Written for... somebody on dA. Wish I could remember who. EdgarxDevi drabbles.

1. ZOMBIE – THE CRANBERRIES

So.

He knew Johnny.

That was bad.

He had been killed by Johnny.

That was… worse?

She told Tenna that her zombie-date story wasn't crazy. Proof of zombies existed right fucking here, didn't it?

Except, well, he didn't seem too eager to rip her skull open and feast on her damaged brain matter. This was a good thing, as she had used the last of her mace on some hobo who'd gotten too grabby after she'd tossed a fiver his way. This was also weird.

The not-brain-eating, not the creepy hobo. That was just part of living downtown.

Had bad horror movies been lying to her all this time? Maybe.

After-reluctantly-talking with the dead-now-kind-of-alive-again man, she decided he was just too damn nice to be a brain-lusting roamer. Which again, was weird. She'd just come to terms with the idea that nice had died somewhere in her parents' generation amid all the pot and heroin and anti-Americanism and bellbottoms, and yet here was nice, buying her dinner at a nice restaurant, wearing nice clothes and a nice expression. An I-actually-am-treating-you-as-a-person-not-a-possible-sex-doll kind of nice.

"Can I buy you a drink?"

"I'm not big on liquor."

His grimacing-scar-smile grew bigger. "All the better then."

-

2. GUITAR – LADY SOVEREIGN

"Does it hurt?"

He shrugged. "Not anymore, no. When I first, um, woke up, yeah. God yes."

"So what happened to your finger?"

"Rats."

"Eeugh."

"Very. I think they got into some of my internal organs too."

"I don't think I want to know."

He watched her draw for a time, a strangely hungry look on his face. Aha. So he did have some authentic zombie qualities. Rather than brains, however, he seemed to go drooly for… art?

Weird.

"Can you? Draw?"

He laughed. "Oh god, you don't even want to see me try. Even when I still had all my fingers…" he trailed off, his lips thin, his good hand rubbing the ruin of the other. "I was damn good at piano though."

Was. Ouch.

-

3. O GREEN WORLD – GORILLAZ

Spring was… interesting in the city. Always had been. For one thing, all the rain really cleaned out the air, so instead of nailing your windows shut in a vain attempt to block out the stench, you could actually dare to let some fresh air into your apartment. The whole population seemed to go mad in the spring, and Devi wasn't sure if she could blame that on animal instincts, the various New Years parties going on depending what week you were going through the foreign corners of town, or the bad rap Aries got, or something else entirely. Whatever it was, Devi knew she wasn't exempt. Maybe she wasn't slavering for a good roll in the sheets, but /idamn/i if she didn't want something new.

Where was Edgar anyway?

-

4. M79 – VAMPIRE WEEKEND

"Dancing?"

"Why not?"

"Would you believe me if I had two left feet?" He smiled. "Literally?"

"Almost, but that wouldn't exempt you, greeny. I wanna dance, so let's hop to it."

"We're hopping now? Goodness, what one misses when you're lying shredded in a basement."

She made a face and turned the music up. "Do me a favor."

"Oh?"

She punched him in the chest, on a knot of thick-tender-scar tissue. Over his yelp, she said with a grin, "Shut the fuck up and dance."

Rubbing his chest and looking decidedly unwilling to "hop," he nevertheless stood to his full wow-you-are-fucking-tall height-her words, not his-and held out his hands. "Shall we?"

He looked tired. Maybe that was just the slight case of partial mummification talking. Maybe not.

"What, you wanna waltz?"

"Call me old-fashioned. I dare you."

"You're old-fashioned."

-

5. GENESIS – VNV NATION

They watched mankind's first steps on Mars with something slightly more attentive than total boredom. Edgar's face was inscrutable, and as usual, the scarring made it impossible for Devi to properly read him anyway. But his body seemed oddly stiff, and he certainly seemed a few million light-years away from the greatest moment in space exploration since… whatever the last greatest moment had been.

"Hey."

"Oats."

"Haha, you're so funny."

"Yes."

"Serious face, Edgar. I have a random and probably stupid question."

"Ooh, my favorite kind."

He was being uncharacteristically biting in his conversation. Maybe the brain-hunger was finally getting to him? Devi scooted a little farther from him on the couch.

"Do you breathe?"

"Um, yes?"

"But when we went swimming last week you stayed underwater for like ten fucking minutes."

"Yes…"

"What, are you that awesome you can turn your lungs on and off?"

He shrugged, and under the excited crackling of distant men making more history for children to groan over in school, she could hear his stitching creak. It was always an unsettling sound. "I'm still figuring this out. How about I get back to you on that after I experiment trying to drown myself in the kitchen sink tonight?"

"Ha."

" Where are you going with this?"

"Just wondering."

"I don't like that look."

"Just wondering if I could vault you into the vacuum of space and see if your head exploded or not."

"…I see."

"Hey, what's that face for?"

"You-nothing."

She rounded on him, all heavy lipstick and dyed hair too close to his milky eyes. "Don't start to say something and change your mind halfway through! What? What's going through that zombie brain of yours?"

"You… won't like it?"

"I don't like a lot of things. This is not news, Edgar."

He sighed. "You sounded a lot like him. That's all."

Edgar watched the rest of the Mars Landing by himself.

-

6. LOSE CONTROL – WALDO'S PEOPLE

"Sickness, huh?"

She punched him arm. "Shut up. I'm an artist, not a writer. The need to name brain-eating head voices does not happen often for visual people, okay? It's usually just really weird dreams."

"I certainly hope it doesn't. Then again, it might explain a few galleries I've paid too damn much for." He studied the pair of blood-crusted screws, and the shaky napkin doodle of a lumpy doll thing with scythe legs. "How the hell did it walk on those things?"

"Edgar. It was a hallucination."

"That could bleed, Devi." He pointed at the screws.

She rolled her eyes. "Can we just say 'fuck you' to physics for like, five minutes?"

"As if I haven't committed my life to flipping the bird to science as it is." He made a face. "After-life. Second life. Whatever, you know what I mean."
"Uh-huh." Devi was too busy scratching doodle-Sickness out of existence to debate the semantics of life/afterlife with a zombie. For good measure, she shredded the napkin, then studied it. "Do you have any matches?"

Edgar's eyebrows rose as much as the scar tissue would allow. "Wow, you really are scared of it."

She almost seemed to bare her teeth at him. "She fucking tried to eat my creativity! She almost got it too. If I hadn't gutted her-um." Devi's face suddenly expressed a dire need for a time machine. "That… came out wrong."

"You gutted a hallucination, huh?"

"Fuck you, don't look so smug."

Edgar ordered another round of coffee, and demanded-in his own way-the whole story.

-

(Skipped a couple songs that weren't in English/couldn't understand the lyrics of.)

-

7 FLAMES – VAST

She found a shoebox of dusty CDs in the back of the closet with dates going back to the mid-80s in Edgar's small, stiff handwriting. Her interest peaked, she secreted them out of his apartment and, in the solitude of her own, began to listen to them.

Every CD was a recording of a piano, often accompanied, often an accompaniment, often alone, always played by Edgar Vargas. And all but the oldest CDs are… beautiful. Even those first few years of awkward, stumbling fingers seem to bleed intensity out of the speakers. He didn't look the part of an artist, even in pictures where he'd still had a pulse, but God.

God.

She lay on the floor for hours, just… listening. Tenna called and was ignored. The neighbor yelled through the door to turn that shit down and was ignored. The mailman came and went and the check she'd been waiting on pins and needles for was ignored. All else seemed… excessive. Superfluous, when compared to such ability. Who could have known?

Music had never made her cry before.

She appeared at his door the next day, a list of viable music stores in hand. "You're going to play again," she said. Ordered. Begged. She wasn't even sure. Her heart would not stop twitching in her chest. She wondered if this dizziness, this tingling of her limbs, was comparable to a heart attack. It didn't hurt, but it scared her.

She wanted more.

-

8 I WAS A LANDSCAPE IN YOUR DREAM – OF MONTREAL

"What kind of comedy is this?"

She shrugged. "Tenna said it was funny."

"Well no wonder it isn't."

"Hey, give it a minute. I bet someone gets eaten by a swarm of crabs in the next five minutes."

"Death by a swarm of crabs is funny?"

"It can be?"

"Do crabs even swarm?"

"Fuck you, like you know what it's called."

"It's called looking it up."

She looked around overdramatically, going so far as to lift up the couch cushion and peering underneath. "Oh my goodness, what a shock! You don't have a computer, dipshit."

He pointed at his many bookshelves. "Have you forgotten what a dictionary is?"

She grimaced. "No thank you. Oh hey!"

"What?"

"Told ya. Swarm of crabs."

"Um. That is graphic. Really graphic." Edgar almost looked sick, which was an accomplishment for him.

"Hey, they're on fire now!"

Devi watched the rest of the National Geographic documentary by herself.

-

(Skipped a song without lyrics.)

-

(Skipped a Bjork song because it was too… yeah.)

-

9 NEVER – FLO RIDA

Edgar slammed his hands down against the keys and Devi almost knocked half her paints over in alarm. She cursed and ran out the doorway of her art room, dripping green all across the carpet. There in the living room lay the electric keyboard, discarded on the table, and Edgar sat on the couch, his mangled hands cradling his head.

"I can't do it," he said in a whisper.

"Bullshit." Devi was unsympathetic.

He raised his head to look at her, a haunted expression twisting his face. He stood and thrust his hands in her face. "They won't work! I try and play one thing and my fingers do something else entirely! They cramp up if I try too long, and-and-And I don't even have enough fingers to PLAY a piano, Devi!" He let his hands fall, and repeated himself. "I can't do it."

Devi was unimpressed.

"Edgar, there is a fine line between honest-to-God not being able to do something, and just being a fucking coward. I've seen some crazy shit-" She opted not to elaborate on said shit, "-and so far I've gotten through all of it. I've beaten all of it." She, in turn, thrust her hands in his face. Scars, far smaller yet striking against her white skin, defaced her palms. "Pain is temporary, Edgar. Do you really want all that music to just sit and rot in that zombie brain?"

His throat clicked.

-

10 JIGSAW – LADY SOVEREIGN

So.

He was a zombie.

This was weird.

This would also never go anywhere sexually. Just… Eeugh.

But that was okay. Because she didn't need to jump his bones. This was a relationship based on A) a mutual "friend," haha no and B) the need for someone who could understand.

Understand what, she doubted either of them quite knew. Whatever it was, some unconscious part of themselves knew what the fuck was going on even if the frontal lobes were a little late on the update, and that worked.

She didn't love easy. Plus, even though they never discussed it either way, Devi had a sneaking suspicion that Edgar was gay. Good for him. Maybe he'd find a zombie with similar interests one day and have a fabulous life of brain-sucking and curtain-picking with him. It.

Ugh, zombie semantics.

In the meantime, however, things were good. If she dared to think it, things were going very good.

Edgar was playing again. His ability was nowhere near where it had been before his unfortunate shredding incident, but he was progressing. Fast. You almost couldn't tell he was one finger short of a set these days.

In her spare time, which was rare now, she hunted for a piano. A real one, the kind that took up an ass ton of space and, if properly persuaded, could bring a nation to lift its head in wonder. She hadn't asked what had happened to his old one. Even she couldn't be that tasteless.

In the photographs, living!Edgar hadn't lived in such a shitty apartment.

Money was good these days. Better than ever, in fact. Pianos were expensive motherfuckers, but she could afford this, if she followed her penny pinching father's example for a time.

This wasn't love, but it was something. Something more than what she had had with any guy, ever. She refused to lose this.

So what if he was a zombie? Let's talk about interesting.

-

7Apr10