Chapter Text
—
Debbie looks down at Ruth, sound asleep and snoring softly, and thinks, this is all wrong.
It’s not the first time she’s had that thought in the near-month since Ruth sold herself, body and soul and everything in between, to secure a bright shining future for their silly little wrestling show. It’s not the first time she’s had it in the near-decade that they’ve known each other, the relentless, never-ending soap opera of comedy and tragedy played out in empty fridges and empty wallets and empty beds.
It’s not the first time she’s had that thought in the eight-plus months since the near-total destruction of their friendship, a near-lifetime of infidelity and brutality, glitter and spandex and scripted violence, high-contact sports and high-cut leotards and and so much high drama it damn near killed them both. It’s not the first time she’s had it in the two-plus months it’s taken to slowly, exhaustingly, painstakingly put that friendship — or whatever the hell it is now, whatever the hell it may or may not become — back together.
Hell, it’s not even the first time she’s had that thought this morning, and it’s barely dawn.
She shouldn’t be here. That’s the start and the end of it, the only thought she truly needs.
She shouldn’t be here. She should be in her own room, in her own bed, getting an extra couple hours of sleep. If she absolutely has to be awake right now, insomnia or stress or whatever the fuck else, she should be at the diner, drinking weak overpriced coffee and refusing to eat the congealed garbage they call ‘breakfast’. She should be outside in the less-than-fresh air, smoking her third or fourth cigarette of the day under the garish neon sign blasting the motel’s name to every pair of eyes within a thousand miles.
She should be bracing herself to make the long drive across town to Mark’s new apartment, bracing herself for the awkward small-talk with his secretary-slash-girlfriend, the necessary toll to pay these days for picking up her son.
It’s seven in the fucking morning, and she should be anywhere else in the world but here.
Here: standing at the foot of Ruth’s shitty little bed at the Dusty Spur, watching her sleep.
Officially, she’s here to wake her. That’s what they agreed upon — and by ‘agreed’, she means that Ruth pouted and pleaded and made that stupid fucking face she knows Debbie can never resist, and Debbie immediately folded like a wet sheet of paper — and that’s why she’s here right now, instead of literally anywhere else in the fucking world.
She’s here to wake her, to drag her back to the land of the living, kicking and screaming if that’s what it takes, because Ruth may be staggeringly lacking in self-awareness when it comes to most aspects of her life but even she will admit — did admit, loudly and miserably and wearing a face that could melt an iceberg — that early mornings are not her forte.
Even on a good day, the lazy little sybarite would be hard-pressed to be even remotely conscious right now, and this is definitely not—
No, that’s a lie.
For Ruth, assuming that all goes according to plan, it’s going to be a very, very good day.
As for Debbie...
Well. There’s a reason Ruth needed to break out that face to get her to agree to this.
“Are you insane?” she sputtered, when Ruth asked. “Or are you trying to punish me?”
Ruth frowned. “Punish you?”
“Punish. Torture. Whatever.”
“I don’t—”
“—understand.” Debbie sighed, already crumbling, already halfway to surrender, and already hating herself for it. “Of course you don’t. You never do.”
If she’s completely honest with herself — something she tries not to be, as a rule, if she can help it — that’s a big part of the reason why she agreed to this.
Ruth is right: she doesn’t understand.
Ruth could never fucking understand.
Ruth isn’t like Debbie. She’s not cold or calculating or calloused, even when she really, really ought to be. She doesn’t get mean or spiteful or defensive, doesn’t lash out the way Debbie does when she feels like she’s been misjudged or mistreated. Ruth doesn’t map out her days through the red-tinted lens of revenge and righteous fury; she doesn’t curdle like sour milk when someone looks at her the wrong way or says the wrong thing.
Ruth doesn’t have that kind of bitterness in her. She never has, and if she hasn’t managed to find it after eight months of playing a psychopathic Soviet villain, she probably never will.
She’s too soft to indulge in that shit, too soft to even understand where those sorts of impulses might come from, and while there was a pretty sizeable part of Debbie that wanted to beat the living tar out of her for the audacity in asking for this so-called ‘favour’, there was another part of her, smaller but not quite small enough to keep from being heard, that wanted to take Ruth’s stupid, annoying, irresistible face in her cold, mean hands and just—
Well.
The point is, Ruth really isn’t trying to punish her.
Or torture her. Or make her life hell. Or whatever.
When she asked Debbie to wake her up bright and early and give her a ride to the hospital to get the cast taken off her — hopefully formerly — broken leg, it was an earnest, genuine request.
When she said, off Debbie’s — frankly understandable — horror, “I’m not punishing you, Debbie, I just trust you and I want you to be there,” it was because she really and truly meant that.
Fucking idiot.
In Ruth’s mind, candy-pink and cock-eyed with overly sugared optimism, she’s making some kind of point. It’s a gesture, a show of faith, a way of saying, look, see, we’re okay. A trust fall, only instead of throwing herself backwards and trusting that Debbie will break her fall, she’s putting her still-healing ankle into Debbie’s cold, mean hands and trusting that she won’t break her fucking bones.
Again.
I want you to be there, she said, like she thinks it’s a kindness.
I want you to be there, like that’s proof she’s not afraid of her.
I want you to be there, like she thinks Debbie should be fucking grateful for the opportunity to go back to the same place that still haunts her nightmares and stalks the shadows of her waking hours, like she really, sincerely believes that’s something she’d want to do, ever, ever again.
There are few things in the fucking world Debbie wants less.
She doesn’t want to have to look at that hideous, horrible x-ray again. She doesn’t want to have to look into the mirror of her own violence, her own brutality, the twisted inner darkness that transformed a moderately successful actor-slash-producer into a monster, the head-spinning rush of blood and booze, cocaine and adrenaline, hurt and hate and heartbreak.
She doesn’t want to have to remember what she did, what she could so easily do again, if the stars aligned and the lines on Ruth’s face caught the light just so.
She doesn’t want to remember how it felt to—
But Ruth, idiotic idealist that she is, doesn’t see that at all.
She just sees Debbie, and thinks, I trust you.
And Debbie, god preserve her, is so fucking weak to that.
So here she is, against her better judgement, against her better fucking sanity. Here she is, standing at the foot of Ruth’s shitty little bed at the Dusty Spur, watching her sleep and bracing herself for the moment she screws up her courage and kicks her awake so they can drive to that disgusting hellhole of a hospital, watching her sleep and wishing she could be anywhere else in the world, watching her sleep and feeling the wrongness of it all the way down to her clean, unbroken bones.
Ruth is beautiful when she’s asleep. That’s, like, an objective fact; it’s not Debbie being weird or creepy or whatever, it’s just the plain and simple truth.
When she sleeps, deep and dead to the world like she is now, Ruth gets still and quiet, peaceful in a way she never really manages when she’s awake, hyperactive little ball of energy that she is. Her features are softer, smoothed of all their little frowns and furrows and creases, and the messy tangle of her hair halos her face as she burrows into the pillow. She looks younger, less burdened, sort of freer, and it’s so rare and precious, so fucking radiant, it feels like watching the trees and flowers blossom back to life after a long, dark winter.
Awake, Ruth is exhausting. She’s overwhelming, overstimulating, the kind of person who drives everyone around her crazy just by existing in the same space and being who she is. She’s like a human ping-pong ball, constantly bouncing from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other, and on the rare occasion she does get still or quiet, it’s almost never peaceful or free or any of that other stuff, it’s usually because she’s fucked herself up so badly her body has simply shut itself down and ceased to function at all.
Awake, Ruth is a wreck, a disaster, a knotted-up tangle of too much everything.
Asleep, she’s just... like this.
Curled up on her side with her arm tucked under her pillow, snoring softly. Still and quiet, peaceful. Younger, freer, less burdened. Rare and precious, radiant and beautiful.
Debbie has seen her like this a million times over the years, so many she’s practically lost count, and it never fails to steal the breath straight out of her goddamned lungs.
All things considered, that probably should have been her first warning.
Normal people don’t usually get breathless watching their friends sleep.
Normal people do not, as a general rule, feel a tug in their chest, right where their heart should be, when those soft little snores shift into other sounds, sighs or murmurs or whimpers or what-the-fuck-ever. Normal people do not, generally speaking, feel a prickle in their throat and a sting behind their eyes, a blaze of summer-bright warmth that shouldn’t even be possible in late fucking January, just from seeing their friends look young and free and unburdened in their brief, rare moments of peace.
Normal people don’t feel a ball of sunlight settle in behind their ribs just from mapping out the rhythm of their friend’s breath.
Normal people don’t think about this shit at all, and they sure as hell don’t put imaginary quote-marks around the word ‘friend’.
It’s been a month, more or less, since Debbie’s world blew itself off its axis, and even now, looking down at Ruth in this rare moment of peace and stillness, feeling her breath stall with raw, overpowering emotion, the only thing she can think is, how could I have been so fucking blind?
She’s supposed to be the smart one. Ruth is the idealistic buffoon, the well-meaning idiot with more heart than brains. Ruth is the one with the passion, the enthusiasm, the blithe, brainless self-deluded optimism; Debbie is the smart one, the shrewd one, the sensible one. Debbie is the one who thinks every situation through in every direction, who studies every opportunity from every possible angle, seeking out catches and gotchas and hidden trap doors; she’s the one who sees things as they are, the one who understands all the messy, complicated, fucked up shit that Ruth, the blithe, brainless, self-deluded optimist, refuses to see at all.
Debbie is the one who should have put the pieces together. She’s the one who should have seen this coming.
It shouldn’t have taken half a bottle of tequila, an ill-advised grapple, and an almost-kiss for her to realise—
What?
That she wants her? Desires her?
No.
Well, okay, yes.
Honestly, a lot.
And that would be fucked up and frightening and completely fucking world-bending all on its own, a great big unfathomable universe of unexpected self-discovery that she really, really does not need right now.
She’s not—
It doesn’t matter. That’s not the problem.
Or... well, okay, it’s not the only problem.
It’s not just rampant horniness or half a decade’s worth of repressed sexual tension or latent gay feelings or whatever the fuck else.
She’s standing at the foot of Ruth’s shitty little bed, watching her sleep, and it’s not like she’s thinking about climbing up there and straddling her and kissing her senseless, it’s not like she’s fantasising about licking into her mouth or biting her neck or sucking her tits or making her—
Not much, anyway.
And even if she was, that’s still not the problem.
It’s the other stuff.
It’s the tug in her chest, the prickle in her throat, the sunlight settling summer-warm behind her ribs.
It’s the part that gets breathless watching her sleep. It’s the part that can’t bear how beautiful she is.
The problem isn’t the part of her that wants to wake Ruth by straddling her hips and kissing her filthy. It’s the part that wants to wake her by pushing back her hair and kissing her fucking forehead.
She won’t, obviously.
No more than she’ll do the other stuff.
No more than she’ll do anything at all.
No more than she’ll—
And oh, look, there’s another problem.
Specifically, the problem where she still can’t actually bring herself to touch Ruth at all. Specifically, the problem where she still can’t even think about touching her without hearing the snapping of bones and those horrible, endless screams.
It’s been weeks since she last touched Ruth in any meaningful way, and months since she’s been able to think about touching her in any way at all without shuddering. That’s not about to change now, just because her weak, traitorous heart — and her weaker, far more traitorous body, that selfish asshole — wants to gaze down at Ruth’s stupid softly-snoring face, lean over, and—
No.
Not now. Not here.
Not—
Tomorrow, maybe.
Tomorrow, when those broken bones are officially healed and mended and knitted back together. Tomorrow, when the cast is gone, all the evidence of that violence swept neatly under the carpet like it never existed at all. Tomorrow, when Ruth is just plain old Ruth again, wide-eyed and wild-haired but whole and intact and herself, not the broken-legged shell of a body she’s been for the last eight or nine weeks, not the beaten, brutalised thing that Debbie tore apart with her bare hands.
Tomorrow, or maybe later today, if they’re really, really lucky. When Ruth is just Ruth and Debbie is just Debbie, and she can look her in the eye and see something other than blood and bone shards, when she can look down at her body and see the living, breathing human being behind those slow-healing injuries. Ruth, simple, idealistic Ruth, stripped at last of two months’ worth of pain and misery, given the all-clear from the same asshole doctor who smiled at a broken bone, snapped right in two, and called it ‘beautiful’.
Debbie would be lying if she said she hadn’t seriously considered tearing him apart with her bare hands.
And maybe that’s another part of the problem: those ugly, violent urges of hers haven’t gone anywhere.
She thought they would. She hoped they would.
But no. She’s still angry, like, all the damn time.
She still wants to hurt the assholes who try to fuck with her, or with the too-few people in her life that she actually cares about.
She still wants to rip them all to shreds.
She’d really, really, really hoped those feelings would disappear after it happened for real. After she gave in to those instincts, blind and high and halfway drunk, and felt the harsh, brittle reality of another human being breaking apart under her hands. She’d hoped she would stop wanting to inflict violence on the people around her after she learned the hard way that it’s not pleasant or vindicating or empowering, that it is, in fact, like living in a fucking nightmare.
She’d hoped she’d lose her interest in violent revenge fantasies after she lived one out for real and then spent the best part of two months going through it again, over and over and over, every time she closed her eyes.
She’d hoped she would lose the taste for blood after smearing it all over her teeth and swallowing it down until she choked and spat it back up, but apparently that’s just one more part of her that doesn’t know how to quit.
Somehow, she needs to find a way to reconcile the part of herself that still indulges in sick, twisted daydreams about doing unthinkable things to people who may or may not deserve it, with the part of herself that feels sick to its stomach every time she looks at Ruth and remembers exactly what it felt like to do those things for real, and far worse things besides.
Not to mention the part of her that wants to kiss her senseless.
Not to mention the part that wants to kiss her forehead.
Not to mention the part that is too scared to do anything at all.
Not to mention—
On the bed, Ruth stirs.
Her breath catches, soft snores shifting into softer sighs, and the twinge of sunlight behind Debbie’s ribs flares hot enough to scorch her from the inside.
Her throat is suddenly much too tight; it hurts to try and push the air through it, in or out or anywhere else. Her heart is pounding against the walls of her chest like it’s trying to break free, and it’s almost more than she can do just to hold herself upright through all the overwhelming, impossible emotions suddenly coursing through every nerve and vein and organ in her body.
Tenderness. Affection. Warmth, and a light so bright it makes her dizzy to try and squint through it. A near-decade’s worth of love peppered with a near-lifetime’s worth of intimacy. That devastating, rebellious urge to kiss her not on the mouth but on the forehead, the cheek, the temple. Tenderness, intense and terrifying, so fond and sugary-sweet it makes her feel a little bit sick, and then, straight on its heels the too-familiar horror, the vicious, visceral vitriol of self-loathing, the never-silent voice whispering in the back of her mind like a slasher movie serial killer, you beat her, you broke her, you tore her apart with your bare hands.
Tenderness isn’t meant for people like her, Debbie thinks, and immediately commits to that thought by kicking Ruth’s shitty little bed so fiercely the whole frame rattles.
The mattress shudders, and Ruth shudders a little bit along with it, grumbling drowsily as she stumbles her way back to consciousness, resisting it every last step of the way.
Debbie ignores the fist clenching in her chest, squeezing her heart until it feels bruised. She ignores the warmth blazing like a hearth behind her ribs, sunlight bleaching her bones from the inside out. She ignores—
“Up and at ’em, Ruth,” she barks, voice raised much too loud for the early hour, and too sharp to cover up the tremor that catches in her throat on that last syllable. “I’m not waiting around all fucking day for you to drag your worthless ass out of bed.”
Ruth fusses some more, every inch the whiny, irritable toddler, then rolls the top half of her body onto its front and shoves her head under the pillow.
“S’too early,” she mumbles, burrowing into the sheets like a goddamned rabbit. “Come back in th’mornin’.”
Debbie sighs. The fist in her chest squeezes a bit tighter. The part of her that wants to kiss Ruth’s forehead rears its head again, obnoxiously insistent.
She ignores it. She grits her teeth and ignores it all.
“Up,” she repeats, laying a hand over her ribs. The skin covering them feels thin, sensitive even through the layered fabric of her blouse, her camisole, her bra. Underneath her fingertips, her heart thrums quietly. “Now, you lazy little shit, or you can find your own way to the fucking hospital.”
Ruth makes another pathetic noise, but doesn’t move an inch.
Debbie snatches up the pillow and smacks her with it. “Ruth!”
That does the job. If only for reasons of pure self-preservation, Ruth rolls onto her back, still pouting and sulking and playing the overtired baby for all she’s worth, and drags her body up into something more or less resembling a sitting position.
She looks ridiculous, Debbie thinks with another surge of rib-creaking fondness. Dishevelled and disoriented, probably still at least three-quarters asleep, with purple-grey smudges under her eyes and little frown lines wrinkling her forehead, squinting pathetically up at her through the tousled curtain of her hair, she’s got the aura of a sad little beetle that’s just crawled out from under a rock and found itself face to face with daylight for the first time in its life.
Ridiculous. Absolutely fucking ridiculous.
It makes Debbie want to smack her with the pillow again, just to stop herself from feeling so damn much.
It makes her want to lean in, brush the mess of hair out of her eyes, and drown in her stupid sleepy scowl.
It makes her want to—
“I’m up,” Ruth whines, scrubbing tiredly at her face. “God, Debbie, is this how you wake Randy in the morning?”
“I don’t need to,” Debbie shoots back. “Unlike you, my infant son is capable of waking himself in the morning.”
Not to mention everyone else in a thirty-mile radius.
That particular addition, she wisely keeps to herself.
Ruth stretches, then yawns, then stretches some more. She looks like she’s giving serious thought to simply toppling over and going back to sleep, risking another skull-shaking whack with the pillow for the sake of another ten seconds of shut-eye. She doesn’t actually do it — no doubt her trademark death wish is muted by the grogginess — but Debbie can tell it’s a close-run thing. She heaves a huge long-suffering sigh, still committed to the role of sulking toddler, then grudgingly, effortfully hauls herself up off the bed.
Debbie doesn’t offer to help. In fact, she turns away completely, unable to stomach the sight of Ruth losing her balance, wobbling one-footed as she scrambles to orient herself, fumbling blindly for a wall or a chair or some other surface to hold her upright. She turns her attention, instead, to the filthy window, peering out through the half-shuttered blinds, tracking the weak strands of early-morning half-light as they pulse in through the glass.
She watches the dust motes dancing in the faint beams, light and airy and so fucking free, and tries to block out the clumsy clamour battering her from behind as Ruth lurches hopelessly around the room.
She watches the dust, watches the light, watches the pre-dawn haze lift from the world outside, and she thinks about Sheila’s empty bed, about the half-dozen empty rooms they’ve reserved for another nine months, about the four short days before those rooms are filled all over again, before fourteen women begin training for the second season — hard won, brutally won, violently won, but won just the same — of their silly little wrestling show.
She doesn’t think about the high price of all that shit.
She doesn’t think about Ruth’s stupid choices, her shredded soul, her fucking blood sacrifice.
She doesn’t think about the week or so she spent helping her to put herself back together.
She doesn’t think about the hole in their team, cigarette-stinking and shaped like Sam Sylvia.
She doesn’t think about his part in that fucking mess.
She doesn’t think about the strained, tired, miserable lines on Bash’s face, the wan pallour of his skin, the way his voice shook like he was jonesing when he mumbled, in a rare moment of actually putting on his producer’s hat, “We’re going to need a new director.”
She doesn’t think about Ruth in the ring, Ruth in her leotard, Ruth bouncing off the ropes, ready for action, with both legs whole and strong and fully healed.
She doesn’t think about her own legs, the blind, uncontrolled strength in the way she used them that awful night, the boot-shaped bruises she left on Ruth’s hips and ribs and ass, the impact thudding inside her skull as Ruth hit the floor again and again and again.
She doesn’t think about—
There’s a heavy thunk on the opposite side of the room, followed by a sleepy curse and the muffled rustle of fabric. It cuts through the mire of Debbie’s thoughts, tramples them down with just enough efficiency to bring her back to the present, to the ugly decor of the room Ruth shares with Sheila at the Dusty Spur, to the exposed plane of her bare back as she steadies herself against the wall, wriggling into a loose tee-shirt like it’s a feat of unfathomable difficulty.
Debbie’s chest pulls tight as she turns, against her better judgement, to look at her. The little bumps of her spine, the perpetually pale skin, the faint greenish bloom of a fading bruise just above the jut of her hipbone.
She’s allowed to look, she thinks faintly. Hell, she’s allowed to stare, if she really wants to.
There is a part of her, small and scared out of its mind, that wants to embrace that. The desire not just to look but to stare, to rewrite all the things she thought she knew about Ruth’s body, and her own feelings about it, all the countless ways she’s looked at it before and felt nothing. The desire to stare, mouth open and heart racing, and the knowledge that Ruth would welcome that staring as the slowly blossoming erotic strangeness that it is.
That part of her, through the fear, the confusion, the what-does-it-all-mean, blushes hot.
The rest of her...
The rest of her just feels sick at the sight of that faint green bruise, the hint of swelling at her hip, the gradually fading echo of blooming pain.
She doesn’t need to ask where it came from. Ruth has been on crutches for two months, give or take, and even now, on the very day she’s about to lose the fucking things forever, she still can’t make it more than three paces — wholly awake, on a good day — without crashing headfirst into something.
She knows, without having to ask, that the bruise is just another mark of her clumsiness, her awkwardness, her fucking Ruth-ness; she knows, without having to ask, that there are probably at least half a dozen more scattered about her person. She knows all of that, she really does.
And yet, even with all that knowledge, that certainty, the set-in-stone evidence that this pain, at least, has nothing at all to do with her, the sight of the bruise goes through her like a fucking earthquake, a barrage of brutality and muscle memory, booze and coke surging blistering hot in her veins, her boot smashing again and again into Ruth’s ribs, her ass, her—
“What time is it?” Ruth asks, slightly muffled by her shirt.
Debbie breathes out, shaky and uneven. “Almost seven.”
The bruise on Ruth’s hip quivers slightly, then disappears under the fabric.
“Appointment’s at nine,” she points out, surfacing from the sea of cotton like a creature from the deep. “That’s, like, two hours from now.”
Debbie rolls her eyes. “Right,” she mutters. “And you take three hours to wake up, and an hour and a half to eat your fucking breakfast.”
“Oh.” Ruth’s voice is suddenly very, very small. Her hand is flat on the wall; Debbie watches her knuckles blanch white. “We don’t need to... I mean, I’m not hungry.”
“It’s seven in the morning, Ruth. No-one’s hungry. But we both know you’re a cranky little bitch when you haven’t been fed, so...”
Ruth makes a low, grumbly sound. “I’m not that bad.”
Debbie can’t fight the smile tugging at the corner of her lips, fondness dragged upwards from the space between her ribs. “You are,” she shoots back. “And getting up at seven is your punishment.”
Ruth shakes her head, wobbling precariously without the support of her crutches to keep her steady. Debbie watches her shoulders crack against the wall, watches all the strength drain out of her like water dripping from a leaky faucet, and feels the loss slice into her own body too, a scalpel pressed to her neck, a tool or a weapon depending on the wielder.
“I mean it,” Ruth mumbles, clearly more focused on keeping herself upright than talking. “I’m not... I don’t want...” She swallows. “I’ll eat when we’re done.”
Debbie’s nerves twitch. In all the years they’ve known each other, she could probably count on one hand the times Ruth has actively turned down food, never mind if she’s hungry, never mind if it’s Stupid O’Clock in the morning, never mind if she’s literally just gotten up from a four-course meal.
She turns. Faces her a little more fully, studies her a little more closely. Asks, with her heart in her mouth and her lungs in her stomach, “You feeling okay?”
Ruth doesn’t answer right away. Granted, she’s kind of busy with the exhausting and laborious task of trying to dress herself without falling face-first onto the carpet, and Debbie can’t help wincing a little as she watches her rummage around for a pair of pants that fit over the bulk of her cast, as she watches her hop the three short steps back to her bed, sit back down, and begin the equally exhausting, equally laborious task of pulling them on.
She doesn’t really look like she’s feeling okay. She looks drained and wan, off-colour in a way that could just be the natural result of getting viciously kicked awake at seven in the morning but could also be something else entirely. It’s unsettling, frustrating, and Debbie kind of hates herself for that because she knows it shouldn’t be either of those things, because she should just know, without having to ask, precisely what’s going on inside Ruth’s stupid, sluggish little half-asleep brain, but she doesn’t.
A year ago, she would have.
Hell, six months ago, she would have, and she would have hated herself all the more because she wouldn’t have wanted to.
Now, when she does want to...
Well.
Maybe she’d be a little better equipped to handle Ruth’s early-morning bullshit if they’d spent more than fifteen minutes in each other’s company over the last four weeks.
Maybe she’d have a better handle on whatever the fuck is going on with her if she hadn’t been a fucking coward and spent the last month buried in other, more important stuff.
Maybe—
Whatever.
The point is, it’s her own fault she can’t read Ruth as well as she knows she should, and she can damn well own that.
She’s the one who insisted that they ‘take it slow’, whatever the fuck that even means after a near-decade of repressed sexual tension or latent gay feelings or what-the-fuck-ever is going on between them. She’s the one who insisted that they pull back from each other and work on their own shit separately, rather than sit the fuck down and actually talk about these strange new — or possibly old — feelings that are suddenly burgeoning, hot and warm and tingly, in the cave of her chest, the pit of her stomach, the shadows between her—
Whatever.
She’s the one who disappeared into the ether, citing ‘producer shit’ or ‘motherhood shit’ or whatever other bullshit she could find lying conveniently at her feet, the instant all those big emotional revelations got a bit too real.
She’s the one who kept herself busy with with Mark and his fucking secretary-slash-girlfriend-slash-whatever, with daycare drama and scheduling conflicts and planning ahead for another near-year of training and rehearsing and shooting their silly little wrestling show.
She’s the one who finally bit the bullet and insisted that they sell off that big, empty failure of a house in Pasadena, and she’s the one who put those wheels into motion as fast and efficiently as possible, to finally draw a line underneath all those wasted, worthless years, not just for herself but for him as well.
She’s the one who spent three straight weeks ‘reorienting herself’ at her mother’s place, shrinking away from the necessity of moving her few remaining worldly possessions back into the motel and making that relocation official. She’s the one who buried her head in paperwork and busywork and whatever other shit she could find, show-related or life-related or Randy-related, just so she wouldn’t have to stop, sit still, and actually think about what was going on inside her heart.
She’s the one who stayed as far away from this place as she could, knowing that Ruth would be alone here in this cheap, shitty almost-empty motel, while Sheila and the rest of the girls took advantage of month-long break to visit their friends and family. She’s the one who hid like a fucking coward, knowing damn well that Ruth was deliberately and purposefully not doing that because she didn’t want her kind, supportive Midwestern parents to see what had happened to her, didn’t want them to know that her wonderful new job, the one she was so fucking proud of, had left her beaten and battered and broken.
That’s Debbie’s fault too.
Ruth is too polite, or too much of a wet blanket, to say it in words, but they both know it.
I’m not punishing you, Ruth said when she asked for a ride to that fucking hospital, but Jesus Christ, does it ever feel like she is.
“I’m fine,” Ruth says now, wrestling her pants up over the ugly, bulky cast for hopefully the last time.
Debbie studies her long and hard, tries to cut through the grogginess, and hates that she can’t tell if she’s telling the truth or not.
“You sure?” she asks, and it’s not what she wanted to say at all.
Ruth falls backwards, flops onto the mattress shoulders-first. The bed bounces a bit, then settles, and Debbie watches the slow rise and fall of Ruth’s chest, the way her tee-shirt rucks up in rhythm with the motion, the wedge of exposed skin at the dip of her waist, the plane of her stomach, the points of her hips. Her mouth is suddenly very, very dry; she feels like a teenage boy getting his first peek at the forbidden fruit of female flesh, embarrassed and excited in almost equal measure.
Ruth is breathing unevenly, fingers splayed across her ribs, and Debbie’s lungs feel heavier just watching her, swollen and much too thin, like they’ve been filled with seawater.
This is all wrong, she thinks again, and she means the warmth rushing up to paint her cheeks red, and she means the heat rushing down to flood through other places, and she means the guilt and shame biting ice-cold into her guts, and she means the tightness yanking at her chest, the seawater flooding into her lungs, the bizarre sensation of drowning and surviving a shipwreck all at once, and she means—
“I’m sure,” Ruth says, blinking up at the ceiling. “I just want to get it over with, you know?”
Debbie watches as she tugs her tee-shirt back down, covering her exposed abdomen, her ribs, the fading green bruise above her hip. She watches her good leg as she kicks it gently back and forth against the edge of the bed, arrhythmic and utterly maddening. She watches her other leg, the one almost completely swallowed up by the cast, her knee twitching above the plaster, a dozen signatures in a spectrum of colours, a galaxy of love and friendship scattered like stars across the broken bone.
“Yeah,” she whispers, and turns back to the dirt-smeared, sun-streaked window. “Me too.”
Early morning traffic in L.A. is a bitch.
Debbie knows this better than most, having made the commute back and forth from Pasadena more times than she’d care to think about. She’s long accustomed to this particular shitshow, she knows what to expect from it, and even today, when it’s the last thing in the fucking world she wants to deal with, she’s more or less ready for teeth-clenching irritation in bumper-to-bumper bullshit.
She’s perfectly prepared for the juddering stop-start-stop, the stuck-still for minutes that feel like hours, the deafening clamour of car horns and cursing drivers and shrieking children who definitely should not be awake at this hour. She’s prepared, more or less, for the journey from hell, and — today, at least — every minute they’re stuck here is another minute before they reach the destination from hell. It’s not much of a comfort, but she’ll take it.
Still, it’s no-one’s definition of fun, being trapped in a limbo of seething frustration and gridlocked radio static for an hour or more, and she’s more than willing to use it as leverage the next time she’s the one in need of a quote-unquote ‘favour’.
Not that she’s ever really needed to weaponise her own generosity when she wants something from Ruth.
Even when they were barely even talking to each other, when Debbie hated her guts and wanted her dead, Ruth was always so quick, so happy, so fucking eager to say ‘how high?’
If she were a good person — or, hell, even just a halfway decent person —Debbie might look back on that and feel a little bit guilty.
She doesn’t, though.
She doesn’t look back at all. She doesn’t think she could stomach the people she knows she’ll find there. The cringing, cowardly, fucked up version of Ruth, all regret and remorse and simpering apologies that meant less than nothing. The vicious, spiteful, bitter version of herself, treading water and hating the fact that it made her look weak, hating Mark and hating Ruth, hating everyone and everything and herself most of all, a smouldering ash heap of bitterness and resentment who would have gladly torched the whole fucking world if she thought for one second it would make her feel even just a tiny bit better.
She doesn’t look back. She won’t look back. She can’t—
So, instead, she looks forward.
Forward, at the bug-splattered bumper of the car in front, the fog of exhaust fumes blurring her vision, the early-morning sunlight glinting obnoxiously off the chassis, dazzling and blinding. Forward, to the smog-clogged horizon, the looming shadow of Valley General Hospital with its smug, smirking, self-satisfied doctors, its hellish, hideous x-rays, its ugly off-white walls that apparently do nothing whatsoever to muffle the sound of what should be private conversations.
She hates that fucking place. More than she ever hated Mark, and much, much more than she ever hated Ruth.
She never wants to see it again, that nightmare of a hospital, but here she is just the same, blinded by reflected sunlight and two turn signals away from murdering every driver in a three-mile radius, and Jesus fucking Christ, this is so much more than just a ‘favour’.
In a futile attempt at distracting herself from the half-dozen idiots stalling their cars in front of her, she turns, instead, to look at Ruth.
Ruth isn’t looking at her. She’s not looking at the traffic either, or the reflected sunlight, or much of anything at all. She’s staring out the passenger-side window, vacant in a way that makes it clear her eyes aren’t really focused, and devastatingly, terrifyingly silent.
Debbie fights against the urge to frown, to bite her lip, to worry.
“Hey,” she says instead, and hears the word bounce off the glass half an inch above Ruth’s head. “You doing okay?”
Ruth blinks a few times. Her lashes flutter over her cheeks, fragile and delicate and almost unbearably soft. “Mhm.”
It’s an easy lie, the kind that comes too fast and with too much confidence, and it settles uncomfortably in the pit of the stomach; it’s the kind of lie that isn’t actually a lie at all, which, of course, is Ruth’s favourite kind. It’s the kind she knows she can get away with, the kind that she thinks is bulletproof because it doesn’t give anything away, because you can’t get called a liar if you didn’t, technically, say any real words.
It’s just a noise, a grunt, a barely-human half-sound, and of course, that could mean anything at all.
Debbie thinks about calling her on it anyway, just because she hates it when Ruth gets away with shit like this, but she doesn’t. It’s the first sound Ruth has made since they left her room, and that in itself is unsettling enough to still her tongue.
Ruth has never been the type of person to sit still and quiet in gridlocked traffic. Hell, most of the time she’s not the sort of person to sit still and quiet anywhere, for any length of time, for any reason. It makes Debbie’s skin feel too tight to see her like that now; it makes her nerves itch, the perfect stillness and the near-perfect quiet that is nothing at all like the way she was when she was sleeping.
In sleep, she was peaceful. Tranquil, even. But now...
It’s not the first time Debbie has seen her like this. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen, and it always makes her throat close up, her lungs shrink to near-uselessness, her whole body seize with worry that comes nearly as unnaturally to her as stillness does to Ruth. It waters that well-buried seed of protectiveness and affection, forces it to spread its roots, to push its way up to the surface, forces her to feel it, all the way down to her fucking bones.
Debbie hates feeling protective, hates feeling affectionate.
She grits her teeth. Turns back to the road, the smog, the sunlight glinting off the car in front.
She says, so gently it leaves her mouth desert-dry, “Ruth.”
Ruth doesn’t lift her head. Debbie can hear her breathing, but she can’t feel her moving at all.
“I’m okay,” Ruth says at last. It doesn’t sound convincing, but at least she’s putting it into words this time; at least, when it inevitably proves to be total bullshit, Debbie will be able to call her on it. “I’m just... you know, nervous.”
Debbie sits with that for a minute or two. She thinks back on a near-decade of friendship, a million auditions, a million callbacks, a million naive, idealistic ‘what if’s. She thinks back to Ruth vibrating over her fourth or fifth cup of coffee, her voice pitching high with excitement, with exuberance and enthusiasm, with the never-crushed hope of the blithely optimistic: this is going to be the one, Deb, I can feel it.
She looks over at Ruth now, still and quiet and all but lifeless, barely aware of the morning sun playing across her face, the delicate yellow highlights making her tousled, messy hair look like it’s caught fire.
“I’ve seen you nervous,” Debbie reminds her, voice cracking in rhythm with the pains in her chest. “Like, a million times. You’re like a fucking hummingbird, all jittery and twitchy and over-caffeinated. This is...” She looks Ruth up and down, takes in her pale face, the purple-grey smudges under her eyes, the dark lines crinkling at their corners, the lightless, soulless void behind them. Her breath stalls; she shakes her head to try and kickstart it. “This is definitely something else.”
Ruth swallows. Her throat visibly contracts. For a long beat, it’s the only movement in her whole body.
“Fine,” she says at last. The word is a tremor, a teardrop caught in her eyelashes. “I’m scared. Better?”
Weirdly, Debbie thinks, it is better. It’s actually honest, for a start, and in moments like this, the early-morning chill and the too-bright glare of the slowly rising sun, trapped in the claustrophobic confines of a sputtering car, when being honest is effectively synonymous with being vulnerable, with admitting to something small and weak and silly, that kind of openness means a whole fucking lot.
More than a lot, really. It makes Debbie’s stomach grow warm, and then immediately turn to ice.
It’s not just honesty, is the thing. It’s trust, the real, deep, soul-baring kind. Trust, not the vapid, shallow, meaningless thing that Ruth babbled and blathered about when she begged for a ride to the hospital from the woman who put her there in the first place. Trust, not like ‘I trust you and I want you to be there’, like she really believed that was something Debbie wanted to hear, like she really thinks it’s something she fucking deserves.
It’s the other kind of trust. The kind that can’t be sold with words alone, the kind they used to share without a thought, as natural as breathing, as comfortable as an old blanket, as warm as skin on skin. Trust, not like hollow words and fading hope and the slow rebuilding of something torn apart and broken into pieces, but like them, the way they were before it all fell apart in a firestorm of infidelity and pain and violence.
Here, in the traffic-clogged guts of early-morning L.A., trust and honesty are rarer than spun gold.
Once, a hundred lifetimes ago, between her and Ruth, those things were as common as car fumes.
I’m scared, Ruth confesses now, in the claustrophobic confines of Debbie’s car, no hope of escape.
Scared or not, that’s fucking brave.
Debbie doesn’t say that, of course.
She looks at Ruth, pale and quiet and frighteningly still, and wishes she could find that kind of courage. She wishes she could listen to the cries of her stupid heart, wishes she could feel the pains in her chest and not want to run the fuck away. She wishes she could lean across the non-existent space between them, take Ruth’s stupid clammy hand in hers, hold it loosely or squeeze it tight, and whisper, staring that devastating, terrifying vulnerability right in the face, it’s okay, Ruthie, I’m scared too.
She doesn’t do that either.
Ruth flexes her hands. Long, delicate fingers, her knuckles turning chalk-white.
Over the blare of another car horn, Debbie hears the snapping of bones.
She faces forward again. Glares at the bug-splattered bumper. Grips the wheel.
“What’s there to be scared of?” she hears herself ask, hating the jagged, splintered edge to her voice, the way it makes what should be an innocent question into something like an accusation. “You sit around in a waiting room for two and a half hours, then you sit around in that asshole doctor’s office for two and a half minutes, then you get the all-clear, lose the cast, and go back home and take the world’s longest, hottest shower.”
Ruth’s chest moves shallowly. Her throat contracts again.
“Yeah,” she says, jaw clenching nearly as white as her knuckles. “I mean, uh, hopefully.”
Debbie raises a brow. “Any reason to assume otherwise?”
That comes out wrong too. Dismissive, indifferent. Casual, like she doesn’t give a shit, like she’s done with Ruth’s melodramatic, needy bullshit. If she were feeling a fraction more charitable, she’d call it muscle memory, her tongue picking up the old familiar tones that used to come so naturally back when things between them were simple and easy, back when Ruth had a fresh new breakdown every other day, back when Debbie had an unquenchable thirst for other people’s tragedies.
Back then, she convinced herself it was harmless, playful teasing. Here we go again. Poor, poor Ruth.
Now, after spending two months watching Ruth regrow a bone, it just makes her feel like an asshole.
Ruth, god bless her, doesn’t call her on it.
She doesn’t say anything at all, in fact, for a very, very long time. It’s long enough that Debbie thinks about repeating the question, or asking a different one, or saying anything at all, just to put an end to the silence. It’s relentless, almost suffocating, but she bites down on the need to fill it up because she doesn’t trust her stupid rebellious mouth to stick to the script, or her stupid traitorous tongue to hold itself in check, to stay sweet instead of turning sour, turning bitter, turning softness into unnecessary, unhelpful spite.
She bites her tongue, stares out at the gridlocked traffic, feels the air between them thicken to tar.
Finally, so low it almost doesn’t carry even in the cramped, airless car, Ruth whispers, “I fuck up a lot. What if I fucked up the healing process somehow?”
Something seizes in Debbie’s chest. Her car gives a low, dull whine as she wrestles with the clutch.
“That’s what the cast was for,” her voice says without her permission, just as casual and calloused and dismissive as before. “It’s basically fuck-up-proof.”
God, she hopes that’s true.
It has to be true. It fucking has to be true, because if it’s not — if something really did go wrong somehow, with the healing process or with the cast or with whatever other bullshit goes into fusing the snapped shards of a broken bone back together — they both know whose fault that would be.
Never mind that Ruth is exactly the kind of living, breathing disaster who lives for making things as hard for herself as possible. Never mind that she’s pretty much dedicated her whole existence to fucking up the un-fuck-up-able, never mind that if there was a single soul in the whole fucking universe who could manage to do unintentional, irreparable damage to a slowly healing bone, it would absolutely, definitely be her.
Never mind that Debbie is halfway convinced that there’s a tiny part of Ruth ‘Shameless Masochist’ Wilder that secretly wants to have fucked it up, just so she can have some new melodramatic tragedy to wallow in.
Never mind any of that.
Anything that happens inside that stupid bulky cast, any fuck-ups or failures or whatever else, anything that may or may not have happened to those brittle, broken bones over the last eight or nine weeks... that’s not on Ruth, sitting stiffly on her ass, staying off her feet, trying her best to follow that dickhead doctor’s orders and not fuck up the healing process.
None of this is on Ruth.
Ruth took the hit. Ruth took every fucking hit Debbie threw at her. Ruth ate shit, and then ate dirt, stuffed herself full on it without a word of complaint.
Ruth has spent the last two months trying to recover, trying to knit her broken parts back together, trying with every last atom of strength she has to heal.
Debbie is the one who tore her apart. Debbie is the one who got high on grief and rage and booze and coke and snapped her ankle in two. If those broken bones didn’t heal right — or, so much more terrifying, if it turns out they didn’t heal at all — that’s not on Ruth, the poor, tragic victim, it’s on the bitch who broke them.
So, yeah, it has to be true. It has to be, it has to be, it fucking has to be.
Because if it’s not, Debbie is pretty sure neither of them will survive it.
Ruth, paranoid drama queen that she is, isn’t nearly so easily convinced.
“Maybe it healed badly,” she presses, doggedly determined and utterly infuriating. “Maybe I broke it again without realising. Or maybe...” She shudders, gags, and presses her knuckles to her mouth. “Maybe it’s, like, gangrenous or something.”
Debbie rolls her eyes. A dull throb pounds behind them, the sickly beginning of a tension headache.
“Believe me,” she says with a sigh. “There’s no damn way you ‘wouldn’t realise’ if you broke it again.”
Don’t make me explain why, she doesn’t have the stomach to add. Don’t make me replay your fucking screams. Don’t make me have to hear them all over again just so I can tell you how horrible they were, how much pain you were in, how the entire state of California would ‘realise’ if that happened to you for a second time. Please, Ruth, please, don’t make me have to hear it again, don’t make me have to—
As if her asshole imagination ever needed any help with that.
As if she hasn’t been hearing them endlessly for two months.
As if she—
“Okay,” Ruth says, still painfully quiet. “If you say so, Debbie.”
Just like that. Now, just like countless times before, like this is any other day, any other conversation, any one of a million other moments that they’ve shared over the years. If you say so, not scathing or sarcastic like it would have been from her, but soft and hopeful, like the very fabric of reality hangs on the word of Debbie fucking Eagan, like sweet, naive little Ruth would really believe up was down if that’s what Debbie told her. Like she’s just that fucking gullible.
No.
Like she trusts her just that fucking much.
Debbie’s chest aches. She closes her eyes.
Stamped onto the backs of her eyelids, she sees the vivid, angry bruises she left all over Ruth’s body that horrible, fateful night. She sees the stark blues and blacks and purples, the sickly greens and yellows, the vicious swelling of her ankle and her foot, the rainbow colours of violence and brutality lighting up that soulless hospital room, the crisp, colourless sheets, the useless flat pillow they’d given her to keep the thing elevated.
Stupidly, ridiculously, it’s not Ruth’s bruised foot or swollen ankle that her mind zooms in on, but her painted toenails, Zoya-red and garish, standing out savagely bright against the rest of those hideous hospital monochromes. All that violence, she remembers thinking at the time, all that bloodshed and brutality, all those neat, clean, beautiful A+ broken bones, and somehow the fucking paint barely even chipped.
“You’d know if you’d fucked up,” she hears her own voice say. It doesn’t really sound like her; it sounds just like that hideous red nail polish looked, garish and artificial and much too bright, refusing to crack or chip or peel away even when the rest of the world is shattered and shredded and smashed into pieces all around her. “You can’t re-break a bone or get gangrene or all that other bullshit and not know about it. Not even you could do that.”
Ruth nods a handful of times, like she’s desperately trying to convince herself she believes it. Her forehead strikes the window with each repetition, an arrhythmic tack-tack-tack that clatters up and down Debbie’s spinal cord and makes her want to scream.
She wants to turn with her whole body, never mind the seatbelt pinning her down. She wants to lunge at Ruth, grab her by the shoulders, and shake her until she goes still again. She wants to snap at her to knock it off, maybe lean over and crank the window open so there’s no surface for her stupid stubborn skull to make contact with.
She wants to punch her in the face, if that’s what it’ll take to make her stop bashing her own brains out.
It’s the same old story, the same, familiar desire to lash out, to turn all of her devastating, unwanted feelings outwards, twist the would-be softness into something destructive. She wants to pummel her, but at the same time, that traitorous, treacherous, affectionate space in her heart wants to take her stupid stubborn face in her hands and just hold her, gently, until she stops needlessly causing herself pain.
It’s the way things have always been between them, for as long as she can remember, and god, that hurts so much more than it should. It’s brutal, but so simple: Ruth takes the hit, over and over and over, but Debbie is the one who feels it, flayed nerves and bloodied flesh, bone shards and torn-up muscle, borrowed pain and borrowed tragedy, second-hand impact bruises to ensure her own skin stays flawless.
Keeping her face pressed against the window, Ruth finally stops nodding. The shallow in-and-out of her breathing turns harsh, unbearable loud in the sudden silence following that maddening tack-tack-tack.
“What if...” she starts, then falls silent again without finishing.
Debbie hears the question anyway. She hears a lot of questions, hundreds, each one worse than the last.
What if I can’t wrestle any more? What if the pain doesn’t go away? What if they amputate the whole leg?
What if I can never walk again?
Debbie has no answer to that.
She thinks she should say, like she would have done a lifetime ago, before Mark, before GLOW, before all this fucking pain, stop being so melodramatic.
That’s what she wants to say. Stop making up new bullshit to freak out about. Stop turning every situation into one of your stupid overblown tragedies.
She doesn’t think it would help — in fact, she’s almost completely convinced it would do a great deal of harm to both of them — but it’s the only thing she really knows how to do: be the smart one, the sensible one, the one who pulls out logic and reason in the too-frequent moments when Ruth gets too dramatic, too deluded, too wrapped up in her own craziness to see just how far she’s strayed from reality.
She’s done it so many times over the years, it should be second nature.
It’s not, though. This time, for perhaps the first time, it’s really not.
And maybe that’s just because Ruth looks so small and sad and scared.
But then again, maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s really, secretly because—
Because, if she’s completely, totally, and unforgivingly honest with herself, Ruth isn’t the only one who is crazy, deluded, and absolutely fucking terrified of finding out the answers to those questions.
Stop being so dramatic, she thinks, but not to Ruth.
Out loud, she simply says, “You’re going to be fine.”
Ruth swallows loudly, like she’s trying to force down a bug stuck in her throat. Out of the corner of her eye, Debbie sees her hunch over, pulling at the seatbelt, circling the edge of her cast with trembling fingertips. White skin tickling white plaster, the dark backdrop of the passenger seat, the early morning sunshine cascading across the lines etching out deep, dark tracks on her face.
She looks so fragile, Debbie thinks sadly, and so fucking strong all at once. Her chest aches at the sight of her, even just briefly, even just out of the corner of her eye, and that tattered, terrifying tangle of tenderness yanks its cords garotte-tight around the chambers of her heart.
The car in front of them shambles forward a quarter of an inch.
Ruth circles traces the rim of her cast again, again, again.
She swallows again. Wets her lips again. Circles the cast again.
“Yeah?” she whispers, without lifting her head.
Debbie clings to the wheel like it’s the only solid thing in the whole damn world. The suspension creaks beneath them as they move, and she bites down on a grimace. Another quarter-inch closer to that godforsaken hospital, another quarter-minute closer to watching that fucking cast disappear forever. Another quick glance at Ruth’s unpainted fingernails, her Zoya-red toenails, the faded spectrum of a dozen once-bright signatures scrawled and scribbled across the plaster.
Another inch closer. Another minute closer. Another—
“Yeah,” Debbie whispers, blinking rapidly. “Trust me.”
The words echo a little too sharply, serrated little vibrations that scrape and scratch against the walls of her skull. It’s a vicious, headachey feeling, like show nights when the crowd goes wild in the wrong way, like boos and jeers and insults thrown like rocks, like the snapping of bones and Ruth’s terrible, endless screams.
Trust me, Debbie says, like that’s not the worst joke ever.
Ruth doesn’t laugh, though. She doesn’t even smile. She doesn’t sigh, doesn’t roll her eyes, doesn’t cry.
She doesn’t crack or snap or shatter. She doesn’t scream.
She just blinks a few times, lifts a hand to shield her eyes from the morning sun, and says, “I always do.”