Disclaimer: yadda-yadda-don't-own-yadda-yadda-please-don't-sue.
A/N: Oh-Em-Gee! This is my 10th chapter! What on earth should I do for this milestone in fanfiction-author-dom? Anybody have any ideas?
Going down the rabbit hole had been less than a magical experience for Shilo. She wondered if Alice had been disillusioned by her trip to Wonderland. Wonderland, for Shilo, currently involved a sewer pipe.
"Hm…" Graverobber's voice from behind her sounded oddly tinny in the pipe they were currently crawling through.
"What?" Shilo asked tightly. "So help me, Graverobber, if you tell me we're going in the wrong direction…" She stopped crawling forward, waiting for Graverobber to answer her.
His chuckle echoed eerily in the small space. "Considering this particular pipe has no junctions, I'd say that it'd take an extraordinary feat of skill and flexibility to get turned around in here, Sparrow."
His hand tapped the back of her calf, an unspoken indication to continue forward, but Shilo ignored the signal. Her hands and knees were aching from the long crawl they'd been doing, and she wanted a rest.
"Then what?" she asked.
"What, what?" Graverobber asked lazily. Shilo could practically hear the smirk in his voice; tinny echo or not.
"You 'hm'ed. What were you 'hm'ing about?"
"Ah. That." He said simply.
"Well?" she asked.
"I'm thinking." Graverobber replied ambiguously.
Shilo impatiently waited for him to say more. She shifted her weight, trying to relieve the ache in her knees. There wasn't much else to do in the pitch darkness of the pipe.
In the darkness, Graverobber's hand encircled Shilo's ankle. It rested there for a moment before lightly trailing up her let to her calf again. Then, slowly, his hand trailed up to the back of her knee. Shilo blushed and resisted the urge to shiver from the seemingly intimate touch.
In a single moment, the hand on her knee was suddenly on her ass, and she froze for a moment before a rough shove made her yelp and stumble forward.
"Keep moving, kid." Graverobber's voice was laced with amusement.
Something seemed to be caught in Shilo's throat and she had to clear her throat in order to speak. "What was that for?" She demanded in a high voice that had been tightened with nerves.
"I was verifying that you actually stole a pair of my pants."
Shilo spluttered for a moment. "Well…I mean…" Indignation managed to overpower her initial feeling of mortification and she was able to speak without stuttering. "You told me to find a pair of pants to wear!"
Graverobber chuckled and it echoed in the pipe. "Figured you'd grab your own pants back."
"The ones covered in vomit?" Shilo asked archly.
"Could have snuck into the apartment across from mine. The transvestite who lives there has a very nice selection of panties, I bet she wouldn't have minded getting you-" Graverobber informed her mischievously, with far too much delight in his voice.
"Okay!" Shilo interrupted. "I'm sorry I stole your pants. Can we drop the subject now?"
"Those were my favorite pair of pants, you know." He said, but the seriousness of his statement was undermined by the amusement that laced his voice.
"Oh yeah, well… you… assaulted my favorite lamp." Shilo's face burned at the lameness of her comeback as soon as she'd said it.
Graverobber was cracking up behind her. "Your lamp? Your favorite lamp?" he gasped out. "Well, I'm so sorry I assaulted your favorite lamp with my nakedness." And then he was gasping in laughter again.
Shilo contemplated thumping her head into the slime covered pipe before deciding that having green muck on her forehead really would kill the last bit of dignity she had left.
Instead, Shilo ignored his laughing ass and started crawling forward again. If she never saw another sewer pipe again, it'd be too soon.
She contemplated whether Graverobber really was a genius mastermind or if he was just insane. His escape tunnel turned out to be a modified access panel to the pipes and wires inside the wall. After going down three narrow and falling apart ladders to get between floors, they'd finally arrived safely on the ground floor. Shilo would have been happy to simply escape onto the streets from that point, but Graverobber had different ideas. He'd pulled aside a shower of bright and patched wires to reveal a sewer drain.
Which led Shilo to her current predicament; crawling around in a sewer pipe on hands and knees that were slowly freezing in the frigid water that was occasionally present in the pipe's bottom.
"How much farther do we have to crawl around in this sewer pipe?" Shilo asked over her shoulder.
"Till we hit a junction." Graverobber replied.
"And how far is that?" Shilo asked wearily.
"Well, let me consult my invisible sewer map with my invisible distance counter so I can see how far we've traveled."
Shilo gritted her teeth and resisted an urge to kick Graverobber in the teeth.
"You could have just said you didn't know." She muttered.
"Actually, when I'm woken up in the mornings by shit-heads breaking down my door, I have a physical imperative to use sarcasm for the rest of the day."
-CRUNCH-
Shilo's hand crunched through something gooey and a whiff of the most god awful smell hit her nose.
"Ugh!" Shilo recoiled and shook her hand.
"What is it?" Graverobber asked from behind her when she'd stopped again.
"I don't know!" Shilo frantically shook her hand, trying to get the last of the putrid mess off her hand.
Graverobber sighed from behind her and a moment later, a faint blue light was glowing over her shoulder.
"Tha-" Shilo started to thank Graverobber when she glanced down and saw what she'd put her hand through.
Shilo screamed and tried to scramble backwards, frantically rubbing her hand on the pipe's walls, trying to scrape off the rest of the dead man's face off her hand. Hysteria started to set in and Shilo felt the tell-tale tightening of her chest that indicated a panic attack was eminent, and then everything went blank.
"What the hell, Sparrow?" Graverobber asked. "Hey, stop that! There isn't enough room for you to try to- Oh." He saw what had started Shilo's screams. Considering Shilo's screams and flailing limbs, he decided that making a joke about not losing her head would be in bad taste.
Shilo's foot scraped down Graverobber's chest as she continued flailing and trying to back up. Her screams were starting to make his ears ring. He tried to wedge himself to the side so she could flail past him, but the pipe was too small. He shuffled backwards, Shilo plastered to him as she frantically took advantage of the ability to back away from the severed and now squished rotting head.
"Shilo, calm down!" Graverobber tried to yell over her screams. "Shilo!"
Shilo gave no indication of hearing him.
After the third time Graverobber had to avoid having his head kicked in by Shilo, he grabbed her legs and pulled her backwards, making her legs collapse and he surged forward and tackled her, pinning her body down with his heavier weight.
Shilo's screams had cut off with the air being knocked out of her lungs, and for a few blissful seconds, silence echoed in the pipe.
Then Shilo started struggling. She wiggled and gasped and seemed to still be trying to scramble backwards- or maybe trying to scrape her palms on the pipe's floor.
Graverobber cursed and grabbed Shilo's shoulders and wrenched her around until her back was to the floor and she was facing him.
The faint blue light from the discarded zydrate bottle only illuminated half of Shilo's face, but it was enough for Graverobber to see Shilo's wide blank eyes, the tears that streaked her cheeks and the gasping heaving sobs she was currently issuing from her silent mouth.
Graverobber recognized the signs of hysteria in Shilo and knew he needed to get her calmed down.
Graverobber's thumbs smoothed over Shilo's cheeks; her tears made him have heartburn, so he wanted to get rid of those first.
"Hey, hey, calm down." Graverobber commanded softly. "Look at me, Shilo." A tears fell from the corner of Shilo's eye and Graverobber continued talking. "It's all right. Everything's going to be fine, Shilo. I'm right here."
Shilo blinked and while she was still silently sobbing, something in her eyes seemed to be indicating that she was hearing him on some level, even if she wasn't fully aware yet.
"That's right." Graverobber soothed. "I'm right here. You're okay. You're going to be just fine."
Small cold hands latched onto the front of Graverobber's shirt and twisted it into a death grip.
"Good girl. You're gonna be okay. Just keep breathing." Graverobber continued talking, one of his hands was still stroking Shilo's face, the other was hesitantly smoothing over the hair at Shilo's temple. "I'm right here, just breathe with me."
Shilo gave another small sob, and her hands twisted deeper in Graverobber's shirt before they fell away. Her eyes were no longer blank.
Graverobber gave a small smirk. "There you are, Sparrow." His hands stopped stroking Shilo's face and hair and he focused on her eyes. "How're you doing?" he asked her softly.
"Th- there was…" Shilo's voice wobbled.
"Don't think about that." Graverobber cut her off.
"It- it was all over my- my hand…" Shilo said with hitching breaths. Another tear fell from the corner of her eye and Graverobber's fingertips caught it before it hit her hairline.
Shilo blinked at the unexpected gesture.
"Don't worry about that." Graverobber said with a hint of wryness on his voice. "You've effectively transferred whatever was on your hand onto my shirt."
For a moment, Shilo just goggled at Graverobber.
"How can you joke like that?" she asked in a pained voice.
Graverobber shrugged. "Everybody dies, everybody rots. Wouldn't be the first time I've gotten dead people all over my clothes."
"Can we go home now?" Shilo asked in a small voice.
"As soon as you're ready to start moving again." Graverobber promised.
"Do we have to go past the…" Shilo swallowed. "…the head?" she asked.
Graverobber just raised an eyebrow. "It's either that or you can go see if those GEnforcers can be swayed by your pretty doe eyes." Shilo's eyebrows raised in surprise at the compliment and Graverobber amended, "Who knows, they might find puffy bloodshot eyes attractive."
Shilo snorted and closed her eyes. "Nobody finds puffy eyes attractive." She informed him.
Graverobber chuckled and gently tapped her nose with his fingertip. "Now you're just fishing for a compliment." He told her. "But I will admit that the green algae on your forehead is particularly fetching."
Shilo, eyes still closed, frowned and swiped her forearm across her forehead.
"You missed." Graverobber sweetly informed her. "Now, what do you say you get up and we get the fuck out of this hellhole?"
"I don't want be in front anymore." Shilo told him.
"That's fine. I'll lead. We're almost to the junction anyways." And with that, Graverobber heaved himself up and carefully crawled over Shilo.
Shilo waited until Graverobber was past her before she rolled over and pulled herself up onto her hands and knees again and crawled after Graverobber.
For a moment, Shilo thought she wouldn't be able to crawl past the squished head, but when she came to the place where she'd found the head, it was carefully pushed to the side and what looked like a dingy handkerchief was draped over the remains. Shilo shuddered and still felt the phantom sensation of the face squishing underneath her hand. She knew that as soon as she got home, she was scrubbing her hand with bleach until the phantom sensation went away.
Graverobber was slightly further down the tunnel, but the faint blue light from the zydrate bottle Shilo carried in her hand was enough to faintly illuminate his face when he turned and looked over his shoulder at her.
"Oh, and Sparrow?" Graverobber said with a laugh. "Try not to stare at my ass."
AN: Okay! Here's the next chapter. Thanks to everyone for their patience. And a special thanks goes out to Pupten whose nice review gave me the jumpstart needed for me to finish off this chapter. This chapter was being incredibly difficult near the middle. I hope it doesn't show. : P
As always, reviews are the fuel I need to make more chapters, so if you like or dislike the chapters and/or the fic, feel free to drop me a line!