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monaboyd May. 13th, 2004 06:30 pm)
semaphore27.livejournal.com posting in monaboyd May. 13th, 2004 06:30 pm)Author: Semaphore
Pairing: Billy/Dom
Rating: PG-13 Language, for now. Yes, it's still angsty!
Summary: It's the end of the world as we know it and no one feels fine. Attack of the rabid AU crossover plotbunny: in which the world of Lotrips mingles with Stephen King’s The Stand, with the timelines bumped slightly into the future. In a nutshell, the basic premise of the book is: after the population of the US has been devastated by a "super flu" the survivors divide into two groups, those who follow Mother Abigail, and represent good, and those who are drawn to Randall Flagg, a demon.
The former Hobbits and Sean Astin’s family take a road trip up to the Napa Valley for a mini-break, completely unaware that everything around them’s about to change.
Feedback: longed for and appreciated
Disclaimers: This is entirely fictional. No disrespect intended. The people involved belong to themselves. The Stand was written by Stephen King.
Previous chapters and other writings can be found at Caraidean
“…the persistent sound in the row behind him signaled the end to all that: there would be no more sequels, and in a very short time, there would be no more movies at all.
In the row behind Larry, a man was coughing.” - Stephen King, The Stand
It’s a given, Dom thinks, that Billy never loses his temper, but he’s lost it now, the veins popping up on his temples, his fists clenched before his chest as he screams in Elijah’s face almost viciously, “Take it back, take it back now, damn yeh!”
Elijah’s practically—literally—knocked of his feet by this onslaught. He staggers back at least a metre, his jaw dropped and his eyes so wide they could hold the whole sky in their blueness.
Billy’s fists open enough to twist themselves into Lij’s t-shirt, hauling Elijah up onto his toes as Bill yells something so impenetrable even Dom can’t make sense of it, all he knows is that it’s time to unfreeze, to step in and take charge before things spin out beyond fixing.
”The center cannot hold,” pops into his head. ”The center cannot hold.” And where in bloody hell did that come from?
Dom gets a hold round Billy’s waist, hauling him backwards off Elijah, Bill’s abs so tense they’re like iron under his arm, the muscles jumping and twitching as if he’s about to be sick, no longer in any sort of control of what he’s doing.
It’s strange, really, because Dom knows Billy loves him. Of course Billy loves him, but sometimes, between Billy’s normally placid face, his laughter and his smiles, Dom tends to forget his lover’s intensity, the fact that Billy loves him quite as much as he loves Billy, past death and beyond to the end of everything. It’s humbling, to be loved with such passion, because Dom’s never been sure he actually deserves it, not when such feelings come from his Billy.
Dom forgets sometimes, too, how strong Bill can be, with his fencing and his martial arts, because he’s so small, even next to Dom’s smallness, and always so tender with him, inevitably. But now Dom’s dragging Billy backward and Bill’s fighting him every step of the way and it’s hard because Dom is still slippery and shaky and weakish from the shock, the cold, the wet and being sick himself, so it’s not until Dom manages to get his shoulders between his lover and his friend, blocking Bill’s view of Lij with his body, that he can really get things halfway back to normal again.
“Billy, Billy, Billy, BillyBoyd,” he croons, softly, hypnotically, because that’s the thing that’s worked in the past, the very few times Bill’s gotten beside himself--the sound of Dom’s voice speaking his name gently.
Behind him, Elijah splashes backwards onto his arse in the mud, legs parted and head bent between them, face in his hands. He’s sobbing, Dom knows, sobbing his always-tender heart out, and in a moment that will matter to him again, but just now Dom can only spare thoughts enough for Billy.
The sounds Bill is making aren’t any Dom’s ever heard, so he gets Billy turned around, pulling him against his chest to muffle the noise, wrapping him up in both arms to hold him fiercely, not caring if it hurts him or not, because he knows right now the hurting doesn’t matter to Bill in the least, it’s the tightness of the hold, it’s their two hearts beating one against the other, it’s the bruising of the other’s muscle and bone against their skins.
“Quiet, quiet,” Dom commands, forcefully, making his voice deep and low, because that’s what Billy needs now. He’s had to spend too much of his life being the strong one, and now he needs Dom to be the stronger, strong enough for both of them, which Dom can do, if he tries his hardest.
He can do it for Billy. He can do whatever Billy needs.
Except Dom’s body’s betraying him, and he’s coughing again, his chest aching as he does so, the shivers creeping under his skin. He turns away, burying his mouth against his shoulder to hide the sound, the other arm still tight around Billy’s middle.
And Dom knows then, whatever’s happening, it’s not hay fever, it’s not allergies. He may actually be getting sick, and the possible meanings of that realization terrify him.
Billy’s shuddering too, shaking in his arms. When he can, Dom turns back to him, easing up a bit until his hold’s become tender, until he’s rubbing Billy’s back in gentle circles, Bill’s face buried against his neck. “I can’t stand for that to happen,” Billy’s muttering. “Can’t stand for you to go away from me, Dommie.”
Dom holds him back a little, putting his fingers beneath Billy’s chin, turning his face upward until their eyes can meet. Sometimes it’s hard to believe Billy’s nearly a decade the elder, and as experienced as Dom knows he is, because there’s still so much innocence in his eyes and in his expressions, those leaf-green eyes, that gently-curving mouth. Dom touches a fingertip to Billy’s lips. “Ssh, love. Ssh. It’s all right. We’ll think this through.” With his other hand he massages the back of Billy’s neck, trying to loosen the stiff muscles. “Ssh, love, we’ll be all right. You’ll see.”
“Ah, m’ Dommie.” Their foreheads touch briefly, part again. Billy’s own small hands cup Dom’s face, fingertips tracing his temples, his cheekbones, his cheeks. “M’ Dommie, swear you won’t leave me. Swear to it, Dommie.”
“Never, Billy.” It’s easy to swear. There’s nothing easier in the world. “Whatever happens, Bill, I swear. And don’t you leave me either, céile.”
A smile flits over Billy’s mouth, hearing the Scots Gaelic word on Dom’s lips. Much as Dom mourns poor little Allie, much as he fears for their friends, there’s nothing else really for him, now, no one but he and Bill in the world. Slowly, their hands drop to their sides, then rise again to hold one another in an embrace that’s warm, familiar, loving, the way they’ve held each other in the past, a million times before, as if nothing in the world has changed or will be changing.
“I’m sorry, Bill, I’m so sorry,” Elijah’s saying, somewhere far away. “I didn’t mean…” His hand closes on Dom’s bicep, kneading painfully. “I didn’t mean anything. I was just…”
Dom raises his head from Billy’s shoulder, suddenly aware of just how sick it is he feels--his head pounding, his throat and chest growing tighter by the minute. But that’s nothing unusual, really. Unlike Billy, or even Elijah, he always gets colds. He’s been susceptible ever since he was a little boy, and just because he’s ill now, just because he’s sore and sniffly and feverish doesn’t have to mean anything. Something horrible, that kills as fast as it’s killed Elizabeth and Allie, doesn’t mean the end of other, less fatal colds and flus, it just makes them more alarming. And just because he’s caught a cold or the flu doesn’t mean he has to stop everything.
“Bill, Lij,” he says softly, “We need…”
Billy steps away again, rubbing his eyes roughly with both hands, looking as if he’s aged a decade in an hour, despite his expression of lingering innocence. Elijah, usually so completely flawless, looks aged too, haggard, like he’s badly strung out on heroin.
“I’m sorry, Bills,” Lij mutters. “Really. Honestly. I didn’t mean to freak you.”
“It’s all right,” Dom tells him gently, stroking his fingers through Elijah’s hair. “You’re just shaken. We all are, really. Aren’t we, Billy?”
Billy nods, speechless, his always fair skin dead-pale. More than ever, Dom determines, he won’t show any weakness he can help. He won’t show anything.
Billy’s hand closes around his, so tightly Bill’s nails bite into Dom’s skin. Soon, he knows, they’ll leave crescents of blood in his palm.
“Dom,” Elijah murmurs. “What do we do now?”
Dom takes in a breath, careful not to make it too deep—he doesn’t want to start coughing again. “Find out what’s happening. Get help, I suppose, to start.”
“And if there is no help?” Elijah asks. “I mean, I’m just saying…”
“Then,” Dom tells him, “We’ll find out what there is. And we have each other, don’t we? Don’t we, Bills?”
Billy’s gaze has drifted, as if he’s become fascinated by their shoes, but he looks up at the sound of his name. “Yes, Dommie,” he says, in a breath of a voice, “We have each other still.”
Paddling back against the current is a thousand times more effort than following it down, and in the end they give it up as a bad deal, dragging their boats up onto the riverbank and overturning them, with paddles secured. Dom wonders how far they’ve come, how many miles might lie between them and town, or between them and their hired house, because he’s carrying Allie, and his head feels light, and small as she is, she seems terribly heavy.
After half a mile or so, Billy says, “Look over there. That hill.”
They stop. Elijah squints, because even with his contacts in, his eyesight’s nothing to write home about, really.
“Isn’t that the back of the hill behind the house? If we cut out across country, won’t reach there eventually?”
Dom squints too. With the burning in his eyes, his vision’s gone wonky, and it doesn’t help in the least that he feels feverish and dizzy as well.
“Dommie,” Elijah says. The weight of Allie’s body leaves his arms suddenly. “Let me carry her, okay? You aren’t looking so great.”
Dom starts to protest, but Billy takes his arm. “Elijah’s right, love. You’re burning.”
“You know,” Dom tells him, wishing Billy would still meet his looks. “It could be nothing. It could be anything.”
“Yes,” Billy answers at long last. “Of course it could.” He weaves his fingers in with Dom’s, leading him on, up away from the river, up a high bank to the road, then across and on, past fields green with grape-vines and yellow with mustard-blossom, beneath eagles swooping and keening through the sky. It’s so peaceful here, and strangely quiet too, not a car or truck or plane overhead to be seen, not even the giant irrigation machines rolling around between the rows of yellow and green.
After another mile they stop for Dom to rest, because he’s breathing hard, coughing forcefully enough to bring up some nasty-tasting stuff that’s thick and almost green, as he notices when he excuses himself, spitting it out behind a bush where Billy can’t see.
But it’s not white, anyway, and not like glue, and there isn’t gallons of it, like there was with Allie, and though the coughing hurts, it’s just a cough, not the horrible tearing noise he heard from Christine.
Dom thinks to himself, What if it’s her, too? If Sean loses all three of them, what in hell will he do?
Sean loves them, Dom knows, loves his three friends as they love him, but he also knows Sean’s family means everything in the world to him.
He remembers once, at an evening barbeque, the whole crowd of them stretched out on the lawn behind Viggo’s place, drinking beer, with the stars of New Zealand like jewels overhead. Sean, just tipsy enough to be sentimental (not that he ever needed much excuse where Chris or the kids were concerned), told him the two days he’d been happiest in his life were the day after his wedding, waking up with Christine asleep beside him in their bed, realizing that the was it, the forever he’d hoped for all his life, and the day he first held tiny, squirming red-faced Allie in his arms.
He felt as if his heart had been torn open, Sean said, then put back together all over again, in a new version so much better than the old it couldn’t even begin to be described, better than he ever could have possibly believed.
“Dommie,” he’d said, squeezing Dom’s shoulder, kindly and tightly. “Dommie, my brother, I hope someday you’ll know what I mean.”
And Dom had glanced over at Billy, who sat cross-legged on the grass, head thrown back as he laughed about something with Orli, and answered his friend, “Sean, mate,I hope I do too.”
Billy had been correct about the hill being the right one, but Dom had known that, really—Billy’s talented, in general, at orienteering, finding his way from place to place even without benefit of a map. They climb over the crest, stopping halfway down the slope on the far side to gaze into the valley with its green grass and well-grown trees. The peach-coloured, white-trimmed house appears normal, unchanged, Sean’s Lexus shining in the drive, sparkling-clean and new.
Dom sinks down on the grass, dry blades crackling under his bum, the noises of insects abuzz in his ears.
“Dommie?” Billy kneels by his side.
“Just want to rest a bit.” With the back of his arm, Dom wipes sweat from his forehead, his neck, the underside of his chin. The temperature must have been well (as the Americans track such things) into the eighties, and he feels quite a bit warmer than that himself. He nods toward the SUV. “Looks like Sean’s here.”
Elijah stoops to lay Allie gently on the grass. They’d stopped, at one point, to wrap her body as best they could in Billy’s windcheater, so that her face is hidden at least, though the sight of her slender, golden-tanned legs dangling over Lij’s straining arm, fills Dom with pity and sorrow for all that’s been lost, for all that Sean doesn’t yet know has slipped away from him.
He still can’t wrap his mind around the fact that things have turned out this way. He keeps wanting to pinch himself, in hopes of awakening to some better day.
Though he knows there’s no awakening left to be had.
Billy touches his cheek gently with the back of his hand. “How’re you holding up, love? Okay?”
Dom nods, wishing he could lie back in the grass, shut his eyes and abandon thinking entirely. What in hell can he say? What can any of them say, when they come into Sean’s company?
“Billy, Dom,” Elijah calls softly. “I fuckin’ hate to say this, but it’s hot. I think we need to get her inside as soon as we can, y’know what I mean?”
Dom shuts his eyes. Yeah. He knows. Oh, God, he knows. Somewhere, not too distant from where they are now, he can hear flies buzzing. Somewhere, quite close by, he hears the cawing of a crow, louder and louder, filling up his ears, and then the world’s slanting, and he’s falling, falling, falling down the rabbithole.
It’s not Wonderland where he awakes, if it can be called awakening.
He’s walking in the corn again, walking softly as he can, not running, because he knows something’s quite close by, looking for him, but he’s dressed as Merry, which means he is a Hobbit, which means he can move quiet as anything.
He’s wearing calf-length trousers, with his feet down below their hems big and bare and more than a little hairy. His toes curl into the soft, dusty earth, which feels weird underneath, because he doesn’t have latex smothering his own feet, he has Merry Brandybuck’s tough, leathery soles.
Inside, too, Dom knows, Merry’s tough, smart and determined and a lot more brave, probably, than he will ever be, even though, when he’d been split apart from his Pip, it seemed to Dom that Merry (the Merry of the film, at least, if not the book) had gone just a bit mental, maybe not caring if he lived or died as the world was ending around him.
Which is one difference between them, it seems—Dom doesn’t want to be dead, even if the world is changing, going bad and dark and strange. He wants very much to live, just so long as Billy is with him.
Or maybe there isn’t such a difference after all, because he has his Bill, whilst Merry didn’t have his Pippin for all that long while.
He feels so small, so small and weak, that it comes to him that he really isn’t Dom Monaghan, all skinny five-foot-seven of him (even if he is taller than Lij and Billy, that truly isn’t much of a distinction) whom the other blokes still call “Hobbit” at his gym, but actually Merry’s size—three and a half feet tall, four feet on a good day, but only if Ent-draughts have been taken.
There are rats in the cornfield, scurrying, so big (or he’s so tiny) that they would come up nearly to his knees, but he sees in the dark as well as they can, and hides himself from their spying red eyes.
From the distance comes music, old-timey fingerpicking on a steel-stringed guitar, like Elizabeth Cotton, who wrote that song “Freight Train.”
And that’s the song that being played right now, fingers leaping and dancing over the jangling strings.
When I die
Please bury me deep…
“I’m not going to die,” Dom states quietly, firmly. “I don’t have what ever it is. I have something else entirely.”
“Mayhap you do,” answers an old woman’s voice, “And mayhap you don’t. Come closer to me, little English boy. Good Lord above, but you are a small one, ain’t ya?”
“It’s a disguise,” Dom tells her. “I’m hiding inside Merry, so that the rats and the pumkinhead man don’t discover me.”
He can see her now: thin wispy white hair and a dark brown face so creased it’s like the line in that song, ”cracked like an August Field, burned in the sun for a hundred years”. She’s old old, in a way that goes far beyond senior citizen or geriatric or elderly. She’s old as a tree is old, as mountains and fields are old, the whole history of the earth contained in their memories, and skinny and knobby, the way a tree can be skinny and knobby, her faded old-lady dress hanging on her like washing on a line, its shape hardly disturbed by the lines of the body inside. The lenses of her spectacles wink at him, first with the moonlight, then with the dark.
“Come closer, little English boy,” she tells him gently in her rusty old voice, like the swing of an old gate on a worn hinge. “Look at you now, boy, what is it you’re doing here?”
“Here?” Dom asks. “In America, you mean?”
She looks at him with humour, the furrows deepening at the corners of her lips. “There’s a fine young man thinks a deal of himself, I see,” she says at last, though not unkindly.
Dom shrugs, grinning back, casual and cheeky. He saunters closer, just as she’s told him to do. At least the rats aren’t here, so far as he can see, only a little front yard, worn bare, a big, rusty barrel for a rubbish bin and a shite-hole of a shack leaning half sideways, its porch held up on what appear to be tyre-jacks. Holy Christ.
But over to the right stands an apple tree, the most beautiful Dom thinks he’s ever seen, because it’s been let to grow naturally, its limbs in lovely twists and turnings, its foliage abundant, green as Billy’s eyes. Dom ambles closer still, unable to resist, leaning his cheek against bark that’s alternately rough and satiny on his skin.
Stay, Dommie, stay here with me, the green leaves whisper, as Dom wraps his arms around the trunk, and dreams.
“You love the earth, little English boy,” the old woman croons, “You love your friends. Best see to it you’re not leaving, because they’ll need you, in the end.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dom tells her. “Of course I’m not leaving them!”
And the leaves whisper new words to him, ones Dom’s never heard before. Hemingford Home, they breathe. Polk County, in Nebraska.
Dom likes the name “Nebraska.” Always has done. It possesses such a lovely, rustling sound. He decides to write the words twice on his hand, front and back, the better not to forget them again.
Pairing: Billy/Dom
Rating: PG-13 Language, for now. Yes, it's still angsty!
Summary: It's the end of the world as we know it and no one feels fine. Attack of the rabid AU crossover plotbunny: in which the world of Lotrips mingles with Stephen King’s The Stand, with the timelines bumped slightly into the future. In a nutshell, the basic premise of the book is: after the population of the US has been devastated by a "super flu" the survivors divide into two groups, those who follow Mother Abigail, and represent good, and those who are drawn to Randall Flagg, a demon.
The former Hobbits and Sean Astin’s family take a road trip up to the Napa Valley for a mini-break, completely unaware that everything around them’s about to change.
Feedback: longed for and appreciated
Disclaimers: This is entirely fictional. No disrespect intended. The people involved belong to themselves. The Stand was written by Stephen King.
Previous chapters and other writings can be found at Caraidean
“…the persistent sound in the row behind him signaled the end to all that: there would be no more sequels, and in a very short time, there would be no more movies at all.
In the row behind Larry, a man was coughing.” - Stephen King, The Stand
It’s a given, Dom thinks, that Billy never loses his temper, but he’s lost it now, the veins popping up on his temples, his fists clenched before his chest as he screams in Elijah’s face almost viciously, “Take it back, take it back now, damn yeh!”
Elijah’s practically—literally—knocked of his feet by this onslaught. He staggers back at least a metre, his jaw dropped and his eyes so wide they could hold the whole sky in their blueness.
Billy’s fists open enough to twist themselves into Lij’s t-shirt, hauling Elijah up onto his toes as Bill yells something so impenetrable even Dom can’t make sense of it, all he knows is that it’s time to unfreeze, to step in and take charge before things spin out beyond fixing.
”The center cannot hold,” pops into his head. ”The center cannot hold.” And where in bloody hell did that come from?
Dom gets a hold round Billy’s waist, hauling him backwards off Elijah, Bill’s abs so tense they’re like iron under his arm, the muscles jumping and twitching as if he’s about to be sick, no longer in any sort of control of what he’s doing.
It’s strange, really, because Dom knows Billy loves him. Of course Billy loves him, but sometimes, between Billy’s normally placid face, his laughter and his smiles, Dom tends to forget his lover’s intensity, the fact that Billy loves him quite as much as he loves Billy, past death and beyond to the end of everything. It’s humbling, to be loved with such passion, because Dom’s never been sure he actually deserves it, not when such feelings come from his Billy.
Dom forgets sometimes, too, how strong Bill can be, with his fencing and his martial arts, because he’s so small, even next to Dom’s smallness, and always so tender with him, inevitably. But now Dom’s dragging Billy backward and Bill’s fighting him every step of the way and it’s hard because Dom is still slippery and shaky and weakish from the shock, the cold, the wet and being sick himself, so it’s not until Dom manages to get his shoulders between his lover and his friend, blocking Bill’s view of Lij with his body, that he can really get things halfway back to normal again.
“Billy, Billy, Billy, BillyBoyd,” he croons, softly, hypnotically, because that’s the thing that’s worked in the past, the very few times Bill’s gotten beside himself--the sound of Dom’s voice speaking his name gently.
Behind him, Elijah splashes backwards onto his arse in the mud, legs parted and head bent between them, face in his hands. He’s sobbing, Dom knows, sobbing his always-tender heart out, and in a moment that will matter to him again, but just now Dom can only spare thoughts enough for Billy.
The sounds Bill is making aren’t any Dom’s ever heard, so he gets Billy turned around, pulling him against his chest to muffle the noise, wrapping him up in both arms to hold him fiercely, not caring if it hurts him or not, because he knows right now the hurting doesn’t matter to Bill in the least, it’s the tightness of the hold, it’s their two hearts beating one against the other, it’s the bruising of the other’s muscle and bone against their skins.
“Quiet, quiet,” Dom commands, forcefully, making his voice deep and low, because that’s what Billy needs now. He’s had to spend too much of his life being the strong one, and now he needs Dom to be the stronger, strong enough for both of them, which Dom can do, if he tries his hardest.
He can do it for Billy. He can do whatever Billy needs.
Except Dom’s body’s betraying him, and he’s coughing again, his chest aching as he does so, the shivers creeping under his skin. He turns away, burying his mouth against his shoulder to hide the sound, the other arm still tight around Billy’s middle.
And Dom knows then, whatever’s happening, it’s not hay fever, it’s not allergies. He may actually be getting sick, and the possible meanings of that realization terrify him.
Billy’s shuddering too, shaking in his arms. When he can, Dom turns back to him, easing up a bit until his hold’s become tender, until he’s rubbing Billy’s back in gentle circles, Bill’s face buried against his neck. “I can’t stand for that to happen,” Billy’s muttering. “Can’t stand for you to go away from me, Dommie.”
Dom holds him back a little, putting his fingers beneath Billy’s chin, turning his face upward until their eyes can meet. Sometimes it’s hard to believe Billy’s nearly a decade the elder, and as experienced as Dom knows he is, because there’s still so much innocence in his eyes and in his expressions, those leaf-green eyes, that gently-curving mouth. Dom touches a fingertip to Billy’s lips. “Ssh, love. Ssh. It’s all right. We’ll think this through.” With his other hand he massages the back of Billy’s neck, trying to loosen the stiff muscles. “Ssh, love, we’ll be all right. You’ll see.”
“Ah, m’ Dommie.” Their foreheads touch briefly, part again. Billy’s own small hands cup Dom’s face, fingertips tracing his temples, his cheekbones, his cheeks. “M’ Dommie, swear you won’t leave me. Swear to it, Dommie.”
“Never, Billy.” It’s easy to swear. There’s nothing easier in the world. “Whatever happens, Bill, I swear. And don’t you leave me either, céile.”
A smile flits over Billy’s mouth, hearing the Scots Gaelic word on Dom’s lips. Much as Dom mourns poor little Allie, much as he fears for their friends, there’s nothing else really for him, now, no one but he and Bill in the world. Slowly, their hands drop to their sides, then rise again to hold one another in an embrace that’s warm, familiar, loving, the way they’ve held each other in the past, a million times before, as if nothing in the world has changed or will be changing.
“I’m sorry, Bill, I’m so sorry,” Elijah’s saying, somewhere far away. “I didn’t mean…” His hand closes on Dom’s bicep, kneading painfully. “I didn’t mean anything. I was just…”
Dom raises his head from Billy’s shoulder, suddenly aware of just how sick it is he feels--his head pounding, his throat and chest growing tighter by the minute. But that’s nothing unusual, really. Unlike Billy, or even Elijah, he always gets colds. He’s been susceptible ever since he was a little boy, and just because he’s ill now, just because he’s sore and sniffly and feverish doesn’t have to mean anything. Something horrible, that kills as fast as it’s killed Elizabeth and Allie, doesn’t mean the end of other, less fatal colds and flus, it just makes them more alarming. And just because he’s caught a cold or the flu doesn’t mean he has to stop everything.
“Bill, Lij,” he says softly, “We need…”
Billy steps away again, rubbing his eyes roughly with both hands, looking as if he’s aged a decade in an hour, despite his expression of lingering innocence. Elijah, usually so completely flawless, looks aged too, haggard, like he’s badly strung out on heroin.
“I’m sorry, Bills,” Lij mutters. “Really. Honestly. I didn’t mean to freak you.”
“It’s all right,” Dom tells him gently, stroking his fingers through Elijah’s hair. “You’re just shaken. We all are, really. Aren’t we, Billy?”
Billy nods, speechless, his always fair skin dead-pale. More than ever, Dom determines, he won’t show any weakness he can help. He won’t show anything.
Billy’s hand closes around his, so tightly Bill’s nails bite into Dom’s skin. Soon, he knows, they’ll leave crescents of blood in his palm.
“Dom,” Elijah murmurs. “What do we do now?”
Dom takes in a breath, careful not to make it too deep—he doesn’t want to start coughing again. “Find out what’s happening. Get help, I suppose, to start.”
“And if there is no help?” Elijah asks. “I mean, I’m just saying…”
“Then,” Dom tells him, “We’ll find out what there is. And we have each other, don’t we? Don’t we, Bills?”
Billy’s gaze has drifted, as if he’s become fascinated by their shoes, but he looks up at the sound of his name. “Yes, Dommie,” he says, in a breath of a voice, “We have each other still.”
Paddling back against the current is a thousand times more effort than following it down, and in the end they give it up as a bad deal, dragging their boats up onto the riverbank and overturning them, with paddles secured. Dom wonders how far they’ve come, how many miles might lie between them and town, or between them and their hired house, because he’s carrying Allie, and his head feels light, and small as she is, she seems terribly heavy.
After half a mile or so, Billy says, “Look over there. That hill.”
They stop. Elijah squints, because even with his contacts in, his eyesight’s nothing to write home about, really.
“Isn’t that the back of the hill behind the house? If we cut out across country, won’t reach there eventually?”
Dom squints too. With the burning in his eyes, his vision’s gone wonky, and it doesn’t help in the least that he feels feverish and dizzy as well.
“Dommie,” Elijah says. The weight of Allie’s body leaves his arms suddenly. “Let me carry her, okay? You aren’t looking so great.”
Dom starts to protest, but Billy takes his arm. “Elijah’s right, love. You’re burning.”
“You know,” Dom tells him, wishing Billy would still meet his looks. “It could be nothing. It could be anything.”
“Yes,” Billy answers at long last. “Of course it could.” He weaves his fingers in with Dom’s, leading him on, up away from the river, up a high bank to the road, then across and on, past fields green with grape-vines and yellow with mustard-blossom, beneath eagles swooping and keening through the sky. It’s so peaceful here, and strangely quiet too, not a car or truck or plane overhead to be seen, not even the giant irrigation machines rolling around between the rows of yellow and green.
After another mile they stop for Dom to rest, because he’s breathing hard, coughing forcefully enough to bring up some nasty-tasting stuff that’s thick and almost green, as he notices when he excuses himself, spitting it out behind a bush where Billy can’t see.
But it’s not white, anyway, and not like glue, and there isn’t gallons of it, like there was with Allie, and though the coughing hurts, it’s just a cough, not the horrible tearing noise he heard from Christine.
Dom thinks to himself, What if it’s her, too? If Sean loses all three of them, what in hell will he do?
Sean loves them, Dom knows, loves his three friends as they love him, but he also knows Sean’s family means everything in the world to him.
He remembers once, at an evening barbeque, the whole crowd of them stretched out on the lawn behind Viggo’s place, drinking beer, with the stars of New Zealand like jewels overhead. Sean, just tipsy enough to be sentimental (not that he ever needed much excuse where Chris or the kids were concerned), told him the two days he’d been happiest in his life were the day after his wedding, waking up with Christine asleep beside him in their bed, realizing that the was it, the forever he’d hoped for all his life, and the day he first held tiny, squirming red-faced Allie in his arms.
He felt as if his heart had been torn open, Sean said, then put back together all over again, in a new version so much better than the old it couldn’t even begin to be described, better than he ever could have possibly believed.
“Dommie,” he’d said, squeezing Dom’s shoulder, kindly and tightly. “Dommie, my brother, I hope someday you’ll know what I mean.”
And Dom had glanced over at Billy, who sat cross-legged on the grass, head thrown back as he laughed about something with Orli, and answered his friend, “Sean, mate,I hope I do too.”
Billy had been correct about the hill being the right one, but Dom had known that, really—Billy’s talented, in general, at orienteering, finding his way from place to place even without benefit of a map. They climb over the crest, stopping halfway down the slope on the far side to gaze into the valley with its green grass and well-grown trees. The peach-coloured, white-trimmed house appears normal, unchanged, Sean’s Lexus shining in the drive, sparkling-clean and new.
Dom sinks down on the grass, dry blades crackling under his bum, the noises of insects abuzz in his ears.
“Dommie?” Billy kneels by his side.
“Just want to rest a bit.” With the back of his arm, Dom wipes sweat from his forehead, his neck, the underside of his chin. The temperature must have been well (as the Americans track such things) into the eighties, and he feels quite a bit warmer than that himself. He nods toward the SUV. “Looks like Sean’s here.”
Elijah stoops to lay Allie gently on the grass. They’d stopped, at one point, to wrap her body as best they could in Billy’s windcheater, so that her face is hidden at least, though the sight of her slender, golden-tanned legs dangling over Lij’s straining arm, fills Dom with pity and sorrow for all that’s been lost, for all that Sean doesn’t yet know has slipped away from him.
He still can’t wrap his mind around the fact that things have turned out this way. He keeps wanting to pinch himself, in hopes of awakening to some better day.
Though he knows there’s no awakening left to be had.
Billy touches his cheek gently with the back of his hand. “How’re you holding up, love? Okay?”
Dom nods, wishing he could lie back in the grass, shut his eyes and abandon thinking entirely. What in hell can he say? What can any of them say, when they come into Sean’s company?
“Billy, Dom,” Elijah calls softly. “I fuckin’ hate to say this, but it’s hot. I think we need to get her inside as soon as we can, y’know what I mean?”
Dom shuts his eyes. Yeah. He knows. Oh, God, he knows. Somewhere, not too distant from where they are now, he can hear flies buzzing. Somewhere, quite close by, he hears the cawing of a crow, louder and louder, filling up his ears, and then the world’s slanting, and he’s falling, falling, falling down the rabbithole.
It’s not Wonderland where he awakes, if it can be called awakening.
He’s walking in the corn again, walking softly as he can, not running, because he knows something’s quite close by, looking for him, but he’s dressed as Merry, which means he is a Hobbit, which means he can move quiet as anything.
He’s wearing calf-length trousers, with his feet down below their hems big and bare and more than a little hairy. His toes curl into the soft, dusty earth, which feels weird underneath, because he doesn’t have latex smothering his own feet, he has Merry Brandybuck’s tough, leathery soles.
Inside, too, Dom knows, Merry’s tough, smart and determined and a lot more brave, probably, than he will ever be, even though, when he’d been split apart from his Pip, it seemed to Dom that Merry (the Merry of the film, at least, if not the book) had gone just a bit mental, maybe not caring if he lived or died as the world was ending around him.
Which is one difference between them, it seems—Dom doesn’t want to be dead, even if the world is changing, going bad and dark and strange. He wants very much to live, just so long as Billy is with him.
Or maybe there isn’t such a difference after all, because he has his Bill, whilst Merry didn’t have his Pippin for all that long while.
He feels so small, so small and weak, that it comes to him that he really isn’t Dom Monaghan, all skinny five-foot-seven of him (even if he is taller than Lij and Billy, that truly isn’t much of a distinction) whom the other blokes still call “Hobbit” at his gym, but actually Merry’s size—three and a half feet tall, four feet on a good day, but only if Ent-draughts have been taken.
There are rats in the cornfield, scurrying, so big (or he’s so tiny) that they would come up nearly to his knees, but he sees in the dark as well as they can, and hides himself from their spying red eyes.
From the distance comes music, old-timey fingerpicking on a steel-stringed guitar, like Elizabeth Cotton, who wrote that song “Freight Train.”
And that’s the song that being played right now, fingers leaping and dancing over the jangling strings.
When I die
Please bury me deep…
“I’m not going to die,” Dom states quietly, firmly. “I don’t have what ever it is. I have something else entirely.”
“Mayhap you do,” answers an old woman’s voice, “And mayhap you don’t. Come closer to me, little English boy. Good Lord above, but you are a small one, ain’t ya?”
“It’s a disguise,” Dom tells her. “I’m hiding inside Merry, so that the rats and the pumkinhead man don’t discover me.”
He can see her now: thin wispy white hair and a dark brown face so creased it’s like the line in that song, ”cracked like an August Field, burned in the sun for a hundred years”. She’s old old, in a way that goes far beyond senior citizen or geriatric or elderly. She’s old as a tree is old, as mountains and fields are old, the whole history of the earth contained in their memories, and skinny and knobby, the way a tree can be skinny and knobby, her faded old-lady dress hanging on her like washing on a line, its shape hardly disturbed by the lines of the body inside. The lenses of her spectacles wink at him, first with the moonlight, then with the dark.
“Come closer, little English boy,” she tells him gently in her rusty old voice, like the swing of an old gate on a worn hinge. “Look at you now, boy, what is it you’re doing here?”
“Here?” Dom asks. “In America, you mean?”
She looks at him with humour, the furrows deepening at the corners of her lips. “There’s a fine young man thinks a deal of himself, I see,” she says at last, though not unkindly.
Dom shrugs, grinning back, casual and cheeky. He saunters closer, just as she’s told him to do. At least the rats aren’t here, so far as he can see, only a little front yard, worn bare, a big, rusty barrel for a rubbish bin and a shite-hole of a shack leaning half sideways, its porch held up on what appear to be tyre-jacks. Holy Christ.
But over to the right stands an apple tree, the most beautiful Dom thinks he’s ever seen, because it’s been let to grow naturally, its limbs in lovely twists and turnings, its foliage abundant, green as Billy’s eyes. Dom ambles closer still, unable to resist, leaning his cheek against bark that’s alternately rough and satiny on his skin.
Stay, Dommie, stay here with me, the green leaves whisper, as Dom wraps his arms around the trunk, and dreams.
“You love the earth, little English boy,” the old woman croons, “You love your friends. Best see to it you’re not leaving, because they’ll need you, in the end.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dom tells her. “Of course I’m not leaving them!”
And the leaves whisper new words to him, ones Dom’s never heard before. Hemingford Home, they breathe. Polk County, in Nebraska.
Dom likes the name “Nebraska.” Always has done. It possesses such a lovely, rustling sound. He decides to write the words twice on his hand, front and back, the better not to forget them again.
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