FIC: "Delilah," Brooke/Sam, R
I'm not entirely sure what happened. I've never written a full-length Popular fic before, and I wrote this all this afternoon, while Oz was sleeping. Spooky. Hope it doesn't suck; x-posted like whoa.
TITLE: Delilah
AUTHOR: Lamia Archer
RATING: R
FANDOM: Popular
PAIRING: Brooke/Sam
WORD COUNT: 2,231
SUMMARY: How canst thou say, I love thee, when thine heart is not with me?
SPOILERS: All of season one.
And she said unto him, How canst thou say, I love thee, when thine heart is not with me? thou hast mocked me these three times, and hast not told me wherein thy great strength lieth.
And it came to pass, when she pressed him daily with her words, and urged him, so that his soul was vexed unto death. . . .
And when Delilah saw that he had told her all his heart, she sent and called for the lords of the Philistines, saying, Come up this once, for he hath showed me all his heart.
- Book of Judges, 16:16-18
“There's a little of Delilah in each and every gal.”
- Neil Sedaka, “Run, Samson, Run”
The yelling does not vibrate the walls. Sam feels that arguments like this should be forces of nature: there should be nothing left of the fashionably neutral walls or the cabinets full of expensive china and delicate glassware. The fights should take everything out, an insatiable tornado. Hurricane Howcouldyounottellmeyou’restillmarried.
***
Sam shaves her head herself, using a straight razor she bought at an antique store months ago because it was charmingly retro. She likes to think of its history: a silent sentry beside porcelain washbowls and thick, worn leather strops.
The weight of the instrument is reassuring in her hand. The thought, once conjured, feels a little strange; certainly, the normal response should be to recoil at the mere touch of the thing. But the razor is so solid, with such an undeniable mass, that Sam is comforted. The razor could be fifty years old, but it hasn’t wasted away: its form announces its continuing presence.
Her hair falls around her feet in snaky brunette tendrils.
***
Sam dreams of the wedding. Her mother beaming radiantly, running out of the church under fire of rice and birdseed and catcalled congratulations.
Outside, the sky darkens so quickly and completely that the cause might be a sudden eclipse. An angry tide of dark clouds unfolds behind the strict, straight architecture of the church. Jane’s face falls, stricken beneath her gauzy white veil, and Sam closes her eyes as the first raindrops fall from the heavens.
***
She hasn’t seen Brooke for more than three minutes of toothpastey nonconversation since Kelly started making up for lost time. Even when the girl is there - radiant, beaming happiness out into the solar system like a giddy supernova - she’s not there. She hasn’t made eye contact with Sam in over a month.
***
The temperature starts reaching record highs daily at the end of June. The heat makes Sam lethargic; she lays across her bed feeling the sweat prickle her skin. The wig is uncomfortable and a little disgusting in the heat, and her mohawk won’t do anything but droop. Here she is, a deflated rooster. Roasting.
***
Jane packs away all the wedding stuff: thank you cards, RSVP’s, the dress. She isn’t crying, but only because she’s so angry. Weeks ago, just after the ceremony, Sam stuffed her dress in her bottom drawer behind t-shirts that don’t fit and a pair of underwear she bought because they were so sexy, not realizing they were actually too sexy to wear.
***
Brooke is home for the night. Sam lies awake, listening to the other girl getting ready for bed. Washing her face, brushing her hair, turning down the sheets. She’s so dainty and precious, humming absentmindedly to herself while she goes about her ritual, that she could be attended by cartoon birds.
Sam is in her underwear on top of her covers. She’s sweatstung and dry-mouthed, and what’s left of her hair is tangled and damp, twisted about her head like a turban.
***
Brooke wins homecoming queen - big surprise - and she’s feeling so much joy from having won, so much guilt from having falsely accused Sam, that she lets her try on the tiara.
As a child, Sam never had much interest in playing dress up. There really wasn’t a point in pretending to be somebody else, and the kind of person she would eventually become definitely didn’t wear boas of pearls and clowns’ smiles of pink lipstick. The first time she wore a dress since being toilet-trained was to her father’s funeral, and only because her mother asked and Sam wouldn’t have denied her anything then.
Still, the tiara makes her feel pretty. It’s a talisman that creates false perception, Sam knows this; it’s just so glittery and shining that it makes you feel as though you have your own personal spotlight. Your own personal halo. It’s stupid, probably, but Sam is not a pretty girl in any way other than how grandmothers mean it, and this borrowed sense of special is so novel that Sam indulges in it.
Maybe gets a little drunk on it. If she were in her right, unpretty mind, she simply would have left the tiara on Brooke’s side of the precious sink, and then gone off to bed. But she’s stupid on beautiful, so she takes the tiara back directly, slipping into Brooke’s darkened room.
Brooke’s voice is blurred by sleep already. The girl can fall asleep immediately, as though touched by a spell. “Sam? What are you doing?”
Sam holds out the crown. The pretty’s starting to wear off; even in this simple movement, she feels awkward and conspicuous. “I brought-I thought you’d want it back . . .”
Brooke sits up and, shooting Sam a look that is equal parts annoyance and confusion, takes the tiara. In the moonlight and shadows, Brooke looks thin and ethereal, unreal. She could be a mermaid. A statue of a mermaid.
“Thanks.”
Sam should leave; the clock’s struck twelve and she’s turning into a pumpkin again.
Instead, she sits on Brooke’s bed. It’s still cool, like Brooke doesn’t have a body temperature. Like maybe she’s above common human ailments like that.
“What was it like?”
Brooke regards her wordlessly for a moment before replying: “Winning? It was amazing. Like being an actress and getting the phone call saying your big break has arrived. Like being chosen to be a star.”
Sam thinks that Brooke is already a star, that she has been her whole life. But then she wonders if that’s not what Brooke meant; if, maybe, she means that she’s been chosen to ascend to the heavens and transfigure into a beacon. Twinkle, twinkle, little Brookie.
“That’s great, Brooke. You deserve it.”
Sam doesn’t believe this. She doesn’t, really, even choose the words; they exit her mouth automatically, without thought.
Brooke doesn’t seem to notice. “Thanks, Sam! That’s-”
Sam wants to get up and leave, but she can’t seem to summon the strength. Her desire for a speedy exit must show on her face, because suddenly Brooke’s looking at her with concern.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s late, and you were sleeping. I should go,” Sam says, and doesn’t.
Brooke touches her hand, and a spark jolts Sam back to life. But instead of beating a speedy retreat to her own bed, Sam leans in and kisses Brooke, full on the mouth. The tiara between them cuts uncomfortably into her belly, her ribs, but Brooke is kissing her back, so Sam is unaware of the pain.
***
“My mom!” Brooke says. She’s been saying it all night, over and over, a talking doll with a kink in its pull string. It’s giving Sam a headache. “Sam, I can’t believe it-my mom came back!”
“Yeah,” Sam says. She feels empty inside, leaden. Like she swallowed molten metal and it burnt out all her insides and paved her hull thick and hard as it cooled.
“And you did it! You brought her here!”
Brooke has been saying that a lot, too. It makes Sam feel nauseous in whatever’s left of her human viscera.
“Yeah.”
And Brooke, who has been so caught up and solitary in her own giddiness for the last several hours that Sam suspects the girl of floating half a foot off the ground, jumps far enough from her cloud nine to reach Sam, to take her by the hands and by the hips and to kiss her jaw and to tickle the back of her neck.
“Don’t,” Sam says, and closes her eyes.
***
Sam lies awake, listening to Brooke getting ready for bed. The dry desert heat has left her lips chapped to the point of cracking and bleeding, and her cottony mouth tastes strongly of copper. The moonlight filtering in through the window gives the room the false impression of being a cool, watery refuge: it dyes everything it touches deep blues and pale, underwater greens; and the shadows undulate slightly, the rock of low-tide waves.
Sam is so hot that she’s almost certain there’s no water left anywhere in her body. Even her blood will have solidified or evaporated.
Sam listens to Brooke humming, brushing her fair hair. She knows what Brooke’s doing because the humming catches every time Brooke’s brush reaches the end of her golden locks, and this creates a slightly unnatural tempo to the song. Sam visualizes Brooke as she is now, relaxed and happy and focused, her lithe body slightly bent toward the brush, a flower reaching toward the sun.
Sam is panting now. Her breasts are swollen to the point of pain. Sam looks briefly down at her body bathed in moonlight; in the underbelly-of-a-frog pale, she could be a different person, someone fair and beautiful. Or a ghost. She could be a beautiful ghost.
***
Jane and Mike swing back and forth between heated arguments and lengthy, weighty silences. Sam doesn’t know which is worse.
Brooke doesn’t seem to notice anything at all; she floats in and out of their lives without actually interacting with anyone. It’s a pretty good trick, Sam thinks, if you can master it.
***
Sam wakes up in the middle of the night, the moonlight falsely illuminating her waking world. She is febrile, disoriented, and it takes her eyes a moment to focus on the thin, pale apparition perched at the edge of her bed.
“Are you sleeping naked? That’s kinky.”
Sam sits up to better regard Brooke. Her sweat-slick limbs slide easily, lightning quick, against each other as she rights herself. Her flesh is so swollen with heat that her bones feel insubstantial; her breasts feel heavy against her empty bird bone chest, and Sam wonders briefly why women have them at all.
“Brooke,” Sam says. That doesn’t really seem like enough, so she adds, “I’m wearing underwear.”
Brooke’s mouth twists. “We can fix that.”
Brooke’s long-fingered hands slip over Sam’s inflamed flesh. Sam doesn’t really want this now, but she wants it later, so she doesn’t say anything.
***
Kelly buys tickets to Disneyland. Sam remembers going when she was little, of being enchanted by Sleeping Beauty’s castle and having her picture taken with Minnie. The last time she went, she was so small that her father had to carry her nodding body from the park.
But of course she’s not invited this time. She’s never invited; she could be Brooke’s ugly stepsister.
***
Brooke wakes her a few more times, but they still haven’t said more than a half dozen words to each other. Not since the wedding. The day that was not the wedding. She needs to stop thinking of it as being an event that actually happened all the way. At best, it’s a half-wedding.
***
Kelly and Mike are having overly-civil words with each other on the topic of the amount of time Brooke’s not spending at home. Brooke has been banished to the children’s table with Sam, but it’s as though she doesn’t notice: she fidgets like a toddler on the exam table, waiting for her lollipop.
“Anyway,” Brooke says, craning her neck in the direction of her parents, talking to Sam from over her shoulder, “he’s a really talented guy, and of course my mom could get us a private showing, a private audience, because she’s been in the business-”
And because she is the single most perfect human being on the planet, Sam thinks.
“Maybe I could go with you,” she hazards.
Brooke doesn’t even look at her. “Yeah, maybe. But not tonight; my mom’s set up this whole special meet-and-greet for me, right, and I don’t want to screw it up. Maybe some other time.”
As Brooke launches into another litany of her mother’s many virtues, Sam mentally weighs the time she’s had with Brooke since summer began. The time, she realizes, must be measured in minutes.
***
It’s one in the morning and Brooke is still gone. Sam lies in bed, listening to the night around her. She wishes there was only a gnawing emptiness to fill her ears, but down the hall Jane and Mike are fighting, and sound carries remarkably well in the McQueens’ modern, expensive home.
“-I’m her father, Jane, I have to be concerned-”
“That would be fine if it were Brooke you were so concerned with-”
“That’s not fair! There’s nothing between Kelly and me-”
“Which explains why she’s still here!”
“That’s not-”
Sam gets up and goes to the bathroom, hovers over the sink she and Brooke fought over her first days in the house. She runs cool water and bathes her face, but it stings rather than calms.
Sam wipes her face with her hands and looks into the mirror. The room is dark, and her reflection is muddied with shadow. Rivulets of water drip off her face, off her twisted scrap of hair. She looks like a melting unicorn.
The razor is still lying on the counter. Sam picks it up, holds it in her wet hand. The handle is smooth and cool, and the weight of the implement is reassuring in her grip.
Sam slides open the blade. The metal glints as though it stole every bit of light from the dim room. Shines like a star.
The rest of Sam’s hair falls to the floor limply. Once severed from its roots, the air barely holds it.