Fluke

[glasgow-blue.livejournal.com]

Blue Plate Special for notfriedkasei, with my most sincere apologies for the lateness. Omnipotent, harvest, stratagem, hubbub. "The sky exploded", and "a black toile pattern".

With thanks to my heterosexual life partner, diavestra.

Title: Fluke
Pairing: Dom/Billy (implied)
Word Count: 450
Disclaimer: I. Am. Making. This. Shit. Up.
Archive: Please ask.
Crossposted: glasgow_blue




Someday, they will be old and frail; forced to sit on a porch (or worse, in a sun room) playing chess and working puzzles. Dom figures that, by then, he will have finally developed The Monaghan Stratagem and will finally be able to beat Billy reliably and without cheating. They will drink tea and slurp soup and make rude comments about the bottoms of the young nurses come to tend them in their twilight years. Maybe pinch a few, now and then. It will be an acceptable way to slip from the world.

Now, though, now they are young and prime and people will gather in ballrooms to see them and listen to them talk about nothing at all, really. It's fan-fucking-tastic, is what it is and Dom wishes he could harvest this omnipotence and bottle it. Make a killing at acting schools and drama festivals around the world. People are hungry for this stuff. He'd have more money than God.

They are poised, he and Billy, on the brink of revelation in a grand room on the ground floor of a hotel with crystal chandeliers and plush carpeting. Dom can hear the din of a crowd from the other side of the black toile curtain. It is the hubbub generated by a room full of fans waiting for their arrival on stage. His fingers twitch. Birds land in his chest and flap their wings against the rhythm of his heart. Two feet away--close enough to touch--Billy shifts from foot to foot and rolls his neck, cracking it audibly. They exchange a grin. Heady stuff, this.

An impossibly tall girl wearing a headset hands out microphones. Her t-shirt says "my other horse is from Rohan" and Billy is in the midst of asking her if she actually has a horse or not, but she motions them through the looking glass. Then the sky explodes into a blinding sea of flashbulbs and they are engulfed in a wall of sound. Equilibrium shifts in exactly the same way as it does when he gets up-ended by a breaker and finds his lungs full of salt water.

Dom falls back a step, overwhelmed and never used to it. What's that tag line from MTV? You think you know, but you have no idea? Yeah. Perfect description. He thinks he knows what to expect. He does know what to expect, but it's impossible to be ready for. And it's in that moment of blitzkrieg and faltering backward momentum that Dom finds his humility again. Just a guy from Manchester. Just a bit of luck. Just some kismet, maybe.

Billy's hand comes up and steadies him, solid against the small of Dom's back.