cimorene

previous parts (i-iv) here. posted at

thehandbasket.

no quiero
jugar mi suerte por ti
no puedo
con U. pequeña vivir
-shakira, 'te dejo madrid'

'bad habit,' elijah manages to get out, and coughs for almost a second before he starts laughing. 'no, really. it's stupid.'

daniel raises an eyebrow. are fourteen year olds allowed to do that, lij thinks crazily? in public? he's almost drawling when he answers, 'i figured that out right at first.'

'how many movies are you going to make?' elijah asks casually. he isn't even looking--dan could have walked away and he wouldn't have seen, as long as he's been rubbing the back of his neck and frowning at the chrome sprinkler head in the wall. he thinks, though, that daniel won't. the voice comes from near his shoulder.

'there are seven books, but i'll probably get horrible acne before the last one.'

elijah looks at him thoughtfully. 'you're fourteen?'

he is, and his skin is like raw silk: not fine-grained, not porcelain like elijah's, but unreally smooth and ridiculously pale. what should be ridiculous, but is instead unearthly.

'so,' says elijah, 'you'll still be doing this when you're nineteen.' he would have had to stop to do the math there; he's a nervous wreck, rubbing the back of his neck because his cuticles are already bleeding, jiggling one of his knees and wishing he could pace, but there's not enough room. he would have had to stop but he doesn't, because of course he knows how old dan is and he knows how many books there are too, now. he did the math months ago.

dan's eyelashes lift suddenly and their eyes meet, although just for a split second, and then he looks away. 'maybe.' if you look at it sideways, 'this' doesn't have to mean movies. 'i tried a cigarette once,' he says. his hands are in his pockets and he's almost unreally calm. when elijah frowns swiftly he's smiling and solemn at once like some sort of confused yet benevolent angel. he might as well be moonlit all the time, though they're between the table with the shrimp and the table with the punch.

'bad habit,' elijah manages to get out, and coughs for almost a second before he starts laughing. 'no, really. it's stupid.'

daniel raises an eyebrow. are fourteen year olds allowed to do that, lij thinks crazily? in public? he's almost drawling when he answers, 'i figured that out right at first.'

oh.

yes.

one thing elijah has never been good at is calmness. waiting he can do--auditions, callbacks--but he can't wait calmly and he couldn't if his life depended on it. his fingernails are ragged nubs, and when he can't bite them anymore he picks at them, and then he pulls the threads out of the cuffs of his shirts. he has one long-sleeved t-shirt--he thinks billy left it in his apartment maybe--with a stray thread sticking out of the cuff, only it's not really a thread but the end of the seam. no matter how long he pulls at it, it stays. it took him weeks to figure this out--it nearly drove him crazy. he bites it a lot, when he wears this shirt, and the end is looking nearly as frazzled as elijah often feels. going through the laundry barely makes it more respectable.

it's probably just as well, in fact, that he doesn't go to the premiere of the prisoner of azkaban. he sees it later with orli in the theaters--at 2 fucking am--and it's good, but it's bad enough in the movie theater. the scar on harry potter's forehead is disgustingly obviously fake and it makes him wince away.

maybe to make up for this, he goes to the fourth premiere--it's surreal, nearly just like the first two with mrs. watson in a purple silk dress and crocodile pumps, and j.k. rowling looking like she could have taken eye-makeup advice from liv. emma watson herself, in fact, is the main difference: whatever difference there is between a fourteen-year-old boy and a sixteen-year-old one is magnified a hundred times in a girl. some sixteen year olds are awkward. emma has the look of hermione; she will never be awkward, and her real hair is the kind shampoo commercials are made of. out of stage makeup--and in real makeup--you can almost see the screen credits, post-harry-potter, written on her forehead, or her bare white arms.

daniel looks almost the same as he did at fourteen, only stretched all over--even his cheekbones and his jaw are stretch-stretching out of the flesh of his face, if you look very closely--but only then, because from a distance it's the same carefully-messy-cut dark hair, the same pale triangular face and pouting mouth. not very many people are looking closely. when they stand next to each other this time, daniel is taller than elijah.

'want a smoke?' he smirks, and his voice is starting to change.

good god. his voice is changing. there's a sort of hovering, near-baritone timbre to it. 'no,' elijah says firmly. 'you don't smoke,'

and dan abruptly switches expressions to pitiful, 'no, but...'

'i bet someone's spilled beer on the doorstep,' says elijah slowly. he is not going out back with sixteen-year-old daniel radcliffe who has his--

--who HAS HIS HAND ON HIS ARM. elijah chews on his thumbnail while daniel says,

'i can hardly hear you in here,' and then, thank god, he drops his hand.

they can hardly hear each other for the whole party, and elijah talks to him for a lot of it--they do a lot of nodding, and elijah nibbles shrimp and his cufflinks and the corner of his mouth until he splits his lip. emma watson offers him lip gloss with a pitying air, but he prefers to wallow in the pain. each shrimp past his lips is a little sting, a reminder.

elijah makes it home to la and thinks a lot about independent films, the kind whose premieres show up as part of a page of celebrity snapshots in the back of vanity fair, the kind without red carpets. when he sees his agent, the first thing he hears is 'get some sunglasses. you know drinking water prevents a hangover?'

fuck.

and the first time he picks up the phone in his apartment again, while he's still rubbing his toe on the carpet where it hurts from having kicked the wall, he doesn't recognize the voice. 'hallo,' it says britishly, and tremors.

oh shit. elijah says, 'hi.'

dan says wryly, 'i got your phone number. a late birthday present.'

he kicks the baseboard again, same spot, leaving a little black smear. eventually there's going to be a dent.