Disclaimer: Vicious and Cowboy Bebop belongs to their fine creators and I wouldn't dream of stealing them. (Well, I might try to steal Spike or Vicious but I'd bring them back when I'd had my way—I mean, finished playing with—hell, I'd return them in good time.)
Author's note: Okay, Vicious has no history. In the show, we know nothing about him except his relationship to Spike and the few hints we get from The Real Folk Blues series finale. So…I made a history for him. I basically asked myself what would turn a man into a psychotic murderer of Vicious's character, and how did he possess the strength not to go completely over the edge? This doesn't really contain much about his relationship to Spike and Julia…that's been done. This is all Vicious, all the time, because I find him fascinating and a great, deep character—not to mention very, very handsome J. This is my first fanfic in a VERY long time, so I think it's not as good as my others…but I'll let you be the judge of that ;).
Spoilers: Teeny ones for Ballad of Fallen Angels, which is the last episode of Season 1, if you didn't know. Other than that, nothing.
Archiving: Absolutely, just let me know where it's going please. Email is jediprincess84@hotmail.com .
Rating: A strong R for language and mature themes. Parts of this story will bother people. If you're against the F-word, child abuse or prostitution don't read it.
Feedback: For the love of God, leave me a review! I live solely for your feedback, and if you don't review I'm going to stick my head in the oven and then throw myself out the window.
Other stuff: The song used at the beginning is 'Sound of Silence', writing and performed by Paul Simon on his album Wednesday Morning 3 a.m. It's Paul Simon's song and I'm just borrowing it for atmosphere, not trying to leech royalties or anything, 'kay? I think it fits Vicious perfectly. And it's the theme of my story. God, I'm such an English teacher wanna-be. The "See You Space Cowboy"-space quote at the end is by a musician named Placido Domingo. The chatter is stopping now, and the story is commencing. I hope you enjoy it.
SOUNDS OF SILENCE
A Story of Vicious
Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone,
'Neath the halo of a street lamp,
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dare
Disturb the sound of silence
Fools, said I, You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you
But my words like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed
In the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning,
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, The words of the prophets
are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whisper'd in the sounds of silence
I have to wonder how it came to this, I really do. How people live who I thought dead and how people hate who I thought friends. I have to wonder at the life that has led me here, and the life that will possibly end here. Not my life. Not now, and not by anyone who currently shares my space. But a life, just the same, that I once held a small measure of concern for. I feel nothing for it, I have decided. Voices are just sounds. Gunshots wipe them out. I draw my blade, making the same sound I've made a thousand times before. I cease to think or feel, and cease to care if life or death takes place here today. It will not be my death.
It will not be my concern.
When I die, I will be buried in a hillside cemetery overlooking a freeway and the skyscrapers of Mars. My coffin will be placed in the soft red earth under a spreading tree that predates both the freeway and the cemetery. When I die, no one will weep for me. I cannot abide the sound of weeping. It brings back too much. I feel quite certain that no one will come to mourn me. I do not deserve mourning. I understand that, and I accept it. When I die, my death will very likely be violent and senseless. When I die there will be no sounds of friends and loved ones talking in hushed voices, no one asking why or thinking how it was such a shame.
I was born with white hair. My mother was a hefty consumer of a diuretic drug that leeches iron from the body. Thus, I was born without pigmentation, a translucent blue-eyed child to two dark and incepting parents. I was born with a name, no doubt. I simply chose not to remember it. I believe, after everything, that it is my right.
My earliest memories are of a house. Not a house, but the green space behind it. A tiny white-picket house nestled between apartment projects, backed up to the blast field of a spaceport of Mars. The house did not belong to my strung-out druggie mother but to my maternal grandmother. She was a small eggshell-thin woman, not right in the head. She was a child, suited to taking care of one. The sounds were her small voice, a treble, singing songs in a language of her own making. This singing rarely stopped. I do not remember being bothered by it. I did not know any wrongness to the songs she sang. I think I rather enjoyed them. Often, the songs were overtaken by the rumble of starship engines making use of the blast field that stood just beyond the boundaries of my world. When one landed our house would shake on its foundation. I had a variety of playthings that lived in the yard and they would dance away from me crazily as the earth moved beneath my feet. I was delighted. When starships landed, my grandmother would hide under her round kitchen table, beneath a thinning tablecloth printed with blue flowers on a pink background, and cry.
My father and mother did not make an appearance in my life for what I suppose was years, except for occasional visits from my mother, who would weep and whimper nonstop and hug me too tightly while my grandmother flitted in the background and sang furious anthems at the tempo of a speed metal band, and the semi-annual return of my father. He always smelled of what I have come to know as peppermint schnapps cut with pure grain alcohol and marijuana. His voice would rumble out of his chest at my grandmother while he held my head against him like it was a basketball that had a tendency to bounce wildly out of control. When he had reduced my grandmother to cowering against a wall, clawing at the curtains made from the same material as her safety table cloth, he would shove my head rudely away and strike me a few times. Once he drew blood from my nose and I was quite surprised to see that it was red, not blue as in my veins. His slaps on my face were always overly sharp and hurt my ears. From my expert perspective in the present moment, he hit like a drunken fourteen-year-old whore spanking her sugar daddy. But I was a boy. Slaps were slaps.
He spoke to me, sometimes. He had to be in a fairly advanced state of intoxication to actually lower himself to talk to me. But oh, such wonderfully pure filth spilled out of his mouth when he did. Freak. Sissy. Cocksucker. Ugly motherfucking joke. Mother fucked a fucking albino circus midget and look what I go stuck with. He really was an inventive man. I attribute my later quickness with language to him.
This continued on for a time. Already I was becoming detached. Parental visits were a chance for study of the two larger halves of myself. Times alone with my grandmother were times for boyhood pursuits, all of which blur together into intricate play by myself in the impossibly green yard, watching spaceships from a prone position while I chewed on my grandmother's outrageous homemade taffy, and looking through the fence in interest when gang members shot one another in the apartments next door. Childhood is never remembered accurately, because it is an idyllic period of rest for the mind, while inside adulthood evolves and shapes itself against the battery of outside influences innocent children are unaware they are soaking in. The ugly mutation bursts forth and takes command of all stations at various times for everyone. I know mine came exceptionally early. This was due mostly to a decision of my pater familias.
He arrived in a broken down car. It had wheels. The engine didn't sound like an engine. It clattered along the street, as if it was going to drop out of the chassis at any moment, and when shut off gave a bang louder than the small-caliber weapons of our neighbors.
"What's this?" he demanded as he hauled my grandmother onto the front porch by her housedress. He was brandishing a letter in her shaky hand.
"Na, la," she trilled before answering. "I told you. Too much, too much money."
"Fucking a right you told me," my father replied. "What is this bullshit you're trying to pull, Laverne?"
"Shine, la non," she said in an operatic fashion. "The baby eats too much. The baby is too big. The baby makes me spend things." She always referred to money, be it credit-cash cards, oolong or uncut diamonds as things.
"No!" said my father in broad, vaudeville shock. He slammed the woman into the doorframe. "I get that you're broke and can't feed the kid no more. I get that just fine. What I don't get is that you have the fucking nerve to send me this fucking handwritten dear Abby bullshit and suggest I take the goddamn brat back in like I was a fucking orphanage."
"Your baby, you spend," said my grandmother rather matter-of-factly.
"Like hell," said my father, and spat on her. He crumpled the letter and dropped it on her worn out slippers. "I already got a plan," he said as he advanced into the house, grabbed me by the arm and hauled me into my bedroom. "Pack your shit, junior. You're movin' out."
You have already surmised I did not go to a happy homecoming. Mars was never a very law-abiding place, not from the first terraformers who were mostly convicts that landed here to make the place habitable. The sounds of the street where I was landed were cars causing greenish-brow shit, vomit and piss-filled water to slosh into gutters choked with garbage. They were the fat, Belgian cook of my new home, the home I had been sold to, screaming in his native language at a kitchen girl. They were doors slamming and women crying. I didn't hear the clackety engine of my father's car again. In point of fact, I never heard from my parents again, period.
I know that sordid details are appreciated, but I reserve the right to use discretion. There is a point where telling of my life in this period would simply become a shameless prick tease. I use that term in its broadest sense, women in my new home were often titillated as well. Yes, to be sterile and matter of fact about the whole thing, I was a handsome, eerie child. I lived in a room with eight other equally handsome boys and at night, when the sounds of my home and my street changed from sobs, screams and pain-sounds, each of which I memorized and wove into the fabric of my existence, to the drunken pleasure-sounds of wealthy patrons who could not see the peeling paint, the smeared shit and the servicing woman's black eye through her heavy makeup—at night I performed a variety of unspeakable anatomical acts for a variety of people, the majority of whom I sincerely hope are roasting in the most exquisite sort of hell Dante ever dreamt of.
I matured in my new home. I was not fed well and consequently cannot keep any weight on even now, when I can feed like an Orwellian pig at trough. As I began to age and my limbs began to extend, my eyes to harden and my face to lose its youthful beauty and I suppose ability to arouse excitement in clients, I was relegated more and more to the kitchen under the Belgian and his ex-kitchen-girl wife, who always seemed to be pregnant, drunk and screaming over the sizzling sounds of meat and vegetables. I scrubbed up grease, blood and dropped food waste, dipping my hands into a wooden bucket of water so hot that they gave off just the faintest sizzle. I would often play when bored, seeing how long I could hold them in and how loud that sizzle would become. The cook beat me at first, but one night, after hours, he caught me at my game. He stared at me for a long moment and I suppose I stared back. I removed my hands from the water after a time and examined the two fresh blisters popping out. He murmured something, his belly quivering. Shaking his head, he backed out of the room, still quaking and quivering and muttering. The beatings ceased. I wonder if it was out of some silly civilized fear of the ancient art of self-inflicted pain, or more probably because he simply realized that hitting me on the back with a broomstick a few times wasn't really very effective by comparison.
One evening two well-dressed gentlemen came into my home. They arrived in a hovercraft. It made a whooshing sound, like a winter wind trying to pry the house apart. One man was old and obese, the very cliché of most of our customers. The other was small and light, with a crinkled face like a Shar-Pei dog. His eyes were quick and black under the folds of his brow. This man made no sounds. It was why I noticed him.
Later on, there was shooting. I had never been close to gunfire, and while I was no stranger to it I stopped my scrubbing to watch. Several other well-dressed men were shooting at the fat man. The dog-man with the silence and the quick eyes was shooting back, shielding the fat man rather comically with his comparably tiny frame. I noticed the Belgian taking a silenced pistol out of his stained apron and aim at the dog-man's back. I did what came naturally, left my mopping duties, took up a paring knife and jammed it into the Belgian's back between his second and third rib. The sound was sucking, low and wet, as a fat man tried to breath through a punctured lung. After seeing the Belgian carve up thousands of chickens, such a well-placed jab was second nature.
The second group of well-dressed men shot at me then. I fell over and spilled my mopping bucket all over the floor. Dirty water ran away into the corners and soaked my hair dark gray. Blood (from me) added to the mixture and made me nearly a brunette. The dog-man came after a time and stood over me. "What's your name?" he asked.
I told him, and he shook his head once. "No. That doesn't fit you." He took the paring knife out of the cook and looked at it. "You like the blades, huh?" I think I managed to nod before I passed out.
His name was Mao Yenrai, and he was a bodyguard and assassin for the Red Dragon syndicate, under the fat man whose life I had narrowly saved. The fat man's name was Tao, but he was known in the syndicate as 'The Buddha'. He really was exceptionally obese, and wheezed when he walked. His sounds were always the creaking shoe leather of his abused footwear and that constant, desperate wheezing. The next morning I was shaken awake by the head madam of the house, and found to my surprise that I was in her bedroom, in her bed, in a clean bathrobe with my shoulder bandaged. She told to pack my things up and go downstairs. I had been purchased, she said with a leer, by one of her best customers, and she hoped that I had a gay old time being his personal toy, no pun intended. I made up my mind then I was going to bolt. I was fourteen, and a boy of my age could make it on the streets of Mars with relative ease. I determined that I would never again be violated in body or spirit by anyone. I put the sum total of my life into a greasy paper bag and went to the battered chest of drawers at the end of the boy's sleeping room. It contained clothing and makeup for when one of our customers desired a boy who didn't look like a boy. I found a chopstick used for binding up hair. It was lacquered. It was sharp. It was no Masamune blade, or even a dull pairing knife, but it would draw blood. I tucked it up my sleeve and went downstairs like a good little boy.
Mao was waiting by a limousine at the curb. I was surprised to see him again, to say the least. He beckoned to me once. "Over here, boy." The chopstick slipped into my grasp. If he grabs for me, I will kill him. The thought came clearly and emotionlessly to my mind. Already, I was planning my escape route. From running errands, I knew the red light district like the back of my hand. I could get away from a fat man and his traitorous underling who last night had been the first one to treat me as human in my memory. I could disappear and take a new name and cease to exist in the form I did now. "Are you deaf?" Mao asked, taking a step towards me. He smiled slightly. "I know from last night you're not. So get over here and get in the car." I backed up slightly. My first mistake. Showing fear, showing weakness, just drives your pursuer on. Mao saw the chopstick. He looked almost hurt. "Jesus, kid." He lowered his hands. "I didn't mean it like that. Look," he took out a cigarette from his suit jacket and lit it in a practiced gesture with a match against his thumbnail, "I'm not here to haul to off to be somebody's fuck toy, okay? Buying you at your purchase price was the only way I could get that old bat in there to let you come with us." He exhaled and looked me dead in the eye. I remember feeling myself suspended, knowing that this moment was the be-all, end-all of my life. I knew that what Mao said next would change me, for better or for worse, forever. "You saved my boss's life last night," Mao said. "Point of fact, you saved mine too, and we're both grateful." He flicked the cigarette into the choked gutter, where it sizzled out. "You stabbed that guy like a pig and you didn't blink. From a kid your age, that takes something special. We can use you." He stepped back and opened the limo door. I could see the silhouette of the fat man inside. My insides roiled with a thousand bad memories, but they already seemed so far away. "My people can use you," said Mao. "And we'd like to take you in and teach you a few things. Think you wanna come on board?" I could hear the fat man wheezing over the limousines almost soundless idle. I knew I was going to say yes eons before it came out of my mouth.
"Okay." Not my most eloquent response, but it got the job done. Stay here in this place until I was worn out and used up, one of the ghosts that haunted a tiny upstairs room? Or go with the man who looked like a dog and who's mind seemed to work in the same strange way mine did, and leave here forever.
Simple choice. Simple answer.
When I left my childhood place I left everything behind, and I do mean everything, from the bag of clothes I dropped on the curb to my name and my identity. Sitting in the limo with Mao and the fat man, listening to Mao extol me in his raspy smoker's voice with the hint of an accent from his native Hong Kong, I felt myself melt away and a new voice being inside my head. The voice was an almost soundless whisper, but it told me such things. Wonderful, terrible things that frightened me a great deal but excited me more.
"This kid is the one," said Mao to the fat man. "If he can do what he did last night on a regular basis, we might have a real winner on our hands." The fat man nodded agreement. Tao didn't talk much, because his high-pitched voice embarrassed him. Mao punched me on the arm with karate-hardened knuckles. It was a firm, friendly gesture and nothing more. The first I had ever experienced. He grinned at Tao. "He's vicious."
Significance can be found even in the smallest things.
From that day to this there have been sounds in my life. Too many to count, too thousands many. I've heard screams and shots, heard blood spurt and the dying moan. I've heard voices, including my own. I've heard hope and pain and hate and love and betrayal, and sometimes I wonder if even back then there was something, some indicator that led to this moment where the total of all I've done would be staring at me, back from the dead. Then my reflective second breaks and I lash out with my sword, a Masamune blade, of course. It's all back to survival and surviving. The sounds are a grunt of pain, not mine. The sounds are breaking glass. The sounds are a cold, barren wind whipping through the jagged opening a man's body has made. The sounds are a high, light clink on the stone floor where I'm standing and my own gasp of realization, cut short. The sound is an explosion. The sound is oblivion.
The sound is silence.
THE HIGH NOTE IS NOT THE ONLY THING…