Chapter Text
krsst!
hiss
krsst!
krsst!
“ –Sunshine. 109 in the sky, but the pigs won’t quit. You’re here with me, Dr. Death Defying. I’ll be your surgeon, your proctor, your helicopter, pumpin’ out the slaughtermatic sounds to keep you alive–”
“Yuri, don’t play with the radio.”
“I’m not listening to anymore of those bullshit dinosaur tapes, I wanna hear real waves for once.”
“Y’know, whatever Dr. D plays is probably from the same tapes. Since we do buy the copies from them and all.”
“…shut up.”
The interior of their shelter is a mess.
It’s not like there’s even that much of a space to make such a mess to being with, but lo and behold it is so. There are clothes scattered, leading from the back room to the front where the salvaged mirror sits above the water basin, to the water from said basin being spilled out everywhere around it from the many times he’s stuck his fingers in there just so that he can slick back his hair.
(It never stays though, his fringe will always fall in front of his eye no matter what he does and if he would just own it instead of trying to tame it, the better off everyone within his vicinity will be.)
“What time is it?!”
Victor shoots out from the front window, shouting and scaring the absolute hell out of Yuri who had been doing nothing but resting on the bench right outside of their shelter and didn’t deserve that at all. He takes a swing at him, but Victor shoots back inside and there’s some sounds of stumbling around, even a crash (and that doesn’t sound good) and soon the makeshift door that replaced the beaded curtain is being slammed open and falls off from the hinges.
That slows him down and actually makes him stop for a moment. Yuri is staring at him with what could only be described as teenage disbelief and Victor just shrugs and props the door back against the frame. He’ll get Mila to fix it later.
“You maybe wanna fuckin’ chill for a second?” Yuri ends up muttering at him after he figures out that Victor is going to do absolutely nothing to repair their home right now.
Victor doesn’t pay him any mind though, he’s rushing past him and heading for the small lookout platform Mila stands on, cracked binoculars in hand and an Individual at her hip. He pushes his way up as well, squishes in next to her in the little booth made out of nothing but scrap planks of wood and the scavenged bits of tin that used to be a roof from their last shack out in Zone 3.
“What time is it?” he asks, again.
Mila, no different than Yuri, shoves him over so she can have more room again and says, “I don’t know. But it’s gotta be past noon, maybe. Seems like that.”
“When are they gonna get here?” Victor whines and slumps next to her. “Also, what do you think of this vest?”
Mila gives his outfit no more than a side glance and shrugs. “It’s okay.”
“Be honest!”
“The red washes you out.”
“What?!”
“You’re too pale, Victor," she tells him. "All that sun you work in just makes you pink and your hair is practically bleached white at this point, the red makes you all washed up and out.”
He doesn’t need to hear any more. It never takes much to get him to second guess his limited fashion choices, and he takes her words to heart. He strips out of the red vest he had chosen and is left in nothing but a pair of ripped jeans and one of Yuri’s black tank tops.
“I spent so long trying to figure out what to wear,” he whines, again, and musses with the hair that he spent so much time on… again…
“You actually look fine like that,” she says after giving him a proper up and down look over. “Rugged real shiny like.”
“Is that a good look?”
Mila only shrugs and goes back to her watch. “Well, that’s how he usually sees you and hasn’t run screaming yet, sooo…”
Victor shoves her to the side again, knocks her off center and Mila just laughs when she hits the ledge and then throws herself at him with full force. They both topple over and hit the floor with a loud thud and send dust flying up and around them. Victor has .2 seconds to realize what’s going to happen next and rolls off to the side before Mila can get the upper hand and shove his face in the dirt even more.
“You can’t hit a girl and not get hit back, Victor!” she shouts and grabs at his legs to keep him down.
“I didn’t even hit you!” Victor shouts back and kicks at her hands.
“Shove, hit, it’s all the same out here!”
“Kick his ass, Mila!” Yuri cheers from where he still sits and stretches his legs out to get comfortable for the show.
Victor has never been much of a fighter, not really. He’s good with an Individual – give him a target and full battery, and he can shoot ‘till everyone around him is nothing short of dust, but hand to hand combat has never been his strong suit. Mila, on the other hand, grew up in a war zone, starting off as a motorbaby to crash kid to the self-proclaimed Desert Queen of Zone 3 and has fought tooth and nail for the semblance of peace she loves.
It’s no surprise when she gets Victor on his stomach and straddles his back, both of his arms pinned behind him and gasping for air.
“Dost thou yield?” she asks haughtily, and presses down on his limbs.
“I yield!” he calls out and the moment she lets up, he rolls around too fast for her to stop him and tackles her back to the ground.
“Cheater!” she shrieks out, but is laughing all the same.
“Alls fair in love and war!” he laughs along with her and tickles down her sides.
Mila is pounding away at his shoulders, not hard enough to do anything other than egg him on and her laughter is contagious. Even Yuri, still sitting off in the shade, is grinning and calling for Georgi to come watch Mila lose her shit.
It’s only when Georgi joins them out front from the gardens in the back that anyone really notices the car coming towards their camp.
Georgi notices it first, he always does even if he’s not technically the one on look-out. He spots the way the dust kicks up on the dirt path they carved out for themselves from the main road around the speeding black dot coming in just this side of a little too fast. He nudges Yuri and Yuri notices it in an instant. He leaps up from his seat and pulls down his shirt where it’s ridden up and steps out into the sun, fingers in his mouth, and lets out a loud, sharp whistle that stops the other two.
Both their heads whip in the direction of the speeding bullet coming right at them and Victor’s breath hitches.
“Oh, shit,” Victor mutters out and is up with no hesitation. “They’re here.”
Mila holds her hand out to him, and he helps her back up to her feet without so much as a second thought. He immediately starts to pat the dirt and dust off from his clothes in some hopeless attempt to looks half-way presentable.
“There’s dirt all over your face,” Mila points on unhelpfully. She only laughs when Victor rubs his hands against his skin and does nothing but make it worse. “Leave it. Now you really look rugged.”
“I should’ve left you stranded in that pick-up when I had the chance,” he grouses at her and turns on his heel to walk back to their shelter.
Her laughter follows him all the way back, as does the crunch of her feet running through the dirt right after him. They both make it back to their tiny porch to join both Yuri and Georgi by the time that black dot speeding towards them takes the shape of an old, poorly painted Impala with rusted chrome on the bumper and begins to slow down the closer it approaches. Eventually, it pulls up some feet away from them, skidding to a stop and kicking up dust. There’s music playing loudly and they can hear every bit of it through the windows.
The engine is killed, the music cuts off, and Victor sees Yuri itching for his own Individual and puts a hand on his shoulder to stop him.
“Play nice,” he says, but Yuri only shakes him off.
The dust settles, and the driver side door flies open. No one steps out of it, not exactly. A gangly kid with bright yellow hair and a shock of red thrown in there stands on the panel and nearly leaps on top of the roof to stare at them His eyes are hidden against the black band painted across them, making them look all that much smaller, and himself a little wilder for it, but he gives that same wide, bright smile that he always does.
“What’s the 411, my dust darlings?” he calls out, and waves at them happily.
“You’re so fucking annoying!” Yuri shouts back at him, but from the way the other boy laughs, it doesn’t seem to faze him much.
The other door opens and out steps a woman dressed primarily in pink, as always. They always see her in the same variation: pink shorts, black tank top, white vest embroidered with pink cherry blossoms by Victor’s apprentice himself on the back, and white band going across her eyes, the same flowers painted right above her brow.
“Sorry to be so late,” she calls out to them. “We tried to stay on time, but there was a clap with some Dracs near the Springs.”
“We didn’t even notice,” Mila tells her. “Nope, not at all. Not to the point where we made complete messes just to look good–”
This time Victor does hit her, elbows her arm hard enough to get her to stop talking and approach their visitors like the rational adult he is. The others follow him behind as sometimes it takes all of them for the supply exchange.
“Was it a bad one?” he asks.
“Nah!” says their driver, who slams his door shut and walks over to them with his hands in his pockets. “It wasn’t that bad.”
Him too, he never changes. As far as Victor knows, none of the flowers change their style, and he’s resigned himself to seeing this boy wear the same dingy yellow pants and grey shirt, with the same weathered blue vest torn and frayed and held together with band pins and sutured bottle caps. It’s a look, he’ll admit that much, at least the yellow cherry blossom painted on his cheek is always drawn nicely.
“They looked like vulture food,” he continues to say. “Probably thought they could round up some runners and didn’t know that we got our own laws out here. That and Kiku took most of them out in like, five minutes, it was wild.”
“Again, that’s not my name.”
Victor is usually always well aware of where the last of their trio is at all times, but this time he didn’t even notice when he came out from the backseat, but the soft hint of resignation in his voice is louder in his ears than anything else going on around them.
Like the others, he’s dressed in his own trademarked outfit: black jeans, black shirt with a v-shaped neckline plunging on just the side of a little too much, and his black vest covered in white outlines of embroidered chrysanthemums. It’s Victor’s own handiwork, and he preens every time he sees it, he’s very proud of it. Today is no different, he stands a little taller, and is smiling a little larger, and his heart is beating a little faster just by watching him run his fingers through his slicked back hair and marvel at the way the gold stripe painted across his eyes always compliments his sun-kissed face.
The little white flowers painted on both of his temples are a little smudged, probably from the fire fight earlier, but they’re still clear and they’re still beautiful.
(He’s thrown back to a memory, one that feels like it happened way longer than it probably did, where Victor had stared at his profile until he was caught and in the attempt to not make it weird, asked him what kind of flower he wore.
He had looked away, just for a second, probably didn’t buy into Victor’s pathetic excuse and was wondering how to get away from as soon as possible, but murmured something that Victor couldn’t help but ask him to repeat it because any chance to hear his voice was worth exposing his feelings.
“Shiragiku,” he said to him, a little louder, but still a murmur. “White Chrysanthemums.”)
“It’s the same though.”
“No, it’s not the same.”
Victor ends up being snapped out of this little memory and brought right back to the present where the seemingly non-argument is getting a little more heated than it should be.
“It means the same thing,” the younger man says. “Right? It still means Chrysanthemum.”
“Technically, but it still has a different meaning to it. What if I just started calling you Sakura?”
There’s a beat.
“Well, I mean, that still means Cherry Blossom so I wouldn’t mind?”
The poor man visibly deflates a little. It’s easy to see that this is a battle he is always losing, and that it’s a battle he’s had to fight more than once. It’s endearing, to say the least, and Victor feels a little privileged in being able to have a small look into what their everyday life must be like. He laughs a little, and it calls attention to himself and not even a second later he’s being stares at in turn and Victor’s pretty sure it isn’t just the sun that’s making his face feel hot.
“There’s no getting through to him,” he says with a shrug.
“Shame,” says Victor. “Shiragiku just sounds a lot prettier.”
He says it without even thinking, and he only realizes how inappropriate that may have been when the other man is suddenly no longer facing him and is instead doing his best to look like he’s surveying the land. For what, who knows? It’s most likely that Victor has stepped over the line. Again.
There’s a little voice in the back of his head that starts screaming whenever he’s being too obvious about his feelings and it’s going off right now.
The little blond menace of their driver saddles up right next to him laughing and says, “Well, I guess I’ll have to use the right name if only because it sounds prettier.”
The screaming just gets louder.
“Ukon!” Ichiyo shouts out to them from where her and Mila are unloading sacks filled with clothes and jugs of water from the trunk of their car. “Don’t just stand around, help Yuri with those boxes!”
“I got it!” Yuri is quick to say and swaying under the weight of three loaded cardboard boxes sealed up with heavy duty tape.
Ukon doesn’t seem to pay any mind to what Yuri says. He abandons both Victor and his associate without a second thought and races over to grab the top box. It goes about as well as any of them could imagine, which is to say not well at all. Yuri kicks at the other boy, Ukon grabs the box on top, Yuri pulls away. Ukon grabs onto Yuri’s shoulder to keep him steady, Yuri knees him in the gut. They both topple over and the boxes fly everywhere.
“Well,” Shiragiku mutters next to him, “at least there wasn’t anything breakable in those ones.”
It seems like he’s been forgiven. Victor will take it.
“Small miracles,” he agrees.
He wants to ask him just what is in the boxes since it seems like more than what’s usual is being dropped off, but it’s then that Georgi comes up beside him with a crate in his arms filled with potatoes and nudges Victor’s shoulder with his elbow.
“You can always help, y’know,” he says, and moves on.
He’s only teasing, Victor knows that much, but that doesn’t stop him from sticking his tongue out at him. He also ignores the small huff of laughter next to him. For one brief second of teasing his friend back and all showmanship of being a well-rounded mature adult has surely gone flying out the window.
Sounds about right.
(Victor really hopes that he can convince others that it’s the sun’s fault why his cheeks are suddenly looking pinker than usual.)
“I can help,” Shiragiku says. “Georgi said there was a lot this time around when he radioed in what to expect, so, that’s good.”
He walks away, without so much as another word, and Victor follows behind with no hesitation at all. He trails after him happily, even more so at the idea that he’s grown comfortable enough around Victor and the rest of them to go ahead and invite himself into their home without any hesitation. It’s a stark contrast to the first time he came onto their base, and it’s a very encouraging thought.
“There’s potatoes this time!” Victor tells him excitedly and falls into step with him. “Georgi was able to get the seeds to take with a new compost he’d been playing around with. Oh, but now we’ve been fighting over the ashes from the fire pits, he keeps saying that’s the secret ingredient, but I think it’s the coffee grounds and he’s just more afraid of Mila than of me.”
They end up not even a foot away from the enclosed garden surrounded my planks of wood with mismatched heights made up to act as the fence, and Shiragiku pauses in his step, making Victor do the same. There’s a little furrow between his brow, crinkling up that splash of gold on his face and he looks concerned.
“Do you need more wood?” he asks. “We can try to get you some, but no one mentioned that in the list–”
“No, no! No, it’s fine,” Victor assures him. “We’re fine, don’t worry about that. We still have plenty, I just like to keep my lye stock full at all times, but no, we’re okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay… You shouldn’t hesitate to let us know what you need out here. I mean, that's why the system was set up, y'know, we try."
He's so cute when he tries to be reassuring. It makes him a little more approachable, and Victor loves to know that he's someone that can see this side of him. He can't reptend that the look he's wearing now isn't fond when he says, “I know. Thank you.”
He’s offered a quick smile, and Victor takes it to keep with all the others that have been given to him in the time they’ve known each other. Each one of them is precious, he knows this, it’s a fact.
Victor steps ahead of him, reaching the garden’s entrance before Shiragiku does and bounces on the balls of his feet as if he was a young pup waiting for his master to catch up. He pushes the gate open and ever the gentleman, holds it for the other man to go through.
Their garden is Georgi’s pride and joy.
It’s a large spread out area with rows of makeshift beds and broken off pieces of planks with scrawled on markings to tell which vegetables are which. He’s been able to grow a variety – beans, carrots, onions, beets, even corn during the hotter months. So far, the only fruit that has flourished has been a few watermelons, but it’s been awhile since the last one. Still, he’s determined to see that more begin to thrive as well.
He’s painstakingly brought the land around their base back to life through blood, sweat, and tears – with the help of everyone else, of course. When not working on other things to ensure their survival out here in the deserts, he was here tilling the soil with help from the solar stills and the different variations of composts he could put together with what they had.
Sometimes the harvest isn’t much, sometimes the seeds don’t take the composts, and sometimes the solar still are just not enough to keep the soil damp enough. They’ve been lucky to have a steady supply of what they can trade along with the laundry service, but hopefully with what they’ve gathered today, it’ll be enough to cover some future expenses through the flower chain as well as reach some of the more far out settlements in the Zones.
Georgi has filled small crates and boxes with vegetables, and left them off to the side for easy transport. Victor picks up two at a time, he buckles a little under the weight but it’s only a little heavier than the laundry equipment and he’s able to deal with it well enough. The Shiragiku on the other hand, is carrying three.
“That’s not heavy for you?” Victor can’t help but ask.
The look he gets back is only slightly confused. “No? This isn’t really all that heavy?”
Again, Victor is left to trail after him in a bit of a marveled daze. If that marveled daze also happens to include watching muscles flex under the strain of carrying three loaded crates of food, that’s nobody’s business but his own.
When they do come back from the garden, it turns out that Georgi is the only one loading up the car. Yuri and Ukon have picked up where Mila and Victor left off and are play fighting among the supplies.
Well, Victor is sure that Ukon is play fighting, he can’t say the same in Yuri’s case.
Yuri is nearly the same as Mila: young, hot headed and grew up swinging fists. The difference is that Victor took Yuri in when he was much younger than Mila, and while he knows the ins-and-outs of a scrap, he can’t say that he has a lot of experience in always needing to fight, not the same kind of way that Ukon has. It’s very much the same parallel as before, and soon Yuri is pinned to the floor, right on his belly and with the other boy holding him down.
“You’re never gonna be a part of the chain if you can’t even get a pin in,” he laughs.
“Fuck off,” says Yuri. “What makes you think I even wanna be a flower!”
He spits the title out of his mouth like venom, but it only makes the other boy laugh.
“That’s not what a little birdie told me,” he says, brightly. “Someone was singing a tune about all the good you can do for us and how we should get you an interview with one of the Big 3.”
“Who told you that?!”
“I just said it was a little birdie singing. Or, I guess I should say mixing? He’s not much of an actual singer, is he? Your DJ friend, I mean.”
Yuri throws Ukon off with all the might in his too skinny body and launches him far enough that he nearly rolls over back to their car. Yuri stands and pulls himself upright, using every inch of his height to tower over the boy on the ground and glare at him through his curtain of hair.
“Don’t talk to my friends,” he growls out. “Don’t look at them, don’t even breathe at them, and definitely don’t listen to them.”
He sounds threatening, but this in no way keeps Ukon from poking more fun at him. “You mean you have more than the one friend?”
“Oi! Stop messing around already and get back to work!” Ichiyo calls out from where she is sitting under the porch awning with Mila, their medical kit opened at her feet. “You weren’t recruited to play around with your friends!”
“He’s not my friend,” Yuri growls, and stomps away.
“I thought I was making progress, now I’m just hurt,” Ukon says, but gets back up and makes to help Georgi out with sorting out the packing.
“Remind me to kill Beka the next time I see him,” Yuri says to Victor as he passes him to go back to the garden.
Victor just hums. “But then who will listen to you when you start to bitch about living with us?”
Yuri doesn’t reply, not verbally. Victor does laugh at the finger he shows off without looking back.
Victor catches up with the others at the car, finally setting down the load he’s been carrying and stretches his arms out, shakes them loose. He’s prepared to go back to the garden to finish collecting the rest, but Mila and Ichiyo catch his eye again. The both of them are on the same bench that Yuri had been relaxing on earlier, the medical kit still opened, but now he’s able to see that Mila’s sleeve has been rolled up and Ichiyo is wrapping her up with a bandage.
“Would you mind if I went to go see what happened with Mila?” he ends up asking Shiragiku. “I don’t want to leave you to do all the work, even if Yuri is helping now.”
“No! That’s fine!” comes his response. “I don’t mind, it’s not a problem, whatever you need.”
Victor ends up giving him his brightest smile, not once taking in the rambles to mean anything more than Shiragiku being a generous person.
With that he leaves the trade off in capable hands, and he’s walking over to the two women in no time at all. From what he can see, Ichiyo has Mila’s sleeve rolled up to her shoulder, and there’s blood drying on her skin below from where there’s a bandage being wrapped around her upper arm.
“What happened, Mila?” he asks.
“Ichiyo found that gash on my upper arm from when I hurt myself fixing up the truck reopened and was bleeding out like an acid pool,” she says, all calm like she’s talking about the weather. “I didn’t even notice it until it started running down to my elbow, my shirt must’ve been soaking up the blood.”
She has been fonder of darker colors lately, and the deep green camouflage print she wears cut off above her waist but is wrapped tight around her torso and all the way down close to her elbow. It soaking up the blood is the most probable reason, even looking at it now, he can’t even tell the difference in the shading.
“How did that happen?” he can’t help but wonder aloud.
“It’s probably happened when you threw me off the lookout post.” She turns to Ichiyo, all doe eyes and a jutting bottom lip. “He’s a brute like that, and it was all because I couldn’t tell him what time it was.”
“I should’ve done that for a lot of other reasons, really.”
“I would be more inclined to believe you,” Ichiyo says as she puts away their medical supplies and closes the kit, “if I hadn’t seen you literally snap the neck of a Drac that tried to put you in a chokehold. If Victor did that, he’d be dead.”
Mila laughs. “Speaking of, we should do a Sunday brunch again one day!”
“Maybe, my girls do miss you.”
It’s then that she turns her head away from Mila to look at Victor, and while he doesn’t hoard her smiles in the same way he does with Shiragiku’s, there’s something fond and motherly about Ichiyo’s displays of affection that he appreciates. It’s probably because she actually is a mother, but it always does make Victor miss his own.
“There’s the Drac incident,” she says, and there’s that fond smile, “and I also wouldn’t believe that because Victor isn’t capable of hurting a fly. A Drac maybe, but not a fly.”
“That’s not true, I’ve seen him catch flies with his bare hands,” says Mila. “And he eats Power Pup straight out of the can, he’s a cryptid, I say.”
“It’s not dog food,” Victor sighs. “Come on, if you’re good to go, help me bring the laundry inside.”
“It’s totally dog food,” she tells Ichiyo, but follows after him all the same.
After the laundry is put inside with their traded supplies as well, and the car is packed up with their vegetables, the three flowers are huddled around the hood of their car with a heavily edited map of thte Zones and a bit of the outerlands. It’s something that they do for them; they point out all the places that are no longer safe to travel because of either gangs or checkpoints.
“There are more checkpoints along the borders of 2,” Ukon is telling them and tracing along the red line that represents that border. “Only here on the westside, we think BLI might be expanding again, we’ve been hearing some stuff from News and Dr D about that since that’s close to where they’re at. We got some crash queens that have been jumping at dwellers and killjoys and robbing them along this section of Guano running into Zone 6. So, no one is happy about that, we’re trying to find out which gang it is and do something about it.”
“Anyone been ghosted?” Yuri asks.
“Not that we know of. We don’t want it to get that bad. Again.”
“No,” Mila agrees. “No, we don’t.”
“So, yeah, that’s pretty much it,” he says and pulls the map away again.
He hands it over to Shiragiku for folding, and while he does that, Ichiyo tells them, “We’ll have some killjoys taking out the checkpoints once we get into contact with the Grove, but if you’re going anywhere near that part of Zone 2’s border, I’d say start counting that as the start of your 48.”
“That’s not even anywhere near Battery though,” Yuri complains.
“Do you have plans to go back near Battery?” Ukon asks him.
“No, fuck that. It’s just not fair, this is our land.”
“Technically, it’s nobody’s land. That’s the point.”
Yuri scoffs and says something else at him, but Victor isn’t able to hear what it is. He gets distracted by Ichiyo suddenly at his side and holding out a marker in front of his face and is already talking to him.
“We’ll be back in a couple days to pick up the cleaned stuff,” Ichiyo tells him and gets his signature for the trade off in the little spiral notebook she carries. “Same as always. If you guys run out of something just radio in to the Springs HQ, we’ll get it from there, the channel is still the same.”
“We should be fine, but thanks,” Victor replies. “Like always. And if you got anything that needs fixing that we can help with, the offer is the same.”
“Actually,” she says, and her smile is a little sharper, a little more conniving, and her tone is just bordering on teasing, “one of us does have something that needs fixing.”
It’s awfully quiet after that. She isn’t looking at him anymore, both her and Ukon are staring at Shiragiku who is taking his sweet time refolding their map up again. It makes everyone well aware, as to what the implication is here, and they all wait. They all watch him, and when he finally does look up from his work to see all these eyes on him, he’s noticeably worried.
“What?” he asks dumbly.
“Don’t you have something to ask Victor?” Ichiyo prompts him.
It’s quiet again.
“…No?”
Ukon reaches over to take the map and shoves him forward.
“Yes, you do,” is all he says, and Shiragiku looks as if he’s just been betrayed.
Ichiyo says something to him then, something that none of them understand because it’s said in the language only the trio share. Victor is nosy though, and since he’s somehow tied in with this, he really wants to know.
Whatever it is she’s said though, in that motherly tone of hers, it gets Shiragiku to relax and the tension that has been surrounding him disappears a little. He doesn’t make any direct eye contact with Victor, but he does step closer to him.
“Actually,” he says and begins to shrug off his vest, “some of the flowers on the back are starting to come undone from the last firefight. Well, not the last one, but the last last one. Would you be able to fix it?”
He hands the vest over the Victor, who takes it quickly and turns it over and holds it out for inspection. Sure enough, some of the chrysanthemums near the right shoulder have been singed off and snapped the thread, making it unravel and loosen the stitching all the way down. It’ll probably take a day or so to redo, but it’s an easy fix.
“This is no problem,” Victor assures him with a smile, and folds it over his arm. “I can have it ready by the next pick-up.”
“That’s great! Thank you.”
He looks relieved, as if he would be denied this one simple thing. Victor would give him anything and everything willingly, all he has to do is ask. This small request is only at the very tip of what Victor would do for this man, surely that much should be obvious.
“What’s your price?” he asks.
“Your name,” Victor says, shamelessly and still has that easy smile plastered onto his face.
(Because Shiragiku is not his real name and Victor knows that much, but like all flowers, they never do go by their actual names outside of their tight-knit families and only refer to themselves by the flower they represent to strangers and even their business partners.)
(Still, Victor is always on the hunt to finding out what his name is, he has been since the beginning.)
Instead of a serious answer, his smile is only returned softly (and doesn’t that just melt his heart a little?) and he reaches into the back pockets of his jeans. Victor doesn’t know what to expect, probably a few carbons for the work, maybe a voucher for a marketplace, but it doesn’t turn out to be any of that. What the Shiragiku ends up presenting is worth more to him than any of those things combined. It’s three packets that fit all in the palm of his hand, with a brand name that used to be so familiar when scanning fluorescent aisles of craft stores and designed with objects in the color it promises to recreate.
“What about these, instead?” he asks, and Victor is still staring.
Purple.
He has purple in his hands.
Victor can never really create the color on his own, he’s tried so hard with what the garden provides and with the flowers he buys, but it’s never the same shade he remembers loving so much. Now it’s right in front of him and he can’t hold back.
Suddenly, all thoughts about his goal to find out this dear man’s name are out the door because never in his life did Victor ever think that he would see anything like these again. He throws the vest over his shoulder and takes the offered packets and looks at them with sheer reverence. He holds them carefully, can’t believe they’re real.
“We were helping out with cleaning up an old complex that’s going to be reused soon out by Ragtown for the runners with kids,” he tells him. “One of them, I guess, whoever lived there before made clothes like you and I found these there. I know making bright colors is hard, and that the flowers at the Springs are expensive, so I thought maybe you would like these.”
This is how he’s going to die. Not by leftover radiation, not by dehydration or starvation, not even by a run in with a Drac or an Exterminator. His heart is going to literally beat out of his chest and motorbabies everywhere are going to hear stories about the man who literally died because his crush gave him a present.
Which is actually a payment, considering he’s going to be fixing the embroidery on his vest, but still, technicalities, it’s whatever. The point is, he saw these and thought of Victor and he’s going to die.
“There was also some other stuff in there I thought you might like. Um, there was a lot of different fabrics, so I packed as many as I could. And there was some starch and just other things that I thought you’d be able to use. So, when you go through the supplies, and you see all that, that’s what it is. Just so you know, y’know? I’m gonna shut up now.”
Forget dying, Victor is already dead and clearly existing on some other plane of existence. This is absolutely the best day of his life.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” he says, honestly. “Really, that means a lot to me.”
Shiragiku only shrugs. “It’s nothing, I mean, you’re welcome, but, yeah.”
“I have to pay you back somehow,” Victor goes on to say. “Whatever you want, I’ll make it for you. Just name it.”
“It’s okay,” he tells him. “I don’t- It’s not like I wear a lot of color anyway.”
“It’s true,” Ukon says. “Everything he owns is in black. Oh, except for those–”
“Those aren’t mine!” Shiragiku nearly jumps at him. “They’re not, they belonged to someone else.”
“Okay, but you still wear them, so…?”
“Ohohoho,” Mila jumps in to tease. “You got some scandalous lingerie hidden at your base?”
Now that’s a thought, Victor thinks, and there’s no denying why he’s suddenly feeling flushed and Mila is whistling.
“It’s not!” he cries out and now he’s blushing, and that’s adorable. “Anyway, we should get going. We still gotta make contact with Halcyon, and that always takes a minute to get to.”
He says it to his friends more than to Victor’s crew, it’s a reminder as well as a way to get the attention of this unknown, and questionable hidden clothing. The thought of Halcyon reminds Victor though, it’s been awhile since he’s spoken to his own friend out there and he really should actually send a transmission his way. For now though, he asks them for a favor.
“Oh, if you’re going to be anywhere near the Joy-Strip there, do you mind passing a message on to Chris?” he asks. “I have the lace he’s been wanting dyed and ready, but I still need to know what I’m doing with it. Ask him to radio me when he can, I never know when he’s busy.”
“No problem,” Shiragiku says, and he’s smiling again. “We actually have to visit his club, so we’ll let him know.”
“You’re going to that club?” Yuri asks. “For what?”
“That’s a secret,” Ukon teases and pokes his nose. “Only a flower can know that!”
He ends up reeling backwards as Yuri swings his arm forward, laughing the whole while, but that seems to be the end of the conversation there. Ichiyo nudges him towards the driver’s door and tells him to get in already, that he’s done enough playing around with his friends. Yuri doesn’t even bother to correct her with just how much of not-friends they are and shoves his hands into his pockets.
The rag-tag group of dwellers stand back as the flowers get into their car, not taking off because Victor makes the motion for a window to be rolled down. Ichiyo rolls her down, and all three lean close to hear what he has to say, but his word are only really directed at Shiragiku.
“I’m serious about paying you back for all the supplies,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be clothes, I can make anything. Curtains, blankets, whatever you like. I’ll even use the purple you got me! You deserve that much!”
“Ask for curtains!” Ukon tells Shiragiku. “We need new ones!”
“We don’t- okay, we kind of do, but it’s not that big of a deal,” he tells him. To Victor, he turns back to him and just shrugs and says, “We don’t really need much, we’re pretty good. And keep the purple for something special, I wouldn’t appreciate it as much as you do. It’s not really one of my favorite colors.”
“What is your favorite color?” he persists. “I’m gonna make you something whether you want me to or not, so don’t lie!”
His smile is wide and his hands are on his hips. There is absolutely no talking him out of this, he has to give this man something, he just has to.
It seems like he’s being taken seriously, because Shiragiku only chuckles and looks him dead in the eye when he says, “Okay, okay. We don’t really need any clothes, but we could use a new blanket.”
“Curtains!”
“Hush up, let him alone.”
Neither one is paying attention to the other two in the car. They’re both too caught up with each other. It usually happens like that.
“But what about your favorite color?” Victor asks. “I don’t wanna make it in something you’re not gonna like.”
The Shiragiku looks away then, and hesitates. It’s always like this, and it’s not like he doesn’t expect it, but that just makes it all the more surprising when he actually does answer and Victor almost misses it when he says, “Blue. My favorite color is blue.”
It takes Victor a second to understand that he’s finally gotten something personal out of this man; it’s like pulling teeth, he’s known him for maybe over two years now and still doesn’t know much. He doesn’t share anything personal like the other two, but Victor’s finally learned something new and his smile is larger than ever before and he really wishes he was a little more cleaned up than he is he must look a fool.
He tries not to think about it too hard.
“Then blue it’ll be,” he promises, and that’s that.
They all say their goodbyes then, and Ukon brings the car back to life and the music as well. Ichiyo yells at him to turn it down, but as far as any of them can tell, she’s ignored and the car peels out away from them, going in the same way it came. Victor is still waving away even when they’re nothing more than just a dot on the horizon.
Even when he does finally drop his arm, he’s still staring out into the distance. It’s enough to get Mila to nudge his shoulder just to see if the sun finally didn’t start to get at him.
“You okay there, boss?” Mila asks.
Victor spins on his heel, throws his arms up and grabs at the first person within reach to pull into a hug. Mila skips back a few steps and Yuri ducks down fast enough to hit the floor, leaving Georgi to be the unlucky winner.
“Why me?” he asks the sky above. “I’m a good person.”
Victor doesn’t seem to mind the rejection, he’s still reeling.
“He said he liked blue,” he swoons. “He likes blue, his favorite color is blue! Oh, do you think that means he likes my eyes?”
Yuri gags.
“Here we are, motobabies. Right before your very eyes as Dr Death Defying appears with the shiniest of surprises. The bag is open, the cat has jumped out, and from zone to zone you won’t want to roll without it.”
krrst!
“Stop! Listen… Thump-thump-thump… can you feel that? My blessed little heart is beating so hard with excitement I could just about taste my blood.
“Yes, I mean to be smug when I say I got the musical wonderdrug that’ll make you wonder how you wonder how you dug anything else.”
krrst!
“What’s new is old, what’s old is new, I’ve got a playlist up and ready just for you! So, hunker down, find a nice hole, keep your neck short. Dr D’s gonna help you forget the world for a while.
Starting… now.”
Their work routine never changes.
Victor is the first to rise. It’s ingrained in him at this point to get up when the sun does. He’ll wash up at the basin in their living room as best as he can, rinse his mouth the best he can, and get dressed. Usually, him walking around wakes up Georgi. Georgi never was a deep sleeper, and it’s for that reason that he gets to sleep in the living room.
Just in case something approaches their shelter in the middle of the night, he’ll be the first to let them know.
Usually, Victor leaves the shelter while Georgi goes through his own routine of morning calisthenics that he claims wakes him up and keep him up. He goes out back to where they have two separated sheds – one that houses the distillery equipment and large steel pots that they use for laundry or coloring fabrics, and the other where under lock and key is all the equipment Victor uses for making patterns on cloth and yards of cloth that have already been dyed and treated and ready for trade.
Victor always brings out two pots, first thing in the morning. Sets them up over a dug-out fire pit, each one respectively and goes out to where they’ve dug their sun stills. He uses half of the water collected over from the previous day, and half the treated water from the distillery to fill up these tubs and light them up to start a boil.
Once that is set up, he’ll go back into the shelter, where Georgi is toasting up pieces of bread on their one good skillet over a small open flame and Mila is already awake and doing her best to make some coffee with the same grounds they’ve been using all week. Yuri wakes up after Victor goes to wake him up, which always involves something being flung and some mornings a near tackle that sends Victor running out of the bedroom laughing.
Yuri usually stumbles out of the bedroom, still half-dressed and plops down at their table just in time to get a plate with toasted bread, a boiled egg that’s been chilled in their ice box, and a portion of jerky that is probably just lizard meat but none of them question what’s given to them when the flowers come by with their weekly ration subscription.
“I think I’ll try to make a stew for dinner tonight,” says Georgi, who always talks about what he wants to make for dinner before their day starts. “It’s been getting a little colder after the sun goes down, it’ll be good to having something warm before bed.”
“You gonna add some of that fresh stuff?” Mila asks, but there’s a smile on her face like she’s privy to her own personal joke.
“Power Pup isn’t real dog food, y’know,” Gerogi tells her. “They only put that on the label so Dracs won’t suspect it’s real meat when the hot wagons come outta Battery.”
“Why does it smell like dog food, then?” Yuri asks, his head on the table and a piece of jerky hanging out of his mouth.
“Probably just because it’s canned,” Victor says and lifts his head up by pushing his forehead back and forcing him up. He puts a tin cup full of watered down coffee sweetened with honey in front of Yuri and smiles at the way he gulps it down. “Fresh meat doesn’t smell like that, but canned food is always different.”
The meal goes on in silence for a few beats at a time. Filling up their bellies and loading themselves up on any form of caffeine they can get their hands on is more important than small talk.
Someone always has to have the last word at some point, though.
“I still think it’s dog food,” says Mila and then shoves the rest of her egg into her mouth.
After breakfast, Mila gathers her tools and goes about the area to oversee the machinery that they use, as well as tune up their truck since it is their only means of transportation. Georgi will clean up the dishes, and gather the laundry – both their own and the clothing they’ve been hired to clean for others. Yuri usually helps Victor depending on what he’s doing; if he’s washing clothes, then he’ll grab the lye and washboards and scrub brushes and the wringer.
If Victor is going about dyeing fabrics, he usually lets him do it on his own and tends to the garden alone until Georgi comes out to help him.
(Victor doesn’t mind when he leaves him during dyeing sessions, it’s long work and it stains everywhere, he understands. He’s just grateful that when it’s time to hang the fabrics to dry, Yuri isn’t usually put off by helping that much. That’s enough.)
Today is laundry day though, so while Victor checks the flames of the pit and how hot the water is, Yuri brings out all of the equipment. They get everything set up just as Georgi brings out the sacks of laundry that will be picked up and returned in two days’ time.
“Do my clothes first,” Yuri demands. “I’m sick of my shit never being as clean as it could be.”
“You’re not a paying customer,” says Victor. “So, no.”
“Bullshit.”
“Dig your own pit.”
“Fuck you.”
“Hand me the paddle?”
Yuri does, and that’s about as far as their back and forth goes. Until there’s back splash when Yuri attempts to take a massive amount of watered down clothes to scrub down and drenches his entire upper body. It happens near every time, and Victor always laughs at him.
That’s usually when Mila walks in on Yuri chasing Victor around firepits with his own paddle and threatening to knock over everything in his path just to get to him.
“It’s a wonder anyone ever trusts us with their stuff if you can’t even do something as simple as get them out of the water,” she says and picks up where Yuri abandoned his job.
Yuri leaves to change his clothes, always coming back in the same style of tank top though it usually varies with either black or leopard print. Today is a leopard print day, and it’s a real look considering the pants he’s been wearing for the past couple of days are a very light pastel pink.
(They used to be a brighter pink, and they used to be Mila’s, but they fit comfortably and Yuri will fight someone who dares talk shit. Hardly anyone ever does, though. It’s not like anybody cares.)
Mila’s already scrubbing the heartier stains out using a small tub and a washboard, and Victor keeps the water boiling, adding more lye with every new batch of clothing. Once Yuri joins back in, the process goes faster, and before long Georgi is bringing out a lunch that is basically just a platter of more jerky, bread, and some vegetables that were ready to be picked and rinsed off.
“I think I could probably make a borscht tonight,” he tells them after they settle down on the wooden bench pressed against the front of their shelter and underneath the small bit of roof hanging over to keep them out of the sun. “The beets are ready and there are a lot of them.”
“I haven’t had borscht in so long!” Mila says. “My momma used to make the best, like, no offense Georgi, I’m sure you’re great, but my momma was the shiniest cook in the world!”
“My grandpa didn’t like beets so we never ate that,” says Yuri. “He made amazing pirozhki, though.”
“I never had pirozhki,” Victor whines. “It was always one of those things that I kept telling myself that I was going to eat, and then never did.”
“You missed out, old man. They were the best damn thing on earth and if I had to miss something from Before, they would definitely be top five.”
“I miss cheese,” says Georgi. “And sour cream. I miss milk.”
“Okay, but same,” Victor agrees. “I loved cheese.”
“I don’t remember what cheese tastes like,” says Yuri. “But I remember liking pizza.”
“Oh, my god!” Mila cries out. “I miss pizza!”
“You can still get all that in Battery,” says Victor. “I think where my first place was got turned into a pizza place. I can’t really remember, I didn’t hang around for too long the last time I went back since it was already the last of my 48.”
“Like I’m gonna willingly walk back into that hell hole for what’s probably some shit pizza,” says Yuri, and angrily bites into a carrot. “Fuck BLI.”
“Fuck BLI!” Mila shouts with him, and they both dissolve into a chanting mess.
“It’s funny,” Georgi says to Victor, because the other two are not paying attention to them anymore. “Some people would say that we’re living in the hell hole.”
“Well,” says Victor, “better hell than purgatory.”
After lunch, they finish the customers’ laundry, with Georgi helping out after he cleans up and they get everything wrangled and hung up to dry. The four of them do their own laundry together, and it takes all four of them to do the clean up since they can’t afford to just dump all the water they’ve used.
Georgi is the first to go back inside, he tells them that he’s going to start on the borscht and Victor asks him to leave him a fair amount of beets because he has an order for a red fringe dress from Zone 6 that he needs to start tomorrow.
“We better be getting some actual carbons for that,” Yuri complains and pulls his long, blond hair up. The sweat on his brow is visible, and he’s looking pink in the cheeks. They all are, Victor’s sure of it.
“Why are you complaining?” Victor asks him. “I’m the one that’s going to be doing most of the work.”
“Whatever, I know I’m gonna be the one to make the fringe since you’re going to be working on that fucking flowers’s vest. And I saw those designs she came up with, so I know it’s gonna take a good chunk of my life.”
“I’ll do it,” says Mila. “I can use more practice with stitching.”
“No, I’m gonna do it, go find something to hit with your hammer.”
The sun goes down by the time everything gets syphoned and rinsed and collected, they’re a sweaty mess and ready to eat again. Georgi meets them by the door with a tin cup full of coldish water for each of them and reminds all of them to wash up the best they can.
It’s several long minutes of each one of them swearing at each other and bumping each other over in front of the water basin before any of them can actually sit at the table again for the last meal of the day.
“Pretty good, Gerogi,” says Mila through a mouthful of vegetables and canned meat. “But not as good as my momma’s!”
“You should be thankful that Georgi cooks for us at all,” Victor scolds her. “After all that work, I never wanna actually make something, I’d be eating Power Pup out of a can for days.”
“Yeah,” says Yuri. “But you like dogs so that’s not saying much.”
Mila howls with a laugh and Victor throws his scrap of a napkin straight at Yuri’s face.
They light some candles after dinner (they don’t want to use up their battery supply for the lanterns they’ve hooked up), and finally take some time of the day to just sit together and relax, for the most part. Victor ends up in the corner with all of his strands of beads and needles and other bits and pieces and is showing Yuri the difference between threading a whole strand and individual beads. Mila is playing with the radio, trying to catch the ending of WKIL’s broadcast and hoping to hear a traffic report and Georgi is scribbling in a half-destroyed notebook he had found during a scavenging trip.
“Georgi,” says Mila after she’s found the station and holds her hands out to him. “Georgi, come dance with me! It’s been so long since I’ve been to a show and I need to dance!”
“Hold on,” he tells her. “I just want to get these thoughts down before they slip away from me.”
“Work on your poetry later, come on and dance with me!”
“My soul is burdened down by the weight of living, Mila, just gimme a minute.”
Neither Victor or Yuri pays them any real mind, as Yuri is focused on threading and knotting individual beads under Victor’s supervision, trying to make some semblance of a flower to start off with. They hardly notice when Georgi and Mila finally take each other’s hands and shuffle around the small living room together. They keep dancing for as long as the broadcast keeps going, only stopping to listen to the good Dr Death Defying give his nightly traffic reports and take some calls from other desert dweller listeners.
“This looks like shit,” says Yuri. He knots off the thread he’s been working with and snaps it off. “You can say it.”
“I’m not gonna lie and say it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen, but it’s your first one,” Victor tells him, and takes the cloth away from him to inspect it. “I wasn’t always so great at this either, y’know. When I started, mine looked a lot worse than this, and this isn’t even that bad.”
“How bad was yours?”
“Awful. No, it was terrible. Granted, I was only about 10 when I started so you have a better advantage on me, there.”
“No, that just means that you’ve had more time to get better, and that I need to get better faster.”
“It was a different time, then, Yuri,” Victor reminds him. “I had the luxury of starting early, it’s not the same.”
It’s not the same, he thinks again after their conversation is interrupted by Mila announcing that their teaching/learning time is over and pulls Yuri out to dance with her against his will.
When he chose his career path all those years ago, it was because he had dreams that involved lit up run-ways and glamourous photo shoots. He thought that by the time he’d hit 30 he would be living in a fabulous pent house with a new trophy boyfriend to dote on every other month and wearing designer wear for the rest of his days.
He didn’t think that he would end up here, in the middle of a labeled deserted wasteland with three other people he would not have met in his previous life, living in an overly-large, weather-beaten shack that’s just strong enough to keep the wind and acid rain at bay, sleeping in a cramped off room that holds two small mattresses and a salvaged cot they insist Yuri sleep on since he’s the youngest.
He thought that his fashion would hang off the lithe frames of supermodels, not the scraggly looking killjoys, crash queens, and motorbabies that find him through word of mouth and bright smiles because they hear he’s the one that can make the wildest creations come to life.
He didn’t think that his embroideries and bead work would belong to a whole networked gang named after flowers of all things, but here he is, and this is what’s happened.
Still, watching the three of them twirl around each other to music that is more often overlapped with static now that the broadcast is ending, he finds himself laughing at the fight Yuri puts on, and the way Georgi moves just fine of his own since Mila abandoned him. He doesn’t even hesitate when Mila throws Yuri away and drags him in too, he goes right along with it and spins her around with him, watches her throw her head back and look like the young woman she is.
No, there is no real reason to mourn over expectations that could never come true now. Not when he has this, not when there’s so much more to living and surviving now.
This can be enough.
Eventually, the fun dies down and the good Doctor is saying his goodnights when Mila and Yuri disappear to go to bed. Georgi starts getting ready for bed and asks Victor if he’s going to do the same.
“Just gonna clean up a little first,” he tells him. “I’ll get out of your way, don’t worry.”
“It takes me awhile anyway,” says Georgi. “To fall asleep, I mean, take your time.”
All the same, Victor does his best to clean up the beads quickly. He puts them away, along with the thread and the needle Yuri had been using. He picks up the cloth and studies the rough pattern of the flower; it’s simple and in some spots it’s too tight and in others it’s too loose, but it’s a vast improvement to when Yuri had first started.
Maybe one day, he can help Victor recreate the last gown he had once dreamt up so many years ago…
He blows out the candle by his work station and wishes Georgi a goodnight and a smile. He ducks into the side room and steps around where Mila is sprawled out on her mattress and strips his shirt off before crawling into his own nest of blankets.
There’s a vision of deep blue tulle and taffeta, with sheer sleeves and dripping pearls that dances before his eyes. It’s as clear in his mind, like it was only this morning that he picked up his tools and began beading those flowers straight onto the bodice of his project and his fingers clench around a needle that isn’t there.
It would’ve been great, he thinks before falling asleep. It’s a shame that he never got to bring it to life, because it would have been great.
