REPOST
Originally posted in fellow_shippers on Dec. 7, 2003. Reposting for archival purposes only.
Title: Cartography (in reverse)
Pairing: Dom/Elijah
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Elijah controls what he can; loses control when he cannot.
Disclaimer: Fictitious, as per the definition, whee.
Dedicated to raynemaiden.
Cartography (in reverse)
LEGEND
You drag your palm across him because he is unaware and you cannot do it otherwise.
You drag your palm across yourself because you can't do that to him.
Literally cannot. But you would.
This is violation and you know it.
However....
RESOURCES
Elijah knows where his boundaries lie. He understands personal space: keeping a knee to your cushion on your side of the couch because knees don't touch when you're just friends. Not when you feel like that, every single time they accidentally do touch.
'Accidentally. I'll keep telling myself that,' he thinks.
Elijah understands headspace: keeping one's thoughts to oneself and not letting others' thoughts permeate your own until you can't separate what you think you heard from what you actually heard in your head and said in your head.
'And just how do you keep track of all that?' he thinks.
He thinks hard. He thinks and bites into the jagged nail of his forefinger, tearing off one hanging fragment of white. He looks at the white line of nail on his second finger, settles his teeth on it, and thinks harder. But it's too late, too blurry without the lights on, too fuzzy with his lenses so dry and filmy, too hazy with just enough alcohol running through his blood to turn it to sparks that set the picture to flame. Around the edges only. But with other burning going on in his gut, Elijah needs desperately for those edges to stay put, needs desperately to have a framework-because the middle won't hold on its own. Not anymore.
One sight is shooting up into his face, everything else falling off into background. Dom is his foreground shot. Dom is all he can see with any clarity. 'Too much clarity,' he thinks, and wonders how, if he's so damn drunk, can he see anything clearly at all. And yet he sees Dom. White on black. Stark.
'Naked,' Elijah whispers in his head as though aloud, disbelieving. He mouths the word to see if it's still true. It is. And he wonders how he got away with it.
COUNTRIES
"You do that because it's your easiest means of control," Dom had told him.
Dom was blitzed and red-faced and stumbling, and so of course he was being philosophical. Elijah had his arm hooking Dom's narrow waist, gripping his side, guiding him up stairs-very high, very steep, possibly mobile stairs. He didn't respond to Dom's assessment. He stared at his red nose, stared at his red ears, blinked and stared.
Dom faced him, walking forward, but his eyes wouldn't focus on one spot-in fact seemed to move separately about, rolling around in a way that made Elijah queasy. 'Like an animal being put to sleep,' he thought, and dry heaved.
"Okay, Lighe? Okay?" Dom had rubbed his back soothingly as if Elijah was the one truly out of sorts. 'Not altogether wrong,' Elijah had thought, 'on either count.'
"Yeah," he said to Dom, offering a weak smile. "Yeah. So, yeah, I have control issues-with the nails and all."
Dom smiled and nodded, licked his lips clumsily, and the eyes roamed. 'Oh god,' Elijah thought, and looked away. "Yeah, El-iii-jah," he singsang. "You do." Too clear, too matter-of-fact.
"Okay," Elijah said quietly, tone of defeat.
"But," Dom said, stopping at the top of the stairs and poking one long finger into Elijah's side. "But," one finger into Elijah's solar plexus. "But,"-one finger tapping-"you lose control where you try most to have it." Tap, tap, tap. "You do."
Elijah looked down at Dom's hand on his chest, now relaxed, palm down, fingers splayed and curled slightly. He looked up at Dom's face, relaxed, eyes closed, skin moist and still red. Dom was asleep on his feet.
'Just like that,' Elijah thought, and exhaled a nervous laugh. "Come on, Dommie," he said into his friend's red ear, nudging him in the shoulder, "let's get you to bed."
Dom nodded his head and fluttered his eyelashes, but didn't move his feet until Elijah placed a hand in the middle of his back and coaxed. "Come on, come on now."
How he'd managed to get him into the bedroom, he never would know. Just aiming him in the right direction, without zigzagging a hundred times over, had been challenge enough. Elijah also was not sure how he'd managed to get Dom onto the bed without twisting his wrists beneath his torso or breaking his seemingly boneless neck or having him slide to the floor in a crooked heap. He had managed it however. He had managed to do more than he should have, he thought.
BODIES OF WATER
Elijah knows he should leave. 'Should have left by now,' he thinks, but does not move. Except for his palm. 'Should not be doing that.' Slow and coarse between his legs, up and down the front of his jeans. 'Should stop right now.' Thumb shoves zipper over and down, catches. "Aaaghh," he hisses, and readjusts, and pulls further. "Stop right now," he whispers to himself, but his back is arching and his hand is in the flap of his boxers. He stares forward, eyes falling to narrow slits. But still focused, he stares forward and remembers.
CONTINENTS
You cannot know how much control I have, how much I have to control. You can't know what I've held back. And you can't know what it's like to be so close to losing control, to find yourself mad and chomping at it like a carrot dangled before your nose.
Your nose. Oh. It's the silliest thing. Bulbous. So red now. You're such an Irish drunkard, no matter what accent you have. Your blood comes up every time you drink something down.
Your ears too. I could kiss them and expect to have reddened lips. Like yours. Broken bow. Mismatched heartshape.
Mismatched face. So asymmetrical. That dimple severing your chin in two, like scraping tectonic plates. Earthquake, Dommie, earthquake.
Ah, your neck, I never knew how long it was. But it is so far down to your collar bones. This mole, that mole. Thin, spindly bones. Soft, elastic veins. So hard and yet so giving. So very long. My whole hand could fit under your chin, running your length.
To those clavicles. So delicate and poetic. Valleys and ridges. Ravines and plateaus. To run along, to fall into.
And under these buttons there's more, more. More crevices and curves of hard flesh, taut. But soft flesh, silky. The fine hairs on your chest. I can't see them, but I feel them, tickling, setting my skin on edge. The subtlest swell toward beaded nipples. Oh, Dom, so tight and gathered. So alert of you, so constantly on.
The press of your ribs, so painfully jutting, lining your skin. Like teeth. Long rows of teeth. Grinning. Somehow. Whalebone, baleen. Swallowing me whole.
If I dip down here, into your navel, I can imagine I'm inside you. Into your navel, warm and enveloping. Into your navel, into darkness, and out into the air and more darkness. Your hairs get thicker and darker and remind me of the hair on your scalp. But not so. Unaltered, untamed. Rough hairs, crude. Suggestive. Machete cut path, scattered hairs, sparse wild hairs. This trail leads further and further. I don't know where.
But I'll take that journey. Linear but rounding bends. I'll... I think I'll take the long way round. Scenic route, Dommie? I'll save you for later, where I know you’re warm and soft now. Maybe you'll lose control. But then you always do. You can. So over you go. Because....
Because, if I could see your eyes-if you would open them-I think I would drown. I think I could feel mist on my skin just from those eyes. I could have sworn I have already. Seabreeze light over dark (almost black sometimes) blue, gray (almost black sometimes) blue. Hard penetrating blue.
But you are white and soft over here. And thank goodness for those loose pants. So much easier. Your tanned back is so exquisite, like raw marble. But not so unyielding as that. More... art nouveau. Arabesques. Curl here, around and down and up again. Sharp lines. Gentle gully. Opening. Crescendo and diminuendo. Down.
Your tan fades without a line, without the slightest demarcation. Just brushed bronze overlapping alabaster white. Under the glow. The spotlight... la luna they say in the valley. White on white. You scoop and slope here. Pools. Swells. You crest here, and I cannot go on. Cannot continue to the taper of your legs. Cannot fold into the dimple behind each knee. Cannot appreciate the fragile arc of your foot, one then the other. Wanna make you curl. But up, up.
Where I could hide and lose myself. Lose control. And want it. I want it. Want to. Want to follow the hollows of your body, falling over the sides, navigating you. Circumnavigating. Over, around. Sinking into the plunge of your skin past your hips. Sinking. The line of your inner thigh....
If I could... but I couldn't... oh, I could... I could just....
PEN
Elijah sits with coolness passing over his damp body, slumped and shivering. He knows he should have left by now. 'Should never have done this,' he thinks, and bites the nail of his third finger, sucking gelatinous white from beneath it and around the cuticle. "Should not do this again."
BLANK PAPER
Drag this on. Redrawing borders, washing them out. Invading.
Cannot do this.
Again.
Title: Cartography (in reverse)
Pairing: Dom/Elijah
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Elijah controls what he can; loses control when he cannot.
Disclaimer: Fictitious, as per the definition, whee.
Dedicated to raynemaiden.
Cartography (in reverse)
LEGEND
You drag your palm across him because he is unaware and you cannot do it otherwise.
You drag your palm across yourself because you can't do that to him.
Literally cannot. But you would.
This is violation and you know it.
However....
RESOURCES
Elijah knows where his boundaries lie. He understands personal space: keeping a knee to your cushion on your side of the couch because knees don't touch when you're just friends. Not when you feel like that, every single time they accidentally do touch.
'Accidentally. I'll keep telling myself that,' he thinks.
Elijah understands headspace: keeping one's thoughts to oneself and not letting others' thoughts permeate your own until you can't separate what you think you heard from what you actually heard in your head and said in your head.
'And just how do you keep track of all that?' he thinks.
He thinks hard. He thinks and bites into the jagged nail of his forefinger, tearing off one hanging fragment of white. He looks at the white line of nail on his second finger, settles his teeth on it, and thinks harder. But it's too late, too blurry without the lights on, too fuzzy with his lenses so dry and filmy, too hazy with just enough alcohol running through his blood to turn it to sparks that set the picture to flame. Around the edges only. But with other burning going on in his gut, Elijah needs desperately for those edges to stay put, needs desperately to have a framework-because the middle won't hold on its own. Not anymore.
One sight is shooting up into his face, everything else falling off into background. Dom is his foreground shot. Dom is all he can see with any clarity. 'Too much clarity,' he thinks, and wonders how, if he's so damn drunk, can he see anything clearly at all. And yet he sees Dom. White on black. Stark.
'Naked,' Elijah whispers in his head as though aloud, disbelieving. He mouths the word to see if it's still true. It is. And he wonders how he got away with it.
COUNTRIES
"You do that because it's your easiest means of control," Dom had told him.
Dom was blitzed and red-faced and stumbling, and so of course he was being philosophical. Elijah had his arm hooking Dom's narrow waist, gripping his side, guiding him up stairs-very high, very steep, possibly mobile stairs. He didn't respond to Dom's assessment. He stared at his red nose, stared at his red ears, blinked and stared.
Dom faced him, walking forward, but his eyes wouldn't focus on one spot-in fact seemed to move separately about, rolling around in a way that made Elijah queasy. 'Like an animal being put to sleep,' he thought, and dry heaved.
"Okay, Lighe? Okay?" Dom had rubbed his back soothingly as if Elijah was the one truly out of sorts. 'Not altogether wrong,' Elijah had thought, 'on either count.'
"Yeah," he said to Dom, offering a weak smile. "Yeah. So, yeah, I have control issues-with the nails and all."
Dom smiled and nodded, licked his lips clumsily, and the eyes roamed. 'Oh god,' Elijah thought, and looked away. "Yeah, El-iii-jah," he singsang. "You do." Too clear, too matter-of-fact.
"Okay," Elijah said quietly, tone of defeat.
"But," Dom said, stopping at the top of the stairs and poking one long finger into Elijah's side. "But," one finger into Elijah's solar plexus. "But,"-one finger tapping-"you lose control where you try most to have it." Tap, tap, tap. "You do."
Elijah looked down at Dom's hand on his chest, now relaxed, palm down, fingers splayed and curled slightly. He looked up at Dom's face, relaxed, eyes closed, skin moist and still red. Dom was asleep on his feet.
'Just like that,' Elijah thought, and exhaled a nervous laugh. "Come on, Dommie," he said into his friend's red ear, nudging him in the shoulder, "let's get you to bed."
Dom nodded his head and fluttered his eyelashes, but didn't move his feet until Elijah placed a hand in the middle of his back and coaxed. "Come on, come on now."
How he'd managed to get him into the bedroom, he never would know. Just aiming him in the right direction, without zigzagging a hundred times over, had been challenge enough. Elijah also was not sure how he'd managed to get Dom onto the bed without twisting his wrists beneath his torso or breaking his seemingly boneless neck or having him slide to the floor in a crooked heap. He had managed it however. He had managed to do more than he should have, he thought.
BODIES OF WATER
Elijah knows he should leave. 'Should have left by now,' he thinks, but does not move. Except for his palm. 'Should not be doing that.' Slow and coarse between his legs, up and down the front of his jeans. 'Should stop right now.' Thumb shoves zipper over and down, catches. "Aaaghh," he hisses, and readjusts, and pulls further. "Stop right now," he whispers to himself, but his back is arching and his hand is in the flap of his boxers. He stares forward, eyes falling to narrow slits. But still focused, he stares forward and remembers.
CONTINENTS
You cannot know how much control I have, how much I have to control. You can't know what I've held back. And you can't know what it's like to be so close to losing control, to find yourself mad and chomping at it like a carrot dangled before your nose.
Your nose. Oh. It's the silliest thing. Bulbous. So red now. You're such an Irish drunkard, no matter what accent you have. Your blood comes up every time you drink something down.
Your ears too. I could kiss them and expect to have reddened lips. Like yours. Broken bow. Mismatched heartshape.
Mismatched face. So asymmetrical. That dimple severing your chin in two, like scraping tectonic plates. Earthquake, Dommie, earthquake.
Ah, your neck, I never knew how long it was. But it is so far down to your collar bones. This mole, that mole. Thin, spindly bones. Soft, elastic veins. So hard and yet so giving. So very long. My whole hand could fit under your chin, running your length.
To those clavicles. So delicate and poetic. Valleys and ridges. Ravines and plateaus. To run along, to fall into.
And under these buttons there's more, more. More crevices and curves of hard flesh, taut. But soft flesh, silky. The fine hairs on your chest. I can't see them, but I feel them, tickling, setting my skin on edge. The subtlest swell toward beaded nipples. Oh, Dom, so tight and gathered. So alert of you, so constantly on.
The press of your ribs, so painfully jutting, lining your skin. Like teeth. Long rows of teeth. Grinning. Somehow. Whalebone, baleen. Swallowing me whole.
If I dip down here, into your navel, I can imagine I'm inside you. Into your navel, warm and enveloping. Into your navel, into darkness, and out into the air and more darkness. Your hairs get thicker and darker and remind me of the hair on your scalp. But not so. Unaltered, untamed. Rough hairs, crude. Suggestive. Machete cut path, scattered hairs, sparse wild hairs. This trail leads further and further. I don't know where.
But I'll take that journey. Linear but rounding bends. I'll... I think I'll take the long way round. Scenic route, Dommie? I'll save you for later, where I know you’re warm and soft now. Maybe you'll lose control. But then you always do. You can. So over you go. Because....
Because, if I could see your eyes-if you would open them-I think I would drown. I think I could feel mist on my skin just from those eyes. I could have sworn I have already. Seabreeze light over dark (almost black sometimes) blue, gray (almost black sometimes) blue. Hard penetrating blue.
But you are white and soft over here. And thank goodness for those loose pants. So much easier. Your tanned back is so exquisite, like raw marble. But not so unyielding as that. More... art nouveau. Arabesques. Curl here, around and down and up again. Sharp lines. Gentle gully. Opening. Crescendo and diminuendo. Down.
Your tan fades without a line, without the slightest demarcation. Just brushed bronze overlapping alabaster white. Under the glow. The spotlight... la luna they say in the valley. White on white. You scoop and slope here. Pools. Swells. You crest here, and I cannot go on. Cannot continue to the taper of your legs. Cannot fold into the dimple behind each knee. Cannot appreciate the fragile arc of your foot, one then the other. Wanna make you curl. But up, up.
Where I could hide and lose myself. Lose control. And want it. I want it. Want to. Want to follow the hollows of your body, falling over the sides, navigating you. Circumnavigating. Over, around. Sinking into the plunge of your skin past your hips. Sinking. The line of your inner thigh....
If I could... but I couldn't... oh, I could... I could just....
PEN
Elijah sits with coolness passing over his damp body, slumped and shivering. He knows he should have left by now. 'Should never have done this,' he thinks, and bites the nail of his third finger, sucking gelatinous white from beneath it and around the cuticle. "Should not do this again."
BLANK PAPER
Drag this on. Redrawing borders, washing them out. Invading.
Cannot do this.
Again.