Fic: Scattered In Her Wake (Lyn-Z gen)
Title: Scattered in Her Wake
Summary: Safe in Battery City, Lyn-Z accidentally hears a Dr. Death Defying broadcast.
Pairing: Lyn-Z and Steve gen
Word count: 2200
Rating: PG
AN: Huge thanks to lielabell for the beta. ♥ ♥ ♥
Lyn-Z stopped taking her pills after she accidentally heard a pirate radio transmission.
Her BL/ind-issued television had gone fuzzy, and she remembered enough about electronics to jerry-rig up a new antennae so she could hear the nightly update. Every night it was the same, but she listened anyway, because the quiet cool drone of the newscaster reassuring her that everything was safe was comforting.
Not a lot of comfort left in the world, so she took what she could get.
So when she fixed up the antennae to the receiver, she almost dropped it and lost the transmission when she heard Dr. Death Defying’s voice introducing himself and sending out some jams.
“Steve,” she whispered, staring at the antennae like it could somehow hear her. And then she promptly clasped her hand over her mouth because it probably could.
She took the antennae out and hid it under her mattress because she knew that it was illegal. The song stayed stuck in her head -- Sonic Youth, she thought the band was, hazy as the memories of music were in her foggy brain -- and that night, staring at the mirror in her small bathroom at her dark hair and her pale face, she very deliberately dropped her nightly dose of pills in the toilet.
They said the Zone sickness would get you if you didn’t take them, but Steve... Steve sounded fine, Steve sounded happy, and he was out there somewhere surrounded by music and bright colors.
She looked around her light grey apartment with its white accents and remembered the chaotic, colorful room of her childhood. Her walls had always been covered in magazine clippings and sketches and paintings, a swirl of color and images and ideas, and for the first time since she’d arrived she missed that.
Already it was easier to remember that chaos wasn’t always a bad thing. That it didn’t have to be the horror that she’d experienced during the Pig Wars. She recalled a book that she’d read for her summer reading list back before everything had gone bad, before the schools had been shut down, about people in a colorless world, who took their pills and didn’t succumb to any human fears or lusts or feelings. She felt sick to her stomach.
She was leaving this shit behind.
*
The longer she went without her meds, the more she realized that she’d fallen into some fucked-up dystopian future. It was getting harder and harder to remember how she’d accepted everything, how easy and clear and perfect life had seemed just a few weeks ago, and she felt a bright burst of joy every time she flushed those pills because she was starting to see what the world really looked like.
It was ugly and it was mean and the simple fact that she could see that now felt like a triumph.
She wanted to leave, but knew that getting out to the Zones wouldn’t be easy on her own, not with the security checkpoints. Besides, she had to have provisions, so she worked slowly to gather what she’d need. It gave her more time to familiarize herself with what was going on out there, what rebellions were taking place and who was doing it.
It didn’t take long for her to realize the Killjoys were just the figureheads in a much larger scheme.
She’d gotten used to the posters and the headlines and the easy acceptance of what she was told, but once her head was clear, it was easy to realize that four people couldn’t do everything that S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W said the Killjoys did.
They were the face of the revolution, and Lyn-Z could remember her history lessons. Rebellions only worked if there was a large network of people helping out, and she was determined to be part of that network.
She was an artist, and she was going to create.
*
Paint and canvas was hard to find, but paper was easy. The newspapers, the magazines, the fliers that were sent out... they became her materials. She cut and rearranged them, turning drab bits of grey and black and white into scenes.
Turned them into faces and emotion and stories.
She made tiny black and white dioramas and shadowboxes showing her dead. She gave her mother and her father and her friends back their faces and pain. She honored their memory.
She made collages bursting with the ideas that the city officials didn’t want anyone remembering.
She filled her apartment with banned ideas and she planned where she was going to leave them as she abandoned the city. She was going to cut all her ties. She’d be wanted by S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W and she’d never be able to return.
She couldn’t wait.
*
When she left, she left a story behind her.
Her apartment was filled with the scraps of her projects, unfinished pieces and scraps of paper and balled-up failed attempts, and it felt more like home than it had since she’d ended up here after everything had gone to shit.
She missed messes, missed things looking lived in rather than spotless and sterile. She was almost sorry to go, now that the apartment finally looked like it was hers.
The art she left behind was her wake. Her funeral. The stark colors match Battery City, but the message was everything they refuse to acknowledge. It was all death and sadness and mourning, all the emotions that they wanted everyone to repress. “Otherwise you can’t function,” they said, but Lyn-Z knew the truth now.
She knew that you couldn’t function if you suppressed all the terrible things that happened. This wasn’t life; this was simply existing from moment to moment.
She didn’t look back when she left her art behind. Left safety and anonymity behind.
Soon it would be her face on those wanted posters.
*
Escaping was easier than she had hoped. The majority of the Draculoids guarding the entrances were focused outward, trying to keep intruders out rather than keeping citizens in. People just don’t leave Battery City. No one wanted to.
She knocked out one of the Dracs once she got far enough out that they were on single patrol. She needed the ray gun and the wheels, and she crept up on him from behind so that she didn’t have to kill him.
She lived in Battery City far too long to think the Draculoids were just monsters.
She drove into the desert in the dark, seeing just the pavement the headlight revealed and, the further she got from Battery City, stars shining through the pollution in the sky. She kept looking back, certain that she would be followed, but the road behind her was dark and empty
She spent the night in an abandoned house. There were still sheets on the bed and photo albums on the bookshelves, but she didn’t look at them. She was carrying around too many of her own dead. She couldn’t add to those ranks.
She had enough provisions to last three weeks, but considerably less water. She had to find people soon to learn how to live in the Zones. The connections she’d forged while still in the city had seemed sufficient, but they seemed far too tenuous and fragile now that she relied on them.
The skyline of Battery City was still visible.
*
The second day of freedom tested her resolve.
The memory of the comforts of the city were fresh in her mind, tempting her with every glimpse of the skyline. She could still go back. She hadn’t hurt anything, hadn’t done anything that couldn’t be explained away by instability caused by forgetting her medication.
Lyn-Z wasn’t a coward. She thought of her art plastered on the walls in downtown Battery City, thought of the people who might have seen her paper-and-glue funeral lining the street before it had been ripped down, and pride settled in her bones.
She made a difference, if only temporarily. She showed others that you could have a voice.
She kept moving forward. She was going to find Dr. Death Defying.
She was going to find Steve.
*
It happened by chance.
She’d run into a few other rebels and had learned useful things, like what water was safe. What supplies could be used. Had mentioned that she was looking for Dr. D, that she had information for him.
She didn’t expect anyone to take her seriously. She was an unknown out here, and being unknown meant she was a possible danger. Everyone treated her warily because they knew she’d been in the city, and people from the city never left willingly.
She looked more like a rebel these days: she’d bleached her hair, something that still gave her a bolt of shock when she caught sight of herself in the side mirror of her bike. She’d covered the white paint in red and yellow and green. Superhero colors. Confident colors that helped her feel more like she could leap into anything and come out alive.
She’d been staying in an old body shop, set back from the highway on a dirt road. It had paint and tools and the owner had left the silver RV he’d obviously lived in parked behind the shop. It wasn’t fancy but it had everything she needed and she loved to sit outside at night and stare at the stars and listen to the strange desert sounds.
She was sitting in an old lawn chair, sketch pad propped up on her knees when he skated up.
“I’m Show Pony,” he said, opening the visor on his helmet and smoothing down his tights. “I hear you’re looking for Dr. Death Defying.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I need to see him.”
*
Lyn-Z had been an art student in New York when the pig bombs started falling.
She’d had a great group of friends, people she thought she’d go to the ends of the earth and back with. Jimmy, who never backed down from a dare. Kitty, who could light up a room with her smile. And Steve, Lyn-Z’s best friend and the person she shared her secrets with, the person she got into the most trouble with.
When the bombs fell, though, things changed. Jimmy left first, leaving their group feeling unhinged and incomplete. His brother’d needed him, and they’d hugged and cried and had all known they wouldn’t see each other again. There was an air of finality back. You never expected to see someone alive again once you’d parted ways.
You usually didn’t.
Kitty drifted off next, recruited to work with a tech firm that was trying to keep the power grid online even through the radiation storms. For a while it had been Steve and Lyn-Z, and then Steve had been drafted to fight and Lyn-Z had finally found safe passage back home.
She didn’t like to think about what had happened once she’d left New York.
She’d ended up in California by chance. The transport vans had all but shoved people in at random, dispersing them anywhere that wasn’t irradiated. Battery City rose like a beacon of hope from the wreckage of the world they’d lost, and for a long time Lyn-Z had been happy.
Then she heard a DJ on a pirate radio station, and she had to leave it behind.
*
She’d listened to him every night once she got to the Zones. Dr. Death Defying was her beacon of hope now, the voice of her past blasting through the present.
*
Steve looked different.
It wasn’t just the years and the robot leg. He’d created something out here, had made a voice for himself in a mute society, and she couldn’t be prouder of him.
She stood in the doorway, grinning from ear to ear, after Show Pony lead her in.
“You’re the little missy who wanted a word?” Steve began, full-on in Dr. Death Defying mode, and then he looked up. He stopped, and Show Pony looked back and forth, asking, “Is she a spy? I worried...”
“Linds,” Steve said, pushing his wheelchair forward. “That can’t be you.”
Lyn-Z dragged a hand through her blonde hair. “I thought the hair might be a bit too Marilyn.”
A smile spread across Steve’s face. “You’re right, you do look ridiculous. Never show your face here again.”
Lyn-Z couldn’t hold back. She launched herself at him, hugging him for all she was worth.
He was real. Everything had changed, but she got her best friend back, even after everything.
The tiny spark of hope she’d felt when she heard that first Dr. Death Defying broadcast flared into something bigger. Something that she didn’t try to suppress.
“I want to help,” she said.
“I could use it,” Steve confessed, still holding on to her like he thought she was going to evaporate.
She didn’t let go. She was home.
Summary: Safe in Battery City, Lyn-Z accidentally hears a Dr. Death Defying broadcast.
Pairing: Lyn-Z and Steve gen
Word count: 2200
Rating: PG
AN: Huge thanks to lielabell for the beta. ♥ ♥ ♥
Lyn-Z stopped taking her pills after she accidentally heard a pirate radio transmission.
Her BL/ind-issued television had gone fuzzy, and she remembered enough about electronics to jerry-rig up a new antennae so she could hear the nightly update. Every night it was the same, but she listened anyway, because the quiet cool drone of the newscaster reassuring her that everything was safe was comforting.
Not a lot of comfort left in the world, so she took what she could get.
So when she fixed up the antennae to the receiver, she almost dropped it and lost the transmission when she heard Dr. Death Defying’s voice introducing himself and sending out some jams.
“Steve,” she whispered, staring at the antennae like it could somehow hear her. And then she promptly clasped her hand over her mouth because it probably could.
She took the antennae out and hid it under her mattress because she knew that it was illegal. The song stayed stuck in her head -- Sonic Youth, she thought the band was, hazy as the memories of music were in her foggy brain -- and that night, staring at the mirror in her small bathroom at her dark hair and her pale face, she very deliberately dropped her nightly dose of pills in the toilet.
They said the Zone sickness would get you if you didn’t take them, but Steve... Steve sounded fine, Steve sounded happy, and he was out there somewhere surrounded by music and bright colors.
She looked around her light grey apartment with its white accents and remembered the chaotic, colorful room of her childhood. Her walls had always been covered in magazine clippings and sketches and paintings, a swirl of color and images and ideas, and for the first time since she’d arrived she missed that.
Already it was easier to remember that chaos wasn’t always a bad thing. That it didn’t have to be the horror that she’d experienced during the Pig Wars. She recalled a book that she’d read for her summer reading list back before everything had gone bad, before the schools had been shut down, about people in a colorless world, who took their pills and didn’t succumb to any human fears or lusts or feelings. She felt sick to her stomach.
She was leaving this shit behind.
*
The longer she went without her meds, the more she realized that she’d fallen into some fucked-up dystopian future. It was getting harder and harder to remember how she’d accepted everything, how easy and clear and perfect life had seemed just a few weeks ago, and she felt a bright burst of joy every time she flushed those pills because she was starting to see what the world really looked like.
It was ugly and it was mean and the simple fact that she could see that now felt like a triumph.
She wanted to leave, but knew that getting out to the Zones wouldn’t be easy on her own, not with the security checkpoints. Besides, she had to have provisions, so she worked slowly to gather what she’d need. It gave her more time to familiarize herself with what was going on out there, what rebellions were taking place and who was doing it.
It didn’t take long for her to realize the Killjoys were just the figureheads in a much larger scheme.
She’d gotten used to the posters and the headlines and the easy acceptance of what she was told, but once her head was clear, it was easy to realize that four people couldn’t do everything that S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W said the Killjoys did.
They were the face of the revolution, and Lyn-Z could remember her history lessons. Rebellions only worked if there was a large network of people helping out, and she was determined to be part of that network.
She was an artist, and she was going to create.
*
Paint and canvas was hard to find, but paper was easy. The newspapers, the magazines, the fliers that were sent out... they became her materials. She cut and rearranged them, turning drab bits of grey and black and white into scenes.
Turned them into faces and emotion and stories.
She made tiny black and white dioramas and shadowboxes showing her dead. She gave her mother and her father and her friends back their faces and pain. She honored their memory.
She made collages bursting with the ideas that the city officials didn’t want anyone remembering.
She filled her apartment with banned ideas and she planned where she was going to leave them as she abandoned the city. She was going to cut all her ties. She’d be wanted by S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W and she’d never be able to return.
She couldn’t wait.
*
When she left, she left a story behind her.
Her apartment was filled with the scraps of her projects, unfinished pieces and scraps of paper and balled-up failed attempts, and it felt more like home than it had since she’d ended up here after everything had gone to shit.
She missed messes, missed things looking lived in rather than spotless and sterile. She was almost sorry to go, now that the apartment finally looked like it was hers.
The art she left behind was her wake. Her funeral. The stark colors match Battery City, but the message was everything they refuse to acknowledge. It was all death and sadness and mourning, all the emotions that they wanted everyone to repress. “Otherwise you can’t function,” they said, but Lyn-Z knew the truth now.
She knew that you couldn’t function if you suppressed all the terrible things that happened. This wasn’t life; this was simply existing from moment to moment.
She didn’t look back when she left her art behind. Left safety and anonymity behind.
Soon it would be her face on those wanted posters.
*
Escaping was easier than she had hoped. The majority of the Draculoids guarding the entrances were focused outward, trying to keep intruders out rather than keeping citizens in. People just don’t leave Battery City. No one wanted to.
She knocked out one of the Dracs once she got far enough out that they were on single patrol. She needed the ray gun and the wheels, and she crept up on him from behind so that she didn’t have to kill him.
She lived in Battery City far too long to think the Draculoids were just monsters.
She drove into the desert in the dark, seeing just the pavement the headlight revealed and, the further she got from Battery City, stars shining through the pollution in the sky. She kept looking back, certain that she would be followed, but the road behind her was dark and empty
She spent the night in an abandoned house. There were still sheets on the bed and photo albums on the bookshelves, but she didn’t look at them. She was carrying around too many of her own dead. She couldn’t add to those ranks.
She had enough provisions to last three weeks, but considerably less water. She had to find people soon to learn how to live in the Zones. The connections she’d forged while still in the city had seemed sufficient, but they seemed far too tenuous and fragile now that she relied on them.
The skyline of Battery City was still visible.
*
The second day of freedom tested her resolve.
The memory of the comforts of the city were fresh in her mind, tempting her with every glimpse of the skyline. She could still go back. She hadn’t hurt anything, hadn’t done anything that couldn’t be explained away by instability caused by forgetting her medication.
Lyn-Z wasn’t a coward. She thought of her art plastered on the walls in downtown Battery City, thought of the people who might have seen her paper-and-glue funeral lining the street before it had been ripped down, and pride settled in her bones.
She made a difference, if only temporarily. She showed others that you could have a voice.
She kept moving forward. She was going to find Dr. Death Defying.
She was going to find Steve.
*
It happened by chance.
She’d run into a few other rebels and had learned useful things, like what water was safe. What supplies could be used. Had mentioned that she was looking for Dr. D, that she had information for him.
She didn’t expect anyone to take her seriously. She was an unknown out here, and being unknown meant she was a possible danger. Everyone treated her warily because they knew she’d been in the city, and people from the city never left willingly.
She looked more like a rebel these days: she’d bleached her hair, something that still gave her a bolt of shock when she caught sight of herself in the side mirror of her bike. She’d covered the white paint in red and yellow and green. Superhero colors. Confident colors that helped her feel more like she could leap into anything and come out alive.
She’d been staying in an old body shop, set back from the highway on a dirt road. It had paint and tools and the owner had left the silver RV he’d obviously lived in parked behind the shop. It wasn’t fancy but it had everything she needed and she loved to sit outside at night and stare at the stars and listen to the strange desert sounds.
She was sitting in an old lawn chair, sketch pad propped up on her knees when he skated up.
“I’m Show Pony,” he said, opening the visor on his helmet and smoothing down his tights. “I hear you’re looking for Dr. Death Defying.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I need to see him.”
*
Lyn-Z had been an art student in New York when the pig bombs started falling.
She’d had a great group of friends, people she thought she’d go to the ends of the earth and back with. Jimmy, who never backed down from a dare. Kitty, who could light up a room with her smile. And Steve, Lyn-Z’s best friend and the person she shared her secrets with, the person she got into the most trouble with.
When the bombs fell, though, things changed. Jimmy left first, leaving their group feeling unhinged and incomplete. His brother’d needed him, and they’d hugged and cried and had all known they wouldn’t see each other again. There was an air of finality back. You never expected to see someone alive again once you’d parted ways.
You usually didn’t.
Kitty drifted off next, recruited to work with a tech firm that was trying to keep the power grid online even through the radiation storms. For a while it had been Steve and Lyn-Z, and then Steve had been drafted to fight and Lyn-Z had finally found safe passage back home.
She didn’t like to think about what had happened once she’d left New York.
She’d ended up in California by chance. The transport vans had all but shoved people in at random, dispersing them anywhere that wasn’t irradiated. Battery City rose like a beacon of hope from the wreckage of the world they’d lost, and for a long time Lyn-Z had been happy.
Then she heard a DJ on a pirate radio station, and she had to leave it behind.
*
She’d listened to him every night once she got to the Zones. Dr. Death Defying was her beacon of hope now, the voice of her past blasting through the present.
*
Steve looked different.
It wasn’t just the years and the robot leg. He’d created something out here, had made a voice for himself in a mute society, and she couldn’t be prouder of him.
She stood in the doorway, grinning from ear to ear, after Show Pony lead her in.
“You’re the little missy who wanted a word?” Steve began, full-on in Dr. Death Defying mode, and then he looked up. He stopped, and Show Pony looked back and forth, asking, “Is she a spy? I worried...”
“Linds,” Steve said, pushing his wheelchair forward. “That can’t be you.”
Lyn-Z dragged a hand through her blonde hair. “I thought the hair might be a bit too Marilyn.”
A smile spread across Steve’s face. “You’re right, you do look ridiculous. Never show your face here again.”
Lyn-Z couldn’t hold back. She launched herself at him, hugging him for all she was worth.
He was real. Everything had changed, but she got her best friend back, even after everything.
The tiny spark of hope she’d felt when she heard that first Dr. Death Defying broadcast flared into something bigger. Something that she didn’t try to suppress.
“I want to help,” she said.
“I could use it,” Steve confessed, still holding on to her like he thought she was going to evaporate.
She didn’t let go. She was home.