Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It's night time, and the two of them stand on the rooftop. The boy who is not yet Party Poison, and the boy who will never get to be Neon Phoenix. It's the second tallest skyscraper in Battery City, and from here they can see everything. Everything except the stars, but those aren't worth looking at. They're rubbish. Better Living's trash, tossed up into the sky when it isn't wanted on the ground anymore, and why look at trash when there's the light of a perfect city.

"It's beautiful." Whispers the boy who will never be Neon, but one day they will call her Phoenix. She is standing dangerously close to the edge, fingers reaching down towards the glittering lights. The boy who is not yet Party Poison sits beside her, feet dangling, and thinks of falling.

It's been a long time.

"It's quieter up here." says Phoenix softly. "I can hear the desert."

"What's it saying?"

She tilts her head slightly. Listening. "You see that?" Phoenix points out into the blackness surrounding the city wall, at the only point of light flickering outside it. "It's a Concert. Some band called Mad Gear and The Missile Kid, Cherri's there, he's broadcasting it live."

The boy who is not yet Party Poison does not know what a concert is. Probably something awful that only killjoys get up to, but the tone in Phoenix's voice makes them think it might not be so bad.

"'s Cherri having a good time?"

"he likes music."

Agent Cherri Cola is Phoenix's imaginary friend. The voice in her head who talks about music and deserts and rebellion. About everything they're not supposed to think about except as something they have to learn to kill. She hasn't mentioned him in years, used to say every time she talked about Cherri something bad would happen to him and his friends, but there's something strange in the city air tonight, they both feel it. Something that smells like spray paint and tastes like missed doses of sterelex and neon dreams.

They are going out tommorow, into the desert, their first ever out-of-city assignment. Real exterminators, Phenyx and Angel. They are going out into the desert, and if everything goes to plan, they are not coming back.

It's cold up here, fucking freezing. Battery city is all climate controlled, but there's only so much you can do about the wind this high up. It makes all Poison's feathers stick up the wrong way. Phoenix is wearing her new exterminator jacket, it's shiny and black with an X patch freshly sewn on the sleeve, and the wind makes it stream out behind her so it almost looks like she has wings of her own. Standing on the edge it seems like she's about to take off. Fly away become a part of the darkness. Not that that would work. They tried, a long time ago. There's some kind of energy field surrounding the top of the building - probably put there specifically to keep them from escaping.

They remember the euphoria of taking off, thinking "fuck it, I'm getting out of here", really getting to fly. They got about three metres out before feeling an electric shock coursing through their body. Panic as the air rushed past them and they couldn't move, couldn't fucking move to break the fall, and the ground was getting closer and closer and closer, and then everything faded to black. A few days later they woke up in a clean white bed in the lab, with clipped wings, a scrubbed clear memory and a new prescription. The director still thinks they don't remember, but the boy who is not yet Party Poison stopped taking their meds a long time ago.

"Do you ever think about falling?" Phoenix asks, “I feel like I could just step off here, float away. Sometimes I forget. That it’s dangerous, that everyone’s not like you.”

And Poison gets it, even though it's a strange thing to say, because they wonder too, about falling, about if it's the closest they'll ever get to really being allowed to fly, and they could jump off here right now, but what would be the point? They’d die, and then the director would scrape them off the pavement, and their genetically engineered cells would put them back together again, and that would be that.

"I wonder what terminal velocity would be like,” they tell Phoenix, "just straight up plumeting, so fast you can't increase the speed, and everything goes still.”

“but it wouldn't be still.” She argues “You would be, and everything else would keep rushing away from you."

"Is that how physics works? I never went to school."

Phoenix shrugs ”I don't know, the only physics I know is how to shoot a bullet in a direction where hits, and that terminal velocity is just that, terminal.”

They laugh. “They'd find a way to bring you back."

"Probably. Not sure I'd enjoy that."

Poison shudders. "I don't recommend it. It hurts."

"It does?" Phoenix seems fascinated, and then looks slightly guilty about it. They don't generally talk about this. They're not supposed to. They're supposed to pretend everything better living does is wonderful. Their super healing is a gift, not a curse that means they can get fucked up in all kinds of awful ways and then wake up the next morning to do it all again. Not even a scar to prove what happened, they’ve looked, late at night, but there’s no a single mark. Evidence. They'd really like some damn evidence.

“When you wake up It's like getting zapped with a million ray guns on stun setting, you know the feeling. That, but multiplied by a few trillion. Only lasts a few seconds, I think it’s all the pain I would’ve felt if I’d been conscious coming all at the same time.”

Phoenix looks over at them then, and there’s a curious look in her eyes that they can’t quite place.

"You know I always assumed it'd make you feel better, like, not being dead anymore" she says, and her voice is measured, careful, like someone hiding that they’re angry, or about to cry. They’re not sure exactly what it is, and they’re probably never gonna know. You’re not allowed to feel emotions here, and if they find out that you do you’re as good as dead.

She sits down next to them, and they watch a car driving past on the streets below, heading for the tunnels that lead out into the desert. It’s headlights paint a streak of light across Party’s vision and they blink it away. They pull their wings in closely and shiver slightly.

"we should go inside"

It's gotten too creepy out here for Poison’s liking. This late at night the darkness and the hazy streetlights make the city strange; an unfamiliar world made from twisting shadows and the ghosts Phoenix hears screaming in the walls. The dizzying height makes them feel like a they’re ghost themself, insubstantial, not quite real, and they're scared the wind could blow them away.

"I wanna stay a little longer." Phoenix says. "but if you go in I won't stop you."

"Okay." says Poison, standing up.

"Okay."

They don't move.

Phoenix turns to look at them, searching their eyes for something. They’re not sure if she finds it. "Or you could stay, it's nice up here."

It's blatantly not, but Poison's not even sure what they want any more.

So they do. They sit back down, and they stay.

"how's Cherri's concert" they ask.

"Good. It's really good."

They both go quiet, ‘cause the wind’s picked up even more and it’s blowing the sound out of their mouths. Party rests their head on Phoenix’s shoulder and she absentmindedly smooths out their ruffled feathers, gently running them through her fingers, one by one. There’s a light flickering on and off in a window a few blocks away, and Party watches it for a while. Maybe there’s a code hidden in the blinking, and if they could only decipher it they’d find a secret message from some rebel planning an escape. Someone else who hated better living, who wanted to run. Someone like them.

Through the ear that's pressed into her collarbone, they can feel Phoenix start to sing along with whatever's playing on the desert radio. It's a sound only she can hear without cybernetic assistance, and they wonder what it would be like to live your whole life with a soundtrack constantly playing in the background. Either really nice or really shit. Probably a little of both. But it's so quiet here, they'd give anything for a bit of noise that's not the monotonous drone of a fact news reporter or the metallic zap of a ray gun. They close the eyes and let themself get a little bit lost, and they're not in love. This is battery city; they don't even know what love is. But that's ok.

Chapter Text

They're given a car: a shiny black pontiac, three draculoids and the coordinates of a killjoy safe house in Zone 2.

"Good luck" says the Director. "The two of you will be excellent killologists. I expect to see you get better and better, remember, the aftermath is secondary.“ They see her in the window as they drive away, watching like a hawk. She smiles, and Party feels a chill run down their spine.

They shoot the dracs once they're far enough away from the city gates, dump the bodies on the side of the road, try not to think about who they could've been. Phoenix searches the car for the tracker she knows is there and smashes it under her boot, and they drive, and they keep driving till battery city is a tiny spec on the horizon. Party turns on the radio, switches it off the bli channel, and fiddles with the dials till the ringing static gives way to a zones pirate radio station, and for the first time in their life they hear a tiny part of what Phoenix has been listening to all along.

They laugh, and for some reason once they start they just can’t stop, and they don’t know why ‘cause nothing’s funny, but then Phoenix is laughing too and it’s like the first time either of them have expressed any emotion or made any noise in, well, ever.

They have supplies in the car, secretly hoarded food, medicine and confiscated spray paint. They don't want to get dusted by zonerunners thinking they're EXs, so the first thing they do when they stop to rest is paint the car, frowny faces, hearts and neon text Bad Luck, XØXØ, FLY AWAY. They also get a liberal amount on their clothes, which is a nice change from the black and white. That night they rip the Xs off their shirts and burn them in a campfire. The radio is still playing, The future is bulletproof. it tells them, and Party thinks that maybe, just maybe, they might be ok.

"We're could to live forever out here." Phoenix says, and Poison agrees.

-

They make it three weeks, before Better Living catches up to them.

It's on a road in Zone 3, while they're listening to Mad Gear screeching over the radio. They're two zones over from their destination: the radio station in Zone Five, where Phoenix says they will find Cherri Cola. If they can just make it there, they might be safe, but it looks like they've run out of time.

Poison's moulted, a consequence of the desert heat; apparently before Battery City birds used to do that whenever there was a change in the weather. Their feathers have grown back in sunset red, and they feel like a part of the desert now, like they belong here on the dusty highways underneath the endless sky.

There are four cars on the horizon, inching closer and closer, so Phoenix slams down the accelerator and tosses Party her ray gun, now customised in neon purple. They pull out their own bright yellow blaster and lean out the front window to yell at the oncoming cars.

"Hey guys! long time no see."

They wave, and a lazer bolt flys past. Poison laughs.

Phoenix turns the radio up as high as it'll go and drives like there's no such thing as a car crash and living till tomorrow is an abstract concept. Terminal velocity. Poison trades bullets with the approaching cars, who seem to be remarkably poor shots for trained exterminators, but then again, maybe Party's just good. There's a reason the two of them were sent out here, and it's not just Party's freakish healing abilities. They're also a damn good shot.

They blow out the tires on one of the cars and it flys to the left with an explosive screech, but the others don't break, and the distance between them is getting shorter and shorter.

"you didn’t hear these guys coming?" they shout over the noise of the radio.

"radio silence!" Phoenix yells back. "You really think they'd tell us they were coming? Better Living fucking made me, they know who they're up against."

"They didn't" Poison yells, in between shots.

"What?" zap

"They didn't make you."

Now is soo not the time to be having this conversation.

"yeah they did. zap they made both of us."

"not you," zap "you came from outside. Don't you remember"

"WHAT?" zap

Poison stops shooting for a moment to pull down their collar, exposing a tiny mark on their neck, Better Living's smily face next to small red text reading S/S V.3.2."You don't have a tag" they explain. "everyone from the lab has a tag. You're from somewhere else."

"so then where..." zap

"Somewhere in the city. They brought you in like five or six years ago. You kept asking to see mum and dad, whoever they are. zap You had a baby with you"

"I had a BABY"

"I think you said its name was sister. I don't know what happened to it. I think they took it away."

They took a lot of people away. 3.2 means Poison's the second individual from the third version of better living's super scarecrow experiment, the version where they added bird genes to increase the subjects metabolism, which had the unfortunate side effect of giving Party their wings. There used to be more of them, the children with super healing, but now Poison's the only one. Better Living made them in an attempt to create the ultimate S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W. An exterminator who even death couldn't stop, that would go out into the zones and eradicate the killjoys once and for all.

But most of the experiments were failures. Poison doesn't know what happened to the others. They weren’t good enough, so they disappeared, one by one. Until it was just Party, and the director said we will make you even better, and they replaced their eyes with scanners and their insides with machines so they could run faster, heal faster, fight better. Be better.

They saw another boy, once, in the laboratory, who was made of even more metal than they were, but they were only half awake, and they wheeled his bed away before the drugs wore off enough for Poison to speak. He probably isn't real. They never saw him again. Never saw anyone who wasn't a Better Living scientist until the day they opened their eyes after bleeding out and there was someone else standing next to their bed. Someone with huge dark eyes, who was about the same size as them, holding another tiny someone in their arms.

"Are you a bird" the someone had asked, and the boy who wasn't yet Party Poison said no, because they didn't know what that was.

"Who are you?" they said. "what are you doing here?" and the someone explained that they were special, they heard things that other people couldn't, and so the scientists had taken them away from their home to the lab where Poison lived in order to to find out why.

"My sister's special too" they said. "although I haven't figured out how yet, and my friend Cherri: he sees things."

I'm special too, Poison had wanted to say, but then one of the scientists came and took the someone away, and they supposed they would never see them again. They probably hadn't been real, Poison tended to imagine things when they were high off the extra strong meds Better Living gave them when they died. But the next day the someone was there again, although the tiny someone wasn't, and the next day, and the next, and from then on Poison wasn't alone.

zap.

Now is not the time for piecing together their drug addled past. Now they are getting shot at, and it is far more important to think about the immediate future. Tomorrow they will tell Phoenix everything they remember that she doesn't, but for now, they will stay free, and they will stay alive.

They're hanging out the window, using both ray guns, one in each hand. A shot manages to hit their arm and it tears open, firing off sparks and coating the side of the car in not-blood, they pull it inside with a hiss and keep shooting with their other arm. There's something coming up on the horizon, an abandoned gas station.

"You ok?" Phoenix shouts at them.

"I'll be fine" they turn to say to her, and so they see it. The moment the white hot light of a ray gun blast seems to bend through space to hit the opposite window. In reality it's only a few microseconds, but it feels like they're watching in slow motion. Every frame of the glass shattering, a circle behind Phoenix's head like a halo on an angel in an old stained glass window, and then it explodes inwards and there's so much red. These windows should really have bulletproof glass.

Poison lunges over and grabs the steering wheel with their good hand, because Phoenix is not driving anymore, but they're not really able to direct the car with only one hand from the passenger seat, so it careens off the road and smashes straight into the side of the gas station.

Party survives. Phoenix... well Phoenix is covered in broken glass, and unlike Party, dying isn't something she was built to shake off.

"fuck. fuck fuck fuck. You're gonna be ok. Hang on." she doesn't say anything, they're not sure if she can hear them.

"Bandages. There are bandages in the glove box. Stop the bleeding." Party's narrating everything they do, half in case Phoenix can hear, and half because they need to get it the fuck together. RIGHT NOW.

Bandages. Stop the Bleeding. Take the glass out, no wait, leave it in, leave it in you're supposed to leave it in if their skin won't instantly heal over because otherwise all the blood comes out, but it's too late. Bandages. Tight. Stop the bleeding. They can hear the exterminators cars approaching. Their hands are sticky. Red, like their wings, and Phoenix is bleeding out and she won't say anything.

The car radio is miraculously intact, and Dr Death Defying is still playing mad gear.

We've got a medical emergency, a medical emergency.

Party has the horrifying urge to laugh.

And then the Exterminators arrive, and everything gets so much worse. They're still shooting ray guns, and this is a gas station a broken down old gas station. And the last thing a huge amount of poorly stored fuel needs is sparks.

You can probably see the explosion all the way in battery city.

Everything is burning, and Party tries to drag Phoenix with them and get out, out, out but she's too heavy, and she's fucking dead anyway. She's dead already and she can't survive that and they need to get out before there's some kind of secondary explosion. They can't breathe from the smoke, and they run, and they jump, and they fly. For the first time, they really properly fly more than a few metres, and it hurts like hell. They think their wings might be burning, and their head's spinning from lack of oxygen, and they need to get away. The S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/Ws are dead. Phoenix is dead. There's just Poison left, and soon they will be dead as well.

The combined weight of their injuries catches up to them just over the border between zones 3 and 4. They're having difficulty keeping aloft when they're missing this many feathers, everything hurts, and they're so so so tired. Phoenix is dead.

It’s not a conscious decision to stop flapping, just numb realisation that their limbs aren't responding and they sort of can't move. Suddenly the ground is looking a lot more detailed and they can hear the wind rushing in their ears. Falling.

There is no fade to black. This time they're still conscious when they hit the ground, and the sand is not as soft as they hoped it would be.