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kat_lair***
Title: birds and bees and prison keys
Author: Mistress Kat /![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kat_lair
Fandom: RPS, Telephone AU
Pairing: Beyoncé(HoneyB)/Lady Gaga
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 9,435
Warnings: Serial killers, violence (including sexual), child abuse (including sexual) and neglect, prostitution, all around fucked-upness
Disclaimer: Not mine, just playing.
Summary: How do little girls turn into serial killers? Well, it has something do with rats. And men. And society that leaves little girls to them. It’s not all bad though. Eventually, sitting in a diner and looking scratched and golden like she’s fresh out of a fight with King Midas, Gaga finds a woman whose scars match hers. And that isn’t even the start of the real story, none of this is. – A pre-canon fic, or a long prologue to the music vid itself, and my consequent ‘show me your teeth’ series.
Author notes: I signed up for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
serialkillerbb in a moment of madness, but somehow managed to pull this out anyway. An because the qualifying word count was lowered, this totally counts \o/ As always, many thanks to pushkin666 for commentary and cheerleading.
Art: Wonderful fanmix and book cover bysirenofodysseus
Before the rat poison there needs to be rats.
And there are. The actual rattus rattus dart between the trailers, their eyes glimmering from under the concrete shower block at night when the light catches them. Sometimes, Gaga stands in the dark, switching the torch on and off, on and off, and the eyes are there and gone, there and gone, blink and you’ll miss it, blink and the rats will get you.
They won’t, not these ones.
It’s the other rats, the human kind, that you have to watch out for. Her daddy knows that but he is a mouse and he won’t do a thing. And she, a scrawny, gawky, stick-thin bird of a girl, like a starving sparrow after the cat caught it, flits between the trailer with her mouse-daddy and his hoard of bottles, the general store and the liquor store. She used to go to school, back when her grandma was around, and then on occasion after that so the social services wouldn’t take her away.
She’s seen birds in cages, knows about how they used to blind them so they would sing more. That ain’t never gonna happen to her.
Gaga covers up her dad when he passes out, rolls him onto his side so he won’t choke on his own vomit, but not always. It never happens though and she’s never sure whether she feels guilty or disappointed when he wakes up, still alive and groping for the next bottle. She gives up cleaning the trailer after a while, and stops washing herself that often too. That has nothing to do with the rats under the shower block though, and everything to do with the rats sniffing around her wherever she goes now.
There’s Jimmy next door, with his piss-yellow teeth and the worn Bible he carries around like a shield. He likes to quote verses to her when she walks by, spittle flying past his thin lips and his eyes burning holes into her flesh until she feels like jumping into the river just to get cool again.
Down at the liquor store Mr Parsons is a different kind of rat altogether, shrewd enough to watch others get caught in a trap and then eat the cheese himself. “How’s your daddy?” he asks every time Gaga comes in.
“Drinking himself to death,” she says.
He laughs and tuts, awkward in the face of truth, but not repentant, and sells her another bottle of cheap vodka even though she is several years shy of legal drinking age. Sometimes, he offers her hard candy, or a bottle of sweet cider, but she always refuses, knowing such gestures would not come for free.
“You say hello to your daddy, now,” Mr Parsons says. “Such a good girl you are.”
Maybe she was, once, but Gaga knows she isn’t now. More to the point, she doesn’t want to be.
Jimmy and Mr Parsons and others like them are easy though, predictable. They look like rats and act like rats so she knows what they are and how to deal with them.
Rats like Miss Rachel are much more dangerous because you don’t even realise they’re rats until it’s too late.
Miss Rachel works for the city. She’s not social services, or children’s services, or even from the school district. As best as Gaga can tell she has something to do with the housing and licenses, because she comes by the trailer park on the regular and talks to the managers and some of the residents and carries a lot of papers around. She wears jeans and white blouses and practical shoes, her caramel hair tucked neatly behind her ears.
She smiles a lot. Gaga thinks she’s pretty but probably doesn’t know it. Or, more to the point, doesn’t care.
Gaga spends a lot of time watching her, and then following her around, trying to figure her out. She sees her give a twenty to Mrs Lopez for food because her pension is late again, hears her arguing with the owner to let the Marshall family stay for another week, then another week, and then another even though they’ve been unable to pay the rent for months. Gaga thinks her observations go unnoticed, because they usually do, but then one afternoon she returns from the store, the plastic bag of beer and cookies (because she can buy what she wants with the rest of the money and sees no reason not to indulge her sweet tooth) digging into her sweaty palm, and finds Miss Rachel waiting.
“Hello,” she says, smiling.
Gaga stops, unsure and not liking it. Miss Rachel is between her and the trailer and there’s nowhere else to go.
“You’ve been following me,” Miss Rachel says but there’s no accusation in her voice and she’s still smiling. “Are you interested in a career in the civil service, young lady?”
No one has ever called her a lady before. Gaga finds that she likes it. She still doesn’t understand the question though.
“Perhaps we can sit down and talk about it after you’ve put your groceries in,” Miss Rachel continues. She steps aside and gestures toward the trailer door as if giving permission.
It grates on her, but Gaga goes in anyway, dumping the bags on the floor and coming right back out. Miss Rachel is sitting on one of the rickety lawn chairs, poised as if for a business meeting, horrendously out of place amidst the debris of humanity. “I believe you have potential in you,” she says and Gaga sits down out of sheer surprise and when Miss Rachel offers her a smoke, she accepts it.
And when she talks, she listens.
That’s her first mistake.
Miss Rachel hires Gaga as her assistant. She pays her in cash and cigarettes, brings her a steaming cup of fancy coffee from a fancy café in town when she arrives to the trailer park, and smiles and smiles and smiles until Gaga is dizzy from it, infatuated. In love.
Not that she knows the word for it at the time, but that’s what it is.
She carries Miss Rachel’s files and folders, and answers questions about the trailer park and its occupants. She calls her a ‘human intelligence source’ with a laugh but she listens carefully to everything Gaga has to say and that’s the real pay-cheque right there; feeling important.
Chances are it would have taken Gaga a long time to realise Miss Rachel was a rat in Gap clothing if not for Ricky Lee from number fifty-six.
Ricky Lee is a doctor. Or, he was a doctor, once upon a time, a few years and countless highs ago. Now he caters to the sick and feeble by making them more sick and feeble with his medicines, bought and homemade both, for a very reasonable price. Rumour is, you can get your prescription filled for a fifty and a blowjob, and every now and then Doctor R Lee employs live in nurses he keeps on a mattress in the backroom, fucked out and happy.
Gaga doesn’t have much to do with Ricky Lee. She isn’t interested in his medicines and her daddy is an old-fashioned addict, relying only on fermented grain products for his escape. Miss Rachel though, she talks to Ricky a lot. Not every time she comes by, but certainly more often than not. At first, Gaga doesn’t think anything of it. Miss Rachel talks to everyone; there always seems to be forms to fill or sign, money to hand out or collect, messages to deliver. She’s a busy lady and so too is Gaga now.
There’s a pattern though and it doesn’t take long for Gaga to notice how every other Monday Miss Rachel goes to Ricky Lee’s trailer with a bulging handbag. Toward the end of each week she pops in too, usually coming out with an even wider smile and a cheeky wink to Gaga like they’re sharing a secret of some sort, or will be just as soon as Gaga figures it out.
So she puzzles at it. Perhaps Miss Rachel is looking to score, which would be disappointing but not so surprising. She knows from TV and magazines that busy businesswomen like her occasionally use a little pick-me-up, something that comes in blister packs or gets injected between toes.
But the theory doesn’t hold scrutiny. Gaga knows addicts, she’s the drug-child, the booze-child, the mistake-child of two of them after all, and Miss Rachel doesn’t smell like one. She only smells of expensive perfume and money, like a magnolia tree burning.
It falls into place one evening, the realisation sinking hard and deep, a rat-shaped truth-stone falling into the well of her mind.
She’s waiting for Miss Rachel outside Ricky Lee’s trailer, watching as she descends the metal steps like a queen. Noticing her, she smiles and beckons Gaga over.
“Here you go, little lady,” she says, handing her a wad of crumpled notes. There must be at least two-hundred dollars there in warm and greasy fivers and tens. “Let’s call it your end of month bonus, eh?”
And that’s when Gaga understands. Miss Rachel isn’t buying drugs, she’s supplying them; carting death and dependence onto the trailer-park from the city, one purseful at a time.
Gaga thinks about it for a week; about all the rats and herself – a ladybird, a rattlesnake, a starling – among them. She thinks about Ricky Lee with his pills and Mr Parsons with his bottles and boiled sweets, about her mouse-daddy who she knows won’t come to her rescue when Jimmy from next door will finally put his hands where his eyes have travelled, who will only shake and cry until the day he finally drinks himself to grave. And she thinks about Miss Rachel; her skin unblemished by needle marks, her teeth white like shark’s and her hands so soft on Gaga’s face when she’d said ‘You understand, don’t you, little lady?’ and kissed her on the mouth, chaste and quick. But underneath that all – the pearl-pink lipstick, fake Channel purse and council-issued clipboards – she is rat-dirty, rat-greedy, just waiting for you to blink so she could eat you alive.
Gaga thinks about it all very carefully and then she uses Miss Rachel’s drug money to buy her first box of rat-poison.
She puts some in the half-empty bottle of booze on her dad’s bedside table, slips next door and adds it to Jimmy’s full fat milk. She goes to the store and gets that bottle of cider Mr Parsons has been offering her and when his back is turned she sprinkles the poison all over the box of sweets on the counter. She waits for Miss Rachel at the edge of the parking lot like usual and when she hands her the cardboard cup holder with two steaming lattes from Starbucks Gaga adds extra sugar and then a little something else extra to Miss Rachel’s drink.
By the time the effects of the poison hit, she’s on a bus, heading out of town with a bagful of clothes and the money she stole out of Mr Parsons till while he was busy vomiting his guts out. He won’t die, none of them will, and more’s the pity. The amount of rat poison needed to kill a human is more than Gaga had been able to get her hands on or plausibly serve out, but it is enough to make them all very, very sick.
It’s a thought that keeps her smiling all the way to California.
***
“You be a busy bee now.” Mama strokes a hand over her head. Her mouth is smiling but her eyes are sad. It’s been that way as long as Beyoncé remembers; mama shutting her into the kitchen while she works, telling her to be a good bee, a busy bee, with her crayons and books, her Barbie-doll with a missing arm.
Beyoncé doesn’t mind it. She’s old enough to be on her own for a few hours without crying and young enough to pretend not to know exactly what kind of clients her mama is seeing in the bedroom.
It’s not too bad. She’s not unhappy, is content being mama’s busy bee, hiding for a few hours most nights. Outside of those times, her mama goes out to work and Beyoncé watches cartoons and reads and sometimes she stays with Mrs Roberts from across the hall. And really, it’s not bad.
Until it is.
One evening her mama is out and Beyoncé is on her own. She’s not scared of being alone, too big for that, making herself a chocolate milk and settling in front of the sofa with it and a pile of comics she’d found in the trash yesterday. The TV drones softly on the background and it’s early enough in the autumn that the apartment isn’t even that cold, not when you have a blanket around your shoulders and you can pretend to be a Native American princess like Pocahontas or maybe the Sitting Bee.
Beyoncé giggles a little to herself about that.
And that’s when the bad thing happens, like universe had seen her small moment of childish joy and decided it was not to be tolerated.
There’s a knock on the door. Beyoncé freezes. She’s not supposed to open a door ever, not even if mama is home and definitely not when she’s alone.
The knock comes again, this time louder, and Beyoncé curls deeper into her makeshift nest of quilts and comics and tries to ignore it.
It doesn’t work and soon the knocking is accompanied by shouting.
“Come on, open up, bitch,” a man’s voice says, loud enough to carry through the door. “I can hear the TV, I know you’re in.”
Beyoncé hurriedly reaches for the remote and shuts down the TV and instantly wishes she hadn’t because it’s worse now, like she and the man outside the door are all alone.
“I’ve got money and I know your snatch isn’t too fancy for it,” the voice says. There’s a silence for a few seconds and then a large crashing sound.
Beyoncé jumps up, staring at the door. She half expects it to hang open but then there’s another thump and she realises the door is holding under the kicks. Barely.
“Open up, slut!” the man is bellowing, “Open up or I’ll break this fucking door down!”
Beyoncé blinks, alarmed, imagining how cross mama will be when she comes home and the door is broken. It’ll come out of the rent and they’re already struggling to keep up. She imagines the dejected slump of mama’s shoulders, the dark shadows under her eyes and thinks about how many more nights she may have to spend hiding in the kitchen as a result.
Then she opens the door.
Years later, during the long nights she lies curled up alone and then finally not alone, she sometimes wonders what would have happened if she hadn’t opened that door. She can’t imagine it although she knows that another path, a different life, could have been a possibility. She can’t even really mourn for it. What would be the point?
On the other side of that door, staring down at her like the future, like an oncoming train in a narrow tunnel, stands a large man with a leather jacket and comb-over. “Well, well,” he says, “Look at you.”
“Mama is not home,” Beyoncé says in her most polite tone. Then she tries to close the door.
But like a can of worms, once opened, there’s no shutting it. White and clammy, a hand grips the frame, a scuffed work boot wedging its way into the gap.
“Not so fast, sweetheart,” the man says, and then, like magic, he’s inside the apartment and Beyoncé gapes at him from next to the sofa. She doesn’t even know how it happened; one minute he was in the hallway, the next he’s here, right here¸ and she can’t do anything about it.
“You sure look like your mother’s daughter,” he says. “A pretty little thing.” His eyes trail her from head to toes greedily. “All over.” He shrugs out of his jacket, tossing it on the sofa like he owns the place. “I was after your old lady, but you’ll do. Oh, you’ll do quite nicely, sweetheart.” And with that her reaches for her like he owns her too.
She doesn’t say no. She can’t seem to make any noise at all, as if her throat is swollen shut, breaths coming in fast, panicky pants. Beyoncé backs away, afraid to turn her back and run, not that there is anywhere for her to go except mama’s bedroom and that doesn’t seem like a safe place at all.
She thinks about hiding, about yelling for help, about fighting, but has no time to do any of that before he is on her, forcing her to the floor. He’s a big man and compared to him she is only small, no matter how tall for her age she is, how mature she looks. Right now she’s a little girl with her dress being wrenched open, buttons popping.
“I knew it,” the man says, his breath hot on Beyoncé’s face and smelling of garlic, “Got yourself a nice pair of little titties here, don’t you? Give it a few years and you’ll be just like your mama.” His hands mover over her chest, almost gently, not that it helps. Nothing helps. No one is helping.
Beyoncé turns her head aside and sees the way the man has trampled on her comics, treading mud all over them, some of the pages ripped loose. Somehow, it’s this that finally makes her cry out; a soft, broken noise that doesn’t even sound like her.
“Yeah, yeah, I know you want it,” the man laughs, rucking up her dress.
Beyoncé kicks and kicks and kicks but his hands slip over her panties and then under them and it hurts.
Things go a little hazy after that. She knows she’s crying now, tears and snot running down her throat and making her choke, and she can’t seem to focus on anything beyond the immediacy of trying to draw breath, over and over. There’s pain that she’s distantly aware of, and the heavy, hot weight of the man moving on top of her, making it even more difficult to get oxygen.
Then a voice penetrates the mist.
“My baby!” someone yells, “What are you…? Get off her, get off, get off!” It’s her mama! Her mama has come back and everything will be alright.
For a moment the weight on top of her increases to almost crushing and then moves away entirely, her mother pulling the man away. Her features are twisted in rage, tears streaming down her face as she flies at the man like some kind of demon or a superhero from the comic books.
“You bastard, you bastard!” she’s shouting, clawing at the man’s face, “I’m going to kill you!”
“Mama?” Beyoncé tries to sit up but the world keeps swimming, nausea pushing at the back of her throat.
There’s more shouting, the man’s voice joining in now, and then the ugly, muted sound of flesh hitting flesh as the fight breaks out in earnest.
Beyoncé manages to get to her hands and knees, swaying and hurting, but determined to help her mama, when there’s a yell and a crash and a sickening crunch. On some level she already knows what’s happened, but it doesn’t make seeing it any easier. On the floor, next to the ruined comics and the discarded quilt, her mama is lying in a pool of slowly spreading blood, red and bright like the setting sun. She must have hit her head on the corner of the coffee table because it’s twisted at an unnatural angle, her eyes glassy and mouth still open mid-expletive.
“Fuck, fuck, shit,” the man is saying. It’s him now with the shallow, panicky breaths, his face gone white with fear. “Look what you bitches have done now,” he says, snatching his jacket off the sofa and backing toward the door. “If you’d only… Fuck. I’m out of here.”
And so he is.
For a few seconds Beyoncé is frozen on spot, in time, blood pooling at her feet and between her own legs. Then, like a bullet from a gun, fury so pure rips through her it carries her out of the door. She’s running, faster and faster, and screaming all the while; a wordless sound of rage and grief and shattered innocence that echoes in the stairwell and inside her otherwise empty head, her shell of a body.
Alarmed, the man turns around, just in time to see her barrelling down toward him at full speed like a carrion bird, fingers clawed and everything about her hurting and ugly and wishing for death. His certainly, and then her own.
He throws up his hand, aiming to block her, but it’s useless. Her weight, insubstantial as it is against his, is enough to overbalance him. He gropes for the railing like he’d groped for her breasts, with the same sort of blind desperation, but she scratching and biting and kicking and screaming-screaming-crying and down they go, down and down and–
The darkness seems to fall before the fall itself comes to an end. Beyoncé welcomes it.
***
The first man Gaga kills has gray eyes and a nice cock as cocks go. It’s clean and not too big, and when he fucks it into her mouth he’s almost polite about it, apologising if he goes too deep even though she’s learned to suppress her gag reflex a long ago.
This is easy money; dropping to her knees or even all fours. This is not like it would have been with Jimmy or Mr Parsons or all the other rats since who had watched her with hungry eyes, willing to take what wasn’t theirs to take, and take it for free. This way Gaga is in control of who, when and how much, and her body becomes a tool, not part of herself at all, for the duration.
It’s not living though, only survival. There’s an itch under her skin, growing day by day, and nothing she tries scratches it. Nothing sticks; not the drugs, not jobs, not the girls she attempts to date on the side. Everything just seems to wash over her like she’s a pebble on a vast beach, unconcerned with the change of seasons or caress of the tide.
Harry changes all of that; Harry with the gray eyes and nice cock, with small soft hands that flutter around her face like some alien moths, pale and smooth and money-cured.
She’s counting the bills, the sour taste of semen still clinging to her lips, when he says it.
“Come home with me?” His voice is sincere, something terribly earnest in his granite eyes. “Spend the night and… I don’t know, have some pancakes with me in the morning.”
Gaga stares at him, genuinely surprised by this turn of events. Johns, even regular and polite ones like Harry here, don’t usually talk to her afterwards. “What?” she asks, stuffing the roll of notes into her pocket. “What for?”
He touches her then, looking like a puppy. “You deserve better than this,” he says. “You are better than this. Just… Let me show you?”
And Gaga, without quite knowing why, says: “Alright.”
Harry drives her home, his home, which is in a converted townhouse in a very respectable looking part of the city. Not that Gaga knows what respectable looks like, has made it her business not to get too acquainted with such concepts; they bring nothing but trouble and cages.
The apartment exudes wealth, not that Gaga knows much about that either. Harry shows her around like she’s an esteemed guest, pointing out the kitchen with its espresso maker and the bathroom with its Jacuzzi. She’s more impressed by the painting above the fake fireplace though, getting lost in the mix of red and orange, tilting her head slowly to regard the gash of black in the bottom right corner that looks like a bullet wound. It’s not the kind of thing she would’ve expected a man like Harry to own.
“It’s only a cheap reproduction print,” he says and Gaga wonders if that’s what she is too, to him; a reproduction of some real girlfriend he once had, a pale copy of the original.
They’re in the living room, Gaga still looking at the painting while Harry is puttering around, pouring drinks and talking all the while. “You don’t have to do what you do, you know?” he’s saying, like he knows a fucking thing about it, “You shouldn’t…” he pauses, clearly searching for a more palatable word than ‘prostitute’ or ‘whore’. “You don’t need to sell yourself,” he finally finishes. “You’re worth so much more than this.”
“I am,” Gaga agrees, readily enough. She’s always thought that, as long as she remembers. It’s the reason she bought that rat poison, it’s the reason she left, it’s why she’s kept going all these years when it would’ve been so much easier to just lie down and fade away like a shadow ahead of the noon sun.
She’s not the fading type though. For one, she’s too clever for that. Far, far too clever for any of it. Harry included.
He’s smiling at her now, looking relieved and pious, like he wasn’t the one paying to get his dick sucked on a regular basis.
“You want my love?” Gaga asks him, conversationally and he nods, dazed. “You want my ugly, my disease?” she continues, not waiting for an answer. “You want everything, don’t you? As long as it’s free.”
He’s still smiling, confused now, but so trusting that he doesn’t even flinch when she punches him on the side of his head, simply folds like a bad hand of poker, falling to the floor.
Gaga kneels next to him and hits him again, quickly before he has a chance to scramble up or fight back.
“Fuck!” He’s choking on the word, face already bloodied, and it’s the first time Gaga has ever wanted to kiss a man. “What…”
It’s a question Harry never finishes. Gaga picks up a fruit bowl from the coffee table, one of those heavy crystal ones, and brings it down on his head. The impact makes a wet, dull sound, and Harry’s skull splits open like a melon, blood and something much thicker pushing past the bone shells. It all looks a bit like the painting above the fireplace, like another piece by the same artist.
Harry’s pretty gray eyes are cloudy now as he stares up at her, still watching even beyond the veil. Gaga thinks about closing the lids but then leaves them open. Let the poor man look if he wants to, she thinks, climbing to her feet.
She spends the night in Harry’s apartment, in his bed between the silk sheets that still smell of him. In the morning, she makes herself pancakes and freshly squeezed orange juice, and eats her breakfast on the sofa with Harry for company. It was, after all, what he’d wanted.
Harry doesn’t keep a lot of spare cash lying around, but he owns some very nice watches and cufflinks, and Gaga knows where to take them. With the money the fence gives her, she buys a ticket to the next town over, and then the one after that. She steals a car, then another, then swaps that for a gun. She kills a liquor store clerk in Iowa and thinks about Mr Parsons the whole time she empties the clip into the twitching body.
She keeps on the move, still running from that cage and happier that way. It’s not a storybook life, but it’s hers, and with the road opening up in front of her like an invitation she feels nothing but grateful.
***
Beyoncé doesn’t die. The fall breaks her arm, but it breaks the neck of the man who raped her and then killed her mother. She envies him. At least he is properly dead, carted away in a plastic sack and probably burnt into a pile of ashes soon after.
Lucky bastard.
Beyoncé isn’t dead, but she doesn’t feel alive either.
They put her into the system, though not the criminal justice one. After all, she didn’t do anything wrong and doesn’t need the countless middle-aged ladies who pat her shoulder telling her what she already knows, that it wasn’t her fault. She wishes it was though. At least that way she’d feel like she had some kind of choice in all of this, instead being a powerless ragdoll, tossed this way and that.
It doesn’t matter whether those playing with her are nice or nasty, they’re still treating her like a toy. That’s what not doing anything wrong gets you, Beyoncé realises: a life of acquiescence and passivity.
Of course she doesn’t learn big words like that until some years later, and by then she’s already decided she’s done being anyone’s plaything. If doing the wrong thing means the freedom to actually do something, then she’ll gladly take any fault she chooses. And who’s to say what’s wrong or right, anyway? No one had told that to the man who hurt him, and she didn’t think it was anything her mama had seen in black-and-white terms either, so all in all she was probably better off without such considerations.
Even if it means being alone. The children’s services doesn’t actually seem to have any children in it; just hollow child-shaped shells like her. For a few years Beyoncé drifts from a place to place, some of them institutions with several occupants and too few too hardened minders, some real homes. Just not hers. The foster carers she ends up with aren’t bad per se; they feed her and try to talk to her and give her things and Beyoncé ignores it all except for the books which she devours like she’s starving.
She is, she just doesn’t know what for.
It never takes long until the foster homes return her to the system though. ‘Unable to connect’ and ‘emotionally underdeveloped’ and ‘lack of social skills’ get thrown around a lot. The psychiatrists don’t know what to do with her and squabble endlessly over labels like just being able to pin one on her would solve the problem.
Beyoncé learns to play the game and turns from a ragdoll to the hand that moves it, from a worker bee to the queen. Information is currency and she makes it her business to know everything about everyone whenever she’s moved to a new place. She knows that her new foster carer smokes in secret, that the janitor at the children’s home is not a paedophile and that it matters less than the suspicions, that if you want to score drugs you talk to Jake and if you want to score pussy you talk to Mandy.
She discovers that it’s all terribly, laughably easy once you put your mind to it.
Beyoncé gets a boyfriend because it fits the image that works for her for the time being, and the first time he tries to touch her she jams the heel of her boot against his foot so hard she can hear the small bones breaking. That works for her too. He cries and begs, crouched on the floor while she tells him how things are going to go. Beyoncé rides him like that, one hand over his throat, his mangled foot swelling inside the sneaker.
She thinks it could be better. He takes three months to work up the courage to break up with her and Beyoncé lets him, out of boredom.
The very same morning that she turns eighteen, she walks out of the young people’s home she’s been living in, and disappears for good. She stops using her birth name, except in her head, and gets new papers for Nancy Kolar and Emma Smith and Janice Warner and many more. She buys some clothes and steals even more, the kind of clothes she actually wants to wear. She catches a train to far away.
In the evening of that very same day, she kills a boy her own age, just to see if she can. Just because she wants to.
That too proves to be laughably easy, quite literally so. She uses a knife to start with, but finishes him off with her bare hands, thumbs pressed firmly into the base of his throat, her nails leaving bloody crescent moons on the purpling skin.
Beyoncé smiles and smiles as he dies, thinking that this is better than the fall; it’s like flying.
After that she never lands again.
***
Gaga’s been twenty-one for exactly twenty-one days when she finds her and if that’s not a sign she doesn’t know what is. She’s still skin and bones but tough with it, and the fire burning in her belly is hot and bright. In the rare moments that she still compares herself to a bird among rats she thinks of herself as a falcon, or a phoenix, something fast and deadly and immortal.
It’s raining that day and Gaga walks into the diner less out of hunger and more out of desire to keep dry. She’s clearly not the only one with the same idea and the place is full of families and holiday makers and jabbering, masticating rats.
And in the middle of it all, sucking on a milkshake with lips painted plum-purple, is the most amazing creature Gaga has seen outside of the mirror. The woman sits at the counter, one leg casually slung over another, miles and miles of bare skin on display, the toned thigh disappearing under the dress just in time to give you palpitations.
With shaky hands, Gaga adjust the feathers in her hair before taking off her sunglasses and clipping them onto her belt. For some reason it feel crucial that this woman sees her eyes.
Unfortunately, the line of sight is obscured by some redneck with a beer-gut and a whisky breath Gaga can smell from here.
“Aren’t you a sweet piece of brown sugar,” the man says, getting so close that the woman has to lean back to avoid touching him. There’s no fear on her face though, nothing really but lazy indifference, like she has already seen far worse than this stumbling idiot and didn’t think much of them either.
Gaga feels the need to interfere; not because she thinks the woman needs any help but because she wants to just… get into her orbit somehow.
“This asshole bothering you?” she asks, not even looking in the guy’s direction but keeping her eyes on the woman, her whole attention eaten up by the soft curves of her body, her fingernails painted golden and her knuckles scraped like she’s been in a fight with King Midas.
She looks up and Gaga is caught mid-flight, feathers in disarray as she’s stuffed into a cage made out of flesh and bone, right into the heart she knows is pumping red and hot underneath the woman’s halter top and her large, round breasts. It’s what she’d feared her whole life but now she can do nothing but stare, struck dumb.
“Listen, lady,” the woman says, and that word, stretched taffy-long, nests on Gaga’s breastbone like a burning coal, “I appreciate the offer, but I can take care of this myself.” What she’s saying is: ‘I can take care of myself’ and Gaga believes it.
“Hey now, no need to fight. There’s plenty of me to go around,” the drunken bozo says, his breath foul, smelling of everything Gaga associates with her childhood. She thinks about simply bending over and biting his throat, tearing into the fatty flesh and shaking him dead, just like a German Sheppard with a rat. The golden caramel-woman, the clever cage-keeper, gets there first though.
“Let’s go,” she says, getting up from the bar stool. Standing up she’s taller than Gaga, definitely taller than the guy, and she likes that. Likes that a lot. Her hand curls around the man’s bicep. He probably thinks it’s seductive but to Gaga it looks like a leather restraint snapping to place. “Out the back.” The woman turns around, not sparing another glance at Gaga, and the fool of a man thinks it’s his lucky day and follows her.
Gaga gives it a minute, just long enough to finish the half-drunk milkshake. It’s peanut butter flavour and the dense sweetness of it clings to her lips still when she slips out of the diner and rounds the corner toward the back of it.
What she sees there makes her almost angry that she wasn’t just a little bit faster. But this is good too. This is brilliant and beautiful and exquisite like nothing else has ever been; the fat rat on the ground, a switchblade sticking out of his neck, blood trickling out in a ruby creek that pools around the woman’s six-inch heels, mixing with the rain water.
This is what makes Gaga fall in love.
“Oh lady,” the woman says when she sees Gaga. “You shouldn’t have followed me.” She doesn’t sound mad or afraid, and when she bends down to pull the knife out Gaga can’t help but stare at the perfect curve or her ass. God, she wants to lick her out; bury her head right between those strong thighs and eat her and eat her and…
“Oh yes,” she says, breathless and giddy and wet inside her zebra-print cat-suit, “I really should have.”
That throws her. She regards Gaga quietly, still standing in the puddle of blood, her skin gleaming from the rain and her almond-shaped, kohl-lined eyes trailing up and down Gaga’s body, noting every imperfection.
Gaga shivers with it, feeling the cage bars tightening.
“You’re not going to run out, screaming for the police, are you,” the woman says, and it’s more of a statement than a question.
“Would you kill me too if I did?” Gaga asks, and when the woman says ‘yes’ like it’s nothing, she almost moans out loud. “What’s your name?” Gaga asks, taking a step forward, pulled by invisible chains. “Please, please, you must tell me your name.”
“Beyoncé,” the woman says and then looks startled, like she hadn’t expected that to come out of her mouth. “HoneyB,” she adds then, wiping the switchblade clean on the dead guy’s jacket before slipping it into her pocket.
She’s gorgeous and in her eyes Gaga can see scars that match hers.
“Well then,” Gaga says, offering her hand, delighted when Beyoncé grabs it briefly for balance as she steps over the corpse. “If you would let me buy you a drink and some apple pie, maybe another knife if you want, I would be most honoured.”
“Lady,” Beyoncé says, shaking her head, “you are a weird one,” but she’s smiling. “Let’s make it somewhere else though, yeah?”
Gaga agrees. No need for the law enforcement to crash a first date.
They head toward their cars; hers a stolen Fiat, Beyoncé’s a big yellow truck, gleaming like a jewel. On the way Gaga links their arms, their steps falling into rhythm automatically. “Let me tell you a story,” Gaga says, “about birds and bees.”
***
Sex is a revelation. It’s a whole book of them, complete with the Four Horsemen and the coming of Kingdom of Heavens.
Gaga is much shier and circumspect about it than Beyoncé which she finds curious considering their relative backgrounds. It might have something to do with the fact that up until the point Gaga tentatively kisses her, she hadn’t even considered this, them, a possibility. It’s not that she’s naïve enough to think that sex only happens between a man and a woman, it’s just that… Well, all the sex she’s seen, all the sex that has been forced on her, that’s she’s fought off, or even the sex she’s initiated, has involved a man.
And it hasn’t been great. Not all bad, not like the thing that happened so long ago she doesn’t let it take room in her mind anymore, but nothing special either.
Gaga is all kinds of special of course. More importantly though, she genuinely believes that Beyoncé is someone special too, someone who matters. No one’s ever done that, not since her mama thought her special enough to die for.
They’re sitting on the hood of her truck, waiting for the sunrise. Gaga is wearing shorts too big for her and one of Beyoncé’s tops. She’s picking dried blood from under her fingernails, remains of the gas station attendant who had been stupid enough to come after them with a shotgun when they hadn’t felt obligated to pay, not after the way he’d spoken to them like they were whores.
Not that there was anything wrong with being a whore, of course, but the attendant clearly hadn’t been a champion of sex worker rights.
He’d screamed mighty prettily though when she’d snapped his fingers, one by one, while Gaga held a gun to his head, smiling all the while and looking at Beyoncé like she was a work of art. And when she’d pulled the trigger… Beyoncé shivers at the memory.
“You cold, Honey?” Gaga asks, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.
Beyoncé smiles, about to point out that even if she was, Gaga’s skinny arm would hardly make a difference, when Gaga suddenly shifts much closer. Her pointy, curious face tilts in an oddly bird-like movement and before Beyoncé has a chance to ask what’s going on, she darts in and drops a quick kiss to her lips.
A second later she’s leaning back again, eyeing Beyoncé nervously.
“What…” Beyoncé licks her lips, blinking slowly. Her skin breaks out in goose bumps and it’s definitely not because of the temperature, cool as it is this early in the morning. “What was that?” she asks, feeling immediately stupid because of course she knows what it was, she just… Hadn’t known that Gaga wanted to do that. Or that she would. Or that she herself…
“A kiss,” Gaga says, like the question is completely valid though. Her arm is still loosely around Beyoncé’s shoulders, her bloodied nails scratching lightly at her sleeve as if asking for entrance. “Did you like it?”
No one had ever said that to her either, not like they meant it, like Beyoncé could say ‘no’ and that would be okay. She asks about that though, just to be sure. “If I didn’t… Would you still stay with me?” It may have only been a few months, but they’ve been the best months of her life and Beyoncé doesn’t want this to stop. With Gaga she feels free and tethered at the same time, both queen and worker of their hive of two.
“Yes,” Gaga says, nodding. Her hair is up in stiff peaks that nod along with her, somehow adding to the sincerity of the response.
“And would you let me drive when it rains?”
“Yes.”
“Get me pastrami sandwiches?”
“Yes.”
“Laugh at my jokes?”
“You don’t make any jokes,” Gaga says, which is true. “But if you did, I would laugh and laugh and laugh until my mouth got big enough to gobble up the sun.”
“It already is,” Beyoncé says, and that’s not a joke either, it’s the truth. “Would you still pull the trigger?”
“Yes,” Gaga says, “Always. For you.”
“Would you watch me pull the trigger?”
“Fuck yes,” Gaga all but moans, her voice breathless and raspy, “yes, yes, you should. Please, I want to see, I…” She starts fumbling for the gun then and there, almost dropping it in her eagerness.
Beyoncé is quicker though. Her hand clamps around Gaga’s, tight and sure, and she kisses her back. It’s wet and sugar-sweet, and Beyoncé takes her time, tasting the inside of Gaga’s mouth thoroughly, curling their tongues together and licking the honeycomb of her teeth. They kiss and kiss, and Gaga’s touch is so careful, her fingers so clever, and she keeps asking ‘like this?’ and ‘is this right?’ and ‘teach me?’ even though it’s her that knows more about it.
When the sun finally rises, breaking through the distant treeline like a forest fire, Gaga is kissing her way down Beyoncé’s belly, leaving little kitten licks across her ribs that make her squirm and laugh. She’s clawing at the earth; the two of them on the grass now, the truck between them and the road. Every now and then a car goes past but none of them stop and Beyoncé is almost disappointed because the gun is right there still and wouldn’t it be good if…
Gaga’s mouth slides lower then and Beyoncé thinks that they must burn brighter than the sun now; the two of them going supernova, growing vast and hot, gobbling up the whole world in their wake. When she comes it’s a little like that long fall down the stairs all those years ago.
Except this time there’s someone waiting to catch her.
***
They have their first fight on a field full of sunflowers, with the sky like a robin’s egg above them. They’re somewhere on the border between Nebraska and Kansas, Gaga is not sure on which side of the state line exactly nor does she care.
She cares about Beyoncé’s rigid back as she slams the truck door and stalks off, hands fisted at her sides, clearly furious. Gaga isn’t sure what to do about this, can’t remember ever much caring if anyone was angry at her because she just can’t ever remember caring this much to begin with.
It sucks, and suddenly she’s angry too, railing against the bars of the gilded cage Beyoncé has shut her in.
“What’s your problem?” she demands, walking after her into the shifting shade of the towering flowers.
Beyoncé whirls around, unsteady on her feet, the heels of her shoes sinking into the soft earth. Gaga has no such problems as she’s been barefoot since the motel.
“You didn’t have to kill them all,” Beyoncé says and her voice is smooth and emotionless and Gaga can’t stand it so she screams.
“No, but I wanted to! I wanted to!” She spreads her arms wide as if embracing the sky. “You hear that? I wanted to and I would do it again!”
Beyoncé looks angry and turned on in equal measure and Gaga would call it a victory if this was about winning.
“I hear you,” Beyoncé says, rubbing an absent hand over her belly, like stroking at the coiling desire. Her voice is husky, huskier than normal, and Gaga wants to wrap herself in it like a caterpillar in a cocoon. “But it was an unnecessary risk.”
“It was fun!” Gaga shouts because it had been. Beyoncé is right, maybe, but the other guests would have discovered the dead receptionist sooner or later so really, Gaga had only been… expediting the events.
And it’s not like Beyoncé hadn’t helped. Once Gaga had started shooting the locks, she’d been quick enough to start dragging the motel’s occupants out of their rooms, most of them still in their pyjamas; sleep-soft and terrified, just the way Gaga likes her rats.
Beyoncé doesn’t contradict her, only says: “There were too many of them to contain like that.” And alright, so it was a miscalculation of logistics, Gaga can give her that.
“We could… use a bomb next time,” she suggests uncertainly.
“We wouldn’t be able to see then,” Beyoncé points out, and that’s true. Both of them like to see and to be seen, to watch and to be watched, and that’s what makes them so perfect together. They’re each other’s audience and performer, director and stage manager all rolled into one.
“Poison then?” Gaga offers, licking her lips like she can already taste it. “If there’s a lot of them, like a whole diner of rats, and we could make them choke…” It probably won’t be as good as actually slitting their throats and feeling the blood pump over your hands, warm and sticky, but it has a charm all its own.
“Deal,” Beyoncé says and just like that the argument is over, blown apart by the promise of murder. It’s a beautiful thing, this love of theirs. A beautiful, terrible thing.
“Come here, Honey,” Gaga says, opening her arms in invitation.
Beyoncé melts into them, all curves and grace and iron-hard muscle. “Ladybird,” she murmurs, nipping at Gaga’s jaw before brushing their mouths together.
Kissing Beyoncé feels like those paintings of melting landscapes; everything slips and slides and stretches, until the whole world is one continuous swirl of colour.
“I want to get you diamonds,” Gaga says, pulling away just long enough to get the words out before plunging back into the storm, fearless.
“I don’t need diamonds,” Beyoncé tells her, breathless and smiling, when they pull apart.
“I’ll get you bracelets and tiaras and gemstones,” Gaga promises anyway. “I’ll get you champagne and caviar and the open horizon sharper than either of those. I’ll get you screamers and mewlers and beggers. I’ll get you silent stars for our Technicolor dream.”
“I don’t need those either,” Beyoncé says. She’s serious now and trailing a finger over Gaga’s features, tracing her eyebrows and the curve of earlobe. It tickles. “I want them, with you, but I don’t need them.”
“Just me then?” Gaga asks.
“Just you. Just us.”
This time, when they kiss, Gaga goes for blood, biting down on Beyoncé’s bottom lip until the skin breaks.
“Oh, fuck you.” It sounds like a promise, coming out of Beyoncé’s red-red mouth, the words sweet and copper-bright.
“Yes, please,” Gaga says and starts unbuttoning her dress. Above them, the sunflowers sway and dance, heavy with seed.
***
It can’t go on forever.
They chase the summer down south as far as they can go without passports. Beyoncé knows where to get fake ones, but it’ll take a while so they follow the Mexican border, killing time. There’s plenty of tequila on this side as well and Gaga has never tasted sweeter than when smeared with salt and lime, gasping under Beyoncé’s tongue.
The desert appeals to them both and they spend hours watching the lizards and snakes, staying up late just to hear the coyotes as they call to each other in excitement and ardour. Gaga gets good at mimicking the noise, sometimes doing it just fuck with the tourists.
They always draw attention to themselves but it’s not something neither of them knows how to change, nor cares enough to try. When it gets too much they simply disappear and move on. And if it really gets too much there are always ways of making other people disappear too. The desert really does have its appeal.
They rob liquor stores and gas stations and fruit stalls for money, for petrol, for sweet watermelons and for the sheer addictive thrill of it. And maybe they get a little cocky, a little careless, but it seems like the world is nothing but an endless buffet spread, groaning under the weight of treats and tasty morsels. And she and her lady… Well, they sample at will, glutting themselves with it all and each other, too busy setting rat traps to see the one snapping shut on their own necks.
It happens in an unremarkable looking mom-and-pop store, not too far off the highway. They’re running low on cash and Gaga has been waxing lyrical about marshmallows for two days straight.
“Fucking shut up already,” Beyoncé grouses, fond but exasperated too, “I’ll get you some mallows.”
It’s late when she turns the truck into the shop parking lot, coming to a screeching halt. There’s no one around except the wind and the stars and the two of them, as elemental as the surrounding night.
“My hero!” Gaga crows, arms stretched toward the sky as she twirls, her dress flaring out like a sail.
“Yeah, yeah,” Beyoncé mutters, pretending not to smile. “Stop dancing and go kick that door in.”
Gaga flips her off but does as she’s told, something she’s good at when she wants to be. The trouble is, Beyoncé never knows when that might be. And by ‘trouble’ she obviously means ‘fun’.
“This is gonna need bolt cutters,” Gaga calls out and Beyoncé fishes them from the truck before going to join her.
They make fast work of the lock and are soon inside, each grabbing a shopping basket and moving down the aisles, throwing stuff in.
“Found them!” Gaga shouts, sounding delighted and girlish. She waves a bag of marshmallows like a trophy and Beyoncé swipes it from her with a grin.
“C’mon then,” she purrs, already wet. “Come and get your treat.” She feeds the mallows to her, one by one, while Gaga moans around her fingers, sugar sticky and all hers.
Beyoncé is ready to go after that. They’ve got money and supplies, including five more bags of marshmallows, but Gaga wants to check the backroom.
And that’s when they hit the jackpot.
There’s an actual safe there, presumably with much more cash inside than what was left in the till.
“Ooooh, baby.” Gaga strokes the combination lock in a way that almost makes Beyoncé jealous.
“There’s no way we can open that here,” she points out, leaning on the doorway.
“That’s why we’re taking it with us,” Gaga says, grinning. “We can blow it up later. Can you go get the tarpaulin from the truck, sweetie? This is way too heavy to carry, we’ll have to drag it.”
“Sure,” Beyoncé shrugs, giving in. Gaga likes blowing things up and they don’t have many opportunities for such fun.
She hasn’t taken more than three steps out of the room though when the fun stops. A single sharp beep pierces the air, immediately followed by a loud, metallic clang. The floor under her feet vibrates from the impact and Beyoncé turns around just in time to see the security door lock into place, sealing Gaga inside the backroom.
“Fuck!” Beyoncé shouts, tugging at the bars in vain. “What the fuck did you do?”
Gaga is looking a little wild around the eyes, but otherwise she’s just standing there, poised and beautiful like a ballet dancer on top of a music box. “I tried opening the safe,” she says. “It must have triggered it. Who the fuck knew a place like this would have security like that?” She gestures at steel bars.
The thought occurs to them both at the same time. Anyone who invests on a trigger-activated security door is unlikely to stop there. They must have tripped some kind of alarm on entering the premises and the cops were likely already on their way.
“Shit, shit! How long have we been here?” Beyoncé asks frantically, looking at her watch even though she has no idea what time it was when they got in.
“Too long,” Gaga says, eerily calm, “You’ve got to…”
Beyoncé doesn’t wait to hear what she has to say. She runs to the car and then back, bolt cutters in hand. If they can just break one bar maybe Gaga can squeeze through, she’s small and thin, she could do it.
“Stop, stop, it’s no use,” Gaga says when Beyoncé is back but she comes to help anyway, adding her strength as they push at the handles, both of them sweating from the effort. “Reinforced,” Gaga spits finally, some of the apprehension pushing through though she visibly stamps on it. “Honey, you’ve got to go.”
“No, no, no, I can’t…” Beyoncé’s heart is a hummingbird in her chest; small and fragile and fluttering-shaking-beating in panic. She reaches for Gaga, clutching at her hands, the thin material of her dress, angry and desperate and shamefully afraid.
“Shh, shh,” Gaga whispers, stroking the hair from her face. “It’ll be alright, Honey. I promise.” She kisses her then, achingly sweet and bitter like life. They can hear the sirens in the distance. “Please go,” Gaga says again, pushing Beyoncé away. “Go, go, go!”
Beyoncé takes a few hesitant steps, each like a nail to her heart, and when she finally turns and runs all she hears is Gaga laughing, wild and beautiful. “Call me!” she yells after her, “Call me on the telephone!”
A couple of weeks later Beyoncé does exactly that.
And that’s the start of the real story, the one that goes on forever.
***
Title: birds and bees and prison keys
Author: Mistress Kat /
kat_lairFandom: RPS, Telephone AU
Pairing: Beyoncé(HoneyB)/Lady Gaga
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 9,435
Warnings: Serial killers, violence (including sexual), child abuse (including sexual) and neglect, prostitution, all around fucked-upness
Disclaimer: Not mine, just playing.
Summary: How do little girls turn into serial killers? Well, it has something do with rats. And men. And society that leaves little girls to them. It’s not all bad though. Eventually, sitting in a diner and looking scratched and golden like she’s fresh out of a fight with King Midas, Gaga finds a woman whose scars match hers. And that isn’t even the start of the real story, none of this is. – A pre-canon fic, or a long prologue to the music vid itself, and my consequent ‘show me your teeth’ series.
Author notes: I signed up for
serialkillerbb in a moment of madness, but somehow managed to pull this out anyway. An because the qualifying word count was lowered, this totally counts \o/ As always, many thanks to pushkin666 for commentary and cheerleading.Art: Wonderful fanmix and book cover by
sirenofodysseusBefore the rat poison there needs to be rats.
And there are. The actual rattus rattus dart between the trailers, their eyes glimmering from under the concrete shower block at night when the light catches them. Sometimes, Gaga stands in the dark, switching the torch on and off, on and off, and the eyes are there and gone, there and gone, blink and you’ll miss it, blink and the rats will get you.
They won’t, not these ones.
It’s the other rats, the human kind, that you have to watch out for. Her daddy knows that but he is a mouse and he won’t do a thing. And she, a scrawny, gawky, stick-thin bird of a girl, like a starving sparrow after the cat caught it, flits between the trailer with her mouse-daddy and his hoard of bottles, the general store and the liquor store. She used to go to school, back when her grandma was around, and then on occasion after that so the social services wouldn’t take her away.
She’s seen birds in cages, knows about how they used to blind them so they would sing more. That ain’t never gonna happen to her.
Gaga covers up her dad when he passes out, rolls him onto his side so he won’t choke on his own vomit, but not always. It never happens though and she’s never sure whether she feels guilty or disappointed when he wakes up, still alive and groping for the next bottle. She gives up cleaning the trailer after a while, and stops washing herself that often too. That has nothing to do with the rats under the shower block though, and everything to do with the rats sniffing around her wherever she goes now.
There’s Jimmy next door, with his piss-yellow teeth and the worn Bible he carries around like a shield. He likes to quote verses to her when she walks by, spittle flying past his thin lips and his eyes burning holes into her flesh until she feels like jumping into the river just to get cool again.
Down at the liquor store Mr Parsons is a different kind of rat altogether, shrewd enough to watch others get caught in a trap and then eat the cheese himself. “How’s your daddy?” he asks every time Gaga comes in.
“Drinking himself to death,” she says.
He laughs and tuts, awkward in the face of truth, but not repentant, and sells her another bottle of cheap vodka even though she is several years shy of legal drinking age. Sometimes, he offers her hard candy, or a bottle of sweet cider, but she always refuses, knowing such gestures would not come for free.
“You say hello to your daddy, now,” Mr Parsons says. “Such a good girl you are.”
Maybe she was, once, but Gaga knows she isn’t now. More to the point, she doesn’t want to be.
Jimmy and Mr Parsons and others like them are easy though, predictable. They look like rats and act like rats so she knows what they are and how to deal with them.
Rats like Miss Rachel are much more dangerous because you don’t even realise they’re rats until it’s too late.
Miss Rachel works for the city. She’s not social services, or children’s services, or even from the school district. As best as Gaga can tell she has something to do with the housing and licenses, because she comes by the trailer park on the regular and talks to the managers and some of the residents and carries a lot of papers around. She wears jeans and white blouses and practical shoes, her caramel hair tucked neatly behind her ears.
She smiles a lot. Gaga thinks she’s pretty but probably doesn’t know it. Or, more to the point, doesn’t care.
Gaga spends a lot of time watching her, and then following her around, trying to figure her out. She sees her give a twenty to Mrs Lopez for food because her pension is late again, hears her arguing with the owner to let the Marshall family stay for another week, then another week, and then another even though they’ve been unable to pay the rent for months. Gaga thinks her observations go unnoticed, because they usually do, but then one afternoon she returns from the store, the plastic bag of beer and cookies (because she can buy what she wants with the rest of the money and sees no reason not to indulge her sweet tooth) digging into her sweaty palm, and finds Miss Rachel waiting.
“Hello,” she says, smiling.
Gaga stops, unsure and not liking it. Miss Rachel is between her and the trailer and there’s nowhere else to go.
“You’ve been following me,” Miss Rachel says but there’s no accusation in her voice and she’s still smiling. “Are you interested in a career in the civil service, young lady?”
No one has ever called her a lady before. Gaga finds that she likes it. She still doesn’t understand the question though.
“Perhaps we can sit down and talk about it after you’ve put your groceries in,” Miss Rachel continues. She steps aside and gestures toward the trailer door as if giving permission.
It grates on her, but Gaga goes in anyway, dumping the bags on the floor and coming right back out. Miss Rachel is sitting on one of the rickety lawn chairs, poised as if for a business meeting, horrendously out of place amidst the debris of humanity. “I believe you have potential in you,” she says and Gaga sits down out of sheer surprise and when Miss Rachel offers her a smoke, she accepts it.
And when she talks, she listens.
That’s her first mistake.
Miss Rachel hires Gaga as her assistant. She pays her in cash and cigarettes, brings her a steaming cup of fancy coffee from a fancy café in town when she arrives to the trailer park, and smiles and smiles and smiles until Gaga is dizzy from it, infatuated. In love.
Not that she knows the word for it at the time, but that’s what it is.
She carries Miss Rachel’s files and folders, and answers questions about the trailer park and its occupants. She calls her a ‘human intelligence source’ with a laugh but she listens carefully to everything Gaga has to say and that’s the real pay-cheque right there; feeling important.
Chances are it would have taken Gaga a long time to realise Miss Rachel was a rat in Gap clothing if not for Ricky Lee from number fifty-six.
Ricky Lee is a doctor. Or, he was a doctor, once upon a time, a few years and countless highs ago. Now he caters to the sick and feeble by making them more sick and feeble with his medicines, bought and homemade both, for a very reasonable price. Rumour is, you can get your prescription filled for a fifty and a blowjob, and every now and then Doctor R Lee employs live in nurses he keeps on a mattress in the backroom, fucked out and happy.
Gaga doesn’t have much to do with Ricky Lee. She isn’t interested in his medicines and her daddy is an old-fashioned addict, relying only on fermented grain products for his escape. Miss Rachel though, she talks to Ricky a lot. Not every time she comes by, but certainly more often than not. At first, Gaga doesn’t think anything of it. Miss Rachel talks to everyone; there always seems to be forms to fill or sign, money to hand out or collect, messages to deliver. She’s a busy lady and so too is Gaga now.
There’s a pattern though and it doesn’t take long for Gaga to notice how every other Monday Miss Rachel goes to Ricky Lee’s trailer with a bulging handbag. Toward the end of each week she pops in too, usually coming out with an even wider smile and a cheeky wink to Gaga like they’re sharing a secret of some sort, or will be just as soon as Gaga figures it out.
So she puzzles at it. Perhaps Miss Rachel is looking to score, which would be disappointing but not so surprising. She knows from TV and magazines that busy businesswomen like her occasionally use a little pick-me-up, something that comes in blister packs or gets injected between toes.
But the theory doesn’t hold scrutiny. Gaga knows addicts, she’s the drug-child, the booze-child, the mistake-child of two of them after all, and Miss Rachel doesn’t smell like one. She only smells of expensive perfume and money, like a magnolia tree burning.
It falls into place one evening, the realisation sinking hard and deep, a rat-shaped truth-stone falling into the well of her mind.
She’s waiting for Miss Rachel outside Ricky Lee’s trailer, watching as she descends the metal steps like a queen. Noticing her, she smiles and beckons Gaga over.
“Here you go, little lady,” she says, handing her a wad of crumpled notes. There must be at least two-hundred dollars there in warm and greasy fivers and tens. “Let’s call it your end of month bonus, eh?”
And that’s when Gaga understands. Miss Rachel isn’t buying drugs, she’s supplying them; carting death and dependence onto the trailer-park from the city, one purseful at a time.
Gaga thinks about it for a week; about all the rats and herself – a ladybird, a rattlesnake, a starling – among them. She thinks about Ricky Lee with his pills and Mr Parsons with his bottles and boiled sweets, about her mouse-daddy who she knows won’t come to her rescue when Jimmy from next door will finally put his hands where his eyes have travelled, who will only shake and cry until the day he finally drinks himself to grave. And she thinks about Miss Rachel; her skin unblemished by needle marks, her teeth white like shark’s and her hands so soft on Gaga’s face when she’d said ‘You understand, don’t you, little lady?’ and kissed her on the mouth, chaste and quick. But underneath that all – the pearl-pink lipstick, fake Channel purse and council-issued clipboards – she is rat-dirty, rat-greedy, just waiting for you to blink so she could eat you alive.
Gaga thinks about it all very carefully and then she uses Miss Rachel’s drug money to buy her first box of rat-poison.
She puts some in the half-empty bottle of booze on her dad’s bedside table, slips next door and adds it to Jimmy’s full fat milk. She goes to the store and gets that bottle of cider Mr Parsons has been offering her and when his back is turned she sprinkles the poison all over the box of sweets on the counter. She waits for Miss Rachel at the edge of the parking lot like usual and when she hands her the cardboard cup holder with two steaming lattes from Starbucks Gaga adds extra sugar and then a little something else extra to Miss Rachel’s drink.
By the time the effects of the poison hit, she’s on a bus, heading out of town with a bagful of clothes and the money she stole out of Mr Parsons till while he was busy vomiting his guts out. He won’t die, none of them will, and more’s the pity. The amount of rat poison needed to kill a human is more than Gaga had been able to get her hands on or plausibly serve out, but it is enough to make them all very, very sick.
It’s a thought that keeps her smiling all the way to California.
***
“You be a busy bee now.” Mama strokes a hand over her head. Her mouth is smiling but her eyes are sad. It’s been that way as long as Beyoncé remembers; mama shutting her into the kitchen while she works, telling her to be a good bee, a busy bee, with her crayons and books, her Barbie-doll with a missing arm.
Beyoncé doesn’t mind it. She’s old enough to be on her own for a few hours without crying and young enough to pretend not to know exactly what kind of clients her mama is seeing in the bedroom.
It’s not too bad. She’s not unhappy, is content being mama’s busy bee, hiding for a few hours most nights. Outside of those times, her mama goes out to work and Beyoncé watches cartoons and reads and sometimes she stays with Mrs Roberts from across the hall. And really, it’s not bad.
Until it is.
One evening her mama is out and Beyoncé is on her own. She’s not scared of being alone, too big for that, making herself a chocolate milk and settling in front of the sofa with it and a pile of comics she’d found in the trash yesterday. The TV drones softly on the background and it’s early enough in the autumn that the apartment isn’t even that cold, not when you have a blanket around your shoulders and you can pretend to be a Native American princess like Pocahontas or maybe the Sitting Bee.
Beyoncé giggles a little to herself about that.
And that’s when the bad thing happens, like universe had seen her small moment of childish joy and decided it was not to be tolerated.
There’s a knock on the door. Beyoncé freezes. She’s not supposed to open a door ever, not even if mama is home and definitely not when she’s alone.
The knock comes again, this time louder, and Beyoncé curls deeper into her makeshift nest of quilts and comics and tries to ignore it.
It doesn’t work and soon the knocking is accompanied by shouting.
“Come on, open up, bitch,” a man’s voice says, loud enough to carry through the door. “I can hear the TV, I know you’re in.”
Beyoncé hurriedly reaches for the remote and shuts down the TV and instantly wishes she hadn’t because it’s worse now, like she and the man outside the door are all alone.
“I’ve got money and I know your snatch isn’t too fancy for it,” the voice says. There’s a silence for a few seconds and then a large crashing sound.
Beyoncé jumps up, staring at the door. She half expects it to hang open but then there’s another thump and she realises the door is holding under the kicks. Barely.
“Open up, slut!” the man is bellowing, “Open up or I’ll break this fucking door down!”
Beyoncé blinks, alarmed, imagining how cross mama will be when she comes home and the door is broken. It’ll come out of the rent and they’re already struggling to keep up. She imagines the dejected slump of mama’s shoulders, the dark shadows under her eyes and thinks about how many more nights she may have to spend hiding in the kitchen as a result.
Then she opens the door.
Years later, during the long nights she lies curled up alone and then finally not alone, she sometimes wonders what would have happened if she hadn’t opened that door. She can’t imagine it although she knows that another path, a different life, could have been a possibility. She can’t even really mourn for it. What would be the point?
On the other side of that door, staring down at her like the future, like an oncoming train in a narrow tunnel, stands a large man with a leather jacket and comb-over. “Well, well,” he says, “Look at you.”
“Mama is not home,” Beyoncé says in her most polite tone. Then she tries to close the door.
But like a can of worms, once opened, there’s no shutting it. White and clammy, a hand grips the frame, a scuffed work boot wedging its way into the gap.
“Not so fast, sweetheart,” the man says, and then, like magic, he’s inside the apartment and Beyoncé gapes at him from next to the sofa. She doesn’t even know how it happened; one minute he was in the hallway, the next he’s here, right here¸ and she can’t do anything about it.
“You sure look like your mother’s daughter,” he says. “A pretty little thing.” His eyes trail her from head to toes greedily. “All over.” He shrugs out of his jacket, tossing it on the sofa like he owns the place. “I was after your old lady, but you’ll do. Oh, you’ll do quite nicely, sweetheart.” And with that her reaches for her like he owns her too.
She doesn’t say no. She can’t seem to make any noise at all, as if her throat is swollen shut, breaths coming in fast, panicky pants. Beyoncé backs away, afraid to turn her back and run, not that there is anywhere for her to go except mama’s bedroom and that doesn’t seem like a safe place at all.
She thinks about hiding, about yelling for help, about fighting, but has no time to do any of that before he is on her, forcing her to the floor. He’s a big man and compared to him she is only small, no matter how tall for her age she is, how mature she looks. Right now she’s a little girl with her dress being wrenched open, buttons popping.
“I knew it,” the man says, his breath hot on Beyoncé’s face and smelling of garlic, “Got yourself a nice pair of little titties here, don’t you? Give it a few years and you’ll be just like your mama.” His hands mover over her chest, almost gently, not that it helps. Nothing helps. No one is helping.
Beyoncé turns her head aside and sees the way the man has trampled on her comics, treading mud all over them, some of the pages ripped loose. Somehow, it’s this that finally makes her cry out; a soft, broken noise that doesn’t even sound like her.
“Yeah, yeah, I know you want it,” the man laughs, rucking up her dress.
Beyoncé kicks and kicks and kicks but his hands slip over her panties and then under them and it hurts.
Things go a little hazy after that. She knows she’s crying now, tears and snot running down her throat and making her choke, and she can’t seem to focus on anything beyond the immediacy of trying to draw breath, over and over. There’s pain that she’s distantly aware of, and the heavy, hot weight of the man moving on top of her, making it even more difficult to get oxygen.
Then a voice penetrates the mist.
“My baby!” someone yells, “What are you…? Get off her, get off, get off!” It’s her mama! Her mama has come back and everything will be alright.
For a moment the weight on top of her increases to almost crushing and then moves away entirely, her mother pulling the man away. Her features are twisted in rage, tears streaming down her face as she flies at the man like some kind of demon or a superhero from the comic books.
“You bastard, you bastard!” she’s shouting, clawing at the man’s face, “I’m going to kill you!”
“Mama?” Beyoncé tries to sit up but the world keeps swimming, nausea pushing at the back of her throat.
There’s more shouting, the man’s voice joining in now, and then the ugly, muted sound of flesh hitting flesh as the fight breaks out in earnest.
Beyoncé manages to get to her hands and knees, swaying and hurting, but determined to help her mama, when there’s a yell and a crash and a sickening crunch. On some level she already knows what’s happened, but it doesn’t make seeing it any easier. On the floor, next to the ruined comics and the discarded quilt, her mama is lying in a pool of slowly spreading blood, red and bright like the setting sun. She must have hit her head on the corner of the coffee table because it’s twisted at an unnatural angle, her eyes glassy and mouth still open mid-expletive.
“Fuck, fuck, shit,” the man is saying. It’s him now with the shallow, panicky breaths, his face gone white with fear. “Look what you bitches have done now,” he says, snatching his jacket off the sofa and backing toward the door. “If you’d only… Fuck. I’m out of here.”
And so he is.
For a few seconds Beyoncé is frozen on spot, in time, blood pooling at her feet and between her own legs. Then, like a bullet from a gun, fury so pure rips through her it carries her out of the door. She’s running, faster and faster, and screaming all the while; a wordless sound of rage and grief and shattered innocence that echoes in the stairwell and inside her otherwise empty head, her shell of a body.
Alarmed, the man turns around, just in time to see her barrelling down toward him at full speed like a carrion bird, fingers clawed and everything about her hurting and ugly and wishing for death. His certainly, and then her own.
He throws up his hand, aiming to block her, but it’s useless. Her weight, insubstantial as it is against his, is enough to overbalance him. He gropes for the railing like he’d groped for her breasts, with the same sort of blind desperation, but she scratching and biting and kicking and screaming-screaming-crying and down they go, down and down and–
The darkness seems to fall before the fall itself comes to an end. Beyoncé welcomes it.
***
The first man Gaga kills has gray eyes and a nice cock as cocks go. It’s clean and not too big, and when he fucks it into her mouth he’s almost polite about it, apologising if he goes too deep even though she’s learned to suppress her gag reflex a long ago.
This is easy money; dropping to her knees or even all fours. This is not like it would have been with Jimmy or Mr Parsons or all the other rats since who had watched her with hungry eyes, willing to take what wasn’t theirs to take, and take it for free. This way Gaga is in control of who, when and how much, and her body becomes a tool, not part of herself at all, for the duration.
It’s not living though, only survival. There’s an itch under her skin, growing day by day, and nothing she tries scratches it. Nothing sticks; not the drugs, not jobs, not the girls she attempts to date on the side. Everything just seems to wash over her like she’s a pebble on a vast beach, unconcerned with the change of seasons or caress of the tide.
Harry changes all of that; Harry with the gray eyes and nice cock, with small soft hands that flutter around her face like some alien moths, pale and smooth and money-cured.
She’s counting the bills, the sour taste of semen still clinging to her lips, when he says it.
“Come home with me?” His voice is sincere, something terribly earnest in his granite eyes. “Spend the night and… I don’t know, have some pancakes with me in the morning.”
Gaga stares at him, genuinely surprised by this turn of events. Johns, even regular and polite ones like Harry here, don’t usually talk to her afterwards. “What?” she asks, stuffing the roll of notes into her pocket. “What for?”
He touches her then, looking like a puppy. “You deserve better than this,” he says. “You are better than this. Just… Let me show you?”
And Gaga, without quite knowing why, says: “Alright.”
Harry drives her home, his home, which is in a converted townhouse in a very respectable looking part of the city. Not that Gaga knows what respectable looks like, has made it her business not to get too acquainted with such concepts; they bring nothing but trouble and cages.
The apartment exudes wealth, not that Gaga knows much about that either. Harry shows her around like she’s an esteemed guest, pointing out the kitchen with its espresso maker and the bathroom with its Jacuzzi. She’s more impressed by the painting above the fake fireplace though, getting lost in the mix of red and orange, tilting her head slowly to regard the gash of black in the bottom right corner that looks like a bullet wound. It’s not the kind of thing she would’ve expected a man like Harry to own.
“It’s only a cheap reproduction print,” he says and Gaga wonders if that’s what she is too, to him; a reproduction of some real girlfriend he once had, a pale copy of the original.
They’re in the living room, Gaga still looking at the painting while Harry is puttering around, pouring drinks and talking all the while. “You don’t have to do what you do, you know?” he’s saying, like he knows a fucking thing about it, “You shouldn’t…” he pauses, clearly searching for a more palatable word than ‘prostitute’ or ‘whore’. “You don’t need to sell yourself,” he finally finishes. “You’re worth so much more than this.”
“I am,” Gaga agrees, readily enough. She’s always thought that, as long as she remembers. It’s the reason she bought that rat poison, it’s the reason she left, it’s why she’s kept going all these years when it would’ve been so much easier to just lie down and fade away like a shadow ahead of the noon sun.
She’s not the fading type though. For one, she’s too clever for that. Far, far too clever for any of it. Harry included.
He’s smiling at her now, looking relieved and pious, like he wasn’t the one paying to get his dick sucked on a regular basis.
“You want my love?” Gaga asks him, conversationally and he nods, dazed. “You want my ugly, my disease?” she continues, not waiting for an answer. “You want everything, don’t you? As long as it’s free.”
He’s still smiling, confused now, but so trusting that he doesn’t even flinch when she punches him on the side of his head, simply folds like a bad hand of poker, falling to the floor.
Gaga kneels next to him and hits him again, quickly before he has a chance to scramble up or fight back.
“Fuck!” He’s choking on the word, face already bloodied, and it’s the first time Gaga has ever wanted to kiss a man. “What…”
It’s a question Harry never finishes. Gaga picks up a fruit bowl from the coffee table, one of those heavy crystal ones, and brings it down on his head. The impact makes a wet, dull sound, and Harry’s skull splits open like a melon, blood and something much thicker pushing past the bone shells. It all looks a bit like the painting above the fireplace, like another piece by the same artist.
Harry’s pretty gray eyes are cloudy now as he stares up at her, still watching even beyond the veil. Gaga thinks about closing the lids but then leaves them open. Let the poor man look if he wants to, she thinks, climbing to her feet.
She spends the night in Harry’s apartment, in his bed between the silk sheets that still smell of him. In the morning, she makes herself pancakes and freshly squeezed orange juice, and eats her breakfast on the sofa with Harry for company. It was, after all, what he’d wanted.
Harry doesn’t keep a lot of spare cash lying around, but he owns some very nice watches and cufflinks, and Gaga knows where to take them. With the money the fence gives her, she buys a ticket to the next town over, and then the one after that. She steals a car, then another, then swaps that for a gun. She kills a liquor store clerk in Iowa and thinks about Mr Parsons the whole time she empties the clip into the twitching body.
She keeps on the move, still running from that cage and happier that way. It’s not a storybook life, but it’s hers, and with the road opening up in front of her like an invitation she feels nothing but grateful.
***
Beyoncé doesn’t die. The fall breaks her arm, but it breaks the neck of the man who raped her and then killed her mother. She envies him. At least he is properly dead, carted away in a plastic sack and probably burnt into a pile of ashes soon after.
Lucky bastard.
Beyoncé isn’t dead, but she doesn’t feel alive either.
They put her into the system, though not the criminal justice one. After all, she didn’t do anything wrong and doesn’t need the countless middle-aged ladies who pat her shoulder telling her what she already knows, that it wasn’t her fault. She wishes it was though. At least that way she’d feel like she had some kind of choice in all of this, instead being a powerless ragdoll, tossed this way and that.
It doesn’t matter whether those playing with her are nice or nasty, they’re still treating her like a toy. That’s what not doing anything wrong gets you, Beyoncé realises: a life of acquiescence and passivity.
Of course she doesn’t learn big words like that until some years later, and by then she’s already decided she’s done being anyone’s plaything. If doing the wrong thing means the freedom to actually do something, then she’ll gladly take any fault she chooses. And who’s to say what’s wrong or right, anyway? No one had told that to the man who hurt him, and she didn’t think it was anything her mama had seen in black-and-white terms either, so all in all she was probably better off without such considerations.
Even if it means being alone. The children’s services doesn’t actually seem to have any children in it; just hollow child-shaped shells like her. For a few years Beyoncé drifts from a place to place, some of them institutions with several occupants and too few too hardened minders, some real homes. Just not hers. The foster carers she ends up with aren’t bad per se; they feed her and try to talk to her and give her things and Beyoncé ignores it all except for the books which she devours like she’s starving.
She is, she just doesn’t know what for.
It never takes long until the foster homes return her to the system though. ‘Unable to connect’ and ‘emotionally underdeveloped’ and ‘lack of social skills’ get thrown around a lot. The psychiatrists don’t know what to do with her and squabble endlessly over labels like just being able to pin one on her would solve the problem.
Beyoncé learns to play the game and turns from a ragdoll to the hand that moves it, from a worker bee to the queen. Information is currency and she makes it her business to know everything about everyone whenever she’s moved to a new place. She knows that her new foster carer smokes in secret, that the janitor at the children’s home is not a paedophile and that it matters less than the suspicions, that if you want to score drugs you talk to Jake and if you want to score pussy you talk to Mandy.
She discovers that it’s all terribly, laughably easy once you put your mind to it.
Beyoncé gets a boyfriend because it fits the image that works for her for the time being, and the first time he tries to touch her she jams the heel of her boot against his foot so hard she can hear the small bones breaking. That works for her too. He cries and begs, crouched on the floor while she tells him how things are going to go. Beyoncé rides him like that, one hand over his throat, his mangled foot swelling inside the sneaker.
She thinks it could be better. He takes three months to work up the courage to break up with her and Beyoncé lets him, out of boredom.
The very same morning that she turns eighteen, she walks out of the young people’s home she’s been living in, and disappears for good. She stops using her birth name, except in her head, and gets new papers for Nancy Kolar and Emma Smith and Janice Warner and many more. She buys some clothes and steals even more, the kind of clothes she actually wants to wear. She catches a train to far away.
In the evening of that very same day, she kills a boy her own age, just to see if she can. Just because she wants to.
That too proves to be laughably easy, quite literally so. She uses a knife to start with, but finishes him off with her bare hands, thumbs pressed firmly into the base of his throat, her nails leaving bloody crescent moons on the purpling skin.
Beyoncé smiles and smiles as he dies, thinking that this is better than the fall; it’s like flying.
After that she never lands again.
***
Gaga’s been twenty-one for exactly twenty-one days when she finds her and if that’s not a sign she doesn’t know what is. She’s still skin and bones but tough with it, and the fire burning in her belly is hot and bright. In the rare moments that she still compares herself to a bird among rats she thinks of herself as a falcon, or a phoenix, something fast and deadly and immortal.
It’s raining that day and Gaga walks into the diner less out of hunger and more out of desire to keep dry. She’s clearly not the only one with the same idea and the place is full of families and holiday makers and jabbering, masticating rats.
And in the middle of it all, sucking on a milkshake with lips painted plum-purple, is the most amazing creature Gaga has seen outside of the mirror. The woman sits at the counter, one leg casually slung over another, miles and miles of bare skin on display, the toned thigh disappearing under the dress just in time to give you palpitations.
With shaky hands, Gaga adjust the feathers in her hair before taking off her sunglasses and clipping them onto her belt. For some reason it feel crucial that this woman sees her eyes.
Unfortunately, the line of sight is obscured by some redneck with a beer-gut and a whisky breath Gaga can smell from here.
“Aren’t you a sweet piece of brown sugar,” the man says, getting so close that the woman has to lean back to avoid touching him. There’s no fear on her face though, nothing really but lazy indifference, like she has already seen far worse than this stumbling idiot and didn’t think much of them either.
Gaga feels the need to interfere; not because she thinks the woman needs any help but because she wants to just… get into her orbit somehow.
“This asshole bothering you?” she asks, not even looking in the guy’s direction but keeping her eyes on the woman, her whole attention eaten up by the soft curves of her body, her fingernails painted golden and her knuckles scraped like she’s been in a fight with King Midas.
She looks up and Gaga is caught mid-flight, feathers in disarray as she’s stuffed into a cage made out of flesh and bone, right into the heart she knows is pumping red and hot underneath the woman’s halter top and her large, round breasts. It’s what she’d feared her whole life but now she can do nothing but stare, struck dumb.
“Listen, lady,” the woman says, and that word, stretched taffy-long, nests on Gaga’s breastbone like a burning coal, “I appreciate the offer, but I can take care of this myself.” What she’s saying is: ‘I can take care of myself’ and Gaga believes it.
“Hey now, no need to fight. There’s plenty of me to go around,” the drunken bozo says, his breath foul, smelling of everything Gaga associates with her childhood. She thinks about simply bending over and biting his throat, tearing into the fatty flesh and shaking him dead, just like a German Sheppard with a rat. The golden caramel-woman, the clever cage-keeper, gets there first though.
“Let’s go,” she says, getting up from the bar stool. Standing up she’s taller than Gaga, definitely taller than the guy, and she likes that. Likes that a lot. Her hand curls around the man’s bicep. He probably thinks it’s seductive but to Gaga it looks like a leather restraint snapping to place. “Out the back.” The woman turns around, not sparing another glance at Gaga, and the fool of a man thinks it’s his lucky day and follows her.
Gaga gives it a minute, just long enough to finish the half-drunk milkshake. It’s peanut butter flavour and the dense sweetness of it clings to her lips still when she slips out of the diner and rounds the corner toward the back of it.
What she sees there makes her almost angry that she wasn’t just a little bit faster. But this is good too. This is brilliant and beautiful and exquisite like nothing else has ever been; the fat rat on the ground, a switchblade sticking out of his neck, blood trickling out in a ruby creek that pools around the woman’s six-inch heels, mixing with the rain water.
This is what makes Gaga fall in love.
“Oh lady,” the woman says when she sees Gaga. “You shouldn’t have followed me.” She doesn’t sound mad or afraid, and when she bends down to pull the knife out Gaga can’t help but stare at the perfect curve or her ass. God, she wants to lick her out; bury her head right between those strong thighs and eat her and eat her and…
“Oh yes,” she says, breathless and giddy and wet inside her zebra-print cat-suit, “I really should have.”
That throws her. She regards Gaga quietly, still standing in the puddle of blood, her skin gleaming from the rain and her almond-shaped, kohl-lined eyes trailing up and down Gaga’s body, noting every imperfection.
Gaga shivers with it, feeling the cage bars tightening.
“You’re not going to run out, screaming for the police, are you,” the woman says, and it’s more of a statement than a question.
“Would you kill me too if I did?” Gaga asks, and when the woman says ‘yes’ like it’s nothing, she almost moans out loud. “What’s your name?” Gaga asks, taking a step forward, pulled by invisible chains. “Please, please, you must tell me your name.”
“Beyoncé,” the woman says and then looks startled, like she hadn’t expected that to come out of her mouth. “HoneyB,” she adds then, wiping the switchblade clean on the dead guy’s jacket before slipping it into her pocket.
She’s gorgeous and in her eyes Gaga can see scars that match hers.
“Well then,” Gaga says, offering her hand, delighted when Beyoncé grabs it briefly for balance as she steps over the corpse. “If you would let me buy you a drink and some apple pie, maybe another knife if you want, I would be most honoured.”
“Lady,” Beyoncé says, shaking her head, “you are a weird one,” but she’s smiling. “Let’s make it somewhere else though, yeah?”
Gaga agrees. No need for the law enforcement to crash a first date.
They head toward their cars; hers a stolen Fiat, Beyoncé’s a big yellow truck, gleaming like a jewel. On the way Gaga links their arms, their steps falling into rhythm automatically. “Let me tell you a story,” Gaga says, “about birds and bees.”
***
Sex is a revelation. It’s a whole book of them, complete with the Four Horsemen and the coming of Kingdom of Heavens.
Gaga is much shier and circumspect about it than Beyoncé which she finds curious considering their relative backgrounds. It might have something to do with the fact that up until the point Gaga tentatively kisses her, she hadn’t even considered this, them, a possibility. It’s not that she’s naïve enough to think that sex only happens between a man and a woman, it’s just that… Well, all the sex she’s seen, all the sex that has been forced on her, that’s she’s fought off, or even the sex she’s initiated, has involved a man.
And it hasn’t been great. Not all bad, not like the thing that happened so long ago she doesn’t let it take room in her mind anymore, but nothing special either.
Gaga is all kinds of special of course. More importantly though, she genuinely believes that Beyoncé is someone special too, someone who matters. No one’s ever done that, not since her mama thought her special enough to die for.
They’re sitting on the hood of her truck, waiting for the sunrise. Gaga is wearing shorts too big for her and one of Beyoncé’s tops. She’s picking dried blood from under her fingernails, remains of the gas station attendant who had been stupid enough to come after them with a shotgun when they hadn’t felt obligated to pay, not after the way he’d spoken to them like they were whores.
Not that there was anything wrong with being a whore, of course, but the attendant clearly hadn’t been a champion of sex worker rights.
He’d screamed mighty prettily though when she’d snapped his fingers, one by one, while Gaga held a gun to his head, smiling all the while and looking at Beyoncé like she was a work of art. And when she’d pulled the trigger… Beyoncé shivers at the memory.
“You cold, Honey?” Gaga asks, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.
Beyoncé smiles, about to point out that even if she was, Gaga’s skinny arm would hardly make a difference, when Gaga suddenly shifts much closer. Her pointy, curious face tilts in an oddly bird-like movement and before Beyoncé has a chance to ask what’s going on, she darts in and drops a quick kiss to her lips.
A second later she’s leaning back again, eyeing Beyoncé nervously.
“What…” Beyoncé licks her lips, blinking slowly. Her skin breaks out in goose bumps and it’s definitely not because of the temperature, cool as it is this early in the morning. “What was that?” she asks, feeling immediately stupid because of course she knows what it was, she just… Hadn’t known that Gaga wanted to do that. Or that she would. Or that she herself…
“A kiss,” Gaga says, like the question is completely valid though. Her arm is still loosely around Beyoncé’s shoulders, her bloodied nails scratching lightly at her sleeve as if asking for entrance. “Did you like it?”
No one had ever said that to her either, not like they meant it, like Beyoncé could say ‘no’ and that would be okay. She asks about that though, just to be sure. “If I didn’t… Would you still stay with me?” It may have only been a few months, but they’ve been the best months of her life and Beyoncé doesn’t want this to stop. With Gaga she feels free and tethered at the same time, both queen and worker of their hive of two.
“Yes,” Gaga says, nodding. Her hair is up in stiff peaks that nod along with her, somehow adding to the sincerity of the response.
“And would you let me drive when it rains?”
“Yes.”
“Get me pastrami sandwiches?”
“Yes.”
“Laugh at my jokes?”
“You don’t make any jokes,” Gaga says, which is true. “But if you did, I would laugh and laugh and laugh until my mouth got big enough to gobble up the sun.”
“It already is,” Beyoncé says, and that’s not a joke either, it’s the truth. “Would you still pull the trigger?”
“Yes,” Gaga says, “Always. For you.”
“Would you watch me pull the trigger?”
“Fuck yes,” Gaga all but moans, her voice breathless and raspy, “yes, yes, you should. Please, I want to see, I…” She starts fumbling for the gun then and there, almost dropping it in her eagerness.
Beyoncé is quicker though. Her hand clamps around Gaga’s, tight and sure, and she kisses her back. It’s wet and sugar-sweet, and Beyoncé takes her time, tasting the inside of Gaga’s mouth thoroughly, curling their tongues together and licking the honeycomb of her teeth. They kiss and kiss, and Gaga’s touch is so careful, her fingers so clever, and she keeps asking ‘like this?’ and ‘is this right?’ and ‘teach me?’ even though it’s her that knows more about it.
When the sun finally rises, breaking through the distant treeline like a forest fire, Gaga is kissing her way down Beyoncé’s belly, leaving little kitten licks across her ribs that make her squirm and laugh. She’s clawing at the earth; the two of them on the grass now, the truck between them and the road. Every now and then a car goes past but none of them stop and Beyoncé is almost disappointed because the gun is right there still and wouldn’t it be good if…
Gaga’s mouth slides lower then and Beyoncé thinks that they must burn brighter than the sun now; the two of them going supernova, growing vast and hot, gobbling up the whole world in their wake. When she comes it’s a little like that long fall down the stairs all those years ago.
Except this time there’s someone waiting to catch her.
***
They have their first fight on a field full of sunflowers, with the sky like a robin’s egg above them. They’re somewhere on the border between Nebraska and Kansas, Gaga is not sure on which side of the state line exactly nor does she care.
She cares about Beyoncé’s rigid back as she slams the truck door and stalks off, hands fisted at her sides, clearly furious. Gaga isn’t sure what to do about this, can’t remember ever much caring if anyone was angry at her because she just can’t ever remember caring this much to begin with.
It sucks, and suddenly she’s angry too, railing against the bars of the gilded cage Beyoncé has shut her in.
“What’s your problem?” she demands, walking after her into the shifting shade of the towering flowers.
Beyoncé whirls around, unsteady on her feet, the heels of her shoes sinking into the soft earth. Gaga has no such problems as she’s been barefoot since the motel.
“You didn’t have to kill them all,” Beyoncé says and her voice is smooth and emotionless and Gaga can’t stand it so she screams.
“No, but I wanted to! I wanted to!” She spreads her arms wide as if embracing the sky. “You hear that? I wanted to and I would do it again!”
Beyoncé looks angry and turned on in equal measure and Gaga would call it a victory if this was about winning.
“I hear you,” Beyoncé says, rubbing an absent hand over her belly, like stroking at the coiling desire. Her voice is husky, huskier than normal, and Gaga wants to wrap herself in it like a caterpillar in a cocoon. “But it was an unnecessary risk.”
“It was fun!” Gaga shouts because it had been. Beyoncé is right, maybe, but the other guests would have discovered the dead receptionist sooner or later so really, Gaga had only been… expediting the events.
And it’s not like Beyoncé hadn’t helped. Once Gaga had started shooting the locks, she’d been quick enough to start dragging the motel’s occupants out of their rooms, most of them still in their pyjamas; sleep-soft and terrified, just the way Gaga likes her rats.
Beyoncé doesn’t contradict her, only says: “There were too many of them to contain like that.” And alright, so it was a miscalculation of logistics, Gaga can give her that.
“We could… use a bomb next time,” she suggests uncertainly.
“We wouldn’t be able to see then,” Beyoncé points out, and that’s true. Both of them like to see and to be seen, to watch and to be watched, and that’s what makes them so perfect together. They’re each other’s audience and performer, director and stage manager all rolled into one.
“Poison then?” Gaga offers, licking her lips like she can already taste it. “If there’s a lot of them, like a whole diner of rats, and we could make them choke…” It probably won’t be as good as actually slitting their throats and feeling the blood pump over your hands, warm and sticky, but it has a charm all its own.
“Deal,” Beyoncé says and just like that the argument is over, blown apart by the promise of murder. It’s a beautiful thing, this love of theirs. A beautiful, terrible thing.
“Come here, Honey,” Gaga says, opening her arms in invitation.
Beyoncé melts into them, all curves and grace and iron-hard muscle. “Ladybird,” she murmurs, nipping at Gaga’s jaw before brushing their mouths together.
Kissing Beyoncé feels like those paintings of melting landscapes; everything slips and slides and stretches, until the whole world is one continuous swirl of colour.
“I want to get you diamonds,” Gaga says, pulling away just long enough to get the words out before plunging back into the storm, fearless.
“I don’t need diamonds,” Beyoncé tells her, breathless and smiling, when they pull apart.
“I’ll get you bracelets and tiaras and gemstones,” Gaga promises anyway. “I’ll get you champagne and caviar and the open horizon sharper than either of those. I’ll get you screamers and mewlers and beggers. I’ll get you silent stars for our Technicolor dream.”
“I don’t need those either,” Beyoncé says. She’s serious now and trailing a finger over Gaga’s features, tracing her eyebrows and the curve of earlobe. It tickles. “I want them, with you, but I don’t need them.”
“Just me then?” Gaga asks.
“Just you. Just us.”
This time, when they kiss, Gaga goes for blood, biting down on Beyoncé’s bottom lip until the skin breaks.
“Oh, fuck you.” It sounds like a promise, coming out of Beyoncé’s red-red mouth, the words sweet and copper-bright.
“Yes, please,” Gaga says and starts unbuttoning her dress. Above them, the sunflowers sway and dance, heavy with seed.
***
It can’t go on forever.
They chase the summer down south as far as they can go without passports. Beyoncé knows where to get fake ones, but it’ll take a while so they follow the Mexican border, killing time. There’s plenty of tequila on this side as well and Gaga has never tasted sweeter than when smeared with salt and lime, gasping under Beyoncé’s tongue.
The desert appeals to them both and they spend hours watching the lizards and snakes, staying up late just to hear the coyotes as they call to each other in excitement and ardour. Gaga gets good at mimicking the noise, sometimes doing it just fuck with the tourists.
They always draw attention to themselves but it’s not something neither of them knows how to change, nor cares enough to try. When it gets too much they simply disappear and move on. And if it really gets too much there are always ways of making other people disappear too. The desert really does have its appeal.
They rob liquor stores and gas stations and fruit stalls for money, for petrol, for sweet watermelons and for the sheer addictive thrill of it. And maybe they get a little cocky, a little careless, but it seems like the world is nothing but an endless buffet spread, groaning under the weight of treats and tasty morsels. And she and her lady… Well, they sample at will, glutting themselves with it all and each other, too busy setting rat traps to see the one snapping shut on their own necks.
It happens in an unremarkable looking mom-and-pop store, not too far off the highway. They’re running low on cash and Gaga has been waxing lyrical about marshmallows for two days straight.
“Fucking shut up already,” Beyoncé grouses, fond but exasperated too, “I’ll get you some mallows.”
It’s late when she turns the truck into the shop parking lot, coming to a screeching halt. There’s no one around except the wind and the stars and the two of them, as elemental as the surrounding night.
“My hero!” Gaga crows, arms stretched toward the sky as she twirls, her dress flaring out like a sail.
“Yeah, yeah,” Beyoncé mutters, pretending not to smile. “Stop dancing and go kick that door in.”
Gaga flips her off but does as she’s told, something she’s good at when she wants to be. The trouble is, Beyoncé never knows when that might be. And by ‘trouble’ she obviously means ‘fun’.
“This is gonna need bolt cutters,” Gaga calls out and Beyoncé fishes them from the truck before going to join her.
They make fast work of the lock and are soon inside, each grabbing a shopping basket and moving down the aisles, throwing stuff in.
“Found them!” Gaga shouts, sounding delighted and girlish. She waves a bag of marshmallows like a trophy and Beyoncé swipes it from her with a grin.
“C’mon then,” she purrs, already wet. “Come and get your treat.” She feeds the mallows to her, one by one, while Gaga moans around her fingers, sugar sticky and all hers.
Beyoncé is ready to go after that. They’ve got money and supplies, including five more bags of marshmallows, but Gaga wants to check the backroom.
And that’s when they hit the jackpot.
There’s an actual safe there, presumably with much more cash inside than what was left in the till.
“Ooooh, baby.” Gaga strokes the combination lock in a way that almost makes Beyoncé jealous.
“There’s no way we can open that here,” she points out, leaning on the doorway.
“That’s why we’re taking it with us,” Gaga says, grinning. “We can blow it up later. Can you go get the tarpaulin from the truck, sweetie? This is way too heavy to carry, we’ll have to drag it.”
“Sure,” Beyoncé shrugs, giving in. Gaga likes blowing things up and they don’t have many opportunities for such fun.
She hasn’t taken more than three steps out of the room though when the fun stops. A single sharp beep pierces the air, immediately followed by a loud, metallic clang. The floor under her feet vibrates from the impact and Beyoncé turns around just in time to see the security door lock into place, sealing Gaga inside the backroom.
“Fuck!” Beyoncé shouts, tugging at the bars in vain. “What the fuck did you do?”
Gaga is looking a little wild around the eyes, but otherwise she’s just standing there, poised and beautiful like a ballet dancer on top of a music box. “I tried opening the safe,” she says. “It must have triggered it. Who the fuck knew a place like this would have security like that?” She gestures at steel bars.
The thought occurs to them both at the same time. Anyone who invests on a trigger-activated security door is unlikely to stop there. They must have tripped some kind of alarm on entering the premises and the cops were likely already on their way.
“Shit, shit! How long have we been here?” Beyoncé asks frantically, looking at her watch even though she has no idea what time it was when they got in.
“Too long,” Gaga says, eerily calm, “You’ve got to…”
Beyoncé doesn’t wait to hear what she has to say. She runs to the car and then back, bolt cutters in hand. If they can just break one bar maybe Gaga can squeeze through, she’s small and thin, she could do it.
“Stop, stop, it’s no use,” Gaga says when Beyoncé is back but she comes to help anyway, adding her strength as they push at the handles, both of them sweating from the effort. “Reinforced,” Gaga spits finally, some of the apprehension pushing through though she visibly stamps on it. “Honey, you’ve got to go.”
“No, no, no, I can’t…” Beyoncé’s heart is a hummingbird in her chest; small and fragile and fluttering-shaking-beating in panic. She reaches for Gaga, clutching at her hands, the thin material of her dress, angry and desperate and shamefully afraid.
“Shh, shh,” Gaga whispers, stroking the hair from her face. “It’ll be alright, Honey. I promise.” She kisses her then, achingly sweet and bitter like life. They can hear the sirens in the distance. “Please go,” Gaga says again, pushing Beyoncé away. “Go, go, go!”
Beyoncé takes a few hesitant steps, each like a nail to her heart, and when she finally turns and runs all she hears is Gaga laughing, wild and beautiful. “Call me!” she yells after her, “Call me on the telephone!”
A couple of weeks later Beyoncé does exactly that.
And that’s the start of the real story, the one that goes on forever.
***