Have You Smiled Today? (A Party Poison AU)

Another Day in the Life

"Good morning, beautiful."
I stood up straight, opened my eyes, and pulled out my machete so fast; my head collided with whomever was hovering above me and cooing at me to wake up. When the person stumbled away, holding their mouth, I saw that it was Party Poison through the swaying fabric of my canopy. Who else could it be, dumbass? I thought, mentally shaming myself for my cat-like reflexes and rubbing my forehead.
"God damn," he mumbled, "There must be a lot of brains or bullshit in your head because that son of a bitch hurt!" I poked my head through the curtains to see Party wipe a finger on his lip to see if it was bleeding. It wasn't.
"Sorry," I said, sheepishly, "I guess now you know not to mess with me while I'm sleeping, huh?" I got out of bed and began to walk to one of my chairs. As soon as I stepped out of the canopy, I realized I was in a tank top and shorts.
"I've seen you in these clothes, like, three times, and I never noticed you had tattoos." Party said, eyeing my exposed arms and legs. I looked down; and I, too, noticed the swirling patterns of flowers and constellations and band logos crawling across my skin. After a while of having them, I somehow forgot that they existed.
"Can I see them?" Party asked, motioning toward the pair of overstuffed armchairs in my corner. I still don't know why I had two, as I had been living alone for the past nine years of my life. I didn't know how to reply to Party, either, because I considered my tattoos to be pretty intimate. They were all on the left side of my body, too, because I did them all myself. I refused to sit down and just named them as I stood.
"There's an encyclopedia diagram of the belladonna plant, there's the constellation Scorpio, there's the alchemical symbol for Mercury, there's a patch of hemlock and foxglove, there's a portrait of Nikola Tesla, there's a raven, there's the Misfits fiend, there's the blink-182 smiley face, and there's the Green Day heart thing. Happy?" I kinda had to do the "Head, shoulders, knees, and toes" preschool dance to point out the pieces of art on my body. I left some unmentioned, and Party seemed to notice.
"What about the one on your wrist?"
Great, I thought, picking at the scab on my wrist that hadn't healed in five years.
"It's none of your business," I replied, flatly, "Now, please leave. I have to get dressed."
********
"Hello," sang Krazy Lazer and Zombie Joker simultaneously, "How'd you sleep?"
"Fine, as always," I replied, "You? How were the accommodations and shit? Do you need food?"
"It was fine! Really wasn't any different than what I was used to living in," Krazy said, "And I hear Flower had that room up there made up just like the hotel room so fast, it freaked Zombie out." Krazy looked at Zombie for conformation of her claim, and Zombie nodded.
"Just like home, really," Zombie said, flipping through a National Geographic magazine that was on my table. I sat down on the sofa with them, and stared out the window.
"The best part about this place is that I have running water, I think," I said, looking at the dead grass in my backyard. I wasn't gonna use the water for that, even though I wish I could.
"I know!" Mused Zombie, her already whispery voice cracking into near silence at the end of her exclamation, "I tried the bathroom upstairs for water, and it worked! It was, like, so amazing! I haven't bathed since I tried to wash up in Battery Lake last week and the acid in there almost melted my feet off..."
   "Just don't use too much." I said.
   "Hey, where should we host the party?" Krazy asked, changing the subject, "I don't really know any good places."
   Soon enough, Ghoul came down from upstairs. "Hey, ladies," he said, giving a friendly wave, "What should we do today before the 'party' things? I mean, nobody's called in about attacks, and we don't really need supplies or anything..."
   Krazy shrugged. "I don't know, babe," she said, tilting her head upward so that Ghoul could kiss her, "We should just hang out here and kill things with drones." She grinned deviously and gave a sidelong glance to me.
   "Yeah," I agreed, "that would be cool."
   Out of nowhere, Kobra and Jet came down the stairs. "We were just leaving our room and we heard the word 'drones'. We became very interested." Jet said, smiling brightly. How come everyone was so happy all the time?
   I simply smiled and got up to go to the kitchen.  I noticed that Party had come down with his brother and friend, and the look in his eyes told me that he wasn't very interested in drones. But who wasn't? Drones were cool. I knew something was up with Party.
   "Who wants coffee?" I yelled behind me, and everyone's eyes widened, except for Zombie's.
   "Sign us the fuck up!" Party cheered.
   "Caffeine dependence will render you physically incapable of anything in times like these," Zombie muttered. Krazy rolled her eyes at her.
   We all sat around the coffee table in my living room, drinking coffee in silence. To be truly honest, it was making me uncomfortable. All these drones for Dr. D just in my house, using my supplies, doing everything I had tried for years to stop them from doing. All my efforts had been for naught. "You know what," I said, breaking the silence, "I need a cigarette. Break anything or steal anything, rest assured that you won't have to put up with BLI any longer." I winked sarcastically, even though my remark wasn't sarcastic in the least bit, and exited to the backyard through the basement.
   As I sat there, on my patio that was about as hot as a stovetop, I looked at all the abandoned houses in my neighborhood, and sighed. My friends and enemies and their parents all used to live in these fancy, secluded homes; before the gas bombs fell and everyone died. Krazy asked me why they couldn't just get a separate house for themselves, and I said they just couldn't. It wasn't right. Those houses were meant to just stay empty. I couldn't explain it, but it just had to be like that.
   I took a long drag of my cigarette. I could tell that it was really old, but what could I do? The Zone people didn't get new things. Only the old and recycled. I put my cigarette between my middle and index finger, and buried my head in my hands. I didn't care if my hair caught on fire and I spontaneously combusted or some shit; because, at that moment, I didn't know what I was even living for.
   The door behind me opened, and I put my cigarette back in my mouth to pretend like I wasn't hoping I would die.
   "Hey," Party said, sitting down on the patio next to me, "Can I borrow a light again?"
   "What would you do if I said no?" I smirked, facing him and blowing smoke in his face.
   "I'd steal your lighter," he replied smugly, nudging me in the side, "So why don't you just lend it to me?"
   "Fine, you asscow," I laughed, throwing the lighter at him. This was just like the day before last, when he confessed his undying love for me and all that shit.
   "Asscow? What the fuck is an asscow?"
   "I don't know. It's an insult I just made up."
   "I'm hardly insulted," he muttered, smiling.
   "Hey!" I said, bumping him in the shoulder with my fist.
   Party grinned and took his cigarette from his mouth. He grabbed my shoulders and pulled me in for a kiss. He pulled away after a few seconds. "I love you, Toxic Oxygen," he sang, planting another kiss on my forehead.
   "I love you too, Party Poison." I cooed, hugging him.
   "Alright, lovebirds," said Ghoul, who had suddenly appeared, standing in the doorway, "Time to go kill stuff with drones."
********
"Dude! Did you fucking see that?! I totally just blew that Drac's brain out, this technology is the best thing that's happened,"
Kobra smiled, fiddling with an old modified X-Box controller and passing his alternate-reality goggles onto Ghoul.
Putting on the goggles, which had a camera at the end which connected to the drone itself, Fun Ghoul grinned and giggled. "You could see that blood spot from space, bro!"
"I appreciate the compliments on my ingenious modifications of a standard delivery drone," I said, sitting down in the shade of a Joshua tree. The sun was very hot, and it hadn't rained since the day at Golden Dragon Sushi. It still gave us hope for a revolution, because rain in a desert is kind of a symbol of hope, after all.
Party, who was standing at the edge of the mountain with the others, glanced down at me and smirked. From behind his half-mask, I could see his eyes sparkle. We hardly ever wore our masks around each other; but since we were, in fact, in the process of killing the enemy, we all had ours on.
Except for Flower Child, who didn't have a mask in the first place. She was meditating beside a teddy bear cholla (which, for those of you that have never visited the deserty region of south California, is a cactus-like plant that kills animals and then grows from their remains). Then again, when was she not meditating? She had to be just a teenager, but she was well on her way to nirvana.
Digressing, yet again. While the four of them (Zombie, Jet, Ghoul, and Kobra) took turns playing with a weapon of mass destruction like a toy, Party stood there and observed. I wondered, since that he was the head honcho of the group, why he wasn't hogging the controller and killing everything by himself.
"Have fun, guys," I said, standing up, "Gotta go do some top-secret shit to take down BLI. If you trash that drone, you owe me all the equipment to build a new one. Hasta la vista."
With that, I began walking across the dirt and sand and down the mountain, back to my home in the valley.
  When I arrived home, I went straight to my study. The guys killing Dracs with drones gave me quite the idea to attach a mega-bomb to a drone and drop it right in the middle of BL/ind HQ. It wouldn't be as satisfying or remarkable as running into the Headquarters with guns blazing and battle cries ringing, but it was an idea. I picked up a notebook off my desk and flipped to the nearest empty page, where my idiotic theory of poisoning was jotted down as well. The bomb was going to be my set plan. A little engineering there, a little planning here, a little training there; bang, bam, boom, it's over with. That's what I thought.
Satisfied with my new plan, while pushing the fact that it never would have came to me if I hadn't joined forces with the Fab Four to the back of my mind, I walked out of my office.
Hopping back down the stairs of my house, half-expecting one of the four to be holding a trashed drone and babbling their apologies, I quite literally ran into Party Poison.
Cliché, I'm aware.
"Oh, hey, Toxic, I've been looking for you everywhere! The guys out there are having a blast, but I'm so uninterested in that-"
"What? Since when is Mr. Macho Man uninterested in destroying shit?"
He reached around my waist and pulled me closer to him. His breath was warm against the crook of my neck. I blushed despite my better judgement and didn't even push him away.
   "I need you, Toxic," he mumbled, lifting one of his hands from my hip and using it to run his hands through the baby hairs on the back of my neck; the ones that didn't get gathered into pigtails. His breathing began to quicken and shallow, and it was beginning to creep me out.
   Then the words he said hit me. He said he needed me. Why would he need me? I've saved his life, yeah, but I imagined a handful of others had, too. Maybe it was because I had good food. Maybe he was just using discreet-speech to say he wanted to fuck my brains out before he went crazy. I didn't know.
But why did I need him? He'd saved my life, too, on the day Max died. I thought for a moment. Before I met him, I'd been following a day-to-day routine: stealing stuff, killing Dracs one by one, and resenting his kind.
He was helping me to live, to do more than survive with luxuries in the carcass of society that we were both flies in.
"So do I," I whispered in reply, after a long time of him holding me in silence. If he was, in fact, implying that he would like to bang me, then I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I needed him like a diabetic needs their insulin, if that's what he was saying.
   He took my chin in his heavily calloused hands, and forced me to make eye contact with him. I did, and noticed how flecks of a golden color glinted in his hazel eyes. He smiled, gently, and pulled my face into his.
   I'd experienced true love only once in my life. But, quoting the old first-grader proverb, "second is the best."
My hand slid through his hair and my fingers tangled in it. After several seconds, his tongue touched my lower lip, and I opened my mouth slightly without hesitation.
   I had absolutely no fucking clue what was going on, but I knew that I liked it. A lot.
   Before I knew it, I was being pushed against a random wall, sending a layer of dust billowing out into the hallway. Suddenly, the front door to my house opened, and someone began talking.
   "Hey, Toxic- Woah."
   I threw Party away from me in a rush and acted like nothing had been going on. Krazy, who had a full view of the second-floor hallway from where she stood, was blushing furiously.
   "Sorry for busting in when you were actually about to get some, Poison; but seriously, Houston, we've got a problem."
   "Ah, shit," I mumbled, racing downstairs while trying to convince myself that Krazy would forget about everything by the party that night. Party Poison, on the other hand, stood confusedly and embarrassedly in the hallway for a moment before racing out of the house after us.
"What the shit did you guys fuck up this time?" I asked once I was outside, flipping my sunglasses on in the desert afternoon.
"Actually, we didn't really fuck up anything-" Kobra began. I wasn't gonna let him finish. He fucked up something, and he was trying to make up excuses.
"You didn't really fuck anything up? Really?"
"Actually, no, we just wanted to point out that Flower Child suddenly disappeared. The last I saw her, she was chilling under that cactus thing, and then poof, she was gone."
"Yeah," Zombie added, "And then then Jet started flipping shit because he's, like, taken her as his ward or something, and he went after her. We haven't seen them since, and they aren't responding to any of our walkie-talkie calls-"
"Hey, guys, guess what?" Jet star laughed as he ran up the hill to the subdivision, Flower Child jogging with him while eating a pink fruit.
   "Oh, hey, we were just talking about you," Ghoul grinned, pacing in circles, "And by talking, I mean fuming about how you went AWOL out of nowhere." He dramatically spun on his heel to flash Star a poker face.
   Jet Star pretended not to hear Ghoul's snarky remark. "We totally found an open and unguarded spot in the fence! We also found a clean pond, and a bunch of chickens running around, and a-"
   "Yeah, that's great, those are my chickens and that's my pond for running water, but why did you run away? Didn't I tell you not to go blasting off anywhere without my permission? I get that you're free-willed adults and all that happy horseshit, but there are precautions that I have to take-" I began, before getting cut off by the girl.
   "I went to see if I could find any cactus fruit. It it is against my principles to eat anything else than what is natural." Flower Child said, pulling another fruit from a pocket on the side of her dress. That's it, I thought, She freaks me out.
   After that, the entire group stood in silence under the sweltering California sun.
   "I think I need a cigarette." I stated, waving a half-hearted goodbye and walking across the dust-smothered pavement to my backyard.
   "Me too," said Party. He probably just wanted a light.
********
I leaned my head on Party's shoulder as I watched him puff smoke rings into the hazy atmosphere. One of his arms was around my shoulder, and his other hand was entwined with mine. The concrete of my patio became colder as the sun went down and our cigarettes burned away.
"I love you, Party," I said, admiring the sunset wavering in the heat waves. The reds and blues of his Killjoy uniform contrasted against the greens and purples of mine, but it still felt like we matched perfectly.
"I love you too." He sounded sincere and genuine, and he squeezed my hand tighter.
Suddenly, a car honk sounded out from in front of the building. I immediately hopped off the ground, threw my nub of a cigarette butt on the ground and stomped it, and ruffled Party's mess of red hair.
"Bachelorette party train! Choo-choo!" Zombie shouted.
I flashed a sheepish smile at Party, who was still on the ground. "I'd stay out here with you all night, but Krazy would kill me," I said, "At least you get to go to the bar, right?"
"It's fine. And yeah, that's fun. I'll buy a bottle of Jack Daniel's and some cans of Coke just for us, okay? We could hang out and get a little wasted and go on a crazy joy ride, or something."
"That sounds nice. Try not to fuck anyone behind my back, alright? Even if they're, like, the hottest fucking porn-star-stripper you've ever seen; like, hotter than the ones in Frank's stash of old Playboys. If you do, just say they now have a tracking device inside them and I'm on the hunt right now."
Party laughed and stomped out his cigarette. "Wouldn't dream of taking advantage of someone like you. Hey, if Krazy wants you, Ghoul probably wants me. Bye, babe." He hugged me.
"Will you two stop fucking back there and come on?" Ghoul shouted.
"Gotta blast," I said, before blowing a kiss at Party and running off.
********
The four of us ladies lounged in a circle of bean bags, lit by candles. Zombie, Krazy, and I were passing around a bottle of Smirnoff to fill up the "#1 Bookworm" coffee cups we had that were formerly available for purchase at the front desk.
Krazy had washed out her hair at home before she came, which resulted in wavy green hair flopping over the side of her head. She was testing herself to see how wasted she could possibly get before we did anything other than sit around. Flower Child was meditating in her bean bag, and I had a strong feeling that her participation in the night's events would be scarce. Zombie was leaning back and waving her feet around in the air. I was braiding my hair, since all of us were in our pajamas.
Suddenly, Krazy giggled and hiccuped. "Guys," she slurred, "I totally bought some weed for tonight. We're gonna have so much more of a fun time than the guys at the bar..." She fished a sandwich bag, about half-full of green lumps, from her pocket.
At that moment, I knew that shit was gonna get completely unfiltered and completely carefree.

Who doesn't love long chapters? I promise there will be more actual bad guy action in the next chapter. Anyway, yeah. Cool. I'll probably update the next chapter sooner, and let me tell you that some shit will go down. Nice. Cool. Until next time, dudes