Angels From the Neon 3
Part 2
"What the hell?" Mikey’s voice makes Gerard turn, he must have practically run in from the desert, he’s close all of a sudden, his raygun out and pointed straight at the Drac who still hasn’t moved, hands still up in surrender. It - he’s - looking straight at Gerard like he’s made of gasoline, like he’s never seen something more shiny in his life. It’s unsettling.
“Seriously, what the hell are you doing?”
Gerard holds out a hand. This is important and he can see Mikey’s finger tightening on the trigger as he speaks, waiting to get closer to them before he fires Gerard knows, waiting for his shot to count.
“Don’t!” he shouts hoarsely, “Don’t fucking shoot!”
Mikey looks at him as though he’s gone crazy - or crazier at least, but he’s been ‘running with his brother for years now in a crew of two and they trust each other implicitly. His grip loosens on the trigger, but he doesn’t lower the gun.
“What the hell?” Mikey repeats.
Gerard ignores him and stares at the now maskless Drac who still looks like someone’s given him a never-ending tank of fuel and a long straight road to drive on. Wiping away the remains of the tears, Gerard points at him. “Say something.” He demands.
“What?..” Mikey starts, but Gerard interrupts him.
“Say it again.”
The Drac can’t seem to take his eyes off him, but he opens his mouth and repeats in a slightly hesitant voice, “Uh, I think it was ‘Motherfuckin’ ow’?”
Beside him, Mikey’s gun drops a few centimetres and Gerard decides he feels slightly better now there’s nothing pointed at the Drac’s head, which is so totally opposite to his normal way of thinking that he has to stifle a laugh.
“What the HELL?” Mikey says again. It’s starting to get old.
“If you could maybe tell me if you’re gonna shoot me or not, that would be shiny.”
The Drac has to be addressing Mikey since he’s the only one with a gun, but he hasn’t taken his eyes off of Gerard.
“Did that fucking thing just SPEAK!?” That’s Ray, and it’s a testament to how distracted Gerard is that he didn’t hear him walking towards them. Gerard’s usually very good at knowing what other people are doing. It’s saved his life.
“Nobody’s gonna fucking shoot you.” Gerard says loudly. It’s partway between being a warning to Mikey and Ray, who’s now pulled his own gun and a confirmation to himself.
“What the…” Ray sounds disbelieving and Gerard doesn’t blame him. “It’s a fuckin’ Drac, Poison. It just tried to kill you. Ghost the fucker, Kobra.”
Gerard shakes his head because that’s not quite right - The Drac’s hands had been shaking and the raygun at his thigh was still in its holster. “It… He didn’t.” He says almost sounding confident.
“What are you talking about?”
“He didn’t try to kill me.” This time he sounds more like he means it. He pushes himself up to his feet, wiping the desert dust from his hands and knees. The Drac is still watching his every move. It’s odd, Gerard’s the only one of them who hasn’t got a gun trained on him, and in his position he’d be watching for someone with an itchy trigger finger. “He never even drew his weapon.”
At that, the Drac actually GRINS, a huge, wide smile that’s the most stunning and downright WEIRD thing Gerard has seen in his entire lifetime both in Battery City and the zones.
“Exactly!” the Drac says, breathes almost, lowering his hand slightly to motion towards the still-holstered gun. “No shooting here.”
Neither Ray nor Mikey seem to have anything to say to that and remain frozen where they stand. It seems to Gerard that several minutes go by in silence, nobody moving an inch, but then Ray bursts into movement. He takes one giant step forwards with his long legs and presses the barrel of his gun up against the side of the Drac’s head.
“Where the fuck is she?” Ray demands and Gerard never knew that he could sound like that. Logically he knows that Jet Star used to hop zones with Rocket and his crew and made a name for himself while doing it, but he’s only ever known him as the bartender in Jet’s, who distils disgusting spirits in his back room and looks after a little girl because he doesn’t trust anyone else to do it.
The Drac swallows as the raygun pushes his head sideways and Gerard notices a small silver box on the side of his head where the hair has been shaved down to his skull.
“Jet…” he warns, because the Drac is still staring at him and still grinning that big goofy smile as though Mikey and Ray and their loaded guns mean absolutely nothing to him. It makes Gerard want to shake him.
“Where’s who?”
Ray pushes the gun harder against his head. “Grace, you motherfucker. Where’s Grace?”
“I… I don’t know.” He mutters before pausing. “Are you going to kill me now?”
“No-one is killing anyone!” Gerard thinks he’s said it before, but the sentiment bears repeating. “Put the gun down, Jet.”
“Hey…” That’s Mikey, using his ‘you’re being crazier than usual and I’m getting worried about you’ voice. “Dude, tell us what’s going on.”
“I’m not sure.” Gerard lies, “But he didn’t try to ghost me and come on, this isn’t exactly normal behaviour for a Drac.”
“I don’t know what’s normal behaviour for a Drac.” Growls Ray, “because I’ve usually killed them by now.”
The Drac shakes his head. It makes the barrel of the gun click against the metal of the box on his head. “It’s not normal.” He says his voice still low and quiet. “I’M not normal. I’m not gonna hurt any of you...”
“Why not?” asks Gerard. “Why…”
Mikey interrupts him. “We need to go.” He holsters his gun. “We can’t stay here much longer. We need to hop zones or they’ll be all over us.”
“We’re taking him with us.”
“Poison!” Ray sounds shocked. “We’re not hopping with a Drac in the car.”
“It’s not your fucking car, Jet. We’re taking him with us. You can either motor with us or spilt, but he might know something about Grace.”
Gerard and Ray stare at each other for a moment, but Ray looks away first. “If it makes one fucking move I don’t like, I’m ghosting it before either of you can blink.”
“Shiny.”
With his free hand - the one that wasn’t still holding a gun to the side of the Drac’s half-shaved head - Ray grabs him by the back of the collar and forces him to stand.
“I’ll be following on my bike.” He threatens, “And Kobra will have a gun on you the whole ride. Unlike Poison, neither of us will hesitate before shooting you.”
The Drac doesn’t look fazed by the threat in the slightest, but just grins at Gerard again. “Shiny” he repeats. “My name’s Frank.”
“Dracs like you don’t have fucking names.” Ray shakes him and starts hauling him towards Gerard’s car.
“There aren’t any Dracs like me.” The Drac - Frank, Gerard supposes, says before he starts laughing.
***
They take Frank back to the old diner. It’s probably a stupid idea, but they don’t exactly have anywhere else to go. He’s locked up in what used to be the old walk-in freezer and they can still hear him laughing in there from their seats in the main room. Ray pours everyone a drink while Gerard tries to explain what had happened.
“I dunno…” he mutters, hunched over the empty tin can Ray had given him his drink in. “It was strange, like… He was walking towards me and I didn’t have a gun and I was stuck there…” Gerard takes a sip from his can and pulls a face. “What the hell did you make this with, Jet? Gasoline?”
“Focus, Gee…” Mikey sighs.
“Oh yeah… Well, I couldn’t go anywhere but he didn’t pull his gun on me. It almost looked as though he was trying, you know? His hand was kinda shaking but he never touched his weapon…” Gerard tails off, he’s already explained to them how he electrocuted Frank and while both Mikey and Ray looked highly impressed, Gerard had felt oddly sick when he got to the part where Frank had collapsed to his knees. “I just don’t think he’s dangerous.” He continues. “Not anymore, anyway.”
Ray sighs loudly. “Uh-huh… It’s a TRAP, Poison. It’s a totally ridiculous and obvious trap. It’s trying to make you trust it.”
“He.” Gerard says stubbornly. “HE’S trying. He’s called Frank.”
“It’s not called anything, man, unless it’s ‘That Drac We Haven’t Ghosted Yet Because Of Party Poison’s Bleeding Fucking Heart’”
“I just don’t understand why you trust him this much Gee.” Says Mikey quietly. “There has to be a reason.”
Gerard shuts his eyes. He does have a reason but it isn’t one he’s comfortable sharing with Mikey or Ray. He’d always told Mikey he didn’t remember anything about his time in the clinic - he knew he sometimes woke Mikey up with his screaming nightmares but always claimed not to know what he was screaming about… and that wasn’t TOTALLY a lie, but it wasn’t exactly the whole truth either. The fact of the matter was that Gerard had precisely one memory of his time there and that was what had saved Frank’s life.
He opens his eyes again. Mikey looks about as worried as it’s possible for him to look.
“There IS a reason. Can you just please trust me?”
Ray scowls and folded his arms but Mikey sighs. “It’s not you we don’t trust, Gee,” he reaches out to top-up their mismatched glasses and cans with alcohol. “You have to try and see this our way though, I mean, we’ve spent the last few cycles ghosting these things and Ray’s been at it even longer. If you can’t give us a reason to trust him, but say we can’t ghost him then I really don’t know what we’re going to do.”
“I could go and talk to him…” Gerard offers.
“I don’t think you should be anywhere near it.” Ray says shortly. “Mikey can go.”
“Is that alright?”
Gerard closes his eyes again. “Yeah, sure. Just… Just don’t, you know… Hurt him or anything.”
“I won’t, Gee… As long as he doesn’t try anything with me.”
***
Mikey shuts the thick metal door behind him and stares down at the… he hesitates to call him a Drac now, but he’s still not sure he should call him a man. He settles for ‘person’.
Whoever - whatever - he is, he’s sat cross-legged on the floor opposite the door and he’s grinning up at Mikey. It’s unsettling, but at least he’s stopped with the hysterical laughter now.
“Hey.” Mikey says, feeling totally creeped out. “I’m, uh… I’m Kobra.” There’s no way he’s telling him his real name.
“Okay.” It… the Drac…he says simply.
Mikey narrows his eyes. It has to be a trap, he thinks. No-one could sound this shiny. He’s never even heard a ‘runner this laid back and happy and he’s certainly never considered the idea that a Drac could be like this behind their expressionless masks.
“And you say your name’s Frank.” He makes it a statement, not a question.
Frank nods enthusiastically. “It was… Is. It is.” He laughs again, breathless. He sounds like Gerard in one of his manic phases when Mikey’s indulging him because he’s just so grateful that his brother is there alive with him that he doesn’t care that he’s driving too fast, Gerard’s head sticking out of the car window cackling madly as the zones rush past them. Mikey starts to understand why Gerard didn’t shoot him.
Then, just like that, Frank stops laughing; his mouth closes with an audible click as his teeth snap together. He stares at the gun Mikey still has strapped to his thigh.
“I know you’re going to kill me.” He says, not looking up. “And that’s okay, really - I understand, but… but can you just tell me something first? I mean, I won’t fight you anyway but please…” he tails off, finally looking at Mikey.
Mikey almost tells him that he shouldn’t worry, that Gerard won’t let anyone lay a finger on him for whatever fucked up reason he has but he really really wants to know what a Drac who’s not afraid to die wants to ask a Zonerunner as a last request.
“Okay, ask.”
Frank swallows. “The boy.” He says eventually, like he’s not sure Mikey will like his question. “The boy with the red hair… What’s his real name? Is he okay?”
Mikey just stares at him. “THAT’S what you want to know?” He doesn’t know what he’d been expecting him to ask - why they ran maybe, or how they managed to stop taking the little white pills that everyone else in Battery City believed that they needed like air to breathe, but Frank wants to know about Gerard.
Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome.
“Why?”
Frank takes a deep breath. His dark eyes are shining but Mikey realises it’s because he’s HAPPY.
“Because I remember him.” Frank says. “Because I can finally have my own thoughts and I remember him. And God, I thought about him so much…”
It’s like now Frank’s started talking he can’t stop himself, words spill out of his mouth in a rush. “I saw him the first time when he was screaming and I’d never seen anything so alive. I never thought I’d ever see him again, but he came back, you see? He came BACK and I never ever spoke to him but I kept on seeing him and it was like, I dunno, like seeing everything that ever MATTERED right there in front of you but you know you’ll never be able to touch it and it HURTS, but it’s a good kind of hurt because even though you’ll never be a part of it, it’s almost enough just to know that it exists out there somewhere - that there’s at least one person in the world who knows what real means. But then he stopped coming. He had red hair then too, and it was like nothing I’d ever seen before because everything else was white, but he STOPPED coming and I was so scared because it meant that they’d finally found a way of stopping him from being real.
And then it didn’t matter anymore. It didn’t matter for such a long time…” he grabs at the silver box on the side of his head. Mikey thinks he might pull it off, but he doesn’t.
“But I can think now. I can think and I can still remember him and like I said, I don’t care that you’re gonna kill me because he’s alive. He’s alive and he’s real and he has friends and red hair… So please. Just… just tell me his name and that he’s alright and still alive inside and I’ll put my head to your gun barrel willingly and even help you pull the fucking trigger, okay?”
There’s not much Mikey can say to that, so he fumbles for the door handle, pulling it open.
“Gerard.” He whispers when he has his back to Frank. He can’t bring himself to look him in the eyes. “His name’s Gerard and he’s… better.”
Mikey shuts the door.
***
Frank bangs his head on the wall behind him as the metal door closes on the tall skinny man who he had been convinced was going to kill him.
“Gerard.” He whispers to himself. “His name is Gerard and he’s alright.”
Frank has no idea why he’s still alive, why the boy with red hair who was called Gerard hadn’t shot him or why the two others with him hadn’t done it either, but it didn’t matter. Gerard himself could come through the door with hate in his eyes and blast him away where he sat and it STILL wouldn’t matter. Frank would die with a smile on his face.
He’d been trapped in his own mind for so long that he could hardly believe he could still think. Everything was blurry in his head, everything except Gerard and screaming and red. The last clear thought was red too, but it was the red of the wires.
After that, everything slipped away like how he thought dreams would do until there had been an all-encompassing nuclear explosion of pain and he’d opened his eyes of his own accord for the first time in years and stared past the gun barrel at Gerard’s red hair.
For a split second Frank had thought he was finally - thankfully - dead and this was his reward or maybe even his punishment, but then there had been other people and movement and Gerard’s voice that hadn’t been screaming and he’d known that it was all finally over.
***
Gerard’s standing stock still and staring up at the collage on the far wall when Mikey returns. Gerard turns towards him as he enters the main room.
“What happened?” he demands. “What did he say? You didn’t ghost him, did you Mikey?”
Mikey shakes his head and heads over to drop back down in his seat opposite Ray.
“He tell you anything?”
Before answering, Mikey pours himself a drink and knocks it back, hissing at the sting of it. He doesn’t know what he’s going to say yet - hasn’t even worked it all out in his own head - but Ray and Gerard want answers.
“I…” he takes another drink. “I think Gerard’s right.” He says finally because at the moment that’s the only thing he’s sure about. “We shouldn’t kill him.”
Gerard makes an indistinct noise in the back of his throat. Ray nods.
“What else?”
“I think… Maybe, I mean, from what he was saying it sounded like… Like he was in the BL/ind clinic with you, Gee.”
Mikey’s pretty sure he couldn’t have said anything else at that moment that would have had a bigger impact than that does. Ray pushes himself away from the table - away from Gerard as though he’s contagious and Gerard crumples to the floor like someone’s taken a baseball bat to the backs of his knees.
“You were in the CLINIC!?” Ray yells, “You’re from the fucking CITY and you didn’t tell me! What the fuck!?”
Mikey ignores him. Gerard is hunched over on his knees staring blankly at the cracked tiled floor of the diner. His brother’s his priority now. Mikey’s seen him like this before and constantly hopes he’ll never have to again. He kneels down next to him, unsure if he should touch him or not. Sometimes that makes things worse.
“Gee?.. Gerard? You okay?”
It feels like it takes forever, but then Gerard raises his head to stare at him. He’s breathing hard and looks utterly insane, but at least his eyes are focused on him.
“I knew.” Gerard says brokenly. “The moment I saw him, I knew.”
“I thought you didn’t remember anything.”
Gerard shakes his head violently, his hair whipping past his face in a blur of colour. “I remember him.” He says again. It sounds as though he’s cold - like his teeth are chattering but neither of them has ever been that cold in their lives. “It’s him. It has to be him. He’s the only one that… Oh God. His EYES… His EYES, Mikey.” It all rushes out of him like it’s an explanation. “It’s him.”
“Gee?”
“He’s in my dreams, Mikey.” Gerard continues in a hoarse voice, clutching at the front of Mikey’s leather jacket. “It’s all I could see. All I knew. Something was going to happen to me and the only thing I can see are his eyes watching me. They’re sad. They’re always so sad.”
Mikey closes his hands gently over his brother’s wrists. “He said he remembered you screaming.” He doesn’t know if it’s the right thing to say, but Gerard has always needed the truth.
“I probably was. I don’t remember.”
The door to the diner slams shut on its loose hinges. Ray’s walked out. Mikey listens for the roar of his bike engine, but they don’t come. Ray hasn’t left them completely. It’s a good sign but he knows they owe him one hell of an explanation.
***
Mikey pushes open the door to the diner and walks outside. Ray is sitting on the ground in the shadow of his bike, fiddling with the straps on his helmet. Mikey walks over to him.
“You’re still here.”
Ray puts his helmet on the ground next to him. “You said you’d help me find Grace.”
“We will.” Mikey’s sure of that.
“I just…” Ray sighs loudly and looks up at him. “I have no fucking clue what’s going on.” He admits.
Mikey considers his answer. “I don’t think any of us do.”
They’re both silent for a while and then Ray says suddenly, “I knew Poison was crazy, but I didn’t think he was THIS crazy.”
Mikey folds himself up to sit next to Ray in the shade. It’s no use denying it, not to Ray. “Gerard’s been crazy for years.” He agrees. “Probably since before BL/ind tried to make him like that. Whatever they did to him, I have no idea if it made him worse, or made things happen faster or anything. It probably didn’t help but all I know is that he can’t go back.”
Ray nods. “You should have told me.” He says, stretching out his legs. “I… I’d heard rumours. Back in the bar - no-one knew where you’d come from. You know how ‘runners talk and how the crews shake up, but no-one had ever heard you ‘running with anyone but each other…” he takes a deep breath, “I didn’t really believe it, you know, just thought you’d both been keeping out of the way or some shit. I dunno…” he glances at Mikey. “You really shoulda fuckin’ told me.” He repeats. “I thought we were crew.”
Mikey smiles bitterly. “We’re crew. We’re fuckin’ solid.” He says, firmly. “And no offence, I guess, but we didn’t really advertise it. ‘Hey, we ran from Battery City you guys! Gee’s crazy and BL/ind might’ve brainwashed him or something but he says he doesn’t remember any of it so we don’t really know!’ Yeah, can’t see that going over too well.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone from Battery City before.” Ray says honestly.
“I don’t think many people escape.” Mikey replies. “Gee wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t stopped him from taking his pills I think.” He waves his hand back towards the diner. “It’s kinda all my fault he’s like that.”
Ray frowns, “What happened?” he asks, “I mean, if you want to tell me. And what about that Drac back there? What’s he got to do with all this?”
Mikey bites his lip. “They give you pills.” He says finally. “I mean, you’re not given a chance to NOT take them and well, everybody takes them - your family, friends, everybody you know. They… they keep you, I dunno, under control maybe? Like things don’t touch you at all. You’re not happy, you’re not sad, or angry or anything. It’s like being in a fog, you understand?”
“I think so.”
“Well, I guess we were always a little different, me and Gerard. Not really so much that BL/ind would take too much notice, but then Gerard turned eighteen and he just… well, we’d heard rumours. A friend of a friend knew someone who took too many pills at once and they’d died or something. I guess Gerard had had enough.”
“Okay.” Ray says, thoughtfully. “He didn’t die though.”
Mikey smiles. “He threw a chair at the holo-projector at school. He went nuts. I guess it was pretty interesting to watch, but then BL/ind came and took him away.”
“What did you do?”
“To be honest? At first, not much. Then I started thinking that if all that had happened because Gee had taken too many, I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t take them at all. It wasn’t a rebellion at all. It was scientific enquiry…It was like waking up.”
Ray blinks. “Okay, so you stopped and Gerard went to the clinic. Why are you blaming yourself for this?”
“Because when he came back I stopped him from taking his pills too and they kept sending him back there. Whatever they kept doing messed him up more and more and he couldn’t seem to hang on to acting normal anymore.” He takes a deep breath. “I don’t regret doing it, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling guilty.”
“You did the right thing.” Ray says decisively. “You’re both away from there, and no-one in the zones cares that he’s…” he makes a hand gesture that implies ‘fucking insane’. “Where does that Drac fit in though?”
***
The moment Mikey had made the connection between Frank and the clinic it was like a download directly into Gerard’s brain. Doors opened to the memories of a room of lights and the sickening sweetness of needleslide under his skin. The memories had sent him to his knees on the ripped floor of the diner, tethered only by his connection to Frank.
After he took all his pills, he wasn’t sure what was going to happen. He’d heard the stories; they’d all heard the stories, whispered in monotone voices about the people who’d died because they didn’t take their pills seriously enough. It had been said as though it was a terrible thing to happen and even worse to want for yourself, but all Gerard could think about was just how fucking tired he was because the mess in his head seemed to be stopping him from even trying to think about anything else.
Later on, once Mikey had helped him to straighten out he’d been almost overcome with guilt at what he’d done. Without the drugs in his system he’d realised just how fucked up he’d been, not even sparing a thought for his brother as he downed the meds totally intent on checking out for good.
He also hadn’t felt comforted by the idea that had Mikey not stopped taking his own pills he probably wouldn’t have cared or even noticed what Gerard had tried to do either.
After he’d swallowed them all and hadn’t dropped dead immediately, he’d simply just gotten on with his day, stumbling down the street on the way to school next to Mikey with the fog in his mind steadily growing denser and denser until it felt as though something inside him would snap with the pressure.
The schoolroom was white, plain white, with only the droning holo-projector’s eerie bluish glow providing any hint of colour. Halfway through the lesson, Gerard had blinked. Then he had blinked again and stood up. No-one had really looked at him until he had picked up his now vacant chair and thrown it with total calm and a surprising degree of accuracy through the glass partition separating the projector from the rest of the room. Glass tinkled for a moment, hitting the white tiled floor.
Gerard smiled his first genuine smile as the alarms started to ring.
He spent the three and a half minutes it took for the BL/ind patrol to arrive screaming at the impassive faces of the rest of his class.
It was like a switch had been blown in his mind. The spots of blood on his hands from the flying glass were like magic. The colour chanting in his mind, telling him that life wasn’t only whitegreyblack and that there could be noise and movement and pain and that things would break with a satisfying smash if he could only just find the weak points.
He was still screaming when they pulled him through the black glass doors of the clinic but he wasn’t afraid, not yet. There was no room in his head for fear. He screamed because maybe he and his voice were the only things that existed and he wasn’t entirely sure about himself.
He screamed until he felt the cold slip of a needle in his arm and everything went grey.
They’d bandaged his hands by the time he woke up in a featureless room. He wanted to rip them off in case he was still bleeding but he couldn’t move, strapped to the metal bars of his bed. Eventually someone had come for him - a bald man flanked by men in masks who grimaced down at him and told him how lucky he had been, that they had gotten to him in time before he had done any real lasting damage to himself.
Gerard hadn’t replied. He didn’t think he wanted to know what would happen if he told the man that they’d been far, far too late.
It was all going to be alright the man said as Gerard realised he was trying to smile at him. They were going to fix him so that he never had to feel like this ever again.
Gerard felt afraid then for the very first time.
When they finally pushed him out of the clinic, Gerard was practically vibrating. They’d given him his last dose hours ago, and promised him that the little bottles of all his new pills would be safe at home waiting for him to take and let them drag him back down into their welcoming fog. He almost ran home.
When Mikey had said ‘They’re gone’ he’d cried.
Mikey had locked him in his room until he came out of it on the other side, when he’d lifted his head from his knees and looked around at his bedroom in a whole new way. He’d said ‘Oh’, because everything looked exactly the same but also completely different. The room looked exactly the same as it always had done, grey walls, plain bed, one dresser and one wardrobe. Gerard had never really thought about his room before, it was just where he slept, but on opening his eyes that morning he suddenly realised he hated it. Loathed it. It felt amazing.
Mikey had unfolded himself from his position out in the hallway and pushed the door open; whispering his name like Gerard might have forgotten it sometime during the night.
He’d explained what had happened, about the pills neither of them really needed and when he’d asked Gerard about what had gone on in the clinic, Gerard’s mind was a total blank.
Mikey had been good at keeping his emotions under cover. When Gerard knew what the pills had suppressed, it scared him sometimes to see his brother’s blank stare and hear his monotone voice when they were out in public. Behind closed doors though, Mikey got angry. So angry that Gerard deliberately picked fights with him just to give Mikey something to give his anger a focus. He rarely fought back as Mikey punched and kicked; instead he smiled and waited for the pain that meant he’d be able to see his own blood again.
So Mikey had been better at pretending and Gerard had managed to keep his thoughts to himself for almost two months before the holo-projector had started a lesson about how safe Battery City was and how any innocent citizens who ventured out into the zones would quickly die from a combination of radiation, exposure and a variety of slavering, dead-eyed mutant zombie cannibals. Gerard had seen it countless times before but this time as he glanced around the classroom he caught himself wondering if the dead-eyed zombies in the zones could be any worse than the ones in Battery City itself. It made him laugh, starting as a faint chuckle hidden behind his hand and disguised as a cough it quickly gained momentum before bursting out of him in a hysterical explosion of sound.
It was the first time he had seen him. Without the influence of the pills he noticed the face at the window immediately, dark hair and eyes out of place in the white corridor watching him stumble past. The eyes looked sad, like something terrible had happened or was about to happen, but Gerard couldn’t remember what was at the end of the corridor and later on, he couldn’t even remember that anyone had ever been sad at all.
Every time Gerard slipped and laughed or cried or shouted or sliced open his fingertips to see the blood welling up to paint his skin in glorious colour, the eyes watched him through the tiny window. And every time Gerard jerked awake in his bed at home - wherever that was at the time - a scream dying on his lips, the dark eyes were the only image that remained clear even though he could never remember having seen them.
***
The moment Mikey leaves to talk to Ray, Gerard half-scrambles, half-crawls through the building to the back room.
The old freezer doesn’t have a lock, just a giant lever that held the door closed and impossible to open from the inside and Gerard wrenches it down and out away from the door, hearing the clunk of the bolts being thrown.
Frank is sitting against the wall opposite, his knees are drawn up to his chest, the white fabric of his trousers are stained a dirty yellow from the wet concrete and dust. He looks up when Gerard flings the door open and it feels to Gerard that all the breath has left his body in one painful gasp.
Frank stares at him for a moment, but it feels like whole lifetimes to Gerard. There’s a nervous smile on his face.
“I remember.” Gerard says quietly, swallowing past the lump in his throat. “I remember you.”
Frank’s tentative smile transforms into his brilliant grin again, splitting his face like the rising sun. “Gerard.” Frank says his name like a prayer. “I remember you too.”
For Gerard, the emotion feels completely new. He thought he’d experienced them all during his time in the zones. This one feels like a combination of all of them.
He takes one shaking step towards Frank. He’s still in the white uniform of the Dracs, but he’d dropped the mask back at the store. Gerard wonders if there’s a change of clothes somewhere around in the diner.
Frank is beaming up at him with his head on one side like he wants to ask Gerard a question, and it draws Gerard’s attention to his half-shaved head and the small silver box.
Frank exhales and the tension breaks. Gerard stumbles the last few steps to collapse in front of him, his hands already reaching out, desperate to touch Frank and reassure himself that he’s really there. He ends up with one hand in a death grip around one of Frank’s wrists and the other cupped to his face staring deep into his eyes. “It’s really you, isn’t it?” he asks, but it’s not really a question at all.
Frank seems to know what he means because he doesn’t reply to it. He just reaches up with his free hand to touch a strand of Gerard’s hair. “Oh…” he sighs happily, threading his fingers through it. “Sometimes I thought I dreamt you.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Part 4
"What the hell?" Mikey’s voice makes Gerard turn, he must have practically run in from the desert, he’s close all of a sudden, his raygun out and pointed straight at the Drac who still hasn’t moved, hands still up in surrender. It - he’s - looking straight at Gerard like he’s made of gasoline, like he’s never seen something more shiny in his life. It’s unsettling.
“Seriously, what the hell are you doing?”
Gerard holds out a hand. This is important and he can see Mikey’s finger tightening on the trigger as he speaks, waiting to get closer to them before he fires Gerard knows, waiting for his shot to count.
“Don’t!” he shouts hoarsely, “Don’t fucking shoot!”
Mikey looks at him as though he’s gone crazy - or crazier at least, but he’s been ‘running with his brother for years now in a crew of two and they trust each other implicitly. His grip loosens on the trigger, but he doesn’t lower the gun.
“What the hell?” Mikey repeats.
Gerard ignores him and stares at the now maskless Drac who still looks like someone’s given him a never-ending tank of fuel and a long straight road to drive on. Wiping away the remains of the tears, Gerard points at him. “Say something.” He demands.
“What?..” Mikey starts, but Gerard interrupts him.
“Say it again.”
The Drac can’t seem to take his eyes off him, but he opens his mouth and repeats in a slightly hesitant voice, “Uh, I think it was ‘Motherfuckin’ ow’?”
Beside him, Mikey’s gun drops a few centimetres and Gerard decides he feels slightly better now there’s nothing pointed at the Drac’s head, which is so totally opposite to his normal way of thinking that he has to stifle a laugh.
“What the HELL?” Mikey says again. It’s starting to get old.
“If you could maybe tell me if you’re gonna shoot me or not, that would be shiny.”
The Drac has to be addressing Mikey since he’s the only one with a gun, but he hasn’t taken his eyes off of Gerard.
“Did that fucking thing just SPEAK!?” That’s Ray, and it’s a testament to how distracted Gerard is that he didn’t hear him walking towards them. Gerard’s usually very good at knowing what other people are doing. It’s saved his life.
“Nobody’s gonna fucking shoot you.” Gerard says loudly. It’s partway between being a warning to Mikey and Ray, who’s now pulled his own gun and a confirmation to himself.
“What the…” Ray sounds disbelieving and Gerard doesn’t blame him. “It’s a fuckin’ Drac, Poison. It just tried to kill you. Ghost the fucker, Kobra.”
Gerard shakes his head because that’s not quite right - The Drac’s hands had been shaking and the raygun at his thigh was still in its holster. “It… He didn’t.” He says almost sounding confident.
“What are you talking about?”
“He didn’t try to kill me.” This time he sounds more like he means it. He pushes himself up to his feet, wiping the desert dust from his hands and knees. The Drac is still watching his every move. It’s odd, Gerard’s the only one of them who hasn’t got a gun trained on him, and in his position he’d be watching for someone with an itchy trigger finger. “He never even drew his weapon.”
At that, the Drac actually GRINS, a huge, wide smile that’s the most stunning and downright WEIRD thing Gerard has seen in his entire lifetime both in Battery City and the zones.
“Exactly!” the Drac says, breathes almost, lowering his hand slightly to motion towards the still-holstered gun. “No shooting here.”
Neither Ray nor Mikey seem to have anything to say to that and remain frozen where they stand. It seems to Gerard that several minutes go by in silence, nobody moving an inch, but then Ray bursts into movement. He takes one giant step forwards with his long legs and presses the barrel of his gun up against the side of the Drac’s head.
“Where the fuck is she?” Ray demands and Gerard never knew that he could sound like that. Logically he knows that Jet Star used to hop zones with Rocket and his crew and made a name for himself while doing it, but he’s only ever known him as the bartender in Jet’s, who distils disgusting spirits in his back room and looks after a little girl because he doesn’t trust anyone else to do it.
The Drac swallows as the raygun pushes his head sideways and Gerard notices a small silver box on the side of his head where the hair has been shaved down to his skull.
“Jet…” he warns, because the Drac is still staring at him and still grinning that big goofy smile as though Mikey and Ray and their loaded guns mean absolutely nothing to him. It makes Gerard want to shake him.
“Where’s who?”
Ray pushes the gun harder against his head. “Grace, you motherfucker. Where’s Grace?”
“I… I don’t know.” He mutters before pausing. “Are you going to kill me now?”
“No-one is killing anyone!” Gerard thinks he’s said it before, but the sentiment bears repeating. “Put the gun down, Jet.”
“Hey…” That’s Mikey, using his ‘you’re being crazier than usual and I’m getting worried about you’ voice. “Dude, tell us what’s going on.”
“I’m not sure.” Gerard lies, “But he didn’t try to ghost me and come on, this isn’t exactly normal behaviour for a Drac.”
“I don’t know what’s normal behaviour for a Drac.” Growls Ray, “because I’ve usually killed them by now.”
The Drac shakes his head. It makes the barrel of the gun click against the metal of the box on his head. “It’s not normal.” He says his voice still low and quiet. “I’M not normal. I’m not gonna hurt any of you...”
“Why not?” asks Gerard. “Why…”
Mikey interrupts him. “We need to go.” He holsters his gun. “We can’t stay here much longer. We need to hop zones or they’ll be all over us.”
“We’re taking him with us.”
“Poison!” Ray sounds shocked. “We’re not hopping with a Drac in the car.”
“It’s not your fucking car, Jet. We’re taking him with us. You can either motor with us or spilt, but he might know something about Grace.”
Gerard and Ray stare at each other for a moment, but Ray looks away first. “If it makes one fucking move I don’t like, I’m ghosting it before either of you can blink.”
“Shiny.”
With his free hand - the one that wasn’t still holding a gun to the side of the Drac’s half-shaved head - Ray grabs him by the back of the collar and forces him to stand.
“I’ll be following on my bike.” He threatens, “And Kobra will have a gun on you the whole ride. Unlike Poison, neither of us will hesitate before shooting you.”
The Drac doesn’t look fazed by the threat in the slightest, but just grins at Gerard again. “Shiny” he repeats. “My name’s Frank.”
“Dracs like you don’t have fucking names.” Ray shakes him and starts hauling him towards Gerard’s car.
“There aren’t any Dracs like me.” The Drac - Frank, Gerard supposes, says before he starts laughing.
***
They take Frank back to the old diner. It’s probably a stupid idea, but they don’t exactly have anywhere else to go. He’s locked up in what used to be the old walk-in freezer and they can still hear him laughing in there from their seats in the main room. Ray pours everyone a drink while Gerard tries to explain what had happened.
“I dunno…” he mutters, hunched over the empty tin can Ray had given him his drink in. “It was strange, like… He was walking towards me and I didn’t have a gun and I was stuck there…” Gerard takes a sip from his can and pulls a face. “What the hell did you make this with, Jet? Gasoline?”
“Focus, Gee…” Mikey sighs.
“Oh yeah… Well, I couldn’t go anywhere but he didn’t pull his gun on me. It almost looked as though he was trying, you know? His hand was kinda shaking but he never touched his weapon…” Gerard tails off, he’s already explained to them how he electrocuted Frank and while both Mikey and Ray looked highly impressed, Gerard had felt oddly sick when he got to the part where Frank had collapsed to his knees. “I just don’t think he’s dangerous.” He continues. “Not anymore, anyway.”
Ray sighs loudly. “Uh-huh… It’s a TRAP, Poison. It’s a totally ridiculous and obvious trap. It’s trying to make you trust it.”
“He.” Gerard says stubbornly. “HE’S trying. He’s called Frank.”
“It’s not called anything, man, unless it’s ‘That Drac We Haven’t Ghosted Yet Because Of Party Poison’s Bleeding Fucking Heart’”
“I just don’t understand why you trust him this much Gee.” Says Mikey quietly. “There has to be a reason.”
Gerard shuts his eyes. He does have a reason but it isn’t one he’s comfortable sharing with Mikey or Ray. He’d always told Mikey he didn’t remember anything about his time in the clinic - he knew he sometimes woke Mikey up with his screaming nightmares but always claimed not to know what he was screaming about… and that wasn’t TOTALLY a lie, but it wasn’t exactly the whole truth either. The fact of the matter was that Gerard had precisely one memory of his time there and that was what had saved Frank’s life.
He opens his eyes again. Mikey looks about as worried as it’s possible for him to look.
“There IS a reason. Can you just please trust me?”
Ray scowls and folded his arms but Mikey sighs. “It’s not you we don’t trust, Gee,” he reaches out to top-up their mismatched glasses and cans with alcohol. “You have to try and see this our way though, I mean, we’ve spent the last few cycles ghosting these things and Ray’s been at it even longer. If you can’t give us a reason to trust him, but say we can’t ghost him then I really don’t know what we’re going to do.”
“I could go and talk to him…” Gerard offers.
“I don’t think you should be anywhere near it.” Ray says shortly. “Mikey can go.”
“Is that alright?”
Gerard closes his eyes again. “Yeah, sure. Just… Just don’t, you know… Hurt him or anything.”
“I won’t, Gee… As long as he doesn’t try anything with me.”
***
Mikey shuts the thick metal door behind him and stares down at the… he hesitates to call him a Drac now, but he’s still not sure he should call him a man. He settles for ‘person’.
Whoever - whatever - he is, he’s sat cross-legged on the floor opposite the door and he’s grinning up at Mikey. It’s unsettling, but at least he’s stopped with the hysterical laughter now.
“Hey.” Mikey says, feeling totally creeped out. “I’m, uh… I’m Kobra.” There’s no way he’s telling him his real name.
“Okay.” It… the Drac…he says simply.
Mikey narrows his eyes. It has to be a trap, he thinks. No-one could sound this shiny. He’s never even heard a ‘runner this laid back and happy and he’s certainly never considered the idea that a Drac could be like this behind their expressionless masks.
“And you say your name’s Frank.” He makes it a statement, not a question.
Frank nods enthusiastically. “It was… Is. It is.” He laughs again, breathless. He sounds like Gerard in one of his manic phases when Mikey’s indulging him because he’s just so grateful that his brother is there alive with him that he doesn’t care that he’s driving too fast, Gerard’s head sticking out of the car window cackling madly as the zones rush past them. Mikey starts to understand why Gerard didn’t shoot him.
Then, just like that, Frank stops laughing; his mouth closes with an audible click as his teeth snap together. He stares at the gun Mikey still has strapped to his thigh.
“I know you’re going to kill me.” He says, not looking up. “And that’s okay, really - I understand, but… but can you just tell me something first? I mean, I won’t fight you anyway but please…” he tails off, finally looking at Mikey.
Mikey almost tells him that he shouldn’t worry, that Gerard won’t let anyone lay a finger on him for whatever fucked up reason he has but he really really wants to know what a Drac who’s not afraid to die wants to ask a Zonerunner as a last request.
“Okay, ask.”
Frank swallows. “The boy.” He says eventually, like he’s not sure Mikey will like his question. “The boy with the red hair… What’s his real name? Is he okay?”
Mikey just stares at him. “THAT’S what you want to know?” He doesn’t know what he’d been expecting him to ask - why they ran maybe, or how they managed to stop taking the little white pills that everyone else in Battery City believed that they needed like air to breathe, but Frank wants to know about Gerard.
Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome.
“Why?”
Frank takes a deep breath. His dark eyes are shining but Mikey realises it’s because he’s HAPPY.
“Because I remember him.” Frank says. “Because I can finally have my own thoughts and I remember him. And God, I thought about him so much…”
It’s like now Frank’s started talking he can’t stop himself, words spill out of his mouth in a rush. “I saw him the first time when he was screaming and I’d never seen anything so alive. I never thought I’d ever see him again, but he came back, you see? He came BACK and I never ever spoke to him but I kept on seeing him and it was like, I dunno, like seeing everything that ever MATTERED right there in front of you but you know you’ll never be able to touch it and it HURTS, but it’s a good kind of hurt because even though you’ll never be a part of it, it’s almost enough just to know that it exists out there somewhere - that there’s at least one person in the world who knows what real means. But then he stopped coming. He had red hair then too, and it was like nothing I’d ever seen before because everything else was white, but he STOPPED coming and I was so scared because it meant that they’d finally found a way of stopping him from being real.
And then it didn’t matter anymore. It didn’t matter for such a long time…” he grabs at the silver box on the side of his head. Mikey thinks he might pull it off, but he doesn’t.
“But I can think now. I can think and I can still remember him and like I said, I don’t care that you’re gonna kill me because he’s alive. He’s alive and he’s real and he has friends and red hair… So please. Just… just tell me his name and that he’s alright and still alive inside and I’ll put my head to your gun barrel willingly and even help you pull the fucking trigger, okay?”
There’s not much Mikey can say to that, so he fumbles for the door handle, pulling it open.
“Gerard.” He whispers when he has his back to Frank. He can’t bring himself to look him in the eyes. “His name’s Gerard and he’s… better.”
Mikey shuts the door.
***
Frank bangs his head on the wall behind him as the metal door closes on the tall skinny man who he had been convinced was going to kill him.
“Gerard.” He whispers to himself. “His name is Gerard and he’s alright.”
Frank has no idea why he’s still alive, why the boy with red hair who was called Gerard hadn’t shot him or why the two others with him hadn’t done it either, but it didn’t matter. Gerard himself could come through the door with hate in his eyes and blast him away where he sat and it STILL wouldn’t matter. Frank would die with a smile on his face.
He’d been trapped in his own mind for so long that he could hardly believe he could still think. Everything was blurry in his head, everything except Gerard and screaming and red. The last clear thought was red too, but it was the red of the wires.
After that, everything slipped away like how he thought dreams would do until there had been an all-encompassing nuclear explosion of pain and he’d opened his eyes of his own accord for the first time in years and stared past the gun barrel at Gerard’s red hair.
For a split second Frank had thought he was finally - thankfully - dead and this was his reward or maybe even his punishment, but then there had been other people and movement and Gerard’s voice that hadn’t been screaming and he’d known that it was all finally over.
***
Gerard’s standing stock still and staring up at the collage on the far wall when Mikey returns. Gerard turns towards him as he enters the main room.
“What happened?” he demands. “What did he say? You didn’t ghost him, did you Mikey?”
Mikey shakes his head and heads over to drop back down in his seat opposite Ray.
“He tell you anything?”
Before answering, Mikey pours himself a drink and knocks it back, hissing at the sting of it. He doesn’t know what he’s going to say yet - hasn’t even worked it all out in his own head - but Ray and Gerard want answers.
“I…” he takes another drink. “I think Gerard’s right.” He says finally because at the moment that’s the only thing he’s sure about. “We shouldn’t kill him.”
Gerard makes an indistinct noise in the back of his throat. Ray nods.
“What else?”
“I think… Maybe, I mean, from what he was saying it sounded like… Like he was in the BL/ind clinic with you, Gee.”
Mikey’s pretty sure he couldn’t have said anything else at that moment that would have had a bigger impact than that does. Ray pushes himself away from the table - away from Gerard as though he’s contagious and Gerard crumples to the floor like someone’s taken a baseball bat to the backs of his knees.
“You were in the CLINIC!?” Ray yells, “You’re from the fucking CITY and you didn’t tell me! What the fuck!?”
Mikey ignores him. Gerard is hunched over on his knees staring blankly at the cracked tiled floor of the diner. His brother’s his priority now. Mikey’s seen him like this before and constantly hopes he’ll never have to again. He kneels down next to him, unsure if he should touch him or not. Sometimes that makes things worse.
“Gee?.. Gerard? You okay?”
It feels like it takes forever, but then Gerard raises his head to stare at him. He’s breathing hard and looks utterly insane, but at least his eyes are focused on him.
“I knew.” Gerard says brokenly. “The moment I saw him, I knew.”
“I thought you didn’t remember anything.”
Gerard shakes his head violently, his hair whipping past his face in a blur of colour. “I remember him.” He says again. It sounds as though he’s cold - like his teeth are chattering but neither of them has ever been that cold in their lives. “It’s him. It has to be him. He’s the only one that… Oh God. His EYES… His EYES, Mikey.” It all rushes out of him like it’s an explanation. “It’s him.”
“Gee?”
“He’s in my dreams, Mikey.” Gerard continues in a hoarse voice, clutching at the front of Mikey’s leather jacket. “It’s all I could see. All I knew. Something was going to happen to me and the only thing I can see are his eyes watching me. They’re sad. They’re always so sad.”
Mikey closes his hands gently over his brother’s wrists. “He said he remembered you screaming.” He doesn’t know if it’s the right thing to say, but Gerard has always needed the truth.
“I probably was. I don’t remember.”
The door to the diner slams shut on its loose hinges. Ray’s walked out. Mikey listens for the roar of his bike engine, but they don’t come. Ray hasn’t left them completely. It’s a good sign but he knows they owe him one hell of an explanation.
***
Mikey pushes open the door to the diner and walks outside. Ray is sitting on the ground in the shadow of his bike, fiddling with the straps on his helmet. Mikey walks over to him.
“You’re still here.”
Ray puts his helmet on the ground next to him. “You said you’d help me find Grace.”
“We will.” Mikey’s sure of that.
“I just…” Ray sighs loudly and looks up at him. “I have no fucking clue what’s going on.” He admits.
Mikey considers his answer. “I don’t think any of us do.”
They’re both silent for a while and then Ray says suddenly, “I knew Poison was crazy, but I didn’t think he was THIS crazy.”
Mikey folds himself up to sit next to Ray in the shade. It’s no use denying it, not to Ray. “Gerard’s been crazy for years.” He agrees. “Probably since before BL/ind tried to make him like that. Whatever they did to him, I have no idea if it made him worse, or made things happen faster or anything. It probably didn’t help but all I know is that he can’t go back.”
Ray nods. “You should have told me.” He says, stretching out his legs. “I… I’d heard rumours. Back in the bar - no-one knew where you’d come from. You know how ‘runners talk and how the crews shake up, but no-one had ever heard you ‘running with anyone but each other…” he takes a deep breath, “I didn’t really believe it, you know, just thought you’d both been keeping out of the way or some shit. I dunno…” he glances at Mikey. “You really shoulda fuckin’ told me.” He repeats. “I thought we were crew.”
Mikey smiles bitterly. “We’re crew. We’re fuckin’ solid.” He says, firmly. “And no offence, I guess, but we didn’t really advertise it. ‘Hey, we ran from Battery City you guys! Gee’s crazy and BL/ind might’ve brainwashed him or something but he says he doesn’t remember any of it so we don’t really know!’ Yeah, can’t see that going over too well.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone from Battery City before.” Ray says honestly.
“I don’t think many people escape.” Mikey replies. “Gee wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t stopped him from taking his pills I think.” He waves his hand back towards the diner. “It’s kinda all my fault he’s like that.”
Ray frowns, “What happened?” he asks, “I mean, if you want to tell me. And what about that Drac back there? What’s he got to do with all this?”
Mikey bites his lip. “They give you pills.” He says finally. “I mean, you’re not given a chance to NOT take them and well, everybody takes them - your family, friends, everybody you know. They… they keep you, I dunno, under control maybe? Like things don’t touch you at all. You’re not happy, you’re not sad, or angry or anything. It’s like being in a fog, you understand?”
“I think so.”
“Well, I guess we were always a little different, me and Gerard. Not really so much that BL/ind would take too much notice, but then Gerard turned eighteen and he just… well, we’d heard rumours. A friend of a friend knew someone who took too many pills at once and they’d died or something. I guess Gerard had had enough.”
“Okay.” Ray says, thoughtfully. “He didn’t die though.”
Mikey smiles. “He threw a chair at the holo-projector at school. He went nuts. I guess it was pretty interesting to watch, but then BL/ind came and took him away.”
“What did you do?”
“To be honest? At first, not much. Then I started thinking that if all that had happened because Gee had taken too many, I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t take them at all. It wasn’t a rebellion at all. It was scientific enquiry…It was like waking up.”
Ray blinks. “Okay, so you stopped and Gerard went to the clinic. Why are you blaming yourself for this?”
“Because when he came back I stopped him from taking his pills too and they kept sending him back there. Whatever they kept doing messed him up more and more and he couldn’t seem to hang on to acting normal anymore.” He takes a deep breath. “I don’t regret doing it, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling guilty.”
“You did the right thing.” Ray says decisively. “You’re both away from there, and no-one in the zones cares that he’s…” he makes a hand gesture that implies ‘fucking insane’. “Where does that Drac fit in though?”
***
The moment Mikey had made the connection between Frank and the clinic it was like a download directly into Gerard’s brain. Doors opened to the memories of a room of lights and the sickening sweetness of needleslide under his skin. The memories had sent him to his knees on the ripped floor of the diner, tethered only by his connection to Frank.
After he took all his pills, he wasn’t sure what was going to happen. He’d heard the stories; they’d all heard the stories, whispered in monotone voices about the people who’d died because they didn’t take their pills seriously enough. It had been said as though it was a terrible thing to happen and even worse to want for yourself, but all Gerard could think about was just how fucking tired he was because the mess in his head seemed to be stopping him from even trying to think about anything else.
Later on, once Mikey had helped him to straighten out he’d been almost overcome with guilt at what he’d done. Without the drugs in his system he’d realised just how fucked up he’d been, not even sparing a thought for his brother as he downed the meds totally intent on checking out for good.
He also hadn’t felt comforted by the idea that had Mikey not stopped taking his own pills he probably wouldn’t have cared or even noticed what Gerard had tried to do either.
After he’d swallowed them all and hadn’t dropped dead immediately, he’d simply just gotten on with his day, stumbling down the street on the way to school next to Mikey with the fog in his mind steadily growing denser and denser until it felt as though something inside him would snap with the pressure.
The schoolroom was white, plain white, with only the droning holo-projector’s eerie bluish glow providing any hint of colour. Halfway through the lesson, Gerard had blinked. Then he had blinked again and stood up. No-one had really looked at him until he had picked up his now vacant chair and thrown it with total calm and a surprising degree of accuracy through the glass partition separating the projector from the rest of the room. Glass tinkled for a moment, hitting the white tiled floor.
Gerard smiled his first genuine smile as the alarms started to ring.
He spent the three and a half minutes it took for the BL/ind patrol to arrive screaming at the impassive faces of the rest of his class.
It was like a switch had been blown in his mind. The spots of blood on his hands from the flying glass were like magic. The colour chanting in his mind, telling him that life wasn’t only whitegreyblack and that there could be noise and movement and pain and that things would break with a satisfying smash if he could only just find the weak points.
He was still screaming when they pulled him through the black glass doors of the clinic but he wasn’t afraid, not yet. There was no room in his head for fear. He screamed because maybe he and his voice were the only things that existed and he wasn’t entirely sure about himself.
He screamed until he felt the cold slip of a needle in his arm and everything went grey.
They’d bandaged his hands by the time he woke up in a featureless room. He wanted to rip them off in case he was still bleeding but he couldn’t move, strapped to the metal bars of his bed. Eventually someone had come for him - a bald man flanked by men in masks who grimaced down at him and told him how lucky he had been, that they had gotten to him in time before he had done any real lasting damage to himself.
Gerard hadn’t replied. He didn’t think he wanted to know what would happen if he told the man that they’d been far, far too late.
It was all going to be alright the man said as Gerard realised he was trying to smile at him. They were going to fix him so that he never had to feel like this ever again.
Gerard felt afraid then for the very first time.
When they finally pushed him out of the clinic, Gerard was practically vibrating. They’d given him his last dose hours ago, and promised him that the little bottles of all his new pills would be safe at home waiting for him to take and let them drag him back down into their welcoming fog. He almost ran home.
When Mikey had said ‘They’re gone’ he’d cried.
Mikey had locked him in his room until he came out of it on the other side, when he’d lifted his head from his knees and looked around at his bedroom in a whole new way. He’d said ‘Oh’, because everything looked exactly the same but also completely different. The room looked exactly the same as it always had done, grey walls, plain bed, one dresser and one wardrobe. Gerard had never really thought about his room before, it was just where he slept, but on opening his eyes that morning he suddenly realised he hated it. Loathed it. It felt amazing.
Mikey had unfolded himself from his position out in the hallway and pushed the door open; whispering his name like Gerard might have forgotten it sometime during the night.
He’d explained what had happened, about the pills neither of them really needed and when he’d asked Gerard about what had gone on in the clinic, Gerard’s mind was a total blank.
Mikey had been good at keeping his emotions under cover. When Gerard knew what the pills had suppressed, it scared him sometimes to see his brother’s blank stare and hear his monotone voice when they were out in public. Behind closed doors though, Mikey got angry. So angry that Gerard deliberately picked fights with him just to give Mikey something to give his anger a focus. He rarely fought back as Mikey punched and kicked; instead he smiled and waited for the pain that meant he’d be able to see his own blood again.
So Mikey had been better at pretending and Gerard had managed to keep his thoughts to himself for almost two months before the holo-projector had started a lesson about how safe Battery City was and how any innocent citizens who ventured out into the zones would quickly die from a combination of radiation, exposure and a variety of slavering, dead-eyed mutant zombie cannibals. Gerard had seen it countless times before but this time as he glanced around the classroom he caught himself wondering if the dead-eyed zombies in the zones could be any worse than the ones in Battery City itself. It made him laugh, starting as a faint chuckle hidden behind his hand and disguised as a cough it quickly gained momentum before bursting out of him in a hysterical explosion of sound.
It was the first time he had seen him. Without the influence of the pills he noticed the face at the window immediately, dark hair and eyes out of place in the white corridor watching him stumble past. The eyes looked sad, like something terrible had happened or was about to happen, but Gerard couldn’t remember what was at the end of the corridor and later on, he couldn’t even remember that anyone had ever been sad at all.
Every time Gerard slipped and laughed or cried or shouted or sliced open his fingertips to see the blood welling up to paint his skin in glorious colour, the eyes watched him through the tiny window. And every time Gerard jerked awake in his bed at home - wherever that was at the time - a scream dying on his lips, the dark eyes were the only image that remained clear even though he could never remember having seen them.
***
The moment Mikey leaves to talk to Ray, Gerard half-scrambles, half-crawls through the building to the back room.
The old freezer doesn’t have a lock, just a giant lever that held the door closed and impossible to open from the inside and Gerard wrenches it down and out away from the door, hearing the clunk of the bolts being thrown.
Frank is sitting against the wall opposite, his knees are drawn up to his chest, the white fabric of his trousers are stained a dirty yellow from the wet concrete and dust. He looks up when Gerard flings the door open and it feels to Gerard that all the breath has left his body in one painful gasp.
Frank stares at him for a moment, but it feels like whole lifetimes to Gerard. There’s a nervous smile on his face.
“I remember.” Gerard says quietly, swallowing past the lump in his throat. “I remember you.”
Frank’s tentative smile transforms into his brilliant grin again, splitting his face like the rising sun. “Gerard.” Frank says his name like a prayer. “I remember you too.”
For Gerard, the emotion feels completely new. He thought he’d experienced them all during his time in the zones. This one feels like a combination of all of them.
He takes one shaking step towards Frank. He’s still in the white uniform of the Dracs, but he’d dropped the mask back at the store. Gerard wonders if there’s a change of clothes somewhere around in the diner.
Frank is beaming up at him with his head on one side like he wants to ask Gerard a question, and it draws Gerard’s attention to his half-shaved head and the small silver box.
Frank exhales and the tension breaks. Gerard stumbles the last few steps to collapse in front of him, his hands already reaching out, desperate to touch Frank and reassure himself that he’s really there. He ends up with one hand in a death grip around one of Frank’s wrists and the other cupped to his face staring deep into his eyes. “It’s really you, isn’t it?” he asks, but it’s not really a question at all.
Frank seems to know what he means because he doesn’t reply to it. He just reaches up with his free hand to touch a strand of Gerard’s hair. “Oh…” he sighs happily, threading his fingers through it. “Sometimes I thought I dreamt you.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Part 4