[Fanfic] Pimps and queens and criminal queers
Lewis crawled onto his sister’s ridiculously huge king-sized bed and tried to unbuckle his belt some time around midnight, but he couldn’t get his fingers to work. Marissa’s heavy, little-girl breathing came steady and slow from her bedroom across the hall; Lewis had tried to pick her up and carry her upside-down up the stairs to bed when it got to ten and he was fairly certain that little girls should be asleep by then, but it didn’t quite go down that way. What actually happened was:
At 9.55pm he attempted to tuck a semi-snoozing pre-pubescent girl over his arm, which was difficult because he was not standing up perhaps as steadily as he might have done had he not laid waste to his sister’s wine stores. Marissa kind of … slithered … over his arm much like a determined drunk and made herself heavier than a sack of lead.
At 9.59pm he had managed to drag her as far as the foot of the stairs, with Marissa not exactly fighting back but not exactly cooperating either, and the house swaying gently from side to side as his meandering footsteps were kept in check by the girl whose armpits his forearms were thrust through.
Come 10.07pm Lewis had succeeded in bouncing his recalcitrant niece up the carpeted staircase with zeal and a couple of occasions where he’d fallen on his ass, with Marissa leaving scrape-marks from her black-soled school shoes all the way up the peach wallpapered walls. Her hair fell over her face like a waterfall of sulk.
By 10.15pm he had given up on trying to wake the little nightmare up enough to make her brush her teeth, humped her onto her stupidly high bed and haphazardly dragged a blanket over the still fully-dressed and -shod child. Marissa made a swatting motion at him as he stumbled out of the distressingly tidy room, tripping on air, and made his way back down to the sofa - mostly on his face after his sock got the better of him a third of the way down the stairs.
Sometime before 12.30am Lewis Nixon passed out on his face, his belt still buckled.
He awoke with an impossibly painful crick in his neck and the bright, bitter light of a Floridian winter streaming in through the unclosed curtains. His face was encrusted with dried drool, his hair - he swung a groggy hand up to check - was standing up at angles unknown to geometry and he ached like several motherfuckers and one or two fatherfuckers for good measure.
The shape of his spine was surely beyond the realistic reaches of science, too; Lewis straightened himself out with difficulty as the alarm on his watch blee-blee-blee’d viciously despite all attempts to kill it through the time-honoured method of groaning pathetically and thinking hard about turning it off. He tried to remember why it was vitally important that he be awake so abusively early on any morning, ever, especially one where he appeared to be - Lewis oriented himself with stunning alacrity - ensconced in a peach-hued boudoir somewhere gratifyingly sunny.
He squinted at his watch.
His watch offered him a time which Lewis had never seen from the perspective of waking up. It was an hour he generally reserved for staggering to bed (or gutter, or onto the floor of any given bar) or for sailing through in a haze of bleary irritation on his way through two or three days without sleep when he simply forgot to go to bed. There could be no rational reason for -
- Dick.
Lewis squirmed his way off the bed in a fog of hungover pain and crawled to the door of the bedroom on his hands and knees. Marta would keep painkillers in the bathroom. She was a conscientious mother. They would be out of small-child reach but the things would be there because whatever her other failings as a human being - and Lewis could think of several, beginning with “corporate lawyer” and “actually once claimed to like our father, while stone cold sober” - she was not notably sadistic. There should at least be child painkillers, and then he could drive to the bus station and pick up his - pick up Dick before some crackhead zombie killed him and ate his brains. Or worse, before Dick made friends with some homeless bum and tried to Do Some Good -
- Child.
Shit. He was going to have to take the rug-rat with him.
Half-way across the hall on his knees and elbows, Lewis Nixon rested his heavy aching head against the carpet and called in what could only be described as a muffled bellow, “MARISSA - ow sweet Jesus my head -“
There was breathy silence from the door labelled “Marissa Schwartz” and adorned with a picture of a sparkly unicorn. Lewis grumbled to himself, which made the headache worse, and tried again.
“MARISSA - yowch fuck grr - MARISSA - “
He was at last answered by the creak of bedsprings, the patter of feet, a swoosh of opening door, and a pair of pink bunny slippers in his line of sight. Lewis tried to squint up at his niece but decided that on the whole he preferred life without the little black dots of pain flashing through his field of vision. Instead he croaked, “Excedrin?” hopefully.
“I’m not allowed,” Marissa began doubtfully, balancing most of her weight on one fluffy bunny slipper and yawning abruptly.
“Fetch, Mungo,” Lewis groaned not raising his head from the floor. “I need to drive to the, uh, the, uh …”
“School?” Marissa suggested, opening the bathroom door and - crashes and bangings notwithstanding - making a positive bee-line for something or other.
“That’s later. I have to get … someone … from the bus station.” He swallowed the dry fuzz in his mouth uncomfortably as his niece knocked something loud over in the bathroom. “Where is the bus station?”
“I dunno,” Marissa mumbled, dropping a long, foil-covered square of Excedrin Super Hardcore Alcoholic Doom Pain-Stoppers on the floor by his hand. “We never go there. Mommy says it’s full of des-tee-suits and people we shouldn’t not mix with.”
“Yes,” Lewis agreed, rolling onto his side with a wince and palming a pill into his desert-dry mouth. He blinked at her for a moment. “Shades?”
“You … “ Marissa sighed and disappeared down the stairs at lightning speed. Lewis winced and flinched with every thunderous step her absurdly heavy little body took on the wooden floorboards, feeling each vibration as though it was being pounded into his head with a wooden mallet.
She returned a few minutes later with his shades in her hand, and squatted beside him to push them onto his face. Along with the Excedrin beginning to work, Lewis felt himself grow - just for a while - absurdly grateful. She’d probably had to do the same for Marta several times when The Schwartz Daddy was away “on business” - the business of cheating, apparently - but that didn’t make it any the less special that someone was, albeit ineptly, pandering to his hangover for once.
“Nngg,” Lewis gasped, stumbling to his feet and groping for the wall. His head throbbed less, but his mouth still felt like it had been wallpapered with the hides of angry toads, and he wasn’t sure he could look food in the face for a good long time. “Hey, carpet-fondler. You’re wearing a night gown. Go put clothes on.”
“But I have to wash my face - “ Marissa protested.
“Later. We have to go to the bus station. I’m not allow - “ Lewis missed his grip on the wall, nearly fell over, and had to steady himself rather faster than he was expecting to, “ - allowed to leave you here on your own in case some African guy with dubious tastes decides to abduct you for medical experiments and/or slavery. And there might be paedophiles.”
“What are you talking about, Uncl - “
“Don’t ‘Uncle’ anything at me,” Lewis groaned, making a few tentative steps towards the staircase. “You can call me ‘Grand High Priest of the Scotch Bottle’ for the duration of this week,” he said clutching at the wall as he took a step down, wishing fervently that his stupid sister had installed a handrail instead of violently uninteresting and dangerously slippery carpets. “Either get some clothes on or get in the car in your goddamned night gown. I don’t care as long as you’re in that fortress on wheels by the time I leave.”
He stumbled on down the stairs, scooped up some likely-looking contenders for car keys from the dish on the kitchen counter and tried to remember what he’d done with his shoes.
Screw it. He didn’t really need shoes to drive. Lewis fumbled into the garage, clattered and clanked his way over the cases of wine he’d dragged from their hiding places the night before and squinted through his blessed aviator shades at the behemoth automobile currently occupying some additional dimensions in the cool blackness of the garage.
“Hey, dwarf-beast,” Lewis said unsteadily as Marissa appeared under his arm, wearing - he looked down in surprise - wearing jeans and her night-gown, “is your Mom expecting some kind of siege in the near future?”
“What?”
Lewis tapped her on the back of the head, a kind of toned-down cranial slap of the kind Marta used to bless him with whenever he wasn’t safely getting the shit kicked out of him at prep. “Don’t say ‘what’.”
“Pardon?”
“Don’t say ‘pardon’, either, you little freakmaggot. Use the brain your teachers are trying to squash out of you. Look at the size of this fucking thing - it looks like a garrison on wheels. Is your Mom intending to run over poor people with this motherfucker or what?” Lewis opened the family-tank with the remote locking device on the key fob and gave the demi-humvee a worried look. “I don’t think I can drive this without actually being in the Chinese army …”
“Why?” Marissa asked, scrambling onto the passenger seat like a squirrel up a tree trunk. She looked like she could have used a step-ladder, but Lewis didn’t see one anywhere and anyhow, the rug-monkey seemed to be getting in some important escape training while she was there.
“Why what?” he asked, sliding into the driver’s side with difficulty. There was motor oil on his sock. He scraped it off on the depressingly clean interior carpet. No one’s car should be that clean.
“Why the Chinese army?” Marissa strapped herself in. She picked up a small black box from the floor beneath her seat and handed it to Lewis without any explanation as to what it was or when it was going to explode and kill them both.
“You think these things are made in America?” Lewis pointed out, “What the hell is this?”
“It tells Mommy where to drive.”
“Ah, a husband-box,” Lewis said sarcastically. “Does she listen to it?”
“No.”
“How do I turn this piece of superfluous technology on?” Lewis turned it over and over, but apart from the screen all he could find was the unsurprising moulded phrase, Made in China.
Marissa sighed her mother’s sigh, snatched it out of his hands, stuck it to the top of the dash and said, “It knows when the engine’s on.”
“Because of the tremendous amount of time wasted in the simple act of hitting an on-switch,” Lewis grumbled somewhat hypocritically - he’d often lamented the lack of coffee-makers that knew when he was awake and what kind of coffee he wanted. Even that bordered on the pointless, since while he lacked a robotic coffee-making mind-reader he did at least have Dick, who on good days amounted to the same thing. Lewis was however hoping that a robot wouldn’t give him the same slightly judgmental look when he needed five cups of coffee just to get out of bed.
He started he engine and the box immediately flickered into life.
"Good morning, Mrs. Schwartz,” it said in one of those irritatingly smooth and elocutionally perfect feminine voices thatalways sounded to him like he was about to be scolded for not putting hospitalcorners on his bed, “Where would you like to go today?”
Lewis glared at his niece, who had just giggled at the misnomer, and nodded at the machine with a look of mild horror. “What the fuck was that all about?”
“You have to tell it where you want to go and then it gives you instructions,” Marissa said as if explaining to an idiot which - Lewis guessed - she probably thought she was. He refrained from any “kids today”-related thinking and reversed slowly out into the drive, the garage door zipping up and back without any interference from him. That at least was an improvement on the old, “send the passenger out to wrestle with the goddamn door for forty minutes” method.
“Right.” Lewis looked at the screen and said hesitantly, “Miami central bus station?”
“Location not known. Please try again
Lewis gave Marissa an exasperated look and spread his hands in the general direction of the idiotic machine. “Well?”
“It’s already set to instructions for Miami,” Marissa said as though he was being especially stupid. She wrapped a strand of hair around her index finger and raised her eyebrows.
“Central bus station,” Lewis tried. The screen lit up with a map and a small red bouncing arrow over an intersection, which was presumably the location of the central bus station, as that was what was written on the yellow roads there.
Over the course of the twenty-five minute drive to the bus station, Lewis called the satellite navigation device:
A cocksucker
A shitfucker
A motherfucker (six or seven times)
A bitch
A useless whore
A fucking bitch
A worthless invention
A fucked up fucking piece of fucking pedantic shit
The biggest waste of space Marta had ever involved herself with other than her husband
That Bullshit Machine
Over the course of the twenty-five minute drive to the bus station Lewis stalled the enormous vehicle four times, was almost pulled over by a traffic cop for going too slowly, had a beer bottle flung at the back of the car by a hobo, nearly ran over a kid with a skateboard, and changed the radio station fourteen times before concluding that Miami broadcast nothing but shit.
Over the course of the twenty-five minute drive to the bus station Marissa asked who they were going to meet more than once a minute; Lewis largely ignored her, occasionally told her to shut up, and spent the rest of the time lying to her or swearing at the cooing voice of the navigation device. Had Marissa believed him she would have been under the impression that they were going to meet:
A large cartel of African slave dealers
A drug dealer
Santa
The Easter Bunny
Jesus
Mohammed
Abraham Lincoln
Ted Bundy
Mark Twain
A giant lizard
Brad Pitt
The Wu Tang Clan
King Tut
Grandma
Marissa did not, however, appear to be taken in by any of his churlish responses and persisted in asking until both of them were on the verge of losing their tempers, Marissa folding her arms and pouting and Lewis shouting more and more venomous abuse at the satellite navigator’s voice, at the traffic lights, at the drivers in front and behind him, and finally at the barrier to the bus station parking lot which refused to go up the first time he reached for the entry button.
“Stay in the goddamn … thing … vehicle … car … “ Lewis instructed, getting out and feeling his lack of shoes keenly on the asphalt. Who knew what discarded hypodermics he was going to run into, if this bus station as at all like any of the others he’d tried to avoid. “Keep the doors locked and don’t make faces at people through the glass.”
“Can I come with - “
“No. You’ll get eaten by polar bears. Stay in the car.” Lewis slammed the car door before she could tell him there were no polar bears in Miami central bus station, and hopped and limped and scuffled over to where Greyhounds and local busses mingled in front of concrete stands and spray-painted departure and arrival boards blinked and twittered.
No one gave him a second glance, instead operating under almost New Yorker levels of unconcern for the weirdnesses of others, ignoring the dirty socks on his feet and the reek of yesterday’s booze on his breath but turning curious, sidelong glances every now and then to the clearly expensive car keys still clutched in his right hand. The screen - just visible under a tag which said either “BIZZKITZ” or “B122KITS” but made no sense either way - directed him to a stand which contained rather fewer people and into which a tired-looking bus was just pulling.
Lewis stuck the keys awkwardly into his pocket and tried in vain to make his hair lie down. He began to wish that he’d had the good sense to put shoes on or been too drunk to take them off; somewhere overheard a bird of uncertain provenance made a sound like a coffee bean grinder with a pebble stuck in it. He tugged at his shirt, unbuckled and rebuckled his belt, knowing damn well that these little alterations were like trying to hold back the sea (oh very well done, Canute, very well done, but your toes are still damp), but going through the motions was at least putting him a little more at ease.
The flood of pale-faced budget vacationers from the north began hauling their cases (some held together with bailer twine) out of the ass of the bus, and Lewis, had he been shod, would have danced awkwardly from foot to foot with ill-concealed impatience. As it was he merely shuffled and swayed a little and tried not to grind any broken glass into the arches of his feet.
At last he spotted the shock of red hair and sleepy expression and impossibly immaculate clothing that so readily identified Dick Winters. No one else could have slept for fourteen, twenty hours or more on a bus and come away with their hair and clothes looking that neat; nature’s kindness in giving Lewis a readily-identifiable beacon in the form of Dick’s hair had at least extended to giving him someone to feel inadequate next to - after all, it would be hard for him to learn equality at his age (thirty-one might not seem that old to senior citizens but to Lewis and doubtless to his diminutive niece it was verging on the grave).
“Dick,” he said once the man was within earshot. He waved the car keys.
“Lew,” Dick said with obvious affection, and looked down. “Where are your shoes?”
Lewis shrugged. “Somewhere in Marta’s house. C’mon.” He tried to take Dick’s bag, but Dick wouldn’t let him.
“I leave you alone for two days and you lose your shoes,” Dick sighed, shouldering his bag. “Is your niece okay?”
“No, she’s evil. Purest and deadliest evil. But she mixes an okay Bloody Mary,” Lewis said with some small satisfaction as Dick stopped abruptly behind him.
“Lew.”
“She already knew!” Lewis said cheerfully, picking his way back towards the car over the uneven blacktop with less than happy feet. “I think Marta taught her. It’s great when they come pre-trained. You know my sisters and I could all make a credible gin and tonic from the age of about five or so? Just in case the help got sick.”
“That’s no reason to - did you leave her alone?” Dick caught Lewis by the shoulder and frowned.
Lewis squinted back over the top of his shades and raised his eyebrow. It hurt his forehead where the sun had caught it, but he was more concerned by the effect. “No, I sold her to a travelling circus.”
“Lew.”
“She’s in the car. If you want to call it that. I think I saw personnel carriers on TV that were smaller.” Lewis gestured to the behemoth and nearly stumbled over the low fence separating the cars from the busses.
“That’s …” Dick stopped and pulled his duffel bag back off his shoulder again as Lewis pointed the key fob at the car and unlocked it again. “… quite a large car.” He put the duffel carefully in the trunk and opened one of the back doors.
“What?” Lewis stared at him through the window. “Rug-monkey, go sit in the back.”
Marissa looked first at Dick, who was bordering on the haggard after his long journey among the finest students, drunks, ex-cons and runaways that America’s premier, his sleeves unbuttoned in the face of the heat but no other concessions made to the massive change in temperature from where snow stood on the ground; then she looked at Lewis, who had beads of sweat on his face everywhere including behind his shades, who despite his best efforts still looked like he’d been dragged through a hayrick, and who - promise to his sister notwithstanding - would happily have thrown her in a polar bear enclosure for the promise of being able to lie down in peace and quiet right now.
She folded her arms. “No.”
“Lew, it’s really no big deal.” Dick got into the back and strapped himself in.
“Is there any chance - “ Lewis said, eyeballing the driver’s seat.
Dick sighed. “Yes. Go on.” He got back out, skirted around the enormous vehicle and got into the driver’s seat. After a little rearrangement of the driver’s seat to accommodate Dick’s considerably longer frame (and that still smarted) he looked up at where Lewis still stood awkwardly on the parking lot surface and said, “Well?”
“Hey, adrenal misfit, get in the back,” Lewis said, addressing his niece again.
“Lew.”
“Ignore him,” Lewis said shortly, “He’s not in charge here. I am. Get in the back or I will put ground glass in your Coco-Puffs - “
“LEW.”
Marissa looked up at Lewis as he dodged around the front of the car - catching his foot on something unseen as he went - and rapped on the window. She stuck out her lower lip and gave it a wobble for good measure, but Lewis just folded his arm over his stomach and jerked his other thumb over his shoulder.
“In the back,” he mouthed.
His niece regarded him with low menace from under her hair, but after a long, long moment while Dick tried to figure out what the heck that thing on the dash talking to him was, Marissa unbuckled her belt and slid - inside the car - back into the rear seat.
Lewis hopped in and made a theatrical show of brushing invisible somethings off the seat. “You had better not have lice -“
“I do not,” Marissa snapped. “And you’re mean.”
“Oh come on,” Lewis retorted as Dick backed the car up gingerly, his hand going automatically to the back of Lewis’s headrest to balance out the way Dick twisted in his seat to see where he was going, “Do you get to rid up front when your Mom and Dad are using the car? Or when they could actually stand to be in the same car at the same time?”
Marissa peered at his reflection in the rearview mirror. “You’re not Mom and Dad.”
“This week I am,” Lewis reminded her.
“Okay then,” Marissa said with an air of horrible triumph, “which one of you is Mommy and which one of you is Daddy?”
Dick choked and went pink, which almost made the infuriating tone of victory in the midget’s voice worth it. Lewis turned in his seat, lowered his shades enough for the child to see his horrid pink-and-yellow eyes and how serious he was and how seriously fucked up he was, and said in a low rumble, “Kidschnapps, if you don’t shut your mouth Lesbian Aid Worker Barbie is going to befall a very unpleasant accident.”
“BARBIE IS NOT A LESBIAN,” Marissa shouted, kicking her feet against the bottom of her own seat and the back of Lewis’s seat in a fierce military tattoo. She looked appalling, her face flushed, her hair a bird’s nest and her eyebrows drawn together in one long caterpillar of rage - a true Nixon, Lewis thought with some mild satisfaction.
“Oh but she so is,” he smirked, settling back into place despite her renewed kicks.
“SHE IS NOT.”
“Is.”
“Do I need to remark,” Dick murmured, relatively unheard by either generation of Nixon, “that this is shaping up to be a very long week?”
Part One, Part Two , Part Three, Part Five
On a fic-related note, does anyone have a clip of/transcript of the last few minutes of Jack Harkness in his little bomb-filled vessel toasting his computer? I need it for, um, writing purposes so I know where to start this thing for someone for Christmas which I REFUSE to let go over 1,000 words. Thanks, B.