Jhonen Vasquez wrote a lovely essay at the beginning of "Squee!" about how important it is to sometimes work on projects that are more creative indulgences than legitimate attempts at creating greatness or sophistication.

So I followed his advice. And wrote this.

It's as much of an indulgence as I can bear to reveal to public eyes. When I started out working on it (last year!) I honestly just expected it to be a temporary project before it fizzled out, and certainly never had any intention of posting it. Then, the next thing I knew, I was finishing up a 100k story that had seemingly come out of nowhere. I wrote what I liked writing, which it turns out is a LOT of character-driven plot, interactions, and some supernatural stuff thrown in for good measure. "Apartment Story" has been a really great writing experience and, perhaps just as important, I ended up being quite fond it and its universe, which is why I've decided to upload it to FFN.

This is going to be a bit of a slow-burning story, but I hope that the payoff will be worth it. In my opinion it doesn't really get good/build up momentum for a while, so if you like the concept but aren't a huge fan of the first few chapters, maybe come back around chapter seven or eight and there might be more for you.

Warnings? Expect some Nny-typical violence and swearing, though not quite on the level of canon JtHM. No sexual content that I can think of, and no slash, really. Maybe some, like, pre-slash hinting, or slash-if-you-squint, but nothing consummated. Think of it more of as BROTP kidfic kind of thing. Like Full House but with manslaughter instead of a laugh track.

Chapter 1: Folks Who Don't Mean Well

"Hey Montana, take your daughter back
It's clear she needs your care
These bustling streets are icy veins
Of a beast who snuffs her prayer
Her bones and the truth show through"

Every town had its darker corners.

Johnny had frequented them more often in the past. Back when the thing behind the wall demanded a sacrifice and Johnny's murders were of necessity rather than personal expression. Reach into the crowd down here and you were far more likely to grab someone who deserved to be dismembered or filled with bees or turned inside-out.

After all, he'd made at least one mistake before. Killed at least one person who didn't need killing. Johnny had hated the idea of re-living that.

Now he didn't really need to visit these parts of town anymore. These dark roads half-lit with grimy streetlights, oil and scuffmarks and puke on every surface, every building with at least three broken windows. Always the smell of broken-down cars and broken-down people and maybe the pitifully too-late burn of bleach. The sounds of sirens and crying children rang out constantly, punctuated with an occasional gunshot.

Johnny always spazzed and froze for a second at these. "Gunshy" was pretty mild term for it.

No, Johnny didn't really need to come down here to the bad side of the tracks - it was his insomnia that did it. People always thought it sounded nice to not have to sleep. "All that extra time on your hands!" they'd say excitedly, imagining a world of non-stop productivity. Before Johnny whacked their fingers off, anyway.

The thing is, eight more hours a day is an awful lot more existing. Especially when you're insane.

Johnny could only read and watch TV and attempt to draw and flay people for so long before he started itching to get out of the house. It wore him thinnest in the evenings, when he felt more comfortable taking long walks to contemplate the horrors of reality and the frustrations of his goddamned 12:00-blinking VCR. At least in the bad part of town, people didn't find his appearance quite so shocking.

Still, the whole place reeked of Hell. Johnny should know. All it needed was a moon with a giant pupil in the center.

So he walked. Never staying in one place for long, never admiring the scenery or smell, always moving on. There was a big loop he could make if he headed down Morgan Avenue and turned at the Taco Hell and headed back up toward his house. It took almost exactly forty-five minutes. An hour if he stopped for a taquito.

Tonight it would take two.

It hadn't been such a bad walk up until this point. He hadn't even seen that creepy Chihuahua.

Johnny stalked down the broken sidewalk with his hands jammed into his pockets and his shoulders hunched against the cold and filth of the world. Generally he stared at the ground as he went. It let him avoid any unnecessary contact with the local wildlife - eye contact seemed to serve as a threat down here. As much as Johnny loved a good eviscerating session, he didn't' always savor the confrontations that spurred them on.

He watched the ground. He ignored the weirdoes and homeless insane that he passed by, the destitute and lonely, and he especially ignored the girl in the tidy brown flats who accidentally brushed shoulders with him as he passed her near a street corner. Johnny winced at the human contact, shrinking away, and would have likely never thought about it again if she hadn't called after him.

"Um, excuse me, sir -" she said, once he'd cleared a good ten feet beyond her.

Johnny didn't realize at first that she was speaking to him. He tuned out most of the sounds of the city, and the words of others most especially. They garbled his mind.

"Guy in the boots! Excuse me!" she tried again. This was harder to ignore.

He turned on his heel to see a woman standing there - shadow-thin in the pale light, with dark-ringed eyes and ratty purple hair. Probably around his age. She must have been very bad-off, because she was holding a child in her arms instead of scooting it around in a stroller.

The child gave a strangled cry and Johnny turned away from them. It was a real shame, he thought, that children had to grow up in this sort of place. Always in darkness, never clean, surrounded by weakness and vice. Most of the jerkoffs who lived here built their own grimy holes to live in, but the kids didn't get a choice. They didn't really get a shot at avoiding all the downfalls of their elders.

Which is not to say that he liked children, particularly. They still had brains and breathed and ate and did all the other disgusting things that organisms do. He just blamed them less for it.

"Wait, mister -" the woman called out from somewhere behind him. Johnny walked a little faster.

He heard the quick tapping of footsteps growing nearer and hunched his shoulders as he went.

"Mister, I think that I might -" she said, and he could tell by her voice that she was right behind him. Johnny twisted his head, meaning to tell her off for following him, but she grabbed his arm with her free hand.

"Stop that," he snapped, shaking her off. She was very close to him now - he saw the nasty bloody spiderwebbing in her eyes and could smell the tang of moldered sweat.

"I know you."

"No, you don't."

"Yes. I'm sure I do."

"That's not possible," he said, darkly, hoping that she would get the hint, feeling disgust and the sick jitter-shake of bloodlust beginning to roil at having this stranger annoy him so.

She's got a kid. Keep it together. Next guy who gives you a dirty look at the store is fair game.

Johnny glanced down at the child in her arms – she had purple hair like her mother's gathered in a clashing pink bow. The kid was awake now, and stared up at him without a hint of a smile on her chubby face.

"Yes, it is," the mother insisted. "You lived in that - " and she pointed back down the street, "In that ratty old house in Biloxi Parrish."

"If you'd been there, you'd be dead by now," Johnny said, speaking through tightly-ground teeth.

"But I think-"

Something snapped in his mind. He grabbed the woman by the wrist, not bringing her close, but holding her still, so he could get a good look at her round face and brown eyes and -

He'd always liked girls with purple hair.

"A-actually, maybe you're right. I think I must've- must've gotten confused. If you'd just- please, sir, if you'd just -" she stuttered, instantly frightened, a waver in her voice that Johnny heard frequently. She seemed to be rethinking her choice to speak with him. Holding her child very close, shielding the girl from Johnny with her body, she tried to pull away.

He stared at her, hand tight around her wrist, as she grew more frantic. He tried to parcel out exactly why...

But how many girls had he ever known and not killed? Besides Devi, obviously.

The girl wailed and whimpered, her child joining her. It was the kid's crying that shook Johnny out of his fugue state. He looked down at his white-knuckled hand and let go of her with a shaking snap of his fingers.

Whatever deja vu had moved him was gone now. The unpleasantness of the murky street and industrial city sounds came smashing back to him. Johnny grimaced in annoyance; maybe he'd be skipping the taquito tonight.

"You maniac!" the woman shrieked at him, stumbling away in her fright. She clutched her sobbing child so close that Johnny wondered that it wasn't suffocated. Or he would have, if he'd cared and if he wasn't feeling suddenly so bad-tempered.

"Close enough," he spat back at her.

Turning his back, Johnny took a few steps down the sidewalk. He rammed his hands back down into his pockets, glaring at the concrete, trying to shake off the invading grossness of the encounter. Why did people always try to talk to him? Or, rather, why did they always try to harass him? He'd be content, at this point, with being ignored. With being a shade moving through the world, finding his own solace in solitude, but no.

That woman had, admittedly, not seemed to have too much meanness in her, but still. If she'd pushed him a little harder he'd have an extra body to carry home tonight besides his own. Johnny walked slowly as he fussed over this, fingers twitching in his pockets along with thoughts of knives -

And then, a gunshot.

Another.

So close by that Johnny's bones rattled inside of him and his guts seized coldly. Everything was frozen into a single instant of tiny, pressed-in fear.

The second passed. Johnny ran his hands over his stomach and was quite sure he wasn't shot or bleeding, although the all-over quiver of adrenaline might have mislead him.

He glanced back, to see if the woman was still there.

She'd been reduced to a lump on the ground. The streetlight nearby cast a sick, shadowy glow across her still body. There were dark shadows in the rumpled folds of her clothes. Everything seemed black-and-white.

Johnny fought with himself briefly about whether to keep walking. He saw the bundle of the child wriggle like a foot beneath a blanket beside her mother.

Right. The kid.

Johnny walked over to the woman's side, taking meandering steps in the vain hope that she might get up and walk on and he wouldn't have to involve himself in this anymore. She stayed very still. He prodded at her side with the tip of his boot, carefully turning her over, the weight heavy on his toe.

Blood dribbled out of the edge of the girl's mouth. The shiny crimson drew his eye, and Johnny watched the liquid drip down and splash onto the concrete, only inches from the child who'd fallen silent. Johnny's gaze flickered between the dead girl's half-open, sightless eyes and the blinking stare of the little child.

It was very strange, Johnny thought, how a piece of metal the size of his fingernail could so utterly destroy a person. There was something obscene about it.

"Bitch owed me money," someone said.

Johnny snapped his neck toward the voice.

"What?"

"Bitch owed me money," it said again, as its owner inched out of the shadows into the pale light cast by the streetlamp. Some stupid college-aged kid revealed himself, wearing dirty oversized clothes and pointing the muzzle of a gun at the ground with one limp-wristed hand.

"Bitch owed you money," Johnny whispered, staring at him. Revulsion rose up in his stomach like bile and pressed against his throat, threatening a sick fit. His fingers started to twitch at his sides.

"Hey, what're you lookin' so bent out of shape over? You some kinda weirdo?" the guy asked, his head tipped slightly back as he spoke, one eyebrow raised.

Johnny knew that look. It was the face that people made when they were contemplating their shallow superiority. 'Oh, at least I'm not like that guy,' the thug was thinking, had to be thinking, even though Johnny was not the one who'd just gunned down a young mother in a back alley over something as inconsequential as money.

Yeah, sure, Johnny knew he'd probably killed mothers before himself. Probably dozens. But never with guns and never as they stood with their guiltless infant in their arms and never over something as paltry as money.

Johnny was disgusted by his own flimsy attempt at justification but not nearly as disgusted as he was by this diseased excuse of a human being standing three feet away from him, still with a smug expression on his pimpled face.

The guy had started to look bored with the situation. He rolled his eyes and turned on the heel of his untied shoe, stupidly exposing his back. Johnny wouldn't have even needed that.

Lunging forward, Johnny snatched the guy's wrist and yanked him back, rewarded with a grim snap as it bent the wrong way. The gun clattered to the ground amidst the kid's screamed profanity.

"What the FUCK are you doing?"

Johnny slammed the hard tip of his boot into the back of the gunner's calf. It gave beneath him and he toppled backwards, head slamming into the concrete, fumbling for his gun until Johnny pressed his foot against the guy's wrist.

"Me? What the fuck are YOU doing, you shitbug?!"

Swinging his other boot around, Johnny stomped down on the kid's free arm. Both were pinned to the pavement now. Beneath him the delinquent wailed - not for forgiveness, but for blood.

"Gettoffa me, you goddamned fag! I'm going to end your shit! My bros and I are going to beat your skinny ass and then -"

Johnny couldn't stand this guy's voice. It grated on his nerves somewhere around the same pitch as a chain-smoking hairdryer. Time to put a stop to it. He fished around in the side of his boot a bit (the kid's pitiful flailing made it trickier) for the handle of his knife.

The boy kept screaming even as Johnny looked for his knife. "What difference does that bitch's ass mean to you? Were you fucking her or something? She ain't worth the world of shit you're going to be in if you don't -"

There it was. The solid, leg-warmed steel felt good in his palm, and better yet as Johnny lifted the blade and held it a few inches above the filthy thug's face.

"You think that that pussy-ass knife is going to do you any good, gothfag?"

The guy stopped, finally, cold blue eyes staring at the steel. Johnny saw his breath fogging the blade and was annoyed by it.

"As much as I'm enjoying your delightful soliloquy, I'm afraid it's got to be cut short. My walk's already ruined and your obscene verbal diarrhea isn't helping," Johnny said.

"Is that supposed to scare me?" he started up again. "You don't have the guts, you fucking hipster."

And there it was. The trigger. Something about the kid's smug and certain, twisted face and his snarling words and the fact that he didn't care at all made Johnny's mind snap. Same as it had a hundred times before, but always such a surprise.

Johnny felt rage and violence and a sick hunger for the smell of blood shriek out from deep down inside of him and erupt out.

"Guts?! You don't' think I have the guts?! It doesn't take guts to do this -"

With a single swing, Johnny slashed down and across. The thug choked up a gurgling cough, stuttered by blood, and was forced silent.

"Or this - "

Johnny ripped his knife down now, spilling shiny sticky rings across the pavement as the kid gurgled in agony.

"But it takes even less to do what you did. I might be a coward but at least I always kill people myself."

Johnny did not let some obscene gunpowder machine do the dirty work for him. He hated blood, but knew that that was the price you paid for a proper murder. The kid made horrific sounds, gasping, choking, as his innards voided from his body cavity and brought surges of blood with them.

"Now I've definitely got more guts than he does." Johnny said, allowing himself a low chuckle as he rubbed the blood off of his knife onto the guy's sweatpants. The blood boiling in his brain was cooling now, second by second, bringing him back together.

A little giggle joined him, sounding from behind, and Johnny wheeled around. Jesus, how many people were going to have to get killed tonight before they learned that -

But it wasn't another person. Not another filthy adult, anyway. The dead girl's little daughter had propped herself up beside her mother. The little girl had blood spattered across her pale, chubby face. Crimson clashed and glistened in her violet hair.

"You think that this is funny?" Johnny asked her, pointing toward the body with his knife.

A half-smile had been hovering on her mouth but it vanished as soon as he spoke. Off like a light. Her eyes followed his blade down to the rent-open corpse of her mother's killer and stopped there, gaze fixed on the spilled viscera and exposed bone and blood like the kind that Johnny had accidentally splashed on her.

Johnny looked across at the bodies and the little one settled between them. Something about the arrangement made him uncomfortable. Oh, sure, everything was a little better now that he'd removed what's-his-gun from existence, but...

But killing him certainly hadn't brought the mother back. Johnny didn't even think that the shithead had learned anything.

The little girl kept staring at the body and Johnny didn't like that. He bent down and picked her up until she was standing (she was light as a hunk of Styrofoam). They had a bit of a fuss at each other when she refused to let go of her mother's shirt, tiny fist grasped tightly around the fabric until Johnny's even thinner fingers managed to work her free.

Ugh. Something living so close. Johnny much preferred touching the dead. The child grabbed his shirtsleeve to steady herself as she got to her feet, and he caught a whiff of gasoline coming off of her clothes.

Gasoline? What kind of smell was that for a kid?

A fucking weird one, if you asked him.

The sound of sirens rang out distantly, somewhere deeper in the city. He jerked his head up for a sign of flashing lights but saw none. Not nearly close enough to surprise either of them but close enough to wrangle Johnny's thoughts in a bit. He really ought to be getting on.

But what about the little girl? She wobbled a bit but stood still, perhaps still shaky from all the chaos of a few moments ago.

If he left her here, alone on the ground in the ghetto between two bodies, she was as good as dead already. Fuck, for all he knew a rat could come wandering up out of the sewer and bite her face off. Stranger things happened. He should know, he'd done them.

For a moment he thought about killing her himself. No biggie. The idea of a trio of bodies laid out on the street, sorted by size, struck him as vaguely artistic. He had always been about the art.

That would both eliminate anymore pondering on his part and spare her the fate of dying of exposure out here on a street frequented by crack heads. Win-win, really.

Johnny shifted his grip on the knife. He reared his knife back and locked his wrist, planning to drive it cleanly through the child's soft skull. They had a squishy place right at the top, he thought. No need to draw things out. This was a mercy kill, after all.

The little girl seemed to be ignoring him. She took no notice of his knife poised snake-like above her head. All through his thinking, she kept staring down at what had been her mother.

"Stop that," Johnny said. "There's nothing there. She's really empty now, don't you see?"

No reaction. The blade quivered in his hand.

"Look, for once it's not my fault, so I can say this: I'm sorry. 'Bout your dead mom and all. Must be tough. But they don't come back."

No reaction. Johnny grabbed her shoulders, turning her around so that they were eye to eye. Her stillness was beginning to aggravate him and he heard a snarl in his voice when he spoke.

"Will you stop staring at it?! It's freaking me out! You weird little-"

The little girl tore her gaze from her mother to look straight at him. Her eyes were dark hazel and shining, heavily lidded in the harsh streetlight glow, and fearless. Not pitiful or sad, not confused or dopey. Perhaps angry if anything - her little body felt stiff beneath his hands and she'd flared her nostrils at him.

He'd seen a look not unlike it before. Once.

They stared at one another. He waited for her gaze to fail, for her to glance at the knife or back down at her dead mother, but she didn't.

Any thoughts he'd kicked around about a third death tonight evaporated. Very slowly, he let the knife fall to his side.

Perhaps a blander or duller child he'd have left to elements. A nastier one he might have dealt with himself. Blade through that soft spot on top of her head, and that would have been it.

Not this one, he didn't think.

He couldn't take her home, of course. That would have been absurd. Johnny had the parental instincts of a giant squid and was even more dangerous around children. His house would probably try to kill her, anyway. It was angry enough with just him there.

"I suppose I've got to figure out what to do with you now, right?" he asked her. She blinked at him, kicking her tiny feet against the bloodied pavement.

The sirens interrupted them again, closer now, and Johnny tore his eyes away from her for a second and could make out the dim flashing of red over the tops of a few burned-out, nearby apartment buildings. Cops would be here soon, maybe some had called 911-

He felt her grab his wrist in surprise, tightening her little fingers around the gloved leather. Unexpected human contact made his gag reflex jerk awake. It surprised him so badly that he nearly struck her.

He caught himself and sank his nails into her shoulder instead. Feeling the soft bones give. She squeaked unhappily, growing red-faced, almost in tears, her serious brown eyes beginning to shine. Shit. Shit goddamned it.

"Don't start that," he snapped. Crying children weren't something that he tolerated particularly well. Parents ought to keep tabs on their little brats in check, or at least keep them from getting upset in the first -

Oh, right.

"What's your name, anyway?" he said. Thank god she looked old enough to walk, because he would absolutely have left her here if she'd needed to be carried.

The little girl didn't answer him. She eyed the two bodies that were still only a few feet away, as if she hadn't heard the question.

"Hey!" He poked her in the side with his boot tip. "What's your name?"

Still no answer. Still no eye contact. In what looked like a totally unrelated action, she started fidgeting with something around her neck. Johnny hoped she wasn't trying to give him any ideas. He shoved her chubby fingers out of the way so he could see what she'd been playing with.

It was a beaded necklace. Nothing fancy - just made out of yarn and those blocky wooden beads they have at kindergartens - but something that looked like it had been handmade. In the middle of the string were a few lettered beads.

They spelled out "Gazlene."

"Is that your name? 'Gazlene'?" he asked her. She did not respond.

"Hey, you want me to leave you here? Gazlene? Gaz!" he tried, louder now, and at the sound of his voice she snapped her head toward him and her sticky hair flew around her face.

Apparently that was it. Shortened was better.

"Alright, Gaz. Keep up. I've got somewhere to take you," he said, yanking gently on the sleeve of her dress as he began walking down the street. For a few seconds she hesitated, still watching the bodies.

"Come on!" Johnny called. "Gaz!"

She tossed one last look over her shoulder and followed him, dashing up to his side as he walked away from the grisly scene, trailing bloody footprints behind her. Johnny rammed his hands down in his pockets so that she wouldn't be tempted to hold his hand, and they walked together into the darkness.

He hoped that his idea would work.

Lyrics at the top courtesy of the song "Hey Montana," by Eve 6. Thought you were going to read a grown-up fic without song lyrics at the beginnings of chapters, didn't you? WELL TOO BAD, SUCKERS. I-I mean…please don't leave me!

Anyway, looks like the first chapter of many is a go. Reviews are encouraged and loved and fawned over, and I'll do my best to respond to all of them. So please leave one, if you're so inclined. If not, Chapter 2 will be up in a week or so, depending on interest, so stick around! Edgar Vargas will be making his appearance.