Spoilers: Up to chapter 38
A/N: Hey, Lynn. Guess it'll take me 5 fucking parts to get Badou get laid at last, but I'll make it worth it. Bear with me here people, this will be five chapters long and I will finish it or I'm committing seppuku. Lyrics belong to The Killers. Which is ironic for this fandom, really.
Soul Searching:
Are We Human
will your system be alright
when you dream of home tonight?
there is no message we're receiving
let me know is your heart still beating
The old woman, Liza, gave Naoto the prettiest dress she could find on such a short notice. Not that Naoto had insisted for her style to be revamped, but the old woman sure had, and there was no messing around with the authority of the elders. The length of the skirt reached down to her knees, the lace around the edges brushing against the back of her knees and tickling her there; it was white, a vast difference between what she usually wore. Naoto had about three dresses in the suitcase she kept back at her place, and all of them were dark coloured. She also held them in a suitcase, because she had a plan of leaving this place as soon as her big fight was fought, but that was another story. Her new dress was not for a lolita, but rather for a woman. It hugged the curves it had to, and fluttered around just enough to taunt whatever onlooker, and covered her scars. It brought out the paleness of her skin, the dark colour of her eyes and hair, and the fragile-looking shape of her bone-structure. It made her look like a pixie.
She tainted it with blood about ten minutes after Liza's helpers had stuffer her inside it.
She had always associated the smell of copper with death and blood and sorrow. It reminded her often of herself, that night when Fuyumine had found her under her parents' corpses. Maybe that was why she tried to kill as little as possible. She left her enemies crippled enough to ensure that they wouldn't follow her in fear of going through the same treatment again, or worse. Normally she would leave them when they were writhing in pain on the floor, far from being dead, but panicked enough to know that she, with her pixie shapes and her warrior eyes, was someone to be avoided from there onwards.
It was a lesson she had taught herself, because while Fuyumine had, apparently, made a business of rescuing injured children, he had no qualms against massacre. It had been her own way of rebelling against the one person she remembered with enough clarity to love as a father. Perhaps if she had been a better protégé to the old man, she would have lived for the thrill of the kill, like Magato. Like Heine. In a way, she was like Heine, but only when she fought. Naoto lived her life by going through the boundaries she'd set for herself at an earlier age. She didn't instigate fights unless necessary, nor did she condone gratuitous violence. She never killed.
There would only be one person she would kill in her life, and she had yet to find that person; or better said, yet to see more than a glimpse of her. Until that moment came, Naoto refused to take a life; she might have been named after the one who'd tried to kill her, but she refused to become her namesake. It was the only way she had of shaping her own destiny.
She had always associated the smell of copper with death, and blood, and sorrow.
When Mihai brought Badou to them, they were both covered in blood—Badou's. Heine was already going crazy after the final fight against his 'brother', whose acquaintance Naoto's blade had had the pleasure of making, because while she and Heine weren't friends, she would have rather he not die—Nill would be too sad. So as soon as Badou was brought in, Heine made himself scarce.
"Tell me you know how to sew," Mihai spoke, his voice tired and battle-worn. He looked like an Atlas, holding the world on his shoulders, only his world was small and skinny and usually loud.
"He won't die," Naoto said, helping him carry Badou to a pew of the church. She had no idea how to sew, but she knew a lot about healing herself. Bullet wounds happened to be her speciality.
As she hurried up to raid Bishop's First Aid Kit, she noticed that her new white dress was red, and smelled like copper.
Badou woke up the next day, and she was there to hear him speak his first words. Unsurprisingly, they were a demand for a cigarette. Naoto placed one between his lips, but did not light it. "You're still too injured for this," she said, going back to polishing her sword with the meticulousness of someone who did it whenever stressed. And she was; she was antsy and anxious, and wanted Badou out of her bed, because he didn't belong in it. But then again, she didn't belong in it either, never had.
After patching him up, Mihai had told her that he needed to lay low and possibly hide until shit calmed down. Naoto mentioned that he'd have to stay in the last place anyone would look for him, and Mihai helped her transport Badou's unconscious body to her place, much to her dislike.
"Don't fucking tell me I'm injured, tranny, okay? Shit, I know I am, I can feel it. Actually, I'm feeling it a bit too much here, so could you just light the fucking cigarette before I go crazy, too?" he snapped at her, and Naoto, because she wasn't really affected by his health and the road to hell he'd decided to take it down, lit his cigarette.
He exhaled very little smoke, which meant he'd swallowed most of it; which made him a freak of nature. "You're a shitty nurse," he mumbled around the stick, finished it, then promptly went back to sleep.
Naoto frowned at him, telling herself that he was such an idiot; what sort of a PI didn't even ask about his whereabouts? Then it occurred to her that maybe he hadn't because he'd thought that he was safe with her. It made her feel strange, but not at all bad. She went back to polishing her sword, and noted with a certain feeling of longing that it was the first time in years this place smelled of cigarette smoke. It was also the first time in years that it smelled of blood.
She got up from her seat near his sick-bed when she was certain he was fast asleep and wouldn't wake up screaming like a maniac, and went to take a shower. The pipes in this warehouse had always been rusty, and rattled as if what passed through them was wind instead of water, but at least the water was hot enough to scorch her when she needed to scrub herself clean. There was a dent in the wall, just under the shower head: she had punched the wall there, after scrubbing herself clean of Magato's touch just stopped working, and when she was so angry at Fuyumine for looking like he cared, that she had took it against the wall.
She was well aware that she slept with her ghosts and the skeletons in her closet, and that it was unhealthy and made her feel like shit most of the time, but sometimes it was okay. Sometimes she would stop in front of a certain room, and remember the lesson she'd taught herself there by watching him, or the nth attempt at killing him there, and she would smile. Other people smiled at the memories of their childhoods because they were full of laughter and playing in the sandbox; Naoto smiled when she remembered the feel of the blade in her hand, because it was the only thing she could associate with Fuyumine anymore that didn't make her want to revive him and beat him up for all his lies.
She got inside the shower of her quiet bathroom, listened to the pipes rattle, and scrubbed, and scrubbed, until she didn't smell of cigarette smoke and blood anymore, until her skeletons disappeared and the warehouse became just a place where she lived.
"So, why are you my nurse?" was what Badou asked that evening, when Naoto returned from Buon Viaggio with two servings of pasta bolognesa neatly dumped inside a plastic Tupperware.
"No-one else would have you," she replied in a monotone voice, but there was a bark beneath that reply, and Badou seemed to notice, because he smiled like he really had gone crazy. Naoto lit another cigarette and held it out to him.
"Where are we?" he asked, finally having the intelligence to look around him.
Naoto knew there wasn't much to look at. The sleeping bag on which she'd been sleeping since they brought him here, the bed, and the suitcase. "My room," she replied, and started to take their food out of the bag. There was a serving of soup in a Thermos, undoubtedly for Badou who shouldn't be eating anything solid. Naoto wondered if he wouldn't be happier if they simply injected nicotine into his veins from here after and forgot about food altogether.
"Shit," he mumbled, and for a moment Naoto wished he would revert back to the loudmouthed idiot she'd known two days ago. "This place ain't a room, it's a people trap." For all his stupidity, he had his share of brilliance.
"What happened to you?" she asked, handing him the Thermos.
"How'd you get your scar?" he asked in turn, taking a gulp of the soup and pulling a face.
"None of your business," she answered, sitting down in the other side of the room and digging into her food with hunger.
"Yeah, neither is my sob-story," he said, and the conversation died off after that.
Badou remained at her place for one more day, before Bishop and Heine came to carry him back to the church because he'd had enough of being an invalid.
Naoto cleaned the room after he left, throwing the bed sheets out instead of simply washing them, and noted that her room smelled like cigarette smoke. She opened the windows wide, and tried not to think about how Fuyumine's coat had smelled the first days after his death, when traces of the cigarettes he used to smoke still remained on it.
The warehouse was again silent, the pipes still rattled, and her three—now four—dresses still remained inside the suitcase, like the skeletons remained in her closet and everywhere else too. She knew everything was the same as usual, but she wondered why it felt different. Like something was missing.
It wasn't until the smell of cigarette smoke was gone that she realised what it was that she was missing, and by then it was too late to do anything but take a shower, and scrub, and scrub, until she could safely pretend the absence didn't bother her.
