Love You but I'm Goin' Down

[infiniteandsmall]

AN: Here is the aforementioned weird Allydia schmoop inspired by a Lana Del Rey song. You know what you're getting into. Lyrics from "Off to the Races" by Lana Del Rey. Unbeta'd, just finished, if there are any major errors they're all mine. Not really triggery at all (considering the show this surprised even me), slight hypervigilance and allusions to stalking. Part One in a series of femslash ficlets based on Lana Del Rey songs.

Summary: For one night, they've got a full tank of gas and Allison can't even care if her dad'll be mad anymore. Allison and Lydia and one knife just in case, a crossbow, ten arrows that they aren't going to use, and the road.

                Love You but I’m Goin’ Down

               

               It’s cold outside and foggy and low in Allison’s stomach there’s something trying to push out of her skin and fly from her mouth. She tightens her belt a notch, tucks her feet underneath her and grips her bedsheets so she won’t fall, like riding a rollercoaster without seatbelts, the rickety wooden one the first time she ever went to an amusement park
               He’s out there, maybe the girl who sits next to her in science is out there or one of the boys who always takes her order on Saturday afternoons at Starbucks. Her door’s locked from the outside and her dad took the car. The window’s open, the window’s fogged and drawn in the fog is something—
                The window curtains flutter, her clock glows persistent red like eyes and she adds the numbers to make sure they’re still numbers, 10: 47, one plus zero plus four, one times zero dead end dead end—
               Ten times four, then, that works, she thinks of Lydia, lying next to her, scribbling equations so sharp they broke her pencil, jaw set lips pressed until her breath slows. She thinks of pressing her hand against Lydia’s heart, holding it steady, but Lydia’s eyes are already far off—
               She clenches her teeth hard enough that something creaks inside her jaw.
               “Allison!” Someone hisses from outside, thin girl voice hazy in the damp night, and she focuses on the voice and the crowd of flies in front of her vision clears, they catch the light as they go, blue and gold and red.
               “Allison!” Lydia calls outside her window, and she can hear a car running in the background behind the crickets and the wind in the trees and the knifepoint prick of the quiet murmur of the stereo with the bass turned up, Lydia’s nice one that she likes soft.
               Lydia’s upturned face underneath, eager sly smile, deja vu.
              “You’re not going to backflip out of the window, are you?” She says. “Put on something nice, God.”
              “How nice?” Allison says.
              “Don’t bring your big crossbow, I’ve got knife if anything comes after us.”
               Allison digs a leather jacket out of her closet, the one that doesn’t smell faintly coppery, the one she makes sure always smells like perfume, the one she never wears hunting. When Lydia’s going hunting she takes her dad’s shotgun and a baseball bat and wears her pink converse.
               Right now, Lydia’s wearing boots, flat-heeled but not made for running. Her hair’s curling around her face and she smiles, her lip gloss sparkling in the light coming out of the family room window.
              “Where are we going?” Allison says, shaking the shock out of her ankles, pulling her hair out of her collar.
              “I don’t know,” Lydia says, “but far.”
               Allison’s finished scanning the 360 degrees around them, no unusual shapes, no glows of blue or gold or red, and looking into Lydia’s eyes is like drowning.
              “Let’s go,” she says.

              “My old man is
               A bad man but
               I can’t deny the way he holds my hand,
               He grabs me, he has me by my heart,”
               Lydia’s got the stereo louder than it’s ever been and there’s no one in the back seats (they checked). Gold streetlights, red taillights, the dark blue of the air and the space. The concrete of the road and the wiggly asphalt snakes roll by, the trees roll by, the acres and acres of woods, they’re between two towns the middle of nowhere and the windows are open but they’re too fast, they’re too fast for Beacon Hills and at the minute they’re faster than any wolf.
               There’s a wolfsbane flower underneath the seat, Allison rips it apart petal by petal and lets it loose outside the window into the cool wet drip of the night, (not Hansel and Gretel because if each one grows breaks through the concrete fells a few trees there will be a line there will be a brand-new border and they will never have to go back they will be safe forever).
                It is her and Lydia and one knife and one small crossbow with ten arrows. It is her and Lydia and slightly impractical boots and clothes that have never had to be bleached of coppery-smelling bloodstains. It is her and Lydia and the road.
                “Swimming pool glimmering darling
                White bikini off with my red nail polish
                Watch me in the swimming pool
                Bright blue ripples
                You can sit and sippin’ on your black crystal—”

                They drive west. The road winds through the suburbs to the untidiest curviest Main Street with neon signs and restaurants closed up for the night, and branches off to a street with bars and brighter neon signs and people laughing in front of the doors, slamming their car doors, and the road gets thinner and thinner until—
               “It’s the ocean,” Allison breathes, and Lydia drives slower so she can hear the steady roar of the waves, smell the salt and the grit of the sand (also so she doesn’t run over the crowds lingering in the street so thin and cracked and sandy and little-used that it doesn’t seem like a street, the ones crossing drunk and laughing to the next bar) and turns the stereo up even more as they turn sharply onto a road that winds along the shore. The bars blur away, the horizon smudges into the water, the bass thumps into her heart. Hotels, blue swimming pools locked up and lit gold outside and rooms lit and unlit turning the face of the building into a haphazard checkerboard, people or inner tubes and foam noodles silhouetted on their balconies, the sea dark and stretched out like another road.
              “Let’s walk on the beach,” Allison says, and Lydia smiles from the driver’s seat, on hand on the steering wheel, fishing for a hair tie in her purse with the other.
             “Of course,” she says.
             “Likes to watch me in the glass room, bathroom, Chateau Marmot,
             Slippin’ on my red dress, puttin’ on my makeup,
             Glass film, perfume, cognac, lilac fumes
             Says it feels like heaven to ‘im...”

             They park in a hotel parking lot and Allison tries to cram the crossbow into her purse while Lydia pulls back her hair and swipes on another coat of lip gloss.
             Lydia raises one eyebrow, her hand dangling easy, wrist limp, over the steering wheel, and the yellow, contained car lights hit it at an angle that makes the slight puckering of the scars that run across her palm, parallel to the fine tendons of her wrist, on the second knuckle of her thumb, stand out.
            “Just leave it,” she says. “Just for tonight?”
             Across the street someone’s singing, drunk, off-key, slurring their s’s into mush: “Is this real li-i-fe? Is this just fa-antasy?”
             She’s smiling in one corner of her mouth, head cocked to listen.
             “Can we take the knife?” Allison says.
             She looks into the Allison’s eye. The smile softens. “You want to carry?”

             Allison feels like she’s a magnet straining to the sea, the sharp prickle of the kind of grass that grows only on the edge of beaches (and that would be left in the yard of a hotel only on the edge of beaches) on her bare feet and the wind whipping her hair back urging her on. Lydia sits on the steps that lead down to the beach to painstakingly roll her jeans up to her knees while Allison shifts her weight from one foot to the other and nervously scans for anyone watching them from the hotel. Her own jeans are drooping down around her calves, she hitches them up roughly, her hands are already sandy and she hasn’t even set foot on the beach. The sand is pervading as sand is, tracked through the parking lot and the sidewalks, settling on the grass and trying to suffocate it.
            “C’mon, aren’t you ready yet?” she says, swiping at the end of Lydia’s ponytail and resting her forearms on Lydia’s shoulders.
            Lydia sits up gingerly. “My butt’s sandy. And it’s wet.”
            Allison muffles a giggle and swipes her hands across the seat of Lydia’s jeans briskly. “There, problem solved.”
           “Allison!” Lydia bites back a squeal.
           “C’mon, let’s go,” Allison begs, taking her hand and starting to run.
           Lydia stumbles a step but catches herself, skids in the sand and laughs. She doesn’t try to pull her hand out, just curls her fingers’ around Allison’s and holds on.
           Allison thinks of running into the water and swimming and not stopping. Of course she knows how to swim, she can remember mornings in the pool, just one more lap, just two, just three more seconds underwater, hands over her head and tread water, but she’s not thinking about that now. She can’t see lights from the other side of the water, it runs all the way to the sky, and the beach stretches down and curves soft around the shore.
            Feeling with her toes, she navigates the strip of sharp-edged crushed shells and makes her way to the edge of the ocean. She and Lydia stand, digging their toes into the wet and viscous sand, and there’s a dampness to the air here that’s different from the dampness of the woods, it’s heavier, weighing down their clothes and the goosebumped hairs on their neck. The smell is overpowered, salt-strong mixed with something else (seaweed or minerals or seafoam or just vast churning water, she doesn’t know), and it reminds her of sweat, how Lydia smells when she stands back gripping her weapon handle, breathing heavy, job done, how Scott’s neck tastes under her lips when he can stop running.
            They’re still gripping each others’ hands, idly swinging them back and forth and the waves rush up to them and then slink away, and a particularly inquisitive and forward one rushes up too eager and runs over their toes.
            “Cold!” Lydia hisses, and even Allison takes an instinctive hop back.
            “You have to jump them,” she says, inching forward again.
            “What?”
            “When they come up, you have to jump. Right over them,” Allison demonstrates on the next one, and Lydia stands next to her again.
            “Next one, we’ll do together,” she says, and Allison looks over at her. She’s a shape in the dark, but Allison can tell from the outline of her eyebrows that she has her concentrating face on.
            “Ready...” Allison breathes, and Lydia fills in,
            “Set.”
            “Go!” They shout-whisper, and as they land Lydia falls forward, deeper into the sea, pulling Allison with her.
             “Cold!” Lydia hisses again, and this time it’s twice as urgent, but Allison is already prepared for the shock.
             “Stay in! It’ll be nice when you get used to it.”
             Lydia hops from one foot to the other, but she doesn’t let go of Allison’s hand to skitter back to the dry sand.
             “You’re the one who pulled us in anyways,” Allison teases, gently splashing a little water towards Lydia with her free hand.
             “Hey!” She squeaks, and, letting go of Allison’s hand to cup both her hands in the water, she tosses back twice the amount.
             “Just can’t lose, can you?” Allison says.
             “You should know that by now,” Lydia says smugly.
              “Well, you should know by now,” Allison says, “that I don’t lose either.” She kicks a mini-wave towards Lydia, and Lydia screams, blood-curdling and (wrists bleeding split lip) Allison feels the bottom drop out of her chest.
              “Oh my god, are you okay, I—” Allison moves forward, reaching for Lydia’s hands, but then Lydia leans back and laughs, big and mouth-open jaw loose and Allison can’t help but grin back as her heartbeat slows down again.
              “You are going to pay for that, Argent!” she chokes out, and one look in Lydia’s eyes and Allison is running the other way.
              For once the way her legs move slow and hampered doesn’t remind her of her nightmares.

             “Now I’m off the races, cases of Bacardi chasers
             Chasin’ me all over town
             ‘Cause he knows I’m wasted
             Facin’
             Time again in Riker’s island and I won’t get out,”
             They’re wet and sandy and sore from laughing when they stumble back to the car, and Lydia digs towels out of her trunk while Allison checks the backseats.
             “Oh, god,” Allison gasps, trying vaguely to stop laughing and not sure if she’ll be able to.
             “Want me to go beg a beer off of someone?” Lydia says, wrapping a towel around Allison’s shoulders.
             “No thanks,” Allison says.
             “I wouldn’t drink,” Lydia says, tucking her own towel business-like under her armpits.
             “Maybe later,” Allison says, suddenly a little drunk already off her own daring.
             Lydia’s eyeing the lit-up pool encased in chain-link fence that butts up against the parking lot.
             “You aren’t thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you?”
             “Of course not,” Lydia says, rolling her eyes. “We have to find one without the lights on.”
             “Because I’m crazy, baby
              I need you to come here and save me,”

             There’s on light shimmering from underneath the water, it’s dim but it lights up its quarter of the pool as blue-gold instead of inky black. It’s the only place that Allison can see what’s underneath.
             “You coming in?” Lydia says.
             “I think—I don’t know. I’ll watch.” As soon as that last sentence is out of her mouth she regrets it, because Lydia’s already stepped out of her jeans and shirt and she’s unclasping her bra, (it’s white and red and probably lacy but Allison doesn’t look long enough to be sure) but Lydia doesn’t raise an eyebrow or give her a look, just throws the bra on top of her pile of clothes and slides her way in.
            She’s lithe and solid against the constant white-black sideways glinting of the water, and for a second she’s submerged and Allison can’t breath until she sees the flutter of a very human foot in the circle of blue transparency around the light.
            Lydia surfaces, pale with her hair slicked flat against her white neck, and she gives Allison a coy smile. “The water’s great.”
            Allison shakes her head. “It’s—I can’t see what’s under it.”
            Lydia rests her arms on the concrete edge. Her voice’s soft. “Want to leave?”
           “I don’t mind watching.” This time she doesn’t really regret it.
           “Then settle down and stay a while,” Lydia says, and there’s a little purr to her voice even though her smile’s gone from coy to wide. Her mascara’s waterproof.

           They’re hiding in the bushes while Lydia slides into her jeans and Allison fumbles with the clasp of the red and white and lacy bra and helps Lydia slide her shirt on over it.
           “Let’s go,” Lydia breathes, and they duck out from behind the shrubs and run to the car. Perfunctory glance at the backseats while Lydia gets it in gear, and then Allison slams the shotgun side door and they’re off towards the neon lights across the street and the unfurl of the road.
           Lydia parks in a sidestreet between a bar and motel and leans close to Allison, eyes flicking down to her lips, and her breath smells like chlorine and strawberry lip gloss.
           Allison leans forward to meet her, and Lydia’s hand snakes around her waist while the car idles.
           “I’m your little scarlet, starlet, singin’ in the garden
           Kiss me on my open mouth...”

           “What do we do now?” Allison says, as the sea fades out of view and the smell’s overwhelmed by the wind whipping in through the windows, kept only in Lydia’s hands on the steering wheel.
            “Want some ice cream?” Lydia says, and Allison thinks of Lydia’s quick pale tongue and says,
            “Sure.”
             It’s one in the morning, maybe the only place open will be McDonalds with fifty-cent cones or maybe they’ll just drive until morning. Maybe they’ll keep driving up the coast and she’ll find a payphone and tell everyone she’s okay and they’ll be back someday, while Lydia waits in the car, and then she’ll get back in and she won’t even need to check the backseat and she’ll watch the road fall by under their wheels.
            “Now I’m off to the races, laces,
            Leather on my waist is tight and I am fallin’ down,
            I can see your face is shameless, Cipriani’s basement,
            Love you but I’m going down,
           God, I’m so crazy, baby, sorry that I’m misbehavin’,
            I’m your little harlot, starlet, queen of Coney Island
            Raisin’ hell all over town,
            Sorry ‘bout it,”
            Lydia’s eyes catch hers over the dashboard and the map from the glove compartment lying crumpled on the side of Allison’s seat. A smile spreads over her face, like the sea over sand, and Allison dangles her arm out of the window and lets the wind push it up and down in unsteady curves.
           “—But I trust in the decision of the Lord to watch over us
           Take him when he may, if he may,
            I’m not afraid to say that I’d die without him
           Who else is gonna put up with me this way?
            I need you, I breath you, I’d never leave you,
           They would rue the day I was alone without you—”
           They leave the cracked-concrete road lined with bars behind, Main Street with its shuttered shops, and they’re winding their way back into the empty twisting suburban back ways lined with cookie-cutter houses when Lydia leans over and kisses her again, hard and sure, and lays her hand between them, palm up.
            Allison takes it, nudging her bow and quiver farther under the seat with her foot.
           “The gas tank’s still half-full,” Lydia says.
            The trees over take the houses, but the road still cuts through, clean and endless.
           “Good,” Allison says.
           “And we’re off to the races, places
            Ready set the gate is down and now we’re goin’ in
            To Las Vegas chaos, Casino Oasis, baby is it time to spin?
            Boy, you’re so crazy, baby, I love you forever not maybe
            You are my one true love,
            You are my one true love...”