delirium - fever

by cimorene

"You can't tell me you've never wondered," Billy said, because he misinterpreted why Elijah was choking.

Dom patted him on the back and said in his patented Dom Accent, "Y'okay, mate?" Ah yes. Mate. Dom calling him mate. Had a special sort of poignance to it now, didn't it? He slanted a glance at Dom, thought the word again. Mate. He decided that yes. Fierce hot swell of it that he clamped down on, and he shook his head at Billy, leaning back into the chair and incidentally into Dom's hand.

Then he leaned back more. And sprawled in his chair, legs apart, until he felt completely debauched. And grinned: "No, actually. I don't have to wonder." Dom, surprised, glanced at him, but his lips were twitching, and when he wrapped his arm around Elijah's shoulders it was only awkward at first.

And that was how they told Billy.

Billy blinked a little, and then laughed, and got up for another piece of mostly-cold pizza, which was getting to be almost Lij and Dom's entire diet. "Well," he said over his shoulder, "no one could say you don't have a sense of dramatic timing, you two."

"Hey," Dom disclaimed, but he was grinning.

Elijah bounced up from his chair for another beer, and bent to nudge against Billy's shoulder. "Yeah. And you know what? I'm also pretty good at making an entrance."

"You should look into acting," said Billy in his perpetually-ingenuous Scots intonation, and Elijah thanked him. One of the first things Billy had said when they got in had been, "Is that Monty Python I see?"

Now they were pretty well committed to watching Time Bandits (thankfully they had a third), the second night of Monty Python in a row, only without sleep in between. "Popcorn," Elijah mused, trying to remember if he had any. "...Or maybe just potato chips."

"Yes," Dom announced though no one had said anything, "Lij is usually this interesting." Which was just totally unfair and drew an outraged glare.

"That's not what you said yesterday afternoon," said Elijah. Dom's exact words, in fact, had been more like "baby" or "oh FUCK yeah," depending on what part of the afternoon you wanted to draw them from.

"I'll just be going in the living room and pretending not to eavesdrop, then," said Billy, eyebrows arched.

Dom grinned at Elijah and followed Billy. Chips, then. It wasn't so much that he couldn't have Dom alone with anyone else as that all of a sudden he wasn't so sure about having Dom out of his sight, like everything that had happened since they'd last seen Billy was even less real than never talking about it could make it.

On the plus side, there wasn't going to be any sleeping-arrangement awkwardness, and nothing said he had to let go of Dom all night...

...Especially not Dom, who wrapped an arm over the arm Lij flung across his chest and agreeably tangled their legs. And when Elijah woke up, Dom's face was buried in his hair. Not that he was going to stop the sleeping, however much elbowing and kicking and blanket-stealing accidentally went on, especially not after such a few short months of it. But still, he couldn't help feeling their bodies were lying to him, wrapping so neatly and quietly together, bronzing and warming in the early light from the window like one entity. The careless weight of Dom's hand in the small of his back suggested something that, six months ago when he was sane, would have scared him. Now it was too tempting, but it didn't make him afraid so much as tired.

And, after all, the only conceivable solutions involved pulling back or asking Dom to, and what a confrontation that'd be: "Could you stop being so affectionate?" And who knew if he could. Didn't he cherish Dom's friendship, and didn't he know Dom wasn't so easy and open with almost anyone, and maybe lately anyone at all? And hadn't they acted, well, pretty much the same before--with the exception of the fucking? No, if he couldn't handle it, it was all his own fault.

He was determined not to make himself insane from overindulgence (Dom as a drug, yeah), but that didn't mean he could stand to deny himself.

It wasn't at all hard to sneak out of bed and leave Dom asleep. He put on a shirt and went to make coffee, only to discover Billy hovering over the coffee maker and frowning. They talked in that hushed visiting-over-breakfast way, and Elijah fidgeted with the newspaper, folding and unfolding it and smoothing out the creases. Finally Elijah thought about breakfast and realized all they had were eggs and cereal.

"D'you want to get bagels or something?" He asked, scrubbing a hand over his face.

"Sure," Billy said, a lovely round oo sound in his mouth.

"So, what's it like?" Billy wondered, when they were alone in the car, and Lij started and nearly swerved into the median. "Oops. Watch it, there."

"Um, what's it like--with a--I mean, I thought you were bi," said Elijah confusedly in a heap.

"Oh," Billy laughed, "no, I'm not, but it's not what I'm askin'." Oh. "What's it like--with you, and Dom?" Admirable control kept his hands steady on the steering wheel through that bombshell.

He bit his lip and looked sideways, wondering what to say. "It's like--listen, there's--nothing else is going on." Being miserable tended to make him confused, and also defensive, but either he hadn't quite reached the defensive point yet or he felt he owed better to Billy.

There was silence in the car, and he saw Billy look surprised before he changed the subject. They got bagels, though, and when they were driving back he managed to change it back again in one of the most tricky round-about ways Lij had ever imagined.

"Did you know," he said, twisting the neck of the clear plastic bag in his hands, "that I used to play the French horn in high school?"

"No!"

"Well, I did," said Billy with an odd kind of resolution.

Elijah tilted his head, thinking of Christmas ornaments and illustrations. "Did you like it?"

"It was bloody difficult," was the answer, "but I liked it. There's a lot about it that's not so very easy to learn, like what to do with your mouth when your fingers are a certain way to make a different note." Elijah was starting to get lost, which Billy seemed to sense, so he added, "It's very complicated. Takes control," and he indicated the muscles around his mouth.

"Uhuh."

"...Of course, it also takes time to learn," Billy continued thoughtfully, almost as if he were talking to himself: "Time and practice. Some things, though--practice won't do a'tall. If there's a really hard part, you know, in one of the songs...sometimes I could play it and play it and never get it right, like if you've got to switch to a higher note at once, and you have to do it with your mouth really quick. It's odd," he continued, slowing his words deliberately, "It's odd because you know you don't how to do it, but you know--how to know how to do it--before you know. You can feel yourself almost know it, and almost do it. And then one day you go to bed and when you wake up, it doesn't even have to make sense, it just is. And you do it right without thinking about it, because your mind sort of knows how to learn how to handle it on its own. Until that happens, there's nothing you can do but wait."

There were some moments of silence with that cryptic story filling the car like the tick of a clock or like drops of water splashing from a leaky faucet, and Elijah was almost so upset as to miss the turn to his street. He pulled too fast into the driveway, screeched to a halt and almost slammed the door behind him. Billy was watching him, maybe a little anxiously.

He had to say something. What he came up with was, "There are some things you can't learn to not need."

Billy shook his head. "No indeed, you can't." Was that a smile? "That's not what you're going to learn."

Dom was up and had made a fresh pot of coffee when they came inside. He looked up at them in that quick, suspicious-looking Dom-in-the-morning way that made Elijah's teeth ache, a little wrinkle between Dom's brows and Dom's mouth still. It wasn't suspicious, really, so much as sleepy, and Elijah had a premonition of teasing, "It wasn't me," a million times until it became a running joke, because he'd have a right to, and with how tired Dom was this early in the morning he wouldn't get it the first time, and he might never think it was funny. He wanted to say it anyway. He wanted to have the right.

There was Billy, going for some auditions during the day, and Elijah with another meeting scheduled with his agent, for which he put on his youth like a sort of heavy mask. He was starting to feel old, lately. When he came back there was a note on the table weighted with the salt shaker. Out to look at lannscapes. No signature. In that handwriting, none was necessary. Dom brooding over the lovely American landscapes, and mourning, no doubt, their pollution with ash, as opposed to the sappy twelve-year-old-with-a-crush thoughts Elijah would have in his place (oh look, a tree! I bet Dom likes trees...).

After three days of a lot of talking with Billy and no direct references to Dom, and a lot of cuddling but only one actual instance of sex, Elijah realized that a week was shorter than it sounded. "Hey, you know," he said, "we should do something, if we're going to."

"Like what?" Said Billy.

He shrugged. "Um... well, we're in LA. There's going to be something."

In a city like LA, where not only was there something but there was bound to be some of everything, what they ended up doing was going "cosmic" bowling around nine, under blacklights that turned the white of Dom's shirt pale neon lavender. Multi-colored shifting light-stencils danced on the wall above the lane they had. The bowling shoes--as that style had recently become a little popular--actually looked, especially in the dark when you couldn't see their muddy color, like something that Lij might have worn with his outfit. Smellier, of course (ew), but a pretty close match.

The maroon vinyl seats arranged around the ball-return machines were one thing in the room not influenced appreciably by the blacklight, so whichever two of them sat there were bathed in shadow but for the lights of the tv scoreboard on their faces.

Billy wanted to try bowling in his sock feet--and he didn't score, but neither did he drop the ball on his foot. That was Elijah's job: he somehow (huh, could that have been the beer...?) managed to miss when he was picking up a ball, and crush his fingers under the edge of it. He had gone too long without bowling, apparently (something he had not thought he would ever say, he thought, blinking).

They took turns buying new rounds of beer, and if their game suffered, they also cared less. Dom, the designated driver, actually made a strike, which caused him to do an impromptu little hip-swiveling victory dance. Ummmmm, Dom in tight jeans? Yes, just, yes. Elijah was feeling really, really odd--and maybe that was just being possessive, maybe arousal, maybe beer. Some combination of them? Or the backlash from his monumental efforts, over the last few days, to not think too hard about Billy's french horn story?

The lights were off, to provide for the blacklights, and the little machines that flickered disco-y colored motifs on the floor and the walls were scattered randomly. Elijah jumped up onto the carpet where the little tables and chairs were set out to stand bathed in red light. He had vague, hysterical-ironic thoughts about blood, but when he stuck out his arm and looked it it it was really more of a raspberry color. Hey, that would work too. He was a bit skinny, but Dom was generally susceptible. Being food couldn't be all that bad, assuming, of course, that you weren't really. But being bitten, and sucked on, yes, he had a Thing for that. Lij just stopped himself from nodding sagely at this conclusion and put out a hand on the little half-height brick wall to steady himself.

With Billy in the house, even Billy knowing, he'd had to steal kisses, lately. There was something thrillingly illicit about that--sneaking them in, quick and silent, in corners, that is--although of course the curtailed sex was a little frustrating. And he had to try, too, not to be too affectionate. He guessed he was striving for a "you're my best friend and I want to jump your bones" vibe, and not an "oh let me kiss you until you can't help but love me like I love you" one. Exactly how different those might be was probably debatable, but he wasn't up to debating the question with himself. And obviously there was no one else to talk about it with. So what Elijah did was try to make the kisses pure sex, wicked licks under Dom's ear and open-mouthed wet ones on the back of his neck, sudden deep nasty ones instead of the sanctity of deliberate tender (still, of course, deep) ones he could envision.

So he'd gotten into the habit of it, was the point. Yes. The habit of secretive affection (ha. Ha. Ha. Secretive--in more than one way!). Now it was awfully tempting. Billy had caved to peer pressure and put his bowling shoes back on, but he immediately proceeded to get another gutter ball.

Dom clapped and smacked Billy on the back, apparently stopping just short of ruffling his hair. "That was fantastic! It took much longer to reach the gutter than the one before it!"

Billy elbowed him good-naturedly in the side. "Shut it, arsehole."

"Tosser."

"Wanker."

"Straight man," Dom came up with after only a slight hesitation.

"That doesn't mean what I think you thought--you think--it means," Billy said, only a bit slurrily.

"Y'knew what I meant!" Dom snapped indignantly.

"Fuck you, you fuck," was the affectionate reply. Dom seemed pleased and gave a little bow with flourishes.

Elijah leapt back down among the chairs (to their level--hee hee) just to bury his face in Dom's shoulder and laugh. Then, of course, while Dom straightened just-perceptibly under the additional weight, he had to curl his body up, a little, on the sudden dry thirst burning through him for skin and sweat and sex and every little inch of Dom and the taste of his come.

"Poor Lij," Dom announced, "Can't handle our harsh British insult-flinging."

"Cunt," Billy grinned at Elijah, settling in a chair with a beer: "It's your turn." Lij got a total of two pins--

"Just to make you feel better," he said, winking at Billy, and wandering towards the impenetrable dark environs of the arcade in the far corner past the shoe-rental counter.

"I'm going to go see what Lij is up to," he heard Dom say, and smirked to himself. Oh yeah. Heterosexuality beware. Although maybe it was a bit late for that.

"But your turn," Billy was saying. Too late for that as well, ahah. The Dom-animal, once on the scent of its mate, will not give up the pursuit until it has him pinned up against the wall.

"Got any quarters?" Lij wondered, staring blankly at the pinball machine. Dom, of course, would be right behind his shoulder--thus the wild parched need slowly pushing out from his center. Damn, it almost hurt, a good pain, but he might feel like a bloody pulp in the wake of this desire.

Dom felt in his pockets. "Fucking American money," he muttered.

Elijah was totally in sympathy. No pinball, then. "We could get some. The shoe counter. Or the bar."

But Dom wrinkled his nose, "Eh," and he was advancing on Elijah with almost unnoticeable slow liquid movements. His eyes sparked gray in the darkness, and Elijah found himself backing away with a conscious invitation in the curve of his back and neck. Maybe his mouth begged for it--he hoped. Up against the wall in the narrow space between the pinball machine and another game, the corner of the room, shrouded in deepest shadow. The wall smacking into his shoulderblades and the grin on Dom's face. Oh, he had been waiting for this--all night. Elijah licked his lips and tilted his chin up to accept a savage kiss with heated enthusiasm, devouring every drop of Dom he could get.

"Damn you," Elijah panted, ripping at the sides of Dom's fly to get the zipper open.

"Quietly, now," Dom chuckled, spreading his hand flat on Lij's stomach under his T-shirt. Elijah arched into the touch, which caused his hips to get in the way of his hands. Finally he had Dom's jeans open and his own pants, one-handed fumbling with the button and muttered curses giving way to the slick slide. And thank God for his boxers and Dom's dislike for underwear. Dom breathed harsh and wet near his ear, pushing his forehead on the wall next to Elijah's head, wrapped a hand slowly around both of them and started jerking them, rough uneven movements that hitched his breath all up in his throat.

"Oh, God."

That hiss might, at one point, have been "Yes." His shirt was riding up in the back, his legs apart to hold one of Dom's thighs between. The wall was carpeted--goddamned bowling alley, he was going to have rugburn for the first time when he hadn't done it on the floor--and oh, oh, shit. Video games pinged in the background, but the rest of the room was sort of fading into and out of his awareness.

Elijah gritted his teeth and ground their hips together. Fuck. This wasn't working. He twined one leg up around Dom's hips, going for a new angle, and turned his face, nuzzling for a kiss. He got a sharp bite on his lower lip--okay, that was good too.

This mutual-masturbation, well, it wasn't quite that, was maybe almost sex, but at any rate--it wasn't good enough, at all. Elijah managed to push Dom's hand aside, stupid fucking tease, and replace it with his own for some even, sure strokes, going faster.

"Slow," Dom protested.

Whatever protest Lij has been going to offer was lost against Dom's mouth.

Mmmm, but what a way to go. Elijah's hands had forgotten what they were doing, and now he just twitched his hips into Dom's, their cocks sliding and dragging together all wrong, with horribly uneven friction. He wrapped his leg tighter around Dom's hips and tried (emphasis on tried) to breathe. Although maybe he wasn't trying very hard, because--

Ah, and all of a sudden (he really didn't know how this happened) he was higher up on the wall, really actually pinned there with Dom's weight and his feet off the ground, his pants below his ass. There was a harsh fumbling, and Dom stepping closer between his legs and he could feel it, Dom's cock sliding along his ass. Elijah bit his tongue and tried not to make noise, and scrabbled with his fingers at the dusty smoke-scented carpet on the wall.

Arched his back in vain. Dom pushed forward with his hips, only, Lij thought, to keep him from falling, but the effect was the blunt head of his cock skipping past the tight cluster of nerves and muscle where all Elijah's attention was focused. Breathing was getting so difficult that he wasn't sure if he was anymore and couldn't devote the attention to finding out, and all of a sudden he was hyper-aware of the rest of the room. He thought, behind Dom's shoulder, that was a kid about thirteen years old silhouetted against the light of one of those tremendous videogame booths. But he trembled violently with the fever of staying still, and tried to relax but couldn't remember how. Nerves were building up like fine tangled webs, pulsing and filled with little swollen knots of sensation, on the surface of his skin. He imagined all of him skin-crawlingly lumpy, blue and red under the blacklight and shadow. Maybe bleeding. Shitshitshit, Dom. He flexed his hips. Knew they could fuck right here, on the wall.

Dom, breathing raggedly into his neck, answered the thrust with another emphatic little push, but Lij could tell he wasn't going to do it without permission, just hold onto his hips hard and lift him a little more till he could feel Dom's cock nudging at him, much like his tongue flirted, darting out to taste the column of Elijah's neck.

Elijah, knowing he couldn't do anything more stupid, probably, let himself relax bonelessly, go soft and pliant and slide down, a little, until he felt himself start to part around the hot heat of it. He could feel the burn of hard vertical sex without lubricant already, could taste it like want with its hands around his throat and its breath on his cheek.

"Careful!" Dom hissed, and took the skin of Elijah's throat between his teeth.

"Bit late," Elijah panted, into Dom's hair. "--Innit?"

Dom mumbled something--or maybe that was a growl. Every muscle in their two bodies was tensed rigid and unyielding, and they were frozen like that, on the verge of joining. God. If he just squirmed a little farther down.

Carpet in his back, boy over Dom's shoulder, where, oh where was sanity? The video game just on the other side of whatever was shielding them to his right shook violently, pinging and bleating, with some not-so-distant yelling. "Daddy! Come look at this!" Ah, fuck. The timely (...God!) intrusion of the real world, and Dom said "Fucking cunt sons of bitches," and some more colorful things than that, and pulled back. Elijah fumbled with his pants, fingers unsteady.

He was sweat and sex all over, and he didn't want to see his mouth or his hair. Dom's mouth and hair, on the other hand, oh yes. He could look at them for some time yet, and he only smoothed Dom's tousled ruffianish look out a little, because it was just too irresistable, and he couldn't think of a better idea on this kind of crack (namely, not crack at all. Dom.) than exposing himself to Dom at his most tempting for the rest of the night.

And, yes. Getting more drunk, so he picked up more beer. That seemed like the best idea of all.

"Nother game?" Dom said. Billy looked back and forth between them and Elijah took a long drink.

---

"How exactly," said Billy in the car on the way to Boys Town (and a trendy gay bar) later that night, "do you get dehydrated, if you're not already ill?"

Elijah would probably have found this annoying, but he had a sense of owing Billy one, or, you know, several, for leaving him alone in the bowling alley while they made out. Almost fucked. Whatever. "You don't get any water, basically, which means you don't eat or drink."

Billy stared, and tried and failed not to laugh. "For how long?"

Had he ever really thought about it before? "Well, it's not that I didn't eat or drink at all, just not very much. A few weeks, I guess."

A whoop of laughter which he didn't try as hard, this time, to turn into a cough. "I won't say you deserved it, Lij, but..."

"If he ever was going to deserve it, that would be when," said Dom over his shoulder from the driver's seat.

Elijah found that funny, possibly because of the beer.

It was as they were getting out of the car that he caught Billy for an apology. "I'm sorry," he said a little anxiously, chewing on his lip. "That was rude, at the bowling alley--"

Billy only laughed. "Oh, Elijah, d'ya think I'd want it on my conscience if I'd stopped you?" His eyes were dancing. "Besides, this way, I won."

"You been before?" Dom said quizzically, hesitating at the curb for Lij.

"Not to this one. It's all new."

"Trendy," Billy supplied, grinning from one of them to the other.

It didn't look like a new hotspot. It was dark, yes, with expensive recessed lighting, but the woodwork was antique and rather ornate in places. There was a little note on the wall that said it'd been taken from a condemned hotel from before the turn of the century. Billy ran loving hands over the edge of the bar while Lij ordered a drink (amusingly, the bartender just gave him a 'you're underage' look, and didn't ask anything).

"So," Billy said later, nursing a Guinness, "What's being dehydrated like, then? You weren't just thirsty, mate, if you went to 'ospital?"

Dom laughed (although not really in an amused way--his eyes were dark) and shook his head, "He was almost fuckin' dead. Fainted four times."

Lij swirled his rum and coke thoughtfully. "Well, it's. It's sort of like just being really sick and feverish, but I didn't have a fever. I was really--really confused. Hardly knew what I was thinking about." Which wasn't true. He knew what he had been thinking about: Dom, and some other stuff, pretty much the story of his life over the past six months. The world seemed to fall apart that way a lot, lately. Dom and "sexsexsex" and other stuff. He added as an afterthought, "And I wasn't thirsty."

"You were bloody insane," said Billy, wide-eyed.

"Yeah, well." Lij drained the glass, looked for the bartender. Recessed white light in the bar, dim but clear, silvered the wooden surface over the wood's natural rose, a smooth glossy polish. Depended how you defined it, but it couldn't be normal. "I wasn't almost dead, though."

The bar stools here had smooth-curved backs and little arms, rungs just the right height for hooking your heels over. There was a wide brass bar at foot-height too, around the bar, and tables with more tall chairs out on the edges of the room, smoky and dark, surreal with multicolored expensive lighting. The dance floor was brilliantly spotlighted, behind them. Someone came fresh from it, smelling of sweat, blond hair on end, wearing a muscle tank. His eyes went up and down Lij quickly and moved to Billy. Maybe lingered a bit longer there. Elijah smiled into his drink.

"You can dance," Billy protested.

"Don't you want to?" Lij asked, exchanging glances with Dom, but it was perfunctory. Billy didn't and they couldn't leave him. He wasn't sure he entirely wanted to either. To push and slide and rub against Dom? Yes. But the bowling alley corner had been bad enough, delicious but guilty and illicit. Dirty, yes. The rugburn on the small of his back was like a brand. He didn't feel he had the right, perhaps.

The music was satisfyingly loud, and the people-watching was fascinating. Dom leaned against the bar between the stool where Billy perched and the one Elijah filled--what he was doing was more like lounging, though. Lounging in the same kind of nervous whatever he'd been in all night, yet, tight-strung and too alert. The drinks were fuzzing everything, but he wasn't relaxing. He could feel his eyes burning in his face. When Dom turned his head, smiling, the low lighting kissed his lower lip, threaded its fingers in his hair, and skated back behind him. His bicep and the careless bend of his arm were exquisite.

And there was just a slight possibility that Elijah might have a staring problem.

Right. He was disgusted with himself, sometimes. Or rather, he felt he should be, but he couldn't really quite make himself. Then again, he definitely had a staring problem, and he might as well embrace it entirely. He'd embraced the unpredictable wicked-sharp barbs of--this thing, he and Dom, his silly crush--or, no, loving. Being in love with Dom, alright. He'd given into it long enough ago that he'd virtually gotten used to not pretending to himself. So yes, staring. He lapped it up.

"We should have a deck of cards," Dom said. "Build a little house."

"Houses o' cards are so boring," Billy protested. "A hobbit-hole of cards."

"You're drunk," Dom said tolerantly. "Hobbit-holes are too round; it wouldn't stand up."

"Billy's right, though!" Elijah leaned forward, grinning. "Because we need to have solidarity."

Dom was doubtful, apparently, that he really understood where Lij was going with that: "Middle Earth solidarity?"

What a silly question. "What else would I be talking about?"

"An Orthanc of cards!" Dom said, abruptly getting into the spirit.

But Billy pursed his lips, "That's kind of tall and skinny. It wouldn't want to stand up straight."

"You don't want to stand up straight either, but I bet I could make you," Dom retorted.

"And making things with cards," said Elijah hastily, "isn't supposed to be easy."

"But still."

Eventually they settled for a castle of cards. "What castle?" Billy wondered. They were far past considering that they didn't have any cards.

"There are plenty, aren't there," Dom said reasonably.

"Sauron's castle."

"He doesn't have a castle! Just another tower!"

"Minas Tirith?" said Elijah.

Billy was thoughtful. "How abouuuuuuuuut..." (only, of course, 'aBOOT') "...the Castle of the Mark?"

"But then," said Dom, "that would make Elijah Éowyn."

"How did I get to be the damsel in distress?" Dom gave him a level look that said all it needed to. Good point. Fuck. Elijah sighed and knocked back the rest of his drink in one.

Billy snorted.

"Don't worry," said Dom soothingly, smirking. "I'll save you."

"Damn," said Lij sarcastically, "and me without my handkerchief." Billy helpfully provided him with a napkin, which he dropped on the floor. Dom, with a cheeky look, bent over to retrieve it. His shirt rode up and his jeans down, which showed a nice gap of the small of his back and perhaps (or maybe that was Elijah's imagination) some of his ass. Unfortunately, they were facing--he hadn't thought fast enough to drop it where Dom would have to turn around.

He pretended to offer it, and snatched his hand back when Lij reached for it.

Billy chortled and took another drink.

Another try, and Dom did a little flourish with it just out of reach. Elijah rolled his eyes. "See if I drop my handkerchief with you around again."

Dom's eyes smoldered, "Oh, but you will."

"You know, it's just a napkin, not a handkerchief. You can have it." Hmph. He couldn't help thinking there was some kind of symbolism, though. You're supposed to give the handkerchief back. That's what it was about, right? You drop it on purpose and if he gives it back that means--

"Although, Lijah, if you're Éowyn, try not to get killed," said Billy.

"I think we've really hit on something," Dom sniggered. "He's awfully good at dressing up like a boy."

Couldn't help giggling at that, though he stuck out his tongue. "I am, aren't I?" He said. "A handsome boy with good taste in clothes."

"Taste is immaculate," Billy agreed blithely, and Dom slowly folded the napkin up in his hand. Their eyes met with a fantastic kind of glimmer, he thought. Heat. Like the shivers in the summer air, ripples in water. Maybe the wavy glass. And maybe he was getting hysterical. (But only on the inside, my dear!) Dom smiled and he was pinned as surely as he'd been to the carpeted wall behind the pinball machine a lifetime ago, at ten pm. God knew if he was smiling back, but he really hoped not: the wisps of smoke and darkness and colored light and noise, here, like layered veils obscuring reality, and he wanted it to be real. Dammit, Dom, say something. Too much longer like this without the solidity and he'd vanish. Okay, hysterical, yes, and he didn't have any reason to be so suddenly angry. He was looking away... now.

A flashbulb went off and his head whipped around, mouth open. A youngish man, relatively innocuous, was standing there with a camera, grinning.

Elijah leapt off the bar stool while Dom was still blinking. "Did you just take a picture of me?" Yes, moron. Well, not that he didn't know the answer. But the guy blinked, turned around. Walking away without saying anything? "Oh, no, he didn't," Lij muttered, and stalked after him. "Excuse me," he shouted. Of course the crowds are the densest and the realest when you want to get through them, but at their most metaphysically ephemeral when you're clutching for purchase on the universe.

Having to shoulder between sweaty bodies did increase immediacy, a bit, but it didn't change the fundamentally transparent-transient nature of what he had. If Dom started pretending tomorrow that nothing had happened, it could still vanish. No he didn't want that, but no asshole's photograph was going to get in Dom's way if Dom did.

Finally, the door! The sudden fresh air, and lack of bodies pressed close, let him practically burst out and sprint with the momentum. He caught up with the guy on the sidewalk just outside and put a hand on his arm.

A wary look on his face when he spun around, camera still in his hand. Night sparkled around them with stars.

"Excuse me!" Lij said determinedly. "You took a picture of me. That's not acceptable. You didn't ask my permission--"

"I'm not a paparazzi!" The guy protested.

Elijah raked him with a contemptuous gaze. Obviously not, or he'd have gotten away. "I want the film," he said.

"But--!"

"I don't want that picture of me to exist," Elijah said firmly. "Give me the film."

He was conscious of Dom and Billy behind him, but he couldn't spare his attention. He thought he might start shaking too from nerves and outrage and anger and he was ready to kick the whole goddamned fame thing in the ass if not for Lord of the Rings, because without it he'd never even have met Dom.

"It's my picture," said the man sullenly. He had a yellow tinge to his skin, narrow rounded cheeks and a wide pale mouth. His face was scarred. He would have had acne as a teenager.

"No," Elijah said with a tight rein on his temper. "It's my picture. The film." He put his hand on the camera, and Sallow Camera Boy's shoulders slumped.

"I can't believe him," Elijah fumed in the car, "That motherfucking bastard, that cunt!"

"He should have asked," said Billy. "At least you got the film."

No music on, the windows half down on the late summer night. All LA smelled fresh at a time like this, a function of the wind more than the actual smell. "Not even that he didn't ask. Well, yes. But when I ask for it and he didn't give it to me!"

"And if the pictures should happen to get out," came the sympathetic Scottish murmur. Of course it hardly mattered what he said, so long as he said something.

Elijah's fist tightened around the roll of film. He'd already pulled it all out. Though it was night, he'd taken vicious pleasure. It probably wasn't completely exposed, but it was too snarled a mess to develop. When they got home he fully planned to go after it with scissors.

It was the night of frustration, and when he got the scissors out of the drawer in the kitchen, he flung them and the film down on the table in inexplicable exasperation and went to get a tall glass of water. No hangovers tomorrow, thanks. The water splashed on him when he turned it on too hard. He drained the glass, poured another and drank half of it, staring at the wall behind the sink and thinking essentially nothing but "fuck" over and over again. He didn't like feeling helpless or confused.

Billy had gone straight to bed. When he walked back into the living room, he could see at a glance that all the lights were out. Dom too, then. He walked close to a window, staring at his ghostly reflection with its red-rimmed eyes, closeclosecloser until he pressed their noses together and closed his eyes.

The bottom line, he thought, was that if nothing was real then nothing should hurt.

Maybe his face was wet. Anyway, it was the kind of mood where it should be raining--late summer rain, fast and hard, not sodden and heavy like early, in June. The time was past for the unstirring moroseness of stagnant despair.

It's hard to admit to yourself that you're waiting for something, when it's something you don't want to be waiting for--maybe he was afraid he'd miss it, somehow, if he couldn't greet whatever it was that must happen with innocence. Like a castle of cards, it all might fall apart if you looked at it funny from the corner of your eye.

But he had to wait. And he was somehow not surprised, then, to feel a hand on his shoulder. He bit his lip and tasted rum, and the same wind that had cooled his cheeks outside the club, that had ruffled their hair in the car, now stirred the dusk-green leaves of a tree in the darkness. The movement was so vivid, as if in slow motion, that he could almost hear the shift and rustle of the leaves.

Trust Dom to come now, when he didn't have a handle on himself. Elijah was crying silently, to his horror. He wished he could be sullen instead of pitiful. What was he going to say, to whatever question he was given? Dom, who would know just the questions to ask, probably, and would ask them because he was genuinely worried.

But he didn't. He came to stand next to Lij at the window instead, turned to look at him, saw the tears, and moved perilously closer all at once, tightening his grip on Lij's shoulder. "No, Lijah," he said. "Hey. Hey."

Bit his lip--yep, still rum, haha. Blinking rapidly, and he shook his head maybe too rapidly at the same time. Becoming dizzy hadn't been in the plan.

"No, you don't understand," Dom said, "I know." And goddamn him, but he didn't seem to have the second half of that sentence ready.

Elijah, who didn't trust his voice yet, turned to face him, wiping quickly at his cheeks with his free hand.

"No," Dom said, almost impatiently, and then stopped and dropped his gaze. Embarrassed? No. Certainly not--"No," Dom said, "I mean, I know. I know it. I, um. I saw something."

He went very, very cold all over and all at once, at this announcement. First, he thought at once the only thing he would have meant if he had said just "know" like that, the thing Dom couldn't possibly mean. Second he thought just that, that it was flatly impossible. But then he had time to pause. He looked at Dom's face again. Saw something.

He didn't have time to think anything else about it. Dom was coming amazingly closer again, with a step that seemed almost cautious, but then he turned them in profile to the window and tipped Lij's chin up with his finger and kissed him again, an old kiss and a new one together, as gentle as any fantasy, but realer. Oh, he knew.

"I know," Dom repeated, without moving his mouth more than a millimeter or so away. It was a good thing his arm was around Elijah's back then, because he was having a lot of trouble with understanding everything and he might have just collapsed in a heap on the floor.

"You know."

"It was on the computer," he said, "And it came up when I turned it on and opened the program, and I shouldn't have read it and I'm really really sorry, but I wasn't even thinking."

The kissing was nice, but Elijah was too numb to quite know what to think.

"Lijah?"

"You read--" Oh, the email. The one from Sean, the only thing he'd ever saved. Fate, baby. "I don't--I just." He met Dom's eyes again. "Why now." He could read it in Dom's face: not that he didn't have a reason, but that he couldn't answer. Elijah nodded. Yes. He understood--understood that. He couldn't even string a whole thought together at once. Fuck, he needed to think. He laid his face against Dom's neck for a moment, and then walked away, and Dom didn't try to stop him.

---

He went in the bathroom, cold and white and too-bright, because it was the only room small enough and bright enough to feel safe. He sat down on the closed lid of the toilet, as the only real place to sit, and set about properly gnawing on his fingernails. Yes, he remembered the computer crashing, and the email of Sean's he'd pasted into the word processor to save and read later. Dom pushing the power button, naked. Their drive and fucking in the long grass at the fringes of the most perfect landscape he'd ever seen. He couldn't really be surprised Dom had read the email, and without it he would have known, anyway. Elijah couldn't have hidden it entirely if he'd wanted to. If.

He hadn't hidden it, hadn't tried hard enough to do more than tell himself he was.

So, then. Why now?

...Of course it was important to be able to appreciate things. If you've never been denied anything, you can't know what you have. If you get an easter basket and tear off wrapper after wrapper and eat all the chocolate bunnies and medallions and Reese's cups at once, after a while it's just a blur of chocolate--not like savoring one as a reward. And a rain never heals like after a drought.

There was a little, narrow window in the bathroom, high up on the wall, with a tear in the screen that he could see when he glanced up. A small moth the rich brown of corduroy trousers had flown in and was fluttering ineffectually around the shower stall, flying, occasionally, into the white tiles on the wall, mostly flailing and buzzing about uselessly (without, of course, actually making much noise).

The door opened, and oh, he thought almost sardonically at himself, I didn't lock it? Dom stood in the door and said, "I maybe should've left you alone a bit longer, but then I figured you can always kick me out again, so I'll give this another try." Pause. "I'm driving myself fucking insane and I'm actually standing here, talking to you, about something that makes not enough sense in my head to turn into a real sentence, which should tell you something too. I've never seen anything like you. I've never had a friend like you, and I know you inside out--heh--but I can't ever know all, er, enough of it. Ah fuck. Lij--" His voice was turning pleading, and Lij blinked. "Even, like, the fact that this weirds you out. See, I knew that. And it just blows me away, because it's all because o' you thinking about everything too damn much until you have it all turned upside down and it doesn't even make sense anymore, and I know you probably bit your fingernails while you thought about it. And you think you think about it too much, but then you can never make up your mind t'stop--All of that. I love it even more. And that's pretty fucked-up."

Elijah blinked, and his lips might have twitched a little. "Maybe it is," he admitted, cocking his head to look at Dom consideringly. "But look at you, standing over there like you didn't know." He smiled reluctantly, surprising himself. "You're... cute." His eyes went back to the shower stall. "It's sad, this moth being trapped here. It's pretty, but it'll probably starve to death. I don't think I can catch it."

He was looking at the moth again, but he knew Dom was slightly thrown before he closed the door again (and locked it this time). When Dom slid up behind him, legs snugged close behind Lij's and the press of his cock on Lij's ass, he might have been laughing or crying, but Elijah had a fair idea it was both. Relief, a hysterical spring of it. Elijah was laughing and crying too, somewhat shakily, sagging against Dom's arms wrapped around his ribcage and bending his head while the back of his neck tingled with the brushes of Dom's lips.

Then he was struggling to breathe evenly as Dom's hands pushed hastily up under his shirt and down under his pants. "I'm going to start wearing just boxers all the time," he whispered and felt the rumble of Dom's laughter, delicious!, against his back and shivery.

"Or nothing," Dom suggested, and got Elijah's fly open and his hand inside.

"Mmmmh--," raising his hips to push pants and boxers off, "--that too." Dom was just in boxers. It didn't take long to arrange everything, and of course, they were in the bathroom. Dom's hands didn't budge from his hips--Lij just reached to the side and fumbled in the drawer for lube.

It was blind and fast, apology, claiming, catharsis. He was facing away from Dom (facing, of all things, the moth in the shower stall, too, and if you really thought about it they were sitting on the toilet, so he didn't), Dom's hands carefully guiding him into place, urging him down until for the second time that night he felt his body pressed, then invaded, giving slickly to Dom's cock. There was the hard pressure he'd wanted to feel and the slight pain burning away the edges of his mind while the pleasure suffused him like insidious poison and his body gasped with greedy need. First stroke, deep. Second, as deep and faster, so Dom moaned behind him.

He wanted to slow, really, but it wasn't worth his last dregs of restraint, and he didn't know where he'd have to find them, somewhere in pitiful tatters. It had been a wild ride of a night.

He couldn't kiss properly, like this, and that was what he would probably have the energy to regret more than fleetingly later when he wasn't laughing and catching his voice on hidden snags of pleasure in his chest. When he leaned back into Dom, he could drop his head onto Dom's shoulder. Their sweat mingled, and the undulating rise and fall of his body was like an obscene belly-dance with the bands of Dom's fingers shocking on the sharp crescents of Elijah's white hips. The angle, too--

Mmmmm. A sharp press, there, that stretched him pleasantly and set off little strings of firecrackers in the confusion in the pit of his stomach. He rotated, then bucked his hips importunately, and cried out. It was like trying to catch water in the fingers of one hand, almost in reach and almost his but the feeling speeding away again.

"Lij," Dom groaned.

No, he was too far lost. Dom tightened his grasp enough to slow his movements, and started to meet them with deliberate little rolling thrusts. There went his brain, in a gravelly slough of mocking pleasure. It seized his throat, scraped like fingernails on his scalp, curled his toes, fluttered his eyelids, owned him. They seemed to come together, shuddering hard and shaking, and Dom was definitely crying on his shoulder. He was crying too, of course. God, they were such a couple of mushballs.

Lij's lips trembled, mouth still open, for long minutes afterward with the aftershocks. This was before they could even gather themselves together to shift around for a kiss, and then, as soon as their mouths would reach--when Lij's thighs were still sticky and he was still halfway in Dom's lap and halfway not, his neck craning around, and he had to lift his face to make their mouths reach. For a thousand of these kisses deep enough to drink. Then he forgot that, going sleepily clingy and wrapping himself around Dom while Dom wrapped around him, a pair of hideously co-dependent vines, heh.

There was nothing like Dom's hand possessive on the crease of his thigh, the small of his back, his hip. Nothing but that and the scaly rippling sound against his lips and puffs of damp breath when Dom laughed, "I'm half out of my head with you, so fucking sweet," and licked a delicate outline around the edge of his lips.

Well, that quickly got a little overwhelmingly mushy for them, so they got up and went in the kitchen (but they left all of Elijah's clothes except his boxers on the floor--"to shock Billy in the morning," Dom said). Also, Dom wanted to make Elijah swallow another several glasses of water before bed, which he wouldn't do without rolling his eyes and claiming a few kisses as reward, but.

"You're cute when you nag," he said over the top of the glass, and Dom flicked the tip of his nose with a fingertip. "Ow. Hey."

Of course, they could have gone to bed, which Dom seemed to rather want to do, but Elijah couldn't sleep so soon with his brain feverishly bright, so he went to stand by the sliding doors, and soon enough felt Dom lean up against his back and rest his chin on Lij's shoulder from behind. It was a sharp chin, but he made up for it with damp breath on Lij's neck.

"You know," said that scratchy-sleepy-contemplative voice after a while, "It wasn't because I found out. It wasn't because I knew. I would have, already. Maybe tonight. Maybe before if I hadn't found out. You know that, right?"

Elijah tilted his head to the side, far enough that he could just see Dom's profile, or at least his nose, out of the corner of his eye. There were a million sensible responses to that, and Elijah chose the least sensible, though in an insane sideways way it might have been the closest to truth: "I know." Then a fit of honesty made him pause. "Well, no, I didn't. I almost did, if I thought about it. But it doesn't really matter--" He added smugly "--because you know it, and you can know it for me."

Dom smiled next to his ear--he could feel it--and tightened his arms around Elijah's narrow ribcage, staring out the window again at the stark obscurity of the night. "I'm yours, now, is that it? I'll follow you around, making sure you eat and drink and aren't late, picking up your handkerchiefs--"

"Damn straight."

"Aggressive little thing, aren't you," said Dom, with his lips buried in the nape of Elijah's neck, and pushed apart the fingers of Elijah's hand to press soft warm paper in them from somewhere. A whisper, "Here's your handkerchief." It was the napkin.

End

thank-yous: k'sal, my one and only beta, without whom I'd be utterly lost; wax jism, for various stolen ideas and general cuteness; buffett, for invaluable early idea-bouncing; kk, gloria mundi, adrienne, anne, calico, jennifer, and steve.