Bloodsong Ch. 01

Jack made a noise in turn, a befuddled one. He'd found tough fabric where he'd counted on touching flesh. His fingers hovered over it, hesitating — no, shifting his nails. Valerie blinked in disbelief as she heard — felt — the vest tearing. 

Shit. So much for kevlar, then.

She cleared her throat, ignoring the fact that it made the ache there worsen.

"Stop. That." Predictably, he did not.

Valerie reviewed the last twenty years, panic rising unbidden within her, looking for precedent, ignoring the echo of Nick's voice — 'you can't pretend to be that innocent' — and finding none. Jack hadn't gone this far before. He'd seize every opening to lay his hands on her, appeared to delight in touching her as an enemy shouldn't, but that tended to feel like him forgetting, in the moment, that they were no longer friends. That it was no longer appropriate to touch her in certain ways, never mind the fact that she'd been ridiculously permissive about physical contact even for what they were then. Further setting aside the fact that kissing shouldn't make the list, because that night had ended in death and tears and a smoking gun and her pushing his lying ass from a bridge.

He'd never tried to tear through her underwear. Granted, the piece in question was a bulletproof vest, but it still counted. Valerie made sure to mention that, spitefully, whilst Jack pulled at the flaps he'd cut along her cleavage. He laughed.

"No, it doesn't count. Stay still, now." He rolled her nipple between his fingers, pinched it lightly. She let a hiss slip past her teeth, causing him to still, but only for an instant before resuming, touch featherlight but still very much present. Rubbing circles down one of her breasts when she'd half expected him to knead it like dough, whispering in her ear as though he cared. "Sorry. Didn't expect you'd be so sensitive. Is this better?"

Valerie closed her eyes and said nothing aloud, slowly counting down from ten in her head. Jack would be counting too, however many seconds it would take for her to crack and start struggling. The sounds behind her had stilled; they'd been subtle and muted and he hadn't meant for her to be aware of those, wanting her concerned solely with the thumb stroking her breast.

Sleight of hand, she thought. Keep her attention diverted to move pieces unseen.

He wasn't very good at it. In fact, he was downright poor, because the noise had ceased, meaning that he was done, and his hand moved to her other breast rather than stopping.

"You're surprisingly relaxed," Jack remarked. His tone was suspicious but filled with wonder. He'd always been apt at contradictions like that. "I'm almost tempted to keep you like this."

"Don't be. I'm trying to lull you into a false sense of security."

A laugh. A breath, soft and warm. Another kiss.

"Are you really?"

"Mmm."

Sleight of hand. Keep his attention diverted so that her hands might slip behind her, her body coil like a spring and release, breaking the driver's seat off its base and slamming it into Jack.

Somehow, he had not seen any of that coming.

Distracted by his own distraction, of all things.

"Told you." He'd had to twist his body diagonally to avoid having his legs flattened by the sudden absence of space between seats. Then, pushed on his back, had to maneuver himself into a less exposed position, losing his remaining grip on her. Valerie snatched the sword from where she'd tossed it, then went for the syringe which she'd sent flying out of his hand upon crashing. The one he'd been moments away from sticking in her neck. "What's this, then?"

He'd regained his bearings and grabbed it before she could, but no matter. She'd just put thirty inches of sharpened askara between them, and he couldn't manifest more tentacles without turning the car into an even more cramped environment, making it hazardous to fight in.

"Tranquilizer. It would only have put you out for a short while." Although Valerie was surprised that he answered without needing to be badgered, the defensive edge to his tone was nothing but predictable. Jack did have a medium-long history of attempted poisonings.

"Lovely," she drawled. "Would I have woken up with your dick between my legs?"

Jack's mouth fell open. Whether it did from shock or outrage paled in significance when compared with his loss of focus on the syringe, which Valerie didn't waste an instant in twisting out of his hand. There was no change in his stance or countenance; his eyes didn't leave her face as she held the thing up, thumb poised on the plunger. She might believe he hadn't even taken notice of it vanishing from his grasp.

Just when she was on the brink of wondering whether she'd gone and broken him, Jack found his voice. The way he spoke, stilted and halting, did little to assuage her doubts. He certainly sounded as though he were having some type of malfunction.

"Why would that possibility even occur to you?"

"Remind me, what was your hand doing just now?" she snipped, watching the look of him morph from livid to the awkward, skittering cageyness of a child caught with a hand in the cookie jar. "Look me in the eye and tell me that you'd never force me. And if you lie . . . at least do me the courtesy of lying well enough that I buy it."

The more Jack stared at her, wearing that expression which in another set of circumstances she might have found comical, cheeks coloring pink of all things, the more Valerie felt queasy. Overly light. Cotton in her head and chest. Mouth tasting like battery acid, because he was giving her nothing. No sloppy lie, no denial. Just silence and, after what felt like two eternities stacked up, a heavy sigh.

"I wouldn't do anything while you were unconscious." She had leveled the sword with his chin, but Jack didn't even appear to recognize that he was a breath away from a perforated windpipe. "Anything else I'd do to you . . . it won't be bad, Val. Swear on my mother's life."

"Which one, the one you barely remember who is dead, or the heinous rotten bitch who is also dead?" Rotten was what she felt, too. Valerie wished she could turn back time, make it so that she hadn't asked, unknow it all. She couldn't bear to look at him without feeling the compulsion to hurl something, but couldn't turn her gaze anywhere else. "You would — you would. Why? Where do you think it would get you? How do you envision it going, please do explain. You fuck me so well that, what, my brain dribbles out of my ears and I beg you to do it again?"

Now it was his whole face flushed, and he who didn't seem able to meet her eyes. Valerie chanced a quick glance past his head, checking whether the others might cook up additional trouble.

Far from it, the men still conscious were dispersed at a rather conservative distance from the jeep, Rem shaking his head to something Byron was saying whilst tapping a finger against his temple. Brown Tentacles stood looking like he wouldn't mind a bucket of popcorn.

The lot of them couldn't telegraph 'I'm not paid enough to get involved in whatever crazy drama is going on over there' more starkly if they tried.

"Ideally, we'd make up before anything else ensued."

Ideally.

"Right. Glad to have established that you are out of your godsdamned mind."

"It won't be bad one way or another." Jack was beginning to sound less as though he were admitting a mortifying secret and more exasperated, as if he were convinced that there was a piece of his chain of thought that she was missing and which would, once it fell in place, make everything appear reasonable and logical. "If you haven't enjoyed yourself by the time I'm through, I'll eat my heart out."

"If you try to put anything in me that isn't bullets or a knife, I'll eat it out for you!" She was screaming now, and the screaming fast devolving into wordless snarling.

Then Jack's hand closed around her wrist and she outright growled. His touch was light, fingers spreading out over her knuckles instead of gripping and twisting, as if he meant to only hold her hand and didn't even contemplate disarming her. Valerie pulled away and shoved him back, but he refused to budge.

"I want to make things right. This," Jack gestured at the syringe, encompassing the sword as an afterthought, "isn't us. You'll realize that we were never meant to be fighting, once you've gone a while with that no longer being an option. It'll be the same way between us that it used to be, only more. You liked how it used to be, remember?"

Valerie stared at him, wishing her eyes hadn't started prickling in that disquieting way that always had her uncertain whether the tears they threatened to spill came from a well of grief that never seemed close to drying, or as a physiological reaction to unsustainable levels of abject spitting ire.

She'd liked how it used to be. She hadn't wanted more. Once she'd realized that Jack would never renege his pre-existing loyalty to Marabeth or his dislike of Mrs. Drakma, once she'd come to accept that he would not fight alongside her, that the best one could expect was that he help in whatever small ways he could manage within the existing constraints.

Jack Aramis would never be a hero or even a good person, but he'd been her friend who was trying. Not saving anyone, but nor causing harm. For as long as that held true, Valerie had been content and at peace with where they each stood.

It would never cease to gall her that the asshole still dared to act as if their fallout had resulted from a failure to meet unreasonably high expectations, when the only standard of behavior she'd held Jack to at the time had gone along the lines of 'don't be a complete monster who destroys people for a living.'

"For the record," she said, unable to regard him with detachment — it felt as though wild animals trampled inside her ribcage — but good enough at feigning it, "just now, when I went 'oh'? That wasn't an 'oh, he got one over me and I'm in trouble!'. That was more of an 'oh, this saves me the trouble of chasing him down!'."

"Val. At least try to—"

He moved closer. She stabbed him with the syringe and emptied it in his shoulder without thinking twice.

Jack lifted a hand to the punctured spot, frowning like he didn't quite grasp what had happened.

"N-o," she said, clearly. Watched his eyelids flutter, then drop, and although she'd been convinced that he wouldn't slip away without some last pithy retort, Jack's eyes stayed closed and his head lolled to the side.

Valerie fished for his arm, watched the rise and fall of his chest. Breaths, slowing. Pulse, waning. He slumped onto his side while she pulled the driver's seat to its original position and retrieved the blaster to shoot him twice in quick succession.

Mostly to make double sure that the lights had gone out.

Also because after everything, she badly felt like shooting him.

Well. Now for the next step.