Title: Prairie Fire: part 3/5: Shelter
Author:  Brigantine
E-mail:  gidgetpup@netzero.com
Pairing:  Bean/Viggo
Rating:  PG
Feedback:  Is ever so lovely!
Disclaimer:  I'm thinking, no, never happened.
Summary:  Sean watches Viggo sleep, and makes a wish.

##########

The lights are off.  It's late.  Or bloody early, depending on one's point of view.  In a 
corner of Viggo's bedroom Sean, wearing nothing but his boxer shorts, sits in a shabby, 
overstuffed chair and watches Viggo sleep.  Viggo lies peacefully on his back, one arm 
flung out to the side, the other across his belly.  The dim light from moon and stars slides 
over his sharp profile, over his collar bones, picking out the curve of a shoulder, the way 
his pectorals gently arc up and then down into his ribs.

Filming today was long and brutal.  Viggo is exhausted, and so is Sean, but he can't sleep, 
so he sits shivering in the dark and watches Viggo sleep.  In the quiet, Sean's past, present 
and future clash in his head; who he's been, who he is, the man Viggo might help him 
make of himself.  His own hope confuses Sean.  The probability of failure paralyses him.

Sean feels as though he's falling apart like an old barn, listing sideways, joinery coming 
loose from too much use and hard weather; perhaps like some mouldering stone wall 
whose mortar is crumbling, pieces of him cracking off and tumbling into rubble.  He isn't 
up to this, he thinks.  He thinks he's got no right to be here.  He worries that he'll let 
Viggo down the moment Viggo needs to lean on him, and he can't bear to even imagine 
the look in Vig's eyes when that happens.

He should run.  Just get up and run, now, before it all turns to shit and he and Viggo can't 
stand to be in the same room together.  Before they end up dividing their friends.  Sean's 
bare legs pull his feet up from the floor, curl in tight against him, and he wraps his arms 
around his knees, huddling in the chair, suddenly shaking hard like a shell-shocked G.I., 
and with something like that thousand-yard stare he watches the long, grey blur that is 
Viggo.

When the clock has ticked off an hour or so past, and the moonlight and Viggo have 
shifted together on Viggo's bed, Sean realizes that he has quit shaking.  He realizes that 
he is still here, still staring at Viggo, because there is one thing, just one thing on planet 
Earth that Sean wants more than to grab his clothes and flee into the night, and that is to 
climb out of this foxhole and crawl quietly into the warm, safe shadow there next to 
Viggo.  He wants to pull the covers up around them both, feel the soft fur of Vig's chest 
under his hand, and the slow, even heartbeat beneath that--to listen to Viggo breathe so 
gently, as though tomorrow and the next day might really be alright, might fulfill their 
promise.  If Sean can just get his feet onto the floor, and force himself to move forward, 
he might have all of that.

--end--