I see a red door and I
want it painted black
No colors anymore I want them to turn black
Paint it Black – Rolling Stones
The guest apartment, spacious and artfully appointed, was quiet after the detectives left, and Maginot, Clara, former war correspondent, had broken the mirror in the bathroom.
She winced, and picked out a thin shard of glass from just between her proximal and middle phalanx with her fingernails. The blood ran, bright in the Ganymede afternoon, and stained the porcelain sink a sanguine color. She ran water to wash the sink bowl and squeezed toilet paper over this biggest of cuts.
"What the hell was that? I heard something break—"
Her father stuck his head in and saw the shattered mirror.
"Clara—"
"It's fine," she snapped, then controlled herself. "I'll pay for the mirror, dad."
"Let me see," he said, and grabbed the wrist of her injured hand. "What happened?" He turned over her wrist to check for more cuts; the blood stood out sharply against the skin.
"I hit the mirror," Maginot admitted, a little balefully. She was ashamed of herself.
"What'd you do that for?"
She hesitated, looked away at the shower head.
"Don't worry about it."
Her father scowled at her, but didn't press the subject. Leave her to her own business, and it had sounded serious. The detectives had questioned her for four summat hours, and the mirror was trivial.
"You might have to have this sewed up," he advised. "It's pretty deep."
"...Great. Can you do it?"
Ryan Maginot moved her sleeve back, held his daughter's hand under the cold tap.
"Sure. Hang on a second and I'll go get the stuff. It's gonna hurt like hell, though." The benefits of having someone related to you with a medical degree were sometimes priceless.
"It hurts like hell now."
"Then I guess you should have thought of that beforehand, huh?" He was laughing at her.
"Oh, really?" she shot back, rolling her eyes, a rather weary smile on her face.
When she took a personal leave of absence from the Spectator, Maginot had done so at the urging of friends and her father, who would not normally have suffered his adult daughter returning to live at home for any period of time.
There was something not right with her, something that had been unscrewed and by necessity bottled up on Titan. Strange images flitted through her head, voices and faces, and so many sounds. Mostly this was expected; she was young and the war had affected her like it had everyone else that it touched.
She had dealt with it relatively well; therapy and support did its trick. The only visible remainder was a long and grisly burn scar that ran from just to the left of her right eye and wrapped around her midsection; cosmetic surgery had taken away much of the damage but it was still quite ugly and obvious.
They had hailed her as a hero when she came home, but for most of these proceedings she had been under heavy sedation and unconscious; the grenade had virtually burned off her skin. She didn't like what she woke up to.
"How you doing?" Ryan Maginot asked, and Clara jumped, startled.
"Ummm...I'm fine," she said, and she was. It all stung like a bitch, but the penguin-shaped stress ball was helping.
On the plus side, anything by comparison doesn't hurt much after that damn grenade, she thought, and then could have rolled her eyes right out.
"You doing alright? I mean on the whole," he asked. "You seem a little depressed."
More than usual, she amended for him.
"I'm just tired," she said. "Those damn detectives..."
He paused in working the nylon thread, and looked up at her.
"...Should I not have let them in?"
"Huh. I think I'd have had to talk with them eventually," she said, sighing. "Unavoidable."
"What did they want?"
"About some stuff on Titan," she said quietly. "About a few people in the battalion I was assigned to."
There was a picture on the mantel that Clara had sent from the battlefield; its resolution appeared gritty, but that was just the sandstorm. Ryan Maginot glanced at it.
"You only know their faces," Clara continued morosely. "Gren...Gren's dead. Well, he died a while ago but they're only just now getting around to doing anything about it. I was notified by a mutual friend from back then, who caught the obituary."
"What? Then why were they here? Surely that can't take fou—I'm sorry, did that hurt?"
"Just finish it, okay?" Clara hissed, gritting her teeth.
"Alright," he said, cautiously. Clara was perched over the dining table, a towel and newspaper underneath her and a bright lamp over her hand. It was bleeding, but she wasn't getting lightheaded yet. She guessed she just failed to hit any vital veins or arteries.
"They weren't asking about Gren," she grunted. "They were asking about another guy. Apparently I'm the only one other than a few dead men who remember him much, that they can find.
"He was like some goddamned ghost. Name was Vicious and I never knew if he had a last one."
"You said something about a Gren, once, right? That was the guy indicted on espionage charges."
Maginot nodded.
"Never knew a guy with a longer name," she said. "He always maintained that he was totally innocent...then he escaped prison and dropped off the face of the solar system. They found him in space...dead. Internal bleeding, they told me. That wasn't in the obituary. I just found out today..."
"...They think this Vicious guy killed Gren?"
"It's possible," Clara said, and shrugged, though she regretted the movement instantly.
"What do you think?"
Her eyes narrowed in consideration.
"I don't know what I think. Now that I've thought about it...I never felt like I actually knew Vicious at all and Gren...Gren, if he was lying his ass off after all, I didn't know him at all. I can't say."
"Is that a good answer, for them?"
She shrugged, and leaned her chin on her palm. The blood crisscrossed her hand and fingers, a dripping spider's web.
"I don't have anything else to say."
With three stitches, the cut was closed and the bleeding minimized. Ryan Maginot washed the blood off, applied alcohol-smelling antiseptic—Clara swore shrilly—and wrapped her hand and fingers up with gauze and tape.
"There you go—all done."
Clara smiled grimly, reminded of field surgery on the fly and the fucking endless sand. If you got shot and the sand blasted it, it was likely to be the end of you. It would collect. She'd fallen into a foxhole and the wood-supported entrance had collapsed in on itself; that had saved her.
They cleaned up the mess and the house returned to its former quietness.
The living room was large and wide, very bright and pink-orange on a sunny day with skylights and French doors leading out onto a balcony that overlooked Ganymede's oceans. In the middle was a coffee table flanked by overstuffed couches and shelves lined with little limoge boxes and teapots. This had been Mica Maginot's room.
On the mantelpiece was a gathering of photographs; some were of Clara and her siblings growing up and others of Mica, Clara's mother. Some were of Clara's grandparents, and a few were very, very old.
One stood out to her as she approached the marble; it was tinted the shade of sand, grainy if the resolution was examined, but the faces quickly stung her thoughts. Clara had been surprised that it made it to the mantel, at least at her father's house. It would have made more sense if it were so prominently displayed in her own home.
She'd have to ask about that, later.
The arbitrary snapshot was of five people; two of which hadn't known they were being photographed, one clearly enamored with the idea and the last two apparently sitting on the fence.
"What the hell do you think you're doing, Stuttgart? Put that fuckin' thing away! The flash'll..."
She could hear the voice fairly clearly, though lately it had been fading away. It wasn't Vicious or Gren, and the man wasn't in the photograph. For the record, he'd been killed early the next Titan day—which meant, on average, that about 9 Earth days had passed. Titan's rotational period had sped up since its terraformation.
Vicious was sitting to the side, on a crate half covered in sand, his Heckler & Koch G36 propped up against his shoulder. She wondered what he was drinking; his face was obscured by the standard tin cup. Gren was standing over a hastily erected shelter, watching an in-progress card game. Clara was a part of this card game and losing desperately with help from Kreig, squatting behind her. Her opponent...she didn't know his name.
She hadn't been there for the end of the war. The grenade had taken care of that.
The one time I didn't do what the son of a bitch told me...
A little sharply, mindful of her hand, Clara turned away and sat down in the couch. In the background, if she really tried, she could hear the whine of spacecraft and boats. It was a little disconcerting, it made her a little dizzy.
She hadn't wanted the assignment, after all.
"I'm going to get killed out there!"
Roger Strom, her boss, had scoffed and shoved a piece of paper into her hands.
"Do you want to go or not? It could really help your career to take off. Major points on your résumé, Clara, do you really want to pass it up?"
He wanted a splendid little war in typewriter font, and was dangling the proverbial carrot in front of her nose. Do you want to keep doing piddly little shit stories and wait for a miracle, or do you want to play Russian Roulette?
She could remember his nose and the way his jacket collar was just out of place, and the little grin on his mouth. She was deliriously reminded of her slimy twelfth grade teacher.
"If you don't want to go, I'm sure Erika will..."
He was manipulating her, and she'd known it very well at the time. It was all her fault for falling for it.
Clara tilted her head back and winced as a shriek penetrated her thoughts. It wasn't real, now. It had taken her this long to tell the difference and it still didn't matter.
It was the sound of a mortar falling and, now, it wasn't accompanied with the usual crash and shudder, the showering of sand—always the sand—and the blast of hot wind and shrapnel.
Paint it Black
Gren, Vicious, and the Titan war. From the eyes of someone who knew them both; tracing the connections between Titan and Callisto. Post Bebop. No pairings.
I got tired of the lack of Gren-and-Vicious-on-Titan fics in general. And, because the whole 'mulling in the trenches while smoking cigarettes (especially since that was a shit idea considering that was how the enemy figured out where you head was)' concept has been done a lot in what there is, I'm going from a different angle. Easily manipulated and naïve little puppets. So much joy. Hell, there's not even any implied pairings in this fic.
Lalalala. We'll actually do something useful in the next chapter rather than be stupid and break mirrors just because someone is a little stressed out.
God, I'm going to get in so much shit for using an OC in this. That's okay. I'd probably deserve it, after all. Spork if you must, but I'd love a link. Not to get angry, but I think I'd laugh right along with you. Hehe.
Besides. This is only just recently past the end of CB. Who knows if I'm actually going to admit anyone's really dead.
Good or bad, I'd love to hear what you have to say!