[karl and viggo's manly-yet-gay camping adventure]

karl and viggo's manly-yet-gay camping adventure

Karl knows how to play chess in theory, but in practice sometimes he sucks at it. Maybe this isn't the ideal time for a game of strategy. He could have a lot on his mind right now or with Viggo watching--well, he could have a lot on his mind is really what it comes down to, like whether he seems cool and whether he tries too hard. Viggo, well, has this effect on him that reminds Karl of the effect on him of girls in middle school.

Miranda, with the sleeves of her bathrobe rolled to the elbows, is standing over his shoulder eating a piece of celery with a nerve-scraping crackling sound on each bite. "You know your manhood is in no way connected to your ability to play chess," she offers. Crunch.

"Thank you," he says.

Crunch. The bitten end of the celery points to his remaining bishop. "Your days are numbered," she says.

Viggo is sitting in a chair submitting to the hair stylists for (Karl has counted) the fourth time this morning, but they haven't even gotten a good take yet. Viggo's watching the chess game with apparent attention, but no notable appearance of extraordinary interest--not surprisingly. He could wake up every ten minutes and take a peek to see that Karl is losing. Across the board, Karl's six year old son, who beats him at chess with some frequency but usually not this fast, makes no attempt whatever to stifle a yawn. "Are you gonna give up yet?"

Miranda pops the last of the celery in her mouth and crosses her arms over her chest; the hairstylist spritzes Viggo with what looks like water but is probably hair spray or something, and Viggo winces. His eyes are open; it still looks like he's looking at them. No! Karl thinks with high school Shakespeare enunciation. Once more unto the breach, and all that. But when he surveys the battle field it really does look pretty hopeless.

"Spare my life in exchange for some prisoners of war?" Karl suggests.

Aaron rolls his eyes and says "Dad," as if banter isn't completely appropriate, given the audience. The audience being either Miranda, scratching the bridge of her nose with her forefinger, or possibly Viggo, whom Aaron thinks is very cool ("Dad! Look at his sword," which almost made Karl laugh out loud).

Karl heaves an exaggerated sigh. "All right. You win."

"You know, Aaron," Miranda says seriously, "You should go easy on your dad." Aaron looks skeptical. "You know, that helmet that he wears--it's really heavy. I think he's losing some brain cells."

Aaron smiles and props his elbows on the bent edge of the rickety folding table and blinks at her, the deference due only to either a pretty lady or a cool person (she might be both). He looks at Karl and says with a deliberately false smile, "I'm sorry, Dad." One of the corners of the table tips precariously. Karl's arm is taking up almost all the space between the chessboard and the edge and the chessmen skitter into it. The king has fallen into his lap. He glances up and Viggo's head is turned, newly-spritzed and curled hair dripping onto the threadbare white towel around his shoulders. Viggo's face is still awfully impressive in profile.

"Good thing I didn't try to let you win," Karl mutters to his unrepentant offspring, and drops a handful of pieces into the box.

Miranda pats the top of his head. "Better luck next time."

Aaron disapproves of Karl's method of putting the chess pieces away because it is too slow. He won't say anything about this because he's secretly fascinated by everything and doesn't want to look like a baby in front of Miranda (or Viggo). Instead, he snatches the box and pushes the pieces into it so they tip and roll across the dented tin of the tabletop. Karl tries to remember if he was that impatient when he was six. In the last few months he has spent days in suspense waiting for a glimpse of Viggo (and, more importantly, the exposed skin of his chest) in his bathrobe.

"What now?" Karl tries gingerly to stretch in a chair that matches the table in terms of stability. He's rolling his shoulders under the weight of leather and metal; he tips his head back and his neck pops.

Aaron is momentarily distracted--"That was a loud one! Cool!"--but then he goes back to fidgeting, looks to his left out of the corner of his eye, and turns the hem of his T-shirt back veeeeeeery carefully. "Dad," he whispers, "can we go over there?"

Like father, like son. Karl, who doesn't need to follow the line of Aaron's gaze to see he has glanced at Viggo, resists the urge to jump up right away. "Sure," he says instead. A curious child is like a passport. He stands up and consciously straightens his spine before he turns his head and acts surprised. "Viggo? Haven't you guys met? He's really--" He pauses because Viggo is certainly rugged, as well as sensitively artistic, intelligent, competent, sensual, and in every other way Karl can think of a perfect package, but he isn't sure if nice is really the proper word. "--Nice," he says anyway.

Viggo's grinning through his hair at them. His lips stretch back from his teeth when he does this and the little scar on his upper lip turns white. "Good morning." He nods and his hair drips.

"Hi," says Aaron.

"Aaron," says Karl, "this is Viggo Mortensen. He's going to be Aragorn. Viggo, this is my son, Aaron." Aaron is staring, but not speaking. "He likes your costume."

"Aaron." The dripping of Viggo's hair has reached a point of some kind of equilibrium; there are drops caught in the spirals, a sheen of damp all over the top of his head, drops caught trembling on the very tips of tendrils. Viggo's face is a little damp too. Since it's supposed to be raining, that's probably intended, although Karl hopes it's water and not hairspray. Hairspray tastes awful. There's a little drop that was in the short stubbly mess Viggo won't allow to become a mustache, and is now poised on the edge of Viggo's lip as if to say "Lick me!" Hairspray, or water? The world may never know. Karl feels a little hypnotized.

"Can I see your sword?"

Viggo nods at a table a few feet away. "Gloria won't let me wear it in the chair. She says I'm too dangerous with it."

Karl and his son both eye the blade. Of course, he has had plenty of opportunities to observe it. Viggo carries the thing everywhere. Viggo walks in in the morning with bits of decaying leaf stuck in his hair from sleeping on the ground in the forest, swinging the sword like a walking stick and singing. Viggo would probably use it to catch fish, if it wouldn't cut through the fishing line. And everyone knows he uses it to cut sticks, and a dagger to whittle them.

Karl remarks dryly, "You could put someone's eye out with that thing," and keeps his eyes trained on Aaron, who is running his fingers over the letters in the hilt.

Aaron exclaims, "Cool!" Karl and Viggo's eyes meet in a moment of adultly or fatherly sympathy, Viggo's crinkled right in the corners, his mouth twisted up in his devastating crooked little smile. All the air has rushed out of some cavity in Karl's abodomen, under the layers of costume. The spot is empty and collapsed painfully, and his lips are tingling sympathetically. He feels like giving a knowing fatherly lecture on the dangers of going too long without sex, but Ashley would kill him.

"Uh," says Karl. "Careful."

"It's sharp." Viggo grins again a little ferally. For Viggo, having a sharp sword is like, well, like it would be for Aaron.

Karl was up early this morning, hovering over the coffee-makers with the crew and inhaling donuts when what he really wanted was eggs and bacon, and maybe gravy and biscuits. Viggo's time of arrival is totally unpredictable, because you never know whether he's slept in his trailer or in any given part of the woods. This morning Viggo arrived in costume--naturally--with his hair pushed back and most of the curl fallen out of it, carrying a little grocery bag, and proceeded to pull a box of herbal tea out of it and brew some in a styrofoam cup right there at the table, rather than, say, going to his trailer. Viggo and Karl are pretty friendly, despite the impression Karl's ridiculous nervousness might give you. This morning, for instance, Viggo came to prop himself with Karl on a truck and confided, "Think I might be coming down with something." He stirred the hot water with a long, callused forefinger instead of a plastic spoon.

Aaron is trying so hard to look casual about the event of handling Aragorn's large and sharp sword that he almost trips over his own nonchalance. He lays three fingers on the flat part of the blade like a faith healer. Can you feel the coolness? The coolness is entering your body. Soon you, too, will be cool.

Karl himself wants to look casual, but there's nowhere around to casually lean. Without armor he could prop himself on the arm of a chair, but wearing it is like driving a seventeen-passenger van all of a sudden, after a little sportscar. You never know where your edges are, and if you try to get into a tight place you're bound to bump something. Karl settles for crossing his arms a la Miranda, who's patiently having her eyelashes curled two table-formations away, and says, "Slept out again, did you?"

Viggo turns his head a little to look at Karl. "Yeah. Found a different spot." Viggo has been talking about the same spot for a week or so now, a spot which boasts what he calls a "thinking tree." They're filming a rainy scene, but it's dryer than dry out, if not for the stylists' spritzers and the other artificial sources of water around the set. At least the something Viggo's coming down with could hardly be caused by damp, unless the new spot is in a pond.

"'S getting colder." Eye-contact! Karl is thinking, dorkily. Aaron, whose attention has moved about five millimeters closer to the tip of the blade, is clearly thinking something like Sword!

"Oh," Viggo breathes, like a shampooee in Elijah's interpretation of an "Herbal Essences" commercial, "it's great."

Over the voice in his head screaming that this is not at all the right way to continue the conversation, Karl says, "The cold, specifically, is great?"

Viggo, maybe because the subject is camping, is in a magnanimous mood. "Sure." His expression becomes subtly quizzical. Karl doesn't know why. In fact, he's waiting to hear why the cold is great, specifically. He can think of a few reasons just personally. He'd be delighted, for instance, to go camping if Viggo asked him because it would be so flattering, like the first time you get asked to go jump in the swimming hole, or picked for someone's team at street hockey (and he can't think of any adult metaphors, unfortunately. Maybe this is something Viggo does to him).

He'd be happy just to go with Viggo. He has this sort of fuzzy image of classic Male Companionship. Ruggedness, strength, competent grace. Fishing. Working together to set up a tent (does Viggo even use a tent?) in companionable near-silence and communicating by grunts and Karl could lay his hand on Viggo's arm, and their eyes could meet, and Viggo might just glance to the side and Karl could smile and they'd have had a whole conversation, at the end of which, instead of burying the bag of food scraps, Karl would hang it competently from a tree. The rope would loop over the branch on the first try, of course.

Maybe if it got really cold they'd be huddled close side-by-side over a fire--sitting on a log, wrapped in a sleeping bag or two. Karl would come up with a witty anecdote and Viggo would glance sideways and their cheeks would brush or something. It would be warmly firelit. Their faces would be baked hot and leathery-feeling the way a good fire does. The light would flicker and paint the bottom planes of Viggo's face and under the blanket the outsides of their thighs would press together.

They'd have to share their sleeping bags for warmth, of course. Too many layers get in the way of properly sharing heat, not to say of moving one's arms comfortably. Viggo'd get out of that green leather tunic for the first time in weeks. He'd probably crouch and strip out of it outside the bag. Maybe he'd take his shirt off later, just by squirming around a little. Karl likes to think of himself as suave, but more realistically, he'd fall asleep pressed gingerly in the opposite seam of the bag and wake up closer to the middle (plastered to Viggo like glue--mmm), or Viggo could calm him down before they fell asleep. "Relax," Viggo could say, sort of whispering, softly. His voice would be sort of rough. "You're not saving any heat way on the edge of the sleeping bag like that with the zipper pressing into your back." (Zippers, says Karl's inner thirteen-year-old with a lascivious giggle.)

He'd chuckle, and so would Viggo. He'd inch inward in the total pitch blackness until some body part encountered some other part. A hand and Viggo's chest or the bottom of his ribcage. Or two knees, or two thighs. "That's it," Viggo would murmur.

That auditory impression moves through Karl in a quick flush of heat. He has a sudden image of Viggo's chin digging into his shoulder while Viggo whispers "That's it" and "yes" into his ear and thrusts slowly into him from behind until their bodies are fitted like a hand and a glove, and shudders.

Of course, real-time, he's discussing camping with Viggo, who (hopefully) can't know the cause of his shudder. A little time has passed, Karl's not sure how long. Aaron has progressed to wrapping his entire little hand around the hilt of the sword. He can't lift it more than a centimeter off the table. "Well, imagine this," Viggo is saying, to Karl. "You get up early in the morning to go out to the forest, and there's no one at all around you; you're so alone and it's so silent that the songs of the birds seem loud. You know how beautiful it is here in New Zealand. The air is cold… and crisp… and clean."

When he talks Viggo does this… thing with his hands, moving them around just a little like he can't think without it. He's stroking the open center seam of the green tunic between thumb and forefinger. The international symbol for "crisp" looks like the last step in making a cat's cradle, and Viggo's stretching a pattern made of invisible string out between his two hands. Karl watches Viggo's fingers.

"It's a little heavy," says Viggo to Aaron, apologetically. Aaron looks around from the sword with wide eyes. He's forgotten he was being watched, no doubt. The intrusion of the outside world is not welcome. Karl is well over six years old and hasn't lost track of their surroundings. An aide with one side of his collar standing up hurries by carrying a clipboard and a plate full of crumbs. Someone with the rain machine is yelling.

The sun's ducked behind a cloud and it makes the breeze blowing by seem somehow gray. The long carefully-crimped strands of Miranda's wig are blowing artfully in the breeze. She's occupied with eating something with dripping sauce out of a tupperware, perched on a director's chair, without trailing her sleeves on the ground. Karl wonders if the unknown substance is shrimp. She has been promising to bring him some of a famous recipe that she insists is better than any he has ever tasted. It would be like her to eat it herself first.

Karl is taken by surprise when Viggo speaks to him again. "So," says a now-standing Viggo, who's apparently through with being at the mercy of the hair stylist's spritzer, "have I converted you?" The towel's still around his shoulders.

Aaron's hitting the blade with his fingernail to hear the little metallic ringing it makes. Karl eyes him a little because he can't quite look at Viggo. He opens his mouth to say something witty and then closes it again because he can't quite think of anything and he doesn't know if he's converted or not. Certainly what Viggo has said sounds wonderful, but that could just be Viggo's voice. Or Viggo's mouth.

But his brief silence must have sounded like hesitation, because Viggo says, "Not yet? Another example?"

"Maybe a demonstration," Karl replies flippantly, and then immediately thinks, Oh my God, did I say that out loud?

Viggo bursts out laughing. He's still enthusiastic, though, when he gets over the fit. "There's definitely an invitation if you'd ever like to come with me. I think you should try it--everyone should try it. There's nothing like being out in the woods for getting in touch with your character, and yourself, just getting a real sense of… your world." He grins crookedly. Viggo must be aware this sounds a little cheesy, but the unashamed earnestness of it Karl finds terribly affecting, and convincing. And at the least, he may not get in touch with Eomer, but he's sure to get a little more in touch with Viggo.

On the way to the bookstore he passes a streetcorner where two teenaged boys are standing. The tall one, completely upright, has the painfully close-cropped hair and perpetually flushed face of an upright lad of Irish Catholic descent, and is incongruously dressed in an oversized basketball jersey. Tall, rail thin, he easily reaches two and a half meters in height. Only his neck is bent forward a little like a bashful turtle's. His friend is barely as tall as his shoulder, and wears his face clotted with freckles and his kinky-curly hair long and combed out to the sides from a part. The latter has the unfortunate effect of giving his head, counting thick tufts of carroty brown on either side, the approximate shape of a pigskin American football. He's bent at an odd angle to put his head (but not his feet) very close to his companion's bicep, like the handle on a tin kettle that's been banged on a rock.

The light changes and Karl drives past them and he finds himself smiling, because, of course, it's two boys standing next to each other and he has automatically given himself a mental Afro and pictured Viggo in a basketball jersey. It's like he's contracted a disease one of whose symptoms is thinking of himself and Viggo at the drop of a pin. It's so stupid he starts laughing at himself as he drives. The stupidity itself, naturally, acts as the big sister leaning over to whisper in his ear "Whatever you do, don't think of an elephant." Karl+Viggo sitting in a tree is his own personal elephant.

Karl concentrates on driving instead so the distress won't translate into breaking the speed limit by too much. The car makes a satisfying squeal as he pulls into the parking lot without braking. There's a bit of chill in the air outside. The tree in front of the bookshop looks forlorn, like the victim of a haircut worse than the skinny basketball-jersey-giant's. Through the denuded branches the sign peeps. A dry leaf scuttles like a skeleton's hand across the stoop ahead of him and spins to the ground with a dizzy, guilty little puff of energy. He pushes the door, flipping open the buttons of his jacket, and strides in like a king, businesslike and a bit taller than all the shelves. His fanfare's the nasal electronic chime of the doorbell. The shop keeper doesn't look up.

In an attempt to calm his fidgety nervousness, Karl puts his hands deep in his jacket pockets and decides to have a look at the mysteries. What he wants is some real trash, a bad ill-fitting story with a jaunty plot to hold his attention. And in the meantime, he'll smell the books and whatnot. He's rather fond of bookshops, and today he was in the mood to indulge a whim.

It's not actually why he came to the bookshop. There are whims and whims, and this is more of an urge than a whim. It doesn't have to make sense that when he's cheerful and a little jittery he wants to be alone, or that he counts being in a far-from-deserted bookshop "alone," or that this bookshop, with its out-of-place little revenants of architectural detailing and its buzzing neon lights, would remind him of his elementary school's library. "A deadly deceit," says the back of a thriller, with a picture of a large bloody shard of mirror. Or is it glass? "A mysterious murder." Karl is humming happily to himself. "Shhhh!" someone says.

He may not have the attention span for more than an inspirational bookmark, but won't let that stop him. On the mystery shelves, sometimes the classier things can get in the way of the trash. They have all the Agatha Christies in multiple flavors of matched set, a rainbow of colorblock spines with white script titles. Next to the mysteries is something called "regional interest" that Karl has less than no interest in for the moment, as he can see they are intended mainly for coffee tables, not for the limp white light of early morning trickling through the window of the trailer.

So Karl really just wants one and he has determined that this time he will not leave the bookshop with more books than he can read before he forgets why he wanted to read them. He likes the smell of bookshops and he wants an excuse to go back. He's just sat down to peer at the pictures in a half-meter square twenty-pound book on the Great Barrier Reef, holding a little stack of three thrillers--not all to buy, but to choose between--when a footstep and then a shadow fall and he's forced to look up, with a confused sense of excitement or maybe dread, to see Viggo with one hand in his pocket and one on the bookshelf, saying, "I thought it was you."

"You seem to be right," says Karl, squinting a little up at him. The Great Barrier Reef is weighing down his knees, and he feels suddenly comfortable on the floor of the bookshop with the edge of the bottom shelf digging into his kneecap, and reluctant to stand up and spoil the long view of Viggo, which starts at knee level and goes up and keeps on going. "How's it going?"

"My mood seems to follow the weather," says Viggo wryly. Karl glances around even though he knows there isn't a visible window. You can still hear the rain out, and the hissing sound of the wind trying and failing to uproot trees. The gutters are going to be full of lukewarm water tomorrow and it's going to be soggy for days.

"Cold and damp?" Karl suggests, before he can close his mouth. Okay, it's probably time to stand up.

Viggo laughs and says "You forgot windy."

Karl has discovered anew, because somehow he forgot, that it's a little awkward to stand up with someone standing that close to you. But he makes it to his feet and jams his hands quickly in his back pockets and shrugs. "I didn't quite see how it could apply on a metaphorical level, you know--"

But he's watching Viggo smile serenely and he sees, or imagines that he sees, Viggo's expression slip. A glint in his eye? What was Viggo thinking for that moment? Suddenly he sees how "windy" could apply metaphorically.

Viggo laughs in a friendly way and claps his shoulder. "Listen, when this weather clears up," he says, "Are you still up for camping?"

Karl wonders again about that expression. He knows Viggo isn't really as mild-mannered as he appears, because after all, once a day Aragorn comes out of him, the strong-silent-scary-smile type. It's easy to forget this about Viggo, though. And of course anyone would want to have sex with Viggo regardless because there's no question that he's fascinatingly intense, if sort of geeky about it. But now Karl's wondering whether Viggo isn't more… volatile… than he's always supposed.

But by then he's already said "Yes."

The weather clears up with the sunset, so that the color of light outside never lightens before it gets darker. The clouds disperse, cold and shiftless, and they unmask a sky as dark as before or darker in their wake. The gray deepens, the trees stand stolidly, pulling their branches into themselves, holding their leaves out straight in crisp, stiff horror. Karl's in a fanciful mood and his forehead is leaving an oily smudge on the window.

He turns around to survey his living room, as if he couldn't remember where everything was, with his hands on his hips. He hasn't been camping for a while, hasn't really been fishing either, but he knows where his fishing rods are. The rest of the things he likes to take camping with him are sort of missing. He thinks some of them might be in Aaron's mother's attic and some of them in his closet at home. Some of them are in his trailer.

He finds a big rubber tub with what purports to be an airtight seal at the top. Inside it is a bag of stale potato chips; two spare tent pegs; a tin kettle, new and undinged, with a straight handle; a bit of some suspicious powder that could be taco seasoning, sand, or hot cocoa mix; a quantity of plastic forks; a little roll of rope; and a very sharp knife (for the fish, not the rope).

Viggo calls later and says, "It's Thursday." Make joke about Viggo's medicine-man method of beginning conversations, demonstrating keen wit? The bad thing about this plan is that Karl is likely to end up laughing nervously. Ask just to make sure Viggo is driving at what Karl thinks he is? Or circumvent all extraneous communication and just--go with it. Choose your own adventure. There's a funny tightness, in the back of his neck, or his chest. Probably its actual location is in his brain. Normally he'd be happy to go Viggo-baiting and listen to Viggo's mostly-good-humored drawl for a while. But he goes with it.

"And we're filming until morning Saturday," says Karl.

"It might not have started raining again by then."

"Might not," says Karl, fumbling hard for wittiness and coming up short.

"All right. So just in case--you're free Saturday afternoon, I presume." It's a good thing that he doesn't have to glance at the calendar, because it's buried in a pile of memos, junk mail, and abortive organizing lists (which is something Karl's mother is big on, so he always makes them, and then leaves them lying about without consulting them). There is also in there a sketch Viggo once did on the back of a napkin. It's not really cartoony, kind of abstract and silly, and it doesn't look like him except for a remarkably accurate pair of eyes, for a cartoon.

"No problem," says Karl, leaning all the way back until his neck comes up against the trailer wall. He's trying to convince himself he feels nonchalant.

But all in all there is a curious kind of calm as he shuffles idly through the drift of papers as through a treasure trove, tossing old memos and torn bits of newspaper and unopened credit card company envelopes on the floor to put in the trash while Viggo mutters in his ear and he gives cursory responses.

When he turns back to his coffee at his elbow the porcelain has gone completely cold; it must have been sitting there a long time before Viggo called, because they've only been talking five minutes or so. He raises it to his lips for a sip and finds the liquid within lukewarm, like swimming hole water when you sneak out of a breezy summer night, like the water in the gutter after a summer monsoon, when it's still windy and glistening green and the sun peeking palely through the treetops.

"Listen, I was looking for the gear I take fishing with me back home," Karl tells Viggo. "But I've only found some of it." He wonders suddenly whether the propane stove isn't in the cabinet under the sink, because he used it once here in the trailer.

Usually he's proud of his own inability to keep a room straight for five minutes, in a twisted kind of way that pretends to be self-effacing. He makes jokes at his own expense with his friends, and because they laugh he's absolved of all guilt. He finds his trailer homey and somehow less rickety and trailer-like strewn with all this junk, until he's looking for something that he can't find. Then Karl will work through peeved anxiousness, through quiet exasperation, to a kind of absolute directionless fury, and decide that he's going to be just ruthless, just pick up the clothes and the knick-knacks and the papers he can't live without and throw everything else away no matter how many garbage bags it takes.

The idea itself always satisfies Karl so much he almost has to lounge back on the step outside and have a smoke (if he smoked--he doesn't), so he usually only throws away a few handfuls of things before calmness returns, and he will lie on his bed staring up at the ceiling, drifting and day-dreaming and mentally flicking tobacco ash with delicious uncaring onto the coverlet.

"Oh," Viggo assures him in answer to his camping-gear question, "don't worry about any of that. You won't need it." After all, Viggo does this all the time. So Karl accedes.

"Great." When he says this he sounds really pleased, not to say a little surprised; so maybe "accedes" is not the right word.

Karl turns back to the paper detritus on the table. Today he's feeling uncharitably towards memos, but even so he scans through them before he tosses them to the floor. "Saturday afternoon, then." Viggo has this tone as if he's reminding him. A more noteworthy aspect of Viggo's tone, of course, is the sort of gravelly quality that creeps in and out of it.

Besides how it makes him shiver a little, the top of his spine, the pit of his belly, Karl regards this sound of Viggo's voice with pure male envy. Viggo is small and wiry, for the most part, that is, if you don't examine his muscles with his shirt off; but he's all masculine. Two more memos--they're awfully prolific writers around here; a picture from Aaron, Caricature of Dad all in Crayola marker; and there's Viggo's napkin drawing.

"Fingers crossed," says Karl, and can't stop himself abandoning the chair and turning to peer out the window. Viggo's hung up, but the clear night beyond the pane of glass isn't quite satisfying as evidence. He bangs open the door and sits on the metal step, which is still damp. In fact, most of everything is still damp, but it's whistle-clean and the sky's a purple bowl crammed with stars and barely a wisp of cloud in sight. The trees are black and glistening, upright, too proud to rustle. The wind has died to a breeze, whispering intermittently across his hands. It isn't until this breeze teases across your exposed forearms that you realize the true humidity of the air, and then it's vanished again. He goes into the trailer dampened a little and wipes his face on a dish cloth.

Next to the pile of trash on the floor he makes a pile of dirty clothes, which he removes from his second chair, the foot of his bed, and one end of his highest-traffic dresser drawer. He is looking for clean ones, of course, but in the end he settles on one shirt that is possibly dirty, because it wasn't folded. Karl doesn't dislike laundry, but he gets around to it infrequently. And he can't forget a sense of his basic incompetence at it. His mother never "trusted" him with the more important things to wash, which used esoteric things like delicates cycles, and temperatures other than Warm-Cold.

Realistically, of course, it might well rain while they are gone. He puts three fresh shirts (short-sleeved) and one long-sleeved in a bag, with a pair of jeans and his coat. (Karl decides to hope that that shirt was not really dirty.) He reserves his manly right to not change underwear on a camping trip and of course the spare jeans are only for if he falls into a mud-pit or a stream. The bag is only half-full, so he puts a chocolate bar and a packet of sesame crackers in the bottom of it.

The bag, being by itself approximately the size of a pile, makes with the papers and the dirty clothes three corners of an almost-perfect square on the floor. It strikes him pleasantly, so he sheds all the clothes that he's wearing to make a fourth corner and climbs into the unmade bed and pulls the rumpled blanket and the sheet over him. He falls asleep thinking about the sky.

Miranda's hair is everywhere. Fortunately for the costume department this is a very good look for her. When they were new to the set, she was jumping every time it got caught on a twig, or tangled in her mouth. Now she spits it out, if she has to, and lets it work itself into knots otherwise. Karl admires her--he doesn't know how she can see through the stuff. His own wig is not nearly so bad, being only shoulder-length, but he nurses a secret hate for it.

"Would you mind standing right here?" She says with a mouthful of chocolate brownie, and gestures with a hand filled with one. "The wind is behind me and--there, thank you." With the wind mostly blocked by Karl, and coming towards her face, she's able to eat happily. He eyes the brownie, and thinks of his last chocolate bar, in the bottom of his duffel bag. She's never on the set without something she's made to eat. You think she'd get fat or share some of it, but she never gains weight and rarely shares. She's munching happily away. Karl doesn't realize he's staring until she's licking the corner of her mouth and raising one eyebrow at him.

"Big day, hm," she says, and produces, amazingly, another plastic-wrapped brownie from the pocket of her brown linen dress. "Have one."

Karl unwraps it and sinks his teeth into soft buttery chocolate. It's not a too-fudgy or a too-cakey brownie, but somewhere in between, crumblier than he expected. He closes his eyes for a second. "Thank you," he murmurs ecstatically with his mouth full, chews and swallows the large bite as Miranda lifts one hand to shade her eyes a little. Then he belatedly realizes what she has said: "Big day?"

"I hear you're going camping," she says merrily, smiling at him smugly. Clearly it was not a change of subject. Bugger.

"Weather permitting," says Karl.

"It's nice and windy!", she observes, dusting her fingers together to rid them of imaginary chocolate crumbs, presumably. Her hair is fluttering behind her head, and her dress behind her legs, like banners, whipping from side-to-side. "But maybe not as windy once you're in among the trees. You can get a good windscreen and build a fire. It could be…"

He leaves Miranda searching for the proper word for a moment and takes another big bite of brownie. It's even better than the first, like a chocolate orgasm for his mouth. Why doesn't he eat brownies more often? Why does he ever buy chocolate bars? Why doesn't he become Miranda's very best friend, so she'll make them for him every day? Heaven. Unfortunately two bites have taken more than half the brownie.

Meanwhile his companion has switched to a new subject. She regards him through narrow eyes and says casually, when his mouth is really full, "Did you see how your boyfriend was looking at me back there?"

Karl starts coughing and can't stop. He feels his eyes widening and imagines they bug out of his head, like a cartoon character's. In fact, he did see just how Viggo was looking at her: He watched every single take this morning, and he admired the tension they were carrying off, and he looked at Viggo's wary face and the thin set of his mouth, and the little lines beside his eyes… he's still coughing and Miranda's looking concerned. She has stepped closer and is peering at his face in a friendly manner.

"Are you all right?" She tilts her head a bit. "Oh, and you have a--" She flicks a piece of chocolate out of his beard. Fantastic.

He glares. What is he supposed to say? Miranda just pats his shoulder. "Ha very ha," Karl says. "Why are you still standing there?"

Polite interest gives way for a second to an amused twinkle. She's not in the least ashamed, and she thinks he's funny. It's small consolation that Miranda has always thought he was a little funny, and he gets more samples of chicken, pasta salad, and brownies from her than anyone else on the set does. In fact, he's confusingly not as annoyed at her as at his--"boyfriend." Not that Viggo would have called himself that.

"Why am I still standing here? Well, I thought you looked like you had something to say to me, but if you're sure you don't--"

Karl opens his mouth to say "I'm sure" and instead sighs and says, "Thanks for the brownie." To soothe himself, he pops the last piece into his mouth.

There's a little softening in her face, but then he sees her eyes fix over his shoulder. "Glad you like them," she says, and pats his shoulder familiarly again, "sorry I keep forgetting about the shrimp--have to make it the night before, you know." He's pondering the idea that she somehow made the brownies, what, this morning? When did she wake up, four? --when she says, "Hi, Viggo! See you," and floats elegantly away.

"Hi, Viggo! See you," parrots Karl's unkind inner voice nastily, with an over-gracious Lady of the Manor sneer. "I'll just leave you two boys alone. Be good, now." And an ostentatious wink. He could groan and bury his face in his hands, but he's holding a crumpled piece of plastic with chocolate crumbs clinging to it. His armor, obviously, does not have pockets. He'll have to go back to the set before he can throw it away, but now Viggo's standing next to him in companionable quiet with his arms crossed peacefully over his chest and he can't just turn after Miranda, or call her back for it. He balls it up in his fist instead.

"Nice weather," says Viggo.

Karl glances at him. His chest feels hard and rigid inside his costume, embarrassed, irritated, aroused. His face is warm; the wind hits his cheeks hard, but it doesn't sting, just cools them. Like a drawstring has been loosened around his mouth, he smiles in spite of himself, still standing still, still preserving that tightly-bottled unease in his chest, still confused and unhappy because he can't know what it means. Still re-living his bizarre irrational moments of jealousy this morning watching the filming of an Aragorn and Eowyn moment.

He stood at a distance, looking at Viggo frowning into Miranda's eyes during one of twenty or so takes that got thrown out. And he felt it like the prick of a hat pin driven viciously through his wrist, piercing the artery, he thinks. Carrying the poison straight to the heart! His mouth firmed and he wouldn't let himself look away. It wasn't Miranda or Eowyn he was jealous of, but the look, and the slow deliberate flex of Aragorn's hands. He looks at Aragorn's hands, and at Viggo's hands--which aren't quite the same, when Viggo isn't acting--and he wants both of them. And he won't let himself brood over it anymore, he tells himself again and again, but who is Karl to not let himself brood?

He isn't jealous anymore now, but he's still felt weird all morning. It was a weird night, and a sleepless one. He lay awake late thinking about today, shifting restlessly under the sheet until gradually the dew started to fall and condense in the trailer, on the walls, on his skin, and the sheet got clammy, clammy and warm, and stuck to his thighs and his abdomen when he tried to move.

But that doesn't mean he doesn't want to go, and it doesn't mean he doesn't want Viggo. He tells himself, with some disgust, to stop being such a girl, and out loud he tells Viggo, "It is. Not a raincloud in sight. --But it is a bit windy."

Viggo grins and shows his teeth. "It'll be snug enough in among the trees with our fire."

Snug--that was what Miranda said too.

Karl's in his trailer taking a very hot shower--right before they're to leave, because after this he will be a whole weekend out in the wind and the dirt and possibly the rain without one. He tilts his head back, and back, with his eyes closed, and lets the water sluice over his face, breaking on his hairline, his forehead, until every last molecule of shampoo and soap is gone from his body.

He's zoned, which is why it takes him several moments to hear a flurry of pounding on the door. He turns and fumbles to turn the tap off and swipes over his face and chest with an annoyingly small white towel that he once stole from a hotel somewhere. Then he ties the towel around his waist and yells "Coming!" He is still dripping all over the carpet when he opens the trailer door.

Viggo is standing there, damp hair crushed under a hat pushed back off his forehead, squinting up at the door. The sky is brilliantly pale so the puffs of cloud scudding behind his head barely show up. Karl blinks. Viggo seems to be ready, because he's wearing a different shirt than he had on this morning, his hair is damp, and his truck is parked behind him. In each hand he's holding a mug. The one on the left has the bottom of the handle chipped off and some kind of university logo. The one on the right shows a cartoon of a teddy bear in an exercise outfit, complete with leg-warmers, smiling beatifically as she lifts a free weight in one paw. Both mugs are emitting curls of steam.

"Hi," says Viggo, pressing the teddy bear mug into his hands. Of course he gets the teddy bear.

Karl finds his voice and takes the mug, which is hot enough to shock, but not to burn, his pink, pruned hands. "Hi," he says and smiles automatically, taking a slight step back. Viggo props one foot on the metal doorstep and takes a drink of the--Karl sniffs--tea in his mug.

"Weather's lookin' good." Viggo's smiling a little unreadably, not openly like the Beary Fit Bear on the mug. If Viggo smiled at Karl like that he'd wonder if he were standing in front of a particularly nice view of some trees--after he spilled tea all over himself. So it's probably just as well. He takes a sip of his own tea.

"Yeah," Karl answers, "So you're ready," standing in his trailer door dripping wet and holding the door open with the backs of his calves and making conversation and smiling as if this is all perfectly normal. Possibly to Viggo it is--or Viggo's got no concept of perfectly normal. He doesn't seem to notice that Karl is wearing only a small white towel.

"That cloud looks like a teapot." Viggo speaks with an air of surprise. He's pointing over to the side so Karl has to lean forward and stick his neck out. He can feel the breeze snaking up under the towel; the door on its spring bounces into his heels, but since it is about the weight of aluminum foil, doesn't hurt.

Karl frowns and squints and looks at the cloud again, but although it's mostly round, it doesn't really look like a teapot--there's a vague tail sticking out of it but nothing that could really be a spout. "Maybe half a teapot," Karl says critically, "a semi-teapot. A teapot being eaten by a snake."

Viggo's eyes crinkle at the corners. "Un mouton."

"In a box," says Karl. "…A wet box." Because it doesn't have anything like corners.

Viggo's eyes are still crinkled and he hasn't stopped smiling, Karl thinks, the entire time he's been standing there--he's got one hand on the wall of the trailer propping himself up, dust on his boots and clean jeans and his hair curls a little when it's damp. He just looks--perfect. Karl lifts the tea to his mouth and takes a big gulp of it--it's warm in his mouth and pleasant on the way to his stomach, but there's an anxious moment when the whole mouthful is caught, uncomfortably tight and hot, in his throat. He blinks, and when his eyes open again they're wet in the corners.

"Maybe the cloud went through the rain this morning," says Viggo, returning his attention to the sky.

It's a cloud! Karl thinks, a rain cloud probably, of course it--oh. Went through the rain--and got wet. The ridiculousness of their conversation is strangely fitting, in the circumstances--Viggo's cleanliness and his packed car, the impromptu nature of the whole trip and the fact it started because of Karl's own little schoolgirl crush.

Karl remembers sitting on this step a few nights ago, the step just before his feet. There's a difference, here on the ground, between the step where he sat, where Viggo's boot is now, and the door where he's standing.

On the ground it's a rather important difference, between here and there--just two feet between two people is the threshold to a whole world of intimacy, a world where personal space doesn't have edges, where Karl wouldn't itch faintly between the shoulderblades wearing this skimpy white towel, where he could sit on the step with Viggo's foot and lean into Viggo's knee, where the scent of Viggo wouldn't make his nostrils flare because it would be as familiar as his own.

But the difference is meaningless to the sky. The sky is identical here and there--the sky is so vast he could be here, there, at Viggo's car, and the clouds (or the stars) would look the same.

The clouds are moving fairly fast--not fleeing before a storm, but scudding visibly, at least. The sheep-in-a-box is perceptibly in a different place than it was when Viggo first called his attention to it. "Maybe the rain is trying to catch up to us," says Karl.

Viggo raises his eyebrows unexpectedly and smiles, slowly, still not like the teddy bear but Karl's mind scrabbles to grasp why he cared about that and can't. His stomach is heating from the bottom up like a fire's lit under him. "Maybe you should go inside and put on some more clothes than that," says Viggo, "So we can go."

What?

Karl lifts the cup to take a drink, studying Viggo over the rim. The towel's never seemed smaller, but the itch between his shoulders has gone away. "Right," he says raspily and turns back into the trailer, tripping over his own feet when he stops and turns around again. "Won't be a minute." He tries to keep his legs as close together as possible when he walks, even after the door clicks closed.

The air in the trailer is still, a little warm, and a little stuffy. It seems to move around him in eddies, curling around his thighs when he (self-consciously) drops the towel. It sticks to him, like the sheet the night before. The window's open but that doesn't really help, after a shower like that and then the contrast of the cooler, quick-moving air outside the door under Viggo's intent--sharp--lazy--enigmatic--Viggoish gaze. He sets the tea on the table; the dregs slosh high, nearly to the rim. He picks it up again and drains the rest in one go, then sets it down on the table with more finality.

Sitting on the edge of the bed and tugging his jeans over his damp legs, Karl snags his gaze on the napkin caricature, draped limply on the edge of the table next to a weeks-old To Do list with nothing crossed off. He closes his mouth, and closes it firmly, and turns to the trailer wall to tug on his shirt, then turns in one motion to the door. The trailer is cramped, so that moving quickly in it is like a ballet, dodging the table with a practiced twitch of his hip, turning his torso sideways to reach one-handed for the door. Karl almost slams its edge into his nose in his haste.

Viggo's standing in profile with his hands on his hips smiling slightly into the grass. Karl sits on the step, his knees grasshoppered up in front of him as high as his ears, to put on his shoes. "Stuffy in there," he says and laughs closely, and the sound comes out in a damp, stifled little box, just like being in the trailer. Viggo never speaks like that--slow or fast, animated or quiet, you can always feel the wind blowing through his voice.

"Ready to go?" Viggo smiles at him, and without waiting for an answer, "Your bag?"

"Right there, behind me--" Karl says without meeting Viggo's eyes.

Viggo pushes against the door over Karl's shoulder and reaches behind him for the duffel and lifts it out over Karl's head, and he has the truck started when Karl's boots are properly tied on and he's made it to the passenger door. "Engage," says Karl, a la Star Trek.

Viggo laughs and the tires spin in the gravel.

The wind picks up slowly as they drive. Karl is in charge of finding a decent classic rock station that gets good reception after Viggo, squinting into the dying sun and fumbling blindly, says frustratedly, "Karl, would you--?" Karl likes the way "Karl" sounds, like it has curled sweetly around Viggo's tongue.

He says ingenuously, "Actually, station-surfing is my other hobby," and Viggo laughs.

Then later they're dipping into a valley and the solo in "Inagodadavida" fades out at a bad spot and Viggo purses his mouth unhappily and reaches for it… and Karl bats his hand away, scolding and looking down because he can't help smiling as he says it, "Dammit, I've only got one job on this show and I'm going to do it!"

And Viggo pulls his hand back and says "Ooookay." The sunset is still not over then, and the look of it keeps changing as they crest hills and stands of trees come between it and them, changing from gold to orange to a sort of syrupy bluey green, like the sky itself has turned into light and reached out for them, dissolving the windscreen. Karl drums his fingers on the inner seam of his jeans, just above the knee; the edge of the seat; the edge of the dashboard; the windowsill; and his jaw, which is getting stubbly. He lets the smile fade, looks up when he judges it safe, and Viggo somehow looks over just then.

Viggo is still smiling, and meets his eyes. He meant not to meet Viggo's eyes, although of course that makes no sense and he knows this. But he knew it wouldn't be natural and just now he is proving himself right. Karl has never felt a vanished smile reappear on his face quite like that before. It feels oddly familiar and oddly off. He looks away.

He can see Viggo's face reflected in his window, gray, with a brisk whoosh of moving trees and brush behind it, and he even imagines that he can see the crinkles in the corners of Viggo's eyes, although of course there is not enough detail in the image for that. Karl finds this inexplicably annoying.

It's like the sunset is music--not a poem; he bets Viggo would describe it as a poem, but it's not--that he feels the urge to dance to. It's hard to relax completely with Viggo right there, and at the same time, it's nice and comfortable, the kind of thing he'd like to get more familiar with so he could say it had been easy from the very beginning. He feels a curious internal dissociation, and he's tense and alert, and calm and rather moved, all at once. He starts to hum under his breath, rubbing a fold of denim between his thumb and forefinger.

The sunset is frozen raspberries, it's a pale yellow too pale to really be yellow, it's permeating the air like dye if you look at it from the side, but when you turn to look straight at it, it's crystal-clear, with just the sky darkening bit by bit and a kiss of rose in the halo of light on the horizon, in the slippery-looking iridescence left on the leaves of the trees.

Karl sits dumbly in the truck sideways after they stop, dangling his feet out the open door. Viggo has moved behind the truck. He directed not so much as a look of complaint or inquiry at Karl.

The place they are is sort of a clearing, and could easily have been filmed for the movie. The road's not far off; some trees are a little further. Those will be their destination. The ground is faintly rolling, like a thick blanket laid over a lot of little rocks and bumps. Green and brown weeds whisper amongst themselves. Between the tree trunks--the forest is fairly free and open, not too dense, not too undergrown--all he can see are more tree trunks growing further away, overlapping veils of green shadow.

He takes a breath and goes to shoulder his bag, and a sleeping bag, and one other bag, dirty canvas with a bit of red yarn knotted around one of the straps. The yarn has frayed away straight to the knot. A subtle scent of forest is growing stronger, the longer he stands and lets it. Karl finds himself breathing more deeply. He tilts his head back and arches his back, helplessly sucking in more, more of a cool breeze that reaches tingling tendrils into all the unused corners of his throat and chest. Viggo is looking at him, smiling and shaking his head.

"It feels good, doesn't it?"

Karl smiles too, feeling confused, but not disliking nor examining the feeling. "It does. It's so--" he spreads his arms. "Should've done this before." Pause. "It's… so quiet, but it's moving everywhere, the leaves, the grass, the wind. The more you slow down, the faster it is."

Viggo tilts his head sideways and puts out his tongue to lick his lower lip. (Karl tries not to freeze and stare too obviously.) "Quiet--fast. It is. I like that. I like being--" he was going to say alone, Karl thinks. "--in the middle of nowhere. Although we're not all the way in the middle of it."

Karl gestures towards the forest. Viggo nods. Somehow Karl ends up walking first, although probably the order doesn't matter, like at a campground, or looking for the best fishing spot--here they're just pleasing themselves. The forest sits back and waits for them, deceptively passive, and then when they step into the shadows at the edge closes around them all at once, mysterious and silent.

What looks small from the outside from the inside feels tremendous. Half of the light of the sunset has stopped at the edge of the shadows; it's hours later, seemingly, under the canopy. The trees don't cluster, but sit proudly, each one alone, surrounded in a circle of mossy skirt. The forest isn't the trees, in other words, but all the gray and green spaces in between.

Karl follows a little ridge of ground around the carcass of a great tree that hasn't lived for many years and comes on a wide, shallow slope that makes his shoes skid a little on the way down.

"Careful," Viggo laughs. His voice doesn't sound so quiet here.

They find a place which is fortunately just about campsite-sized and has not obviously been used before for anything of the kind. The ground is not bare, but marked with trailing creepers, moss, lichen, a fallen log, a single toadstool, and one medium-sized rock of a nastily pointy shape.

Karl paces two easy steps from where Viggo crouches, luggage a forgotten heap at his side, apparently gathering his mental energies to make a fire. That is where they should clearly put the tent, so as not to disturb the log, which is really very pretty with its doily-like green shawl of lichen. The designated tent-place, though, unfortunately contains the pointy rock; and even more unfortunately, the rock doesn't respond much at all to Karl's attempts to move it.

"Move," he mutters aloud. Viggo has built a little pile of sticks and appears to pay no attention. The rock pays no attention either.

Karl thus finds himself kneeling undignifiedly in the dirt, trying to wriggle his fingers painfully under the rather uneven edge of the unobliging rock. By this time he is determined that the tent will go nowhere else. The skin on the tips of his fingers is breaking, scraping on the harsh surface, and he thinks he feels a fingernail tear. He wishes he had something to tidy to dissipate his nervous energy, but in that regard Karl is out of luck.

"Fuck. Viggo?"

"Hm?" Says Viggo, barely glancing up. He balances elegantly in a squat that Karl is sure would look ridiculous on anyone else. One knee brushes the ground, the other in the air with his forearm resting on it. And when he turns in response to Karl's query a bit of hair falls in his eyes, and he's too occupied to brush it away.

"Think you can give me a hand with this rock?"

Viggo's eyebrows go up and he says, "I'm building a fire. Why?"

...And so it begins. Karl, feeling somehow challenged, feels his spine stiffen straight up. One hand falls on the rock; the uppermost point of it is sun-warmed. A bird warbles, a single inquiring note that hovers in the air longer than it should. "If the fire is there I thought we'd put the tent here--" with chin-jerks instead of gestures, because his hand on the rock seems mysteriously to be anchoring him.

"Tent!" Viggo says ominously, and smiles this slow smile that really is wasted on an audience of only one.

"Tent?" says Karl. "Shelter?"

Viggo shakes his head and--the bastard, his grin has actually widened. When he speaks, of course, his voice is soothing (not apologetic). "Camping means sleeping under the stars."

Karl swallows hard. He hasn't relaxed. "If you," he begins angrily, but quietly. He doesn't know what he's saying and breaks off.

"I've got sleeping bags," says Viggo, who is already facing the pile of kindling again and seems to be having some difficulty with a book of matches.

Karl silently, fatalistically, opens a canvas bag and then the large plastic box and finds Viggo's sleeping bag as well as his own. Of course without a tent the rock isn't a problem--it simply goes between the bags. They bracket it neatly. Karl smooths them out parallel, a purple nylon and a blue and gray nylon river on either side of a little mountain.

Camping means sleeping under the stars? Karl looks at Viggo. The kindling is clearly damp. "Does camping also mean starting a fire without a lighter?"

Before Viggo turned his whole body towards Karl to speak, but now he seems absorbed. "I don't bother. Do you have one?" But there's nothing unusual in his voice.

Karl is accustomed to starting fires with balled-up newspaper, something he learned years ago in Scouts and has never questioned. He's starting to feel a little fear or--something--fear--as he says "No." It comes out more tightly than he intends.

He seats himself on his own blue sleeping bag and watches the dancing hypnotic grace of Viggo's well-shaped hands. He breathes deeply to savor the smell of the forest.

It smells dirty.

Truthfully camping like this makes Karl not just nervous, but a little angry. What kind of ridiculous overblown pride packs matches, not a cheap plastic cigarette lighter. And he should have known Viggo wouldn't sleep in a tent, not dismissed the speculation when it occurred to him on Thursday night. In Karl's world, you don't camp without a tent; he shouldn't have forgotten that Viggo's world is somewhat different. And it's no excuse that Viggo makes him forget everything else too.

Turning away and looking up, he encounters a spangled darkness made up of shifting tree-leaves, with spots and shafts of paler gray light between them. There's a crackling behind him, twigs, not flame.

Karl has moved to the edge of the campsite; each of his slightly chilled hands, clasped behind his back, seems to be offering comfort to the other. He is gritting his teeth.

"Do you usually have this much trouble lighting a fire?" He wonders, not quite managing any sort of smile.

"Sometimes," says Viggo evenly. "If the ground is wet. If I want one badly enough, I keep trying." Of course he does--Viggo's middle name is patience. And what has Karl been doing for months with Viggo but wearing his hands to blisters trying to strike limp matches over soggy kindling?

Karl bites his lip--caught between guilt at his childish behavior and irritation that is still only growing, like a persistent, pounding headache.

"Shall I go kill dinner now, then?" Says Karl, watching the line of Viggo's shoulder out of the corner of his eye. A match has caught and the kindling is smoking sullenly. "Or wait for you? We might hunt together, as I'm sure only you know the real way."

Viggo's back is, he decides, abnormally tense. Another tendril of smoke reaches skyward. The glow is moving towards the center of the kindling pile.

Viggo responds evenly again: "I know you don't have much experience with wilderness camping." His tone suggests that Karl need not reinforce the point anymore, not that he is making any sort of allowance.

The plastic box opens again, with small effort, though its edges bite into his abraded fingertips. The rock (still unmoved!) left them reddened and sensitive and dirty.

Inside: cheese, sesame crackers, coffee, cream, two kinds of tea, four potatoes, two small Tupperwares, and a foil-wrapped bundle which divulges the extremely interesting smell of meat. It mingles with the smell of smoke from the now healthily-crackling fire.

Tupperware number one contains some kind of stirfry, with onion, pepper, mushroom, and tomato. Tupperware number two contains a rapidly-melting stick of butter.

Karl resolves all of this quickly into a meal; he uses the foil from the meat (hamburger) to cook the potatoes, but he thinks that's all right; Viggo sits on the other side of the fire, making faces that could be smiles, watching him intermittently, with shadows in the hollows of his eyes.

His distance is incredible and somehow part of him. Soggy kindling! Thinks Karl disgustedly. Somehow he thought that if he came with Viggo it would be easier, so to speak, to get a fire started. But still Viggo sits across the fire as if he's in another world and likes it there well enough not to spare any attention for Karl's discomfort, like it's totally normal to go away with someone for a weekend and keep them one alternate universe over the whole time. Still Viggo says nothing, probably composing private poetry in his head.

Karl can't decide if it would be worse if he talked.

Hunger increases proportionate to the difficulty of getting food into your stomach. Karl burns his rock-torn fingers on aluminum foil more than once peeling it back from the baked potato. Too-soft butter won't spread with the paring knife; it's too sharp and slick, and goes through the butter as though it wasn't there, won't hold a pat on its surface for more than a few seconds. He drips butter in the dirt and leaves and fishes, swearing, in the box for a plastic fork instead. By the time he's gotten a bite of butter and potato--undercooked but still piping hot--into his mouth, Viggo has had time to open some mysterious package or go back to the truck, and is stirring the fire with his sword.

Karl licks his fingers and watches for a moment. A log seems to be resisting Viggo's advances. Then it turns over all of a sudden in a shower of sparks. Viggo stands back, but he doesn't flinch. "There's stir fry," says Karl carefully, "and another potato. The butter's melting."

How can Viggo come around the fire, fix an entire meal when the dishes are spread around Karl on the ground, and even ask Karl how the meat works reheated, all without meeting Karl's eyes? He does.

"Well enough," says Karl, turning his head. He's broken the tines of the plastic fork and is eating limp cooked (burnt) onions out of his potato skin with his fingers. "Small pieces, I suppose."

Viggo doesn't look up. "Not too hot? They were cooked before."

Karl remembers a fantasy about sitting round the fire on a log. The closest they've got to a log is that spike of a rock between their sleeping bags. He's sitting on his ass because he couldn't make dinner crouching on his haunches like Viggo is. "Not too hot."

"Good."

Karl feels his scalp twitch. This all feels so stilted. He has been cheated out of his expectations; his fingers are burnt and there's a lump in his throat. Viggo seems totally unconcerned, so that it almost might be a figment of his imagination from beginning to end; but Viggo isn't meeting his eyes.

Viggo moves away and sits licking stray butter off his thumb. He looks up with a sort of calm expectation and says "It seems much later out in the forest."

Karl looks around. There's the beginning of a chill bite in the air--he's not ready to go looking for a coat yet, but he knows he'll sleep burrowed deep in the down sleeping bag. "What time is it?"

The sky is black beyond the tree leaves and their darker silhouettes against it are the only evidence that it could be any darker. "Not past eight," he hazards, squinting a little. He holds a piece of hamburger meat in his left hand with excruciating delicacy, his pinky free, middle finger and thumb around it. Firelight is an unrelenting wave of gold crashing all along his palm, over his roughened knuckles, and Karl is looking at the wrinkles on them, at the tips of Viggo's fingers.

"It's a different world out here," Karl mutters, feeling angry with himself. He reaches out one booted foot and pushes a log further into the fire.

Viggo nods as though he's a martial arts instructor who has been gradually leading Karl towards the proper frame of mind he will need to battle Master Yu in the hardest level of the game, the final scene of the movie. Karl pops a little cube of cheese into his mouth. What Viggo says isn't the expecteed "Very good, little grasshopper." Instead he says, "The way I think of it I'm the one who's different."

That seems to be the end of the conversation. They're finished eating; it's too dark to wash dishes in the stream, at least without falling in. Viggo sits with his knees drawn up in front of him and his arm looped casually around one of them, twirling a strand of his hair with thumb and forefinger of the other hand. He's beautiful, beautiful and hard and dirty and inscrutable. It doesn't look like he's watching Karl, but Karl feels uneasy anyway.

"I don't know any campfire stories," he has to admit. "Not that I can remember. There was some kind of thing about monks and a tower. And a haunted summer camp. But it's been too long."

"You like to tell ghost stories around a campfire?" Viggo laughs, apparently at the novelty.

Karl says, "It seemed appropriate."

Viggo yawns, after a silence, and Karl realizes then that he's sleepy, that he's yawned several times in the past few minutes. "Nature's reset your internal clock," he says when they seem to yawn in concert and he catches Karl's eye.

"Is she going to wake me at dawn?" Karl wonders, rubbing through his shirt at a minor itch.

He receives an unusually small Viggo-smile that goes straight to his gut. "If she doesn't I will," says Viggo, moving towards the sleeping bags.

Karl thinks wildly, O wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied? but apparently Viggo will; and he's not even sure what is wrong, so he'd hardly be satisfied if Viggo caught him by the front of the shirt and bore him back on the ground and kissed him breathless. Well, maybe he would, but what would be the point if he looked over in the afterglow and discovered he still needed an inter-dimensional transporter to even speak to him?

In fact, he thinks as he lies in his sleeping bag looking up at the stars, Viggo had really better not come kissing him now after bringing him out here without a proper tent, or any newspaper or even a cigarette lighter, condemning him to sleep on the ground next to a rock, sulking over dinner about--whatever it was, Karl is sure it isn't his fault, and he's deeply disturbed to discover that Viggo is not, in fact, above sulking.

When he moves, the bag slithers on the ground, which is hard underneath him, pressing painfully on his hipbones through the padding. His nose is starting to chill. When he looks over Viggo's lying motionless with his profile just traced in starlight. What is he looking at? Karl wonders sulkily, and fixes his gaze firmly on the sky and away from Viggo, breathing deeply to try to sleep.

It's impossible.

He can hear Viggo breathing. It's maddening, but the longer he goes and the less he concentrates the louder the sounds around him become until what seemed like perfect silence is a roaring cacophany of sussuration, night rustles, animals in the woods--even a satiny kind of slick noise as Viggo shifts in his sleeping bag.

Karl doesn't open his eyes and doesn't have to. He's counting his pulse, feeling his blood pool in the part of his body on the ground and throb and swell with each beat of his heart. He is helplessly angry and so focused now that he will never sleep. He wants badly to be alone, free of even the forest's hum of life. He wishes that Viggo would get honestly angry like he should. He wants to kiss Viggo so hard he'll never forget.

He wants Viggo to reach out or make some overture, to crawl out of his sleeping bag, crouch over him, reach out and touch his face, just so that he can push him away. Viggo still doesn't move.

In the end he can't sleep until he has forgotten that Viggo is there.

A dream is a restless thing like a snake twining around his arms and darting from Kar'ls grasp. As he's waking he snatches at pieces of it, knowing it's almost over, knowing he won't be able to remember. He never wants to leave sleep while he has it and tries so hard it hurts to relax back into the dream.

He wakes anyway with his mind almost blank. The sky is darkest gray, but it's pinkening at the edges. His eyes are all the way open, heavy and gummy, and the sky is clear and cold on his face. Karl licks his lips and only then realizes that Viggo is crouched by the rock and is watching not the sunrise, but him.

Viggo smiles a little bit, but it seems to be a self-deprecating smile, not necessarily aimed at Karl. "I was just about to wake you."

"I hope you haven't ruined the coffee," says Karl thickly. Viggo is a tea-drinker who Karl thinks prefers tea mainly to camouflage his horrible lack of ability to make coffee.

"I was saving it for you."

Karl winces. "If I didn't have to get out of the sleeping bag for it I'd almost rather have yours."

Viggo's mouth twitches twice, but then it stills. He says, oddly with no hint of a smile remaining, "Then it's my duty to save you from yourself."

"Save yourself from my criticism, you mean," says Karl, experimentally pushing the top of the sleeping bag down his chest.

"More or less." Viggo rises from his crouch in a movement that's not so much graceful as feral. He prowls around the black remains of the fire while Karl tries to coordinate his long clumsy limbs to get up.

He peels the sleeping bag back like the skin of a fruit and crouches new-born and vulnerable in the cold early morning. He can't balance perfectly, so he gives in and lets himself drop down and take his weight on one knee; the ground chills the fabric of his jeans. The sun is rising sluggishly. His hands feel large and clumsy. Viggo has gotten the fire going. He glances up at Karl's curse, and reaches out for the kettle. "I'll fill it," he says. "Do you have a coat? If not, there's a flannel shirt in my bag." He's wearing a bulky cotton sweater with dull tortoiseshell buttons at the neck over what looks like the same t-shirt he was wearing yesterday.

"Somewhere," Karl mutters. His mouth feels cottony and scaly. He rubs it with the back of his hand and works his jaw open and closed as he pulls the cold metal zip on his bag. The contents of the bag have somehow turned themselves into a kind of untidy tangled soup of cold fabric that feels harsh like paper on his skin. His jacket is at the bottom. He pulls it out and a candy bar falls out of the folds. It's thick and heavy compared to the transient chill of night. Karl knows it will burn off in the light of the sun, which is even now thrusting its long fingers between the trunks of the trees. He looks around guiltily, in case Viggo has seen the over-thickness of his coat.

Viggo is in three quarter profile, squinting at the flames. Karl stuffs the jacket decisively back into the bag. He keeps the candy bar.

Viggo's bag seems to be mostly empty. The zipper has a little pull made of knotted nylon cording on it that hasn't even begun to fray. The sides are department store-blue overlaid with black elastic net. There's a flannel shirt almost on the top; Karl takes it out slowly, feeling like a peeping Tom, but not willing to look away yet. Viggo's jeans are in here, a pair he's seen only a few times around the set. There's a worn sweatshirt in an unusually dark shade of heather gray. There's a pair of brown socks.

There's a worn edge to the collar of the flannel shirt, small buttons on the cuffs not threaded through their holes, a hair clinging to the shoulder that is wavy brown and certainly one of Viggo's. He pulls the shirt over his t-shirt and lets the fabric acclimate to his skin, shrugging his shoulders in it as he buttons it up. A faint scent of Viggo seems to cling to it, under the blank freshness of laundry detergent. Karl finishes buttoning the shirt with his eyes closed, the loose cuffs flopping against the backs of his hands. The shirt is comfortable, which means it's probably a little loose on Viggo.

The fire crackles reproachfully. It seems like a very small jewel in the center of the clearing. Viggo has already taken the kettle back out of it and he's handling it carefully. Steam creeps out the spout. Karl rubs his hands on his jean-clad thighs. He's looking at Viggo's movements and wondering why Viggo has been so silent. He doesn't know where he stepped onto the wrong path here, sometime around dinner last night, but the very air is sour. He meets Viggo's eyes. He wonders why he is torturing himself.

If every morning in New Zealand were like this one Karl would probably be terminally depressed. The country is known, not without reason, for beautiful scenery, but nothing can eradicate this persistent damp--apparently not even the sun, because by full sunrise the temperature has risen, but Karl hasn't taken off Viggo's shirt. The fire is still small, smaller than it should be after so long, because there's nearly-invisible mist on the ground. The sky is overcast white and gray, not golden in the least.

"People have tried to teach me to make coffee before," Viggo says conversationally.

Karl has just emptied his last cup. "No luck?" He says.

"I guess some things can't be taught," Viggo shrugs. "Someday you'll have to give it a try too."

Karl is sure if Viggo can't learn something like this it must be because he doesn't want to. Viggo is so competent it hurts. He lit a second fire this morning with just matches, after all. "You can't stir coffee with a sword," he says.

Viggo's sword is lying only a few feet away from them. The weed-spotted dusty brown earth is an appropriate Rohan-like backdrop for a sword that might have just clattered from a warrior's hand. It is they who are the intruders with their blue jeans and nylon sleeping bags.

"You know me too well," says Viggo wryly, but this is nonsense. Everyone on the set knows Viggo won't put the damned thing down.

Karl looks off through the trees, thinking that it's a long day and it has started to become awkward already. Viggo is too graceful, too self-contained, too quiet and assured. He is beautiful grimacing into the fire, stirring it with his toe, sitting with his hand outstretched in the act of picking up the sword again. Something has happened, yes, but nothing at all has happened to Karl's desire. He can't look at Viggo with his eyes open and not want. "What are we going to do?" He says. "Not fish."

"I guess we could," says Viggo.

"But without a fishing pole," says Karl. "And we only have one sword."

Viggo laughs, opening his mouth wide, sitting back on his haunches as if he's surprised to be so amused. "I guess you're right," he says finally. Karl relaxes--not much, but a little.

There's something inescapably masculine about walking through the woods carrying a sword, no matter how silly it feels. He swings it experimentally in front of him. It makes a wooshing noise. This sword is longer but lighter than Eomer's.

He still is surprised Viggo has let him carry it.

Without turning around, Viggo says, "You're like Gimli in Fangorn, making the trees nervous with your axe."

"Don't make me too nervous if you still want to stay in the woods tonight," jokes Karl.

Viggo looks over his shoulder with a smile. His face is mysterious, short shadows cast around his eyes.

Karl is still wearing Viggo's flannel shirt. The faint Viggo-smell has settled around him, maybe to cling to his skin like the smells of cigarettes, pot, salt water, or sex. He has already drifted off into scent-inspired daydreams several times today and been called back to earth by Viggo twice. But each time he thinks about it it still wakens a little ache in the pit of his stomach; he wants to come home to a place that smells like this, wants to be able to pick a shirt up off the floor and smell it, wants to chase it down to its source through all the hidden creases of Viggo's long body.

But the ache makes him angry and he shifts his grip and stabs and swings the sword again.

"You're not going to get us lost, are you?" says Karl.

Viggo looks up at the sky. "Well--I was planning to make it back to the campsite for lunch but I can't tell what time it is with all these clouds," he says.

Trust Viggo not to wear a watch. Karl jogs a pace and a half. He thrusts his hand out sideways to give back the sword; Viggo has to stop walking to take it without awkwardness. He moves his fingers out of the way before their hands brush on the hilt, but then he pushes the sleeve of Viggo's shirt up his own wrist to proffer his own watch.

It is 11:49. "Thank you," says Viggo. He smiles but doesn't look at Karl. "I have a compass in my back pocket," he goes on, "so even if I didn't know where we were we'd make it back eventually. The woods aren't as big as they look from the inside."

"How many times have you been here now, then?" says Karl. Viggo told him it was a "new" spot, didn't he?

"Just four."

"Oh." He lets the conversation lag and tilts his head to turn his attention to the canopy of trees.

Instead his attention is quickly arrested by a cloud formation on the horizon, moving towards them from the direction of shooting at a not-too-sluggish pace. It's grayer than the pale gray that suffuses the sky, piled in dusky heaps that spell a good chance of rain.

"Rainclouds," he points out.

"I think they're going to miss us," Viggo says, without looking up again.

Karl squints at the sky again and can see that their trajectory is by no means straight. "Maybe," he says. "But they're moving rather fast."

"We'll turn around when we get to the lake," Viggo suggests. "I think it's just a little bit up this way--" his voice has gone mumbling and introspective as it does when he forgets that other people are listening to him. Karl doesn't mind; it's roughened as well, plucking low resonant chords deep in his chest and heating his belly. Viggo talks low and precisely, but the words come out ghostly because he shapes them with ridiculously careless movements of his lips. Karl fantasizes about seizing that chin and holding it motionless, fastening his mouth over Viggo's and drinking all those sighs and mutters and absorbing every little movement with his own lips.

But the longer he spends out here in the forest with Viggo, the colder those fantasies become--colder and more unreal. Real is mist around his ankles and Viggo, absurdly, using Anduril as a walking-stick. Real is stuffing his hands in his pockets because they're damp and becoming prickle-necked aware of the thus-emphasized movements of his hips, because Viggo is walking behind him for once.

He doesn't take his hands out of his pockets right away. When he does he finds himself shivering. Viggo has started forward eagerly, and Karl's brow creases while his ribcage becomes suddenly too tight, every muscle tensing as if for a fight. But Viggo is looking over his shoulder. "There it is!"

It's the lake.

More like a large pond, it's gray-brown and large and still and even relatively round. The ground is hunched like an ill-fitting coat around the V where it's fed by the stream, and the knobby knees of a tree's roots jut out and up into the air, like perches for fairies. The mist isn't gone, though it's past midday; it rises like curls of steam from the rippling surface of the water. The wind seems braver there, rushing gleefully over the glassy surface, while it's only barely enough to turn Karl's ears and nose pink.

Viggo turns with his hands on his hips, grinning a little ruefully. "It's smaller than I remembered. What do you think?"

A willow is next to them and one of the branches has interposed itself between them as Karl moved cautiously forward. "I don't think it will make New Zealand's number one vacation destinations," he says at last, but he has to force himself to the pleasantry. He's examining all the edges of the really unimpressive little pond. Viggo wanders away a little doing Viggo-things, talking to himself, testing the ground with the sword. Karl tears leaves off the willow branch one at a time and flicks them into the water, where the ripples continue uncaring under them without carrying them away. The water's littered around his feet by the time they turn around.

Apparently that was hypnotizing enough to make Karl lose track of time. The wind is cooler and slower; the air smells decidedly wet. He hears the raindrops before he sees them, but the key point is he and Viggo are still probably an hour from the campsite when they begin to fall, landing on his shoulder, in his hair, on the backs of his hands.

Viggo looks up, frowning a little. "What time is it?"

It's past one.

The dark clouds are almost just overhead; the rain isn't picking up much speed, but it shows no sign of stopping.

"Walk faster." Viggo suits action to words.

Karl mutters, "Shit."

There's no sense in running when you have forty-five minutes to walk through the rain. The back of Viggo's neck is shiny with rain when he draws ahead of Karl for a moment. Viggo's shirt is sticking with rainwater to Karl's shoulders, and his fingers are cold. The water actually somewhat obscures the view; the path is turning to a sort of muddy dead-leaf slush underfoot. It's like even the trees are shivering.

The temperature wouldn't be objectionable, Karl thinks miserably after another five minutes of silence, if it weren't so wet.

He assumes Viggo, who is mostly silent, is doing his predictably competent job of playing stoic. But then he looks at Viggo's face and finds that he's actually smiling.

"Are you all right?" says Karl doubtfully.

Viggo seems surprised. "What? No, I'm fine."

Karl scrunches his face futilely. It's slick and dirty with rain and the smell of Viggo's shirt is mostly gone, the remainder filtered through the wet. "You were smiling," he points out.

"Oh." Silence. Does he need a minute to think about it?

The longer the silence continues the more Karl can feel his frustration building. "You thought the rain wouldn't hit," he says.

"Well," Viggo shrugs. "You never know."

"Until it's too late," says Karl bitterly and completely out loud. He's too angry to mutter.

Viggo snorts a little. "Of course."

"I don't suppose there's a shortcut," Karl says. It seems to require more effort than usual to speak. He feels like he's enunciating everything far too carefully, fighting some stiffness in his own jaw. And face. And chest.

Viggo pauses and turns his head to look at Karl. "Actually," he says, "I think we could avoid the hill, the way we went, by going off--" he has to look at his pocket compass "--to the left."

Karl breathes out through his nose and turns his steps to the left, off what has passed for a path. He can't stop himself from asking: "Do you like the rain?"

Somehow, impossibly, this amuses Viggo. He chuckles, looking sidelong at Karl, "Sometimes."

"Once I was caught out in a boat on a lake in the rain," Karl says determinedly. "It was one of the most miserable experiences--sitting there soaking wet, without being able to move out of the way, you know, or get any shelter."

"At least you can move now," says Viggo, laughing outright.

"I can't move out of the rain."

"Soon enough," he says. "Come on. It's funny."

It's funny, but there's absolutely no way Karl is going to laugh. You don't laugh when you're cold and wet and plodding through the forest. In fact, Karl's fuming so much he's surprised it hasn't spread out to his fingertips and ears in little licking flames of warm anger. He's still cold, though. It just figures.

Viggo pulls ahead a little. He's almost jaunty, a tall sexpot Tom Bombadil in old jeans and a loose-cabled green sweater. His hair pulled back, drizzling over the back of his neck, is so far from Aragorn's artfully tumbled wet ringlets that by all rights it can't be equally entrancing.

But it is.

It reminds him of the Disney movie Fantasia--the water drip, drop, drip dropping, each drop placed with a wave of a little fairy's wand until it's rushing merrily along, and the classical music thunders cheerfully in the background. There's not a hint of thunder here, but the slow damp leak of precipitate has finally reached some sort of critical mass; it's trembling on the tips of leaves no longer, but falling steadily off them in stuttering streams, pouring through low spots on the ground like miniature rivers and breaking on twigs like rocky rapids.

The sound is a dull, low roar of white noise. The sky is a thoroughly unremarkable gray. The whole day trods miserably in time with Karl's damp, squishy steps in the squelchy, rotten mess of fallen leaves on the ground. Gray and brown and mist and dirt and cold wet have all been combined in the perfect amounts along with some sort of secret ingredient to make him seethe--secretly of course--so hard he pulls the cuffs of the flannel shirt down tight over his hands.

It's a long forty-five minutes.

By the time they reach the stream where Viggo filled the kettle--which is probably not entirely sanitary, but Viggo didn't bat an eyelash of course, and Karl isn't really inclined to more than a twinge of worry about it--the rain has eased off and eased as easily back on several times. Karl has grown so used to trying to seek shelter under trees that he's probably wetter than Viggo. He's been instinctually stepping where the still-wet branches will shake their leafy heads at the wind of his passage and wet him thoroughly even when the rain has stopped.

"Getting close," Karl says with palpable relief.

Viggo's eyes crinkle at the corners, he sees with disbelief.

They enter the clearing and find the smoldering ruin of the fire has been beaten down, the ashes textured like a bizarre pebbled zen garden by the weight of raindrops. There's a sort of black sludge, too. At least Viggo seems to have tied the sleeping bags back up in their waterproof bags. "Could use a fire," he says helplessly, rubbing wet hands on the outer thighs of his wet jeans. It chafes painfully.

Viggo's already crouching there thoughtfully, sword lying on the ground a few feet away. When Karl comes back from taking a leak Viggo's actually got a rather promising beginning of one going--damp sticks, and some papers, including Karl's breakfast candybar wrapper, are huddled in the black ashes with fire clinging to them like a rat to a sinking ship.

Karl finds the sight exasperating even though it's better than he could do. After all, he's not Viggo. He would have brought paper, and a lighter, and a tent, and--.

"Where's the fire?" Says Karl, studiedly innocent.

"I've got it here," says Viggo, "Just barely going, but I think with luck it'll get a little bigger--it's not much now but if you get really close to it--" he demonstrates, putting out his callused, long-fingered hands to let the pitiful heat and wan pale light play over the palms.

Karl comes closer, wringing out the tails of Viggo's shirt as he goes. "Oh," he says, dropping in an uncontrolled, too-fast movement to his knees. He's reckless with irritation. His hands itch to bleed.

He bites his lip and stretches his hands out, searching in vain for that flicker of warmth. "Not very warm," he says, raising his eyebrows and looking at Viggo. Just for a test, he puts one hand on Viggo's arm through the sodden sweater instead. The sweater is cold, but he can tell the heat of Viggo's skin is greater. "This is a really, really--really--pitiful fire," he continues.

Viggo raises his eyebrows right back, and a silence forms abruptly in the air between them.

"It is," Viggo replies slowly after a delay. He's watching Karl with something in his eyes that is almost--frightening.

Karl feels like a spoilt child, stamping his foot because he doesn't want his bad behavior criticized. "This is bloody miserable," he says flatly, clearly. Unmistakably.

Viggo's lips tighten. "I noticed you feel that way," he says, when he probably should really not have responded at all.

Karl is still reckless. "Stupid fucking limp-dick motherfucker fire, God, look at it, it's ridiculous," he says. "Is it always like this? Do you enjoy--"

"Yes," says Viggo sharply. "I do enjoy myself. That's why I come out in the woods. And I usually don't make a habit of inviting people who don't. Children don't get the same things out of nature that I thought you would."

"Viggo, I'm sorry to tell you that no one would enjoy this. People don't usually enjoy having everything go wrong. And you've sabotaged practically every point from the beginning with the end result that we are sitting here without a fucking tent, without a fucking fire, soaking wet, cold, hungry--"

"All right," says Viggo coldly. The really amazing thing is that he's actually speaking very quietly, but the low even rasp of his masterful voice cuts through Karl's hysteria like his sword through Elijah's birthday cake. "I apologize."

Karl picks up a stick and snaps it between his hands, flinging the pieces on the fire. "Thank you!" He says sarcastically. "The most disastrous camping trip ever, your--bloody--Buddha act, no lunch, no tent, your gracious opinion that I'm a child and the least gracious apology I've ever--" he stops because it's not truly the least gracious apology he's ever gotten.

It just stings a lot more than the others.

"I am sorry for inviting you now," Viggo snaps. "Don't think I don't mean it just because I sound angry."

Karl turns too quickly, his feet slipping in the mud. His ankles are cold, his joints stiff, and the ground is slippery, but he's sitting very close to the fire. He doesn't know why he's turning at first, because he moves too fast to think about it, and then after he loses his balance his whole attention goes to not falling on the fire--not so much to avoid catching on fire, but because he wouldn't like to put it out.

He falls on Viggo, more or less--Viggo lifts his arms in Karl's grip automatically to steady him. Karl has to throw himself sideways though to keep from twisting his ankle, and he upsets Viggo's balance too. They hover in a slow funnel of uncertainty for a moment and then they're slipping, Viggo back and Karl forward with his teeth still clenched, angry and now wired shut with shots and sparks of adrenaline.

And from there, well, it's really too easy.

"What--" Viggo starts.

Karl doesn't stop. He pushes harder from his off-balance legs, feeling his feet slip further away in the mud. The rain has started to speed up again, and the fire's letting off tall clouds of unpleasant pale gray smoke, seeming suitable for secret signaling from mountain to mountain. His weight, and his sneaky push, have carried Viggo all the way back to the ground, on his back, lips parted in surprise, his forehead smooth and blank, his hair spread around his face and blending into the mud.

He actually feels his foot connect with the sword and pushes, with determination but not a lot of coordination, trying to move them away from it. Viggo's brow has creased like thunderclouds gathering. He gives a shove that rolls Karl most of the way off him. Karl has a very good grip on Viggo's biceps and can't let go, so Viggo rolls with him, and now they're further from the sword, liberally streaked with slimy mud. Viggo's silhouetted against smoke and mist, teeth clenched in a rictus. It might be amusing in other circumstances. Now it makes Karl furious. The harder Viggo shoves, the harder he holds on.

"Let--go--" says Viggo, as if pushing with his full strength hadn't got the point across.

Karl surprises himself by the force of his snarl. "As long as you're sorry I came," he grits out, "I might as well--"

Viggo seems to double his efforts. He brings a knee up swiftly and Karl catches it, clamping down with both his thighs, which feel bruised, not to mention abraded by the heavy denim. "I am sorry," he says, "because I wanted to go camping with my co-star--not--" a grunt as Karl twists and hits him with his shoulder-- "--a sullen teenager."

A sullen teenager? Karl would be speechless with shock and anger if he weren't already so worked up. It doesn't matter that teenager isn't too far from how he has thought of himself. How dare he?

Viggo is fighting in earnest, lips drawn back over his teeth, the tendons in his neck standing out sharply. He writhes. He punches Karl in the gut.

They're rolling in the mud now, slippery with it. Karl exerts as much force as he can to flip them: Viggo is like a wildcat, shocking and a little awe-inspiring. He may hurt both of them. Karl isn't sure which will be worse, his injury or Viggo's, shamed guilt or shamed pain.

Viggo has the impressive manly body, cords of muscles, trim hips and sculpted shoulders and thrusting jaw; but Karl is definitely heavier. He presses down with his whole body weight on the slender shape of Viggo, who is straining, trembling, bucking. Viggo's face is red and sweaty under the streaks of grime. His lip is bleeding from a small slit near the corner.

Karl is going to be bruised. Viggo grunts, thrashes, tosses his head. Karl wants to shake him back to reason. "Who's the child?" He shouts, "Who?" Shouting may have been a mistake. For a minute there he was trying to stop the violence; now he seems to have opened some floodgates.

The mouth opens, short puffs of breath and some kind of wordless groan. He may be trying to speak. Karl doesn't care: he yells right over him, furious because he hurts:

"Bringing me here just to--ignore me? Just to prove you don't need anyone?"

Viggo takes a fast, deep breath. His chest rises until they're chest-to-chest. Then he shakes himself all over, still trying to get free, though he's fairly well pinned. He closes his eyes to avoid looking at Karl and clenches his teeth.

"Because your way has to be the only way, Viggo, doesn't it--even out here! And you have to punish anyone who dares to think otherwise!"

It's like the countdown time on Jeopardy, a moment of exquisite silence in which the forest rustles around them and the rain spatters in the mud and on the back of Karl's head. Viggo's eyes are squinched shut, his chest heaving as he takes deep fast breaths and deep slower ones. He's tense as a bowstring still, but he's not struggling. Then he opens his eyes. Karl looks at him warily, trying to breathe evenly and failing, hoping there aren't tears in his eyes because he's really already been girly enough for one day.

Viggo relaxes slowly. His hands gentle, curving--resting. Karl realizes with a little surprise that Viggo's hands have slid up under his shirts, to rest on his hips. He can feel the dirt from Viggo's fingers. Viggo sighs. He licks his lips. He is probably searching for something to say, but he gives the appearance of purposeful silence, as though he never does anything by accident.

He strokes Karl's right hipbone with his thumb, and moves his other hand thoughtfully to the small of Karl's back, moving his palm slowly up and down.

Karl fights the urge to say What? Instead, he blinks.

Viggo's lips twitch. "You look like I just jumped you out of nowhere and wrassled you to the ground," he says. His voice seems to have gone back to normal: soft and slow.

"Huh," says Karl.

"Why don't you stand up," Viggo suggests, "and let me get out a sleeping bag. We need to get out of these wet--"

"Filthy--" Karl adds.

Viggo smiles. "--These wet clothes."

It isn't really like all the fight has drained out of them. Karl has relaxed a little, partly in bewilderment, and he shifts his weight to his knees awkwardly, kneeling over Viggo, and stands up without too much slipping and offers Viggo his hand. But he stands there and his blood is still flowing fast and free, and he's still feeling the adrenaline rush. He's starting to shiver with it now. Viggo stands with one smooth motion and he doesn't let go of Karl's hand when he finds his balance, just pulls Karl closer up against his chest.

Karl blinks some more, but he's grateful for the contact. He hugs his arms around his stomach. Viggo rubs his shoulder reassuringly, and uses the contact to turn Karl around. Karl steps over the sword on the ground. Viggo pauses to pick it up and then sets it down gently next to his bag and Karl's and the two sleeping bags. He kneels, loosens the drawstring carefully and pulls the sleeping bag out. Every move is deliberate and graceful, like a dance, or a religious ritual.

They're both sitting on the ground. Viggo has pushed the sleeping bag out, right there on the sparse grass and spotty mud. "Come on," he says, looking up at Karl, "Go on and get out of those clothes."

Karl looks doubtfully at Viggo spreading the sleeping bag out and wonders what it was he said to make this happen, and why he didn't say it sooner. He tries to decide whether he's still angry. Viggo unzips the bag halfway while Karl undoes the buttons of the flannel shirt and struggles out of it. It clings to his skin like it's glued on. "Are any of the clothes dry?" says Karl.

Viggo picks up the hem of Karl's white t-shirt and lifts it briskly, like Mary Poppins undressing Michael Banks. "I don't know," he says when Karl's blindfolded by the wet cotton, "Probably." He drops the shirt in the mud.

Karl flexes his hands; the skin is cold and wet, on the verge of pruning. It feels like he's been doing dishes for hours. His skin is pale in the light.

He looks up and catches Viggo looking at him too--his arms, his chest, his belly. Viggo lets his eyes wander without shame, ostentatiously, and smiles. Karl almost shakes with a kind of unsurprised, terrified confusion when Viggo reaches out and starts unbuttoning his fly.

Viggo undresses himself more quickly and with less care than he spent on Karl. "Get in the sleeping bag," he says quietly. His expression has reverted to calm unreadability, and he raises his eyebrows, but Karl doesn't think he's hostile. Either way, he's tired, and the chill is getting to him. He fumbles a little with the corner of the sleeping bag and slides inside. The lining feels like flannel but is probably more high-tech than that. Viggo, matter-of-factly naked, is climbing in after him before he has finished stretching his toes to the bottom.

Karl feels another half-surprised shiver and gives into it. His shoulders and fingertips tremble. He frowns. He really has no idea what is happening.

"Shhh," says Viggo, and a warm arm steals around his ribs, drawing him close before he knows what's happening and then their legs are tangling; they're belly-to-belly, chest-to-chest, quiescient cock to quiescient cock.

He thinks maybe he is still angry, but he only stiffens a little, because he is cold, and Viggo is warm. He firms his lips and decides that if Viggo can be Buddha so can he: he will wait patiently to see what's happening. It has to come out eventually.

"Don't you like camping?" Viggo says, over Karl's shoulder so that Karl can't see his face.

Karl shifts uncomfortably. Viggo's hand on his spine lifts a little, becoming light as a butterfly, until he settles again. Then the touch firms into a gentle stroking. "I like fishing," says Karl. "I go camping. I mean, I enjoy it. I don't love it like you do. I don't--go away the way you do."

"Ahh." It gusts by his ear, a soft puff of exhalation.

Karl is still cold. His fingers are cold. They must feel frigid against the heat of Viggo's ribs--maybe as frigid as Viggo's fingers on his shoulderblade.

"I don't mean this rudely or to be impertinent," Viggo mumbles, "But--you don't seem to like it here. I mean, you have been--I think you have been--really unhappy. And I have to wonder. Why did you come?"

Karl doesn't think this is fair. He said yes to camping, not to camping without a fire, camping without a tent, camping in the rain, camping without a lighter. And he said yes to camping with Viggo, not camping by himself, not camping with Viggo and feeling like they were both essentially by themselves. Karl doesn't like to feel isolated. If it was the way he thought it was going to be he wouldn't have been unhappy, he thinks petulantly.

But then he squashes the thought and answers the question, because he thinks that Viggo really does mean it. Viggo is honestly confused. He might even be a little hurt.

"I thought I'd like to," he starts, and stops. He starts over. "I wanted," he says, "To get to know you." He feels faintly foolish, having said it, when thinking it in the privacy of his head didn't feel foolish at all. Getting to know Viggo: isn't that like catching a falling star or something, some kind of great hubris, a terrible presumption, an impossible task?

Viggo hooms like an ent, or maybe he's just humming thoughtfully. He doesn't say anything like "Get to know me? You foolish mortal." But then again, he doesn't say "That's exactly what I wanted" either.

"Um," says Karl, by way of a reminder that they are in fact having a conversation. A naked, tangled conversation, but this is Viggo.

It works. "Well," says Viggo steadily. "You got your wish, didn't you?"

Karl grits his teeth. "What did I get to know? That you're a totally self-sufficient Renaissance man who--who--catches--squirrels with his bare teeth, lights wet kindling without a lighter, and doesn't need anything? Or anybody?"

Viggo doesn't answer.

And so, made bold by increasing body heat, and feeling rather safe in the cocoon of sleeping bag and Viggo, Karl returns, "Why did you ask me?"

And Viggo laughs.

"What?" Karl stiffens.

"No," Viggo says, "I'm not laughing at you--I'm laughing at me, I'm laughing because you don't know, and I didn't tell you." His hands are curling on opposite sides of Karl's ribs, he's wrapped his arms all the way around Karl and let his head fall back on the ground, chin no longer tucked over Karl's shoulder. Karl finds himself sort of lying on Viggo again. He doesn't mind.

Karl tries to get used to lying sort of on Viggo, and looks at Viggo's face.

Viggo stops laughing but his face is still split in that beautiful grin. Karl wants to reach down and wipe away that white scar on Viggo's upper lip. "I invited you because I wanted to," Viggo smiles. "I wanted to know you better and I wanted to let you know me better. I didn't invite you here, to my place… to tell you. I invited you to let you see it. Just to show you. I could tell you about this anywhere. You have to be here to see it."

For the first time Karl finds himself thinking: You have to be here to see it. You do.

Viggo's grip has tightened. "Come here," he murmurs, letting his eyes fall mostly closed. Karl can't move in Viggo's grip, but Viggo doesn't seem to mean much by "come here" except a generic sort of, well, snuggle. He says, "This is nice."

"The woods?" Says Karl. "Quiet?"

Viggo opens his eyes. He looks amused. "The sleeping bag," he says. A hand strokes demonstratively from the base of Karl's spine to the top, maps the width of his shoulder blades, curves around the back of his neck. "You're very warm." His voice seems to have gone gritty, rumbly, husky with sleep, like his tongue has gotten sleepy.

Karl rests his forehead on Viggo's shoulder and lets Viggo twitch the top of the sleeping bag up over their heads. Light still seeps in the top, but it doesn't matter with his eyes mostly closed anyway. This is very comfortable, and he doesn't know what to say. As he lies in the silence, wondering, it seems to grow on him. It is nice. He's confused. What went wrong before? And now what went right?

"I do like the woods, though," Viggo attempts to explain after a while. "It's real. It's just so… real. People who aren't real--out here they're nothing. Maybe on the set I'm Aragorn. I'm a sword, and a child, and a Jeep, and three cups of tea a day. And you're your trailer, your son, your… fishing gear, your cell phone, your morning jog. But here I'm me. And you're you. And maybe--for someone who doesn't know what they want--" Karl feels his hair stir, then a little shiver as Viggo's fingers threading through it touch his head. "--out here they might figure it out." He's stroking Karl's hair and Karl's feeling very dreamy.

"You always know what you want," Karl says. "Don't you?"

Viggo's chest shakes a little with an abortive laugh. "I like to think so."

"You think you know because you have peace and quiet," Karl mumbles in Viggo's shoulder. It is very nice and warm. "But you would know anyway. I know what I want.... People are real. They know what they want. It's just that sometimes they can't have it."

When Viggo's hand untangles itself from his hair Karl makes a very undignified little noise. But Viggo frames his face and tilts it up to look at him searchingly. "If they know what they want," he says, "then why don't they--go after it?"

Why don't they? Because for Viggo, it really is that simple. Karl realizes that he has known this all along, if he had only stopped to think it.

Karl can't help smiling; Viggo smiles hesitantly back, not really sure why he's smiling. There's a minute, comfortable, harmonious mutual shifting of limbs. They've just become perfectly, exquisitely warm and snug. Viggo runs the back of his hand, some knuckles, slowly down over a few bumps at the top of Karl's spine, and Karl shivers at the sensation. Their cocks are no longer quite quiescient. He sighs; he puts his head down again, tilting his nose up to bury it in Viggo's hair. Viggo nuzzles the top of his head. They are definitely, unquestionably cuddling. And rubbing. Viggo stretches a little under him, curls impossibly closer, like a happy cat.

Karl pushes himself up a little and kisses him.

Viggo makes a pleased, not surprised noise, lifting his head suddenly, responsively, opening his mouth and tilting his chin. Their noses bump. Viggo's tongue tastes Viggoish. When they pull apart, their lips cling damply. Viggo sighs and presses their foreheads together, looking cross-eyed into Karl's eyes. "What I really need to know," he says, "Is this. If you knew what you wanted, then why didn't you?"

Karl says, "You knew what you wanted. Why didn't you go after it?"

Viggo frowns, moving his head a little and rubbing the tips of their noses contemplatively. His hand spreads over the curve of Karl's neck and shoulder like an Egyptian necklace, thumb on Karl's collarbone. His other hand moves from the small of Karl's back decisively around his hipbone, stroking down his flank and up his thigh to the curve of his buttock. "It wasn't a matter of what I wanted," he mumbles thickly. He seems distracted. In the next instant, he sort of arches his whole body up into Karl's.

They both gasp, and nestle closer, though they can't really get much closer. They're swimming in the sensations of skin on skin, so good, all over, warm and alive, responsive, real.

"It wasn't about what I wanted," Viggo mumbles again with his lips just centimeters from Karl's. "We didn't know what you wanted. I invited you to come camping with me--"

Karl bends his head and stops Viggo's mouth with a kiss, smoothing his hands down from biceps to slow-heaving ribs, lean waist, trim hips, smooth, trembling flanks. He grips Viggo's hips and holds him firmly still.

It's hardly necessary to point out that he said yes.

They're beyond that anyway--and they still have all that adrenaline to get rid of.

So Viggo kisses him--or he kisses Viggo--and Viggo puts one hand on the side of Karl's face, running his fingertips around his hairline and his ear and over his cheekbone like a blind man, while Karl pushes his thigh between Viggo's legs and runs his hands feverishly over Viggo's torso.

The adrenaline comes back like a torrent after a drizzle of rain and wipes the hint of tension away, drowns it under need. Viggo opens his legs and arches, thrusting. Their dicks slip together and Karl groans.

Viggo's given up touching Karl's face. He strokes Karl's chest and rubs his nipples with his callused palms. "Oh," Karl sighs. He bends down. They kiss, and Viggo bites his lip hard and licks it gently. Karl's trying to thrust against Viggo's thrusts. Their groins are rubbing together with heat and maddening friction, but it's not adequate stimulation, not with Viggo clutching him like a drowning man, writhing beautifully under him like a dancer.

They can't stop kissing.

Their teeth click; "Ow," Viggo mutters, and laughs a little, but breathlessly, because Karl's pushed himself up on his hands and knees and grabbed Viggo's hips with both hands and he's trying, trying to press their bodies close enough together, and it isn't, isn't enough. Viggo lifts one leg and hooks it around Karl's knee. Their legs tangle. Karl falls on Viggo, who gives a surprised grunt. His cock is between Viggo's legs, in the sweaty crease, and he gasps and sweats and cries out when he feels the new angle. Viggo does too. There are going to be little half-moons from Viggo's short fingernails in Karl's ass.

"Not enough," Viggo says, "Turn--"

Karl is ridiculously clumsy, more than he can ever remember being in bed, and he gets tangled with Viggo trying to turn around, but then he's flipped on his side trying to turn on his back, and Viggo's foot is on his ankle and teeth are on his ear. He tilts his head back and Viggo bites, and presses up breathlessly all along the length of his back. Oh, it's good, so good. He wriggles, and rubs, pressing back. Viggo hugs him close, rocks his hips so Viggo's cock nestles between his ass cheeks.

"Yesssss," he hisses, burying his face in the back of Karl's neck, flattening his hands and sliding them down the fronts of Karl's thighs while he rocks and thrusts behind. Karl shudders, hard and aching. Viggo's hand closes around his cock.

"Oh," says Karl. "Oh. Oh--"

Viggo's lips are against his ear now. "Oh, I wanted you," he whispers, low and gravelly. "I want you now, so much. I want to fuck you."

Karl bites his lip and stifles a cry. Viggo knows just how to do this, pressing gently and rubbing the head of his cock with his thumb, fisting gently and then harder, slow measured strokes and faster ones, amazing while he's grunting and thrusting against Karl's ass. Viggo traces the crease of Karl's thigh with his other hand, cups his balls, presses gently on the sensitive skin behind them. Karl feels his body so impossibly tight, harder than anger or fear, his neck taut, his head tossing. "Oh," he says, "Ah--oh," because he can't say anything else.

Viggo whispers, confusedly, "Yes. Karl--oh--" and his free arm is curved possessively around Karl's waist now, his hand a tight fist against Karl's chest.

Yes.

It bends and breaks him and picks up the pieces of him and inundates him, drowns him, soaks him, cleanses him.

Viggo comes, and Karl comes, and they press themselves together hard. Viggo's arms around him are tense. His right hand is extremely sticky. They're sweaty, slippery, breathless and, for the moment, satisfied.

Viggo whispers in his ear: "Thank you."

Karl shudders again, or maybe that's an aftershock skating down his spine. He tilts his head back a little more. He can feel Viggo's nose just under his ear, and hot, breathy kisses being dropped every now and then on the side of his neck. "Yeah," he whispers back.

Moments pass in which it is still raining, because they can hear the slow patter on the nylon of the sleeping bag, which is still pulled over their heads. In fact, with their knees bent, nested together like slowly-relaxing spoons, they have slid deeper into it.

The forest intrudes itself gradually. It has never really gone away. The smell of smoke faintly infuses the soft bag lining. The subtler scent of mud is not far off. "Are you hot?" says Viggo, stroking Karl's stomach almost hesitantly.

"Mmmm," Karl agrees. "Sticky."

They push the top half of the bag down a little, after some wrestling with the zipper. Viggo has to pull back a little; they turn until they're lying on their sides and facing. With daylight, even wan and gray, spilling in again Karl smiles wryly at the wreckage evinced--mud and semen and sweat on their faces and hands and hair, smeared on their bellies and inside the sleeping bag. He wriggles awkwardly the few inches to reach contact again. The air is cold, after all, and the heat they generated is escaping faster now.

Viggo tucks his chin down a little. His eyelashes droop over his cheekbones, and Karl notices not for the first time that they're long, and Viggo's cheekbones are sharp, and his nose is perhaps too large or rough-hewn for beauty, but his jaw is strong and his chin attractive and his forehead noble. He puts one hand on Viggo's neck and strokes his jaw and his chin with his thumb. Viggo doesn't even look up, just sighs and lets his eyes drift all the way shut. "Mmmm," he says. "It's still raining."

"Yeah."

"Not going to stop anytime soon."

"No," Karl agrees.

"I'm not in any hurry to get up. Are you?"

"No."

"Mmm."

He kisses Viggo, startling his eyes open.

"Mf," says Viggo against his mouth, surprised, but he smiles against Karl's lips and opens his mouth. "Ahh," he murmurs into the kiss.

Karl luxuriates idly in the feel of Viggo's skin, where it is softer and where rougher, the bumps of his spine, a scar on his hip.

Viggo is sweetly drowsy, accepting every touch, occasionally humming or moving slightly in contentment. He's strangely quiet, seeming on the verge of sleep, wholly satisfied, as though he understands all--while Karl is more satisfied than he could have imagined, but feels at least a little confused--

"Oh," he says suddenly. "You wanted me. And... you wanted me a lot."

"Mm?" says Viggo.

"You're crazy about me," Karl accuses.

Viggo opens one eye. "Is that what I said?"

Since Viggo clearly said nothing at all like that, Karl ignores him. "That's why you invited me out here in the first place." The only reason, the only way Viggo could say it.

One Viggo-eyebrow slides up just a little, enquiringly. "Well--I knew I wanted you and I knew you wanted me. It's easy to want on the movie set or in Wellington. You can't ever know if something will work there. Because it's not--"

Karl smiles at him, "Real." And thinks that Viggo is unquestionably crazy, but possibly right. He admires the insane, irrational, lonely logic Viggo seems to have invented or discovered for himself out in the forest. He wonders if it really works. And it might. It might.

Viggo takes a deep breath and seems to pull words from deep inside himself, like gripping a long narrow splinter determinedly between too-short fingernails. He says softly "I didn't bring you to prove I don't need anyone. I mean, I don't need anyone--to camp. But being really self-sufficient, being complete out here where it's real and alone, is harder. You need…" he hesitates, and corrects himself while Karl holds his breath, "I wanted you for that."

"For being alone."

"I didn't come to be alone--I came to be alone with you."

Karl bites his lower lip and thinks about that, and presses the heel of his hand into the resilient flesh along Viggo's spine. Viggo is really amazingly resilient, all over: cautious, obscure, lonely, but all this for a purpose. He works.

But he's difficult, almost impossible to understand. Karl realizes that what went wrong was something of a language barrier. Now he knows of it he can be careful not to kick it over: but he's also a little frightened. Okay, maybe a little more frightened than that. He didn't even know it was there before. Good God, he thinks, am I sleeping with an alien?

And wanting to?

He shivers with the closeness of that close call. What if they hadn't gone for a walk, and Karl hadn't finally pushed Viggo hard enough to make him push back? What if he hadn't said whatever it was that made Viggo realize what he was thinking? What if they hadn't made that breakthrough in translation?

Right now, Karl would be cold and more miserable than ever instead of warm and sleepy and more amazingly content than he ever got around to imagining. You can imagine sex when you jerk off: you can't imagine this kind of contentment: you need another person for that.

The fact that he might have missed it even for another hour is profoundly horrifying.

I came to be alone with you, said Viggo, who--who clearly valued so deeply the woods, and being self-sufficient. It is clear in everything, from starting fires with matches, to the way he brings his own tea bags and stirs his tea not with a coffee straw but with his finger, to the fact that this couldn't happen anywhere but in these sleepy, damp little woods, around a snug fire Viggo built himself.

And they are lying in Viggo's sleeping bag.

To be alone with you. "Thank you," Karl says softly.

"Mm," Viggo says against the hollow of Karl's throat. One of his hands has gone to Karl's hip again. He cradles the bone in his palm like it's a flame which might blow out in the wind.

Karl gives himself over to the sensation, pushes his free hand lazily up Viggo's shoulders to tangle in the damp and dirty hair. He tilts his chin slowly until he's pressed their noses and their foreheads together. He goes almost cross-eyed but he can see Viggo's crooked grin at that. "What?" he whispers.

And Viggo closes his eyes and says nothing. And they listen to the drip of the leaves of trees slowly shaking themselves dry.

Karl never imagined anything quite like this, but he wishes he had. He's so warm the hollows of his groin are sweating, and he doesn't think he could move if he tried. The energy of the earth itself, the forest, something, is holding him perfectly still and he can't ever remember being this contentedly drowsy-yet-awake. He wishes he knew what to say.

A long, long time later, they might have slept and woken again, but Karl at least thinks he has been awake. "You're crazy," he says.

Viggo laughs quietly.

"This is a beauiful forest--even in this miserable rain."

Viggo laughs harder. He almost shakes. Karl pats his back anxiously, wondering what he said. "I'm glad you think so."

"Because it's a sign of my sanity?"

"Why not," Viggo murmurs, "Yes. But if you want to, you can think it's because I want you to be happy."

Uh-huh.

Drip, drip go the trees all around them.

"Do you think it will be all right?" Karl says when they're both quiet again.

"Maybe," Viggo says.

"You brought me out here to test it," Karl accuses. Viggo may not have said exactly as much, but he knows.

"I stopped waiting to find out," says Viggo with a shrug. "But I think that means it probably will."

End

This story is finished, and is itself, because of K'Sal's determined work, from character psychoanalysis to telling me what it was about to telling me what was going to happen next. It was originally inspired by squealing with Phineas, and in the early stages, Elaine talked me over a few humps. Kisses for all.