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fellowshippers2004-11-14 12:17 am
sophrosyne31.livejournal.com) wrote in fellowshippers2004-11-14 12:17 am
Recall, Elijah/Billy/Dom AU
Title: Recall
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sophrosyne31
Pairing: Elijah/Billy/Dom
Genre: AU (warning, contains mention of a kind of drug use)
Disclaimer: this is the product of my admiration for a particular person, and my imagination in general
Feedback: will make me remember
A/N: based on a ficlet i posted previously in my own journal, and dedicated with much modesty toangstslashhope, who always inspires me. Thanks and licks to frisbyg and sparktastic who beta'd for me most promptly and most generously.
The window of the shop’s door was brass-edged and beveled. It had seen better days: the brass was smeared and sticky; Elijah could see fingerprints on the dull-shining edge. He pushed the clammy brass handle down with his fingertips and eased the door open. The bell rang above his head.
Inside the smell was of sweat and tobacco and alcohol swabs, the sort that people used to disinfect their skin before they injected dysmemoria. The whole city stank of the swabs and the cloying vanilla scent of discarded ampules. Elijah had had to kick several aside on his short walk from the apartment; a hurried walk, because these days the streets were simply not safe. People who had no memories had no memories of respect.
He stood there in the middle of the shop, hot in his tweed suit. There was no one else in the shop, though Elijah noticed mouse droppings on the floor and several stacks of pornographic magazines on the counter, skewed in their piles as if someone had been riffling through them. The shelves behind the counter were equally disarrayed, but stocked with all manner of comestibles and household oddments. There was a stiff glassy pyramid of dysmemoria ampules on one shelf.
Elijah pulled his green wool tie straight, adjusted his spectacles, and coughed.
A head jerked up from behind the counter. A neat little head, despite the tufts of pale-brown hair that stuck up like shaggy heather. The man had obviously been delving into a cupboard somewhere; he had the distracted look of someone who was in pursuit of a particular small something.
“Mr Wood,” the man said. “Why, I haven’t seen you for a good while.” He straightened up, brushing down his grocer’s apron. His smile was dreamish and askew between the tight lines that curved down from his nose and graced the corners of his mouth.
“No, Mr Boyd, I have been entombed,” said Elijah. “Writing is devilishly solitary and frugal work. It’s only the need for your fine tobacco that brings me out.” He rested his hands on the counter. The other man looked at them: yellow-tipped, gnawed, soft.
“To be sure—Now will it be the Old Bingley you’re after? I recall last time you sampled the Uzbekhistani Rough…” He turned to the shelf behind him, with its tiny metal tins of tight-wadded tobacco. Each tin was painted in a different gaudy colour and inscribed Warning: Interferes with mental state on the side.
“I thought—“ said Elijah, and stopped. The back of Mr Boyd’s neck was especially pretty. Frail and strapped with two strong tendons, it peeped beneath the silky fronds of badly-trimmed hair and the dirty white collar of the shopkeeper’s uniform. “I thought, some snuff.”
“Ah,” said Mr Boyd, turning again to give Elijah a thoughtful gaze. “You’re really a writer, then, Mr Wood. Snuff is not for those who enjoy the humour of oblivion.” He gave the glittering ampules of dysmemoria on the next shelf a severe glare for emphasis.
“No, Mr Boyd, I enjoy a good thought,” said Elijah. He felt a smile creak up on his face. How long had it been since his face had done anything but frown in concentration over his typewriter? Over the words that came stuttering out his fingertips—enough, but not ever enough. Since he’d weaned himself off the damned drug he was aware of all the memories he’d lost. Freakish dreams had engulfed them in all the long hours of fractured and untethered reverie, an ampule shattered beside his limp hand; the hand that now intently smoothed the cool counter-top, nearer and nearer to Mr Boyd’s side.
“I was wondering just how strong you’d be wanting it then?” said Mr Boyd with a quizzical, but almost complicit smile. His own hand slowly widened its span on the counter. The two men gazed at their hands, tensing towards each other; then looked up.
“As strong as you can give me,” said Elijah, and let his hand glide further across. “I enjoy many good things,” he said. “Good and strong, as long as one is aware—”
“Yes,” said Mr Boyd, “Yes…” and he kept gazing —but then his smile faltered away dreamily and his hand grew limp and Elijah knew his little shopkeeper had already forgotten the conversation.
“Some snuff, Mr Boyd,” he said. The shopkeeper glanced up. His eyes were green as moss on a brick wall.
“Ah, Mr Wood,” he said. “Snuff, you say? Just let me see what we have—” and he turned away.
Elijah sighed, and took his hands off the counter. The man was attractive but, like everyone else, he was long lost. Elijah was lonely, but there was no solace here. Being a writer was always about too many memories; being a writer was about keeping other people’s memories for them.
::
Gloom hazed the street outside the shop window. “I bid you a good evening,” said Elijah, and tipped his hat at the man behind the counter. But surely there was something in the piquancy of the man’s gaze? Perhaps a dreaming man was better than no man at all. Mr Boyd waved, his hand heavy. Elijah checked at the door, with the bell already jangling over his head, and said, “And when do you finish up?”
The shopkeeper blinked. His dazed smile was so sweet. “You’ll be my last customer, Mr Wood. It doesn’t do to be open too late at night, if you take my meaning.”
Elijah paused, his smile still sharp on his face. The doorknob was greasy in his palm. “Would you consider accompanying me for an ale? I’m wretched for some company, Mr Boyd.”
The man’s face faltered, then rounded in a larger smile. The creases beside his mouth deepened and yet it made him look younger. “Mr Wood, I’d be glad to. If you can just wait while I close the books—” and he began stripping off his apron.
“I’ll sample your wares,” said Elijah, and the bell clattered as he closed the door behind him and took a deep breath of chill evening air. The night had thickened in the minutes he’d been inside, and become planes of grey; few streetlights were lit. The world was the colour of cobblestones.
He thumbed open the tin of snuff and took a peck between his fingers; inhaled it and jerked his head back at the searing, aromatic flush through his nose. Fine stuff. He’d write some metaphors with this, for certain.
He’d hated the smoke when he was younger; but the more hazed the world became with amnesia, the more he’d craved the bitter stimulation of a toxin. Acid and pure and making his blood scrape in his veins, he’d discovered how to beat back the drowse of forgetfulness. And to make the words jitter from his fingers. Writing, now that was a task uncalled-for these days. No one wanted to chronicle, to archive or retain; forgetfulness was the balm, and with it the blank page.
The room in which he lived was walled with pages no one would care to see. And still Elijah typed on, blunting his fingers, blurring the keys with his prints, to recollect what he saw, what he’d seen, what he imagined he’d seen… except that his addiction to dysmemoria had fugged his mind, and he wondered at times whether his chronicles were not just phancies too.
The bell at his back startled him and Mr Boyd was there, buttoning up a grubby cloak with his long clever fingers.
“Nippy night,” said Mr Boyd.
“We shall warm ourselves,” said Elijah, and turned him to walk down the dimming street.
But the alehouse was closed, with its shutters drawn and only a feeble figure lolling at the doorway with a shattered ampule beside it.
“Well,” Elijah said. “If that’s not a pity… But I have a bottle in my room, just nearby, if you’d care to—“ He didn’t know why he was so intent on sharing time with this man, except for the way he smelled, so richly, and the kindness in his face, and that Elijah’s room was dark and waiting for him.
Mr Boyd fluttered. “I don’t want to trouble you—” But then he seemed to blink and his voice was firmer. “Mr Wood, I’d very much like a taste with you,” he said, and his lovely green eyes gazed gleaming in the dark. “I’ve often wondered to discuss your fondness for books. I used to read, myself, once a time.”
“It’s not a fondness, so much as an urgency,” said Elijah, walking on again. “I find myself troubled by the winsomeness—if you’ll forgive the writerly word—of so many people these days. What’s experience if there’s no memory? What’s life if there’s no trace?” He was aware he was speaking to an adept of the cult of amnesia and its solaces, but he liked this little man and saw in his pert movements and sharp smile something nearly like a hope. He was very lonely, and he dreamed, when he permitted himself to dream, of waking to a person already awake. There had been too much drowsing.
“There is so much in life to forget…” said the shopkeeper. In the shadows Elijah couldn’t discern the man’s expression, but he heard sadness in the voice.
“It’s better to remember,” was all he said, and he took the man’s fingers in his. The shopkeeper kept his hand loose, but didn’t remove it as they walked together towards the entrance of Elijah’s building.
::
“You’re very young to be so wise,” said Mr Boyd as they stepped gingerly up the dank stairway to the room. They reached the landing. “You have a sweetness in your face that—”
The door opposite Elijah’s was yanked open and a young man, disheveled and smudge-eyed, staggered out to lean in the doorway.
“Elijah!” he said, blinking and lolling. He scrubbed his eyes. “Oh, my apologies, mate, you have a guest—” There was archness in the way he said it as he peered at the shopkeeper.
“Dominic, yes, I’m having someone in for a drink.” As if he did this every evening.
”You have a drink? I’m parched,” said the young man, shoving himself off the wall and coming closer. He smelled of peppermint and dysmemoria, that sweet thick scent. And sweat; rich and delicious, to go with his unshaven jaw and grease-spiked hair.
Elijah sighed. Dominic was a kind of company, and he’d had him in to visit before, but usually the visits were strictly curtailed by Elijah’s orgasm and Dom’s wiping his mouth and stumbling out. Elijah didn’t like to foster something that might get out of hand, as he suspected this might; however Dominic needed the occasional sally out of his den, and Elijah needed the orgasm to sleep. It was the closest he liked to get to obliteration.
If he didn’t ask in this messy young man, Dominic would only beat around in the landing, making noise, casting sullen looks the next time Elijah came knocking at his door at one in the morning.
“You too are welcome,” he said, and unlocked his door with the foot-long key that hung at his waist. Three locks, and each of them requiring a wrench with his wrist. Behind him he could feel Dom eyeing the nervous shopkeeper, who pressed slightly closer to Elijah.
Within, it took a moment to light the lanterns and trim the sagging wicks. “I rarely have coins for the meter,” Elijah said apologetically. In truth he rather liked the gentler glow of candlelight, for all that his glasses needed renewing due to his reading in the bad light. “Please just allow me a minute to—” he pushed ahead into the little, crowded room, and piled papers off his bed and onto the floor. The desk by the window nook and the floor around it was already cluttered.
“I see you weren’t deceiving me,” said the shopkeeper, edging into the room. “Such paper, such labour—!”
Dom immediately sat on the bed, with the assurance of proprietorial familiarity. “He’s a scribbler, he is,” he observed. “Wonderful with the writing, that’s a cert.” In truth Dominic had never so much as peeped at any of the pages, as far as Elijah knew. The man was a dreamer, and the language of the world passed before his closed eyes as he tranced all day and night. Elijah had always skipped his eyes over the bruised and punctured seams of Dominic’s pale inner arms.
Fishing a greasy bottle from under a dolmen of books, Elijah straightened. “Mr Boyd, I do apologise. I did forget—I have no glasses.” He blushed. A bachelor scribe, living in a bedsit, without even a single glass from which to drink. The rim of the bottle was sticky with mouth-prints.
Shuffling his way to sit at the other end of the bed from Dom—for there was no other place, except for the chair at the desk behind Elijah—and the shopkeeper was too timid to take the host’s chair—Mr Boyd gave Elijah a surprising grin. “My da said the milk always tastes best from the cow,” he said, and tilted his head. Elijah smiled back, and handed him the bottle with a gentlemanly bow and flourish.
It was fierce stuff, the liquor, and Mr Boyd gasped a little as he put the rim away from his mouth, which shone cherry red in the lamplight. “I thank you.”
It must have been several hours since his last dose of the drug, because already there was a sheen to his eyes and his lips had darkened. With another hour, skin would begin to sensitise and the world scrape against him with its realness.
Dominic grabbed the bottle, took a greedy draught. “What happened to that Russky stuff you had?” he asked, as he shoved the bottle at Elijah, who stood there awkwardly for a moment still, then sat on the chair and dragged it forwards so the three men made a little candlelit circle.
“I drank it,” he said shortly, and tipped the bottle at his lips. He was nervous; this was the first entertainment he’d made in as long as he could remember. Dominic was practically a stranger, for all that he’d mumbled Elijah’s flesh from time to time, and Mr Boyd was a nice little grocery man whom he hardly knew. The night was chill and the light was warm, though, and he rubbed his eye behind his spectacles and was glad his back was turned to the typewriter he was so weary of. It was pleasant to sit with other men.
The bottle went around, and Mr Boyd’s bright eyes took in the room, avoiding looking sideways at Dominic sprawled over the pillow, but, Elijah knew, observing the youth sharply. The youth, though he was a year or two older than Elijah. His rank dark clothes and the slender forearms revealed by his loose shirtsleeves made him look more like an urchin, however. Elijah and Mr Boyd were the gentlemen here.
Dominic cast a sluttish gaze at Elijah. “So how do you two gents know each other?” As if he cared; he’d have forgotten all of this by the morning, once he’d returned to his dose of dysmemoria. As if he cared; he was only looking at Elijah, while his body was angled towards the tidy Mr Boyd.
“Mr Boyd is my tobacco merchant,” Elijah said, and gestured at the shopkeeper. The alcohol was loosening his limbs; the gesture was a little more fulsome than he intended, and so was his smile of explanation. “I have asked him here to—” He stopped.
“I’ve always had a soft spot for Mr Wood,” helped the shopkeeper. His cheeks were flushed and his mouth still exquisitely reddened. He glanced up at Elijah, and then away again, as if shy, or perhaps the fading drug in his system was causing him a little flicker of confusion. “I’ve always had a soft spot—” he said again, more quietly. Dom looked at him then, amused.
“Two at once, Mr Wood?” he asked, perking an eyebrow and a sly grin at Elijah. “Your work must be getting on marvelous fine. Aren’t you a greedy chap.”
Elijah felt the alcohol bloom hot in his cheeks. “Now, Dominic—“ He darted a warning glare at the young man, his own spine stiffening, Dominic’s body curling more insolently over the pillows. Dom picked up one foot with his hand and tucked it beneath him, dirty boot on the bed.
“I’m not complaining,” Dom said, and placed a hand, heavy and matey, around Mr Boyd’s startling shoulder. “He’s a pretty one,” said Dominic, and rubbed his hand on Mr Boyd’s arm.
To Elijah’s surprise, the meek shopkeeper smiled, and turned his face to Dom.
“I haven’t had the pleasure—” he said, and Dom grinned and said, “You can, mate, you can,” as Mr Boyd finished, “—of seeing you in my shop.”
Elijah smiled, seeing the Scottish man match the tawdry youth. For all his demureness and the soft down of his skin, Mr Boyd was no quisling. There was something almost literary in the tableau of the dark urchin and the neat merchant, both their faces golden in the light, their collars loosened, the same veil of fading dreams in their eyes. Elijah, still the sharper despite the liquor, watched from his chair as Dominic slid his hand down Mr Boyd’s upper arm to take his wrist in one sinewed hand.
Elijah shivered. Something defensive came up in him, or perhaps it was something territorial. Instincts were feral in these perilous days, when every shadow on the street might be a man who would rob you and then forget he’d even done so. Elijah fancied himself aloof from the pitiful grasping of the outside world, here in his snug little garret, but perhaps he was as hungry as all the rest. He watched the sinews of Mr Boyd’s wrist curl as he turned his hand to grip Dominic’s.
“Ah,” said the shopkeeper, and the smile on his face was definitely sharper. Elijah chafed his own wrist with a tense thumb. Dominic turned his face back into the light and Elijah saw complicity there.
“Are you going to write all this down?” Dominic asked slyly. His thigh moved, opening his crotch towards Elijah, and he slid down on the bed a little until he was in the posture of invitation. Mr Boyd went on massaging the boy’s slim wrist, with an intent, unblinking stare. His neat head was bowed, but Elijah saw, in the rumpled folds of the man’s breeches, a swelling in the niche between his lean thighs.
“Oh,” he said, softly, and felt his own prick suddenly stiff and tingling and hot in his trousers. Flush went the blood through his body. Now both Dominic and Mr Boyd were gazing at him. The candlelight made their faces shadowy and shining, and their eyes were golden glossy.
“Mr Wood, will you not sit with us?” Mr Boyd said, and reached out a hand. “If it’s not imposing on your own good hospitality—” and the man gave a little abashed laugh. The atmosphere was changing, and becoming brittle and singing almost with strangeness. Like a crystal glass, wetted and rubbed. Enough with the similes, thought Elijah. But he remained on his seat.
From outside in the street came the sound of a shriek, breaking glass, running footsteps, the syren of a constabulary. The scream jolted Elijah, and he started forward, right into Mr Boyd’s palm, which grasped him by the shoulder.
“My name is William,” said Mr Boyd. “And I thank you for the invitation this eve. I too have been too much alone.” His voice was soft but his hand was hard. And he pulled Elijah over and onto him.
The world blurred; Elijah landed on the solid ground of men’s bodies.
Now Dom’s arms were around him, and there was a hand smoothing between his legs, hardly sensible against the thick tweed fabric but still, pressure, and Elijah, tumbling against legs and chests and shoulders, arched and fumbled and came to rest huddled against the wall, his back hunched in astonishment but his legs open.
This was not quite as he had expected.
“You need not remember any of this,” said William, and gave him a gentle smile. Elijah was reassured that it was not the smile of a man who was going to rob him. “But since you have provided the refreshments, and this interesting companion, and it is a dark and nasty night, perhaps, after all, we might—” and his hand smoothed Elijah’s thigh, from knee to groin. It came to rest cupping Elijah’s prick, and squeezed slightly. Blood surged up in the man’s grip, stiffening the flesh. On the other side of him, Dominic was nuzzling Elijah’s jaw with his soft-bristled mouth. The bitter fragrance of unwashed men intoxicated Elijah; he let his shoulders slump and his lips form a smile. This might be what he wanted, after all.
It was what he had wanted, had dreamed of, perhaps—but this fey strangeness that had come over the tableau had thrown him askew. Where was his sureness, where was his design? He was alone in his room with two strangers. They knew more than he; they surrounded him. And despite the nag of unease, he liked it.
Dominic was already shrugging his black shirt to open over his broad, pale chest. A tiny brown nipple caught Elijah’s eye and he reached to thumb it, feeling the flesh harden.
“That’s it, my lovely,” murmured Dom, arching into the caress, and he eased Elijah’s jacket off him and slowly slid the knot of the tie down. In previous times he’d never dared touch Elijah until touched. Now there was a sultry languor to his confidence, a saucy curl to his smile. William was still frigging Elijah’s prick, but with the other hand he reached for the liquor bottle on the floor and took a long swallow. Then he leaned in and pressed his lips to Elijah’s. He made a sound behind his closed lips, and Elijah, hesitating in a daze still, opened his.
So hot, that mouth, and so unexpectedly fiery the fast spill of liquid into his throat, followed by a tongue sugary with liquor and fluid with insistence. William ran his tongue over Elijah’s, over his teeth, darted and dashed it around until Elijah was moaning from the choking liquor and the passion of the kiss. He experienced a moment of vertigo: was this the same meek little man he had felt sorry for? He felt for an instant that he had been dreaming all these years, and this was waking. The sensation had the edge of terror he remembered from dysmemoria. I shall write it down, he thought confusedly, and then he thought, What words?
Hands on him now, and opening his eyes he caught Dom’s arm blocking the light as it wrapped around William and then William’s head was wrenched away and turned to Dom’s, and Elijah watched as the two men smothered each other’s mouths. Their faces were silhouetted against the dissolute lamplight that seemed to flush the room now into a blaze of gold. The sounds of saliva and greed. Elijah jerked his hips forward, with a petulance that surprised him, and butted his head forward into the warmth he felt coming from the two groping men. They turned, as the same time, and each slid down to lick at a side of Elijah’s throat.
And, oh, yes, hands on him, two hands each with a different feel, tugging open his trousers and fumbling for a place and one of them tight-grasping his prick, the other his balls, oh exquisite, oh finery, and Elijah sagged with only his prick rigid while his body melted. All over him a sense of gold.
Just light, blaring behind his eyelids, and nothing more for a moment. Charcoal. Then he came back to himself.
The delicate wetness of a mouth on him, and a rough hand chafing his nipples, and the murmurs of satisfaction and a bumping as Dominic, he thought it was, slid off the bed and took warmth away. When he cracked open a heavy eyelid Elijah saw that Dominic was crouching on the floor beside the bed, behind the black silhouette of William who was bent over Elijah, and from the way William suddenly jerked and then stilled, trembling, Elijah could guess at what Dom was doing to him. The thought made him flush hotter still.
“Is this better than my snuff?” he heard, and William’s face came up towards his. It caught the lamplight again, and Elijah saw that the shopkeeper’s smile was softened, for all the grin on it, blurred with plump lips and the sheen of saliva on his chin. The face of sex, but also the face of his friend. Elijah smiled at him.
“A great—improvement, Mr Boyd—William,” he breathed. For a moment he was Mr Wood again, writer and aficionado of tobacco, and then the next minute William kissed him again and he was no one, just a dazzle. A finger probed beneath his balls, into the fine fluff of hair there in the crack; came up to be wetted in Elijah’s own mouth—he sucked it, showing willing, showing want—and then he felt it again, insisting towards the sensitive aperture of his arse. It pushed, gently at first, and then more relentlessly, and Elijah opened his legs further, and the finger slipped in, firm against fragile grip, and he felt himself dissolve just a little more.
“That’s my fine fellow,” whispered William into his mouth, and Elijah felt the smile against his lips.
Then gold in his brain again, as the finger rubbed and curled and twisted, then another finger beside the first, and for a while Elijah had no thoughts at all. And gold raged into red.
When he next opened his eyes Dominic was taking William’s place, and Elijah could smell the difference in men. Dom’s fingers were already wet, his mouth was smudged and full, and he tasted musky. The palm of his hand, as he pressed it over Elijah’s face, had the rich scent of vanilla and sex.
“Now my pretty,” he said, shuffling. “Now you can see what you see,” and he took the palm away again and Elijah blinked to see Dom’s prick in front of him, legs straddling his chest, the prick stiff upright and the downy balls plump and tight below. The tip of the cock was pink and shining and there was a bead of fluid at the very top. He craned his head up, and captured the flesh in his mouth. The taste was salt and as dizzying as liquor.
Above him, as he sucked and laved, he saw Dom’s torso arch back, his long strong throat bared, his arms hanging limp by his sides. The boy was beautiful in abandonment, tight at the belly and loose above, and Elijah worked more slavishly, dashing his tongue around the globe of the prick, down to lick the softness of the balls, back up to tease at the slit and take the whole thing in his mouth until it filled him with its nudging solidity. Dom groaned, his head tipping still further back, and then William appeared and supported him and took Dom’s head in his hands and kissed him. A stray hand fondled at Elijah’s prick, tugged and smoothed at it, and Elijah arched up beneath the two men, gasping for breath and still sucking feverishly, until Dom began to tremble, and William broke the kiss to say, “Change.”
“What shall we do, so much—” gasped Dominic. His urchin face was transformed; the black liner around his eyes smeared, his cheeks full and pink.
“Anything you like,” said William, who was hard and adult now, intent and sure. Elijah looked at him in enchantment. This man was no dreamer, he was a guide. But then, “We none of us will recall in the morning,” said William softly, and Elijah looked down at the man’s naked arms and saw the violet bruises dotted neatly up and down. For the first time in years, he too longed for puncture, for swoon, for—yes, penetration. If not the steel spike, then something equally as ruthless and tensile.
Desire was so simple sometimes. Trite, even; but the glare of want numbed the writer’s chagrin.
“You,” he whispered. “You. Your prick—I want you to—”
“Yes?” William quirked a smile at him, and ran his fingers teasingly down the side of Elijah’s belly.
“In me,” said Elijah, and he blushed. “If I shan’t remember the act, I shall recall the sense,” he said quickly. The feeling of want in his arse was fierce now. He imagined being plugged, being driven into, and his hips jerked. The clench through his thighs and groin was voluptuous; he shivered. The man’s hand darted to Elijah’s prick and gripped it close.
“I shall make you feel it,” William said, and again Elijah’s eyes closed in a rush of molten colour, and the gilded room faded.
He returned to sense with the thought they will give me the drug, that drug, I will forget—but he did not care. For he was kneeling now, on the bed, his hands pale and clenching the sheet before him, and William was at his arse. Hands spread Elijah’s cheeks and there was the round nub of a prick there—yes, so solid, so insistent, coming for him, and Elijah tilted his hips insolently higher, and there was the sound of a delighted laugh. Even that sound was glossed with tenderness, it seemed, and Elijah remembered the loveliness of this man, with his green eyes and his dirty child’s neck—how he was drawn to the kindness of this man—and then there was flesh inside him, not his, there was presence within his body—and the prick in his arse pushed and pulled back and pushed deeper—
“Oh!” was pushed from his lips and silenced by a palm. Dominic’s. A body slithered in front of Elijah’s face and a mouth came at him; he staggered back at the force of the kiss while he was pushed back onto the prick and the hands that held his hips so surely—“Oh!” he cried again when his tongue was free. A glimpse of Dominic’s face, eyes blazing and mouth messy—gleam of eyes and teeth, golden in the light, whipping away to one side—hand grasping through his hair and trailing away, and William delicately slowing down, the drag and slide of his prick easier now, Elijah’s legs trembling beneath him.
There was the sound of a moan, ragged and loose behind him. Something tautened and rolled and came over shadowed within Elijah at that—he ground his hips backwards again, William groaned again—Dominic somewhere behind, the sound of sucking and William’s hands, too, trembling on Elijah and his thrusts growing fast again now—Elijah shoved a hand down to grasp his own prick and pulled at it frantically.
“Feel it—feel it—” he gasped to himself, and he heard William say, “I feel it” and Dom’s muffled groan; he massaged more desperately at his prick, hand tight around the base and William thrust in deep and deliberate, once, twice—oh, the glory of it, the incandescence—frayed threads running hot through him—knotting—and Elijah started to come.
Gold and hot and delicious, his body turned to light, as if he were glass shone through by the sun, luminous—and then the dimming, and he sagged forward, light flooding out again, and he heard his own breathing loud and ragged.
In his flesh there was still flesh embedded; he felt it, thick and strange. It stirred, and William said, “Mind now, gently now,” and thrust in hard. A surge of shock went through Elijah; he dragged on the bed, drowsy, tried to recover himself; loosened again. “And master Dominic hasn’t had his pleasure—” said William’s voice, distant now. A mumble, in Dom’s deep voice—Elijah roused again for a moment—
—Shadows between him and the light—
—the slide of metal into his skin—
—whispers—
—gold—
::
The light was dense and dim when he opened his eyes—grey, grained. Elijah rubbed his face weakly. It must be twilight. In the room the air was cold; how dark everything was, how sad.
He sat up. Naked, but for the thin blanket over him; cold, but for a burning between his legs. There was a bottle beside the bed, he saw, in the bleak gloom—he caught the thin shine of light along its curved edge. The room smelled of alcohol and his own fugged breath.
He must have slept all day. How tired he was. As tired as a guttering candle.
Wash; dress; open the curtains a crack and look out on the last of the day’s activity. People walked past, down in the street, muffled and in haste; the shutters on the shop-fronts opposite were already half-drawn down. There would only just be time to catch him.
Down the stairs and out into the sharp chill of the street. His body felt clumsy, his eyes hollow, as if pressed into his skull. There were smears on his spectacles; they made the world blur into blocks of greased light and shadow. Each step was a voyage into strangeness.
The doorbell rang above his head as he entered the shop; the shopkeeper lifted his head from the book on the counter and smiled.
“Mr Wood,” said the shopkeeper.
“Mr Boyd,” said Elijah.
“Naturally, I was expecting you,” the man said, and rubbed the back of his head tiredly. Little fronds of pale brown hair fluffed out; he dropped his hand. “This is your hour to venture out.”
“I believe I’m in great need of your wares,” said Elijah. “I have a dreadful headache and a craving for something sharp.” He laid his hand on the counter. It took a little weight from him.
“Perhaps some snuff?” said the man. He smiled with his drowsy eyes.
Elijah looked at him. Green eyes and smile and hands—the curve of the man’s smile—his hands—something edged slyly into Elijah’s mind and crept out again.
“I think I shall take some snuff,” Elijah said. “It’s a devilishly lonely business, writing—” and he wondered if he should ask the fellow to share a drink. He’d always liked the man. But no. Another time.
Loneliness was a bitter drug, but a soothing one. It was all he could recall.
“Here you are, sir,” said Mr Boyd, and held out the package in his hand.
Author:
sophrosyne31Pairing: Elijah/Billy/Dom
Genre: AU (warning, contains mention of a kind of drug use)
Disclaimer: this is the product of my admiration for a particular person, and my imagination in general
Feedback: will make me remember
A/N: based on a ficlet i posted previously in my own journal, and dedicated with much modesty to
angstslashhope, who always inspires me. Thanks and licks to frisbyg and sparktastic who beta'd for me most promptly and most generously.The window of the shop’s door was brass-edged and beveled. It had seen better days: the brass was smeared and sticky; Elijah could see fingerprints on the dull-shining edge. He pushed the clammy brass handle down with his fingertips and eased the door open. The bell rang above his head.
Inside the smell was of sweat and tobacco and alcohol swabs, the sort that people used to disinfect their skin before they injected dysmemoria. The whole city stank of the swabs and the cloying vanilla scent of discarded ampules. Elijah had had to kick several aside on his short walk from the apartment; a hurried walk, because these days the streets were simply not safe. People who had no memories had no memories of respect.
He stood there in the middle of the shop, hot in his tweed suit. There was no one else in the shop, though Elijah noticed mouse droppings on the floor and several stacks of pornographic magazines on the counter, skewed in their piles as if someone had been riffling through them. The shelves behind the counter were equally disarrayed, but stocked with all manner of comestibles and household oddments. There was a stiff glassy pyramid of dysmemoria ampules on one shelf.
Elijah pulled his green wool tie straight, adjusted his spectacles, and coughed.
A head jerked up from behind the counter. A neat little head, despite the tufts of pale-brown hair that stuck up like shaggy heather. The man had obviously been delving into a cupboard somewhere; he had the distracted look of someone who was in pursuit of a particular small something.
“Mr Wood,” the man said. “Why, I haven’t seen you for a good while.” He straightened up, brushing down his grocer’s apron. His smile was dreamish and askew between the tight lines that curved down from his nose and graced the corners of his mouth.
“No, Mr Boyd, I have been entombed,” said Elijah. “Writing is devilishly solitary and frugal work. It’s only the need for your fine tobacco that brings me out.” He rested his hands on the counter. The other man looked at them: yellow-tipped, gnawed, soft.
“To be sure—Now will it be the Old Bingley you’re after? I recall last time you sampled the Uzbekhistani Rough…” He turned to the shelf behind him, with its tiny metal tins of tight-wadded tobacco. Each tin was painted in a different gaudy colour and inscribed Warning: Interferes with mental state on the side.
“I thought—“ said Elijah, and stopped. The back of Mr Boyd’s neck was especially pretty. Frail and strapped with two strong tendons, it peeped beneath the silky fronds of badly-trimmed hair and the dirty white collar of the shopkeeper’s uniform. “I thought, some snuff.”
“Ah,” said Mr Boyd, turning again to give Elijah a thoughtful gaze. “You’re really a writer, then, Mr Wood. Snuff is not for those who enjoy the humour of oblivion.” He gave the glittering ampules of dysmemoria on the next shelf a severe glare for emphasis.
“No, Mr Boyd, I enjoy a good thought,” said Elijah. He felt a smile creak up on his face. How long had it been since his face had done anything but frown in concentration over his typewriter? Over the words that came stuttering out his fingertips—enough, but not ever enough. Since he’d weaned himself off the damned drug he was aware of all the memories he’d lost. Freakish dreams had engulfed them in all the long hours of fractured and untethered reverie, an ampule shattered beside his limp hand; the hand that now intently smoothed the cool counter-top, nearer and nearer to Mr Boyd’s side.
“I was wondering just how strong you’d be wanting it then?” said Mr Boyd with a quizzical, but almost complicit smile. His own hand slowly widened its span on the counter. The two men gazed at their hands, tensing towards each other; then looked up.
“As strong as you can give me,” said Elijah, and let his hand glide further across. “I enjoy many good things,” he said. “Good and strong, as long as one is aware—”
“Yes,” said Mr Boyd, “Yes…” and he kept gazing —but then his smile faltered away dreamily and his hand grew limp and Elijah knew his little shopkeeper had already forgotten the conversation.
“Some snuff, Mr Boyd,” he said. The shopkeeper glanced up. His eyes were green as moss on a brick wall.
“Ah, Mr Wood,” he said. “Snuff, you say? Just let me see what we have—” and he turned away.
Elijah sighed, and took his hands off the counter. The man was attractive but, like everyone else, he was long lost. Elijah was lonely, but there was no solace here. Being a writer was always about too many memories; being a writer was about keeping other people’s memories for them.
::
Gloom hazed the street outside the shop window. “I bid you a good evening,” said Elijah, and tipped his hat at the man behind the counter. But surely there was something in the piquancy of the man’s gaze? Perhaps a dreaming man was better than no man at all. Mr Boyd waved, his hand heavy. Elijah checked at the door, with the bell already jangling over his head, and said, “And when do you finish up?”
The shopkeeper blinked. His dazed smile was so sweet. “You’ll be my last customer, Mr Wood. It doesn’t do to be open too late at night, if you take my meaning.”
Elijah paused, his smile still sharp on his face. The doorknob was greasy in his palm. “Would you consider accompanying me for an ale? I’m wretched for some company, Mr Boyd.”
The man’s face faltered, then rounded in a larger smile. The creases beside his mouth deepened and yet it made him look younger. “Mr Wood, I’d be glad to. If you can just wait while I close the books—” and he began stripping off his apron.
“I’ll sample your wares,” said Elijah, and the bell clattered as he closed the door behind him and took a deep breath of chill evening air. The night had thickened in the minutes he’d been inside, and become planes of grey; few streetlights were lit. The world was the colour of cobblestones.
He thumbed open the tin of snuff and took a peck between his fingers; inhaled it and jerked his head back at the searing, aromatic flush through his nose. Fine stuff. He’d write some metaphors with this, for certain.
He’d hated the smoke when he was younger; but the more hazed the world became with amnesia, the more he’d craved the bitter stimulation of a toxin. Acid and pure and making his blood scrape in his veins, he’d discovered how to beat back the drowse of forgetfulness. And to make the words jitter from his fingers. Writing, now that was a task uncalled-for these days. No one wanted to chronicle, to archive or retain; forgetfulness was the balm, and with it the blank page.
The room in which he lived was walled with pages no one would care to see. And still Elijah typed on, blunting his fingers, blurring the keys with his prints, to recollect what he saw, what he’d seen, what he imagined he’d seen… except that his addiction to dysmemoria had fugged his mind, and he wondered at times whether his chronicles were not just phancies too.
The bell at his back startled him and Mr Boyd was there, buttoning up a grubby cloak with his long clever fingers.
“Nippy night,” said Mr Boyd.
“We shall warm ourselves,” said Elijah, and turned him to walk down the dimming street.
But the alehouse was closed, with its shutters drawn and only a feeble figure lolling at the doorway with a shattered ampule beside it.
“Well,” Elijah said. “If that’s not a pity… But I have a bottle in my room, just nearby, if you’d care to—“ He didn’t know why he was so intent on sharing time with this man, except for the way he smelled, so richly, and the kindness in his face, and that Elijah’s room was dark and waiting for him.
Mr Boyd fluttered. “I don’t want to trouble you—” But then he seemed to blink and his voice was firmer. “Mr Wood, I’d very much like a taste with you,” he said, and his lovely green eyes gazed gleaming in the dark. “I’ve often wondered to discuss your fondness for books. I used to read, myself, once a time.”
“It’s not a fondness, so much as an urgency,” said Elijah, walking on again. “I find myself troubled by the winsomeness—if you’ll forgive the writerly word—of so many people these days. What’s experience if there’s no memory? What’s life if there’s no trace?” He was aware he was speaking to an adept of the cult of amnesia and its solaces, but he liked this little man and saw in his pert movements and sharp smile something nearly like a hope. He was very lonely, and he dreamed, when he permitted himself to dream, of waking to a person already awake. There had been too much drowsing.
“There is so much in life to forget…” said the shopkeeper. In the shadows Elijah couldn’t discern the man’s expression, but he heard sadness in the voice.
“It’s better to remember,” was all he said, and he took the man’s fingers in his. The shopkeeper kept his hand loose, but didn’t remove it as they walked together towards the entrance of Elijah’s building.
::
“You’re very young to be so wise,” said Mr Boyd as they stepped gingerly up the dank stairway to the room. They reached the landing. “You have a sweetness in your face that—”
The door opposite Elijah’s was yanked open and a young man, disheveled and smudge-eyed, staggered out to lean in the doorway.
“Elijah!” he said, blinking and lolling. He scrubbed his eyes. “Oh, my apologies, mate, you have a guest—” There was archness in the way he said it as he peered at the shopkeeper.
“Dominic, yes, I’m having someone in for a drink.” As if he did this every evening.
”You have a drink? I’m parched,” said the young man, shoving himself off the wall and coming closer. He smelled of peppermint and dysmemoria, that sweet thick scent. And sweat; rich and delicious, to go with his unshaven jaw and grease-spiked hair.
Elijah sighed. Dominic was a kind of company, and he’d had him in to visit before, but usually the visits were strictly curtailed by Elijah’s orgasm and Dom’s wiping his mouth and stumbling out. Elijah didn’t like to foster something that might get out of hand, as he suspected this might; however Dominic needed the occasional sally out of his den, and Elijah needed the orgasm to sleep. It was the closest he liked to get to obliteration.
If he didn’t ask in this messy young man, Dominic would only beat around in the landing, making noise, casting sullen looks the next time Elijah came knocking at his door at one in the morning.
“You too are welcome,” he said, and unlocked his door with the foot-long key that hung at his waist. Three locks, and each of them requiring a wrench with his wrist. Behind him he could feel Dom eyeing the nervous shopkeeper, who pressed slightly closer to Elijah.
Within, it took a moment to light the lanterns and trim the sagging wicks. “I rarely have coins for the meter,” Elijah said apologetically. In truth he rather liked the gentler glow of candlelight, for all that his glasses needed renewing due to his reading in the bad light. “Please just allow me a minute to—” he pushed ahead into the little, crowded room, and piled papers off his bed and onto the floor. The desk by the window nook and the floor around it was already cluttered.
“I see you weren’t deceiving me,” said the shopkeeper, edging into the room. “Such paper, such labour—!”
Dom immediately sat on the bed, with the assurance of proprietorial familiarity. “He’s a scribbler, he is,” he observed. “Wonderful with the writing, that’s a cert.” In truth Dominic had never so much as peeped at any of the pages, as far as Elijah knew. The man was a dreamer, and the language of the world passed before his closed eyes as he tranced all day and night. Elijah had always skipped his eyes over the bruised and punctured seams of Dominic’s pale inner arms.
Fishing a greasy bottle from under a dolmen of books, Elijah straightened. “Mr Boyd, I do apologise. I did forget—I have no glasses.” He blushed. A bachelor scribe, living in a bedsit, without even a single glass from which to drink. The rim of the bottle was sticky with mouth-prints.
Shuffling his way to sit at the other end of the bed from Dom—for there was no other place, except for the chair at the desk behind Elijah—and the shopkeeper was too timid to take the host’s chair—Mr Boyd gave Elijah a surprising grin. “My da said the milk always tastes best from the cow,” he said, and tilted his head. Elijah smiled back, and handed him the bottle with a gentlemanly bow and flourish.
It was fierce stuff, the liquor, and Mr Boyd gasped a little as he put the rim away from his mouth, which shone cherry red in the lamplight. “I thank you.”
It must have been several hours since his last dose of the drug, because already there was a sheen to his eyes and his lips had darkened. With another hour, skin would begin to sensitise and the world scrape against him with its realness.
Dominic grabbed the bottle, took a greedy draught. “What happened to that Russky stuff you had?” he asked, as he shoved the bottle at Elijah, who stood there awkwardly for a moment still, then sat on the chair and dragged it forwards so the three men made a little candlelit circle.
“I drank it,” he said shortly, and tipped the bottle at his lips. He was nervous; this was the first entertainment he’d made in as long as he could remember. Dominic was practically a stranger, for all that he’d mumbled Elijah’s flesh from time to time, and Mr Boyd was a nice little grocery man whom he hardly knew. The night was chill and the light was warm, though, and he rubbed his eye behind his spectacles and was glad his back was turned to the typewriter he was so weary of. It was pleasant to sit with other men.
The bottle went around, and Mr Boyd’s bright eyes took in the room, avoiding looking sideways at Dominic sprawled over the pillow, but, Elijah knew, observing the youth sharply. The youth, though he was a year or two older than Elijah. His rank dark clothes and the slender forearms revealed by his loose shirtsleeves made him look more like an urchin, however. Elijah and Mr Boyd were the gentlemen here.
Dominic cast a sluttish gaze at Elijah. “So how do you two gents know each other?” As if he cared; he’d have forgotten all of this by the morning, once he’d returned to his dose of dysmemoria. As if he cared; he was only looking at Elijah, while his body was angled towards the tidy Mr Boyd.
“Mr Boyd is my tobacco merchant,” Elijah said, and gestured at the shopkeeper. The alcohol was loosening his limbs; the gesture was a little more fulsome than he intended, and so was his smile of explanation. “I have asked him here to—” He stopped.
“I’ve always had a soft spot for Mr Wood,” helped the shopkeeper. His cheeks were flushed and his mouth still exquisitely reddened. He glanced up at Elijah, and then away again, as if shy, or perhaps the fading drug in his system was causing him a little flicker of confusion. “I’ve always had a soft spot—” he said again, more quietly. Dom looked at him then, amused.
“Two at once, Mr Wood?” he asked, perking an eyebrow and a sly grin at Elijah. “Your work must be getting on marvelous fine. Aren’t you a greedy chap.”
Elijah felt the alcohol bloom hot in his cheeks. “Now, Dominic—“ He darted a warning glare at the young man, his own spine stiffening, Dominic’s body curling more insolently over the pillows. Dom picked up one foot with his hand and tucked it beneath him, dirty boot on the bed.
“I’m not complaining,” Dom said, and placed a hand, heavy and matey, around Mr Boyd’s startling shoulder. “He’s a pretty one,” said Dominic, and rubbed his hand on Mr Boyd’s arm.
To Elijah’s surprise, the meek shopkeeper smiled, and turned his face to Dom.
“I haven’t had the pleasure—” he said, and Dom grinned and said, “You can, mate, you can,” as Mr Boyd finished, “—of seeing you in my shop.”
Elijah smiled, seeing the Scottish man match the tawdry youth. For all his demureness and the soft down of his skin, Mr Boyd was no quisling. There was something almost literary in the tableau of the dark urchin and the neat merchant, both their faces golden in the light, their collars loosened, the same veil of fading dreams in their eyes. Elijah, still the sharper despite the liquor, watched from his chair as Dominic slid his hand down Mr Boyd’s upper arm to take his wrist in one sinewed hand.
Elijah shivered. Something defensive came up in him, or perhaps it was something territorial. Instincts were feral in these perilous days, when every shadow on the street might be a man who would rob you and then forget he’d even done so. Elijah fancied himself aloof from the pitiful grasping of the outside world, here in his snug little garret, but perhaps he was as hungry as all the rest. He watched the sinews of Mr Boyd’s wrist curl as he turned his hand to grip Dominic’s.
“Ah,” said the shopkeeper, and the smile on his face was definitely sharper. Elijah chafed his own wrist with a tense thumb. Dominic turned his face back into the light and Elijah saw complicity there.
“Are you going to write all this down?” Dominic asked slyly. His thigh moved, opening his crotch towards Elijah, and he slid down on the bed a little until he was in the posture of invitation. Mr Boyd went on massaging the boy’s slim wrist, with an intent, unblinking stare. His neat head was bowed, but Elijah saw, in the rumpled folds of the man’s breeches, a swelling in the niche between his lean thighs.
“Oh,” he said, softly, and felt his own prick suddenly stiff and tingling and hot in his trousers. Flush went the blood through his body. Now both Dominic and Mr Boyd were gazing at him. The candlelight made their faces shadowy and shining, and their eyes were golden glossy.
“Mr Wood, will you not sit with us?” Mr Boyd said, and reached out a hand. “If it’s not imposing on your own good hospitality—” and the man gave a little abashed laugh. The atmosphere was changing, and becoming brittle and singing almost with strangeness. Like a crystal glass, wetted and rubbed. Enough with the similes, thought Elijah. But he remained on his seat.
From outside in the street came the sound of a shriek, breaking glass, running footsteps, the syren of a constabulary. The scream jolted Elijah, and he started forward, right into Mr Boyd’s palm, which grasped him by the shoulder.
“My name is William,” said Mr Boyd. “And I thank you for the invitation this eve. I too have been too much alone.” His voice was soft but his hand was hard. And he pulled Elijah over and onto him.
The world blurred; Elijah landed on the solid ground of men’s bodies.
Now Dom’s arms were around him, and there was a hand smoothing between his legs, hardly sensible against the thick tweed fabric but still, pressure, and Elijah, tumbling against legs and chests and shoulders, arched and fumbled and came to rest huddled against the wall, his back hunched in astonishment but his legs open.
This was not quite as he had expected.
“You need not remember any of this,” said William, and gave him a gentle smile. Elijah was reassured that it was not the smile of a man who was going to rob him. “But since you have provided the refreshments, and this interesting companion, and it is a dark and nasty night, perhaps, after all, we might—” and his hand smoothed Elijah’s thigh, from knee to groin. It came to rest cupping Elijah’s prick, and squeezed slightly. Blood surged up in the man’s grip, stiffening the flesh. On the other side of him, Dominic was nuzzling Elijah’s jaw with his soft-bristled mouth. The bitter fragrance of unwashed men intoxicated Elijah; he let his shoulders slump and his lips form a smile. This might be what he wanted, after all.
It was what he had wanted, had dreamed of, perhaps—but this fey strangeness that had come over the tableau had thrown him askew. Where was his sureness, where was his design? He was alone in his room with two strangers. They knew more than he; they surrounded him. And despite the nag of unease, he liked it.
Dominic was already shrugging his black shirt to open over his broad, pale chest. A tiny brown nipple caught Elijah’s eye and he reached to thumb it, feeling the flesh harden.
“That’s it, my lovely,” murmured Dom, arching into the caress, and he eased Elijah’s jacket off him and slowly slid the knot of the tie down. In previous times he’d never dared touch Elijah until touched. Now there was a sultry languor to his confidence, a saucy curl to his smile. William was still frigging Elijah’s prick, but with the other hand he reached for the liquor bottle on the floor and took a long swallow. Then he leaned in and pressed his lips to Elijah’s. He made a sound behind his closed lips, and Elijah, hesitating in a daze still, opened his.
So hot, that mouth, and so unexpectedly fiery the fast spill of liquid into his throat, followed by a tongue sugary with liquor and fluid with insistence. William ran his tongue over Elijah’s, over his teeth, darted and dashed it around until Elijah was moaning from the choking liquor and the passion of the kiss. He experienced a moment of vertigo: was this the same meek little man he had felt sorry for? He felt for an instant that he had been dreaming all these years, and this was waking. The sensation had the edge of terror he remembered from dysmemoria. I shall write it down, he thought confusedly, and then he thought, What words?
Hands on him now, and opening his eyes he caught Dom’s arm blocking the light as it wrapped around William and then William’s head was wrenched away and turned to Dom’s, and Elijah watched as the two men smothered each other’s mouths. Their faces were silhouetted against the dissolute lamplight that seemed to flush the room now into a blaze of gold. The sounds of saliva and greed. Elijah jerked his hips forward, with a petulance that surprised him, and butted his head forward into the warmth he felt coming from the two groping men. They turned, as the same time, and each slid down to lick at a side of Elijah’s throat.
And, oh, yes, hands on him, two hands each with a different feel, tugging open his trousers and fumbling for a place and one of them tight-grasping his prick, the other his balls, oh exquisite, oh finery, and Elijah sagged with only his prick rigid while his body melted. All over him a sense of gold.
Just light, blaring behind his eyelids, and nothing more for a moment. Charcoal. Then he came back to himself.
The delicate wetness of a mouth on him, and a rough hand chafing his nipples, and the murmurs of satisfaction and a bumping as Dominic, he thought it was, slid off the bed and took warmth away. When he cracked open a heavy eyelid Elijah saw that Dominic was crouching on the floor beside the bed, behind the black silhouette of William who was bent over Elijah, and from the way William suddenly jerked and then stilled, trembling, Elijah could guess at what Dom was doing to him. The thought made him flush hotter still.
“Is this better than my snuff?” he heard, and William’s face came up towards his. It caught the lamplight again, and Elijah saw that the shopkeeper’s smile was softened, for all the grin on it, blurred with plump lips and the sheen of saliva on his chin. The face of sex, but also the face of his friend. Elijah smiled at him.
“A great—improvement, Mr Boyd—William,” he breathed. For a moment he was Mr Wood again, writer and aficionado of tobacco, and then the next minute William kissed him again and he was no one, just a dazzle. A finger probed beneath his balls, into the fine fluff of hair there in the crack; came up to be wetted in Elijah’s own mouth—he sucked it, showing willing, showing want—and then he felt it again, insisting towards the sensitive aperture of his arse. It pushed, gently at first, and then more relentlessly, and Elijah opened his legs further, and the finger slipped in, firm against fragile grip, and he felt himself dissolve just a little more.
“That’s my fine fellow,” whispered William into his mouth, and Elijah felt the smile against his lips.
Then gold in his brain again, as the finger rubbed and curled and twisted, then another finger beside the first, and for a while Elijah had no thoughts at all. And gold raged into red.
When he next opened his eyes Dominic was taking William’s place, and Elijah could smell the difference in men. Dom’s fingers were already wet, his mouth was smudged and full, and he tasted musky. The palm of his hand, as he pressed it over Elijah’s face, had the rich scent of vanilla and sex.
“Now my pretty,” he said, shuffling. “Now you can see what you see,” and he took the palm away again and Elijah blinked to see Dom’s prick in front of him, legs straddling his chest, the prick stiff upright and the downy balls plump and tight below. The tip of the cock was pink and shining and there was a bead of fluid at the very top. He craned his head up, and captured the flesh in his mouth. The taste was salt and as dizzying as liquor.
Above him, as he sucked and laved, he saw Dom’s torso arch back, his long strong throat bared, his arms hanging limp by his sides. The boy was beautiful in abandonment, tight at the belly and loose above, and Elijah worked more slavishly, dashing his tongue around the globe of the prick, down to lick the softness of the balls, back up to tease at the slit and take the whole thing in his mouth until it filled him with its nudging solidity. Dom groaned, his head tipping still further back, and then William appeared and supported him and took Dom’s head in his hands and kissed him. A stray hand fondled at Elijah’s prick, tugged and smoothed at it, and Elijah arched up beneath the two men, gasping for breath and still sucking feverishly, until Dom began to tremble, and William broke the kiss to say, “Change.”
“What shall we do, so much—” gasped Dominic. His urchin face was transformed; the black liner around his eyes smeared, his cheeks full and pink.
“Anything you like,” said William, who was hard and adult now, intent and sure. Elijah looked at him in enchantment. This man was no dreamer, he was a guide. But then, “We none of us will recall in the morning,” said William softly, and Elijah looked down at the man’s naked arms and saw the violet bruises dotted neatly up and down. For the first time in years, he too longed for puncture, for swoon, for—yes, penetration. If not the steel spike, then something equally as ruthless and tensile.
Desire was so simple sometimes. Trite, even; but the glare of want numbed the writer’s chagrin.
“You,” he whispered. “You. Your prick—I want you to—”
“Yes?” William quirked a smile at him, and ran his fingers teasingly down the side of Elijah’s belly.
“In me,” said Elijah, and he blushed. “If I shan’t remember the act, I shall recall the sense,” he said quickly. The feeling of want in his arse was fierce now. He imagined being plugged, being driven into, and his hips jerked. The clench through his thighs and groin was voluptuous; he shivered. The man’s hand darted to Elijah’s prick and gripped it close.
“I shall make you feel it,” William said, and again Elijah’s eyes closed in a rush of molten colour, and the gilded room faded.
He returned to sense with the thought they will give me the drug, that drug, I will forget—but he did not care. For he was kneeling now, on the bed, his hands pale and clenching the sheet before him, and William was at his arse. Hands spread Elijah’s cheeks and there was the round nub of a prick there—yes, so solid, so insistent, coming for him, and Elijah tilted his hips insolently higher, and there was the sound of a delighted laugh. Even that sound was glossed with tenderness, it seemed, and Elijah remembered the loveliness of this man, with his green eyes and his dirty child’s neck—how he was drawn to the kindness of this man—and then there was flesh inside him, not his, there was presence within his body—and the prick in his arse pushed and pulled back and pushed deeper—
“Oh!” was pushed from his lips and silenced by a palm. Dominic’s. A body slithered in front of Elijah’s face and a mouth came at him; he staggered back at the force of the kiss while he was pushed back onto the prick and the hands that held his hips so surely—“Oh!” he cried again when his tongue was free. A glimpse of Dominic’s face, eyes blazing and mouth messy—gleam of eyes and teeth, golden in the light, whipping away to one side—hand grasping through his hair and trailing away, and William delicately slowing down, the drag and slide of his prick easier now, Elijah’s legs trembling beneath him.
There was the sound of a moan, ragged and loose behind him. Something tautened and rolled and came over shadowed within Elijah at that—he ground his hips backwards again, William groaned again—Dominic somewhere behind, the sound of sucking and William’s hands, too, trembling on Elijah and his thrusts growing fast again now—Elijah shoved a hand down to grasp his own prick and pulled at it frantically.
“Feel it—feel it—” he gasped to himself, and he heard William say, “I feel it” and Dom’s muffled groan; he massaged more desperately at his prick, hand tight around the base and William thrust in deep and deliberate, once, twice—oh, the glory of it, the incandescence—frayed threads running hot through him—knotting—and Elijah started to come.
Gold and hot and delicious, his body turned to light, as if he were glass shone through by the sun, luminous—and then the dimming, and he sagged forward, light flooding out again, and he heard his own breathing loud and ragged.
In his flesh there was still flesh embedded; he felt it, thick and strange. It stirred, and William said, “Mind now, gently now,” and thrust in hard. A surge of shock went through Elijah; he dragged on the bed, drowsy, tried to recover himself; loosened again. “And master Dominic hasn’t had his pleasure—” said William’s voice, distant now. A mumble, in Dom’s deep voice—Elijah roused again for a moment—
—Shadows between him and the light—
—the slide of metal into his skin—
—whispers—
—gold—
::
The light was dense and dim when he opened his eyes—grey, grained. Elijah rubbed his face weakly. It must be twilight. In the room the air was cold; how dark everything was, how sad.
He sat up. Naked, but for the thin blanket over him; cold, but for a burning between his legs. There was a bottle beside the bed, he saw, in the bleak gloom—he caught the thin shine of light along its curved edge. The room smelled of alcohol and his own fugged breath.
He must have slept all day. How tired he was. As tired as a guttering candle.
Wash; dress; open the curtains a crack and look out on the last of the day’s activity. People walked past, down in the street, muffled and in haste; the shutters on the shop-fronts opposite were already half-drawn down. There would only just be time to catch him.
Down the stairs and out into the sharp chill of the street. His body felt clumsy, his eyes hollow, as if pressed into his skull. There were smears on his spectacles; they made the world blur into blocks of greased light and shadow. Each step was a voyage into strangeness.
The doorbell rang above his head as he entered the shop; the shopkeeper lifted his head from the book on the counter and smiled.
“Mr Wood,” said the shopkeeper.
“Mr Boyd,” said Elijah.
“Naturally, I was expecting you,” the man said, and rubbed the back of his head tiredly. Little fronds of pale brown hair fluffed out; he dropped his hand. “This is your hour to venture out.”
“I believe I’m in great need of your wares,” said Elijah. “I have a dreadful headache and a craving for something sharp.” He laid his hand on the counter. It took a little weight from him.
“Perhaps some snuff?” said the man. He smiled with his drowsy eyes.
Elijah looked at him. Green eyes and smile and hands—the curve of the man’s smile—his hands—something edged slyly into Elijah’s mind and crept out again.
“I think I shall take some snuff,” Elijah said. “It’s a devilishly lonely business, writing—” and he wondered if he should ask the fellow to share a drink. He’d always liked the man. But no. Another time.
Loneliness was a bitter drug, but a soothing one. It was all he could recall.
“Here you are, sir,” said Mr Boyd, and held out the package in his hand.
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Writing, now that was a task uncalled-for these days. No one wanted to chronicle, to archive or retain; forgetfulness was the balm, and with it the blank page.
We might not have dysmemoria in this universe, but that still is one of the most poignant truths I have read in a while.
What’s experience if there’s no memory? What’s life if there’s no trace?”
I wonder...
Haunting and painful. Very inventive. You have a beautiful twisted imagination that I am glad you're willing to share.
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but still. i believe that. i'm a compulsive recorder of my experiences; the more i write, the more i even experience things (like elijah in my fic) while simultaneously framing them in words and phrases. words are very imperfect and imprecise but i love them so.
thank you for the comment, that's lovely and to be told i have a beautiful twisted imagination is all i could hope for. *grins*
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Absolutely fantastic, and that's still not even close enough for explaining my absolute awe of this.
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yes yes yes about the fin-de-siecle ambience - although in my mind i could never decide if it was regency, or later - or in the future - as you say, a bit of each. something nasty and decadent and desperate. i loved making this 'verse. someone said it it was a bit 'steampunk' (adjunct to cyberpunk), which i liked.
thank you again, you're really kind.