Title: Also.
Archiving: just ask.
Rating: PG
Date: Jan 2004.
Summary: everything that rises must converge.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction only. I do not in any way shape or form believe that Dominick Monaghan and Elijah Wood have ever been romantically involved or attracted to one another, nor is this fic a presumption of how I think they *should* behave.
Notes: I have decided to post this as just a drabble, but I plan on adding to it if I can actually write down the rest of the story in my head. I don't know the slightest thing about what I'm doing. Any mistakes in terms of canon, characterization, and factual/chronological errors should be wholly expected.
For Cesare, who asked, and anatsuno, who didn't, but who gets half anyway because this is all her fault. <3
"I really think you should rethink the length of your sideburns, Lij." Billy is buttering his bit of breakfast roll with the knife facing the wrong direction, so that all the butter is sliding off the blunt end and ending up mostly stuck in a clump on the top of the handle. "You look like Christ going through puberty."
They are all sitting together at a round table in the bar; Sean registers the bemused expression on Elijah's face and laughs. "He looks better when he hasn't shaved. You need that scruffy look to keep people from thinking you're fourteen." He slurs his 'R' ever so slightly on the last word, a subtle sign that Sam is having an effect on him.
Billy's face cracks open into a trademark grin. "Nah, that's not it," he says. "Look at Dom here, he's got a babyface and the women love it." He reaches over and pats Dom's cheek. Billy has permanent callouses from his days as a bookbinder, and Dom smiles as they scratch and tickle his skin. "Lij, though, the women see him and run *screaming* in the other direction."
Billy gives a girlish squeal, and as everyone is laughing Dom glances over at Lij.
His eyes are crinkling around the edges.
Lij is going to have so many wrinkles when he's older. His face was built for them, the same way Billy's is, like a perfectly blank page waiting to be creased. He will have crows' feet that start halfway under his eyebrows and taper out to just above his temple. He will have creases in his cheeks that start with his dimples and jut inward, into folds of skin so sharp you could slip your hand inside them when he smiles. He will have a jaw line that disappears into roundness, and a jowl that sags just a little in the back from too much grinning. When he arches his eyebrows his forehead will break into wrinkles like ripples on a smooth sea, and when he frowns the dimple beneath his lower lip will be a hard groove in his chin.
Dom can see all of this in a flash for a moment—he can visualize Elijah, twenty, thirty years from now, with a face etched with laughter and hollowed out in love. He sees himself there, fingertips tracing chiseled skin, and he sees the permanent glint of laughter in Elijah’s eyes, then as now, bright and sparkling.
Lijah looks around at each of them, smiling at them all before he answers, and somewhere in that space of time Dom can feel his heart burst.
(Thanks and hugs to Orphne for being horrified, Kash for encouraging, and especially to Rach for the revelations and the chocolate suits.)