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Nov. 26th, 2010 12:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sour_idealistFinally completed a story for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
origfic_bingo. The prompts in order are:
- Wild Card
- Homelessness
- Bad day
- Reunions
- Memories
Title: The Last Cigarette
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sour_idealist
Rating/Warnings: Strong PG-13. Violence, swearing, sexual situations.
Wordcount: 1,200
“I need someone with me who I can trust,” he says shortly, standing at the end of the alley in his fancy suit, ridiculously out of place for now. He knows he’s fishing, knows he’s being selfish. He knows this is why the Association doesn’t usually allow teams of two so close in age. “I need to know that I can depend on you absolutely. I need to know that you will stick with me to the end.”
She chuckles, closer than he expected – she’s good, better than him. He should tell her that. After this mission, he will. “You can count on me, Cap’n,” she tells him, pressing her chin into his shoulder.
“Can I be sure?” he asks. He reaches back to grab her hand and sets it against his ribs, over his jacket. She laughs again, scarcely more than a huff of breath on his ear, and slides both of her hands across him. Palms first his literal gun, then the euphemistic one. He bites his lip and hisses, wondering if she knows that he’d still train her without this. Not that he’s made that clear.
“Of course you can. I’d follow you anywhere, sir.” The honorific is just on the line between playful and serious, and he winces, the more because it turns him on. She twists him around and shoves him against the wall, and as she prepares to ruin another dress in the stinking mud of the alley, he presses his palms against the brick and curses himself for a manipulative ass.
She might be willing to follow him anywhere, but only because she’d rather be anywhere than back where she was.
She’s eight months from becoming a full Associate when her teacher buys her a suitcase, hands her a shiny debit card, and tells her that she deserves better than this. She thinks about telling him that she’s known that for the past three years, and she figured she’d take what she could get, but this is about more than her. It’s mostly about his self-respect, and the man he thinks he is, and the fact that he knows she thinks of the blowjobs as paying the rent. So she throws clothes, guns and toiletries into a suitcase, and makes her way to the Association’s headquarters to figure out what to do next.
The opulent lobby is empty and the time is far too late when a guy she worked with a few cases back, name of Blaine, storms in and kicks a chair, muttering something about damn self-repressed closet-case clichés. It wakes her up, and she’s bored enough to stand and ask him what the problem is.
They end up sharing their stories: both kicked out by people ashamed of sleeping with them, both stuck without anywhere else to go. The Association rooms them together for the night, and they end up bumming cigarettes and sharing bullets, spilling rants and trade secrets. She takes him to the best knife suppliers; he offers her his stock of performance enhancers, with fair warning about the risks. (She finds violet ice works the best for her.) Before long they’re sharing whatever tiny corners of their lives they’ve kept personal; before much longer they’re friends more than comrades.
She stares at the pockmarked hospital ceiling, running over the body count, the damages. Blaine’s on the edge of death, caught in the fire with a hole blown in his spine. Just last night they were talking about work getting more frightening as they grew older; she wonders if she jinxed him. Her old master is spread across the wall of an alley again, this time in pieces. A redhead from Omega division took five bullets to the chest – she’d loaned everyone a stick of gum, baring her braces in a grin like a high school girl. A gray-haired woman with a taste for dry jokes lies three beds over, burned beyond recognition. A boy with a still-cracking voice and a side dose of hero-worship is in surgery now, getting shrapnel dug out of his brain. Nine are flat-out missing, no effort currently mounted to find them.
One bad day, she thinks. That’s all this took. One of the missing showed up sick and tearstained but ready to work, put their foot two millimeters to the right, and this happened. She can’t remember his name, but she knows that if he’s found, they’ll just finish him off. For two millimeters.
The instant her burns heal (it will be soon, so soon; why did she have to be hurt the least?), she’ll be gone too.
~***~
It isn’t like they just let her go, of course. A carefully folded note, fine black ink on expensive paper, sitting like a gilded cancer on the stained Formica countertop of her new apartment.
We cannot lose those who have not failed us.
It’s meant to frighten her, but she’s furious. They could have dropped it in her purse, slipped it into her pocket, tucked it into the cash register at her new work. This place, this apartment with its overwhelmingly mint-colored walls and slight smell of turpentine, is the first place that she picked out for herself, the first place she paid for on her own. It’s her home, her new life. They have no right.
(The Association has never cared about rights. She knows that. She doesn’t care.)
She leaves her response on a Post-It note written in ballpoint pen, stuck to the door of the nearest outpost.
I paid all my debts and the departure fee. I owe you nothing.
She finds wads of cash, two thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills, piled on the pillow of her bed. Getting it back to them takes work, but she does it, with an additional note. I will not be re-joining. I’ve had enough killing, thanks.
She’s calculated her worth. If she takes out the team that they’ll be sending and then pays for the medical bills – and doesn’t kill – they’ll mark her down as too much trouble and leave her be. She’s seen the process before, been sent before.
Of course, that requires that she take out the squad. And that she abandon the ideas of revenge that keep her up at night. She did sign up for it, once.
She leans against the old stone wall with a smirk, knowing what a sight she makes at six o’clock on a Saturday morning. Someone else’s white leather jacket over her old, spangled red dress – got to offer the Association some respect still. Mascara sticks to her cheeks like post-battle war paint. Her battered heels are caked in half-dried mud; the spatters reach halfway up her knees but don’t even come close to hiding the gargantuan runs in her stockings.
Smiling, she gazes at the sky and lights up one final cigarette. It really is her last, a final tribute to her old life. Today she’ll go home, throw the gun in the river, collapse in the living room of her own apartment and start thinking about paying for online classes at college. She’ll have a normal life.
“I did it, Blaine,” she whispers, in case he died and can hear her now. “I got out. You should too, if you’re still alive.” Maybe she’ll track him down, give him tips, take him in once he leaves. He got badly enough hurt that they might not even chase him.
And if he doesn’t leave, she’ll miss him. But she has time for friendships now, time for people. She won’t necessarily be alone.
The cigarette smoke spirals into the morning sky, drifting away with the life she’s lived since she was fourteen.
origfic_bingo. The prompts in order are:- Wild Card
- Homelessness
- Bad day
- Reunions
- Memories
Title: The Last Cigarette
Author:
sour_idealist Rating/Warnings: Strong PG-13. Violence, swearing, sexual situations.
Wordcount: 1,200
“I need someone with me who I can trust,” he says shortly, standing at the end of the alley in his fancy suit, ridiculously out of place for now. He knows he’s fishing, knows he’s being selfish. He knows this is why the Association doesn’t usually allow teams of two so close in age. “I need to know that I can depend on you absolutely. I need to know that you will stick with me to the end.”
She chuckles, closer than he expected – she’s good, better than him. He should tell her that. After this mission, he will. “You can count on me, Cap’n,” she tells him, pressing her chin into his shoulder.
“Can I be sure?” he asks. He reaches back to grab her hand and sets it against his ribs, over his jacket. She laughs again, scarcely more than a huff of breath on his ear, and slides both of her hands across him. Palms first his literal gun, then the euphemistic one. He bites his lip and hisses, wondering if she knows that he’d still train her without this. Not that he’s made that clear.
“Of course you can. I’d follow you anywhere, sir.” The honorific is just on the line between playful and serious, and he winces, the more because it turns him on. She twists him around and shoves him against the wall, and as she prepares to ruin another dress in the stinking mud of the alley, he presses his palms against the brick and curses himself for a manipulative ass.
She might be willing to follow him anywhere, but only because she’d rather be anywhere than back where she was.
~***~
She’s eight months from becoming a full Associate when her teacher buys her a suitcase, hands her a shiny debit card, and tells her that she deserves better than this. She thinks about telling him that she’s known that for the past three years, and she figured she’d take what she could get, but this is about more than her. It’s mostly about his self-respect, and the man he thinks he is, and the fact that he knows she thinks of the blowjobs as paying the rent. So she throws clothes, guns and toiletries into a suitcase, and makes her way to the Association’s headquarters to figure out what to do next.
The opulent lobby is empty and the time is far too late when a guy she worked with a few cases back, name of Blaine, storms in and kicks a chair, muttering something about damn self-repressed closet-case clichés. It wakes her up, and she’s bored enough to stand and ask him what the problem is.
They end up sharing their stories: both kicked out by people ashamed of sleeping with them, both stuck without anywhere else to go. The Association rooms them together for the night, and they end up bumming cigarettes and sharing bullets, spilling rants and trade secrets. She takes him to the best knife suppliers; he offers her his stock of performance enhancers, with fair warning about the risks. (She finds violet ice works the best for her.) Before long they’re sharing whatever tiny corners of their lives they’ve kept personal; before much longer they’re friends more than comrades.
~***~
She stares at the pockmarked hospital ceiling, running over the body count, the damages. Blaine’s on the edge of death, caught in the fire with a hole blown in his spine. Just last night they were talking about work getting more frightening as they grew older; she wonders if she jinxed him. Her old master is spread across the wall of an alley again, this time in pieces. A redhead from Omega division took five bullets to the chest – she’d loaned everyone a stick of gum, baring her braces in a grin like a high school girl. A gray-haired woman with a taste for dry jokes lies three beds over, burned beyond recognition. A boy with a still-cracking voice and a side dose of hero-worship is in surgery now, getting shrapnel dug out of his brain. Nine are flat-out missing, no effort currently mounted to find them.
One bad day, she thinks. That’s all this took. One of the missing showed up sick and tearstained but ready to work, put their foot two millimeters to the right, and this happened. She can’t remember his name, but she knows that if he’s found, they’ll just finish him off. For two millimeters.
The instant her burns heal (it will be soon, so soon; why did she have to be hurt the least?), she’ll be gone too.
~***~
It isn’t like they just let her go, of course. A carefully folded note, fine black ink on expensive paper, sitting like a gilded cancer on the stained Formica countertop of her new apartment.
We cannot lose those who have not failed us.
It’s meant to frighten her, but she’s furious. They could have dropped it in her purse, slipped it into her pocket, tucked it into the cash register at her new work. This place, this apartment with its overwhelmingly mint-colored walls and slight smell of turpentine, is the first place that she picked out for herself, the first place she paid for on her own. It’s her home, her new life. They have no right.
(The Association has never cared about rights. She knows that. She doesn’t care.)
She leaves her response on a Post-It note written in ballpoint pen, stuck to the door of the nearest outpost.
I paid all my debts and the departure fee. I owe you nothing.
She finds wads of cash, two thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills, piled on the pillow of her bed. Getting it back to them takes work, but she does it, with an additional note. I will not be re-joining. I’ve had enough killing, thanks.
She’s calculated her worth. If she takes out the team that they’ll be sending and then pays for the medical bills – and doesn’t kill – they’ll mark her down as too much trouble and leave her be. She’s seen the process before, been sent before.
Of course, that requires that she take out the squad. And that she abandon the ideas of revenge that keep her up at night. She did sign up for it, once.
~***~
She leans against the old stone wall with a smirk, knowing what a sight she makes at six o’clock on a Saturday morning. Someone else’s white leather jacket over her old, spangled red dress – got to offer the Association some respect still. Mascara sticks to her cheeks like post-battle war paint. Her battered heels are caked in half-dried mud; the spatters reach halfway up her knees but don’t even come close to hiding the gargantuan runs in her stockings.
Smiling, she gazes at the sky and lights up one final cigarette. It really is her last, a final tribute to her old life. Today she’ll go home, throw the gun in the river, collapse in the living room of her own apartment and start thinking about paying for online classes at college. She’ll have a normal life.
“I did it, Blaine,” she whispers, in case he died and can hear her now. “I got out. You should too, if you’re still alive.” Maybe she’ll track him down, give him tips, take him in once he leaves. He got badly enough hurt that they might not even chase him.
And if he doesn’t leave, she’ll miss him. But she has time for friendships now, time for people. She won’t necessarily be alone.
The cigarette smoke spirals into the morning sky, drifting away with the life she’s lived since she was fourteen.
