[L4D2, Nick/Ellis]: Playing Pretend
Title: Playing Pretend
Author: Still me, katsumeragi
Fandom: Left 4 Dead 2
Rating: R18
Word Count: 6340
Summary: “No God-fearing man should have a clue about bayou magic,” in which Nick pretends to be distant, unmoved, and a ghost altogether. Nick/Ellis, Keith/Ellis, Set in AU version of “The Parish” where these people somehow have more free time.
A/N: So after seeing The Princess and the Frog and playing way too much L4D2, the idea for this fic just popped into my head. I really wanted to tie in the voodoo element of New Orleans with the fact that Nick never planned to stick around. I hope this came out okay under a big underlying theme.
Rochelle is trying to think of the last morning she didn’t wake up to the sound of a fist connecting with a jaw or irrational bickering, and sadly that morning didn’t come to mind.
She forgot that instead of the cheap alarm clock that played a badly tuned version of Grieg’s "Morning Mood" that resided in her Cleveland apartment, she was going to wake up to a fist connecting with a jaw and the grunts of two men unwilling to put their manly pride aside.
“It’s seven in the damn morning, and you’ve already found a reason to go on punching each other,” Rochelle said, disgruntled.
Nick smeared blood away from his cheek. “It’s more like someone doesn’t realize that I don’t want to wake up next to a sack of redneck, even after some very specific conversations we’ve been having.”
Ellis, in the other corner of the upper floor of the safe house, tilted his trucker hat to cover his scowling eyes and spat a wad of red saliva onto the wooden floor. “’Sonuvabitch hits like a girl.”
Nick didn’t take well to taunting. “When I say ‘Get the fuck off my side of the room,’ your answer should be ‘How far?’ not to sneak back in the middle of the night and use me as a damn pillow.”
Rochelle curbed the urge to slap the older man across the face. “Just because Ellis might have been cold doesn’t mean you have to knock his teeth out.”
“Stay out of this Ro’” Ellis barked. He went downstairs to load his pack for the next venture with Coach.
Rochelle followed the disheveled boy and came back up seconds later with two cups of stale coffee. At this point, Nick was sitting against the wall, cracking his knuckles, looking impressed by a round crack in the wall that was most likely caused by his fist. She handed him a chipped mug. “You better have a good explanation for all of your fighting.”
The conman used his fingers to trace where his skin broke above his eyebrow. “Remember how both of
us volunteered to keep watch downstairs before Coach took over?”
“You’re kidding.”
“We weren’t doing a whole lot of watching out, if you catch my drift.”
Rochelle folded her arms and furrowed her brow. “You slept with the kid? I understand everyone has their needs, but Nick, seriously? At a time like this? In the most traumatic two weeks of someone’s life?”
“Calm down, it’s not like we got into a fistfight because of a quick fuck.”
“Nick, tell me.”
“Well the fuck wasn’t necessarily quick because we’ve been doing it for the past few days, and the funny thing about screwing a mechanic is―”
“Nick.”
“He called me ‘Keith.’”
Rochelle didn’t bother to ask any more questions. She looked away from the disgruntled man and took another sip of coffee, wondering how many of Nick’s walls Ellis managed to bulldoze down before finding and confusing whatever was left of his heart.
---
Ellis didn’t bother to speak that day as they trudged from the cemetery to where the hustle and bustle
of New Orleans used to be.
“My momma, she had relative that lived in the Big Easy. She had a sister named Clementine who made the damndest best beignets, and I used to eat them by the tray-full. So much powdered sugar was sprinkled on those babies, it looked like the first snow of winter!” Coach went on about the special peppers and homemade Tabasco Aunt Clementine put in her gumbo as Nick absentmindedly glanced around the old French Quarter. He saw torn purple, gold, and green banners trailing along the balconies of the buildings. He imagined how much better his visit to the South would be if there were more college girls flashing their tits on Mardi Gras instead of having to see the sagging ones of a Spitter.
“Let me know the recipe to your aunt’s voodoo po’boys or something and then I’ll be interested in your food stories” the gambler said. To his surprise, he was answered with the coldest glance Coach had ever given someone.
“Boy, Aunt Pattie and black magic ain’t nothing to joke about.”
Nick laughed. “Sounds like Aunt Pattie’s got you scared shitless.”
“Do you enjoy bringing up childhood trauma, Nick?” Rochelle asked.
“Don’t yell at me for that. It’s not like I knew Coach over here has a fear of parlor tricks.” Nick chuckled to himself while planting a bullet between the eyes of an infected up ahead.
“It ain’t a parlor trick” Coach snapped. “If you’d seen the inside of that woman’s house, you’d realize she’s got death on her side.”
“Right. And Siegfried and Roy never get mauled by tigers because they’ve got some magic animal powers.” Rochelle glared at Nick again, signaling that he should at least humor the man. “Does voodoo run in the family, Coach?”
He clutched the barrel of his rifle and looked straight ahead. “No God-fearing man should have a clue about bayou magic.”
Nick lit a cigarette and took a drag from it. “Something about your actions says that visit to your aunt’s house taught you a little something.”
Coach ignored the snide man and took his mind to a better place, full of beignets and powdered sugar snowstorms, while changing the subject to his trip to the Baton Rouge Zoo.
---
All of the talking Ellis didn’t do that afternoon was saved up for their night in another safe house, as he asked Coach endless questions about Aunt Pattie and told another Keith story about how he was kicked out of a Saints game for a fight in the bleachers (of course the fight wasn’t related to football, but about the price difference between hot dogs at the Louisiana Superdome and the Houston Astrodome.)
“So does that mean you got one of those dolls that ya stick the pins in and it makes ‘em act funny?” Ellis asked.
“Just because I saw Aunt Pattie workin’ her magic doesn’t mean it was a voodoo doll,” Coach said while knifing open a can of baked beans. “Her rituals were a little more in-depth than that.”
“Voodoo dolls, the Tex-Mex of magic tricks,” Nick said, amused at his own joke, while wrapping a small cut with a tattered bandage.
“My momma told me she was a guide for the spirits. Used to channel them to talk to loved ones or to send them off if they were hauntin’ someone.” This made Ellis’ ears perk up, and Nick could guess every thought that popped into his head. As the gears in his head started shifting some more, Ellis was about
to speak but saw Nick’s eyes on him, unmoving.
Look at me and no one else.
He decided it’d be best to ask his question when Nick was asleep or on guard. He was guessing that they wouldn’t be sharing a shift today.
---
“So tell me Mister Gambling Man, since when did you start to give a damn about us?” Rochelle asked as the undead walked outside the bolted door.
“Is ‘giving a damn’ what you call friends with benefits? No, forget that, we’re not even friends.” Nick averted his eyes from the woman who knew too much and fiddled with the magazine of his uzi.
“I’d like to think that you give a damn about Ellis, considering he called another guy’s name when you were playing pretend upstairs.”
Nick raised an eyebrow. “Pretend? Was I pretending that Ellis was a Vegas showgirl and that there wasn’t the blood of a thousand zombies on my three thousand dollar suit?”
“You were pretending that whatever stability you have with Ellis would last even after we cross that bridge up ahead.”
It left the man speechless yet with so much to say. And he might as well have said it all to Rochelle, who wasn’t a member of a crack news investigation team for nothing.
It started like this, he began over the moans of infected outside, and told her about his ex-wife Tracy, who sucked his emotional capacity and his wallet dry. He told her about the child that he most likely is the father to somewhere in the wasteland known as Atlantic City.
And then he told her about the first night him and Ellis were on watch duty and talked the whole night about their lives, not that he fully agreed to bear his soul to the Georgian so quickly, he added.
This was during the first week or so. The next time they were between watch shifts, Nick found a bottle of Vitaly in the safe room and gulped some down to remind himself of his past classier life. His nostalgia ended with him planting a sloppy drunk kiss onto Ellis, who was a little too happy to reciprocate.
The next night, as Nick and Ellis volunteered to keep watch (Rochelle surprised herself by not picking up on that hint), Nick was literally knee-deep in Ellis for the first time, and what Nick thought would be the only time.
“The one thing more valuable in this hell we live in now, more valuable than clean water, bullets, or even a damn helicopter ride, is companionship. Waking up next to the same person every morning may not be able to blow anyone’s brains out, but it keeps you sane.”
Nick toyed with a silver lighter from his suit pocket, flipping it open and closed, staring into the weak flame it produced. He looked up to Rochelle. “Call it crazy, but giving a damn might be the most stable thing I’ve got right now.”
Rochelle agreed, admitting she would have punched Ellis in the face just as hard as he did.
Misery did love company, after all.
---
Rochelle was hoping today would be the day when she would be greeted in the morning by tranquility, and maybe a group of small melodious bluebirds like a more apocalyptic version of Snow White. Instead, it was like the previous morning but a few hours earlier, and the right hooks Nick threw seemed to be a lot stronger.
She woke to see Coach restraining Nick against the safe room wall as he threw a profane fit. Ellis was on a few feet away, grasping his jaw and shaking.
“What the fuck kind of apology is that?” Nick yelled. “You tell me you’re sorry for pulling that shit and now you want me to be a vessel for your poltergeist fuck buddy? Remind me why the fuck that would be acceptable!”
Ellis wouldn’t look up. Rochelle ran to his side and tried to examine his pain but she was a ghost to him.
He was in shock, a man shoved underwater that couldn’t be brought back to the surface. Rochelle turned to Nick, her eyes practically shooting through him. “You have no idea how much I just want to hit you stupid for whatever you did to scare Ellis this much.”
“Right, of course, always take his fucking side!” Coach was having a hard time keeping Nick, who was trying to claw out of his binding like a Hunter, pinned to the wall. “He’s not a damn kid, Rochelle! He knows very well what he asked me to do and I’m not going to be some channel for a hick ghost!”
And then Rochelle remembered the conversation they had the night before, and remembered how Nick’s expressions told her how everything that gave him the upper hand was taken away by Ellis after each night they spent together, Rochelle had no idea what to do.
“He doesn’t get it,” Ellis quietly said, still clutching his face and struggling to stand. If Ellis was a weaker man, he would be wiping tears that were trailing down his cheeks. But
“So now what’s your big plan, Nick? Or do you usually get to leave town before things like this happen?” Coach asked.
“What does it take?” Nick stood up while daubing blood off the side of his head, spotting the sleeve of his suit.
“The hell does that mean?”
“What does it take to play Ghostbusters?”
Coach cocked his eyebrow. “’Few odds and ends, some free time we probably don’t have. You kids are
out of your goddamn mind, tryin’ to pull this kind of shit when we’re so close to the bridge.”
“I’m not doing it for him.” Coach was going to ask him why he was losing his damned mind, in those
precise words, but Rochelle made a motion to stop him. Not that she thought it’d work, but because it might be just the thing they needed to piece themselves back together.
---
As far as Ellis was concerned, this was the most misguided scavenger hunt he had ever been on, even worse than the one at his old Sunday School (this thought triggered another Keith story in his mind, when at an Easter egg hunt he wandered into the Savannah graveyard right next to the church and got locked inside a mausoleum, where after digging his way out of it with a plastic egg bucket he brought back someone’s egg-shaped knee bone and won a big chocolate bunny. It was the only time Ellis was actually envious of someone. He would have given anything to get in that mausoleum.)
It was misguided because all of the necessary ingredients for a séance were distant blurs in Coach’s memories, but he could remember at least these things: “Candles, something that belonged to the deceased, the wing of a bird, the hand of a sinner, and a broom.”
“No offense to your Aunt Pattie, but why do we need a broom?” Rochelle asked.
“To keep the witches out.” She and the other two men nodded in approval. “Also, this safe room floor is damn dusty, and if I gotta make up some voodoo chant shit, I don’t’ want to cough my lungs out.”
Currently, Ellis was butchering through the arm of a dead infected to cut off the hand. If someone was feasting on other humans, didn’t that make them a sinner? This kind of reasoning is what passed as acceptable for the ingredients, after Nick asked an important question.
“How am I supposed to know what kind of bird to find? If I’m on the hunt for a dove with a fucking olive branch in its mouth, I’ve got some bad news for you.”
“The way I see it,” Coach replied, “Keith’s gonna see our sorry-ass display of a spirit channeling and will visit us out of pity.”
As he went back inside the safe room, zombie hand in hand, Ellis saw the candlesticks and broom taken from an inn a few blocks down, Coach in the corner of the safe room, writing and erasing words nervously like a man and his wedding vows, and a bloody ruffled bird carcass. He heard Nick and Rochelle enter behind him and bolt the door shut.
“You had to go shoot a bird? This isn’t a hunting trip, Nick! Why couldn’t you go find a dead one?”
“Yes, because free meat on the ground would be completely ignored by zombies. Who’s going to get all teary-eyed over a seagull?” Ellis’s eyes met Nick’s for the first time in what felt like weeks, but the gambler wasn’t in the mood for reconciliation and quickly turned away. “Hey Coach, are we ready to get this show on the road? I don’t have all night to be a dead guy’s puppet.”
“Calm yourself, Nick. From what I can remember, the man was in the chair, with his hands hog-tied and he was blindfolded.” Coach couldn’t help but laugh and the uncompromising position Nick would be stuck in. “Well shit, Rochelle, do the honors of gettin’ this man bound and gagged.” Rochelle rolled her eyes and muttered about how she wished him and Ellis would kiss and make up so she wouldn’t have to touch the slimeball.
“But you’ve got to admit, I’m a damn charming slimeball” Nick added, and she tightened the rope around his wrists and the splintering chair with such might that he thought his blood vessels would pop and his arms would burst at the seams. She did the same for the white cloth bandage that she placed around his eyes. He expected a brain volcano to erupt from his scalp and onto his suit. At least they could wash it out if tonight was also his funeral.
Coach, the makeshift shaman, found a machete near the medicine cabinet of the safe room and hacked a wing off the seagull. Rochelle turned off the lights so only a hodgepodge collection of candles lit the room, sending ill light onto the walls and faces of the nearby undead outside. The wing laid in front of the blindfolded Nick, next to the hand, and all that was missing was the item of the deceased, which was still sitting atop Ellis’s head. Rochelle nodded to the younger man, who slowly took off his hat and caressed the dirty mesh and bloodstained logo of his ex-lover’s cap. He carefully placed it on the floorboards next to the hand of the sinner.
Coach cleared his throat and waved his hands in the air in a way Ellis and Rochelle couldn’t figure out. It was less of a summoning and more of conducting a symphony for the dead, but they weren’t in the position to question if anything in this ceremony was accurate.
“Keith Durand, we’re here today to ask you to visit us from God’s heavenly kingdom above and pass through the body of Nicholas...aw shit, I forgot to get your last name, Nick.”
“I’m not getting married to the hick! Can’t you do without it and get this over with?” Nick shouted, rocking the flimsy chair in anticipation.
“It ain’t proper to mess with these things.”
“And the seagull wing is somehow acceptable?”
“Mastrofrancesco-Ricci,” someone said, and everyone turned to Ellis who spoke the name with such ease. Nick didn’t get it, how his contractions were so fractured and his accent obstructing everything right in the English language and somehow his Italian-to-the-core last name glided off his tongue. He couldn’t even remember when, or why, he told Ellis. Good conmen never tell anyone their real surnames (or first names, but the minute he saw a decaying woman spitting acid at his face he thought it wouldn’t be too bad of an idea.) But it was Ellis, and a kid like that was someone Nick couldn’t bring himself to con.
“Alright then, Keith Durand, we’re here today to ask you to visit us from God’s heavenly kingdom above and pass through the body of Nicholas Mastrofrancesco-Ricci. We pray that you do not harm his earthbound soul as you reach us, as we have greeted you with familiarity from your past life, a symbol of peace, and an offering from the damned.” After that Coach’s words were inaudible, mumbles that resembled an old spell. A great silence overcame the room, not a breath or toe-tap could be heard.
And then, the hog-tied and blinded Nick realized why hoodoo and voodoo rhymed, and it was because one was just as fake as the other, since he was obviously not experiencing a supernatural takeover of his body. Séance ingredients with their own quirks or not, he was sure Keith wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between an albatross and a cardinal, or maybe he was a member of the Autobahn society or something.
Or maybe Keith wasn’t really dead. Either way, he was a no-show.
Oh…shit.
Thinking about the way Ellis would have looked on the other side of the blindfold (and Nick knew exactly how he looked when nervous, his hands shaking and that Southern Gentleman mentality holding back a needed cry), there was no chance in frozen-over Hell that he’d shout the first thing that came to his mind: “This whole playing Poltergeist thing isn’t working out. Is this when I climb on to the ceiling or when I vomit on all of you?” Coach probably knew this wasn’t going to work and created this pity party anyway, just to keep Nick on his toes. Ellis asked if it worked, and he knew if he stayed silent for much longer he’d crush whatever hope Ellis had left.
Because, although Nick hated admitting it, losing Ellis wasn’t just losing a good fuck every once in a while.
It was about waking up to the same person every morning, which he hadn’t done for years, and it was about finding someone who didn’t think of him as just a conman. It was about not breaking stupid little promises, and it was about finding a way to make up for stupid little lies.
It was, more or less, about losing Ellis.
So Nick coughed. He hacked and grunted until he forgot to breathe. Maybe, he thought, maybe this would be a convincing enough entrance for Redneck the Friendly Ghost. He tried to subtly bite the inside of his mouth to draw blood to cough out. Out with the bad, in with the good. Whoever that good exactly was. After his coughing fit, the safe house grew silent.
“Nick,” a quiet Ellis asked. “Nick, did it work?”
“Well I’ll be damned,” Nick asked in the same hush, using a slight Southern drawl that would mask his city boy tongue. “Is that you Ellis?” A faint cry escaped Ellis’s lips, so he assumed his impersonation was good enough. He heard hurried footwork, felt a tight embrace around his frame as Ellis buried his face in the crook of neck and then pressed against Nick’s face.
He felt Ellis’s tears soak into the cloth of his blindfold as their noses brushed against each other and their foreheads touched. So overcome with joy, Ellis planted a kiss onto Nick-Keith’s lips. There was something different about it, but Nick’s mind couldn’t articulate it, about this kiss. There was a tenacity that wasn’t there when they usually locked lips, either when Nick was drunk or sober. As Ellis continued to whisper sweet I-missed-yous into his ears, that’s when it clicked in his brain that Ellis wasn’t really kissing him in the literal sense.
He was kissing Keith. And conceitedness be damned, Nick was not pleased. But it wasn’t like he had the liberty to let it show.
“Aw Keith, buddy, wait ‘till I tell you ‘bout all the crazy shit we’ve been doin’ lately!” Ellis said, clearing his sinuses and with more cheer in his voice. “We drove Jimmy Gibbs Jr’s stock car. Out of the damn Liberty Mall window. Can you believe that man?”
Nick nervously laughed, feigning excitement for the Evel Knievel knockoff. He was forced to learn enough about the guy that “Shit Ellis, you jus’ steal all the luck I need. Drivin’ a car outta a mall and I jus’ get burned all the time.”
“I realize it’s been a while since you’ve seen one another,” Nick heard Coach say, “but if you sit there and tell your damn stories for hours you’ll end up killin’ Nick. No one’s body, not even that evil sonuvabitch, can handle a holy spirit in them for that long.” There was no way that anyone else was buying Nick’s lame attempt at being Keith. No matter how God-fearing Coach was, he should have known better. God wasn’t this bad at magic tricks.
Nick wondered what Rochelle thought of this whole ordeal. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to receive a palm to the face when he woke up in the morning.
“So I got this problem, Keith,” Ellis said softly, resting his wrists on Nick’s broad shoulders. “You know the guy who’s body yer usin’? Nick?”
“Ellis, I’ve been too busy drinkin’ beer and checkin’ out all the pretty girls in Heaven to see who this fella is.”
As Nick managed to insult the whole population of the South, he wondered if he’d be receiving a slap or the butt of a rifle to the groin.
“He dresses real fancy, like one of them actor or models or somethin’ in a white suit and all. He’s kind of an ass, like he don’t care much to hear ‘bout stories ‘bout ya, and he got a mean right hook.” An exasperated Nick cleared his throat. If he would have known Ellis was going to use a dead guy for an armchair psychiatrist he would have never agreed to this.
“But he’s also really nice to me sometimes, like the other night when I heard some o’them zombies outside the safe house door in my sleep, I got all nervous an’ shaky n’ stuff. He put his fingers though my hair, like I was some dog or somethin’.” Ellis combed his fingers through Nick’s hair, his actions reflecting his words. “And he told me everything was gonna be okay.”
The gambler heard whispering in the far end of the room. A woman’s whisper, Rochelle’s voice. A disapproving cough from Coach followed. Some people are lucky enough not to know all the details.
“But he ain’t nothin’ like you, Keith,” Ellis said solemnly. Nick stopped concentrating on the background voices and tried to stay so composed, so in the character of Keith even if he was so frustrated by
“Why ain’t he like me?”
“He don’t have your kindness, hell, that’s fer sure. He’ll open up to me but then he just snaps back shut again. We don’t really have that much in common, shit, can you believe he doesn’t like the Midnight Riders? Well it don’t really matter, since I know when we go to the evac center he’s jus’ gonna leave and go back up north to gamble.”
Nick wanted to swallow, but there was a lump in his throat that would subside. He couldn’t tell if it arose from how incredibly pissed he was at Ellis, or something else that Nick didn’t want to name. Rochelle and Coach owed him a gold medal or a spa treatment for the fact that he didn’t pin him to the ground and slice out his corneas with a machete. To humor the kid, he simply stayed quiet as Ellis asked his all-important question.
“But here’s the problem: since you’re dead, it’s not alright to be doin’ things with someone else, right? We’re pretty close, but I can stop if that’s what you want. Would ya be mad if I was settlin’?”
Settling?
Nick knows of a con that only the most desperate try to pull if the debt tier in is really high. They fake their own deaths, usually with the help of an accomplice, and lay inside the coffin during the funeral since there’s no way to replicate the body during a wake (unless you made your debt buying wax from Madame Toussat’s or something.) As the not-so-deceased is in their coffin, they hear all the horrible things their family has to say. The spouse, the children, the parents, the friends, all take time and put on their best black for a formal roast.
And for Nick’s roast, Ellis sure saved his Sunday best.
“You just don’t get it, El.”
His accent was thinning out. He could just feel the scorn Coach and Rochelle were going to give him later that night.
“He tries so hard to stop being such a bastard and somehow you found a way to make him remember the joys of fuckin’ monogamy, and now that you have he can’t help but be pissed. You’ve known each other for not even a month and he’s become so invested in you. There is nothing left to go back to.”
He paused, to see if Ellis would prove him wrong. He didn’t dare.
“And instead of letting go and moving on, you’re putting him through this utter shit of a bad rerun of Three’s Company with the ghost of redneck past and I don’t want that stability taken away. What, if Keith tells you to never even speak to me again, you’ll listen? You’ll try to make it past that bridge with one less person having your back? Do you want to get yourself killed?”
Nick lost his control over his words. How did he expect this whole ordeal to mend them back together in the end?
“The sooner you realize that everything in your old ass-backwards life is probably gone, the better. I’m not going to sit here and cry to Huckleberry Finn about how I’m the worst replacement you could find.”
His arms violently struggled out of their binds and, once free, he tore off his blindfold to see what his judgment was. Ellis was slack-jawed and looked hurt, as if someone struck him. He walked straight past him, avoiding eye contact and kicking the infected hand from its arrangement by accident. The safe room door opened after fidgeting with the bar in frustration, and as he saw Rochelle and Coach for the last time he couldn’t tell if they were condemning him or in rue of him.
---
Nick ran till his whole chest was on the brink of combustion. Luckily he still had a pistol and an adrenaline shot in his suit pocket or else he wouldn’t have been able to fend off the stray zombie that remained in an area they already ransacked. He wound up back in the old bar and pool hall, the kind of place his old persona would have thrived on. Nick looked for water behind the bar counter but only found a bit of gin. Well, it wasn’t the first time he was willing to make that substitution. It went down his throat like peroxide and nails.
It was an inopportune night for him to need more than alcohol to clear his mind. He wondered if he should set up a game of pool for him to see if he still had a good cue thrust but instead took a gander at the jukebox near an area he assumed was a dance floor. He fumbled for switches and electrical outlets in the back until it turned back on with a display of pale neon lights. He heard an infected running to him, which he expected a few at least, and shot it promptly in the head. What luck he had to not attract a horde with his endeavors.
Nick stood blankly in front of the jukebox, slamming against the Wurlitzer’s side and pushing buttons. He wasn’t very knowledgeable in terms of music, hell, he and Tracy danced to Journey on their wedding day. He found a slow song by accident, something that lit up as “Come Sunday” with a soulful voice saying “Lord, dear Lord above, God almighty, God of love, Please look down and see my people through.” He scoffed. If there was someone watching over them, he must have gone out for a coffee break and forgot to come back.
He heard shuffling behind, not the dead aimless legs of a zombie but something else, and wasn’t prepared for this. Not right now. Not so soon after what he’d call nothing short of a clusterfuck.
“I know I’ve heard this song somewhere ‘fore, but I can’t put my finger on where I coulda heard it,” Ellis said quizzically without any of the malice or melancholy Nick expected from him.
“If you pull a Fonzie on it at just the right angle you don’t have to put a quarter in,” Nick observed.
“Don’t do that, man, you’ll get glass in yer suit or somethin’!” Nick laughed at the comment. How did they get to know each other so well in such a short span of time? “Oh man, this reminds me of the time Keith and I tried to make our school’s Sadie Hawkins dance a lot more excitin’ by us showin’ up without dates and with a neon green penguin suit on, or at least I had a suit while Keith painted a suit on ‘cause he was so piss-drunk…well, half of that night was gone on account of how much beer we drank that night but still,” he paused, and looked up at Nick. “Well shit, you wanna pretend we’re dancin’ all slow like at prom or somethin’?”
“Alright then, you can pretend to be the woman if you want.” He wrapped an arm around the mechanic’s waist and willed his feet to move into simple back-and-forth steps. The trumpets and soft hits of piano keys in the song flew through his coarse suit and tired skin. To hell with his bad high school dance moves, this felt so right to him.
“Sure, and you can pretend to be Keith again.”
Nick was silent, but still moving. He wouldn’t dare release his grip.
“You really know how to hit me where it hurts, Overalls.”
“I’m sorry Nick, I didn’t mean to make a crack at ya, but if I didn’t say things to make ya get outta character you woulda had me fooled. Coach and Ro’ think there’s somethin’ wrong with ya for pretendin’ to be Keith, but…” Ellis’s arms tightened around Nick’s frame. He buried his face into Nick’s neck, and the conman felt guilty for this moment of intimacy. “I ain’t mad at you or anythin’, but I can see why you’d be mad at me ‘n all.”
“I’m not mad at you Ellis,” Nick rasped. “I have a habit of making myself look like an ass. That’s not your fault.”
“It’s just…damn, why did I have to go and phrase everything all fucked up? I don’t try to compare you or anythin’, but there’s just things that’re different and I know that.” He sounded so wounded as he spoke, Nick thought. Such a sincere apology came from his lips, he knew this, and he wanted to just take everything back that he yelled while blindfolded and bound and stripped naked to his core in front everyone to see.
“I had to kill him myself, y’know,” Ellis murmurs and Nick feels even more like the devil that Coach and Rochelle condemn him to be sometimes. He looks up to the ceiling, seeing blood sprays overlapping water leaks and wishes he wasn’t so right in the head so he could see a sign in the smears to make everything seem okay. Why was it only the insane who found the Virgin Mary in a Twinkie that felt so safe and saved?
“Me an’ Keith, we’ve got memories together, since we were young’uns an’ shit. He knew shit about me that nobody knows, and you don’t yet, an’ sometimes I miss havin’ that.”
“Well it’s not like I’m not willing to―”
A rabid screech and Ellis turned his head away to see a few zombies planned on interrupting their dance party. Nick pulled the pistol from his waist again and took aim, bullets deafeningly whirring past Ellis’s head, but going straight into theirs. “Ho-lee shit, Nick! You’re like James Bond or somethin’ with how smooth you killed those sons of bitches!”
“I don’t wear a suit this nice for no reason,” he replied with a smirk.
“An’ that’s why I like you so much.” Nick raised an eyebrow to this. “You walk around with yer nice suit an’ yer attitude an’ humor, most people would think you’re some kind of asshole ‘n all, but knowin’ how you really are when you’re not tryin’ to act all slick and shit, I think you’re amazin’.”
Smirking, Nick pushed Ellis away from him and grasped the sides of his head. Their eyes met, the first time that’s happened in a very long time. Ellis was forgetting how easily he could willingly get lost in them, the way he did as Nick pulled him into a kiss and lulled him back into the safety and warmth and fluttering heartbeats that came with Nick’s mere presence.
“Do we really got anything once we find a real CEDA evac center, Nick?” Ellis asked after breaking the kiss to reunite into their slow dance and lay his head on the gambler’s shoulder as they continued to sway aimlessly to the music.
“I’m not sure I have much of a life to go back to. Trying to be a conman in a football stadium full of hopeless bastards isn’t really the most righteous idea.”
Ellis laughed but corrected himself. “Naw, I mean I could get a job fixin’ up cars for the military or somethin’, but when I say ‘we got anythin’’ I mean ‘we got anythin’.’”
The dance floor was only filled with the sound of music. Not that Ellis expected a response from Nick at this point. But after a few seconds of thought, Nick whispered “I don’t see why not,” Ellis smiled into the cloth of Nick’s suit and tried to hum to the reprise in the song but couldn’t get the notes quite right.
“Hey Nick, do ya think CEDA’s gonna let us keep pets in the evac center?”
“Should I really ask why?”
“Aw shit, man, if we could get a horse, then―”
“Damn it Ells” Nick laughed and knocked the cap, taken back from its arrangement on the safe room floor.
“We could ride it like that general Neapolitan when we get our food rations for the week and we’ll look like badasses and set up a pettin’ zoo…’course no one is gonna ride it because that is my horse, but―”
Nick didn’t have the heart to correct Ellis but watched his face glow with the excitement of playing polo with zombies on his prospective stallion, his dreams louder than the jukebox. Ellis was practically begging for a horde to find them. Nick had his pistol at the ready, just in case he’d have to pull another Bond move to keep dancing.
Even if nothing was certain, when their chance at escape was so painfully close, just teetering over a bridge full of rubble, it was safe to pretend that their time would last until the infected dragged them down to Hell themselves.
NOTES:
+ This story was really hard for me to finish. I think it’s because it ended happily and I was on an angstficmarathon or something, but I’m glad this strange “what if?” scenario got completed.
+ In my head, Nick is a real softie at heart. And is totally from Jersey but ditched the accent and bad guido tan to look more credible while conning :D
+ The song in the last scene is a realy song, called “Come Sunday” by Duke Ellington, and you can get a good idea of how it goes from the first minute or so: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYQhTrpVmMo
Author: Still me, katsumeragi
Fandom: Left 4 Dead 2
Rating: R18
Word Count: 6340
Summary: “No God-fearing man should have a clue about bayou magic,” in which Nick pretends to be distant, unmoved, and a ghost altogether. Nick/Ellis, Keith/Ellis, Set in AU version of “The Parish” where these people somehow have more free time.
A/N: So after seeing The Princess and the Frog and playing way too much L4D2, the idea for this fic just popped into my head. I really wanted to tie in the voodoo element of New Orleans with the fact that Nick never planned to stick around. I hope this came out okay under a big underlying theme.
Rochelle is trying to think of the last morning she didn’t wake up to the sound of a fist connecting with a jaw or irrational bickering, and sadly that morning didn’t come to mind.
She forgot that instead of the cheap alarm clock that played a badly tuned version of Grieg’s "Morning Mood" that resided in her Cleveland apartment, she was going to wake up to a fist connecting with a jaw and the grunts of two men unwilling to put their manly pride aside.
“It’s seven in the damn morning, and you’ve already found a reason to go on punching each other,” Rochelle said, disgruntled.
Nick smeared blood away from his cheek. “It’s more like someone doesn’t realize that I don’t want to wake up next to a sack of redneck, even after some very specific conversations we’ve been having.”
Ellis, in the other corner of the upper floor of the safe house, tilted his trucker hat to cover his scowling eyes and spat a wad of red saliva onto the wooden floor. “’Sonuvabitch hits like a girl.”
Nick didn’t take well to taunting. “When I say ‘Get the fuck off my side of the room,’ your answer should be ‘How far?’ not to sneak back in the middle of the night and use me as a damn pillow.”
Rochelle curbed the urge to slap the older man across the face. “Just because Ellis might have been cold doesn’t mean you have to knock his teeth out.”
“Stay out of this Ro’” Ellis barked. He went downstairs to load his pack for the next venture with Coach.
Rochelle followed the disheveled boy and came back up seconds later with two cups of stale coffee. At this point, Nick was sitting against the wall, cracking his knuckles, looking impressed by a round crack in the wall that was most likely caused by his fist. She handed him a chipped mug. “You better have a good explanation for all of your fighting.”
The conman used his fingers to trace where his skin broke above his eyebrow. “Remember how both of
us volunteered to keep watch downstairs before Coach took over?”
“You’re kidding.”
“We weren’t doing a whole lot of watching out, if you catch my drift.”
Rochelle folded her arms and furrowed her brow. “You slept with the kid? I understand everyone has their needs, but Nick, seriously? At a time like this? In the most traumatic two weeks of someone’s life?”
“Calm down, it’s not like we got into a fistfight because of a quick fuck.”
“Nick, tell me.”
“Well the fuck wasn’t necessarily quick because we’ve been doing it for the past few days, and the funny thing about screwing a mechanic is―”
“Nick.”
“He called me ‘Keith.’”
Rochelle didn’t bother to ask any more questions. She looked away from the disgruntled man and took another sip of coffee, wondering how many of Nick’s walls Ellis managed to bulldoze down before finding and confusing whatever was left of his heart.
---
Ellis didn’t bother to speak that day as they trudged from the cemetery to where the hustle and bustle
of New Orleans used to be.
“My momma, she had relative that lived in the Big Easy. She had a sister named Clementine who made the damndest best beignets, and I used to eat them by the tray-full. So much powdered sugar was sprinkled on those babies, it looked like the first snow of winter!” Coach went on about the special peppers and homemade Tabasco Aunt Clementine put in her gumbo as Nick absentmindedly glanced around the old French Quarter. He saw torn purple, gold, and green banners trailing along the balconies of the buildings. He imagined how much better his visit to the South would be if there were more college girls flashing their tits on Mardi Gras instead of having to see the sagging ones of a Spitter.
“Let me know the recipe to your aunt’s voodoo po’boys or something and then I’ll be interested in your food stories” the gambler said. To his surprise, he was answered with the coldest glance Coach had ever given someone.
“Boy, Aunt Pattie and black magic ain’t nothing to joke about.”
Nick laughed. “Sounds like Aunt Pattie’s got you scared shitless.”
“Do you enjoy bringing up childhood trauma, Nick?” Rochelle asked.
“Don’t yell at me for that. It’s not like I knew Coach over here has a fear of parlor tricks.” Nick chuckled to himself while planting a bullet between the eyes of an infected up ahead.
“It ain’t a parlor trick” Coach snapped. “If you’d seen the inside of that woman’s house, you’d realize she’s got death on her side.”
“Right. And Siegfried and Roy never get mauled by tigers because they’ve got some magic animal powers.” Rochelle glared at Nick again, signaling that he should at least humor the man. “Does voodoo run in the family, Coach?”
He clutched the barrel of his rifle and looked straight ahead. “No God-fearing man should have a clue about bayou magic.”
Nick lit a cigarette and took a drag from it. “Something about your actions says that visit to your aunt’s house taught you a little something.”
Coach ignored the snide man and took his mind to a better place, full of beignets and powdered sugar snowstorms, while changing the subject to his trip to the Baton Rouge Zoo.
---
All of the talking Ellis didn’t do that afternoon was saved up for their night in another safe house, as he asked Coach endless questions about Aunt Pattie and told another Keith story about how he was kicked out of a Saints game for a fight in the bleachers (of course the fight wasn’t related to football, but about the price difference between hot dogs at the Louisiana Superdome and the Houston Astrodome.)
“So does that mean you got one of those dolls that ya stick the pins in and it makes ‘em act funny?” Ellis asked.
“Just because I saw Aunt Pattie workin’ her magic doesn’t mean it was a voodoo doll,” Coach said while knifing open a can of baked beans. “Her rituals were a little more in-depth than that.”
“Voodoo dolls, the Tex-Mex of magic tricks,” Nick said, amused at his own joke, while wrapping a small cut with a tattered bandage.
“My momma told me she was a guide for the spirits. Used to channel them to talk to loved ones or to send them off if they were hauntin’ someone.” This made Ellis’ ears perk up, and Nick could guess every thought that popped into his head. As the gears in his head started shifting some more, Ellis was about
to speak but saw Nick’s eyes on him, unmoving.
Look at me and no one else.
He decided it’d be best to ask his question when Nick was asleep or on guard. He was guessing that they wouldn’t be sharing a shift today.
---
“So tell me Mister Gambling Man, since when did you start to give a damn about us?” Rochelle asked as the undead walked outside the bolted door.
“Is ‘giving a damn’ what you call friends with benefits? No, forget that, we’re not even friends.” Nick averted his eyes from the woman who knew too much and fiddled with the magazine of his uzi.
“I’d like to think that you give a damn about Ellis, considering he called another guy’s name when you were playing pretend upstairs.”
Nick raised an eyebrow. “Pretend? Was I pretending that Ellis was a Vegas showgirl and that there wasn’t the blood of a thousand zombies on my three thousand dollar suit?”
“You were pretending that whatever stability you have with Ellis would last even after we cross that bridge up ahead.”
It left the man speechless yet with so much to say. And he might as well have said it all to Rochelle, who wasn’t a member of a crack news investigation team for nothing.
It started like this, he began over the moans of infected outside, and told her about his ex-wife Tracy, who sucked his emotional capacity and his wallet dry. He told her about the child that he most likely is the father to somewhere in the wasteland known as Atlantic City.
And then he told her about the first night him and Ellis were on watch duty and talked the whole night about their lives, not that he fully agreed to bear his soul to the Georgian so quickly, he added.
This was during the first week or so. The next time they were between watch shifts, Nick found a bottle of Vitaly in the safe room and gulped some down to remind himself of his past classier life. His nostalgia ended with him planting a sloppy drunk kiss onto Ellis, who was a little too happy to reciprocate.
The next night, as Nick and Ellis volunteered to keep watch (Rochelle surprised herself by not picking up on that hint), Nick was literally knee-deep in Ellis for the first time, and what Nick thought would be the only time.
“The one thing more valuable in this hell we live in now, more valuable than clean water, bullets, or even a damn helicopter ride, is companionship. Waking up next to the same person every morning may not be able to blow anyone’s brains out, but it keeps you sane.”
Nick toyed with a silver lighter from his suit pocket, flipping it open and closed, staring into the weak flame it produced. He looked up to Rochelle. “Call it crazy, but giving a damn might be the most stable thing I’ve got right now.”
Rochelle agreed, admitting she would have punched Ellis in the face just as hard as he did.
Misery did love company, after all.
---
Rochelle was hoping today would be the day when she would be greeted in the morning by tranquility, and maybe a group of small melodious bluebirds like a more apocalyptic version of Snow White. Instead, it was like the previous morning but a few hours earlier, and the right hooks Nick threw seemed to be a lot stronger.
She woke to see Coach restraining Nick against the safe room wall as he threw a profane fit. Ellis was on a few feet away, grasping his jaw and shaking.
“What the fuck kind of apology is that?” Nick yelled. “You tell me you’re sorry for pulling that shit and now you want me to be a vessel for your poltergeist fuck buddy? Remind me why the fuck that would be acceptable!”
Ellis wouldn’t look up. Rochelle ran to his side and tried to examine his pain but she was a ghost to him.
He was in shock, a man shoved underwater that couldn’t be brought back to the surface. Rochelle turned to Nick, her eyes practically shooting through him. “You have no idea how much I just want to hit you stupid for whatever you did to scare Ellis this much.”
“Right, of course, always take his fucking side!” Coach was having a hard time keeping Nick, who was trying to claw out of his binding like a Hunter, pinned to the wall. “He’s not a damn kid, Rochelle! He knows very well what he asked me to do and I’m not going to be some channel for a hick ghost!”
And then Rochelle remembered the conversation they had the night before, and remembered how Nick’s expressions told her how everything that gave him the upper hand was taken away by Ellis after each night they spent together, Rochelle had no idea what to do.
“He doesn’t get it,” Ellis quietly said, still clutching his face and struggling to stand. If Ellis was a weaker man, he would be wiping tears that were trailing down his cheeks. But
“So now what’s your big plan, Nick? Or do you usually get to leave town before things like this happen?” Coach asked.
“What does it take?” Nick stood up while daubing blood off the side of his head, spotting the sleeve of his suit.
“The hell does that mean?”
“What does it take to play Ghostbusters?”
Coach cocked his eyebrow. “’Few odds and ends, some free time we probably don’t have. You kids are
out of your goddamn mind, tryin’ to pull this kind of shit when we’re so close to the bridge.”
“I’m not doing it for him.” Coach was going to ask him why he was losing his damned mind, in those
precise words, but Rochelle made a motion to stop him. Not that she thought it’d work, but because it might be just the thing they needed to piece themselves back together.
---
As far as Ellis was concerned, this was the most misguided scavenger hunt he had ever been on, even worse than the one at his old Sunday School (this thought triggered another Keith story in his mind, when at an Easter egg hunt he wandered into the Savannah graveyard right next to the church and got locked inside a mausoleum, where after digging his way out of it with a plastic egg bucket he brought back someone’s egg-shaped knee bone and won a big chocolate bunny. It was the only time Ellis was actually envious of someone. He would have given anything to get in that mausoleum.)
It was misguided because all of the necessary ingredients for a séance were distant blurs in Coach’s memories, but he could remember at least these things: “Candles, something that belonged to the deceased, the wing of a bird, the hand of a sinner, and a broom.”
“No offense to your Aunt Pattie, but why do we need a broom?” Rochelle asked.
“To keep the witches out.” She and the other two men nodded in approval. “Also, this safe room floor is damn dusty, and if I gotta make up some voodoo chant shit, I don’t’ want to cough my lungs out.”
Currently, Ellis was butchering through the arm of a dead infected to cut off the hand. If someone was feasting on other humans, didn’t that make them a sinner? This kind of reasoning is what passed as acceptable for the ingredients, after Nick asked an important question.
“How am I supposed to know what kind of bird to find? If I’m on the hunt for a dove with a fucking olive branch in its mouth, I’ve got some bad news for you.”
“The way I see it,” Coach replied, “Keith’s gonna see our sorry-ass display of a spirit channeling and will visit us out of pity.”
As he went back inside the safe room, zombie hand in hand, Ellis saw the candlesticks and broom taken from an inn a few blocks down, Coach in the corner of the safe room, writing and erasing words nervously like a man and his wedding vows, and a bloody ruffled bird carcass. He heard Nick and Rochelle enter behind him and bolt the door shut.
“You had to go shoot a bird? This isn’t a hunting trip, Nick! Why couldn’t you go find a dead one?”
“Yes, because free meat on the ground would be completely ignored by zombies. Who’s going to get all teary-eyed over a seagull?” Ellis’s eyes met Nick’s for the first time in what felt like weeks, but the gambler wasn’t in the mood for reconciliation and quickly turned away. “Hey Coach, are we ready to get this show on the road? I don’t have all night to be a dead guy’s puppet.”
“Calm yourself, Nick. From what I can remember, the man was in the chair, with his hands hog-tied and he was blindfolded.” Coach couldn’t help but laugh and the uncompromising position Nick would be stuck in. “Well shit, Rochelle, do the honors of gettin’ this man bound and gagged.” Rochelle rolled her eyes and muttered about how she wished him and Ellis would kiss and make up so she wouldn’t have to touch the slimeball.
“But you’ve got to admit, I’m a damn charming slimeball” Nick added, and she tightened the rope around his wrists and the splintering chair with such might that he thought his blood vessels would pop and his arms would burst at the seams. She did the same for the white cloth bandage that she placed around his eyes. He expected a brain volcano to erupt from his scalp and onto his suit. At least they could wash it out if tonight was also his funeral.
Coach, the makeshift shaman, found a machete near the medicine cabinet of the safe room and hacked a wing off the seagull. Rochelle turned off the lights so only a hodgepodge collection of candles lit the room, sending ill light onto the walls and faces of the nearby undead outside. The wing laid in front of the blindfolded Nick, next to the hand, and all that was missing was the item of the deceased, which was still sitting atop Ellis’s head. Rochelle nodded to the younger man, who slowly took off his hat and caressed the dirty mesh and bloodstained logo of his ex-lover’s cap. He carefully placed it on the floorboards next to the hand of the sinner.
Coach cleared his throat and waved his hands in the air in a way Ellis and Rochelle couldn’t figure out. It was less of a summoning and more of conducting a symphony for the dead, but they weren’t in the position to question if anything in this ceremony was accurate.
“Keith Durand, we’re here today to ask you to visit us from God’s heavenly kingdom above and pass through the body of Nicholas...aw shit, I forgot to get your last name, Nick.”
“I’m not getting married to the hick! Can’t you do without it and get this over with?” Nick shouted, rocking the flimsy chair in anticipation.
“It ain’t proper to mess with these things.”
“And the seagull wing is somehow acceptable?”
“Mastrofrancesco-Ricci,” someone said, and everyone turned to Ellis who spoke the name with such ease. Nick didn’t get it, how his contractions were so fractured and his accent obstructing everything right in the English language and somehow his Italian-to-the-core last name glided off his tongue. He couldn’t even remember when, or why, he told Ellis. Good conmen never tell anyone their real surnames (or first names, but the minute he saw a decaying woman spitting acid at his face he thought it wouldn’t be too bad of an idea.) But it was Ellis, and a kid like that was someone Nick couldn’t bring himself to con.
“Alright then, Keith Durand, we’re here today to ask you to visit us from God’s heavenly kingdom above and pass through the body of Nicholas Mastrofrancesco-Ricci. We pray that you do not harm his earthbound soul as you reach us, as we have greeted you with familiarity from your past life, a symbol of peace, and an offering from the damned.” After that Coach’s words were inaudible, mumbles that resembled an old spell. A great silence overcame the room, not a breath or toe-tap could be heard.
And then, the hog-tied and blinded Nick realized why hoodoo and voodoo rhymed, and it was because one was just as fake as the other, since he was obviously not experiencing a supernatural takeover of his body. Séance ingredients with their own quirks or not, he was sure Keith wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between an albatross and a cardinal, or maybe he was a member of the Autobahn society or something.
Or maybe Keith wasn’t really dead. Either way, he was a no-show.
Oh…shit.
Thinking about the way Ellis would have looked on the other side of the blindfold (and Nick knew exactly how he looked when nervous, his hands shaking and that Southern Gentleman mentality holding back a needed cry), there was no chance in frozen-over Hell that he’d shout the first thing that came to his mind: “This whole playing Poltergeist thing isn’t working out. Is this when I climb on to the ceiling or when I vomit on all of you?” Coach probably knew this wasn’t going to work and created this pity party anyway, just to keep Nick on his toes. Ellis asked if it worked, and he knew if he stayed silent for much longer he’d crush whatever hope Ellis had left.
Because, although Nick hated admitting it, losing Ellis wasn’t just losing a good fuck every once in a while.
It was about waking up to the same person every morning, which he hadn’t done for years, and it was about finding someone who didn’t think of him as just a conman. It was about not breaking stupid little promises, and it was about finding a way to make up for stupid little lies.
It was, more or less, about losing Ellis.
So Nick coughed. He hacked and grunted until he forgot to breathe. Maybe, he thought, maybe this would be a convincing enough entrance for Redneck the Friendly Ghost. He tried to subtly bite the inside of his mouth to draw blood to cough out. Out with the bad, in with the good. Whoever that good exactly was. After his coughing fit, the safe house grew silent.
“Nick,” a quiet Ellis asked. “Nick, did it work?”
“Well I’ll be damned,” Nick asked in the same hush, using a slight Southern drawl that would mask his city boy tongue. “Is that you Ellis?” A faint cry escaped Ellis’s lips, so he assumed his impersonation was good enough. He heard hurried footwork, felt a tight embrace around his frame as Ellis buried his face in the crook of neck and then pressed against Nick’s face.
He felt Ellis’s tears soak into the cloth of his blindfold as their noses brushed against each other and their foreheads touched. So overcome with joy, Ellis planted a kiss onto Nick-Keith’s lips. There was something different about it, but Nick’s mind couldn’t articulate it, about this kiss. There was a tenacity that wasn’t there when they usually locked lips, either when Nick was drunk or sober. As Ellis continued to whisper sweet I-missed-yous into his ears, that’s when it clicked in his brain that Ellis wasn’t really kissing him in the literal sense.
He was kissing Keith. And conceitedness be damned, Nick was not pleased. But it wasn’t like he had the liberty to let it show.
“Aw Keith, buddy, wait ‘till I tell you ‘bout all the crazy shit we’ve been doin’ lately!” Ellis said, clearing his sinuses and with more cheer in his voice. “We drove Jimmy Gibbs Jr’s stock car. Out of the damn Liberty Mall window. Can you believe that man?”
Nick nervously laughed, feigning excitement for the Evel Knievel knockoff. He was forced to learn enough about the guy that “Shit Ellis, you jus’ steal all the luck I need. Drivin’ a car outta a mall and I jus’ get burned all the time.”
“I realize it’s been a while since you’ve seen one another,” Nick heard Coach say, “but if you sit there and tell your damn stories for hours you’ll end up killin’ Nick. No one’s body, not even that evil sonuvabitch, can handle a holy spirit in them for that long.” There was no way that anyone else was buying Nick’s lame attempt at being Keith. No matter how God-fearing Coach was, he should have known better. God wasn’t this bad at magic tricks.
Nick wondered what Rochelle thought of this whole ordeal. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to receive a palm to the face when he woke up in the morning.
“So I got this problem, Keith,” Ellis said softly, resting his wrists on Nick’s broad shoulders. “You know the guy who’s body yer usin’? Nick?”
“Ellis, I’ve been too busy drinkin’ beer and checkin’ out all the pretty girls in Heaven to see who this fella is.”
As Nick managed to insult the whole population of the South, he wondered if he’d be receiving a slap or the butt of a rifle to the groin.
“He dresses real fancy, like one of them actor or models or somethin’ in a white suit and all. He’s kind of an ass, like he don’t care much to hear ‘bout stories ‘bout ya, and he got a mean right hook.” An exasperated Nick cleared his throat. If he would have known Ellis was going to use a dead guy for an armchair psychiatrist he would have never agreed to this.
“But he’s also really nice to me sometimes, like the other night when I heard some o’them zombies outside the safe house door in my sleep, I got all nervous an’ shaky n’ stuff. He put his fingers though my hair, like I was some dog or somethin’.” Ellis combed his fingers through Nick’s hair, his actions reflecting his words. “And he told me everything was gonna be okay.”
The gambler heard whispering in the far end of the room. A woman’s whisper, Rochelle’s voice. A disapproving cough from Coach followed. Some people are lucky enough not to know all the details.
“But he ain’t nothin’ like you, Keith,” Ellis said solemnly. Nick stopped concentrating on the background voices and tried to stay so composed, so in the character of Keith even if he was so frustrated by
“Why ain’t he like me?”
“He don’t have your kindness, hell, that’s fer sure. He’ll open up to me but then he just snaps back shut again. We don’t really have that much in common, shit, can you believe he doesn’t like the Midnight Riders? Well it don’t really matter, since I know when we go to the evac center he’s jus’ gonna leave and go back up north to gamble.”
Nick wanted to swallow, but there was a lump in his throat that would subside. He couldn’t tell if it arose from how incredibly pissed he was at Ellis, or something else that Nick didn’t want to name. Rochelle and Coach owed him a gold medal or a spa treatment for the fact that he didn’t pin him to the ground and slice out his corneas with a machete. To humor the kid, he simply stayed quiet as Ellis asked his all-important question.
“But here’s the problem: since you’re dead, it’s not alright to be doin’ things with someone else, right? We’re pretty close, but I can stop if that’s what you want. Would ya be mad if I was settlin’?”
Settling?
Nick knows of a con that only the most desperate try to pull if the debt tier in is really high. They fake their own deaths, usually with the help of an accomplice, and lay inside the coffin during the funeral since there’s no way to replicate the body during a wake (unless you made your debt buying wax from Madame Toussat’s or something.) As the not-so-deceased is in their coffin, they hear all the horrible things their family has to say. The spouse, the children, the parents, the friends, all take time and put on their best black for a formal roast.
And for Nick’s roast, Ellis sure saved his Sunday best.
“You just don’t get it, El.”
His accent was thinning out. He could just feel the scorn Coach and Rochelle were going to give him later that night.
“He tries so hard to stop being such a bastard and somehow you found a way to make him remember the joys of fuckin’ monogamy, and now that you have he can’t help but be pissed. You’ve known each other for not even a month and he’s become so invested in you. There is nothing left to go back to.”
He paused, to see if Ellis would prove him wrong. He didn’t dare.
“And instead of letting go and moving on, you’re putting him through this utter shit of a bad rerun of Three’s Company with the ghost of redneck past and I don’t want that stability taken away. What, if Keith tells you to never even speak to me again, you’ll listen? You’ll try to make it past that bridge with one less person having your back? Do you want to get yourself killed?”
Nick lost his control over his words. How did he expect this whole ordeal to mend them back together in the end?
“The sooner you realize that everything in your old ass-backwards life is probably gone, the better. I’m not going to sit here and cry to Huckleberry Finn about how I’m the worst replacement you could find.”
His arms violently struggled out of their binds and, once free, he tore off his blindfold to see what his judgment was. Ellis was slack-jawed and looked hurt, as if someone struck him. He walked straight past him, avoiding eye contact and kicking the infected hand from its arrangement by accident. The safe room door opened after fidgeting with the bar in frustration, and as he saw Rochelle and Coach for the last time he couldn’t tell if they were condemning him or in rue of him.
---
Nick ran till his whole chest was on the brink of combustion. Luckily he still had a pistol and an adrenaline shot in his suit pocket or else he wouldn’t have been able to fend off the stray zombie that remained in an area they already ransacked. He wound up back in the old bar and pool hall, the kind of place his old persona would have thrived on. Nick looked for water behind the bar counter but only found a bit of gin. Well, it wasn’t the first time he was willing to make that substitution. It went down his throat like peroxide and nails.
It was an inopportune night for him to need more than alcohol to clear his mind. He wondered if he should set up a game of pool for him to see if he still had a good cue thrust but instead took a gander at the jukebox near an area he assumed was a dance floor. He fumbled for switches and electrical outlets in the back until it turned back on with a display of pale neon lights. He heard an infected running to him, which he expected a few at least, and shot it promptly in the head. What luck he had to not attract a horde with his endeavors.
Nick stood blankly in front of the jukebox, slamming against the Wurlitzer’s side and pushing buttons. He wasn’t very knowledgeable in terms of music, hell, he and Tracy danced to Journey on their wedding day. He found a slow song by accident, something that lit up as “Come Sunday” with a soulful voice saying “Lord, dear Lord above, God almighty, God of love, Please look down and see my people through.” He scoffed. If there was someone watching over them, he must have gone out for a coffee break and forgot to come back.
He heard shuffling behind, not the dead aimless legs of a zombie but something else, and wasn’t prepared for this. Not right now. Not so soon after what he’d call nothing short of a clusterfuck.
“I know I’ve heard this song somewhere ‘fore, but I can’t put my finger on where I coulda heard it,” Ellis said quizzically without any of the malice or melancholy Nick expected from him.
“If you pull a Fonzie on it at just the right angle you don’t have to put a quarter in,” Nick observed.
“Don’t do that, man, you’ll get glass in yer suit or somethin’!” Nick laughed at the comment. How did they get to know each other so well in such a short span of time? “Oh man, this reminds me of the time Keith and I tried to make our school’s Sadie Hawkins dance a lot more excitin’ by us showin’ up without dates and with a neon green penguin suit on, or at least I had a suit while Keith painted a suit on ‘cause he was so piss-drunk…well, half of that night was gone on account of how much beer we drank that night but still,” he paused, and looked up at Nick. “Well shit, you wanna pretend we’re dancin’ all slow like at prom or somethin’?”
“Alright then, you can pretend to be the woman if you want.” He wrapped an arm around the mechanic’s waist and willed his feet to move into simple back-and-forth steps. The trumpets and soft hits of piano keys in the song flew through his coarse suit and tired skin. To hell with his bad high school dance moves, this felt so right to him.
“Sure, and you can pretend to be Keith again.”
Nick was silent, but still moving. He wouldn’t dare release his grip.
“You really know how to hit me where it hurts, Overalls.”
“I’m sorry Nick, I didn’t mean to make a crack at ya, but if I didn’t say things to make ya get outta character you woulda had me fooled. Coach and Ro’ think there’s somethin’ wrong with ya for pretendin’ to be Keith, but…” Ellis’s arms tightened around Nick’s frame. He buried his face into Nick’s neck, and the conman felt guilty for this moment of intimacy. “I ain’t mad at you or anythin’, but I can see why you’d be mad at me ‘n all.”
“I’m not mad at you Ellis,” Nick rasped. “I have a habit of making myself look like an ass. That’s not your fault.”
“It’s just…damn, why did I have to go and phrase everything all fucked up? I don’t try to compare you or anythin’, but there’s just things that’re different and I know that.” He sounded so wounded as he spoke, Nick thought. Such a sincere apology came from his lips, he knew this, and he wanted to just take everything back that he yelled while blindfolded and bound and stripped naked to his core in front everyone to see.
“I had to kill him myself, y’know,” Ellis murmurs and Nick feels even more like the devil that Coach and Rochelle condemn him to be sometimes. He looks up to the ceiling, seeing blood sprays overlapping water leaks and wishes he wasn’t so right in the head so he could see a sign in the smears to make everything seem okay. Why was it only the insane who found the Virgin Mary in a Twinkie that felt so safe and saved?
“Me an’ Keith, we’ve got memories together, since we were young’uns an’ shit. He knew shit about me that nobody knows, and you don’t yet, an’ sometimes I miss havin’ that.”
“Well it’s not like I’m not willing to―”
A rabid screech and Ellis turned his head away to see a few zombies planned on interrupting their dance party. Nick pulled the pistol from his waist again and took aim, bullets deafeningly whirring past Ellis’s head, but going straight into theirs. “Ho-lee shit, Nick! You’re like James Bond or somethin’ with how smooth you killed those sons of bitches!”
“I don’t wear a suit this nice for no reason,” he replied with a smirk.
“An’ that’s why I like you so much.” Nick raised an eyebrow to this. “You walk around with yer nice suit an’ yer attitude an’ humor, most people would think you’re some kind of asshole ‘n all, but knowin’ how you really are when you’re not tryin’ to act all slick and shit, I think you’re amazin’.”
Smirking, Nick pushed Ellis away from him and grasped the sides of his head. Their eyes met, the first time that’s happened in a very long time. Ellis was forgetting how easily he could willingly get lost in them, the way he did as Nick pulled him into a kiss and lulled him back into the safety and warmth and fluttering heartbeats that came with Nick’s mere presence.
“Do we really got anything once we find a real CEDA evac center, Nick?” Ellis asked after breaking the kiss to reunite into their slow dance and lay his head on the gambler’s shoulder as they continued to sway aimlessly to the music.
“I’m not sure I have much of a life to go back to. Trying to be a conman in a football stadium full of hopeless bastards isn’t really the most righteous idea.”
Ellis laughed but corrected himself. “Naw, I mean I could get a job fixin’ up cars for the military or somethin’, but when I say ‘we got anythin’’ I mean ‘we got anythin’.’”
The dance floor was only filled with the sound of music. Not that Ellis expected a response from Nick at this point. But after a few seconds of thought, Nick whispered “I don’t see why not,” Ellis smiled into the cloth of Nick’s suit and tried to hum to the reprise in the song but couldn’t get the notes quite right.
“Hey Nick, do ya think CEDA’s gonna let us keep pets in the evac center?”
“Should I really ask why?”
“Aw shit, man, if we could get a horse, then―”
“Damn it Ells” Nick laughed and knocked the cap, taken back from its arrangement on the safe room floor.
“We could ride it like that general Neapolitan when we get our food rations for the week and we’ll look like badasses and set up a pettin’ zoo…’course no one is gonna ride it because that is my horse, but―”
Nick didn’t have the heart to correct Ellis but watched his face glow with the excitement of playing polo with zombies on his prospective stallion, his dreams louder than the jukebox. Ellis was practically begging for a horde to find them. Nick had his pistol at the ready, just in case he’d have to pull another Bond move to keep dancing.
Even if nothing was certain, when their chance at escape was so painfully close, just teetering over a bridge full of rubble, it was safe to pretend that their time would last until the infected dragged them down to Hell themselves.
NOTES:
+ This story was really hard for me to finish. I think it’s because it ended happily and I was on an angstficmarathon or something, but I’m glad this strange “what if?” scenario got completed.
+ In my head, Nick is a real softie at heart. And is totally from Jersey but ditched the accent and bad guido tan to look more credible while conning :D
+ The song in the last scene is a realy song, called “Come Sunday” by Duke Ellington, and you can get a good idea of how it goes from the first minute or so: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYQhTrpVmMo