I don't own the characters of Spriggan - I think Bandai does, but whoever it is it isn't me. This is non-profit fanfiction, for entertainment purposes only, but it's still my intellectual property, not to say copyright. So ner.
There's a minor inconsistency with manga canon which I didn't know was there when I wrote it and am too fond of by now to change: this is, therefore, set in anime canon only, since there's a lot more room for movement and, besides, it was the movie gave me the idea.
This is for Wren, because she made me do it.
Sow a little tenderness
Some dreams scare you only when you wake up and realise you were not scared at all. You have not been panting and frantic as you run, you have not felt the scrabble of bark shedding from trees under your hands or clutched the kickback of your gun into your chest. You have stood in the centre of the camp, and your parents were there. Your father has wrapped an arm about your mother's shoulders, resting his head just to the side of hers, and their legs are entwined behind them. She has turned her head to the side to avoid being face-down in the grass and dirt, and his body is a shelter over hers. They are asleep, and you must not wake them.
When you were younger you thought people were made of blood: after all, every time you scratched the surface that was what you found. Parents made children by mixing their blood together, pouring it into a sac of skin. There was a woman in the camp who was pregnant: you imagined the texture of the bump to be like a water-balloon, that if it was poked too hard it might burst and the contents flood out. It seemed very dangerous for her to be around people with tools, people preparing food with knives, people who might trip and in an accident split it open. You kept a watch over her to make sure she was safe, but she seemed very good at keeping the bump from harm and your mother asked you if you were leaving her for that other woman and smiled. Besides, you yourself were clumsy, and it would have been the worst thing to destroy exactly what you had set out to protect.
In the dream, your parents are still lying in their heap. The blood from the bulletholes in your father's back seeps through his clothes and drips down into the would on your mother's neck. It interspills from twin heart to twin heart, trickling from her shoulder along his embracing arm. The mess the bruises make of his face looks like a swelling contentment that he and she may still share their blood, give and take, at rest, in love.
The first time you saw Jean get badly hurt you took the knife from your pack and gashed the same length of open wound into your own arm, holding the two cuts together with your awkward head on Jean's shoulder. Jean, who was fourteen, was baffled at the time, but then said "Like blood brothers, yes?" and twisted his body so the healing arms could be in alignment. You had never heard of a blood brother before - there was nothing like that at Cosmos - but if Jean took it for granted then it had to be all right. This was Jean, after all, whose first words to you had been "you pronounce it jhahn, not 'jeen', okay?", and who called you Ominae "because that's your first name, right?", and you had liked him straight away just for trying. You know now how children are made, now, another thing they never taught you at Cosmos but Dr Meisel explained with a stutter and a "this isn't really my area of expertise, but", and you knew that you were too old to snigger, so you stopped yourself. Still, blood brothers sounds like just brothers to you, people with the same blood forming them and part of them inadvertently, and that is not quite what you want.
You dream that you are happy for your parents, but there is a gun in your hand which tells you to be jealous. They are perfect without you, their comingling blood birthing a sibling to rival you. It shakes angry in your hand, and before you can stop it it blasts the blood out of their beating bodies and scatters it over the ground. They come to rest again, bloodless and disjointed at your feet. The air is silent and calm and the gunshots do not echo.
Sometimes, when Jean is asleep and you yourself nearly so, you imagine the stickiness on your stomach to be blood, imagine that Jean's dead weight is the weight of your father's body sheltering your mother and that Jean's snores are the rumble of the trucks arriving. This time they will not be able to take you away to Cosmos, held as you are under Jean's sleep-heavy arms, but will pass on and leave you with the heat of his blood pouring into your veins in comfort. There are bruises forming on your shoulderblades, you think, bruises which are just burst blood vessels along the surface, from the dig of his fingers. He tries to control himself in everything else, you know, and he apologises in the mornings when he can feel them thrum against his skin, but you have never minded. When his body shudders and twists above yours, you don't dream.
Those dreams are generally worse than the ones in which you kill living people.
intellectual property of harpy_elian, august 2002