She was getting sort of impatient.
She'd expected them to show up first thing, to go back to a landmark they knew- or one of them knew it, at least. She'd expected greetings.
But nothing. Nada. She'd seen exactly no one since arriving, people she knew or not.
Hadn't they been friends?
Maybe he was just busy. Yes, that was it. He'd had lots of enemies in life, and they were probably waiting for him here the way she was.
Well, Adrenaline Angel was sick of waiting.
She put a note on the door of the music shop, saying she'd gone out to lunch for a while, and went to find Kobra Kid.
Soon enough, she stumbled across some weird mist, and this derelict warehouse. There was a pair of sunglasses on the floor there, but as it wasn't his favorite pair it had no meaning for her, and she wrinkled her nose and turned to go.
Sitting against the wall was his old bass guitar, the one he'd burned the day they met. She went over and picked it up. It looked like it had never been used, much less set on fire, and she slung it over her back to take with her to the shop. She wasn't going to sell it, though; she figured he'd be glad to have it back.
Then she left, because the mist gave her the heebie-jeebies.
She decided that waiting wasn't so bad. He'd get there soon enough.
Korse had not experienced a setback of this magnitude since he'd quit his job as a comic book artist years ago. He spent his days wandering through the city, figuring out what his next step should be.
He fully intended to set up as much of Better Living Industries by himself as he could, and that meant he would have to get premises and start figuring out how to hire people for manufacturing, marketing, shipping…
Oh, who was he kidding?
From the moment he'd set foot in the city of the dead, this reclamation of California, he'd known, deep down, that BLI would never work here. The people were not prone to dependency the way living people were. They had their own ideas, their own worlds to create and afterlives to live. There was no way they'd bother with anything he could give them, and certainly no way they'd ever conform to anything the way the citizens of Battery City had. It was an impossibility.
It was a painful thing to admit to himself, made more painful still when he realized that he could no longer just take a pill and be rid of that feeling; he would have to cope with every part of life now that he was dead.
He recalled with a cynical smile the threats he'd made before killing the great Kobra Kid, that he'd take down all the other Killjoys before he himself ended up in Hell. Well, he'd been wrong, because not only had he been betrayed by more people than he could have anticipated before he'd accomplished his mission, but he wasn't sure if this was Hell at all. He had no company to serve anymore, but he had no more wars to fight either: with no BLI, there was no Killjoy rebellion.
So Korse set aside his dreams of grandeur (he was never quite sure he had really meant to rule BLI anyway, and had not just thought of it out of habit) and went off to find something else to do.
Well, this was just great. He'd already been having a crappy day, one that was not helped by his depression or anger management issues, and now he had to go and make Jet Star mad at him.
Not that Jet was ever technically "mad," not so you'd notice, but when you'd been his friend for as long as Kobra had, you could tell that he was irritated or disapproving (or, in this case, both) by the way his eyes narrowed and his voice grew sharper and lost its usual Zen calmness.
"Why'd you have to go around punching people we were trying to make friends with?"
Kobra didn't have an answer; he felt as bad about it as Jet did. Or maybe not quite as bad, because he didn't have a bruise turning blue-purple on the side of his face. He quickly realized that that was his fault; he should've known that of course Jet would figure out how to absorb pain and go around taking it from others. Maybe he had known and that was what had been bothering him, along with all his other problems.
Jet sighed. "Look, I know that being dead is hard, and I'm not enjoying it any more than you are, but you have to find a better way to deal with your problems than taking them out on others."
Kobra really did not appreciate being lectured, especially not when he knew for a fact that Jet was enjoying death at least slightly more than he was, because Jet was no longer horribly depressed; he'd made sure of that. "All right, all right, fine. I won't take revenge on random people, just the ones that deserve it."
Bad choice of words. "And how do you know when they deserve it if you don't give them a chance to talk? What's that mean anyway, that they deserve it? Is it just the ones you don't like, or the ones that don't give you the answers you're looking for, or what?"
Kobra had given up on answers since they'd left the first Drac's office building. He hadn't even known, exactly, how to figure out who to take vengeance on; he'd assumed that they would be the ones that still professed a hatred for the Killjoys, the ones that were loudly unapologetic about their work for BLI. But the meeting with the Drac today had thrown him off, made him unsure of his methods.
Did he even have methods?
Kobra said, "I don't know," and that was a pathetic answer too.
Jet Star was suddenly sympathetic. "Look, I'm sure we can find a way for you to deal with your issues. I just wanna make sure that your being okay doesn't mean that other people have to suffer for it."
The conversation would've been over had Kobra not been in a really bad mood, and recognized the hypocrisy of Jet's words. The worst part was that he didn't know he was being a hypocrite, because Kobra had never explained the sacrifice he'd made. He hadn't intended to do so ever if he could avoid it, but now he was pissed. "Easy for you to say. You don't have to deal with your issues anymore. I'm dealing with yours for you, and mine at the same time. So forgive me if I seem a bit on edge!"
Jet raised his eyebrows as he realized what Kobra meant, as he pieced together why he was no longer depressed and why Kobra had been hiding from him so often and what it was that his friend had wanted to keep secret.
"You stole my…" he trailed off, eyes wide, at a loss for words to describe how messed up they both were.
Kobra nodded.
Jet reached for him. "Give it back! It's my problem; let me handle it."
Kobra stepped away. "No," he said simply.
Jet knew, as much as he refused to admit, that he couldn't handle this on his own. He sighed again, dropped his arm. "Fine, but the second you have any nightmares, I want you to tell me. I can help with those. And definitely tell me if you feel like hurting yourself, okay. I've dealt with that too."
Right. He would only burden Jet with his own nightmares if he was on the brink of…what? Suicide? That'd be the biggest waste of time ever, and no longer from just a moral standpoint, Kobra realized, and laughed darkly in his head. Self-harm? Maybe, but being no stranger to such things himself, he could handle it
"So have I, remember?" Kobra's reply held not only a reminder of his own trials, but of what had brought them together in the first place, the reason they had formed the band. They would all be in this together, they'd said.
And in that, he had a different kind of answer. Why would he not rely on his friend, who had saved his life once, twice, a hundred times? He would try his best not to be dependent on Jet- God knows the man had enough to be getting on with already- but he didn't have to go it totally alone.
Jet just smiled, and he took it as a confirmation.
Kobra Kid, a self-proclaimed self-sufficient loner, didn't like to admit it, but that made him feel better.
"Hey Angel. Long time, no see."
Adrenaline Angel wondered if she'd ever been as happy to see someone as she was to see Kobra Kid.
He'd brought his friend with him, that guy with the hair who played guitar, the one they called the "mastermind." That was about all she knew about him- that and that he never bought his own guitar strings; Kobra always went and got them for him, which was how they'd often got to talking about Jet Star in the first place- because Kobra wasn't the talkative type, but Jet Star struck up a conversation about how she was doing with being dead. She explained that she was still running her music store and people still came and bought things (or not bought, exactly, as they didn't have money, but they traded CDs for salad recipes and it was all good).
She asked how he was doing.
"Oh, actually, that's why we're here. We wanted to find out about getting some music stuff." On the far side of the room, Kobra twitched- not enough to be obvious, but Angel could tell when he was nervous or irritated, or in this case, both.
"'Kay, whatcha lookin' for?" Angel asked.
"A bass guitar and, um, I don't know if you have any Gibsons?"
Did she have Gibsons? If he was a friend of Kobra's and he needed it, she could've gotten him Jimi Hendrix's guitar.
She showed them the wall where she kept all her guitars, and if she'd thought Kobra was twitchy before, it was nothing compared to his reaction to his old bass.
He turned to Jet. "I'm telling you, I still don't think this is a good idea."
"Kobra, it's not like the cops will show up and arrest us again. We're dead, remember? I doubt there are cops. I doubt there's even crime!" Jet's face took on a dreamy, faraway look. "Nobody kills anyone here…nobody kills themselves…"
"Yeah, fuck dying!" Angel added with a laugh. "We already did that once."
Jet laughed, and Kobra shook his head in the way that he did when he found something amusing but couldn't be bothered to crack a smile.
"Wait, then what's the point of us getting a band together?" Kobra clearly did not want to be involved in this, and Angel could see why: their last gig sounded like hell, even in the understated way Kobra had told the story. Cops or no cops, he had reason to be wary of concerts.
"Well, people are still lonely." Jet Star began. "They have nothing to do. We need stuff to do too, so why not something we love? It doesn't cost anything, we can try out new songs, and everybody will enjoy it." He paused with a grin. "Do you need any more reasons, 'cause I could make you a list…"
"No, I'm good, thanks," Kobra replied, with a small smirk this time. "But what'll we do without Gerard? And I know you're good, Jet, but you can't play yours and Frankie's parts at the same time."
Angel didn't know if she was the only one who detected the hint of vulnerability in Kobra's question. That was what made her a little uncertain about presenting them with a solution of sorts. "I could play rhythm guitar."
"Yeah?" Jet sounded mildly interested and open to the idea.
Kobra was neither of those things, and trying to hide it. "That'd be nice, but we're not really into country."
Angel rolled her eyes in affectionate annoyance. "Ignoring the stereotyping in that comment, I was going to show y'all my guitar." She emphasized the word y'all with a smirk of her own before walking behind the counter and emerging with Featherweight.
She was the only person she knew who had given their guitar a name, but she was proud of Featherweight and how the totally shiny Flying V had taught her everything she knew, and she wasn't going to change it now.
Kobra let out a whistle. "All right, let's see what you got."
She was also glad that she'd stayed in practice, so that when she plugged her guitar into one of her many amps, she knew she didn't suck. All she had to do was prove it.
She launched into a tricky little Van Halen lick that had taken her hours of work, and she totally nailed it. When she hit the final bend, Kobra had his eyebrows raised, which was the highest compliment he could give.
Jet Star chuckled. "Hey now, I don't want you replacing me or anything."
Angel giggled. "'Course not. But we do all need to practice at some point."
"How about now? We have time."
"Alrighty, cool."
"One more thing," Kobra tried again. "What about a lead singer?"
"Oh," Angel frowned. Shredding Van Halen was fine and dandy, but singing while playing guitar was way beyond her.
Jet Star had thought about this; there was no other explanation for how quickly he came up with an answer. "We should get the fans to sing. Like, every night, or every song, we invite one of them up to sing for us. Then they all get a chance in the spotlight."
That explained why he was the mastermind.
Maybe it was that he'd lost his defenses, or that he was jealous of how well she was getting on with Jet (did he even get jealous, or was that just wishful thinking?), but Kobra seemed sullen as he picked up the bass he'd tried to get rid of and sat down to play.
He brightened up pretty fast, though; music had that effect on him. Angel was happy too, first because he was happy, and second because they were getting this plan off the ground.
Jet started teaching her some MCR riffs (Kobra hadn't been lying when he said that Jet was good, only under-exaggerating), which Kobra joined on bass, and they all got along great.
It was about time he'd got here.
