I joined 16candles_fics and I am LOVING it.

It's summer when Velma first comes to call. She hasn't forgiven Edna for making her lose her job, but it's not as though she needs the money. Edna can tell by the filmy dress she is wearing, which exposes more skin than it covers and keeps her blissfully cool, whereas Edna is sweating in her cramped little home, even with all the windows open and in her summer dress. And she still has ironing to do.

Velma brushes past her as soon as the door is open, so thin that she could probably slip between a shut door and its doorframe. She just ducks under Edna's arm, folds into herself for a moment as she pulls herself past the obstacle that is Edna's thrust-out, angry hip, and is standing again on the other side, like a champion swimmer who has just completed her laps at lightning speed. “What a dump,” she says, her pretty nose wrinkling as she looks around. “You need to replace the wallpaper.” Edna opens her mouth, but Velma cuts her off. “Offer me food and a drink. I have a proposition for you.”

A proposition? “What proposition?”

“For your charming daughter. As I understand-” here her expression grows somewhat smug- “the Corny Collins Show didn't do too well after the integration? Such a pity, everyone had such high hopes for the Negroes.” She spits it out like a filthy word.

“Listen, Mrs. Von Tussle, you can't just walk in here and demand things from me-”

“Do you want your daughter to be successful or not?

Their blue eyes meet, Velma's hard and cold, Edna's distrustful but softening. “Fine,” Edna says unhappily, and leads her into their kitchen. Velma looks around as though hunting for cockroaches, and Edna is pleased that she had them all exterminated the previous week.

Velma gets her drink- cheap red wine that Edna had been saving for a special occasion (namely, her and Wilbur's anniversary)- and wrinkles her nose again at the offerings of fatty, sugary food, before reaching one clawlike hand into the Frigidaire and extracting, of all things, prepackaged carrots, which she turns over a bit in her hands, studies to make sure that they aren't rotting, and holds out to Edna, who reluctantly shakes a few of them onto a plate. Velma snaps off a piece and feels it necessary to visibly slide it onto her tongue. Edna shudders and has to remind herself that that particular tongue was all too eager to shove itself down Wilbur's throat not too long ago.

“Now,” Velma says after chewing and swallowing with a delicacy belied only by the danger in her tense frame, “about darling Tracy. You might have ruined my career and in one swift blow ruined hers, but we can always start anew, can't we? I know people. Talent scouts, professional ones, not those idiots who came to the show that night. I have names in my address book that would make you swoon. It's just the matter of payment.”

“Payment? We don't have that much-”

“Mrs. Turnblad,” Velma says with a cruel smile, the way she says her name making Edna shudder, “you look so overheated.” She presses her mouth to the corner of the larger woman's lips and begins to pop the buttons of her dress. “We'll have to fix that.”