YULETIDE FIC: you lost me in the rear view (American Gods, Laura/Mad Sweeney, R)
TITLE: you lost me in the rear view
RATING: R for sex and gratuitous use of the F word
FANDOM: American Gods
CHARACTERS: Laura Moon, Mad Sweeney
PAIRING: Laura Moon/Mad Sweeney, Laura Moon/Shadow Moon
SUMMARY: A lonesome motel pitstop en route to resurrection.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Written as a treat for pax’s 2017 yuletide. Title from Tori Amos’s “a sorta fairytale.”
It got dark a long time ago, and Sweeney swore he had actual fucking frostbite on his fingers and the end of his nose. When they stopped for gas, he’d been able to convince her the evening chill was cool enough for her, and anyway, now that Salim was gone, they didn’t have to stop near as often. They could afford a bit of rest.
“I don’t sleep,” Laura said grumpily, but she’d driven them to a hotel just the same.
It’s hours later and neither of them has had a wink, but the color has returned to Sweeney’s nose and fingers, and he’s got no complaints with how they’ve spent the time.
At some point, they fell off the bed. The curtains aren’t closed, and a blueish light from the motel’s neon sign filters in over the two of them sprawled naked on the floor half tangled in the scratchy cheap sheets. It’s like being in a fucking aquarium.
Laura’s hair fans out around her head, like a mermaid’s. She lays on the ground on her back, one leg caught in a twist of sheet. She was not an easy lay. The getting there, sure; he’d smacked her ass and snarled at her, and she nearly put him through a wall in response, but when the bleeding had stopped, she’d asked if he wanted to fuck, and there’s only ever one right answer to that question. The laying part, though, sweet Aine. She fought and bit and scratched and rode him like a bucking bronco. She looks peaceful now, coffin peaceful, how the fuck.
“I’m going to assume I can’t get pregnant because all my organs have been scooped out,” she says, “but fuck, wouldn’t that suck?”
Sweeney looks at her. An ugly thought strikes him.
“You know, more’n once throughout history, people’ve tanned human flesh for their leather.”
“Is that why Birkin bags are so expensive?” Laura asks. She stretches like a cat, like part of her’s not bound to the laws of physics, and maybe it isn’t. Sweeney watches her pale skin slide over those dead ribs, watches the stitches in her chest pull. It doesn’t seem to hurt her. Fuck, she must’ve had great tits before. They’re stunners now, even though her color is blanching as Jacquel’s paint fades, and Sweeney loves the peony pink of a living girl’s nipple. It’s just hard to look at them and not see the great fucking valleys carved into her chest.
Laura narrows her eyes. Sweeney hasn’t answered her question.
“You’ll be a Birkin bag,” he says, “soon enough. Taut and pale as a Nazi lampshade.”
“That’s disgusting,” she says.
“Which part?” he asks, but she doesn’t answer.
“That’s what I’ll do with you,” he says, mostly to see how much he can get away with. “When all this is over and you’ve given me back what’s mine, I’ll have your fine, ornery hide treated and tanned and made into one of those fucking bags. Or-no, better yet-a codpiece.”
Laura arches an eyebrow. “If I’m going to spend my afterlife wrapped around someone’s wang, it won’t be yours.”
That stings, and it stings that it stings. Sweeney wasn’t expecting that.
“Ah, yes. Shadow Moon is a lucky man. Married to a purse.”
Laura looks away. Her eyes are fixed on the sliver of world between the curtains, and the blue light reflects off her, makes her glow like a will-o’-wisp.
“Shadow will fix this,” she says. “He’ll make me better.”
Sweeney chokes out a laugh. It sounds weak, and he hates it and he hates himself. “Your man’s more useful than I gave him credit for, raising the dead.”
Laura’s shoulders straighten, set. “He’d do anything for me. He’ll find a way.”
Sweeney looks at her. She looks sure. Laura Moon is not a woman for faith, and he knows she wouldn’t call it that, but it’s odd to see her so filled with it.
There was a girl once, a long time ago. She had nothing but faith, nothing but faith and her fine looks and quick mind, and she’d had a helluva time but a happy ending just the same, had she, Essie MacGowan. It strikes Sweeney not for the first time how much Laura favors her, and he wonders if maybe all the shit Laura’s life and death has become is just trials, just trials like Essie slogged through, and maybe there’s a happy ending in store for her as well.
He isn’t the sort for happy endings. It’s possible Shadow is, though he doubts it.
“Okay,” Sweeney says, and he says it soft. “Between my friend with the resurrection gift and your fine husband, soon you’ll be back to your normal, and you’ll never set eyes on old Mad Sweeney again.”
“This just gets better and better!” Laura says dryly, but she’s smiling, a little, and Sweeney can’t tell if it’s a sad sort of smile or not, since everything looks sad in that queer aquarium light from the neon sign that says, if he recalls, LAST CHANCE INN. It doesn’t matter, though. She isn’t his girl, she’s his impediment, she’s the thorn in his fucking side, she’s-she’s penance, probably. And he’ll be glad to be rid of her, he thinks, but then she turns to look at him proper, and she does smile, not a sad smile at all, and they could be in the damned ice cream truck with ice crystals in his eyelashes and his fingers turning blue, and he’d feel warm as he normally does with the coin in his keep.
Sweeney pulls his long self from the hotel floor and comes to stand behind her. He puts his arms around her and she lets him, and he fits her small body against the front of his own. It’s odd-no heartbeat, the dead cool of her-but no less perfect, and she lets him hold her there in the window beneath the odd glowing neon of their Last Chance.