A fic, short, but not too short :)
Viggo/Orlando, PG.
Bare
There’s something about a man with bare feet, Orlando thinks, gaze steadily trained on those belonging to Viggo.
Water drips down the panes of glass with wet thuds, turning the view into a grey and green smudge of life.
Can’t film today they were told, again.
So he folded himself up with a book in his favorite dilapidated armchair, the one no one else will sit in, the one they tease him for coveting. Ignoring the comings and goings of the raucous hobbits around him he’d managed to immerse himself in his novel.
And when he’d looked up again everyone had left except Viggo, who sat across the room from him, cross-legged in his chair, bare footed.
The older man was himself staring out the window, lost in internal reverie. Orlando shifted slightly, breathed deeply the warmed air of the room, tasting the always present earthy scent of the land outside.
Viggo looked up at the movement, a small smile flickering across his mouth. "It got quiet."
"Yeah...hobbits on the loose."
"Hate to think," Viggo replied, grinning, then shifting in his chair and dragging Orlando’s gaze back to the bare feet for a split second. What was it about bare feet on a man, he wondered again. They made him think...want...he wasn’t sure.
"You aren’t loose with them today though," Viggo said, questioned. Voice soft within the quiet room.
"Nah mate, they tire me out some days"
An arched dark brow.
"You?"
Incredulous.
Orlando shifted, suddenly uncomfortable at the stereotyping of himself that everyone fell into. Why should Viggo be different...more worryingly, why should he want him to be?
He cleared his throat, slipped into expected normalcy, "Shocking ain’t it?"
Viggo didn’t answer at first, studied him with dark unreadable eyes. A moment, too long.
"Maybe."
The answer made him feel exposed and he drew his knees up to his chest, feet on the edge of the chair seat, toes curling and uncurling along the edge. For the first time he realized his own feet were bare too.
"It must be hard," Viggo added after a long pause.
"Yeah," he answered, not sure what must be hard, wanting to answer. A lopsided smile as an afterthought.
A smile in return and Viggo turned back to look out the window at the water filmed landscape.
Orlando sighed, strangely relieved not to be the focus of the other man’s intensity for awhile.
Wriggled his toes contemplatively.
So many thoughts.
Looked again over at Viggo. Viggo’s feet. So many thoughts.
End.