By My Hands

A/N: So, I'm sure you were astute enough to realize that I've change the title. The simple reason for this is that, even though there are only a ridiculously small number of Outlaw Star fanfics on the internet, one of them is already called 'Just the Way You Are'. Go figure. So, it was my authorial duty to change it!

Anyway, onward!

Chapter 4—From Unsettling Dreams

I wanted to laugh. The entire way down to my cell, I wanted to laugh my ass off at this big cosmic joke. Because, that had to be what it was. There was absolutely no way this was real—life wouldn't be so cruel, would it?

Apparently, it would.

I had the full escort to take me away, Mister Rotund leading the way with that horrible, self-satisfied smirk of his plastered onto his face. The strongest desire gripped me to ask him what the hell he was so happy about, because I really didn't see anything funny about this situation at all. I kept closing my eyes, hoping that when I opened them again it would turn out to be one huge, complex dream that my subconscious had decided to torture me with.

“You'll find that we give even those awaiting trial adequate accommodations. If you require anything else, please don't hesitate to ask.”

The soldiers behind him looked vaguely uncomfortable, as though what was considered as 'adequate' to their superior wasn't really on par with their views. It seemed safe to assume that the bubble bath I had been craving for the past few months would probably not be included in either of their criteria, but I would have to wait and see. Maybe here 'adequate' was a synonym for 'lavish', and my time in captivity wouldn't be nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be.

A laugh almost made its way out of my throat, because I was executing 'Gene's Avoidance Maneuver Number One'—making fun of something to make it seem more bearable. It was something that I had always yelled at him for, but it was certainly doing the trick now. If I could avoid thinking about the situation, maybe I wouldn't break down like I was almost threatening to do.

How the hell could I have killed my parents?

Even if I were to ignore the fact that I had been eight years old at the time of their deaths, I had loved my mother and father. Sure, I didn't remember much of them, but that hadn't meant that my regard for them was any less acute. They had brought me in to this world together, and I would never have repaid them with murder. It was a horrible thought, but no more horrible than the fact that the Special Forces knew I hadn't done it.

How did I know? It was simple, really.

Mainly, it had just been too long. There was no way they could have recently come into more evidence against me, because the trail would have been cold for a long time. Then there was that ridiculously high bounty, meaning that they wanted to catch me quickly and without a lot of questions asked. I was clearly a time-sensitive issue.

Then there was the most obvious reason of all: there was simply no reason for the Special Forces to care why my parents had died, even if they had been murdered. Sentinel III had what I suppose you could call an excess of crime. The only people who took notice of it were the barkeeps and the bounty hunters, and certainly not the federal government.

So, if they were well aware that I hadn't murdered my parents, the only question left was: why was I there? What could I have possibly done to merit their concern?

The prisoner cells weren't lavish, I found out. They were, instead, exceedingly simple. A cot against one wall, a sink, and, surprisingly, a chalk board hanging on the other wall. They shoved me through the door, tossing a set of clothes and a toothbrush inside along with me before slamming the door shut. I wasn't being treated like a criminal, but I certainly wasn't being treated with any sort of consideration, either.

It suddenly struck me as funny (in the sense of 'not really funny at all') that nothing good ever seemed to happen to me. But that wasn't really true. I'd had a good life so far, honestly. I had lived on the streets long enough to figure out how much it sucked, but not long enough to become jaded by it. Gene and I had been hungry on occasion, but neither of us had ever starved to death. I'd been able to travel to every corner of the universe with the man that I loved, even if he had never loved me back. And now, the one thing that I had always wanted—for my name to be famous—had finally happened. Granted, this wasn't how I had always envisioned it, but I supposed that I wasn't really in any position to be picky. All in all, if I were to die here, I would go with relatively few regrets.

There was no where that I had always wanted to go but never gotten the chance, no foods I hadn't eaten. I mean, it's not like I was planning on banging on the bars and asking them to shoot me, but you know how it works. Whenever something bad happens, and I mean something really bad, something life changingly bad, it's sort of like you're not a part of it anymore. Like you can step back and say 'Wow, sucks for him.' The implications of the situation don't really set in for a while.

Laying there on the bed they'd given me, in the same position I always lay in, it didn't seem so much different.

–

“I think you should quit, Dear. We have enough money to get by on for a while, at least until one of us finds another job. I just don't like the thought of you being around that sort of thing every single day.”

My father sighed heavily and ruined his normally impeccable posture by slouching down on the sofa. I was sitting on the area rug which had always covered our hardwood living room floors, a sample engine spread out in front of me. The smell of muffins came wafting through the open doorway from the kitchen, my mother's best dessert recipe by far.

“I know. But who's going to take care of keeping the business straight if I leave? I know it's gotten out of hand...I know that...but I don't know what would happen if I left. Truthfully, I'm not even sure they'd let me leave at this point.”

“I don't care whether they let you or not!” I could hear the sound of the over opening, an ancient rattling piece of trash that we'd had for as long as I could remember.

“It's not that easy. If they were still just Jodan Securities, I could turn around and never look back, but this is the Space Forces we're dealing with. Not some small-fry backwater company with a grand total of ten clients. You don't leave the Space Forces unless they want you to.”

“I don't like it. Maybe we should move?”

For the first time in the entire conversation, I looked up from my engine. I wanted to tell them that I didn't want to move, that I loved it here. Where else would I be able to eat popcorn and watch the sunset from my bedroom window? Certainly nowhere else on Sentinel III, right? But I kept quiet. It wasn't that our family wasn't loving—we were, completely and utterly, but there was a bit more of a gap between me and my parents than the family dynamic usually called for.

“You worry too much. It's just trading. Granted, it's some trading that I heartily wish the company wasn't doing, but I can't do much about it. Maybe if I stick around I can convince Takamura to drop the accounts.”

My mother came into the room carrying a huge plate of steaming muffins.

“I just hope you don't get blamed for this if it goes wrong, Dear.”

“I hope so too.”

–

Growing up, I never had any desire to be a space pirate, or whatever the hell it was that we were. I thought I would get through school (the basics, at least, but probably not university), maybe start my own mechanic shop. It wouldn't have been too bad to work for someone else, either, but the idea of having my own business was a nice one. I didn't think I'd need anything more than that, you know? But when my parents died, that idea sort of went out the window. How could I finish school if I had to worry about not starving to death? How could I get any credentials if I didn't have a diploma? But even then, it wasn't too much of a disappointment. My dreams had never been big enough to end in disappointment.

Then I met Gene, and for about a month afterward, my only ambition was to get my face plastered onto a wanted poster.

It wasn't a very long lived dream, mainly because I saw really quickly what they did to the guys who were legitimate criminals. But for a while the glory of having my face all over the universe overshadowed the possibility of dismemberment and death. I would have looked handsome, I imagined, tall and distinguished, but rugged at the same time. Somewhat like Gene, come to think of it.

Of course, like everything else in life, my wanted picture ended up being more true to life. I can say this with perfect certainty because it was the only decoration they allowed inside my cell—my wanted poster, that is. The one I had stolen from the post office was in my trunk, locked away underneath the bed in Sophia's guest room still, and I doubted I would ever be getting it back.

Alright, I'll admit it—I was bored out of my fucking mind. A person can only spend so many hours staring at the ceiling before it's not fun anymore, you know? I must have brushed my teeth ten times the first day I was there, simply because I didn't have anything better to do with my time. Even though I was glad for it, I couldn't help but wonder why they would bother putting a chalk board in with the prisoners. Surely alleviating their captives' boredom was pretty far down on their list of priorities. Not that I was complaining, far from it, in fact, because of all the things which I could have asked for, pen and paper would have been one of the first. And what was a chalk board but an infinite supply of paper?

Back on the Star, we'd had a lot of down time. That was the way it was, on ships—far from the rush and rabble atmosphere I'd always imagined back when I was a kid. Whether we were in the air or docked at a port somewhere, there was enough down time to drive even the most patient man up the wall. So, I spent a huge chunk of my free time drawing up models. Ships and cars and buildings, or guns, more recently. My entire ideal future was planned out on paper back in my room on the ship. I knew everything, from what my house would look like to the exact mechanical structure of the radiator. I'd left it on the star because any future I may have imagined had always included Gene, but that didn't matter because I already knew it by heart.

So, the chalk board they had so courteously provided me was already completely covered in my doodles. Back at Sophia's, I had been tossing around an idea of a new engine, compatible with bio-fuel as well as regular jet fuel. I'd been too busy working on the Junkmobile to put it down on paper, but it was just as well—now I had something to occupy my time.

A few times, the guards had poked their heads around the corner, looking suspiciously at my diagrams as though somehow I was diligently plotting my escape. I'd taken to giving them nicknames based on strange personality quirks I noticed. The double Johnson tag team who'd brought me here had never returned, which was a bit of a let down. I could have had one hell of a time messing around with them.

When I wasn't spending time wasting chalk or internally making fun of my guards, there wasn't much else to do. They fed me three times a day, happily, but it was a far cry from Melfina's veggie lasagna. Hell, it was even a far cry from Franky's cruddy man-food and Sophia's old-lady fare. Every day dragged on like it lasted for months, but what really surprised me was that they hadn't done something with me yet. It was like they didn't really want to dole out any punishment—like they just wanted to make me wait. Mister Rotund, the only person around here who would probably know something about something, hadn't been back either, so I didn't even bother asking. No one would answer me anyway.

So, I did the only thing I could reasonably do in a situation like that: I made a plan. As the hours went by, my brain went into overload. Because how the hell was someone supposed to break out of a high security cell in what was probably one of the Space Forces main bases?

During the ten years that Gene and I have been partners, we've managed to get ourselves out of some pretty shitty situations. Granted, we'd gotten ourselves into those situations in the first place, so I can't complain, but that's not the point. What I'm trying to say is that we had gotten good at coming up with half-baked, somewhat effective plans. But I needed something more than just a half-baked plan to get me out of here.

'Jim', Gene had once told me, 'I'm not always going to be here to save your obnoxious little butt from certain death. And what are you going to do then? Well?'

At the time, I had no idea. I was the one who came up with the plans and Gene was the one who got to put his life on the line to test them out. It was a good system—it worked well for us. But I'd have to play both parts this time, and I'd never been very good at putting my life on the line.

The way I always saw it, there were three steps to making a plan work. The first was data collection, something which I had been doing since the moment I stepped off of the plane.

From what I could tell, there were probably three shifts of guards per day. The first guards brought me breakfast and lunch, the second guards brought me dinner, and I assumed that there was another set in between the two during the night. They went by something like every fifteen minutes, although I wasn't completely sure about that.

One guard, whose nametag said 'C. Peterson', gave me the strangest look every time his group came by on patrol. Sympathy wasn't something which I had ever expected to see in a prison cell, but that's what I got from him. It seemed like he knew something, but didn't quite care enough to do anything about it. All the other guards had the same uncaring expression permanently etched onto their faces, and I had to keep reminding myself of the simple fact that every single person here believed that I, as an eight year old child, had murdered my parents in cold blood. I was lucky to get even one person who looked at me with any sort of compassion.

As I moved on to stage two, I had to remember that my life didn't actually suck as bad as it seemed to.

Stage two was the laying of the plan. Putting the pieces into place, so to speak. I have to say, in all my years of designing escape tactics, this particular plan would have been my absolute best. It relied on more luck than I usually accounted for, but it was also a plan that would only work if whoever I was trying to get away from—in this case, the ever-competent Space Forces—were complete morons. I was hoping that might be the case.

It was a basic plan, as far as plans go. The essentials of it consisted of getting a hold of mechanical scrap parts, building myself a cleverly constructed firearm, and blasting myself the hell out of there.

Unfortunately, every single aspect of my plan was problematic in some way or another. I was in the middle of a high security cell, where mechanical parts were surprisingly hard to come by. Even if I did manage to get my dirty hands on the parts, I would have an even harder time coming across the gunpowder to make it work. Last, but certainly not least, I couldn't even bring myself to kill the rats that sometimes made their way onto the Star, so it seemed very unlikely that I would ever get around to 'blasting myself the hell' out of anywhere if someone might get killed in the process.

But I was resourceful. I figured I could get around all that and still end up with a workable plan. The first thing I had to do, though, was get myself out of this cell.

His name was L. Smith, and he had a horrible nervous habit of chewing on his nails and constantly tugging on his collar. He was part of the 'dinner guard' as I'd come to call them, and I picked him out because he was the perfect mix of the meekest man on the planet and one who still wanted to pretend that he'd been born with a backbone. Living on a ship with Gene, I saw an awful lot of people, and I'd gotten pretty good at picking out the type of person who would give me what I needed.

“Excuse me.” He looked around, like there might be someone else in the cramped hallway that I was talking to. “Yes, you.”

“What?” He gulped nervously. It bugged me, but I couldn't blame him—if I murdered my parents, I probably wouldn't hesitate to do away with him too if the opportunity arose.

“Can you do me a favor?”

“We're not really supposed to talk to...you...”

Of course they weren't supposed to. Whoever it was who wanted me out of the way had to make sure that no one doubted my guilt, and if there was one thing which I was particularly good at, it was convincing people that James 'Jim' Hawking was a pretty cool guy, and they couldn't afford to have any sympathizers.

“Well, they said that I could ask if I needed anything.”

“I guess.” His pointer finger went into his mouth, muffling his words a little as he bit his nail.

“If I don't get something productive to do, I'm going to die of overexposure to pure boredom before I can even get to a trial. Can you ask your superior, whatever his name was, if I could do some mechanical work? I mean, I know I'm a prisoner and all that, but isn't unpaid labor what prisoners are for, really?”

I think I confused him with that last remark. Maybe they discouraged sarcasm in the Space Forces.

“You want to do what?”

“I'm sure you have plenty of cars and whatnot that are just sitting around, broken down, right? I'm offering to fix them, because I am so bored that I want to jump out the fucking window.”

“Well...I can ask. But don't go thinking Captain Roeper'll say yes. He probably won't.”

I wondered if Captain Roeper was the man who'd brought me down here, who'd so callously told me that I was being accused of my parents' murders. I really hoped he was—maybe that way he'd get his just desserts.

Smith checked the door like they always did, turned, and walked away without another word. That was alright, though. I knew he'd ask, because that was the sort of man he seemed to be.

–

I heard my father's footsteps as he crossed the hardwood floor in their shared bedroom. He never knew how thin the walls were, but I could hear every sound. Usually that bothered me, but today I had my ear pressed to the paint, hoping to catch everything.

“Are you feeling any better? At all?” His voice was more worried than I'd ever heard it. It was so far from his normal geniality that I wouldn't have recognized him if I hadn't already known.

I didn't hear a reply, either because my mother hadn't spoken or because her voice had been too weak to make out.

“We could go to another doctor! We should get another opinion...I know we've gone to Doctor Cambridge for a long time, but he can't know everything. Someone out there has to know what's wrong with you!”

My mother had gone into town twelve days ago, and somehow she'd brought a horrible illness back with her. Within three days, she hadn't even been able to get out of bed. She couldn't eat, could barely drink, her normally healthy face had become sunken and pallid. Around me, they acted as though it wasn't a big deal, but I knew differently. I was eight, not three. I did have some awareness of my surroundings.

“Honey, I don't want to get another opinion.”

It was clear, but quiet. Her words seemed to be amplified by the very silence that they disrupted. That was just the sort of person my mother was—she loved every moment, but when her time came, she let it come with her arms stretched wide.

“I can't stand this. It's too sudden.” My eyes were slowly filling with tears, but I didn't dare move. If I did, they would hear me. They would go back to remembering that they had a child and pretending everything wasn't falling apart.

“I know.”

My mother was dying. I knew about death—a girl in my school class had had a ferret once who had died—but I had never been able to reach right into the next room and touch it. The only person who I had ever been close to at all was dying right before my eyes. The doctors had said so. 'The virus will spread', they said.

I looked over to the big window next to my bed, and saw my mother, or the woman she had been as few as two weeks ago. The weak, wavering voice that I heard from the next room could never belong to the same woman. The woman who made me popcorn and watched the sun go down would never die from something as stupid as a virus that no one could cure. She just wouldn't.

She wouldn't. I needed her.

“You should rest. I'll leave you alone. How about some tea? Do you think you could keep it down?”

“I don't think now is a good time, Jules.”

“What do you mean, Michelle?... Michelle?”

Silence reigned through the room, and it frightened me.

Because it was so very silent.

–


Next up: The plan, and an almost expected delay.