Hey guys! It's me, presenting another piece of writing that I'm not exactly proud of!
I intended to make this fic a LOT longer, but then I thought it was going to be boring... I don't know, I'm thinking about writing more, include more characters that I really love... We'll see!
As requested by the crooked queen, here's some Roxie/Velma! Although this is not a sweet and fluffy fic... I wanted to maintain the bitter and cold tone in the whole story, I'm sorry :/
Soooo, I hope you all like it!
It was exactly midnight; the moon was almost completely covered by the clouds, sinking the city into an intimidating semi-darkness, casting foreign shadows in every corner of where two buildings met. The shadows seemed to come to life, as the wintery air roamed and ran through the empty streets of Chicago; the snowflakes traveled, bringing with them all sorts of previously forgotten pieces of paper or litter… Newspapers, a telephone number, a love letter, wraps… Everything lost and forgotten, the lifeless objects protected by the discreetness of the night.
The silence wasn't broken by any kind of sound; almost like a sacred hour, where the stillness must be worshipped. Whoever had the courage to be out on the street by that time was only able to hear the howling wind, nothing else; not music, nor voices, nor a scream or a laugh; everything was momentarily dead on the outside, while the people decided to take their lives to the inner places.
This same wintery air came gusting wildly, making the still open windows of a rather large apartment knock heavily, making a loud noise.
In the inside of the well lit room, Mary Sunshine jumps in a slight fright from her cushioned chair; she'd been working absorbedly on her typing machine, so much to the point she had forgotten to close her windows. She gets up, clutches the silken robe across her figure tightly and closes the windows, getting a chill down her spine after it.
She walks slowly back to her working table, feasting herself at the feeling of having a warmer room. As she sits back on her chair, she reads the headline of her newest editorial: "All a consequence of fate".
She smiles as she remembers the true story of the girl who murdered her own brother and sisters… A family discussion perhaps, something involving a deceased and rich sibling… Either way, Mary didn't care. As long as she could push down a little bit of her sunshine down the other people's throat, it was fine with her.
It had been quite a long time since she accepted painting the most cruel, cold-blooded criminals of Chicago as little innocent lambs, victims of the mad Jazz Age they were all in. She didn't do these things for free of course… Even good has its price; it involved a significant amount of money from the part of the most famous attorney in the city… He would take the case, and Mary would make the propaganda. She was the ultimate pushover; after all, those we call rats are not complete rats! Of course as long as they kept her services, society could still believe people had a beating and warm heart on their chests, even when those hearts had grown cold a long time ago.
The woman stretches her fingers in order to start to write again. She can't hold the thought that comes creeping from the back of her head, though: Was it really a sin to make people believe that the most mean, nasty and malicious criminals were, indeed and in the end, just victims of fate?
Nonsense! If there was something that she was doing to society, it was a favor, not an offence…
Yes, there was indeed a little bit of good in everyone, even in the sweet, hypocrite fraud that was Mary Sunshine.
Down on the Cook County jail, things weren't as silent as in the streets, although the lights had been already out, and all the sounds had to be lowered.
In one particular cell a match had just been lit; the glowing red flame eats the wood for a moment before it touches the fingertips of a rather pale and skinny girl. She sits on the edge of her bed, unable to sleep, like always… She seems hypnotized by the light, and she sighs when the flame finally dies, enveloped by the darkness of the place.
For Liz, that flame represents her perfectly… She faintly remembers how lively she was before being arrested, before she blew her husband's brains out and her vision became permanently red, and her soul permanently black. She was that glorious flame that burned for a second or two before fading completely, until there was nothing left but burnt wood.
Not even mentioning the sounds… Since that blasted day, her hearing seemed to be altered permanently; she now has the hearing ability of a trained dog. Even the slightest whisper, the softer footsteps, or the lowest breathing can be captured and don't go unnoticed by the oldest prisoner…
How long had she been there? How long had she been tormented and haunted by annoying sounds that sometimes didn't even exist? How many years have passed since she became that empty shell, that poor excuse of a human being? What was just a fantasy from her deranged head, and what was true? And the most important question: Why she hadn't been sentenced yet? Was her sentence being trapped there forever, rotting in that cell, not even remembering how being normal felt like? Sometimes, even the thought of being executed seemed more pleasant than being in that place.
Her delicate ears now capture the sound of droplets of water, probably escaping from a poorly closed tap. Was the sound coming from several cells of distance from her? She's not able to know… it sounds so close… so close.
So close that it seems the water is dripping inside her head, with an interruption of two seconds or so. Pop, pop, pop… pop… pop… pop…
Deep down in her heart she knows that, if she was able to remember how to cry again, she would be doing it right now.
Next to Liz, a redhead rests herself in the cold bars of her cell; the iron is ice cold, but she doesn't care… It had been a while since Annie stopped caring about anything.
She thinks; sometimes she wonders if she's the only prisoner in that block that regrets something… Not killing Ezekiel Young, of course, but if she knew what was in store for her she would definitely had counted to ten and taken a deep breath before poisoning that bastard…
The little dark bottle of arsenic is the only thing that's still fresh in her memories… She remembers pouring a considerable amount of the deadly liquid on Ezekiel's drink; she remembers the look of it, the smell of it. It overall looked and smelled like death… She wasn't unfamiliar with death, though. She had seen it before.
She remembers when she was a kid, around her six or seven years old; her pet, a rather skinny and weak black bunny had died of intoxication. She could still hear her parents saying in disbelief and anger "Of course the poor animal was poisoned!" "I bet it was one of our neighbors… I always suspected that man that lives next door…"
No one knew, no one even suspected, but the responsible for the death of the bunny was Annie herself… She never told her parents about the things she would give to the animal to eat; it wasn't her fault, she liked experimenting, there was nothing wrong with that. Until of course the day she found strange little things scattered around the tiny corners of her house, and decided to experiment, see if her bunny liked them. It was rat poison.
The girl cried for days, got sick and had nightmares for an entire month. She promised herself she would never be responsible for such a thing ever again.
But of course people tend to break their own promises…
The man choking in front of her, asking for her help, reminds her of her little pet; Both so incredibly weak, vulnerable... This time the woman doesn't cry, but she smiles while she compares the two lives she was responsible for, but she managed to ruin. She always had this ability to contaminate everything she cared for; she liked to consider herself poisonous.
Unlike Liz, Annie is tormented, not by sounds, but by questions; what her life would be like if she hadn't killed her boyfriend? Would she still be with him? Would she be with another guy, or would she be alone? What would they do to her? Would she be hanged, like the poor Hungarian girl, who once shared a cell right next to her? Was she finally giving up to the overwhelming fear that threatened to take her heart as the days passed by?
The conviction to know that she eventually would get her answer, positive or not, would only assist to make her even more frightened… After all, nothing lasts forever, one day or another someone would come to her, but whether it was with the freedom or with the noose, she still didn't know. The girl who once handled death so graciously, now risks herself to have the taste of her own poison; to meet that cruel, deadly mistress once more. And now, she knows that there's only one way this meeting can end.
June paces not far from Annie; she can't sleep as well. For a strange reason, the nights on jail were so utterly difficult to get through… But she knows the reason for such difficulty.
She knows that when everything settles down, when the body prepares itself to rest, and the silence falls like a cloth under the building, it's when the mind starts working at full force.
The woman manages to block her dark thoughts through the whole day, she's been doing it wonderfully since the day she got arrested, but when the sun goes down she knows she can't escape from her memories. She knows she can't keep the mask of a though girl permanently, and when the night falls, her façade falls too. Then she's unable to hide the fact that she feels scared… She can't hide it, especially from herself. But unlike any other girl, she doesn't fear the future, but the past.
She fears the monsters that lurk inside her head; the demons that sleep during the day, only to awake at full force at night. And, ironically, the biggest and scariest monster that creeps in darkness, is the one she once shared a bed with, raised a daughter with, and - at least tried to – love; her own husband.
She fears the look in her partner's eyes, that murderous, mad look he got when he incriminated her of screwing the milkman. Even after months, she still awakes sweating, almost unable to silence the terrorized scream that's ready to leave her throat, while she blocks away the sight of that deep, maniacal gaze.
It's incredible; he always managed to fright her, to inflict her fear… And even now, when she knows he's dead, he still can frighten her; even more now than when he was alive.
She knew what was going to happen to her if she didn't defend herself. She was completely sure she would be dead if she hadn't grabbed that kitchen knife in time. She never was able to deliberate with that man anyway…
The truth was: Wilbur was a monster. He had always been a monster… a jealous, passionate man that goes blind and vengeful if his wife even glances at another guy in a different way; that night he didn't even look like the man she so willingly married, but he rather looked like the devil itself. In June's head there's not even the slightest hint of doubt that he was guilty, that he had it coming…
But as she stops pacing and remembers all the blood, splattered across the kitchen floor, and her husband lying there, with his stomach and chest stabbed ten times, and herself, still clutching the knife like her life depended on that, her own murderous look she knew it was printed in her eyes, she can't help but think that she's a bit of a monster herself.
The wind continues its progress; it now howls through the cracks on the wooden windows of a condo in the heart of the town. The sound it makes resembles of the ones a person do when it's in deep pain, but the sound is quickly covered by the ones that are made on the inside of the place.
On the living room, several things are being pushed or thrown down on the floor, the crashing noises being mixed together with long moans and eventually some hysterical laugh.
Velma Kelly is in charge, as usual. The queen bee pushes the younger and smaller girl to the nearer wall, not really caring if it was the girl's head that made that thud, or if it's just a piece of decoration that fell on the floor; she starts to kiss her again, trailing her lips down to the other's neck, in rough, passionate kisses and bites.
Roxie Hart is laughing. She's way too euphoric to deal with something like that in a normal way. Her hands are shaking, trailing down her partner's body in a random, messy pattern. How long had it been since she felt like that? She couldn't even remember feeling so alive and so dead at the same time… She can't say the reason of why she's doing it, especially with someone she, just minutes ago, hated with all her forces.
Both women don't know the reason for such a brutal change, but right now they don't really care, since they are way too involved in tearing off each other's clothes, while they share kisses, scratches, bites and so many other things.
A long time later – a time that couldn't be measured, as a matter of fact; had it lasted hours or just a few minutes? – Velma and Roxie are lying down on the bed, next to each other, covered in sweat, still breathing heavily. The cold is long forgotten out there; the only motive of why they don't open the window to let the winter air fresh down their bodies is because they're both too exhausted to do anything else. Even words now seem difficult to say, getting lost in the cloud of steaming heat that still surrounds the whole bedroom. It won't last long, though.
It doesn't take too much time for the thoughts start creeping around in both of their heads. A blend of terrible frustration, with deep regret, and the worst, most disgusting kind of embarrassment.
"Velma…" The blonde finally gathers the courage to speak, her voice sounds cracked, just above a whisper, but before she can finish her sentence, her stage partner – and, right now, also her lover – shifts her position and turns her back to Roxie, unable to look at her.
Velma hears the girl sighing deeply and turning her back to her as well. The woman knows she couldn't be able to say anything to ease the uncomfortable situation, even if she wanted. What could she say, after all? A simply "I love you" while her hands would trail through golden hair and she tucks a strand behind Roxie's ear? That, besides of being a ridiculous thing to do, was far for being true.
She would never love Roxie. Of course, she didn't hate the girl that much, how could she; after all they've been through in the last hour? But the sentiment of love was the most wrong one to describe the whole situation. Deep down, Velma knows that she only had taken the girl that way, because she was feeling miserably empty in the last couple of days, and it just felt incredibly practical, since she was living with the blonde. It couldn't be a crime, could it?
This must be a crime – Roxie thinks while she feels Velma's breathing mere inches from her; she can still feel the wave of warm coming from the woman, gradually cooling down until she can't sense anything but the cold from the outside. It must be a crime to be with someone that way…
What was that? How she could name it; Stress-relief sex? The three words made the blonde disgusted as she shuddered and curled her body in a ball protecting herself from the cold that comes, not from the outside, but from her own heart.
God, what am I doing with my life? She inhales deeply, trying hard to swallow the lump that has formed in her throat, she struggles to make the tears that had formed in the corners of her eyes to come back, to dry, but they continue their uncontainable path, rolling down the bridge of her nose and the roots of her hair. This is not how she planned her life to be; everything was out of order, everything had happened exactly the way she didn't planned, and the fame – she discovered after a few months, while working with Velma – was nothing but an addictive drug. She planned to be a star, and now? She was addicted to the fame she conquered, but she was far from being the diva from her childhood dreams.
In fifty years or so, it's gonna change, you know? Yeah, maybe… who knows? Maybe it'll change for the better, although both women in bed doubted it very much.
The end sucks! I know! Please, don't kill me guys... I wanted to keep going with the story, to write Billy and perhaps Mama's thoughts, but when I reached this point, the story just looked completed to me, you know?
But if you guys want, I can write a chapter 2 and include more characters! :D
By the way, I didn't include Mona in this piece just for the fact that I can't sympathize with her, I'm sorry, but for me she's just not interesting...
Anyway, liked the story? Hated it? Wanna leave a critic or suggestion? Want to say hi? Please review or PM me, I promise I don't bite! hehe
Thanks a lot for reading!