The Symphony Hall
Pre-Bebop, pre-Julia. Twenty-year-olds Spike and Vicious are low-time gang members for a group called the Red Dragons, but when an opportunity makes itself clear, their lives are changed. Rated R for cussing and adult situations.
Radishface
~ 3 ~
Vicious had decided to spend the night at Spike's, not that it was anything new. They usually drunk themselves into oblivion-- Spike, anyway, and Vicious would have to drag him home, and make sure he didn't puke on the carpet, otherwise his apartment would be smelling like a shit until he decided to clean it up.
Maybe Spike wasn't that bad in his habits. But he was nonchalant about things.
Vicious fiddled with the cigarette in his fingers, staring at the white of the refrigerator door in Spike's kitchen, which was blissfully bare. Maternal refrigerators had all sorts of notes and magnets and various elementary school paintings stuck onto the white door, papers would rustle when it was opened. Spike's had a calendar on the top, where the freezer was, and it was unmarked, perhaps even two years old.
He didn't remember much about when he was a child, Vicious thought, as he stared out the window, the first light of dawn creeping through hesitantly, crawling on the floor with orange and yellow fingers. He might have painted something unintelligible with his fingers in school, he might have sat cross-legged in the middle of a classroom, listening to stories about giants and dragons and princes.
His house wasn't poor, Vicious remembered. His mother had been strangely distant, light hair and light eyes never focusing too long on one person or one thing at a time. She cooked his meals, but they tasted of white chalk and bland lumps of starch, without color. She had tucked him into bed, had turned off his light, had picked him up from school, had killed herself, the water in the bathtub a swirl of clear pinks and reds, spiraling out of her wrists.
And then his father had come home, Vicious remembered clinging onto the expensive trousers, the loudness of the usually quiet house as men in uniforms marched in, asking what her daily routine was, what she did, and his father had replied that she stayed home, and when they told her that they had found traces of morphine in her body, in her blood, his father's face had become stony.
His father had placed a careful hand on his head, a gesture meant to calm, and he had let himself be calmed. He had lost his mother, his source of maternal love and eternal tranquility. He didn't feel anything.
And then his father had sent him away.
At the boarding school, somewhere, he dressed well, in tailor-fit grey pants, in a clean shirt and a vest, a red tie to match. He was only a little boy then, and without his mother there to tell him when his hair was too long, he let it grow a little, past his ears. It was thick, silver hair, and the teachers at the school looked his direction, their gnarled, adult hands seeking to pet it, sometimes the fingers trailing lower, to the back of his neck, where they rested.
When he was an adolescent, he was a scrawny, pathetic thing, always the one to huddle in the back of the classrooms, skirting meals as if they meant nothing to him. He made enemies without knowing it, those other boys who sneered at his light hair and his grey eyes and how he didn't have a family to return to when summer vacation arrived.
Of course these accusations were not true. He had returned to the house, not his mother's apartment, but his father's house located by the ocean, huge glass windows facing the sea, the roar of the sea nothing more than a whisper in his ears. When his father was home, it was always with very beautiful women with long, silky tresses who smiled at him and stroked his face with thin fingers, and then disappeared when his father disappeared in the vastness of the house.
It was the day before summer vacation one year, and he was packing, doing everything in a slow, leisurely way, his skin stretched tight over bony fingers, so pale he was almost translucent, a ghost of a shadow, and even more severe than that. And one of his roommates, who usually left him alone, came over to him.
Had asked him a question, hostile, and he had replied vaguely, his mind elsewhere. He had been turned around by the shoulders, and startled, his hand had lashed out, shock in his features, around him. And then he was knocked to the ground. It was then he was genuinely nervous, with strong legs on either side of his hips, calloused fingers digging into his wrists, and he was reminded of when his mother died, her own wrists hollow with scarlet tears.
Oh, but something had stirred, and he had felt it. Apparently, the other boy had as well, and jumped off him as soon as Vicious acknowledged the feeling. It wasn't much, but perhaps the other boy had felt it more keenly than he did. He was left on the ground, his head spinning, while the other boy walked out the door, not bothering to mutter a caustic remark, not bothering to earn the last laugh.
That night at his father's house, he was eating his dinner, watching the familiar ebb of the waves and the moonlight off the tide, a white snake that crept from one end of the beach to the other. And today, his father was displeased with the maid for having knocked over one of his rare, priceless antique vases, and was consulting with her in his office. The woman he brought home today had sauntered into the kitchen, as he drank the last drops of water out of his cup, his plate only half finished.
"You're his son?" She had asked him, her manicured fingers wound around the stem of a wine glass.
He had nodded, and knew that she was not the ones he usually brought home with him, the ones that knew how to hold wine glasses and lean over the bar so that just the right amount of skin on their backs was shown, the right amount of chest expanse bared. She showed too much, or too little.
"You don't go to school here." She stated, and did not wait for him to answer, tossing her golden hair over her shoulder, flickering her blue eyes out to the sea, and then back at him, and then at his hands, which were resting on the edge of the table. She noticed the blue and black marks encircling his wrists, and her eyes narrowed, and she smiled.
"Fight?" She laughed. "Boys will be boys."
He wanted to shake his head, and tell her, no, it was a tryst.
But she stopped laughing, and a little of that tenderness, the maternal quality that women like that rarely showed, was fused into her features, and in her voice. "You'd better be careful." She smiled, an uneven smile. "You're his only son."
That could have meant many things, he had been thinking, as his father came down with the maid, who had her gaze on the floor. His father smiled at the woman and dismissed the maid, nodding at him like he was a guest in the house, fairly welcome, but merely a guest, and not his only son.
But he was careful after that, and he wasn't a scrawny, pathetic, miserable thing anymore. The words had changed him, for some unknown reason.
He remembered coming home for winter break, remembered the house in a mess and his father stuffing something in a suitcase, a phone pressed to his ear, his lips moving frantically, words coming out sometimes, sometimes it was just his lips moving. He had eyed his son as he walked through the doors, his eyes had widened slightly with vague surprise, as if he hadn't expected him. He told the person on the phone to wait.
"Pack." He'd told the boy. "We're leaving in six minutes."
And he remembered standing perfectly still, the absence of confusion and anxiety, as he asked why.
"They've got me." His father had stated simply. "We have to go." And then he had rolled up his sleeves, and had walked into his office. Vicious walked into the kitchen, dropping his school bags on the table, poured himself a glass of water, and waited.
His father came out with a stack of papers, a few vials of red liquid. Setting aside two vials, he threw the papers into the fireplace and struck a match, everything smoking and burning, the edges of the paper shying away from the flames, only to be ignited themselves, a futile resistance.
He had never asked his father how they had acquired so much money, so many things. It wasn't his to know.
His clothes had been packed away in a small suitcase, had been thrown into the back of the car. There was nobody in the house besides the two of them. There were no women to complain about the furniture, the jewelry.
He had slid into the passenger seat of his father's black sedan, the sun setting dangerously behind them. His father's hand on the stick shift sped the car up to the highest gear it could go and even higher, the world a blur by them, only he was staring out the window, fascinated as the glimmer of the sea faded to an undecipherable smudge of volatile light.
He should have known it would happen, it was inevitable, the way his father looked then, placid, like the reflection of clouds in a lake before a thunderstorm, the eye of the hurricane. He couldn't be sure in the orange of the sunset, but his father's eyes looked red, the intensity of his concentration was frightening.
Too fast, for some reason, and the car had flipped over, his head had turned to look at his father's before they collided with the ground, the man's features were schooled into the utmost calm, fearless, and resigned. All within a split second, it barely seemed human, and his father had somehow managed to unlock the doors, and unbuckle his seatbelt, push him out of the car into the air.
He had watched himself fly out of the vehicle, the man in the car not his father, but a stranger, and from his position in the air as he fell, it was like he could see the police cars twenty miles back, chasing the wreckage with the stupidity of an animal hunting a fire.
And then he had woken up in a different place, in a room with walls of white, and he had correctly assumed he was in a hospital. A hospital in a city he didn't know, nor did he care to know. He was released without any legal complications, the son of a dead man, or the son of a living man whose face would be unrecognizable to his offspring, a mesh of wires and synthetic skin. He had been separated from his father, and he didn't care.
In the city, it was simple to find the right and wrong places to eat, to dine, to bed. And he quickly found all the wrong places, sought the connections from the wrong people, his father's kind. They asked him his heritage, where he had come from, he answered with a dead honesty, and they said they claimed to know his father, and he was, for a short time, revered as the child of a god.
And a man named Wolfe had offered him admission into a gang called the Red Dragons, something small, an insignificant group of nonentities that the local police only considered as a catch not worth making unless there was nothing else to be done. With his admission, the Red Dragons gained some notoriety for housing the son of the kingpin that had ruled half of the underworld. He had accepted this fact about his father without a grimace, he had suspected something had been like it all along.
Vicious learned quickly, how to hold a gun, how to shoot accurately and deadly. Bulletproof vests were no problem, because gang members were too proud to wear them. He learned how to pick locks when silence was necessary, he learned to shoot them open when it didn't matter. He learned how to disguise his footsteps in the dark of corridors and his voice over the phone, learned how to recognize the signs of rendezvous, learned an honor that would eventually serve as his death.
He was Wolfe's favorite. Wolfe, who was only a few years older than him and always seemed infinitely more sophisticated, more secular, knew more than him. But over time, Vicious grew to know him as a pretender of those things, one who wished and never would attain. But he went around in a nihilistic way, not minding that Wolfe had sucked him into a petty trap, an enclosure to use the Red Eye's son as a way to temporarily boost the infamy of the Red Dragons. And when the Red Dragon's status in the underground began to decline, so did Wolfe's favoritism.
And then Wolfe somehow managed to lure an innocent into the Red Dragons.
They hadn't gotten along instantaneously. Wolfe had recruited a fluffy-haired, tall and gangly person much like himself in physique, completely different in attitude. Whereas Wolfe was an insufferable and pompous bighead with his brain in the clouds and his dick in the air, Spiegel had been a shy person who bit his bottom lip when he smiled, embarrassed. His personality was a breath of fresh air among the other Red Dragons, who were coarse, crude, and obnoxious.
A shy kid, Wolfe had called him, had smiled on him in a different way. Wolfe had told Vicious to teach Spiegel the basics, and Spiegel had approached the matter with a matter of casual enthusiasm, trying to mask the brightness in his eyes.
And at first, Vicious had looked down upon him, not daring to order him around as that was Wolfe's job, but merely taught him the most elementary of basics. Shoot a gun, fine, don't care where you hit, did you miss?, that's fine, I have better things to do. Spiegel, he murmured the name often, his voice never reaching above a disdainful whisper. Why did you join the Red Dragons?
The youth's first gang war had come unexpectedly quickly, a test of his new abilities. At the time, Vicious had been out wandering home from the bars, his cell phone turned off, hanging like a dead weight in his pocket. Wolfe hadn't been able to reach him and tell him that Spiegel had gotten himself into a fight in the pool hall down by the fifth avenue, that he had managed to kill five Monazites before backup had arrived, scattering them. He had turned on his cell phone later, found a frantic message, Spike was in the hospital, had hauled himself up there, didn't Vicious even tell him that they were supposed to send all injuries to Dr. Nyugen, the back alley abortionist? It was his responsibility, get the kid out of the hospital before authorities could question them.
Vicious had driven up to the hospital, had told the receptionist he was Spiegel's first cousin. Strangely enough, the computer records showed, when she checked, he was. Wolfe must have gotten Eddy to hack into the database and changed Spiegel's family history. The reception gave him a bored smile, looked him once over, his tired eyes, his silver hair, his heaving chest, and told him that Spiegel was on the third floor, room 340B.
"You bastard." He said, as he stormed through the door, not bothering with the nurse who had jumped back a step from Spiegel's bed. "You bastard."
The nurse hastily exited, leaving the two alone. Spike was propped up on four pillows, a bandage wound around his head, over his right arm. The knuckles on his left hand were broken and the dried blood caked itself on his hand, and Vicious wondered why that hadn't been wrapped and set like the rest of his wounds.
Spiegel had seemed to read his mind, and he laughed. "The nurse was just about to do that before you came."
Vicious stared at him unblinkingly, scowled in the face of good humor. He couldn't bring himself to say anything. Damn kid was his responsibility. For the first time, he felt the pang of anticipated consequence. If he lost Spiegel, then he lost his position, his status, on the Red Dragons. And then he'd have nowhere to go. It shouldn't matter to him, but it did, stung him with all the force of a needle piercing his eye.
He'd grabbed the roll of bandages from the counter and rolled up his sleeves, unwinding the gauze, cutting a piece with a pair of scissors. Spiegel had been watching him with a quiet surprise, his hair in his bandaged face and his shirt half-buttoned, revealing more bandages criss-crossing over his chest. No, he had sounded fine when he was talking. No hoarse struggle for breath, no puncture in the lungs. Maybe the bullets just grazed the side of his hip, his chest, his arms, fingers in quest for touch.
The red stains on the gauze blinded him for a moment.
"Who was I supposed to go to?" Spiegel asked him, and Vicious looked up quickly.
"Dr. Nyugen." He replied curtly. "Poyntell Avenue, the alley behind the piano warehouse."
"Oh." He laughed, but it sounded weak now, a shade of the former brightness. "You never told me."
"You would have thought to ask." Vicious said, a raspy murmur. "I would have told you."
"What?" Spiegel's attention focused on him, the man sitting at his side, bandaging his arm.
"But maybe you didn't want to ask," Vicious went on, "because you didn't think you'd get hurt?"
"I didn't start anything." Spiegel defended, warily. "They were--"
"You were supposed to start something." Vicious muttered, angry, for some reason. "With the right backup, you could have done anything and fucking escaped without a scratch."
"I'm not hurt."
"Then get up." Vicious stood up himself, facing the door. "We need to go. I'll have Dr. Nyugen check the rest of your wounds."
"Sure." The easy smile had come back, despite the obvious pain he was in. "Let me put on some pants."
Vicious stared at the door while Spiegel crawled out of the squeaky cot, keeping his groans of pain muffled as he limped to a chair where his blood-stained trousers were, the sound of cloth rustling, zippers fastening. And then a hand on his shoulder and nearly sent him jumping twenty feet in the air.
"Spiegel..." He said, warningly. Don't get too close.
The other withdrew his hand too quickly, like he'd been burned, and almost tripped over his own legs, wobbling unsteadily, unused to standing again. "Sorry," He replied casually. "Lost my balance for a minute there."
He limped like a newborn colt as they went down the hallway. They didn't say anything to each other in the elevator, and Spiegel had blithely protested to the receptionist at the counter, ignoring stares from the nurses and doctors, insisting he was fine. Vicious had intervened, saying his aunt was dying of leukemia back at home, that they needed to return home immediately.
"I heard it was you who started the fight." Vicious said, once they were in his car. "I got a call from Wolfe."
"Yeah, it was me." Spiegel said sheepishly, almost proudly. "I don't know. Fucking stupid reason, though."
Vicious didn't say anything, waited for the response or the one that wouldn't follow.
"They were just saying some things, that was all." He shook his hair out of his face, unable to do it with his hands. "They know a lot about you. More than I do." He grinned, impersonally, facing the window. "Kept saying things about you, what a whore you were, some other things. I just happened to be in the same room, and I heard them, and... I don't know." He trailed off, his confidence waning, suddenly embarrassed at his display. "It was a stupid thing to do."
Vicious felt his vision seem to contract to a small pinpoint of light, his breathing shallow, heartbeat slowing, his world seemed to be a small, pulsing center of numbness, and his hands clenched on the driving wheel.
"Vicious." Hoarsely whispered, heavily intoned, coming from far away, and he turned to look at Spike, not Spiegel, not an impersonal last name that didn't mean anything to the listener. It was like that one night when that woman his father brought home had told him to be careful, it was a small and strange moment, and he didn't know quite what to make of it.
"Vicious."
He blinked, startled out of his dream-like state, his head spinning slightly, and he realized the cigarette had become a long cylinder of ash now, still burning, dangerously close to his fingers.
Crushing it hastily on a napkin, he heard Spike's voice coming from the bedroom, strangely strained and raspy, like he had just swallowed bile and vomit, making his throat scratchy and red, ripping it out in torrents of flesh. Vicious threw the cigarette into the sink and stood up, the feeling returning to his legs again.
"I feel fuckin' awful." The voice rasped jokingly as Vicious walked into the bedroom, carefully stepping over stray clothes and cigarette butts. "Did I drink too much again? O.D. on something?"
Vicious stared at him blankly, sun falling through the blinds in horizontal strips of light, catching the light on his face, his eyes as they blinked, growing accustomed to the morning light. His left hand grasped the sheets, his right hand was limp at his side. As Spike sat up in his bed, the sheets slithered off his chest, fell over his hips, and loosely draped there.
Spike yawned, giving a slight groan of pain as the feeling in his right arm returned. "I'm just kidding." He laughed, sliding off the bed. The silver-haired man turned away, walked to the blinds, looked out the window, looked at anything else.
"You got shot in the arm." Vicious said, his voice carefully neutral. He was tired, that was it. He had stayed up half the night making sure Spike didn't accidentally vomit in his sleep, went into his room periodically at night to make sure the wastebasket was on the right side of the bed, depending on which way Spike's head was facing. The moon had been high that night, fell in thick beams through the blinds like the sun was doing now. He had sat on the couch or in the kitchen when he wasn't up walking around, had wasted a box of cigarettes, lit, not smoked once or twice before they had burned out.
"It's kind of obvious." Spike said, and Vicious heard the footsteps going in the direction of the shower. "Fuckin' hell, I won't be able to jack off for another two weeks."
~
That was a change in writing style from the previous chapters… more rambly. O_o I suppose listening to floaty music doesn't help when trying to write a gritty gang fanfic.
Hahahaha, can anyone tell that Vicious is… having certain feelings? For someone? I think I might have made it a little vague. Nothing ever writes out the way I want it to.
As for the next chapter… Two new characters introduced, Vicious gets in touch with his feminine (j/k, j/k) side. Don't worry, they're not original characters like that annoying Wolfe is, but from the Bebop series. ^_~ C&C is very muchly appreciated.
