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valmoraTitle: la jambe cassée (the broken leg)
Fandom: Banlieue 13 aka District B13
Characters: Leïto/Damien, Lola
Rating: light R
Disclaimer: not my characters, no money made, unlikely to happen in the movie.
Notes: This is AU, from what rumours I have heard about B13-U.
I also made the choice of translating certain French swear words literally. The movie subtitles “putain de [noun]” as “fucking [noun]”; I prefer “whore of a [noun]” as a translation for anal-retention reasons.
Sort-of a sequel to my other B-13 fics, but not really.
Courtesy of some prostitution-ring employees less sophisticated than Taha’s – K2’s, now – gang, Damien ends up in the hospital with a broken leg and some fractured ribs. He tries to bear with it because the faster he heals, the faster he can be out working. Anything at less than peak shape and he’ll learn bad habits, favor certain body parts or strikes, and that will make him predictable and therefore dead.
So he waits to heal. He drinks his coffee with two times more milk than usual, hoping for a placebo effect on his bones. He tries not to put stress on his ribs.
He spends a lot of time lying in bed at home, not wanting to face the stairs – he would never forgive himself for taking the elevator – thinking about how much he wants to be back on the job, or at least have someone to talk to.
After a few days he decides he really is that needy. He picks up his cell phone and dials Lola’s cell phone number. If things are the same as they were three months ago when he dropped them off, she’s prepaying by the minute, so he doesn’t want to take long.
“Damien,” she says warmly, picking it up. “I’m at work, so be quick.”
He hesitates a moment, thinking of apologizing, then doesn’t. “I’m dropping by your apartment tomorrow. Don’t let your brother kill me.”
“Won’t. If nobody’s home, just wait.”
“Got it,” he says, right before she hangs up.
He gets to the apartment building by driving himself, parking just before the empty guard post in the wall that still hasn’t gone down, and wants to go kill something for knowing that his government, not just some people in it, hands out lies like candy.
He walks through the gate in the wall, his car on the other side, and remembers to turn right at the proper intersection before his sense of direction gives way. After all, he found Leïto, but only because the idiot had had a tracker in his clothes. And the tracker is gone now.
So he starts wandering, hoping that he’s going in the right direction. Climbs up a deserted building, normal-people style, and looks out across a few blocks of banlieue, seeing nothing but empty streets and broken buildings.
And then a mote of black against the side of a building, too big to be anything but a person, changing shape as it falls to the roof of a building before uncurling into a running man.
Damien hopes there is no one pursuing, that Leïto is merely running for pleasure. But no, it is merely a jog, not a full sprint, and Damien, heart in his throat, watches him until Leïto can no longer be seen, having disappeared into a maze of shorter buildings, obscured by a few taller ones in Damien’s range of vision.
At the bottom of the stairs Damien needs to sit down for a bit, so he does, hoping the swelling pain in his leg will fade. If nothing else he’ll have better quadriceps, from swinging this whore of a cast around all the time.
Finally he stands up, goes into the street, and heads out towards where he saw Leïto last. After about ten minutes he sees a bustling grocery store, and hoping he’s at the right one, goes inside.
Apparently he’s a very lucky man, because Lola is staffing the third checkout counter. She’s in the middle of ringing up a pile of groceries big enough to swallow her, and he stands next to the bags for a few minutes so she can finish up. There’s no one in the line after the woman with lots of groceries, so after she leaves, Damien calls out over the noise, “Lola!”
She turns, her eyes scanning the people in the store, until finally her gaze falls on him -
“Oh!” she says, and darts over to hug him.
He buries his face in her shoulder, hiding his wince at how tight her hug is, and mutters, “Hey, hey, invalid here.”
She squeezes tighter for a moment before letting go. “I can see that,” she says archly. “You have a cast on. And I have a job to do. But I bet you couldn’t find the apartment.”
“Not at all,” he admits, grinning.
“Go out the front door there, turn right, and walk straight for two blocks. Turn right and go a block, then turn left. Second building on the left.”
He repeats her instructions to make sure, then heads out.
On the way he passes by a lot of buildings with guys out front, hands shoved in their pockets or busy smoking something. He leaves his hands free and empty, keeps his eyes open and pays attention to his ears. The cast will keep him from running away, so if he gets in trouble he needs to know long in advance.
But nobody tries to mess with him on his way to the apartment building It’s nice, to be safe. Things are better here, even though the wall isn’t gone – there’s still a little hope, even if it’s tempered by cynicism.
At the building, there are a few men out front, looking tough but competent; they have guns with them. He walks up to them, but leaves enough distance that they won’t get itchy trigger fingers.
“I’m here to visit Leïto and Lola,” he says. “Lola said it was okay.”
The men glance at each other knowingly. One of them drawls, “Sure she did.”
“Look, if Leïto’s in, just tell him Damien’s here, hey? If he’s not I’ll wait.” He stays standing there, not moving, hands open and empty.
One of the guys brings a walkie-talkie up to his mouth, says into it, “Some guy named Damien wants to come in. Who is this bitch?”
There’s a lot of static-filled silence. Damien breathes slowly, his ribs tickling.
The guy with the walkie-talkie shakes it a bit, then repeats himself. This time there’s a response. It might be “I’ll go ask him,” but then again it could just as easily be “I had an almond tree,” so who’s Damien to know.
There’s a long wait, thirty seconds or more, before a voice comes on the walkie-talkie, just as incomprehensible as the rest. It sounds like Leïto, though, intense and deep, self-assured. The walkie-talkie garbles it, but the guard looks at the device in his hand like it’s started telling him about Vietnamese literature, then glances at Damien.
“White. Shaved head. Broken leg.”
Damien crosses his arms, waits for the walkie-talkie to be silent, and is distracted by clattering above him. He looks up, readying himself to move out of the way of danger, and instead sees Leïto scaling the walls down.
It takes about a minute, from a hanging rope to the railings of the stairs and little jutting bits of concrete. Damien watches all of it, the raw poetry of Leïto in motion, hungering for the freedom and the health to do the same.
“Shit,” Leïto says, once they’re looking each other in the face. He grabs Damien’s hand and pulls him into a hug.
Damien closes his eyes to keep from getting stabbed by Leïto’s hair, pats Leïto on the back. He didn’t think Leïto would be so – effusive. But it’s been a while. Three months. Long enough that it doesn’t feel the same being near him, like a part of Damien has chipped off since they last saw each other, fucking up the grooves of his personality so Leïto doesn’t quite fit anymore.
Leïto lets go of him, smile a little wider than usual, still holding a few secrets, and says, “C’mon.”
Damien walks past the silent guards into the building. They take the stairs to the seventh floor; there’s no elevator. Leïto and Lola’s apartment is dark and dingy, more because of the building than the state of cleanliness of the apartment. There’s a set of weights in one corner and an abbreviated kitchen in the other. The apartment smells like baking bread, though Damien doubts that Leïto has the patience or skill to make bread from scratch. Maybe a neighbor does.
“I’m glad you came,” Leïto says, spilling into a chair across from the weight bench. “We were starting to worry.”
Damien sits on the weight bench. “I had work.”
“And now you don’t. Because you got yourself injured.”
“Yeah.”
“That hurts.” Leïto stands, goes to fidde with something in the kitchen. He adds, voice a little louder, “Lola thought you didn’t care.”
Damien swallows, shamed. If Lola was saying it, then Leïto was thinking it. That was never his intention, to make them wonder. And he wanted to ask Lola about the kiss. Did she mean it? He doesn’t feel anything other than brotherly affection for her, so he’s not really looking forward to the conversation.
“I cared,” he says. “I still care. But you forget the importance of the big things, when all you can hear is the screaming of the small ones.”
“Yes,” Leïto agrees. Damien wonders if it’s really agreement. Leïto has a clarity of purpose, of mind and spirit, that Damien admires, envies, desires.
Lola arrives home not long before six. Long before that Damien had been drafted into cooking a stir fry, so the food – with fresh bread; Damien had to resasses his opinion of Leïto’s cooking skills – was waiting for all three of them then. They eat, talk a little. Leïto has a shift at the door, two hours, so he goes downstairs at eight to keep watch.
Damien and Lola wash the dishes. Damien tells her a little more about his most recent assignment because she seemed interested in a way that Leïto didn’t, at dinner. He asks her about how the banlieue is doing, if things are changing. Her answer is a little hopeful, but guardedly so. Nobody wants to be left crying if things go bad.
“So, um,” he starts, trying not to look as though he has no idea what he’s doing, “that kiss when I dropped you and Leïto off. What did you mean by it?”
“I meant that you should come visit, because Leïto and I would miss you. Which we did.”
“Nothing more?”
“Well,” she says, drawing it out, “no. Not on my part.”
He has no clue what that means.
Leïto gets back at ten-fifteen and tosses a pillow at Damien. “Borrowed this. You can sleep on the couch.” He indicates with a sharp wave of his hand the beat-up couch on the wall next to the door.
“Thanks.” Damien really is grateful. He doesn’t even care that his car’s probably been broken down for parts by now. It doesn’t really matter.
“It’s nothing. You want a shower?”
“No thanks,” Damien says. Leïto closes the door to his room and walks out a few minutes later wearing a towel around his hips. His tattoos cluster on his chest, shoulders, back, black edged contrast to his skin. Damien, curled up on the couch, closes his eyes. He can still feel the depth of Leïto’s footfalls on the floor, so he sits up before Leïto reaches the door to the bathroom and says, “How good is your sister at reading emotions.”
Leïto frowns at him, clearly confused. “What?”
Damien stands, takes two steps forward. Watches Leïto for a second, two, three, both of them breathing, and reaches to brush his thumb along Leïto’s cheekbone, fingers sliding to the back of his head. Slow. Leïto can tell him to stop.
He doesn’t. Damien kisses him.
The towel ends up on the floor in front of the couch. Damien ends up on the couch, salt-sweat on his tongue as he draws his mouth down Leïto’s stomach, over ridges of muscle, Leïto’s hands cradling his head. The callouses on his palms scrape, and Damien pauses, looks up just enough to meet Leïto’s gaze, before turning his attention back to Leïto’s skin, his silence, his cock.
Fandom: Banlieue 13 aka District B13
Characters: Leïto/Damien, Lola
Rating: light R
Disclaimer: not my characters, no money made, unlikely to happen in the movie.
Notes: This is AU, from what rumours I have heard about B13-U.
I also made the choice of translating certain French swear words literally. The movie subtitles “putain de [noun]” as “fucking [noun]”; I prefer “whore of a [noun]” as a translation for anal-retention reasons.
Sort-of a sequel to my other B-13 fics, but not really.
Courtesy of some prostitution-ring employees less sophisticated than Taha’s – K2’s, now – gang, Damien ends up in the hospital with a broken leg and some fractured ribs. He tries to bear with it because the faster he heals, the faster he can be out working. Anything at less than peak shape and he’ll learn bad habits, favor certain body parts or strikes, and that will make him predictable and therefore dead.
So he waits to heal. He drinks his coffee with two times more milk than usual, hoping for a placebo effect on his bones. He tries not to put stress on his ribs.
He spends a lot of time lying in bed at home, not wanting to face the stairs – he would never forgive himself for taking the elevator – thinking about how much he wants to be back on the job, or at least have someone to talk to.
After a few days he decides he really is that needy. He picks up his cell phone and dials Lola’s cell phone number. If things are the same as they were three months ago when he dropped them off, she’s prepaying by the minute, so he doesn’t want to take long.
“Damien,” she says warmly, picking it up. “I’m at work, so be quick.”
He hesitates a moment, thinking of apologizing, then doesn’t. “I’m dropping by your apartment tomorrow. Don’t let your brother kill me.”
“Won’t. If nobody’s home, just wait.”
“Got it,” he says, right before she hangs up.
He gets to the apartment building by driving himself, parking just before the empty guard post in the wall that still hasn’t gone down, and wants to go kill something for knowing that his government, not just some people in it, hands out lies like candy.
He walks through the gate in the wall, his car on the other side, and remembers to turn right at the proper intersection before his sense of direction gives way. After all, he found Leïto, but only because the idiot had had a tracker in his clothes. And the tracker is gone now.
So he starts wandering, hoping that he’s going in the right direction. Climbs up a deserted building, normal-people style, and looks out across a few blocks of banlieue, seeing nothing but empty streets and broken buildings.
And then a mote of black against the side of a building, too big to be anything but a person, changing shape as it falls to the roof of a building before uncurling into a running man.
Damien hopes there is no one pursuing, that Leïto is merely running for pleasure. But no, it is merely a jog, not a full sprint, and Damien, heart in his throat, watches him until Leïto can no longer be seen, having disappeared into a maze of shorter buildings, obscured by a few taller ones in Damien’s range of vision.
At the bottom of the stairs Damien needs to sit down for a bit, so he does, hoping the swelling pain in his leg will fade. If nothing else he’ll have better quadriceps, from swinging this whore of a cast around all the time.
Finally he stands up, goes into the street, and heads out towards where he saw Leïto last. After about ten minutes he sees a bustling grocery store, and hoping he’s at the right one, goes inside.
Apparently he’s a very lucky man, because Lola is staffing the third checkout counter. She’s in the middle of ringing up a pile of groceries big enough to swallow her, and he stands next to the bags for a few minutes so she can finish up. There’s no one in the line after the woman with lots of groceries, so after she leaves, Damien calls out over the noise, “Lola!”
She turns, her eyes scanning the people in the store, until finally her gaze falls on him -
“Oh!” she says, and darts over to hug him.
He buries his face in her shoulder, hiding his wince at how tight her hug is, and mutters, “Hey, hey, invalid here.”
She squeezes tighter for a moment before letting go. “I can see that,” she says archly. “You have a cast on. And I have a job to do. But I bet you couldn’t find the apartment.”
“Not at all,” he admits, grinning.
“Go out the front door there, turn right, and walk straight for two blocks. Turn right and go a block, then turn left. Second building on the left.”
He repeats her instructions to make sure, then heads out.
On the way he passes by a lot of buildings with guys out front, hands shoved in their pockets or busy smoking something. He leaves his hands free and empty, keeps his eyes open and pays attention to his ears. The cast will keep him from running away, so if he gets in trouble he needs to know long in advance.
But nobody tries to mess with him on his way to the apartment building It’s nice, to be safe. Things are better here, even though the wall isn’t gone – there’s still a little hope, even if it’s tempered by cynicism.
At the building, there are a few men out front, looking tough but competent; they have guns with them. He walks up to them, but leaves enough distance that they won’t get itchy trigger fingers.
“I’m here to visit Leïto and Lola,” he says. “Lola said it was okay.”
The men glance at each other knowingly. One of them drawls, “Sure she did.”
“Look, if Leïto’s in, just tell him Damien’s here, hey? If he’s not I’ll wait.” He stays standing there, not moving, hands open and empty.
One of the guys brings a walkie-talkie up to his mouth, says into it, “Some guy named Damien wants to come in. Who is this bitch?”
There’s a lot of static-filled silence. Damien breathes slowly, his ribs tickling.
The guy with the walkie-talkie shakes it a bit, then repeats himself. This time there’s a response. It might be “I’ll go ask him,” but then again it could just as easily be “I had an almond tree,” so who’s Damien to know.
There’s a long wait, thirty seconds or more, before a voice comes on the walkie-talkie, just as incomprehensible as the rest. It sounds like Leïto, though, intense and deep, self-assured. The walkie-talkie garbles it, but the guard looks at the device in his hand like it’s started telling him about Vietnamese literature, then glances at Damien.
“White. Shaved head. Broken leg.”
Damien crosses his arms, waits for the walkie-talkie to be silent, and is distracted by clattering above him. He looks up, readying himself to move out of the way of danger, and instead sees Leïto scaling the walls down.
It takes about a minute, from a hanging rope to the railings of the stairs and little jutting bits of concrete. Damien watches all of it, the raw poetry of Leïto in motion, hungering for the freedom and the health to do the same.
“Shit,” Leïto says, once they’re looking each other in the face. He grabs Damien’s hand and pulls him into a hug.
Damien closes his eyes to keep from getting stabbed by Leïto’s hair, pats Leïto on the back. He didn’t think Leïto would be so – effusive. But it’s been a while. Three months. Long enough that it doesn’t feel the same being near him, like a part of Damien has chipped off since they last saw each other, fucking up the grooves of his personality so Leïto doesn’t quite fit anymore.
Leïto lets go of him, smile a little wider than usual, still holding a few secrets, and says, “C’mon.”
Damien walks past the silent guards into the building. They take the stairs to the seventh floor; there’s no elevator. Leïto and Lola’s apartment is dark and dingy, more because of the building than the state of cleanliness of the apartment. There’s a set of weights in one corner and an abbreviated kitchen in the other. The apartment smells like baking bread, though Damien doubts that Leïto has the patience or skill to make bread from scratch. Maybe a neighbor does.
“I’m glad you came,” Leïto says, spilling into a chair across from the weight bench. “We were starting to worry.”
Damien sits on the weight bench. “I had work.”
“And now you don’t. Because you got yourself injured.”
“Yeah.”
“That hurts.” Leïto stands, goes to fidde with something in the kitchen. He adds, voice a little louder, “Lola thought you didn’t care.”
Damien swallows, shamed. If Lola was saying it, then Leïto was thinking it. That was never his intention, to make them wonder. And he wanted to ask Lola about the kiss. Did she mean it? He doesn’t feel anything other than brotherly affection for her, so he’s not really looking forward to the conversation.
“I cared,” he says. “I still care. But you forget the importance of the big things, when all you can hear is the screaming of the small ones.”
“Yes,” Leïto agrees. Damien wonders if it’s really agreement. Leïto has a clarity of purpose, of mind and spirit, that Damien admires, envies, desires.
Lola arrives home not long before six. Long before that Damien had been drafted into cooking a stir fry, so the food – with fresh bread; Damien had to resasses his opinion of Leïto’s cooking skills – was waiting for all three of them then. They eat, talk a little. Leïto has a shift at the door, two hours, so he goes downstairs at eight to keep watch.
Damien and Lola wash the dishes. Damien tells her a little more about his most recent assignment because she seemed interested in a way that Leïto didn’t, at dinner. He asks her about how the banlieue is doing, if things are changing. Her answer is a little hopeful, but guardedly so. Nobody wants to be left crying if things go bad.
“So, um,” he starts, trying not to look as though he has no idea what he’s doing, “that kiss when I dropped you and Leïto off. What did you mean by it?”
“I meant that you should come visit, because Leïto and I would miss you. Which we did.”
“Nothing more?”
“Well,” she says, drawing it out, “no. Not on my part.”
He has no clue what that means.
Leïto gets back at ten-fifteen and tosses a pillow at Damien. “Borrowed this. You can sleep on the couch.” He indicates with a sharp wave of his hand the beat-up couch on the wall next to the door.
“Thanks.” Damien really is grateful. He doesn’t even care that his car’s probably been broken down for parts by now. It doesn’t really matter.
“It’s nothing. You want a shower?”
“No thanks,” Damien says. Leïto closes the door to his room and walks out a few minutes later wearing a towel around his hips. His tattoos cluster on his chest, shoulders, back, black edged contrast to his skin. Damien, curled up on the couch, closes his eyes. He can still feel the depth of Leïto’s footfalls on the floor, so he sits up before Leïto reaches the door to the bathroom and says, “How good is your sister at reading emotions.”
Leïto frowns at him, clearly confused. “What?”
Damien stands, takes two steps forward. Watches Leïto for a second, two, three, both of them breathing, and reaches to brush his thumb along Leïto’s cheekbone, fingers sliding to the back of his head. Slow. Leïto can tell him to stop.
He doesn’t. Damien kisses him.
The towel ends up on the floor in front of the couch. Damien ends up on the couch, salt-sweat on his tongue as he draws his mouth down Leïto’s stomach, over ridges of muscle, Leïto’s hands cradling his head. The callouses on his palms scrape, and Damien pauses, looks up just enough to meet Leïto’s gaze, before turning his attention back to Leïto’s skin, his silence, his cock.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-19 11:04 pm (UTC)I love this, Damien wandering through B13, the unintelligible walkie talkie conversations, Leito scaling down the building to greet Damien, the reference to Leito's porcupine hair, and most of all Damien finally putting two and two together and having Leito right there and then ;-)
no subject
Date: 2009-03-19 11:22 pm (UTC)Heeeeeeeeee!
no subject
Date: 2009-03-20 07:10 am (UTC)I was going to quote the parts I particularly enjoyed, but I'd end up doing the whole thing. Your voices are spot-on, especially Damien's reaction to being injured, and your descriptions of the banlieue--how it's changed, how it's the same--and Damien watching Leito are very nice.
I love Leito literally jumping down the building to see Damien (I can picture the guards' faces LOL) and that he knows how to bake. I love Lola giving Damien a gentle push in the right direction with her comments. Mostly I love how Damien finally gets a clue.
The only thing I didn't love was that it ended. What happened the next day? Did Lola get an eyeful or what? ;)
Also, whore of a cast may be my favourite line. I prefer your translation in this case. It just fits better.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-20 04:36 pm (UTC)I love the strength of Damien's voice in this, the way he thinks and moves, his constant awareness of his body and his surroundings. And the way you describe Leito leaping across the skyline--and Damien's reaction while he watches--is absolutely spot-on.
And much as I've been enjoying the raging UST that's so true to the spirit of the film, thank goodness Lola's hinting finally achieved the desired result! But you can't stop there, you know. I'm going to be very greedy and hope you oblige us all with another companion piece/sequel from Leito's perspective. Or, as others have wondered, what does Lola make of the eyeful she's going to get in the morning? ;)
no subject
Date: 2011-11-08 10:03 am (UTC)Hah! I wondered how the hell he caught up with Leito *g*
This. Just yes.
XD