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jedibuttercupT; Guns Akimbo/Ready or Not, 1600 words. Post-canon for both; Miles/Grace.
Bit of a cliché, really, looking into a stranger's eyes and feeling the world hold its breath around you.
Title: Thank You For Playing, But Your Soulmate Was In Another Genre
Author: Jedi Buttercup
Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not.
Rating: T/PG-13
Spoilers: Post-movie for Guns Akimbo (2019) and Ready or Not (2019)
Notes: Action comedy meets black comedy horror, for Launch the Ship Round 2. Because they both could use someone who understands, because both their canons involve deadly games ... and because I only realized after watching them back-to-back that both movies star Samara Weaving. :)
Bit of a cliché, really, looking into a stranger's eyes and feeling the world hold its breath around you. 1600 words.
It was her eyes that caught Miles' attention first.
He'd been minding his own business, using the Wi-Fi in a New York Starbucks while he researched the next Skizm leader to take down, and hadn't properly been paying attention when one of the other patrons stopped next to his table. She'd said something; he'd glanced up briefly with the intent of brushing her off ... and then he'd seen her eyes.
Bit of a cliché, really, looking into a stranger's eyes and feeling the world hold its breath around you. But that kind of thing had never happened to him when he was just a nobody code monkey spending his days programming cell phone games and his nights trolling arseholes on the internet, and it felt a bit more like a gut punch than he'd been expecting. His relationship with Nova had been mundane by comparison; an awkwardly earnest sort of geeky connection that inevitably fizzled as her star kept rising and his stagnated on a couch with a video game controller and a six-pack of beer, not the stuff of romance novels. And even that had been better than he probably deserved.
He might have levelled up a bit since, but more in the action-movie genre than anything that might suggest stripped off shirts and breathy sighs. Quite the opposite, really; surviving an underground deathmatch club had left him with a not insignificant number of scars. But as striking as the stranger was, he would be perfectly willing to guest-star in whatever genre she was visiting from for a little while.
She was tall, blonde, sharply pretty, dressed quietly but expensively, with vivid blue irises under distractingly dark eyebrows; the kind of woman who normally wouldn't even notice a vaguely scruffy guy bent over a laptop in a café. Her gaze was intent and haunted, strangely familiar on some level that wasn't quite clicking. And ... curious? Not in the creepy way he got from Skizm fanatics who recognized him from the livestream footage, but as though she'd really noticed his existence as a person.
"I'm sorry, what?" he said vaguely, blinking at her in astonishment.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to be rude. It's just, the scars," she replied. A wry smile turned up one corner of her mouth, and she gestured with the hand wrapped around her disposable cup toward where his rested on the keyboard. "Not often I run across someone else with matching trauma."
For about half a second, Miles thought she meant matching as in the fact that both hands had the same damage; he'd faced more than a few prurient questions about that since they'd healed from being forcibly pierced through and bolted to a pair of handguns. But then the someone else caught up to him, and he glanced at the hand she'd gestured with ... which also bore a very messy central gnarl of newly healed skin.
"Uh, wow," he said, lifting one of his hands and flexing it in sympathetic reaction. Riktor's nutjobs had been careful to drill between the major bones – they'd wanted him to put on a show, and he would've had a hard time pulling the trigger if his metacarpals had been shattered – but they'd been less careful with his fingers and hadn't given a fuck if the wounds got infected. Not to mention the damage from all that accumulated recoil; he was lucky he could still type at even half his former rate of speed. Her scar looked even worse than his. "I don't suppose you ran into Skizm, too?"
"Not unless you mean the kind of schism where I found out the night after my wedding that my new in-laws all belonged to a Satanic cult," she said, dryly.
"What, after?" he blurted. Secret cult plus scars like that equalled – well, probably an unexpected experience at least as terrible as his. "Your husband didn't...?"
"Oh, no, apparently he was lapsed. But funny how major social rituals have a habit of bringing people back to their roots. Such as sacrificing the occasional innocent on the family altar after playing hide and seek with deadly weapons. You...?"
Something in her tone reminded him of that crazy moment storming Skizm's headquarters with Nix, teaming up with the woman originally sent to kill him to take down the man who'd victimized them both, when she'd asked him do you wanna sit here and cry about it, or do you wanna go shoot a bunch of people in the face? The challenge, and the faux lightness both.
Wait – Nix. That was who she reminded him of. Nix had bleached her eyebrows, had a distractingly misspelled tattoo on her throat that read 'IF YOU CAN SEE THIS YOUR TOO CLOSE', and dressed like an escapee from a gunrunning biker gang, but the cheekbones, the intensity, the self-possession; now that he'd seen the resemblance, he couldn't unsee it. Somehow, it made him doubt the cultist husband was still in the picture any more than Riktor. Well, that and the fact that she'd used past tense to describe him.
Miles shut the lid on his computer, pretty sure now that he was getting no more research done that afternoon, and smiled lopsidedly back at her. "Mmm. Trolled the wrong guys on the internet; they broke into my apartment, bolted guns to my hands, and threw me into a livestreamed death match."
Her eyebrows lifted gratifyingly high. "Surprise worst night of your life," she said, knowingly.
"That's one way to put it," he chuckled, then slid the laptop into his bag. "Look, this might sound like a weird question, but, is your last name – was your last name – Degraves?"
The eyebrows arched higher. "Uh, no; but my mother had a cousin who married a Degraves. Why?"
"I think I might have briefly met your ... second cousin, then? Nix? And her father."
She sucked in a sharp breath. "I'd heard ... I mean, my parents died when I was really young, but when the state went looking for family ... well, I haven't been in touch in years."
She trailed off there, letting him fill in the blanks: another tragedy in a family apparently on Lady Luck's shit list. It was too much to get into in a Starbucks, really, on either of their parts, but he didn't think he'd have wanted to walk away even without that added coincidence.
"I'm sorry," he said uselessly, then got up, flailing for some reason to keep talking. "Do you have somewhere you need to be, or...?"
"Could we go somewhere and talk?" she suggested, smile flashing out again.
"God, yes," he replied. "I don't mean to sound over-eager...."
She laughed, sounding as relieved as he felt. "Not any more than I do. Which is weird, but ... I didn't have many friends aside from Alex to begin with, and you'd be amazed – or maybe you wouldn't – how few people want to believe a story as insane as mine."
"Probably about as many want to believe that everything that happened to me wasn't actually a stunt on a soundstage." He snorted. "It's a deepfaked world out there."
"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist," she said, almost to herself; then she shook her head and held out her unscarred hand. "Well, most of it, anyway. I'm Grace."
"Miles," he replied, clasping it carefully. "And fuck what other people think. You didn't give those fuckers the satisfaction of killing you; every day you're still here, you're winning."
"Is that how you get through it?" she asked, earnestly.
Miles waited until they'd pushed through the door before answering, exiting onto the busy city sidewalk. "That ... and plotting to hunt down every other asshole who wants to keep Skizm going, mug their resources, and move on to the next," he admitted.
"Now there's a life goal I can understand," Grace replied. "If you asked me whether I'd thought about investigating all the other people sitting on the groom's side at my wedding ... well, ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies, but what else am I going to use all the family's blood money for?"
"Rich family?" Miles had been slightly more than comfortable – as shitty as his programming job had been, he'd had enough disposable income to pick up all the posters and figurines he could want at the minor expense of not renewing his laptop warranty – but it sounded like she meant more than that.
"Ever hear of the Le Domas Gaming Dominion?" She wrinkled her nose.
"Oh wow," he blurted. "Wait – really? The family that makes board games with names like Family Ritual, Secret Council, Abracadabra – and Le Bail's Gambit? Shit, that's an anagram for Belial. A bit on the nose, isn't it?"
"Yes, really," Grace replied, laughing. "I guess it's like they say – the rich really are different."
"I wouldn't know, but I'll take your word for it," Miles shook his head, marvelling. "So tell me, how'd you even meet a rich Satanic cultist in the first place?"
"Well, like I said, he was lapsed at the time...." she began.
How often was Miles ever going to meet someone who understood even a fraction of what his life was now? Much less someone funny, smart, beautiful, and as much as survivor as he was, who seemed as thrilled to meet him as the reverse? Watching as the summer sun lit up her blonde chignon like a halo, he had a feeling he'd be thanking whatever providence might exist – just in case – that Grace had stopped to talk to him for a long, long time to come.
(x-posted at![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
launchtheship and on AO3)
Bit of a cliché, really, looking into a stranger's eyes and feeling the world hold its breath around you.
Title: Thank You For Playing, But Your Soulmate Was In Another Genre
Author: Jedi Buttercup
Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not.
Rating: T/PG-13
Spoilers: Post-movie for Guns Akimbo (2019) and Ready or Not (2019)
Notes: Action comedy meets black comedy horror, for Launch the Ship Round 2. Because they both could use someone who understands, because both their canons involve deadly games ... and because I only realized after watching them back-to-back that both movies star Samara Weaving. :)
Bit of a cliché, really, looking into a stranger's eyes and feeling the world hold its breath around you. 1600 words.
It was her eyes that caught Miles' attention first.
He'd been minding his own business, using the Wi-Fi in a New York Starbucks while he researched the next Skizm leader to take down, and hadn't properly been paying attention when one of the other patrons stopped next to his table. She'd said something; he'd glanced up briefly with the intent of brushing her off ... and then he'd seen her eyes.
Bit of a cliché, really, looking into a stranger's eyes and feeling the world hold its breath around you. But that kind of thing had never happened to him when he was just a nobody code monkey spending his days programming cell phone games and his nights trolling arseholes on the internet, and it felt a bit more like a gut punch than he'd been expecting. His relationship with Nova had been mundane by comparison; an awkwardly earnest sort of geeky connection that inevitably fizzled as her star kept rising and his stagnated on a couch with a video game controller and a six-pack of beer, not the stuff of romance novels. And even that had been better than he probably deserved.
He might have levelled up a bit since, but more in the action-movie genre than anything that might suggest stripped off shirts and breathy sighs. Quite the opposite, really; surviving an underground deathmatch club had left him with a not insignificant number of scars. But as striking as the stranger was, he would be perfectly willing to guest-star in whatever genre she was visiting from for a little while.
She was tall, blonde, sharply pretty, dressed quietly but expensively, with vivid blue irises under distractingly dark eyebrows; the kind of woman who normally wouldn't even notice a vaguely scruffy guy bent over a laptop in a café. Her gaze was intent and haunted, strangely familiar on some level that wasn't quite clicking. And ... curious? Not in the creepy way he got from Skizm fanatics who recognized him from the livestream footage, but as though she'd really noticed his existence as a person.
"I'm sorry, what?" he said vaguely, blinking at her in astonishment.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to be rude. It's just, the scars," she replied. A wry smile turned up one corner of her mouth, and she gestured with the hand wrapped around her disposable cup toward where his rested on the keyboard. "Not often I run across someone else with matching trauma."
For about half a second, Miles thought she meant matching as in the fact that both hands had the same damage; he'd faced more than a few prurient questions about that since they'd healed from being forcibly pierced through and bolted to a pair of handguns. But then the someone else caught up to him, and he glanced at the hand she'd gestured with ... which also bore a very messy central gnarl of newly healed skin.
"Uh, wow," he said, lifting one of his hands and flexing it in sympathetic reaction. Riktor's nutjobs had been careful to drill between the major bones – they'd wanted him to put on a show, and he would've had a hard time pulling the trigger if his metacarpals had been shattered – but they'd been less careful with his fingers and hadn't given a fuck if the wounds got infected. Not to mention the damage from all that accumulated recoil; he was lucky he could still type at even half his former rate of speed. Her scar looked even worse than his. "I don't suppose you ran into Skizm, too?"
"Not unless you mean the kind of schism where I found out the night after my wedding that my new in-laws all belonged to a Satanic cult," she said, dryly.
"What, after?" he blurted. Secret cult plus scars like that equalled – well, probably an unexpected experience at least as terrible as his. "Your husband didn't...?"
"Oh, no, apparently he was lapsed. But funny how major social rituals have a habit of bringing people back to their roots. Such as sacrificing the occasional innocent on the family altar after playing hide and seek with deadly weapons. You...?"
Something in her tone reminded him of that crazy moment storming Skizm's headquarters with Nix, teaming up with the woman originally sent to kill him to take down the man who'd victimized them both, when she'd asked him do you wanna sit here and cry about it, or do you wanna go shoot a bunch of people in the face? The challenge, and the faux lightness both.
Wait – Nix. That was who she reminded him of. Nix had bleached her eyebrows, had a distractingly misspelled tattoo on her throat that read 'IF YOU CAN SEE THIS YOUR TOO CLOSE', and dressed like an escapee from a gunrunning biker gang, but the cheekbones, the intensity, the self-possession; now that he'd seen the resemblance, he couldn't unsee it. Somehow, it made him doubt the cultist husband was still in the picture any more than Riktor. Well, that and the fact that she'd used past tense to describe him.
Miles shut the lid on his computer, pretty sure now that he was getting no more research done that afternoon, and smiled lopsidedly back at her. "Mmm. Trolled the wrong guys on the internet; they broke into my apartment, bolted guns to my hands, and threw me into a livestreamed death match."
Her eyebrows lifted gratifyingly high. "Surprise worst night of your life," she said, knowingly.
"That's one way to put it," he chuckled, then slid the laptop into his bag. "Look, this might sound like a weird question, but, is your last name – was your last name – Degraves?"
The eyebrows arched higher. "Uh, no; but my mother had a cousin who married a Degraves. Why?"
"I think I might have briefly met your ... second cousin, then? Nix? And her father."
She sucked in a sharp breath. "I'd heard ... I mean, my parents died when I was really young, but when the state went looking for family ... well, I haven't been in touch in years."
She trailed off there, letting him fill in the blanks: another tragedy in a family apparently on Lady Luck's shit list. It was too much to get into in a Starbucks, really, on either of their parts, but he didn't think he'd have wanted to walk away even without that added coincidence.
"I'm sorry," he said uselessly, then got up, flailing for some reason to keep talking. "Do you have somewhere you need to be, or...?"
"Could we go somewhere and talk?" she suggested, smile flashing out again.
"God, yes," he replied. "I don't mean to sound over-eager...."
She laughed, sounding as relieved as he felt. "Not any more than I do. Which is weird, but ... I didn't have many friends aside from Alex to begin with, and you'd be amazed – or maybe you wouldn't – how few people want to believe a story as insane as mine."
"Probably about as many want to believe that everything that happened to me wasn't actually a stunt on a soundstage." He snorted. "It's a deepfaked world out there."
"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist," she said, almost to herself; then she shook her head and held out her unscarred hand. "Well, most of it, anyway. I'm Grace."
"Miles," he replied, clasping it carefully. "And fuck what other people think. You didn't give those fuckers the satisfaction of killing you; every day you're still here, you're winning."
"Is that how you get through it?" she asked, earnestly.
Miles waited until they'd pushed through the door before answering, exiting onto the busy city sidewalk. "That ... and plotting to hunt down every other asshole who wants to keep Skizm going, mug their resources, and move on to the next," he admitted.
"Now there's a life goal I can understand," Grace replied. "If you asked me whether I'd thought about investigating all the other people sitting on the groom's side at my wedding ... well, ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies, but what else am I going to use all the family's blood money for?"
"Rich family?" Miles had been slightly more than comfortable – as shitty as his programming job had been, he'd had enough disposable income to pick up all the posters and figurines he could want at the minor expense of not renewing his laptop warranty – but it sounded like she meant more than that.
"Ever hear of the Le Domas Gaming Dominion?" She wrinkled her nose.
"Oh wow," he blurted. "Wait – really? The family that makes board games with names like Family Ritual, Secret Council, Abracadabra – and Le Bail's Gambit? Shit, that's an anagram for Belial. A bit on the nose, isn't it?"
"Yes, really," Grace replied, laughing. "I guess it's like they say – the rich really are different."
"I wouldn't know, but I'll take your word for it," Miles shook his head, marvelling. "So tell me, how'd you even meet a rich Satanic cultist in the first place?"
"Well, like I said, he was lapsed at the time...." she began.
How often was Miles ever going to meet someone who understood even a fraction of what his life was now? Much less someone funny, smart, beautiful, and as much as survivor as he was, who seemed as thrilled to meet him as the reverse? Watching as the summer sun lit up her blonde chignon like a halo, he had a feeling he'd be thanking whatever providence might exist – just in case – that Grace had stopped to talk to him for a long, long time to come.
(x-posted at
launchtheship and on AO3)
