Roll it up and smoke it again

For a man who is so obsessed with the thought of being hard-boiled that he’ll rent Mark of the Killer from the video store, at first glance you can’t really call him that. You can see him screaming and crying, flying like a bat out of hell out of a situation he’s nosed his way into, cursing and regretting it. Badou shrieks, he shits, he smokes and delivers that well needed comic relief to a gang of depressing killers. When he isn’t screaming, he’s rather aloof, laid back and jaded, nearly to the point of being apathetic. He isn’t afraid to tell it like it is, despite how untactful it may be. But he does have tact, probably. Somewhere. And that might have been it, if his screen time remains as it is. Badou is a man of a tiring regimen of contradiction: ‘save for the future’ (there is hope) in the same place as ‘the entire city is full of trash’ (acceptance that things are The Way They Are). Badou is a realist above all else. Unlike his older brother who was always looking for a story to make it big, to break the mold, Badou knows with stunning clarity that change cannot come from one person. He lives his life desperately, from job to job and paycheck to paycheck, precisely because of this. Water is wet, crime pays, and he’s got to put food on his table. Despite how hysterical he is, he lives with realistic values: food, cigarettes, money, and emergency counter-measures. (In canon his place of residence has never been shown—now this might just be because of lack of screen time, but even Naoto’s old residence and Heine’s have been shown. Badou appears to be the type of guy who doesn’t want people knowing where he lives, and it makes sense with how many goons go after ‘Eyepatch’) He is paranoid and has lost his trust (in the way things Are that couldn’t happen to him and Dave, in the untouchableness that comes with youth, in the aftermath) in what he knows, has painted his own life over into some shadow out of necessity and yet-- A paranoid guy should probably make for a complete jerk, someone stony and stingy and cares not for anyone in this world. But Badou has clients, contacts, allies. For someone who doesn’t trust as far as he can throw someone, trusts the facts, he says, of a man who is nothing but a prickly pear: he’s only human. Of a young woman who seeks revenge and herself: can’t you do any normal girl stuff. He’s terrified of so many things, cowardly to a fault, but he isn’t terrified to know people, to read them and learn them. When he isn’t the punchline, Badou can be a downright friendly guy. As crass and disgusting and whiny and obnoxious as he is, he has his charm. It's in the way he laughs way too loudly and talks crassly about things no one wants to hear, in the way he briskly tells Heine the kids they had freed wouldn’t have their hands held but they’d tough out the future. In the way he doesn’t sugarcoat anything. In the way he brazenly says he won’t put his nose into anyone’s business but tries so hard to steer everyone else out of the way of the underground mystery. Badou gives free candy to kids that come into his part-time job with their moms for shopping, he HAS a part-time job; Badou functions as a (very broken) member of society. He has carved out this future he has claimed he’s removed from his past, from the learner’s fee of his brother’s story. As a child, it's clear he looked up to his brother, quietly took in his lectures and (ill-advised) advice, and as an adult, he claims to be different than him. Perhaps unbeknownst to him, he’s taken on a few of Dave’s habits, such as his recklessness and impulsiveness, jobs that might get him killed, cigarettes, and being chased by goons. Badou is a man that cannot escape the past, and though he claims otherwise (‘he was useless, I was always better without him [Dave]’ and ‘I won’t be like you’) he runs straight at it. He is a man frozen in time; he still looks for his brother though he faults him for his fall into the abyss. (He hasn't even cut his hair in 7 years, time has trapped him here) He functions and goes through the motions, creates this life, but he is still searching for answers he couldn’t grasp as a kid. He is a walking contradiction, and what he says doesn’t often match up with what he does. In these claims, he often says he doesn’t take on jobs that could be dangerous and get him killed, but that’s overwhelmingly untrue—the reasoning behind these, however, isn’t to make the world a better place. He isn’t a hero and he doesn’t pretend to be. He is, however, sympathetic. More often than not the times he does ‘take out the trash’ of his city it’s by accident or via a job. He claims he isn’t looking for his brother, or revenge, but when faced with his killer he comes out guns blazing. Comedic relief, danger zone, complete train wreck: Badou is all of these things, and definitely stupidly foolhardy, but he quickly determines wild ways to get himself out of situations. Get bombarded by goons of a wounded gangster? Kick and throw furniture on them, barring their path to his behind. Badou could have been left as comedic relief, as the occasional voice of reason and danger in the throngs of the plot, but over all else, he’s damn interesting and damnably annoying, too much to ignore. And above everything else he’s compelling. And squeezed in there: he knows things the others don't.

Between squabbling nations and the ever-present and hungry race to the top, humanity has phone lines that reach space, have been able to make ‘sex dolls’ in the form of beings with DNA spliced between animal and human, and a government whose leader they’ve never seen. Their sacrifices have been their dignity, their safety, and even their children. Especially their children. In a world where power-hungry, agenda fueled people have robbed the Earth of four seasons, Badou was raised presumably by his older brother Dave. Within 100 plus chapters of the manga their parents have never been mentioned, and Dave is at least eight or more years older than Badou, thus it isn’t a stretch to assume the older Nails has raised him from a young age. For many years it was just Dave and Badou, the Nails brothers; Badou can attest to more or less being responsible for both of them when it comes to the more realistic issues, from bills to household chores to sewing up underwear. Dave was a freelance journalist who, like this brother in a few years, sniffed at trouble until it snapped back at his heels, had a knack for trouble and goon throw downs, and caged cigarettes just as badly. The two of them scrapped to get by, (Badou would later complain how Dave couldn’t even do one household chore, thus he shouldered the responsibility), riding on the coattails of the justice Dave would discover in that seedy city. Badou, like many young boys in the face of an older, cool sibling, followed at Dave’s heels and picked up many’a thing about the city he ran around in. When Dave discovered too much in the serial missing person’s case (strange soldiers dressed in black who wielded katanas were seen in the area at the time of each crime) he was murdered. Badou in turn received a very steep learners fee in the form of the scar on his right hand and the removal of his right eye. That was 7 years pre-canon, and in that time he’s had to fend for himself. He’s made a reputation for himself not just as an information broker for the highest bidder, but also as a private investigator and hired gun. Despite his efforts to stay away from cases and information that could get him killed again, Badou finds himself drawn into the underground, a rumored ‘underneath the underneath’. Beneath this city lies a deeper, much darker swirl of political sandtraps, a genetically engineered kindergarten of children forced to kill and never to die, the laughter of one mad, mad woman, and most importantly, the answers Badou is looking for. Too bad for him he’s once again bitten off more than he can chew. The good news is, this time he isn’t alone: he’s got a crew, tangled together in this web, who are good at taking on the leftovers.

INVENTORY ITEM #1. Cigarettes

INVENTORY ITEM #2. 2 Ingram MAC 10 pistols