"Shut Up And Let Me See Your Jazz Hands", MCR RPS (Killjoys 'verse), Frank/Gerard
Title: Shut Up And Let Me See Your Jazz Hands
Fandom: My Chemical Romance RPS (Killjoys 'verse)
Pairing: Frank/Gerard [implied past Pete/Mikey]
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3855
Genre: Slash
Disclaimer: The fabulous killjoys and all their fabulousness belong to My Chemical Romance, and My Chemical Romance belong to themselves, and I don't own anything and please don't send ninjas to break my legs.
Copyright: Title taken from Na Na Na (because although I was going to try and use something else not related to the song, it is my favourite line and I'll never call anything else this ever, so...)
Summary: Frank frowns. "Aren't we the bad guys this week? I can't keep track anymore."
Author's Notes: God, I'm nervous about posting this. As researched as I could get it, please point out my fuck-ups (both in canon and characterisation). I'm studying tyranny in 16th century England at the moment and my internet kept going down, so I wrote this in notepad (which is different to writing in word, has anyone ever noticed this?) in the spaces when I was waiting for the server to start working again. Literally, I got the first line and everything else just tumbled out. This story is intentionally a case of style over substance and is therefore possibly pretentious/possibly doesn't work. Oh, and I decided to use their real not their code names so I wouldn't confuse myself. Most references to propaganda/brainwashing come from my studies of Stalinist Russia. It's so tragic that this is apparently what I'm using the history half of my degree for. *goes back to writing things she's more confident about*
I just can't get enough electric shocks.
- Patrick Wolf
.first page (three panels, no dialogue, 2009 in the top right-hand corner).
I have had enough of everything that you represent the boy's t-shirt says, in black marker scrawled across torn cotton.
Gerard reads it, eyes skipping across the words which shake in his vision because this is one of those moments when he's five minutes from his knees, and whether he'll have company for that venture all depends on just how pretty he remains even with his hair in his eyes and the lingering background promise of vomit.
He reads the t-shirt again and then looks at the boy wearing it, who is dark-haired and talking to someone else and not looking at Gerard and laughing and it makes his face light up in a way that doesn't fit with the angry words on his chest.
I have had enough of everything that you represent the t-shirt says, eloquent, and Gerard takes another step that nearly ends in smacking his palms off the cold gritty remains of the cracking sidewalk.
He thinks: fair enough. He keeps going. He doesn't look back.
[He doesn't remember this, but the words will take root somewhere in the back of his head, somewhere important so that later on he can get them back again, when the world's gone to shit and he needs them.]
-
.second page. (six panels, 2019 in the top left-hand corner, panels four and five are in black and white).
The hospital is abandoned (they're always abandoned; no one would be stupid enough to try and stay in one place) but the halls are clean and white and bordering on sanitary.
The Girl's teeth are bright white in her face as Frank pushes her too fast down the hall on a rusted gurney, wheels churning over cracked linoleum. Her laughter is vivid but silent; the dracs are getting better than they used to be and noise is all to the good when they're screaming come fucking get me at the dracs, but some days you have to eat and some days you have to patch up your wounded and some days quiet has to win out over noise, just for a little while.
It feels like too much of a compromise. Gerard rips a poster of himself off the wall; he's dark-haired, before he learned that power came from colour, and he kind of wants Korse to update his Wanted posters, though that isn't one of those things you can really request.
He lets Ray handle the needles because they're necessary and even though fear is a state of mind and something he has no need or want for anymore, there are still some things it's better not to go into. He walks through the empty wards, smelling of desert dust and loneliness, and doesn't think about the time he was a kid and they punched him so hard it broke his nose and he had to leave school and be taken to hospital.
[There weren't enough staff and there weren't enough drugs and he sat slumped against Mikey, his hands stained Fire Truck Red from where they'd been pressed against his face, and that's why he loves this fucking colour; it's more than a promise, and it hurts when you touch it, look at it or think about it.]
He looks to Mikey to see if he's remembering even though they try not to these days; Mikey's expression doesn't flicker, calm with his ray in his hands, and Gerard knows that means he's thinking about it too, young and helpless and angry without access to things that explode.
At least one thing has changed.
-
.third page (four panels, panel three in black and white).
Ray's sat at a spare table with The Girl, their heads bent together over a sheet of relatively intact white paper. Gerard doesn't know how Ray found paper; he doesn't ask, just knows that if any of them but The Girl needed it, there wouldn't be any. They all have magical powers when it comes to her and the fact she never asks for anything because she knows there's nothing to ask for but they'll get her whatever they can.
She's literate enough; Gerard made sure of that. You can raise a girl on the radio alone, you really can, but he didn't and he and Ray taught her to read a couple of years ago from the battered and waterstained copy of Watchmen he used to keep under the backseat of the ride they had before they got the trans-am. Korse blew the car up and Watchmen with it, and it's still one of the things Gerard quietly mourns, because he knows he'll never see it again. The shit and lies they publish in Battery City make it out here sometimes, an old newspaper or a cheap paperback of pretty little lies about people in the city; boy meets girl meets hardcore behavioural modification drugs. There's no imagination in it anymore.
[One of the dracs had one of the pulpy novels in his glove compartment once; Gerard was tearing pages out by the handful with a kind of desperate anger when Mikey pulled it from his hands, dropping it all into the dust and wasting ammunition they didn't have, calmly raying it until it burst into flames and coiled into ashes. When Gerard closed his eyes, he could still see Pete Wentz's name printed neatly on the cover.]
The Girl is writing to her mom, and if Gerard knew where she was then he'd risk anything to get one of the painstakingly crayoned notes to her; he'd risk life and limb and discovery just to push it into her hands, even if she no longer remembered she even had a daughter. But he can't, he doesn't know how to, so they push the letters into what used to be mailboxes before everyone abandoned the zones to the zonerunners and their explosives, and Gerard wants to think that maybe that's enough anyway.
-
.fourth page (six panels, dialogue in the final two).
The house has the battered remains of running water that isn't too filled with rust and that actually comes out of faucets when requested. Gerard wonders if he's supposed to be as excited about the prospect of a shower as the others seem to be, but he notes that they all let Ray go first.
It's a relatively quiet evening; The Girl plays with her radio, humming over the static as she tries to get a signal, white noise crackling in the room. Mikey's quiet, alert, but Korse is at least a day behind and at least this place has water and they've still got what passes for food. That's the life of a zonerunner; the long moments of waiting and silence in between the noise and the heat and the pain and the adrenaline. The waiting is almost more tiring than the fighting.
Gerard is sure he used to know how to waste time. Now he can feel each second of it pressed to his skin, and he doesn't know what to do with it.
He's forgotten that they have an approximation of a bathroom until he pushes the random door open and catches Frank with his head tilted back under the shitty water pressure, more like a hosepipe than a shower. There's no curtain or anything - there's better uses for plastic sheeting out here - and Gerard's seen Frank naked in all sorts of ways and in all different lighting but never anything like this, skin a tangle of black lines and too-long hair smeared wet back from his face.
It isn't like sex.
It isn't like sex how Gerard remembers it, awkward fumbling and the continual promise of shame, and it isn't like sex how they tried to sell it after the world started going to shit, all plastic recreation and just as potent and unreal as the drugs. It isn't like sex but it is like something that unfurls in his stomach like he put it somewhere else and forgot all about it until he needed it again. He's reached for his zap without realising it, and he has to uncurl his fingers from around it one at a time. He hopes Frank hasn't noticed; it's a slip-up he doesn't really want to think about.
"Everything ok?" Frank arches an eyebrow, water streaming down his cheeks, making the tattoos on his skin look blacker, still wet, like Gerard could run his hands over them and come away with his palms smeared and stained with something that's part of Frank but that isn't.
"Yeah," he says, and puts together a smile that doesn't feel fixed, walking out and banging the door behind him.
-
.fifth page (eight panels, all in black and white).
They got Mikey.
This was years ago, before Party Poison and Fire Truck Red and Dr D and before there were even fucking zones to run between.
That was the catalyst, actually, but it isn't a story he tells to anyone. He doesn't even know how much Mikey remembers, how much he can possibly remember.
What they do when they're not sure about you, when they think you can think too hard and it will hurt them, is they find you. They find you and they shut you up in rooms that don't have windows and they pump your veins full of narcotics and they pump your head full of electricity and eventually your brain shuts down and you become theirs.
They took Mikey because he was hanging out with Pete Wentz, Pete Wentz with his underground pamphlets and his wide smiles and black eyeliner, Pete Wentz with his subversive messages of fuck the system and fuck it hard.
It took Gerard a week to find him, a week of hacking and hunting and trying to look like he was a model citizen when he wasn't. It took a week of having to find a shady dealer on the outskirts of the city to sell him a decent ray and not ask too many questions, a week of cutting his hair and bleaching it white so he wouldn't be recognised. It took a week but he found him, and he broke in and he got Mikey out before they could shatter his mind and take away his ability to think.
They've been running ever since.
Pete Wentz didn't have a brother to rescue him. But he's still writing, though the message has gotten a little scrambled. Maybe one day Gerard will be able to sympathise.
-
.sixth page (eight panels; check copyright).
Frank is telling The Girl a story while he puts together a bomb, and when Gerard actually starts listening, he realises Frank is recounting a half-remembered episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, embellishing the parts he can't remember. He's fucked up one of the turtle's names and Gerard's reasonably sure Shredder never used a ray gun, but The Girl listens avidly and, well, she'll never know.
"TMNT?" he asks, when The Girl's run outside to practice kicks with Mikey in what used to be the diner's parking lot and is now just another dust bowl.
Frank shrugs, grinning. "Shit, you never watched it as a kid?"
[It's ok to talk about childhood, because the world ended everyday then, just no one else wanted to notice it. It's just not ok to talk about what happened once they all grew up.]
It was pretty retro already when Gerard was a kid, but he remembers it. "Of course I did," he says.
"Shredder was fucking awesome," Frank adds, sticking a cigarette between his teeth and lighting it. Gerard considers pointing out that naked flames next to explosives is probably a shitty idea, but Frank knows what he's doing and if he blows them all sky high then, well, fuck, he blows them all sky high.
It'll definitely piss Korse off that he never caught them, so at least there's an upside.
"He was the bad guy," Gerard points out mildly.
Frank frowns. "Aren't we the bad guys this week? I can't keep track anymore."
Gerard laughs, feeling it rip out of him without warning. "Fuck yeah, we're the bad guys," he agrees, and lights his own cigarette.
-
.seventh page (eight panels, second in black and white).
Mikey was never prone to loquaciousness and while his spell in what they call a BLI Rehabilitiation Centre didn't make it worse, it didn't make it better either.
[After Frank had been with them for three months, Mikey had casually asked what was for dinner, The Girl half-asleep against his shoulder. "Fuck me, you can talk," Frank breathed, eyes wide, and Gerard had laughed until his stomach ached.]
Gerard scrawls babble that can be read on the airwaves, passing it on to Show Pony when their paths cross, and they all talk for The Girl's sake, if nothing else, to fill up hours that would otherwise just sound like static. But Mikey's the quietest of all of them, with the kind of silence that makes him seem that much more dangerous than the rest of them.
Mikey's on the hood of the trans-am, flicking through the latest issue of Murder magazine, one of the underground publications that are spread throughout the zones. They burn boxes of them in Battery City, carefully organised public demonstrations that ensure the public can never get their hands on a copy or actually see what it is they're supposed to be hating. Not that they're technically allowed to hate anything; the point of the pills is to keep everyone from feeling too much, from choosing to break out of their boxes.
"Anything interesting?" he asks, leaning over Mikey's shoulder.
Mikey shows him the page he's looking at.
"Lion porn," Gerard says, bemused and amused and other words that feel like that. "Ok."
"You wear a giant mouse head," Mikey responds, the corners of his mouth curling just a little, so it's almost a smile.
Ray and The Girl are hacking a vending machine, pocketing handfuls of batteries. Gerard is old enough to remember the days of rechargeable batteries, but it's ok, it's not like electricity is all that easy to come by out here anyway.
"...do they have mouse porn?" he asks.
He can't see Mikey rolling his eyes behind his sunglasses, but he knows that he is anyway. Frank makes a snorting sound of amusement, cigarette between his lips, ray gun fixed on the distant horizon.
"What's 'porn'?" The Girl asks, and, well, shit. She knows a lot of things that Gerard didn't know growing up, a lot of things little girls shouldn't have to know at all, but she's still young, and there are certain talks they haven't had with her yet.
Gerard's going to let Ray do The Eventual Talk, by the way. He's pretty sure Ray's the only one who won't make The Girl go away with some kind of extremely warped view of what sex actually entails.
"It's the product of a fascist society," Ray says without batting an eyelid. "It's another way of suppressing the masses."
The Girl nods very seriously and turns her attention back to the vending machine.
"Shiny," Frank says.
-
.eighth page (six panels).
The thing about identities is that they give other people something to cling onto, something they can drag you back with.
Hence the code names.
Real names, honest last names, they all belong to before, to before this shit started and didn't stop. Korse may know too much about him but he doesn't know he's Gerard Way and that feels like the last shred of power he's got some days.
He sometimes thinks he prefers being Party Poison anyway. Gerard was kind of a loser. Gerard was kind of a fuck-up. Gerard doesn't remember large chunks of the years before the takeover, and fuck, but he kind of hates himself for that sometimes; this is all they have left now and he's only got a shaky grasp of what they had before.
[They don't make alcohol anymore. They make pills for every possible occasion and mood, but they don't make alcohol. None has ever turned up in the zones either; Frank and Ray complain from time to time, bitching about missing beer, but Gerard sometimes thinks it's the one good thing about this brave new world.]
Mostly, he remembers the pop culture; the movies and the books, almost all of which are gone now, and the music, which survives in the form of bootlegs in cracked jewel cases. He had an iPod, he thinks, everyone was so convinced that technology was going to be the answer, now they're running on wind-up and batteries and analogue.
"What are you thinking about?" Frank asks, looking up from a mass of wires. Frank is fucking scary; Gerard sometimes forgets this.
"iPods," he replies, because it's easier than the truth. He's not even sure what the truth is.
"God," Frank mumbles. "D'you think the girl would believe us if we told her there used to be a time when you could listen to music whenever you wanted?" he adds on a crooked half-smile.
"No," Gerard says, and: "it made music less sacred."
"Did it?" Frank asks.
Gerard thinks about the time Dr D acquired a CD of Morrissey that everyone thought was gone; he played The First Of The Gang To Die and it came back into Gerard's head that night, and he had to stumble away from everyone else and cry until it ached, sand plastered to the sticky tears on his cheeks.
"Yes," he says. "Yes."
-
.ninth page (five panels).
Gerard writes with a cracked leaking ballpoint pen onto the back of a poster of Mikey, because he hates the picture they've got of him and it seems kind of weirdly private to write on Frank or Ray.
They're words for Dr Death-Defying; he doesn't know if they're things to be broadcast or if it's an ain't dead yet letter, and for a moment he wishes for email, for text messages, for the ease of communication that used to exist. It still does exist in Battery City, but there's nothing there to say.
I have had enough of everything that you represent he scrawls without thinking, and then looks at it for a while.
He only becomes aware of someone standing behind him when he hears the sharp intake of breath; it's not a gasp, but it's surprise.
"What," Frank says quietly.
Gerard looks back at the words and thinks that they're not his but he doesn't know where they came from. "I don't know," he says.
"I used to make my own t-shirts when I was a kid," Frank almost-whispers, and he's not looking at Gerard. Gerard doesn't want to hear this; he doesn't want to know about memories, about things that happened that can never happen again. "They were shitty, but they were mine. And that one was my favourite."
Gerard looks at the words again and he doesn't know how he got them. The world feels so small now, limited down to his group, to the groups they trade with, to the unnamed people in Battery City who toil away while their veins buzz. There used to be a lot of people in the world, more people than he can stand to think about.
"I don't remember you," Frank says at last.
I don't remember a lot of things, Gerard thinks, but he doesn't tell Frank that. He shrugs, and tries to tell himself his hands aren't shaking.
-
.tenth page (six panels; explosion from several angles).
-
.eleventh page (six panels; thought balloons for Gerard).
The Girl's asleep in the back between Ray and Mikey, her head pillowed against Ray's shoulder. It's dark, sand kicking into Gerard's eyes even with his sunglasses. The dried dye at his throat is itching and flaking, his hair blowing across his sunglasses. His mouth tastes like sand.
"You ever wonder what the point of running is?" Frank asks, the words almost lost under the screaming of the engine.
Gerard glances back; Ray's asleep too, but Mikey's still awake. He looks asleep, but he isn't; Gerard knows his brother better than that.
"You want to stop?" he asks, and it comes out sharper than he means it to.
Frank laughs. "Fuck no. I was running before I was running." His grin is sudden, bright, and something about it is weirdly familiar but Gerard doesn't know why. He's pretty sure he'll never know. "Weren't you?"
"Gee's always been running." That's Mikey, quiet and matter-of-fact, and it's been so long since anyone called him 'Gee' that it feels like the last time a drac punched him in the chest.
"We don't take ourselves seriously," he says, "that's the key. Or did everyone forget that?"
Mikey rolls his eyes and then closes them.
"Ok," Frank says, eyes on the road, "running never used to be this much fun, anyway."
-
.twelfth page (three panels; fade to black).
The fire's almost dead when Frank and Ray return from scouting, checking there are no nasty surprises near where they've made camp for the night. Ray pulls off his helmet, tossing Gerard a tired smile before pulling on his cellophane sleep suit, casting a quick glance at The Girl, who's curled up beside Mikey.
Frank pulls off his mask but instead of reaching for a cigarette like he normally does, he sits in the sand beside Gerard and looks expectantly at him for a long moment before leaning in and kissing him. He tastes like sweat and rubber and sand and the last dregs of nicotine and Gerard freezes for a second before curling his hands in the warm worn leather of his jacket and hauling him closer, pressed together with silence and desperation and determination.
The feeling in his stomach is hot and twisted like when he's watching dracs come for him, screaming wanna try wanna try wanna try wanna try at them until he imagines them losing composure behind their rubber masks which is when they fuck up and they kill them, except the feeling isn't quite as destructive and Frank sinks his teeth into his lip and a hand fists in the filthy mass of Gerard's Fire Truck Red hair.
The last embers of the fire die out and the stars are hidden beneath poison and pollution from the shit Battery City pumps into the atmosphere, and they fuck in the dark with their ray guns within reach, mumbling shhhh into each other's mouths, listening to the wind and the sand and their family breathing and, somewhere in a bag, white noise and static crackling into the night.
-
.thirteenth page (repetition of image from previous page).
WILL PARTY POISON AND FUN GHOUL BEGIN A ROMANCE? IS THIS THE BEGINNING OR THE BEGINNING OF THE END? WILL THE GIRL EVER FIND HER MOTHER? IS KORSE CATCHING UP? WILL THE DRACS EVER LET THEIR GUARD DOWN? IS IT ALL ALREADY TOO LATE?
- FIND OUT, ONLY IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF THE FABULOUS KILLJOYS, AVAILABLE FROM NEXT WEEK!
-
Fandom: My Chemical Romance RPS (Killjoys 'verse)
Pairing: Frank/Gerard [implied past Pete/Mikey]
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3855
Genre: Slash
Disclaimer: The fabulous killjoys and all their fabulousness belong to My Chemical Romance, and My Chemical Romance belong to themselves, and I don't own anything and please don't send ninjas to break my legs.
Copyright: Title taken from Na Na Na (because although I was going to try and use something else not related to the song, it is my favourite line and I'll never call anything else this ever, so...)
Summary: Frank frowns. "Aren't we the bad guys this week? I can't keep track anymore."
Author's Notes: God, I'm nervous about posting this. As researched as I could get it, please point out my fuck-ups (both in canon and characterisation). I'm studying tyranny in 16th century England at the moment and my internet kept going down, so I wrote this in notepad (which is different to writing in word, has anyone ever noticed this?) in the spaces when I was waiting for the server to start working again. Literally, I got the first line and everything else just tumbled out. This story is intentionally a case of style over substance and is therefore possibly pretentious/possibly doesn't work. Oh, and I decided to use their real not their code names so I wouldn't confuse myself. Most references to propaganda/brainwashing come from my studies of Stalinist Russia. It's so tragic that this is apparently what I'm using the history half of my degree for. *goes back to writing things she's more confident about*
I just can't get enough electric shocks.
- Patrick Wolf
.first page (three panels, no dialogue, 2009 in the top right-hand corner).
I have had enough of everything that you represent the boy's t-shirt says, in black marker scrawled across torn cotton.
Gerard reads it, eyes skipping across the words which shake in his vision because this is one of those moments when he's five minutes from his knees, and whether he'll have company for that venture all depends on just how pretty he remains even with his hair in his eyes and the lingering background promise of vomit.
He reads the t-shirt again and then looks at the boy wearing it, who is dark-haired and talking to someone else and not looking at Gerard and laughing and it makes his face light up in a way that doesn't fit with the angry words on his chest.
I have had enough of everything that you represent the t-shirt says, eloquent, and Gerard takes another step that nearly ends in smacking his palms off the cold gritty remains of the cracking sidewalk.
He thinks: fair enough. He keeps going. He doesn't look back.
[He doesn't remember this, but the words will take root somewhere in the back of his head, somewhere important so that later on he can get them back again, when the world's gone to shit and he needs them.]
-
.second page. (six panels, 2019 in the top left-hand corner, panels four and five are in black and white).
The hospital is abandoned (they're always abandoned; no one would be stupid enough to try and stay in one place) but the halls are clean and white and bordering on sanitary.
The Girl's teeth are bright white in her face as Frank pushes her too fast down the hall on a rusted gurney, wheels churning over cracked linoleum. Her laughter is vivid but silent; the dracs are getting better than they used to be and noise is all to the good when they're screaming come fucking get me at the dracs, but some days you have to eat and some days you have to patch up your wounded and some days quiet has to win out over noise, just for a little while.
It feels like too much of a compromise. Gerard rips a poster of himself off the wall; he's dark-haired, before he learned that power came from colour, and he kind of wants Korse to update his Wanted posters, though that isn't one of those things you can really request.
He lets Ray handle the needles because they're necessary and even though fear is a state of mind and something he has no need or want for anymore, there are still some things it's better not to go into. He walks through the empty wards, smelling of desert dust and loneliness, and doesn't think about the time he was a kid and they punched him so hard it broke his nose and he had to leave school and be taken to hospital.
[There weren't enough staff and there weren't enough drugs and he sat slumped against Mikey, his hands stained Fire Truck Red from where they'd been pressed against his face, and that's why he loves this fucking colour; it's more than a promise, and it hurts when you touch it, look at it or think about it.]
He looks to Mikey to see if he's remembering even though they try not to these days; Mikey's expression doesn't flicker, calm with his ray in his hands, and Gerard knows that means he's thinking about it too, young and helpless and angry without access to things that explode.
At least one thing has changed.
-
.third page (four panels, panel three in black and white).
Ray's sat at a spare table with The Girl, their heads bent together over a sheet of relatively intact white paper. Gerard doesn't know how Ray found paper; he doesn't ask, just knows that if any of them but The Girl needed it, there wouldn't be any. They all have magical powers when it comes to her and the fact she never asks for anything because she knows there's nothing to ask for but they'll get her whatever they can.
She's literate enough; Gerard made sure of that. You can raise a girl on the radio alone, you really can, but he didn't and he and Ray taught her to read a couple of years ago from the battered and waterstained copy of Watchmen he used to keep under the backseat of the ride they had before they got the trans-am. Korse blew the car up and Watchmen with it, and it's still one of the things Gerard quietly mourns, because he knows he'll never see it again. The shit and lies they publish in Battery City make it out here sometimes, an old newspaper or a cheap paperback of pretty little lies about people in the city; boy meets girl meets hardcore behavioural modification drugs. There's no imagination in it anymore.
[One of the dracs had one of the pulpy novels in his glove compartment once; Gerard was tearing pages out by the handful with a kind of desperate anger when Mikey pulled it from his hands, dropping it all into the dust and wasting ammunition they didn't have, calmly raying it until it burst into flames and coiled into ashes. When Gerard closed his eyes, he could still see Pete Wentz's name printed neatly on the cover.]
The Girl is writing to her mom, and if Gerard knew where she was then he'd risk anything to get one of the painstakingly crayoned notes to her; he'd risk life and limb and discovery just to push it into her hands, even if she no longer remembered she even had a daughter. But he can't, he doesn't know how to, so they push the letters into what used to be mailboxes before everyone abandoned the zones to the zonerunners and their explosives, and Gerard wants to think that maybe that's enough anyway.
-
.fourth page (six panels, dialogue in the final two).
The house has the battered remains of running water that isn't too filled with rust and that actually comes out of faucets when requested. Gerard wonders if he's supposed to be as excited about the prospect of a shower as the others seem to be, but he notes that they all let Ray go first.
It's a relatively quiet evening; The Girl plays with her radio, humming over the static as she tries to get a signal, white noise crackling in the room. Mikey's quiet, alert, but Korse is at least a day behind and at least this place has water and they've still got what passes for food. That's the life of a zonerunner; the long moments of waiting and silence in between the noise and the heat and the pain and the adrenaline. The waiting is almost more tiring than the fighting.
Gerard is sure he used to know how to waste time. Now he can feel each second of it pressed to his skin, and he doesn't know what to do with it.
He's forgotten that they have an approximation of a bathroom until he pushes the random door open and catches Frank with his head tilted back under the shitty water pressure, more like a hosepipe than a shower. There's no curtain or anything - there's better uses for plastic sheeting out here - and Gerard's seen Frank naked in all sorts of ways and in all different lighting but never anything like this, skin a tangle of black lines and too-long hair smeared wet back from his face.
It isn't like sex.
It isn't like sex how Gerard remembers it, awkward fumbling and the continual promise of shame, and it isn't like sex how they tried to sell it after the world started going to shit, all plastic recreation and just as potent and unreal as the drugs. It isn't like sex but it is like something that unfurls in his stomach like he put it somewhere else and forgot all about it until he needed it again. He's reached for his zap without realising it, and he has to uncurl his fingers from around it one at a time. He hopes Frank hasn't noticed; it's a slip-up he doesn't really want to think about.
"Everything ok?" Frank arches an eyebrow, water streaming down his cheeks, making the tattoos on his skin look blacker, still wet, like Gerard could run his hands over them and come away with his palms smeared and stained with something that's part of Frank but that isn't.
"Yeah," he says, and puts together a smile that doesn't feel fixed, walking out and banging the door behind him.
-
.fifth page (eight panels, all in black and white).
They got Mikey.
This was years ago, before Party Poison and Fire Truck Red and Dr D and before there were even fucking zones to run between.
That was the catalyst, actually, but it isn't a story he tells to anyone. He doesn't even know how much Mikey remembers, how much he can possibly remember.
What they do when they're not sure about you, when they think you can think too hard and it will hurt them, is they find you. They find you and they shut you up in rooms that don't have windows and they pump your veins full of narcotics and they pump your head full of electricity and eventually your brain shuts down and you become theirs.
They took Mikey because he was hanging out with Pete Wentz, Pete Wentz with his underground pamphlets and his wide smiles and black eyeliner, Pete Wentz with his subversive messages of fuck the system and fuck it hard.
It took Gerard a week to find him, a week of hacking and hunting and trying to look like he was a model citizen when he wasn't. It took a week of having to find a shady dealer on the outskirts of the city to sell him a decent ray and not ask too many questions, a week of cutting his hair and bleaching it white so he wouldn't be recognised. It took a week but he found him, and he broke in and he got Mikey out before they could shatter his mind and take away his ability to think.
They've been running ever since.
Pete Wentz didn't have a brother to rescue him. But he's still writing, though the message has gotten a little scrambled. Maybe one day Gerard will be able to sympathise.
-
.sixth page (eight panels; check copyright).
Frank is telling The Girl a story while he puts together a bomb, and when Gerard actually starts listening, he realises Frank is recounting a half-remembered episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, embellishing the parts he can't remember. He's fucked up one of the turtle's names and Gerard's reasonably sure Shredder never used a ray gun, but The Girl listens avidly and, well, she'll never know.
"TMNT?" he asks, when The Girl's run outside to practice kicks with Mikey in what used to be the diner's parking lot and is now just another dust bowl.
Frank shrugs, grinning. "Shit, you never watched it as a kid?"
[It's ok to talk about childhood, because the world ended everyday then, just no one else wanted to notice it. It's just not ok to talk about what happened once they all grew up.]
It was pretty retro already when Gerard was a kid, but he remembers it. "Of course I did," he says.
"Shredder was fucking awesome," Frank adds, sticking a cigarette between his teeth and lighting it. Gerard considers pointing out that naked flames next to explosives is probably a shitty idea, but Frank knows what he's doing and if he blows them all sky high then, well, fuck, he blows them all sky high.
It'll definitely piss Korse off that he never caught them, so at least there's an upside.
"He was the bad guy," Gerard points out mildly.
Frank frowns. "Aren't we the bad guys this week? I can't keep track anymore."
Gerard laughs, feeling it rip out of him without warning. "Fuck yeah, we're the bad guys," he agrees, and lights his own cigarette.
-
.seventh page (eight panels, second in black and white).
Mikey was never prone to loquaciousness and while his spell in what they call a BLI Rehabilitiation Centre didn't make it worse, it didn't make it better either.
[After Frank had been with them for three months, Mikey had casually asked what was for dinner, The Girl half-asleep against his shoulder. "Fuck me, you can talk," Frank breathed, eyes wide, and Gerard had laughed until his stomach ached.]
Gerard scrawls babble that can be read on the airwaves, passing it on to Show Pony when their paths cross, and they all talk for The Girl's sake, if nothing else, to fill up hours that would otherwise just sound like static. But Mikey's the quietest of all of them, with the kind of silence that makes him seem that much more dangerous than the rest of them.
Mikey's on the hood of the trans-am, flicking through the latest issue of Murder magazine, one of the underground publications that are spread throughout the zones. They burn boxes of them in Battery City, carefully organised public demonstrations that ensure the public can never get their hands on a copy or actually see what it is they're supposed to be hating. Not that they're technically allowed to hate anything; the point of the pills is to keep everyone from feeling too much, from choosing to break out of their boxes.
"Anything interesting?" he asks, leaning over Mikey's shoulder.
Mikey shows him the page he's looking at.
"Lion porn," Gerard says, bemused and amused and other words that feel like that. "Ok."
"You wear a giant mouse head," Mikey responds, the corners of his mouth curling just a little, so it's almost a smile.
Ray and The Girl are hacking a vending machine, pocketing handfuls of batteries. Gerard is old enough to remember the days of rechargeable batteries, but it's ok, it's not like electricity is all that easy to come by out here anyway.
"...do they have mouse porn?" he asks.
He can't see Mikey rolling his eyes behind his sunglasses, but he knows that he is anyway. Frank makes a snorting sound of amusement, cigarette between his lips, ray gun fixed on the distant horizon.
"What's 'porn'?" The Girl asks, and, well, shit. She knows a lot of things that Gerard didn't know growing up, a lot of things little girls shouldn't have to know at all, but she's still young, and there are certain talks they haven't had with her yet.
Gerard's going to let Ray do The Eventual Talk, by the way. He's pretty sure Ray's the only one who won't make The Girl go away with some kind of extremely warped view of what sex actually entails.
"It's the product of a fascist society," Ray says without batting an eyelid. "It's another way of suppressing the masses."
The Girl nods very seriously and turns her attention back to the vending machine.
"Shiny," Frank says.
-
.eighth page (six panels).
The thing about identities is that they give other people something to cling onto, something they can drag you back with.
Hence the code names.
Real names, honest last names, they all belong to before, to before this shit started and didn't stop. Korse may know too much about him but he doesn't know he's Gerard Way and that feels like the last shred of power he's got some days.
He sometimes thinks he prefers being Party Poison anyway. Gerard was kind of a loser. Gerard was kind of a fuck-up. Gerard doesn't remember large chunks of the years before the takeover, and fuck, but he kind of hates himself for that sometimes; this is all they have left now and he's only got a shaky grasp of what they had before.
[They don't make alcohol anymore. They make pills for every possible occasion and mood, but they don't make alcohol. None has ever turned up in the zones either; Frank and Ray complain from time to time, bitching about missing beer, but Gerard sometimes thinks it's the one good thing about this brave new world.]
Mostly, he remembers the pop culture; the movies and the books, almost all of which are gone now, and the music, which survives in the form of bootlegs in cracked jewel cases. He had an iPod, he thinks, everyone was so convinced that technology was going to be the answer, now they're running on wind-up and batteries and analogue.
"What are you thinking about?" Frank asks, looking up from a mass of wires. Frank is fucking scary; Gerard sometimes forgets this.
"iPods," he replies, because it's easier than the truth. He's not even sure what the truth is.
"God," Frank mumbles. "D'you think the girl would believe us if we told her there used to be a time when you could listen to music whenever you wanted?" he adds on a crooked half-smile.
"No," Gerard says, and: "it made music less sacred."
"Did it?" Frank asks.
Gerard thinks about the time Dr D acquired a CD of Morrissey that everyone thought was gone; he played The First Of The Gang To Die and it came back into Gerard's head that night, and he had to stumble away from everyone else and cry until it ached, sand plastered to the sticky tears on his cheeks.
"Yes," he says. "Yes."
-
.ninth page (five panels).
Gerard writes with a cracked leaking ballpoint pen onto the back of a poster of Mikey, because he hates the picture they've got of him and it seems kind of weirdly private to write on Frank or Ray.
They're words for Dr Death-Defying; he doesn't know if they're things to be broadcast or if it's an ain't dead yet letter, and for a moment he wishes for email, for text messages, for the ease of communication that used to exist. It still does exist in Battery City, but there's nothing there to say.
I have had enough of everything that you represent he scrawls without thinking, and then looks at it for a while.
He only becomes aware of someone standing behind him when he hears the sharp intake of breath; it's not a gasp, but it's surprise.
"What," Frank says quietly.
Gerard looks back at the words and thinks that they're not his but he doesn't know where they came from. "I don't know," he says.
"I used to make my own t-shirts when I was a kid," Frank almost-whispers, and he's not looking at Gerard. Gerard doesn't want to hear this; he doesn't want to know about memories, about things that happened that can never happen again. "They were shitty, but they were mine. And that one was my favourite."
Gerard looks at the words again and he doesn't know how he got them. The world feels so small now, limited down to his group, to the groups they trade with, to the unnamed people in Battery City who toil away while their veins buzz. There used to be a lot of people in the world, more people than he can stand to think about.
"I don't remember you," Frank says at last.
I don't remember a lot of things, Gerard thinks, but he doesn't tell Frank that. He shrugs, and tries to tell himself his hands aren't shaking.
-
.tenth page (six panels; explosion from several angles).
-
.eleventh page (six panels; thought balloons for Gerard).
The Girl's asleep in the back between Ray and Mikey, her head pillowed against Ray's shoulder. It's dark, sand kicking into Gerard's eyes even with his sunglasses. The dried dye at his throat is itching and flaking, his hair blowing across his sunglasses. His mouth tastes like sand.
"You ever wonder what the point of running is?" Frank asks, the words almost lost under the screaming of the engine.
Gerard glances back; Ray's asleep too, but Mikey's still awake. He looks asleep, but he isn't; Gerard knows his brother better than that.
"You want to stop?" he asks, and it comes out sharper than he means it to.
Frank laughs. "Fuck no. I was running before I was running." His grin is sudden, bright, and something about it is weirdly familiar but Gerard doesn't know why. He's pretty sure he'll never know. "Weren't you?"
"Gee's always been running." That's Mikey, quiet and matter-of-fact, and it's been so long since anyone called him 'Gee' that it feels like the last time a drac punched him in the chest.
"We don't take ourselves seriously," he says, "that's the key. Or did everyone forget that?"
Mikey rolls his eyes and then closes them.
"Ok," Frank says, eyes on the road, "running never used to be this much fun, anyway."
-
.twelfth page (three panels; fade to black).
The fire's almost dead when Frank and Ray return from scouting, checking there are no nasty surprises near where they've made camp for the night. Ray pulls off his helmet, tossing Gerard a tired smile before pulling on his cellophane sleep suit, casting a quick glance at The Girl, who's curled up beside Mikey.
Frank pulls off his mask but instead of reaching for a cigarette like he normally does, he sits in the sand beside Gerard and looks expectantly at him for a long moment before leaning in and kissing him. He tastes like sweat and rubber and sand and the last dregs of nicotine and Gerard freezes for a second before curling his hands in the warm worn leather of his jacket and hauling him closer, pressed together with silence and desperation and determination.
The feeling in his stomach is hot and twisted like when he's watching dracs come for him, screaming wanna try wanna try wanna try wanna try at them until he imagines them losing composure behind their rubber masks which is when they fuck up and they kill them, except the feeling isn't quite as destructive and Frank sinks his teeth into his lip and a hand fists in the filthy mass of Gerard's Fire Truck Red hair.
The last embers of the fire die out and the stars are hidden beneath poison and pollution from the shit Battery City pumps into the atmosphere, and they fuck in the dark with their ray guns within reach, mumbling shhhh into each other's mouths, listening to the wind and the sand and their family breathing and, somewhere in a bag, white noise and static crackling into the night.
-
.thirteenth page (repetition of image from previous page).
WILL PARTY POISON AND FUN GHOUL BEGIN A ROMANCE? IS THIS THE BEGINNING OR THE BEGINNING OF THE END? WILL THE GIRL EVER FIND HER MOTHER? IS KORSE CATCHING UP? WILL THE DRACS EVER LET THEIR GUARD DOWN? IS IT ALL ALREADY TOO LATE?
- FIND OUT, ONLY IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF THE FABULOUS KILLJOYS, AVAILABLE FROM NEXT WEEK!
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