[OUATIM] Where the Devil can't go
Dec. 4th, 2003 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterFandom: OUATIM
Pairings: Sands/Ajedrez, El/Sands
Rating: R
Summary: What if things were different? What if Sands was?
WARNING: Femslash, het, slash. In other words, every possible gender configuration with two partners. Also, this is not an original female character.
Dedicated to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
permetaform for finding me not only a quote, but a context.
WHERE THE DEVIL CAN'T GO
Gdzie diabeł nie może, tam babę pośle
[Where the devil can't go, he'll send a woman]
- old Polish proverb
They passed her up for promotion again, and Ajedrez was livid. Men! What good were they anyway?
At least in this gym there were only women, and all admitted Ajedrez was the strongest of them. She hit the punching bag again, hard enough that it swung almost horizontally, barely missing someone on the other side.
"Whoa, you've got a punch," the woman said in English with an American accent. "Imagining it's your boyfriend?"
She was pretty, with hair bleached platinum blonde and a friendly smile, makeup perfect despite the sweat on her forehead. Ajedrez smiled back.
"My boss. He doesn't believe a woman can be a good cop."
The American woman rolled her eyes as she set up her weights. "Tell me about it. It's the fucking stone age around here. The stories I could tell..."
"Me too." Ajedrez stretched. "Do you want me to spot for you?"
"Sure, thanks." The woman did have a nice smile, and dark brown eyes you could drown in.
* * *
The thug led El to the table and told him to wait for the "superior". At least he had a name now: Sands. What business could an American have with a retired Mexican pistolero, and what kind of a man would hire a thug like Cucuy? Maybe this Sands was the American partner of a Mexican druglord, and the partner had crossed him. No matter; he would soon learn the danger of calling up old ghosts.
Needed or not, El would have his answer soon. He could hear voices at the door, too low to hear, but Cucuy sounded deferential enough that the other man had to be Sands.
The mariachi did not look up from his guitar as the footsteps approached. The click on heels on the floor was sharp. Was the American wearing cowboy boots?
Then the American sat down opposite him, and El raised his eyes.
This was not what he had expected.
The woman had shoulder-length blonde hair almost as pale as moonlight and delicate features that seemed carved in amber-tinted glass. She wore a pale pink rodeo shirt and a leather tie. She was sitting slightly sideways, one leg stretched out along the table. He could see the sharply clicking heels he had heard were high enough that it was a wonder she could walk in them. The hand on the table had nails of a pale orange.
She had deep brown eyes that suddenly, painfully reminded him of Carolina.
She smiled, razor-sharp. "I'm Sands. I need you to kill a man."
* * *
This was not the first prince he was betraying, but the President's advisor had never conspired to do so with as disconcerting a person as senorita Sands. On this meeting the woman had her hair in two pigtails sticking out to the sides of her head, and wore a t-shirt with "Cleavage Inspection Agency (Department of Dyke Operations)" on it.
"You want to know the secret to winning?" She smiled like a girl from a toothpaste advertisement. "One has to rig the game."
* * *
Sands pulled on a rubber glove with a long-suffering sigh.
"Time to get messy." She glared at Bellini's prone body. "I swear, fuckmook, if this messes up my manicure I'll call my ex the witch and get her to resurrect you just so I can cut you into itty-bitty tiny pieces one by one. Understood?"
Then she had an idea. Behind the eyepatch? Why not, Bellini had been fucked in the head anyway...
* * *
And then it all went south in a fucking handbasket, and Sands was stumbling out of Guevara's makeshift chop shop with her shades back on and her blood full of whatever drugs that dicksucking bitch Ajedrez had pumped her up with. She forced her lips to move, her mind to remember the things that held her anchored to the ground.
"My name is Rosemary Jocelyn Sands..."
Blood running down her face, and she hoped her makeup wasn't smudging, but she'd gotten splashed with blood before when she killed that shithead Bellini and her Helena Rubinstein Natural Radiance foundation hadn't let her down. The blood was running from where her eyes had been and how the fuck was she supposed to put on her eyeliner now?
"I work for the CIA..."
James Bond in a fucking skirt, and fuck it all with a spoon if she couldn't play a Bond villain now, all of them were cripples and were any blind she couldn't remember okay what was she saying-
"I throw shapes..."
Shapes, impressions, and wouldn't her drama teacher be so fucking proud of her now? Blood on her face, dark plum lipstick and she was become Death, a bleach-blonde Death in leather pants and high heels, no guns unless you counted the little thing stuck down her bra, and oh God, she'd better find a way to make it count.
"I set them up. I watch them fall..."
Ajedrez set her up like a fucking floorshow, and did little miss Barillo tell her bandaged-up horror-freak of a daddy how she'd really liked to hear Sands talk, especially between her thighs, and returned the favor without even prompting? Cuntsucking slut, and it wasn't a bad thing, but hell, it was men who were supposed to fuck you and betray you in the same breath, wasn't it?
But Sands had messed up and now everything was falling, falling down.
"I am living la vida loca."
And she heard the bell on a bike.
* * *
Red dust in her face. Under her arms, in her wounds, mixing with the blood on her cheeks. The scent, dust and metal, death and her own Tommy Girl perfume. There were dead bodies around her, but she waited and listened for footsteps.
Sands knew those footsteps. And the hands that placed her shades back on her face.
"You fucking little monkey."
Very funny, Ajedrez you bitch, any more sparkling gems of wit you wish to share? There, just like that, and thank Jesus the dickless whore didn't have the sense to end this. Someone gets one fucking break and they think they can walk all over you. But no. Not over Rosemary Jocelyn Sands.
She barely felt the lips on her face. It was getting so cold... there, just like that, that's a good cockweasel...
"See anything you like?"
And now, miss Sands, this does demand an answer, doesn't it?
"No."
And cold black metal in her hands.
* * *
The sun was dying now, red sky over red dust and pools of red blood, or at least that was the way Sands imagined it. Not like she could see, exactly. Kind of hard to do that with no fucking eyes.
No fucking eyes, which really started to hurt now, along with her arm and leg and head. Her fingers twitched in minute spasms, and the cellphone Ramirez threw her clattered to the ground.
When the bubblegum kid came back, she would tear him limb from limb, cut out his liver and make him damn well eat it...
Oh fucking hell, who was she kidding? If he came back, she'd be counting her blessings she could no longer cry. Or could she? Somehow in her study of torture effects she had never investigated eye removal, because after all, who did this?
Footsteps, and the kid came back, and she did cry, or at least felt the blood on her cheeks moisten again. Other steps, heavier, chains jangling and strong hands on her back and under her knees. The fucking mariachi picked her up like a doll, and she'd tear him a new one just for that if she wasn't so busy burrowing into his arms because hot damn, that guy was a furnace and she was so cold...
Cold and dark.
* * *
El picked at the strings of his guitar as Sands made the lids of her new purchases clatter in the bedroom. She had bought what he thought were dozens of jars and tubes and boxes, all of them online and with a credit card she would not tell him how she got. (Not that he asked. He could recognize blood on the plastic when he saw it.) She'd made him read the labels for her on the ones that did not have embossed writing, and jeered as he mispronounced the French words.
His house now bore signs of her presence. The computer, grey and forbidding, with her headphones and Braille-marked keyboard. Scattered guns with manufacturers' labels El had never heard of, from Europe and Asia. Bullet holes from the times when Sands lost her temper.
She came out of the bedroom now, and came up to him. He put down the guitar and stood up, his face inches from hers.
"Is my makeup on straight?" Sands asked, her voice strangely blank. She brushed the pale hair (dyed, her roots were showing) behind one ear and stared at him with the dark holes of her freshly healed eyesockets.
"What?"
And the sculpted face twisted with hate, and there was the cold metal of a gun's muzzle at his throat. "I asked, assrag, is my fucking makeup on straight?" Despite the twisted mouth, there was barely a trace of a hiss in her voice.
El lifted his hand, very slowly. He passed his fingers over the side of her mouth.
"Just your lipstick smeared a bit," he said. He was surprised to hear how hoarse his voice sounded.
That oh-so-expressive mouth twisted again, this time into a smile. "Thanks."
* * *
It was not a big step, after that, to fall in bed together one night when they had too much tequila. The next time they drank less, and the time after that they only needed the adrenaline from blowing a dozen cartel enforcers straight into hell, hand in hand and gun in gun.
And nine hells, after Ajedrez Sands decided to swear off women for a while anyway. Ah, the joys of bisexuality.
But when El called out another name one morning, on that edge between sleep and life, that just wouldn't do.
So she waited for him in the bedroom when he returned from the town. She waited, knife in hand.
A very specific knife.
El stopped three paces into the room.
"That's hers, isn't it?" Sands said, hefting the throwing knife. "Carolina's."
"Si."
"You know, El, there's a lot of things you never tell me. Like about her." Sands got up, stretched, heard black leather creak. It was all black linen and leather now, black in mourning and black as she slipped into the skin of Lady Death, and that scared the shit out of the cartel fuckwits even better than her valley-girl white trash serial killer act had. "Tell me. Did she ever shoot a man because he simply did not fit in with her vision of the world?"
"No."
"I did. Did she ever make a plan that called for dozens to be killed just so she could have more money?" She moved towards him, slowly.
"No."
"I did." Sands was in full swing now. "Did she ever drive a fifteen-year-old girl to suicide just to see if she could?"
"No."
"I did." There were barely inches apart now, and Sands' hand rose, blade glinting. "Did she ever cut her boytoy's throat and watch him die at her feet, painted her face with his blood and laughed in the moonlight?"
"No." El's voice was a whisper now.
"I might."
And the knife flew from her hand, fast and true, embedding in the crucifix above the bed.
*
*
*
Sands woke up with a gasp. It would have been one of those movie-like wakings where you sit up straight in bed, but El's hand in a sensitive place prevented that.
Wait a minute. El's hand was resting, in fact, on Sands' dick.
Sands had a dick.
"Hallelujah, thank you, Jesus," he muttered, wiping cold sweat from his face. "Just a fucking dream."
Behind him, El grunted and moved his hand, smoothing it up Sands' side. "Bad dream?"
"Nah, just damn weird. I think my subconscious is more fucked up in the head than I am."
Sands got up and walked to the bathroom. Behind him, El rolled over into the warm hollow left by the agent's body and promptly went back to sleep.
Sands found the sink by touch and splashed water on his face. Damn, but this had been a weird one. Him as a girl, could it get any more ridiculous? Especially the way it started to make sense, there at the end?
"Somebody up there really fucking hates me," he muttered as he reached for a towel.
#FINIS#
How did this happen? I was thinking that there seems to be an acute lack of antiheroines in fiction; I couldn't name any off the top of my head, except maybe Thessaly from Sandman. Sands said to this, "I think it's just that women don't fit the mould, in general - present company excepted. Don't get me wrong, but can you imagine me as a woman.... oh shit, did I just say that??"
The rest is, well, history.
[EDIT] Illustration: Rosemary Jocelyn Sands
Comments? (yes/no/BANG!)
Pairings: Sands/Ajedrez, El/Sands
Rating: R
Summary: What if things were different? What if Sands was?
WARNING: Femslash, het, slash. In other words, every possible gender configuration with two partners. Also, this is not an original female character.
Dedicated to
permetaform for finding me not only a quote, but a context.WHERE THE DEVIL CAN'T GO
Gdzie diabeł nie może, tam babę pośle
[Where the devil can't go, he'll send a woman]
- old Polish proverb
They passed her up for promotion again, and Ajedrez was livid. Men! What good were they anyway?
At least in this gym there were only women, and all admitted Ajedrez was the strongest of them. She hit the punching bag again, hard enough that it swung almost horizontally, barely missing someone on the other side.
"Whoa, you've got a punch," the woman said in English with an American accent. "Imagining it's your boyfriend?"
She was pretty, with hair bleached platinum blonde and a friendly smile, makeup perfect despite the sweat on her forehead. Ajedrez smiled back.
"My boss. He doesn't believe a woman can be a good cop."
The American woman rolled her eyes as she set up her weights. "Tell me about it. It's the fucking stone age around here. The stories I could tell..."
"Me too." Ajedrez stretched. "Do you want me to spot for you?"
"Sure, thanks." The woman did have a nice smile, and dark brown eyes you could drown in.
* * *
The thug led El to the table and told him to wait for the "superior". At least he had a name now: Sands. What business could an American have with a retired Mexican pistolero, and what kind of a man would hire a thug like Cucuy? Maybe this Sands was the American partner of a Mexican druglord, and the partner had crossed him. No matter; he would soon learn the danger of calling up old ghosts.
Needed or not, El would have his answer soon. He could hear voices at the door, too low to hear, but Cucuy sounded deferential enough that the other man had to be Sands.
The mariachi did not look up from his guitar as the footsteps approached. The click on heels on the floor was sharp. Was the American wearing cowboy boots?
Then the American sat down opposite him, and El raised his eyes.
This was not what he had expected.
The woman had shoulder-length blonde hair almost as pale as moonlight and delicate features that seemed carved in amber-tinted glass. She wore a pale pink rodeo shirt and a leather tie. She was sitting slightly sideways, one leg stretched out along the table. He could see the sharply clicking heels he had heard were high enough that it was a wonder she could walk in them. The hand on the table had nails of a pale orange.
She had deep brown eyes that suddenly, painfully reminded him of Carolina.
She smiled, razor-sharp. "I'm Sands. I need you to kill a man."
* * *
This was not the first prince he was betraying, but the President's advisor had never conspired to do so with as disconcerting a person as senorita Sands. On this meeting the woman had her hair in two pigtails sticking out to the sides of her head, and wore a t-shirt with "Cleavage Inspection Agency (Department of Dyke Operations)" on it.
"You want to know the secret to winning?" She smiled like a girl from a toothpaste advertisement. "One has to rig the game."
* * *
Sands pulled on a rubber glove with a long-suffering sigh.
"Time to get messy." She glared at Bellini's prone body. "I swear, fuckmook, if this messes up my manicure I'll call my ex the witch and get her to resurrect you just so I can cut you into itty-bitty tiny pieces one by one. Understood?"
Then she had an idea. Behind the eyepatch? Why not, Bellini had been fucked in the head anyway...
* * *
And then it all went south in a fucking handbasket, and Sands was stumbling out of Guevara's makeshift chop shop with her shades back on and her blood full of whatever drugs that dicksucking bitch Ajedrez had pumped her up with. She forced her lips to move, her mind to remember the things that held her anchored to the ground.
"My name is Rosemary Jocelyn Sands..."
Blood running down her face, and she hoped her makeup wasn't smudging, but she'd gotten splashed with blood before when she killed that shithead Bellini and her Helena Rubinstein Natural Radiance foundation hadn't let her down. The blood was running from where her eyes had been and how the fuck was she supposed to put on her eyeliner now?
"I work for the CIA..."
James Bond in a fucking skirt, and fuck it all with a spoon if she couldn't play a Bond villain now, all of them were cripples and were any blind she couldn't remember okay what was she saying-
"I throw shapes..."
Shapes, impressions, and wouldn't her drama teacher be so fucking proud of her now? Blood on her face, dark plum lipstick and she was become Death, a bleach-blonde Death in leather pants and high heels, no guns unless you counted the little thing stuck down her bra, and oh God, she'd better find a way to make it count.
"I set them up. I watch them fall..."
Ajedrez set her up like a fucking floorshow, and did little miss Barillo tell her bandaged-up horror-freak of a daddy how she'd really liked to hear Sands talk, especially between her thighs, and returned the favor without even prompting? Cuntsucking slut, and it wasn't a bad thing, but hell, it was men who were supposed to fuck you and betray you in the same breath, wasn't it?
But Sands had messed up and now everything was falling, falling down.
"I am living la vida loca."
And she heard the bell on a bike.
* * *
Red dust in her face. Under her arms, in her wounds, mixing with the blood on her cheeks. The scent, dust and metal, death and her own Tommy Girl perfume. There were dead bodies around her, but she waited and listened for footsteps.
Sands knew those footsteps. And the hands that placed her shades back on her face.
"You fucking little monkey."
Very funny, Ajedrez you bitch, any more sparkling gems of wit you wish to share? There, just like that, and thank Jesus the dickless whore didn't have the sense to end this. Someone gets one fucking break and they think they can walk all over you. But no. Not over Rosemary Jocelyn Sands.
She barely felt the lips on her face. It was getting so cold... there, just like that, that's a good cockweasel...
"See anything you like?"
And now, miss Sands, this does demand an answer, doesn't it?
"No."
And cold black metal in her hands.
* * *
The sun was dying now, red sky over red dust and pools of red blood, or at least that was the way Sands imagined it. Not like she could see, exactly. Kind of hard to do that with no fucking eyes.
No fucking eyes, which really started to hurt now, along with her arm and leg and head. Her fingers twitched in minute spasms, and the cellphone Ramirez threw her clattered to the ground.
When the bubblegum kid came back, she would tear him limb from limb, cut out his liver and make him damn well eat it...
Oh fucking hell, who was she kidding? If he came back, she'd be counting her blessings she could no longer cry. Or could she? Somehow in her study of torture effects she had never investigated eye removal, because after all, who did this?
Footsteps, and the kid came back, and she did cry, or at least felt the blood on her cheeks moisten again. Other steps, heavier, chains jangling and strong hands on her back and under her knees. The fucking mariachi picked her up like a doll, and she'd tear him a new one just for that if she wasn't so busy burrowing into his arms because hot damn, that guy was a furnace and she was so cold...
Cold and dark.
* * *
El picked at the strings of his guitar as Sands made the lids of her new purchases clatter in the bedroom. She had bought what he thought were dozens of jars and tubes and boxes, all of them online and with a credit card she would not tell him how she got. (Not that he asked. He could recognize blood on the plastic when he saw it.) She'd made him read the labels for her on the ones that did not have embossed writing, and jeered as he mispronounced the French words.
His house now bore signs of her presence. The computer, grey and forbidding, with her headphones and Braille-marked keyboard. Scattered guns with manufacturers' labels El had never heard of, from Europe and Asia. Bullet holes from the times when Sands lost her temper.
She came out of the bedroom now, and came up to him. He put down the guitar and stood up, his face inches from hers.
"Is my makeup on straight?" Sands asked, her voice strangely blank. She brushed the pale hair (dyed, her roots were showing) behind one ear and stared at him with the dark holes of her freshly healed eyesockets.
"What?"
And the sculpted face twisted with hate, and there was the cold metal of a gun's muzzle at his throat. "I asked, assrag, is my fucking makeup on straight?" Despite the twisted mouth, there was barely a trace of a hiss in her voice.
El lifted his hand, very slowly. He passed his fingers over the side of her mouth.
"Just your lipstick smeared a bit," he said. He was surprised to hear how hoarse his voice sounded.
That oh-so-expressive mouth twisted again, this time into a smile. "Thanks."
* * *
It was not a big step, after that, to fall in bed together one night when they had too much tequila. The next time they drank less, and the time after that they only needed the adrenaline from blowing a dozen cartel enforcers straight into hell, hand in hand and gun in gun.
And nine hells, after Ajedrez Sands decided to swear off women for a while anyway. Ah, the joys of bisexuality.
But when El called out another name one morning, on that edge between sleep and life, that just wouldn't do.
So she waited for him in the bedroom when he returned from the town. She waited, knife in hand.
A very specific knife.
El stopped three paces into the room.
"That's hers, isn't it?" Sands said, hefting the throwing knife. "Carolina's."
"Si."
"You know, El, there's a lot of things you never tell me. Like about her." Sands got up, stretched, heard black leather creak. It was all black linen and leather now, black in mourning and black as she slipped into the skin of Lady Death, and that scared the shit out of the cartel fuckwits even better than her valley-girl white trash serial killer act had. "Tell me. Did she ever shoot a man because he simply did not fit in with her vision of the world?"
"No."
"I did. Did she ever make a plan that called for dozens to be killed just so she could have more money?" She moved towards him, slowly.
"No."
"I did." Sands was in full swing now. "Did she ever drive a fifteen-year-old girl to suicide just to see if she could?"
"No."
"I did." There were barely inches apart now, and Sands' hand rose, blade glinting. "Did she ever cut her boytoy's throat and watch him die at her feet, painted her face with his blood and laughed in the moonlight?"
"No." El's voice was a whisper now.
"I might."
And the knife flew from her hand, fast and true, embedding in the crucifix above the bed.
*
*
*
Sands woke up with a gasp. It would have been one of those movie-like wakings where you sit up straight in bed, but El's hand in a sensitive place prevented that.
Wait a minute. El's hand was resting, in fact, on Sands' dick.
Sands had a dick.
"Hallelujah, thank you, Jesus," he muttered, wiping cold sweat from his face. "Just a fucking dream."
Behind him, El grunted and moved his hand, smoothing it up Sands' side. "Bad dream?"
"Nah, just damn weird. I think my subconscious is more fucked up in the head than I am."
Sands got up and walked to the bathroom. Behind him, El rolled over into the warm hollow left by the agent's body and promptly went back to sleep.
Sands found the sink by touch and splashed water on his face. Damn, but this had been a weird one. Him as a girl, could it get any more ridiculous? Especially the way it started to make sense, there at the end?
"Somebody up there really fucking hates me," he muttered as he reached for a towel.
#FINIS#
How did this happen? I was thinking that there seems to be an acute lack of antiheroines in fiction; I couldn't name any off the top of my head, except maybe Thessaly from Sandman. Sands said to this, "I think it's just that women don't fit the mould, in general - present company excepted. Don't get me wrong, but can you imagine me as a woman.... oh shit, did I just say that??"
The rest is, well, history.
[EDIT] Illustration: Rosemary Jocelyn Sands
Comments? (yes/no/BANG!)
