Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ How to Be Dead ❯ Prince Charming ( Chapter 5 )

Part 5 "Prince Charming"

"Fuck, my head hurts! I can barely see straight, let alone patch your leg up."

The body’s voice was unaccommodating. "Just do it."

Duo’s severe scowl had seemingly no effect on him. "Fine! C’mere, then, give me your arm and just do whatever you do to make the pain go away, okay, Supercorpse? Unless you want a crooked stitch job."

The morgue worker stood cautiously at the examination table where the cadaver sat up awaiting his medical attention, bathed in the stark white light, making his blue eyes glow beneath the shadow of his disheveled dark hair. Those eyes squinted unhappily at him.

"You think your head hurts," he deadpanned at him.

Duo blinked up at the scalpel in his temple, dripping casually down the side of his face and continuing down his neck. He didn’t dare watch it trail any further and mentally cursed him. Why the fuck doesn’t he just wipe it away?

If Duo didn’t know better than to think that dead bodies could have senses of humor, he would have thought it was being ignored just for the sadistic reason of making him squirm. Of course, those dead bodies shouldn’t have a pulse or brainwaves, they definitely shouldn’t be scowling at him, very much animated, and they most definitely should have left him the hell alone. Hearing that low voice in his ear had shaven off at least a few years that might have come in handy down the road.

The sight of that sharp metal lodged in his temple made Duo wince and crack a half-hearted, sheepish smile. "Well, not as much as yours, I guess, but hey," he mumbled, giving a nervous chuckle, "come on, I’m not the dead one here. I still gotta deal with headaches, okay? And the stiffs like you."

The cadaver just stared at him, being quite helpful. The trickle of blood continued onward down his unbelievable physique. So Duo bared a falsely undisturbed grin at him and reached up for the embedded scalpel.

"All right, then. Hold still. I’ll get it for you, since you asked so nicely," he grit out, forcing an obliging expression onto his face. His fingertips brushed against the cold metal, he hesitated, but found no fear in that face and resisted a scowl just before he yanked the scalpel out.

The dead body barely flinched after he had done so, his cryptic stare trained unwaveringly on Duo’s face, only adding to the strangeness that overcame him when he stood there, the bloody blade in his palm and a thick stripe of red dribbling down the flawless curve of his jaw. His only reaction to this was a blink, and a casual swipe at the cold stream resulting in just more smeared across his hand and cheek. Duo winced and hissed at the sight.

This night only gets better.

"Uh, hold on, I’ll get you something for that," he started nervously, before the dead body cut him off.

"No. It’ll be fine." His hand went to snatch Duo’s wrist before he turned and got him to stop pretty quickly. Just the touch of his once dead, lukewarm skin was enough to send considerable shivers down his spine and somehow he felt compelled to do whatever was asked of him as the pain melted away again.

That stare leveled at him without an extra ounce of expression. "Fix my leg first. I can handle the rest."

With the other hand, he snatched up the dirty rag hanging off the side of the examination table. Leaving the blood already smeared across the side of his face to stain, he pressed it over the wound, slowly drawing the bleeding to a halt. Duo made a face at it, but was forced to shrug. What else was there to do about it?

"Ooo—kay. Whatever you say, Supercorpse," he muttered, palms up, rolling his eyes.

The medical supplies in the City Morgue were limited. After all, all their customers were very much dead, or at least, that had been the rule up until that stormy night, and they had no need for a lot of things that Duo thought the cadaver would need. But after the little display with the removal of the scalpel, he didn’t think the dead body would opt for disinfectants or painkillers.

There was not a lot of anesthesia lying around either, so when Duo scrounged up some fishing wire and a needle, he didn’t ask if he wanted any, just hesitated above his half-severed leg with a clothespin in the other hand to pinch his bleeding femoral close while he worked. Hey, this was all an improvisation, mind you!

Duo looked him in those impenetrable eyes of his, thinking about his breath on his ear when he had come back to life for a second, and again had to wonder out loud, "Man, who the hell are you?"

"Nobody," he told Duo in his unaffected voice, still clutching his wrist with his pale hand. "Just some dead guy. Now sew."

Duo kept a scrunched up, suspicious look on him, but simultaneously strung the fishing line through the eye of the large needle in his hand. He forced a sigh and, "Whatever," out of himself as he put the clothes pin around the bleeding femoral exposed and started stitching up the living, breathing cadaver, taking all his concentration to just not let his eyes stray too far.

~*~

"There, that’s as good as it’s going to get. I’m not a doctor or anything, so you’re just gonna have to deal with it," Duo told the corpse as he straightened up, a bloody needle in hand.

The dribble of blood from his leg had disappeared, and the stagnate collection of crimson red was slowly draining through the steely grate of the drain at the lowered end of the examination table. The cadaver had remained mostly silent through the whole process, not showing even a hint of pain or discomfort as Duo had finished the last stitch and yanked, closing up the wound as best he could. Instead of emote in the slightest, he had chosen to fix that debilitating stare at the top of his head, making Duo inwardly squirm and curse him. Bad enough he had to lay his hand on the hottest thing he’d ever seen, never mind the fact that he’d found aforementioned in the morgue in the middle of the night, but he was staring neat little holes into his head with those eyes of his.

What nerve dead guys had these days—bolting up on his exam table and shaving years off his life in the process, and then, without an ounce of tact, demanding medical attention. He hadn’t remembered stiffs being this demanding before, he thought with a crooked grimace as he brushed his hands off on his bloodstained apron. He looked closer at his uniform pants and saw a little had dribbled onto his newest pair.

"Aw, shit," he grumbled. "Well, this is just great."

The cadaver ignored him as he examined the wound again, lifting his leg to inspect the stitching job. As heat flew up into his face, Duo quickly found somewhere to occupy his eyes, but a stain on a wall could only be interesting for so long, you know. He grunted in what Duo assumed was satisfaction and quickly hopped down from the table, the blood slowly drying on the back of his thigh.

"That’ll be fine," he thanked the morgue worker unemotionally, turning away to walk out the door almost as abruptly as he had arrived at it. "Goodnight, then."

"Hey, wait just one second, Supercorpse," Duo barked at him, offended.

He kept walking.

"That’s your idea of thanks? I drag my ass out in the rain to drag yours inside, you scare the shit outta me, I fix you up, and you think you can just stroll right on out again?" He didn’t even turn to face him as the accusation flew.

"Yes."

"Fuck if you’re just gonna walk out of here—what about your bill, pal?"

That made him turn and come to a stop, his bloodstained, naked body drawing to a halt in mid-step on the tiles. "Excuse me?"

Duo, driven by the success of actually drawing a reaction from this unbelievable corpse, jabbed his finger at him. "That’s right. Your bill. Haven’t you heard? Nothing’s free in the world anymore, and least of all medical care. You oughta know better than that. They charge you for just walking into the hospital nowadays, so don’t expect to stroll out of here without a little something for my time."

"This is not a hospital," came the growl. "I’m not paying you anything."

"Well, you’re just shit out of luck then, because you are!"

His eyes flickered down to illustrate his (distracting) lack of clothing. "Do I look like I have any money?"

"No, but I don’t care. Pay up."

"I’m not paying you anything."

"The hell you aren’t! Look at my clothes!"

The cadaver’s lips were pressing ever so slightly together—a display of honest emotion as the corners of his mouth sank sourly at Duo’s accusation. "They’re cheap, replaceable, and unflattering," he said flatly, glancing up. "Your point being?"

Duo’s eyes turned an explicit shade of pissed. "Well, fuck you, buddy! They’re much more flattering than anything you’ve got! And now you’ve gone and fucked ‘em up!"

"Huh." He shrugged. "Funny, though, that I’m the best looking one here, and I’m the dead one."

The word ‘gape’ did not accurately sum up the expression that then filled up Duo’s face. It did not begin to describe the frustration that this stranger thought he had the right to talk to him like this. How could he, when he’d done him a very generous favor, if he did said so himself? It added offensively to the shock that he was stunning beyond compare or belief and only a few minutes ago he’d been DOA.

Luckily, his temper was always quick to step in and hide shock with something much more volatile. It was enough to make him temporarily forget the circumstance leading up to his arrival and the unexplainable revival he’d pulled and stomp over, putting himself firmly between the dead and naked body and the door. The midnight atmosphere and the storm grumbling outside did not daunt Duo any more than the simmering blue of the corpse’s eyes as he shoved his nose into his face.

"If I ripped that half-assed stitch job clean out of your leg and let you bleed to death all over again for the way you’ve fucked with me, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it, bud. Not a minute. After all, you’re dead, and you’re supposed to stay that way! No, once you kick the bucket, you can’t be popping back up and asking people for favors. It just doesn’t work that way! And if you’re gonna pretend your alive and kicking just like everybody else, then you can pay your bill like ev-er-y-bod-y else. You got it? Nod if you can get that through your thick skull," he told him with a sneer, standing up to that rigid expression he received, standing up to the part of him that was too busy with paying attention to the dead body itself to lend much to his mouth as it lectured him. To the blood trickling like temptation personified down that neck, curling around the clavicle in its path.

Slowly, he began to realize that his mouth had stopped moving for a moment, and he was standing nearly nose to nose with this defiant corpse in a silent and otherwise uninhabited morgue. In the absence of words, Duo simply looked into the once pale, ashen face brightened with color, blood, and personality—filled with life where had been convinced was only death.

And that’s when he grabbed Duo by the neck and lifted him a clean five inches off the tiles. Ruining the romantic moment, he’d say, but hey—that could have been just him.

Feeling that hand closing around his windpipe, smearing his vision with slow-growing dark clouds, brought a fear to life in Duo he’d never experienced. Something simultaneously primal and fearfully childish. His hands scrambled up the length of the arm holding him off the ground and at gravity’s cruel mercy, until he started prying at the fingers crushing into his skin. He drew blood, felt pain fly up the length of his own arm from the sheer stress. He tried gasping, but the air narrowly scraped through his throat as it closed further with each breath. His legs moved on their own accord through the air, pawing, reaching for the earth below, startled by their loss.

Okay, this isn’t so bad. It could be worse. He thought in awful clarity for a moment, before he decided it would be in his best defense to knee his job-turned-would-be-murderer. Instead he found himself simply being flung against the opposite wall with the force of a rollercoaster car.

All right, his brain said in one last moment of awareness. Now it’s safe to say it’s worse. The corpse remained calmly where he was and when Duo crumpled to the floor in the fashion of a ragdoll, sucking for air, holding his throat, he calmly showed himself to the door.