Chapter Text
Party Poison was trapped.
The coldness of the sleek wall on his back seeped through his bloodstained jacket. His lungs were frozen in place, refusing to allow air into his chest. His palms hung empty and weaponless. He could feel every inconsistency in the unyielding floor through the thin soles of his boots. The sharp snapping of raygun blasts rattled in his ears.
And on the floor was a dead draculoid-- no, a dead man, and Poison had killed him, but not before the mask had come off, and Poison had seen his terrified face.
And a still-smoking muzzle of a gun was being held to Poison’s throat.
Korse pressed the gun further into his windpipe, and he choked and coughed at the sudden pressure. The Exterminator’s face was twisted into a revoltingly triumphant smile.
Was this how he died? As nothing but a powerless and paralyzed teenager, doomed to never feel the sun warm his face again?
In the distance Kobra shouted raggedly. “Poison!” Ghoul and Jet were running, but they’d never reach him. The Girl was curled up, eyes wide and filled with fear. Fear for him.
Poison met Korse’s gaze, and he saw no mercy in it, only fanatical satisfaction.
Some deep, tired part of him wanted to give up. It would be so easy to slip into the dark, to let Korse have this final victory. Nothing would have to hurt anymore. Nothing would stop him.
But he took another breath, and a fierce burning shame rose in chest. He was so much stronger than that. He was the leader of the Fabulous Killjoys, and Killjoys never gave up. Killjoys never died.
No. He wouldn’t let Korse win.
“Rrrgh!” He let out a hoarse roar, willing his muscles from numbness into action. With a ferocious heave, he wrestled Korse’s gun away from his throat just as the Exterminator pulled the trigger in surprise. Smoke stung his nose as the blast scorched the wall inches away from his face. Korse recoiled, victory turning to caution as Poison stood straight.
Gone was the hopelessness. He was alive and by God he was going to stay that way. Poison threw himself away from Korse, crawling across the slippery floor. His heart thrummed a raging beat as he scrambled upright to find Korse forced back by the might of three enraged Killjoys.
Kobra, Ghoul and Jet stood in front of Poison, each firing as fast as they could into the tide of Dracs. Korse had escaped, crept back behind his soldiers. With a deep breath, Poison snagged his raygun from where it had fallen and joined them.
“You idiot,” said Ghoul through gritted teeth. “Dude, we all thought you were about t’ be ghosted.”
“Sorry,” said Poison offhandedly, trying not to reveal how shaken he was. His fingers still trembled on the grip of his gun. He clenched the other hand over the traitorous digits tightly and started firing.
Jet let out a hmph, dissatisfied with the apology, and all four Killjoys ducked around a column as a new batch of Dracs jumped from the stairwells. With his flanks covered by Jet and Ghoul, Poison took the opportunity to rest for a moment.
To his left, Kobra’s face was a waxy mask. Poison knew that look. He nudged his brother and said, “I’m ok now, dude. You can relax.”
Kobra’s expression softened into something sad, resigned to his brother’s tendencies. “‘S ok. Just don’t spook me like that again.”
“I promise,” said Poison. They all stood there for a second, all breathing heavily. He wished that the moment of brotherhood, of cameradie and connection, could last for longer.
But something felt off.
“Wait,” said Ghoul, panic seeping into his voice. “Where’d the Girl go?”
“Huh?!” Jet said. “I thought she was behind you!”
Poison swore, realizing what was missing. “We came here for a reason!” he said. “And that reason was to keep her safe!” Anxiety began to replace the adrenaline flooding his veins.
The Four shot into the open, all thoughts of cover and safety forgotten. Poison rapidly scanned the atrium, ignoring the sweat pooling on his face. After what felt like hours of standing there exposed, Poison saw her, crouched against the wall.
She must have moved when the Killjoys did, trying to join them in safety, and found herself cut off. Her eyes were scrunched tight, small frame shaking like a tumbleweed borne along on a hurricane gust.
Poison made a helpless lunge toward her just as Ghoul cried a warning. “Watch out!”
Poison turned back to find dozens of Dracs and Scarecrows, rallied up from the corners of the battlefield. His breath caught. Tensing instinctively, he tried to dodge, making himself a smaller target. It wasn’t enough, and a scream tore out of his throat as a blast hit his leg, sending him onto the ground.
He couldn’t see through the pain for a few seconds, only hearing the buzzing of endless shots above his head. An odor of burning flesh reached his nose, and he gagged as he realized it was from his own wound.
Ghoul was sprawled on the floor next to him, face wrenched in pain as he clamped his hand over his shoulder. “They got me,” he forced out, “Go on, save yourself.”
“Nice try,” gritted Poison, clamping his jaw shut to stop another scream as he shuffled, head low, over to Ghoul. He took his groaning friend by the collar and dragged them both away from the incessant fire. “Shit, the others…”
He spotted Kobra and Jet across the floor, apparently uninjured, pinned by the fire and unable to move. Poison cursed again. “God. We gotta get out of here.”
“What do we do?” moaned Ghoul. “It hurts…”
Resisting the urge to yell at Ghoul, Poison wracked his brain, frantically trying to think of a way out. The doors were right there, but the BL/ind bugs would have a direct shot at them if they tried to run.
His eyes were blurry with exhaustion, but as his gaze swept the atrium, he could make out the figure of the Girl, draculoids cautiously approaching her, ready to imprison her again.
“Goddammit,” breathed Poison.
“Poison, wait--” said Ghoul, but tunnel vision had kicked in and Poison did not bother looking back.
Before he knew what he was doing, he lurched upright, suppressing a howl of pain. He jerkily forced his broken body across the floor. He had to protect the Girl. Shots seared dangerously close to him, heat brushing his cheek, his side, his limp hands. God, the Dracs were closing in on her.
Doggedly he stumbled on, watching the Girl flinch as cruel painted faces loomed over her. With every step, his heartbeat throbbed in his wounds. It was agony. He groped for his gun and whipped it out of his belt.
Killing didn’t take the pain away, but it didn’t hurt either. He pulled the trigger on the horde, and luck was on his side, his shots felling some of them while all of their shots flew wide.
Too wide. The shots were straying near the Girl. He pressed on, faster. She had always trusted the Fabulous Four to protect her, and he wouldn’t let her down.
Ghoul shouted a ragged battlecry somewhere behind him, and a familiar chorus of Killjoy rayguns buzzed, carving a path through white-clothed flesh. The others must’ve seen that this was their last chance.
The Draculoids fell back under the deluge, and the Girl looked up at Poison past the bodies.
He fell in front of her. “I got you now,” he rasped.
She grabbed the front of his jacket, her tears mixing in with his blood. “Poison, i-it’s so scary here. Y-you’re bleeding, there’s so, there’s so much blood.”
“We’re gonna get you out now,” said Poison, wincing at her tight grasp and firing his raygun over her shoulder. “Don’t you worry.”
Her sniffles subsided. “Okay.”
Letting her curls brush past his cheek, Poison smiled, a slight thing. “You’re very brave, you know that?”
“Mhm,” she said.
He held her there for a moment, letting bullets part around them. “The others are coming now,” he said gently, watching his friends regrouping. “Are you ready to go?”
She nodded against his shoulder.
All of the pieces had fallen into place. They could escape. They could make it out.
But then the hair on the back of his neck prickled dangerously. Never a good sign. His instincts were rarely wrong.
Poison blinked the weariness out of his eyes just in time to be blinded by a brand-new wave of bright hot blaster fire, aimed at him. By proxy, aimed at the Girl.
He tried to twist, to shield her with his own body. He really did.
He could’ve saved her.
But “tried”s and “could’ve”s never helped anyone. It didn’t change the fact that he wasn’t fast enough.
The Girl gasped in pain.
For a moment, all was deathly still. Not even white BL/ind rayguns were firing.
“Kiddo?” whispered Poison.
She slid out of his grip, onto the pale cold floor, eyes still moving feverishly. Words tried to form in her mouth, but all Poison could hear was the wet sound of blood.
A single shot had taken her right in the stomach. Redness bloomed across her shirt, the same sickeningly vibrant crimson as his hair. “No,” said Poison. “No.”
Instinct kicked in, and he placed his hands over the wound, applying pressure, trying to slow the seeping blood. The Girl’s hands fluttered weakly by her side, trying to grab him.
“Hey, hey, hey, you’re gonna be all right,” said Poison. “You’re gonna be ok. Hang on. Just hang on…”
The other Killjoys were suddenly kneeling there, next to him. “Put more pressure on!” said Kobra wildly. “I have, I have bandages somewhere…”
Ghoul took one of her hands, stopping its feeble grasping. She clamped onto his hand and squeezed it tight enough to turn her knuckles white. “Calm down there, kid,” he said, eyes going damp.
“It’s going to be all right,” murmured Jet, sounding as if he was trying to convince himself. He took her other hand. “We’re-- we’re here.”
The Girl shivered on the floor, trying to say something. “D-don’t wanna go.” Her chest rose and fell rapidly, body trying to resuscitate itself. Poison felt something warm on his hands, and looked down to see them soaked in crimson. His stomach heaved.
“Stay with us!” he pleaded to the Girl. “Hey, you’re going to be okay, just, stay awake! You, you don’t have to go, I got you, I…”
Her eyes were emptying rapidly, life spilling out with her blood. A single, trembling finger rose up and brushed against his forearm, and then went limp.
“No!” said Ghoul. “NO!”
Her breathing slowed, and Poison could feel the desperate pumping of her heart fade in time with the sluggish pulses of blood staining his arms.
All she got was one last, heaving rise of her lungs. One last stand against the inevitable. And then the Girl’s head fell back and her body relaxed.
And she was just another corpse laying on the ground.
Poison stared at her, still trying to staunch her wound, unable to admit to himself. A horrible, painful coldness spread through his ribs.
He couldn’t understand how this could happen. Kids weren't supposed to get hurt. She wasn’t supposed to die, just like that.
How could she be so still?
“Here,” said Kobra, thrusting a mess of bandages under Poison’s frozen hands. “Stop the bleeding, gotta stop the bleeding, press harder, Poison.” He put his knobbly hands over his brother’s, voice rising higher. “Did you hear me? We have to stop the blood!”
“Kobra,” said Jet, voice hollow. “That’s not going to help anymore.”
“We can save her!” insisted Kobra. “We can do…” He fell back on his heels and put his head in his hands. “There has to be something… Anything…”
Poison turned away as his brother let out a low sound of despair.
Slowly, the draculoids began to regroup and rally.
He dully realized that they too must’ve been surprised by her death. What, ordered to keep her alive so they could capture her again? Look where that had gotten them.
At that moment, Poison didn’t want to be the leader. He wanted someone else to tell him what to do to make everything right, to reassure him that everything would be okay. He didn’t want the Girl’s blood on his hands.
But he could not avoid it, and he refused to shy from his duty. To keep his friends safe.
Painfully, he ripped his gaze from the body on the floor and tackled his paralyzed friends down as blaster fire seared over their heads.
“We have to go!” he yelled harshly. “We’re going, now!” He pushed Ghoul to his feet and shoved him at the exit. “GET UP!”
Kobra and Jet staggered upright and broke into halting runs. Poison swung to face the Dracs with a grenade he had slipped from Ghoul’s belt and hurled it with the last of his strength.
It arced over the Girl in slow motion, refracting glints of afternoon light across the backpedaling Scarecrows and Dracs. With one last, aching look, he turned away from her body, so lonely, like a bright broken songbird against the expanse of white tile.
Poison ran.
The explosion almost knocked him over, and his ears rang with the blast. Half of the windows shattered, spraying glass across the pavement. He leapt through a broken window, knees almost buckling as he impacted the sidewalk.
Poison pushed on, shouting at his friends to get in the car before reinforcements arrived. They complied.
He wrenched the car door open and gunned the gas pedal, the ringing in his ears not entirely blocking out the sobs of his friends in the backseat. Not his problem. He hunched over the wheel, only seeing the streets in his way.
It was a miracle they made it out of the city at all, but Poison’s hands knew the road home and he deftly spun the wheel through the maze of skyscrapers and filth. Before long the desert spread before them, and he slammed the acceleration so hard he felt the car jolt beneath his boots.
A buzz and a crackle. The radio on the dashboard rang with sudden voices. It turned out that Dr. Death Defying and his crew of DJs had followed them after all.
“Killjoys,” said the Doc urgently, distorted and muffled over the queries of the disc jockeys he had packed into his van. “We just saw you fly outta the City. Were you successful?”
Poison felt disgust rising in his stomach at the notion that they ever could’ve been successful. He flicked the “talk” switch.
“Fuck off.” His voice came out hoarse and flat. “Leave me alone.” He was sure that they could hear Ghoul weeping in the background and Jet’s quiet tears and Kobra’s strangled breathing. He was sure they could tell something had gone wrong. He didn’t give a damn.
Another voice came on. “Poison,” said Cherri Cola, with more than radio distortion wobbling in his voice, “Poison, is everyone safe? Did you find the Girl?”
“I said, fuck off!”
A clamor of words, incomprehensible through the commotion, tumbled through the radio. DJs frantically asking where the hope of the revolution was. DJs who would soon find out that the revolution was hopeless without the strange little girl who had died, who was dead, who was probably being zipped into a body bag at this fucking moment--
His hands were digging into the steering wheel uncomfortably. He didn’t care, and reached a finger to turn the radio off.
The static faded into the burning afternoon heat and the only sounds left were of grief. He tuned it out, tuned everything out but the bitter roar of the engine.
And Poison was alone as he drove towards the sunset.