Chapter Text
He asks her if she ever loved him, and she thinks - -
Yeah.
For real, yeah. There was a whole damn time, a heady slice of her life, when Dean was goofy jokes and closed-lipped kisses at the movie theatre. When he was first dates at Joe’s Pie Shop and a letterman jacket around her shoulders and a hand over hers as she cried giving birth. When he was surprise gifts and surprise back rubs and making love instead of fucking and nights at prom and fairs and concerts and home.
A time he was home.
So she says – “We have four kids, Dean. Ask me that again.”
“Did you ever love me?”
*
But that’s later.
Right now, Beth pulls the trigger, and Rio’s smile doesn’t so much as slip. His empty grin widening out into something real, something animal. Beth cocks his gun clumsily, and aims again, and it takes her three tries to realise that the chamber’s empty.
She can feel herself getting jittery, the hot bubble of urgency rising in her chest to grip her like a vice, and her hands are trembling when she fumbles with the gun a fourth time, only now Rio doesn’t sit around to watch. He’s out of the chair and in front of her before she can blink, grabbing the gun from her hands and tossing it aside with a heavy, heady, clang.
It’s only then that he starts to clap, his hands low, at his middle, and Beth is fumbling backwards, thinking of what’s behind her – the lamp? Too unwieldy. The books? Not heavy enough to do damage. She needs another bottle, to do what she did to Boomer, a frypan, something heavy and fat-bottomed.
“Maybe there’s a king in you, after all,” Rio says, and Beth blinks up at him. She knows she’s crying – the tears settling like a glaze across her cheeks, but it does nothing for Rio. Doesn’t turn him or sway him like it might have any other man in her life.
“Please,” she breathes. “We’re not worth it, we’re - -”
He just laughs, shaking his head.
“Try again.”
“We have children.”
“That ain’t worked on me the last ten times, sweetheart.”
And - - wait. Beth pauses, catches her breath. She looks up at him.
“Yes it has.”
There’s quiet then. Vaguely, Beth’s aware of Dean, of his nervous breathing, of Buddy’s oblivious pants, tail slapping against the deck outside, of the hum of the bug catcher there too, loud even in the depths of the evening. Rio just arches an eyebrow.
“It has worked on you. It’s why you let me live in the first place. What did you call me the other night? A charity case? And maybe I am. One with little kids, and a life, and a family, and needs, and fuck you, you know? I’m a lot of things, and I don’t think you understand a single one.”
It’s enough for Rio to roll his eyes, to hold his hand up, and Beth loses her voice. He turns back to look at Dean, still slumped, beaten, at the table and Rio gestures out towards the front door.
“Get out.”
“What?” Dean flusters, and Beth’s heart spikes.
“Get out.”
“I’m not leaving her - - Beth, I’m not leaving without you.”
And the thought is a sweet one, but she thinks they probably all know the sentiment has no legs. She looks back at Rio, who only arches an eyebrow back at her, the white hot fire in him is still there, simmering, but his mask is back on, that infuriating glance of smug amusement. Beth shuffles her weight between her feet, finally looking back at Dean and, still trembling, nods.
“I can handle myself. Go to your mom’s. Stay with the kids.”
The look Dean gives her then reminds her there’s a man in there who loves her – beneath all the shit – the lies and the affair and the gaslighting which, for twenty years, made her feel not enough. A part that knows that in spite of it all, the four kids they have together means they’ll never be completely unbound, but right now the only thing that matters is getting him out.
“Dean,” she says, and she hopes her tone conveys that. “Please.”
It takes Dean an embarrassing amount of time to peel himself out of her dining room chair, to collect his shirt back around himself and fumble towards the door. Still, she’s so focused on Rio that the only reason she knows Dean looks back at them is for the way Rio smirks, and waves him a patronising goodbye.
The door clicks shut, and Beth’s heart mostly stops. She’s in four inch heels, and Rio still seems alarmingly tall before her, his gaze steady, and focused, his face scraped. Something in her is set alight by the intimacy of their closeness, but she swallows the flame so far down it can only catch at her toes.
They just stand there, staring at each other for minutes, before Rio reaches forwards and undoes the top button of her shirt, tugging out the gold pin she’d settled there. She shakes, and Rio laughs, making neat work of the second button, and then the third, pulling out the collar of her shirt, until her pale clavicle is exposed, but that’s as far as he goes before his hands drop back to his sides.
“You think you dress like me, build a house like me, talk game like me, you a boss? How many times I gotta tell you? You ain’t a boss, Elizabeth, and you ain’t me.”
Beth opens her mouth to speak, but Rio doesn’t give her the chance.
“There’s not enough,” he continues. “To put me away. You know that, right? You proved someone was washing cash there, but I got a good lawyer, and ain’t nothin’ in there points to me. Your boy at the FBI was overzealous. He fucked up. All it’ll take will be a couple of boys to serve time for me, and I can pay for that, but that’s it. You played your hand too early.”
Fumbling for breadth, for any ground at all, Beth squares her stance.
“They arrested you though, didn’t they?
Rio just laughs again.
“Yeah, they arrested me.”
She can almost see it – the cuffs on his wrists. Can see at least the shadow of them – the cut into his skin, like they’d done it hard enough to hurt, and she tries to ignore that deep pang of guilt, deep in her gut. It’s easier to when Rio slides in a little closer, enough that he can wrap a hand around the back of her neck, a thumb to her chin, forcing her gaze up to meet him.
“You, me, we got a contract now.”
Beth blinks. She tries to fumble back, but Rio’s grip is too tight. She pushes against his chest, but he’s steadier thing than that, and the tension in her arms doesn’t faze him.
“You work full time now, and I mean full time. No more odd jobs, no more weeks off, none of that. Full time, you and your girls, so I’d think about retiring from the PTA and the recycling committee.”
Beth blinks up at him again, her hands still on his chest. Rio reaches his free hand out to wrap one around hers, clasping at her fingers.
“I thought you and me were done?” she says, voice thick, and he just stares at her.
“Me too.”
Somewhere outside a car drives passed, lighting up the loungeroom. The couple next door are watching something loud, brash, funny, and are laughing true to form, an owl outside hoots. Beth, for the millionth time tonight, tries to find her breath.
“What’ll we be doing?” she asks after a beat, and Rio smirks, releasing her hands, her chin, her neck. He takes a step back.
“You’ll find out soon enough. But hey, you got what you wanted, huh? Pop the champagne with the ladies. Celebrate. I’ll be in touch. Sooner rather than later.”
Beth breathes, watches him grab his jacket off the floor, his phone, his gun. Watches him look at her again, smirking, body taut as a bow.
“What if we say no?”
He laughs as he ducks out the back door, something, somehow, both sinister and lyrical.
*
“What do you think the work will be?”
It’s Ruby who asks it, leaning forwards on Annie’s couch, and Beth just shrugs, still wrapped up in Annie’s bathrobe, her hair wet and her heart raw.
“Probably giving post-job handies to Demon and Mr. Cisco,” Annie supplies from the floor, taking a big drink from her glass of scotch. It’s enough to make Beth cringe, drop her head to the couch. She doesn’t think he would – but then – the way he’d unbuttoned her shirt…the heat rushes down, and she crosses her legs, looking back out at the two of them.
“No. I don’t think so. The women at the warehouse, what were they doing? Sorting the cash? It’s not like we don’t have experience in that. Maybe he’ll just put us there. Or it’ll be more laundering or something…maybe nursing his beat up pals again.”
Neither Annie nor Ruby look convinced, and Beth doesn’t exactly feel it either. She’s got no idea what he wants from them.
Beth’s eyes dart to Ruby, and she takes a breath.
“Stan knows?” she asks.
She’d gotten a text some time during the Rio-debacle saying as much, and Ruby only nods. Annie reaches out to grab her hand, but Ruby deflects.
“I married a smart man,” she says with a shrug. “He figured it out on his own. He’s at home with Harry while Sarah’s in hospital. He thinks I’m staying over at yours.”
She looks at Beth then, and Beth sighs, leaning into the arm of the couch.
“I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. We all made choices. Sarah has a good kidney. She’s better. That’s what I need to think about right now. Stan and I…” Ruby takes a shaky breath, reaches for her drink. “We’ll figure it out. We always do.”
Beth looks over at her, and Ruby looks right back, and there’s tears in both their eyes, and really, truly, in this whole mess, this will be the thing she regrets most. Driving a wedge between Ruby and Stan, who really are two of the best ones. Beth lets her eyes slip shut, and Annie tops up their drinks, and then Beth says, “Dean lied about having cancer,” and her words sink like a stone in the room.
“Sorry, I think I heard you wrong,” Annie says, staring straight at her, and Beth looks away.
“I told you, he was in a car accident today. He was fine. Doctor gave him painkillers, which’ll probably help with what Rio did to his face now, and …I asked if they’d mess with his radiation.”
Annie takes a sharp intake of breath, and Beth looks over at Ruby, who meets her look, a cocktail of empathy and rage and non-surprise.
“Did you know?” Beth asks suddenly, brow furrowed, but Ruby just shakes her head.
“No, Beth,” she says vehemently. “If I even suspected, I would’ve told you, but he doesn’t have the best track record in terms of, y’know, stone cold lying.”
That at least is enough to make Beth laugh, some rigid, empty thing.
“Well, sure,” Beth replies, gesturing vaguely. She drinks her scotch like a shot as Annie starts a tirade about what a fucking dick Dean is and Beth lets her eyes slip shut, until Ruby all but pries them open again with a dart sharp question.
“What are you going to do then?”
“I don’t know.”
It’s enough to stopper both Annie and Ruby, who look at her and then each other. Beth gets off the sofa to pour another drink and pretends not to see the obviously in-depth, non-verbal conversation the pair are having with their eyebrows and their rapidly moving mouths. Finally, Annie cracks.
“Dump. His. Ass. Beth.”
And lo, were it that easy.
“He knows about us, he knows what we’ve been doing. Plus we’ve managed to be fired and re-hired by a murderer in the space of three days in case you forgot. I think dealing with Dean is pretty low down on my priority list right now.”
“Right,” Annie says. “Just like leaving him in the first place was.”
Beth blinks, looks at her sister, who’s now standing, sullen as a teenager, against her living room wall.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, come on, Beth. You’ve been wanting to ejector seat out of that relationship since before Emma was born. You were just settled. And then he cheated on you, in case you forgot, and you still let him come home.”
Beth grits her teeth.
“I thought he had cancer, Annie.”
Annie just scoffs, finishing off her drink, and Beth feels a white hot cord of rage pull up through her chest.
“You don’t get to do this,” she hisses. “You don’t get to judge. I’m sorry I had my kids after I got married, and after high school, and you know, I’m sorry I made that marriage work for twenty years instead of, what? Five minutes? Ten?”
Annie’s face clouds over, quick as anything.
“The only reason your marriage has ‘worked’” and the bitch – she actually air quotes it, “Is because until you decided to be a crime lord, you turned a blind eye, and let Deans-y walk all over you. Half the time I was surprised there wasn’t a boot print on your face. Hell, even as Bad-ass-Betty, you still let him do whatever the fuck he wants.”
“I don’t,” Beth says, and Annie barks on a laugh, looking over at Ruby, who just throws her hands up.
“Really?” Beth asks, pulling Annie’s bathrobe tighter to her chest., and Ruby groans, pushing her face down until her forehead knocks against her scotch glass.
“Come on, Beth, what do you want us to say? In the space of half an hour, you tell us we’re newly indebted to gangfriend again, and that your piece of shit husband has somehow managed to out piece-of-shit himself.”
Annie throws her hands up, dramatically, into the air.
“Thank you!”
Beth stares down at her drink, feeling too hot and too cold and too flushed and too, oddly, desperate. A part of her just wants to up and leave, wants to run, but then Ruby starts talking again.
“It wasn’t sudden,” Ruby says. “That’s all I’m saying. Dean didn’t become a jackass after one night. It was a slow crawl to shit town, you know? And you put up with it, and I get it, you guys had a life together, and you were a family, but you can’t be mad at us for wanting you to get away from a man who’s treated you like garbage for fifteen years.”
Beth looks away, and Ruby just sighs, grabbing her handbag off the counter.
“I’m going home. I want to talk to Stan. I guess we’ll figure out this shit with gangfriend next time.”
Beth just nods, rotating the glass in her hand, and Ruby sighs again, louder this time.
“Love you,” Ruby says, and it’s a reflex now for Beth, but also always true.
“Love you,” she replies.
*
The first time she’d kicked him out, before he’d thought up his cancer lie, when it had just been the affair, and just the money, Emma had slept in her bed. Her littlest girl, wiry and sweet, with her mothy stuffed rabbit and her pants kicked off to the bottom of the mattress. It had, oddly enough, pulled up forgotten memories of her own mother, who would never, ever let Beth or Annie sleep with her and their father, not even as little girls.
Then again, their mother was not really the sort. She didn’t coddle, or cuddle, or comfort. Their mother would start the day with whiskey in her coffee and smoke through the closest window, and still manage to be the perfect little homemaker for their daddy. She was set tables and pot roasts and impossible cleanliness and a model wife. As a kid, Annie would fake looking for their mother’s robot switch, and their humourless mother, who never seemed to know what to do with two daughters, would fail to play along.
So Beth and Annie had become their own family, and Beth, almost ten years older than Annie, had become something of a mother around the same time she’d gotten her first period. The two things coinciding like her body had recognised the change in her too, and Beth had been the mother of the family ever since, and then again, when she’d dropped out of college to come home and take care of their mom when she got sick.
And it was only supposed to be a little while – their mom was supposed to get better, and Beth was supposed to go back, but their mom hadn’t gotten better, and Annie, six months before graduation, had gotten knocked up, and then their mom had died, and Dean had been there, and so kind, and then Beth was pregnant too.
And the thing is, with enough time, Beth could’ve forgiven the cheating. Hell, she was already starting to. And maybe with more time, she could’ve forgiven the cancer lie too. She knows Dean well enough to know that when he’s pushed into a corner, he’ll put his foot in his mouth.
The thing she can’t forgive is him thinking that she’s stupid.
“Please, Beth, I need you,” Dean had said.
*
“You think I need you?” that’s what Rio had said, looking back at her at the depot after the truck, lip curled into a snarl. The memory of that is etched into her mind, written on it like a decree. It had left her speechless then, and it does now, catching words and thoughts in her throat like a fly trap.
“You think I need you?”
No, she guesses he probably doesn’t.
She’s not sure why she thought it, blinking awake, nor, for that matter, what woke her up. She’s alone in bed, the kids still with Dean’s mom, and she’s three blankets deep in her mattress, dressed only in her pyjamas – a satin two-piecer given to her by Dean for an anniversary years ago. It’s frayed at the edges now, just off-white enough to make her look, as Annie put it, like a haunted Victorian doll.
Pushing the heels of her palms against her eyes, Beth rolls over, only to be met by a familiar face. She bolts upright.
“Nah,” Rio says. “By all means, sleep in.”
She pulls the blankets to her chest without a clue as to why, the fabric like static there, and she’s suddenly very aware of the fact that she is both make up-less and bra-less, that her hair is a mess, her body still docile and unwieldy with sleep. For his part, leaning back against the wall, cleaner than yesterday, but still scratched up, Rio mostly just looks amused.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, body inching back in the bed.
“I told you, didn’t I? You and your lady friends are full time now. We got shit to do.”
She reaches sideways for her clock – it’s just past 5 in the morning, and leans back against the headboard, scrubbing at her face.
“Really? Now?”
But Rio’s off the wall, waving his gun around – loaded, she’s sure, now – and vague.
“Get dressed, put your face on, whatever you ladies do, and then meet me downstairs. You got ten minutes before I come back and get you, yeah?”
Beth looks at him, wants to ask, or what, but from the look on his face it’s pretty clear he’s not playing today, and Beth doesn’t fancy being dragged out in her underwear with only half a face done up for, well, god knows how long. Rio goes downstairs and Beth changes quickly into jeans and a mustard sweater and flat brown boots, and makes quick work of putting on a basic face and messing her hair up so at least it looks well-fucked as opposed to just slept-in, and then it’s right on the ten minutes, and, true to his word, Rio’s there again, his expression dour as he looks at her.
“I’m coming,” she hisses, and promptly follows him out to his car. To her surprise, there’s no one else. Just her and him, in the yawning stretch of morning. He opens his passenger side door for her, gesturing her in with a tilt of his head.
“Well?”
And Beth slides right in.