Warnings: If you're just here for sex, it'll be a while till you get there. Hope you like dialogue. M/F sex. Bi-sexuality mentioned. Language. Mild angst. A bit of sap at the end.
Timeframe: TTT Filming; Edoras
Notes: I stole a couple references from the DVDs...special features and extended version.
As always, this is fiction. It never happened. The beliefs, preferences, and actions of those mentioned here are all figments of my imagination.
Today they were interviewing for the upcoming TTT "making of" preview. John, Ian, and Viggo were done. Liv's bits had been filmed already from another location. The stunt people wouldn't be started on till tomorrow. All that were left were Orlando and Miranda. Miranda was late. She'd been slotted first of the two. Orlando, they'd wanted more from, being he was who he was. But, time being of the essence, they had to get started anyway.
Six minutes and thirty-seven seconds into Orli's interview, Miranda blew in. The door banged back against the wall, pushed by the strong winds, and for a second, Miranda's long blond hair stood straight up. Everyone in the vast pole-barn-like building jumped at the noise including the cameraman, which ruined the angle of his shot. It would have to be set to rights.
It had been a long day full of interruptions. Since the sun set the temperature had dropped steadily. The propane heaters weren't cutting the chill. It was damn cold. Up since 6am, Orli had drunk a lot of soda to stay awake. All of this added up to Orli squirming around in his seat in obvious need of a piss. Might as well be now, since Miranda's disturbance had thrown off the flow of his interview. He excused himself while the small outside crew worked on their equipment.
Five minutes later, and, he was sure, five pounds lighter, Orli arrived back at the little corner they had roped off to find Miranda's spot in full swing. He ducked back out for a smoke, wondering about getting cut off midway through like that. Oh, well. She was supposed to have gone first anyway. Maybe the camera angle when they bumped it was better for her.
Stubbing his cig out after he'd smoked half, Orlando went back inside. It was just too cold to stand around doing nothing. His fingers were half frozen. Slowly he focused on what Miranda was saying. The journalist had done his homework. The man had brought a couple of keys to unlock his normally quiet and near-reclusive costar's hidden gift of gab.
"...what do you like best about playing Eowyn?" the journalist was asking.
"She's a tough woman," Miranda responded. "She rides horses, fights with swords and knives... she gets to kick butt!"
Even Orli had to laugh at the way she said it. Her enthusiasm was infectious.
"And what about her misplaced love for Aragorn? Did you have any problems living up to that role?"
"Oh, yeah." Miranda's clear blue eyes sparkled. Her voice was all husky. "She wants him."
The book spelled it out plainly. Even the usually laconic Tolkien conveyed the heat between Eowyn and Aragorn most convincingly. You've have to be dead or asexual not to pick it up. Miranda convinced herself she was only speaking as Eowyn, but no one else was laboring under any such delusion. She wanted him, alright.
"Poor Miranda," thought Orlando. "That's never going to happen." Meanwhile, Miranda was at the end of her time allotment, and now she was flustered. She'd essentially clued the world in on some very personal information; with the concept of it going onto worldwide television and eventually millions of peoples' media libraries, a severe case of hoof-in-mouth disease set in.
Orli understood how she felt, and how she got to that point. He was hardly immune to Viggo's feral poise. The man could pull any emotion he wanted out of his arse, portray it, and you believed. After nine months of shooting, Orli thought he had figured it out. Viggo had spent so much time observing people, he carried a full-service human-psychology thesis in his head. His own complicated and intense psyche led him to work it outward in various ways; acting was only one of them. Viggo was a mirror to the human race.
Miranda had been around full-scale shooting for a couple months. She hadn't been exposed to the man long enough to realize one rarely, if ever, met the real Viggo. Because he was so convincingly genuine, most people didn't understand they were talking to a façade. It was nothing Vig did out of spite or malice, simply his method of self-preservation. Orli had watched the subtleties of Viggo's facial expression when he and Miranda shot the scene in which she feeds him slop and inquires about his age. Orli would consider himself talented indeed if he could ever achieve half that, twenty years from now. Miranda's open face said it all, just as Eowyn's did. She believed. Then, a few days later, when Viggo rides off with the Rohirrim to battle wargs, Peter, that sly fox, used what Orli hadn't known for all that long to his advantage. He deliberately captured Aragorn's turn-and-bolt first. Viggo threw all manner of longing looks in the correct direction, giving Pete just the right amount of what he needed, like he always did. Miranda was watching. To compound it, PJ replayed the dailies for her. And she believed. Nor was she acting when it came around to her turn.
Miranda properly thanked and was thanked by the representative shooting the preview show, and then she bolted. Orli went after her. He caught up in the room reserved for make-up. She was beside herself. A track was practically being worn into the floor by her pacing.
"Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck... goddammit all! Fucking stupid bird...
"Who are you talking to?" Orli inquired to her back.
She whirled around, eyes blazing conflicting hot-and-cold. "Who do you think, fuckwit! For being so fucking pretty, you're not very bright, are you?"
Orlando hated it when people called him stupid but kept his cool. "Hey, calm down. Go on. What's eating you?"
"Fuck off, Orli." She was off in some alternate plane of rage and self-hatred. "You saw, before you walked off to go snicker behind your hand. The whole fucking world is going to see that, but do I care? No. All I care about is..."
She cut herself off. And they were calling for him. "... Mr. Bloom? We're ready for you now...."
He spoke in a low voice, and quickly. "Look, maybe I'm not the right man for the job, but wait for me, ok? You really shouldn't be alone right now. Can I try to talk you down?"
To the outside world, he might have asked a weird question; here it was more of a courtesy. The whole crew used the expression 'talk you down' for any matter of upset that one couldn't deal with on his or her own, be it a blown line, a problem with one's character, or getting blown off in real life by last night's conquest. To Orli's thinking, the blond actress had rolled all three into one pretty well.
"We'll see," she said slowly, staring at him wide-eyed. "Now, get out of here. Go! They're waiting."
Orlando's question-and-answer session went on for nearly half an hour. He hadn't caught sight of Miranda once. She must have sneaked out a side door, he decided. Wishing he had brought a heavier jacket, he made ready to head back to his trailer. At least in his small, portable house, the space heaters took care of most of the chill.
Orli found Miranda waiting for him just outside the door, bundled in a puffy light blue coat, dragging heavily on what looked like one of Elijah's cloves. His eyebrows shot up. "You smoke?"
Miranda exhaled a cloud of blue smoke to the sky. It disappeared immediately in the whipping wind. "Today I do. Well then, let's go. 'Talk me down,' will you? Good luck. I'm warning you now. I am so... you could get your head bitten off."
He looked her up and down. She was not a small woman, but he still had a few inches and months worth of crash-course martial arts and weapons training on her. Her temper on the other hand: acid. "Do your worst," Orlando told her. "I'm not scared."
They walked. Now that Miranda had free rein, she couldn't think of anything to say.
