Flea

Chapter Fifty Six

"I don't own a single gun
But if I did you'd be the one
To hold it, aim it, make all of the bad men run"

There was music emanating throughout Maeve's apartment, as if from speakers. Dabi sat up on the couch to investigate and spied the master of the house herself hunched over a desk in her office. She was examining a pair of expensive-looking headphones with unusually jerky movements and was wearing her famous bodysuit, so Dabi gathered she'd fallen asleep over work. Given the villain hadn't seen her in several days, he couldn't help but feel amused exasperation. Maeve had been fully serious when she proclaimed her solution of stopping sleeping entirely.

"But I don't own a single gun"

She glanced up and their equally bloodshot, exhausted eyes met.

"It's two in the afternoon, fuck's sake," Maeve snapped over strumming guitar. Instead of his usual sarcastic reply about hypocrisy, Dabi just raised his hands in surrender and avoided eye contact. His head was spinning so much from shock after the dream he could barely think straight. The villain just couldn't overlay the nightmare consciousness he'd just experienced with the usual cheeky girl sitting in front of him. He'd never seen her in a bodysuit and lab coat in person before. It gave her an edge of authority that was a far cry from the bloodied shirt of their first encounter.  

Maeve gathered up the sea of documents on her desktop into a manila folder and closed it into a waiting filing cabinet, which clanged so loudly it worsened his growing headache. She then locked it and put the key around a chain on her neck. The show of defiance was amusing, even in his current state. Maeve had already worked out he was too lazy to confront her, especially physically, even if official information was on the line. He imagined her father wasn't quite as confident.

"I don't have a sweetheart yet
But if I did I'd break my neck"

"Where's the music coming from?" Dabi asked, needing to raise his voice slightly to be heard. Maeve hesitated fractionally, clearly torn about whether to even talk to him, then tapped her headphones.

"They're still playing and my mind's amplifying it in here. I'm not sure I can turn it off."

From her tone of voice and expression, it seemed like that was rather unfortunate on her part. Dabi found the music a bit grating but not awful, so just shrugged and got up to make himself coffee. He was stopped in his tracks when he glanced out the floor to ceiling windows.

They were floating hundreds of metres above the canopies he'd spied in his dreams.

"To please her, want to make her want stay
In my arms she'd rest
But I don't have a sweetheart yet"

The forest was so enormous he couldn't spy its edges. Dabi understood why: it exactly mirrored the vast sprawl of Maeve's subconscious. That didn't make the expanse any less staggering.

"Why are we above-" he asked, turning back to the desk where Maeve had been sitting, to catch a glimpse of her white coattails disappearing around the corner of her room.

Dabi chose to leave her alone and waded through already accumulated mess to the kitchen. He hit a jackpot of newly stocked food in the pantry and fridge so the burn victim helped himself.  Not eating properly in days left him wolfing down leftover noodles with the same desperation as members of the homeless community he'd exiled from under bridges.

"I can't believe what I found in daddy's
Sock drawer, sock drawer today"

Bizarre lyrics made Dabi wonder how things had gone between Maeve and Eraserhead. From the state of the apartment and her dishevelled appearance, however, he guessed not well. For the life of him, the villain didn't understand how she wasn't in the midst of a complete mental breakdown. Maeve clearly relied on work as a distraction from her trauma. Dabi could relate to that.