[lotrips] menagerie


i. perch


When Elijah has the perch built in the lounge, it seems to make him content, less prone to startling mood swings, less likely to mope on the porch, staring at the sky. Elijah's poise is perfect; he counterbalances with his wings curved slightly, happy to sit there swinging idly, humming as he listens to Coldplay. Dom doesn't mind, because he gets the couch to himself.

Besides, the swing - Dom can't quite bring himself to say perch just yet - is sturdy enough for two, and Elijah is developing either technique or muscles (or both) that can hold Dom firmly in place while Elijah fucks him, beating his spread wings hard for momentum.

Dom flys then, too.


ii. preda


Billy meows.

He’s teasing, of course. It’s the first time he’s seen Elijah like this, and the mrow comes from nowhere.

Elijah squawks in panic, skittering back, dropping his glass on the kitchen floor to thump up against the fridge. Dom is alarmed to see Elijah rigid with fear, his eyes swivelling furiously, wings half-open and trembling so the feathers puff out.

Elijah wards off Billy with outstretched palms, pale-faced and sweating, his voice strangled when he pleads, “Dom, don’t let him.”

Billy smiles, confused, but Dom shivers when he sees Billy's green eyes slide and flicker to yellow.


iii. purr

"Elijah smells so... good." Billy's sigh is throaty, slightly sibilant, and Dom swears it curls and slinks around his ankles. Mesmerized by Billy's gold gaze, Dom brings his hand to Billy's mouth, watches unsurprised as the small pink tongue rasps across his fingers. When Billy bites with fine incisors, worrying Dom's fleshy thumb muscle, Dom cannot help stroking Billy's hair, scratching under his ears.

"You scared him," Dom says.

Billy's ears flatten back when he rubs up against Dom. "Just wanted to play," Billy murmurs, arching his neck to one side, and Dom is captivated by Billy's low purr.


iv. two outtakes


Just like drama school," Elijah said airily, and Dominic swallowed a shudder as Elijah unfurled his dusty grey wings. "Except I'm not pretending to move like an bird, now."

The reporter had taken an inital step backwards when Elijah flapped at her, mischief on his face, but now she leaned in, fascinated, her hand already hovering.

"May I?" she asked, and Dom was pleased to see the wince on Elijah's face when her fingers stroked a feather out of alignment. Prissy little cunt, he thought. Elijah had spent an hour on the porch that morning, tweaking the overlapping feathers into place. Drove him up the fucking wall.


::


"What's that for, then?" Billy leans over Dominic's shoulder, peering at the screen, at his own image--albeit distorted, rendered plastic and choppy by the mapping software--and Dom jolts a little, too engrossed to be able to answer for half a minute.

When he spins around in the chair it's to see Billy step back to the bunk, sitting heavily, the analgesics kicking in where the anaesthetics are wearing off, making his eyes slide and jitter unevenly over Dom's face, so different to his normal level gaze. It makes him look slightly vulnerable, almost lost, and there's another twinge in Dom's gut that he tries to quash, remembering Billy said yes, said it was okay, even got a fucking lawyer to write up some consent agreement.

"Bill? Are you okay?" Dominic asks, leaning forward for Billy's wrist, for his pulse. It's normal, a little slow maybe, low blood pressure or something. "Do you want some tea?"

"I'm fine," is the reply, but it's a little slurred, and he's pleased when Billy leans back on the bunk. "Tell me what you're doing."

He looks at Billy for a long moment, watching his eyes drift closed and his face settle, muscles twitching in his forearms, his thighs. Sure signs of sleepiness, and Dom turns back to the image mapping. Only the hands remain, and he's not going to try and map them at this stage. The boundaries can stop at the wrist for now, and he's not even sure whether Billy would want them extended to his fingers; the skittering movement of the ink across his knuckles or palm while he was stitching a repair, while trying to appraise a ceramic, it might be too distracting. Not to imagine unnerving for customers. Dom at least has no such worries, no public to deal with.

"Dommie," and this time it really is slurred--and he smiles at the nickname, rarely used when Bill is sober or fully awake--"Dommie, what are you doing?"

"Converting you into cartesian co-ordinates and programming a perimeter into the ink," and Billy opens his eyes and looks suitably confused.

"Tha' so," he smiles, still bleary but obviously content. "Does that mean these--" he flips an arm across his chest to pat the injection spot gingerly--"will move soon? 'Cos that's what you said, Doc."

Dominic saves the map file and adds it to the permanent program routine loops; once the ink gets a UV charge, the chips will pick up the map of Billy's body and learn the new boundaries. Hands, neck and face are all delineated as missing, as is the groin--Dominic doesn't know what would happen if the ink started travelling around Bill's internal organs, and he doesn't want to find out.


v. ethical debates

St Mary's Close
Edinburgh


"Wait."

It sounds like a hiss. Billy pulls him back from the group, around the archway corner. There is still light - dull yellow from the twenty-watt bulb in the corner - but not enough to discriminate colour, only to provide shadings, faded watercolour textures. All except Billy's eyes, and curiously, his fingernails. Dominic is becoming accustomed to the faint glow of Billy's eyes in dim light. He wonders if whatever had changed the irises had also altered his retina, created a tapetum surface that collected incidental light, gave the green its lemony shine.

Billy sidles against him as the guide begins another story about ghosts, and the wall feels crumbly, plaster-putrid against his arms, backed into the corner.

"Scary?" Dominic focuses on Billy's teeth when he speaks, tiny pointed canines glimmering white and gone, the bright flash making him shiver.

"I don't believe in all that supernatural crap, Bill," he sighs, tipped his head back to the wall and studying the ceiling, trying to imagine what it must have been like to be locked in here, barred and forgotten by the town for fear of plague, to die in here with twenty other families. "History is frightening enough."

Billy's fingernails (he grows them now, where before he kept them trimmed neat, perfect for handling parchment and broken bindings, now they are longer, sharper, and Dominic has schooled himself to refuse the word claws) inch under Dominic's shirt, so light, ghosting circles, and this is so innappropriate.

Murmur, and a bite into Dominic's neck. "The future is worse." He scratches, purrs, and blood pulses in Dominic's belly at the touch, at Billy's words, at the implications. You're doing wrong. You have done wrong. You will do wrong. They are still, breathing quietly, until Billy pulls back, his eyes no longer gleaming, the moment gone to be puzzled over in daylight, or more likely, forgotten. Billy's fingers slip into Dominic's - only slightly trembling - hand, and he leads him through the archway.