Title: A Different Man

Summary: The Tremor Brothers are hired to kill a girl. A oneshot lesson in Tremor family history, speed, sunrises, murder-for-hire, innocence, absolution, rooftop romances, neon lights, giving in, and giving up. Darwin/OC. Sort of.

Rated M for cussing, violence, and implied sexuality. Oh, also, and lots of killing.

ttt

If Darwin Tremor were a different man, the Holy Trinity of Tremor Brothers might never've happened. The three of them as they are now—a trio of superheroes, doing the work of God, invincible and deadly and righteous—well, they might not exist if Darwin hadn't been the type of murderin', massacrein' man that he is.

Truth is, he'd seen both his brothers born. His own daddy was a one-night stand who left without looking back and probably never knew he had a Tremor Terror runnin' around, causin' havoc. Lester's pappy was actually Ma's second-cousin, who even as a kid Darwin had liked to sneer at and call Fuckhead Fritz. When Lester was born, Darwin had taken real good care of him, even changin' him when Ma was too strung out to notice that he'd been wet for a couple hours. Jeeves had been born just a couple years later, the sweetest baby boy Darwin'd ever seen, with his big smooth head and cross-eyed blue gaze. He'd been tiny as a baby, a scrawny li'l thing. Jeeves' daddy—a drunk Yank named Duke with a funny accent who considered hisself educated even though he didn't attend any more years of school than Darwin himself at the time—had cracked Ma in the head with his huge meaty fist and tried to take baby Jeeves with him, cussin' about backwater white-trash and Southern hicks. Darwin, only seven years old at the time, had given the big shit-fer-brains two black eyes and stabbed him in the belly with a lopsided serving fork that was missing a tine. Needless to say, Duke had left without the baby, and the three brothers had managed to live happily enough for a few years. They'd caught frogs in the weedy ditches and stuffed their mouths full of bottle rockets; they'd kidnapped cantankerous Miss Violet's yowling cat and cut off its tail. When a stray dog bit Les, Darwin had single-handedly hunted it down and trapped it behind a nearby bar, knocked it out with an old wooden baseball bat, and pulled out all its teeth with a set of pliers. The dog had wandered around the street in front of the bar for a week, weaving like a drunk—cross-eyed and bleeding from the muzzle—till it died. During its last days, the tinier Tremors had occasionally gone down to chuck rocks at its miserable hide, 'specially Les, who still bore its teethmarks today.

Yeah, the Tremor boys had grand adventures.

ttt

Fuckhead Fritz had come back and near-ruined it when Darwin was just fifteen. Les had been ten, and Fritz had decided his son was old enough to welcome into the family business. Darwin had been foolin' around with May Guthries in the dried-up ditch out on Allen Road; Jeeves—still tiny, with his only bulk coming from a scant smattering of baby fat—had come running, hollering for Big Brother. By the time Darwin had run back, leaving May with her skirt rucked up around her waist and an eight-year-old Jeeves gawping at all her girly bits, Les was already gone.

They didn't see the middlest Tremor for another seven years. Ma had died—her liver or her heart or her lungs; anyone's guess—and he and Jeeves had stayed at the house when they weren't out shooting shit and blowing things up and getting into fights and sometimes doing a little freelance killin'. Even then, though, the encounter was brief—just long enough for Darwin to decide he was gettin' his kid brother back no matter what.

"AK-47," Les had hissed under his breath at Darwin. "She's a cunt and a slut. She thinks I want her cootch jus' 'cause her daddy was always sniffin' after Ma. Incestial relay-shuns, she says t'me—they run in the family."

As if she'd heard 'em, the girl in question had leaned out the truck window and flashed her negligible titties. "You an' yer brother want some of this, Lesssssster?" And she'd snapped her bikini back over 'em. "Too bad, lover boy! You two kin just diddle each other instead!"

"Shutyer cockholster!" Les had screamed back, his ears red with impotent fury, and it had cut Darwin to the quick to see his little brother so helpless against this bitchy little tart.

"I kin arrange for her," Darwin had offered. "We miss ya, Les. Jeeves has growed up so tall ya wouldn't even rec'gnize him. He likes to make fun, but he ain't nothin' like that skinny whore."

Les had narrowed his eyes at his sister, who was leaning out the window still, wagging her tongue obscenely. "Do whatever ya got to," he'd said.

It took another five years—and maybe a bigger incident than Darwin had entirely planned for—but the abominations that he'd taken to thinking of as the Tremor Rejects were eventually taken care of, leaving ample opportunity for Les to escape back home.

And ever since then, the three'd been inseparable.

The killin' thing had taken center-stage. It fed every instinct they had. They kept the house but were rarely home, preferring instead to ride around in the killmobile with Jeeves at the wheel. The world was an open road, littered with meth and whiskey and moonshine, dusty sunsets and dirty bottles and dirtier women, blood and grease and gunpowder. And laughter. And jokes. And brotherly camaraderie, in amongst the carnage. Once or twice they'd tried some retrieval missions, but it always ended up with the person they were supposed to retrieve bein' dead. Or that one time when Jeeves'd accidentally lopped off the retrieval's arms and one leg. 'Parently people didn't like to pay full-price if you didn't bring 'em back with all their bodyparts still firmly and properly attached in all the original places. It turned into a big argument between the Tremor trio and their one-time clients.

After that, the Tremor Brothers just stuck with assassinatin'.

ttt

And so now here they are, years later, just on the dark edge of morning, sitting in the car outside of Plato's Club. They're shooting up and checking their weapons and snapping in their holsters and sheaths and all sorts of weaponry and safety gear. Darwin examines the edge of his machetes. If he can, he hopes to get in at least one kill with his bare hands. He loves his blades, but when it comes down to it, he always prefers to get right in there and use his fingers. Maybe tonight he'll take out the target hisself, bludgeon her to death with his fists.

"Put on yer goggles this time," he reminds Jeeves, who obeys immediately and grins.

"You ready?" he asks 'em both, though he can already tell from the way Les' eyes have dilated and Jeeves' eager breathing that they're both more than ready: they've both already hit their flash and are antsy to go. He taps a little speed out on the edge of his machete; lifts the blade crosswise and snorts it quick—

And he's ready too. Everything is bright, the contrast is clearer, the rainbow-halos of the streetlights are as sharp as spears. He can feel each muscle in his body, each cell, moving and dividing and dying. Tears sting his eyes. He's in love—he's in love. Les takes a breath and with the kind of clarity you can only get on the impending peak of a meth-flash, Darwin knows what he's going to say before he even says it.

"Let's go," Lester hisses. "Let's go let's go let's go—"

"Now," Darwin says, and the Tremors Three explode from the car, nearly tearing the doors off as they go. Machetes drawn, guns blazin', chainsaw guttering—they pour through the front entrance of the club, killing everything they can.

There's blood. Greasefires. Screaming. There's even music for a while, till Jeeves cuts off the Deejay's arm and it lands on the turntables like a roadblock. There's all sorts of carnage and Darwin feels strong, stronger than he thinks he's ever felt before (even though he thinks this every time he hits a rush). He's grinning and screaming out battle cries and licking the blood off his lips and rolling through the slippery tissue and the smouldering guts. He doesn't feel the blisters on his hand from shoving that burning guy out of his way. He doesn't feel the bruises that are coloring his shins under his pants, or that he just broke the little finger on his left hand. All he feels is adrenaline, dopamine, the thud of his own pulse. All he feels is color and light and skin, the prickle of the hair on his arms.

Somewhere, at some point, he pauses. Everything crystallizes; he can see every drop of blood arching in the air. He looks around, a twitch of pride on his mouth as he watches Les and Jeeves work their special brand of Tremor magic. Usually they blaze through a place, burn the buildings, salt the earth. But that's when he notices that the target ain't here. He's seen a picture of her—little thing, with curly hair and light eyes of some indiscernible color, golden freckles. She'd been wearing scrubs in the photo, and grinning to herself with a pensive, amused look in her eyes, but he figures she probably ain't wearing scrubs here. And she might be hard to recognize if she's covered in blood, or if her face is contorted in fear and screaming.

He remembers the intel they'd gotten. Her name (Eden Arnold). Her height (five feet, two inches). Her weight (a hunnert and fifty-five pounds, bigger'n what was trendy these days, but packed into all the right places). No family, no home, no job—leastways, not any more, for any of these things. Not since she'd got a target painted on her back. His eyes skim the room real quick, just once more.

But no. There are no girls the right size or shape in this room, no heads full of cloud-like curls, not even matted with blood.

Darwin is good about getting feelings sometimes: almost like Lester, who always seems to know when people are alive and when they are dead, even without looking at 'em. Lester can feel spirits, can tell when they're still lingerin', and he'll sometimes tell his big brother so Darwin will know who to go to for absolution, for forgiveness and spiritual fortitude. But Darwin, when he's in the middle of a flash, when he's in a meth-rush…he can tell what's gonna happen next, like Lester saying let's go let's go, like how Jeeves is gonna cut that guy off at the knees just about n—yup.

And so he just knows—he just knows—that the girl will be upstairs, all alone an' defenseless, all by herself.

He crashes through the corpses, the carnage, heading for the door. He bursts through; he takes the stairs three at a time, his long strides lifting him up one flight, then three, then five. He's leaping so hard and fast he almost slams into the door that reads CAUTION! Roof Access: Authorized Personnel Only. Instead he stops, teetering on the highest stair. He sheathes his machetes. He breathes through his nose. He eases through the door.

He can't wait to use his hands.

ttt

He grins and moves toward her, palms itching to dig into the soft skin of her throat, to feel her esophagus give under his fingers, feel it resist and then collapse. He wants to run, to rush her; he wants to leap from ledge to ledge, cinderblock to cinderblock. Instead, he lopes forward like a wolf; he flexes his fingers; he bares his teeth and tries not to let loose a warcry. She's under the neon sign, leaning over the edge of the roof, and she half turns to look at him. Her hair is aglow with the pink and green light, which pulses, throwing her features into sparkling relief. Riding high on the flash, he swears he can pick out each strand of hair as it lights up like a Christmas tree, golden and mint-colored and magenta. He can see each glittering eyelash.

"You're here to murder me."

He rolls his shoulders back and forth; he dances like a boxer in place, trying to hold back the gleeful energy, trying to make it last. "You hearda me," he says giddily, advancing on her, stepping side to side, back and forth, but always moving forward. "You hearda the Tremors."

She puts her back to the ledge and he watches the muscles in her arms. They're soft muscles, wimpy; he's so excited he could just about piss himself.

"I don't think so," she says slowly, and he can tell by the quietness of her voice, the way her mouth wraps around the words just right, that she's from the prim-n-proper set. "No. Not ever."

"You never hearda us?" he asks this time, aiming to sound disappointed and instead just grinning recklessly. She's got a slender neck—he can see all the taut little tendons in it—and he could snap it, probably, snap it right in two with a neat little twist— "I hearda you," he drawls, almost teasing. "You're Eden, aintcha?"

"No to your first question," she says, "and—yes." And she tilts her head the other way, and her eyes lock onto his. He can't tell the color in the shadows and the neon pulse—maybe they're all colors: something translucent, reflective—but he can count the striations, the little radiating flecks of a darker shade, the ring around her pupil and the outer edge of her iris, the strange and tiny little freckle in the white of her left eye, right near the outer corner. He can see it all, all the parts that aren't visible in the photo they'd shown him, and he isn't sure he's ever looked at a target in the face like this, openly, without their eyeballs bulging and their tongues lolling and their teeth gnashing while they screamed, or tried to. "No, I haven't heard of you," she repeats, "but there's something in your eyes that says you're a killer."

He smiles again, foxlike. "Aw, stoppit," he says, "yer gonna make me blush." He bats his eyes. "S'most romantic thing anyone's ever said t'me."

She hasn't moved though, and he realizes abruptly that there's only so much tension in her soft little muscles, like she's not really worried yet. Yet.

"Your eyes are cold," he hears her say, quietly. He can track every change in the cadence of her voice. "Cunning," she says. "Like an animal's."

He licks his teeth, runs his tongue over his incisors.

"So how does this work?" she continues. "Is there a certain set of steps? Criteria? A procedure?"

He's too quick on the speed right now to be thrown off by her strange questions. He takes them in a stride, though he knows they're odd. "M'gonna kill you," he reaffirms, almost dancing now, "an' then I'm gonna ask you for absolution, an' yer gonna forgive me."

Her eyelashes are tipped in gold. She's got freckles on her cheekbones, and on her shoulders. She's blushing, or maybe she's flushed, and as he gets closer he swears he can see all the little capillaries in her cheeks, burnished in the ghostlike pulsing light.

"I'm going to forgive you after I'm dead?" she clarifies.

"Uh-huh," he tells her, and grins. His fingers curl. He can already feel her skin: velvety, fragile. Each pore, gasping under his grease-rimed thumbs.

She tilts her head. "Why not before?"

If he hadn't been flashing, he might've faltered. Instead his eyes go narrow: calculating, crocodilian. "There ain't nothin' to forgive before," he tells her only, and reaches for her.

She doesn't move. Just waits for his hands. "What about during?" she says, and his fingers brush her collarbone.

Now he hesitates, considering. The thoughts pelt through his mind, almost too quick to grasp anymore.

"I could do that," she says. "You could kill me, and I could forgive you while you do it. Also"—she points to his right leg—"you have a little something there."

His gaze zeroes in on her lower lip. How it shines when she sweeps her tongue over it. He's still antsy; he's still giddy. All this restraint is killing him; he looks at where she's pointing and suddenly feels the butter knife lodged deep in the muscle of his thigh.

"Oh, hey," he says, intrigued by the way the metal gleams in the neon. No matter how many times he's seen blood, too, it always looks different: black and purple, now—sludgy, almost. "Lookit that." He wonders if he could use the knife to kill her, but he does like using his hands.

"I could forgive you," she repeats, in case he's forgotten—and in the flash, he almost has. "I would."

He laughs then—like a hyena, tossing back the dirty hair from his eyes. "Mos' people ain't ready to do that till they're already in heaven," he tells her, and pulls the knife out smoothly and tosses it over the edge of the roof.

"I am," she whispers. "I'm ready." She breathes deep. "I'd thank you."

He watches her, and is a little surprised to figure she's telling the truth. She means it. And she doesn't shy away from his gaze: she meets him openly, emptily. Like she's just waiting for him to fill her. Like her whole life has been leading up to this singular point.

He likes to think it has.

He tilts his head now, eyes her like a rabid wolf. "Why?" he drawls, and advances till he's on her. He grips the edge of the roof on either side of her, caging her in, grinning; he can feel each stone in the concrete under his fingers, and he can smell a faint trace of some fancy wine on her lips, even though he can see from the clarity of her striated eyes that she ain't drunk.

She watches him back. He can feel her stare like starbursts on his skin: taking in each glint in the hair of his stubble, the cold glaze of his eyes, like mirrors.

"Have you ever felt like you've lost something?" she whispers at last, and there is something very intimate in her voice, more intimate than anything Darwin Tremor's ever heard from a woman's lips. He can feel her breath on the underside of his chin.

He tips his head like a dog. "Nah," he says, and the word is honest and easy, wolfish. But he knows what she's talking about—vaguely, abstractly. There's something he's seen in other peoples' eyes, people who aren't Tremors—some sort of light, a certain focus on a distant horizon, a kind of brilliance. He's seen people lose it, too: most assassins lost it, din't they? And people who'd been in wars, right? Once Darwin had run into a man whom he'd recognized but couldn't place, watched the stranger's face turn gray and hollow. He'd realized later that the bastard had been a rare survivor—a bystander, of course—in a Tremor hit, and sure enough he'd lost that thing in his eyes too. Whatever it was, this girl—this Eden—she's lost it just as surely.

Now, Darwin can't speak to what the thing itself is. He don't really know at all. But he imagines it's something like what you'd call innocence, or hope. A certain steadfast belief that people can't really do awful things to each other, that people can't stomach the guilt and horror of—say—plowing a chainsaw down through a woman's skull, or watching a man scream his death while wrapped in sheets of grease and flames. A stubborn, clinging insistence that a human being won't want to hurt another human being if they can find a way around it.

Darwin hisself don't think he's ever harbored such an odd and obviously flawed notion.

But it doesn't mean he likes to think of her knowing that particular truth. Doesn't like to think how she's come across that knowledge, 'bout what most people are really like. For a minute, he considers being glad that she's up here—in the quiet and the stars and the impending dawn, drenched in the neon—instead of down dragging herself through the sloppy wreckage.

—considers it, and then decides he don't care, and it don't really matter anyway. He is happy she's up here, all by her lonesome, 'cause that just means he'll get to kill her proper.

Have you ever felt like you've lost something?

"Nah," he repeats carelessly, and grins. "An' you ain't lost nothin' worth havin'."

She watches him carefully, and her starburst-eyes grow even sadder and emptier, if it's possible. Kinda makes him feel meaner than the lowest sort of snake, an' he usually don't think of hisself that way, bein' a heroic Tremor an' all.

"It feels like it," she tells him quietly. "I thought for sure you'd—know. What it was. Where it went." Her eyes look like Jeeves' that one time when he was a baby and he'd thought he'd gotten lost.

For a minute, Darwin's quiet, leaning kind of into her. He thinks, in the wake of his flash, that he can feel every fiber of her dress, even through his own Velcro and Kevlar. Every thread, every stitch. For a second, the hem on her collar captivates his gaze, but then he shakes it free even as she tells him gently:

"Whether you know what it is or not—I'll still forgive you."

He narrows one eye, looking for all the world like a hungry coyote. And then, as if he's got her measure, he straightens, then leans in.

"What d'you want?" he purrs, wedging his knee just a bit between hers, fascinated by the freckle in the white of her eye. It moves as she glances at his mouth, his eyes, then off to some distance in the left.

She turns, as though she doesn't even care. Puts her back to him, brushing against his bicep as she does. He wishes, for a second, that he wasn't wearing the Kevlar and such, 'cause then she'd be tucked right up against his flesh, against his dirty tattoos and the dry heat of his skin. He watches each strand of her short curling hair: like a halo, a luminous riot of color under the rainbow of neon light. She rests her elbows on the ledge—leans over. He wonders if she'll throw herself off if he doesn't do it for her. Instead he moves in closer. He can smell, still, the wine—and the exhaust of the cars below, and the smell of the food in the kitchens inside…and the blood and carnage clinging to his own skin, the death he brought with him on his hands.

But also, the fragrance of her hair.

If he had known the smells, he has no doubt he could place them—but he doesn't. He is used to the scent of dust and auto-oil and grease—gunpowder, blood, fire. This—some kind of perfume, he guesses, or the remnants of her soap, her shiny-hair shampoo—it's alien.

He breathes it in. Strands of her glowing hair rise with his inhalation, brush his face, cling briefly to the stubble on his chin. He moves his knee higher. She's got on some sort of ruffled dress, something light and pale, and the Velcro straps on the sheath at his thigh scrape her skin.

"What d'you want?" he repeats, and she leans forward further, bending at the waist and pushing her torso farther over the edge, seemingly unaware of his thigh creeping higher between her own.

"Just wait with me," she says. "Just a little bit. The sun's coming up soon." She's quiet for a minute. "I just want to see it rise."

He briefly debates making a nasty joke about watchin' things rise. He also doesn't know if he can keep still that long. Doesn't know if it's worth it, either. He can get his absolution after she's dead, and maybe have more fun killing her, too. On the other hand, he's never had someone offer forgiveness alive, and it sounds like a new and interesting kinda development.

"Police'll be comin' soon," he says.

She casts a sideways glance over her shoulder. "Are you worried?" she asks, and it's not a challenge, even if he can't quite figure what it is.

"Naw," he tells her. "I kin be sneaky." He grins into the cloud of her hair. "Or kill 'em."

"It'll be less than five minutes," she says, turning her eyes out to the graying edge of the world. "Just when the first sliver spills over. Will you wait with me?"

There's a silence, and he stares at the freckles on her shoulders. When the neon blinks on, they are splashed on her skin; when it goes off, they disappear like ghosts. He's already created constellations with them—counted them, categorized them by size and shape. He can do it all in a blink when he's on speed. The things he sees—the things he notices—

In the absence of any sort of intelligible response, she whispers, "The last assassins they sent—they messed up. I wasn't working the day they came in to my building. They killed—well." She swallows, and she tosses him a little sideways grin. "Guess they sent in the big guns this time, huh?"

He wants to ask her what she did, what she's done. She's got her own story—he can see it in the shape of her shoulders, the way they slope. He remembers how she wore the scrubs in the photo. He remembers what little he read: that she works—no, that she worked—in a residential facility for people with closed-head injuries, some kind of brain damage. He wonders if maybe one of her clients used to be on the dark side—an' wouldn't it be shitty to end up like that, after a life like this one?—maybe one of 'em said something he shouldn't've, some bit of memory that leaked through and was no longer filtered. Darwin's brain is in overdrive and he wonders if maybe she heard something said, wonders if she even knows what she heard or why they're after her.

But he don't ask. Because it's not his business to ask—it's just his business to end it. He feels the strength of his flash slowly leaking away, and so he doesn't question, focusing instead on the fading darkness, the now washed-out pulse of the neon. He's never cared before—he just always assumes the people they kill are bad motherfuckers, 'cause the Tremor brothers are the Hand of God, an' so everything they do must be righteous and just. He's not even sure he cares now, but she's a pretty, soft li'l thing and if he weren't s'posed to kill her he might just fuck her instead.

She turns in his arms again, facing him now, and if he weren't on the down-swing of a flash he might be able to pull back before her fingers find his jaw, cradle the sides of his face. "I'm just tired," she says, and her eyes are pleading, and he sees again how empty they are of that silly little conviction, the one that says people are innocent.

He can see it. Maybe it's just the remainder of the flash but he can see it, how she's not made for the kind of ongoing onslaught that the Tremor Brothers are. She's been running, he realizes, a long time. He almost takes a step back with the sudden questions that burst through the bright, scintillating haze in his mind, like an oil fire that sits on the surface of a lake: what happens to make a girl so exhausted? What happens to wear her down, make 'er give up?

He wants to ask her—almost does—but it's not part of the job, is it? Still, he's all intrigued now, and somehow her exhaustion makes her seem even stronger to him. Her girly, soft little muscles are unimportant in the face of whatever's wrecked her so bad. She's tough on the inside, he's sure, and she's wounded, and even though he usually thinks that his victims are probably deservin' of death, there's something in the striations of her eyes that says she's good. She's good—yes. And she's tough, yes. And she's tired. Yes.

And she's gonna be dead soon.

Suddenly the whole thing seems a li'l questionable.

"Watch the sunrise with me?" she asks again, but she sounds like she thinks she already knows the answer this time. Also, she sounds like she's full of some kind of hope, like maybe if he says yes it'll put some of that belief back in her eyes.

He'll remember this tone of voice—the softness of her, the scent, the freckles—for the rest of his days.

And because Darwin sometimes knows things before they happen—because that's just one of his gifts along with talking to dead men and pullin' teeth outta dogs' mouths—he suddenly knows that those days don't number too long. In the fade of his flash he sees it clearly: how his brothers will be cut down one by one until it's just him, lying in a lake of hot sunlight in a graveled-out parking lot, staring up at the white-blue-yellow circle of the sky. There's a plan in place—they always have a plan—a certain spot where they're s'posed to meet back if they get separated or split up. He won't know they're dead, or won't be sure of it—he'll go out to the parking lot, surrender their car (though of course he'll be planning on getting it back just as soon as he an' his brothers reunite). He'll stride lazily away, so certain in the face of his flash , because Tremors are invincible. And then—the thud, the jangled dance of flailing limbs, the collapse, and as he goes he'll know with more certainty than anything ever before that his brothers are dead, and that he is alone.

And in the hot pelting sun, that's how he'll die.

Soon, the remainder of his current rush will fade, and he'll forget he ever knew this. He'll forget. But for now, he knows, as surely as he knows from Eden's file that she's all alone, that she doesn't have a trace of family in the world anymore, no-one left to wonder where she's gone.

She'll die like he's gonna, if he lets her.

ttt

He closes his eyes. He can feel each of her fingers on his face. The high isn't that far gone yet—he thinks he can decipher her fingerprints just from the way they press into his skin. And he thinks of Jeeves, still the baby of their little family despite his size, and Lester, who is always sensitive to Big Brother's need to talk to the spirits of the recently-massacred. He thinks of how the two of them hauled his ass out of the last fiery inferno they'd been in, a trio of holocaustin' superheroes in spite of their respective blindness, paralysis, unconsciousness. He thinks of knocking Duke out to protect baby Jeeves, and ripping the teeth out of that dog that bit Les, and he thinks of Fuckhead Fritz and AK-47. He thinks of how he'd do anything for these little brothers of his.

It's not empathy he feels, and it's not sympathy—not even a detached, inhuman sort of pity. It's just something he wants to do, 'cause it feels right, and she did offer to forgive him out loud if he just waited a fuckin' minute, din't she? It's a scavenging sort of curiosity, flat-eyed and panting, like a coyote that's just found a wounded antelope, like a hyena watching from the shadows.

And so he says, "Yeah," and she nods like she's expecting it, but there's something else there: a little edge of dawn in her eyes, a little unfurling of that hopelike thing, as though he's somehow just given her back some of her faith in humanity.

Strange, since he's gonna kill her anyway, and all he'd offered was some company while he did it, an extra handful of inhalations, a stray sunrise on the spired horizons. Instead, she looks like he's just handed her a present, one she's frightened to open in case it's a lie.

So he just holds real still, breathing her in, feeling his own stubble prickle against her soft palms. Her fingers are still heavy on his skin, and her gaze is heavy on his eyes, on his mouth—clinging to his lips like syrup—and he is surprised to feel his own skin calling out for her, and something at the root of his heart, and in his belly, and-of course-and lower.

He jerks his chin to the horizon. "Yer gonna miss it," he tells her.

She half-turns, her side still pressed into him. An edge of burnished gold and matte silver glows on the crisp lines of the warehouses and factories. He can hear Jeeves' voice inside, yelling for him, but he looks down instead at the side of her neck, where her head is turned. He can see the pulse there—he can match his own to it—and for just a second he thinks he wants to bury his face there, hoist her against him. He leans in close.

"You want me to push ya over?" he asks. His fingers, twitching against the concrete ledge, find their way to her skin—to her soft elbows, the weak muscles in her upper arms. "It'd feel like you were flyin'." He imagines her hair and her pale ruffles spread around her in the wind. She'd look like an angel.

"What if it doesn't kill me?" she whispers. "You have to make sure."

She's got a point. Not that a Tremor's ever failed before.

Instead he studies the way the hair lies at her temple—curling a bit, falling every which way. As the sky lightens—so quickly, too, it seems—he can see the color of it come out more, only picking up the faintest glints of the neon light. In that moment, he knows:

If he were a different man, he might not kill her.

He might clean himself up.
Drop the meth, take a shower, maybe brush his teeth.
There is a distinct possibility that he might even use toothpaste, and soap.

He might carry her off to his bedroom, or at least a tobacco-stained hotel room somewhere—offer to protect her from the guys who want her dead.
He'd most certainly fuck her silly, use his tongue, make her come. Lots of times.
Eventually, he'd introduce her to the younger Tremors, give her brothers of her own, a family of her own. They'd of course come to love her—Darwin knows they would, even if he didn't tell 'em to, 'cause there's something about her hair, her hands, the light on her freckles—and the four of them would drive off into the sunset or wherever the next job took 'em, and the world would be a different place. Lester would cackle like a hyena, adopt her in a way he never could with AK-47. He'd protect her; he'd like to make her laugh. Jeeves would be dopey-eyed in adoration of her, treat her like some kind of fragile Madonna. He knows it. Darwin knows it, just like he knows he's gonna die in a few months' time.

For a second—no, for less, but it's there all the same—he thinks about the possibilities. He toys with the idea of it. With cold coyote-eyes, he considers the fine glittering hairs on the back of her neck, where her hair is too short to protect them, and he thinks about renaming her Eden Tremor, thinks about saving her, thinks about how sweet she'll taste. Thinks about loving her.

ttt

But he is not a different man.

He is Darwin Tremor, the middle finger on the righteous hand of God, experienced in killin' and holocaustin', a fuckin' superhero who's never failed a job, who burns down everything in his path like an avenging angel in Sodom and Gomorrah.

An avenging angel who is coming off his divine flash, and who is staring intently at the light-painted shoulders of his target. One of her hands is lying on the cement; the other is pressed to her chest, where she's half-turned from him. And as the striations in her eyes pulse and fade slowly in the ebbing of his high—as he briefly considers a futile attempt to prepare himself for the inevitable crash—as the light becomes less brilliant, the tiny capillaries in her cheeks less rosy, the pulse in her throat less obvious, Darwin simply…

waits.

The rush dies differently this time. Usually he and his brothers hole up somewhere while they crash, and maybe it's kind of a miracle that they haven't decided to try executing major surgery, eaten each others' kidneys, or pried out their own eyeballs with crowbars (though there was that one time when Darwin woke up to find Jeeves trying to yank the tendons out of his sliced-open calf, and the other time when he discovered Lester had chewed his own pinky finger down to the bone). Maybe some people can come off a speed flash without gutting themselves or anyone else, but the Tremor brothers don't do nothin' quietly.

Except now. This one time. His fingers jitter on her elbows like the legs of a crushed spider, spasming; he watches them intently, then watches her watch them. She's maybe not so pretty without the rush showing him every little twitch of her mouth, lighting up her hair where the neon sparkles against each strand, but she's still a looker.

Especially with that new fragile thing glowing under the shadows in her eyes.

"You all right?" she asks. She doesn't really care—or maybe she does; she's an oddity after all—but he tilts his head and watches her anyway, a little intrigued that she's asked. He might be burning out, but he's still got the animal cunning she'd noticed right from the beginning.

"Yeah," he says. And the gold melts over the edge of the buildings, finally, spilling out a sliver of liquid burning metallic light. "Turn n' look."

Darwin Tremor is not a different man. He watches her watch the sun, and he lifts his shivering fingers to her throat, stepping close so he can wrap his arms around her from behind. Her hair is a caress on his throat. He thinks maybe hedoes love her, after all.

"Okay," she whispers, and his fingers close. "I forgive you," she manages to gasp out. "I—" And then she is half-silent, whispery, because he is slowly squeezing her larynx, and the words are breathless and fragile and half-broken but she leans back into him, her shoulderblades softening against him, and he can feel them even through the Kevlar, even without the flash. How relaxed she is: how vulnerable and unafraid. She rests her head back against his Kevlar-hard shoulder, looks up, and when he sees that thing in her eyes, like she can't believe how kind he's being, like everything she's lost has been restored-well, when he sees it, he about blows his load but it don't feel sexual at all. His skin tingles and tightens over his bones. His eyes sting like he's been staring straight into her sunrise, but they don't water.

Instead, he gazes down at the soft striations of her eyes—tilts his head, considers her like a cold-eyed predator. She reaches back with one hand, and her fingers ghost over his cheek, his jaw. They whisper through the ends of his dirty hair. Her thumb sweeps gently over his lip, and later when he licks his mouth he'll think he can taste her sweetness like a ghost of the kiss that never happened. For now, though, her gratitude is silent—but palpable, and visible, and real. He can feel it.

He'll remember this moment, too, for the rest of his days: not as a regret, not even as a shadow of a doubt—but as a moment of perfection, a sort of assassin's nirvana.

In the cold clarity of the sunrise, his fingers bite into her throat.

ttt

Author's Note: WTF was this? I don't even know.
Also I have no experience with meth and it is remarkably hard to find anyone, even online, who will tell you what a meth-flash is really like. I mean, there are plenty of clinical or chemical descriptions, but nothing about the experience itself. So, uh, that's all made up. Sorry if any of you know the truth and find my portrayal annoyingly unrealistic, especially in the speed with which it passes. (But hey, it's about the Tremor Brothers, so everything about it should be hyperbolic, right?)

I had originally intended to write a oneshot that focused on Jeeves, and was lighthearted (mostly) and gleeful (ly violent), with pleasant and ridiculously fluffsome endings while clinging to appropriate characterization. I still have bits of that one, and maybe it will come to something more, but somehow this happened instead. Go figure. For some reason I just found myself taking common fanfiction tropes and trying to turn them on their heads while still maintaining some semblance of romance. Darwin likes her, Darwin lusts after her, Darwin maybe even loves her (as much as he can, anyway)—but he's still, well, Darwin.

I hope no-one finds him out of character. :)

Eden's story is meant to be vague. I wanted—I hoped—she left you wondering, that she was complicated enough that you wanted her story (and felt like she was at least a little bit real) while being vague enough to leave you guessing (maybe even desperately). Unlike most of the time, where what the characters hide from the reader they are also hiding from me, I do know her story, and will share it if you ask. (It won't be nearly as well-written, though!) I also thought, as much as I might want to tell her story…Darwin wouldn't care. At least, he wouldn't care enough.

Not unless he were a different man.