The Art of Running . TFatF . Part I/II
Title: The Art of Running
Author: pprfaith
Disclaimer: Not mine, no stepping on toes intended.
Summary: The first question to ask any runner: ‘Are you running from or towards?’ - Or: The life of a girl named Brian. AU, genderswap.
Rating: R
Warnings:Total AUness abounds. Some violence, some crime, some sexy times. And genderswap. Duh.
Pairings: canon pairings, Dom/alwaysagirl!Brian
Praise and blame: Thanks go to jedibuttercup for unintentional motivation and a beta read. Thanks, dear!
A/N: Apparently, when I tell myself, ‘write something small to get a grip on the characters‘, my brain hears, ‘genderswap, ganderswap, genderswap!’. This matches this kink meme prompt, although the prompt was posted after I finished the story. Feedback would be wildly appreciated.
+
+
The Art of Running
+
“Are you sure you can do this, O’Conner?” Tanner asks, worriedly squinting from behind his glasses. As if they haven’t had this conversation before. As if there’s anyone else who could successfully infiltrate a gang of racers.
As if the whole precinct isn’t talking about ‘O’Conner’s crazy driving’ and juvie record anyway. Apparently ‘sealed’ doesn’t actually mean shit among cops.
So everyone knows Officer O’Conner used to boost cars for fun, take them on joyrides and usually leave them in ditches. Busted. Two years juvie. Doesn’t get more real than that.
Doesn’t get more suited for the job than that.
“Yes, sir. I’m sure.”
Tanner nods and his squint eases marginally and he smiles wanly, waving a hand at the door, “Then go get’em, girl.”
+
Brianna Marilyn O’Conner - call me Brian, or it’ll be your blood on the floor - isn’t nearly as sure about this as she pretends to be for Tanner’s sake.
She can do this, of that she has no doubt. The shit she got busted for back in Barstow was only the tip of the iceberg of what she actually did. The racing, the stealing, the crime. The lies and the thrill and the adrenaline rush that’s like nothing else on this planet.
She’s the best person for this job.
The problem is, after juvie, after two years in hell with not even Rome to keep her company, she swore off all that. And after her mom died, she actually stuck with the plan, too. No more thrills. No more joyrides. No more heart in her throat and life on the edge.
From street racer to traffic cop. It doesn’t get much more anticlimactic than that. These days, the biggest rush she can hope for is a domestic call, and even those are usually drab compared to what life was like once upon a time.
And she’s okay with that. She calmed down, got her life straight. Once Rome gets out of Chino, she’ll set him straight, too, and they’ll lead boring, but safe lives and she’ll be able to forget she ever knew what flying felt like.
Only now here’s the job, undercover in the racing scene, everything she weaned herself off like a junkie going cold turkey, dangled right in front of her.
She can do the job.
But she’s kind of scared what it’ll do to her in return.
+
She’s twenty when she leaves it all behind.
Rome drives her to the bus station, his silence icy, angry, hurt. He doesn’t understand why she’s doing this, throwing her life away. Throwing him away.
She doesn’t have the energy to explain anymore.
Her mother is dead. She’s dead and the last thing she ever said to Brian was, “You be good, Brianna”
She always said that, a million times. Every time she left, every time Brian fucked up again, got in trouble again. Her mother is dead and half the reason for that is all the shit her daughter heaped on her.
You be good.
She never was while her mom was alive, never cared. Even post-juvie, her attempts were half-assed. But now her mom is dead and she knows it’s hollow, but she’s gotta do something. Make it right. Make anything right.
She can’t do that boosting cars and racing, can’t do that as a criminal. But being a cop is about as far from being a criminal as you can get without becoming a saint, so Brian figures she’ll try. She’ll leave all this behind, get her ass on the straight and narrow and she’ll try. For her mother, and for herself.
“This isn’t about you, man,” she tells Rome as he coasts to a halt at the bus station, still staring fixedly out the window.
“It’s still shit,” he says, and the fact that that’s all he says is telling. He’s hurt. Because she’s leaving behind the life and Rome is part of that life and yeah, shitty move on her part.
She runs a hand through her chopped off hair, sighs, leans into him. He tries to shrug her off, but she doesn’t budge. “I love you, Rome,” she says and fuck sticking to the guy-code, fuck the manly silences. She’s got ovaries, and just this once, she’ll act like it. “I love you and I’m sorry, but this is something I gotta do, okay? I’ll call. I’ll visit. I’ll post bail for you.”
And then she pulls out the ultimate weapon: The Pout. “Please don’t be mad at me?”
He looks, only for half a second, but it’s enough. He looks and falls victim to The Pout. With a sigh and a grunt he twists his arm around and over her, hugging her close. She’ll have finger shaped bruises on her arm come morning, but she doesn’t mind.
“You be careful, Bri,” he mutters straight into her ear, “And don’t forget where you from, girl.”
“I won’t,” she promises.
Rome waits in the car until the bus pulls away.
+
She knows Toretto isn’t her way in. Can’t be. Brian is the kind of scrappy a bitch only gets from being a white girl with a black boy for a best friend, stirring up shit wherever they go, but Toretto could simply break her. She doubts she could so much as make him budge if things went wrong.
His best friend isn’t much better and his girlfriend… well, Brian isn’t one to judge a book by its cover, but the Latina looks the kind of mean that comes with a fist, not a bitch slap. Hardcore.
So she figures she’ll have to either go for the sister, or one of the two other guys. The twitchy kid and the quiet one. Twitchy kid looks like someone she might get along with in real life, the life where she’s Brian, not Officer O’Conner. The quiet guy, too.
Maybe it’s a result of growing up with Rome for a best friend and being a tomboy, but she’s always been more comfortable around men than women.
Which is exactly why she picks the sister as her in.
If she doesn’t get comfortable, the siren’s song of the open road might not draw her in this time.
Here’s to hoping.
+
Connecting with Mia - who stops being Toretto’s sister about two days in and becomes Mia - is easy. Once Brian has the job at Harry’s, she can go for lunch at Mia’s place and bitch about the injustice of trying to make a living in a testosterone filled world and Mia hears her.
Just small talk the first week, a few smiles, a few shared groans here and there. The second week Mia starts asking how Brian’s day’s been so far, and tries to get her to eat something other than the crappy tuna.
Brian smiles, tells her, “It reminds me of my best friend. Guy can burn water, but he always made a mean sandwich.” Rome hates tuna, she doesn’t say, but he used to brave it for her, way back in Barstow, in his mother’s dingy kitchen. The memory tastes bittersweet and Mia doesn’t ask about it, just starts chattering.
By the third week they talk like old friends and Brian thinks that Mia might be lonely.
She thinks that she shouldn’t care about a mark’s sister, but that’s really hard when the younger woman smiles at her, says, “I like you, Brian. You’re not complicated.”
She shrugs in response, swallowing the last of her sandwich, “Few people are, if you get right down to it. We all want the same things, in the end.”
“Yeah? What do you want?”
My best friend out of Chino. My life as it was. The guys at the precinct to stop fucking wolf-whistling every time I walk past. A road that never ends. A family. A home. Peace. Freedom.
“Right now? A coffee to go would be great. Harry’s got me doing inventory. Again.”
+
“I’m not posting your bail this time, Brianna,” mom says and Brian is too stunned to react at all for a long second.
Then her mouth - sixteen and pretty much running all the time - takes over, “Mom! You can’t do that! You can’t let me rot in here!”
Her mom runs a hand over her tired face, smudging her cheap make-up. “Yes, I can. I am. At least this way, you can’t run away again.”
“I’ve never run away!” Brian snaps, feeling the urge to reach through the bars and strangle her mother. Goddamn holier than thou attitude. What the hell does the old bat know? It’s her fault that Brian’s stuck in this ass-backward town in the first place. Her and her shitty taste in men!
But then her mother does something she has never done before. She surprises Brian by yelling right back, “You’re always running! Every time you steal a car, or race, or get in a fight, you’re always running! And I have no idea why because no-one’s ever done anything to you!”
Years later Brian will understand that the edge she hears in her mother’s voice is desperation over her only daughter running rampant. But right then all she hears is more insults, more shit placed at her feet.
She turns away from the bars, crosses her arms over her chest and snarls without looking, “Fine. Leave me here. If I get gangraped, I’ll let you know.”
She stalks off, as far as she can get in her small holding cell and sits down on the rickety bench with jerky movements. Running. Okay, shit, maybe she is.
Maybe her mom’s right. But it’s not about running away, doesn’t she see that? Shit town, shit life, shit everything, but Brian’s not running away. She’s running toward something. The life she deserves, big money, big cars.
The good life.
The life she’ll have one day.
Freedom.
Brian O’Conner doesn’t run away from anything.
+
The kid, Jesse, walks up to her one day, pupils blown, arms waving wildly. He leans in too close, licks his lips and says, very carefully, “Bee-ooti-ful!”
She laughs and can’t help patting his shoulder. He nods, smiles dopily and ambles away, still muttering the word, over and over.
Later, when he already knows her name, he still calls her that.
+
The best friend - Vince - is the next to make contact. He sits next to her one day, makes noise about her coming here every day for the tuna. No-one likes the tuna, he says, suspicion shining in his eyes.
“Mia’s good company,” Brian says with a shrug and a smile, just ditzy enough to go with her dumb blonde act.
The guy growls and if she had a dick, Brian’s pretty sure he’d be sucker punching her right about now.
Testy.
Sure, he’s right about her and all that, but still. Testy.
But she has no dick and so all he does is motion with two fingers and growl, “I’m watching you, Barbie.”
Brian smiles back vacantly and asks, sweet as anything, “Yeah? My tits or my ass?”
Mia chokes behind the counter and the few patrons around them fall silent as the big guy stares at her like she’s speaking Japanese. Somewhere behind him, Dominic Toretto laughs a laugh that sounds like a pack of attack dogs, wildly amused.
Vince stumbles away muttering and Mia leans across the counter to whisper, eyes still sparkling with mirth, “Knowing Vince? Both.”
+
After that, she sometimes exchanges a few words with them, Vince and Toretto. Hi, how you been, what’s up. Nothing special, but they seem to be getting used to her face.
Progress, she guesses, and that’s fine, because her racing, while not up to what it used to be, is decent enough for an intentional loss.
She spent days agonizing over whether a win or a loss would be a better introduction, but in the end it comes down to two things: One, Toretto doesn’t lose. Ever. And two, a good loser is usually more appreciated than a good winner. Racing is about two things, flash and pride.
You got cred, or you’re no-one. Toretto has a shitload of cred and losing to a girl would make him look weak. He’d probably drive her out of town just to restore his name.
But Brian’s a logical person. Cool, controlled. Laid-back, usually. It takes a lot to get her going for real. So she plans and she thinks and she works out the kinks in her head before making her move. Losing is okay if it’s part of some bigger plan.
She plans the race down to the last detail. How to approach Toretto, how to play him. How to bet her pink slip and lose and find a way to put herself into his debt. Some sort of deal, maybe, for her car, which is a butt-ugly lime green, but still hers, even if Tanner got it out of the impound lot only a month ago. That kind of deal would give her an in.
Plans, plans, plans.
And then she gets in the car and Toretto’s engine rumbles next to hers and the world shrinks down to them and the quarter mile ahead and she forgets every single one of her plans.
Forgets that she means to lose, that this is a job, that she’s a cop, that she’s clean and straight, free of this shit. That she’s not a racer anymore. Forgets.
Her heartbeat in her ears, the road under her, thrumming with promise, and the needle edging in on the red. Siren song.
It’s everything she promised herself to never do again, everything she left behind.
It’s fucking exhilarating.
+
Hector tries to pick her up for about two minutes before laughing, shaking his head and dubbing her ‘Ice’. White and cold, he says.
She kind of likes it.
+
She loses the race against Toretto, which is kind of tied directly to the whole doesn’t ever lose thing and pisses her off more than it should, seeing as how it’s part of her plan. But, damn, racing Toretto is a challenge, not like taking money from the hicks back in Barstow, not even like racing Rome, because no matter how badly he trash talks her, she never really gets riled up at him anymore.
They had this three week long affair when they were sixteen and since then, Roman Pearce and all his bullshit sticks to her like oil to Teflon.
But Toretto is good, really good. Dangerously good, she thinks, remembering the truckers’ descriptions of the crazy driving of the hijackers.
She puts that thought aside for when she’s not playing Brian Spilner and tries to get to the man instead, to talk him into letting her earn her car back. Only Letty, the girlfriend, seems to have tentacles and eyes in the back of her head, because every time Brian so much as twitches in Toretto’s direction, the Latina is there, ready to cut a bitch up.
She plasters herself all over her man, or cuts past Brian with a nasty glare and a jeer and Brian has to fight to keep her mouth shut. There’s a comment about possessiveness and insecurity that’s just begging to spill out onto the concrete. It’d probably end in a cat fight, except for the part where neither of them fights in a typically female way.
Brian’s about to say screw it and go through the other woman, when the call goes up. A bust.
It’s not part of her plan and definitely not something Tanner organized, but she can make this work. Maybe.
She trails Toretto and when things get tight for him, she rides in, all damsel in shining armor. Or knight in shining car. Something like that, anyway. She saves his ass.
And then it all turns out to be for nothing when the nuts on the crotch rockets hijack them and make them follow them to the butt-end of some industrial area. Far from anyone else. Nice. And they have pretty big guns. Even nicer.
They’re rolling to a stop when Toretto starts hissing out of the corner of his mouth, “Ignore anything they say. Pretend you don’t know me at all and say it’s your car if they ask. Play it cool and don’t let either of them get close.”
She nods, quick and short and that is all she has time for before they stop and climb out of the car. Toretto introduces Johnny Tran and his cousin Lance and Brian looks at them as blandly as she can and pretends she can’t feel their leers like a weight on her skin. She regrets wearing something tighter than her usual loose t-shirts tonight and fights the urge to pull her jacket closed around her.
Johnny talks big at Toretto, but he keeps his eyes on her the whole time, undressing her mentally. She fights to stand still and ignore him and mostly manages until his cousin surprises her. He comes up to her from behind, puts a hand on her tit and squeezes. It’s a brief touch, there and gone, and it makes her want to rip his dick off and feed it to him.
Don’t, she tells herself. Don’t, don’t, don’t. Don’t fuck this up. She hears Toretto say something, aggressive, loud. He’s distracting them, giving her time to pull her shit together. Drawing the attention onto himself. She’s ridiculously grateful, even if it’s his fault they’re here in the first place.
After a few beats, she spins on her heel to face the asshole, conveniently taking a step back as she does, smiles artificially, says, “Babe, I don’t put out before the third date.”
She cocks her hip, bites her lip, plays it coy and easy. It works. Tran laughs and his cousin steps back.
“That’s a cocky whore you found yourself, Dom.”
Toretto shrugs, says nothing. Man’s a fucking steel trap and Brian would really appreciate someone throwing some kind of clue her way right about now.
She waits a beat, but, predictably, it doesn’t happen. The men keep slinging shit for another few minutes and all she has to do is keep distance between her and the groper and not freak the fuck out because she can still feel his hand on her, even through two layers of cloth.
They leave, and that’s all she notices in a blur of adrenaline. And then they come back and shoot up the car and fuck, the NOS, the fucking NOS. The car blows. Tanner will not be pleased, Brian thinks, oddly detached, as she sits her ass on the dirty concrete twenty feet from the car and relearns how to breathe.
Danger is over, she tells her system, which happily keeps pumping adrenaline through her veins. She jumps about seven feet high when Toretto comes at her from a bad angle, invisible until he’s practically on top of her.
“You okay?” he asks when she comes back down, scrambles to her feet.
“Fine,” she tries to snarl, but it comes out shaky. “Fucking fantastic. What the hell, Toretto?”
“Long story,” he tries to placate, reaching out a hand to probably pat her shoulder or something.
She jumps again and this time the snarl works just fine. “Don’t fucking touch me!”
+
She’s fifteen and has just won her first big race when a guy she knows only from seeing his face on the street walks up to her, congratulates her. She eats it up, fifteen and stupid, and flirts clumsily back when he puts his arm around her shoulders, reels her in, whispers in her ear. He makes her feel real special.
He leads her outside, away from the party. They start making out and it’s all cool, his hands on her hips, then her waist. Her tits, and that’s still okay, until he jerks her bra to one side and fumbles for her nipples and she tries to pull back.
He catches her around the waist, presses her close, onto his dick. One hand slips into her jeans and palms her ass, squeezing. Leaving bruises.
She starts struggling, tries to hit him, but he’s too close and he won’t stop biting at her lip, groaning filth into her ear. She’s crying, even though she doesn’t notice at the time, and fighting. She’s tall for her age, tall for a girl, and scrappy, but he’s too close, holds her too tight. She doesn’t stand a chance and he’ll… he’ll… he’s going to….
He’s gone.
It takes her a second to register that fact and then there’s a sound, flesh hitting flesh, screams and Rome cussing and kicking the shit out of someone. She blinks, wipes at her mouth and tries to order her clothes at the same time, still panting, terrified.
When Rome touches her, she almost knees him in the balls before realizing who he is.
After that, she never reacts well to handsy guys.
+
Toretto pulls back, hands spread at hip-height, making himself as harmless as a guy built like a bulldozer can ever be. She appreciates it even while it pisses her off. She breathes, in, out, telling herself that she could have taken the asshole in the snake leather pants. Could have broken him to pieces.
Wouldn’t have been a victim.
Isn’t a victim.
She straightens and Toretto drops his hands. “What happened?” he asks, and it might just be her, but he almost sounds worried.
Damn it, she was supposed to be the savior here. “Long story,” she shoots right back at him.
He laughs and she finds herself smiling alongside him. “But since we have a twenty mile hike ahead of us, I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
He shrugs and they fall in step next to each other, easily. “Not much to tell. Business deal that went sour. And I made the mistake of sleeping with his sister. You?”
She mirrors him again, says, “Not much to tell. Had a close call at a party when I was fifteen.”
There’s an expression on his face, half rage, half apology, and she can see him trying to find something to say. In the end, he settles for, “So. You owe me another car.”
Brian splutters. “Dude, the only reason those guys shot up that car was because it was already yours. I don’t owe you shit.”
He grins at her and it’s almost boyish. Sweet. “Oh, yes, you do. One ten-second-car, Brian.” Mocking.
“Man,” she defends her name, “If your parents had named you Brianna, you’d be going by Brian, too.”
They keep bantering and heckling over the car she owes all the way back to his place and somewhere along the way, he stops being Toretto and becomes Dom.
That’s probably a bad sign.
He invites her in for a beer and that’s good, that’s really good, because it means she’s in, but it also sucks because…
Well, shit.
She likes him.
+
Letty is back in action as soon as she lays eyes on Brian inside the house. She blocks Brian’s path, sniffs the air and smirks wickedly. “I smell skank,” she announces.
Brian tries to look nonplussed and move past her, but the chick is fast, blocking her again. “We don’t need any skanks here, skank.”
Dom, who marched into the crowded living room ahead of Brian, is suddenly back, plucking Letty’s beer from her hand and handing it to Brian, telling her to enjoy it. O-kay. Someone’s pissed.
Letty snarls, “Why’d you bring the bitch, Dom?”
He rounds on her so fast she takes an involuntary step back. “Because the bitch kept me out of handcuffs! She didn’t just run for the fort!” He spins again, arms wide, including the room at large, Vince and Leon standing a few feet away. “The bitch brought me back!”
Then he looks at Brian, and while the frustration still makes his shoulders tight, the anger’s gone from his face. He raises his own beer in a silent toast and Brian meets the bottle with her own and they drink. It’s an asshole move, doing this in front of Dom’s girlfriend, even if she is a bitch. But after the night Brian’s just had, beer is the least Dominic Toretto can do for her. They blew up her car.
Letty stalks off to spread her mood somewhere else and Dom stomps away in the opposite direction and okay, this is Brian being left to the wolves.
Vince and Leon loom over her, both taller, even if not by much. She’s a tall girl. She expects to get the inquisition, but all that comes is Vince’s rumbled, “You saved Dom’s ass?”
She shrugs, downplays it. “Right place, right time.”
He nods gravely and then answers the question she asked weeks ago, “I like watching your ass better. Barbie.”
Leon roars with laughter.
+
That night, lying alone in bed, Brian tries to sort out all the thrills, all the shiny newold things in her life. Racing. Adrenaline. Dom. Friends. Mia. Dom. Freedom.
Dom comes up a lot, as does racing and she tries to disentangle the two, tries to figure out if she likes Dom because of what he stands for, if she’s just projecting her elation over racing again on the first guy that crossed her path after the rush of the year.
Brian’s always lied. To her mom, her teachers, the pigs. To her fellow cops, sometimes, to anyone who asked questions she didn’t want to answer. Her ability to race put her name on the list of candidates for this job, but it was her ability to bullshit with a straight face that got her in.
The first rule of lying is to make it as true as possible. The second is to never lie to yourself.
And she doesn’t.
She knows exactly who, and what, she is. Trailer trash white chick with a record, trying to make it straight and hating every minute of it, burned racer, adrenaline junkie, liar, thief, criminal in disguise.
Lost girl.
She knows herself, alright.
So when, at four in the morning, the idea of Dominic Toretto still gives her a little jolt of adrenaline, she knows she can’t tell herself it’s the racing.
It’s him.
+
Vince calls her ‘Buster’ after the night of the party and sometimes, it almost sounds fond.
+
She visits Rome back in Barstow a month before he’s busted. They have dinner, shoot the shit, talk cars. It’s as close to happy as she gets these days and when she says goodbye the next morning, she looks around the yard of his crappy place, tells him to get rid of all the hot shit he’s got stored.
“Get it off your property at least, Jesus. You’re stupid without me around.”
She can tell from the way he sets his jaw that he won’t listen to her because it’s her giving advice and Roman Pearce doesn’t take life advice from pigs. Not even this pig.
Four weeks later the cops bust his ass and there are eight hot cars in the lot.
He demands a lawyer and then shuts up. Doesn’t say a word, even when Barstow’s finest offers him a way out. They all keep grudges very well, and they want Brian O’Conner. If he can confirm that she’s dirty, that she knew about his cars and didn’t report it, they tell him, they’ll let him off easy.
She only hears about it weeks later, when IA knocks on her door, wanting to pull her life apart to see if she’s still in with her old buddy from home. There’s no evidence to link her to the cars, since she had nothing to do with them.
But she knew and didn’t say. Maybe, in a way, that makes her the dirty cop the Barstow people want her to be. Rome could reduce his sentence if he narc’ed on her. He could get off easy and he’s so pissed at her most of the time that she almost expects him to do it.
Rome doesn’t do well in cages.
But he never says a word. He protects her, always has. Even when they’re at odds, he protects her, and she knows at least some of that is because she’s a girl. He feels like he has to. Sometimes, she hates him for that. They give him three years in Chino and he doesn’t say a single fucking word to implicate her.
+
The Supra goes over better than she thought and somehow, before she knows it, she has a new job. Apparently, Dom doesn’t care about your parts, as long as you know your way around a car. She can appreciate that.
Letty drags Dom out of the garage, starts hissing and hand-waving and Brian hears ‘bitch’, hears ‘cop’ hears a lot of unflattering things before Mia brushes past her, smile on her face, says, “He owns you now.”
That should not make her as happy as it does, not by a long shot.
+
Jesse has a crush on her the size of a semi and he makes no secret of it. Or can’t, rather. He starts twitching and stuttering every time she enters a room until she gets tired of it, pulls him aside.
He wants to show her his designs for the Supra, but his hands are shaking enough that he has trouble with the computer. And he rambles on worse than Rome.
“Jesse, man,” she says, in her best bro-voice, “you gotta calm down.”
He grins at her, all boyish, dead joint dangling from the corner of his mouth. Maybe there’s a bit more to his twitchiness than just a major crush. Still, “But you are so bee-ooti-ful!”
She looks down herself, not for the first time since he settled her with the nickname of ‘Beautiful’. Oversized t-shirt, ripped jeans, old chucks. She has a nice ass from all the running she does, but her tits are too small to be worth mentioning and she’s tall, gangly. Her blonde hair is barely chin length because the curls get messy if it’s longer and her face is kind of angular. She tans nice, yeah, and she’s got those bright blue eyes, but all in all she always figured she was meant to be a boy. With a dick, she’d have been a real looker. As it is, she’s pretty, but average. Nothing for Jesse to drool over, really.
She slaps his shoulder. “You smoke too much, man, I keep telling you. Now show me what you got, genius.”
He looks hurt at the nickname, but when he sees that she’s smiling, he takes it as the compliment it was meant as and finally - thank god - settles down from strung-out-tweak to simply skipped-his-ADD-meds. She keeps smiling and nods along with everything he says and tries not to pat him on the head like a stray puppy on the street.
He gets lost in his rambling eventually, trails off until it’s clear he doesn’t need her anymore and she gets up, leaves the office.
Dom is leaning against the wall next to the door, beer in hand, apparently not doing much of anything, besides eavesdropping. She shoots him a look and marches past, grabbing her own beer and stopping at the hood of the Supra, checking out the engine. She was right when she picked the car; the engine is golden.
Dom comes to a halt next to her. “That was nice of you, letting Jesse down gently.”
She shakes her head. “Ain’t no other way to do it.”
He nods wisely, then asks, “You got plans?”
Another headshake. “I was hoping to work on the car a bit more. I get bored at home.”
Bored and itchy. The urge to run head-first into the nearest wall becomes almost unbearable when she holds still long enough to wonder what the hell she’s doing, getting in with these people like this. Talking to them, getting to know them. Making friends with them.
Dom puts down his Corona. “Let’s have a look at the fuel injection then, shall we?”
+
“How long you planning on running?” Rome asks, tiredly. They’ve been fighting about her leaving ever since her mom’s funeral, and at this point, he’s mostly resigned. His anger only comes in flickers anymore.
She glares at him, her eyes as cold as she can make them and says, “Forever.”
She’s told him once, about running toward and not from, about the life she planned for herself, for him. Better things. But he didn’t get it. Rome only sees one direction and he doesn’t understand that she can’t ever stop.
She can change direction but she can’t stop because if she does she’ll die.
Brian runs like she breathes and she won’t stop until the day she dies. She thought Rome understood that, but he doesn’t.
+
Whatever ideas Brian had about Letty settling down once she notices that Dom has no interest in the new girl evaporate quickly. Because for some reason, Dom seems to have an interest in her after all.
It’s weird and pretty much non-sexual - or so she thinks, but he keeps inviting her to hang out, keeps talking to her. Like she’s his best friend, when they don’t know each other from Adam. Like he wants something from her and she finds herself wanting to give it to him, even if she has no idea what it is.
In a way it’s worse than the shit she’s seen him pull at the house parties, skank on either arm. The skanks don’t mean anything and Letty knows that, but Brian… Dom talks to Brian. As far as she can tell, Dom doesn’t even talk to Vince.
And Letty goes ballistic at least once a day. The words ‘cop’, ‘bitch’, ‘skank’ and ‘groupie’ come up so often that Brian stops reacting to them at all. Not even ‘cop’ makes her pulse speed up anymore after the first two hundred times.
Still, Brian feels bad for the younger woman, because she’s right, mostly. Brian is a cop, and she is here to cozy up to Dom. And if she succeeds, she will rip this family apart.
Letty keeps screaming the truth from the rooftops and gets alienated for it.
At the Sunday barbeque she tries to make Dom choose, puts it down for him, Letty or Brian. And Brian cringes and looks away when Dom picks her without noticing. He shoots down his girlfriend, casual as can be, and doesn’t even notice.
There’s hurt in her eyes when Letty stalks off. Brian waits for Dom to react, but he just glowers at everyone at the table, getting awkward half-glances in return.
Brian shoves to her feet, squeezes around Vince, calls Dom a dumbass as she passes him and jogs after Letty. She shouldn’t care, but that ship’s pretty much sailed. She’s in way too deep. Might as well go for broke.
She calls the other woman’s name just as she’s about to get in her car and probably peel out making tracks. Letty glowers, but doesn’t drive off. Too much like running, Brian guesses. She’s the same. Don’t ever back down. Only she doesn’t let very much get to her in the first place and Letty is… Letty is kind of a female version of Dom, all fire and steam where Brian is ice.
“What the fuck do you want?!”
Brian screeches to a halt with her hands raised, palms out. “To apologize. Your man is behaving like an asshole and I’m sorry. But you gotta realize there’s nothing going on. I don’t do that kind of shit.”
Letty’s fingers clench like she really wants to punch Brian, but in the end she deflates and just looks tired. Maybe this isn’t the first straw. Maybe this isn’t even about Brian, in the end. Maybe all those skanks mean something after all, to Letty, to Dom.
This assignment was supposed to be easy. Get in good with thug and thug friends, make thug and thug friends confess, put thug and thug friends behind bars. Only thug turned out to have more layers than a freaking onion, and his friends are just as bad. Files on people aren’t people. Brian’s learning that pretty fast. Goddamn people. Goddamn layers.
Letty spins on her heel, stalks the rest of the way to her car, gets in. She revs the engine, then rolls down the window to get in one last shot. “I’m gonna laugh when they figure out you’re for shit.”
Then she’s gone and yep, definitely making tracks. The smell of burnt rubber stings Brian’s nose. She’s just gonna blame her headache on that.
+
She’s twelve, the first time she drives. Rome’s mom works nights and somehow, he has the brilliant idea to take her car for a little ride while she’s sleeping off a crappy shift.
At twelve, Brian is still shorter than Rome by more than a couple of inches. He’s just hit a growth spurt, too, all gangly limbs and awkwardness. And somehow, he doesn’t have those limbs under control very well. Admittedly, he has no clue what he’s doing, but still.
They barely make it three blocks before he slips on the gas, startles and jerks the car off the road. It freaks him completely and he takes his foot off the gas, lets the car coast to a stop in some weeds and shrubs.
He turns to her, wide-eyed, with that ‘oh-shit’ expression he always gets when their mad schemes go belly-up and she rolls her eyes. If you want a job done right…
She kicks him out of the car. Literally. Reaches across to pop the driver’s side door and then kicks him in the hip until he moves. She scoots over, twists and shifts until she can reach the pedals and the wheel at the same time and still look out the windshield.
Then she takes a few dry runs for practice while Rome gets in shotgun, bitching loudly. He’s freaked, she can tell that just from the volume of his complaints. She glares at him, turns the key in the ignition and then she’s driving.
Rome looks kind of awed when she gets them back on the road and then out of town without anyone calling the pigs down on them and she tries to keep her poker face - still a work in progress - in place, but she’s kind of in awe herself.
+
Life with the Torettos is actually kind of perfect. Working on cars, shooting the shit with friends, cold beer, no pressure. Long days and longer nights. It’s been a long time since she had anyone to hang with, to just sit around with, not doing anything.
Long time since she had friends.
The only black spots on her golden days are the meetings with Tanner and an increasingly irate Bilkins. Seriously, the man is going to give himself a heart attack if he doesn’t shift down a few gears soon.
They pick her up whenever they want something from her, drag her to Tanner’s Hollywood hideout, and rip into her for not getting results. And while they practice their good cop, bad fed spiel on her she keeps thinking stuff like, I got a car to fix, or, I need to get back to work.
Things are shifting and somehow, before she knows it, she thinks of work at the garage as her real job, and this cop thing is the temporary one, the cover. A means to an end.
What does it say about her that a gang of street racers seem more real to her after only a few weeks than being a cop does after five years?
+
“So, tell me about the others,” Brian demands. She’s curled up with Mia on the other girl’s bed, a plate of cookies and a mound of pillows between them. They’re having one of this mystical ‘girl’s night’ things that Brian’s never done in her life.
She’s pretty sure she’s subbing for Letty, who stormed off in a snit again, only this time Dom followed, which means they’re probably having angry sex in a car somewhere right now.
Whatever.
Mia shrugs and wipes crumbs from her shirt. “Just family, you know?”
“How’d you all meet, then?”
She rolls her eyes. “Well, Dom and Vince grew up together, and Letty lived down the street. She’s always been into cars and naturally - “
“That meant she was into Dom as well.”
They share a giggle over that and no more is said. “Leon and Jesse just showed up one day and never left. That’s what Dom’s like,” she says, looking wistful. “He’s like gravity. Everything just gets pulled in.”
She gives Brian a significant look, but doesn’t say more. Gravity. Not a bad way to describe Dom. Not a bad way at all.
She tries to steer the conversation back on track. “So you all just… teamed up and that’s it, instant family?”
Mia nods, nibbling on another cookie. “Yeah. Sort of. I mean, there’s trouble, as you know,” she smirks at Brian, who tries not to squirm. Letty’s and Dom’s fights are becoming legend and everyone knows who causes them. “But in the end, we stick together.”
“Must be nice,” Brian mutters before her head catches up with her mouth. She didn’t mean to say that out loud. Didn’t even mean to think that. She grabs another cookie, hopes that Mia will let it go and pretends to be mesmerized by the taste of chocolate chips on her tongue.
“You don’t have family?” Pity. Brian hates pity.
She looks up, trying hard not to glare. “I do just fine on my own.”
Mia backs off immediately. “Never said you didn’t. Just… you got us now, alright?”
This time, Brian doesn’t look up again. She fixes her gaze on the bedspread and keeps it there for a long time.
+
Mia calls Brian ‘Girlfriend’ sometimes, with an easy grin on her face, like they’ve been painting each other’s toenails since junior high.
Brian can never quite indentify the squirming in her gut when she hears that nickname. It’s either happiness or guilt. Knowing herself, probably both.
+
+
On to Part II
Author: pprfaith
Disclaimer: Not mine, no stepping on toes intended.
Summary: The first question to ask any runner: ‘Are you running from or towards?’ - Or: The life of a girl named Brian. AU, genderswap.
Rating: R
Warnings:Total AUness abounds. Some violence, some crime, some sexy times. And genderswap. Duh.
Pairings: canon pairings, Dom/alwaysagirl!Brian
Praise and blame: Thanks go to jedibuttercup for unintentional motivation and a beta read. Thanks, dear!
A/N: Apparently, when I tell myself, ‘write something small to get a grip on the characters‘, my brain hears, ‘genderswap, ganderswap, genderswap!’. This matches this kink meme prompt, although the prompt was posted after I finished the story. Feedback would be wildly appreciated.
+
+
The Art of Running
+
“Are you sure you can do this, O’Conner?” Tanner asks, worriedly squinting from behind his glasses. As if they haven’t had this conversation before. As if there’s anyone else who could successfully infiltrate a gang of racers.
As if the whole precinct isn’t talking about ‘O’Conner’s crazy driving’ and juvie record anyway. Apparently ‘sealed’ doesn’t actually mean shit among cops.
So everyone knows Officer O’Conner used to boost cars for fun, take them on joyrides and usually leave them in ditches. Busted. Two years juvie. Doesn’t get more real than that.
Doesn’t get more suited for the job than that.
“Yes, sir. I’m sure.”
Tanner nods and his squint eases marginally and he smiles wanly, waving a hand at the door, “Then go get’em, girl.”
+
Brianna Marilyn O’Conner - call me Brian, or it’ll be your blood on the floor - isn’t nearly as sure about this as she pretends to be for Tanner’s sake.
She can do this, of that she has no doubt. The shit she got busted for back in Barstow was only the tip of the iceberg of what she actually did. The racing, the stealing, the crime. The lies and the thrill and the adrenaline rush that’s like nothing else on this planet.
She’s the best person for this job.
The problem is, after juvie, after two years in hell with not even Rome to keep her company, she swore off all that. And after her mom died, she actually stuck with the plan, too. No more thrills. No more joyrides. No more heart in her throat and life on the edge.
From street racer to traffic cop. It doesn’t get much more anticlimactic than that. These days, the biggest rush she can hope for is a domestic call, and even those are usually drab compared to what life was like once upon a time.
And she’s okay with that. She calmed down, got her life straight. Once Rome gets out of Chino, she’ll set him straight, too, and they’ll lead boring, but safe lives and she’ll be able to forget she ever knew what flying felt like.
Only now here’s the job, undercover in the racing scene, everything she weaned herself off like a junkie going cold turkey, dangled right in front of her.
She can do the job.
But she’s kind of scared what it’ll do to her in return.
+
She’s twenty when she leaves it all behind.
Rome drives her to the bus station, his silence icy, angry, hurt. He doesn’t understand why she’s doing this, throwing her life away. Throwing him away.
She doesn’t have the energy to explain anymore.
Her mother is dead. She’s dead and the last thing she ever said to Brian was, “You be good, Brianna”
She always said that, a million times. Every time she left, every time Brian fucked up again, got in trouble again. Her mother is dead and half the reason for that is all the shit her daughter heaped on her.
You be good.
She never was while her mom was alive, never cared. Even post-juvie, her attempts were half-assed. But now her mom is dead and she knows it’s hollow, but she’s gotta do something. Make it right. Make anything right.
She can’t do that boosting cars and racing, can’t do that as a criminal. But being a cop is about as far from being a criminal as you can get without becoming a saint, so Brian figures she’ll try. She’ll leave all this behind, get her ass on the straight and narrow and she’ll try. For her mother, and for herself.
“This isn’t about you, man,” she tells Rome as he coasts to a halt at the bus station, still staring fixedly out the window.
“It’s still shit,” he says, and the fact that that’s all he says is telling. He’s hurt. Because she’s leaving behind the life and Rome is part of that life and yeah, shitty move on her part.
She runs a hand through her chopped off hair, sighs, leans into him. He tries to shrug her off, but she doesn’t budge. “I love you, Rome,” she says and fuck sticking to the guy-code, fuck the manly silences. She’s got ovaries, and just this once, she’ll act like it. “I love you and I’m sorry, but this is something I gotta do, okay? I’ll call. I’ll visit. I’ll post bail for you.”
And then she pulls out the ultimate weapon: The Pout. “Please don’t be mad at me?”
He looks, only for half a second, but it’s enough. He looks and falls victim to The Pout. With a sigh and a grunt he twists his arm around and over her, hugging her close. She’ll have finger shaped bruises on her arm come morning, but she doesn’t mind.
“You be careful, Bri,” he mutters straight into her ear, “And don’t forget where you from, girl.”
“I won’t,” she promises.
Rome waits in the car until the bus pulls away.
+
She knows Toretto isn’t her way in. Can’t be. Brian is the kind of scrappy a bitch only gets from being a white girl with a black boy for a best friend, stirring up shit wherever they go, but Toretto could simply break her. She doubts she could so much as make him budge if things went wrong.
His best friend isn’t much better and his girlfriend… well, Brian isn’t one to judge a book by its cover, but the Latina looks the kind of mean that comes with a fist, not a bitch slap. Hardcore.
So she figures she’ll have to either go for the sister, or one of the two other guys. The twitchy kid and the quiet one. Twitchy kid looks like someone she might get along with in real life, the life where she’s Brian, not Officer O’Conner. The quiet guy, too.
Maybe it’s a result of growing up with Rome for a best friend and being a tomboy, but she’s always been more comfortable around men than women.
Which is exactly why she picks the sister as her in.
If she doesn’t get comfortable, the siren’s song of the open road might not draw her in this time.
Here’s to hoping.
+
Connecting with Mia - who stops being Toretto’s sister about two days in and becomes Mia - is easy. Once Brian has the job at Harry’s, she can go for lunch at Mia’s place and bitch about the injustice of trying to make a living in a testosterone filled world and Mia hears her.
Just small talk the first week, a few smiles, a few shared groans here and there. The second week Mia starts asking how Brian’s day’s been so far, and tries to get her to eat something other than the crappy tuna.
Brian smiles, tells her, “It reminds me of my best friend. Guy can burn water, but he always made a mean sandwich.” Rome hates tuna, she doesn’t say, but he used to brave it for her, way back in Barstow, in his mother’s dingy kitchen. The memory tastes bittersweet and Mia doesn’t ask about it, just starts chattering.
By the third week they talk like old friends and Brian thinks that Mia might be lonely.
She thinks that she shouldn’t care about a mark’s sister, but that’s really hard when the younger woman smiles at her, says, “I like you, Brian. You’re not complicated.”
She shrugs in response, swallowing the last of her sandwich, “Few people are, if you get right down to it. We all want the same things, in the end.”
“Yeah? What do you want?”
My best friend out of Chino. My life as it was. The guys at the precinct to stop fucking wolf-whistling every time I walk past. A road that never ends. A family. A home. Peace. Freedom.
“Right now? A coffee to go would be great. Harry’s got me doing inventory. Again.”
+
“I’m not posting your bail this time, Brianna,” mom says and Brian is too stunned to react at all for a long second.
Then her mouth - sixteen and pretty much running all the time - takes over, “Mom! You can’t do that! You can’t let me rot in here!”
Her mom runs a hand over her tired face, smudging her cheap make-up. “Yes, I can. I am. At least this way, you can’t run away again.”
“I’ve never run away!” Brian snaps, feeling the urge to reach through the bars and strangle her mother. Goddamn holier than thou attitude. What the hell does the old bat know? It’s her fault that Brian’s stuck in this ass-backward town in the first place. Her and her shitty taste in men!
But then her mother does something she has never done before. She surprises Brian by yelling right back, “You’re always running! Every time you steal a car, or race, or get in a fight, you’re always running! And I have no idea why because no-one’s ever done anything to you!”
Years later Brian will understand that the edge she hears in her mother’s voice is desperation over her only daughter running rampant. But right then all she hears is more insults, more shit placed at her feet.
She turns away from the bars, crosses her arms over her chest and snarls without looking, “Fine. Leave me here. If I get gangraped, I’ll let you know.”
She stalks off, as far as she can get in her small holding cell and sits down on the rickety bench with jerky movements. Running. Okay, shit, maybe she is.
Maybe her mom’s right. But it’s not about running away, doesn’t she see that? Shit town, shit life, shit everything, but Brian’s not running away. She’s running toward something. The life she deserves, big money, big cars.
The good life.
The life she’ll have one day.
Freedom.
Brian O’Conner doesn’t run away from anything.
+
The kid, Jesse, walks up to her one day, pupils blown, arms waving wildly. He leans in too close, licks his lips and says, very carefully, “Bee-ooti-ful!”
She laughs and can’t help patting his shoulder. He nods, smiles dopily and ambles away, still muttering the word, over and over.
Later, when he already knows her name, he still calls her that.
+
The best friend - Vince - is the next to make contact. He sits next to her one day, makes noise about her coming here every day for the tuna. No-one likes the tuna, he says, suspicion shining in his eyes.
“Mia’s good company,” Brian says with a shrug and a smile, just ditzy enough to go with her dumb blonde act.
The guy growls and if she had a dick, Brian’s pretty sure he’d be sucker punching her right about now.
Testy.
Sure, he’s right about her and all that, but still. Testy.
But she has no dick and so all he does is motion with two fingers and growl, “I’m watching you, Barbie.”
Brian smiles back vacantly and asks, sweet as anything, “Yeah? My tits or my ass?”
Mia chokes behind the counter and the few patrons around them fall silent as the big guy stares at her like she’s speaking Japanese. Somewhere behind him, Dominic Toretto laughs a laugh that sounds like a pack of attack dogs, wildly amused.
Vince stumbles away muttering and Mia leans across the counter to whisper, eyes still sparkling with mirth, “Knowing Vince? Both.”
+
After that, she sometimes exchanges a few words with them, Vince and Toretto. Hi, how you been, what’s up. Nothing special, but they seem to be getting used to her face.
Progress, she guesses, and that’s fine, because her racing, while not up to what it used to be, is decent enough for an intentional loss.
She spent days agonizing over whether a win or a loss would be a better introduction, but in the end it comes down to two things: One, Toretto doesn’t lose. Ever. And two, a good loser is usually more appreciated than a good winner. Racing is about two things, flash and pride.
You got cred, or you’re no-one. Toretto has a shitload of cred and losing to a girl would make him look weak. He’d probably drive her out of town just to restore his name.
But Brian’s a logical person. Cool, controlled. Laid-back, usually. It takes a lot to get her going for real. So she plans and she thinks and she works out the kinks in her head before making her move. Losing is okay if it’s part of some bigger plan.
She plans the race down to the last detail. How to approach Toretto, how to play him. How to bet her pink slip and lose and find a way to put herself into his debt. Some sort of deal, maybe, for her car, which is a butt-ugly lime green, but still hers, even if Tanner got it out of the impound lot only a month ago. That kind of deal would give her an in.
Plans, plans, plans.
And then she gets in the car and Toretto’s engine rumbles next to hers and the world shrinks down to them and the quarter mile ahead and she forgets every single one of her plans.
Forgets that she means to lose, that this is a job, that she’s a cop, that she’s clean and straight, free of this shit. That she’s not a racer anymore. Forgets.
Her heartbeat in her ears, the road under her, thrumming with promise, and the needle edging in on the red. Siren song.
It’s everything she promised herself to never do again, everything she left behind.
It’s fucking exhilarating.
+
Hector tries to pick her up for about two minutes before laughing, shaking his head and dubbing her ‘Ice’. White and cold, he says.
She kind of likes it.
+
She loses the race against Toretto, which is kind of tied directly to the whole doesn’t ever lose thing and pisses her off more than it should, seeing as how it’s part of her plan. But, damn, racing Toretto is a challenge, not like taking money from the hicks back in Barstow, not even like racing Rome, because no matter how badly he trash talks her, she never really gets riled up at him anymore.
They had this three week long affair when they were sixteen and since then, Roman Pearce and all his bullshit sticks to her like oil to Teflon.
But Toretto is good, really good. Dangerously good, she thinks, remembering the truckers’ descriptions of the crazy driving of the hijackers.
She puts that thought aside for when she’s not playing Brian Spilner and tries to get to the man instead, to talk him into letting her earn her car back. Only Letty, the girlfriend, seems to have tentacles and eyes in the back of her head, because every time Brian so much as twitches in Toretto’s direction, the Latina is there, ready to cut a bitch up.
She plasters herself all over her man, or cuts past Brian with a nasty glare and a jeer and Brian has to fight to keep her mouth shut. There’s a comment about possessiveness and insecurity that’s just begging to spill out onto the concrete. It’d probably end in a cat fight, except for the part where neither of them fights in a typically female way.
Brian’s about to say screw it and go through the other woman, when the call goes up. A bust.
It’s not part of her plan and definitely not something Tanner organized, but she can make this work. Maybe.
She trails Toretto and when things get tight for him, she rides in, all damsel in shining armor. Or knight in shining car. Something like that, anyway. She saves his ass.
And then it all turns out to be for nothing when the nuts on the crotch rockets hijack them and make them follow them to the butt-end of some industrial area. Far from anyone else. Nice. And they have pretty big guns. Even nicer.
They’re rolling to a stop when Toretto starts hissing out of the corner of his mouth, “Ignore anything they say. Pretend you don’t know me at all and say it’s your car if they ask. Play it cool and don’t let either of them get close.”
She nods, quick and short and that is all she has time for before they stop and climb out of the car. Toretto introduces Johnny Tran and his cousin Lance and Brian looks at them as blandly as she can and pretends she can’t feel their leers like a weight on her skin. She regrets wearing something tighter than her usual loose t-shirts tonight and fights the urge to pull her jacket closed around her.
Johnny talks big at Toretto, but he keeps his eyes on her the whole time, undressing her mentally. She fights to stand still and ignore him and mostly manages until his cousin surprises her. He comes up to her from behind, puts a hand on her tit and squeezes. It’s a brief touch, there and gone, and it makes her want to rip his dick off and feed it to him.
Don’t, she tells herself. Don’t, don’t, don’t. Don’t fuck this up. She hears Toretto say something, aggressive, loud. He’s distracting them, giving her time to pull her shit together. Drawing the attention onto himself. She’s ridiculously grateful, even if it’s his fault they’re here in the first place.
After a few beats, she spins on her heel to face the asshole, conveniently taking a step back as she does, smiles artificially, says, “Babe, I don’t put out before the third date.”
She cocks her hip, bites her lip, plays it coy and easy. It works. Tran laughs and his cousin steps back.
“That’s a cocky whore you found yourself, Dom.”
Toretto shrugs, says nothing. Man’s a fucking steel trap and Brian would really appreciate someone throwing some kind of clue her way right about now.
She waits a beat, but, predictably, it doesn’t happen. The men keep slinging shit for another few minutes and all she has to do is keep distance between her and the groper and not freak the fuck out because she can still feel his hand on her, even through two layers of cloth.
They leave, and that’s all she notices in a blur of adrenaline. And then they come back and shoot up the car and fuck, the NOS, the fucking NOS. The car blows. Tanner will not be pleased, Brian thinks, oddly detached, as she sits her ass on the dirty concrete twenty feet from the car and relearns how to breathe.
Danger is over, she tells her system, which happily keeps pumping adrenaline through her veins. She jumps about seven feet high when Toretto comes at her from a bad angle, invisible until he’s practically on top of her.
“You okay?” he asks when she comes back down, scrambles to her feet.
“Fine,” she tries to snarl, but it comes out shaky. “Fucking fantastic. What the hell, Toretto?”
“Long story,” he tries to placate, reaching out a hand to probably pat her shoulder or something.
She jumps again and this time the snarl works just fine. “Don’t fucking touch me!”
+
She’s fifteen and has just won her first big race when a guy she knows only from seeing his face on the street walks up to her, congratulates her. She eats it up, fifteen and stupid, and flirts clumsily back when he puts his arm around her shoulders, reels her in, whispers in her ear. He makes her feel real special.
He leads her outside, away from the party. They start making out and it’s all cool, his hands on her hips, then her waist. Her tits, and that’s still okay, until he jerks her bra to one side and fumbles for her nipples and she tries to pull back.
He catches her around the waist, presses her close, onto his dick. One hand slips into her jeans and palms her ass, squeezing. Leaving bruises.
She starts struggling, tries to hit him, but he’s too close and he won’t stop biting at her lip, groaning filth into her ear. She’s crying, even though she doesn’t notice at the time, and fighting. She’s tall for her age, tall for a girl, and scrappy, but he’s too close, holds her too tight. She doesn’t stand a chance and he’ll… he’ll… he’s going to….
He’s gone.
It takes her a second to register that fact and then there’s a sound, flesh hitting flesh, screams and Rome cussing and kicking the shit out of someone. She blinks, wipes at her mouth and tries to order her clothes at the same time, still panting, terrified.
When Rome touches her, she almost knees him in the balls before realizing who he is.
After that, she never reacts well to handsy guys.
+
Toretto pulls back, hands spread at hip-height, making himself as harmless as a guy built like a bulldozer can ever be. She appreciates it even while it pisses her off. She breathes, in, out, telling herself that she could have taken the asshole in the snake leather pants. Could have broken him to pieces.
Wouldn’t have been a victim.
Isn’t a victim.
She straightens and Toretto drops his hands. “What happened?” he asks, and it might just be her, but he almost sounds worried.
Damn it, she was supposed to be the savior here. “Long story,” she shoots right back at him.
He laughs and she finds herself smiling alongside him. “But since we have a twenty mile hike ahead of us, I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
He shrugs and they fall in step next to each other, easily. “Not much to tell. Business deal that went sour. And I made the mistake of sleeping with his sister. You?”
She mirrors him again, says, “Not much to tell. Had a close call at a party when I was fifteen.”
There’s an expression on his face, half rage, half apology, and she can see him trying to find something to say. In the end, he settles for, “So. You owe me another car.”
Brian splutters. “Dude, the only reason those guys shot up that car was because it was already yours. I don’t owe you shit.”
He grins at her and it’s almost boyish. Sweet. “Oh, yes, you do. One ten-second-car, Brian.” Mocking.
“Man,” she defends her name, “If your parents had named you Brianna, you’d be going by Brian, too.”
They keep bantering and heckling over the car she owes all the way back to his place and somewhere along the way, he stops being Toretto and becomes Dom.
That’s probably a bad sign.
He invites her in for a beer and that’s good, that’s really good, because it means she’s in, but it also sucks because…
Well, shit.
She likes him.
+
Letty is back in action as soon as she lays eyes on Brian inside the house. She blocks Brian’s path, sniffs the air and smirks wickedly. “I smell skank,” she announces.
Brian tries to look nonplussed and move past her, but the chick is fast, blocking her again. “We don’t need any skanks here, skank.”
Dom, who marched into the crowded living room ahead of Brian, is suddenly back, plucking Letty’s beer from her hand and handing it to Brian, telling her to enjoy it. O-kay. Someone’s pissed.
Letty snarls, “Why’d you bring the bitch, Dom?”
He rounds on her so fast she takes an involuntary step back. “Because the bitch kept me out of handcuffs! She didn’t just run for the fort!” He spins again, arms wide, including the room at large, Vince and Leon standing a few feet away. “The bitch brought me back!”
Then he looks at Brian, and while the frustration still makes his shoulders tight, the anger’s gone from his face. He raises his own beer in a silent toast and Brian meets the bottle with her own and they drink. It’s an asshole move, doing this in front of Dom’s girlfriend, even if she is a bitch. But after the night Brian’s just had, beer is the least Dominic Toretto can do for her. They blew up her car.
Letty stalks off to spread her mood somewhere else and Dom stomps away in the opposite direction and okay, this is Brian being left to the wolves.
Vince and Leon loom over her, both taller, even if not by much. She’s a tall girl. She expects to get the inquisition, but all that comes is Vince’s rumbled, “You saved Dom’s ass?”
She shrugs, downplays it. “Right place, right time.”
He nods gravely and then answers the question she asked weeks ago, “I like watching your ass better. Barbie.”
Leon roars with laughter.
+
That night, lying alone in bed, Brian tries to sort out all the thrills, all the shiny newold things in her life. Racing. Adrenaline. Dom. Friends. Mia. Dom. Freedom.
Dom comes up a lot, as does racing and she tries to disentangle the two, tries to figure out if she likes Dom because of what he stands for, if she’s just projecting her elation over racing again on the first guy that crossed her path after the rush of the year.
Brian’s always lied. To her mom, her teachers, the pigs. To her fellow cops, sometimes, to anyone who asked questions she didn’t want to answer. Her ability to race put her name on the list of candidates for this job, but it was her ability to bullshit with a straight face that got her in.
The first rule of lying is to make it as true as possible. The second is to never lie to yourself.
And she doesn’t.
She knows exactly who, and what, she is. Trailer trash white chick with a record, trying to make it straight and hating every minute of it, burned racer, adrenaline junkie, liar, thief, criminal in disguise.
Lost girl.
She knows herself, alright.
So when, at four in the morning, the idea of Dominic Toretto still gives her a little jolt of adrenaline, she knows she can’t tell herself it’s the racing.
It’s him.
+
Vince calls her ‘Buster’ after the night of the party and sometimes, it almost sounds fond.
+
She visits Rome back in Barstow a month before he’s busted. They have dinner, shoot the shit, talk cars. It’s as close to happy as she gets these days and when she says goodbye the next morning, she looks around the yard of his crappy place, tells him to get rid of all the hot shit he’s got stored.
“Get it off your property at least, Jesus. You’re stupid without me around.”
She can tell from the way he sets his jaw that he won’t listen to her because it’s her giving advice and Roman Pearce doesn’t take life advice from pigs. Not even this pig.
Four weeks later the cops bust his ass and there are eight hot cars in the lot.
He demands a lawyer and then shuts up. Doesn’t say a word, even when Barstow’s finest offers him a way out. They all keep grudges very well, and they want Brian O’Conner. If he can confirm that she’s dirty, that she knew about his cars and didn’t report it, they tell him, they’ll let him off easy.
She only hears about it weeks later, when IA knocks on her door, wanting to pull her life apart to see if she’s still in with her old buddy from home. There’s no evidence to link her to the cars, since she had nothing to do with them.
But she knew and didn’t say. Maybe, in a way, that makes her the dirty cop the Barstow people want her to be. Rome could reduce his sentence if he narc’ed on her. He could get off easy and he’s so pissed at her most of the time that she almost expects him to do it.
Rome doesn’t do well in cages.
But he never says a word. He protects her, always has. Even when they’re at odds, he protects her, and she knows at least some of that is because she’s a girl. He feels like he has to. Sometimes, she hates him for that. They give him three years in Chino and he doesn’t say a single fucking word to implicate her.
+
The Supra goes over better than she thought and somehow, before she knows it, she has a new job. Apparently, Dom doesn’t care about your parts, as long as you know your way around a car. She can appreciate that.
Letty drags Dom out of the garage, starts hissing and hand-waving and Brian hears ‘bitch’, hears ‘cop’ hears a lot of unflattering things before Mia brushes past her, smile on her face, says, “He owns you now.”
That should not make her as happy as it does, not by a long shot.
+
Jesse has a crush on her the size of a semi and he makes no secret of it. Or can’t, rather. He starts twitching and stuttering every time she enters a room until she gets tired of it, pulls him aside.
He wants to show her his designs for the Supra, but his hands are shaking enough that he has trouble with the computer. And he rambles on worse than Rome.
“Jesse, man,” she says, in her best bro-voice, “you gotta calm down.”
He grins at her, all boyish, dead joint dangling from the corner of his mouth. Maybe there’s a bit more to his twitchiness than just a major crush. Still, “But you are so bee-ooti-ful!”
She looks down herself, not for the first time since he settled her with the nickname of ‘Beautiful’. Oversized t-shirt, ripped jeans, old chucks. She has a nice ass from all the running she does, but her tits are too small to be worth mentioning and she’s tall, gangly. Her blonde hair is barely chin length because the curls get messy if it’s longer and her face is kind of angular. She tans nice, yeah, and she’s got those bright blue eyes, but all in all she always figured she was meant to be a boy. With a dick, she’d have been a real looker. As it is, she’s pretty, but average. Nothing for Jesse to drool over, really.
She slaps his shoulder. “You smoke too much, man, I keep telling you. Now show me what you got, genius.”
He looks hurt at the nickname, but when he sees that she’s smiling, he takes it as the compliment it was meant as and finally - thank god - settles down from strung-out-tweak to simply skipped-his-ADD-meds. She keeps smiling and nods along with everything he says and tries not to pat him on the head like a stray puppy on the street.
He gets lost in his rambling eventually, trails off until it’s clear he doesn’t need her anymore and she gets up, leaves the office.
Dom is leaning against the wall next to the door, beer in hand, apparently not doing much of anything, besides eavesdropping. She shoots him a look and marches past, grabbing her own beer and stopping at the hood of the Supra, checking out the engine. She was right when she picked the car; the engine is golden.
Dom comes to a halt next to her. “That was nice of you, letting Jesse down gently.”
She shakes her head. “Ain’t no other way to do it.”
He nods wisely, then asks, “You got plans?”
Another headshake. “I was hoping to work on the car a bit more. I get bored at home.”
Bored and itchy. The urge to run head-first into the nearest wall becomes almost unbearable when she holds still long enough to wonder what the hell she’s doing, getting in with these people like this. Talking to them, getting to know them. Making friends with them.
Dom puts down his Corona. “Let’s have a look at the fuel injection then, shall we?”
+
“How long you planning on running?” Rome asks, tiredly. They’ve been fighting about her leaving ever since her mom’s funeral, and at this point, he’s mostly resigned. His anger only comes in flickers anymore.
She glares at him, her eyes as cold as she can make them and says, “Forever.”
She’s told him once, about running toward and not from, about the life she planned for herself, for him. Better things. But he didn’t get it. Rome only sees one direction and he doesn’t understand that she can’t ever stop.
She can change direction but she can’t stop because if she does she’ll die.
Brian runs like she breathes and she won’t stop until the day she dies. She thought Rome understood that, but he doesn’t.
+
Whatever ideas Brian had about Letty settling down once she notices that Dom has no interest in the new girl evaporate quickly. Because for some reason, Dom seems to have an interest in her after all.
It’s weird and pretty much non-sexual - or so she thinks, but he keeps inviting her to hang out, keeps talking to her. Like she’s his best friend, when they don’t know each other from Adam. Like he wants something from her and she finds herself wanting to give it to him, even if she has no idea what it is.
In a way it’s worse than the shit she’s seen him pull at the house parties, skank on either arm. The skanks don’t mean anything and Letty knows that, but Brian… Dom talks to Brian. As far as she can tell, Dom doesn’t even talk to Vince.
And Letty goes ballistic at least once a day. The words ‘cop’, ‘bitch’, ‘skank’ and ‘groupie’ come up so often that Brian stops reacting to them at all. Not even ‘cop’ makes her pulse speed up anymore after the first two hundred times.
Still, Brian feels bad for the younger woman, because she’s right, mostly. Brian is a cop, and she is here to cozy up to Dom. And if she succeeds, she will rip this family apart.
Letty keeps screaming the truth from the rooftops and gets alienated for it.
At the Sunday barbeque she tries to make Dom choose, puts it down for him, Letty or Brian. And Brian cringes and looks away when Dom picks her without noticing. He shoots down his girlfriend, casual as can be, and doesn’t even notice.
There’s hurt in her eyes when Letty stalks off. Brian waits for Dom to react, but he just glowers at everyone at the table, getting awkward half-glances in return.
Brian shoves to her feet, squeezes around Vince, calls Dom a dumbass as she passes him and jogs after Letty. She shouldn’t care, but that ship’s pretty much sailed. She’s in way too deep. Might as well go for broke.
She calls the other woman’s name just as she’s about to get in her car and probably peel out making tracks. Letty glowers, but doesn’t drive off. Too much like running, Brian guesses. She’s the same. Don’t ever back down. Only she doesn’t let very much get to her in the first place and Letty is… Letty is kind of a female version of Dom, all fire and steam where Brian is ice.
“What the fuck do you want?!”
Brian screeches to a halt with her hands raised, palms out. “To apologize. Your man is behaving like an asshole and I’m sorry. But you gotta realize there’s nothing going on. I don’t do that kind of shit.”
Letty’s fingers clench like she really wants to punch Brian, but in the end she deflates and just looks tired. Maybe this isn’t the first straw. Maybe this isn’t even about Brian, in the end. Maybe all those skanks mean something after all, to Letty, to Dom.
This assignment was supposed to be easy. Get in good with thug and thug friends, make thug and thug friends confess, put thug and thug friends behind bars. Only thug turned out to have more layers than a freaking onion, and his friends are just as bad. Files on people aren’t people. Brian’s learning that pretty fast. Goddamn people. Goddamn layers.
Letty spins on her heel, stalks the rest of the way to her car, gets in. She revs the engine, then rolls down the window to get in one last shot. “I’m gonna laugh when they figure out you’re for shit.”
Then she’s gone and yep, definitely making tracks. The smell of burnt rubber stings Brian’s nose. She’s just gonna blame her headache on that.
+
She’s twelve, the first time she drives. Rome’s mom works nights and somehow, he has the brilliant idea to take her car for a little ride while she’s sleeping off a crappy shift.
At twelve, Brian is still shorter than Rome by more than a couple of inches. He’s just hit a growth spurt, too, all gangly limbs and awkwardness. And somehow, he doesn’t have those limbs under control very well. Admittedly, he has no clue what he’s doing, but still.
They barely make it three blocks before he slips on the gas, startles and jerks the car off the road. It freaks him completely and he takes his foot off the gas, lets the car coast to a stop in some weeds and shrubs.
He turns to her, wide-eyed, with that ‘oh-shit’ expression he always gets when their mad schemes go belly-up and she rolls her eyes. If you want a job done right…
She kicks him out of the car. Literally. Reaches across to pop the driver’s side door and then kicks him in the hip until he moves. She scoots over, twists and shifts until she can reach the pedals and the wheel at the same time and still look out the windshield.
Then she takes a few dry runs for practice while Rome gets in shotgun, bitching loudly. He’s freaked, she can tell that just from the volume of his complaints. She glares at him, turns the key in the ignition and then she’s driving.
Rome looks kind of awed when she gets them back on the road and then out of town without anyone calling the pigs down on them and she tries to keep her poker face - still a work in progress - in place, but she’s kind of in awe herself.
+
Life with the Torettos is actually kind of perfect. Working on cars, shooting the shit with friends, cold beer, no pressure. Long days and longer nights. It’s been a long time since she had anyone to hang with, to just sit around with, not doing anything.
Long time since she had friends.
The only black spots on her golden days are the meetings with Tanner and an increasingly irate Bilkins. Seriously, the man is going to give himself a heart attack if he doesn’t shift down a few gears soon.
They pick her up whenever they want something from her, drag her to Tanner’s Hollywood hideout, and rip into her for not getting results. And while they practice their good cop, bad fed spiel on her she keeps thinking stuff like, I got a car to fix, or, I need to get back to work.
Things are shifting and somehow, before she knows it, she thinks of work at the garage as her real job, and this cop thing is the temporary one, the cover. A means to an end.
What does it say about her that a gang of street racers seem more real to her after only a few weeks than being a cop does after five years?
+
“So, tell me about the others,” Brian demands. She’s curled up with Mia on the other girl’s bed, a plate of cookies and a mound of pillows between them. They’re having one of this mystical ‘girl’s night’ things that Brian’s never done in her life.
She’s pretty sure she’s subbing for Letty, who stormed off in a snit again, only this time Dom followed, which means they’re probably having angry sex in a car somewhere right now.
Whatever.
Mia shrugs and wipes crumbs from her shirt. “Just family, you know?”
“How’d you all meet, then?”
She rolls her eyes. “Well, Dom and Vince grew up together, and Letty lived down the street. She’s always been into cars and naturally - “
“That meant she was into Dom as well.”
They share a giggle over that and no more is said. “Leon and Jesse just showed up one day and never left. That’s what Dom’s like,” she says, looking wistful. “He’s like gravity. Everything just gets pulled in.”
She gives Brian a significant look, but doesn’t say more. Gravity. Not a bad way to describe Dom. Not a bad way at all.
She tries to steer the conversation back on track. “So you all just… teamed up and that’s it, instant family?”
Mia nods, nibbling on another cookie. “Yeah. Sort of. I mean, there’s trouble, as you know,” she smirks at Brian, who tries not to squirm. Letty’s and Dom’s fights are becoming legend and everyone knows who causes them. “But in the end, we stick together.”
“Must be nice,” Brian mutters before her head catches up with her mouth. She didn’t mean to say that out loud. Didn’t even mean to think that. She grabs another cookie, hopes that Mia will let it go and pretends to be mesmerized by the taste of chocolate chips on her tongue.
“You don’t have family?” Pity. Brian hates pity.
She looks up, trying hard not to glare. “I do just fine on my own.”
Mia backs off immediately. “Never said you didn’t. Just… you got us now, alright?”
This time, Brian doesn’t look up again. She fixes her gaze on the bedspread and keeps it there for a long time.
+
Mia calls Brian ‘Girlfriend’ sometimes, with an easy grin on her face, like they’ve been painting each other’s toenails since junior high.
Brian can never quite indentify the squirming in her gut when she hears that nickname. It’s either happiness or guilt. Knowing herself, probably both.
+
+
On to Part II