FANFICTION ⇌ 「 DOGS/Deadman Wonderland 」 Genkaku & Badou. ``Memory.``
I hope this rips you apart.
For oopsipuked and written with this fucking song on repeat that it broke my soul, okay.
"You got some kinda nerve, takin' all I want..."
Badou remembers. He remembers everything, in painfully bright colors (of bright orange hair [of red red eyes]), in sickeningly hot temperatures (of warm blood down his face [of too much heat caressing him everywhere]), in sharp fox-den hearing (of screams [of screams]).
He remembers too much. Too tightly, like lips forming unsaid sentences over filters of cigarettes and rims of coffee mugs (things he wanted to show appreciation for, things he wanted to swear to whatever fucking naraka the monk was in now so that he could just hear him the way he still heard his whispers on his pillow-side), unsaid mantrasprayersbegs (the only fucking time he ever did, during those horrible, awful lies--) that he will never say, because ...
because he is scar tissue.
Because these things don't phase him. Because he keeps walking, one foot in front of the other, with that furred coat flipping behind his calves. (The one the shitty monk always wanted to destroy but never found the heart to.)
Because ...
because he remembers so vibrantly that he can relive it all in waking and dreaming cycles.
(The very cycles his ... lover [gotta admit to it now, don't you? with him gone...] would try to break.)
He walks the maintenance shafts, so familiar after so long counting their grill and their doors the way Genkaku had counted days to that one (had even looked up the numerology and zodiac despite not being from the same world and with stars aligned a little funnier), the way they had celebrated at least five of Badou's birthdays with that same old high-noon shootout where the bullets got a little closer and a little more deadly every time, despite the fact the rain was heavier, too.
Walking the corridors reminds him of entangled throes, getting busted by the police with his jeans around his ankles (a most fond memory when blood goes into the grate ["katsukatsuKATSU"] like it had, once upon a time, gone into sewers [and into lower levels of debauchery in The City]), of blows that break bones and get memorized into skin in constellations of purple, swirling galaxies and bloody, sallow universes like milky ways. He can breathe down here, down in the bowels of the ship, where the man had clung onto like a snake wrapped around an smothered limb, sucking all of its heat away.
... Five years. Damn. So much had changed. (He hadn't changed, not per se ... but he knew he wasn't the same.)
Some refugees got their lives back. Some giant fuckin' machine out in B.F.E. (did Egypt exist in space? -- irrelevant) churning out planets if you paid it enough money, like a ... a twisted prostitute's paradise on such a bigger scale. Genkaku and he had stared out of portholes and brushed knuckles so softly, so subtly (never held hands, not in public like that), neither fearing nor nervous, just ...
awed. (Buddhism, Jesus, Jimi Hendrix, Dave Nails, or Jet Li -- none of them had said anything about that one.)
Luke and all of his stupid friends had been one of the lucky ones. They monetarily saved, they flourished, they got their home world back. The pipsqueak (who was growing into a man, really; even Badou had to admit that, if only to himself) had even invited him back to live on their world with them, some place called Auldrant (trying too hard not to glare at Genkaku from the corner of his eye). He declined, said he wasn't ready for trees the size of planets.
He regrets nothing.
Cigarettes don't taste the same anymore, he realizes with his tongue tap-tapping on the flat of a filter. (They had tasted so much better passed through the lips of another.)
Heine comes and goes, as Badou knows he always will. Sometimes he remembers, sometimes he doesn't, always proving to defy space and time continuums with nothing but carnage and destruction. Only once had Genkaku gotten the fight he'd so desired (and probably only because Heine was from a particularly itchy point in his life...), and both of them had wound up on deathbeds.
Badou had stayed by the monk's side, notwithstanding his ... feelings. Genkaku hadn't been lucky enough to get a shot off at the stray dog's temple. (Or Heine had been lucky enough that Kannon-Sama was looking down on him for a nice change. Those were the little evolutions that kept the S.S. Thor running, after all.)
... He still smells spice and musk and nicotine and leather and sweat on the crumpled, hard sheets of his bed. He hasn't washed them since ...
doesn't matter. He doesn't want it to leave, despite everything. He's found cheap hookers, tried the old fixes (like taking a step off cocaine to see if snorting chalk is easier), and still cries the wrong name as he comes. (Some girls get offended, some don't give a shit. He likes the latter the best. He likes people who don't ask questions anymore.)
He remembers rain. In the shower, he thinks about duels under it, about first kisses and tangled, hot tongues, about knees parting his thighs as the sky wept and this feels even better than the hookers, and that's stupid, because it's just his hand, it's just his stupid fucking scarred hand (and sometimes, in the shower, he can pretend he doesn't do something so pussy and ridiculous as crymax). The memory of Genkaku's body pressed onto his, pressed into his, the way the smoke had swirled so many ways over mirrors and reflections in eyes that just didn't fucking matter any more ...
Genkaku's body. He had learned to love it. Rounded bones (instead of his own sharp, knobby ones), broad chest, slanting shoulders. Prison-sculpted muscles. You could take the man outta the facility, but you couldn't take the regulation outta the man. Leatherbitch complaints aside, he loved the way his pants slid off his hips shamelessly, exposed inch by inch of sunscorched skin, and Badou had learned (the easy way, with Genkaku [finally, finally] sleeping) that the difference in their skin tones were best enunciated by an open balconyporthole that let the light from a nearby moon or planet damper into the normally pitch-black rooms.
(It was a secret he had never shared -- one of those mantrathings he wished he had said, now.)
The days keep pouring out. In. Doesn't matter anymore. The flow's all the same, whether it's coming or going, like new and old refugee faces, like aliens and their larvae (Hothgorn and his smoke shop being taken over by his runt of a kid, Swigdlit).
Nobody says anything. Gojyo still gives him these quiet, knowing glances, despite how things ended between the two of them. Zexion looks like he might care, if he could, in little hollows of his ice blue eyes that thaw from time to time. (Badou only sees from the corners of his eye, like watching ghosts on a film reel running backwards, counting down the days of his life [from Dave to After Dave to After Genkaku].)
He remembers how light weight and zero gravity simple words seemed back then ... but he remembers the heavy ones, too. The ones that landed on his chest and knocked the wind out of him, and they were usually the ones that were the shortest. Three or four letters.
"Now."
"Here."
"Yet?"
(These words have been crammed in urns with ashes and now weigh too much for him to say, even in daily conversation. He avoids them like small plagues what will spread cancer over his resolve and God Fucking Forbid he show that--)
Stupid, simple words had never had that much power Before Genkaku. And their ability to leave him breathless After Genkaku both enrages him and leaves ice in his veins until he's fucking screaming in a smoking rage (the only time he's left bulletholes in gastanks with the cigarette still in his mouth).
It's Ritsuka (grown-up Ritsuka, no longer Ritsukitty, with the thin fur lines of his ears and tail fallen off and lost somewhere in the voidless depths of space) who puts his hand over the scope of his gun calmly and gently and stares him down in the eye.
Badou just breathes -- in, out, in, out, inininouuuuut (a-one-two-three) -- as he watches the kid's frowning mouth curve lower.
... That was the last time he'd seen him, too. As if disappearing right before his eyes, pulled into white holes full of red string that will bind them all together in some fucking afterlife he doesn't even believe in anymore.
(And he cries. He hasn't in a long time, didn't want to, but those gastank bulletholes leave him screamingcryingsofuckingempty because goddamn it we were supposed to go down together.)
Everyone leaves in the end.
This wasn't any different.
Scar tissue boils over until he's ... he's fucking overflowing.
In his dreams, he still sees him. And he understands, distantly, why the man had been so hesitant to sleep at the beginning of their relationship. He understands Lost Lovers now (the real ones, not Dave, not metacarpal and ocular scars, but real ones across hearts that are not so full of wisdom), and sleeping -- dreaming is not respite.
There is no more respite.
There is only the path he walks, canvassing out in front of him, and he turns off Free Bird and turns on Stairway to Heaven.
(Cyanide cigarettes don't taste as good as shotgun kisses, but they are an acceptable substitute.
He smokes and recalls one of the last conversations they had [whether it was of dreaming, when Genkaku comes to his bedside in his delusions, or was still in the man's life {all stained up by his own guns except Super Monks are not gasoline even if they burn just the same} is still unclear].
"Don't ever use a barrel."
"How come?"
"Because you die and all you can taste is metal and shit. Have some more fuckin' class.")
Bang, bang.
It doesn't surprise Badou in the least that he dies with never having said "I love you" to someone. But as he smokes poison (the real kind, the kind that scratches his throat and makes [not just his heart] organs clench down uncomfortably), he leans his head back with a spilling of too-bright too-straight orange hair ...
and almost gets it out. Almost chokes it out over noxious smoke.
"I have loved", is what he says instead.
There's no one to hear him, anyway. Not in the cold, dead hangar that used to house Gundam Wing.
When Heero finds him hours later, he sees the smile on his lips
(finds his body relaxed around his final fix, instead of junkie-string tight, rigor mortis not setting in just yet)
and tilts his head low with a hum of acceptance.
(The words still ring off the walls.)
I have loved is not a good summation to Badou's life ... but it's enough.
It's enough.
The only note he leaves behind says, simply:
see ya.
For oopsipuked and written with this fucking song on repeat that it broke my soul, okay.
"You got some kinda nerve, takin' all I want..."
Badou remembers. He remembers everything, in painfully bright colors (of bright orange hair [of red red eyes]), in sickeningly hot temperatures (of warm blood down his face [of too much heat caressing him everywhere]), in sharp fox-den hearing (of screams [of screams]).
He remembers too much. Too tightly, like lips forming unsaid sentences over filters of cigarettes and rims of coffee mugs (things he wanted to show appreciation for, things he wanted to swear to whatever fucking naraka the monk was in now so that he could just hear him the way he still heard his whispers on his pillow-side), unsaid mantrasprayersbegs (the only fucking time he ever did, during those horrible, awful lies--) that he will never say, because ...
because he is scar tissue.
Because these things don't phase him. Because he keeps walking, one foot in front of the other, with that furred coat flipping behind his calves. (The one the shitty monk always wanted to destroy but never found the heart to.)
Because ...
because he remembers so vibrantly that he can relive it all in waking and dreaming cycles.
(The very cycles his ... lover [gotta admit to it now, don't you? with him gone...] would try to break.)
He walks the maintenance shafts, so familiar after so long counting their grill and their doors the way Genkaku had counted days to that one (had even looked up the numerology and zodiac despite not being from the same world and with stars aligned a little funnier), the way they had celebrated at least five of Badou's birthdays with that same old high-noon shootout where the bullets got a little closer and a little more deadly every time, despite the fact the rain was heavier, too.
Walking the corridors reminds him of entangled throes, getting busted by the police with his jeans around his ankles (a most fond memory when blood goes into the grate ["katsukatsuKATSU"] like it had, once upon a time, gone into sewers [and into lower levels of debauchery in The City]), of blows that break bones and get memorized into skin in constellations of purple, swirling galaxies and bloody, sallow universes like milky ways. He can breathe down here, down in the bowels of the ship, where the man had clung onto like a snake wrapped around an smothered limb, sucking all of its heat away.
... Five years. Damn. So much had changed. (He hadn't changed, not per se ... but he knew he wasn't the same.)
Some refugees got their lives back. Some giant fuckin' machine out in B.F.E. (did Egypt exist in space? -- irrelevant) churning out planets if you paid it enough money, like a ... a twisted prostitute's paradise on such a bigger scale. Genkaku and he had stared out of portholes and brushed knuckles so softly, so subtly (never held hands, not in public like that), neither fearing nor nervous, just ...
awed. (Buddhism, Jesus, Jimi Hendrix, Dave Nails, or Jet Li -- none of them had said anything about that one.)
Luke and all of his stupid friends had been one of the lucky ones. They monetarily saved, they flourished, they got their home world back. The pipsqueak (who was growing into a man, really; even Badou had to admit that, if only to himself) had even invited him back to live on their world with them, some place called Auldrant (trying too hard not to glare at Genkaku from the corner of his eye). He declined, said he wasn't ready for trees the size of planets.
He regrets nothing.
Cigarettes don't taste the same anymore, he realizes with his tongue tap-tapping on the flat of a filter. (They had tasted so much better passed through the lips of another.)
Heine comes and goes, as Badou knows he always will. Sometimes he remembers, sometimes he doesn't, always proving to defy space and time continuums with nothing but carnage and destruction. Only once had Genkaku gotten the fight he'd so desired (and probably only because Heine was from a particularly itchy point in his life...), and both of them had wound up on deathbeds.
Badou had stayed by the monk's side, notwithstanding his ... feelings. Genkaku hadn't been lucky enough to get a shot off at the stray dog's temple. (Or Heine had been lucky enough that Kannon-Sama was looking down on him for a nice change. Those were the little evolutions that kept the S.S. Thor running, after all.)
... He still smells spice and musk and nicotine and leather and sweat on the crumpled, hard sheets of his bed. He hasn't washed them since ...
doesn't matter. He doesn't want it to leave, despite everything. He's found cheap hookers, tried the old fixes (like taking a step off cocaine to see if snorting chalk is easier), and still cries the wrong name as he comes. (Some girls get offended, some don't give a shit. He likes the latter the best. He likes people who don't ask questions anymore.)
He remembers rain. In the shower, he thinks about duels under it, about first kisses and tangled, hot tongues, about knees parting his thighs as the sky wept and this feels even better than the hookers, and that's stupid, because it's just his hand, it's just his stupid fucking scarred hand (and sometimes, in the shower, he can pretend he doesn't do something so pussy and ridiculous as crymax). The memory of Genkaku's body pressed onto his, pressed into his, the way the smoke had swirled so many ways over mirrors and reflections in eyes that just didn't fucking matter any more ...
Genkaku's body. He had learned to love it. Rounded bones (instead of his own sharp, knobby ones), broad chest, slanting shoulders. Prison-sculpted muscles. You could take the man outta the facility, but you couldn't take the regulation outta the man. Leatherbitch complaints aside, he loved the way his pants slid off his hips shamelessly, exposed inch by inch of sunscorched skin, and Badou had learned (the easy way, with Genkaku [finally, finally] sleeping) that the difference in their skin tones were best enunciated by an open balconyporthole that let the light from a nearby moon or planet damper into the normally pitch-black rooms.
(It was a secret he had never shared -- one of those mantrathings he wished he had said, now.)
The days keep pouring out. In. Doesn't matter anymore. The flow's all the same, whether it's coming or going, like new and old refugee faces, like aliens and their larvae (Hothgorn and his smoke shop being taken over by his runt of a kid, Swigdlit).
Nobody says anything. Gojyo still gives him these quiet, knowing glances, despite how things ended between the two of them. Zexion looks like he might care, if he could, in little hollows of his ice blue eyes that thaw from time to time. (Badou only sees from the corners of his eye, like watching ghosts on a film reel running backwards, counting down the days of his life [from Dave to After Dave to After Genkaku].)
He remembers how light weight and zero gravity simple words seemed back then ... but he remembers the heavy ones, too. The ones that landed on his chest and knocked the wind out of him, and they were usually the ones that were the shortest. Three or four letters.
"Now."
"Here."
"Yet?"
(These words have been crammed in urns with ashes and now weigh too much for him to say, even in daily conversation. He avoids them like small plagues what will spread cancer over his resolve and God Fucking Forbid he show that--)
Stupid, simple words had never had that much power Before Genkaku. And their ability to leave him breathless After Genkaku both enrages him and leaves ice in his veins until he's fucking screaming in a smoking rage (the only time he's left bulletholes in gastanks with the cigarette still in his mouth).
It's Ritsuka (grown-up Ritsuka, no longer Ritsukitty, with the thin fur lines of his ears and tail fallen off and lost somewhere in the voidless depths of space) who puts his hand over the scope of his gun calmly and gently and stares him down in the eye.
Badou just breathes -- in, out, in, out, inininouuuuut (a-one-two-three) -- as he watches the kid's frowning mouth curve lower.
... That was the last time he'd seen him, too. As if disappearing right before his eyes, pulled into white holes full of red string that will bind them all together in some fucking afterlife he doesn't even believe in anymore.
(And he cries. He hasn't in a long time, didn't want to, but those gastank bulletholes leave him screamingcryingsofuckingempty because goddamn it we were supposed to go down together.)
Everyone leaves in the end.
This wasn't any different.
Scar tissue boils over until he's ... he's fucking overflowing.
In his dreams, he still sees him. And he understands, distantly, why the man had been so hesitant to sleep at the beginning of their relationship. He understands Lost Lovers now (the real ones, not Dave, not metacarpal and ocular scars, but real ones across hearts that are not so full of wisdom), and sleeping -- dreaming is not respite.
There is no more respite.
There is only the path he walks, canvassing out in front of him, and he turns off Free Bird and turns on Stairway to Heaven.
(Cyanide cigarettes don't taste as good as shotgun kisses, but they are an acceptable substitute.
He smokes and recalls one of the last conversations they had [whether it was of dreaming, when Genkaku comes to his bedside in his delusions, or was still in the man's life {all stained up by his own guns except Super Monks are not gasoline even if they burn just the same} is still unclear].
"Don't ever use a barrel."
"How come?"
"Because you die and all you can taste is metal and shit. Have some more fuckin' class.")
Bang, bang.
It doesn't surprise Badou in the least that he dies with never having said "I love you" to someone. But as he smokes poison (the real kind, the kind that scratches his throat and makes [not just his heart] organs clench down uncomfortably), he leans his head back with a spilling of too-bright too-straight orange hair ...
and almost gets it out. Almost chokes it out over noxious smoke.
"I have loved", is what he says instead.
There's no one to hear him, anyway. Not in the cold, dead hangar that used to house Gundam Wing.
When Heero finds him hours later, he sees the smile on his lips
(finds his body relaxed around his final fix, instead of junkie-string tight, rigor mortis not setting in just yet)
and tilts his head low with a hum of acceptance.
(The words still ring off the walls.)
I have loved is not a good summation to Badou's life ... but it's enough.
It's enough.
The only note he leaves behind says, simply:
see ya.