A/N: Hokey dokes, so, I listened to 21st Century Breakdown in its entirety with my dad tonight, and we were interpreting it. It was epic.
Anyway, this is my interpretation. This first part goes from Song Of The Century to Viva La Gloria.
It gets more exciting, I promise.
Songs and characters (c) Green Day.
Chapter 1- The Freedom To Obey
The rain poured heavily on the erect skyscrapers and street-corner kiosks, as if the Gods were pissing on the heads of the civilians and conformists who littered the structured streets like debris. Props of the grandeur of the government were peeling from the walls of buildings and being trodden on under the feet of the working class on their way back from their lunch break. The scene was mundane and simple, a comfortable but loveless marriage between a nation ruled by religious ideals and her acquiescing countrymen--until the shatter of glass tore through the silence.
In a school parking lot in the heart of New York, a student with a baseball bat thrashed a teacher's car, bits of windshield clinging to his uniform, which wasn't much of a uniform anymore after all of his alterations to it. The car wasn't much of a car anymore, either.
Christian had tried to fit in, to do what he was supposed to--scratch that, he totally hadn't. The world was moving at a pace too slow for him, the peace imposed on him by the masses allowing him only the freedom to obey. Frankly, he was sick of it. He was sick of the long hours at Catholic school and the bullies who shoved his head in the toilet when no one was looking. He was sick of being graded on his thoughts and scolded for his lack of strong beliefs. He was sick of missing his fix because another one of his dealers had been publicly executed as an example to the rest of society.
So he fought back the only way he knew how: with violence and vandalism. Taking a step back, he admired his handiwork, nodding approvingly, until something pricked him in the arm. A syringe full of anesthesia.
"Oh, come on," he groaned as he looked up to see a government official standing over him. He'd heard that these people didn't warn before taking people in for 'discipline', but he didn't think punishment in this city was that austere. "You've got to be kidding." He collapsed to the ground and the world spun before going black.
"WAKE THE FUCK UP, YOU LITTLE MAGGOT!"
Christian was jostled awake by a sharp screech, followed by a blow to the head. A woman, his interrogator, had slammed him against the wall of a dreary, concrete wall.
"Wh-wha--?" He looked around, first at the woman in the crisp gray uniform, then at the chain that secured his cuffed wrist to a metal desk.
"Finally. I thought you'd never come around for questioning," the interrogator snapped. "Let's get the formalities out of the way: at one in the afternoon today, you were caught disturbing the peace, yada yada yada, and now I'm going to need to ask you a few questions, like where you live, what your parents do, whether or not you had any accomplices, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, and we'll have to keep tabs on you for the next few weeks to make sure you don't do any more naughty things." She gave a little snort at her own words and pulled up a chair across from him, sitting backwards in it with one leg on each side of the backrest. "Before we get through any of that, though..."
She drew a gun and shot at him, the bullet barely grazing his shoulder.
"Aaugh! What was that for?"
"It gets boring," said the interrogator. "There's nothing to do in this dump but abuse you nasty dissenters. So, let's get this paperwork out of the way, shall we?"
She pulled a stack of forms seemingly out of nowhere. Probably out her slimy ass, thought Christian with a smirk. Before she could do anything with them, though, the sound of feedback, followed by a megaphone-amplified female voice, pervaded the silence and made the interrogator drop everything she was holding.
"People of America, you are in chains!" yelled the girl outside the disciplinary compound's walls.
No shit, Christian thought.
"The government forces God and Peace into your lives, controls you through the fear of damnation, and demands that you get along. You think you live without enemies, but your enemy is the very ruling body that enslaves your minds!"
There were cheers in the background, and she went on, with never-wavering enthusiasm, "We've lived without wars for too long! We've grown compliant and cowardly! We've lost ourselves! Those leaders in their fiftieth-story offices call me a demon. Well, I say, let there be demons! Corruption is already sitting on our heads--let it be exposed! Let there be revolution!"
"Bloody rioteers, always making a bloody ruckus around these parts," the interrogator grumbled. "Sit tight, you little worm, I'll be back before you know it." She left the room to deal with the situation, and that's when Christian noticed that, along with her paperwork, she had also dropped her keys.
He scooped them up and uncuffed himself, skirting down hallways carefully and quietly, looking over his shoulder every few seconds with a sense of paranoia. Finally, after navigating his way through the government complex, he emerged on the outside, where the light was fading with the sunset.
There, he found his interrogator dead, her wind- and food-pipes ripped clear out of her throat. His eyes followed a trail of blood to a slender white hand, which was attached to an arm, a shoulder, a neck, and a face, its lower half covered with a piece of an American flag worn like a bandana.
"Uh..." he uttered.
The girl with the bloody hands stowed a switchblade in her pocket. "I had to do it. It was her or me, and these government freaks have tried to kill me too many times for me to give them the benefit of the doubt."
"Wh-who are you?" asked Christian.
The girl turned to the wall and scrawled messy letters in the interrogator's blood over a poster advertising 'Unity and Faith'. "I'm all that remains of the American Spirit, kid. I'm the revolutionary, the rebel, the next Washington. But for all practical purposes, you may call me..."
GLORIA, read the graffiti on the wall.
"Come on," she said, taking his hand in one of hers, which was still caked with blood. "We should go. Everyone else who was in the riot already left, and the panic is dying down--if they find you, they'll kill you."
"But the guard said they were just going to keep tabs."
"No, they were going to kill you," said Gloria. "Trust me. I used to believe their bullshit, too, until I found myself where you just were."
"Guess you saved my life, then. Thanks. Name's Christian, by the way."
"Yeah, sure it is." She dragged him into a thicket of trees and led him down a meandering path she seemed to be making up on the spot. "Look, can you pick up the pace? It's getting dark. If they find us and kill us now, no one will ever know."
Christian sped up and kept his eyes on Gloria's bobbing ponytail, too troubled to look back this time.