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Author: Guede Mazaka
Rating: PG.
Pairing: Aisha/Franklin Clay
Feedback: Good lines, typos, etc.
Disclaimer: Characters were not created by me and I take no credit for them.
Notes: Movie-verse The Losers fic.
Summary: Aisha isn’t a one-liner.
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Girl never knew her momma, never got her daddy to pay attention to her, grew up too hard and too fast.
He’s a good dancer. His eyes slipping through the cockfight crowd to her, dipping low and warm in that little shithole of a bar. The way he turns his wrists and ankles and knees, careful, slow enough for some to mistake precision for middle-aged spread. The slant of his shoulders even when his back is to her, anticipating her next move. She already knew who he was when they chatted each other up in the bar and he still looked good to her, like he’d give her a long fast run that’d let her kick up her heels for once. It’d been a long time since anybody’s given her that. Since she’s let anybody give her that.
She’s nobody’s fool. She knew who he was and she knew why he’d been at her father’s house in the first place. But she needed them, she told herself, and they were just front-loaded monkeys dancing to orders from on high. She’d known the type all her life, counted on the type, killed the type. You can’t blame a snake for being a snake and she’s never wasted her time like that. She needed them and they needed her and nobody was going anywhere else till they’d gone after Max, anyway. If she danced a little first, if she flicked her skirts here and there and let somebody’s hand slide round her back, it was just a little diversion. Monkeys like fun, and toys, and pretty shiny things.
Even in broad daylight Clay’s no magazine cover. He might look a little more Sunday-best with the stubble shaved clean and a tie on, but he’s got eyes that go deeper and darker than the double barrels on a shotgun, and he smiles like he’s fixing to have you one way or the other. Dead or under him, either way he doesn’t care that much. He might think he’s being kind, or that he cares, especially about his boys, but it all goes back to the same fight or fuck place. There has to be something to fight/fuck over.
The thing is, she thinks, lying on him, watching the tension in the creases around his eyes, his mouth—the thing is, she knows who he is and what he is and where he’s been, and he doesn’t know a thing about her. She knows where the dance is going so it doesn’t matter if she lets him lead for a little while. He doesn’t know, and as good as he is with improvisation, as natural as his rhythm is, he doesn’t know the last turn in the dance. She does. So all of this, all of this planning in the day and fucking at night, all of his growling possessiveness and sudden passiveness under her, his breath in her hair and his hand lying easy on her hip—it all doesn’t matter.
She knows he killed her father. However it happened, he was there and he tried to save a bunch of schoolchildren and he got them more than five klicks away, but he didn’t take her father with them. It wasn’t his finger on the button but it’s his blood her father’s grave cries out for, his blood same as Max’s. When the monkey dances, he might not choose the tune but it’s his feet stamping in the dirt.
Aisha knew her mother. Maybe not when they were both alive, but later, when she knew how to sift through computer databases and dusty boxes in abandoned warehouses. And she’s always had her father’s attention, always—even if she didn’t know that for sure till he died and his estate dropped into her bank account. And she grew up hard and fast but that’s the way she likes it, and she doesn’t have the time to waste on thinking about whether she would’ve liked it different. She’s nobody’s footnote. She’s doing this for her father but because that’s her choice to do it for him. If she’d chosen to walk away she would have walked away, and nobody could have brought her back.
If she chooses to let Clay take her out on the floor for a few turns, if she chooses to lean into the turns and let his head rest on her arm a while, then that’s what she chooses. She doesn’t have to stick to the steps everybody else thinks they know. All she needs to know is how it ends.
***