Chapter Text
"There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself."
— Raymond Chandler
I always thought a dame would end me.
One of those femme fatales you read about in pulp rags — crimson lips and enough bad news to fill a morgue drawer.
Lying in the gutter with my life running out into the harbor muck, I look up at wide baby blues and wonder if he's still playing the hick, if a single word that ever fell from those honest lips had been true.
"Bruce! Bruce, you have to stay awake—" His voice cracks like a boy's, a harsh whisper scraped raw. He presses down on the wound with both hands, too hard, too desperate, like he could force my blood back into doing its job. I groan despite my best intentions.
I should have sent him away. Told him to get the hell out the first time he barged through my door and broke the handle like the clumsy sonofabitch he is. Should have made him hate me the moment I laid eyes on his face.
"Bruce! Come on!"
He towers over me from this angle, long legs in a crouch. His boots are filthy in the harbor muck.
My arm is heavy, too damn heavy, but I manage — run my fingers across his lips and paint them with my blood.
The blood makes him beautiful. Turns him into exactly the dame I'd been waiting for. Crimson lips. Just like I expected.
"There's a letter." The words come up through copper and cold. "In the safe. Deliver it."
He doesn't answer, and I'm too far gone to demand it from the one man who never took my orders anyway. His lips brush against my ruined fingers — or seem to. I can't feel much of anything now but the cold.
The darkness takes me then, that familiar ache of things left unfinished, of accounts that will never balance.
I'm just another open case.