vanitashaze (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
vanitashaze) wrote2008-05-01 10:24 pm
vanitashaze) wrote2008-05-01 10:24 pm
Fic: 1 BR / 1 BA [Heroes, Claire/Elle, R]
(Frankly, I'm amazed at myself lately. I've actually been getting stuff done.)
...Manipulation and locked-door romance, to the vague tune of .6, chain, as in "that which is locked". Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are presenting: Claire/Elle, the majority of which was written on post-it notes, file folders and taxi cab receipts, seeing as those are the only things I seem to have a large quantity of lying around. Title from Vienna Teng's brilliant song "1 BR / 1 BA" (which this bears absolutely no resemblance to, except if the girls are the 'upstairs neighbors'). Applaud and be warned - especially for any girl-secks within as I am not that talented yet.
ETA: Fucking hell. 4038 words. For me, this is a record.No wonder it took a bleedin' month to write it.
1 br / ba
heroes; r-whateva. claire/elle.
spoilers up to 2.11 Powerless
Elle cooks a lot. Claire can't fathom where she learned it, all alone and encased in daddy's cinderblock expectations, but the practical where, what, how does not interest her as much as the why, these days. Her answer may be the heat, or the flame - perhaps, the vegetables dropped one by one into water so hot they would scream if they had voices? She's not even sure it has anything to do with food; Elle burns half she cooks and refuses to eat nearly all the rest. "Watching my figure, princess," she says, and Claire thinks about electricity rippling along the grooves of fingertips, how it would feel at the back of her raw, wet throat. (No shame there. She's done it, once or twice - she is a girl, after all - might do it more but all things said and done, vacuuming the fat out of a hole snipped in her stomach was so much more satisfying.)
But anyway. Anyway, maybe the answer is the knives, the clean slices and parting halves of things that, in life, were whole and fresh and pristine. (Claire thinks Elle likes taking things apart far too much. Still, she puts up with the potato cubes, the stains on the laptop keys, the blackened knives always twisting, always contorted - the burnt metal tucked away in corners and drawers, slid betwixt dishtowels like children in sleep or cadavers on a pyre. Sometimes Elle draws little faces on them in sharpie and buries them in the windowbox. "Dum de dum dum," she hums all day, every other breath another mourner in this endless funeral parade, hearses, flowers, women crying.
From their fathers they learned this: it's always the women who weep, and the women who carry on.)
"You know, you could at least try to escape," Elle says one day.
"Why?"
"Well," her words are bubblegum-pink, a cheshire cat hiding its claws, "it would be interesting. I mean, you're so boring. Don't you want to get out of here? Be free, and all that?"
"No."
"Not even a little bit? A teensy-weensy tiny little bit?"
"I can't leave you, what's the point?"
*
There had been someone, once, Elle said. A woman who loved bright eye-shadow and dark sweaters, could transfer ninety percent of her body mass into one fist. God, you would have gotten along like peanut butter & jelly, you're both so dark and gloomy. Listening to retro music and all that, Jefferson Airplane, Nancy Sinatra; headphones on the bus. She drank vitamin-water when she needed to sit back and ponder things, so much that she cried carbonated grapefruit, or maybe joined Costco just to keep up with the prices. Every morning at eight-thirty, before catching the A bus to work, she walked through the vacuum-sealed doors with a backpack flapping empty just above the tuck of her skirt, and at eight fourty-five, the backpack clanked once for every step. In the aisles, Elle would watch as the woman chewed on a hangnail, absently comparing B12 to vitamin C, her smooth, dark fingers stuck through rips in her sweater-sleeves.
"It sounds like you really loved her," Claire says, because really, who is she to judge?
Elle looks at her, delighted and surprised. She giggles. "No, silly, I killed her."
*
This is not a fairy-tale. There is no princess, and even if there were, she will not be rescued from her ivory tower, castle of bones, a cement-and-metal viewing cube that still smelled of dust (to dust) and was her home for months, years.
In this story, instead, there is a girl and her keeper, and their ivory tower is a third-floor apartment in some affordable-housing block with low ceilings, baby bars on the windows and lights that flicker even when Elle's not in the room. There is no contact with the outside; the world could end and they wouldn't know it, unless they stopped getting cable. Sometimes the girl thinks that there is no outside world. If something beyond these four walls exists and you are not part of it, does it really?
Sometimes, too, the girl thinks it's not so bad. She only has to wait; Elle is just watching her, until one of them dies permanently or she gets further instructions. She is quite cheerful about this but sometimes the girl thinks there's no one left to give those further instructions, and so it is only a matter of time. Elle will get old, she knows, and she wither, she will die, something will happen. (She just has to wait.)
*
They brought her here in the night, of course - some cliches are there for a reason, and when ghosts loiter around every streetlamp it's less likely to catch notice of two men drag-carrying a girl with sedatives sloshing behind her eyeballs. They brought her here when the end of the world was just beginning. To keep her safe, they said when she screamed. Valuable assets are usually locked away in a safe but sometimes a duffel hidden under the mattress will do.
(Judging from their state of being alive and generally not dead, it's apparent that the ending of the world must not have been as ending as they thought.)
*
"You were so much more fun when you actually did something, you know," Elle grouses. "I mean, you were an earnest little bitch, but at least you didn't just sit around and mope."
Claire ignores her, digging her stick-on nails into the damp weight of paper, stitched and bound in her hands. Her mother used to take her for manicures every fourth Sunday; she said it was a religious duty. "Besides," she would say, "it's not as if your father can't afford it"; they would be laughing as they waded through the parking-lot heat, and Claire would wonder if there had been a precise moment that her mother decided to give up her future for her family. Was it shining, clear like parlor-ornament crystal, or did it sneak up on you, until one day you dug your toes into your beige shag carpet and realized that your dreams had been bundled into the trash, lost somewhere in the dirty diapers?
("God," Elle mutters, deep in her throat. "God," and Claire wonders whom exactly she's referring to.)
They're reading, again - Elle is deep in the armchair that smells of herbal cigarettes, flipping Cosmopolitans and Vogues. The sound probably reminds Elle of bullets ripping through paper targets, though Claire thinks of bird wings. She herself is lying on the floor, sleepover-style: legs crossed in mid-air, chin tipped upwards and straw-blonde curls caught in her eyelashes. By now, Claire's given up on reading, and she's just letting her mind drift. Dirty dishes in the sink; Elle's magazine is the same one she had two weeks ago. Unconsciously, Claire starts rubbing her stomach against the carpet. Back-and-forth, back-and-forth, her tank-top bunching up under her breasts as her belly turns blush-pink from chafing.
"Stop that," Elle says.
"What?"
"Whatever you're doing."
"I'm not doing anything."
"That rubbing thing. Stop it," she says, and oh, Elle's just spoiling for a fight.
Claire hates the blush that seeps under her skin, and because of it she rubs harder, swinging her legs down to angle her hips. Blue eyes follow the curve of her back. Somewhere inside, Claire shivers with pleasure at what she's doing - this little insubordination she's committing. The hair falling over her shoulders is her own Constitution; the dip above the edge of her shorts is her Declaration of War.
And then suddenly Elle's stalking towards her, the swing of her hips leaving behind a trail of dying sparks. She crouches next to Claire and smoothes her hair behind her ear, her breath a whisper across the delicate shell: "Just one? Please?"
Claire knows this game, so she nods, feeling her own power as she braces her back, shoulders, but what she doesn't expect is Elle's delicate fingers (delicate oh so delicate) to creep under her shirt and stroke electrified, one lazy motion that burns the tips of her nipples and sends sparks like shooting stars over the horizon of her nerves. "God," Elle says again, sounding almost bored, but the last letter sticks somewhere in her throat and it comes out almost breathless. "You're so easy."
(Elle walks away, because that's how it goes, of course, she can't do anything else - but when she goes, she trips on the carpet edge.)
Claire licks up all the tears that make it to her lips, feeling her throat work against floor as the salt mixes with spit, and she swallows.
*
The first thing they did was cut communications. "Too easy to track," Bob had said. "We'll find you as soon as this is done." Elle handed over her cellphone but stomped on Claire's, stiletto heel digging into the plastic frame as if it were Claire's skeleton cracking under her boot.
Instead of shopping, Elle gets her groceries delivered to the door. At first she pestered the delivery boy for useless things, guavas and steak knives and saffron, but she stopped the same day she burnt her pocketbook calendar over the range. At the time Claire wondered why she didn't use her powers, instead of letting the cover's gooey plastic strings melt and get tangled up in her fingers like a spiderweb.
(Elle had whimpered but kept her hand steady. When she pulled herself away, muscles trembling, pages ash & smears on the countertop, she stood there stupidly for a moment until Claire realized Elle didn't know what to do, and led her to the sink, uncurled her fingers under the cold rush of water. They were moisturizer-smooth but knobby like an old woman's, and some of the plastic threads ripped the skin up with them. Claire held on as Elle electrocuted her and then herself, from the water still beading their smoking skin.)
She doesn't understand later, because that would be too much of a cliche, too easy, but she does catch Elle zapping a mouse by segments and surprises herself by feeling nothing.
*
(During the night Elle creeps to where Claire is sleeping on the pull-out couch and burns a stripe of skin from breastbone to navel. Claire doesn't fight and Elle does it over and over again, watching the raw skin ripple down her chest like a mexican wave, until the half-light of morning seeps under the blinds and she sees her own fingers, zebra-striped with burns.
She cries, and leaves bloody handprints on Claire's nightie as she tries to strangle her.)
*
"She was so lovely," Elle says. Cheekbones sharp enough to chop up the orange slices she was always sucking on with her red, red lips. She left them strewn around her desk like marigold petals, cherry lip-gloss prints still sticky and shining on the peels. "So lovely."
"What happened to her?" Claire asks.
"Daddy told me to bring her in," Elle shrugs and her face smiles. "She was my first. The prettiest one, even after poor little Peter."
These bizarre truth-or-dares mean nothing, Claire knows, just a way to pass the time. She tries not to feel pity for this little girl who thinks love is bloodstains and ash that someone else has to clean up.
"Your turn, Claire-bear," and Claire doesn't wince, doesn't flinch. Building walls around a castle is harder than cleaning out everything valuable in the first place; defense means leaving it empty, echoing, "I choose dare."
The human body has neurons as complex as a subway system. The whole stretching, trembling framework is trained to react to every stimulus so Claire reaches for Elle's neck, trails her fingers over skin oh-so-carefully and Elle grabs her hand and says, "No." Elle is a child, she learned what she knows of sex from Cosmopolitan and that intern on the second floor, but she knows she doesn't like it like Claire does, did, imagines she would, all soft and slow and rock-a-bye baby. They're mirrors and when they fall they smash. They are sharp. They are jagged, broken, hard and fast and a little bit of mechanics unknown. Elle is a sociopath or at the very least a sadist; Claire thinks that her body might be a masochist even if her mind isn't. Recover, regenerate, soft and powdery and bleeding, if she were afraid of pain she wouldn't jump off car-park roofs for fun.
"You're so, so easy," Elle murmurs, and Claire refuses to speak.
Are they going to do this?
Yes. Yes.
*
Elle dismantles the pull-out without asking. It's obvious she wants Claire in her bed, at her fingertips to shock and burn whenever she needs to feel secure, but Claire pretends not to understand. She wants to make Elle ask.
"Right, Claire-bear," Elle says, rubbing her hands together. "Here's how it's going to be." And then she slams Claire into the kitchen counter, fingers unbuttoning Claire's jeans and cursing when her hair gets caught in the zipper ("Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."), and Claire's too preoccupied with the blood trickling down her neck and the healing crack in her skull from when her head banged against the cheap kitchen cupboards to realize what Elle's doing, or at least trying to. "Come on," Elle groans; the zipper rips free, Claire's jeans are being wrenched off her hips and Elle's lifting her onto the counter, giving her ass a vicious pinch.
"Earnest little bitch," Elle whispers, muffled from where her mouth is pressed against Claire's stomach, her tongue lazily swiping around the belly-button stud she got - what, centuries, millennium ago? Her stomach muscles are twitching, tensing. Claire can feel Elle's smirk as Elle presses dry kisses downwards and downwards, leaving behind electrical burns shaped like rose petals.
Sparks, flickering lamp, formica splinters digging into her thighs. Elle mumbles something, and Claire laughs because she wants to chastise her for talking with her mouth full. Instead she spreads her legs further apart, making way, letting Elle wiggle and probe and penetrate as if she wants to crawl up inside of Claire. It's then that Claire thinks - oh god, Elle, ohmygodohmygod - she thinks Elle might be a little bit afraid.
"What did you say?" she gasps out. Elle scrapes Claire's clit with her teeth, and then pulls back and says, "What?"
"Before," Claire says, looking down cross-eyed. Elle's still leaning against the drawers - right breast jammed between the knobs and her pointy chin on Claire's thigh, looking earnest and young, almost happy. "What'd you say?"
Elle grins - not young anymore, timeless in her viciousness. Strands of blonde hair are caught in Claire's snatch; her lips are sticky, shining. "Claire-bear," Elle repeats, scissoring the fingers she has thrust deep inside her, and Claire feels sudden, sharp disgust stain the oncoming orgasm.
(In bed she is kinder. Elle curls around her - breasts sliding against her back, their bodies slick with salt-water - and lets her hands drift, leaving burns the size of coins. Claire is silent, the air-conditioner hums, sheets draped so delicately over them that Claire wants to cry. In the half-light, their curves could be mistaken for sand-dunes, and Elle presses a kiss to Claire's neck for every spark.)
*
Other than her magazines, Elle doesn't read much. She cooks through trial-and-error; they have no computer. Instead Claire watches her stalk around the bathroom for hours at a time - swiping stripes of makeup over cheekbones, under brows, choosing the absolutely perfect shade of lip-gloss for that eyeshadow. She tries out all the hairstyles, puts together a new outfit for every day, as if she actually has somewhere to go. Claire knows, now, that when Elle looks in a mirror she won't meet her own eyes, as if she's afraid of the Maybeline truth she might see there.
Claire doesn't cook or curl her hair; she's given up on normalcy. These days she regenerates a lot - now from necessity but first out of boredom, finding new ways to shatter bones or poke her fingers inside her own stomach lining. (They were burned by the acid, of course, she read somewhere that even a normal person's lining regenerates each week. She's not a freak, she's just faster. Accelerated. Making what is natural even more so.)
*
Once, the thermostat breaks. Elle shivers and screams at walls, piles on designer sweaters until it's fixed. Already cold, Claire can't even tell. This Frankenstein romance of theirs has already burned away all her nerves, and not just the ones Elle shocked that morning. She feels like someone is pushing crushed ice through her veins, nitroglycerin; she's being embalmed, cryogenically frozen.
I belong in a body-bag, her mind thinks, as it commands a body too stupid to realize it.
*
They writhe behind bars - shadows, cast by the neon light that flickers behind the closed blinds. Claire watches Elle moaning at the feeling of Claire's fingers inside of her, already throbbing with the blood that's rushing to Claire's damaged chest, throat. The blackened flesh flaking off of new, healthy skin is turning Elle's hair grey with soot; Claire's sloppy kisses leave a cross of ashes on Elle's forehead. "Claire-bear, Princess Claire," Elle whispers, and Claire bites her lips to quiet her, because this moment is so poignant, stretched thin and trembling, that any second it might break & leave them, desolate among the quivering shards that sing like broken glass.
*
Then there's that other time, when Claire walks in on Elle in the shower. Here is her woman all pale skin and frightened smile, strings of wet hair bleeding soapsuds. Claire reaches out to touch and Elle shoves her, hard. "Get your own shower," she says.
(What she means is: I have no power here. What this means is: I am defenseless.)
In the spot on her hip where she hit the sink-top, Claire feels a bruise bloom and wither under her skin: purple-yellow-red, a fragmented sunset and a brief-setting star of pain. She has learned to appreciate form and function of the body shivering before her, but never has she considered a time when voltage does not scorch Elle's veins, and she does not like it now. Elle is not newly revealed, another person under the armor; she is fragmented, amputated, limp. Under water, she is not all of herself. How does it feel, Claire wonders, to set aside the still-crackling ghost of yourself each morning so you can shampoo your hair?
*
She learns to sleep like never before. The magazines burned in one of Elle's fits; the windows are cemented shut, and rooms are lit by ghosts, suggestions of past light. With nothing else to do, all roads lead to the bed, one way or another. There is fucking to be had there, slow and sweet like the grey carpet; once Claire tried to teach Elle how to make love as if she knew it herself, but Elle grew angry, bright and hot, until Claire's nipples were ash-flakes leaving greasy smears on the sheets and the dull scrape of Elle's long nails inside her left her red and throbbing, from pleasure, from pain. It's not that Claire can't tell the difference anymore; there isn't one. Any sensation is a stranger, a foreigner in the dull land of her body. If she were a normal human, Claire calculated, she would have been 97.9999% scar tissue by now, and evolution has its bumps, of course, its hiccups. Perhaps her nerves do not heal at the same rate as the rest of her cells, or they grow back strange. Perhaps the quicker she heals, the less she feels, until one morning she will wake up and not feel anything at all.
An imperfect process, she remembers the Indian saying. Is that what she was thinking, when she smashed her hand through a reinforced car window? Or is that what she thinks now, when her tongue traces the stress lines of Elle's face? Soon - soon for her, at least, the immortal one - those lines will be real, they will be permanent. Elle may be a flat plateau but wind can cut through rock. And when it happens, she'll be ready. When it happens. In the half-light she thinks is the sun through the curtains, plans follow the shell-curve of her ear and slither into her mind. And at night, Claire dreams of escaping, and wakes to find she's sweated through the sheets.
*
They dance together with the neon light outside their window flashing pink-blue-yellow-blue, staining their blonde-blue-white features, and they're mirrors in a funhouse, almost reflections, but a twinge there, a tuck here, a little taller a little shorter. This morning Claire got dressed in Elle's clothes. Her blue top is too big in the chest, the short skirt a little too loose in the back (Claire thinks she might be eighteen by now, she's never sure and Elle thinks every day should be her birthday, because they do this every day, she dies every day and is born again) but her face is round and because of this she knows her body will always be flat.
"Aren't you cute?" Elle grins, and Claire looks in the mirror.
"No," she says, "I look like you."
*
Once, the delivery boy leaves the groceries at the wrong door. Elle is twitchy and silent, her muscles clenching as teeth skitter over their own surfaces. Claire waits for something to happen, but the moment stretches like a crusty old rubber-band, and finally, it breaks. "Daddy's going to be so mad at me," Elle mutters, and she scurries out; grabs them, scurries back in. Her hair is wild, the silence thick - for good measure, Elle zaps Claire until her skin is the color of a black hole, and for hours after the rooms smell of smoke.
"What're you looking at?" she snaps, and Claire doesn't have the heart to tell her.
*
(What happens to the Princess, mummy? Why, they live happily ever after, of course.) "Kill me," she pleads, "kill me," and Elle does, over and over again, and she dies & lives & blackens & burns & heals with Elle's face above hers, her hair falling over her breasts, and they never stop, never ever ever ever.
In the midnight hours, a neighbor knocks on their door. Claire pads into the kitchen as Elle sashays to the door, skin and eyes and everything unbound. In the half-light her pale ass bobs from side to side like a wobbling moon, spun galaxies with Claire's fingerprints for stars. Love lingers in her waist, her hips, in the hourglass figure that Claire's trapped in (drowning in sand and glass and dry, dry desert heat); smoothness she burns to touch. Elle's edges are deceptively sweet geometry.
"Yeah?" Elle says.
The neighbor is an old woman with blue hair like a raincloud. Her wrinkles are etched with shock at the shape of Elle's body, the raw art of it out on display; she flaps a bit, the crooked old bird. Claire has to stifle a snicker.
"Well, my dear, I um, I saw a lot of flashing lights, didn't I? Yes. Yes. I did, is there a problem, did a lamp short-circuit? I keep asking them to replace the wires in this old place - almost as old as me - but do they listen, no of course they don't..."
Elle smiles (Cheshire Cat) and there's a bit of static in her teeth, voltage in her eyes. "Just the television, grandma."
"Oh, of course, of course. Goodnight then," and Elle stands there for a moment, her toes curling over the carpet-edge, hands splayed on the doorframe. Her eyes shine in the gloom. The old woman drifts away like a ghost, orthopedic slippers shush-shushing on the carpet.
The door is open, as open as it will ever be. Claire steps behind Elle, fingers tracing over the abdominal muscles - feeling out her prison - their hair clinging together with static and sweat.
"I hate you Elle," she says, and Elle shuts the door.
...Manipulation and locked-door romance, to the vague tune of .6, chain, as in "that which is locked". Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are presenting: Claire/Elle, the majority of which was written on post-it notes, file folders and taxi cab receipts, seeing as those are the only things I seem to have a large quantity of lying around. Title from Vienna Teng's brilliant song "1 BR / 1 BA" (which this bears absolutely no resemblance to, except if the girls are the 'upstairs neighbors'). Applaud and be warned - especially for any girl-secks within as I am not that talented yet.
ETA: Fucking hell. 4038 words. For me, this is a record.
1 br / ba
heroes; r-whateva. claire/elle.
spoilers up to 2.11 Powerless
Elle cooks a lot. Claire can't fathom where she learned it, all alone and encased in daddy's cinderblock expectations, but the practical where, what, how does not interest her as much as the why, these days. Her answer may be the heat, or the flame - perhaps, the vegetables dropped one by one into water so hot they would scream if they had voices? She's not even sure it has anything to do with food; Elle burns half she cooks and refuses to eat nearly all the rest. "Watching my figure, princess," she says, and Claire thinks about electricity rippling along the grooves of fingertips, how it would feel at the back of her raw, wet throat. (No shame there. She's done it, once or twice - she is a girl, after all - might do it more but all things said and done, vacuuming the fat out of a hole snipped in her stomach was so much more satisfying.)
But anyway. Anyway, maybe the answer is the knives, the clean slices and parting halves of things that, in life, were whole and fresh and pristine. (Claire thinks Elle likes taking things apart far too much. Still, she puts up with the potato cubes, the stains on the laptop keys, the blackened knives always twisting, always contorted - the burnt metal tucked away in corners and drawers, slid betwixt dishtowels like children in sleep or cadavers on a pyre. Sometimes Elle draws little faces on them in sharpie and buries them in the windowbox. "Dum de dum dum," she hums all day, every other breath another mourner in this endless funeral parade, hearses, flowers, women crying.
From their fathers they learned this: it's always the women who weep, and the women who carry on.)
"You know, you could at least try to escape," Elle says one day.
"Why?"
"Well," her words are bubblegum-pink, a cheshire cat hiding its claws, "it would be interesting. I mean, you're so boring. Don't you want to get out of here? Be free, and all that?"
"No."
"Not even a little bit? A teensy-weensy tiny little bit?"
"I can't leave you, what's the point?"
*
There had been someone, once, Elle said. A woman who loved bright eye-shadow and dark sweaters, could transfer ninety percent of her body mass into one fist. God, you would have gotten along like peanut butter & jelly, you're both so dark and gloomy. Listening to retro music and all that, Jefferson Airplane, Nancy Sinatra; headphones on the bus. She drank vitamin-water when she needed to sit back and ponder things, so much that she cried carbonated grapefruit, or maybe joined Costco just to keep up with the prices. Every morning at eight-thirty, before catching the A bus to work, she walked through the vacuum-sealed doors with a backpack flapping empty just above the tuck of her skirt, and at eight fourty-five, the backpack clanked once for every step. In the aisles, Elle would watch as the woman chewed on a hangnail, absently comparing B12 to vitamin C, her smooth, dark fingers stuck through rips in her sweater-sleeves.
"It sounds like you really loved her," Claire says, because really, who is she to judge?
Elle looks at her, delighted and surprised. She giggles. "No, silly, I killed her."
*
This is not a fairy-tale. There is no princess, and even if there were, she will not be rescued from her ivory tower, castle of bones, a cement-and-metal viewing cube that still smelled of dust (to dust) and was her home for months, years.
In this story, instead, there is a girl and her keeper, and their ivory tower is a third-floor apartment in some affordable-housing block with low ceilings, baby bars on the windows and lights that flicker even when Elle's not in the room. There is no contact with the outside; the world could end and they wouldn't know it, unless they stopped getting cable. Sometimes the girl thinks that there is no outside world. If something beyond these four walls exists and you are not part of it, does it really?
Sometimes, too, the girl thinks it's not so bad. She only has to wait; Elle is just watching her, until one of them dies permanently or she gets further instructions. She is quite cheerful about this but sometimes the girl thinks there's no one left to give those further instructions, and so it is only a matter of time. Elle will get old, she knows, and she wither, she will die, something will happen. (She just has to wait.)
*
They brought her here in the night, of course - some cliches are there for a reason, and when ghosts loiter around every streetlamp it's less likely to catch notice of two men drag-carrying a girl with sedatives sloshing behind her eyeballs. They brought her here when the end of the world was just beginning. To keep her safe, they said when she screamed. Valuable assets are usually locked away in a safe but sometimes a duffel hidden under the mattress will do.
(Judging from their state of being alive and generally not dead, it's apparent that the ending of the world must not have been as ending as they thought.)
*
"You were so much more fun when you actually did something, you know," Elle grouses. "I mean, you were an earnest little bitch, but at least you didn't just sit around and mope."
Claire ignores her, digging her stick-on nails into the damp weight of paper, stitched and bound in her hands. Her mother used to take her for manicures every fourth Sunday; she said it was a religious duty. "Besides," she would say, "it's not as if your father can't afford it"; they would be laughing as they waded through the parking-lot heat, and Claire would wonder if there had been a precise moment that her mother decided to give up her future for her family. Was it shining, clear like parlor-ornament crystal, or did it sneak up on you, until one day you dug your toes into your beige shag carpet and realized that your dreams had been bundled into the trash, lost somewhere in the dirty diapers?
("God," Elle mutters, deep in her throat. "God," and Claire wonders whom exactly she's referring to.)
They're reading, again - Elle is deep in the armchair that smells of herbal cigarettes, flipping Cosmopolitans and Vogues. The sound probably reminds Elle of bullets ripping through paper targets, though Claire thinks of bird wings. She herself is lying on the floor, sleepover-style: legs crossed in mid-air, chin tipped upwards and straw-blonde curls caught in her eyelashes. By now, Claire's given up on reading, and she's just letting her mind drift. Dirty dishes in the sink; Elle's magazine is the same one she had two weeks ago. Unconsciously, Claire starts rubbing her stomach against the carpet. Back-and-forth, back-and-forth, her tank-top bunching up under her breasts as her belly turns blush-pink from chafing.
"Stop that," Elle says.
"What?"
"Whatever you're doing."
"I'm not doing anything."
"That rubbing thing. Stop it," she says, and oh, Elle's just spoiling for a fight.
Claire hates the blush that seeps under her skin, and because of it she rubs harder, swinging her legs down to angle her hips. Blue eyes follow the curve of her back. Somewhere inside, Claire shivers with pleasure at what she's doing - this little insubordination she's committing. The hair falling over her shoulders is her own Constitution; the dip above the edge of her shorts is her Declaration of War.
And then suddenly Elle's stalking towards her, the swing of her hips leaving behind a trail of dying sparks. She crouches next to Claire and smoothes her hair behind her ear, her breath a whisper across the delicate shell: "Just one? Please?"
Claire knows this game, so she nods, feeling her own power as she braces her back, shoulders, but what she doesn't expect is Elle's delicate fingers (delicate oh so delicate) to creep under her shirt and stroke electrified, one lazy motion that burns the tips of her nipples and sends sparks like shooting stars over the horizon of her nerves. "God," Elle says again, sounding almost bored, but the last letter sticks somewhere in her throat and it comes out almost breathless. "You're so easy."
(Elle walks away, because that's how it goes, of course, she can't do anything else - but when she goes, she trips on the carpet edge.)
Claire licks up all the tears that make it to her lips, feeling her throat work against floor as the salt mixes with spit, and she swallows.
*
The first thing they did was cut communications. "Too easy to track," Bob had said. "We'll find you as soon as this is done." Elle handed over her cellphone but stomped on Claire's, stiletto heel digging into the plastic frame as if it were Claire's skeleton cracking under her boot.
Instead of shopping, Elle gets her groceries delivered to the door. At first she pestered the delivery boy for useless things, guavas and steak knives and saffron, but she stopped the same day she burnt her pocketbook calendar over the range. At the time Claire wondered why she didn't use her powers, instead of letting the cover's gooey plastic strings melt and get tangled up in her fingers like a spiderweb.
(Elle had whimpered but kept her hand steady. When she pulled herself away, muscles trembling, pages ash & smears on the countertop, she stood there stupidly for a moment until Claire realized Elle didn't know what to do, and led her to the sink, uncurled her fingers under the cold rush of water. They were moisturizer-smooth but knobby like an old woman's, and some of the plastic threads ripped the skin up with them. Claire held on as Elle electrocuted her and then herself, from the water still beading their smoking skin.)
She doesn't understand later, because that would be too much of a cliche, too easy, but she does catch Elle zapping a mouse by segments and surprises herself by feeling nothing.
*
(During the night Elle creeps to where Claire is sleeping on the pull-out couch and burns a stripe of skin from breastbone to navel. Claire doesn't fight and Elle does it over and over again, watching the raw skin ripple down her chest like a mexican wave, until the half-light of morning seeps under the blinds and she sees her own fingers, zebra-striped with burns.
She cries, and leaves bloody handprints on Claire's nightie as she tries to strangle her.)
*
"She was so lovely," Elle says. Cheekbones sharp enough to chop up the orange slices she was always sucking on with her red, red lips. She left them strewn around her desk like marigold petals, cherry lip-gloss prints still sticky and shining on the peels. "So lovely."
"What happened to her?" Claire asks.
"Daddy told me to bring her in," Elle shrugs and her face smiles. "She was my first. The prettiest one, even after poor little Peter."
These bizarre truth-or-dares mean nothing, Claire knows, just a way to pass the time. She tries not to feel pity for this little girl who thinks love is bloodstains and ash that someone else has to clean up.
"Your turn, Claire-bear," and Claire doesn't wince, doesn't flinch. Building walls around a castle is harder than cleaning out everything valuable in the first place; defense means leaving it empty, echoing, "I choose dare."
The human body has neurons as complex as a subway system. The whole stretching, trembling framework is trained to react to every stimulus so Claire reaches for Elle's neck, trails her fingers over skin oh-so-carefully and Elle grabs her hand and says, "No." Elle is a child, she learned what she knows of sex from Cosmopolitan and that intern on the second floor, but she knows she doesn't like it like Claire does, did, imagines she would, all soft and slow and rock-a-bye baby. They're mirrors and when they fall they smash. They are sharp. They are jagged, broken, hard and fast and a little bit of mechanics unknown. Elle is a sociopath or at the very least a sadist; Claire thinks that her body might be a masochist even if her mind isn't. Recover, regenerate, soft and powdery and bleeding, if she were afraid of pain she wouldn't jump off car-park roofs for fun.
"You're so, so easy," Elle murmurs, and Claire refuses to speak.
Are they going to do this?
Yes. Yes.
*
Elle dismantles the pull-out without asking. It's obvious she wants Claire in her bed, at her fingertips to shock and burn whenever she needs to feel secure, but Claire pretends not to understand. She wants to make Elle ask.
"Right, Claire-bear," Elle says, rubbing her hands together. "Here's how it's going to be." And then she slams Claire into the kitchen counter, fingers unbuttoning Claire's jeans and cursing when her hair gets caught in the zipper ("Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."), and Claire's too preoccupied with the blood trickling down her neck and the healing crack in her skull from when her head banged against the cheap kitchen cupboards to realize what Elle's doing, or at least trying to. "Come on," Elle groans; the zipper rips free, Claire's jeans are being wrenched off her hips and Elle's lifting her onto the counter, giving her ass a vicious pinch.
"Earnest little bitch," Elle whispers, muffled from where her mouth is pressed against Claire's stomach, her tongue lazily swiping around the belly-button stud she got - what, centuries, millennium ago? Her stomach muscles are twitching, tensing. Claire can feel Elle's smirk as Elle presses dry kisses downwards and downwards, leaving behind electrical burns shaped like rose petals.
Sparks, flickering lamp, formica splinters digging into her thighs. Elle mumbles something, and Claire laughs because she wants to chastise her for talking with her mouth full. Instead she spreads her legs further apart, making way, letting Elle wiggle and probe and penetrate as if she wants to crawl up inside of Claire. It's then that Claire thinks - oh god, Elle, ohmygodohmygod - she thinks Elle might be a little bit afraid.
"What did you say?" she gasps out. Elle scrapes Claire's clit with her teeth, and then pulls back and says, "What?"
"Before," Claire says, looking down cross-eyed. Elle's still leaning against the drawers - right breast jammed between the knobs and her pointy chin on Claire's thigh, looking earnest and young, almost happy. "What'd you say?"
Elle grins - not young anymore, timeless in her viciousness. Strands of blonde hair are caught in Claire's snatch; her lips are sticky, shining. "Claire-bear," Elle repeats, scissoring the fingers she has thrust deep inside her, and Claire feels sudden, sharp disgust stain the oncoming orgasm.
(In bed she is kinder. Elle curls around her - breasts sliding against her back, their bodies slick with salt-water - and lets her hands drift, leaving burns the size of coins. Claire is silent, the air-conditioner hums, sheets draped so delicately over them that Claire wants to cry. In the half-light, their curves could be mistaken for sand-dunes, and Elle presses a kiss to Claire's neck for every spark.)
*
Other than her magazines, Elle doesn't read much. She cooks through trial-and-error; they have no computer. Instead Claire watches her stalk around the bathroom for hours at a time - swiping stripes of makeup over cheekbones, under brows, choosing the absolutely perfect shade of lip-gloss for that eyeshadow. She tries out all the hairstyles, puts together a new outfit for every day, as if she actually has somewhere to go. Claire knows, now, that when Elle looks in a mirror she won't meet her own eyes, as if she's afraid of the Maybeline truth she might see there.
Claire doesn't cook or curl her hair; she's given up on normalcy. These days she regenerates a lot - now from necessity but first out of boredom, finding new ways to shatter bones or poke her fingers inside her own stomach lining. (They were burned by the acid, of course, she read somewhere that even a normal person's lining regenerates each week. She's not a freak, she's just faster. Accelerated. Making what is natural even more so.)
*
Once, the thermostat breaks. Elle shivers and screams at walls, piles on designer sweaters until it's fixed. Already cold, Claire can't even tell. This Frankenstein romance of theirs has already burned away all her nerves, and not just the ones Elle shocked that morning. She feels like someone is pushing crushed ice through her veins, nitroglycerin; she's being embalmed, cryogenically frozen.
I belong in a body-bag, her mind thinks, as it commands a body too stupid to realize it.
*
They writhe behind bars - shadows, cast by the neon light that flickers behind the closed blinds. Claire watches Elle moaning at the feeling of Claire's fingers inside of her, already throbbing with the blood that's rushing to Claire's damaged chest, throat. The blackened flesh flaking off of new, healthy skin is turning Elle's hair grey with soot; Claire's sloppy kisses leave a cross of ashes on Elle's forehead. "Claire-bear, Princess Claire," Elle whispers, and Claire bites her lips to quiet her, because this moment is so poignant, stretched thin and trembling, that any second it might break & leave them, desolate among the quivering shards that sing like broken glass.
*
Then there's that other time, when Claire walks in on Elle in the shower. Here is her woman all pale skin and frightened smile, strings of wet hair bleeding soapsuds. Claire reaches out to touch and Elle shoves her, hard. "Get your own shower," she says.
(What she means is: I have no power here. What this means is: I am defenseless.)
In the spot on her hip where she hit the sink-top, Claire feels a bruise bloom and wither under her skin: purple-yellow-red, a fragmented sunset and a brief-setting star of pain. She has learned to appreciate form and function of the body shivering before her, but never has she considered a time when voltage does not scorch Elle's veins, and she does not like it now. Elle is not newly revealed, another person under the armor; she is fragmented, amputated, limp. Under water, she is not all of herself. How does it feel, Claire wonders, to set aside the still-crackling ghost of yourself each morning so you can shampoo your hair?
*
She learns to sleep like never before. The magazines burned in one of Elle's fits; the windows are cemented shut, and rooms are lit by ghosts, suggestions of past light. With nothing else to do, all roads lead to the bed, one way or another. There is fucking to be had there, slow and sweet like the grey carpet; once Claire tried to teach Elle how to make love as if she knew it herself, but Elle grew angry, bright and hot, until Claire's nipples were ash-flakes leaving greasy smears on the sheets and the dull scrape of Elle's long nails inside her left her red and throbbing, from pleasure, from pain. It's not that Claire can't tell the difference anymore; there isn't one. Any sensation is a stranger, a foreigner in the dull land of her body. If she were a normal human, Claire calculated, she would have been 97.9999% scar tissue by now, and evolution has its bumps, of course, its hiccups. Perhaps her nerves do not heal at the same rate as the rest of her cells, or they grow back strange. Perhaps the quicker she heals, the less she feels, until one morning she will wake up and not feel anything at all.
An imperfect process, she remembers the Indian saying. Is that what she was thinking, when she smashed her hand through a reinforced car window? Or is that what she thinks now, when her tongue traces the stress lines of Elle's face? Soon - soon for her, at least, the immortal one - those lines will be real, they will be permanent. Elle may be a flat plateau but wind can cut through rock. And when it happens, she'll be ready. When it happens. In the half-light she thinks is the sun through the curtains, plans follow the shell-curve of her ear and slither into her mind. And at night, Claire dreams of escaping, and wakes to find she's sweated through the sheets.
*
They dance together with the neon light outside their window flashing pink-blue-yellow-blue, staining their blonde-blue-white features, and they're mirrors in a funhouse, almost reflections, but a twinge there, a tuck here, a little taller a little shorter. This morning Claire got dressed in Elle's clothes. Her blue top is too big in the chest, the short skirt a little too loose in the back (Claire thinks she might be eighteen by now, she's never sure and Elle thinks every day should be her birthday, because they do this every day, she dies every day and is born again) but her face is round and because of this she knows her body will always be flat.
"Aren't you cute?" Elle grins, and Claire looks in the mirror.
"No," she says, "I look like you."
*
Once, the delivery boy leaves the groceries at the wrong door. Elle is twitchy and silent, her muscles clenching as teeth skitter over their own surfaces. Claire waits for something to happen, but the moment stretches like a crusty old rubber-band, and finally, it breaks. "Daddy's going to be so mad at me," Elle mutters, and she scurries out; grabs them, scurries back in. Her hair is wild, the silence thick - for good measure, Elle zaps Claire until her skin is the color of a black hole, and for hours after the rooms smell of smoke.
"What're you looking at?" she snaps, and Claire doesn't have the heart to tell her.
*
(What happens to the Princess, mummy? Why, they live happily ever after, of course.) "Kill me," she pleads, "kill me," and Elle does, over and over again, and she dies & lives & blackens & burns & heals with Elle's face above hers, her hair falling over her breasts, and they never stop, never ever ever ever.
In the midnight hours, a neighbor knocks on their door. Claire pads into the kitchen as Elle sashays to the door, skin and eyes and everything unbound. In the half-light her pale ass bobs from side to side like a wobbling moon, spun galaxies with Claire's fingerprints for stars. Love lingers in her waist, her hips, in the hourglass figure that Claire's trapped in (drowning in sand and glass and dry, dry desert heat); smoothness she burns to touch. Elle's edges are deceptively sweet geometry.
"Yeah?" Elle says.
The neighbor is an old woman with blue hair like a raincloud. Her wrinkles are etched with shock at the shape of Elle's body, the raw art of it out on display; she flaps a bit, the crooked old bird. Claire has to stifle a snicker.
"Well, my dear, I um, I saw a lot of flashing lights, didn't I? Yes. Yes. I did, is there a problem, did a lamp short-circuit? I keep asking them to replace the wires in this old place - almost as old as me - but do they listen, no of course they don't..."
Elle smiles (Cheshire Cat) and there's a bit of static in her teeth, voltage in her eyes. "Just the television, grandma."
"Oh, of course, of course. Goodnight then," and Elle stands there for a moment, her toes curling over the carpet-edge, hands splayed on the doorframe. Her eyes shine in the gloom. The old woman drifts away like a ghost, orthopedic slippers shush-shushing on the carpet.
The door is open, as open as it will ever be. Claire steps behind Elle, fingers tracing over the abdominal muscles - feeling out her prison - their hair clinging together with static and sweat.
"I hate you Elle," she says, and Elle shuts the door.
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