This Is The Life of Suzie Costello
Title: This Is The Life of Suzie Costello
Rating: R
Warnings: Sexual abuse of a minor, suicide
Characters: Suzie, team
Words: ~3,000
Beta: curriejean
Summary: This was originally meant for dark_fest, for the prompt, "Suzie Costello, where did she come from and what went wrong?" So, this is that.
Author's Note: The poem is "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath. Suzie was always more Sylvia Plath than Emily Dickinson, to me. I've structured the poem to serve the narrative, but you can find the amazing full version here.
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
It watched, she thought, when he came at night; big glass eyes painted wide and surprised, as though it was always the first time, and it was always wondering, how could he do it? Fuzzy pink ears flopped left and right, it never even had the decency to look away. She would stare back at it, a contest, who would blink first, who would be shamed first, and it was always her, but still she tried because it was better than what was happening under her belly-button. There was nothing under her belly-button. Nothing but the dark. Nothingnothingnothing.
His hands on the insides of her thighs, fingers trailing up, dark shoeleather skin pressed into her abdomen to keep her still, long after she’d stopped struggling, because struggling brought bruises to her face she’d have to explain at school, I fell down the stairs, I ran into the doorknob, because telling someone what he did at night in her bedroom with the bunny watching would make him kill himself, and did she want Daddy to die?
No.
In the back garden she took a red plastic candle lighter to a pile of dry leaves and sat with her knees to her chest to watch the bunny bubble, its faded pink face turned out to her accusatory as the fire dragged its mouth into a frown and melted its eyes. But it had betrayed her first. It never told anyone. And it always saw.
She threw its blackened corpse to the neighbor’s dog and watched the stuffing blow across the lawn.
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
She nursed a glass of water against the kitchen counter and swung her legs back and forth against her stool, watching Mother tip cigarette ash into the oily grey dishwater and stare out of the window.
“Mrs. Jefferson sent Janie to the corner today,” Suzie said
Mother said nothing. Her half-curly hair was pinned up sloppily, wisps of frizzy brown falling against her shoulders and around her face, back hunched and body leaning protectively over the dishes she had stopped washing ten minutes ago in favor of a fag and a stare out of the window at the dull grey afternoon, no rain but no sun.
Suzie looked down into her glass of water and watched each slow, separate bubble struggle its way to the surface.
When she came home two years later to find Mother hanging from the ceiling fan in the master bedroom, she was ashamed that she should feel relief.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack, and my Taroc pack
“I knew you were coming.”
Suzie grinned without humour, slipping into a chair across the table. “Is that how you start every conversation?”
The Girl only watched her, huge dark eyes unmoving from Suzie’s face, her short-long fingers wrapped around the Tarot pack she held against the table.
“They tell me you can see the future,” Suzie said. She leaned forward on her elbows. “They say you’re very good at it.”
“They say you’re very good at conning tourists.”
Suzie smirked. Tourists. “I take it you don’t mean Americans.”
“If that were the case, they wouldn’t say anything about you at all.” The Girl began to shuffle slowly, watching her own hands mix the cards, the conversations surrounding them (shouting, laughter, languages no human had ever heard or would ever hear) bleeding into the pause.
“Could you tell me my future?”
The Girl still watched her own hands, the hypnotic dance of her fingers over the cards. “I could,” she said, “but you would be in debt to me.”
“I can pay you,” Suzie said, reaching for her purse.
The Girl’s hand was on Suzie’s arm in an instant, her eyes on Suzie’s eyes, holding them there. “It isn’t that type of payment that I’ll need.” Suzie took in a slow breath as The Girl seemed to stare into her, mapping out the patterns of veins on her heart, the pattern of wrinkles on her brain. “I have no use for money. This will be a favor. And when I ask, you’re bound to do it, Suzie Costello.”
Suzie stared for a moment, then forced her voice out level. “What is it?”
“You’ll know when I do,” The Girl said. Her fingers around Suzie’s arm tightened. “Do we have a deal?”
Without a thought, Suzie breathed, “Yes.”
The Girl let go. “Then shuffle.” She slid the cards across the table.
Suzie picked up the cards and shuffled them like a poker player, her eyes scanning the room for anyone listening in on them. The whole pub seemed to be ignoring them. Or maybe, she realized, the pub couldn’t see them at all anymore. “Are we hidden?” she asked.
“We’re veiled,” The Girl said, her own eyes roaming the lowlife clientele. “Their eyes move over us. It will lift when we’re finished here.”
“You don’t talk much like a child,” Suzie said, passing the cards back over to The Girl.
The Girl smiled, small. “You don’t talk much like a monster.” Suzie furrowed her brow and opened her mouth to argue, but The Girl dealt the first card. “The Emperor,” she said, her fingers trailing the picture of a man at a throne. “The father.” Suzie’s hand clenched against the edge of the table, and the girl looked up with a little grin. “It’s so much more than that,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Wait until the spread is finished,” The Girl chided, then drew another card and lay it down. “The Nine of Swords.”
Suzie stared down at the picture on the card. A woman sitting up in bed, her face in her hands, dark curly hair falling against her shoulders. “Is that--” she started, but no, it couldn’t be.
“Worry, guilt,” The Girl said, and tapped the card. “It’s you.”
“How did you--”
“It wasn’t me,” The Girl said, then drew another card and set it down. A skeleton grinned out from the top of the table.
“Death,” Suzie said.
“And so much of it,” The Girl agreed quietly. “This is one of the more interesting fortunes I’ve told.”
“Whose death?” Suzie asked. She looked up, expectant. “Not mine?”
“The deaths of many,” The Girl said, staring at Suzie. “And yours. Twice.”
Suzie balked. “Twice?”
“Am I interrupting, ladies?”
The Girl looked up, and Suzie followed her gaze to look at the man now standing beside their table. The veil was apparently gone.
“Captain,” The Girl said, warm, sliding the cards back into the deck and shuffling once again. “Always a pleasure to see you again.”
“The feeling’s mutual,” the man said, smiling the smile of a man who knows very well that he is utterly charming. “And who is this?” He looked at Suzie, raising an eyebrow.
Suzie stood and extended a hand. “Suzie Costello,” she said.
The man took her hand. “Captain Jack Harkness.” A smirk tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Suzie Costello. I’m familiar with your work. You left a bit of a mess for me to clean up in Newport a few weeks ago.”
Suzie shrugged, retracting her hand. “Plezians are a messy bunch in general. Especially when they’re angry.”
Captain Harkness grinned. “You made them angry.”
Suzie matched his grin. “I’m very good at it.”
Jack glanced to The Girl, then smiled wide at Suzie. “You ever think of using your powers for good?”
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-
Torchwood is Suzie and Jack for eight months. Torchwood is beauty and torture and guns and running. Jack is nothing and everything that Suzie needs, and she clings to her playful disregard of him as a figure of authority while following him into danger with a sweep of their coats, arms held straight and locked with guns on the end of them, entering rooms from both sides of the doorway and sweeping with eyes and sights.
Suzie is everything Jack needed when he picked her up at a bar. He can’t believe his luck until she gets shot in the stomach.
“We need more people.”
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year
Owen was all want. He was need and breath and bruises, fingers pressed hard into her shoulder, gripping, huffing into her neck. He was all lips and tongue and bony and red, and she could lie with her arms spread against his dark sheets without touching him and he could just go and go and go. She could stare up at the ceiling and let him pound his way inside of her until he cried out sharp, almost like he was in pain, and collapsed on top of her.
Or she could hold him against a wall, watch his big-surprised eyes go excited and eager while her hands traveled and pushed and pulled, tore away anything that wasn’t skin and exposed him in front of his big bay windows and out to the world at large, this man she could know and play like a violin string, who she could control with the grip of her fingers and the breath of her laughter.
And when Tosh’s eyes lingered on the fresh-mouthed bruises at the base of Suzie’s throat, the red marks of nails down the back of Owen’s neck, Suzie wanted to laugh until she cried.
If I've killed one man, I've killed two-
And then I knew what to do.
“Your debt.”
Suzie spun on her heel. The rain was pouring down, torrential, forming puddles and little floods and rivers over her shoes, but her hand dropped to the gun at her side anyway, because even if she couldn’t see she could still shoot. “Who’s there?” she shouted, her voice ringing and bouncing off of the brick walls of the alleyway. She was not going to die here surrounded by club trash and condom wrappers.
There was the click click click of approaching footsteps on the cobblestones, and Suzie blinked the rain out of her eyes and wiped her hand across her face to see - The Girl. She lowered the gun. The Girl stared at her, big-ancient eyes beneath the hood of her cloak. She looked like Red Riding Hood, if Red Riding Hood could inspire this sinking sensation in Suzie’s stomach, make Suzie back up a few paces with the intensity of her stare.
“What do you want?” she called over the huge noise of the rain.
“It’s time to repay your debt, Suzie Costello.”
Suzie hesitated, looking behind herself at the mouth of the alley.
“There’s no need to run. And I will find you anyway.” The Girl stepped closer, holding out an old piece of paper. It darkened in the rain, yellowed with age. Suzie could see dark loops of ink through the folded sides. “These are directions. You will go there and find what you’re looking for.”
Suzie stared down at the paper, her hair dripping onto her face. She reached out and grasped the note between her fingers. “How does this repay you? Me getting what I want?” She was still shouting over the rain.
The Girl let go and let her arm fall to her side. “It’s done,” she said. She turned and started away, back down the alley, her cloak billowing behind her.
Suzie looked at the paper for a moment, then stuffed it in her pocket. She shouted at The Girl’s retreating back, “What’ll I find?”
The Girl stopped. She looked over her shoulder. “Life,” she said, low. And then she disappeared.
The mausoleum was locked when she finally got to it, soaked to the skin and weary, as though she had been walking through a tide instead of a cemetery. She gripped the padlock in one hand and placed the alien lockpick against it with the other. It was a strange mix; the very old with the not-yet-made, the dead with the unborn. The lock fell open with a green blinking light and she pulled it off and tossed it aside into the drenched, muddy earth, pulling the mausoleum gate open and stepping inside under the marble roof, finally out of the rain.
It was freezing inside.
There was a half-burned candle on a stand by the entryway, and she clicked her lighter once, twice, three times before the flame sprang up. She tipped the wick into the fire and tucked the lighter away when it caught. The place was filled with cobwebs; she lifted the candle high to cast as much light as she could. There was no grave. No tomb. No body.
There was just an altar at the back of the small marble room. A table flanked by candles, covered with dust; and perfectly positioned at the center, untouched and unlocked, an ornate wooden box. She stepped closer, bringing the candle nearer to it. There was something carved into the marble altar; she wiped her hand along it to clear the dust away.
I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.
John 11:25-26
She stared at the words, tracing them with her fingers. Then she opened the box, and the metal glove shone in the candlelight.
The rain stopped.
Constructing a false archival history of the glove was simple. By the time she’d killed the second man, she knew that she was doing right.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
“Such a sad little boy,” she said.
He stopped in the doorway, his back to her. She could hear the low thunder of the metal tray quaking in his hands. He lowered his head and didn’t turn around.
“Ianto Jones,” she said with a mocking sigh. “The saddest little butler.” She settled back in the wheelchair, languid, a lazy smile on her face. “How did it happen, then? How did it all turn out? Your tin soldier.”
He turned his face up toward the ceiling, the empty tray falling with his hand to his side. “She died,” he said.
“I think it was more than just that,” Suzie said. “I think it would have to be more, to make you look like that. What did they do?”
Ianto lowered his head again. “They shot her.” His voice was soft.
“That sounds like them.” She leaned forward against the table, smiling sunnily at Ianto’s back. “And you let them do it, didn’t you?”
He winced.
She laughed. “That’s you, then. Trained like a faithful dog. First by her, then by Jack. You’ll follow anyone who throws you a fuck.”
The tray made a huge sound in the tiny room when he dropped it and turned in the doorway. His hands were clenched into painful fists, his face flashing anger and grief like an alarm light.
“I was glad when you died,” he said. Then he left.
Suzie stared at the metal tray at the bottom of the stairs. It caught the light and flashed against her eyes.
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
The fear in her father’s eyes when he woke up to see her hovering above him - it was worth it. It was worth everything, all of the death and the pain and the complications, worth the whistling sounds of Gwen’s ragged breath behind her, the near-silent cries for help, the blood. The tug that tore out his endotracheal tube, the satisfying slick of it, the feel of it sliding out of his throat. The pinging of the machines. His dying gasps.
She could see the knowledge in his eyes. He knew. He knew she was the one who killed him, and he would take that knowledge with him into the dark. Into the silence.
He deserved it. Because of what he’d done to her. Dying wasted and alone in a hospital wasn’t enough. He needed to be sent. He needed to be sent by her. He needed to be shown that there were consequences. There were consequences for his actions.
So she showed him.
With the morning light reflecting off of the water, Jack showed her.
But he would know soon enough.
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
Rating: R
Warnings: Sexual abuse of a minor, suicide
Characters: Suzie, team
Words: ~3,000
Beta: curriejean
Summary: This was originally meant for dark_fest, for the prompt, "Suzie Costello, where did she come from and what went wrong?" So, this is that.
Author's Note: The poem is "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath. Suzie was always more Sylvia Plath than Emily Dickinson, to me. I've structured the poem to serve the narrative, but you can find the amazing full version here.
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
It watched, she thought, when he came at night; big glass eyes painted wide and surprised, as though it was always the first time, and it was always wondering, how could he do it? Fuzzy pink ears flopped left and right, it never even had the decency to look away. She would stare back at it, a contest, who would blink first, who would be shamed first, and it was always her, but still she tried because it was better than what was happening under her belly-button. There was nothing under her belly-button. Nothing but the dark. Nothingnothingnothing.
His hands on the insides of her thighs, fingers trailing up, dark shoeleather skin pressed into her abdomen to keep her still, long after she’d stopped struggling, because struggling brought bruises to her face she’d have to explain at school, I fell down the stairs, I ran into the doorknob, because telling someone what he did at night in her bedroom with the bunny watching would make him kill himself, and did she want Daddy to die?
No.
In the back garden she took a red plastic candle lighter to a pile of dry leaves and sat with her knees to her chest to watch the bunny bubble, its faded pink face turned out to her accusatory as the fire dragged its mouth into a frown and melted its eyes. But it had betrayed her first. It never told anyone. And it always saw.
She threw its blackened corpse to the neighbor’s dog and watched the stuffing blow across the lawn.
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
She nursed a glass of water against the kitchen counter and swung her legs back and forth against her stool, watching Mother tip cigarette ash into the oily grey dishwater and stare out of the window.
“Mrs. Jefferson sent Janie to the corner today,” Suzie said
Mother said nothing. Her half-curly hair was pinned up sloppily, wisps of frizzy brown falling against her shoulders and around her face, back hunched and body leaning protectively over the dishes she had stopped washing ten minutes ago in favor of a fag and a stare out of the window at the dull grey afternoon, no rain but no sun.
Suzie looked down into her glass of water and watched each slow, separate bubble struggle its way to the surface.
When she came home two years later to find Mother hanging from the ceiling fan in the master bedroom, she was ashamed that she should feel relief.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack, and my Taroc pack
“I knew you were coming.”
Suzie grinned without humour, slipping into a chair across the table. “Is that how you start every conversation?”
The Girl only watched her, huge dark eyes unmoving from Suzie’s face, her short-long fingers wrapped around the Tarot pack she held against the table.
“They tell me you can see the future,” Suzie said. She leaned forward on her elbows. “They say you’re very good at it.”
“They say you’re very good at conning tourists.”
Suzie smirked. Tourists. “I take it you don’t mean Americans.”
“If that were the case, they wouldn’t say anything about you at all.” The Girl began to shuffle slowly, watching her own hands mix the cards, the conversations surrounding them (shouting, laughter, languages no human had ever heard or would ever hear) bleeding into the pause.
“Could you tell me my future?”
The Girl still watched her own hands, the hypnotic dance of her fingers over the cards. “I could,” she said, “but you would be in debt to me.”
“I can pay you,” Suzie said, reaching for her purse.
The Girl’s hand was on Suzie’s arm in an instant, her eyes on Suzie’s eyes, holding them there. “It isn’t that type of payment that I’ll need.” Suzie took in a slow breath as The Girl seemed to stare into her, mapping out the patterns of veins on her heart, the pattern of wrinkles on her brain. “I have no use for money. This will be a favor. And when I ask, you’re bound to do it, Suzie Costello.”
Suzie stared for a moment, then forced her voice out level. “What is it?”
“You’ll know when I do,” The Girl said. Her fingers around Suzie’s arm tightened. “Do we have a deal?”
Without a thought, Suzie breathed, “Yes.”
The Girl let go. “Then shuffle.” She slid the cards across the table.
Suzie picked up the cards and shuffled them like a poker player, her eyes scanning the room for anyone listening in on them. The whole pub seemed to be ignoring them. Or maybe, she realized, the pub couldn’t see them at all anymore. “Are we hidden?” she asked.
“We’re veiled,” The Girl said, her own eyes roaming the lowlife clientele. “Their eyes move over us. It will lift when we’re finished here.”
“You don’t talk much like a child,” Suzie said, passing the cards back over to The Girl.
The Girl smiled, small. “You don’t talk much like a monster.” Suzie furrowed her brow and opened her mouth to argue, but The Girl dealt the first card. “The Emperor,” she said, her fingers trailing the picture of a man at a throne. “The father.” Suzie’s hand clenched against the edge of the table, and the girl looked up with a little grin. “It’s so much more than that,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Wait until the spread is finished,” The Girl chided, then drew another card and lay it down. “The Nine of Swords.”
Suzie stared down at the picture on the card. A woman sitting up in bed, her face in her hands, dark curly hair falling against her shoulders. “Is that--” she started, but no, it couldn’t be.
“Worry, guilt,” The Girl said, and tapped the card. “It’s you.”
“How did you--”
“It wasn’t me,” The Girl said, then drew another card and set it down. A skeleton grinned out from the top of the table.
“Death,” Suzie said.
“And so much of it,” The Girl agreed quietly. “This is one of the more interesting fortunes I’ve told.”
“Whose death?” Suzie asked. She looked up, expectant. “Not mine?”
“The deaths of many,” The Girl said, staring at Suzie. “And yours. Twice.”
Suzie balked. “Twice?”
“Am I interrupting, ladies?”
The Girl looked up, and Suzie followed her gaze to look at the man now standing beside their table. The veil was apparently gone.
“Captain,” The Girl said, warm, sliding the cards back into the deck and shuffling once again. “Always a pleasure to see you again.”
“The feeling’s mutual,” the man said, smiling the smile of a man who knows very well that he is utterly charming. “And who is this?” He looked at Suzie, raising an eyebrow.
Suzie stood and extended a hand. “Suzie Costello,” she said.
The man took her hand. “Captain Jack Harkness.” A smirk tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Suzie Costello. I’m familiar with your work. You left a bit of a mess for me to clean up in Newport a few weeks ago.”
Suzie shrugged, retracting her hand. “Plezians are a messy bunch in general. Especially when they’re angry.”
Captain Harkness grinned. “You made them angry.”
Suzie matched his grin. “I’m very good at it.”
Jack glanced to The Girl, then smiled wide at Suzie. “You ever think of using your powers for good?”
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-
Torchwood is Suzie and Jack for eight months. Torchwood is beauty and torture and guns and running. Jack is nothing and everything that Suzie needs, and she clings to her playful disregard of him as a figure of authority while following him into danger with a sweep of their coats, arms held straight and locked with guns on the end of them, entering rooms from both sides of the doorway and sweeping with eyes and sights.
Suzie is everything Jack needed when he picked her up at a bar. He can’t believe his luck until she gets shot in the stomach.
“We need more people.”
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year
Owen was all want. He was need and breath and bruises, fingers pressed hard into her shoulder, gripping, huffing into her neck. He was all lips and tongue and bony and red, and she could lie with her arms spread against his dark sheets without touching him and he could just go and go and go. She could stare up at the ceiling and let him pound his way inside of her until he cried out sharp, almost like he was in pain, and collapsed on top of her.
Or she could hold him against a wall, watch his big-surprised eyes go excited and eager while her hands traveled and pushed and pulled, tore away anything that wasn’t skin and exposed him in front of his big bay windows and out to the world at large, this man she could know and play like a violin string, who she could control with the grip of her fingers and the breath of her laughter.
And when Tosh’s eyes lingered on the fresh-mouthed bruises at the base of Suzie’s throat, the red marks of nails down the back of Owen’s neck, Suzie wanted to laugh until she cried.
If I've killed one man, I've killed two-
And then I knew what to do.
“Your debt.”
Suzie spun on her heel. The rain was pouring down, torrential, forming puddles and little floods and rivers over her shoes, but her hand dropped to the gun at her side anyway, because even if she couldn’t see she could still shoot. “Who’s there?” she shouted, her voice ringing and bouncing off of the brick walls of the alleyway. She was not going to die here surrounded by club trash and condom wrappers.
There was the click click click of approaching footsteps on the cobblestones, and Suzie blinked the rain out of her eyes and wiped her hand across her face to see - The Girl. She lowered the gun. The Girl stared at her, big-ancient eyes beneath the hood of her cloak. She looked like Red Riding Hood, if Red Riding Hood could inspire this sinking sensation in Suzie’s stomach, make Suzie back up a few paces with the intensity of her stare.
“What do you want?” she called over the huge noise of the rain.
“It’s time to repay your debt, Suzie Costello.”
Suzie hesitated, looking behind herself at the mouth of the alley.
“There’s no need to run. And I will find you anyway.” The Girl stepped closer, holding out an old piece of paper. It darkened in the rain, yellowed with age. Suzie could see dark loops of ink through the folded sides. “These are directions. You will go there and find what you’re looking for.”
Suzie stared down at the paper, her hair dripping onto her face. She reached out and grasped the note between her fingers. “How does this repay you? Me getting what I want?” She was still shouting over the rain.
The Girl let go and let her arm fall to her side. “It’s done,” she said. She turned and started away, back down the alley, her cloak billowing behind her.
Suzie looked at the paper for a moment, then stuffed it in her pocket. She shouted at The Girl’s retreating back, “What’ll I find?”
The Girl stopped. She looked over her shoulder. “Life,” she said, low. And then she disappeared.
The mausoleum was locked when she finally got to it, soaked to the skin and weary, as though she had been walking through a tide instead of a cemetery. She gripped the padlock in one hand and placed the alien lockpick against it with the other. It was a strange mix; the very old with the not-yet-made, the dead with the unborn. The lock fell open with a green blinking light and she pulled it off and tossed it aside into the drenched, muddy earth, pulling the mausoleum gate open and stepping inside under the marble roof, finally out of the rain.
It was freezing inside.
There was a half-burned candle on a stand by the entryway, and she clicked her lighter once, twice, three times before the flame sprang up. She tipped the wick into the fire and tucked the lighter away when it caught. The place was filled with cobwebs; she lifted the candle high to cast as much light as she could. There was no grave. No tomb. No body.
There was just an altar at the back of the small marble room. A table flanked by candles, covered with dust; and perfectly positioned at the center, untouched and unlocked, an ornate wooden box. She stepped closer, bringing the candle nearer to it. There was something carved into the marble altar; she wiped her hand along it to clear the dust away.
I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.
John 11:25-26
She stared at the words, tracing them with her fingers. Then she opened the box, and the metal glove shone in the candlelight.
The rain stopped.
Constructing a false archival history of the glove was simple. By the time she’d killed the second man, she knew that she was doing right.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
“Such a sad little boy,” she said.
He stopped in the doorway, his back to her. She could hear the low thunder of the metal tray quaking in his hands. He lowered his head and didn’t turn around.
“Ianto Jones,” she said with a mocking sigh. “The saddest little butler.” She settled back in the wheelchair, languid, a lazy smile on her face. “How did it happen, then? How did it all turn out? Your tin soldier.”
He turned his face up toward the ceiling, the empty tray falling with his hand to his side. “She died,” he said.
“I think it was more than just that,” Suzie said. “I think it would have to be more, to make you look like that. What did they do?”
Ianto lowered his head again. “They shot her.” His voice was soft.
“That sounds like them.” She leaned forward against the table, smiling sunnily at Ianto’s back. “And you let them do it, didn’t you?”
He winced.
She laughed. “That’s you, then. Trained like a faithful dog. First by her, then by Jack. You’ll follow anyone who throws you a fuck.”
The tray made a huge sound in the tiny room when he dropped it and turned in the doorway. His hands were clenched into painful fists, his face flashing anger and grief like an alarm light.
“I was glad when you died,” he said. Then he left.
Suzie stared at the metal tray at the bottom of the stairs. It caught the light and flashed against her eyes.
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
The fear in her father’s eyes when he woke up to see her hovering above him - it was worth it. It was worth everything, all of the death and the pain and the complications, worth the whistling sounds of Gwen’s ragged breath behind her, the near-silent cries for help, the blood. The tug that tore out his endotracheal tube, the satisfying slick of it, the feel of it sliding out of his throat. The pinging of the machines. His dying gasps.
She could see the knowledge in his eyes. He knew. He knew she was the one who killed him, and he would take that knowledge with him into the dark. Into the silence.
He deserved it. Because of what he’d done to her. Dying wasted and alone in a hospital wasn’t enough. He needed to be sent. He needed to be sent by her. He needed to be shown that there were consequences. There were consequences for his actions.
So she showed him.
With the morning light reflecting off of the water, Jack showed her.
But he would know soon enough.
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.