Columbia/Riff Raff, and Columbia/Everyone. She's passed around like a party favour, and no one seems to notice.

I have a major thing for weird pairings. Title taken from Katy Perry's E.T.

Disclaimer: Oh, if only. But no.

you're not like the others, futuristic lover

So he picks her up one bitter Tuesday evening, when she's shivering in her miniskirt and tank top and wishing she had a coat, a coffee, and cocaine. She'd been a groupie for some two-bit rock band for the past couple of months on the road, until she overslept and found them gone on the wind like they had never been at all.

She's walking down on the road when he pulls up, larger than life, literally, in a pickup truck. His eyes glitter black fire - the devil's eyes, she finds herself thinking - and he doesn't need to say a word for her to climb in beside him as he turns out of town and onto the open road.

They've gone three miles when he takes his hand off the wheel, pats her knee gently. She's expecting it when he puts his hand up her skirt but she squeals anyway, voice shuttling up an octave in surprise. He grins.

"I like that, your voice," he says in the most delicious accent, sex and cinnamon and smoke. "Do it again."

It doesn't take Columbia long to work out that her official position in the castle is 'fuck toy' rather than groupie, although maybe, really, they're the same thing. There is the man, Frank, and the maid and the handyman, Magenta and Riff-Raff, and one or two others, whose names don't appear to matter. Guests, Frank decrees with an expansive throw of his arms, and tells her to come to bed. Frank is a madman of a lover, all hands and teeth and cruelty, drugs she'd never dreamed of and wine poured from the bottle over her skin, licked off in delirious joy. She finds him addictive. She can't get enough of him.

Except, of course, when she can. When she's tired or sore or on her period and she doesn't want to fuck, then she's had enough of him. When he takes her against the wall and leaves her bruised or rakes his nails over her skin until red welts show up in the light of day. Then, can she contemplate leaving, can she consider life as it was before Frank and the castle. She thinks about slipping out in the dark time just before dawn, the guests and staff in bed, Frank amusing himself in the lab. It's her security blanket, thinking about leaving.

She never does.

The guests grope her one night, the two of them, the man and the woman, and tug her from the hallway into their room towards the back of the house. He takes the woman from behind while she goes down on Columbia, it all happening so fast she can hardly take it in. Their room is smoky with some alien kind of incense - she feels dizzy and half-mad, looking up as the couple labour beside her.

The skylight bleeds moonlight and Frank's eyes, watching, from the roof.

The next day, she can't tell if it were real or not, and eventually decides to forget about it. The guests leave a few days later, moving on, Frank says, and she doesn't ask to where. It is just her and Frank then, for a while, together in bed, sweetly psychotic love-making, his skin on hers a siren screech, a lunatic's love song.

And for a little while, it is all right.

Magenta fucks her one night, out of boredom. Nothing more than that. Magenta is bored and horny and as Columbia lies on the sofa Magenta strips and sits on her face without so much as a by your leave. She does it, of course, Magenta comes and climbs off of her without a word, and then returns the favour. Days later, when she musters up the nerve to ask Magenta about it, Magenta merely replies, "I vos bored," and that is the end of it.

Except for Frank's eyes around the corner.

She waits for Riff Raff to do the same, but he never does. The handyman is oddly respectful, averting his eyes from her naked body when Frank leaves her chained to the bed and forgets about her. It happens at least twice a week, the shackles biting into her skin. The handyman will edge in, eyes scuttling about the room until they land on her and then determinedly look away, examining the wallpaper as he unlocks her shackles and sets her free. Sometimes he even hands her her clothes as he inspects the specks on his boots with the utmost attention until she is dressed.

She's passed around like a party favour, and no one seems to notice. Except for him, because he's the only one who doesn't use her like the whore that somehow, she's become moulded into. She doesn't know what to make of it, until he comes. Him. A big, burly man, a Transylvanian who left a long time ago and made his home on Earth. He is brutish and rough, but his crudity seems to delight Frank and they spend hours together, this stranger in his leathers and Frank in his dress, an odd pair. She watches from the corner, this parody of male bonding, the two slapping one another on the back and singing drinking songs in a strange, lilting tongue and getting ever drunker.

Riff Raff and Magenta stand by the door, rigid and attentive, fetching more bottles of wine when Frank beckons them, but mostly unneeded. Columbia tries to leave several times but Frank waves her to stay, and she finds the stranger's eyes on her more and more.

Frank notices, comments to the stranger in that odd language. Her skin prickles, her body tightens with anticipation - sick, ugly anticipation of some weird terror to come. So when Frank forces her onto the bed, yanks off her top and skirt, leaving her only in her purple go-go boots and white plastic belt, she knows what's going to happen, and she lies back and waits as the stranger climbs atop her, crushing her down.

He's bigger than anyone she's ever had before, and it hurts, and Frank just watches, intent, at the man's big body covering her own. She sees his eyes over the man's shoulder as he heaves and grunts; she can hardly breathe and she wants to scream and it's not fair, not fair at all, and she hates him, him and this stranger both.

And she doesn't even know his name.

It's savage sex, brutal sex, not like the occasional exertions with Frank that leave her aching but satisfied. No, this is excruciating. And she can't do a damn thing about it - no, she won't do a damn thing about it, not with Frank perched in the armchair by the bed, dress pushed up, unabashedly touching himself and never looking away from her.

Bastard.

She'll be damned if she'll give him the satisfaction.

She'll be damned.

Frank looks at her with an eerie kind of respect after that, as though she's passed some test, but all she feels is sick. Sick at the sight of his dark eyes, his elegant drawl, his hands with their nails like talons grasping at her flesh. What attracted her to him now disgusts her, but not enough to stop her sleeping with him. She's grateful for the corsets Frank is so fond of her wearing; they pinch her tight and hold her together, keep her from flying apart. And determinedly Columbia thinks about other things; if she has to remember that night, she thinks of the taste of wine, Frank's perfume in the air.

Riff Raff's pitying eyes.

She's late coming to Frank one day when Eddie arrives, a delivery boy on a motorbike, a hulking figure of a man - boy, really. He wears the same kind of leathers as the Transylvanian had, big and strong, with hands that look capable of crushing her to powder and snorting her up his nostrils.

Frank likes him right away. "This is Eddie," he drawls, a shark's smile coming over his face.

And this time he is no longer content just to watch, running a hand over the boy's shoulder and leading him into the bedroom.

Replacing her.

It's what she's dreamed of, someone else to share the brunt of his maniacal affection, but now that it's here, she'd happily tear out the delivery boy's throat for the return to Frank's bed, to what she knows.

Somehow she gets to the dining room, throws herself down against the wall. Columbia drags her knees to her chest and sobs against them, like a doll, eyes stinging from the running makeup and the salt from the tears. It is a release, a mourning of something, of the stupid little girl who ran away from home so very long ago. Poor, dead child. Poor, wretchedly alive Columbia.

None of it is fair.

she's aware after a while of a shadow looming over her, and looking up, she meets Riff Raff's emotionless face. She must look like hell.

"Where's 'Genta?" she asks, sniffing, and trying to keep it together. Riff Raff's brow crinkles in displeasure.

"With the master," he replies in his odd slur, meaning more time than she had expected must have passed and he had moved on, for the moment, from Eddie. Magenta occasionally sleeps with Frank, and Columbia knows it rankles Riff Raff, more than he ever says. She doesn't know what's between them, exactly, but it's different from any other sibling dynamic she's ever seen. Well, why should it be. They are aliens, after all.

"Sorry," she replies, and Riff Raff's eyes flash.

"It is... not your doing," he says, pausing oddly in the middle of the sentence in his usual strange speech pattern. She's used to it. She takes the hand he holds out to her and hauls herself to her feet; she comes up closer to him than she expects. Startled, she steps back, and sees a ghost of something flash across his face - Riff Raff rarely touches anyone, she realises, except his sister. She's offended him.

And for some reason, she cares.

"Sorry," she says again, ridiculously repetitive, berating herself for being so utterly fucking boring. Somehow her hand finds Riff Raff's tattered sleeve, clinging to it, really. "Didn't mean to - " Didn't mean to what? She hardly knows.

But he nods. He understands. And in a moment of weird gratitude, Columbia throws her arms around him.

He is rigid next to her, body shifted awkwardly away from her. He is alien, she remembers, not in Frank's inhumanly sensual fashion but in pure maddening difference, cooler skin, faster heart. And she thinks he won't move. Won't put his arms around her, shelter her, and that's all right, because she's older now, old enough to stand on her own two feet and she doesn't need to be protected.

Except sometimes, it's kind of nice. Riff Raff puts one hand awkwardly on her shoulder blade and one on her hip, and she thinks she might just fall into him. She feels the odd curve of the handyman's humped back, his icy eyes boring into her as she stares up at him from her place against his chest. She's barefoot and he's taller than he seems; even being held gingerly makes her feel like his crooked shoulders shield her from the winds of change, the vagaries of Frank's ever changing temperament.

And yeah, OK, she'll admit it. She wants this. She doesn't know why. Perhaps it is because he is kind, when he thinks no one is looking, but perhaps that is not the reason. It could be because of Magenta, of his sister in Frank's arms, and his having to just live with that. Or maybe her own personal fuck you to Frank, screwing his handyman.

Or perhaps just because Riff Raff too has been watching her all along, but she is not afraid. She turns her face up to his, an invitation, an invocation. He kisses her, and he tastes of Frank's wine and moondust. She shudders into his embrace, his cold hands, his thumping heart.

She thinks it will be a long night.