rainbowfic | Grey #3: Grey Becomes Her (Peccadillo Parlour)

Name: Grey Becomes Her
Story: Peccadillo Parlour
Colors: Grey #3: Grey area
Supplies and Styles: n/a
Word Count: 600
Rating: mature
Warnings: Corruption, adulterous behaviour.
Notes: Crossposted on

femslashficlets.

Violet Holmes didn't sleep with judges. She didn't need to.

The old men shared their dirty jokes with her because they knew she'd come back with something just as filthy, and likely funnier. Some tried to scratch her resolve and ended up with blunted claws. Some she flirted with only just enough; others she flirted with aggressively enough that they ended up thinking they had a real chance. Until they thought that the two of them shared something special.

That always came in handy eventually.

She couldn't reach all of them, of course. There were the disturbing ones, the ones whose brow never knitted when charges were read; the ones whose minds, like their houses, were fortified castles. It wasn't that these servants of the people were immune to corruption—they were immune to influence. They chose when to be corrupted and by whom. They chose the death penalty, more often than not, or a recommended sentence to their favourite privately run prison. In the end, they chose power over everything else.

That's how the system had manufactured them. Violet fancied she'd be one of them if she'd decided to go that route in her career. But they weren't happy, so perhaps it was just as swell. Violet had her own little empire, and the excitement of juggling several clients and cases at the same time. She had the fun of getting to know each judge and predict the results of her cases before they even appeared in front of them—of finding out just how far she could push a special relationship.

You could easily push the men too far, of course, and Violet in any case felt no answering desire for them. But the women—

Judge Giddis, for one. Married for thirty-two years. A suprisingly girlish giggle ending in an abrupt gasp and a shushing finger on Violet's lips. "Behave. We have guests coming over."

"What a pity," Violet murmured into the judge's collar, though she had known it all along. She had wrangled their flirtation right on the edge between a running joke and serious proposal. Giddis couldn't know for sure if glamorous Violet really would go for a sixty-year old mother of two. It was just a bit of fooling around.

But that gasp. It let Violet know there was more, could be more. That there was a woman under the layers of that pant-suit, wrapped up in this life and in this oak-panelled mini-mansion on the outskirts of town, with its ordered garden and close-cropped hedges, the iron gate and the heavy curtains, the fragrant smoking-room, the piano and the servants and the vacations in Europe.

Sex was a great equalizer. Anyone could become an animal around her fingers.

But that would ruin everything, so Violet drew back and let Judge Giddis go to the door as the doorbell rang, letting in dusty old men and their tightly wound wives. Violet was already on her way out the back.

It wouldn't look too good, a named partner of a civil law firm cozying up to a judge in her free time. They'd toed the line, of course—Violet wasn't currently involved in any of Giddis's cases, Giddis herself had no stake in Holmes, Gordon & Gibbs—but if it was all above bar, then why did Violet sneak in at night to drop off her birthday bouquet and sneak out the back again? Why not say hello to the judge's guests?

They both knew what they were doing. Unlike, Violet suspected, the judge's husband. And one day it would pay off.

One way or another.