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It was really the wind that was getting to her. These morons were too drunk to really throw a decent punch, but she was having trouble finding her footing on the icy ground and the wind was blowing right through her jeans. Her fingers were aching and numb, and the cold was slowing her down. Motherfuckers should have been grateful she wasn't operating at one hundred percent. She'd have swept the floor with them under normal circumstances.
As it was, she was having a little bit of difficulty keeping track of all three of them - they at least had the brainpower to try and keep her surrounded, which was annoying. She really ought to be thinking about splitting, but in the cold and the dark she didn't like her chances of finding safe harbor.
She took advantage of the predictable rhythms of their circling to back up closer to the wall of the alley, forcing them in front of her and giving her some semblance of protection to her back. This was a great plan, except for the fact that there was a broken gutter pipe to her left and the ice was thick and slick beneath her boots this close to the wall. Trying to keep her balance and track all of her opponents was too much for her admittedly-maybe-a-little-more-than-tipsy brain. One of them kicked out at her shin and she lost her balance in the instinctive dodge.
She knocked her head on the wall on the way down, and the glow from the streetlight was blurring when she opened her eyes. Fuck . She needed to get back up but the impact to her skull had rattled down her spine and she was having trouble getting her limbs to coordinate with each other. The ice was burning cold on her palms as she pushed herself back up, gritting her teeth and taking a kick to the thigh rather than try and dodge and end up falling again. She bared her teeth at the men as they closed in on her like sharks on the scent of blood. She just needed a second to catch her breath, but it was very much a second she did not have.
One of the men was stepping forward, and she could probably swing the momentum of his punch to trade places with him. She’d take a few hits from his buddies, but it would get her off of the patch of ice. He drew back his arm.
From the entrance to the alley, off to her right, someone politely cleared their throat.
Only one of the bozos looked towards the sound, but he blanched at what he saw. He grabbed urgently at his companion's arm, interrupting him halfway through his swing and making him stumble.
The crunch of boots on shards of glass and thickets of frost drew nearer. “I said ‘ahem’ ,” the newcomer repeated, in a casual, friendly tone.
“The fuck do you want,” slurred the man who had just been trying to hit her, lurching around to face this new contender. Ajax took his moment of distraction to step to the side until she found some less slippery patches of ground to stand on. She braced herself against the wall, silently calculating whether she could use this gap in the violence to escape.
“Get lost,” the newcomer said flatly. Ajax risked looking away from the men to see who was intervening. Her heart kicked at the sight of a woman in a black turtleneck and leather vest, standing with her hands in her pockets and looking bored. What the fuck did she think she was doing? She was tiny, she didn’t stand a chance against even one of these guys. Fuck, was Ajax going to have to save this new girl’s life, too?
The man in the middle reared back in outrage at the brazen disrespect. He took a step towards her, insults already starting to bubble at his lips, but the friend who had spotted the woman to begin with caught him by the arm - he was, Ajax thought, marginally the smartest of the goons.
“Don’t,” he hissed, “She’s a Warrior, it’s not worth it.”
At that word, a chill descended over the other two. The men stood up a little straighter, and the leader ducked his head in a reluctant nod. “Whatever,” he muttered, “Crazy bitch, you can have her.”
As the men turned to leave, one of them kicked out at Ajax’s ankle. She hadn’t been paying close enough attention to see it coming, and she hit the ground hard. Lucky shot , she thought bitterly from the floor of the alley. They’d all been lucky shots. She’d been off her game. The bruises would hurt the same in the morning, regardless.
“Pay your damn tabs,” the woman called over her shoulder to the men as they left, before unhurriedly walking over to crouch next to Ajax.
She nudged Ajax’s shoulder. “You alive?”
Ajax made a noise of refusal to comment. She sat up slowly, feeling through her body for where the adrenaline was already starting to thin. Her left shoulder was fucked, but that was fine. She didn’t need her shoulder to walk. The ache in her hips and twinge in her ankle from hitting the ground twice was more concerning.
“I had that handled,” Ajax grumbled.
“Sure you did,” said her savior, who was a shitty savior because she’d watched those guys trip Ajax and hadn’t even said anything.
Squinting through the pounding in her temples, Ajax couldn’t quite make out her face. She was limned by the streetlight behind her, catching in her hair like the gold halo on a Byzantine icon. Ajax could only catch flashes of the contours of her face as she moved.
Ajax caught the edge of her frown in the stark light. “You’re bleeding,” she said, reaching out to hover her fingertips over the cut near Ajax’s eyebrow.
Ajax had been bleeding, but the warm trickle had subsided, and now the blood was just sticky and cold on her skin. She reached up and batted her hand away. “I’m fine.”
The stranger rocked back on her heels, and the change in angle cast her face in light for the first time. Her mouth was drawn into a tight little knot of unhappiness, her furrowed brows casting deep shadows over her eyes. Kind of really pretty, kind of really scary, just how Ajax liked ‘em. Ajax’s heart turned over again. No. Bad heart. Down, boy. Not the time .
“You don’t look familiar,” her savior said, almost to herself.
“Should I?”
She tilted her head a little bit, her eyes narrowing. “You’re new here.”
Ajax thought about the men shrinking back in fear from this woman. Was she supposed to be afraid? This woman was a Warrior, whatever that meant. But… well, she hadn’t hurt Ajax yet .
There was curiosity in that dark gaze, a kind of expression that regarded Ajax like a math problem or a lock to be picked. “How long have you been in Coney Island?”
“What time is it?”
She blinked. “Eleven.”
“Five hours.”
“You cannot be serious.”
Oh, but Ajax was serious. As deadly serious as she could be sitting on the floor of an alleyway with blood smeared on her face, having been unceremoniously rescued by some random girl she ought to have been holding a door open for. She stared back, daring her to say something.
The girl let out a low whistle. “Christ. Okay. That’s gotta be a new record. Stay here.”
She stood up (easy, graceful, like a dancer - wait, Ajax wasn’t thinking about that right now) and crossed the alley to knock on a door set into the wall that Ajax hadn’t noticed in the dim light. Probably the back door of the bar, from where it was.
Someone opened it and they had a quick, tense conversation, and then the door closed again and stranger-girl came back to stand over Ajax’s shoulder. “You got a place to spend the night?” she said, with a flat inflection that suggested she knew the answer. “Or like… anything?”
So much contained in that ‘anything.’ So many things Ajax could have had. What Ajax had was forty bucks and an ID that would probably do more harm than good. “I’ve got a headache,” she said bluntly.
It wasn’t really supposed to be a joke. It was a “fuck you for asking, I don’t need your help” kind of answer, the kind of attitude that had her ending up on the wrong end of a fight, in a city a thousand miles from anyone she knew, on the wrong side of sunset. The kind of answer that had worn through the ranks of people who’d’ve picked up a phone call if she could have remembered their numbers. But stranger-girl laughed anyways, her eyes crinkling up at the corners, and Ajax found that, despite scolding herself not to, she was thinking about it.
The door reopened before Ajax could open her mouth and make everything worse. A woman with a cowboy hat on over her brown curls emerged. The bartender from inside, the one Ajax had been trying hard not to flirt with. But she had smiled at Ajax, warm and easy, and Ajax had felt normal for five minutes of her life, so Ajax had failed. Her face was softly concerned now as she crouched down next to Ajax. She was holding a wet rag which she gently reached out and started wiping the blood from Ajax’s temple with.
Ajax braced for it to be cold, but the rag had been run under warm water. This was a small compassion which felt like it punched right through her chest.
“Jesus, Rem,” said the woman in the cowboy hat - cow…girl hat? “You couldn’t have moved a little faster? She looks like hell.”
“I was fast!” “Rem” protested, which Ajax considered objecting to. She also considered objecting to “looks like hell” but then cowboygirl hat woman very gently put a hand on her jaw to tilt her head and Ajax stopped thinking about anything.
“I’m sorry about her,” Hat Woman said in a stage whisper, “I would have come to save you myself, but I was at work.”
She was still probably at work, Ajax thought numbly. Her shift couldn’t have ended just now. Belatedly, Ajax thought, oh. It was you . The bartender had watched those men follow her out of the bar and sent someone to check up on her. That was very, well - it was almost chivalrous, which meant she was stealing Ajax’s brand, but Ajax was alright with sharing in this one instance. Also, she smelled nice, and Ajax could feel her breath very faintly on her neck, so Ajax was alright with quite a lot of things in this particular instance.
“Hey,” “Rem” said warningly.
Hat Woman smiled winningly at Ajax. “I called dibs,” she said, and that smile kind of put a wrench in Ajax’s mental processes so it took her a second to realize she wasn’t being spoken to.
“And I did all the work!” Rem complained. “Find literally anyone else!”
“Fine,” Hat Woman said magnanimously, rising to her feet - also a dancer, Ajax’s brain supplied. A different kind of dance, said a more primitive and idiotic part of Ajax’s brain. “You can have the first shot. But I’m taking her if it doesn’t work out.”
Ajax squinted up at the two of them, brain struggling through a morass of pain and alcohol and cold and pain and dear god, leather , to parse what the fuck they were talking about. Hat Woman noticed her confusion and winked at her, which did not help her situation in the slightest.
To Ajax’s great horror and dismay, Hat Woman wiped imaginary dirt off her hands and turned around, leaving her alone in the alley with New York’s Miss Least Helpful Guardian Angel, 1974, who only looked marginally less bored/annoyed/suspicious than she had before.
“Can you walk?” she said down at Ajax.
“Absolutely,” Ajax said, and then made no attempt to stand up.
Ajax’s Personal Boricua Fairy Godmother rolled her eyes. She bent down and started dragging Ajax to her feet. She wasn’t really stronger than she looked, but she was very determined. Ajax thought she probably had experience throwing around people who were bigger than her. This was what she was thinking about, instead of about the suspicious numbness in that ankle of hers, and so was the reason that she tried to take a step on it and immediately nearly fell over when it failed to hold her weight.
Luckily for Ajax, Rem seemed to have been anticipating this possibility, and managed to keep her upright. “Okay, Christ,” she muttered under her breath. She put an arm around Ajax’s waist, and dragged Ajax’s other arm around her shoulder so she could hold some of her weight.
“Oh, hello,” Ajax’s mouth said, very unhelpfully and with no input from her brain. “Hi, I’m Ajax.”
Even though Rem had her head turned away to look down the mouth of the alley, Ajax got the distinct impression she was rolling her eyes. “Yes, hello Ajax,” she said, like she had already known somehow. Magic powers? It would track, what with the whole fairy godmother thing. “I’m Rembrandt.”
She said this with very firm enunciation, like it was not up for debate, which was most of the reason Ajax decided to debate it. “But that other girl called you-”
“You are not allowed to call me Rem,” Rembrandt said, “Cowgirl is not allowed to call me Rem either.”
“Wait, Cowgirl?” Ajax said, immediately distracted. Rembrandt tried to get her to take a step, and Ajax forgot which of her feet was injured and almost fell over again. “Her name is really Cowgirl?”
“No, it’s not,” Rembrandt deadpanned.
“But, like, it’s really not-really Cowgirl?”
When Ajax looked down at her Rembrandt was, to Ajax’s great surprise, trying not to smile. “Yes,” she said, “It’s really not-really Cowgirl.”
On that hint of a smile, Ajax allowed herself to be led out of the alley. She could put most of her weight on her injured ankle, it turned out, as long as it was from the right angle. She probably could have managed on her own. She didn’t mention this to Rembrandt. Through the worn ribbing of her turtleneck, she was very warm.
Walking still took up enough of Ajax’s concentration that it took her a few blocks to realize she had no idea where they were going. “Are you… kidnapping me?”
Rembrandt sighed heavily, in a way Ajax was beginning to suspect was performative. “Yes,” she said, “You can file a police report in the morning.”
“Hey, hey, I wasn’t complaining.”
Ajax could see the little white cloud of Rembrandt’s breath in the air as she laughed despite herself. It was more effective than liquor at numbing the ache in Ajax’s bones.
Rembrandt was quiet for a while, comfortable in the rhythm of walking together, until she took in a deep breath and slowed slightly. Something turned over in Ajax’s stomach. She was more than familiar with what regret looked like right before it became her problem.
“You can stay tonight,” Rembrandt said, and hey, that was something. That wasn’t the worst-case scenario. “But if you want to stay longer you have to join up. I’m sorry, that’s just how it works, I don’t want you to feel like I’m entrapping you-”
Ajax, marginally more sober than she had been in the alley, raced to connect the dots on several pieces of information she’d been busy ignoring. “Join… up?” she said slowly, stupidly.
Warrior , that guy had said. Like it had a capital W. And, well. Rembrandt was wearing a vest with a W on it. Ajax slowed to a stop, gently pulling away from Rembrandt. Rembrandt looked up at her, concerned, like maybe it had been her who’d said something wrong.
But it was Ajax who hadn’t done the math. Stupid, they were why she was here anyways. She’d gotten off the bus here because there had been some gangbangers in Jersey bitching about a crew in Coney and fuck her, she’d been interested . And she hadn’t really had any better ideas. But now that she was here, it wasn’t seeming like such a good idea.
“You’re the Warriors,” Ajax said, unnecessarily. Rembrandt blinked at her. Her eyelashes cast little filigreed shadows on her cheeks in the lamplight. “You’re all women, right?”
Rembrandt nodded slowly, like she wasn’t sure what Ajax was getting at.
“But I can’t-” She didn’t want to say anything . She wanted to lean her weight on Rembrandt and follow her wherever they were going, and then hopefully get some fucking sleep. But if there was one thing she’d learned, it was that it was better to meet violence here, on her feet, in the street, then to let it invite her inside.
“I’m not- I’m -” she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know any words for it that weren’t cruel. She let herself trail off into silence under the weight of Rembrandt’s gaze, feeling terribly see-through.
Rembrandt tilted her head. “Would you… want to be in a crew that’s just women?”
The answer to this question felt dangerous. As dangerous as all the words Ajax couldn’t bring herself to say, even now - especially not. But what the hell. Ajax had already blown up her entire life once this week. What was once more? There might still be a train she could catch.
“Yeah,” Ajax said quietly.
Rembrandt blinked. “Okay. So you can join.”
Ajax lost track of where the pavement was beneath her feet. “...What?”
Rembrandt squinted at her like this was a side effect of the head injury. “You can join? I mean, you don’t have to, but you seem like you can throw a punch, so you’d probably be nice to have around.”
“Sorry, I just mean,” Ajax said helplessly. “Don’t you need to… think about it?”
“Think about what?” Rembrandt said blankly. “You’re allowed to join. That’s the rule. That’s always been the rule.”
“But I’m-”
“I know ,” Rembrandt said, impatiently cutting her off. “It’s cold out here, do you want to keep going or not?”
When Rembrandt drew Ajax into leaning on her again, Ajax was glad for her steadiness. The ground felt a little wobbly under her feet.
After a while, her voice small and hating herself for it, she said, “That’s… always been the rule?”
Rembrandt slowed their progress again to look up at her. She studied Ajax’s face for a long moment. Ajax couldn’t quite muster enough confidence to cover up the uncertainty she was feeling. She knew Rembrandt could see it.
“Where are you from, Ajax?” Rembrandt asked finally.
“Tennessee.”
Rembrandt blinked. “For real?”
Ajax shrugged helplessly. “Is there somewhere else I should be from?”
“No, I just-” Rembrandt backpedaled, “I thought you were from, like Jersey , you know?”
In her five hours in the city, Ajax had learned enough to know she should be deeply offended by this. “Hey!”
“No, it’s – look,” Rembrandt said. She was looking at Ajax with something that looked suspiciously like sympathy. “You’re in New York, all right? It’s not just you. So yeah, we settled this whole thing. A while ago. You’ll be fine.”
“Oh,” Ajax said. “Oh. Okay.”
She didn’t really know what to say. “Thank you?”
“Jesus,” Rembrandt muttered to herself. “You’re not faking the accent.”
“Why would I be faking it?” Ajax asked, baffled. She had, in fact, been trying just a little bit to hide it.
“Because it’s hot,” Rembrandt said bluntly, face a mask of complete neutrality. Ajax stared down at her. Rembrandt wasn’t really that much shorter than her. Their faces were very close together.
The tension was too much for Ajax’s frazzled nervous system to take. She started to laugh. After a moment, Rembrandt joined in.
Some kind of weight that had hung threateningly over Ajax’s head her whole life seemed to ease.
- - -
Their mystery destination was an old apartment building a few blocks from the bar. Ajax was relieved to not have to walk anymore, because even if they hadn’t gone that far, walking while trying not to aggravate her injured ankle was starting to make her other ankle complain.
Rembrandt looked at the door, and then at her, and said, not sympathetically, “There are stairs.”
“Fuuuck.” Ajax said.
So they climbed the stairs.
Rembrandt let them into an apartment at the end of a hallway. It was dark inside, but in what light was coming through the window it seemed small but lived-in. Rembrandt shooed her off to collapse onto the couch while she ducked into the small kitchen. She flicked on the light over the stove and it clicked and buzzed as it turned on.
From deeper in the apartment, a soft voice said, “Rem? Is that you?”
Rembrandt cursed to herself. She pitched her voice louder to carry to whoever else was in here. “Yeah, hi, I’m back.”
There were quiet footsteps on the wooden floor and then a woman was poking her head out into the living room, blinking at the glare from the kitchen light.
“You’re home early,” she observed. She looked away from the light and spotted Ajax on the couch.
“I, um,” Rembrandt said, “I ran into some unexpected circumstances.”
The unexpected circumstances tried to sink deeper into the couch cushions, like she could turn invisible.
The woman – Rembrandt’s roommate? – looked at her consideringly. She was. Well. There were a lot of adjectives that came to mind, but Ajax had had a good thing going with Rembrandt for about forty-five minutes, so she judiciously decided not to use any of them. This new woman was. Tall.
Woman-of-many-adjectives stared Ajax down. “You brought… a friend.” She sounded like the idea that Rembrandt had managed to make a friend was equally unlikely as whatever other scenario might have led to her kidnapping Ajax back to her apartment. Based on the general bedside manner Rembrandt had displayed, Ajax was not surprised.
Rembrandt had crouched down to fish a first aid kid out of the cabinet beneath the sink, and was now straightening up. “So, Cleon,” she said, in a tone that was much warmer and friendlier than Ajax had heard from her thus far. “You know how you were telling me we could use some new soldiers, and also you have sooooo much faith in me and I could probably just go out and find them myself because you trust my judgment implicitly?”
“I seem to remember that we were going to talk about that more before we made any decisions,” Cleon said, but she was amused.
“Right,” Rembrandt agreed, hurrying to hand Ajax the first aid kit and then drag her up off the couch - something Ajax protested to - and usher her into the bathroom. “More talking. Great. We should do that soon. Like, right now maybe?”
She shut the door on Ajax before showing her where the light was, so Ajax had to fumble around in the dark for it while trying not to listen to the scraps of quiet conversation that floated up from beneath the door. In the slightly warped, aged mirror, she looked… well. Okay. The cut on her forehead would only need a bandaid, and not even one of the really big ones. She took off her jacket to see how the bruising on her shoulder was developing. It… could have been worse.
In the mirror, the rest of her wasn’t too bad either, as long as she didn’t look too closely. She washed her face and put a band-aid on the cut and then stood in the bathroom for a few seconds debating whether it would be better to interrupt Cleon and Rembrandt’s conversation, or wait for them to have stopped talking and just be sitting out there waiting for her.
She decided she liked the idea of standing in a tiny bathroom with nothing to do less than either of those options, so she went back to the living room.
Rembrandt was sitting on the kitchen counter, and Cleon was leaning against it next to her. They didn’t look like they were fighting. Ajax counted this as a win.
Cleon looked at her when she walked in. To Rembrandt, she said, “Did she at least win?”
Pitilessly, Rembrandt said, “No.”
Very diplomatically, Cleon nodded. She gestured to the couch. “Why don’t you sit down,” she said to Ajax. At least, if Ajax was going to be murdered, they were going to be polite to her first. It was the little things.
Cleon dragged one of the kitchen chairs over so she could straddle it sitting opposite Ajax. She folded her arms on the backrest and leaned against them as she studied Ajax.
Ajax felt a little bit like one of those bugs that had been stuck with pins to make it easier to look at. It was impressive. She wasted her time trying to figure out what it was about the weight of Cleon’s gaze that made her so terrifying, to distract herself from the fact that her body was having all the wrong hormonal reactions to this new very frightening woman who probably held Ajax’s fate in her hands.
“So,” Cleon said slowly, maybe knowing she was scary, maybe having a little bit of fun with it. “Ajax.”
She said Ajax’s name like she was testing it out. Like she was considering something. Her pause was contemplative. It did not invite response.
That had never stopped Ajax. “Yes,” she said.
Cleon blinked. “I haven’t asked you anything yet.”
“Um. Sorry,” Ajax said. “But the answer is going to be yes.”
Cleon looked at Rembrandt, like she might be able to explain something. Rembrandt raised an eyebrow. “You don’t even know what I’m going to ask you,” she said, gently but firmly.
“Doesn’t really matter,” Ajax said, shrugging in a way she hoped seemed appropriately apologetic. “Answer’s still yes.”
Cleon sat back in her chair. “Okay,” she said with a huff. “That makes this pretty easy, then.”
And then she smiled, slow and easy, and she was beautiful, and fuck had Ajax agreed to stay on this woman’s couch? What the fuck was she getting herself into? She wasn’t cut out for this. Despite everything, she could feel herself starting to smile. She was going to fuck this up so, so badly.
“Welcome to the Warriors.”
She was going to make this work if it killed her.