Hello and welcome to yet another chapter of Roanapur Shakedown. As always, I own absolutely nothing but Black Lagoon on DVD & Blu-Ray. Also, I'd like to take this opportunity to shed just the tiniest bit of light on a couple of things. First off, the Eda storyline will be revisited in the near future with an unexpected twist, and I'm even planning a story focusing on tying up the loose ends of that arc. Second, the "push and pull" between Rock and Revy will continue and become a little more prominent all the way through the end of this story and likely won't be resolved until the next story. Anyway, please enjoy and review!

Ch. 14: Best Shot in the East: The Origin of Two-Hands

The sights and sounds of New York's famed Coney Island amusement park were absolutely overwhelming. Everywhere Rock turned laughing children could be seen absorbed in one of the many carnival games, or screaming from overhead as the Cyclone coaster was put hard to work. Many of them pulled their parents by the hand to the nearest food vendors, the various smells of which melded together in the air and assaulted the businessman's nose with an aroma so heavenly he couldn't begin to accurately describe it. He kept his mouth shut for fear that the drool might pour out like a faucet.

Looking over to his left, Rock caught sight of a game that he recognized as a shooting gallery and smiled as the memory of the incident at the fair crossed his mind; for the first time that night, Revy had been cheated by someone she couldn't shoot. The smiled faded for the briefest of seconds when Rock's memory reminded him that it was also the night he was introduced to the ill-fated maiden of the Washimine clan. He was back in good spirits just a split second later as his partner spotted the shooting gallery as well and jovially beckoned him to follow her. "Sweet! It's still right where it used to be! Come on, Rock!"

The white collar from Lagoon Company smiled in amusement at the gunslinger's excitement. Hopefully this time around would be less disastrous. "You go ahead, Revy." He gestured to a nearby food vendor that was advertising funnel cakes. "I think I'm gonna go over here first."

"Suit yourself." She shrugged, boots clomping on the ground as she walked off toward the gallery.

Rock returned to her side just a short time later and she had already spent four of her allotted eight shots. It came as no surprise to him that she had successfully tagged each target. In the moment that he spent simply standing and taking in her body language and facial expression, the businessman noted a certain light in her eyes that was different from the way her eyes usually blazed in the middle of a fierce gun fight. It was as if she was enjoying this simple carnival game more than the fighting. He guessed it must've been that there was a tangible prize involved in the shooting game that satisfied her competitive nature.

Rock must've gotten lost in his thoughts and stared just a moment too long because once Revy had fired the fifth round she paused with her hand in the bowl and turned to shoot him a questioning look.

"Somethin' on your mind?" The sixth round was placed in the muzzle of the toy gun as her partner came back from the space of his thoughts.

"Hmm? Why do you ask?" There was a pop and then a wooden clunking sound that signified Revy's sixth hit and the sharpshooter snorted as she reached for the seventh round and pointed out an obvious bit of information, "You stare at me less when I'm half-naked."

A very slight blush graced the Japanese man's cheeks for a short moment at that comment. It was true, Rock didn't make a habit of staring at Revy…or any scantily clad woman really. With Eda and the girls in Rowan's shop, he made a point to avert his eyes from any excess show of skin out of embarrassment. With Revy, it was out of courtesy. Sure, she was pretty much always scantily clad in front of him, but curious as he was about her body in particular from the tattoo, the generous cup size, to the numerous scars that littered it like a story woven on a tapestry, it just felt wrong for him to look at her openly while she was naked without her expressed consent. Granted, over time, he'd become a bit more flexible in that area. That was why he generally only found himself staring at her in such a fashion when he was particularly lost in thought about something.

Rock shook his head of the thoughts and smiled as he watched her work, "It's nothing. I was just thinking that maybe this was where the best shot in the East got an early start toward that title."

Revy's demeanor darkened slightly at the words, though the content expression failed to leave her face. Rock had been half-right in saying that; she just wished it could've been the whole truth. Still, she kept her mask firmly in place for the time being. "You could say that." She chuckled, pulling the trigger and dropping a target, though the absence of humor in that laugh was not lost on Rock.

They stood in silence for a second while Revy loaded her eighth round and then leveled the rifle at her target, apparently having no more to say on the matter at the moment. "All right! Last one!" The trigger gave way under the slight pressure of her finger, but before it could be pulled enough, Revy felt Rock's hand push her arm down.

"Wait." She arched an eyebrow at him in confusion, prompting him to explain just why the hell he'd interrupted.

"Maybe you should aim for a small target this time." He explained, and she followed his gaze to the target she'd been about to shoot, realizing that she had almost repeated her mistake from six months ago since she had chosen to aim at a six inch tall Michael Myers bobble head that likely wouldn't have given way behind the force of a small cork.

A small smirk crossed Revy's face, "Nice save, Rock." In the next second, the eighth target met the same fate as the seven before it and the man running the gallery dumped a supremely oversized teddy bear on top of the gunwoman rather unceremoniously. She grumbled something nearly incoherent from beneath the fuzz as they walked off and finally tired of the burden after only a few steps, violently throwing it to the ground in a random direction. Unseen by either of them, the bear had landed softly at the feet of a lonely little gutter rat, perhaps only about eight years old, who looked as if all he wanted was a little compassion but had been knocked down time and time again. Insignificant as Revy's gesture might have been, the boy had seen it as an intentional gift and he clung to that bear in search of any ounce of warmth and comfort it could provide him as he cried softly in the shadows.

"Hey Rock?" Revy's eyes shone with a hint of mischief from her place beside him.

"Yeah?"

"Did anyone ever tell you sharing is caring?" To his surprise, she yanked his plate of funnel cake out of his hands and ripped a large chunk of the confection away before returning it to him.

"I'll remember that the next time you hog the pizza." Rock deadpanned as his partner chowed down on what was pretty much half of his food that she held in her hand.

Amid the activity of the amusement park and the harassment of the vendors and game runners lined up on either side of them, Rock spotted something of interest to him. It was a tall triangular shaped attraction that appeared to have its riders swinging like a pendulum in between the two legs of the triangle.

"Hey, Revy," He bumped her arm with his elbow to get her attention and pointed toward the contraption, "What's that?"

The sharpshooter furrowed her brow in confusion since she had no memory of the ride from her time as a child. Still, she knew what it was and answered Rock with an excited laugh. "That there's a sky coaster, Rock. Reserved only for the ballsiest motherfuckers."

The businessman from Japan stood watching its movements for a bit longer before he made his decision and kept walking towards the triangle. "I think we should try it, Revy." He could already feel the adrenaline coursing through his veins at the prospect of feeling the wind rushing through his hair and watching the world rush by. Adrenaline had become something of a drug since he'd started living in the city of the dead. One had to learn to love the fast pace or go cower in a corner and wait for a bullet.

"You sure, Rock?" Revy asked of him in a voice that seemed to be serious, "I mean you've lived through gunfights, explosions, and kidnappings, and some of the worst fuckin' shit our city offers, but I'm not sure you can handle that bad boy." She teased him, much like she did before a drinking match and Rock knew that she was just as eager despite the sarcasm in her voice.

"Well, everything's taken care of on our end," Balalaika spoke to the boss of Lagoon Company as she placed the phone back into its receiver on the mahogany desk. "The meeting with the Albanians will proceed as planned."

The Russian mafia boss held Lagoon's leader in high regard. Despite the fact that he wasn't Hotel Moscow, there was an unspoken understanding between the pair that he had been shoved into the role of her second-in-command in the absence of her faithful Sergeant…or any other members of Roanapur's Russian faction.

Dutch, who had been nursing a glass of finely aged Crown Royal Reserve, took a slow sip of the amber liquid before addressing the Kapitan. "So…how'd your friends take the news?"

She scoffed at his words. These Russian pisants were not her friends…certainly not her comrades either. Quite honestly, they made her skin crawl. In fact, if boss Slevenin hadn't been so insistent that she offer her services to the fools, she would've gladly sat back from her plush office chair in Roanapur and watched as the Albanians waged a bloody war against Turischeva and his boorish, uncivilized goons. She heaved a long sigh while clipping the end of a fine Cuban cigar. They were disgraces to the name of Mother Russia…all of them.

"He wasn't happy to learn that we didn't come here to destroy his enemy, but," her next words were accented with a cloud of light gray smoke, "I really couldn't care less about this petty dispute over turf. The fact is, Hotel Moscow has its own problems. He can go bark to Slevenin like the dog he is; I've got the boss' support on this matter."

Dutch chuckled briefly. From what little the Kapitan had shared with him on the flight over, it was obvious that she held nothing but contempt for her American counterpart. He was also perceptive enough to note that it was likely due to a massively enflamed ego on the Red Mafia boss' part.

"It was the same with that damn cowboy and his friends back when that cartel from Florida came chasin' after their money maker." Balalaika herself had no hand in that matter, but had heard plenty about it since then, and the thought of it still tickled her twisted sense of humor as she smirked from across the table.

"Things aren't the same here in the good ol' U.S of A. All these organized crime syndicates like to think they're tough shit, but they wouldn't last a day in our fucked up world." His words were full of wordly wisdom, and yet his voice betrayed a vague hint of weariness. While this trip wasn't exactly the former Marine's idea of a vacation, persuading central European gangsters to assist their enemy promised to be a walk in the park compared to the shit storm that was brewing back in Roanapur.

Having nothing more to say, Dutch leaned back into his well cushioned chair and reached into the breast pocket of his flak jacket for a pack of smokes.

The Kapitan conceded to Dutch's sentiment with a weary sigh. Her fingers, which had been laid on a forgotten cigar, finally pressed it down into the ashtray to crush the remaining life from it.

"It's a shame that circumstances prevented me from travelling with my full force. Maybe then we could all avoid the headache of this tedious show of diplomacy."

Back at the carnival, the gun and the office boy from the Lagoon Company were seated high over the park with their legs dangling in the air from where they sat inside the ferris wheel. Rock had lost track of how long they had spent in the park. They had spent their time well, going on each ride at least once, playing several of the games, and eating lots of food. Now, as they were seated precariously at the top of the large wheel watching the sun sink lower into the sky, silence had overtaken them.

This was how it had been almost from the moment the lap bars had come down.

For much of their time at Coney Island, Revy had been unusually cheerful and carefree. Now, it seemed to Rock as if all of that had just vanished in the blink of an eye. She wore her brooding look well and the businessman had identified it almost easily; from where he sat in the space next to her, he could practically feel the negative vibes diffusing into the air from her very core. While she wasn't what he would call angry, Rock knew that something was very wrong with his partner.

Revy didn't speak to him again until their seat had moved two more times from its position at the top. When she did, it was with a tentative and shaky quality that he had never quite heard in her voice before. There was also something faintly remote about that voice. Looking closer, Rock noted that she had the usual voids in her eyes that would appear when she was trying to suppress some emotion or memory that she didn't want to feel.

"Rock…" Her voice trailed for just a brief moment and he noted that she was fidgeting with her hands, and that they were trembling very slightly. "You know I didn't bring us here just for shits and grins, right?"

Lagoon's white collar swallowed heavily at the words. While he had known she had an agenda on some level of his consciousness, the implications behind what she had said troubled him greatly. Clearly, if she was in such a bad state right now, she had brought him here to have fun and help ease her mind before something bad happened. But what?

An uneasy silence settled over the duo before Rock managed to find a voice inside of his dried out throat. It stayed that way for several seconds that felt unbearably tense to the businessman until he finally managed to force out some collection of words. "Revy…what are we here for?" His speech was gentle, as if he were diffusing a bomb with his voice. The side of Revy he was seeing was both familiar, and yet completely unknown to him and he didn't want to risk spooking her.

His partner continued to stare off into space. She fumbled around her pockets for a moment with a shaky hand before finally retrieving cigarettes and a lighter. She lit one and took an extra long drag off of it and returned her lighter and smokes to their home in her pocket before answering him. "You remember what you said in Japan; about goin' there to forget?" There was a brief pause in her speech and Rock gave a small nod, though she had already continued at that point, or at least tried to.

"Ah, fuck it! I ain't any good at this deep bullshit." Rock heard her mutter under her breath as she shook her head as if to clear her jumbled thoughts. They were about halfway to the bottom of the wheel now, and for the first time since they got on, Revy turned to look at Rock. "You know I can't fuckin' stand being here in this fuckin' piece of shit city." With that statement, he began to form an idea of where she was going with this, but he still couldn't quite connect the dots and he fixed her with a confused look as she kept speaking. "Everywhere I look it's some piece of my shitty past! I need to forget; I knew it was time to deal with my shit when Sis asked us to come here with her.

Now Rock understood.

Coney Island was the one part of Revy's fucked up childhood that she still thought of fondly. She had brought him here to this place to remember the good parts of that childhood before immersing herself in the demons of her past. Still, any possible motives behind this decision concerned him. Was she really just trying to forget, or was there an angle to her attempt at coming to terms with her past?

It was a question that kept turning over inside Rock's mind all the way back to the cab and then on the ride to Mott Street.

Once again, the gunslinger reached forward to pay the cabbie. Rock had yet to notice that they'd even stopped since he was lost in his thoughts and worries. Revy seemed to have more presence of mind given that she'd become focused on the task at hand and that the rundown neighborhood they were presently sitting in had all too often been the subject of her depressing ruminations.

The two of them lingered inside of the taxi cab for a moment, just long enough for the cabbie to open his mouth for the beginnings of what was sure to be a fantastic verbal tirade, but Revy moved her right hand to the door just as he began to speak. The other hand went to the grip of a cutlass hidden beneath her jacket in a display of warning. The cabbie's eyes widened and he turned his attention back to the street. That pile of garbage further up the road suddenly looked mighty interesting.

Wordlessly, the gunwoman gripped her partner roughly by his tie and drug him out of the cab since his mind was apparently still too occupied to comprehend his surroundings. At her touch, Rock realized they had arrived at their destination and his eyes immediately fell upon the ratty old abandoned apartment building that Revy seemed to be heading towards. He could feel the anxiety radiating from both of them.

Rock had long thought that one day he would learn Revy's story; a part of him was even eager to know how his partner ended up where she was in life, but the other part of him dreaded ever knowing something that was sure to be such a tragic tale…and he never thought that she would actually make the first move in telling him. It just didn't make sense! So it was, as they walked up a decrepit old staircase and into one of the apartments, that Rock found himself in a very conflicted state of mind.

The apartment that Revy led Rock into was just as ramshackle as the exterior of the building had become. It was apparent that no one had lived in this unit for quite some time. In fact, what little décor remained in the living room suggested that the apartment hadn't had any permanent inhabitants for at least fifteen years…maybe longer. There were magazines and pieces of mail that looked as if they hadn't been touched in just as long. Clearly Revy had brought him to a place of great significance to her, and obviously something very wrong had happened here. Ironically, Rock mused, the place seemed to visually match Revy's contemptuous opinion of it now more so than it probably ever did when she was living in New York.

Meanwhile, the gunwoman was surveying the living room much like Rock had been doing since they entered. It was the same shitty place where she'd spent her first years, but it was hardly recognizable now. At least back then, there had been a decent landlord who took pride in the upkeep of each unit. She couldn't remember how long the shitheap had been abandoned, but she had caught wind that a slumlord had got his hands on the place shortly before her stint in juvie and her subsequent departure from the United States. From the looks of things; the rumors were true.

"This is where I grew up…" Revy continued to look around as old memories began to come back. It made her stomach turn just being in this place. It wasn't even the worst place from her past, but it was the place where her life turned to shit right before her eyes; still, she forged on.

"The first few years of my life were actually pretty good." Revy allowed a brief smile at the handful of happy memories she had and chanced a look in Rock's direction to see that he was intently listening, albeit there was a certain amount of unease about him.

"I had a mother, I had a father, and they were good fuckin' parents." Her eyes went downward to the floor and Rock knew that she was remembering something, speaking again with bitter words, "Well…one was always better than the other."

"So, what happened?" Rock prodded gently, allowing curiosity to get the better of him, though he knew he would likely dread hearing the rest of this story.

"One day, some shithead mugger changed all that with a fuckin' bullet." Revy didn't disappoint.

She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, willing herself to continue with this tale. She would do it, damn it! Just like easing into freezing water; a little bit at a time.

"I was only four at the time, but I still remember. Good ol' dad was a god damn saint right the dirt covered my mother's casket, but after that…the father I knew disappeared. He drowned himself in booze and whores and didn't give a shit that I was home to see any of it."

From where he remained standing near the door of the apartment, Rock's eyes were frozen wide open in shock. Sure, this was Revy. He wasn't expecting some damn fairytale, but the notion of a small child not even five years old being forced to endure those things pained him greatly. Of course, there was much more to come. Here they were only a fraction of the way into this walk down fucked up memory lane and already both of them were having second-thoughts. Rock was second-guessing ever wishing to know of Revy's past, and Revy just wanted to get the hell out of the old apartment and never look back.

The salaryman watched as his partner squeezed her eyes shut against what was no doubt a particularly bad memory and he braced himself for what he was about to hear.

"The abuse didn't start until a couple months later. Usually he'd get too wasted and turn into one o' those angry pricks who thinks their tough because they have a set o' knuckles, but that wasn't even the worst of it."

Rock's eyes widened at that last part. He had seen all manner of depraved shit over the last year and a half of working for Dutch in the city of death, and this wasn't even worse than any of that, but he found it unbearable to listen to the sufferings of someone he felt so strongly for. It just wasn't right!

"Revy…"

Her eyes snapped open and fixed him in their sights with a pointed glare. "Shut up!" She had to do this while she had the chance and she feared that she might lose her nerve if she allowed Rock to speak his mind.

"On my fifth birthday, the fuckin' alkie son of a bitch told me he wasn't my real dad…told me that mom got knocked up by some rapist. Then he gave me the birthday gift of a swift kick in the ass out the door. I remember that I somehow managed to find my way to Coney Island. I slept underneath a table at the shooting gallery that night."

Though his stomach turned at the depressing details of Revy's story, Rock's interest was piqued by the turn of events. The fact that she was Chinese-American was something he had always known, but he had always secretly wondered why her appearance was only a vaguely Asian one. It seemed to support her father's claim that she was not his. As Revy continued her tale, the salaryman ceased his contemplating and gave her his utmost attention once again.

As she spoke, she turned on her heel and stepped with heavy boots on the rotting wood leading to the hallway. Rock followed like a dog on a leash.

"From then on…I was nothin' but a little rat livin' in the fuckin' gutter. For the next three years, I did what I had to just to get by in the filth of the projects; I stole, and I fought, but I didn't have to kill…not yet." They had stopped in the doorway of one of the two bedrooms. Judging by its larger size, Rock guessed it was the master bedroom.

"At some point, I got careless and stayed out o' my shelter too late after dark. The next think I know, I had two dipshit pigs on my ass chasing me back through an alley—you know, the fuckers I told ya about on the sub".

Rock nodded his head, swallowing down the bile that was burning at the back of his throat. He remembered that conversation very well, and he knew this was about to take a brutal turn. When Revy continued again, her voice was considerably more shaky despite the fact that her composure failed to be broken.

"I can still remember 'em laughin' behind me while they shot at my feet, and then I tripped…Let's just say, that was the last goddamn time I begged for mercy from anyone. When I woke up in that alley the next day I was fuckin' ready to blow. I had a bitch of a headache, my body felt like it was hit by a truck, I was pissed at where my life was and I wanted blood. That was the day I made my first kill." Revy's empty eyes drifted toward a corner of the bedroom where a ratty old mattress still sat and down to the feathers scattered on the floor. On the wall at the head of the bed, the faint sight of a faded blood stain could be seen; though no one would really recognize it as such unless they already knew it was there. Her hollow eyes lingered on the stain. "Can you guess who it was?"

Rock didn't even have to guess, he knew. One man had abandoned her and thrust her into her life of scavenging and greed. "You're father?"

Revy gave a short nod to affirm that he was correct before offering an explanation. "When I woke up, I noticed that one o' the cops had dropped their gun; at least, I assumed it was the cop's. I didn't know a damn thing about real guns: not the make; not the model. I was just seein' fuckin' red. I came straight back to this place and found my deadbeat shithead ol' man passed out in his fuckin' bed under a pile o' liquor. I put a pillow over the old man's face and fired."

Rock's eyes widened in recognition as he looked on at the disorganization inside the room. "So then…these feathers?"

"They're what's left of a crime scene." Revy affirmed, and as if she were inside Rock's head reading his thoughts from a computer screen, she elaborated even further on the state of the apartment. "Not long before I came back, the place got sold to some scumbag slumlord. After the murder, he never bothered fixing it up again, or getting' rid of the ol' man's shit. Everything you see here is what nobody bothered to steal over the years."

With this new information, Rock was just slightly unnerved. He had just assumed that at least one person had lived here for a short time afterward. Now that he realized differently, the place was even more like a time capsule. It was literally a link straight to Revy's past. Everything that remained in the place would've been familiar to her in some way. No wonder she was so affected. It gave Rock chills just thinking about that fact.

No longer able to stand anymore of the oppressive atmosphere combined with the torturous memories, it was Revy who moved from the doorframe first.

"Time to get the fuck out of here."

Rock was all too eager to comply, for he too was eager to escape from this nightmarish funhouse of Revy's agonizing memories.

Well there's 14 finally! Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it! R & R!