Archive of Our Own

Angels from the Neon (laughing down the road)

Mikey stops taking his pills the day after Gerard takes all of his at once.

It’s a beginning of sorts.

Later, he realises that if he could think without the pills, then Gerard had been able to see with them all.

Collecting them altogether, all uniformly white, the mood enhancers, suppressors, stabilisers, uppers, downers and tranquilisers, Gerard had tipped them all down in one illegal handful.

Mikey had watched him, knowing on a purely intellectual level what his brother was trying to do. Like most things then, it hadn’t really bothered him. Now, it terrifies him.

He’d been in the next classroom over when he’d heard the smash. It took a while to process the noise; things didn’t break in Battery City, not when everything in it was so clean, white and manufactured.

When Gerard started screaming though, the thought that he knew what was happening had slowly swum into his mind. They were brothers and even if chair-throwing wasn’t genetic, Mikey later thought that maybe some of the reasons for throwing them were.

It had been Gerard’s eighteenth birthday. It usually didn’t mean anything, one year older was just one year older, but eighteen was important enough and according to Battery City, it was important enough to make Gerard an adult. Adults didn’t go to therapy sessions, or get given more plain white pills to take everyday. Adults had to be adjusted properly. Mikey watched impassively as it took five men in white, faces covered with masks, to get his brother into the back of the van. Eventually he would feel almost proud of Gerard. Whatever the pills had shown him, it seemed it had been worth fighting for.

Mikey was apparently better at pretending than Gerard. Without the pills he could think, his mind was less fuzzy and more angry than he ever imagined anyone could be but he knew that standing up in the middle of a classroom and hurling a chair right at the holo-projector was a one-way ticket to more pills and sitting in a little white room with stern people telling him how to think, even if he was now awake enough to know that what was being shown on it made him want to.

Gerard was in the clinic for three weeks. Mikey didn’t take his pills, went to class as normal and nobody said anything about his brother. He wondered if anyone else remembered Gerard when he wasn’t right there in front of them. Wondered exactly what the pills had been taking away from him all these years. Once, he wondered if he would forget Gerard if he started taking them again, but decided he didn’t need to know the answer that badly.

When Gerard came back, thinner, paler even than usual with deep shadows under his eyes and a look that made him seem crazier than when he’d gone away, Mikey hid his pills too.

***

When Frank hears the screaming from down the corridor, he’s half-tempted to stay where he is, lying back on the thin mattress in the corner of his tiny room. People scream in the clinic at odd hours of the day and night, but he knows that if there’s the possibility that they’re bringing someone new down past his room he’s gotta see them. The people they bring in only come in once. Once in the clinic is enough for everyone except Frank.

Frank doesn’t know if he’ll ever leave the clinic, and even if he does, he doesn’t know if he’s got a chance of being able to remember the people they drag past his room, but he thinks he’s got to try. Maybe the lights and the drugs won’t take one of them all the way away from the world as it really is.

The screaming gets louder, which is unusual.

Frank levers himself up off the mattress and stands on his toes so he can see through the strip of glass in the deadlock bolted door. They’re bringing someone in from outside, from out in the City he can see through his tiny window, and for once, the someone they’re bringing in is putting up a hell of a fight.

He’s young, probably only just old enough to be brought in. He looks like he should be a nice boy. He has short dark hair and a tie done up tight around his pale throat and he’s dressed in the black and white clothes that all the people they march past his room wear, but his eyes fix on Frank for a fraction of a second as the people in masks take him past the door and they’re shining and almost - almost - mad. He screams again, and vanishes round the corner.

In the weeks and months that follow the screaming, Frank doesn’t see anyone else who seems as alive as the boy with dark hair. The patientsclientsprisoners that shuffle past his cell are terrified of the men in masks and silent both before and after they are escorted to the room full of lights.

He thinks about him sometimes, the screaming boy, makes up names and friends and lives for him and occasionally if he’s feeling brave he’ll think about him in other ways – ones that he only thinks of in the dead of night and hidden under his blanket. It’s something to do while they pump him full of drugs that never work and show him the lights that do nothing to him but give him a headache.

Frank is one hundred percent convinced he’ll never see the boy again until he does. He’s not screaming this time, and Frank only knows someone’s coming from the sound of the footsteps on the tiles outside his room.

The boy, his hair a shade longer and his dark tie slightly looser on his neck, looks at Frank again through the small window. This time he looks sane. Well, as sane as Frank feels anyway, and that leaves a lot of room to manoeuvre. He blinks at him as the men pull him past.

Frank’s seen him twice, for only a few seconds at a time, but in this place it practically feels like they’re best friends.

Every few months they bring the boy back now. Frank wonders if the boy’s like him, immune to whatever the fuckers in this place give him, but he knows they let him go in between times, so whatever they give him works for a while before the boy goes off the rails once again.

It’s a flash of colour, bright red in the whitewhitewhite of the facility that Frank sees first. The boy has done something to his hair – paint or dye covers it, and it’s painted in stripes on his neck, right where the straps of the big black chair would dig in to hold his head steady when the movies and voices and bright lights start. Frank can’t remember ever seeing anything so real in his life as the firebloodmayhem red of the boy’s hair. The boy sees him though the tiny window and grins at him this time, wide smile full of sharp teeth and Frank wants. He wants so hard it’s painful and he doesn’t even know what it is he’s wanting.

It’s the last time he sees the boy in the clinic.

***

Right up until the moment it all goes Costa Rica, Ray thinks everything is just as shiny as can be. They’ve found an abandoned farmhouse out in the zones, and there’s cans in the cupboards, water in the tank and mattresses still on the beds. It doesn’t look like anyone has been around since the end.

He follows his crew up the long dusty driveway, pulling his bike round to the side of the house, into what’s left of the shade. If he knows Rocket at all, he’s gonna ask him to ride to the Pegasus back on the route and pick up some more gas and Ray hates riding his bike hot. He walks into the house through the door into the kitchen, if it wasn’t for the dust and sand it could have been yesterday since it was abandoned.

Rocket is lounging on one of the battered couches in the living room; his boots are kicked up onto the remains of the coffee table. Full Force and Candy are both laughing somewhere in the house and probably taking advantage of the mattresses and the lack of prying eyes. The crew’s solid like only motorbabies can be, but if Ray has to see ‘Force’s junk going through the motions one more time he thinks he might not be responsible for his actions. They’re out of sight now though, and it’s rare enough that they get time to themselves. Besides, Ray can’t remember the last time he heard anyone in his crew laugh like that since the Drac that ghosted itself by falling off the cliffs out in zone four. It’s a nice sound.

“Shiny, Jet. Very fuckin’ shiny.” Rocket says, waving a hand at the room.

Ray nods. “Shiny.” He agrees, there’s no other word for it.

“Hey, why don’t you go back to the route and tank us up some more gas?” Rocket asks, as though Ray hadn’t been waiting for him to suggest it. “’Force and Candy ain’t gonna wanna be disturbed and I’m all out.”

Ray shoves his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and pulls put a handful of crumpled bills. It’ll be enough, especially if there’s an empty gas can in the garage of the farm.

“Shiny.” He repeats to himself.

Three hours later and Ray’s got the gas. Full tank in the bike and full can strapped on tight.

They others will be waiting for him, he knows, but he had to slide off away from a convoy full of Dracs on his way back and even though he’s good, and his name – or rather his fucking alias – is well known in the zones from riding with Rocket, Full Force and Candy Wreck for all this time, even Jet Star can’t ghost an entire patrol of Dracs on his own. Not when there are cans and water and mattresses worth going back for.

The only things back at the house though, are the cans, water and mattresses. His crew are nowhere to be seen; even Rocket’s old Dodge has gone. Tyre tracks in the desert cut over his, but there’s no-one around.

Ray thinks he knows what all the Dracs were doing in the vans.

***

They leave Battery City behind them the day Mikey turns eighteen. Gerard says he can’t remember what happens to him in the clinic, but sometimes he wakes up screaming into the night and he says he doesn’t want the same thing to happen to his brother.

Neither of them have been taking their pills for years now, every time Gerard comes back from the clinic with his head re-full of crazy and lies Mikey makes sure that Gerard never takes the dosage they’ve upped for him. Piles and piles of the little white pills go to waste down the trash chute as he watches his brother cry and scream about the drugs they’ve had to teach him how to need over again. The men in masks never seem to think of the possibility that Mikey’s in on the conspiracy to keep Gerard’s mind wide awake.

Gerard discovers paints and colours and art and music and beauty over and over, like they’re all new every single time he emerges back into the unrelenting greywhite of Battery City from however many weeks they’ve sent him away. Mikey makes sure of that, keeping Gerard’s notebook safe and hidden away from prying eyes because every time the pills stop working he shows it to Gerard again and Mikey almost feels as though he might cry over the things that they both might have never have known.

***

In the weeks before Mikey’s birthday Gerard starts seeing how far out of the city he can go without the men in masks seeing him. Turns out the answer is ‘not far’ but he can get to the outskirts in a few hours if he memorises the patrol routes and ducks into the sewers for a while. It’s enough to take him out to abandoned buildings and factories and to a corner of a crumbling parking lot where a rusting and battered Trans-Am is waiting just for him and Mikey to drive away from Battery City and towards something real.

Once they have the transport, they’re ready to run to the zones.

***

Frank doesn’t know how long it’s been since he saw the boy last, but it’s been a while. The red of his hair still shines like a beacon in his mind, calling to him about things he doesn’t – will never – know.

He hopes the boy didn’t give up, that he’s not now working out there in the City, happy with his dull life because the men in masks have finally figured out a way to make him be and stay that way. He hopes the boy can still remember the red too.

One day though, they come for him. The bald man Frank’s never been allowed to know the name of stands in his doorway flanked by two others. The bald man smiles at him, it’s nothing like the grin the boy had given him that last time long ago, this one isn’t so full of teeth and psychotic laughter about learning the meaning of real. This one is thin and victorious.

“Well,” the bald man says. “I think we know just what to do with you now.”

Frank snorts with laughter. Nothing has worked on him so far.

The men in masks take him away to a new room, full of shining steel. It’s not like the room with the lights or the room where they force pills down his throat. It’s brighter and colder than the rest of the clinic. Frank thinks he might be scared this time.

They strap him to a bed in the middle of the room. Frank turns his head sideways and looks at a small shiny box on the tray next to him. There are wires coming out of it.

One of the wires is firebloodmayhem red. It makes Frank smile. 

***

Ray has been on his own for a while when he finally stops running. Avoiding the Dracs is certainly easier when you’re running solo, but he has to admit it was nicer having the backup of a crew he could trust.

The old roadhouse isn’t quite wrecked when he pulls his bike up outside it, but it’s close – almost falling down around the little girl’s ears as he sees her sitting on the tiny porch as though she’s been waiting for him.

“This your nest?” he asks her.

She peers at him and nods, just once, looking serious. The up-down motion of her head makes her curls bounce like Ray’s used to before he had them cut.

“Where’s your crew?” because no-one really has family out in the zones anymore, just a crew to ride with or stay nested with.

She shrugs.

Ray stares up at the old building. It looks like it’ll take some work, but the water tank seems milkshake and he can see an old generator rusting slowly around the side.

“Wanna learn how to tend bar?” he asks.

This time the girl grins. 

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Sometimes Gerard curls up in the backseat of the car while Mikey drives. It always looks as though it hurts to Mikey, because Gerard isn’t that small and the backseat isn’t that big and he won’t move a muscle for hours. The first time he did it, Mikey hopped three zones in almost as many hours while shooting his brother concerned looks in the rear-view mirror. Gerard had been staring at the rip on the back of the passenger seat and Mikey can’t remember having seen him blink.

Other times, Gerard hangs out of the windows of the car while they’re ‘running, shouting into the desert things that get taken away by the wind before Mikey can hear them and that’s okay too.

He gets used to it, in time, all of it - the hours of silence and staring and the waking screaming from nightmares Gerard pretends he doesn’t have and the cackling mad laughter that sometimes just seems like it bubbles out of him, no place to go other than away, free and open. Mikey thinks that laughter like that is better not locked up inside. It sounds like the sort of laughter that sends people crazy.

These are just the things his brother does sometimes that Mikey doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to understand and then he remembers that they’re ‘running so that he’ll never have to.

***

Home in the zones changes regularly, they nest in whatever empty abandoned buildings they can find. Mikey always makes sure they’re alone though, the last thing he thinks they need are other ‘runners asking questions about them, about Gerard.

At first they found a broken down old Pegasus set back from the dusty road. It’s been stripped clean of anything worth selling long before they found it, but it’s still standing, and the shelves and counter – although chipped and faded – are still bolted to the floor. They sleep in the back room, away from the wide cracked windows even after they’ve found enough scrap wood and bent nails to board them over.

Gerard spends his time ripping up old magazines. Mikey wants to tell him that he’s wasting their gas money, the magazines are so old they’re printed in colour, totally unlike the greyscale ones that come from Battery City and he knows that there’s a market for them. People in the zones are willing to pay a price for anything that keeps their minds from their everyday lives.

Mikey keeps his mouth shut though, because he can see the look on Gerard’s face as he shreds the shiny paper and divides them into piles of colours - blues, reds and greens in stacks on the faded Formica counter weighed down by old cans and rocks. He knows this is how Gerard keeps his mind busy and he’d much rather have him here like this instead of curled up in the backseat of the car staring at nothing.

When Gerard finds a sealed bottle of thick white glue, still sticky even after this long, his eyes light up like Mikey hasn’t seen since he used to get out of the clinic and discover that things other than the whiteblackgrey of the City existed.

Gerard spends hours working on the collage, painstakingly sticking the tiny pieces of paper to the splinter-ridden boards covering the windows. Mikey can’t even begin to imagine what it’s meant to be a picture of – it looks like it could be a face, but if it is then Mikey can’t make out any features apart from the eyes, deepwide and fathomless staring out of the scraps of paper like it’s watching him. Sometimes he feels uneasy but he knows it doesn’t matter what he thinks.

After that Mikey keeps an eye out for art supplies. He trades batteries and bottles of water they probably can’t spare for worn-down coloured pencils and scraps of blank paper. They drive dangerously close to the City to find more glue and magazines, and in every single place they find to sleep for a while Gerard creates his collage.

***

Gerard knows that life in the zones is better than anything they had back in Battery City. It’s not a hard distinction to make at all, even with everything that happens out here – the Drac patrols BL/ind send out just to fuck with all the ‘runners, the scraping for all the things they need, the dust and wreckage of buildings – it’s so much better than the drugs and fear and confusion of his previous life that it’s almost hard to remember that they ever had to deal with them at all.

Sometimes he even finds he almost loves it, a feeling like a punch to the gut when it’s just him and Mikey and the car and music pouring from the radio drawn out of old records by a DJ with a voice like something thick and sweet and inbetween, when it feels almost like Gerard can see the notes spilling from the speakers and down the road behind them like their vapour trail. That’s when he thinks that this life could go on forever and it would only take one more piece of a puzzle to slip into place and he would be in love with it for real and ever and always.

He spends a long time trying to find that puzzle piece.

There are places they will always find other runners. There are bars and Dead Pegasus stations that still have gas and tiny impromptu markets right out in the middle of the desert where water and food and guns and stories are swapped and bartered for. Gerard and Mikey keep to themselves mostly, but sometimes they need parts for the car or a drink or fuel so they have to end up somewhere with other people.

Mikey doesn’t talk to anyone unless it’s directly about the business they’ve come for, keeps himself to sharp nods and ‘How much?’, but Gerard knows there’s still a piece of his puzzle missing and he tries to find it. He’s quiet too, but he finds the time to say things like ‘Yes’ and ‘Please’ and ‘I want’, groaning into the sides of ramshackle buildings and rusty cars as someone behind him pushes their hands into his jeans. Always behind him.

None of them have ever been the piece of the puzzle for Gerard; they’ve been nothing but a distraction.

They can’t make him love anything if he can’t even look them in the eyes.

***

The Drac’s bike skids to the left as the blast from Mikey’s ray gun snaps the masked head back.

“Drive!”

“What the motherloving fuck do you think I’m doing!” demands Gerard, but pushes harder down on the Trans-Am’s accelerator anyway. The bike, now on its side and smoking, retreats into the distance. Mikey hangs out of the window for a few more miles, but nothing else appears on the long low horizon.

Finally slumping back into the passenger seat, he glances over a Gerard, who keeps flicking his eyes away from the road and up to the shattered rear-view mirror.

“We’ve lost them.” Mikey says, as calmly as he can. “There was only one and I ghosted it good, Gee.”

Gerard’s hands are white-knuckled on the steering wheel, but he loosens them slowly, grinning over at his brother with a crazy smile. He laughs.

“Let’s get off the road for a while.” Mikey suggests. “I think we could both do with it.”

***

Jet’s is miles out in the zones, up a dusty track that might have had a bigger purpose in life before, but now just serves as an approach to one of the safest Zonerunner bars out there. There’s a still set up in the back, constantly dripping with the nastiest, harshest spirit in what’s left of the world, but the desert is open for miles around and there’s electric and sometimes water and Jet Star is enough of a presence in the bar to keep most of the fighting outside.

Grace is drawing on the boards over the windows when the Trans-Am pulls up, Mikey doesn’t know where she got the markers from, all the ones he’s found for Gee had dried up long ago, but the colours are bright and Mikey thinks she’s caught the spray of blood from the Drac’s neck quite well.

Gerard pulls his bandana away from his face as he grins down at her, “That looks shiny, kid.” He says, and means every word.

Grace smiles back, shading her eyes with her hand as she looks up.

“Where’d you get the markers?”

“Jet Star traded Bouncer for them. For a can of gas.” She sounds proud, but then makes a face, “I’ve only got three though – I bet I could make a much better picture with more.” 

Gerard laughs again. “I’m sure you could.” He says, “But hey, it’s three more than I’ve got.”

***

The first time Ray met Poison and Kobra; he thought they might be insane. The second time, he KNOWS they are.

Poison has flame red hair and spends his time knocking back whatever Ray can sell him and fluctuating between breathless mania and staring blankly at the bare wall of the roadhouse, hardly blinking.

Kobra, at least, is consistent. He drinks sparingly but steadily, always has a slight half-grin on his face like there’s someone whispering jokes only he can hear in his ear and very rarely says anything to anyone who isn’t Poison.

They come by every so often, then head out zonehopping for a while. Grace likes them though, so even if Ray thinks that neither of them is operating on all pistons, he’s usually glad enough to see them.

When they walk into the bar this time, Poison is smiling with what looks like all of his sharp teeth on show and Ray can’t help but think he’s at least in for an entertaining evening.

It just goes to show that the zones still have a way of fucking you over when you least expect it.

***

There are six ‘runners in the roadhouse including Mikey and Gerard when it happens. Jet Star is behind the bar, Grace still hasn’t come in from the desert yet, and the other four are huddled into a corner. Gerard half-recognises them from the zones, but can’t remember their names. He’s staring hard into his glass of murky brown liquid and thinking about how they’re gonna afford their next tank of gas when the door of the bar crashes open, the already fragile wood splintering on the wall behind it. Heads snap up, and there are already several Dracs spreading out.

Everyone pulls their rayguns at the same time, no-one goes anywhere in the zones unarmed, and then everything is just flashes of blasts and noise and Jet Star yelling for Grace and people and Dracs dying all around him. Gerard throws himself behind an upturned table, there’s already somebody behind it – one of the crew from the corner, but he’s on his back with a hole between his eyes, and Gerard suddenly remembers he’s called Lunacy Fringe and they met once a few cycles back in a Pegasus out in zone two where they got into a fight over the last tank of gas and then they might have fucked in the back room while Mikey flipped through magazines and tried to pretend he didn’t know what was happening, but he’s fucking dead now, so none of that really matters anymore, does it?

Gerard screams into the bar, louder than he can remember since... since something happened to him that he can’t won’t remember even if all he can remember is dark eyes watching him through a thin strip of glass and shoots anything he can see dressed in white.

***

When the smoke clears, Ray is standing on the bartop, raygun smoking in his hand. The only other movement in the bar comes from Poison and Kobra.

Poison is crouched behind an upturned table surrounded by bodies of Dracs and runners. His red hair is smoking slightly as though the colour has set itself on fire. Kobra is kneeling down by the body of a Drac lying in the blasted open doorway, fiddling with its raygun.

“Where’s Grace?” Ray demands. “Where the fuck is she!” He stares around at the ruin of the bar again, hoping for her to pop up grinning from somewhere or to hear his voice from wherever she’d cleverly hidden and come running back inside, but nothing happens.

Kobra looks out into the desert and shakes his head. “Dracs.” He mutters, mostly to himself.

“What?”

Kobra finally looks at him. “The Dracs took her, Jet. Grabbed her into the back of their van… Shit.”

Ray can’t seem to process the info for a moment, but he can’t see that there’s any reason for Kobra to lie about it. He likes Grace, he knows that for sure and Ray’s pretty sure he’s friendly enough with him for Kobra not to fuck him around like this. “The Dracs took Grace?” he repeats dumbly. “Why?”

Kobra takes a step towards him, strapping his gun back into its holster. He holds out a hand. “Jet…”

From the corner, Poison starts laughing; rocking backwards and forwards on his knees crouched over the dead body of a Zonerunner and cackling wildly. It shocks Ray into movement, jumping down off the counter. His gun is still in his hand from the firefight and before he knows what’s happening it’s pressed against the side of Party Poison’s head. “What the fuck?” he demands as Poison covers his face with his gloved hands, breathing deeply in between great heaving bursts of laughter. “You think this shit is FUNNY!?”

Ray is pretty sure that his finger was just about to tighten on the trigger, that he was a split second away from ghosting Party Poison right there in his bar when Kobra’s hand clamps down on his wrist and drags his hand away.

“Don’t you fucking threaten my brother.” He says in a low voice. He sounds more dangerous than anyone Ray has ever heard. Somehow though, neither that nor the gun held to his ribs by Kobra’s other hand is what makes him flip the safety.

“Brother?” he asks, “He’s your brother for real?” He’s never heard of ‘runners having family. He grew up in a place out of the way in zone four, sharing the floorspace of an abandoned Pegasus with eight other people, any or none of which could have been his parents. People don’t have ties like that out here. You have a crew, not family.

“For real.” Kobra says, still menacing. “You okay, Poison?”

His laughter is starting to sound more like tears now, but his face is still hidden by his hands so Ray can’t tell for sure.

Kobra turns his attention back to Ray, “You don’t want to get into this with us.” He says. “The Dracs took Grace, and we know she’s your crew and we’re sorry she’s gone, but we’re not the enemy here. Okay?”

Ray holsters his gun and takes a step back. Even through the thick leather of his jacket he thinks he might develop a bruise in his side from Kobra’s threats. “What’s his problem?” he asks, nodding his head at Poison. Kobra ignores him.

“It’s not safe here anymore. We’ve got to go.”

***

Kobra’s filling up the tank of their car from a rusting can when Ray walks out of the roadhouse with his duffle bag slung over his shoulder. He can just see the top of Poison’s bright red hair through the passenger side window. Kobra looks up.

“I have to find her.” Ray says in answer to Kobra’s silent question.

Kobra nods and caps the gas can.

“I’m sorry about, you know… the gun.”

“Just don’t do it again.” Kobra says, shrugging. “I kinda like you, Jet and I’d feel bad if I had to ghost you.”

“Ray.” Ray says impulsively.

Kobra raises an eyebrow.

“I’m Ray.” He clarifies. “You know… for real.” He doesn’t know why he says it, but Kobra’s ‘running with his honest-to-God brother and if Ray’s going to go get himself ghosted looking for Grace, he thinks he’d like someone to have known his real name.

Kobra stares at him for a long while. “We’ve got a place out in zone five.” He says finally. “It’s safe enough.”

Ray glances at his bike. He knows what Kobra’s offering, a new crew to run with – it might be like Rocket and Force and Candy all over again and Ray had thought he’d left all that behind when he found Grace and the bar. But now the bar’s a wreck and Grace is missing and Ray is surprised by how much he wants it. “I want to find her.”

“You know where to start looking?” Kobra asks, but it doesn’t sound like he’s trying to be mean.

Ray sighs. “I guess not.”

Kobra nods in the direction of Ray’s bike. “Follow us then.”

He digs the keys out of his pocket and heads towards the parked bike.

“Hey.” Kobra’s got the door to the car open now, looking at him over the roof and shading his eyes with his hand. “I’m Mikey.” He says. “That’s Gerard.”

Just like that, Ray has a new crew.

***

Poison – Gerard – is awake by the time Ray pulls up beside the Trans-Am behind a broken down diner. He looks up at Ray from the cocoon he’s made on the passenger seat out of ragged blankets and his leather jacket.

“Hey.” He says, kicking the door open and levering himself upright, unfolding out of the hunched over position he had been in. “Welcome to the nest.”

Ray acknowledges this with a nod. He’s not sure how to act around Gerard now that he’s put a gun to his head - and he’s heard stories about the two of them. Mostly just the general bar-room gossip that gets spun about all the ‘runners in the zones – Dracs they’ve ghosted, things they’ve done, allegiances and enemies with other crews – but sometimes the tales he’s been told about Mikey and Gerard have been different. Ones he’s never heard said about the other patrons of his bar and that’s enough to make him feel maybe slightly uneasy.

Of course, they seem okay enough, not operating on all pistons perhaps, but Ray’s hard pressed to think of any ‘runners that are one hundred percent milkshake in the brain department so he’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

Gerard shrugs his jacket back on and stumbles towards the diner. He glances back over his shoulder, “Come on then.”

Mikey’s started making dinner and Gerard is nowhere to be seen by the time Ray drops his bag on one of the cracked tables. He glances around the place; it looks similar to all the other abandoned diners across the zones, long counter and tiny booths, with a wide double swing door leading back into what used to be the kitchen. Mikey has his back to him behind the counter, a haphazard pile of cans next to him jumbled up in a stained sink.

It’s getting dark, but as Ray turns to check his exit strategy he can still make out the giant picture on the wall next to the window. He’s started to walk closer to it before he knows what he’s doing.

The picture is made up of tiny pieces of paper stuck to the peeling boards and it makes Ray feel almost uncomfortable to look at but he can’t quite pin down the reason why.

“It’s Gerard’s.” Mikey says from behind him. Ray wheels around.

“It’s…” Ray starts, but since he doesn’t know what it is, he lets the sentence trail off.

Mikey looks at him. “It’s Gerard’s.” he repeats firmly. It’s actually more of an explanation than Ray would have thought.

“What is it of?” he asks.

Mikey shrugs. “He’s never said.” He turns back to the pile of cans on the counter. “Sleep wherever.” he says shortly, “But you’ll probably be best off staying away from the back room.” 

Six hours later, Ray realises that what Mikey meant was that he and Gerard didn’t necessarily want to keep the back room for themselves; they just got it because one of them wakes up screaming. A couple of years living with a kid, even one as self-possessed as Grace makes Ray wake up the instant he hears the noise. Lying on the floor of the diner for a few moments, he wonders what’s happening and if he should go and see if he can help when he sees the shadowy figure of Mikey in the doorway leading to the back room. He stares down at Ray.

“Go back to sleep.” He says, arms crossed over his chest. “It’s nothing.”

It doesn’t sound like nothing to Ray, even though the screams have stopped now, have levelled out to a panicked hitching of breath, but it’s early days yet and he doesn’t want to stick his nose in where it’s not wanted. So he nods, not sure if Mikey can even see him in the dark, “Okay.”

It’s just another thing he guesses he’s gonna have to get used to.

***

The next morning, no-one mentions anything. Gerard emerges from the back room just as Ray’s shrugging on his jacket. He has his goggles pushed up onto his head, making his hair more of a mess than usual. He grins at Ray when he sees him. He seems to have more teeth than anyone Ray’s ever seen before.

“Oh, hey. Hi. Kobra… I mean Mikey I guess, said you were still here. I never really introduced myself, did I? I’m Gerard. We should probably be on first name terms if you’re planning on shaking it with our crew.” He laughs again, but this time it sounds more genuine than back at the roadhouse, an odd honking noise that makes Ray start to smile in return. “Well, I say crew, but two’s not really much of a crew is it? More of a pair, really! But you’re here now, so I guess that makes us a crew now. Do you think we should think of a name?”

This seems like a real question, but Ray gets as far as “Uh…” before Gerard plows on.

“I’m sure we’ll think of something good. I’ll ask Mikey, he’s usually got some good ideas. Are you hungry? We’ve probably gotta go and scavenge some more to eat so I don’t know what we’ve got around. Hang on…” Gerard vanishes back into the rear of the diner.

“Uh…” Ray repeats to the empty room.

***

“Your brother’s insane.” He says to Mikey later on that day. He doesn’t really mean to, it’s not the sort of thing you say to well-armed people you’ve only just met, but it just slips out while Gerard haggles for gas in a Pegasus station in zone three. He’s watching him through the cracked window and it seems to involve a lot of arm gestures. Mikey’s flipping through one of the black and white magazines that Battery City produces. There aren’t any pictures.

Mikey raises an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t be the first person to say that.” He says, but Ray hasn’t had enough practice to be able to tell if he’s insulted or not. He goes with ‘not’ purely because he still seems to be standing.

“Does he actually need to breathe?”

The eyebrow lowers. “You saw him this morning then?”

“Uh-huh. He thinks we need a name for our crew.”

Mikey drops the magazine on the dusty ground. No-one’s going to pay for it. Not even Gerard would want it for the growing collage of colours back at the diner.

“He gets like that sometimes.” That’s all Mikey says before Gerard emerges from the station, giving them the thumbs up sign. 

***

When the sun gets too hot to drive sweating in leather jackets, they pull off the route into the shade of a rock cliff and Ray joins them in the car.

Gerard seems closer to normal than Ray has seen before.

“Do you have any idea why the Dracs would have taken Grace?” he asks, passing a canteen full of water back to Ray. He thinks about it as he unscrews the cap.

“Not really.” He admits eventually. “I mean, I guess I could think of a reason for taking her but the whole thing doesn’t really make much sense. They seemed to have made her the priority target. I mean, we barely got out of that place alive. One or two more of them and we would have been ghosted along with the other ‘runners and they must have had that many stay outside to deal with Grace. She bites.”

Mikey nods. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. It doesn’t motor does it? If it’d been just a regular fuck-you patrol, the Dracs would have been better taking out the ‘runners in the bar and leaving one girl. It must have been about her.

Gerard wrinkles his nose. “I really don’t think I’m gonna want to know the reason why.”

They’re quiet for a while as the canteen passes around the car and back to Ray.

Mikey says “She’ll be in Battery City by now, won’t she?”

“Probably.” Ray answers. It’s only logical.

Gerard says nothing, but stares silently out of the window, his drawn-up foot tapping out a nervous rhythm on the dash.

***

That night, Mikey and Ray spread out blankets next to the small campfire they’ve lit in the desert and Gerard sleeps in the trunk of the car. Ray looks confused when he climbs into the trunk and tugs the door closed but Gerard leaves it to Mikey to explain. Mikey never questions his weirdness – he had nodded when Gerard had first wanted to sleep somewhere enclosed and had said ‘Sure. I’ll see you in the morning.’ Anyway, it’s not as though he does it every night. But now, with Ray so close and Grace missing Gerard feels like his brain is about to fly apart and needs some way of keeping it contained.

Gerard thinks about Battery City before he sleeps, he’s in no rush to go back there – but Mikey’s right, the Dracs took Grace alive and that’s enough to believe she’s still alive now. They must’ve wanted her for something, and Gerard’s probably in a slightly better position to imagine what that something is than Ray or even Mikey.

He feels like they should be doing something more, like they should be loading up on batteries and guns and running to the City. If his life was a story he thinks that they would have called together all the ‘runners in the zones and Gerard would have spoken to them, rallied them all together for an almost-suicide mission and they would drive to Battery City together, storming the buildings, shooting their way through BL/ind and liberating not just Grace but the whole City.

Life, however, isn’t a story and persuading all the Zonerunners to do anything they don’t want to is impossible. Gerard hasn’t taken his pills for years and he doesn’t want to die any longer.

***

They don’t talk about Grace for a few days after that, but Gerard starts a lot of conversations with things like ‘What if…’ and ‘We could just…’ before catching Mikey’s eye and falling silent.

It’s not exactly like ‘running with Rocket and the old crew. Ray’s slowly getting used to the differences – Mikey’s stoic silence compared with the way Full Force would talk continually until Candy found a new and inventive way of shutting him up and how things that would have had Rocket draining the batteries of his raygun just tended to make Gerard smile – but he’s slowly getting into the groove.

He’s even getting used to Gerard’s particular brand of crazy and it’s not too long before he finds himself with a saddlebag full of magazine scraps and nubs of wax crayons that he’s saving for him and occasionally catches himself feeling proud if he recognises one of the pieces in Gerard’s ever-growing collage.

They sleep in the diner if they’re close enough or out in the desert if they’re still ‘hopping. There’s a rhythm to their days, scavenging for food and anything they can trade for a tank of gas to keep ‘running, either dodging the fuck-you patrols BL/ind send into the zones or ghosting them if their batteries are full and they’re feeling cocky enough. He rides with Gerard and Mikey sometimes, Ray tells himself they’re conserving gas, but Mikey can tune the radio to the frequency if it’s playing. A DJ’s voice, smooth like five miles of good road playing music no-one remembers.

Ray finds it comforting and listens to the news reports of cheap gas, patrols and ‘runners he can’t quite put a face to. The DJ mentions his bar once or twice, or rather the lack of it, and seems to know that he’s ‘running with Gerard and Mikey.

Ray knows they all want to find Grace, but none of them know where to start looking beyond Battery City and passing the city limits in the beat-up Trans-Am is probably the fastest way to commit suicide that Ray can think of.

It’s as good as it can get without Grace, Ray thinks, which is why he’s not really surprised when they’re ambushed at a boarded-up store by a van full of Dracs.

***

The store’s completely empty when they break in. They pick hopefully through the wreckage of empty boxes and collapsed shelves for a little while but apart from a handful of empty tin cans they turn up nothing. Sighing, Gerard crawls back out into the desert through the broken window behind Ray and Mikey. He glances around at the dead scrub of the zone surrounding the concrete of the small parking lot.

“Oh.” He mutters half to himself.

“Gee?”

Gerard raises a hand and points at the small raised water tank on the roof. ”What do you think?”

Mikey peers up. “Worth a try.”

“I think I’ve got a rope ladder on the bike.” Ray says. “I’ll go and look.”

Gerard smiles. “Not such a wasted journey if it’s full.”

“Don’t spend your gas money before we check.” Mikey says. “It could be dry.”

“Might not be. Have we got something to carry it in?”

“Probably. I don’t think we moved those bottles out of the car.” Mikey follows Ray back to the road, leaving Gerard to stare up at the tank.

The only warnings he gets are a droning noise, a cut-off yell of alarm from Ray and the fizzflash of a blaster shot that explodes the water tank in a shower of sparks and causes all the water in it to rain down over the parking lot.

Gerard’s drawn his gun before he turns round to face the five or six Dracs fanning out from their van parked in front of Ray’s bike.

Gerard starts firing.

Gerard rolls and comes up shooting, he can hear the rayguns of the Dracs and of Mikey and Ray all around him, they sound so close that he’s surprised to notice Mikey far far off to his left, heading out into the desert with a couple of Dracs following behind and Ray huddling down behind the relative safety of his bike and firing over the back of it. Gerard’s shot fades off harmlessly into the distance and the next pull of the trigger clicks on the battery. Empty. He drops the useless weapon onto the flooded concrete. ‘All that water’, he thinks wildly, ‘we could have sold it for gas and driven wherever we’d wanted.’

The Drac in front of him is now advancing slowly and Gerard’s alone and unarmed – unarmed except for his knife anyway, but he doesn’t fancy his chances against a Drac and a raygun with it. Gerard keeps backing up as the Drac walks forward, its hand at its holster strapped tight to its thigh, but it hasn’t drawn the weapon yet, the pale gloved hand is trembling near the handle though and Gerard wonders if it’d been injured by one of his wild shots after all. The back of Gerard’s boots hit the low step of the building as the Drac steps into the puddle of water. One more step back and that’s as far as he can go, his back hitting the boarded-up door. Gerard swallows, hardly daring to take his eyes from the hand that’s now shaking uncontrollably.

Maybe the Drac’s waiting for him to draw his own gun.

Then he notices the neon still flickering. Although some of the bulbs had blown, it’s still suspended by ropes attached to the porch of the building and it’s anchored right next to him. The neon is swaying slightly in the breeze and hanging right over the spreading puddle of water.

Everything seems to slow down as Gerard’s brain makes all the right connections. Flickering neon meant the power pack hadn’t totally ghosted. Power meant electric and electric and the puddle of water that should have been gas money meant he might have a chance against the Drac after all.

The Drac is shaking harder as Gerard drops the knife into his palm, and he almost wonders if it knows what he’s planning, but he has one chance before the Drac catches up with the game he’s playing and he isn’t going to let it go to waste. He swings out with the razor sharp knife and severs the rope. The neon drops and smashes on the concrete.

It was less impressive than Gerard had expected. The Drac didn’t explode like he’d kinda been hoping; it didn’t even make a noise, just crumpled silently to its knees. Gerard let out a breath he’d been holding for too long. The Drac doesn’t move, just kneels in the puddle with its head down and Gerard takes an uneasy step forward.

He’s never ghosted a Drac with electric before, so he isn’t sure if it’ll stay down. He needs to blast it away just to be positive, but his gun’s still empty on the concrete and although the neon’s stopped flickering now Gerard doesn’t know enough about electric to know if it’s safe to stand in the water.

A quick glance around reveals Mikey far out in the desert but walking slowly back towards him and Ray kneeling on the road next to his bike struggling out of his jacket, left shoulder torn and smoking slightly, he looks like he’s in pain, but Gerard knows Ray’s had enough blasts in his time and as long as he’s still moving then it’s all milkshake.

He takes another step down onto the concrete, sidestepping the tendrils of the puddle. A Drac lies ghosted close by, its raygun on the floor next to it. Gerard thinks he can grab the gun and blast the Drac in the puddle just to be sure, but meanwhile he’s not taking his eyes off it.

Five steps away from the gun though, the Drac’s fingers twitch and Gerard freezes, an unbelievably stupid thing to do, he knows, but all the adrenaline had left him in a rush about eight steps ago and now he’s popped on nothing but his own fear.

The twitch turns into a clenching fist, but Gerard’s on the wrong side of the Drac to see if it’s finally going for its weapon.

Mikey’s still out in the desert, Ray’s trying not to bleed to death and Gerard is frozen, staring at the Drac like every kind of pill-munching Battery City wavehead he thought he’d left behind years ago. He’s going to die.

“MOTHERFUCKING OW!”

Gerard blinks. The Drac’s hand is moving now, up to the side of its mask, clutching it like it’s fighting a headache.

“Motherfuckin’ FUCKING SHIT!”    

Gerard’s never heard a Drac swear before now. Hell, he doesn’t think he’s ever heard a Drac SPEAK before now, but the noise somehow kicks him back into movement.

He lunges for the abandoned gun but as he comes up with it, swinging it round and setting the sights on the kneeling Drac, it does something even more surprising than swearing like Dr D on a bad day, and pulls off its mask.

Like hearing a Drac speak, Gerard’s never seen under a Drac’s mask before now, and he’s never felt the need to check the ones he’s ghosted, but as this one grabs at the side of its head and turns to look at him, Gerard thinks that he might start looking if they all look like THAT under the white painted faces. It’s a wildly inappropriate thought, but the Drac stares down the barrel of Gerard’s raygun, blinks once and raises its hands in surrender.

Gerard drops the raygun and starts crying.

***

“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.”

***

Mikey looks thoughtful for a while before he admits: “I’m not sure. Not completely, anyway. Gerard says he saw him in the clinic, but he didn’t say who he was.”

Ray scoffs at that. “From what you’ve said Mikey, he doesn’t remember what happened in there, so the Drac could be anyone. Hell, he could be the one that fucked Gee up so bad…” he’s sorta playing Devil’s Advocate now, but some things need to be said.

“Gerard’s not acting like it.” Mikey says carefully. “He seems to be pretty… protective of him…”

Ray snorts a little. “Gerard doesn’t exactly have the normal reactions to things. I’m sure you’ve noticed.” He says, because Ray’s noticed, oh, he’s noticed, and knowing what he knows now about the pills they had to take and what Gerard had done, he’s not surprised that he’s got some wires crossed upstairs. In between Gerard’s almost violent mood swings, he could easily believe that he’d try to protect someone who’d hurt him.

“He…” Mikey begins, but then cuts himself off. “No. You’re wrong, I think. Frank’s not like that, not really. When I spoke to him he sounded like… Well, he sounded like a Zonerunner – he’s not on any meds that I can tell, and knowing BL/ind, I don’t think they’d just let one of their Dracs go clean. If this is a trick, it’s a pretty fucking risky one. We could’ve killed him easy at the store.”

Ray nods. He hasn’t been travelling with Mikey and Gerard for long, but he’s learnt that Mikey can be pretty perceptive at times and no matter what he thinks about Dracs in general or Frank in particular Mikey certainly has a point. “I’ve been thinking about that.” Says Ray, scratching at his shoulder. “You saw what Gerard did, yeah? With the water and the neon?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And there’s that box on his head. Never seen a Drac with one of those before. Shit’s gotta be connected, hasn’t it?”

Mikey puffs out a breath. “You think that’s how they were controlling him? With that box instead of pills?”

Ray nods. “And then when Gerard dropped the neon in that puddle, it must have… I dunno, short-circuited it or something. Then BANG: One free-thinking Drac.”

“It makes more sense than all this being a fucking elaborate trap.” Mikey agrees.

“So now what?” Ray asks after a pause. “We just gonna keep on ‘running with a tame Drac in the back of the car?”

Mikey shrugs. “I don’t think Gee’s gonna want him to leave, and to be honest, I got the impression that Frank’s not going anywhere on his own shout either. He seems a little… obsessed.”

“Obsessed? With Gerard? This shit just keeps getting weirder.”

“When Frank thought I was gonna ghost him, the only thing he wanted to know was if Gerard was okay.”

Ray pushes himself to his feet. “Riding with a Drac in the crew…” he cracks his neck. “Never saw THAT coming.”

Mikey gives a funny half-smile. “No-one ever said me and Gerard led boring lives.”

***

They were still sat in the old freezer. Gerard curled up against Frank’s side while Frank ran his fingers through the red strands of his hair. It was soothing and Frank could hardly bring himself to believe it was real. They hadn’t said anything for a while – nothing had seemed important enough.

Eventually though, Gerard broke the silence.

“The clinic…” he says his voice slightly hoarse. “What really happened in there?”

Frank shifts slightly so that he can see Gerard’s face. “To me or to you?”

Gerard tries to shrug, but Frank still has his arm slung over his shoulders and the movement comes out half-formed. “Either.” He says, “Or both, I guess.”

Frank breathes out slowly. He doesn’t really know where to begin with that question so he just decides to start at the beginning. “The first thing I can remember – my earliest memory, I mean – is from kindergarten. You probably went somewhere exactly like it so I’m sure you can imagine it. I was about four, I think, and I had a tantrum because one of the other kids took my favourite alphabet block while I was playing with it. I practically brought the house down with my yelling. None of the teachers knew what to do about it – I don’t think any of the kids had ever done anything like it before… So of course BL/ind got involved – changed my drugs, therapy, you know the drill – but it happened again. And again. And again, and soon I was taking pills that would’ve put a grown man in a coma but they weren’t even touching the side. I remember being so angry with everyone. I was only a kid and I just couldn’t understand why nobody else seemed to feel the same way.

Then, when I was eleven, BL/ind took me to the clinic. I think they’d run out of ideas – none of the usual things were working on me and once I was there, they found that none of the UN-usual things worked either.”

By now, Gerard has twisted himself around so he can look at Frank directly. “You were eleven years old, Frank. Fucking hell, you were just a kid!”

Frank tugs on Gerard’s hair one last time and moves his hands to tangle them in his lap. Gerard reaches out to cover them with his own.

“It wasn’t that bad.” Frank says quietly. “I was a guinea-pig for their new treatments, I think, but the worst thing that happened was that I got a headache from the flashing lights…” He laughs, “I used to think about you, you know.”

Gerard makes a pained noise in the back of his throat.

“After you’d been brought in. I wondered who you were – what your name was, that sort of thing. And…” Frank shakes his head, stops that thought right there. “I couldn’t believe it when you came back there. I thought…”

“You thought I was like you.” Gerard finishes.

“Yeah. But they kept letting you go. Every time they walked you past my room I’d think ‘Maybe this is it, this is the last time I’m gonna see him – they’ve found a way of making it STICK this time…”

“It stuck every time.” Gerard says morosely. “If it hadn’t been for Mikey…”

Frank shakes his head. “That doesn’t matter. You got out. It doesn’t matter how.”

They’re silent again for a while and Frank finds himself reaching back up to touch Gerard’s hair again. “It was like this the last time I saw you.” He says sounding awed, “I’d never seen anything like it. Still haven’t.”

Gerard ducks his head for a moment as though he’s embarrassed. “There’s these ruins outside Battery City. They’re like; mostly just rubble so I don’t think BL/ind pays that much attention. I found the Trans-Am there like it was waiting for me and Mikey to come along and take it away… Anyway, there’s a few people there too, not really ‘runners but not citizens either. One of them’s this crazy chemist and I gave him a pile of my pills so he could study them. He paid me back by showing me how to mix up the dye. It was sort of meant to be one last fuck-you to BL/ind before Mikey turned eighteen and we started hopping.”

“It’s amazing.” Frank says honestly, “I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It’s the last thought I remember before…” but he can’t finish that sentence, not really, because he doesn’t want to think about what they did to him. He starts a new one. “Then I woke up and you were pointing a gun at me.”

Gerard touches the box on the side of Frank’s head. “Is this what they did to you?”

“I remember someone coming to my room and telling me they’d found a way of fixing me. Then they took me to this operating theatre. That’s all I know.”

Gerard bites his lip. “What was it like?” he asks nervously, like he doesn’t really want to know the answer. “Like being asleep?”

“It’s… grey. All grey. Like sleeping without dreaming but I knew I was asleep. Does that make sense? It’s just nothing. But it feels like it lasted for years”

Gerard looks like he’s going to be sick. “That’s HORRIBLE.” He breathes, “God, Frankie… that’s just… worse than the pills.”

“It didn’t hurt.” Frank says. It seems important to point this out.

“That doesn’t matter.” Gerard says his voice tight with emotion. “We’re gonna find someone t get that thing out of your head. Fuck, Frankie, how are you not mad about this?”

Frank shrugs, “Don’t know any different I guess.” He says, “Anyway, it’s over now.”

Gerard shakes his head and tightens his grip on Frank’s arm. “Still, we’re gonna get that thing out. I don’t wanna worry about it, I dunno, reactivating again.”

Frank relaxes against Gerard. “Yeah.” He says, “That would be good.”

***

They all eat together that night. Ray shoots Frank suspicious looks over the chipped table but says nothing. Mikey watches Gerard and Frank together –they never move more than a few centimetres apart through the whole meal – but he thinks he trusts Frank now. He doesn’t think the connection between Frank and his brother is something that could be faked, especially not by anyone still under BL/ind control.

When they’ve finished eating, Ray breaks open his last bottle of home-made spirit. His hand hesitates for a second over the glass Mikey’s set out for Frank, but he pours some without comment. Frank thanks him with a grin on his face.

“Wait ‘till you try it.” Ray warns. He doesn’t quite return the smile, but Mikey thinks it’s a good sign.

Gerard claps Frank hard on the back several times when he chokes on the alcohol and starts coughing loudly.

“Wow.” Frank says when he can speak again. “I’ve never tasted anything like it.”

“Never will again.” Ray replies, emptying the last of the bottle into his own glass. “That’s the last of it.”

Mikey looks at the liquid left in the bottom of his tin can. “Good thing too.” He jokes, “This shit’s vile.”

Ray laughs. “You never complained about it before.”

“I didn’t want you to throw us out of the bar. Gerard would have, I dunno, cried like a bitch or something.”

“Leave me the fuck out of this!” Gerard grins.

Frank watches the conversation with delight and asks “What happened?” during a pause in the argument once it’s descended into playground name calling.

Ray stops laughing immediately. “I had a bar.” He says shortly. “A bar and a little girl and now they’re both gone.”

Frank looks worried but Ray doesn’t continue, just folds his arms and looks away.

“The Dracs came.” Gerard explains quietly. “They killed a few ‘runners and took her. Ray came with us. We were going to rescue her – we still are, but we don’t know how to try without all of us getting ghosted within thirty seconds of setting foot in Battery City, let alone trying to work out where they’re holding her.”

Frank thinks for a moment and then says “I’m sorry.”

“Frank…” Gerard starts.

“No, it’s fine. I really am sorry Ray. Is that why you kept asking me where Grace was?”

Ray finally looks back to the table. “Yes.”

Frank taps his fingers on the table for a few seconds. “She’s probably in the clinic.” He says finally.

Three pairs of eyes turn to stare at him.

“Why would she be in there?” asks Ray, “What are they doing to her?”

“Frank…” Gerard bites his lip, “What they did to you – you don’t think they’d do it to Grace do you?”

Frank shakes his head. “I don’t think so.” He says, “I think that’s a last resort. All I know is that they were always talking about the need for test subjects for the drugs. They couldn’t test them on me because they didn’t work right and they couldn’t test them on citizens because they had too much in their system already. They need people who were a clean sheet.”

“Grace.” Ray says, his hands clenching into fists. “She grew up in the zones, never taken their pills a day in her life.”

“Yeah.” Frank says, still sounding apologetic, like he’s afraid Ray’s gonna haul him off and punch him any moment. Mikey watches Gerard’s hand tighten on Frank’s leg under the table.

Ray sags noticeably. “Okay.” He says, sounding defeated. “So we know where she is, but that doesn’t get us much closer to being able to rescue her, does it?”

No-one says anything for a while, finishing their drinks in silence before Frank finally puts his empty glass on the table. “I’ll help.” He says. “Whenever, whatever you guys decide to do, count me in. They shouldn’t be able to get away with this.”

Ray finally meets Frank’s eyes, a tiny smile turning up the corners of his mouth. “Thanks.” He says, “That actually means a lot.”

***

When it gets too dark, Gerard tugs Frank into the back room, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Frank first thinks that Gerard means for him to sleep in the old freezer again, but he leads him to a pile of blankets heaped up in the opposite corner.

“Me and Mikey usually sleep here.” Gerard says, “But…” he tails off.

Frank can only just make him out in the dark. “You want…” he coughs, unsure. “You want me to sleep here? Instead?”

Gerard nods, “I… If you want to. I mean, you can sleep in the diner if you like.”

Frank thinks about Ray and the looks he’d been shooting him for most of the day. “Here’s good.” He says.

Gerard beams at him. 

An hour later and Frank has come to the conclusion that he isn’t tired. He probably should be given everything that’s happened in the last twenty four hours but he’s just too ramped up to be able to close his eyes for more than a few moments at a time. Instead, he lies back, staring at the ceiling with his hands folded across his chest listening to the soft sounds of Gerard sleeping next to him.

He finally gives in and turns his head. Gerard’s lying on his side facing him and the sight makes Frank smile. Gerard’s a messy sleeper; limbs spread out in a way that would probably be annoying in a real bed – one knee drawn up between them and the arm that isn’t pillowed under his balled-up jacket is thrown out reaching for Frank, his fingertips just brushing his shoulder like he can’t bear to be apart from him even while he’s asleep. Now Frank can see them, he can suddenly feel them as well; through the thin cotton of his shirt they’re like two miniscule points of burning heat.

Gerard’s mouth is open and there’s hair all over his face in a way that has Frank’s fingers itching to brush it aside but he doesn’t because Frank is absolutely, totally, one hundred percent convinced that he’s never seen anything quite as beautiful in his entire life.

His fingers twitch on his chest as he watches Gerard sleep.

He’d been fourteen the first time he’d seen Gerard and for the next four years he’d been almost literally the only person who Frank had seen whose face hadn’t been covered by a mask, so the dreams really hadn’t been much of a surprise. Frank had lost count of the number of times he’d woken up panting and curled in on himself with an image of Gerard slowly fading from behind his eyelids.

Unfortunately, just because Frank understands what was happening now doesn’t make it easier because Gerard has been the be-all and end-all of Frank’s lonely teenage sexuality and now he’s sleeping next to him real and warm and alive and close enough for Frank to touch in all the ways he’s ever thought of in the middle of the night.

Frank watches him sleep for another few minutes before rolling over to stare at the remains of the diner kitchen. Gerard’s fingers slip from his shoulder as he moves and Frank shivers.

During the day, he hadn’t wanted to let Gerard go in case everything vanished and he woke up back surrounded by blank walls and screaming in the hallways, but at night, in the dark now it’s just the two of them, touching seems different. Too intimate, too much like Gerard’s part of his dreams rather than his nightmares.

It’s enough that they’re both here, it has to be. It seems safer that way.

***

Mikey is sitting cross-legged on the floor behind the diner counter, taking stock of their tin cans when he hears the squeakthump of the double doors opening. He doesn’t bother looking up, the two pairs of even footsteps sounding only a split second out of sync means it can only be his brother and Frank.

Mikey counts again, but the numbers remain the same – If Frank’s staying with them then they’re really going to need to go out for some more supplies soon They have enough for three more days before they start going hungry.

One pair of the footsteps stutters to a halt in the middle of the diner and Mikey hears Frank say “Oh…”, so quiet and full of wonder that it makes Mikey lay down the can currently in his hand silently and wait.

The silence stretches on.

Mikey hasn’t been able to find the mysterious DJ’s radio signal for the last few days and the diner still sounds somehow off without the noise.

Gerard breaks the quiet first, but he only gets as far as “It’s…” before Frank finishes the rest of his sentence.

“It’s me…” he breathes.

BL/ind had never even mentioned religion while Mikey was at school. There’d been no need for it in Battery City, and they’d never have allowed anything so cemented in faith and feelings, but Mikey’s read things since he’s been out in the zones – funny little pamphlets and books that talk about the old religions and he had thought that he understood what they meant. Or, rather, he’d THOUGHT he’d known what they had meant by the stories about rapture and love and hope. But now?

This? Right here, with the way Frank is staring up at the scraps of paper glued to the boards and how Gerard is smiling softly at him, makes Mikey finally understand.

And, if the next time he’s alone, he stops in front of the collage and looks at it and smiles as the separate tiny pieces coalesce into an idea of a picture of Frank’s face that he’s seen a hundred times and none at all then nobody knows except him.

***

“You need to stay in the car.” Ray says, forcefully. Gerard knows he still doesn’t really trust Frank, not completely.

Frank looks as though he’s going to argue but thinks better of it, folding his arms across his chest.

Gerard doesn’t really blame him for being cross but then he also doesn’t think it’s a good idea for Frank to show his face – or more accurately his head to the assembled group of ‘runners hawking junk from the backs of their rides. The last thing they need are awkward questions.

“We won’t be long.” Gerard says, trying to placate Frank. “We just need to trade out for some more food and shit and we’ll be right back. I’ll even see if we can find you a jacket or something.” He give Frank what he hopes is a reassuring smile but Gerard’s never really had much practice so it probably comes out a little wrong. He’s only ever tried to reassure Mikey before now and his brother could always see right through him.

“Look,” says Ray suddenly, toying with the holster at his thigh, “You’re staying in the fuckin’ car and that’s final. It’s not like we can leave without you.” He finishes in a tone of voice that makes Gerard think he’s tried – and failed – to think of a way they can do just that. He resists the urge to hit him. Ray hasn’t said anything about his misgivings regarding Frank since they’d met him two days ago, but he doesn’t really need to. It’s obvious that he’s only putting up with Frank’s presence so as not to cause conflict with Gerard and therefore Mikey. Gerard wishes it was different, that he could make Ray understand but if he thinks about it Ray’s reservations at least make sense – Jet Star was fighting Dracs since before Gerard and Mikey had even thought about ‘running.

Gerard knows that Ray understands that Mikey is following his lead out of trust, which is at least something Ray can put a name to, but Gerard doesn’t really understand his own faith in Frank. He’s not questioning it in itself, not at all, just where it comes from.

Ray stomps off towards the assembled cars and Mikey hovers for a moment before following him. Gerard smiles at Frank. “We won’t be long.”

Gerard keeps glancing back at the Trans-Am as Ray and Mikey barter for food and parts. From this distance, Frank’s an indistinct shadow in the back seat but Gerard still finds it comforting to check on him. He’s barely paying attention to anything else around him in fact. Mikey has to ask him a question about their supplies three times before Gerard can formulate an answer.

“What’s wrong, Gee?” Mikey hisses out of the corner of his mouth.

Gerard blinks, trying to refocus. Ray hasn’t noticed anything, too busy trying to barter down for a pile of electrics.

“I… Uh…” Gerard steals a glance back to the car and scratches an itch at his collar.

Mikey sighs, “You can wait in the car too, you know.” He says quietly.

Gerard shivers even though the sun is beating down. “I think… I should…” he starts, but he never gets to finish the sentence. It’s almost lucky because he really doesn’t know what he was going to say.

Frank has slammed open the car door and is running towards the makeshift market, screaming at the top of his voice.

“DRACS!” he yells, “Fuckin’ RUN!”

Gerard looks around him in a sudden panic, half expecting figures to pop out of nowhere, but Frank’s flapping a hand back out into the desert where two boxy white vans are heading towards them in clouds of whirling sand.

Everyone starts panicking at once, grabbing their gear and jumping into their cars. Gerard stares, frozen – there’s no way they’ll be able to get away. The Trans-Am is between them and the oncoming Dracs and the vans are too fast. They’ll be on them before they make it to the car.

***

Frank starts feeling twitchy as soon as Gerard walks away. He feels faintly ridiculous – he can still see Gerard, his bright red hair makes him impossible to miss, but this is the furthest he’s been from him since meeting him and he’s so used to just being able to stretch out a hand and touch him that being separated from him like this feels wrong and unnatural. He wonders how he managed to cope without it before for a moment and then starts to try to take his mind off it while his hands grip nervously on empty air.

A rising dust cloud in the distance catches his attention. For a while he thinks it’s simply another carful of ‘runners coming to trade but the cloud gets bigger and bigger until it’s clear that whatever’s causing it is larger than one junked out car.

Frank reaches for the door handle. He knows what the cloud means and oh shit, he has to warn everyone because Dracs are coming and Gerard – no one – is safe anymore.

Everyone turns when he starts shouting; all the traders slamming shut the trunks of their cars and jumping behind the wheels. Frank should have noticed the Dracs earlier, should have given them all more warning because he’s not sure that anyone will be able to outrun this many Dracs.

Frank realises that somehow they’re going to have to fight off two vanloads of Dracs and maybe that’s not all that realistic, but at least they’ve got some advanced warning and he’s damned if he’s gonna go down without a fight. He reaches Gerard, who’s still standing staring at the advancing vans as though he’s waiting for a plan to present itself. Frank doesn’t waste any time, just grabs the raygun from the opened holster at his thigh and turns, dropping to one knee as he lines up the sights with the front tyre of the leading van and firing off a shot.  

He distantly hears someone shouting his name – it sounds like Ray, but there’s no time to answer as his blast explodes the tyre and the van swerves violently before losing balance and tipping over onto its side.

“Fuckin’ FIRE!” he yells, because the second van is still coming closer and it won’t take long before the Dracs in the crashed van get their shit together and come after them and they have fewer guns than people to shoot them.

There’s a movement beside him, a black shape that turns out to be Ray firing with deadly accuracy at the second van, taking out the driver through the windscreen and forcing it to a stop. Mikey joins in alongside them with some of the other ‘runners who haven’t left yet. The air is full of rayblasts and fortunately most of them come from their side, the Dracs climbing out of the vans are getting picked off almost before they can return fire.

Some sort of sixth sense tells Frank that Gerard isn’t behind him any longer and almost everything in his body is screaming to turn around and look for him because it would probably be just Frank’s luck to lose Gerard two days after finding him but there’s a miraculously more rational part of his brain that seems to be more in control which convinces him to wait until the threat is over before turning his back on the Dracs, so Frank keeps shooting, squeezing the trigger of Gerard’s gun over and over again because it feels like he’s the only thing standing between BL/ind and his new-found crew and fuck, if Gerard’s been hurt – he doesn’t even let the word ‘killed’ begin to cross his mind – then Frank’s gonna spend the rest of his life tracking down every last Drac in the zones.

***

Despite Gerard – and by proxy, Mikey’s – willingness to trust Frank, Ray still isn’t totally sold on the idea of trusting someone who used to work for BL/ind until he sees Frank shooting at the oncoming Dracs with such singleminded determination that he doesn’t think Frank’s aware that the Dracs have even started shooting back.

Ray, along with Mikey and Gerard, quickly takes cover behind one of the remaining cars, taking their shots from relative safety while Frank doesn’t even bother to hide, firing with such calm determination that it’s actually almost frightening.

Ray keeps an eye on him as much as he can; watching in amazement as Frank keeps shooting, walking slowly forward across the desert and advancing on the two stationary vans. He’s yelling something that sounds like it’s full of rage and hatred but his exact words are swept away by the wind and covered by the crackling of rayblasts. There’s no way in hell Frank’s still controlled by BL/ind or anything except himself.

The Dracs are all motionless long before Frank takes his finger off the trigger. The Zonerunner in Ray wants to shout at him – they’re really not in the position to be wasting batteries like this, but Frank doesn’t look like he’s in the right place to listen to rational arguments at the moment. Finally the gun starts clicking on empty and Frank pulls the trigger several more times before Gerard lays a hand on his outstretched arm.

“It’s okay.” He says, quietly, “They’re all dead. I’m right here.”

The few remaining ‘runners are watching them with what passes for interest out in the zones – shifty sideways glances and raised eyebrows. Ray tries to move so he’s standing between them and Gerard and Frank because if the look on the ex-Drac’s face is anything to go by, the ‘runners are going to get something a whole lot more interesting to watch in the next few moments.

“We should motor.” He says loudly, making Frank jump slightly. “Get in the car.”

Mikey gently herds Frank and Gerard back to the Trans-Am in silence, opening the rear doors for them before climbing behind the wheel. Ray looks back at the small group of ‘runners but while some are watching them the others are checking over their cars. They’ll get away with this easy.

Ray folds himself into the passenger seat and releases a loud breath as Mikey guns the engine and pulls the car around, heading back to the diner. He glances into the rearview mirror once they’re out on the open road – Frank and Gerard are curled tightly round each other again, and it looks like Frank has a hand tightly gripped in Gerard’s hair. It’s less worrying than it had been.

Ray stares out of the side window until they’re back at the diner. 

***

The addition of Frank to their crew does little to change their day-to-day lives. He claims the back seat of the Trans-Am as his own and Mikey does most of the driving so that Gerard can climb into the back with Frank. It’s safer that way. When Gerard drives, Frank has the disconcerting habit of pulling on the hair at the back of Gerard’s head and making the car swerve wildly over the road.

Mikey rarely sees them apart, not in the usual way – the way that they’re all usually together because they’re crew and they sleep and eat and hop zones together – Gerard and Frank are together because they’re always WITH each other, like they’re both too afraid to let the other go in case they slip away. It’s always Frank’s hands in Gerard’s hair and Gerard’s fingers on Frank’s arm and while he’s pretty sure they’re not fucking – because, hell, where would they get the time or privacy for that? – He doesn’t think he’d be all that surprised by it, Gerard’s always been… different.

The thing is though, that Frank’s good for him, Mikey’s tried – oh God, he’s tried – but somehow Frank GETS his brother in a way that’s totally different. Mikey would be jealous if it wasn’t so obvious. Gerard and Frank sleep in the back room of the diner now, he’s seen them, curled up together under a pile of leather and blankets and not-quite-touching.

He found another magazine, tucked under a pile of punctured tires at a deserted Pegasus and pulled it out, flattening them under his fingers. It’s become a habit now, collecting things for his brother to create with, but when he hands it to Gerard he just twitches his mouth up at the corner and thanks him politely.

Gerard hasn’t worked on the collage at the diner in days.

Occasionally he watches them both, while he’s driving with one eye on the rearview at them piled together under a blanket on the back seat. Frank’s head moving updown with every breath Gerard takes, his hand in a death grip around Frank’s wrist like he never wants to let go. Mikey wonders if it’s good that they found each other, or if it just means that there’s one more thing for Gerard to lose.

***

They break into a wrecked factory while scavenging – It’s almost untouched and while they’re understandably cautious, there’s still enough left behind that they won’t have to worry about food or gas money for a week or so.

Gerard helps Mikey and Ray carry things out to the car. He feels uncomfortable, twitchy, because Frank’s still inside and he can’t see him. He taps his foot nervously as Mikey loads the trunk.

“Go and look for him for fuck’s sake.” Mikey says without looking back. “You’re giving me a headache.”

Gerard is careful not to run back to the factory, but it’s a close thing.

He finds Frank sitting cross-legged in the centre of an old storeroom surrounded by bits and pieces of junk. A shaft of light from one of the high-up windows is falling across his lap where he’s busy with a screwdriver and a handful of wires. He looks up the moment Gerard enters the room even though he’s convinced that he didn’t make a sound.

“Gerard.” Frank says happily, but then his face falls. “Shit, do you want me to help take things to the car?”

“Nah, it’s okay. We’ve done it all now. What’re you doing in here?”

Frank holds up what he was working on – it looks like a modified tin can with wires sticking out of the sides. “Look at this!” he says, standing up and sending all the pieces of junk on his lap crashing to the floor. “If you’ve got a spare battery, I think it’ll work.”

Gerard immediately starts fumbling in his pockets as he crosses the room to Frank. “Does it have to be full?” he asks as his fingers close on the familiar shape.

“Nope. As long as it’s got a bit of charge to spark the detonator, then we’re all shiny.”

“Detonator? Frankie, have you built a BOMB?!”

Frank grins hard. “Oh yes,” he replies in a conspiratorial whisper. “I built a bomb.”

Gerard eyes the thing in Frank’s hands. “You built a bomb out of a tin can and a handful of wires? On your own? In half and hour?”

Frank nods. It looks as though the top of his head might fall off from the smile on his face.

“How?”

Frank shrugs, “Dunno.” He replies, taking the battery from Gerard’s fingers. “I just saw all the parts and knew how to put them together.”

Gerard scratches his cheek thoughtfully. “Well… I’m pretty sure they didn’t teach you that in the clinic.”

Frank blinks, his fingers stilling as he tries to fit the battery. “No.” he says slowly, “No, I don’t suppose they did.” he shakes himself. “It doesn’t matter.” It doesn’t sound at all like he believes himself.

Gerard reaches out to touch Frank’s wrist. “I think it does matter.” He says quietly. “You must have been taught this when you were…”

“A Drac?” Frank spits, pulling himself away from Gerard’s hand. “It’s okay, you can fucking say it. I was one, after all.”

“I was going to say ‘asleep’.” Gerard says, “You were never a Drac, not really. You didn’t know.”

Frank sighs loudly, looking down at the bomb rather than at Gerard. “What if I’m remembering?” he asks in a small voice. “I don’t want to remember what they made me do.”

Gerard reaches out again, putting a hand on Frank’s arm. “It’ll be okay, Frankie. I’ll – we’ll all be here, even if you remember.”

Frank closes his eyes. “What about all the things I did? – I know I didn’t have a choice, but I’ll still know. I’ve KILLED people, Gerard. Zonerunners. You probably knew some of them. And Grace… They wanted kids to experiment on. I must’ve helped them.” Frank’s voice has taken on an edge of panic now and Gerard feels useless as he grabs the side of his head. “I just wanna pull this fucking thing out of my head. I don’t care what’ll happen as long as they can’t do that to me again.”

“Frank…” Gerard reaches up to grab hold of his hands, “We’ll find someone who knows what to do, okay? Even if we have to kidnap like, BL/ind doctors or some shit. We’ll get it out, I promise.”

Frank relaxes against him. “Okay.” He mumbles into Gerard’s leather jacket, the bomb caught between them.

“Okay.” Gerard repeats, “Now, how about we go outside and see it this thing works?”

***

They don’t mention Frank’s worries to Ray or Mikey. Gerard says it’s ridiculous to worry them over nothing and Frank doesn’t think he wants a return to Ray’s suspicious looks. Mikey’s sleeping out in the main room of the diner now, his place in the back taken by Frank – Gerard hasn’t had a nightmare since they met him, but that night it’s Frank who wakes up while it’s still pitch black outside, sitting bolt upright and gasping.

He hears the bald man telling him to stand up, so he does. It’s better like that. He pushes himself upright and opens his eyes, swinging his legs off the metal table he’d been lying on.

“There.” The bald man says, “That’s better, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” He says, because it is, even though he doesn’t quite know what it’s supposed to be better than.

“Good.”

The door swings open to reveal two men in masks. The bald man smiles.

“I have a job for you.”

He’s out in the desert, in the middle of nowhere, firing his gun at a car. He can make out the occupants, two men and a woman. One of the men is already dead, slumped in the driver’s seat with a blast mark covering half his face, his jacket smouldering from the shot. The others are shooting back at him but it won’t be long until they’re dead too – outnumbered and taken by surprise. He doesn’t know why these people have to die, he doesn’t need to know. These are his orders and following orders is better.

The bald man tells him to study, puts him in a room with a machine that spills blue light on the white walls and shows him pictures. He watches them with interest; even though he’s not sure what the pictures are showing him.

Afterwards, the bald man gives him a pile of wires and metal. It’s to see how much he’s learnt.

He makes something. The bald man seems pleased with the result.

The young boy kicks him as he carries him to the van. The boy’s yelling too, for people to save him. It’s loud and it’s right in his ear and he wants the boy to shut up – can’t he see that this is for his own good? He will take him to the City and it will all be better.

The corridor is lined with pictures. Some of them have a big red cross over them. The first time he saw them he’d felt an odd clenching sensation in the pit of his stomach like he hadn’t eaten recently, but it vanished as quickly as it had arrived. There were two pictures that hadn’t been crossed out yet that the bald man always glared at more than the others. He said they were traitors.

He found that interesting.

He advanced across the concrete, recognising the Zonerunner from his picture in the corridor. The traitor had nowhere to run to and no weapon. The bald man would be pleased. Maybe he could take him in alive, that would be better – a shot to the leg to incapacitate him. His fingers twitched at the holster. He should draw his weapon. He WANTED to draw his weapon.

Everything went white.

Gerard had been curled up next to him, sleeping fully dressed except for his jacket balled up under his head but he wakes up as he feels Frank move next to him. He listens to his breathing for a few seconds, a little unsure of what he should do – he’s punched Mikey a few times when he’d grabbed hold of him before he’d been fully aware of his surroundings.

“Frankie?” he whispers as his breaths start to slow down and even out. “You okay? It’s fine, it’s only me.”

“G…Gerard?” Frank fumbles for him in the dark, hands searching for something to ground him back in the present.

Gerard grabs his hand and pulls it upwards to his hair, letting Frank grab hold of a handful. “Okay?”

Frank shakes his head, a movement Gerard can only just make out in the dark room. His hand tightens painfully in Gerard’s hair, tugging at it. “What happened?”

Frank swallows loudly and sniffs, it sounds like he’d been crying. “I remember learning to make that bomb now.” He says in an undertone.

Gerard takes a deep breath. “Okay.” He says as calmly as he can manage. “It’ll be okay, Frankie.”

Frank sniffs again. “I really, really didn’t want to remember this.”

Gerard bites his lip, “Maybe there’s nothing you can do about it…” he says sadly. “Maybe it’s just a matter of time.”

“Fuckin’ fantastic.” Frank grumbles, sounding more like himself now. He throws the blanket he’d been sleeping under aside. “I’m just gonna get some air. Sorry for waking you up.”

Gerard reaches for his jacket. “Hold on, I’ll come with you.”

“DON’T.” Frank snaps, zipping up his own jacket. “Don’t fucking…” he turns away from Gerard who’s paused, his jacket hanging from one shoulder. “Gerard, please. Just don’t.”

“Frankie?” Gerard doesn’t sound upset, just concerned.

Frank can’t bring himself to turn and face him though. He swallows hard. “Trust me; you shouldn’t want to be around me.”

“Is this about your nightmare? I told you, I don’t care about that.”

Frank grinds his teeth – Gerard just isn’t getting it. “It wasn’t a nightmare, Gee. It HAPPENED. And you should care.”

He hears Gerard’s soft footfall and tenses up. He should have known Gerard would push at this. His hand falls on Frank’s shoulder. “Frank.” He says, his voice sounds as dangerous as Frank feels. “Stop, okay. Just fucking STOP. Talk to me.”

Frank wants to be able to shake Gerard’s hand off and run – leave Gerard and the diner and the others far behind him. He knows what could happen if he stays, memories from his time ‘asleep’ are pounding through his head, given a kick-start from the dream, but it’s Gerard – even though he only met him a week ago he’s known him for years and he thinks Gerard’s been everything Frank’s wanted since the first time he saw him. He’s terrified of staying but even more scared of what’ll happen to him if he loses Gerard now.

“You shouldn’t…” he starts, pinching the bridge of his nose in an effort not to cry. “I can’t… I might…” but he doesn’t know how to finish the sentence he’s trying to start. The nightmare had come to him in flashes, moments of memory, and scenes from his life – things that couldwouldwere real. It had been his hands on the wheel of a van and his finger on the trigger of a gun and he’d woken when he’d stared down the sights at Gerard.

“You’re not gonna hurt me.” Gerard says as though he’s reading Frank’s mind. He sounds as though he’s never been surer of anything in his life. It makes Frank feel sick.

“You don’t know that.” He mumbles, feeling like the heat from Gerard’s palm is going to burn through the shoulder of his jacket any second.

Gerard turns him slowly, forcing him to look at him with one hand under his chin. “You didn’t.” he says with a strange smile on his face. “You could’ve shot me back at the store and you didn’t. I trust you.”

Frank leans forward, resting his head on Gerard’s chest and listening to his heartbeat, steady and soothing. “I don’t trust myself.” He admits. “I don’t trust myself at all.”

Frank feels twitchy for the next couple of days. Every time he closes his eyes he’s back inside his own head, pointing a gun at Gerard, even though he’s never done it in real life.

He’s not sure why or even how Gerard can still trust him, not really. He knows that right here, right now, he wouldn’t – couldn’t – even think of hurting Gerard, but the small silver box is still attached and Frank can tell by the way he can feel the (firebloodmayhemred) wires snaking into his brain that the possibility is still there.

Every so often he tries to tell Gerard again. He wants to – to explain about the things he knows he’s done and the things he’s scared he’ll do – but Gerard never lets him start, never lets him get past ‘There was this man in a Pegasus station’ and ‘I dreamt…’

“Shh…” Gerard says in the dark of the diner. “You won’t hurt me.”

***

Gerard stumbles into the diner. It’s dark and deserted, the few loose chairs lie smashed on the floor, empty cans and ripped clothes are strewn everywhere.

The door to the back room lies propped open by Ray’s dead body, a blasthole burnt through his jacket and t-shirt. Gerard feels an empty clench in his gut but forces himself to step forward. There’ll be time for grief once he finds Mikey and Frank.

His footsteps sound hollow on the floortiles.

One, two, three paces and he spots Mikey behind the counter, raygun lying in a pool of blood next to his outstretched hand. Someone – something – has slit his throat from ear to ear and everything is drenched in the sticky red fluid.

Gerard swallows, sounding loud in the silent building. He tries to remember what he’d been doing but the memories won’t come. He doesn’t know where he’d been before this, if he could have stopped it.

“Frank…” he whispers, trying to push away the rising terror. The word falls into the empty room like a lead weight.

Behind him, the main door to the diner slams open and Gerard spins around on his heel, panic threatening to overcome him. Frank is standing in the doorway but if Gerard had thought the sight of him would make this horror even slightly better he’s wrong. The blood feels like it’s freezing in his veins.

“Frank!?” he gasps, but the name can’t truthfully be applied to what’s standing in front of him.

Dressed in a white suit again, raygun raised to point directly at Gerard’s head, the… thing… in the doorway is wearing Frank’s face but that’s all the similarity. Blank eyed and passive it looks like a ‘bot and the red light blinking on the box on the side of his head seems to be flashing to the beat of Gerard’s heart.

“Frank…” he says again desperately. This cannot be happening.

“Who?” asks the Frank-thing before it pulls the trigger.

Gerard sits bolt upright, gasping for breath and panting loudly.

He’s in the back of the car, there’s no-one else there but through the pitch-black night outside he can see the nearby flicker of a campfire and he releases the breath he’s been holding, dragging a shaking hand over his face and through the tangled mess of his hair, trying to calm himself down before pushing open the car door and going in search of the others.

Frank looks up as he stumbles towards the fire, Ray is in the middle of a story that Mikey is listening to intently, a tin can held loosely in his grip.

“Gerard?” Frank stands up as he says his name and it makes Ray pause mid sentence. Gerard though only has eyes for Frank.

He wobbles closer, wishing he could see Frank clearer, that he could check that he’s alive inside his head without giving away how scared he really is.

Frank seems to understand and stumbles forward to grab hold of Gerard’s upper arms. It’s still too dark to properly see him but his thumbs rub soothing circles on his shoulders and he can feel himself relaxing fraction by fraction.

“You okay?”

It’s all Gerard can do to nod, even though he’s not one hundred percent sure he still is.

***

Despite what he’s read in some of the old magazines – usually the ones with recipes for food that doesn’t exist anymore and quizzes that he doesn’t understand – Gerard thinks Frank’s smile is not at all like the sun coming out. In the zones there’s never anything BUT sun, and Frank’s wide, beaming grins are nothing like as commonplace or every-day. Rather, when Frank smiles, it’s like the first notes of a crunching guitar track on a crystal-clear signal setting up a reverb in Gerard’s chest that reaches to the very tips of his fingers and toes and changes everything that he ever thought he understood about himself.

He knows what he’d spent countless hours trying to recreate now – even though he didn’t quite understand what he was doing while ripping up the tiny pieces of paper, now he can see Frank’s eyes staring out across the diner from the centre of the collage and it almost scares him how deep inside his head Frank has settled.

It ALMOST scares him because he doesn’t think there’s anywhere else he’d want Frank to be.

He’s not naïve – Gerard’s had enough encounters in empty rooms and bathrooms and the back seats of cars with enough lonely zonerunners that he knows that at least part of what he feels for Frank is desire. Frank’s good looking after all, and when your only other companions are a guy you’d be worried would eat you alive for asking and a close blood relation it’s a natural reaction to be attracted to him. Plus, Frank’s always touching him and hugging him and stroking his hair and sleeping right next to him and Gerard might be crazy but he’s not made of stone.

However, it’s more than that.

There’s something he can’t pin down, deeper than he’s ever known that stops him every time he catches himself thinking about how easy it would be to push Frank down and see what sort of delicious noises he can wring out of him with his tongue.

All Gerard knows is that there was probably a very fucking good reason that he couldn’t look any of those ‘runners in the eyes but Frank’s not a semi-anonymous fuck in a back room and Gerard’s not going to treat him like one, so he limits himself to listening to the rhythm of Frank’s smile and feeling the tangle of his fingers in his hair.

***

They hear from two different sources that BL/ind have taken kids other than Grace. First, there’s an overheard conversation in a Pegasus, a ‘runner talking to the girl at the counter about raids on some of the dust-hole scratch farms on the outskirts of zone six. Ray flinches, looking over at Mikey, Frank and Gerard, standing suddenly still while waiting for his turn to negotiate.

‘Dracs’ Ray mouths to the three of them with a quick head jerk to the two ‘runners who are still talking. Ray watches as Frank shudders

Then there’s a message from the radio DJ stuck between two songs and coded in his usual mix of slang and style, but it all boils down to teams of Dracs that seem to be scouring the zones looking for children. Ray’s riding shotgun as Mikey drives the Trans-Am but he brings it to a screeching halt when the next song begins. He glances around at them, Frank lying with his head on Gerard’s lap on the backseat. Ray feels strangely light headed in a way that has nothing whatsoever to do with the early afternoon heat. He’s been on edge for a while now, a response to simultaneously trying to come up with a plan that doesn’t end with them all being shot thirty seconds after rolling into Battery City and trying not to let thoughts of Grace overwhelm him entirely.

It’s all finally too much, Ray’s angry now – he’s not sad or lonely or overcome by grief and loss anymore, he’s pissed off and cross and there’s no way he’s going to let BL/ind get away with this any more even if there’s no hope. It bubbles out of him, no chance of stopping it. “We gotta do something.” He growls in a low tone. “I don’t care anymore. We have to TRY. It’s not just Grace. Whatever those fuckers are doing… ”

Next to him, Mikey inhales a sharp breath through his nose and Ray realises that he doesn’t need to finish his sentence for them all to understand him. They’re his crew.

No-one says anything for a moment and then Gerard swallows loudly. “Okay.”

“I’ve been thinking of a plan.” Frank says croakily. “It’s probably a terrible plan, but…”

“It seems as though it’s the only one we’ve got.” Says Ray firmly. “Get us back to the diner, Mikey.”

***

“You’re right.” Says Mikey in his most monotone voice. “That’s a fucking ridiculous plan.”

Gerard is staring at Frank as though he’s just grown an extra head and declared his intentions to eat babies. “Fuck no.” he says loudly.

Frank raises his head. “I know you don’t want to go back, but…”

“Fuck THAT.” Gerard says angrily. “Fuck THAT, Frank. You think this is about me?” he lowers his voice to a hiss. “You know what BL/ind will do to you if you get caught? You think I’m gonna let you walk back in there?”

Frank can’t hold Gerard’s gaze and looks away.

Ray sighs. “I don’t like this.” He says in his measured voice, “But if we’re gonna go through with this then Frank’s the only one who can do it.”

Gerard explodes into movement, sweeping the empty tin cans off the table with a crash and standing up, pushing himself away from them all. “Fuck.” He yells, just to drive the point home.

“Gee…” Mikey begins.

Gerard wheels round, dragging a hand through his hair. “Have you told them?” he demands. “Have you fucking TOLD them, Frankie? About the dreams you’ve been having? About what BL/ind DID TO YOU?”

Frank stands up, breathing heavily. He leans across the table, staring at Gerard. “No.” he says, “No, I haven’t fucking told them.”

“Haven’t told us what, Frank?” Ray asks, “What the hell is going on?”

“BL/ind.” Spits Gerard. “They did something to Frankie’s head. Turned him into their perfect fucking soldier, so excuse me for not wanting them to do it again!” Two long strides and Gerard’s back at the table and grabbing at Frank’s jacket, hauling him closer. “I’ve only just FOUND you, you fucking asshole. You think I wanna risk losing you now? Especially like that. To them.”

Frank looks shaken. “Gee?...”

Gerard crumples, head going to rest on Frank’s shoulder as Frank’s hands clutch at his waist to hold him up. “But… I’m gonna have to, aren’t I? We have to – For Grace and those other kids.”

“We’ll be careful.” Mutters Frank. “I’LL be careful.”

***

It really hasn’t been easy to get Gerard on his own but eventually Mikey hits on the idea of telling Ray that Frank should lean basic mechanics in case anything should happen to the Trans-Am and waiting until they’re both outside before waylaying Gerard before he tries to follow them.

Gerard looks nervous as Mikey stands in front of him blocking the way to the door but he feels that this is a conversation that needs to be had, awkward or not.

Mikey unfolds his arms and says “Sit down.”

Gerard blinks at him but slides into the booth anyway.

Sitting opposite him, Mikey’s not one hundred percent sure about what to say, so he starts by sighing Gerard’s name in a slightly pained tone and hoping his brother will pick it up from there.

Gerard just huffs in return and glances out of the dusty window through a crack in the boards. Mikey follows his gaze. Frank is leaning over the engine of the car, looking at whatever it is Ray is pointing to.

“Gerard.” He says again, trying to sound kinder this time.

“What do you want me to say, Mikey?” Gerard asks, looking back at him, “Just fuckin’ ASK.”

Mikey shrugs half-heartedly. “What’s going on with you and Frank?”

Gerard’s face sort of freezes. “Nothing’s going on with me and Frank.” He says carefully.

“Yeah, that’s kind of my point.”

Gerard huffs again in a way that means he’s avoiding the question. Mikey rests his chin on his hand and leans forward, his elbow slipping slightly on the table top. “If you think he doesn’t feel the same way about you then you’re even crazier than I think you are.” He says quietly, trying to be as gentle as possible. Gerard flinches anyway.

“It’s not that.” He says after a pause, his gaze tracking back to Frank outside.

“You deserve to be happy, Gee.” Mikey says. He feels like this is something that needs to be pointed out. He’s seen his brother searching for something ever since they started ‘running and he has the idea that for Gerard it started a long time before that.

There’s something about Frank and the way he and Gerard are together that makes Mikey think Gerard can stop looking, but the trick is going to be getting Gerard to see what’s right in front of him.

Gerard sighs. “I know that, Mikey.” He says quietly. “I’m not quite that masochistic.”

“Then what’s stopping you?” Mikey asks. “All I’ve ever wanted since I knew how to think for myself is for you to be alright, and I’ve gotta tell you Gee, I think if you let this go you’ll probably never find it again.”

Once again, Gerard looks back to him, eyes wide, “But what am I going to do if he leaves?” he asks. The sound of his voice is almost painful. “It’s going to be hard enough as it is…”

Mikey’s initial reaction is to tell him not to be so stupid, that he’s seen the way Frank looks at him, and there’s no way in hell that Frank’s going to leave, but this is the zones and there’s more than one way to leave.

He reaches across the table and rests his hand on Gerard’s shoulder. It feels like there’s nothing else he can do.

***

They spend the next few days getting ready. Gerard, Frank and Ray take the Trans-Am to collect supplies while Mikey borrows Ray’s bike to see how many of the Drac’s battery vends he can hack. They’ll need them for their guns and Frank’s secret project.

Everyone’s uncharacteristically quiet when they meet back at the diner. Mikey hands Frank a fistful of batteries and Frank nods his thanks, taking them and Gerard into the back of the diner. He’d been working on something, Mikey knew, but hadn’t shared it with anyone – not even Gerard. He watches his brother vanish through the wonky swing doors and turns to Ray.

“You wanna sort out the transport?” he asks, “I’ll get everything sorted in here.”

Mikey had just finished double-checking the guns and their power supplies when he hears the first shout from the back room.

“You want me to fuckin’ do WHAT?! Frankie…”

Frank’s reply is too quiet for Mikey to catch, but he hears Gerard’s “PLEASE. Don’t ask me to do that.”

Mikey’s hands still on the gun in his lap. He isn’t sure he should be listening to this conversation.

He hears heavy footsteps pacing the back room and then a loud sigh. Frank says “You’re the only one I want to do this, Gee. I’m so sorry, but you have to see how important this is to me. I don’t… I don’t want to live like that again…Look, I…”

Mikey goes to help Ray with the transport. If they want to motor tomorrow, everything needs to be shiny as fuck today.

***

When Gerard and Frank finally emerge out of the diner, Frank looks far too serious and Gerard’s hair is practically sticking straight up, a sure sign that he’s feeling upset and stressed.

“Are you guys ready?” asks Ray, standing up.

“Yeah.” Says Frank flatly as Gerard stares off into the middle distance.

“How are we gonna do this?” asks Mikey. “Ray, you’ve probably got the steadiest aim.”

“No.” says Gerard.

Mikey sighs, he’s been half-expecting this. “Gee, we talked about this. It makes more sense if…”

Gerard’s gaze snaps back to them. “No.” he says again, unfolding his arms and resting them on his hips. “NO-ONE is getting shot today.” He glances at Frank and Mikey’s stomach turns over.

“BL/ind will never believe that, Gerard, and you know it.” Says Frank, “We agreed on this – Mikey has to…”

Mikey watches as Gerard’s jaw clenches and in that moment the years of living and running with his brother collapse into one shining moment of clarity. “GERARD!” he shouts, but he knows it’s too late.

“Mikey doesn’t have to do anything.” Gerard says with a twisted grin as his hand reaches for the grip of his gun.

To Mikey, it’s like everything’s running in slow-motion, both Frank and Ray are reaching out to Gerard but he’s already unholstered his gun. He adjusts the grip, pushing the barrel tight against his left shoulder. It’ll be a perfectly clean shot from that distance – the ray will burn through the flesh of Gerard’s arm, cauterising itself with minimal extra damage, but it’ll leave his left arm useless for a while.

Mikey looks away as Gerard pulls the trigger.

***

Frank’s hands start shaking as he drives the van through the outskirts of Battery City. He’s sweating behind his stolen mask and desperately wants to rip it off but he knows what a stupid idea that is. He hits a pothole in the road and hears Gerard swear faintly from the back of the van. It makes Frank’s heart skip a beat, but he keeps quiet, trying to remember the route to the clinic and stopping himself from imaging all the ways that his plan could go wrong.

As he pulls into the parking lot under the clinic, Frank thinks he’s managed to calm himself down enough to pass for normal – or as normal as a someone trying to pass as a Drac in BL/ind headquarters could possibly be anyway. He keeps his mind on the memories that had been slowly pushing their way out of their hiding places and, taking deep breaths, Frank tries to lock down all of his emotions – all the fear, for Gerard, still in pain in the back of the van, for Ray, waiting for them to return in the outskirts of the City, for Mikey, voluntarily walking into the place that had done so much to damage his brother and for himself and what might happen to him.

As he parks the van, the elevator doors swing open revealing the bald man and two Dracs.

“Here we go…” mutters Frank under his breath.

Korse steps forward as Frank mechanically opens the door. He doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t need to, Korse gives orders and doesn’t answer questions.

“You’re back.” Korse says in his flat, expressionless voice. “Alone. And you’ve bought me something.”

Frank doesn’t speak, doesn’t even bother to nod, he just follows Korse around to the back of the van. One of the Dracs unlocks the rear doors and swings them open, Frank’s chest constricting tightly as Gerard and Mikey are revealed.

Mikey’s lying on the floor of the van and doing a good job of looking like he’s been thrown there while unconscious and hasn’t woken up yet. Gerard’s kneeling by his side, his right hand clutching at the wound in his left shoulder. His head turns as the doors open; he’s breathing heavily and glares at them all through a fall of bright red hair, head down, eyes sparking with pure hate. Frank stares at him through the eyeholes of his mask. He’s never seen Gerard look like this before, never even suspected he could. It almost makes him step back, step away from the… the thing that’s taken Gerard’s place.

Korse smiles. It’s the same smile of triumph he’d given Frank before they’d taken him to the operating theatre – wide and full of teeth.

“Gerard.” Korse says, “Welcome home.”

***

Despite the blasthole in his shoulder, Gerard launches himself out of the van, snarling like a wild animal. Frank holds himself still, even though everything in him is screaming to help Gerard, that he’ll injure himself more, that Korse will decide Gerard’s not worth the trouble and have him ghosted right there in front of him in the parking lot. As it is, it feels as though his heart is going to burst out of his chest as one of the Dracs reaches out, catching a gloved hand in Gerard’s hair, yanking on it hard and stopping him with a crash mid leap and sending him sprawling to his knees.

Korse already has his gun out. “Now, now, Gerard.” He says in a horrifyingly reasonable tone. “That’s no way to behave, is it? I see we have our work cut out for us.”

Gerard tries to jerk his head away from the Drac with its hand in his hair, but its grip seems too strong. “Fuck. You.” He says clearly, his eyes boring into Korse. He hasn’t so much as glanced at Frank and Frank feels oddly grateful for that – he’d probably give the game away if he had to pretend to be a Drac again with Gerard watching him like that.

Korse doesn’t even seem to hear Gerard, he just looks past him to Mikey lying still in the back of the van, “Ah, and that must be your brother. Excellent.” He turns to the second Drac and Frank. “You two take that one down to one of the empty cells in the experimentation block.” He gestures with the gun at Mikey, who doesn’t as much as twitch. “Gerard here has an appointment to keep.”

Gerard screams something unintelligible but full of swear words and Korse shakes his head. “Such an ANGRY young man.” He sighs, “May I remind you…” he steps closer to Gerard, leaning forward to mutter into his ear. “We have your brother now, Gerard. Try anything and I’m sure we can find something more… painful to experiment on him with than just pills.”

Gerard stops struggling immediately.

The other Drac starts moving towards the van and Frank manages to get his feet to move after only a split second, dragging Mikey out of the van. Mikey groans and it sounds like a question but there’s no way Frank can answer him. Instead, he gives his ankle an extra hard squeeze. ‘It’s okay,’ he thinks as though Mikey can read his mind. ‘Gerard’s fine. It’s all going to plan.’

In the next thirty seconds Frank discovers two things. First, Mikey is very, very good at pretending to be unconscious, letting himself remain totally limp as Frank and the Drac haul him upright and sling his arms over their shoulders. Secondly, and more importantly, he’s a hell of a lot heavier than he looks.

As they start half-carrying, half-dragging Mikey, the elevator doors slide open again for a small party of Dracs who must be here to deal with Gerard. For his own part, Gerard says Mikey’s name as they pass him and Frank feels Mikey’s fingers spasm against his shoulder.

Just before the elevator doors close on them, Frank hears Korse’s voice echoing across the parking lot. “When you’ve dealt with him, come and see me. I’m sure you’ll have a fascinating story to tell me.”

Frank knows that it’s directed at him.

***

Frank and the Drac drop Mikey on a bed, or at least a flat, faintly padded surface Mikey hopes is a bed. He feels a slight, reassuring squeeze of fingers on his shoulder before the sound of boots on a tiled floor and the slam of the door.

Mikey flickers open one eye to see a plain white, brightly lit room with no windows and no furniture other than what he’s lying on. He opens the other eye. The thick door has a sliding observation window, but it’s closed. Not that it matters too much, Mikey’s sure there are cameras hidden in the room.

He forces himself to relax, crossing his legs at the ankle and stretching his arms to fold them under his head. All he can do now is wait for Frank to put the next part of the plan into action and try not to die of a stress or panic induced heart attack.

***

As soon as he leaves Mikey in the cell, Frank goes to find Korse. He’s been practicing his story since they decided to try his plan so he knows what he’s going to tell him, but he also knows where Korse is likely to be and it’s going to be hard to keep in character if he’s right.

He walks down the corridor of pictures. Someone has already replaced the ones of Mikey and Gerard with ones that have a large red cross through them. BL/ind were always efficient. The only one left alone from his new-found family is a particularly unflattering one of Ray - fuzzy and slightly out of focus it looks like it was taken from a long distance. Frank allows himself a small smile behind his mask. One day, he tells himself, his picture will be here too.

Korse is precisely where Frank had known he would be – an observation room with a large window into another one that is used for ‘treatment’. He feels a little like he’s going to throw up; Gerard’s in the room beyond, strapped to the chair. Frank knows from experience that Gerard can see everything that’s going on in the observation room even though he can’t hear what’s being said.

Frank tries not to look at Gerard as he crosses the observation room to Korse, who’s staring at Gerard through the window, but he can’t help it – in the unremitting white of the clinic it’s like Gerard is the only thing in the room, a violent splash of riotous colour struggling against the straps that keep him bound in place. The glass is soundproof, but Frank can tell Gerard is screaming, wild eyes all but rolling back in his head. He looks as crazy as he did the first time Frank saw him and he’s suddenly reminded of why Mikey worries about him like he does.

***

Gerard fell asleep as soon as he’d lain down, leaving Frank to watch him. He thinks it should still feel weirder, creepier maybe, just sitting next to Gerard and watching him slowly breathe in and out but it doesn’t. It feels absolutely right, like something he was born to do. The thought makes Frank smile and he braves reaching down to run his fingers through Gerard’s long hair. Gerard makes a small noise that sounds like a question and shifts slightly but doesn’t wake up. They remain like that for a while. Frank feels peaceful and oddly protected even though Gerard’s asleep and he doesn’t even flinch when the door to the main room creaks open.

Mikey leans up against the doorframe and studies them for a while. Frank turns his attention back to Gerard, pushing his hair away from his sleeping face.

“Can I talk to you?” Mikey says eventually.

Frank’s been expecting this. “Yeah,” he replies, “I’ll see you outside in a moment, okay?”

Mikey doesn’t say anything but lets the door creak shut behind him.

Frank tugs a little on Gerard’s hair. He makes the questioning noise again but this time his eyes flicker open. Frank grins at him.

“I’m just going outside.” he whispers, “Not for long. Mikey wants to talk to me.”

Gerard makes another noise that Frank takes as a sign of assent.

Mikey’s sitting on the hood of the Trans-Am, staring at the diner with his arms folded. He looks like he usually does serious and deadly calm. Frank wonders if it’s his natural state of being or if it’s something he’d had to learn to stay safe in Battery City and hasn’t managed to rid himself of the habit now he’s out here in the zones. He jams his hands in his pockets and walks over to him, trying to hide his nervousness. It’s a little ridiculous, Frank thinks, the only person less physically intimidating than Mikey is himself.

“Gee’ll be pissed if you kill me now.” he tries to joke, but Mikey raises an eyebrow. “Heh… I just meant, well, you know…” Frank tails off, not sure if Mikey does know. He doesn’t even think HE knows.

“Gerard’s insane.” Mikey says flatly.

Frank swallows. “Uh…”

Mikey shakes his head. “He hasn’t had a nightmare since we met you.” he continues, “and I’ve been listening.”

Frank gets the feeling that his place in this conversation is to listen to whatever Mikey has to say.

“He used to wake up screaming almost every night.” Mikey unfolds his arms and puts his hands palm down on the hood of the car, “Unless he’d drunk so much he was practically in a coma.”

Frank nods hesitantly and Mikey gives an odd one-shouldered shrug. “He sleeps.” he says matter-of-factly. “With you, I mean. With you he just sleeps.”

Frank bites his lip. “I know he’s your brother…” he starts, Mikey doesn’t sound accusing but it seems as though he should reply. Mikey just keeps talking over him.

“It’s okay. I don’t pretend to understand it and I’m still pretty creeped out by the, uh…” he gestures to the side of Frank’s head, “But I trust you, I guess. And Gerard deserves to get some fuckin’ rest for once and I know you’re not gonna ghost him in his sleep or anything. It’s pretty shiny…” he kicks his heels against the bumper of the car and Frank is suddenly reminded of how young Mikey really is. It’s kinda shocking after watching him ‘running the zones with a gun in his hand. “It’s just…” he kicks the bumper one last time and looks up at Frank. “You should know how bad he is… was. Whatever. I think it’s you now. I think it’s always been you, ever since he first saw you; you were gonna be the one to keep him grounded. And you gotta be sure about this, okay, because I’m his brother but you’re FRANK and he sleeps when you’re there. So if you’re gonna leave us, leave HIM, you better fuckin’ do it now before he decides he can’t live without you, because if you fuck my brother over… I will fuckin’ END you. ”

Frank’s sure his eyes are the size of plates. “I’m not gonna fucking LEAVE!” he says, astounded that Mikey could even think that he could.

Mikey does his odd half-shrug again. “There’s more than one way to leave.” He says matter-of-factly. “You know there is. Especially here.”

Frank shivers, even though it’s a warm night. “I…” he starts, trying to think of anything to say. “You know I can’t promise that.”

Mikey nods, once, and sighs. “Feels like I’ve been worrying about Gerard for forever.” he says, “You can’t blame me.” He’s not actually looking at Frank, just staring past him to the diner.

Frank shakes his head and then says, “No. No, I don’t blame you. Fuck, Mikey… I know I wasn’t there and you have no idea how much I wish I had been but…” he huffs out a deep breath. “I thought about Gerard every single day until they took that away from me. I did my fair share of worrying about him, believe me.” he stops, trying to pull his thoughts together. “I didn’t shoot him.” he tries, “I could’ve. Probably should’ve done, but I didn’t. I think despite everything BL/ind did to me, I knew who he was. It was – HE was the only thing that broke through, Mikey. They made me do so many terrible things and I did them, no questions, no emotion, nothing – but Gerard? For Gerard I stopped, if only for a moment. I don’t want to leave him. I can’t even think of leaving him… But… I still can’t promise nothing will go Costa Rica tomorrow...”

“Nobody can.” Mikey says, “But you better fuckin’ try.”

Frank laughs, the suddenness of it surprises even him, but nothing about this situation is even remotely funny.

Mikey jumps off the hood of the car. “You realise that you’re both just holding each other together?” he asks, “I’m not sure that’s healthy.”

“Fuck healthy.” Frank says succinctly. “It works.”

Mikey nods and starts walking back to the diner. “Get some sleep, Frank. Big day tomorrow.” 

***

Korse doesn’t bother looking at Frank as he approaches, he never did. Frank doesn’t think Korse thinks of the Dracs who work for him as human. He might have a point. He watches Gerard’s silent struggles for a few more moments and then says “I’ll never understand these… people. It’s disgusting.”

Frank doesn’t think anything about zonerunners in general or Gerard in particular is disgusting – If anything, it’s Korse and BL/ind’s white sterility, but of course he doesn’t even move a muscle. Korse finally turns. “Where did you find them?” he demands. He never asks.

Frank’s trying to remember what he sounded like and how he spoke when he’d been here last. He just hopes he gets it right. “Zone three.” he says. He uses short, clipped sentences, no extra words; only answering the question he’s being asked. Korse nods.

“And your team?”

“Dead.”

Korse glances back at Gerard for a moment. “Not much of a loss.” he says eventually, “They had a third.”

“Dead.” Frank repeats. They don’t need any patrols sent out to look for Ray.

“Good.” Korse says coldly. “Follow me.”

He starts towards the door and Frank’s heart leaps into his mouth. If Korse wants him to help ‘interrogate’ Gerard then he’s going to be sick, no question. It takes a few seconds to force his feet to move, but Korse doesn’t seem to notice. He pushes open the door to Gerard’s room and Frank can’t do anything but follow him although his heart is beating so hard and fast that he’s shocked that Korse hasn’t heard it.

Gerard stops yelling when they enter and looks at Korse with pure hate again. His fingernails are broken and there are deep scratch marks on the arms of the chair. “Where’s Mikey, you fucker?” he demands.

Korse barks out a laugh that has absolutely nothing to do with humour. “Your… brother,” he replies, saying the word as if it’s entirely distasteful, “Is being looked after.”

Gerard’s eyes go wide. Frank doesn’t blame him. In Korse’s voice it sounds like the worst kind of threat imaginable, like Mikey’s already dead and rotting in hell. He wishes there was some way of allaying Gerard’s fears.

Korse just smiles again. “You, Gerard.” he says almost pleasantly, “were one of my biggest failures, No matter what we did to make you normal, you always ended right back up here.” he shakes his head as though Gerard has disappointed him.

“You never made me normal.” Gerard spits, “I’m normal NOW, you fucking maniac.”

Korse tuts at him like he’s a small child refusing to see the truth. “Tell me how you did it, Gerard. Tell me how you escaped. There was no way you stopped taking those pills on your own – I made sure of that, so someone helped you and then you dragged your poor innocent brother down with you. It’s your fault he’s here. You know that.”

Frank wants to laugh at that. At the fact that Mikey was just that good at convincing BL/ind that he was still their good little citizen, but Gerard’s shaking his head at Korse,

“No one helped me.” he says.

“More lies, Gerard? I think we’ll have to cure you of that first.”

As if summoned, the door opens again and two Dracs carrying a tray are revealed. Frank can see the light glinting off the wicked-looking needle of a full syringe. Gerard starts struggling again, swearing at the top of his voice. “Oh fuck… Shit, no. You can’t fuckin’ do this…” Frank gets the feeling his panic isn’t faked.

Korse turns to Frank and nods at the tray. “Do it.” he says, “Let’s see if we can curb his temper somewhat.”

Frank’s stomach is rolling now, he’s afraid of giving himself away but he really, really doesn’t want it to be his hand that gives Gerard back to the grip of the drugs.

“You two,” Korse says to the other Dracs, “Hold him still.”

The Dracs start moving immediately, clamping down on Gerard’s uninjured arm and shoulder. Frank knows he had no choice but to pick up the syringe and pray that everything is going to work out. Gerard’s gone cold turkey from BL/ind drugs countless times before, he’s just gonna have to do it again. If they get out of here.

Gerard’s arm is trembling under his hand when he holds it steady and Frank watches him for a second. Gerard’s gone paler than he usually is – almost greenish under the harsh lights of the room, and he’s muttering under his breath. Even as close as he is, Frank still can’t quite make out what he’s saying, but just before he slides the needle into Gerard’s arm he watches him exhale, close his eyes and nod, just once. Frank knows he’s been forgiven for what he’s about to do.

Gerard slumps down in the chair as the powerful drug hits his bloodstream. Frank removes the syringe and replaces it on the tray, resisting the urge to hurl it across the room and hoping that Korse hasn’t noticed how badly his hands are shaking.

Korse isn’t even looking at Frank. “Bring his brother.” he says, watching Gerard. “He should see this.”

***

Mikey gave up on pretending to relax several minutes ago – it was too stressful. He had no idea when Frank would be able to let him out of the cell, and there was a part of him that wondered if he could, or indeed would.

The room was small, but Mikey was pacing it. “Fuckin’ stupid.” he muttered to himself and anyone from BL/ind who might be listening. It was getting harder and harder not to start worrying about Gerard. He was on his three hundredth and eighty first circuit of the room when the door crashed opened. He wheeled round to face the Drac in the doorway. It – He – was panting heavily, but Mikey said nothing. If it wasn’t Frank then he didn’t want to give anything away.

“It’s me.” the Drac said after catching his breath and raising his mask just high enough for Mikey to see Frank’s mouth. “Listen to me, Dracs are coming. You gotta go. Here, take this gun. It’ll help, but don’t draw attention to yourself. I’ll cause a diversion so you should be able to get everyone out but you gotta get to Gee. I… they, they gave him their fuckin’ drugs. Get him outta here, get him clean.”

Frank shakes his head as Mikey opens his mouth to reply. “Grace is in the test centre. Gerard’s up in treatment. This is the only way. Korse’ll know I’m not… well, not theirs anymore by now and this is the only way, okay?” He quickly glances up and down the corridor before turning back to Mikey. “Tell Gee… Fuck. Tell Gee not to give up, right?”

Mikey nods mutely, turning the white raygun over in his hands. There’s nothing he can say. It won’t change anything.

Frank points down the corridor. “Grace is that way. Gee’s three floors up. There’s signs. Take care of him for me, and whatever you do, don’t let him follow me. Tell him I changed my mind…” he takes a deep breath. “Mikey.” He says, “I’m so fuckin’ sorry.”

With that, Frank runs off down the corridor in the opposite direction to the one he’d pointed in. Mikey doesn’t lose any time in running.

A minute and a half later, alarms start to ring.

***

The moment the Dracs join him in the corridor to fetch Mikey, Frank knows he’s dead, dead and ghosted and over. He just hasn’t stopped moving yet. This was always the risky part of the plan and while technically it’s all still shiny enough to get Grace, Mikey and Gerard out, Frank can’t see a way of carrying it out so that he leaves with them. He’s good at forward thinking – BL/ind made sure of that, but the plan they so carefully worked out back in the zones is all fucked up now. He’d been banking on the thought – hope – that he’d be able to spring Mikey from his cell without the Dracs or Korse knowing but he’s got a fucking escort now and if he waits any longer then Mikey will be in Korse’s hands and then there won’t be anything he or anyone else can do. The plan is useless from here on out, so it’s all up to Frank.

There’s nothing else for it, he thinks as he hangs back just enough to get slightly behind the Dracs walking with him.

He’s gonna get the three others out of here and back to the zones where they belong and if he can do that then he doesn’t care if BL/ind kill him. He almost doesn’t care if they manage to get the control box working again as long as his last real thought is of Gerard ‘running free with the wind in his hair. At least he finally got to meet Gerard for real.

Just around the corner from Mikey’s cell he grabs one of the Drac’s rayguns. Frank’s got his own, of course, but it’ll be useless for what he has to do.

He’s fast and the Dracs barely have enough time to react. Two swift headshots and they’re both down. Frank runs for Mikey’s door.

***

Mikey feels kinda ridiculous, edging down totally empty corridors clutching the gun. He keeps thinking that the Dracs’ll catch him at any moment but apart from the sound of running feet close by a few minutes ago, he’s neither seen nor heard anyone else. He’s following the signs to the test centre – he knows they’re underground on this level so it makes more sense to get Grace first, but if he’s being honest with himself he’s dreading the moment he has to look Gerard in the eye and tell him what Frank’s done. Mikey’s almost – ALMOST – wishing for Gerard to be so far gone on the drugs when he finally reaches him that he won’t know, understand or care about Frank’s actions. He’s dealt with his brother popping so hard on pills that the only thing he cares about is his next dose and it’s not easy by any stretch but Mikey’s been doing it since he was fourteen and he’s used to it. The loss of Frank though, is something he doesn’t see his brother coming back from, not as the same person anyway.

He tries to push that whole train of though to the back of his mind for now. Grace is his priority at the moment. He’ll deal with Gerard when the time comes.

The test centre is just as deserted as the route to it had been. Whatever Frank’s diversion had been, it’d been a good one. 

***

Frank doesn’t let Mikey say anything when he opens the door to the room they’re holding him in and he barely lets himself stop to think about what he’s saying. The most important thing is to give Mikey all the information he needs to get Grace and Gerard and to get out of the clinic. He gets the feeling Mikey knows what he’s about to do anyway.

Hopefully he’ll pass on his message to Gee, it’s too dangerous now, especially with the fucking drugs flowing through Gerard’s system and he just knows for sure that Korse isn’t the sort of person to stop there, not while he can still find a vein.

He’s getting close to his destination now and he pauses for a second, leaning up against the wall of the corridor. He tries to steady his breathing and then reaches up to pull the black and white mask away from his head. He’s either gonna die or spend the rest of his life not knowing that he wished he had. Either way, he’s gonna walk into it with his own fucking face.

Frank hopes they haven’t moved anything around. He doesn’t think they would, BL/ind isn’t the sort of organisation that changes things around just for the hell of it. Frank doubts anything has changed here for years. He leans carefully up against the door anyway, he can’t hear anything in the room beyond but that’s not necessarily a bad thing – Dracs aren’t exactly chatty.

Strangely, after everything that has happened to him during the days and weeks before this, Frank now feels totally calm. He knows what he’s about to do, but it doesn’t scare him as much as the idea that Gerard would remain in the clutches of Korse and BL/ind along with Mikey and Grace, leaving Ray all alone in the zones again.

Frank runs his hands through his hair – it’s longer now than he can ever remember having it before, plasters a wide shit-eating grin on his face and pushes open the door to the Drac’s meeting room.

***

Mikey peers through the small windows of the cells in the test centre trying to find Grace, but all the rooms are deserted. There are empty beds in every one. Mikey starts worrying after the fifteenth room he checks and outright panicking after the twenty fifth. There still aren’t any Dracs around, which he’s grateful for even if it means they’re all still busy with Frank.

He’s at an intersection trying to decide which direction to try next when he hears a noise. In the silence of the clinic it startles him. It’s a muted, regular banging noise and his first instinct is to head in the opposite direction but he’s barely heard a noise apart from his own breathing since just after Frank let him out of his cell and he realises that it might be worth checking out.

Mikey follows the sound down identical white corridor. The noise isn’t quite regular after all, thump-thump and then a pause before the thumping again. He traces it eventually, one plain door among many.

Keeping his gun at the ready, he peers nervously through the spyhole. At first, he can’t see anything, just another unmade bed pushed up against the far wall but then he looks further down to see the top of a curly-haired head. Grace seems to be lying on her back in the middle of the floor and Mikey realises the noise he can still hear is Grace banging her feet on the closed door. He glances down at the keypad next to the door. Frank didn’t say anything about the locks, but it’s electric and Mikey’s got a raygun. It’s worth a try at least.

“Grace!” he calls as loudly as he dares. Just because he hasn’t seen anything around doesn’t mean they’re not close by.

The thumping stops and Mikey hears Grace scrambling to her feet.

“Who’s that?” she hisses in return, sounding defensive.

“Grace, it’s Mikey… I mean Kobra. You know me, Poison’s br… crew.”

There’s a pause and then Grace says suspiciously, “Where’s Jet Star?”

Mikey fiddles with the keypad but it seems pretty secure. “He’s waiting for you outside.” he replies, “Just stand back. I’m gonna get you out of here, okay?”

There’s no reply, but Mikey guesses she’s moved. He steps back and points the gun Frank gave him at the lock. “Here goes nothing…” he mutters, taking aim, closing his eyes and pulling the trigger.

***

Frank knows he’s a fast shot, and he’s got a secret weapon. He pushes open the doors to the meeting room a crack and tosses the homemade bomb through. He slams the door closed just before it explodes. Almost immediately a loud alarm starts to ring, a deafening wailing noise that must be sounding throughout the whole clinic. The Dracs are definitely distracted now; hopefully he’ll be able to ghost all the ones who didn’t get caught by the bomb blast.

Throwing the doors open once more, Frank bursts in and starts firing through the smoke. He knows he doesn’t have long, the explosion will have drawn attention, and it turns out that he only has a few seconds once all the Dracs are dead to overturn one of the desks for cover before the alarms bring reinforcements through the door on the opposite side of the room.

Frank thinks he’s laughing as he’s shooting. He’s got a pile of guns he took from the dead Dracs so he’s not going to run out of ammo any time soon. The alarms will keep the Dracs busy and away from tracking down the others until he’s either dead, captured or he’s ghosted every motherfucking Drac in Battery City and beyond.

He doesn’t know how long he’s there, firing blindly into the room, the Dracs’ blasts whizzing past his head until finally, eventually, inevitably, he’s surrounded. The gun in his hand is clicking on empty and he’d make a dive for another but there’s two Dracs both with the barrels of their blasters less than a foot from his face and Korse is staring down at him with his hands on his hips.

Frank grins up at Korse. “Surprise!” he says. He can feel the hysterical laughter pushing its way up his throat.

Korse narrows his eyes in reply. “Get him out of there.” he orders a nearby Drac.

Frank finds himself kneeling in the middle of the room surrounded by Dracs with guns pointed right at him. He has his hands linked behind his head and he thinks he’s done well – hopefully the distraction had given Mikey enough time to be able to get everyone out – and he can’t stop smiling.

Korse has his arms folded now, still looking down at Frank. He tips his head slightly to the side like Frank’s a problem he can’t work out.

“You hesitated.” Korse says finally. “I asked you to inject him and you hesitated.”

Frank just can’t stop himself. He just starts laughing. It bubbles out of him in choked-off gasps.

“Find them.” Korse orders the surrounding Dracs. “Keep them alive. This one here needs to be fixed and we wouldn’t want his new friends to miss it…”

***

Mikey doesn’t think he’s ever been hugged quite as hard as he’d being hugged now. Grace clutches the back of his jacket tightly as though she’s never planning on letting him go. Mikey doesn’t think she’s crying, not exactly, but she’s pretty close.

“Kobra.” she half-sobs into his ear, “It really is you.”

“Yeah, sweetheart, it’s really me. You ready to get out of here, yeah?”

She pulls back slightly. “Where’s Jet and Poison?”

“We gotta go find Poison first but Jet’s waiting for us all outside. It’s all gonna be okay.”

Grace nods at him. She looks incredibly serious.

“Are you alright?” Mikey asks, “Is there anyone else here we need to get out?”

She shakes her head. “There were others.” she looks away from him. “Kids. I heard them, but they’re all gone now.”

“Gone?”

“They – the Dracs – they gave us these little white pills, yeah? They tasted horrible, and the people in masks, they said they would make us all better but they didn’t make me feel any different even though all the others went all quiet and stuff so they took them away and left me here. They said they’d come back but now you’re here so I guess I’m okay now.”

Mikey shuts his eyes for a moment, thinking of the kids he’d heard about BL/ind taking and the drugs they’d used on them. He has to admit that escaping from the clinic will be easier with just him and Grace but he can’t help but think it means he’s failed. He tries to pull himself together. “Right. Okay. We gotta go get Poison and then we’re all out of here.

It takes them a while to find some stairs. There are Dracs back on patrol now, obviously whatever time Frank had managed to buy them had run out. They make their way to the treatment rooms, dodging the patrols and it’s Grace who spots Gerard first. An open door reveals a deserted office and a huge plate glass window.

“THERE!” she hisses, pointing through the door at a horribly familiar red-haired figure slumped down in an intimidating metal chair complete with thick straps at the wrists and ankles.

“Gerard…” Mikey mutters, hurrying towards the next door along. “Oh hell no… Please…”

Afterwards, Mikey won’t remember crossing the room to his brother. Gerard’s head is on one side, lolling on his shoulder. There’s blood under his ripped fingernails and he’s lost his jacket. With his shoulder bandaged and in just his jeans and t-shirt he looks worryingly vulnerable.

“Gee!” Mikey breathes, kneeling down beside him. “Fuck, Gee… Wake the hell up.”

Grace waits nervously by the door, shooting glances at both Mikey and Gerard and up and down the corridor. Mikey reaches out a rather shaky hand. Gerard’s hair and forehead are drenched in sweat and as Mikey pushes it back, he’s  reminded of all the times he’s seen Frank do exactly the same thing.

It takes several agonising seconds for Gerard to react and he blinks groggily. “Mi… Mi’keh?” Gerard slurs.

Mikey allows himself three seconds. All the relief rushes through him in one long sigh, his fingers almost digging into Gerard’s arm. “Oh thank fucking God.” he murmurs, starting to tug at the straps.

“Wuz F’key?”

He’d known it’d been coming, so Mikey swallows deeply before ignoring the question totally. He yanks the strap around Gerard’s right wrist away and begins work on the left. “We gotta get you out of here.”

“Frankie.” Gerard repeats more forcefully.

“We have to GO.” Mikey hisses, starting on the ankle straps.

Gerard levers himself forward and grabs Mikey’s wrist in a startlingly strong grip. “TELL ME.” he says. “Tell me where the hell he is right the fuck now, Mikey.”

Mikey stares up at him. He knows that look. He’s only seen it a few times before but it means Gerard’s deadly serious.

“Gee… I…” the last strap comes undone and Mikey pushes himself upright, holding out a hand for Gerard. “We needed a distraction.” he finishes.

“And you LET HIM GO!?”

“Gerard, keep it down for fuck’s sake. I didn’t LET him do anything. Frank knew exactly what he was doing. He did it for us – for YOU, Gerard. We have to get out of here.”

Gerard pulls himself unsteadily out of the chair, ignoring Mikey’s hand. Once he’s fully upright, he puts his hands up to cover his face for a second. They’re shaking hard and sweat is still pouring off him.

“I’m not going.” Gerard says inevitably.

“Gerard. Please. You think you’re in any shape for a rescue mission? In that state? What the hell did they give you? Gerard, I’m sorry, but he’s probably dead by now, or they’ve, well…”

Gerard flinches as though Mikey’s just hit him, “I don’t care.” He says, staring straight at Mikey. “And he’s not dead.”

He takes a few wobbly steps towards the door. Grace stares at him as though she’s never seen him before.

“He gave me a message.”

Gerard stops suddenly, bumping into the wall with his shoulder. He hisses in pain and looks back at Mikey.

Mikey take a step closer to him, “He told me to tell you not to go after him. He said he’d changed his mind.”

Gerard shuts his eyes, one hand twitching into a fist.

“Don’t go, Gee.” Mikey whispers. “I don’t want to lose you too.”

“I have to try, Mikey.” Gerard croaks. He sounds even closer to tears than Grace had been. “I have to TRY. He’s… Fuck. Please, just take Grace and get out of here. Find Ray. Wait for me, okay? Give me time. If I’m not there within a day, just get the hell out of there. The car’s yours, yeah? Run safe, Mikey, run safe.”

Grace gets out of the way as Gerard hauls himself through the door. Mikey watches him go.

“Kobra?”

Mikey blinks back the tears that are threatening to fall. “Come on, Gracie. We gotta motor.”

***

Gerard weaves his way along corridors, bouncing from wall to wall like a pinball. He can hear pounding feet in the distance, Dracs looking for Frank or him. He doesn’t know which, but he’s pretty sure they won’t care if they catch him. His head is pounding and he feels like he’s both burning up and frozen cold at the same time. He doesn’t know what drugs Frank had been forced to give him or the ones they had injected him with later – the ones that he can’t quite remember because they make his head feel like it’s full of cotton wool.

He can almost hear something whispering. It’s a constant hum at the back of his mind and it sounds like his own brain whispering Frank’s name but that could just be wishful thinking on his part. Whatever it is, it’s probably the only thing keeping him going right now, the simple all-consuming urge – no, NEED – to find Frank.

Gerard doesn’t even know what he’s going to find when he gets wherever he’s going. He thinks that maybe he’d know if Frank was already dead, that no matter where he was, however far away it would be like a switch flipping in his head and his entire universe collapsing down around his ears. An utter annihilation of everything he believes in that no-one else would even notice.

But then of course if Frank’s not dead then that raises a whole lot of new issues that make Gerard’s gut turn over.

The footfalls are getting closer now and Gerard pushes his way through the nearest door into what seems like a tiny, pitch black storage closet. He fumbles for the lock, sliding it quietly into place and pressing himself up against the door, half to keep himself upright and half to try and listen.

“No.” a voice says from outside. Gerard recognises it but it takes a little while for his fogged brain to supply him with a face to match. When it does, it makes Gerard freeze, holding a breath until his chest burns in fear. The bald man. The one who’d given him the drugs and asked him so many questions about Mikey and the pills and the zones that he hadn’t known which way was up.

“No.” the bald man says again, slightly clearer now. He must be right outside Gerard’s cupboard. “I want them both alive. I don’t know what happened in that godforsaken desert but they found a way to… to corrupt it. I have to know how.” There’s a pause as though the man is listening to a reply from someone Gerard can’t hear. “And they should see what we can do… Yes. I’ve sent the corrupted one back for surgery. By now he won’t even remember who they are.”

Gerard heroically manages to wait until the footsteps recede into the distance before being thoroughly sick all over the floor of the closet.

He follows the signs. If he squints and concentrates he can just make out the words ‘operating theatre’ on the spartan grey signposts at the junctions of the corridors. It’s the last place in the world he wants to look for Frank but it’s also the best bet according to what he overheard. The alarms had started up again a little while ago and Gerard prays it’s a good thing – that it’s because Mikey and Grace have found a way to escape from the clinic rather than anything else. At least it means there aren’t any patrols around again. He guesses BL/ind think he’s gotten away with Mikey.

He finally comes face to face with a set of double doors marked ‘Theater’. He feels he might throw up again just from the sight of it but he forces a hand up to push them open. He’s shaking so hard by this point that his fingers drum a nervous tattoo on the metal of the door.

Beyond is another brightly lit room, totally deserted except for one figure on a table in the centre. The floor around the table is flecked with black and he realises with a twist of his gut that it’s the strands of Frank’s hair that BL/ind have shaved from his head for the operation. It’s just like them, he thinks, making sure they finished the operation before sending everyone out to search for him and Mikey.

Gerard crosses the room to Frank in four steps but they feel like they take a lifetime.

“Frankie?” he says. He’s not even expecting an answer now and he doesn’t bother to wipe away the tears that are streaming down his face. “Oh, Frankie…”

When he reaches the head of the table he realises that Frank’s eyes are open. They’re not focussed on anything but Gerard can see his pupils expanding slightly as he blocks out the harsh white light. He’s still alive and Gerard doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry harder. It’s like a scene from one of his nightmares – one of the very worst, but this is real life now and he made a promise and no matter how hard it’s going to hurt, Gerard is going to try and keep that promise even if Frank says he’s changed his mind.

Frank blinks once and Gerard finally wipes the tears from his eyes. He knows what he’s been asked to do but he needs to be one hundred percent sure.

“Frank.” He says, trying to keep his vice steady. “You know who I am?” All he wants is Frank to nod or smile or blink or reach for him or ANYTHING to let Gerard believe that he doesn’t have to do what he knows he has to.

Frank – no, Gerard can’t think of him like that now – the thing that’s wearing Frank’s body rather, just looks past him with his eyes still blank.

Gerard runs his hand down Frank’s side, pulling the gun out of the holster at his thigh. At least they hadn’t taken it off him.

He leans closer to Frank’s ear. They didn’t shave this side of his hair and Gerard winds his fingers through it briefly. Then, pushing back a sob, he cocks the gun, bringing it up.

Frank doesn’t even react, still absolutely no recognition in his eyes.

Gerard presses his mouth to his ear, the gun pointing directly at Frank’s head. “I love you…” he whispers, before leaning back and pulling the trigger.

***

They’re walking slowly down the featureless corridors, Grace holding his hand tightly and the gun gripped at the ready. The alarms haven’t started ringing again yet, which is probably a good sign, but Mikey doesn’t really know for sure. He knows it’s useless to worry about Gerard, even though he is, because there’s nothing he can do to help him when he’s trying to get Grace out of the clinic. All he can really do is get to Ray and wait – hope – that Gerard will be able to escape without him.

He tries not to think about Frank at all.

In fact, he’s trying so hard not to think about Frank that it takes Grace tugging on his arm to notice that there’s something wrong.

“I can hear something.” Grace hisses.

Mikey freezes, listening hard. He can hear something too, he realises. The steady thump of boots on the floor getting gradually closer and closer. There’s a T-junction not far ahead and absolutely nowhere to hide. He doesn’t want to open one of the doors along the corridor to duck into the room beyond – they’ve all got electronic keypads next to them and they really can’t risk getting themselves locked in when they’re so close to getting out.

“Get behind me.” He whispers to Grace, “Get down and keep your eyes shut, okay?”

Grace has lived in the zones for long enough to do exactly as she’s told without asking questions. 

The sound of the feet comes closer, echoing down the halls of the clinic. Mikey hunkers down on one knee, braced against the wall and arms locked pointing the raygun at the junction. He’s not going to have much time to shoot, and if there’s more than two Dracs he doesn’t think he’s going to be able to take them all out before they return fire.

He breathes out slowly.

When the Dracs come into view Mikey doesn’t hesitate for a second. He squeezes the trigger of the raygun and feels like everything is happening in slow motion. He watches the path of the blast as it flies down the corridor and catches the closest Drac in the side just above its hip. The Drac spins round with the force of the blast and Mikey fires again, aiming for its chest. The other Drac is reaching for its own gun now; flipping open the holster even as its companion is thrown against the wall by the blast to its sternum and starts to slide down it.

Mikey fires again, just as the second Drac shoots. The two laser streams cross each other and Mikey flings out his other hand, pulling Grace down to the floor with him, even as he realises that if his shot has missed it won’t matter if they manage to duck out of the way of this one.

He hears the double fizz of the shots finding a target and then everything is silent again. He’s lying on the floor on his side, back to the junction and curled round Grace who still has her hands clamped over her ears. Neither of them seems to be hurt, so at least one of the shots missed. Mikey waits for a moment but there’s no sound behind him. Either the Drac is waiting for them to move or it’s dead.  Slowly – very slowly – Mikey rolls over onto his back. He can feel the cold of the tiled floor seeping through the gap between the end of his jacket and the top of his jeans. It makes him shiver. He looks up and over at the junction.

The second Drac is slumped against the wall next to its companion. There’s a blast hole in the dead centre of its forehead.

Mikey relaxes, his head thumping back down on the floor. He reaches out blindly to Grace and manages to pat her on her upper back. Her shirt feels odd to his fingers and he wonders if it’s because it’s clean.

“S’okay.” He says, as calmly as he can manage. “They’re gone.”

Grace uncurls from the ball and sits up. Mikey thinks it’ll be a few more moments before he feels up to a similar task. He feels like he’s just run the entire length of Route Guano – all shaking legs and deep gasping breaths. “Just give me a couple of minutes.”

Grace beams at him. “Kobra.” She says happily, “You’re my FAVOURITE.”

***

Eventually they find a door. It doesn’t look like the main door, it’s more a fire escape set into a corridor’s blank wall, but an exit is an exit and a sign next to the door says it’s rigged with an alarm. Mikey considers this for a second. With any luck the noise will draw the Dracs away from Gerard.

He gives it a hard shove, leaning into it with all his weight. It opens after the third attempt and the ringing starts up again immediately.

“Come on.” He says, waving at Grace.

She stares at him. “We’re leaving Poison?” she asks nervously. “He’s all alone, and he looked really ill.”

Mikey’s holding the door open with one hand and he knows it’s all up to him to get her out of here and back to Ray. There’s no way she’ll be able to navigate the tunnels to the outskirts of the City on her own. He’s midway between anger and grief, but deep down he knows Gerard’s an adult and capable of making his own choices even if he doesn’t like them.

“Poison’s just got a job to do.” He says firmly. “We’re going to find Jet Star and we’ll wait for Poison to catch us up, okay?”

Grace doesn’t look like she believes him all that much, but she follows him through the open door and out into Battery City.

***

Ray feels like he’s been waiting for years. They’d agreed to meet in the same parking lot that Gerard had first found the Trans-Am, out in a ruined area of crumbling buildings on the outskirts of the City. Ray had found it easily from Gerard’s carefully detailed map and pulled the car up behind some rubble where it was impossible to see from outside.

He’s on edge, unable to sit still for any length of time but not really wanting to get out of the car and stretch his legs in case it drew attention to himself. Gerard had said that the Drac patrols rarely bothered with anywhere this close to Battery City, but he’d mentioned that there’s people living here – apparently they’re closer to ‘runners than not, but Ray doesn’t want to take any chances no matter how many of them are friendly with Gerard.

He drums his fingers on the steering wheel, trying not to think of how long it’s been since they left the diner and goes over the plan in his head again, wondering how much of it they’ve achieved and how much of it has all gone south.

He wants Grace to be okay. He wants Mikey and Gerard to be okay too, and he’s surprised at how unsurprised he is about wanting Frank to be okay. He never thought he’d even talk to a Drac and get an answer, let alone realise he’s actually riding a crew with one – one he calls his friend – but he guesses Frank has that sort of way about him.

“They’re gonna be fuckin’ milkshake.” He mutters to himself. Maybe he’ll believe it if he says it enough.

***

Mikey has only been in the tunnels beneath Battery City once before, on the night he and Gerard had got out, but he doesn’t think it’s the sort of thing he’s ever going to forget. They’d run from the clinic, the alarm still sounding behind them, keeping to the shadows and the back alleys. Mikey has no doubt that there are Dracs behind them, following them out through the city and he’s keeping his gun primed and ready in case they stumble into some of them but as long as they’re after him then his brother has a chance to get out.

He tries not to focus too much on anything past getting Grace back to Ray. For all that he’s pissed with Gerard ignoring Frank’s request to leave him behind, he knows that if it comes down to it, if they never show up at the meeting point, he’d go back to the clinic for them too.

When they hurry down the last alley, the one that Gerard had chosen because of the awkward dog-leg shielding the end from view from the street he all but throws himself to his knees. The grate is still there, a little rustier perhaps, and half-covered by a junked ‘bot, but it looks like it’ll still open at least. Grace helps him prise it open and then pulls a face at the smell.

“Ugh.” She says, wrinkling her nose. “Down there? I don’t like the dark.”

Mikey nods, leaning into the dark hole to find the catch that’ll release the ladder, “Down here.” He agrees. “Don’t worry, it’s fine. Poison used to do it all the time.”

Grace looks at him, impressed. “You used to come into the City?” she asks, “Shiny! Not even Jet’s been here before.”

Mikey springs the catch and hears the ladder extend with a creak to the bottom of the hole. “We were born here.” He says, not knowing if it’ll make things better or worse. “And this is how we left.”

Grace joins him in peering into the tunnels and then looks at him, eyes wide. Mikey can’t work out if she’s scared or amazed. “Does Jet know?” she asks finally.

Mikey nods. “He knows.” He says, “But we’ve really gotta go.”

***

Ray wishes he had a hobby. There usually wasn’t any time in the zones for anything much beyond scavenging deserted buildings and trying not to get shot at by the fuck-you patrols, but right now he could really do with something to keep his mind off the wait. He used to enjoy running the still out of the back of the bar, but he’s been so bored that he’s done an inventory of the contents of Gerard’s car and not even he can make anything even passably drinkable from fourteen batteries in various states of decay, three empty tin cans, a stained notebook with most of the pages missing and a kazoo that doesn’t make a sound no matter how hard he tries blowing into it.

He shoves all of the things back into the glove compartment of the car. This is probably one of the hardest things he’s had to do. He’s never been good at waiting, and since the Dracs took Rocket and the others, his brain has always been too good at thinking up ways things could all go to shit.

Ray spends a little time trying to tune the radio into the frequency of the DJ Mikey can always seem to find, rolling the dial up and down the airwaves and trying to make sense of the crackle of white noise. He thinks he catches a few bars of what sounds like a wailing guitar, but his fingers slip and when he tries to find it again it’s gone. Either the DJ’s not broadcasting or he’s too far from the signal to pick it up clean.

He’s seriously contemplating trying to get some noise out of the kazoo again when he sees something moving out of the corner of his eye.

He barely has enough time to slide the gun out of its holster – stupid, stupid for not keeping it out on the dash – before the passenger side door opens and someone climbs into the car.

***

Mikey flails around in the dark at the foot of the ladder. There should be motion-sensitive emergency lights, or at least there were last time he’d made this trip. He hopes they’re still working because trying to remember his way back to the parking lot in the pitch black where he’s unable to see the arrows Gerard painted on the walls during his explorations of the tunnels is going to be frankly impossible.

Grace remains still next to him. He can’t even see her until the red lights flicker on. She looks up at him again. “You and Poison were really brave.” She says approvingly.

“Huh?” asks Mikey, peering around at the walls of the tunnel.

“Escaping from the City.” She says, like Mikey’s a little slow on the uptake. “Did you have to shoot your way out then too?” she cocks her fingers like a gun and shoots an imaginary Drac. “Pew, pew.”

The lines of the black markered arrow have faded slightly, but it’s still there along with a quick little sketch of a car. “This way.” Mikey says, pointing down the tunnel. The red lights are flickering off and on making everything look eerie. “And no, we didn’t shoot our way out. We just ran.”

Grace looks a little disappointed by this, but then perks up. “But you had to climb through tunnels.” She says. “That’s kinda shiny.”

Mikey thinks about dragging two heavy bags and his even heavier brother through an old system of sewer tunnels while Gerard had been in the middle of coming down off his meds but even more determined than ever before to get Mikey out of Battery City before he turned eighteen. “Kinda.” He murmurs.

***

The guy sitting in the passenger seat is pretty small, probably about the same size as Frank, but he’s wearing a bandana over the bottom half of his face so all Ray can see are dark eyes and dark hair. He’s certainly not a Drac and if the clashing colours of his clothes are any indication, he’s not anything to do with BL/ind either. Ray keeps his gun pointed at the guy’s head though, just in case. The guy doesn’t seem to notice.

“Dr D said you’re running with Party Poison now.” The guy says, like they’re old friends picking up a conversation after an interruption.

Ray’s not sure what to say, so he keeps quiet.

The guy shakes his head, pulling down the bandana to reveal a wide horsey grin, “Don’t worry.” He says, his eyes slipping sideways to look at Ray. “We already know all about you, Jet Star. You and Grace, ‘running the zones with Party Poison and the Kobra Kid. Word on the airwaves says you got a new motorbaby in your crew as well. Kinda looking forward to meeting him, he sounds pretty fuckin’ special.”

“You might not get the chance.” Ray growls, not sure if he’s threatening the guy or worrying about the plan going wrong again. It feels like a little of both. “Who the fuck are you anyway?”

The guy’s eyes crinkle at the corners as he smiles impossibly wider. “Don’t worry about that.” He replies as though it really ISN’T something that Ray should be worrying about. “Me and my crew are tight with the Doc. You’ve just gone and got yourselves noticed is all. Now, Dr D wanted me to tell you all that he might be askin’ a few favours soon – there’s gonna be a shitstorm blowing into the zones and you’ll all want to be on our good side – especially since we’ve got someone who can do a little…” he wiggles his fingers in what he obviously thinks is a mysterious way, “Biomechanical engineering for your latest acquisition.”

Ray scoffs, but his finger loosens on the trigger of his gun. Whoever this idiot is, he’s definitely nothing to do with BL/ind. He’s spoken to enough ‘runners to know he’s one of them. “Okay.” He says, thinking tightly about the box on the side of Frank’s head, “But I’ve gotta warn you, you might be too late if you’re signing up all of us…”

Whoever-he-is reaches for the door handle, “I think you’re underestimating your new partners, they’re pretty milkshake…” He says kindly, pushing the door open. “I’m sure someone’ll be in touch with you. You’re out in that diner, yeah?”

Ray nods before he can stop himself.

“Shiny.” The guy replies. “Now, I’m gonna motor. See you soon, Jet.” He climbs out of the car and sticks his hands in his pockets. “You don’t have long to wait.”

Ray’s still pointing the gun at mid-air when Mikey and Grace turn the corner a few moments later.

Grace breaks into a wide grin the moment she sees him, and stumbles into a run. Ray drops the gun on the passenger seat and all but leaps out of the car. He barely looks at Mikey as he gathers Grace up in his arms, going to one knee on the floor, not even caring about the lumps of concrete digging into his leg. Grace hugs him tightly, her arms around his neck are almost threatening to choke him but he doesn’t really care about that. After a whole minute of hugging, she starts talking and Ray realises he’d started crying a little way back. 

“It’s okay, Jet. I’m okay. They didn’t hurt me at all and I wasn’t scared, not really. They gave me all these yucky pills to take but they didn’t work or anything and then Kobra came and found me and Party Poison was there too, but he didn’t look very well and he had to stay there but we escaped and Kobra took me through these tunnels and he says that’s how they escaped from Battery City before because Poison had drawn on the walls like a map and then we were here and it’s gonna be okay now, isn’t it?” She takes a deep breath. Ray can’t believe he’d forgotten how much she can talk.

“That’s great, Gracie.” Ray mumbles into her hair. “I’m so proud of you.” He distantly hears the muted click of the car doors opening and runs his hands over Grace’s hair one last time before pushing himself back to his feet, reaching out to hold her hand.

Mikey’s opened the rear door of the car and is lying on his back across the seats with his legs hanging out, feet flat on the floor. Ray can’t really see his face properly thanks to his arm flung up over his eyes. Ray leans over, peering into the car.

“Where’s Gerard and Frank?” he asks quietly.

“Who’s that?” Grace hisses next to him.

Mikey doesn’t move his arm, or anything at all. “Gerard’s Poison’s real name.” he explains. “And Frank’s our new friend. And they’re both still back in the clinic.”

Ray blinks at Mikey’s still unmoving form. “That wasn’t part of the plan.”

“I know.” Mikey replies, his voice muffled slightly by his sleeve. “The plan went Costa Rica. Gee’s fuckin’ improvising.”

“What happened?”

Mikey sort of twitches slightly like he wants to shrug, but doesn’t have the energy. “BL/ind somehow figured out Frank wasn’t with them any longer or something. He got me out and then ran off to distract the Dracs while I got Grace and Gerard out…”

Ray sighs, “And Gee wouldn’t run without going back for Frank.” He finishes.

“Exactly.”

“Poison’ll be okay, won’t he though?” asks Grace, squeezing Ray’s hand a little tighter. “He’ll be able to get out okay and come through the tunnel like us?”

Mikey doesn’t reply and Ray feels as though the weeks ‘running with him and his brother have given him special powers. The trick with Mikey and Gerard is to listen to the things they’re not saying, and Mikey might as well have just screamed his worry from the rooftops.

“Sure thing, Gracie.” He says squeezing her hand back. “Hey, why don’t you try and get some sleep? There’s a blanket in the trunk.”

***

Grace has replaced Mikey stretched out in the back seat of the car, and he’s sitting on the hood next to Ray. They haven’t said anything for a while. Mikey tries to tell himself that it’s because Grace was trying to get to sleep, but he knows she can sleep through a bar full of drunken zonerunners and really it’s because he doesn’t really know what to say.

Neither of them are looking at each other, just staring out at the rubble, so it almost surprises Mikey when Ray clears his throat with a cough and says “There was a guy…” in a low voice. “Just before you rolled in. He told me the DJ was watching us.”

“He watches everyone.” Mikey says, because he has a sneaking suspicion it’s true. He’s heard broadcasts about things he has no idea how anyone would know about. “You could spend eight cycles under a fuckin’ rock and that guy would still know when you scratched your balls.”

Ray snorts a little with laughter at that. “He said they’d be in touch.”

“I believe him.” Mikey nods. “I just don’t know how many of us he’ll find.”

Ray scratches at his shoulder where the Drac’s blast had caught him back when they had first met Frank. “He also said that they had someone who could… take that thing out of Frank’s head. The box, the one they were using to control him. He knew about it. About Frank.”

Mikey makes a surprised sound, “Oh.” He says quietly. “Wow, I guess he really does know everything about us.”

Ray sighs. “You… You really don’t think they’re coming back?” he asks quietly.

Mikey keeps his arms folded across his chest. “I don’t think Frank’s coming back.” He replies. “Frank didn’t think he would, at least. And Gerard…”

“You don’t think Gerard’s gonna be leaving without him.” Ray finishes for him.

“He told me to wait for him.” Mikey says, but he knows he’s really just trying to convince himself. “Just him… but then he told me the car was mine, so I don’t really know what to think.”

From out of the corner of his eye he watches Ray run a gloved hand through his hair. “What happened in there?” He asks. “What really happened?”

“Pretty much exactly what we thought would happen.” Mikey grinds out. “They were more interested in Gee and dragged him off to have junk pumped into his system and threw me in a cell. Then Frank let me out to look for Grace, but he went and got himself fucking caught or ghosted or some shit and Gee wouldn’t leave without him even though Frank told him to motor…” without wanting to, Mikey flashes back to the conversation he’d half-overheard back in the diner and crosses his arms even tighter. “I think he’d asked Gerard to kill him though.” He admits.

“What?” Ray sounds incredulous.

“I overheard them talking. Frank was saying Gee’d gotta do something because he didn’t want to live like that again. What else could it’ve been?”

“I… uh…” Ray’s obviously trying to come up with a plausible explanation but finally settles on “Shit, Mikey…”

“Yeah.” There isn’t really anything else he can say. 

“Well then,” Ray says, blowing out a breath, “I guess we should wait and see.”

***

It’s dark when something finally happens. Mikey can barely see past the end of the car. He’d love to switch the headlights on, but they really don’t need to draw any attention to themselves. Mikey’s met some of the people who live in the outskirts and they’re pretty solid, but if the Dracs are still searching for them then the best plan is to stay under the radar until… Well, until they can leave.

The first hint they have that something is going on is a scrabbling noise, like unsure feet climbing over the lumps of rubble in a pitch-black parking lot. Grace doesn’t wake up from the back seat, but Ray and Mikey are both on high alert the second they hear the noise. Ray swings his gun around to point unwaveringly in the direction of the sound, waving his free hand at Mikey to usher him around the side of the car.

Mikey steadies his hand on the roof of the Trans-Am, gun trained on the gap in the rubble that’s the only way into the area they’re hiding in. Ray’s crouched down behind the hood and Mikey glances at him quickly. He can feel a tremble start in his wrist and grips it with his other hand to keep his aim true. While he desperately hopes that what he can hear is Gerard coming back to them, he knows it’s just as likely to be an outskirts wave-head scavving for junk or a Drac patrol BL/ind have sent to track them down. It’s better to be safe than sorry

Another clatter of concrete, closer this time, has Mikey exhaling slowly. Any second now.

There’s a crunch of gravel and the clickwhirr of Ray’s gun being powered up. Mikey’s breath hitches. Then there’s a flash of two people in white uniforms and masks and he squeezes the trigger before he really knows what’s happening.

***

Gerard presses his mouth to his ear, the gun pointing directly at Frank’s head. “I love you…” he whispers, before leaning back and pulling the trigger.

He shuts his eyes tightly against the flash of the gun going off, listening to the crackle. He keeps them closed as one-by-one his fingers seem to prise themselves off the trigger and handle of Frank’s raygun and it clatters to the tiled floor to land amongst the strands of hair. Gerard’s other hand fumbles blindly for Frank’s, clutching at it tightly once he finds it.

He exhales slowly, feeling hot tears leaking out between his squeezed shut eyelids. From the minute Mikey’d woken him up in the interrogation room he’d been running towards this very moment on nothing but adrenaline and pure force of will, pushing back the drug-created clouds as far as he could. He thinks that now he’s completed his mission he just wants to be able to curl up next to Frank and go to sleep. Let the fucking Dracs and BL/ind and the bald man and his pills find him – it doesn’t matter any more.

Gerard lowers his head, feeling parts of his mind vanish in the fog, his hair tickles at his face but he’s just too tired to brush it away, and anyway, that would mean he’d have to let go of Frank.

Everything is silent.

Then.

“’sa good thing they din’ check my gun, isn’ it?”

Gerard’s eyes snap open. Frank’s looking directly at him, one side of his mouth twitched up in a pained smile.

“’thought I told Mi’keh you shouldn’t fuckin’ follow me, you asshole.”

Gerard claps his hand over his mouth. He’s still crying, but he can feel hysterical laughter starting to bubble up his throat.

Frank blinks at him and twitches his fingers in Gerard’s grip. “So… That worked then.” He says, the smile gradually taking over more and more of his face.

Gerard’s breath catches from the strain of keeping his whirling emotions under control, “I thought…” he mumbles from behind his hand, “I thought you were DEAD, YOU FUCKER!”

Frank pushes himself up onto his elbows. “Not quite.” He says as the grin slips from his face. “But what the hell are you doing here, Gee? You should’ve gotten out of here with Mikey. S’not safe.”

Gerard stares at him for a moment. The raygun Frank had rigged back at the diner to deliver a massive electric shock rather than a laser bolt had scorched off some of the stubble around the blackened and wrecked box on his head. He finally lowers his hand. “I couldn’t…” he starts, “I wouldn’t… Frankie. I thought you were DEAD. I thought it hadn’t worked and you were still a fucking Drac, or I was too late or…”

“I’m not dead,” Frank stops him mid flow. “And I’m still me.”

Gerard thinks he can breathe again.

***

Frank’s unsteady when he stands up, one hand on the metal gurney and the other wrapped tightly around Gerard’s arm and Gerard himself still feels like his knees are about to give out from under him. Whatever BL/ind gave him is crawling though his veins again, making him feel weak and calling him down to foggy oblivion and he tries desperately to push it away. He can feel the warmth of Frank seeping though the thing cotton of his shirt and he realises that he doesn’t want it to take hold, he has no desire for the sponsored blankness he’s already spent too much of his life swimming though already.

Frank laughs a little as he takes a wobbly step away from the operating table. “We don’t even have a gun, Gee…” he looks a little lost. “How the hell are we gonna get out of here?”

Gerard tries to think for a moment and then glances around the room, considering their options. There’s nothing in the way of weapons, unless they’re planning on going up against Dracs armed with scalpels. “We’re going to have to try to sneak out.” He says finally.

Frank shakes his head. “They’ll be looking for us by now.” He says.

Gerard looks back at him and blinks. “They’ll be looking for me…” he says slowly. Thinking rationally is starting to get harder. “Not you, not if they think you’re a Drac. “

Frank looks down at himself. He’s still in the white uniform, but it’s burnt in places. “We’ll need uniforms.” He says, “Clean ones. And masks. And we still don’t have a gun.”

“How many Dracs do you think you killed during your ‘distraction’?” Gerard asks, scratching the back of his head. He’s got the beginnings of a plan, but it keeps slipping away from him.

“Few dozen maybe.” Frank admits, “They won’t still be lying around though, and the meeting room’s on the other side of the building.”

Gerard bites his lip. “This is the operating theatre, yeah?” he asks. Frank nods.

“Well, where’s the morgue?”

Frank twists his expression into one halfway between disgust and admiration. “That’s fucking NASTY, Gee.” He says in a tone that matches the look on his face exactly. He takes another step forward. “It’s just down… Oh SHIT.” Frank’s legs give way as he swears loudly.

Gerard makes a grab for him but since he’s not exactly stable either he simply ends up on the floor next to him. The crash feels like it jars his brain.

“Fuck.” Frank spits, pulling at the long strands of hair on half his head and breathing heavily.

Gerard watches him. Even through the building clouds in his mind he can tell that Frank’s still in a lot of pain, but even though he KNOWS this as a fact he can’t quite remember exactly what physical pain feels like. His head falls back on his neck as he begins to feel the old, terrible disconnect from the world around him and he tries to move his head back up to look at Frank. He should probably try and tell Frank what’s happening, but by the time he’s forced his head back upright and his eyes to focus back on Frank he can no longer remember that there’s anything wrong with him at all.

***

Frank is too busy trying to push back the rolling waves of nausea at first to notice there’s something wrong with Gerard. He’s gone perfectly still, kneeling next to him – hands palm down on his thighs, head straight, breathing gone steady and slow, a calm gentle in-out through his slightly parted lips – and Frank knows something is reallyfuckingwrong.

It’s his eyes that really seal the deal though. Gerard’s still staring at him and as far as Frank can tell he’s still tracking him rather than staring past him but his pupils are tiny, pinprick small and it’s suddenly the most unnerving thing Frank’s ever seen.

“Gerard?” he whispers, all the pain in his head forgotten.

Gerard blinks slowly. “Yes?” he asks in a monotone voice that almost reminds Frank of Mikey on a bad day. The problem is that this is Gerard, whose bad days have him a screaming, laughing mess of emotional states and Frank’s unease spills over into outright panic.

“GERARD.” He tries again, picking up a limp, unresisting hand. “You know who I am, don’t you?”

Gerard nods, one slow up-down of his head. “Yes.” He says. “You’re Frank.”

Frank allows himself to be partially relieved, but if he’s honest with himself he’s actually surprised that Gerard’s lasted this long. Korse would certainly have given him the strongest drugs BL/ind manufacture and even though Gerard’s had years of living without them he was never immune to them like Frank is. It’s not going to be easy, either escaping or watching Gerard like this or watching him go cold turkey afterwards, but Frank’s determined. This is the last fucking time he’s ever going to be like this.

Without really thinking about what he’s doing, Frank shoves himself forward, pushing his lips against Gerard’s like it’s a promise, but he’s just hoping that this isn’t going to be the first, last and only time he’ll get to do it, not when Gerard is cold and motionless against him, not when he’s wanted him warm and alive and with him for so long. Hasn’t he done enough good things in his life yet to deserve a second chance?

He kisses him once, gently, refusing to think of how close this must be to kissing Gerard’s corpse.

When he pulls away, Gerard looks almost confused.

“Can you stand up?” Frank asks. Gerard nods slowly again.

“Stand up.” Frank directs, “and help me up as well. We have to get out of here and you’re gonna have to help me.”

The tremors that had been all too evident in Gerard’s limbs have vanished as he unfolds himself to push up until he’s standing. He reaches down to Frank to help him up, tugging on his hand to pull him to his feet. Standing makes Frank feel slightly light-headed and he staggers again before throwing an arm over Gerard’s shoulders.

“Right.” He says in a voice that sounds whole worlds more cheerful than he feels. “Now all we gotta do is find the morgue.”

Frank didn’t even know what they must look like staggering down the short corridor, but it was definitely incriminating enough to get them shot. Gerard, in his current state was thankfully pliant enough to let Frank simply direct him while Frank clutched his uninjured arm and tried to concentrate on walking. If they ever got out of here, he thought, he was going to make sure Gerard was okay and then drag him into the back room of the diner, wrap his arms around him tightly and then sleep for a fucking WEEK.

Frank has memories of this, of going down to the morgue with Korse, he can’t even remember why they came down here, just the image of standing next to Korse as he unzips one of the body bags, but as with all the other memories of his time here he can’t associate any specific emotions or feelings with it. He wonders if that’s what Gerard’s feeling right now, but pushes the thought away.

He shudders slightly and adds it to his list of ‘things he really, really doesn’t want to think about’.

“In here.” Frank says, pulling on Gerard’s arm to get him to stop. He does it immediately and Frank tries not to shudder. It feels like someone has replaced him with a perfect Gerard-shaped ‘bot, all silent and compliant.

The morgue looks exactly the same. A dozen or so tables with full body bags in the centre of the room and walls lined with large drawers. There’s a desk with a computer terminal on it in the corner but the room is deserted. It’s obviously all hands on deck in the effort to recapture Mikey and Grace.

“Lock the door.” Frank hisses as he flails for the closest table, catching hold of the metal edge and pulling himself towards it.

There’s a clunk of the bolt being thrown and Frank reaches out a shaking hand to undo the zip of the body bag on the table.

He’s heard it said, but there’s absolutely no way what’s inside the bag is ‘only sleeping’. Nothing with a hole that big where its chest used to be could ever be ‘only sleeping’, but the mask is untouched so Frank grits his teeth and tugs it off.

The man under the mask is a lot younger than Frank had been prepared for. He looks like a child with blond hair and round cheeks still chubby with baby fat. Frank’s brain sort of fractures for a moment, split between a concentrated effort not to be sick and wondering what the boy’s name was and if he ever remembered what it was.

He zips the bag back up before he can do either.

The next bag he opens, he shuts his eyes as he pulls off the mask. He almost feels guilty about it, but he killed these Dracs – people – and he’s just not ready to confront what he’s done, not yet. The boy’s face is already going to haunt his dreams.

“Now we need to find you a uniform.” He says to the silent figure of Gerard still standing motionless by the door.

Gerard blinks at him and Frank tightens his grip on the metal edge of the table. He wants to scream at him, hit him, kiss him, ANYTHING to get any sort of reaction from him just so he doesn’t have to deal with this… this empty facsimile of his best friend and entire world.

“Gerard.” He forces himself to say instead, “I need you to open those bags and find a uniform that isn’t ripped or covered in…” he can’t quite bring himself to say it so he ends with, “anything.”

Gerard blinks again, then nods, stumbling forward to open the next body bag. Frank turns away. He can’t bring himself to look, not when he can’t forget they’re people.

They finally find a uniform Gerard can use on the body of another boy who looks too young to be here. His mask has peeled away from his face and the one eye he has left is open and Frank refuses to think about it – him – it.

“This one.” Frank croaks.

Gerard doesn’t even flinch as he strips the white uniform from the limp body.

Frank shuts his eyes and pulls his stolen mask on over his head. He doesn’t open them again until the rustle of clothing has finished and what he sees almost makes him want to close them again. He holds out the other mask. “Here.” He mutters, “Put this on.” There’s something about the contrast between Gerard’s hair and the white uniform that makes him feel like he’s going to cry.

Gerard takes the mask wordlessly and tugs it over his head. It isn’t until the red is completely covered that Frank thinks he can breathe again. Now all he has to do is be able to walk out of here under his own power.

***

Frank is telling Gerard what to do and it’s just so much easier to go along with it.

He knows Frank. He knows they live out in the zones together along with Ray and Mikey, his brother. He knows he has a car and that sometimes Ray rides a motorbike and that somewhere out there, miles away, there’s a diner with chipped Formica tables and torn paper glued to the walls that they all call home.

All this knowledge is academic, just dry facts that Gerard knows are important to him even if he can’t tell why they should be.

What he doesn’t know is why Frank is so upset. Gerard’s not even sure if he understands what ‘upset’ really means, there’s just a nagging feeling that Frank shouldn’t be it.

So when Frank tells him to strip the white clothes from a corpse and put them on, he does without a second thought because the body is dead and doesn’t need them any more and maybe it’ll make Frank stop looking like that.

***

It’s slow going but at least Frank’s managing to move on his own now. Gerard’s walking like a Drac – even though Frank is desperately trying not to notice – all straight arms and minimal movement with none of his usual swagger. He hopes they don’t meet anyone, not only because he knows their disguises are less than perfect what with what feels like several gallons of sweat pouring off him, but also because he doesn’t know if Gerard’s together enough to lie if anyone starts asking them questions.

Looking at Gerard like this isn’t getting any easier either, Frank had thought it might, that he might get used to it in time in some way but every time Gerard moves too stiffly or doesn’t reach out to take his hand or doesn’t take the time to mutter reassurances to him Frank gets the feeling it’s like looking in a mirror – one that sends him back to the grey place inside his own head that’s full of all the terrible things he’s done.

Frank shakes his head to try and clear it.

 ‘One step at a time’ Frank thinks. He hasn’t got the energy to worry about things that might go wrong. There’s not enough space in his head to worry about anything except their escape. Everything else is secondary.

 Escape. Meet up with Mikey, Grace and Ray. Get back to the diner. Sleep.

Frank repeats it over and over like a mantra because he knows that once they’ve done all that and once Gerard is back inside his own mind they’ll be able to talk about what happens after Gerard risked his own life just to give Frank back his.

“Down here.” He says as they come to a junction. There are burn marks on the walls at roughly chest height but Gerard doesn’t seem to notice them.

Frank resolutely Doesn’t Think About Mikey enough for the both of them.

***

When Frank finally manages to push open the exit door and pull Gerard out into the open air it’s already starting to get dark. Frank can see Dracs out on the streets but so far none of them seem to be paying them any attention.

“Where do we need to go, Gerard?” he asks, “Where’s the entrance to the tunnel?”

Gerard doesn’t look at him, he’s still staring back at the ominous bulk of the clinic behind them. “An alleyway off of Eighteenth.” He mumbles. He’s started sweating again even though Battery City is several degrees cooler than the inside of the building.

Frank glances around, trying to orient himself. He never did all that many patrols inside the City, but he has a rough idea of where everything is. Eighteenth is only a few blocks away, but he can see the flashing lights of a Drac patrol stopped in the middle of the road. They don’t look as though they’re going to be moving any time soon and there’s no way in hell they’ll be able to sneak past them without being seen and even in their disguises if they’re seen they won’t be able to use the tunnels without leading the Dracs directly back to the others.

“Fuck.” Frank says, thinking hard. “We’re gonna have to hide out until they go.” He looks around again. They really need to get off the main street.

There’s only one real solution. He grabs Gerard’s arm again – he’s shaking slightly under the pull of Frank’s fingers.

“Down here.” Frank says, trying to ignore the tremble and tugging him down the nearest alleyway.

Battery
City
is a lot older than it looks. No-one has ever bothered to give Frank the history lesson, not even for the few brief years he’d been in school, but it’s not really a secret. BL/ind have built their glass and steel towers on top of the brick and concrete of the previous buildings and created a network of abandoned cellars and unexpected cavities at street level and below. The City’s population, hopped on their daily handfuls of pills don’t notice, or if they do, they don’t care about the steps in blind alleys that lead to them.

Periodically the Dracs will be sent to do a sweep of the ones that are still accessible – make-work for when they’ve scoured the zones so hard all the ‘runners are in hiding – but Frank’s pretty sure BL/ind have better things to do at the moment than to use their manpower like that.

At the top of the crumbling staircase down the alley, Gerard stumbles. It’s the first misstep Frank’s seen him make since they were in the operating theatre, but with all the Dracs on the street Frank doesn’t waste time, dragging him down below to the basement level. The door at the end of the stairs isn’t locked – in fact, it’s practically hanging off its hinges, but there’s nowhere else Frank can think of to wait it out.

The room beyond is low, dark and smells of damp. Two tiny windows high up on the opposite side of the room are the only illumination and the daylight is fading quickly and it’ll be pitch black in here soon.

Frank pulls Gerard over to the darkest corner. “Here. Sit down.”

Gerard does so instantly, but Frank stays standing. He feels too anxious and worked-up to be able to stay still. He wrenches the hideous Drac mask off his head and hurls it into the furthest corner. He’ll probably have to put it back on later, but right now? Fuck that shit.

***

The light has almost gone when Frank’s nervous pacing is interrupted by Gerard. “Ihaveto… back…” he stumbles over his words but Frank’s chest clenches because he sounds much more like the REAL Gerard than he has done for the last few hours. “I have to go back.”

Frank flinches and then stares over at Gerard. He’s moved at some point while Frank was pacing now he’s sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest, head down and arms wrapped around his torso. There’s barely any light and Frank isn’t exactly close to him but he can still see how hard Gerard is shaking.

Frank swallows. “We can’t.” he says, wishing he didn’t sound so nervous. “We can’t go back, Gee, you know that.”

Gerard rolls his head back and Frank can hear the soft scrape of his hair on the rough brickwork behind him. “Can’t…” he mumbles, “I can’t stay here.”

Frank takes a small step closer, Gerard can’t seem to be able to keep his head still, rocking it back and forth, his eyes darting everywhere but to Frank. As Frank watches, Gerard’s arm jerks, like a gesture cut short. He breathes out shakily.

“I need… Frankie, please.” Gerard moans. Frank tries not to let the sound travel straight to his dick, but it doesn’t work. It feels so wrong, he knows Gerard’s not talking about… well, he’s talking about the pills and they’re stuck in a tiny room in the middle of Battery City surrounded by Dracs searching for them , Frank KNOWS all this but jesusfuck he must be wired up wrong because that sounded so good.

He takes another step towards him, almost close enough to touch if Frank reaches out an arm.

“I need...” Gerard whimpers again. “Frank… I…”

Frank swallows. He feels sick and horribly turned on. It’s not a very good combination. He takes one more step forward, now standing right in front of Gerard’s hunched form. He’s only a few fingerwidths away and despite the fact that Frank isn’t really sure if it’s a good idea or not he can’t hold back any longer. He reaches out with both hands as gently as he possibly can under the circumstances and pushes the unruly strands of Gerard’s hair back behind his ears, leaving his fingers there once he’s finished, cradling the sides of his head.

“You’ve done this before.” Frank says, trying to keep his voice calm. This is not a good time to let his panic show.

Gerard shakes his head and Frank tries to work out if he’s saying no or trying to actually escape from the hold he has on him. He’s not going to move his hands either way. Not now.

“You’ve done this before.” He repeats more forcefully this time. “And you’re gonna do it again, okay?” Frank tips Gerard’s head up so that he can try and look him in the eyes, wishing that it wasn’t quite so dark and that he could check to see if his pupils have gone back to their normal size.

“This is different.” Gerard gasps, “More… I can feel… under my skin…”

It’s too fucking dark – Frank can barely even see Gerard but he can feel him under his hands sweating so hard his hair is soaked. “We’re going to STAY HERE.” Frank grinds out. “We’re going to stay right here nice and quiet until the Dracs go and we can get out of the City and find Mikey, okay Gee? Remember Mikey? What would he do if you went back to that fucking place, hey? He’d have to go back too so he could rescue you and you told me you became a ‘runner so Mikey wouldn’t have to go through what you’re going through. I LOVE you, Gerard and I know I’d have to follow you and once he gets Grace back I’m sure Ray would as well, you know that right? We’d all follow you to the ends of the fucking EARTH, Gerard but YOU CAN’T GO BACK THERE!” Frank finishes in a hiss, as loud as he dares, shaking Gerard ever so slightly.

And then, because he can now, because he’s so close, because it feels like Gerard’s skin is vibrating under his fingers and his eyes are almost back to normal, but mostly because Frank loves him so much he can’t imagine ever letting him go again, he leans forward and kisses him.

Gerard all but melts against him, finally unfolding his arms to clutch at the back of Frank’s head and pulling him closer. They’re a tangle of limbs for a second as Gerard stretches out his legs and Frank’s give way and then he’s sitting on Gerard’s lap, knees either side of his thighs pushing closer like he’s trying to crawl inside Gerard’s skin.

Maybe he is, Frank thinks wildly, and maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing. He feels as though if he tries hard he could strip the drugs from Gerard’s system like this, suck all the bad things out and replace them with this feeling. It’s a nice thought.

Frank doesn’t move his hands but Gerard does, one wide warm palm slips down Frank’s back to come to rest just above his waistband. It’s too warm maybe, if feels like fire and Frank thinks it might burn through his clothes and skin and flesh to leave a scorch mark on his bones but he can’t move, doesn’t want to move. He wouldn’t move even if Korse and all the Dracs in Battery City came through the door to drag them both away.

Gerard shifts position slightly and everything lines up perfectly. It makes Frank gasp, but Gerard swallows the sound away.

***

Gerard is really, honestly, desperately trying to keep his shit together as Frank drags him down some stairs and into a tiny abandoned cellar. Things are starting to come back to him and he stumbles slightly when he realises he’s completely forgotten to worry about Mikey.

The dark room almost helps, it kinda reminds him of the trunk of the Trans-Am which has always been associated with concepts like ‘safe’ and ‘home’ and ‘contained’ in his mind and those are exactly the sort of things he needs right now as the cloudy grey fog in his brain starts blowing away like smoke from a bonfire – or maybe the other way around.

Gerard can’t exactly remember escaping the clinic. He knows they must have, they’re both here in the City after all, and there are flashes, images of white walls and dead bodies and a scorch mark on the wall and Frank. Frank watching him with a look on his face that Gerard wouldn’t have a hope of deciphering even if he was stone cold sober – A look that could have been pity or fear or despair or horror or even love and maybe some terrible mixture of them all but Gerard can’t think clearly, not yet, so he pulls his knees up to his chin and curls his arms around himself and tries to pretend he’s in the trunk of the car he runs the zones in along with his brother and friend and Frank who couldmightshould be his lover while he listens to Frank’s footsteps falling on the filthy floor.

He concentrates on the steady sound of Frank’s pacing and tries to match his heartbeat to them, breathing slow and deep. No matter how many times he did this before running to the zones it never got any easier. He’d told Mikey it had, but that had been a lie – trying to make his brother worry less about him, to feel less guilty about everything. Gerard knows he did, probably still does.

He shivers, telling himself it’s because the cellar’s cold and the Drac uniform he can’t remember putting on is too thin but he knows he’s just lying to himself. He pulls the mask off of his head anyway, tossing it aside.

The feeling of something crawling under his skin is getting stronger and more insistent like an itch he could never hope to scratch.

A new drumline opens, crossing the beat of Frank’s footsteps and the bass thump of his own heart, moremoremore, and Gerard wants to grip the sides of his head to stop his mind from leaking out of his ears but if he moves he’s going to see the maggots he can feel moving through his veins and that, right there, will kill him dusted and ghostdead and he has to go back, he has to go back he has to go back hehastogoback…

He says it out loud and Frank stops pacing. It almost feels as though his heart stops beating along with him.

When Frank kisses him it’s like a release of something he hadn’t even known he’d been holding in, like the feeling of the wave of an explosion washing over him.

When everything slides into place Gerard thinks he might shake himself apart from wanting. The drumbeat of moremoremore is still rattling his bones and he doesn’t know if he wants more of Frank – his lips, his mouth, his cock, his cool skin slipping under Gerard’s fingertips like water – or more of the drugs that make his thoughts cloud over and every single problem he’s ever had vanish. He thinks he wants it to be Frank, but his thoughts won’t stay still long enough for him to examine them.

Everything feels heightened – Frank, the nagging pain in his BL/ind healed shoulder, the grit on the floor under him and the maggots crawling through him and it’s all he can do to just hold on to Frank and try and force everything else away because he has the idea that if there’s anything he could want or need more than the slip of a needle under his skin and a handful of clean white pills it’s going to be Frank. It was maybealways going to be Frank.

He tightens his grip on Frank’s hair. It probably hurts him, but Gerard sort of wants it to. He wants Frank to hurt him in return because he can just about remember that blood is good, it makes him feel alive and there’s a voice at the back of his mind that sounds almost like Mikey that’s telling him that whatever happens here in this abandoned room in the dark it’ll be better and healthier than what would be waiting for him back in the clinic.

Frank grunts when Gerard pulls his hair again and he can sort of make out the shape of words in the kiss even though he has no clue what Frank’s saying.

Frank hasn’t moved his hands yet, they’re still curled lightly in his hair behind his ears but Gerard’s haven’t stopped moving, desperate to feel Frank everywhere, sliding over his back and down to his ass, tuggingpullingdragging Frank closer even though there’s no room between them anymore

***

Time seems to stretch and bend around Frank. He doesn’t know how long he’s spent with Gerard wrapped around him like this, it could easily be days and Gerard hasn’t stopped moving for a single second. He’s trying to touch Frank everywhere it seems, one hand roving all over his body, pulling him impossibly closer and keeping Frank’s head still with a grip in his hair that’s just the right side of painful, whichever side that is.

Frank doesn’t move at all, he’s the passive partner in this – whatever it is, whatever Gerard needs it to be, because Gerard is shaking less now and the words he’s whispering into the skin of Frank’s neck are sounding more and more human and less and less robotic and Frank can’t think of anything in the City or the zones or the entire world that he wouldn’t endure just so that Gerard could come back to himself. Also, having Gerard kiss him like he needs him to breathe isn’t exactly a hardship.

Gerard is biting at Frank’s neck in between muffled repetitions of his name and pulling so hard on the remaining strands of long hair on Frank’s head that his head is tipped right back to stare at the ceiling and Frank is so fucking hard that one wrong – right – move will set him off when Gerard says something that makes time shudder to a complete stop before kicking back up.

“Hit me.”

Frank pulls back. He can barely see Gerard in the dark. Only a faint glimmer of streetlights through the grimy windows prevent the room from being pitch black, but Gerard’s face is so pale it’s practically glowing.

“What?”

Gerard’s head thumps back against the wall behind him. It sounds as though it hurts. “Hit me.” He grinds out again, like he’s trying to keep too much bottled up inside and it’s starting to spill over. Frank can feel his hands – one still tight in his hair, the other on his waist under his jacket, nails digging into his skin.

“I’m not gonna fuckin’ hi…” The punch to his jaw comes out of nowhere. Frank wasn’t expecting it, couldn’t have been – so it knocks him off balance, slumping to the side off of Gerard’s lap. His hand comes up to his face automatically. The punch hadn’t been too hard, Frank’s sure he’s had worse, but it’d been a shock and he’s bitten the inside of his cheek and his mouth is filling up with the copper sick taste of blood. He spits it on the floor. “What the HELL?” he asks.

Gerard surges forwards, kneeling up over him. “Fuck… Frankie, please.”

He sounds so desperate that Frank’s on his feet with his fist drawn back before he knows what he’s doing.

“Do it.” Gerard says, kneeling at his feet, his voice low. It sends shivers down Frank’s spine.

“Do it or I’ll hit you again.”

Frank can hear the smile in Gerard’s voice, a sharp, malicious thing utterly devoid of any humour and he knows that Gerard isn’t joking – he means this, he wants it maybe even more than he wanted Frank to kiss him and goddamn but Frank hasn’t been able to deny Gerard anything even before he even met him.

Frank hits him.

***

It’s completely counter-intuitive but Gerard can feel himself relax as Frank’s fist splits open his lip and snaps his head violently to the side.

“Again.” He says, feeling his blood coating his teeth.

Time speeds up. Flashes of images.

Frank hits him and Gerard goes down, Frank on top of him, fists working until Gerard starts to laugh because he’s bleeding freely and it hurts but it’s redredred even though it’s too dark to see and then Frank’s kissing him again, muttering apologies against his broken lips, hands moving down his body under his stolen uniform, Frank sinking down, his mouth stretched wide and Gerard bows his back because it all just feels so good and then and then…

Gerard opens his eyes to look into Frank’s own and.

Everything.

Makes.

Sense.

***

Mikey’s blast dissipates harmlessly on the concrete, leaving a small black scorch mark behind.

“Fucking hell Mikey, I thought you’d be happier to see us.” Slurs Gerard before slipping out of Frank’s grip entirely and crumpling over onto the floor.

Frank follows him down with such force that Mikey can hear the crack of his knees hitting the ground from the other side of the car. He hunches over Gerard, one hand fisted in the front of his jacket. He looks so tired that Mikey can hardly believe his eyes are still open.

“Gerard.” Frank mumbles, shaking him slightly. In the faded light, Mikey can only just make out a thin trickle of blood from the side of his mouth.

“Gerard…” Frank says again, and the sound of the absolutely wrecked whisper is what finally spurs Mikey into action, abandoning the gun on the roof of the Trans-Am and all but running over to the fallen form of his brother. He skids to his knees on the opposite side of him from Frank, ignoring the pain of his skin scraping along the concrete floor. Now he’s closer, Gerard looks half-dead – bloodstains mix with dirt and dust and bruises on his face, there’s a rip in the sleeve of his jacket and he smells like a mixture of singed hair and burnt out electronics. Mikey hears the crunching gravel as Ray hurries over to join them, but now he’s here Mikey can barely take his eyes off Gerard breathing shallowly on the ground between them.

“He’s alive.” Mikey murmurs, glancing quickly at Ray – standing at Gerard’s feet with his arms folded and Frank, who’s now swaying noticeably.

Ray nods. “I’ll wake Grace.” He says, “She can travel up front with us.”

“Frank.” Mikey says quietly, looking down at Frank’s fist, holding onto Gerard’s stolen Drac jacket so hard his knuckles have turned white around the bloody scrapes. “Frank, you can let go now. It’s all okay, you’re both safe. Let me and Ray take care of it.”

Frank blinks slowly. “Gerard.” He says for a third time. This time though, it lacks the tone of panic and desperation that had been evident in the other two. Mikey puts his hand on top of Frank’s fist and very, very slowly Frank slips sideways to land on the floor next to Gerard.

For a second, the sheer relief makes Mikey feel like joining him, but instead he stands up and helps Ray sort out the car.

***

Somehow, between the two of them Ray and Mikey manage to manhandle Gerard and Frank into the back of the car. Neither of them wakes up during the process, they barely even stir. Frank still looks far too pale under his layer of grime, but apart from the blood on his face and a darkening bruise at his jaw he looks relatively unharmed.

It’s Gerard Mikey’s more worried about at the moment anyway – not that this is a new thing. He looks like he’s been in a fight, and lost badly. Mikey wonders briefly what happened during their escape from the clinic but he can’t think about things like that at the moment. They need to leave, put Battery City and their utterly shitty fucking day in the rearview and never think about it ever again. The minute they get back to the diner, after Frank wakes up, there’s gonna be a whole load of questions being asked.

Mikey keeps checking on them in the mirror as he drives down dark desert roads, speeding away from Battery City and everything in it as fast as possible.

He’s probably driving too fast for the night, slumped in the driver’s seat which is pushed back as far as it’ll go, hands on the wheel, arms locked straight out in front of him and his foot pressed to the accelerator so hard he wonders if he could push it right through the floor.

“Mikey.” Ray says from the passenger seat, Grace curled up back asleep on his lap. “Mikey, they’re both okay you know. It’s fine.”

Something about Ray’s quiet assurances make Mikey relax a fraction and he eases up on the speed.

Ray exhales slowly. “Fuck, I’m glad they’re both okay.”

Mikey checks the mirror again; Frank and Gerard are still slumped up against each other in the backseat, still completely out of it. They look like they’re going to sleep for a long time. “Yeah.” He replies. “God, yeah.”

***

Neither Frank nor Gerard have woken up by the time Mikey pulls the car to a stop behind the diner even though he drove the long way home, staying clear of the major routes, and it’s been daylight for several hours. Grace is also still asleep, and Ray opens the door silently and carries her inside.

Mikey stays in the car, craning round the driver’s seat to look at Frank and his brother. They both look like shit. Gerard in particular looks like he’s run face first into a solid brick wall. He wonders how they’re going to get them both back into the diner, or if they should just let them sleep in the car. Unpleasant as it is though, it looks as if getting a cricked neck is going to be the least of their problems.

He takes a deep breath, and lets it out slowly; letting his hands finally loosen from the steering wheel and slip off into his lap. Logically he knows that they’re now all as safe as they usually are – for the moment anyway – what will happen when BL/ind start trying to track them down is anyone’s guess, especially now they seem to have made a name for themselves as the only ‘runners to have ever broken into and out of the supposedly secure facility in the middle of Battery City and of course, according to Ray it seems as though BL/ind aren’t the only ones taking an interest.

He’s so deep in thought that it startles him when Frank speaks.

“It was me.” Frank says mournfully, remaining perfectly still tucked up against Gerard’s side.

Mikey blinks, he can’t work out what Frank’s talking about. “What?”

“If you were wondering about Gerard.” He replies quietly, looking away like he can’t quite meet Mikey’s eyes. “It was me. I hit him.”

Mikey doesn’t say anything right away, he just watches Frank for a while. His hand is curled tightly in the fabric of Gerard’s sleeve, his battered knuckles look painful and it makes him wonder how much it’s hurting Frank just to keep up that contact. All the hair that had grown out while he’s been living with them in the zones has been clipped unevenly but closely right down to the skull on one side of his head and the small silver box looks like it’s been set on fire, only barely singeing Frank’s scalp. It’s burnt black and totally wrecked. Mikey doesn’t think they’ll ever have to worry about it activating again.

Most interestingly – for a given value of interesting anyway, since the only people Frank has been around in the last few hours are Dracs and Mikey’s brother – is the ring of bruising teeth marks around Frank’s neck.

Mikey sighs. He should have been expecting something like this, should’ve told Frank this could happen but he hadn’t and now all he can do is tell Frank the absolute truth because now he’s awake and he knows they’re all safe it looks like the guilt has hit him all at once.

He swallows in an attempt to keep his voice steady. “He used to trick me into hitting him too.” He says, pleased and surprised at how calm he sounds.

Frank still doesn’t move but his eyes flick back to Mikey’s briefly. “He ASKED me.” He mumbles. Mikey thinks he sounds like he needs more sleep but Mikey gets the impression he’s not going to until he knows Gerard is going to be okay. Mikey knows that feeling well.

“You didn’t do anything wrong.” He says as forcefully as he can manage. He can’t let Frank blame himself for this, it won’t do anyone any good and Mikey knows that having his brother’s blood on his hands has cost him more than enough sleepless nights already. “It’s the drugs.” He explains, “It’s… nothing can touch you, nothing MEANS anything… I dunno, I don’t think I can explain it right but…” he shrugs. “I think it makes him feel alive.”

Frank hunches over as much as he can without disturbing Gerard and Mikey leans forward. “Two things we do better in the zones, Frank – violence and sex.”

Frank finally looks at him properly. Mikey smiles. “I’d have been more surprised if you hadn’t.”

A faint smile wobbles its way onto Frank’s face

“He loves you, Frank. He’s always loved you, even when he didn’t know who you were and now you’re here where you should be he’s going to be okay. No, BETTER than okay. We’re all gonna be fucking SHINY.”

Frank’s smile solidifies into a tentative grin. “Yeah, I guess.”

Mikey’s just about to reply, but he’s had a lifetime’s experience of knowing when his brother’s awake so he simply pushes open the car door to get out. “I’ll see how Ray and Grace are.” He says and heads towards the diner without looking back – There are some things he doesn’t want to share with his brother and he gets the feeling that whatever’s about to be said, he’s not a part of it. Frank knows what Gerard needs to keep him sane now, and he’s able to do a much better job of it than Mikey could ever hope to do.

The thought cheers him up even more.

He lets out a long, deep breath and stares up at the inky night sky above the diner. They’re all home safe for now, and Mikey can feel the clench of worry – the murmur of GerardGerardGerard that he’s carried with him for years – loosen and slip away. He feels lighter already.

Gerard’s collage is wilting in the humidity of the diner. Mikey is hunched over the gas burner as Gerard walks in from the desert, adjusting it as the tank of water above starts to boil. It’s not going to help with the brackish taste but it’s better to be safe than sorry. His brother smiles up at him as the door bangs closed and Gerard nods in reply to the unvoiced question.

The radio is on in the corner, Mikey found the signal earlier and Dr Deathdefying has been pumping out all kinds of music for the whole evening.

Frank is sat at the table with Ray and Grace and Gerard stands by the door watching him. He feels strangely itchy under his skin but he can’t place the feeling.

Frank throws his head back and laughs loudly at something Grace has said.

Gerard smiles.

Another piece of the collage peels away and flutters unnoticed to the floor.