Work Text:
Embodying the Cliché
for an incomparable fan friend
on her birthday, May 5, 2007
Disclaimer: merely a silly flight of fictional fancy that happens to use two rather unusual names and the imaginary likeness of two very unusual men.
The helicopter lowered carefully to its pad, whipping up a blizzard from the surrounding snow. When it was settled, two men smothered in heavy winter coats shook hands with the pilot, making silent gestures of gratitude, then, heads down, ran together to the edge of the cleared space. The helicopter lifted ponderously away, flying back into the weak winter sunset.
"Wow," said Orlando, grinning. "When you said you wanted to get me alone to have your wicked way with me, I didn't realize you meant this alone! Wasn't the ranch quiet enough?"
Viggo grinned back broadly and waggled his eyebrows. "In Yellowstone, no-one can hear you screeeaaammm… "
Orlando giggled and pretended to shudder. "Isn't there anyone here at all?" he asked.
Viggo shook his head. "It's off-season," he replied. "All the roads are snowed in and closed. Jack tells me they sometimes bring hiking parties in by snowcat to stay at the Snow Lodge over there, but the latest weather has cancelled even those. It's just the park rangers 'coptering in every few days to see that all's well - and us."
Orlando shivered, this time for real. "Lodge," he said. "Sounds like a good idea. I'm freezing."
"Nope, this way," said Viggo, reaching for Orlando's mittened hand. "They've opened one wing of the Inn for us - we have electricity, hot water, food… All the comforts of home."
"Well, well," said Orlando, impressed, as they strode rapidly to a side-door of the Old Faithful Inn. "You have some pull with this Jack guy."
Viggo shrugged. "Jack and I go way back." He didn't add that substantial contributions to environmental causes in Idaho and Wyoming over many years hadn't hurt his cause with the authorities. "We Rangers stick together, you know," he joked as he switched on a light.
"This is great!" enthused Orlando as he explored their room. The furniture was deliberately on the primitive side, but the bed was large and responded springily to the young man's eager bounce.
"Mm, still really chilly though," replied Viggo, swinging his sweatered arms around himself. "Jack said there were space heaters - do you see…? Oh yes, there's one, by the window."
Orlando bent to switch the heater on, and as he stood up, he was startled by a loud hissing noise.
"Vig, come and see!" he exclaimed. Old Faithful was in full flight.
Viggo joined his lover at the window, wrapping him in his arms from behind and resting his chin on the convenient shoulder. "Amazing, isn't it?" he murmured. "And all just for us."
"Well, us and the bears," replied Orlando. "It must be a hundred feet high."
"Sometimes as high as a hundred and fifty, they say," said Viggo. "And the bears are all asleep this time of year, by the way."
"Our very own geyser, then, just for us," said Orlando, turning in his lover's arms and giving him a little kiss. "Aren't you the clever lad?"
"Oh, I have some well thought out plans for you, Elf Boy," said Viggo, pulling him closer for another smooch and then taking a quick glance at his watch.
Orlando asked "what?" with his eyes, but Viggo just gave his best sphinx smile. "Later. Food first."
/-/-/-/
"Not exactly haute cuisine," remarked Viggo over the remains of his Hungry Man Frozen Dinner.
"Filling, though," responded Orlando, contented enough. Roughing it with Vig was infinitely preferable to being solitary and pampered. "You know," he said, surveying the contents of their freezer, "it's really a waste of good electricity to run a freezer when we could just stick the stuff outside the door."
"Well, that'd be one surefire way to find out whether all the bears are asleep, city-boy," drawled Viggo. Orlando stuck out his tongue. "But now that you mention outside, I'd sure like to take a walk with you,"
"Outside where the bears are? In the snow? In the dark?"
"Flashlight." Viggo waved it at him.
"Crazy man," muttered Orlando under his breath, but he pulled on his boots and coat nonetheless.
"It's why you love me," Viggo told him as he wrapped a warm scarf round Orlando's neck and then pulled on his own voluminous coat.
"True."
They were no sooner outside the door than Orlando was complaining. "This snow is two feet deep if it's an inch! It goes over the top of my boots! I can't see where I'm going. And it's snowing!"
Viggo elbowed him. "Oh hush up, Elf. Aren't you supposed to be able to run on top of the snow?"
"That's only in Middle Earth," muttered Orlando, "not the Middle of Nowhere…"
Viggo chuckled out loud and reached for Orlando's hand. "Just a few yards down this path," he said cajolingly. He aimed the flashlight beam. "See those benches down there?"
Orlando squinted. "I'll take your word for it," he grumped. "Are you going to lead me over top of a geyser and warm me up that way?"
"Close, but not quite."
Orlando turned and stared into his lover's dimly-seen features. A slow smile spread across the younger man's face. "What are you up to, you wicked old man?"
"You're standing on top of a volcano, you know."
Used to Viggo's non sequiturs, Orlando just wrapped an arm around Viggo's cloth-bulked waist as they walked heavily onwards through the snow. "I didn't know. And…?"
"Well, all that heat right under the beautiful landscape - kind of like a certain Englishman I know - it builds up the pressure in the waterworks. And every so often, when the pressure gets to be too much, it has to give forth a glorious white explosion - a geyser."
"You know, that's got to be just about the corniest cliché I ever heard," said Orlando, planting a quick kiss on Viggo's cheek before bending to help him swipe some snow off and away from one of the benches.
"I know," said Viggo, almost penitently. "But will you humour me? It's just amazing, this natural wonder out here, and now it's right next to you, the most astonishing natural wonder I know. Will you give me the privilege of bringing you into synch? Will you embody the cliché for me and let me watch and feel as you and our geyser explode together?"
Orlando shivered and wrapped himself tightly around Viggo where they stood. A few dozen yards away, Old Faithful sighed forth a plume of steam that drifted away in the patchy moonlight. "You could talk me into anything," conceded Orlando. "But I hope Old Faithful's going to perform soon, 'cause it's cold out here!"
"Wuss!" Viggo scolded cheerfully. "It's barely below freezing. Unbutton your coat and slip out your arms."
Orlando bit his tongue and did as he was told, curious as always to see what his mad poet would do next. Viggo unbuttoned his own coat, which was loose, generously double-breasted and had wide and ample skirts. Then he pulled Orlando into his arms and managed to make a couple of buttons meet at Orlando's back. He pulled his own sleeves off, leaving his hands in the tiny space between them. Finally, with a grin, he sat suddenly down on the very end of their bench, and Orlando landed perforce in his lap, legs sprawled on either side.
"We're in a cocoon," laughed the younger man.
"A chrysalis," agreed Viggo. "With two heads. A strange, rare beast."
"Makes it hard to run away from bears," mused Orlando mock-seriously.
"You're not running anywhere for the next twenty minutes, mister," said Viggo, pushing up Orlando's shirt between them, and deftly unbuttoning his lover's jeans.
"Twenty minutes!"
"Give or take ten. Old Faithful's not quite as predictable as people think."
"You're planning to tease me all that time?" Orlando was already squirming under Viggo's fingertips. "I'll never last."
Viggo found Orlando's right hand in their cocoon, and wrapped it meaningfully round the base of Orlando's cock. "Yes you will," he said, and his tone brooked no argument. "Making sure of that is your job."
"Torturer!"
"And you love it," retorted Viggo, leaning in to bite gently on Orlando's lower lip.
Orlando's only answer was a stifled moan as Viggo's knowing hands traversed the accustomed territory of his skin, unerringly finding the familiar sensitive landmarks upon the map his fingers had learned so well.
Old Faithful quietly puffed another billow of vapour towards the full moon emerging from the clouds.
Orlando's breathing was loud in his own ears. Other than the soft noises of the two men and the occasional distant hiss from one of the dozen geyser craters in the area, the silence was absolute.
"Too bloody quiet," said Orlando aloud, and his voice was suddenly shocking to him.
"It's all waiting for you, love; you and our geyser and your moment of glory together."
"Madman," whispered Orlando, but without conviction. Viggo's hands played silent symphonies of pleasure across his flesh - firm and demanding, up, down, around, back, making him arch and strain in the warmth of their cocoon.
"Easy, easy," murmured Viggo then, as he pulled away for the first of many times, sensing that Orlando's passion was beginning to spiral.
Orlando made a despairing little sound and ground closer to Viggo.
"Look," said Viggo to distract him, turning his head towards the mound where Old Faithful had cleared itself of snow. "The moon's all the way out and you can see the crater clearly."
But Orlando was looking at Viggo instead. The deep moon-shadows traced sharp cheekbones, and the pale light glinted the older man's hair into an unearthly silver. Orlando traced his lover's lips with a finger. "God, you're beautiful," he murmured shakily.
Viggo dipped his head. "Isn't that my line, you goof?" he muttered, and his busy hands took up their secret labours again. Orlando crushed his lips passionately to his lover's, very nearly overbalancing them both. Viggo clenched him tight, little details like breathing be damned.
Old Faithful gave an audible sigh with its next puff of steam, and a tiny trickle of water dribbled over its lip, unnoticed by anyone.
/-/-/
Ten minutes later, Orlando reached for himself yet one more time and squeezed, against all his instincts. "I can't," he panted frantically. "I can't stop now. Bugger… bugger the damn geyser, I need to… you fucking bastard!" His howl echoed around the silent hills of the Upper Geyser Basin.
Viggo gave an apologetic smirk and withdrew the snow-filled right hand he had just wrapped around Orlando's privates, substituting the soothing warmth of his left. "Worked though, didn't it?"
"Sort of." Orlando rubbed himself on his lover's bared abs not just for friction but for warmth, fully hard again within seconds.
A brief splash of water jumped up about two or three feet in the geyser crater. Both men turned to the sound in time to see another splash, and a third.
"Now!" gasped Orlando.
"Hold on." Viggo ceased his steady fisting of Orlando's cock, and managed to insinuate his fingers down the back of Orlando's jeans.
"Fuck, Vig," groaned Orlando, as his lover fingered his tight pucker. "Let me come. Now. Please!"
"Hold on," said Viggo again.
The geyser stopped splashing and steaming, going completely still.
Orlando panted futilely.
Viggo resumed his steady stroking, and gasped silently in astonishment as he heard a deep subterranean rumble. In all the years he had visited, he had never heard that before.
"Now!" he shouted to Orlando, and as the water fountained up to the moon with a deafening hiss, Orlando cried aloud to the night sky, and loosed his pent-up need on his lover's belly.
Viggo opened his eyes and etched the moment on his memory and his soul. The huge roaring column of water and steam, lit by the moon as if by a spotlight; the volcanic heat of his lover resting in both his hands, on his thighs, on his skin. Orlando's head tilted back, curls in disarray and fists bruising Viggo's shoulders as he screamed his uninhibited pleasure to the lonely wilds. And gently, caring nothing for the violent passion beneath them, the snowflakes twinkling their way down in the moonlight to land and melt on Orlando's heated face, or upon the boiling water now flowing briskly down its accustomed channel to the river.
Orlando's head drooped to Viggo's shoulder as the geyser continued to produce a small fountain for two or three minutes. "Holy fuck," he said tiredly. A capricious breeze sent the last gusts of steam blowing in their direction, and they were enveloped for a second or two in humid heat.
Viggo tilted up Orlando's face. "You," he said with conviction, "are fucking amazing."
"I didn't do a damned thing," replied Orlando. "It was all you. And speaking of…." He wriggled against the steely bulge beneath him. "What about that?"
"Take me back to the Inn and you can do anything you like about that," smiled Viggo. As they spoke, they reluctantly uncocooned and disentangled themselves, tucking in and buttoning up.
"Really? Anything?" There was a gleam in Orlando's eye.
"You'll have to catch me first!" Viggo tossed back over his shoulder. But galumphing through the deep snow with a raging hard-on was too much work, so after a couple of snowballs he quickly let himself be caught, wrestled to the ground, and helped to his feet again.
"Anything?" asked Orlando eagerly again as the approached the door.
"Well, I draw the line at chainsaws and dead animals…"
"But live animals are OK?" teased Orlando. "A bear, maybe?" He essayed a growl that no self-respecting real bear would have recognized.
Exit Viggo, pursued by a bear.
/-/-/-
Viggo looked up from his canvas, where he had just finished imposing a huge swirl of white on a black background.
"You've sure taken to computers now that you have your own laptop," he remarked. "What have you found now?"
"Webcams," replied Orlando. "Look, you get live pictures of all these volcanoes and things - there's Popo in Mexico, and Kilauea in Hawaii. And there's the very edge of Niagara Falls. And," he added triumphantly, "Look what else I found. Old Faithful!"
"Hey, isn't that our bench?"
"It sure is." Orlando paused. "Ohmigawd, Viggo, they leave these things on all the time. Two point five million unique visits a year." He shifted a little in his seat. "Zillions of people could have been watching!"
Viggo decided that the white paint needed to dry a little before he could continue his work. "And you really like that notion, don't you?" he murmured throatily in Orlando's ear. Orlando shuddered slightly, while Viggo ran exploring fingertips down the V-neck of his shirt.
"Hang on, I've got an idea," Orlando announced. "You settle yourself nicely on the couch. Oh, and before you do, check out the prediction for the next eruption of our geyser."
Viggo glanced at the numbers above the live picture on the computer screen and groaned. Old Faithful would do its party trick in forty-five minutes (plus or minus ten).
Orlando reappeared from the kitchen, gleefully dipping his fingertips into a full bowlful of very wet-looking, very cold-looking ice cubes.
Viggo shook his head, sat down in full view of the ever-changing steam plumes on the screen, and resigned himself happily to his awful fate.
After all, what good is a cliché that's never repeated?
Finis