Please Stay; Billy/Dom
Please Stay
PG-13
Billy/Dom
It's angsty. I'm sorry. I'm sorry! It's angst, but there's love there, too. If it helps, I'll be following it up with some happy stuff.
But for now, have the angst.
I wrote this after listening to this Beecake song:
Sometimes Billy dreams of New Zealand.
He'll wake in the middle of the night tasting youth and Dom and hearing the pounding of his own heart. He'll fumble, misplaced in time, thinking he's somewhere else. He can't quite remember what the bedroom looked like but he knows where the door should be, what direction the light should be coming in from, and it's all wrong in his head.
He'll lay there sometimes trying to capture the feeling, because it's as close as he'll ever get to reliving the past.
*
Dom's voice, on the phone, is sort of like that. He can dial the number at any time of day, any time of night, and Dom will answer and Billy can shut his eyes and that first gravely burst of noise makes him shudder a little with something he'd be entirely too terrified to put a name to.
But then Dom starts to talk and it's all Los Angeles and television shows and traveling and whatever idiotic mess he's gotten himself into lately and Billy tucks the feeling back deep down and talks to his best friend.
*
They'll go back to New Zealand, one day.
They always talk about it. They'll go back, just the two of them. They'll revisit all the places.
Except they won't and the knowledge burns inside of Billy because he knows why he can't go back, but he's never entirely sure why Dom can't.
*
Move on. He moved on. He did it gloriously, splendidly, and he likes his life now.
He doesn't love it, exactly. He loves his boy, and his music, and everything else is like a shirt that he likes the look of and keeps even though it doesn't fit quite like he thought it would.
He can forget mostly, except when Dom comes to visit, and his world tilts again and refocuses, recenters on something different than what it does the rest of the time, just for the amount of time that Dom is there.
*
He goes to the park with Jack and Dom once and it hits him like a sock to the gut, the maybes and could have beens and what ifs. Dom, and a little boy, the two of them and oh, Christ, it hurts that he wants this and no one else knows it.
Only if they hadn't met as actors. Only if Dom didn't want his career so badly he nearly killed himself trying to chase it. Only if Billy didn't genuinely love so much being the class clown, the face in front of the cameras. And he did love it - does - just not as much anymore, and too many years have passed and all his chances to speak are gone, and now he has what he has.
A wife, and a son, and a best friend that has no shame in hopping on all the playground equipment and goes to ridiculous lengths to get a laugh out of Jack (and Billy).
*
He's middle aged, balding, relatively successful. Successful enough that his boy can go to a good school and his wife can shop without worrying about the bill and Billy can afford very good Scotch when he feels like indulging, and lately he feels like it a lot.
It's a cliche by now. Or maybe it's always been a cliche, just not one Billy's lived. Having a drink was something different before. A laugh with friends, a night at the pub. It wasn't this sulking twisting looming feeling that drove him to want to forget.
But he does write some of his best songs drunk, so there's always that. He gets sloppy and scrawls in a notebook because he tried it on his laptop once and the next morning he couldn't decipher anything. He'd sent the email to Dom because he'd known Dom would find it amusing, and for a week after he'd gotten random emails with attempts at guessing what the words were supposed to be. If it were anything close to recognizable, Billy never would have had the courage to show him, because lately it always comes right back around to the same thing.
Right now, Billy isn't scrawling anything, though. Right now Billy has the golden glow of liquid courage and he's staring at his phone.
He picks it up, scrolls through the display. Finds Dom's name, that ridiculous picture of the two of them set to his profile image. He smiles, a little bit goofy, at the still of Dom smiling back .
He types it out and his fingers swipe over the wrong letters, clumsy but the phone changes it for him, back into what he meant it to be.
He doesn't remember hitting send.
The next morning he wakes up with a hangover, but it isn't until he remembers the message that he bolts for the toilet.
*
Airports always smell the same to Billy; thick with disinfectant and stale with people.
Planes are worse, but on a plane he can be at peace; there's no alternative, no option, nowhere else to go. In an airport he always ends up looking at the window and thinking of the fresh clean air just the other side of it. Something about airports ping claustrophobic for him, sometimes worse than others.
That's why he waits for Dom outside every time.
*
A visit comes and goes, and another a few months after that.
Billy in Los Angeles, Dom in London. They meet, they make it a point, a priority. They are in each others lives, now and forever.
Til death do they part, Billy thinks, and it almost makes him smile because he thinks it would make Dom smile, too. Dom would appreciate that. What Dom thinks always matters for him. It's always a priority, just under the surface.
*
"Do you ever wish we just hadn't left?" Dom asks.
Billy's walking outside of a little bar, a breather between sets and an escape from the noise. He has his phone clutched in his hand. He's a little too wobbly to do the math and figure out what time it is wherever Dom is. The fact that he's not even sure where Dom is might also add to the lacking equation.
But he still knows what startling clarity exactly what it is Dom is talking about.
"Only every minute of every day," he says, voice raw from singing and alcohol and the smoke in the room.
"You wrecked me, you know that, Boyd?" Dom asks, and he actually sounds a little bit angry. Real anger, feeling behind it.
"Well, you did me, too," Billy shoots back, because whatever Dom is feeling Billy has plenty of it, too.
"I didn't go and get married."
"I waited, you wanker." Billy blinks quickly, can't believe Dom can bring him to this so fast. "And you would have, if she hadn't fucked around on you."
"I thought that was the best it was going to get. And you had - fuck, Bill, you went and had a baby with someone."
"You know how that was," Billy says, voice dropping. His son is everything to him now, but before - it hadn't been the plan. "Why'd you do this? Why are you doing this?"
"I don't even know." Dom sounds just as miserable as Billy feels. "I just wanted to make sure it wasn't all in my head."
"Well." Billy breathes in. "It's not."
"Okay. Good." They both take a moment, regrouping. "Are you busy? I didn't even ask."
"I've..." Billy has to go back on in a few minutes. One of the guys will come looking for him. He looks toward the door as if just thinking it will make it happen, but it doesn't. "I've got a minute."
"Can you just - talk to me?"
"Yeah," Billy says, sitting down against the wall. He rests his head against rough brick and can still hear the filler music playing, all thick bass and heavy beat. "I'm here."
"Good." Dom goes quiet again, goes quiet for so long Billy has to check that the call is still on. "We'll go back, won't we? One day?"
Billy brings a hand to his eyes and rubs, moisture smearing on his fingers. "Of course we will."
PG-13
Billy/Dom
It's angsty. I'm sorry. I'm sorry! It's angst, but there's love there, too. If it helps, I'll be following it up with some happy stuff.
But for now, have the angst.
I wrote this after listening to this Beecake song:
Click to viewSometimes Billy dreams of New Zealand.
He'll wake in the middle of the night tasting youth and Dom and hearing the pounding of his own heart. He'll fumble, misplaced in time, thinking he's somewhere else. He can't quite remember what the bedroom looked like but he knows where the door should be, what direction the light should be coming in from, and it's all wrong in his head.
He'll lay there sometimes trying to capture the feeling, because it's as close as he'll ever get to reliving the past.
*
Dom's voice, on the phone, is sort of like that. He can dial the number at any time of day, any time of night, and Dom will answer and Billy can shut his eyes and that first gravely burst of noise makes him shudder a little with something he'd be entirely too terrified to put a name to.
But then Dom starts to talk and it's all Los Angeles and television shows and traveling and whatever idiotic mess he's gotten himself into lately and Billy tucks the feeling back deep down and talks to his best friend.
*
They'll go back to New Zealand, one day.
They always talk about it. They'll go back, just the two of them. They'll revisit all the places.
Except they won't and the knowledge burns inside of Billy because he knows why he can't go back, but he's never entirely sure why Dom can't.
*
Move on. He moved on. He did it gloriously, splendidly, and he likes his life now.
He doesn't love it, exactly. He loves his boy, and his music, and everything else is like a shirt that he likes the look of and keeps even though it doesn't fit quite like he thought it would.
He can forget mostly, except when Dom comes to visit, and his world tilts again and refocuses, recenters on something different than what it does the rest of the time, just for the amount of time that Dom is there.
*
He goes to the park with Jack and Dom once and it hits him like a sock to the gut, the maybes and could have beens and what ifs. Dom, and a little boy, the two of them and oh, Christ, it hurts that he wants this and no one else knows it.
Only if they hadn't met as actors. Only if Dom didn't want his career so badly he nearly killed himself trying to chase it. Only if Billy didn't genuinely love so much being the class clown, the face in front of the cameras. And he did love it - does - just not as much anymore, and too many years have passed and all his chances to speak are gone, and now he has what he has.
A wife, and a son, and a best friend that has no shame in hopping on all the playground equipment and goes to ridiculous lengths to get a laugh out of Jack (and Billy).
*
He's middle aged, balding, relatively successful. Successful enough that his boy can go to a good school and his wife can shop without worrying about the bill and Billy can afford very good Scotch when he feels like indulging, and lately he feels like it a lot.
It's a cliche by now. Or maybe it's always been a cliche, just not one Billy's lived. Having a drink was something different before. A laugh with friends, a night at the pub. It wasn't this sulking twisting looming feeling that drove him to want to forget.
But he does write some of his best songs drunk, so there's always that. He gets sloppy and scrawls in a notebook because he tried it on his laptop once and the next morning he couldn't decipher anything. He'd sent the email to Dom because he'd known Dom would find it amusing, and for a week after he'd gotten random emails with attempts at guessing what the words were supposed to be. If it were anything close to recognizable, Billy never would have had the courage to show him, because lately it always comes right back around to the same thing.
Right now, Billy isn't scrawling anything, though. Right now Billy has the golden glow of liquid courage and he's staring at his phone.
He picks it up, scrolls through the display. Finds Dom's name, that ridiculous picture of the two of them set to his profile image. He smiles, a little bit goofy, at the still of Dom smiling back .
He types it out and his fingers swipe over the wrong letters, clumsy but the phone changes it for him, back into what he meant it to be.
He doesn't remember hitting send.
The next morning he wakes up with a hangover, but it isn't until he remembers the message that he bolts for the toilet.
*
Airports always smell the same to Billy; thick with disinfectant and stale with people.
Planes are worse, but on a plane he can be at peace; there's no alternative, no option, nowhere else to go. In an airport he always ends up looking at the window and thinking of the fresh clean air just the other side of it. Something about airports ping claustrophobic for him, sometimes worse than others.
That's why he waits for Dom outside every time.
*
A visit comes and goes, and another a few months after that.
Billy in Los Angeles, Dom in London. They meet, they make it a point, a priority. They are in each others lives, now and forever.
Til death do they part, Billy thinks, and it almost makes him smile because he thinks it would make Dom smile, too. Dom would appreciate that. What Dom thinks always matters for him. It's always a priority, just under the surface.
*
"Do you ever wish we just hadn't left?" Dom asks.
Billy's walking outside of a little bar, a breather between sets and an escape from the noise. He has his phone clutched in his hand. He's a little too wobbly to do the math and figure out what time it is wherever Dom is. The fact that he's not even sure where Dom is might also add to the lacking equation.
But he still knows what startling clarity exactly what it is Dom is talking about.
"Only every minute of every day," he says, voice raw from singing and alcohol and the smoke in the room.
"You wrecked me, you know that, Boyd?" Dom asks, and he actually sounds a little bit angry. Real anger, feeling behind it.
"Well, you did me, too," Billy shoots back, because whatever Dom is feeling Billy has plenty of it, too.
"I didn't go and get married."
"I waited, you wanker." Billy blinks quickly, can't believe Dom can bring him to this so fast. "And you would have, if she hadn't fucked around on you."
"I thought that was the best it was going to get. And you had - fuck, Bill, you went and had a baby with someone."
"You know how that was," Billy says, voice dropping. His son is everything to him now, but before - it hadn't been the plan. "Why'd you do this? Why are you doing this?"
"I don't even know." Dom sounds just as miserable as Billy feels. "I just wanted to make sure it wasn't all in my head."
"Well." Billy breathes in. "It's not."
"Okay. Good." They both take a moment, regrouping. "Are you busy? I didn't even ask."
"I've..." Billy has to go back on in a few minutes. One of the guys will come looking for him. He looks toward the door as if just thinking it will make it happen, but it doesn't. "I've got a minute."
"Can you just - talk to me?"
"Yeah," Billy says, sitting down against the wall. He rests his head against rough brick and can still hear the filler music playing, all thick bass and heavy beat. "I'm here."
"Good." Dom goes quiet again, goes quiet for so long Billy has to check that the call is still on. "We'll go back, won't we? One day?"
Billy brings a hand to his eyes and rubs, moisture smearing on his fingers. "Of course we will."