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Her dad was a tall, blurred shape beside her, his hand warm and dry around hers. The two of them were walking steadily through the afternoon. Around them, the air itself was bright. Gravel that made up the side of the road crunched under her feet. There was the smell of smoke blowing through the forest to their left, making all the trees wave. In the distance, following the solid white line down the road, bright smudges made up a faraway place.
It looked like somewhere she wanted to be.
She pointed toward the bright things, jumping up and down in her excitement; can I go?
There wasn't any answer, but suddenly her dad wasn't holding onto her hand anymore. She was free.
Grace ran quickly, letting the wind comb her loose hair back.
She spread out her arms like a bird.
*
Chemo doesn't feed his tumours, but it doesn't shrink them either. The doctors give him medication to free his mind from his body. They increase the dose as the pain rises, adjust his oxygen when his lungs start to strain. It's a tug of war and he won't live through it. The patient doesn’t so much float on the morphine as get dragged down.
In the deep, there is a city, and it is his body. Tall and thin, sunless, ravaged from an unseen war, made up of parts broken and breaking.
In the streets of the city there are people, and they are his mind. Friends, fears, past lovers. There, a warped vision of his mother as he saw her before he headed off to war; there, a perversion of his little sisters, hand in hand, deathly pale as they must have been at the end; everywhere, streams of people who walk past him without looking or seeing, though he knows all their faces. And there is something else about them. Something off, like a recording with the sound half-seconds out of synch. He remembers. He can't quite place it.
He slips in and out, regularly, like a pulse.
*
The Mother bears the girl in. She carries her laid across Her arms like a infant and sets the child down on the cracked concrete, holding a gloved hand to her back as the girl pushes herself up.
Fear and Regret are the first to greet the newcomer, stepping forward from a alley hand-in-hand and smiling down at her as though recognizing a friend. They sit behind her like they were actually children themselves. Each of them pull three dark, soft ribbons from their dress, and at a nod from the Mother (who still stands over the girl like a sentinel) they start braiding them into the girl's hair.
The girl is quiet. She is bright. She is shaking.
The parade seeps up the street, continuing their endless circle through the city, and then the front line stops. All turn their faces toward the Mother, who is great and terrible and commands your eye whenever She can be seen; and then they look at Her feet, and a ripple of surprise goes through them.
A wolf howls in the distance.
Eventually, the crowd splits and the storytellers come forward, as they must, and always would. They walk silently and quick, hands clasped in front of them, moving as one though there are five.
The girl looks up. Her mouth drops open and for the first time her eyes swim with tears. “Party?”
There is no sound.
The little girl pushes the twins away from her and runs forward, grabbing the light storyteller, the leader, around the waist with enough force to make him fall backward a couple steps. It appears, although no one save him can really know (and he never tells), that she's hugging him with all her strength. She takes two deep, rushing breaths, like she just came up from drowning.
The leader raises his hand at the few who come forward to pull her from him; he shakes his head. The extras melt back into the crowd. He makes another motion; his band closes around him and the sobbing child. One gently pries the girl away from their leader and pulls her into the middle of the small circle they have made.
She is still shaking, but she’s gathered enough courage to look at his face full-on, and narrow her eyes in confusion. She reaches out and picks at a piece of his hair, which is all wrong, short and crunchy and white instead of the vibrant fuck-off red it was supposed to be. “You’ve changed,” she said, more to herself than him. “How did you change so fast?"
The leader kneels so he and her are face to face, pulls a square of tattered velvet out of his pocket and offers it to her. When she does nothing but stare, leftover tears sticking to the dust and ash on her face, he sighs and carefully wipes them away.
When her face is dry the man who isn't her friend puts the handkerchief back in his pocket, carefully folded, and then looks her in the eye again. “Honey,” the storyteller says, as gently as he is able to. “I think you and I have very different ideas about who I am.”
*
“How the fuck did you know who I am?!” The rat yelps, practically tripping over himself in an effort to get the fuck back from the door of the little shack of a hidey-hole he'd found himself, and that cowardliness is more evidence than Party Poison needed to have.
After the firefight, after the burial, after they'd smoked and drank horrible beer and yelled at each other about meaningless shit because the important thing was too big and fragile to be talked about just then, him and his Killjoys had went out hunting for the bastards that must’ve sold them out. (Must have, Poison knows it. A full-fledged blackird party, scary-ass Exterminating motherfucker included, rolling up through the sandcastles on some kind of random patrol exactly at the right time to catch Party's crew's Trans Am speeding in? And he was supposed to assume it was coincidence? Like hell.)
Before they'd rolled out from their base, Poison had taken some charred hunks of rotten wood that was leftover from a old bonfire and ground it into a dust, and then he'd smeared that dust into thick lines under his eyes and across his cheekbones. He thought of it as murder make-up. It made his thin face look thinner and crueler. The others hadn't dressed up with anything except extra gun batteries strung down from their belts, but Poison couldn't blame them for that.
Now the four of them bust through the guy's door one after the other like shots out of a barrel, and they descend on the rat at the same time, kicking and yelling. It's no kind of fair fight because the bastard doesn't even have his gun. But their baby is dead, Poison has no time for anything as human as mercy. He wants blood, and lots of it; the others do too, he can read it in their faces, their snarls. And in the way that, after beating the shit out of the rat so he's twitching and bruised on the floor, they all back away when Party pulls out a knife. They back away silent, no judgements made, and then stand in the room waiting.
The rat-fink snitch murderer is bascally pissing his jeans in fear at that point. Broken as he is, he still manages to scramble to his feet, trip backward and fall against one of the shack's thin walls, cowering.
When Party doesn't move in immediately the rat's head starts to jerk all over the place, looking for a way out. He spreads his hands in front of him as much as he can with two fingers cracked in half. Babble spills from his lips. “Hey, hey, sunshines, I get that you're angry but c'mon, give a man a break, I've gotta eat-- and you've too, right? Listen, I've connections with high-ups in the Bat, okay, I can get y'all anything you want! What is-- what is it you want, huh? Carbons? Some of the sweet stuff? Or need some Nitros, or-- or meds, they've some fucking wicked sharp-points, could maybe help your friend in the chair, or-- or music-making machines! They've got all kinds stuffed under a few warehouses out in the backwoods, stuff the war didn't touch, I'll give you the codes and you have can have fucking all of it, you can have anything there, I've got all the codes to get yourselves in and out with nobody bothering, just, fucking, just---"
Poison steps in closer, holding the handle of the knife so hard he feels like he might break it. The rat focuses on him and Poison can tell now that, on top of everything else, the fucker is tweaking pretty hard; his pupils are big as moons.
The guy is offering them anything they wanted, and if he had had contact with the City, he could probably deliver on that without complaint. The injuries would take weeks to heal. He'd never fuck with the Killjoys again, probably never rat out anybody again while his legs are still working to break. He is broken all over, out of his mind, openly bunny-run terrified. Helpless.
Motorbaby is dead.
Poison laughs once, unable to help himself. It isn't a shiny feeling. “I don't fucking care about your codes," he spits.
The rat's answering wail is cut off as Poison buries the knife in his neck.
*
The city is his body and it is getting worse.
There are explosions in the dark and wolves in the distance. They are getting worse.
The people in the city are his mind but they have minds of their own. He remembers. They neither hunger nor sleep. They are waiting for something, and when it gets there, they will know.
The patient doesn't know if he wants them to find it. He doesn't know if he wants them to know anything.
In the hospital, amidst the machines, his breaths come harder and harder.
The people walk back and forth in the streets of his mind like lost things in a haunted place. They are waiting.
*
She looked at the man who wasn't her friend at all, not saying anything, not understanding. She looked up at the others, who were standing around her and staring down.
There was Ghoul, and Kobra, and Jet, and a third man with ice-eyes who she didn’t know. But they all looked— changed. Like Not-Party did. No exactly unfriendly but darker, especially around their eyes. And the other people, those two weird girls and the woman with her melted-on rebreather, all of them are tinted, too. The air feels weird around her. There was ash in the sky.
“Is this after the war?” She hears herself say, wonderingly.
An unfamiliar voice answers, “This is after all the wars.”
She jumps. The Not-Ghoul and Not–Jet step aside in one smooth movement, closing ranks to stand behind her again as she whirls around.
It’s all the wars,” he said again. “But—but before them, too. I think. Or maybe during, this place…” He rubbed his hands over his face. "It's hard to explain. And everything hurts, but the pain is—it’s muted here.” The man paused in his babbling and looked at her again, eyes suddenly sharp. “Who are you? What’s your name?”
The man's insane, she thought. No greynatter left. And rude-- her name was a source of pride, a reminder; a charm people she loved knew, something she must keep safe. Who would ask somebody what that was? But she couldn't not answer a question. "Motorbaby," she said.
Someone behind her chuckled. It sounded like Jet's laugh, but it couldn't be--- he would never laugh at her. She turned to find the five Not-Killjoys looking at her with weird, amused smiles.
Not-Party, who was still kneeling to be eye-to-eye with her, took her hand lightly. "Honey," he said again--- and why did he keep calling her that? Why was she even letting him hold her hand? His glove was cold around her palm. "It's no use lying here, everyone can tell as soon as you speak one."
She didn't get it, but she bristled. Her name wasn't a lie. She said as much, but there was just laughteragain, and this time she could hear it start in the men in front of her and then ripple out through the crowd of sleek and misshappen things, or people, that she'd almost forgotten was standing close around them.
Suddenly, the girl felt very small. She ground her teeth together so she wouldn't do something stupid like start to cry.
"Tell us your name," the mean imitation of Party insisted.
Fine, she thought, fine. it wasn't like there were any Exterminator's to run it through Battery City Runaway's databases here. She raised her chin, not letting it tremble. ‘Grace,” she said. “I’m Grace.”
From the way they had asked about it, she almost expected there to be some kind of thunderclap when she said it, or a collective gasp, or something. But nothing happened except Not-Party holding still for a second, and then smiling. His teeth were even and white, but they somehow looked ashy all the same. “Grace,” he said, warmly. “What a good name.”
"Almost a balancer, after all this time,” the man who looked like Ghoul remarked. Not-Jet and him had moved back to their previous spots, to complete the circle the men were making around Grace. Through the gaps in their arms and their legs she could see some of the people that had closed around them; through the silence of the grey air she could hear all the whisperings the fabric of their clothes made.
They weren't making any sense, and Grace tried to not let them see how much it was freaking her out. "Who are you?” She asked back, like a challenge, directing itchallenge at all of them at once. And then specifically to the man who wasn’t Party: "Who are you?"
The man kept smiling at her, his grip on her hand tightening a bit. He didn’t answer.
She bit the inside of her cheek and tried something different. “What is this place?”
"This is the city,” not-Kobra answered. He looked the most tired out of all of them, but his tone was the same that she remembered.
But he was wrong, Grace knew, this couldn't be the City. The city was brain-melting and dangerous, full of dead-eyes and white suits, but it was chrome-coloured. She remembers that. (And there had been something. Something bright, that had happened to her. And then she’d been---)
“The city of the dead,” not-Ghoul clarified and Grace bent double like she'd been struck, suddenly gasping.
*
Grace remembers.
Everything around her was bright, very bright, and she'd been terrified but had stood anyway, holding up a boom box that pounded out strength and encouragement, and her Killjoys were facing off against an Exterminator and a few nobodyfaces. (How she loved them-- her Killjoys, her crew, her family, now; how bright they were standing in front of her, how colourful, how brave.)
The bland Exterminator in front of Party organized his Dracs into a line so each of them was right across from one Killjoy, and he had been taking his sweet City time walking into the line across from Party.
And Party, he'd just sneered, “What, are we showing our manners?” And then he shot the Exterminator straight through the skull.
It happened so fast it almost hadn't make sense. And it was crazy then, all lightning and laser-burn-smell and steam. Grace had stumbled back from the heat of the firing guns and her friends yells, and everything had been chaos, except-- to the right of her, she had seen Kobra go down.
She'd registered the music that had been pumping cutting out before she realized she dropped the box, but it hadn't matter, because she had to get to Kobra, who was hunched over in the sand like he'd been shot somewhere important.
Grace hadn't thinking still a whole bunch of Dracs around or be careful or firefight, she had been just thinking couldn't have been that bad and getupgetupgetup Kobra, please. She had run toward him.
But, before she could even get to her friend, a sound had burst itself from her mouth: shrill, high scream, and then Jet looked up –she can see him, to her left, too far away to reach--- and he was shouting, and from the ground, Kobra rolled over and lurched to his feet, also shouting. The sight of him moving makes her joy burst her heart, like a roar of static, because she knew however he'd been shot it must not have been that bad--
but something was wrong. Her Killjoys, they were all yelling and running toward her, and her eyesight was going strange. She had seen Party a few feet away, his face under his mask one huge frozen picture of fury and grief, and she'd tried to take a step forward but just sunk to her knees in the burning sand. She felt like miserable worthless sand, because the Killjoys won, they should be celebrating, but they're all upset and it'd been her fault her fault her fault because--
a few seconds ago, a shadow crashing into hers on the dust, the Drac had shoved jagged hurt at her stomach and she'd ran right into it, not thinking, not seeing, like a greener. Like a waste.
Her fingers had came away bloody when she'd touched the wound in her stomach. The things her hand and her common sense had been telling her hadn't made sense; so she had made herself look down, and then numbly wrapped both of her hands around the neck of the half of a broken bottle that'd been embedded in her stomach to try and pull it free. The first time, even with a terrible lurching feeling in her stomach like she was sick and she'd coughed out something sticky and hadn't thought about it, the bottle doesn't give. She took a deep breath. Another. Then she'd closed her eyes and pulled hard, yelling out of exhaustion and pain and fear.
The glass had hit the ground in front of her with a soft thud she couldn't quite hear-- the static, it'd sread from her heart to her eyes and her ears, now---, and a spill of dark water had came down with it. Everything had been starting to go wavy and bright in front of Grace's eyes.
The Killjoys had been all on their knees too, crowded around her. Blurry shades of burning red and blue and green and blonde-gold.
Grace wanted so badly to stay with them, but she'd been drifting, could feel herself drifting. This was beiing dusted. She'd seen people die this way. The knowledge was like a big murky thing in her brain that was slowly oozing over every other part. Saltwater had been falling on her face from somewhere. She could hear four pleading voices she'd wished she hadn't understood so well (that was them mourning; it was them panicking), but none of their words made sense. It was like trying to decipher echoes in code. Someone had been pressing a unfolded bandana to her stomach. Her ears had been pulsing. Someone else's hand had been on her head, smoothing her hair back, over and over. Her world had been tilting.
She'd fell.
*
The explosions and the wolves and the people and the dark.
The pneumatic hiss and click of his IV.
Phone calls from his weeping mother who can’t afford to leave her job on the east coast.
Exaggerated faces of the nurses who rush in whenever he presses the button attached to his bed.
The patient see's all of it in waves, like a black and white television show with wobbling reception, and he is getting tired.
*
When the ground righted itself again Not-Party was holding onto her by her arms, keeping her on her feet. The others had knelt but the people gathered behind them had stayed standing, so anywhere Grace looked she saw stripes and dark clothing and darker eyes. The man’s hands were soft on her shoulders; once he saw her looking at him, he let go.
Standing was too much effort so she sat down on the concrete. She swallowed and pressed her hand to her stomach, shaking, suddenly shaking all over. “I can’t go back, can I,” she asked, her voice quiet and vulnerable like she’d never wanted it to be.
They all shook their heads. “No one goes back from here,” the one with the blue eyes said. “The only way out is through.”
Grace didn’t know what to do, or say. A hopelessness grew and grew in the pit of her chest. The ribons in her hair suddenly felt like lead. She curled up, hiding her face in her knees, wrapping her arms tightly around herself. Her shoulders started trembling again. She couldn’t stop it.
Someone touched her shoulder gently, and then equally as gently, took her chin and tilted it up. The man who wasn’t Party looked at her, his face soft, and--- somehow, under the softness, excited. Suddenly, but with a strength she recognized as instinct and stupid to ignore, she didn’t trust him or want to be near him. Something was rotten in him—maybe in all of them. She knew.
Then he smiled without showing his teeth, something akin to love shining out through his eyes, and she relaxed, and she forgot.
“You are Grace,” he said, encouragingly, wiping her hair back like Grace's real friend had, when she was alive, when they'd been running. “My brothers and I--- we’re the storytellers. They,” he pointed behind her head, to where the crowd was pressing in and down and flickering like crows’ wings, “Are the people.”
“And the man,” Grace asked, as his hand stilled on her face. “The man who talked to me--”
“He is the Patient,” Not-Party finished. “He is the exception to this place.”
Grace didn’t know what he meant and didn’t have the opportunity to ask, because just as she was taking her next breath, the wolf made itself known again, sounding closer than before. She flinched, looking toward the direction it had came from.
Not-Party looked the same way, and nodded, as if paying respect. “And he,” Not-Party said softly, “Is someone I know well.”
"All of us together are the black parade.” He turned back to her fully, brushed a curl off her forehead. “And now you’re one of us, too. Aren’t you?”
It wasn’t actually a question. Grace knew that. The cloying way in which he said it; thetotally creepy ease and familiarity that he touched her face with; the tight circle of ‘brothers’ (he had called them) that surrounded her, and the earnest uncovered faces of the crowd that surrounded them; the endlessness of the grey in the sky, and her own pain, her own memories—all of these were the evidence. To his question, in this place, there was only one answer.
She tightened her arms around her knees, but sat up straighter. The people and the brothers smiled, encouraging.
She took a breath.
*
Waving a 'taking a break' hand at his boys, as he'd had enough scheming for just then, Party Poison stepped out of the garage and glanced at the grey sky. That colour of cloud meant it was likely to rain pretty hard soon, he knew, hopefully not acid rain but it was impossible to tell before it happened.
He pulled a crumpled cigarette box out of his jacket pocket, selected a cancer stick and stuck it in his teeth, pulling a lighter out of the same pocket in a fluid, practiced movement.
There was a grating sound as someone inside pushed the loose board that served as a door open, and Fun Ghoul stepped up beside him. Without a word Party handed over his cigarette, lit end first. Ghoul held it loosely between his fingers, using the cherry to light up his own, and then passed it back. They smoked together in silence, Ghoul trying to make his exhales into rings.
“I’m not going to say she’s somewhere happy now, or anything,” Ghoul said after a while.
Party Poison snorted. “Good. Because that’s bullshit. She was happy here.”
“I know.” Ghoul dropped the remainder of his cigarette in the dust and stubbed it out with his toe.
The hand-rolled smokes that people sold in the desert were enough to make a 'Joy stop jittering for a while, but they tasted shitty and don't hold together too well, and were expensive trade-things on top of that. If Ghoul was a smarter man he would've broken the habit by now.
Like the rest of them should have, too, Party mused. He scratched his head, looking uninterestedly at the ink-colour that smeared off on his fingers. He’d re-dyed most of his hair black a few weeks ago, but decided to keep some of the roots red because it looked like he’d "been hit with a axe in the grey-matter", as he'd told the guys. That had been kind of bent, even for him, but none of them had wasted time asking him if he was alright. Of course he wasn’t. “She was so fucking young," he said abruptly.
“I know,” Ghoul repeated.
Party grit his teeth and stared out at the desert that stretched past the little bit of shade the diner gave them.
After he had finished with the rat, they had raided its place for anything useful. It was where they had found the cigarettes that Poison and Ghoul were currently smoking, and, to their surprise, a fuckful of shinier things: material for explosives, a time-table of Drac shift changes at the Zone One/Bat City border, and most significantly, building maps and access codes. (Yeah, the rat had said he had things like that on hand, but he'd been broken-babbling. None of the Killjoys thought he'd been serious.) It was those things that were causing most of the strife now.
None of them remembered much from their days inside the City, but they did remember how they got out: straight and fast. They’d get in the same way. Plant the bombs, kill the heart of the Industry, avenge their little Girl. That was the plan all four of them had agreed on almost a week ago, after fuming and raging for a while to no end and no ceasing. They'd called Doctor Death-Defying in to work out the nit-grit of it all, which was what Jet and Kobra were still doing inside.
Didi (as was his nickname, and how Motorbaby had laughed, the first time she'd heard it, Party's heart-muscle hurt---) was helping them readily enough, because he knew the truth about the desert as well as they did, but he wasn't happy about it.
Fuck, Poison thought. It wasn't like they were happy, either, you didn't throw yourself into a death trap to be happy. All the Killjoys knew what would happen to them after the day got done.
In the face of that, there wasn't much to say.
Party Poison felt the bottle-caps he’d strung into a necklace for himself, clenching them in his fist. He'd made it mimicking Motorbaby's belt, the one that she’d been so proud of and had been buried in. Three days from now, they’d be going in to the City. “Fucks help us,” he muttered.
Ghoul gave a small twisted smile in response. He clapped his hand on Party’s shoulder, held on for a few seconds before he went back inside.
*
In the streets of the city of his body in his mind the final crumble is muted, and then he can feel the not-sun on his face, and he realizes what must have happened.
It is frightening. He can't go back. There's noises he doesn't understand and noises that make him think of things he never wanted to think of again. There’s all the things that worry him, here, all the fears and regrets that ate him away made flesh and face that pace past him. They look like shadows, or thing that spent too long under rocks, and they fit with the world as seemlessly as he himself probably does (the sickness sapping all warmth from his body, with the ash setled onto his clothes).
But--- there's also a little girl, tumble-over hair in curls, who he see's sometimes running by by herself, keeping away from the parade. She's dressed in bright clothes he doesn't recognize, and seems unafraid, somehow. She glows like a halogen light in the darkening place.
He does not know her, but she gives him hope.
*