Pacifier

🌙Sam🥀

"Areet steady ok you gotta look where you wanna shoot not anywhere else yeah..." I said talking to her on the roof at the top of the block of flats where Dean lived. It wasn't exactly ideal in terms of keeping her hidden but I'd decided we couldn't wait. I had to teach her this.

Not just because Id promised her I would, to build her trust, but because I was getting scared.

Things were tense, Ruby getting killed was only the beginning, and though I knew I could look after her, though I knew there was no way Van would have made her my responsibility if that fact was even in doubt for a fleeting second. I wanted her to know how to defend herself.

It was what she wanted too. I could tell that.

The days after her grandmother had been murdered she'd receded into her shell, not a Della I recognised but a terrified, lost looking girl who couldn't look after herself. For a few days she'd been very lucky that I wasn't one of those bad men she feared me to be. Because if I had been thats when I'd have chosen to strike. To hurt her.

She knew that deep down, though she still looked at me with a glaze of suspicion sometimes, when she forgot herself and the act I had a feeling she was still playing. She knew it and she hated herself for it. Hated how vulnerable she'd allowed herself to be. How she'd dropped her defenses and crumbled.

I didn't blame her for it but she blamed herself and i knew that this now, her insistence to learn how to shoot and how to kill, it was to prove to herself more than to me, that she wasn't some lost little girl. Thst she was diamond cut and cold like the girls she'd grown up admiring back home.

That was all she wanted to be and do, prove she was a bottleman at heart just the same as anyone else in her family.

And that suited me, though it made me nervous to think that when she knew everything, when she realised that it didn't take much to be able to fire a gun, she'd turn the one I'd given her on me.

Its what I knew she planned to do. No matter how sweet she seemed to be somehow. When she held my hand or crawled into my lap in the evenings half asleep waiting for tea.

We didn't have a bed at Dean's, just the settee and though I'd intended to sleep on the floor, she'd refused to even entertain the idea of sleeping alone. So now every night I lay on that sofa and she crawled above me, let her body rest atop of mine, her head on my chest, her legs either side of mine. And it was the warmest I'd ever felt. The most at home. But I knew I couldn't allow myself to believe it was the same for her. I knew what she was doing.

Playing a game. Trying to win my trust. Trying to convince me I had hers.

But I didn't and I probably never would and every time I held her like that, my fingers curled in her hair as I lay awake struggling to comprehend this situation i could never have predicted myself falling victim to, i had to remind myself that she wasnt just some teenage girl. She was a bottleman and she was deadly.

"I am looking..." she groaned, "cmon Sam am bored just let me.."

"Ey ey ey calm down little one don't get ahead of yourself," i said my hand on her wrist lowering the gun much to her dismay. She let out a long sigh and turned to me where I stood directly behind her. She tilted her head to look up at me and scowled, though even her sullen little pout was adorable to me. Her dark hair and dark lashes catching the early morning light as the sun rose.

"Why," she wined making Dean laugh from where he'd been sitting with a cig watching the mornings entertainment.

"Cause yas canny be shootin guns willy nilly round here like lass, you'll have the world an his wife in a panic thinkin their bairns have been shot up!" he grinned, chuckling as he pushed himself up and wandered over, "anyway youre holding yourself from the wrong place, you're all weak in the middle like," he said prodding her tummy with his finger making her jump, making her frown etch a little deeper as she mimicked him and pulled a face.