"Fix", Lotrips, PG-13, Dom/Elijah

Title: Fix
Author: Kate
Fandom: Lotrips
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: DM/EW
Disclaimer: Fiction. Yup.
Notes: Written in about 40 minutes for the taste challenge. Dedicated to gabbyhope for teaching me to stop worrying and write Domlijah again. And yes, it's Domlijah, albeit unhappy and angsty Domlijah.



You hadn’t really gone to sleep, not really, and so it’s a long time before Dom wanders into the kitchen in the morning, still looking dazed and half-asleep. Different from a few hours ago, slipping out of the room with silent shuffled feet and a bowed head as he had shifted in his sleep. You regard him with cool eyes as you flick ash out of the window and take another drag. Your fingers curve around the cigarette the way they had curled around Dom’s hands last night, and the memory puts you off your guard. He looks at you calmly, notices your upraised hand as it shakes in the air, maybe having the same connection click inside his brain.

“You’re going to kill yourself,” he says to you, off-handed, but you can feel the burn beneath the words, scratching at your skin like fingernails on a wound. You wave the cigarette in his direction around a little, half-hearted, any enthusiasm diluted by the way his eyes squint, one hand raised to rub his eyes and the other gripping his shoes by the laces. You take another drag, another five years off your life. Another attempt to numb your mouth and chase away everything that lingers, beer and salt and sweat. And something else, too, something that stays in the back of your tongue, dark and shadowy like a ghost of a memory. You don’t want to name it, but every time you swallow, it spells his name all the way down your throat. Oh, you remember, you do. Bright and detailed like a series of Polaroids, slightly jerky in your mind but making perfect sense as it progresses. A slide show, hands wet skin hot air sweat sweat sweat. Licking the salt off of his back, muscles shifting and stretching as they meet your tongue.

And you wonder whether or not you’re supposed to remember the clicking of teeth hitting teeth, or the alcohol that buzzed thick and sour on both your tongues (but not enough, oh not enough). And if you’re supposed to remember it, whether or not you’re supposed to even bring it up. Perhaps steal glances with a guilty flush on your face like Dom is doing, questions half-formed and refusing to come out. The words twist around your tongue, beginnings and ends and middles. Are we, what, did we, what the fuck happened last night, huh?

You decide not to say anything. If he can’t come out and admit it, then there’s no way in hell you’re going to.

“Well.” Dom sounds more like he’s taking to himself than to you; he’s pulling on his shoes, head ducked down. You can’t see his eyes at all. “Should be going, then,” he says to his feet, then tilts his head to regard you, waiting for an answer or a validation. Something that you can’t exactly decipher in his eyes, something sour that would make your mouth pucker if you tasted it. And you know you should say something, we need to talk about what happened this is too soon don’t go please don’t go. The only thing that you can force out of your mouth is a clenched “See ya, then,” accompanied by a tight smile, forced and fake. Your hand rests on the window ledge, letting the smoke sift out and into the cool morning air. Your lower lip held tight between your teeth, straining and raw.

Dom smiles, weak, and stretches himself upwards until his fingers brush the doorframe. Graceful, really, reminds you of how his body lined up tight and taut under your hands, reaching for something that you couldn’t quite give him. And you can’t. You know it. His shirt rises up diagonally to show a thin triangle of familiar skin, and you bite down until you can catch the blood on your tongue as he turns to leave. The cigarette slips out of your fingers and into the bushes outside, forgotten. You can’t chase away memories with the taste of smoke.