Nothing Clean About It Who: Summer/Tasha What: Some hard truths Where: Las Vegas When: Immediately after "Don't Freak Out" Ratings/Warnings: Mild language, almost barf
No sooner did she walk out of Seventh Circle, Summer felt as if her entire body deflated. The sheer mental effort in steeling herself the entire time, in keeping her face from contorting in disgust whenever she saw something strange, to sit there and act like everything was normal when she was surrounded by creatures who were anything but...
Summer leaned her back against the cold brick wall, if for no other reason than to keep herself from falling on the spot. Her knees were wobbly, her stomach was practically doing somersaults. She stared up at the night sky, gulping in as deep a breath as she could. So deep, in fact, she nearly coughed.
Her head lulled to the side, watching Tasha ahead of her. Slowly, Summer slid down the wall and to her knees.
“Permission to freak out now?”
Tasha turned and took one look at Summer on the ground, then at the denizens of the fight club spilling out of the venue. She hauled the other woman up by her arm. “Not here,” she whispered, leading the brunette away from the building. The hunter kept going until they found a spot that seemed safe enough.
“Sorry,” she said. “You don’t want to show that kind of weakness around there.” Tasha took in a sharp inhale of breath, crossing her arms. “What are you freaking out about the most? Let’s take it one thing at a time. Less overwhelming that way.”
Summer leaned against the wall again. She supposed she should’ve been annoyed that Tasha grabbed her and led her away like that, but she simply enjoyed Tasha touching her. The hows or whys didn’t matter much to her -- though Summer supposed Tasha beating the hell out of her would be less than ideal.
Especially since she was apparently some sort of demon fighter?
Summer doubled over, hands on her knees. Oh, no… she would not retch. Not here. Not in front of someone. Definitely not in front of Tasha. That was one embarrassment Summer would never allow herself. She would rather be on the ground bleeding out.
“The whole…” Summer waved a hand about, swallowing hard. “Demons thing! Like… we were just packed in a fight club surrounded by vampires and werewolves and demons and…” Summer gagged. “There was a guy in there with antlers, Tasha! Antlers!” And…” Another gag. “slime!.”
“Okay, we’ll touch on the most simple to kill first,” she told Summer. “Vampires. They’re like the training wheels of hunting. Fire, beheading. Stakes make them go into a weird rigid coma, which helps facilitate the beheading.” Tasha flashed back to the other night in the park with Rhiannon.
“Have you ever beheaded something?” she asked the other woman. “If you know the basics, I can skip over it. Is this helping?”
It wasn’t, yet it was. This was all so very odd. Then again, when had anything in Summer’s life been normal? Probably back when she was still in medical school, when she was operating under the impression she’d spend her days saving lives instead of taking them. It still boggled her mind how much of a 180 her life had taken, but this… this was...
Summer chewed on her lower lip, fighting the urge to smirk at the sheer absurdity of it all, because here she was, trying not to revisit that night’s dinner while her girlfriend -- was Tasha her girlfriend? -- told her how to kill vampires.
Vampires!
“I’m not typically that hands-on,” she explained around another hard swallow. “I know quite a few who are, though. One guy I ran into in Vienna last year enjoyed the whole…” She ran her finger along her neck, making a halting sound in the back of her throat, “...thing a little too much.”
Tasha nodded, then tilted her head thoughtfully. “That makes sense, kinda,” she said. “The guy in Vienna, I mean. If you’re going to do something, you might as well be passionate about it? But for the record, I don’t like the whole killing humans thing. And I haven’t exactly accepted it. That’s a whole ‘nother conversation.”
She knelt next to Summer, her hands on her knees. “Why the hell did you start this kind of work in the first place, then?”
“Same reason some girls turned to stripping,” Summer said with a shrug. “Medical school wasn’t cheap, and I was looking at a mountain of debt when I graduated. You’d be surprised the things you say yes to when you’re desperate.”
Granted, that desperation had come not from needing the money, but from having a gun pointed at her forehead. Summer’s first gig as an assassin had been the very definition of disaster: from being duped into thinking she had scored an internship with a drug company to finding out her mark died from some other cause to being a target herself.
The money in being an assassin was good. Like, set-for-life good. And since Summer had the autonomy of a true freelancer, she was able to take or reject any job she chose -- which meant she took only the jobs that meant she’d be offing someone who deserved to die.
That did wonders for her ability to sleep at night. Eventually.
“Fellow assassin called me ‘the female Dexter’ once,” she added. “I didn’t get it at the time, but… I guess it makes sense?”
“Hang on,” Tasha said, holding up a palm. “Are...are you comparing sex work to murder?” She blinked a couple of times. There had been a lot of talking and the hunter was trying to parse through it all. She knew Summer was in a sort of shock. She knew she should probably be trying harder to comfort her or walk her through it. But she was stuck on the assassin thing. If Tasha hadn’t been a hunter, that guy in the alley would have killed her. That fact suddenly hit her in a moment of mental sobriety.
“And is this fellow assassin the one that vacated her hospital bed?”
“No.” Summer raked her hands through her hair, staring at nothing in particular.
This was the part of the conversation she had dreaded more than anything else -- even the monsters, even the bit where she had to justify her job. Which… fair. Murder-for-hire was, largely, indefensible. Even if Summer had gone out of her way to make sure her targets were the sorts of people the world would be better off without, there was a reality to her line of work the vast majority of people would never get.
She didn’t begrudge anyone who saw her differently. There was a reason she didn’t tell Tasha she was an assassin the night they met.
“That was…” Summer heaved a weary sigh, moving until she was now sitting on the ground. Her knees were howling at this point. “Her name’s Lola Haskins. And once upon a time, we were in love with each other.”
Tasha began laughing, her head tilting back. “You’re kidding, right?” Now this was how she reacted to shocking news. It seemed better than almost throwing up. That was reserved for getting too far down in the tequila bottle. “The one who tried to kill you? And you shot her in the...leg, was it?”
She stood up, leaning against the wall. “Side note, the guy with the antlers? Harmless. Your ex? Not so much. And neither was the guy who came after me, looking for you. Dude, I kill killers. Not humans, but...I’m trying really hard to see your POV on this one, is what I’m saying.”
Resting the back of her head against the wall, Summer closed her eyes and took three deep breaths. Not as deep as before, when she damn near choked on her own oxygen -- which, graceful -- but deep enough that it almost always calmed her down.
Almost.
Summer slowly got back to her feet, turning so she was looking Tasha dead in the eye. Things had gotten real, in more ways than one, and suddenly the existence of things that went bump in the night was the least of her concerns. Summer cocked her head ever so slightly to the side, chewing on her lower lip. Her eyes fluttered briefly before she forced them back up to Tasha’s.
“This Hunter Bailey,” she began, “he came to me with all this intel that suggested a man named Sebastian was going to steal his tech and build weapons of mass destruction, and he needed me to take care of the problem -- quietly -- before stakeholders and government contractors caught wind. That’s the kind of mark I accept: bad dudes doing bad things that get people killed.
“Only when I line up the target, turns out Sebastian is… just Hunter’s son. The intel -- which I thought I had vetted -- was faked.
“So I don’t complete the job. We stage things to make it seem like I did, but Hunter sees right through me. Which is how I ended up getting tossed out of a van in the middle of the Nevada desert.”
Another sigh. Fingers again through her hair, shaking this time.
“Lola’s the first one to come at me. In the freaking Denny’s parking lot. I put a bullet in her knee and tell her if I ever see her again, the next one’s going in her forehead.” Summer shrugged. “In so many words.”
“And this guy tried to have her killed,” Tasha countered incredulously. “He’s a billionaire. If he hated his son, why didn’t he hire a killer that would just do it, no questions asked? Why the huge red herring?” It was all too complicated. Humans were too complicated. She was starting to understand why Rhiannon had vampire and Were acquaintances.
“So, he’s playing this game with you, and he’s losing.” The hunter began to pace, removing a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and shaking one loose. “He’s psychotic, and psychotic pissed people aren’t rational. He’s going to be here in two weeks.” Tasha needed to talk this through. “What are you going to do? Walk up to him and shoot him?”
“You have no idea how tempting that is.” Summer tossed a look over her shoulder, thankful the sidewalk was deserted save for the two of them.
In the nearly four years she’d been doing this, Summer only ever took pleasure over the fact that truly wicked people were getting their just desserts. She never reveled in the actual act of taking someone’s life. Mostly because she tried not to be so up-close and personal when it happened. She operated so differently than so many of the others in her field, and Summer always knew, even without acknowledging it, this job likely had an expiration date.
If nothing else, this fiasco with Hunter Bailey had forced her to face some truths about her lot in life. Summer was knee-deep in a boiling pot, that much was true, but she also knew things weren’t completely terrible here. Even with vampires and demons and seemingly harmless antler monsters.
For the first time, Summer was allowing herself to envision life without killing people.
“Could we sic a vampire on him instead?” she asked.
Tasha lit the cigarette and took an initial drag before nodding slowly and sarcastically. “Yes,” she answered, “absolutely. Vampires are very well known for following orders.” She sighed, running her free hand through her hair. With a flick, ash tumbled to the ground.
“He is going to have armed people, and knowing that he has a foot in this world? My world? They’re going to be armed with more than just guns.” The hunter stared at Summer for a moment, then looked away guiltily. The thought had occurred to her before she could stop it happening. Was this worth it?
Summer opened her mouth, ready to assure Tasha that she’d killed people without even being in the room before. But she caught the way the other woman looked away, which made her lean back against the wall again, stuffing her hands in her pockets with a sigh. Truth be told, Summer wouldn’t blame Tasha if she’d simple said fuck this and washed her hands of it all.
This was a mess. A giant, needless mess, and Summer had dropped it at Tasha’s front stoop like a Brinks truck backing up to a bank vault. To say nothing of what Summer did for a living. Killing demons was one thing. People?
Summer couldn’t bring herself to tear her eyes from the sidewalk.
“You don’t deserve any of this,” she muttered practically under her breath. Summer prided herself in minimizing collateral damage, and if this kept up, she feared that was exactly what Tasha would become.
“There are a lot of things people don’t deserve,” Tasha replied. “I’m just kind of famous for making crazy decisions.” Like leaving her entire family and support network — no matter how faulty — behind to move to Las Vegas with a pathological narcissist.
“But you have to figure this out,” the hunter added. “I can only help up to a certain point.”
Summer figured her life would eventually come to a head like this, even if she had never admitted it -- to herself or anyone else. A life like this wasn’t the sort to end happily, and certainly not after a long, fulfilling life. Every day that had passed since the day she had taken her first life had been, in essence, borrowed time, and Hunter Bailey’s imminent arrival to Las Vegas felt like the bill coming due.
Had this been part of the game the whole time? Did Summer end up dropped off here because Hunter was coming? Was this month-long charade nothing more than letting her stew in anxiety and uncertainty until he gathered the stones to do the job himself? Considering how few actual killers had come after Summer, that theory had merit.
Tasha’s involuntary involvement was a complication, though Summer bristled at the thought. She cared about Tasha too much to think of her in such a way, even if it was sort of true. Summer didn’t know what this was between them, but she liked it, and she shuddered to think of it all falling apart.
Though Tasha walking away beat Tasha ending up in the crossfire. Because at least in the first option, she was still alive.
“I just wanna stop killing,” she said with a shrug, staring at nothing in particular. Admitting it felt good, even if she felt like she was admitting it to herself more than anything. Live in this world long enough, and one started finding ways to justify staying in this world.
“Well, killing humans, anyway.”
“What do you mean by ‘humans, anyway’?” Tasha asked, before recognition dawned. “Oh, no. No, Summer. Killing vampires, demons, mutant creatures from the deep, whatever? A hands-on business. There is nothing clean about it.”
She was starting to wonder about the other woman’s sanity, and coming from the hunter, that was meaningful. “Not killing is a great start. We can work with that. But one step at a time. Namely, not dying.”
“I figured ‘not dying’ went without saying,” Summer said with what she thought passed for a soft smile, but she wasn’t sure how well she pulled it off.
Tender and vulnerable were still choppy waters for her, given wounds from past relationships gone wrong. She could feel the beginnings of a thaw as far as Tasha was concerned, which was part of why she wanted to at least put in the effort, but she had no idea if she was any good at it.
And okay, the crack about killing things not human was spur-of-the-moment, borne of the residual shock of finding out such creatures existed. She trusted Tasha’s judgment on that, to say nothing of the fact that Summer wasn’t even sure if she was capable of physically taking on a demon. She was… adequate on the rare occasion she had to get violent with another person, but Summer wouldn’t call herself a fighter or anything.
Maybe this was one ledge she definitely needed talked down from.