Author's Notes: Something I wrote really really fast after watching Rocky Horror for the 3095436 time. I've always been fascinated by all the weird codependent relationships in it, but none as much as Eddie and Columbia. Yes, the ending is quite abrupt.
Rose-Tinted Memory
Columbia has to stop screaming. If she stays quiet and still, Frank will forget about her. The rattling from the elevator helps, the bars jerking wildly as Rocky tries ineffectively to get free.
She has to stop the short little bursts of sound that are trying to wrestle their way out of her throat, cutting against the back of her mouth like razors. She can't make Frank mad at her. His temper is the sudden wet thwacks of the ice-pick in flesh, the little sensual smile curving his lips while his eyes stay burning cold. His temper is the part you don't see, behind the mask of foundation and eyeshadow.
When he had seduced her away from everything, she had gone without thinking. There had been other people there, in Frank's bedchamber the first few days. Not always at the same time as her, but in the castle, other lovers that had slowly seemed to fade away.
Frank only had one favorite at a time. It had never occurred to her to ask where the others had gone.
Then Eddie came and he was different, his hungry, simple desires somehow cutting through the swath of cloth that wrapped around them, rose-colored and silken. They had fucked with wild abandon and lay swathed in each other. She had never thought he loved her. He loved music, violence, drugs, motorbikes, all women and Frank, not in that order.
But she had loved him. Magenta had slapped her for trying to get into the lab when Frank took Eddie up there and she had hid in her room, in the dolls and child's toys and all the nice meaningless things Frank had given her. Most of them still smelled like sweat and motor oil.
She had thought, then, that that was the end of it. End was a word she tried hard not to process, but in the back of her mind she had come to grips with the reality that she wouldn't see him again, that his smell would fade, that his pictures would stay on her wall and yellow and she might start to forget.
For a while, Frank took her back to his bed, bored without Eddie around and impatient with his scientific processes. Sometimes she tried to get it straight in her head, what going to bed with Frank was like. Like swimming in nothing but sensation, like the rest of your mind, that part that processed and thought and analyzed, left you. All you did was want and take and be taken.
God help her, she would have done anything, said anything, while she was in bed with Frank. He made that happen. Eddie had said that it was like a perfect piece of rock'n'roll, capturing something no one could ever say in words.
Then the day had come when she had to unveil Frank's perfect monster with half of her lover's brain in him and none of his personality. She had done her duty. She had danced and sung and partied and singled out possible Translyvanian lovers for the inevitable orgy. She hadn't thought. You could do that, in Frank's castle. Just…stop thinking and drift.
And then the beeping from the deep freezer and he was there, motorbike and smile and sax and the scar she couldn't look at. And he smelled like himself, like oil and he sung and he smiled and she had been…happy.
She had been happy being his girl. She would have driven away with him on that motorbike, knowing he would love it more. She wanted to scream at him to get away from this place and take her with him. When his hands lifted her on the back of the bike, she had a moment of belief that they would make it.
But you didn't leave Frank. You didn't walk away and he didn't let go. She had seen Frank smile, the cold smile, the wet thwack smile. The one that hinted that he wasn't human, not where it counted.
Columbia chokes down her sobs, swallows her screaming and watches Frank play to the crowd. He loves a crowd, loves approval. He is the center of attention. All eyes are on him. A screaming woman would distract them and Frank can't have that.
She sits silently on the motorbike and tries to drift, tries to rose-tint everything and fall away into sensuality and dreaming. She tries to forget. But she can smell the scent of oil and sweat and the seat of the bike she's still perched on is warm with his memory.