Chapter Twelve
Disclaimer: I don't own Gorillaz.
A/N: I'm back after a vacation and posting again! REVIEW, DAMMIT! (and thanks to all the people who already do. But I know some people aren't doing their share when I get 5 comments and 89 views for a chapter.) Keep in mind, the rating may go up in a rapidly approaching chapter.
The following chapter is based on real events that happened some time ago, when I began writing. Message me for details.
Noodle was high on life. All of a sudden, her worries had melted.
Everyone in the house noticed it, not just me this time. Energetic, excited. She ignored anything negative. Her PPCDA magazines were piling in the garbage, and if there was no more room in the garbage, they piled next to it, instead.
She loved living. But I had the feeling she was looking for something that wasn't there. And no one could break it to her. No one could tell her there was nothing left to live for in this world, nothing except each other. And still, she searched on. If she couldn't find a reason to live, she'd make it.
There was one time, her first and last attempt to create beauty, something to live for. It was a Tuesday. She was out with her friends, the older girls, seniors in school, with long black hair and their clear eyes, reading poetry and practicing Zen. Pale skin, faces calm, army headbands, rings from their boyfriends on their long fingers.
Noodle, she laughed along with them, in the center of their circle, but it was easy to see why it was them who followed her. She was calm, relaxed, unreadable. She made the decisions that saved their asses plenty of times, but what trouble girls like these could get into, I could not imagine.
They had decided to go around town, the movies... Noodle had her own agenda - she told me she'd go to the shops and get me a surprise. As they headed out the door, she pecked me on the forehead, and ruffled my hair. "Be back soon. Love ya."
"See ya," I called, watching them from the beach chair on the porch. I heard one of the girls saying, "You are so lucky to live with them you know that?"
Noodle paused, then chuckled. "It can be a blessing or a curse." More laughter, then they headed down the road and faded from view.
An hour later, I wanted a grilled tuna sandwich. Like, really badly wanted it. So I picked myself up and headed inside, and had almost found and retrieved the bread, when who walks in but dearest Noods. And she was not alone, for in her hand, she carried a metal-wire cage with four tiny birds!
I gaped. As if her rarely-mentioned monkey friend 'Mike' who stops in for food, then hops back over the fence wasn't enough! She gently put the cage on the floor and pointed.
"Finches," she said. There was one white, one black, one gray, and one splotched. "Hope you don't mind."
Murdoc walked in abruptly, stopping and staring at the birds. "Ohh," he said, "Dinner."
Noodle jumped, not realizing he had come in, and clung to the cage like a magnet. "One toe out of line from you," she warning, hissing, "an I'll chop it off."
Muds blinked and slowly backed out of the room...
She took really good care of them. REALLY good care of them. She pampered those things. A nice cage in a corner in a clean patch of the lawn, right under her window. She became obsessive.
We lay in her room one day, on her bed, flipping through channels on the TV suspended from the ceiling. We stopped at a Spanish soap opera, which was very interesting, aside from the fact that it was in... well, Spanish. Noodle, however, watched it, and liked it.
"Oi, Noods, d'ya 'ave tha English version a' this?" I asked. She tilted her head to look over at me.
"Yeah," she replied, "It's called reality."
I chuckled. "D'ya unnerstand it, then?"
"Yup," was the answer, "In training, we learned five different languages. Spanish, Italian, German, French, English. We already knew Japanese, and we studied sign language. Well, actually, we first studied Latin, which made it much easier, being how it's the root language of all the others. But English was tough. It has it's own words."
"You speak it fine," I said.
"Arigato. Danke. Gracias. Merci. Grazie." She made some strange motion with her hand and laughed.
She was amazing. This extraordinary being laying next to me, speaking better English than someone who had spoke it all their life.
How could it be me who had caught her? Why did I, 2D, a smoking, drinking, usually hooker-embracing guy, have the fortune of finding someone as perfect as Noodle? What did I do to deserve her, when there were hundreds of hardworking men better than me looking for their soulmates?
Was Noodle a warning? Was she a sign, telling me something was about to go terribly wrong, that there was a mistake, that she was a taster of the girl that I'd want most of all but never have? Was she too good to be true?
What was the price I'd have to pay for her?
"Stu!"
My name snapped me from my reverie. Noodle's eyes were wide.
"Well," she said, "that seemed to work."
"Anythin' ya want, love?"
She shrugged. "Just to tell you - I have names for the finches. Tell me how you like them."
She listed them on her fingers.
"Let's see, we've got Aika, Mome, Maruci, and Kyokomono. Good?"
"They sound pretty," I admitted, "'specially Aika an' Mome. But I still don' speak Japanese."
She laughed. "It's funny you say that," she observed, "Aika was my mother's first name. Maruchi was the girl I told you about, the one who coughed herself to death." A pause. "Mome was my nickname. And Kyokomono was my first boyfriend."
"First boyfriend? Hmm. Whateva 'appened ta' im?"
"We met in training. I was 12, he was, 14, maybe? We only saw each other on the shooting range. He thought I was funny or something, he'd always tease me about the way I handled a rifle. I guess that's what made me so determined, trying to prove myself. Eventually, he asked me out." She picked at her fingernails. "I got my first kiss to that kid."
"It was my first public relationship, being that they were forbidden in 'school.' But all my friends knew about it. After school disbanded and we were released and I got my apartment, he showed up at my doorstep. It was a year later. He told me people were after him, and he'd probably never see him again. So he left, and I haven't heard from him since."
"So..." I asked, slowly, "If 'e came back on up 'ere tomorrow, would ya' love 'im again?"
She wrapped an arm around my neck and kissed my chin. "What do you think, 2D-san?"
"I... Well, I dunno, tha's why I'm askin'!"
"You're really that unsure?"
"I-"
"Relax." She kissed my lower lip again. "Crushes fade, that one's dead. Kyokomono made a big dent in my life, but I'm willing to leave it alone if you are."
I took that as a truce. If I no talky Paula, she no talky Kyononononononono.
"Love ya," I said, kissing her in return.
We kissed and kissed again, and, well, y'know... it gathered up speed as it went. In a minute, I was trailing my lips down her neck, where I bit into her shoulder. I couldn't help myself. Noodle made a huffed sound, or maybe that was me. But something was not right, for when I clamped down, she lifted my face to hers, pecked me on the cheek and murmured, "I've got to go... got to feed the birds..."
Without saying anything else, she picked herself up, flicked the TV off, and left the room, maybe a bit too quickly.
"Tuppence a bag," I muttered, getting no response. Fuck those birds. I want Noodle.
I heard the cage slamming shut outside the window. "Mome..." she cooed, followed by a short 'peep.' I could imagine her cuddling the tiny thing, rubbing it's feathers and changing the seeds in it's cage. Those little attention whores.
But suddenly, I felt a pang of guilt. Noodle was young. I was... not. It was times like these that made me remember how little and fragile and ... well, 'unexperienced,' she was. I felt a blush rise to my face thinking about it. She wasn't stupid, she knew they didn't need to be fed at that moment...
Whatever. If it meant I had to wait years, I would. Noods was not getting off the hook this easy.
A week passed, with no further mention of that afternoon. It was a Wednesday morning. A dead morning.
I was sitting in the café, having my Irish coffee with large amounts of alcohol in it, when Noodle, already awake and dressed, comes bounding in and yanking on my sleeve.
"2D-cha'!" she calls, "C'mere, I wanna show you how to clean the bird cage, in case I ever go out and can't do it."
After a bit of reluctance, I gave in. Let her show me.
We went outside, me still in my robe and bunny slippers, circling the yard until we found the cage. But something was not right.
The usual peeping that came from inside the wires was replaced by silence. The critters were not hopping and flapping about the mesh as they usually did.
Noodle's pace slowed. "...What?" she asked, stopping. We stared, neither daring to really go up to the cage...
"Noodle," I said. She hushed me, and crept towards the wire.
A few feet before it, she stopped. Froze, right then and there. I did not move.
"Oh, my god..."
Her words were horrified and disgusted. She was tense. Her arms were rigid. Frozen in mid-step. I came up behind her, to see what she was looking at. But as I reached out a hand to touch her shoulder, she dropped to the ground, kneeling, and I saw what she had been looking at.
Body parts... the scattered pieces, wings, feathers, feathers clumped together with blood, bits of bone...
My throat tightened, this was what hell looked like... Noodle made a retching noise.
She was holding a grey wing. She ha not said anything, not a word. I waited for her, not wanting to be first to talk.
"Cats."
She spat out that tiny thing, her voice hoarse.
"Cats," she repeated, like I hadn't heard her the first time.
The mesh cage had been torn open. Feathers were everywhere.
"Noodle," I said, squatting down next to her, "Noodle, I'm..."
"I'll fucking kill it," she said. I could not see her face, but her outstretched hand was shaking like a leaf. Anger coursed through her veins, faster than her blood did. The aura here had changed. She was not sad. She was fire.
"It's survival, love," I reasoned, "Cats gotta–"
"That fucking thing comes here again, and I'll kill it. I'll dice it. Chop it to pieces, murder it." I had never seen her this angry before. It scared me. I wonder if she'd get activated or something. "Cats kill for the sweet fuck of it," she said.
Her head turned. Unblinking, green eyes. Danger zone.
A deathly smile, teeth white as paper.
"I think I might give it a try, too..."
Russel and I eventually convinced her to calm down. I finally realized why Noodle was such a threat to anyone who opposed her.
She made three crosses. Wood. They read the names of the birds, Mome, Aika, Maruchi.
She did not make one for Kyokomono.
"Noods," Russ asked, upon seeing them, "What about that other bird?"
"There was no other bird," she said.
I found her lying on the floor on the kitchen one day, her face pressed against the cold floor.
I didn't bother to ask what she was doing, Noodle had her strange ways. So I lay down next to her and stared.
"Hey," she muttered. Now that the birds were gone, she had freed up her schedule.
"Love," I said, "Whaddaya thinkin' 'bout?"
She ignored that. "2D, what if I don't live to see my goals achieved? What if I die before this war is over? It hit me all of a sudden." A pause. "I'm all they have. If I go, we lose the fight."
"Yaw tha strongest they 'ave. Tha's why yaw what they depend on," I said.
"What if I can't do this? If I can't protect them? There's 22 more kids out there who they can use against me, and I couldn't fight that."
I lay quiet for a minute, trying to think of what to say.
"But..." I managed, "If all a' those kids went through what you did, then why'd they take the gov's side? Theah with ya, aw theah dead."
We lay there, so silent, so silent. She slid her hand across the floor, and I took it and held it.
"What if I can't finish everything I want to?" she asked.
"Then do it now." Because it was the only true to god answer I could give, or think of. And I didn't want to scare her or upset her by saying it, but that was what I honestly thought. Do it now.
She nodded, her hair fanning out on the tiles.
"Okay."
And she held my hand and slid closer and touched my forehead with hers. And we lay until a thousand years passed by.