do so every other month. That system worked well, as he got to see Henry on a regular basis, Lynne got to be his manager, rather than a glorified receptionist - her words - and he never outstayed his welcome with the pride. So long as he never stayed in one country for longer than a total of six months in the year, he wouldn’t have to worry about residency issues either, one of the joys of dual nationality. This year though, hadn’t exactly gone to plan. Which probably explained how he’d wound up so messed up back there. He may be an artist, prone to unusual spurts of creativity and random whimsy, but in certain parts of his life he thrived on a certain level of structure. He hadn’t even realised it until he’d come back to LA, but the beginning of the year had seen him floating around with nothing to ground him and he’d just… drifted. That uncertainty combined with missing Henry and worrying about Orlando, had, not to put too fine a point on it, sent him slightly bat shit.
That wasn’t to say though, that he’d been wrong. He may have reacted badly, but his issue was still real. All his issues had been real actually, but the one that made him hesitate to return, and had driven him across an ocean and continent in the first place, was just as valid as it was then. Orlando.
Now he had time to think, he wanted to try to work out just where he stood with the whole problem. When he’d left, he’d been obsessed. And not just with Orlando himself, although he had been, he had a vivid memory of his studio collage almost turning into a stalker wall to prove that. But he’d also been obsessed with being obsessed. Which was a dangerous place to be. He’d been away almost ten weeks now and he realised that through all that time, he hadn’t had the time to be obsessed. When he wasn’t working, his mind was on his time with Henry, and when he was working, his mind had been on the work. Even in the dark of night when he’d felt the distance from his pride, the longing had been for his pride, not Orlando on his own, but Orlando as part of that bond. Now he had time to think about it, he could admit that he did miss him, as one would miss a friend.
Sitting up, Viggo frowned into the flames as a thought struck him like a slap around the head. He and Orlando hadn’t been friends. He’d said as much to Sean all those weeks ago. ‘As a father’. Orlando had looked to him as a father, but he’d looked to Orlando as a son. That was what their relationship had been. And that he realised, was why he’d been so worked up about his attraction. How could he be attracted to a person who he saw as his son? Orlando wasn’t his son though, Henry was. Henry was the one who needed his father to help and guide him through life, to give him that unconditional love and support, not Orlando.
Viggo almost laughed. He’d been so scared to dig into these thoughts, so scared he’d wind up finding something about himself he couldn’t live with, and yet, when he finally did, he found the root of all his despair with hardly any effort at all, and found it wasn’t something dark and illicit after all. He’d missed Henry so much he’d made Orlando a substitute. He’d missed being a father. He’d missed being needed and useful. He’d poured all his longing for his own child, all his need to have a purpose, into a vulnerable young man who had needed guidance and support.
Had Orlando actually been a child then it might have been all right. But he wasn’t, and had soon started to prove it. What had emerged was a very attractive young man who intrigued him in ways a child would not, and that shift in their roles, even imagined, had been terrifying; at odds with the kind of man he thought he was.
He really had been ten times the fool, hadn’t he? He couldn’t believe he’d put off dealing with this for so long. It seemed so silly now. It didn’t matter that he had an attraction to Orlando. They were both adults, but what he really wanted from the young man was to become friends, and he was sure that the intensity of his attraction would fade as they did. And if in the meantime he also had the occasional fantasy about someone who was quite easily one of the most stunning men he’d ever met, then that was all right too. Now he did laugh.
“Whas, so funny?”
Viggo looked round at the sleepy voice and saw his son stumbling free of the tent, rubbing his eye with a clenched fist and looking even younger than his ten years. He shook his head, and flopped down onto his side, a clear invitation for Henry to join him. ‘Did I wake you?’
Henry shuffled closer and knelt down on the grass, burying his head in Viggo scraggly mane, curling up close and hugging Viggo like a giant soft toy. “No… there’s a stone or some…” he yawned and snuggled closer, “thing under my bedroll.”
Viggo chuckled, moving his head to let Henry lay more comfortably, and slinging a huge paw over the small boy’s shoulder to keep the cold away. ‘You want me to go dig it out?’
“No” Henry mumbled into his neck, “comfy… so come on… what’s so funny?”
Viggo snorted. ‘Your Dad’s just a silly old man. That’s all.’
“Knew that.” Henry shot back quietly. “I don’t want you to go back.”
Viggo sighed sadly. ‘Me either Hen. But you know I can’t stay. Beatrice is about ready to skin me for a throw rug.’
“Beatrice is stupid.” Henry retorted somewhat angrily, thinking of the senior elder in his mother’s pride. “It’s not fair. Why do they make you leave all the time?”
‘That’s just the way things are.’ Viggo replied in resignation. ‘Just the way we are.’
“Well it’s dumb. I can’t wait ‘till I’m sixteen. Then I can join your pride and I can see you every day.” Henry said defiantly. “And I won’t have to listen to stupid Beatrice anymore."
Viggo chuckled, poked Henry in the shoulder with his paw. ‘I thought we agreed eighteen?’
“Da-ad!” Henry whined. “That’s like eight years!”
‘It’s not that long.’ Viggo pacified. ‘And it’s not like we won’t see each other before then.’
“Still. Your pride is way cooler.” Henry grumped. “Mine’s full of girls.”
Viggo laughed again. He knew from experience that when the time actually came for Henry to leave his pride, he wasn’t going to want to. Those annoying girls were going to seem far less annoying at eighteen than they did at ten. But still, it would be good to have Henry with them. Them; he, Sean and Orlando; his pride. An image of them came to mind and that old ache returned, this time without the worries he tried to push to the back of his mind. It was definitely time to start making plans to go home. He was ready.
Tbc…
Part Twenty Four - Changes