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Happy Friday, monaboydians! Here is a fic for you.
Title: How to Leave Your Heart in New Zealand
Pairing: Dom/Billy
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Contains a bit of angst, and a bit of recreational drug use. Thanks to fiercynn for betaing!
1. Windows
As a child, Dom had never understood the idea of waking up and not knowing where you were. If someone had contrived to move you in your sleep, that was one thing, but it made no sense to him to be confused upon waking in the exact place you expected to be.
He slept in as many and as varied places as any child might be expected to, or perhaps more. He napped in cars, was relegated to sofas and sleeping bags and sometimes to sharing a spare bed with Matt in the houses of his aunts and uncles and grandparents; he crawled in with his parents when he was young and spent the night with friends when he grew older. There was his own bedroom, and then his bedroom disassembled and rearranged in another country, grief and anger at waking up there, at first, cut loose from everything he knew and set adrift, but not once did he open his eyes and expect Germany.
After New Zealand, this changes.
He sleeps in many places, still: apartments and hotels, sets and trailers. When he can he likes to arrange his furniture a certain way, a habit left from the childhood room in Manchester that did eventually become home. He sleeps by windows. He puts his beds against walls, window on his right side if he can, open almost all year for the fresh air on his face.
It happens for the first time that first winter back from filming, home in a room that should be familiar, his: he opens his eyes on Christmas morning and expects to see the squat green tree outside his window in New Zealand.
He never gets the certainty back. It doesn't happen every morning, but for the rest of his life every so often he awakens without knowing where he is. It's a bewildering feeling, truly disorienting, like waking up to find that gravity has disappeared overnight. He is in bed, light and the sounds of the world from the window to his right, but no sense of what lies beyond it. No sense, either, of what lies behind him: where are the walls, how far the floor. Until he moves he doesn't know how big the bed is, or even whether he is sharing it with someone else.
If he keeps his eyes closed and his mind quiet, he can drift in limbo for minutes at a time, unmoored, without any idea where he is in the world.
2. Billy
When he's high, Dom is prone to believing that he and Billy can actually communicate telepathically. He's never sure afterward if he's imagining Billy's half of the conversation in his head or if they're speaking out loud and he just doesn't realize it. Asking someone else is only a surefire way to get mocked, so maybe he'll never know. Hell, maybe they actually are telepathic.
Probably unlikely.
He hadn't intended to get quite that out of touch with reality tonight, but Elijah had wanted another go and you couldn’t just let a mate smoke alone. So now they're picking their way back inside and Dom is at the point where time is starting to do really unpredictable things, or maybe it does actually take him forever to get across the living room, stepping around chairs and dishes and a variety of limbs. Orlando is apparently fast asleep on the floor with one arm over his eyes, but there is a low murmur of conversation from everyone else. Billy has usurped Dom's prize spot on the sofa.
He decides to surrender it gracefully and settles down on the floor instead, leaning his head back against Billy's leg. It's surprisingly comfortable.
"Billlll," he says, leaving his tongue on the roof of his mouth like a finger forgotten on the L key. I want comes into his mind, but the words kind of dissipate before he gets them voiced. There's that telepathy, though, because Billy drops a hand and begins running it back and forth through Dom's hair, heavy and slow. Every once in a while his fingers stray and sweep down over Dom's temple, his forehead, or his thumb drags over the back of Dom's neck, sending a cascade of shivery warmth down his spine. It feels like the most intimate thing in the world, though maybe that's the weed. He wants to turn the moment liquid and drown in it.
I'm never moving ever again he tells Billy telepathically.
Okay, Billy thinks back, or doesn't. Stay here.
3. Fears
Dom hasn't really had nightmares since he was eight or nine years old. Ever since his fears stopped involving monsters and turned instead to reality- to blowing auditions and loved ones dying and people hating him for the many and varied mistakes he's made- they've started keeping him awake rather than waking him up.
So he's familiar with the sensation of tossing and turning in his bed with a knot of anxiety in his stomach, watching the minutes tick by, trying to shake his mind free to any other subject. The part that's new when he gets to New Zealand is the nature of the particular fear.
It has to do with the fact that Lord of the Rings is it. It's going to be huge, a phenomenon, the pinnacle of the industry, it's the best thing he'll ever work on, and nobody knows it yet. Sometimes it feels like he's holding his breath until the first premiere, years in the future.
Dom's always been afraid of death in the kind of vague, general way that he figures most people are, but now he's afraid of dying before they finish. He keeps himself up at night worrying that Peter Jackson will have a heart attack, or the funding will somehow fall through, or the rights, or a giant tidal wave will wipe New Zealand right off the map, and it doesn't matter that each scenario is less plausible than the last. He's terrified that something will stop this movie, this incredible secret dream they're living, and then the world will never know.
4. Billy
Dom is more of an outdoorsy sort of person than Billy. This is exacerbated by the fact that Dom wants to be more outdoorsy than he is, whereas Billy, more comfortable in his own skin than anyone Dom knows, is content just to want what he wants. Still, the other side of this equation is New Zealand, so even Billy gets out some.
It's easy enough to talk him into repeating a trip Dom has done before, with plenty of assurances that it's only half a day's hike, and pretty, besides. Dom tells him he's been wanting to go back with a camera for the water bugs on the stream beside the trail. This is true, but it isn't the whole truth.
Dom likes to watch Billy in nature. He gets quiet- not a tense, coiled quiet like Dom trying to coax out wildlife, but quiet with this strange kind of deep calm. If his companions don't make conversation he's perfectly content to walk for hours in silence, though as soon as they get back to the car he's his usual chatty self. Dom could ask him what it is, whether the outdoors stirs some particular memory or thought or if it just disconnects him from other thoughts altogether, but he kind of likes the inconsequential mystery of it.
Dom lingers of the water bugs and Billy gets ahead, quiet as ever. Once in a while he'll stop to point something out, just a few words, an interesting insect or plant or one of the small views that grow more frequent as they climb. His eyes are bright, breath quick with exertion, even while he waits for Dom to catch up. Today Dom is favoring the theory that being outside gives Billy some kind of instinctual, enviable zen, grounds him completely in the moment.
At the top of the ridge the tree cover thins to reveal sudden sunlight and an unexpected breeze that feels like heaven. They sit on a wide exposed slope of sun-warmed rock. Dom digs the water out of his pack and takes a long swallow before handing it over. Billy drinks and then tips the bottle into his hand, scrubbing a palmful of water over his hair and applying another to the back of his neck, letting it trickle down under the collar of his shirt.
After a minute Dom wipes his hands and picks up the camera again. It's a beautiful view, the forest a carpet of vivid green stretching below them, glimpses of the little stream just barely glimmering through. He's trying to find a way to frame it that captures the height they've achieved when he hears Billy lying down and he turns and snaps a picture, just to be annoying. Billy doesn't even notice, stretched out blissfully with his eyes closed against the sun. The breeze returns, ruffling his damp hair and stirring leaf shadows over his face, and Dom, caught, takes another picture.
And another, and another, shifting to his knees for a better angle, trying to capture the sense of absolute peace in the image before him
At some point he looks up from fiddling with the ISO to find green eyes watching him, focused and calm, but Billy doesn't say anything, and Dom doesn't stop.
5. Breaking and Leaving
There is a difference between breaking your heart- or having it broken- and leaving it somewhere. A broken heart is when you have something perfect and someone destroys it, betrays you, cuts you down. Leaving your heart is when you have something perfect and then time runs out and you walk away.
A broken heart has splinters and jagged edges, cutting and catching at the inside of your chest, keeping the wound open and bleeding. When you leave your heart somewhere all you get is an empty space where it used to be.
6. Billy
"Cradle robber," says Dom the first time, breathless, the two of them stumbling through the door to his bedroom. They've lost their shirts somewhere in the hallway; he keeps getting distracted by Billy's chest hair.
Billy narrows his eyes like he's aiming for a you really want to go there? expression, but they're already getting tripped up between laughing and kissing and adding a fake glare just isn't going to happen convincingly.
"Baby," he shoots back.
"Pervert."
"I bet this is all a scheme to inherit when I die of old age."
Billy toes his shoes off. Dom's are laced too tightly, so he sits on the edge of the bed to deal with them.
"You're like an old man waving his stick around and telling kids to get off his lawn," he says, giving up on the knots and just prying them off with both hands.
"I'll show you waving my stick around."
Dom laughs so hard he actually snorts. "Really? That's the line you're going with?"
He's flying through the air a disoriented second later, Billy pulling out his secret ninja skills to flip him facedown and pin him to the bed.
"What was that?" he asks sweetly, and Dom has to take a long second to drag the conversation back into his mind because there is seriously nothing about Billy manhandling him that isn't sexy. He's pretty sure that the pin-someone-down-and-sit-victoriously-on-their-arse move isn't supposed to involve a really noticeable erection, but whatever. They're unconventional people.
"I meant, you can wave your stick at me any-" Billy scratches his nails roughly through the hair at the back of Dom's head and he shorts out of the conversation again, predictably. It's not like he was being subtle that night, getting high and letting Billy pet him.
(Maybe he isn't really subtle ever.)
He shifts around and Billy obligingly lets him up enough to roll over, then settles back down again, straddling him with a choked-off noise that Dom desperately wants to hear in full. He arches up to see if he can get it but only succeeds in clinking their belt buckles together, and why the hell are they still wearing clothes? This could be so much better.
Billy leans down to bracket Dom with his arms.
"You're really sure about this?" he asks, serious for once. Dom rolls his eyes and hooks a leg around the back of Billy's thigh.
"Bill, I don't think I know how to get any more consenting, and even if I'm not as much of an old man as some people in the room I am definitely an adult."
He doesn't feel like one, though. He feels like a teenager. Not like his own, younger, insecure self, but like everyone says teenagers are supposed to feel.
He feels golden, invincible, the whole of the glorious world laid before his feet, a perfect surety of his place in it. Here.
Title: How to Leave Your Heart in New Zealand
Pairing: Dom/Billy
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Contains a bit of angst, and a bit of recreational drug use. Thanks to fiercynn for betaing!
1. Windows
As a child, Dom had never understood the idea of waking up and not knowing where you were. If someone had contrived to move you in your sleep, that was one thing, but it made no sense to him to be confused upon waking in the exact place you expected to be.
He slept in as many and as varied places as any child might be expected to, or perhaps more. He napped in cars, was relegated to sofas and sleeping bags and sometimes to sharing a spare bed with Matt in the houses of his aunts and uncles and grandparents; he crawled in with his parents when he was young and spent the night with friends when he grew older. There was his own bedroom, and then his bedroom disassembled and rearranged in another country, grief and anger at waking up there, at first, cut loose from everything he knew and set adrift, but not once did he open his eyes and expect Germany.
After New Zealand, this changes.
He sleeps in many places, still: apartments and hotels, sets and trailers. When he can he likes to arrange his furniture a certain way, a habit left from the childhood room in Manchester that did eventually become home. He sleeps by windows. He puts his beds against walls, window on his right side if he can, open almost all year for the fresh air on his face.
It happens for the first time that first winter back from filming, home in a room that should be familiar, his: he opens his eyes on Christmas morning and expects to see the squat green tree outside his window in New Zealand.
He never gets the certainty back. It doesn't happen every morning, but for the rest of his life every so often he awakens without knowing where he is. It's a bewildering feeling, truly disorienting, like waking up to find that gravity has disappeared overnight. He is in bed, light and the sounds of the world from the window to his right, but no sense of what lies beyond it. No sense, either, of what lies behind him: where are the walls, how far the floor. Until he moves he doesn't know how big the bed is, or even whether he is sharing it with someone else.
If he keeps his eyes closed and his mind quiet, he can drift in limbo for minutes at a time, unmoored, without any idea where he is in the world.
2. Billy
When he's high, Dom is prone to believing that he and Billy can actually communicate telepathically. He's never sure afterward if he's imagining Billy's half of the conversation in his head or if they're speaking out loud and he just doesn't realize it. Asking someone else is only a surefire way to get mocked, so maybe he'll never know. Hell, maybe they actually are telepathic.
Probably unlikely.
He hadn't intended to get quite that out of touch with reality tonight, but Elijah had wanted another go and you couldn’t just let a mate smoke alone. So now they're picking their way back inside and Dom is at the point where time is starting to do really unpredictable things, or maybe it does actually take him forever to get across the living room, stepping around chairs and dishes and a variety of limbs. Orlando is apparently fast asleep on the floor with one arm over his eyes, but there is a low murmur of conversation from everyone else. Billy has usurped Dom's prize spot on the sofa.
He decides to surrender it gracefully and settles down on the floor instead, leaning his head back against Billy's leg. It's surprisingly comfortable.
"Billlll," he says, leaving his tongue on the roof of his mouth like a finger forgotten on the L key. I want comes into his mind, but the words kind of dissipate before he gets them voiced. There's that telepathy, though, because Billy drops a hand and begins running it back and forth through Dom's hair, heavy and slow. Every once in a while his fingers stray and sweep down over Dom's temple, his forehead, or his thumb drags over the back of Dom's neck, sending a cascade of shivery warmth down his spine. It feels like the most intimate thing in the world, though maybe that's the weed. He wants to turn the moment liquid and drown in it.
I'm never moving ever again he tells Billy telepathically.
Okay, Billy thinks back, or doesn't. Stay here.
3. Fears
Dom hasn't really had nightmares since he was eight or nine years old. Ever since his fears stopped involving monsters and turned instead to reality- to blowing auditions and loved ones dying and people hating him for the many and varied mistakes he's made- they've started keeping him awake rather than waking him up.
So he's familiar with the sensation of tossing and turning in his bed with a knot of anxiety in his stomach, watching the minutes tick by, trying to shake his mind free to any other subject. The part that's new when he gets to New Zealand is the nature of the particular fear.
It has to do with the fact that Lord of the Rings is it. It's going to be huge, a phenomenon, the pinnacle of the industry, it's the best thing he'll ever work on, and nobody knows it yet. Sometimes it feels like he's holding his breath until the first premiere, years in the future.
Dom's always been afraid of death in the kind of vague, general way that he figures most people are, but now he's afraid of dying before they finish. He keeps himself up at night worrying that Peter Jackson will have a heart attack, or the funding will somehow fall through, or the rights, or a giant tidal wave will wipe New Zealand right off the map, and it doesn't matter that each scenario is less plausible than the last. He's terrified that something will stop this movie, this incredible secret dream they're living, and then the world will never know.
4. Billy
Dom is more of an outdoorsy sort of person than Billy. This is exacerbated by the fact that Dom wants to be more outdoorsy than he is, whereas Billy, more comfortable in his own skin than anyone Dom knows, is content just to want what he wants. Still, the other side of this equation is New Zealand, so even Billy gets out some.
It's easy enough to talk him into repeating a trip Dom has done before, with plenty of assurances that it's only half a day's hike, and pretty, besides. Dom tells him he's been wanting to go back with a camera for the water bugs on the stream beside the trail. This is true, but it isn't the whole truth.
Dom likes to watch Billy in nature. He gets quiet- not a tense, coiled quiet like Dom trying to coax out wildlife, but quiet with this strange kind of deep calm. If his companions don't make conversation he's perfectly content to walk for hours in silence, though as soon as they get back to the car he's his usual chatty self. Dom could ask him what it is, whether the outdoors stirs some particular memory or thought or if it just disconnects him from other thoughts altogether, but he kind of likes the inconsequential mystery of it.
Dom lingers of the water bugs and Billy gets ahead, quiet as ever. Once in a while he'll stop to point something out, just a few words, an interesting insect or plant or one of the small views that grow more frequent as they climb. His eyes are bright, breath quick with exertion, even while he waits for Dom to catch up. Today Dom is favoring the theory that being outside gives Billy some kind of instinctual, enviable zen, grounds him completely in the moment.
At the top of the ridge the tree cover thins to reveal sudden sunlight and an unexpected breeze that feels like heaven. They sit on a wide exposed slope of sun-warmed rock. Dom digs the water out of his pack and takes a long swallow before handing it over. Billy drinks and then tips the bottle into his hand, scrubbing a palmful of water over his hair and applying another to the back of his neck, letting it trickle down under the collar of his shirt.
After a minute Dom wipes his hands and picks up the camera again. It's a beautiful view, the forest a carpet of vivid green stretching below them, glimpses of the little stream just barely glimmering through. He's trying to find a way to frame it that captures the height they've achieved when he hears Billy lying down and he turns and snaps a picture, just to be annoying. Billy doesn't even notice, stretched out blissfully with his eyes closed against the sun. The breeze returns, ruffling his damp hair and stirring leaf shadows over his face, and Dom, caught, takes another picture.
And another, and another, shifting to his knees for a better angle, trying to capture the sense of absolute peace in the image before him
At some point he looks up from fiddling with the ISO to find green eyes watching him, focused and calm, but Billy doesn't say anything, and Dom doesn't stop.
5. Breaking and Leaving
There is a difference between breaking your heart- or having it broken- and leaving it somewhere. A broken heart is when you have something perfect and someone destroys it, betrays you, cuts you down. Leaving your heart is when you have something perfect and then time runs out and you walk away.
A broken heart has splinters and jagged edges, cutting and catching at the inside of your chest, keeping the wound open and bleeding. When you leave your heart somewhere all you get is an empty space where it used to be.
6. Billy
"Cradle robber," says Dom the first time, breathless, the two of them stumbling through the door to his bedroom. They've lost their shirts somewhere in the hallway; he keeps getting distracted by Billy's chest hair.
Billy narrows his eyes like he's aiming for a you really want to go there? expression, but they're already getting tripped up between laughing and kissing and adding a fake glare just isn't going to happen convincingly.
"Baby," he shoots back.
"Pervert."
"I bet this is all a scheme to inherit when I die of old age."
Billy toes his shoes off. Dom's are laced too tightly, so he sits on the edge of the bed to deal with them.
"You're like an old man waving his stick around and telling kids to get off his lawn," he says, giving up on the knots and just prying them off with both hands.
"I'll show you waving my stick around."
Dom laughs so hard he actually snorts. "Really? That's the line you're going with?"
He's flying through the air a disoriented second later, Billy pulling out his secret ninja skills to flip him facedown and pin him to the bed.
"What was that?" he asks sweetly, and Dom has to take a long second to drag the conversation back into his mind because there is seriously nothing about Billy manhandling him that isn't sexy. He's pretty sure that the pin-someone-down-and-sit-victoriously-on-their-arse move isn't supposed to involve a really noticeable erection, but whatever. They're unconventional people.
"I meant, you can wave your stick at me any-" Billy scratches his nails roughly through the hair at the back of Dom's head and he shorts out of the conversation again, predictably. It's not like he was being subtle that night, getting high and letting Billy pet him.
(Maybe he isn't really subtle ever.)
He shifts around and Billy obligingly lets him up enough to roll over, then settles back down again, straddling him with a choked-off noise that Dom desperately wants to hear in full. He arches up to see if he can get it but only succeeds in clinking their belt buckles together, and why the hell are they still wearing clothes? This could be so much better.
Billy leans down to bracket Dom with his arms.
"You're really sure about this?" he asks, serious for once. Dom rolls his eyes and hooks a leg around the back of Billy's thigh.
"Bill, I don't think I know how to get any more consenting, and even if I'm not as much of an old man as some people in the room I am definitely an adult."
He doesn't feel like one, though. He feels like a teenager. Not like his own, younger, insecure self, but like everyone says teenagers are supposed to feel.
He feels golden, invincible, the whole of the glorious world laid before his feet, a perfect surety of his place in it. Here.