Chapter Text
25 Days
Floating.
Party Poison is cold and blind and infinitely more aware of their body as a THING than they have ever been in their life.
First—infinitesimally tiny sensations in their smallest toes. Not a twitch or a wiggle, just a little jolt of energy shooting down through the joints. Up in their head, they have a head, they can picture where their toenails fall in space. They have the impression that a few minutes ago, they wouldn’t have been able to do that.
Goosebumps dimpling along their skin. They’re not shivering even though it feels like they’re laying directly on a slab of ice, so they’re either so frozen shivering won’t do any good, or too weak for even involuntary movements—neither of which are great options.
Their arms lie flat at their sides, fingers brushing against bare thighs under some sort of cloth—maybe a sheet. It’s rough. Dry.
Then there’s this—either there’s nothing to see, or they aren’t able to see whatever there is around them. They can feel their eyes rock back and forth in the sockets, but it’s gritty and shadowed and feels more like it’s tugging deep at their brain than stretching outward to the world beyond.
There’s a flash of memory—curly hair, steady hands, a piece of dark fabric over a ruined eye. But it’s gone as quickly as it came.
They try to picture the last thing they laid eyes on. Brilliant figures of glaring white, glowing so bright they burned their retinas away? Were they a punishment or a salvation, these visions? Were there tears of blood on their cheeks as they fell forward into the dust and knew no more?
Or was it something mundane—like scorpions, stabbing into their face and laying eggs in their empty sockets as they slept. They used to worry about things like that, they think, in the early days. They remember thinking about it once or twice, at least.
The early days?
It’s so hard to remember that now.
It’s so much work to have THOUGHTS like this at all, to force their synapses to light up and connect when they really just want to fade to nothingness. It’s probably draining them of the little energy they have left, energy they need to crawl, to stand, to run. Surely they should be running? They should always be running. They remember running.
Unless the thing they should be running from already caught them, and what’s happening now is the aftermath.
There’s a horrible swooping sensation deep within them, in some middle region they haven’t yet identified, and it feels a lot like dread. Like thinking about something that they desperately don’t want to be true, but that despite it all they know is true anyway.
Distantly, they’re recognizing now what they must have known somewhere inside the whole time: that waking up dazed and disoriented means that there’s something excruciating and usually grotesque waiting for them in the land of the living. If the world gets sharper from here, it will also invariably get worse. And they’re no stranger to worse. But they don’t like it.
There go those racing thoughts again, conjuring up the most horrifying images behind the dark empty static in their head. It’s unnecessary, really. It won’t even help in the end.
Preserve your strength. Rest.
Maybe, though, the racing thoughts are actually a kindness—a distraction. Because finally, they realize the worst—their throat is on fire, and they can’t breathe.
They can’t breathe.
It feels like they’re choking and drowning all at once, something solid in their windpipe and liquid in their lungs. The solid is a knife, and the liquid is acid. They’re pretty sure, at least. It feels that way. They would be screaming, but they don’t have any air to make a sound.
They try to thrash. They can’t. Their upper arms are nailed to the ground, bones splitting open as they jerk and twist. Their anklebones are being pulled out of their sockets with a thick wet snap, like a snail from a shell.
It’s as incomprehensible as it is dazzling, the sheer violence contained in this forced stillness. The violence they remember is fast and loud and gritty, bursts of light and screeching brakes and bright colors and sweat and tears. RED.
It’s been so long they’ve almost forgotten the brutality that can hide a cold, sterile room. It’s all coming back, though. Because they know this suffering, too.
That’s not comforting to them. Not at all.
There are noises in the background now, muted, like they’re underwater—or behind a nice thick curtain before the start of a play. Rustling. Clicking.
They try to listen, although it’s still kind of news at this point that they even have ears. Everything muffled. Something’s ringing. If there was a wire stretching between their two eardrums through the center of their skull, it would be white-hot and razor sharp. They can feel the place where the pulses emanate, right in the middle.
Is that a shadow in an already-dark world? A soft touch amid all this agony?
They don’t want to be touched, even softly.
But they’re powerless against it.
Next thing they know there’s icy water inside them, flooding through their arm and spreading out under their skin until they slosh and bubble and the fire in their throat gets washed away in the waves.
They always thought drowning would be a miserable way to go. They’re like a cat, in a way—they’ve never liked being wet, fought it tooth and nail. But this is like a coveted drink on the most unbearably hot day, the kind that washes away sunburn and sand and sweat and everything in between. They chase the feeling to its limits until they fall into a churning abyss at the edge of the world.
CAR. CRASH. BODY. That’s what it’s like. Locked limbs. Metallic mouth. Schrödinger’s wreckage—where you can’t see what’s wrong and you don’t want to twist your head to find out. Is a pole through your abdomen really a pole through your abdomen until you look down and see it’s there? What about when your thighs are warm and wet and you’re thinking it’s probably pooling blood? Seeing is believing, after all. It’s only human to look away from the carnage when the carnage is your own.
Well. Party’s never had a pole through their abdomen, actually. Just a few blaster bolts, some skin-deep slices, a cute little switchblade stab. Black eyes. Cracked ribs. That’s all. But they’d imagine it’s like that, being impaled. They’ve drawn something like that, before, in a frantic sketchbook years ago—only it was through their chest, and it looked more like a stake.
Sometimes when you’re dreaming/hallucinating you’ve gotta adjust a little for believability. There are more poles than stakes in the desert, after all. More regular old corpses than vampires by far.
ANYWAY.
Killjoys are all fucking obsessed with car crashes. Party would think it’s hilarious honestly, because Killjoys are an eclectic bunch that don’t agree on much at all—so like, what the fuck?
Except, they’ve started to buy into all the hype, just a little, too.
It’s a little for the masochism, the freedom in the boneheaded recklessness of it all, and the rest for that unbeatable old Hollywood iconography. It’s very Grace Kelly. James Dean. Bonnie and Clyde. It’s all bare skin when they cut your shirt off to get to the damage, warm blood and flashing lights and pure overwhelming adrenaline.
It’s the crowd of people gathered round to look on and say, gosh, isn’t this all so tragically beautiful? as you take your final gasping breaths spread open in the dirt.
Killjoys (the monolith, this delicate union of disagreeable nonconformists) also love the idea of having an audience around to witness their demise. The Perfect Death Aftermath would include at least one fistfight over who gets to take your mask to the Mailbox. Letters would flow from admirers for weeks before somebody else got smeared across the pavement or stabbed at a rest stop and the whole damn herd moved on.
Party spent so much time back in the day thinking they’d die alone on a bathroom floor that they don’t actually waste a lot of braincells picturing the many hypotheticals that could prove personally fatal out here. They don’t have a “perfect death.” In their head these days, despite the close calls and the darkness in their past, they don’t think they’re destined to die at all. But going against the grain is in their nature, after all. The car crash thing, baffling as it is, is already one trend too many.
But oh, it’s a pretty one.
There’s also this, too, which might be a factor: Party and Ghoul meet in a car crash.
Well, not technically—they knew each other before. They circled around each other. Snapped at each other’s heels. But they didn’t trust each other until they had to drag each other through a sea of broken glass.
This was before the Trans Am, or at least before they (Ghoul) got it running. The poor hot-wired little Honda they veer off a cliff in the middle of a firefight with a couple of Scavs never drives again. Hell, it’s just a burned-out shell by the time they’re done with it.
Together, they could probably burn anything to the ground.
This is a good feeling.
They’re shouting at each other when it all goes belly-up. SHOUTING. It’s like this: Party isn’t driving steady enough for Ghoul to get a clear shot, and Ghoul isn’t picking off enough of them for Party to be able to stop swerving. They don’t even want to be out here alone together—Party wants their brother and Ghoul wants to be fifty miles away. They sleep at opposite ends of the motel they’re staying in, and Jet has to physically restrain one or the other without fail for them to get through an entire meal together. Previously, Ghoul has used Party’s favorite jeans as kindling and Party has shot clear through Ghoul’s one and only hat. It’s still up in the air as to whether they hit their target dead on, or missed their intended one by half an inch.
Ghoul’s eyes get all squinty when he yells. Party’s not looking at Ghoul’s eyes instead of the road, they’re looking at the ugly truck gaining on them in the rearview mirror instead of the road, they do happen to take a teensy detour along the way.
Green eyes. Red truck. Dust everywhere.
The cliff comes out of nowhere, and they’re still not looking at the road. It’s always, somehow, their fault. Ghoul surely won’t let them forget it.
Ghoul?
There’s glass. Smoke. Thick, salty blood. Nothing out of the ordinary, but nothing they expected, and so it’s jarring, and it doesn’t quite register right away.
Ghoul?
They were shouting, both of them, but Party’s voice is soft and spooky when he whispers Ghoul’s name in the piercing stillness.
Are you there?
I don’t know if I am. But I need to know that you are.
And he is.
He is, and it gives Party the strength to cut the seatbelt and heave themself over the twisted window frame, drag themself to where Ghoul is laying at an awkward angle outside, legs twisted up behind him funny. At first, they think he’s hurt. Broken, somehow—it’s alarming how much their heart shudders in their chest at the thought. Then they realize he’s just avoiding the gasoline rivers slowly spreading out from the wreckage.
Then they realize he’s dropping his lighter in the pooling liquid.
The motherfucker sets the whole thing on fire, just because he can.
He’s spitting blood in the dust and grinning that big, crooked grin, the one he kept to himself in the beginning but doesn’t seem compelled to hide anymore, and one of his hands is practically inside the nasty cut that’s smeared across Party’s hip now as he’s tugging the ragged skin together. And the fire rages in the background, and all they can think about is how weirdly hot that is.
Because of the blood loss, probably. But also because Ghoul is fucking crazy, and because even so Ghoul didn’t leave them there to explode along with the car. They half expected Ghoul to run off without them. They’re usually the one dragging others to safety, and they’re not accustomed to being on the other end of that care.
There’s something overwhelming about this first casual refusal to leave them behind.
It takes Party about thirty feet of being dragged down the berm in the warmth of the explosion for the feeling to come back to their legs.
Feeling that they’re lacking even now. Also now? Now, too.
But this time, Party wasn’t in a car—
So why is their mouth still filled with smoke?
21 Days
They peel open their eyes, slowly, painfully, and they’re not blind anymore.
It’s such a relief. At least, they think so, for an instant. Then their brain actually registers what their eyes can now see, the dim blue lights and metal cabinets and sharp tools and pale limbs.
They’re surrounded by bodies, and they’re in a morgue.
It’s happened, they accept immediately, without even bothering to process that further. I’m dead. It’s a thought they’ve had so many times they don’t even know how to respond now that it’s finally happened. In the moment, it’s almost a relief. No more waking up to aches and alarms and chilling screams. No more getting through day after merciless day. No more hunger, no more hurting. No more.
There’s a distant thought that maybe they weren’t alone in it all, that someone was waiting for them to come back home. There’s a dim light on in a quiet room somewhere, somebody looking at the door, praying for them to burst through it. But they brush that away. They’re alone here, and they’ve probably always been alone. Nobody will cry for them. Why should they?
It’s colder than they thought it would be. They always thought it would be all golden glow and a warm, friendly embrace. Where’s their rolled-out carpet, their pearly gates?
Maybe this is hell, then. It’s not unthinkable that they’d end up where the sinners go. They’ve sinned a lot, after all.
But there are needles in their arms and flat patches on their bare chest and a beeping somewhere over their left shoulder, and so gradually it dawns on them that they aren’t actually dead at all.
They aren’t dead.
There’s relief, and there’s disappointment, and then there’s the strange swooping in their stomach that could be either or both or simply nothing they’ve ever felt before.
They don’t like needles. They don’t like the beeping. And in the end, once they give it some thought, they’re not sure they like not being dead.
What did life ever do for them, anyway?
JACK. SHIT. That’s what.
They don’t remember much at the moment. There’s a ball of static where a snapshot of their past should be—they feel the emptiness like a sore tooth. But they know that for sure.
Just like they know this, all of a sudden—they’re not alone here anymore.
Someone is breathing here, and the sound sends fear prickling down their spine.
“Well, well, well—if it isn’t our little miracle, back from the dead,” a voice to their left says softly. It’s familiar, but they can’t place it. It doesn’t sound nice. They don’t think they want it to come any closer.
They try to turn their head, to figure it out, but they’re stopped by something tugging at their face. They try to lift an arm to pull it away, but their fingers don’t move. Are their lips numb? Is their mouth even there?
What if they don’t have a mouth anymore? That would be really horrible, they think. They use their mouth for so many things. They need it. Mouths are important.
“You’re sedated,” the voice interrupts, sounding almost amused. “And intubated. So try not to struggle.”
Then the voice steps into the light, into their field of vision, and Party’s heart just about stops. They’re not being dramatic—the machines behind them jolt into a terrible staccato. And there in front of them, studying the little screens with academic interest, is Korse. The Scarecrow who hunted them all. Who lured them, who trapped them.
Who killed them, in the end.
It’s all coming back to them now—their family, packed into a the Trans Am in the dead of night, speeding down the highway on the ultimate suicide mission. Their baby, poked and prodded, locked in a cage. Her little hand in theirs as they raced through unfamiliar halls. Their brother’s footsteps beside them. Rooms filled with blank-faced enemies, reckless and replaceable, shooting to kill.
A hand gripping their collar. The warm barrel of a blaster jammed under their chin. A desperate scream, maybe their own. Did they have time to scream? They don’t remember having time to scream.
Then—nothing.
Try not to struggle.
Ha fucking ha.
Drugged out of their mind and too weak to lift their little finger, Party struggles harder than they’ve ever struggled before. And it gets them nowhere. They don’t even let out a sound.
It’s somewhere between realizing their heart is acting up again (that fucking BEEPING) and realizing that they’re not out of breath that they also realize they aren’t breathing.
There’s oxygen in their lungs. Probably. There must be. They’re not dead—they’re not. But they’re also not breathing.
What was it Korse said? Intubated?
Something is very wrong.
“Oh, come now.” Korse reaches out a spindly hand, oh so slowly, and runs his fingers delicately down Party’s cheek. Out of nowhere, they find the strength to flinch away. And immediately, they wish more than they’ve ever wished before that they could take it right back.
The movement jostles somewhere deep inside, and the next thing they know something is heaving, sucking their insides up and out of them like an excruciating vacuum of pure torture.
They’re gagging and choking and so so sure their intestines must be splattering all down their front. Weirdly, it doesn’t feel like worms, or snakes—it feels like hot coals. Are they still dry? Is their skin peeling off as they’re incinerated from the inside out?
“Really?” Korse mutters, fiddling with something on a tray. Then the icy water is back and they’re washing out to sea once more.
Party was so young they can barely remember it now, when they learned to stop crying in their sleep.
They used to cry so loud.
They weren’t tortured as a little child. Their father didn’t hit them—not yet—and their mother hadn’t decided to lock them outside when the schoolyard bullies closed in down the street, when they were just within sight of the house and desperately running for cover. But the city meds set the shadow people on them without mercy—dark figures with glowing eyes and cruel weapons that poke and prod—and their temperature was never right—too hot or too cold or both at the same time—and their blood pooled thick and heavy in their veins. And so every night they would fight for their life against their subconscious and, more often than not, their subconscious would win.
There was the sweating—they would sweat so much their shirt was plastered to their skin. There was the thrashing—they’d wind up knotted so tightly into their sheets that it would take them fifteen minutes just to untangle themself when they finally calmed down. They’d gasp for a breath. They’d lose their clumsy fingers somewhere on the mattress below them, have to wiggle around desperately before everything reconnected the way it was supposed to.
And there was the screaming.
Kobra told them once that it sounded like they were dying.
Good boys don’t cry in their sleep, their mother says one morning, in an odd tone of voice. Her steady, careful hands fumble over the sugar she’s sprinkling on top of the oatmeal. You should know that by now. You’re old enough. You need to remember.
What Party knows by now is, Party knows better than to correct any of that. Doesn’t even have the words to explain everything she got wrong, but feels deep in their gut how badly it would go if they tried.
Their mother isn’t done, though. And what she says next is worse: If we can’t get this sorted here and now, the doctors might have to do it for us.
They haven’t even seen what the city can do up close yet. Not firsthand. But, perhaps instinctively, they know that they want nothing to do with it. They know that it could be the end of the little sanity they’ve managed to hold onto.
The first week, they put the pillow over their head, tuck themself right into the pillowcase with it so they can’t thrash it off, so the stuffing covers all the sounds. The second week they try a sock shoved in their mouth before they turn out the lights, so they can still breathe through their nose.
Why are you pretending to be kidnapped? asks Kobra-who-isn’t-Kobra-yet. Kobra is still practically a baby, but he knows about stranger danger. Is this a cry for help or something? He says it loud, so loud, and there’s a camera in the hall now, pointing at their door. Their mother hadn’t mentioned it, but she had pinched her mouth together tight and raised her eyebrows as she stood under the blinking light. On the outside door of their apartment, there are little scuff marks just above the floor—like heavy boots had kicked at the wood to announce their presence.
They’re sure they’re being watched, and that whoever is doing the watching, doesn’t like what they see.
All of this coincides with Kobra’s loud teasing, and it all spooks Party. So then Party, who is not known for having the best instincts when spooked, decides the best thing to do at this point is simply not to sleep at all.
This is the first time Party decides to adjust the dosage of their meds on their own. Too much makes them sleepy, so a little less will surely help them stay awake.
And stay awake they do. But there’s more.
The first thing that happens is that they remember how to cry when their eyes are open, though they don’t do it where anyone can see. The second thing that happens is that they remember how to draw, not just scribbling greyscale inside the lines but weird, beautiful creations with feelings trapped inside. The third thing that happens is that the person in the mirror with short hair and tired eyes starts to look funny, then downright strange, then WRONG.
They don’t know what to do about that, exactly. But it’s something to think about while they’re sitting up staring at the wall at night, at least.
This is also when they learn to love coffee, and learn to write when their eyes are blurring so badly they’re seeing double, and learn that you can turn a headache off if you push your fingers hard enough into the little hollow at the base of your skull.
They’re not sure what actually does it, in the end. But by some miracle, something ends up working.
When they finally slip into a blurry haze around the fourth day, they’re silent as the grave, and they never utter a sound in their sleep again.
And that’s when Party learns they can do anything if they just set their mind to it.
15 Days
They feel Korse everywhere.
Battery City has nurses. Once upon a time, their mother was a nurse, maybe. They think. They remember the white uniform, the tiny cross on the breast pocket, the shoes with the small heel that they found by the door one night and wore around the house before they were caught and scolded and sent to bed early.
So they’re not sure why it’s Korse’s fingers working their way up and down the muscles in their leg, chasing away the numbness and replacing it with the sharp stabs of white-hot needles instead. Why Korse is pressing against the tender dip of their stomach, as if feeling for something beneath the skin. Why Korse is peeling back scratchy bandages on their throat, scraping and prodding at whatever horror lies beneath.
There’s nothing blocking up their throat on the inside this time, so they’re free to roll over and vomit over the metal rail beside them and onto the floor. They regret it immediately, even if they couldn’t have stopped it if they tried. Their soft insides are raw and burning, like they’re breathing fire. The vomit is tinged with blood.
They’re so sick of this burning. When will it go away?
Korse is still beside them, watching with that same detached interest. He waits for them to finish, gasping where they lay hunched over themself on some sort of gurney, and presses their shoulders back against the thin mattress and runs a finger along the underside of their chin again. His hands are so cold on their bare skin.
“This is healing well,” he says in a conversational tone. “No leaks.”
No leaks.
Well. They hadn’t even considered that vomit seeping through a gristly hole in their neck was a possibility, but it’s nice to know it didn’t happen all the same. Much appreciated.
There’s rust on their tongue when they try to speak, and all that comes out is a muffled gasp.
“In time,” Korse says, patting their head like some sort of pathetic dog. They flinch away. The sudden movement sends their stomach roiling again. It also pulls at tubes that are still connected to their arm, and they try not to look at it, but now they can’t look away.
They grit their teeth, clench their fists, and try to get themself under control. They have a reputation to uphold, after all.
First things first.
They’re in the same room as before, from what they can tell. They remember vague impressions from their last fleeting moments of hazy consciousness, and they try to match them to what they can see now. It’s the same cool fluorescent lights flickering faintly overhead, the same stainless steel countertops and cabinets and trays with various medical instruments.
Terrifying medical instruments. Thin. Sharp. Dangerous. They’ve always hated doctors.
The gurneys with the bodies—Party swears there were gurneys with bodies—those are gone now. Maybe they imagined it. Maybe part of this—all of this?—was just a bizarre, miserable dream.
Or maybe they’ve been asleep so long that the bodies have been sliced up, examined, and sent on their way. All while Party laid helpless and unaware one bed over.
A hand gripping their collar. The warm barrel of a blaster jammed under their chin. A burst of light. Heat. Blackness.
They’re pretty sure they should be a slab of meat on a gurney, too. Not hooked up to evil nasty wires and forced to make eye contact with the ugliest motherfucker in Battery City.
It makes no goddamn sense.
“How?” they manage to choke out.
Korse looks briefly surprised at the sound of their voice. If they could, Party would scream in rage. He has no right—yeah, they sound like they’ve been swallowing hornets for fun, but as far as they recall the two of them have never sat down and had a friendly conversation. The Scarecrow is not in a position to have expectations that are met or not met about the quality of what their abused vocal cords manage to rasp out.
Fuck you. FUCK you. They think it as hard as they can with their mind. If only they were a Jedi, he’d be keeling over from the force of it.
They are, alas, no Jedi. Korse merely smirks.
“How indeed.”
Oh. Somewhere in there, they’d completely forgotten that they asked him a question.
Korse looks down at them, reaching out again to trail two fingers down the side of their throat. Party swallows thickly, and even that burns burns burns. “The blaster auto-set to stun,” he says finally.
He actually sounds a little annoyed now, like this was somewhat of an inconvenience for him. Great. Party hopes he got reprimanded to hell and back. They hope he had to fill out a mountain of paperwork. They hope somebody took his blaster away, and won’t give it back until he completes a hundred extra hours of grueling, mind-numbing training.
Wait—more training doesn’t actually sound like a good thing. Motherfucker is more than dangerous enough. Scratch that one out.
So they’ve never had a conversation with Korse, but they’ve figured out this about him—he does like to talk. They probably shouldn’t have got him going.
“Would you like to know what it did you, Party Poison? The silly little stun blasts?”
They can feel what it did to them. So, no. But when they roll their eyes, Korse digs his nails into their shoulder, and they have no choice but to sit there as he describes the gore in detail.
“It came through just behind your jawbone here—” he taps a spot beneath Party’s chin, and they bite back a yelp— “and seared the inside of your throat. It also burned the roof of your mouth, and you almost lost your tongue—and what a shame that would have been.” Then he sighs, though there’s a threatening smile stretching across his face. “But you’re recovering well, and you’ll live to serve as the single largest thorn in my side for at least another day.”
Party can’t explain it, but there’s an edge of danger in that statement. It’s becoming overwhelmingly clear, if it wasn’t already, that it’s their problem and Korse’s gain that they’re trapped here in this place. And they’re pretty sure he’s got some big ideas about what to do with his surprise gift, which is such a shitty realization to wake up to.
“Our little miracle, here to help us turn the tide against all your little rebel friends.”
Miracle—that’s not right. No, a faulty blaster and pure luck are obviously far more responsible for the fact that they’re standing here—metaphorically, they’re not sure they’re going to be actually standing any time soon—than any sort of miracle, heaven-sent or otherwise.
“Said that… before,” they rasp. “Not funny.”
“I suppose not,” Korse says, though he’s still smiling. “Simple mechanical failure, a series of coincidences, and a world of pain probably don’t seem all that miraculous to someone in your shoes.”
Party’s got this feeling that comes over them when they’re in danger, like the prickling on the back of your neck before you’re hit with a massive bolt of lightning. They used to jokingly describe it as their Spidey Sense, when they were younger, until Kobra made fun of them so loudly and repeatedly that people they’d never met before teased them about it as they were literally shooting them.
Anyway, they weren’t alert enough to really get a feel for their predicament when they first woke up, but those alarm bells are ringing full force now. And even if they weren’t—it only takes a couple functioning neurons for it to really sink in, just how bad things are.
They are alone, in Battery City. They are unable to walk, or even sit up, and in the care of the most sadistic killer they know (and they know a lot of killers, honestly). They have been kept alive, when BLI has wanted them dead for at least half a decade at this point. This is probably for a reason.
They are so, so fucked. FUCKED. And nobody—nobody—is coming to save them.
Korse is still speaking, though he’s disappeared from view somewhere around Party’s feet. They could probably turn their head to locate him, but just the thought of it is enough to make them dizzy, so they don’t bother. It doesn’t matter anyway.
“But you’re not wearing any shoes,” he’s saying. “Which reminds me. I came here to prep you for the next phase of your recuperation.”
By the time they realize he’s fiddling with the blanket over their middle, the only thing covering them in this cold sterile room, it’s too late. Suddenly there’s stinging, burning burning burning, and then Korse is at their side again brandishing a little plastic tube. “Catheter,” he explains. Party feels their face burn brighter scarlet than the blood in their vomit as more blood rushes to their cheeks. They’re distantly surprised they even have any more to spare.
He discards the tube and adjusts the blanket back over their hips. Party thinks dully that it probably doesn’t even matter, anyway. At this point he’s seen it all.
“Nothing I haven’t seen before,” Korse adds with another smirk, as though he’s reading their goddamn mind.
Still, Party doesn’t want to think about that at all—Korse tugging their jacket off of them while they’re bleeding and unconscious on the floor, filling their body with tubes and needles and laying them out alone in the dark where nobody will ever find them. There are other things they probably need to be thinking about at this point—like, how long is he going to keep them there? What is he going to do with them now that they’re awake and they can’t hide in the fog of their injuries anymore?
But maybe the fog is still there after all, because they can’t quite bring themself to imagine, or care.
Korse says something else, somewhere far above them, but it’s fuzzy and muddled by the time it gets to their ears.
It doesn’t matter anyway.
Ghoul has tattoos all over, and Ghoul offers to get Party one, too. As a gift. A homecoming gift.
I have lived in the desert for three fucking years, Party snaps. Just because they met Ghoul three months ago, just because Ghoul loves to point out all the things they still do that are strange and alien and wrong that Jet was always polite enough not to mention, does not mean that they’re some fucking freshman. Asshole.
Ghoul just giggles. A homecoming gift for me, because I’m home now, he says. And Party would almost think that’s sweet, if it weren’t for his stupid tone of voice—and the fact that this is an all-around stupid fucking idea.
Ghoul doesn’t think it’s stupid, unfortunately. Ghoul is like a dog with a bone. Do you know what it would do to me to see all that pale pretty skin covered with ink? he asks. Maybe you could get my name right across your ass. Now that, I’d love to see.
He’s messing with them—they know that. He doesn’t think they’re pretty, he thinks they’re snooty and annoying even after the whole homoerotic leg wound/rescue thing, and he definitely doesn’t have enough money to buy them a tattoo anywhere nice enough that the process wouldn’t make their skin turn green and fall off in a week.
Unless he’s offering to do the tattooing himself? Which is so, so much worse. They’d have flesh-eating bacteria in a matter of hours.
But either way, Ghoul’s a tenacious little fucker, and they’re having a hard time picturing an end to this conversation where they’re not forced to admit why there’s absolutely not a chance in hell that a needle dipped in ink is ever going to pierce their skin as long as they have breath in their body.
No needle is EVER going to touch their body again.
To be completely honest, their heart would probably stop beating the second anyone tried.
They’d thought they were kidding at first—the doctors, with their quiet voices and gentle smiles and thick leather restraints and stainless steel tools. When they’d counted out the piles and piles of pills Party had stashed in the little crack behind the baseboard in their room in neat rows of ten, and said they’d had their chance, and there was no such thing as second chances. When one of them pulled out the syringe with a needle as thick as a pencil and as long as Party’s entire finger and said that they could either hold still, or the doctors would make them.
Party knew how to laugh and how to cry, and how to draw things that felt good and mattered to them, and they didn’t want to lose those things. They didn’t want that needle to stab into their soft, defenseless arm.
They were thirteen years old.
It happened anyway. There was nothing they could do.
There were a lot more needles, after that. Once you’re labeled a problem child, they treat you like a problem child, until the empty husk that remains doesn’t look much like a child at all. And they were technically pumping chemicals in, but it felt like they were sucking Party out. Every day a little more of them disappeared.
There was no such thing as second chances in Battery City.
And so needles are the worst thing they can imagine in the entire world.
Hey, Ghoul says, far away, and he doesn’t sound so smug now. He sounds really scared. Hey, I was joking—I won’t touch you. No tattoos. I won’t touch you if you don’t want me to.
I mean, I wouldn’t go that far, Party chokes out, unsure what it is that they’re doing, or why they’re bothering to flirt from a ball on the ground with tears running down their cheeks. They don’t even remember curling up down here. This sucks, actually—they’re positive this is going to go on Ghoul’s list of Reasons Why Party Poison Is Not Fit to Lead Anything More Important Than a Mid-Afternoon Yoga Session At the YMCA.
(Ghoul doesn’t even know what a YMCA is. Or yoga, probably. Party barely even knows what yoga is. He just thought it sounded appropriately condescending.)
But Ghoul’s not laughing, or taking notes to use against them later. He crouches down carefully by their side and puts a gentle hand on their back, so light they can barely feel it. Then he puts his other hand on their shoulder, and then he’s rearranged them so their face is no longer pressed against the ground, and he moves the hand from their back to brush sand off their cheek. The grains stick to the tear tracks. It burns a little.
Party’s making this god-awful sound that could be laughing or could be sobbing, they honestly can’t tell. They can’t seem to stop. It’s so stupid—nothing even happened.
Ghoul runs a hand through his hair, then looks around for backup. But they’re the only ones out here. Kobra’s at the racetrack, swore he was okay to go alone, and Jet is helping Show Pony dye their hair. So Ghoul rolls up the sleeve covering his left arm, the one with the fanciest art, and puts his wrist in Party’s lap to distract them. Like they’re some sort of infant that needs soothing.
It works, though.
They trace the delicate face of the stoic lady on his forearm, moving back and forth across the careful lines. The art is really cool, of course, but just the act of running their fingers over Ghoul’s skin is helping too. It grounds them. Reminds them that they’re both here, and not there, and not anywhere else bad either.
I only brought it up cause I’ve seen you staring, Ghoul says quietly. I thought I was being nice this time. Honest.
Sometimes, Ghoul is decidedly not being nice. But this time Party believes him.
See, they do stare at Ghoul’s tattoos. They thought they were being sneaky about it, but they absolutely do. It’s not out of any kind of envy, though. It’s just because they think Ghoul’s the most beautiful person they’ve ever seen sometimes, and that includes every part of him.
I guess we just know each other less well than we thought, Party says softly.
They don’t mean it as a criticism, just a fact, but Ghoul’s face scrunches guiltily. Oh, he says. Right.
But that’s good, Party says quickly. They’re feeling better now, and they want to try to salvage this miserable afternoon. They don’t want Ghoul to look sad anymore. It just means we have so much more to learn.
They really don’t want Ghoul to learn about this little detail, though. They hope he doesn’t ask. Because a background of cowering in fear for two years while other people fought and risked their lives and made a difference definitely does belong on a list of why they’re not fit to lead anything more important than yoga at the YMCA.
But Ghoul just smiles and tugs his arm back enough to get a gentle grip on Party’s hand. And Party smells ozone and tastes smoke and sees the dazzle of shattered glass, and thinks that maybe, just a little, they’re falling in love.
Fairy tales don’t happen in the desert. They know that. But even tragedies have good parts before they end in pain.
13 Days
The day Party walks again for the first time is the day they are dragged out of the cold sterile bed with the machines in the morgue and down and endless hallway to a smaller, darker room.
They’re wearing clothes now, stark white pajama pants and a scratchy shirt so flimsy they can feel the breeze from the air conditioner pass right through it. Someone did that to them too, dressed them one night when they were dead asleep. It’s like their body is no longer their own—it hasn’t been in a while.
Their feet are still bare. Their toes burn on the icy tile floor.
Korse is the one who moves them, practically carrying them when their legs give out halfway through the journey. He drops them down in a heavy chair in the middle of the room, waves a finger at them, and says, “Don’t move.”
Party’s panting and aching and trying not to cry out when the smallest movement pulls and pinches the delicate scab beneath their chin and the half-healed burns inside their mouth, so there wasn’t much danger of that, anyway.
But when Korse comes back, all of their care and caution goes out the window. Because he’s holding some kind of tool with a wire and a big needle on the end, and he’s wielding it like he’s going to use it on Party.
No.
Either Korse doesn’t know what this means for them, or he simply doesn’t care. He hasn’t even looked up from where he’s prepping ink on a tray.
“This is simply routine,” he says casually, like it’s no big deal, like it’s nothing at all. “Now, I’m no artist, but it’s nothing to worry about. The pattern is keyed into the tool. It’s a regular part of prisoner processing—it can’t be special treatment all the time even for you, I’m afraid.”
Processing.
Absolutely not.
Party has always—always—hated needles. The only reason the IVs in their arm in the morgue didn’t completely set them off was because of the drugs and the dull lethargy of injury. But they’re healed and sober enough now that they’re twitching even before Korse gets the thing turned on, and then they’ve thrown themself across the room and into a corner as if that’s actually going to protect them from the guy who’s like twice their height and almost definitely packing more functional firepower than they’ve ever even seen in their life.
Korse doesn’t pick them up and he doesn’t draw a weapon, though. He just places a knee on their chest and bends over them right there on the floor.
“It’s really not as sterile here,” he muses as he grabs both of their ankles in one hand, keeping them from kicking up at him as he tugs their waistband down to reveal one pale hipbone. “But it’s no matter. Nothing needs to last forever these days.”
Party doesn’t have time to even spare a thought what that means.
They pass out immediately when the needle first enters their skin. It’s the kindest thing that can happen at that point. But Korse makes sure they’re conscious way before the end, so the full effect really sinks in.
It’s the noise that they’re aware of first, then the pressure on their chest—Korse hadn’t moved his knee even though they were unconscious. They taste blood again, from something somewhere opening back up, and there’s a wicked headache starting behind their eyes. They try to focus on these things. These things are bearable.
The needle is kind of hard to ignore, though. In some ways, it’s better than the ones Party remembers—it’s much thinner, and isn’t going in so deep. Korse isn’t shooting for somewhere deep in the muscle or bloodstream for maximum mental anguish and immediate absorption of powerful medications.
In some ways, though, it’s worse. It’s a continuous roar of pain, and Party has no idea how much longer they’ll have to endure it, and it’s doing something permanent and ugly to their body. This isn’t a simple in and out and done. And whatever Korse is etching on their hip, it won’t wear off in 24 to 36 hours.
Oh, they can’t breathe—
“You know, we had in your file that you react poorly to needles,” Korse muses in a light tone, like this is some sort of fucking puzzle to work out and not a real person’s life and sanity that he’s obliterating. “But I hadn’t realized it was quite so extreme.”
Party grits their teeth harder and presses their head back onto the cold tile floor, their vision swimming in and out. There’s nothing else they can do, restrained like this. They’re trying so hard to keep it under control, but a little whimper sneaks past them. Korse grins like a vampire when he hears it.
“And why is it you react this way?”
They twist their face away even though their throat screams at the movement. He has their file. He should fucking know.
“Oh, that’s right,” he continues without really waiting for an answer. Beneath him, the needle is buzzing. The pain is a constant smear across Party’s consciousness. And honestly, if he was zeroing in on any other subject, Party would be glad for the monologue to keep their mind off things. “You were … somewhat resistant to our methods the first time around. They had to find creative ways to keep you medicated.”
They’re not grateful for this subject, though. This subject was shot execution-style and buried in a bottomless pit they thought it could never claw its way out of. They cheered when they stopped seeing those horrible white city rooms behind their eyelids every fucking night when they tried to go to sleep. It took them months to get to that point, if not years.
They wonder how long it will take them to forget this.
If they ever even get the chance, that is.
Time in general is something they’re having trouble with right now, because they’re honestly not sure if it’s minutes or hours later that Korse finally climbs off them and takes his horrible little torture device away. Party lays limply until he looks back expectantly at them, then starts the arduous process of getting their elbows underneath them, then fully sitting up. The room spins. Their throat twinges. They look down.
Korse didn’t fix their pants, so the waistband is low enough on the left that they can see the marks on their skin. When they do, they almost throw up yet again.
It’s a fucking barcode.
Their next stop looks more permanent. It’s a cell.
Home sweet home.
There’s a small metal bed bolted to the concrete floor, a bare mattress that doesn’t quite fit thrown haphazardly top of it. A cracked, stained urinal in the corner, and a tiny sink that’s little more than a bowl beneath a spigot sticking out of the wall. The whole room is probably ten paces across, from the bare, windowless wall to the thick metal door. Two different cameras hang from opposite corners on the high ceiling.
How wonderful. Different angles for whatever festivities Korse has planned.
And oh, he absolutely has something planned. He’s got this air of menace and destruction about him, coming off him in stinking waves.
He tosses Party into the cell, leaving them to stumble forward and land half on the dirty mattress, before pulling a simple metal chair into the room and taking a seat across from the bed.
“I thought you and I could have a little conversation,” he says politely.
Fuck that.
“Go fuck yourself,” Party rasps, dragging their body the rest of the way onto the mattress so they can be horizontal. Their hip throbs. Their throat burns. They’re so not in the mood.
“Maybe later,” he shoots back, and Party is almost curious enough about what facial expression accompanied that to look up. Almost. “Right now, let’s talk about your friends out there in the desert.”
Party has two thoughts to that. The first is, Not fucking likely. No way are they giving this freak anything.
But almost immediately afterwards, they realize that Korse gave them something. Their friends in the desert, he said. In the desert.
It’s the answer to the question Party has been too scared to ask, too scared to even think about: The others got away. They weren’t shot down and captured, or worse. They’re not here.
They’re not here.
Party should be laughing madly, jumping for joy. Instead, they find themself fighting back a wave of tears.
Korse is ignorant of the realizations behind their silence. “Come now, Party Poison. Is this any way to repay me for the way I’ve treated you here?”
His voice is taunting now, like he’s trying to push all of their buttons. But he’s crazy. If they were going to repay him for anything, it wouldn’t be for saving their life, and it wouldn’t be with a little conversation.
“Don’t you have a fucking job to do?” Party snaps, over this completely. Korse just laughs.
“Oh, little killjoy. You are my job, for the foreseeable future.”
Well. There’s nothing that says Party has to make that easy for him.
They roll carefully onto their side facing the wall, away from the Scarecrow shifting his weight behind them. Then they close their eyes, and resolve to stay silent regardless of what happens next.
Unfortunately, what happens next is that they’re dragged out of bed by their ankle and slammed into the floor.
“I think you misunderstand,” Korse says, towering above them. He jostles them around a little with his boot until they’re spread-eagle like a starfish on the concrete floor, then bends over them and presses down on their wrists. They feel the pressure in their bones. “This isn’t a polite discussion, Party Poison. It’s not even an interrogation.”
When he smiles cruelly this time, it’s directly in front of Party’s face, and they have no choice but to watch his harsh mouth split open meanly.
“It’s a demonstration.”
“A demonstration of how I won’t give you what you want?” Party tries to snarl, although it comes out more like a gasp. That doesn’t mean their conviction is weak, though. Korse can cut off every finger and toe they have, stab them with a hot poker, dig out their eyeballs with a spoon—they’re not telling him where to find their brother. Their friends. Their family.
“A demonstration of how I don’t want anything—except to cause you pain. To make you regret every time you’ve ever raised your voice and your weapons against me and mine.”
That sounds really fun. Party can take it, though. They’ve taken worse before.
Bring it on.
He starts simple, with a slap across the face. It would barely register as pain at all, except for the way the edge of his thumb catches on their throat and snags the healing skin. They bite their lip at the sharp tear, squeezing their eyes shut to keep the tears from welling up. But they don’t make a sound.
And Korse isn’t happy about that. The look on his face makes Party laugh, despite the pain.
“Hit me,” they wheeze when they can get the words out. They sound ruined, and rough, and fucking crazy. “Hit me, motherfucker—as hard as you can.”
The look on Korse’s face is vicious now. But Party doesn’t even have time for fear to shoot through them before he’s moving again.
His next blow is with a fist, directly in the center of Party’s chest. Their body curls forward at the force, and Korse uses his other hand to punch their cheekbone, sending them reeling right back to the floor. The hits rain down, catching their nose, their eyebrow, their jaw. He gets a sharp elbow into their ribcage with a remarkable amount of force—they swear they hear a crack—and they can no longer hold back a quiet yelp when he brings his weight down on their leg and twists their ankle violently to the side.
Somewhere along the line there became so much blood in their mouth that they can’t even tell where it’s all coming from. It’s making it hard to breathe—draining into the back of their throat, mixing with the pain in their chest that makes it agony to try to cough any of it back up.
“Did you want to smile for our audience, Party?” Korse asks cruelly. He squeezes Party’s cheeks between his thumb and fingers and turns their bloody face to the cameras overhead.
“Fucked-up propaganda machine,” Party spits, along with some saliva and blood and what might be a tiny fragment of tooth. Korse tilts his head, considering.
“That’s not an unfair assessment,” he admits. “But I have something much more specific in mind for this footage.” He drops their face and leans closer, digging harshly into the sore spot under their ribs with the heel of his hand. “Of course, it will do us well to spread the word of your capture. We want people to know when we’ve had a little victory against the feral children wreaking havoc at our borders. But there are three people in particular who I think will be especially interested to know you’re still alive–for now.”
He still wants the others. Korse has Party, completely free to do his worst, to do whatever he wants. But he still wants to hurt their family.
It’s just not fair.
It’s also never going to happen. Never.
“Stay away,” Party screams, directly to the closest camera overhead. It feels like swallowing glass, speaking at that volume, but there’s no world where they don’t warn them with every ounce of strength they have left. Another blow strikes them across the back, then another. Wind knocked out of them, they force out, “Don’t come for me.”
They can’t.
They won’t. They’re not that stupid—no matter what they see. No matter what happens next.
That’s the rule, see—it’s always been the rule. When they were younger and dumber and still halfway thought they were playing some kind of fucked-up game, they’d all sliced their palms and sworn on it like it was a cute little coming of age adventure. Don’t go down with the ship. Save yourself. If someone’s caught and you’re not, then you’re the one who has to make sure that the legacy continues.
They should probably face the music—Party’s worth more as a martyr at this point, anyway. They can’t even imagine the kind of movement their torture and eventual reconditioning or death will give wings to. Right now, they’re not feeling particularly creative. But Jet will think of something. Jet has a beautiful mind.
Jet will take their destruction and build something incredible—something that will bring the city to its knees.
But here’s another thing. Party’s still a fighter, and not particularly inclined to take their doom lying down. It’s not in their nature. They’ve been like this as long as they can remember, even when it made things worse and set them back in the end.
And so they spit another mouthful of blood onto the floor, stare down the open door to the cell that Korse never bothered to shut behind him, and shoot up and through it in one mad dash, slapping the touchpad that slams the whole thing shut behind them.
It won’t take Korse long to free himself. They’re not stupid enough to have delusions about that. But if they can hide themself good, it might take him just a little bit longer to find them once he does.
Party has this thing that Kobra calls a deathwish and Jet calls overcompensating. Party just calls it a healthy sense of fun. It’s like this: when somebody says something offensive, or implies that maybe they’re not all they’re cracked to be, they roll their eyes and spit in their face and say okay, well if you’re so tough, then I challenge you to a duel.
They think it’s funny, the old-fashioned pomp and pageantry of the thing. It’s sarcasm with a physical bite, making a mockery of their adversary’s bluster. Party’s an expert at calling people on their bullshit, because Party’s got no bullshit at all. They’re 100 percent all-in, all the time.
Sometimes people pick up on this and back down to save face.
Usually whoever it is just gets madder, though.
They choose the location (outside), let their victim pick the weapons—cause there’s never been a single soul that doesn’t pick blasters with a smirk and cocky nod. And then they promptly blow the idiot out of the water, even if they do make sure their blaster is set to stun, because nobody draws and aims and fires with more precision or speed than Party fucking Poison, that’s why.
They figure, if after all this time people are still saying yes and they’re still picking blaster, they’re probably looking for the honor of being leveled by a fucking legend. They’ll be getting free drinks off that sob story for the next month, at least. All it costs them is some burn ointment and the dressing-down or outright elimination of a second-rate ego.
Party is more than happy to oblige.
It’s not that Party thinks they’re all that. Not really. They just think it’s funny.
You sure you’re not hoping somebody shoots you in the head one of these days? Kobra mutters with a dirty look. Kobra has never really forgiven them for the dark days after they were caught skipping pills, the times he had to peel them off the floor and watch them through the night. Kobra still knocks on the bathroom door if they’ve been quiet for more than fifteen minutes.
True leaders know they ain’t got nothing to prove, Jet says a little more delicately. You know what you are, Party— you don’t gotta convince the bottom-feeders who are too sun-seared to know their own mama if she smacked ‘em right on the ass.
Jet’s the authority on this, in a way—he’s got this crazy way of weaving folk tales together from smoke and sand and stardust. Leave him alone at a bar and he’ll have the name of the Fabulous Four on the lips of everyone there by the end of the night. Their most daring highway robbery. Their most glorious explosion. Party’s convinced it’s his fault they’ve got half their notoriety at all.
But his stories are always a little cleaner than the truth, a little less biting and desperate. They paint Party as some sort of hero, not a scrappy, sharp-edged renegade.
See, people never expect the hero to shoot first. And Party tries, but they can’t quite work out if that’s a blessing, or a disservice to their name.
Only Ghoul gets it. Well, he doesn’t get the whole ten-paces-and-fire thing—just shoot ‘em when their back is turned, keep it SIMPLE, he says exasperatedly, like Party’s an idiot. But Ghoul is also all-in. Ghoul has his name and he has his reputation, and that’s all he’s got keeping him alive too.
They’re not kind like Jet. They’re not smart like Kobra. The two of them are cut from the same cloth—bright, and loud, and mean. If they don’t take their place, they won’t have a place at all.
Overcompensating—as if. They’re compensating exactly the right amount to get through the fucking day.
And if some day their reputation does get them into trouble they can’t come back from? Well, at least it’ll be just another a variation on their theme.
They’re in a dark room with bright screens, and those screens are streaked with dashes of color.
That’s how Party knows they found a good hiding spot. There’s usually no color here at BLI headquarters—everything’s white and black and shades of grey. It’s like this place was calling to them.
One last look, it whispers, kind and sympathetic. Something to remember the world by when you fade away.
So Party looks, and Party memorizes.
The red line starts in the lower right of the screen, and makes a series of turns across the middle before ending up right in the center of the rightmost edge. There’s green in the upper quadrant, looping twice before doubling back the way it came. The blue almost looks like a star, which makes Party think of Jet Star, so they stop looking at that one in favor of a yellow line that connects two dots of orange.
They like the way the yellow passes through the green loops, almost like the two colors are dancing.
Their throat burns, and their nose throbs, and it feels like their chest is caving in. If their ankle wasn’t broken or at least sprained before they bolted for the door, they’re pretty sure it is now. They’ve never shied away from getting pain, but they’re kind of a bitch about it once it’s settled over their body. Kobra loves to tease them about how delicate they are.
What—you can take a punch but you can’t hold it after?
It’s not my fault my eyes are bigger than my stomach.
They sit tucked into the corner of the dark room, knees pulled up to their chest and pounding head limp against the wall, and they wrack their miserable aching brain over why Korse would painstakingly nurse them back to health just to stomp them into the ground again.
They imagine it was fun for him to beat the shit out of them, sure. They’ve always had a very antagonistic relationship, and it can’t feel great that Party, for all their lack of training and resources, usually came out on top. But Korse is also more controlled than that. They don’t think he’d undo days—weeks?–of intensive medical repair on a mere whim.
They ponder more, and eventually they realize they do know the answer, actually.
When it comes down to it, so much of the city is about optics. They’re spoon-feeding the poor brainless masses the narrative they need to get the appropriate messaging from Party’s eventual reconditioning or demise.
Party shot down in a failed raid: Great optics. BLI reigns victorious. Except, they didn’t die, and also, the raid didn’t fail. The others got Girlie to safety, right under Korse’s ugly nose.
Party lying on a bed being nursed back to health: Not great optics.
Party, beaten and helpless in a cell, while efforts to bring in other killjoys ramp up across the zones? That’s some good fucking television right there.
They don’t want that, of course. People are going to get hurt because of them, or because of what BLI does with their image. But they’re not sure what to do about it.
Part of them thinks it might just be time to call it—take themself out of the equation, before anything worse comes along. But they truly don’t think they’ll get the opportunity. They’ve spent very little time in their cell so far, but there was quite plainly nothing they could use in there to off themself. They’re fairly confident they can’t hit their head hard enough off the sink to make unconsciousness permanent.
They’re a good actor, at least they think they are, but probably not good enough to smile through whatever comes next. They’re only human. They’ll scream, or cry, or worse if it gets bad enough. And it will be used against them—against all of them.
Maybe, before this is all over, they’ll go genuinely crazy. If they snap—it they’re dangling naked from the ceiling foaming at the mouth and speaking in tongues, or something wild like that—there probably won’t be a lot of useable content BLI can pull from the camera footage.
Unfortunately, Party’s whole life so far has been an exercise in not losing their mind despite the odds. But, it’s never too late.
Things to think about.
Their ankle twinges. Their nose expels another pulse of thick, hot blood. And somewhere, down the hall, a sharp crack and a loud boom echo.
There’s a buzz in the air, almost like a wave of electricity. The hair on their arms stands straight up, and their ears pop.
Then the screens in the room all turn black and they’re left in utter darkness.
The silence is loud and their labored breathing is louder. It feels colder now than it did before, chills creeping up their spine, but there’s also sweat beading on their skin. They feel confused. They feel hopeless.
Most of all, they feel scared.
Their breathing is so loud, and they’re convinced everyone in the building will be able to follow their choking gasps right to their hiding place. But what’s even louder still is the banging outside the door, a terrible, halting repetition that stops short of any discernible pattern, always sounding when they least expect it and are sure it’s done, getting closer and closer every time it reverberates through the shadows.
Party presses a shaking hand over their mouth, trying to silence their panting. They taste more blood, and try not to gag. For the first time, they think seriously that they might be about to die.
There’s a cacophony of sounds now, from either side of the hall outside the door of their little room. Heavy boots. Shrieking, scuffing rubber on tile. Slamming metal. Still that horrible, irregular boom. They have no idea what it is, or when it’s coming next.
Then the alarm starts wailing.
There are three boxes on the walls above them, powerful, grainy speakers and a disorienting pulse of light. The noise is shrill enough that their teeth involuntarily clench despite the intense pain already ravaging their mouth, and the light is pure white and bright enough to have them seeing stars even when it’s cycled off.
They get glimpses of the world around them in an eerie, black-and-white strobe, like high-contrast photos flashing one after another. Dark screens and furniture hulking over them. Shadows in the hallway. The door—shut, then cracked, then wide open. Faceless bodies toy-soldier-marching in.
There’s shouting, but they can’t hear it over the alarm. Hands reach for them, but it’s as if time has slowed down in the shutter-flare of the lights. There’s cold metal around their wrist before they can process or twist away. Something locking their ankles into place.
Then the baton connects with their middle and the real torture starts.
Electricity arcs through their body, blazing across their skin and pinching their nerves until they have no choice but to writhe and contort to get away. They can’t escape it no matter how hard they try. Eventually their muscles give out, and they flop numbly on the ground, unable to move. They’ve bitten their tongue. There’s raw, oozing burns on the strip of skin between their shirt and their waistband, then along their bare arms, and across the side of their neck.
When Korse finally retrieves them from the horde of Dracs and dumps them back in their cell, they’re so close to unconsciousness they can’t even shift on the concrete floor.
Time passes. It might as well leave them behind.
8 Days
For the longest time, touch doesn’t come naturally to them.
As strange as it seems to everyone out here, there are only a few touches that they even comprehend. Their brain recognizes dry latex gloves holding them down. Needle stabs and burning antiseptic. The sharp sting of a palm across their cheek. Pinching, prodding, tugging at their hair—those are all familiar, and unwanted, and inspire them to lash out. The people closest to them—or at least, the ones who seem like they might be trying to get close—eventually learn not to brush against them at all, at least not without warning.
Even Kobra, who has been at their side through it all, never reaches out to them. They’d clasped hands, sometimes, across the chasm between their rickety twin beds when it all got to be too much. But they never had an opportunity to hold each other, to brush the tears and messy hair out of each others’ eyes.
Not until now, anyway. And now that they could—they don’t know how.
Party watches killjoys and crash queens and motorbabies across the zones, studies them like their life depends on it (because, someday, it might). They watch the hugs and handholding, the different lead-times and lingering that accompany threats and camaraderie. They review. They refresh. Slowly, they start to imitate.
They learn by doing. They find that a lot of the time, the easiest way to get what they want is with a really solid handshake or a filthy kiss. They teach themself how to still their flinch at fingers trailing up their spine and faces leaning closer to their own.
They tell themself, these people aren’t trying to deconstruct them. They’re just trying to connect in one way or another. Just because someone else is getting what they want, doesn’t have to mean they’re getting the opposite. Out here, where everyone is still a threat, they’re simultaneously all on the same team.
There’s a lot of grey areas. It’s a hard lesson to learn.
They wrap their arms around Kobra to hold him back when he squares up to cheaters at the racetrack, lean into Jet’s hand for a fraction of a second when he’s bandaging a gash on their shoulder. But beyond that, they don’t seek it out. It’s not something they need.
Not at first. Not before it all changes.
Then Ghoul joins them. Ghoul keeps his distance, for a while, but closes the gap in those first moments of disaster.
Ghoul starts poking at them, because it makes them flustered. Ghoul leans up against them in their booth, instead of taking his civilized place across the table. Party, who is actually making an effort, forces themself to wait an almost-polite amount of time before squirming away and trying erase the feeling of his skin by rolling around in the sand outside like some kind of fucked-up chinchilla. Ghoul tugs at their fingers and traces lines between the freckles on their shoulders and pulls their hair to get a reaction. One time, Ghoul even licks right up the side of their face, and they have to sit for a while with all of the wildly dissonant things that makes them feel.
And Ghoul has nightmares.
It takes them a shamefully long time to notice, honestly, because Party really only has two modes at night: passed out so completely they might as well be dead, or wide awake and roaming as if they can outrun their own thoughts. They’re just coming back from a nighttime stroll when they hear it—first a whimper, then a genuine, terrified cry.
Party’s not the leader because they’re the smartest or (contrary to popular belief) the loudest—they’re the leader because the part of their brain that cares about other people is so sharp and intense that they can’t turn it off when somebody needs them. They take off running in the direction of Ghoul’s room, and only when they slam their way inside do they realize he’s sound asleep and completely alone.
Ghoul? they whisper in the dark. He doesn’t answer, but in the moonlight streaming in through his bare window (why hasn’t anyone gotten him curtains yet?) they can see tears shining on his cheeks.
That’s no good. That’s no good at all. They crouch beside him, stretch out a hand, and place it gently on his bicep, just resting.
He doesn’t even flinch. Idiot. Party has no idea how he survived on his own as long as he did.
Part of them wants to give up and leave, but they can’t abandon him like this. So they press harder against his arm, then start shaking him when he still doesn’t respond.
Finally he jerks awake with a startled cry, fists coming up to protect himself. Party swats at his wrists to keep from getting punched in the face.
It’s just me, they say softly, when the haze in his eyes clears and they can tell he sees them. You were havin’ a nightmare.
Sure was, Ghoul says, no shame at all in his tone. Everyone has nightmares. Nothing wrong with it. But his eyes are shifty and he’s not really meeting their gaze.
You gonna be all right?
He nods immediately, doesn’t even let them finish. I’m tough. You don’t gotta worry about me.
They know. God, do they know. And they know that Ghoul gets annoyed when they get too protective or overbearing, even though they honestly can’t help it, so they decide they’ve done enough because they don’t want to make him uncomfortable or even more upset.
They turn to go without another word—but then there are cold, calloused fingers clasped around their wrist, and they’re not budging.
They look back at him, eyes wide. Ghoul clears his throat. I—
I can stay, Party whispers, a thrill of regret, or maybe something else, shooting through them even as they say it. If that’s what you—
Ghoul nods immediately.
Well, shit. Party absolutely, without a doubt, doesn’t know how to do this. But for Ghoul, who they’ve now accepted that they like and maybe even kinda sorta love, they’re apparently willing to try.
They drop to their knees beside his mattress, ready to settle in for a long night on the cold, dirty floor. Ghoul adjusts his grip on their wrist automatically so he doesn’t hurt them as they move. Then he frowns at them and props himself up on an elbow.
What the fuck are you doing? he asks.
Party’s confused. You said you wanted me to stay—
Ghoul snorts out a laugh. Destroya, Party. Come on.
They blink at him.
You are not seriously this dumb, he says when they simply don’t respond. Then he’s tugging them up and shoving them back on the mattress next to him without even waiting for an answer. Before they can even think about struggling or squirming away, he’s dumped a nest of ratty blankets over their lap and latched himself onto their side.
They freeze, stiff and awkward even as his arm finds its way around their middle and one of his legs loops over their thigh to hook behind their other knee. Then, slowly, they let one of their hands come up to brush lightly against his back. They unclench their jaw and turn their face, just a little, so their nose is brushing the top of his head.
It’s unfamiliar, but it’s not horrible. It’s actually sort of nice.
Under their chin, Ghoul cracks a smile.
Hey—maybe you need this too, he says softly. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that you haven’t slept in a week.
They’d thought they were hiding it well, or that he simply wouldn’t care. But the fact that he realized does leave a little warm spot glowing somewhere inside their ribcage.
And after that night, Party never sleeps alone again.
Until now.
When Korse comes back for them, after a vast stretching indeterminate amount of time that might have been hours and is probably more like days, he brings a tray of some kind. He sets it down on the floor, just in front of where Party’s curled up in the corner of the room. It’s some sort of bowl, something that looks like a roll, and a plastic spoon. It smells like food.
It’s nice that Party gets to smell it—they haven’t smelled anything other than blood and their own unwashed skin in a long time. It smells sweet, maybe, like there’s some kind of flavor in it. If they really try, they can almost imagine they’re tasting it.
It’s almost nicer just to pretend, honestly. They don’t have to worry about the flavor, or the texture, or whether it will make them sick. Their stomach is picky in the best of times. Right now, starved and sore and completely unused to solid food, they doubt they’d be able to keep anything down.
“Don’t you want this?” Korse asks softly.
Party doesn’t answer. They probably don’t. There’s gotta be a catch.
“It’s yours,” he continues, as if he read their mind. He keeps doing that—it’s starting to freak them out. “But I’d take it quickly, before I change my mind.”
Even still, they hesitate. They hesitate for too long, because Korse steps out with one sleek black boot and brings his foot down on the roll, stomping it into the ground.
Party flinches back. Then they scoot forward before he has the chance to strike again. Their ankle screams as they drag their leg behind them, and their face still throbs every time they blink. But they make it to the tray in time.
They were going to start with the bread. There’s a pretty good chance their stomach can’t handle anything else. They literally haven’t eaten solids in weeks. But since they have no choice, they pick up the bowl and the spoon and shovel a shaky mouthful onto their tongue.
It’s good. Hot. Oatmeal, they think? They’ve had oatmeal before, ages ago, when they and Kobra were called something else and woke up at 6:45 every morning and sat around a clean wooden table …
They don’t want to think about that, though. If they think about Kobra, a horrible gaping ache cracks open in their chest, and it’s so much worse than the physical pain they’re still in.
They make it through about half the bowl before the novelty of eating wears off and the soreness in their jaw and the fire along the back of their tongue overwhelm them. They can feel their stomach churning, and they say a silent prayer that it doesn’t all come back up. Stomach acid will surely burn more than the simple oatmeal did. They swallow thickly and set the bowl back down.
“Finished?” Korse asks.
Party doesn’t want to respond, doesn’t even want to acknowledge that he spoke, but they’re also afraid he’s going to get mad and hurt them again. There’s not really anything to gain by being so stubborn it makes their life even more miserable. So they nod slightly, keeping their eyes on the ground. Korse makes a sound of approval and takes the bowl away.
He doesn’t disappear again, though. He’s back almost immediately, settling himself down on the edge of Party’s mattress and glancing over their body hunched beneath him.
Then he places a hand on top of Party’s head, carding his fingers through their hair that hasn’t been washed in weeks, and before Party can catch themself, before they realize what they’re doing, they fucking lean into it like some kind of dog.
They jerk away, when it hits them, but Korse has a good grip. He tugs at the strands, sending twinges through their scalp, for another moment before finally letting go.
“It’s lonely in here, isn’t it? Without your little friends?”
“I told you they wouldn’t come,” Party mutters, knowing that the pain in their voice will give them away. It’s a sore subject. But they’re still so glad they’re talking this out instead of using fists or boots or needles.
Is it weak to admit it? They’re exhausted and aching and close to some sort of breaking point, though not the confessing-secrets kind Korse is probably hoping they’ll reach. They honestly don’t care what he thinks of them anymore.
To be honest, they can’t usually tell from his expression, anyway.
“They are a little preoccupied,” Korse tells them in a stage whisper, almost conspiratorially. “Maybe they’re simply too busy these days to spare a thought for their poor, fallen leader.”
Busy with what? Party doesn’t like the sound of that, but they can’t quite work out whether Korse is taunting them about all the creative ways he’s managed to endanger their family recently, or about the fact that they’ve been abandoned in this hell.
It doesn’t matter. Their family is alive, and they’re not supposed to come. As much as that last point sucks—and it really, really does—it’s also the most important thing in the world. It breaks Party’s heart, but only because it’s so weak right now anyway. They wouldn’t have it any other way.
“They won’t come.” They’re like a broken record, but there’s nothing else to say. Korse has never put another person first in his life, so it would be pointless to waste their energy explaining the concept to him.
Korse looks coldly down at them, and they straighten a little in an effort to appear marginally less pathetic. It doesn’t matter, though. Their face is still bruised, their ankle is still broken, and they feel like the tattoo on their hip—which they’ve done their best not to look at since he stuck it into them—is dark enough to bleed right through their clothes. In a picture book about the meaning of the word pathetic, they’d be plastered across all the pages.
“And what about you?” he asks.
Party’s admittedly not quite sure what he’s looking for here. They’re scared to give the wrong answer. “Me?”
“Fun Ghoul and Jet Star and Kobra Kid are fighting a war. They’re not going to come. And so what are you doing, little killjoy?”
Party flinches—they want him to keep their family’s names out of his filthy mouth. But they still don’t pick a fight. Instead, they think about his question.
Surviving is the honest answer, though they don’t even feel like they’re doing a real shiny job of that right now. And what for?
That’s probably what he’s getting at. How resistance is futile, destiny is written in the stars, and they might as well give in now because the end result will be the same either way.
The only thing is, they’ve never believed that. They’re not about to start now.
“Digesting,” they say eventually, trying to pass off a grimace as a shadow of their formerly-famous cocky grin. It definitely doesn’t land, but Korse smiles good-naturedly.
“Undoubtedly,” he says. “And now, this.”
He holds something out. It’s a tiny white pill.
No.
“Go fuck yourself,” Party hisses, because, absolutely not. No way.
Korse’s smile only widens.
“I know for a fact that you know how this goes,” he says calmly. “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way.”
There are all sorts of painful, violating, nightmarish tactics that make up the hard way. They’ve had all of them used against them before. In fact, in the days before the desert, they’d learned pretty quickly that the only way to get through it all in one piece was the easy way, and had eventually gotten to the point where they barely even felt any shame about that decision.
It all feels so far away now, though. Not the panic, but the lessons learned and the reasons why they learned them. The panic, though—that’s still here. And as it rushes through them, as they thrash out, trying to get away and knock the medication out of Korse’s hand at the same time, they’re almost drowning in enough of it to silence the voice screaming in their head that they’re making a mistake.
Something they learned years ago, but had almost forgotten—when someone holds a hand over your nose and stops the air from going in and out, you’ll do almost anything to breathe. And when instinct kicks in and your mouth opens in a silent gasp, it’s all too easy for a tiny little pill to slip inside.
Party dangles from the railing of the rickety scaffolding in the warehouse, and they must be drunk or something, because they feel like they’re flying as they stretch out over the floor a dozen feet below them.
It’s crazy—they’ve never had alcohol that made them feel quite like this. Explosively giddy and violently free, with no inhibitions and no reservations at all. But they know there’s nothing else in their system, because they would NEVER. They’re always so careful about what they drink and who they kiss and where they rest their hands. Even out here in the Zones, so far from Battery City, there’s never a guarantee that other substances are safe and Party would never risk it. Not after everything.
So, drunk. That must be what’s going on.
The funny thing is, they can only really remember having one drink at the beginning of the night.
Far below them, the crowd writhes. Music booms from the stage, sharp rhythms and deep bass. The lights are flashing, and the air is thick with humidity and the smell of desert sweat. Party doesn’t know what time it is. They don’t know what band is playing. They don’t even remember who invited them, or who they got all dressed up to see.
The only thing they know is Ghoul, clinging to the back of their beaded lace shirt, holding on like their life depends on it, like he’s the only thing keeping them from falling right over the edge.
Who knows—maybe he is.
They sway with the beat, latched onto the railing behind them in a death grip they don’t need with Ghoul watching out for them, and every time their body twists his fingers brush against the small of their back. God, they feel like gravity doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s like helium is bubbling in their veins and pulling them toward the sky just barely visible through the holes in the roof above.
Eventually their wrists start to get sore and they feel dizzy from the height, so they clamber back over the railing and drop to the ground beside him. They’d come up here, maybe half an hour ago, to get away from the roiling crowd below—to try to get above the heat a little, and to get a better view of the stage. But it seems the crowd followed them up. There’s barely room to stand, and they find themself all pressed up against him.
It’s not as alien now, and it’s definitely not scary anymore. After all the nights curled up together and all the days of gradually eroding boundaries and steadily growing trust, the outline of Ghoul’s body is almost as familiar as their own.
That doesn’t mean it’s not overwhelming, though. For a totally different reason. Every inch of skin that brushes against them only increases the feeling that they’re flying.
First they’re holding each other, a little caught off guard by the proximity. Then they’re dancing, unable to resist in the sea of moving people. Ghoul’s hands untangle from their shirt and rest on their hips, then the middle of their back, then their shoulder blades. They’ve got one arm around his neck and the other tight against his waist, pulling him closer. They’re breathing in the air Ghoul breathes out. It should be gross, with the beer and smoke on his breath, but it’s not.
Eventually, they’re not even dancing anymore, just straight up grinding against each other in the middle of all these people. They can tell the moment it crosses over the boundary from socially acceptable, because Kobra and Jet make awkward eye contact from across the balcony and then turn and flee.
They should stop. They should stop. But they don’t stop, not until it’s too late, and instead of avoiding their gaze or twisting away in shame, Ghoul just holds them even tighter.
The car ride home is awkward, but Party tries not to let it bother them. Ghoul’s got their hand clasped in his, and he’s humming softly—something from the show, they think, although they have no idea how he remembers the music. It’s nice.
It’s also, somehow, terrifying.
You disgust me, Kobra mutters in their ear as they all shuffle into the diner together. I just really wanted you to know that.
Party blinks innocently—like, who, me? They snicker as Kobra swats at them, then disappears into his room down the hall.
Party’s not tired, though. They wander up to the roof instead of going to their own room. They’re not surprised when Ghoul follows them up and plasters himself to their back as they stare out over the horizon.
I think I’m scared of how you make me feel, they eventually say into the darkness.
Ghoul smirks. They can feel it against their throat. And how do I make you feel?
They have to think about how to phrase it. They don’t want to trivialize it. They don’t want to offend him. They just want to make him understand the magnitude of what he does, and why it’s completely overwhelming in a way they can’t decide is good or bad.
Like I’m losing control, they offer finally.
Ghoul hums sympathetically—they don’t exactly share sob stories, that’s not what kind of thing they have going on here, but at a certain point you start to pick up details and put puzzle pieces together.
It is scary, he agrees. But maybe good, too?
The other ways Ghoul makes them feel are good. They’re really not sure about this one, though. It’s a little too close to crazy for comfort.
I wish I didn’t have to worry about it, is what they decide to say. They really don’t want to make it seem like they regret anything.
Ghoul just shrugs. So then don’t.
If only it was that simple.
But Ghoul—loud, ridiculous, unpredictable Ghoul, with his crazy laugh and his rough hands and his dirty fucking mouth—isn’t done sharing unexpected wisdom tonight.
Someday, he says, someday at the end? I think you’ll probably wish you had this feeling one last time.
It’s an unspoken rule in the desert: live each moment as if it’s your last. Because it very well might be. And yet Party can’t imagine this ending. It’s woven into the very fiber of their DNA, and as long as they’re here, these feelings for Ghoul will be too. And they’ve already decided they’re not going anywhere.
But even so, they decide that’s a real nice way of looking at it.
5 Days
“Still with us, Party?” Korse asks as he glides into the cell with a bounce in his step that’s pretty unlike him. Party thinks they know each other well enough to make those kind of statements now.
They’re not fond of him. That’s not at all what it is. They’d gut him like a fish and hang his innards like a banner if given half the chance. But there’s something about the repeated return of a familiar face that’s doing something awful and numbing to their psyche.
What does it mean if they’re starting to wonder whether Korse can do anything as terrible to them as the things they think when they’re left on their own? What does it mean that the buzzing of the lights and the emptiness of the room almost make them wish he’d come back and kick them around when he’s gone, just to give them something new to focus on?
They’d found out pretty quickly that the standard cocktail of Battery City drugs didn’t work on them anymore. Korse hadn’t seemed all that surprised—something to do with tolerance and resistance, he said, making notes on a little electronic device he pulled from his pocket. He was taking it back to the committee, he’d said. BLI had other tricks up their sleeve.
Their newfound immunity doesn’t mean they haven’t been going through some weird variation of withdrawal, though. They’re constantly nauseous, even when their stomach is empty—which is most of the time. Lights are brighter and even the limited sounds they’re exposed to are louder than they can ever remember them being before. Their headache seems to pound from the very fabric of their skull, and their skin is always crawling, sometimes with sweat and sometimes with chills and sometimes with this persistent itch that they have to be careful not to scratch, or they’ll draw blood.
So much blood.
“I hate to disturb your solitude,” Korse continues, looming ever closer to where Party lays limply on the dirty mattress. “But you know how it is. The powers that be demanded proof of life.”
“Killjoys never die,” Party replies dully—not because underwhelming, over-repeated platitudes are going to make them feel particularly better, but simply because they know it’ll piss Korse off.
“They never shut up, either,” the Scarecrow murmurs idly. “Apparently they’re already writing songs out there in the Zones about your miraculous feat: Party Poison, back from the dead. Delivered from the darkness to save them all. Or something to that effect.”
“I ain’t fucking Jesus,” Party snaps. Today, martyrdom annoys them.
“Oh, I know,” Korse says coolly. “And we’re going to prove it—quite publicly—in five days time.”
Party can’t even imagine what that’s supposed to mean. A flogging in the town square, maybe? A community-building exercise where everyone gets to throw a switch that shocks them or stabs them or sends them into a pool filled with sharks?
Korse clears it up for them really quick, though: “You’ve been sentenced to death and scheduled for public execution.”
Death.
Execution.
They repeat what he said back to themself, and a single thought flashes through their mind: Good.
Good.
“Good,” Party says slowly.
“I beg your pardon?”
Korse had been practically vibrating with excitement to share the good news of their impending doom with them. In retrospect, they imagine he’s been arguing for it since they got trapped here—really, it’s gotta be frustrating to spend so much time trying to eliminate somebody, just to be forced to nurse them back to health and wait on their petty mortal needs. He’s probably been gathering evidence of their noncompliance since the very beginning, tracking all the ways they can never be released back into the population of Battery City and the resources they’re draining just laying around in this cell. He’ll probably mark their death as a holiday.
But he doesn’t look thrilled at their nonchalant reaction. He’s obviously a sadist—he wanted terror, he wanted fear, he wanted weeping and begging shaking in their metaphorical boots. He probably wanted to get off on it.
Well, Party’s not going to give him that. It’s not their style at all.
“Good. Better that than a fucking zombie out there in the city.” They grin viciously. “You know you can’t change me, so this is the only option you have left.”
Five days to live.
Oh—how many different ways there are to feel about that.
They shuffle through some options. They’re pretty basic, probably. Will it hurt. Will it drag on. Will their corpse be pretty. Will anyone cry for them. Will their family feel it, somewhere in their hearts, when they’re no longer on this earth alongside them.
In the end, though, they decide that it literally doesn’t matter. To the others, they’re as good as dead anyway. Whether they’re in this room or decomposing in a pit somewhere, there’s not any more of a chance of them seeing Jet or Kobra or Ghoul or Girlie again. Of holding them. Of letting their voices wash over them.
God, they miss their voices.
Korse hasn’t left—he’s just been watching them stare at the ceiling, eyes unfocused and glazed. Now he crouches beside them and snaps next to their ear, bringing their fragile attention back to him.
“I want you to tell me what you’re thinking about,” he says firmly.
No.
“I’m thinking about an army of giant squids learning ballet.” The obvious lie enrages him, but they’re not scared anymore. There’s nothing he can do to them that will make them suffer any longer than five days, and five days is a very small, manageable amount of time.
He slaps them across the face, and it only makes them laugh.
“What are you going to do?” they ask. “Kill me?”
Korse came in here ready to rock their world in the worst way he could imagine. But he leaves questioning whether he showed his hand too early, and how much it’s going to cost him.
Good.
Maybe they haven’t lost their touch. Maybe they can cling to their pride until the end.
Somebody tells Party once as a child that the entire body replaces itself, cell by tiny little cell, every seven years.
They think it was presented joyously, initially—like, wow, isn’t this an incredible opportunity for renewal and rebirth. But to them, it sounded morbid as shit. They can’t see it as anything more than dozens of consecutive deaths, all leading up to the big event, the Real Death, when new cells won’t form anymore and everything just stops.
Hair, that cycles quicker. If hair grows half an inch a month and you have two inches of hair, that’s all-new hair every four months. Party runs their fingers through the soft edges of their hair, thinking about how long they’ve had it, how much longer it could stay.
They will not let their mother cut their hair.
They’re not even sure it’s their mother anymore—not really. There was the makeup incident, and then the violence-at-school incident, and then they fought off the syringes the doctor tried to stick them with, and at some point between all those incidents she stopped kissing them goodnight and started making metallic clicking sounds when asked questions that required an answer more complicated than yes or no. They’re a full-blown conspiracy theorist by now, but even if they weren’t, it would be mighty fucking suspicious.
So they’re back in that room, with a hypodermic needle in their neck and shears to their scalp, and there’s something in their eye to monitor their brainwaves and something on their finger to monitor their heart. The clippers nick their scalp and nobody even apologizes.
In the desert, they swear their hair grows faster than it ever has before. It must be all the pure unfiltered sunshine. It’s growing, but it’s not dying, because they’re keeping all of it. It brushes their ears and kisses the back of their neck and they think that it may be magic, or the closest they’re ever going to get.
(It’s probably the radiation, corrupting their cells and mutating their scalp, or it’s all in their head and it’s actually just the same as it’s always been. But they’re free to think what they want now. There’s literally no one around to correct them anymore.)
You look like a wild animal, the newly-christened Kobra Kid says, ruffling the top of their freshly-bleached, frizzy head. And not the good kind. The feral chicken kind.
Kobra sounds batshit crazy. Do feral chickens even exist? But Party just grins. I know.
It’s glorious.
It’s not until they’ve been out here for seven years that it finally hits them, the joy of the realization—not a single cell in their body was ever inside Battery City. Everything they are, was made out here, wild and beautiful and free.
It’s like this corruption, this stain that’s been on them and that they’ve been sure others could see, has finally washed away. And now that it’s gone, their soul is finally healed.
Even dying for real, some day long in the future, surely won’t be so bad now that it won’t happen in that cold, colorless hell.
2 Days
T minus two days. Korse comes early in the morning to gloat.
“How are you feeling today, Party?” There’s been a big emphasis on feelings lately. Tired. Hungry. Sore. Hopeless. Despondent.
They never answer, but he usually provides some options for them to ignore. Sometimes, they’re really creative, like he had to break out a thesaurus.
It’s like he takes particular joy in reminding them: Soon you won’t feel anything at all.
The joke’s on him, though. Pretty much all they’ve felt for a while now is ready to die.
“Fuck off,” they whisper. They’re not even sure if he hears. He does step closer, though, so they curl themself into an even tighter ball.
“Come on, Party Poison,” he says lightly. He weaves his fingers through the oily strands of their unwashed hair and then yanks upward, pulling them roughly to their skinny, bruised knees. They weren’t expecting it, and their jaw clacks together with the force. “Don’t give out on me just yet. I haven’t even introduced today’s main event.”
They sway. Even after weeks of being manhandled and dragged limply through the sterile white halls, they still can’t wrap their head around the sick dichotomy—that Korse is the primary reason they’re so weak and pathetic now, and also the only thing between them and complete collapse. At this point, they’d bet money on collapse being the less humiliating path by far.
If only they were allowed to take it.
He’s holding their hair so tightly they’re worried he’s going to pull it right out of their scalp, leave them with a bald spot right in the middle. And after everything they’ve been through, this sounds like just about the worst thing possible.
At least, through it all, they’ve stayed pretty. At least when Kobra finds their body after BLI dumps it out in the desert like a scrap of rotten meat for the vultures, he’ll be able to recognize them. People can gaze upon their tragic visage and understand what was lost and what was gained, and maybe even weep. They like to think someone out there might weep for them.
It’s shallow, and it’s not. Party has fought against the world for the agency to look exactly the way they want to look. Their hair might as well be dyed in their own blood when it comes down to it. God knows there have been enough days where blood has darkened the color and slicked it to their face, as they were kicked and stabbed and shocked and shot and forced to watched so many of their friends die.
It’s theirs. It’s theirs, and they barely have anything left.
And then the Scarecrow pulls out a pair of glittering shears from somewhere in his jacket, and they forget about the few strands lost in his fist. There’s a much more real danger now.
“No,” they breathe, trying and failing to jerk away. There’s searing pain at the top of their head, and they swear they feel blood trickling down the back of their neck. It’s no use; there’s nowhere to go. They can barely breathe, and Korse hasn’t even done anything yet.
“I’m afraid so,” he replies. Of course the bastard doesn’t sound sorry at all. If anything, he sounds eager. “We have to make you presentable for our audience.”
He runs the blade back and forth across their cheekbone, smiling cruelly as they flinch and hiss. They hate the way they’ve started to tremble, try desperately to get their limbs under control, but it’s no use.
It’s just hair. It’s just hair.
It’s really not.
“Fuck, please,” they beg, even though they swore they wouldn’t, couldn’t give him the satisfaction. “This isn’t a good idea, you have to listen to me—”
Korse drags the scissors along the slant of their eyebrow. The metal is ice cold and stings. “I’m listening.”
The subtext lingers just below the surface of his cold voice: But not for long.
But it’s not going to change anything.
Still, futile or not, Party has to try. They wrack their brain for a strategy.
“I—people won’t recognize me.”
Korse hums. “That’s why you’re tagged.”
He moves his hand down to Party’s hipbone, runs the tip of the scissors over the scabby barcode etched there. Party tries not to gag. They hate it, they hate it. Cut that off instead.
“I mean—” They take a shuddering breath. “Out there. When you—”
Drag me through the streets. String me up. Make a bloodthirsty holiday of a public execution.
They know it’s coming and there’s nothing they can do to stop it, but they somehow can’t bring themself to say any of those things out loud. They wonder, distantly, if that means they’re not so accepting of their fate as they’ve pretended.
Not that it matters. Nothing matters at all.
“Your hair makes you recognizable?” Korse asks them.
Party starts to nod, before they remember that moving their head is agony. He hasn’t loosened his grip at all. “And if I’m so famous, and dangerous, and you want people to know that you caught me—that you’re better than us—they should be able to tell—”
“Hmm,” Korse says, and Party can’t tell if he’s genuinely considering or just humoring them to make the disappointment hurt worse later on. “And in this scenario, is it the length or the color that identifies you?”
“Red,” Party gasps, even though they should probably lie and say it’s the whole situation. Why wouldn’t they just lie? They’re so stupid—
Korse bares his teeth. It’s nowhere close to kind.
“Luckily, you should have plenty of other opportunities to display your signature shade of red that day,” he says reasonably. Then he brings the scissors home, and that first horrible chunk of hair falls limply at Party’s knees like a dead little bird.
They can’t bear it.
“Fuck. Please.”
Korse drops them, stepping back and bringing his fingers to his chin to consider his handiwork. Party slams roughly to the ground, trying to catch themself but not managing to work out where exactly their arms are in time. They struggle upright. For some reason their vision is blurry now.
“The damage is done now. Best to let me finish.” Korse tugs lightly at their jaw until they’re more or less making eye contact, then frowns in mock sympathy. His fingers press into the barely-healed edge of the wound at their throat. “Like ripping off a bandage.”
Then his hand finds its way back into the hair that’s left, gripping tight and jerking their head roughly to the side.
Or ripping out a knife when you’ve been stabbed.
But Party doesn’t have the capacity for words anymore. They sit frozen, listening to a distant sound of broken keening growing louder and louder in their ears. And it’s not until the pressure builds in their chest and they find they can’t breathe that they realize it’s coming from them—that they’re sobbing.
“Dramatic, aren’t we?” Korse muses as they splutter weakly. He smirks. “Hair grows back with time.”
He doesn’t say it, but they’re both thinking it—that time is something Party no longer has in any kind of abundance. They’ll never tuck their hair behind their ears again.
Gradually Korse’s grip on them weakens as there’s less and less to hold onto. It feels both an instant and a lifetime later that his hands are empty and Party’s head feels cold and bare.
It’s funny—the red doesn’t look like so much splayed out across the floor. But it was all they had.
They hear the shears shick shut, footsteps behind them as Korse walks around them in a tight circle. His foot nudges their thigh as he passes, but they don’t move. He makes little noises, somewhere between approval and distaste. He’s made Party ugly, but he’s also made them his. A fucked-up work of art, or perhaps a withered hunting trophy.
“You can keep this,” he says when he’s done admiring his handiwork, kicking one of the little piles of hair and sending it fluttering in Party’s direction.
Then he’s gone, the metal door sealing with a hiss behind him.
Party slumps to the ground once more, and thinks dully that the strands scratching at their eyelids as they lie on the floor are the last hairs they’ll ever brush out of their face in this lifetime.
Party misses their family. So, so much. But they can’t picture them anymore.
0 Days
It is the very last day of Party Poison’s life, and they are bored.
So bored.
White walls. White floors. Blinding white lights that shatter synapses at the base of their skull, over and over again. Scratchy white pajamas that grate unpleasantly at their skin and almost make them wish they were wearing nothing at all.
No food. No water. No windows. And someone took their hair away in the middle of the night, swept the red off the floor as they dozed in and out of fitful slumber. There’s nothing at all to break up the monotony.
They hum a little, just to themself. It hurts, the vibrations picking over raw skin and rattling it apart just the tiniest bit at the edges, but they persevere anyway. If it’s the last day, there should be singing.
They don’t even notice that Korse has appeared in the room until he speaks.
“Beautiful.”
Party flushes, but doesn’t bother to muster the energy for a scowl.
That wasn’t for you.
It doesn’t matter whether they say it or not. Korse wouldn’t hear. He wouldn’t care. He just takes and takes and takes, like this whole fucking evil place.
“So. We’ve made it to the end at last,” he says, in a somber tone of voice. Like it’s inevitable and not something he’s actively pursued. Like it’s a tragedy he’ll feel personally and not just a means to an end.
Party doesn’t say anything. They don’t even look up from the floor.
“Do you want to talk about what it will be like?” Korse asks. “I would think a gentle contemplation of mortality in such a fraught time could be an almost religious experience.”
“Don’t people looking for religion normally get a priest at the end?” Party asks dully. “Last rites, and all that?”
Korse doesn’t respond, because Party already knows that’s not an option they’d be given even if they wanted it. They’ve carefully cultivated their reputation as one slippery motherfucker, and BLI is taking absolutely no chances that they’ll slip out from under their watchful eye again. But eventually he does murmur, “Not a soul will come for you but me. So …”
“I don’t want to talk about it, no,” Party snaps. Privately, they’ve been pressing their hands to their eyelids and dangling upside down on the narrow metal cot, trying to induce violent hallucinations of what the Phoenix Witch would be like if she was real. So far they’ve gotten a lot of pulsing red and static.
They’re kind of hoping she’s draped in soft fabric that will wrap around them when she takes them in her arms, and maybe that she smells like the sea. If she even exists, of course—which they’re doubtful of. But that’s none of Korse’s fucking business.
“Do you think you’ll cry?” Korse asks into the emptiness that follows. “I have come to rather enjoy your tears. The pathetic little sounds you make. The way your nose gets dusted red.”
“Maybe I’ll laugh,” Party says. “I know how much you love when I laugh at you.”
Korse just ignores that. They’re not surprised.
“Some people piss themselves as they’re dying,” he continues in a conversational tone. He makes a show of studying his nails, as if he’s not hanging onto their every movement, analyzing even the slightest reaction. “Shit, even. It’s something the body does—nothing to be ashamed of.” Now he grins, and it’s mean. “But at the same time—I’m sure it’ll do wonders for your memory.”
He’s been to a fuckton of executions, Party figures. So he would know.
“I’m Jesus, remember?” they grit their teeth and try to stop trembling. It’s what the fucker wants, to work them up—and anyway, there’s nothing to worry about since they haven’t even eaten in days. “I’m gonna flare up in a blaze of glory and ascend into the heavens. The Witch herself is gonna ride down on a golden buzzard and smite all you fuckers before she douses me in your ashes like pixie dust and makes me fly—”
Korse laughs softly. “You desert fools and your little superstitions,” he says. Party considers demanding a little more individual credit, considering they just made all of that up on the spot for dramatic effect, but they also don’t want anything from him.
“Just wait,” they say instead. They pour every ounce of conviction they have left into those two little words, just to leave him guessing.
Once upon a time—and they know this even if they’ve never heard it confirmed—the name Party Poison used to send at least a jolt of fear through his heart. So help them, they’ll get that power back one last time before they take their final breath. They will.
Korse doesn’t respond. They sit in silence together, two enemies headed to the same place for the complete opposite purpose. Executioner and executed. The beginning of the end.
“Well,” he says finally, after Party’s almost forgotten he was there. His voice is different now, more serious. He holds out a hand, and when Party doesn’t move, takes them gently by the back of the neck like a lost kitten. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?”
They shall. There’s no other choice.
Party doesn’t know where they’re going to do it. They are bound and blindfolded before they’re lifted bodily into some sort of van, so they can’t see and have no sense of direction as it takes off at a speed entirely too slow for their taste. A puzzle: does the desire to speed fast vroom vroom outweigh the dread of arriving at the final destination.
Yes. It’s so stupid, so incredibly stupid, but it really does. They want to scream at the driver to floor it. They want to bash their head against the wall, over and over again, until the velocity of their swings drowns out the pathetic pace of the cool city lights flashing by outside.
They do neither of those things.
Instead, they jostle weakly against the cold plastic of the seat, not even restrained because everyone here knows there’s nowhere they could go and no strength to get them there even if there was. Party wants to die now, in relative privacy, in peace. Party wants to go out in the biggest fucking spectacle Battery City has ever seen. Party wants to sleep for a thousand years, until without ever regaining consciousness they turn to wood, to stone, to dust.
Party can tell the exact moment the van crosses over the city boundary and into the desert, and is so shocked that they almost fall out of their seat completely.
“Wha—” they mumble, and Korse chuckles cruelly.
“It’s not my people who need this demonstration, little killjoy,” he says. “It’s yours.”
They’re not far outside the city when they stop. Korse tugs them from the van and slides the blindfold from their face, and the glare of the sun glinting off the skyscrapers whites out their vision for the better part of a minute. When the stars fade, they can see that Korse is both right and wrong. Sure, there’s sand all around them. But the people who have gathered are definitely his.
There’s this weird polarity about the city—that the people are so meek and controlled in daily life, but so quick to snap up any scraps of brutality and vice. It’s like a modern-day gladiator mentality. Bread and circuses. They get their drugs and their pornodroids and their fucking public executions, and they conveniently forget that there’s anything else they could be feeling in the empty interim between the generous offerings of their evil overlords on high.
Well, they’re feeling now. All of them. And these feelings take the form of earsplitting taunts and scorn.
Party’s used to having rude things shouted at them, because they live with wild animals and fight barbarians every damn day. They’re also used to shouting back, louder and worse. Without that option—because really, what would they say now?—they’re so off-balance they want to sink to their knees and melt away.
Korse lays his hands on their shoulders, as if to steady them. As if to say, I’m here. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? If he wasn’t here, Party would be half a mile away by now, even with their empty stomach and their shaking legs and their injured ankle and the waves of despair crashing back and forth inside their skull.
He takes a step forward, shuffling Party in front of him. Another halting step. And then they’re marching toward a platform at the center of the crowd at a pace Party wasn’t ready for and can barely keep up with.
People spit on them as they pass. One faceless stranger actually throws something, sticky and wet—an egg? Maybe? It’s disgusting and overwhelming and a thought darts through their mind before they can stop it: in just a few minutes, all this will be gone.
That shouldn’t be something to take comfort in. But they do. Just a few more terrible minutes before the blessed end.
Korse lets them go to climb the narrow wooden stairs alone, one hand lightly brushing the small of their back to remind them that he hasn’t gone anywhere. Party looks around when they limp to the top. There’s no executioner with studded leather bracelets and a dark hood, no fancy documents to proclaim or rules to review. Just a simple frame and a rope with a loop at one end. Grand fucking gallows. Korse, and Party, and nothing more.
“You?” they croak in Korse’s direction. He nods grimly.
“I execute people every day,” he reminds them, not gloating or threatening but simply matter-of-fact. “This affair is hardly different from that.”
It feels different. When Party imagined their death out in the Zones with their mask on and a smoking blaster still clutched tightly in their hand, it felt bright. Heroic. This just feels like old sludgy water trickling down a drain.
Korse holds up the dark cotton blindfold again, soft and thick. “Your choice,” he says. And Party looks at it. They look at him. And they shake their head.
This whole time they’ve been scanning the crowd—pretending the flash of yellow is their brother’s head weaving through the crowd. The streak of green is Ghoul’s jacket as he sneaks around the platform. The curls in the distance are Jet, or Girlie, come to cheer on their last performance. To let them know they were loved, however brief and intangible it might have been.
People are probably blindfolded for a reason. It probably helps. But they don’t want to give up that little glimmer of hope.
If nothing else, they’ll have setting sun and the warm desert air to send them off this last time.
“Suit yourself.”
The rope tugs on their almost-healed wound when Korse slides it over their head. Not enough to open it back up, but enough to sting like hell. And it’s funny, isn’t it, to be worrying about the condition of their throat in a time like this.
Just another minute. Then it will be done.
It’s inevitable. It’s a gift, even. And yet, when they remember why they’re here, they can barely stand.
Korse takes their upper arm in his big hand and turns them around to face the crowd. When he speaks, his voice rings out like a politician.
“Any final words, Party Poison?”
Final words.
They are angry, suddenly—that they didn’t think of something to say, that there’s no one here to record it even if they had. It finally sinks in that there’s no paragraph in the history books for them, no epigraph etched in granite to render them forward into the ages in immortality. There’s not even anything to be taken to the Mailbox. Their mask, their jacket—long gone, surely incinerated the day they were captured. Or displayed in Korse’s office like some kind of trophy. They’re not sure which is worse.
They care about this now, so acutely it feels like the’ve been shot all over again. In the heart, this time. But in a moment they won’t care anymore.
“Kiss my ass, fucker,” Party hisses, regretting it instantly when Korse steps forward on the platform to press roughly against them from behind and squeeze their hips in a cold, cruel grip. His thumb finds the barcode again, just beneath the waistband of their ratty linen pants. Even your last moments are mine, he says without words. Every cell in their body, once uncorrupted and free, is stained by the city and its wretched minion.
The crowd jeers.
And then Korse is stepping away. There’s pulsing somewhere, maybe drumming. A voice, probably in their head, whispering, Come on, come on.
They look to the fiery horizon one last time, squeeze their eyes tight, and fall.
Now!