For Vaznetti, in the Female Gen Ficathon. Thanks to tellitslant for nit-picking and Kelbelle for assuring me it did, in fact fit the fandom.OCEAN BREATHES SALTY
By Cherry Ice
California is a carefully constructed study in too much. Sand and sun, sun reflecting off the sand, off the ocean, off the windows of office buildings and whitewashed homes. They drove out in Alex's beat-up old Chevy with the top down, New Mexico to Cali with one stop; smoking Morleys and flicking stations on the dial. They make the shore for the first time at night; sit on the hood of the car and drink beer, car warm from the engine and cooler open on the tarmac of the parking lot.
Marita is sweating in the night, hair in knots from the wind, split lip stinging in the salt spray of the ocean. 1990 and the radio is still on, Madonna, Mariah, Vanilla Ice, Billy Idol, Alannah Myles singing Up in Memphis, the music's like a heat wave/White lightening, bound to drive you wild.
"Told you so," Alex says, finally. He hands her another beer with his split knuckles black in the moonlight and eyes bright in his face. It's the first words they've spoken since the kitchen in New Mexico. Condensation from the longneck is cold beneath her fingers and she fights the sudden, overwhelming urge to laugh.
"Yeah," she says, and the laugh escapes her lips, betraying her. "You did." The car beneath her is suddenly cold, muscle aching, taste in her throat more vomit than beer.
Laughing, she is laughing and cold, eyes closed against the glare of the moon, and when she opens them she is not in California, not six feet from having the sand between her toes. She is aching and cold, curled up in the dark on bathroom tiles, as far back into the corner as she can push herself. Streetlights and neon spill in through the window, and the room is unfamiliar.
She is too weak to stand, and her hair falls in front of her face, bleached as pale as her skin (from the tests, oh, god, the tests) and she lunges for the toilet.
Spender's place, she remembers. Supposes. There's a bit, arms around her shoulders, driving and afraid the vibrations would shake the teeth from her head, being carried into an elevator. She told him where to find his mother (his mother's corpse) and he bolted – bolted, gentlemanly, tucked her in beneath the heavy blankets she can see strewn across the floor outside the bathroom door.
The tests, the fucking tests, and she may be free of them, but the drugs are leaving her system now as well. Ironic, she thinks, and vomits again, if it's detoxing from the drugs they gave her to keep her alive that kills her, not the tests themselves.
Yeah, ironic, fucking ironic, and she wipes her mouth and laughs.
Spender shot two men to get her out. He is far from the first man to kill for her, but he is the first one who seemed genuinely sorry about it, to turn green and tug her past as fast as she could go so that she wouldn't have to look.
California, she thinks, and leans back against the bathroom wall. Her mouth is sour but she cannot make herself move any farther, body burning, tiles and plaster ice cold through the too-large robe wrapped around her shoulders.
California, she thinks, and wonders what would have happened if she'd listened to Alex and just taken off without telling her father, if they'd just packed up the car and left for UCLA.
If there was one less body in the desert between New Arizona and California.
The first time Marita saw a dead man, she was eleven years old. They (Marita with laces trailing and thread-bare jeans, Joseph with a fading bruise on his cheek) found him, at recess, in the back corner of the schoolyard. It (he) was a misshapen pile of clothes on the cracked tarmac, back pressed against the chain-link fence.
"Cool," Joseph said when they poked it and a sweater fell back from the face. Hollow cheeks, heavy jowls, a week's worth of stubble, and his (its) eyes were open, unseeing, staring up at the grey sky.
"Cool," Joseph said again and when he went to poke him (it) once more she grabbed his arm. He hissed, breath freezing white in the cold, and she, in the one true flash of foresight she would ever have, found the vacant eyes as familiar as an old, worn blanket.
She dreams that her lip is split, her ribs cracked and body bruised; that it is Alex's hand she is holding and her father's eyes lifeless (but that is not a dream, now is it?). She dreams that it is Alex holding back Jeffrey, and she is curled up against the fence, soft, shaking, dying, as they watch.
Warmth, upon waking. She is tucked deep into what she takes to be Jeffrey's bed, blinds pulled tightly shut against the sun. She is exhausted and weak and trembling, but the violence of her illness seems to have abated. There is bottled water on a table beside the bed, a bucket, a bottle of painkillers with no doctor's label.
She hears the door open, then shut, and she tenses, reaching beneath the pillow out of habit, fingers faltering when they do, indeed, touch metal. A shadow looms at the bedroom door, her eyes fighting to focus both in the same place. She releases her grip on the gun (her gun, she thinks) when she sees it is Jeffrey. The slump of his shoulders says it all. "I'm sorry," she says, voice hoarse from screaming and bile, and is not as surprised as she should be to find that she means it. She had a mother once, and a father.
(Something – windows open, blinds fluttering, traffic loud, so fucking loud as she stumbles towards the bathroom, falls.)
The blinds, she thinks, were open last night. Her face has been washed and her hair has been brushed and her favourite gun is beneath her pillow. Stupid, sentimental, stubborn Alex.
Jeffrey sits heavily on the foot of the bed, eyes vacant. "I just—" he says. "My father—" Swallows. Stares down at his hands for a second, a minute, an hour, and starts talking about his mother.
"I know," she says, because she had a mother once, too.
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