A/N: Fic written for the kink meme and contains Ema/Gant. Consider yourself warned.
Like Sisters
Detective Dick Gumshoe's ID card flutters to the ground as the door shuts behind him. Now they are alone in the Chief's office, just the two of them: Damon Gant and Ema Skye.
Ema is frightened, can hear her own blood rush through her veins, surely it must be as loud as the Chief's organ when it is played. But Damon Gant's fingers are not leisurely stroking the fine white keys as he presses down on another note. Damon Gant is playing a different organ: Ema's heart.
Does he what he's doing? She looks at his face, and green eyes stare eerily at her over the top of glasses. She can't tell anything just by looking; she can't read him like a book. Damon Gant is like a book she'd need a dictionary by her side to even attempt reading.
Meanwhile, the Chief thinks of how much she is like her sister, trapped and scared and vulnerable in the office, trying her hardest not to show fear on her face, but betrayed by the shaking of her knees.
He crumples the detective's ID in one hand, and the message he sends is clear.
"Ema." His voice is deep and commanding, just the way she has always remembered it. He hadn't used her name before, but maybe it's safe now to admit they've met previously, here, where no-one else can overhear.
He takes a step towards her, and Ema's heart starts pounding louder. She cannot stay calm, not under these circumstances, there is no way—
—she recites the periodic table of elements under her breath. Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon. Shit, what comes after carbon again? She can't remember. In normal circumstances, she would never forget.
He's closer now, can feel a hand on her shoulders, which can only be his as there's no-one else in the room. She hears his voice, it says, "You're just like your sister, you know."
And for some inexplicable reason, her heart plummets, the rapid beat slowing, she doesn't know if she wants to be here anymore. That is, if she wanted to be here in the first place. No-one sees her as Ema Skye these days. They look at her, and they just see her older sister Lana. The smart one, the pretty one, the in control one.
Ema's not smart, she studies hard for sometimes disappointing results.
Ema's not pretty, not like her sister, anyway. Ema's eyes are too far apart, and she has a tendency to put on weight easily when upset.
Ema's never in control. Oh, never, never, never. This situation would show that clearly enough.
Damon Gant has known Lana Skye for a long time.
Lana was the top of her graduating year at law school.
Lana has to be one of the prettiest women he's ever seen, or at least, had the pleasure of working with.
Lana's never in control. He's hardly ever seen her in control. Sure, she puts up a pretty good façade, but get her into a room alone and she's trembling, frightened, shaky at the knees…just like her sister.
Ema's never going to be like her big sister, Lana. It's impossible.
Ema's just like her older sister: a weak mind, easy for him to control and manipulate.
She doesn't realise how close they've become until she feels the wooden desk press into her back, and Damon Gant looming over her. The hand on her shoulder strays up from her shoulder to her cheek, then to her hair.
His lips are on hers, tongue thrusting into her mouth and he doesn't stop until he feels her hands on his shoulders, pushing him away.
She can still taste him on her lips, can still feel his tongue wrapped around hers. She wonders if he did this to Lana, it makes her feel disgusted, repulsed, jealous. She hears her heart pounding in her ears again; Damon Gant is indeed a masterful organ player.
There is silence in the room, and it deafens her, makes her want to claw at her ears and scream just to reassure herself that she can. She hates the absence of noise when it should be present.
He thinks about Lana, about what she would say if she knew what he had just done. Yet, he knows Lana will never find out. After all, Ema would be just like her sister when it kept to keeping secrets—she would keep it to the grave.
He escorts her down to the questioning room, where the detectives are waiting by now, ready to pick and pick and pick at Ema's scabs, the ones that have barely healed over the past two years. He sits there and watches her tear up over the most insignificant of details and smiles to himself, because he is the only one who knows the truth.
Ema cries, old wounds opened no matter how much she tries to close them off again. She doesn't want to cry in front of him. She bets her sister never did.
He sits across the table, and her tears remind him of Lana's. She is just like her sister, but maybe that's because he can't separate them in his own mind, that whenever he looks at Ema, he sees Lana.
After the trial is over, they never meet again.
Ema tries not to think of the incident in that office; years later it's easier to tell herself that it's just a recurring dream than to admit that it actually happened. But every time she looks at Lana, it's hard not to imagine his face on hers. It would be easy just to tell her what happened, tell her the truth, but they just don't talk about things like that.
Damon Gant is about to die. In jail, he has a lot of time to think. In his mind, Lana and Ema swirl around, spinning around each other to the point where he's no longer sure where Lana ends and Ema begins.
Lana was a lot like her sister Ema when she was younger. Naïve and trusting, easy to impress. She had learnt her life lessons the hard way, by virtue of actually living through them. Lana knows that Ema, too, admired Damon Gant. They never talk about him, never say his name, even, but it's just below the surface of every conversation they ever have.
Something happened between them, Ema and Damon, when Lana hadn't been looking, and it chilled her to the bone to think that he could have treated her sister the way he used to treat her. Then she tells herself it doesn't matter anymore. Damon Gant is gone.
They have the same dreams every night.
---
Ema and Lana are, in fact, very different people.
In her dreams, Lana runs away.
In her dreams, Ema kisses back.