Note: I'm reposting this story from my AO3 account. It was originally posted on 6-22-2018.

Feel The Burn

Ears still ringing from the blast, they only paused long enough to shake off the worst of the pieces of broken glass and pulverized brick before throwing themselves into the car. Then, Grace hit the gas and pointed the Camaro back towards the Mayhem Party. As soon as they pulled out onto the main highway, she pushed the gas pedal down even further and enjoyed the engine's throaty roar as the speedometer quickly climbed towards 80mph and then beyond.

At this point, getting back to the party as fast as they could before Slink got his remote control unit fixed and used it to kill them for being out of bounds was more important than aiming for the better fuel economy she could have achieved with more sedate speeds. Grace wasn't too concerned about where her next tankful of blood would come from anyway. Between fighting the cannibals at Pixie Swallow and the Glimmers in Steel City, Grace was sure that they had racked up enough carnage points to earn a free pre-race top-off, which she planned to claim before they headed out on the next leg tomorrow morning. All she needed to worry about in the here and now was getting from Point A to Point B. Figuring out what to do about the folded photograph that felt like it was burning a hole in her pocket could wait until later. Even if she had wanted to talk about it just then, saying anything on the subject while surrounded by Slink's cameras would have been stupid and potentially even more suicidal than their little field trip to Kane Hill had threatened to become.

Beside her, Arthur made a noise that was half sigh and half groan as he slouched a little lower in his seat. Grace hadn't seen enough of that last fight to know just how badly Rib Bone had kicked the shit out of him before Arthur got the upper hand, but she figured it must have been pretty bad since he hadn't raised so much as a token protest over Grace being the one to drive back despite the still-fading effects of her unwanted Red Rapture high.

For a few minutes, they were both content to simply ride in silence.

Then, as the flaming wreckage of Kane Hill grew ever smaller in the rearview mirror, Grace pulled a fresh lollipop down from where she had stashed it in the sun visor, unwrapped it onehanded, and popped the bright red sphere of dye and artificial flavoring into her mouth. She let the flavor wash over her tongue and tried not to think about Smax candy, its freaky psychosis-inducing sugar substitutes, and whether she would even notice the difference if she ever ate any by mistake, given her current lifestyle. No, it was better to forget about those sorts of ideas and instead focus on the more immediately relevant information of what she had and had not found back at the mental hospital and what she planned to do about it.

Grace sucked on her lollipop, and they sped through the night in silence for a while, maybe ten minutes, maybe fifteen, definitely more than long enough for Grace to start thinking that Arthur must have fallen asleep, so she was surprised when she glanced over at him and saw that his eyes were wide open and staring at her. It was a little difficult to tell by the dim light from the Camaro's gages and GPS unit, but it looked like he was staring at her mouth. She didn't mind that kind of staring, quite often welcomed it in fact, but it wasn't Arthur's usual MO. Maybe either Rib Bone or the explosion had rattled his brain more than Grace had thought. Maybe they both had.

"What?" she asked when Arthur refused to look away. She briefly considered being more specific in her questioning, but she had enough practice talking with her mouth full to know that it was easiest to stick to single syllables when possible. As it was, it still came out sounding more like, 'Whuh?' And, yeah, he was definitely staring at her mouth.

Arthur straightened in his seat, blinked a few times as if surprised that she was asking him anything at all, and then said, "Can I have a lick?"

It wasn't exactly the response Grace had been expecting, but it wasn't anywhere near the weirdest thing that Arthur could have said either. If he had asked her a day or two ago, or, hell, even a couple of hours ago, Grace probably would have said no, but the man had just put himself through all sorts of trouble and pain on her behalf, so she figured that sharing some of her sugar with him was the least she could do, especially when he was wearing the beginnings of one of those dopey, slightly hopeful little smiles that he tended to get when he let his guard down. And, with his newly acquired cuts and scrapes, for once it didn't even make him look more like a plastic toy than usual, which was another point in Arthur's favor.

Grace smiled and made a show of giving the lollipop one more long, thorough suck before she slowly slid it out of her mouth, said, "Sure, Barbie, you can have a lick if you think you can handle it, but only because you earned it," and passed the candy over to him. He accepted the lollipop from her without hesitation, but Grace could see that his eyes were still on her mouth as she ran her tongue around her lips, ostensibly to clean the stickiness from them but really just because she knew how good she looked while doing it. The wink that she gave him promised a willingness to share a lot more with him than just her lollipop if he could bring himself to ask for it.

Arthur didn't ask for anything else, at least not yet, but Grace could tell that he understood the option was there and he was thinking about it. For the moment, he simply raised the lollipop in salute to her. Then he leaned back in his seat with a look of triumphant contentment, tilted his head back, opened his mouth wide, and dropped the lollipop in. Grace half expected him to swallow the damn thing whole, stick and all, or at the very least, deepthroat it.

As it turned out, Arthur did not deepthroat the lollipop, a fact which both relieved and disappointed and Grace in equal measure. However, he did suddenly look like he wanted to gag. The exact moment when the messages from Arthur's taste buds reached his brain was obvious, because the look of contentment vanished from his face and was instantly replaced by one that was equal parts surprise and another expression which Grace saw him wearing a lot more often, the one which loudly proclaimed his regret for every single decision which had combined to bring him to this point in his life. Grace suspected that Arthur might have actually preferred having a dick in his mouth instead of the lollipop just then.

"Uh ma guh," Arthur muttered unhappily around the candy, and Grace figured that she should consider herself lucky that Arthur was too much of a gentleman to just spit it out on the floor. Taking the lollipop out of his mouth, he eyed it with a look of resigned disgust and repeated, "Oh my god."

"What's the problem?" Grace asked, trying to hide her grin at Arthur's discomfort. It was really obvious what the problem was, but she wanted to hear him say it.

"I thought it was going to be cherry flavored," he complained.

Grace turned her head enough to be sure that he would see her arched eyebrow directed at him even by the dim light of the dashboard gages and asked, "Do I look like a cherry kind of a girl to you?"

"When you put it that way, I guess not," he said with a sigh, still holding the lollipop out and away from his face as if he was afraid it might bite him.

"Sorry, Barbie," Grace said, no longer bothering to try to hide her grin as she reached over to pat him on the knee in mock consolation and then take back her prize, "but it's Red Hot Cinnamon all the way." She mostly returned her attention back to the road but made a big show of running her tongue all over the red sphere of the lollipop before popping it back into her mouth.

The last of the glow from Kane Hill vanished below the horizon behind them. For a few minutes, the only visible light in any direction beyond the reach of the Camaro's headlights came from the stars above. Then, the first faint glow from the nameless dying industrial town which was playing host to that night's Mayhem Party began peeking up over the horizon ahead of them.

They drove along in silence for a while longer.

At this distance, their destination didn't look much different than the fiery remains of the mental hospital they had left behind. They both knew that it wouldn't look much different up close either, aside from the fires being more contained and most of the destruction being less fresh. All the people there would be just as crazy.

"You were eating one of those lollipops right before we met," Arthur said at last, rousing Grace from the darker turn of her thoughts. "Weren't you?"

"Yeah," Grace answered. She was almost down to the stick now, making it a lot easier to talk around. "So what if I was?" She glanced at Arthur and saw that he was staring at her mouth again. Or maybe still. His look of disgust was long gone now, replaced by something a lot more interesting, with the beginnings of a toothy smile that promised mischief of the naked and sweaty variety if she was up for it.

"So," he said, his smile growing even wider, "they taste a lot better secondhand."

Grace grinned around the remains of her lollipop, saying, "Are you sure? I mean, you only tasted it like that the once, and I thought you were all about conducting a thorough investigation and putting together a solid case."

"Then I'll have to commandeer you and your candy stash to help me gather more evidence," Arthur informed her with mock seriousness even as his smile became a full leer.

"Only if I get to play with your nightstick," Grace said with a wink.

Then, in a trick which she had mastered back in her days of "borrowing" the Camaro for late night teenage joyrides without her parents noticing (at least not until the next time that her dad looked the odometer), Grace lifted her foot off the gas pedal and let their momentum carry them the final mile into town, so that they could unobtrusively coast up to the edge of the Mayhem Party with only the low purr of an idling engine to announce their arrival instead of a roar. With luck and the party's perpetual noise, no one would hear them at all.

It felt weird to Grace to be pulling this move on the way to potentially having sex with a guy instead of immediately after. However, assuming that Slink wasn't just waiting to kill them where he could watch the splatter in person, maybe there was still a chance for them to make sure that the night wasn't a total loss for them.

The End