Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ How to Be Dead ❯ Cut a Deal With Death ( Chapter 4 )

Part 4 "Cut a Deal with Death"

Blue. They had been blue eyes, thought the swimming brain pleasantly.

Duo’s lips sleepily stretched into a smile, focusing on the image of those blinking Prussian blues in his semi-conscious haze rather than choosing to think about how they belonged to the dead body he had found on the back step. That dreamy smile spread a little, the image of the body’s pale face coming a little sharper into view. Humming contentedly, Duo tilted up to meet it, but stopped when he felt a cold drop fall onto the tip of his nose, bringing his eyes open abruptly on the real world, lit with industrial lights and overshadowed by the body as he sat close, his face hovering so near he could count ever single dead pore.

And the single cold drop was blood from the scalpel lodged in his temple.

"F-f-f—" came the start of another scream.

The body’s blue eyes flickered, frightened by the possibility of another curdling scream, and quickly put his palm over Duo’s mouth, physically driving it back into him. Duo suddenly felt like he had naught an ounce of air in his chest. The clammy hand made him freeze up against the wall he was sitting against. No, he wasn’t sitting, he was lying down, staring up at the steel rafters, just beyond the dead body’s face fringed by the light overhead.

Very much animated, the corpse bent further forward until their noses were very narrowly separated. Naked, he was bleeding on the white apron between them, crouched at Duo’s side.

"Now," he was saying firmly, "I’m going to lift my hand. And you will not scream." His blue eyes flickered at him once, twice, blinking. The hot breath from his mouth made Duo nervous, and his husky, slightly accented voice only made that fact worse. "Nod your head if you understand what I’m saying."

Duo clawed the fingers off his mouth and pushed his voice to the top of his lungs, lunging away from the cadaver as quickly as he could. "Get your hands off me! Oh, shit! Don’t touch me! Get the fuck away from me, man!"

"Not exactly a nod, but—" the dead body muttered, then shrugged. "All right. You won’t like it," he warned casually, his face drawn into the picture of indifference.

He complied; his other hand lifted itself from where it had left a hot little nest on the left side of his chest.

"Oh, no, I think I’ll be much happier if you get the—" Duo stopped in mid-sentence, his mouth sculpted to pronounce the beginning of his favorite go-to cussword, an anxious finger jabbed in the corpse’s direction. Frozen up.

The dead body’s stern brow lay hidden behind his disarrayed, dark bangs, but he saw it raise at him as if almost amused. "If I what?"

The morgue worker groaned and crumpled up against the wall again, trying to bury the palms of his hands directly into his forehead, the source of a new and unrelenting headache of mythical proportions.

"Shi-yit—what the fuck did you do to me?" he whined, pressing his knees up into his chest, his stomach heaving against his thighs from the pain that overcame him.

"I didn’t do anything," the dead body growled in defense, in a voice that was almost luscious to hear. "You did it to yourself."

Even worse than the fear that had thrown him to the floor, clawing across the floor like a crustacean with its head cut off, was the acute, stinging pain that lived in his temples, drumming and thundering. The image of the scalpel buried into the risen cadaver’s head, the sensation of whipping toward the floor came back to him with a dull ache.

"Oh, man… don’t remind me," he groaned. "Shit."

The dead body sighed at him, but Duo could barely see straight through his new and nauseating headache.

Amongst the unbearable throbbing in his head, he felt the heat of a hand sliding up his calf sear straight through the fabric his blue jeans and settle on his knee. And as quickly as it has struck him, the crippling pain faded away and he lifted his head to gape at the strange, living cadaver.

He just lifted that same eyebrow in response, causing Duo’s expression to contort into utter bewilderment as he looked down at the hand on his leg and up to the pale face it belonged to. "Who are you?"

"I can’t tell you that, but I am going to bleed to death if you don’t attend to my leg," he replied, as if the fact that blood was spilling out in rhythmic splashes from his ruptured femoral onto the tiles was painfully obvious.

Duo shook his head, unable to grasp the insanity that sat so close to him, the heat of his thigh against his adding to the frantic spin of his mind.

"But you’re dead!"

The dead body arched an eyebrow. "I’ve noticed. Now, will you please repair my leg so that I may be able to so kindly grant your request and leave you ‘the fuck alone’?"

"No," Duo told him, amazed his voice had not scurried away in shock. Quickly, he put as much space as the wall against his back would allow between him and the naked, bleeding corpse and it watched him carefully, gently.

"What I’m going to do it pretend that I never picked you up off the street and you never even thought about coming back from the dead and sitting up on my table and scaring the—"

Nausea and head-splitting pain, his newfound and awfully loyal companions, rushed back to greet him and soon Duo was grounded once again, pressing his palms viciously against his temples to ebb it.

"Shit… maybe later."

The corpse gave a sigh, rolled his eyes beneath his ragged bangs, and grumbled something to himself. Duo was plenty absorbed in dealing with the monstrous headache he’d acquired, no doubt a result from his brains bouncing around from hitting the floor in the manner that he did, so he didn’t give a second thought to the sound of the dead body shuffling over to his side again and sliding his hand underneath Duo’s own bangs, pressing his palm against his temple. Most surprisingly, it was warm. Not hot, like he was alive, but simply lukewarm. Room temperature. And that was the most disturbing of all.

He jerked away from it. "Hey—D-don’t touch me!" Duo warned him sharply, giving him his best offended and unwelcoming look.

But at the time, that capacity was considerably dwindled, seeing how the corpse’s lips only twitched with a hint of mild amusement and his hand reclaimed its spot on the side of his face as if it belonged there. And again, the pain dissipated in matter of seconds. As the morgue worker’s face began to bend into an expression of astonishment, the corpse grunted at him with the slightest twitch of the corners of his mouth.

"You fool," he mumbled at him. "Hold still."

He blinked at the corpse and slowly the words began to form in his agape, wondering mouth. "You’re not one of those average, run-of-the-mill corpses, are you?" he managed out cautiously as he finally made the connection between that disturbing and comforting hand and the mysterious disappearance of his headache.

"Whatever gave you that idea."

He tried a sheepish smile at the flat humor but it soon faded. He was suddenly much more aware of their situation. Duo’s eyes flickered from the blue eyes hovering so close to the very much unclothed, bleeding body just beneath it, and back again.

"Uh, dude, you’re sort of bleeding on me. Do you mind?"

The corpse didn’t even twitch, let alone obey. "Sew up my leg."

"Yes, done, fine, you’ve got it—just get off me!" Duo answered hurriedly, suddenly overwhelmed by a hot flash at the realization of that perfectly realized (and perfectly dead) body just over him. He moved away momentarily, silently hobbling on the one unsliced leg he possessed, and another thick line of blood dribbled down the length of his thigh, coming to pool in the grouted crevices of the tiled floor.

Feeling something hot and vaguely embarrassing rising up in his face, he quickly looked away as he stood up and brushed some of the blood off his apron.

The dead body watched him carefully and the stoic corner of his mouth twitched again. "Something wrong? It’s nothing you haven’t seen before. Or am I wrong?"

Duo, flushed, jabbed a finger at the examination table, his head still turned securely toward the wall. "Hey, hey, just get your butt over there, alright? You want your damn leg fixed or not? Then git!"