Work Text:
"It's fine, it's work. She's married. I have a lot of respect for marriage."
- Dominic Monaghan, to MTV News in 2010
…
"I'm going to ask Ali to marry me."
The words vibrate through the receiver, and the echoes resound in his head, firing off the walls of his brain, chaos and emptiness all at the same time.
He feels Billy waiting for a reply, the silence stretching a few seconds too long. Then the words are there: "Bloody hell, mate. That is fantastic!" That's what friends say to one another, right? In light of a decision of this magnitude.
A short time, or perhaps an age later, Dom looks at the screen on his mobile, watches "call ended" replace "22:06" as Bill rings off from a million miles away. Twenty-two minutes and some change, and he feels like he has been pushed off a cliff and is plummeting into nothingness. He imagines wind pushing against his skin, distorting his cheeks into some grotesque mask the way it does with skydivers, pulling tears upwards. He imagines falling while the wind whips through him, the violence of it carrying away everything until he's a falling shell. He wonders, if he fell forever, would it eventually feel like flying? His house, this whole shitty city, the whole fucking world suddenly feels empty.
He snaps his phone face down on the counter, grabs his keys and is in his driveway, sliding into his car in one feral swoop of motion. He'd known this was coming, hadn't he? And yet the last few years, he'd been of two minds living in willful ignorance of each other: one warning that this was inevitable, the other one unable to believe it would (could) happen.
He remembered when Jack was born, and wondered why that hadn't tolled finality. Perhaps because children could often be accidents. And Billy had called him, elation in every syllable until his brogue was nearly unintelligible. "I'm gonna be a da', Dom! A DA'." And Dom, often the one pushing the envelope of exuberance, had joined in with genuine joy and pleasure.
Dom didn't begrudge Bill kids. Not in the least. He knew how deeply Billy wanted a family. He needed Billy to have a family, because he knew it's what Billy needed.
I'm going to ask Ali to marry me.
Head pounding, he throttled his car up the freeway onramp, hugging the corner and heading north to God knows where. He pushed away the thought that going north felt like heading towards Bill.
Dom had had the most trouble leaving New Zealand and his Rings family behind. Something about it – the country, the people, the air – something had made his soul feel like he'd been journeying his whole life, and had finally come home. He'd connived half a hundred ways to keep everyone together, and of course not a one had worked.
But living halfway across the world from Billy had been a whole other level of torture. For the first few years, it felt like waking up with a right hand missing -- if a right hand could also make you feel that the world was alright, and answer your jokes with even better lines, and buy you a pint on bad days, and call you out on your shit when needed. It had gotten marginally better with time – like the right hand was more of a dream than a reality.
For the thousandth time, Dom wished that the fans had been right: that he and Billy could have been gay as maypoles – because had that been the case, he'd have some ownership over Bills. Well, not ownership. But a right to one another, as lovers do. He'd have been able to say, years ago, you can't leave me. You're my soulmate, you're the single best thing in my life. I want to grow old and decrepit and decorate a sodding house and fight and fuck and wrap the story of my life indefinitely into yours, until no one can tell where one ends and the other begins.
He could have said that all to Bill (even the fucking bit could have worked in jest), but he'd always feared – always known – it wouldn't have made a difference. Billy had other attentions pulling at him, and though he'd loved New Zealand fiercely, Billy was a Scot through and through.
Sexual attraction is not necessary to find a soulmate, Dom thought bitterly. But it damn well helps in holding onto one.
I'm going to ask Ali to marry me.
Dom cursed the unfairness of life up and down the wall. Was there anything so cruel as the shortness of an experience like Rings? Or of having a friend like Bills that you couldn't be with always? Dom knew that good, selfless people said it was better to love and lose, than to live a lifetime never experiencing it. But he knew better: this love, in its depth and purity and holistic understanding, rendered everything else bitter and empty in its wake. In the years following the breaking of the Fellowship, Dom had lived on the hope that someday Bill would come to visit and never leave. Or he would find himself on a plane to Scotland and just stay on forever.
I'm going to ask Ali to marry me.
There was finality in that statement.
Bills never rushed into anything, never impetuous and hurried like Dom. In the beginning it was, perhaps, the one way that they had truly reflected their age difference. Billy had finished the reckless race of twenties and settled calmly into thirties, while Dom was still in full tilt. When they went to restaurants, Billy took an infuriating amount of time to read each menu item, and invariably ended up with something he loved. Dom would scan quickly and choose an item that (more often than not) was completely new and adventurous, and spend the rest of the time trying to flick straw wrappers down Billy's shirt. And sometimes he would end up eating half of Billy's when his own adventure turned up inedible.
I'm going to ask Ali to marry me.
Dom examined each word and turned them over in his head. It wasn't just the words themselves that were different. It was in their delivery. Dom and Billy had highly refined their art of communication during the Rings years. There was always subtext that fellow cast members, prosthetic crews, reporters, girlfriends didn't understand.
And this subtext said: "I'm not coming. I belong here. I'm choosing to belong here…Stop waiting."
I'm going to ask Ali to marry me.
….
Billy rang off quickly. He knew his thumb was pressed to the keypad, but he couldn't quite feel it. There was a ringing in his ears.
He had heard everything Dom hadn't said…had heard it before he'd even dialed the numbers, had known it before he'd even made the decision to ask Ali. He'd known it since the third worst day of his life, when he'd gotten on a final plane to leave New Zealand. It had been a similar feeling to losing his parents: feeling the fabric of life tearing, and knowing it would never be the same.
Billy considered himself an optimist, an opportunist. He was proud of having the strength to rearrange and put together a life when pieces were in shambles. And the fact that he had built a family out of so much pain always made him profoundly proud, and grateful.
Dom was the one bit he hadn't been able to piece back together. He ached for his friend – his other half in so many ways – who was slowly floundering, drowning. And Billy's own feeling of betrayal had been curling in the pit of his stomach for weeks, for years. He knew this step, this final step, would hurt Dom, possibly irrevocably.
Something was dying, and in some ways Billy envied Dom the freedom to be hurt, sometimes to the point of anger. Billy always seemed to be the one who was letting them down, and he hated it.
Even though it was getting terribly late, Billy knew sleep would evade him for a while. He padded quietly to the kitchen, carefully edging a squeaky door shut so as not to wake Jack. A strong scotch would be warranted, but Ali was on tour and he was responsible for the little man. A strong cuppa would have to do. The familiar motions of making tea allowed his mind to wander back to the Rings days.
"But…we all belong together." Dom had only gotten plaintive when sufficiently pissed, and that evening, with two nights left in principle photography, those words had finally fallen out.
"We've still got pickups, man. And all the press junkets! And there's phones, airplanes, the whole fucking internet…and you'll be living in LA with me!" Lij had been pained, trying to make it bearable with his enthusiasm. He hated it too.
Billy had, for once in his life, been unable to say anything. He knew what Dom meant…and he knew that Dom was right. The Fellowship was breaking, and it hurt more terribly than he imagined it had, even for the literary characters. The world and time itself should listen to Dom. But Billy was the eldest in both age and soul, and the only practical influence capable of moving Dom: and he knew time and change couldn't be swayed.
So he'd slung an arm around Dom, ordered another round, and did everything he could to keep himself together. And the subtext, for Dom and only Dom, was that they had to be grateful. Good things don't last in life, but they never leave us. They become part of who we are forever.
Dom had reached up and grabbed his hand, with the fierceness of hanging on for dear life. I know.
The whistling kettle jerked Billy back to the present. "You'll be my best man? Obviously it has to be you," he had told Dom at the end of their phone conversation. It was a small consolation to the point of insufferable, and he wasn't even sure if Dom had heard him. He'd have to ask again, later.
In some ways it wasn't fair. Dom had always been the most extraverted in their fellowship: thoughts and feelings flowed from him unabated, and there wasn't a friend who hadn't been hugged or kissed, tackled or punched. And because Dom vocalized his grief and regret more loudly, Billy had to swallow and internalize his own, no less deep or painful. He was the strong one, the practical one, supposedly wiser (though he often wondered). For the thousandth time, it struck Billy how the roles of Merry and Pippin were so perfectly reversed in real life.
Billy thought of Pippin, remembered studying the character for filming Return of the King: meditating on his aloneness, his one small life being tossed about in a great war, the weight of a life so marked by the absence of his friend. The unfairness, un-rightness, that the two should be separated, even for a moment. To play Pip, Billy had imagined what it would be like to lose Dom. He realized now, he should have been imagining what it would have been like from Dom's perspective.
Well, the war was the real world and the need to keep going in it.
He had wanted to say so much more on the phone, but had found it impossible to verbalize without hitting the nail too sharply on the head. Maybe someday, hopefully soon, he'd get to voice his thoughts: you still have good things to do in your life! You can't stay with me forever, nor I with you. There was a world out there that needed Dom engaged with it, moving through it, changing it for the better. This thought was the only thing that consoled Billy, had convinced him he was doing the right thing – not just for him, but for his closest friend. Across the barrier of thousands of miles, Billy willed his thoughts: I will always be here for you. I will always be your best mate, no matter what happens. I will never forget.
You will find your strength, Peregrin Took.
And Billy, never much of one for spirituality, felt a prayer leave him and float out to the universe: that Dom would come back to him.
…
His car had picked its way to his favorite trail in the hills north of LA. It was quiet and cool, and the stars were beginning to pick themselves out of the sky.
He cried a bit, and cursed a bit, and thought about those same stars shining in the deep morning hours of Glasgow. He was sick of feeling tired, sick of feeling sad, sick of working for nothing, and waiting for the universe to get off its bleeding arse and open up the next direction.
The immense beauty of the sky stretched on every side, pounding into his head. There was some small consolation that even as fucked as he felt, this sky would continue being there, unmarred, unaltered, infinite. He was part of that, in some small way. Part of the fabric of life. And life always found a way to continue.
Dom leaned back on the hood of his car, breathing in the stillness, savoring the cool air. It well and truly felt like an ending…but endings were always a bit difficult and fucked up right? And an end always meant that something else was beginning.
…
"I've been a mess."
"I know." Sometimes life's like that. It's ok. "I wanted you to understand though. I wasn't…" It's not that I don't love you.
"I know." I know.
You're still young. You're still figuring out who you are. Rings and me, we're all part of that. But we're not all. We don't define you, you know? And Ali, and Jack, and you, and Rings, you're all part of me too. I wouldn't be the same if you took away any of those things.
Everyone says there's life after Rings, but life has been fucking shite. "I miss you so much."
I know. Sometimes life's like that. "I miss you too, mate."
"Lij thinks I should get an animal. One that actually cares I'm looking after it."
"Well, we know Lij can be a bit daft."
"Maybe I will someday though. I'll get an awful chihuahua and name it Billy. And it will be idiotic and yappy and annoying and needy, but it won't ever run off and leave me." Obviously you didn't run off. That's not really what I meant.
I know. "Ah, but could it help you finish the script, or entrance you body and soul with a flick of its eyes?" Remember the script? Remember how we always say we're going to finish it, and then we just sit around a pub and make jokes all night.
I love that.
Me too. But you've got scripts to write, Dom. You can't just knock around with me all the time, chihuahua or otherwise.
And through the silence, the strain lifts a little. For the first time in months, the pit in Billy's stomach unfurls a little, and he's not sure if he's forgiven yet…but he think their friendship may survive.
...
A year later, Dom stood next to Bills on his wedding day.
It was a complicated day to be Dom's emotional state. His happiness was tinged with grief for lives not possible, roads that couldn't be taken – but rather than marring empathetic joy, the sadness was an undercurrent adding depth and richness. It was impossible to explain, even to himself. But as he stood next to his best mate, watching Billy's joy in his family (Ali and Jack, and Maggie, and he and Lij), Dom felt alive and at peace.
He'd made that peace with life months ago, sitting under the stars as the universe pounded him with its beauty. As idiotic and trite as it sounded, he had decided to choose joy. To choose hope.
When Jack began getting fidgety during the ceremony (short though it was), Dom held him and played thumb wars with him. Something about holding Jack, this twitchy and warm little bundle of energy, reminded Dom of himself as a child. And he realized (or perhaps remembered something he'd always known) that Ali and Jack were his own too: he would always take care of them because they mattered so much to Bill.
That was his vow, and he willed it to Billy as he held Jack fiercely. I'm there for you, no matter where life lands you. Your own are my own, your trials are mine, your joys are mine. The spans of distance and time are no match for us.
After the pronunciation and the kiss, Ali reached for Jack and swung him into her arms, joy bouying every movement. Billy grabbed Dom by the shoulder, a grin looking like it would split his face. As he caught Dom's eye, the smile softened and turned grateful.
I know. No match for us.