Baby had a cigarette in her teeth, but her teeth were her lips and they were red. Dragged in, breathed out, and, in the smoke, she was in another world.
She was sprawled on the couch, half-undressed. Just got down to one layer and let it go. Nevermind the one layer left was the most uncomfortable; it didn't matter.
She was in another world. A world in which ‘Ria drifted in through the smoke with a fussed look on her face and sighed a little, but to Baby it was nightclubs like the old classy ones in movies and she was just tired.
It wasn't nightclubs, but she was tired.
Gloria picked up a couple of pieces of mail from the table. A scrap here, scrap there. She put them up on the too-tall apartment bar and pushed a hand against her hairline. Baby had scattered shit all over the place when she came in – her purse on the floor, half its contents spilling out, including a big, newly-acquired red-tinged silver Mary pendant, a set of pens and Double-Bubble stolen from the Refuge for no reason, and a handful of bullets. Her dress was over by the table, as if it'd fallen off the chair, dripping hem just adding a few more bloodstains to the carpet. There were drips tracing her path in, crossing other drips from other passings several millennia old. Or so it felt.
She'd been out tonight. Gloria always felt more tired when Baby'd been out tonight. Like Gloria's two jobs were half of hers, because they were, though twice as tiring, which they weren't. Oh, they were tiring, but Gloria couldn't even imagine...
Wouldn't. Didn't. Couldn't.
She pushed herself away from the bar. Baby wasn't supposed to smoke inside. They'd lost their deposit eons ago with the traces of blood in the carpet, but still. Her words stuck in her throat like tar. She couldn't bitch about the mess, she couldn't bitch about the mail, she couldn't bitch about her work...
And with Baby all beat up on the couch, looking like she'd been alley-fucked rather than gone to a hotel room, Gloria could hardly touch her, hardly push her into place. She knew the scrapes and scars and blood were from the fighting – fighting the things Baby fought – but she couldn't separate the two in her mind.
Same monsters, different results.
The first night she’d seen the wounds, she’d flipped her shit – that was her first new world, as Baby wordlessly stared as she raved about the wrongness, the danger, of what Baby did for money. Baby never spoke when she could show instead, though. So, just on the tail of that memory of anger, Gloria remembered that the first night she had seen the beast – she, the nurse who’d seen all manner of blood and gore – cowered like a child with her slim silver cross clutched tight in her hand. And Baby, bloody-handed, held her shaking still and thumbed her eyelids closed and kissed them, lipstick sticky-soft and breath warm.
But for Baby being with her, that whole life which happened in the dark was another world, and that was how Baby wanted it.
Still – Gloria could stand a lot, but she couldn’t stand the smoke.
So Gloria stalked over, pushed through the smoke, bent over Baby on the couch and plucked the cigarette from her lips...
Baby put a hand gently against the back of her neck and pulled her in for a kiss. Gloria was burning a hole in the upholstery of the couch with the end of the cigarette as she held herself up.
Letting go, they looked at one another.
Gloria could never stand being with her when she'd been out working, but Gloria couldn't say anything. She lowered herself to her knees. Baby's long-held lungful slipped through her teeth. Through curls and smoke – like nightclubs–
They were in their world, now.