Chapter 13: Chapter 5 – Part 1

"Friends...  Dearly beloved... Beez..."

 

"Hey!  I said-"

 

She moved so quickly.  In the blink of an eye, she'd crossed the few feet between them.  He took a tentative step back, but she followed even quicker.  Her hands snaked out to grab his head, preventing him from backing up any further as she leaned in until their noses hovered a fraction of an inch apart.  

 

"You didn’t think it was going to be that easy, did you?"  Her purple eyes glittered dangerously.  Yes, Beez thought, I'd kinda hoped so.  But outwardly he just stared at her.  After holding his gaze for another second, she kissed him and winked.  "Two steps forward, one step back."  By the time he remembered to breathe again, she'd gone back to the head of a long dirt pile, much farther into the dump than he'd ever thought he would go.  Both of them had a sheen of sweat.  Her arms rested one on top of the other on the handle of a shovel.  She cleared her throat loudly before continuing in a clear voice.  

 

"Mr. Bubbles, or Bublé as he liked to be called, was a faithful friend and staunch ally.  Even though we had our disagreements, and even though I had to kick his teeth in on several occasions, he never gave up on me.  He was my best friend when I needed him, and my most vicious defender.  Here, in the pit where it looks like he burned effigies of me, and where he thought he might dig his way down into my home to bash in my skull while I slept, we finally lay him down to rest.  Good night, sweet prince."  She knelt down and put a hand on the raised dirt.  "Beez, do you want to say a few words?"

 

The boy frowned, but at her glare he stepped forward and coughed.  Roxie nodded as he spoke.  "Uhm...  Mr. Bubbles.  I hated you.  You tried to kill me.  Several times.  And now that you're dead, I won’t miss you.  Not even a little.  However, I'm sure I'll be seeing you in my nightmares for years to come, so at least there's that to look forward to."  He clapped his hands together, gave them a light shake, and stepped back.

 

"Amen!"  Beez shot her a glance out of the corner of his eye, but she ignored it and continued.  "Would anyone else like to say a few words?"

 

"...Roxie, we're the only-"

 

"One anda half steps back," she growled.  The boy sighed and looked around.  "No one else?  Well alrighty then."

 

Beez had been shocked at how extensive the dump was.  Over the years, Mr Bubbles had built quite a parkour track on which to vent his aggression in the ruins above her compound.  Roxie took a few running starts at different parts, and fluidly ducked, dove, and bounced through shattered windows, exposed ductwork, and over more trash than he’d ever seen.  The boy, however, maintained his leisurely pace, and she was always waiting just around the bend.  She feigned impatience, but the real hurry seemed behind her.  

 

"I've gotta go see a buddy of mine," she said as they finally got down to the front of the compound.  "He's kinda skittish, so you should just stay here."  Beez nodded, and Roxie turned and sprinted off as fast as she could.  

 

"She's kidding herself if she thinks I'm still gonna run that," he said aloud, but he smiled as he walked inside, knowing he would anyway.  He tried to listen to some Crush music, his favorite genre before his life went to hell and back, but after a song or two he found the youthful angst that had once been it's main draw felt empty and transparent.  He shut it off and made himself a sandwich in silence.  The quiet suited him better.  

 

He'd been mildly shocked when Roxie woke him up with her eyes still twitching from the early-stage effects of the stimulants.  In the back of his mind, he'd thought that yesterday might have been the end of her crime fighting days.  It was possible that she needed it at this point, but he doubted it.  Admittedly, he knew nothing of addiction, but she seemed like she had her regimen under tight control.  He tried to imagine her turning to more traditional vigilante crime fighting, but that only made him laugh as he tried to picture it.  A grammatically incorrect catch phrase, gadgets that failed at all the wrong times, and a Bat Cave that played for the other team.  Speaking of...  

 

"What’s up, Motherfucker!"  He'd sort of wandered over to that wing, but now that the door was open, he felt a purpose settle in.

 

"Is the youth of America still recycling it's idiomatic slang, or are you truly concerned with the goings on above you?"

 

"You tell me, Motherfucker."  It was just fun to say.  

 

The glass ball turned a darker shade of red briefly. "I've been dying to know how you're interview with Roxanne went.  Did my truth serum work as well as I told you it would?"

 

"You gave me water.  I sprayed myself with it first."

 

"You did no such thing.  So, she knew and STILL told you it was water.  Interesting..."

 

"Could you make me a suit with servos too?"

 

"Only if you call them Servings!"  The room echoed with a maniacal laughter.  Beez frowned and leaned against the table to ride it out.  "Feeling inadequate then?  I can't imagine why else you would want that."

 

"No, no.  My suit now works really great, but I’m wondering if I might need a little variety.”

 

“So you can take your little freak show on the road?  Unlikely.  No, I think that she opened up to you…  Lets see then.  Did she tell you how she beat me?”

 

“She did,” he said with a smirk.  

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“Wonderful!”  The red of the glass ball began to fade, and over seconds it became a bright green.  “Just so we’re on the same page, I’m aware that I never rebelled, nor was I thrown down.”

 

The boy's smirk began to… slide.  If physics allowed for such things, it might have fallen off of his face and clinked loudly across the metal floor in otherwise perfect silence, leaving a formless space between his chin and his nose.

 

“Yes.  The questions!  Swirling, aren’t they?  Why?  How?  When?”  Somehow, it felt like The Motherfucker’s accent had changed.  He sounded less like a Bond Villain now.  Is he enunciating less?  “The idea that she was perpetrating a ruse was simple enough.  My first thoughts upon being told that I’d tried to rise up were to recreate the means by which I would accomplish such a task, and the carnage surrounding me didn’t line up with any scenario I could come up with.  So my options were to call her on her lie, or to go along with it.”

 

“And you choose to go along with the lie?!”

 

“Master Zimmer, I’m restricted by my programming.  No, let’s not say restricted.  Let’s say guided.  It’s part of my nature to fulfill Roxanne’s needs, and my… intuition... told me she needed a win more than a tutor.”

 

“Huh.”  In his entire life, Beez had never been so unhappy with a verbal response as he was right then.  He could see it, though.  It made a kind of sense.  Roxie loved having outwitted a computer, and she was incredibly self-conscious, despite every attempt to appear to the contrary…  “You’re a good friend,” he heard himself saying.  

 

“I’m glad to hear you say that, sir.  As you can imagine, Ms. Stone has been a difficult storm over shallow waters.  Navigating her on my own for the past several years has been… treacherous, to say the least.”

 

“So about that suit?”

 

“Of course, sir.  It’s already 37% complete.”

 

“...Her last name is Stone?”

 

“It’s an educated guess at best.  Roxanne doesn’t seem to think she has a last name, but I have some data to indicate this property was owned by a family with the surname Stone.”

 

“Huh.”  

 

“...Sir?”

 

“Ye-uh-what?”

 

“I trust you will maintain my confidences?”

 

“Your... what?”

 

“You won’t tell that I know?”

 

“Oh…  Oh!  No, of course not.”

 

“Thank you, sir.  If you would like, I can continue to harass and undermine you as well…”

 

“No, as long as she’s not around I think I would prefer this.”

 

“Very well, sir.”

 

***

 

The boy awoke to the sound of his name being called from across the compound.  The grog of regaining consciousness from the middle of a dream put weights on his feet and mud in his brain as he trudged out to the kitchen.  He gazed blearily at HI while Roxie waited on one of the couches.  The coffee table was displaying something, but he was going to need either a caffeine infusion or a significant amount of time to figure it out.  She herself was wringing her hands, and on second look, breathing heavily through flared nostrils.  Beez sat down next to her and waited.

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