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FIC: The Queen and the Soldier (M'ways)
TITLE: The Queen and the Soldier
FANDOM: Milliways
RATING: R
WORD COUNT: 10, 799
WARNINGS: Contains off-screen violence and on-screen results of it, also mentions one fully consentual, adult incestuous couple in passing.
DISCLAIMER: The poem Mary Anne quotes from is ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, by Oscar Wilde. The various interpretations of tarot cards come from a variety of books, websites and, ultimately, my own view of them. Nearly all of the characters in this, including the tarot cards as actual personifications, are not mine. The description of the tarot cards’ beach has been taken from what Saundra has already written, I have merely lifted and edited.
The Queen and the Soldier
This is Ajedrez. Beautiful and Mexican, all curves and shadows and tomboyish enthusiasm. Sands’s ex, although the idea of Sands going out with anyone, let alone the genuinely likable AJ, gives you a headache.
“You know, my grandmother sometimes does readings.” She says one night, looking through her tequila glass at the rest of the Bar.
“Oh?” You asks, glancing over. You are the Queen of Swords, not as new as you used to be, and Ajedrez rings a bell, somewhere. Right now, that bell is ringing Sorrow despite her quick smiles.
“For the gringo tourists and hippies in Tepoztlán. Part of the whole bruja and voodoo business.”
“As she ever done a reading for you?
“Once. And then Abuelo said it was heathen nonsense. I can’t even remember what she said.” Ajedrez tilts her head back, watches the ceiling. “Would you do one, Mary Anne? Just a card? I’m curious.”
You smile, a little sadly.
“You know, not everyone can be summed up in just one.” Her head tips forward and she regards you with her wide dark eyes. She smiles back, faintly.
“I’m not that complicated, chica.”
This is a lie. But you draw yourself together, focusing and stilling your mind and self. A deep breath in, a deep breath out and you hold up a card. Ajedrez leans closer, tilting her head slightly.
“And what, oh wise and beautiful one, does the Three of Swords mean when it is home?”
So you tell her. Pain and heartbreak and Sorrow. The fragile balancing act of the previous card has shattered, and now the truth has no choice but to come forward. It hurts, though. What was previously held to be true is now revealed to be lies, or misconceptions. Words and thoughts that have been bottled up can now come out into the open, to be fought out and argued if Ajedrez is to move on. And it’ll hurt. It’ll hurt and hurt, but it’s up to her if what comes out of it all is blood or poison.
The dreaded Three of Swords, piercing a heart that can’t help but bleed.
Two sentences in, Ajedrez goes as pale as she can and tips back another shot.
“Fuck.”
Privately, you agree.
--
There is an itching in the back of your head. Like a swarm of angry wasps, buzzing and stinging incessantly. It’s hard to sleep, hard to concentrate.
It’s the feeling of Random trying to hold reality together. It’s the feeling of his siblings, of Julian and Fiona and all the others you have never met, fighting to help him. This is a war you can’t fight, can’t help. You can only watch and wait.
To hold yourself together, you take to drinking.
(it dulls the connection. nothing else.)
--
Ajedrez has acquired a lighter. Nothing fancy, just silver, but she’s snapping it open and shut, on and off, to a beat that only she can hear. You stop and look, figure what the hell and walk over.
As you sit, she glances up and takes the cigarette out of her mouth to grin at you.
“Hola, Mary Anne.”
“Hey. I didn’t know you smoked.”
She glances at the cigarette, brown and slim like her fingers, and huffs a laugh.
“I don’t. It’s Sands’s.”
You quirk up a brow.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Found him passed out and it was too good an opportunity to lose.”
And maybe it’s just because you are drunk, still drunk, or maybe it’s because you are feeling old and weary, or maybe you just tired of the other woman having Sorrow engraved in her soul, or maybe…
The point is that you stop your thoughts from looping over and over and make yourself say,
“Lovely, maybe you shouldn’t.”
Ajedrez looks up, and her full lips twist. Dimly, you can hear her foot jiggling up and down but you are just staring into her flat brown eyes. Flat and empty and something behind them has broken. Has been broken, you realize, for quite some time. Years, maybe.
“Why not?” And her voice is a soft, dangerous purr. Snap, click, snap, goes the lighter.
“Because maybe you need to let him go.”
Ajedrez watches you, smiling faintly. “Yeah?”
The alcohol is starting to catch up with you. It’s making the room spin and you grip the table.
“Yeah,” you tell her. Firmly. The wasps are back, and you just want to be sick.
She snorts. Snap, click, snap.
“I’ll let him go when he lets me go. In the meantime, chica, it fills in the time.”
Snap, click, snap.
--
A couple days later, you are nursing a hangover. Nothing new. Ruin is, too, but he didn’t actually make it downstairs. No, that little piece of masochism he leaves to you. You nurse your coffee and try and avoid the lights.
It’s a little hard to avoid the screaming, though.
Sands and Ajedrez, in the middle of Milliways. You watch, although it’s a little like watching a head-on collision between two passenger trains. In slow motion. Before the trains go over the edge of a cliff.
You can’t tear your eyes away.
She’s punctuating her speech with her hands, he is still. So still, too still, but they both are shouting. She says something. Softly, looking almost stricken and the silence stretches out impossibly long.
You realize that you’ve never seen them together before.
You realize that you’ve never seen Sands lose control like this.
You wonder if you should visit them in the cells.
--
“So,” you say when Ajedrez comes out. “So, was it worth it?”
She looks at you, looks through you with eyes that glint oddly for a moment.
“I don’t know.”
And with that, she walks up the stairs.
--
“So,” you say to Sands as you claim a seat. “So, what did she say?”
“None of your fucking business, sugarbutt,” he snarls.
“You loved her, didn’t you?”
“She’s a traitorous bitch and I killed her.”
“ ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard’.” Sands goes still. You don’t know why, but it is hurting him and sometimes the Queen of Swords is a bitch. And you hate him, still. A little.
“ ‘ Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword.’”
He opens his mouth, shuts it again, and looks at you. For a moment, someone a little deeper, a little more emotional and human peers out of his dark eyes. Someone that Ajedrez loves. And then he pushes the chair back.
“Fuck you, Mary Anne,” and he walks away. You watch him go, and softly continue.
“ ‘ Some kill their love when they are young, And some when they are old; Some strangle with the hands of lust, Some with the hands of gold; The kindest use a knife, because The dead so soon grow cold.’”
--
“I think,” Ajedrez announces one night, “that I am growing mad. Er.”
“Oh?” It’s a murmur as you reach for the tequila bottle.
(you had the dreams again last night, dreams of the wasps escaping from your head and buzzing and stinging and making the whole universe swell and bleed.
in the morning, you always end up throwing up.)
“Yes,” says Ajedrez. “Mad. Completely and utterly loco from lack of meaning and purpose and activity. You shall come down one day to find that I’ve snapped and gone on a shooting spree and have been eaten. Heart cut out and blood poured to fuel the windows, my ribs devoted to the ceiling beams. Or whatever it is that they do here,” she adds and tips back another shot.
“I…don’t know, actually. What they do. Or would.”
“It could be very civilized. Go the route of the Mayans and the Aztecs and the Toltecs. My heart would make the false sun cross the false sky and my blood the real plants grow. I think it makes perfect sense.”
“‘Thought you were Catholic.”
“I am. Just….I’m also Mexican.”
“And crazy.”
“Now that, my dear queen, goes without saying.”
“‘M not your queen.”
“No? No. No, I guess not.” Ajedrez looks at you, and her eyes are oddly compelling. And then she shakes her head.
“I couldn’t do it, you know.”
“Do what?” She tops up your shot, you nod in thanks.
“Be what you are. Tarot card. I couldn’t.”
“Oh?”
“I couldn’t be this for the rest of the eternity. I just…couldn’t.”
“We already have a Three of Swords.”
“Really?”
“My step-daughter, Reue.”
“Fuck. Poor kid. Think we can have another bottle without killing ourselves?”
“I’m immortal.”
“Speak for yourself.”
--
“Tell me about Sands.” It is afternoon, you think, and you’ve just come back from Vietnam. You smell of blood and dirt and green living things and the young Mexican woman just looks at you with her wide dark eyes.
“He is American and annoying and a psychopath. What else did you want to know?”
“Why did you go out with him?”
Ajedrez finishes braiding her thick brown hair and tosses the braid over one shoulder.
“It was either that or kill him, and I figured if it didn’t work I could always shoot him anyway. And then…I don’t know. He made me laugh. Plus,” she adds with a wistful and rueful sigh, “Sands is the kind of man who can kiss you behind your ear and make you feel like you just had kinky sex. Very addictive.”
You think of Sands. Of irritating, twitchy, snarky Sands. You try and match him with kinky sex, and the other woman just laughs at your expression.
--
You see them kissing on the couch, Ajedrez in his lap and her hands framing his face. Sands has one hand pressing against the small of her back and his free fingers tangling in her gloriously thick hair and they kiss as if they are drowning. They kiss as if they are long-lost lovers who have been missing for centuries, and you think that this really can’t end well.
You watch them and you think, Sands isn’t half bad.
You wonder if Ajedrez’s little comment is correct, and then you remember Ramon’s blood spilling across your hands and decide that Ajedrez can keep the irritating little shit.
You wonder what Mal will think.
--
Ajedrez and Mal fight by the lake. Well. It starts off as a fight. Probably fair, too, until Ajedrez gains the upper hand. She’s taught you to fight, so you know her style. Gutter-fighting, sharpened by professional training. At the heart of the federal agent, at the heart of the cartel princess, will always, always be the crazy gangster, and a gangster would never let another girl get away with fucking her man.
Ajedrez, bouncy and likable and now bloody Ajedrez, drags Mal over to the infirmary and then turns herself into security.
You visit her in the cells, although your head feels like it is going to split. You lean against the glass and peer at her through your fingers. She’s sitting on the floor, head against the wall and snapping Sands’s lighter open and shut.
“Was it worth it,” you ask her, not really knowing if you mean the sex or the fight or both. She, she of the bruised face and split knuckles, just smiles. Opens her wide brown eyes and looks at you and smiles. Except for the lighter, she is still. Still and at peace, for the first time that you’ve seen her.
The afterglow of violence.
“Yes, it was.”
--
One day, the wasps leave. You wake up and they aren’t there. You can feel your brothers and sisters, you can feel the reality again. A little different from before, but it’s there.
“Thank you, Random,” you whisper, and fall back asleep.
(you don’t wake up for three days)
--
One day, Ajedrez walks in. From the front door, this time. A little older, and she’s whistling. Dressed as a cowgirl in jeans and a vest and a hat, with one gun on her hip and rifle slung across her back and she’s nearly humming with focused energy.
She looks happy.
You don’t say anything at first, just drink some coffee and watch her.
You can still Sorrow in the shadows of her smile, but there is something else as well. Something, something…the world starts to swim behind your eyes, and you shut your eyes.
Still not well.
--
“What’s up, chica?” You look up and smile.
“I’m good. Yourself?”
She just grins at you.
“Yeah, I’m good. Been a few years. About four. I’m all grown up, I think.”
“And what,” you ask, “constitutes being grown up?”
“Being over thirty. Oh, god. I feel old now.” Ajedrez makes a face, and then laughs. “Not much over that, though. Can you tell?”
“I’m afraid so. But not very much.” Your eyes are wide and innocent and she snorts.
“Thanks for the ego-massage.” She ducks her head under the rifle strap and then leans the weapon against the table. You want to run your hands over it, and are half-tempted to sit on your hands to stop yourself.
“You look good, though.” Ajedrez smiles at that.
“Gracias. I’m just patrolling at the moment, checking out the labs and such.”
“A good leader-”
“Oh, I’m not leading anyone, really. That’s Iago.”
“I can’t see you being a grunt,” you tell her, bluntly.
“Well…I’m not. I order, they obey, but I follow my orders just as much. I’m a good little cartel daughter.”
“And Iago is…”
“My cousin.”
“And you follow him?”
This time, the smile is a soft glow. The glow of a solider in love with her leader. Oh, not in love in love. But it’s love and respect and something almost feudal. A knight and her lord.
“Yeah, I do. I couldn’t…I’m not a leader, Mary Anne. I’m not a general or a king-pin. I’m a solider. Always have been, always will be.”
You look at her, curiously. She shrugs and orders a tequila.
“They wouldn’t follow me, even if I wanted. I’m too female, and I would spend too much time proving that I have just as many balls as they do. So. I scare them enough that they don’t give Iago shit and…well, I can be very scary.”
You look at her wolfish smile, and remember the razor-blade lessons. You remember Mal, the little vampire broken and unconscious on the infirmary bed as Ajedrez walked away, and you remember her sensual languor in the cells. You think and you remember and you give her a smile.
(you remember the green berets and killing for the first time, you remember the terror and the electric feeling that filled your body to bursting, you remember dancing in a pink cardigan with a necklace of tongues and wonder if she is related to the aztecs)
“Good,” you say as your smile widens and sharpens, “for you.”
--
Time passes, both in the Bar and in Vietnam. Time passes in Mexico and Texorami and Amber and sometimes to hurts to see Fiona glow so. You are happy for her; she is your friend, after all. Your close friend (you don’t use the word ‘best’, that is for Ramon. Always, always, always for Ramon), but you had loved Julian so…
Sometimes, it is easier to retreat into the hopeless butchery of Vietnam then it is wishing that you could have everyone that you love.
You don’t say much of this Ajedrez, that’s not how things work between you, but maybe she guesses.
The rifle she leaves at the Bar for you one day is a thing of beauty.
--
The wedding is lovely, managing to be both elegantly cosy and a public ceremony celebrating love, perseverance, and the utter disregard of common morals.
You smile and laugh and dance with both the bride and groom, make polite talk with their siblings (you find that you like the ditzy and leggy Flora despite yourself) before you retreat to Ramon and make snarky comments about the entire event and everyone in it.
You also get very, very drunk.
Ruin, oddly enough, doesn’t even mention it.
You think that you would love him for the rest of eternity just for that.
--
“What you need,” Ajedrez says one day, dropping her cowboy hat onto your head, “is to kill someone.”
“I have,” you inform her with great dignity, “been doing that.”
“Psssh. Knives and bullets. I think you need to blow someone up.” You remember grenades, you remember planes flying overhead and the burning agony of napalm on your legs.
You remember Julian kissing Fiona as if she were something precious.
“And what precisely did you have in mind?”
--
Ajedrez’s Mexico is hot and dry like it should be, and dusty like no one ever mentions. The heat hits you as soon as you step out of the door, but it’s not so bad. Humid is worse. Vietnam is worse.
Or so you keep on telling yourself.
You swallow a mouthful of water, and follow Ajedrez’s boots as she glides across the desert. She hasn’t told you the details, but then you didn’t ask. She just said what and when, and that’s all you wanted to know.
“And, once things get interesting, be prepared to run.”
“Why,” you had asked, and you had been rewarded by one of the most beautiful smiles you have ever seen.
“You’ve never seen a drugs lab blow, have you?”
That was a couple days ago and this is now. This is hot and dense and smoky and you hear a man’s appreciative laugh as you step into the shade.
“Hey, princess, who’s the broad?” You hear someone ask in Spanish, and as your eyes adjust you see Ajedrez gesture.
“She’s with me, boys. No touching.” And then you see her smile. “Save that for the whores you spend so much money on.” Some more laughter, and that’s that. You find a spot between José and Pablo, and just wait for nightfall.
(it’s like being with the green berets. low laughter in the shadows and crude jokes, but they don’t care what you are as long as you are one of the boys. you’ve missed this more then you’ve ever realized, and for a moment you have nothing but envy for the curvy latina woman you call friend.
just for a moment)
--
This is also what you’ve missed. Smoke and haze and screams in the distance. You, all ten of you, have run into the guards and it’s a gunfight. A bullet skims across your jaw and the pain is a kiss of adrenaline.
Oh god, oh god help you, but you love this.
Somehow, you think as you slide behind a building and reload, you are a little past His Mercy now.
Sorry about that, Mom.
--
Ajedrez nearly runs into you. Soot and blood on her face, on her hands and her clothes, and she’s laughing.
“Come on, Mary Anne!”
It’s hard to hear from the here-again-gone-now deafness, but she grabs your arm and hauls you to your feet.
“Come on.”
She jerks her head towards a building hidden by haze, and you remember what she had said. You’ve never seen a drugs lab blow have you, and something about getting ready to run…
Her fingers tighten and she’s gone three steps before you get your head back into gear. She’s taller, just, but your legs are longer and it’s a race back to the truck. A race against each other, just for the sheer fun of life and this moment, and a race against the flames before they hit the stores.
You sit in the back, with her and some of the others and when the lab blows up you are nearly deafened. It’s like a bomb. It’s better then a bomb and Ajedrez is still laughing. You could kiss her, but you are too busy devouring the orange and red smoke that mushrooms into the night sky with your hungry, greedy eyes.
You can taste blood and smoke and the wound on your jaw is stinging like a bitch, but you feel so alive. So alive. And you can’t help but laugh.
--
It takes you a while to come down from your high, but that’s okay. The next time you see Fi, you can smile without it hurting and that’s the main thing.
You leave a note for Ajedrez with the Bar.
Thank you.
--
“Is it normally like that?”
Ajedrez is sitting in the corner of the booth, eyes closed. You can’t decide if she reminds you more of a great, lazy cat or a wolf.
“Sometimes. When I’m with my boys, it is. I don’t let the rest of the cartel treat me like that.”
“I thought you said that you didn’t lead anyone,” you murmur, remembering the way the men, grown and experienced and cynical as any soldier, followed her into the valley. Ajedrez opens her eyes and the light catches them. For a moment, they glint rich red-brown.
(a lioness, you think; she’s not solitary enough for a leopard. Or jaguar, if you are going by geography)
“I don’t. Not really.”
“You lead them. I think,” and you pull your glass closer, “that they would follow you into hell and back, AJ.”
“Maybe,” she says, and Sands’s lighter goes snap, click, snap.
--
Sometimes when Ajedrez comes into the Bar, she seems tense and on edge. Like when she was Bound, but somehow worse. That was the nervous energy of someone trapped and caged and frantic that the jailer has lost the key; this is the nervous energy of someone whose recently righted world is starting to go deeply wrong and she can’t help but fight.
Fight to keep it together or maybe just fight, you haven’t decided yet.
She won’t say what is wrong. You ask and she laughs, tosses her gloriously thick hair over a curved shoulder and says that it is just cartel politics. But then her lips twist and she stares at the flames with eyes that are sometimes black and sometimes brown and always unreadable.
You worry.
It doesn’t seem to help.
--
One night in the Milliways autumn you see Ajedrez stumble down the stairs and head straight to the bar. Her hair is a tangled mess, her shirt is half undone, and when you get close you can see that her eyes are wide and staring at nothing.
You also see the burns like fingermarks. On her face and neck, circling one wrist; red and painful and they stand out against her brown skin as she drinks tequila straight from the bottle.
You have, to borrow a popular phrase, a really bad feeling about this.
“What happened?”
Ajedrez blinks, and when she looks at you, you have the uncomfortable sensation that she is looking through you. No, not through. Into. As if picturing what you would look like without your skin, and wondering if that would make her feel better.
“He,” and her voice is a rasp. She coughs, clears it, tries again. “He said that I went looking for him. A door I hadn’t seen before, and he opened it and said my name.”
“Who?” But you think you know who, so you change the question. “Why?”
“They’re dead,” Ajedrez whispers. “They are all dead. And I’m the only one left.” She shuts her eyes and sways on the stool, and you need all your supernatural speed to catch her before she hits the floor.
--
Ruin helps you carry her to your room. He takes off her shoes as you pull back the sheets and Ajedrez sprawls almost lifelessly across them. She looks, you think, very brown and very vulnerable.
The burns seem even worse now.
“Legs,” Ruin says quietly, and you turn and glare at him. She’s fallen from the daughter straight to the father and some part of you can’t help but be angry.
“What?”
He runs a hand through his shaggy hair and looks down at the Mexican woman sprawled over your bed.
“You can’t,” he says at last, “help everyone.”
“Yes,” you tell him, “I can. But for now, I’m going to settle for punching the Devil.”
Ruin glances at you in a show of mock(ing) confusion.
“Which one?”
--
Belial. Satan. The Devil.
Well, whatever. His lip still splits as you send your fist into it and he still bleeds red. But the hand that he uses to grab your wrist burns, and that’s not terribly human of him.
“Now really, my dear,” he says mildly. You want to spit in his face and only just restrain yourself.
“Leave her alone.”
“Who?” It’s a sly smile, his sly smile, and even through your protective fury you feel yourself react to it. Only a little bit, though. You are way passed being merely pissed off.
“You know perfectly well who.”
“Ah, yes. Sheldon’s little Mexican. Pretty thing, don’t you think? All those curves, all those buttons to press…” He is running his thumb over your skin and you barely even notice.
“Leave her alone, asshole.”
“Now, Mary Anne…she came looking for me. And I’m hardly going to turn down a lovely little piece like her, am I? I do so love the Catholic girls. They know how to fall.”
“She-”
“She is a grown woman,” Belial says smoothly, overriding you. “And fully capable of choosing her own destruction if she so desires. She gambled away a life of crime and passion with that agent of hers, and for what? Her family is gone, her cartel is in ruins, her cause is dead. The soldier put aside everything, sacrificed chances and people and dreams, and now all that is left is the desire to fall. Could I really be so cruel as to deny her that?”
You wrench your hand away and try to rub away the burning sensation his fingers have left.
“I won’t let you have her,” you tell him, and something in the universe goes click.
Belial smiles.
“My, my. That does sound like a challenge, doesn’t it?”
--
Ajedrez is in the bathroom when you step into your otherwise empty room. She’s standing topless in front of the mirror, hands braced against the sink and her head bowed and all you can see from behind is her hair and her yellow bra and those burns.
She is far, far too still.
“Ajedrez?” Your voice is soft, but she flinches as if you shouted. Slowly, she lifts her head and looks at you via the mirror. In the light, her eyes are a beautiful mahogany, but just as lifeless.
Suddenly, you see it. You can see the knowledge and the possible futures and you can see what Ajedrez could become. Could.
Not will.
“Mary Anne.”
You hover in the doorway and watch as her lips twist. You can see the welts on her back, the press of fingers and hands around the scars of bullets and knives. The area just below the small of her back is red and blistered, but you know that it’ll all heal clean.
“I-”
“You know,” she says then, interrupting you (it seems to be your night for it), “I had a tattoo on my back. LQ, the Latin Queens. From when I went loco in San Antonio. Big and chunky but it…it was mine.”
Was.
Your eyes fall to the concentration of blisters and she laughs. Low and harsh and more then a little mad.
“All gone, now. All gone.”
“AJ…” You take a step forward and she takes a step to the side as if it is a choreographed dance. But when she stumbles over the hem of her jeans all grace is lost. She ends up a crumpled heap on the floor, hands pressing against her temples and breath coming shallow and fast.
You squat down in front of her, balancing easily on the balls of your feet.
“AJ, look at me.”
She doesn’t move, so you reach out and push her chin up with your fingers. You look into her eyes, her face, and wish that she would cry. She might not feel better, but you would. This silence, even with the shaking shoulders, is unnerving.
Especially with Belial’s smile fresh in your mind.
“AJ…”
“My name is Beatriz. Beatriz fucking Barillo.”
“What is more real, Ajedrez? The name you are given or the name that you choose?” She doesn’t answer and you let your hand drop with sigh.
“Come on then, lovely, lets get those burns looked at.”
--
You’ve been in a war before, but this is different. This is personal, the only casualty a lovely and likable woman that you met by chance. You don’t think that she is lost, not yet, but she certainly isn’t here.
The Ajedrez in the Bar is now cynical and bitter with flashes of caustic humour. Sometimes, you think you see the laughing girl who had pulled you to the truck before she vanishes into someone on the fast track to self-destruction. She annoys, she pushes and shoves until she is pushed and shoved back and then she laughs. She walks into the Bar with burns like fingermarks and you grit your teeth.
It’s like watching Sands, and you wonder if this is what happened to him.
It’s like watching yourself and Ruin all those months and months ago, and you wish that you hadn’t thought that. That was different, you protest to yourself. That was a…it was an accident, a collision. We never meant to start anything. This is all on purpose.
(somehow, that doesn’t actually help and it just gives you the urge to apologize to your friends)
--
She gets into a fight with Sands. Out by the lake one cold day, and you wonder if it is the anniversary of their first one. They know each other well, so well, and this time there are no witnesses, no Mal or Random to stop them, no restraint.
They are tearing each other apart, and you know on some level that that is precisely what they want. What they crave. Pull out the guns, pull out the knives, and say the hundred nasty, hurtful things that they want to scream, and don’t leave the other standing alone again.
Well.
Not on your watch, because a) you are a bitch like that and b) you have a little on-going disagreement with Belial as to the state of Ajedrez’s wellbeing.
You reach them just as Sands shoves her back, hard. Her fist smacks into your open hand, and quick as quick you close your fingers around hers before looking at Sands.
“Enough.”
He snarls at you and she struggles to get free. You let her go only to grab her wrist and she goes rigid at the pain. Burns are the worst, after all. He steps back, rubs the back of his head and just glares at you.
“Mary Anne, fuck off.”
“No,” you tell him, sweetly.
“Mary Anne, please.” That is Ajedrez, voice husky from anger and other things.
“No, I don’t think I will.”
Sands smiles, blandly and insincerely.
“What are you going to do, stop us?”
“Mmm, yes.”
He moves then, feinting to the side with the knife and then lunging in. Your hand snaps out automatically and you feel the blade slash your wrist. You also feel your hand snaking around and grabbing his anyway.
You’re not entirely sure what to do, you are just so sick of their fighting and the hatred that only comes from true love gone wrong that you just pull. You reach down into their minds and pull the first things that flash, searching for memories of them.
What you forgot is that you’d get the memories as well.
You get Ajedrez as a little girl in a pink cotton dress, lying on sun-warmed tiles and tormenting a shiny beetle with a pin. You get Sands as a little boy, gravely explaining to his baby brother how the man lives on the moon. You get her screams for her father as they set her on fire and you get him holding the body of his cat, named for his dead brother, in his hands and trying not to cry. She’s playing with two monkeys in the garden and he’s being stood up on prom night. You see them kill their first men and lose their first innocence. You get laughter and blood, death and the flickering quality of every day life. Violence and normality, twined around each other and marking Sands and Ajedrez for life. You struggle through the random images, trying to find…
There.
You see him walking over to her in a club, hear her ringing laughter. You see her ignoring him at work, telling him to take a hike. You see him watching and flirting and making her heart beat fast despite herself, you see her coming to work on a Saturday in very short denim shorts with a split lip from her then-boyfriend, you see him shoving her against her desk and kissing her. You see the seduction in a matter of seconds, but you feel it. Both sides, at once.
You see the occasionally awkward process of two people trying to slip and slide into compatibility, and you see the fights. Screaming, painful, but you see them make up time and time again. You see the mornings of shared coffee and bitching about work, you see him slide into bed at some ungodly hour of the morning and her moving automatically to curl around him. You see her pale and unconscious in a hospital ward while he holds her hand and waits for her to wake up and you see her sit beside him on some church steps and rest her head against his shoulder. You see her upset and crying and you see him gather her into his arms and murmur that it’ll be okay, it’ll be okay.
You see them laughing as she drags him out onto the patio to dance in the rain and you see them holding up a MacDonald’s before getting into a gunfight with a Mexico City gang.
You see them fitting together like the proverbial hand and glove and you shove that into their brains.
And that’s all you meant to show them, but you are new at this and the vision escapes your slippery-fingered grasp.
You see her sitting at a café, trying not to study the clock as he sits somewhere else and talks to a little fat man with a patch over his right eye. You see him stumble into her room as she informs him that he is paying for the lock before she fires the gun that he had given her. You see him offer her chance to escape, nonchalant and cocky and you see her grin as he leaves. You see her father backhand her or maybe he shoots her and she’s left on the ground, staring into nothing while Sands is on the operating table screaming, no but she can’t as she lets the Mariachi go and smiles at Sands in the café and murmur that he didn’t see it coming and then he has his eyes gouged out…
Oops, you half think to yourself as was and could have been and might be pan out and tighten their grip on the three of you.
You see her stop him before he leaves and explain in tumbling words who she is and could they leave now, please. Modern day Bonnie and Clyde, they are killed again and again and live again and again. They have a little boy, a little girl, a house somewhere that no one has heard of and two unmarked graves all at once.
She doesn’t tell him who she is and he kills her as she kisses him and stares sightlessly at the sky before he falls and she kills him as she stands there and they kill at each and she bleeds to death on a smoky street with his blood covering her face. He comes to Milliways and she follows from unconscious habit.
They kill each other. Again, and again, and again. He kills her and she kills him and they are both left with nothing but bitter regret in their mouths before they follow the other. Sometimes within a matter of moments, other times months or years, but it’s always a downward spiral. They work things out in the Bar, fragile and uneasy and he digs at her for years and she stays because she deserves it and they split, again, and she goes running to Belial while he gets himself killed by Ramon as the Bar’s second murder victim. She’s shot in front of an old blue farmhouse and he lets her die he is shot as he runs towards her he drives her to the hospital and he leaves and he comes back and they go and find their son. You attempt to gain some control again, and follow that future to a doctor placing their daughter in Sands’s arms and he whispers into her baby ear that he’ll kill anyone who hurts her and she’s eight while her brother is twelve and talking to Ajedrez about football and she tugs on his sleeve, Daddy can you teach me to shoot a gun and
“Fuck,” Sands whispers, tearing himself away. You blink as the world spins and you, carefully, let go of Ajedrez’s wrist. Sands is shaking, pacing, and she’s just staring at him with too many emotions in her dark eyes to be understood. He flinches and brings up a hand, running it jerkily through his hair.
“Don’t say anything, AJ. Just…don’t.”
What she might have said in reply is lost as you say quite clearly, “Oh, shit,” and fall backwards in a dead faint.
--
You wake to see Ajedrez sitting on the desk, one leg swinging free while her hands clasp her ankle.
“Welcome to the land of the awake, Mary Anne. Interesting…thing that you showed us. Probably award-worthy. Although I am a little pissed off that you interrupted us. We had some really amazing progress happening. The relative merits of being independent and knowing when you are being bullshitted to instead of dumbly swallowing the hierarchical crap before asking for seconds, as opposed to being a malcontent cynic who is only out for himself and his own sick, twisted entertainment instead of believing in something greater then yourself and having the discipline to follow orders, even when you don’t like them. A really in-depth, civilized conversation. Practically a college debate.”
You raise a hand to your head to try and defend yourself against the onslaught of words, and realize that she’s bandaged it for you.
“Thank you,” you say, gesturing to your wrist with your eyes.
“Not a problem. It was worth it to see Sands nearly have a heart attack trying to carry your lily-coloured ass up the stairs. Really, he’s terribly out of shape. I always did tell him that the smoking was bad for him.”
Somehow you manage to mostly suppress a whimper.
“You’re in a fine mood.”
Ajedrez grins at you.
“Yeah, I think I am.”
You attempt to sit up, and feel inordinately cheered when you succeed. Her grin fades to smile, and then she ducks her head. Your eyes fall to the burns on her wrists and you let the silence stretch out.
“So…”
“So. Hello, Mary Anne. Welcome to my humble abode.”
“Not that I’m complaining, but why your room?”
“I couldn’t remember where yours was, and I didn’t see Señor Longshanks-”
“Who?”
“Your husband.”
“Ah.”
“As I was saying. I couldn’t see your dearly beloved anywhere, and Sands doesn’t have a room anymore, so…it was mine by default.”
“You were talking?”
Ajedrez bites her bottom lip.
“Um. Sorta.” A quick shrug, topic now off-limits. You swing your legs out of the bed and wait for the room to stop doing the cha-cha around your head.
“Why Belial, AJ?” You ask then, quietly, not looking at her. “Why are you….why?”
“Because he gives me what I need.”
“Which is?” You know the answer, both because of your intuition and because sometimes Ajedrez is scarily like yourself, but you have to hear it from her own lips.
“Pain. Lots, and lots, of pain. You can’t feel anything when you are dead, and if I am alive I can go track down my hijo de puta of an ex-boyfriend, and carve out his heart for turning us over to the Feds.”
“You have,” you inform her then, “the worst taste in men of anyone that I have ever seen. Including myself. And if you knew the rest of my friends…”
She just laughs. The sound is rich and genuinely amused, and you think that maybe she isn’t lost yet.
“I know. They keep on trying to kill me. Maybe they don’t like my sense of humour.”
--
Things should be better after that. Should be, but they aren’t, because the world isn’t fair. If anything, they are worse. Sands now avoids the both of you with an ease that you find maddening even as you are amazed at his skill, and Ajedrez goes back to Belial time and time again.
It should be better, if he only gave her physical pain. That you could understand, deal with, not mind and all of that.
But that’s not what the Devil is about. Honey-tongued and poison-tongued, he reduces her to tears even as she whispers please. Please, please, oh god, what have I done, oh please I want to die please, amante, please.
He plays her like a guitar and then smirks as you try and drag her back into the world and conversation.
You think that you are losing.
You hate the fact that you are losing her.
--
One night as you sit on the couch, she comes to you crying. You move to open your arms but she falls to her knees instead, and curls up with her head resting against your knee. It can’t be comfortable, but she isn’t moving. You stroke her gloriously thick and wavy (and now almost hopelessly tangled) hair and glare at the Devil as he walks to the front door.
She’s crying in Spanish, soft and tangled with Nahuatl and English, and your fingers tighten.
“Stop it, Ajedrez,” and you pull her head back. “Don’t go to him, you don’t have to…it’s not worth this.”
Ajedrez pulls back and there is anger in her eyes. Well, it’s better then before. It’s an emotion.
“It’s no worse than anything you’ve done.”
“I didn’t-”
“So just general self-destruction is better then it being for a purpose, Mary Anne?”
“You can’t…Ajedrez, your family are dead. And once you kill your ex, what do you have left? Once he’s dead, it’s all over!”
She smiles and gets to her feet. The firelight catches her face, all Aztec angles and impracticality.
“Don’t do it, Ajedrez.”
“You,” she says quite calmly, “have no right to tell me what to do.”
“I am your friend.”
“Sorry, not good enough,” and she walks away.
--
Ajedrez leaves the Bar as soon as her door comes back.
You act very mature and do not go and antagonize a certain Irish-sounding gentleman.
Ruin tells you that he is astounded.
You tell him to shut up and kiss you.
(he is, occasionally, very obliging)
--
The waiting is the worse part. Waiting, waiting, waiting; you look up every time that the front door opens and out of the corner of your eye you notice that Sands does the exact same thing.
Who knows, it might even be for the same reason.
Might be.
--
When she comes back, she leaves blood on the door and its handle. Not really her fault, her hands are slick with the stuff. Drenched blood-red up to her elbows and you have the phrase carve out his heart running through your head. You look at the knife in her hand, and reflect that sometimes it’s nice knowing people for whom that saying isn’t a metaphor.
Then you look up into her blank eyes.
Blank, empty, but you know Ajedrez well enough by now to know that sooner or later, she’s going to break.
And this time, there might be no coming back.
You see her sway and drop the knife and you mutter, ‘Oh no you don’t,’ before you run towards her. You kick the door shut and open it again. A pristine white beach with a violet-red sky lays beyond the doorway and your grab her by the arm.
“Come on, Ajedrez.”
“What, Mary Anne-” And you haul her through.
--
You stand on a beach. The sand is pure white, untouched and unspoiled, powder-fine. The sea is a shade of jade unknown to the human eye, and the sky at the height of the day is a cool violet-red. Now it is late afternoon, almost evening, and the sky is darker, richer. There is a sun, but it seems far away in the cloudy sky, and three moons hang in the sky.
Ajedrez falls to her knees, gape-mouthed in shock.
“Oh, sweet Mary. Where am I?”
You slip off your shoes and wriggle your toes in the powder soft sand. And then you straighten, cross your arms and regard her coolly with your too-blue eyes.
“You are at a crossroads. If you want, I can turn around and open the door again and let you fuck your way to damnation or whatever it is that you want. Or you can come with me and hear out a proposal. If you say no, I’ll return you to Milliways. If yes, well, then whatever you do is up to you.”
She sits back on her heels, and automatically raises a hand to push back her heavy mass of hair before it catches her eye. Drying blood, drying sticky blood now covered with that pure white sand. You can only imagine how her skin is crawling as she rubs her hands, both of them, against her jeans to try and clean them.
“The sea is right there, you know.”
She pulls off her boots and gets to her feet, putting her hands on her hips.
“Mary Anne?”
“Yes?”
“Sometimes you can be a real bitch.” And then she stalks towards the sea.
“Yes, I can,” you whisper to yourself, letting your shoulders slump while she isn’t watching. You don’t know if she’ll say yes, you just hope that she will. She’d fit, she’d fit so well and, well, Ruin had said that you would find a project, didn’t he?
You just wish that Ajedrez didn’t require so much tough love when she’s like this. You think that, and you check who is the castle, and then you grin.
Oh, yes.
He’d be perfect.
You are grinning happily to yourself as she comes back, looking marginally better. Her jeans rolled up to her knees, and her arms are mostly free of the blood. Her fingernails are still caked with it, but nothing a good bath won’t cure.
She’s regarding you warily, but the blankness in her eyes has been pushed back.
At least, for the moment.
“Okay, then, so what’s this proposal?”
“Not for me to offer, lovely. I mean I could, but I won’t. Come with me?”
“I don’t,” she points out, “really have a choice, do I?”
“There is always a choice.”
“Whatever.”
--
You hand her over to Tower. He raises an eyebrow as you explain telepathically something of the circumstances and what you saw that day in the bathroom.
Highly unusual.
You grin at him.
I thought you might like it.
We’ll see. He hides a smile and then turns to Ajedrez. Ajedrez, who is clutching her boots to her chest and eyeing the both of you as if she wants to bolt.
“Now, Ajedrez, was it?” Tower says, placing a hand on her back and guiding her to the library.
“I think you know perfectly well who I am,” she snaps. You resist the urge to cackle, just, and decide to go exploring.
After all, you have some time to kill.
--
She’s sitting in a courtyard in when you find her. She’s sitting on the step next to the column and staring at nothing for all that her face is towards the fountain. She hears your steps and jumps to her feet, whirling around to face you in a flurry of brown hair and limbs.
“What…he…”
“Yes?”
“The fucking Knight of Swords?!”
You raise an eyebrow at her.
“I think it suits you quite well.”
She’s shaking her head, moving backwards and shaking her head and you wonder if she’ll topple into the fountain.
“No, I can’t…I’m not…”
“Why not? It suits you. The Knight of Swords is skilful, clever, decisive, fierce and courageous, possessed with a swift and bright energy-“
“Oh, stop sounding like a fucking book.”
“-you are goal-orientated. When you know what to do, you go out and you don’t rest until it is done. You consider things, but once you decide on something, your mind can’t be changed. You can be fanatical, single-minded. You know how to plan things out, how to fight and how to win, but on the reverse you fight for no reason. You can be obstinate and malicious, and you can be temperamental and cruel as easily as you are passionate and practical.”
She’s rubbing her mouth, but she’s not looking away.
“This is a card of duality, of good and bad at once, and it is a break from the past. Something, a relationship or world or job, has ended; you are released and free to forge a new destiny. You are not a general or a leader, but neither are you a blind follower. You uphold what you think is true and worthy, and you are loyal.”
“Are you talking about the card there, or me?”
“Both.”
“He…the Tower. He said all that. And, I…oh god.” And her face crumples. You start to move forward, but then you feel a hand at your elbow.
“Let me,” Reue says, quietly. You stand to one side and let Ruin’s daughter past. Reue, Sorrow, the Three of Swords. You watch as Ajedrez sits down, sharply, on the step leading up to the fountain and you watch as Reue folds Ajedrez into her arms and just hold her as the woman cries.
It’s only fitting, after all; Ajedrez has spent quite a few years in Reue’s sphere of influence, and maybe the time has finally come for a gentle hand and soothing voice.
Silently, you walk away. You can do nothing more here.
--
You have dinner with the Family, only half paying attention to the talk and gossip and bickering.
They talk about Ajedrez.
You listen to Tower scolding them for being conservative about getting a new family member so soon, you hear Victory say that it might be nice to have another woman to spar with, you hear…
You hear them all talk, some for and some against and all acting like a loud, boisterous, argumentative family, and you are glad that Ajedrez, only child and reeling, has elected to stay in the suite that Reue found for her. Her nerves really, really wouldn’t be up to this right now, and it’d be a shame to put bullet holes in the walls.
--
Balancing a try on one hand, you knock on the door with the other.
“Ajedrez?”
There is a long pause, and then your hear a simple,
“Come in.”
The room would be dark if it weren’t lit by the three full moons, their light shining in through the large open window to your left. Ajedrez is sitting on the wide window still, back against the frame. There is still room for another person to sit, so you place the tray down on the coffee table and walk over.
“I brought you some dinner.”
A flash of a wan smile, and you notice that she has Sands’s lighter out.
“I can see that. Mucho gracias, mi reina.” Snap, click, snap.
You think about saying ‘I’m not your queen’, but figure that at this point it’ll be counter-productive. So you settle for asking,
“Am I?”
She bites her bottom lip, looks out the window to the sea.
Snap, click, snap.
“I don’t know,” she says, softly. “You could be. All too easily, I think. It’s…it’s tempting.”
“So…” You draw one knee up, hug it to your chest.
“So it feels like running.”
“Ajedrez…you have nothing left.”
She looks at you, her eyes black in the moonlight and her skin oddly pale. You turn your head and watch the moons play on the waves.
“You…there is nothing to go back to in your Mexico. Nothing to run from. Do you believe me?”
“I believe that you may just have an ulterior motive.” You glance at her, sharply, and she grins. “Well, you do.”
“And so I have. I think you would be a good Knight of Swords, and I also think that you are too good a person to waste because you believe…whatever it is you believe you are doing with Belial. And if offering you the chance to be a card is the way out of it, then I will do it.”
“It’s a question of penance, I guess.”
“Penance.” The word is flat in your mouth.
“I’m…I’m not a very good Catholic, but I am Mexican and we are Catholic. We may be atheist, or whatever else, but there are saints’ days and fiestas and churches and you argue with an upbringing like that. You don’t escape it.”
“Do you still believe in God?”
“Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t. It’s a little hard to tell.”
“Ajedrez…” You rub your temple with one hand and regard her wearily. She smiles back, which means absolutely nothing.
Snap, click, snap.
“You know, that is very annoying.”
“Mmm, do you want me to stop?”
“Does it make you feel better?”
“Yes.”
“Then no, I don’t.”
Ajedrez laughs softly.
“You know, my father and Iago would have ordered me to stop a long, long time ago.”
“Well, I don’t order people.”
Snap, click-
“I think that’s your problem.”
“…huh?”
“You don’t like being a queen. Oh, I don’t mean Queen of Swords, I think you like that well enough. No, I don’t think you like being a queen.” You shift uncomfortably, and her smile widens. “See? I have no problem with being a knight, it’s a lot like being a solider and I am already that. I like it, it’s me. But you, chica…you don’t like it.”
“And what is your deeply revealing and intuitive reason as to why?” You ask her, amused.
“You don’t want the responsibility. Not because you are lazy, but because you are scared. Fucked up little Mary Anne, how could you lead anyone? Order anyone? To have people rely on you not as a friend but as a leader…well, I think that scares you.”
- snap.
You stopped smiling after the second sentence and now you are just staring at her. She smiles again and you swallow.
Hard.
“And what,” you murmur, “is your solution to that?”
“Go out. Find a world somewhere, join up in an army or a mercenary gang, and work your way up. Just a matter of practice, if you have it. I think you could, you’ll just have to find it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Oh, shush. Besides, if I do this, I’m going to be following you.”
“You’re what?”
“You are the Queen.” she says with a wicked grin, and you think that she is enjoying this far too much, “If I am your Knight, chica…a Knight is supposed to protect her Queen, no? And if you read the stories, you are supposed to send me on all these stupid quests and-”
“And you are supposed to be in love me.”
“Oh, god no. Aside from that bit.”
“I think I may be insulted.”
“Hey, if you were a guy I’d be so checking out your ass. As it is, you’re a friend.”
“And your Queen?”
Ajedrez traces a fading burn scar on her wrist.
“We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”
You don’t mention how much you hate waiting; it won’t help, and by the trace of apology in her voice, you think that she already knows.
Snap, click, snap.
--
You take her back to Milliways, like you said you would.
Fuck you hate waiting.
--
You see her, sometimes, but for the most part she avoids you and you let her. No sense pushing, she’ll tell you aye or nay soon enough.
You see her talking with Sands, and yes, they are actually talking. Softly, seriously, and later she says that she’ll see where that leads them. She stands to go, kisses his cheek; he ignores her, stares into the fire. But later you notice that he reaches up and touches where her lips had pressed.
You remember the flashing images that you saw, and wonder what happened to the man that Ajedrez had loved so very much.
“If he forgives me,” Ajedrez says a couple days later over some coffee, “then we have somewhere to start from. If not, then ni modo.”
Ni modo; it can’t be helped, nothing to be done. Sometimes you wish that you didn’t have this gift of languages, but her fatalistic shrug is translation enough.
“Have you…”
“Not yet.”
--
One day, she walks over to you with burns on her neck and arms.
“I’ll do it.”
You blink and raise your head to look at her; she stares back at you with eyes that are dark and angry.
“I’ll be your Knight, Mary Anne. As soon as the burns heal, anyway.”
“Okay.” Your voice is soft, and you think you should feel triumphant. Instead, you just look at the burns and the pain that screams from the lines of her body, and wish that it didn’t have to be like this.
“Good. And now to the infirmary I go.”
And with that, she stalks away, Sands’s lighter a pacifier in her hand.
Snap, click, snap.
--
Belial seems more then a little annoyed when you see him next, although he is hiding it well.
You smile at him, sweetly, and don’t go over.
Responsible Adults ‘R’ Us.
--
“Are you sure?” Ajedrez smiles faintly at you and you continue talking. “You can’t back away from this once the tattoo is in place, you know.”
“Mary Anne,” and her voice is a woman’s purr and a warrior’s report all at once. “Mary Anne, I have been tattooed once before. And I want this.”
“Why?”
It’s the first time that you’ve asked her, and for a moment she doesn’t answer. She just lifts the hem of her simple white dress so that she doesn’t trip down the stairs. The dress is backless and bound at the waist with a cord of silver, with a silver clasp at the back of her neck. It’s the most feminine thing that you’ve ever seen her wear, and it suits her surprisingly well.
Her hair, like yours had been, is twisted up and tied into a knot.
“It’s not the power, if that is what is worrying you. As far as I see at the moment, the power that you…we have is not that great, at least not as I am used to. It’s the power of offering choices and showing paths, not glory and riches. It’s….showing people that, like you did with Sands and me. It’s seeing things like my grandmother, knowing things and helping when you can. It’s a purpose I think I could believe in, that I do believe in.
Does that make you feel better?”
“A little,” you admit, and are rewarded by her smile.
--
You lead her to the little used back room and open the door. The room is lined with candles and Tower stands next to a high table. Cynical Tower, with the Socrates-like ability to make people think even as they get angry at their ill-considered ideals and thoughts being destroyed; destroyed, only to have the freedom to start again anew and afresh with a stronger foundation.
Annoying, maddening Tower, and you were fairly certain that he and Ajedrez would get along.
Once she stopped screaming at him.
(you have a feeling that he won’t let you forget her reaction to the offer any time soon)
Ajedrez walks over and sits on the table, the table tall enough for him to work at while standing, and for a moment she just looks at the door. And then she draws in a deep breath and swings her legs up. She settles with her arms folded and her forehead resting against her wrist.
And so Tower begins to paint.
Unlike Choice did with you, he starts with the hilt and works his way down. The pommel, perfectly circular and just an outline at the moment, rests at the base of her neck and the curved cross-guard sweeps across her shoulder-blades. The length of the sword runs down her spine, and you can see that it is different to yours. Darker, heavier, wider; the more practical, working sword belongs to the Knight, after all. Not for her the rapier delicacy, nor the pretty gold trim; that she leaves, and trusts, to you.
A Knight defends her Queen, you find yourself thinking, and then wishing that you knew what that will entail.
Well, you’ll both find out sooner or later.
The blade, you are interested to note, is double-edged and double-hued. On one side it is iron, dark and cold; on the other, dancing silver steel. There is a shield on the pommel, white and black, with an iron blade in the white and a steel one in the black so that it is almost yin and yang. It’s a detail that not many will see, but you see it and will remember. Tower paints copper wire twining around the grip before standing back. He puts the paintbrush down and whispers “Esto perpetua”.
The sword glows against Ajedrez’s brown skin, all shades of contrasting grey with the slim richness of the copper wire, and you see her fingers tighten around her lower arms. Slowly, as the glow fades, she begins to move.
You push yourself off the wall and walk over. She looks up, almost in a daze.
“Hey, lovely,” you say, quietly. She smiles at you, and her eyes are dark. Dark and deep as the night sky, and just as unfathomable. It is then that the reality of what she has done and chosen crashes in on her. The knowledge of millions of various paths - walked and unwalked --known from those in her own sphere and known second-hand through the other cards. All those paths and choices, all hers to oversee and Know.
And as you watch her stiffen and clutch the edge of the table, you watch her eyes. They seem to, almost impossibly, darken before the light catches them. Her eyes are now brown. Brown as wood, brown as mahogany and stained maple, but it’s that rich red-brown of living trees instead of the lifeless beauty of polished boards.
Most people, you think, would just see black and brown. But then again, most people are mortal.
“Oh,” Ajedrez says, almost too soft to hear. “Oh, my.”
“Interesting, isn’t it?”
“Si.” And then her smile turns impish as she slides off the table. “You still need to get your ass down to a proper war.”
You hear Tower snort as he packs up the paints, and you just put your hands on your hips.
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah, really.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah-huh.”
The exchange is beginning to have the faint overtones of ‘well, your mom’, and it’s so utterly ridiculous that you can’t help but laugh. It’s her way of dealing with things, you know and now Know; to make jokes, to laugh and tease and another person might think that she wasn’t taking it all seriously.
But you know that she is.
You see it in her eyes, now old and shifting colour as the light hits them. You see it in the way she holds herself, with the quiet pride and silent purpose that she had had under Iago, only more so. You see it and it makes you smile.
The Knight of Swords.
“Come then, sister, lets meet the rest of the family.” And with that, you open the door and lead the way.
FANDOM: Milliways
RATING: R
WORD COUNT: 10, 799
WARNINGS: Contains off-screen violence and on-screen results of it, also mentions one fully consentual, adult incestuous couple in passing.
DISCLAIMER: The poem Mary Anne quotes from is ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, by Oscar Wilde. The various interpretations of tarot cards come from a variety of books, websites and, ultimately, my own view of them. Nearly all of the characters in this, including the tarot cards as actual personifications, are not mine. The description of the tarot cards’ beach has been taken from what Saundra has already written, I have merely lifted and edited.
This is Ajedrez. Beautiful and Mexican, all curves and shadows and tomboyish enthusiasm. Sands’s ex, although the idea of Sands going out with anyone, let alone the genuinely likable AJ, gives you a headache.
“You know, my grandmother sometimes does readings.” She says one night, looking through her tequila glass at the rest of the Bar.
“Oh?” You asks, glancing over. You are the Queen of Swords, not as new as you used to be, and Ajedrez rings a bell, somewhere. Right now, that bell is ringing Sorrow despite her quick smiles.
“For the gringo tourists and hippies in Tepoztlán. Part of the whole bruja and voodoo business.”
“As she ever done a reading for you?
“Once. And then Abuelo said it was heathen nonsense. I can’t even remember what she said.” Ajedrez tilts her head back, watches the ceiling. “Would you do one, Mary Anne? Just a card? I’m curious.”
You smile, a little sadly.
“You know, not everyone can be summed up in just one.” Her head tips forward and she regards you with her wide dark eyes. She smiles back, faintly.
“I’m not that complicated, chica.”
This is a lie. But you draw yourself together, focusing and stilling your mind and self. A deep breath in, a deep breath out and you hold up a card. Ajedrez leans closer, tilting her head slightly.
“And what, oh wise and beautiful one, does the Three of Swords mean when it is home?”
So you tell her. Pain and heartbreak and Sorrow. The fragile balancing act of the previous card has shattered, and now the truth has no choice but to come forward. It hurts, though. What was previously held to be true is now revealed to be lies, or misconceptions. Words and thoughts that have been bottled up can now come out into the open, to be fought out and argued if Ajedrez is to move on. And it’ll hurt. It’ll hurt and hurt, but it’s up to her if what comes out of it all is blood or poison.
The dreaded Three of Swords, piercing a heart that can’t help but bleed.
Two sentences in, Ajedrez goes as pale as she can and tips back another shot.
“Fuck.”
Privately, you agree.
--
There is an itching in the back of your head. Like a swarm of angry wasps, buzzing and stinging incessantly. It’s hard to sleep, hard to concentrate.
It’s the feeling of Random trying to hold reality together. It’s the feeling of his siblings, of Julian and Fiona and all the others you have never met, fighting to help him. This is a war you can’t fight, can’t help. You can only watch and wait.
To hold yourself together, you take to drinking.
(it dulls the connection. nothing else.)
--
Ajedrez has acquired a lighter. Nothing fancy, just silver, but she’s snapping it open and shut, on and off, to a beat that only she can hear. You stop and look, figure what the hell and walk over.
As you sit, she glances up and takes the cigarette out of her mouth to grin at you.
“Hola, Mary Anne.”
“Hey. I didn’t know you smoked.”
She glances at the cigarette, brown and slim like her fingers, and huffs a laugh.
“I don’t. It’s Sands’s.”
You quirk up a brow.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Found him passed out and it was too good an opportunity to lose.”
And maybe it’s just because you are drunk, still drunk, or maybe it’s because you are feeling old and weary, or maybe you just tired of the other woman having Sorrow engraved in her soul, or maybe…
The point is that you stop your thoughts from looping over and over and make yourself say,
“Lovely, maybe you shouldn’t.”
Ajedrez looks up, and her full lips twist. Dimly, you can hear her foot jiggling up and down but you are just staring into her flat brown eyes. Flat and empty and something behind them has broken. Has been broken, you realize, for quite some time. Years, maybe.
“Why not?” And her voice is a soft, dangerous purr. Snap, click, snap, goes the lighter.
“Because maybe you need to let him go.”
Ajedrez watches you, smiling faintly. “Yeah?”
The alcohol is starting to catch up with you. It’s making the room spin and you grip the table.
“Yeah,” you tell her. Firmly. The wasps are back, and you just want to be sick.
She snorts. Snap, click, snap.
“I’ll let him go when he lets me go. In the meantime, chica, it fills in the time.”
Snap, click, snap.
--
A couple days later, you are nursing a hangover. Nothing new. Ruin is, too, but he didn’t actually make it downstairs. No, that little piece of masochism he leaves to you. You nurse your coffee and try and avoid the lights.
It’s a little hard to avoid the screaming, though.
Sands and Ajedrez, in the middle of Milliways. You watch, although it’s a little like watching a head-on collision between two passenger trains. In slow motion. Before the trains go over the edge of a cliff.
You can’t tear your eyes away.
She’s punctuating her speech with her hands, he is still. So still, too still, but they both are shouting. She says something. Softly, looking almost stricken and the silence stretches out impossibly long.
You realize that you’ve never seen them together before.
You realize that you’ve never seen Sands lose control like this.
You wonder if you should visit them in the cells.
--
“So,” you say when Ajedrez comes out. “So, was it worth it?”
She looks at you, looks through you with eyes that glint oddly for a moment.
“I don’t know.”
And with that, she walks up the stairs.
--
“So,” you say to Sands as you claim a seat. “So, what did she say?”
“None of your fucking business, sugarbutt,” he snarls.
“You loved her, didn’t you?”
“She’s a traitorous bitch and I killed her.”
“ ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard’.” Sands goes still. You don’t know why, but it is hurting him and sometimes the Queen of Swords is a bitch. And you hate him, still. A little.
“ ‘ Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword.’”
He opens his mouth, shuts it again, and looks at you. For a moment, someone a little deeper, a little more emotional and human peers out of his dark eyes. Someone that Ajedrez loves. And then he pushes the chair back.
“Fuck you, Mary Anne,” and he walks away. You watch him go, and softly continue.
“ ‘ Some kill their love when they are young, And some when they are old; Some strangle with the hands of lust, Some with the hands of gold; The kindest use a knife, because The dead so soon grow cold.’”
--
“I think,” Ajedrez announces one night, “that I am growing mad. Er.”
“Oh?” It’s a murmur as you reach for the tequila bottle.
(you had the dreams again last night, dreams of the wasps escaping from your head and buzzing and stinging and making the whole universe swell and bleed.
in the morning, you always end up throwing up.)
“Yes,” says Ajedrez. “Mad. Completely and utterly loco from lack of meaning and purpose and activity. You shall come down one day to find that I’ve snapped and gone on a shooting spree and have been eaten. Heart cut out and blood poured to fuel the windows, my ribs devoted to the ceiling beams. Or whatever it is that they do here,” she adds and tips back another shot.
“I…don’t know, actually. What they do. Or would.”
“It could be very civilized. Go the route of the Mayans and the Aztecs and the Toltecs. My heart would make the false sun cross the false sky and my blood the real plants grow. I think it makes perfect sense.”
“‘Thought you were Catholic.”
“I am. Just….I’m also Mexican.”
“And crazy.”
“Now that, my dear queen, goes without saying.”
“‘M not your queen.”
“No? No. No, I guess not.” Ajedrez looks at you, and her eyes are oddly compelling. And then she shakes her head.
“I couldn’t do it, you know.”
“Do what?” She tops up your shot, you nod in thanks.
“Be what you are. Tarot card. I couldn’t.”
“Oh?”
“I couldn’t be this for the rest of the eternity. I just…couldn’t.”
“We already have a Three of Swords.”
“Really?”
“My step-daughter, Reue.”
“Fuck. Poor kid. Think we can have another bottle without killing ourselves?”
“I’m immortal.”
“Speak for yourself.”
--
“Tell me about Sands.” It is afternoon, you think, and you’ve just come back from Vietnam. You smell of blood and dirt and green living things and the young Mexican woman just looks at you with her wide dark eyes.
“He is American and annoying and a psychopath. What else did you want to know?”
“Why did you go out with him?”
Ajedrez finishes braiding her thick brown hair and tosses the braid over one shoulder.
“It was either that or kill him, and I figured if it didn’t work I could always shoot him anyway. And then…I don’t know. He made me laugh. Plus,” she adds with a wistful and rueful sigh, “Sands is the kind of man who can kiss you behind your ear and make you feel like you just had kinky sex. Very addictive.”
You think of Sands. Of irritating, twitchy, snarky Sands. You try and match him with kinky sex, and the other woman just laughs at your expression.
--
You see them kissing on the couch, Ajedrez in his lap and her hands framing his face. Sands has one hand pressing against the small of her back and his free fingers tangling in her gloriously thick hair and they kiss as if they are drowning. They kiss as if they are long-lost lovers who have been missing for centuries, and you think that this really can’t end well.
You watch them and you think, Sands isn’t half bad.
You wonder if Ajedrez’s little comment is correct, and then you remember Ramon’s blood spilling across your hands and decide that Ajedrez can keep the irritating little shit.
You wonder what Mal will think.
--
Ajedrez and Mal fight by the lake. Well. It starts off as a fight. Probably fair, too, until Ajedrez gains the upper hand. She’s taught you to fight, so you know her style. Gutter-fighting, sharpened by professional training. At the heart of the federal agent, at the heart of the cartel princess, will always, always be the crazy gangster, and a gangster would never let another girl get away with fucking her man.
Ajedrez, bouncy and likable and now bloody Ajedrez, drags Mal over to the infirmary and then turns herself into security.
You visit her in the cells, although your head feels like it is going to split. You lean against the glass and peer at her through your fingers. She’s sitting on the floor, head against the wall and snapping Sands’s lighter open and shut.
“Was it worth it,” you ask her, not really knowing if you mean the sex or the fight or both. She, she of the bruised face and split knuckles, just smiles. Opens her wide brown eyes and looks at you and smiles. Except for the lighter, she is still. Still and at peace, for the first time that you’ve seen her.
The afterglow of violence.
“Yes, it was.”
--
One day, the wasps leave. You wake up and they aren’t there. You can feel your brothers and sisters, you can feel the reality again. A little different from before, but it’s there.
“Thank you, Random,” you whisper, and fall back asleep.
(you don’t wake up for three days)
--
One day, Ajedrez walks in. From the front door, this time. A little older, and she’s whistling. Dressed as a cowgirl in jeans and a vest and a hat, with one gun on her hip and rifle slung across her back and she’s nearly humming with focused energy.
She looks happy.
You don’t say anything at first, just drink some coffee and watch her.
You can still Sorrow in the shadows of her smile, but there is something else as well. Something, something…the world starts to swim behind your eyes, and you shut your eyes.
Still not well.
--
“What’s up, chica?” You look up and smile.
“I’m good. Yourself?”
She just grins at you.
“Yeah, I’m good. Been a few years. About four. I’m all grown up, I think.”
“And what,” you ask, “constitutes being grown up?”
“Being over thirty. Oh, god. I feel old now.” Ajedrez makes a face, and then laughs. “Not much over that, though. Can you tell?”
“I’m afraid so. But not very much.” Your eyes are wide and innocent and she snorts.
“Thanks for the ego-massage.” She ducks her head under the rifle strap and then leans the weapon against the table. You want to run your hands over it, and are half-tempted to sit on your hands to stop yourself.
“You look good, though.” Ajedrez smiles at that.
“Gracias. I’m just patrolling at the moment, checking out the labs and such.”
“A good leader-”
“Oh, I’m not leading anyone, really. That’s Iago.”
“I can’t see you being a grunt,” you tell her, bluntly.
“Well…I’m not. I order, they obey, but I follow my orders just as much. I’m a good little cartel daughter.”
“And Iago is…”
“My cousin.”
“And you follow him?”
This time, the smile is a soft glow. The glow of a solider in love with her leader. Oh, not in love in love. But it’s love and respect and something almost feudal. A knight and her lord.
“Yeah, I do. I couldn’t…I’m not a leader, Mary Anne. I’m not a general or a king-pin. I’m a solider. Always have been, always will be.”
You look at her, curiously. She shrugs and orders a tequila.
“They wouldn’t follow me, even if I wanted. I’m too female, and I would spend too much time proving that I have just as many balls as they do. So. I scare them enough that they don’t give Iago shit and…well, I can be very scary.”
You look at her wolfish smile, and remember the razor-blade lessons. You remember Mal, the little vampire broken and unconscious on the infirmary bed as Ajedrez walked away, and you remember her sensual languor in the cells. You think and you remember and you give her a smile.
(you remember the green berets and killing for the first time, you remember the terror and the electric feeling that filled your body to bursting, you remember dancing in a pink cardigan with a necklace of tongues and wonder if she is related to the aztecs)
“Good,” you say as your smile widens and sharpens, “for you.”
--
Time passes, both in the Bar and in Vietnam. Time passes in Mexico and Texorami and Amber and sometimes to hurts to see Fiona glow so. You are happy for her; she is your friend, after all. Your close friend (you don’t use the word ‘best’, that is for Ramon. Always, always, always for Ramon), but you had loved Julian so…
Sometimes, it is easier to retreat into the hopeless butchery of Vietnam then it is wishing that you could have everyone that you love.
You don’t say much of this Ajedrez, that’s not how things work between you, but maybe she guesses.
The rifle she leaves at the Bar for you one day is a thing of beauty.
--
The wedding is lovely, managing to be both elegantly cosy and a public ceremony celebrating love, perseverance, and the utter disregard of common morals.
You smile and laugh and dance with both the bride and groom, make polite talk with their siblings (you find that you like the ditzy and leggy Flora despite yourself) before you retreat to Ramon and make snarky comments about the entire event and everyone in it.
You also get very, very drunk.
Ruin, oddly enough, doesn’t even mention it.
You think that you would love him for the rest of eternity just for that.
--
“What you need,” Ajedrez says one day, dropping her cowboy hat onto your head, “is to kill someone.”
“I have,” you inform her with great dignity, “been doing that.”
“Psssh. Knives and bullets. I think you need to blow someone up.” You remember grenades, you remember planes flying overhead and the burning agony of napalm on your legs.
You remember Julian kissing Fiona as if she were something precious.
“And what precisely did you have in mind?”
--
Ajedrez’s Mexico is hot and dry like it should be, and dusty like no one ever mentions. The heat hits you as soon as you step out of the door, but it’s not so bad. Humid is worse. Vietnam is worse.
Or so you keep on telling yourself.
You swallow a mouthful of water, and follow Ajedrez’s boots as she glides across the desert. She hasn’t told you the details, but then you didn’t ask. She just said what and when, and that’s all you wanted to know.
“And, once things get interesting, be prepared to run.”
“Why,” you had asked, and you had been rewarded by one of the most beautiful smiles you have ever seen.
“You’ve never seen a drugs lab blow, have you?”
That was a couple days ago and this is now. This is hot and dense and smoky and you hear a man’s appreciative laugh as you step into the shade.
“Hey, princess, who’s the broad?” You hear someone ask in Spanish, and as your eyes adjust you see Ajedrez gesture.
“She’s with me, boys. No touching.” And then you see her smile. “Save that for the whores you spend so much money on.” Some more laughter, and that’s that. You find a spot between José and Pablo, and just wait for nightfall.
(it’s like being with the green berets. low laughter in the shadows and crude jokes, but they don’t care what you are as long as you are one of the boys. you’ve missed this more then you’ve ever realized, and for a moment you have nothing but envy for the curvy latina woman you call friend.
just for a moment)
--
This is also what you’ve missed. Smoke and haze and screams in the distance. You, all ten of you, have run into the guards and it’s a gunfight. A bullet skims across your jaw and the pain is a kiss of adrenaline.
Oh god, oh god help you, but you love this.
Somehow, you think as you slide behind a building and reload, you are a little past His Mercy now.
Sorry about that, Mom.
--
Ajedrez nearly runs into you. Soot and blood on her face, on her hands and her clothes, and she’s laughing.
“Come on, Mary Anne!”
It’s hard to hear from the here-again-gone-now deafness, but she grabs your arm and hauls you to your feet.
“Come on.”
She jerks her head towards a building hidden by haze, and you remember what she had said. You’ve never seen a drugs lab blow have you, and something about getting ready to run…
Her fingers tighten and she’s gone three steps before you get your head back into gear. She’s taller, just, but your legs are longer and it’s a race back to the truck. A race against each other, just for the sheer fun of life and this moment, and a race against the flames before they hit the stores.
You sit in the back, with her and some of the others and when the lab blows up you are nearly deafened. It’s like a bomb. It’s better then a bomb and Ajedrez is still laughing. You could kiss her, but you are too busy devouring the orange and red smoke that mushrooms into the night sky with your hungry, greedy eyes.
You can taste blood and smoke and the wound on your jaw is stinging like a bitch, but you feel so alive. So alive. And you can’t help but laugh.
--
It takes you a while to come down from your high, but that’s okay. The next time you see Fi, you can smile without it hurting and that’s the main thing.
You leave a note for Ajedrez with the Bar.
Thank you.
--
“Is it normally like that?”
Ajedrez is sitting in the corner of the booth, eyes closed. You can’t decide if she reminds you more of a great, lazy cat or a wolf.
“Sometimes. When I’m with my boys, it is. I don’t let the rest of the cartel treat me like that.”
“I thought you said that you didn’t lead anyone,” you murmur, remembering the way the men, grown and experienced and cynical as any soldier, followed her into the valley. Ajedrez opens her eyes and the light catches them. For a moment, they glint rich red-brown.
(a lioness, you think; she’s not solitary enough for a leopard. Or jaguar, if you are going by geography)
“I don’t. Not really.”
“You lead them. I think,” and you pull your glass closer, “that they would follow you into hell and back, AJ.”
“Maybe,” she says, and Sands’s lighter goes snap, click, snap.
--
Sometimes when Ajedrez comes into the Bar, she seems tense and on edge. Like when she was Bound, but somehow worse. That was the nervous energy of someone trapped and caged and frantic that the jailer has lost the key; this is the nervous energy of someone whose recently righted world is starting to go deeply wrong and she can’t help but fight.
Fight to keep it together or maybe just fight, you haven’t decided yet.
She won’t say what is wrong. You ask and she laughs, tosses her gloriously thick hair over a curved shoulder and says that it is just cartel politics. But then her lips twist and she stares at the flames with eyes that are sometimes black and sometimes brown and always unreadable.
You worry.
It doesn’t seem to help.
--
One night in the Milliways autumn you see Ajedrez stumble down the stairs and head straight to the bar. Her hair is a tangled mess, her shirt is half undone, and when you get close you can see that her eyes are wide and staring at nothing.
You also see the burns like fingermarks. On her face and neck, circling one wrist; red and painful and they stand out against her brown skin as she drinks tequila straight from the bottle.
You have, to borrow a popular phrase, a really bad feeling about this.
“What happened?”
Ajedrez blinks, and when she looks at you, you have the uncomfortable sensation that she is looking through you. No, not through. Into. As if picturing what you would look like without your skin, and wondering if that would make her feel better.
“He,” and her voice is a rasp. She coughs, clears it, tries again. “He said that I went looking for him. A door I hadn’t seen before, and he opened it and said my name.”
“Who?” But you think you know who, so you change the question. “Why?”
“They’re dead,” Ajedrez whispers. “They are all dead. And I’m the only one left.” She shuts her eyes and sways on the stool, and you need all your supernatural speed to catch her before she hits the floor.
--
Ruin helps you carry her to your room. He takes off her shoes as you pull back the sheets and Ajedrez sprawls almost lifelessly across them. She looks, you think, very brown and very vulnerable.
The burns seem even worse now.
“Legs,” Ruin says quietly, and you turn and glare at him. She’s fallen from the daughter straight to the father and some part of you can’t help but be angry.
“What?”
He runs a hand through his shaggy hair and looks down at the Mexican woman sprawled over your bed.
“You can’t,” he says at last, “help everyone.”
“Yes,” you tell him, “I can. But for now, I’m going to settle for punching the Devil.”
Ruin glances at you in a show of mock(ing) confusion.
“Which one?”
--
Belial. Satan. The Devil.
Well, whatever. His lip still splits as you send your fist into it and he still bleeds red. But the hand that he uses to grab your wrist burns, and that’s not terribly human of him.
“Now really, my dear,” he says mildly. You want to spit in his face and only just restrain yourself.
“Leave her alone.”
“Who?” It’s a sly smile, his sly smile, and even through your protective fury you feel yourself react to it. Only a little bit, though. You are way passed being merely pissed off.
“You know perfectly well who.”
“Ah, yes. Sheldon’s little Mexican. Pretty thing, don’t you think? All those curves, all those buttons to press…” He is running his thumb over your skin and you barely even notice.
“Leave her alone, asshole.”
“Now, Mary Anne…she came looking for me. And I’m hardly going to turn down a lovely little piece like her, am I? I do so love the Catholic girls. They know how to fall.”
“She-”
“She is a grown woman,” Belial says smoothly, overriding you. “And fully capable of choosing her own destruction if she so desires. She gambled away a life of crime and passion with that agent of hers, and for what? Her family is gone, her cartel is in ruins, her cause is dead. The soldier put aside everything, sacrificed chances and people and dreams, and now all that is left is the desire to fall. Could I really be so cruel as to deny her that?”
You wrench your hand away and try to rub away the burning sensation his fingers have left.
“I won’t let you have her,” you tell him, and something in the universe goes click.
Belial smiles.
“My, my. That does sound like a challenge, doesn’t it?”
--
Ajedrez is in the bathroom when you step into your otherwise empty room. She’s standing topless in front of the mirror, hands braced against the sink and her head bowed and all you can see from behind is her hair and her yellow bra and those burns.
She is far, far too still.
“Ajedrez?” Your voice is soft, but she flinches as if you shouted. Slowly, she lifts her head and looks at you via the mirror. In the light, her eyes are a beautiful mahogany, but just as lifeless.
Suddenly, you see it. You can see the knowledge and the possible futures and you can see what Ajedrez could become. Could.
Not will.
“Mary Anne.”
You hover in the doorway and watch as her lips twist. You can see the welts on her back, the press of fingers and hands around the scars of bullets and knives. The area just below the small of her back is red and blistered, but you know that it’ll all heal clean.
“I-”
“You know,” she says then, interrupting you (it seems to be your night for it), “I had a tattoo on my back. LQ, the Latin Queens. From when I went loco in San Antonio. Big and chunky but it…it was mine.”
Was.
Your eyes fall to the concentration of blisters and she laughs. Low and harsh and more then a little mad.
“All gone, now. All gone.”
“AJ…” You take a step forward and she takes a step to the side as if it is a choreographed dance. But when she stumbles over the hem of her jeans all grace is lost. She ends up a crumpled heap on the floor, hands pressing against her temples and breath coming shallow and fast.
You squat down in front of her, balancing easily on the balls of your feet.
“AJ, look at me.”
She doesn’t move, so you reach out and push her chin up with your fingers. You look into her eyes, her face, and wish that she would cry. She might not feel better, but you would. This silence, even with the shaking shoulders, is unnerving.
Especially with Belial’s smile fresh in your mind.
“AJ…”
“My name is Beatriz. Beatriz fucking Barillo.”
“What is more real, Ajedrez? The name you are given or the name that you choose?” She doesn’t answer and you let your hand drop with sigh.
“Come on then, lovely, lets get those burns looked at.”
--
You’ve been in a war before, but this is different. This is personal, the only casualty a lovely and likable woman that you met by chance. You don’t think that she is lost, not yet, but she certainly isn’t here.
The Ajedrez in the Bar is now cynical and bitter with flashes of caustic humour. Sometimes, you think you see the laughing girl who had pulled you to the truck before she vanishes into someone on the fast track to self-destruction. She annoys, she pushes and shoves until she is pushed and shoved back and then she laughs. She walks into the Bar with burns like fingermarks and you grit your teeth.
It’s like watching Sands, and you wonder if this is what happened to him.
It’s like watching yourself and Ruin all those months and months ago, and you wish that you hadn’t thought that. That was different, you protest to yourself. That was a…it was an accident, a collision. We never meant to start anything. This is all on purpose.
(somehow, that doesn’t actually help and it just gives you the urge to apologize to your friends)
--
She gets into a fight with Sands. Out by the lake one cold day, and you wonder if it is the anniversary of their first one. They know each other well, so well, and this time there are no witnesses, no Mal or Random to stop them, no restraint.
They are tearing each other apart, and you know on some level that that is precisely what they want. What they crave. Pull out the guns, pull out the knives, and say the hundred nasty, hurtful things that they want to scream, and don’t leave the other standing alone again.
Well.
Not on your watch, because a) you are a bitch like that and b) you have a little on-going disagreement with Belial as to the state of Ajedrez’s wellbeing.
You reach them just as Sands shoves her back, hard. Her fist smacks into your open hand, and quick as quick you close your fingers around hers before looking at Sands.
“Enough.”
He snarls at you and she struggles to get free. You let her go only to grab her wrist and she goes rigid at the pain. Burns are the worst, after all. He steps back, rubs the back of his head and just glares at you.
“Mary Anne, fuck off.”
“No,” you tell him, sweetly.
“Mary Anne, please.” That is Ajedrez, voice husky from anger and other things.
“No, I don’t think I will.”
Sands smiles, blandly and insincerely.
“What are you going to do, stop us?”
“Mmm, yes.”
He moves then, feinting to the side with the knife and then lunging in. Your hand snaps out automatically and you feel the blade slash your wrist. You also feel your hand snaking around and grabbing his anyway.
You’re not entirely sure what to do, you are just so sick of their fighting and the hatred that only comes from true love gone wrong that you just pull. You reach down into their minds and pull the first things that flash, searching for memories of them.
What you forgot is that you’d get the memories as well.
You get Ajedrez as a little girl in a pink cotton dress, lying on sun-warmed tiles and tormenting a shiny beetle with a pin. You get Sands as a little boy, gravely explaining to his baby brother how the man lives on the moon. You get her screams for her father as they set her on fire and you get him holding the body of his cat, named for his dead brother, in his hands and trying not to cry. She’s playing with two monkeys in the garden and he’s being stood up on prom night. You see them kill their first men and lose their first innocence. You get laughter and blood, death and the flickering quality of every day life. Violence and normality, twined around each other and marking Sands and Ajedrez for life. You struggle through the random images, trying to find…
There.
You see him walking over to her in a club, hear her ringing laughter. You see her ignoring him at work, telling him to take a hike. You see him watching and flirting and making her heart beat fast despite herself, you see her coming to work on a Saturday in very short denim shorts with a split lip from her then-boyfriend, you see him shoving her against her desk and kissing her. You see the seduction in a matter of seconds, but you feel it. Both sides, at once.
You see the occasionally awkward process of two people trying to slip and slide into compatibility, and you see the fights. Screaming, painful, but you see them make up time and time again. You see the mornings of shared coffee and bitching about work, you see him slide into bed at some ungodly hour of the morning and her moving automatically to curl around him. You see her pale and unconscious in a hospital ward while he holds her hand and waits for her to wake up and you see her sit beside him on some church steps and rest her head against his shoulder. You see her upset and crying and you see him gather her into his arms and murmur that it’ll be okay, it’ll be okay.
You see them laughing as she drags him out onto the patio to dance in the rain and you see them holding up a MacDonald’s before getting into a gunfight with a Mexico City gang.
You see them fitting together like the proverbial hand and glove and you shove that into their brains.
And that’s all you meant to show them, but you are new at this and the vision escapes your slippery-fingered grasp.
You see her sitting at a café, trying not to study the clock as he sits somewhere else and talks to a little fat man with a patch over his right eye. You see him stumble into her room as she informs him that he is paying for the lock before she fires the gun that he had given her. You see him offer her chance to escape, nonchalant and cocky and you see her grin as he leaves. You see her father backhand her or maybe he shoots her and she’s left on the ground, staring into nothing while Sands is on the operating table screaming, no but she can’t as she lets the Mariachi go and smiles at Sands in the café and murmur that he didn’t see it coming and then he has his eyes gouged out…
Oops, you half think to yourself as was and could have been and might be pan out and tighten their grip on the three of you.
You see her stop him before he leaves and explain in tumbling words who she is and could they leave now, please. Modern day Bonnie and Clyde, they are killed again and again and live again and again. They have a little boy, a little girl, a house somewhere that no one has heard of and two unmarked graves all at once.
She doesn’t tell him who she is and he kills her as she kisses him and stares sightlessly at the sky before he falls and she kills him as she stands there and they kill at each and she bleeds to death on a smoky street with his blood covering her face. He comes to Milliways and she follows from unconscious habit.
They kill each other. Again, and again, and again. He kills her and she kills him and they are both left with nothing but bitter regret in their mouths before they follow the other. Sometimes within a matter of moments, other times months or years, but it’s always a downward spiral. They work things out in the Bar, fragile and uneasy and he digs at her for years and she stays because she deserves it and they split, again, and she goes running to Belial while he gets himself killed by Ramon as the Bar’s second murder victim. She’s shot in front of an old blue farmhouse and he lets her die he is shot as he runs towards her he drives her to the hospital and he leaves and he comes back and they go and find their son. You attempt to gain some control again, and follow that future to a doctor placing their daughter in Sands’s arms and he whispers into her baby ear that he’ll kill anyone who hurts her and she’s eight while her brother is twelve and talking to Ajedrez about football and she tugs on his sleeve, Daddy can you teach me to shoot a gun and
“Fuck,” Sands whispers, tearing himself away. You blink as the world spins and you, carefully, let go of Ajedrez’s wrist. Sands is shaking, pacing, and she’s just staring at him with too many emotions in her dark eyes to be understood. He flinches and brings up a hand, running it jerkily through his hair.
“Don’t say anything, AJ. Just…don’t.”
What she might have said in reply is lost as you say quite clearly, “Oh, shit,” and fall backwards in a dead faint.
--
You wake to see Ajedrez sitting on the desk, one leg swinging free while her hands clasp her ankle.
“Welcome to the land of the awake, Mary Anne. Interesting…thing that you showed us. Probably award-worthy. Although I am a little pissed off that you interrupted us. We had some really amazing progress happening. The relative merits of being independent and knowing when you are being bullshitted to instead of dumbly swallowing the hierarchical crap before asking for seconds, as opposed to being a malcontent cynic who is only out for himself and his own sick, twisted entertainment instead of believing in something greater then yourself and having the discipline to follow orders, even when you don’t like them. A really in-depth, civilized conversation. Practically a college debate.”
You raise a hand to your head to try and defend yourself against the onslaught of words, and realize that she’s bandaged it for you.
“Thank you,” you say, gesturing to your wrist with your eyes.
“Not a problem. It was worth it to see Sands nearly have a heart attack trying to carry your lily-coloured ass up the stairs. Really, he’s terribly out of shape. I always did tell him that the smoking was bad for him.”
Somehow you manage to mostly suppress a whimper.
“You’re in a fine mood.”
Ajedrez grins at you.
“Yeah, I think I am.”
You attempt to sit up, and feel inordinately cheered when you succeed. Her grin fades to smile, and then she ducks her head. Your eyes fall to the burns on her wrists and you let the silence stretch out.
“So…”
“So. Hello, Mary Anne. Welcome to my humble abode.”
“Not that I’m complaining, but why your room?”
“I couldn’t remember where yours was, and I didn’t see Señor Longshanks-”
“Who?”
“Your husband.”
“Ah.”
“As I was saying. I couldn’t see your dearly beloved anywhere, and Sands doesn’t have a room anymore, so…it was mine by default.”
“You were talking?”
Ajedrez bites her bottom lip.
“Um. Sorta.” A quick shrug, topic now off-limits. You swing your legs out of the bed and wait for the room to stop doing the cha-cha around your head.
“Why Belial, AJ?” You ask then, quietly, not looking at her. “Why are you….why?”
“Because he gives me what I need.”
“Which is?” You know the answer, both because of your intuition and because sometimes Ajedrez is scarily like yourself, but you have to hear it from her own lips.
“Pain. Lots, and lots, of pain. You can’t feel anything when you are dead, and if I am alive I can go track down my hijo de puta of an ex-boyfriend, and carve out his heart for turning us over to the Feds.”
“You have,” you inform her then, “the worst taste in men of anyone that I have ever seen. Including myself. And if you knew the rest of my friends…”
She just laughs. The sound is rich and genuinely amused, and you think that maybe she isn’t lost yet.
“I know. They keep on trying to kill me. Maybe they don’t like my sense of humour.”
--
Things should be better after that. Should be, but they aren’t, because the world isn’t fair. If anything, they are worse. Sands now avoids the both of you with an ease that you find maddening even as you are amazed at his skill, and Ajedrez goes back to Belial time and time again.
It should be better, if he only gave her physical pain. That you could understand, deal with, not mind and all of that.
But that’s not what the Devil is about. Honey-tongued and poison-tongued, he reduces her to tears even as she whispers please. Please, please, oh god, what have I done, oh please I want to die please, amante, please.
He plays her like a guitar and then smirks as you try and drag her back into the world and conversation.
You think that you are losing.
You hate the fact that you are losing her.
--
One night as you sit on the couch, she comes to you crying. You move to open your arms but she falls to her knees instead, and curls up with her head resting against your knee. It can’t be comfortable, but she isn’t moving. You stroke her gloriously thick and wavy (and now almost hopelessly tangled) hair and glare at the Devil as he walks to the front door.
She’s crying in Spanish, soft and tangled with Nahuatl and English, and your fingers tighten.
“Stop it, Ajedrez,” and you pull her head back. “Don’t go to him, you don’t have to…it’s not worth this.”
Ajedrez pulls back and there is anger in her eyes. Well, it’s better then before. It’s an emotion.
“It’s no worse than anything you’ve done.”
“I didn’t-”
“So just general self-destruction is better then it being for a purpose, Mary Anne?”
“You can’t…Ajedrez, your family are dead. And once you kill your ex, what do you have left? Once he’s dead, it’s all over!”
She smiles and gets to her feet. The firelight catches her face, all Aztec angles and impracticality.
“Don’t do it, Ajedrez.”
“You,” she says quite calmly, “have no right to tell me what to do.”
“I am your friend.”
“Sorry, not good enough,” and she walks away.
--
Ajedrez leaves the Bar as soon as her door comes back.
You act very mature and do not go and antagonize a certain Irish-sounding gentleman.
Ruin tells you that he is astounded.
You tell him to shut up and kiss you.
(he is, occasionally, very obliging)
--
The waiting is the worse part. Waiting, waiting, waiting; you look up every time that the front door opens and out of the corner of your eye you notice that Sands does the exact same thing.
Who knows, it might even be for the same reason.
Might be.
--
When she comes back, she leaves blood on the door and its handle. Not really her fault, her hands are slick with the stuff. Drenched blood-red up to her elbows and you have the phrase carve out his heart running through your head. You look at the knife in her hand, and reflect that sometimes it’s nice knowing people for whom that saying isn’t a metaphor.
Then you look up into her blank eyes.
Blank, empty, but you know Ajedrez well enough by now to know that sooner or later, she’s going to break.
And this time, there might be no coming back.
You see her sway and drop the knife and you mutter, ‘Oh no you don’t,’ before you run towards her. You kick the door shut and open it again. A pristine white beach with a violet-red sky lays beyond the doorway and your grab her by the arm.
“Come on, Ajedrez.”
“What, Mary Anne-” And you haul her through.
--
You stand on a beach. The sand is pure white, untouched and unspoiled, powder-fine. The sea is a shade of jade unknown to the human eye, and the sky at the height of the day is a cool violet-red. Now it is late afternoon, almost evening, and the sky is darker, richer. There is a sun, but it seems far away in the cloudy sky, and three moons hang in the sky.
Ajedrez falls to her knees, gape-mouthed in shock.
“Oh, sweet Mary. Where am I?”
You slip off your shoes and wriggle your toes in the powder soft sand. And then you straighten, cross your arms and regard her coolly with your too-blue eyes.
“You are at a crossroads. If you want, I can turn around and open the door again and let you fuck your way to damnation or whatever it is that you want. Or you can come with me and hear out a proposal. If you say no, I’ll return you to Milliways. If yes, well, then whatever you do is up to you.”
She sits back on her heels, and automatically raises a hand to push back her heavy mass of hair before it catches her eye. Drying blood, drying sticky blood now covered with that pure white sand. You can only imagine how her skin is crawling as she rubs her hands, both of them, against her jeans to try and clean them.
“The sea is right there, you know.”
She pulls off her boots and gets to her feet, putting her hands on her hips.
“Mary Anne?”
“Yes?”
“Sometimes you can be a real bitch.” And then she stalks towards the sea.
“Yes, I can,” you whisper to yourself, letting your shoulders slump while she isn’t watching. You don’t know if she’ll say yes, you just hope that she will. She’d fit, she’d fit so well and, well, Ruin had said that you would find a project, didn’t he?
You just wish that Ajedrez didn’t require so much tough love when she’s like this. You think that, and you check who is the castle, and then you grin.
Oh, yes.
He’d be perfect.
You are grinning happily to yourself as she comes back, looking marginally better. Her jeans rolled up to her knees, and her arms are mostly free of the blood. Her fingernails are still caked with it, but nothing a good bath won’t cure.
She’s regarding you warily, but the blankness in her eyes has been pushed back.
At least, for the moment.
“Okay, then, so what’s this proposal?”
“Not for me to offer, lovely. I mean I could, but I won’t. Come with me?”
“I don’t,” she points out, “really have a choice, do I?”
“There is always a choice.”
“Whatever.”
--
You hand her over to Tower. He raises an eyebrow as you explain telepathically something of the circumstances and what you saw that day in the bathroom.
Highly unusual.
You grin at him.
I thought you might like it.
We’ll see. He hides a smile and then turns to Ajedrez. Ajedrez, who is clutching her boots to her chest and eyeing the both of you as if she wants to bolt.
“Now, Ajedrez, was it?” Tower says, placing a hand on her back and guiding her to the library.
“I think you know perfectly well who I am,” she snaps. You resist the urge to cackle, just, and decide to go exploring.
After all, you have some time to kill.
--
She’s sitting in a courtyard in when you find her. She’s sitting on the step next to the column and staring at nothing for all that her face is towards the fountain. She hears your steps and jumps to her feet, whirling around to face you in a flurry of brown hair and limbs.
“What…he…”
“Yes?”
“The fucking Knight of Swords?!”
You raise an eyebrow at her.
“I think it suits you quite well.”
She’s shaking her head, moving backwards and shaking her head and you wonder if she’ll topple into the fountain.
“No, I can’t…I’m not…”
“Why not? It suits you. The Knight of Swords is skilful, clever, decisive, fierce and courageous, possessed with a swift and bright energy-“
“Oh, stop sounding like a fucking book.”
“-you are goal-orientated. When you know what to do, you go out and you don’t rest until it is done. You consider things, but once you decide on something, your mind can’t be changed. You can be fanatical, single-minded. You know how to plan things out, how to fight and how to win, but on the reverse you fight for no reason. You can be obstinate and malicious, and you can be temperamental and cruel as easily as you are passionate and practical.”
She’s rubbing her mouth, but she’s not looking away.
“This is a card of duality, of good and bad at once, and it is a break from the past. Something, a relationship or world or job, has ended; you are released and free to forge a new destiny. You are not a general or a leader, but neither are you a blind follower. You uphold what you think is true and worthy, and you are loyal.”
“Are you talking about the card there, or me?”
“Both.”
“He…the Tower. He said all that. And, I…oh god.” And her face crumples. You start to move forward, but then you feel a hand at your elbow.
“Let me,” Reue says, quietly. You stand to one side and let Ruin’s daughter past. Reue, Sorrow, the Three of Swords. You watch as Ajedrez sits down, sharply, on the step leading up to the fountain and you watch as Reue folds Ajedrez into her arms and just hold her as the woman cries.
It’s only fitting, after all; Ajedrez has spent quite a few years in Reue’s sphere of influence, and maybe the time has finally come for a gentle hand and soothing voice.
Silently, you walk away. You can do nothing more here.
--
You have dinner with the Family, only half paying attention to the talk and gossip and bickering.
They talk about Ajedrez.
You listen to Tower scolding them for being conservative about getting a new family member so soon, you hear Victory say that it might be nice to have another woman to spar with, you hear…
You hear them all talk, some for and some against and all acting like a loud, boisterous, argumentative family, and you are glad that Ajedrez, only child and reeling, has elected to stay in the suite that Reue found for her. Her nerves really, really wouldn’t be up to this right now, and it’d be a shame to put bullet holes in the walls.
--
Balancing a try on one hand, you knock on the door with the other.
“Ajedrez?”
There is a long pause, and then your hear a simple,
“Come in.”
The room would be dark if it weren’t lit by the three full moons, their light shining in through the large open window to your left. Ajedrez is sitting on the wide window still, back against the frame. There is still room for another person to sit, so you place the tray down on the coffee table and walk over.
“I brought you some dinner.”
A flash of a wan smile, and you notice that she has Sands’s lighter out.
“I can see that. Mucho gracias, mi reina.” Snap, click, snap.
You think about saying ‘I’m not your queen’, but figure that at this point it’ll be counter-productive. So you settle for asking,
“Am I?”
She bites her bottom lip, looks out the window to the sea.
Snap, click, snap.
“I don’t know,” she says, softly. “You could be. All too easily, I think. It’s…it’s tempting.”
“So…” You draw one knee up, hug it to your chest.
“So it feels like running.”
“Ajedrez…you have nothing left.”
She looks at you, her eyes black in the moonlight and her skin oddly pale. You turn your head and watch the moons play on the waves.
“You…there is nothing to go back to in your Mexico. Nothing to run from. Do you believe me?”
“I believe that you may just have an ulterior motive.” You glance at her, sharply, and she grins. “Well, you do.”
“And so I have. I think you would be a good Knight of Swords, and I also think that you are too good a person to waste because you believe…whatever it is you believe you are doing with Belial. And if offering you the chance to be a card is the way out of it, then I will do it.”
“It’s a question of penance, I guess.”
“Penance.” The word is flat in your mouth.
“I’m…I’m not a very good Catholic, but I am Mexican and we are Catholic. We may be atheist, or whatever else, but there are saints’ days and fiestas and churches and you argue with an upbringing like that. You don’t escape it.”
“Do you still believe in God?”
“Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t. It’s a little hard to tell.”
“Ajedrez…” You rub your temple with one hand and regard her wearily. She smiles back, which means absolutely nothing.
Snap, click, snap.
“You know, that is very annoying.”
“Mmm, do you want me to stop?”
“Does it make you feel better?”
“Yes.”
“Then no, I don’t.”
Ajedrez laughs softly.
“You know, my father and Iago would have ordered me to stop a long, long time ago.”
“Well, I don’t order people.”
Snap, click-
“I think that’s your problem.”
“…huh?”
“You don’t like being a queen. Oh, I don’t mean Queen of Swords, I think you like that well enough. No, I don’t think you like being a queen.” You shift uncomfortably, and her smile widens. “See? I have no problem with being a knight, it’s a lot like being a solider and I am already that. I like it, it’s me. But you, chica…you don’t like it.”
“And what is your deeply revealing and intuitive reason as to why?” You ask her, amused.
“You don’t want the responsibility. Not because you are lazy, but because you are scared. Fucked up little Mary Anne, how could you lead anyone? Order anyone? To have people rely on you not as a friend but as a leader…well, I think that scares you.”
- snap.
You stopped smiling after the second sentence and now you are just staring at her. She smiles again and you swallow.
Hard.
“And what,” you murmur, “is your solution to that?”
“Go out. Find a world somewhere, join up in an army or a mercenary gang, and work your way up. Just a matter of practice, if you have it. I think you could, you’ll just have to find it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Oh, shush. Besides, if I do this, I’m going to be following you.”
“You’re what?”
“You are the Queen.” she says with a wicked grin, and you think that she is enjoying this far too much, “If I am your Knight, chica…a Knight is supposed to protect her Queen, no? And if you read the stories, you are supposed to send me on all these stupid quests and-”
“And you are supposed to be in love me.”
“Oh, god no. Aside from that bit.”
“I think I may be insulted.”
“Hey, if you were a guy I’d be so checking out your ass. As it is, you’re a friend.”
“And your Queen?”
Ajedrez traces a fading burn scar on her wrist.
“We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”
You don’t mention how much you hate waiting; it won’t help, and by the trace of apology in her voice, you think that she already knows.
Snap, click, snap.
--
You take her back to Milliways, like you said you would.
Fuck you hate waiting.
--
You see her, sometimes, but for the most part she avoids you and you let her. No sense pushing, she’ll tell you aye or nay soon enough.
You see her talking with Sands, and yes, they are actually talking. Softly, seriously, and later she says that she’ll see where that leads them. She stands to go, kisses his cheek; he ignores her, stares into the fire. But later you notice that he reaches up and touches where her lips had pressed.
You remember the flashing images that you saw, and wonder what happened to the man that Ajedrez had loved so very much.
“If he forgives me,” Ajedrez says a couple days later over some coffee, “then we have somewhere to start from. If not, then ni modo.”
Ni modo; it can’t be helped, nothing to be done. Sometimes you wish that you didn’t have this gift of languages, but her fatalistic shrug is translation enough.
“Have you…”
“Not yet.”
--
One day, she walks over to you with burns on her neck and arms.
“I’ll do it.”
You blink and raise your head to look at her; she stares back at you with eyes that are dark and angry.
“I’ll be your Knight, Mary Anne. As soon as the burns heal, anyway.”
“Okay.” Your voice is soft, and you think you should feel triumphant. Instead, you just look at the burns and the pain that screams from the lines of her body, and wish that it didn’t have to be like this.
“Good. And now to the infirmary I go.”
And with that, she stalks away, Sands’s lighter a pacifier in her hand.
Snap, click, snap.
--
Belial seems more then a little annoyed when you see him next, although he is hiding it well.
You smile at him, sweetly, and don’t go over.
Responsible Adults ‘R’ Us.
--
“Are you sure?” Ajedrez smiles faintly at you and you continue talking. “You can’t back away from this once the tattoo is in place, you know.”
“Mary Anne,” and her voice is a woman’s purr and a warrior’s report all at once. “Mary Anne, I have been tattooed once before. And I want this.”
“Why?”
It’s the first time that you’ve asked her, and for a moment she doesn’t answer. She just lifts the hem of her simple white dress so that she doesn’t trip down the stairs. The dress is backless and bound at the waist with a cord of silver, with a silver clasp at the back of her neck. It’s the most feminine thing that you’ve ever seen her wear, and it suits her surprisingly well.
Her hair, like yours had been, is twisted up and tied into a knot.
“It’s not the power, if that is what is worrying you. As far as I see at the moment, the power that you…we have is not that great, at least not as I am used to. It’s the power of offering choices and showing paths, not glory and riches. It’s….showing people that, like you did with Sands and me. It’s seeing things like my grandmother, knowing things and helping when you can. It’s a purpose I think I could believe in, that I do believe in.
Does that make you feel better?”
“A little,” you admit, and are rewarded by her smile.
--
You lead her to the little used back room and open the door. The room is lined with candles and Tower stands next to a high table. Cynical Tower, with the Socrates-like ability to make people think even as they get angry at their ill-considered ideals and thoughts being destroyed; destroyed, only to have the freedom to start again anew and afresh with a stronger foundation.
Annoying, maddening Tower, and you were fairly certain that he and Ajedrez would get along.
Once she stopped screaming at him.
(you have a feeling that he won’t let you forget her reaction to the offer any time soon)
Ajedrez walks over and sits on the table, the table tall enough for him to work at while standing, and for a moment she just looks at the door. And then she draws in a deep breath and swings her legs up. She settles with her arms folded and her forehead resting against her wrist.
And so Tower begins to paint.
Unlike Choice did with you, he starts with the hilt and works his way down. The pommel, perfectly circular and just an outline at the moment, rests at the base of her neck and the curved cross-guard sweeps across her shoulder-blades. The length of the sword runs down her spine, and you can see that it is different to yours. Darker, heavier, wider; the more practical, working sword belongs to the Knight, after all. Not for her the rapier delicacy, nor the pretty gold trim; that she leaves, and trusts, to you.
A Knight defends her Queen, you find yourself thinking, and then wishing that you knew what that will entail.
Well, you’ll both find out sooner or later.
The blade, you are interested to note, is double-edged and double-hued. On one side it is iron, dark and cold; on the other, dancing silver steel. There is a shield on the pommel, white and black, with an iron blade in the white and a steel one in the black so that it is almost yin and yang. It’s a detail that not many will see, but you see it and will remember. Tower paints copper wire twining around the grip before standing back. He puts the paintbrush down and whispers “Esto perpetua”.
The sword glows against Ajedrez’s brown skin, all shades of contrasting grey with the slim richness of the copper wire, and you see her fingers tighten around her lower arms. Slowly, as the glow fades, she begins to move.
You push yourself off the wall and walk over. She looks up, almost in a daze.
“Hey, lovely,” you say, quietly. She smiles at you, and her eyes are dark. Dark and deep as the night sky, and just as unfathomable. It is then that the reality of what she has done and chosen crashes in on her. The knowledge of millions of various paths - walked and unwalked --known from those in her own sphere and known second-hand through the other cards. All those paths and choices, all hers to oversee and Know.
And as you watch her stiffen and clutch the edge of the table, you watch her eyes. They seem to, almost impossibly, darken before the light catches them. Her eyes are now brown. Brown as wood, brown as mahogany and stained maple, but it’s that rich red-brown of living trees instead of the lifeless beauty of polished boards.
Most people, you think, would just see black and brown. But then again, most people are mortal.
“Oh,” Ajedrez says, almost too soft to hear. “Oh, my.”
“Interesting, isn’t it?”
“Si.” And then her smile turns impish as she slides off the table. “You still need to get your ass down to a proper war.”
You hear Tower snort as he packs up the paints, and you just put your hands on your hips.
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah, really.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah-huh.”
The exchange is beginning to have the faint overtones of ‘well, your mom’, and it’s so utterly ridiculous that you can’t help but laugh. It’s her way of dealing with things, you know and now Know; to make jokes, to laugh and tease and another person might think that she wasn’t taking it all seriously.
But you know that she is.
You see it in her eyes, now old and shifting colour as the light hits them. You see it in the way she holds herself, with the quiet pride and silent purpose that she had had under Iago, only more so. You see it and it makes you smile.
The Knight of Swords.
“Come then, sister, lets meet the rest of the family.” And with that, you open the door and lead the way.