challenge nine, prompt two
Title: if you don't want to get your feet wet, wear boots
Author: wizened_cynic
Fandom: Crossover: Dead Like Me/House/SVU/The O.C. + 1 original female character
Pairing: Alex/Olivia if you cover your left eye and squint
Notes: This fic might possibly only make sense to flying_peanuts. I'm not even going to bother to explain. Good luck.
Raindrops doused all disquiet thoughts. It had started to rain a couple of minutes after the M.E. came and took the body away, and now the blood was starting to wash off from the sidewalk.
I wanted to mention how it was funny that we always learn in bio class that blood is red. Because I've seen a lot of blood in my line of work, and when it gets smeared all over the floor, it's actually more of a yellowish-orange. It's because of all the pus in it, but no one wants to think about pus. Nobody wants to make death uglier than it is already.
I had a feeling the new girl wouldn't really want to hear my theory about blood, since she'd just died and all. I decided to give her a minute.
Then the minute was up. Time for her to cross over.
"Yes, yes, you're dead. Let's get with it," I said. I tried to take her arm but my hand went right through. Her eyes widened to the size of Frisbees. "See what I mean? Dead. Now let's go. I'm missing a Full House marathon on Nick at Nite."
"Where am I going?" she asked.
"I can't tell you," I said. "I've never been."
"Why not?"
"Because the universe fucking sucks. Now are you going to cross over or not?"
*
She wouldn't cross over.
Next morning, I was on my way to Ginger Joe's when I saw her on the cover of the New York Ledger.
"Oh, you're famous," I said. The Russian newstand guy gave me a funny look as he handed me my change.
"I'm dead," the new girl said flatly. She'd moved on from depression to acceptance, which was a good sign, because I couldn't handle babysitting anymore. She was playing cat's cradle with my nerves. I had to jump a turnstile last night to get home and she chastised me about it the entire time we were on the train.
House was snorting antihistamines when we got to the restaurant. I slapped the newspaper down in front of him. "My reap made the headlines."
"Technically," House huffed another breath of white powder up the twenty he'd rolled into a straw, "she's not your reap."
"I don't care. I got stuck with her all night. She's my reap now," I said. "Besides, Kate crossed over after she popped this one."
"About time," House said. "I hate the ones who get killed in the line of duty. They're no fun."
"This one's an ADA."
From the way she was glaring at House, I could tell this one wasn't going to be any fun either.
*
According to the article, Alexandra Cabot died at 11:52 pm.
They got the time wrong. I know, because I was there.
I'd taken a peek at Kate's Post It when House handed them out. It said 11:48.
So. Four minutes off.
The article didn't say anything about that woman cop, how she was pressing her hand against the wound on Cabot's shoulder until all the blood seeped through her fingers. That blood was red as fresh paint, and there was so much of it. The woman cop kept saying, "Stay with me, Alex, sweetie. Stay with me," but Kate had already popped her soul back in the bar, so. Too little, too late.
I wanted to say something, but reapers got to keep a low profile, and with all the cops hanging around, it wasn't like I could take Cabot's wallet anyway, so I just watched from the distance until sirens started to sound and the man cop leaned over the woman cop and said, "Liv, Liv. She's gone."
The woman cop made this low, keening sound, like she didn't know how to cry.
That wasn't in the article either.
*
We had to break into the morgue to show Cabot the body.
"You're dead," we all said as House pulled out the drawer. The whole place smelled like an autopsy.
"For a person who graduated from Harvard law, you really have no learning curve." House lifted the sheet down to show Cabot the gunshot wounds. One in her shoulder, through-and-through, the other in her chest. The bullet had exploded into a million pieces in her heart, like what would happen if you stuck something metal into a microwave. She never had a chance.
Trey was looking away. He didn't like GSWs, considering he'd died from one. His own fault for trying to fuck his brother's crazy alcoholic girlfriend.
House was pulling the sheet further down, and I said, "House, she's dead. Quit checking her out," and Cabot smacked House upside the head and kicked his cane from beneath him.
"I could do that?" Cabot looked at her hand, the same one that hadn't been able to touch anything a couple of minutes before.
I told her, "Honey, you're gonna be a grim reaper."
*
The first reap is always the hardest.
House made me ride shotgun to Cabot's first reap, because he knew she'd chicken out and then be all self-righteous about it, and say some crap about how she wasn't going to kill anybody. Trey came along because he loved seeing people freak out over their first reap.
The Post It said N. Norman, Museum of Natural History, Hall A.
"Fuck," Trey said, when we got there and saw a bunch of school kids looking at the dinosaur fossils. "He gave her a kid."
"Fuck," I agreed, but it was so like House to do shit like this.
Cabot wouldn't do it. She said, "I'm not going to kill a child," and I said, "You're not killing him. You're just popping his soul. He showed up to his appointment. He's going to die anyway. Just get it over with, or House is going to, hell, send you to Vietnam or something, where they're all dropping like flies from the fucking bird flu."
Trey rolled a joint and, feeling sorry for Cabot, passed it to her. She looked at him like he'd just offered her a urinal cake and told her to smoke it.
"It helps," I tried to tell her, but she just started walking ten steps ahead, trying not to seem like she knew either of us.
"Bitch," Trey muttered, and I shrugged.
N. Norman was this weaselly-looking kid with Coke-bottle glasses and a Pokemon t-shirt. His was wearing this metal brace thing around his teeth that covered half his face. He wanted to be a paleontologist.
"I can't do this," Cabot said when she came back from a chat with Norman. Norman Norman. That was his name.
I said to her, "It's not up to you anymore." The kid had two last names, no friends, and a passion for prehistoric reptiles. If you asked me, I'd say Cabot was doing him a favor.
Cabot looked like she was gonna throw up, which was funny, because girl looked like she'd never been upclose and personal with the porcelain king before, ever. Didn't look like she'd puked since she learned to eat solid food.
"You sure you don't want that joint?" I asked.
She didn't say anything. I looked at the clock. Told her it was time.
She came back a minute later, her shoulders trembling. "Let's go," she said quietly.
"What? You don't want to watch?"
She looked like she was going to hit me. "Let's. Go."
We were in the gift shop, trying to stop Trey from juggling the snowglobes when we heard the crash.
Norman Norman was crushed to death by a triceratops.
*
We took the bus back to Joe's. Cabot looked surprised at the number of people masturbating on public transit. I told her we could take a cab if she wanted, but she was going to have to pay for it.
She was still pretty upset, so I tried to make her feel better. "That wasn't a bad way to go," I lied.
It's always a bad way to go, unless you were eighty years old and surrounded by your friends and family, even the ones who'd been waiting for years for you to kick the bucket so they could jack your Burberry coat.
"He was ten," Cabot said. She looked so pissed off she might cry.
"It gets easier," I told her, and we watched Trey juggle his snowglobes.
*
By the time Halloween came 'round, Cabot was an expert at reaping. She hated it, the way everyone had to hate it --- you couldn't like death, or you'd turn into a graveling --- but she got the job done. She refused to steal from her reaps though, which meant she had to get real work, a concept that got me and Trey totally confused.
House had a job, of course, but that was only because he liked to make fun of people when they were sick.
Trey had a job, sort of.
"You're a drug dealer," Cabot said, looking like she'd just picked up some old gum off the back a table and tried to chew it. "That's not a profession. That's a B felony."
Trey smirked. "That's why I have my own apartment, and you're sleeping on a bedroom floor."
"My bedroom floor," I added.
Cabot glared at us, like the time we found out she wouldn't say the word "pee," so Trey and me spent all morning trying to get her to say it.
"Anyone know the answer to 4-Down?" I'd pretended to ask. "Split-blank-soup."
"L, M, N, O ... what's next?" Trey had prompted.
Trey got busted for possession on Halloween. It was just like in the movies: he had one phone call he could make, and he made it to his lawyer, which was Cabot.
Unfortunately, Cabot was dead, which complicated things. Even if she wasn't dead, she wasn't going to defend no pot-dealing lowlife anyway, she said.
"Yeah, but he's our lowlife," I said, and she rolled her eyes.
House didn't give a shit whether Trey was going to jail or not. He just said that if Trey ended up in prison, Cabot and I would have to take over his reaping duties, so we bitched at him for half an hour and then pooled our money together.
When we went to bail Trey out, I told Cabot to wear a mask. I found her one of those Romeo and Juliet masks, the ones you see in that masked ball scene in the Roman Polansky movie.
"Why? You said they wouldn't recognize me."
"That's every other day. On Halloween, people can see the dead. Do you really want your ex-co-workers to see you running around with drug dealers?"
Trey promised to pay Cabot back the five thousand, and on the way out of the courthouse we ran into the woman cop again. The woman cop and her partner.
"Watch where you're going!" Trey walked up to the man cop and stared right into his eyes, like they were going to fight each other out through brain waves or something. It was a guy thing. I swear in middle school when girls learn about getting their periods, the boys learn how to glower at each other in that "I will pummel your brains out" way.
"Shut up, Trey," Cabot said. She was staring at the woman cop, who must've recognized her or something.
Oh, this was bad. This was bad, bad, bad.
This small smile came across the woman cop's face, but it disappeared, and she started to frown.
Cabot grabbed the cuff of Trey's shirt and hauled him back. "Sorry," she said to the woman cop, "he's ..."
"A fuckup," I supplied.
"Have I seen you somewhere before?" the woman cop asked.
Cabot swallowed. Swallowed again.
I took Cabot's arm, put a little pressure on her elbow to tell her it was time to get the fuck out of here before the man cop punched Trey in the jaw or something even worse happened, something like Cabot taking off her mask accidentally-on-purpose and the woman cop realizing that she was talking to a dead woman.
"Nice talking to you," I said to the woman cop. "But we gotta go. AA meeting."
Trey groaned and Cabot shoved her elbow into my back, but I grabbed them and pushed them down the hall.
"Hey!" the woman cop called, and I just walked faster, even though Cabot was stalling her feet and Trey was still cursing at the man cop. In a flurry of sluggish impatience, arched voices filled the empty spaces of the hallway, where the ceilings were high and vaulted, and the light was streaming in from the glass above, making the place look like heaven, or wherever the hell it is that the three of us couldn't quite get to.
Author: wizened_cynic
Fandom: Crossover: Dead Like Me/House/SVU/The O.C. + 1 original female character
Pairing: Alex/Olivia if you cover your left eye and squint
Notes: This fic might possibly only make sense to flying_peanuts. I'm not even going to bother to explain. Good luck.
Raindrops doused all disquiet thoughts. It had started to rain a couple of minutes after the M.E. came and took the body away, and now the blood was starting to wash off from the sidewalk.
I wanted to mention how it was funny that we always learn in bio class that blood is red. Because I've seen a lot of blood in my line of work, and when it gets smeared all over the floor, it's actually more of a yellowish-orange. It's because of all the pus in it, but no one wants to think about pus. Nobody wants to make death uglier than it is already.
I had a feeling the new girl wouldn't really want to hear my theory about blood, since she'd just died and all. I decided to give her a minute.
Then the minute was up. Time for her to cross over.
"Yes, yes, you're dead. Let's get with it," I said. I tried to take her arm but my hand went right through. Her eyes widened to the size of Frisbees. "See what I mean? Dead. Now let's go. I'm missing a Full House marathon on Nick at Nite."
"Where am I going?" she asked.
"I can't tell you," I said. "I've never been."
"Why not?"
"Because the universe fucking sucks. Now are you going to cross over or not?"
*
She wouldn't cross over.
Next morning, I was on my way to Ginger Joe's when I saw her on the cover of the New York Ledger.
"Oh, you're famous," I said. The Russian newstand guy gave me a funny look as he handed me my change.
"I'm dead," the new girl said flatly. She'd moved on from depression to acceptance, which was a good sign, because I couldn't handle babysitting anymore. She was playing cat's cradle with my nerves. I had to jump a turnstile last night to get home and she chastised me about it the entire time we were on the train.
House was snorting antihistamines when we got to the restaurant. I slapped the newspaper down in front of him. "My reap made the headlines."
"Technically," House huffed another breath of white powder up the twenty he'd rolled into a straw, "she's not your reap."
"I don't care. I got stuck with her all night. She's my reap now," I said. "Besides, Kate crossed over after she popped this one."
"About time," House said. "I hate the ones who get killed in the line of duty. They're no fun."
"This one's an ADA."
From the way she was glaring at House, I could tell this one wasn't going to be any fun either.
*
According to the article, Alexandra Cabot died at 11:52 pm.
They got the time wrong. I know, because I was there.
I'd taken a peek at Kate's Post It when House handed them out. It said 11:48.
So. Four minutes off.
The article didn't say anything about that woman cop, how she was pressing her hand against the wound on Cabot's shoulder until all the blood seeped through her fingers. That blood was red as fresh paint, and there was so much of it. The woman cop kept saying, "Stay with me, Alex, sweetie. Stay with me," but Kate had already popped her soul back in the bar, so. Too little, too late.
I wanted to say something, but reapers got to keep a low profile, and with all the cops hanging around, it wasn't like I could take Cabot's wallet anyway, so I just watched from the distance until sirens started to sound and the man cop leaned over the woman cop and said, "Liv, Liv. She's gone."
The woman cop made this low, keening sound, like she didn't know how to cry.
That wasn't in the article either.
*
We had to break into the morgue to show Cabot the body.
"You're dead," we all said as House pulled out the drawer. The whole place smelled like an autopsy.
"For a person who graduated from Harvard law, you really have no learning curve." House lifted the sheet down to show Cabot the gunshot wounds. One in her shoulder, through-and-through, the other in her chest. The bullet had exploded into a million pieces in her heart, like what would happen if you stuck something metal into a microwave. She never had a chance.
Trey was looking away. He didn't like GSWs, considering he'd died from one. His own fault for trying to fuck his brother's crazy alcoholic girlfriend.
House was pulling the sheet further down, and I said, "House, she's dead. Quit checking her out," and Cabot smacked House upside the head and kicked his cane from beneath him.
"I could do that?" Cabot looked at her hand, the same one that hadn't been able to touch anything a couple of minutes before.
I told her, "Honey, you're gonna be a grim reaper."
*
The first reap is always the hardest.
House made me ride shotgun to Cabot's first reap, because he knew she'd chicken out and then be all self-righteous about it, and say some crap about how she wasn't going to kill anybody. Trey came along because he loved seeing people freak out over their first reap.
The Post It said N. Norman, Museum of Natural History, Hall A.
"Fuck," Trey said, when we got there and saw a bunch of school kids looking at the dinosaur fossils. "He gave her a kid."
"Fuck," I agreed, but it was so like House to do shit like this.
Cabot wouldn't do it. She said, "I'm not going to kill a child," and I said, "You're not killing him. You're just popping his soul. He showed up to his appointment. He's going to die anyway. Just get it over with, or House is going to, hell, send you to Vietnam or something, where they're all dropping like flies from the fucking bird flu."
Trey rolled a joint and, feeling sorry for Cabot, passed it to her. She looked at him like he'd just offered her a urinal cake and told her to smoke it.
"It helps," I tried to tell her, but she just started walking ten steps ahead, trying not to seem like she knew either of us.
"Bitch," Trey muttered, and I shrugged.
N. Norman was this weaselly-looking kid with Coke-bottle glasses and a Pokemon t-shirt. His was wearing this metal brace thing around his teeth that covered half his face. He wanted to be a paleontologist.
"I can't do this," Cabot said when she came back from a chat with Norman. Norman Norman. That was his name.
I said to her, "It's not up to you anymore." The kid had two last names, no friends, and a passion for prehistoric reptiles. If you asked me, I'd say Cabot was doing him a favor.
Cabot looked like she was gonna throw up, which was funny, because girl looked like she'd never been upclose and personal with the porcelain king before, ever. Didn't look like she'd puked since she learned to eat solid food.
"You sure you don't want that joint?" I asked.
She didn't say anything. I looked at the clock. Told her it was time.
She came back a minute later, her shoulders trembling. "Let's go," she said quietly.
"What? You don't want to watch?"
She looked like she was going to hit me. "Let's. Go."
We were in the gift shop, trying to stop Trey from juggling the snowglobes when we heard the crash.
Norman Norman was crushed to death by a triceratops.
*
We took the bus back to Joe's. Cabot looked surprised at the number of people masturbating on public transit. I told her we could take a cab if she wanted, but she was going to have to pay for it.
She was still pretty upset, so I tried to make her feel better. "That wasn't a bad way to go," I lied.
It's always a bad way to go, unless you were eighty years old and surrounded by your friends and family, even the ones who'd been waiting for years for you to kick the bucket so they could jack your Burberry coat.
"He was ten," Cabot said. She looked so pissed off she might cry.
"It gets easier," I told her, and we watched Trey juggle his snowglobes.
*
By the time Halloween came 'round, Cabot was an expert at reaping. She hated it, the way everyone had to hate it --- you couldn't like death, or you'd turn into a graveling --- but she got the job done. She refused to steal from her reaps though, which meant she had to get real work, a concept that got me and Trey totally confused.
House had a job, of course, but that was only because he liked to make fun of people when they were sick.
Trey had a job, sort of.
"You're a drug dealer," Cabot said, looking like she'd just picked up some old gum off the back a table and tried to chew it. "That's not a profession. That's a B felony."
Trey smirked. "That's why I have my own apartment, and you're sleeping on a bedroom floor."
"My bedroom floor," I added.
Cabot glared at us, like the time we found out she wouldn't say the word "pee," so Trey and me spent all morning trying to get her to say it.
"Anyone know the answer to 4-Down?" I'd pretended to ask. "Split-blank-soup."
"L, M, N, O ... what's next?" Trey had prompted.
Trey got busted for possession on Halloween. It was just like in the movies: he had one phone call he could make, and he made it to his lawyer, which was Cabot.
Unfortunately, Cabot was dead, which complicated things. Even if she wasn't dead, she wasn't going to defend no pot-dealing lowlife anyway, she said.
"Yeah, but he's our lowlife," I said, and she rolled her eyes.
House didn't give a shit whether Trey was going to jail or not. He just said that if Trey ended up in prison, Cabot and I would have to take over his reaping duties, so we bitched at him for half an hour and then pooled our money together.
When we went to bail Trey out, I told Cabot to wear a mask. I found her one of those Romeo and Juliet masks, the ones you see in that masked ball scene in the Roman Polansky movie.
"Why? You said they wouldn't recognize me."
"That's every other day. On Halloween, people can see the dead. Do you really want your ex-co-workers to see you running around with drug dealers?"
Trey promised to pay Cabot back the five thousand, and on the way out of the courthouse we ran into the woman cop again. The woman cop and her partner.
"Watch where you're going!" Trey walked up to the man cop and stared right into his eyes, like they were going to fight each other out through brain waves or something. It was a guy thing. I swear in middle school when girls learn about getting their periods, the boys learn how to glower at each other in that "I will pummel your brains out" way.
"Shut up, Trey," Cabot said. She was staring at the woman cop, who must've recognized her or something.
Oh, this was bad. This was bad, bad, bad.
This small smile came across the woman cop's face, but it disappeared, and she started to frown.
Cabot grabbed the cuff of Trey's shirt and hauled him back. "Sorry," she said to the woman cop, "he's ..."
"A fuckup," I supplied.
"Have I seen you somewhere before?" the woman cop asked.
Cabot swallowed. Swallowed again.
I took Cabot's arm, put a little pressure on her elbow to tell her it was time to get the fuck out of here before the man cop punched Trey in the jaw or something even worse happened, something like Cabot taking off her mask accidentally-on-purpose and the woman cop realizing that she was talking to a dead woman.
"Nice talking to you," I said to the woman cop. "But we gotta go. AA meeting."
Trey groaned and Cabot shoved her elbow into my back, but I grabbed them and pushed them down the hall.
"Hey!" the woman cop called, and I just walked faster, even though Cabot was stalling her feet and Trey was still cursing at the man cop. In a flurry of sluggish impatience, arched voices filled the empty spaces of the hallway, where the ceilings were high and vaulted, and the light was streaming in from the glass above, making the place look like heaven, or wherever the hell it is that the three of us couldn't quite get to.