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The Daybreakers, when they’re not actively mistrusting Turbo, treat him like a dog. And not the cute, fluffy kind that they want to feed treats and scratch his belly. Wesley hadn’t expected them to exactly trust him, or to even really like him all that much. Turbo had been their boogeyman for so long, second only to Baron Triumph as an object of fear. First, sometimes, if the once-identified-and-now-dead Principal Burr hadn’t been spotted in your area for a decent enough amount of time.
Some of them have taken to calling him Frankenstein, which Wesley can only hope they’re doing ironically. It seems impossible that memes haven’t clued his peers into the difference between Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster by this point, but at the same time, Wesley’s learnt not to underestimate people’s ignorance. Anyway, it’s far preferable to Josh asking him if he’s been keeping Turbo on a leash.
Truthfully, the mistrust doesn’t bother him all that much, and it certainly doesn’t bother Turbo. He would prefer it if they all stayed away It’s that they don’t even treat him as a human. And Turbo has always been so wonderfully, painfully human, with such human flaws.
Like, Turbo loves his dad. He never talked about him much, but Wesley could hear it in his voice, that he worshipped the ground his dad walked on. And Wesley also knows that Turbo’s dad treated him like trash; that he taught his son that if he spent any time with him, if he ever put him first, then thousands of other kids would literally die.
So it’s no wonder, really, that Turbo has such a messed up way of looking at parenting and leadership. It’s not an excuse for any of the truly terrible suff that he did as leader of the Jocks, but Wesley understands that he internalised a lot of awful and abusive ideas. He watched enough Criminal Minds before everything went to hell to know that a kid will pick up all sorts of bad habits from watching their parents while they’re growing up.
And Turbo had picked up the worst. And that is so incredibly human.
Now it’s up to him to do the other most human thing that Wesley can think of: to lean that there is a better way.
********************
“Babe.” He starts, and Turbo looks up from where he’s building what looks like the floorpan of the school out of Lego. In the end, the Daybreakers agreed to lock Turbo up in the toy store. More than a few had wanted to keep him down in the basement, but Wesley had fought to at least give him this, a place where there is light and other people. It’s about as good as a cage, but at the vey least he’s not locked up under everybody’s feet with the trash compactor like some kind of horror movie monster.
“You and me need to have a chat.” He says, and Turbo cocks his head in confusion. Even before the apocalypse, they never really talked about their relationship. It was always so easy and natural. Wesley had never really had a boyfriend before; a handful kisses behind various school buildings, two almost-handjobs in the locker-rooms. He’d thought it would be difficult, but it hadn’t been with Turbo. Their friendship had flowed so seamlessly into a romance that Wesley suspects that it had been that way from the beginning. And they’d never really had to talk about it.
He regrets that now, that lack of communication probably at the heart of some of their issues. Definitely not all of them, definitely not all the issues Turbo had with his dad, and how his abandonment lead to possessiveness, if Wesley is going to get all pop-psychology diagnosing him. But some of their issues.
They had been kids, basically. They are still kids. And they could be forgiven for diving in head first, falling hard and fast.
“Man to man.” Wesley continues. “Work out our traumas. Actualise.” He draws the last word out, every syllable, and Turbo smiles that soft little half-smile he has now. Wesley smiles back, and moves towards the shutters at the store entrance. Josh has the fob to open the store and he won’t give it to him, so he can’t actually get inside to talk to Turbo. It’s fair enough, since he did seriously consider killing Josh at one point not too long ago, but it still hurts that he doesn’t trust him. Josh will let him in overnight, but during the day if they have any grievances to air, they have to do so in public. And they have probably more than their fair share of grievances, so they have worked out a system.
Wesley sits on the ground, his back pressed against the shutters, and Turbo does the same on the other side, shuffles up to get near him. Turbo never doesn’t have at least one eye on the open mall, except in moments like this, back-to-back with Wesley, and he trusts him to watch out for him. It’s a little awkward to have a private conversation even like this, their heads twisted awkwardly to the side to they can whisper to each other and not to the empty space in front of them. The first time they had tried sitting face-to-face, but Turbo couldn’t see past Wesley, so no one was keeping a lookout. And then they had tried Turbo facing the shutters and Wesley the mall, but Turbo had hated talking to the back of Wesley’s head, and unseen eyes on him had made Wesley think too much of ghoulies.
It’s a little hard to know what Turbo is thinking if Wesley can’t see him, but thankfully they quickly figured out a solution to that too; and Turbo sticks his fingers through the shutters, and Wesley grabs them between his own. He runs his thumb up and down the side of Turbo’s pinky finger, and he hears Turbo’s head thump softly against the shutters as he relaxes and slumps backwards a little, as close to Wesley as he can get right now. Wesley imagines his face, eyes closed, expression soft and open and he takes a moment just to savour this while he has it.
“I don’t know if I can forgive you.” Wesley all but whispers. Turbo’s fingers stiffen, his grip tight. Wesley wishes he could see what’s in his face right now: fear, anger, nothing? “But I want to try.” There’s a small tremble in Turbo’s fingers, although whether that’s a reaction to what Wesley is saying, or because his clenched so tightly, Wesley can’t be sure. Either way, he squeezes back. “And I think you want to try to change, too. So we’re going to try together.”
He hears Turbo’s breath grow ragged behind him, and then as if it was pushed and squeezed out of him, like rolling up a toothpaste tube until the little bit at the end bursts out unexpectedly: “yes”. When Wesley lets go of his hand and spins around Turbo does the same, and the thin line of blood that trickles out from Turbo’s mouth makes his heart ache. It’s a tight fit, but he forces his fingers as far through the shutters as he can, and for a moment Turbo leans forward, nobody watching the mall, completely exposed to anything that might happen, and lets Wesley wipe the blood away.
********************
Turbo makes him playlists. It’s not something he ever did before. People have it in their head that Turbo has only ever been a dumb jock, but truth be told he had always been good with words when it mattered. When he was with Wesley. He always knew exactly what to say, and he was always upfront about who he was and what he wanted; never shy. It’s what made him such a good quarterback, a good leader, eloquent in his praise and criticism.
Without his voice, his face is so expressive; but only Wesley can speak Turbo. Well, Wesley and Mona, but she’s not here. So it’s up to him to be Turbo’s voice.
Even so, there’s some things he never heard him say, doesn’t know what they look like on his face. Hence the playlists.
It’s mostly the sad stuff, wistfulness. Turbo had never liked showing that he was hurt or upset. Some toxic masculinity crap, but Wesley gets it. It’s soft songs that speak to a longing that Turbo never gave voice to, and now can’t. Wesley watches his face as they play, and he learns.
Once he hears “Making Love Out of Nothing At All” drifting out of the toy shop, and when he gets close enough to be able to see inside, he sees Turbo leaning against a shelf and crying, his head resting against his arms folded over his knees. When the song ends Wesley almost coughs to let him know he’s there, but Turbo beats him to it, his thumb pressing the skip backwards button as soon as the song fades out. He doesn’t lift his head, or move in any other way.
Wesley leaves him to it. Sometimes he doesn’t know what to say, either.
********************
Josh corners him coming out of the bathroom.
They had all assumed there would be no shower in the mall, and had resigned themselves to just trying to cover up the smell of a bunch of teenagers who could only wash themselves in bathroom sinks with perfume and fancy smelling soap. Wesley had been actively not thinking about it. But then someone had kicked down the door to the security office for reasons that he doesn’t want to consider, and tucked in the far side of the employee bathroom there was a shower cubicle. There’s a sign-up sheet stuck to the door, and if you miss your allotted shower time, then bad luck for the day. So at least they can get clean, but it unfortunately means that there is a time when Josh will know for sure where he is, and that he is alone.
Wesley has been avoiding him. Things had been ok for a bit at the missile, their lives on the line, existence on the line. They’d hugged, they’d cried, they’d put all their other troubles behind them. Back living under the same roof, Wesley only speaks to him in public, when he’s asking for the shutter fob, and even then the tension between them feels like a ticking time bomb. Wesley gets it. He did try to kill him after all, no matter how briefly he had resolved to actually go through with it.
Anyway, it hadn’t exactly been one-sided. Until a week ago, Josh had been avoiding him as diligently as Wesley had been doing the same. At one point, Josh had almost hip-checked himself into a rubbish bin like he was a character in a pre-teen comedy when he had spun away after seeing him at the other end of an otherwise empty corridor of the mall. And then one day it was like a switched had flipped, and Josh had been spotting him up in abandoned corridors or across the foodcourt, and Wesley had been hiding behind display plants or around corners, and three times he had just straight up run in the opposite direction.
But with his hair still damp from the shower, still not wearing shoes, there’s nowhere to escape too.
“Turbo needs to be able to talk to people.” Josh says, and Wesley sighs. He’s right, probably. It can’t be good for Turbo to not be able to communicate with the people around him, and they’ll never treat him as a human if all he does is grunt and huff at them. Ableism: alive and well, even after so many people are not. "Maybe we can get him to write stuff down.” He continues. “If he can even write.”
“Wow.” Wesley raises his eyebrows, blinks, and maybe his first though was that Turbo would hate the idea of writing stuff down because he’s a bad speller and he has an inferiority complex a mile long, that can’t possibly be what Josh means. “Did you channel all of your obsessive need to be the knight in shining armour that Sam Dean never asked for into being a dick to Turbo?”
Josh gapes at him for a moment. “He killed people, Wesley. Kids. For fun.”
“So do the Cheermazons, and you seem fine with having them around.” Wesley snaps back. He wishes he had shoes on. He felt weirdly exposed, having an argument barefoot; especially when Josh is fully done up, headphones around his neck and everything. “Is it just because you think they’re hot?”
The Cheermazons are mostly nice people, after they got over wanting to kill him, and Wesley feels bad objectifying them like that. But Josh blushes under his bluster, and Wesley is a little depressed, a little outraged, by how quickly he hit it on the head, how transparent straight boys are. “Is it because you think he’s hot?” Josh stammers, and that may have been a valid argument at the very beginning, when Wesley transferred schools and first met Turbo, but now that’s just a stupid argument to make. And he’s about to open his mouth and tell him that, when Josh continues. “Besides. I thought you were a pacifist”.
Wesley has nothing he can say about that, and he sighs. “I am.” He says. “And I’m not okay with all of that. But I killed the guy who did it. Metaphorically speaking. Turbo let me shoot him.”
Josh stares for a moment, mouth hanging ever so slightly open, and then shakes his head. “I just don’t get it, man.”
Wesley shrugs like its the easiest thing in the world. And sometimes, it is. Sometimes it’s the hardest, but sometimes it’s the easiest. “I love him.” He says. “For real.”
********************
There were times, at the start, when Wesley had worried that he really was just fronting. That he had fallen for Turbo - the classically handsome, all-American white boy jock - because of some internalised racism and homophobia. That maybe it was all because Turbo was who he wanted to be, rather than someone that he wanted to be with, and it had all just gotten mixed up somewhere in his hormone-addled brain.
But quite frankly, and Wesley doesn’t want to sound shallow or anything, but that can’t be said about Turbo now. And Wesley still wants him just as badly.
The truth is that Turbo only ever really watches him. He told him once that he knew all his lines, and Wesley had scoffed. It at seemed so unbelievable at the time that this boy had liked him too. But he thinks he gets it now, why Turbo knows his lines.
Turbo is always so on guard, so alert. He keeps track of everyone in the room, until Wesley enters. And then he has eyes only for him.
********************
Ms Crumble is difficult to define. Not quite ghoulie, not quite human, not quite all there anymore. But most importantly, she is their friend. And she actually likes Turbo, which is not something Wesley can say about really anyone but himself.
He catches them together sometimes. Not talking, obviously, but just sitting together, understanding each other somehow. She eats her bugs and grubs and speaks loudly to herself and her doll heads and very occasionally to Turbo, and in turn he isn’t disgusted whenever she offers anything to him.
It’s difficult to catch her alone, Angelica always nearby as her combination mother/daughter. But Wesley has nothing but spare time to waste, cooped up in the mall and waiting for ghoulies or Jocks or whatever other faction has formed outside since they stopped Principal Burr’s missile strike to attack the Daybreakers. He may have some misgivings about Josh’s very-generously-called “plan”, but his refuge in the mall is shaky at best and Turbo’s is worse, so he doesn’t complain.
Wesley finds her crouched over near the fountain. She doesn’t bring her doll heads out much anymore, now that she has people to talk to, but three of them are lined up along the lip of the fountain and facing towards him, like she knew he was coming, somehow.
Wesley swallows his unease. “What are you and Turbo talking about?”
Ms Crumble doesn’t look away from her doll heads. “Turbo doesn’t talk about anything.” Wesley can’t see her face properly, but he can see the edge of what he doesn’t doubt is a mischievous smile, proud of her own joke.
Wesley roles his eyes. “Fine.” He says. “Why are you hanging around with Turbo?”
Ms Crumble grabs one of the dolls’ heads and holds it up to eye level. She squeezes its cheeks between her thumb and finger until they collapse, and the top and bottom of the head bulge a little. “We are the same.” She says, and she tilts the head from side to side. “Me and him. We were made different by what happened.” She finally looks over at Wesley, and her eyes are as clear as they were when she was volunteering to stay behind to launch the rocket away to safety. “But we’re trying our best not to kill anyone. For the person we love.”
********************
Sometimes Wesley thinks that Turbo is just manipulating him. That he doesn’t care about Wesley, only about what Wesley will do for him.
And then a lot of time time, most of the time, he thinks that Turbo just doesn’t know how much power he has over him.
HIs mom left, and he could never convince his dad to stay. Turbo doesn’t think that anyone will ever choose him. And that’s why Wesley picked him. Every time. Even over himself.
For quite some time after it all went down, Wesley told himself that he chose himself and started a fight at that football game, rather than hurt Emmett. And then for a while he managed to convince himself that he only tripped him because Turbo asked him to, and he couldn’t do anything but what Turbo had asked.
But he’s had a lot of time to spend sitting around and thinking since the Daybreakers locked themselves up in the mall again, and the truth is that Wesley had done it because, at the time, he had wanted to.
He didn’t want to actually hurt Emmett, obviously. But he did want to choose Turbo, Because no one ever did. He’d spent the night at Turbo’s after he apologised for asking him to hit his cousin, and in the dark and under the covers, he’d held on tight and let Turbo talk; about his dad leaving him again, and about how it’s ok, really, he’s just being cruel and selfish because his dad is needed more by all those other kids, but he just wishes he’d come to watch even one football game. Wesley shifts a little so Turbo can’t feel that he’s tearing up, because Turbo’s dad is gaslighting him, and Turbo wants his approval so badly that he doesn’t even notice, doesn’t even recognise that he is right, that he is more than justified in hoping that his dad is there for him, and not on the other side of the world.
Turbo’s dad should be there for him, and Turbo tries so hard not to show that he’s hurt, but when he said that he needed a win, Wesley had felt it. Like a hand squeezing his heart. Like a punch to the gut.
And he had wanted to give Turbo that win.
********************
“I told you you didn’t have to go back to him.” Angelica says, as she steps up beside him. He’s leaving the toy shop and it’s about an hour earlier in the morning than he would like to get up, but it’s the only time he could book the shower. He’s already missing Turbo’s warmth beside him, and Angelica doesn’t even give off half the heat. But she certainly tries to make up for that deficiency with chattiness about uncomfortable topics.
Wesley sighs. “I know.” Angelica gives him a look that clearly says to elaborate. He forgets, sometimes, that she’s just a kid, and that that can mean that she needs things spelled out for her. “I didn’t.” He says. “Not really. This time Turbo and I are doing things my way.”
Angelica looks dubious, like she doesn’t believe that he won’t do whatever Turbo asks him to do. It’s like she completely forgot that he did eventually decide to not murder Josh. If this is going to work, he needs to change the way that she thinks about Turbo