-Slit-
The nutter lifted my head and poured cola into me, hand fed me because I was too rusted out to care for myself, and I thanked her as the memory played itself out.
She'd look so confused, but Dune always smiled after a moment.
This is what I should have done all that time ago instead of spitting the maggot-tucker she fed me back into her face. I should have had some V8-damned gratitude, but I had not known then what would happen or what that lonesome hermit would one day mean to me.
I don't know when I forgot that I was just remembering, I thought I was granted a miracle, plunked back down in the past to do it over, do it right this time.
Dune was always shocked with me, like she somehow knew I wasn't supposed to be like this, thankful. I wasn't supposed to know what I knew, or care for her, or want to be near her, but after some time, she'd smile and crack fond jokes about her 'Soft Boy'.
She always deserved more than what she got out of me those first two years. She should have gotten better than a layabout, reeking, bitter sack of self pity. This time she got what little of me she could make good in the doomed version of our time together.
She was always smiling. She smiled when I'd try to show her how to fix her mother's motorcycle and the car, because this time I didn't lose patience and call her a mediocre pedestrian or kick her out the passenger side to walk home on own. She smiled when I told her, honestly, that she was chrome when she held a rifle in her hands. She smiled curiously, maybe not believing me at first, when I told her we shouldn't go out to settle the bet over whether or not a convoy was moving through the scav lands monthly.
I told her I had a bad feeling about it, that day and the convoy. She insisted that it was sunny and lovely out, argued that she wanted me to see for myself, but eventually, I convinced her to stay home.
We rode out the storm there in her caverns. She never had to almost die of lightning strike. That night I kissed the place on her head where she wouldn't have a scar this time. Again, she was confused. I lied to her, told her I had a dream that everything went wrong when we would go to spot the convoy. It was just a little lie so she wouldn't suspect that I knew enough to meddle in the flow of time, switch everything up so we'd always be okay. We got tangled up that night, for the first time, while the sandstorm beat the slopes of the mountains furiously.
In this second chance, I hadn't pissed away two years. I knew who I was, I knew how I felt, and I knew Dune. I knew she'd need time to stop looking at me and seeing a man sized pup, and I knew she was just as closed off as I'd been.
Doing it all again, this time, I could see that Dune was never really bodily shameless. She just... Didn't think anyone could get past those scars. So why even bother with modesty? She didn't feel chrome, and that must be why she thanked me in our doomed versions for touching her. I realized this when she thanked me again, in those same words and in first person all over again.
I told her, "Valkyries are supposed to have scars, yeah?" and from then on I'd call her that from time to time, My Valkyrie, because she'd swooped in like one to lift me up when she found me at deaths door.
She kept smiling. She smiled when I took her to the Citadel and she saw green for the first time in a decade and a half, and she smiled when she told me she was happy... Then the dream ended.
It was like a pair of hands had snatched her away to pull her, still smiling, down a black corridor. All that was left was her torn vest in my hands, stained in red flecks of my dried blood. Pain had come back, and now the hands in the darkness came back to tear away her vest too.
Other hands, somehow familiar, came after the last trace of the Scavenger had disappeared. Cola was poured in, mashed grit was pushed past my teeth with a pair of fingers for me to swallow, and I was looked after while I couldn't move for myself.
This time I knew it wasn't Dune. It was someone else. I could hear low voices jawing back and forth and sometimes I recognized both in that way when you're not even half aware but know on some deep instinct that you're with people you know. Knew the voices or not all sounds and smells were like garbled radio static in my skull.
The decrepit doctor and my driver's ghost were there. Nux looked like absolute hell when I'd manage a look at him, so it must have been another dream, or the process of dying. The wrong side of the gates must have decayed my driver's very soul. The ghost had raged once, not at me, then started on a rambling, panic fueled string of nonsense, then he went quiet and just loomed nearby.
He looked at me, and I looked at him when l had the energy to force my seemingly weighted eyelids open. Sometimes he'd say something, lean excitedly toward me and jabber, but it never made any sense. It was just more static and his hair haloed face seemed to warp the longer my eyes were open. I couldn't say much either, it would be badly stitched together noise that should've been questions. Sometimes words got switched.
"Where am I?" became "Place. Place. Scrawn." Then more gibberish in my ears from Nux, Wilson's low drone, and I'd have to turn my head away and close my eyes before it all started to rub me raw and piss me off to the point of wanting to scream. I couldn't understand anything. Couldn't find Dune, couldn't remember why I was dead -or on my way to death- and seeing ghosts.
I was supposed to be holding Dune's vest for her, couldn't find that either. I couldn't hold myself together in whatever second plain of suffering I'd been sucked into.
I started truly remembering eventually. Nux, his ghost, a motorcycle, his bony back to lean on and the wheezing of an exceptionally po-dunk piece-of-shit motor under us. This, ridiculous as it was, had happened. I remembered being left in quiet, shaded places, fed rationed sips of aqua-cola, and his shivering arms straining to pull me elsewhere a handful of times. So his ghost had saved me, and I seemed to be alive somehow?
This made even less sense as my skull meat began pulling its pieces back together, but the memory was vivid and I couldn't deny it. It didn't recall like dreams that always seem veiled by dust and easy to forget.
The first day my brain had a few brief moments of competence, I saw a wall of thin fabric and could detect movement beyond it, silhouetted against light from an overhead lamp. It was someone pacing slowly and fiddling with things that clink and clang like metal. My face pulled oddly around a cringe. It stung, so I touched it and found the knots of six stitches over my chin and two more through my left eyebrow. Right, my face hit the steering wheel when I wrecked Shirley. I tortured my broken teeth with the tip of my tongue and hissed at the jolt it sent through my jaw. I must have been real hard to look at after getting clobbered by Featherknife and getting my face rearranged in a crash. Maybe I really should have worn a seatbelt.
I remembered Dune, her screaming as the trailer doors slammed closed, so my guts churned violently and a sob left me. I dreamed of that next, on a repeating cycle, but with Nux's ghostly mutterings constantly creeping into the memory.
"Slit? Hey, hey, just a dream, mate," and then he'd nudge my shoulder with his knuckles and leave his cool, thin hand there.
"Aw, mate... Hey, shh. Shit, Jaw's coming. Shh... Slit! Shhh!" he'd said urgently once.
Another time, his ghost was crammed into this musty, piss stinking cot with me and praying to V8. I smelled the reek of infection all around me, but not coming from me. Nearby, I could hear someone else retching and shitting their brains out and practically taste the pungent stench. Wilson was talking over this repulsive noise, going on about a lack of anything he could do about this to a fifth person in the room.
The ghost behind me was disturbed by it. He shuddered through every mantra and sacred hymn he whispered. When the grotesque song of sickness quieted and the stench faded, I assumed in that quarter-aware state that the sod patient of Wilson's had carked it.
My driver's ghost still stayed close at night, vanishing in the day when Wilson was awake. I found it easier to exist when Nux was there. Sometimes he was just a ghost, sometimes he seemed -and smelled- alive, and I could never seem to decide which he must be.
In those rare but strengthening coherent moments it was obvious, I'd been delirious. Ghosts can't drag you out of your soon-to-be grave. My skull flesh must have cobbled together one giant cluster of insanity and slapped the likeness of a Nux who looked as rust as I felt over it.
The last day I spent lying there on that damp cot, I really expected the floor to be closer. I rolled half out before figuring out the floor was a full foot lower than I thought, The rest of me followed and flopped to the floor with all the grace of a wet bath rag. The hanging curtain flew aside and the light from the other side burned my eyes.
"Wilson?" I growled through the throbbing in my sockets. It certainly sounded like the old meat mender when he shuffled over.
"Good God, son," definitely Wilson.
He was trying to help me off the floor. As much help as I'd taken from the ancient bastard, I still couldn't stand being assisted by him and I let him know that with a curse. I'm not sure why I hated this. It was fine when Dune helped.
It hit me then that if Wilson was here, wherever here is, then Dune might be here. Maybe we'd all been recovered somehow, maybe the crow fishers turned back and... Or maybe Crank made it to the Citadel and convinced them to send a detachment from the patrol teams to come find us. Maybe this was the Bloodshed.
"Dune?" I tried, squinting through the light as my eyes adjusted. I couldn't find her, the walls didn't look like the stone of the Bloodshed either, it looked like steel panels and packed dirt exposed where some were fallen off.
Wilson didn't have to say anything, his sighing as he turned me to face the grungy cot told me everything I needed to know.
"Bullet Farm?" I don't know why I bothered to ask. He sighed again and spontaneous imagery assaulted my skull, of Dune coated gray with rock dust and hacking up splatters of red into her hands. I wanted to vomit.
I'd fix this, I had to... Wait. Her Vest. Where was it? It wasn't on the cot, I didn't see it on the floor or under the frame of it either. I started digging around the crumpled pile of sweaty sheets balled at the foot of the cot and found my pants in there. Wilson tried to stop me. He knew.
"It isn't there, Boy," he said as he grabbed at my wrist.
"Where is it! I'm supposed to-" I shook him off on reflex as I turned to look at him. V8, he... Maybe this was another nightmare. "Why the fuck are you blue?!"
"Never mind the blue!" he huffed.
He was trying to make me sit, which would probably have been a good idea since as soon as I put any real weight on my foot, I could feel the patterned floor biting into a thick scabs. I wobbled into the wall and landed on my ass to pull up the foot and look at the screeching sole.
My heel and the blade of my foot was just one big brown crust, every toe pad was a popped blister starting to harden over. Cooked from walking barefoot on hot salt. I could probably wrap it and walk on it, but I wouldn't be going anywhere fast. Wilson was taking advantage of the fact that I was on the floor, leaning to brace on my shoulders with his palms to keep me there.
"You know where you are? Know who I am? What can you remember?" This was his work-mode switching on.
"I was on the salt, now where are we?" I skipped his questions and asked my own.
"Shatterbone," he answered before continuing, "Slit, there's something we need to talk about, if you're all-there upstairs..."
I didn't care at that very moment and let my ears tune him out. I might not have been 'all-there', I felt like I was going full speed but no-one had control of the wheel. I was still looking around the room for the vest. It was just a little scrap of clothing, it shouldn't matter that much, but it felt like I might start to implode if I didn't have it. My hands were clenching around handfuls of my pants, and I was still fumbling to get my hands in the pockets to look for that tiny trace of the scav. The world was starting to fish-tail out of control.
"Slit," he wrapped his hand around my wrist again, more firmly, "it's not here."
"Where is it?!" I shrieked into his face. It was like I'd finally snapped. The rest raced out of my mouth as if I was a pup with a scrambled head from his first time doing war. "I'm supposed to have it for her when I find her!"
It shouldn't matter that much, some meek voice of logic whimpered from the back of my mind because the vest wasn't a component necessary to rescue Dune from the gulags of The Bullet Farm. I was having some kind of fit, vision tunneling and starting to feel like I might lose consciousness all over again.
Wilson sucked in a deep breath with his eyes practically bugging out... Ugh, why is he that color? It wasn't helping with whatever was happening to me. I thought the ground was shaking, no, it was me.
"Don't. Get. Up. You're having a panic attack. Slit, breathe..." There was a tone there I didn't recognized out of Wilson. It made me listen to him, he's the expert on fixing people, after all.
I couldn't look at him, he looked so wrong right now, so I had to mash my eyes shut, grip whatever was within reach -which was Wilson- because I felt like I was going to to vibrate out of existence. He counted over the breathing thing and kept praising me when I didn't choke on air. I don't understand the method, but it worked after time. I wasn't dying, or collapsing in on myself. Still felt like rust when I crawled back into the moment, though. I was folded on myself like a jackknife between Wilson and the cot frame, I was getting enough air, but I still needed to know where her vest was.
"...where is it." I asked flatly.
"Slit-"
"Where, Wilson?" I could tell by the quiver of his voice that he was avoiding the truth. He was afraid of something.
"...Jawbreaker. Ack! He's some lower management grunt around here. He took it a few days back and- HEY! I SAID DON'T GET UP!"
Over his shoulder, I could see my leg propped against the wall on the other side of the room. On my palms and shredded foot, I shuffled around him for it, dragging my pants behind me. My pants stunk like everything that could spew out of a fleshy body, but I pulled them on anyway and checked my leg for damage before pulling that on over the carefully bandaged stump.
"I need something to wrap my foot," I stated simply.
"You need to git your stubborn ass back in bed! You're in no condition to go anywhere!" he bellowed as he struggled to get up from the floor.
"I've been worse," I told him, ignoring the pangs in my left elbow as I reached up for a roll of what looked like bandages sitting by the edge of a narrow table to wrap up that foot.
"You've been unconscious for a week and a half!" He revealed.
I looked at him then, saw on his stained face that he wasn't lying. Fuck, that long?
"You don't even know where the bastard is!" Wilson continued to strengthen his case. He's right, I am stubborn, but he didn't know just how stubborn I could get.
"I'll ask someone, since I'm getting nowhere asking you,"
"You. Are. In. No. Condition-"
"I'm dandy!" I snapped, repeating a phrase I've heard him say before and not even completely believing myself as I rose from the floor. That shut him up for a second or two.
I thought the loss of my leg and the infection to follow that had been the worst I'd ever feel. Well, how I felt when I stood was pretty damn close. Wilson followed me out of the room and down an empty and dim dirt corridor. He was still protesting as I hobbled.
"You are a whole-fucking-goat!"
"What's a goat?"
"You are,"
"STOP," that was neither me nor Wilson. We both turned to look and the old man spat a curse.
There were two men. Both had faces painted in black and rust red stripes striking over brows and eyes from hair line to chin. They were wearing leathers and pauldrons made from some kind of old combat sport gear. I've seen the stuff before, you were lucky to get ahold of good protection like that back home. They must have some kind of rank here and were probably the ones to ask if I wanted to find whoever stole Dune's vest
"I'm looking for-"
"We know who you are," he cut me off.
The insult burning in my skull had to be let go. Not like I could make anyone pay for a slight in this shape. The one on the left seized Wilson by the elbow as he grumbled.
"C'mon pops, back to the E.R.,"
"Fuck yourself," Wilson barked, but the man just flexed the hand wrapped around the ancient limb he held and forced a tight lipped smile. I guessed this might be a regular thing. Still didn't like the looks of it though.
I was next, left elbow grabbed and yanking myself out of his grip on reflex because he tweaked my wrecked shit. I was grabbed instead around the back of the neck in a sweaty palm and pushed further down the tunnel, away from Wilson. I had to bite my tongue and roll with it. I was pretty sure this asshole was armed. He seemed like some kind of security around here. I know when I'm in no position to shit on boots for the joy of it. It was a better idea to try remembering every turn that was taken through these dirt tunnels so I could get back.
Left. Right. Left. It was all sharp corners around here, like a grid on a the finest blueprint paper only imperators ever got to touch.
I was palmed across the back of the head and shoved down through a low doorway, pushed further in and stumbled with the throbbing of my foot, then held around the back of the neck again. The room was lit up with oil lamps and a few spark bulbs too. Four more men, dressed and painted the same as the one who gripped me, looked up from where they sat on stools and crates cramped about a small table. They were playing some kind of game on a pattern carved on the table top with trinkets and little pebbles as pieces.
"One of you, get Jaw. The rest of you, quit playing with yourselves and find something productive to do that isn't in here."
They cleared out quick. I could see that they didn't have as much paint on their faces. It probably indicated rank, much like what I was used to at home.
I was swaying some. Felt sick, didn't really want to stand anymore. When my knee buckled, the painted man let me drop out of his grip and took a step back. Smart of him to put some distance between us even if there was no need. If I wasn't really half corpse, I might be feigning weakness and hiding a shiv to jam into his thigh gusher.
Wilson was right. I wasn't in any condition to be out of a cot. I almost passed out sitting in the middle of the floor, however long I was there. I was sore in ways that went as deep as every bone. My fingers even ached if I curled them. The narrow bunks scattered around the room and on the floors looked incredibly inviting.
I was nudged at the back with the toe of a boot. "Can you keep walking on your own?"
I turned a bit to glance at up him with my good eye. I couldn't help it, I'm still me even when I know I'm good as a dog with no teeth.
"Aw, you wanna carry me, mate? Real sweet of ya." I grinned up as he cut his eyes away and rolled his shoulders, apparently electing to ignore me now as he admired a wall.
It was quite a wait. My ass was numb by the time somebody poked their head through the doorway and muttered something. I was scooped off the floor under the arms like an invalid, though, I guess I was. My protests were ignored and I was cursed for reeking like a piss-pot.
Both the man who brought me here and the one who came after the long wait hauled me along without giving me another chance to walk. My metal foot dragged and the occasional catch of my flesh heel on the floor was enough pain for me to keep it held up and just allow myself to be moved like a lot of scrap in a burlap bag.
Right. Left. Right. We were going back the way we came. We passed Wilson's, I caught sight of his horror stricken face through the doorway as we passed.
Down that hall all the way to the end and up a dirt ramp to a locked hatch. Sunlight was blinding as it opened, good thing I wasn't doing my own walking then. I heard and felt through the rattling of my metal leg rather than saw that we were moving over steel flooring. Clunk clunk clunk clunk. My eyes were still adjusting to bright light when we slipped back into near darkness. I saw only sun-scorch orbs in the blackness.
A windowed room was where the trek ended. It was furnished in some old world shit, a folding couch, a desk, and a slate board on the wall with names and brackets scrawled all over it. I recognized this, we had one and used the same system for fights down in the Citadel Fury Pits.
There was a shelf, across from the circular window to illuminate it, full of miscellaneous shit. Trinkets, smooth rocks, a big chunk of salt crystals, a few word burgers. Beyond that, the walls were all scribbled on with trailing lines of words I was too tired to struggle reading.
I was dropped on my ass after a quick look around. They both strode out of the room single file while another stranger made his way in on their left. He must've been the face-breaker or whatever.
I don't know what made me think I could demand anything from anybody, let alone this man. I couldn't tell how tall he was from the floor, but I could see that he was fit, healthy, full-life, someone who wasn't a stranger to a fight. He wore no paint on his face, no shirt. I assume everyone would recognize him by the scattered scars which reminded me of what Dune once said of this place. 'Shatterbone is for scum suckin' wasteland gladiators,' she'd said to me in the bog when we stayed with the Crow Fishers.
This man was or had been in the arena many times. The scar across his lower belly was so deep that the tissue had become grey at its center and the muscle kinked with traumatic deformity. He needed no decoration to be unforgettable and intimidating. I hadn't even taken notice that he had a face. My eyes scanned upward.
Blond. Grey eyes. Ears like a car driving with both the doors open, but you could hardly find that flaw ripe for mockery when the face on him looked like it was chiseled out of a boulder with a jack hammer. A pissed off boulder, actually. I felt like a flea.
"...vest?" was all that came slithered of me, and I abruptly felt like I had to take a wicked piss.
That stone face only further resembled stone. He moved through the room without shifting his leer from me as he sat behind the desk and rifled through the drawer. I couldn't see what he was doing, so struggled to stand without making myself sound any more pathetically rusted than I was.
The vest, familiar patches and a rising Sun stitched into it in fading yellow thread. He was spreading it over the surface of the desk. In a moment of exhausted stupidity, I immediately stumbled a step and reached for it. I almost lost a finger tip as the thick shaft of a blade came down to wedge it's tip between the grain of the wood. That snapped me out of the stupor I'd been in.
He stood, looming a hand length taller than I stood and leaning over the desk toward me, fist still clenched around the handle of the blade and the wood creaking under his weight as he braced himself on his other palm. This man could kill me without the smallest measure of effort right now, and he could make sure I knew that without uttering a single word.
"I need to know where you got this," he said so calmly that I was both confused and yanked out of my moment of terrible, mortal fear.
"What?"
"Where did this vest come from, War Boy?"
I blinked, looking between the vest and the arena beast leaning over it. I could see that the tears had been neatly repaired with scrap cloth that almost matched and careful stitches. He fixed it?
"...I'm not a patient man," for a second time he commanded my attention.
How was I supposed to answer that? I knew it was Dune's mothers before it was hers, how would it matter to this stranger in any way, unless. Yes, I knew who he was, she'd described him to me months ago in the bog, him and the oldest brother, Russel.
"You're Flick, you're her brother."
He sat slowly with a sigh that hit my ears the way a mongrel mutt's growl would, "No, no I'm not."
He plucked the blade from the desk top with a hollow thunk, then toyed with it as he held the vest over the spread fingers of his other hand. Two fingers were missing from his right hand.
I was confused, he must have known Dune back then, her mother too. He dropped the vest into his lap and began to twist at the bluntly cut bristles of hair on the side of his head, just like Dune always did when she was stressed. Was he lying to me? I don't know what my face was doing, but he seemed to be able to read the fact that I didn't believe what he'd just claimed.
"...Whoever you think I am, you're wrong," he said to me with the certainly of knowing the sun would always rise in the West.
"I'm looking at what she described, she thinks all of her kin are dead,"
"They are. Flick and Russel died their first go-round in the arena. I'm the Jawbreaker, I can't be anyone else. I've been here too long... I assume Kay has passed?"
It was a lot to process, I just nodded, he looked away and winced before speaking again. "What are you do Dune?"
I shook my head, reminded of Ardith and her questioning. "We just- we go around together. Get on okay. I trust her." I was lying, it was more than that now, so much that I couldn't cope with the fact that I wasn't at all capable of going to her right now. I kept feeling the sensation of an imminent spew of chunks every time I remembered where she'd be by now.
"Where is she?" he asked the question I dreaded.
I couldn't, I shook my head. I couldn't look at him and answer that. My throat felt like it was going to close up.
His lips thinned, but he stood and stepped around the desk to push the vest into my hands, then pushed me until I had no choice but to crumple up on that fold-up couch.
"Is she alive?"
His final question I could nod to, and sweet V8 I hoped I was right. A jug of water was set down next to me. Fuck, I didn't want another attack, not here with this not-quite-stranger.
"Rest, drink. I'll take you back to the doctor-"
The door few open and someone else with a painted face stood under the frame, flapping a hand to get attention.
"The old coot and some bone-bag are out here accusing us of murdering Smiley-Face here." he called in, "Could you? Please? Gauge is this close to decking the ol' Wrinkly."
Jawbreaker growled through his teeth, "Jus' let 'em in here, I was about to have somebody come escort him back anyway."
Old wrinkly coot? Wilson? Yup. It wasn't long at all before I saw him -still a weird-ass blue- clumping his way through the doorway. He clutched his chest and threw back his head with his brand of melodramatic relief, but there was something behind him. Looked like a giant mess of hair and wretched clothes being worn by a corpse. It was some spindly little wretched looking bloke holding onto the back of Wilson's shirt.
Eyes though. Huge, blue, ghost eyes. He smiled, and I saw his yellow teeth under the scraggled mustache.
"Slit!" Nux, not a ghost, cried out my name.
And then I chundered onto my lap
