Coda

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They met up again at a premiere. It wasn't the first, it wouldn't be the last. It was just one more event, like the others. Just like the others. Show up and wave. Smile for the cameras, for the cheering fans, ham it up with the others, laughing, on top of the world.

And in the groups, with the others, they talked, like they'd learned to talk a year and a half ago. Talked and laughed and lived around and beside, each skirting the edges of the black hole where the other was not.

They were good at it. No one even noticed. No one had ever noticed. It had been easy.

At least something had been.

But they'd got good at not noticing it themselves. Ignoring the effort and the difficulty, the splinters of pain that were all that remained of what had shattered.

What had shattered?

They were good at not thinking about that, too.

So many things they weren't thinking about. Hadn't been thinking about for so long. Had been ignoring and hence they hadn't even noticed when the lines started to blur. It was so gradual they hadn't noticed when they stopped turning their bodies away in crowds. Hadn't noticed when they stopped putting John, or Ian, or Sean between them in group photos. When shadows had diminished in the black holes. When twisting agony had dulled to a mere ache.

Hadn't noticed how they found themselves side-by-side at the bar at the ubiquitous after-party. The back wall of the bar was mirrored, behind the bottles of spirits, and it was somehow safe enough for eyes to meet in that reflective surface. Eyes that had seen so much; in the world, in each other. Eyes that were just the same, and completely different in time and space.

"How have you been?" asked one, light-coloured eyes with, unchanged, that defining stillness.

"Not bad," replied the other, and realised it was true. Blinked warm brown eyes. "And yourself?"

"Fine," he answered, and didn't have to lie.

A silence between them, but not an absence.

"Let's go somewhere," Viggo suggested suddenly. "Get a drink."

It would have been easy to cut him down. Orlando knew it. The words were in the back of his mind - "I have a drink right here" - but they got no further. He had no urge to say them.

"Sure," he agreed.

It was late, in the city whose streets they walked, strides not matching, one slower, then faster, stuttering to avoid a puddle, lengthening at a corner. There were few others marching along those sidewalks. It was very late.

But not too late.

"Where are we going?" Orlando asked, as they lingered on the kerb, waiting for traffic to pass.

"There used to be a great little bar just up there." Viggo gestured. "Hope it's still there; I haven't been in years."

It was still there. They ordered double shots of the best of the top-shelf whiskeys, and argued lightly over whether adding ice was an insult to such a fine malt.

They did, anyway.

There were only a handful of other people in the long, narrow space, slotted into close, leather-lined booths, having their private conversations. Viggo and Orlando were just two more people, one more booth, one more conversation.

"What do we drink to?" Viggo asked, raising his glass and an eyebrow.

Orlando turned the glass, letting the ice settle as it melted one cube into the next. "To the Fellowship," he suggested, raising his own glass, and his eyes to meet the other's.

"To fellowship."

"Yes."

The glasses met with a heavy clink - good glassware - and they each took a sip - good whiskey.

"So what do you think of the movie?" Cautious, Viggo; a safe topic for eyes meeting over the rim of glasses.

"Meh." Non-committal noise, overly ambivilant, and they were both laughing now. It was so easy, didn't even twinge, to slip into teasing banter, whip-light and dizzyingly carefree. "Needed more Legolas, of course."

"Narcissist."

They delved into analysis, dissection, character differences and the best parts that got left out, a conversation punctuated with short silences and sips of whiskey. It was all old news, had been discussed half a hundred times already, but they'd never talked about it.

They'd never really talked at all.

Certainly hadn't talked since...

And now they broke off, stared across the table over glasses holding only ice. Uneasy silence because the reminiscence Orlando had started would lead them directly where they were still not sure they wanted to go.

The morning after the night before.

The morning of Orlando with hollow eyes make-up couldn't quite cover and a too-ready smile. Of Viggo with white-knuckled grip on his sword and a stare like a solid force. Of "Are you OK?" and "I'm fine" and of being anything but.

Followed by the night, long and dark and empty. Filled with make-do companionship, and alcohol. Viggo laid himself out drinking vile New Zealand beer, watching late-night Italian soccer on the couch of the blithely uncaring Sean Bean. Orlando went shot for shot with the raucous hobbits through two bottles of Glenlivet, watching them laugh and not joining in.

And whiskey and beer both had numbed, had wiped them clean, and they'd stopped caring, and talking, and watching. So they'd missed the thaw. Missed the return of equilibrium.

Dawn comes, even after the longest night, but they'd almost slept through it.

They'd both woken the next morning with ash-tray mouths and sandpaper eyes and it hadn't been enough, hadn't meant a thing. But they'd lived. They'd managed.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Sean had asked, in a kitchen quiet with lazy sunlight and birdsong.

"No," Viggo had replied, and took his coffee back into the living room.

"There is something going on between you and Viggo, isn't there?" Elijah had demanded, morning cigarette between his fingers as he flicked the ash off the verandah, squinting into the too-bright sun.

"There is nothing going on between me and Viggo," Orlando had replied, nothing changed in hangover-roughened voice or lazy drape against the verandah railing. But Elijah never asked again.

Orlando had caught the first whiff of cigarette smoke, and had gone to throw up. He'd hated whiskey ever since.

He looked down at his empty glass as silence stretched between them. Looked up into eyes that were just eyes. "Another round?"

"Sure."

Refilled and reseated, they clinked heavy glasses together again, took a sip. And then just looked across the table. Watched as they hadn't done in a year and a half. Like they'd never done, maybe. Looked at each other, not over their shoulder, or ignoring them, or staring through them to a memory or a dream or a wish.

Noted things that never changed, that they'd known all along simply couldn't. But also noted what had changed, the new areas under shed skin, shiny and stiff.

And it was time. It was necessary. The words were on their tongues almost before they thought of them.

"Did you ever finish the painting?"

No need to ask which one. "Yes. Sort of."

"Sort of?"

"I slashed the canvas. Kept the frame."

"Why?"

Viggo didn't even blink. "Why what?"

"I don't know." But he did. Why both. Why everything.

"Because I had to."

Orlando returned the favour. "Had to what?"

"I don't know." And he did too.

Their eyes fused across the table, now, and there was a space between them. A different reality. It wasn't true. It was the only thing that was true.

Orlando didn't even have to take a deep breath before he said: "I thought I loved you, at the end."

"Thought?" But it wasn't a challenge; a query, perhaps.

"I don't know. Don't know anything."

"Me neither."

"You hated me."

"Maybe."

"Not maybe."

"Maybe what I hated was myself."

A moment of stillness, as eyes locked, and suddenly it was simple. Everything they needed to say condensed itself into two-word phrases; a dialogue in duologies.

"I'm sorry."
"I know. Me too."
"I understand."

And there it was. A weight off their minds, a burden lifted from their souls, a stone removed from the pit of their stomachs that had been in residence for so long that its sudden absence left them breathing hard.

They finished the whiskey, a single last gulp. Emerged from the close, dark comfort of the bar into the cold, grey street that was somehow lightened, for all the depth of the night. From a block away came the slish of a wheel through a puddle. Somewhere there was the sound of sirens. Here, there was only silence, and the pair of them, lingering.

"I go that way," Orlando noted, gesturing with his elbow because his hands were in his jacket pockets against the chill wind gusting along the sidewalk.

Viggo nodded. "Yes," he said. A pause, silence settling around them, and then he held out a hand.

Sure, steady, hovering between them.

Orlando shook it. Placed his palm against the other man's, fingers curling, cool skin gripping, shifting slightly in a firm shake, then slipping away.

But not entirely. Never entirely. Never again.

Viggo smiled, pulling on his gloves. "See you again soon."

Orlando smiled, pushing his hands back into his pockets. "Yeah. Next time."

END