fic: the victor and the vanquished (wanted)
the victor and the vanquished
wanted. she has forgotten the in-between - that sometimes there can be more than dead or alive. fox; fox/cross. 1031 words. rated pg-13.
notes: for paul! aka navras_rheya. because you're awesome, dude.
a dangerous woman up to a point once said
‘as per your wishes, i left you for dead
i left england to the english.’
is it always one thing or the other with you?
(destroyer)
-
The Boy looks nothing like the father. Sloan was wrong.
This is her first thought upon seeing him.
It is also her last.
-
In the beginning there were rats.
“Fox,” he had mused. Thoughtful as he considered, his lips pursed but she watched his chin. “Got a real name to go with that?”
She didn’t answer. She had not shot a glance over her shoulder as she walked away.
He would ask that. He’s the kind of man - she could see it - who placed a finite weight on the shoulders of things, loaded them down with traditions and meanings: names, places, guns, people.
If she tries, she thought, she can’t even remember that original name.
It smells too much like gasoline.
-
Later, she will whip the car around the corner and the tires screech, squeal. Now she crouches behind boxes of cereal, tired linoleum beneath patent shine of her feet. She cocks the gun.
Wesley squeaks next to her; she bites her lip, something like a laugh rising there.
His father was a trick of geometry. Still is, she reminds herself, a careful bend of her knee as she slides down, gun at the ready. He is a trick of geometry, always a show of solid mass bent at right angles into delicate human form. Dull colors wrapped around him, khakis and greens and muted grays and she isn’t sure if this is supposed to matter.
There is a bullet and then an explosion of pre-packaged food and cardboard, plastic, paper, glass. She thinks the word, fuck, shoots back towards the frozen food section.
His son is sorry, apologetic in all the ways Cross never was, never aimed to be, a practiced trigger.
She catches Wesley by the back of the bright blue windbreaker and can all but reach inside him.
His jaw drops.
He apologizes.
-
He pushed her face down into the pillow; when she had breathed in, the taste was acrid, tired, damp.
He bit along the length of her bare back, tongue slicking against pressed ink and her spine arched beneath him.
He caught her by the hips. After, she likes to think she let him.
(As he fucked her, he demanded, begged her for a name. Her fingers had curled; she declined).
-
She kisses Wesley and she is twelve.
He sighs, giddy, and the shame of it all makes her lips curl.
She says, “we have to go.”
-
When he would speak the words carried heavy, as though laden with an unspoken set of hardened regrets, an intractable past.
It is for this that she decided she liked him. It’s for this she had thought she almost cared for him.
But no: She nimbly retracted the word.
She met him when she was young, when he was old, somewhere resting there, in the in-between - a solitary stop on an unmarked timeline.
She’d like to say her own winding story went something instant, like from flame and dead flesh to tapestries and unprovoked revenge. That would not be the truth.
Cross would never ask.
(She would watch him in her periphery, hooded eyes and downcast lashes; he knew).
-
At one point, there were nuns. There was her father and his remains and an empty cedar coffin underground, a stone with their family name scratched into it.
“Let’s see what life has in store for you,” Sister Angelica had said, hands spread flat against the tabletop. Fox had scowled.
She thinks she understood it then, that life doesn’t work that way. You don’t wait around and sit blindly, curious has to what the twists and turns said life is supposed to offer.
You take it.
She left the rosary beads to hang off the arm of her chair as she rose and left.
-
Cross dies in between two mountains.
A bullet travels in a circle.
-
Wesley sputters, “what the fuck?”
The water splashes against the windmill of his arms, something like a mask cracking over the features of his face.
She listens as he pants, as he cracks the knuckles of his fingers and mutters repeatedly under his breath, “I’ll be damned, I’ll be fucking goddamned…”
-
She had gasped; it did not hurt.
The first time she awoke in the baths and felt the foreign, eerie stretch of new skin over raw wounds, tenderized flesh, as she bent her elbows, knees, each finger and toe, a crack of first her wrists and then her neck, she had wanted to laugh.
So she did.
The sound had held out of place against the arch of the brick and the quiet, lapping water slicking against her chin, her shoulders.
He had sat there in the bath next to her, and he watched.
Her eyelashes were wet against her cheek as she blinked, a breathless gasp caught in her chest, tight as though she had just been crying instead of laughing, that aching pulse to catch up of the diaphragm. She didn’t look away from him.
“Cross,” she said with a nod in his direction. Yesterday she had fallen out a window. Yesterday she had fallen fifteen stories and her last coherent thought was a crunch and a word, bone.
“Fox,” he answered.
He was the first to rise from the water, his footsteps wet smacks against the tiles.
She didn’t look away.
-
Wesley asks questions.
She forgets what that was like.
He stumbles atop subway cars and she lets the dark wind catch at her back.
-
Cross died when he stepped through that gate for the last time.
Or perhaps not.
Maybe he died when he stepped through the gate, when he shook hands with Sloan - when he said her name that first time all those years ago.
-
A bullet travels in a circle; it did not hurt.
There were rats.
Sloan was wrong.
-
fin