Things Fall Apart

10. Summertime

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.