gaslight gatekeep girlboss (succession | rhea/shiv)

[fiachairecht]

gaslight gatekeep girlboss. succession, rhea/shiv. faking death for fun and profit. 1.6k words, rated t. for parsleymoore in WDLF: Time Loop.

Siobhan Roy's disappearance is the lead story on the five o'clock news.

It's also the lead story on the seven o'clock news, and the nine o'clock news, and the ten o'clock news, which is about when Rhea starts to think this might be a little bit much.

Not that she's actually going to say anything to Shiv about it — she might be doing a very studied imitation of cute and nonthreatening on Rhea's sofa in a silk dressing gown and not much else, but Rhea knows her, maybe better than Shiv likes to think. She also knows better than to tell Shiv the dressing gown situation makes her look like her father, but that one she files away for future ammunition.

If she needs it.

"So what do you think?" Shiv asks as the station cuts to commercial, studying the slowly melting ice in her drink. "Who are they gonna blame? Kendall or Roman?"

Rhea frowns and reaches for the bottle to replenish her own glass. "Bit early to tell, isn't it? It still sounds like they're looking at Tom."

"Oh please," Shiv says with a snort. "That's gonna last all of two minutes. They'll do their due diligence on the incompetent sad puppydog of a husband to appease the masses, but — no, they'll be looking at my brothers soon enough. The question is ... which one of them killed me?"

It feels like a trick question. Rhea sips her bourbon and watches some D-list actress she fucked at a charity banquet twenty years ago extol the questionable virtues of a new face cream. Kendall would be an easy sell, maybe too easy: she can visualise the headline now, Drug Addict Roy Brother Relapses, Kills Sister Who Beat Him To Top Job. She even has a pretty good guess which paparazzi shots they'd run underneath it. Roman would be a little trickier — would they play up his misogyny? The idea that he didn't know how much he wanted the company until his sister stole it away?

She's made a career out of playing games with people like Siobhan Roy, but Rhea's decided that she doesn't actually like this game. Especially because, the longer the silence stretches on, the more certain she is that this is a game she was dragged into halfway through with absolutely no understanding of the rules.

"Well?" Shiv stretches over one leg, prods Rhea's thigh with her perfect pedicure. "Kendall or Roman, Ms Jarrell? Who killed me?"

Rhea blinks, caught momentarily by the expanse of skin the motion reveals as the robe falls away from Shiv's outstretched leg. "Who says it wasn't Connor? The tragedy of a dead sister will do wonders for the sympathy vote on the campaign trail."

Shiv sets her glass down with a thud, her toes curling just a fraction into the fabric of Rhea's pajama pants. "Clever," she breathes, and Rhea's body has no business at all reacting to such a tone with such heat. "And controversial. I knew there was a reason I liked you."

You don't like me at all, Rhea thinks, you just needed a place to crash for a while with someone who could keep their mouth shut. But that, too, is something she doesn't say, not least because the only thing she hates more than not knowing the full details of Shiv's game right now is the fact that she's become someone who can be paid to keep her mouth shut, rather than someone pays other people to keep their mouths shut.

"Anyway," Shiv continues. "Nice thought, but, that one seems to only work if I stay dead. What's his angle if I come back?" Her eyes are hard, but somehow, this one feels more like a test than a trick.

"Well." Rhea says, trying not to make it obvious she's stalling for time. She takes another, bigger sip of her bourbon, shifts in her chair and presses her thigh more firmly into Shiv's foot. "He ... hired one of Kendall's old dealers to do it. And," she glances over, but Shiv's face is carefully neutral, giving Rhea absolutely no help. "The guy botched the job. And Connor's delighted you're actually safe, so he gets the sympathy vote and the ... good brother vote?"

It sounds absolutely cringeworthy even as the words leave her mouth, like some reject Law and Order script from a decade ago. But there's a calculating gleam in Shiv's eye now, like she's looking directly at and right through Rhea at the same time and taking all sorts of probably disturbing mental notes.

Rhea despises it. More than that, though, she despises how much she likes being looked at like that. She presses her thighs together, feels herself slick against her underwear, and wonders if Shiv's the kind of girl to put her mouth where her money is. Or, more specifically, her mouth where Rhea wants it.

"Cool," Shiv says abruptly, snapping back to herself and shaking Rhea out of her thoughts. "Not even close, but I'll keep it in mind. Always useful to see how these things play outside the family. Anyway, it's Roman."

She drops her foot back to the floor and picks up her glass again, knocking back the remainder with one swallow. Her eyes are fixed on the television again, where some senator she used to work for is appealing for any information on Shiv's whereabouts, one perfectly fake tear in the corner of his eye as if he actually misses her.

And just like that, the conversation's over.

For Shiv, maybe. That doesn't mean Rhea's willing to let it go, and she'd like to think Shiv wouldn't want her to let it go.

"I'll bite," Rhea says, and is she imagining it, or does that send the slightest shiver through Shiv's body. "Why is it Roman?"

"Because," Shiv says. "That's where the evidence is going to point." She reaches over again, snags the bottle from Rhea's unresisting hand, and looks entirely too pleased with herself.

"Okay," Rhea says slowly. "Assume that part. You set it all up, the police believe Roman killed you, you emerge triumphant from the ruins of your family to run Waystar with me as your right hand—"

"Hey," Shiv snaps, "I never said—"

"—And we rebrand into something both more palatable and more profitable," Rhea continues as if she hadn't spoken at all. Shiv's talk of payment had been broad enough that Rhea was counting on being able to finesse the details herself. "Roman's in jail. Why?"

"I'm not letting him go to jail," Shiv says, and when she looks over at Rhea again she looks genuinely wounded. "By the time they get to that part I'll be back and I'll make sure that doesn't happen. No victim, no crime, right?"

"First of all, I really don't think that's how it works," Rhea says, but then again — maybe it is, for the Roys. It's not the sort of thing that would fly at Pierce, not under Nan's hand, but, much as it pained her to admit it, the Roys always had operated under a slightly different set of rules than even the Pierces.

No, the more she thinks about it, the more she can actually see it, especially because a clever lawyer could do a whole lot of things with the word victim, not to mention crime. Having state and federal senators in one's pocket just made it that much easier.

Shiv's still looking at her, a little more open than she's been all night and even, maybe, something bordering on expectant. Shiv's the only Roy who's ever looked at her like she wants to hear what Rhea has to say, like she's not entirely sure what Rhea's going to say, and that's just one more thing she shouldn't be thinking about if she wants to have any hope of keeping the effect Shiv's having on her a secret.

"Second of all," Rhea says, and it's an effort keeping her voice steady, "That still doesn't explain why Roman and not Kendall."

Shiv sighs, and Rhea realises, all of a sudden, that Shiv doesn't want to say whatever her reason is. Her whole plan to disappear, to make everyone think she was dead, to emerge and take over the company — there's a thousand reasons obvious to even the densest observer why she'd want to do that, but why the blame has to fall on one particular brother— 

Rhea's going to be the only person to know that. "Tell me, Siobhan," she urges, leaning forwards and letting her voice drop lower, the same tone she uses at the very end of negotiations she knows are going to be successful. "Why did Roman kill you?"

And, there: the shiver that runs through Shiv is unmistakable, as is the way her eyelids lower just slightly, the way her breath catches just slightly as she says, "Because ..."

She leans back, tops off her drink, and Rhea leans forwards too, presses a comforting hand to Shiv's knee. Her skin is warm under the silk, and Rhea knows that, if she wants, she'll have Shiv naked in bed before midnight.

And, oh, does she want it. Has wanted it ever since they were locked down together, back when everything was still so full of promise. They're both a little wiser now, but that just means, perhaps, more possibility.

"He's fucking Gerri," Shiv says, and the moment's broken. "Or, I don't know, maybe it's not fucking, exactly, but he has a thing with her. And I need her for Waystar, and that can't happen if she has some kind of thing with Roman. So ... it's Roman."

Rhea smiles, slow and a little mean. It's not what she'd expect of Shiv, necessarily, but she'd like to think she's getting better at adapting now. "Dare I ask who's fucking you, then?"

It's not her best line, far from it. But Shiv leans forward to capture her lips in a bruising kiss anyway, so Rhea's content to leave those details to later, too.