A/N: Welcome, all! I am immensely excited to present to you, this, my baby, the love-child of my imagination and wicked humour: The Dump, The Worm and The Nutcase, starring Kai as the focal point of many a hilarious situation. Ok, whilst the first chapter might be a tad bit dreary and grey, once you get past it, many a chapter oozing with delicious sarcasm are sure to follow. Yum. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: Don't own Beyblade.

Ch. 1 – Saying Goodbye and Airports

The train slowly pulls into the station and its doors squeak open. The night air is cool and the commuters are reluctant to step out. Nonetheless, warm houses and hot meals await them at their respective homes, so they leave the train, motivated by this thought. Among the small throng of chilled people are a mother and her son carrying grocery bags.

'Hey, mum?' asks the teenage boy, frowning slightly. 'Can blind people be dyslexic when they read Braille?'

His mother gives a tiny smile and shakes her head in amusement at her son's never-ending curiosity and bottomless supply of peculiar questions. 'I'm not sure, Kai.'

Not deterred, he continues, 'Hey, ma, can you sentence a homeless person to house arrest?'

Kai's mother readjusts the bags in her hand and is about to make a witty reply when a strange, pained expression distorts her features and her body becomes taut.

Kai steps towards her. 'Mum, what's wrong?'

Unable to answer, she drops to her knees and the grocery bags fall to the floor, fruit and vegetables spilling forth and rolling away, unnoticed. Crying out she clutches her chest, her breathing is laboured and her eyes panic stricken. Kai drops his bags and runs to his mother. He grabs her shoulders and shakes. Her body falls limp in his arms and he, while not knowing quite what to do, lays her on the ground as she moans arduously.

'Someone call an ambulance!' shouts Kai to the motionless bystanders. He sits on the ground cradling his mother's head in his lap in the middle of the station, tears running down his cheeks only to fall in his mother's soft, slate hair.

'Mum,' he sobs, 'Say something…'

The mother looks up at her son with round, sorry eyes, and though she's too stricken to speak, Kai already knows but can't accept what she's trying to convey to him: Goodbye.

She has stopped breathing.

Blue and red suddenly splash across her pale face: the lights from the ambulance. Two paramedics rush forward and push Kai out of the way to attempt CPR and get his mother breathing again.

Kai watches in shocked silence as they pump his mother's chest and blow into her mouth again and again. Her body remains listless, unresponsive, dead… It seems like hours before they finally stop trying and let his mother rest.

Kai doesn't notice the horrified onlookers or the despondent wails. He sees only his mother, lying there on her back, her eyes locked on the austere station ceiling. Slowly, he crawls forward and reaches out to brush her cheek. It is cold and she doesn't respond. He quickly draws his hand back and stares at her. This can't be…

Terrified, Kai draws his knees up to his chest and gently rocks back and forth. Too many thoughts assault him; all he can do is look at his mother, dead. No, he thought, she can't be dead.

Again he reaches out, this time for her hand, which doesn't grasp his. With his other hand he sweeps his palm across her face, closing her eyes and taking the words she never spoke from her lips.

Hands grasp his shoulders and pull him back, away from her. Always pulling him back, drawing him further from his mother. Through blurred eyes he watches as they bring a body bag over, and a strange thought occurs to him, and he would've shared it with his mother, but she was the source of his query.

He voices his curious thought in a whisper, to no one. 'Do they reuse body bags? Or do they throw them away and get new ones? The people using them wouldn't care anyway.'

Kai sat on a bench outside the courtroom waiting for his lawyer to return. The funeral had been simple enough, many people came, friends of his mother's, no family. He had worn a black suit and the dark red tie his mother had bought for him a few weeks before she'd died. People cried a lot, but he knew his mother wouldn't have wanted all that grieving. She was a very happy person, always wearing bright, cheery colours and constantly flashing smiles. But it was hard to be anything but sombre on such an occasion.

Kai's mother had died of a massive heart attack; strange, the pathologist had said, for one so young and healthy. Then again, the family did have a history of heart disease, failure, and problems in general. Kai wished that it had skipped a generation.

It hadn't.

Being seventeen, and still technically a minor, the issue of Kai's custody came up, and his lawyer was currently assessing Kai's options in the courtroom. Kai's father had died barely months before he was born, and as far as he knew, he had only two other living relatives, his grandfather Voltaire and his aunty Georgina who lived under the same roof in Boston. It was either them or foster parents. Some of his friends had foster parents; their tales were less than pleasant. So it looked as though he'd have to take his chances with his relatives. In his past experiences, his grandfather and his aunty were quite uptight and cold, but that didn't concern him; he could live with them just fine as long as they kept to themselves.

Eventually the courtroom doors opened and a small collection of important looking men, likely lawyers, flooded out and away before his lawyer appeared.

'Hello, Kai,' said the lawyer cheerily as he approached the seated boy. 'Well, all went well, yes, just swell. Your relatives in America have agreed to take custody of you, so all we need to do is get you on the next plane to Boston. We have a law firm there too, so if you ever need any legal help, you know where to go. Isn't that swell? There's a taxi outside ready to take you to the airport, it's got your luggage in it already, just one bag, or so I was told. You like to travel light, eh? That's just swell. Oh, here's your ticket. Have a swell trip, won't you?'

'Yeah, just swell.'

Kai stood, took the ticket, glared at the lawyer and walked past him to the courthouse exit, also the entrance. As he walked through the large revolving doors the cold air hit him forcefully. The sky was overcast and the wind was out with a vengeance. This would be his last day in Russia, and what a day to see him off. He spotted his cab and got in, quickly sighting his duffel bag and grabbing it to make sure it didn't disappear.

'Go,' he told the driver gruffly. The taxi pulled away from the courthouse and began its journey to the Moscow airport, Domodedovo.

Kai felt a sad tugging feeling in his chest. He would be leaving behind everything he ever knew. His father and his mother would remain here, at least the memory of them, and he'd be gone, in Boston, alone with his grandfather and aunty. His parents had left everything they owned to him, their only child, but he had to wait until he turned eighteen, only a year away now, before he could access his inheritance and move back to Moscow, his home. I can wait, he told himself strongly.

'We're here, sir, the Domodedovo. Everything's been paid for. Do you know where to go?' asked the taxi driver as he pulled up to the airport kerb and looked over his shoulder.

'Yeah,' Kai said, getting out of the car holding only his duffel bag.

The taxi drove away and Kai walked alone into the airport which was crowded and noisy. He didn't really know where to go, but he had a fair idea. Just look for the sign that says flight to Boston, right? Kai spent the next ten minutes looking for said sign, and with it he found an elongated queue. He got in the queue and had been waiting for another ten minutes when a dishevelled man walked up to him and smiled a maniacal toothless smile.

'Harro! Whaz your name?!' slurred the man. To Kai's horror, the hobo farted and giggled in hysterics at the sound it made. Kai inched away from him but the man stepped closer and belched in his face. It smelt like fish and old socks.

Apart from an obvious lack of self-hygiene, there was definitely something not quite right upstairs with this odd fellow. Two security guards appeared quickly and escorted the tittering man away.

As he resumed his position in the line, Kai wondered if his grandfather, since the last time he had seen him, had become anything like the crazed man he'd just encountered. Quite an amusing thought thinking of Voltaire farting and giggling. Also quite a disturbing thought. What about Georgina? Whenever Kai's mother talked about her she always described his aunty as weird and a bit of a fruit basket. What went wrong in the gene pool?

'Next, please,' called an over-worked luggage checker. Kai walked over still thinking about a farting Voltaire. 'Where to, sir?'

'Boston, obviously…'

'Any luggage, sir?'

'Just this,' said Kai holding up his duffel bag.

'You'll be able to take that onboard, sir. Can I see your ticket, sir? Thank you. Okay, please make your way to the terminal now; your Gate is…23. Have a nice flight, sir.'

Monotony abounds, thought Kai.

Still haunted by the image of Voltaire giggling and farting, Kai made his way through security and into the terminal where he looked for Gate 23. 'Yeah, give me the one at the other end of the airport why don't you,' muttered Kai to himself. When he got there he sat himself in a chair and waited, for a long, long time.

'I hate airports…'

A/N: Originally this chapter was going to be some 5,000 words long, so be grateful that after much deliberation, I have chopped it up into snappy, bite-sized segments...sort of. I hope you guys leave me lots of lovely constructive criticism with a slight sprinkling of due praise! Cheers.