Fic: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out (MCR, PG-13, Mikey/Frank)
Title: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out
Rating: Mikey/Frank
Pairing: PG-13
Length: ~2600 words
Beta: Thanks to ladyfoxxx, turps33 and rockeandroll for the help/beta.
Author's Note: Inspired by the recent tweets by the Dr. Deathdefying, NewsAGoGo and other Killjoys twitterfeeds. Written prior to the release of the Art is the Weapon video so it deviates fairly hard from that canon.
Summary: No matter how many zones they run through, Frank can't completely escape the lights of Battery City.
Frank’s noticed that people outside the perimeter of Battery City liked to argue about when the world ended the first time. A lot of people liked to point a finger at the virus or the first major meltdown. General consensus was that by the time the Zones were needed it was all over.
No arguing with that.
Once the Zones were up, it was all passes and patrols and life behind walled up sectors with more droids and robots than flesh and blood people. Mikey once said that he thought the Wolverines had no idea how good they had it in Red Dawn. Frank had to ask him what the fuck Red Dawn was. Mikey had gotten quiet for a long time before he finally answered.
Frank blames the first droid implant, back before everything shifted and the desert grew. But then he’s kind of a history geek. He blames the droid tech for needing the energy that lead to the hotspots, the nitros, the helium wars and its fallout. If there weren’t any droid implants, they wouldn’t have needed Battery City in the first place.
“It’s about fucking dependence,” Gerard says whenever Frank voices that opinion. He smokes cigarettes he finds in the ruins of gas stations. The most recent one was what Mikey says was a Circle K. There’s sand in the filter but he always shares, so Frank doesn’t mind. Stale, sandy cigarettes were better than none. “Droids and robots can’t fucking unplug, so the world won’t get a chance to reboot.”
Frank doesn’t comment this time. He just smokes and thinks about how even fifty or a hundred miles outside the perimeter, the lights of Battery City glow at the edge of the horizon, its factories eating people up and spitting them back out charged up and wired into the system for another week, month, year.
Gerard’s passionate about this shit - the underground. Frank is, too, and he’s cool to follow him. The Dr. Deathdefying shtick is a better rebellion than anything Frank could come up with. It’s not going to win the war, but at least it’s a fight. Frank just doesn’t want to talk about it all the time.
The cause is all Gerard seems to have left since his grandmother died. Well, the cause and Mikey, but sometimes Frank thinks that maybe they’re the same thing. He fights to have something to give Mikey -the same thing she tried to give them both - a life outside of Battery City, unplugged and alive.
Frank only met her a few times, but apparently Elena’s the reason the Ways never even came close to being part of the network. She was old school resistance and the whole fucking family came from hidden organic settlements. Ray never got any droid tech implants because his dad was traditional, and Bob…
Well, it didn’t matter about Bob. That’s what they tell themselves. It doesn’t matter that Bob just never came back, ghosted trying to get out of Battery City one time too many.
It can’t matter because Frank knows by now that you don’t think about ghosts. It’s one of a hundred zonnerunner survival rules. If you let yourself dwell on ghosts, they’ll just haunt you. Then the haunted just end up ghosted themselves.
Frank really does get that. Doesn’t stop him wondering about his mom though. She’s not technically a ghost yet, but she went droid after agents took his dad back in the beginning of the latest power shift. He was just a baby when it happened, but she told him that back then, there were roads at the outskirts of Battery City that were more than cracked asphalt and dirt. Frank doesn’t remember life outside the perimeter as a child, but he wasn’t born inside. He knows that much.
And he knows that without his old man, she felt like she needed more: more energy, more mental storage, more, more, more. She needed. So she dragged him into Battery City - a lonely organic boy growing up in a city of droids and robots.
His mom, for all that she kept plugging deeper and deeper into the network, melting into the system, was old school like Ray’s dad. She still believed in choice. So where his classmates got droid implants like birthday presents, Frank stayed far the fuck away and kept his fists out.
He figured out early how wrong it all was. Because people changed. He saw it with his mom first and then the kids in his education units. The droid kids became less real the more they added.
His friend Hambone stopped talking after his fifth upgrade. Instead he transmitted messages over the network instead of speaking like a human being, just assuming he’d be heard. After all, everyone was plugged in right?
He was nineteen when he finally tore out of the city. He’d been in factory training at the time. It wasn’t what he’d dreamed of as a kid, but it wasn’t like he had much of a choice. Organics weren’t much good to the system. If you couldn’t tap in, labor was the only thing you were good for - working next to robots with AI that made them less intelligent than hamsters.
“It’s just such a waste,” his supervisor told him once. He remembers it so fucking clearly, sitting in the droid’s office, staring at her large glowing right eye - metal and fiberglass instead of tissue. She had NewsAGoGo streaming directly into her brain through her tech and on a view screen behind her on the wall - for organics like him, no doubt. “You’re so intelligent, Frank. You could be something great one day, maybe even a system controller, if you would just integrate.”
That’s what the droids and high-programmed robots called it - integrating. They talk about it like it was becoming part of something good instead of cutting out a piece of your humanity and trading it for cold metal and coding.
Frank had just been starting to realize that integration was less of a choice the older you got and goddamnit, he liked his skin. He liked his skin and his hair and his teeth and his fingernails. He especially liked having the choice to keep them his to do with as he fucking pleased.
For a little while though, he’d been content to let that just be a political statement - my skin, my business. People clicked their tongues, or whatever they’d replaced their tongues with, and rolled their eye/s at him but that was it. Then the second to last organic in his group came in one morning with metal crawling over his jawbone and up into his ear and a slight fiber-optic glint in his dark eyes.
Frank’s decision to run after seeing that wasn’t a conscious one. He got through his work day, checked out and suddenly his feet wear moving. He was racing anywhere so long as it was outside of the city.
He met Mikey Way more than fifteen miles outside the perimeter in Zone 1A. Frank had collapsed under an old dead truck, hiding and sleeping. He dreamed of his mother, too integrated with the Network to pull loose, until Mikey had spotted him and proceeded to kick his foot until he woke up crawled out.
“Hey. Hey, dude. You a droid?” He asked, staring down at Frank through his dirty lenses, raygun pointed casually at him with one hand. Back then Mikey’d worn smudged glasses and clothes that were black before the sun bleached them. The glasses are gone now - broken in a run and they haven’t been able to find new ones. For almost a month, Mikey stuck close with his hand always fisted in Gerard’s shirt or wrapped around Frank’s wrist. Ray found a doctor in the organic settlement hidden deep in Zone 5 to fix his eyes but the clothes still tend to be black.
He shook his head, hard. The image of silver over bone made him shudder. “Fucking zombies.”
Mikey laughed. “No man. At least zombies stay down if you destroy the brain. Zombies are fucking milkshake next to droids.”
Then he held out a battered plastic bottle. He offered Frank water and Frank offered his hand. He was the first organic Frank had ever met who was his age who wasn’t on his way to integration, and it meant a lot.
Of course, that was before Frank knew that out in the zones, giving away your water like offering pure energy to a robot - liquid fucking currency. It means more now, that Mikey gave it away to him without knowing him. Yet it was nearly a week before Frank found out his name. Two before Mikey let him meet his brother.
Even not knowing, Frank had put his life in Way hands. Mikey showed him how to survive as a zonerunner. Then he and Gerard showed him how they fought back. They pulled him into their family and never looked back, even though Frank did, maybe once or twice, when it was late and he missed his mom. Five years later he still doesn’t regret it. There’s lots of shit he regrets, yeah, but never trusting them.
Now here he is, smoking in Gerard’s beat up car in the gutted ruins of a truck stop half a mile from Zone 4, wondering if this Dr. Deathdefying broadcast will be the last one they get away with. He wonders that every time though. Gerard and Mikey are fairly confident about the ‘they’ll never find me’ shit but Frank worries. He thinks about Hambone and his mom and the droid supervisor’s fucking hopes for him and wonders if maybe they don’t need to get found to get caught.
“I can hear you thinking,” Mikey says, climbing through the window rather than opening the door and dropping into the back seat beside Frank. He’s come back from scouring over the remains of the building to bum a cigarette - he always does when Gerard finds them. Ray used to but he’s trying to quit. There’s not enough, anyway, and he spends most of his time with his head under the hood of their wheels, trying to fight the sand and the fallout back for one more day.
“You shouldn’t eavesdrop.” Frank holds out his cigarette because Gerard’s wandered off and Mikey will chase a cigarette down like a tracker with a target. He doesn’t want him to leave just yet.
“You shouldn’t think so loud.” Mikey counters. But he takes the cigarette and gives Frank a thin smile. “Gee’s going to start the broadcast in ten. You ready?”
Frank gives him a wide grin. It’s huge, like he’s not terrified, same as always. He’s always scared and it’s always worth it. “I was born ready, gorgeous.”
Mikey doesn’t say anything to that. He just tilts his head to the left and takes another drag off the stale cigarette. It’s a puzzled expression and Frank wants to figure it out.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just… Thanks for the cigarette.”
“What’s mine’s yours.” And he means that. Since that first drink of water, Frank’s been ready to give Mikey pretty much anything of his. That’s true for everyone out here on the fringes - you don’t share, you don’t live. But it’s different with Mikey. Frank can’t say how, exactly. He just knows that it is.
“Yeah.”
“I mean it, Mikes.”
“I know. Same here. ”
“Okay. Just wanted to be clear. You know.” Frank shrugs. “Just in case.”
Mikey nods because they both know how shit goes. Hotspots flare, robots on patrols get lucky, and people get fucking ghosted every day. Their little unit is pretty good so far. Otter decided to integrate on his own, yeah, but they’re all still stinging from Bob. None of them are ready to make the same mistake of things left unsaid again.
“Yeah. Just in case.” Mikey agrees. He takes another drag off the cigarette before handing it back. Then he pushes an absent hand through his sun-bleached hair. He hasn’t washed in weeks, none of them have. Water, it’s too precious to waste on hygiene unless it’s an emergency. So dust particles puff up off his head like mist and Frank stares.
Mikey’s the one Frank always thinks off when Gerard calls his listeners dust angels. He thinks about him now, caked in years of sand and dust and sun, and he thinks of him five years ago, tapping his foot with his boot. He thinks about water handed over to a stranger and how Mikey’s mouth would be wet like Frank hasn’t felt since he left Battery City, even with the smoke still on his tongue.
Frank pinches off the end of the cigarette - there’s still some left to smoke and pockets it thinking about how he can’t remember when he had his last kiss. He knows it was before he left Battery City. He remembers that it was with a newly integrated droid with metal where the soft skin between neck and shoulder should be. But everything else has been replaced with Mikey’s stone face and the way his hands never shake when his brother passes him a gun.
“Mikey,” he says, his voice raw. He has to say something. It’s almost time for Dr Deathdefying to burn up the airwaves.
When Gerard gets back from whatever it is that has caught his attention this time, he’ll clamber back behind the wheel of his beloved Trans-Am and Ray will close the hood. Once they’re all tucked in, they’ll head into Zone 4. That will be the end of their relative safety until the transmission is over.
Frank says Mikey’s name because maybe this time will be the one where the robots get him, the way the last broadcast back in March was Bob’s. Maybe they’ll get Mikey. Maybe they’ll get Gerard which will kill Mikey just as surely as a raygun blast to the face. Any of those things could happen and he just has to know first.
Then he reaches across the space between then and cups the back of Mikey’s neck to pull him close, giving him every opportunity to pull back. There’s no resistance or hesitation. If anything Mikey surges into him, electric and alive. His lips are rough but his tongue is as wet as Frank hoped it would be.
He buries his hands in Mikey’s dirty hair. For an instant, it must look like they’re kissing in a cloud of dust but Frank just doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about anything but the taste of Mikey’s mouth and the way Mikey’s hands dig into his shoulder through his clothing.
A banging sound on the hood of the car sends them jerking apart. Gerard yanks the driver’s door open seconds later and grins in at them. “Look alive, kids. Time to light the fucking sky on fire.”
There’s what look like a pair of shoes hanging around his neck by the laces. No, not shoes. Shoes don’t have wheels on them. Frank has no idea what the hell goes on in Gerard’s head sometimes. Mikey’s almost smiling at him so it’ll probably make sense later.
“Someone’s gotta give the other zonerunners something to run to, huh?” Frank asks, smiling a little wider than he usually does maybe. His pulls his feet off the floor and tucks them up under him, his knee brushing Mikey’s thigh.
“You know it. Ray, how’s the lady holding up?”
“Milkshake,” comes the muffled reply. Gerard lifts an eyebrow at them as if it say “see, told you it’d work” as if any of them doubted him anymore.
“It’s all fucking milkshake,” Mikey says, casually dropping his hand onto Frank’s knee.
He squeezes once, and in that instant Frank has to agree. It’s hot as fuck and so dry sweat feels like rain. They could get ghosted when they change zones, but right now it doesn’t matter. Everything’s fucking milkshake.
Rating: Mikey/Frank
Pairing: PG-13
Length: ~2600 words
Beta: Thanks to ladyfoxxx, turps33 and rockeandroll for the help/beta.
Author's Note: Inspired by the recent tweets by the Dr. Deathdefying, NewsAGoGo and other Killjoys twitterfeeds. Written prior to the release of the Art is the Weapon video so it deviates fairly hard from that canon.
Summary: No matter how many zones they run through, Frank can't completely escape the lights of Battery City.
Frank’s noticed that people outside the perimeter of Battery City liked to argue about when the world ended the first time. A lot of people liked to point a finger at the virus or the first major meltdown. General consensus was that by the time the Zones were needed it was all over.
No arguing with that.
Once the Zones were up, it was all passes and patrols and life behind walled up sectors with more droids and robots than flesh and blood people. Mikey once said that he thought the Wolverines had no idea how good they had it in Red Dawn. Frank had to ask him what the fuck Red Dawn was. Mikey had gotten quiet for a long time before he finally answered.
Frank blames the first droid implant, back before everything shifted and the desert grew. But then he’s kind of a history geek. He blames the droid tech for needing the energy that lead to the hotspots, the nitros, the helium wars and its fallout. If there weren’t any droid implants, they wouldn’t have needed Battery City in the first place.
“It’s about fucking dependence,” Gerard says whenever Frank voices that opinion. He smokes cigarettes he finds in the ruins of gas stations. The most recent one was what Mikey says was a Circle K. There’s sand in the filter but he always shares, so Frank doesn’t mind. Stale, sandy cigarettes were better than none. “Droids and robots can’t fucking unplug, so the world won’t get a chance to reboot.”
Frank doesn’t comment this time. He just smokes and thinks about how even fifty or a hundred miles outside the perimeter, the lights of Battery City glow at the edge of the horizon, its factories eating people up and spitting them back out charged up and wired into the system for another week, month, year.
Gerard’s passionate about this shit - the underground. Frank is, too, and he’s cool to follow him. The Dr. Deathdefying shtick is a better rebellion than anything Frank could come up with. It’s not going to win the war, but at least it’s a fight. Frank just doesn’t want to talk about it all the time.
The cause is all Gerard seems to have left since his grandmother died. Well, the cause and Mikey, but sometimes Frank thinks that maybe they’re the same thing. He fights to have something to give Mikey -the same thing she tried to give them both - a life outside of Battery City, unplugged and alive.
Frank only met her a few times, but apparently Elena’s the reason the Ways never even came close to being part of the network. She was old school resistance and the whole fucking family came from hidden organic settlements. Ray never got any droid tech implants because his dad was traditional, and Bob…
Well, it didn’t matter about Bob. That’s what they tell themselves. It doesn’t matter that Bob just never came back, ghosted trying to get out of Battery City one time too many.
It can’t matter because Frank knows by now that you don’t think about ghosts. It’s one of a hundred zonnerunner survival rules. If you let yourself dwell on ghosts, they’ll just haunt you. Then the haunted just end up ghosted themselves.
Frank really does get that. Doesn’t stop him wondering about his mom though. She’s not technically a ghost yet, but she went droid after agents took his dad back in the beginning of the latest power shift. He was just a baby when it happened, but she told him that back then, there were roads at the outskirts of Battery City that were more than cracked asphalt and dirt. Frank doesn’t remember life outside the perimeter as a child, but he wasn’t born inside. He knows that much.
And he knows that without his old man, she felt like she needed more: more energy, more mental storage, more, more, more. She needed. So she dragged him into Battery City - a lonely organic boy growing up in a city of droids and robots.
His mom, for all that she kept plugging deeper and deeper into the network, melting into the system, was old school like Ray’s dad. She still believed in choice. So where his classmates got droid implants like birthday presents, Frank stayed far the fuck away and kept his fists out.
He figured out early how wrong it all was. Because people changed. He saw it with his mom first and then the kids in his education units. The droid kids became less real the more they added.
His friend Hambone stopped talking after his fifth upgrade. Instead he transmitted messages over the network instead of speaking like a human being, just assuming he’d be heard. After all, everyone was plugged in right?
He was nineteen when he finally tore out of the city. He’d been in factory training at the time. It wasn’t what he’d dreamed of as a kid, but it wasn’t like he had much of a choice. Organics weren’t much good to the system. If you couldn’t tap in, labor was the only thing you were good for - working next to robots with AI that made them less intelligent than hamsters.
“It’s just such a waste,” his supervisor told him once. He remembers it so fucking clearly, sitting in the droid’s office, staring at her large glowing right eye - metal and fiberglass instead of tissue. She had NewsAGoGo streaming directly into her brain through her tech and on a view screen behind her on the wall - for organics like him, no doubt. “You’re so intelligent, Frank. You could be something great one day, maybe even a system controller, if you would just integrate.”
That’s what the droids and high-programmed robots called it - integrating. They talk about it like it was becoming part of something good instead of cutting out a piece of your humanity and trading it for cold metal and coding.
Frank had just been starting to realize that integration was less of a choice the older you got and goddamnit, he liked his skin. He liked his skin and his hair and his teeth and his fingernails. He especially liked having the choice to keep them his to do with as he fucking pleased.
For a little while though, he’d been content to let that just be a political statement - my skin, my business. People clicked their tongues, or whatever they’d replaced their tongues with, and rolled their eye/s at him but that was it. Then the second to last organic in his group came in one morning with metal crawling over his jawbone and up into his ear and a slight fiber-optic glint in his dark eyes.
Frank’s decision to run after seeing that wasn’t a conscious one. He got through his work day, checked out and suddenly his feet wear moving. He was racing anywhere so long as it was outside of the city.
He met Mikey Way more than fifteen miles outside the perimeter in Zone 1A. Frank had collapsed under an old dead truck, hiding and sleeping. He dreamed of his mother, too integrated with the Network to pull loose, until Mikey had spotted him and proceeded to kick his foot until he woke up crawled out.
“Hey. Hey, dude. You a droid?” He asked, staring down at Frank through his dirty lenses, raygun pointed casually at him with one hand. Back then Mikey’d worn smudged glasses and clothes that were black before the sun bleached them. The glasses are gone now - broken in a run and they haven’t been able to find new ones. For almost a month, Mikey stuck close with his hand always fisted in Gerard’s shirt or wrapped around Frank’s wrist. Ray found a doctor in the organic settlement hidden deep in Zone 5 to fix his eyes but the clothes still tend to be black.
He shook his head, hard. The image of silver over bone made him shudder. “Fucking zombies.”
Mikey laughed. “No man. At least zombies stay down if you destroy the brain. Zombies are fucking milkshake next to droids.”
Then he held out a battered plastic bottle. He offered Frank water and Frank offered his hand. He was the first organic Frank had ever met who was his age who wasn’t on his way to integration, and it meant a lot.
Of course, that was before Frank knew that out in the zones, giving away your water like offering pure energy to a robot - liquid fucking currency. It means more now, that Mikey gave it away to him without knowing him. Yet it was nearly a week before Frank found out his name. Two before Mikey let him meet his brother.
Even not knowing, Frank had put his life in Way hands. Mikey showed him how to survive as a zonerunner. Then he and Gerard showed him how they fought back. They pulled him into their family and never looked back, even though Frank did, maybe once or twice, when it was late and he missed his mom. Five years later he still doesn’t regret it. There’s lots of shit he regrets, yeah, but never trusting them.
Now here he is, smoking in Gerard’s beat up car in the gutted ruins of a truck stop half a mile from Zone 4, wondering if this Dr. Deathdefying broadcast will be the last one they get away with. He wonders that every time though. Gerard and Mikey are fairly confident about the ‘they’ll never find me’ shit but Frank worries. He thinks about Hambone and his mom and the droid supervisor’s fucking hopes for him and wonders if maybe they don’t need to get found to get caught.
“I can hear you thinking,” Mikey says, climbing through the window rather than opening the door and dropping into the back seat beside Frank. He’s come back from scouring over the remains of the building to bum a cigarette - he always does when Gerard finds them. Ray used to but he’s trying to quit. There’s not enough, anyway, and he spends most of his time with his head under the hood of their wheels, trying to fight the sand and the fallout back for one more day.
“You shouldn’t eavesdrop.” Frank holds out his cigarette because Gerard’s wandered off and Mikey will chase a cigarette down like a tracker with a target. He doesn’t want him to leave just yet.
“You shouldn’t think so loud.” Mikey counters. But he takes the cigarette and gives Frank a thin smile. “Gee’s going to start the broadcast in ten. You ready?”
Frank gives him a wide grin. It’s huge, like he’s not terrified, same as always. He’s always scared and it’s always worth it. “I was born ready, gorgeous.”
Mikey doesn’t say anything to that. He just tilts his head to the left and takes another drag off the stale cigarette. It’s a puzzled expression and Frank wants to figure it out.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just… Thanks for the cigarette.”
“What’s mine’s yours.” And he means that. Since that first drink of water, Frank’s been ready to give Mikey pretty much anything of his. That’s true for everyone out here on the fringes - you don’t share, you don’t live. But it’s different with Mikey. Frank can’t say how, exactly. He just knows that it is.
“Yeah.”
“I mean it, Mikes.”
“I know. Same here. ”
“Okay. Just wanted to be clear. You know.” Frank shrugs. “Just in case.”
Mikey nods because they both know how shit goes. Hotspots flare, robots on patrols get lucky, and people get fucking ghosted every day. Their little unit is pretty good so far. Otter decided to integrate on his own, yeah, but they’re all still stinging from Bob. None of them are ready to make the same mistake of things left unsaid again.
“Yeah. Just in case.” Mikey agrees. He takes another drag off the cigarette before handing it back. Then he pushes an absent hand through his sun-bleached hair. He hasn’t washed in weeks, none of them have. Water, it’s too precious to waste on hygiene unless it’s an emergency. So dust particles puff up off his head like mist and Frank stares.
Mikey’s the one Frank always thinks off when Gerard calls his listeners dust angels. He thinks about him now, caked in years of sand and dust and sun, and he thinks of him five years ago, tapping his foot with his boot. He thinks about water handed over to a stranger and how Mikey’s mouth would be wet like Frank hasn’t felt since he left Battery City, even with the smoke still on his tongue.
Frank pinches off the end of the cigarette - there’s still some left to smoke and pockets it thinking about how he can’t remember when he had his last kiss. He knows it was before he left Battery City. He remembers that it was with a newly integrated droid with metal where the soft skin between neck and shoulder should be. But everything else has been replaced with Mikey’s stone face and the way his hands never shake when his brother passes him a gun.
“Mikey,” he says, his voice raw. He has to say something. It’s almost time for Dr Deathdefying to burn up the airwaves.
When Gerard gets back from whatever it is that has caught his attention this time, he’ll clamber back behind the wheel of his beloved Trans-Am and Ray will close the hood. Once they’re all tucked in, they’ll head into Zone 4. That will be the end of their relative safety until the transmission is over.
Frank says Mikey’s name because maybe this time will be the one where the robots get him, the way the last broadcast back in March was Bob’s. Maybe they’ll get Mikey. Maybe they’ll get Gerard which will kill Mikey just as surely as a raygun blast to the face. Any of those things could happen and he just has to know first.
Then he reaches across the space between then and cups the back of Mikey’s neck to pull him close, giving him every opportunity to pull back. There’s no resistance or hesitation. If anything Mikey surges into him, electric and alive. His lips are rough but his tongue is as wet as Frank hoped it would be.
He buries his hands in Mikey’s dirty hair. For an instant, it must look like they’re kissing in a cloud of dust but Frank just doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about anything but the taste of Mikey’s mouth and the way Mikey’s hands dig into his shoulder through his clothing.
A banging sound on the hood of the car sends them jerking apart. Gerard yanks the driver’s door open seconds later and grins in at them. “Look alive, kids. Time to light the fucking sky on fire.”
There’s what look like a pair of shoes hanging around his neck by the laces. No, not shoes. Shoes don’t have wheels on them. Frank has no idea what the hell goes on in Gerard’s head sometimes. Mikey’s almost smiling at him so it’ll probably make sense later.
“Someone’s gotta give the other zonerunners something to run to, huh?” Frank asks, smiling a little wider than he usually does maybe. His pulls his feet off the floor and tucks them up under him, his knee brushing Mikey’s thigh.
“You know it. Ray, how’s the lady holding up?”
“Milkshake,” comes the muffled reply. Gerard lifts an eyebrow at them as if it say “see, told you it’d work” as if any of them doubted him anymore.
“It’s all fucking milkshake,” Mikey says, casually dropping his hand onto Frank’s knee.
He squeezes once, and in that instant Frank has to agree. It’s hot as fuck and so dry sweat feels like rain. They could get ghosted when they change zones, but right now it doesn’t matter. Everything’s fucking milkshake.