meow 3/?, dom/elijah
Title: Meow (3/?)
Pairing: Dom/Elijah
Rating/Warnings: None yet.
Notes: Aka the werekitten fic.
*
Cricket comes round the next night, and the next. He scratches at the door an hour or two after Dom arrives home, and leaves when Dom goes to bed.
The third night, it rains again, and when Cricket scratches to be let out, Dom folds himself to sit down by the door.
"Listen, now," he says, and Cricket sits back on his haunches, his tail wrapping around his paws, and tilts his head attentively.
Taken aback a bit, Dom goes on, "Well... it's raining, innit. You don't want to go out there when it's raining, do you? You can stay in for the night."
After only a few words, Cricket bends to groom his paw and ignores Dom, which is a bit of a relief really. Thanks to his allergies, Dom's never spent much time around cats or dogs, and he's given to understand they're quite clever animals, but that was odd. Even a clever animal ought not respond as if it understands English, surely.
"Parrots can talk though, can't they," he muses aloud, patting his leg to tempt Cricket into his lap. Cricket paces a circuit around Dom before finally consenting to leap up and settle on his thigh. "Doesn't mean they understand it. Any road, you should stay in tonight. Come and look..."
Gathering the kitten in his arms, he carries Cricket to the back door. Cricket wriggles and gives a halfhearted mew of protest, already melting to bonelessness in his new position and beginning to purr.
"See? I'll leave this back door open a bit. The gate to the back garden's closed and locked up. You can have the run of the garden, use that bit of ground under the bushes for a litterbox. I hope," Dom adds with a grimace, having no idea how to housetrain a cat. "I'll leave out food and water in the kitchen, and you can stay nice and dry in here."
Cricket carries on purring, eyes slitted with contentment, so that seems to settle it. Dom takes him to the bedroom and gently spills him onto the blankets.
"Mriaou," Cricket warbles, sounding aggrieved.
"I know, I know, it's dead early to be going to bed. But I have to get up at a terrible hour. Billy will be here before dawn! Ridiculous! So I need to get some sleep now." Dom tugs his t-shirt off. "You don't have to stay in the bedroom, I'll leave this door open a bit as well, so you can roam about. But you can sleep in here if you like. If you were going to make me sneeze, I reckon you'd've done it by now."
Cricket only looks up round-eyed, whiskers quivering. Dom strokes his silky ears, and goes to do his brush.
Frothy-mouthed and yawning, he inspects his complexion in the mirror. As well as the sneezing and that, allergies make him break out rather badly. But his skin looks no worse than normal, despite Cricket having been around a few days in a row.
Spit and a rinse, and Dom pads back to the bedroom, stretching and unbuttoning his fly. Cricket lifts his head, one ear twitching.
"What sort of cat are you, hm?" Dom asks. "You don't seem to shed much. Maybe that's why I'm not having any bad reactions to you." He shucks his jeans and pants and slips between the sheets. "Carry on with that not-shedding, all right? Don't suddenly molt now that you're in my bed, I don't want to wake up covered in hives!"
He puts out the light, though the room doesn't darken completely. Mild silvery light seeps in past the blinds and reflects brightly in Cricket's eyes as the kitten lifts to his feet and picks his way over the rumpled duvet.
Dom always sleeps on his stomach, head turned to the side; Cricket fits himself close and nestles against the curve of Dom's neck and shoulder. His entire tiny body rumbles with a soothing low purr. Now and then, the tip of his tail brushes Dom's chin.
Dom dozes off almost instantly.
*
The evening went so well that Dom really ought to have been more suspicious. Sure enough, it all balances out in the morning, when he wakes up to screechy kitten chirps and mewling right in his ear.
"What, what," he moans, stumbling out of bed and following as Cricket bounds off to the kitchen and circles the empty food bowl, meowing piteously.
"It's four in the morning, you horrid little beast," Dom complains as he fills the bowl.
He's a bit less surly after he makes himself a cuppa. "I suppose it's all the same," he philosophizes, petting Cricket with his bare foot. "My alarm'll go off in ten minutes anyway."
Waking up so early gives him time to finish his tea, shower, and dress, and he still has a few spare minutes before Billy's due.
Dom can't wait to see Billy's face when he arrives and for once Dom isn't running late. Unfortunately, while he's anticipating the glorious event, Dom falls asleep again on the sofa.
He wakes up with a start; Billy's already let himself in, looking at him with a raised eyebrow. The small of Dom's back feels unusually warm and thrummy, so it's not hard to guess what has Billy so perplexed.
"I have a cat," Dom says.
"I see that. I thought you were allergic."
"I thought so as well, but this one seems to be a breed apart."
"Here, kitty kitty," Billy clicks his fingers, and Dom feels little paws planting along his spine. In a moment he's abandoned, and Billy has a handful of black kitten scaling his chest and sniffing at his face.
"His name's Cricket."
"Of course it is," Billy replies with perfect equanimity. "And hallo to you there, Cricket. Aren't you a pretty thing... that's funny, blue eyes."
Dom pulls the back door shut and collects his keys. "What's funny about that?"
"Kittens only have blue eyes the first few weeks," says Billy. "Then they mostly turn other colors. I thought it was only light-colored cats that could keep their blue eyes. I remember hearing white cats can have blue eyes, but most of them are deaf. The genes are related."
"Cricket's certainly not deaf," Dom says. "Perhaps he's still a baby."
"He's not that small," Billy says. Cricket purrs loudly and rubs his cheek against Billy's hand, but then suddenly he struggles in Billy's arms, pawing and mewing with agitation. Billy stoops and lets him down; the kitten scrambles to the front door. Puzzled, Dom opens it, and Cricket streaks out and disappears.
"That was quick. He doesn't seem to like me."
"I don't think it was that," says Dom. "He was purring, he looked happy enough."
"Maybe he belongs to someone else. At his other home it might be breakfast time."
"I'd hate to think anyone else had to be up as early as us! The sun's not even out!"
Billy thumps him on the back. "We should take a cue from the cat and put a welly in it. Sunrise or no, if we don't go soon we'll be late."
*
"They're not going to get our feet in any of the shots again today," Sean says. "I can feel it."
"It's early yet," Billy says, but he's distracted, tending to Dom, who fell asleep again just after Feet with his face and neck smashed against a pullover that Liv left about, which turned out to be wool.
Makeup did what they could to cover the red patches. Dom's been enjoined not to scratch; it requires epic restraint, most of it Billy's.
"Allergic to wool, and us in New Zealand," Billy sympathizes. "It's like being allergic to coal dust in Newcastle."
"It didn't feel like wool! It was soft, it smelled lovely. And now look. The itching!"
Billy's hands lock around his wrists with surprising strength, and Dom silently laments, not for the first time, that Billy only fancies girls.
"They won't get a single shot of the feet again today," Sean says again, this time to Elijah. "I bet you five bucks."
"I'll take that action," Elijah says a bit loudly from under his headphones.
Sean leans in. "What're you listening to?"
"It's a mix." Lijah lifts one of the ear-cups to broadcast tinny sound.
"Fucking Nirvana," says Sean. "Loud, quiet, loud."
"You're not going to rag on me about the Pixies again, are you?"
"I'm never gonna stop ragging on you about the Pixies."
"I like the Pixies! I keep telling you I like the Pixies!"
"Yeah, but you don't like them enough," Sean says.
"How much is enough?"
"I'll know when you get there."
Elijah gives a keening off-key "Ah-oooooh" that Dom only just recognizes as being from a pop song.
Sean shakes his head. "One, liking the Breeders isn't the same, and two, liking 'Cannonball' doesn't count as liking the Breeders anyway."
Miserable and itchy, Dom listens to them argue about Elastica and Veruca Salt and Garbage while Billy swats and grabs his hands every time he starts to scratch.
"You owe me five bucks," Sean tells Elijah at the end of the day.
"I'll buy you a drink."
*
It's a Saturday night, so once the costumes come off and the eartips are peeled away, more than a few of the cast and crew head down to the local. Astin absents himself after the first round, citing family.
"I hope for Sean's sake that Christine likes New Zealand," Billy says, and they all drink to that.
"What a fucking day," Dom says, scratching his face to his heart's content. It doesn't even itch any more, he's only doing it because now he can.
"Orli!" Elijah waves the elf down. Orlando waves back, but his lean hips are twisted away from them, a compass orientated toward the table Viggo's sat at with Hugo and the other Sean.
"He's not coming over here, he's out to impress," Billy says. "He wore his cleanest kerchief and all."
"Orlando on the pull! What I wouldn't give to hear one of his chat-up lines." Dom puts on a puppyish expression and a try at Orli's accent. "Hullo... so. Nice, ehm, bar. Yeah?"
"How come you guys always pick on Orlando?" Elijah asks.
"He makes good target practice," Dom says.
"He's a good sport," Billy says with more tact.
"I know, but. I'm a good sport, you guys don't do that to me."
"Well... you're not English. We're more used to it," Dom explains, "taking the piss, it's what everyone does down the pub."
"I'm just saying. I could handle it. Come on."
"You're asking us to take the piss," Dom looks at Billy, unsure if Bill would go along with that. Billy quirks his mouth in a sort of lippy shrug.
"I'm just, why would you go easy on me when you're giving everybody else a hard time? Do you think I'd get all pissy or something? I can take it."
"It's not that, Lijah," Dom leans forth, relaxing and balancing on his elbows. "Only where would we start? The hair, the feet, the incessant picking of the underpants out of the arsecrack?"
Elijah's lashes waver in a startled flutter, but he snickers and throws back a swallow of beer in a gesture likely intended to look insouciant.
"Of course the alcohol tolerance is out of bounds," Billy considers. "He can't help that, poor Yank, it's illegal there."
"God knows I never had a drop before I was sixteen," Dom toasts Billy, and they both drain their pints.
"The hair," Elijah says, "I want to hear what's wrong with my hair."
"The smell," Billy suggests, properly ignoring Elijah.
"Mm. Which one?"
"Eau de Elijah le Matin."
"Ah yeah. Elijah, I did mean to tell you. You're allowed to brush your teeth any time, not just after meals, yeah? It's not entirely necessary to treat us all to that toxic morning melange of coffee and clove cigarettes, steeped and aged with all your," Dom swirls his hand about in illustration, "mouthly bacteria, festering away... the total effect's a bit... what did you call it, Billy?"
Dom hands the joke off completely blind, counting on Billy to give it a punchline. He's never shifted the spotlight so willingly to anyone else like that, or trusted them to come up with something funnier than he could think of himself; and as much as he adores Billy, he holds his breath a bit, not sure it's going to quite work out.
"Toilet zombie," Billy says.
Dom falls about, half choking on his laughter.
Laughing as well, Elijah stabs a middle finger at them, flinging cigarette ashes all over the table.
*
Later though, Elijah herds Dom off to one side as Dom's leaving the gent's.
"You know," he says earnestly, all doll-blue eyes and lashes, "if I'm doing stuff that's bugging you guys, you can just tell me. I mean, I don't mind you joking about it or anything, but you could just kind of, say something--"
"You're all right, Lijah," Dom says as kindly as he can, trying not to laugh in his face.
"For real though, if my breath smells, tell me and I'll chew some gum or something."
"We were only having a go. It's not so bad. It's nothing compared to one of Billy's trouser-busters."
"Yeah, but nothing's that bad!"
Dom chafes Elijah's arm, ruffling the sleeve of his t-shirt. "You've nothing to worry about really. You've heard how we joke about Orlando, and you know hardly any of that's true."
"I guess." Elijah looks back to the bar, where Orlando's quite obviously wriggled up as close to Viggo as two layers of clothing and Viggo's jutting elbow will allow. "But some of it is. And. You guys can be pretty harsh, you know?"
"I know. But Orli's the sort that can shake it off."
"Are you sure? Because, I mean, he really likes you guys, he wants you to like him."
"He knows we do. He knows we wouldn't take the piss if we didn't think he could bear up. It's our own sort of compliment, really." Dom focuses on Lijah again, hand on his shoulder for emphasis. "And he can cope it out, Elijah. Maybe better than anyone. After he took that tumble of his, people told Orlando he'd never walk again. Do you think anything we could say to him could possibly bother him after that?"
"Oh."
Nodding, Dom smiles at him. "He knows some things are just talk. And he knows we think he's a good sort. And he is, you know. Everyone on this job, Lijah, they're all fantastic. Look around." He knows he's just pissed enough to be idiotically sentimental, but Dom can't help it. Everyone in the place seems wrapped in a warm golden halo; he's expansive with fondness for them all. "Just, that they took this on, just that they're part of it, you know? You've seen how hard everyone's working, how much they're all putting into this, and bucking up for the time it's going to take. Everyone, Mathilda and Caroline, Olly and Russ, Ian and Ian and Christopher Lee, all up and down the scale. Pay attention to all of them, cos everyone here's committed to putting all the best of themselves into this, for a solid year and a half. You're not going to find many who'd do that, Lijah. These are some of the most amazing people you're going to meet in your life."
Elijah looks at him with an expression of dazzled bonhomie, or else it's disbelief at how Dom is dribbling on; it's hard to tell.
"Any road," Dom recovers, a bit embarrassed. "One more round?"
*
The taxi drops Dom off that night, and he stumbles into his house, still swaddled in genial good feelings for everyone involved in the Rings films, as well as a sort of all-enveloping comity for the entire nation of New Zealand, even the ones responsible for rash-inducing wool jumpers.
He flops onto his bed, arms and legs out, only to be greeted with a tiny pained squeak.
The sound shakes him out of his boozy haze and off the bed. "Cricket?"
With a creaky little mew, the kitten surfaces from under the blanket-wad on Dom's bed, just about where Dom's forearm landed when he nose-dove onto the mattress.
"I'm sorry." Dom pets the little animal, gingerly slipping into bed again. This time he remembers to take his shoes and clothes off. Cricket evidently forgives him, climbing onto his chest and curling there, whirring away.
"What d'you think, Cricket? Does our Lijah think I'm a complete twat now, after I went rabbiting onto him about how lovely everyone is?"
Just for a moment, he could swear that Cricket rocks his head side to side just a bit. But Dom is, after all, quite drunk.
***
Pairing: Dom/Elijah
Rating/Warnings: None yet.
Notes: Aka the werekitten fic.
*
Cricket comes round the next night, and the next. He scratches at the door an hour or two after Dom arrives home, and leaves when Dom goes to bed.
The third night, it rains again, and when Cricket scratches to be let out, Dom folds himself to sit down by the door.
"Listen, now," he says, and Cricket sits back on his haunches, his tail wrapping around his paws, and tilts his head attentively.
Taken aback a bit, Dom goes on, "Well... it's raining, innit. You don't want to go out there when it's raining, do you? You can stay in for the night."
After only a few words, Cricket bends to groom his paw and ignores Dom, which is a bit of a relief really. Thanks to his allergies, Dom's never spent much time around cats or dogs, and he's given to understand they're quite clever animals, but that was odd. Even a clever animal ought not respond as if it understands English, surely.
"Parrots can talk though, can't they," he muses aloud, patting his leg to tempt Cricket into his lap. Cricket paces a circuit around Dom before finally consenting to leap up and settle on his thigh. "Doesn't mean they understand it. Any road, you should stay in tonight. Come and look..."
Gathering the kitten in his arms, he carries Cricket to the back door. Cricket wriggles and gives a halfhearted mew of protest, already melting to bonelessness in his new position and beginning to purr.
"See? I'll leave this back door open a bit. The gate to the back garden's closed and locked up. You can have the run of the garden, use that bit of ground under the bushes for a litterbox. I hope," Dom adds with a grimace, having no idea how to housetrain a cat. "I'll leave out food and water in the kitchen, and you can stay nice and dry in here."
Cricket carries on purring, eyes slitted with contentment, so that seems to settle it. Dom takes him to the bedroom and gently spills him onto the blankets.
"Mriaou," Cricket warbles, sounding aggrieved.
"I know, I know, it's dead early to be going to bed. But I have to get up at a terrible hour. Billy will be here before dawn! Ridiculous! So I need to get some sleep now." Dom tugs his t-shirt off. "You don't have to stay in the bedroom, I'll leave this door open a bit as well, so you can roam about. But you can sleep in here if you like. If you were going to make me sneeze, I reckon you'd've done it by now."
Cricket only looks up round-eyed, whiskers quivering. Dom strokes his silky ears, and goes to do his brush.
Frothy-mouthed and yawning, he inspects his complexion in the mirror. As well as the sneezing and that, allergies make him break out rather badly. But his skin looks no worse than normal, despite Cricket having been around a few days in a row.
Spit and a rinse, and Dom pads back to the bedroom, stretching and unbuttoning his fly. Cricket lifts his head, one ear twitching.
"What sort of cat are you, hm?" Dom asks. "You don't seem to shed much. Maybe that's why I'm not having any bad reactions to you." He shucks his jeans and pants and slips between the sheets. "Carry on with that not-shedding, all right? Don't suddenly molt now that you're in my bed, I don't want to wake up covered in hives!"
He puts out the light, though the room doesn't darken completely. Mild silvery light seeps in past the blinds and reflects brightly in Cricket's eyes as the kitten lifts to his feet and picks his way over the rumpled duvet.
Dom always sleeps on his stomach, head turned to the side; Cricket fits himself close and nestles against the curve of Dom's neck and shoulder. His entire tiny body rumbles with a soothing low purr. Now and then, the tip of his tail brushes Dom's chin.
Dom dozes off almost instantly.
*
The evening went so well that Dom really ought to have been more suspicious. Sure enough, it all balances out in the morning, when he wakes up to screechy kitten chirps and mewling right in his ear.
"What, what," he moans, stumbling out of bed and following as Cricket bounds off to the kitchen and circles the empty food bowl, meowing piteously.
"It's four in the morning, you horrid little beast," Dom complains as he fills the bowl.
He's a bit less surly after he makes himself a cuppa. "I suppose it's all the same," he philosophizes, petting Cricket with his bare foot. "My alarm'll go off in ten minutes anyway."
Waking up so early gives him time to finish his tea, shower, and dress, and he still has a few spare minutes before Billy's due.
Dom can't wait to see Billy's face when he arrives and for once Dom isn't running late. Unfortunately, while he's anticipating the glorious event, Dom falls asleep again on the sofa.
He wakes up with a start; Billy's already let himself in, looking at him with a raised eyebrow. The small of Dom's back feels unusually warm and thrummy, so it's not hard to guess what has Billy so perplexed.
"I have a cat," Dom says.
"I see that. I thought you were allergic."
"I thought so as well, but this one seems to be a breed apart."
"Here, kitty kitty," Billy clicks his fingers, and Dom feels little paws planting along his spine. In a moment he's abandoned, and Billy has a handful of black kitten scaling his chest and sniffing at his face.
"His name's Cricket."
"Of course it is," Billy replies with perfect equanimity. "And hallo to you there, Cricket. Aren't you a pretty thing... that's funny, blue eyes."
Dom pulls the back door shut and collects his keys. "What's funny about that?"
"Kittens only have blue eyes the first few weeks," says Billy. "Then they mostly turn other colors. I thought it was only light-colored cats that could keep their blue eyes. I remember hearing white cats can have blue eyes, but most of them are deaf. The genes are related."
"Cricket's certainly not deaf," Dom says. "Perhaps he's still a baby."
"He's not that small," Billy says. Cricket purrs loudly and rubs his cheek against Billy's hand, but then suddenly he struggles in Billy's arms, pawing and mewing with agitation. Billy stoops and lets him down; the kitten scrambles to the front door. Puzzled, Dom opens it, and Cricket streaks out and disappears.
"That was quick. He doesn't seem to like me."
"I don't think it was that," says Dom. "He was purring, he looked happy enough."
"Maybe he belongs to someone else. At his other home it might be breakfast time."
"I'd hate to think anyone else had to be up as early as us! The sun's not even out!"
Billy thumps him on the back. "We should take a cue from the cat and put a welly in it. Sunrise or no, if we don't go soon we'll be late."
*
"They're not going to get our feet in any of the shots again today," Sean says. "I can feel it."
"It's early yet," Billy says, but he's distracted, tending to Dom, who fell asleep again just after Feet with his face and neck smashed against a pullover that Liv left about, which turned out to be wool.
Makeup did what they could to cover the red patches. Dom's been enjoined not to scratch; it requires epic restraint, most of it Billy's.
"Allergic to wool, and us in New Zealand," Billy sympathizes. "It's like being allergic to coal dust in Newcastle."
"It didn't feel like wool! It was soft, it smelled lovely. And now look. The itching!"
Billy's hands lock around his wrists with surprising strength, and Dom silently laments, not for the first time, that Billy only fancies girls.
"They won't get a single shot of the feet again today," Sean says again, this time to Elijah. "I bet you five bucks."
"I'll take that action," Elijah says a bit loudly from under his headphones.
Sean leans in. "What're you listening to?"
"It's a mix." Lijah lifts one of the ear-cups to broadcast tinny sound.
"Fucking Nirvana," says Sean. "Loud, quiet, loud."
"You're not going to rag on me about the Pixies again, are you?"
"I'm never gonna stop ragging on you about the Pixies."
"I like the Pixies! I keep telling you I like the Pixies!"
"Yeah, but you don't like them enough," Sean says.
"How much is enough?"
"I'll know when you get there."
Elijah gives a keening off-key "Ah-oooooh" that Dom only just recognizes as being from a pop song.
Sean shakes his head. "One, liking the Breeders isn't the same, and two, liking 'Cannonball' doesn't count as liking the Breeders anyway."
Miserable and itchy, Dom listens to them argue about Elastica and Veruca Salt and Garbage while Billy swats and grabs his hands every time he starts to scratch.
"You owe me five bucks," Sean tells Elijah at the end of the day.
"I'll buy you a drink."
*
It's a Saturday night, so once the costumes come off and the eartips are peeled away, more than a few of the cast and crew head down to the local. Astin absents himself after the first round, citing family.
"I hope for Sean's sake that Christine likes New Zealand," Billy says, and they all drink to that.
"What a fucking day," Dom says, scratching his face to his heart's content. It doesn't even itch any more, he's only doing it because now he can.
"Orli!" Elijah waves the elf down. Orlando waves back, but his lean hips are twisted away from them, a compass orientated toward the table Viggo's sat at with Hugo and the other Sean.
"He's not coming over here, he's out to impress," Billy says. "He wore his cleanest kerchief and all."
"Orlando on the pull! What I wouldn't give to hear one of his chat-up lines." Dom puts on a puppyish expression and a try at Orli's accent. "Hullo... so. Nice, ehm, bar. Yeah?"
"How come you guys always pick on Orlando?" Elijah asks.
"He makes good target practice," Dom says.
"He's a good sport," Billy says with more tact.
"I know, but. I'm a good sport, you guys don't do that to me."
"Well... you're not English. We're more used to it," Dom explains, "taking the piss, it's what everyone does down the pub."
"I'm just saying. I could handle it. Come on."
"You're asking us to take the piss," Dom looks at Billy, unsure if Bill would go along with that. Billy quirks his mouth in a sort of lippy shrug.
"I'm just, why would you go easy on me when you're giving everybody else a hard time? Do you think I'd get all pissy or something? I can take it."
"It's not that, Lijah," Dom leans forth, relaxing and balancing on his elbows. "Only where would we start? The hair, the feet, the incessant picking of the underpants out of the arsecrack?"
Elijah's lashes waver in a startled flutter, but he snickers and throws back a swallow of beer in a gesture likely intended to look insouciant.
"Of course the alcohol tolerance is out of bounds," Billy considers. "He can't help that, poor Yank, it's illegal there."
"God knows I never had a drop before I was sixteen," Dom toasts Billy, and they both drain their pints.
"The hair," Elijah says, "I want to hear what's wrong with my hair."
"The smell," Billy suggests, properly ignoring Elijah.
"Mm. Which one?"
"Eau de Elijah le Matin."
"Ah yeah. Elijah, I did mean to tell you. You're allowed to brush your teeth any time, not just after meals, yeah? It's not entirely necessary to treat us all to that toxic morning melange of coffee and clove cigarettes, steeped and aged with all your," Dom swirls his hand about in illustration, "mouthly bacteria, festering away... the total effect's a bit... what did you call it, Billy?"
Dom hands the joke off completely blind, counting on Billy to give it a punchline. He's never shifted the spotlight so willingly to anyone else like that, or trusted them to come up with something funnier than he could think of himself; and as much as he adores Billy, he holds his breath a bit, not sure it's going to quite work out.
"Toilet zombie," Billy says.
Dom falls about, half choking on his laughter.
Laughing as well, Elijah stabs a middle finger at them, flinging cigarette ashes all over the table.
*
Later though, Elijah herds Dom off to one side as Dom's leaving the gent's.
"You know," he says earnestly, all doll-blue eyes and lashes, "if I'm doing stuff that's bugging you guys, you can just tell me. I mean, I don't mind you joking about it or anything, but you could just kind of, say something--"
"You're all right, Lijah," Dom says as kindly as he can, trying not to laugh in his face.
"For real though, if my breath smells, tell me and I'll chew some gum or something."
"We were only having a go. It's not so bad. It's nothing compared to one of Billy's trouser-busters."
"Yeah, but nothing's that bad!"
Dom chafes Elijah's arm, ruffling the sleeve of his t-shirt. "You've nothing to worry about really. You've heard how we joke about Orlando, and you know hardly any of that's true."
"I guess." Elijah looks back to the bar, where Orlando's quite obviously wriggled up as close to Viggo as two layers of clothing and Viggo's jutting elbow will allow. "But some of it is. And. You guys can be pretty harsh, you know?"
"I know. But Orli's the sort that can shake it off."
"Are you sure? Because, I mean, he really likes you guys, he wants you to like him."
"He knows we do. He knows we wouldn't take the piss if we didn't think he could bear up. It's our own sort of compliment, really." Dom focuses on Lijah again, hand on his shoulder for emphasis. "And he can cope it out, Elijah. Maybe better than anyone. After he took that tumble of his, people told Orlando he'd never walk again. Do you think anything we could say to him could possibly bother him after that?"
"Oh."
Nodding, Dom smiles at him. "He knows some things are just talk. And he knows we think he's a good sort. And he is, you know. Everyone on this job, Lijah, they're all fantastic. Look around." He knows he's just pissed enough to be idiotically sentimental, but Dom can't help it. Everyone in the place seems wrapped in a warm golden halo; he's expansive with fondness for them all. "Just, that they took this on, just that they're part of it, you know? You've seen how hard everyone's working, how much they're all putting into this, and bucking up for the time it's going to take. Everyone, Mathilda and Caroline, Olly and Russ, Ian and Ian and Christopher Lee, all up and down the scale. Pay attention to all of them, cos everyone here's committed to putting all the best of themselves into this, for a solid year and a half. You're not going to find many who'd do that, Lijah. These are some of the most amazing people you're going to meet in your life."
Elijah looks at him with an expression of dazzled bonhomie, or else it's disbelief at how Dom is dribbling on; it's hard to tell.
"Any road," Dom recovers, a bit embarrassed. "One more round?"
*
The taxi drops Dom off that night, and he stumbles into his house, still swaddled in genial good feelings for everyone involved in the Rings films, as well as a sort of all-enveloping comity for the entire nation of New Zealand, even the ones responsible for rash-inducing wool jumpers.
He flops onto his bed, arms and legs out, only to be greeted with a tiny pained squeak.
The sound shakes him out of his boozy haze and off the bed. "Cricket?"
With a creaky little mew, the kitten surfaces from under the blanket-wad on Dom's bed, just about where Dom's forearm landed when he nose-dove onto the mattress.
"I'm sorry." Dom pets the little animal, gingerly slipping into bed again. This time he remembers to take his shoes and clothes off. Cricket evidently forgives him, climbing onto his chest and curling there, whirring away.
"What d'you think, Cricket? Does our Lijah think I'm a complete twat now, after I went rabbiting onto him about how lovely everyone is?"
Just for a moment, he could swear that Cricket rocks his head side to side just a bit. But Dom is, after all, quite drunk.
***