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You know I'm not a saint.
- Apoptygma Bezerk - "Kathy's Song"

It's raining. Like some sort of biblical downpour, it just keeps coming, hard and uncompromising and unrelenting. The windows are all open, because there's no wind to blow the rain inside. The air is utterly still, stunned into insensibility by the onslaught, so the only thing that's moving outside is the falling water.

The only thing that's moving inside is Orlando. He's sliding down Viggo's body like pigment onto paper. He's dripping wet from the rain and neither of them care. He's like a seal, slither-sliding into the water, into his natural element. Except he's on his knees, now, looking up with a smirk and anyway, Viggo's sure there are laws against feeling this way about a seal, even in New Zealand.

Viggo gasps and has to reach for something; he finds the window frame and braces himself against it. Behind him, outside, the rain is falling insistently, constantly, beating down upon an earth already flattened by it. But the ground still takes in it, drains every last drop the sky can throw at it. It will pay for that, later. Maybe even now. It will give way where it has been sodden beyond endurance. It will disappear with the rain's fluid determination. It will leak for weeks afterwards - should this ever, ever stop - in a slow bleed of the accumulated moisture it didn't want in the first place.

His hands are off the window sill. His hands are curled. He won't - can't - look down. He'll lean against the window frame until he can feel the rain drumming on the roof through his temple and making his whole body rattle with its rhythm. It's raining. It's a flood.

Orlando kisses him, young and hard and crystalline. He's barely damp now.

When Viggo finds his voice, lost in the back of his throat, it's even rustier than usual. "This doesn't make it all right."

"Shut up," Orlando repeats.

It's still raining.

END