Fic--Boston
Fanfic--everyone who isnt here for the LotR stuff should like it. Let me know what you think. I don't know if it's ready to be posted to a public comm, and I can use some concrit.
Thanks to amourality for her help and support and to realm_of_ylith for getting me interested in this new subject of fanfiction. Yeah, I needed another fandom like I needed a hole in the head, but I appreciate it, really. :)
Warnings: Crossover, violence, profanity, good guys getting hurt, bad guys getting dead, little girls being frightened. AU for misaligned timelines. Eventual slash (more of a selling point than a warning, isnt it?)
Boston
Sometimes shit don't work out like it should. The battles, the studio time, none of it got him any closer to where he wanted to be.
Sometimes a man just has to say fuck it, fuck it all, and take his ass somewhere new, start over fresh.
Jimmy couldn't leave Lily there though, in that ratty-ass trailer. If he couldn't stand living there he sure as hell wasn't going to let her grow up in a place like that. He talked his mom into making up some papers. He was pretty sure the wherefores and party-of-the-first-parts were out of place, but he hoped it was enough to keep him out of jail if she changed her mind one day and started wanting back the baby she gave away.
He put it all in the car, everything that mattered. Lily, her stuff, his garbage bag of clothes and the demo tape that nobody but him gave a fuck about. He started driving, heading for New York--a new start, a new scene.
Fuck if he knew where he took a wrong turn, but they ended up in Boston when the tranny fell out of the car. It would have taken the last of his cash to fix it, leaving nothing at all for an apartment or hotel or anything when they got to New York, and he'd be damned if Lily was going to be sleeping in a car.
So yeah. Fuck. Boston. What the hell was there for him in Boston?
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For two weeks they live life like normal people. Jimmy finds a job detailing used cars for sale, a tiny apartment and a sitter just down the block for Lily. The job pays minimum wage, under the table. He's the only white guy that works there, but he's used to that. The apartment has hot water less than half the time and the babysitter doesn’t speak much English, but it isn’t worse than life was in Detroit, so he can't complain much.
It's the stupid shit that fucks a man's life up most of the time. It's after work and after picking up Lily from Consuela's that he realizes he's left his key at the lot. Another hour on the bus to get back and he's exhausted by the time he sees that the back gate is open and people are moving something in the shop. He recognizes them, guys that are always hanging around, friends of the boss or something.
He's still by the gate, Lily's little hand in his, when it registers that the thing they're stuffing into the trunk of a car is some dead guy, blood and gold rings shining on his limp fingers.
He does the thing any man that wasn’t brain-dead would do. He grabs Lily and gets the fuck out of there.
He thinks he may have gotten away clean, but at the last second there's a shout behind him, and gunfire. He cuts through a back alley, up a fire escape, over a roof. He circles around the long way, taking a bus near his house but not to it. Adrenaline fuels him because there sure as hell isn’t anything else left in his system. He knows he just needs a few minutes to think, to make a plan.
He takes a back way the last few blocks. He doesn’t think anybody knows where he lives, but nobody ever died from being too sure there wasn’t an ambush outside his house.
He stands around a dark corner, talking to Lily while he tries to figure how he's going to get inside their place without a key. One of them runs past, not ten feet from him. Fuck if he doesn’t almost overlook Jimmy but he freezes at the last second.
The guy yells, Jimmy runs. He turns down another damn alley and feels his feet go out from under him, sliding on something he doesn’t have time to think about right then. He twists in the air, landing with Lily on top of him instead of the other way around. He tries to get up but the knee is no good. No more running.
"Lily, baby," he says, looking into her tear-filled blue eyes. "I need you to be a big girl now. I need you to run, and I'll be there in just a second, okay? The corner store, okay?"
His relief at seeing her nod and scurry off is offset by the sound of a group of men coming into the alley behind him. He gets to his feet, stuffing one hand deep into the pocket of his hoodie. Every second he can hold them off with the threat of a gun he doesn’t have is another second that Lily can use to get further from here.
There are six of them, and one is moving around to follow Lily. Jimmy always had a knack for pissing people off, and he uses it like a weapon now.
He takes just enough of a step to get in the guy's way, to get eye to eye. "Hey, faggot. Yeah, you. What, you so scared of me you'd rather go chasin' down little girls? Ain't you got no dick? Or maybe you been getting' too much dick from your boys here?"
The fist hits him so hard he imagines he feels his brain smacking the inside of his own skull. His knees wobble and he goes down again. He tries curling into a ball, protecting his head and his nuts. The guy that was chasing after Lily moves on past, out of his sight.
Five guys are kicking the shit out of him but it feels like there's more of them than that. The blows make a random pattern, dull thuds of pain along his arms and spine and shins. He thinks maybe one of those kicks has fucked up his head because he could swear he hears Lily's little-girl voice singing.
There's a zip of a silencer, like in a fucking movie and one of the guys kicking him to death falls on the ground beside him. There's a neat hole, the size of a pencil, in the front of his head. Jimmy knows that's one asshole that won't be getting up again.
He rolls over and tries to scramble back. Two white guys are walking down the alley. One has two guns out. The other only has one, firing left-handed. He's carrying Lily with his other arm. Her face is hidden against his neck and she's singing, "Twinkle twinkle little star" in between sobs.
The guns flash and the bad guys die. Lily can't take it anymore and starts screaming his name, but the guy holds her head, keeping her from seeing the death and blood that's filling the alley.
"Are ya Jimmy then?" The man with two guns asks, crouching to look him in the eye.
He can't catch his breath. He just watched these men kill five guys, and they've got Lily. He feels sick and dizzy and his knee hurts so bad he wants to puke. He manages to nod.
Dark eyes stare at him, judging him. The smile that accompanies that gaze is almost gentle. There's a little mole by the side of his mouth, and somehow it makes the man seem more real, more human. "Tell her t' be good, an' hide her eyes. There are things a little one shouldn’t see, aye?"
He nods and swallows. If she doesn’t see, she's not a witness. Not like he is. They'd have killed her before this if they were going to, wouldn’t they?
"Lily," he calls, his voice going all soft for her. "Lily, baby, listen to me, okay? Just close your eyes, baby, everything is going to be okay." He can feel blood running down the side of his face, hot and cold at the same time. "You listen to the man, you do as he says, okay?"
"Connor," says the one that's still to close to him. He makes the n's roll under, and the r at the end roll over. Gloved fingers take hold of his chin, turning Jimmy's face towards the light. "Tell her t' listen t' Connor."
Connor, Jimmy thinks, and knows in that moment that they're planning to kill him. It's quit being a theory and is now a fact. Men with guns don't share their names. And he doesn't want Lily's last memory of him to be the sight of his brain being splattered across the brick.
He closes his eyes, because he doesn’t want to see it coming. The fingers leave his jaw. "Listen to Connor," he says, hearing his voice catch. "I love you, girl. You be good, okay?" And fuck he hopes she listens because it'll be better for her if she doesn’t give them problems.
The darker one, the one closer to him, sighs. "Jaysus, Conn..." and then he drops into some language Jimmy doesn’t know, je ne sais fuckety fuck.
Gloved fingers touch his face again. He opens his eyes and sees "Connor" walking away carrying Lily. He stops where he can see still, but she can't hear.
"Stay with me," the man says and starts rifling through the nearest corpse's pockets. "I'll find a phone and call an ambulance for ya. You'll be fine. She'll be fine." He stuffs the dead man's watch into his pocket.
Ambulance. Fuck, that wasn’t good either. It took him a second to process that this meant he'd be living in the morning.
"A cab," he groans.
"What? Are y' fuckin' mad?" The search for a phone continues.
"I can't go to the damn hospital!" Jimmy snaps back. "If you ain't gonna shoot me just call a fucking a cab and let us go home." He rolls over onto his stomach and tries to push himself up. The world twists around him.
Strong hands grab his shoulders and push him up so he's leaning against the wall. His knee screams and his stomach won't settle.
"Look at yourself, man. Y'need a fucken doctor." Jimmy gets the impression that the guy is trying for reasonable, but he's bad at hiding his impatience. He finds a phone on one of the other corpses and dials.
"No, don’t fucking do this to me, man,"
He starts telling the emergency operator what he needs, but he's watching Jimmy. His blue-grey eyes say, "Talk fast."
"I'm scared, man. I ain't got nobody to come get Lily. They could take her away from me."
The man's accented words slow down a little. "No I don't know, let me find a sign," he tells the phone. He doesn’t look around.
Jimmy knows, he knows that he has to give this guy a better reason, a bigger bite of the truth. "Her mom let me have her but what if she's changed her mind? I can't let her go back there, man. I can't. I won't."
The guy gives 911 an address and Jimmy could be wrong, but he doesn’t think it's anywhere around here. When he's done he closes the phone and throws it into the wall to shatter into bright shards of plastic.
"Connor'll be killin' me over this," he mutters as he hauls Jimmy up to his feet. With Jimmy's arm around his shoulders and his arm around Jimmy's waist, he's got most of the weight. Jimmy knows that even if they'd put him in the cab he wouldn’t have made it to the door of his building, much less his apartment. .
Lily's asleep on Connor's shoulder when Jimmy and the other one come out of the alley, her soft blonde curls laying against the darker sandy-brown spikes of his hair.
"Murph!" Connor scolds, but he keeps his voice down. "Where th' fuck's your head, man?"
Jimmy's pretty sure he hasn’t heard that name before, but it fits the man.
Murph replies in something that isn't English, his voice quiet but urgent. There's no way Jimmy''ll be able to follow that shit and the effort is too much to bother. He closes his eyes, letting the hushed argument that follows wash over him like white noise.