Weekly Drabble #393: Hot and Bothered

This week's prompt is from uberdrops with 'sauna and a hot meal'; the latter part didn't make it through the censors, I mean redrafting, but we've definitely got a sauna! Enjoy.

~

Hot and Bothered:

Kaley Atwell let out a sigh as she leaned back in the sauna, her red eyes closed. Not red from crying, irritation or asphyxiation; her irises were a true, hellish red. The same colour as the eyes of every other Seeded on the planet, the eyes that instantly marked her as different from all other humans. She was tired, though. She had been for a long time.

She’d been back from Colombia for nearly a month now and still couldn’t shake that mission from her mind. Tasha had been calling and texting. Kaley hadn’t answered. She hadn’t even been to their hideaway penthouse. She needed space, but for what, she didn’t know.

She alternated between anger and self-pity, blaming herself one moment, Tasha the next. Stupid little girl, a voice inside her head would whisper. You knew what she was from the very beginning, and you let yourself thinK otherwise.

The nightmares about von Diem’s surgical butchery were still there, but now there wasn’t any monstrous snake to protect her and in those dreams, she was taken apart piece by piece...

Kaley’s eyes snapped up and she jolted upright. Her heart pounded in her chest, her eyes darting around the room, but the sauna was empty except for her, the warm yellow glow of the lights overwhelmed by the spear of light in the metahuman’s hands. She was alone. She was safe. She was safe, she reminded herself, sinking back against the warm wooden wall, slowing her breathing and letting the power ebb out of her. As it did, she hoped that all her other worries would be so easily dismissed.

Fat chance.

It was about five minutes later that Kaley heard the door to the sauna open. She didn’t open her eyes, just trying to enjoy warmth and not think about things for a while when-

“Hello, pearl.”

Kaley’s eyes snapped open. Even if she couldn’t immediately recognize that smoke and honey voice, there was only one person on the planet who called her ‘pearl’. Standing just off to the side and pulling off the towel she’d wrapped around herself was Tasha. “What-” Kaley began. “What are you doing here?”

Tasha set the towel on a rack, letting out a breathy sigh as she sat down. Her body was athletic perfection; lithe and taut. Across her back she had the diamond pattern of an eastern diamondback, while the scales on her outer thighs and arms shifted to a tiger rattlesnake’s stripes, one outward sign of the mix of DNA that had changed her from a herpetology grad student into one of the most feared Seeded on the planet. Her tail, two-thirds as long as she was tall, extended down from her cocyx and ended in the same bony rattle as her namesake. Her eyes, though just as red as Kaley’s own, had slit pupils instead of round and her cheeks had a light smattering of scales. “I’m half snake,” she replied. “How could I resist a sauna?”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” Kaley snapped. “What are you doing here?”

The other woman sat down, leaning forward with her elbows on her thighs. “You won’t answer my calls,” she said. “You won’t even read my texts. You haven’t blocked me, but you won’t talk to me, so I’m forcing the issue.”

“What makes you think I even want to talk to you?” the younger Seeded bit back.

Tasha cocked her head, looking at their surroundings, then back to the younger metahuman. “In the past two weeks, you’ve been to this sauna more than in all the time we’ve been together. This is a private club, known for discretion regarding its clients. Only the wealthy or well-connected can get in here, and I’m both. You may as well have put out a billboard ad saying ‘covert rendezvous with snake woman sought’.”

Kaley opened her mouth to deny it, but stopped herself and sagged back. God damn it. The other woman was right. “Stupid fucking subconscious,” she grumbled. “So, you tracked me down. Congratulations. What did you want to talk about?”

“I think it’s more of what you wanted to talk about,” Tasha pointed out, pressing her palms together. “Talk to me, firefly.”

The blonde almost refused, almost got up and walked out, but the anger got the better of her. “You murdered more than a dozen people! You assassinated the sitting head of a country!”

“I killed soldiers and armed bodyguards,” Tasha corrected, not a shred of remorse in her voice. “And I didn’t have any political agenda when I took out Lozano, so it was hardly an assassination.” She waved dismissively. “The rebels wanted to make some big speech to him, have him cower and beg, even make a public spectacle of the whole affair.” They hadn’t had the time for that, not with Starlight and Piranha in the presidential mansion.

“You murdered a man in cold blood! You-you... I had to wade through the bodies you left behind!”

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Rattler answered, and this time she did sound regretful. “But I’m not sorry I took the job.”

“You fought on the side of a drug cartel! They overthrew an entire country because of what you did!” With Lozano dead, the Guzman cartel had seized power. Rather than get sucked into that quagmire, the League had been forced to recall its people. They’d returned home with the weight of knowing they’d failed.

Rattler’s tail tka’d once. “Lozano wasn’t any better, firefly. That man had more people killed in a week than I have my entire career. He was a brutal dictator who got into power with Guzman money and influence. Once he got the president’s office, he decided he didn’t need his former allies any longer and made himself a hero of the people by slaughtering anyone he said belonged to a cartel, and not all of them did. This wasn’t a case of some filthy criminals upending a country. This was one set of scumbags clearing out another.”

Kaley opened her mouth, then shut it again. Arvin Lozano hadn’t been the most democratic of rulers in the world and not even in South America. He was – he had been – a strongman, ruthless in rooting out ‘criminals’. There’d long been accusations of human rights abuses within the Colombian justice system under his rule, the intimidation of political rivals and jailing of dissidents and even suggestions of death squads and disappearences, but he’d held his country together through the upheavals caused by the emergence of the Seeded. “You can prove that?”

“Not in a court of law and not to the League’s standard, but one of my first jobs in South America was in Colombia. I met Lozano when he was still Guzman’s man, an up and comer with an eye on the presidency. To help prove his ‘tough on crime’ bonafides, he needed to clear out a drug cartel in his department, a cartel that also happened to be one of Guzman’s competitors in that region. Guzman was willing to pay for my services as an investment in Lozano’s career.” Tka-tka-tka. “You can imagine how heartbroken he was when the president cut all ties with him.”

“So he hired you again. You helped put Lozano in Casa de Narino...”

“...and he wanted me to help take him out of it, yes. The old man enjoys his irony.” Tasha shook her head. “Trust me on this, Kaley. Lozano was a monster. He just hid it better than most. You know the old saying ‘the bigger the smile, the sharper the knife’?”

Kaley chuckled at her words. Just once, and she got angry at herself for it, but still. That wasn’t an old saying. That was a Ferengi saying from Deep Space Nine. She and Tasha had marathoned it about a month after their back-alley trysts had moved into the penthouse. She became more serious, reminding herself that she was mad at the other woman, and rightfully so. “What about it?”

“Lozano’s knife was sharper than most.” Tasha didn’t elaborate. She knew about Kayley’s trauma from von Diem’s little shop of horrors. She didn’t need to know any more details, but Lozano had had himself a little playroom in the presidential mansion. He wasn’t as twisted as some men she’d met, but that was all you could say for him. He’d enjoyed being powerful and using that power for his own ambition... and amusement.

Kaley might look like a prissy, pampered princess but she wasn’t dumb. “That doesn’t change anything. We don’t have to right to play with other people like this! You helped overthrow a country, and even if Lozano was a monster, not everyone who worked for him was. Those soldiers and guards were just doing their jobs.”

“And I was doing mine. One of us had to succeed. Firefly,” Tasha leaned forward again. “You know what I do. I’ve never hidden that, even if I could. I know you think I’ve got this seed of goodness in me, but... well, look at us now. You’re the perfect girl that everyone wants to be, and I slink through shadows and come home coated red.”

“You’re better than you think you are,” Kaley answered. Rattler was a mercenary, a soldier for the highest bidder and willing to kill for money. Amoral at best, immoral at worst. But there was something there, Kaley knew it. That’s why Colombia had hurt so much. She’d never been confronted smack in the face by Tasha’s work like that...

...and because of how easy it would be to do the same. She’d killed six people. Every one of them haunted her, but Tasha had gone through the soldiers like they were nothing, like they didn’t matter. Even Lozano, monster that he’d been, deserved a trial and to face justice for his actions, not a brutal death at the hands of a disinterested mercenary. That indifference to human life was what had shocked her the most, scared her more than anything.

But...

But Rattler, despite being one of the ‘super villains’, wasn’t like them. She chose her jobs and her clients carefully. She didn’t rack up collateral damage. She didn’t have depraved pastimes. She didn’t kill innocent people. If I come to your door, you did something to bring me there, she’d once said.

Maybe not a good person, but one better than she could have been. One better than even she thought she was. Everyone else had given up on Tasha. They said she was a lost cause, a violent sociopath that just used her job as a threadbare excuse for brutality, but Kaley... she’d known that couldn’t be the whole truth, known it since the moment Tasha had sunk her fangs into her neck and not pumped her full of venom that could have killed any Seeded on the planet and she’d proven it the day she’d broken Kaley out of Brian von Diem’s slaughterhouse. There’d been no profit in it and she’d made an enemy of both von Diems that day. The cold-blooded monster everyone said Rattler was wouldn’t have done that.

Tasha shrugged. She stood. “I miss you, pearl. But... this won’t work out, will it? I’ll always be your dirty little secret, and you’ll be mine. Your world won’t have me, and you’ve seen how dirty you’ll get in mine.”

I don’t care if I’m a secret, Kaley wanted to say. I just want you! But she couldn’t say the words, couldn’t push past all the doubt, fear and anger. Tasha took her by the chin and kissed her forehead. “I have something for you,” she said. “I know the League’s trying to find out who I was working with in Colombia.”

Kaley could only nod. The blown-out corpses with no signs of weapon damage had been a mystery. They were the work of a Seeded, but one whose powers had never been seen before. “Come to the penthouse tonight,” Tasha said. “I’ll give you the name when you collect your things.”

She pulled back, wrapping herself back in the towel and opened the door. “And if...” Kaley said, forcing herself to speak now, to not let silence eat everything between them. “And what if I stayed?”

Ratter paused, half-in and half-outside the sauna. “Do you think you should do that?”

“I don’t know,” Kaley confessed. “I don’t even know if I will.” She couldn’t give herself or Tasha false hope, not when she didn’t even know what she wanted. “But if I do... will you let me in?”

Tasha was silent for a moment. The sauna got noticeably cooler as cold air from outside wafted in. “Nine o’clock, pearl,” was all she said. “I guess that’s when we’ll find out.”