Chapter Text
The air is thick with purple shadows and the night is deep with ink; Rey's breath rattles in her trembling chest and her pulse thrums in her ears. Her small hands tighten on the hilt of her heavy blade; her arms burn with exertion and her breath comes ragged in her lungs. These are not her first steps; she has walked this road, she knows its twists and turns, and she has no path forward but to prevail. Sharp brambles pull at her booted ankles and she stumbles, the noise of skittering pebbles ever so brackish in the quiet indigo—has she given away her position?
Her ears prick, but the whoosh of a ravenous scream is already descending, its cacophonous velvet mantle falling across her heaving shoulders.
The creature is on her now.
She writhes but its thick talons dig into her collarbone; wordless she cries out but there is only her blade to hear her, and its glittering edge once honed beneath her palm is no match for the lick of flame so hot and molten across the nape of her neck. It comes the way that violet saffron must taste: exquisitely heart-wrenching, the familiar citrus tang of defeat on her tongue, and then she is not-sand and not-ash with only a hollow pile of bones to a name that will surely be forgotten—
"No," comes Poe's injured howl in her ear, his fist slamming down hard across the control panel before her. It's enough to make Rey startle but he pays no heed, grieving their mutual loss: her pitched battle, and his fifty cents. "You had her that time," he exclaims, gripping hard the frame of the old arcade and snowing dust down across the crown of Rey's head. "I know you did. I can't figure out where you went wrong—must be something in the timing. Maybe the maze? Did you miss one of the upgrades? I was getting my drink, I didn't see you tackle the ... first bit?"
He's snapping his fingers as if to prompt her, but Rey knows Beauty's Kingdom better than she knows the back of her hand, and she shakes her head and scuffs her palms, demurring in the face of the 8-bit mystery.
Game Over flits across the screen in delicate orchid letters, and taunting synth music tinkles quietly between them. Through groans Poe kicks at the foot of the arcade, heedless of the way the flurry of dust makes her sneeze. It's hard to blame him: the arcade is lit low for adult night, the fogger churning deep into hour four. The glittering disco ball that hasn't seen the light of day since the last millennium turns ever so slowly and dapples diamond constellations across the felted neon walls.
And it's June, so there's glitter. The glitter is a given. It's caked into the webs between her fingers. Sweat makes it stick to the inside of her elbows. It's probably in her bloodstream—tell the pig with his radar gun haunting the desolate stretch at the top of the highway to eighty-six the blood alcohol, give his resignation, his newfound abolition as one final fuck-you to the force, and tell his boyfriend it's ten years too long now that they haven't come out of the closet. Radar guns into glitter plowshares or some other fucking bullshit.
Rey traces the pad of her index finger down the convex screen probably personally assembled in 1974 by Bill Gates's unfaltering hands. Hot, Rey thinks. Not the capitalism bit, but the competency. She's a creature of simple wants; she has reasonable expectations. She wants the Amy Winehouse Back to Black vinyl that comes in pink because she thinks it's ironic, she wants to practice until she perfects doing illicit things to a cigarette the way that Barbara Stanwyck does in Double Indemnity, and she wants to unseat the anonymous Kyla Ren from the top of the Beauty's Kingdom leaderboard.
Her Zoom ASL tutor—elegant, steady, glittering hands—assures her that these are measurable and achievable goals.
"C'mon," Poe laughs, taking in her morose expression and steering her past the arcade game with one hand between her shoulder blades. This close, he smells of his Cosmopolitan and too much cologne. "Let's get you back out on your skates. Phas is two-stepping, she can teach you to do it on wheels, and I'm debuting my Lotería letter presses—"
"No," Rey signs, her index and middle fingers demonstrative. "No, no, no. I emptied my wallet for you just last week, and I can’t get on wheels again, my teeth aren’t going to un-chip themselves."
But his warm hands are like a steady bulldozer at her back, spiriting her away from Beauty's Kingdom and back to the shoulder-to-shoulder press of her friends. "You might have two left feet," he agrees, gently teasing in her ear, "so we'll just find you someone with two right feet, and you'll trade, and you'll never look back. How does that sound?"
Rey pulls a face and lets herself be pulled as far as Poe will take her until he slips in behind his partner Finn, hip to hip and familiar. Their cut-off denim Levi's press together, and in acknowledgment Finn's knowing hand only slips down the outside of Poe's muscular thigh—he doesn't even stop speaking, only lifts his booted foot to the bench of the laminate table.
"So there I was," Finn says, his fingers moving quickly near his cheek as his eyes slide across Rey. The light is low but the mirror ball flecks baby-blue across his dark skin, and there's a knowing, teasing curve in the pull of his mouth as he says, "And there he was ... "
Rose's eyes are wide as she watches him, attention rapt, but Poe only lets his plush lips skate across Finn's bare shoulder, his kissing touch so practiced that he must know how this story goes. Finn lifts his chin, holding court like any king of the roller-skating disco. "And he says to me, 'I like you, you boy from Bethnal Green, but we can't do this to 'A Boy Named Sue.' It's against my religion." His brows lift high on his temples, ever suggestive.
Rose's little hands lift to cover her mouth, and her voice is high and her words come quick when she asks, "So what did you do?"
Finn brushes imaginary lint from the neon-orange mesh shirt that strains against his pec, and at his shoulder Poe laughs darkly.
"I edged him, until Johnny Cash was done," Finn shrugs, "and when the DJ changed his tune and asked me why I stopped, I told him that fucking raw to Joan Jett was against my religion."
"You didn't," Rose squeals, color high in her cheeks.
But Finn only lifts his brows once more. "So he fumbles for his wallet, belt still hanging open and swinging into all of his sound equipment," Finn gesticulates as he signs, hands moving as if careening into receivers and speakers alike, "and he pulls out a condom that wasn’t yet flattened, so I knew if he'd been cruising that at least this one was fresh—and he told me we might be at a spiritual impasse and he looked at me like he might change his mind. So I taught him the Hail Mary," Finn says, straightening his shoulders with self-satisfaction, calves flexing as he leans in across the table, "and, Rose—the Lord may not have been with him that night, but I certainly was."
Rose's cheeks hollow as she sucks on the straw in her mango-blue raspberry slushie. Her eyes are green with envy. "I still can't believe you fucked Darth Talon in the middle of the Mos Eisley nightclub. I know that place has a reputation, but still." Her tongue snakes out when she licks her lips, stained purple from Grape Yumptious Fun Dip. "No one's seen that guy's face in years. Not since the motorcycle incident. You know, when Brenha ... "
But Rose falters when there comes a hard-riding creak at Rey's ear, and her head swings down toward the sound to take in two well-worn Lucchese's that shine dark with alligator skin and fray like a woven checkerboard.
In the parched desert, Rey knows care when she sees it, and these leather boots sing with well-oiled care. She knows these boots, and she knows the woman they belong to—but their polished secrets disappear beneath flared leather pants that pull tight around one muscular calf as Brenha Organa props her booted foot up on the bench of the laminate table, close enough to Finn that a stranger could mistake them for friends.
But Rey knows better. Her instincts pull taut and her nerve endings pulse with danger, as if to warn her of a rattlesnake in the dry grass that hasn't yet begun to sing—and Brenha Organa has always been a snake in the desert grass.
Rey knows about the day she freed the wild dogs from the wolf sanctuary, the way she watched them bound through the streets of Santa Fe, sandy and overwhelmed with their new freedom, unheeding of the cars that wove around them. The child in the backwards-facing carseat, the one who never saw the pick-up truck that hit them head-on. The mother who came home from the hospital, infant in matching stitches, shocked but slated to make a miraculous recovery—and the rumors say that Brenha had only climbed the chain link fence to revel in her victory and howl at the summer sun.
Rey remembers the night the firehouse lit wild and bright with retribution the January sky, curiously soon and surely only incidentally after the press conference when the chief couldn't spit out the word arson from between his teeth, not even though everyone with any sense knew their local mosque was built from the same material as any other building in town. But the ACLU headquarters are somewhere far beyond the New Mexico horizon, and there are creatures in the desert more dangerous than rattlesnakes.
It has to be one of those tall tales, but the people who tell them say that Brenha even took the time to light herself a joint before she left the blazing firehouse to burn, and Rey's never been able to sort out precisely how she feels about that one.
The stories grew the way that Brenha did: taller than any other woman in town, though she'd always give up her seat and her pocketed peppermints to the abuelitas at the bus stop—the only people evidently spared from the wrath that poured out of Brenha like a last confession to the wispy priest who tends his flock at Our Lady of Guadalupe.
But she rips her bike through town as if to wake the dead, and rumor has it that even the pigs have given up on issuing her speeding tickets anymore, because she never pays them anyway, and she won't show her face in court, and evidently her father was once upon a time a crack shot, which would explain the deputy police chief who showed up at her desert doorstep and came back with only the toes of his shoes blown to bits. A shotgun, of all things, he said weakly. And no officer, deputized or otherwise, ever again went out into the desert.
Brenha Organa might not have been born on the wrong side of the tracks, but she sure did get there as quick as she could, and she doesn’t seem to mind the view.
The baby hairs at the back of Rey's neck stand on edge as Brenha leans in, draping her forearms across her knees. Waves of her dark hair slip from the messy bun that holds only half of her thick hair, and Rose's eyes are wide as saucers as Brenha takes her index finger and wipes a bead of mango-blue raspberry slushie from Rose's lip.
"Is that my name," Brenha asks, her eyelids lazily shuttered, "in your mouth?"
Rose Tico is utterly slack-jawed, hypnotized and blind even to the glimmering light of the mirror ball.
With preternatural ease, Brenha turns her head as she considers. "Does it taste ... very nice there?"
Incapable of forming words, Rose flushes deeply pink.
There's a lot that Rey will stand for, but she won't see her friend humiliated by this spectre of a young woman, pale as any ghost. Defiant, Rey lifts both hands to gesture archly; she takes no purchase. "Acting like a dick won't make your strap any bigger," she signs. "Go back to the desert, and run with la loba."
Poe's shoulders rise with tension, though it shouldn't matter—he's the only one in the roller disco who really understands her, even if he himself can't sign for shit, and anyway she knows he thinks the structures of British Sign Language are a cruel joke she's contrived just to daze and confuse him.
But Brenha's dark eyes slit sideways and flicker across Rey, viperous and predatory. Absently her hand drifts away from Rose's mouth, fingertips faltering in the thickly-fogged air, and Rey's heart thrums jackalope-fast, though she's rooted to the spot.
"Puta," she signs, for good measure, and she hears Poe's sharp inhale like the sound of a pin pulled from a grenade.
Elegant, sharp-nailed fingers curl like claws in the fragile cotton of Rey's boxy ivory tee as Brenha fixes her with those huntress's eyes. She shivers, and thinks Brenha's touch must graze her very heartstrings.
It's June in the roller disco, and the fogger is whirring deep into hour four, and Rey remembers the press of sweat-slick bodies against hers as they danced on neon felted floors. So there must be people exclaiming, there must be women curling their hair over the backs of their shoulders and lifting the long planes of their necks to be kissed in the mirror ball light. Somewhere there are people dancing, somewhere there are men with paper wristbands intertwined. But Rey can only hear KiNG MALA crooning in her rushing ears.
"You should see their face when they finally realize ... that she plays with the boys ... but she comes on to me."
Finn is reaching for the curve of Brenha's shoulder, a protective arch in the set of his brow, but the woman from the desert ripples out of his reach as if his touch might come like Midas’s. Suddenly she's no more than a breath from Rey and the fronts of those alligator-skin Lucchese's brush at the toes of the worn-out Converses that Rey could just trip over.
"You're mine," Brenha murmurs, soft enough that only Rey can hear, and somehow from the mouth of even a snake it's less threat than truth, less menace than promise, and this makes her heart leap in her chest, her throat go dry. Parched.
Rey bares her teeth and hopes that Brenha can see the whites of her eyes when she signs, "I don't belong to anyone."
Once more Finn is reaching, always her hero—and it's at this moment that a hapless young person in lavender and orange trips at high speed and whirs, arms wildly windmilling, from the skate floor. For a moment a collision looks uncertain, but oblivious Finn steps directly into their path, arms lifted for Brenha's shoulders—and what should be a warning touch becomes a shove.
Brenha's eyes are wild, lips already pulling back from her mouth as she turns with a growl, Rey's ivory shirt still fisted tight in her hand.
Rey is reeling, her jaw knocking hard enough into Brenha's forearm that her teeth rattle. Her feet are no longer under her, which is odd because she isn't on wheels, and her hands are seeking, grasping, finding purchase on Brenha's body.
But it's too late for finding balance—because a brawl has already found them first.
***
Rey cannot feel the night air on her brow. The realization comes to her as if from a great distance, the same way her fingers do when they lift to her forehead. Wincing, she draws them back, dismayed to find blood whorled deep crimson across the pad of her thumb.
Her whole body is rattling, though her hand before her face is deceptively still. She's turned upside down on the inside, and she's as far away from her mind as she is from Beauty's Kingdom. Bleary-eyed she shifts, trying to recall what she knows about concussions, and the gravel beneath her feet skids loosely, making her doubt for a moment whether she's lost her balance sitting down. The roller disco alley is no place to recover from a fistfight.
"You sure do have a mean left hook," Brenha mutters, tipping her head back into the facing brick wall. She looks walloped, the hollow around her eye already purpling, and Rey thinks with a tinge of pride that she must be able to take credit for that one. Brenha's hand lifts to her face and she curses a blue streak, making a horrible sound echo all up and down the little alley as she drags her nails through the mortar smeared messily across the wall.
It's a bar next door, isn't it? Rey can't remember. A billiards hall? Frequented by the Knights of Columbus? Not satisfied with bringing smallpox to the Americas, they needed a homoerotic fraternity all their own, too?
Rey pulls her knees up to her chest, squinting up at Brenha out from under her swollen temple. Her Zoom ASL tutor is going to kill her in the morning if Brenha Organa doesn't finish her off tonight. How does she expect to be able to emote the way she's supposed to, if she can't move any of the muscles in her face? She's going to be stuck talking to the international students from the University of New Mexico for the next week, at least. Maybe if she's lucky Poe will still be able to make her out.
Brenha glares down the line of that elegant nose. Her dark-as-ebony hair fans out messily around her face, mussed the way it must when she rises from bed in the morning. She lost her bun somewhere along the way—probably Finn's handiwork, if Rey had to guess. He seems like the type to want a souvenir for his troubles. Something to put on the ofrenda and summon back the spirit of Brenha Organa after he throttles her for breaking Rey's jaw.
"You're bleeding," says the viper in the shape of a woman, like she wasn't the one to shove Rey to her knees and drag her off into the shadows after Chewie threw them out of the roller disco.
Her eyes are watering, though, so maybe Rey really did get gravel in them. That's something.
Peeling herself away from the mortared wall like she's one of the posters advertising the concerts they do at Red Rocks, Rey cringes back as Brenha half-staggers close, though she only splays out those long elegant fingers in palest tentative surrender, and Rey decides she's caught her breath well enough at this point, if Brenha does decide to try for her jugular.
Those tight leather pants creak as she kneels, graceful and heedless of the gravel—and Rey thinks vaguely that she could never bring herself to do that, not if she had leather pants sleek enough for a weekend at Red Rocks, the kind of pants so effortlessly butch that Rey would just die if she ever stood so easily in her own skin.
Brenha touches the rips in the knees of the baggy jeans Rey stole from Phas—they’re the reason she couldn't go two-stepping, who takes roller-dance lessons from someone after raiding their wardrobe and defacing their denim?—and her thumbs are strangely gentle, for so violent a woman. It should be unpleasant, but it isn't—and Rey is very brave, but it isn't bravery, it's confusion that keeps her still when Brenha slips a flask from her back pocket and pours amber liquid across her scraped knees and Phasma's denim jeans. She watches her blood stain Brenha's scraped elegant fingertips and thinks of their foremothers, for whom tender care became contagion, and she thinks that even the Chihuahuense is neither wide nor empty enough to hold all the memories and all the women lost to the sands of time.
Why are you doing this? she wants to sign, and yet when Brenha hefts herself to her feet and offers her hand—fingertips outstretched, caught by the light of the streetlamps—Rey takes it, huffing a small breath as she staggers close. Brenha catches her with a hand to her shoulder, and Rey hates that it helps.
Brenha’s near enough that Rey feels the rumble in her chest before she hears her voice. "You need out of those as soon as you can," she says. "Bloodstains are a bitch."
It hurts Rey to furrow her brow, and she can't even really tell if Brenha understands her, but she fans out her fingertips regardless and scissors her palms, emphatic as she signs. "What?"
Sidling in close to press Rey into the brick and mortar wall, Brenha's notching one knee between both of hers, long fingers opening the buckle of Rey's latticed leather belt. Shocked, she makes to shove her away, but the planes of Brenha's chest are unforgivingly hard. Maybe she really does go out in the pre-dawn light, shed her shoes in the riverbed of the canyon, and run with the wolves.
Brenha splays her palm across Rey's hip, making her wince, and only presses harder into a spot that will surely bruise come morning. Her eyes are roving, catching the hitch of Rey's breath and the slackening of her hands on her chest. Brenha is warm. Hot-blooded, and dark-eyed—a predator who doesn't miss the way that Rey sags into the wall, letting the thrum of the music in the roller disco reverberate through her shoulder blades.
"Give them to me," Brenha says, her voice rich even as it cracks, "and I'll make you clean. Give you more." She wets her lips, and Rey watches her eyes settle on her mouth.
Rey’s no fool; she's survived the worst this sleepy town has to offer, and she understands that even a predator needs a counterpart. She understands that she has power of her own, and she finds the nerve she needs to crush in her hand the sleeve of the button-up that covers Brenha's strong arm.
Rey touches her other fingertips to the ones that lift with Brenha's arm as she cages her with her body. "More?" she signs.
"Promise," Brenha husks. Color blooms beneath her swollen eye; she's bruising but her lips are plush and pink, and Rey wonders if anyone has ever looked at once so wounded and yet so lovely. She wonders if Brenha kisses like the violence that still rolls off of her in molten waves. Her pulse thrums and she senses new heavy groundedness in her body.
In the end, her denim jeans are so billowy on her little frame that Brenha doesn't even have to kneel at her feet and doff her worn-out Converses. The leather pants she's sure she could wear to Red Rocks slip up her little thighs like a second skin—and they're still warm, she realizes, with the heat from Brenha's core.
Rey doesn't ever want to take her hands off of this woman, not ever again, and so she follows across the gravel to the roaring metal beast of Brenha's motorcycle, threading her small hands through the waves of Brenha's dark hair before she settles her helmet on her head. Reluctant, Rey steps away, faltering like the bike might be the realest viper on the road, and Brenha revs the throttle, though her booted toes catch the gravel, and she hesitates. Waiting for something.
When she flips up her visor and studies Rey through darkly glimmering eyes, Rey's stomach flips in a way she recognizes.
Billowing out in the night as Brenha tears out of the roller disco parking lot and picks up speed for the darkened highway, the legs of Phas's stolen jeans are full like two wide sails on a metal desert ship. And Rey's mouth is bittersweet with the taste of the amber liquid that Brenha poured across her bloody knees.