Headcanoned with and beta-ed by graceonce
Music: Religion by Lana Del Rey
"And yer sure that's all that went on, huh?"
Lana glanced upwards, eyebrows in a tight frown. Her gaze flitted back to her lap, her fingers black with blood. "Yeah."
The cop watched her from beneath the brim of his hat, pen tapping against his spiral notebook, but she didn't flinch. He finally clicked the thing and stuffed it back into his blazer's front pocket, pad following soon after. "If you say so. You sure you say so? This is yer last chance to complain 'bout something."
She shrugged lightly, minutely, movement so small he almost missed it.
He grunted. "You do whatever you want, then." He glanced back over his shoulder, eyeing the blonde on the other end of the living room, the kitchen."You ladies are bizarre," he muttered.
Lana watched him amble away, scowl hardening. She turned her head to follow him out the house, blue and red lights flashing outside, but the bandage around her neck prevented her from doing so. It'd been shock that had knocked her out and not blood loss, the demon hadn't bit far enough for that.
She had refused to go to the hospital.
Instead she fixed the stains on the floor, her dark blood mixing with Grace's in the rug, her fingers flexing against her still knee.
Mary's was shifting impossibly, she could see from where she was, gauze around the girl's hand clutching the bible to her heart, baby blues locked on her shoes, untied.
The brunette was moving towards her, heel stepping into coagulated red and trailing across the wooden floors, until she was kneeling before the blonde and grasping at her shoelaces, dark enough that she wasn't imprinting them with her life.
She took her time, forehead falling to the inside of Mary's thigh as she breathed out and let her fingers flick and loop. She would have lied if she said she wasn't purposefully untying them over and over again just to feel the girl's fingers fall to her hair and sift through her locks.
Kit, bruises to his temples and his back bent at an odd angle, sat on a kitchen stool not far off, head to a faded breast, Grace shifting her hand through his own chestnut curls.
"I'm so sorry," he murmured. "I''m so sorry."
Her ghost lifted his head. "I was trying to protect Julia from her, I swear to you."
"I know." He swallowed heavily. "Thank you."
"I love you, Kit."
"I love you too," he replied, defeated. His gaze fell and his head followed and she pressed a kiss to his forehead before disappearing into the outside night.
Lana faced Mary, black melting into blue. "Let's take you home."
The girl slept for a long time, Lana at her side and sometimes not, and when not she stood at her window, facing the sun as she drank bitter coffee. When the blonde was awake, she was bright-eyed and cheerful but constantly yawning, as if she'd never really slept, but Lana knew someone else had simply slept for her then.
The brunette'd taken to sleeping outside the duvet, Mary unable and unwilling to let her sleep anywhere but in her own bed, and she'd taken to sleeping inside her covers when it became cold at dawn. She watched Mary breathe almost obsessively, big gulps of air through clean lungs that days, hours, before had been stunted and through collapsed organs. She flirted with the girl's skin, placing the palm of her hand flat on her rising back.
When Lana woke Mary was gone, her place just warm enough to suggest she'd slept at the brunette's side in her dreams, and the journalist was quick in scrambling off the mattress and into her main room, the apartment too small for her to truly run.
Mary gazed up, blue eyes filled with mirth, and Lana pulled her shirt down her side, suddenly self-conscious.
"Where are you going?" she breathed.
The girl smiled. "I'm just coming back, actually."
"Where'd you go?"
Mary's eyebrows raised excitedly as she lifted her hand, a bakery box in her fingers. "Breakfast for breakfast?"
Lana softened, finally breaking into her own smile and her fists unfurling at her sides. She rubbed at the raised skin on her neck, four little puncture marks and their trails. "I still don't have a table."
The blonde shrugged good-naturedly, grin widening. "Like children, Lana." She sat against the counter, legs crossed at her ankles and skirts tugged down past her knee, and Lana mirrored her beneath the window.
A pain au chocolat was thrown to her and she caught it easily, the treat warm through the paper bag.
"I hate to ask," Mary began, but she paused to take a bite, eyes closing in a light bliss Lana hadn't truly seen in a long time. A light, free, bliss. Her blue eyes opened, sheepish, and she brushed a crumb away from the side of her mouth. "How long did I sleep?"
"Three days, or so. I didn't really count. I brought you home from Kit's and you were out like a light."
"Did you eat at all? Sleep at all?"
The brunette shrugged and Mary sighed, but it was far from out of annoyance, more so from caring disappointment. The woman smiled softly, shaking her head as she looked away, and Mary sat up.
"Why are you grinning like that?"
"You just-" Lana's pen had found its way out of her pant pocket and into her hand and she was clicking it relentlessly. "You look good."
Mary's blush was bright. "Lana."
"You know what I mean."
"I do," the girl breathed. "I feel good, if I may say so. I feel rested. I feel," she fingered her pain, breaking into a small smile, "Warm."
"It's gone, then," Lana whispered. "Truly?"
"I feel free, Lana. Whatever weight I had on my shoulders all these months, it's gone. I can breathe again, I can think again, and maybe," her blush grew, "I can feel again." She sobered slowly, a light frown dotting her features. "I don't know what happened Lana, please don't ask me, but I'm glad it did."
"You simply exorcised it out," the brunette said. Her gaze fell. "I'm so sorry I wasn't able to do anything for you, as I had promised I would."
"Don't go there, please," Mary pleaded. "I don't want you going there. You kept me alive, Lana."
Lana shook her head but had nothing to say, and she ate silently instead.
But the blonde was squirming, shifting as she folded her paper napkin cleanly and placed it into her empty bag. "Are you going to write it, then?"
"Write?"
"Are you going to write this case?" Mary prompted, glancing up. "And finish your contract?"
"I..." Lana reached for her notepad, pulling it out from her jacket hanging dangerously off the window's sill. She played with the edges of the pages, furling and curling the paper corners. "I was going to keep your story out, Mary. Our story."
"No," the girl said softly. "Put it in."
"Mary?"
"People should know, shouldn't they? That no one is safe, not even a wife of God? Know of the struggle we went through?" The girl laughed lightly. "Maybe that's your downtown miracle. Me."
Lana scowled. "I wouldn't take you as one."
"No, but it's there. Write, Lana, write, and take your fame. That apartment. Don't you deserve it?"
The woman watched her, unsure. "What about you?"
"Timothy will read your last papers, I'm sure, but I don't care. I'm cleansed now, in control if not blessed, and that's all that matters. And surely you wouldn't close your door to me if I came around?" she asked sheepishly.
Lana scoffed. "I fully intend on having you live with me and out of that dreary dormitory." She softened. "Are you sure?"
Mary smiled. "You were hired to seek and speak the truth, you'd only be doing what you were asked to do. And I wouldn't want anyone else writing my story. We're alright, Lana."
And Lana believed her.
The blonde's smile faded but she pushed it back onto her face, shaking her head when the woman looked to her questioningly, waiting. She swallowed heavily. "I just can't really believe you're finishing up a year with me. It's crazy, isn't it?"
"I'm not leaving you," Lana said.
"You have nothing to stay here for."
"I do."
"You're done, so why stay?" Mary continued. "You have a life waiting in New York, or L.A., or-"
She stopped, glancing up wide-eyed when Lana crawled to kneel in front of her, a black gaze searching her own blue eyes.
"I love you," Lana finally blurted out.
"You love me?" she echoed, disbelief tainting her voice. She closed her eyes. "Even now? After all this?"
"Love isn't a state of perfect caring."
The blonde shook her head, biting her lower lip hard and not daring to look up.
"To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is right here and now," Lana continued.
Mary wiped at her eyes, laughing lightly. "Isn't that a Mr. Rogers quote?"
The woman smiled. "I watch it sometimes, he's charmingly calming, and always right." She sobered. "I mean it, Mary. I need nothing from you, I never did. I want nothing else than to be beside you for the rest of my life, in that state of imperfect caring." She shifted, knees smarting on the floor. "If you'll have me."
"That sounds like a marriage proposal," the blonde said, hiding a grin behind her hand. Lana scowled, suddenly vulnerable and searching for words. She began to stammer but Mary hushed her, smiling now. "Lana."
The brunette glanced at her, wringing her hands together.
"I wouldn't want anything else," the girl murmured. "But how can you be so sure?"
"You delight me," Lana assured her. She glanced back at her notes left on the floor. "I'll have this written for Friday."
The blonde nodded and she upturned her lips when the woman kissed her lightly, fingers at the base of her neck. She hummed when the woman pulled away to press another kiss to her hair, her fingers finding Lana's, scar on the palm of her hand rubbing against pristine, unmarred, skin.
"What's your secret, Miss McKee?" Lana murmured.
"Secret, Ms. Winters?" The blonde laughed lightly before smiling, her dimples deep beneath her bright blue eyes, gold but a forgotten whisper in the air. "I'm just a simple nun."