shanrocks | Fic: My Boy - James/Hugh RPS (Reply)

Title: My Boy
Author: Cricket (aka cricket52579)
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: James/Hugh RPS
Warnings: Unbetaed, so beware of typos!
Summary: Hugh receives a peculiar email and travels to the US to visit Jimmy.
Disclaimer: Lies, lies, lies, every last bit.

My Boy

(PROLOGUE)

In the middle of a staring contest with a photo on my laptop screen came the moment I realized that I, Hugh Jackman, was a complete and utter dill.

Okay, let me backtrack a little bit. A few days ago, I’d been sitting alone in my over-extravagantly ritzy (and bloody exy) hotel room in Sydney, Australia. I’d had a few uncharacteristic off hours in the day when I didn’t need to be at a movie set or a press junket or a red carpet premiere. I didn’t feel much like subjecting myself to the unwavering eye of the paparazzi, so I just lazed around the hotel room to catch up on Tivo-ed TV shows and unanswered email.

Turns out I didn’t have a lot of email to answer, mostly just appearance requests, forwards, chain letters and other insignificant rubbish to sort through and delete, that is until I came upon the crazy email sent to me from none other than Sir Ian McKellen. I won’t go into detail about the actual forwarded message because it’s just too . . . Ian, but the end of the message contained a highlighted link that read Private Property next to which was a winking smiley. Curious bloke that I was, I clicked on the link . . . only to have the breath knocked from my lungs.

What blinked onto the screen was a hundred tiny thumbnail photos of a man I knew well, a man with the body of an Olympic swimmer -- sleek and toned, lips like plump silk pillows, cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass, and eyes, god, his eyes could pierce you with their purity, burn you with their iciness, and drown you in their depths of bottomless blue.

James Marsden.

Leave it to good ole Ian to tease me with photos of a man I hadn’t seen in almost two months – Holy dooley, had it really been that long? And browsing the photos only intensified my longing. I hadn’t realized how much I missed him. And I also never realized how much I could be turned on by a still photograph of my lover.

I enlarged a black and white photo of Jimmy shirtless (tight abs deliciously on display) looking towards the ground, hands jammed in his pockets, probably wondering when the shoot would conclude. My Jimmy was modest, believe it or not. Beautiful as he was, showing off his body in a revealing photo shoot or movie scene made him bloody uncomfortable; he’d told me as much in confidence.

Scrolling down, I found one where he’s fully clothed in a bathtub, hair tousled, and wearing that ridiculously adorable smile that I’m sure had to give even the straightest man on the planet a little tingle in his bottom.

Looking through the endless amount of stunning photos -- some candid, others posed, some years old, others taken only a few days ago – I realized how his different types of physical appearances helped him portray classic James Dean and broody Cyclops as easily as he could a silly puffy-sleeved prince and cheesy TV show host. The styles of pictures ranged from cute and cuddly to sexy and dangerous, and Jimmy’s seemingly effortless transition between the different arrays of characters was absolutely mind boggling. He was a man of a thousand personas, all of them gorgeous in their own way.

Then I found the photo that had me staring at the laptop screen for a good half hour. It was a simple black and white picture, just Jimmy reclined, leaning against a wall. He wore a faded cotton collared shirt and white daks, his arm carelessly stretched out resting on his knee. He was looking right at the camera -- no slick smile, no brooding stare, no mouth-watering pout – he was just looking . . . exchanging an easy glance with whomever was gazing at the photo. But the truth always lingered in Jimmy’s eyes, even frozen in a picture of no color. He stared right at you, right into your own eyes, right into your soul.

That’s the kind of photograph that sparked fantasies; when people of every age -- both male and female -- would stare at the photo just as I’d been doing, and start to imagine that Jimmy was looking at them and only them, visualized themselves lying next to him – lounging breathlessly in the morning sun or the evening twilight, envisioned themselves as his lover – lingering kisses, soft sighs, whispering desires to a being who could fulfill their every wish and need. These very people would be dreaming that one day they would meet this beautiful person in the photo and that he would fall madly in love with them and they’d live happily ever after.

In the middle of a staring contest with that picture was the moment I realized that I, Hugh Jackman, was a complete and utter dill -- or as Americans would say: a friggin’ idiot.

While thousands of people looked at this photo and pined and fantasized about the gorgeous man that they most likely would never have, I was sitting in a lonely hotel room currently half a world away from the man in the photograph, and it only dawned on me then that this man was mine. He wasn’t a fantasy where I had to imagine what he’d be like in between the sheets, or how delicious he smelled fresh from the shower, or if he laughed when tickled, or how he clenched his jaw when he was frustrated or angry. I didn’t have to envisage what kind of touch made him sigh, or wonder where to caress to cause him to moan. I didn’t have to question whether he liked steak for dinner or chicken, or if he cheered for the Yankees or the Red Sox. I knew all of these things. I knew them because, to me, James Marsden was not a fantasy. He wasn’t a still photograph forever trapped on a computer screen. He was my real life lover. My partner. My best mate. My boy.

I’d been neglecting that fact for far too long. I had what so many people longed for: the beautiful man in all of those pictures, and I was lucky enough to call him my own.

And I hadn’t so much as called him in almost two months! What the hell was a matter with me?

Well, that was about to change . . . immediately. It took me about an hour to make some calls and shuffle things around, cancel scheduled appointments, placate my agent and smooth-talk my way into an indeterminate amount of holiday time. After quickly packing what I needed for the trip, I called down to the front desk and made arrangements to have a car waiting for me, ready to take me to Sydney Airport. I had a flight to catch, destination: New York City. It was way past time to reclaim what was, and always would be, mine.