You Can Fall For
Notes: A companion piece set immediately before Chains of Silver, Chains of Gold
Juliet says hey it's Romeo you nearly gimme me a heart attack
He's underneath the window she's singing hey-la my boyfriend's back
You shouldn't come around here singing up at people like that
Anyway what you gonna do about it?
It's been six days; average turnaround for trips up to Randolph Safehouse is four. Desdemona's not much of a worrier by nature, but after afternoon starts to approach evening, she finds herself antsy, worried that Glory won't be returning today at all.
What if she never comes back?
A good question, though the thought chills her to the bone. Not only would the Railroad be down a heavy – definitely a worrisome thing with so few on staff anyway – but it would be Glory. Desdemona looks wildly around the main room of the Switchboard, the thought of losing her so painful it makes something twist in her gut. She's going to be sick, and the air down here is stale, the scent of so many bodies packed non-stop in a windowless space. There's an undercurrent of burnt coffee and something greasy, like Cram and if she doesn't get out in the air soon she'll toss her cookies.
That's the last thing any of them need to see, she thinks as she springs to her feet and takes the stairs two at a time. Carrington stands in the control room above the main atrium, and he looks like he wants to talk to her, but she brushes past him with a murmur. For once he lets her go with nothing more than a frown.
Small miracles, Desdemona muses, and she turns right down the narrow hall. There's an exit room, and the elevator, and then she's in the Slocum's Joe.
The responsible thing to do would be to wait on the bottom floor of the building, to take a couple deep breaths and then head back down where it's safe. The smart thing would be to go back down and get back to work – she's got reams of information about current packages and safehouses to work through, and Deacon will be back with more any day – but her feet want to take her recklessly through Lexington. She wants to go through town until she runs into trouble, to get into a firefight with someone and get some of this feeling of impotence out of her system.
Back when – a long, long time ago – when she ran with Sam and her crew, the woman Desdemona had been loved getting into scrapes with other gangs. The whiz of bullets screaming past her ears, the high-pitched whistle of laser fire; it had been a way to feel alive.
Desdemona should go back downstairs and she knows it; that woman was a lifetime ago, or maybe two. These days she's getting older, less nimble. If she wanders down to the Corvega plant and tries to engage with the raiders there she has no doubt she'll just end up dead.
She's got too much work to finish to die right now.
Instead, with a heavy sigh, she climbs the stairs, taking deep steadying breaths of the fresh air. On the top floor is what used to be an office, though it's not much now – collapsed ceiling and centuries of rot that makes the wood floor creak, a moldy couch and battered metal desk, a filing cabinet in which she sometimes keeps a bottle of whiskey.
Desdemona eyes the couch suspiciously, then figures it doesn't much matter and sinks into it. It swallows her, the thick velvet of the seat worn and ripped from centuries of exposure. The far armrest has a spatter of bird shit on it, white marring the faded burgundy, so Desdemona sits with her back against the other. At this angle she can see out the window, or at least through the blank spots around the shards of dirty glass still awkwardly jammed into the frame.
The pack of cigarettes in her vest pocket is only slightly crumpled; she pulls it out and draws one from the cardboard box. She's forgotten her lighter but there's a box of matches in her opposite pocket, and after two failed strikes she gets one to light; there's the scent of sulfur from the match as she shakes it out and tosses its corpse onto the floor. The cigarette itself is as stale as every other one she's ever smoked, but she knows she'll never know the difference. The smoke burns going in her lungs; she should probably quit, it's not like no one knows what smoking does to you.
But with all the other ways she risks her life every day, smoking just doesn't seem dangerous.
It was when she was with Sam that she first started. She hadn't been Desdemona yet; this life was more than twenty years in the future, and she was just a scrawny girl from up north who'd wandered down to the Commonwealth when raiders took out her family. She'd been called something else then but when she took out one of Sam's raiders the older woman had nicknamed her Hair-Trigger, or Trigger for short.
Desdemona – Trigger – hadn't meant to fall in with a bunch of raiders, just like she didn't mean to keep finding herself staring at Glory when she thought no one was looking. But Sam had seemed to have a gravitational pull all her own; whenever Trigger had looked at her, she'd found herself drawn in.
When she'd died, Trigger swore she'd never love again. The chance of loss – of suffering – was just too high, too inevitable. She's done pretty well with it, too, Desdemona thinks as she takes a pull on her cigarette.
Until Glory.
The light changes as she sits there, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and the memory of Sam crashes into her, like a rock on a still pond. Desdemona sits there and smokes and the waves of recollection lap against her shores. Sam had been beautiful and dangerous, a scarred and pale-skinned beauty with dark eyes and black hair; she'd seen something in Trigger no one else ever had.
Slim fingers offering Trigger a pack of smokes; a painted cigarette lighter with a half-naked pin-up on the side. Leather armor that smelled of smoke and liquor and hair that smelled of hubflowers. She'd had a big revolver, too big for her hand really, but Sam had been ballsy and never met a fight she didn't plan to win. It was why she'd been overrun by gen-2s in that last fight, when they went to raid a local settlement and found it packed with the things.
Trigger hadn't known what to do then, hadn't wanted to keep raiding without Sam. There'd been a period of wandering, of hiding. Then an agent who called himself John D, and a test, and a new home and family. A mission.
The sound of shooting growing closer jolts Desdemona to an alert pose and she looks out over the street. Somewhere below and to the left, the raiders from the Corvega plant are attacking some ferals; even from here, Desdemona can see their twitchy movements and the way their bodies fall apart at impact. It turns her stomach, but then again there's no point in getting worked up over it. It's just another way to go out in a world filled with so many of them.
Sam was the last one; Sam was the only one. She'd been younger then, hadn't known how much she would come to live that vicious, contradictory raider queen. But to fall for someone else, again, someone she works with, someone who draws her like a bloodbug to a burn barrel – this is something she knows too well.
It's something that can only end in tears and death. She has to shut it down now, before things go any further. The thought makes a few tears begin to leak out of her eyes, and she scrubs at them furiously with the back of one gloved hand.
There's a creak at the bottom of the stairs and Desdemona's ears perk up. If someone has wandered into the old café by mistake she might be able to play dumb and convince them to leave; it'd be preferable to shooting them. Still, her hand works the pistol on her hip free.
It's not someone come to kill her, though, or a feral that wants nothing but to rip her throat out. Worse, it's Glory; beautiful, sexy, funny, smart, confounding Glory. Glory with those thighs like tree trunks, with that voice like an angel, with those breasts –
A hot shiver works through Desdemona and she wonders if she's blushing. She doesn't dare look at Glory; the yearning will surely show on her face and she doesn't dare give away how much she desperately wants to bury her face in Glory's neck, to feel the soft curves of her breasts against her lips. The tender skin of her neck, the taste of her lips, the way she shudders when Desdemona brushes her hand at the top of her jacket.
Desdemona doesn't trust her voice to speak. She knows she needs to end this, but the way she looks standing there, so strong and vibrant – it's going to be impossible. There's reasons for it, she knows there are, she's gone over it in her head so many times but now she can't seem to remember any of them.
It's about work, she reminds herself. We still have business to conduct. You can break your own heart later, when the work is done. She clears her throat and without looking at the heavy, speaks: "Glory."
Oh, god, her voice shakes; she feels timid and scared and thrilled. The feelings are tangled up within her, contradictory and strong and all she can do is wait to see if Glory will speak. She can't wait and yet she must; she wants to kiss her and yet she doesn't dare.
"G5-19 is safe," Glory says, and that stupid voice inside her tells Desdemona – once again – that she's misread everything. There's no passion here; it's all one-sided lust and if she just pushes it down again, it'll go away. Desdemona is very good at sublimating – the two years she harbored that crush on Maven they saved more synths than any other time.
What about that night, then? That kiss, and the moonlight? What about all those kisses since? You think those mean nothing to her?
She has to distract herself. She takes another drag of her cigarette and watches the buildings across the road as if they'll suddenly start doing something interesting. If she keeps talking, Glory will answer and stay here; the idea is terrifying and wonderful.
"And how is Randolph?"
"They're doing well," Glory says disinterestedly. Admittedly, it's not a very interesting topic, although it is necessary. "They're growing corn."
Good, that'll help maintain the cover of an average settlement; not to mention it'll help teach the synths valuable life skills before they're placed. And of course the agents will be able to eat, which is no small concern with the buildings of the Commonwealth as picked-over as they are now. Desdemona nods thoughtfully.
But this exhausts that topic; there's nothing more to say, really, about Randolph, or about G5-19. She should go back down, should pull up the endless reports and start figuring out what to do with P0-17, or with Jenny, who wandered into Augusta last week. There's so many things she should be doing, and none of them include Glory, but she can't ignore the scent of the woman across the room, like leather and dust and clean sweat.
"Well, if there's nothing else," Glory says, and turns to head back down the stairs. She should let her go, should let her get some rest and deal with her feelings alone, but the disappointed set of Glory's shoulders make her panic.
"There might be," Desdemona's voice floats across the room even though she doesn't mean to speak. She racks her brain, frantic, trying to come up with something – anything – to keep Glory here so she can keep talking to her, keep hearing that beautiful voice. But she's made the mistake of looking at her now, and she can't speak. Her voice will shake, her words won't come. She stubs out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray, suddenly frustrated with herself.
"I was worried," she says, her voice going on without her. It does shake, although Glory doesn't seem to notice. No, instead Glory is walking towards her, and in a moment Desdemona is too; her feet seem to know something her brain doesn't.
No, her brain is clearly on vacation entirely because now they're meeting in the middle of the room, and Glory's hair is gilded by the late afternoon sun, the silvery lights tinted with warmth. Glory's hands are on her and this is a terrible idea but Desdemona doesn't care; she buries her face in Glory's neck, her lips working that sweet spot where chin meets throat. There's a vibration, or a sigh, and that's when Desdemona lets go of the idea that she can end this.
This is it, she realizes. This is it for her, for as long as Glory wants her.