Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Bad news from the zones, tumbleweeds. It looks like Jet Star and the Kobra Kid had a clap with an Exterminator that went all Costa Rica, and uh… got themselves ghosted.

The words weren’t even all the way out of the old patched-together radio on the windowsill before Poison was on his feet, jacket in hand.

“Stay here,” he said before Ghoul had moved a muscle.

“Like hell!” Ghoul shot back, swiping his mask off the back of the chair where he’d left it.

“Stay here and protect the Girl!” Ghoul could hear the panic bubbling beneath Poison’s voice, could see his hands shaking as he fumbled for the keys.

“I’m coming, too!” the Girl protested, voice sharp.

“It’s too dangerous!” he snapped.

“Poison.”

Ghoul waited until Poison met his gaze.

“We’re better together,” he said. “Safer.”

A strangled sound of frustration crawled up Poison’s throat.

“Fine. But we go now -- they could still be alive.”

Ghoul swallowed his own doubt and nodded. He guessed it was possible, but… well, Dr. Death Defying had never been wrong before.

The three of them piled into the Trans Am. Ghoul offered to drive, but Poison insisted, which meant that Ghoul was going to have to find a different outlet for the fear coursing through his veins.

He reached for the radio and cranked the volume up as loud as it would go.

The engine roared to life the second the Girl had put her seatbelt on, Poison’s foot lead on the pedal as he steered a course for Route Guano. Poison had said that this would be dangerous, but Ghoul doubted that he was really prepared for something like an ambush; when Kobra was in danger, Poison didn’t think about anything else. That was alright for now, though. Ghoul would just have to keep both eyes open.

It wasn’t long before Draculoid bodies started turning up, stark white (with splashes of brilliant red) against the monotonous tan of the desert. So Dr. D had been right about one thing: the clap.

“Shit,” Poison spat, just loud enough to be heard over the electric guitar roaring from the speakers. He thumped the heel of one hand into the steering wheel. “Shit, shit, shit. An Exterminator, he said. Nothing about the handful of fucking Dracs.”

Ghoul’s hands curled into fists on his lap, a sick sort of ache tightening his chest. He felt more than heard the Girl say his name through the music that filled the small car. When he turned to face her she was holding out her hand. He took it and gave it a strong squeeze.

An anguished noise from Poison pulled Ghoul’s attention back through the windshield to a spot of darkness in the distance contrasting with the Drac corpses that surrounded it. As they got closer Ghoul could see the charred remains of a motorcycle, as well as the modified American flag shouting from the back of the figure sprawled beside it. He felt his throat tighten.

“Jet,” he whispered. The Girl’s grip on his hand tightened so that it was painful.

The Trans Am skidded to a halt once they’d gotten within a few yards of the bike, and no sooner was the car in park than the three of them were bursting from its doors, Poison and the Girl running full tilt toward Jet Star, Ghoul taking up the rear and keeping an eye on their surroundings, gun in hand.

Only once he was absolutely sure that no one was approaching them on any side of the expansive desert did Ghoul join Poison and the Girl, and even once he had knelt beside them he continued to glance up periodically to ensure that no one got the jump on them.

Poison had turned Jet onto his back and had removed his helmet. He was checking his pulse, but Ghoul could see already that there was no point. His entire torso was dark with blood. He was dust.

“Fuck,” Ghoul said thickly, turning away. It was one thing knowing that you and all your friends were going to die young; everyone out in the zones knew that. But what could prepare you for seeing the empty shell of someone you grew up with lying motionless on the dry, cracked earth? And when that someone was Jet, who had brought such a quiet balance to the chaos of the zones? Ghoul squeezed his eyes shut and resisted the urge to scream, long and loud, into the poisonous sky.

Once he was sure that he wasn’t going to totally lose it (not yet, anyway), he glanced up at the other two.

The Girl had her wide eyes fixed on Jet’s face, slack and pale. He was the first of the Killjoys that she had really warmed up to on that very first day, the day she found them. The rest of them had been arguing about whether she was safer with Dr. D at the station or with them in the Trans Am. Jet had sat beside her on the ground with a piece of string and offered to teach her Cat’s Cradle. From then on there had been an ease between them that she hadn’t really had with any of the others. Ghoul could see that tears had gathered in her eyes, but she stubbornly refused to let them fall, screwing up her mouth with the effort.

Poison was holding Jet’s helmet, hugging it tightly to his chest. He met Ghoul’s eyes with a beseeching look that struck him as painfully childlike. Ghoul looked away again, swallowing past a click in his throat.

“Come on,” he said. “We gotta burn ‘im.”

Poison blinked back to himself at that, his equilibrium returning with the reminder that there were things they could do, things they needed to do.

“Quickly,” he said, pulling himself to his feet. “Then we gotta go find the Kid. He could still be -- he could still --”

He couldn’t seem to finish the sentence this time.

“We’ll find him,” Ghoul promised. “Right after we get Jet on his way to the Phoenix Witch.”

Poison nodded, taking a deep breath and then exhaling. As long as he felt like he was accomplishing something, he would be more or less alright. It was only once he was idle, Ghoul knew, that the hopelessness would begin to seep in, and he meant to put that off for as long as he could.

They spared what gasoline they could and tossed a match to their fallen comrade. Poison kept his bandanna, though, to drop by the Witch’s box later. They watched him burn for as long as they felt was right. Then they went back to the Trans Am and continued down the Getaway Mile in search of the Kobra Kid.

Poison pushed the pedal into the floor as if frustrated that it didn’t go down further, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. Ghoul stared hard out the windshield, grief boiling in his stomach in spite of the music he tried to drown it in. A glance into the rearview mirror revealed that the Girl had finally surrendered to the tears she’d held back earlier; Ghoul reached his hand back to her without turning around, and she clutched it like a vice.

Soon, however, evidence of the clap dwindled and then disappeared without any sign of the Kobra Kid or his bike. They drove until they almost hit Battery City, until Ghoul began to vaguely worry about how much gas they had left. But there was nothing. Ghoul finally turned the music down.

“Where the hell is he?” he murmured. He turned to Poison, who looked like he was going to be sick.

“Maybe he went back,” he suggested, voice tight. “Maybe -- maybe we just missed him.” Ghoul shook his head.

“We would’ve passed him,” he said. “Hell, we would’ve seen something. Do you think maybe he --?”

“There!” the Girl shouted suddenly from the back.

Poison hit the brakes so hard it was a wonder no one got whiplash. The Girl was out of the car before both Killjoys, sprinting toward a glint far to their right. As they got closer, Ghoul felt his stomach drop. It was Kobra’s helmet, the words GOOD LUCK shouting up at them from the visor.

When they reached it, panting, there was a moment when no one seemed to know what to do. They just stood around it, staring numbly at the yellow helmet with its cheerful painted eyes, unsure whether this was cause for hope or despair.

It was Poison who broke their paralysis, bending to pick up his brother’s helmet. He turned it over in his hands. When he looked inside it through the bottom, he froze.

“What?” Ghoul asked. “What is it?”

Instead of answering, Poison reached his hand inside and pulled out a slip of paper emblazoned with B.L.I.’s logo.

“What’s it say?” the Girl asked, voice small.

Again, Poison didn’t seem able to answer. As his eyes scanned the note, however, Ghoul saw his bottom lip trying not to quiver.

“Poison,” he said.

Poison took a deep, shaking breath, and then recited:

“‘The Kobra Kid won’t be needing this mask anymore. We’ve --” His voice broke. He swallowed and continued. “We’ve given him a new one that fits quite nicely.’”

Something like vertigo washed through Ghoul’s veins.

“No,” he breathed.

“What?” The Girl was turning frightened eyes from one to the other of them. “What do they mean, what did they do?”

“They, um.” Ghoul took a deep breath in through his nose. Because she deserved to know, but he wasn’t sure if he could say it. He exhaled and knelt so that their eyes were level. “You know those masks the Draculoids wear?”

The Girl nodded slowly, cautiously, as if suddenly she didn’t want to hear this after all.

“Well, see. The Dracs, they were regular people once, you know? But when someone puts one of those masks on you --”

“You lose your soul,” Poison cut across him, voice dark. “You lose your fucking soul.”

“Poise --”

“So you’d better be fucking worth it,” Poison continued, ignoring Ghoul and addressing the Girl with tears standing in his eyes. “You’d better burn Bat City to the fucking ground.”

“Poison.” Ghoul stood then, placing a hand on his friend’s shoulder and lowering his voice so that the Girl couldn’t hear him. “You can’t say shit like that to h--”

“THEY TOOK MY BROTHER!” Poison yanked himself from Ghoul’s grip and then gave him a hard shove, face twisted with grief. “MY BROTHER, MY KID, AND THEY MADE HIM -- they --!”

He lost the rest of that sentence to sobs. He sank to his knees and curled in on himself, head in his hands.

For a moment, Ghoul and the Girl could only watch through some kind of grief-stricken paralysis as Party Poison, their fearless leader, wept into the baking desert for the brother he had spent his life trying to save.

It was the Girl who moved first, approaching Poison slowly, as if he were an animal that might bite. Carefully, she placed a small hand on his shoulder. In a swift movement, Poison pulled her into a hug.

“I’m sorry,” he croaked into her curls. “I’m so sorry, sweetie, I shouldn’t -- I didn’t mean that, what I said, okay? I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said, squeezing him back with all her might. And she said it again, and again, and again, holding him tightly and rubbing his back while he cried, being the grown-up for a little bit so that he could be the child.

She lifted her head after a moment to check on Ghoul, who had succumbed to his own tears in the meantime. Solemnly, she reached for him.

“Come on,” she said. “You, too.”

With a gusty sigh, Ghoul knelt and joined his remaining companions, wrapping a strong arm around each of them, leaning his head against Poison’s and trying not to think too hard about how small his family was now. He tried, instead, to focus on what was in front of him, what he was lucky enough to still have: Party Poison, who had shown him the colors and given him a direction in which to fight, and the Girl, the embodiment of hope, who time and time again showed him how much more there was to bravery than exposing oneself to danger. He squeezed them tighter. He had lost so much, and it hurt like hell, but he still had a lot to hold onto.

He couldn’t have said how long they stayed this way, only that it was a distant rumble of thunder that finally pulled them back to the real world.

“C’mon,” Poison said thickly, pulling himself away and dragging his sleeves across his cheeks as he glanced up at the darkening sky. “We gotta get home.”

Ghoul nodded, scooping the Girl up into his arms; it had been a hard day on all of them, but she was just a kid, after all. She gratefully looped her arms around his neck and rested her head against his shoulder.

This time, when Ghoul offered to drive, Poison nodded without even looking up. The Girl was already sleeping by the time they reached the Trans Am; Ghoul buckled her into the back seat before taking the keys from Poison. About five minutes of driving later (with no music this time), Poison was knocked out, too.

And Ghoul made a promise driving into the gathering storm, one that he repeated in his mind every time he turned a glance on the passenger’s seat or shot a look into the rearview mirror.

I’m not letting you go, he thought, over and over and over. I’m not letting either of you go without one hell of a fight.

Chapter Text

Even as Fun Ghoul had promised himself he’d protect the Girl and Party Poison from absolutely anything the day they found Jet Star dead in the desert, he hadn’t bet on having to protect them from their own Kobra Kid.

It was impossible not to recognize Kobra’s gangly build, even if he was what Ghoul liked to call “dressed in Drac”—especially for Poison, who’d pretty much raised him. Neither Poison nor Ghoul were willing to hurt him, and that hesitation cost them. Specifically, it cost them the Girl, kidnapped by Korse’s goons while the remaining Killjoys were unconscious.

“He could’ve killed us,” Poison pointed out later that night after they returned to the abandoned diner they’d made their home, of course talking about the Kobra Kid. “He could’ve killed us, but he didn’t. He’s still in there, man, I know he is. Maybe… maybe if one of us can get close enough to get that mask off…”

Ghoul didn’t respond. As badly as he wanted to reassure them, to tell them that of course their brother could still be saved, he knew how easily hopes were dashed out here in the Zones—and without the Girl’s bright presence, those hopes only felt all the more fragile.

“I guess we’re gonna have to do it on Korse’s turf now, though,” Poison continued.

Ghoul nodded at that. “Yeah. Guess so.”

Neither of them acknowledged out loud that this was as good as a death sentence. Didn’t have to.

Ghoul let his mind wander into the heavy silence that followed, a silence that made no sense in this place which had always been bursting with rebellious, cacophonous color. He hummed a hollow little laugh.

“What?” Poison asked.

Ghoul shrugged. “Just… all the time we spent trying to get each other alone,” he said, smirking halfheartedly.

Poison chuckled, equally subdued. “Yeah,” they agreed. “I kind of preferred having to sneak around, honestly. More fun that way.”

“Yeah.” Ghoul felt a stab of grief, remembering the over-the-top way the Kobra Kid used to react to catching a display of affection between Ghoul and his sibling, until the two of them started goading him on purpose. He forced his way past the memory. “Still. Might not get another shot.”

There was more genuine joy in Poison’s laughter this time, and that alone turned Ghoul’s smirk into more of a smile.

“Very romantic,” Poison said dryly.

They didn’t get farther than making out and cuddling once they’d peeled off layers of leather, too heavy with grief and exhaustion to do much else, but Ghoul was alright with that. The closeness was the important thing, and he was close enough to Party Poison with his head pillowed on their chest to hear the steady beating of their heart as they both drifted into an uneasy sleep.

“Remember me.”

Fun Ghoul watched Party Poison shove through the monochrome chaos the two of them had detonated in the shiny and sterile Better Living Industries HQ, pleading with the Draculoid shaped like their brother even as it steadily trained its ray gun on them.

“Remember me!”

The Draculoid Kid pulled the trigger, and Poison cried out when the bolt hit them just above the hip.

“Poise!” Ghoul yelped, stumbling over to help them, but Poison surprised him by shoving him away.

“Go get the Girl,” they ground out, clutching their side. “I got the Kid.”

Ghoul hesitated. They had a snowball’s chance in hell of making it out of here alive; if Poison wanted to spend their final moments trying to save their brother, there wasn’t any real reason to stop them, even if Ghoul was pretty sure Kobra was long gone.

But Poison was the only one Ghoul had left—the only member of his makeshift family that hadn’t yet been taken from him. He couldn’t just let go.

“Kobra wouldn’t want you getting yourself ghosted trying to bring him back from the fucking dead!” he begged them, voice harsh.

He expected Poison to lash out at that, maybe even to hit him, but they surprised him instead with a tight laugh.

“Nah, he wouldn’t,” Poison agreed. “But he’d also know nothing would stop me.”

Fun Ghoul closed his eyes against a wave of grief, borne by the certainty that Poison was right. There would be no arguing with them now. Which meant this, right here, was it.

“Oh, God damn it,” Fun Ghoul swore shakily.

He opened his eyes just long enough to yank Party Poison by the collar into a last desperate kiss, which Poison returned with biting fervor. They tangled gloved fingers into Ghoul’s sweaty black hair with an urgency that set his nerves alight, that had his brain deliriously demanding where the hell all this was last night. They were locked together breathing each other’s heady, adrenaline-spiked madness long enough for Ghoul to think they might die this way, to think he wouldn’t really mind if they did.

Still, try as he might, he couldn’t forget that the Girl was still alive in this building somewhere. If there was even the slightest chance the Killjoys could save her, it was a chance they had to take.

Ghoul tore himself from Party Poison’s grasp in spite of his bone-deep desire to stay, running deeper into the shimmering corporate labyrinth of BLi and forcing himself not to look back.

“Remember me.”

Against every instinct that had kept them alive so far, Party Poison kept moving toward the ray gun in their brother’s hand, slowed slightly by the pain in their side and the neverending onslaught of BLi security as they tried to break through to any part of the Kobra Kid that might still be able to hear them.

“Remember—remember when it was just us. Before the Killjoys. Remember? When we were kids.” They’d had different names, then, before the colors and the masks. “Before the rain got too toxic and we could go out and play in it.”

They were probably imagining it, but Poison could have sworn they saw a tremor run through the Kid’s arm before he pulled the trigger on his ray gun again. This time the bolt grazed Poison’s cheek, searing a white-hot scar beneath their left eye. They locked a scream behind gritted teeth.

“You used to love that,” they continued, turning their grimace into a pained smile. “You used to look straight up into the sky so you could watch it coming down. ‘S probably—why your eyesight is so fuckin bad.”

Another shot from the Kid’s gun went wide, as if to illustrate Poison’s point about his vision. They barked a sharp laugh. Their Kid had to be in there—why else would his aim be getting worse as his target got closer?

Poison let themself stumble the last few steps of distance between them and their brother, nearly toppling them both as they wrapped an arm around him for purchase. With their free hand they took the useless ray gun from his grasp and let it clatter to the shiny tile floor. Then, at long last, they reached up and removed the Kid’s Draculoid mask.

For a horrible, hovering moment there was an emptiness in the Kobra Kid’s eyes that made Poison’s heart jump into their throat—he’s gone, he’s gone, Ghoul was right—but then the Kid blinked, and Poison watched as his personality snuck slowly back into his features, as if he was waking up from a deep sleep.

As if he was back from the dead.

Poison let out a tear-choked laugh. “There you are,” they rasped, reaching up to cup the Kid’s face in one hand. They pulled his forehead forward to press against their own. “Good to see you again, Kid.”

“The fuck…?” the Kid mumbled groggily, his un-Draculoidized brain struggling to catch up from what Poison hoped had felt like a long and heavy nap. “Oh… Was that…?” He reached for the bloody tear in Poison’s jacket, stopping just short of touching it. Was that me?

“It’s okay. Didn’t hit anything important.” Poison gave him a wolfish grin. “You’re garbage with that gun, man.”

The Kid laughed, and Poison felt something loosen in their chest at the sound, a tension that had constricted their lungs since the moment the two of them had been separated.

“Guess if Korse was gonna get one of us it’s a good thing it was me,” the Kid agreed sleepily. Then he pulled back so they were face to face, brow creasing. “Is Jet…?”

A shock of grief struck Poison’s heart. “Ghosted,” they confirmed.

The Kid hung his head, overlong blond hair falling into his eyes. “That’s my fault. I’m sorry.”

Poison shook their head, pushing the Kid’s hair back to catch his eyes, accidentally smearing the blond with blood in the process.

“Not your fault,” they insisted, “but I can catch you up later. Dr. D’s en route, we just gotta grab the Girl and we can—”

The Kid jerked forward then with a surprised grunt—a shot from behind him had clipped his shoulder. Poison had almost forgotten they were in the middle of a firefight, but the pain on the Kid’s face brought them back to the present moment with stark clarity, and they yanked their brother behind them so they could deal with the BLi guy who shot him—a scarecrow, they realized. They grinned. Korse was pulling out all the stops.

For a shining, delirious moment, things were almost like they used to be. Party Poison and the Kobra Kid, dynamic duo of the Fabulous Killjoys, fighting back to back with ray guns in hand, a vibrant riot of rage and rebellion beating back a robotic sea of efficient black and white and gray despite more and more daunting odds. Poison even heard the Kid laugh again, breathless and exhilarated, and they laughed back with a blazing smile, dropping Dracs like dominos.

Poison caught a flash of green through the monochrome onslaught in their peripheral vision—Fun Ghoul, holding the Girl by the hand and waving them over while the Girl simply waved. Poison barked another giddy laugh, hope expanding in their chest like helium. Maybe they could actually do this. Maybe no one else needed to die.

“Ghoul’s got the Girl!” they shouted over their shoulder to their brother. “Run, bunny, run!”

The Kid was still smiling when he turned to acknowledge his sibling, but Poison clocked tension in his jaw and felt that hopeful bubble burst. The longer they looked at him the more red they saw, blossoming with alarming speed across the white Draculoid uniform he wore.

“Hell yeah,” the Kid grinned distantly. He took a step toward his sibling only to find that his legs weren’t up to the task.

Poison lurched forward and caught him almost without thinking. They staggered backwards to lean against the nearest wall for balance, maneuvering the Kid so that his back was pressed against their chest. Then they slowly sank to the floor under what they tried not to think of as their brother’s dead weight.

“Shit,” the Kid swore weakly.

The Kid reached back blindly until his hand found his sibling’s shoulder; Poison took his hand and squeezed.

“I’m right here,” Poison heard themselves say.

Despite being siblings, Party Poison and the Kobra Kid were opposites in many ways. Poison, for instance, always wore their heart on their sleeve, while the Kid was much more subdued, much harder to read. Only his sibling always knew what he was feeling, always heard what was inside his quiet, even voice.

So when the Kid answered them with a calm “I know,” Poison could hear the fear in those words that no one else would have. They made a strangled sound and pulled him closer with the arm they had wrapped around his chest.

“Ow,” the Kid grunted, pushing weakly against them.

“Sorry.” For a second Poison didn’t think they would be able to loosen their hold, however—it felt too much like letting him go—but they managed. They sniffed as hot tears blurred their vision. “I’m sorry, Kid, I should’ve—been paying better attention, I should’ve—”

Kobra cut them off with a sigh that was tinged with dull sarcasm. “If you make me spend my dying moments making you feel better…”

Poison snorted an ugly, wet laugh. “No, you’re right,” they agreed. They swiped his hair back from his forehead again and pressed a kiss into the bloody blond. “You’re right, I’m sorry, I’m. I’m here. I’m right here. I’ve got ya.”

The Kid visibly relaxed at that, letting his eyes fall shut.

“Just stay awake until I fall asleep,” he murmured with an echo of a grin, quoting the child he’d been years ago, crawling into his sibling’s bed after a nightmare.

Poison choked out a sob, but they nodded. “I will. I promise.”

When the two of them were little, Party Poison used to worry about oversleeping. BLi enforced strict health standards for the citizens of Battery City, and they were taught from a young age that adherence to these standards could be the difference between life and death. Poison had heard stories of parents being taken away from children for sleeping in past 8 a.m. As a result, they were almost always awake before the Kid in the mornings. They would cross their shared childhood room to wake him, and an irrational fear would grip them every time.

Asleep or dead? they would fret, watching their brother’s still form under his covers, holding their breath as they scanned for the rise and fall of his chest, the flickering of his eyelids—any movement at all that might betray life.

But they needn’t have worried, Poison realized now, watching as the color drained from their little brother’s face. Death, as it turned out, looked a lot different on the Kobra Kid than sleeping did.

For a moment Party Poison couldn’t breathe, crushed beneath horror and disbelief and the inescapable weight of their brother’s body against theirs. When they finally did manage to gulp down an inhale, what came out with the exhale was a mangled, tear-choked wail. And then another, and another. Holding their brother tightly against them they rocked back and forth, screaming their loss like a wounded animal dying slowly in a snare.

“If it was going to upset you that much, you should have left the mask on.”

Poison almost didn’t register that someone was speaking to them, much less that the person was Korse himself. His tone was flat as he moved to stand over the two Killjoys, gun held loose at his side.

“If you hadn’t taken the mask off,” he explained like he was speaking to a child, “he would still be alive.”

“That ain’t livin’,” Poison spat, looking up just in time for the muzzle of Korse’s gun to press against their forehead, eyes blazing even as they drowned with tears. “None of what you do here is.”

“So you’re saying this is preferable?” Korse asked, giving the Kid an irreverent kick.

“The fuck away from him—!” Poison roared, but Korse just pressed his gun harder against their head to remind them who had the upper hand. “Don’t fucking touch him,” they demanded hoarsely, fingers clawed into the blood-soaked fabric of the Kid’s shirt. “Shoot me if you’re gonna shoot me, but don’t fucking touch him again.”

At that, Korse very nearly smiled.

“I’m glad I got to watch you lose something that truly mattered to you, Party Poison,” he said, sneering the syllables of their rebel alias. “Almost as glad as I am to watch you die.”

With that he pulled the trigger, leaving only one final Fabulous Killjoy still alive.

Fun Ghoul saw it the second before Party Poison did, the second before they turned to tell Kobra it was time to burn rubber: the Kobra Kid’s chest and torso were dark with blood. Ghoul’s heart tugged him toward the siblings like a physical force, but his head knew he couldn’t afford to go back. Not even to spend his last momennts with people he loved. He was going to be the one who got the Girl out of here, and that meant he was going out alone.

“Come on,” he said, tugging the Girl by the hand, hoping she hadn’t seen what he had.

“But—Party Poison—”

“They’ll catch up,” Ghoul lied, hating himself. “But we’re just gonna get got if we’re standing around with—” He thought better of using the expression “with our dicks in our hands” in conversation with a nine-year-old. “If we’re standing around.”

That did the trick; she let him pull her through the shining white interior toward the exits in the back, a row of glass doors through which Ghoul could see the desert. After all the glossy monochrome even the burning beige of the sand was a welcome change.

The second his free hand slapped against the push bar on the nearest door, however, Party Poison’s howls of anguish ripped through the confused racket of bootfalls and barked orders and ray gun blasts. It felt like being punched in the stomach, hearing Poison scream like that. It felt like having the wind knocked clean out of him, and he struggled to get it back.

The Girl tugged at his hand. Ghoul turned to meet her wide, scared eyes glistening with the threat of tears.

“Let’s go back,” she pleaded. “They need us. They need our help.”

Ghoul shook his head, throat tight. “It’s too late,” he said, voice cracking. “We can’t help them now.”

“They need us,” the Girl said again, tears at last spilling over her cheeks.

“Aw, kid…” Ghoul lowered himself into a squat that put him on the Girl’s eye level. “The best thing you can do for them—for all of us—is survive.”

“No!” she sobbed, and Ghoul felt something akin to nausea as he was forced to remember how young she really was. It wasn’t fair of the Killjoys to put this weight on her… but you didn’t get a choice for things like that in the Zones. “I don’t want to be alone! I don’t want to be the only one left!”

“Hey, hey,” Ghoul soothed, swiping tears from her cheeks. “You’re not gonna be alone. You’re gonna be with Dr. D and Show Pony and—”

“But not you!” she wept. “I miss—Jet Star and Poison and Kobra and you, the—the Killjoys.”

It sent a shiver down Ghoul’s spine to hear her talk about him like he was already dead.

“I—I know. We’ll miss you, too. But that’s why you gotta fix things, right?” He tried to smile, though he could feel tears of his own prickling at the corners of his eyes. “You gotta make it so families like us don’t get separated like this anymore. And I know you can do it.”

For a moment Ghoul thought she might be crying too hard to respond, but eventually she managed a miserable nod. “Okay,” she said. 

Ghoul smiled again and gave her cheek a soft pinch.

“You’re gonna be great,” he said. “Seriously, you’re gonna be so great. I wish I could see it.”

He pulled her into a rough final hug, partly to hide the tears that had formed in his own eyes.

“I love you,” the Girl whispered, squeezing him tight. Ghoul clamped his teeth down on a sob, pressing a hand into her curly hair.

“Yeah, I love you, too,” he said hoarsely, making sure to blink his tears away before he made himself let her go and push her gently toward the glass door.

“Okay. Now go on. Get out of here.” He stood, gun in hand, and took a deep breath. “I’ll hold them back.”