Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction / Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Midnight Aloha ❯ Jeuel Crawford ( Chapter 4 )

The city outside her window looked brown and dirty, gray and terribly interesting from where she sat on the fire escape. Far above, beyond the blue sky there were other worlds, other places. One of her Mommy's visitors had told her about them, about places with only letters and numbers for names where people could live differently, live with the stars.

Stars must be wonderful friends, she thought, pretending she had one in her arms, like a glowing stuffed shape. A star she thought would have only happy thoughts, slippery distant thoughts of warmth and hot chocolate. Stars didn't hurt, didn't cry. She closed her eyes and imagined a field of stars, with black grass and a blue sky, dancing and playing. Lost in her field of black grass and rainbow stars, she started to hum as she rocked back and forth, bare knees against the metal slats of the fire escape floor. Soft black grass, like velvet she though, like the velvet of her mother's best dress, but thicker and everywhere.

"Shut up!" The hand that hit the back of her head sent her forward; face forward into rusted fire escape. Fingers took hold of long dirty blond hair, jerked her back up and held her for the slap that followed up. "Shut up."

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" she whimpered, blood salty on her tongue as she cried. "I'm sorry."

"What are you doing out there anyway? Get your skinny ass in here!" He said, chuckling, slightly amused. "Your mother's been gone a while, uh? You think she'll come back for you?"

Jeuel licked the blood from her lip and stood there, not trying to move away from him, not gonna hide until he forgot about her for a while. He grabbed her hair again, shaking her a little, almost playfully, though she started crying again. "Well, do you think she will? Why in the fuck would she come back for you? Go get me a beer." He snapped, letting go of her and going back to his computer terminal, the nicest thing in the whole two rooms of the apartment.

She padded barefoot to the old white refrigerator against the far wall. It took a little effort to get one of the cans of beer out of the box and it was cold, cold enough to make her small fingers achy as she carried it to him. She stopped two steps from him, eyes growing distant, as if she were seeing right through him. In a faint, sing-songy voice she said, "You're gonna die today. Gonna fall right through the floor."

He grabbed the beer and this time it wasn't a slap. His fist hit her on the side of her head, sending her flying to the maroon carpet, thin and nasty with poverty twice her age in development. The vision held her as he kicked her, hips, shoulders, until she didn't really care. Rising up out of her body she saw it coming, not in a vision, she saw it.

It streaked like a meteor across the tiny little patch of sky. "Death's coming," she said, a bubble of bloody spit forming between her lips. It wasn't the one that streaked across the sky though, that started the fire that would clean away the ghetto. It was the ones that waited for him. Jeuel Crawford died that day, at least in body.

Three years later, the building she'd died it was a park, pretty and clean, with the night sky and the blue sky always visible to her, but she was waiting for her Mommy still.

…

Brad Crawford's eyes snapped open. Jeuel. The name was slightly familiar, the face in the third vision of the day was familiar too, vaguely, just enough to caress his memory. He leaned back against the couch arm, not even minding that he was laying out flat on some stranger's couch. "Get me painkillers," he snapped as he rubbed his temples. "Naoe, did you get into the computer yet?"

"Yes, Crawford. It was odd, it just suddenly let all the security drop on it. It's almost as if someone remotely dropped them."

Not that a vision of the present could get into him with whatever that thing he just had was, but Crawford didn't feel like they were in any danger. "Find out what you can about a Jeuel Crawford."

::Are you okay,:: Schuldig asked telepathically.

::Of course,:: Crawford replied.