milliways_bar | (no subject)

Entry tags:

ramon salazar,
teja

(no subject)

It's one thing having your own island. It's quite another bothering to drive your boat to the nearest place with a shop and stocking the house up (obviously, he leaves this to Fiona most of the time). But when there's a magic bar in the closet, why the need to go anywhere at all? And seeing as he's here, he figures he might as well have a few drinks and see if there's anything interesting going on.

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Ramon stares at him for a moment. When he speaks it's with exaggerated slowness, like Teja might be retarded.

'I...don't...know...everyone...you...do.'

How can he give out a name of an enemy Teja might have when he has no idea who is in the man's acquaintance?

"You know not a single name to offer to me instead of your own?" Teja asks, calmly.

He rolls his eyes and pours a drink.

'If you want to think it's me, go right ahead. You're going to anyway, no matter what I say. All I can do is tell you you're wrong.'

"Then you will come and look at my dead body with me?" Teja says.

He looks at him for a long moment over the rim of his glass. Then he takes a drink and places it down.

'Why?'

"Why not?" Teja says. "Humour me. You are innocent; what risk is there?"

He sighs and stands up. Maybe going with him will get him to shut up and go away. And he's armed, as always.

'Come on then. If you promise me that you'll fuck off after we go and stare at your remains.'

Beat.

'They'd better not smell.'

Teja had not expected the man to comply; but perhaps he hadn't heard of the old superstition?

He leads the way upstairs, to the quiet cold room where the body is being kept. "You have not heard of the old superstition, then?" he says.

The test is pointless, if the subject doesn't know about it.

Ramon looks blank.

'What superstition?'

Pointless then. He has no idea what the man is talking about.

"You never heard of the old tales," Teja says, "that corpses started to bleed again in the presence of their murderers? And if you paid Urquhart, then you are morally my murderer as much as he is. But if you didn't, then you have nothing to fear, do you?"

He just laughs. For one thing, he didn't murder Teja. Urquhart did. Morally or not, Ramon has no actual blood on his hands.

'That's such bullshit. Who makes up shit like that? No, I've never heard of any such thing - but I'll tell you this, I've seen the corpses of many people that I've killed and not one of them has started to bleed again.'

He couldn't be less concerned.

"It was a common superstition among my people," Teja says. "So you are not afraid that my corpse will bleed again, in your presence?"

He is walking down a corridor, trusting Ramon to follow him. For surely, if he fled now, could that not be held against him?

"But this is Milliways. Everything may be true here."

'Not the slightest bit.'

He follows, unbothered. He knows this won't work. If everything may be true, then why not the customs of his world, where corpses certainly don't bleed again no matter who's standing next to them.

And besides, no blood on his hands. Urquhart shot the bolt, not him.

Teja opens a door. The room inside is very small, and very cold, and quite bright.

Ramon strides in and looks around.

'Come on then. Lets see it. It's fucking freezing in here.'

"Of course; else, the corpse would rot," Teja says. The room is bare, with a table on which something is covered by a sheet. Teja takes the sheet away, as far down as the groin. There is his bare pale corpse, looking slightly blueish and absolutely stone cold dead, with a little hole, not unlike a bullet hole, pale and bloodless, on his sternum, where the bolt came out.

Ramon looks at it.

It's a corpse.

He looks at it more.

Still a corpse. And no blood.

Eventually he spreads his hands.

'Are we done?'

"Put your finger in the wound, if you dare?" Teja asks.

He looks amused.

'And how do I know you haven't stuck a blood capsule in there?'

He wouldn't put it past him.

"I haven't," Teja says. "How could I know I would see you today, and that you would indeed follow me up here?"

He does not insult both their intellects by claiming a fake proof would be no proof. Whatever happened here could never be a proof of anything. Ramon's reaction alone is what he brought him here for.

That said, he ought to have prepared something like that, just to see that reaction.

"Go on."

Ramon still looks amused. He holds up a finger, right up in Teja's face. Then very deliberately, he moves it to the corpse, points it downwards and shoves it into the wound.

Not just a bit. All the way in.

'This must have hurt.'

He twists it around, playing now, making a show of this ridiculous game. Then he pauses, turns his head to Teja and says,

'If this was all a ploy to get me inside you, it's really quite pathetic.'

He pulls the finger out and holds it out again. Clean and nothing on the corpse, though the exit wound is a bit more open than it was.

'We're done.'

"We're done," Teja agrees, and covers up the corpse again.

Either this man was even more cold-blooded than he had ever thought, or he was really innocent, to act so lightly and add a sexual slur to the whole process.

More cold-blooded, obviously. It's just a corpse. Just meat. The body of someone he liked might get a more sombre reaction but for Teja, no. And there was never a question of him reacting in a guilty way because...just a corpse. It means nothing to him.

It is probably also a good thing that Teja got to the sheet before him because he was totally planning on whipping it off and making rude comments about his manhood.

He heads to the door but doesn't take off just yet though he's dying to wash his hands. He waits for Teja instead, lighting another smoke.

"You shall spend your alleged five hundred years coughing and hacking up your lungs in very small pieces, if you keep inhaling all that smoke," Teja says, calmly, while locking the door to that room again.

'Alleged?'

Amused again. This time by the notion that his extended lifespan might somehow not be real. But he's not going to dwell on it.

'You owe me an apology.'