Fic: Happily Ever After, Lua/Ladd karanguni: you sucked me into Baccano! bigtime. I’m so glad you made this site. Everything so far's been so cool!
This is my second fandom, and is wanting to hit it hardcore. First thoughts were on a happy love story tailored to suit our charming canon couple. Anime-based, completely made-up backstory, and probably completely wrong. Couldn’t find much info on these two online. (Maybe looking in the wrong places?)
Fandom: Baccano! Title: Happily Ever After. Characters/Pairings: Lua/Ladd Rating: NC-17 Other: Violent consensual sexual activity, eyeball assault, fisting, blood, mind-f*ckery, arrogance, bad monologues, alliteration. No real spoilers, I think?
---
This is Lua.
Look.
(The domestics are laughing at her. She’s so simple.)
Dressed in silk, Lua spins herself sick, dancing in circles and loops intersecting, colliding. So graceful she would make herself weep if she saw. The layers of silk ripple, unfurling, in colours from peach, to pink, to white lace. Lua stretches the skirt from one wrist to the other. She will not sing, not through the flutter of her breath, the whirl of the world. But perhaps she pretends she has wings.
But there, betrayal, from her very own body. Her unwary heel catches on stone, but the world keeps spinning, spins away, and leaves her behind. Her knee meets the earth without a cushioning skirt. Her breath catches, stutters, hurts. But Lua blinks without tears, without fuss, without caution, because her eyes are on the sky, calm still. Her heartbeat’s staccato, a reverberation that wants to shatter her bones, to twist itself free.
This is Lua, and she’s a dream. So they say. Papa’s girl, and Mama’s baby, and Nurse’s poppet, and she couldn’t bear to disturb them, not them, so busy and talking, so full of instruction. So pretty (Mama’s smirking), nice and quiet (Papa’s proud), very obedient (Nurse’s satisfied); Lua lives for dreams not her own.
Maybe Lua thinks she’s a princess. She lives in a tower in this city of towers, all of them with faces alike to their neighbor’s, blankness and deep-eyed and bland on the ground, blind against the sky. A prince could save her, one day, if he could, or would; but only if he could see through the smoke, if he could smash all this falsehood, reflection, fear, if he could find her tower in this woodland of towers, if he could find her, and see her. Not just her face, not someone else’s dream.
Smoke hides the edge of the sky, and the only birds here are those as grey as sorrow. Lua knows this sky, starless and aching. She knows the marble of her parlor. The curve of her cheek caught in the coldness of a mirror. She knows the leather of the inside of the Mercedes. The dark tint of the glass that shows her as shadow. She knows the mahogany stair rail, so gleaming it shows up her fingerprints thus, that she dares not touch even though it looks warm. She knows the brass of the door handles, the whisk of the broom. She knows the coldness of metal and the sting of a slap. Lua thinks she knows the world, and she does, but it’s her world she knows, and nobody else’s. The doors are closed, and she’s alone.
This is Lua, her breath steady when Nurse calls, her eyes blank, like a window, when Nurse beckons. Her shoes are so small, her steps so dainty, that she runs across the brick-paved court without once touching a crack, because she would never, could never, break her mother’s back.
This is Lua, silent. She does what she’s told, smiles when she’s asked, laughs almost never.
This is Lua, she who sits so quietly as Nurse brushes her hair.
This is Lua who will not wince or flinch or cry, even when the ragged comb claims a day’s worth of tangle from her scalp. Nurse clucks, and a necklace of ruby curls around Lua’s neck, as warm as the memory of a touch.
---
This is Lua.
This is life, a contiguous chain of her mother’s merrymaking and her father’s endeavor.
Life is not Lua’s to live.
(The domestics are whispering about her. She’s so silly, so strange: she doesn’t even know who’s coming.)
“Dress her pretty,” says Papa, in a voice weighted with accent, “these guests. They’re important.”
“Smile, Lua --” Mama demonstrates, teeth a yellow slash through her face cream. “Show Papa your smile.”
Lua turns, and her eyes will not rise above the satin knot of Papa’s cravat. She smiles.
Mama sighs, as though melodrama could change the world. An overfull corset bares the wobble of breast; the pinned curlers bobble. “You look like a street waif, Lua. Smile, nicely. Modestly. Smile, or how else will you ever get a husband? Smile, Lua. Are you ignoring me? Are you deliberately—you rude, rude, rude, how dare you ignore me? Are you-don’t you dare--“
The hand on her cheek pinches. Mama’s fingers flit, flicker, fat, beringed. Lua’s eyes are on Papa’s shoes, which shine like a mirror. Lua can see her face in them, a reflection distorted over the curve.
Fingers tighten on her jaw, just—so—
An ache blossoms from five distinct points, a star of almost-pain.
Lua smiles. Prettily, this time.
Papa nods.
---
This is Lua.
This is her life, and it is not her own.
This—
This is Ladd.
(The domestics are ignoring her. Young ones tighten corsetry, tug down necklines; wise ones wear shawls and caps tight, heavy, don’t dare meet his eyes. Ladd Russo. Unmarried. At his age. You know what they say about Ladd Russo.)
“Do you dance,” Ladd asks, or rather says, because— “I don’t care if you do, or if you don’t. When I lead, where I lead, you’ll dance like a dream. You won’t be able to help yourself.”
Lua does not look at him. But she smiles. Prettily.
Glove on glove, Ladd takes her, pulls her against him. Her eyes fix on his hand, the incomparable width of his wrist, his knuckles, his fingers a vice. A curl of blonde escapes the cuff of his jacket, where his cufflink has fallen away or never been bestowed. She cannot look away from that gaping mouth of fabric, baring skin rough, pale, hairy. He laughs for some reason, slowly closes his fist, until sweat prickles her brow, her neck, her spine. She sways, sways—and his hand, tighter, and there’s—this—
Ladd laughs, again, holds her, still. She cannot fall.
—it’s…pain—
The dance is slow and the vocalist high; the brass is heavy and the drum a silken caress, a beat that moves her feet and heart and head all as one. Ladd looks over her shoulder, his profile a blade. When he moves, Lua follows. His hips are a coiled deftness against hers. Too close. His other hand sits on her back, broad, hot, weighted. Too low.
“Look at all those frowns.” He chortles. “They’re not happy I’m here.”
He says it, to the air, or to her. A smile like seven kinds of sin spills across his lips, the grind of his teeth flexing along his jaw.
“Your family,” he elucidates. “Very unhappy, because everyone knows who Ladd Russo is. My fame proves as grand from a distance as it is in person, and look at your eyes, I can see what you’re thinking: you do find me rather grand, don’t you? But I’m not a boor, no: not Ladd Russo. I was raised to be polite and I was invited here, Lua Klein, invited. The Russo Family, their presence requested at the Klein’s. The Russos don’t care about German scum, but your Papa Klein’s a busy man in manufacturing. So here we are, the Russos, and here I am, and my: aren’t you glad I was bored enough to come?”
Her skirts sweep the marble, and Ladd’s heels are silent, silken with motion, and he’s light, a burning light. The heat of his shoulder is immense, scorching, even through layers of jacket and shirt. Lua steeples her fingers, keeps her palm from touching him, but her other hand is his claim, caught, aching.
Ladd smiles, at the ceiling, the chandeliers, the sparkle of marble. “A very pretty little birdcage for a pretty little bird.”
The strain of a long note curls a thread of vicarious intent through Lua, a hot wire tense, a cobweb vibrating–
--throbbing, like her hand in Ladd’s, like Ladd’s pulse in his throat, hard, heavy, strong. Lua cannot tremble, cannot stutter, because he dances and she would not stumble because then he might look at her, look down at her, and surely he would see her—
His hands tighten – a sharp, this pain – and he whirls, dips, and she is adrift in his arms.
The gold of the candlelight finds its twin in the fall of his hair over his brow. Her world spins, with vertigo, with effort, with the lack of her breath. Her vision is consumed by Ladd, consuming Ladd, Ladd’s gold, Ladd’s smile like a sin, like salvation. He holds her there, her hair touching the floor, her neck angled, arching, her throat bare to the white of his teeth.
The dip is too deep. She can’t find her feet. Pain flickers from his grip on her hips, the small of her back, like, like kisses.
She does not resist.
After a moment the music lifts, and Ladd lifts Lua also, aright again. The movement unbalances her, and her cheek just, just brushes the edge of his lapel, a starched fabric, rough, spice-scented. They whirl, again, still, always—
Lua closes her eyes. Ladd carries her away.
The chill that envelopes her lasts but a moment before Ladd’s jacket, Ladd’s warmth startles her alive again. The balcony’s dark swallows the spill of light and sound from the ballroom. Lua can see the dancers within move into another formation, threads of cohesion nothingness against the intent of Ladd’s scent, Ladd’s smile, wrapping her more completely than his jacket.
His shoulders shift against his shirt, twice as broad as she; his suspenders hold the rumple of fabric tight, a lengthy gun weights his waistband. As she watches, Ladd removes his gloves, tucks them into his back pocket. His fingers are long, blunt; his knuckles raw, broken, with a pad of callus across the first two that he brushes along the line of her jaw. Such force turns her head, cracks her neck. She’s forced to meet his eyes.
Forced, although not. Longs for it, his gaze, and hers to meet. Lua complies, her eyes veiled by her lashes.
Lua smiles.
“You don’t want to know why no one wants me around? The Russos, even though I am one and the best of them, or the Kleins, your happy rich Papa and your fat friendly Mama, in their safe and happy and expensive castle in the sky?”
He asks, as if such a thing matters with the two of them here, alone, his jacket on her shoulders and his fist against her jaw.
Lua lets her lashes lift, to bare her eyes. Ladd’s smile becomes something else entirely.
“It’s because,” his boxer’s hand drops, to unfurl his long fingers against her throat; the breadth of his palm lifts her chin, awkward, until the line of her sight encompasses only the sky, “I like killing things.”
Her pulse pounds against his palm and she can feel his own thrill in return, through the point of his thumb under her ear. His breath likewise quickens, his smile deepens, and the stars swim in her vision, tri-pointed, a dream, her dream—
Ladd dips Lua, sweeps her off her feet, with only his grip around her throat to hold her to the surface of this earth. The balustrade is a cold line against her spine, and his heat is against her hip. Her hands fall, limp. She finds no urge in her to clutch at anything, to try to hold on, to his wrist, to the rail. To anything.
The sky. Above. And his heavy breath, beside. His jacket, below, falling from her shoulders in a spiral of white against the night; she sees because she tilts away from the balcony, she lets her head drop, her throat straining against Ladd’s hand, so her eyes can follow its path.
Lua will search that garden on the morrow, to find his jacket just before the police arrive.
And that she can do, because Ladd laughs then, like life, like light, and returns her to her feet, to the balcony.
Lua does fall, then, when she does not want to. Only against his chest with her fingers false, fumbling for him. He evades that, plants a broad-lipped kiss against her brow, and leaves wet there. The cold of the night layers its own lick over the top, to have her skin prickle, tighten, a strange burning scar.
“But I don’t think I’ll like killing you. Not now. You’re rather expecting it, aren’t you? Lua, my lady, you may have surprised me, here, where I thought I knew what I would find. I like surprises.”
He bows with a grace more suited to a cat, and leaves with a courtesy more suited to a gentleman. He is neither, neither, not graceful, not courteous, not a cat nor a gentleman—
Ladd leaves.
Lua is—
Still alive. Left behind.
---
This is Lua.
This is her life, now.
This is longing. For Ladd.
This is lust.
(The domestics are leaving. Sneaking out, running away, because if she’s so simple she won’t even weep, she surely won’t remember something as simple as wages.)
The death of Mama and Papa and Nurse is a dream, a dream, like the sky and like flying and like loving someone, and like laughter, Ladd’s laughter. Lua’s alone, with her only shackle in the form of a letter from a lawyer, shipped to a distant uncle with instructions to come to America, quickly. It will be the wealth that draws him, not Lua, never Lua, waiting, alone, for this someone, this no one, to take her in charge. The police sit in a car outside the house, waiting. Lua lies within, dreaming, dazed, and also waiting. She sleeps on the expansive Persian rug that the police moved from the parlor to cover the bloodstained floor of the ballroom.
Lua can’t care, can’t even think about the blood, because Ladd’s jacket covers her. Layers: Ladd, then Lua; the rug, the blood; the marble, the earth; everlasting, eternal, forever. That cold earth, below it all, will give her an everlasting, last embrace, and Lua longs, longs for it.
Lua weighs nothing, aloft on Ladd’s wings. He’s given her such dreams, such dreams, that sleeping is more real than waking. This moment, here, in which the swollen remnant of her sleep meets the unwelcome of her awakening, this moment is one in which dream could be almost touched—
—should be touched. Her thighs grind against each other beneath her skirt. Her hipbones ache against the hardness of tile through rug. The scent of blood rides heavy on the air, like lust, like Ladd, more real than the earth itself. Lua’s fingers find the column of her throat, tighten, until stars swim towards her, a broken darkness, or a broken light.
Lua strips away her dress and all three layers of skirt; she unlaces her corset knowing she will not be able to lace it again, alone. The loop of the rug rasps an unfamiliar tongue across the curve of her back. The silk that lines Ladd’s jacket is a liquid longing against her nipples. Everything swells, tingles, in this sudden freedom. She spreads, enlarging, her self thinning until she covers the room and encompasses everything, even with her eyes yet not completely open. Every curl of air on her skin has her gasp, the flesh of her stomach a silent wave against the demanding ripple of what lies within.
Her hand moves on the outside of Ladd’s jacket so her fingers are a stranger’s against her skin, disguised by the fabric. The lace of her corset coils about her free hand, her wrist. She clamps the loose end between her teeth, the cord a serration against her lips as well as fingers.
The slide of Ladd’s jacket has the sleeve fall between her thighs, stocking loose and lost around her knees, and she moves, captures, legs tight, pulling the fabric against her core. The rock of her hips is mesmerizing even her, until the rhythm is all, and everything, and she almost, almost forgets to—
Lua turns her head, swiftly, as it had when Ladd’s knuckles had moved her. The weave of her corset lace draws so tightly against her hand that her skin bursts with it, and she, she—
Blood bursts with the fire and her pulse and her breath, free. She is caught between cords innumerable but every cord is one that gives her freedom. She holds the knots to all; her mouth bleeds, her hand bleeds, and there is wet and salt across her, in her, bursting from her in tripartite harmony, a thrum timed with the tilt of her head and the clench of her jaw and the writhe of her hips against Ladd’s sleeve, until brine and blood stain that fabric worse than the massacre stained the floor of the ballroom.
After, Lua takes the time to fold Ladd’s jacket, precisely; her own garb is less neatly returned to her person, her corset discarded, her breasts free against the rough reverse embroider of the dress’s bodice.
She wants to dream then, to stare into the sky and dream herself in his hands, or in the embrace of the earth, to let herself, be, cut herself, free, but then. Then. She sees a card, fallen on the rug, white against that rich red.
A nightclub’s card, a name, and, and—
A bite. An imprint of teeth buckling the card, a halfmoon manic grin. Ladd’s—
Lua smiles, and her expression softens then, only then.
---
This is Lua.
This is her life, longing no longer, only belonging.
(The nightclub’s gentlemen stare at her. Pretty girl, rather young, looks loose enough to come over here, sweetheart, and say hello to my friend.)
This is Ladd, veiled by the smoke of a hundred cigars, his hair the only clarity in this underground room. He won’t sit, not Ladd. He struts and he stretches, pontificates, poses, lounges and leans. He’s always in motion, a spring coiled with force. Hands reach out for Lua, even touch her, but she ignores them. Ladd’s seen her, even through the smoke. When Ladd smiles, beckons; Lua smiles, approaches.
--and if that was lust, then this: this is love.
The hotel room above the club is fraught with music and conversation from below. Ladd’s fingers find Lua’s throat, press against the beat of life, and Ladd whispers, sings, charms:
“Lua, Lua, the things I could do to you, the things I could make you say, and nothing, none of it would surprise you, would it? Because you expect it. I don’t like it when people know me so well, you know me too well, Lua, Lua, do you love me, lady, to know me so well?”
His teeth, white against her skin, cutting; the escape of her blood has her tongue curl in her mouth, her lips puckering, seeking, to bite the brightness of his hair, taste the coil of his smile.
“You’re lucky, to have found me--”
His fingers strip away silk and stockings both, unhurried. He strokes the gleam that slicks her thighs, quests against the hair that hides. His forefingers break her, in so his callused knuckle hits her, hard; Lua flexes, falls limp. He smiles, laughs, bites her shoulder; she expects even this, the—
--burning, this pain, and she bites here, that, flesh, her own hand holds him--
“Luck’s brought us together, or shall we call this fate, or something else entirely—“
A third finger beside the two, and a fourth; the pain swallows her, not pain any longer, just heat, more heat, and she is a mist, a curl of smoke, she can ride the heat like vapor, up, away, fluting into the night like a sound or a song, on wings, he gives her such wings that she can fly so far, far away from here. Her hand curls around his wrist, that thickness she can’t span, and his laugh is a wet blade against her shoulder, a ragged gasp; his shoulder heaves under that jacket, he wants, he wants her—
“—even this,” he breathes, a trail of spit on her skin, a moistness to match hers, “even this hurt you expect, Lua, Lua, I can’t hurt you if it’s not going to surprise you.”
Her breath escapes, this is panic, this is fear; he withdraws. He breaks her grip, of her hand on his wrist, her thighs on his hand, her cunt on his fingers. In his absence she feels nothing, nothing, but heavy, lost, cold, fleshy and bound.
“--you’re my perfect dream girl,” he says, and his hands are on her throat, one wet and one dry, “and am I ever so glad that I dream in such detail. I want to do something to surprise you.”
A tear, Lua hates it, a wasted weeping that changes nothing. He’s left her empty, aching, she wants, wants--
His tongue catches that wet, follows it to her eye; the tip’s in there as well, along eyelash, eyeball, lifting lid and probing, as though his tongue could find more tears therein. His fingers enter her again, two, three, palm upwards; his tongue worms at her eye at the same pace as his hand. Her vision is lost in the heat of his breath. His free hand spreads her legs, wider, to make her hips grate, tremble, straining; he holds her there, with his tongue and his strength and his hand. His thumb curls, flicks through folds of skin and lashes and layers, as his tongue does to her lids, until he finds her, there—
Lua is not vapor, rising on a shaft of heat, no. She is the heat, and a torrent of it, and he’s swearing into her face and her eye and her ear like the gentleman he is not. Her spine wants to break, her heart wants to shatter; this is her head snapping, cracking backwards against the plastered wall, this is her hand, a vice on Ladd’s wrist and a chain on his heart; this is her expanse, a raging furor that layers the room and the world and eternity, she is everything, she exists, and only she. Ladd lives a half-life, and breathes all ragged, demanding, hopeless. He lives, breathes, continues, because he is hers: he lives only for one purpose, to kill her.
Ladd whines, withdraws his fingers, his tongue; he whimpers, a giggle or a laugh or a wail. He strips off his shirt, his guns, his knives, removes his belt, his shoes, his pants. She sees nothing she doesn’t expect, the heavy throb of his cock, blood-dark; the wide ache of his eyes. He knows, he meets her gaze, he grins, grins, a laughing lord. Her laughing lord.
“I’m going to kill you,” he says, “I will, this is a promise between us, forever. This universe is mine, and I’m in the middle; you exist only for me to kill you. You want this, because I want it. I’m going to kill you, Lua, one day. But not,” and he grins, insane, and dancing, and wholly for her, “today. Only when you least expect it. When I can surprise you.”
Before he writes his lust on her body with an ink as fleeting as agony, he surprises her once, once only. This, then, when his lips touch her ear, gentle, and he whispers:
“Lua. You’re going to marry me.”
This is Lua, and her whole life is lived as a resounding acquiescence.