I have no idea where I got this idea. I was trying to figure out if Johnny Rancid has a power, or a quirk, or what, and this just popped into my head. And I knew I wanted to write the chapter where he and Billy meet, and I needed to set some things for Jinxed For Life…so yeah. Johnny's not a HIVE kid, but as far as I'm concerned, he's involved. And there's so little Johnny Rancid fiction out there.

Oh, and I completely give up on trying to write Billy's dialect. It's too crazy hard. I'm going to go back and edit several parts of Jinxed For Life, and maybe tweak one or two things in this collection.

Oh, and Happy Holidays, y'all!


Heartless

It wasn't that Jonathan Sykes, later known as Johnny Rancid, didn't try to care. He had learned to fake emotions very well. But there were certain situations that he simply couldn't respond to properly, because emotionally he had been pretending to respond from the start.

Johnny had no heart. Not in the metaphorical sense, the "have a heart" mentality that charity-spokespeople used to guilt trip unwilling patrons. He very literally had no heart. Put a hand to his chest, where his heart should have been, there was no pulse. Knock on the spot; it rang hollow. You didn't get as pale as him from a lack of sunlight. It was a lack of blood flow.

He had realized early on that pretending to care about things was a generally good idea, because people seemed to get worried when you turned a blind eye to what was going on. From an early age he learned to watch people and take note of what situation should result in what emotion, learned to smile, laugh, cry, fight, whine on demand, until it became as natural as having real emotions. But interaction with real people was such a joke, such a game. He moved out of his family's house as soon as he could, which ended up being damn early, and got his own place.

He liked cars. Or rather, he was indifferent to cars. Cars didn't have odd expectations of you, they didn't care if you laughed at their funeral because it seemed like it might strike a chord with yourself. That was as close as he came to liking something for a long time. Most other things annoyed him, especially music, because he always got the idea that he was missing out on something when the singers ranted about their feelings.

But living alone, and working in the car garage where he'd managed to impress the manager by reacting so coldly to a gang fight outside, suited him because people thought his cold manner was some kind of cool. Chicks dug him. Gangs wanted him. If he had possessed a heart, he might have found all this rather cool himself, but as far as he was concerned, living like that was easier than squirming away from the doctor when he held up the stethoscope during a routine checkup.

He became aware of the HIVE academy when he was about fourteen, and got into a fight with one of its younger students. William Numrus-Jones, aka Billy Numerous, was an angry little piece of work, and was apparently het up about something other than the comment Johnny had made about his eyesight, and that interested Johnny. When he managed to pin the younger boy's arms down, he asked him about it.

"Those bastards called my dad," Billy snarled. "He's coming to Jump City. I don't want to see him!"

Johnny took a moment to think about this. He knew that fathers could be tough, especially when a school called them in. He knew that schools called fathers when they were angry about something. He knew that for a school to be angry, you had to have done something. So he asked the question:

"What did you do?"

"Nothing!" Billy snapped back, wriggling futilely. "This is routine! They're gonna do this a lot, all the time. If I wanted to see my dad, I could have stayed home!"

This all sounded very messed up to Johnny. "Is something wrong with your dad?"

"He's a yuppie Mephistopheles, an asshole, a cheating, lying bastard, a---"

"Okay, cool," Johnny said, to make the other boy shut up so he could think. He didn't know what a yuppie Mephistopheles was, but a cheating, lying bastard and an asshole sounded bad. "So, now what?"

"So I left," Billy said proudly. "And I ain't going back."

"You talk weird. So now what?"

"Now what what?"

"Well," Johnny said reasonably. "You gotta go somewhere."

Billy gnawed at his lip. "Got somewhere I can stay?"

"I've got a place," Johnny said without thinking. He had always tried to avoid arguing with people, because improvisation wasn't his thing, and people tended to take it the wrong way when he treated their conflict as something trivial.

"So let me stay there."

"You are a brat."

Billy smirked. "Yeah, and?"

Johnny was not good at arguing.

"Yer place is tiny," Billy said automatically when they arrived. "Do you really only got two rooms?"

"Do you really talk that way on a regular basis?"

Billy shot him a glare. Johnny didn't bother to try to understand why. Billy took up residence of the couch, and didn't ask for anything else. Johnny had never had a guest before, so he figured that Billy would do as he did, and left him to it. In the morning the boy was gone, and Johnny would not have even remembered that he had had a guest last night if the boy's anger hadn't stuck itself so clearly in his mind. He'd seen fights and couples break up and people get shanked---you saw a lot at the garage he worked at---but nobody seemed to put their heart into what they did quite like Billy had. Like any excuse would be enough to set him off with his bare fists against the world. Crazy mad.

Johnny wondered if people could really live like that.

Billy showed up again a week or so later, asking gruffly if Johnny would let him stay the night again. He didn't seem as angry as before, and Johnny was tempted to tell him no just because his lack of violence was so boring. But he shrugged and let him in, and Billy leapt onto the couch like he owned it.

After another two events like this it finally occurred to Johnny that Billy had been referring to "the school" in all their short conversation, and so he asked him what it was. Billy launched into a twangy description of HIVE Academy and its purpose, its students, its faculty, and its stupid rules that made him so angry.

"I just can't stand it sometimes," Billy admitted. "I gotta get air. That's why I keep coming, I guess."

Johnny shrugged. He didn't really care why Billy kept coming, but a school with that sort of purpose sounded messed up, according to the standards of other people that Johnny tended to employ for his own purposes.

"So, if it's a school for special powers, what can you do?"

Billy grinned. "My whole family's got a set of self-preservative skills that gets spread out through the genes. I can make more of me."

Johnny told him to prove it or get the hell out. Billy made a twin of himself, and they sat side by side, answering Johnny's questions for about an hour. They explained about what their father, how he owned more companies than a man ought to, how he slept with all his secretaries and fired them as soon as they got pregnant, how Billy himself was one of several illegitimate children but for some reason Mr. Jones had decided to make him the heir and he, Billy, hated business and politics. He was at HIVE now to cultivate his interests, so to speak. It was nice to get out of the mansion, but having information shoved down his throat was driving him crazy.

At the end of it all, Johnny said: "If you really can't stand it, then shouldn't you leave?"

The pair scowled at that. "Maybe. But then what would I do?"

Johnny shrugged. "Do you know anything about cars? The guy I work for thinks it's a crack and a half to use child labor."

The boys perked at the mention of cars, and launched into a lengthy description of their dream ride. Johnny pretended to be interested through the whole thing, and the Billies finished their description without ever suspecting him of being bored.

If he had had a heart, he might have called it being proud. But passing for normal had always seemed like it would be a good thing, so it didn't really matter what he called it.

Billy went back to the school the next morning, as usual. Johnny knew he would be back soon.

It was several weeks before Billy showed up again, but when he did Johnny was deeply immersed in a fight. He had found drugs in the car he had been servicing, and like any other human being, had taken them for himself. After Billy's last visit, he had begun experimenting with different substances to see what sort of sensations he could stir up. He had so far been unsuccessful in getting any more of a buzz than what could be wrought from alcohol, and had been pursuing stronger stuff when he'd found Mr. Doe's stash.

He came away from the fight victorious, but with several broken fingers and a deep gash in his arm. Billy had immediately proffered his medical services.

"I get into shit like that all the time at HIVE," Billy explained as he patched Johnny up. "So the doctor there has been trying to teach me about doctoring stuff so I won't have to bother him so much."

Billy was immensely impressed by what he had seen of the fight, and more so by Johnny's cool demeanor as Billy realigned his finger bones.

"It's like you can't feel me doing anything to you," Billy marveled. "How do ya do that?"

"Well," Johnny shrugged. "I can't feel what you're doing."

He explained about his condition, about the way he had to fake things like pain and emotions and how he didn't like bothering people with his odd self, how inconvenient it made things. "I've probably lost that job now," He added. "They don't like it when their guys fight with the clientele."

"I could get you money," said Billy.

"You'll steal some?"

"I'll ask my dad. Tell him it's for a cause in his heir's interest."

"Thought you hated your dad."

"I do."

"Well, then, what are you doing, asking him favors?" said Johnny. "That's weird. If I could hate somebody, I wouldn't ask them for nothing."

"Well, you can't hate anybody. Think of it as me paying off the last few times you let me stay." Billy snuck a glance at him. "I wondered why you were so cool about me staying."

"Should I not have been? You're just a kid."

Billy snorted at that. "That's what everybody says. Could you teach me to fight like that? They don't teach you stuff like that at HIVE. They say dirty business is unsportsmanlike. Everything's got rules. I don't know why. Dirty business and clean business seem all the same to me."

"There's nothing to teach," said Johnny. "I'm just imitating what I've seen."

They talked for a while longer, and in the morning Billy was gone again. He was back two days later with his face and chest bruised.

"Intense training is bullshit," He said, apparently not caring whether Johnny cared or not. He poked a bruise gingerly. "Fuck, that hurts."

"Looks painful," Johnny said unhelpfully.

Billy thought for a moment. "Hey, you ignore pain. Teach me the trick."

"I don't ignore it. I just can't feel it."

"But there's a trick to it, right?"

Johnny shrugged. "Not that I know of."

"Sure there is. There's a trick to everything. That's what Professor Nanson said."

It occurred to Johnny that other people might find Billy's lack of willingness to listen to anyone besides himself very annoying. He wondered if he should apply that to himself, and found himself wondering why the hell it mattered what other people would do.

"I don't see what's wrong with feeling pain," He finally said.

"Well," Billy said thoughtfully. "It hurts. Nothing to like about hurting."

"Try ignoring it."

"But it hurts."

"Try it."

Billy tried. "It doesn't work," He whined.

"Well, practice makes perfect," said Johnny, quoting something he had heard in an ad once. Because he hoped it might help a little, he added, "I guess I don't blame you for not wanting to feel pain."

"So, do you gotta pretend a lot about things?" said Billy. "I mean, couldn't you just not care?"

"But it makes people uncomfortable."

"So you do care."

"I don't know." Johnny scratched his head. "Sometimes I don't always know what to do, and things get difficult because suddenly people realize that something is wrong, and they want to get involved. I don't want to get sent somewhere for being different."

"Like HIVE."

"Yeah. Like HIVE."

Billy gnawed his lip. "Don't blame you."

And then, because it seemed like a good idea, Johnny asked Billy if he wanted something to drink.

It turned out that Billy had never had a drop of alcohol in his life. But he liked the burning sensation as it went down his throat, and he didn't greatly mind the hangover he got the next day. He asked Johnny if he wanted the money after all, and Johnny said he wouldn't mind some extra cash. Billy came over to his place consistently after that, and continued to do so for a long, long time.