Life, Later (17/?)
Title: Life, Later (17/?)
Pairing: Pepa/Silvia (LHDP)
Rating: R [to be on the safe side]
Spoilers: Yup, if you haven’t seen the earlier pre-Pepa episodes (season 3). So basically, this will be a kind of half-AU.
A/N: Read, enjoy & comment! :-)
17.
There are only hours left, hours!, not even a day until that damned ‘date’ that Silvia insisted she must go on, I’m sure only to punish me and throw me into the pits of hell by letting me imagine all kinds of horrific scenarios, like that dude actually daring to look at her, and talk to her, and dear god, maybe even touch her, when they’re shaking hands or something. Or something! Must save Silvia! from what is no doubt a sexual predator - he must be one, and if he isn’t I’m sure Silvia will turn him into one, you can’t but help turn into a sexual predator around her, she’s too hot to walk the streets… well, at least without my protection.
I know that little cosy Italian restaurant he’s planning to take her to. Italian! What a fucking cliché! Like chicks get so turned on by boring pasta and red wine. Did guys never hear about expanding culinary horizons, about giving their numbed taste buds new delicious pleasures? I think that they imagine women will get aroused by this traditional date food and almost come when they see how much he pays for bland pasta and cheap red wine. Argh! Must stop thinking of the dating habits of men, it just depresses me. Poor women, they don’t know what they’re losing out on. Oh well, one can’t save all, even though many have asked for my help, but I can damn well save my Silvia! And I know just how. Just need an accomplice, an assistant… well, it’ll have to be Sara so that would make her more just like another obstacle, but maybe I can still use her as a distraction if all else fails. And ok, I gotta give the kid some credit, she can follow directions… if you repeat them 5 times and write them down on paper or better yet somewhere on her skin, that at least she can’t lose or say she ate by mistake… dear god, this is gonna turn into a bigass mess! She attracts disaster, I swear, she’s bad luck, it’s like there’s a homing device implanted in her scrawny little neck attracting all kinds of calamities! I love the little ditz but she brings doom and gloom wherever she goes.
I shudder as these bleak thoughts run through my mind but the decision is taken, against my will, so I start through the precinct looking for the little troublemaker. I figure if she can somehow always cause trouble for others, being genetically predisposed to it, she ought to cause a shitload of trouble for that loser encroaching upon MY territory. I let loose a cartoonish, deep-voiced and slightly crazy ‘Mwhahahaha!’ while passing some tables and the guy I booked this morning on a drug bust gone right [well if you’d ask Silvia, gone wrong, because there was a cool shootout between me and the bad guys and some evidence got trampled with - good thing she doesn’t know about it yet!] jumps from the chair, he was sitting in, giving a deposition to Rita, and throws himself to the floor mumbling incomprehensible, stunted phrases while looking beseechingly to a stunned Rita, I could only understand something like ‘Please, don’t let her take me… I have children… I wanna live…. please!... she’s crazy!’ I look at him there on the floor.
‘Who you calling crazy?! Me, me, are you talking to me?!’ I sneer at him.
He only keeps shaking his head like one of those defective dolls you just have an urge to shoot at when you see them at fairs.
‘You have children? Yeah!’ I snort. ‘You’re like 15, you little shit!... Wait, you’re 15 and you look ok for a minor drug dealer - have you seen my niece Sara?’ I cock my head waiting for an answer.
He’s hyperventilating now, he’s no help to me and I move on.
She’s nowhere to be found, so I check the last possible place. The locker room and there she is. Sitting on a bench laughing her ass off - I swear, this child is weird. When she was little Silvia and I would often find her somewhere alone just laughing her head off at stuff, when we’d ask her what was so funny she’s stay stuff like: ‘the socks’ or ‘that leaf’ or ‘my pinky’ and then she’d laugh herself silly again. Silvia, my little nerdy scientist was quite worried and was coming up with experiments and plans to improve Sara, I told her it was not worth the effort - she was a Miranda, what you see is what you get with us, nothing more - truly, nothing more and definitely nothing changed or improved. We don’t deal well with changes, let’s put it that way.
I wonder what’s tickled her weird funny bone this time.
‘Sara, what’s so funny?’ I ask, not really wanting to know. Knowledge can be scary!
She sniffles and raised her face towards me.
‘Pe-e-e-e-pa?’ Hiccoughing.
Dear god, no, I feel an emotional - and irrational and crazy, this is Sara after all! - women talk coming on and I brace myself for it. I wanna impart to her the immortal words of Barbra Streisand ‘You better not cry, you better not shout / You better not pout / I’m telling you why / Santa Claus is dead’, but as appropriate as they would be now, I can’t, Sara still believes in Santa Claus and waits for him every year, and he comes, every year, and it makes her so happy and Paco can’t help himself and puts on that ugly, paunchy costume and fake plastic beard, every year, for his little girl. Can’t explain myself how she hasn’t figured out yet it’s her father, guess the teachers in school were right - it pays off in life to have lots of imagination.
‘What’s wrong, Sara?’ Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, please. I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you!
She’s mumbling something. Don’t know what, but it doesn’t sound that bad so I get back to me.
‘Yeah, yeah, uhu… Look, the reason I’ve been looking for you is I need your help with something…’ I start.
‘Is it a worldly issue?’ She interjects.
‘Huh?’ I knew Silvia’s shouldn’t have given her an explanatory dictionary for her birthday, look what good it did!
‘I can’t be involved in worldly issues. I’m becoming a nun.’ She declares and smoothes her hands down her mini-skirt - gesture which would’ve worked if the length of her skirt were more than just-barely-covering her derriere.
‘Huh?’ I know I’m repeating myself, but c’mon, what word can be more expressive than ‘huh’. It speaks volumes… so to speak.
She wipes the last tear out of the corner of her left eye and says decidedly: ‘I shall leave behind this world with its confusion and pain and its people with their foibles and trials and tribulations to find peace in a sacred convent.’
‘Huh’? I know, I know but still… huh????
‘You may wonder what has provoked this utterly unexpected decision in my life. I shall tell you, though after I won’t ever lose anymore breath discussing it. Ramon… he left me. Can you believe it???!? He left me… for an older woman.’ She barely finishes being wrecked once again by mistakenly laugh-like convulsions.
It takes a long time for her to settle down and compose herself once again, and I figured saying ‘huh?’ one more time was overdoing it, so I stayed silent.
‘So now that you know the truth, let’s not talk about it anymore and please accept my decision, aunt.’ She asks of me.
‘Huh!’ though I don’t say it, instead I try telling her once again I need her help.
‘Ok, what do you need, tita?’ She asks.
‘Rats.’ I answer.