Subject: BG CROSS 14 Rough Draft - 2/2
From: Panda
Date: 10/26/1996, 11:55 PM
To: fanfic@fanfic.com

Continued from Section 1 of 2

                                                     ****

'Shit, he's crazy.'
     Priss watched the black motorcycle in front of her weaving in and out
of the spotty traffic, as she and Blackie made their way towards Bayside
Park on the rain-soaked main highway. For only the second time in her life,
she was having a hard time keeping up with a vehicle in front of her. She
hoped that the bike rider wasn't as crazy as the Griffon's creator had been.
     "Hurry up!" came Blackie's voice to her ears amid the whine of  her own
bike's accelerating engine. Her bike shot forward, the front wheel lifting
briefly off the road, while the rear tire jogged a little to one side as it
struggled to grip the slick pavement. The black bike in front of her had
slowed a little, and soon she was riding with Blackie side-by-side.
     To their left, Tokyo Bay spread out as far as their eyes could see, its
surface reflectionless, mottled by the downpour. The late morning sun was no
more than a dull opaque presence, hidden by the overcast. Priss pointed
ahead of her, and motioned to Blackie to pull over. Blackie looked ahead for
a moment, then nodded.
     Soon, the two cyclists were seated on a metal-form bench under the
rusting tin roof of what used to be a road-side snack bar, the windows and
doors long since boarded up. Several vending machines stood sentry-like
across the street, their slightly rusted and cracked exteriors showing signs
of aging and vandalism. Priss sighed as she stared at the soda dispensing
machine through the rain and the "out of order" sign that hung from its
credit slot.
     Her gaze drifted up to the hills behind the vending machines, rising
higher and higher until the sweeping ridges met the edge of a man-made
structure, in the distance and to her left, that dwarfed its natural
surroundings; the Genom Tower.
     Priss stared in a dream-like state at the abandoned metal mountain,
until Blackie's hand on her arm startled her.
     Blackie quickly withdrew his hand. The sudden look in Priss's eyes was
a warning that did not bear repeating verbally. His thoughts drifted back to
the night before, when she had grasped his hand in hers, and how much it had
affected him. He had assumed that she had reached out for a comforting
touch. It suddenly occurred to him how little he knew about his own
emotions, and the emotions of those around him.
     He sat back against the bench, crossed his arms, and watched her
thoughtfully, as she turned to stare across the street at something.
Oblivious to his gaze, she ignored the rain's mist that somehow swept under
the thin metal roof above them. As they sat there, the fine droplets
collected at the ends of her brown locks to drip hypnotically. Her eyes were
locked on some point out there, no doubt blurred and unseeing as her
thoughts carried her away with the gentle hush of the rain. He smiled to
himself. 'She's just like me.'
     "Priss?"
     Priss turned slowly to face Blackie, her eyes refocusing. "Hm?"
     Blackie paused for a moment before continuing, the words jumbled in his
mind. "What were you thinking about just now?"
     Priss turned back to stare out into the rain. 'What had she been
thinking about? The past . . . again.'
     "Nothing much," she lied.
     Blackie processed the response, then picked the first reply that came
out of the murk of his nervous thoughts into the light. "Oh . . . you just
seemed to be somewhere else there."
     An awkward silence ensued, as each struggled for something more to say.
Blackie stared out into the curtain of water, one question rising to his
lips above the inner cacophony of endlessly looping small-talk trigger
phrases. "Why do I get the feeling that this ride up here wasn't just to
wash our bikes? Was there something you wanted to talk about?"
     Priss turned, her eyes suddenly lit with a fear Blackie couldn't see.
She had wanted to talk to him about something, but now that they were here,
she wasn't sure that she should. Even if she were sure, she thought, she
couldn't think of exactly *how* to tell him.
     "Priss. . ."
     "Yes," Priss began haltingly. "I did want to talk to you about something."
     Blackie waited, seeing the struggle in Priss's darkened eyes as she
looked down at her boots.
     "I've been here before," she continued, the words full of uncertainty.
"A long time ago . . . with a friend."
     Blackie turned a bit more to face her. "So this is kind of a special
place to you?"
     Priss looked up at Blackie and merely nodded. "You could say that.
Anyway, this friend was killed . . . by someone."
     Blackie started to reach out for Priss's hand again but stopped short.
"I'm sorry-"
     "No need to be. It wasn't your fault," she interrupted him. "It was . . .
mine."
     "Yours? What do you mean?"
     Priss looked out into the rain again, her eyes slowly filling with an
unfamiliar moistness. It had been five years since she'd ridden with Sylvie
to this very spot. "I'm free" she'd said. It hadn't made much sense at the
time she'd said it, but now it made perfect sense. Too perfect.
     Five years since Sylvie's death too, and yet it seemed she still hadn't
dealt with the guilt. Her friends would go on telling her long after, that
she'd had no other choice but to kill the sexaroid boomer she knew as
Sylvie. If she hadn't, *no-one* would have lived to even think about the
'right or wrong thing to do'. Sometimes though, being alive to think about
such things didn't seem like such a great choice.
     "I . . . I killed her Blackie," Priss finally spoke.
     "You?!"
     Priss looked Blackie squarely in his widening eyes, and nodded twice.
     Blackie looked away from her sober stare, the words even harder to put
together now, then looked back. "Why?! What happened?"
     "She was a boomer, Blackie. I had . . . no other choice at the time."
'There' she thought to herself, 'the words have finally come out.'
     "I see," came the thoughtful response. Blackie looked around wildly,
for anything to fix his eyes on as he thought about what to say, his hand
still instinctively wanting to reach out for hers. The hills . . . the gray
mist above them . . . and beyond the mist- the Genom Tower. "You couldn't
save her?" he finally said.
     Priss just shook her head, her eyes staring away from him, back into
the rain again, salty moisture starting to burgeon on the edge of her lower
eyelids. She fought the tears the only way she knew how; with a clenched fist.
     Blackie saw the watery eyes, the balled up fists, and again his hand
reached out, then retracted. His mind reeled, the confusion, and the desire
to say something locked in mortal combat. This was something he didn't think
he was prepared to deal with. What to say, what to say . . .
     "Couldn't the police help at all?"
     Priss turned, her eyes suddenly full of fury. Blackie cringed. "The
police?!" Priss shouted, "Gimmee a break! The police are-"
     Priss cut herself off suddenly, and looked carefully at Blackie's face;
the withdrawn look, the confusion.
     Bristling, and ready to unload, she checked her angry discharge
instead, and sat back against the bench with an audible thump. Wincing, she
rubbed her still sore back, and after a moment she continued, her voice now
slightly calmer. "Okay, let me explain something. We all know the police are
pretty incompetent, despite shutting Genom down. Hell, if the government
hadn't stepped in *we'd* still be dealing with Genom's problems." Inside
her, Priss could not help but wonder what things would *really* be like now,
if the government hadn't stepped in. Blackie's inquiring look cut her
internalizing about an alternate future short. She continued, "If you think
the police were bad a few years ago, you should have tried asking them for
help a few years earlier than that."
     Blackie looked into Priss's eyes and saw the source of her quelled
rage. Something deep inside, deeper still than her confession to the murder
of her friend. The look in her eyes caused him to think back, to a moment in
time when he wanted more than anything to get answers. Answers to the
mysteries surrounding his father's death.
     "Priss . . ." he began, startling her with his sudden, hushed tone. The
softness of his voice caused all the rage inside to suddenly drain out of
her. She looked away for a moment, knowing that whatever he was about to say
was something he had held within him for a long time. She'd used the very
same tone of voice only moments ago.
     Her gaze suddenly swung back to meet his, as his hand closed around
hers. She didn't resist, but his touch made her nervous.
     "Priss- after my father was killed . . . a few months passed, and Pops-
Dr. Raven-  kept telling me to let it go, to leave the investigating to the
police. But I couldn't wait for them. I needed to know why he had died."
     Priss stared at the man before her, and then looked down at his hand,
loosely clasped around hers. The urge to pull away slowly eroded from within
her, as she listened intently to hear his words over the hissing rain.
     "So I went to the police. With the data unit," he continued.
     Priss's eyes widened. "You didn't show it to them did you?!"
     "No. I never got that far," Blackie replied; the roles reversed now,
with his voice full of long buried emotion. "They wanted to ask me questions
about my father's work, and about the people he worked with. Suddenly it
seemed like I had made a mistake in going to them. They weren't interested
in what I had to say, they just wanted answers to their questions. And their
questions got more and more accusational."
     "What did you do?" Priss queried, the hand around her own fading from
her thoughts.
     "I ran. And they nearly caught up to me too. But I ended up at a
friend's place for a few days where a lot of biker gang members hung out."
Blackie paused, suddenly feeling Priss's hand tense a bit. "When the police
showed up, I headed out the back. I got back to the Garage okay, but later
on I heard from the guy who owned the place that the cops had shot someone
that looked a little like me . . .Well, someone who looked like me the way I
looked back then. But, what I'm trying to say is, I understand how you feel
about the police . . ."
     Blackie stopped. Priss had slipped her hand out of his, and was now
standing facing the road, her back to him. He reached out to touch her arm,
but then changed his mind, the confusion of her action robbing him of his
momentary confidence. "I'm sorry Priss. Did I say something wrong?"
     Priss said nothing, her thoughts suddenly thrust back into the past. As
the tears finally rose against her will and fell to the road to be carried
away by the rainwater, she thought of *his* face the night he had died, her
memory of it etched in her mind. The pain, the fear, the confusion; frozen
like a mask, and underneath the mask . . . his innocence.
     "What was his name Blackie?"
     Blackie stuttered a bit, thrown by the unexpected question. "Um, Jesse
something I think. I can't remember exactly."
     Priss sighed, and closed her eyes tightly, mentally comparing Jesse's
face to Blackie's. More than a passing resemblance; now she understood what
it was that had drawn her to him last night in the bar.
    "I take it from your reaction that you knew this guy?" Blackie asked.
     Priss nodded. "Yeah," was all she could say.
     "Oh," Blackie said, the realization of the coincidence's odds not lost
on him. Suddenly he was struggling to remember the faces of everyone he'd
seen that night he'd run from the police.
    "But," Blackie went on abruptly, "there's more to it. I used Pops'
computer to find out a little more about the shooting."
     Priss turned slowly, wiping her eyes in embarrassment. Computers. She'd
forgotten he was a *Stingray*.
     Blackie continued, his audience now captivated again. "I was able to
get hold of a copy of the ballistics report from the ADP's database. I
needed to know why this guy was shot. The bullet that killed your Jesse
wasn't standard police issue."
     Priss flinched.
     Blackie went on. "The bullet was of Genom manufacture, as was all the
ammunition used by the TPD and ADP then, but this particular caliber and
make was never used by the police. They had pretty strict policies about
their weapons and ammunition."
     Priss finished wiping her eyes and thought about the revolver Leon
toted around. Her voice still betraying her emotional state, she decided not
to argue the point, and asked the first question that came to her mind. "If
the police never used this kind of ammo, then you're saying that the police
didn't kill Jesse?"
     Blackie nodded. "In fact," he said with a firmness in his voice, "I'm
pretty sure I know who killed him."
     "Who?" was all Priss could manage to say between tightening jaws.
     Blackie sat back against the bench and sighed. "The same man who is
shown on my data unit killing my father, who used the same type of gun to
kill your Jesse. An ambitious Genom executive named- "
     "Brian J. Mason," Priss finished for him.
     "Yes," Blackie replied unsurprised,  as he remembered who Priss worked
for. He continued, his voice more excited as he raced to assemble the final
puzzle piece. "He must of somehow managed to learn about me and my visit to
the police, no doubt through hacked files, the same way I got the ballistics
reports. Priss, he was after me and my data unit, and mistook your Jesse for
me."

     Blackie watched, the feelings inside him suddenly before him like
looking into a mirror, as Priss stood and stepped out into the rain to face
the shadowy metal mountain in the distance, and shout. "Lay down and die you
son-of-a-bitch!!! Just die, for god's sake. . . Just die . . ." 
     Priss's shoulders suddenly slumped, and her arms fell loosely to her
sides, the fists unclenching slowly to lay flat against her thighs. Her
chest began to heave in fits as she cried, all her willpower cast aside by
the futility of wanting *him* back . . . of wanting *her* back. Blackie
stood slowly, and stepped into the rain next to her. Not knowing what to do,
he simply stood beside her as she sobbed, hoping his nearness might make her
stop, but wanting more; to take the pain away.
     Instead, Priss reached out and took his hand in hers, then grasped his
arm, then fell against him, her arms reaching behind him to draw him close.
Blackie hesitated, his thoughts stricken by a mild panic. But as she held
him, and showed no signs of letting go, instinct took over, and he slowly
wrapped his arms about her and held her, as her tears washed away in the rain.

END Chapter 14

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"BG Cross", "Dark Traveler", "The Dragon's Tower"
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