Fanfic: Sunehri's Decameron (Dhoom 2), 1/1
Feb. 9th, 2007 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dangermousieTitle: Sunehri’s Decameron
Fandom: Dhoom 2
Tech stuff: 1994 words
Characters: Sunehri (Sunehri/Aryan)
A/N: I mentioned a really long time ago that I wanted to write a Sunehri story (right after seeing D2) and then forgot all about it. But I kept thinking about it off and on, so here it is. A Sunehri story? Yes. I am one of the people who did like her and was rather interested by her. So anyway, here it is. Set before and during the movie.
I.
What rotten luck!
Sunehri fidgets in the hard chair. If her hands weren’t cuffed, she’d be tempted to bite her nails, glittery nail polish be damned.
Huh. Luck.
Yeah, yeah, ‘thou shalt not steal’ and all that, but it’s not like she makes much at that nightclub. Not enough to live on, at any rate, not without selling yourself, like Priya and Simran do. A sideline.
Well, to be honest, she’s done it too once or twice, when the money was real tight, but if it wasn’t for stealing, she’d have to do it as a regular sort of thing, and she couldn’t. Last time she did it, four months ago, she didn’t think there was enough showers left in the world.
No more. Won’t won’t won’t won’t. The manager would love it, the greasy-haired freak. He’d get good tips from the clients and be extra good to her, he hinted. If she didn’t need the work, she’d have probably kneed him.
Figures. Lesser of two evil leads you to a cell. She kicks out at the table leg, but her shoes are flimsy and all she does is stub her toes.
But the thing is, she is good. She knows she is. There aren’t that many things she is good at: men, and dancing, and taking things that don’t belong to her but that she wants. It helps that the men’s brains go gooey when they look at her, have done so since she was twelve, and so they are less observant of their belongings. It’s not her fault if that stupid man’s friend came up at exactly the wrong moment.
You can’t run fast in heels and if she ever gets the hell out of here, she swears she will wear flats. She promises to be good, if only she gets out. She promises a lot of things.
The door opens and the cop comes in. Tall, tough-looking. She knows cajoling won’t help, not with his type, and is horrified to hear a whimpering, pleading voice and to realize it’s hers. Her make-up is probably all smeared and she looks a sight and what’s the use anyway, but she can’t stop with the begging and the crying.
II.
If Sunehri had any brains, she would have taken her lumps and went to jail. But no, no brains at all. And now she is roped in as a stool-pigeon. Small fry informer. She hates it and can’t stop it. And she is always terrified of being caught and she doesn’t know when it will end. If ever. That policeman, the lanky one with the legs, owns her body and soul and it doesn’t look like he is ever letting her go.
They got her a job at a ritzier place though. Information gathering and all that. Less groping, more overpaid white collars getting drunk on fancy booze. If she wanted to, she’d be taken to fancy hotels now for the night, not the run down places with paint peeling off the walls.
When she gets the call on her cell phone to come meet Jai at the coffee place, she is expecting the usual ‘make eyes at the bald guy in the suit, listen what he says to his buddies, tell us back' stuff he is so fond of. Huh. Looks glamorous in the movies, sucks in real life.
But it isn’t. When she finds out what he wants, if she could refuse, she’d run screaming. Screaming.
Yeah. Help him catch the Super-Thief. By pretending to be one herself and drawing his attention. Great idea. No one knows anything about the guy. Tall, short, fat, skinny? Of more immediate interest to Sunehri is homicidal or not too much? Who knows what the hell the guy does for a hobby. For all she knows, she’ll end up in a body bag, if she is lucky. Or raped, her throat half-slit, left to die slowly, like that girl in her neighborhood when she was a kid. What was her name? She can’t remember but she remembers the bruises on the corpse’s face and how all the mothers scared the kids in the neighborhood for weeks. No one found who did it though.
But like she has a choice.
III.
Sunehri is terrified. The scam is good. Jai came up with a better one than she could have done herself. He is wasted in his current career. Good scam, but she is praying as hard as she can, though not with much hope of success, that Mr. A won’t show up. She will go through with the charade, no one will be there, everything will be OK.
She is down, cable still attached to her waist and she doesn’t see anyone. So far so good. She reaches out for the sword, like she is supposed to, Sunehri the good little girl, and then…
There he is. The mysterious Mr. A.
The adrenalin makes it hard for her to breathe so she puts on her hardest attitude and her brittlest shell and she hopes it’s enough. She is probably over-compensating, but she can’t help it. The following minutes are a blur, and what she says is part script, part what she’s always thought, if not out loud, and seventy percent pure panic.
Yeah. Attitude and sharp angles and defensive shell. Even if she can’t help but be drawn by the tall stranger’s intense gaze, and the measured voice against which her own words bounce around harmlessly.
She realizes she is a bit disappointed that it all might end there, after all. She wonders what he looks like, under the mask.
IV.
She is still keyed up from the heist-not-heist, but on the plus side, that makes her extra good, with all that energy to put on the dance floor, and so the tips are better and hey, she’s done her best, so Jai-the-obnoxious-cop can’t complain. She hopes.
So she does her number and as she is dancing, singing the song she probably knows backwards by now, she is scanning the crowd for the usual lucky sucker who gets to have two seconds of one-on-one with the Golden Girl, during the number. It totally is a crowd trap that works.
That’s when she sees him. She has no idea who he is, but the guy is hands down the hottest man Sunehri has ever laid eyes on. Black shirt, green eyes, whoa. He is staring at her and she totally doesn’t mind. She’s like found her one-on-one candidate.
That’s all he’s gonna get though, Mr. Good-Looking or not. That’s all she’s gonna get, too. That’s life. Oh well.
He is gone by the time she finishes her number. She is still thinking of him though (well, of him and the fact that she is getting soaked in the rain and that her new boots hurt), when she hears the rhythmic thud of a basketball.
V.
Brazil instead of a body bag? Oh yeah, she is so there. The flight is long and she is by herself, but she isn’t bored, oh no, she isn’t. Sunehri has never flown before, and certainly not international, not with the food and the drinks and the seventeen kinds of movies on the little screen in front of you.
Whoever said crime doesn’t pay was a fool, she thinks as she settles in deeper. She’s excited and scared (she’s not that dumb) and rather eager. Whichever way it turns out, at least it seems like it’s going to be fun.
VI.
There it is. She’s told him she trusts him (we’ll just ignore she hasn’t heard it back), and she is looking very well tonight, and she knows the way men look at her. The way he looks at her. And who are we kidding, it can’t just be all because of crook solidarity or because he sees some untapped promise of her becoming a master criminal. Sunehri is not that much a fool. Men, crooked or not, are all the same, or as near it as makes no difference.
She is trying to figure out when he’ll make his move and she doesn’t mind a bit. He did fly her half-way across the world to the biggest house she’s ever been to. Not to mention the dress he’s picked for her looks hot. She’s certainly gone off with men for much less.
But he just tells her to go off to bed, and to be up early, school all over again.
How odd but not unwelcome. She smiles as she walks off to bed, fully prepared to sleep across it.
And she feels maybe she can let go, just a bit.
VII.
So, there she is, on the edge of some cliff or other, at some godforsaken hour, no less. A bit cranky from the lack of sleep, or maybe just jetlagged. The fact that she is cool enough to be jetlagged is something she rather likes. Doesn’t make her less cranky though.
And there he is, coming up to her, finally no masks, disguises or bizarre piercings required. So she takes a look. A good, long look.
Yeah.
Sunehri about swallows her tongue. She knows she is staring and she knows she is shallow, but she doesn’t care, not one bit.
It’s the guy from the nightclub, only somehow even hotter. Or maybe the sun is beginning to affect her brain. That’s another thing she can’t bring herself to care about, at the moment.
Lucky.
Yeah.
VIII.
And so it begins. Sunehri feels herself go gooey, like a marshmallow left out on the windowsill for too long. If she was smarter, she’d try to fight it, but she isn’t that smart.
She is having fun. Not the forced, artificial ‘see me have fun and so leave me happy successful alone and everything is all right thank you’ kind of fun. No, the one that leaves you relaxed, and happy, and maybe laughing sometimes, or maybe all keyed up. She is actually looking forward to her days.
And her nights. There are advantages to being with a perfectionist.
She knows she will have to wake up at some point, but she doesn’t really want to think about that yet.
She tells herself it’s all a game, a pretense, and he is merely her ticket to being free of Jai Dixit, but as the days go on, she finds repeating it to herself less and less. When she does, her inner voice lacks conviction somehow. So she shoves it to the back of her mind.
This is ridiculous, and she totally shouldn’t, and she’s Sunehri, the tough and smart one, the one who will soon be out of this mess.
She can deal with it and can take it and dish it out. Of course. All right.
He treats her as if she matters, and Sunehri feels herself turning into a bit more of a sucker every time he looks at her with those eyes.
IX.
She is crying and this time she doesn’t take time out to wonder if her make-up is getting smeared. If things can go wrong, they generally will, and she should have remembered, but she didn’t, and is now to pay the price.
Well, at least she won’t have to see the betrayal in his eyes any more. She feels oddly calm as she puts the gun to her head and squeezes the trigger.
Silence.
She should have known he would always have another trick up his sleeve.
X.
To be honest, she misses the rush. But there are other rushes to be had and the water is blue and the sand is warm and it looks like she is stuck forever with being in the service industry, but at last she doesn’t mind.
She is looking forward to a slow afternoon, and a nap (or not) with Aryan and she smiles at the panorama of her days.
Things didn’t work out so badly after all.
Yeah.
Fandom: Dhoom 2
Tech stuff: 1994 words
Characters: Sunehri (Sunehri/Aryan)
A/N: I mentioned a really long time ago that I wanted to write a Sunehri story (right after seeing D2) and then forgot all about it. But I kept thinking about it off and on, so here it is. A Sunehri story? Yes. I am one of the people who did like her and was rather interested by her. So anyway, here it is. Set before and during the movie.
I.
What rotten luck!
Sunehri fidgets in the hard chair. If her hands weren’t cuffed, she’d be tempted to bite her nails, glittery nail polish be damned.
Huh. Luck.
Yeah, yeah, ‘thou shalt not steal’ and all that, but it’s not like she makes much at that nightclub. Not enough to live on, at any rate, not without selling yourself, like Priya and Simran do. A sideline.
Well, to be honest, she’s done it too once or twice, when the money was real tight, but if it wasn’t for stealing, she’d have to do it as a regular sort of thing, and she couldn’t. Last time she did it, four months ago, she didn’t think there was enough showers left in the world.
No more. Won’t won’t won’t won’t. The manager would love it, the greasy-haired freak. He’d get good tips from the clients and be extra good to her, he hinted. If she didn’t need the work, she’d have probably kneed him.
Figures. Lesser of two evil leads you to a cell. She kicks out at the table leg, but her shoes are flimsy and all she does is stub her toes.
But the thing is, she is good. She knows she is. There aren’t that many things she is good at: men, and dancing, and taking things that don’t belong to her but that she wants. It helps that the men’s brains go gooey when they look at her, have done so since she was twelve, and so they are less observant of their belongings. It’s not her fault if that stupid man’s friend came up at exactly the wrong moment.
You can’t run fast in heels and if she ever gets the hell out of here, she swears she will wear flats. She promises to be good, if only she gets out. She promises a lot of things.
The door opens and the cop comes in. Tall, tough-looking. She knows cajoling won’t help, not with his type, and is horrified to hear a whimpering, pleading voice and to realize it’s hers. Her make-up is probably all smeared and she looks a sight and what’s the use anyway, but she can’t stop with the begging and the crying.
II.
If Sunehri had any brains, she would have taken her lumps and went to jail. But no, no brains at all. And now she is roped in as a stool-pigeon. Small fry informer. She hates it and can’t stop it. And she is always terrified of being caught and she doesn’t know when it will end. If ever. That policeman, the lanky one with the legs, owns her body and soul and it doesn’t look like he is ever letting her go.
They got her a job at a ritzier place though. Information gathering and all that. Less groping, more overpaid white collars getting drunk on fancy booze. If she wanted to, she’d be taken to fancy hotels now for the night, not the run down places with paint peeling off the walls.
When she gets the call on her cell phone to come meet Jai at the coffee place, she is expecting the usual ‘make eyes at the bald guy in the suit, listen what he says to his buddies, tell us back' stuff he is so fond of. Huh. Looks glamorous in the movies, sucks in real life.
But it isn’t. When she finds out what he wants, if she could refuse, she’d run screaming. Screaming.
Yeah. Help him catch the Super-Thief. By pretending to be one herself and drawing his attention. Great idea. No one knows anything about the guy. Tall, short, fat, skinny? Of more immediate interest to Sunehri is homicidal or not too much? Who knows what the hell the guy does for a hobby. For all she knows, she’ll end up in a body bag, if she is lucky. Or raped, her throat half-slit, left to die slowly, like that girl in her neighborhood when she was a kid. What was her name? She can’t remember but she remembers the bruises on the corpse’s face and how all the mothers scared the kids in the neighborhood for weeks. No one found who did it though.
But like she has a choice.
III.
Sunehri is terrified. The scam is good. Jai came up with a better one than she could have done herself. He is wasted in his current career. Good scam, but she is praying as hard as she can, though not with much hope of success, that Mr. A won’t show up. She will go through with the charade, no one will be there, everything will be OK.
She is down, cable still attached to her waist and she doesn’t see anyone. So far so good. She reaches out for the sword, like she is supposed to, Sunehri the good little girl, and then…
There he is. The mysterious Mr. A.
The adrenalin makes it hard for her to breathe so she puts on her hardest attitude and her brittlest shell and she hopes it’s enough. She is probably over-compensating, but she can’t help it. The following minutes are a blur, and what she says is part script, part what she’s always thought, if not out loud, and seventy percent pure panic.
Yeah. Attitude and sharp angles and defensive shell. Even if she can’t help but be drawn by the tall stranger’s intense gaze, and the measured voice against which her own words bounce around harmlessly.
She realizes she is a bit disappointed that it all might end there, after all. She wonders what he looks like, under the mask.
IV.
She is still keyed up from the heist-not-heist, but on the plus side, that makes her extra good, with all that energy to put on the dance floor, and so the tips are better and hey, she’s done her best, so Jai-the-obnoxious-cop can’t complain. She hopes.
So she does her number and as she is dancing, singing the song she probably knows backwards by now, she is scanning the crowd for the usual lucky sucker who gets to have two seconds of one-on-one with the Golden Girl, during the number. It totally is a crowd trap that works.
That’s when she sees him. She has no idea who he is, but the guy is hands down the hottest man Sunehri has ever laid eyes on. Black shirt, green eyes, whoa. He is staring at her and she totally doesn’t mind. She’s like found her one-on-one candidate.
That’s all he’s gonna get though, Mr. Good-Looking or not. That’s all she’s gonna get, too. That’s life. Oh well.
He is gone by the time she finishes her number. She is still thinking of him though (well, of him and the fact that she is getting soaked in the rain and that her new boots hurt), when she hears the rhythmic thud of a basketball.
V.
Brazil instead of a body bag? Oh yeah, she is so there. The flight is long and she is by herself, but she isn’t bored, oh no, she isn’t. Sunehri has never flown before, and certainly not international, not with the food and the drinks and the seventeen kinds of movies on the little screen in front of you.
Whoever said crime doesn’t pay was a fool, she thinks as she settles in deeper. She’s excited and scared (she’s not that dumb) and rather eager. Whichever way it turns out, at least it seems like it’s going to be fun.
VI.
There it is. She’s told him she trusts him (we’ll just ignore she hasn’t heard it back), and she is looking very well tonight, and she knows the way men look at her. The way he looks at her. And who are we kidding, it can’t just be all because of crook solidarity or because he sees some untapped promise of her becoming a master criminal. Sunehri is not that much a fool. Men, crooked or not, are all the same, or as near it as makes no difference.
She is trying to figure out when he’ll make his move and she doesn’t mind a bit. He did fly her half-way across the world to the biggest house she’s ever been to. Not to mention the dress he’s picked for her looks hot. She’s certainly gone off with men for much less.
But he just tells her to go off to bed, and to be up early, school all over again.
How odd but not unwelcome. She smiles as she walks off to bed, fully prepared to sleep across it.
And she feels maybe she can let go, just a bit.
VII.
So, there she is, on the edge of some cliff or other, at some godforsaken hour, no less. A bit cranky from the lack of sleep, or maybe just jetlagged. The fact that she is cool enough to be jetlagged is something she rather likes. Doesn’t make her less cranky though.
And there he is, coming up to her, finally no masks, disguises or bizarre piercings required. So she takes a look. A good, long look.
Yeah.
Sunehri about swallows her tongue. She knows she is staring and she knows she is shallow, but she doesn’t care, not one bit.
It’s the guy from the nightclub, only somehow even hotter. Or maybe the sun is beginning to affect her brain. That’s another thing she can’t bring herself to care about, at the moment.
Lucky.
Yeah.
VIII.
And so it begins. Sunehri feels herself go gooey, like a marshmallow left out on the windowsill for too long. If she was smarter, she’d try to fight it, but she isn’t that smart.
She is having fun. Not the forced, artificial ‘see me have fun and so leave me happy successful alone and everything is all right thank you’ kind of fun. No, the one that leaves you relaxed, and happy, and maybe laughing sometimes, or maybe all keyed up. She is actually looking forward to her days.
And her nights. There are advantages to being with a perfectionist.
She knows she will have to wake up at some point, but she doesn’t really want to think about that yet.
She tells herself it’s all a game, a pretense, and he is merely her ticket to being free of Jai Dixit, but as the days go on, she finds repeating it to herself less and less. When she does, her inner voice lacks conviction somehow. So she shoves it to the back of her mind.
This is ridiculous, and she totally shouldn’t, and she’s Sunehri, the tough and smart one, the one who will soon be out of this mess.
She can deal with it and can take it and dish it out. Of course. All right.
He treats her as if she matters, and Sunehri feels herself turning into a bit more of a sucker every time he looks at her with those eyes.
IX.
She is crying and this time she doesn’t take time out to wonder if her make-up is getting smeared. If things can go wrong, they generally will, and she should have remembered, but she didn’t, and is now to pay the price.
Well, at least she won’t have to see the betrayal in his eyes any more. She feels oddly calm as she puts the gun to her head and squeezes the trigger.
Silence.
She should have known he would always have another trick up his sleeve.
X.
To be honest, she misses the rush. But there are other rushes to be had and the water is blue and the sand is warm and it looks like she is stuck forever with being in the service industry, but at last she doesn’t mind.
She is looking forward to a slow afternoon, and a nap (or not) with Aryan and she smiles at the panorama of her days.
Things didn’t work out so badly after all.
Yeah.
