If you want anyone to pay attention to what you’re saying, you really shouldn’t have one of those little swingy ballbearing things that go clack-clack-clack on your desk; it’s just asking for everyone to mentally check out and to physically check in to ballsville.
Vyper thinks Wraith probably didn’t even pick it out herself. It seems so ‘Mo, go get me something that a big tough-guy businesslady would have on her desk’, and Wraith is a tough-guy business lady, Vyper supposes. Technically. If the business is running books, killing people, and getting out looking like you didn’t kill people. ‘Technically’ is one of Wraith’s favorite words/excuses/general concepts. But Wraith, Wraith wouldn’t say it like that though, the ‘Mo’ thing. She’d probably say something like ‘Maurice, go get me something… indiscreet.’ Vyper’s pretty sure of that. She hangs around Wraith so much, she’s confident that her internal impersonation matches the genuine article a good eighty-three percent of the time.
Hangs around maybe a bit too much. Like now, when the schmuck in a suit (not a Wall Street suit, a Wraith kinda suit, a we-all-bring-potatoes-to-the-same-potluck-wink-wink kinda suit) (and yeah Vyper knows the difference now, yeesh this is bad) has been going on and on about some bad deal or another for hours now. Or an hour that’s felt like hours. Clack-clack-clack go the ballbearings. Man, Vyper shoulda never fished for this job. Part of her had thought it was never really gonna happen, had taken that first ‘no’ at face value and only kept at it because she’d really needed work post-clink. And thought she’d be good at it. Which she is! When it doesn’t involve standing around looking intimidating (NOT bored, V! Not bored! Stand up straighter!) and involves actually going around muscling losers and slinging knives. The part of her that settled into pessimistic acceptance was absolutely blindsided when her personal strategy of ‘needle until they cave’ actually paid off.
‘Paid off’ in the loosest terms. Even Wraith is looking bored now, which is how you know shit’s making watching paint dry look like a fight at the Bear Pit. Bored bored, not just ‘I don’t want you to think you’re anywhere on my level, so I’m gonna act like none of this bothers me’, but like she needs a whiskey snifter just to stay awake. Vyper can tell she wants this guy would just beat it so she can go back to work, and she can tell because Wraith’s stopped listening enough to notice Vyper’s playing with her desk-doohickey. The ever-iconic ‘stop touching that so help me god’ look rolls Vyper’s way, of which she’s very familiar. It’s not venom filled the way it could be, though. Vyper’s hung around long enough to know that too, can see a layer underneath everything Wraith does that wasn’t there when Vyper first took the job. Of what, exactly, she can’t say.
Vyper slinks to the interloper’s side of the room, acting like she was totally going to anyway, yawning as she does. Throwing in a big stretch too.
It works. Everyone thinks she’s totally casual, suit guy’s not even paying attention to her. But, oh, whoops, right, she’s supposed to be paid attention to, because she’s the intimidation factor. Oh well. She’ll catch them looking again soon and really give ‘em the stink eye.
If she remembers. Already her mind is drifting again, looking at the posters on the walls, the plans for the Empire State Wraith has framed. Usually shows those off to guests, claims her money propped that thing up. Might even be true. Vyper’s moll has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies.
Vyper’s moll has a lot of everything in a lot of everywhere. She’s the sort of person who commands a room, who relies on indiscretion yet falls back showmanship when the hour demands. Who hides her eyes with a swanky hat, yet whose shoulderpads take up the whole damn office. Who, now that the unwelcome bozo is done with their spiel, is addressing the room at large, doing that aforementioned show-stealing. Just an absolute bombshell, a real, bona fide star. Her eyes alive in a way Vyper’s never seen on any other dame, not even the showgirl Vyper once blew in the back of a theater, talking about how any day her name was going be in lights. It’s the sort of thing that stills tapping claws, ceases all fussing. Every single person feels like Wraith is talking just to them.
Except Vyper, who knows better.
Inexplicable calm washes over her. Everything’s a little more bearable now, and she periscopes everyone engrossed by Wraith’s speech, her rallying of the troops, something something we’re not being pushed out of our city. Inviting this guy was just a pretense, probably. A springboard. It’s working. Wraith’s two other bodyguards, her second, her ground woman; they all look to her, enthralled.
They all look at her, and no one’s looking at suit guy anymore, rustling in the inner pocket of their jacket.
It’s a gun. Vyper knows it’s a gun, they way you know to shape your tongue in your mouth to say ‘hey’ before you even know you’re doing it. She knows in the way she’s already thinking somebody’s gonna stop it before they’re going to shoot her even completes. Wraith doesn’t get gunned down in her own casino. It doesn’t happen. That’s not the way the story goes.
But nobody’s looking. Vyper knows that too, that for someone to stop it they have to notice it, and because all these things are happening in her mind before the snub-nose is even out of the breast pocket, she can come to the more accurate conclusion: Wraith is about to die without even seeing it coming. It’s going to go off, and the world’s not going to have a Wraith in it anymore.
It’s Vyper. Vyper’s gotta be the one to do the thing. The thing that stops this. Stop a gun, from when you’re standing behind a person with a gun. Which isn’t something you can do. Not really.
Sinks in her fangs, done this enough times to know what happens next. Knows it so well it’s a little out of body, watching the gangster twist, fail to fire because there’s a hundred-ninety pounds of gorgon slamming into their body. All that slamming, and, crucially, the bite, diving in between their trapezius and omohyoid, plunging in with six-inch fangs that deliver paralyzing agent right where it counts.
The paralyzing agent’s kind of besides the point, though. It takes at least three seconds to be picked up by the body, and in a gunfight, three seconds might as well be a lifetime.
Because, to bite, you have to get in close.
Back to chest, so that when they turn to try and throw her off, there’s nowhere to go, and they only twist in closer to her, putting their arm and most importantly their gun right up against her. Hey! It’s a gun that’s no longer pointed at Wraith!
Instead, it’s a gun that’s now wedged between their bodies. And the thing about guns — guns in general, but especially guns you plan on shooting anyway — is:
Vyper shrivels. Her whole weight falls onto the assassin as her midsection obliterates in the point blank blast, slumping forward and, conviniently enough, eliminating any chance of them freeing the gun and waving it at Wraith again.
She’s not standing under her own power anymore, but her jaw doesn’t care. It’s built to bite, to penetrate, and to withstand the three seconds of thrashing it takes for the venom to do its work; whether that’s the prey’s thrashing or Vyper’s, evolution forgot to make the distinction. So she’s there, not letting go, her eyes rolling back in her head as the room explodes into screams and bursts of magic, the red inside her flying out her back and hitting the opposite wall.
She’s a pretty slim lady. Slim enough that she really can’t afford to have whole chunks of her body blasted away, and one shot right where it counts make her realize is oh. this is the last one, huh?
Purple telekinetics grab the mobster out from under her, flinging them into the opposite wall. The glass frame of the Empire State building shatters into a thousand fragments of stardust. Vyper’s jaw wrenches, a terrible pain sliding from her pterygoid right down her neck.
Doesn’t that suck? Doesn’t that just fucking beat all? That she just lost most of her organs, but the ripped-out fang hurts worse than anything else.
Without the human supporting her weight, she collapses onto Wraith’s meticulously clean office floor. Or, she assumes she does. It’s the logical missing moment between when she’s standing toothless and when she’s next lying on her back, looking at a terrifying Wraith holding her by the shoulders.
Terrifying, not because she’s furious — which she is, screaming at her bodyguards, saying get the fucking lazareth or so help me you’re going to wind up under six layers of concrete and how did they smuggle that in here, we check, we fucking check every one of these fuckers — but because she is terrified. It’s a completely incongruous look on her. Her film-coated eyes are blown wide, almost in mockery, like she’s parodying a person who actually ‘gets scared’ because that’s the only way Vyper’s mind can square what she’s looking at. Square the complete and abject horror as she whips off her jacket and presses it to Vyper’s wound. Heh, good luck with that, sweetheart. There’s more of Vyper on the carpet behind her than there is held down by the compress.
“Why did you do that?” Wraith hollers.
“…Why did I do that?” Vyper lisps.
Even if no one says it, anyone can take an educated guess that Vyper only took this gig because she thought it would be easy. Yeah it’s a ‘bodyguard’ job, and that’s got a suicidal implication to it, but Vyper wasn’t actually planning on doing the. Y’know. Messy part of that. She was planning to coast, and when the going got tough, beat town like she always does. Stupid Wraith, suckering her in like this.
“Can’t believe you told me to do that,” Vyper says. Tries not to notice how her voice is getting weaker.
“I didn’t tell you to do jack shit!”
“Yeah, but you were standing there all ‘ooo I’m Wraith, I can’t get shot, I’m too… it’s gotta not…’”
The sentence trails off. Wraith’s reply does too, though that’s because Vyper’s going again, slinking into the black between moments, where this time she won’t come back from. She can tell the general tone though, more screams for the lazareth. The doc that isn’t going to make it in time.
She’s awake in a part of Houdini’s Shackles she’s never seen before. Not really waking up, just sort of awake, sitting propped up on something comfy but not so comfy that she’d not rather just be laying down. What jackass let her recover from a gutshot sitting up? She’s woken up half-dead in enough dumpsters to know that recouping horizontally is perfectly fine, thank you very much, probably some human who doesn’t know how much tender loving care a gorgon’s neck needs when unconscious. Or Krill, who’s in the chair across from her, reading a book.
She should ask where Mo is. First question that should spring to mind, seein’ a Krill without a Mo, an Abbot without a Costello.
Instead what croaks its way out of a parched and aching throat is, “Where’s Wraith?”
Krill lifts his eyes. Sets down his pen, because he wasn’t actually reading, was writing something, journal maybe. Vyper’s never seen him do that before. Her mind is wandering, something heavenly but sense-scrambling flowing through her veins. She manages to push through ‘solo Krill’ thoughts of that’s weird. is that weird? maybe that’s not weird. to land back on her question. Where’s Wraith? Why isn’t she here? She was here just a moment ago.
“I can go get her,” Krill says.
Which. Doesn’t answer the question. Vyper doesn’t want him to go get her, she wants her to be here, to not be that last echoing after-image of herself, repeating, no, no don’t you do this, don’t you do this, asshole. To immediately dispel Wraith and replace it with a real one.
To have been by Vyper’s side the whole time.
“Where’d she go?” Why isn’t she here?
“On a constitutional.” It’s hard to tell if that’s a joke, Krill’s voice swimming in the morphine — it must be morphine, Vyper hasn’t had a good hit of this stuff in ages — and floating somewhere between annoyed and uninterested. “She’s quite upset you took a bullet for her.”
“In a rare moment of irationality, considering that’s your job.” Ok, that one was definitely annoyed.
“I didn’t mean to,” Vyper says instinctively.
“It was uh. An accident.”
“Ah, so you flung yourself upon an assassin, bit through three layers of clothing, and placed your mortal body between a gun and its target purely through a string of clumsy missteps?”
“No I-” She swallows. Her voice isn’t feeling much better. Worse even. It’s hard to talk about the missing tooth. “I just- it had to happen, you know?”
“Certainly it could have happened without you disarming a Red Familiar in the most inefficient way possible? Knocking the gun out of their hand, for example? Perhaps then you could have kept the undue effect you have on Wraith to a reasonable minimum.”
“What uh…what do you mean?”
“After Casilda took over keeping you alive,” Krill says, “Wraith stood up, walked over to your victim, and shot them for the entirety of her magazine.”
“Very gruesome. Muzzle flashing. Twitching. It went on for ages.”
That certainly didn’t sound like her. Wraith didn’t use a full clip when half would do, and took care to never let the other guy think he could get under her skin. Everything about her was measured, from the cut of her suit to the way she leaned against her desk. It was a form of control, showing temperance, even when you had the resources to waste.
“Didn’t even question ‘em?” Vyper asks.
“No.” Krill leans forward. “I think you should consider what you do to Wraith, next time you pull something like that.”
“I will go get her.” Krill slips his pen into the spine of his journal.
Vyper gets out a few more choice words before he hops off the chair and lopes out of the room, into the bowels of wherever the hell in the Casino they’ve posted her up in. The unfamiliarity hits her strong the moment she’s alone. It brings on the nausea, or maybe that’s lifting the blanket because holy shit is there a lot of gauze there, more gauze that should be possible. Seriously the gauze-to-Vyper ratio is off the charts; she tries not to pass out. Fails. When she wakes Wraith is standing over her.
“Good work out there,” Wraith says flatly.
“Uh yeah, yeah no problem,” Vyper says. Regaining life. Fixating on Wraith, who’s here, who’s safe, who’s come to see her. “But uh…out where?”
“In the office. Showed backbone. Wish more of my people had that kind of initiative.”
“Oh. Uh. That’s me. You can always count on V to get a job done. Especially when you pay up front.”
Her mouth is running on its own. Forget Wraith coming to replace the echo, she can’t connect this woman standing in front of her to anything that’s come before. Wraith’s last words to her were furious, was that the truth? Is this? What was all that about losing her shit when Vyper beefed it?
Vyper wants to ask. Wants to know if, when Wraith was begging her to stay with her, she really meant it. Wants to ask why, when Wraith held her folded jacket against Vyper so hard the blood soaked up the fabric to her elbows, she’d used her human hands. They’re tucked back in her pockets now. As if they never left.
Vyper wants to ask. Opens her still incredibly dry mouth. The morphine beats her down.
Or the morphine is an excuse, when Wraith’s carefully neutral face sheds doubt on whether anything Vyper thought she saw was actually there.
“Nice bonus coming your way,” Wraith says with a turn, a spare hand waved in Vyper’s direction, focus already elsewhere “Rest up. I’ll tell Casilda to bring you some water. You sound like shit.”
“Thanks,” Vyper says. “Yeah, great.”
Wraith’s gone before the second ‘thanks’ makes it past Vyper’s lips.
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