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Camu Camu	By : TalaXRei Category: +A through F > Crash Bandicoot Views: 634 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Crash Bandicoot, nor the characters from it. I do not make money from the writing of this story. Crash Bandicoot and its respective characters are (c) to Naughty Dog and Sony. D'Enfer and Dazzle (c) R. Kinghorn.

Chapter List
- 1-Chapter One
- 2-Chapter Two
- 1
- 2
—Day 0—

I remember the day of the collision as if it were hours old. I had begged him to wait for me, told him I would go with him and told him that I refused to stay here. I was three minutes away, two minutes, one minute as I sprinted through the dark corridors of the compound for all I was worth, high heels pounding the aluminium with all the elegance of a brick hitting concrete and arms pumping as my constrained lungs screamed for the breath they could not draw. I panted like a true animale, ignoring the pain that shot through my legs. I raced to be there for him. But I’d been a second too late. I should have known that when he stopped responding on the radio. As much as I loved him, and I did more than anything, Cortex was a stubborn man. Restless from being bested at every turn and craving nothing but to exact the revenge that was so close at hand in that moment, he had gone it alone, save for the five wooden Loa and Crunch to support him. He had left me behind, and all I could do was watch the security feed which streamed from up aboard the space station from down here on Earth, and pray the result would be the one we had wanted.

      D’Enfer gazed ahead in utter silence, her eyes wide and glassy with unadulterated suspense as they flicked back and forth between the giant, glowing radar and the frizzy security footage on the smaller one to its right. She could feel them turning square in their sockets and beginning to itch from the effort to keep them focused, but she didn’t dare to blink in case she missed anything.

      I drowned in my adrenaline. It pumped through me with savage ferocity as if its intention was to break free of me, yet I cannot recall how my heart had managed to stay in the cage of my chest in spite of smashing against them in contumacy.

      N Labs’ master engineer, Gin, was sat in front of the console at her side. His shouting and hollering was an energised violence that filled the foul-smelling air of his small and dank workroom. He behaved as if he were in attendance of a football match or watching wrestling; the vigour he displayed as he cheered, bouncing about in the chair and pumped his balled fists wildly upwards at absolutely nothing was not like anything she had seen from the erratic doctor before. His usual demeanour was tame in comparison, and that was saying something. The chequered missile lodged deep in his skull wavered to and fro, like a withered flame, its thick plume of ebony smog left heavily curled trails in its wake. Usually D’Enfer would have found his loutish behaviour just that, or obnoxious or amusing, or even over the top. He usually was in one way or another. But no, not this time. Gin was giving Cortex every trace of strength he had in him to let his master know he was supported - despite it being largely insane prattle and unheeded by the parties aboard the station.

      “You got it! C’mon! Doc-tor Cor-tex! Doc-tor Cor-tex! Beat that disgusting bandicoot to a ginger smoothie and eat him with cheese!” Then, to himself, he muttered, “Fourth time lucky, it’s gonna be fourth time lucky!” He twisted his ugly, steel-sheathed face toward D’Enfer for the first time since she’d come bursting into the office, his mismatched eyes almost feral in the light of the console. He peeled his cracked lips back and offered the mutant the most disturbing of smiles and jabbed a gnarled, gloved finger at the screen. “See that?”

      D’Enfer followed his finger, in time to watch a resolute-looking Crunch hurl a great handful of ardent flame at Crash Bandicoot running about on the platform below him. Beside him was Doctor Cortex. Like a flower, her lips parted but she said nothing in reply. “See it? Take a goooood long look, dollface because the master’s got this, you watch! You watch! He’s gonna do it this time!” He laughed, the sound nothing short of maniacal. “Doctor Cortex has been slaaaaving away in his lab for months working on this ripped rodent! With Uka Uka and the other lumps of firewood there to back him up and charge that rat like a battery, there’s no way he’s going down this time! No way. Nada!”

      She didn’t even spare Gin a glance as he went back to his caterwauling, rolling her dry lips together subconsciously to wet them. Her gaze didn’t leave Neo, transfixed to his dwarven shape as he sprinted around the grated balcony of the control centre, his faithful plasma pistol clutched in both hands. Internally she cheered him on, prayed for him, wished him every mote of fortune the world could ever promise; vastly contrary to Gin but no less sincere or intense. This was the first time she had ever witnessed the doctor do battle with the legendry Crash Bandicoot, and it wasn’t even in person, for that she was still bitter. She knew in the past he had done this but as the first time, her hopes ran high, rampant and full. She felt excitement tear through her throat and chest like a tempest, watching the man she loved get knocked to the ground like a maimed stag over and over and over again and struggle to his trembling feet, his haggard face striped with blood break and twist into a wild snarl, refusing the defeat with admirable, unwavering mettle.

      Win. Please, win.

      “C’mon baby,” she finally whispered. The rich tone of her voice touched her own ears as a faraway echo from a dream. “C’mon, you have this...”

      Neo had worked on Crunch since she had started at N. Labs, maybe even before that. He had pushed himself mentally to exhaustion every day for hours upon hours. She couldn’t count the times she had found him, collapsed at his desk with a disorderly stack of paperwork as his pillow, all the coffee in the world unable to help him. He had become emaciated, reduced to a bleary-eyed, nocturnal creature that functioned on little patience and nonexistent sanity, and all to see this agenda come to fruition. N. Gin was right, and she knew it. But she also knew this particular fight was a matter of considerable dignity to Cortex. He never concerned himself with anyone’s opinion on what he did in regards to himself nor his creations. He didn’t care for criticism, speculation or the moral principles of others. He didn’t care for anyone ordinarily, but he had cared to make an impression on Uka Uka. The demonic Loa had lost faith quickly in Cortex, and subsequently the entire laboratory. It had raised questions amongst the doctors and mutants, questions that had caught the voodoo god’s notice. All of this was to restore credibility as a leader, an aide and an inventor. A lot rode on this for him.

      But history repeats itself.
      The security footage was the first thing to die.

      Cortex had managed to drag himself to his feet once again, clinging to the now-broken railing as if it might escape him. He was looking increasingly—and alarming—fagged and thrashed, their battleground reduced to a wreck of fragmented metal and bare, fizzing wiring hanging from every crevice like makeshift garlands. The screen rippled, crackled and turned black with a sudden, piercing pop. D’Enfer’s stomach plummeted into her tiny feet. She snapped her eyes to the radar. The large blinking dot of lime green, a little off to the right that signalled the space station’s presence, was still there. But it did not bring her solace or relief. It was torture, torture after seeing what she had seen. And what she had seen did not look promising.

      This fear, I remember thinking. This fear had no place inside me. It was unannounced and gnarly. Until this moment, I dare say I had feared nothing.

      “Cosa? Gin, what happened?” She flittered her hand toward the console frantically as if trying to shoo something irritable away from her. “What did you do? Get it back! Get it back! Get it back now!”

      “I didn’t do anything! I’ll try! Just - gimme a second...!” The cyborg’s hands raced over the intricate console like a flight of wild fowl, snapping various buttons and switches left and right and centre and bringing up folders and root files, his head bobbing up and down to check if his piffling about garnered any result on the screen. Nothing. D’Enfer swallowed, the spindly fingers on the back of his chair curled tightly into the worn leather, threatening to puncture it like a ripe fruit. “I-I can’t!” he stammered despairingly. “It’s a fault on the station, not with us! Something’s happened and—“

      The blinking dot then gave out, dying suddenly like a star. It vanished, and so did the beeping with it. Silence, a deep and uncomfortable silence fell over the workroom like a blanket of frost. D’Enfer and Gin stayed cloaked beneath it for what felt like an eternal moment, both staring at the rotating hand of the radar as it hunted for the signal, waiting to see if communication would re-establish. But it found naught.

      “It’s gone,” she heard him murmur quietly, his voice taking a second to reach her through the white noise in her mind. She slowly looked to him. “It’s gone. It’s over. Something—”

      Without warning, D’Enfer’s right hand flashed across. Her knuckles came into contact with his cheekbone. A wet crack filled the air. Gin swore in pain and cupped his face, toppling from his seat like a coconut in a shie. Before he’d even hit the cold, filth-strewn sheet-metal, she was in the chair. Her hands flew over the keys. Her work as an intelligencer left her absent from the lab most of the year, but operating the security console when she was had given her the expertise she needed to know the system. She brought up the folder that harboured all the camera feeds aboard the space station. It was the exact same one Gin had just ransacked.

      Looking back I never doubted Signor Gin knew what he was doing. I tried nothing he hadn’t. He was a creep beyond comparison but is still one of the most intelligent men I knew. I just didn’t want to believe that was it.

      “I told you D, I tried that!” he complained, rubbing his face and sitting on the floor reminiscent of some unsightly garden gnome. “They’re all dead! Every. Single. One!”

      Her eyes raced across the encoded list, trying to find the control centre’s camera roster. “Shut up.”

      “It’s something up on the ship! Got nothing to do with our system!”

      “Shut up!” she snapped.

      He threw his hands in the air and rolled his eyes upward, as if beseeching some unknown force in the sky to give him strength, or strike her with a giant surge of lightning and consequentially make his life easier.

      D’Enfer found what she was looking for and clicked through each one of the cameras, and each one sank a knife dripping with disquiet into her back, stabbing her over and over with a growing sensation of icy dread as they all displayed the same, monotonous message.

      CAM036: ERROR – UNAVAILABLE
      CAM037: ERROR – UNAVAILABLE
      CAM038: ERROR – UNAVAILABLE
      CAM039: ERROR – UNAVAILABLE

      He pulled himself to his feet with a grunt of considerable effort, the rocket in his skull still wobbling like a grisly banner. He gripped the arm of the chair for leverage and joined her at her side, hand still clasped to his throbbing cheek.

      “There’s no way it would just fall from the sky,” she demanded. “So how? What happened?”

      “I don’t know!” replied Gin defensively. The master engineer was all too accustomed to being blamed for mishaps and issues that were not his fault, and quite frequently grovelled for forgiveness and accepted the blame nonetheless, but for D’Enfer. She wasn’t Cortex. She wasn’t even human. “Many reasons given how fucked that control centre looked.” He lifted the hand from his face and waved it angrily toward the screen. The flesh just over the apple of his cheek was bruising already, peeping in and out of view from behind the tails of his fringe. “You saw it, didn’t you? Wanna take a guess?! It’s probably as good as mine.”

      She ignored him. “Did that brainless creature do something? Is he dead?” she murmured to herself more then to Gin as her mind ran a thousand miles a minute, alluding to Crash. “What about the elementals? What about... Apetta—!”

      The dark weight lifted from her shoulders as if it had been momentarily forgotten. She stood from the chair, idly stalking off a little ways into the untouched reaches of darkness skirting the edges of the small room. She thumbed the earpiece atop of her head, missing the button the first time, so shaken were her fingers. Gin narrowed his eyes, but didn’t quiz her, returning to his vacated seat with a huff and continued to examine the data from the station.

      She listened to the receiver beep slowly, periodic like a heartbeat, as it tried to patch her through. The automated voice told her that the person she wished to reach was out of service range, so she tried again, and again. Her breast heaved as the arachnid of fear spun a thick web in her throat that caught all other rational emotions. Did he get caught in the collision too? Just as she was about to give in, the beeping stopped, and she heard the click of the receiver as it engaged. Her eyes shone. “Crunch? Crunch? Come in. It’s D’Enfer. Mi caro, are you there? It’s an emergency, respond.”

      The abiding silence continued for a moment more, torturous. She strained her ear, trying to pick up any telltale sign he was there like breathing or surrounding noise. Just when she thought it was a technical fault or was a dead line, his gravelly voice came from down the end. He sounded wooden and uncharacteristically detached. D’Enfer didn’t think anything of it.

      Perhaps I should have addressed that immediately.

      “Sup, Red?”

      She heaved a sigh of relief, rubbing at the tension that had polluted her graceful features. Oh, thank god! “Crunch - what happened? We were watching the feed form the here and everything just died on us.”

      “Yeah, place got wreeecked.”

      “So I understand. Dottor Cortex - where is he? Is he safe? Is he with you?”

      “With me? Uhhhh no?” The cutting edge his voice adopted was as sharp as a whetted blade and dripped with the same mockery she had only ever heard him use when addressing the Bandicoots. Something didn’t seem... right.

      “Then where is he?”

      “Well, I got picked up by the Bandicoot kids so, I’m all safe and sound in their rocket ship – thanks for askin’ by the way, you’re a fuckin’ star. As for Cortex? Dunno. Last I saw him he was up on the space station with Uka Uka, y’know, crashing to earth at’a breakneck speed and looking pretty wack. I dunno where it’s gonna crash but, boy, it’ll make one hell of a mess when it does.”

      The chokehold of horror took her speck of hope by the neck as she listened to him and crushed it to stardust, the remnants evaporating. It was like he was speaking in tongues; using a barbarian language lost to time she didn’t understand. But the coldness of reality crashed upon her like a wave upon the shore, even though she clung to the shred of disbelief. D’Enfer’s voice cracked, fractured by the sudden eruption of blazing rage. “You left him to die? How could you! W-Why would you? What would possess you to do that?!”

      She heard the snarl in the male bandicoot’s voice, and could picture with ease the black look on his chiselled visage. “Hey—we did this place a favour! You have any idea what he’s done to me, to us, to this planet?”

      “He’s the only reason you’re even alive, you miserable—!”

      “Slaves, Red!” he cut in. “Slaves and experiments, objects to shove needles in to and watch the results! That’s all we ever were to these chumps, it’s all we’ll ever be.” He paused, his breathing betraying his mounting temper. “You think they care about us, beyond what they can take from us, what they can steal from us? You need to wake the fuck up and fast.”

      “How dare you,” she hissed.

      “Seriously? When did you suddenly become a Saint, huh? You kill people, innocent people and for a lot less, and why? Just because the good ol’ doctor you’re thirsting over snaps his fingers? You weren’t even stuck in that goddamn machine like the rest of us and you still can’t see you’re brainwashed to shit. So don’t you get mad at me for waking up, for really waking up! You should be thanking me...”

      She inhaled, willing the rare anger that had raised its head to heel at her command like a lowly dog. D’Enfer scarcely got angry. She could count the occurrences she had gotten this angry on one hand. But this stirred a lot more then anger. “Sí. And I do thank you. You’ve given me a reason to hunt you, finally.”

      “Oh, please.”

      “As a defector, you’ve breached your terms of service with N. Labs. You’re now mine. And I promise you, bello, I’ll come for you.”

      “I’m shakin’ in my goddamn sneakers, sugar.” He gave a small, surly laugh but she discerned the trace of uneasiness stitched into it like gilded thread. Crunch knew her. He had assisted her on operations and been her partner since his induction into Cortex’s defence force. He knew no one escaped her. She was incredibly good at her job and always got her target. He knew that there was a very real chance she’d come for him and garrotte him with his own laces. “Good talk. See ya around, babe.”

      And with that, he hung up, leaving her in the gloom of Gin’s workshop with a myriad of thoughts she was trying to but couldn’t process. She swallowed uncomfortably, and felt nothing of reassurance inside her. So that was it? Crunch had betrayed N. Labs on the verge of victory, they had lost one of their most valuable and state-of-the-art foxholes, Uka Uka was god-knew-where and Cortex had been defeated.

      Non. Not defeated. Killed.
      In defeat, one had the opportunity to come back. But Neo was not coming back.

      She blinked furiously, face devoid of sensation, and turned back toward the radar. Gin quickly twisted his head away, trying to seem as if he had not been eavesdropping in on her call but wasn’t fast enough. He already knew what the outcome was, she reminded herself. The silence therefore was miasma of awkwardness.

      He hoisted a shoulder. “Hey, if it makes a difference—”

      “If you say “I told you so”, I swear to god I will shoot you in the kneecap.”

      “Actually, I was gonna say this is, like, the fourth time we’ve done this. Seriously, don’t sweat it. You, ehhhhh, you get used to it. The crippling failure, the treachery, random members of our staff going suspiciously missing for days on end after... It’s not so bad.”

      D’Enfer crossed her arms beneath her breasts. The motion made her look vulnerable, not self-assured. She hated that. “How can you be so nonchalant about this?”

      Gin profoundly rolled his eyes again in their gaunt sockets. “Like I just said lady, I’m used to it. This is the second spacecraft crash the master has been in. He’s survived falling to earth from tremendous heights without turning in a red mist a few times now. I honestly wouldn’t worry about it. And hey – he’s with Uka Uka. He’s got the freakin’ king of magic masks with him. He’ll be fiiiiine!”

      She didn’t know if Gin was trying to—albeit atrociously—reassure her by explaining that he had been in this set of unfortunate circumstances before and had come through it but from where D’Enfer was sitting, and her personal experiences, people did not get up from something like this. She wilted her head and mercifully hidden from her colleague’s piggish gaze by the dark curls that cascaded to veil her face, she cried, for the first time ever. The tears came, hot and saline and to no end. It was not just for Neo she cried, but for the fact his hard work had gone to such waste. Even the loss of her partner was a blow to the company, and not to mention Uka Uka... She remained quiet, sobbing in utter silence, curling her long, ruby nails into the soft fur of her upper arms and into the flesh beneath, as if physical pain could quell the psychological one that ravaged her at this moment. Least, physical pain she knew how to tend. She sucked in a sharp, wet sniff. Gin sat there, awkwardly watching her for a moment. He loathed these situations, women as a whole spectrum and mutants. He pulled a hideous face of uncertainty but had the good sense not to try and touch her.

      “Ehhhhhh - I give it a month. Honestly. He’ll be back. A month is, what— four weeks? Four weeks, and he’ll come waltzing through that door, totally fine, already armed with a new and brilliant idea to get us all started on. Trust me. I know this guy, and we’ll be laughing about it.”
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