The air in St. Vincent was so unlike the air in New Zealand, Orlando thought as he leaned back against the railing on the deck of the ship. It was heavier, thicker, and the heated taste of it lingered on his tongue after every breath that he took.

Comparatively, the air in New Zealand had been cool and refreshing, like vanilla ice cream and lemonade on a hot summer’s day. He’d nearly told that to Keira once, when they’d been on the mansion set, waiting to film their first onscreen scene together. When they should have been practicing "making eyes" at one another.

Instead, they’d been talking. About actor things, sharing experiences and tips, like actors are so prone to do. They’d covered lots of topics—embarrassing auditions, co-star horror stories, the like—but then she’d asked him what he thought about when he was trying to look wistful, how he got that emotion in his eyes, that want, that desire.

She was envious, she’d said. She’d said, "Your eyes have got to be the most expressive things I’ve ever seen."

Then she’d reached over to run a fingertip along the smooth line of his eyebrow. Waxed, despite the fact that Orlando had pointed out to the Powers That Be that the only way his eyebrows could have been altered Back In The Day would have been if he’d singed them in his forge. His protests had been in vain, though, because not two days later the evil lady with her little pot of warm wax had come for him and he’d been unable to escape.

"I think about—" he’d started. Then he’d stopped because too many words had crowded onto the tip of his tongue all at once, all of them fighting against each other to be the reason that he uttered.

"You’ve got a girl that you haven’t been talking about, haven’t you," Keira had said well into the pause, while he’d still been searching for words. Then she’d smiled brightly and had poked him on the arm, hard. "One of your Rings girls? That Kate girl that you were linked with?"

And just like that, the moment had been broken. He’d laughed.

He’d said, "Yeah, that’s it." Then, "No, not really. I’m just a bloody brilliant actor. Don’t you know that by now?"

Now, though, as he stood on the deck of the ship that they called the Interceptor, all of those words that he’d almost spoken to Kiera, that he hadn’t been able to sort out in that moment, came back again.

The air in St. Vincent was so unlike the air in New Zealand, he thought: thick and heavy, with a lingering taste. Different.  But everything in the Caribbean was different from how it had been in New Zealand.

He was surrounded on all sides by water instead of those damnable mountain ranges that Peter had kept making them climb.

He was leaning against the railing of a ship in that moment of relaxation, instead of leaning against trees, or rocks, or just plain collapsing on the solid (if rather foliage covered) ground.

Also, there were no blond wigs, no bow and arrow sets, and most certainly no extras dressed as Orcs in sight.

But those weren’t the differences that he was really thinking of, that he was focusing on no matter how hard he tried not to; they weren’t the reasons that he was staring wistfully off into space, mindlessly looking towards the island floating not so far away from them.

The real reason was this: if he’d been in New Zealand, he wouldn’t have been able to stand there for as long as he had, leaning against the railing of a ship, staring off into space.

In New Zealand he would have had an Elijah inviting himself for a piggyback ride, a Billy and a Dom pulling at his wig and snatching his bows and arrows to whack each other over the head with. He would have had a Viggo taking his picture, a print that he would have later watched Viggo develop in his dark room. It would have been titled Elf at Rest.

It was that months had passed and he still expected them all, the whole fellowship, to be there when he looked over his shoulder. It was that he still thought about what each of them would say in any given situation. It was that his hand still strayed towards his phone at night, when he wanted to go out to a pub.

It was that they were still the first people he thought to call, even.

He breathed in deeply, pulling the heavy Caribbean air into his lungs until it was all he could feel, all he could taste, until he was reoriented in his life, and when he exhaled, Johnny was looking at him, smiling that gold capped smile of his.

"’Lizabeth isn’t here, me boy," he said. "You don’t need to be practicing that look on board this ship. Bachelor territory only, remember?"

Like he had when he was talking to Keira, Orlando tried to swallow the words that had converged on the tip of his tongue, but this time, they wouldn’t go away. This time, they parted his lips on their own, without permission from his brain.

"I was just thinking how different from New Zealand this all was," he said. His tongue tripped over the words, a stutter almost, and heat rose in his cheeks. He tried to cover: "It’s just really different here, that’s all."

He coughed and looked down at the deck beneath his feet. When Johnny didn’t say anything for several seconds, he looked back up. The older man was staring at him in a rather sympathetic way, as if he understood what Orlando wasn’t saying. There was the usual glimmer in his eyes, though. There was the usual quirk of his lips.

"But you know what they say! There’s nowhere like the Caribbean!" He raised one of his hands, as if he was making a toast, and Orlando had to smile, even if he’d never heard of such a saying himself.

He said, "I thought the saying was, ‘Welcome to the Caribbean.’ It’s your line in the movie."

And as his mouth moved, he turned so that he was staring out at the ocean, away from the island, away from Johnny.

And then, only then, did he let his smile fade. His eyes slipped shut as he looked out over the water, and as he breathed in deeply again, he tried not to picture snow-capped peaks. He tried not to remember the taste of New Zealand air. He tried to not think too hard about anything that wasn’t there, with him, in St. Vincent.

It didn’t work, but when he turned back towards Johnny, he was smiling again. He was making himself.

And it was a believable smile, too, because he was a bloody brilliant actor, after all.

End.