Reunion

May 16, 2010 17:44

I had to write this all in short spurts in between planning and marking and being half-dead, and I think the dialogue gets shaky and convoluted towards the end, but hey, it is something. Really, I just wanted to write more Kain/Neil interaction.

This would be set after The Angsty One, but there is not too much angst here.



The first sensation that returned to him was smell. It was something that could not be ignored: acrid and unpleasant, but somehow comfortingly familiar. He let that knowledge simmer a moment in his mind, waiting for the system to fully reboot and recover the hidden files stored somewhere in his memory, while the thick smell stuffed itself like cotton up his nose. Finally the words to describe this odor drifted sedately to the forefront of his mind. Old sweaty socks.

His eyes shot open, both in horror at the stench and the revelation that he was in a world in which such things as sweaty socks were something to be smelled. He had often dreamed that he smelled things, half-remembered scents that faded like smoke in an instant, but his mind could not create something so unpleasantly vivid.

Light arced down at him in sharp red and white, and he blinked at the unfamiliar pain it drummed through his head. His eyes slowly adjusted to their new surroundings, and for several long seconds he stared at the light source as his groggy brain attempted to make sense of it.

It was some kind of flag. With some kind of leaf on it. The country it represented maybe started with a C, but then, so did a lot of them. It took another full minute of studying it to reason out why it was glowing. The word "window" made some sense. Maybe he was confused because normal people didn't use their nation's flags in place of curtains. Especially when those flags had a lot of white on them and didn't actually keep much light out at all.

But windows normally meant fresh air, and maybe he could do something about the sock smell. He sat up, and the room wavered a little, doing swooping dances in his vision. He noticed for the first time the bed he was in, and the sheets he was not certain whether he should be trusting. One of the blankets had a beer logo on it. He gingerly touched his feet to the floor, and was met with a carpet that felt damp, and was probably full of mildew. Clothes littered his path, and any of them were potential culprits for the sweaty sock smell. He stood unsteadily, leaning a hand on the very corner of a dresser that was almost hidden beneath piles of papers and garbage. With a little effort and patience, he braved the trek to the glowing flag that was from a country that he would be remembering the name of very soon because he used to be great at geography, or at least he thought he was.

The window was nothing but a rectangle of glass that was half-submerged into a cluster of weeds and dying grass. Breaking it would be his only option, but the panes looked thick, and besides that, there were bars in his way. No wonder they kept it covered.

Defeated, he turned to survey the rest of the room. It was not much different from what he was already coming to expect. Aside from the bed, it was equipped with a mini-fridge, beside which was an overflowing garbage can and a stack of empty pizza boxes. Something may have resembled a desk at one time, beneath the dirty laundry and sports equipment, and there may have even been a computer rising among the ruins. The busty cheerleader on the wall said all that needed to be said about the age and gender of the room's owner, and the hockey stick propped in the corner had what looked like a pair of red briefs hanging from it. Bottles and cans labeled with every product from beer to energy drinks to various carbonated poisons occupied every surface from floor to ceiling.

The back of his throat felt like sandpaper, and he decided to try his luck with the mini-fridge. The contents consisted of two bottles of beer, ketchup, a half-empty bottle of Gatorade (red), and a takeout box in the process of growing a fuzzy green ecosystem.

He debated over swiping the Gatorade. Aside from the fact that he was pretty sure he hated red, some other unknown person had once contaminated it with his mouth fluids, and who knew how long it had been sitting beside the takeout surprise.

But he was thirsty.

And who knew how many diseases he already had just from stepping on that carpet.

And he didn't know for sure that he hated red.

And he had already died from a lot worse.

The whole bottle was drained before he confirmed that he definitely hated red.

He sat on the bed and willed himself not to puke on the carpet. Not that it would have made the place any less sanitary, but it seemed impolite to do it when he had yet to meet his host. It was just then that he heard the scrape and click of keys in the door.

He wasn't sure what he had expected, but the notion of recognizing the face that appeared in the doorway had not occurred to him. He was still trying to summon a name to match it when that face broke into an easy grin. "Hey, there's my bro! About fucking time you woke up. I've been sitting here twiddling my fingers for days."

A name unstuck itself from the cobwebs in his brain. "Nephrite?"

The brunette dropped his bag on top of what looked to be a longstanding pile of stuff that he discarded by the door, and held out a hand. "Neil." His hand was rough, his grip strong. "You remember yours yet?"

He stared. It seemed like such a simple question.

"Give it time. You lucked out, you know that? I got found wandering around on the side of the fucking Trans-Canada Highway by an RCMP douchebag who thought I was stoned out of my mind. They had to go through my wallet because I couldn't tell them who I was or where I was from or why I was wearing a shitty old Ninja Turtles t-shirt." Neil tossed his jacket on a clothing-covered lump that may have had a chair beneath it, dug through the rubble on his desk, and came up with a box of Oreos. "You come back wearing the same stuff you left with, right? And I was apparently experiencing a pretentious vintage t-shirts phase of my life when I went." Neil held the box out, but he shook his head, still feeling the red dye churning in his stomach. Who knew how stale those cookies were. The brunette stuffed two Oreos in his mouth, crunched them up, and talked around them. "I wanna hear about what kind of fight you put up, cause your clothes don't look like you went quietly."

He had not noticed what he was wearing. His feet were bare, maybe because Nephrite-who-was-now-Neil had had the courtesy to remove his shoes, but the pants, though wrinkled and torn, were dress pants. The shirt must have once been white, but it was dark in places with rust-colored patches, ripped and frayed in such ways that it could barely be considered a shirt anymore.

Neil stopped chewing. "Whoa, hey. You okay? You just turned the same color as your hair, which doesn't seem healthy."

"I can't wear this."

The brunette looked at him a moment, then fished out another cookie. "Okay buddy, that's easy enough to change. You could probably fit into my stuff alright. Let me see if I've got anything clean."

He would have taken even the sweatiest smelling shirt sitting on that dingy carpet over what he had on now. His fingers felt like jelly as he fumbled with the buttons at his throat. He wanted to rip them from their threads, tear the shirt apart and peel its bloodied mess from his skin. Each new button that his fingers met was an exercise in precise control. If he could not handle this simple task, then there was nothing to keep him from screaming like a lunatic.

Neil was investigating the closet floor, oblivious. "But, like I said, you lucked out. You showed up in an alley not five blocks from my house. Totally unconscious, and you scared the shit out of me showing up looking like that, but still. You didn't get verbally assaulted by Mounties."

He forced himself to focus on what his comrade was saying. "I didn't end up in Canada, did I?" He knew it started with a C.

The brunette snorted as he straightened, a moderately wrinkle-free shirt in hand. "Hell no, bro. Our instructions are to plant ourselves where Endy will show up, and Canada's not exactly a hub for major world happenings, you know?" The last button slipped through its hole. He began to struggle out of the shirt like a trapped animal. "No, I went home first, stayed around long enough for my family to get used to me being alive, and then came down here to wait for Endy." The brunette walked over and helpfully took hold of the garment, freeing his shoulders from it. Neil handled the blood-stained shirt casually, as if it were no different from any other article of clothing, as if it did not make his skin burn with half-remembered nightmares. "You're in Boston, USA. Don't ask me why, that's just where they told me to go. Pretty far from my home, but by the sounds of that accent, even further for you."

He looked up at Neil as he accepted the clean-ish, blood-free shirt. "I have an accent?"

"Uh, have you heard yourself? You sound, I don't know. Australian, maybe."

Something clicked inside him. "Kiwi."

"What?"

"Kiwi. New Zealand. That's where I'm from."

Neil grinned. "Well that's a start." While he pulled on the maroon shirt, Neil spent several seconds digging through a pile on the floor, until he finally retrieved a can of Rockstar. It had to have been lukewarm, but he cracked it open and took a swig anyway. Somewhere in those seconds that he wasn't looking, the bloodstained shirt had vanished from sight. "Here's what's funny, though. Before, I had this awful tattoo on my arm that my parents let me get when I was fifteen. I had a scar over my eye from falling out of a tree when I was seven, and another one on my knee from hockey. I come back, and it's all gone. Same clothes, different body." He rolled the can around in his fingers. "Or it's more like, the same body, but after the reset button's been set. I still have hairy toes. I guess I can't get rid of that no matter how many times I start over."

"Okay."

"So that's why, you know, when I found you, there was nothing wrong with you."

"I guess." The word "nothing" seemed to be a relative term.

"Know your name yet?"

"No."

"Keep working on that." Neil dug his chair out from under his coat and everything else burying it, pulled it over, and sat down. He seemed much calmer, more solid, than the Nephrite he used to know. But when he was looking him in the eye, he could still see that same intensity that the soldier in him had been known for. "So here's what I want to know. Why are you here?"

"Is that a philosophical question, or..."

"I mean here. In Boston. See, I went to see my family first. That was what I asked for. To be with them. So why didn't you take that option?"

"You're asking me this when I can't even tell you my name yet?"

"Seems like as good a time as any. And I still remembered parts of that when I woke up. Why I came back. What I said. They asked all sorts of questions, like what I would do with my time when I got back. What I missed most. I don't know if they were testing me or if they were just curious. I was honest: I told them I'd been craving pizza with mushrooms and olives for like the past decade and that I'd serve Endy only after I'd spent a week doing nothing but eat."

"Did you?"

Neil gulped down his Rockstar. "Shit, bro, I don't think I've stopped. Do you have any idea how good food tastes when you haven't had any in a year? I'll never stop eating again."

"I can believe that." He seemed to remember Nephrite having all the kitchen ladies swooning as he sweet-talked them into letting him snatch whatever they were preparing straight out of the pot.

"I'm not asking you to divulge any dark secrets here, but I can't help but notice that you skipped a step in the whole resurrection process. I told them I needed to let my family know I was okay, and that's where they put me. Ten kilometers out of town, but close enough, I guess. The RCMP got it worked out when they found a missing persons file with my name on it."

"Can I ask something? How did your family take it?"

"What, me not being dead? They were elated, what else would they be?"

"Yeah, but..." he tried to think of how to explain without sounding like an asshole. "Wasn't it a shock? It had been a long time, right? They had already grieved, maybe even moved on..."

"It was almost a year, yeah. And that was rough on them, no doubt about it. But my mom, she's really low drama. Really serene about everything. She made things normal again pretty quickly."

"I just don't think... that's not something I can say about mine. And the way I went, it... looked bad. Really bad."

"So? You can't really make things any worse, can you? I mean, if your family has to choose between having you stay dead and having you miraculously not dead, I can't think of one that would go with the first option. But yeah, you don't have to tell me about that if you don't want. What I'm thinking is, you took your sweet fucking time coming back. I'm sure you had your reasons and all, but I want to know what it took to make you come back. What did you ask for?"

"To return to my prince, of course. What else would it be?"

Neil rolled his eyes so hard that he launched himself out of his chair. "Of course. Forgive me for presuming that my fearless leader would consider anything in his life important other than his mission." He went digging through the pile on his desk again, apparently unsatisfied with his over-sugared concoction of Oreos and Rockstar.

"What? What do you want me to say?"

"I don't know. Maybe that it's not the only thing you missed?"

He paused, watching the broad back that was turned to him, brown curls spilling over a t-shirt printed with robots. "Well, I did ask for one other thing."

"Was it to be surgically attached to Endy's hip? Because I think you need to ask permission for stuff like that."

"No, it was..." he shifted, "well, to see you."

The brunette grinned at the empty bag of Doritos he pulled out from under his computer monitor. "Now you're just making shit up."

"No, I specifically asked to see my brothers again."

Neil looked up. "Wait, you said that?"

"I just did, didn't I?"

"But brothers, as in plural?"

"Yes. Have you... have you met any of them yet?"

"No, but..." wonder began to dance in his eyes. "If you asked for that, and they sent you here, maybe..."

"They're already here too."

"We need to celebrate. You haven't eaten in like a year and--aha!" Neil triumphantly pulled a crumpled takeout menu out of the detritus. "Nothing makes you feel alive again like spicy sausage pizza."

He found himself smiling slightly. "If you say so, but I don't know if I've got the cash to help pay for it."

"Nah, I know you don't. All you've got is this crazy Monopoly money your country likes to trade with. You know your five dollar bill is orange with a penguin on it? What the fuck is that about?"

It took him a moment to work out the implication of that statement. "You went through my wallet?"

"Of course I did. Want it back?"

"That means..."

"Well yeah, but who the hell wants some jerk telling them who they are? Wouldn't you rather work that out for yourself?" Neil pulled open a drawer, and there was surprisingly little searching before he came up with the leather wallet. He held it up. "What's your name, man?"

He blurted before he could think. "Kain."

The wallet sailed through the air and landed beside him. Neil had his phone and the crumpled pizza menu in hand. "Kain? Welcome to the land of the living. It sucks balls and you spend most of your time feeling like you're gonna die from it, but we got pizza here."

diet angst, nephrite, monster socks!, comedy, kunzite

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