COLD SKY

TITLE/S: Cold Sky
PAIRING/S: Billy Boyd/Bakura, confusion as to whether this is also Billy/Ryou, and Billy/Other Person.
RATING/S: M? R? NC-17?
WARNING/S: Angst, mixed up time, Bowie lyrics, real person x anime character/s.
NOTE/S: Again, written for nabootheenigma's birthday. To continue with the theme of LOTR actors and YGO characters, started in “Really Very Dark”, I give you the angst that is Billy and Yami Bakura. Well, I should say the hottsexiness that is Bakura and the melancholy that is Billy Boyd post-relationship with... well, with someone else. I’ll let you read it as Dom if you want. Fairly obviously, Billy doesn’t know who Bakura is/are. Please do your duty as an honourable fic reader - review!
DISCLAIMER/S: I don’t own BB, YB or RB. Nor do I own the Bowie lyrics to “Space Oddity”. But I love them all. DUDES, IT'S FICTION.


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COLD SKY

Darkness started shining when Billy felt the boy pull out but not pull out. It appeared as droplets, perfectly formed, like rain in a picture book. It glowed with the blackness of space dancing between stars on a clear night. He tried to follow it with his left eye, breathing around the pillow in his face and the hand on his neck, and wondered if he was fainting. Wondered if this was what it felt like to free-fall into a galaxy, and wondered if it was a side effect of being smothered in a bed that stank of his own sex.

The boy smelled of stardust, and that scent hadn’t rubbed off on anything, except maybe Billy’s brain. It had snaked out into the night, slithering around him and through him like a nova-front of some extinct star. It made Billy stop at the broken little café down the end of the strip, made him stay for a drink, another drink, made him look up, drink more and look again. He never would have found himself here without it – no matter how flirting the smile, how intense the unwilling come on leaking from those eyes.

Bowie had been playing, in that out-of-context, classic-hits sense. Take your protein pills and put your helmet on. There was sugar on the tablecloth, and it stuck to the black cuff of his shirt in lazy white specks. Billy stared at it for a while, his hand curled on the table, then glanced up. The boy was still there, a smile that wasn’t a smile, in a way that told Billy he clearly wanted it. Him. Clearly wanted him. Put out a hand, almost touched Billy’s fingers, brushed some stars off Billy’s cuff. The papers want to know whose shirts you wear.

And yes, Billy was tempted. It had been . . . too long. He’d only recently begun to entertain the idea of restoring his faith in the essential goodness of two bodies, skin on skin, working together. He was tempted. The boy’s mingling of gentle colour and shocking white was like a lost sunset drifting across the moon, like the memory of life ghosting around a set of bleached bones. There was some sort of promise there, something like age under the smoothness of his skin. Maybe that was what tipped it in the end – the elusive smell of knowingness.

Something hot touched Billy’s blood. Hot like a just-warm shower on a freezing morning, burning him the way ice burns. Burning him like the aftermath of a slap on his cheek. Bringing him back from a whole tiny universe of numbness. It’s time to leave the capsule if you dare. Hurting him.

He stared at the tablecloth for a long time. Shook his head.

Fingers brushed over his sides, hoisted his hips higher, wrapped around him. Physical memory moved his spine, so the fullness of each thrust touched where he wanted it to touch, and each touch was sweet like warm earth after rain, like the scent of cut grass in summer. He rocked back and back and, imperceptibly, found the rhythm. That was what sex was like, back then. Effortless, comfortable.

He didn’t want to go home with jailbait. He didn’t want to go anywhere with anyone who wasn’t . . . wasn’t at least twenty five. Even the thought made him feel like changing his clothes and washing his face. Made him feel small and withered and tired. I’m an old man, he’d said. It seemed like years ago. It was years ago. And maybe he’d meant it then, or maybe not, but he felt it now in the twisting of his mouth, the aching of his bones.

He shook his head, and thought that was that, and now he could leave or not as he pleased. Stood up. Found the front of his shirt crunched in someone’s fist. Followed the arm on its moonpale path along the curves of muscles, under a striped t-shirt, up a shamelessly bare throat . . . Billy’s lips parted, involuntarily. Without thinking, he did the standing-tall trick, stretching his spine to give him an extra half inch. Still, his eyes stopped level with a smirk. The boy was taller than anticipated. The smirk was toothier. Billy found himself short of air, tilting his head back, taking in sharpened features and a set of eyes glittering down at him. Found that he’d just licked his lips, felt himself losing height under the weight of that gaze, felt himself losing his tenuous resolve as the easy sweetness of submission curled up his neck and made his eyelids flicker.

And in half of no time, he was unlocking his apartment, being walked to his bed as possessive fingers claimed his shirt. I’m stepping through the door. Getting undressed was almost awkward, almost like the first time, only the first time was decades ago, and the first-first time had been . . . somewhere else, somewhere warm, with the smell of leaves and timber in his hair, and a smile untwisted by histories and those thousand little hurts of human interaction. Later, they had stripped the bed, but Billy didn’t wash the sheets. He bundled them up and threw them in the corner for safekeeping.

A hand gripped his hair, jerked his head backwards, forcing him to look at the corner next to the window, forcing him to see the impossible: the boy, faintly luminous, almost transparent, sitting in his armchair. Slipping his mind into a parallel: the boy, squeezing him almost painfully, hissing against his neck. Splitting the room into years: there was a time when someone else sat in that chair and watched him. Watched him even before he knew he was being watched. He had woken slowly, like an old oil painting, to a half-smile tickled by steam over a coffee mug. Disconcerted, he’d only thought to say, What? Wished he’d found something wittier, or more sincere, in his repertoire.

Mug had gone to lips then, and Billy only just made out the whisper. Mine.

Mine. Snarl and teeth. Billy’s face shoved back against the damp cotton. A feral sound, somewhere between a curse and a growl. The final thrusts were deliberately violent, or so he thought amidst the haze of almost-there.

Almost there.

But the closer he came to that point where everything material becomes the earth, and his mind the air, the further he felt from fulfilment. In the back of his thought formed the odd impression that he was been fucked by a distant constellation. The Southern Cross. Orion. Cold fingers dug into his sides, pulled his hips up demandingly. Gemini. The Bear. Floating in a most peculiar way. And then what felt like a release behind him, a soft little whimper, the pulling-but-not-pulling out, and the shining raindrops of black merry-go-rounding before his face. The stars look very different today.

The first real time it had been face-to-face, eyes open to every expression, every second of possibility. They had been thirsty for it. Them. Each other. Got drunk on the nearness, and stayed drunk for months. Years. Not long enough. And when they were done, there was that grin and eyebrow wiggle and, Ah, c’mon Bills, let’s go again and then he’d said, I’m an old man. Later, much later, they had changed the sheets.

He came with absolute abstraction, felt his muscles contract, release, contract again. Watched the inside of his eyelids spasm with distant disinterest. Feeling very still. Chronicled the movements of cool hands, one holding his arse up, the other grabbing his neck and pushing his face into the pillow. Was almost glad when that fist moved to his head and wrenched it back, when nails bit into his skin, hurting him. Mine. Felt the violence of the other’s climax, claws on his back. Tried to see around the dark spots in his vision. Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong. Thought maybe he heard the other-other crying, and then he was alone.

He could smell himself, and inside that scent was the horrible glimmer of happiness. Suddenly, painfully, he was too hot, and kicked the tangled mess of sheets and pillows to the floor. They had changed the bed together, and Billy had never thought what it might be like to want to fall into forgetting, as if no one had ever looked at him with warm eyes, drawn fingertip patterns on his forehead. Never considered the possibility that the quiet like morning sun whisper, Can you hear me, Bills? would sit like a hangover in his stomach.

The boy was gone, or were gone, or had never been. The hollow greyness of dawn stained the room. Billy smalled himself into a droplet of dark, and curled into his own empty arms.


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