Work Text:
2014 August 1
Friday
“I hate this outfit.”
“You look simply wonderful, darling.”
“It itches,” Gemma insists.
“It can’t itch. You can’t itch.”
“I can if I want.”
“You’re a vampire, Gemma, darling; you simply don’t have it in you. Your skin doesn’t… It doesn’t do that.”
Gemma laughs. “You don’t know what causes itching in humans, do you?” She makes the final turn into the hotel car park, wincing as the morning sun once again lances out from between the buildings and, even through the darkened windows of Helena’s stupid, attention-grabbing limousine, contrives to make her thumping headache just a little worse. At least Helena took her for ‘coffee’ before all this, to wake her up, to get her going, to apologise for requiring this of her again. “You were all set up to own me with facts and logic, and you just couldn’t.”
Helena’s not in the back seat. The rear compartment, with its expansive seating, built-in fridge and gently perfumed air conditioning is going unused, because the limo is, like everything else about Helena’s human persona, an affectation: empty, and starting to smell. Helena sits in front, in the passenger seat, the better to survey the road, the better to lay her hand on Gemma’s thigh.
“To ‘own’ you?” she asks. “What on earth does that mean?”
There’s a parking space reserved for them at the rear of the hotel. Gemma pilots the limo carefully through the narrow gap that leads to the staff spaces, and aims it at their spot. “Remember when you tried that computer game? Back in, what, oh-six?”
“Two-thousand-and-six?”
Gemma expresses her irritation via the handbrake, and nearly rips it from its housing. “What do you think?”
Helena smirks at her. “We had computers in nineteen-oh-six. They were usually women.”
“I bet they were,” Gemma says, and draws a laugh from Helena. Gemma wonders if any of them still work for her now. “I mean a computer like the beige boxes. With the te-le-vi-sion attached.”
“You can’t make fun of me like this in there, you know,” Helena says. “You’re going to have to pretend like you respect me. And, yes, I remember. Counter Stroke, I think it was called.”
Gemma slaps at the door release and steps out into the light, immediately snatching her sunglasses from the inside pocket of her jacket and slipping them over her eyes. Why did they always have to do this in the middle of summer? During the day?
And why did she have to wear this stupid fucking outfit?
“Counter Strike,” she says, leaning on the roof of the limo while Helena extracts herself and retrieves a pair of briefcases from the boot. “One of those kids got a headshot on you and you said—”
Helena grins, exposing her fangs. “I said I’d find out where he lived and I’d kill him, his parents, his siblings, and burn down his house around him. I remember. And then I went on to win the match.”
Despite herself, Gemma laughs. Even a suffragette can win at Counter Strike if she has vampire reflexes. She catches the briefcase Helena throws at her and quickly checks inside: all there. Unnecessary for her, of course, just as Helena’s matching weapon is unnecessary for her. More affectations. “When he killed you that one time, he said, ‘Owned.’ It’s a thing they say.”
Helena walks briskly around the limo and together they head for the back entrance. “Rather an unpleasant thing to shout at someone over the internet.”
“You’d know.”
“Respect, remember?” Helena says. There’s a man waiting for them at the double doors and he nods as they pass. He looks like a few dozen packs of minced beef stuffed uncomfortably into a suit. Gemma knows how he feels. “Game face, my jewel.”
Gemma taps at her teeth, where her fangs would be if they weren’t retracted. “Back at you,” she says, and Helena rolls her eyes. Slight movement under her upper lip suggests she’s retracted hers, too, and not before time, because the suite of rooms they’ve reserved is right in front of them and voices are coming from inside and it’s time for Gemma to play at bodyguard and Helena to play at human.
* * *
Vampire influence in the UK doesn’t just flow through the corporation, even though that is where most of the higher-ups like to hang their opera hats. Helena and Benjamin between them have enough plates in the air, enough fingers in enough pies, that if the corporation were to suddenly vanish they would still be able to keep themselves and their subordinates, hangers-on and indentured no-hopers (Gemma) in nice clothes, posh hotel rooms and human blood until such time as a successor organisation could be spun up, hopefully without quite so many dodderingly ancient vampire arseholes at the top, looking down on everyone else. And part of the work, part of what keeps it all going, is meeting the human participants every so often, in being visibly and touchably the strong and secure (and human) face of the money.
Helena and Benjamin both have aliases for this kind of thing. Gemma doesn’t know what they are; doesn’t care. There’s undoubtedly a paper trail thirty-plus years long to support Helena’s current identity and the age she claims, and another one for Benjamin, and thank the good undead Christ none of that is Gemma’s job; it’s Jackie’s. All Gemma has to do to support this side of their collective endeavour is to show up and look competent.
She just wishes competent wasn’t so fucking uncomfortable.
She said it itches, and it doesn’t, but it’s dressing up, and in something that is not only more or less the exact opposite of the sort of thing she normally wears to do her job, it’s also a little too much like the things she always wanted to wear when she was a kid, the things she used to fantasise about. There’s residual shame attached to clothes like this, the memory of her fear that just because she wanted to look pretty that made her a fetishist or something; not really real.
Gemma doesn’t laugh. As if she’s at all real any more.
“Coffee?” someone asks, and Gemma doesn’t look up. It’s the woman who entered the room last, nervously looked around at its occupants, and fiddled for a while with her briefcase. Under other circumstances Gemma might have sought her out, as the only other woman in the room, but she’s not in the mood. Unfortunately, the woman appears to have had the same thought.
“Sure,” Gemma says. “Cream, two sugars, and anything else they have: chocolate, cinnamon, blood.”
“Blood?”
“Just the two sugars, then.”
The woman walks away towards the extensively stocked buffet table and Gemma listens to her struggle with the coffee machine, listens to her drop one of the pods on the floor, listens to one of the men lean down to pick it up for her, listens to him shuffle a little too close to her as he rises, and before he’s on her level again Gemma decides, fuck it.
She hadn’t bothered worrying about anyone in the room when she and Helena glided through it in the manner befitting the station they were both pretending to occupy in life (hah!). She had an accurate heartbeat count before they even entered, all of them running too fast to belong to another vampire, and that means she’s off the hook: unless any of them are concealing a shotgun (they’re not) and can somehow get up to her without her noticing (impossible) then the most any of these so-called assistants can do to her is worsen her headache. Helena’s in the next room now, behind soundproofing that Gemma has to concentrate a little to penetrate, which leaves Gemma to massage her temples in a room filled with humans. She’s hunched over in her chair with her back to the room, and before this woman approached her she’d successfully radiated sufficient hostility to keep everyone away; a necessity, since she’s not great with people and has no wish accidentally to fucking murder one of them just for being irritating.
But she’s not going to let some poor woman get harassed by one of these guys. She can hear his heartbeat, and he’s excited, and in this kind of environment that rarely goes anywhere that won’t make her head hurt more.
She’s at the buffet table by the other woman slightly too fast, but no-one was looking at her, and humans tend not to notice that shit, anyway. She inserts herself between the man and the woman with a feral smile, and says, “Oh, seriously, sweetheart, let me do that,” in her most saccharine voice.
“But—” he says.
“Thank you so much,” the woman says, transferring all of her attention to Gemma with a gratitude Gemma can smell. And hear: the woman’s heartbeat is irregular.
It’s enough to make the man back off. He radiates testosterone but he’s almost definitely under orders not to start a scene unless absolutely necessary, and he leaves Gemma and the woman be. Together they make their coffee — no blood, but there is a shaker of chocolate powder, which Gemma applies liberally — and return to the table Gemma staked out in the far corner of the room.
“Thank you for that,” the woman says, sitting down and cupping her coffee in both hands.
“No problem,” Gemma says. “And, uh, sorry for being short with you before. Headache.”
“I sympathise. I always feel out of depth at these kinds of things.”
Gemma frowns. “I don’t remember you from last year.”
“Oh! No.” The woman waves a hand. “I haven’t worked for Ms Lambert for that long. I’m new,” she adds, and laughs to herself. “Very new. But she gets around, you know? And she has… very precise instructions. For example…” She fiddles with her mug the same way she fiddled with her briefcase. “She told me to find you.”
Gemma covers her surprise by drinking some coffee, and then wonders if she’s made a mistake: it’s far too hot. It doesn’t matter to her, of course, but it’s not seemly to be caught performing superhuman acts — even minor ones — without an ironclad excuse, lest you create a problem you’ll have to kill your way out of. “Me?” she asks, hoping the woman hasn’t noticed anything.
“You,” the woman confirms.
At least the woman’s embarrassed by her confession and is looking away. She won’t have seen anything. Gemma replaces her mug on the table, wipes from her lips any evidence that she’s drunk any at all, and says, “Why me?”
The woman’s still looking away, and speaks almost too quietly for a human to hear. Gemma, naturally, has no trouble. “She apologised for putting me in this situation—” the woman quickly gestures at the room full of armed bodyguards and ‘assistants’; the situation, “—but said there’d be someone who could keep me safe. She described you perfectly. Even knew what you were going to wear.”
Gemma, uncomfortable in her short black skirt, her fitted waistcoat, her revealing blouse and her now-discarded jacket, glares down at her coffee. “I’ll cut that bloody woman’s head off one of these days,” she mutters.
The woman covers Gemma’s hand with hers, and Gemma goes still for a fraction of a second, so she doesn’t react in any of the several ways she might, the ways her body wants to; the ways her mind, running suddenly scared of the human contact, needs to.
“Problematic boss?” the woman says.
Gemma shakes her head. Swallows away the sudden wetness in her mouth; the woman sitting next to her is attractive — very attractive — and seems sweet and kind and everything, but right now there’s only one thing about her that matters, and it’s something Gemma thinks the woman would prefer to keep to herself. “You don’t know the half of it,” she says.
“Which one’s yours?”
Well, that worked to distract Gemma from her incipient bloodlust; she has no idea what name Helena’s working under! No-one has ever expected her to know before. She covers: “Look for a white woman with long dark hair and a sharp suit. And an expression like she wants to eat you.”
“Huh,” the woman says, removing her hand from Gemma’s and granting them both a reprieve. She sips at her coffee, winces at the heat, and continues, “Sounds a lot like mine.”
“Small world,” Gemma says. She looks at the spot between the woman’s eyes so she doesn’t have to look into them, doesn’t have to witness the woman’s humanity at the same time as her subconscious is having fun playing in the woman’s entrails.
“She says you have to look the part when you’re dealing with these old men.”
Gemma grunts. “Mine insisted I look the part, too.” Yes, perfect; concentrate on how much you hate this fucking skirt. Much better than thinking about how much you want to kill and drain the nice lady who did nothing more than make you a coffee and touch you on the hand. “I hate it.”
“You look nice!”
“I kind of resent having to tuck so hard,” Gemma says.
“Oh! You’re— You’re— Did I hear you right?” The woman looks shocked, and Gemma deducts points all around: from the woman, for being a bigot; from herself, for just assuming everyone can always tell.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Gemma says, to prod at her own wound, to keep the pressure on something other than how nice the woman smells.
“No! I mean, no, not really, I mean, yes, I suppose you’re tall and everything, but so am I, and Elle didn’t say anything, and I’ve learned never to assume, and… Shit. Are you from… where I’m from?”
Huh. Weird. “I doubt it.”
“Okay.” The woman flaps a hand near her face, like she’s trying to cool off. It’s… it’s actually adorable. Hard to want to eat someone so cute and flustered. “Okay. Shit. Sorry. I’m so rude. I’m Emma.”
Gemma laughs. “Wow. It really is a small world. I’m Gemma.”
Emma snorts. “Emma, Gemma,” she says, giggling. “Gemma, Emma.” She takes another sip of coffee, and it must be an okay temperature to drink now, because she follows up with another. Gemma mirrors her, and for a moment they sit in silence, drinking.
Having a name helps. Gemma’s okay around humans, mostly, as long as they keep their distance and she’s had something nourishing to drink recently, but she’s not had many opportunities to hone her people skills. Her not-eating-people skills. Knowing her name, imagining for her a life, a history, a future? It all helps. Gemma breathes deeply, takes in the steam from the coffee, the aroma of Emma’s perfume and the scent of her skin and the heat of her blood, the mixed sensations from the dozen or so bodies scattered around the room. Places herself carefully and deliberately in the centre of it. A calm and composed vampire, who had a full big glass of (donated) human blood just this morning, who doesn’t need to murder anyone.
“I’m trans, too,” Emma says suddenly, quickly, like she’s ripping off a plaster. “Sort of. Mostly?”
“You’re ‘mostly trans’?” Gemma says, smiling politely. Is this a new gender thing? She’s online a lot — unavoidably — but occasionally someone will surprise her with how much things have changed since she came out.
“I am,” Emma says, more confident. “I’m trans. Too. Like you.”
Gemma holds up her thumb and forefinger, almost touching. “Tiny world,” she says. Emma blushes. “So,” she continues, after a little more coffee, “you said your boss said to look for me?”
Emma nods, relieved to be back to a slightly less personal subject. “Elle Lambert,” she confirms. “Peckinville Group… among other things.”
Ah. Peckinville; one of Helena’s big investments, she’s pretty sure. Another thing Jackie would know more about. “Heard of that. My boss is involved, too. Probably.”
“Probably?” Emma says, grinning.
“I don’t ‘know things’.” She finger-quotes, and Emma laughs. “I’m just the muscle.”
Emma looks at Gemma’s arms. “Clearly,” she says. Gemma, very suddenly, wants to put her jacket back on. “Anyway, she said you work for someone she trusts intimately, so she trusts you intimately, too. She said, if shit hits the fan, hide behind you.” She looks around, some of her earlier nerves returning. “Does shit normally hit the fan at these things?”
“Not for years,” Gemma says. “But, yes, if something happens, behind me is the best place to be.” More coffee. Emma hasn’t touched her again, which is good, but otherwise this conversation seems to be going pretty well! Both trans; huh. Emma even looks a little like Gemma, with her pale skin, dark blonde hair and kinked nose. A kick of jealousy surprises her, and it takes her a moment to nail it down: this woman can probably get bottom surgery, if she hasn’t already. Suddenly she wants to know everything about this girl. “So, why are you here, Emma? If Ms Lambert is so worried about you she sends you to me to protect you?”
Emma leans forward and whispers, “New packets. Profiles from the operation at— Fuck.” She rolls her eyes. “Almost said it. I’m not cut out for this shit. Secure packets. Stuff you can’t just send over the internet. You know the kind of thing.”
Gemma shrugs. The secure packets she gets are all about the kidnappings and murders she’s obliged to carry out; this girl seems too nervous, too innocent, to be in the same line of work. “Yeah,” she says. “I know the kind of thing.”
“She’s very excited about the new intake.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what that is,” Gemma says.
“Oh,” Emma says, “it’s just… It’s not important.”
* * *
The meeting must be breaking up. Gemma’s not been paying attention — she’s been too enraptured by the first conversation she’s had with a normal human in years to care about listening through the layers of soundproofing — but various bodyguards have started taking phone calls and organising their shit, checking their hidden weapons, and so on, which suggests that business has reached its conclusion. A shame it has to end, really, because Emma really is fun to talk to, but, as with every other contact Gemma’s had with a better world, fleeting and ultimately unsatisfying is better than nothing at all, and definitely better than Gemma overstaying her welcome and losing her self-control.
But she’s agreed to stay in touch. She has standing instructions from Helena to claim to be in her early twenties, which of course turned out to be yet another thing she has in common with Emma, and now as a result she has an invite to a private Consensus server for young British trans people.
“You know shit,” Emma had said, midway through their conversation. “You could really help these kids. Better than me.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Gemma had insisted.
“I’m not.” And when she said it, Emma looked for a moment almost like she was older than Gemma. “There are so many things I don’t know. And so many things I really have the wrong end of the stick about. Just log on. Give yourself a whimsical username. Chat with them. I guarantee fun.”
“And you’ll be on there?”
“Sometimes. Not as much as I’d like.”
They’re hugging — actually hugging! and even though Gemma has to hold her breath and freeze her limbs in place it’s not as bad as all that! — when Benjamin enters from the meeting room and breaks out in a broad grin.
“Gemma!” he says, holding out his arms for a hug of his own, as much to rescue Gemma as anything else. “Missed you.”
“Hi, Benjamin,” Gemma says, pulling away from him. “This is Emma. She works for Elle Lambert.”
“Ah!” Benjamin says. “Well, I have a message for you, then, Emma-who-works-for-Elle-Lambert. She wants to meet you in there. You’ll go over your—” he waggles a disinterested hand, “—your whatever together, and Gemma and I will head out together.”
Emma frowns. “Mind if I confirm?” she asks, pulling out a phone.
“Not at all,” Benjamin says, winking at her.
While Emma calls her boss, Gemma whispers, “Why are we leaving without Helena?”
Benjamin glances back at the closed door. “She’s got another engagement,” he says. “And so’ve you. A job. One of your usual, I’m afraid.”
“Fuck.” So much for the better world. “How many?”
“One,” Benjamin says, holding up a single finger. “And it’s right here in the city! It’s a guy who stalks cons.”
“Cons?”
“Conventions. Have you ever—” he purses his lips, the way he does when he’s about to articulate a foreign concept, “—‘cos-played’?”
“Yeah,” Gemma says, gesturing at her outfit. “Right now.”
Benjamin kisses her on the cheek. “Smartass. Come on.”
“Helena will be okay?” Gemma doesn’t know why she needs to know; she just does.
“She’ll be fine. I’ll drop you off and come right back for her.”
And that’s it. Gemma waves once more to Emma, who’s hanging up the phone and collecting her stuff, preparing to join her boss, this Lambert woman, in the meeting room. Emma returns her wave, mimes typing on a computer keyboard to remind her about her promise, and Gemma nods, smiles, and turns away, following Benjamin back out to the limo, and the world from which she briefly escaped.