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carlyinromeTITLE: they'll inherit your blood
RATING: R
FANDOM: Confident - Demi Lovato (Music Video)
PAIRING: Woman (Demi Lovato)/Woman (Michelle Rodriguez)
SUMMARY: Both before and after. Title from Regina Spektor's Après Moi.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Written for
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
escritoireazul’s 2016 ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif){kind=small}
yuletide. THANKS: Many thanks to
formanymiles, beta reader extraordinaire. one.
Bishop is 23 and they are transferring her into American custody. The local screw unlocks her handcuffs just long enough for the army guard to shackle her in American handcuffs. There is no difference in weight, but Bishop thinks maybe the American cuffs shine a little brighter.
In prison, she cut her hair short because she was tired of picking out the tangles after head bags and water boarding and days in the dusty desert cells without showering. She likes the uneven edges. She has a lot of uneven edges. People call her hair color “jet black”, but she likes to think of it as “obsidian”, because jet is a shineless shit coal, and obsidian is shiny, wickedly sharp glass made by active volcanos, and it's easy to understand which world she belongs to.
Another head bag, and she feels herself being hauled into some sort of transport. They chain her to the vehicle's floor and close the door behind her, and soon her bones rattle as the vehicle shudders over the uneven terrain.
It's 36 hours later and Bishop is in the states. They strip her and hose her down, washing the desert dust from her hair and skin. She shakes the water out of her hair, but her back is still damp as she zips herself into the prison coveralls.
The cell is dark and windowless and they lock her inside.
***
They call her enforcer, and they call her La Avispa. Before he died, her husband called her Mariposa, but that was a very long time ago. Her real name is Reyes, or at least that's the earliest one she can remember.
Enforcer is not a high-level position, but she has no interest in trafficking, and besides, this position perfectly matches her skill set. A week after her thirty-second birthday, she puts the barrel of her gun to the temple of a runner-turned-snitch, and her boys clean up and she goes home. Two days later a police SWAT team is bursting in through every entrance point of her house and before she knows it, her face is in the carpet and cable ties bind her hands.
She isn't going to talk. She's never going to talk. Maybe they know, because they don't take her to the police station. They drive her into the city, and a man on either side of her pulls her through the doors of a shining silver high-rise and all the way up to the twenty-seventh floor.
There is a man at the head of a long, dark wood table, silver-haired and steady-handed. He stands, and the men cut the cable ties, freeing Reyes’s hands. Before she can use them, the man at the end of the table offers her a seat.
“Miss Reyes,” he says. “I believe I have something to offer you.”
The guards are still at the door, perhaps 500 pounds of them, but the silver-haired man's expression is pleasant, not threatening.
She takes a seat.
***
Bishop is 14. Her name is Danielle but she'll only answer to Dani.
She is in the family services office again after getting kicked out of her fourth foster home in sixteen months.
Dani waits. She eats half the candy in the little glass bowl on Mr. Simmons’ desk. She looks over his papers; when she finds nothing of interest, she tries to open the file cabinets, but finds the drawers locked.
The door opens behind her and Dani tries not to smile, tries to look repentant, because she's not sorry about leaving the Kaplans’ house--it smelled like cat pee and the TV only had five channels, including the weather channel, which is worse than watching nothing--but if she loves anyone--if anyone loves her--it's Mr. Simmons.
But it's not Mr. Simmons coming in through the door. It's a tall man with a suit and an utterly forgettable face. He closes the door behind him, and says, “Miss Bishop.”
Dani frowns. “Who are you?”
“You can call me Mike,” he says, and Dani knows that's not his name.
“Where's Mr. Simmons?” she asks, but the faceless man acts like he hasn't heard.
“How would you like to never go to another foster home again?”
Dani’s face screws up. “Are you here to adopt me?”
“I'm here to take you to school. A new kind of school.”
“I don't like school,” she says. “That's why I don't go.”
“This is a different kind of school,” he says, and he looks at her in such a way that she knows she doesn't have any choice in the matter.
She never sees Mr. Simmons again.
***
They brand Reyes’s forearm, and give her a target. They show her a video image of a Japanese woman, older than her, locking rifles into a gun cabinet. Reyes doesn't know what the woman has done to end up on this screen, but that's not an entirely unfamiliar feeling.
They give Reyes a gun and a truck and they tell her to shoot to kill.
***
Bishop is 16, and it's been a very long time since anyone's called her Dani. She never gets in trouble for fighting anymore; they tell her to fight, to fight on purpose. She fights the other girls. Some of them are stronger than she is, some faster, but none of them have the understanding of the fight that she does. She can see its schematics unfold in front of her, and she steps into them like rejoining a dance.
One day they come for her, the men in the black suits. She's leaving, they tell her. They have papers for her; they have a mission.
Bishop cracks her knuckles. She straps the knife to her boot and the gun to her hip and she walks between the men, leaving the school for the last time.
***
Reyes goes alone to the target’s house. From a shadowed position tucked behind the chimney of the house next door, she watches the Japanese woman in her garage, watches her pack and press her own bullets, sharpen knives on wet stones. She is alone.
Reyes waits until the woman leaves the garage. The Japanese woman walks barefoot into her garden. She feels a rose’s petals, her touch gentle. She fills a watering can and begins watering the plants’ roots.
Reyes drops from the roof to the dormer window below, and from there to the ground. She takes a pistol in each hand and walks quickly through the yard between them. Bullets fly. The Japanese woman ducks, then springs up from her crouch, throwing the watering can at Reyes with considerable force. Reyes shields her face, and the metal can bounces off her forearm, but water splashes into her eyes, temporarily blinding her. Reyes wipes her eyes dry with the back of her hand, but it's enough distraction that the first thing she sees when she recovers is her target’s foot crashing into her face. Reyes's vision goes black for a moment, and she stumbles; a gun goes off.
The Japanese woman is on top of her, attempting to pin down Reyes's wrists to control the aim of the guns. Reyes bucks, then slams her head into the Japanese woman's, kicking up and sending the woman flying back. She comes to her feet quickly, but Reyes has fast hands and great aim, and there are three bullets in the woman's chest, and she falls.
***
Bishop has lost track of her missions. Each one is different, but each one is the same: they tell her where to go, what to do, and when she's done, she reports in, and they give her another mission.
Each one is different, but this one is not the same. They tell her where to go, and they tell her what to do, and she mistimes the dance, going momentarily off beat, and suddenly she's a political prisoner.
***
They don't warn Reyes that anyone is coming for her, but when she sees the girl, she knows. All of a sudden, Reyes understands the Japanese woman: that was an audition.
Reyes smiles. No one upstages her.
two.
They ride out before anyone figures out that they're probably worth a second look. Reyes follows the girl, first because they're both going to the interstate, and then because that's where her internal compass points.
The girl stops at a gas station 50 miles down the road, and she waits for Reyes to pull up behind her, arms crossed over her chest but a smile on her face.
“About time,” she says.
Reyes steps out of the truck. “Reyes,” she says.
“Bishop.”
Reyes nods. She looks the girl over. She's shorter and younger but they have the same look in their eyes.
“Let's talk,” Reyes says.
***
They drink. They talk. They walk to the nearest hotel, a fleabag with orange carpet so worn in the middle that the dirty carpet pad shows through. Reyes sits on one of the beds, slipping off her boots while Bishop showers.
When the water shuts off, Reyes says, loud enough for the girl to hear her through the bathroom door: “One of us shouldn't exist, you know.”
Bishop cracks open the door, looks at Reyes through just that sliver. It's only a moment, though, and then Bishop pushes through the door. She is wearing a scratchy white motel towel, and her hair is in curled ringlets dripping water onto her freckled skin. Her face is scrubbed but her eyes are the same as when they're smeared with kohl. Her eyes are the same as Reyes's.
Reyes wonders what Bishop’s life has been like. Not like hers, she knows, but not so foreign, either. They are the same, but different.
Bishop’s mouth quirks, not quite a smile. Her hair is the color of volcanic glass and her gaze is steady.
Reyes reaches out to her, and Bishop just looks at her for a moment before walking over.
Some weapons are double edged, two sharp blades but with a shared core. Bishop allows Reyes to take her hand, steps forward when Reyes tugs.
If Bishop can only be the weapon if she kills Reyes, and if Reyes is still alive, then now, in this room in this moment in this world, which one of them doesn't exist?
Reyes puts her hands on Bishop’s ribs, feels the girl breathing. Reyes pulls away the knot tying the towel around Bishop’s body, and Bishop’s hands are still as the towel falls away, as Reyes studies her naked body. The girl was so fresh scrubbed clean that Reyes is surprised to see the scars marring her young body. Reyes remembers her own perfect body before life tore at it, before injury remodeled itself skin deep. Reyes has a mottled knot of flesh where a bullet pierced her shoulder the night her husband was killed. That one she wishes she could cut off.
Bishop has marks from beatings and bullets and broken bones. Her scars are pinkish against her pale skin. In the right light, you might not notice them at all.
“Which one of us?” Bishop asks.
“What?”
“Which one of us shouldn't exist?”
Reyes shakes her head. She doesn't know. What she does know is that Bishop's skin will be cool and her mouth will be warm. She pulls the girl down to her on the bed, pulls the girl against her. The thought crosses Reyes's mind that after has an advantage on Bishop, maybe one that she's exploiting, but then Bishop is kissing her first, her touch capable and insistent but not rough. Bishop is straddling her, her light body against Reyes's, and Reyes touches her, cupping the girl's breasts, feeling the weight of them in her hands, scratching her nails across the sensitive skin of Bishop's nipples, pinching until her back arches. Reyes leaves marks, biting down on Bishop's throat and collarbone, digging into her back and ribs with her nails. It's painful, but necessary, Reyes marking her like the tattoo or the scars.
Bishop pushes Reyes to her back, still straddling her. Bishop grinds against her hips and claws off Reyes's shirt. Bishop's hair drips cold little drops of water onto Reyes's fever flushed skin and she shivers, every cell of her body prickling up, standing at attention. This shouldn't be allowed; one of them should be dead. Reyes’s husband had liked science fiction movies, and Reyes remembers something about time travel, that if there are two of one person in the same time--one from the present, one from the future--then there's a paradox that can tear apart the earth.
Reyes flips them over, Bishop on her back and Reyes above her, pinning her to the mattress. Reyes has warring impulses to destroy her and to protect her, and she settles somewhere in the middle, kissing the girl and thrusting her fingers into her. Reyes wishes she had more than just her fingers; she wants to fill Bishop up with every part of her. The touch isn't gentle but it isn't cruel, and Bishop grinds against Reyes's fingers and her fingers tear at her hair and Reyes realizes that neither one of them has taken their eyes of the other, even for a second, since Bishop left the bathroom.
Reyes isn't used to being matched, not by anyone, but Bishop--Bishop's not just keeping up with her, matching her speed and intensity; Bishop is her match, her perfect match, crafted specifically to measure up to her. They are a paradox, an impossible pairing that should not exist, but here they are, as real and sharp and connected as the blades of a double-edged sword.
They kiss, and Reyes tastes herself and not herself, the same but different.
Bishop is 23 and they are transferring her into American custody. The local screw unlocks her handcuffs just long enough for the army guard to shackle her in American handcuffs. There is no difference in weight, but Bishop thinks maybe the American cuffs shine a little brighter.
In prison, she cut her hair short because she was tired of picking out the tangles after head bags and water boarding and days in the dusty desert cells without showering. She likes the uneven edges. She has a lot of uneven edges. People call her hair color “jet black”, but she likes to think of it as “obsidian”, because jet is a shineless shit coal, and obsidian is shiny, wickedly sharp glass made by active volcanos, and it's easy to understand which world she belongs to.
Another head bag, and she feels herself being hauled into some sort of transport. They chain her to the vehicle's floor and close the door behind her, and soon her bones rattle as the vehicle shudders over the uneven terrain.
It's 36 hours later and Bishop is in the states. They strip her and hose her down, washing the desert dust from her hair and skin. She shakes the water out of her hair, but her back is still damp as she zips herself into the prison coveralls.
The cell is dark and windowless and they lock her inside.
***
They call her enforcer, and they call her La Avispa. Before he died, her husband called her Mariposa, but that was a very long time ago. Her real name is Reyes, or at least that's the earliest one she can remember.
Enforcer is not a high-level position, but she has no interest in trafficking, and besides, this position perfectly matches her skill set. A week after her thirty-second birthday, she puts the barrel of her gun to the temple of a runner-turned-snitch, and her boys clean up and she goes home. Two days later a police SWAT team is bursting in through every entrance point of her house and before she knows it, her face is in the carpet and cable ties bind her hands.
She isn't going to talk. She's never going to talk. Maybe they know, because they don't take her to the police station. They drive her into the city, and a man on either side of her pulls her through the doors of a shining silver high-rise and all the way up to the twenty-seventh floor.
There is a man at the head of a long, dark wood table, silver-haired and steady-handed. He stands, and the men cut the cable ties, freeing Reyes’s hands. Before she can use them, the man at the end of the table offers her a seat.
“Miss Reyes,” he says. “I believe I have something to offer you.”
The guards are still at the door, perhaps 500 pounds of them, but the silver-haired man's expression is pleasant, not threatening.
She takes a seat.
***
Bishop is 14. Her name is Danielle but she'll only answer to Dani.
She is in the family services office again after getting kicked out of her fourth foster home in sixteen months.
Dani waits. She eats half the candy in the little glass bowl on Mr. Simmons’ desk. She looks over his papers; when she finds nothing of interest, she tries to open the file cabinets, but finds the drawers locked.
The door opens behind her and Dani tries not to smile, tries to look repentant, because she's not sorry about leaving the Kaplans’ house--it smelled like cat pee and the TV only had five channels, including the weather channel, which is worse than watching nothing--but if she loves anyone--if anyone loves her--it's Mr. Simmons.
But it's not Mr. Simmons coming in through the door. It's a tall man with a suit and an utterly forgettable face. He closes the door behind him, and says, “Miss Bishop.”
Dani frowns. “Who are you?”
“You can call me Mike,” he says, and Dani knows that's not his name.
“Where's Mr. Simmons?” she asks, but the faceless man acts like he hasn't heard.
“How would you like to never go to another foster home again?”
Dani’s face screws up. “Are you here to adopt me?”
“I'm here to take you to school. A new kind of school.”
“I don't like school,” she says. “That's why I don't go.”
“This is a different kind of school,” he says, and he looks at her in such a way that she knows she doesn't have any choice in the matter.
She never sees Mr. Simmons again.
***
They brand Reyes’s forearm, and give her a target. They show her a video image of a Japanese woman, older than her, locking rifles into a gun cabinet. Reyes doesn't know what the woman has done to end up on this screen, but that's not an entirely unfamiliar feeling.
They give Reyes a gun and a truck and they tell her to shoot to kill.
***
Bishop is 16, and it's been a very long time since anyone's called her Dani. She never gets in trouble for fighting anymore; they tell her to fight, to fight on purpose. She fights the other girls. Some of them are stronger than she is, some faster, but none of them have the understanding of the fight that she does. She can see its schematics unfold in front of her, and she steps into them like rejoining a dance.
One day they come for her, the men in the black suits. She's leaving, they tell her. They have papers for her; they have a mission.
Bishop cracks her knuckles. She straps the knife to her boot and the gun to her hip and she walks between the men, leaving the school for the last time.
***
Reyes goes alone to the target’s house. From a shadowed position tucked behind the chimney of the house next door, she watches the Japanese woman in her garage, watches her pack and press her own bullets, sharpen knives on wet stones. She is alone.
Reyes waits until the woman leaves the garage. The Japanese woman walks barefoot into her garden. She feels a rose’s petals, her touch gentle. She fills a watering can and begins watering the plants’ roots.
Reyes drops from the roof to the dormer window below, and from there to the ground. She takes a pistol in each hand and walks quickly through the yard between them. Bullets fly. The Japanese woman ducks, then springs up from her crouch, throwing the watering can at Reyes with considerable force. Reyes shields her face, and the metal can bounces off her forearm, but water splashes into her eyes, temporarily blinding her. Reyes wipes her eyes dry with the back of her hand, but it's enough distraction that the first thing she sees when she recovers is her target’s foot crashing into her face. Reyes's vision goes black for a moment, and she stumbles; a gun goes off.
The Japanese woman is on top of her, attempting to pin down Reyes's wrists to control the aim of the guns. Reyes bucks, then slams her head into the Japanese woman's, kicking up and sending the woman flying back. She comes to her feet quickly, but Reyes has fast hands and great aim, and there are three bullets in the woman's chest, and she falls.
***
Bishop has lost track of her missions. Each one is different, but each one is the same: they tell her where to go, what to do, and when she's done, she reports in, and they give her another mission.
Each one is different, but this one is not the same. They tell her where to go, and they tell her what to do, and she mistimes the dance, going momentarily off beat, and suddenly she's a political prisoner.
***
They don't warn Reyes that anyone is coming for her, but when she sees the girl, she knows. All of a sudden, Reyes understands the Japanese woman: that was an audition.
Reyes smiles. No one upstages her.
two.
They ride out before anyone figures out that they're probably worth a second look. Reyes follows the girl, first because they're both going to the interstate, and then because that's where her internal compass points.
The girl stops at a gas station 50 miles down the road, and she waits for Reyes to pull up behind her, arms crossed over her chest but a smile on her face.
“About time,” she says.
Reyes steps out of the truck. “Reyes,” she says.
“Bishop.”
Reyes nods. She looks the girl over. She's shorter and younger but they have the same look in their eyes.
“Let's talk,” Reyes says.
***
They drink. They talk. They walk to the nearest hotel, a fleabag with orange carpet so worn in the middle that the dirty carpet pad shows through. Reyes sits on one of the beds, slipping off her boots while Bishop showers.
When the water shuts off, Reyes says, loud enough for the girl to hear her through the bathroom door: “One of us shouldn't exist, you know.”
Bishop cracks open the door, looks at Reyes through just that sliver. It's only a moment, though, and then Bishop pushes through the door. She is wearing a scratchy white motel towel, and her hair is in curled ringlets dripping water onto her freckled skin. Her face is scrubbed but her eyes are the same as when they're smeared with kohl. Her eyes are the same as Reyes's.
Reyes wonders what Bishop’s life has been like. Not like hers, she knows, but not so foreign, either. They are the same, but different.
Bishop’s mouth quirks, not quite a smile. Her hair is the color of volcanic glass and her gaze is steady.
Reyes reaches out to her, and Bishop just looks at her for a moment before walking over.
Some weapons are double edged, two sharp blades but with a shared core. Bishop allows Reyes to take her hand, steps forward when Reyes tugs.
If Bishop can only be the weapon if she kills Reyes, and if Reyes is still alive, then now, in this room in this moment in this world, which one of them doesn't exist?
Reyes puts her hands on Bishop’s ribs, feels the girl breathing. Reyes pulls away the knot tying the towel around Bishop’s body, and Bishop’s hands are still as the towel falls away, as Reyes studies her naked body. The girl was so fresh scrubbed clean that Reyes is surprised to see the scars marring her young body. Reyes remembers her own perfect body before life tore at it, before injury remodeled itself skin deep. Reyes has a mottled knot of flesh where a bullet pierced her shoulder the night her husband was killed. That one she wishes she could cut off.
Bishop has marks from beatings and bullets and broken bones. Her scars are pinkish against her pale skin. In the right light, you might not notice them at all.
“Which one of us?” Bishop asks.
“What?”
“Which one of us shouldn't exist?”
Reyes shakes her head. She doesn't know. What she does know is that Bishop's skin will be cool and her mouth will be warm. She pulls the girl down to her on the bed, pulls the girl against her. The thought crosses Reyes's mind that after has an advantage on Bishop, maybe one that she's exploiting, but then Bishop is kissing her first, her touch capable and insistent but not rough. Bishop is straddling her, her light body against Reyes's, and Reyes touches her, cupping the girl's breasts, feeling the weight of them in her hands, scratching her nails across the sensitive skin of Bishop's nipples, pinching until her back arches. Reyes leaves marks, biting down on Bishop's throat and collarbone, digging into her back and ribs with her nails. It's painful, but necessary, Reyes marking her like the tattoo or the scars.
Bishop pushes Reyes to her back, still straddling her. Bishop grinds against her hips and claws off Reyes's shirt. Bishop's hair drips cold little drops of water onto Reyes's fever flushed skin and she shivers, every cell of her body prickling up, standing at attention. This shouldn't be allowed; one of them should be dead. Reyes’s husband had liked science fiction movies, and Reyes remembers something about time travel, that if there are two of one person in the same time--one from the present, one from the future--then there's a paradox that can tear apart the earth.
Reyes flips them over, Bishop on her back and Reyes above her, pinning her to the mattress. Reyes has warring impulses to destroy her and to protect her, and she settles somewhere in the middle, kissing the girl and thrusting her fingers into her. Reyes wishes she had more than just her fingers; she wants to fill Bishop up with every part of her. The touch isn't gentle but it isn't cruel, and Bishop grinds against Reyes's fingers and her fingers tear at her hair and Reyes realizes that neither one of them has taken their eyes of the other, even for a second, since Bishop left the bathroom.
Reyes isn't used to being matched, not by anyone, but Bishop--Bishop's not just keeping up with her, matching her speed and intensity; Bishop is her match, her perfect match, crafted specifically to measure up to her. They are a paradox, an impossible pairing that should not exist, but here they are, as real and sharp and connected as the blades of a double-edged sword.
They kiss, and Reyes tastes herself and not herself, the same but different.