Six Weeks to Recovery
Jan. 18th, 2012 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeSix Weeks to Recovery (part One)
Prompt: ‘Weeks’
Summary: A few weeks after the events in After the Fall, Biff gets shot, M.D. falls apart, and Raige reads a lot of books about princesses. Warnings for self-harm.
Word Count: 17,777
Notes: This story was supposed to be done a long time ago, but things kept adding themselves. For all his dangerous lifestyle, I’ve never written Biff getting really clobbered, while both Raige and M.D. have taken big-time damage in canon. Obviously, this needed to be remedied. Also, I wrote a lot of this either post-op or sick, can ya tell?
Week Zero
Biff staggers across the hall. The floor bucks and dances under him, and the wall lurches up and smacks him in the face. Normally, he’d be pissed at it, but it keeps him from falling, so it’s all right. After a moment to properly calibrate the movements, he raises his fist and pounds on the door of the raggedy old lady who rents him his room but isn’t his landlady. It takes a couple tries; the damn door keeps running away from him.
The door opens a crack, and a suspicious rheumy eye peers out at him. “Is he gone?”
Biff thinks about it a second. “Uh huh.”
“Good dog.” The door opens a little further. “This’s why I keep you around—shit. That looks serious.”
Biff blinks. Then he tries to follow her eyes and connects it to the pain. Blood. Yeah. That’s why he’s here.
“I need,” he enunciates, “your phone.”
Then the wall runs away from him and the world keels over on its axis. The floor slams into his back, driving the air out of his lungs, and his shoulder and leg turn everything white for a moment.
“Shit. Shit.” She fumbles through her raggedy skirts. “Okay. You got a patcher, or is it Vaygo Gen?”
“Patcher.”
“Which one?”
“Med School.”
She turns her head at him. “Who?”
Names. Fuck names. They never make any sense anyway. He tries to stick out his hand, but shit, that hurts. He tries the other one, and that works okay, but she won’t give it to him.
“Med school? You mean the Rose’s girl? Mandy Rosenthal?”
That sounds about right. Biff nods.
“You can afford her? Never mind, what’s her number?”
Biff holds out his hand more insistently, even though he’s not sure he could dredge the number out of his sodden mind anyway.
“I’m dialing.” And she does, pacing back and forth across her splintery doorway. “Hello? Benny hon? ‘S Frances. I need your girl’s number. Not now, it’s important. Uh huh. Uh huh. No, just give it to me, I’ll remember it. Uh huh. Okay. Thanks.” She hangs up and dials again, and this time, it must get answered right away. “Hello? This is Frances Bertelli, I’m a friend of your father. Biff MacGilligan’s my guard dog; he says you’re his patcher?”
“She owes me. Tell ‘er she owes me.” Biff glances at his shoulder just to make sure the searing agony is where it’s supposed to be. It is. “Tell ‘er I’m shot,” he adds.
The bag lady just covers one of her ears. “What? Yeah, that’s him; he’s been drinking again. Yeah, he’s shot, bleeding all over my floor. What? I dunno. Shoulder and leg, looks like. If you’re going to do something, be fast; costs me ten cents a minute to use this thing, and I don’t want to find a new dog. 252 Everclear, fourth floor. Uh huh. Uh huh. Okay.” She hangs up, gives Biff a scanning look. “You need anything else?”
Biff gives the question due consideration, then shakes his head, which turns out to be a bad idea, because it gets the world spinning again. He’s not too worried, though; once he’s on the floor, it tends to stay under him. It’s good like that.
The bag lady goes back into her room. The door swings shut.
Biff stays on the floor. Pain is hammering at his side, but his patcher’s coming, his home is clear, and he’s safe on the floor. Everything is right with the world.
The window always screeches going up, but this time around, Biff feels it like nails on the chalkboard of his brain. The window catches on the frame, but after a good shake, it levers itself up the rest of the way with another teeth-grinding shriek, and the kid climbs in.
He hasn’t seen her in a while. After last time, he wasn’t sure she’d ever be back, but right now, all he cares about is that of all times, she came back now.
“The hell is wrong with you?” Biff snarls, clutching his skull. “I got a door, a perfectly good goddamn door you can use.”
“Doors are for people lacking imagination.” Her voice is uncharacteristically flat. She looks up, takes in the sight of him bandaged up on the couch, and blinks. “Wow. What happened to you?”
“Whaddaya think? I got shot.” He can’t put much fire into it. Shouting hurts, his skull is a size and a half too small, and smacking her is out of the question. As of a few hours ago, he is good for nothing but lying on the couch and taking pills, and M.D., jack-of-all-trades-expert-at-shit, knows it.
She doesn’t seem too gleeful, though. Mostly, she just looks hollow and dead. She shuffles over, eyes his bandages. “Twice?”
“Twice.”
“Mm. I realize your line of work has a high risk of gunshot wounds, but you’ve been wrecking trajectories since you were my age. What were you doing?”
“Nothing!”
She mistakes the reason for his vehemence. She sniffs. “Ugh, don’t know why I asked. This places smells like a brewery.”
Even when she’s blank, M.D.’s voice is always a little whiny and grating; now it sounds like an electric drill feels. He rubs his temples with his good hand and resists a groan. “Keep it down, would ya? Christ Jesus.”
Rolling her eyes, M.D. reaches to drag a chair around backwards. She collapses into it like she hasn’t sat in a week, rests her chin on the top, and watches him through dark-circled eyes.
“Well?” she prompts after a couple seconds. “Wow me with your life choices.”
Like she’s one to talk about life choices.
“I wasn’t doing shit, okay? Wasn’t even working. Somebody broke into my house,” Biff snarls, then grimaces and lays back against the sofa cushions. (He tried to stay in bed, but once lying flat, it was too hard to get back up again.) “Tried to steal my fucking stuff.”
She stares at him for a moment. Her eyes flicker around the bare walls of his apartment, taking in the hole in the wall for the extension cord that supplies all his power, the rusted sink that leaks brown water. The splintered wood and peeling linoleum.
“You don’t own a television.”
“No.”
“You don’t own a stereo.”
“No.”
“Do you even own a phone?”
“No.”
“So… what exactly do you own worth stealing?”
“Jack fucking shit!”
“So why—”
Biff throws up the arm that still works. “I don’t know! I don’t fucking know, okay? What the hell? Here I am, minding my own business—”
“Massively intoxicated.”
“Minding my own business, and someone breaks into my fucking house.”
“Apartment. Or is it a squat?”
“Shut up.” It is. “What the hell? Didn’t even know the guy.”
“Also, aren’t you on the fifth floor or something?”
“Fourth. Took the fire escape and came through the window you always take. Figured it was you, until he shot me in the fucking back. Shoulder.” He points. “Here.”
“And the leg?”
“Thazz from when I got up. Can’t tell if he was going for my knee or my balls, but he was a shit shot either way.”
“I’m assuming by the way you’re carrying on that they didn’t hit anything important.”
“No.” Just his sense of professional pride. “Then the fucker ransacks the place, looking for the riches I don’t got, I break the bottle over his head, beat the shit out of him, and kick his wired ass out.” He also gave the tweaker a good chewing-out, but between the pain and the mutual intoxication, he isn’t sure how much got through. The beating did, though. Beatings always work.
“Drunk and with two bullets in you? Can you even do illusion in that state?”
“They hadn’t started hurting yet.”
“That must’ve been one heck of a binge.”
“It was good stuff.” Biff looks mournfully at the dark stain on the floor. The patcher and the bag lady cleaned up the glass, more out of concern for their own skins than his, but the rest of the mess remains.
“Ah. That explains the smell. And the bloodstain, I assumed it was from one of us…”
“I didn’t ezzackly have time to clean up before you got here. And I can’t take these fucking pills till I finish sobering up. They say it’ll kill me.”
“And that explains your charming demeanor.” She picks up the bottle and reads the label. “Vicodin, yup, that’d do it.” She makes a double-take and reads the label again. “But somehow, I doubt you’re the Vanessa Carlisle they prescribed these to.”
He snorts, which sends an ache through his ribs. “Like I can afford Vicodin. Someone owed me a favor. She patched me up, gave me that.”
She opens the top and looks at the pills. “Well, this should be enough to get you through the worst of it. Careful, this stuff is addictive.”
“No shit. Why you think she had it?”
“Ah.” M.D. sets the pills down and glances at his bandages. “Can I look over her work?”
“No.”
“You trust a drug dealer to do a patch job?”
“More than you.”
“Ow-that-hurt.” She pushes herself up from the chair and advances. The life is starting to come back into her eyes, but he doesn’t like the look she’s giving his bandages. “Come on, I’m trained for this.”
“No!” He tries to shove her away, then curses with pain. “You use rat shit!”
“Beetle larvae, only in select circumstances, and you’re the one with bullet wounds going to a drug dealer for medical care, so you don’t exactly have a lot to feel superior about.” She’s getting into his personal space now.
He wedges himself as far back into the sofa as he can, sending a bolt of pain down his side. “She went to med school.”
“Did she finish? Or has the educational situation in this country finally gotten bad enough that she needs to push painkillers to pay her loans?”
“She don’t use rat shit.”
She doesn’t look convinced, and he raises his good arm warningly when she gets too close. He can smell the herbs and unguents on her clothes, and his stomach roils. “You want my hangover? Keep coming.”
That gets her to back off. Too easy, too easy. But she sits back down and rubs the bridge of her nose with a sigh, and she says, “At least go to a hospital with a proper doctor. This is Vaygo; I’m sure they’ve had more than one ‘I fell on a bullet’ case, and for once, you weren’t doing anything illegal.”
He points to his leg, bandaged around the thigh where the bullet tore through the muscle. “You got a car all of a sudden? Cuz I sure as hell ain’t walking to Vaygo Gen. I’m broke, I got no ID, and I don’t like hospitals. I ain’t going nowhere.”
That cuts her short. She rubs her eyes tiredly. “Right. Of course you don’t. God, I’m off, I know that…”
He just grunts.
She raises her eyes over her hands to look him over. “So how long did Dr. Drug Dealer say you’d be stuck like this?”
He sighs and rubs his forehead. With his shoulder wrecked, he can’t shrug. “Till I get better, I guess. My arm’s fucked to hell, back’s not much better, but it was just a .22 and it only hit the muscle; she said it’d take a month.”
M.D. looks wry. “Hate to break it to you, Biff, but she lied. Leg maybe, but shoulder? It’s going to be at least six weeks.”
“Shut up, you didn’t go to med school.” M.D. just shrugs, like she’s too worn out to argue with him. “Told me to stop smoking too.”
“That is an incredibly professional drug dealer you went to. But yeah, you should. Your blood probably smells like tar.”
“Fuck you, I’ll quit when I want.”
“Uh huh.” She wraps one scrawny arm over the chair top and sets her chin on it. “So this is what you’re like without alcohol and nicotine. Charming.”
“Yeah, it’s great, fucking fantastic, c’mere, I’ll show you how great it is…”
She dodges the swipe. “You need anything?”
The non sequitur catches him. “Huh?”
“Things. Do you need them? Because you look like microwaved death.”
“Fuck you, you look like shit too.” It’s true. Her complexion looks gray, her shoulders are slumped, and beating her in an argument is being far too easy.
“Haven’t been getting enough sleep.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet.”
“Been busy.”
“Uh huh.”
“However, unlike you, I’m fully mobile, able-bodied, and lacking superfluous holes. Can you even sit up?”
“Yeah, I can fucking sit up, Jesus.” If only because of all the crunches he does; he can’t bend his left leg for leverage, and his left arm is useless, so his abs have to take up the slack. He stares at the wall so he won’t have to look at her. “I’m just… I’m out of cash, okay? It all went to this.” He points to his bandages.
“I thought you said she owed you a favor.”
“Not that much favor. Until I can beat ass again, I got jack. I need groceries, but I got shit all to pay with.” He struggles to get upright. “Wait, I think I got some soup left, I can—”
“You keep your bullet-riddled rump on that couch. I’ll check.” She pushes herself out of the chair and goes to the fridge. It takes her a good couple yanks to get the fridge door open, but she manages.
“Congratulations. You’re the proud owner of mustard, wilted greens, and… something.”
Biff grimaces.
M.D. nods and shoves the fridge closed. “Make me a list, and I’ll grab you some stuff. I won’t be able to carry a lot, but…”
“You deaf or something? I told you I’m broke, and you can’t vanish for shit.”
“Biff, you see, some people actually come by their possessions legally. It’s this amazing invention called money. Revolutionized your society, from what I hear.”
He snorts. “You broke. I know you broke, cuz you the only person I know broker’n me.”
“That’s a filthy lie; my assets just happen to be in goods and scrip not easily converted into dollars.” Biff just looks at her. “All right, fine, I’m mostly broke too.”
“Oh. Mostly. Uh huh. That like being mostly pregnant?”
“Shut up. See, unlike you, I’ve got this thing they call friends who lend me or trade me resources when I am in need. Now, either you accept that, or you sit on your moldy couch, feeling your self-righteous, alcohol-deprived rump take root to the cushions, and be hungry. The choice is yours.”
Biff glares at her, but M.D. just crosses her arms and waits. They both know he isn’t going anywhere. He’s stuck for it.
Finally, he says, “How much you gonna borrow?”
She rolls her eyes. “Biff, give me credit. I wouldn’t spend tons of money on the likes of you.”
“Good. Here, gimme some paper or something, I’ll make you a list…”
She digs into her belt. “Use your best handwriting, I can barely read your chicken scratch.”
He takes the gnawed stub of pencil and fibrous scrap of something that he’s pretty sure isn’t paper, but whatever. He starts writing.
“How you spell ‘cilantro’?”
“I have no idea. What is it?”
“Forget it.” He hands the list to her, and she salutes and crawls out the window like a lizard.
“Back in a flash.”
Biff glares at the window after she’s gone. Sure, he always knew that one day he’d get his ass beat too bad to be able to go anywhere, but he always figured he’d be working when it happened. That he got his ass blasted just sitting drunk in his own apartment, that he’s got no one else to help except some broke skinny-ass kid who’s half-dead herself… that’s just humiliating.
He needs to go to the bathroom.
He turns his head. The bathroom is across the room, twenty feet away. Shit. Might as well be ten miles.
With a sigh, he gets his good arm under him and levers himself up from the couch, pushes himself to the edge. It hurts like hell, and for a moment, he slumps against the back of the couch, wheezing. Pain. It’s just pain. Weakness leaving the body. He can do this. It’s twenty feet.
Jesus.
The hangover is still drilling at his temples, and his whole left side is one pounding ache. When he stands, he keeps his weight off his left leg, and it still throbs. He grabs the chair M.D. left behind, uses it to push off. He makes it to the wall, leans hard on it, manages to drag to the bathroom, light-headed.
M.D. finds him there half an hour later, bleeding through his bandages and sweating. At least he got his pants back up by himself.
“Can’t make it to the couch on your own?” She asks.
He shakes his head. He takes her arm, and they make it back to the couch. He collapses into it, head spinning.
“Told you,” she says, pushing the Vicodin into his hand. “Six weeks to recovery. At least.”
He swears.
Week Zero, Day Three
M.D. crawls through his window with a backpack and starts unloading cans. “Here, brought you soup. You like chicken noodle, I hope.”
Biff wrinkles his nose. He’s against the concept of canned soup on principle; he can do it better and fresher himself and in larger batches. But then again, he’s not really doing a lot of cooking right now. “You got anything else?”
“Sure, few other things I didn’t manage the last time. So how’re you doing, Swiss Cheese? Keeping yourself entertained?”
Biff lets his head fall back against the arm of the sofa and groans.
“That good, huh?”
“I got Top Ten radio and thazz it.”
“Well, I’m not much good for electronic entertainment—I’m shocked I haven’t killed that radio yet—but I’ve got some books you could borrow…”
Biff glares at her, but since she’s got her back to him, putting cans away, it doesn’t do much. He doesn’t know what the kid would read, but he can guess. “I’ll stick with the radio.”
“You can’t be that desperate.” She flicks the radio with her finger, and it goes dead with a plaintive drone. “Really, Biff, Céline Dion? Sad.”
Biff makes a face, but he can’t say much.
“Seriously, I have enough books that surely I can find you something interesting.”
“I don’t read much.”
She pauses, can in one hand. Then she turns and looks at him over her shoulder. “You know, whenever I’ve been in your head, you process text strangely. I never thought about it, but between that, your spelling, and your penmanship… has it ever occurred to you that you might be dyslexic?”
“Fuck you, I can read,” Biff snaps, lurching from the couch to snatch the radio off the counter. Once it’s away from the kid, a good whack and it starts up again, wailing how Céline Dion will always love him.
“Never said you couldn’t.”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with me, okay, books’re just boring as fuck is all.”
The kid turns to him, arms full of potatoes. “Obviously you haven’t met the right books.”
He doesn’t like where she’s going with this, and he doesn’t like being someone’s pet rescue project. Before, he was too hurt and hungover to care about anything, but today, he’s sober and sick of her bullshit.
“They let you out of the nuthouse, huh?”
She freezes. Her face goes blank, and she turns away from him to put the potatoes away.
“Well?”
She opens the cabinet and starts putting the potatoes into it. Her gloves are latex today; he can see the tendons and sinew of her hands through them. “It’s not that kind of commitment.”
“Uh huh.”
“I’ve been doing better.”
“Uh huh.”
“I mean it. I haven’t had an episode since…”
She lets it hang. They both remember the last time. Biff waits.
“I’m finding less dysfunctional coping mechanisms.”
“Really,” Biff says.
“Really.”
“How that working out for you?”
She slams the cabinet shut. Her voice is a virtual snarl. “Fine.”
Well. That explains why she’s looking so shitty. He doesn’t know what she’s doing instead, but whatever it is, it’s obviously not working as good.
“You been talking to Fagboy about it?”
He should’ve quit while he was ahead. He doesn’t see her move, just suddenly one of the heavy cans of soup is whizzing past his head and smashing into the wall, leaving a deep dent in the plaster. She doesn’t even turn around to face him.
“The next one’s in your shoulder,” she says, and her voice is quiet, shaking, and furious.
She puts the (now dented) can away, along with the rest of them, and no one talks for a while. He hears her sniff once, and she wipes at her face with the bend of her wrist once, and that’s it.
“You could’ve just said you were sensitive about being illiterate,” she says when she’s done. “Asshole.”
“I can read,” Biff says, but the fire is out of it this time. “I’m just not very good at it.”
She takes it. “Ever tried audiobooks?”
“Don’t got a stereo.”
“The old-fashioned way, then.”
“I ain’t five. I ain’t going to Miss O’Shaughnessy for fairy tales no more.” He still can’t manage more than token annoyance.
She turns to face him and hops up onto the counter. “Biff, stop pretending you have anything resembling dignity. You’re sitting around, listening to boy bands and watching the neighbors. If you even have neighbors.” She kicks a cabinet shut with her foot. It creaks open again. “Come on, we can make it a bet: I find a book you enjoy, you owe me assistance for Dead-Carrier Beetle hatching season. I don’t, I owe you assistance for whatever it is you do, long as it isn’t moral anathema.”
Biff is still pretty sure that whatever the kid reads, he won’t like, but at least it’ll keep her in his sight and give them something to do besides play cards and shout at each other. “Deal.”
“Great.” She hops down and kicks the cabinet shut again, this time hard enough that the door wedges in its frame. “Be right back.” And she climbs out his window again.
In not too long, she comes back, books under her arm. Biff doesn’t like the look of them, but at least none are leather-bound or anything. She tosses some on the table and takes one with her to the chair.
“So what is it?” He asks as she sits her bony ass down and gets comfortable with a glass of water.
“John Steinbeck. A lot of people think he’s a hack. You might like him.” She takes a drink, settles back, and starts to read. “‘Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light…’”
It turns out the kid’s a pretty good reader. The whine in her voice disappears, she keeps a good speed, and even though he knows she learned English late, he can’t tell by the way she reads. Something about her voice and the way she uses it takes the black marks off the page and turns them into something alive. And despite himself, Biff starts to pay attention, until he doesn’t even remember it’s a book from some old dead guy, or words at all. Instead, he’s on the streets of California during the Great Depression, with the canning factories and the whorehouses and the pimps, gamblers, and holy men.
He doesn’t notice he’s interested till M.D. stops reading, and even then, it takes him a bit before he notices. She’s looking at him, eyebrow raised.
Biff waves a hand at her. “I didn’t say stop.”
She doesn’t needle him. Just takes another drink, clears her throat, and starts reading again.
Week One
The windowsill scrapes up a few inches, and M.D. pokes her head in, grocery bags on one arm. She has a strange fever gleam in her raccoon eyes, but her voice sounds stronger, so maybe she’s doing better.
“Hey. I come bearing fuel for your precancerous precirrhotic carcass.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Biff says, but it doesn’t have much punch. The Vicodin is setting in, and he’s having trouble feeling much emotion about anything. “What you got?”
“Wow, I’ve never seen you with so little ingratitude; those painkillers are really something.” She climbs in, sets the bags on the table, and starts emptying them. Biff makes a cursory effort to sit up, but he’s too lethargic. “I got most of the stuff on your list—milk, bread, bacon, eggs, cheese, sour cream, couple cans of beans… those little green thingies…”
“Chives.”
“Yeah, those.” She begins wadding up the bags and shoving them in the pockets of her belt. He doesn’t know how she keeps track of them all. “I did not get the beer. And I have no earthly idea what kielbasa and cumin are, so you’re out of luck on that front.”
“Kielbasa’s Polish sausage. Cumin’s a herb. Spice. Thingy.” He can’t remember which. Blame the painkillers. “What you got?”
“I told you…”
“The book.”
“Oh. Unfortunately, the only other Steinbeck I’ve got is East of Eden, and that’s in the realm of six hundred pages, but if you feel up for that…”
Biff grimaces.
“I thought not. And since you loathed the Princess Bride—”
“Girly confusing bullshit.”
“—And Tarzan—”
“Racist bullshit.”
“—I dug up my old copy of Upton Sinclair’s the Jungle.”
“What, like that old movie with the tiger?”
“Wrong jungle book—and trust me, if Burroughs raised your blood pressure, Kipling would give you a coronary. No, this is misery in the meatpacking plant, maybe you’ll be less picky about that…”
Biff feels a brief glint of suspicion, but the feeling takes too much effort to follow up on, so he lets it go. Besides, she’s putting things away, like she’s his friend or something, and for a couple days, that’s fine, but after a week, that’s wrong.
“Leave it. I got it.”
“Yeah, I can tell by the speed you’re rising from the couch to take on the task.” She opens the fridge to put away tomatoes.
Biff tries to get up, but fuck, that hurts, and that’s the end of that idea. “Don’t fridge those, they go bad faster. Just leave ‘em on the counter.”
“Same with the green thingies?”
“Nah, chives you can fridge.”
“Fridge is a noun, not a verb.” But the tomatoes end up in the fruit bowl and she starts stuffing the fridge with meat and sour cream. “Took your painkillers in a timely fashion, I see.”
“Uh huh.”
“So you’ll likely be conking out any minute now.”
“Uh huh.” He stifles a yawn. “I can hold on. Try this jungle guy…”
Turns out the Jungle isn’t half bad… though admittedly he’s stoned enough on the Vicodin that the words drift over him rather than sink in proper. He’s high enough that he doesn’t realize how far gone M.D. is till she starts nodding off after barely a couple pages.
“Hey.” When that doesn’t work, he lurches upright and leans over to grab her shoulder and shake her awake. She jolts.
“Uh? Yeah, ‘m awake. Where was I?”
“Forget it. We’ll read it later, when I ain’t high and you ain’t—what’s wrong with you, anyway? You seemed okay when you got here…”
She pretends not to hear him. “You need anything else?” She stands up, checking the watch on her belt loop. She rubs her eyes and smothers a yawn behind her hand. “Because I have to get to work, and though the portal lets me wiggle around with time, I can’t push my own circadian rhythms too hard or I crash.”
Biff frowns and glances out his window, just to make sure that yes, it’s still dusk. “You work nights?”
“What? No, time dysynchrony. It’s early morning back at Treehouse. Good thing too; it’s the only way I can keep track of you nocturnal people. You’re even worse than Raige.”
“You’re still working?” She’d been looking so crappy lately, he figured she was too busy just being alive.
She gives him a look of groggy, wide-eyed innocence. “Why Biff, of course I’m working. How else would I get my rat shit?”
“Figured you got it from the rats.”
She snorts. “No way. Vaygo rats are like honey badgers. Anything else you need? I can get you crutches from work or something, we might have ones adjustable to your anatomy…”
“Nah, I’m good.” Biff says absently. He’s busy fighting through the haze of the Vicodin so he can look her over and think properly. Tired, thinner, a little gray around the edges. Like she hasn’t been eating or sleeping well. And if she’s working and being her craptastic self and running back and forth to get him food and toilet paper and books…
“You look like shit,” he tells her.
She gives him a syrupy smile. “Aw, Biffy, thanks. You look like shit too.”
“Naw, I mean it, you really look like shit. You can push time, I ain’t going nowhere, you can… y’know. Sleep. Or something. I ain’t cooking now, but I got extra stroganoff in the fridge…”
He can’t interpret the look she’s giving him. “Are you offering me hospitality?”
“No,” he says quickly. “I just…”
She groans. “Oh god, you are. I really must look terrible, if you’re knocked on your back on Vicodin and noticing…”
“Look, I got room, gimme a sec and I’ll get off the couch—”
He moves to get up and she holds up a finger. She’s too tired to pull off anger, but she gives it a good shot. “No.”
“No?”
“We have an arrangement. A perfectly good working relationship of mutual antagonism. Don’t go wrecking it now while you’re under the influence of heavy drugs.”
She turns away, leaving the Jungle on the table, and the obvious finally works its way through the drugs. The kid’s breaking. The only reason she hasn’t ditched him like Fagboy is that he gives her something to fight.
Okay. He can give her that.
Biff jerks his head towards the fridge and says, “I got extra stroganoff in there. Take it or I fucking shove it down your throat.”
She snorts. “In your state, you couldn’t dose a puppy for worms.” But it works; she goes to yank open the fridge and pull out a Tupperware container. She swings up onto the windowsill, gives him a bleary salute. “See you Thursday. I left the local Jaunter’s League public access number on the fridge for you. Leave a message with them and I’ll get to it within a few days.”
Biff’s high, not stupid. “What if I need to get a hold of you faster?”
She rubs her face. “Look, that’s the only contact for me. Treehouse doesn’t exactly have an inter-overlap postal service, and you don’t have a portal to the Jaunter’s League, so—”
“What about Fagboy?”
She sends him a sharp look, then hastily turns away. “He has one.”
Biff nods knowingly. “You should tell him whazz going on with you.”
But she’s already gone.
Week Two
M.D. doesn’t show. Biff’s well-stocked with groceries still, thanks to her week of hauls, but he still feels a prickle of anxiety on the back of his neck. For all the time dissinkathingy, when the kid says she’ll be somewhere, she’ll be there, and he cooked and everything. Though he still rarely leaves his apartment, he can get around it pretty well and he’s mostly off the Vicodin now, except for rough mornings and overdoing it, so he figured on shoving her full of hamburger and saying, “See, I don’t need no fucking six weeks!”
But she never comes.
Whatever. She has shit to do, God knows he’s skipped out on her plenty of times, and he doesn’t even have a steady job to blame it on. He’s seen her looking like shit before, and she always shakes it off. She’s fine. The no-show, it don’t mean nothing.
Sure. Nothing. He taps the wooden spoon against the frying pan, then shakes his head and shoves the thoughts back. Fuck it, he ain’t Fagboy. He ain’t going to give her house calls unless she says she wants them.
He eyes the hamburger sizzling in its own grease. It smells perfect, but he doesn’t smile. He fumbles for his spice rack, but the cumin isn’t in its space.
“Goddammit, kid.”
Okay, he has an excuse now. He takes the meat off the burner, tosses the spoon in the pan, and hobbles across the hall to bang on the bag lady’s door.
She squints out the crack in the door at him. “What do you want now?”
He holds out his hand. “Phone.”
Her long nose protrudes through the crack in the door, sniffs a couple times. Her tone gets friendly. “What you cooking?”
“Breakfast. Hamburger pie. Give you leftovers, you gimme your damn phone for a second.”
“It’s four in the afternoon. That ain’t breakfast.” But she holds out the phone.
Biff grunts and goes back to dig cheese out of the fridge and check the number M.D. left stuck to the door. Lucky for him, her handwriting is spidery, but neat; she knows how to space her numbers so he can read them. He squints at them, then punches the twelve digits into the phone. The phone is silent for a while, just long enough for him to think it didn’t work, then it blurts a long stream of gibberish that sounds like Russian backwards. Then more, a different kind of gibberish. It takes a while, but finally it says, in an accent he can’t place, “For English, press eight.”
Biff presses eight impatiently and pins the phone to his ear with his good shoulder as he digs ketchup out of the fridge.
“Hello, for calling Jaunter’s League Public Access Line, Overlap 216B, English language, thank you. I may help you?”
“Uh.” Biff had assumed the number went straight to the kid. Looks like he’s not the only one who doesn’t own a phone. “I’m trying to get…” shit, the hell is her full name? “M.D. The kid.” Snapping his fingers, he remembers at the last second. “Rawlins.”
“Ah, yes. I may ask who calls?”
“Biff.”
Silence, then, “I apologize, right now, Ms. Rawlins is no answer.” Ms.? Jesus. They don’t know shit about her, do they? “I may take message?”
Biff grits his teeth and drums his fingers on the counter. “She got an answering machine or something?”
“If message is of private nature, I may forward you to message box.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.”
“Please, one moment.”
The line goes quiet a moment, and then there’s M.D.’s voice, lively and obnoxious and not at all busted up. “So, apparently I have this answering machine box thingy. I barely ever check it, just so you know, because I’m barely ever here, but if this is the best you’ve got, leave me a message and I’ll get back to you eventually. Thanks.” Beep.
Biff growls through his teeth. “Hey, kid. It’s Friday, and I still don’t got my motherfucking cumin. Get your ass over here so you can get it and read that jungle book. We had a deal.” And he hangs up.
Week Two, Day Five
“—best you’ve got, leave me a message, and I’ll get back to you eventually. Thanks.” Beep.
“Godfuckingdammit, kid, it’s fucking Wednesday; I’m out of milk. You dead or something? You better be dead, or I fucking make you dead. Come on! Get your ass back here! The hell is wrong with you?”
Click.
Week Three
“—I’ll get back to you eventually. Thanks.” Beep.
“Kid, I’m outta bread. And meat. And cheese. Where the hell are you?”
Biff hangs up and looks out the window. The Jungle is starting to gather dust on the table, and M.D. still hasn’t shown her face. He picks it up, goes to the grocery receipt she was using as a bookmark, gives reading a shot. He makes it through the word ‘Pasilinksminimams’ before he figures out that it’s not English and tosses the book down with disgust. Still stuck with Top Ten radio. By this point he knows all the songs on their play lists.
But that’s not the problem so much as food. Now it’s getting bad, because he’s out of money and with only one working arm and his leg still too messed up for more than short walks, there’s only so much food he can steal at a time. It’s bad habit to hit the same place too many times, but he can’t make it any further than the mini mart across the street, and its stock is too small for them not to notice.
He’s trying to decide what to do next when there’s a knock at the door.
Biff’s head jerks up. For a moment, he thinks—but no, M.D. never uses the door. She just climbs up the wall and through his window like a giant, bony-ass squirrel. And he never gets any other visitors, at least, not the good kind.
Biff still has the gun he took off the tweaker, weeks ago. He grabs it off the table, limps to the door, and glances through the home-drilled peephole.
There’s a freckled white chin with a half-healed scar, and the top half of a T-shirt that reads, ‘I dig giant robots.’ Biff frowns. Fagboy? How’s he know where Biff lives? And what’s he want?
He tucks the revolver in his pants and opens the door. “Yeah?”
“Uh.” Raige holds out a few bags, eyes flickering to him to the floor and back. “M.D. said she’d been bringing you groceries the past couple weeks, and I guess she kind of hasn’t been able to do it lately, so…”
Biff takes the bags with his good arm automatically and peers inside, too startled to think of something suitably rude to say. The bags say Manic Organic, and the eggs are from free-range vegan-fed hens. And holy shit, that must be three pounds of New York strip—
By the time he gets over the shock (there has to be sixty bucks worth of groceries in there!) and looks up, Raige has bolted.
“Hey! Come back here!”
But he’s already gone.
“Goddammit.” He punches the doorsill. The one time he wants Fagboy to stick around, the guy runs away. Not that it’s really unexpected, but dammit, Biff isn’t near well enough to chase him down and demand answers about where the kid is… and anyway, Fagboy runs track. He’s fast.
The raggedy old lady’s door across the hall creaks open. She squints out at him.
“Who’s the rich kid?”
“No clue,” Biff says, gives her phone back, and goes back into his apartment, slamming the door behind him.
Week Three, Day Three
“—Back to you eventually. Thanks.” Beep.
Click.
--cont. in part two
Prompt: ‘Weeks’
Summary: A few weeks after the events in After the Fall, Biff gets shot, M.D. falls apart, and Raige reads a lot of books about princesses. Warnings for self-harm.
Word Count: 17,777
Notes: This story was supposed to be done a long time ago, but things kept adding themselves. For all his dangerous lifestyle, I’ve never written Biff getting really clobbered, while both Raige and M.D. have taken big-time damage in canon. Obviously, this needed to be remedied. Also, I wrote a lot of this either post-op or sick, can ya tell?
Week Zero
Biff staggers across the hall. The floor bucks and dances under him, and the wall lurches up and smacks him in the face. Normally, he’d be pissed at it, but it keeps him from falling, so it’s all right. After a moment to properly calibrate the movements, he raises his fist and pounds on the door of the raggedy old lady who rents him his room but isn’t his landlady. It takes a couple tries; the damn door keeps running away from him.
The door opens a crack, and a suspicious rheumy eye peers out at him. “Is he gone?”
Biff thinks about it a second. “Uh huh.”
“Good dog.” The door opens a little further. “This’s why I keep you around—shit. That looks serious.”
Biff blinks. Then he tries to follow her eyes and connects it to the pain. Blood. Yeah. That’s why he’s here.
“I need,” he enunciates, “your phone.”
Then the wall runs away from him and the world keels over on its axis. The floor slams into his back, driving the air out of his lungs, and his shoulder and leg turn everything white for a moment.
“Shit. Shit.” She fumbles through her raggedy skirts. “Okay. You got a patcher, or is it Vaygo Gen?”
“Patcher.”
“Which one?”
“Med School.”
She turns her head at him. “Who?”
Names. Fuck names. They never make any sense anyway. He tries to stick out his hand, but shit, that hurts. He tries the other one, and that works okay, but she won’t give it to him.
“Med school? You mean the Rose’s girl? Mandy Rosenthal?”
That sounds about right. Biff nods.
“You can afford her? Never mind, what’s her number?”
Biff holds out his hand more insistently, even though he’s not sure he could dredge the number out of his sodden mind anyway.
“I’m dialing.” And she does, pacing back and forth across her splintery doorway. “Hello? Benny hon? ‘S Frances. I need your girl’s number. Not now, it’s important. Uh huh. Uh huh. No, just give it to me, I’ll remember it. Uh huh. Okay. Thanks.” She hangs up and dials again, and this time, it must get answered right away. “Hello? This is Frances Bertelli, I’m a friend of your father. Biff MacGilligan’s my guard dog; he says you’re his patcher?”
“She owes me. Tell ‘er she owes me.” Biff glances at his shoulder just to make sure the searing agony is where it’s supposed to be. It is. “Tell ‘er I’m shot,” he adds.
The bag lady just covers one of her ears. “What? Yeah, that’s him; he’s been drinking again. Yeah, he’s shot, bleeding all over my floor. What? I dunno. Shoulder and leg, looks like. If you’re going to do something, be fast; costs me ten cents a minute to use this thing, and I don’t want to find a new dog. 252 Everclear, fourth floor. Uh huh. Uh huh. Okay.” She hangs up, gives Biff a scanning look. “You need anything else?”
Biff gives the question due consideration, then shakes his head, which turns out to be a bad idea, because it gets the world spinning again. He’s not too worried, though; once he’s on the floor, it tends to stay under him. It’s good like that.
The bag lady goes back into her room. The door swings shut.
Biff stays on the floor. Pain is hammering at his side, but his patcher’s coming, his home is clear, and he’s safe on the floor. Everything is right with the world.
…
The window always screeches going up, but this time around, Biff feels it like nails on the chalkboard of his brain. The window catches on the frame, but after a good shake, it levers itself up the rest of the way with another teeth-grinding shriek, and the kid climbs in.
He hasn’t seen her in a while. After last time, he wasn’t sure she’d ever be back, but right now, all he cares about is that of all times, she came back now.
“The hell is wrong with you?” Biff snarls, clutching his skull. “I got a door, a perfectly good goddamn door you can use.”
“Doors are for people lacking imagination.” Her voice is uncharacteristically flat. She looks up, takes in the sight of him bandaged up on the couch, and blinks. “Wow. What happened to you?”
“Whaddaya think? I got shot.” He can’t put much fire into it. Shouting hurts, his skull is a size and a half too small, and smacking her is out of the question. As of a few hours ago, he is good for nothing but lying on the couch and taking pills, and M.D., jack-of-all-trades-expert-at-shit, knows it.
She doesn’t seem too gleeful, though. Mostly, she just looks hollow and dead. She shuffles over, eyes his bandages. “Twice?”
“Twice.”
“Mm. I realize your line of work has a high risk of gunshot wounds, but you’ve been wrecking trajectories since you were my age. What were you doing?”
“Nothing!”
She mistakes the reason for his vehemence. She sniffs. “Ugh, don’t know why I asked. This places smells like a brewery.”
Even when she’s blank, M.D.’s voice is always a little whiny and grating; now it sounds like an electric drill feels. He rubs his temples with his good hand and resists a groan. “Keep it down, would ya? Christ Jesus.”
Rolling her eyes, M.D. reaches to drag a chair around backwards. She collapses into it like she hasn’t sat in a week, rests her chin on the top, and watches him through dark-circled eyes.
“Well?” she prompts after a couple seconds. “Wow me with your life choices.”
Like she’s one to talk about life choices.
“I wasn’t doing shit, okay? Wasn’t even working. Somebody broke into my house,” Biff snarls, then grimaces and lays back against the sofa cushions. (He tried to stay in bed, but once lying flat, it was too hard to get back up again.) “Tried to steal my fucking stuff.”
She stares at him for a moment. Her eyes flicker around the bare walls of his apartment, taking in the hole in the wall for the extension cord that supplies all his power, the rusted sink that leaks brown water. The splintered wood and peeling linoleum.
“You don’t own a television.”
“No.”
“You don’t own a stereo.”
“No.”
“Do you even own a phone?”
“No.”
“So… what exactly do you own worth stealing?”
“Jack fucking shit!”
“So why—”
Biff throws up the arm that still works. “I don’t know! I don’t fucking know, okay? What the hell? Here I am, minding my own business—”
“Massively intoxicated.”
“Minding my own business, and someone breaks into my fucking house.”
“Apartment. Or is it a squat?”
“Shut up.” It is. “What the hell? Didn’t even know the guy.”
“Also, aren’t you on the fifth floor or something?”
“Fourth. Took the fire escape and came through the window you always take. Figured it was you, until he shot me in the fucking back. Shoulder.” He points. “Here.”
“And the leg?”
“Thazz from when I got up. Can’t tell if he was going for my knee or my balls, but he was a shit shot either way.”
“I’m assuming by the way you’re carrying on that they didn’t hit anything important.”
“No.” Just his sense of professional pride. “Then the fucker ransacks the place, looking for the riches I don’t got, I break the bottle over his head, beat the shit out of him, and kick his wired ass out.” He also gave the tweaker a good chewing-out, but between the pain and the mutual intoxication, he isn’t sure how much got through. The beating did, though. Beatings always work.
“Drunk and with two bullets in you? Can you even do illusion in that state?”
“They hadn’t started hurting yet.”
“That must’ve been one heck of a binge.”
“It was good stuff.” Biff looks mournfully at the dark stain on the floor. The patcher and the bag lady cleaned up the glass, more out of concern for their own skins than his, but the rest of the mess remains.
“Ah. That explains the smell. And the bloodstain, I assumed it was from one of us…”
“I didn’t ezzackly have time to clean up before you got here. And I can’t take these fucking pills till I finish sobering up. They say it’ll kill me.”
“And that explains your charming demeanor.” She picks up the bottle and reads the label. “Vicodin, yup, that’d do it.” She makes a double-take and reads the label again. “But somehow, I doubt you’re the Vanessa Carlisle they prescribed these to.”
He snorts, which sends an ache through his ribs. “Like I can afford Vicodin. Someone owed me a favor. She patched me up, gave me that.”
She opens the top and looks at the pills. “Well, this should be enough to get you through the worst of it. Careful, this stuff is addictive.”
“No shit. Why you think she had it?”
“Ah.” M.D. sets the pills down and glances at his bandages. “Can I look over her work?”
“No.”
“You trust a drug dealer to do a patch job?”
“More than you.”
“Ow-that-hurt.” She pushes herself up from the chair and advances. The life is starting to come back into her eyes, but he doesn’t like the look she’s giving his bandages. “Come on, I’m trained for this.”
“No!” He tries to shove her away, then curses with pain. “You use rat shit!”
“Beetle larvae, only in select circumstances, and you’re the one with bullet wounds going to a drug dealer for medical care, so you don’t exactly have a lot to feel superior about.” She’s getting into his personal space now.
He wedges himself as far back into the sofa as he can, sending a bolt of pain down his side. “She went to med school.”
“Did she finish? Or has the educational situation in this country finally gotten bad enough that she needs to push painkillers to pay her loans?”
“She don’t use rat shit.”
She doesn’t look convinced, and he raises his good arm warningly when she gets too close. He can smell the herbs and unguents on her clothes, and his stomach roils. “You want my hangover? Keep coming.”
That gets her to back off. Too easy, too easy. But she sits back down and rubs the bridge of her nose with a sigh, and she says, “At least go to a hospital with a proper doctor. This is Vaygo; I’m sure they’ve had more than one ‘I fell on a bullet’ case, and for once, you weren’t doing anything illegal.”
He points to his leg, bandaged around the thigh where the bullet tore through the muscle. “You got a car all of a sudden? Cuz I sure as hell ain’t walking to Vaygo Gen. I’m broke, I got no ID, and I don’t like hospitals. I ain’t going nowhere.”
That cuts her short. She rubs her eyes tiredly. “Right. Of course you don’t. God, I’m off, I know that…”
He just grunts.
She raises her eyes over her hands to look him over. “So how long did Dr. Drug Dealer say you’d be stuck like this?”
He sighs and rubs his forehead. With his shoulder wrecked, he can’t shrug. “Till I get better, I guess. My arm’s fucked to hell, back’s not much better, but it was just a .22 and it only hit the muscle; she said it’d take a month.”
M.D. looks wry. “Hate to break it to you, Biff, but she lied. Leg maybe, but shoulder? It’s going to be at least six weeks.”
“Shut up, you didn’t go to med school.” M.D. just shrugs, like she’s too worn out to argue with him. “Told me to stop smoking too.”
“That is an incredibly professional drug dealer you went to. But yeah, you should. Your blood probably smells like tar.”
“Fuck you, I’ll quit when I want.”
“Uh huh.” She wraps one scrawny arm over the chair top and sets her chin on it. “So this is what you’re like without alcohol and nicotine. Charming.”
“Yeah, it’s great, fucking fantastic, c’mere, I’ll show you how great it is…”
She dodges the swipe. “You need anything?”
The non sequitur catches him. “Huh?”
“Things. Do you need them? Because you look like microwaved death.”
“Fuck you, you look like shit too.” It’s true. Her complexion looks gray, her shoulders are slumped, and beating her in an argument is being far too easy.
“Haven’t been getting enough sleep.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet.”
“Been busy.”
“Uh huh.”
“However, unlike you, I’m fully mobile, able-bodied, and lacking superfluous holes. Can you even sit up?”
“Yeah, I can fucking sit up, Jesus.” If only because of all the crunches he does; he can’t bend his left leg for leverage, and his left arm is useless, so his abs have to take up the slack. He stares at the wall so he won’t have to look at her. “I’m just… I’m out of cash, okay? It all went to this.” He points to his bandages.
“I thought you said she owed you a favor.”
“Not that much favor. Until I can beat ass again, I got jack. I need groceries, but I got shit all to pay with.” He struggles to get upright. “Wait, I think I got some soup left, I can—”
“You keep your bullet-riddled rump on that couch. I’ll check.” She pushes herself out of the chair and goes to the fridge. It takes her a good couple yanks to get the fridge door open, but she manages.
“Congratulations. You’re the proud owner of mustard, wilted greens, and… something.”
Biff grimaces.
M.D. nods and shoves the fridge closed. “Make me a list, and I’ll grab you some stuff. I won’t be able to carry a lot, but…”
“You deaf or something? I told you I’m broke, and you can’t vanish for shit.”
“Biff, you see, some people actually come by their possessions legally. It’s this amazing invention called money. Revolutionized your society, from what I hear.”
He snorts. “You broke. I know you broke, cuz you the only person I know broker’n me.”
“That’s a filthy lie; my assets just happen to be in goods and scrip not easily converted into dollars.” Biff just looks at her. “All right, fine, I’m mostly broke too.”
“Oh. Mostly. Uh huh. That like being mostly pregnant?”
“Shut up. See, unlike you, I’ve got this thing they call friends who lend me or trade me resources when I am in need. Now, either you accept that, or you sit on your moldy couch, feeling your self-righteous, alcohol-deprived rump take root to the cushions, and be hungry. The choice is yours.”
Biff glares at her, but M.D. just crosses her arms and waits. They both know he isn’t going anywhere. He’s stuck for it.
Finally, he says, “How much you gonna borrow?”
She rolls her eyes. “Biff, give me credit. I wouldn’t spend tons of money on the likes of you.”
“Good. Here, gimme some paper or something, I’ll make you a list…”
She digs into her belt. “Use your best handwriting, I can barely read your chicken scratch.”
He takes the gnawed stub of pencil and fibrous scrap of something that he’s pretty sure isn’t paper, but whatever. He starts writing.
“How you spell ‘cilantro’?”
“I have no idea. What is it?”
“Forget it.” He hands the list to her, and she salutes and crawls out the window like a lizard.
“Back in a flash.”
Biff glares at the window after she’s gone. Sure, he always knew that one day he’d get his ass beat too bad to be able to go anywhere, but he always figured he’d be working when it happened. That he got his ass blasted just sitting drunk in his own apartment, that he’s got no one else to help except some broke skinny-ass kid who’s half-dead herself… that’s just humiliating.
He needs to go to the bathroom.
He turns his head. The bathroom is across the room, twenty feet away. Shit. Might as well be ten miles.
With a sigh, he gets his good arm under him and levers himself up from the couch, pushes himself to the edge. It hurts like hell, and for a moment, he slumps against the back of the couch, wheezing. Pain. It’s just pain. Weakness leaving the body. He can do this. It’s twenty feet.
Jesus.
The hangover is still drilling at his temples, and his whole left side is one pounding ache. When he stands, he keeps his weight off his left leg, and it still throbs. He grabs the chair M.D. left behind, uses it to push off. He makes it to the wall, leans hard on it, manages to drag to the bathroom, light-headed.
M.D. finds him there half an hour later, bleeding through his bandages and sweating. At least he got his pants back up by himself.
“Can’t make it to the couch on your own?” She asks.
He shakes his head. He takes her arm, and they make it back to the couch. He collapses into it, head spinning.
“Told you,” she says, pushing the Vicodin into his hand. “Six weeks to recovery. At least.”
He swears.
Week Zero, Day Three
M.D. crawls through his window with a backpack and starts unloading cans. “Here, brought you soup. You like chicken noodle, I hope.”
Biff wrinkles his nose. He’s against the concept of canned soup on principle; he can do it better and fresher himself and in larger batches. But then again, he’s not really doing a lot of cooking right now. “You got anything else?”
“Sure, few other things I didn’t manage the last time. So how’re you doing, Swiss Cheese? Keeping yourself entertained?”
Biff lets his head fall back against the arm of the sofa and groans.
“That good, huh?”
“I got Top Ten radio and thazz it.”
“Well, I’m not much good for electronic entertainment—I’m shocked I haven’t killed that radio yet—but I’ve got some books you could borrow…”
Biff glares at her, but since she’s got her back to him, putting cans away, it doesn’t do much. He doesn’t know what the kid would read, but he can guess. “I’ll stick with the radio.”
“You can’t be that desperate.” She flicks the radio with her finger, and it goes dead with a plaintive drone. “Really, Biff, Céline Dion? Sad.”
Biff makes a face, but he can’t say much.
“Seriously, I have enough books that surely I can find you something interesting.”
“I don’t read much.”
She pauses, can in one hand. Then she turns and looks at him over her shoulder. “You know, whenever I’ve been in your head, you process text strangely. I never thought about it, but between that, your spelling, and your penmanship… has it ever occurred to you that you might be dyslexic?”
“Fuck you, I can read,” Biff snaps, lurching from the couch to snatch the radio off the counter. Once it’s away from the kid, a good whack and it starts up again, wailing how Céline Dion will always love him.
“Never said you couldn’t.”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with me, okay, books’re just boring as fuck is all.”
The kid turns to him, arms full of potatoes. “Obviously you haven’t met the right books.”
He doesn’t like where she’s going with this, and he doesn’t like being someone’s pet rescue project. Before, he was too hurt and hungover to care about anything, but today, he’s sober and sick of her bullshit.
“They let you out of the nuthouse, huh?”
She freezes. Her face goes blank, and she turns away from him to put the potatoes away.
“Well?”
She opens the cabinet and starts putting the potatoes into it. Her gloves are latex today; he can see the tendons and sinew of her hands through them. “It’s not that kind of commitment.”
“Uh huh.”
“I’ve been doing better.”
“Uh huh.”
“I mean it. I haven’t had an episode since…”
She lets it hang. They both remember the last time. Biff waits.
“I’m finding less dysfunctional coping mechanisms.”
“Really,” Biff says.
“Really.”
“How that working out for you?”
She slams the cabinet shut. Her voice is a virtual snarl. “Fine.”
Well. That explains why she’s looking so shitty. He doesn’t know what she’s doing instead, but whatever it is, it’s obviously not working as good.
“You been talking to Fagboy about it?”
He should’ve quit while he was ahead. He doesn’t see her move, just suddenly one of the heavy cans of soup is whizzing past his head and smashing into the wall, leaving a deep dent in the plaster. She doesn’t even turn around to face him.
“The next one’s in your shoulder,” she says, and her voice is quiet, shaking, and furious.
She puts the (now dented) can away, along with the rest of them, and no one talks for a while. He hears her sniff once, and she wipes at her face with the bend of her wrist once, and that’s it.
“You could’ve just said you were sensitive about being illiterate,” she says when she’s done. “Asshole.”
“I can read,” Biff says, but the fire is out of it this time. “I’m just not very good at it.”
She takes it. “Ever tried audiobooks?”
“Don’t got a stereo.”
“The old-fashioned way, then.”
“I ain’t five. I ain’t going to Miss O’Shaughnessy for fairy tales no more.” He still can’t manage more than token annoyance.
She turns to face him and hops up onto the counter. “Biff, stop pretending you have anything resembling dignity. You’re sitting around, listening to boy bands and watching the neighbors. If you even have neighbors.” She kicks a cabinet shut with her foot. It creaks open again. “Come on, we can make it a bet: I find a book you enjoy, you owe me assistance for Dead-Carrier Beetle hatching season. I don’t, I owe you assistance for whatever it is you do, long as it isn’t moral anathema.”
Biff is still pretty sure that whatever the kid reads, he won’t like, but at least it’ll keep her in his sight and give them something to do besides play cards and shout at each other. “Deal.”
“Great.” She hops down and kicks the cabinet shut again, this time hard enough that the door wedges in its frame. “Be right back.” And she climbs out his window again.
In not too long, she comes back, books under her arm. Biff doesn’t like the look of them, but at least none are leather-bound or anything. She tosses some on the table and takes one with her to the chair.
“So what is it?” He asks as she sits her bony ass down and gets comfortable with a glass of water.
“John Steinbeck. A lot of people think he’s a hack. You might like him.” She takes a drink, settles back, and starts to read. “‘Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light…’”
It turns out the kid’s a pretty good reader. The whine in her voice disappears, she keeps a good speed, and even though he knows she learned English late, he can’t tell by the way she reads. Something about her voice and the way she uses it takes the black marks off the page and turns them into something alive. And despite himself, Biff starts to pay attention, until he doesn’t even remember it’s a book from some old dead guy, or words at all. Instead, he’s on the streets of California during the Great Depression, with the canning factories and the whorehouses and the pimps, gamblers, and holy men.
He doesn’t notice he’s interested till M.D. stops reading, and even then, it takes him a bit before he notices. She’s looking at him, eyebrow raised.
Biff waves a hand at her. “I didn’t say stop.”
She doesn’t needle him. Just takes another drink, clears her throat, and starts reading again.
Week One
The windowsill scrapes up a few inches, and M.D. pokes her head in, grocery bags on one arm. She has a strange fever gleam in her raccoon eyes, but her voice sounds stronger, so maybe she’s doing better.
“Hey. I come bearing fuel for your precancerous precirrhotic carcass.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Biff says, but it doesn’t have much punch. The Vicodin is setting in, and he’s having trouble feeling much emotion about anything. “What you got?”
“Wow, I’ve never seen you with so little ingratitude; those painkillers are really something.” She climbs in, sets the bags on the table, and starts emptying them. Biff makes a cursory effort to sit up, but he’s too lethargic. “I got most of the stuff on your list—milk, bread, bacon, eggs, cheese, sour cream, couple cans of beans… those little green thingies…”
“Chives.”
“Yeah, those.” She begins wadding up the bags and shoving them in the pockets of her belt. He doesn’t know how she keeps track of them all. “I did not get the beer. And I have no earthly idea what kielbasa and cumin are, so you’re out of luck on that front.”
“Kielbasa’s Polish sausage. Cumin’s a herb. Spice. Thingy.” He can’t remember which. Blame the painkillers. “What you got?”
“I told you…”
“The book.”
“Oh. Unfortunately, the only other Steinbeck I’ve got is East of Eden, and that’s in the realm of six hundred pages, but if you feel up for that…”
Biff grimaces.
“I thought not. And since you loathed the Princess Bride—”
“Girly confusing bullshit.”
“—And Tarzan—”
“Racist bullshit.”
“—I dug up my old copy of Upton Sinclair’s the Jungle.”
“What, like that old movie with the tiger?”
“Wrong jungle book—and trust me, if Burroughs raised your blood pressure, Kipling would give you a coronary. No, this is misery in the meatpacking plant, maybe you’ll be less picky about that…”
Biff feels a brief glint of suspicion, but the feeling takes too much effort to follow up on, so he lets it go. Besides, she’s putting things away, like she’s his friend or something, and for a couple days, that’s fine, but after a week, that’s wrong.
“Leave it. I got it.”
“Yeah, I can tell by the speed you’re rising from the couch to take on the task.” She opens the fridge to put away tomatoes.
Biff tries to get up, but fuck, that hurts, and that’s the end of that idea. “Don’t fridge those, they go bad faster. Just leave ‘em on the counter.”
“Same with the green thingies?”
“Nah, chives you can fridge.”
“Fridge is a noun, not a verb.” But the tomatoes end up in the fruit bowl and she starts stuffing the fridge with meat and sour cream. “Took your painkillers in a timely fashion, I see.”
“Uh huh.”
“So you’ll likely be conking out any minute now.”
“Uh huh.” He stifles a yawn. “I can hold on. Try this jungle guy…”
Turns out the Jungle isn’t half bad… though admittedly he’s stoned enough on the Vicodin that the words drift over him rather than sink in proper. He’s high enough that he doesn’t realize how far gone M.D. is till she starts nodding off after barely a couple pages.
“Hey.” When that doesn’t work, he lurches upright and leans over to grab her shoulder and shake her awake. She jolts.
“Uh? Yeah, ‘m awake. Where was I?”
“Forget it. We’ll read it later, when I ain’t high and you ain’t—what’s wrong with you, anyway? You seemed okay when you got here…”
She pretends not to hear him. “You need anything else?” She stands up, checking the watch on her belt loop. She rubs her eyes and smothers a yawn behind her hand. “Because I have to get to work, and though the portal lets me wiggle around with time, I can’t push my own circadian rhythms too hard or I crash.”
Biff frowns and glances out his window, just to make sure that yes, it’s still dusk. “You work nights?”
“What? No, time dysynchrony. It’s early morning back at Treehouse. Good thing too; it’s the only way I can keep track of you nocturnal people. You’re even worse than Raige.”
“You’re still working?” She’d been looking so crappy lately, he figured she was too busy just being alive.
She gives him a look of groggy, wide-eyed innocence. “Why Biff, of course I’m working. How else would I get my rat shit?”
“Figured you got it from the rats.”
She snorts. “No way. Vaygo rats are like honey badgers. Anything else you need? I can get you crutches from work or something, we might have ones adjustable to your anatomy…”
“Nah, I’m good.” Biff says absently. He’s busy fighting through the haze of the Vicodin so he can look her over and think properly. Tired, thinner, a little gray around the edges. Like she hasn’t been eating or sleeping well. And if she’s working and being her craptastic self and running back and forth to get him food and toilet paper and books…
“You look like shit,” he tells her.
She gives him a syrupy smile. “Aw, Biffy, thanks. You look like shit too.”
“Naw, I mean it, you really look like shit. You can push time, I ain’t going nowhere, you can… y’know. Sleep. Or something. I ain’t cooking now, but I got extra stroganoff in the fridge…”
He can’t interpret the look she’s giving him. “Are you offering me hospitality?”
“No,” he says quickly. “I just…”
She groans. “Oh god, you are. I really must look terrible, if you’re knocked on your back on Vicodin and noticing…”
“Look, I got room, gimme a sec and I’ll get off the couch—”
He moves to get up and she holds up a finger. She’s too tired to pull off anger, but she gives it a good shot. “No.”
“No?”
“We have an arrangement. A perfectly good working relationship of mutual antagonism. Don’t go wrecking it now while you’re under the influence of heavy drugs.”
She turns away, leaving the Jungle on the table, and the obvious finally works its way through the drugs. The kid’s breaking. The only reason she hasn’t ditched him like Fagboy is that he gives her something to fight.
Okay. He can give her that.
Biff jerks his head towards the fridge and says, “I got extra stroganoff in there. Take it or I fucking shove it down your throat.”
She snorts. “In your state, you couldn’t dose a puppy for worms.” But it works; she goes to yank open the fridge and pull out a Tupperware container. She swings up onto the windowsill, gives him a bleary salute. “See you Thursday. I left the local Jaunter’s League public access number on the fridge for you. Leave a message with them and I’ll get to it within a few days.”
Biff’s high, not stupid. “What if I need to get a hold of you faster?”
She rubs her face. “Look, that’s the only contact for me. Treehouse doesn’t exactly have an inter-overlap postal service, and you don’t have a portal to the Jaunter’s League, so—”
“What about Fagboy?”
She sends him a sharp look, then hastily turns away. “He has one.”
Biff nods knowingly. “You should tell him whazz going on with you.”
But she’s already gone.
Week Two
M.D. doesn’t show. Biff’s well-stocked with groceries still, thanks to her week of hauls, but he still feels a prickle of anxiety on the back of his neck. For all the time dissinkathingy, when the kid says she’ll be somewhere, she’ll be there, and he cooked and everything. Though he still rarely leaves his apartment, he can get around it pretty well and he’s mostly off the Vicodin now, except for rough mornings and overdoing it, so he figured on shoving her full of hamburger and saying, “See, I don’t need no fucking six weeks!”
But she never comes.
Whatever. She has shit to do, God knows he’s skipped out on her plenty of times, and he doesn’t even have a steady job to blame it on. He’s seen her looking like shit before, and she always shakes it off. She’s fine. The no-show, it don’t mean nothing.
Sure. Nothing. He taps the wooden spoon against the frying pan, then shakes his head and shoves the thoughts back. Fuck it, he ain’t Fagboy. He ain’t going to give her house calls unless she says she wants them.
He eyes the hamburger sizzling in its own grease. It smells perfect, but he doesn’t smile. He fumbles for his spice rack, but the cumin isn’t in its space.
“Goddammit, kid.”
Okay, he has an excuse now. He takes the meat off the burner, tosses the spoon in the pan, and hobbles across the hall to bang on the bag lady’s door.
She squints out the crack in the door at him. “What do you want now?”
He holds out his hand. “Phone.”
Her long nose protrudes through the crack in the door, sniffs a couple times. Her tone gets friendly. “What you cooking?”
“Breakfast. Hamburger pie. Give you leftovers, you gimme your damn phone for a second.”
“It’s four in the afternoon. That ain’t breakfast.” But she holds out the phone.
Biff grunts and goes back to dig cheese out of the fridge and check the number M.D. left stuck to the door. Lucky for him, her handwriting is spidery, but neat; she knows how to space her numbers so he can read them. He squints at them, then punches the twelve digits into the phone. The phone is silent for a while, just long enough for him to think it didn’t work, then it blurts a long stream of gibberish that sounds like Russian backwards. Then more, a different kind of gibberish. It takes a while, but finally it says, in an accent he can’t place, “For English, press eight.”
Biff presses eight impatiently and pins the phone to his ear with his good shoulder as he digs ketchup out of the fridge.
“Hello, for calling Jaunter’s League Public Access Line, Overlap 216B, English language, thank you. I may help you?”
“Uh.” Biff had assumed the number went straight to the kid. Looks like he’s not the only one who doesn’t own a phone. “I’m trying to get…” shit, the hell is her full name? “M.D. The kid.” Snapping his fingers, he remembers at the last second. “Rawlins.”
“Ah, yes. I may ask who calls?”
“Biff.”
Silence, then, “I apologize, right now, Ms. Rawlins is no answer.” Ms.? Jesus. They don’t know shit about her, do they? “I may take message?”
Biff grits his teeth and drums his fingers on the counter. “She got an answering machine or something?”
“If message is of private nature, I may forward you to message box.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.”
“Please, one moment.”
The line goes quiet a moment, and then there’s M.D.’s voice, lively and obnoxious and not at all busted up. “So, apparently I have this answering machine box thingy. I barely ever check it, just so you know, because I’m barely ever here, but if this is the best you’ve got, leave me a message and I’ll get back to you eventually. Thanks.” Beep.
Biff growls through his teeth. “Hey, kid. It’s Friday, and I still don’t got my motherfucking cumin. Get your ass over here so you can get it and read that jungle book. We had a deal.” And he hangs up.
Week Two, Day Five
“—best you’ve got, leave me a message, and I’ll get back to you eventually. Thanks.” Beep.
“Godfuckingdammit, kid, it’s fucking Wednesday; I’m out of milk. You dead or something? You better be dead, or I fucking make you dead. Come on! Get your ass back here! The hell is wrong with you?”
Click.
Week Three
“—I’ll get back to you eventually. Thanks.” Beep.
“Kid, I’m outta bread. And meat. And cheese. Where the hell are you?”
Biff hangs up and looks out the window. The Jungle is starting to gather dust on the table, and M.D. still hasn’t shown her face. He picks it up, goes to the grocery receipt she was using as a bookmark, gives reading a shot. He makes it through the word ‘Pasilinksminimams’ before he figures out that it’s not English and tosses the book down with disgust. Still stuck with Top Ten radio. By this point he knows all the songs on their play lists.
But that’s not the problem so much as food. Now it’s getting bad, because he’s out of money and with only one working arm and his leg still too messed up for more than short walks, there’s only so much food he can steal at a time. It’s bad habit to hit the same place too many times, but he can’t make it any further than the mini mart across the street, and its stock is too small for them not to notice.
He’s trying to decide what to do next when there’s a knock at the door.
Biff’s head jerks up. For a moment, he thinks—but no, M.D. never uses the door. She just climbs up the wall and through his window like a giant, bony-ass squirrel. And he never gets any other visitors, at least, not the good kind.
Biff still has the gun he took off the tweaker, weeks ago. He grabs it off the table, limps to the door, and glances through the home-drilled peephole.
There’s a freckled white chin with a half-healed scar, and the top half of a T-shirt that reads, ‘I dig giant robots.’ Biff frowns. Fagboy? How’s he know where Biff lives? And what’s he want?
He tucks the revolver in his pants and opens the door. “Yeah?”
“Uh.” Raige holds out a few bags, eyes flickering to him to the floor and back. “M.D. said she’d been bringing you groceries the past couple weeks, and I guess she kind of hasn’t been able to do it lately, so…”
Biff takes the bags with his good arm automatically and peers inside, too startled to think of something suitably rude to say. The bags say Manic Organic, and the eggs are from free-range vegan-fed hens. And holy shit, that must be three pounds of New York strip—
By the time he gets over the shock (there has to be sixty bucks worth of groceries in there!) and looks up, Raige has bolted.
“Hey! Come back here!”
But he’s already gone.
“Goddammit.” He punches the doorsill. The one time he wants Fagboy to stick around, the guy runs away. Not that it’s really unexpected, but dammit, Biff isn’t near well enough to chase him down and demand answers about where the kid is… and anyway, Fagboy runs track. He’s fast.
The raggedy old lady’s door across the hall creaks open. She squints out at him.
“Who’s the rich kid?”
“No clue,” Biff says, gives her phone back, and goes back into his apartment, slamming the door behind him.
Week Three, Day Three
“—Back to you eventually. Thanks.” Beep.
Click.
--cont. in part two
no subject
Date: 2012-01-18 03:33 pm (UTC)Coherency later, high on good fiction right now.
(Also - Rogan - dude your heritage is showing.)
no subject
Date: 2012-01-18 05:32 pm (UTC)