Look Alive Sunshine!
As the days went by, Poison found it more and more difficult to wake up.
He remembered a time when there only were dreamless nights, and waking up couldn't have been more anodyne.
Now, every morning meant another day further from Her. Every morning was another morning he didn't wake up next to Her. Bunny.
And he had counted them all, the mornings. He carved them down in the walls. Nobody ever said anything about it.

It was on the edge of the 546th morning.
He woke up after dreaming of Her again.
And he didn't cry about it. Because Party Poison never cried. Poison wasn't much about Sadness, but Anger.
It was that Anger that fuelled him, that pulled him out of bed everyday, that made him run through the Wasteland and pulled his gun's trigger. It was that Anger that prevented him from falling apart, that kept him alive. That and Bandit.
Bandit was almost two years old now. She grew more and more beautiful everyday. She looked more and more like her mother. She was the only thing left he had of Bunny. She was the only thing left he had.
He woke up first, he always did. He got out of bed just before morning and silently scratched down another line on the wall. Another morning.
He took a look at Bandit, still sound asleep in her baby bed Jet Star had built especially for her. And his heart ached from love for her.
He gently woke her up, rubbing her little stomach with the palm of his hand, slipped a few butterfly hair clips in her curls, kissed the tip of her nose and tied her safely behind his back while she gently babbled about what she had been dreaming of.
He did this every morning. He woke up before dawn, took his little girl with him, grabbed his purse full of water and food bars and his small radio with which he used to intercept distress calls. He replied to every one of them. He would wander in the Wasteland, either by foot or by car, as Trans AM had been waiting for them while they were gone in the Trash Lords, from dawn to dusk, from twilight to starlight., saving lives, taking back some, leaving masks to rot, alone with his daughter. The younger she learnt about Death the better, he thought.
The sun rose in grand pink shades over the Zones, pale blue clouds stretched above their heads. He remembered he always used to admire the magnificence of the Wasteland's sunrises. He used to. Colours had gradually begun to come back in the eyes and the lives of all the Fabulous Killjoys, once back in the Wasteland. To all the Fabulous Killjoys except for him.
He had stopped hoping: he would never see the colours again.
He never told anyone.
He didn't care much about the sunrise anymore anyways.
He felt the sun-warmed sand burning the bottom of his bare feet. He knew the Wasteland like the back of his hand. Like his own body through which he wandered.
The Wasteland was all he knew and anywhere he belonged.
But, deep down inside of him, he dreamt of forests.

Nobody talked about the Fabulous Killjoys anymore. They had drifted apart. It was everyone on his own now that Poison wasn't around much anymore.
And to Kobra Kid it felt as though he had been abandoned.
Ever since they came back, Poison hadn't cared about him at all. He hardly even threw a look at him. All Poison cared about now was Bandit. It was as though Kobra had never even existed.
And maybe he didn't.
And, every morning, before dawn, Kobra pretended to sleep, and, witnessed, with an aching heart, his brother leaving. And, every morning he hoped, more than he expected, that, right before he walked out the door, he would kneel next to his sleeping corpse bag and wake him up, kiss his brow and tell him they were going Home.
For Kobra was terribly homesick.
And his heart broke a little every time his brother left without a word.
While Poison was away, he would spend the day wandering around the Radio House. Sometimes alone, sometimes with people. It never mattered much. He never got too far.
Cherri Cola had seemed to like him from the start though. Ever since they had came back, they had drew much closer, though Kobra never said anything at all. It seemed like Cola was the only who understood what was up with him. It seemed like he was the only one who cared at all. They would take long silent walks together, holding hands. Cola had noticed that his friend seemed to enjoy physical contact: he would often snuggle, or lean against someone. They often hugged and always slept embraced.
Kobra always seemed absent, as though his mind had gone away, and it seemed very wrong to Cola. Something was wrong with him and he wanted to change that.
Only he didn't know how.
He cared so much about Kobra it sometimes hurt.
He had never liked the Wasteland. Everything seemed wrong here. Of course being here was still better than in Bat city, but, everyday, a little bit of him was dying from inside.
In a way, Cola and Kobra matched, like stacked spoons. One's silence only echoing the other's emptiness.
Cola sometimes wondered how the other people in the Radio House saw their relationship, even though he didn't care much about what they thought of it anyways.
And, obviously, Kobra didn't either.
Nobody cared much about anything around here.
And, somehow, Cola found that terribly wrong.

Jet Star went down in the Trash Lords everyday ever since they came back and ever since the Fabulous Killjoys had drifted away. He had never enjoyed killing much, and he welcomed this calm period with his open heart. Out of the four of them, he seemed to be the only one who remembered what happened to them, down in Battery City. It was as though the three others had tried to erase everything about it from their memory. But Jet Star didn't want to forget, because he didn't want to make the same mistakes again. Only, there was nobody around willing to talk about it, now. So he would go down to the Trash Lords everyday to behold the city that had birthed him and then wounded him so profoundly he thought it would never heal. And he promised himself to make that city right again, one day. He rummaged in the trash piles for useful leftovers and built sculptures with them, along with sand. It was his only way of expressing himself, about it, about everything.
He never showed anyone.
Anyone except for the Trash Lords.
And the Trash Lords understood.

There hadn't been a lot of distress calls that day, and Poison had only merely rescued three citizens about to be turned into Dracos. He had killed the Dracos in charge quite easily, while the three citizens had decided to settle themselves with one of the many Rebel Tribes living in the Wasteland. He had came back to the Radio House around four o'clock and put Bandit, who was exhausted, to sleep for a well deserved nap.
He hadn't came back here that early in a while.
And, suddenly, he remembered.
Leaving Bandit in Doctor Death Defying's trusted hands, he went back outside and sprinted throughout the dunes.
He had an appointment he could not miss.
Fun Ghoul was almost about to go when he got there. His entire face lit up when he spotted him descending the dune in front of him.
"I thought you had forgotten about me..." He chuckled.
It was the first time Poison had been here since Before.
Maybe it was because he didn't believe much in the Witch anymore. But, then, he never had.
"Don't you think the sunset looks beautiful?" Ghoul continued.
"Yeah..." Poison replied evasively. He couldn't see sunsets anymore, and he couldn't care less.
"This is still about Bunny, right?" Ghoul then gently whispered, even though nobody else would have heard.
Poison opened his eyes wide, taken aback. Nobody ever talked about Bunny around here as by an unspoken agreement. It was as though she had never existed.
"Let's make a deal. You tell me your secret and I'll tell you mine." Ghoul proposed, smiling even though he had felt the air thicken and the tension weigh down his lungs.
Bunny wasn't a secret, she never had been. But, no matter how hard he tried, Poison couldn't bring himself to talk about her. Not because he didn't want to, but because there was nothing much he could say.
It had been 546 mornings.
And so he remained silent.
It wasn't much about her anymore, but The Memory of Her. In his mind, Everything About Her had crystallised, and had turned her into more of a perfect white Memory than a flawed and Human being.
It wasn't Bunny whom Poison grieved, but The Loss Of Bunny.
And that did make a huge difference.
He had started to forget Her.
Only, he never realised that.
Ghoul knew about this. He knew about grief.
He knew that a Loss could never really be forgotten. He knew that only Time could make it up, but that it never really healed at all.
Ghoul knew all about this because of His Secret.
But because Poison never told his, he couldn't tell him about it. About Them.
Deep down inside of him, his heart still was a little not right.
It had been almost six years. 1948 mornings. He too, counted the days.
Six years since he had scratched three names on a postbox, pinpoints at the tip of his fingers.
Six years since he had been found by the Killjoys in the Wasteland, screaming, falling apart.
But nothing, nobody ever made it up.
And, oh how much he wished Everything hadn't went Berserk.
But then, everyone did.
Nobody ever wondered why he spent so much time near the Witch's Postbox Shrine, lighting up candles, scratching with sticks in the dust, talking to himself, talking to Them.
They just thought he was crazy. But he wasn't.
His children had never owned a mask.
He never told anyone. He didn't tell Poison.
"Write me a love song..." He sighed instead.
But Poison wasn't one to write songs. Poison especially wasn't one to love.
He once was, though he had forgotten about it.
But, somehow, Ghoul knew.
And Poison didn't cry when they kissed, even though it wasn't Ghoul's lips he thought about.
And when they touched, it wasn't Ghoul's skin he thought about either.
He kissed without meaning and stroked without love.
Nobody ever told him it wasn't allowed.
But, somehow, Ghoul knew.
And he kissed him back anyways.
Of course Ghoul loved. He always had.
He knew there was something terribly sick in his friend's mind, and he knew it wasn't much love but grief. As though he was Someone Else.
But this had been the only time he had felt the blood pumping through his veins and his lungs fill in with hot air.
And he felt his body melt together with the burning hot sand of the Wasteland, and he felt his heart beat in the ground as though the world had started to fall apart.
But they were Alone.
And he knew that, to Poison it felt the same.
It wasn't love. Therefore they didn't call it love.
And they didn't tell anyone.
But when they came back, Ghoul's eyes shone a little brighter, and Kobra noticed.
And Kobra knew.
But they all were just a bunch of kids with senseless names only kids could have chosen, clothes too big and colours all wrong, who had ran away from home. Kids with wounded eyes and hearts too heavy for their bones and bones too old for their bodies. Kids that didn't understand Why.
And Kobra knew that too.

Notes

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