Gun

The tractor settles on its skids as the gravs spin down to idle. The fence along the edge of the Exclusion Zone needs checking every week; stewarding the razed prairies’ recovery is hard enough without any old incommunicado warbot breaking through and re-emplacing itself in the fragile ecosystem. But everything’s fine out there.

The tractor steers like a tranquillised sow and rattles like a washer full of rocks, it’s now an hour past the hottest part of the day, Jessie’s shorts are sticking uncomfortably to her, and she needs a shower.

Aunt Olivia’s been out here, digging out the machines and re-establishing wildlife, for as long as Jess remembers — one of a handful of stewards tending a range along the rim of the Zone, a lonesome cabin for every few hundred klicks, just her and the birds and the weeds. Some summers, they’d visit. And then Liv broke her wrist, and Jessie’s parents were Just Concerned, and there were rows about Liv keeping on out here, and Jess made a peacekeeping suggestion that she could just go and help out until her aunt’s wrist healed and she could do everything herself again.

Didn’t exactly smooth things over, but here she is. Lil’ Jess, now a summer-fresh seventeen and with a whole load of new calluses from finding out just how hard Aunt Liv works out here. The doc came through with his plane a week back, dropped off the season’s slow-mail, took off Liv’s cast, told Jess to make her take it easy for another few weeks.

Liv’s spent all the long months chafing at taking it easy. Should be happy that there’s light at the end of the tunnel. But there’s something off that she hasn’t told Jess about, something that’s had her sunk in her own thoughts and mopey. Jess’d thought it was just the arm, not being able to do, but if it ain’t that....

She follows the path around the cabin, following the pop and crack of someone target-shooting at stacks of pebbles with the robot gun, an old-fashioned forearm-length hand cannon, steel-bound ceramic barrel heat-stained at the muzzle end, dark oil-rainbow colours from the blowback where it spits superhot plasma. Never had a robot make it this far over the fence, but better in case.

And that’s wrong too, because there’s more pop than crack, more shots than heat-shattered rocks exploding to gravel, and Liv’s never missed a shot before that Jess knows.

“Aunt Liv?” she calls, before she rounds the corner — never smart to surprise a body with a firearm — and walks to the back, shading her eyes from the sun. Aunt Liv’s a scarecrow-lean figure, iron-grey stipples in the dark hair at her temples, jaw forever squared like she’s the Big Damn Action Hero in a movie and someone just raised the stakes on her, high enough that she can’t just pass through minding her business. She has the robot gun pointed downrange (toward the back of the garden, where the backstop is a whole lot of nothing but compost and rocks), and she’s leaning sideways a little, as if in a wind that ain’t there.

…She’s been drinking.

“Aunt Liv?” Jess sounds worried in her own ears, which makes her sound like she’s more like twelve than a rising young woman. This ain’t like Liv. “Is everything all right?”

Liv’s jaw twitches, she steadies her arm, and shoots the top off another vertical stack of fist-sized rocks. Pop! Crack! “Fine.”

“Should you—” Jess approaches hesitantly, puts a hand on her aunt’s shoulder. “Should you be doing that when you’ve had a drink?” And Liv turns a little to her, with the slight confusion of precision and order to do things in that people get after hitting the plum gin, and Jess finds herself gasping at being prodded in the ribs with the bad end of the gun.

They both freeze.

“Now, you’re the one who taught me when I was knee-high that you should never point a gun at something you ain’t willing to kill,” Jess says softly. “I think you should let me take that, for now.”

“Ah, hell.” Her aunt’s mouth is a clamped line, and her eyes are big sleepless bruises. She carefully peels her fingers off the hilt, one at a time, letting Jess gently take it away. “Maybe you should—” and her teeth chatter and her breath dies over what she was about to say. Something sadder and tired-er crawls in after her lost nerve, to push the words out anyway: “Maybe you oughta point it at me.”

Jess takes a couple of deep breaths. “Now, what kind of talk is that?” she says.

“You ever wanted to…hurt someone, Jessie?” her aunt says, in the distant way she’s talked for months, looking right through her at something that’s only inside her own head. “No, now I don’t mean like fighting with your sister.”

Jess glances down at the robot gun in her ginger grip.

“No, lord , Jessie, not like murder, either!” Olivia’s eyes focus right back on her. There’s an edge to her voice like she’s desperate Jess understands — also terrified she will. “You ever just looked at someone and thought, you. I wanna hurt you. I wanna hurt you and I’ll like it?”

Jess swallows. “Can’t say I have,” she says, sounding very small to herself. “But. See. I wouldn’t know, myself. But some of the girls at school liked to talk big about watching pornos on Starnet—” and she has to speed up all through saying it so that her burning face doesn’t stall her voice halfway through — “And I have the idea that’s just a thing some people do and it’s probably fine if y’all agree on it?”

Aunt Liv makes a strangled noise, and it makes Jess feel maybe a fraction of a hair better to see that her face is nearly the colour Jessie’s own is.

There aren’t even that many people on this whole planet. Her parents used to tease Liv about the guy who tends the next range — she always figured it was more an expression of how they disapproved of Liv being here than anything real, and she’s never heard her talk about him much of any way at all, but — “David,” she begins dubiously, a baffled note of question high in her voice, and gets no further than that.

“David? Oh my lord no—” it almost gets a laugh out of her aunt. “At least he could consent—” and her mouth shuts like a steel trap.

Well, if not him, and not the doctor — it won’t be the doctor, Jess thinks definitely, even if she can’t articulate why not — David’s a widower with a son a few years older than Jess, a big contented wood-splitting rock-hauling robot-shooting lunk rancher type, and Liv must have known him before he growed up, so that must be why she’s made herself feel so bad about it.

“Well, I don’t, I can’t say what’s right, Aunt Liv,” she babbles nervously, patting her arm. “I guess I can see how knowing Phil as a youngster makes it—”

“Oh my god,” her aunt says in angry despair. “No, Jessie, you don’t understand.”

It stings a little, even as Jess feels childish for it. “Well, I’m trying,” she says, and Liv bites her lip and reaches out to lightly touch Jess’s arms, just above the elbow; and Jess is just about to open her mouth to say she’s sorry, it’s okay, and she wants to understand, she’d never judge Liv — when the lean, sun-browned, strong hands close around her biceps, and Liv takes a deliberate step, and another, another, all the way up to the wall of the house, holding her like a natural history specimen on a pin.

And then the wall arrives against her back, firm enough to push the breath out of her, and before she can grab the air back into her lungs, Liv’s slim, rough hand is around her neck. It’s not tight — not very. But she squeaks and grabs at her aunt’s wrist, shaking, as if she is a butterfly and it is stabbing steel.

“I watched you take the tractor out this morning,” Liv says, voice rough, sticky in her throat from feeling too many things. “And I sat here wondering if this time, this time, am I gonna do something terrible when Jessie comes home?”

Jessie squeaks again, and then, with her free hand, Liv gently tugs the gun out of her grasp, where Jess hadn’t give it a single thought.

“And I sat out here with this, and I thought, maybe today I’ll have the guts to fix this…but I didn’t.” She stares Jess in the face, eyes hot, face stone. “Spread your legs.”

“Aunt Liv—”

Jess feels the heat of the bolt wash down her calves as the gun goes off, pointed straight down into the ground between her feet. Hot dirt sprays her legs, and she bucks as hard as if Liv had shot her, a wail torn from her throat.

Olivia grates, low in her throat, wordless, and presses Jess back firmly into the wall. “Shh, shhhh. Spread your legs.”

Shaking, Jess shuffles one foot outward, then the other — then, with a whimper, just in case it’s not enough, shuffles the one and then the other a bit further. Liv’s face is flushed, and she turns her head to scrub her cheek against her own shoulder. “Fuck,” she mouths, silent but for the wet catch of her lips parting over the F.

“Liv — “

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Liv mutters, and Jess’s breath seizes as knuckles brush inside her thigh — Liv’s hand, turned to shield her from any touch of the hot gun, whispers up her leg. And then, when the back of her wrist gently meets Jessie’s crotch, Jess inhales sharp enough to hurt and starts whimpering, short and constant and low in her mouth, like a scared puppy. “It’s okay,” and Liv’s thumb carefully hooks into the leg of her shorts and swipes over Jessie’s sensitive parts —

Jess’s head snaps back involuntarily into the wall, and Olivia moans, pure filth. Jess is wet. Jess is soaked.

“It’s okay,” Liv says again, throaty and a just little shaky. “It’s okay, Jessie, I promise. That’s not, that doesn’t mean anything, okay? That happens to women who get…it doesn’t make it your fault.”

Some noises that might be trying to be words creep into Jess’s whimpering, but she doesn’t know what they might be, and Liv steps up into her, pressing Jess between the wall and her body. Jess’s hips are jumping against Liv’s touch, and then the grip-smoothed ball of the robot-gun’s butt presses firmly into the crotch of her shorts and Jess’s grinding hips fuck her against it, and her aunt’s hand tightens just a little on her throat —

Jess sobs explosively, once, twice, and comes.

A while later, when she prises her eyes open — the hand on her throat gone, to shakily cup the side of her face — she finds Liv, cheek pressed again against her own shoulder, a glimpse of teeth worrying the tip of her shirt collar, face very white. Seeing her looking back, her aunt starts shakily disentangling herself, stepping back, and Jess’s rubbery legs simply let her slide down the wall into a heap.

Liv sits down on a rock, back to her.

“Liv?” Jess says eventually.

“Go inside,” Liv says roughly.

“I don’t — “

“Leave the gun.”

Jess seems to be sitting on it. She weakly rolls to her hands and knees, gives up on her rubbery legs supporting her, and crawls shakily over to her aunt. She starts to say Aunt Liv, but it doesn’t seem to fit in her mouth right now. “Olivia,” she says instead, the full, unaccustomed name rolling throatily off her tongue.

“Go inside.” Liv is silently crying, face screwed up.

“Olivia.” She takes Liv’s hands. “I’ve never looked at someone and thought I want to hurt you.” She looks at the rough fingers between her own, rubs her thumb over them. “Have you ever looked at someone and thought you. Hurt me?”

A shudder runs through Olivia, and Jessie smiles down at their twined hands before she looks up into her face. Still smiling, she raises one of Liv’s hands with her own, brings it to cup her cheek, snuggles into it.

“Have you ever looked at someone and thought hit me?”

She turns her face down, moves Liv’s hand up and coaxes it into closing, a loose fist tangled with her hair.

“Spit on me. Call me a whore. Slap me till I scream.”

Nuzzles Liv’s knee.

“Tie me to the tractor and fist me while I cry. Grind on my face till I think I’ll suffocate. God, Liv, fuck me till the beds break. Fuck me till I break. Please.”

Olivia makes a deep, wordless sound.

“Liv.” She scrambles as close as she can, pushing herself between Olivia’s seated thighs, wrapping her arms around her waist, pressing her face into her shirt. “Never ever touch the gun again drunk, okay?”

“Okay,” Liv manages, after a trembling pause.

Jess hesitates, face hidden against her. “I love you,” she murmurs.

“Oh god, Jessie—”

“Take me inside. Fuck me. Mark me. I’m yours.”

“I love you too,” Liv whispers, and pulls her closer; the fist in her hair tightening, drawing her head up and back so that Liv can kiss her, timid, trembling.