Chapter Text
Bad news from the zones, tumbleweeds. It looks like Jet Star and the Kobra Kid had a clap with an Exterminator that went all Costa Rica, and uh… got themselves ghosted.
The words weren’t even all the way out of the old patched-together radio on the windowsill before Poison was on his feet, jacket in hand.
“Stay here,” he said before Ghoul had moved a muscle.
“Like hell!” Ghoul shot back, swiping his mask off the back of the chair where he’d left it.
“Stay here and protect the Girl!” Ghoul could hear the panic bubbling beneath Poison’s voice, could see his hands shaking as he fumbled for the keys.
“I’m coming, too!” the Girl protested, voice sharp.
“It’s too dangerous!” he snapped.
“Poison.”
Ghoul waited until Poison met his gaze.
“We’re better together,” he said. “Safer.”
A strangled sound of frustration crawled up Poison’s throat.
“Fine. But we go now -- they could still be alive.”
Ghoul swallowed his own doubt and nodded. He guessed it was possible, but… well, Dr. Death Defying had never been wrong before.
The three of them piled into the Trans Am. Ghoul offered to drive, but Poison insisted, which meant that Ghoul was going to have to find a different outlet for the fear coursing through his veins.
He reached for the radio and cranked the volume up as loud as it would go.
The engine roared to life the second the Girl had put her seatbelt on, Poison’s foot lead on the pedal as he steered a course for Route Guano. Poison had said that this would be dangerous, but Ghoul doubted that he was really prepared for something like an ambush; when Kobra was in danger, Poison didn’t think about anything else. That was alright for now, though. Ghoul would just have to keep both eyes open.
It wasn’t long before Draculoid bodies started turning up, stark white (with splashes of brilliant red) against the monotonous tan of the desert. So Dr. D had been right about one thing: the clap.
“Shit,” Poison spat, just loud enough to be heard over the electric guitar roaring from the speakers. He thumped the heel of one hand into the steering wheel. “Shit, shit, shit. An Exterminator, he said. Nothing about the handful of fucking Dracs.”
Ghoul’s hands curled into fists on his lap, a sick sort of ache tightening his chest. He felt more than heard the Girl say his name through the music that filled the small car. When he turned to face her she was holding out her hand. He took it and gave it a strong squeeze.
An anguished noise from Poison pulled Ghoul’s attention back through the windshield to a spot of darkness in the distance contrasting with the Drac corpses that surrounded it. As they got closer Ghoul could see the charred remains of a motorcycle, as well as the modified American flag shouting from the back of the figure sprawled beside it. He felt his throat tighten.
“Jet,” he whispered. The Girl’s grip on his hand tightened so that it was painful.
The Trans Am skidded to a halt once they’d gotten within a few yards of the bike, and no sooner was the car in park than the three of them were bursting from its doors, Poison and the Girl running full tilt toward Jet Star, Ghoul taking up the rear and keeping an eye on their surroundings, gun in hand.
Only once he was absolutely sure that no one was approaching them on any side of the expansive desert did Ghoul join Poison and the Girl, and even once he had knelt beside them he continued to glance up periodically to ensure that no one got the jump on them.
Poison had turned Jet onto his back and had removed his helmet. He was checking his pulse, but Ghoul could see already that there was no point. His entire torso was dark with blood. He was dust.
“Fuck,” Ghoul said thickly, turning away. It was one thing knowing that you and all your friends were going to die young; everyone out in the zones knew that. But what could prepare you for seeing the empty shell of someone you grew up with lying motionless on the dry, cracked earth? And when that someone was Jet, who had brought such a quiet balance to the chaos of the zones? Ghoul squeezed his eyes shut and resisted the urge to scream, long and loud, into the poisonous sky.
Once he was sure that he wasn’t going to totally lose it (not yet, anyway), he glanced up at the other two.
The Girl had her wide eyes fixed on Jet’s face, slack and pale. He was the first of the Killjoys that she had really warmed up to on that very first day, the day she found them. The rest of them had been arguing about whether she was safer with Dr. D at the station or with them in the Trans Am. Jet had sat beside her on the ground with a piece of string and offered to teach her Cat’s Cradle. From then on there had been an ease between them that she hadn’t really had with any of the others. Ghoul could see that tears had gathered in her eyes, but she stubbornly refused to let them fall, screwing up her mouth with the effort.
Poison was holding Jet’s helmet, hugging it tightly to his chest. He met Ghoul’s eyes with a beseeching look that struck him as painfully childlike. Ghoul looked away again, swallowing past a click in his throat.
“Come on,” he said. “We gotta burn ‘im.”
Poison blinked back to himself at that, his equilibrium returning with the reminder that there were things they could do, things they needed to do.
“Quickly,” he said, pulling himself to his feet. “Then we gotta go find the Kid. He could still be -- he could still --”
He couldn’t seem to finish the sentence this time.
“We’ll find him,” Ghoul promised. “Right after we get Jet on his way to the Phoenix Witch.”
Poison nodded, taking a deep breath and then exhaling. As long as he felt like he was accomplishing something, he would be more or less alright. It was only once he was idle, Ghoul knew, that the hopelessness would begin to seep in, and he meant to put that off for as long as he could.
They spared what gasoline they could and tossed a match to their fallen comrade. Poison kept his bandanna, though, to drop by the Witch’s box later. They watched him burn for as long as they felt was right. Then they went back to the Trans Am and continued down the Getaway Mile in search of the Kobra Kid.
Poison pushed the pedal into the floor as if frustrated that it didn’t go down further, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. Ghoul stared hard out the windshield, grief boiling in his stomach in spite of the music he tried to drown it in. A glance into the rearview mirror revealed that the Girl had finally surrendered to the tears she’d held back earlier; Ghoul reached his hand back to her without turning around, and she clutched it like a vice.
Soon, however, evidence of the clap dwindled and then disappeared without any sign of the Kobra Kid or his bike. They drove until they almost hit Battery City, until Ghoul began to vaguely worry about how much gas they had left. But there was nothing. Ghoul finally turned the music down.
“Where the hell is he?” he murmured. He turned to Poison, who looked like he was going to be sick.
“Maybe he went back,” he suggested, voice tight. “Maybe -- maybe we just missed him.” Ghoul shook his head.
“We would’ve passed him,” he said. “Hell, we would’ve seen something. Do you think maybe he --?”
“There!” the Girl shouted suddenly from the back.
Poison hit the brakes so hard it was a wonder no one got whiplash. The Girl was out of the car before both Killjoys, sprinting toward a glint far to their right. As they got closer, Ghoul felt his stomach drop. It was Kobra’s helmet, the words GOOD LUCK shouting up at them from the visor.
When they reached it, panting, there was a moment when no one seemed to know what to do. They just stood around it, staring numbly at the yellow helmet with its cheerful painted eyes, unsure whether this was cause for hope or despair.
It was Poison who broke their paralysis, bending to pick up his brother’s helmet. He turned it over in his hands. When he looked inside it through the bottom, he froze.
“What?” Ghoul asked. “What is it?”
Instead of answering, Poison reached his hand inside and pulled out a slip of paper emblazoned with B.L.I.’s logo.
“What’s it say?” the Girl asked, voice small.
Again, Poison didn’t seem able to answer. As his eyes scanned the note, however, Ghoul saw his bottom lip trying not to quiver.
“Poison,” he said.
Poison took a deep, shaking breath, and then recited:
“‘The Kobra Kid won’t be needing this mask anymore. We’ve --” His voice broke. He swallowed and continued. “We’ve given him a new one that fits quite nicely.’”
Something like vertigo washed through Ghoul’s veins.
“No,” he breathed.
“What?” The Girl was turning frightened eyes from one to the other of them. “What do they mean, what did they do?”
“They, um.” Ghoul took a deep breath in through his nose. Because she deserved to know, but he wasn’t sure if he could say it. He exhaled and knelt so that their eyes were level. “You know those masks the Draculoids wear?”
The Girl nodded slowly, cautiously, as if suddenly she didn’t want to hear this after all.
“Well, see. The Dracs, they were regular people once, you know? But when someone puts one of those masks on you --”
“You lose your soul,” Poison cut across him, voice dark. “You lose your fucking soul.”
“Poise --”
“So you’d better be fucking worth it,” Poison continued, ignoring Ghoul and addressing the Girl with tears standing in his eyes. “You’d better burn Bat City to the fucking ground.”
“Poison.” Ghoul stood then, placing a hand on his friend’s shoulder and lowering his voice so that the Girl couldn’t hear him. “You can’t say shit like that to h--”
“THEY TOOK MY BROTHER!” Poison yanked himself from Ghoul’s grip and then gave him a hard shove, face twisted with grief. “MY BROTHER, MY KID, AND THEY MADE HIM -- they --!”
He lost the rest of that sentence to sobs. He sank to his knees and curled in on himself, head in his hands.
For a moment, Ghoul and the Girl could only watch through some kind of grief-stricken paralysis as Party Poison, their fearless leader, wept into the baking desert for the brother he had spent his life trying to save.
It was the Girl who moved first, approaching Poison slowly, as if he were an animal that might bite. Carefully, she placed a small hand on his shoulder. In a swift movement, Poison pulled her into a hug.
“I’m sorry,” he croaked into her curls. “I’m so sorry, sweetie, I shouldn’t -- I didn’t mean that, what I said, okay? I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she said, squeezing him back with all her might. And she said it again, and again, and again, holding him tightly and rubbing his back while he cried, being the grown-up for a little bit so that he could be the child.
She lifted her head after a moment to check on Ghoul, who had succumbed to his own tears in the meantime. Solemnly, she reached for him.
“Come on,” she said. “You, too.”
With a gusty sigh, Ghoul knelt and joined his remaining companions, wrapping a strong arm around each of them, leaning his head against Poison’s and trying not to think too hard about how small his family was now. He tried, instead, to focus on what was in front of him, what he was lucky enough to still have: Party Poison, who had shown him the colors and given him a direction in which to fight, and the Girl, the embodiment of hope, who time and time again showed him how much more there was to bravery than exposing oneself to danger. He squeezed them tighter. He had lost so much, and it hurt like hell, but he still had a lot to hold onto.
He couldn’t have said how long they stayed this way, only that it was a distant rumble of thunder that finally pulled them back to the real world.
“C’mon,” Poison said thickly, pulling himself away and dragging his sleeves across his cheeks as he glanced up at the darkening sky. “We gotta get home.”
Ghoul nodded, scooping the Girl up into his arms; it had been a hard day on all of them, but she was just a kid, after all. She gratefully looped her arms around his neck and rested her head against his shoulder.
This time, when Ghoul offered to drive, Poison nodded without even looking up. The Girl was already sleeping by the time they reached the Trans Am; Ghoul buckled her into the back seat before taking the keys from Poison. About five minutes of driving later (with no music this time), Poison was knocked out, too.
And Ghoul made a promise driving into the gathering storm, one that he repeated in his mind every time he turned a glance on the passenger’s seat or shot a look into the rearview mirror.
I’m not letting you go, he thought, over and over and over. I’m not letting either of you go without one hell of a fight.