Author: Minervacat
Fandom: LOTR RPF
Pairing: Dom & Billy
Rating: G
Summary: "I refuse to have this conversation with someone who is decapitating poor, defenseless candy bears for the sole purpose of torturing Elijah."

Dom was sitting on the couch in the pool house behind Elijah's mum's place biting the heads off gummi bears and sticking the bodies together into weird mutant headless gummi bears when Billy walked in from the kitchen with a cup of coffee.

"You've gone absolutely Hollywood," he said to the back of Dom's getting-blonder-by-the-day head, and Dom snapped around to look at him, red gummi bear still clenched between his teeth.

"I have not," Dom replied around the gummi bear, and then he swallowed it whole.

"I refuse to have this conversation with someone who is decapitating poor, defenseless candy bears for the sole purpose of torturing Elijah."

"Torturing Elijah is a spectator sport." Dom bit the heads from two more bears, a green one and a yellow one, and stuck them upside down in a half full ashtray. "In fact, it should be an Olympic sport. Torturing Elijah Wood For Fun And Profit. I could write a book."

"The ones stuck to the refrigerator are covered in ants, Dom."

"That is only a minor setback in the face of great art," Dom said loftily. "Great art and the ability to make Elijah's eyes bug out more than they already do."

Billy shook his head and went back to the kitchen.

They were sitting in a sushi place that Dom liked, on the boardwalk in Venice, and Billy tried again. "The blond doesn't really suit you," he said.

Dom dropped his maki on the table and ran a hand through his hair, tufting it up as though he'd just woken. He had a spot of wasabi clinging to his lower lip, and Billy wanted to reach across the sushi and the tea and the rice and lick it off. "I like it," he said. "I look like every other bloke in the city. It's comforting."

Billy rolled his eyes. "Your logic is, as always, completely impeccable, and utterly ridiculous. I'm not sure how you manage it."

"It's the smog. It helps you think quite clearly."

"You're completely addled. And you've got wasabi stuck to your lip."

"You prefer me this way," Dom said. He snaked his tongue to lick away the green smear and Billy felt oddly light-headed.

In Los Angeles, Dominic wears ugly sunglasses and absolutely mad t-shirts and his too-blond hair sticks up artfully with the help of the 17 different styling products that Billy has to wade through if he wants to get to the sink in the bath to shave.

Dom knows all the bouncers at all the best clubs, and they wave him past the velvet rope and the crowds, Billy in tow, and shoot Billy looks like he shouldn't be in these places with these people. Billy doesn't mind; Dominic knows all the bartenders, too, and he presses free drinks into Billy's waiting hands before Billy can stop to think about whether or not he actually belongs here.

It isn't that Dom is famous here, any more than he's really famous anywhere or Billy's really famous anywhere or any more than the fact that people still can't tell the two of them apart, it's just that something about him fits here. Dom's flashy, always has been, he's all jokes and pranks and easy, honest laughter, and he shines in L.A.'s crush of bodies and fame.

This Dom is not unrecognizable to Billy; New Zealand might have soothed the nature of the savage Dominic, but it didn't eliminate it, and Los Angeles brings it out. It isn't unpleasant. Different, but not bad. Dom is polished to a higher shine here, and in the back of the cab, on the way home from an endless string of clubs and drinks and pretty girls, when Dom sighs and tilts into Billy's side and closes his eyes, Billy wraps an arm around him and thinks the glow from this Dom in L.A. is a bit of alright to see by.