Chapter Text
The first time Laurence Dominic fucked Adelle, she hadn’t seen him in well over a year. She started awake in her tiny attic room – oh yes, the irony abounded – that afforded her the luxury of her own private space in this rambling, ramshackle farmhouse full of refugee souls of all shapes and sizes, and under her care.
No such luxury now; she was not alone. She didn’t have to look, she woke knowing it was him, a silent, brooding presence in the little threadbare armchair that sat jammed in the opposite corner such that you couldn’t fully open the door. Three years by my side, striding in step from day one, and mutual betrayals to damnation; she knew when Laurence Dominic was nearby. She would probably always know, and a part of her hated herself for that.
She stared up at the roof sloping low over her head where a skylight gave the room some dim illumination, enough to catch a gleam off his pistol. The comfort was, there was no vodka to lose. “I don’t even have any whisky left,” she completed the thought aloud, though hardly above a murmur, in deference to nighttime’s hush. “Put it away.”
He gave a small, nasty laugh, before getting up and taking the few steps to sit down at her side with all the presumption of belonging there. Worse, her blood pounded its agreement, along with its fear; the dip of the mattress, the concrete proof of him leaning over her, eyes burning in the dark, the weapon loose in his ready hand.
“But I really want to kill you,” he pointed out reasonably, the words taking on an obscene intimacy when spoken in the same low sleep-preserving tones as her.
He might have the the upper hand, but he would not have it all his own way. Not this time. She sat up to give him her most withering look, trying to ignore the weariness gnawing at her cerebellum, and, worse, the frilly, old-fashioned white cotton shift that was all she had to wear to bed. Relic of the farmhouse’s previous owners, she didn’t need the flash of his eyes to know she looked perfectly absurd, and her chin lifted as if it could make up for her entire long-lost wardrobe.
He returned her sneer with interest, pouring all that terrifying, welcome heat into her, so angry with her. Her. Not Rossum – not Topher – her, his own personal failed assignment. He continued, his voice remaining as soft as his breath falling on her cheek, dripping with disgust. “Oh, you think I wouldn’t shoot you? Have you been out there? Seen what you caused? Or have you just hidden away above it all as usual, reigning over the last pathetic scraps of your kingdom from this rustic little tower?”
She felt a spurt of annoyance at that, that he should impugn her house, slumbering and secure below them. He’d slipped past all of them to get to her, so he must know how easily she could summon them to her rescue. Tony was away; Paul, he’d likely scoff at; but even on the chance Echo greeted him as a comrade, there was always the wonderful threat of Alpha to scare him off.
Yet Adelle didn’t raise her voice a jot above his, locking them both within the privacy of their feud. If they were finally to destroy each other, it would be theirs alone.
“Come, Mr Dominic. I imagine you’ve wanted to kill me every day since first we met,” she replied icily. “I sincerely doubt you’ll ever do it. Follow-through has not turned out to be your strong suit.” She savored his little hiss at that, but couldn’t quite let go of his other indictments. Summoning the day-time assurance she wore for her people, she insisted, “And for the rest, yes, I have been out there. I have seen it. And I told you – we’re trying to fix it.”
“Come, Adelle.” His mocking echo was vicious – yet still it sent a wild thrill through her to hear her name in his voice for the first time. He smiled cruelly, looking down his hawk nose – and still it brought out that beautiful dimple in his left cheek. She glared at him for her body’s hot unruly reactions, but he took no notice. He was too busy with seeing right through her. “Still? Still, you poor, naïve little true believer? Working your madam’s tricks to help the whole world now? Really?”
“You told me our priorities had always been the same,” she snapped. It was that or claw his blue eyes red. “Will you help me or not?”
He pressed his look of disbelief in close, as if searching her face from only inches away would yield the trick. “Send me to the Attic twice, then have the nerve to ask me to go back to being your lapdog – twice – lady, you really are a piece of work.”
“But you aren’t,” she said suddenly, desperate enough to try to get past the venom in his voice. If she had Laurence Dominic by her side once more, perhaps she actually could find a way to do this. She could – she must – find a way to be strong enough to hold her people together. Because together, her people could do anything. “In the Attic. Echo told me –” He made a thundercloud face, but if she could be put off by something like that, she wouldn’t be Adelle DeWitt and the world wouldn’t have ended. “She told me – what you were trying to do –”
“Adelle.” His breathing had become hard, the warning clear.
“– what you stayed behind to do! I’ve read your NSA file –”
His hand, the one without the gun, closed on her neck. “Stop. Right now.”
“I know you started out, believing in a cause – you keep coming ba–”
He squeezed; she choked off. “I gave you that, all of that! I’d have –” He clenched his jaw, but could only stem his violent sotto voce outburst for a moment. “Everything you’re asking for, everything, and you threw me away like I was garbage sticking to your shoe. And now you’ll look me in the eye and give me your sales pitch? What’s the going rate for a human being in a world circling the drain? What spiel do you have for that? Is there still time? Still a way to fix this? Go on. Please, do, tell me. Tell me. Do I have something to live for, Adelle? Will I sell you my soul for that song?”
She paid no mind to her tear ducts beginning to water, meeting his eyes with all the wretched sincerity of every single spiel she’d ever believed in to give; without a second thought she used all that was left of the breath he allowed her. “I need yo–”
He went white with rage; a motion brought his gun perilously close to her temple. “No, you bitch. You don’t say that to me.”
Her eyes slid closed, the tears that weren’t tears spreading wet along her lashes. How very warped had she become, that his hand, his elegant, strong, indomitable hand upon her, felt like the last of her hopes holding her up, holding up the weight of all this fallen world? She opened her eyes again, sure in the knowledge that he wouldn’t pull the trigger, but that even if she was wrong, it would be the kind of mercy she had never shown him. She lifted her eyes to his. “Plea–”
With a furious, agonized sound, his mouth crashed onto hers. It wasn’t a kiss, it was a gag, but as he drove her back down into the bed it didn’t matter. Their foreplay had built for years; the mere enmity between them could not stop this now. The only thought she thought to have was hoping he disposed of the gun safely, and then his body was over hers and she was scrabbling frantically at his belt, couldn’t wait a second longer to have him.
The sheets, his trousers, her ridiculous nightgown, any obstructions were little more than shoved and yanked out of the way; the only pause in their headlong rush into one another came from him, with a groan almost of pain, when he found how wet she was. Then he was buried within her, deep and brutal and perfect.
He didn’t let her utter a word, catching her abandoned moans in a hand that tasted of her over her mouth while keeping up a fierce, filthy litany in her ear, half-mangled in time to the work of his hips. Bitch – cunt – spread you – until you – your desk – every day since – fucking her to fever pitch. Taking everything, and she let him, wild to be just a body moved and moving to his, nothing but a collection of nerve endings rasping with the pleasure he goaded, mercilessly, until she didn’t know how much more she could bear and then low and harsh it was Come, Adelle – and with a muffled cry, she did.
He followed hard upon, his head dropping silently into the curve of her shoulder. He remained there only a few painfully sweet moments before unceremoniously rolling off her, staring at the ceiling. She would have thought her bed was too narrow even to fit two, yet somehow as he lay beside her, closing up his clothing, he made the space between them feel as wide as when she’d had him filed away in the Attic. Cold reality swept in to fill it, and she forced her body not to curl around its own flush, aching emptiness; allowed herself to shift only enough to restore some order – if not dignity – to her covering.
She too could only stare upward, listening to their panting falling into step like some kind of dreadful punchline. The instant she felt sure of her voice, she drowned the sound out with the first thing that came into her head. “Priya’s pregnant.”
There was a tiny pause before indifference sliced at her, “You won’t be.”
It hadn’t been her point, but it raised some distracting questions. “You sound remarkably certain.”
“Your implant is good for another – three years?”
If she’d ever needed evidence that he had regularly practiced the kind of professional gossip that greased the job of underlings – particularly when one of those underlings was a spy ... yet even after everything, this one surprised her. “Dr Saunders?”
“Judith.” A touch of amusement almost made his tone conversational. “I’d bring her coffee.”
Damn him. “Two and a half,” she said pettily; it was closer to three. Then she sighed. “Priya demanded to be rid of hers.” To think she once thought Caroline to be stubborn and difficult.
“Can’t say I blame her.”
Perhaps not. “However, it does make life more complicated.”
Quietly, so quietly that she didn’t know if it was meant as a reply to her or just a private thought, he said, “It makes life more like life.”
He would never have afforded himself something like that with her, before. It set her cooling heart pounding again and shattered the crust of old, well-worn patterns that had begun to form on their exchange. She didn’t dare look at him; she only barely managed to pluralize the pronoun coming out of her mouth. “We need you.”
Another pause, before his response came out as pitiless as anything in her memory of him. “I was NSA, not an obstetrician.”
She did her best to speak as though her breath wasn’t trying to lock up in her throat. “Fortunately, between Echo and Alpha, we have that area of expertise covered.”
There was a frozen silence next to her. Eventually he said, flatly, “Alpha. So it’s true.”
It did not surprise her one bit that he had learned something of Alpha’s presence among them. She knew that thoroughness. She had relied on it, more times than she could count, a constant of her universe. Then it turned out he’d been serving a different master the entire time and Adelle had never had the faintest idea. “Echo has come to trust who he’s become, over this last year.”
“Has she.”
“I have come to trust ... her judgment in these matters, I suppose.”
He sat up abruptly, away from her, swinging his still-booted feet to the floor with a thud. She watched the shoulders she had just been clutching, the tense shape they made under his frayed field jacket, wondering if there was any power in the world that could hold onto him if he got up right then.
He didn’t. Yet. Instead, he spoke. “Enough to let him play midwife on her best friend. Adelle. Even as your traitorous and deposed Head of Security, I have to report that I have some concerns.”
She sat up behind him. “Join us then, and voice them.”
A tired snort greeted this bitterly.
“Mr Dominic, ple–”
“Beg me and I will shoot you.”
Though she couldn’t see his expression, it still chilled her to her spine. If she might have questioned the sincerity of any of the things he’d said tonight, she did not question this. It tore through the last shreds of guilt and uncertainty tying her tongue, gun be damned – he was right. She was Adelle DeWitt. She would not beg again.
“For God’s sake, Mr Dominic, it is the end of the world! Get over yourself and help us!”
He reared back, up to his feet, laughter seeming to crawl through him unbidden even as he looked scorn down upon her. He tucked the gun away in the small of his back, and added an impossibly sarcastic flourish to his obeisance, his eyebrows arched sky-high. “Oh – as Adelle commands.”
She could only look daggers as he slipped silently out of the room, resenting how his insolent grace never deserted him, resenting having no idea if he had meant those words or not, if she’d ever even see him again, resenting the scent of sex and the languor he’d left on her, in her.
She still slept better than she had in years.
When she came downstairs the next morning, her day-time face nailed down tight, it was to find a small crowd in the kitchen, Echo’s eyes sparkling at her over a blond head, her effortlessly laughing voice. “Adelle! Guess who found his way to the Island of Misfit Toys?”
He turned and gave her a smile sharper than knives.
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