DISCLAIMER: I don't know own Cowboy Bebop or its characters, this work is
strictly for entertainment value, so on and so forth.
In Triad parlance, a "49" is a foot soldier, the first rank one attains upon joining. Just a regular gangster. A "426" or "Red Pole" is a war leader or a chief hitman.
Okay, I thought this chapter kind of sucked, so I reworked it a little bit. Hope it makes Tylor a bit more realistic ...
--------------------------------------------------------------
"Hoy, Spike."
"Jet."
"Where the hell are you? What are you into?"
"Can't talk right now. Have to see to an old friend."
"Hey, Spike, wait! An old friend from before?"
"Ask Faye. She'll tell you what happened."
"Hoy---"
Spike clicked the phone off. Jet might call back in a day or two, but he knew better than to press him now. Jet, at least, still understood what a man had to do.
The hiding place Ho Nam had led them to was an abandoned truck stop three miles in the Orphis suburbs, running along a barely used highway that led sightseeing tours into the canyon networks below the city. An industrial park, empty for the weekend, and a mechanized junkyard surrounded it. It would do for a day or two, Ho Nam had said, but after that they would have to move again.
He started back inside the dim one-story building. Lornette was on her way out. Spike looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time.
She was coffee-skinned with sharp cheekbones and alert, almond eyes, with sweeping braids that dropped down her shoulders. Her long, stringy muscles stood out on her shoulders and arms, evidence of tough training. Her eyes were brown and sad. She'd really grown into a striking woman, he thought. Like her mother.
Ho Nam appeared behind her, a slight limp making him look old for the first time.
"Spike, come in for a moment. Lornette, please wait before you go. I want Spike to go with you."
She didn't say anything, just walked outside with tight shoulders. Spike followed Ho Nam past the lounge and into the truck stop's old kitchen.
"We heard about your fight with Vicious, in the old cathedral. You killed all of his men, almost killed him." Ho Nam sat himself on the counter. "I didn't believe it, at first. Thought that maybe it was a ghost."
Spike smiled. "Maybe it was."
Ho Nam inclined his head. The scar where an ISSP riot baton had hit him as a child showed white below his scalp. "You are thinking, why is he still alive. Why didn't he strike Vicious before he murdered Mao."
Spike avoided Ho Nam's eyes. "I know why."
"After you left, most of the young dragons, they went with Vicious. Why not? You were dead, who were they to follow in the war to come? All the Red Poles, even me, we all thought it was the right thing. After you, Vicious was our best." Ho Nam struck a match and lit a cigarette for himself. Smoke curled around his eyes, his scar. "And after my Mace died ..."
"No one blames you. Everyone knew what she meant to you."
"Vicious knew too. When he wiped out all of the loyalists, he left me alive. Because he knew I was too weak to do anything, even for the man who raised me from the dirt." Ho Nam's voice was dead. Like a man in a dream, Spike thought. It doesn't really matter.
"But after the fight in the church ..." Spike asked.
"Yes, I got some of the older heads together. The useless ones, like me. We went after Vicious, for Mao. And for you. Killed two of his lieutenants, we had four cities in our hand. The Van might have even anointed us, if we had ..." Ho Nam clutched his fist. "But he wasn't really injured like they said. Not mortally. After he showed himself to the 49s, they all left us. While the Van did NOTHING."
Spike grimaced. He knew what Vicious had done then, even before Ho Nam spoke.
"They shot Pike down in front of his nine-year-old son. Strangled the son. Killed the Gorch brothers, Duck-face Gu, Dutch, even little Martinez. Do you remember him? The one that Lin used to look after, after his mother died of the virus? Vicious cut his head off with his katana, they say. After they tortured him."
"Tortured him to find you," Spike said. "The old woman back there ..."
"She was Lornette's grandmother. Mace's mother."
"I see. I didn't recognize her at first ..."
Ho Nam's face was murderous stone. "She always hated me. Hated me for taking Mace from her. For being what I am. But she took me in at the end, and she died for it."
"She didn't take you in for you. For Lornette." Spike looked back toward the door. "What are you going to do?"
Ho Nam's face softened. "Do you remember Olympus Mons, and Master Wong?"
"Of course I do. She shows his training."
"As do you. He only gets our best. Mao sent you there. I did
the same for Lornette."
"She has potential," Spike said. "The way she moves .... But not for this." Spike's face hardened. "Why did you bring her out of there?"
Ho Nam gritted his teeth. "In the old days, you never---"
"These aren't the old days." Spike's eyes were full and hard. Ho Nam blinked, and gave in. Spike ... he'd changed.
"You always saw things clearly." Ho Nam shrugged. "You're right. I was too confident. I thought that with her by my side, I couldn't lose. Besides, it was---"
Spike interrupted. "She's not Mace. She's not me. She doesn't owe you anything."
Ho Nam was quiet for a moment. When had this happened to him, where he thought he could talk back to a 426? He was good, but he wasn't a true Red Pole, not---
No. You aren't either. Not anymore. Old dragon, you were that blind----?
Ho Nam sighed. The age showed again, in his eyes and his face. "When I'm finished here, take her back to Olympus. Vicious doesn't dare touch her, not there."
Spike looked away. So some of the old Ho Nam still survived, then. He was glad.
"You could always go to Callisto. Or Earth. Vicious can't look for you everywhere."
Ho Nam stubbed out his cigarette and began unwrapping the bandage on his leg. "I have to get a proper dressing on this, if I'm going to move. Go with Lornette, she wants to scout the place out." He turned his back.
Spike opened his mouth, as if to say something.
"Nothing lasts in this world," Ho Nam said softly, almost to himself. "Julia knew it too, Spike."
He heard Spike leave through the double doors. Time to go, he thought. Old dragon, who wants to live forever?
Spike looked back at the double doors. When my time comes, I won't do what you did. I'll be strong enough to face it on my own.
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"Here, Faye!" Tylor's goofy grin was back in place. He handed Faye a cup of black Turkish coffee and drank his own with relish. She looked at the curtains that provided a threadbare privacy for his 20 x 10 living space. She could hear jostling and some whispered curses from behind it. Good God, she thought. What a pack of losers. She could almost feel them straining to hear what they were saying.
Tylor lived in a rooming house in the north slums of Orphis City. It was a rundown place, barely livable. Faye triple-locked Redtail's cockpit and helped Tylor carry the Bulldog into the building. Tylor lived, of course, on the tenth floor, and the elevator was broken. The floor was laid out in a long corridor, with rows of cubicles to either side. Men of all ages were sitting around, cleaning or eating or shooting dice. All eyes had gone straight to Faye when she'd come up the stairs.
"Hey, Tylor!" An older man with four teeth glistening from a wet smile stood up and gestured. "Wow---"
Faye wasn't about to deal with all of that nonsense. The catcalls had still been rising in the men's throats when she fired a round from her Glock into the ceiling.
That had silenced them; Tylor and Faye had walked to Tylor's cube with barely a whisper behind them. That didn't stop them from crowding around when Tylor had drawn the curtain.
"Thanks for helping me bring the Bullldog up," Tylor said, pulling a long black footlocker from underneath his cot. He dialed in a combination and pressed his thumb against a small scanner above the lock; four bolts clicked back and he opened it. "I'll just put it in with the rest of the stuff that needs cleaning .. I've been pretty sloppy lately. Busy at the shop."
Faye felt a small tinge of sorrow. "What are you going to do now?"
"What do you mean?"
"Your store, it's all shot to pieces." Faye didn't really want to sit down on the cot next to him. She stood back and crossed her arms over her chest. He was a nice kid, she thought. He doesn't look upset at all.
"Well, it's okay. It's just one, there's at least eight stores in Orphis. I'll just go work at another one. I'm not much of a baker, but the owner likes me." Tylor began disassembling the assault cannon. Faye glimpsed at least four assault rifles and a M-203 grenade launcher inside the footlocker as she looked down at him.
"Do you sell those?" Spike would like to see this, she thought. He was always on the lookout for new guns.
"No," he replied, an uncertain shyness creeping back into his voice. "I just like to work on them. Guns, they're pretty to me. I always had fun working with them."
Faye looked at him quizzically. "But you don't shoot them? Isn't that what they're for?"
Tylor's hands worked methodically. "Not for me. I mean, I don't think of them like that anymore."
"But weren't you on Titan?"
"Yeah."
"You didn't fight?"
Tylor's eyes seemed to lock in on the assault cannon's parts, spread across his thin cot. "I wanted to, when I was there. I liked guns and I was good with them. They drafted all of us, I mean, I was an orphan. In the State orphanage, they drafted everyone who could go. It was our duty to repay the State, that's what they said. So we were going to go to Titan."
Faye sat on the bed. His eyes didn't seem to be looking at her anymore.
"I didn't mind. I wanted to go, we all did. Who wouldn't want to get out of the orphanage? I was 15, so they put me to work in the armory. I really wanted to go with the Special Forces. But I was too young. One of my friends, he got to go. I stayed in touch with him. He was my best friend from the orphanage, he was a great athlete. I mean, I was smaller than most kids. He kept the bigger ones from picking on me. He told me that no one had done that for him when he was coming up in the orphanage. He felt it was his responsibility to do that for me."
Faye wanted to stop him, stop him before he could reveal something that would make him more than a silly google-eyed boy in her eyes. But his eyes looked too much like her own ...
"My friend, he made it all the way to Special Forces. He got to see everything. He would tell me stories when he made it back to the Base. All I got to see was a lot of sand and guns. I thought it was boring." Tylor smiled for a moment. "I helped fix up his weapons for him, I would work on them special for him. He said he needed a modification for his grenade launcher one day, he said he wanted it to fire plasma grenades instead of just the regular fragmentation ones. I looked at him and he looked different. Not any meaner or anything, just really different. I heard later that the enemy had caught most of his unit, killed them. Only two or three of them got away.
"He told me that he could take me on a run with him a few days after that. He told me that he would show me what the war was like." A tear fell from Tylor's eyes, but his voice didn't change. "The chopper dropped him and five other people from his unit off in a Titan refugee camp. He told me to stay in the chopper. I thought they were going after infiltrators. I was really excited."
There was nothing more to do, she thought. Just leave, that's the best thing to do now. This crazy kid was going to tell her everything.
"What happened?" Faye asked. Why did she have to do that? God, you're so stupid. You don't want to hear this.
"My friend and his unit, went to every tent. There must have been like four, five hundred people. They were shooting everybody."
Tylor's voice was hushed, raspy. "My friend, he was laughing. He was firing plasma grenades into every tent, burning everyone alive. From the launcher I designed. People were crawling under the tent flaps on the sides. They were trying to put out the fire, rolling on the ground, but you can't put burning plasma out like that. And my friend was laughing. If anyone tried to come out of the door he would shoot them with his rifle. But most of the people, they just crawled outside and burned."
The boy's hands were clenched. His knuckles were white and his nails were digging into his flesh. "I just sat there in the chopper and watched with the pilot. The pilot, he was a Special Forces guy too. He was smiling. He told me, this is a camp that supports the enemy. They do this to the camps that support us, he said. These people, don't be fooled. They're all against us and they would kill you if they caught you by yourself, even the little kids. That's what he told me. He said that the Special Forces didn't do this, usually, it was usually the Regular Army that handled that kind of job. But sometimes they had to let off some steam. That was why they were doing this. And when I got back to the Base and told my CO, he said the same thing. I didn't understand that. Letting off steam."
Faye found herself holding Tylor's shoulder. "Hey," she said. "Kid."
Tylor smiled through his tears. "I'm sorry, I don't know why I told you that. I'm so stupid. Stupid and weak, I mean I know you think that, I would too if I were you ..."
"Hey, that's not what I think!" She chucked him under the chin. "Kid, we all ... I mean we all seen bad things. I'm sorry you had to see something like that. But ... sometimes you learn things that way. In a way ... at least you can remember. You know what you've seen, and you can learn from it. I can see it in you already." Faye smiled at him him. "You know you don't want to be like your friend. You're not, trust me. You are so much better than someone like that."
The poor boy had no self control. He was already wiping his eyes and she could tell her words were having their effect. I wonder how much of it is my words and how much are my breasts, she thought, but pushed it away. "Listen to me. You have your memories. Some people out there, they don't even have that. They don't have anything to go on, don't have anything to learn from. You're better off than that, you know? So don't feel so bad ..."
-----------------------------------------------------------
Okay, I know there wasn't any action in this one. But don't worry, it's coming soon .
Please read & review! I know exposition and characterization is my weakest link, so give me some pointers!
In Triad parlance, a "49" is a foot soldier, the first rank one attains upon joining. Just a regular gangster. A "426" or "Red Pole" is a war leader or a chief hitman.
Okay, I thought this chapter kind of sucked, so I reworked it a little bit. Hope it makes Tylor a bit more realistic ...
--------------------------------------------------------------
"Hoy, Spike."
"Jet."
"Where the hell are you? What are you into?"
"Can't talk right now. Have to see to an old friend."
"Hey, Spike, wait! An old friend from before?"
"Ask Faye. She'll tell you what happened."
"Hoy---"
Spike clicked the phone off. Jet might call back in a day or two, but he knew better than to press him now. Jet, at least, still understood what a man had to do.
The hiding place Ho Nam had led them to was an abandoned truck stop three miles in the Orphis suburbs, running along a barely used highway that led sightseeing tours into the canyon networks below the city. An industrial park, empty for the weekend, and a mechanized junkyard surrounded it. It would do for a day or two, Ho Nam had said, but after that they would have to move again.
He started back inside the dim one-story building. Lornette was on her way out. Spike looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time.
She was coffee-skinned with sharp cheekbones and alert, almond eyes, with sweeping braids that dropped down her shoulders. Her long, stringy muscles stood out on her shoulders and arms, evidence of tough training. Her eyes were brown and sad. She'd really grown into a striking woman, he thought. Like her mother.
Ho Nam appeared behind her, a slight limp making him look old for the first time.
"Spike, come in for a moment. Lornette, please wait before you go. I want Spike to go with you."
She didn't say anything, just walked outside with tight shoulders. Spike followed Ho Nam past the lounge and into the truck stop's old kitchen.
"We heard about your fight with Vicious, in the old cathedral. You killed all of his men, almost killed him." Ho Nam sat himself on the counter. "I didn't believe it, at first. Thought that maybe it was a ghost."
Spike smiled. "Maybe it was."
Ho Nam inclined his head. The scar where an ISSP riot baton had hit him as a child showed white below his scalp. "You are thinking, why is he still alive. Why didn't he strike Vicious before he murdered Mao."
Spike avoided Ho Nam's eyes. "I know why."
"After you left, most of the young dragons, they went with Vicious. Why not? You were dead, who were they to follow in the war to come? All the Red Poles, even me, we all thought it was the right thing. After you, Vicious was our best." Ho Nam struck a match and lit a cigarette for himself. Smoke curled around his eyes, his scar. "And after my Mace died ..."
"No one blames you. Everyone knew what she meant to you."
"Vicious knew too. When he wiped out all of the loyalists, he left me alive. Because he knew I was too weak to do anything, even for the man who raised me from the dirt." Ho Nam's voice was dead. Like a man in a dream, Spike thought. It doesn't really matter.
"But after the fight in the church ..." Spike asked.
"Yes, I got some of the older heads together. The useless ones, like me. We went after Vicious, for Mao. And for you. Killed two of his lieutenants, we had four cities in our hand. The Van might have even anointed us, if we had ..." Ho Nam clutched his fist. "But he wasn't really injured like they said. Not mortally. After he showed himself to the 49s, they all left us. While the Van did NOTHING."
Spike grimaced. He knew what Vicious had done then, even before Ho Nam spoke.
"They shot Pike down in front of his nine-year-old son. Strangled the son. Killed the Gorch brothers, Duck-face Gu, Dutch, even little Martinez. Do you remember him? The one that Lin used to look after, after his mother died of the virus? Vicious cut his head off with his katana, they say. After they tortured him."
"Tortured him to find you," Spike said. "The old woman back there ..."
"She was Lornette's grandmother. Mace's mother."
"I see. I didn't recognize her at first ..."
Ho Nam's face was murderous stone. "She always hated me. Hated me for taking Mace from her. For being what I am. But she took me in at the end, and she died for it."
"She didn't take you in for you. For Lornette." Spike looked back toward the door. "What are you going to do?"
Ho Nam's face softened. "Do you remember Olympus Mons, and Master Wong?"
"Of course I do. She shows his training."
"As do you. He only gets our best. Mao sent you there. I did
the same for Lornette."
"She has potential," Spike said. "The way she moves .... But not for this." Spike's face hardened. "Why did you bring her out of there?"
Ho Nam gritted his teeth. "In the old days, you never---"
"These aren't the old days." Spike's eyes were full and hard. Ho Nam blinked, and gave in. Spike ... he'd changed.
"You always saw things clearly." Ho Nam shrugged. "You're right. I was too confident. I thought that with her by my side, I couldn't lose. Besides, it was---"
Spike interrupted. "She's not Mace. She's not me. She doesn't owe you anything."
Ho Nam was quiet for a moment. When had this happened to him, where he thought he could talk back to a 426? He was good, but he wasn't a true Red Pole, not---
No. You aren't either. Not anymore. Old dragon, you were that blind----?
Ho Nam sighed. The age showed again, in his eyes and his face. "When I'm finished here, take her back to Olympus. Vicious doesn't dare touch her, not there."
Spike looked away. So some of the old Ho Nam still survived, then. He was glad.
"You could always go to Callisto. Or Earth. Vicious can't look for you everywhere."
Ho Nam stubbed out his cigarette and began unwrapping the bandage on his leg. "I have to get a proper dressing on this, if I'm going to move. Go with Lornette, she wants to scout the place out." He turned his back.
Spike opened his mouth, as if to say something.
"Nothing lasts in this world," Ho Nam said softly, almost to himself. "Julia knew it too, Spike."
He heard Spike leave through the double doors. Time to go, he thought. Old dragon, who wants to live forever?
Spike looked back at the double doors. When my time comes, I won't do what you did. I'll be strong enough to face it on my own.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Here, Faye!" Tylor's goofy grin was back in place. He handed Faye a cup of black Turkish coffee and drank his own with relish. She looked at the curtains that provided a threadbare privacy for his 20 x 10 living space. She could hear jostling and some whispered curses from behind it. Good God, she thought. What a pack of losers. She could almost feel them straining to hear what they were saying.
Tylor lived in a rooming house in the north slums of Orphis City. It was a rundown place, barely livable. Faye triple-locked Redtail's cockpit and helped Tylor carry the Bulldog into the building. Tylor lived, of course, on the tenth floor, and the elevator was broken. The floor was laid out in a long corridor, with rows of cubicles to either side. Men of all ages were sitting around, cleaning or eating or shooting dice. All eyes had gone straight to Faye when she'd come up the stairs.
"Hey, Tylor!" An older man with four teeth glistening from a wet smile stood up and gestured. "Wow---"
Faye wasn't about to deal with all of that nonsense. The catcalls had still been rising in the men's throats when she fired a round from her Glock into the ceiling.
That had silenced them; Tylor and Faye had walked to Tylor's cube with barely a whisper behind them. That didn't stop them from crowding around when Tylor had drawn the curtain.
"Thanks for helping me bring the Bullldog up," Tylor said, pulling a long black footlocker from underneath his cot. He dialed in a combination and pressed his thumb against a small scanner above the lock; four bolts clicked back and he opened it. "I'll just put it in with the rest of the stuff that needs cleaning .. I've been pretty sloppy lately. Busy at the shop."
Faye felt a small tinge of sorrow. "What are you going to do now?"
"What do you mean?"
"Your store, it's all shot to pieces." Faye didn't really want to sit down on the cot next to him. She stood back and crossed her arms over her chest. He was a nice kid, she thought. He doesn't look upset at all.
"Well, it's okay. It's just one, there's at least eight stores in Orphis. I'll just go work at another one. I'm not much of a baker, but the owner likes me." Tylor began disassembling the assault cannon. Faye glimpsed at least four assault rifles and a M-203 grenade launcher inside the footlocker as she looked down at him.
"Do you sell those?" Spike would like to see this, she thought. He was always on the lookout for new guns.
"No," he replied, an uncertain shyness creeping back into his voice. "I just like to work on them. Guns, they're pretty to me. I always had fun working with them."
Faye looked at him quizzically. "But you don't shoot them? Isn't that what they're for?"
Tylor's hands worked methodically. "Not for me. I mean, I don't think of them like that anymore."
"But weren't you on Titan?"
"Yeah."
"You didn't fight?"
Tylor's eyes seemed to lock in on the assault cannon's parts, spread across his thin cot. "I wanted to, when I was there. I liked guns and I was good with them. They drafted all of us, I mean, I was an orphan. In the State orphanage, they drafted everyone who could go. It was our duty to repay the State, that's what they said. So we were going to go to Titan."
Faye sat on the bed. His eyes didn't seem to be looking at her anymore.
"I didn't mind. I wanted to go, we all did. Who wouldn't want to get out of the orphanage? I was 15, so they put me to work in the armory. I really wanted to go with the Special Forces. But I was too young. One of my friends, he got to go. I stayed in touch with him. He was my best friend from the orphanage, he was a great athlete. I mean, I was smaller than most kids. He kept the bigger ones from picking on me. He told me that no one had done that for him when he was coming up in the orphanage. He felt it was his responsibility to do that for me."
Faye wanted to stop him, stop him before he could reveal something that would make him more than a silly google-eyed boy in her eyes. But his eyes looked too much like her own ...
"My friend, he made it all the way to Special Forces. He got to see everything. He would tell me stories when he made it back to the Base. All I got to see was a lot of sand and guns. I thought it was boring." Tylor smiled for a moment. "I helped fix up his weapons for him, I would work on them special for him. He said he needed a modification for his grenade launcher one day, he said he wanted it to fire plasma grenades instead of just the regular fragmentation ones. I looked at him and he looked different. Not any meaner or anything, just really different. I heard later that the enemy had caught most of his unit, killed them. Only two or three of them got away.
"He told me that he could take me on a run with him a few days after that. He told me that he would show me what the war was like." A tear fell from Tylor's eyes, but his voice didn't change. "The chopper dropped him and five other people from his unit off in a Titan refugee camp. He told me to stay in the chopper. I thought they were going after infiltrators. I was really excited."
There was nothing more to do, she thought. Just leave, that's the best thing to do now. This crazy kid was going to tell her everything.
"What happened?" Faye asked. Why did she have to do that? God, you're so stupid. You don't want to hear this.
"My friend and his unit, went to every tent. There must have been like four, five hundred people. They were shooting everybody."
Tylor's voice was hushed, raspy. "My friend, he was laughing. He was firing plasma grenades into every tent, burning everyone alive. From the launcher I designed. People were crawling under the tent flaps on the sides. They were trying to put out the fire, rolling on the ground, but you can't put burning plasma out like that. And my friend was laughing. If anyone tried to come out of the door he would shoot them with his rifle. But most of the people, they just crawled outside and burned."
The boy's hands were clenched. His knuckles were white and his nails were digging into his flesh. "I just sat there in the chopper and watched with the pilot. The pilot, he was a Special Forces guy too. He was smiling. He told me, this is a camp that supports the enemy. They do this to the camps that support us, he said. These people, don't be fooled. They're all against us and they would kill you if they caught you by yourself, even the little kids. That's what he told me. He said that the Special Forces didn't do this, usually, it was usually the Regular Army that handled that kind of job. But sometimes they had to let off some steam. That was why they were doing this. And when I got back to the Base and told my CO, he said the same thing. I didn't understand that. Letting off steam."
Faye found herself holding Tylor's shoulder. "Hey," she said. "Kid."
Tylor smiled through his tears. "I'm sorry, I don't know why I told you that. I'm so stupid. Stupid and weak, I mean I know you think that, I would too if I were you ..."
"Hey, that's not what I think!" She chucked him under the chin. "Kid, we all ... I mean we all seen bad things. I'm sorry you had to see something like that. But ... sometimes you learn things that way. In a way ... at least you can remember. You know what you've seen, and you can learn from it. I can see it in you already." Faye smiled at him him. "You know you don't want to be like your friend. You're not, trust me. You are so much better than someone like that."
The poor boy had no self control. He was already wiping his eyes and she could tell her words were having their effect. I wonder how much of it is my words and how much are my breasts, she thought, but pushed it away. "Listen to me. You have your memories. Some people out there, they don't even have that. They don't have anything to go on, don't have anything to learn from. You're better off than that, you know? So don't feel so bad ..."
-----------------------------------------------------------
Okay, I know there wasn't any action in this one. But don't worry, it's coming soon .
Please read & review! I know exposition and characterization is my weakest link, so give me some pointers!
