Threadbare Gypsy Soul ~ The End
Title: Threadbare Gypsy Soul (26/26)
Rating: NC-17 over all (PG-13 most chapters)
Pairing: Dom/Billy
Warnings: Sequel to BTS, AU, angst. In this universe, Dom is a NYC social worker. The nature of his work may be a touchy subject for some people.
Feedback: is loved.
Summary: It’s human nature to bury our secrets. The fear lies in digging them up.
Chapter Notes: For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), it's always our self we find in the sea. ~e.e. cummings
A/N: Enormous apologies for the wait. Even more enormous apologies for the lack of warning, because this is, in fact, the end, at very long last. Enormous-est thanks to everyone who read and enjoyed this crazy universe over the last ridiculous five years. I love you all more than I can say.
Saturday, December 31st, New Year's Eve
10:05am
Billy stood with his hands deep in his pockets, wrapped in his peacoat. As much as he fit among the naked trees and the mist clinging over the park in the sleepy town of Stranraer, he still looked as though he didn’t quite belong in the damp heart of a Scottish winter. Like he was forever looking outward.
Dom let him be. The previous days had been quiet, Billy drawn more inward and pensive than Dom had ever known him. He and Maggie had conversations Dom was not privy to, and in turn Dom and Maggie spoke when Billy wanted to be alone. He ate and walked on his own over the grounds, staring out across the sea, deep in thought. When he returned looking for Dom, he clung, needing a simple connection to something familiar.
But the days of rest and soul searching had done their work. Maggie waved them over, having gone ahead to be sure Gran was ready for them. Billy looked up and walked back toward the groups of small flats that made up the senior home, looking tired and resigned. Nothing Dom could say would make this any easier, he knew. He felt nervous himself, aware this was as much like meeting Billy’s parents as it ever could be.
“Come on, lads,” Maggie encouraged quietly to both of them as they entered the flat. It was a very small space, but enough for one who seemed to live in happiness very simply. Gran stood in the sitting room, a tiny but only slightly hunched woman, with her thin gray hair pinned up. She wore no glasses, her eyes quite sharp even at her age, but the way she wrung her hands betrayed that she, too, might be quite nervous. But she stilled them, seeing Billy come in, his expression wary and ashamed, as though he thoroughly expected a talking-to.
“Well, now,” she said, her voice strong and lilting, beckoning him closer. Billy approached, and she took his shoulders in her thin, spotty hands. A smile broke on her wrinkled face. “You finally cut that awful hair.”
Billy blurted a surprised laugh, looking down at his toes, clearly something that had been just one, if a superficial bone of contention between them from so many years ago.
When she stepped forward and embraced him, her chin barely able to rest on his shoulder, Billy inhaled, slowly raising his hands to return it. Her chin trembled, but her voice was still strong as she said, “You could have phoned.”
“Sorry,” Billy murmured.
“I’m sure you are,” she patted his back, forgiving and accepting, leaning back again and looking him over more fully and pressing a hand to his scruffy cheek, “Goodness, you’re so like your father. You’ve got that same proper Scottish build he and your grandda' had, God rest them both. Come, take off that coat and sit. Oh! I should make tea.”
“I’ve got the kettle on already, Gran, you just sit down,” Maggie answered. Dom hung back at the front door by the kitchenette, and Billy’s eyes lit on him as they hung their coats, and Gran’s eyes followed as she settled back in her chintz armchair.
“That’s not ever you little friend, Geoffrey… Geoff… bugger, I can’t remember his last name now.”
“Christ, Geoffrey Shawcross,” Billy chuckled under his breath, urging Dom forward with a hand on his back. “No. This is Dominic. He’s… ah.” He glanced at Maggie nervously, who simply nodded from her place near the stove, and Billy bit his lip and muttered, “He’s my boyfriend.”
Gran glanced between them silently her thin eyebrows coming together, and then at Maggie who nodded again.
“I’m very happy to meet you,” Dom said quietly, offering his hand, which she shook, her grip light but firm.
“Yes, how do you do?” she returned politely. Her eyes were sparkling green, even brighter than Billy’s as she looked between them, and shook her head amiably with an understanding smile, “You were always such a sensitive boy, I suppose I should have known.”
Billy rolled his eyes as he sat with Dom on the flowery sofa, but Gran sparked right up at him, “Don’t make that face at me, lad. I’ve not sat here waiting for you for so many years to kick you out for that; I’m too old for petty prejudice anymore. But I don’t have to stand for your attitude, do I?”
“No, ma’am,” Billy murmured, properly chastised.
She giggled, a nearly girlish sound as Maggie brought in the tea tray and pulled a chair over from the small dining table. “Billy’s had a good deal of help from Dom, actually. Dominic works in child welfare in New York City, Gran.”
“Really?” she remarked with interest, her eyes lighting brightly on him again, “I imagine that’s difficult, dealing with the young people in that area? Not unlike Glasgow, I suppose.”
“It’s challenging, definitely,” Dom smiled, taking a sip of his tea.
“Mmm. Children are beings of light and emotion. When their parents passed on, the hospital sent out a young man to be certain an old woman like me could mind them properly,” Gran shrugged her thin shoulders, as if to say they did what they must, but unnecessarily, “He was an eager young man, poor fella. These two gave him quite the runaround, try as he did to get through to them.”
“He was an arse,” Billy muttered.
“He was a teacher,” she contradicted smartly, “Perhaps not of Maths and Literature, but of life and the coping with the very worst of it. You would’ve done better to listen to his advice,” she flicked her eyes to Dominic, cheekily. “But I see the second time’s the charm.”
Dom smiled a bit bashfully at his knees.
Gran set her tea down a reached into a basket beside her chair. “Look here,” she beckoned him to lean closer while she opened an album full of photos.
“Oh, Christ,” Billy whispered, earning a sharp look.
Dom looked eagerly while she flipped to the first page, pointing out the photos. “That’s me, when I was younger than you, I reckon, and my Jack, bless him. And this is William and Mary on their wedding day, and little Maggie when she was born, and here…. Ah.”
There was a whole page of photos of Billy as a boy, playing board games with Maggie, one holding a toad, dressed in a suit and pouting heavily, one in front of a square topped water tower. And one, with his father playing guitar, in which Billy was clearly singing at the top of his voice. Dom could not look hard enough, taking in the cant of his head and the wild shaggy hair, and the pure joy he took in singing.
“They were always good for a song, those two,” Gran remembered, “Like a pair of sparrows, you were. Look at your parents, Billy. They were so happy.”
She handed the album over and Billy obeyed, taking deep breath as he looked at the images of his past, flipping the pages. He fingered a blank space on one page, the photo corners still there. “I have the one that was here. I took it, the day I left.”
“I wondered,” Gran murmured. “You were a happy boy once. We’d made a good run of it, our little family. But God takes people as He may. Not out of spite or malice, it’s simply His way. That’s all.”
7:45pm
Dom made his way down to the pebble beach in the frigid setting sun, clutching Billy’s coat in his fingers. He draped it over Billy’s shoulders when he reached him, sat as he so often was, staring out at the open water.
“It is winter, you know. In Scotland. Bloody freezing.”
“I don’t mind.”
Dom brushed the top of his head with his fingers, “Well, I do. I have to sit by you on the plane, and you’ll be sneezing and drippy and miserable. I’ll put up with you, but then I’ll be sneezing and drippy and miserable when we get home, and you’ll have to put up with me.”
Billy tipped his head back to Dom’s thigh briefly, and with a sigh pushed his arms into the coat sleeves.
They watched the tide for some minutes, the lulling sound of the waves a familiar nostalgia. One day, Dom thought, we’ll go back. The pair of us. We’ll go back to New Zealand together, and climb that same tree.
“What is it, Bills,” he murmured, “What are you looking for out there?”
“I dunno,” Billy shrugged, wrapping his arms around himself in the wind, “I feel like… I’ve woven this shield round myself, this cloak that’s kept me safe for so long. And now I feel like it’s all coming unraveled. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Dom shifted the pebbles beneath his shoe, aware of the disquiet in Billy’s words. The sharp way he’d been drawn around himself since they’d arrived here, protecting everything laid bare, was beginning to loosen. Dom sat down in the gravel beside him. “It’s scary, changing everything you thought you knew about your life.”
Billy nodded once, eyes still far out along the horizon.
“The day I left the ship,” Dom said, his mouth turning up at the memory, “Bean told me something about you. He said, you live your life by two things. Hope, and the choice to take hold of it.”
“Bean said that?” Billy chuckled, shaking his head, “He’s an idiot.”
“He’s a barman. They see people. Bills,” Dom murmured, “There’s a big difference between the way things happened when you were a kid and what you’re going through now. You chose to... to pull that thread that started your cloak unraveling. You chose to come here.”
“You helped.”
“You chose to come to me.”
“You had my guitar.”
“You told me about it. You brought me my jacket outside your lounge.”
“You walked into my lounge.”
“You looked.”
“I fell.”
Dom had a breath to bounce back, but it caught, seeing Billy’s soft eyes turning on him in mock accusation, acknowledgment of that pesky serendipitous idea that neither over them had any control over anything in this life. Dom’s smile widened as he looked back out to sea. “Here we are, then.”
“Aye. Both of us a bit metaphorically naked, as it were.”
Dom lifted an eyebrow, “I’m fully decent, thanks.”
“Yeah?” Billy quipped. “Your dad loves you. See there? Look at you fretting over it already.”
“I have a lot of mistakes to make up for,” Dom fidgeted.
“So do I,” Billy shrugged. “But neither of us will ever be perfect, will we?”
Dom found Billy’s fingers and wove them together. “You have an overbite.”
“Your jaw is crooked.”
Dom leaned over to kiss him softly, his lips cold and dry, but smiling.
“I might as well go into this starkers, if I’m going to get use to it,” Billy said, tugging loose and slipping the Manaia pendant over his head, and gave it to Dom. “I don’t think I need it anymore.”
Dom studied the carved creature, meant to protect and guard the lost. He’d never understood why he’d bought it that day in Christchurch. It only had so much meaning between them because Billy had given it such enormous purpose.
“How do you feel about going back to work?” Billy asked.
Dom saw the knowing look in Billy’s face and dropped his own, scraping his heels in the pebbles.
“Oi,” Billy murmured, bringing their heads together again, “Do you think I didn’t know what’s been eating you on this trip, my Dommeh? I was there the first time you lost your way.”
“You were,” Dom nodded, tracing the lines of the pendant with his thumb, he drew a deep breath of the crisp, clean salty air, turning over the thoughts he’d had over the last few weeks about the cost of his job on his heart. It shattered him each time he lost a child, that much was plain. It left him flayed and raw and aching. But each time, it slowly scarred over to a solid, everlasting reminder.
Underneath it all, it had been about the past, about people he’d lost long ago, about living up to an unrealistic ideal he’d built up in place of a father who did precisely what Dom did himself, who was unable to let the past go. A father that - and it would take him awhile to really believe it - was proud of what he did. It was still failure, to lose kids, and he’d struggle with that forever. But each time he’d pulled himself back together and tried again, driven by his own stubborn will and the strength he took from the man beside him. Scars, after all, were hurts that had healed.
“I hope it never comes to it,” he said, the pendant warm in his hands from Billy’s body heat, “But if it does, I hope you’ll keep helping me find my way back.”
“You know I will,” Billy’s fingers tugged on the double twist greenstone at Dom’s neck, “I’ve nowhere else to be anymore, but right here.”
Dom rested his forehead against Billy’s temple for a moment, then stood up and walked to the tide pulling the sea away from the pebbly shore. With a running start into the licking waves he drew back and launched the Manaia as far as he could, losing sight of it against the waves.
Billy’s shoes crunched over the beach as he came to Dom’s side. There was no anger in his face at what Dom had done, only a little curiosity.
“It’s not mine anyway,” Dom told him, “Let it find its way to someone who needs it.”
Billy nodded agreement, curling an arm around Dom’s neck and shoulder, lending support and gaining some of his own. As the sun touched the horizon, the sea lit with gold.
THE END
Rating: NC-17 over all (PG-13 most chapters)
Pairing: Dom/Billy
Warnings: Sequel to BTS, AU, angst. In this universe, Dom is a NYC social worker. The nature of his work may be a touchy subject for some people.
Feedback: is loved.
Summary: It’s human nature to bury our secrets. The fear lies in digging them up.
Chapter Notes: For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), it's always our self we find in the sea. ~e.e. cummings
A/N: Enormous apologies for the wait. Even more enormous apologies for the lack of warning, because this is, in fact, the end, at very long last. Enormous-est thanks to everyone who read and enjoyed this crazy universe over the last ridiculous five years. I love you all more than I can say.
Saturday, December 31st, New Year's Eve
10:05am
Billy stood with his hands deep in his pockets, wrapped in his peacoat. As much as he fit among the naked trees and the mist clinging over the park in the sleepy town of Stranraer, he still looked as though he didn’t quite belong in the damp heart of a Scottish winter. Like he was forever looking outward.
Dom let him be. The previous days had been quiet, Billy drawn more inward and pensive than Dom had ever known him. He and Maggie had conversations Dom was not privy to, and in turn Dom and Maggie spoke when Billy wanted to be alone. He ate and walked on his own over the grounds, staring out across the sea, deep in thought. When he returned looking for Dom, he clung, needing a simple connection to something familiar.
But the days of rest and soul searching had done their work. Maggie waved them over, having gone ahead to be sure Gran was ready for them. Billy looked up and walked back toward the groups of small flats that made up the senior home, looking tired and resigned. Nothing Dom could say would make this any easier, he knew. He felt nervous himself, aware this was as much like meeting Billy’s parents as it ever could be.
“Come on, lads,” Maggie encouraged quietly to both of them as they entered the flat. It was a very small space, but enough for one who seemed to live in happiness very simply. Gran stood in the sitting room, a tiny but only slightly hunched woman, with her thin gray hair pinned up. She wore no glasses, her eyes quite sharp even at her age, but the way she wrung her hands betrayed that she, too, might be quite nervous. But she stilled them, seeing Billy come in, his expression wary and ashamed, as though he thoroughly expected a talking-to.
“Well, now,” she said, her voice strong and lilting, beckoning him closer. Billy approached, and she took his shoulders in her thin, spotty hands. A smile broke on her wrinkled face. “You finally cut that awful hair.”
Billy blurted a surprised laugh, looking down at his toes, clearly something that had been just one, if a superficial bone of contention between them from so many years ago.
When she stepped forward and embraced him, her chin barely able to rest on his shoulder, Billy inhaled, slowly raising his hands to return it. Her chin trembled, but her voice was still strong as she said, “You could have phoned.”
“Sorry,” Billy murmured.
“I’m sure you are,” she patted his back, forgiving and accepting, leaning back again and looking him over more fully and pressing a hand to his scruffy cheek, “Goodness, you’re so like your father. You’ve got that same proper Scottish build he and your grandda' had, God rest them both. Come, take off that coat and sit. Oh! I should make tea.”
“I’ve got the kettle on already, Gran, you just sit down,” Maggie answered. Dom hung back at the front door by the kitchenette, and Billy’s eyes lit on him as they hung their coats, and Gran’s eyes followed as she settled back in her chintz armchair.
“That’s not ever you little friend, Geoffrey… Geoff… bugger, I can’t remember his last name now.”
“Christ, Geoffrey Shawcross,” Billy chuckled under his breath, urging Dom forward with a hand on his back. “No. This is Dominic. He’s… ah.” He glanced at Maggie nervously, who simply nodded from her place near the stove, and Billy bit his lip and muttered, “He’s my boyfriend.”
Gran glanced between them silently her thin eyebrows coming together, and then at Maggie who nodded again.
“I’m very happy to meet you,” Dom said quietly, offering his hand, which she shook, her grip light but firm.
“Yes, how do you do?” she returned politely. Her eyes were sparkling green, even brighter than Billy’s as she looked between them, and shook her head amiably with an understanding smile, “You were always such a sensitive boy, I suppose I should have known.”
Billy rolled his eyes as he sat with Dom on the flowery sofa, but Gran sparked right up at him, “Don’t make that face at me, lad. I’ve not sat here waiting for you for so many years to kick you out for that; I’m too old for petty prejudice anymore. But I don’t have to stand for your attitude, do I?”
“No, ma’am,” Billy murmured, properly chastised.
She giggled, a nearly girlish sound as Maggie brought in the tea tray and pulled a chair over from the small dining table. “Billy’s had a good deal of help from Dom, actually. Dominic works in child welfare in New York City, Gran.”
“Really?” she remarked with interest, her eyes lighting brightly on him again, “I imagine that’s difficult, dealing with the young people in that area? Not unlike Glasgow, I suppose.”
“It’s challenging, definitely,” Dom smiled, taking a sip of his tea.
“Mmm. Children are beings of light and emotion. When their parents passed on, the hospital sent out a young man to be certain an old woman like me could mind them properly,” Gran shrugged her thin shoulders, as if to say they did what they must, but unnecessarily, “He was an eager young man, poor fella. These two gave him quite the runaround, try as he did to get through to them.”
“He was an arse,” Billy muttered.
“He was a teacher,” she contradicted smartly, “Perhaps not of Maths and Literature, but of life and the coping with the very worst of it. You would’ve done better to listen to his advice,” she flicked her eyes to Dominic, cheekily. “But I see the second time’s the charm.”
Dom smiled a bit bashfully at his knees.
Gran set her tea down a reached into a basket beside her chair. “Look here,” she beckoned him to lean closer while she opened an album full of photos.
“Oh, Christ,” Billy whispered, earning a sharp look.
Dom looked eagerly while she flipped to the first page, pointing out the photos. “That’s me, when I was younger than you, I reckon, and my Jack, bless him. And this is William and Mary on their wedding day, and little Maggie when she was born, and here…. Ah.”
There was a whole page of photos of Billy as a boy, playing board games with Maggie, one holding a toad, dressed in a suit and pouting heavily, one in front of a square topped water tower. And one, with his father playing guitar, in which Billy was clearly singing at the top of his voice. Dom could not look hard enough, taking in the cant of his head and the wild shaggy hair, and the pure joy he took in singing.
“They were always good for a song, those two,” Gran remembered, “Like a pair of sparrows, you were. Look at your parents, Billy. They were so happy.”
She handed the album over and Billy obeyed, taking deep breath as he looked at the images of his past, flipping the pages. He fingered a blank space on one page, the photo corners still there. “I have the one that was here. I took it, the day I left.”
“I wondered,” Gran murmured. “You were a happy boy once. We’d made a good run of it, our little family. But God takes people as He may. Not out of spite or malice, it’s simply His way. That’s all.”
7:45pm
Dom made his way down to the pebble beach in the frigid setting sun, clutching Billy’s coat in his fingers. He draped it over Billy’s shoulders when he reached him, sat as he so often was, staring out at the open water.
“It is winter, you know. In Scotland. Bloody freezing.”
“I don’t mind.”
Dom brushed the top of his head with his fingers, “Well, I do. I have to sit by you on the plane, and you’ll be sneezing and drippy and miserable. I’ll put up with you, but then I’ll be sneezing and drippy and miserable when we get home, and you’ll have to put up with me.”
Billy tipped his head back to Dom’s thigh briefly, and with a sigh pushed his arms into the coat sleeves.
They watched the tide for some minutes, the lulling sound of the waves a familiar nostalgia. One day, Dom thought, we’ll go back. The pair of us. We’ll go back to New Zealand together, and climb that same tree.
“What is it, Bills,” he murmured, “What are you looking for out there?”
“I dunno,” Billy shrugged, wrapping his arms around himself in the wind, “I feel like… I’ve woven this shield round myself, this cloak that’s kept me safe for so long. And now I feel like it’s all coming unraveled. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Dom shifted the pebbles beneath his shoe, aware of the disquiet in Billy’s words. The sharp way he’d been drawn around himself since they’d arrived here, protecting everything laid bare, was beginning to loosen. Dom sat down in the gravel beside him. “It’s scary, changing everything you thought you knew about your life.”
Billy nodded once, eyes still far out along the horizon.
“The day I left the ship,” Dom said, his mouth turning up at the memory, “Bean told me something about you. He said, you live your life by two things. Hope, and the choice to take hold of it.”
“Bean said that?” Billy chuckled, shaking his head, “He’s an idiot.”
“He’s a barman. They see people. Bills,” Dom murmured, “There’s a big difference between the way things happened when you were a kid and what you’re going through now. You chose to... to pull that thread that started your cloak unraveling. You chose to come here.”
“You helped.”
“You chose to come to me.”
“You had my guitar.”
“You told me about it. You brought me my jacket outside your lounge.”
“You walked into my lounge.”
“You looked.”
“I fell.”
Dom had a breath to bounce back, but it caught, seeing Billy’s soft eyes turning on him in mock accusation, acknowledgment of that pesky serendipitous idea that neither over them had any control over anything in this life. Dom’s smile widened as he looked back out to sea. “Here we are, then.”
“Aye. Both of us a bit metaphorically naked, as it were.”
Dom lifted an eyebrow, “I’m fully decent, thanks.”
“Yeah?” Billy quipped. “Your dad loves you. See there? Look at you fretting over it already.”
“I have a lot of mistakes to make up for,” Dom fidgeted.
“So do I,” Billy shrugged. “But neither of us will ever be perfect, will we?”
Dom found Billy’s fingers and wove them together. “You have an overbite.”
“Your jaw is crooked.”
Dom leaned over to kiss him softly, his lips cold and dry, but smiling.
“I might as well go into this starkers, if I’m going to get use to it,” Billy said, tugging loose and slipping the Manaia pendant over his head, and gave it to Dom. “I don’t think I need it anymore.”
Dom studied the carved creature, meant to protect and guard the lost. He’d never understood why he’d bought it that day in Christchurch. It only had so much meaning between them because Billy had given it such enormous purpose.
“How do you feel about going back to work?” Billy asked.
Dom saw the knowing look in Billy’s face and dropped his own, scraping his heels in the pebbles.
“Oi,” Billy murmured, bringing their heads together again, “Do you think I didn’t know what’s been eating you on this trip, my Dommeh? I was there the first time you lost your way.”
“You were,” Dom nodded, tracing the lines of the pendant with his thumb, he drew a deep breath of the crisp, clean salty air, turning over the thoughts he’d had over the last few weeks about the cost of his job on his heart. It shattered him each time he lost a child, that much was plain. It left him flayed and raw and aching. But each time, it slowly scarred over to a solid, everlasting reminder.
Underneath it all, it had been about the past, about people he’d lost long ago, about living up to an unrealistic ideal he’d built up in place of a father who did precisely what Dom did himself, who was unable to let the past go. A father that - and it would take him awhile to really believe it - was proud of what he did. It was still failure, to lose kids, and he’d struggle with that forever. But each time he’d pulled himself back together and tried again, driven by his own stubborn will and the strength he took from the man beside him. Scars, after all, were hurts that had healed.
“I hope it never comes to it,” he said, the pendant warm in his hands from Billy’s body heat, “But if it does, I hope you’ll keep helping me find my way back.”
“You know I will,” Billy’s fingers tugged on the double twist greenstone at Dom’s neck, “I’ve nowhere else to be anymore, but right here.”
Dom rested his forehead against Billy’s temple for a moment, then stood up and walked to the tide pulling the sea away from the pebbly shore. With a running start into the licking waves he drew back and launched the Manaia as far as he could, losing sight of it against the waves.
Billy’s shoes crunched over the beach as he came to Dom’s side. There was no anger in his face at what Dom had done, only a little curiosity.
“It’s not mine anyway,” Dom told him, “Let it find its way to someone who needs it.”
Billy nodded agreement, curling an arm around Dom’s neck and shoulder, lending support and gaining some of his own. As the sun touched the horizon, the sea lit with gold.
THE END