Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Whatever’s going on at the entrance of radio shack, it’s loud, and Kobra’s hiding out in her and Party’s room until it’s over.

It started with Dr Death coming back from his trip to the Juviehalls with people Kobra didn’t recognize and two vans full of books. It wasn’t any of her business, so she let it be, but Party has a habit of needing to be an integral part of everything around him, so he tried helping out for maybe half an hour- and then everything devolved to just plain yelling, until Kobra couldn’t tell one voice from another.

And then it was over. Party stomps away- Kobra can recognize her brother’s footsteps without even trying- and the other voices get too quiet for Kobra to make anything out.

She’s flipping through some zines she won after betting with Show Pony at the racetrack, already forgetting about the whole ordeal, when the raspy voice comes back. “Who the fuck are you?”

Kobra looks up from her magazine just in time to catch the sand-haired boy at the doorway narrow his eyes at her. She’s still riding out the last stretch of withdrawal from her meds, so her memory’s hazy at best, but she’s pretty fucking sure she’s never seen him and his angry eyebrows before.

“Who are you?”

Dr Death appears from the hallway. “Stand down, Cherri. These kids‘re staying here for a bit. They’re on our side.” Kobra’s not sure what “sides” there are, but the boy- Cherry?- nods like he knows what that means, and walks back out, returning with his arms full of more books than Kobra’s ever seen in one place at the same time. He drops them on Kobra’s mattress without a glance in her direction, and leaves again.

“The fuck’s his problem?” she spits, and Dr Death shoots her a glare.

“You watch your mouth too, Kid. He’s a friend of mine.”

And Dr Death has friends all over the desert, not just from running the most popular radio show in the Zones- as far as Kobra can tell, anyway- but from everything the guy’s been involved in. He helped rebuild half the Zones after the bombs, fought in all the wars, and lived to tell the tale and make sure no one fucking forgot it. But here’s the thing about friends: they’re meant to be on equal footing as you.

Even if they’re friendly, Kobra and Party aren’t friends with the Doc, for example, because he’s a desert legend and they’re just kids he didn’t have the heart to abandon. They’re something else, something she doesn’t really have a name for but resembles the relationship between a nice guy and two kicked puppies in a box on the curb.

Cherri’s scrawny ass looks like he should be in the same boat. Hell, he can’t be much older than Kobra- not even Party.

Dr Death must see the confusion on her face, because he sighs and looks down the hallway like he’s making sure they’re alone. “The boy’s involved with my work stuff. And he already had to deal with your brother outside, so be nice.”

Kobra frowns. “I’m involved with your work stuff.”

“Yeah, papergirl. And you’re good at it too, but Cherri deals with other shit. Don’t worry your pretty head about it, he’ll only be here ‘till the sun goes down.”

“And his books, too?”

“Those are a little more permanent.” When Kobra rolls her eyes, kicking the stack of books off her bed, the Doc snaps, “that’s a good thing. It’s good to be well-read. Get your head out of those zines and read a goddamn novel."

He doesn’t give her a chance to respond before he leaves, so she huffs and turns back to her magazine. This is a good issue, too. They finally managed to track down Sonic Boom and interview her about that accident at the racetrack a while back, and it's fucking cool, so she doesn’t get what Dr Death is so bitchy about.

She does eye the pile of books, though; skims through the covers to try and find anything interesting. They’re all about food. They remind her of the cookbooks her mother had in their Battery City apartment, but much more colourful.

Here’s the thing: ever since they left, Party’s never looked back, like their entire lives up until the point they crossed City lines were blown away with the sand their bare feet picked up as they walked through the desert for the first time. He’s so confident in that world of his, where nothing but the future exists, that Kobra could never admit she still thinks about Before. It feels wrong acknowledging something that Party has already left behind, like she’s still a kid picking up scraps while her big older brother is busy seeing the world.

She imagines both of them staring down the desert in both directions: Party towards the sand, the people, the radioactive waste, and Kobra- past the City and into the ocean, directionless. And something about it compels her to pick up a cookbook.

She’s about to open it when Party trips on the books at the doorway and crashes into the floor.

“Fuck! Watch where you leave your shit! Fuckin’ klutz,” he yells, and Kobra can see frustration already tensed up on his shoulders so she tries really hard not to let any venom into her voice when she answers, “Fuck, Party, calm down. What happened?”

She’s not sure if it worked, but Party isn’t throwing anything at her, just dropping onto the mattress and kicking off his boots with the same violence he’d use to crush an exterminator. Small wins. “Nothing happened.”

Kobra stays silent. Party finally looks up at her.

“Nothing, I swear! Just that salty ass fucker bothering the shit out of me. Gimme a minute.”

His voice gets gentler towards the end, the closest thing to an apology Party can muster without looking like he’s choking on something. Satisfied, Kobra nods, tossing the book to the side, deciding to leave in case he gets any more explosive. “’Kay.”

She climbs through the half-beat door in the back, trying to avoid the group of strangers with the books at the entrance.

Instead, she finds Cherri outside on a curb a little ways away from the radio shack, throwing sticks into the sand with his head on his other hand and his knees folded up to his chin. Kobra’s leg starts bouncing before she can stop it.

“Hi.”

Cherri discards his stick pile and stares straight at her. It feels a bit like a scorpion is poking holes through Kobra’s eyes, so she looks at the ground instead.

“What,” Cherri answers, but it sounds less like a question and more like a threat.

Kobra’s never been good at this, at knowing what to say and when and how to say it. At socializing. She suspects it’s part of the reason why she had such a high dosage of medication in the City- they never tell you what’s wrong with you, just the drugs to take to get Better- which is ironic considering the chemicals fucked her up so bad that easing herself off the Battery Acid probably only made the problem worse.

All of this is why she skips at least six lines of dialogue and says, “I think my brother hates you.”

Cherri stares at her for a second longer before bursting into laughter. Kobra frowns; she wasn’t trying to be funny.

“Good,” Cherri sneers. “I hate him too. He needs to get his head out of his ass.”

If he’s sharing his honest thoughts and opinions with her, that’s gotta be a good sign, right? Kobra takes it as an invitation to sit next to him on the crumbling concrete. “What’d he do this time?” she asks, not even bothering to defend Party. She’s still pissed he yelled at her.

He shrugs, turning his attention back to his sticks. “My parents and I own the library, down at the Juviehalls, but the City’s shuttin’ us all down, so. We need somewhere to keep our shit. And the Doc offered.” He runs out of sticks. “Your brother thinks he can stop BLi singlehandedly. Actin’ like he’s the face of the rebellion, the prick.”

Kobra giggles, finished making a pile of her own sticks and throwing them next to Cherri’s. “Sounds like him.”

The conversation sputters to a stop, a dead-end where neither of them bother to pick it up again.

Even though it should be awkward, it’s not. At least not to Kobra, who’s content with the rhythmic pattern of playing with the sticks until the sun is at its highest point in the sky and sweat starts beading at the back of her neck, even in the shade.

Cherri huffs. “I should probably go back in, help my dad,” he announces, getting up and being careful not to shake any sand off in Kobra’s direction. “I’m Cherri Cola.”

Kobra waves him off. “Kobra Kid.”

=

Cherri and the Doc are arguing again, so Kobra is hiding out in their room. Again. Party sits with her this time, trying (and failing) to look like he’s practising his tag instead of eavesdropping.

After a while, he gives up. “That kid’s a little bitch,” he says, and Kobra braces herself for a long rant.

“Him and his family literally read books for a living- they own a library in the Lobby, ‘cept their library’s gettin’ shut down ‘cuz of BLi and they won’t do anythin’ about it. They’ll just dump all their shit on us, and go back with their tails between their legs like nothin’ happened. If they had any fucking balls they’d at least stay in the fuckin’ desert, right? What the fuck’s waitin’ for them back there?”

Kobra hums. She doesn’t have anything to add, but Party doesn’t usually get mad about that until he’s done monologuing.

“I don’t care about smuggling all their books here now. Not my fuckin’ problem. But it’s not gonna help anyone. Who’s gonna read all this shit here, anyway? They should be buildin’ a library in the zones- they don’t even have to build anything, there’s definitely a shithole somewhere nobody’s using, but that way people can access their shit. Which is the whole fucking point.”

Kobra doesn’t know how he talks about Battery City without any familiarity. Treating it like a symbol, the way desert-borns do, and not the place he learned to walk.

“Better yet, they should be fighting this. Protesting, rioting, fuckin’- anything, ‘stead of runnin’ away like chickens. Either fight for their home, and their fuckin’ right to education and whatever, or commit to running away. Not this shitty, half-assed thing they’re so hellbent on doing.”

Party scribbles some more onto his paper and lapses into silence- shit. This is her cue.

“It’s dangerous, fightin’ against BLi,” Kobra probes, and Party scoffs.

“No shit? You think? But how is anything gonna change if we sit on our asses all day and do nothing? Hell, we fought against them, and we were kids.”

“We ran away,” Kobra corrects.

“Hell yeah. That’s the thing, Kobes, we have it so easy. Running away is fighting back. Proves we’re not some mindless motherfucks that Better Living can screw over however they like. It’s so easy, and somehow Cherri and his fucking family chose the one pussy option available. I actually think it’s harder to do the pussy shit they’re pulling than it is to man up and run the fuck away. It’s so dumb you’d have to be doin’ it on purpose.”

Party runs out of space on his paper. Lifting it up, inspecting it from all angles, he hands it to Kobra. “What do you think?”

Kobra looks at each version, compares and contrasts. Party waits.

“I like the swoop-y thing you did for this ‘P,’” she starts, pointing at the tag. “And how you connected the ‘T’ and ‘Y’ here.”

Party beams, snatching the sheet up. “I was thinking that too,” he says, and gets up to stretch. “Now I just need to start tagging. Soon I’ll be everywhere. If I saved enough carbons, maybe I could get some paints- the good shit from the Lobby.”

Kobra’s blood turns to ice. “You’re not going back there.”

“No shit, dumbass.” Party drops onto his mattress and tosses the paper in the air, where it twists and flutters and lands by Kobra’s feet. “I’ll buy it off a bullet kid, or something.”

Without Party pushing it forward, the conversation draws to a close. Kobra waits for her heartbeat to slow and picks at her shoelaces.

It’s a bit later, after Party gets bored and goes outside to shoot a cactus or something and Cherri’s dad has floated in and out of their room with enough books that Kobra’s not sure where the floor is anymore, that Cherri reappears in the doorway.

“Thanks for lettin’ us use your room,” he says.

“Yeah,” Kobra shrugs. “Are they all about food?”

“What?”

Kobra nudges the pile on the foot of the mattress.

“Oh,” Cherri says, tip-toeing around the books and squatting next to her. “That was probably the food and health section. No, there’s books about anything. Everything. You wouldn’t believe how much.”

“I would,” Kobra says, her voice smaller than she’d like it to be. “I’m city-born. My mom had cookbooks.”

Cherri picks one up, named after a place Kobra’s sure has been underwater for years now, more to have something to fidget with than anything else. “Ran away?”

“Yeah, me and my brother.” It feels good to finally admit. She was never as good as Party at pretending all they had ever known was sand, sunburns, and colour. “He was gettin’ in a lotta trouble at school, I was gettin’ real drugged up. You know,” she shrugs. “I still take a bit of Battery Acid in the morning. Tryna ease off ‘em.”

Cherri nods. Kobra wonders if he takes meds too, or if he’s like Party was, quitting cold turkey and hiding them away so their parents wouldn’t know. Or, maybe he doesn’t hide from his dad at all.

Kobra’s voice is as small as it’s ever been when she goes, “must be nice, havin’ parents that get it. You won’t have to abandon ‘em when shit hits the fan.”

The shack goes completely silent. Cherri’s tracing the spine of the book, spinning it ‘round in his hands, and Kobra’s kicking herself for letting the conversation get so dark.

“Sorry. It’s no big deal anyway,” she tries, “they were basically zombies. The one thing I miss,” she grins, “is the food.”

“Ugh, the food?” Cherri finally says. “Are you serious?”

“Rations are better than dog food,” Kobra shrugs.

“Dog food? You guys eat dog food?”

“It’s easy as shit to steal,” she nods. “They’re always makin’ more than they need. For whatever fucking reason.”

Cherri’s laughing now, and Kobra joins in- they’re more amused little huffs of air than laughter, but in the desert, you take what you can get.

“Well, all of these books are from before the Helium war. They have food no one’s made for years,” Cherri says, opening his book to a random page. “Like, look at this. There’s a whole section for seafood.”

“The fuck’s an octopus?” Kobra laughs, peering over Cherri’s shoulder and pointing at the picture.

They stay there awhile, giggling at the names and marveling at what they haven’t seen before- which is a lot. Kobra notices that, although Cherri hasn’t seen the same shit Kobra hasn’t, he’s heard of it all before. “From books,” he says with a shrug when Kobra asks about it. “I read a lot. You pick things up.”

When Cherri’s dad finally pops his head in to let them know they’re leaving, Cherri stretches his legs out and makes for the doorway.

“See you, Kobrakid,” he says.

Kobra nods. “Cherricola.”

Chapter Text

Party doesn’t spare a fucking thought to Cherri Cola once he’s gone, which would be a hell of a lot easier if he wasn’t tripping over his books at every corner.

Eventually, it just became part of his routine. Wake up to the Doc’s shitty music, find anything that passes as edible to eat that day with Show Pony, run errands for the radioshack with Kobra, and ignore the fuckton of books like The Odyssey, and Spanish to English Dictionary still thrown everywhere on the floor. No one’s bothered enough to clean them up, and Poison sure as shit doesn’t give enough of a fuck to consider it.

Kobra’s actually taken to reading them. It’s been weeks since they were dropped off, and everyone else in the shack has moved the fuck on but her. Party leans over his mattress to glance at the title of the book in her hands now- Contact.

Even the cover looks boring. Party sighs, long and dramatic in a way he knows will grab her attention, and jumps off his bed.

“Things are getting heated out there, you know,” he says, and Kobra slowly finds a slip of paper to tuck between the pages, putting the book away. “Outtrack says BLi’s started arming their transport trucks. No one knows what’s in them.”

Kobra nods, obviously uninterested. Usually, Party wouldn’t mind. He knows he talks a lot, and he knows Kobra zones out 90% of the time his mouth is open. As long as she doesn’t stop him, Party doesn’t care. But this time it matters, and he can’t figure out why Kobra is so unbothered, and it’s pissing him off that she reads all the fucking time now.

“Can you get your shit together, for once?” he snaps. “BLi’s planning something big. They’re shutting everything down, taking control of the City- the pills were just the beginning! Why the fuck do you think we left?”

“Exactly,” Kobra says. “We left. We left so we wouldn’t have to deal with all that, but you’re obsessed with getting yourself involved in their shit anyway.”

It’s the most Kobra’s ever talked back at him since... forever. Party’s blood boils. “What.”

She shrugs like this shit should be obvious. “I mean you love pretending you’re not from the City, but it’s all you ever fucking talk about.”

“What the fuck do you mean?” Party yells. “Why can’t you fucking get that-”

“You’re stuck back there! It’s gone, we left, you don’t even have to think about it-”

“I’m not the one reading every fucking day, am I-”

“I’m not the one talking about their fucking transport trucks, who the fuck gives a shit-”

“Because it’s not just the fucking City, dickhead! They’re tryna control all of us!”

“What the fuck are you even-”

“They’re planning on controlling the desert, and then the whole state, and then any other state still fucking standing-”

“Listen to yourself! What zoned-off-his-ass killjoy’s feeding you his conspiracy bullshit?!”

“You don’t understand anything-”

“No one asked you to be the fuckin’ hero, asshole!”

“You’re the one reading all the storybook fucking hero shit!”

“Why do you care so much that I read?”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck off!”

Party throws his hands in the air, storming out of the room with one last “Fuck!” because he can’t let Kobra have the last word. The door slams shut loud enough that he wonders if he broke something, but he doesn’t stop to check.

Show Pony is waiting for him outside. They smirk at him, toss him a washcloth.

“You crashqueens are gonna kill each other, one of these days,” they say, wiping down the van. Party doesn’t answer, but he dips his cloth in the soapy bucket by Pony’s feet and wrings it out, snapping some of the thread.

“She’s right, you know,” they keep going, because they just can’t contain themself from imparting their worldly wisdom on him any chance they get. Party focuses on a particularly stubborn stain on the window instead of punching Pony in the nose.

The sun burns their skin. No one should ever do manual labour at this time of day, and the water’s basically evaporating the minute it hits the car, anyway. He doesn’t know if Show Pony just didn’t think this through, or if it’s all intentional. He can’t figure them the fuck out.

“But you’re right, too,” they huff. “BLi’s takin’ control of the City, we all know, but they’re expandin’. Everyday the exterminators go further past City lines,” they use their washcloth to wipe their forehead, not even bothering to clean the mud off it first. “They’re plannin’ on takin’ over as much land as they can get their hands on, and fuckin’ over us killjoys to do it.”

“Thanks for defending me back there, asshole,” Party grumbles, but he knows there’s no bite in his voice. Arguing with Kobra always makes him feel like shit, whether Pony helps him win or not.

Show Pony smiles in that sweet way they do when they’re about to say something insightful. They act like they know everything and can read anyone, and Party’s still deciding whether or not that’s true. “See, baby,” they say, “that’s the thing. That all may be true, but she’s right in sayin’ you don’t hafta be the hero. In fact,” they shrug, turning back to the van, “you’re needed here. With her.”

Party’s mouth goes dry. Show Pony doesn’t go on, doesn’t need to. He knows.

=

The sun has gone down by the time Party stops avoiding Kobra. It’s not just ‘cuz he’s stubborn; he knows he’d blow a fuse if he saw her, but he also knows she doesn’t deserve it, so he stays away until his anger simmers back to normal.

She knows how he is, by now. When Party finds her outside, lighting a cigarette, he knows she was waiting for him to come to her.

“Show Pony said I was right,” Poison says. “BLi’s gonna conquer the world.”

Kobra huffs, and it might’ve been a laugh, and she looks over her shoulder to Party. “Right. ‘Cept they won’t even make it past California, ‘cuz you’ll stop ‘em singlehandedly with nothin’ but a raygun and a spare battery.”

Party grins, makes his way over to her. “Damn straight.”

It’s a silent admission, just by poking fun at the whole thing, and it might even be an apology. Kobra sees it for what it is, passes the cigarette over to him, and all grudges are washed away with the smoke.

Party’s about to hand it back when she whispers, “do you ever think about Mom and Dad?”

If it was any other night, if Party was in any other mood, if Kobra’s eyes were any less shiny, he would dismiss it. Of course not, he’d say, what’s the point? And a big part of him believes that, because there is no point in thinking about them. They ran away for a reason. Their parents were part of that reason.

But, probably the same way Party’s stuck with Kobra for the rest of his life just by virtue of the fact that she’s his little sister, it’s impossible for him to get rid of his parents. No amount of running away will change that.

When he hands the cigarette back, his hand lingers on Kobra’s. “Yeah, I do. Sometimes.”

She looks at him like he hung the moon in the sky. “Yeah? Remember when Mom used to cook?”

“What? Man, how do you remember that?” Party grins. “She stopped when you were a baby.”

They don’t mention that she stopped ‘cuz she was too medicated, or ‘cuz that was around the time the City started with standardized rations, but maybe that didn’t even cross Kobra’s mind. Her laugh dances with her smoke. “Shithead. I was six.”

Party hums, taking the cigarette out of her mouth to take one last hit. Kobra taps at her knee while he stubs it out on the faded concrete.

“Dad used to take us to the movies,” she goes on. “But only the shitty old ones. Fuckin’... never thought I’d miss those,” she sighs.

Party bristles, all the warmth from the smoke chilled over. “You miss it?”

“I mean, better than the Mousekat bullshit they replaced it with.”

“No, I mean...” Party scratches behind his neck. “Fuck, Kobes. D’you miss the City?”

Kobra looks at him, eyebrows bunched together. “Party. They were killing us.”

Party huffs, tilts his head. “Not if I killed ‘em first.”

There’s a flash of light in the distance, followed by a muted cheer. Someone’s having a party, or concert, or drag race. Kobra watches them for a minute, playing with the frayed edges of her jeans, then turns back to Party.

“You’re right,” she mumbles. “If it had been just me, I would’ve stayed put. Let them drug me until I ended up like those tweakers in the Lobby.” She’s looking at Party’s shoes, his hair- anywhere but his eyes. “You’re the one that got us out.”

Party stares for a little longer before sighing and pulling her close. “You would’ve been fine,” he says, fitting her head on his shoulder. Soon, she’ll be too big to fit into him like this; soon, but not yet. He plays with her hair. “None of it matters anyway.”

Kobra doesn’t answer, but she nestles in closer. Party lets his head fall on hers, and they stay there for another hour, watching the party in the horizon get bigger and louder the later it gets. When she falls asleep, Party shakes her awake and leads her back to their room.

=

A month later, they’re saying goodbye.

They all barely fit in the shack. The Doc, Pony, Gogo, Hot Chimp, Grasskid Jim, Old Man Disco, Outtrack, Cherri Cola, his dad, and a couple more zonerunners Party and Kobra haven’t gotten around to meeting yet are all squished together in the main room.

All eyes in the room are filled with tears, but no water spills over. Their hands are firm when they wrap around each other. Their voices, maybe less so, not with everyone so nervous- but there’s no room here for second guessing.

Here’s the plan: Dr Death Defying and his gang go to war, and all the kids stay behind and hold down the shack. The Doc already broadcasted his going away message, and left some warped, fucked up version of Star Spangled Banner playing on loop on his station. Party barely remembers a time when that song had any relevance. Kobra definitely doesn’t.

The only other kid left behind is Cherri Cola. Between the three of them, they’re supposed to keep the shack clean, standing, and safe. The adults pretend it’s a big deal- it’s up to you to protect the base of operations, it’s the most important job, we’re trusting you- but Party knows they’re just trying to saitate their appetities with that bullshit. There isn’t a single soul in the desert whose bones don’t sing for revolution, for freedom- for glory, mostly. Party can admit that. Even Kobra, who didn’t even believe a war was imminent until it was right at their fucking doorstep, is brimming with energy, itching for a raygun.

Cherri Cola, however, is sulking. He avoids everyone’s gaze and pretends not to hear when they say their goodbyes. Party’s just as annoyed as he is, being left behind like this, but even he can’t pretend he doesn’t care that they’re going to war. War. Last time this happened, half the fucking world turned to dust. And he likes Dr Death, and Show Pony, and Gogo, and Outtrack gave him real fucking spraypaints last week.

Party wasn’t stupid. There was a big fucking chance he wouldn’t see any of them again.

Cherri doesn’t seem bothered, still slouching over Pony’s ratty old couch like this was any other day, like his own fucking father was going on any other supply run.

The individual goodbyes start, now, having been avoided for as long as possible. Hot Chimp ruffles Kobra’s hair, gives her a pair of sunglasses. Grasskid Jim hugs Party tighter than he’s ever let them, ‘cuz they smell like a rancid mix of zoneweed and tires left out in the sun for too long. Out of the corner of his eye, Party sees Cherri’s dad cup his son’s face in his hands, Cherri’s eyes darting in every possible direction that isn’t back into his father’s eyes.

Finally, Show Pony gets to them. They hug them both with their entire body, squeezing and nestling their face where Party’s shoulder meets Kobra’s, not saying a word. Their silence is so unlike them that Party almost wants to cry. When they get up, there are unshed tears in their eyes; but they’re smiling like nothing’s wrong. “Be good with each other,” they say, and they’ve turned away before either of them could clear the melancholy from their throats to respond.

Then, Dr Death. Party doesn’t even try and hide it with him; his lip wobbles and he buries his face in his chest. Kobra’s beside him in seconds- or maybe they collapsed at the same time- and the Doc pulls them both close, shushing them.

“Y’all better take good fuckin’ care of my radio station,” he says. Party laughs, despite it all. When he lifts his head, he wipes at the wet spot on the Doc’s shirt.

“When’d you say you’d be back?” Kobra asks, still muffled by the fabric. The Doc puts his hand on her head, not even messing with her hair, just pressing down.

“Maybe a month or so, if all goes well,” he says. “Just to restock, take a breather before goin’ back out. Check in on you guys,” he smiles, finally putting a hand on Party’s hair, too. “You’ll be fine for food? Sunshrine’s gonna drop some off for you every week or so, but if there’s any trouble, go to Tommy and tell him to get y’all a discount. Say it’s from me and you know he’ll give it to ya.”

“We fuckin’ know, Doc. See you in a month,” Party says, embarassment catching up to him. No wonder they think he can’t go to battle with them, with his fucking snot all over the Doc’s shirt.

He laughs, pulls them close one more time, and then he’s gone. Him, and all the rest of them. Party thinks his ears could be ringing.

Kobra turns, runs to their room and shuts the door. He’ll check in on her later; for now, he’ll let her cry in peace. It’s taking all he fucking has not to break down on the spot, himself.

He turns to Cherri, who has stayed in his seat, unmoving since his dad said goodbye. His fucking books have finally been cleared away, put in boxes and shoved into the space between the cieling and the roof that isn’t big enough to be an attic. Kobra’s finally stopped reading them now that they’re not constantly at arm’s length, and Party feels oddly relaxed about it. Maybe they could’ve been useful now, though. Maybe Cherri needs something to do.

But Party doesn’t really give a shit about Cherri Cola, so he huffs and gets to his own business. He checks in on Kobra, presses a kiss to her hair when he sees she’s asleep, and pulls off his jeans to crawl in with her.

=

He’s just about to sleep when he hears it. He looks at Kobra, still sleeping soundly- she still hasn’t quit her pills, and they make her sleep like the dead- and pads out into the main room. Cherri’s gone and fucked off somewhere. Probably in the Doc and Pony’s room, even though Party specifically told him to leave it the fuck alone and crash on the couch. He’ll deal with that once he’s dealt with this.

He’d heard a crash, just outside the shack. It had to be close, ‘cuz shit doesn’t make that kinda noise when it falls on sand, and the only concrete around for miles is the crumbling sidewalk by the door. Party grabs a tire iron on his way out and swings the door open, heart singing with excitement. Maybe there were exterminators outside. Party’d knock ‘em all out, and he’d prove himself to the Doc and all the others. Finally, they’d stop seeing him like a kid, and he’d get to help.

But the door opens, and all he sees is Cherri Cola. He’s swearing under his breath, picking shit up where it all tumbled from a rip in his bag and onto the pavement. Party drops the tire iron, weapon forgotten.

“Dude,” Party whisper-shouts, “what the fuck?”

Cherri looks up, and if Party didn’t know any better, he’d say he looked scared. Then his eyes steel over and he presses his lips together. “Leave me the fuck alone,” he spits, and Party finally notices the batteries spilling out of the bag- the kind for rayguns.

Any killjoy that doesn’t have an active deathwish goes out in the desert with a raygun. That’s fucking normal. It’d be worse if Cherri was planning to leave without one. But, bringing batteries? He has to be planning on being gone for a while.

Party looks past the batteries, finds clothes and ration packets, and it finally hits him.

“You’re going with them,” he mutters. Cherri stops scrambling.

“There’s another group on their way. They’re gonna let me hitch a ride,” he huffs. Then, “And you can’t fucking stop me.” Party believes him. He wasn’t even planning on it. In fact, this is the only time he can say with confidence he’s ever liked Cherri Cola.

Party laughs. “Fuck off with that. I’m coming with you.”

Cherri’s eyebrows bunch together, like he’s confused, or doesn’t fucking believe him or something, but Party’s already back in the radioshack. He’s alive with energy. This is his fucking moment. Everything he’s ever done, every decision he’s ever made, has led up to this: sneaking away to fight for something bigger than himself. It’s all he’s ever wanted. And he’s ready as fuck for it, whether Dr Death admits it or not. He can imagine it already; shooting down any exterminator that comes his way, leading their group once they finally realize what he’s capable of, and then leading the entire fucking desert after that. A legion of killjoys behind him, laserfire cascading past him and into the hearts of every BLi bitch that fucks with them.

He doesn’t find another bag to throw his shit in, but that’s fine. He doesn’t need anything but a raygun. He probably does need some fucking pants, though, so he opens the door to his room and looks for the jeans he’d thrown somewhere-

Kobra snorts in her sleep. Party feels every individual atom in his body stop.

Her hair is splayed out over her pillow, blissfully unaware of the fire in Party’s blood. And she looks small, so small, even with the extra muscle she’s put on since they came here. There’s a scar on her arm where the snake bit her.

It was their first week in the desert, and they were about an hour away from dying on the spot, probably. Even without the fucking snake. They hadn’t had any water since the last morning, and food was a distant memory. He doesn’t even remember how it happened; just his sister, screaming and crying, and Show Pony finding them, carrying her away. Half delirious, he’d been so fucking confused where all the polka dots came from.

They took them to the radioshack. Dr Death got to work right away, and she was fine. He called her Kobra Kid and it stuck, their past names long forgotten anyway. When the Doc turned to him, and asked for his name, Party Poison already knew his answer.

He watches her now. The slope of her shoulders rising, falling. Her breaths hitting her pillow.

You’re the one that got us out.

And, fuck, suddenly it’s choking him. She’ll go with him to the ends of the Earth. If he leaves, if he fucks up and takes a blaster to the chest, she goes down, too. And it’ll be on him. Her life, in his hands. For the rest of their fucking lives.

He drops his jeans. His throat is dry. He can’t stop staring at his sister.

Finally, finally, he swallows. Turns around and shuts the door behind him. His eyes whip around the shack until he finds duct tape, and then he’s out the door, where Cherri is waiting for him. He narrows his eyes when he sees Party’s still in his boxers, but Party doesn’t say a thing. Just tapes the hole in Cherri’s bag so his shit stops falling out.

“Staying behind?” Cherri says, smugly, like he already knew this was how it was gonna go. Party scowls.

“Fuck you, seriously. Just go.”

And he goes. Party watches him run into the desert, and he watches when a truck rolls by, and he watches as Cherri climbs in.

There’s no word to describe what he’s feeling. Frustration, maybe, at Kobra, for being stuck with her forever. For missing his chance, for staying behind like a coward while everyone risks their lives.

But he’s not angry. He watches the truck disappear into the horizon, and he doesn’t feel angry.

When Kobra wakes up in the morning, Party pretends to scramble with her when they can’t find Cherri. Her hands shake, whining about how the Doc will be so mad at them, and what if Cherri’s hurt, and if he is it’s their fault, but Party just shakes his head and tells her not to worry. She looks at him like he’s crazy, but she sniffs and nods.

Party’s beginning to see what he looks like in her eyes, and it’s heavier on his shoulders than any army he could imagine.

Chapter Text

The first week is the hardest. Kobra, although she’d never say it out loud, is too scared to leave the shack. Sometimes she sees Party jump and shake his arms out of the corner of her eye, like there are scorpions in his sleeves. She thinks he’s probably brimming with pent up energy, and she doesn’t know why he hasn’t snuck off without her, yet.

Then Sunshrine visits, and she’s a breath of fresh air. Party leaves her some carbons- the Doc had left a good amount of them, but there’s an unspoken agreement to spend as little as possible. Otherwise, it’d feel too much like an inheritance, and then like a last will and testament. No, they couldn’t spend too many. The Doc’ll need it when he comes back.

“You two look shiny,” Sunshrine smiles, only a little red in the face after carrying an entire box of Powerpup onto the tilted, duct taped table. Kobra had bravely refrained from complaining, with Party watching her. Everyone eats Powerpup, his eyes say. Mom can’t cook for you anymore.

She had expected things to get better after their little heart to heart, out on the steps. In lots of ways, they had; she could rest easy, when Party was being a jackass, just knowing that he knew how she felt and acknowledged it. But that didn’t mean that he wasn’t a fucking jackass. It was like he reached his emotions quota that night and as such was obligated to ramp up his bitchy, have to be cannon fodder for the revolution factor by twenty. And now he knows exactly what presses her buttons; although, admittedly, he has the courtesy to only weaponize it in side eyes and raised eyebrows, and not in words a hundred decibels too loud, like he usually would.

Sunshrine huffs, wipes at her brow. The sun feels like it melts through the shack, these days. “You need anythin’ else? I can stop by more often, no problem.”

“Course not,” Party quips back. “Go relax. You’ve been a real spot of brown sugar for us, already.”

She laughs. “Brown sugar, huh? You talk like a sandpup,” and she ruffles Party’s hair like she’d do with a real pup- a kid, that is- and Kobra knows it pisses him off. He always gets his voice a certain way when he says shit like that, all sticky and sweet and seductive, maybe, and it really does make him sound like a desertborn, the kind that hangs around zone five and smells like laserfire. Sunshrine’s too old for his tricks, though. She sees right through him. It probably doesn’t help that the Doc told her all about them, either.

“Whatever, man. Find another batt rat to dump your dog food on.”

And that, the carelessness in lumping himself in with batt rats that would’ve never slipped his tongue a week ago, is the only confirmation Kobra has that their conversation ever even happened.

“How is it, out there?” Kobra asks, and it’s now- out of nowhere- that she hates the sound of her own voice. Propping it up against her brother’s, she can’t help but feel unnerved.

“Costa Rica, I hear,” Sunshrine sighs. “But I haven’t seen it. Can hardly tell there’s fightin’ at all, if you stay past zone 3. But,” she adds, seeing Kobra’s face, “I hear the Doc’s doin’ real good.”

Then Sunshrine leaves and they get to opening their first can. Kobra doesn’t bother getting her own, knows it’ll go to waste if she does, and Party’s content with letting her gag through two or three bites of his before giving up and letting him finish. She’ll only be able to avoid it for so long, anyway. Hunger is already gnawing in her gut.

=

Party and Kobra leave the radioshack for the first time the next day. Kobra feels a little guilty for abandoning their post, but even she was starting to feel a little crazy under the same four walls everyday.

They don’t have the Doc’s van- or direction, so, to Party’s discomfort, they wouldn’t know how to find their way back if they hitchhiked. For the first day they wander around the shack, shooting the shit, trying not to feel like stupid, hopeless undergrads for not knowing how to go any further.

Two days later, Party wakes her up early and announces they’re going out.

She doesn’t know how he suddenly figured out exactly where to go and how to retrace his steps, but she isn’t gonna waste time trying to figure him out. She’s starting to realize the desert makes him a little magical- or plain fucking crazy. Maybe intoxicated. Manic? Psychic? He found some old maps and he’s just fucking studious?

He leads her down an invisible path that, if she didn’t know any better, she’d assume he’d taken a thousand times. Sure enough, they hit a road, and even as a stupid, hopeless undergrad, Kobra recognizes the Getaway Mile right away. She looks around for landmarks- anything to put her on the same level as her brother- and comes up empty. That cactus looks the same as every other cactus in every other desert.

“Do you know where we’re going?” she asks, just in case his head’s so far up his own ass he doesn’t realize he doesn’t.

“Fuckin’ course I do,” is all she gets in response. So she frowns, but doesn’t ask again, even though she’s not sure which direction they’re going- towards the City or to Zone 3- and it’s freaking her out. That, and the mix of blinding sunlight and the jagged edges of the sand that somehow always makes it under her jacket. It’s too fucking much. She’s tripping all over the sand until they finally reach some point on the highway that Party knows about and she doesn’t, where he turns away from the asphalt and walks into the horizon.

It makes her feel so, so stupid. It’s obvious now that he’s leading them into nothing that she’s too fucking dependant on her older brother. She shouldn’t have even let him walk along Route Guano. Or, at least, she should’ve turned around, stopped following him like a lost bunny and let the static fucking take him.

“Party, be fucking straight with me,” she says. “Do you know where we’re going?”

“I swear to the Witch I do,” he scowls, but now she’s just less convinced. She didn’t even think he believed in that shit.

“If you get us lost, I swear to your goddamn Witch, I’ll kill you.”

“Kobra, shut the fuck up for two fucking seconds, man. We’re almost there.”

She throws herself at him, they scuffle, sand is kicked between them in clouds, and it ends with a cut on Party’s lip and a bruise on Kobra’s arm. For a second, everything is as it should be.

Then Party reorients himself and goes on, and Kobra follows him like a lost bunny.

=

The place he’d been so fucking obsessed with taking her to is literally just another shack. It’s an ugly, run down, looted to hell and back piece of shit, and Kobra wonders how it’s still standing after everything.

“Is this it?” she asks, because she can’t believe the look in Party’s eye could be summed up by this.

He glares at her, so she shuts up.

Slowly, the ground beneath her boots becomes solid, until it gives way completely to red stone. Brown vines and yellow shrubs squeeze between the cracks.

They’re in a neighbourhood. What used to be one. All the other houses other than the one Poison leads her to aren’t houses at all, but piles of debris ranging from big, almost intact pieces to piles of dust that mix together with the sand. The roads between them are crumbling. Compared to other neighbourhoods ruined by the war, though- the first one, the Helium war- this one isn’t the worst.

The house, close enough now that they stand in its shadow, with its faded paint and broken windows, still manages to be more colourful than any house Kobra’d ever seen in the City. Party pushes the door. It swings open easily. Sunlight streams onto and bounces off the hardwood floors, which are still in good shape, even with all the sand piled up in it, and washes the room in a sort of piss coloured glow. Stray wires hang from the ceiling, holes and animal shit litter the couch, and the paint is just as chipped on the inside as it was out.

Party grabs a thin, musty blanket off the floor and drapes it over the open window, muting the light. Then he takes a step back, like he expected dimming the sun to change something. He must realize it doesn’t, because he shakes his head.

“This place is a shithole.”

They run back home, and never mention it again.

=

Kobra wishes she’s more lucid when the Doc comes back for the first time. As it is, he’s a week earlier than planned, and she’d been taking her pills on an empty stomach for the better part of the month. Party used to try coaxing food into her every morning, then he tried to force her, and then he gave up for good. Now she’s standing on shaky knees as Show Pony and Cherri Cola track blood all over the floor.

The Doc has to carry Pony in. They’re unconscious. Kobra’s stomach turns just looking at them, limp in his arms where they’d usually be the one breathing life into the room. Hell, she doesn’t even think she’s ever seen them asleep.

Cherri’s doing marginally better, at least in the sense that he’s awake and upright, but it’s a near thing. He has one arm over Gogo’s shoulder, and she’s carrying most of his weight. His other arm is wrapped around his stomach. Kobra can see all the blood from here.

“Clear the table!” the Doc grunts, and Poison’s on it in two seconds flat. He dumps all their zines and empty Powerpup cans on the floor, then kicks at all their shit to clear a path for him and Pony. They haven’t cleaned in weeks.

By the time Poison finishes, Gogo has Cherri propped up on the counter. He’s hunched over himself so deeply that Kobra can’t make out his face, although she’s not sure she even wants to. Then Grasskid Jim bounds through the doorway with a spool of thread and a sewing needle, so Kobra tears her eyes away from the red on Cherri’s shirt and realizes she hasn’t moved since Gogo kicked down the door.

“Make yourself useful,” the Doc growls, coming to the same realization, “or get the fuck out.”

She lets herself bristle at his words for a second, and then she’s shaking her head. She- fuck. She can’t really talk right now. Everything’s making too much fucking noise.

Dr Death helps her out. “Help me carry Pony to the table,” he mutters, and Kobra’s on it right away.

She’s not wearing her jacket. Blood and dirt get all over her arms as she lays them down on the table Party cleared, and she has to put all her energy into not freaking the fuck out over it.

Party hovers with his hands suspended, waiting. “What can I do?”

“Help Jim with Cola, and get Newsie over here.”

Shuffling. Hissing that turns into screaming. Kobra has to tune Cherri out to keep herself on her feet. She stares at Pony, instead. They’re pale. They’re sweaty. They’re awake now, sure, but their eyes are glossy and unfocused like they’re not aware of that fact, themself. She can’t ask if they’ll be okay, so she looks at Gogo and hopes it comes across.

“You can sit this one out, Kid,” she says. “You’re lookin’ green.”

Kobra shakes her head. Gogo cocks hers to the side.

“Fair enough. What’re we lookin’ at, Doc?”

“They got caught by the building,” he says, ripping off his jacket and reaching for- Kobra swallows. He reaches for scissors and pliers. “Thinkin’ they got jammed in the side by the debris. Maybe some laserfire, too.”

“Shiny,” Gogo mutters. “Fuckin’ perfect.”

The Doc hands her the scissors, and she props them up against Pony’s stomach. Voiceless or not, Kobra thinks she’s gonna scream, or throw up, or something equally embarrassing, until Gogo just starts cutting Pony’s shirt, and Kobra sighs in relief.

Then she peels it off, though. And Kobra does throw up. She manages to get outside just before, and she doesn’t even think Party saw her, or anything, but now she’s on the ground and she doesn’t really know how to get up.

She just- fuck. She needs a second.

They don’t really need her in the radioshack, anyway. Her hands are too shaky to hold a needle, her ears are too sensitive to handle anyone’s barking orders, and her mind is too foggy to make the kind of decisions Gogo and the Doc must be making on their makeshift operating table. So, she stays outside, useless, crouched in the shade, for what must be an hour.

Her head is spinning and her stomach feels like its trying to crawl out of her gut. It’s the pill’s fault. It’s the dog food’s fault. It’s the whole damn desert’s fault, if she really gets down to it, and the thought makes her so frustrated that she feels tears prick at her eyes. The simplest way to put it: she fucking hates her body. Everything in her wants to crawl right out of her own skin and rip it up with her teeth when she’s done.

But, the sun is setting. Kobra slowly stretches out her legs, wincing at the strain she didn’t notice she was putting on her knees. Ignoring the wicked pins and needles going on in her legs, she braces herself and walks back into the shack.

Pony is on the couch, unconscious again, although this time they look peacefully asleep. Their middle section is covered in bandages, thank the Witch, and they must’ve been applied recently, ‘cuz they haven’t bled through yet.

The Doc is smoking with Jim in the kitchen. Kobra makes her way over to them, and the Doc wordlessly hands his cigarette to Jim and envelops his arms around her before she can say a word. She’s not sure she can, still.

“You’re shaking,” he says against her hair. “Sorry for scarin’ you, bunny. Pony’s just fine. We’ll stay for a couple days so they can sleep it off.”

Kobra nods, listening to the rumble in his chest as he talks.

“Your brother’s helpin’ Newsie with the van. She says it’s jus’ a tire, but I ‘spect somethin’s wrong with the engine, too. You think she might finally get through to him?”

“Poison?” Jim sighs, stubbing out the cigarette. “That kid wouldn’t know a wrench from a hammer if you stuck it up his ass. He’s hopeless.”

The Doc laughs, and Kobra feels it grind against his ribs. “Have some faith, Jim. We can make a gearhead of him, yet.”

They joke around a bit more, graciously ignoring how Kobra hasn’t let go of the Doc and doesn’t plan to. She thinks she should probably ask about the war: who’s winning, what have we lost, when will it be over? But they’re so relaxed, talking about nothing. The stress eases out of Kobra’s muscles.

When she finally does let go, she’s still trembling, but the buzzing under her skin has gone away. Dr Death smiles at her.

“Thanks Doc,” she whispers, clearing her throat. “’M glad you’re okay.”

“I might be more okay than you,” he says. “We should get you off that Battery Acid for good.”

Kobra shivers. “Sure, Doc.”

Jim scowls, twists up his nose like he just smelled something rancid, although he’s not smelling like roses, right now, either. “You still on that shit?”

“She’s easin’ off ‘em,” the Doc says, assertive.

Jim holds his hands up in surrender. “That’s why we’re fightin’ ‘em, anyway.”

“You don’t think they’ll use bombs again, do you?” Kobra blurts, feeling as small and young as ever.

Jim laughs. The Doc barely takes her seriously, either, even though this has been weighing on her since the damn war began. “Nukes? Please. The most they have the guts to use is a cherry bomb. No one wants another Helium war.”

She nods. Dr Death must feel the wave of exhaustion hitting her, ‘cuz he rubs her shoulder and says, “you’re lookin’ dead on your feet, there, Kid.”

Grasskid Jim smiles, but he doesn’t look all that happy. “Get some rest, puppy. We’ve got it all handled now.”

She doesn’t wanna deal with Party’s bravado yet, so she heads straight to her room. She doesn’t want to stay awake any longer than she has to. Only, when she opens the door, Cherri Cola is sitting on her mattress, his shirt tossed and abandoned somewhere near his feet.

She slumps against the doorknob, bracing herself for at least another twenty minutes without sleep. Cherri seems to be coming to the same sort of realization. He shifts, and immediately winces. Kobra’s eyes are drawn to his stomach.

There are so many scars, she doesn’t know where to start. A raygun shot on his arm, two more on his stomach, and one more by his hips, half hidden by his jeans. Stitches cross over his sides and up into his ribcage, not nearly as deep as Pony’s cut, but longer. Just about every inch of his skin is yellow, blueblack, red, with bruises and burns and scratches.

Mainly, though, Kobra’s eyes settle on his chest- at the scar right below it, stretching across both ends. It looks like it’s been healed for long enough that it couldn’t have been from the war. It looks too intentional for that, anyway, although its raised and kinda jagged and uneven, sometimes. She’s never seen anything like it- not that she’s been around long enough to know every weapon and every type of scar that comes with them.

“The fuck are you looking at?” Cherri spits. Not with the usual venom people throw around, with pride and intimidation like the scar proves they’re untouchable. Cherri’s hunched over himself, eyes guarded.

She shrugs, trying to look nonthreatening. “Where’d you get that?”

“None of your business,” he scoffs. Kobra briefly wonders if he knows what she’s talking about, or just trying to get her to shut up about everything in general, but she figures he wouldn’t look so shameful if he thought she was asking about a regular old bruise.

“I have one too, dude.” She lifts her shirt up, just enough to uncover the scar on her side. “Some prick at the racetrack didn’t hit a curve right and went flying right into me,” she shivers. “Pony had to give me stitches.”

Cherri huffs. “Whatever. This isn’t like that.”

She can’t tell if it’s intuition, or if she’s had the question in her head for long enough that she’s making up answers in places where they aren’t, but she thinks she could guess what the scars are for.

“What’s it like, then?” she asks anyway. Just to be sure.

Cherri bites his lip, looking up at her. She stares right back; something she can’t usually bring herself to do.

“Fine,” he says, tearing his eyes away. “I’m a guy. Okay? I am. But I was born like a girl, I guess. With tits and whatever, so I got them off.”

Kobra’s heart hums. “Got them off? Like how?”

“You never wonder why they call him Doc?”

Kobra’s jaw drops, and Cherri giggles. “I’m kidding, man. I mean, no, he has a buddy that helped him out with it, but he calls himself ‘doctor’ just ‘cuz he’s fucking old. He went to proper school and shit.”

“Wait,” Kobra says, stuck on the scars, still. “How did you know you were a guy?”

Cherri bites his lip again. This time, when he stares, Kobra thinks he’s trying to discern something. He must figure it out fine, ‘cuz eventually he answers, “I sorta just knew.”

Sighing, Kobra nods. “Sure.”

“I mean,” Cherri goes on, scratching his head. “It’s like- something was wrong, you know? I just didn’t know what. And then one day, I was a kid, and I got gum in my hair, and my dad cut it all off. And I looked in the mirror and it was like...” he pauses. “It was like finally seeing me? I never minded girly shit, but it wasn’t me. And this was.”

Kobra nods, eyes far away.

“And, since then, it kept going,” Cherri says. “I used to do all sorts of shit to- uh, to make me flatter. And I never grew my hair out again, and I started wishing for things, like... I dunno. A deeper voice. A beard, maybe. It just all clicked. If that make sense?”

Kobra thinks about all the times she’s stared at her reflection, dead eyed and searching for something that wasn’t there. At the buzz beneath her skin that she hasn’t been able to shake ever since she stepped foot in the desert and slowed her intake of heart numbing pills.

“Sure,” Kobra says, playing with her hair. “That makes sense.”

=

Party isn’t happy about sharing a room with Cherri, so Kobra offers her bed for them to share. It just pisses Party off even more, and he sleeps every night with his back facing their side of the room.

While he’s busy being a jealous dick, Cherri and Kobra get to talking. He tells her about the fighting, close calls with Scarecrows, days without food. Kobra tells him about Sunshrine and broken old neighbourhoods, because she doesn’t have much else to offer.

Gogo filled her and Party in on everything the morning of the second day, when Pony was still sleeping through the daylight on the couch. “Usually, we stick just to laser fire, but we’re hitting some BLi bases too, the ones just outside the Lobby. Tryna hit them where it counts. Everyone’s mostly okay. Divina got ghosted, Witch find her soul. The beginning was hard, you know, everyone running everywhere, but ever since the Doc joined, it’s been more organized. The guy’s a legend. There’s squads and legions and proper missions...”

They tried convincing Cherri to stay on the fourth day.

“It’s dangerous,” Pony said, lucid enough now to walk to the bathroom on their own and to scold the kids, but not much else. “What if we hadn’t found you when we did, huh? You could’ve bled out!”

“But you found me,” Cherri said. “I’m fine.”

“We told your father we’d keep you here,” Jim tried.

“Bullshit, you did,” Cherri said. “If you leave me here, I’ll run right back. I already started. I’m already involved. You can’t take that from me.”

Kobra had noticed Party’s fists clenching through the corner of her eye. Dr Death’s, too. Eventually, the Doc just said, “Fine.” And that was that.

She still thinks about Cherri’s scar. She becomes acutely aware about how her hair is starting to grow past her chest. He never lets himself be caught without a shirt on again. Life goes on.

The night before they’re set to leave- Show Pony shot a cactus right on target, so they all figure they’re well enough to leave again, and Cherri got his stitches out- Party is fast asleep, and Kobra is staring at Cherri through the darkness. They’re facing each other. She knows he’s awake, and that he knows she’s awake, too.

“Sodapop,” she calls.

She can’t see the colours of his smile in the dark, but she sees the way the darkness shifts and rearranges itself around his mouth.

“Sodapop? Really?”

She’s glad he can’t see her blush. “Yeah, like The Outsiders. Have you read it?”

“Have I- Of course I’ve read The Outsiders.”

“Okay,” she says, playing with the blanket. “Cherri Cola, Sodapop. You know.”

“Yeah,” Cherri huffs- but he’s still smiling. “I know. But I’m not anything like him.”

Kobra considers this. “Prolly not,” she muses. “You’re too intense.”

Cherri laughs, quiet so Party doesn’t stir. “Sure, that too.”

“What were you thinking of?”

He stills, considering his answer. “Soda fights for fun.”

“Oh.”

How does he even remember that? She sifts through her memory and looks for the scene where that comes up, and in all her pondering, the conversation trails off without her meaning to. She struggles to pick it back up. “You don’t think fighting is fun?”

“Who the fuck thinks fighting is fun?”

“Party,” Kobra answers, no hesitation, although it’s not the complete truth. Party tends to see it all like a game, sure, but he takes it more seriously than anything else in his life.

“That’s ‘cuz your brother’s a psycho.”

Kobra giggles. “Okay, Sodapop. Why do you fight, then?”

Cherri shrugs, voice dropping impossibly quieter.

“’Cuz I have to.”

This time, when the conversation dies, Kobra doesn’t even try to start it up again. She turns it over and over in her head, instead. ‘Cuz I have to. An obligation. One that, by all accounts, must be entirely self imposed; the adults have spent the entire week trying to convince him to stay away.

Party makes a noise in his sleep. He shifts and turns towards them, and Kobra tears her eyes away from Cherri to look at him.

Party Poison fights because he needs to be grander than he is. A clap, or war, or petty argument, doesn’t mean anything to him as much as proving himself does. He was small, in the city. He needs to be important now. Cherri fights because he doesn’t know what to do if he doesn’t.

When Kobra turns the question back to herself, she realizes she isn’t even sure she’s fighting to begin with.

She rips the covers off and swings her legs over the mattress.

“Kobra?”

She leaves, finds the foggy old mirror in the bathroom, and has to squint through the moonlight to make out her face. Cherri trails behind her, whisper-yelling, “what’re you doing?”

She pulls all the drawers open, digging and digging until she finds Pony’s old switchblade and swings it open.

“I’m gonna cut my hair,” she says, holding the knife between her fingers.

Cherri pauses for a second, then nods like he gets it. “Okay.”

Kobra starts hacking off his hair right at the top of his head, desperate, so there’s no going back. Not that he would ever go back, anyway. Soft tufts of it, blonde and heavy, start piling up at his feet. At some point, Cherri takes the knife from him and helps him out with the back.

Kobra’s shaking, he always is, but Cherri’s gentle. He evens out the jagged strands that Kobra had cut. Kobra almost falls asleep in his hands when he finishes and cards his fingers through.

It’s pretty anticlimactic. Kobra looks at himself in the mirror and his eyes go wide as something settles deep in his chest, but there are no fireworks, no fanfare. Cherri helps him pick up all the hair on the floor to toss out the window and into the breeze, then they crawl back into bed, and then morning comes and Party and Kobra are the only ones left in the radioshack all over again.

Chapter Text

Sand blows behind the van, kicked up by its tires, so Party and Kobra don’t even get a good view of the radio crew as they drive back into battle.

The sun makes it all the way above the sand. The goosebumps on Party’s arms melt away. By the time the van is small enough that he needs to squint to make it out, the heat dancing off the ground makes it warp and shake and wrap around the sky.

Kobra stands beside him, taller than ever.

“I’m a boy,” he says into the wind. Even though he’s not facing Party, Party feels like he needs to answer him, anyway.

“Ok.”

So he’s pissed.

But he’s not an asshole. Show Pony explained it to the both of them, when they were settling into the radioshack and Kobra’s snake bite was still healing and they were awkwardly avoiding referring to Pony at all, unsure how to go about it. They explained it. How things are fluid in the desert: there’s no black or white, right or wrong, boy or girl. There’s in between, there’s everything at once, there’s nothing at all. It’s all fair enough.

It’s not that. It’s the fact that Kobra, the shadow that has trailed Party around since before he bothers to remember, has started to live on his own. To make decisions by himself. Party knows, logically, that that’s a good thing. How many times has he wished for this? How many times has the presence of Kobra behind him, ever following, ever imitating, annoyed the fuck out of him?

It’s just that, now that he’s finally proved he can stand on his own feet, Party’s thrown off balance. Kobra needed him. The one truth that stayed true after they ran away, the one constant, isn’t fucking constant anymore. Kobra didn’t even tell him about this shit. But he told Cherri Cola, because obviously. Because why would Party need to know? And he doesn’t, he doesn’t need to know, but he thought that Kobra would’ve needed him to know, because Kobra needs Party. Little brothers need their older brothers. That’s how it goes. Only, suddenly he doesn’t, and suddenly Kobra can cut his hair in the middle of the night with his best friend Cherri and not even think about Party at all.

The absolute worst of it all, though, is Party can’t even be mad at Kobra if he’s violently sick.

It came outta nowhere. Well, not nowhere, Party knows the exact cause, but it doesn’t make any sense. He was easing off his meds specifically so he wouldn’t get sick when he finally quit them for good. And Party knows Kobra’s dose was higher than his, but he didn’t even get half this sick when he quit cold fucking turkey, so what the fuck?

At first, he was just sleepy. He was pissy, too, but there’s a lot to be pissed about in the desert, so Party didn’t hold it against him. But then his eyes got glassy, and his skin started to boil, and he stopped laughing or talking or even really doing anything at all, other than shivering into his pillow and sleeping.

When Sunshrine visits them for the first time since the crew went away, Kobra has already been bedridden for two days straight. His breath is rotten and Party’s 90% sure he hasn’t pissed since the last time he was up on both legs.

“Oh, hell,” Sunshrine says, once she’s hit by the smell. “Shit. Okay. I’ll see if Tommy has anything.”

Party takes a deep breath. “What can I do?”

“Stay with him. Try getting some water in him too? And Powerpup, if he can keep it down.”

Party laughs. He wants to cry. Kobra can’t keep Powerpup down, ever, even if he’s cutting his hair and giggling with Cherri and living his best fucking life.

Sunshrine looks a little disturbed by his reaction, but doesn’t comment on it. “I’ll be right back.”

She leaves as fast as she came, and Party sits down with Kobra, like he has for the past week since everything went to shit. He even runs his fingers through his hair, petting him like a goddamn puppy. He doesn’t know what’s gotten into him.

“You hear that, Kobes? Sunny’s gonna get you the good shit,” he whispers, watching the slope of his shoulders rise and fall. “Tommy Chow Mein, man. You’re gonna be set.”

Kobra sighs a little in his sleep. His breaths have been a little uneven lately, which is totally fine and doesn’t make Party’s stomach churn at all. It hurts to think about all the Battery Acid that was forced down his throat.

But he doesn’t let himself reminisce on the City- on how Kobra used to be so dull and lifeless and how much it fucking killed Party to watch. He doesn’t. Being in the shack with no one but his half dead brother for company is driving him crazy, pushing him into recesses of his mind that haven’t belonged to him for... Fuck, it’s been a year, now, hasn’t it? They’ve been in the desert a whole year.

Kobra’s breaths get a little thin, and then he lets out one giant huff and goes back to normal. Party sighs and lifts Kobra’s head onto his lap, where he sits and waits for Sunshrine to come back. He hasn’t stayed still for this long since the restraints in Re-education, not that he’s thinking about them, but he stays still now. For as long as he can before the laserfire starts.

Lately, sometimes, the fighting gets close enough to hear it. Party’s pretty sure they’re not in danger, but when Kobra was still sentient, he used to get all nervous and Party scratched one of Doc’s old records trying to figure out how to play it long enough to drown it out. But he worked it out a while ago, so he goes to play something now. Kobra would appreciate it, he thinks, and then he remembers his brother’s unresponsive on the floor a few feet away from him and he has to stand still in the middle of the room to calm himself down before he breaks something. Then he goes and plays a record anyway. Spends the first song in front of the player with his fists in his eyes to collect himself.

When he comes back to Kobra, miraculously, he’s awake and sitting up. More or less. The hem of his shirt is fraying where he picks at it, distracted, eyes far away. Party settles down next to him.

“Kobra,” he says softly, brushing hair out of his sweat soaked skin. “You okay?”

He knows the answer, obviously, but still waits for one. Kobra takes a second too long to focus on him, then groans and rolls his eyes. “No. Feel like shit.”

“Yeah,” Party nods. “Look like it, too.”

He doesn’t know if Kobra doesn’t catch the joke, or if he’s too tired to react. He just wipes his nose on his hand and tries shifting higher up against the wall.

Determined, Party grabs a bottle of water from the fridge- thank the Witch the Doc still has electricity, even if it goes out every so often- and tries shoving it in Kobra’s hand until it’s clear he doesn’t know what to do with it, and Party has to tilt it back against his mouth for him. Kobra almost drinks the whole bottle.

“Easy, you’ll make yourself sick,” Party says, grins. “Or- whatever. Guess it’s too late for that.”

“What song’s that?” Kobra mutters.

“Uh.” Party leans back and squints at the vinyl cover in the next room. “Nebraska?”

“Fuckin’ harmonica.”

“Yeah.”

“Put somethin’ happy,” Kobra sniffs, tripping over his words. “Witch, Party. Who hurt you.”

Party bites back a grin. He can’t believe he’s more happy that Kobra’s conscious enough to make fun of him than mad that, you know. Kobra’s making fun of him.

“Fuck off, K. I’ll fuckin’ change it.”

=

It’s three albums later- they kept playing music after the laserfire faded, and Party can’t believe it took them this long to figure it out, holy shit, he forgot music is awesome- that he remembers Sunshrine. Mainly, the concerning lack thereof.

“How far is Tommy’s?” Party asks, only halfway expecting Kobra to be awake enough to answer.

His brother grumbles, rubs at his eyes. “Ummm. You leavin’?”

“No.”

“Mm.” Silence. Kobra might have fallen asleep. Then, “hour from here, I think.”

So, three albums, plus maybe two Springsteen songs before Kobra made him change it, plus the time after Sunshrine left and before he started the music. That’s gotta be three hours. Maybe a bit more.

“Sure you’re not leaving?”

Party scratches his brother’s head where it lays next to him on the mattress. “I’m staying,” he soothes, and Kobra falls asleep instantly.

=

Party never got up to switch out the last album after it finished, too comfortable on the bed beside his brother, so he’s not sure how long it’s been this time. Feels like five hours, but he knows time passes slower in silence. It probably hasn’t even been four.

He starts to get nervous. He can’t tell if he’s imagining Kobra getting hotter under his hand or not.

Now, Party doesn’t like thinking about the Lobby. Not for the same reason he doesn’t think about the City, which is ‘cuz it’s irrelevant, but for reasons he can’t even say out loud to Kobra. But Kobra knows about it all anyway, and he doesn’t like thinking about that either. Whatever. Against his will, Party thinks about the Lobby.

They weren’t hiding out there very long. A month or two, maybe, and they weren’t even alone in the beginning. An android trailed behind them for a week. Defective enough to get thrown away, but not enough to fuck up its programming for customer service. It helped them avoid patrols, barter for food, and kept Kobra safe while Party slipped away at night for extra pocket change- basically, it kept them alive until they got their footing and learned to manage it all on their own.

It knew shit, too. Told them about Destroya, passionately, but Kobra remembers more about that than Party does. He got more sleep at night. What Party does remember were it’s stories about the desert; the people and the colour and the decent fucking music running around just beyond City lines.

It died after a couple of days, and it was Party’s fault, mostly. The thing kept asking for carbons, for Plus, and he’d say they didn’t have any even with his pockets full. Kobra took priority over a shitty robot with half its screws missing. He’s not sorry. Shit, Party doesn’t even remember its name.

But, the point is, it told them how empty it felt as its battery drained. He would’ve thought it was human, almost, if its eyelids weren’t rusting, or if its fan wasn’t so fucking loud. That was the first time he realized going off drugs could be just as deadly as staying on them.

It’s not like Kobra’s gonna die. Party knows that, mostly. It’s just a fever. In a wasteland, far away from antibiotics, but just a fever.

...There had been bodies everywhere, in the Juviehalls. Maybe not everywhere, but since Party and Kobra looked for the darkest crevices to hide in, they saw the rotten underbelly of an already neglected place, and all the rotten people BLi pushed into the edges of society. Not all the bodies were dead, but enough of them were that Party wonders if the reason Kobra cries out in his sleep is ‘cuz he didn’t do a well enough job shielding him from their fly eaten faces.

He’s still playing with Kobra’s hair. It’s the only thing keeping him from floating away, through the ceiling and straight into the sun.

Fuck. Okay. Party puts another record on.

=

Party jerks awake.

The first thing he notices is that he can’t fucking see, but he’s pretty sure his eyes are open. He starts making out shapes, then objects, then details as his eyes adjust to the dark, and he realizes it’s nighttime.

Next, is that there is something HOT beside him. His brother is on fire. When his brain finally wakes up enough to internalize the sensation, it’s already internalizing something else: YOU ARE FUCKED.

Lastly, but it’s pretty useless at this point considering the second realization, is that he doesn’t even remember falling asleep. He has no idea what time it is, no idea how long he was out, but it’s been a long fucking time. He completely missed the afternoon.

Sunshrine still isn’t back. Sunshrine isn’t coming back.

Kobra’s breaths are slow, thin, and violent.

They’re so fucked. FUCKED. Now that all the sleep has washed away, panic fills him up instead. His breaths come short and his gut twists and his brother is scalding to touch and they’re fucked.

Party can only remember one other time he felt this helpless. Coincidentally, for the first time in a year, it’s been on his mind for hours.

He takes Kobra’s hand and squeezes. A year of kicking ass in the desert and somehow they’re right back to where they began. Maybe they’re regressing. Maybe they never changed to begin with. Either way, Party only knows one way to fix it.

It’s not as bad as before, at least. He isn’t leaving Kobra behind a dumpster in the middle of the night, praying to anyone who will listen that he’ll still be there when he gets back. He’s not jumping off rooftops running from whoever he stole food from, or getting sucked off in alleyways for five carbons a pop, or finding useless junk in alleyways and trying to sell them again. He’s leaving Kobra in a cool bed and hitchhiking to Tommy’s.

He gets up to leave- not before pressing a kiss to Kobra’s temple, because he’s a soft bitch now- and scrambles to find his pens and leave a note.

Of course, if he’s gone for long enough that Kobra can wake up and read it, it’d probably be too late to do any good. But he’s not thinking about that. He’s not thinking about a lot of things.

=

Outside, the chill of the dark desert breeze bites Poison’s cheeks. He’s ready and armed with his only raygun, a pack of chewing gum to ease his nerves, and Dr Death’s stack of carbons he promised himself he’d never spend.

He knows the way to Route Guano. Straight north. The moon is half full, just bright enough for him to watch the sand give way to asphalt when he reaches it. His head turns, left, right, and he doesn’t see headlights in any direction. Then again, most zonerunners turn them off at night to avoid exterminators, but he strains his ears and doesn’t hear any cars, either.

He’ll walk if he has to, just up to Zone 3. He’ll find a gang of killjoys to take him to Tommy’s on the way.

The night sky is cloudy, like it usually is, with the occasional blink of a pre-war satellite. The horizon glows behind him where Battery City sits on the sand. He can’t see it from this far out, but the light pollution is visible even as far back as the outer zones.

But the sky he’s walking towards is pitch black. It’s so silent it makes his skin crawl. It shouldn’t be so terrifying, but he can feel the City behind him, he’s totally alone for miles, and this is the first time since they ran away that he’s been on his own without Kobra.

The ghost of his brother’s fever under his fingertips keeps him going.

He doesn’t know how to tell time without the sun, but eventually, he hears tires on pavement in front of him. Instinctively, he jumps off the road and crouches into the weeds, squinting to make out the blinding white coat of an exterminator car. But the closer it gets, the more obvious it’s driven by a killjoy. There’s laughing, yelling, music.

He jumps back onto the concrete just in time for the driver to see him and swerve out of the way. His heart is all the way up to his ears. Thump thump thump.

“Are you fucking crazy!?” someone yells, and Party shuffles towards the open window, already feeling stupid. “I was going 90 miles! Are you tryna get yourself killed??”

Party peers into the car. There’re three zonerunners: the one yelling at him- the driver- a girl with bright purple hair in shotgun, and a pair of legs spread out over the backseat. Party watches the driver’s eyes settle on him, and he feels even smaller.

He’s been wanting to do something with his hair for months, ever since Kobra bleached his with Show Pony before a party at the crater in Zone 3, but he’s never been downright self conscious about his ratty brown hair like he is now. The driver has stars dyed into his buzzcut and the killjoy in shotgun has a jacket littered with patches of every damn colour of the rainbow.

“Are you lost, kid? You weren’t really tryna kill yourself, were you?”

“Fuck no,” Party said, maybe a little too defensive. “I need a ride.”

The killjoy in shotgun laughs like it’s the most ridiculous thing she’s heard all day. “You’re tryna hitchhike on Route Guano? No one’s driving here during the war, man. You are crazy.”

“What are you doing on Route Guano, then?” Poison counters, and the killjoy scowls.

“That’s our business.”

“Casey,” the driver sighs. “Go easy on the puppy.”

Poison’s defenses shoot up. He can’t be weak, he can’t look weak, or he’ll be roadkill by morning. “Don’t call me a fucking puppy.”

The killjoy shrugs, undeterred. “You do got guts, I’ll give you that.”

“Where’d you need to go, sweetheart?” The driver calls out, ignoring the side-eye the killjoy shoots at him.

“Tommy’s,” Poison replies, making the conscious choice not to say his full name. Did that sound more casual? Or is there more than one Tommy and now he looks stupid?

“Ah, that’s in the opposite direction,” the driver sighs. “We’re looking for the radioshack.”

“Annie,” the killjoy groans, and the driver waves her off. “Witch, Case, loosen up. He won’t bite.”

Party’s not paying attention. Looking for, he figures, doesn’t sound all that certain. He might’ve severely lucked out here.

“I know where the radioshack is,” he says. Both of them shut up. By the looks on their faces, he was right on the money. “Take me to Tommy’s and I’ll take you to the shack.”

“How do we know you’re not lying?” the voice in the back says. Party shifts to make out their face, and gets distracted by the curls framing it.

“...I know you’re looking for Dr Death,” he offers, hazarding another guess. The killjoy closest to him- Case?- shoots the driver a wide-eyed glare. He’d be lying if he said it didn’t inflate his ego a little.

“What do you know about Dr Death?” the driver asks, after a heated conversation they had with their eyes.

“Where he lives,” Party asserts.

They look at each other one more time, before Case nods and Party hears the click of the doors unlocking.

“If you’re lying, we’ll shoot.”

Party settles into the backseat next to the quiet one, grinning wider than he thought possible. Considering the circumstances.

=

The driver’s name is Anion, the hot-headed one is Casey Jones, and the one beside Party is Jet Star. The drive to Tommy’s is less than 45 minutes with all the ground Party already covered, and after realizing they weren’t gonna get a conversation outta him, they spend the whole ride arguing over who to bet on in the upcoming fight in the gladiator arena. At least, Casey and Anion do. Jet Star chuckles and chimes in every so often, but mostly stays silent.

About ten minutes away, Jet Star leans sideways and says, low so the other two don’t hear, “you don’t have a mask.”

Party’s careful not to immediately snap, but after the excitement of driving in a car wore off, he’s been on edge for the whole ride. “So what?”

Jet Star doesn’t say anything. Party wonders if he said the wrong thing. He knows, vaguely, that masks are important, but no one’s bothered to explain the specifics to him. The Doc doesn’t wear his, opting to keep it in his pocket, and it wouldn’t make sense for Show Pony to wear one under their helmet.

Party’s heart falls out of his ass when Jet Star asks, “are you from the City?”

“Of course not,” he spits, automatic. But Jet Star sees right through him. He settles back into his seat and leaves Party alone with a pit in his stomach that only settles once they pull into Tommy’s.

“You want someone to go in with you?” Anion asks, and maybe it should be sweet that he’s looking out for the newbie, but Party just finds it fucking patronizing and tells him to fuck off.

Then Jet Star grabs his arm and shoves a couple carbons into his hand. “Get me sour gummies,” he says, and Party only stares dumbly for a few seconds before nodding and finally getting out of the car.

It’s a short walk to Tommy’s from the road, and one Party knows by heart from all the errands he ran with Show Pony. On the way, he realizes there’s a real possibility the gang of killjoys will leave him stranded out there, but, like always, he doesn’t think about it. He focuses on the echo of Kobra’s shallow breathing in his ears and pushes Tommy Chow Mein’s door open with a chime.

It has to be, like, 3am by now, but lots of killjoys are nocturnal since the middle of the day is too hot to do anything but sleep through, so Party’s not surprised that the store is equally as busy as it would’ve been 12 hours ago. He grabs Jet’s candy and makes a beeline for the counter. Just five minutes in line feels like an eternity knowing there’s a car full of strangers outside waiting for him.

Tommy finally finishes with the zonerunner in front of him and Party drops the candy on the counter. “I need medicine with this.”

Tommy just raises an eyebrow. Party wonders if he ever sleeps. Is the shop ever closed?

“What kinda medicine,” he asks, and Party shrugs helplessly.

“Anything you got, seriously. My brother’s out with a fever.”

“I thought it was a sister. Kobra?”

“Brother,” Party says, firmly, daring Tommy to challenge him. But Tommy’s on another train entirely. He leans in and lowers his voice when he asks, “is it the Battery Acid?”

Party gulps and nods. Living with Dr Death is, like, the ultimate way to network. Tommy nods and disappears to his supply room, where he keeps everything too expensive to be left out in the open. When he comes back, he hands Party a bag made out of colour paper.

See, Tommy may be a greedy dick, but this has to be the most considerate thing he does. Most of the medicine in the zones that’s a step above herbs, tea, and prayer is manufactured by BLi, and labeled as such. Just the sight of the logo makes Party, and any other killjoy in the desert, sick to their stomach. And no one would take pills if they thought they were tampered with, so they have to stay in the original packaging. And so the colour paper means everything. You’d never find something like that in the City. A reminder: this isn’t to make Kobra Better. It’s to get him healthy.

Deep down, though, Tommy will always just be a greedy dick. The register flashes an obscene number of carbons and even without counting what’s in his pockets, Party knows he doesn’t have enough.

“You have to be shitting me,” he cries.

“You know how many people are running away from the City, nowadays?” Tommy shrugs. “There’s a lot of demand.”

“Tommy, I don’t have this much. My brother’s gonna die. Dr Death will be pissed if you let him die. He said you’d give me a discount.”

“This is the discount.”

“I wasn’t born yesterday,” Party scowls, even though by zone standards, he might as well have been. “Don’t fuck with me.”

Tommy sighs, and brings it down by only a couple tens of carbons. Party swears under his breath, recounts his stash, and is still just barely under.

“Fine,” Party spits, throwing all of his carbons on the counter, including Jet’s. “Keep the fucking gummies.”

Tommy scoops up the carbons. “Pleasure doing business.”

“Suck a dick.”

Party takes the pills and fucks off, but not before swiping a new bag of Jet’s candies off the aisle and booking it out of the store. Tommy yells out after him, but a killjoy- the one behind Party in the line, they must’ve been eavesdropping- gets in between them and even throws him an extra bag.

“Hope your brother survives!” the killjoy yells from somewhere behind him, and then Party’s out of the store and running into the cold night air.

He sprints all the way to the car, which is still there, thank fuck, and when he jumps in, he yells “go, go, go!!”

Anion whoops and slams the accelerator. Even Casey laughs, and yells, “what happened?”

Party turns to Jet Star, breathless, and deposits the candy onto his lap. “I swiped you an extra one.”

“Oh, sweet,” he says, tearing it open. Anion cackles.

“You stole that from Tommy?”

“He can suck my dick,” Party grins. Casey scoffs.

Later, Party realized that stealing candy was no big deal. He didn’t even have to sprint to the car, there was no one chasing him- but no one else in there seemed to notice, or care if they did. Anion celebrated, Casey sang loud with the radio, and Jet passed his gummies around.

Another thing he realizes as he chews on the candy is that all of the effort spent worrying about whether or not the car would still be waiting for him once he got back was totally useless. By handing Party his carbons, Jet Star, intentionally or not, promised him they’d wait. And there’s something about him that makes Party think it probably was on purpose.

When the celebration dies down, Anion clears his throat. “So,” he begins, eyeing Party from the rearview mirror. “You know the way to Dr Death?”

“Just straight ahead,” Party nods. “I’ll tell you when to stop.”

=

Ok, so he should’ve expected Anion to blow up. It wasn’t lost on Party that he had asked for Dr Death himself earlier, not the radioshack, which means they were only looking for the radioshack in the first place because they thought the Doc would be there, and he isn’t. And he thought of filling them in before they opened the door to an empty shack, but he also thought about Casey’s if you’re lying we’ll shoot, and figured he should at least wait until he could give Kobra his medicine before they laser him.

Anion and Casey are still looking around the shack as if Dr Death’s been hiding in a closet the whole time when Party slips away to where he’d left Kobra, in the Doc’s studio. He’s even hotter to touch than before. If that’s even possible. Party grabs the water he’d left beside him hours ago and helps his barely-conscious brother swallow the pills down.

“It’s okay,” Party whispers when Kobra starts crying. He can’t even figure out why he’s crying. He must feel so fucking miserable.

Party hopes it has nothing to do with the fact that Kobra’s definitely too out of it to know where he is, and that swallowing pills has certain connotations. But whatever. He won’t even remember this once he’s healthy.

“You fucking tricked us,” Casey growls from the doorway, and Party lets go of Kobra’s hand too late. Her eyes zero in on the scene. Party’s eyes bounce between the hand on her raygun and Jet Star’s looming figure behind her. Kobra shudders in his sleep.

They stare off a moment longer, and then Casey groans and drops her hands, then groans a little more and stomps.

“Fuck you, Party Poison. I won’t shoot you this time.”

Party doesn’t let his guard down, and he doesn’t move away from Kobra’s figure on the floor, either. She sighs and shrugs, “I won’t kill you for protecting your brother, man. But any other gang would shoot you point blank for lying to them,” she adds.

Maybe Party’s just a dumb undergrad, but he’s pretty sure that’s not even true.

“This is the radioshack, though,” Jet says just as Anion comes up behind them. “Look.”

He points to the Doc’s stack of records.

“Of course it’s the fucking radioshack,” Party says, regaining confidence now that his objective was completed. “It’s just that Dr Death’s fighting. You know? In the war? Have you heard of it?”

“No, wait,” Anion cuts in, “we could’ve sworn he was back. He was playing music in his station again.”

“Must’ve been the wrong frequency. He’s been gone for weeks.”

“We heard it switch from the anthem,” Casey growls, out of exasperation more than anything. “There was a buncha scratching, and then music. Earlier today he played Springsteen and Sleater-Kinney!”

“Sleater-” Party’s eyes go wide. “Oh, man. That was me. I didn’t-” Casey throws her hands in the air, and Anion deflates like he’d been punched.

“What-the-fuck-ever, then,” he says, already heading out.

Casey pulls him back by the collar. “Annie, wait! This can still work,” she turns back to Party. “We just have news we need to get to the frontlines. One of the warehouses was attacked, and it’ll take a week to get the supplies they were expecting yesterday. That’s all. Let us broadcast it.”

“Uhhh,” Party says, dumbly. He hadn’t even fucking known that record player was hooked up to the radio. He has no clue how to work it. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Casey nods.

Party spares one more glance at Kobra, for good luck, then makes his way to the desk with all of the Doc’s radio shit, everyone else trailing behind him.

“Hm,” Party says, looking at all the sliders with stupid, unhelpful labels like “AA” and “AB” and “PONY DON’T TOUCH.”

“He doesn’t even know how it works,” Anion whispers, as if he wasn’t an inch away from Party’s ear.

“Yes I do,” Party says.

It takes a lot of guessing, smooth talking, and (as much as he hates to admit it) patience on the other killjoys’ end, but he finally finds the mic button and figures out he probably hadn’t needed to mess with all the sliders in the first place. Oops.

He’s readjusting them all to what he’s pretty sure they were at before he touched them while Casey speaks into the microphone, saying exactly what she said to Party and repeating it at least twenty times before Jet found a way to loop it automatically.

By the time they finally start getting ready to leave, the sun is rising and Party is dead on his feet. It’s impossible to think about anything other than Kobra’s limp body on the other side of the wall, and how much he wants to curl up next to him and feel him cool down as he gets better. He hasn’t checked on him since he gave him the pills.

Party’s sure it’s obvious his mind’s somewhere else because Annie slaps his back and says, “we hope your brother recovers.”

“May the Witch find him,” Casey nods, reaching behind the sofa where she had tossed her jacket.

Party nods, not trusting his voice.

“If we have any other news, we’ll come find you,” she adds. Party figures he doesn’t have a choice. Would the Doc be mad that a bunch of strangers know where he lives? That they’re using his radio? Then again, Party thinks about how long it’s been since he’s seen Kobra smile, and realizes he doesn’t give a fuck what he feels about it.

Anion and Casey leave without any more bullshit, but Jet Star lags behind. Party sort of wishes he talked more. Maybe it was just comforting, in general, to be around someone your age, but he also felt like this was different. That Jet Star was different.

“Here,” he says, reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out the second bag of gummies he never opened. “For when Kobra wakes up.”

Maybe ‘cuz he’s so tired, or ‘cuz he’s so fucking worried for his brother, or he’s just seriously gonna miss this guy he’s only known for a couple hours, but Party Poison starts crying. His chin wobbles and his eyes water and the water leaks and trails down his face and it’s the most humiliating thing that’s ever fucking happened to him. But Jet smiles, and Party thinks he could genuinely be an angel.

“See you,” he replies, ‘cuz thank you feels too sincere. Jet keeps smiling like he gets it anyway.

And then they’re all gone, and Party’s holding a bag of sour gummies, crying in the middle of the radioshack, and he remembers, on top of everything else, that Sunshrine literally fucking died less than 24 hours ago.