Title: As Wrong As It Gets
Author: Whyyy
Rating: R
Category: Crap
Summary: SpikexVicious, which is…as wrong as it gets, in my humble opinion. Hence the title. They still aren't getting it on here; I wish to be thorough in my defiling of this series, so I think Jet needs a few sentences. And I figured out how to upload passages with italics. Oooh, ahh. Yeah, I'm a moron. Deal with it. Or not.
Disclaimer: Again, I do not own Cowboy Bebop or any of the characters. Keith Roberts is still a real person that I do not own.
why-indeed: I'm glad you agree with yourself that sepia is sexy. Tell me, does threatening to kill me in third-person make you feel better about yourself? Well, I promise you that this fic is going all the way to the R-rated stuff, so I encourage you to continue reading with your eyeballs absolutely glued to the screen.
TheWainscottWeasel: Thanks, I'll see if I can incorporate more Rikki Tikki goodness!
Princess Brimstone: Wowie, I'm glad you like the humor so much, and I'm even GLADDER that you think SpikexVicious is wrong. Thanks for the review!
Shae Enspira: Yes, there will be much banging in the chapters to come. And definitely more putting down Spike and Vicious. In the nicest way possible, of course (cough).
Chapter 2 – The Wrong-ness Continues (and my computer feels increasingly dirty)
Spike had gotten a few good hints on this Keith Roberts fellow from the random informative bystanders that apparently often plague the streets of various planets, and decided to head back to the Bebop. He told himself the reason he was giving up for the day was because he was hungry and tired and not because he couldn't stop fantasizing about Vicious. Definitely not because he was in desperate need of a cold shower after a particular vivid visage of Vicious in salsa and sour cream had randomly popped into his head. A Vicious taco salad…hell yeah…no, wait, Spike, are you crazy? Worse, are you a obsessive booby dork like GREN who plotted for ages on how to get back at Vicious and ended up dead and in a state of cross-dress while Vicious flew away happily? Nonononono, you're just hungry. Yeah, that's it. Honestly. If you were really into Vicious, you'd envision him in hot chocolate or whipped cream. Whipped, not sour. Sour cream isn't a turn-on.
Unless it's on some tasty Mexican dish, some weird tiny voice that sounded remarkably like himself if he were carrying on a heated internal monologue at the back of his head retorted evilly. You know what they say, that food is second only to SEX.
Spike's inner reason didn't put up much of a fight. And I DO like Mexican food. Whipped cream is nasty, man. …Mmm, I wonder how Vicious would look whipped…AAGH!!
Jet looked up in momentary alarm as Spike stumbled into the living area of the Bebop, not bothering to close the hatch. "Spike…?" he ventured.
Spike barely glanced at him, stomping off, muttering something about a shower, Mexican food, and…Vicious? Jet pondered for a very, very, very, VERY brief moment how those three objects of discourse may be related. He came up with a few interesting theories:
1) Vicious was a dirty evil man and did not like to take showers. Neither did Mexican food. In this manner, Vicious was very akin to Mexican food, and Spike had just realized this. That WOULD explain why Spike was so unhappy, given his partiality to Mexican food. No one enjoys realizing they're favorite food shared similarities with an asshat like Vicious.
2) There had been a shower of Mexican food somewhere, due somehow to an evil plan hatched by Vicious. Only Vicious was dead, so this shower of Mexican food had to have taken place earlier, possibly during that fateful fight where he and Faye had to save Spike from the Red Dragon goons. Oh, and the string cheese. Bad memories.
3) …Spike wanted to take a shower because of something having to do with Vicious and…Mexican food…
Jet quickly decided this was involving too much imagination. Best not
to…contemplate…any more…No, most likely, his hearing was off, and Jet decided to go check up on his precious bonsai plants.
~*~*~*~
Spike sighed in frustration as he stepped out of the shower. Yes, a cold shower was all very good until one started thinking how much better it would be if there was a naked but succulent psychopath in the shower as well. Then, the cold shower no longer seemed that cold. Oy.
With not much else to do in the Bebop, Spike decided maybe he would go after Roberts some more. He ambled to Jet's bonsai tree room to inform Jet that he'd be missing dinner, but stopped short when some strange noises reached his ears. Jet's voice, to be exact, but lower and more husky. What Spike heard went something like, "…ohhhhhHHHHHhhh, yeah baby yeah, I love it when you do that…harder, yes, HARDER!! Ohhh…ahh!!"
Despite the fact that furrowing one's brow can lead to headaches, Spike went ahead and did so in confusion. Then, he stuck his head surreptitiously into the doorway of the room to see just what Jet was up to.
Jet was standing in the center of the room, surrounded by his shelves of bonsai trees, and RUBBING himself with one of the bonsais, BOUNCING it off his crotch and immediate surrounding areas, eyes closed in ecstasy, panting loudly. Rhythmic groans continued as Jet pounded into that poor hapless bonsai, jolting a few shaggy clumps of leaves off the branches and sending them fluttering weakly to the floor…and Spike ducked his head back out of the doorway and dashed past the room but not fast enough to miss Jet's scream of "Again! Yeah, oh, yes, GREAT GOOGLY-MOOGLY that's good!!"
Well damn, I knew he wasn't keeping those bonsais around for any good. "Helps me relax," he said. "For 'aesthetic purposes'". Aesthetic, my ass…Well, MY ass is aesthetic. Jet's with a bonsai tree is NOT. At least my new Vicious fetish doesn't seem so bad…oh, wait, yes it still does.
Spike had now left the Bebop and was heading back to Roberts's neighborhood. It was getting dark, so when Spike passed a small deserted lot and overheard more strange noises, he had to squint to make out anything. Now, one would think, after the last incident with Jet's "strange noises", Spike would be at least reticent to investigate. Then again, nothing interesting would ever happen if Spike learned from his mistakes. Besides, 9 out of the 10 times Spike checked stuff out, it somehow led back to his current bounty. It's never some other aspiring criminal who has no relation whatsoever to the problems of the day. A truly amazing and—of course, purely coincidental—phenomenon. So, anyway, Spike decided he had no reason to worry about the strange noises; if he survived Jet's little TLC session with the bonsais, surely he could handle the source of the strange noises in some dinky lot. Most likely, it would lead him to Roberts. Finally, some normalcy.
Grinning smugly to himself at the prospect of finding Roberts, Spike trotted closer, eyes adjusting to the rather crappy lighting in the lot space and taking in the lanky silhouette of a man…a man with hair that couldn't decide if it wanted to be chin-length or shoulder-length and therefore very difficult to describe…a man with a haggard appearance and bold yet slitted eyes…a man surrounded in an aura of brooding mystery and cold evil…a man with…a…cockatoo…
Spike's heart had been threatening to pound its way through his chest as the features of this second man increased in clarity with each nearing step, but the cockatoo came out of nowhere, right-field, as they say, and with the whole silent suspense gig ruined, he simply blurted out, incredulous, "Vicious, is that a cockatoo??"
~*~*~*~
Rikki Tikki had to go. Without a question. Vicious growled something obscene under his breath as the remarkably overfed cyborg cockatoo shit on his T-shirt. Again. After the meeting with Roberts, he had only gotten a few blocks before Rikki Tikki heard nature's call. And when nature called, it called for Rikki Tikki to relieve himself right then and there on Vicious's most prized plain black coat without even attempting to relocate somewhere else, like the air. Vicious remembered hearing somewhere that wearing white was bad because it made dirt and other stains more visible, and it had made sense at the time. However, he was forced to reassess the validity of the statement as he reached the apartment he had holed himself up in, coat shoulders covered in a thick half-dried layer of dirty-white tropical bird fecal matter.
How in the Seven Circles of Hell can an engineered overgrown parakeet SHIT? That's what Vicious wanted to know, and he had demanded this knowledge from Roberts exactly 2.2 milliseconds after he had entered his lodge and slammed the door behind him. The phone conversation that ensued went something like this:
"Hello?"
"ROBERTS!! How in the Seven Circles of Hell can an engineered overgrown parakeet SHIT?"
"What? …Oh! Oh, you mean Rikki Tikki!" A silence of disapproval. "He's a cockatoo, Mr. Vicious, not a parakeet."
"Roberts, I don't care what kind of bird he is. He is a SHITTING bird. Do you understand??! A bird that shits. Lets loose organic waste. On. My. Coat."
"Well, of course. Doesn't it make him more realistic? After that last exploding bird, people are going to be a mite more suspicious of any birds perched on your shoulder like a second head. If he goes every few minutes, people will see and think--"
Vicious's heart had stopped. "Did you say 'every few minutes'?"
A pause on the other end. "…err, yes. But only when you're moving. It makes his mechanical bowels move around a bit faster, so you see…"
Vicious grabbed his katana again. God he loved his katana at moments like this. It made him feel so much more manly. Or maybe he was trying to overcompensate for something else. And there were only a few things men like Vicious tried to overcompensate for. Certainly not eyebrow wax. Or sunblock. In any case, Vicious squeezed his katana's hilt for moral support and barked into the phone with what he thought was admirable calm, "I'm coming over, and you are removing this feathered monstrosity from my shoulder. Then, you are either providing me with a replacement, or I will stick my katana through your nasal cavity."
Roberts was understandably flustered. "But, Mr. Vicious, you gave me two weeks! It's hardly been two hours! I don't have a replacement for you!"
Vicious cursed. He HAD given Roberts two weeks. This was where it positively rocked to be evil, he thought. "Did I say two weeks? Funny, I don't remember. You have 5 hours. That should be adequate. If not…" he let his voice trail off because it's always more psychologically tortuous to let one's lackeys sweat and imagine the promised consequences, and also because he couldn't think of any good/evil threats. That nasal cavity bit had been a good touch; he should have saved it for the end. Vicious never was good at making threats, or comebacks for that matter. That was why he usually spewed weird philosophical phrases about angels and devils and blood that were just confusing enough to sound cool as long as no one ever re-thought them. Still, Vicious thought perhaps it would be a good idea to brainstorm up some new threats of physical harm, and so he made a list over the next five hours. After he'd changed into his white T-shirt with "Kill Spike" first, of course. One of the few T-shirts he regularly wore, usually for bed. He'd gotten the "Kill Spike" bit after one too many drinks with Lin one night. He'd been chagrined at first; it was just so childish, but it did aptly sum up one of his long-term goals in life. And compared to some of the other events that alcohol-induced night…but that's another story.
So it was now five hours later, and Vicious was making his way to Robert's workshop rather eagerly. So eager, as a matter of fact, to be free of the creature (he could not bring himself to call it Rikki Tikki), that he wasn't alerted to the presence of anyone else in the lot until someone shouted, "Vicious, is that a cockatoo??" Then he was alerted.
And oh so confused. Because the man who shouted that most embarrassing of inquiries sounded and rather looked like the man whose name was imprinted on his shirt. In other words, it seemed as if Spike was not only alive and well, but had appeared in of all places and of all times here for the express purpose of staring at him getting pooped on by a high-tech weapon in the guise of a retarded parrot that could not control its own digestive tract. Oh, the irony. Oh, the humanity. Oh, what a great dramatic moment to end on.