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It’s Fun Ghoul’s idea to go to Hyper Thrust.
“To wind down!” he’s saying, sprawled upside down on the couch. “It’s been months since we’ve gone out like that. C’mon, it’ll be good for us.”
Between the stress of keeping an infant alive in the desert and housing someone as... volatile as Cherri, he understands why Ghoul would suggest it. In fact, he was prepared to stay at the diner while the rest of the four went, considering he was part of the reason they needed a break in the first place- it isn’t lost on Cherri, how Ghoul carefully left out that they haven’t gone out in a group specifically since he moved in with them- until Jet smiled at him with teeth full of honey and Kobra assured him that they wanted him there, too.
Cherri isn’t convinced it’s a good idea. Kobra says he needs to cut himself more slack. And he might be right, because it’s been months since the Massacre and he’s not at rock bottom anymore, and it’s a start. But the bar is low.
It’s not that he thinks that he’s a danger to anyone- not anymore- or even that he’ll panic in a room full of people, or anything. It’s something like this: being in the nebulous concept of “recovery” is like being in limbo, except you don’t ever know if you’re out of the woods and you won’t ever feel like you should be. There’s a certain guilt that hangs around the idea of being a person again, and Cherri’s just not sure if a few months is enough to keep it at bay.
He can’t voice this to a diner full of the very people that are giving so much of their time and effort into helping him, so he quietly agrees to go. Jet and Kobra are planning their outfits, and Ghoul is already two feet away from the door.
It’s Party who notices they forgot something.
“And the baby?”
Ghoul stiffens. Turns back around. His voice jumps an octave when he offers, like a true crashqueen: “I mean... she can come with us?”
Jet yells “NO,” at the same time that Party says, “Are you crazy? She’s barely a year old. She’ll fucking die.”
“That’s pretty hardcore,” Kobra mutters, and even though Cherri doesn’t particularly want to contribute to the conversation, he lets himself giggle. “A baby. In Hyper Thrust.”
Jet’s laughing, too. “We’re not that hardcore.”
“The fuck? Who’s we?” Ghoul gasps. “She’s no pussy.”
They all look at her- swallowed in blankets so only her little head peeks out, with her cheek pressed so tightly against Party’s chest that she looks like she melted in their arms. The peace will only last a few hours at most, because she still wakes up wailing in the middle of the night and they still don’t have the heart to not rock her back to sleep.
“Yeah. You’re crazy,” Party sighs. They adjust the Girl so she can stay upright on their shoulder while they rub at their eye. “I’ll stay behind. No big deal.”
“You sure? I can stay, too,” Jet offers, but Party’s already shaking their head.
“I’m sure. But-” they smile, “next time Ghoul gets babysitting duty.”
Ghoul spins around and groans. “The fuck did I do?”
“You were gonna take her to Hyper Thrust!”
Cherri tunes them out when Kobra turns to him. “You sure you’re feeling okay for this?”
He means well, and his voice isn’t even patronizing, just sincere and careful and sweet, like the rest of him, but Cherri can’t shake the feeling that he’s being talked down to. It frustrates him more than anything else, but he doesn’t want to take it out on Kobra. He doesn’t deserve all the shit Cherri’s thrown at him recently.
So he tries for a joke and hopes he doesn’t notice he’s sort of evading the question. “I’m more worried about Party willingly staying home. Do you think it’s a clone?”
Kobra huffs a breath of air that could’ve been a laugh if he let it. “They’re fine. I think this is their way of thanking Jet for the paints he got them last week.”
“Ah,” Cherri nods.
It takes more arguing, some wardrobe changes, and Ghoul almost waking the Girl up by the sheer volume of his voice, but eventually the sun dips below the horizon and they start the drive to Zone 5.
In the trans am, Cherri sits with Kobra in the backseat since Jet had the keys and Ghoul took shotgun before the rest of them could even make it to the car. Not that Cherri minds- and he knows Kobra doesn’t either, because he spends the whole ride rubbing circles into Cherri’s thigh. It would’ve been reassuring if he was nervous to begin with. But he’s not feeling much of anything.
Should he be nervous? Is Kobra nervous?
He looks at him, singing along to a band on the radio that Cherri doesn’t recognize. Not nervous at all.
“Let us know when you wanna leave,” Ghoul says, and even though he twisted in his seat to look at Cherri, he hastily adds, “You know- that goes for everyone.”
He wishes they’d stop treating him like a ticking bomb. Even if he is one, it’s a lot easier to pretend he isn’t if everyone else pretends with him. “I’ll be fine,” he says, then flinches when he hears the venom in his own voice. “I’ll tell you if anything happens.”
Ghoul purses his lips, probably realising he upset him, but he doesn’t apologise. Instead he nods, twists back into his headrest, and asks Jet about the DJ playing on the radio.
Cherri feels himself spacing out already when they park the am and start walking the rest of the way. His legs itch- he didn’t want to change his clothes to anything too unfamiliar, or he might properly freak out, but Kobra stole Jet’s fishnets and convinced him to put them on under his cargo pants so they peek out under the holes.
It looks cool. Probably. Cherri’s watching the strobe lights flash and pulse in the distance and bracing himself for the headache he’s gonna get later if the music is already this loud this far away.
When was the last time he went out like this? Has he ever gone out for fun?
He barely keeps himself from tripping on the curb at the entrance, and a memory washes over him; the paint on the walls of the half-standing nightclub have been retouched, and the crumbling sidewalk is tangled in weeds and brown, weathered shrubs, but he has been here before. Before the Massacre. Before he worked in Battery City, even. A lifetime ago.
He grabs blindly for Kobra’s hand as they pass through doors that shake with the bass of whatever band is playing. They’re hit with a wall of colour, sweat, and that certain heaviness in the air in Zone 5 that could be anything between radiation and pure magic and no one can really tell.
Yes, he’s been here before, but trying to recall the memory feels like trying to remember a story that was told to him by a friend he lost contact with instead of remembering a moment that he literally lived in.
“Everything okay?” Jet asks, eyeing him from the side.
Cherri reaches inward- he can breathe, he can see, and he isn’t feeling any homicidal rage. Just thinking vaguely about the ship of Theseus. “I’m okay.”
Jet looks him up and down and, probably upon noticing his and Kobra’s interlocked hands, seems to decide he’s telling the truth. At least he has the decency to check first; Ghoul ran off into the noise the moment they arrived.
Kobra has to yell to keep his voice above the speakers. “WE’RE GETTING DRINKS.”
It’s a statement, not a question. Cherri barely has time to yell back, “OKAY!” before Kobra’s pulling him to the other side of the wall, Jet trailing behind them. Their palms are already sweaty.
“Holy shit, a menu?” Jet says when they reach the bar. The killjoy on the other side of the counter smiles. Cherri guesses they know each other.
“Hell yeah. We got our shit together while you were playing babysitter,” they say, shaking their head to one side to get their bright purple fringe out of their eyes. “What can I get you, Jetsy?”
“Uhh... the gin... thing? I can’t read shit in here. Kobra, what about you?”
“Same.”
Jet turns around. “Cherri?”
Cherri blanks. He wasn’t planning on drinking. Shit, that’d be a disaster, wouldn’t it? ‘Cuz that’s exactly what any recovering wavehead needs. Alcohol. Fuck. Not that he’d had a very good relationship with alcohol to begin with- what else was he supposed to do when the sun went down? Let himself get sober?
The killjoy at the counter’s saying something about good old times, and it ends with “...on the house,” and a lukewarm cup shoved in Cherri’s face. He lets go of Kobra to grab it, instinctively, and immediately regrets it.
Jet must feel the turmoil radiating off of Cherri’s death glare ‘cuz he puts a hand on his shoulder and says, “You don’t have to drink if you don’t want to. But I think you can handle it.”
Cherri doesn’t know why everyone has such high hopes for him, and he knows even less what to do with it all. It’s nauseating. He has to wonder if they really know him, or if they’re projecting a version of him that’s better, stronger- easier to deal with, maybe. He can’t really blame them.
“Oh,” he says, weakly. “Thank you.”
Jet smiles and Cherri gets the feeling he knows what he’s thinking. But he doesn’t say anything else; with a quick hair ruffle for Kobra, he leaves to melt with the crowd.
Kobra hums, watching him go. “Are you really gonna drink that?”
There’s doubt in his voice, and somehow it feels infinitely better than the confidence in Jet’s- like finding shoes you finally fit into. Cherri shrugs in response. “We’ll see.”
They’re on the outskirts of the crowd. The club’s roof was blown clean off in one of the bombs, as well as half of the wall to their right, so the stars are in full view. Or, they would be, if there weren’t neon lasers shooting directly into the sky.
Cherri would’ve been content to stay here for the rest of the night, taking in the life around him without participating directly in it. He wouldn’t know what to do with himself in the midst of it all.
Here’s the truth: he’s watching killjoys dance with each other, scream against the guitars, sing so loud they could probably hear them all the way in Battery City, and he can’t help but think that he’s watching it all from a dirty window, hovering above it all, not quite close enough to touch. There’s a stain in his chest where the music should be.
No one else seems to have this problem. The floor is so full of killjoys they’re practically on top of each other, and they know the words to every song on the setlist. It felt a little bit like missing out on an inside joke.
Kobra only gives him until he’s halfway done his drink to sulk before he’s tugging on Cherri’s elbow.
“What are you looking at?” he asks.
Cherri blinks. “Huh?”
“You look like a fucking statue, Cola! C’mon, I like this song.” He’s pulling, now, and the only way to keep from spilling his drink is by going with him. Cherri sighs. Kobra grins.
“Thank you. We won’t go too close,” he promises.
And they don’t. Cherri knows part of it is Kobra pacing himself; he can deal with the bright lights and heavy noise- enjoys it, sometimes- but something about being pressed up against strangers on all sides of his body overwhelms him more than anything else. Which is fine by Cherri, because he can feel less bad about staying distanced from the crowd knowing it helps Kobra, too.
Kobra finally lets go of his elbow to dance with everyone else, and Cherri stays where he is, eyeing the drink in his hands. It sloshes around the cup. Tentatively- and guiltily, if he’s being honest- he raises it to his lips.
He drinks slowly, swaying to the beat of the music and smiling at Kobra every time he checks behind him to make sure he’s still there. The crowd cheers when a new band comes onstage. And the lights are pretty, when he focuses on them. It could be worse.
That’s when he hears it, behind him, only audible in the quieter lapses of the music.
“Oh my God-”
“Are you sure?”
“Look at him, I swear to the Witch-”
He turns and glares at the group of five or so killjoys behind him, who all go wide-eyed simultaneously. A particularly pale one in the middle gulps and mutters “Sorry,” before turning tail and taking the rest of the group with them.
It happens a couple more times throughout the night, after Kobra disappears into the mob and Cherri finds Ghoul in front of the fried karaoke machine. At first, he thought maybe people were staring at the stump where his left arm should be and just not being polite about it, until he catches someone say, loud and clear as if he isn’t right behind them, “Isn’t that the guy we saw that one time? With all the blood...” and Cherri freezes right there on the spot.
“You good?” Ghoul asks, too busy readjusting his skirt to hear what they were saying. Also, Cherri can’t tell if he’s wearing his hearing aids under the purple light.
Cherri can barely say anything more than “uhm,” and resolves to down the rest of his drink instead.
He isn’t anywhere near prepared for this. There’s a five month long blank spot in his memory, from the moment he heard Newsagogo’s obituary on the radio to the day he woke up on the outskirts of Battery City with one less arm and the blood of hundreds of Dracs on his hands, where all he can remember is flashes. It makes sense, all things considered, that people saw him on his killing spree and he forgot about it entirely. Or that he was just too busy chopping his own fucking arm off to notice and, either way, no one bothered to fill him in.
Ghoul watches him with academic interest, like how he looks at a faulty engines before figuring out what’s wrong with them.
“Did people see me?” Cherri asks once they’ve distanced themselves from the speakers. “You know, when I went crazy.”
Ghoul shuffles on his feet. “I mean... Yeah? You went across half of the zones, man. People were radioing about it and everything. I thought you knew.”
“Oh,” Cherri replies. He glances at the crowd in front of them. Wonders how many of them saw him at the lowest point of his life- what do they see now? Do they still see all the blood? Can he ever go back to normal now?
He looks at his cup. “I think I need a refill.”
Ghoul skips with him to the bar. “Where did that come from?” he asks, dodging a group of killjoys trying to climb on top of each other to grab a mask someone threw onto a light.
“People were recognising me. More gin, please.”
He fishes around his pockets for carbons, but Ghoul’s faster. He drops a handful on the counter and punches Cherri’s arm before he can even say thank you. “Cherri Cola, zone celebrity! How much longer ‘till you start giving out autographs?”
“No thanks,” Cherri takes his cup back. He doesn’t know if Ghoul genuinely didn’t catch the negative connotation, or if he’s purposefully avoiding it. “I’m about as famous as I wanna be.”
“I’ll bet.” Ghoul leans against the counter and blows the hair out of his face. “I’ll have a Diet Coke, please.”
The bartender smiles. “They’re all flat, Ghoul.”
“Oh, fuck you. Your bar is worth a shit.”
“You’re not drinking?” Cherri asks.
“Nah. Jet ‘n Kobra ‘re already getting fucked up, ‘nd someone has to drive back. But if I don’t find a fucking Diet Coke I’ll seriously consider getting drunk and crashing the car on purpose.” Ghoul stares straight at the bartender and they stare right back, until a pink haired killjoy comes between them and asks for a beer.
“Where are Jet and Kobra, anyway?”
“Kobra’s dancing,” Cherri says. “Jet’s... also dancing. We’re at a nightclub, Ghoul.”
“Fuck you! Whatever. And fuck you, too,” Ghoul snaps, turning back to the bar. “I’ll take your lameass Coke juice.”
“You owe me double for that fucking potty mouth,” the bartender snaps, handing him a can. Cherri should really learn their name, but before he can ask Ghoul has already downed his Coke in one go and left to watch the band that just switched on, and Cherri’s really against being alone right now.
He follows Ghoul right to the centre of the crowd. Everyone is dancing. He stays mostly still unless he has to dodge someone’s flailing limbs, until- and he’s not sure why- he starts joining in on it too. It must be the alcohol; he still feels like a monster masquerading as human in his own skin and if he thinks about it for too long he gets too nauseous to focus on anything else.
It’s easier to distract himself from that here, though, between all the people and squeezed by all the music. A few songs in, he even lets himself think he’s enjoying this.
The band starts a game of blind karaoke, picking random people from the audience, and Jet gets chosen after a couple of rounds. He sees Kobra taking a break by the entrance, then looks away for a second and loses him again. Ghoul loses a shoe. It’s a blur of purple, sweat, and glitter. The air is too sticky to catch a breath, but a few hours into the night it loosens up around Cherri’s neck enough to ignore.
Eventually, the party lulls. Cherri can’t tell what time it is, and he’s too many drinks in too really care. He’s not entirely sure where everyone else is, either.
Sitting on what’s left of the crumbling wall, he spaces out and watches all of the people in the club- at least 200 of them, even towards the tail end of the party. Instinctively, he wonders how long it’d take to kill them all.
It’s a habit he has yet to kick. It took him weeks in the diner to stop planning murders everytime he entered a room; he’d never act on it, but his brain doesn’t know that yet, because it plays through every gory detail, dripping red and all.
He’d killed a building full of Dracs in Zone 3 by chopping the support pillars with an axe and watching the roof cave in on itself in front of him. And that still hadn’t been enough, so he went in without any protection from the debris and thrown the axe into each of their hearts before leaving the way he came. He looks around Hyper Thrust now, and knows he couldn’t do the same even if he wanted to, because half of this shithole was already blown off, but if he still had the axe...
Killing everyone isn’t an option either, shit. He squeezes his eyes like it’ll block out the sight his brain conjures up for him: blood stained floors, screams echoing off walls, the intoxicating spike in his gut when he looks at the brain matter stuck under his boot...
He’s thinking stop it stop it stop it so maybe it’ll be louder than all the blood and viscera when Jet Star reappears.
“Cherri! I was with Casey and she told me that Fantasma brought these...”
Something is glowing in his hand. Cherri tries really hard to listen to his words instead of imagining his head coming clean off his body, even though they’re already slurring together. How much has Jet had to drink?
Not that Cherri’s in any place to judge. He’s been drunk for a while now, and he’s supposed to be the recovering addict. How is he supposed to tell if he’s doing it for fun, like everyone else is? Or is this a relapse? Or is he fine? Is this fine? Does it count as a relapse if it’s not waveriding? Don’t think about waveriding. Don’t scratch at the scabs either, fuck.
“Whaddya think?” Jet finishes. Cherri blinks. He missed the entire first half of that. Playing it safe, he just nods. “Yeah, man. For sure.”
Jet smiles and uncaps the thing in his palm- a marker, Cherri can see now- and pulls Cherri’s hand with so much force that some of the gin in the cup he’s still holding spills all over their ankles.
Before he can freak out, Jet is drawing on his arm. The ink glows in the dim light of the bar.
“Oh,” he mutters. Jet doesn’t register the surprise in his voice, or he ignores it. Cherri tries not to wince when the felt tip runs over his scars- not even from pain, but from something twisting and writhing in his gut that he doesn’t want to call shame even though it probably, definitely is. Jet stays concentrated as ever.
When he finally pulls back, Cherri looks at his arm, praying to the Witch he didn’t draw a dick.
They’re cherries.
“It’s you!” Jet smiles, bouncing on his heels. “Do me next.”
He shoves the marker in Cherri’s face, and even though he feels a little frozen, but he puts his drink down beside him and takes the marker anyway.
They’re just cherries. It isn’t a big deal at all, but his throat is knotting up. After so much time seeing himself as something dark, and charred, and beyond saving- hell, he still isn’t really doing mirrors, and probably won’t be for a long time- to be associated with something as cute as a fucking cherry is disorienting.
“Done.” Jet pulls back to admire Cherri’s handiwork: a little rocket ship on an asteroid. It reminds Cherri of The Little Prince, but he doesn’t say anything about it. He’s pretty sure he’s the only zonerat in the desert to have ever read through Dr Death’s stash of pre-war fiction novels.
“Aww, this is awesome! Ghoul, look,” Jet says, shoving his arm in Ghoul’s face. Cherri didn’t even notice him walk over here.
“That’s fuckin’ sick. Gimme that,” Ghoul takes the marker and, obviously, draws a dick on Jet’s shoulder.
“Dude, fuck you. What the fuck.”
Kobra comes up behind them, hair ruffled from all the crowdsurfing, holding three more glow-in-the-dark markers in three different colours.
By the end of their marker tattoo circle, Cherri has a TNT stick on his neck, book buzzer written across his back, a big, green eye on his forehead, and probably at least five penises. The others are luckier- Cherri actually knows how to draw- and get full paintings of dancing pornodroids on their backs.
“It’s been hours,” Kobra points out, slurring a little. “We should leave ‘fore Dracs crash the party.”
Ghoul looks up from what appears to be the dragon with cat ears he was drawing on Jet- which must’ve been difficult, ‘cuz they’re both dancing to the music at the same time- and hums. “Yeah, probably.”
They stumble and giggle their way out of the club, still singing and spinning in the sand like they’re planning on bringing the party with them to the diner. Cherri would’ve fallen asleep in the am if it weren’t for the other three screaming the lyrics to the songs on the radio, until they make it to zone 4 and the car quiets down to a sleepy murmur.
When they finally get home, the alcohol in their blood has dulled to a buzz. They find Poison asleep in a booth with their head on the table.
“Their neck’s gonna kill ‘em in the morning,” Ghoul whispers, dropping the keys and making his way to them. He pushes their hair out of the way and mutters softly to wake them up. Cherri throws himself onto the couch, head spinning.
“Moveee,” Kobra says, poking Cherri with his knee. He pretends not to hear, so Kobra settles in on top of him instead, putting his head under his chin. Cherri shifts to put his arm around Kobra’s back, closing his eyes.
“Did we miss anything?” Ghoul asks, somewhere beyond the arm of the couch, and Party scoffs.
“Girlie took the biggest shit I’ve ever seen,” they whisper, syllables sleepily slipping into each other. “You guys are changing diapers for the foreseeable future, I reached my fucking quota.” They stop. “What the fuck are those?” Cherri hears Jet laugh.
“Cola drew them. Look, I brought you the markers...” There’s the sound of rummaging plastic, and Cherri sighs and pulls Kobra in closer, tuning it out.
Lying together like this, breathing in tandem, Cherri hears Kobra’s feelings like they’re his own. He knows he’s recharging from the party. Not just from the bone-deep tiredness that comes with any killjoy social event, but from all of the lights and sounds and people. He’ll be upset tomorrow. It’s a trade-off; Kobra can deal with a party enough to enjoy it, but he needs to borrow patience from the next day in order to do it. Cherri doesn’t mind at all.
He wonders if Kobra is thinking of him like that right now, if he feels the weight of his hand on his back and in turn feels the routines and sentiments of Cherri’s inner consciousness. It would be nice considering Cherri’s not entirely sure what’s going on in there, himself.
“How was your night out, Cola?” Party asks, stepping into his line of vision and sitting on the stool. There are doodles all over their arms- one arm done by Jet, the other by Ghoul, Cherri can tell by the line quality, the way Ghoul’s are looser and Jet’s have more angles- and their eyelids are drooping like they’re not fully awake yet.
Jet slumps into the armchair and Ghoul presses up next to him, waiting for his answer. Cherri blinks. “It was normal,” he settles on. Nothing bad had happened, really. He enjoyed himself.
But that’s the problem, isn’t it? He enjoyed himself. Just a few months ago, not even a year ago, he was so ready to die he almost turned himself over to Battery City on a silver platter. Now he’s having fun. He feels like he’s living on borrowed time.
“That sounds boring as fuck,” Party huffs. “Changing diapers sounds more exciting than that.”
“I won karaoke,” Jet mutters. Cherri thought he’d fallen asleep already. “I won... another drink.”
“We can tell,” Ghoul says. “You’re gonna be so hungover tomorrow.”
“Ugh.” Jet presses his heels into his eye sockets.
“23rd Century played,” Kobra says, muffled a little by Cherri’s T-shirt. “Their new bassist sounds way better.”
Jet shoots up from his chair, and Ghoul tumbles a little in their seat. “I want popcorn,” he announces, and turns to the kitchen.
Ghoul and Poison exchange nervous glances.
When Jet comes back, his shoulders are slumped forward, visibly defeated. “I forgot we only have Powerpup.”
Kobra physically recoils like someone slapped him. “What?”
“Shh, you’re gonna wake her up,” Party hisses. Kobra buries his face into the crack between Cherri’s chest and the couch cushions, making choked wailing noises. Cherri pats his hair sympathetically.
“We need to get supplies,” he says, not prepared to deal with a socially burnt out, hungover, and hungry Kobra in the morning. Ghoul sighs. “Party’ll go to Tommy’s tomorrow. You hear that, K? You’ll survive.” Kobra doesn’t respond, but he reemerges from the couch cushions.
“Why the fuck do I have to go?” Party scowls, kicking Ghoul’s side of the armchair. He swats at their foot.
“’Cuz we’re gonna be hungover, and you’re gonna be an angel and do it for us!”
Before Poison can react, Cherri asks, “I thought you weren’t drinking.”
“I said I wouldn’t if they had Diet Coke,” Ghoul grins. “That juice shit don’t count.”
“Bullshit,” Jet calls. “You mixed my drink with your Coke juice. You were barely tipsy.”
“So you can come with me to Tommy’s tomorrow,” Party smiles. “You know. Like an angel.”
Ghoul groans and throws his head back against the chair- it teeters a little bit, still not fully stable after that time Kobra stubbed his toe and kicked one of the legs clean off, and then taped it back on. “Fuck all of you.”
Poison turns back to the couch. At first, Cherri thinks they’re gonna say something about him and Kobra. Before Cherri moved in, he’s sure they hated him and hated that Kobra didn’t hate him even more, and even though they don’t feel that way anymore, he still expects it.
Instead, they ask, “Did you drink, Cherri?”
His breath sputters. He knows because Kobra lifts his head to see what’s wrong.
Party must’ve sensed his panic, because they quickly elaborate, “Not that that’s bad. Just- thought it’d be good to know.”
Guilt washes over him, sticky and slippery, cold and hot on his skin simultaneously. Of course they’re asking, because they’re the ones that have to deal with his shit after. It’s their roof he’s under, their supplies that he takes, their social events that he tags along to when he has no business being anywhere.
He’s fucked up before. It’s been months, but he still remembers the disappointment in Jet’s eyes when he peeled him off the roof and wasted their water on his blistered skin. He still remembers the way Ghoul’s hands shook when he found him in the bathroom in front of a red sink. For the first time, he was confronted with the fact that if he fails himself, he brings them and all of their hospitality down with him.
And maybe he’s catastrophizing, because whatever he felt at the party wasn’t nearly as bad, but he can’t let them think their efforts have been for nothing. And he knows they wouldn’t want him thinking like this anyway, so he breathes- in, out, then nods. “Yeah. I think it was okay though. I don’t- nothing happened.”
Party nods back, smiles. “That’s good, man. I’m proud of you.” Ghoul’s nodding too, Jet’s agreeing, and Kobra’s pulling him closer, and suddenly Cherri feels very, very sick. Somehow, receiving praise he doesn’t deserve feels about infinitely worse than failing them.
“I mean... I dunno,” he gets out, and then he squeezes his eyes shut.
Is that all he can do? He’s a parasite and a monster and he can’t even admit it to the people that care about him the most?
Kobra taps his shoulder. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” Cherri says, shame curling in his gut. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry.”
But he forgot that Kobra gets annoyed so easily after a party. “’S not nothin’ and you know it,” he scowls. “Spit it out.”
“Let him be, Kobes,” Jet says. He takes up the entire armchair now, after Ghoul moved to the floor in front of Party’s stool. They gravitate toward each other like two stars in orbit for collision.
Cherri doesn’t want Kobra to get up from where he’s laying on top of him, and he knows he will if he gets too upset, so he braces himself for the spill. “It’s really nothing. It just felt weird, that’s all. You know- never thought I’d get to go out like normal again.” His voice dwindles to a whisper by the end. “It was just weird.”
There’s silence, and Kobra readjusts himself back under Cherri’s chin. His way of acknowledging it. Ghoul brings his knees to his chest.
“I get that,” he mutters. And from the scarlet-clad stories Cherri’s heard about Ghoul’s past, he might be the only one that does.
It’s probably the silent understanding between them that gives him the confidence to keep going. “Yeah. I guess it just felt like, what the fuck was I doing? I should be dead in a ditch. Or killing someone in a ditch.”
Silence. Kobra stiffens under Cherri’s hand.
“I- I mean,” he sputters, struggling to find the right words against the chorus of fuck fuck fuck playing in his head. “It’s fine. I’m being dramatic.” Who says that? Why would he say that? What the fuck? He wonders if Kobra can hear the way his heart is beating out of his chest under his ear. Can someone say something? Can he go back in time to shoot himself before he ever said a damn thing?
Jet clears his throat, shattering the silence, picking up the pieces. “Cherri... you’re not out there anymore. You’re allowed to let yourself be.”
Cherri’s voice dies in his throat. Everyone’s looking at him. Waiting for something, he thinks- a choked out sob, a biting scream. He almost wants to lash out just to give them what they’re expecting.
But he stays in place, staring at the wall beside Jet’s eyes. Dried out. Suddenly, he wants to sleep more than he wants anything else in the world.
“Okay,” he finally gets out. Maybe his voice wavers, because Party’s still looking at him like they’re waiting for something more. If Cherri was any more sober, any less tired, he would’ve snapped at them already.
“You could’ve told us if you wanted to go home,” Ghoul offers; small enough to ignore, but just enough to keep going if he wants to. The ball is in Cherri’s court.
“I had fun,” he promises. He wants to salvage this. “It’s just weird to have fun right now. I’ll grow into it.”
Kobra laughs- more like an amused hum, but still. Small wins.
Party finally looks away from Cherri and back to the knots in Ghoul’s hair that they’re trying to untangle with their fingers. “You’re allowed to have fun. Like Jet said.”
“I know.”
“Mhm.”
“But...” Cherri figures if he’s spilled this much, he should get everything out already. Ripping off the band-aid. “I was killing everyone in my head again. I thought I was over that.”
Ghoul starts rocking back and forth from where he sits, cross-legged. “That’s not your fault.”
“’S totally normal,” Jet drawls. He looks like he’s barely conscious.
They leave it at that. It feels less like reassurance and more like acceptance, caring enough to matter and casual enough to be genuine.
The silence is comfortable this time around. Cherri’s heart has slowed back down to a non-threatening pace and Kobra’s dropping his weight onto him, beginning to fall asleep. Ghoul looks like he’s nodding off, too, eyes half-lidded and leaning completely into Party’s hand. Jet looks so deeply asleep that Cherri’s not sure he wasn’t sleep talking earlier.
Party rubs their eye. “It’ll get easier.”
Cherri hums, sticky and dense and heavy, barely grasping at consciousness enough to answer anything at all. He thinks he catches Party get up from the stool to nudge Ghoul with their foot. Between his slow blinks, Jet disappears from the armchair.
Cherri is caught between the couch and the back of his eyelids. When he finally falls asleep, the guilt is released from his shoulders.