not dead only sleeping
HALLO.
So I'm very nearly finished with a short DGM fic and a whole slew of Fullmetal fic. Until then, there's more DOGS fic.
Also, sutlers has very kindly given me a dreamwidth account. :D It is here. From now on, I plan to post everything both places. I'm not going back and putting old stuff on the dreamwidth account, though. Laziness. It's like a disease.
As for the DOGS fic, someday I'll write a fic for that fandom that's more about action and less about characters sitting around and brooding.
THAT DAY IS NOT TODAY.
Heine, sitting around and brooding. I guess this is vaguely Heine/Badou. Vaguely.
Mephistopheles
Heine doesn’t usually get bored. That said, he’s pretty fucking tired of this. Sadly, there’s no end in sight, and he’s not even being allowed to brood about it alone.
You have gone pathetic, haven’t you?
A woman staggers past the mouth of the alley wrapped in what is probably every item of clothing she owns, carrying bags full of crap and muttering to herself. She careens off a wall, then wanders away on a slightly different trajectory. She takes no notice of what’s in the alley. It’s still the most exciting thing that’s happened for the last hour.
Heine wonders if the voices in her head are as goddamn annoying as the voice in his. She looked pretty irritated. She probably would have looked even more irritated if her voices had a tendency to giggle about disemboweling things, though. Because that is really fucking irritating.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, you’re letting Giovanni of all people kick your ass now. Is this as low as you go, or should I brace myself for more humiliation?
Heine wonders what the voice in Giovanni’s head talks about. What Lily’s voice talked about. Or maybe they all talk about the same thing; maybe it’s one size fits all. He could ask the priest what he hears.
He isn’t going to.
Maybe I should just take over.
Usually he’d have shut the dog up by now. There’s enough to deal with, generally speaking, without getting nagged by his own fucking spine. But at the moment, it’s good to have a distraction. He should thank the bitch for that, maybe. He always has a distraction when he wants one.
There’s not much else going for a talking, homicidal spine. However.
Sometimes he daydreams about ripping it out. He knows just how he’d like to do it. He’d get some of those meat hooks like they hang the dogs from in the butcher shops Underground. He’d hook them into the doorframe and into himself, then he’d grab the opposite side of the frame and pull. Like deboning a fish, only more efficient, because it won’t involve dicking around with a knife.
Is that any way for a master to treat his loyal companion?
He hasn’t done it yet, obviously. If the day keeps going the way it’s been going, though, there’ll be no reason not to.
But no. It isn’t practical, if he’s being serious-it’s just a happy thought. If he actually tried it, he’d probably get the spine partway out, then his joints would be too fucked to go on. Half-deboned. And what if his ribs tried to come along for the ride and his shoulder blades got in the way? This is not a do-it-yourself kind of job.
Nah. If he does it, he’ll use the old, reliable bullet to the head. The only problem is, it won’t be anywhere near as fun. What good is suicide if there’s no mess? He wants to leave a fucking disaster.
And he’s sitting in a pile of trash in a stinking alleyway brooding about suicide. Shit.
He picks up Badou’s pack of cigarettes as a distraction. He often wonders where the magic is in them. He doubts he could get addicted to anything-that was probably bred out along with the ability to get sick.
There’s blood on the cardboard. He suspects it’s Badou’s, and fights the urge to lick it and make sure. Dogs are disgusting.
Disgusting? I’m not the one sitting here with a corpse, master mine. That’s all you.
Of course not. The dog wouldn’t leave a corpse to waste when he could eat it instead. Anyway, despite how shitty he looks, Badou is not dead.
Pathetic.
He is not fucking dead.
Delusional and pathetic.
He’s breathing.
But for how long?
For now. Everything is for now. There’s nothing else. Argue with that, son of a bitch.
Badou is, admittedly, passed out, gasping, bleeding. At least he doesn’t smell like anything but blood, which is lucky for a gut wound. Heine hopes the gut wound is all that’s wrong with him. Hard to tell when the idiot’s unconscious.
The sum total of what Heine knows about first aid is that you shouldn’t fuck with things you don’t understand. He doesn’t understand anything, so that makes his brand of emergency assistance very straightforward.
Badou knows a ton of first aid. They’re mutually useless to each other. This is just one of the many illustrations of how stupid their partnership is.
The old you wouldn’t have cared about him. The old you-
“Fuck off!” Heine screams, startling a handful of human scavengers who’d been hovering at the entrance to the alley, trying to decide if he was worth the trouble. The random scream persuades them that he isn’t, and they scatter. He’s lost count of how many people he’s scared away from here by now. He hasn’t been making any special effort, he’s just been…being himself.
Convenient, in a way. Although it’s sad that he comes off as crazier than the bag lady.
He is crazier than the bag lady.
The old him wouldn’t have stayed with Badou, that’s the truth. The old him was all about moving on, getting over things, being stronger than what had been done to him.
The old him tore Lily to pieces. The old him was a stupid little shit who didn’t know what life was like.
Christ, you get more boring all the time.
The new him spends pretty much every hour of the day pissed off about something, but he’s never killed anyone he loves. He would have said that’s because he doesn’t love anyone anymore.
Current behavior suggests he may have been bullshitting himself. Again.
Holy shit. You did not just think you love this guy, did you? I’ll rip myself out.
It’s not like Heine is thrilled about it, either. Badou would be even less thrilled, if he knew. That’s some consolation.
Not enough, though. Because if he’s let himself care about Badou, it logically follows that he’s let himself care about Nill way the hell too much, and he’s probably on shaky ground with the priest, too. If he doesn’t watch it, he’ll be on shaky ground with Naoto, and then he really will be fucked.
At least he doesn’t give a shit about Giovanni. If he starts fretting over Giovanni, that’s bullet-to-the-head time for sure.
The dog gives a wordless disgusted growl. The dog thinks suicidal people are weak.
The dog is right. Oh well.
Heine isn’t really suicidal, of course. If he were, he’d be dead by now. This passive suicide thing is just his way of bitching about life. He suspects that irritates the dog more than anything. He hopes it does.
No comment from the spine? Hah.
Cerberus is a near-constant nagging annoyance, but he’s easy to ignore as long as Heine isn’t fighting. It’s only during a fight that the dog starts to make a lot of sense. Maybe Heine should have chosen a lifestyle that involved less fighting.
Like what, fucking maid service?
Huh. Shame he’s not good for much but fighting. He can’t see anyone hiring him as a maid. Not even Bishop.
Badou’s breathing is changing, going shallow. Does that mean he’s finally waking up, or does it mean he’s about to croak?
Heine should really learn some goddamn first aid.
Yeah, if you knew shit about first aid, you’d have noticed you’re sitting next to a soon-to-be dead man. Let’s go already.
Badou moans.
Heine edges forward. Badou is waking up. He is waking up, Heine hasn’t been sitting next to a corpse. The dog can take that and shove it.
Screw you, Heine. It’s bound to happen sooner or later. It won’t be any less pathetic later.
Badou’s scowling. Maybe it’s starting to hit him that consciousness is going to hurt like a bitch.
Heine crawls over him and leans down to watch his face. Leans close so their noses are almost touching and he can feel Badou breathe.
Badou opens his eyes and almost concusses himself on the pavement trying to jerk backward.
“How do you feel?” Heine asks, not moving an inch.
“What the fuck are you doing, Heine?” Badou rasps out, trying to focus on his face. He won’t be able to; Heine’s too close. “And by the way, fucking ow.”
As for what he’s doing, Badou always freaks a little when he gets this close; Heine can smell it. If he’s freaked, then he won’t fucking lie, which is a tendency of his. Plus, Heine has a lingering conviction that it’s easier to know what people are thinking when you can smell their breath. That’s probably the dog talking.
“I asked you how you feel. Asshole.”
Badou sighs into Heine’s mouth. Cigarettes and blood. “I feel like I got stabbed in the gut. Which, I’m pretty sure, is because I got stabbed in the fucking gut. Other than that, I’m peachy. Or anyway, I’ll survive. I think. My head feels like it’s about to crack open and I think we’d better hike to a hospital before I pass out again. Happy now? Get away.”
Yes. He knows what he wanted to know, Badou didn’t lie. He should get away.
He doesn’t want to.
“Heine,” Badou snaps, baring his teeth. “Back the fuck off.”
He backs off. His spine breathes in a barely-there whisper, losing dog.
Losing dog.
“Can you stand up?” he asks.
Badou moans and flops around and finally holds out a hand.
First he growls and tells Heine to back off, now he’s whining and asking for a hand up. Badou never makes any goddamn sense. Heine gives him a hand up anyway, and does him the courtesy of pretending he can stand until he falls sideways and proves that he can’t.
“Why’d you let somebody stab you?” Heine grumbles, propping Badou up. “Moron.”
Badou just gives him a dirty look that turns considering after a few seconds.
He’s wearing a watch today. It’s on his right wrist, the one not draped over Heine’s shoulders. He consults it. “We met those guys at two,” he says to the watch.
Heine doesn’t see what this has to do with sweet screw-all.
“I’d guess, with one thing and another, that they took about an hour of our time,” he goes on. Maybe he's loopy with blood loss.
They’re at the mouth of the alley now, and the sidewalk is crowded. It’s not a problem. People are strangely eager to get out of their way. “So?” Heine grunts, glaring at a beefy man in leather until he scurries to the other side of the sidewalk.
“So…it’s six now.” Silence for a handful of shuffling steps. “You sat with me in that cold, miserable little alley for three hours.”
He should have known Badou would try to make something of it. Badou has perfected the art of being annoying. “What’s your point?”
More silence. Badou’s fingers tighten on one shoulder, and his head tips briefly to lean against the other. “My point is, in all that time, you couldn’t have covered me with a goddamn blanket?”
Badou is a dick and Heine has always hated him. “Fuck you. What blanket?”
“Or…gotten me off the ground?”
“For all I knew, your back was broken, asshole.”
“Or…called someone to help? Mihai? Kiri? Bishop?”
“So you really think it would’ve been a good idea to leave you unconscious in an alley while I looked for a phone.”
“Shit. We gotta scrape together money for cell phones someday.”
“I thought you had a phone.”
“I pawned it for smokes. I thought you had a phone.”
“I pawned it for rent.”
“Huh. We need better jobs. So, d’you get my smokes?”
“They’re bloody.”
“But you have them, right?”
He has them. He knows Badou.
He wedges Badou between himself and a wall so the guy can use both shaking hands to light a cigarette. This is not one of Badou’s better days, and it’s not just because of the knife wound. He’s thin even for him, and kind of hot to the touch. Heine doubts he’s eaten recently, suspects he’s been spending all his food money on nicotine. Idiot. He’ll take forever to heal.
It’s not hard for Heine to spot what got him attached to his partner. It’s not hard even now, when he’s weak, shaking, bleeding, pathetic. All Badou needs to be is awake. When he’s awake, he’s loud and demanding and obnoxious and crazy; he has a tendency to shoot random people and blow shit up. He’s ridiculously high-maintenance, and if he’s around…
Heine can’t hear the dog at all.
“Badou, if you die on me, I’ll eat you.”
Badou squints up at him, either thoughtful or in pain, and shakes out his match. He says, “Saves the cost of a funeral.”