FicWad

Jim and I get to sleep in the kitchen, because to be honest, the diner isn’t that big. We get a thin mattress. I fall asleep instantly, and Jim steals the mattress from me.
I dream of Lindsey. Her hair’s falling out, like if she had cancer, and she’s facing down something big, armed with a bat. Lindsey’s got blood leaking from a hole in her shoulder.
I call her name, but she doesn’t turn. The dark Thing advances, and crashes over her.
Lindsey closes her eyes.

I open mine, hearing a loud noise outside.

“Lindsey?” I shout, getting up from the floor. Jim wakes up with a small noise, and I leap over him and out the door.
It’s her. My Lindsey.
“Lin!”
She turns, and stares. It stops me, because her stare is dead and empty, with eyes like a fish.
“Lindsey?”
“Dexter!” Lindsey calls for me, and throws herself to me. “Oh, I missed you...” I blather.
Lindsey’s got a different greeting strategy.

The knee to my balls is extremely unexpected.
I sink to my knees, holding my aching scrotum.
“Whyyyyy?”
“You left no note, you refused to talk to me, and you didn’t tell me where you were going.”
So much pain.

I lie on the ground, and I hear a car pull up.
“Stop! Both of you are rogue units! We don’t want to hurt you, but we will if we have to!”
“Fuck,” Lindsey mutters. I look up, to see a Better Living van, with two Drac soldiers aiming at us. “What’d you do?” I ask softly.
“You! Female! Hands on your head! Step away from him!”
Lindsey obeys, and one of the soldiers steps closer. “Don’t touch me,” Lindsey says coolly.
“Ma’am, you are under arrest.”
“Don’t. Touch me.”
“I’m taking you in.”
“Don’t touch me. Last chance.”
He grabs her wrist, and Lindsey hits him hard in the stomach. When he doubles over, Lindsey takes his gun. “Dex! Go get me some pliers please?” Lindsey commands softly. I get off the ground, and I go back into the diner, searching around for pliers. Lindsey, sweet girl, what have you done? I find some pliers, and drag myself back to Linds.
Both soldiers are dead. What are the pliers for?
Lindsey smiles, waves me over. Why are you smiling? You just killed two people!
“I haven’t gotten any new ones recently. Pliers, pleaseandthankyou.”
I numbly hand her the pliers.
“First time I did this, I got upset by the muchness. So much blood, so much people. But now I only take one thing, and it’s small, so it matters to me.”
Lindsey’s got the pliers in her left hand, and I notice a small tattoo of the words Dream darkly on her wrist. Isn’t it funny how I would notice that? In the grand scheme of everything, I’d notice a freaking tattoo.
Lindsey wrenches open the mouth of one of the Drac soldiers, and starts taking out his teeth with the pliers.

“What are you doing?”
“I have to take something.”
I feel dizzy and sick, like I’ve been shot in the brain. I want to go home, I want old Lindsey, I want to be far away from here. Lindsey just wrenches more teeth like a demon dentist.
“Oh my....Lindsey, what happened?”
She doesn’t even look at me. “You’re a transvestite. You are because you feel it. I feel this.”
I sit down, then curl up. My balls are in agony-isn’t it funny?-and maybe if I close my eyes really tight it’ll all go away.

Lindsey eventually sits with me, and runs a hand through my too-long hair.
“Hey.”
I ignore her. She’s clicking some teeth in her free hand. I notice she’s got a necklace of them hanging around her neck, and I just feel worse.
“You can’t tell anyone about this, okay?”
I focus on the ground.
“Dexter, I really like you a lot. But if you tell anyone about this, then I’ll have to take your teeth too.”
I cover my ears. I want my life back.

~*~

Gerard finds me and Lindsey asleep outside, and he kicks me awake.
“Who is that and what is she doing here?”
I stare down at Lindsey. Sweet girl with a tooth fetish.
I shrug, and remember her threat. Yikes. How did I get myself into this?
“Well, get her out of here!” Gerard whisper-shouts, looking terrified. What is his problem? “Listen,” I say, carefully slipping away from Lindsey. “You are being a total dick ever since I got here, and I wanna know why you hate me so much.”
Gerard looks pained. “It’s not you I hate.”
“Then who? And why?”
Gerard looks past me, to Lindsey.

“She used to do backbends on stage while playing punk rock.”
Things start colliding. Wait, how does he know Lindsey? Lindsey never played punk rock.
“It started with a cold. Just a cold. She never smoked, but I used to. Women are more likely to get cancer than men, did you know that?”
I want to say something, but things are still working themselves out.
“Then it got worse. A really deep cough. But she said she’d be okay.”
Gerard’s voice gets tight, and he keeps staring at Lindsey.

“Lindsey got diagnosed on October sixteenth, and all her fans were rooting for her. Squamous cell lung cancer doesn’t give a shit about fans. It went straight to her kidneys and ate her away. All the chemo did was make her hair fall out. But there was a way.”
Oh. Wow. The story of Lindsey’s creation.
“We needed something. It was an eyelash. We gave her life. That Lindsey. Robot Lindsey has a liver, a heart, and....” Gerard trails off.
“Two kidneys?” I fill in.
“Yeah. It didn’t matter. Lindsey died, and I was stuck with new Lindsey. I gave her to the government, broke up the band. A lot of people hated me for what I did. The robot shit was new, and a lot of people hated me for it.”

I stare down at Lindsey with Gerard.
“She’s so beautiful.”
I don’t know which one of us said it. But it’s true all the same. Gerard’s silently crying, and I’m stuck in between his tears and Lindsey’s teeth.

A.n. sorry for not updating.