Work Text:
Don't go looking for trouble.
Jinx hesitated after shutting the door, staring at its wood grain in the office's glass-green light. The funny thing about that advice was that it could have come from anywhere. Silco said it to her a lot, hoping it would stick. It wasn't him this time, though: he was just sitting down on the couch, fishing a half-smoked cigar from the ashtray on the coffee table and digging in his pocket for a lighter.
So it had come from one of the other places, a memory or a dream. It could be hard to tell the difference, especially afterward. Usually, she relied on Silco to tell her. But she was catching on that it didn't matter if something she heard was real if it was stupid. She didn't look for trouble. That was just how she looked.
Silco called her attention back, patting the couch next to him. Jinx skipped over and sat. He didn't always invite her, but he must have been in a better mood than he'd sounded from the other side of the door a few minutes ago. He even offered her the lighter.
Then, just as quickly, he drew it back. "When was the last time you handled gunpowder?"
"Um. This morning." Rigging up the little prototype that now sat dismantled on his desk, sadly unexploded. This was a real morning, all right —a real quiet morning.
"Have you washed your hands since then?" said Silco. Jinx stuck her tongue out as she shook her head, to annoy him for asking like he'd already known the answer. "Better not risk it, then," he said, unmoved, and lit the cigar himself.
The prototype had twelve parts, all of which she had wanted to name and explain for him. But she had wanted to show off, too, and she'd taken the thing apart so quickly that she couldn't talk through all the details. He hadn't touched any of it. He'd only listened as she explained that she was being careful and testing setup, not firepower, and the eastern door of the storeroom was just a convenient staging ground; no one would actually have gotten hurt.
At least, she was pretty sure he hadn't touched any of the pieces. If his curiosity had gotten the better of him while she had waited in the hall, and there was a chance of the cigar exploding in his face…well, the joke would be on him.
His voice interceded. "Here. These were a gift from our new friends at Havershaft."
Jinx took his proffered wrist and, reassured by its solidness, sucked experimentally on the cigar. "Oh," she managed, and then started coughing. It was much stronger than the last one she'd tried, and unexpectedly sharp like pepper. She pushed his hand away, coughed again, and rubbed her burning nose. "Yuck!"
"I've told you, not that hard," he reproached her.
She ignored this, sprawling on her back and hanging her head over the edge of the couch. Between the smoke and her position, she was soon pleasantly dizzy. "I did it right," she said defensively. "That was just nasty."
Silco's hand crept under her neck to support it, and Jinx shut her eyes. What had he been saying before inflicting the cigar on her?
"Havershaft," she repeated. The pieces came back slowly. Last week, or maybe the week before, he'd taken her to some old mining site he'd bought and had her blast a few new holes in it. "I liked doing that."
She'd liked the walk home afterward, too, when he'd stopped at the railing of a bridge they were crossing, pulled her to him, and held her very tightly. Most of that evening was fuzz now, but she did remember that part. Later, he'd explained that he'd almost lost his footing on the slippery concrete.
"Good. I want to take you to another site soon."
"Just say the word. I've got enough gear."
"You do?"
"Yeah? I wanted to be prepared."
She peeked at him. Silco wore her most favorite of his expressions: she had managed to surprise him. "Maybe I shouldn't let you smoke at all," he mused.
Jinx heaved a sigh and rolled away, sliding off the couch and wrapping herself around one of Silco's legs. "I only do it with you now," she pointed out. She'd liked his cigarettes better, the way they'd scorched her lungs—and how quickly she could suck one down on the sly. Cigar smoke just hung around and left a sticky, stained feeling on the walls of her mouth. But cigars had been his preference for years now.
"Don't those make your spit taste gross, too?" she asked, resting her chin on his knee.
He scoffed and squeezed her hand. She wiggled her fingers between his and brought them to her face, announcing, "You have a lot of wrinkles." He didn't take that bait, either. She kissed his knuckles. He cleared his throat and his fingers twitched, so she continued on to kissing his stained nail beds.
It was so easy, it was almost thoughtless. She couldn't resist looking up at him as she slid his fingertips past her lips. They tasted intriguingly bitter, but as soon as her tongue made contact, a flash of something she couldn't read passed across his face. Anger? Disgust? He pulled his hand away immediately and transferred the cigar into it.
"Try it again," he suggested. "Now that you know what to expect, you'll find it isn't so overwhelming."
She didn't want that. She wanted…what did she want? She noticed a small tear in her pants, nearly invisible with how it lined up on the border of two stripes. Who knew how long it had been there. Lately, it had all started to feel like a countdown to detonation. When Silco had come to a halt that evening and held her, his breath had been so warm in her ear. She'd been waiting for something else to happen. But what?
She said, "Do you ever want something but don't know what it is?"
Silco hunched forward and took a few puffs on the cigar, letting the smoke crawl lazily from his mouth while he considered her. "Something from me?" he finally said.
Jinx didn't know how to answer that. Between her legs, where she had settled on it, Silco's boot shifted. He exhaled, then reached to tap the cigar off into the ashtray sitting on the coffee table. "My only concern," he said, "is that when you want my attention, you so often end up getting others' as well."
"Your only concern? Please." She'd heard this lecture before, and didn't care to let him work up to it. Plus, it was getting difficult to ignore how firm his booted foot felt in her crotch. "You worry too much."
Silco was stroking her hair. "I don't think it's possible to worry too much about you."
Jinx's gaze snapped up to his bad eye. She used to think he looked meaner on that side, and if she tried, she could still make herself believe it. It was easy right now. His words stuck in her like a fishbone in her gum line. She couldn't keep herself from working at them, tasting for blood.
"What really would have happened?" she said. She rolled from side to side on the hard rise of his boot. "You think I would have ruined your morning?"
"No. I trust your engineering. I trust you."
His voice was calm. His hand closed around her braid, not pulling, just exerting a little pressure to remind her it was there. But that only made Jinx giggle. She was far more focused on the pressure somewhere else. "Well, maybe you shouldn't. Sometimes I don't know what I'm doing," she said, because it wasn't what Silco wanted to hear. She was rubbing too hard; it felt good, but it hurt, too. Another confession: "I don't always store my gear correctly."
"Why not?" he said sharply.
The smile was huge and irrepressible. She clung to his leg as tightly as she could, crushing herself against the smooth leather.
"Because that way it might hurt me."
It was a relief to say it. When she went looking, turning thoughts over like stones, this was the dark, squirming thing she always found on the underside. It had never mattered how careful she was. So she might as well embrace it. Plunge her hands into it, watch them get dark and dirty.
Was that what she wanted?
"Why are you saying that, Jinx?" said Silco. But he wasn't making her stop. In fact, he had leaned in closer, and his boot now jutted even harder against her. She had surprised him again. His attention was fixed on her like she was a risk he couldn't afford to ignore.
With that encouragement, all of her thoughts now were mean and forbidden. It would be so easy to spike those stinking cigars with something that would hurt. Gunpowder couldn't taste any worse than tobacco. But it would be so much more exciting to smoke.
"Jinx."
Between the rubbing leather, the creaking floorboards, and the eager clamor in her head, she could barely hear his voice. She was already modifying the plan. There would be a whole lot more firepower in a sneaky bomb that only looked like a cigar. She'd never built a prototype with that shape before, but maybe she could work it out, match the heft of it so he wouldn't even suspect anything was wrong until it was too late.
It was coming soon, her body clenching down to that point of focused heat. She could do it. She'd be so good that he would invite her to join him, and he would hand her the lighter. She'd get close enough to kiss him. And then—think about how pretty and nasty it could be!
"Let me have a cigar," she urged. "I'll take good care of myself. I'll make it so you never have to worry about me again!"
Silco jerked her braid. He snapped, "Why are you making yourself so upset?"
Jinx gasped. Her body cramped in something that might have been a pitiful orgasm, but felt a lot more like being slapped in the face. She hid against his knee. Between her legs it was burning and raw, as though she'd been slapped there, too.
Surprises could be bad. She should have remembered that.
"Come back here," said Silco.
He took her wrist and pulled her onto the couch beside him; she swung her legs over his lap and stared down at them. The cigar was suddenly at her lips. "Now again," Silco said. He stroked her shoulder with his thumb.
He was right: the taste wasn't as bad, somehow. But it made the dizziness worse. Her gaze found the tiny rip in her pants again, which throbbed as she tried to focus on it. She was so dizzy. So mixed up. She didn't know anything, really.
"Feeling better?" said Silco.
She'd felt something rising, its pressure about to burst her open. And then the pin got stuck. Or he'd pushed it back in, somehow. She'd never realized he could do that. Who hooked his fingers on a pin and didn't pull it? There was only one conclusion to draw, and she hated it. All her fantasies of death and being understood were turned to ash and blowing away. She'd worked so hard to make herself look like a total idiot.
She shoved her legs out straight. "I want—"
The cigar was in her mouth again, and she was so focused on not choking on its tarry-thick smoke that she barely noticed Silco quickly pushing her legs aside. She curled them beneath herself instead. Silco kept the cigar pressed to her until her mouth was filled with smoke, until she had to pull away in disgust. And then, like the ringing in her ears finally clearing, she realized that all of this had not quite distracted her from what she had felt against the back of her thigh when she stretched her legs across his lap: the unmistakable jut of an erection.
She exhaled the smoke slowly.
Silco knew exactly what she had been doing on his boot. He knew so well that he was hard about it. And he had already decided what to do next: he was going to forget it had ever happened. He had that power, too.
Jinx leaned into his shoulder as he brought the cigar to his own mouth again. She lifted her hand, pretending to examine her chipped nail polish, but really thinking hard. It wasn't fair. Why should he always get to decide? It was too easy for her to lose the details of what she thought and wanted. But his hard-on was real, and so was the raw, tingling skin between her legs. More than that, the relief had been real, and powerful enough that she still had it clenched in her fist. She didn't want to be told to let it go.
There had to be something that would make him feel the same way.
She set her hand against his hip and said calmly, "Sometimes you make me hate you."
He was quiet and very still. "And sometimes I never want to see you again," she said as she crept her fingers across his waist.
These thoughts were even more forbidden. Speaking them gave her the dark excitement she usually only got from destruction. But this time it didn't feel like she was breaking anything.
She held her breath and undid a trouser button. He didn't move a muscle to stop her. She hoped he didn't want to. But she didn't dare look up at his face to check. She kept her focus on opening the remaining buttons, trying not to be clumsy or slow.
As she reached inside his trousers, Silco went as taut as a wire. The cigar smoldered, forgotten, in his hand. His breathing was slow and even. What it really was was controlled, because the thing sprang right out once freed. Its skin was softer than Jinx had expected, but it fit her hand as comfortably as an untested prototype. It looked as dangerous, too: stiff and straight and dark with blood at the end. "You're not supposed to be cruel to me," she said as she began stroking it. She summoned the familiar firm grip of his hand on her wrists, around her braids, at the back of her neck, and heat surged in her face.
"You could make me happy all the time if you wanted," she admitted in a rush, and Silco's breath hitched and suddenly sped up. It hissed through his teeth like a busted pneumatic line. Was she hurting him? She kept pumping with a stab of sadistic glee. He had to be watching her.
An alarming length of ash had accumulated on the end of the cigar, and Jinx was sure he wasn't going to notice anytime soon. She reached for the ashtray with her free hand. "But I don't understand what you want instead," she said. "It's like—"
Silco made a strangled noise and bucked against her. He lurched forward, seized her wrist, and yanked the ashtray to himself. He was already spilling from her fingers. Gasping, he replaced her stroking hand with his own, and he squeezed himself until spent. Jinx watched in fascination as he dripped into the ashtray. There was no mistaking that.
Shakily, belatedly, Silco tapped the cigar off and shoved the slimy mess away. He pulled Jinx close before she could see his expression and pressed a long kiss to her forehead. A shock raced down her spine; and then suddenly she was trembling uncontrollably, wave after wave of shivers as though she had just come properly, even though she hadn't. It was better than that.
He broke the kiss and hugged her against him, pressing her face into his chest, and leaned back heavily into the couch. Her hand was sticky. She kept it awkwardly held in front of her and nuzzled him. The bitter-pepper cigar smoke was all around her again, but so were his arms. She tried to feel nothing but their embrace, and to hear nothing but the familiar sounds of his smoking: lips smacking around the cigar, the fizz of the ember, his slow exhalation. She used to fall asleep to this, she suddenly remembered. Maybe all she really missed about his cigarettes was the thrill of stealing them out of his nightstand.
Silco heaved a sigh, and more than just air seemed to go out of him: he finally relaxed his shoulders, and Jinx slid even more snugly against him. "I want you to be happy," he said firmly, like it was the final word in an argument they had been having.
And out of the fog of her mind rose the other things he wanted. He'd told her all of it for years, enough times that she could remember clearly: And I want you to be impervious. And fearsome. And indomitable.
What does that mean? she had asked, the first time he'd used that word.
It means no one can stop you.