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fellowshippers2004-02-23 05:18 pm
childeproof.livejournal.com) wrote in fellowshippers2004-02-23 05:18 pm
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TITLE: ‘Third Astronaut and Fourth Cop’ (LotR RPS)
AUTHOR: Sheela na Gig, aka Childeproof
PAIRING: Dom/Billy, Dom/Elijah, Elijah/Sean A.
RATING: R
WARNINGS: swearing, hobbits giving head, m/m sexual situations. Also, unbeta’d, so warnings for dangling qualifiers and such.
FEEDBACK: Would be most kind.
NOTE: The hobbits as suggested by their use as background noise in my ‘Boiling Point’ SB/VM series.
http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=childeproof&keyword=LotRPS&filter=all
SUMMARY: Dom’s never got why people trek solo to the North Pole because it’s there. Because so are the sofa and the remote control. Why subject yourself to pain when nipping to the off-licence and back, followed by a bit of telly, is an option? Why explore when you can mooch, trek when you can taxi, hanglide when you can take the stairs?
But then he thinks, what the fuck.
The cab drops the four of them at the corner. The driver taps his forehead as he hands over the change.
‘Ah, who pissed on your chips, anyway?’ Billy blows a kiss at the cab as it turns in someone’s gateway, tires protesting.
‘You know, we may have just been blacklisted,’ Dom says.
A curtain twitches nearby, and Billy waves at that too.
‘Come on, you daft git.’ Dom’s brain is numb after hours of bad techno, and watching Astin, Billy and Lijah bouncing off each other and the walls like human pinballs. His ears are still rushing with the quiet, as if he just dipped his head inside a seashell. There’s only a small rind of moon, not the full, grubby milk-coloured globe he likes best.
‘That club is shit.’ Dom says this every time they’ve been there, and the four of them agree until the next time they have a skinful and someone says ‘Come on, it’s not that bad.’ He doesn’t mind, though, because tonight he doesn’t mind anything. He’s pissed as a fish and happy to be weaving his way home, breathing himself clear of the night’s second-hand heat and cigarette smoke.
‘Place is a bloody museum with a mirror ball.’ Billy bumps Dom with his shoulder, warm and sleepy and drunk. He’s wearing his current favourite teeshirt, which is grass green and says NO FUCKING SWEARING.
‘The beer was like - like a urine sample, ‘ Lijah says over his shoulder. ‘Only a really huge one.’ Drunk, Lijah can sound so relaxed Dom wonders about his vital signs.
‘Yeah, like from a circus animal or something.’ Billy lets out his shunting, breathy laugh, coming in neat against Dom’s hip. He gets drunk from the legs up, Billy does. The pleasantly heavy meeting of their sides makes Dom feel he could topple, so he bumps Billy back. He likes it when their long, skinny shadows merge on the pavement.
Astin wavers to a halt in the middle of the road. ‘I’m an actor. I used to go on the road in Strindberg.’ He makes Strindberg sound like a death metal band. ‘Now look at me. I’m playing a hairy-footed midget who, get this, carries saucepans to Mordor. Do I get so much as a light-sabre? Do I fuck.’
Lijah points an unlit cigarette at him. His voice is slurring. ‘Yeah, well, I get a magic sword called after whatsisname, the guy from The Police. Like it’s an eighties sword or something.’
‘FRODO
YOU DON’T HAVE TO
WEAR THAT DRESS TONIGHT - ’
Billy sings. He has a voice Dom likes, a round, almost edible sound.
‘Hey, I like that dress.’ Lijah sounds genuinely wounded.
‘Well, fuck off, so. Wear it if you like.’
‘Fucking Sam has all the mystical strength of, like, a doily.’
Astin is enjoying his rant. ‘And he’s fat. I’m firing my agent.’
‘I had an agent once.’ Between the loose neck of Billy’s teeshirt and the odd shell sort of necklace he wears, the cleft of his collarbone stands out under the skin. ‘Dunno what happened to the bastard. Think he might’ve died.’
‘It’ll prob’ly go straight to video, anyway.’ Dom is absolutely sure it won’t. After years of measuring career success in terms of how little heavy lifting he has to do, Dom is pretty sure this is the real thing, the thing he’s been wanting. Even if his new improved New Zealand self is proving harder to find than he’d thought, and parts of the old him, the parts he was hoping to shrug off, have stuck around, like the Fruit and Nut wrappers and crumpled receipts that lurk in his pockets.
He tips his head back and is nearly knocked off balance by the size and clarity of the stars.
Billy slings an arm around his neck. ‘Och, Dommie, never mind. We’ll still get offers like Third Astronaut and Fourth Cop.’
This move – the curl of his fingers against Dom’s collar, the whole warm weight of him, leaning - can look quite intimate when Billy does it with anyone else. But then he does it with other people quite often, and he’s only being friendly, because that’s what Billy is like, so Dom should leave it the fuck alone.
He rolls out his smoothest voice. ‘Ah well, be a nice change from being the only well-balanced hobbit.’
Billy’s mouth falls open in protest, softened the way it would be before a kiss. ‘Come again?’
Dom frowns contentedly. He loves this. ‘Well, Pippin’s a kleptomaniac, right. And Sam’s sexually frustrated enough to follow Frodo to certain death, just on the off chance of a shag in the Dead Marshes. And Frodo’s a bit thick. I mean, what part of ‘Don’t put on the ring’ doesn’t he understand?’
‘Just ‘cos Merry’s not getting any.’ Astin says sourly.
Lijah turns round and gives Dom the finger.
Dom closes his eyes and lets himself lean in a bit against Billy’s ribs, his teeshirt, the smell of his shampoo and aftershave and sweat, mixed with the smoke and smell of strangers.
‘Aye. Merry’s a lovely wee hobbit. ’ Dom can hear the smile rinsing through Billy’s voice, close to Dom’s ear. It feels drowningly close. ‘Merry’s the kind of hobbit you’d like to take home to your mother.’
Billy is just putting himself there, close to Dom’s shoulder, like a coffee table or a lamp. Only of course that his skin is warm, under the damp cotton sleeve of his teeshirt, which makes him not like any piece of furniture at all. His slightly hoarse beer-and-pizza breathing strokes the air beside Dom’s cheek.
The strange thing, though, is that a thought can go on circling your mind. You can’t stop thinking about it. Dom’s thinking about fucking Billy, undressing him, bending him, listening to his breathing roughen, gripping his hipbones and working the two of them up into a fast, wet smack of fucking. He would like to give this to Billy.
He risks a sideways look at Billy - no clues there, just a hot palm resting lightly on Dom’s neck, and not going away.
Considering this makes it hard to swallow. ‘People are just gonna think hobbits are Oompa Loompas,’ he says randomly.
‘Yeah, ‘stead of international sex symbols.’
‘If international sex symbols got milk moustaches and picked their noses all the time.’ Dom pokes Lijah in the back, and Lijah staggers.
Billy’s arm, his whole warm weight, slides away from Dom as they get to their gate. ‘I need food.’
And Dom’s common sense is saying all the time that Billy won’t look back at him as he heads up the path. Except he doesn’t listen, because he is a stupid, stupid headfuck.
----
From inside the house, the air swaggers faintly with music. Billy’s put on a CD, quietly, because of the neighbours. Dom can hear him moving round the kitchen, talking to Astin, opening the fridge, swearing softly.
‘Eh, Lij?’ Dom props Lijah on the steps outside the back door, hoping the air might sober him up. He can stay away from Billy for five minutes. He’ll come out and join them soon enough, with a Billy Toasted Special – ham, cheese, and anything else in the fridge, all served at the temperature of molten lava. ‘Did no one ever tell you to avoid spaghetti bolognese before a pub crawl?’
Lijah spits half-heartedly into a bush, then cranes back up. His ballpoint blue gaze skitters over Dom. ‘No, Dominic. My education was neglected before you guys took me on.’
Fair play to Lijah. He might get ripped to the tits on a chronically small amount of beer, but he can still manage sarcasm, and Dom appreciates that.
‘Not your fault, I suppose’, he says, magnanimous. The coarse clutch of alcohol is still buoying him up. He sits down next to Lijah and looks at their four denim knees. ‘I mean, the Lord shall smite thee if thou enterest a package store under twenty one and all that. Land of the Free, my arse.’
‘Not that I would know this, of course – ‘
‘Because you were this child star who lived in a bubble and bathed in humming birds’ tears all the time.’
‘Fuck off, asshole.’ Lijah shuffles up slightly so he can strike a match in the shelter of Dom’s body. He lights a cigarette and inhales like his only oxygen comes from this unideal source. ‘Remind me never to tell you anything, like, ever.’
Dom scrabbles in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. ‘Don’t have to. We just look up your fan sites for ammunition.’
Needling Lijah is brilliant, Dom loves it. He and Billy can do an excited teenybopper voice to perfection. ‘Elijah’s favourite food is home-made potato salad! Elijah loves animals! If Elijah had one wish, it’d be to bring all the rainforests back!’
Lijah’s face flashes round in the dark, the colour of cheap typing paper. ‘You’re dead.’
His hand clamps hotly around Dom’s wrist, then there’s a quick twist and he manages to get him in some kind of neck lock, a close hold.
‘Ow!’ Dom is caught off guard. He falls back under the full weight of Lijah.
‘Quite the running gag going there, haven’t you, Dom?’ Lijah gets in a jab at his ribs with one bitten-nailed forefinger.
‘If I ever - ow - if I ever - oh fuck off with that -’ Dom’s never seen Lijah’s face so close before, the wide line of his mouth, the bluish shadows under his eyes, hair pushed up crackly with gel. He can be surprising, this Lijah.
‘Begging will get you nowhere, Monaghan.’
‘Let go of me, you bollocks - ‘ He jerks sideways and is rewarded with a bit more throttling. The warm night smell of relaxing vegetation rises off the garden. His stomach gives a small electric twist.
‘Mention that rainforest stuff ever again, I’m going to have to hunt down your entire family.’
‘All right, all right. Jesus.’
The grip slackens.
Dom’s pulse is pounding up from a kick start. They’re still for long enough for Dom to hear the air moving round them. A thin breeze wavers between the wall and the mass of dark, sweet-smelling shrubs. His stomach flickers and his skin tightens down along his back.
‘For crying out loud - ’ Dom massages his neck. Something is swiping a moustache of sweat on his upper lip.
Lijah’s impersonal gaze is so blue it’s like a child coloured it in. His breathing pushes against Dom’s cheek, hoarse, snagging slightly. ‘You’ll live.’
Then Dom can’t resist it. ‘His first screen kiss was in Flipper, but they- ’
Lijah fits his mouth to Dom’s, hard, until his spine is jammed back against the breeze blocks of the wall. Two hands come up and angle his jaw. Lijah’s tongue pushes in, slick and heavy, then moves, slow.
Dom’s stupid like that. He has a tendency to go with the pleasant advice of his body, to get so he’s scrabbling against the idea of fucking Lijah in the night grass.
The door behind them swings open in a wash of yellowish light, and there’s a mutter of bare feet that stop. It still surprises Dom how little time it takes for him to know that this is Billy, his inhalation before speaking, that one small opening breath. ‘Uh, sorry.’
For a second, his naked eyes meet Dom’s, tidying away pain. He’s sunk back into the neck of his hoodie, like a loaf of risen dough that’s been punched down. Dom’s mind scrambles over itself to get off and away, stumbling, kicking over his collection of hopes.
‘We’re drunk,’ Lijah says, plaintive, just as the door shuts. Not slams, just closes, not loudly. ‘We’re only obeying orders from testosterone.’
Dom has the tearing sensation of having landed badly inside his own skin. He wants to give himself up to the air, to get scraped clean, pressed flat like an aerodynamic object. ‘Oh Jesus.’
It takes him three goes to strike a match, so he can light a cigarette. He doesn’t even manage it the third time, Lijah does it for him, impatient.
‘What’s up with you, anyway?’
Dom says nothing. He takes a drag on his cigarette, and holds the smoke in his mouth, watching the tip glow orange, then lets it curl down into his chest. This shouldn’t be happening, It shouldn’t feel this bad to get something wrong.
‘So you don’t –‘
‘No.’
‘Final offer?’
‘Oh, fuck off. Lij.’
‘All right, all right. I’m fucking off.’
----
Next day, there’s no one in the kitchen at noon, so Dom grills a slice of bread into submission, and then heads back up the stairs. He’s not feeling so bad, considering. The light, pulsing headache goes well with the nausea, and that’s fine because he doesn’t have to think. With a bit of luck, it’ll go on feeling like this, just uncomfortable, like he’s misplaced a belonging he’s fond of. Not more.
Dom has a genius for hiding his feelings from himself and he’s working at the limits of his genius on this one.
In Lijah’s room, the first thing he sees is the dark untidy shape of Astin’s hair denting the pillow, then the two sloughed condoms on the bedside table. Milky blue light from the thin curtains falls over the two bodies. The duvet has slid down and half-off them during the night. They face the wall, the two of them forming the same curve, like a comma. Lijah’s narrow shoulderblades, a jutting isoceles triangle of bone and muscle, flex and retract beneath the skin with his breathing, like he’s preparing for flight.
Bits of Dom’s thinking flake and crumble. There’s a scrape of rawness when he blinks, and something else, a rushing in his skin.
He stops at the foot of the bed, toast in hand, and stirs their mingled clothes with his bare foot. He lifts Lijah’s jeans off the floor, grasping the belt in his toes like a monkey. Then he drops it and slides his foot into Astin’s shoe. Wrong foot. He pushes it back in, under Lijah’s shirt, and turns to go.
‘Dom?’
Dom turns round to see Lijah wriggling round in the bed. He rolls up on an elbow, rubs his face and gives Dom his best lucky dog look, with just the right degree of delighted shame. ‘What?’ he says, tetchy, like there’s nothing new. There’s a lovebite on his collarbone, rosy against the skin.
Dom crunches on his charcoaly toast, which sounds deafeningly loud. ‘I bet you fuck like you’re raping a sheep, Lij.’ He can hear it in his voice, the sound of a man becoming superfluous.
‘Screw you, man.’ Lijah shies a pillow at him, but misses by a foot.
Astin is blinking and waking. He rolls onto his back and looks from Lijah to Dom.
‘Dom, Lij,’ he says, carefully. ‘Morning, you guys.’ Then his expression changes.
‘Jesus.’ Dom swallows the crust. He feels something like round stones moving inside him, settling into a new position. ’It’s like the fucking Waltons in here.’
----
Sunlight makes rectangles of light on the kitchen floor. Dom is trying to tune the radio into a dance station that seems to be making a desperate attempt to broadcast from the further reaches of the solar system. Lijah, in a pair of Astin’s tracksuit bottoms, wanders around like a lost, half-naked tourist, peering into cupboards like he’s never seen them before, making coffee. ‘Hey, Sean!’ He shouts. ‘Coffee?’
‘No,’ comes dull through the ceiling. ‘Or yeah, okay. Milk, two sugars.’
Lijah enjoys a sigh of disbelief, flips the filter lid shut and shouts back. ‘You have to come get it yourself! You weren’t that goddamn good.’ Overhead, feet hit the floor with an offended flounce.
Dom feels an unwilling grin fire up from his stomach. ‘Way more information than I needed there.’
‘You know you love it, you pervert.’ Lijah clatters mugs onto the table, the crappy white kind the entire crew and cast have been stealing by the dozen from the canteen. His spine, above the baggy waistband of the tracksuit, is slender and knobbed. He punches Dom on the shoulder as he sits down, and when he gets no response kicks him as well, a soft kick, barefooted.
‘Uh, you okay?’
‘Fuck off, Lij.’
They both make an effort not to grin and are both not entirely successful.
Dom eases down his first scalding gulp of coffee. There’s a lot of shrugging going on. Thank God for the shrug. He’d like Lijah to go on liking him, for the two of them to go on liking each other. Liking isn’t too excessive or meaningful, and he’d like it to go on. He tries to keep the memory of Billy in the doorway angled away.
He holds his knuckle against the boiling side of his mug. It hurts, but not enough.
Before the quiet gets too awkward, Astin pads in, fingers tucked away in his pockets, like he’s afraid what they’d do if they were left loose. His eyes flash across Lijah. He clears his throat and flicks a glance at Dom, testing. ‘Uh -‘
’Coffee.’ Lijah pushes a slopping mug across the table.
Astin sits down, drinks, scalds himself, winces. Usually He takes milk and sugar, but not this morning. ‘Fuck.’
‘Save the gratitude, it’s embarrassing, ‘ Lijah says, cocky. Dom sees him checking Astin’s eyes, though, sideways, when he thinks Dom isn’t looking.
Dom starts taking the sugar cubes out of the bowl one by one and building them into a wall on the table top. They’re yellowy and grainy because people keep building stuff, and then knocking them into pools of tea or beer.
Astin sets down his mug, and puts his hands over his face. After a minute it’s clear he’s laughing, his shoulders are shaking. ’Follow you into Mordor, my ass. I can’t believe I followed you upstairs.’
Billy appears, rubbing his eyes, wincing at the daylight, just as he says it, and Dom doesn’t in any way know what to do.
A wave of cold washes over him, trickles down nastily.
‘To be honest, I wouldn’t’ve thought Lij could’ve talked someone out of a burning car, far less into bed,’ he says randomly.
There’s a laugh building up inside him, but one that mightn’t be controllable if it gets out past his teeth.
Dom tries to catch Billy’s glance as he grunts and heads past the table to the sink, and he nearly does, but it’s like a poster flashing past when you’re on the train, there but too fast to catch. He watches Billy’s back, the creased white of his teeshirt, the soft rise and fall of his bare feet, the small plume of hair near his crown that won’t lie flat.
Lijah’s burying his nose in his mug and blushing slightly. ‘Fuck off, Dom. Jealousy is an ugly emotion.’
Astin drags his fingers down his face. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ.’
Hope bobs absurdly in Dom’s throat as Billy turns to pick up the milk, and his eyes tick back and forth between Astin and Lijah, pale and bemused.
Dom’s not looking at anyone, and starts adding a fifth layer to his wall. While he reaches for another cube, he curls his hand around it, like he’s protecting it from a draught. ‘And another thing, Lij,’ he says. ‘I’d piss better coffee.’
----
Day is basting the garden pleasantly. A cartoon reels silently across the tv screen in the living room. The radio is singing easy listening rubbish to itself in the kitchen.
Dom doesn’t mean to see it.
Because anything that happens just once has a kind of lightness about it, like it might well not have happened at all. More than once makes things real, and then you have to think about them. That lick of chill.
He was going to take a bath with his Walkman on, have that slippery comfortable feeling after the first almost-pain of relaxation, when you settle into hot water. Dom likes his Walkman, the way the music bisects his skull, a half-forgotten old lyric pushing up under the root of his brain, enclosing him in private sound.
He’s just closing the bathroom door when there they are in the doorway of Astin’s bedroom. He’s nearly about to say something, take the piss, break the air, but the stillness stops him.
It’s not even that they’re looking at each other. Astin’s got his back to the door, leaning on the frame, looking down. Lijah’s facing him, close, with one hand resting flat on Astin’s stomach. It’s just resting there, the thumb stroking the weave of his shirt, just softly thumbing the cloth.
Dom’s neck is straining from watching the hand, moving. It doesn’t seem to be Lijah’s hand at all, just a pale shape stroking slowly. It shifts the edge of the shirt, so Astin’s bare stomach shows above his belt.
Lijah’s hand slides up under the cotton. ‘So, d’you want to - ?’
‘Uh, okay, ‘Astin says, not looking up. ‘Twist my arm.’
Lijah’s thumbs go to the elastic of his tracksuit bottoms, hook under the waistband.
‘No strings, all right?’ Astin says.
‘Whatever.’ Lijah is elaborately casual. Then he gets down on his knees, matter of fact, unzips Astin’s jeans and rests his forehead against his undone belt. When he starts to suck him off, he’s almost absent-minded, like a kid with a lollipop, but graceful, too.
Astin’s eyes are squeezed shut. His bottom lips is caught in his teeth. He seems intent on reaching for something just too far away. His hands hover, slide along Lijah’s shoulders and up his neck, then cradle his head as it bobs and dips. Dom can feel the fingers stroke his neck, and the waking of each of the hairs as they pass. Lijah’s breathing is harsh around Astin’s cock, and the sinews in his upturned throat work like he’s in pain.
Dom closes the bathroom door before he lets himself watch Lijah drinking Astin’s spunk. But he isn’t all right, he’s full of untidy corners and shards of dark. Shame sours his teeth. He doesn’t usually lock the bathroom door, none of them do, but he does today.
He twists the tap and drinks straight from it, bending and pushing his mouth into the tepid, pressurised flow.
Outside, the light has gone golden and benevolent, dipping towards evening. Dom touches his hot forehead to the smooth cool of the glass.
The back door slams and there’s Billy below in the back garden, beer in hand, shrugging off his shirt, then settling himself on his back on the sun-yellowed grass. Billy who’s been all light and bright all day, but not in a good way, like a lighthouse warning you off the rocks. The lick of chill when he thinks of that. Billy goes in for carcinogenic lounging, though you’d never think it to look at him. His skin is bleached, pale, the kind that bruises easily. You could mark Billy, if you wanted, without hurting him. You could watch him walking around all day, knowing that under his clothes he was wearing the memory of your mouth and hands, worked into his skin, like a smell.
Billy closes his eyes, folds his arms behind his head, and turns his face up to the sun, exposing the small rise of his chin, and the softness beneath his jaw. Above the shallow ridges of his ribs, his nipples are pale and tight. After a while he reaches out and props the bottle on his stomach. It tilts a little, not much, when he breathes, the light through it stretching a green stripe across Billy’s skin.
Fuck, he’s lovely. The way he can be so still.
Dom holds his breath, hard in his chest as though it’s some kind of precious guarded pain. There’s the first real hook of hunger, growing in. His prick stirs, and he recognises the creep of free-floating need.
He lets his mind fill with the tranquil hiss of someone’s sprinkler, two doors along.
He unzips himself, and feels a lift of want taking the pumped weight of him off his fist. But it’s not just that he wants to come. He wants to fuck. To fuck. The one you can’t do on your own.
It’s like he looked in the mirror to discover his face is not the one he thought he had. It’s like those kitsch Catholic cards, the ridged plastic ones that, when you tilt them, show another picture behind the first, so you can make it look like Jesus is blessing you. To Dom it feels like everything has been tilted to reveal this whole other picture which has existed, just out of sight, all along.
He fills the sink. The water flashes and throws darts of light up on the ceiling. When he’s finished he’ll mop up and change his clothes, but for now he’s trying to wash out the inside of his head and he doesn’t know how to do that tidily.
----
Dom’s never got why people trek solo to the North Pole because it’s there. Because so are the sofa and the remote control. Why subject yourself to pain when nipping to the off-licence and back, followed by a bit of telly, is an option? Why explore when you can mooch, trek when you can taxi, hanglide when you can take the stairs?
But then he thinks, what the fuck.
That night, Dom finds Billy in the dark kitchen, slouched against the counter, smoking. He flicks on the light and Billy’s head snaps round. His pupils narrow like the closing of a fan. Sometimes Billy can look small, like a woollen jumper washed on hot.
Dom clears his throat experimentally. The whitish level light makes his eyes smart.
Billy’s holding a tv dinner like he doesn’t understand its purpose. ‘Tear along perforation, my arse’, he says. ‘I dunno why they have to make the bloody box like it’s Alcatraz. It’s a curry, for fuck sake, not the crown jewels.’ His grin is having to work harder than usual, it’s slightly bruised.
Dom looks at him. Billy is motionless like a stuffed animal skin, a cigarette hanging on his lip.
‘I’m surprised it doesn’t get delivered in a Securicor van or something.’ Billy runs his palm across his stubbly chin, then balances his cigarette on the edge of the drainer. ‘With, like, instructions that tell you how to dynamite it open.’
The need to reach and touch is slapping and twisting in Dom like a flag. ‘Never mind, you’re doing well. Once you’re past the tricky early stages, it’s a breeze.’
‘Eh?’ Billy’s brush of goldy-messy hair radiates from a single point, the widow’s peak on his forehead. He looks like he is just possibly finding this pleasant, the two of them together by themselves, just the two of them. Maybe.
‘Opening the box, that’s where a lot of people lose it completely. They fail to grasp that opening the box is possibly the most important step of the entire process.’ Dom shakes out the little hard plastic-wrapped bricks of curry and rice, with a conjuror’s flourish. ‘This is where the war is won or lost. See, the rest’s a formality. A child could do it.’
The complicated curves of Billy’s mouth move into their most irresistible presentation, the strange upside-down grin. He squashes the cardboard and chucks it in the rubbish sack hanging by the sink. ‘They take up less space, flattened,’ he explains.
From overhead comes the sound of Lijah’s voice being pleased about something private. No words, just an unashamed pulse of sound, pushed out onto the air.
‘Ah well,’ Dom says. ‘Don’t we all?’ He tries to keep his voice buttoned smooth.
Billy looks at him and says nothing. He breathes out through his lips, one small puff. Dom has learned to recognise this as a sign of distress. Then he says ‘Dommie.’
Billy’s voice around his name is such a good fit.
‘What did you do to your hand?’
Dom looks down at his hand flattened on the counter, the raw mark on the forefinger. ‘Oh, nothing. Scalded it.’
‘You need to be more careful.’
Dom lets Billy catch him with a raw, bright look.
‘Stupid hobbit,’ Billy says.
Billy is looking at him. Or maybe he was already looking at him, but he stays looking, his eyes stay still. Neither of them moves or breathes. They wait for the moment to settle, to die away.
‘C’mere.’ Billy is rubbing at his neck, frowning in concern.
They can have a therapeutic hug, this is okay. The soles of his feet peel away from the lino.
So he stands with Billy’s body close in against him, his head snug on his shoulder. Billy always begins with his left arm, then the right, then shuts in around him, a gesture that’s all give and no take. His hair feels something like feathers, blunt and soft at the same time, and has a slight woody smell, like freshly sharpened pencils. His body is compact and definite, something Dom has for some time definitely liked.
The whispering tick of his own blood sounds against his
eardrums.
He puts a hand on Billy’s ribcage and feels the swell and fall of his lungs. The aureoles of Billy’s eyes widen in surprise, and he sighs beneath Dom’ s palm, his breath sharp with smoke.
A nice hope ripples through his spine. There’s something about the shape of Billy’s lips, the childish way they dip, the way they meet doubtfully, like Billy’s never entirely finished speaking, so Dom kisses them. After a while, they open under his mouth, trusting, and then it seems natural to drag his mouth, slow, down Billy’s jaw to where the pulse is banging in the tender crevice under his ear. He’s never known a pulse to be more naked.
Dom feels warm, he feels fate snuggling round him with good intentions.
He can plainly feel Billy’s curiosity against the crest of his hip.
‘Can I fuck you?’ he whispers into the baby-soft spikes of Billy hair.
There’s a faint huff of a smile he can’t see, or maybe a small intake of breath in the hollow between his shoulder and his collarbone. ‘Do you not think it’s a bit, eh, copycat?’
‘Well, now you mention it.’ He waits.
After a bit, a hand feels its way into his, first tentative, then squeezing till he can feel the pleasant bite of the fingerbones. ‘Uh huh.’ Sometimes this is a terrible sound, a brush off, an agreement that doesn’t agree. Other times, though, this is a good sound to make, a wonderful fucking sound.
As they head for the stairs, Dom feels wonderfully, sickeningly tense.
He will know what Billy sounds like when he comes.
</lj-cut
AUTHOR: Sheela na Gig, aka Childeproof
PAIRING: Dom/Billy, Dom/Elijah, Elijah/Sean A.
RATING: R
WARNINGS: swearing, hobbits giving head, m/m sexual situations. Also, unbeta’d, so warnings for dangling qualifiers and such.
FEEDBACK: Would be most kind.
NOTE: The hobbits as suggested by their use as background noise in my ‘Boiling Point’ SB/VM series.
http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=childeproof&keyword=LotRPS&filter=all
SUMMARY: Dom’s never got why people trek solo to the North Pole because it’s there. Because so are the sofa and the remote control. Why subject yourself to pain when nipping to the off-licence and back, followed by a bit of telly, is an option? Why explore when you can mooch, trek when you can taxi, hanglide when you can take the stairs?
But then he thinks, what the fuck.
The cab drops the four of them at the corner. The driver taps his forehead as he hands over the change.
‘Ah, who pissed on your chips, anyway?’ Billy blows a kiss at the cab as it turns in someone’s gateway, tires protesting.
‘You know, we may have just been blacklisted,’ Dom says.
A curtain twitches nearby, and Billy waves at that too.
‘Come on, you daft git.’ Dom’s brain is numb after hours of bad techno, and watching Astin, Billy and Lijah bouncing off each other and the walls like human pinballs. His ears are still rushing with the quiet, as if he just dipped his head inside a seashell. There’s only a small rind of moon, not the full, grubby milk-coloured globe he likes best.
‘That club is shit.’ Dom says this every time they’ve been there, and the four of them agree until the next time they have a skinful and someone says ‘Come on, it’s not that bad.’ He doesn’t mind, though, because tonight he doesn’t mind anything. He’s pissed as a fish and happy to be weaving his way home, breathing himself clear of the night’s second-hand heat and cigarette smoke.
‘Place is a bloody museum with a mirror ball.’ Billy bumps Dom with his shoulder, warm and sleepy and drunk. He’s wearing his current favourite teeshirt, which is grass green and says NO FUCKING SWEARING.
‘The beer was like - like a urine sample, ‘ Lijah says over his shoulder. ‘Only a really huge one.’ Drunk, Lijah can sound so relaxed Dom wonders about his vital signs.
‘Yeah, like from a circus animal or something.’ Billy lets out his shunting, breathy laugh, coming in neat against Dom’s hip. He gets drunk from the legs up, Billy does. The pleasantly heavy meeting of their sides makes Dom feel he could topple, so he bumps Billy back. He likes it when their long, skinny shadows merge on the pavement.
Astin wavers to a halt in the middle of the road. ‘I’m an actor. I used to go on the road in Strindberg.’ He makes Strindberg sound like a death metal band. ‘Now look at me. I’m playing a hairy-footed midget who, get this, carries saucepans to Mordor. Do I get so much as a light-sabre? Do I fuck.’
Lijah points an unlit cigarette at him. His voice is slurring. ‘Yeah, well, I get a magic sword called after whatsisname, the guy from The Police. Like it’s an eighties sword or something.’
‘FRODO
YOU DON’T HAVE TO
WEAR THAT DRESS TONIGHT - ’
Billy sings. He has a voice Dom likes, a round, almost edible sound.
‘Hey, I like that dress.’ Lijah sounds genuinely wounded.
‘Well, fuck off, so. Wear it if you like.’
‘Fucking Sam has all the mystical strength of, like, a doily.’
Astin is enjoying his rant. ‘And he’s fat. I’m firing my agent.’
‘I had an agent once.’ Between the loose neck of Billy’s teeshirt and the odd shell sort of necklace he wears, the cleft of his collarbone stands out under the skin. ‘Dunno what happened to the bastard. Think he might’ve died.’
‘It’ll prob’ly go straight to video, anyway.’ Dom is absolutely sure it won’t. After years of measuring career success in terms of how little heavy lifting he has to do, Dom is pretty sure this is the real thing, the thing he’s been wanting. Even if his new improved New Zealand self is proving harder to find than he’d thought, and parts of the old him, the parts he was hoping to shrug off, have stuck around, like the Fruit and Nut wrappers and crumpled receipts that lurk in his pockets.
He tips his head back and is nearly knocked off balance by the size and clarity of the stars.
Billy slings an arm around his neck. ‘Och, Dommie, never mind. We’ll still get offers like Third Astronaut and Fourth Cop.’
This move – the curl of his fingers against Dom’s collar, the whole warm weight of him, leaning - can look quite intimate when Billy does it with anyone else. But then he does it with other people quite often, and he’s only being friendly, because that’s what Billy is like, so Dom should leave it the fuck alone.
He rolls out his smoothest voice. ‘Ah well, be a nice change from being the only well-balanced hobbit.’
Billy’s mouth falls open in protest, softened the way it would be before a kiss. ‘Come again?’
Dom frowns contentedly. He loves this. ‘Well, Pippin’s a kleptomaniac, right. And Sam’s sexually frustrated enough to follow Frodo to certain death, just on the off chance of a shag in the Dead Marshes. And Frodo’s a bit thick. I mean, what part of ‘Don’t put on the ring’ doesn’t he understand?’
‘Just ‘cos Merry’s not getting any.’ Astin says sourly.
Lijah turns round and gives Dom the finger.
Dom closes his eyes and lets himself lean in a bit against Billy’s ribs, his teeshirt, the smell of his shampoo and aftershave and sweat, mixed with the smoke and smell of strangers.
‘Aye. Merry’s a lovely wee hobbit. ’ Dom can hear the smile rinsing through Billy’s voice, close to Dom’s ear. It feels drowningly close. ‘Merry’s the kind of hobbit you’d like to take home to your mother.’
Billy is just putting himself there, close to Dom’s shoulder, like a coffee table or a lamp. Only of course that his skin is warm, under the damp cotton sleeve of his teeshirt, which makes him not like any piece of furniture at all. His slightly hoarse beer-and-pizza breathing strokes the air beside Dom’s cheek.
The strange thing, though, is that a thought can go on circling your mind. You can’t stop thinking about it. Dom’s thinking about fucking Billy, undressing him, bending him, listening to his breathing roughen, gripping his hipbones and working the two of them up into a fast, wet smack of fucking. He would like to give this to Billy.
He risks a sideways look at Billy - no clues there, just a hot palm resting lightly on Dom’s neck, and not going away.
Considering this makes it hard to swallow. ‘People are just gonna think hobbits are Oompa Loompas,’ he says randomly.
‘Yeah, ‘stead of international sex symbols.’
‘If international sex symbols got milk moustaches and picked their noses all the time.’ Dom pokes Lijah in the back, and Lijah staggers.
Billy’s arm, his whole warm weight, slides away from Dom as they get to their gate. ‘I need food.’
And Dom’s common sense is saying all the time that Billy won’t look back at him as he heads up the path. Except he doesn’t listen, because he is a stupid, stupid headfuck.
----
From inside the house, the air swaggers faintly with music. Billy’s put on a CD, quietly, because of the neighbours. Dom can hear him moving round the kitchen, talking to Astin, opening the fridge, swearing softly.
‘Eh, Lij?’ Dom props Lijah on the steps outside the back door, hoping the air might sober him up. He can stay away from Billy for five minutes. He’ll come out and join them soon enough, with a Billy Toasted Special – ham, cheese, and anything else in the fridge, all served at the temperature of molten lava. ‘Did no one ever tell you to avoid spaghetti bolognese before a pub crawl?’
Lijah spits half-heartedly into a bush, then cranes back up. His ballpoint blue gaze skitters over Dom. ‘No, Dominic. My education was neglected before you guys took me on.’
Fair play to Lijah. He might get ripped to the tits on a chronically small amount of beer, but he can still manage sarcasm, and Dom appreciates that.
‘Not your fault, I suppose’, he says, magnanimous. The coarse clutch of alcohol is still buoying him up. He sits down next to Lijah and looks at their four denim knees. ‘I mean, the Lord shall smite thee if thou enterest a package store under twenty one and all that. Land of the Free, my arse.’
‘Not that I would know this, of course – ‘
‘Because you were this child star who lived in a bubble and bathed in humming birds’ tears all the time.’
‘Fuck off, asshole.’ Lijah shuffles up slightly so he can strike a match in the shelter of Dom’s body. He lights a cigarette and inhales like his only oxygen comes from this unideal source. ‘Remind me never to tell you anything, like, ever.’
Dom scrabbles in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. ‘Don’t have to. We just look up your fan sites for ammunition.’
Needling Lijah is brilliant, Dom loves it. He and Billy can do an excited teenybopper voice to perfection. ‘Elijah’s favourite food is home-made potato salad! Elijah loves animals! If Elijah had one wish, it’d be to bring all the rainforests back!’
Lijah’s face flashes round in the dark, the colour of cheap typing paper. ‘You’re dead.’
His hand clamps hotly around Dom’s wrist, then there’s a quick twist and he manages to get him in some kind of neck lock, a close hold.
‘Ow!’ Dom is caught off guard. He falls back under the full weight of Lijah.
‘Quite the running gag going there, haven’t you, Dom?’ Lijah gets in a jab at his ribs with one bitten-nailed forefinger.
‘If I ever - ow - if I ever - oh fuck off with that -’ Dom’s never seen Lijah’s face so close before, the wide line of his mouth, the bluish shadows under his eyes, hair pushed up crackly with gel. He can be surprising, this Lijah.
‘Begging will get you nowhere, Monaghan.’
‘Let go of me, you bollocks - ‘ He jerks sideways and is rewarded with a bit more throttling. The warm night smell of relaxing vegetation rises off the garden. His stomach gives a small electric twist.
‘Mention that rainforest stuff ever again, I’m going to have to hunt down your entire family.’
‘All right, all right. Jesus.’
The grip slackens.
Dom’s pulse is pounding up from a kick start. They’re still for long enough for Dom to hear the air moving round them. A thin breeze wavers between the wall and the mass of dark, sweet-smelling shrubs. His stomach flickers and his skin tightens down along his back.
‘For crying out loud - ’ Dom massages his neck. Something is swiping a moustache of sweat on his upper lip.
Lijah’s impersonal gaze is so blue it’s like a child coloured it in. His breathing pushes against Dom’s cheek, hoarse, snagging slightly. ‘You’ll live.’
Then Dom can’t resist it. ‘His first screen kiss was in Flipper, but they- ’
Lijah fits his mouth to Dom’s, hard, until his spine is jammed back against the breeze blocks of the wall. Two hands come up and angle his jaw. Lijah’s tongue pushes in, slick and heavy, then moves, slow.
Dom’s stupid like that. He has a tendency to go with the pleasant advice of his body, to get so he’s scrabbling against the idea of fucking Lijah in the night grass.
The door behind them swings open in a wash of yellowish light, and there’s a mutter of bare feet that stop. It still surprises Dom how little time it takes for him to know that this is Billy, his inhalation before speaking, that one small opening breath. ‘Uh, sorry.’
For a second, his naked eyes meet Dom’s, tidying away pain. He’s sunk back into the neck of his hoodie, like a loaf of risen dough that’s been punched down. Dom’s mind scrambles over itself to get off and away, stumbling, kicking over his collection of hopes.
‘We’re drunk,’ Lijah says, plaintive, just as the door shuts. Not slams, just closes, not loudly. ‘We’re only obeying orders from testosterone.’
Dom has the tearing sensation of having landed badly inside his own skin. He wants to give himself up to the air, to get scraped clean, pressed flat like an aerodynamic object. ‘Oh Jesus.’
It takes him three goes to strike a match, so he can light a cigarette. He doesn’t even manage it the third time, Lijah does it for him, impatient.
‘What’s up with you, anyway?’
Dom says nothing. He takes a drag on his cigarette, and holds the smoke in his mouth, watching the tip glow orange, then lets it curl down into his chest. This shouldn’t be happening, It shouldn’t feel this bad to get something wrong.
‘So you don’t –‘
‘No.’
‘Final offer?’
‘Oh, fuck off. Lij.’
‘All right, all right. I’m fucking off.’
----
Next day, there’s no one in the kitchen at noon, so Dom grills a slice of bread into submission, and then heads back up the stairs. He’s not feeling so bad, considering. The light, pulsing headache goes well with the nausea, and that’s fine because he doesn’t have to think. With a bit of luck, it’ll go on feeling like this, just uncomfortable, like he’s misplaced a belonging he’s fond of. Not more.
Dom has a genius for hiding his feelings from himself and he’s working at the limits of his genius on this one.
In Lijah’s room, the first thing he sees is the dark untidy shape of Astin’s hair denting the pillow, then the two sloughed condoms on the bedside table. Milky blue light from the thin curtains falls over the two bodies. The duvet has slid down and half-off them during the night. They face the wall, the two of them forming the same curve, like a comma. Lijah’s narrow shoulderblades, a jutting isoceles triangle of bone and muscle, flex and retract beneath the skin with his breathing, like he’s preparing for flight.
Bits of Dom’s thinking flake and crumble. There’s a scrape of rawness when he blinks, and something else, a rushing in his skin.
He stops at the foot of the bed, toast in hand, and stirs their mingled clothes with his bare foot. He lifts Lijah’s jeans off the floor, grasping the belt in his toes like a monkey. Then he drops it and slides his foot into Astin’s shoe. Wrong foot. He pushes it back in, under Lijah’s shirt, and turns to go.
‘Dom?’
Dom turns round to see Lijah wriggling round in the bed. He rolls up on an elbow, rubs his face and gives Dom his best lucky dog look, with just the right degree of delighted shame. ‘What?’ he says, tetchy, like there’s nothing new. There’s a lovebite on his collarbone, rosy against the skin.
Dom crunches on his charcoaly toast, which sounds deafeningly loud. ‘I bet you fuck like you’re raping a sheep, Lij.’ He can hear it in his voice, the sound of a man becoming superfluous.
‘Screw you, man.’ Lijah shies a pillow at him, but misses by a foot.
Astin is blinking and waking. He rolls onto his back and looks from Lijah to Dom.
‘Dom, Lij,’ he says, carefully. ‘Morning, you guys.’ Then his expression changes.
‘Jesus.’ Dom swallows the crust. He feels something like round stones moving inside him, settling into a new position. ’It’s like the fucking Waltons in here.’
----
Sunlight makes rectangles of light on the kitchen floor. Dom is trying to tune the radio into a dance station that seems to be making a desperate attempt to broadcast from the further reaches of the solar system. Lijah, in a pair of Astin’s tracksuit bottoms, wanders around like a lost, half-naked tourist, peering into cupboards like he’s never seen them before, making coffee. ‘Hey, Sean!’ He shouts. ‘Coffee?’
‘No,’ comes dull through the ceiling. ‘Or yeah, okay. Milk, two sugars.’
Lijah enjoys a sigh of disbelief, flips the filter lid shut and shouts back. ‘You have to come get it yourself! You weren’t that goddamn good.’ Overhead, feet hit the floor with an offended flounce.
Dom feels an unwilling grin fire up from his stomach. ‘Way more information than I needed there.’
‘You know you love it, you pervert.’ Lijah clatters mugs onto the table, the crappy white kind the entire crew and cast have been stealing by the dozen from the canteen. His spine, above the baggy waistband of the tracksuit, is slender and knobbed. He punches Dom on the shoulder as he sits down, and when he gets no response kicks him as well, a soft kick, barefooted.
‘Uh, you okay?’
‘Fuck off, Lij.’
They both make an effort not to grin and are both not entirely successful.
Dom eases down his first scalding gulp of coffee. There’s a lot of shrugging going on. Thank God for the shrug. He’d like Lijah to go on liking him, for the two of them to go on liking each other. Liking isn’t too excessive or meaningful, and he’d like it to go on. He tries to keep the memory of Billy in the doorway angled away.
He holds his knuckle against the boiling side of his mug. It hurts, but not enough.
Before the quiet gets too awkward, Astin pads in, fingers tucked away in his pockets, like he’s afraid what they’d do if they were left loose. His eyes flash across Lijah. He clears his throat and flicks a glance at Dom, testing. ‘Uh -‘
’Coffee.’ Lijah pushes a slopping mug across the table.
Astin sits down, drinks, scalds himself, winces. Usually He takes milk and sugar, but not this morning. ‘Fuck.’
‘Save the gratitude, it’s embarrassing, ‘ Lijah says, cocky. Dom sees him checking Astin’s eyes, though, sideways, when he thinks Dom isn’t looking.
Dom starts taking the sugar cubes out of the bowl one by one and building them into a wall on the table top. They’re yellowy and grainy because people keep building stuff, and then knocking them into pools of tea or beer.
Astin sets down his mug, and puts his hands over his face. After a minute it’s clear he’s laughing, his shoulders are shaking. ’Follow you into Mordor, my ass. I can’t believe I followed you upstairs.’
Billy appears, rubbing his eyes, wincing at the daylight, just as he says it, and Dom doesn’t in any way know what to do.
A wave of cold washes over him, trickles down nastily.
‘To be honest, I wouldn’t’ve thought Lij could’ve talked someone out of a burning car, far less into bed,’ he says randomly.
There’s a laugh building up inside him, but one that mightn’t be controllable if it gets out past his teeth.
Dom tries to catch Billy’s glance as he grunts and heads past the table to the sink, and he nearly does, but it’s like a poster flashing past when you’re on the train, there but too fast to catch. He watches Billy’s back, the creased white of his teeshirt, the soft rise and fall of his bare feet, the small plume of hair near his crown that won’t lie flat.
Lijah’s burying his nose in his mug and blushing slightly. ‘Fuck off, Dom. Jealousy is an ugly emotion.’
Astin drags his fingers down his face. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ.’
Hope bobs absurdly in Dom’s throat as Billy turns to pick up the milk, and his eyes tick back and forth between Astin and Lijah, pale and bemused.
Dom’s not looking at anyone, and starts adding a fifth layer to his wall. While he reaches for another cube, he curls his hand around it, like he’s protecting it from a draught. ‘And another thing, Lij,’ he says. ‘I’d piss better coffee.’
----
Day is basting the garden pleasantly. A cartoon reels silently across the tv screen in the living room. The radio is singing easy listening rubbish to itself in the kitchen.
Dom doesn’t mean to see it.
Because anything that happens just once has a kind of lightness about it, like it might well not have happened at all. More than once makes things real, and then you have to think about them. That lick of chill.
He was going to take a bath with his Walkman on, have that slippery comfortable feeling after the first almost-pain of relaxation, when you settle into hot water. Dom likes his Walkman, the way the music bisects his skull, a half-forgotten old lyric pushing up under the root of his brain, enclosing him in private sound.
He’s just closing the bathroom door when there they are in the doorway of Astin’s bedroom. He’s nearly about to say something, take the piss, break the air, but the stillness stops him.
It’s not even that they’re looking at each other. Astin’s got his back to the door, leaning on the frame, looking down. Lijah’s facing him, close, with one hand resting flat on Astin’s stomach. It’s just resting there, the thumb stroking the weave of his shirt, just softly thumbing the cloth.
Dom’s neck is straining from watching the hand, moving. It doesn’t seem to be Lijah’s hand at all, just a pale shape stroking slowly. It shifts the edge of the shirt, so Astin’s bare stomach shows above his belt.
Lijah’s hand slides up under the cotton. ‘So, d’you want to - ?’
‘Uh, okay, ‘Astin says, not looking up. ‘Twist my arm.’
Lijah’s thumbs go to the elastic of his tracksuit bottoms, hook under the waistband.
‘No strings, all right?’ Astin says.
‘Whatever.’ Lijah is elaborately casual. Then he gets down on his knees, matter of fact, unzips Astin’s jeans and rests his forehead against his undone belt. When he starts to suck him off, he’s almost absent-minded, like a kid with a lollipop, but graceful, too.
Astin’s eyes are squeezed shut. His bottom lips is caught in his teeth. He seems intent on reaching for something just too far away. His hands hover, slide along Lijah’s shoulders and up his neck, then cradle his head as it bobs and dips. Dom can feel the fingers stroke his neck, and the waking of each of the hairs as they pass. Lijah’s breathing is harsh around Astin’s cock, and the sinews in his upturned throat work like he’s in pain.
Dom closes the bathroom door before he lets himself watch Lijah drinking Astin’s spunk. But he isn’t all right, he’s full of untidy corners and shards of dark. Shame sours his teeth. He doesn’t usually lock the bathroom door, none of them do, but he does today.
He twists the tap and drinks straight from it, bending and pushing his mouth into the tepid, pressurised flow.
Outside, the light has gone golden and benevolent, dipping towards evening. Dom touches his hot forehead to the smooth cool of the glass.
The back door slams and there’s Billy below in the back garden, beer in hand, shrugging off his shirt, then settling himself on his back on the sun-yellowed grass. Billy who’s been all light and bright all day, but not in a good way, like a lighthouse warning you off the rocks. The lick of chill when he thinks of that. Billy goes in for carcinogenic lounging, though you’d never think it to look at him. His skin is bleached, pale, the kind that bruises easily. You could mark Billy, if you wanted, without hurting him. You could watch him walking around all day, knowing that under his clothes he was wearing the memory of your mouth and hands, worked into his skin, like a smell.
Billy closes his eyes, folds his arms behind his head, and turns his face up to the sun, exposing the small rise of his chin, and the softness beneath his jaw. Above the shallow ridges of his ribs, his nipples are pale and tight. After a while he reaches out and props the bottle on his stomach. It tilts a little, not much, when he breathes, the light through it stretching a green stripe across Billy’s skin.
Fuck, he’s lovely. The way he can be so still.
Dom holds his breath, hard in his chest as though it’s some kind of precious guarded pain. There’s the first real hook of hunger, growing in. His prick stirs, and he recognises the creep of free-floating need.
He lets his mind fill with the tranquil hiss of someone’s sprinkler, two doors along.
He unzips himself, and feels a lift of want taking the pumped weight of him off his fist. But it’s not just that he wants to come. He wants to fuck. To fuck. The one you can’t do on your own.
It’s like he looked in the mirror to discover his face is not the one he thought he had. It’s like those kitsch Catholic cards, the ridged plastic ones that, when you tilt them, show another picture behind the first, so you can make it look like Jesus is blessing you. To Dom it feels like everything has been tilted to reveal this whole other picture which has existed, just out of sight, all along.
He fills the sink. The water flashes and throws darts of light up on the ceiling. When he’s finished he’ll mop up and change his clothes, but for now he’s trying to wash out the inside of his head and he doesn’t know how to do that tidily.
----
Dom’s never got why people trek solo to the North Pole because it’s there. Because so are the sofa and the remote control. Why subject yourself to pain when nipping to the off-licence and back, followed by a bit of telly, is an option? Why explore when you can mooch, trek when you can taxi, hanglide when you can take the stairs?
But then he thinks, what the fuck.
That night, Dom finds Billy in the dark kitchen, slouched against the counter, smoking. He flicks on the light and Billy’s head snaps round. His pupils narrow like the closing of a fan. Sometimes Billy can look small, like a woollen jumper washed on hot.
Dom clears his throat experimentally. The whitish level light makes his eyes smart.
Billy’s holding a tv dinner like he doesn’t understand its purpose. ‘Tear along perforation, my arse’, he says. ‘I dunno why they have to make the bloody box like it’s Alcatraz. It’s a curry, for fuck sake, not the crown jewels.’ His grin is having to work harder than usual, it’s slightly bruised.
Dom looks at him. Billy is motionless like a stuffed animal skin, a cigarette hanging on his lip.
‘I’m surprised it doesn’t get delivered in a Securicor van or something.’ Billy runs his palm across his stubbly chin, then balances his cigarette on the edge of the drainer. ‘With, like, instructions that tell you how to dynamite it open.’
The need to reach and touch is slapping and twisting in Dom like a flag. ‘Never mind, you’re doing well. Once you’re past the tricky early stages, it’s a breeze.’
‘Eh?’ Billy’s brush of goldy-messy hair radiates from a single point, the widow’s peak on his forehead. He looks like he is just possibly finding this pleasant, the two of them together by themselves, just the two of them. Maybe.
‘Opening the box, that’s where a lot of people lose it completely. They fail to grasp that opening the box is possibly the most important step of the entire process.’ Dom shakes out the little hard plastic-wrapped bricks of curry and rice, with a conjuror’s flourish. ‘This is where the war is won or lost. See, the rest’s a formality. A child could do it.’
The complicated curves of Billy’s mouth move into their most irresistible presentation, the strange upside-down grin. He squashes the cardboard and chucks it in the rubbish sack hanging by the sink. ‘They take up less space, flattened,’ he explains.
From overhead comes the sound of Lijah’s voice being pleased about something private. No words, just an unashamed pulse of sound, pushed out onto the air.
‘Ah well,’ Dom says. ‘Don’t we all?’ He tries to keep his voice buttoned smooth.
Billy looks at him and says nothing. He breathes out through his lips, one small puff. Dom has learned to recognise this as a sign of distress. Then he says ‘Dommie.’
Billy’s voice around his name is such a good fit.
‘What did you do to your hand?’
Dom looks down at his hand flattened on the counter, the raw mark on the forefinger. ‘Oh, nothing. Scalded it.’
‘You need to be more careful.’
Dom lets Billy catch him with a raw, bright look.
‘Stupid hobbit,’ Billy says.
Billy is looking at him. Or maybe he was already looking at him, but he stays looking, his eyes stay still. Neither of them moves or breathes. They wait for the moment to settle, to die away.
‘C’mere.’ Billy is rubbing at his neck, frowning in concern.
They can have a therapeutic hug, this is okay. The soles of his feet peel away from the lino.
So he stands with Billy’s body close in against him, his head snug on his shoulder. Billy always begins with his left arm, then the right, then shuts in around him, a gesture that’s all give and no take. His hair feels something like feathers, blunt and soft at the same time, and has a slight woody smell, like freshly sharpened pencils. His body is compact and definite, something Dom has for some time definitely liked.
The whispering tick of his own blood sounds against his
eardrums.
He puts a hand on Billy’s ribcage and feels the swell and fall of his lungs. The aureoles of Billy’s eyes widen in surprise, and he sighs beneath Dom’ s palm, his breath sharp with smoke.
A nice hope ripples through his spine. There’s something about the shape of Billy’s lips, the childish way they dip, the way they meet doubtfully, like Billy’s never entirely finished speaking, so Dom kisses them. After a while, they open under his mouth, trusting, and then it seems natural to drag his mouth, slow, down Billy’s jaw to where the pulse is banging in the tender crevice under his ear. He’s never known a pulse to be more naked.
Dom feels warm, he feels fate snuggling round him with good intentions.
He can plainly feel Billy’s curiosity against the crest of his hip.
‘Can I fuck you?’ he whispers into the baby-soft spikes of Billy hair.
There’s a faint huff of a smile he can’t see, or maybe a small intake of breath in the hollow between his shoulder and his collarbone. ‘Do you not think it’s a bit, eh, copycat?’
‘Well, now you mention it.’ He waits.
After a bit, a hand feels its way into his, first tentative, then squeezing till he can feel the pleasant bite of the fingerbones. ‘Uh huh.’ Sometimes this is a terrible sound, a brush off, an agreement that doesn’t agree. Other times, though, this is a good sound to make, a wonderful fucking sound.
As they head for the stairs, Dom feels wonderfully, sickeningly tense.
He will know what Billy sounds like when he comes.
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‘They take up less space, flattened,’ he explains.
From overhead comes the sound of Lijah’s voice being pleased about something private. No words, just an unashamed pulse of sound, pushed out onto the air.
‘Ah well,’ Dom says. ‘Don’t we all?’ He tries to keep his voice buttoned smooth.
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Thanks! *is overcome*