[FIC] RPF: After Eclipse
1) Look I'm actually capitalising my titles! (For now anyway.)
2) I think I'm out of my funk. At least I hope I am. It's an irritating funk to be in.
3) My f-list has been so down lately, and I don't know what I can do. But I hope that this helps, because I like to think that it's pretty funny. 8D
After Eclipse
Characters/Pairings: Sean Bean/Viggo Mortensen
Rating: NC-17
Words: ~5310
Disclaimer: Didn’t happen, just the product of my imagination.
Summary: Sean and Viggo meet for the first time after the Eclipse Stakes, a horse-racing event.
Warnings: Non-romantic sex.
Notes: A prelude to afra_schatz’s Sports of Kings AU about Sean and Viggo’s first meeting. You don’t need to know anything about that ‘verse except that Sean is a misanthropic horse trainer and Viggo is a vet. For my prompt in ruby_story_swap for ‘sporting event’.
Horses were always a matter of a gamble, Sean’s father had always told him. You might breed them, choose them carefully, train them with obsessive concentration, but horses had their own minds like cards did and there was always uncertainty and the strange element of ‘what if’. What trainers and breeders could do was to try to eliminate that uncertainty as much as possible, but sometimes it just wasn’t possible.
Whenever his father said that, Sean thought the old man was making excuses for the reasons why a horse didn’t win in a race, or why it scored an injury. The excuse worked well enough for explaining to owners why their horses didn’t win, but Sean couldn’t believe in it. Lady Boots won the Eclipse Stakes. Maybe he was young, but Sean believed that it was all those mornings, afternoons and nights he spent with her that led to her win. She was foaled at his father’s stables, and Sean looked long and hard for another stable that would allow him to apprentice there and to train his own horse. He brought her up and trained her from the time she was a foal stumbling on unsteady feet to now. He even named her, for Christ’s sake - after the white stockings that marked her from hoof to knee. (Sean freely admitted that he wasn’t entirely creative with names.) He was damned pleased with her, and he would argue to the end of his days with his old man that it wasn’t just luck.
Still, she was getting a little older at seven years old, and he wondered if he should enter her into the flats ever again. Even though the flats were more prestigious and paid better, Sean preferred the National Hunt - horses were capable of being trained for far more than simply running across flat ground for over a mile and not being scared by the trampling of other horses nearby. Maybe he should enter Lady Boots into the Tingle Creek chase; it was in Surrey, and there would be enough time for training before next year’s race. The problem laid in where he could. Sinclair’s stables were made for flats-training, because Sinclair himself specialises in flats. It was one of the reasons why Sean chose him, really. Then again, Sean could always go back up North to his father to use his jump training grounds, but that somehow seemed a little bit too much like defeat.
Sean looked down at his beer before he lifted the mug. The cardboard coaster was a little wet, but it would serve well enough for some emergency note-taking. He dug into his pockets and cursed under his breath when he realised he didn’t actually have a pen with him.
He was about to wave his arm and wrangle one from a waitress when a pen was thrust under his nose. Sean blinked, looking from the fingers (with dirt under the nails) down the arm and up to the face.
“I figured you need one,” the stranger said. He spoke with a flat, drawling accent that had Sean narrowing his eyes in suspicion immediately. But he took the pen nonetheless, twirling it around his fingers. It’s a common, cheap ball point, one of those things that clicked with every press against the surface. In other words, Sean’s favourite, and he entertained for a few moments the thought that the stranger was an American spy who spent weeks researching about Sean’s favourite kind of pen so he could offer him one right that moment. Then he shook it off and narrowed his eyes.
“Are you American,” he half-accused.
“Everyone keeps asking me that,” the stranger complained. “Do I have something on my face that declares that?”
Sean snorted. “It’s the way you speak,” he said, and turned back to the coaster. He drew a line in the middle, and wrote ‘pros’ on one side and ‘cons’ on the other. Whether it was pros and cons of keeping his mare in the flats or going back to his father, he wasn’t sure yet. He flicked the pen cap for a few moments, thinking.
“My name is Viggo, by the way.”
Oh, the American was still there. Sean blinked, looking up. “I didn’t ask for your name,” he said, perfectly reasonably. “What kind of name is Viggo anyway?”
“I know you didn’t ask, but I’m giving it. Anyway, it’s a Danish name,” the stranger - Viggo - said. He sat down on the chair opposite of Sean, just dropping down and leaning his elbows on the table as if he belonged there.
“The seat is taken,” Sean said.
“No, it’s not,” Viggo countered. He grinned, an expression that took over the whole of his face and made him look ridiculous. “Anyway,” he was saying. “Are you here for the races?”
Sean blinked again. “Yeah,” he said, and looked down at the coaster. Hopefully the man would take a fucking hint the second time he was ignored.
“Me too,” Viggo said. No such luck then. Sean knew he should ignore him and hope he would get it into his thick skull to fuck off, but the next words came far too easily.
“What does an American know about horse racing?”
“We have more land than you do, you know,” Viggo pointed out reasonably, still grinning. “Plenty of space for horses to run, jump, and such things. I grew up with horses, actually.”
That was too much information Sean didn’t particular care about, so he only snorted. He looked at the coaster again and scribbled chases are better in the pros column. So the question was actually about whether to change Lady to the chases rather than the flats, he thought. His pen was poised to cancel the line he just wrote before Viggo spoke again.
“What are you doing at the races anyway?”
“That should be my question,” Sean said without looking up. “Isn’t the Atlantic a little too big to cross for you to come to just watch one race?”
“Maybe,” Viggo said, and his finger poked at the edge of Sean’s coaster. Sean prodded him with the pen, smearing blue all over the nail, but Viggo only laughed. “It’ll be worth it even if I did that. I won a pretty penny.”
Now that made Sean look up. He blinked, tilting his head to the side. “Who did you bet on?”
“The newcomer,” Viggo said, and he leaned forward, hands folding underneath his chin. “The pretty filly with the white stockings. She has such an unimaginative name that I didn’t bother remembering it.”
“Lady Boots,” Sean corrected automatically. He stopped fiddling with the pen, setting it down with a loud, plastic click on the table. “It’s a good name. I gave it to her myself.”
Viggo’s eyebrows flew up, making him look even more comical for a moment. “You’re the owner?”
“I’m her trainer,” Sean said, and paused for a moment before he shrugged. “And her owner, but that don’t matter. It’s more important that I’m her trainer.”
All owners did was to pay the money and have their names associated with the horse. Most owners didn’t even have any knowledge about horses aside from thoroughbred or not, and more often than not they weren’t willing to learn, only wanting to know if their horses would win a big race. It was the trainers who chose the race and readied the horses for it, and no one really cared about the owners because they only cared about the money. Sean shook his head, ducking his head down and drawing a cigarette from his pack. He lit it, and looked at Viggo through the smoke.
“You don’t know much about racing, do you,” he stated.
Viggo laughed, once more refusing to take offence. Sean wondered if he was going to have to insult the man’s mother to get him to leave him alone.
“I don’t know that much about the schematics of it,” Viggo said casually. “I liked the way that horses look when they race, although the bridle and saddle and all of that kind of get in the way.”
“No one will ever allow a race without saddle and bridle,” Sean said archly. “If you want that, go watch a movie.”
There was a long moment of silence. Sean was aware of Viggo’s eyes on him, but he was far more interested in going back to his coaster. He circled the line, thought for another few seconds, and struck the whole thing off.
His father had always preferred the steeplechases, and after a few years running for the flats, Sean realised that he was the same. He might have gone all the way down South to apprentice for at a stable specialising in the opposite of what his old man usually did, but it seemed that his tastes were still affected by his father. In any case, it shouldn’t be about whether he liked chases or flats better, but which suited the horse. Lady Boots had training in jumps during the days Sean was training her in his father’s stables, and he knew she was at the age where he should switch her over. But somehow running Lady in the chases seemed like defeat; yet if he continued in the flats when he didn’t particularly like it and with a horse that was not particularly suited to it, weren’t his actions still being controlled by his old man?
Damnit, his mind was running in circles, and Sean growled at himself. He threw the pen onto the table, looking up. At that moment, he caught Viggo’s eyes, bright blue under the dim lights of the pub.
“What?” he found himself saying half-defensively. Viggo looked strange, almost alien, without his smile.
“You haven’t given me your name,” the other man said. “Sure, I can find out if I dig for my race program, but I don’t want to bother.”
If he gave Viggo his name, he probably wouldn’t be left alone; but if he didn’t, he had a good idea that Viggo wouldn’t leave until he did. Sean sighed, running a hand through his own hair.
“Sean,” he said.
Viggo smiled again, and he tipped his head to the side. “Sean,” he said, and his lips and tongue seemed to stroke that single syllable and made it entirely too obscene. Sean opened his mouth to speak, but before he could, Viggo was leaning forward, practically draping himself across the table.
“There are bareback races, you know,” he said conversationally. “It’s in Italy, and it’s been going on for hundreds of years.” Sean opened his mouth, but before he could even say a word, Viggo steamrolled over him.
“I’ve never won anything before, and I know it’s because of you that I won this time. You and your filly,” and Sean felt the pen fall from his hand from the sudden, soft, and deep dip of Viggo’s voice. “So I really hope that you’re not going to punch me for this.” He reached out, and his fingers tapped very, very lightly against the top of Sean’s knuckles.
“You, me, sex,” Viggo said. His grin widened, and he slid backwards, snake-sinuous, back into his chair. “Just for tonight. To celebrate.”
Somehow, Sean expected something else. Something more daring, more open; something that would prove all of the assumptions about American depravity to be true. That would be far easier to reject, Sean thought; far easier than this, something like a logical proposition more than anything else. There was no overt praise, no gushing about the colour of his eyes or anything stupid like that. Which was a good thing, because he wouldn’t be able to return anything in the same vein - he liked horses more than he liked people. Still, he had to admit that there were certain things that horses couldn’t give him, and which people could. Just a matter of biology, really.
He took another drag of his cigarette, his eyes raking Viggo from top to bottom. There was a certain attractiveness to the man, something in his high cheekbones and the strange colour of his eyes, something in the callused tips of his fingers that didn’t make Sean instinctively and immediately reject him. There was this too: that throughout Sean’s inspection, Viggo didn’t flinch. He didn’t even move.
Sometimes a twitchy foal portended good things - sensitivity, perhaps. But Sean had never really like horses whose eyes flicked from one end of the stables to another, as if they were waiting for the right moment to bolt. Sean looked at Viggo again, wondering wryly if there was something wrong for him to judge a man by criterions he used for horses. Maybe he was wrong about this man, but there were still remnants of adrenaline from watching Lady Boots win, and Sean figured that if he was to become the owner of his own stables at some point, he would need to be able to take a judgment of a person with some accuracy.
Stubbing his cigarette on the ashtray by his elbow, he smiled.
“Alright,” he said. “Do you have a room?”
***
Viggo did have a room, and it had a sturdy door. Sean pressed him against it the moment it shut, and their fingers groped for the deadbolt together, turning in. His breath ghosted across Viggo’s lips and their eyes met, and Sean’s lips curled upwards, a sharp smirk.
“Has all of that courage of yours fled already?” he asked.
“No,” Viggo said, and he laughed again. “I’m just wondering if you’ll freak out if I kiss you. I like kissing, but there are plenty of men-”
The bad thing about Viggo, Sean thought as he crashed their lips together, was that he talked far too much. Horses were rarely noisy, and even when they were, Sean could always pretend he didn’t understand them. Humans always looked so offended when they were ignored, especially when Sean had already shown that he could speak English. He would have continued on that train of thought, but Viggo distracted him, pulling away and pushing him backwards. Sean stumbled, craning his neck, and almost missed Viggo starting to talk again in his attempt to not fall ass-backwards onto the bed.
“It’s like having lightning underneath your skin, sometimes,” Viggo was saying. “Excitement, I mean; that one moment when you’re waiting, anticipating, something that is almost there and you don’t know if it’s going to be. You don’t know if it will be satisfaction or disappointment.”
His lips brushed against Sean’s neck, and in that one moment, Sean realised that Viggo wasn’t talking to him. He wasn’t talking to anyone else at all, but just speaking, a constant stream of words that had no real meaning or significance. Like a trainer trying to calm down a nervous foal, Sean thought, and he growled immediately, grabbing Viggo by the shirt. He spun on his heel, and threw him down onto the bed, crawling over him.
“Do you ever shut up?”
“No,” Viggo said. He grinned at Sean beneath heavy eyelids, his hands going down to his own shirt, starting to unbutton them. “I’m a good multitasker, you see, and every time I’m not doing at least two things at once, my brain drifts off, and I get distracted.” Sean looked at him and bent his knees, folding himself back until he was straddling Viggo’s hips. His eyes didn’t leave the other man’s as he viciously thumbed his jeans open.
“Why don’t you find something else to do with that mouth,” he snarled, and really, it wasn’t the best pickup line he could think of, especially since he was only half-hard.
But Viggo didn’t seem to care. He only laughed again, pushing himself up with a grace that made Sean think of horses again. His hands pushed Sean’s away, and Sean dropped onto the bed, spreading his legs with his shirt still on, but thank you God, Viggo was finally shutting up. There was heat surrounding his cock, and Sean threw his head back, a groan tearing itself out of his chest, his throat. He was at full mast immediately, and Sean squeezed his eyes shut, rocking his hips slowly forward, driving himself into that hot, wet mouth.
Then he felt Viggo’s hands on his shirt, unbuttoning it from bottom up.
Multitasker, right, he thought, and almost snorted as he helped, tugging the buttons out of their holes from collar downwards. Their hands met in the middle, and Viggo was pulling them down, forcing them to curl around his neck.
“Stop,” Sean breathed. He turned his hand, tugged heavily on the ends of Viggo’s too-long hair. “C’mon, stop for a moment.”
Viggo looked up and hummed questioningly around his cock, but Sean only narrowed his eyes, baring his teeth. He jerked his hips upwards, almost choking the other man before he sat up. “Stop and up. Get up here.”
Slowly, Viggo pulled off, eyes flickering upwards before he licked the head of Sean’s cock, causing a shock of pleasure to travel down his spine and twine around his nerves. Sean shivered, but he nudged at Viggo’s shoulders. “Turn around,” he said, and was almost surprised at how hoarse his voice sounded. He shook his head hard, once, trying to get his hair out of his eyes.
“Give me your cock.”
There was a single heartbeat’s worth of silence before Viggo was laughing again. “You’re fucking charming,” he said, and his accent gave fucking a certain inflection that made Sean shove at him again. But Viggo seemed to understand well enough, and he shifted, turning around until Sean could reach his hips, his arse, and his teeth caught the buttons of Viggo’s jeans as he tried his best to not rip them off.
“I’m focused,” he answered tartly. “And I’d like you to shut the fuck up while getting on with this.”
“You make it sound like a chore,” Viggo said, and Sean could feel the vibrations of his words against his thighs. He fell back onto the bed, nails scraping against the skin of Viggo’s hips as he pulled them off. No underwear, he noted, and he wondered why he wasn’t more surprised.
“I don’t like small talk,” Sean said, and to prevent Viggo from giving a comeback, he relaxed his throat and took the other man’s half-hard cock into his mouth.
Viggo made a strangled sound, a twisting and living thing from the back of his throat. His back arching as his hips spasmed, but Sean had a tight grip on him and held him still. He rocked upwards again, impatiently, and felt the whisper of Viggo’s chuckle against the skin of his cock before Viggo’s lips closed around the head of his cock and started to move down. Sean closed his eyes, and it was easy to slip into the usual unthinking trance of sex, of sensations that came upon him like waves of pleasure that broke against the shore, over and over, drawing him closer and closer to drowning.
His nails dug into Viggo’s thighs, sinking into the skin, and Viggo jerked his head, his cock sliding further down Sean’s throat. But Sean was used to this and he only swallowed, feeling Viggo’s groan beat against the skin of his own cock. It was good like this, the silence broken only by the sounds of sex, a peace that was pleasurable in a completely different from yet something evocative of that he found in the stables, stroking his fingers through the horses’ manes as he calmed them during a storm.
Viggo was making urgent little noises, muffled and trembling, the insides of his cheeks pressing against Sean’s cock. Sean moaned, pressed his nose even further into the thick, wiry hair at the base, and his hands urged Viggo forward, let him jerk and rock his hips. Nails scraped down Sean’s hip. When Viggo came, there was a rush of salt Sean could barely taste as it slipped down his throat, and Sean closed his eyes. He pulled off, let Viggo slip from his mouth, before he laid his mouth against strong thighs, breathing hard before he threw his hips up, shoving his cock as deep as Viggo would let him, and came.
No sparks, no fireworks, but Sean preferred it that way. It was as if he was a rubber band over-stretched, knotted at both ends, and someone had released the ties, snapping him back to his original length and drawing all of the tension out of his body. He slumped back onto the sheets, breathing out through his teeth as he closed his eyes.
Plenty of people told him that he had a bad habit of falling asleep right after sex, and Sean always snorted and told them he was only dozing. That was what he was doing now, letting his eyes close and just breathing, inhaling the scent of sex and sweat. Viggo was quiet, and though his fingers were making some ridiculous shapes on his thigh and his lips were scraping the skin of his calf, Sean was too relaxed to care at the moment. Besides, he could ignore both easily, given how light the touches were from beneath the cotton of his slacks.
Then there was a knock on the door. Sean blinked his eyes open, and he punched Viggo lightly on the hip to get him off.
“Doctor Mortensen?” the voice came through the door. Sean blinked as Viggo practically flew off of the bed, and he muffled his laughter behind a hand as he watched the other man trip, legs tangling in his jeans - neither of them actually got any article of clothing actually off. Sean sat up, wiping his mouth as he started to pull up his underwear, tucking his limp cock back into his slacks.
Doctor, huh. Sean wondered if Viggo was rooming with a friend or something - he didn’t look anything like a doctor. Or even a vet, for the matter. He took one glance at Viggo before he shook his head.
“You might want to wipe your mouth before answering the door,” he said quietly, and almost grinned.
Viggo shot him a look before he licked his lips instead, leaving them spit-slicked and looking even more obscene than before. Sean snorted, shifting onto the bed and slumping back down. He watched through half-lidded eyes as Viggo had a conversation with the woman through the half-opened door for a couple of seconds.
“I got a call and I have to pick it up downstairs,” Viggo said once the door was closed. “Sounds like an emergency.”
“You’re actually a doctor?” Sean raised his eyebrow.
“No,” Viggo said, grinning. Red and swollen lips didn’t make the expression look any better. “I’m a vet, specialising in horses.” His grin widened, most likely because Sean was staring at him wide-eyed.
Sean opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. “You should probably zip up your fly before you go,” he finally managed to say.
“I was going to give my landlords a free show, really, because they’ve been so nice to me,” Viggo laughed again. “But hey, stay here, alright? I’ll just be a few minutes.”
He bounded out of the door before Sean could tell him to fuck off, far too energetic for a man who had literally just come a few minutes ago. Sean looked at the half-closed door for a few seconds before he sighed, getting up and closing it. Distractedly, he buttoned up his shirt before meandering into the bathroom.
Viggo’s toothbrush was buried in foam in his mouth when he heard the door open and close again. Sean stepped out of the bathroom, leaning against the doorframe and watching as Viggo stared at the bed as if he was trying to make Sean appear on it.
“I’m here,” he said, and the words were so muffled by the toothbrush it sounded more like mmhrrrr.
But Viggo’s eyes snapped towards him nonetheless. He grinned, and shrugged. “I’ve got to go. Some idiot owner took their horse out in the rain in the morning and now she’s shivering in the middle of the night. They’re afraid she’s sick, so I’m being called in.” He sighed dramatically.
That sounded incredibly familiar, almost disturbingly so. Sean strode back to the sink, spitting out toothpaste before raising his voice. “Which stables is that?”
“Hedley Park,” Viggo answered. He stepped into the bathroom, catching Sean’s eyes in the mirror. “Why?”
Sean swore under his breath, wiping his mouth. “Because that’s the stables I work at and more than likely one of the horses under my charge,” he said. “He took the horse out in the morning and refused to let her go back in when the boy went to call him, and when it started storming he was still fucking riding. Christ, I’m going to kill the bastard.”
Viggo was staring at him. “You are Harry Sinclair’s new kid?”
“What?”
“The people at the Animal Clinic talk. They seem to think gossiping is a bonding activity,” Viggo shrugged. He nudged Sean out of the way before ducking his head underneath this sink to gargle water. “Anyway, you’ll be going back then?”
“Of course I am,” Sean growled. He stomped back into the main room.
“Then you can give me a ride.”
“What?” Sean whirled around.
“I don’t have a car and I’m not going to reach them quick enough if I call a cab,” Viggo said, reasonably. “We can get both of our asses to the stables if you drive.”
Sean stared at him for a long moment, trying to figure out what Viggo was trying to do. He was inherently, instinctively suspicious of people, and he thought that maybe Viggo was going back on his word, that this wasn’t ‘just sex’ and he was being clingy. But he looked into grey-blue eyes and realised that all of Viggo’s playfulness had drained out of him, and he was meeting Sean’s gaze with his head tipped back.
“Are you going to just stand there and waste time?” Viggo asked, arching an eyebrow.
Common wisdom said that you were supposed to like someone better when you were fucking them. But common wisdom could go screw itself, because Sean liked Viggo much better like this, with barely concealed concern and no little anger hidden underneath his skin. His cheekbones stood out right now, as if they had become symbols of Viggo’s emotions trying to break free. Sean barked a laugh, and he made sure he grabbed his wallet and car keys before looking at Viggo.
“The hell are you waiting for? Get your arse moving.”
***
Some years later
“The problem is that human beings make things too complicated,” Viggo heard himself saying. He sank back against Sean’s couch and took another long swig of the wine bottle hanging from his hand. “Like, for example, you need one veterinarian degree for theoretically almost all animals, and you need a whole ‘medical’ degree for the ‘human animal’. Self-centered, selfish, complicated, and they make everything they touch the same.”
He glanced over to look at Sean’s reaction to his tirade. His friend had always been far more misanthropic than himself, and maybe that was why Viggo had stumbled into his new place - his new stables, he corrected himself automatically - instead of anywhere else.
Sean disappointed him. He only made a small, agreeing noise and turned his attention back to the television, still sipping at the same glass of wine he poured at the beginning of the night. Viggo had long abandoned his glass.
“Pay attention to me,” Viggo demanded, nudging Sean’s thigh with a bare foot.
“I am,” Sean said, green eyes glancing over to Viggo. He raised an eyebrow, “I thought you like it that people are complicated.”
Viggo snorted. He wondered why he even bothered coming over if Sean was going to just say things Viggo was perfectly capable of thinking himself. Taking another swig of the wine, he realised why - he always hated getting drunk alone because he always got horny when drunk. Usually that wasn’t a problem, because he had his wife with him at home - but then, he didn’t have a wife anymore, did he? Not for long anyway.
He shook his head hard to dislodge those depressing thoughts. That was yet another reason why he left the house. Viggo shifted on the couch, raising his feet onto the leather. He nudged Sean again.
“Hey,” Viggo said. To his disappointment, his voice wasn’t slurring yet. “Do you remember the first time we met?”
“If I’d known you to be a maudlin drunk, I’d have tried even harder to ignore you,” Sean drawled. He looked at Viggo for a long moment before he grabbed the packet of cigarettes lying on the table, drawing one stick out and lighting it.
Maybe it was the wine. Viggo tipped his head to the side, his gaze fixed upon the way Sean’s lips curled around the filter, the way his cheeks hollowed as he took a deep drag. He watched how the smoke curled out of Sean’s mouth and nostrils, wreathing him in mist for a long moment. For the whole of their friendship, Viggo had always known, in the abstract kind of way, that Sean was a hell of an attractive man (bloke, as the slang of England would say). Usually it didn’t matter, like the fact that a filly was absolutely beautiful mattered very little when he was trying to deal with her sprain, but right now, the alcohol made him horny enough to notice it again. Notice and stick in his mind, like a nagging, worming thought.
The bottle went back to the table with a hard thunk. Viggo reached out, his finger brushing the very edge of Sean’s lip before he was batted away irritably.
“What are you doing?” Sean asked, arching an eyebrow. He didn’t look particularly surprised.
“We met because of sex and horses,” Viggo mused aloud, only half-answering. “It’s a shame, isn’t it, that only horses remained.”
Sean snorted. His reins-calluses were rough on Viggo’s chin as he dragged him forward. His eyes were very green this close, and they were far too sober and amused.
“You’re drunk and I am not your rebound guy,” Sean said, and there was an odd gentleness to his voice. “We’re better as friends. You know that.”
Viggo’s hand curled around Sean’s wrist, and Sean let go, moving back until he was leaning against the arm of the couch. They watched each other for a long moment before Viggo made a sound, something almost like a laugh.
“We are, aren’t we,” he said, and he chuckled, this time with some real mirth in it. “You’re a good friend, Sean.”
“Only you’d think that,” Sean snorted. He turned back to the television, his eyes fixed once more on the screen.
Maybe he came here not because he didn’t want to be alone - any bar would’ve served if that was the case. Maybe he chose to go to Sean because this was the one man who could see through him, who knew him well enough to not take any of his bullshit.
Viggo leaned back against the couch again, stretching out his feet and placing them on the coffee table. Sean didn’t even protest, so Viggo made himself comfortable, grabbing the bottle of wine again. This time he only wrapped his lips around the top, tasting bitter sweetness on the tip of his tongue.
Like this, it was comfortable, and Viggo knew it wouldn’t be possible if they actually had sex tonight. There were the reruns of the latest chases on the television screen and there was Sean, and Viggo thought that it was enough. More than enough.
Maybe he came here because there was something this simple, this easy, and Viggo might love the complexity of people, but he still needed this.
End
2) I think I'm out of my funk. At least I hope I am. It's an irritating funk to be in.
3) My f-list has been so down lately, and I don't know what I can do. But I hope that this helps, because I like to think that it's pretty funny. 8D
After Eclipse
Characters/Pairings: Sean Bean/Viggo Mortensen
Rating: NC-17
Words: ~5310
Disclaimer: Didn’t happen, just the product of my imagination.
Summary: Sean and Viggo meet for the first time after the Eclipse Stakes, a horse-racing event.
Warnings: Non-romantic sex.
Notes: A prelude to afra_schatz’s Sports of Kings AU about Sean and Viggo’s first meeting. You don’t need to know anything about that ‘verse except that Sean is a misanthropic horse trainer and Viggo is a vet. For my prompt in ruby_story_swap for ‘sporting event’.
Horses were always a matter of a gamble, Sean’s father had always told him. You might breed them, choose them carefully, train them with obsessive concentration, but horses had their own minds like cards did and there was always uncertainty and the strange element of ‘what if’. What trainers and breeders could do was to try to eliminate that uncertainty as much as possible, but sometimes it just wasn’t possible.
Whenever his father said that, Sean thought the old man was making excuses for the reasons why a horse didn’t win in a race, or why it scored an injury. The excuse worked well enough for explaining to owners why their horses didn’t win, but Sean couldn’t believe in it. Lady Boots won the Eclipse Stakes. Maybe he was young, but Sean believed that it was all those mornings, afternoons and nights he spent with her that led to her win. She was foaled at his father’s stables, and Sean looked long and hard for another stable that would allow him to apprentice there and to train his own horse. He brought her up and trained her from the time she was a foal stumbling on unsteady feet to now. He even named her, for Christ’s sake - after the white stockings that marked her from hoof to knee. (Sean freely admitted that he wasn’t entirely creative with names.) He was damned pleased with her, and he would argue to the end of his days with his old man that it wasn’t just luck.
Still, she was getting a little older at seven years old, and he wondered if he should enter her into the flats ever again. Even though the flats were more prestigious and paid better, Sean preferred the National Hunt - horses were capable of being trained for far more than simply running across flat ground for over a mile and not being scared by the trampling of other horses nearby. Maybe he should enter Lady Boots into the Tingle Creek chase; it was in Surrey, and there would be enough time for training before next year’s race. The problem laid in where he could. Sinclair’s stables were made for flats-training, because Sinclair himself specialises in flats. It was one of the reasons why Sean chose him, really. Then again, Sean could always go back up North to his father to use his jump training grounds, but that somehow seemed a little bit too much like defeat.
Sean looked down at his beer before he lifted the mug. The cardboard coaster was a little wet, but it would serve well enough for some emergency note-taking. He dug into his pockets and cursed under his breath when he realised he didn’t actually have a pen with him.
He was about to wave his arm and wrangle one from a waitress when a pen was thrust under his nose. Sean blinked, looking from the fingers (with dirt under the nails) down the arm and up to the face.
“I figured you need one,” the stranger said. He spoke with a flat, drawling accent that had Sean narrowing his eyes in suspicion immediately. But he took the pen nonetheless, twirling it around his fingers. It’s a common, cheap ball point, one of those things that clicked with every press against the surface. In other words, Sean’s favourite, and he entertained for a few moments the thought that the stranger was an American spy who spent weeks researching about Sean’s favourite kind of pen so he could offer him one right that moment. Then he shook it off and narrowed his eyes.
“Are you American,” he half-accused.
“Everyone keeps asking me that,” the stranger complained. “Do I have something on my face that declares that?”
Sean snorted. “It’s the way you speak,” he said, and turned back to the coaster. He drew a line in the middle, and wrote ‘pros’ on one side and ‘cons’ on the other. Whether it was pros and cons of keeping his mare in the flats or going back to his father, he wasn’t sure yet. He flicked the pen cap for a few moments, thinking.
“My name is Viggo, by the way.”
Oh, the American was still there. Sean blinked, looking up. “I didn’t ask for your name,” he said, perfectly reasonably. “What kind of name is Viggo anyway?”
“I know you didn’t ask, but I’m giving it. Anyway, it’s a Danish name,” the stranger - Viggo - said. He sat down on the chair opposite of Sean, just dropping down and leaning his elbows on the table as if he belonged there.
“The seat is taken,” Sean said.
“No, it’s not,” Viggo countered. He grinned, an expression that took over the whole of his face and made him look ridiculous. “Anyway,” he was saying. “Are you here for the races?”
Sean blinked again. “Yeah,” he said, and looked down at the coaster. Hopefully the man would take a fucking hint the second time he was ignored.
“Me too,” Viggo said. No such luck then. Sean knew he should ignore him and hope he would get it into his thick skull to fuck off, but the next words came far too easily.
“What does an American know about horse racing?”
“We have more land than you do, you know,” Viggo pointed out reasonably, still grinning. “Plenty of space for horses to run, jump, and such things. I grew up with horses, actually.”
That was too much information Sean didn’t particular care about, so he only snorted. He looked at the coaster again and scribbled chases are better in the pros column. So the question was actually about whether to change Lady to the chases rather than the flats, he thought. His pen was poised to cancel the line he just wrote before Viggo spoke again.
“What are you doing at the races anyway?”
“That should be my question,” Sean said without looking up. “Isn’t the Atlantic a little too big to cross for you to come to just watch one race?”
“Maybe,” Viggo said, and his finger poked at the edge of Sean’s coaster. Sean prodded him with the pen, smearing blue all over the nail, but Viggo only laughed. “It’ll be worth it even if I did that. I won a pretty penny.”
Now that made Sean look up. He blinked, tilting his head to the side. “Who did you bet on?”
“The newcomer,” Viggo said, and he leaned forward, hands folding underneath his chin. “The pretty filly with the white stockings. She has such an unimaginative name that I didn’t bother remembering it.”
“Lady Boots,” Sean corrected automatically. He stopped fiddling with the pen, setting it down with a loud, plastic click on the table. “It’s a good name. I gave it to her myself.”
Viggo’s eyebrows flew up, making him look even more comical for a moment. “You’re the owner?”
“I’m her trainer,” Sean said, and paused for a moment before he shrugged. “And her owner, but that don’t matter. It’s more important that I’m her trainer.”
All owners did was to pay the money and have their names associated with the horse. Most owners didn’t even have any knowledge about horses aside from thoroughbred or not, and more often than not they weren’t willing to learn, only wanting to know if their horses would win a big race. It was the trainers who chose the race and readied the horses for it, and no one really cared about the owners because they only cared about the money. Sean shook his head, ducking his head down and drawing a cigarette from his pack. He lit it, and looked at Viggo through the smoke.
“You don’t know much about racing, do you,” he stated.
Viggo laughed, once more refusing to take offence. Sean wondered if he was going to have to insult the man’s mother to get him to leave him alone.
“I don’t know that much about the schematics of it,” Viggo said casually. “I liked the way that horses look when they race, although the bridle and saddle and all of that kind of get in the way.”
“No one will ever allow a race without saddle and bridle,” Sean said archly. “If you want that, go watch a movie.”
There was a long moment of silence. Sean was aware of Viggo’s eyes on him, but he was far more interested in going back to his coaster. He circled the line, thought for another few seconds, and struck the whole thing off.
His father had always preferred the steeplechases, and after a few years running for the flats, Sean realised that he was the same. He might have gone all the way down South to apprentice for at a stable specialising in the opposite of what his old man usually did, but it seemed that his tastes were still affected by his father. In any case, it shouldn’t be about whether he liked chases or flats better, but which suited the horse. Lady Boots had training in jumps during the days Sean was training her in his father’s stables, and he knew she was at the age where he should switch her over. But somehow running Lady in the chases seemed like defeat; yet if he continued in the flats when he didn’t particularly like it and with a horse that was not particularly suited to it, weren’t his actions still being controlled by his old man?
Damnit, his mind was running in circles, and Sean growled at himself. He threw the pen onto the table, looking up. At that moment, he caught Viggo’s eyes, bright blue under the dim lights of the pub.
“What?” he found himself saying half-defensively. Viggo looked strange, almost alien, without his smile.
“You haven’t given me your name,” the other man said. “Sure, I can find out if I dig for my race program, but I don’t want to bother.”
If he gave Viggo his name, he probably wouldn’t be left alone; but if he didn’t, he had a good idea that Viggo wouldn’t leave until he did. Sean sighed, running a hand through his own hair.
“Sean,” he said.
Viggo smiled again, and he tipped his head to the side. “Sean,” he said, and his lips and tongue seemed to stroke that single syllable and made it entirely too obscene. Sean opened his mouth to speak, but before he could, Viggo was leaning forward, practically draping himself across the table.
“There are bareback races, you know,” he said conversationally. “It’s in Italy, and it’s been going on for hundreds of years.” Sean opened his mouth, but before he could even say a word, Viggo steamrolled over him.
“I’ve never won anything before, and I know it’s because of you that I won this time. You and your filly,” and Sean felt the pen fall from his hand from the sudden, soft, and deep dip of Viggo’s voice. “So I really hope that you’re not going to punch me for this.” He reached out, and his fingers tapped very, very lightly against the top of Sean’s knuckles.
“You, me, sex,” Viggo said. His grin widened, and he slid backwards, snake-sinuous, back into his chair. “Just for tonight. To celebrate.”
Somehow, Sean expected something else. Something more daring, more open; something that would prove all of the assumptions about American depravity to be true. That would be far easier to reject, Sean thought; far easier than this, something like a logical proposition more than anything else. There was no overt praise, no gushing about the colour of his eyes or anything stupid like that. Which was a good thing, because he wouldn’t be able to return anything in the same vein - he liked horses more than he liked people. Still, he had to admit that there were certain things that horses couldn’t give him, and which people could. Just a matter of biology, really.
He took another drag of his cigarette, his eyes raking Viggo from top to bottom. There was a certain attractiveness to the man, something in his high cheekbones and the strange colour of his eyes, something in the callused tips of his fingers that didn’t make Sean instinctively and immediately reject him. There was this too: that throughout Sean’s inspection, Viggo didn’t flinch. He didn’t even move.
Sometimes a twitchy foal portended good things - sensitivity, perhaps. But Sean had never really like horses whose eyes flicked from one end of the stables to another, as if they were waiting for the right moment to bolt. Sean looked at Viggo again, wondering wryly if there was something wrong for him to judge a man by criterions he used for horses. Maybe he was wrong about this man, but there were still remnants of adrenaline from watching Lady Boots win, and Sean figured that if he was to become the owner of his own stables at some point, he would need to be able to take a judgment of a person with some accuracy.
Stubbing his cigarette on the ashtray by his elbow, he smiled.
“Alright,” he said. “Do you have a room?”
***
Viggo did have a room, and it had a sturdy door. Sean pressed him against it the moment it shut, and their fingers groped for the deadbolt together, turning in. His breath ghosted across Viggo’s lips and their eyes met, and Sean’s lips curled upwards, a sharp smirk.
“Has all of that courage of yours fled already?” he asked.
“No,” Viggo said, and he laughed again. “I’m just wondering if you’ll freak out if I kiss you. I like kissing, but there are plenty of men-”
The bad thing about Viggo, Sean thought as he crashed their lips together, was that he talked far too much. Horses were rarely noisy, and even when they were, Sean could always pretend he didn’t understand them. Humans always looked so offended when they were ignored, especially when Sean had already shown that he could speak English. He would have continued on that train of thought, but Viggo distracted him, pulling away and pushing him backwards. Sean stumbled, craning his neck, and almost missed Viggo starting to talk again in his attempt to not fall ass-backwards onto the bed.
“It’s like having lightning underneath your skin, sometimes,” Viggo was saying. “Excitement, I mean; that one moment when you’re waiting, anticipating, something that is almost there and you don’t know if it’s going to be. You don’t know if it will be satisfaction or disappointment.”
His lips brushed against Sean’s neck, and in that one moment, Sean realised that Viggo wasn’t talking to him. He wasn’t talking to anyone else at all, but just speaking, a constant stream of words that had no real meaning or significance. Like a trainer trying to calm down a nervous foal, Sean thought, and he growled immediately, grabbing Viggo by the shirt. He spun on his heel, and threw him down onto the bed, crawling over him.
“Do you ever shut up?”
“No,” Viggo said. He grinned at Sean beneath heavy eyelids, his hands going down to his own shirt, starting to unbutton them. “I’m a good multitasker, you see, and every time I’m not doing at least two things at once, my brain drifts off, and I get distracted.” Sean looked at him and bent his knees, folding himself back until he was straddling Viggo’s hips. His eyes didn’t leave the other man’s as he viciously thumbed his jeans open.
“Why don’t you find something else to do with that mouth,” he snarled, and really, it wasn’t the best pickup line he could think of, especially since he was only half-hard.
But Viggo didn’t seem to care. He only laughed again, pushing himself up with a grace that made Sean think of horses again. His hands pushed Sean’s away, and Sean dropped onto the bed, spreading his legs with his shirt still on, but thank you God, Viggo was finally shutting up. There was heat surrounding his cock, and Sean threw his head back, a groan tearing itself out of his chest, his throat. He was at full mast immediately, and Sean squeezed his eyes shut, rocking his hips slowly forward, driving himself into that hot, wet mouth.
Then he felt Viggo’s hands on his shirt, unbuttoning it from bottom up.
Multitasker, right, he thought, and almost snorted as he helped, tugging the buttons out of their holes from collar downwards. Their hands met in the middle, and Viggo was pulling them down, forcing them to curl around his neck.
“Stop,” Sean breathed. He turned his hand, tugged heavily on the ends of Viggo’s too-long hair. “C’mon, stop for a moment.”
Viggo looked up and hummed questioningly around his cock, but Sean only narrowed his eyes, baring his teeth. He jerked his hips upwards, almost choking the other man before he sat up. “Stop and up. Get up here.”
Slowly, Viggo pulled off, eyes flickering upwards before he licked the head of Sean’s cock, causing a shock of pleasure to travel down his spine and twine around his nerves. Sean shivered, but he nudged at Viggo’s shoulders. “Turn around,” he said, and was almost surprised at how hoarse his voice sounded. He shook his head hard, once, trying to get his hair out of his eyes.
“Give me your cock.”
There was a single heartbeat’s worth of silence before Viggo was laughing again. “You’re fucking charming,” he said, and his accent gave fucking a certain inflection that made Sean shove at him again. But Viggo seemed to understand well enough, and he shifted, turning around until Sean could reach his hips, his arse, and his teeth caught the buttons of Viggo’s jeans as he tried his best to not rip them off.
“I’m focused,” he answered tartly. “And I’d like you to shut the fuck up while getting on with this.”
“You make it sound like a chore,” Viggo said, and Sean could feel the vibrations of his words against his thighs. He fell back onto the bed, nails scraping against the skin of Viggo’s hips as he pulled them off. No underwear, he noted, and he wondered why he wasn’t more surprised.
“I don’t like small talk,” Sean said, and to prevent Viggo from giving a comeback, he relaxed his throat and took the other man’s half-hard cock into his mouth.
Viggo made a strangled sound, a twisting and living thing from the back of his throat. His back arching as his hips spasmed, but Sean had a tight grip on him and held him still. He rocked upwards again, impatiently, and felt the whisper of Viggo’s chuckle against the skin of his cock before Viggo’s lips closed around the head of his cock and started to move down. Sean closed his eyes, and it was easy to slip into the usual unthinking trance of sex, of sensations that came upon him like waves of pleasure that broke against the shore, over and over, drawing him closer and closer to drowning.
His nails dug into Viggo’s thighs, sinking into the skin, and Viggo jerked his head, his cock sliding further down Sean’s throat. But Sean was used to this and he only swallowed, feeling Viggo’s groan beat against the skin of his own cock. It was good like this, the silence broken only by the sounds of sex, a peace that was pleasurable in a completely different from yet something evocative of that he found in the stables, stroking his fingers through the horses’ manes as he calmed them during a storm.
Viggo was making urgent little noises, muffled and trembling, the insides of his cheeks pressing against Sean’s cock. Sean moaned, pressed his nose even further into the thick, wiry hair at the base, and his hands urged Viggo forward, let him jerk and rock his hips. Nails scraped down Sean’s hip. When Viggo came, there was a rush of salt Sean could barely taste as it slipped down his throat, and Sean closed his eyes. He pulled off, let Viggo slip from his mouth, before he laid his mouth against strong thighs, breathing hard before he threw his hips up, shoving his cock as deep as Viggo would let him, and came.
No sparks, no fireworks, but Sean preferred it that way. It was as if he was a rubber band over-stretched, knotted at both ends, and someone had released the ties, snapping him back to his original length and drawing all of the tension out of his body. He slumped back onto the sheets, breathing out through his teeth as he closed his eyes.
Plenty of people told him that he had a bad habit of falling asleep right after sex, and Sean always snorted and told them he was only dozing. That was what he was doing now, letting his eyes close and just breathing, inhaling the scent of sex and sweat. Viggo was quiet, and though his fingers were making some ridiculous shapes on his thigh and his lips were scraping the skin of his calf, Sean was too relaxed to care at the moment. Besides, he could ignore both easily, given how light the touches were from beneath the cotton of his slacks.
Then there was a knock on the door. Sean blinked his eyes open, and he punched Viggo lightly on the hip to get him off.
“Doctor Mortensen?” the voice came through the door. Sean blinked as Viggo practically flew off of the bed, and he muffled his laughter behind a hand as he watched the other man trip, legs tangling in his jeans - neither of them actually got any article of clothing actually off. Sean sat up, wiping his mouth as he started to pull up his underwear, tucking his limp cock back into his slacks.
Doctor, huh. Sean wondered if Viggo was rooming with a friend or something - he didn’t look anything like a doctor. Or even a vet, for the matter. He took one glance at Viggo before he shook his head.
“You might want to wipe your mouth before answering the door,” he said quietly, and almost grinned.
Viggo shot him a look before he licked his lips instead, leaving them spit-slicked and looking even more obscene than before. Sean snorted, shifting onto the bed and slumping back down. He watched through half-lidded eyes as Viggo had a conversation with the woman through the half-opened door for a couple of seconds.
“I got a call and I have to pick it up downstairs,” Viggo said once the door was closed. “Sounds like an emergency.”
“You’re actually a doctor?” Sean raised his eyebrow.
“No,” Viggo said, grinning. Red and swollen lips didn’t make the expression look any better. “I’m a vet, specialising in horses.” His grin widened, most likely because Sean was staring at him wide-eyed.
Sean opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. “You should probably zip up your fly before you go,” he finally managed to say.
“I was going to give my landlords a free show, really, because they’ve been so nice to me,” Viggo laughed again. “But hey, stay here, alright? I’ll just be a few minutes.”
He bounded out of the door before Sean could tell him to fuck off, far too energetic for a man who had literally just come a few minutes ago. Sean looked at the half-closed door for a few seconds before he sighed, getting up and closing it. Distractedly, he buttoned up his shirt before meandering into the bathroom.
Viggo’s toothbrush was buried in foam in his mouth when he heard the door open and close again. Sean stepped out of the bathroom, leaning against the doorframe and watching as Viggo stared at the bed as if he was trying to make Sean appear on it.
“I’m here,” he said, and the words were so muffled by the toothbrush it sounded more like mmhrrrr.
But Viggo’s eyes snapped towards him nonetheless. He grinned, and shrugged. “I’ve got to go. Some idiot owner took their horse out in the rain in the morning and now she’s shivering in the middle of the night. They’re afraid she’s sick, so I’m being called in.” He sighed dramatically.
That sounded incredibly familiar, almost disturbingly so. Sean strode back to the sink, spitting out toothpaste before raising his voice. “Which stables is that?”
“Hedley Park,” Viggo answered. He stepped into the bathroom, catching Sean’s eyes in the mirror. “Why?”
Sean swore under his breath, wiping his mouth. “Because that’s the stables I work at and more than likely one of the horses under my charge,” he said. “He took the horse out in the morning and refused to let her go back in when the boy went to call him, and when it started storming he was still fucking riding. Christ, I’m going to kill the bastard.”
Viggo was staring at him. “You are Harry Sinclair’s new kid?”
“What?”
“The people at the Animal Clinic talk. They seem to think gossiping is a bonding activity,” Viggo shrugged. He nudged Sean out of the way before ducking his head underneath this sink to gargle water. “Anyway, you’ll be going back then?”
“Of course I am,” Sean growled. He stomped back into the main room.
“Then you can give me a ride.”
“What?” Sean whirled around.
“I don’t have a car and I’m not going to reach them quick enough if I call a cab,” Viggo said, reasonably. “We can get both of our asses to the stables if you drive.”
Sean stared at him for a long moment, trying to figure out what Viggo was trying to do. He was inherently, instinctively suspicious of people, and he thought that maybe Viggo was going back on his word, that this wasn’t ‘just sex’ and he was being clingy. But he looked into grey-blue eyes and realised that all of Viggo’s playfulness had drained out of him, and he was meeting Sean’s gaze with his head tipped back.
“Are you going to just stand there and waste time?” Viggo asked, arching an eyebrow.
Common wisdom said that you were supposed to like someone better when you were fucking them. But common wisdom could go screw itself, because Sean liked Viggo much better like this, with barely concealed concern and no little anger hidden underneath his skin. His cheekbones stood out right now, as if they had become symbols of Viggo’s emotions trying to break free. Sean barked a laugh, and he made sure he grabbed his wallet and car keys before looking at Viggo.
“The hell are you waiting for? Get your arse moving.”
***
Some years later
“The problem is that human beings make things too complicated,” Viggo heard himself saying. He sank back against Sean’s couch and took another long swig of the wine bottle hanging from his hand. “Like, for example, you need one veterinarian degree for theoretically almost all animals, and you need a whole ‘medical’ degree for the ‘human animal’. Self-centered, selfish, complicated, and they make everything they touch the same.”
He glanced over to look at Sean’s reaction to his tirade. His friend had always been far more misanthropic than himself, and maybe that was why Viggo had stumbled into his new place - his new stables, he corrected himself automatically - instead of anywhere else.
Sean disappointed him. He only made a small, agreeing noise and turned his attention back to the television, still sipping at the same glass of wine he poured at the beginning of the night. Viggo had long abandoned his glass.
“Pay attention to me,” Viggo demanded, nudging Sean’s thigh with a bare foot.
“I am,” Sean said, green eyes glancing over to Viggo. He raised an eyebrow, “I thought you like it that people are complicated.”
Viggo snorted. He wondered why he even bothered coming over if Sean was going to just say things Viggo was perfectly capable of thinking himself. Taking another swig of the wine, he realised why - he always hated getting drunk alone because he always got horny when drunk. Usually that wasn’t a problem, because he had his wife with him at home - but then, he didn’t have a wife anymore, did he? Not for long anyway.
He shook his head hard to dislodge those depressing thoughts. That was yet another reason why he left the house. Viggo shifted on the couch, raising his feet onto the leather. He nudged Sean again.
“Hey,” Viggo said. To his disappointment, his voice wasn’t slurring yet. “Do you remember the first time we met?”
“If I’d known you to be a maudlin drunk, I’d have tried even harder to ignore you,” Sean drawled. He looked at Viggo for a long moment before he grabbed the packet of cigarettes lying on the table, drawing one stick out and lighting it.
Maybe it was the wine. Viggo tipped his head to the side, his gaze fixed upon the way Sean’s lips curled around the filter, the way his cheeks hollowed as he took a deep drag. He watched how the smoke curled out of Sean’s mouth and nostrils, wreathing him in mist for a long moment. For the whole of their friendship, Viggo had always known, in the abstract kind of way, that Sean was a hell of an attractive man (bloke, as the slang of England would say). Usually it didn’t matter, like the fact that a filly was absolutely beautiful mattered very little when he was trying to deal with her sprain, but right now, the alcohol made him horny enough to notice it again. Notice and stick in his mind, like a nagging, worming thought.
The bottle went back to the table with a hard thunk. Viggo reached out, his finger brushing the very edge of Sean’s lip before he was batted away irritably.
“What are you doing?” Sean asked, arching an eyebrow. He didn’t look particularly surprised.
“We met because of sex and horses,” Viggo mused aloud, only half-answering. “It’s a shame, isn’t it, that only horses remained.”
Sean snorted. His reins-calluses were rough on Viggo’s chin as he dragged him forward. His eyes were very green this close, and they were far too sober and amused.
“You’re drunk and I am not your rebound guy,” Sean said, and there was an odd gentleness to his voice. “We’re better as friends. You know that.”
Viggo’s hand curled around Sean’s wrist, and Sean let go, moving back until he was leaning against the arm of the couch. They watched each other for a long moment before Viggo made a sound, something almost like a laugh.
“We are, aren’t we,” he said, and he chuckled, this time with some real mirth in it. “You’re a good friend, Sean.”
“Only you’d think that,” Sean snorted. He turned back to the television, his eyes fixed once more on the screen.
Maybe he came here not because he didn’t want to be alone - any bar would’ve served if that was the case. Maybe he chose to go to Sean because this was the one man who could see through him, who knew him well enough to not take any of his bullshit.
Viggo leaned back against the couch again, stretching out his feet and placing them on the coffee table. Sean didn’t even protest, so Viggo made himself comfortable, grabbing the bottle of wine again. This time he only wrapped his lips around the top, tasting bitter sweetness on the tip of his tongue.
Like this, it was comfortable, and Viggo knew it wouldn’t be possible if they actually had sex tonight. There were the reruns of the latest chases on the television screen and there was Sean, and Viggo thought that it was enough. More than enough.
Maybe he came here because there was something this simple, this easy, and Viggo might love the complexity of people, but he still needed this.
End