Things Fall Apart

3. Party Poison, Jet Star, Kobra Kid & Fun Ghoul

There was no way anyone would have recognised the kids the three of them used to be now.

It was like the desert had slowly slunk inside of them. It crackled on their skin and glowed into their eyes.

Just like it, they smelled like fire and danger.

Just like it, they were swift, dry and reckless.

The desert was both their home and their mother. They wandered on it and knew all of its ways better than their own skin.

They knew it breathed.

It had a spirit.

It was The Witch.

Jet-Star had long curly hair and wore a leather patch on his blind eye. Just like anyone else here, he wore a leather jacket and leather gloves, as well as a blue laser gun. He was a good fighter, very loyal and friendly, always in a good mood. His nice character had melted everyone's reluctance towards the newcomers away very quickly. Even the cold Tommy Chow-Mein hadn't resisted, and the two of them were often found friendly chatting. But he had remained closer with the two lost brothers he had arrived along with.

Party Poison had dyed his hair bright red and hid his face between a yellow mask with dark triangles cutting its blind eyes and a purple round like a third eye in the middle of his brow. He walked around in skinny Dead-Pegasus leather clothes, carrying a pink laser gun. He had grown thin and muscular, and always talked loudly in a defying tone, accompanied with impertinent gestures.

He was loud, rude, mean, violent, dominant and impertinent.

He didn't love anything or anyone apart from his brother, even though he never publicly showed any form of kindness or affection towards him nor towards anyone else, and always seemed angry against the whole wide world.

But Party Poison only lived too bright and too loud to overwhelm that oppressive feeling of numbness that had lurked inside of him, like a poison. Hence his name. He was a Poison to himself.

Part of him had burned away with the now forgotten memory of a chubby raven-haired kid he used to be that he had buried deep inside of him.

Everyone lived in a sort of oblivion of their previous lives, as though it had been nothing but a dream. As though they had always been in the desert and the desert had always been inside of them.

Only Kobra Kid remembered. But he had no voice to bring these memories back to life.

He wore the same skinny Dead-Pegasus clothes as his brother, a yellow laser gun and a motorcycle helmet Poison had personalised for him that read "GOOD LUCK".

When he did not fight, he walked around wearing a pair of entirely black sunglasses that were too big and hid half of his delicate-featured pointy face. His actual glasses had been buried in the sand a while ago, and he didn't really mind.

Cherri Cola, who was only a year older than the three newcomers, had made a point in cutting Kobra's hair short on the side, brushing his longer locks back, away from his face, and dying it blonde, just like his own hairdo was, so that they sort of looked alike now. Actually more than Kobra and Poison did. What Kobra had of Poison though were his impertinent smirk and manners, and his silence, only echoing the other's emptiness.

Everyone thought the latter to have become an asshole, and maybe they were right.

Only Kobra saw that his brother was Dead. It hurt him, to see him that way. But there was nothing he could do.

And perhaps that was why Kobra never reacted to anything. Hardly ever communicated. The only times he did were through gestures only Poison understood. Maybe because he was the only one that actually listened and cared.