New Fic: 'No Harm Done'
FIC: No Harm Done
PAIRING: SB/VM
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: MSilverstar for a wonderful beta
DEDICATION: Lobelia for making my icon.
SUMMARY: Sean’s feeling the need for a new bad habit, something to warm his blood. Hang on, can that be Viggo at the door?
WARNING: Sensitive readers may be shocked by the fact that Viggo wears Birkenstocks in this fic. Usual warnings for coarse language and m/m sex.
NOTE: This is a sort-of sequel to my ‘Boiling Point’ and ‘Government Health Warning’, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be read on its own.



Viggo shows up in Sean’s trailer at the end of the first day of the Mines of Moria shoot.

Sean is lying across an armchair, cigarettes laid out on the arm, watching television with the sound off. A disgruntled ex-SAS bruiser with a face like a robber’s dog is going after some terrorists, nationality unspecified. Sean has played both the disgruntled bruiser and the chief terrorist enough times not to need the sound up to predict the next rollicking piece of caper, which is nearly always another crunchy beating in a deserted warehouse.

Swirls of cigarette smoke roll in the air of the trailer. There are gritty coffee rings and overflowing foil ashtrays on every surface.

Sean is inhabiting some kind of mental space that’s scratchy and two sizes too small. Mesmerised by tiredness and bad TV, he wants a new bad habit, he feels the need of something to warm his blood.

He picks wig-glue off his forehead, looks at it, and flicks it into the corner. He should really take a shower, but he’s already wet through from the rain, and slouching around in a towel is about all he feels up for.

Viggo doesn’t knock. It wouldn’t be like him.

He ducks in out of the rain, casual as you like, wet through. He’s wearing a different jacket but the same old green shirt. The angle of his shoulders, the whole pitch of him, is unsettlingly three-dimensional.

There’s a hesitancy, a light hurt, laid across the way he moves.

‘You’re avoiding me,’ Viggo says.

These days, when Sean allows himself to look, Viggo tends to be a flurry of bruises and minor cuts, moving fast. Every time Sean’s weak enough to let his eyes slide sideways, he gets the same swipe of vertigo.

‘Piss off, what would I be avoiding you for?’ Sean hears himself snarl, which is never a good sign in an opening gambit. He’s at a disadvantage, wet, wrapped in only a clammy towel and conscious of the shoddy male neglect around him.

‘You tell me.’ One of Viggo’s hands is scooping his hair out of his eyes, the other one is holding his plastic coffee mug like it’s too hot for comfort.

After the last time they went home together, Sean thought they could maybe orbit each other at a safe distance. What would be best would be a truce, the borders restored to where they’d been before the touching started. He really thinks it would be best.

Viggo’s gaze slithers below Sean’s face, and Sean gets down to trying to talk himself out of the sly prod of lust. He would watch videos of Viggo’s films while beating a steel mallet off his own head if it would do any good.

Sean gets to his feet, wrapping his towel more tightly around him.

Viggo’s silence is dense with expectation.

It doesn’t help that the two of them are closer than Sean likes, crammed together in the smallness and mess of the trailer. The thrum of space closes and yaws between potentially unavoidable small contacts, accidental brushes of shoulder or hip.

Rain is beating on the roof in rhythmic gusts.

‘All right, I have. Been avoiding you. I also have to go now.’ It’s amazing what your mouth can say while you are thinking something entirely different.

Sean knows his hair is sticking up in stiff spines from being under the wig, and that it’s leaking big drops of rain onto his face, like unwanted earrings, tears, snot. The only shirt he can find to put on is that shamefaced colour grey achieved by adding a single black sock to the white wash.

He puts his arms into it anyway, and tears through the confusion looking for more clothes. An ashtray flips over in a fine spray of ash.

He can feel Viggo considering the shambolic relations between Sean and the inanimate world.

The ceiling blinks with the colours of the portable TV. It’s showing an ad for dog-food, the one that eight out of ten dogs are so opinionated about.

The pale web of Viggo’s gaze blinks, resumes. ‘You’re doing it again.’

‘That’s right, I am.’ Sean folds his arms, liking the grip on his ribs, the security of that.

‘Look, I don’t mind being avoided, I just want to hear you say it.’ Viggo makes a half step back, the angles of his body opening a bit, possibly inviting a touch.

And there, just because of that, Sean makes the serious mistake of not simply ducking out, towel and all, into the downpour, banging the door behind him. Instead, he allows the possibility of conversation.

‘Say what, for fuck sake?’A thuggish impulse has broken out in Sean and he’s apparently preparing to indulge it happily, to make up for not having walked out.

‘Let me see. The reason you suddenly have an entirely different schedule even though we’re shooting exactly the same scenes.’ Viggo’s voice is ironed flat. ‘The reason you hide in here like the sheriff’s on your trail. Why I’m toxic all of a sudden.’

‘I have my reasons.’ A slicing ache presses between Sean’s temples.

The slope of Viggo’s shoulders seems, ridiculously in such a muscular man, breakable. He is managing to form a range of vulnerable slopes. ‘Uh, I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me any of them?’

‘No.’ His body is viciously alert to Viggo’s recognisable heat a foot away, and absurdly, accurately imaginative. He is stiffening, lifting under his towel.

Sean looks away from where the open neck of Viggo’s wet shirt shows a feathering of oil-dark hair.

He starts to think about murders, lengthy, elaborate, nasty unrepentant executions. He sorts out the blunt instruments, piano wire, poison, locations, last words, procedures for disposal of bodies.

Viggo sidesteps a sigh. ‘Sure. Why would you say something when it’s easier not to?’ His shrug slops a small tide of coffee onto his leg and he rubs abstractedly at the stain. He’s off-balance, spilling things.

Sean slams past him, managing not to touch, into the toilet. He fills the tiny sink until overflow slops onto his feet. He pushes his face down into the tepid wet until his ears crackle and his lungs cramp, then gulps back and up.

His reflection blinks and drips at him, its nose running.

When he emerges, Viggo is propped against the edge of the counter, staring at his feet, not going anywhere. He’s hung his wet jacket over the back of a chair.

‘Look, Vig, I’ve tried and failed before.’ When it comes to relationships, Sean is unfit, exempt, permanently classified as wounded, out of the whole godawful messy war. He should have some kind of certificate, or a stamp on his passport, so people don’t get confused. Or so he doesn’t get confused. ‘People disappoint me, I disappoint them. It’s nothing personal.’

Viggo’s eyebrows lift like antennae.

‘No offence, but I have suicidally appalling taste, always have done.’ Sean looks to see whether this has drawn blood, but Viggo’s face shows a faint light of a grin.

‘Thanks a lot.’ The tucked edge of Viggo’s mouth uncurls.

‘You’re welcome.’ Sean infuses this with all the menace he can muster, which is precious little by his usual standards.

The light from the TV fluctuates and wavers.

One of Viggo’s feet, in a muddy Birkenstock, is making a kind of sketching movement on the floor, and Viggo’s staring down at it like he’s never seen it before. It’s hard not to find that likeable, not to make some kind of conversational surrender.

‘Look, I’m just not one of life’s nice people,’ Sean offers finally.

Viggo’s head snaps up and his expression is suddenly belligerent. ‘You’re right, it’s pathetic. The entire world’s fucked. All that shit about lack of self-esteem, as if anyone’s interested. Inner Child Discovery workshops. And underneath we’d all fuck each other over at the drop of a hat.’

‘Huh?’ Sean is not recognising this man, though the stuff he’s coming out with sounds familiar. He realises belatedly he’s being teased, that this is Viggo-being-Sean. Even the accent is perfect, he’s got Sean’s private-use gutturals down pat.

Dimples like apostrophes frame Viggo’s mouth, cocky.

A grin wells dangerously. Sean ducks his head. Surges of happiness are urging him to lower his guard. ‘You bastard.’

Quick as a slap, Viggo is off the counter and moving at him. For a second, Sean thinks he is going to hit him. Then, not, but the intention is maybe the same.

‘What the-’ Sean grabs Viggo’s wrist just as his hand makes contact with where Sean is thickening under the towel.

This is where Sean entirely blows it. All he can think of is how much he’s wanted to have this again, the anxious sugary friction of anticipated sex in the blood. His body is like that, constantly forming habits, making forthright doggy demands, asking for more of the same again.

Viggo palms him roughly and the damp towelling frets against his tensing cock. Sean can feel sweat gathering above his eyes.

‘This is-’ Sean’s voice seems unpleasantly intrusive, so he swallows the rest of his sentence. He’s still gripping Viggo’s moving wrist so hard he’s beginning a little thrum of strangled circulation.

But he’s not stopping him. He could, but he’s not.

Viggo is staring at him, appraising, working his hand slow and harder. In the light from the TV, his eyes are soupy verdigris. Sean can feel Viggo reading his face, and is powerless to know what he’s found.

This movement of Viggo’s hand is needy, uncovered.

Sean gathers a stiff breath. ‘Christ, Vig, what am I ... what are we supposed to do?’

‘Let’s talk sense.’ Viggo parts Sean’s teeth with his tongue. The familiar taste of him runs at Sean and sets in motion some kind of warm unfocusing of his vision.

Sean is aware of the full arrival of Viggo’s whole heat, his faint gamy smell, the first joint give of their breath. Viggo’s shirt buttons dig into Sean’s bare chest. Sean accepts the warm wet shift of denim leg parting his, and Viggo’s hands fumbling the shirt off his shoulders, while the hunger for comfort screams in his blood like a circular saw.

Then he twists away from Viggo, breathing hard. ‘Why do I always go along with this?’

Viggo’s eyes are narrow. ‘Later, okay?’

‘All right.’

‘I never met anyone before who did the guilt stuff in advance.’

‘I said all right.’

‘That’s right, you did.’

They are both grinning now, they’ve remembered they can do that. They both like it when they tease, are warmed by it.

Sean drops his towel on top of Viggo’s jacket. His breathing has become unpredictable.

For a minute Viggo does nothing but look. Sean has never been so naked.

Then Viggo runs the curl of one finger down the slope of Sean’s cheekbone until the muscles in Sean’s back begin to shudder.

They scramble against each other. Viggo backs them towards the sofa till they hit it and fall.

Sean kisses near the root of Viggo’s jaw, gives in to the hot urge to bite. His thinking is steaming over. The most desirable thing in the world is this, to be nothing but want and touch inside a thickening dark.

Viggo kneels up. The blue light from the TV shows the sheen on Viggo’s forehead and upper lip as he peels down to the rounded polish of bone and flesh.

Sean gropes for the remote control and blitzes a car chase into oblivion.

Then he rolls Viggo onto his back. He trawls his way unhurriedly down from neck to nipples to navel until he is where he wants to be, breathing hard around the fat silk weight of Viggo’s cock. His forehead rests against the puckered brand left on Viggo’s stomach by Viggo’s belt. He has no brakes, no judgement, just appetite.

Viggo’s hands come down and stroke Sean’s hair, massage the nape of his neck. After a while, they move in increasingly frantic patterns.

Sean pulls away in time and pushes himself upright. There is just enough light from the window for him to watch Viggo come, his face crumpled and bewildered, eyes squeezed shut. His body heaves once, twice, the third time ending in a violent shiver.

Sean leans down and bites a nipple.

‘Have you got a condom?’ Viggo’s breathing is still rough.

‘You mean -?’

‘Yeah.’

Sean thinks. ‘No. Wasn’t expecting you.’

‘I should have called first, should I?’ Viggo’s heartbeat is galloping under the palm of Sean’s hand.

‘You should’ve, yeah.’

But Viggo is sliding off the edge off the sofa into the dark and there’s the sound of his knees settling on the floor. He leans into Sean’s spread lap.

After a minute, Sean is glad the rain is hitting the roof harder than ever to cover up the noises he can hear himself making.


Afterwards, Sean feels his bones have opened up and his identity has flaked away like rusty paint. The two of them sort themselves out and make the transition back to electric light and speech. They make tea in the kitchenette with a lot of unnecessary nudging and brushing of hands.

Sean’s self isn’t bad to be with tonight, he’s not unpleasant company.

He watches Viggo, the angles of his body, the cautious gentle way he drinks, the intent way he smokes with his head dipped, the patterns of wear on this particular pair of battered jeans.

The air still holds the light heat of fucking, the smells they have worked into each other.

After a while, Viggo seems to lock down again. He sets down his mug. ‘I should get going.’

‘What’s the hurry?’ Sean’s words try to be as weightless as they can, no pressure, no threat.

‘I was trying to give you some space, you fuck.’ Viggo seems to be trying to muffle a smile. He’s maybe being careful until he can tell if Sean will let him be daft. He’s still wary of what Sean might think.

‘That’s very-’ Sean gulps the end of his tea instead of finishing his sentence. A neat relaxation rolls through the muscle of his back. He allows himself the total foolishness of a grin.

Viggo gets quickly serious again, but liking him. Sean is nearly certain that Viggo is quite probably liking him.

He rubs his index finger over the back of Viggo’s hand, so lightly it might be an accident.

Each of them knowing the other is there is no harm done.