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monaboyd Sep. 7th, 2004 03:18 pm)
childeproof.livejournal.com posting in monaboyd Sep. 7th, 2004 03:18 pm)TITLE: Getting Hit by a Train
AUTHOR:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
childeproof
PAIRING/S: Hobbitpile, DM/BB/EW/SA, but mostly DM/BB
RATING: R for language and sexual situations
DEDICATION: tomsilverstar for lots of excellent reasons
SUMMARY: Then Lijah is leaning over to Billy, with an expression that will stand him in good stead if he’s ever tried for murder. ‘Bills, do us a favour, take Dommie behind the sound van and blow him, or we may as well giftwrap the ring for the Nazgul and go home, ‘cos there’s not gonna be a movie.’
DISCLAIMER: Invented from start to finish. No disrespect to anyone intended, no cash made.
NOTE: A sort-of sequel to ‘Third Astronaut and Fourth Cop’ which can be found here - http://www.livejournal.com/users/childeproof/4333.html - but can be read alone.
An early start is like a bad birthing experience, is how Dom sees it. Getting out of bed in the morning is like going through every stage of evolution from lump of primordial slime to hairy, uncommunicative biped. The final stage to erect, tool-wielding homo sapiens takes all the drive to the set, and most of Feet and Makeup.
‘Getting up at this hour is cruel and unusual punishment.’ His polystyrene cup of catering coffee smells uncannily like sweat, but he’s just about able to face the day, provided the day isn’t in tip-top condition either. ‘I’m probably infringing my own human rights.’
‘So call Amnesty International,’ Lijah says, yawning, jeans hanging low and unzipped, in his costume shirt. He’s a sippy smoker, Lijah, takes a few rushed puffs and then stubs out a cigarette like he’s afraid of someone coming along and telling him off.
‘I thought it was going to be, like, glamorous,’ Dom complains. ‘It’s like a – a Tupperware party, at the ass-crack of dawn.’
The chairs in the trailer, it comes to him, are the exact colour of testicles, that pinkish-brown kind of shade. This is the kind of existential insight you are subject to if you have to get out of bed when it’s still dark.
‘‘Look on the bright side, at least you don’t have to drag around chunky gold jewellery in practically every scene.’ Lijah bites his nails down so far they sometimes get infected. He often has a fingertip bandaged, sometimes more than one, which doesn’t stop him gnawing at them with his restless little teeth. ‘I mean, I look like some kind of rapper.’
Dom has to laugh. ‘MC Frodo.’
‘You know, Lij,’ Sean says, shouldering in the door in a lumberjack shirt over his costume. ‘I caught him trying to sell the One Ring on E-bay last night.’
‘God, not another one after the preciousss. Stand in line.’
‘Look, I’m planning for my retirement.’
‘That’s his story,’ Lijah says, letting Sean sit on the arm of his chair. ‘It’s just a cover for buying ball-gags and leg-spreaders.’ He gives Sean a drag of his cigarette, beds his head more comfortably against his thigh.
Dom spits out a mouthful of coffee. ‘That’s it. I’m putting Amnesty on speed-dial.’
But Billy, his brother-in-arms, is back from Makeup. Billy who he’d known for all of five minutes before realising he needed to get a poster of him for his bedroom wall. ‘Our Lijah’s only nine. So who taught him about ball-gags, Seanie, I wonder?’
Billy, wig and cigarette in hand, his own hair in wet spikes, is hunched up in the kind of hoodie Dom especially dislikes with the marsupial brand of large front pocket. It looks wonderful on Billy. On Billy he wants to have sex with it.
‘I’d never’ve picked you out of a line-up as a pervy kiddy-fiddler, Samwise,’ Dom says, randomly, because he can’t sit here at seven am thinking about fucking items of Billy’s wardrobe.
‘Why’m I the Big Bad Wolf here?’ Sean wants to know, blushing slightly.
‘And why’m I pure as the driven snow?’ Lijah complains. ‘I might’ve, like, blown someone to get this job.’
Billy leans over and pats Lijah, messes his hair. ‘Ok, petal. You’ve had more cock ends than weekends, we know that.’
There are consonants where Billy’s voice sounds like he’s kissing, and that’s another thing that Dom finds inconvenient to think about now, at the start of the day. Sex is like booze, it’s definitely bad to start brooding about it too early, wondering arewegoingto and canweagain, when you should still be living off the look of Billy soft and swollen with sleep, with a whole map of sheet creases on one cheek.
Lijah gives Billy the finger, but trying not to look pleased. Even after Dom’s seen him get down on his knees in the upstairs hall for Sean, heard the private sounds, the steady rhythms and delayed intakes of breath, that come through the bedroom wall, he looks barely old enough to cross the road by himself.
‘So who’d you blow to be Pippin, Bills?’ Lijah, a bit flustered from all the attention.
Billy’s eyes slide over to Dom, then skitter away again, as he props himself against the counter. He starts using the string of his teabag to floss under his thumbnail. His lowered eyelids are slightly blue, like some tiny hurt is bruising them. ‘That, wee Lij, is a story too depraved for your young ears.’
And evidently Dom is keen to avoid hearing it, because he drinks off the dregs of his coffee and says ‘Personally, I just used an ancient Tantric mind-control technique, also known as lying. ‘Do you have film experience?’ ’Yes.’ ‘Can you swordfight?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you as handsome as your photo?’ ‘Sure.’’
Billy slides him a sideways grin, then dips and turns for a lighter. The nape of his neck has a faint bite mark Makeup’s missed.
Drenched with coffee, so much his bones are trilling slightly, Dom tries to keep himself balanced on top of his neck, not letting his personality start to slop out nervously over the sides, running down his chin.
He gets up for a refill, and puts himself close to Billy’s side, poking for a stirrer among the little plastic UHT semi-skimmeds. Billy makes tea as a form of marking out territory. He takes enormous pleasure in the ritual of filling the kettle, mashing the bag in the cup, adding the right amount of milk. Anyone else attempting to come and make a cup of tea on his territory will be most severely dealt with, like by seizure of their Hobnobs, the half-chocolate half-plain kind Billy says are an expression of Scottish Calvinism, because making them entirely chocolate-covered would be too luxurious by far.
All the caffeine makes Dom’s heartbeat scuffle.
He’ll definitely regret this, he’ll end the day at the supermarket, and when the checkout girl asks whether he wants a plastic bag, he’ll feel like saying ‘Yes, please, for my face’.
But for now, when his mind is buzzing around like a wasp under a glass, and it’s too early in the morning to matter, he has a couple of options.
He could lean in and kiss Billy, or, alternatively, he could pull himself together. Then he sees Sean’s hand fisting itself into Lijah’s bed hair, moving slow, and Lijah blowing smoke up at his face, picking at the laddered knees of his pale jeans, and thinks, what the fuck.
‘Hey Bills, I think I’m in love with you.’ His teeth feel all of a sudden as if they’re made of plastic, squeezy and squeaky.
Billy blinks, bemused. ‘No, you’re not, Dommie, stop being soft.’
Something about this is strangely enjoyable. Dom puts on his best patientandopenandfunloving expression. Sooner or later this works. He is a person people warm to. ‘Oh, all right. I take it back. I changed my mind.’
‘You can’t change your mind.’ Billy’s hair is blurred over his forehead.
‘Too late,’ Dom says. ‘I’m a blonde, I’m supposed to be fickle.’
‘What, you dye it brown?’
‘What are you talking about?’ Dom is outraged. ‘My hair is blonde.’
Billy considers. ‘Dirty blonde. Maybe. In the sun.’
‘It’s bloody blonde, all right?’
If Billy was any more laid back he’d be horizontal. ‘Jeez, you’re touchy today.’
‘Don’t mind us, we’re invisible to the naked eye,’ Lijah says. ‘But I should warn you I can see Orli heading this way to complain about his contact lenses and people making him stay up all night doing drinking games.’
Billy flicks his teabag skilfully into the bin from a difficult angle and turns back to Dom. There’s the way his hair ruffles damply over his ears, his small, deep mouth.
There are many kinds of smile. The insincere wellscrewyouanyway, the wishiwasanywherefuckingelse, the mindonsomethingelseentirely and the goingalongwithajokeidon’tget. But there is another kind of smile entirely, one you can’t prepare in advance, or fake, one that convinces you briefly but completely of the existence of God and the benevolence of the universe. This is the kind Billy can do, sometimes, and does now.
It makes Dom think of words like unblemished, pure. But you can’t just let that kind of – thing, go unchallenged.
‘The thing is, see,’ he says. ‘ I have this massive erection.’
Billy leans in and smiles against the fold of his neck, mouths him. He smells of toothpaste and warm washed skin. ‘Dommie, that’s not massive.’
Lijah claps a hand over Sean’s open mouth. ‘Shh.’
‘Huh?’
‘Because I’m trying to fix this moment in my memory forever.’
Orli stamps up the steps, eyes bloodshot, groggy with sleep, blonde Elf wig and a brewery promotion teeshirt. ‘You know, the chairs in here are the exact colour of balls.’
‘Yeah,’ Dom deadpans in his Hello! Magazine interview voice. ‘I need to, like, talk to my decorator.’
Over lunch, Dom watches Billy eat the tomato and turn the pasta over with his fork the way kids try to heap leftovers to make them look smaller. The veins in his wrists and arms are very blue. His nails have been very neatly bitten.
Lijah is sparky with blood-sugar, rattling on, not unentertainingly, with his one-man version of The Princess Bride. ‘You keeled my father, prepare to die.’ Inigo Montoya in a hobbit-wig brandishing the ketchup bottle.
‘Not in this film, babes,’ Billy says repressively. ‘Your fighting technique involves dropping your sword and falling over.’
Lijah leans over to stick his tongue out at Billy and smudges a kiss by Sean’s ear. He can have this look of being unmarked by normal wear and tear, Lijah can.
‘Get off me, mayo-mouth.’ Sean swats him. Crush is the right word for the way his eyes follow Lijah, unblinkingly, when he thinks no one’s looking, though often when Lijah turns to him, he’s looking at something else.
They’re the hobbits, they come in two pairs, like eyebrows or gloves, or something.
Dom decides it would all be even more pleasant if he shuffled a bit closer to Billy. ‘Can I suck you off ?’
Billy thinks about this, eating a Golden Delicious. ‘Call my agent.’
‘So, I suppose gaffer-taping you face-down over the bar of the Prancing Pony’s out.’
He senses, rather than sees, Billy blush slightly. He wants to be fucking him and kissing the backs of his ears, licking the soft frond of light hair in the hollow of Billy’s neck.
Billy’s voice edges into amusement. ‘Only if you eat your greens.’
Dom looks at his spinach. ‘Was that a yes?’
There’s a nicely chafing silence. ‘Yeah.’
Somewhere out there six billion human beings are treading on each other’s faces. But Dom’s happy. He’s fairly sure they hadn’t wanted to give him the job, that the hundreds of other experienced, well-qualified actors were busy, on holiday, suffering spiritual crises, having ski-ing accidents, doing jury duty or being contestants on game shows. But they hired him, and he loves it, the transition from the weird concentration of a take to the madness behind the cameras, Elves blowing their noses into wads of Kleenex and having hissy fits at their agents on mobile phones, orcs doing crosswords while simultaneously looking for a last-minute babysitter for their three-year-old. Orcus domesticus, Billy calls them.
Then Lijah is leaning over to Billy, with an expression that will stand him in good stead if he’s ever tried for murder. ‘Bills, do us a favour, take Dommie behind the sound van and blow him, or we may as well giftwrap the ring for the Nazgul and go home, ‘cos there’s not gonna be a movie.’
Some Nazgul eating chilli con carne on the next table raise an ironic cheer.
Orli, who’s clearly been putting two and two together and making about fifteen, leans across, dipping a hank of blonde wig in his Coke. ‘So, are you guys -?’
Dom, getting to his feet, tugs on the back of Billy’s hoodie. ‘Nah, Elfboy. It’s all just part of the surreal dream you’re having.’
The two of them hit the air and walk, not touching. The air is lovely here, silk air, clean and cold. Dom feels clean, bleached-in-the-blood-of-the-lamb clean, you-could-eat-off-me clean. Since he’s been in Wellington he’s a smoother fit in the days, he can be comfortable in nature, it approves of him, is glad to have him.
Billy hands over his lighter without asking, lopes alongside, hands deep in his pockets, whistling through his teeth. Dom likes the shot of smoke, the warmth of lighting up, the solid nudge of Billy’s arm against his.
The blood taps in the back of his head every time his heels hit the ground.
Their small talk is small. No souls are unburdened, no important secrets revealed.
‘Can you call it incest, if it’s first cousins?’
‘Huh?’
'Merry and Pippin, stupid.’ Billy slides one hand into Dom’s pocket.
‘Haven’t a clue.’ Dom tries to look like he gives a shit, with Billy’s fist moving him against the rough lining. ‘They’re hardly going to ask us that in character brainstorming, are they?’
‘Over here.’ Billy steers him with a hand warm on the small of his back. Billy can be … happy. Not happy because he’s got a good part, or is finally making some money, or has smoked an especially good joint, or is getting laid regularly, just happy. There’s times when he looks at Dom and makes him want to take parcels abroad for strangers, smoke in petrol stations, swallow chewing gum, run down steps with his hands in his pockets, stare at the sun.
The rush increases, starts rummaging around under his skin.
In the angle between a toppling pile of crates and a high wall, he leans into Billy’s small, hitched breaths and traces with his fingertips the quick-pulsing blue vein in his neck. Billy takes hold of Dom’s hand till he can feel the pleasant bite of the fingerbones, and rubs it against his own crotch, where his cock is a hard ridge held sideways.
When he licks Billy’s lips, left to right, he tastes of apple and cigarette smoke.
The breeze blocks of the wall, stippled with sharp plaster, are giving out the day’s stored warmth against Dom’s spine. He gets his hands under Billy’s shirt, up to his shallow, milky nipples and then down under the breeches waistband to the damp cleft of his ass.
As he’s jerking Billy’s trousers down, he thinks of what this reminds him of. ‘School flashback,’ he says thickly into Billy’s neck. ‘Behind the gym during assembly, the hymns and stuff. I always thought ‘Our God Reigns’ was ‘Argo Drains’ ‘cos you were only ever listening for the bell, getting your pubes caught in your zip -- ‘
‘Dommie,’ Billy says, taking a rough grip on Dom’s erection. ‘Enough with the trip down memory lane.’
Afterwards, they walk back together, now and again jarring arms the way people do when they can’t quite meet each other’s step. And Dom realises he is a total fuckwit because it isn’t remotely like those heartless occasional jerk-offs at school with someone who had the IQ of a table and called you a fag afterwards.
And he might have said so, only something heavy barges into them from behind. Lijah, warming his hands in Sean’s pockets, wanting to rent a movie later.
‘Don’t let Sean choose.’
‘Yeah, nothing with French people sitting around talking about philosophy.’
‘Bud Likes Big Cocks.’
‘Oh, I dunno, ‘Dom says. ‘Bit vague, isn’t it? I mean, Bud Likes Big Cocks, what would that be about?’ He’s in that running-off-at-the mouth mood, buzzed up and blissed out, in need of a mate to commit banter with.
‘You’re right, Dom,’ Billy says, limpid-eyed. ‘You wouldn’t want to rent something where you aren’t sure what you’re getting. Just how big are the cocks, that’s the kind of thing we need to know.’
‘Yeah, and are there park rangers who get in on the action.’
‘Suspiciously clean greasemonkeys.’
As they move off towards the Bree sets, Lijah’s arm stays heavily where it is, around Dom’s neck, his fingers doodling absent-mindedly on his collarbone.
In the end, it ends up happening the same way everything the four of them do together happens, blundering, improvised, going the scenic route.
It’s late, they’ve all got a few beers in them, and they’ve got an early call. Lijah’s already upstairs singing Urge Overkill in the bath, but the other three are still on the sofa under Dom’s duvet in its red Man U cover. The bite-marked crusts of two Monster Pepperonis from Mac’s Pizza are limp in their greasy boxes. The Scandinavian satellite porn they ended up watching consisted entirely of bobbing mullets and girls in dirndls acting surprised at being entered from behind. It’s like watching some pointless Olympic sport when you don’t know the rules, don’t support either team and don’t know any of the players, is what Dom thinks. It passes the time, but you don’t give a shit.
Now he’s channel-hopping, warm and syrupy with sleep, hugged up against Sean’s beer and cotton and denim on one side, and with Billy’s heavy head lodged in the hollow between his neck and shoulder on the other. The duvet has the faint yeasty smell of dried spunk, and Dom and Billy.
A newsreader shuffles papers, doing that serious straight-to-camera smile.
It kills Dom that news programmes are scheduled to be exactly the same length, say half an hour, whatever’s actually happening. It’d make a nice change, he thinks, if just once they had the talking head rip up his autocue and say, can’t think of a single thing to say today, chaps, nothing but a few hiccups in the stock market, and let’s face it, who gives a flying fuck.
He turns off the sound, leaving the picture on some late-night shopping channel, where two blonde women are demonstrating kitchen knives with terrifying stretched smiles. A thin rattle of sound from the cheap kitchen radio leaks across the hall.
They’ve stopped managing anything like the average conversation a while back. It’s more like bad experimental theatre, with moments of lucidity.
Sean says, pressing his chin down onto the faded denim of his knees, that he wouldn’t mind having his spunk harvested by aliens as long as they were good-looking.
Billy’s chuckle heats Dom’s collarbone pleasantly. ‘I got off with one of Madonna’s backing dancers once in a club in Glasgow,’ he says after a bit. ‘He looked a bit like an alien. In a good way.’
Dom chokes on a mouthful of beer. ‘Yeah. I’ve been one of Madonna’s backing dancers myself in clubs. And a fighter pilot.’
Billy pouts. He’s got on his ‘MENACE TO SOBRIETY’ teeshirt and his taut bare insteps, marked with faint red lines from the hobbit feet, are propped on the coffee table alongside Dom’s. After a while he says ‘Come to think of it, I produced Trainspotting once myself. Or it might’ve been Small Faces. ’
‘Never fucking worked, either.’
‘Total waste of time. ’
Feet drum on the stairs, and Lijah, in a bathtowel, catapults himself onto the sofa. His hair is slick with water and he’s shivering, hugging his ribs. The skin of his narrow arms is rough with gooseflesh. ‘Freezing my balls off’, he says, squirming to get under the duvet.
‘Let’s just check, shall we,’ Dom says automatically, as wet hair smacks him lightly in the face.
Lijah’s narrow haunches twist in his lap. ‘Hey, Dommie, stop – ’
And for the first time, Dom thinks no fucking way. The want must have been nestling in him for a while, only surfacing in little prods.
Billy gets a funny upside-down smile, like he’s been looking for something and then found it where he thought he would. In the bluish light of the TV, his eyes look big and dark, unsurprised. ‘Now, which genius was it first discovered our Lij is ticklish as a little girl?’
‘Ow, stop it, it’ll be tiny --’
‘Sheesh, you’re right, it is tiny.’ Lijah’s perverse little cock is hardening, untouched, in the damp hollow of his thigh.
Dom can feel Sean’s roughened breathing against his ribs. But it’s Billy who says, wonderfully matter-of-fact, more Scottish when he’s had a few, ‘You might want to get that seen to, Lij, you could catch cold.’
So Dom reaches down, spreads his fingers on the smooth flatness of Lijah’s stomach, and moves his hand down, over the fine line of hair. He’s waiting for opposition, but none comes. When he stops, the momentum of his thoughts sends them rushing forward, pressing at the back of his eyes.
Lijah goes quiet, sprawled. His eyes are dilating, the pupils swallowing the blue and his breath is coming in brusque little sighs.
Sean’s breath hitches and quietens again.
Billy checks Sean’s eyes, and whatever he sees make him lean in, run one bitten-nailed finger over where the skin clings closely to Lijah’s ribcage up to the dark bud of his left nipple. ‘Relax, flower.’
‘It’ll be like doctors and nurses,’ Dom offers softly, his hand moving, slow.
‘Or alien abduction.’
Air is leaving Lijah’s lungs in little bird-like clucks. He’s damp and malleable as a newborn calf.
It is simply and beautifully clear what they are going to do.
Later, Dom is gathering up his duvet, which really needs to go in the wash, but he needs his bed, his soft, unmade, horizontal bed, more than anything else right now.
Billy comes and stands in the doorway. His mouth is a little soft rip in his tired face. He’s wearing only his loose old tracksuit bottoms, and there’s a messy smear of come on his side. He makes a kind of shrug, looking very breakable for a moment.
Dom’s throat is stiff, and he’s not sure about this, but – ‘You coming up?’
The air gets unsteady with involuntary hope of the pleasegodletmenothavefuckedthisup variety.
There’s a pause. A toilet upstairs flushes.
‘Barring better offers’, Billy says eventually, mashing a hand around in his sticking-up hair, on the edge of smiling.
Jesusjustthanksandi’llcontactyouinfuturewithmorethanjustcomplaints.
Is feeling that everything will be all right an indication you’ve finally grown up, or just a sign you’re not right in the head? Dom hasn’t a fucking clue what’s going on, and that’s fine with him. Because knowing would take the fun out of it, like when you’re reading a good book and someone says, ‘Oh that’s a great one, did he get hit by the train yet?’
He lets the duvet fall in a heap and puts his head against Billy’s shoulder, feeling the mechanisms that are Billy working, lacing his hands under the damp edges of his hair.
Billy puts a palm on the back of his head, rubs a little. ‘C’mon. It’s late.’
AUTHOR:
childeproof PAIRING/S: Hobbitpile, DM/BB/EW/SA, but mostly DM/BB
RATING: R for language and sexual situations
DEDICATION: to
msilverstar for lots of excellent reasonsSUMMARY: Then Lijah is leaning over to Billy, with an expression that will stand him in good stead if he’s ever tried for murder. ‘Bills, do us a favour, take Dommie behind the sound van and blow him, or we may as well giftwrap the ring for the Nazgul and go home, ‘cos there’s not gonna be a movie.’
DISCLAIMER: Invented from start to finish. No disrespect to anyone intended, no cash made.
NOTE: A sort-of sequel to ‘Third Astronaut and Fourth Cop’ which can be found here - http://www.livejournal.com/users/childeproof/4333.html - but can be read alone.
An early start is like a bad birthing experience, is how Dom sees it. Getting out of bed in the morning is like going through every stage of evolution from lump of primordial slime to hairy, uncommunicative biped. The final stage to erect, tool-wielding homo sapiens takes all the drive to the set, and most of Feet and Makeup.
‘Getting up at this hour is cruel and unusual punishment.’ His polystyrene cup of catering coffee smells uncannily like sweat, but he’s just about able to face the day, provided the day isn’t in tip-top condition either. ‘I’m probably infringing my own human rights.’
‘So call Amnesty International,’ Lijah says, yawning, jeans hanging low and unzipped, in his costume shirt. He’s a sippy smoker, Lijah, takes a few rushed puffs and then stubs out a cigarette like he’s afraid of someone coming along and telling him off.
‘I thought it was going to be, like, glamorous,’ Dom complains. ‘It’s like a – a Tupperware party, at the ass-crack of dawn.’
The chairs in the trailer, it comes to him, are the exact colour of testicles, that pinkish-brown kind of shade. This is the kind of existential insight you are subject to if you have to get out of bed when it’s still dark.
‘‘Look on the bright side, at least you don’t have to drag around chunky gold jewellery in practically every scene.’ Lijah bites his nails down so far they sometimes get infected. He often has a fingertip bandaged, sometimes more than one, which doesn’t stop him gnawing at them with his restless little teeth. ‘I mean, I look like some kind of rapper.’
Dom has to laugh. ‘MC Frodo.’
‘You know, Lij,’ Sean says, shouldering in the door in a lumberjack shirt over his costume. ‘I caught him trying to sell the One Ring on E-bay last night.’
‘God, not another one after the preciousss. Stand in line.’
‘Look, I’m planning for my retirement.’
‘That’s his story,’ Lijah says, letting Sean sit on the arm of his chair. ‘It’s just a cover for buying ball-gags and leg-spreaders.’ He gives Sean a drag of his cigarette, beds his head more comfortably against his thigh.
Dom spits out a mouthful of coffee. ‘That’s it. I’m putting Amnesty on speed-dial.’
But Billy, his brother-in-arms, is back from Makeup. Billy who he’d known for all of five minutes before realising he needed to get a poster of him for his bedroom wall. ‘Our Lijah’s only nine. So who taught him about ball-gags, Seanie, I wonder?’
Billy, wig and cigarette in hand, his own hair in wet spikes, is hunched up in the kind of hoodie Dom especially dislikes with the marsupial brand of large front pocket. It looks wonderful on Billy. On Billy he wants to have sex with it.
‘I’d never’ve picked you out of a line-up as a pervy kiddy-fiddler, Samwise,’ Dom says, randomly, because he can’t sit here at seven am thinking about fucking items of Billy’s wardrobe.
‘Why’m I the Big Bad Wolf here?’ Sean wants to know, blushing slightly.
‘And why’m I pure as the driven snow?’ Lijah complains. ‘I might’ve, like, blown someone to get this job.’
Billy leans over and pats Lijah, messes his hair. ‘Ok, petal. You’ve had more cock ends than weekends, we know that.’
There are consonants where Billy’s voice sounds like he’s kissing, and that’s another thing that Dom finds inconvenient to think about now, at the start of the day. Sex is like booze, it’s definitely bad to start brooding about it too early, wondering arewegoingto and canweagain, when you should still be living off the look of Billy soft and swollen with sleep, with a whole map of sheet creases on one cheek.
Lijah gives Billy the finger, but trying not to look pleased. Even after Dom’s seen him get down on his knees in the upstairs hall for Sean, heard the private sounds, the steady rhythms and delayed intakes of breath, that come through the bedroom wall, he looks barely old enough to cross the road by himself.
‘So who’d you blow to be Pippin, Bills?’ Lijah, a bit flustered from all the attention.
Billy’s eyes slide over to Dom, then skitter away again, as he props himself against the counter. He starts using the string of his teabag to floss under his thumbnail. His lowered eyelids are slightly blue, like some tiny hurt is bruising them. ‘That, wee Lij, is a story too depraved for your young ears.’
And evidently Dom is keen to avoid hearing it, because he drinks off the dregs of his coffee and says ‘Personally, I just used an ancient Tantric mind-control technique, also known as lying. ‘Do you have film experience?’ ’Yes.’ ‘Can you swordfight?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you as handsome as your photo?’ ‘Sure.’’
Billy slides him a sideways grin, then dips and turns for a lighter. The nape of his neck has a faint bite mark Makeup’s missed.
Drenched with coffee, so much his bones are trilling slightly, Dom tries to keep himself balanced on top of his neck, not letting his personality start to slop out nervously over the sides, running down his chin.
He gets up for a refill, and puts himself close to Billy’s side, poking for a stirrer among the little plastic UHT semi-skimmeds. Billy makes tea as a form of marking out territory. He takes enormous pleasure in the ritual of filling the kettle, mashing the bag in the cup, adding the right amount of milk. Anyone else attempting to come and make a cup of tea on his territory will be most severely dealt with, like by seizure of their Hobnobs, the half-chocolate half-plain kind Billy says are an expression of Scottish Calvinism, because making them entirely chocolate-covered would be too luxurious by far.
All the caffeine makes Dom’s heartbeat scuffle.
He’ll definitely regret this, he’ll end the day at the supermarket, and when the checkout girl asks whether he wants a plastic bag, he’ll feel like saying ‘Yes, please, for my face’.
But for now, when his mind is buzzing around like a wasp under a glass, and it’s too early in the morning to matter, he has a couple of options.
He could lean in and kiss Billy, or, alternatively, he could pull himself together. Then he sees Sean’s hand fisting itself into Lijah’s bed hair, moving slow, and Lijah blowing smoke up at his face, picking at the laddered knees of his pale jeans, and thinks, what the fuck.
‘Hey Bills, I think I’m in love with you.’ His teeth feel all of a sudden as if they’re made of plastic, squeezy and squeaky.
Billy blinks, bemused. ‘No, you’re not, Dommie, stop being soft.’
Something about this is strangely enjoyable. Dom puts on his best patientandopenandfunloving expression. Sooner or later this works. He is a person people warm to. ‘Oh, all right. I take it back. I changed my mind.’
‘You can’t change your mind.’ Billy’s hair is blurred over his forehead.
‘Too late,’ Dom says. ‘I’m a blonde, I’m supposed to be fickle.’
‘What, you dye it brown?’
‘What are you talking about?’ Dom is outraged. ‘My hair is blonde.’
Billy considers. ‘Dirty blonde. Maybe. In the sun.’
‘It’s bloody blonde, all right?’
If Billy was any more laid back he’d be horizontal. ‘Jeez, you’re touchy today.’
‘Don’t mind us, we’re invisible to the naked eye,’ Lijah says. ‘But I should warn you I can see Orli heading this way to complain about his contact lenses and people making him stay up all night doing drinking games.’
Billy flicks his teabag skilfully into the bin from a difficult angle and turns back to Dom. There’s the way his hair ruffles damply over his ears, his small, deep mouth.
There are many kinds of smile. The insincere wellscrewyouanyway, the wishiwasanywherefuckingelse, the mindonsomethingelseentirely and the goingalongwithajokeidon’tget. But there is another kind of smile entirely, one you can’t prepare in advance, or fake, one that convinces you briefly but completely of the existence of God and the benevolence of the universe. This is the kind Billy can do, sometimes, and does now.
It makes Dom think of words like unblemished, pure. But you can’t just let that kind of – thing, go unchallenged.
‘The thing is, see,’ he says. ‘ I have this massive erection.’
Billy leans in and smiles against the fold of his neck, mouths him. He smells of toothpaste and warm washed skin. ‘Dommie, that’s not massive.’
Lijah claps a hand over Sean’s open mouth. ‘Shh.’
‘Huh?’
‘Because I’m trying to fix this moment in my memory forever.’
Orli stamps up the steps, eyes bloodshot, groggy with sleep, blonde Elf wig and a brewery promotion teeshirt. ‘You know, the chairs in here are the exact colour of balls.’
‘Yeah,’ Dom deadpans in his Hello! Magazine interview voice. ‘I need to, like, talk to my decorator.’
Over lunch, Dom watches Billy eat the tomato and turn the pasta over with his fork the way kids try to heap leftovers to make them look smaller. The veins in his wrists and arms are very blue. His nails have been very neatly bitten.
Lijah is sparky with blood-sugar, rattling on, not unentertainingly, with his one-man version of The Princess Bride. ‘You keeled my father, prepare to die.’ Inigo Montoya in a hobbit-wig brandishing the ketchup bottle.
‘Not in this film, babes,’ Billy says repressively. ‘Your fighting technique involves dropping your sword and falling over.’
Lijah leans over to stick his tongue out at Billy and smudges a kiss by Sean’s ear. He can have this look of being unmarked by normal wear and tear, Lijah can.
‘Get off me, mayo-mouth.’ Sean swats him. Crush is the right word for the way his eyes follow Lijah, unblinkingly, when he thinks no one’s looking, though often when Lijah turns to him, he’s looking at something else.
They’re the hobbits, they come in two pairs, like eyebrows or gloves, or something.
Dom decides it would all be even more pleasant if he shuffled a bit closer to Billy. ‘Can I suck you off ?’
Billy thinks about this, eating a Golden Delicious. ‘Call my agent.’
‘So, I suppose gaffer-taping you face-down over the bar of the Prancing Pony’s out.’
He senses, rather than sees, Billy blush slightly. He wants to be fucking him and kissing the backs of his ears, licking the soft frond of light hair in the hollow of Billy’s neck.
Billy’s voice edges into amusement. ‘Only if you eat your greens.’
Dom looks at his spinach. ‘Was that a yes?’
There’s a nicely chafing silence. ‘Yeah.’
Somewhere out there six billion human beings are treading on each other’s faces. But Dom’s happy. He’s fairly sure they hadn’t wanted to give him the job, that the hundreds of other experienced, well-qualified actors were busy, on holiday, suffering spiritual crises, having ski-ing accidents, doing jury duty or being contestants on game shows. But they hired him, and he loves it, the transition from the weird concentration of a take to the madness behind the cameras, Elves blowing their noses into wads of Kleenex and having hissy fits at their agents on mobile phones, orcs doing crosswords while simultaneously looking for a last-minute babysitter for their three-year-old. Orcus domesticus, Billy calls them.
Then Lijah is leaning over to Billy, with an expression that will stand him in good stead if he’s ever tried for murder. ‘Bills, do us a favour, take Dommie behind the sound van and blow him, or we may as well giftwrap the ring for the Nazgul and go home, ‘cos there’s not gonna be a movie.’
Some Nazgul eating chilli con carne on the next table raise an ironic cheer.
Orli, who’s clearly been putting two and two together and making about fifteen, leans across, dipping a hank of blonde wig in his Coke. ‘So, are you guys -?’
Dom, getting to his feet, tugs on the back of Billy’s hoodie. ‘Nah, Elfboy. It’s all just part of the surreal dream you’re having.’
The two of them hit the air and walk, not touching. The air is lovely here, silk air, clean and cold. Dom feels clean, bleached-in-the-blood-of-the-lamb clean, you-could-eat-off-me clean. Since he’s been in Wellington he’s a smoother fit in the days, he can be comfortable in nature, it approves of him, is glad to have him.
Billy hands over his lighter without asking, lopes alongside, hands deep in his pockets, whistling through his teeth. Dom likes the shot of smoke, the warmth of lighting up, the solid nudge of Billy’s arm against his.
The blood taps in the back of his head every time his heels hit the ground.
Their small talk is small. No souls are unburdened, no important secrets revealed.
‘Can you call it incest, if it’s first cousins?’
‘Huh?’
'Merry and Pippin, stupid.’ Billy slides one hand into Dom’s pocket.
‘Haven’t a clue.’ Dom tries to look like he gives a shit, with Billy’s fist moving him against the rough lining. ‘They’re hardly going to ask us that in character brainstorming, are they?’
‘Over here.’ Billy steers him with a hand warm on the small of his back. Billy can be … happy. Not happy because he’s got a good part, or is finally making some money, or has smoked an especially good joint, or is getting laid regularly, just happy. There’s times when he looks at Dom and makes him want to take parcels abroad for strangers, smoke in petrol stations, swallow chewing gum, run down steps with his hands in his pockets, stare at the sun.
The rush increases, starts rummaging around under his skin.
In the angle between a toppling pile of crates and a high wall, he leans into Billy’s small, hitched breaths and traces with his fingertips the quick-pulsing blue vein in his neck. Billy takes hold of Dom’s hand till he can feel the pleasant bite of the fingerbones, and rubs it against his own crotch, where his cock is a hard ridge held sideways.
When he licks Billy’s lips, left to right, he tastes of apple and cigarette smoke.
The breeze blocks of the wall, stippled with sharp plaster, are giving out the day’s stored warmth against Dom’s spine. He gets his hands under Billy’s shirt, up to his shallow, milky nipples and then down under the breeches waistband to the damp cleft of his ass.
As he’s jerking Billy’s trousers down, he thinks of what this reminds him of. ‘School flashback,’ he says thickly into Billy’s neck. ‘Behind the gym during assembly, the hymns and stuff. I always thought ‘Our God Reigns’ was ‘Argo Drains’ ‘cos you were only ever listening for the bell, getting your pubes caught in your zip -- ‘
‘Dommie,’ Billy says, taking a rough grip on Dom’s erection. ‘Enough with the trip down memory lane.’
Afterwards, they walk back together, now and again jarring arms the way people do when they can’t quite meet each other’s step. And Dom realises he is a total fuckwit because it isn’t remotely like those heartless occasional jerk-offs at school with someone who had the IQ of a table and called you a fag afterwards.
And he might have said so, only something heavy barges into them from behind. Lijah, warming his hands in Sean’s pockets, wanting to rent a movie later.
‘Don’t let Sean choose.’
‘Yeah, nothing with French people sitting around talking about philosophy.’
‘Bud Likes Big Cocks.’
‘Oh, I dunno, ‘Dom says. ‘Bit vague, isn’t it? I mean, Bud Likes Big Cocks, what would that be about?’ He’s in that running-off-at-the mouth mood, buzzed up and blissed out, in need of a mate to commit banter with.
‘You’re right, Dom,’ Billy says, limpid-eyed. ‘You wouldn’t want to rent something where you aren’t sure what you’re getting. Just how big are the cocks, that’s the kind of thing we need to know.’
‘Yeah, and are there park rangers who get in on the action.’
‘Suspiciously clean greasemonkeys.’
As they move off towards the Bree sets, Lijah’s arm stays heavily where it is, around Dom’s neck, his fingers doodling absent-mindedly on his collarbone.
In the end, it ends up happening the same way everything the four of them do together happens, blundering, improvised, going the scenic route.
It’s late, they’ve all got a few beers in them, and they’ve got an early call. Lijah’s already upstairs singing Urge Overkill in the bath, but the other three are still on the sofa under Dom’s duvet in its red Man U cover. The bite-marked crusts of two Monster Pepperonis from Mac’s Pizza are limp in their greasy boxes. The Scandinavian satellite porn they ended up watching consisted entirely of bobbing mullets and girls in dirndls acting surprised at being entered from behind. It’s like watching some pointless Olympic sport when you don’t know the rules, don’t support either team and don’t know any of the players, is what Dom thinks. It passes the time, but you don’t give a shit.
Now he’s channel-hopping, warm and syrupy with sleep, hugged up against Sean’s beer and cotton and denim on one side, and with Billy’s heavy head lodged in the hollow between his neck and shoulder on the other. The duvet has the faint yeasty smell of dried spunk, and Dom and Billy.
A newsreader shuffles papers, doing that serious straight-to-camera smile.
It kills Dom that news programmes are scheduled to be exactly the same length, say half an hour, whatever’s actually happening. It’d make a nice change, he thinks, if just once they had the talking head rip up his autocue and say, can’t think of a single thing to say today, chaps, nothing but a few hiccups in the stock market, and let’s face it, who gives a flying fuck.
He turns off the sound, leaving the picture on some late-night shopping channel, where two blonde women are demonstrating kitchen knives with terrifying stretched smiles. A thin rattle of sound from the cheap kitchen radio leaks across the hall.
They’ve stopped managing anything like the average conversation a while back. It’s more like bad experimental theatre, with moments of lucidity.
Sean says, pressing his chin down onto the faded denim of his knees, that he wouldn’t mind having his spunk harvested by aliens as long as they were good-looking.
Billy’s chuckle heats Dom’s collarbone pleasantly. ‘I got off with one of Madonna’s backing dancers once in a club in Glasgow,’ he says after a bit. ‘He looked a bit like an alien. In a good way.’
Dom chokes on a mouthful of beer. ‘Yeah. I’ve been one of Madonna’s backing dancers myself in clubs. And a fighter pilot.’
Billy pouts. He’s got on his ‘MENACE TO SOBRIETY’ teeshirt and his taut bare insteps, marked with faint red lines from the hobbit feet, are propped on the coffee table alongside Dom’s. After a while he says ‘Come to think of it, I produced Trainspotting once myself. Or it might’ve been Small Faces. ’
‘Never fucking worked, either.’
‘Total waste of time. ’
Feet drum on the stairs, and Lijah, in a bathtowel, catapults himself onto the sofa. His hair is slick with water and he’s shivering, hugging his ribs. The skin of his narrow arms is rough with gooseflesh. ‘Freezing my balls off’, he says, squirming to get under the duvet.
‘Let’s just check, shall we,’ Dom says automatically, as wet hair smacks him lightly in the face.
Lijah’s narrow haunches twist in his lap. ‘Hey, Dommie, stop – ’
And for the first time, Dom thinks no fucking way. The want must have been nestling in him for a while, only surfacing in little prods.
Billy gets a funny upside-down smile, like he’s been looking for something and then found it where he thought he would. In the bluish light of the TV, his eyes look big and dark, unsurprised. ‘Now, which genius was it first discovered our Lij is ticklish as a little girl?’
‘Ow, stop it, it’ll be tiny --’
‘Sheesh, you’re right, it is tiny.’ Lijah’s perverse little cock is hardening, untouched, in the damp hollow of his thigh.
Dom can feel Sean’s roughened breathing against his ribs. But it’s Billy who says, wonderfully matter-of-fact, more Scottish when he’s had a few, ‘You might want to get that seen to, Lij, you could catch cold.’
So Dom reaches down, spreads his fingers on the smooth flatness of Lijah’s stomach, and moves his hand down, over the fine line of hair. He’s waiting for opposition, but none comes. When he stops, the momentum of his thoughts sends them rushing forward, pressing at the back of his eyes.
Lijah goes quiet, sprawled. His eyes are dilating, the pupils swallowing the blue and his breath is coming in brusque little sighs.
Sean’s breath hitches and quietens again.
Billy checks Sean’s eyes, and whatever he sees make him lean in, run one bitten-nailed finger over where the skin clings closely to Lijah’s ribcage up to the dark bud of his left nipple. ‘Relax, flower.’
‘It’ll be like doctors and nurses,’ Dom offers softly, his hand moving, slow.
‘Or alien abduction.’
Air is leaving Lijah’s lungs in little bird-like clucks. He’s damp and malleable as a newborn calf.
It is simply and beautifully clear what they are going to do.
Later, Dom is gathering up his duvet, which really needs to go in the wash, but he needs his bed, his soft, unmade, horizontal bed, more than anything else right now.
Billy comes and stands in the doorway. His mouth is a little soft rip in his tired face. He’s wearing only his loose old tracksuit bottoms, and there’s a messy smear of come on his side. He makes a kind of shrug, looking very breakable for a moment.
Dom’s throat is stiff, and he’s not sure about this, but – ‘You coming up?’
The air gets unsteady with involuntary hope of the pleasegodletmenothavefuckedthisup variety.
There’s a pause. A toilet upstairs flushes.
‘Barring better offers’, Billy says eventually, mashing a hand around in his sticking-up hair, on the edge of smiling.
Jesusjustthanksandi’llcontactyouinfuturewithmorethanjustcomplaints.
Is feeling that everything will be all right an indication you’ve finally grown up, or just a sign you’re not right in the head? Dom hasn’t a fucking clue what’s going on, and that’s fine with him. Because knowing would take the fun out of it, like when you’re reading a good book and someone says, ‘Oh that’s a great one, did he get hit by the train yet?’
He lets the duvet fall in a heap and puts his head against Billy’s shoulder, feeling the mechanisms that are Billy working, lacing his hands under the damp edges of his hair.
Billy puts a palm on the back of his head, rubs a little. ‘C’mon. It’s late.’
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Nicely done.
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Really enjoyed this. Great characterisation - especially of Billy and Dom - a wonderful flow to the story and excellent dialogue.
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Well written!
I liked it alot!
-- Malin
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I _loved_ that line! I keep saying it over and over in my head. =D
Just read both of these =) Fabulous work =D Love the interaction between all of them =)
And I laughed really hard at the Nazgul's cheering =) Don't know why it was so funny but -- yeah =D
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And one of the things that always strikes me re. any of the (few) film sets I've ever been around, is that the scary characters are sitting about playing snap and queueing for the portaloos like anyone else.
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I think if I ever heard Billy say that I would die laughing and happy. Great fic.
(*^-^*)
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...would be the point where I laughed really loud and woke up my flatmate.
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Poor flatmate.
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Love this.
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Thanks for sharing.
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...
I really, really like that.
This read kind of odd to me, like in the way James Ellroy material did upon first read. But also, like his stuff, once I caught the rhythm of it I couldn't help but delighting in it again and again. Very lovely. =)
Oh. And for this?: Billy soft and swollen with sleep, with a whole map of sheet creases on one cheek. Thanks.
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Thanks! I think. Glad you liked eventually.
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No. I didn't like it. I loved it. It delights me to read it. (I've done so a few times now.) So thanks for sharing it. =)
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oh girl, this is just more wonderful than the word 'wonderful', even broken into real etymology, can handle. i'll have to come back another time to explain.
um, the tiny details, the word-choice, the rhythm, the tenderness, the characters oh god, the sexiness, the way i just couldn't skip a single word.
it made me swoon! god, thank you.
*burbles*
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But this:
They’ve stopped managing anything like the average conversatin a while back. It’s more like bad experimental theatre, with moments of lucidity.
is perfect.
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