Irregular Orbit
Summary #6: All shooting stars were destined to crash someday.
Pairing: Charlie MacDonald/Bad Girl, during NMH2
I cannot believe it's been more than two years since I've last updated this fanfic. I submitted the first chapter when I was a sixteen-year-old junior in high school! Anyway, this content is simply a repost from my blog. I am fond of this particular fanfic, so I hope to add new chapters to it eventually (preferably before the release of No More Heroes 3 in fifteen to twenty-five years).
The universe had always been defined by a perpetual forward movement — inertia was the term. All planets needed a balanced forward speed to remain in orbit, along with a considerable pull from a larger body to keep them from reaching escape velocity and running wild throughout the solar system. Not too much pull, or the moving object would be yanked down by the bigger mass' gravitational field and plummet.
That was why prehistoric spaceships were built to resemble straight lines. Before the twenty-first century, there wasn't enough fuel for astronauts to perform Immelmann turns if they happened to veer off course. Astrophysicists relied on the gravitational pull of rest stop planets to direct their ships to the correct destination. Similarly to a frisbee, a curved ship would have a greater percentage of deviation from the predetermined path. In frat boy terms, freedom was fucking terrifying. At least in space.
All free space bodies, the irregulars, were slated for imminent destruction. All shooting stars were destined to crash someday. Their only salvation was finding that one special rock, the one with a gravitational field strong yet gentle enough to keep them in orbit. Cosmic symbiosis.
Such was the essence of teamwork.
No matter how much denial he subjected himself to, his entire life had been dominated by that perfect balance. Football was a game of forward motions constricted by an external force — a quarterback's O-line guys had to be just as tough, if not tougher, than the other team's defensive ends. It was the crack in that balance, the gap in an offensive line, which exposed the quarterback to ruination and a possible visit to the trainer.
In the cockpit of his battle mech, there was an equal amount of seats to each side of the pilot's chair. Twelve to his left and twelve to his right, all pointing towards him rather than the interface. A chair for all twenty-four of his cheerleaders. "A girl for every hour," his pit crew used to remark.
Sometimes, he likened his own existence to a computer program. Most people thought of programs as green text scampering across a black screen or movie hackers somehow gaining access to a host server just by pounding away at a keyboard for a few minutes. Really, all software was just uniform blocks of text entered into a processor. Unlike spoken languages, however, these codes had to be exact. A single error could fuck up the entire program. Just like how a single deviation could fuck up a spaceship's flight path and get everyone killed.
Such was life.
The darkened skin underneath his eyes indicated that the jock hadn't slept well in years, maybe even ever. As cliche as it sounded, he had been plagued by the same nightmare for the past two years now, ever since he had joined that stupid killers' association. Each time, he'd lose a duel with another mech pilot, who would then fling the limp corpse of his robot out of Earth's atmosphere before killing him and his girls in a magnificent explosion. No matter what maneuvers he'd change or how hard he'd try to beat him, every dream ended the exact same way — he would die. Just like that, he wouldn't exist anymore. Everyone would forget about him.
Then, the hulking football player would wake up with a jolt, sweating all over his sheets and the other person in his bed. The girl of the hour would have to spend the entire morning holding the monstrous jock, gently reassuring him that he wasn't going to die in such a terrible way. Not that he wasn't going to die in there, in the ranks. Everyone expected to die. It was just that — he didn't want to die in space. He feared nothing in their universe but that possibility.
Death was the ultimate gamechanger. The overtime to end all overtimes. There was no order or balance to the referee of life, the ghastly man in the black-and-white striped shirt who waited with that damn whistle stuffed in his mouth. He sometimes took people for no reason at all. To where? Maybe to the place all astronauts went after their homebase made a critical error and sent them a one-way ticket to fuck-all. He envied old Captain Vladimir a little. Somehow, he had returned from that unknown dimension. Alive? That was questionable.
In his deepest dreams, he glimpsed into that abyss. It wasn't as dreary as he had imagined. No lead coffins full of lava or three-headed ice demons. Hell was a DMV waiting room full of people, some of them deformed beyond human comprehension. Big-eyed, anime chicks with longswords jutting out of their chests sitting next to generic soldiers missing parts of their heads. One time, he had even seen that Skelter Helter guy, who walked in holding his decapitated head underneath one arm.
"Travis says you're still a douche," gurgled the head to another head, this one belonging to a man who looked to be his older brother.
He didn't want to interrupt the brothers' reunion, and he wasn't too fond of the idea of taking a seat next to Mr. Copeland's still-squirting bottom half; so he opted for two chairs next to the most chill-looking person there. She looked less fatally injured than the other dead people, sporting only a bright red gash just underneath her very prominent bust. The wound went all the way through her and exited her back, but it wasn't wide enough to see the wall on the other side. He figured that this was advantageous for him — it would suck to toss up his protein shake on his first day in Hell.
He thought himself a little biased. She resembled his cheerleaders in a sense, only she was shorter and a lot more bodacious. He often found himself with a bird's eye view of her massive footballs, which thankfully weren't harmed by the puncture wound. The lady liked to guzzle liquor from a silver flask and had a little tag on her pink bodice with the name "Becky" written on it.
Becky scoffed at most everything he said and called him "kid" a lot, even though she was only one or two years older. Sometimes, she'd oblige him with a little childish flirting. She had taught him how to smoke a cigarette. They had even made out a couple of times in the waiting room, more from boredom rather than anything else. Not that he didn't find her righteously hot.
Those were the nicest periods of his nightmares. Like any other pretentious college student, Charlie rationalized that this Becky chick was a manifestation of his anxieties and repressed sexual desires. She was his mind trying to to compensate for all the stress hormones which had tainted his nightly escapades. After all, dreams were just the mind's attempt to piece repressed thoughts into a coherent narrative. He was sure that she had never existed.
Still, he daydreamed about Miss Becky often. When no one, not even his cheer squad, was around to watch him, he'd play anime dating sims in the darkness of his dorm room. Miss Becky was a devout connoisseur of dating sims. She had never admitted it, but she was afraid of driving people away with her habits. Dating sims allowed her to fail without hurting anyone. Allowed her to start over when she fucked up. Maybe they even provided her with a little companionship, as sad and pathetic as it was.
He had never enjoyed baseball before meeting Miss Becky. To the pro-gridiron surpremacist, baseball was a wimpy sport where nobody touched anybody else and everyone pissed all over the umpire. Most of his debates with Miss Becky about the overwhelming prepotence of American football usually ended with them agreeing to disagree. Still, he sneaked in a a game or two on his LBphone between work-outs and practices.
In real life, there were all sorts of chicks willing to pull aside his jock pouch with their teeth so he could scratch his softball-sized nuts, but all his mental energies were being poured into one girl — and she wasn't even real. Was that bizarre of him, the quarterback? The king of all 'roid monkeys? Legendary Twenty-five, Mr. Shotgun? Was he really any better than those grody psuedo-neckbeards living in motel rooms and jacking it to underage anime girls?
He had polished the trophy to Miss Becky before. Maybe.
Whenever he stuck his goalpost into some chick's field, he shut his eyes and imagined that it was Miss Becky who was underneath him, softly cooing his name like she did sometimes when they made out. He liked to imagine that the red lines marring his back were from Miss Becky, not the hipster chick from the organic foods market who had gotten a little carried away. He'd be lying in bed, occasionally turning to the side to make a comment about his day before realizing that a different girl was asleep next to him.
Charlie MacDonald was certifiably crazy. Grade Mac-D psychopath. They should have wrapped him up in a size XXXXXL straitjacket to prevent him from hurting more people and, to a lesser extent, himself. Normal college kids didn't fucking torpedo into space and form a combat-ready mobile suit with his adoring groupies. Normal college kids didn't even have groupies. Normal college kids discovered weird ways to masturbate and whined about their self-imposed loneliness and maintained shitty Internet blogs. Okay, so he did all of those, but every mundane, shitty thing seemed a lot more interesting after having taken a life. Murder was great! Murder was alright! Murder was the antithesis of balance and order! An irregular orbit in that confusing and short existence of his!
Here came another Chinese earthquake, motherfuckers.
Charlie waited within the shade of the tunnel leading to Destroy University's football stadium, priming himself for a spectacular entrance. In a few moments, Mr. Touchdown would show up, and then they would fight to the death. He prayed not to die in space.
Most importantly, he prayed for Miss Becky to be there after he passed over, if she even existed at all. She made death make sense for him, a person too young to keel over yet too dangerous to remain alive. They were alike in that sense. They were two shooting stars who happened to get dragged in by the same planet. They completed each other's orbits.
"Ranking roll call! Forty-nine, forty-eight, forty-seven…"
A countdown to liftoff.