Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It became competitive almost immediately.

The Limp Lizards released an entire album about them a week and a half after she and Jem posted their cover of Broken Glass, for one thing. Pizzazz spends that entire morning pacing around her living room listening to I Don’t Know What Those Girls’ Deal Is on repeat before she calls in the heavy artillery. That’s a lie: first she calls in the Misfits war room, who promptly agree that there’s no real reason to even retaliate against the Limp Lizards of all bands when they have bigger fish to fry. They lay down some tracks for their next actual record, and then leave for the weekend.

“Just… don’t obsess over it.” Stormer says on the way out, and they both know that there is absolutely nothing either of them can do to stop Pizzazz obsessing over it.

She does.

Pizzazz finds herself completely unwilling to let the Limp Lizards of all bands disrespect her across an entire ten track album of absolute trash just because she covered one of their songs as a joke, so she sends a text to call in the heavy artillery. Jem shows up at her doorstep an hour later, looking as disgustingly perfect as ever in the closest thing she has to a casual outfit, guitar case slung over her shoulder, proudly displaying that she remembered to pack an overnight bag this time.

“I am not letting them Songs-About-Courtney-Love us.” Pizzazz groans in the doorway, makeup a mess from furiously stomping around her house with the spotlights on, and Jem agrees.

Pizzazz ushers Jem into the house conspiratorially, and they get to work.

With their bands back in the mix, Jem suggested they keep their jam sessions as sporadic ‘not-dates’ between tours and recording sessions. The past week had been consumed entirely by what Jem had described as ‘label drama’ and not elaborated further, and Pizzazz had left her to her own devices to avoid seeming clingy.

Plus, The Misfits had their own problems to deal with. Try getting your backing vocalists to harmonize when one of them is wearing a zebra print Phantom of the Opera mask for her busted nose that’s making her sound all nasally and awful. Basically every vocal track they’ve laid down with Jetta over the past week is gonna have to be re-recorded once she gets the cast off.

This was obviously an emergency exception to the rule, because it was a dire emergency and exceptional circumstances. They had to respond to this provocation from a band who wanted to step in on their feud.

So they start talking song concepts for taking the fight to a band made up conceptually of lizards, which immediately devolve s into Pizzazz putting on old monster movies, because they don’t care about the Limp Lizards that much, and Pizzazz has a deep instinctive fondness for anything that’s fifty feet tall and trying to eat people. Pizzazz gets the idea in her head of muting the movie and playing their own score to go along with it, and Jem is on her knees plugging her guitar into the spiderwebs of pedals growing around Mount Amplifier as they try to rush through setup while they’re still in the ‘boring humans talking’ phase of the monster movie.

“Just eat them already.” Pizzazz scowls at the television screen, as the scientists debate the morality of what’s to be done about the giant monster, hefting a Marshall onto the already overloaded stack.

Pizzazz tries to straighten out the cables behind her, but that just seems to make the floor around Mount Amplifier into an even more chaotic pit of snakes. She makes a little distortion hiss on her speaker, trailing the guitar cable behind her like a cobra.

“C’mon, before the guy in the rubber suit shows up.” Pizzazz whines, palm-muting Godzilla-Stomping-Up-The-City chords on her beat-up Strat while she watched Jem get to work.

“Are we watching Mothra or Pulp Fiction here?” Jem says, dryly, trying to free her ankle from the clutches of a rogue wah-wah pedal. “We can just rewind it. How many pedals does one band—”

“Don’t tell me Jem’s scared of a little distortion.” Pizzazz laughs, ducking down to get in Jem’s face about it.

Pizzazz has broken through the barrier where the highly-regimented too-perfect-smile bubblegum vampire ‘Media Jem’ melts away for something that, if still uncanny and strange and far too perfect to her, at least feels more genuinely her.

Media Jem still lingers on the surface.

It’s force of habit for her, Pizzazz figures, like breathing or singing sappy love ballads about happy endings, but Pizzazz finds it easier and easier to dig her nails into the mask and pull it back, and get Genuine Jem (Pizzazz refuses to call her Jem-uine, because she exhausted her tolerance for Jem’s puns when Jem snatched her phone and added herself in Pizzazz’s contacts as ‘Old School Jem-ini’) to let herself surface.

Genuine Jem swears under her breath when her strings break because she tuned them too tightly and has a habit of meticulously re-tuning the guitar before she plays. She has this weird love of old Jazz and Blues records that gives her an experimental streak and an endless ‘guitar nerd’ love of weird scales. She talks about her old childhood hobbies, how hard she tried to be good at the ones that never came easy to her, and why they ultimately never meant as much to her as music did. She talks about her sisters, but tries not to divulge any details that Pizzazz could use to fill out the rough sketch of a family life that Pizzazz tries not to dwell on, because she has to have kept those secret for a reason, and although Pizzazz crosses a lot of boundaries, she refuses to dredge up dirt on someone’s family just to score points.

(But a part of her wants to think that Jem was forgotten about too, if only to imagine that they came from the same place.)

One of the easier ways to bring Genuine Jem out is to appeal to her sense of competitiveness, Pizzazz has realized. She gets that spark in her eyes when Pizzazz tells her to prove she still knows how to skateboard, or says something so confidently incorrect that Jem has to go out of her way to prove that Pizzazz is wrong, or trashes her band and tells her to play like she wants to kick Pizzazz’s ass and prove her wrong.

There’s two Jems, Pizzazz knows, and the one who likes to fight about it is the one that’s hers.

“So prove it.” Pizzazz says, and Jem pauses for a moment while Pizzazz looms over her, tauntingly strumming something that almost sounds like one of her own band’s songs, and that spark in her eyes ignites again.

“You’re so on.” Jem laughs, staggering to her feet, leg still coiled in the wires. She starts leaning sideways and pressing her leg to the couch when she needs to hit the pedal, before eventually hopping over the cables to try and disentangle herself.

She’s playing pentatonic scales over Pizzazz’s chords, which is such a nerd way of trying to forcing Pizzazz into a different key to harmonize with her. The point is also, Pizzazz figures, to try and drag her into watching Jem for the changes because neither of them want to follow the other, but enough Holograms songs use the pop chords that she figures muscle memory takes over at a certain point.

“Bite me, Gloss-feratu.” Pizzazz barks back. She’s a rhythm guitarist, of course she knows how to dig up a bunch of weird chords to match a lead with a high opinion of herself. “You gonna try and One-Five-Six-Four me to death?”

“G Nine Suss Four, come on.” Jem calls.

That’s just cruel. Jem knows that finger set weird after the break.

“Nice scale, did Guitar Center sell it to you?”

“Don’t you have another off-brand Offspring track Blaze can play the riff to Ocean Avenue over?”

“Oh, now it’s on.” Pizzazz grunts. Jem could trash her all she wanted, Pizzazz loves anything that brings the competitive edge out of her and boils away the too-nice facade, but the second Jem brings her band into this, Pizzazz knew she had to out-shred the bubblegum vampire for all she was worth.

At least, until there’s a loud, awkward cough in the alcove.

“Miss Gabor?” calls the cleaning lady. “Your friend been knocking for an hour and with all the commotion in here I thought you just didn’t hear her—”

Stormer stands in the entrance, offering an awkward little wave as she watches them go at it. She goes to grab her handbag from beside the couch, says sorry upwards of two hundred times, avoids eye contact with either of them, and hurries out of the house as quickly as she arrived.

“Storm, wait. We’re just—”

“—Misfits in Hawai’i 2.” Jem blurts out, like that being the case would help. She tries to rush after them as Pizzazz heads for the door, but promptly trips on the cable still caught around her leg and lands face first in Pizzazz’s couch.

Her face is fine, but the ankle needs ice. It’s when Pizzazz is getting a bag of frozen peas from the freezer that Jem pulls her good leg up to her chest and tells her that the Holograms have been thinking of using a clause buried in their contract to get their masters back and break free from 5x5.

Their plan’s to set something up, shop around for a distribution deal.

Go independent.

Pizzazz promises to help. Not with money, she’s poured so much into launching Misfits Music that even her billionaire dad is threatening to cut her off if they don’t do something serious soon, but if there’s one think on the planet that Pizzazz is an expert in, it’s that she knows how to get set back up after label drama.

Pizzazz scrunches up her nose. Way too much sentimentality.

“Can you walk on it, or should I call a cab?” Pizzazz asks.

It’s when the pain in her foot comes back as they’re tangled up in the one guest bedroom that has the nice view, overwhelmingly sharp and jolting up her leg, that Jem pats her hands against the outside of Pizzazz’s thighs and tells her to get dressed because she might actually need to go to the hospital for this one.

Everyone keeps looking at her like she’s made out of glass.

It’s not the worst fracture, six weeks if she’s lucky, but it doesn’t make anyone else feel better and that’s still six weeks where Jem has to be injured and Jerrica is supposed to be fine, which can be managed by judicious use of Synergy but the constant lying doesn’t exactly make Jerrica feel any better. So Jerrica is sat with her crutches on her lap back on the therapy bench in the garage for another session with Doctor Leith, who repeatedly stresses that she is not a psychiatric professional and that talking to her while she works on her car is not an adequate replacement for therapy.

“Jer,” Aja says, fiddling with the turbo charger. “It’s like you keep turning a big dial and looking back to me for approval.”

“I just don’t know if I’m doing the right thing.” Jerrica says, shifting to take the weight off her cast. She’s keeping two pens on her because everyone who bumps into Jem wants to sign it. It’s a strange feeling being the one receiving autographs for a change.

“I’m not gonna pretend I’m not biased, because she’s now put two members of the band in the hospital, but I think—”

Jerrica blinks, running her hands through her hair.

“Aja, what did you think I was talking about?”

“You and Pizzazz last weekend?” Aja offers. “Stage diving on her couch? Broken ankle?”

“...I’m talking about the plan to get our masters back from 5x5.”

“Oh.” Aja blinks, tapping her temples with her palms. “OH.”

She pauses, thinking for a moment.

“Retracting my previous statement.” Aja says. “Harcourt’s just gonna put you in the hospital from overworking. Just think about what it’s gonna be like when we go indie. No label meetings, no press briefings, set our own budgets, control of our own destinies…”

And a lot of people at 5x5 who relied on Jem to pay their bills would suddenly be out of work, Jerrica knows, and she can’t hire any of them for at least six months without it looking like poaching which would trigger all sorts of contract clauses that would bury them in legal battles that could sink their new label before it ever got started, and did they even know enough people who would be willing to work on favors and promises of future pay to—

“Jerrica.” Aja says, waving a hand in front of her face. “You zoned out just now.”

“You’re giving me a stress headache just thinking about it.” Jerrica says. “It’s a big step.”

“It’s the right step.” Aja says. “We’re all with you on this, Jerrica. You’re putting in more work than the label gives us back to begin with. We’re better off without them.”

“So look how the turns have tabled...” Kimber swings around in the doorway, braids dangling beneath her as she pokes her head through the garage door. “My own sisters turned on me for dating the nice Misfit, only for Jerrica to—”

“Kimber, I don’t want to talk about it—”

“...But I have so many double date ideas.” Kimber says, dejectedly, and then runs off after the rapid-fire click-clack of Jerrica speed-crutching her way out of the garage.

“I’m going to the new office space.” Jerrica calls.

“...Who’s driving you?” Aja calls back.

“You are!”

“Oh Rodimus,” Aja pats a hand on the signed and framed poster of a confidently smiling robot that hung reverently above the therapy bench. “We’re really in it now.”

Pizzazz walks into her living room the morning after driving Jem to the one clinic they trusted not to be weird about her identity and sitting with her in the ER for six hours to find the rest of the Misfits staring awkwardly at her from the couch. The first thing she sees is Blaze with her reading glasses on, tapping into an old-fashioned typewriter. The second thing she sees is Stormer holding onto one of the Minion statues they liberated from the red carpet event for emotional support, and realizes in an instant that everybody is mad at her again.

“...Tell me you’re not staging an intervention.” Pizzazz says, pulling her sunglasses to her forehead. She’s hoping the fact she got two hours of sleep in the back of her van after Jem left the ER is offset by the fact she slept in yesterday’s makeup. She holds up a drive thru coffee order for the full band and the snacks she pulled from a 711 on the way back. “I brought bagels.”

“Stormer, she’s trying to bribe the Prosecution!” Roxy says.

“As the special counsel for the Defense, I would just like—” Clash begins.

“Overruled.” Roxy says, narrowing her eyes. “Tell her what’s what, Judge Stormer.”

Stormer rubs her temples, then walks over to Pizzazz.

“We’re really happy for you and whatever weird thing your rivalry with Jem has turned into,” Stormer says. “But we know where this has led the band in the past, and--”

“...So you’re putting me on trial?!”

“For crimes against The Misfits!” Jetta shouts, holding up an A4 sheet of paper that had grown increasingly coffee-stained over months of addendums. “You know what’s in the band Charter same as any of us, P. No dating in the band or in the industry. ‘Cept for that special exemption clause we wrote in there specifically for Stormer.”

Pizzazz genuinely cannot remember anything she wrote in the band Charter or why she was convinced, in the studio at 4am after a really destructive tour, that it was really important to her at that time to write a band charter. She’s pretty sure an entire page of it is written in Hungarian.

She settles on saying: “I wrote that as a joke?!”

“So Roxy and I have been hiding our thing for months for no reason?!” Jetta slams her fist on the armrest, throwing the papers in the air, before stretching out both arms and falling into the couch in a huff. “Throw the book at her, Stormer.”

“I genuinely did not know you were supposed to be hiding it.” Pizzazz blinks. “Storm, tell them. You cannot pre-crime me for thinking that who I’m hooking up with is going to kill the band.”

Stormer scrunches up her face, her hands on Pizzazz’s shoulders.

“The stuff we wrote when I was dating Alyx was not that bad.” Pizzazz insists.

Stormer mouths a quiet ‘I’m sorry. I love you’ to Pizzazz. Then, she closes her eyes, and then looks over to the other Misfits. “She needs to understand what we’re dealing with here. Blaze, put it on the record that I would like to introduce Exhibit A: the unreleased song ‘Godzilla Love,’ scheduled for release on the 2014 album Our Songs Are Better.”

“Pizzazz.” the fixer calls. Square-jawed guy with short-cropped hair, big shoulders, loud shirt, looked like a bouncer. Labels loved their leg-breakers. Pizzazz slams the door of the van, severely lacking patience for dealing with industry types today. “You look—”

“Like a woman who just drove to the hospital. What’s with the ambush?”

“5x5 is seeing some movement with one of their top acts.”

“Good for them.”

“Bad movement.”

“I already said good for them.”

“If they walk, 5x5 wants the Misfits back.”

Pizzazz stops in her tracks.

“Tell them the Misfits broke up.” Pizzazz says, finally. “Creative differences.”

“Shame.” the guy shrugs, standing up. “They’re offering them a blank check.”

“I already have a blank check.”

That night, Pizzazz finds she can’t let it go.

PIZZAZZ: Congratulations
PIZZAZZ: You’ve officially broken up the Misfits.

OLD SCHOOL JEM-INI: My evil plan is working!
OLD SCHOOL JEM-INI: Now to take over half of Misfits Music.

PIZZAZZ: Don’t even joke.
PIZZAZZ: I have Eric Raymond breathing down my neck to play nice with 5x5
PIZZAZZ: In case we can swoop in and steal your spot on their roster.

OLD SCHOOL JEM-INI: Did you tell him???
OLD SCHOOL JEM-INI: Pizzazz.
OLD SCHOOL JEM-INI: Nobody outside the band knew until I told you.

PIZZAZZ: I got jumped by some creep looking to sign us.
PIZZAZZ: So I asked Eric what the word at 5x5 was about the Misfits.
PIZZAZZ: Eric doesn’t KNOW for sure something’s up
PIZZAZZ: But he’s got feelers in the label.
PIZZAZZ: Industry guys talk to industry guys
PIZZAZZ: They suspect something
PIZZAZZ: They think you’re holding onto your best material for a jump

OLD SCHOOL JEM-INI: Duck.

PIZZAZZ: Jem.
PIZZAZZ: This is only sorta related but
PIZZAZZ: I’m going to need you to be totally honest with me right now.

 

OLD SCHOOL JEM-INI: Sure.

PIZZAZZ: Do you have autocorrect turned on?

OLD SCHOOL JEM-INI: Yes.
OLD SCHOOL JEM-INI: But thank you.
OLD SCHOOL JEM-INI: Keep me posted if you hear anything else.

Pizzazz rubs at the corner of her eyes with her palms. She keeps to her promises, even the stupid ones, and a poisoned record deal with a label that already dropped them and sold them down the river once wasn’t worth it. Her phone buzzes again: Stormer’s texting her. She slides it open and starts reading.

STORMER: Things got ugly this morning and I’m sorry.

PIZZAZZ: Better to get everything out in the open.

STORMER: What’s the plan?

PIZZAZZ: Same as always.
PIZZAZZ: Give everyone a day or two to cool off then we hash it out.

STORMER: Are you sure that’ll work this time?
STORMER: I haven’t heard from the others.
STORMER: And this total creep ambushed me to try and talk about signing to 5x5 for a solo deal.

PIZZAZZ: Just remember how that label treated us last time.
PIZZAZZ: They’ll promise us anything.

STORMER: Why?
STORMER: We were a nightmare to deal with.
STORMER: Are they losing The Holograms or something?

Pizzazz pauses. Stormer doesn’t know. She flicks the screen over to her contacts list to try and warn Blaze about the headhunter, largely because Blaze is the only other Misfit she trusts not to text her back with a textbox filled with curses right now. At least if Blaze was mad at her, Pizzazz figures, she’d just be burning thyme and manifesting her downfall.

PIZZAZZ: There’s a 5x5 goon trying to sign us all to solo deals
PIZZAZZ: The Lunas are your band, so it’s your call
PIZZAZZ: Just know I’m here to look over any contracts they offer you

BLAZE: i already told him where he can shove his offer
BLAZE: thanks for watching out for me
BLAZE: [JEMOJI: Hug!]

PIZZAZZ: I’ll allow it
PIZZAZZ: But only because it’s virtual

Pizzazz flips back to talking to Stormer.

PIZZAZZ: 5x5 went after Blaze too
PIZZAZZ: I’ll check in on Roxy and Jetta tomorrow

STORMER: Do you need me to come over?

PIZZAZZ: I’m good.
PIZZAZZ: Heading to the studio for a bit.

She has one last text to send.

 

PIZZAZZ: Clash. Do you still run that makeup channel?

CLASH: OMG are u finally gonna guest in a video???

PIZZAZZ: Worse.
PIZZAZZ: Bring your stuff over tomorrow

Pizzazz tosses her phone up in the air, hopes it lands somewhere soft, and gets about as far as trying to lurch out of bed before she decides that she’s actually not going to the studio tonight. Or anywhere, for that matter. She crashes out the second her head hits the too-hard pillow, and sleeps until morning.

The next morning, Pizzazz pulls up outside an apartment block downtown and spends a solid five minutes deleting the thirty messages Roxy left her from the county jail after she and Jetta got arrested for beating the crap out of 5x5’s legbreaker. Jetta’s bundled in the back of the van while Roxy sleeps in the passenger seat after Pizzazz drove up there to make their bail.

“Watch the van.” Pizzazz says.

“Nobody’s cutting these brakes but me, P.” Jetta says, which doesn’t exactly instill her with confidence.

“’Rat.” She knocks on the open door to the apartment on the third floor, twice, before walking in. “Office hours. You in?”

“Do not touch me, do not touch anything on the table,” Techrat says, glancing through a magnifier at an intricately-painted statue from one of those tabletop games. The table was a mess of scattered electronic components and half-constructed toy robot kits. “and do not ask where I get it from.”

“Cool.” Pizzazz says, folding her arms. “Do you have a laser gun?”

“No.” Techrat says, lying unconvincingly.

“Do you have the second best thing to a laser gun?”

“That, I can provide.” Techrat rises to their feet, brushes their greasy hair from their face, and retrieves a hardcase from above their desk. They slide it to Pizzazz, who opens it. “Alongside a word of free advice: tell the Misfits to stop discussing your plans over SMS. It’s pathetically easy to intercept the messages if you’re already monitoring the cell towers.”

“Didn’t you hear? We broke up.”

Techrat scowls, not buying it for a second. Pizzazz just shrugs.

“You gonna rat us out?” She asks.

“This rat has better things to do. Remember: attach it to the surface, press this button once, and then run.”

(And on the third floor of 5x5 records, if everything is going to plan, a woman who looks distinctly not-like-Clash picks up a Roomba that’s about to tell them the floor plans to the label’s building.)

Pizzazz, hair pulled back in a tight bun and hidden under the baseball cap with the security guard outfits Blaze was able to source from her old temp agency, slaps Techrat’s gimmick onto the server, presses the button, and has enough time to hope it worked before it self-destructs. She turns, and starts to run as the actual security guards catch onto her.

“Jer,” Kimber says, carrying her laptop into the living room. “Not to worry you, but our albums just vanished.”

Jerrica blinks, midway through doing her morning rehab routine. She hops onto her crutches, and meets Kimber at the dinner table.

“Vanished?”

“Totally gone. I was listening to Cold Slither just now, because…” Kimber pauses, tapping her chin with her finger. “Actually, I don’t need to justify that. We all get Cold Slither moods. But all of a sudden it just got replaced. So I check the pages for some of the other 5x5 acts. Namely, us.”

“...What did it get replaced by?” Jerrica asks, and puts her head in her hands because she already knows the answer and knows that she made a terrible mistake lowering her guard to think that there was a person underneath all that makeup and attitude and not some horrible spite gremlin who could never let someone be more successful than her.

To say that it’s all Misfits would be an understatement. It’s not just the songs and album art replaced on streaming platforms, all of 5x5’s websites have been defaced, their store pages redirected to the Misfits merch page. They’ve taken over the label’s social media account, alongside all the bands who let 5x5 handle their marketing directly, and flooded them with whatever posts Roxy could come up with, and are promptly getting spammed by disaffected fans of other acts posting the same image a crab with laser eyes hundreds of times.

Jerrica, for once feeling eternally grateful that she never turned any of their socials over to the label, takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes. She’s mentally drafting the Notes App response post in her head, trying to figure out how she can disavow this.

“Pretty outrageous move, right?” Kimber says.

“I’m pretty outraged. Who does Pizzazz think she is—”

Jerrica pauses for a moment, checking her watch. It’s Saturday, so if Pizzazz was responsible for all of this, she would be trying to angle it into getting on VTV’s entertainment news. Jerrica hops on her crutches over to the remote, and flips the TV on.

Live interview outside her mansion, with the full band in stage costumes beside her. Woman knew her dramatic timing.

“—they wanted to re-sign The Misfits after dumping us off their trashy label? I say we give them more Misfits than they can handle!”

Jerrica lets the television play in the background as Aja walks into the living room, package in hand. She sends off texts to the group chat to keep Shana in the loop. The last thing her sister needs is to find out about this from the news.

“Guys, our music is gone—” Aja huffs, out of breath. She sets the large cardboard box down on the table. “And this arrived.”

Kimber digs her nails into the tape and immediately starts tearing the box apart, burrowing around because there’s nothing but packing peanuts in there. After all that, the only thing she can find is a single USB stick, which she holds up.

“Kimber, don’t, you don’t know where—”

Too late.

Kimber has already jammed it into her laptop. Jerrica suddenly remembers their dad cleaning viruses off the computer after she downloaded what she insisted were totally legitimate expansion packs for The Sims, and wonders how Kimber could have learned nothing from that.

There’s a big green progress bar subsuming the screen, and Kimber covers her eyes.

Finally, a little cartoon drawing of Techrat appears on the screen with their arms folded, changing to different static poses as they explain the process. They points to two folders. One of them is the stems for all their tracks. Cartoon Techrat advises them to never delete these, because they are the last copies of the songs. Then, it takes her to the back end of the streaming platforms, with a username and password that Cartoon Techrat advises them to change immediately. All their recordings, back online, on an account they control.

Cartoon Techrat disappears, leaving them with the folder of their stems and Kimber scribbling down the account name. There’s another folder there, just labelled ‘FOR JEM.’

“Aja, can you post the announcement video we shot?” Jerrica says. “We should still have access to our YouTube channel.”

“That’s for after we trigger the release clause.” Aja offers.

“I think we just did.” Jerrica stares at the television screen.

Kimber stares at her, silently pointing at the ‘FOR JEM’ folder, before pleading with her to please let them play it.

“Play it,” Jerrica says, knowing she will regret it.

She sits stone-faced through four tracks of the sappiest acoustic love ballads she’s ever heard, filtered through the lens of Pizzazz’s best needy rasp about plague rats and a medieval torturer being in love with the knight she’s about to execute, and other high concept lyrics that feel acutely Pizzazz but… don’t exactly make for the best listening experience.

But it’s heartfelt, and she appreciates that on some level.

“Aja, can you bury these in a vault so deep that nobody will try to put them on an album even after we’ve both been dead for a hundred years?”

“Prolly.”

“Do that.” Jerrica pauses, pursing her lips. She rattles her hand against the table until she spots her phone and props her elbows on her crutches to type out a message. Pizzazz pauses mid-rant to check her phone, and Jerrica watches her eyes light up on the tv screen.

OLD SCHOOL JEM-INI: I love you.
OLD SCHOOL JEM-INI: Never do that again.

“--and tell the Limp Lizards that the ‘thing’ is she’s my girl.” Pizzazz shouts into the camera, having sidetracked from trashing the Holograms’ newly-former label towards taking the opportunity to address any other enemies she can think of. “And if they have a problem with that, I’m gonna shout so loud it blows their houses down—”

Chapter Text

They figure out something is deeply wrong with the timeline when Pizzazz arrives to help move their equipment into the new offices. She’s got the latest issue of Cool Trash on top of the stack of boxes, and Jerrica looks surprised that they even print that magazine any more.

“Lovelorn Leading Lady Lashes Out At Limp Lizards.” Aja snatches up the magazine and reads off the cover story. “A for Effort on the title.”

“I really wish they’d have focused on the part where I said I was gonna crush ‘em like bugs and smash their houses with a wrecking ball instead of all the mushy parts.” Pizzazz scowls.

“Oh, wow.” Kimber says, carrying the bare minimum boxes required to make herself look like she’s actually helping to unpack everything. “She actually showed up.”

“I keep my promises. Especially the stupid ones.” Pizzazz nudges her head over to Rio, setting the box down with the other instruments. “Quicker with two vans, anyway.”

Rio says nothing, staring at Pizzazz like he’s trying to evaluate something about himself based on what Jem sees in her. He doesn’t seem to like what it says about either of them.

For all their faults, the Misfits are always willing to help out an act that’s getting screwed by the label.

“Over there—” Jerrica calls, walking down the hallway.

(And getting Synergy to impersonate her through this entire stressful-enough move because only one of them is supposed to have a broken ankle has been nothing but abject torment, but Jerrica has resigned herself to a mindset of ‘you put up with what you have to put up with’ until they’re settled in the new building.)

“I wanna talk to Jem when she’s got a minute.” Pizzazz calls down the hallway, with enough plausible deniability that Jerrica still isn’t sure she knows anything.

“I’ll go fetch her.” Jerrica says. “Back in a sec.”

As the portal snaps shut, Stormer grabs Kimber’s shoulder with her meat arm and watches Pizzazz kiss Jem, hobbling out on crutches with a glammed out leg cast, on the cheek.

“We should go,” Stormer says. “This timeline is—“

“Busted?” Kimber offers, peering at the horrible spectacle through her fingers.

This was worse than Pizzazzworld.

“I was going to say ‘not the right one.’” Stormer gives a quiet laugh, before they both have to cram into a cleaning closet to hide from Kimber’s other self sneaking down the hallway to try and find somewhere she could wait out the move without having to do any work.

“It’s one of the timelines where Starlight Music is founded.” Kimber puts her head in her hands. “Maybe we can get dad to re-open the—”

“Oh, hey Storm.” Pizzazz, this timeline's Pizzazz, not the evil dictator they actually needed help unseating, opens the closet to grab a bottle of window cleaner, looking over her robot arm. “When’d you two get into the post-apocalypse thing?”