Work Text:
Five attacks in a single week. Either the Batterwitch has a lot of spare time to kill, or someone’s stuck a big red target on your back while you weren’t looking.
It was all standard assassination fare, the first four times. Mildly explosive packages, some poisoned cake mixes… par for the course. Nothing you and Dad aren’t used to handling.
Then, today, there was the brick thrown straight through your living room window. The shattering glass scared the hell out of both you and Dad, but not nearly as much as the close-up photographs of your nighttime bedroom window that were tied to it did. Now, you’re effectively under house arrest – again – but this time you’re a lot less exasperated with your father and a lot more terrified. You’ve covered your webcam out of sheer paranoia (you’ve heard the horror stories) and even though your blinds are shut tight, you can’t keep from shooting little glances at it all night. Your neck prickles when you turn away from it.
You’ve had many a worried night before, of course. Usually if you’re too scared to sleep, you call Roxy and have her distract you with stories about what dumb shit her cats did that day, or she’ll tell you every bit of trivia about whatever retro video game she’s playing. If you can’t get Roxy, you settle for Jake – his bravado concerning the “good-for-nothing roustabouts” who attack you and his ceaseless good spirits are usually enough to calm your frazzled nerves.
But now it is four twenty-two in the morning, even Roxy will be asleep, and you don’t even bother with Jake. Desperate times call for desperate measures, you suppose, and speed-dial 3.
He picks up on the second ring. “What’s up.”
You don’t say anything at first. You really hadn’t thought this far ahead. How should you start this conversation? Hi Dirk, my great-grandmother keeps trying to murder me, and I’d love some reassurance that I won’t be stabbed in my sleep. Oh, he’ll handle that like a champ.
“Jane?” The tinny background noise of mechanical tinkering slows to a stop.
And, to your embarrassment, you sniffle.
“What’s wrong? What happened?” Oh, wonderful, there’s the worry. Once he starts worrying, he’s an especially high-strung macaw with ruffled feathers that downright refuse to be smoothed.
“Nothing,” you say immediately, mostly to derail him. “Well, I… not nothing, I suppose, but—”
“Isn’t it four in the morning over there?”
“I… yes.” You sniffle again, pathetically, before you can stop yourself. He waits for you to get your shit together. “It’s just… Things are, you know, happening again. To me.”
“The assassins?”
You sniffle again and now the waterworks are starting up in earnest, welling up in the back of your throat and making it hard to swallow or talk. He gets it anyway.
“Shit, Jane, I’m sorry. That sucks an enormous set of donkey tits.”
You giggle in spite of the tears prickling hot at the corners of your eyes.
“So what’d they do now?” You hear rustling on the other end, like cloth on metal. “Send you another jack-in-the-box full of knives? Cyanide in the sugar bowl? Cause I’ve said it before, those are just… not efficient traps. Like, at all.”
“They’ve gotten a little more creative.” You can’t help another glance at your window. You wonder briefly if Dad will board it over like he always claims he will when something like this happens.
“Good, that shit was boring. I mean, not good, obviously, because why the fuck are they trying to kill you, but the—”
“I know what you meant, Dirk.” You crack a smile and catch an almost-there teardrop on your thumbnail. “They threw a brick through the living room window.”
“Doesn’t sound too—”
“It had photos. Of my bedroom window and such. It… well, it really spooked my dad.” And me goes unsaid.
There’s nothing but quiet on the other end.
“And, I don’t know,” you start babbling to fill the gap because you suddenly, desperately do not want to hear silence right now, “I guess it’s spooked me too, hasn’t it, because—because I’ve tried calling Roxy already but she’s asleep, and, and I’ve even thought about trying Jake because for all his endearing bluster he’s really quite good at being a distraction, and even my Dad is probably asleep out there and I’ve drawn the blinds as tight as they’ll go but it still feels like there’s someone watching me—” Your voice goes high and shrill at the end and you cut yourself off before it breaks, because you’d rather listen to the dead unnerving silence than hear yourself carry on like some hysterical dame.
Then: “Wait, you mean I’m your last choice, like you’ll even talk to your lame-ass adult male guardian before your rad as hell BFF? I am wounded.”
You laugh a little hysterically and can’t quite manage the no you idiot Roxy is my BFF quip you’d usually have at the ready.
“Hey. Do you want me to come over there and fuck someone’s shit all the way up with a shitty katana? Cause I have a lot of free time here and I’d be a hundred percent down with that if it’d make you feel better. Also, I’ve seen Orange Is the New Black, I’m not scared of prison.”
“Maybe,” you say thickly around the lump in your throat. “Let’s not rule it out.”
“Noted. Just say the word.” Something changes in his voice then, something you can’t quite identify. “You know I wouldn’t let anything hurt you, right?”
“I know,” you say quickly, even though you have been hurt by these assassination attempts before. There’s still a four-inch scar stretching sideways across your back from where a bit of shrapnel caught you when you were fourteen. It’s probably best if you don’t tell Dirk that, though. He tends to spiral into guilt; and for all your pitiful sniffling on his metaphorical shoulder tonight, you do try your best to look after him.
Dirk protects you from the world. You protect him from himself.
You take a deep breath to steady your voice. “So,” you say for his benefit as much as yours, “what are you doing awake at this ungodly hour, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Heterosexual things. Attending strip clubs. Geocaching. Learning how to roll sushi. Straight shit like that.”
You giggle a little. “To imitate the enemy?”
“Gotta blend in out there.” He snickers. “But really, I’m repairing Sawtooth. One of his speech processors burned out today. Or yesterday, I guess.”
“How’d that happen?” you prompt, and he immediately launches into a detailed description of exactly what’s wrong with the processor and exactly how he’s repairing it. Somewhere along the way, the fuzzy background noise begins again – scuffling and mechanical humming in patterns that lull you with their regularity.
Before you can let yourself think too much about it, you make your way over to your bed, switching off your light.
“—then it turned out the goddamn coil was fried too, so I had to spend half the day welding a new one in place. Do you know how hard it is welding something the size of a taste bud? Cause let me tell you, Jane, it’s not fun. And now I’m almost out of tungsten.”
You tug the blanket up around your shoulders. “Can’t you get more?” you yawn.
“See, though, it’s not getting more that’s the problem, it’s just so hard to process. It is the hardest metal to melt, period, end of story, P.S. fuck you and your soldering tools.” You hear him huff a long-suffering sigh, then, almost as an afterthought: “Hey, I’ll make something for you.”
“Like what?” You pull your glasses off and set them on your bedside table.
“I don’t know yet. A robot guardian. Maybe a weaponized rabbit. Bitches love rabbits.”
“I do love rabbits,” you concede sleepily.
“Gonna call it Huggy Bear or some shit.”
“You do that.” You smile. “I’m going to sleep.”
“Cool. I’ll be here.”
“Dirk?”
“Hmm?”
“Thank you.”
There’s the quiet puff of his laugh. “I’ll be here,” he repeats.
You drift off to sleep.