Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ How to Be Dead ❯ Strangers in the Night ( Chapter 6 )

Part 6 "Strangers in the Night"

"Jeeze, Duo, you look like you’ve been to hell and back. What happened to you?"

"I had problems… negotiating with the stiffs tonight," he responded weakly, rubbing at the back of his head, though it only seemed to fuel the thunderous headache. Time for better medication. He groped forward over the bar as Hilde produced a tall, water-beaded glass from underneath the frothing tap and slid it toward him with a sympathetic smile. She chuckled as he threw down more than what was probably healthy in one swig and sighed, setting it on the napkin coaster provided.

"One fought back tonight?" she asked, unable to resist at least a little laughter at his expense. "Maybe the graveyard shift really has done a number on your imagination. I told you working such late hours in a place like that would catch up to you."

"Hell, if I’m just imagining this headache, then I should get a fucking Oscar. And an Emmy and Tony, too, for that matter," he grumbled. "Feels like some took an axe to my head."

"It looks that way, too."

Duo lifted an eyebrow at her, through the wafting smoky air, over the low, intimate din, lit by the neon signs from the windows. He’d taken off the bloodstained apron, scrubbed furiously at the stain on his jeans, and had been doused by a fresh sheet of rain on the way into the bar, his hair still damp. He puckered his bottom lip unenthusiastically. "That was low, Hil."

The young bartender smiled and leaned forward to rest her elbows on the polished bar, her reflection of a sleeveless, low-cut red shirt and styled dark hair blurred on the surface of the glass between her and Duo. "What’s the matter? You don’t seem yourself. Usually, you’ve got just as many taunts for me. What happened to that wonderful sense of humor of yours?"

"I told you, I just got the crap beaten out of me by a dead guy. I’ve just misplaced it somewhere," he muttered tiredly, his eyes falling down into the amber gold of his alcoholic beverage and concentrating dully on the white froth.

That evoked another laugh from Hilde and she said, "Well, I think it’s already found you. No worries."

"Oh, right. No worries. Hope it brought some goddamn aspirin with it, though, ‘cuz I’d kill for some right now."

Hilde smiled at him, wrapping her fingers around his beer glass and swishing it lightly around, considering the amount he’d already gulped down with a smirk on her face. "You know, Duo, if you’re going to skip work because of a headache, I don’t think going out drinking’s going to help much. You should get home and lay down for a while." She stood up and took a drink, smacking her lips happily when she finished and set it down close to her. "Why don’t you get out of here, and I’ll catch you tomorrow for dinner, how about?"

"You know, it’s breakfast to the rest of the world. Not everyone is a creature of the night like us," Duo commented, somewhat sullen from the fact that she’d taken his beverage and only aggravated by the splitting migraine he was developing. But, pinned by her look, he finally just nodded his head and grumbled as the pain from that little movement hit him. "Fine, fine, I’m gettin’, I’m gettin’."

Before he staggered to his feet, Hilde bent over the bar to give him a friendly kiss on forehead, a towel for drying glasses slung over her petite shoulder. "Call me if you don’t feel better soon, okay? If it’s bad, maybe I’ll take you to the clinic."

"What, you have to escort me the three whole blocks?"

"I just want to take you, Duo. I care about you, you know."

"A date with a woman plus outrageous medical bills? Now that sounds like fun." A tiny roll of the eyes earned him another chuckle, and Hilde snapped the towel at him.

"Get going, Grumpy Bear."

As soon as he had stepped outside, pushing the door open ahead of him while his heavy-weighed mind and aching body followed, he could sense something in the chill night air laughing at him. It was waiting, and by coming out into the unpredictable cold of night, he was coming inevitably toward it. As his breath appeared before him a trail of short-lived steam, he glanced up into the darkened sky. The stars were obscured by pollution, but the clouds were calm again.

"Huh. It stopped raining." He shivered through his coat and pulled it tighter around his shoulders as he began his walk down the sidewalk toward his car. By the time he was at the driver side door and fishing out his keys with bitterly cold fingers, his teeth had begun a telltale chatter in the back of his mouth and he swore with a stutter. "Isn’t alcohol supposed to make me at least feel warmer?"

The door jammed a little from the cold, the seats were freezing, it stung to hold the steering wheel, and the engine acted particularly fussy the first few attempts, but Duo barely noticed it all, as tired as he was. He finally drove away from the curb and the headlights of his old, dented green automobile disappeared down the street.

"God! This is the shittiest excuse for a summer night. What ever happened to that thing called ‘heat’? Vacation? Tax evasion?"

Duo leaned slightly over to reach for any and every knob that would help produce some warmth in the cold shell of his car. Through the vents came a mixture of cold and lukewarm air, hissing at him, making his condition even worse. He grimaced and decided to turn the radio dial as well.

"Well, if I don’t warm up soon," he reasoned with himself, while his icy fingers turned up the volume on the local thrash metal station, "I’ll go deaf instead, so at least I won’t be able to hear my teeth chatter."

He turned onto Cemetery Drive, coincidentally the location of his apartment and an apt name, considering the personalities of the other tenants with which he lived, and it was quietly snoring. He had never seen it otherwise. Daylight was a far off dream for Duo. He’d been working the night shift at East Central for some time now and last year he had been able to pay off the last of his student loans. But the rent monster waited for no one, and it’d been the horrible muse for many an overworked night.

"Not that I’m bitter or anything. I mean, the pay’s good, the super leaves me alone, and hey, there’s always a pile of lively conversationalists lying around," he muttered.

Duo casually lifted his free hand up to his neck to gently touch the bruises forming there, underneath his collar, and with the other hand turned the wheel to park on the sidewalk in front of his apartment. He found, though, that the young man abruptly sprinting out in front of him, screaming bloody murder, hindered that process.

"Shit!"

How many times have I used that particular cuss word, in that particular sense by now?

He flung his foot at the brake pedal, but the reaction was too slow. Duo braced himself for the impact, and when it came, in the form of a frightening jolt and a loud thud!, he found himself automatically hissing obscenities under his breath as if it could chase this horrible reality away. Chh, you wish.

He lifted his head and looked reluctantly out the windshield, his leg rigid against the pedal and the stress running hot through the rest of his body, suddenly breathless. He hadn’t remembered closing his eyes, but when he opened them, the cold and unmerciful, orange-lit street filled him with dread.

"Oh, shit, shit, shit. I’m dead, I’m just dead!" he swore, flushing, the thrash music still pounding loud enough to shake Beethoven from his grave.

Duo threw the seatbelt off him, threw the door open, and threw himself out of the car like it was a charged electric chair. Another jolt of dread as strong as a body being thrown against his bumper ran through him, electrifying him with fear. As he got out of the car, again into the cold, he stumbled on his feet and swore again, louder, sharper.

A hand lay limp on the blacktop, poking out into sight. The fingers were curled toward the stars, as if clawing after the soul that departed from the body. That hand was connected to an arm, and the consequential stream of red curling down that arm, soaking into the fabric of his shirt.

He decided there and then that he thoroughly hated dead hands sprawled out on the wet concrete.

Duo also dreaded to see the body that was connected to that arm, but before he could lay his eyes on the gory scene, out came a rushing figure from the alleyway opposite, swooping toward the body lying on the ground. It moved impossibly fast, Duo thought, his head nearly spinning just to look at it, and jerked at the sudden movement. He was pressed against the door of his car equally fast, ready to haul ass out of there, feeling the adrenaline throbbing through him almost painfully.

The blur slowed in the orange-black light cast over the street, glimmering in the puddles of water dotting the road, slowed until Duo could see that it was not a streak of white, but a person. The second thing he noticed was the lack of clothing, and then the circular scar around the enticing, muscled thigh, streaked with dried crimson blood.

The dead body slowed as he noticed Duo standing there, coming to a complete halt a few feet away from the sprawled body, just near enough for his haunting blue eyes to catch the illumination from the headlights and glow at him. Thrown over his slim shoulders was what Duo assumed was the jacket of the man he’d just bowled over, but the rest of his rather perfect body was as bare as he had found it on the back step, sprawled out in the rain.

No fucking way. Duo’s mind hissed in disbelief. His skin, however, was screaming in fright, crawling, burning where the fingertips had dug into his neck and bruised violently.

The dead body watched him remain frozen with shock, frozen with fear, and slowly Duo began to see that beneath that light jacket, he was trembling ever so slightly. His face tightened as if to suppress the shiver completely, while droplets of rain glittered on his face like jewels in the headlights. The entire night had had a certain surreal sense to it, as far as the morgue worker was concerned, but now it seemed almost dream-like. As if he were an intruder on someone else’s drug-induced hallucination.

The dead body pulled his eyes away from Duo and looked down at the young man crushed beneath the bumper of the dimpled Camry. "You killed him," he accused softly, his voice shivering from the cold. He barely heard him over the pounding metal.

"I d-d-didn’t mean to," Duo stammered. "He just ran out in front of me—I couldn’t see him coming! It wasn’t my fault, damn it—!"

"Shut up already," the dead body growled at him. "I know it wasn’t your fault."

The morgue worker’s feet seemed glued beneath him, for he couldn’t move away, couldn’t get into his car and flee from this living, breathing corpse. But somehow, he felt more inclined to move forward, toward it.

Duo’s jaw opened once, twice, before any words could escape him. "Well, what were you doing anyway, chasing him like that? And what are those, his clothes?" He found his feet taking him closer, squinting at the corpse. "What were you doing—mugging him?! Jesus Christ, who are you? What are you?"

"It’s none of your business," he said tersely, his face drawn darkly.

He turned away from Duo and bent down beside the body on the rain-slicked street. In the stark white illumination, he could see the blood leaking steadily from his poor stitch job, but saw that there was a scrap of cloth wrapped around it, futilely trying to stop the excess bleeding. His pale skin had taken on some color, but not enough to fool necessarily everyone that he was completely alive.

The dead body then started the process of unbuttoning the other corpse’s shirt, crouched at his bleeding side.

Duo’s face soured and he sprinted around the side of his car, filled with outrage. He grimaced at the sight of the young man’s face, eyes closed, mouth agape and lifeless and the side of his body reddening. "Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing? Don’t take his clothes! For fuck’s sake, you thief, leave him alone! We’ve gotta get him some help!"

"No use. He’s dead. He doesn’t need clothes."

"So are you!" he accused. "And neither do you!"

That’s when the dead body turned a harsh expression toward him, his dark blues simmering with frustration, and Duo’s eyes took the time to wander onto the very visible expanse of skin illuminated by his glaring headlights. That’s when he saw his legs shaking violently trying to support his weight, which couldn’t have been that much, seeing the traces of hungry lines in his body just past the light jacket he’d stolen off the young man now bleeding in the streets. No, it wasn’t all him—Duo could hear the droplets of blood dripping at a dependable rate from the dead body’s thigh, collecting around his foot.

"You’re bleeding again," Duo heard himself say, though he hadn’t given his mouth permission. As soon as he had approached him, he found himself wincing again at the sight. He’d been working how long in that godforsaken morgue, and he was disturbed by the sight of blood?

"I realize that," the living, breathing corpse muttered at him, and was just about to snatch the unbuttoned shirt off the other dead body when Duo’s hand landed on his arm. He flinched as if offended that he had not see him moving toward him, but his muscles only twitched, he did not recoil. Instead, he shifted a highly disgruntled look onto Duo’s face, trying to repel him in that manner.

"Let go of me. Why don’t you leave me alone? Don’t you have to cause someone else grievous bodily harm with your vehicle?"

"You’re pretty cheeky for a guy who came back from the dead," Duo snapped at him. "You know how many people would be grateful for that? I’d have a better appreciation for life if I were you, you know!"

"And if I were you, I’d let me go," he threatened immediately, but in a low, unenthusiastic tone.

Duo felt him swaying slightly beneath his grip, felt the violent shutters running through his body. Every time the corpse began to lose his balance, he would doggedly, almost angrily right himself, but every motion became slowly more and more exhausted and uncontrolled. It was not enough to erase Duo’s anger, to see this mysterious body obviously in suffering and desperately in need, but he found it much easier to overlook it. Who said there wasn’t a little saint lurking in him, smoking and swearing all the while?

"All right, listen up, pal. I’ll only say this once. I’m taking you to a hospital. It’s not far from here—Hell, I can see it from here. And I won’t say a word about this to anybody, either. I just don’t want to be responsible for your second death, all right? You’ve disturbed me enough tonight as is."

For an instant, something of color and emotion flickered in the corpse’s eye at that comment. Hurt? He wasn’t even supposed to be able to feel the cold, for god’s sake!

Pushing hesitation aside, Duo took his other arm with his free hand and lifted him from the ground, getting his weak feet beneath him. This time there was not a resisting surge, and he did not feel a hot hand clamping around his throat. Woo who. Progress. He tried to pull the corpse toward the passenger door, telling him, "You need real medical attention, not just a bunch of ten-pound test knitted into you—"

Again that flash of color, but more fearful this time. "No," he croaked, pushing away in resistance. Only problem was that his ability to resist had dwindled considerably and was dripping away along with the blood on the blacktop. "I can’t—I—"

"I don’t wanna hear it, buddy! You’re getting help, and I’m the only one who’s gonna get you there in time, so don’t even think about pulling the shit you did back at the morgue again."

Of course, Duo knew that the possibility of the repetition of that little stunt was close to nil, with those bloodied hands clutching so tiredly at his arms.

"No, I can’t go to the hospital. That’s the last place I should be," he growled weakly.

"Well, then you’re just shit out of luck, ‘cause that’s where you’re going."

Duo was just about to drag the corpse into his car if the need be, talking firmly over any objection voiced, when he caught a glimpse of that fleeting color in the dead body’s eyes flash dangerously, morphing into insurgency, and Duo felt his body momentarily paralyze as the hot fingers dug tightly into his arm. He could not move, and his mind had been crippled, animated instead by this inexplicable urge to heed the command. He heard the alluring voice murmur instead of growl at him from inside his head, and for one tempting second he seriously considered folding to it.

Then the moment passed as quickly as it had come, as if only a bad dream, and Duo jarred him in return.

"Hey, knock that off, whatever you’re doing! You’re coming, and I already know you don’t like it, so keep your paws off of me and deal with it!"

The corpse seemed frustrated by this as he was propelled to the opposite side of the door.

"No, please—" Almost pleading now, the last vestiges of resistance were gone and the dead body moved at the will of his hands. "I’m not going to any hospital."

"What, like I’m just going to say, ‘Oh, okay, then,’ and let you go? Pul-leeze."

The door handle clacked as Duo lifted and pulled, keeping the half-naked, bleeding, shivering, and defiant dead body close. Damned if he was going to run off and die on him for a second time that night. He was assured of a few months’ worth of nightmares as it was, and having someone’s demise on his conscience wouldn’t remedy the situation in the least. It was easy enough to convince the corpse’s trembling body to enter the car, though his mouth was more than able to retaliate.

He settled reluctantly into the seat, staring, strained, up at Duo. "Don’t do this," he implored in that imperturbable voice. "You don’t understand."

The morgue worker looked down into those simmering blue eyes and snorted. "You? Understand you? Of course I can’t get my head around you. But you need to get help, and that’s crystal clear to me." A grin crossed his face for almost the first time that night. And with that, he pulled a blanket out from the backseat, stuffed it into the corpse’s lap, told him to get warm, and then shut the door tight.