-Slit-
I thought the loon was just in a mood. I thought it might pass, that I'd sleep in the car since she was being a thankless bitch about the whole thing. I also thought that I'd wake up half way through the night to her dragging me back to the interior, jabbering the whole way. Nope.
I woke up freezing my nuts off on the back seat of the nameless Impala in the earliest hours to find that I was alone. I checked every chamber, every passageway, and every narrow squeeze in the underground for the little rustlicker but found nothing. I even looked around by the reeking maggot farm.
Now here I am, watching her stumble over to the passenger side door to pull it open and get inside. I found the little idiot's trail leaving the cave. I followed her tracks and drops of blood wicked into the sand under the shine of the still working right head light. Around the time the sun had risen a knuckle's width from the morning horizon I spotted her. There she had been, meandering around covered in blood and clutching a crudely made shiv to her chest.
She might have killed someone or some fool tried to whack her and bit off more than they could chew. She was all bruised up and sporting new scuffs, which was her own fault for leaving unarmed and damn near naked. Those boots weren't hers, dunno where she got them but they stunk even from a distance. Her feet are going to rot off her damn legs in those. Couldn't rip them off now, though. It was cold as hell and the wench was blue through the fingers, ears and lips.
She must have walked right by the parked car in the middle of the night and moved on foot heading east for a straight six hours until I woke up. Why?
Didn't care. I was too fucking aggravated. Lightning warped her head even worse than it was before, and now she wouldn't even explain herself. Or maybe she couldn't. Great, just fucking chrome.
I was still freezing my ass off and the car had no windshield so it wasn't going to get any warmer in here. I could probably cut steel with my nipples if I wanted to, they were so hard. That was also Dune's fault. She'd shot out most of the glass when she killed the previous owners.
I had to switch out the foot bit on the stupid metal leg again before we left, then slide the curved hooks of the driving foot around the clutch so I could shift gears properly. Once we were moving I found just enough self-control to ask a question without roaring it, but only just.
"You wanna tell me what I'm looking at here? Huh? The fuck is this about? You're acting like some pup."
She turned her head slowly to meet my gaze, eyes narrowed as she curled her arms around her kneecaps for warmth. "Mmph."
"What. What!?"
A grunt, that was all the more I got. So, I turned my attention back to the lack of road ahead, following the tire tracks I left to get out here like bread crumbs. I could hear her breath, shuddering from the frigid morning air. We were maybe a month away from lean times when the wastes got cold and stayed that way for what would feel like forever. We'd have to burn garbage just to keep warm enough not to freeze at night. It would be another hour before the sun rose high to become an oppressive haze of burning light and rising shimmers of heat. I thought I was irritated enough to let the little bitch shiver the whole way home. Was wrong, usually am these days. For a while, in the beginning, I wondered if this was just life after death. I had entertained the idea that I hadn't gone out glorious enough for a place in Valhalla and that this was hell. Condemned to pick through scrap and chunks of rust for all eternity and that the loon was somehow the devil incarnate, suffering me with the torture of her incessant prattling.
I was wrong, or maybe too accustomed to the sound of her voice. Hearing nothing was worse than the raving. Worse than the hell of living with her for seven hundred and twenty-eight days, minus the time I spent spying on the Citadel from among the Wretched.
She shivered again, a noise passing between her raunchy teeth which almost sounded like a word.
"What?" I didn't like how gently it fell off my tongue. It made things in the bottom of my gut tighten as if I should be expecting a flogging for going as soft as a breeder. Yet, no matter how hard I fought it, hearing something akin to speech coming out of the loudest mouth in the wasteland was the a relief second only to quenching my addiction to aqua-cola.
"Died?... Did-"
She chewed her tongue and worried her lower lip between her fangs so strongly that I wondered if she'd draw her own blood. She was struggling, voice hoarse and flat. I swallowed the dry knot in my throat as I looked at her, the tire tracks ahead and back again. She managed to repeat the first word twice more in stutters and slurs. It hit me then that it was a question. She wanted to know if she had died.
It was rotten to be reminded of how I felt when the nutter wouldn't breathe and had no discernible pulse. Like my insides were being squeezed out under a tire. Feelings like that made me doubly unworthy of Valhalla. She hadn't any fuckin' right to make me feel this shit. Having no right to do something to me never stopped her before. She healed me, touched me with a shine hand, called me her Ducky like she had some moronic claim on me. Damn her. Damn her to fucking hell to burn again and again in an endless cycle till her bones are reduced to ash. And my weak, half-life corpus just reveled in the attention, totally independent of how my skull meat interpreted the happenings outside its shell.
Again, the flesh on my bones acted of its own accord. An arm made more from scars than skin stretched out, the fingers on the end of it snapped a few times to get her attention when she stared off into the nothing with a blank look on her face. My fingers curled, beckoning her closer.
"You're obviously a weak rust spawnling that can't keep herself warm without help. C'mere."
Dune snorted, then brushed off my hand in protest until I gave up. She only inched closer when she thought I wouldn't notice, tucking her head under my arm and leaning heavy as she could into my side. Dumb, weak, pathetic half-life body kept on betraying me. This felt just as good as throwing a lance and hitting the target dead on balls accurate. Sinful, rusty, mediocre, unworthy.
I was still rip-roaring mad that she had strolled out of her kip like that. She'd wandered around, gotten herself into a fight with Immortan knows what and almost undid all the work I'd done keeping her alive and dragging her limp carcass to Wilson's for a patch job. Had to keep telling myself I was pissed, or else it would slip away and wind up forgotten.
Her shine hand pushed aside the kutte I had replaced when I gave her the shirt off my back to cover her near nudity and torn clothes. A finger began drawing lines in the wind cooled flesh around the scars on my gut and ribs. I should have told her that it was a waste, like pouring aqua-cola into the thirsty dirt. I wasn't going to forgive her. Not for saving me, not for keeping me, not for almost dying herself. Hell no... Maybe, a little.
Her fingers stopped and lifted away to tug at something stuffed into one of my pockets. It came out into her hands and uncrumpled. It was that vest she always wore with the patches all over it. I'd had it in my hands as I searched the cavern, like an assurance that she could not have gone far because she never left the place without it. I hate being wrong.
She pulled away to put it on. She probably felt as naked without it as I would without the flip blade and bracer on my wrist. She only gave that back four hundred or so days after dragging me out of the grip of holy death, kicking and screaming. It took her a while to trust me with a weapon, which was not unwise. I truly burned to watch her suffer in the beginning.
When the loon pressed back into me and tried to continue tracing the shapes of my cut-ups I snatched her hand away from them and brought it to where I really wanted it. For all of this trouble, I deserved something in return for going out to fetch her. Her fingers stunk like dried blood and they were cold as frost but my face was where I wished them to do their work, where I liked them best. It could almost make up for missing out on Valhalla, having my hands on a wheel, the rumble of an engine around me and those shiny little fingers gliding up and down the splits in my chrome face. I'd accept nothing less.
I didn't let her stop and wouldn't until I could park this rust bucket. I didn't care if all the blood ran out of her arm by the time we got back, she owed me all the touches that the shine hand could give. Anytime her palm tried to drop away I'd put it right back.
Eventually, the homestead appeared within sight. I had let my thoughts wander in the silence. I was sick of it, hearing no litany of insanity in my left ear as we made the trek home. Would she try to speak if I started? I thought of her question, she could still be waiting for an answer. I considered what had happened four days ago long and hard before opening my mouth. That weird twist in my guts left me feeling like I needed to take a leak as I answered her finally.
"When the lightning got ya, stopped breathin'. Couldn't find your bloodpump beats either. I had to do your breathin' for you."
Her hand stopped, fingers twitching against my lips with what felt like agitation. I turned my head into her knuckles to look at her. Horror spread had across her face. At first, I thought it was a natural reaction for a non-warrior to learn that they had been, for all intents and purposes, a corpse. Then the look faded away as she leaned back and retracted her touch. Mortification was replaced by lips curled back brows pinned low. There was something feral about those eyes, pupils blown wide and jaw clicking.
I didn't see what came next. I'd stupidly shifted my gaze back to the sand ahead, giving her the opening she needed to ram her fist into my eye with strength I was never aware she had. My vision actually spun momentarily as the car swerved to a stop. When I realized what she had done I tried to snatch at her hair again but, she was already pushing open the passenger side door to make her exodus and slamming it shut.
"The shitting FUCK Dune! What the hell was that for!?"
She didn't answer. The psycho walked just a couple hand widths from the front bumper of the car and stumbled the last ten minutes of the way to the cavern. Stubborn, rock headed little-
I fought off the urge to run her over more than a few times, instead revving the engine to get her to speed the fuck up. Couldn't just go around and leave her to her own devices. I didn't trust her not to wander off again without supervision. If she wanted to wear her messed up feet through until those boots were filled with blood then so be it. It was hard to give a damn about her what with my good eye threatening to swell shut and render me temporarily blind.
It was a long half mile drive to the cave mouth.
-0-
That punch in the eye was the last time the shine hand reached out to touch me for twenty-five days. That's not to say I didn't try to reverse her shitty mood or win back some favor. All the trying earned me were four new red crescents on my arms and fingers from her teeth. It wasn't long at all before I exiled myself to the garage indefinitely. She looked after herself, I made sure of that. Watching as she wrapped her feet and cleaned out the wound on her scalp. She still filled a bowl with maggots and bits of lizard for me after I ran out of Wilson's MREs to feed on by the Impala. We just existed in the same general vicinity, except at night when she walked in her sleep. It explained her wandering off that first night, but it was no less frustrating. I had to set trip wires to drop bundles of cans and scrap to wake me she stumbled toward the cave mouth. Then I'd have to put her back into her sleep spot. She seldom fought me in those moments because she was not aware enough to get pissy and lash out. Every once in a while, she'd cling to me instead of trying to evade listlessly. That inspired confusion in me.
I worked up the nerve to leave once so that I could salvage what we left behind at the wrecked rig. The body of the War Boy was useless. It had long been bloated, picked by blackbirds, and then all the juices sucked away by the persistent thirst of the wasteland. The fan sled was also worthless. Twisted beyond recognition by the winds. The fan and the motor were barely worth the effort of hauling them home on the back of the Impala. Dune had run her fingers over the remains of her preferred ride sorrowfully. A faint echo of the feeling I used to get watching brethren mourn over lost war chariots spread through my limbs at the sight before she vanished into the maze of tunnels once again.
So many days of silence passed that I considered leaving for good. I wasn't too dense not to know when I was unwelcome. It burned to realize I cared that I had been wanted somewhere, but no longer was. I'd been nothing but fucking tolerant of her this whole time and now this. For what reason? That's what I wanted to know.
On the twenty-fifth day, I ate at an arms length away from her, watched her change the wraps on her feet and then left the place where we both used to sleep. I meant to go prepare for another night in the cold of the garage-chamber.
-Dune-
Days blurred together. He left once to salvage the belongings we left behind somewhere I can't recall. I'd had an inconsolable itch to get on the cycle and head east. When I ventured into the chamber where we kept our rides, I found that he had taken the key and the front tire off the bike before leaving in the Impala. The bastard, the clever bastard.
His return was... Disappointing. My sand sled had perished. There was barely anything left to salvage. Wasted. Ganked. Kicked.
Something else nagged and scratched at the back of my mind. I never woke up where I fell asleep. Sometimes I was standing up in the middle of one of the stone corridors when I came to, or I woke to the sensation of being lifted and finding that Slit was rolling me into the sleep spot.
More time passed. My feet began to heal, so did my scalp, my voice didn't.
It took twenty-four days before I forgave Ducky for dragging me back from the other side, where my kin waited for me. Realizing that this was where my anger flowed from, that it was the reason my lips curled back into a snarl whenever he came too close, that was what gave me the power to let it go. It didn't change the fact that the memory still had it's claws dug into the flesh of my soul so deeply that it was all I could think about. I still felt swindled but I had the willingness to stop my Ducky from slinking off to the car to sleep in it on the twenty-fifth day.
We had been eating when I resolved to break the cycle. It had been easy to fall into a routine. I'd shove a bowl full of maggots and lizard into his lap every evening and then turn away to pick at my own meal. He'd watch intensely while I checked over the wounds on the soles of my feet as if he could not trust me to do it right. Then there came the weight of the silence which pressed into every pore of healthy skin. After all of these daily rituals, he would get up and leave so that he could skulk around by the car. At night he spent his time taking apart things I could not name and putting them back together for the hundredth time until he exhausted himself and slept on the back seat, curled up for warmth.
I waited until I could hear that he was done eating. He always chewed and swallowed loudly for some reason. Sometimes the cracks in his face would bubble with spittle and make flatulent sounds that I used to think were funny. He was licking his bowl clean when I turned to watch. He looked like shit under the grease smeared across his face, smelled like shit too. I wondered if he'd even been making an attempt to look after himself.
Lightning stole my voice. I couldn't say these things to him. He was so engrossed in the last morsels of his dinner that he didn't notice as I reached out. He was up and clumping away before my finger could even graze the shell of his deformed ear.
If I let him, he would stay in the space he called the garage until dawn let down ribbons of light into the hole at the top of that chamber. I felt sick with shame. He'd tried a few times in past weeks to get my attention, to seek out touch or try to taunt words out of me, and all I could do was shove him away or nip him hard with my sharp and yellows because my tongue wouldn't work.
Rust and dust. Everything got snagged on the green things in my head, lost in the foliage.
I rose to my feet with a wounded growl. Wrapping them tightly seemed to help a little, but not enough to quell the way the stone bit at the tender scars. I made my way to where I knew he'd be.
When I entered the chamber I found him leaning under the hood of his precious ride and cranking something or other. I had little understanding of the mechanical works in there. I suspected that he once had the desire to teach me more than just the ways in which the motorcycle worked but had given up quickly due to his low threshold for frustration. Slit was a creature that thrived on instant gratification and I was too slow to learn new things.
He didn't hear me as I closed the distance between us. I seldom heard his approach anymore either. There was always this persistent low whooshing in my ears ever since the storm. It made for many startles to have two half deaf people living together.
His hair was dirty, his skin a patchy mess of engine grease and red dust. My fingers curled anxiously at the sight a few times. Ducky stayed much tidier back when we first met and I had to wash him myself. I wondered if he'd let me run a wet rag over him despite his being entirely capable of doing the work himself.
It was just like the first time my left hand reached out to feel his skin without reason or warning. I sought out the feel of a little swirl in his arm under the pads of my fingertips. He jerked away on reflex and looked at me as if I had struck him. There was electricity crackling between us as our eyes met.
God that had to be the word that described everything we wound up doing to each other. Like fucking wretched, blissfully blinding electricity. Painful and beautiful all at once. It's only fitting that the emperor of that element would tear us apart. Damned lightning.
He scratched at the spot I'd touched and sneered a few harsh words that I should have been expecting. "Come to bite me again? Ungrateful cunt."
A nasty sensation pulsed in my chest, between my ribs, and through every limb. I tried biting my tongue until it bled. Then I tried turning away to leave again. I could not will it to pass. The feeling swelled up like a rotten body in the unforgiving sun, swelling and bubbling until it finally pops open and spews out something no one wants anything to do with. I was halfway across the chamber when I tripped over Slit's mess, tools and parts scattered all over the stone floor in no sensible order.
I fell flat on my breast bone and chin, which caused me to truly bite down on my tongue. As I licked the back of my hand to check for blood I heard it. He laughed at me. It was a harsh gravel of wicked glee and disdain. This was what sent me flying over the edge of reason and... It happened, it tore through me and escaped from every possible avenue out of my being. I rose, hand wrapped white-knuckled around some tool thing that I'd fallen over. That went flying too. It might have blackened his face with savage bruises had he not ducked just in time to be missed by the torque wrench sailing through the air.
"FUCK YOU AND FUCK YOUR UGLY, MEDIOCRE FACE!"
He gawked at me, ruined mouth agape as if those words had been bullets. Did I hurt him? Morbidly, I hoped so. I spat on the ground between us, wiping a line of pink slime from my chin a moment after.
"What did you just say? What the shit did you just say to me?!"
"Dune called you ugly!"
"What?" I could see the flame in his eyes. The fire in his temper amassing heat and brimstone to smite me with. "What is this?! You want me to regret saving your worthless skin? IS THAT IT?!"
"Yeah, I do! I went home you bag of dicks. I was home," There was still so much more to expel, to vomit out and make up for the twenty-six days I couldn't bring forth the words I needed to say. I'd almost let it go and I'd almost been able to forgive, but it was not to be. We weren't like that. Ducky and I don't sort ourselves out easily. "You think I like living in this slag heap!? This, all of it is nothing but a shit show and you stole my out! I haven't seen the color green in fifteen years and you cheated me out of it! Why couldn't you leave me dead?!"
It was selfish and hypocritical but I couldn't bring myself to stop the flow. He was just standing there, leaning on the fender for support as if every word threatened to knock him down like a blow from a great fist. When he finally made his reply it shook the very ground with his blistering rage. Slit's response was not one of words. His flesh spoke for him, charging forward with a roar that was not quite of man nor of animal. I could not move out of the way quickly enough.
It felt like the ground had risen up to slam against my back. My head bounced and the sound it made was just awful. A dull thonk. I was dazed, seeing stars through the hole in the roof although the black of night had not yet risen into the sky to reveal the twinkling lights. The sting of teeth closing around the mound of my shoulder brought me back to the struggle at hand.
"GAHH! Is that the best you can do!? Cheap move Slit! CHEAP MOVE! Stop being such a pussy and hit me!" I cuffed at his ear. It really takes less force than one might think to tear an ear off. I was tempted. So, so tempted to grab it and twist.
I shouldn't have said what I had. He eased off his grip on me with his teeth but reared back and brought his brow down into mine mercilessly. I was dazed again, barely making out what he shouted next.
"You bitch. I was awaited! I could hear a thousand voices calling my name! I was awaited in Valhalla and you might as well have blown up the fucking gate just as I was reaching out to it! And you're whining like some simpering pup about a ruddy ugly color!? I COULD THROTTLE YOU!"
"Valhalla is a bad JOKE! You were going straight to the flaming lake of hell for all the meaningless killin' you've done FAILURE WAR BOY!"
His fist was my reward for that comment. I tasted copper. Saw the stars again too. I gave him a fist in return, feeling his nose break and my knuckles split open in tandem. The pain was irrelevant, just an inconsequential symptom of the flurry of blows.
"You threatened to eat me! I'll drag you down to hell myself!"
It was an old sin he spoke of but he was not wrong. Somehow I managed to kick his metal leg off. Tearing a strap in half with the heel of my foot and reopening the jagged scar there in the same move. Slit howled an inhuman battle cry as the tendon in his groin was pinched by the straps being torn down the stump.
He spat the blood dribbling down from his nostrils into his mouth in a spray against my eyes before rolling the both of us. He used the momentum to toss me into the trunk he'd built for his tools. The corner bit into my spine like nothing I'd ever felt before, short of the touch of fire.
-Slit-
"I did war in the name of a God!"
It was true. I'd been on the holy path, the one true course for a half life so that I could live again in a new body which wouldn't die by lumps or radiation or dust filling up my chest. Did I cheat her? No! She cheated me! My blood boiled and the pump that pushed it through every vein sent my head spinning with its speed. I saw the color red even in the eye that wasn't forever busted.
Dune was sprawled on her belly like a lizard that had been stepped on, choking up pathetic noises and clawing at the stone to slither away. No, I had her right where she needed to be for a good thrashing. I was burning too hot in the skull to think, like an engine running hard and loose under the sun much too long. When I lurched forward to pin her, a barefoot lifted and struck out. One of the staples tore out of the long closed slice over my ribs. Couldn't breathe. A relentless coughing fit brought me near to blacking out. It had been a solid blow and I had launched myself right into it.
The clank of tools crashing around me brought me back into the fight. Dune was throwing anything she could at me but she still hadn't been able to rise up off the floor.
"Your god was a just a man. A pig king!"
Blasphemy.
I dove forward again, more carefully this time to avoid flailing feet and made a grab at her ankles as she tried to scramble out of my reach. I dragged her back under me, doing what I could to ignore the little fists rapping against my skull and shoulders as my fingers closed tight around her scrawny neck.
Time slowed, I watched the light begin to fade from those crazy eyes. For a moment, she struggled, kicked and arched her spine almost violently enough to throw me off. Then In the renewed silence she looked at me with peace in her green gaze. It was acceptance, gratitude even. She was ready to die, for me to kill her. It made me sick. Literally sick.
I let go.
The silence was broken with retching and involuntary gasps for breath. I lost my meal in a shallow bucket that I used as an oil pan as she gulped down air. It felt like days we sat far apart, breathing shallow, ragged breaths in between full body shakes.
"It's a r- real place. Dune was born there. A Green Place... It won't leave her alone."
The floor under us was smeared in oil and spatters of red. She huffed and heaved in deep lungfuls of air for another moment before flopping onto her back again. A roar was let loose, long, mournful, but furious. It ended in a broken sob which riveted my attention. She was curling spasmodically on herself with tremors. Cries. I'd never seen Dune cry. I'd never thought she was actually capable of anything but restless excitement and amusement at herself. She ground the heels of her hands into her eyes as if the salt and aqua-cola flowing out of them would burn her skin if she left them there too long. Couldn't find it in me to call her mediocre for it. Of all the reasons to whimper like a pup, being denied your right to die is chief among them.
I spoke the thought as it appeared in my head, not thinking about the consequences of such a suggestion at all before voicing it.
"Show me. If it's real then take me there and show me how your green whatever is more real than Valhalla."
Her head just rolled around on the ground as she shook it to say no.
"Why not?"
She swallowed hard, voice hoarse but now controlled. "It's not the same as it was before. No point. It's like a barren womb. Nothing grows there anymore."
Well, that made me right in a sense, didn't it? If it was a real place but isn't as it was, then that sort of makes Valhalla more real. A victory here still tasted bitter after I reasoned that in my head. She was talking, and that victory tasted better although I couldn't identify a legitimate cause for it to feel sweet next to being proven right.
I was still curious about this Green Place and how it could be the root of all this not-Dune-like behavior. Hell, she hadn't even spoken like herself while she ranted. It was like the nutter had been possessed by someone else, maybe by who'd she'd been before the scars and the ugly teeth. I made a snap decision in spite of the enlightenment she supplied.
"Take me anyway. We'll drive Shurely."
