Work Text:
Party is different when he comes back.
No one can quite put their finger on it but it’s there, clinging to the mean line of his mouth and making the hollow of his eyes darker and deeper. He’s the same, kind of, but not as loose, like being captured by BLI tightened his strings or something, his cello slope hunch replaced with a set of stone shoulders and a poker straight back and his soft jaw somehow sharper; the line of his body leaner.
He crawls back to them trailing a blaze of gunfire and blood, drooling it, breathing it, and afterwards when they’ve burned the Dracs so their remains can’t be used again (like puppets given a paint job, like taxidermy animals in a museum) he sobs into his hands; apologises over and over in a broken voice and jerks away from anyone who touches him. No one knows what to say. Party has never cried in front of them before. He looks so different, in the white clothes that were forced upon him, hair shaved down to brown, his face grey and thin. They thought he was dead. He still looks it.
They leave the Diner, shooting across a couple of zones to a weathered-looking warehouse that houses the car and all of them easily. It has rusted holes in the corrugated iron ceiling and smells like an abattoir. The holes turn out to be pretty useful for filtering away the smoke that curls off the fire, and they take it in turns to stoke it to life whilst they cover all entrances to the warehouse. As Party changes out of the white BLI overalls with shaking hands the tension of the whole room suddenly shifts, eyes on him, unsure and in need of some kind of reassurance that he’s not just machine parts under that white fabric. He’s covered in star-shaped marks, bursts of silvery white on his pale skin. Char marks. Ghoul and Jet exchange worried looks from opposite sides of the room but Kobra is the one who makes a little noise; breathes out hard and shudders, unable to take his eyes off Party until he pulls down one of Jet’s borrowed shirts and the moment is broken.
Without needing to converse on the matter, the three of them settle around him when he falls asleep where Kobra lies him down. None of them can sleep, curled up on their respective perches around the fire, watching over him while he fits and shakes. He frowns to himself and murmurs. One name in particular crops up again and again.
The fire is fading into embers, the silence unbroken but for Party’s little murmurs and breaths, when Ghoul speaks. He can see Jet Star’s eyes reflecting the firelight, and the tense T of Kobra’s back is enough of a tell that he doesn’t worry about waking him.
“We all know what we saw, right?” he breathes, eyes scarcely drifting from Party’s prone form. There’s no answer for a moment, just Jet shifting up onto his elbows, fixing him with his earnest eyes.
“Guess it wasn’t really what we saw.”
Ghoul considers this. He picks at his teeth with a splinter of wood and then sucks them with his tongue.
“I don’t believe that,” he says after a minute, “my peepers are the only thing I can fuckin’ trust anymore. People don’t get riddled with charges like that and live to tell the tail. Not even Party. Not even the poison in the well himself.”
There’s another terse little silence. Jet watches him, expression hesitant. His eyes flicker to Party.
“Ghoul...” he murmurs, his head shaking in disbelief. “You don’t know what kinda zap they’re working with. You don’t know he’s. Y’know.” He shifts, as though the very thought makes his feet itch. Ghoul is all but glaring at Party, thoughts written all over his face. Jet doesn’t know what to think. They do all know what they saw. Party went out decorated with more holes than a pincushion but... he’s Party. He does that. One minute, blood and glory, the next, roller skates and a pyramid of Dracs turned inside out. “He must have had a plan.”
“Some plan,” Ghoul gripes, lighting himself a cigarette. He sucks down the smoke and exhales sharply, stealing another quick glance at Party’s back. He quiets down for a minute, letting the crackle of the fire break up the tension, then he adds, “all I’m sayin’ is if he turns out to be a Drac I’m going to blow his fucking head off, I don’t care who he used to be.”
“Ghoul ,if you don’t shut your fuckin’ garbage flap about my brother, he won’t be the one getting his head blown off.”
Kobra doesn’t turn over to face them but he doesn’t need to; his voice is enough that Ghoul drops it, looking down at the tattoos on his hands and letting out a frustrated sigh, eyebrows raised. He forgets sometimes that Party and Kobra were once kids, brothers no less. He guesses it’s uncommon now, living relatives. That kind of bond is more of a myth than anything these days. People call themselves brothers, hell. They all call one another ‘brother’, but. Kobra and Party. They washed up together on the same sand, pale and soft and with clasped hands. They’ve never been apart for so long as when Party bit the big one, or bit the little one, more like. He guesses he should be relieved: they were starting to worry for Kobra cracking in the sun.
Family’ll do that, he guesses. Probably best that no one has one anymore.
On that note he looks at Jet and he can tell just the mention of relatives – this whole day, really - has his mind back on the kid. He chews his lip, not really knowing what to say. She’s with Doctor D, but that could mean anything. They haven’t heard anything on the fizzbox for weeks now.
“We should get some sleep?” he hears Jet suggest, and he nods, taking a last draught of his cigarette. Kobra obviously isn’t going to sleep anytime soon and it’s no use all of them being exhausted. Jet reaches to touch at the tuft of blonde hair that sticks over the back of Kobra’s jacket and Ghoul wonders how he doesn’t fear being bitten. “Wake me in a couple ‘hours, okay?”
Kobra doesn’t say anything but there’s a slight movement that could be a nod. Without another word they settle down to sleep, warm spit of the fire comforting amidst the roar of the wind outside.
*
In the morning the desert is a clean canvas, tire tracks flattened out like a sheet being shook smooth, the sand blasting away all evidence of their dive to the warehouse. Kobra sits and smokes a cigarette outside under a rather skeletal umbrella, his brother beside him, blinking in the light.
They don’t speak, but that’s nothing new. Kobra shares his smoke and Party sups it like he hasn’t had one in years, sipping water carefully from a flask and warming his bones. The sand is already hot beneath them but not unbearable yet, and the warmth is bringing the colour back into his face a bit, though he’s still as pale as when he was born.
He doesn’t look different, though. Kobra would know if he was different, he thinks, studying him. His expression is a little more jaded, maybe, his body a little more scarred up, but his eyes are still the same.
“Y’starin’ for?” he murmurs out of the corner of his mouth. Kobra doesn’t even bother to deny it.
“I can’t believe you’re still alive,” he replies simply. Party’s mouth twitches in a wry smile, voice scratchy.
“Take more than that bomblicker to wipe me out.” He closes his eyes and sighs like he’s exhausted, though he slept for hours. “Tried his best though.”
“’Tried’ being the operative word.”
“Yeah.”
Party takes another drag on the cigarette and passes it back, running a hand over his cropped hair. It’s strange to see it like that, dull and wrong. It looks like it’s had a couple of weeks growth but it’s still not like it was. He must hate it.
“Try get you some Kool Aid for that,” Kobra suggests. Party smiles at him then, crooked and grateful.
“S’gonna need more than just Kool Aid, babe,” he says, “gonna have to pay a visit to Tommy Chow Mein, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Kobra nods and it feels good to suddenly have something to do; a proactive approach to getting this melted-bones feeling gone. After a moment he nudges Party. “I’ve still got your jacket.”
“Good,” Party says with a grin. He gets up and kicks sand off his boots, “let’s tell the guys then. I wanna get this fuckin’ wig off, I look like a Drac.”
Nodding again, Kobra feels the unease of last night’s conversation slipping off him; it’s Party, no doubt. Their fucking glue, back between their creases. He pushes his hair back.
“I’ll get the car ready.”
*
In the gas station bathroom, Party dries off his newly-blond hair as best as he can on a bedraggled sheet, trying to scrub the dried bleach from behind his ears. He’s using bottled water and he’s not got much left. Dousing another quarter of the bottle on his head and scrubbing it with the sheet, he has to just hope that’s everything.
His hands settle on the rim of the basin and he stops, grubby sheet around his neck and face starkly white, even paler with the help of his hair. His eyes are the darkest part, and as he gazes, the lights overhead flicker, no doubt run on a clunky old generator. A vampire flashes on the surface of the mirror where his face used to be, clad in black and white, bloody-mouthed and dark haired and ruthless. He blinks the image away when the light becomes constant again, then picks up the tub of dye on the counter; uncaps it and gouges his hand into the slick surface of the stuff, scooping half of it onto his hair and scrubbing it in with frantic hands.
The last of the water goes to rinsing it out a while later, and as the water sluices down his face and neck, stained red, he doesn’t look at the mirror.