Chapter Text
It’s been 3 days since getting Jet back. Three days of Ghoul sleeping next to his teammate like they’re back in the past. 3 days of eating, sleeping and living next to a ghost all while Grace spends forever outside with Cherri Cola working on doing whatever it is that he thinks she can do.
Ghoul wants her to be able to change the world, he wants her to be the hero that everyone wants her to be. But at the same time, he knows the nature of heroes, knows how they usually have to die to be turned into a legend the way that his team was turned into heroes after their death. He doesn’t want that for Grace. He doesn’t want her to do anything like what he’d done when he was her age. He wants an easier life for her, it’s what he’d been fighting for when he was a teenager even if he didn’t know it yet.
Jet sits on the bench next to him, you’d think that after so long apart the two of them would have more to say to each other but most of the time they’re silent. It’s Grace that starts the conversations between the three of them. All the other times Ghoul just sits with his friend, with the man he wrote off as dead, and he lets himself hope for the first time in years.
“Do you think she can do it?” Jet asks, it’s not the first time. Ghoul never wants to answer. He doesn’t like to question Grace or what makes her special. She’s special because she’s his. That’s all he needs to know. But not anymore, not if Cherri is right and the desert needs her.
“Maybe.” He relents. “I don’t know. She’s definitely special. I’m biased, but she’s something special.”
Jet snorts, like he knows something that Ghoul doesn’t. “Yeah, she’s something special.” He says, “Do you have any ideas on what you’re going to name her?”
Ghoul throws his head back. This was the other constant topic of his conversations with Jet. The other killjoy was pushing for Ghoul to share his ideas for Grace’s names. “Still the same as the last time you asked.” He grumbled. “I just don’t know what to name her!”
“Ghoul, you’ve raised her for a decade. You have to have some idea of what to call her.”
He does. He could call her all kinds of things. But mostly what he comes back to is His Girl. He doesn’t know when he mentally switched from calling her their girl or “The girl” to just calling her his. It’s not a name by any means, but it’s his truth. Grace is his girl, the closest person to him and the only family that he’s got left.
“It’s such a big deal. If I’m gonna do this, I need to do it right.” Ghoul says. “She’s going to stick with it, even if I accidentally pick something stupid. She cares too much not to stick with it. That’s a lot of pressure.”
“That is how it goes.” Jet nods.
“Can you just do it?” Ghoul groans, flopping his head back against the wall as he does. “You’ve always been better at naming. I couldn’t even pick my own name, you had to help me.”
“I could do it. But I won’t.” Jet says, the eyebrow on his good eye raising as he does. “It has to be you Ghoul.” He knows. He knows that it has to be him. Kids get their names from their parents, and if they don’t have parents they get it from the closest adult to them. For Grace that leaves him. “She has no parents, but she has you. You’ve taken care of her for years. You’ve watched her grow and raised her into the woman that she’s becoming today. I wasn’t there for that. I don’t know her the way you do.” Ghoul senses a hint of bitterness in his voice at that last statement.
“If I could switch with you, I would.” Ghoul says, sounding meaner than he planned to. “You would have done a better job.”
“Don’t say that.” Jet grabs his arm, forcing Ghoul to look into his stern eye. “We can’t change what happened Ghoul and she doesn’t need your self-pity. What she needs is a name, and it needs to come from you.”
“I’m working on it, ok?” Ghoul grumbles, wrenching himself out of Jet’s grip. “I’m gonna go work on the van. Come get me if you need me.” He stands, hating that he needs his crutch to even get to his feet these days. He hasn’t broken into the good meds that Grace got him, so far the salve Cotton made has been doing it’s trick, bringing the constant stinging pain down to a more manageable thrum that he can work with. He knows that Jet knows he’s avoiding the conversation. Ghoul knows that he’s acting like a pouty teenager, running off to work on the van like he used to run off to work on the trans-am.
He finds the same comfort in the engine that he used to find in the trans-am. The car belonged to Jet first, and while he might have been the one to scrounge up the credits to buy the car in the first place, Ghoul was the one to keep it going. He missed that damn car, he hoped that whoever owned it now was treating it with the same respect that he and his team treated it with. He hoped they were using it, not letting it sit around collecting dust as some kind of relic of the dead killjoys. He finds a rhythm in his work, stealing glances out to the sand where Cherri is “teaching” Grace. Said teaching looks like he’s just teaching her to shoot, which Ghoul wants to point out that he has already done from the time she was big enough to pick up a gun. He made damn sure that his girl could take care of herself, that she knew how to feed and protect herself, that she could hide and run and live if something happened to him and he couldn’t be there to protect her anymore.
Cherri says he has an idea of how to unlock her powers, and Ghoul is going to trust him on this. He does trust Cherri, despite all their differences he knows that he and Cherri have the same goals, he knows they show the same care and affection for Grace and want her to be safe. It’s that information that allows Ghoul to rest easy and leave her care to him.
She might be old enough now that she could take care of herself, but based on her first instinct, which had been to run off to Val Velocity and his team of idiots, Ghoul wasn’t sure he was ready to let her run off to make her own mistakes. He knew that she would make mistakes, it was a part of growing up and he’d made plenty while he was growing up, but he would prefer that she be able to run back to him after making said mistakes. Maybe Jet was right and he ought to let her out of the van more, maybe he should let her join Clawhammer or some of the other little rag-tag groups of kids out there trying to carve out their own places in the desert. Maybe he shouldn’t keep her on such a tight leash, but after losing everyone else how can he just let her go? He has Jet back, but if anything that fact only makes him want to hold on tighter to the two of them. Having two people so special to him just means having two people that he needs to be afraid of losing.
He clenches the wrench. He’s no good at emotions. He doesn’t think he shows it enough to Grace just how much he cares. He worries that she misreads his fear of losing her as anger. He doesn’t want to keep her locked up forever, he just doesn’t want to lose the one constant in his life. He doesn’t want her to end up like him. He doesn’t want her to self-destruct.
He can’t wallow in pity for too long, after what might have been a couple of minutes or hours - he’s lost track as he was lost in his mind - Show Pony runs up to him, a panicked look on their face.
“Get inside, there’s a broadcast that you need to hear.” They say, not offering more than that before they turn to jog back inside. Ghoul grumbles, he can’t exactly move as fast as they can and if this broadcast is really as important as they’re making it out to be, he would like to at least be briefed on what it is. He looks out into the sand to see that Cherri Cola and Grace are nowhere to be found, probably inside around the radio with everyone else. He shuffles as fast as he can towards the building, making good time in his opinion before throwing the door open. He finds the whole group; Cherri Cola, Jet Star, Grace, Dr. Death Defying and Show Pony, all huddled around the radio as a voice he recognizes as DJ Deception talking in his usual fast toned monologue.
“-heard this one good authority, you guys know I wouldn’t give you a bogus story.” Deception is saying, Ghoul grunts but can’t deny that it’s true. He prefers Cherri and Dr. D’s show, but Deception is pretty good at sticking to the truth - even if he's got a bit of a flair for the dramatic. “If you’re just joining then I’ll say it again. We have it on good authority - insider knowledge from BLI themself - that the Fabulous Four aren’t as dead as we believed.” Ghoul’s blood runs cold. “Now we all know Fun Ghoul is still kicking, but rumor has it he’s not the only one still wandering the desert. Rumor has it that Party Poison is still kicking…and working for the other team.” Everyone around the radio is a blur of pale, shocked faces. This must be what they heard, this must be what Show Pony dragged him back to the outpost for.
DJ Deception keeps going, like he hasn’t just dropped a bomb that rocked Fun Ghoul’s whole world. “That’s right, rumor has it that Party Poison is alive. And get this - they’re an exterminator” Ghoul balks. It can’t be true. Party can’t be alive, and they can’t be an exterminator of all things. Deception must be joking, or hacked somehow. Yet at the same time Ghoul knows Deception’s voice and knows it’s him.
“No.” He whispers, his throat feeling raw.
“I think - and this is just me -” Deception keeps talking, his voice taking that dramatic, theatric tone that Ghoul suddenly loathes. “That BLI wants us to know this. I think they want us scared, they want us to know that they can turn one of our own into one of their monsters. But remember, we’re stronger than them. They can do this, but they can’t stop us.” Deception sighs, “You might have heard earlier, but we have it on good information that Jet Star is back as well. It’s unclear where he’s been all this time, but our sources say that he’s back in the game. No news on Kobra Kid, but who knows - if the others are still kicking maybe he is too - I think these two have to be connected. If Jet Star really is back in the zones, then we know who to look to when fighting against this new information. Now remember Killjoys, this is all speculation, but as for me - I believe it.” Deception keeps talking, looping back through the information. “Hello listeners, new and continuing. We have some news from the zones, BLI news about our favorite dead Killjoy.” Ghoul reaches out and stops the broadcast. He can’t listen to this anymore, not while his head is reeling.
Deception knows that Jet is back. Somehow someone else knew that Jet was back, someone who leaked the news to Deception and who knows who else. Then there was the news that Party Poison was back.
It had to be BLI. It has to be connected. It’s too much all at once to not be connected. Lie or not, Ghoul knows that this alone is enough to send the zones into turmoil.
“Is he right?” Grace says, her voice sounding so high and scared. It’s a little girl’s voice. “Are they really alive? Are they really…that?”
“We don’t know for sure.” Jet says quickly, pulling the girl into his chest. “They could just be trying to scare us. They know I got out, they might just be sending a message to me specifically.” He hugs her close, a grim look on his face, “It’s probably not real, it’s probably a trick to scare us.”
“It’s connected. It has to be.” Cherri says, standing. “They’re afraid that you’re going to give people the kind of hope that Party brought. They’re afraid of what you could do. That’s why they’re releasing this information now.”
“But is it true?” Ghoul’s voice is low and angry. “Did they really do whatever the fuck it is they did to Party to turn them into a fucking exterminator?” A rage starts to fill him, rage at having fought so hard for years only to end up crippled by BLI all over again, rage that BLI had just put a target on he and Jet Star’s backs by releasing the information that he was alive and back in the zones after all this time. Rage that they’d hurt his friend, that they might have hurt another and been hurting them for years. “How? How did they keep it quiet? How did we not know that Jet and Party made it through. And what about Kobra? Is he out there somewhere too? Have they been hurting all of them this whole time? Why not say something sooner, why not use this information sooner?” He’s rambling, raging in a way that’s making Grace look at him with wide, scared eyes.
“I don’t know.” Cherri says. “We can’t know for sure right now?”
“When can we know? When can we finally get ahead of them.” Ghoul shouts. “When can we finally start winning instead of just retreating and licking our wounds after every fight.”
“Ghoul. We’re ok.” Jet’s voice is soft. “If Party or Kobra are still out there, we’ll find them and we’ll fix things.”
“How?” Ghoul’s voice is choked.
“We help them, or we stop them.” Jet’s face is grim. “But right now we work with what we have. We get ready for visitors, because you and I are certainly going to have visitors and this is the first place they’re going to look for us, and we’re going to gather information and work with what we have. We’re going to fight like we always fight, and we’re going to take care of each other the way we always take care of each other. The three of us are a team, we’re family and we’re going to stick together.”
Ghoul looks at Jet and Grace, the closest thing he has to a family and the two people in this world that he fears losing the most.
“What then?” He asks, feeling defeated. “How do we win when they’re always a step ahead?”
“They can’t stay ahead forever.” Dr. D says, “Trust me, they’re going to slip up eventually. Until then, we do as Jet says. We work with what we have and we keep each other safe.” His authority helps quell some of the fears in the group, but there’s only so much that words can do to help against the storm that Ghoul knows is coming.