Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter 1

It all started with a kiss.

* * * *

The rain touched down on his sandpaper skin, finding a home in the ruggedly delicate curves of his nose. His eyes were closed against what felt like hope, slick with the translucent water. They hadn’t had a rainfall in what felt like years but had probably only been months.

“The good doctor is never wrong.”

Mikey hummed under his breath, unable to hold back a smile. If this had been ten years ago, he would have been racing through puddles, hopping from slippery stone to slippery stone, but ten years ago he hadn’t heard of nitros or a better way of living either.

“I don’t know how he does it.”

“Magic,” Mikey said, and flashed his grin to the man beside him. The pearly white teeth were sharp against the man’s natural tan, his hair the opposite contrast. “I mean, he somehow manages to stay free and still has enough time to go outside and check what the sky is doing over the City.”

“Nah,” the man scoffed. His lips were sharp at the edges, like the razor in his eyes. “He probably has some accomplices who are,” he waved a hand in a gesture that Mikey didn’t know how to interpret, “fuckin’ sky readers. The science ones, you know, with the wind patterns or whatever the hell else.”

Ah. “Meteorologists, they used to call ‘em,” Mikey said.

The man frowned. “What do they call ‘em now?”

Mikey glanced to the side, and turned his face up to the sky, letting the rain wash at the grime on his skin. “Whites.”

* * * *

“I think I’m going to put in an application.”

Gerard worried at his lip between his teeth, and barely glanced up from the label of the bottle of pills he was peeling from the clean, white plastic cylinder. “What for?”

Mikey dropped a pile of papers in front of his brother. “The Industries,” he said. “Think I might go to school for tech. Maybe medicine. They hire you while you’re still in school, you know, pay your way through, keep you in a house and with food.” Keep your family alive and well.

Gerard’s eyes twitched over the pages. “Good,” he said. “You’re good with tech. Remember the toaster?”

Mikey rolled his eyes. “Of course I remember the toaster.”

“And the heater?”

“Are you trying to hint at something?”

Almost matching brown-green eyes met across the level wood of the table. Gerard’s left eyebrow twitched, I’m just saying, Mikey.

Well, Mikey rolled his eyes, It’s something I like doing.

Gerard drummed his fingers on the table and watched them for a second before looking back up. I’m serious, you’d be great at it. Why the... His eyes twitched over to the bottle of pills, which he took in his hand. Something dark shadowed his face, barely tinted the white-under-brown.

“Not because of,” Mikey said.

Gerard’s lips tightened. He wouldn’t meet Mikey’s eyes.

“Fuck, Gee.” He slammed his fist on the table, and stood up. “It isn’t because of you. I’ve always been interested in that stuff, okay? The pills, whatever goes on inside of us, it’s...it’s crazy. Have you ever, like. Blood, it’s...all of this is inside us. And I want to learn, I want to know how to...”

“Fix someone.” Gerard laughed, sharp and dry. “Yeah, I get it. You want to know how to fix me. Well, there ain’t a cure for whatever I’ve got,” he spat. He stood up with such force that the chair he’d been sitting on fell back. “At least have the courtesy to say it to my face.”

“I am saying it to your face, tunnel scum.” Mikey met Gerard’s eyes, held them. “There isn’t anything wrong with you. I just want to know how to prove it. And if I can pick up some advice on sewing your dirty-ass clothes back together while I’m at it, we’ll be set.”

“Hmmph.” Gerard pulled away. “Mom’s going to be proud, at least.”

“She’d be proud of us even if we lived in the zones,” Mikey muttered. He scooped up the papers from the table, and singled out the top one. “I’ve got the qualifications, anyway. I talked to one of the recruiters, and I start school on Monday.”

“Work?”

Mikey glanced at Gerard on his way to his room. “They don’t hire you until you’ve completed a full year of schooling. I’m taking as many classes as I can this first year so I can concentrate on making the world a better place once I’m all dressed in white.”

“Picked ‘em out?”

“Anatomy, introductory biology, advanced mixed martial arts, emergency first aid, and introduction to injuries. So,” he explained, for the quizzical look on his brother’s face, “I can stitch up a Drac if they get cut open.”

Gerard nodded. “You’ll be great at it, Mikes. I know you will.”

Mikey watched as Gerard glanced from the clock on the wall to the bottle of pills on the table. There was just one minute left before he could take another one, and sink into the couch, complacent and happy again. He turned away, but the sight of his brother’s anxious face was burned into his retinas, haunting his every motion. He marched quickly to his room, where the phone on his bedside table flashed the time up at him, jeering one minute to five o’clock. He picked up the phone and punched in the numbers he’d memorized hours ago, when the brochure that was next to him on the bed had first touched his hands.

“Hello?” he said, when the ringing clicked.

“Better Living Industries, everything is perfect. Would you like to be transferred?”

“Yes, um.” Mikey squinted down at the brochure. “Doctor Beckett?”

“Keep smiling.”

The line crackled, the slick static of dead air ringing through the receiver he was holding up to his ear. “Doctor Beckett with Better Living Industries. Building a better you so that you can build a better world. How may I assist you today?”

“This is Michael,” Mikey said, clearing his throat. “We spoke earlier, at the Institution?”

“Michael. How may I assist you today?”

“I’ve decided to take the position.”

“How wonderful. Are you enrolled in classes at the Institution already?”

“Yes. I’ll be taking classes in the fall and spring semesters and I should be all caught up by the end of that and ready to start working next fall.”

“Come to our offices in Battery Towers and we will reimburse you for your education, Michael. I can set up an appointment with one of our Doctors for Tuesday. Building C.”

“Sure, yes.” Mikey nodded, and adjusted his glasses on his nose. “That sounds good. All day Tuesday?”

“Yes. There are some matters we must attend to. Is that everything, Michael?”

“That’s everything.”

“Goodbye, Michael. Better Living Industries looks forward to your future with us. Have a wonderful day, and don’t forget to take your pills.”

Mikey swallowed. He hung up the phone as the Doctor disconnected the line. It was now 5:03, and his pills were on the bedside table. He reached out and unscrewed the white cap. Two pills every day at five, one red and one blue. The slide of the pills down his throat made him cough, but in a few minutes, everything would be better.

He reclined on his bed and stared up into the ceiling, white and clean above him like an empty canvas. No, like a cloud. Or a blanket.

His eyes drifted closed as the happy-makers filled his head with static, a phone without a connection, dead air living.

The small apartment he shared with his brother grew silent as Gerard’s fingers stopped twitching and lay still at his side. They both let out a sigh of relief at the lifting of the tension from their shoulders and fell asleep to the whine of static in the air.

 

 

Chapter 2

The body of the rat, white on the silver tray, was warm and soft. Its tiny eyes were closed, its breathing almost as quick as the hectic pittering of its tiny, rodent heart. Mikey reached for the scalpel, the thin layer of plastic forgotten as he manipulated the knife. Months of practice wielding pencils, knives, drills, and common household utensils with the gloves had given him the dexterity and mobility he enjoyed with his naked fingers. The plastic was thin enough not to impinge too much on the sensitivity of his finger pads, and it kept everything nice and sterile. The Better Living Institution had given their medical students boxes upon boxes of the gloves, and he wasn’t going to run short any time soon.

“I want you,” Professor Ross said, arms folded across his chest as he patrolled the room, “to make the incision without shaving. When in the field, remember, you might not have access to all the tools you would in the lab. Remember what we did with the dogs: that is what you must do with the rats. Open, fix, close.”

Mikey remembered the dogs. He tightened his lips beneath the Mouth Mask looped behind his ears. There had been a great deal of blood that they hadn’t expected, though they should have. Before the dogs, they’d only been given dead animals to practice on.

“Gauze,” Mikey muttered. His eyes narrowed as his lab partner moved the tiny patch of gauze over the area, hovering. His hand was much steadier than Brent’s, and Brent was really only here because it was a required class. He gripped the scalpel, and spread the white fur with his index and thumb of his left hand.

“Incision made,” he said, as the knife cut through the skin. There was a layer of muscle beneath it, but he’d chosen the right direction in which to cut, with the grain instead of against it. The muscles parted fairly easily, and revealed, “Apply pressure, please,” the small abscess he was supposed to remove.

The tiny, drugged animal was constantly jittering beneath his fingertips, but he held it steady, and leaned in closer. His eyes, sharper than they had been when he’d needed glasses, focused on something that didn’t look quite right. “Professor?”

Ross shuffled over. “Yes, Way? What is it?”

“There’s,” Mikey said, and frowned. “It looks as though this rat’s liver has sustained some real damage, sir. From what I know of rats, could this mean that whoever his owner was, they were not using the proper bedding?”

Ross leaned over the rat and squinted. “I do believe you’re correct,” he said. “But there isn’t anything we can do in surgery for that kind of a problem. Is that the abscess you removed?”

He was pointing to the tiny, shapeless lump on the metal tray. Mikey nodded, and signaled for Brent to remove the gauze. The abscess had been sitting on the rat’s spleen, some kind of nitro-induced tumour, the card had said. He’d already stitched it back up with a fine thread that BL/Ind had invented for the most delicate of surgeries, and moved now to the skin. He threaded his needle, and moved it deftly from side to side, pulling the skin together, and tying it at the ends.

He sat down on the stool that was right behind him as Brent finished things up, applying bandages over the wound.

“That diagnosis was impressive.”

MIkey jumped in his seat as a voice floated over his shoulder. He put the scalpel on the tray and turned around as quickly as he could, bloodied hands hanging limply in the air in front of him. “Doctor Beckett,” he said.

Beckett leaned a bit closer. His hair was cropped short, and his nails were perfectly manicured and well kept. “And that needlework.” He shook his head, and his eyes met Mikey’s. “You have certainly come a long way in such a short time, Michael. Come with me.”

Mikey swallowed. “Yes sir.” He pulled off his gloves, one into the other, and deposited them into the incineration chute before washing his hands thoroughly. The mask over his mouth went into the chute as well before he hurried out of the lab, his white lab coat still buttoned up to his neck.

Doctor Beckett was waiting for him right outside of the lab, hands clasped behind his back. He was wearing a lab coat as well, though his had the BL/Ind logo on each shoulder. “Most students kill their first rat, you know,” he said. “I certainly did.”

“Sir?” Mikey asked, falling in step behind Beckett.

“You have a remarkable mind, Michael. And we at Better Living Industries would like to congratulate you on your exceptional grades. This past year you have progressed so rapidly in your studies, both medical and technical, that we can hardly decide where you will be of the most use to us.”

“I would like to learn more about the human body, sir,” Mikey said. “While I’m working for Better Living Industries, I mean.”

Beckett stopped walking. “What do you mean?”

“I...” Mikey frowned. “I would like to work in Better Living Industries’ medical department. I feel like I have a lot to offer that department, and a lot to learn about illnesses and diseases and how to treat them.”

Beckett blinked. “You learn before you come to work with us full time, Michael. Once you are working at Better Living Industries, there is no reason for you to learn any more. You must learn to quell your desires if you are going to advance in the company.”

He smiled, his white teeth startlingly close in shade to his skin. “Doesn’t that sound lovely? I’m glad we had this talk. Keep smiling, Michael.”

Mikey stayed in the hall as Beckett turned around and walked away without another word. He didn’t know what to do or say, with his thoughts all in a jumble. No learning? How were they supposed to create new cures if they didn’t learn from past mistakes? His mouth twisted, and he shoved his hands deep in his pockets before walking to the train that was waiting to take him home.

* * * *

When Mikey got home, it was almost 4:30. Gerard was already home, already pacing around the kitchen with his head in his hands.

Mikey left his lab coat hanging on the hook near the door. He didn’t look into the kitchen when he walked past: he could hear the soft sound of his brother’s feet padding across the floor, tap-tap-tapping evenly skin on linoleum. He’d come home at four, and had probably already taken a shower because it was something to do. As Mikey headed into the sitting room, he could hear the squeak and slide of Gerard’s probably still-wet feet on the ground.

“Cut open a rat today,” he said loudly, hoping to cut into the steady pattern of pacing. He pulled open the cabinet beneath their television, looking for one of the textbooks he thought he’d put int here. “A live one. We had to get out a tumour.”

Gerard’s feet stuttered on the ground, and slowed down.

No book. Mikey shuffled instead through the stack of papers in the cabinet. He hadn’t put these here. He frowned at pages of old prescriptions, faded labels grey on white. He didn’t even notice when the sound of walking ceased completely.

Underneath a few of the pages of prescriptions (all Gerard’s), Mikey frowned at one page. It wasn’t black and white, it was...something else. Like the inside of a rat instead of its outside. The way the rat’s pink eyes looked against its white skin, or the way its blood had looked against Mikey’s white gloves. It wasn’t letters either, it was lines, curved and straight. It was dark eyes and a sharp nose.

It wasn’t a photograph. But it was him.

Where had this come from? Mikey checked the back: a prescription. He flipped over one of the other prescriptions, in a neat pile at his side. This one was the colour of the pills he took each evening. It was the City, sharp buildings glowing in the light from an absent sun. Another one was their kitchen, in almost perfect detail. And a handful of others were people Mikey didn’t recognize, people that looked real in purples, greens and blues.

“Did it survive?”

Mikey jumped. He turned around, the picture of him still in his hand.

There was silence as Mikey’s eyes met Gerard’s across the room. Gerard’s mouth was open, slightly crooked to one side. Mikey’s tongue felt swollen, and he licked his lips in an effort to get moisture into his mouth. “What,” he said, voice coming out strained, “are these?”

Gerard swallowed. His eyebrows were drawn together as though he might cry. “I can...I can explain.”

Mikey looked down at himself, and got to his feet. Papers fell from where they had been in his lap, showing faces and places. “Oh god,” he muttered. His breathing function seemed to be broken, this did not compute. “Oh god.” He put a hand to his chest, and stepped away from the pile of paper, his eyes wide with the horror of the situation. “Gerard, drawing...drawing is illegal. Colours are illegal. What the hell, what the fuck, what, what are...what are you doing?”

Gerard was wringing his hands in front of him, his elbows tucked in close to his sides. “They just come out of me,” he whispered. Tears were now actually coming from his eyes, and he shuddered in a breath. Mikey ran his hands through his hair anxiously, front to back and front to back again. “I can’t help it, Mikes, I...someone gave me the pencils at work, and I can’t not do it. My mind is always thinking, and my hands want to draw.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Mikey breathed. “Gerard, shit. This is...this is bad. This is worse than bad. That’s what the pills are for, Gee, you’re supposed to be taking your pills, and they’re supposed to fix this.”

Gerard shook his head. He was biting his lower lip now, still crying. “They don’t work,” he managed to say. “I don’t know why. They work for a little while, but then it’s like I’ve never taken a pill and everything is moving and I need to make things.”

“You...” Mikey said. “You can’t. You can’t do this to us, Gerard. Do you have any idea how...how hard I’ve been working? To make sure that we have enough money for your pills? If they’re not working, then get better pills.”

“I’ve asked!” Gerard shook his head. “My doctor, he told me that...this was the strongest they dared to give me and that if it wasn’t working, he wasn’t sure that the next ones wouldn’t erase everything in my brain and that they'd have to report me as a special case, so I told him...”

“You lied to your doctor?”

Gerard hung his head. His eyes closed, and his voice, when it came out, was small and pitiful. “Yes.”

Mikey breathed in. He tried to. If the pills wear off before five and you get the way you get, you need to take in a deep breath, and let it out. In and out. That’s good, Mikey. Keep calm until you can take your pills, okay? Okay. “Okay. This...this is not good, Gerard.” Gerard’s shoulders seemed to cave in a bit, so Mikey cleared his throat. “This is not good, but I’m in school. I can probably try and figure something out, okay? Just, you have to try too, Gerard, I can’t do all the work.”

Gerard nodded. “I’ll try.”

“And you can’t show anyone, okay? The...these.” Mikey scooped them up and stuffed them back in the cabinet. “Nobody. Don’t tell anybody.”

Mikey took a deep breath and crossed the room. “Okay, Gee?”

Gerard met his eyes. “Yeah, Mikes.”

When Mikey pulled him close, he could feel the remnants of Gerard’s tears seeping through the material on his shoulder and the way his brother gripped at his back for dear life. He could, he had to find a way to help him.

* * * *

“Michael?”

Mikey jerked awake. The librarian, whose name Mikey could never remember, was looking at him from the end of the table. The table in the library that Mikey was lying on. Sleeping.

Books were spread out beneath him, open to various pages. He’d been reading about neural pathways, he remembered. When he glanced down at the page, a small brain stared up at him. Degeneration. There hadn’t been anything about compulsive drawing in that section, and he’d gotten stuck on the last line about selective blocking and using dopamine to reduce psychoses in the mesolimbic pathway, or was it reducing dopamine. Had there even been dopamine? Maybe it had been something else, about...receptors...

“The library's closing, Michael.”

Mikey closed the book. “Okay,” he muttered. He started stacking books, but the librarian put a hand on his shoulder.

“I’ll put them back behind my desk, so you won’t have to go looking for them again.”

Mikey nodded with relief, and gathered his notes into his bag. He had some books back at the apartment, had been poring over them night after sleepless night. He finally felt like he was getting somewhere in his studies, though he was having more and more trouble staying awake.

“Are you adequate, Michael?” the librarian asked, as they headed out the mostly dark library together. “Your pills are treating you well, I trust?”

“Yes,” Mikey said, with a smile. It made the librarian node, a look of relief washing across his face. “Keep smiling, sir.”

“Keep smiling, Michael.”

Mikey did until he’d exited the library, and only then did he let his smile drop. The campus was dark and abandoned, night had come over the City. Buses, trains, cars wouldn’t be running, not at this time. That meant he’d be facing another long, dreary walk home in the dry cool.

He wasn’t adequate, not really. He wasn’t even good. He was cold, and tired, and obsessed. He’d been wasting too much precious time sleeping when he could have been trying to find a cure, so he’d looked around and discovered that some students at the Institution had been taking pills that were designed to keep you awake. They worked right after you took your pills, counteracting the nanos that made you fall asleep, adding nitros that kept your brain awake. It had been a few weeks since he’d found the drawings Gerard had made, and his notes were getting more extensive by the day. He hadn’t slept much, but little things he did like repetition of verbal suggestions, seemed to be helping his brother’s twitches.

His limbs felt heavy all the time, and it was hard to lift a pencil or a scalpel, but he just popped another yellow pill and blinked away the night. Shuffling home in the dark was especially draining, so he reached into his pocket and grabbed one of the little pills from the line-marked bottle. It took a few minutes for them to kick in, longer every time, but soon he was blinking and managing not to trip over the slightly crooked step.

A voice cut through the darkness and made him trip over the step after the slightly crooked one. “You again.”

Mikey flailed for balance and barely caught himself on the cold steel railing. He looked up to where the voice had come from to see a man, no older than himself, looking relaxed as could be. His hands were in his pockets, dark brown hair sweeping across his forehead. He had a pair of glasses perched on his nose, and an easy smile lifted his mouth and eyes. “What?” Mikey asked. “Who are you?”

“No names,” the man said. “Sorry. House rule. I just see you a lot. Around here, late at night. Are you always in the library?”

Mikey glanced down at his bag, sheets of paper still miraculously inside. “Yes. I’m...doing research.”

“Thought I saw you using some yellows earlier.”

Mikey froze, eyes wide.

The man paused, and laughed, hands up. “No, sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. The look on your face, chill out. It’s okay, I don’t work for the Industry. I’m in food production, here. I just thought, you’re never around anyone.”

Mikey shifted his weight. “No,” he said. He’d never thought about not having friends before. School wasn’t a place where you made friends, and the Institution, especially, wasn’t.

“I have some friends that like to meet in one of the clubs,” the man continued. “If you want to join us, you’d definitely be welcome.”

“Wait.” Mikey frowned. “Why are you telling me this? What if I worked for the Industry?”

The man shrugged. “You don’t know my name. You could go into every single food production class to find me if you really wanted to. But if you worked for the Industry, you wouldn’t be taking those yellows. And you would have stopped me at the beginning.”

That made sense. “Okay, I guess.”

“You just took a yellow,” the man said. “I’m going there now, if you want to come. It’ll wake you right up.”

Mikey thought about his brother, curled up on a bed at home, and of the books spread out on his own bed. There were things he still needed to learn, charts he needed to memorize, and homework he had to do before the end of the week. He didn’t have enough time to do it all, and exams were coming up in a month. He still had to work on his working model for his tech class, come up with a blueprint for his other tech class.

Just thinking about his room made his eye twitch.

“Sure,” he said. “Yes.”

The man smirked, and crooked a long finger at Mikey before walking off. “Follow me.”

 

Chapter 3

“We should name them,” Gerard blurted.

* * * *

Red light stained the tunnels, dripping down the water in the walls like blood, flickering like the beat of an erratic heart. Mikey blinked rapidly against the intrusion, but all he could see when he closed his eyes was green, which was somehow even worse than the gory reflections around him.

The man he was following kept looking back to check on him. “The guy who runs this place, he called it Marv’s, because of the sign.”

Mikey squinted. “Marvelous?” Where had they even found a working neon sign? They were supposed to have been eradicated ages ago because they weren’t terribly environmentally friendly or something like that.

“Watch,” the man said.

Mikey looked away from him and back at the sign, which flickered every few moments, a few of the letters extinguished because of some kind of malfunction inside the hollow tubes of glass. “I don’t,” he said, and then. The middle letters of the word flickered out while he was staring. Mikey blinked. “Marvs,” he breathed.

“Marv’s,” the man agreed. “Welcome.” A dull clank arose when he knocked sharply on the door.

A panel that Mikey hadn’t seen slid open to reveal a set of narrowed eyes. “Password?”

“Fuck you,” the man laughed.

“That ain’t the code,” the eyes said.

“I brung you a potential motorbaby. We’re here to pump off and slam. Can’t you be grateful for once?”

“Come on, how do I know you’re still you if you won’t give me the password?”

“My eyes wouldn’t be as shiny,” the man said. “Passwords are for babies. And not children of the carb, either.”

“Okay, ain’t nobody I know would shorten carburetor to carb. You’re such a stomach-mind.” The panel squealed shut before the door swung open, out towards them.

“In you get, yellow,” the man said.

Mikey wrinkled his nose, but stepped inside. It had probably been a good idea to send him in first, because the second he crossed that threshold, he wanted to step back, rewind. There was a wall of music and lights waiting for him on the inside, so loud and bright that he put his hands over his ears instinctively. A hand tucked into the crook of his elbow and tugged him towards a bar. He couldn’t keep track of what was happening: there was too much movement and way too much noise.

A small glass was shoved under his face. Mikey looked at it, and then up at the tall man he assumed had given it to him. The man mimed drinking the glass, and the one beside Mikey clapped him on the back. “Slam it down!” he shouted, into Mikey’s ear, and downed his small glass.

Mikey hesitated, but the tall, tanned man was still miming drinking to him, even though there were clearly other people who needed drinks as well. He reached out, and picked up the glass. For its size, it was oddly heavy. What the hell, he had nothing left to lose. He gulped the drink, and almost dropped the glass at the way the liquid burned in his mouth and down his throat.

“What,” he choked, “was that?”

“Something to loosen you up,” the man shouted. The bartender had moved on now. Mikey licked his lips.

“It gives you a case of the dust mouth for a little while,” the man yelled again, “But it makes everything so fucking shiny.”

“Are you,” Mikey yelled back, unable to resist a glance down the bar at some men with painted arms and blown pupils.

“A Wave-Head? Nah. I just chase a few slams, but I don’t pop unless I’ve got an exam.”

“Pills?”

The man shook his head. His eyes lit up and moved past Mikey’s shoulder. When Mikey turned, he caught an eyeful of smooth skin and sharp, dark hair. The eyes that had peeked out through the panel in the door were bright and on him, calculating but not cold like Professor Ross’. There was something off about them that Mikey couldn’t quite put a finger on.

“Nobody takes pills here,” the door man said. His voice somehow managed to cut through the other noise, though it was soft at the edges, catching on the man’s pearly, even teeth, buffeted along by his tongue.

There was that dust mouth again. “I don’t understand,” Mikey said, unable to tear his eyes away from the man. The music pounding through the air slowly ebbed, and the door guy grinned at the bartender before turning back to Mikey.

“Don’t understand what, brighteyes?”

Mikey blinked. “How can you not take pills? What do you do about the radiation and the gas? The pills...help us.” Make us normal.

“You’ve never been here before, huh?” When Mikey shook his head, the man smiled. “The pills don’t do shit to keep you safe. All they do is suppress...everything that’s inside of you. They want you to be robots, man, it’s a whole city full of robots stuttering around in the skin of the people they should be.”

“But...” Mikey paused. “Genetic diseases, they cure those.”

“If they cured diseases, BLI wouldn’t need hospitals.”

Mikey frowned. “What you’re talking about is treason.”

“So?” The man laughed. “You gonna report me to the whites? You don’t know my name, little motorbaby. You don’t know where I live, or what I do in the bright, clean light of day.”

“I...” Mikey gulped. “I just don’t see why you would give up what the pills let you have.”

“Let?” The man laughed. “Tell you what, kid. You give it up for a full day and then you can come back here and tell me I’m wrong.”

Mikey’s hair bristled at the challenge. That was not how the world worked! Better Living Industries gave him pills so that he would be better, so that he wouldn’t suffer. They calmed down the chaos of things like this stupid place. “Fine,” he said. He could do research to back his findings.

“Shake on it,” the man said, and spat into his palm.

“Gross.” Mikey wrinkled his nose.

“Your DNA seals the deal, kid. Unless you’d rather slit our thumbs, it isn’t a real deal unless our insides touch.”

“Gross,” Mikey repeated, but spat into his palm. This entire place made him feel dirty. “You’re disgusting,” he informed the man, wiping his hand on his pants. “I hope you know that.”

Mikey turned away, wondering when he would get to go home.

Beside him, the man chuckled as the music picked up again, pounding through his temples like the start of a bad headache. “Oh, I know,” he said.

When Mikey got home, three drinks and two sets later, his head was still spinning from the lights and the music that had been pounding around his head. Even the walk from the tunnel entrance to his apartment hadn’t cleared him of it. He allowed himself to collapse, unceremoniously and without any kind of grace, onto his soft, welcoming bed. He thought far enough into the future to take off his glasses, but fell almost immediately into deep unconsciousness.

The first thing he saw when his alarm clock beep-beep-beeped him in what felt like the eye was his pills.

Tell me I’m wrong.

Mikey pursed his lips in a line. There was no reason for him to do what an insane, illegal club owner had told him to. There hadn’t been any reason for him to drink four of whatever the bartender had served up, and there certainly hadn’t been any reason for him to ever listen to that stupid, wavy-haired man in the first place.

But he hadn’t ever failed anything in his life. And he hadn’t ever turned down a challenge.

“Fine,” Mikey grumbled. He could suffer through one painful day without his pills. And then he’d get the satisfaction of telling that moron of a man that he was wrong.

Gerard was at the kitchen table when Mikey emerged from his room. He was still wearing his full lab outfit, and felt mildly grimy and disgusting beneath his coat, but there wasn’t enough time for him to wash up and change clothes.

“Hey, Gee,” Mikey muttered. A headache was threatening to rent his skull in two.

Gerard didn’t say anything, just spooned cereal into his mouth. His motions were slightly jerky, and Mikey watched him eat for a minute, a frown on his face. He shouldn’t be like this so early in the morning. The pills were supposed to keep him afloat until noon, at the very least.

He’d wasted his entire night drinking shit and listening to terrible music, when he could have been reading and trying to help his brother.

It was official: he was the worst sibling in the entire world. “Hey Gee, you okay?”

Gerard tightened his lips, and blinked twice. “Yes,” he said. He hung onto the ‘s’ longer than he should have, but smiled. “I’m adequate, Michael.”

Mikey would have stayed longer, but he was almost late, and the room seemed to be spinning. He really should have gotten more than three hours of sleep. And he really should have taken his pills. The headache didn’t seem to get better when the hot air of the City slapped him full in the face. And it didn’t get better throughout the day, so when his morning classes were finished, he collapsed onto a bench in a rare patch of shade. His head felt like it might be full of lead, and something was trying to tear his eyes from his head.

He jerked to the side when a hand touched his shoulder.

When Mikey looked up, squinting into the bright light, he saw that it was the man from the night before, with the dark brown hair and the easy grin. He was still wearing glasses, and was holding what looked like a cup in the hand not on Mikey’s shoulder.

“Hey,” he said.

Mikey grunted. “What do you want? Come to invite me to make another terrible decision?”

The man laughed. “No, I came to bring you some coffee. I didn’t think you’d take him up on his offer so quickly.”

“Him?” Mikey asked. He peered suspiciously into the cup that had been shoved into his hands. It was warm, like the end of one of the laser-shooters they’d learned about last week in tech. “The batshit insane one, or the bartender?”

“Well. Both.”

“You’re telling me that most people don’t drink five of whatever that was on their first night? And you’re just telling this to me now?”

“Drink it,” the man said, when Mikey raised an eyebrow to him. “It’ll fix what’s going on in your head. I didn’t think you...most City poppers take their pills after a night like the one we had, though. That’s why I brought the coffee and not one of the special pills some of the ‘heads have concocted. So, how do you feel so far?”

Mikey took a tentative drink of the ‘coffee’. It was black, and bitter, but the second it washed warm down his throat, he blinked and took another gulp. It left a bad taste in his mouth, so he kept filling it up until the cup was empty. “I feel like someone stepped on my head.”

“Mm. No. That feels worse. I meant without the pills.” The man leaned in to take his cup back, and searched Mikey’s face. “You have no idea yet, do you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and, just rewind here. You’ve had your head stepped on?”

“I’ll tell you all about that if you’re still around in a week,” the man said. “Listen, if you don’t feel any different by tonight, don’t take your pills at five. It takes some people longer than others to expel all the nitros.”

Mikey frowned. “How will I know if I feel different?”

“Look up at the sky,” the man said, and smiled. “You’ll know. Come find me when you do, yeah?” He got to his feet, tucking the empty cup into his bag.

“Wait, where are you going?” Mikey stood up as well, already feeling a bit better, though not much.

The man laughed. “You’re way too excitable. I have class. See you later though, I hope.”

“But how,” Mikey tried to say. The man had already turned around and was walking quickly away, without so much as a glance over his shoulder. “How will I know how to find you?”

His watch chirped at him. That meant it was time for him to return to class as well. He heaved a sigh, and ducked his head under the strap of his bag. It was full to the brim with heavy textbooks for class and for Gerard, and pulled his shoulder down if he wore it on just the one side. “I’ll know,” he muttered to himself. There was no possible way for his day to get any weirder.

* * * *

On days when Mikey left class early enough to catch the Mag Rail, he often drifted in the current of his own thoughts or read from the textbooks he had in his bag. He generally had homework due either the next day or the next week, and Mikey was nothing if not a perfectionist. The unmanned passenger cars levitated over strips of metal that he had learned in tech were called “magnets”, so the only sounds within the car were those that came from the other passengers.

Mikey turned the page, soaking up the information presented below. In tech, they’d recently dissected a few of the more upper-level security items that BL/Ind used to keep peace in the city, and they were learning about lasers, and how they could be produced and harnessed for good. Lights and mirrors were spread out beneath him in diagrams of lines and triangles, demonstrating how each item functioned and to what angle the light needed to be refracted in order to create the powerful, burning beams of the most innovative technology the City boasted: its ray guns.

He slid his finger along the path of the laser, finding it hard to concentrate today.

A tapping noise drew his attention upwards. It was the foot of a passenger dressed all in gray. He was clicking the toe of his shoe against the scuffed floor of the car. Click-tap. Click-tap. Click-tap.

Beside Mikey, a large, darker-skinned man breathed in and out. Breath. Breath. Breath.

A woman picked absently at the hem of her sleeve. Scritch.

A child scratched at her scalp. Scratch, scratch, scratch, pause. Scratch, scratch, scratch.

Click, breathe, tap. Click, breathe, tap, scritch. Click, breathe, scritch scratch scritch tap.

Mikey ran his finger along the edge of the page, slide, click, scritch scratch scritch tap. Click slide, breathe scratch, tap scritch scritch. Scratch, slide, tap click tap. With his other hand, he shifted his leg on the seat: rustle slide clicktapscritchscratch. Breathe, breathe, click tap scritchscratchtap.

The beats of the night before reverberated at the back of his mind, a steady thump beneath the surface noises. The whine of the guitar wound around the nails of the woman, the low growl of the bass the long, deep breaths.

Mikey clapped his hands over his ears, eyes wide. When the doors of the train opened, he stuffed his books in his bag and ran off towards their apartment as quickly as he could. But no matter how quickly he ran, he couldn’t escape the noises of the City.

His hands were over his ears, but sounds made him stop and turn, made him almost run into signs. The steady tap of Scarecrow boots on the sparkling concrete, the slide of the Mag Rail’s doors, the shift in Draculoid clothing.

And yet, as he stood on the sidewalk, turning around, there was something missing.

There were no notes to accompany the incessant noises that all of these people were making in one place, the sounds of their heartbeats and the feel of them pressing up against him on their way to their homes. They didn’t look up when they jostled his still form, or make eye contact with him when he crossed the street and tucked his hands into the crooks of his elbows.

There was no music, and there were no words. Nobody was talking, muttering, even whispering.

He expected blissful silence when he slammed his way into their apartment and fumbled with the buttons on his coat. His bag he left on the floor next to the front door.

Click. Crunch. Slide.

Mikey’s eye twitched. Gerard was sitting at the kitchen table, munching thoughtfully on a bowl of cereal. The sounds of his chewing were deafening, the sucking noises, the grinding, the swallow. Mikey shucked his shoes and coat and left them on the floor next to his bag.

His room. Gerard wasn’t chewing in his room. He could be safe there. But even with the door to his room closed tightly behind him, even with his window jammed all the way closed, he couldn’t escape. There was a high-pitched whining noise coming from somewhere, and a dull thump that seemed to quicken and slow of its own accord.

His eyes twitched over to the clock. 6:30, read the blinking lights.

The blinking of the light made him blink. Had his clock done that before? Had his shirt smelled like that the night before? Had his floor looked so dirty only yesterday? He hurried to pick up every last item of clothing on the ground, which wasn’t a lot. He had to clean them all, get rid of whatever it was in there that was making his nose itch and his eyes burn.

Mikey rushed out into the kitchen. “I’m going to do some laundry,” he said.

Gerard nodded. “It is good to do laundry,” he said.

“Do you have any laundry is what I was trying to hint at,” Mikey snapped.

Gerard tilted his head to the side. “Hinting is like lying, Michael.”

“What the fuck,” Mikey muttered. “Just get your clothes, Gee. Okay?”

Gerard sighed happily, and abandoned his bowl on the table. “I will get my clothes for you, brother.” His shoulders were hunched forwards, and his eyes were drooping shut. When he came back, bag of laundry in hand, he smiled at Mikey. “I am going to bed, Michael. Have a restful sleep.”

Mikey nodded. Gerard had probably just taken his pills to be acting like he was. His reactions had been awfully slow, though. Mikey hadn’t ever remembered seeing him that way. But then again, Mikey had always gone to bed after he’d taken his pills. Or stayed in his room, reading all night.

The Insta-Wash machines were louder than he remembered, and the Insta-Dry ones made him want to leap for cover. The room was in the basement of their apartment building, beneath the street level of the city, and it was cold. Goosebumps raised the skin on Mikey’s arms, painful and uncomfortable. He rubbed at his skin, close to bare because he’d stripped down as far as he could without completely disrobing, and danced to the tune of the swishing water. The machines didn’t take more than ten minutes each to run, but they felt like the longest ten minutes of Mikey’s young life.

When his clothes came out of the dryer, the smell rising from them made his nose wrinkle. They almost smelled too clean, like the machine had taken something that wasn’t supposed to be removed from the clothes. But it was better than before, so he got dressed and walked up to their apartment. He could have taken the elevator but when he’d pressed the button an hour ago, it had made an awful grinding noise, and a fearsome whirring that had made Mikey wince. They only lived on the third floor: the stairs wouldn’t kill him, though they threatened to. He was out of breath by the time he got up to the top, because the sound of his feet echoing back at him in the cement cylinder of a stairwell had made him run as quickly as he could up all four flights.

“Clothes,” Mikey said, to Gerard’s dark room when he dumped the bag in there. Gerard was breathing heavily and didn’t respond.

The bowl of cereal on the table smelled too sweet, and the table itself smelled off, the rich scent of the dark wood something he hadn’t ever noticed. Their television winked at him across the living room, which he usually found inviting, but the vapid smile of the BLI logo made him back away. What was it looking at?

Back in his room, the whine and the thump-thump-thump were almost deafening. It was almost eight now, but his mind was abuzz with energy. He flicked open one of his textbooks and let himself drop onto his bed.

There was something wrong with his mattress.

With all of his sharp angles, the mattress seemed to be revolting, poking back at him with loudly-squeaking springs. His pillow was lumpy, and his clock was bright. His ceiling seemed to be lower than it had been before, his walls smaller and tighter.

And that damn whine. It was behind everything, making his face tense up and his head pound along with the beat of whatever was thumping continuously. It wasn’t his clock: he leaned over and pressed his ear to the cool, plastic body. It wasn’t coming from his window. There weren’t any bits of tech trapped beneath his bed. Where the fuck was it coming from?

When his clock blinked nine, he abandoned his attempts to read without being distracted by the squeak of his slightly sweating fingers on the pages. He picked up his lumpy pillow and his blanket and crossed the hall to Gerard’s room. It was dark and small, and Gerard’s breathing was heavy and loud, but at least with the sound of his brother’s life, he could no longer hear the infuriating whine.

He shoved Gerard closer to the wall and curled up in the warm space left behind, his back pressed up against his brother’s comfortingly solid back. Gerard’s heart thumped through Mikey’s thin shirt, and oh. He pressed a hand to his own chest. The thumping noise, louder when he put his head onto his pillow, was the sound of his own heart. It slowed down to keep pace with Gerard’s as Mikey let himself fall into sleep, wishing he could hear the silence.

The only thing Mikey wanted to do when he woke up for the thousandth time that night, at seven in the morning was to curl up on Gerard’s bed and never leave. He forced himself out of the room and into clothes that were too damn warm. “What the fuck is the temperature?” he asked Gerard when he walked into the kitchen to try and get a glass of water. His hands were slippery around the slick glass, but he managed to get a full cup of water into his stomach.

“Better Living Industries says that the weather outside is a balmy seventy-five degrees outside.”

Mikey frowned. “Outside?” he asked. “You said that twice.”

Gerard smiled. “It is good to enunciate.”

“You’re so fucking weird,” Mikey mumbled. His stomach groaned when he pushed away from the counter. It seemed to be stabbing him, eating him from the inside out. He doubled over for a minute until the pain receded, and he was left with a wave of nausea and sweat that he had to keep wicking away from his upper lip. “I’m going to be home late again, Gee. Take care of yourself.”

“Keep smiling, Michael,” Gerard said, and spooned more cereal into his mouth.

Mikey was too busy wiping his forehead on his sleeve and squinting his eyes up against the lights and the sounds to bother asking what was wrong. The train was louder than it had been the day before and the sun was blinding overhead. The world was spinning around him, cement sparkling like stars. He tapped his foot anxiously on the train, pressing his mouth tightly closed.

When they slid into place at the Institution, Mikey barely made it off and up to the third floor bathroom before he was kneeling in front of the white porcelain. His bag of books lay forgotten on the shiny grey floors, pristine and clean like the toilet was before he emptied the contents of his stomach into the waiting bowl. Unlike the time when he got the flu, however, the torrent of pain from his stomach didn’t seem to cease, even when there was nothing left inside of him.

He panted, sweat and tears mingling together on his cheeks and dripping into the toilet. He flushed, and wiped his face with toilet paper moments before it was time for round two. Mikey was not winning this battle, he was going to die in a stupidly clean room that smelled like disinfectant.

Thinking about the smell made him throw up again, and again, though the action wasn’t accomplishing anything. This was worse than all the times he’d ever been sick in his entire life.

“Okay, okay, okay.”

A hand on his shoulder pulled him away from the toilet. “I got him, I found him.”

He was in some kind of mystical world where his stomach hurt twice as much and his skin wouldn’t fit properly over his blood and bone.

“I didn’t think...it seemed like he was going to take longer to get here.”

“What’s his temperature?”

“He’s burning up, how the fuck am I supposed to know, I’m not one of your pet cyborgs.”

“Why d’you always have to be such a wiseass?”

“Have you come to kill me?” Mikey croaked through his chapped lips and burning throat. “Because you should do it before I throw up again.”

“What classes is he in?”

“Fuck if I know! You told us not to tell anyone that kind of shit!”

“Don’t know his name, either, huh?”

“You’re the moron who invented the stupid rules in the first place. Can’t he just ditch his classes?”

“You’re the moron who has a perfect attendance record, moron. What would happen if you skipped your classes?”

“Alright, fine. Hey! HEY! Hey, guy.”

Mikey blinked his eyes open. It was the man who’d brought him the coffee, who’d brought him to the club. “You’re here to make things worse, aren’t you?”

“No, listen. It’ll get better, okay? You just have to...get up. Can you do that? Hey, boss, you get his other arm, yeah?”

“Sure.”

Mikey tried to glare at the black-haired man. “You,” he managed, before he had to clamp his lips shut. The wave of nausea smacked him in the face, but he held on. “You’re the one who did this to me.” His voice was shaky, like a boat with a hole in its bottom.

The man grinned. Ass. “I’m afraid that’s true.”

“How do I fix it?”

The ‘boss’ looked at the other man. “You can take your pills,” coffee guy said. “Or you can ride it out until the shiny end.”

Mikey bit his lip so hard he thought it might bleed. “Does it get worse?” he asked, through clenched teeth.

“Stays the same,” coffee guy said. “And then it gets better.”

Boss shifted: he was shorter than Mikey, where Coffee Guy was taller. “Way better.”

Way better. Mikey laughed bitterly at the unintentional pun. “Fine.”

“Good. Can you stand on your own?”

He nodded.

“You need to go to each of your classes and tell them you’re sick. Tell them you think it might be contagious and you’ve been vomiting all morning. Tell them you’ll need...what d’you think? A week, week and a half?”

“I can’t miss a week of classes,” Mikey said.

“Well, you’re going to.” Boss nodded. “Is there anybody who’ll miss you if you’re gone for a week?”

Mikey nodded. “My brother.”

“Fuck, he’s got a brother?”

“I’m right here,” Mikey muttered.

“It’s against our house rule to know where everyone lives,” Boss said. “Do you guys have a phone?”

“I keep telling you, everyone in this damn City has a phone. You’re, like, the only one who doesn’t. And it’s because you probably live in one of the ancient sectors.”

Boss shrugged. “You can call him then, and tell him you’re staying with friends while you study for a test.”

That didn’t sound like him. But hopefully Gerard would be okay. “Yeah, fine.”

“Off you go, then. Come back here and we’ll take you to our lair and make you all better. Okay, little dude?”

Mikey nodded. Sweat dripped down his temple: at least he wouldn’t have to work very hard pretending he was sick.

Mikey shivered as the cold pressed in on him. He was completely submersed in a sea of blankets. The chill in his bones was choking him. He couldn’t breathe, or think, and he scrambled to get out, but the blankets were tangled around like a sticky web.

“It’s okay, little guy.”

Mikey pushed away from the arms that reached into the sea to pull him out. It was the giant again, the impossibly tall man the size of the tallest building in Battery City. He reached above all of their heads with his massively spindly body, towering above them like an evil overlord.

Mikey shoved at the arms, desperate to get away. His eyes were swimming, and his stomach clenched when the white fingers wrapped around his arms.

“Dude.”

The hands froze, and Mikey took the opportunity to shove his weight against the arm, making the man topple away. “He’s coming,” Mikey panted, pushing at the blankets to get them between him and the giant. “Stay away!”

He fell into the sea again, eyes wide as he sunk away from the surface before they closed of their own accord, protesting against the wash of salty water across his face.

Mikey jittered, the force of a Mag Rail train slamming into his bones, crunching through his muscles like they were nothing more than paper. His entire body ached, from the tips of his sweating fingers to his ribs. Muscles he didn’t even know he had groaned with the force of the pain.

Strong, tan arms wrapped themselves around Mikey, grasping his shoulder and curving around his stomach, moving and comforting. Mikey panted and struggled. As his eyes adjusted to being open, he saw the giant watching him, the tan bartender and the coffee guy sitting at the bar. He tried to let himself relax into the inky arms of the Boss, but his body wouldn’t stop moving, shaking at every end. His chest heaved with every breath and his eyes squinted closed, tears leaking from the corners.

“It hurts,” he sobbed. “I want it to stop.”

“I know,” Boss whispered in his ear.

The shoulder behind him seemed like a good place to lean his head, so Mikey let himself collapse as much as he could. His hands moved up to tighten around Boss’s strong arms. With every wave of pain, a wave of heat and cold washed over Mikey, buffeting him like a leaf on the wind. “Make it stop,” Mikey sobbed. “I just want to sleep.”

He was close to the man’s face now, but his eyes wouldn’t stay open. The little bit he could glimpse looked sad as his body shook again. The arms tightened their hold on him, and Mikey clenched his body around his protesting stomach, but nothing would come out.

There weren’t any tears left for Mikey to cry, so he curled up around the blanket, his eyes dry and his mouth wet. His throat was hoarse, and his muscles were exhausted, but they kept shaking. Every few hours, the Boss would come in from the club, leaking a throbbing bass beat when the door opened for a few seconds. He rubbed at Mikey’s arms and tucked the blanket around him.

Mikey had nothing left except the chattering of his teeth.

 

Chapter 4

The soft beeps of the patient’s heart stuttered when the scalpel pierced his side. The eyes of the doctor were unblinkingly focused on the surgical area. His gloves were molded to his skin, and he released the scalpel into the tray beside him. “Forceps,” he murmured. His voice was muffled by the mask tucked around his ears, but it sounded familiar.

“Forceps,” the nurse answered. He placed the tools into the doctor’s stiff hand, his glinting eyes from somewhere in Mikey’s past.

“Opening up the stomach,” the doctor said.

The beeping picked up speed.

“Heart rate eighty six,” a second nurse said.

“Breathing normal,” a third added.

“I think we’ve hit a nerve,” the doctor said, his voice a low chuckle.

“Do you think we should have put him under?” the first nurse asked. He was extremely tall and pale, leering over the hospital bed like it was nothing more than an ant.

“Nah,” the second said. “Heart rate ninety.” This one’s dark, curly hair peeked out between the elastics of the surgical mask. “Ninety two.”

“We’re running out of time,” the doctor said. His monotonous voice stirred something in Mikey’s mind even as the knife in his stomach made him want to curl around. The nurses’ strong hands were holding him down.

“Would have been easier than this though,” the third nurse muttered. His brown eyes were kind.

Mikey shifted.

“Almost got it,” the doctor said.

“Ninety eight.”

“Breathing picking up.”

“Ninety nine.”

The beeping was speeding up now, settling into a high whine behind Mikey’s ears. The pain in his stomach was worse now, the doctor’s knife scraping the lining of his stomach when he moved to the side.

“There,” the doctor said. “I’ve got the tumour.”

The first nurse frowned, and leaned over the surgical area. Mikey could feel blood pouring out from the wound, and the sick tearing of the edges of the incision. He was going to throw up. Something clenched inside his chest, and his stomach seized.

“A hundred and twelve. A hundred and twenty.”

“Breathing rapid.”

“A hundred and thirty.”

“It’ll stop soon.”

“But,” the first nurse said. “That’s not a tumour, doctor.”

“No?” Doctor Ross asked, though his voice didn’t lift at the end of the question. “I think you’ll find that it is. This should fix all of our patient’s problems, nurse.”

“It won’t fix him, it’ll kill him.”

“A hundred and fifty.”

“Aren’t they the same?”

“Doctor, you can’t remove that.”

Doctor Ross reached his hand into the area. “And why not?”

“Because, Doctor, that tumour is this man’s heart.”

Mikey convulsed, twisting his body away from the hands scratching at his stomach. “NO!” he shouted, and sat up.

His eyes snapped open. His hands flew to his sides, wrapping around his midsection. His chest was heaving and he placed a hand over it, shoved one beneath his shirt where his stomach was, but there was no gaping wound. The round edges of his ribs expanding and contracting past the strong muscles over his stomach, the poking ends was all that he could find. His heart was beating rapidly, but it was there, under his skin and the safe cage that his ribs provided.

His stomach was still hurting, but he put both of his hands over his heart, the feeling of being blessedly alive so much of a relief that he slumped back against the pillows propped up behind him.

The tough little muscle slowed down with his breathing as his eyes adjusted to the dark room around him. He pressed his fingers into his chest, savouring every thump moving his fingers up and down, in and out.

His stomach clenched again. What the hell was wrong with him? He’d...been vomiting in a toilet, and now he was lying in a bed that he didn’t know in a shirt and pants he didn’t recognize. No, there had been two men. Mikey threw the blanket off him and swung his legs off the bed. When he pushed himself to his feet, he almost fell over. Shit, his legs were wobbly.

He could see a door in the distance so he stumbled towards it. The doorknob confused him: it didn’t work quite right. When he tried to twist it one way, it twisted the other way against him. When he twisted it in the way it had twisted, it twisted against him.

This was making him dizzy. “What the fuck?” he muttered and let go of the knob, which twirled of its own accord. He put a hand onto the wood of the door, and the second he did, it moved outwards. Caught off balance, he fell forwards. He reached for the knob, tried to move his legs quickly enough to catch himself, but his feet seemed to be frozen.

“Woah!” Strong hands wrapped around his torso, his head hit a collarbone. The body catching him grunted and stepped back.

Mikey gripped the arms beneath him. He managed to get into a full standing position, keeping his eyes on his feet until they did what he told them to.

“Hey, he’s awake!”

It was the voice of the tall nurse. Mikey frowned, and focused his eyes on the man holding him up. It was the Boss again, and he maneuvered himself under Mikey’s arm, propping him up. “You okay?”

Mikey licked his lips. “Where...” He groaned, cutting himself off mid-word. His stomach again, made him curl his free hand around his stomach.

“Marv’s. You’re at the club. Can you stand?”

Mikey shook his head. “My stomach,” he managed, through clenched teeth. “Why does my stomach want to kill me?”

“Ah.” Boss helped Mikey over to a barstool. He hopped up on one beside him, and placed one steadying hand in the small of Mikey’s back. “You’re hungry.”

“Hungry? I don’t...what’s that?”

Coffee guy hopped up onto the free stool on the other side of Mikey. “It means you need to eat.”

“But not a lot,” Boss warned. “Here, get him a grind-drink.”

The bartender popped up from somewhere: how he’d managed to hide his six-foot frame beneath the counter, Mikey didn’t know. “Grind drink comin’ up.”

The giant slid down the counter on the bartender’s side, a sheepish grin on his face. “Hey, I’m sorry about the other day. You were freaking out under those blankets and it seemed like maybe you were having trouble breathing.”

Mikey frowned. “Oh. That’s...it’s fine. Probably. What’s, sorry.” He shook his head, and looked over at Boss. “Why do I need to eat?”

“Because you haven’t taken your pills,” Boss said. “You know how you take three, right?”

Mikey nodded. One orange, one green, and one black.

“One of them is to kill your emotions. One of them is to dampen your senses. And the other one fills your immune system - you know what that is?” When Mikey nodded again, he grimaced. “One fills your immune system with the amount of food, water, and disease fighters it needs to function on a daily basis. Only, if you eat food and drink water you don’t need those pills.”

“What about the disease fighters? Don’t we need those?”

“Nah,” Boss shrugged. “You just live for a while without the nitros and your body will toughen up. I’m sure you’ve snuck snack food before, right?”

“Everyone does,” Mikey said.

“Right, well.” Boss accepted the off-white drink from the bartender and slid it into Mikey’s hands. “It’s like that, but all the time.”

“I can’t just take the food pill?” The drink did not look appetizing. “And not the emotion dampeners? I thought those were supposed to keep us...safe though.”

“They’re so that BLI doesn’t have to deal with a lot of crime, sure,” Coffee guy said. “Without the pills, you’re so much more alive. You take the train home, probably, right?”

“Mag Rail,” Mikey said. He took a tentative sip of the drink. It was cold, and made him grimace. “Yeah.”

“Well, you saw all the people on there. Heard...things they do? Tapping pencils, adjusting zippers, whatever.” Coffee guy searched Mikey’s eyes. “They don’t notice any of that. They don’t notice anything.”

Mikey’s stomach growled, so he took another sip. “The pills do that?”

Coffee guy nodded. “They dampen your senses.”

“They made me switch pills when I started at the Institution,” Mikey said. “My fingers hurt for two weeks. Okay, wait. I heard all that on the train, but when I got home and I went into my room, I heard this...this really high-pitched whine.”

“Ah,” Boss said. “That’s your nervous system.”

“My...” Mikey frowned. “My nervous system makes a sound?” He looked down at the tips of his fingers. “And it’s a fuckin’ whine?”

“You can only hear it when there aren’t any other noises. At least, that’s what I heard from a medhead,” Boss shrugged. “It’s something in your body, at least.”

“Does it go away?”

Boss looked across Mikey to Coffee guy. “You stop noticing it after a while. Like with all of the other stuff.”

MIkey sucked through the straw at the last bits of the drink in the cup. “Pretty gross,” he admitted.

“Don’t want you to just heave it back up,” the bartender said.

“Hey,” Mikey said, with a frown. “You guys said that pill takers don’t need to eat?”

Boss nodded. “Yeah. They don’t usually feel the need to, either. Why?”

“Fuck,” Mikey said. “Fuck. If he doesn’t feel the need to eat, why was he eating cereal?”

“I don’t understand,” Boss said. Mikey pushed away from him.

“Where are my clothes? I need to go.”

“You’re not ready,” Boss said.

Mikey set his jaw. At his sides, his hands clenched into fists. “Where are my fucking clothes, Bossman?”

“They’re in the room,” Coffee guy said. “I’ll get ‘em.”

“No, he isn’t ready,” Boss protested.

Mikey ground his teeth together. “I’m leaving,” he said. He was already off the stool, following the Coffee guy towards the room. A hand snagged the sleeve of his shirt, trying to stop him in his tracks.

He curled his toes on the dirty floor of the club. “Don’t,” he growled, voice low, “test me.”

“You can’t leave,” Boss said behind him.

“You can’t make me stay,” Mikey growled. Nobody. Repeat: nobody stopped him from going to his brother. “Get your fucking hand off my arm and let me go.”

“Or what?”

Mikey looked down at his hand. “Or,” he said, and did a quick calculation. With the Boss man behind him, he would have to spin quite quickly to catch him off his guard. It he didn’t duck, he’d be slightly higher than Mikey’s shoulders, and if he did, then he might be where Mikey’s stomach was now. He was glad now, for all of those hours his mother had made him go to the daijo to practice. He’d complained for so long, but never had he been more grateful than when he rolled his shoulder back and slid his legs apart before turning around and bringing his fist with him. The force of the turn and the push he gave it behind his shoulder sent it straight into Boss’s face.

The man stumbled back, his hands cupped over his nose and his eyes squeezed shut. “What the fuck!” he exclaimed.

Mikey flicked his hand open and wiped his knuckles on the borrowed pants. Coffee guy was standing with his arms full of Mikey’s own clothes. His mouth was wide.

“Thanks,” Mikey muttered. He ducked past Coffee guy into the room to change and did so quickly. He had no idea if he’d still be welcome here after that little show, but it didn’t really matter now. He just needed to get the hell out and up to the surface where something was horribly wrong.

He emerged from the room, pulling his shirt over his head. The boss man was nowhere in sight, but the bartender was laughing his head off at the bar. “That was the best thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, gasping for air.

“Thanks for the drink,” Mikey nodded at him. Nobody stopped him as he pulled open the heavy metal door and walked towards the glinting light of morning.

* * * *Mikey burst through their front door. He was out of breath: the Mag Rail hadn’t been working, so he’d been forced to go all the way home on foot. He’d run most of the way, pushing past the sick feeling in his stomach and the cramping in his legs. Adrenaline had carried him past the pain in his arms and head, all the way up the three flights of stairs that led to their home.

“Gerard!” he shouted, to an apparently empty kitchen. It was almost seven o’clock. “Gerard?”

He checked the dining table and the living room. The television was blinking, but nobody was on the couch. The bathroom was white and clean and empty. Gerard’s room was vacant. Mikey was almost hoarse from shouting his brother’s name when he shouldered his way into his room.

The relief Mikey felt at seeing his brother lying on the bed forced him to his knees, panting and choking. “Gerard! Fuck, Gerard. Gee, hey.” He crawled over to the bed, frowning. “Gee?”

Gerard’s breathing was slow but steady. Mikey put his index and middle fingers over Gerard’s throat, where a pulse was beating. According to his watch, Gerard’s heart rate was way too low.

He shook Gerard’s shoulder. “Gerard?”

Fuck. He should have known something was wrong when Gee had been eating cereal. They didn’t even have cereal in their apartment. “Gee, come on. Come on.” He shook harder, lips tight together. His brother’s head lolled about, not tightening when Mikey moved him. “Fuck, Gee. Fuck, you can’t do this to me. Gerard. Wake up, wake up.”

Water. He had to wake him up, maybe water would help. Mikey ran into the kitchen and filled a cup up, not able to wait until the water hit the rim. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

He poured the water in a steady stream onto Gerard’s forehead, and moved aside three bottles on the nightstand to put the cup down. “Gee, wake up.” Mikey shook his shoulder, slapped his face. “Gerard!” he shouted, breath coming in hiccups now. “Gerard, fuck, you have to wake up. You’re all I got.” He heaved in a breath through the water coursing down his cheeks. “You have to wake up, you just gotta.”

Gerard’s eyes moved beneath his eyelids, the eyelashes fluttered before they opened halfway.

Mikey fell to his knees again, getting down to Gerard’s level so he could look into his brother’s face. “Gerard?”

“Mi,” Gerard mumbled.

“Gerard, fuck.” Mikey threw himself at Gerard, wrapping his arms around his brother as tightly as he could, holding on like he might disappear. “God, you fucking...why wouldn’t you wake up?”

“Mi,” Gerard mumbled into his ear, “I...fixed me.”

Mikey froze. “You what?”

“Fixed. Did...all myself.”

“Wait,” Mikey said. “You, no. What did you fix?”

“The pills’re wrong,” Gerard slurred.

Mikey pulled away from Gerard. “What the fuck did you do?”

“Got...” Gerard’s lips moved, but no sound came out. “Bet’r. Bet’r ones.” He pointed shakily at the dresser. “See, all good now.”

Mikey followed the path that his finger was tracing through the air, at the three bottles of pills on the dresser. One was Mikey’s. One was Gerard’s. One was unlabeled. “Oh my god,” Mikey whispered. “No.”

Gerard’s hand reached out to grip the front of Mikey’s shirt, though it did not grab very tightly. “Now you...don’t hafta, Mikes. You...can...” His eyes blinked closed.

“Gerard!” Mikey shook his shoulder again. Some pills were not meant to be mixed together, they were chosen specifically for each person, in a specific order, and they were not meant to be popped willy nilly. “Hey, stay with me. Wake up, okay? Fuck, this is not good. We’re...it’ll be okay, okay?”

Gerard’s eyes opened, and Mikey saw how bloodshot they were. “You...can...come...back,” he murmured.

“Hey, Gee.” Mikey put one hand on Gerard’s cheek. His brother smiled happily underneath him. “Hey. It’s good, I’m back now, okay? I’m here for good. We’ll get you fixed up, okay?”

Gerard hummed under his breath. His eyelashes tickled Mikey’s palm. “Gee?” Mikey asked, hoping his brother hadn’t drifted off to sleep again. “You still there?”

“Yeap,” Gerard murmured.

“Okay, I’m going to need you to try and stay awake, okay? For me, Gee. Think you can do that?”

Gerard nodded.

“Good. Now, remember when I called you a week ago?”

He nodded again.

“Did you call anybody else after that?”

Gerard shook his head.

So it would be the last number, then. “Don’t go to sleep, Gee. Try and sit up for me, okay?”

Mikey ran off, towards their living room. He hadn’t used their phone very often because he didn’t have many friends outside of him and his brother. But the button that said “last number” should, logically, work.

Ring.

Ring.

Rin-click.

“Hello?” Mikey asked. His voice was shaking, but he swallowed past the lump in his throat.

There was nothing but silence on the other end of the phone.

“H-hello? I’m looking for...well, none of you have any names, but this is Marv’s, right?”

Silence.

“I’m...the guy you had for a week? I just punched your head guy?”

“Oh, Fists!”

Mikey heaved a sigh. “Is this the...er. Tall guy?”

“Yeah, man. Why’re you calling us? I don’t think I’ve ever heard this phone ring before, I wasn’t sure what to do.”

“I need help.” Mikey bit his lip. There was no guarantee that they would lift a finger for him.

“Did you just say ‘Fists’?”

“Yeah, the guy’s on the phone for us. Says he needs help.”

“Give me that. Hello?”

“I, it’s my brother,” Mikey blurted. His hands were sweating around the plastic body of the phone. “He’s...the pills, the normal ones were never, like, strong enough for him? He’d get all twitchy around noon, and he kept...drawing. And, I don’t know. I’ve been doing research to see what I could do for him, but he thought he should.” Mikey swallowed again. “Take matters into his own hands. And now,” he breathed in, shakily, trying to squint back tears, “he’s all groggy and he wouldn’t wake up. And I don’t...I don’t know what to do.”

There was a pause, so Mikey wiped his cheeks. “Just, I know you’re not supposed to know where everybody lives, but this is my brother. I wouldn’t be around if it wasn’t for him. And I can’t leave him.”

“We can’t purge him involuntarily. He has to want it.”

“He’d do anything for me,” Mikey said. “I’ve been trying to figure out what pills are going to fix him, fix the problem...with his head, right? But there isn’t a problem, is there? Not with him.”

“No. Not with him.”

“So then, we’ll have to fix him.”

“He has to agree to it.”

“I’ll get him to.”

Boss sighed. “Give me your street name. And the lines are probably tapped, so you’re going to want to pack up anything incriminating, and anything you might want to keep. Just in case.”

“Right.” Mikey gave him his street, and hung up. He did as the boss had asked: he packed Gerard’s drawings, and as many of their clothes as he could find into their backpacks, and then he went back into his room.

“Where...we...going?” Gerard stammered when Mikey hoisted him off the bed.

“To a new beginning,” Mikey said.

“Good?” Gerard asked. his voice was uncertain, but his eyes were full of trust.

Mikey nodded, and squeezed his brother’s side. “Good,” he said.

They made it down to the street just as the sun peeked its fearsome head over the peak of the smallest tower. Light flooded the street, bouncing off the glinting glass and the shining concrete. Mikey steadied their bags on his shoulder and started walking towards the club, with his brother at his side.

“Very good.”

 

 

Chapter 5 (Epilogue)

Mikey tried not to touch the sides of the porcelain cup as he carried it towards the back of the club. It was full of steaming, red-tinted water, and the Boss had said that it would soothe Gerard’s burning throat. He’d had a much harder time getting over the nitros, and had been attacked by a fierce virus the second he’d managed to get above the relentless tides that the pills had forced over their bodies throughout their lives. He was just getting over it now, but Mikey could still see the disease clinging to him. It was in the slight tremble of his fingers, and the dark circles under his eyes.

“What’s that?” Gerard asked, when Mikey opened the door to the Boss’s small office. It was where he kept the people who were getting off the pills safe from any BL/Ind agents who might raid the place from time to time. Though Gerard’s arms were weak, Mikey could see a brightness in his eyes that hadn’t ever been there before.

“Tea,” Mikey said, maneuvering his way over to the makeshift bed. “Boss called it tea. Said it would help your throat, but that it’s pipin’ hot.”

Gerard accepted the drink, his eyes already on the items tucked under Mikey’s other arm. His reflexes were sharp, only dulled slightly by the virus, but his brain had always worked quicker than Mikey’s. It didn’t put things together the same way he did, but that was why they had each other. “What’re those?” he asked. He took a sip of the drink, grimacing at the taste, but kept his eyes fixed on the plastic shapes Mikey laid on Gerard’s blanket-covered legs.

“Boss called ‘em zappers,” Mikey said. “They don’t look like the ones we got in class, but I bet you anything these are the ray guns BLI uses.”

Gerard looked down at them. He put his cup on the desk beside the bed, and reached his thin hands down to wrap around the body of the gun. Mikey was already holding the one he’d decided was his, fingers just outside of the trigger cavity. “They’re ours?” he asked.

Mikey nodded. “Yeah.”

Gerard seemed to be weighing it in his hand, holding it up like he was about to shoot a Drac between the eyes. “Awesome,” he said. Then, his tongue darted out to wet his lips. His finger traced a path from end to end, the white plastic smooth under his white skin. “We should name them,” Gerard blurted.

Mikey frowned. “Name?”

“Well,” Gerard said, “Yeah. I mean, the guy who runs this place doesn’t want any names, right?”

“Right,” Mikey said.

Gerard shrugged. He was looking down at his gun with an expression of slight fondness. “I figure, new beginnings and all, we should get new names. And it would be easier to flag someone down if we all had names, y’know? Nothing real, just.”

Watching Gerard light up with creativity made Mikey smile. “That’s a good idea,” he said. “You have any ideas already?”

Gerard looked up at Mikey through his lashes. “Thinking about Poison,” he murmured. “These pills, this City, all of the people...it’s all poison. And we have to do something about it.”

“Poison is too dark,” Mikey said. Gerard’s eyes fell. “I just mean,” Mikey said, wincing internally. “We want a new life, right? Full of colour and life? So shouldn’t your name kind of be something brighter, like...music, or art...lights...”

Gerard sighed. “I don’t want to forget all the bad shit that’s happened to me,” he muttered. “If I forget that, I won’t have any real purpose.”

“So keep the Poison,” Mikey said. “But make it a joke. Make BLI a big, fucking joke. Make it...” He snapped his fingers. “Make it a party. Poison Party.”

“Party Poison,” Gerard said. “That sounds better.”

Mikey nodded. “Party Poison.”

“What about you?” Gerard asked, just as the Boss peeked his head into the small room.

“Hey big guy, how’s the tea?”

Gerard smiled. “Hot.”

Boss nodded. “Awesome. Hey, kid, come out here when you’re done, yeah?”

“Sure,” Mikey said.

Gerard waited until the door was closed, and then leaned forward. “Kid?” he asked.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Mikey muttered. “He’s called me that before. I mean, I’m younger than him, I guess. And I’m your kid brother.”

“Needs something else though,” Gerard said. “Something fierce. Like you. Kind of quiet, good at waiting, but when the moment comes...” He leaned forward, hands poised to tickle Mikey. “He strikes!”

Mikey tried to bat him away with little success. “Gerard, fuck! Stop!” When Gerard pulled back, grinning madly, Mikey couldn’t help but grin, too. “Cobras,” he said. “Cobras do that. We learned about them in bio.”

“Make it with a ‘k’,” Gerard said. “Then we can have names that start with the same letter, right? Party Poison and Kobra Kid.” He leaned back in the bed, and took another sip of the tea. “This stuff grows on you.”

“Good,” Mikey said. Kobra Kid. He smiled. “Hey, I’m going to go tell the others, yeah? You get some sleep. Boss says we’re heading out into the desert tomorrow whether you’re better or not.”

Gerard nodded. As Mikey walked to the door, he heard a voice clear behind him. “Mikes,” Gerard said, voice soft. “Thanks.”

Mikey looked over his shoulder at his brother, tucking himself in among the blankets. “Yeah, Gee,” he said. “You too.”

He wandered out into the body of the club, where the Boss and his ragtag gang of motorbabies were all clustered around the bar. There were a few that he hadn’t met until a few weeks ago: a short guy with dark eyes and dark hair and a girl who always seemed to have a lightning bolt on her face. The two bartenders were there, along with the guy who’d brought Mikey to this ridiculous place in the first time. Boss raised a hand and waved him over to the bar.

“How’s your brother?” he asked, voice low among the chattering group.

“Good,” Mikey said. “Better than good, actually. He came up with an idea. A really good one.”

“Oh?” Boss raised an eyebrow. “What is it?”

“Well,” Mikey said. “You know how we never know what to call each other? And it’s great for hiding from BLI, but it’s fucking inconvenient when you want to catch someone’s attention?”

Boss nodded. The rest of the gang were listening in now, attentively.

“He suggested that we come up with codenames,” Mikey said. “Like that Doctor you keep telling me about. But...all of us.”

The rest of them looked at each other, and then the tall bartender shouted: “Cobra! I call Cobra. I call it, you guys can fucking suck it.”

“Dammit,” the tallest one said. “You’re such a fucking junkpunk sometimes, you know that?”

The tan man did a little dance of victory behind the bar while the tall one rolled his eyes.

“I was thinking about this a little while ago,” Coffee guy said. “I think I should be Easy A. For like, a few good reasons, but they all involve my name, so I can’t really share them.”

Boss raised an eyebrow. “You’ve all been thinking about this?”

“Well, I mean,” Easy A said. “Doctor DeathDefying. We listen to his broadcasts, right? It seemed like the logical next step to separating ourselves from our real names.”

“We named our guns, actually,” Mikey said. “But Party Poison, that’s my brother, he figured the names should work for both. So the guns are like us fighting against BLI. But, uh, I picked Kobra Kid.”

“Fuck off,” Cobra said. “I’m not changing my name.”

“We can call you Kid,” Boss said, a smile in his eyes when he looked over at Mikey. “It’s cool.”

“I want to be Rip,” the tall guy said. When everyone stared, he shrugged. “Like requiescat in pace, right?” That garnered no response. “Fuckin’ rest in peace, you uneducated knobheads. Plus, also, it is the sound that Dracs make when you tear ‘em in two.”

“As if you’d ever be strong enough to do that,” the woman said. “I think I’m going to be Glitter.”

“Because it’s impossible to get rid of?” Cobra asked. He barely flinched when she punched his shoulder.

“No, asswipe, because I love glitter. It’s shiny, and sparkly, and sharp. And my gun’s name is Glam.”

“But,” Mikey said, “You can’t have a different name from your gun.”

Glitter eyed Mikey. “Who are you, with these rules? Fuckin’ BLI? I’m keeping the names.”

They all looked towards the small guy at the end of the bar. “Uh,” he shrugged. “I dunno. I’ll just be...somethin’ with drums. I like drums.”

“Drum Killa!” Cobra said. “You should totally be Drum Killa.”

Drum nodded. “Sure.”

“I don’t know what my name should be,” Boss muttered.

Mikey looked at him. “Thriller,” he said. “You should be Thriller.”

There was a chorus of approval from the others. Apparently satisfied with all of the names, they shuffled off to various corners of the club. Thriller leaned against the counter and glanced at Mikey. “Why Thriller?” he asked.

Mikey moved to sit next to him. “You give people this place,” he said. “You give people what they need, a thrill. You just...created all of this awesome shit out of that mess that BLI made. You make them whole, and kind of, like, cool with all of this, you know?”

Thriller’s smile was small but sure. “Cool.”

“The only thing I still don’t get,” Mikey said, when Thriller moved to watch Drum pounce on Rip across the room, “is what you meant when you said this shit was going to get way better.”

Mikey purposefully didn’t look at Thriller when the man glanced over at him. “What?”

“Well,” Mikey said, casually inspecting his nails though his heart was beating about a mile a minute. “Sure, it’s great that we’ve got guns, and I can like, hear stuff? But I just don’t know. I mean, my feeling was pretty sensitive before, how do I know it’s improved?”

“You were learning medical stuff,” Thriller said. “So your hands were sensitive, but other parts of your body weren’t. That’ll all be different now, and it’s awesome.”

Mikey raised an eyebrow, and tilted his head to the side. “So show me.”

Thriller searched his eyes, eyebrows knitting together. “You,” he said, voice lower than it had been before. He licked his lips, and leaned closer. “You sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” Mikey said. “I’m fuckin’ here, aren’t I?”

“I guess you are,” Thriller muttered. He’d moved closer now, so close that Mikey could feel the warmth of his breath ghosting across his own lips.

“I guess my ass,” Mikey said. He closed the distance between them, hand moving to the front of Thriller’s shirt, pulling him in. Hands moved through his hair, down his neck, settled into the small of his back and on his hips. Thriller’s lips were chapped but warm, soft and gentle. His eyes were closed, but he could feel Thriller’s eyelashes brushing against his cheek.

When Thriller pulled back, he opened his eyes to look into Mikey’s. “This,” he said, voice breathy.

Mikey nodded, and pulled him back in. Thriller smiled against his mouth and licked his way inside. “This,” Mikey whispered, unable to hold back his own grin at the warm hands working their way under his shirt.

This was everything he’d been missing, everything Better Living Industries had been stealing from him, this connection with another person. This was what living should be, a hand fisting in his hair and a voice whispering in his ear about places they should be going to and things they should be doing. This was the opportunity to do those things. This was...right.

This was home, more than the tiny apartment or the bottle of pills ever had been. These people, this club, this entire world that had been hidden from him.

And this was just the beginning.