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fellowshippers2010-03-15 11:58 pm
sema427.livejournal.com) wrote in fellowshippers2010-03-15 11:58 pm
Entry tags:
Fic: Savage Heart 1/? AU RPS
Author: Sema
Pairing: Eventually, Monaboyd, for this part Dom/Juliette Caton, Dom/OC (very briefly)
Rating: NC-17 overall
Note: I'm playing fast and loose with some timelines and relationships here, but that's why they call it an alternative reality, right? Dom and Juliette were both featured in the Masterpiece Theater series, Monsignor Renard, Dom as Etienne, Juliette as Helene. Filming took place in the town of Saint-Valery-sur-Somme, Picardy.
Disclaimers: this story uses the names and images of real people. I do not know these people, neither to I claim to have any actual knowledge of their lives. No insult is intended.
Part One: Picardy, France
When Dom and Juliette shag for the second-to-the-last time, Juliette stares up into the green-leaved branches overhead, her equally green eyes hazy and out-of-focus, her lower lip trapped, just slightly, beneath her top teeth. It's not shaming, exactly, the way it was for poor Etienne, caught short with Helene lying beneath beneath him like a stick of old wood. Not exactly. Neither is it precisely flattering to his prowess. She looks, even as she comes, a bit as if she's planning the next week's shopping.
This afternoon excursion to the countryside has not turned out particularly romantic, for all their blankets and picnic baskets, their plans to make love under the sky.
She's angry at him, Dom knows that--angry that in less than a week he'll be off to New Zealand and, hopefully, the break of his career. He suspects, well enough, that he deserves it. Her anger, that is, not the break. For that, he can only assume the stars were aligned in his direction, if he actually believed in that rot.
Juliette's a nice girl, and a good person, and Dom's fully aware that he's leaving her like a bundle of laundry at the cleaners. He hasn't meant it that way, truly he hasn't, but he has a way of hurting people, sometimes, when he doesn't mean to. He knows she doesn't love him, not much, anyway, and now and then he's even wondered if she liked him, but he's never meant to make her feel as if he doesn't care for her.
"Juliette," Dom says, hating the pensiveness in his voice, "Will you miss me?" He cups her lovely face in his hands, framing it with his fingers and palms, her brilliant ginger hair soft against his skin. He can't believe how pretty she is, much prettier in real life than she is as Helene--much too pretty for the likes of him. It's yet another reason why his castmates resent him.
"Dominic, you're ridiculous," Juliette answers, but there's no sting in it. Though she's only a year older, Juliette seems to him, at times, infinitely more mature, as if she's been fully a woman for a long while now, whilst he's still, in very many ways, a boy.
She reaches up to ruffle his hair, then pulls him down, until he's kissing her, his tongue stroking her tongue. Dom closes his eyes, knowing, at the same time, that Juliette isn't closing hers, but if he tries to gaze at her this way his eyes will go crossed and he'll look a perfect twat.
He is ridiculous, he knows it, and he wishes all this was over, up to and including the shag and beyond. That he'd said goodbye to Saint-Valery-sur-Somme and France and everyone in it, said his farewells to his mum and dad and gone well on his way. He wishes he was on that long, long flight to New Zealand, even though he knows it will drive him half-mental to sit in one confined place for so long.
Christ, but he can't do this thinking of Juliette, and so he squeezes his eyes tighter shut and thinks of Roger instead, the bloke from make-up he shared a bottle of wine with the past night. They'd drunk it together down by the marina, sitting on the quay with their feet in the cold salt sea, passing the bottle back and forth, then, not anything like drunk, only warm and tipsy, wandered up into the old town, holding hands now and then, until they wound up under the gargoyles at Saint-Martin's church, where Roger pushed him up against the old stone wall and snogged him nearly breathless, his right hand questing down the front of Dom's jeans.
Roger's is a little older than he is, a little shorter than he is, and Dom fancies him fiercely. He climaxed when Roger had scarcely touched him, at the merest glide of Roger's fingers over his bare skin, and though Dom had been more than embarrassed by his lack of restraint, the older man had only chuckled a bit and kissed him again, telling him, "You're brilliant, do you know that, Dominic? Don't worry, love, it's flattering."
Dom had pulled him close then, just holding tightly, loving the strong compactness of Roger's body in his arms, the stubbly warmth of Roger's cheek against his cheek. Roger doesn't want anything from him, only the company--or perhaps the true word is companionship.
Dom comes now thinking of Roger instead of Juliette, feeling like a traitor to her, and a right git, and more glad than ever that he's going away. He rolls off almost at once, sitting up with his back to her as he pretends to be a gentleman with the disposal of the condom, or as if he hasn't wanted to inconvenience her with the burden of his weight.
The truth is, at that moment, he doesn't want to be touching her, pretty or not, good person or not.
"Well," Juliette says after another moment. "What was that?"
"Pardon?" Dom glances over his shoulder, shooting her his look of complete innocence, perfected over years.
"Muppet," Juliette says, vehemently. She doesn't believe a bit of it, that much is obvious. "I won't miss you at all, you know, when you're gone."
"Wouldn't expect you to," Dom answers, with a grin. His cheeky look beats out the innocent one any day, and Juliette, if not charmed, is at least mollified.
She turns over onto her side, patting the tartan blanket before her. "Come here, at least. Let me look at you."
Dom obeys; it would be rude not to. They lie facing one another, heads propped on their hands, Juliette's eyes like the still pool they walked beside the other day, the one with the waterlilies. Dom wonders what his eyes look like to her, if they're already full of New Zealand's skies.
After a while, he can't think anymore, and so he flops down on his belly, Juliette softly rubbing his shoulders, stroking his newly-shorn head. He falls asleep feeling her touch, feeling the flickers of light and shade as the wind stirs the leaves of the trees overhead.
He wakes stiff and groggy, disoriented and alone. Warm as the day had been, the night air is chilly. Climbing to his feet, Dom wraps his arms around himself, hugging his chest, shivering lightly.
"Juliette?" he ventures, blinking and rubbing his eyes. They're stinging like mad; he can't believe he's let himself sleep half the day away in the middle of a field of assorted grasses. He coughs a time or two, sneezes, coughs again. "Juliette, love?"
The car's at least where he left it, just at the top of the hill; he can just make out the darker shape of its blue roof through the sea of waving green.
At least Juliette hasn't left him alone here, for vengeance or a prank. Not that she'd do such a thing: she's too fine a person, and too mature besides.
"Juliette?" he calls again, then, louder, "JULIETTE!"
He resolutely will not allow his mind to imagine being found alone in the countryside of Picardy with the butchered body of his girlfriend. That's bollocks. This isn't a fucking Urban Myth.
"JULIETTE!" he cries out one last time, with everything in him. What if something has happened to her? If something's happened whilst he slept, he will never forgive himself. Never.
"What is it?" Juliette steps out, perfectly unharmed, from behind a tree, slightly more distant than the one they'd lain beneath. "I was having a wee."
"You might have answered." Dom's heart's beating madly. He presses his palm to his chest.
"Did you think you were shouting?" She wades, barefoot, through the grass, the tall stalks catching at her soft skirt, twining round her legs. "My poor Dommie. Were you frightened? You sound like shite, by the way. Did you bring your allergy tablets?"
"Terrified," Dom answers, which is true, though he couldn't say why. There's a funny pong here, oddly enough, as if they're near to some animal's den, and an animal with untidy habits, at that. It actually surprises him that he can smell at all, he's so powerfully congested. "There's a kind of… dunno… stench. As if we're on top of a badger's burrow, or a fox's den, or something."
Juliette shakes her head, frowning. "I haven't noticed. But anyway, let's get back. I'm famished! Where are you planning to take me for dinner? I reckon you owe me."
"Hadn't thought." Dom's interest's piqued now. If there's some sort of den in there, amongst the trees, he'd like to see it. Not to disturb, mind. Only to see.
Further back, in the shadows, he thinks he glimpses a yellow gleam.
Eyes? he wonders. Could be eyes. Or some old reflector left behind. It could be anything.
The yellow flash comes again, and with it the smell, that's growing, growing…
Behind him, closer now than she's been, Juliette lets out a shriek. Dom's hard-pressed not to roll his own eyes.
"Ssh," he says, "You'll frighten it."
There's a darkness in there, he sees that now, along with the gleam. A amorphous darkness bigger than the biggest man he's ever seen, too big for any animal one would find in France that wasn't a horse or a cow, or something else utterly prosaic.
"Oi, Juliette," Dom breathes. "That's not a fucking badger."
He jumps nearly a mile when her hands latch onto him from behind, twisting through his shirt, into his skin. That'll leave bruises, he thinks, in the moment before Juliette screams, the night wind seeming to raise her voice and whip it, like a flag, around them.
It's then that the yellow eyes blink and the darkness moves, so suddenly Dom can scarcely track its progress. It's rushing towards him at approximately the velocity of a bullettrain as Dom spreads out his arms and, in the most ineffectual way possible, tries to shield Juliette from the impact of its body--except they're all falling together then, nearly spinning over the surface of the hill, and there's fur and stench and hot acid spit in his face and something scraping like fire over his skin, over his nearly-bare scalp and his cheek and his neck. There's something stepping on him, crouching on him, pressing him into the broken grass and the gravel and the dirt beneath and he's pushing and pushing on its chest, using every bit of strength he has, every drop of adrenaline, just to try to keep it away from Juliette, only it's pushing back hard, crushing him.
Dom can't breathe, suddenly. He can't breathe. The world's become very small and tight, no more than the full, full moon and a wedge of black night--or maybe that's the monster's eye he sees.
Because it is a monster. Dom knows that in a flash of insight: it's a monster, and monsters are real, not just the psychological ones one reads about, but the true old nightmares of the tales and stories, or the films that sent him scuttling late at night to his parents' bed when he was small, the films he wasn't meant to be watching after midnight on the telly.
It's a monster, and his life, whether he dies this night or goes on to New Zealand, is entirely in its hands. There's not a bloody thing in hell he can do to stop it.
Fuck, Dom thinks, with a curious mixture of wonder, terror and irritation, It's going to kill me!
Dom's surprised to wake up. Leave it at that. "Wake up alive" would be redundant.
His head's cradled in Juliette's lap, and she's weeping on him, hot salty tears that sting the scrapes on his skin. She rocks as she weeps, clearly pushed past the point of hysteria.
"Juliette?" Fumblingly, Dom lays a hand on her wrist; she starts violently.
"Did you see it?" she asks, in a small, shrill voice far removed from her usual warm contralto. "Did you see it, Dom, did you see it?"
Dom scrubs his hands over his face. He feels shaky, a little light-headed. He also feels if he doesn't get out of this field at exactly this minute, he may well go entirely mental. Juliette's hands are clamped onto his arm now, bruisingly tight, pulling him off balance as he tries to climb to his feet. In truth, he hasn't the heart to dislodge her. It's good to feel a human touch in a world full of monsters.
The car seems miles away as they're running, joined and awkward, stumbling over the uneven ground, through the thigh-high grass, both of them barefoot, the blanket and their picnic basket completely forgotten. The French countryside, that had seemed so tamed, so mundane, in the afternoon, seems huge and dark and full of danger. The stink of the monster's all over them now; for all Dom knows it could be just behind them, or miles away.
Juliette's sobs take on a new fury as her hands close on the car's doorhandle. She's trembling from head to foot, nearly fainting. Dom holds her upright with one arm as he fumbles for the keys in the pockets of his jeans, terrified, for a moment, that he's lost them, until, reaching crosswise over his body, he finds them tangled in his pocket-lining.
By then, Juliette's been sick down the door, barely missing their feet. Dom's own stomach twists too, but he swallows hard and manages to contain himself, pushing Juliette into the car and crawling in behind her, climbing over her body to reach the steering wheel, then reaching back to slam the door behind them.
He punches down the locks harder than he needs to, and when that's done sits shaking and shaking and shaking.
Juliette is sick again, on the carpet. It wouldn't for a moment occur to Dom to ask her to open the door, or roll down the window. He presses his own hands to his face, over his mouth, saying to himself, I won't, I won't, I won't…
Only he doesn't know, precisely, what it is he won't do. Spoil the carpets like his girlfriend? Believe what he's seen? Fall apart before he reaches Saint-Valery-sur-Somme in safety again?
Still trembling, he puts the car in gear, wondering for a moment why it's so dark, before he realizes, with a more-than-half-hysterical laugh, that he's forgotten to switch on the headlights.
He's driving worse than he ever has, including his very first try in his dad's car, steering erratically, unable to maintain a consistent speed. At first he doesn't even know where he's driving, until a signpost comes up and he realizes he's managed to head off wrong-way round, southeast toward Amiens, instead of northwest to Saint-Valery.
"Juliette." Dom's voice comes out harsh, louder than he's intended. "Is your purse in the back? Can we use your credit card?"
She stares at him as if he's grown a second head.
"It's only… We're ten kilometres out of Amiens." Dom grips hard on the wheel, still trying to quiet his shaking hands. "I went the wrong way. Don't know if I could manage the drive back, just now."
Another time, she might have been acerbic. This time, Juliette only lays her hand on Dom's thigh, squeezing lightly. "Of course, darling," she tells him in something almost like her ordinary voice. "Whatever you need."
Dom takes them to the first place he stumbles across, the Hotel Alsace Lorraine, it's called, located vaguely near the Amiens city center. It's small, and has a carpark, and that's all he asks.
"You realize, Dom," Juliette tells him as they sit outside, gathering their strength to go in, "That they'll think we're quite mad. I'm covered in sick, we haven't any shoes, and you..." She touches the side of his head gently, then his cheek, then his neck. "Poor love, you're all bloody! Did it hurt you?"
"Don't know," Dom answers, honestly enough. He doesn't know. He thinks he may be, just a little bit, in shock and wishes he could ring his mum to ask her what to do. Still, he raises Juliette's hand in his own, and kisses it. "I'm game if you are."
Perhaps it's the concierge's nationality that causes him not to question them at all.
They're given a small room with two narrow beds. The curtains and headboards are scarlet, the coverlets, walls and carpets, stark white. Dom and Juliette stare into each other's blood-marked, dead-pale faces and start to laugh.
"Perhaps he thought we fit the general theme," Juliette giggles, until she's forced to press her fists to her mouth, blocking the sound. She's shaking nearly as badly as Dom is now, and it feels the most natural thing in the world to hold her in his arms, to soothe her with soft words and kisses, until suddenly they're both dragging off one another's stained, spoiled clothes, fighting to keep contact between them as they stumble to the shower. There Dom fucks her long and hard, hoisting Juliette up against the white tile wall, the water cascading down, getting in their mouths and eyes until they're blind and half-drowned and the water itself has gone nearly cold.
When they're done they sink into the bottom of the tub, sodden and exhausted, crouching in the chill spray until Dom finally thinks to turn the taps off again.
"It's all right," Juliette tells him at last, touching Dom's hand. "In case you'd wondered, I am on the pill."
"Oh," Dom says. There doesn't seem much more to say, except perhaps, "I've never… Y'know. Without a condom." He's shagged her perhaps a hundred times, in half as many different places, and it still feels funny to talk about these things. He feels nothing but young, inexperienced, shy.
"Good," she tells him brightly, with a sort of mad British politeness. "Because I know…"
"Oh," Dom says again. Know what? he wonders.
"About the blokes," she says softly, her head ducking down.
"Oh," Dom says for the third time, blushing. "It's okay, though. I'm okay. I mean, I get tested, and I'm not… And I don't…"
He stands up in the tub, raising Juliette to her feet also, handing her out of the tub, ridiculously, in his own mind, like a gentleman of long ago handing a lady into her coach. For a moment, Juliette busies herself with a towel, drying her body carefully, then taking a second towel to rub at her long, lustrous hair.
Dom watches her, dripping, frozen nearly solid now.
At last, seemingly satisfied with the results, Juliette flips her hair back over her shoulders, fashioning it swiftly into a long plait and securing the plait with an elastic from around her wrist. Even naked, she seems to have resumed her natural confidence, her dignity, her usual loveliness, whilst he's still a sodden mess.
"Dominic," she says at last, shaking her head, and takes a third towel, drying him in gentle strokes. When she's through, the towel's streaked in his blood. "Are you okay, love?" She takes his crooked jaw in her strong, slender fingers, turning his face this way and that. "Whatever it was, it gave you a good clawing, that's for sure."
Whatever it was, Juliette? Dom gapes at her. It was a monster!
But he can tell she's already forgetting, putting her world back in order. Her smooth fair skin's a little bruised, but other than that, there's not a mark on her.
"Poor thing," she croons, sweet-voiced. "You poor, poor thing. My hero!" Juliette's nearly his height; she scarcely has to raise herself to kiss his lips. "Come into bed, and get warm with me. We'll forget tonight ever happened."
Bloody likely, Dom thinks, but he follows her, and it is warm beside her beneath the crisp white sheets and the thick duvet. He tucks his face into her shoulder, shutting his eyes, as Juliette natters on about dangerous wild dogs, and how something Ought To Be Done. Already, she's safe. Already, nothing exists that can't be dealt with by the proper authorities.
Dom's torn cheek feels hot, as do his neck and his scalp. They itch and pang in hot, electric little stings, as if he's being tormented, over and over, by bees.
Again, he sees the yellow eye, like the full moon interrupted by a sliver of night sky, and he knows that nothing, nothing, nothing will ever be the same as it was before this day.
Pairing: Eventually, Monaboyd, for this part Dom/Juliette Caton, Dom/OC (very briefly)
Rating: NC-17 overall
Note: I'm playing fast and loose with some timelines and relationships here, but that's why they call it an alternative reality, right? Dom and Juliette were both featured in the Masterpiece Theater series, Monsignor Renard, Dom as Etienne, Juliette as Helene. Filming took place in the town of Saint-Valery-sur-Somme, Picardy.
Disclaimers: this story uses the names and images of real people. I do not know these people, neither to I claim to have any actual knowledge of their lives. No insult is intended.
Part One: Picardy, France
When Dom and Juliette shag for the second-to-the-last time, Juliette stares up into the green-leaved branches overhead, her equally green eyes hazy and out-of-focus, her lower lip trapped, just slightly, beneath her top teeth. It's not shaming, exactly, the way it was for poor Etienne, caught short with Helene lying beneath beneath him like a stick of old wood. Not exactly. Neither is it precisely flattering to his prowess. She looks, even as she comes, a bit as if she's planning the next week's shopping.
This afternoon excursion to the countryside has not turned out particularly romantic, for all their blankets and picnic baskets, their plans to make love under the sky.
She's angry at him, Dom knows that--angry that in less than a week he'll be off to New Zealand and, hopefully, the break of his career. He suspects, well enough, that he deserves it. Her anger, that is, not the break. For that, he can only assume the stars were aligned in his direction, if he actually believed in that rot.
Juliette's a nice girl, and a good person, and Dom's fully aware that he's leaving her like a bundle of laundry at the cleaners. He hasn't meant it that way, truly he hasn't, but he has a way of hurting people, sometimes, when he doesn't mean to. He knows she doesn't love him, not much, anyway, and now and then he's even wondered if she liked him, but he's never meant to make her feel as if he doesn't care for her.
"Juliette," Dom says, hating the pensiveness in his voice, "Will you miss me?" He cups her lovely face in his hands, framing it with his fingers and palms, her brilliant ginger hair soft against his skin. He can't believe how pretty she is, much prettier in real life than she is as Helene--much too pretty for the likes of him. It's yet another reason why his castmates resent him.
"Dominic, you're ridiculous," Juliette answers, but there's no sting in it. Though she's only a year older, Juliette seems to him, at times, infinitely more mature, as if she's been fully a woman for a long while now, whilst he's still, in very many ways, a boy.
She reaches up to ruffle his hair, then pulls him down, until he's kissing her, his tongue stroking her tongue. Dom closes his eyes, knowing, at the same time, that Juliette isn't closing hers, but if he tries to gaze at her this way his eyes will go crossed and he'll look a perfect twat.
He is ridiculous, he knows it, and he wishes all this was over, up to and including the shag and beyond. That he'd said goodbye to Saint-Valery-sur-Somme and France and everyone in it, said his farewells to his mum and dad and gone well on his way. He wishes he was on that long, long flight to New Zealand, even though he knows it will drive him half-mental to sit in one confined place for so long.
Christ, but he can't do this thinking of Juliette, and so he squeezes his eyes tighter shut and thinks of Roger instead, the bloke from make-up he shared a bottle of wine with the past night. They'd drunk it together down by the marina, sitting on the quay with their feet in the cold salt sea, passing the bottle back and forth, then, not anything like drunk, only warm and tipsy, wandered up into the old town, holding hands now and then, until they wound up under the gargoyles at Saint-Martin's church, where Roger pushed him up against the old stone wall and snogged him nearly breathless, his right hand questing down the front of Dom's jeans.
Roger's is a little older than he is, a little shorter than he is, and Dom fancies him fiercely. He climaxed when Roger had scarcely touched him, at the merest glide of Roger's fingers over his bare skin, and though Dom had been more than embarrassed by his lack of restraint, the older man had only chuckled a bit and kissed him again, telling him, "You're brilliant, do you know that, Dominic? Don't worry, love, it's flattering."
Dom had pulled him close then, just holding tightly, loving the strong compactness of Roger's body in his arms, the stubbly warmth of Roger's cheek against his cheek. Roger doesn't want anything from him, only the company--or perhaps the true word is companionship.
Dom comes now thinking of Roger instead of Juliette, feeling like a traitor to her, and a right git, and more glad than ever that he's going away. He rolls off almost at once, sitting up with his back to her as he pretends to be a gentleman with the disposal of the condom, or as if he hasn't wanted to inconvenience her with the burden of his weight.
The truth is, at that moment, he doesn't want to be touching her, pretty or not, good person or not.
"Well," Juliette says after another moment. "What was that?"
"Pardon?" Dom glances over his shoulder, shooting her his look of complete innocence, perfected over years.
"Muppet," Juliette says, vehemently. She doesn't believe a bit of it, that much is obvious. "I won't miss you at all, you know, when you're gone."
"Wouldn't expect you to," Dom answers, with a grin. His cheeky look beats out the innocent one any day, and Juliette, if not charmed, is at least mollified.
She turns over onto her side, patting the tartan blanket before her. "Come here, at least. Let me look at you."
Dom obeys; it would be rude not to. They lie facing one another, heads propped on their hands, Juliette's eyes like the still pool they walked beside the other day, the one with the waterlilies. Dom wonders what his eyes look like to her, if they're already full of New Zealand's skies.
After a while, he can't think anymore, and so he flops down on his belly, Juliette softly rubbing his shoulders, stroking his newly-shorn head. He falls asleep feeling her touch, feeling the flickers of light and shade as the wind stirs the leaves of the trees overhead.
He wakes stiff and groggy, disoriented and alone. Warm as the day had been, the night air is chilly. Climbing to his feet, Dom wraps his arms around himself, hugging his chest, shivering lightly.
"Juliette?" he ventures, blinking and rubbing his eyes. They're stinging like mad; he can't believe he's let himself sleep half the day away in the middle of a field of assorted grasses. He coughs a time or two, sneezes, coughs again. "Juliette, love?"
The car's at least where he left it, just at the top of the hill; he can just make out the darker shape of its blue roof through the sea of waving green.
At least Juliette hasn't left him alone here, for vengeance or a prank. Not that she'd do such a thing: she's too fine a person, and too mature besides.
"Juliette?" he calls again, then, louder, "JULIETTE!"
He resolutely will not allow his mind to imagine being found alone in the countryside of Picardy with the butchered body of his girlfriend. That's bollocks. This isn't a fucking Urban Myth.
"JULIETTE!" he cries out one last time, with everything in him. What if something has happened to her? If something's happened whilst he slept, he will never forgive himself. Never.
"What is it?" Juliette steps out, perfectly unharmed, from behind a tree, slightly more distant than the one they'd lain beneath. "I was having a wee."
"You might have answered." Dom's heart's beating madly. He presses his palm to his chest.
"Did you think you were shouting?" She wades, barefoot, through the grass, the tall stalks catching at her soft skirt, twining round her legs. "My poor Dommie. Were you frightened? You sound like shite, by the way. Did you bring your allergy tablets?"
"Terrified," Dom answers, which is true, though he couldn't say why. There's a funny pong here, oddly enough, as if they're near to some animal's den, and an animal with untidy habits, at that. It actually surprises him that he can smell at all, he's so powerfully congested. "There's a kind of… dunno… stench. As if we're on top of a badger's burrow, or a fox's den, or something."
Juliette shakes her head, frowning. "I haven't noticed. But anyway, let's get back. I'm famished! Where are you planning to take me for dinner? I reckon you owe me."
"Hadn't thought." Dom's interest's piqued now. If there's some sort of den in there, amongst the trees, he'd like to see it. Not to disturb, mind. Only to see.
Further back, in the shadows, he thinks he glimpses a yellow gleam.
Eyes? he wonders. Could be eyes. Or some old reflector left behind. It could be anything.
The yellow flash comes again, and with it the smell, that's growing, growing…
Behind him, closer now than she's been, Juliette lets out a shriek. Dom's hard-pressed not to roll his own eyes.
"Ssh," he says, "You'll frighten it."
There's a darkness in there, he sees that now, along with the gleam. A amorphous darkness bigger than the biggest man he's ever seen, too big for any animal one would find in France that wasn't a horse or a cow, or something else utterly prosaic.
"Oi, Juliette," Dom breathes. "That's not a fucking badger."
He jumps nearly a mile when her hands latch onto him from behind, twisting through his shirt, into his skin. That'll leave bruises, he thinks, in the moment before Juliette screams, the night wind seeming to raise her voice and whip it, like a flag, around them.
It's then that the yellow eyes blink and the darkness moves, so suddenly Dom can scarcely track its progress. It's rushing towards him at approximately the velocity of a bullettrain as Dom spreads out his arms and, in the most ineffectual way possible, tries to shield Juliette from the impact of its body--except they're all falling together then, nearly spinning over the surface of the hill, and there's fur and stench and hot acid spit in his face and something scraping like fire over his skin, over his nearly-bare scalp and his cheek and his neck. There's something stepping on him, crouching on him, pressing him into the broken grass and the gravel and the dirt beneath and he's pushing and pushing on its chest, using every bit of strength he has, every drop of adrenaline, just to try to keep it away from Juliette, only it's pushing back hard, crushing him.
Dom can't breathe, suddenly. He can't breathe. The world's become very small and tight, no more than the full, full moon and a wedge of black night--or maybe that's the monster's eye he sees.
Because it is a monster. Dom knows that in a flash of insight: it's a monster, and monsters are real, not just the psychological ones one reads about, but the true old nightmares of the tales and stories, or the films that sent him scuttling late at night to his parents' bed when he was small, the films he wasn't meant to be watching after midnight on the telly.
It's a monster, and his life, whether he dies this night or goes on to New Zealand, is entirely in its hands. There's not a bloody thing in hell he can do to stop it.
Fuck, Dom thinks, with a curious mixture of wonder, terror and irritation, It's going to kill me!
Dom's surprised to wake up. Leave it at that. "Wake up alive" would be redundant.
His head's cradled in Juliette's lap, and she's weeping on him, hot salty tears that sting the scrapes on his skin. She rocks as she weeps, clearly pushed past the point of hysteria.
"Juliette?" Fumblingly, Dom lays a hand on her wrist; she starts violently.
"Did you see it?" she asks, in a small, shrill voice far removed from her usual warm contralto. "Did you see it, Dom, did you see it?"
Dom scrubs his hands over his face. He feels shaky, a little light-headed. He also feels if he doesn't get out of this field at exactly this minute, he may well go entirely mental. Juliette's hands are clamped onto his arm now, bruisingly tight, pulling him off balance as he tries to climb to his feet. In truth, he hasn't the heart to dislodge her. It's good to feel a human touch in a world full of monsters.
The car seems miles away as they're running, joined and awkward, stumbling over the uneven ground, through the thigh-high grass, both of them barefoot, the blanket and their picnic basket completely forgotten. The French countryside, that had seemed so tamed, so mundane, in the afternoon, seems huge and dark and full of danger. The stink of the monster's all over them now; for all Dom knows it could be just behind them, or miles away.
Juliette's sobs take on a new fury as her hands close on the car's doorhandle. She's trembling from head to foot, nearly fainting. Dom holds her upright with one arm as he fumbles for the keys in the pockets of his jeans, terrified, for a moment, that he's lost them, until, reaching crosswise over his body, he finds them tangled in his pocket-lining.
By then, Juliette's been sick down the door, barely missing their feet. Dom's own stomach twists too, but he swallows hard and manages to contain himself, pushing Juliette into the car and crawling in behind her, climbing over her body to reach the steering wheel, then reaching back to slam the door behind them.
He punches down the locks harder than he needs to, and when that's done sits shaking and shaking and shaking.
Juliette is sick again, on the carpet. It wouldn't for a moment occur to Dom to ask her to open the door, or roll down the window. He presses his own hands to his face, over his mouth, saying to himself, I won't, I won't, I won't…
Only he doesn't know, precisely, what it is he won't do. Spoil the carpets like his girlfriend? Believe what he's seen? Fall apart before he reaches Saint-Valery-sur-Somme in safety again?
Still trembling, he puts the car in gear, wondering for a moment why it's so dark, before he realizes, with a more-than-half-hysterical laugh, that he's forgotten to switch on the headlights.
He's driving worse than he ever has, including his very first try in his dad's car, steering erratically, unable to maintain a consistent speed. At first he doesn't even know where he's driving, until a signpost comes up and he realizes he's managed to head off wrong-way round, southeast toward Amiens, instead of northwest to Saint-Valery.
"Juliette." Dom's voice comes out harsh, louder than he's intended. "Is your purse in the back? Can we use your credit card?"
She stares at him as if he's grown a second head.
"It's only… We're ten kilometres out of Amiens." Dom grips hard on the wheel, still trying to quiet his shaking hands. "I went the wrong way. Don't know if I could manage the drive back, just now."
Another time, she might have been acerbic. This time, Juliette only lays her hand on Dom's thigh, squeezing lightly. "Of course, darling," she tells him in something almost like her ordinary voice. "Whatever you need."
Dom takes them to the first place he stumbles across, the Hotel Alsace Lorraine, it's called, located vaguely near the Amiens city center. It's small, and has a carpark, and that's all he asks.
"You realize, Dom," Juliette tells him as they sit outside, gathering their strength to go in, "That they'll think we're quite mad. I'm covered in sick, we haven't any shoes, and you..." She touches the side of his head gently, then his cheek, then his neck. "Poor love, you're all bloody! Did it hurt you?"
"Don't know," Dom answers, honestly enough. He doesn't know. He thinks he may be, just a little bit, in shock and wishes he could ring his mum to ask her what to do. Still, he raises Juliette's hand in his own, and kisses it. "I'm game if you are."
Perhaps it's the concierge's nationality that causes him not to question them at all.
They're given a small room with two narrow beds. The curtains and headboards are scarlet, the coverlets, walls and carpets, stark white. Dom and Juliette stare into each other's blood-marked, dead-pale faces and start to laugh.
"Perhaps he thought we fit the general theme," Juliette giggles, until she's forced to press her fists to her mouth, blocking the sound. She's shaking nearly as badly as Dom is now, and it feels the most natural thing in the world to hold her in his arms, to soothe her with soft words and kisses, until suddenly they're both dragging off one another's stained, spoiled clothes, fighting to keep contact between them as they stumble to the shower. There Dom fucks her long and hard, hoisting Juliette up against the white tile wall, the water cascading down, getting in their mouths and eyes until they're blind and half-drowned and the water itself has gone nearly cold.
When they're done they sink into the bottom of the tub, sodden and exhausted, crouching in the chill spray until Dom finally thinks to turn the taps off again.
"It's all right," Juliette tells him at last, touching Dom's hand. "In case you'd wondered, I am on the pill."
"Oh," Dom says. There doesn't seem much more to say, except perhaps, "I've never… Y'know. Without a condom." He's shagged her perhaps a hundred times, in half as many different places, and it still feels funny to talk about these things. He feels nothing but young, inexperienced, shy.
"Good," she tells him brightly, with a sort of mad British politeness. "Because I know…"
"Oh," Dom says again. Know what? he wonders.
"About the blokes," she says softly, her head ducking down.
"Oh," Dom says for the third time, blushing. "It's okay, though. I'm okay. I mean, I get tested, and I'm not… And I don't…"
He stands up in the tub, raising Juliette to her feet also, handing her out of the tub, ridiculously, in his own mind, like a gentleman of long ago handing a lady into her coach. For a moment, Juliette busies herself with a towel, drying her body carefully, then taking a second towel to rub at her long, lustrous hair.
Dom watches her, dripping, frozen nearly solid now.
At last, seemingly satisfied with the results, Juliette flips her hair back over her shoulders, fashioning it swiftly into a long plait and securing the plait with an elastic from around her wrist. Even naked, she seems to have resumed her natural confidence, her dignity, her usual loveliness, whilst he's still a sodden mess.
"Dominic," she says at last, shaking her head, and takes a third towel, drying him in gentle strokes. When she's through, the towel's streaked in his blood. "Are you okay, love?" She takes his crooked jaw in her strong, slender fingers, turning his face this way and that. "Whatever it was, it gave you a good clawing, that's for sure."
Whatever it was, Juliette? Dom gapes at her. It was a monster!
But he can tell she's already forgetting, putting her world back in order. Her smooth fair skin's a little bruised, but other than that, there's not a mark on her.
"Poor thing," she croons, sweet-voiced. "You poor, poor thing. My hero!" Juliette's nearly his height; she scarcely has to raise herself to kiss his lips. "Come into bed, and get warm with me. We'll forget tonight ever happened."
Bloody likely, Dom thinks, but he follows her, and it is warm beside her beneath the crisp white sheets and the thick duvet. He tucks his face into her shoulder, shutting his eyes, as Juliette natters on about dangerous wild dogs, and how something Ought To Be Done. Already, she's safe. Already, nothing exists that can't be dealt with by the proper authorities.
Dom's torn cheek feels hot, as do his neck and his scalp. They itch and pang in hot, electric little stings, as if he's being tormented, over and over, by bees.
Again, he sees the yellow eye, like the full moon interrupted by a sliver of night sky, and he knows that nothing, nothing, nothing will ever be the same as it was before this day.
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And it's definitely the last het sex anyone's getting out of me!*g*