DISCLAIMER: The author makes no claims or inferences to reality or truthfulness. Moreover, this story is based upon the work of another author and recognises their creation.

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A Couple Of Mismatched Caskets

V.

Dom twitched in frustration as the canopy over his head burst into flames. "Fucking Orlando," he cursed loudly, although the nonstop flood of rain had the fire quashed almost as soon as it started.

"He can't help it," Billy started, ever the diplomatic one, but Dom cut him off by standing abruptly, jostling the canopy enough that Billy's Pippin curls were soon streaming with water.

"Pete, I need a break," Dom said, and his black mood must have looked serious, because Peter readily agreed. "Let's just wrap for today, then," Peter said, "This rain certainly isn't going to stop." Dom made an incoherent noise that bordered on a moan and set off for the Feet trailer as quickly as his legs would carry him.

"C'mon, Dom, they're trying," Billy said, running to catch up.

"That's easy for you to say!" Dom retorted, making a swirling motion in the air with his finger. "And they're trying to what, exactly? Toast us in our beds, or create a new rain forest?" Billy fell silent, angry or hurt, but the breeze picked up only slightly.

They arrived at the trailer to find the doors and windows open, which seemed strange, given the weather. But upon stepping inside the answer presented itself as the wet heat rolled over Dom, steaming him enough to bring the wrinkles out of his shirt.

"What the hell were they doing in here?" Dom burst out, and the crew looked embarrassed and wouldn't meet his eyes. "Never mind, don't tell me, I don't want to know." He bounced his way through feet removal like a ball of nervous energy. After the second time he knocked Billy's hand away, Billy stopped all pretense of trying to hold him still.

"Won't you at least talk about it?" Billy pleaded.

"I just need to be alone for a bit," Dom answered, and though he was dashing his way through the car park, Billy would not stop following. "Billy, what's to talk about? If Elijah and Orlando are going to be at each other every day and make the set all elementally wonky, there's really nothing I can do about it."

"What's bothering you really?" Billy asked. "Is it just about the powers, or is it about Orlando fucking Elijah?" Dom gritted his teeth and didn't answer.

As in speaking of devils, the objects of their conversation came into view, arms entwined as they made their way toward Elijah's car. And when Orlando leaned in to briefly kiss Elijah's lips, the earth beneath Dom's feet began to tremble.

IV.

Orlando looks for Elijah's imperfections, and they're not hard to find. He ticks them off on his fingers and toes, counts them until he's used up all his digits, and fixed each one with a glaring fault. The big toe on his left foot, for example, is the way his eyes are too far apart. Elijah's eyes, that is. Too big (but that's the right index finger, and another problem all together) and too far apart.

He figured that when he had counted them all he would stop being jealous.

But today's been the last flaw – Elijah's ragged fingernails, bitten to shreds, counted on Orlando's littlest toe on his right foot – and the jealousy's still there, cold and hard in his stomach and green like his dragonfly wings. Orlando hums with concern, and his wings buzz behind him in a blur of motion, stirring the air in his sanctuary up in pollen-dusty tufts. A sneeze alerts him to his visitor before Dom loses his balance and tumbles wings-over-teakettle into Orlando's home.

"Excuse me," Dom says. He stands up and brushes himself off, monarch wings fluttering lazily behind him. "Whatcha' been up to?" Dom asks companionably. He actually manages to sit down, though his feet and wings continue to dance long after the rest of him has stilled. Orlando would probably count that as an imperfection – except there was nothing imperfect about Dom. "Haven't seen much of you lately," Dom continues.

Orlando can only meet his eyes for a second. "Been busy," he mumbles, and it is not really an answer, but Dom lets it go.

"Well, if you're not busy today," he says, traces of mocking, "Elijah and I wondered—"

"Elijah," Orlando breaks in, sighs. "Must you do everything with Elijah?"

Dom's eyes are sharper now, questing. "What? I thought you liked Elijah." And he looks genuinely confused, the ruffled hair and ocean eyes of him, as to why Orlando would ever want to spend time with Dom without Elijah.

You don't kiss me any more, Orlando wants to rage. You touch him too much. Instead, he keeps silent.

"Orli?" Dom asks. He creeps closer and puts a hand on Orlando's knee, radiating concern. "You can talk to me."

Orlando's vision fragments, goes green like his wings, and all the things he wants to say feel sharp and stick in his throat. He clears it once, twice, but his feelings won't budge. And Dom's fingers are gripping, so he has to say something. He focuses on his left ring finger to keep the world still, and the words come out like the lines of a script.

"His wings are crooked."

III.

Viggo should never have kept the kid around, should have dispatched him right back out into the desert the moment he'd turned up. Should have chased him off with a roar and watched from his own cool shade as the boy tripped through the shrubs and cactus in his attempt to get away. Should maybe even have chased him and awoken long-dead appetites with the taste of young blood. Should be more menacing, perhaps, so the locals would be more inclined to warn people away.

And that's what Viggo would have done, if the kid had been ten years earlier. Or maybe even five – it was only recently that Viggo had begun to feel old. Or maybe he had just become complacent with no dragon hunters around, and no dragons left to hunt.

At the very least things had become easy, and then Orlando had shown up to make them complicated again. Orlando -- stupid name for a dragon hunter, but perfect for a boy who looked like a deer, all brown and soft and wild, leaping grace. Viggo could appreciate that somewhere there were cultures that would pay great prices just to sit and look at the boy. In that, at least, he was not alone.

Although he felt alone, pushed into the blankets by nothing more than the feather-light weight of the boy above him. Orlando's eyes closed and opened, opened and closed as he thrust, and each expression was more beautiful than the one before, and somehow they were all the same. Everything was hot and hard, the sandstone beneath him, the boy above.

Viggo could feel his own breath rushing in and out with the strokes of Orlando's cock, scorching him from the inside out. He wondered if that was how the hunter intended to kill him.

VI.

"Is it true…" Dominic started hesitantly, then found his strength. "Is it true, High Lord, that you purr?"

The retreating figure was brought to a full stop at the sound of Dominic's voice, and the taller man turned to face him. "What?" But when faced with him, the golden eyes and the winking Black Jewel, Dominic found he couldn't repeat his question. Didn't, in fact, know why he'd spoken it in the first place.

"I know your name isn't Orlando," Dominic finally whispered, stammering as his words ghosted over themselves. The man stepped closer, and the Jewel he wore seemed to flash. "I won't tell anyone," Dominic added quickly, shaking his head. The man laughed, a rich sound that started Dominic's knees trembling.

"It doesn't matter if you tell," the man said. "I've learned everything I needed here. I won't be back." Dominic felt something then that might have been disappointment, but his heart was hammering too quickly to tell. The man moved even nearer, studying Dominic's eyes and his Jewel from under heavy eyelashes. The Sapphire that Dom had once been so proud of suddenly felt like failure.

"But perhaps I'll meet you again, Dominic," the man said, and his slow smile stole any answer that Dominic might have made. "We can explore this purring theory of yours." He was less delicate up close, and even more beautiful.

The man resumed his departure, crossed the length of the corridor in three long steps before disappearing into thin air.

Dominic collapsed against the wall, and let out a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding.

II.

At first, Hannah's sudden, ferocious kiss doesn't seem suspect. After all, she rarely has any contact with Dom that isn't fucking or fighting. The problem is the way she keeps pulling back from the kiss to look at him – study him a second before diving back in. This starts the tiniest thread of doubt slithering through his stomach, cold and silver.

"Hannah?" he asks on the next break. "Are you okay?"

Hannah's face immediately goes still at the question. "Fine," she spits angrily. Dom evades her hands as she moves to kiss him again, and for just a moment he thinks her eyes glow, and something is very, very wrong.

"What, thinking of my brother again?" Hannah asks, and she sounds like Hannah when she's pissed off, but the dam holding back the doubt breaks and spills out ice. Dom doesn't have the power, but he can see it clearly because he's been trained to look.

"Well, maybe I can take your mind off of him," Elijah says, and flashes Hannah's most seductive smile. The elaborately pinned hair is a tell. Hannah's never been one for much maintenance, especially in times such as these. The set of the mouth is wrong as well – hard in a way that Hannah's had never managed to get, no matter how many horrors she was faced with. And Dom bets she was probably faced with her last.

He wonders if Elijah made her suffer.

And here he is, seeing exactly what he's been taught to watch for, and he's following the specter into the bedroom anyway.

I'll sound the alarm, he tells himself. I will. I won't move out of reach of the bell. But he is kissing Hannah even though he knows it's Elijah, or maybe because he knows it's Elijah. He couldn't pretend, even to Hannah, that he hadn't always wanted her brother.

"It's those damned creepy eyes," she'd teased him, but even now when the eyes look like Hannah's, the pull of Elijah is still strong.

Hannah pins him to the bed with one small hand and begins to ride him, and the slickness of her body clenched around him is at once familiar and completely new. When Dom thrusts up to meet her she gasps and opens her eyes, and this time Dom is certain that they're glowing. He can't stop his own gasp, a sharp echo of hers, and she is moving her hands to her hair as his orgasm overtakes him.

Dom's hand slides toward the knife under his pillow, but Elijah's weapon is closer.

VII.

Elijah awoke in the dark, lightly padded confines of his coffin, which was not unusual for him – the heavy oppression, the stagnant taste of the air was what threw him off-kilter. He raised a hand to the lid automatically, but he discovered without surprise that it would not yield to his push.

"Help," he called, without enough conviction behind it to even carry the sound through the dirt. He felt in his pockets for his cigarettes and wondered how deeply he was buried.

"Elijah?" a voice called back, slightly desperate, familiar. From… beneath him?

"Dom?" Elijah shouted. "Where are you?"

"They stacked your coffin on top of mine, the fuckers!" Dom snarled. The wood beneath Elijah's back rocked slightly, then fell still. "Christ, it's fucking heavy."

Of course it was. He was the more successful actor, and his coffin was thicker wood, finer-grained than Dominic's. He felt a momentary stab of sympathy before he realized that the order was probably deliberate – his coffin was being used to pin Dominic down. The younger vampire, but the bigger threat.

"What are the odds that this is Billy and Orli, playing a joke?" Dom asked, but not seriously. His voice was already changing, thinning in that way that signaled he was channeling his powers.

"Slim to none," Elijah answered. He wiggled one hand into his back pocket and withdrew his lighter, flicked it on and lit a cigarette. The dank air smelled like smoke, and his fingertips smelled like the girl he drank that night, or the night before. It concerned him that he couldn't remember. In the dim light from the cigarette he could make out one stray nail poking through the glossy lid of his coffin. "Make that none whatsoever," he amended. "I've got a nail. No joke. Somebody's nailed me shut." Silver, by the look of it, but he didn't want to touch it to be sure.

"Fucking Viggo," Dom growled, and Elijah was shocked that someone so prestigious would even bother to hunt them. He didn't want to ask how Dominic knew. "Are you smoking?" Dom asked, but he didn't wait for an answer. "You'll use up all your oxygen."

"Then you'd better melt these things fast," Elijah said, tapping the nails of his nonsmoking hand on the hard wood beneath him.

When Dominic responded, his voice had gone so deep that it was almost off the register, and Elijah trembled a bit in spite of his best efforts. "With pleasure," Dom murmured. The nails above Elijah's head had already started to glow.

I.

After a time, the screaming stops.

Elijah lies in the dark and listens to the quiet, broken by the occasional crumbling of stone, or the sharp crack of a wooden beam falling. He knows the city is strewn in ruins around him, although he cannot see it. The fire is still burning, but he can smell that it is dying down.

Next he will have to dig himself out of the collapsed keep with his hands, stone by stone by stone. He's not sure he's quite ready for this, so he remains where he is for a time. He tries to listen to the quiet, channel it, draw it inside him to block out the sounds of his mother crying and Hannah screaming, and the horrible, triumphant laugh of Miranda as she struck one down and swept the other away.

He tries not to remember the children dying, tries not to remember the blood bubbling over his mother's lips as she told him to hide. Tries not to remember the look in Hannah's eyes as she left – don't follow me. No love, no regret, no acknowledgement that the next time they met they'd likely be enemies. No admission that they might never meet again. Elijah's heard many stories about Miranda, not the least of them being that her training is difficult to live through.

The remains become even darker, more silent as the dust settles. Elijah shifts a little in the wreckage and finds his wrist is broken, feels the power well up to bursting within him, although he hasn't the training to heal himself. This final injustice, after everything else, is too much to bear, and Elijah begins to cry, tears mingling with the blood already dripping across his face.

It is a mind from outside the keep that stops him short – the presence of a powerful mage, like a blue light in his mind. Elijah tries to ignore the pain in his wrist, and slowly, slowly begins to dig.