Work Text:
Camilla cleans, treats, and wraps the girls’ wounds.
The redhead has the least urgent wounds and sits on the couch with a thin cigarette held to her lips as Camilla deals with the other two.
Yor and the blonde.
The blonde has some artificial scratches and a two-inch-long laceration that needs stitches. She also has a scowl that is certainly going to result in some deep wrinkles by the time she reaches her mid-thirties. That thought makes wrapping gauze around her arm while she bitches a little easier.
Yor has the worst wounds. Several inch deep wounds that, to her comically untrained eyes, look like stab wounds littered down her left side. There is a single long, shallow wound from the middle of her spine that curves to the left. And the bruises . Bruises, galore.
This is what Camilla is faced with on a previously run-of-the-mill Saturday night. Camilla has a shiny, long needle that came in the sewing kit she bought when the button popped off her favorite tweed skirt. The whole thing cost her five dalc from the convenience store down the street. The needle burns an angry red and orange when she holds it over the flame of her gas stove because she’d seen a doctor do that once on an episode of Memorial Hospital a couple of years ago and sizzles against the skin when she stitches flesh. At the first whiff, her stomach rolls. After closing the long laceration on the blonde's arm she vomits in her kitchen sink. All of them need stitches. Yor, the redhead, and the fucking blonde.
Every one of them.
Multiple stitches each.
And so, Camilla wipes her mouth and stitches.
They refuse to go to the hospital. And the redhead unplugs her landline when she tries to call for an ambulance so it isn’t like she has any real choice in the matter. Camilla cleans and treats wounds and bandages before she even asks them exactly why the hell they’re bleeding all over her new carpet.
But she does ask. Eventually.
The bleach blonde—because hair that ghostly platinum color cannot be natural—doesn’t know Camilla, did not want to stop here in the first place, and refuses, as a part of her training, to answer to her.
The redhead says nothing. From the arch of her brow and the way she assesses everything in the apartment, she gives the impression that she is above answering to anyone.
And all Yor can think to say is, “It’s a very nice carpet.”
Which is, as it turns out, exactly the wrong thing to say.
“No.” Camilla crosses her arms over her chest. “ No . We’re not doing that.”
Camilla is trying to be intimidating. She is. But even she can admit that her fluffy pink negligee is hardly threatening—and certainly not to three women still covered in blood—but it will have to do. It’s not like she can redo this all and wear something else, something that actually covers up the majority of her tits.
As it was, she had been expecting very different company tonight.
And yet here she was with two strangers and Yor.
Tits out.
She’ll have to call Dominic and reschedule.
She cast them all another glance. No. Not two. Three strangers because, clearly, she knows nothing about her coworker.
She takes a deep breath. “I need the truth.”
The red-headed one gives her a look that would send most people running.
“You need the truth?”
Camilla doesn’t back down. “I could have left all three of you to bleed out on the front step.” She won’t be intimidated. Not in her own home. And certainly not in her new sexy nightgown. “I deserve the truth,” she says. “Now one of you— Speak .”
None of them do.
Camilla turns to the weakest link. “ Yor .”
Her coworker won’t meet her eyes. “Yes, Camilla?”
“What the hell is going on here?”
She waits.
One heartbeat.
Two.
Nothing.
A worrying thought enters her mind. Three bleeding women, bruised knuckles, split lips. She thinks of the crime rates in Berlint. She’d just typed out a report on the subject for Barnes only last week. Camilla looks at Yor and despite herself, some of her bravado melts. “Did… Did someone hurt you?”
There’s a long stretch of silence before Yor answers, “No.”
No one speaks again.
It’s so quiet that she can hear herself breathing. Only herself. She’s breathing like she’s just run a marathon but she can’t be blamed for that. She is stressed. This is stressful. The three of them had been in an utter state on her doorstep and they hadn’t wanted her to call the police and she had barely enough bandages to keep them all from bleeding out in her living room. That had been more than stressful.
Camilla watches the women closely.
They seem… unbothered .
They’d been unbothered all along, actually. Almost as though—“Did you hurt someone? The three of you?” Camilla looks between the three. Black, blonde, and red in sequence. There was certainly a lot of blood on them. More than could come from three petite women. “Shit. Did you three kill someone?”
Again, no one answers. Not that they need to.
Well, fuck. “Who?”
The blonde scoffs. “Don’t worry. No one you’d know.”
Camilla doesn’t freak out. “Oh,” she says calmly. “Oh. Alright then.”
She does not freak out. She says it looking straight at the blonde. Voice at a respectable volume and not at all disturbed.
But, perhaps, too calmly.
Yor frowns. “Alright?”
“Well.” She doesn’t know what else to say. She points a thumb over her shoulder towards the hallway. “I’m just going to…” The words die in her throat. Which is alright. They were probably going to be stupid, pointless words anyway. So instead she settles on, “Excuse me a moment.”
She leaves the three probably-killers in her living room and heads to her bedroom.
The first thing she does is take off that stupid negligee. She tugs it over her head in one move, balls it up, and tosses it over her shoulder. She pulls out a comfy pair of pants and that oversized t-shirt that Dominic left last time he was here. She shuts the drawer with a slam.
Once that’s taken care of she sits at the foot of her bed.
And just stares at the wall.
She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t cry.
She does not freak out.
She just stares and thinks because, honestly, she’s always known that Yor Briar was weird. Since the moment she was hired. And, yeah, she might as well be a killer and she might as well be in some mismatched killer girl group with blondie and red back there. Why the hell not?
And besides, it’s not like Camilla doesn’t know people who’ve done that before.
Killed people.
Of course, she does.
The war was still ongoing when she was a child. She remembers the practice drills at school, hiding under desks and huddling in the gymnasium like there was a hurricane coming. She remembers seeing soldiers with rifles walking down the avenue and through the town centre. Her older brother was a soldier. And her father, in his younger years, had been a commander. Dominic’s oldest brother had been stationed right at the East-West border. They’d all killed people.
She’d heard their war stories. She knew the things that they had done.
She knew people who had killed people before.
So, yeah, she doesn’t freak out.
She just…
She just needs a minute. Just one.
Just one fucking minute.
But, of course, she can’t have that.
This is, after all, Yor we’re talking about.
Camilla doesn’t even hear her come in. “Camilla?” To her credit, she doesn’t jump at the sound of her name. She is too busy rolling her eyes. “Are you alright?”
Is she alright?
She snorts, “Just dandy.” This girl is terrible at social cues. Killer or not — it’s inexcusable to be this socially inept. “Never been better.”
Silence.
Camilla is still looking at the wall.
Now she’s thinking about parties. Or one party in particular. With music and coworkers and hors d'oeuvres straight out of the oven. She’s thinking about the athleticism that someone would need to catch a baking tray with their feet and only spill one drop. She’s thinking about the force it takes to break a neck.
“I understand it’s a lot to take in. And I wouldn’t have come here if it were just me who was hurt but…” Yor stops, gnawing on her bottom lip like she does sometimes at work. It’s her tell. She has many. Most of them appear when she’s nervous or feeling awkward, which is pretty much all the time. “Fiona shouldn’t have been so crude.”
“Fiona? The blonde?” Yor’s eyes widen. Camilla almost rolls her eyes again. “You weren’t supposed to tell me her name, were you?”
“No,” she says. “Sylvia— fuck .”
Camilla almost smiles at that.
“Didn’t know you cursed.”
Yor looks at her a moment then sits down. “I try not to.” She looks at Camilla strangely. “Especially now. What with my daughter and all.”
She’s making a point of mentioning her daughter. Camilla knows that. But really all that reminds her of is how well she’d handled the knife that night Camilla had tried to teach her to cook. Perfectly thin and even slices of vegetables. Small cubes of meat. Yor had sliced straight through Camilla’s cutting board.
She really was an idiot, wasn’t she?
Not that she’ll admit that. Instead, she steels her nerves and says, “Honestly? I didn’t think you even knew how.” Another beat of silence. It lasts until Camilla can’t take it anymore. “Who else knows?”
She’s not expecting an answer but one comes anyway. “Well… I mean— god, Camilla .” Yor stops, reconsiders, and then continues. “I'm part of an organization. A sort of collective, really. They know. I mean— of course, they know. They’re the ones who give me the jobs . But other than that…”
Yor pauses, chewing on her bottom lip again.
And at that, watching her do that, part of Camilla almost regrets asking because it’s so annoying. Why would Yor be the one who is nervous? She’s not the one with three strange women in her house. She’s not the one who is going to have to burn the duvet cover her coworker is sitting on in case the bloodied woman leaves blood in the fibers or whatever. She’s not the one who feels like the world is upside down and slanted to the left.
Camilla gonna have to burn her couch too, isn’t she?
She thinks of her lovely cream couch. It was one of the first things she’d bought for her apartment when she’d moved down south to Berlint from her little nowhere town almost five years ago. She’d watched some of her favorite shows on that couch. Berlint in Love. My Children and He. Reckless Housewives. Dominic and she had christened that couch. She loved that couch. Then she imagines dragging it down to the alley behind her building and setting it on fire.
Fuck.
No.
No way.
Fuck that.
Yor doesn’t get to be nervous.
She is about to tell Yor to stop chewing on her fucking lip when she says, “Those two in there. They know. Now they know,” she says. “That’s a new development.”
“How new?”
“A couple of hours?”
Camilla calms her homicidal instincts for a moment. “Anyone else?” Your husband? Your brother? Your daughter? “Does no one else know?”
Yor shakes her head. “No one else.”
It’s weird how the words hang in the word between them. They feel heavy. And, honestly, they feel kind of suffocating. Like too much of the truth. And, yes, Camilla knows Yor but she doesn’t know know her. Not like that. She knows that Yor is awkward to the point of being nearly socially inept. She knows that she probably has some kind of anxiety disorder. And she knows that for all her many shortcomings—her many , many annoying shortcomings—Yor is probably a nice, good kind of person. But that’s all.
This whole admitting things we’ve probably never admitted to anyone else thing?
They don’t do that. They’ve never done that. That is something friends do. And they aren’t that. They aren’t girlfriends. And Camilla doesn’t know what to do with that now that they have done that.
Fuck.
She’ll probably regret it later but she says, “You’re wrong.”
Yor looks at her. “What?”
Dominic has been teaching Camilla about breathwork and meditation. He says it is supposed to help her regulate her mood because sometimes she has a temper like a lit stick of dynamite drenched in kerosene. Which is to say, a bad one.
Camilla tries it now.
She inhales so deeply she can almost feel her ribcage pressing against her skin, then exhales.
It doesn’t work. “Someone else does know,” she snaps. Her mind is all cloudy and thundering and she can hear her blood rushing. She’s fucking furious. She’s furious and irritated and annoyed. And under all that she’s also a little hurt, she feels a little betrayed. And she’s pissed about that too because like she said, she doesn’t know Yor well enough to feel betrayed by her. At least she doesn’t think she does. “ I know.”
Yor just looks at her. Big red eyes the color of the blood that had been weeping from the gash at her eyebrow. The color of the cloths soaking in bleach in Camilla’s bathroom sink. “Oh, Camilla. No. You don’t,” she says. “ I—I haven’t told you anywhere near enough for you to know. Not really. So you’ll be fine, Camilla. You’ll be—“
And that is just the wrong thing to say. Again .
Camilla shoots up. “You can’t seriously expect me to pretend this didn’t happen.” Yor has never been able to hide any of her thoughts. She doesn’t have the face for it. Her eyes are too big and she blushes like she’s a spokesperson for a cosmetics company. So she certainly can’t hide her thoughts at this moment. Not from Camilla. “You do. You expect me to act like this didn’t happen.” Camilla is shaking. Actually, physically shaking. She’s never been so bothered in her entire life. “You’ve said a lot of dumb things since we’ve met, Yor, but honestly this truly takes the cake. This takes the whole fucking bakery. ”
Silence falls over them like heavy snow—cold, frigid, and unforgiving.
Camilla is angry. Furious.
And Yor—“You’ll be safer that way.”
That truly sets Camilla off. “I can’t just pretend that you didn’t knock on my door with blood all over you and gashes all over your limbs. Stab wounds. Stab wounds , Yor. You were covered in stab wounds! And I can’t just pretend there aren’t two strangers getting blood on my sofa right now. I can’t pretend that you aren’t… aren’t… whatever the fuck you are !”
“An assassin.”
Camilla laughs. “ A fucking assassin.” Right. Sure. Fine . “I can’t pretend any of that away. Nope. Uh uh. I can’t. I won’t. ”
Yor looks panicked. Her shoulders are tense and if she wrings her hands together any harder she’ll start bleeding all over again. Then she stands. She looks at Camilla for a while and just as she starts wondering if the assassin’s code would look approvingly on murdering one’s coworker, Yor walks to the living room.
She’s only gone a minute before she says, “Oh dear.”
“What?”Camilla asks more to the ceiling and past the sky and whatever god thinks that this is a normal thing for someone to have to deal with on the weekend, then to Yor. “What could it possibly be now?”
“Oh. Well. They’re gone.”
Camilla stands.
No. “Gone? What do you mean gone ?” It’s a stupid question. She knows it’s a stupid question but that doesn’t stop her from asking it. “ They’re gone? ”
Camilla walks out to an empty living room. Couch cushions perfectly arranged, woven throw draped nicely over the armrest, and not a single sign that anyone had ever been here. Even the metallic scent of blood is gone, replaced by— she sniffs—an expensive-smelling perfume used as an air freshener.
Everything looks perfect.
Cleaner, even, than it had been before this whole ordeal.
She could just scream .
Again, she doesn’t do that.
She does, in fact, have some dignity left.
Instead, she heads to the kitchen and grabs the bottle of whiskey she keeps on the top shelf for Dominic. It’s bitter medicine, strong enough to burn not only her throat on the way down but her lips, her tongue, and the entirety of her mouth. She usually never touches the stuff. Tonight it seems only fitting.
Camilla pours herself a whole glass.
She tops it off with ice.
Camilla looks over her shoulder. “Do you want one?”
Yor is standing by the breakfast nook now. She takes a seat. “What is it?”
“Alcohol.”
“What kind?”
“The kind that will get us drunk.” Camilla pours a second glass right up to the rim. “Tonight is the kind of night we need to be drunk for.”
“I don’t—”
Camilla slides a drink over to the assassin. “Drink.”
Yor takes one sip.
Then another.
And another.
She coughs. “This isn’t very good.”
Camilla sits down next to her. She places the bottle between them and then downs her own drink. The burn of alcohol warms her from her feet all the way to the crown of her head.
“I know.”
“Why do you drink this?”
“I don’t usually.” A beat of silence. Two empty glasses. “Do you want some more?”
“Yes.”
Camilla refills both of their glasses and then turns to Yor. “Okay.” She says. “Tell me everything.”
And Yor tells her everything.