Growing Old is Mandatory, Growing Up is Optional
Title: Growing Old is Mandatory, Growing Up is Optional
Fandom/Series: Some Idiots (Original)
Characters: Walter Holiday, Cade Somers, Eagle Four Eyes
Pairings: Cade/Walter
Summary: A short look into Walt's past and his relationship with a kind, eccentric mentor. Character sketch for Walter and Eagle Four Eyes.
Rating: R, for cursing mercenaries, murder, and mayhem.
Challenge/Theme: For 31_days , the theme was: Childhood is short, maturity is forever - March 08, 2010
Genre: General/Romance.
Length: 2, 372 words.
Status: Complete.
Warning: Slash.
Notes: Sorry if this doesn't make much sense. I was on a roll, however random it was. ^^;; It's a purposefully over-the-top comic book spoof as well as a character sketch for some characters in my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel.
--
Walter Holiday never had a childhood - no, not in the usual sense.
His father was a military man who absorbed himself in his job and hobbies and ignored his family. So there went out the window anything traditional shimmering with ideas of playing catch in the backyard or dunking Oreos in milk.
His mother, originally a good ol’ fashioned Oklahoma girl raised on a farm whisked away to Hawaii by a man who looked like he stepped off screen of “the good kind of porn,” was later turned into a government experiment because of the bureaucratic system, resulting in Walt’s somewhat-genetically altered gifts at the onset of his birth.
His mother tried the house-wife thing - it didn’t go so well for her.
No, in fact, it didn’t go so well so well that it resulted in Walter’s mother snapping and murdering Michael Holiday right in front of their eight-year-old son.
Walt was young, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew his mother had become lost, knew that she had very muchly gone insane.
And yet, when he had witnessed the murder of his father, he felt no ill will towards his mother. His young little mind and his young little heart merely wanted to understand why she did it, why she killed Daddy, why she wasn’t killing him then for bearing witness.
Walt’s mother, although twisted beyond a shade of humanity, did love her son. Gazing into his cocoa eyes, she found a shred of sanity, and came back to the planet, came back to the light.
“Don’t worry,” she said, almost softly. “I won’t do that to you.”
“…I know,” said young Walt. “…What now?” He gaped at her with watery brown orbs.
“I’m all you’ve got left… I’ll teach you how I did it. Next time, we’ll do it together.” She said it quite lovingly.
And that’s how you turn a sweet little eight-year-old against the living and shape him to be one of deadliest mercenaries, fifteen years later along the road.
Yes, Walt Holiday grew up to be a reluctant killer, but something happened along the way that made him start enjoying it.
Maybe it was something to do with ol’ mommy dearest. After all, they bonded over slitting people’s throats, and perhaps when Walt did it himself alone, it allowed him to feel closer to her. Especially considering that his nutcase mom abandoned Walt when he was seventeen, told him to take care of himself.
“I’m done here,” she said. She got into the car of her new boyfriend and hadn’t been seen since.
Now, Walter had the chance to renounce all the lives he’d taken because of the bonding time he did with his mother. He could turn her in, turn himself in, redeem himself. He was still a teenager, he would get juvvie instead of actual jail time - right?
No, that’s not what he did.
He signed on with one of his mother’s former employers, the guy who had been giving them assassination targets since he was twelve, Eagle Four Eyes. Eagle told him to come up with a name, a persona, for himself - a name that separated what he did for a living and the life he actually lived with the money he made from the kills, like how Eagle Four Eyes wasn’t Eagle’s real name. It was Patrick Roeker.
“It’ll keep your conscience,” said Eagle, glaring at the teenage Walt with his one good eye, the the emerald of his speckled iris flickering in the dimness of fluorescent shit bulbs, the other eye hidden under a homemade leather eyepatch. “Keep you from snappin’, like your mom. She made you good at killin’, but that don’t make you a bad person. You’re just doing what you’re told,” he said. “It’s how you was raised, boy.”
“I don’t… know what to call myself,” said Walt, signing his name to Eagle’s contract. “I’m not a hero.” Walter wasn’t twelve anymore. He had a bit more meat to his muscles, some facial hair scruffing his chin and temples, and he had grown to a decent five-foot-six. It had been a while since he and Eagle last talked to each other, but the ol’ crack-pot informer was the only person alive that resembled any sort of familial relation to Walt - that he knew of, at least.
“Then give yourself a hero’s name,” Eagle said. “Irony’s great. Gets you through life, boy. You had a hard one growin’ up. Laugh a little.”
“I don’t know where to start…”
Eagle looked around his office a bit, taking in some of the random things that decorated his abode: a stuffed buzzard on a plague across the wall from him, a poster of Colonel Sanders in black-and-white holding up a bucket of KFC, a pair of WWII dog tags thumb-tacked on the beat-up mahogany door, an American flag on a short pole standing up in the corner by the coat tree, a photo of his late wife in camouflage and a Red Sox cap showing off the huge 25.01 lb Big Mouth Bass she caught during the last fishing trip they took together before the gators finally got to her.
He thought it over quick, then said, “Ever read a comic book, boy?”
“A few, yeah.”
“How’s about we call you somethin’ that’s comic-soundin’?”
“Sure,” said Walt.
Eagle mulled over some thoughts dealing with chicken and fish, some thoughts dealing with the dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale-skinned and skinny punk in front of him.
“I got it,” he said. “Dark Meat.”
“What the hell…?”
“It’s like, white meat… Fish and chickens,” he said, “That shit. ‘Cept, you’re human, and humans ain’t white meat. Hell, lookit me, I ain’t white neither, but shit, you’re damn white. You’re whiter than Snow White.” Eagle gave a hearty laugh, digging into his breast pocket to pull out a cigar. “That’s irony, boy. Learn to love it.”
Walter nodded at the name, thought it over a bit. “Dark Meat it is,” he agreed.
The name, the persona, stuck ever since.
Walt grew from his teens to his early twenties, taking killing jobs and miscellaneous assignments that Eagle Four Eyes wanted him to do, anything from babysitting Eagle’s grandkids to political assassinations. He earned his keep, saved his money and built up his life savings, while living in Eagle’s attic.
One time, Eagle and Walt were helping in the local cemetery. They were digging graves. Eagle tripped on a dandelion weed that someone should have mowed earlier that day and landed face first in the grave, snapping his neck on impact.
So it goes.
Eagle was always telling Walt, “Irony’s great. Laugh it up.”
Eagle wasn’t laughing now.
* * *
Two years later, Walter “Dark Meat” Holiday took an assignment from a third party informant, someone who had heard about Walt’s skills from Eagle when the coot was still among the living and damaging his liver at Bobby’s Cellar knocking back gin and tonic. The informant wanted Walter to retrieve something from a secret military testing facility somewhere close to Geneva, Wisconsin.
The informant was named Hank Wilson. He was squat man shaped like a toad stool and round at his soft waist. His left eye bulged upwards a little when he talked, and his right eye was a different color. He was the head of a major corporation that specialized in space travel and secret devices that may come in handy when the age of interplanetary commerce was upon them.
It wasn’t yet, but he was making a move before his competitors.
“There’s this thing,” said Hank on the phone when he called up Walter to offer him the job. “We want you to go get it from the base. It’s called the Mundus Codex , and it is- ”
“I’ll get paid for it, right?” That’s all Walt was worried about. He was going to have fun no matter what they asked him to do, but if he got paid for it, all the better! Fuck yeah!
“Yes, that was the assumption…”
“Fabulous! I’ll take the job. So how do I get the Thingy?”
“It has a name,” said Hank, talking through gritted teeth.
“So what, does it matter? I don’t care if you call it grilled cheese, I’m still gonna get it for ya,” said Walt. “I’m just wondering where to find it and how to get it to ya.”
“You don’t care about the risks, the security measures that the military base has implemented? Do you even care what the Mundus Codex is?!”
Walt was all too happy when he said, “Nope!” He beamed, not caring that he was alone in his apartment that he bought for himself about three months ago with the money he’d been saving up since he was seventeen. He was a well-off merc with a comfortable living style, and that’s just the way it went.
He had enough money that he could live on his own for two years without needing a roommate.
“All right, fine,” Hank said. “I’m faxing you the coordinates, instructions and anything else that’s important to the mission via secured phone line. No screw ups, Walt. I heard you’re one of the best - don’t fuck up.”
“No problemo, buddy,” Walt said. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. I’ll bring you the Thingy, no sweat.”
* * *
Hank never got his Thingy.
Walter failed - for the first time - and it was quite spectacular, actually.
See, something happened that nobody expected: the infamous, slightly maniacal and deranged costumed killer fell in love at first sight with an alien from an alternate Earth’s alternate time line. Yep - the guy’s name was Cade Somers. He wasn’t really an alien in the take me to your leader way. He was human, just not from this world; a time-traveling super soldier on a mission to stop the Great Evil that threatened the galaxy.
Or something like that.
Cade was after the Mundus Codex, and had traveled from his own time - which was an alternate future of alternate Earth’s alternate universe’s alternate time line - to get a hold of it.
He explained it like this: “It’s an artifact from the future of the future of my future - it’s complicated - and it was a vital component to the revival of the greatest evil the galaxy has ever known… I was… supposed to either secure it or destroy it. Destroying it was the first option, securing it was the second if destroying it was an impossibility.” His voice held the timber of hypnosis, his eyes misty with mysterious and confusing emotions.
He and Walter were standing across from each other, gazing into each other’s eyes as best they could, despite having just fought each other and Walt wearing full-body spandex that concealed his identity (furthering his persona, as per the advice of Eagle Four Eyes). They were both smitten with one another, quite obviously.
“I guess you helped me accomplish my mission…” Cade said. He was referring to the fact that during the scramble with Walt, somehow they’d both end up in the air - Cade with his telekinesis, Walt with his super-deluxe genetically-enhanced leg muscles - and Cade flung the merc down to the either with inhuman super strength from a height of twenty feet. The Codex was broken during the fray when Walt’s body collided with the cement.
“And you helped me fail it,” Walt said, smiling oddly enough that the faint outline of his curved lips could be seen beneath his mask. He had survived the fall rather intact because of his mutated genes from his government experiment reject mother.
“Are you upset?”
Dark Meat shrugged. “Not really,” he said. “I had way too much fun stealing the Thingy. I wasn’t really worried about bringing it to the guy in one piece. Plus he paid me upfront before the job was done, the numbnuts.”
And thus was the start of a beautifully fast-paced romance between a homicidal maniac and a time-traveling, world-walking peace advocate that made very little sense in the beginning and deepened in meaning and understanding in the next five years.
* * *
Five years of living together cooled Walt’s psycho-fires to the point where he didn’t enjoy killing - as much. Five years of living with Cade the health nut, who became a politician and a yoga instructor on Tuesdays, allowed Walter to pursue compensating for his loss of childhood innocence in ways that didn’t involve slicing through a cyborg security guard’s trachea.
Walter traded completely merciless killing for kinda merciless killing, along with the promise to Cade that he would only kill “bad guys.” He didn’t take forty jobs at once and freed up some time to sit down and watch PBSKids, Nickelodeon, and Cartoon Network. He started spending more time eating fruit snacks and PB&J and Kool-Aid instead of drinking vodka and eating pork rinds for three square meals.
He shared a bed with Cade - and his stuffed albino penguin that he found at a flea market, Mr. Snuffleumpkins. On a whim, he bought DVDs of all the Disney classics and watched every single one of them in a twenty-four-hour marathon, claiming for three days straight that he would have loved to have been a mermaid princess.
While Cade traveled to places like Norway, Sicily, London, Washington, D.C., and Prague to negotiate world peace, Walt played on the slide and swings in the park. He spent hours alone on the Merry-Go-Round. He started wearing super hero Underoos, Mickey Mouse socks, and not washing his hands after making mud pies. He bought himself a Big Wheel, even though his legs were too long for him to ride it, and started collecting the toys out of Happy Meals.
Some people say that Walter when from okay, he’s nuts to okay, he’s fucking psycho. Some say that he should have just stuck to killing people for money instead of regressing. Others say he was just fine.
Cade told those people, “He’s Walt, and I love him no matter how he is, grown-up and mature or otherwise.”
Eagle Four Eyes, through some sort of otherworld phenomenon, would have given a ghostly chuckle, and regarding how Walter grew up kind of backwards, would have said quite sagely, “Irony’s great, boy. I’m glad you’re laughin’ again.”