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It’s not the fall that kills you, and it’s not the tour that kills you, either. Touring keeps you so hopped up on internal and external stimulants that absolutely nothing can touch you. Your body is a divine instrument, a machine that turns pizza and alcohol into an unstoppable musical rampage. You are a godlike manifestation of creative power, you are a beacon of worship in the dullness of these people’s lives, you are a sex symbol slithering into their repressed subconscious and waiting to be uncovered and interpreted in future therapy sessions. You are, as Murdoc tells himself in the mirror every morning, totally immune to scurvy.
The first morning after the tour, though, back in his own bed, in their West London studio, Murdoc wakes up feeling like he’s finished falling and has now splattered onto the ground from not-quite-high-enough. The slightest movement irritates his throat, and he coughs as one might imagine an out-of-shape fifty-year-old smoker with an absolutely catastrophic case of the flu would cough, wretchedly, until a piece of dark grey phlegm unlodges itself from his lungs and lands in front of him like some kind of horrific afterbirth. There might still be a piece of lung attached, actually.
Murdoc flicks it off the blanket and throws himself back onto the mattress, shivering violently, teeth chattering. There’s no reason your bones should ache for totally bone-unrelated reasons like having a fever or thinking about your father. Bones shouldn’t be able to ache at all. It’s just a bunch of sodding sticks holding your skin up.
Well, he’s not going to suffer in silence. Murdoc kicks his legs to drape the blanket across himself in the most tragic possible way, throws a limp wrist across his forehead, and groans and gurgles in his best impression of fresh roadkill.
Predictably, only one person in the house gives any kind of a shit. 2D looks worse for wear, himself, when he peeks into his room.
“Muds? You alright?”
Murdoc makes a completely vowel-free noise, something like “rrrhhhgghhhrr”.
“Y’need anything?”
He motions 2D to come closer like he’s the king on his deathbed, seeking to impart some final piece of wisdom to his heir before fucking off into the afterlife. Instead, he just ends up sneezing right into his face. 2D wordlessly wipes it on his sleeves.
Murdoc slowly raises a shaky hand. “Bring me… a proper fistful of your painkillers. And a bottle of robitussin. Or Jägermeister, if we don’t have that.”
“Alright.”
“And codeine. Fuck it.”
“Okay. Jus’ wait here.”
Murdoc’s forehead wrinkles with irritation as he watches him trot off. It only accentuates his headache. “Not like I’m bloody well going anywhere, am I? I’m dying!” He retreats fully under the blanket. “And bring me Noodle’s fluffy bathrobe,” he calls after him. “I’m freezing my arse off.”
This is awful. If he doesn’t nip this in the bud, it might take days to recover. He clearly isn’t meant to take breaks. He’d have no problems, mental or physical, if he could just keep touring forever. He’s almost tempted to flip through his little black book and see if there's any demons left that’ll return his calls.
2D returns, surprisingly, with the correct list of ingredients for his flu-fuck-off cocktail. “You want I should just put all this stuff in the blender or what,” he quips.
Murdoc growls. Then he downs a fistful of pills with a big swig of this and a big swig of that. “I’ll beat this fucking bug if it’s the last thing I do,” Murdoc says.
“Might be,” 2D says.
2D’s sitting on the edge of his bed as Murdoc gingerly pulls on the bathrobe, overly sensitive all over, miserable as any man has ever been, and lies back down to try to sleep it off. He gets about three minutes of peace.
“Hi, Noodle,” 2D says, cheerily.
Another cold shiver runs up his spine. His eyes open, barely peeking out between the covers and the pillows and the pink polyester fluff to meet hers. There’s a beat. She runs off. Then she returns wearing a respirator mask, entering the room by means of flying tackle.
“How dare you!”
Murdoc gets all the air knocked out of him as she lands. She shakes him by the collar. “Noodle-” He coughs helplessly. “Noodle, I just- 2D got it, not me!”
2D’s eyes widen. “You what? You told me to get it!”
“You don’t have to do everything I say, you fucking moron!”
Noodle drops him with stars circling around his head, then glares at 2D, who just kind of shrinks in on himself. “Don’t touch my stuff!”
“Sorry.”
“Look at him! I will have to submerge that thing in bleach!”
Murdoc groans. “You can just dunk me along with it. That’ll kill it off.”
"That will kill you. And it’ll ruin the fabric!”
Murdoc chuckles insofar as his respiratory system is capable of it. “Can’t have that.”
Noodle crosses her arms. She furrows her eyebrows at something outside the window. “No point. No point at all. Just keep it.”
Murdoc’s head is swimming. He wishes lying down and closing his eyes would make him feel any less like he’s falling through space again. “Thanks,” he mumbles.
“And you,” she continues. “What are you still doing here? Do you want to catch what he has?”
2D takes a second to realise he’s being addressed. He shrugs the most pathetic little shrug. “He already sneezed in my face.”
Noodle withers. Then she inhales, exhales and begins massaging her temples.
“How am I gonna get him back if he doesn't get me sick? By the time he's better I'll be wretched and I'll get to sneeze right back at him.”
Murdoc has an evil little giggle. “And you'll get me sick again? And we'll just go 'round and 'round keeping each other sick and miserable for all of eternity?”
“I think so, yeah.”
A grin spreads across his face. “That sounds absolutely dreadful, mate.” He lifts the blanket. “Hop on in.”
It’s 2D’s clear joy at this development that seems to kill something inside Noodle. She watches him crawl into bed like she’s watching her favorite horse walk into the glue factory. “You’re going to wake up with a missing kidney,” she tries.
“Aw, he wouldn’t take both of ‘em. Wouldja, Muds?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he rumbles. “I’m a changed man, remember?”
He had, in fact, taken and replaced both of them at some point, and so the kidney he’d stolen had technically been his own, but this doesn’t seem like it would earn him any points, so he keeps it to himself. See? He’s learning.
Noodle leaves with her shoulders drawn up, arms straight at her sides, fists clenched. It doesn’t feel good, exactly, that she only ever seems to regard him with suspicion and exasperation these days, but it’s fine, really. She’s only being rational, which means she turned out a lot better than whatever the hell went wrong with 2D. Maybe, sometimes, the best you can do is raise the girl that’ll get the honor of killing you. Even if knowing that doesn’t feel good.
He at least waits until she’s out of earshot before he grabs 2D by the chin and gleefully unfurls his tongue to lick a long, virus-laden stripe up his cheek. He whines and wriggles out of it in much the hoped-for manner. Then he dives under his shoulder to wrap his arms around him and hide his face in his side in a way he hadn’t anticipated at all.
Murdoc had gotten so excited at the thought of infecting 2D with the plague, he hadn’t even considered that he was volunteering to spend time with him to do so. Ugh.
No violence. He just rolls his eyes and pats him on the back a little too hard.
Nobody’s really sure how serious he is about making amends, least of all himself. In his mind, he’s playing everyone for suckers at basically all times, hail Satan and such, but in reality, he’s still fucking sitting there doing stupid fucking jigsaw puzzles every Sunday afternoon, so the joke might be on him.
It’s just that he needs his frontman. He needs him to make up for everything he lacks. He needs him so desperately that he used to be unable to touch him without backhanding him at all, could hardly stand to look at him without wanting to crawl out of his skin.
Murdoc throws an arm across his eyes. He really doesn’t feel too good. Not sure if it’s the fever or something he took.
The ground starts shaking. Like, more so than it usually does when Russel wakes up. This is because he appears in the doorframe decked out in his full space suit.
Murdoc stares open-mouthed. “It’s the flu, not a bloody nuclear meltdown!”
“You’re a medical mystery, man,” comes out of the comm’s loudspeaker. “If anyone’s gonna mutate the flu into a supervirus and kick off another pandemic, it’s gonna be you.”
“We did already have the suits,” 2D notes, poking his head out of the blankets. “Be a shame if we only wear them once. Like that wicked spider-suit I got for a party when I was twelve, so I started wearing it to gym class-”
“What the hell do you want?” Murdoc snaps.
“Noodle said you’re messing with 2D again. And I’m here to keep order. Again.”
Murdoc bristles. “I’m not messing with him. He doesn’t need to be messed with. He messes with himself just fine!”
“Made me way better at climbing the ropes. Climbed so high I couldn’t get back down. Teacher was proper shouting at me.”
“I don’t care.” Russel slowly steps closer, clattering with mechanics and hissing with hydraulics. “I’m not letting them become the first victim of Murvid.”
“They pulled out a trampoline for me to land on, but I bounced straight off of it, and then I bounced straight off of the floor, which I guess Spider-Man wouldn’t have done. Hey- Wait-”
“It’s the jaws of life, ‘D. I’m sorry.”
Russel tries to get his hands around 2D’s waist to pick him up and carry him off, but the little bugger’s actually resisting, scrambling away and grasping for something to hold on to, flailing his fingers into Murdoc’s eyes and nose before reaching the headboard.
“C’mon- Don’t make this harder than it needs to be-”
Soon enough, 2D’s being pulled by both legs, stretched like a rubber band. Russel actually seems to be straining. The absolute stupidity and insanity of this elates Murdoc so much that he shoots Russel the kind of look you might lose all your teeth for.
“What the hell,” he wheezes. “Will you just…”
“Mr. Paulsen started sobbing when I hit the ground,” 2D continues, suspended in mid-air. “I guess he didn’t know how durable a cartoon can be. That must’ve been pretty scary.”
The bed screeches quite horrifically across the floor, centimeter by centimeter, with 2D’s effortless attachment broken no sooner than gravity itself, until Russel’s back hits the wall. He lets go to stare at his hands, mortified, and 2D crashes down right on top of Murdoc, sending him into another violent coughing fit.
Russel flexes his gloved fingers. “I guess it’s too late, then.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Russ,” 2D says, not even looking at him. “I wouldn’t be able to help me, either.”
“Can you-” Murdoc thumps his chest to try to get some words out. “While you’re all dressed up- Can you get me a pack of-”
The door slams shut behind him.
“Now we’re quarantined,” 2D announces, leaning over him, and Murdoc desperately wishes the plague would kick in a lot quicker, ‘cause 2D looks totally fine while he really does need a smoke. He feels wrong all over.
“Is your stuff kicking in, d’you think? ‘Cause then you won’t be coughing anymore. Or feeling much of anything.”
Murdoc tries and fails to inhale through his nose. It makes a noise too disgusting to transcribe. “Could you do me another solid?”
“Like what?”
“See how long you can keep your mouth shut for me, yeah?”
2D opens his mouth, processes this request for exactly six seconds, and then closes it.
“Good boy,” Murdoc exhales.
And then he immediately gets to hear his inexplicably grating fucking voice again, not three seconds later, not even two: “You mean that like a puppy, right? If it’s like a puppy, it’s ok.”
No violence. No violence. “What I mean is that good boys are quiet while their owner’s brain gets cooked in its goddamn dome.”
“Puppies aren’t quiet for anything, I don’t think. Puppies are actually a really big responsibility, you can’t expect them to-”
“2D, I am begging you-”
“‘Cause otherwise that makes no sense that you would say that, ‘cause I’m no good at being a boy, and, um, and I’m not one, and you know this. So you wouldn’t say stuff like that.”
This stirs some vague recollection of a speech about sweet and savoury breakfast items, and how it’s silly to act like it’s all one or the other, like you’re either a scone with strawberry jam or you’re eggs on toast. Noodle and Russel had applauded politely and Murdoc had pretended to be anywhere else. “Yeah- Yeah- Yeah. Right. Listen: I’ll call you damn near anything if you’ll shut up. What about good girl, you like that?”
“No, that’s- I’m just me. I’m just a good person, I guess.”
Murdoc narrows his eyes at him in disgust and disbelief. “No, you’re not.”
“Um.”
“But you’re no good as a boy, either. I’ll give you that much.”
To be honest, after a lifetime of - not just Murdoc, but a lot of Murdoc, surely - telling him - them - that they’re not a real man, that they’re just a variety of things you can no longer say in the 2020s… Embracing that to say, alright then, I’m not a man, so I’m not a failure of a man, either, is almost admirable. Almost another thing to be envious of, ‘cause Satan knows he never figured out how to handle that one, himself.
“I’ll miss calling you a pretty boy,” he muses.
2D tilts their head and bats their doe-like lashes, quite infuriatingly, without even seeming to notice what they’re doing. “Couldn’t you just call me pretty?”
The frown absolutely seizes his face. “You out of your mind? If you’re not a boy, then it’s not an insult. That's the whole point of it, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think there’s a point. I think it’s just who I am. That’s how the kids at the club explained it, anyway.” They slowly lay down on their side, head propped up on their elbow, face way too fucking close. “Why’s it got to be an insult if you're a boy?”
“I’m too old for this,” he sighs, shrinking away. “I’m too tired and I’m too sick. I’ve got a fever competing with three different downers and my heart doesn’t know whether to race or stop or burst out of my ribcage and splatter its way to freedom. And I’ve half a mind to snort a fucking line just to clear my nasal passageways.”
“I think you’re pretty, sometimes.”
This frown’s even worse. “Like when?”
“When you’re asleep, mostly. Or, uh, playing bass, or crying, or throwing up, or otherwise not talking, you know.”
This information hits his brain like a burst of blinding light. “Mate.” He faces them. “That’s exactly how I feel about you. That’s actually messing with me, that is.”
“Cheers.”
Murdoc stretches out under the blankets and settles into the pillow with a sigh. “Why don’t we both just sit pretty for a second,” he says, afforded no shred of dignity by how incredibly congested he sounds, “and you can watch me sleep. Creep that you are.”
“Sure.” 2D scratches the back of their head. “I mean, no. But sure, yeah.”
The silence doesn’t end up helping at all. It just heightens his awareness of his heartbeat pounding through his head with what should, undoubtedly, be pain, but is instead the sensation of his heart pumping his head full of piping hot porridge. He can feel the stuff accumulate behind his eyes, building up pressure. He can feel his head get heavy and his thoughts get gooey.
It must be spiked with something that’s giving him fevered visions, too. Not dreams, ‘cause that’d mean he gets to sleep. Every time he tries to leave his body behind, he’s suddenly on stage fat-fingering his bass until the audience starts to laugh and boo and jeer. Somehow he never learns from it, either, because every half-awake moment he goes, oh, okay, that wasn’t real, and then he drifts off again and goes, fuck, why is it real this time?
At some point he rolls himself out of bed for a piss break, absolutely dripping with sweat, and gets so nauseous standing up that he drops to his knees and hangs over the toilet bowl for a while, but he doesn’t throw up and feels weirdly impotent about it and just crawls back into the wet and cold sheets while 2D naps like a fucking angel without a care in the world.
It might be his natural stubbornness that’s working against him here, because he keeps ending up in the same place every time, as soon as he closes his eyes, trying again and again and again. He doesn’t get better, but the audience gets quieter. Like they’re bored, at first, and he cusses them out and chews through all the strings on his bass before smashing it on the stage. Like they’re scared, then, and he stands frozen, sweat dripping from his brow. And from then on they’re just quiet. Ten thousand people staring back at him without a single thought or feeling on their faces, not moving an inch, not making a sound, never looking away.
He tells them that they’re a horde of brainless idiot zombies, and he tells them that they’re all he has, and he tells them that he’ll love them so much if only they’ll let him, and he tells them all to kill themselves, and he tells them that he’ll kill himself if they don’t say something, and most of all, he tells them that he’s going to fuck their mothers. And then their fathers for good measure.
Only when he’s absolutely exhausted this scenario of its existential terror does it occur to him to check behind himself. Noodle’s not there, ‘cause he killed her. 2D’s not there, ‘cause he locked him away. And Russel’s looming large, raising one hand towards his neck to put an end to this sad fucking display of desperation.
Murdoc absolutely cannot handle being suddenly thrown back into a reality where 2D is going on about the little tea set they’ve brought. Murdoc is tightly curled up into a ball, shaking with what can’t even be described as rage so much as straight fucking bitter-acidic bile-flavoured hatred. His vision’s swimming when 2D leans down to ask him something, and he thinks about how they’re not even pretty in a way that makes you want to fuck them, they’re pretty in a way that makes you want to crush their skull between your palms and lick whatever remaining bits of brain you find off of your fingers, but he’s not strong enough for that, he’s hardly ever been weaker, and his hand lands on their cheek with not even a slap, but a plap.
They smile and cover his hand with their own. “I said, d’you want some lemon? ‘Cause I don’t think you do, usually, but a shot of vitamin C couldn’t hurt, I think.”
Murdoc starts sobbing. He’s almost instantly hysterical with it.
“Oh, okay. Sorry. No lemon. My fault. Sorry.”
2D starts piling up tissues in front of him to try to save the sheets from the river of snot and tears his body begins to release. “I really need to kill you,” Murdoc whines.
They twiddle their thumbs nervously. “I don’t really need to be killed, I don’t think.”
“I know,” he chokes out. “That’s what makes it so hard.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s the childhood trauma,” he says, sagely. “I never got the chance to develop a healthy attachment style. It’s not my fault.”
“That’s good if your therapist’s doing something for you,” 2D says, pouring themselves a cup, squeeze of lemon and ten sugars. “Mine doesn’t really get me at all.”
Murdoc blows his nose, noisily. Weak and shaky, he reaches for the Biscoff biscuits and starts to gnaw on one like a hamster. Get his blood sugar up.
“It’s so difficult to find someone who specialises in cartoons. And she came recommended by the Coyote, y’know, the Coyote, and at first I wasn’t sure what the Coyote needed therapy for, ‘cause that’s a pretty funny cartoon, but then I thought, well, he is sort of mental, really, doing the same thing over and over again and always getting hurt - that’s the definition of insanity, actually, I think I heard that once. But I think I heard it in a video game, so that’s kind of weird, ‘cause every video game is just doing the same tasks over and over…”
Murdoc is well-practised at tuning this sort of prattle out. At some point he’s going to hear some keyword he can respond to and no one’ll be the wiser.
“...but I don’t want to be healthy if I’m not gonna be happy. And she said, well, you’re gonna be happy, you’re gonna be happy in ways you didn’t know were possible. And I said, but I don’t want to be happy if I’m not gonna be me. And she was like, you know, you can be a whole new version of yourself without him, your life's not set in stone like that, and I just thought of the Coyote, like, I think they call him William now or something, I think he’s doing some office job for Acme QA, and I don’t think he even sees the Roadrunner anymore, but I bet he still thinks of him. And I said, I want to believe that you did something good, but I also think you did something unforgivable. And I still don’t know what Norway has to do with any of this. I’ve been to Norway but I didn’t think it was traumatic enough to give me a Syndrome.”
There it is. “I like their little pickled fish sandwiches.”
“Ew." 2D pauses. "Maybe it was those.”
Murdoc unwraps his tenth Biscoff.
“But I like that she listens. And she’s nice to me.”
It breaks in half between his fingers. “Who?!”
“My therapist. Have you not been…?”
“Oh, soz, mate. Must’ve nodded off for a second.”
2D sighs. “She says I’m a charming young non-gendered person and I have a unique world view.”
“Does she know you’re forty?”
“I think she forgets.”
The door suddenly creaks ajar. Noodle pushes in head-first, eyeing the scene up and down behind her mask, then uses the rest of her body to let the light in and reveal two cups in her hands.
Nobody says anything.
“It’s soup,” she clarifies.
“Oh, brilliant,” 2D says, smiling brightly. “We’ve been subsisting off of stolen Biscoff packets from McDonald’s.”
“And without me you wouldn’t even have that,” Murdoc grumbles.
It’s Pho from that Vietnamese place down the road. Noodle hands one of the cups to 2D. Then she hesitates. “How are you doing so far?”
“We’re having a lovely time. Having a laugh, having a cry.”
“I did try to kill them, but I failed pretty miserably.”
Noodle holds the cup above him. “I will pour this over your crotch,” she says.
"Sorry." Murdoc grins sheepishly. “Bad joke.”
It takes another incredibly uncomfortable Mexican stand-off between the haughty look she's giving him over her raised chin and his mildly constipated isn’t-this-funny attempt at a disarming smile from the bottom of a pile of tear-sodden tissues, but she hands it over.
“Thanks, love,” he tries, and nearly chokes on it.
“Hmm,” she says, and leaves.
2D starts slurping noisily. “I think she wants to love you, really.”
“Shut up,” Murdoc says, voice more than a little fragile. “She spent five years on the run after getting involved in my nonsense. She can do whatever she wants.”
“Can I do whatever I want?”
“No. You’re staying right where the hell you are or I’ll chase you down and run you over a second time.”
2D nods at this with inexplicable satisfaction.
Murdoc can't help ruminating. “Do you, though?”
“What?”
“You know.”
“I don’t.”
“Do you want to…?”
“Do I want to…?”
“...me.”
“You. Oh, do I want to … you. Yeah. Yeah, I want to. More than anything, really.”
“Love was the verb,” Murdoc croaks out. “To be clear.”
“Oh. That, too.”