Speakeasy

A/N: This was originally written for a prompt of "saying yes". I wanted to see if I could follow that without having any actual dialogue in the piece. In the end, I decided that I needed the one line.

If you missed it on the description, this story contains some pretty serious SPOILERS for Baccano, through episode 13

- - -

He takes her to a speakeasy for her birthday. He doesn't tell her it's her birthday, of course, because then he might be wrong, or she might not even know when her birthday is, and it would make her sad, he would think, to not know. So he just decides that it's her birthday today and so it is, and there's a pretty new dress for her and a car waiting for them to take them really not so many blocks away that they couldn't have walked, but he's nothing if not a gentleman to this particular, beautiful, lady.

Chane is beautiful. It bothers him sometimes, when he thinks about her getting old or dying without him. It bothers him sometimes to think of her as just a figment of his imagination, it bothers him to think of her as something else. But she is beautiful, dark hair and red dress and knowing that she could kill anyone in here, except for him, knowing that there's a knife under that dress and under that, there's a woman who loves him is the most thrilling thing he can imagine. He loves her. He loves knowing that no one else loves her like he does. He loves knowing that none of the people around them know who she is, what she is, what she could do.

They see the pretty girl in a pretty dress. Her father sees the knife, the weapon, the tool. Claire sees all of that, and loves her for it, but under that, he sees Chane. The grace that's neither a young woman's nor a young killer's. The way she'll give him a shocked look sometimes at little things, flowers, this dress, like she doesn't know what to make of him. He listens to her silences and she lets him talk. He loves her.

Which is why he notices that she's less expressive than normal, more silent, as the crooning notes of the lounge singer float over them. The singer's a pretty enough girl, all pale and delicate, light hair, white flesh, white dress. He supposes that, at one point, he would have thought her beautiful, but he's already with the loveliest girl in the world, so why would he even look? But Chane is looking, oddly, glancing over at the singer when Claire's busy ordering their drinks or looking off into space for a moment as he searches for a word. For almost a whole glass of champagne, he wonders if Chane is actually looking, the way he might have, once. But no, not really, he decides, finally. Which means it's something else.

And then he knows, understands suddenly, and his own rambling sort of conversation stops and he smiles, reaching over the table to cup her cheek in his hand. The startled look she gives him, her eyes a little wet at the corners, is all the confirmation he needs.

"It's too noisy in here, I think. Let's go somewhere else," she's surprised, but when she closes her eyes and nods, too fast, Claire knows he's understood perfectly. He'd rather listen to her eyes than her voice anyway, he's never heard a better harmony.

- - -

She's tucked into his arm the whole way back to his place. He supposes it's their place, really, because unless she's doing something specifically for her father or one of their other friends from the train, she's there every night. But, for some reason, he has trouble thinking of it as "hers". Not because of any silly notions of a woman's place-- his woman's place is with a knife in her hands-- but because he's not sure that any one place can be "her place". She belongs everywhere and nowhere, just like him but, unlike him, she doesn't pick a persona to wrap herself in, she is always herself, always Chane, always his Chane, and it's always like a punch in the gut, how much that makes him feel even more immortal.

She always seems surprised, that first moment, when his hand slides under the strap of the red dress, slips it off her shoulder, and his fingers trace her collarbone. It's a part of her song that he can never quite hear the lyrics to, no matter how he strains his ears. It isn't that she doesn't want to be touched, he knows that now, though he might have been stymied by that look the first time if he were anyone but who he is. She just seems... young, innocent, somehow, even now, when they've done this enough that he's stopped keeping count. He is frightened of her, every time, in that moment, before she melts against him, winds her arms around his neck and shrugs out of the other strap herself. He's frightened of her because that's the moment where she could kill him, if she wanted to. She's the one that looks surprised, but he's always the one who feels vulnerable.
In that moment, she could always say no.
If she could say no, what else could she do?

For a man who really, truly believes that this whole world was made just for him, it's terrifying. It's also why he loves her. He'd felt it on the train. He was mostly kidding, when he asked her to marry him, to write her answer in the top of the car with her knife. He was attracted to her, of course, but there would be other girls, if she said no. It wasn't until he'd made his way back to the car later and found himself, for a moment, afraid to look down, that he realized how serious he was about her. He'd never, in all his time in this circus everyone else called life, been afraid to look down. He had never stopped loving her for an instant since then.

And then the dizzying moment passes and his hands pull gently on the back of the dress and the whole thing slides off her and pools on the floor, red as blood-- then it's just the shoes and the knife and then just the knife as he picks her up and carries her into the bedroom. Sometimes, she takes the knife off herself. Sometimes she undresses herself and it's attached to the dress, just another thing in the way to remove. Sometimes she forgets and leaves it where it is, as much a part of herself as her arm or her eyes. He doesn't avoid it, when she forgets, but he never takes it off for her, either. He doesn't really want her disarmed, not by him, not by a choice other than her own.

She lays back on the bed, neither wanton or self-conscious, but just Chane, just looking at him, just his, and he can't ever remember wanting something the way he wants her. It's almost too much effort to shrug out of his coat, shoes, shirt, it takes too long and what he wants is right there, and then he just gives up and decides he's been patient enough and joins her, hands sliding up her legs, his left hand catching slightly on the belt still holding the knife.

He tried to be more patient, once, tried to read her eyes for what she wanted, strained to hear what she was saying in each breath she shuddered out, but eventually she bit him on the neck hard enough that he was wearing turtlenecks through the most miserably hot week of the late spring he'd ever been through, and he'd stopped trying. Now, he does whatever he wants and knows that if she wants something, she'll ask. Sometimes, she does, but it's rare, and she's not asking now, so he just slides his hands up her legs and then follows with his lips, pulling one leg up to taste the thin flesh behind her knee for a moment before sliding up to where he really wants to be.

It was strange, at first, that she's so silent, even her breathing soft in the stillness of the room, weird to hear his own noises louder than he would have thought they'd be. But he learns how to listen, how to feel what she can't say. He loves the way she tastes, the way this one, small part of her is actually soft and delicate, the way he can turn such a solid person to liquid with just a touch right there. She's beautiful and she's letting him see this about her and she might be the one arching her back off the bed and pressing herself against his mouth, but he's the one humbled, he thinks, he's the one who's blessed.

He'd forgotten that he was still half dressed in his haste to feel her underneath his hands, but the look she gives him, even flushed pink and trying to catch her breath, reminds him of why patience is considered a virtue. Even so, he sheds the rest of his clothing quickly, without leaving her side, completely unconcerned with being seen as overeager. She knows him.

Too well, it seems, as he moves over her, because she plants a hand solidly against his shoulder and shoves, hard. He rolls with it, instinctively, and when he comes to rest, she's on top of him, grinning, and her smile is like the rest of her: half a sad little thing and half a grin like the whole world could be hers. It's possessive, he thinks, tempered with the knowledge of what possession means. He's hers and she loves him and she knows what he is, has seen him covered in blood, has seen him subtle and suave, has seen him a little lost for words, perhaps even vulnerable himself. He's hers and she knows the dangerous thing she owns, holds, eases inside herself, the slowness more for his sake than her own.

He doesn't even try to stop the noise that wrings from him, though he does fight against closing his eyes, wanting to see every moment of this, of her. He can do crazy acrobatics, things with his body no human being should be able to do, but she holds him still with her motion, the rise and fall of her, and he wraps his hands around her hips, but not to constrain her in any way, just because he needs something to hold onto, and she is real in his world, the way that everyone else, even his brothers, isn't.

She wrings every noise she can out of him, makes him loud enough for both of them before there is, once again, silence.


He remembers later, much later, that it's supposed to be her birthday, that he was supposed to be making things as nice for her as he could and he hasn't really apologized properly for subjecting her to the singing in the speakeasy. She doesn't seem to ever miss her voice, though-- he's not sure how he could have known, and he's not sure how to apologize for it. He doubts she would really want his apology anyway, it would be too much like pity. So he doesn't apologize after. Doesn't apologize when his phone rings and it's Luck and there's a job he needs done. Doesn't apologize when he gets up to go. He knows that she knows. He knows that she'll understand.

He wonders, sometimes, what her voice would sound like, whether she ever sang when she was a little girl, whether her voice would be high and clear, like a bell, or a low, sultry sort of purr. Would she have an accent, or would she speak perfect English, would her voice be cultured or the sort of rough and tumble kind of thing that Firo speaks? It's only ever idly that he wonders these things, though.

Mostly, he figures, she would just sound like Chane.