They walked side by side, Sweet Revenge and Cameron, padding across the miles. They wandered aimlessly, but somehow always felt like they were going in the right direction. They saw no one, and did not care to look, as content as their troubled minds would allow to simply be alone together.
His younger self held his hand, not seeming to mind the blood that dripped onto his new white shirt. The old wounds carving lines of nostalgic sadness into his wrists, scars that he'd thought were sealed for good, had reopened after Cam had joined him. His presence filled Sweet Revenge with joy and sorrow, a familiar bittersweet combination of emotions that he'd often tried to hide from everyone in life who he was supposed to be friends with.
He was also sorry that the kid had to be exposed to his own struggles, his miserable musings on the emptiness of death. While they had some kind of alliance, perhaps a friendship, and a place to go, Sweet Revenge couldn't help that he still felt lost and alone. It wasn't so much a physical loneliness now that he had a companion, but a vacancy inside, like something important was missing. It was that notion that seeps in on a long trip, like there was a light bulb left somewhere on or a door unlocked.
And of course, there were always the curtains. He had almost given up on finding out what they meant by the time he met Cam, and now he walked past the shadow-rippled apparitions with such a façade of nonchalance that he almost convinced himself that he couldn't see them, that they weren't there.
Cam had no such pretenses to uphold, and when he noticed the curtains, he began to cry again, holding Revenge's hand tightly in fear.
"What is it? What's wrong?" Sweet Revenge asked, hoping beyond reason that Cam could finally end the mystery for him. He turned back, holding the curtains in his vision, and saw that they were now standing in front of a mass of them, a maze of misty cloth billowing like sails on the funeral boats of old, darker than night or death itself even though they were pure white.
Cam shook his head, not wanting or unable through his tears to explain. He sobbed something that sounded like, "Mama."
"I'm going to figure this out," Revenge told him, and let go of his hand to approach the wall of curtains. Cam cried more loudly, rushing forward to catch hold of him, to pull him back. He tugged against his younger self. "Come on, it can't be that bad."
Even as he said it, he knew it was a lie. The fear reflected in his own eyes told him all he needed to know: whatever he would find in that labyrinth was more than bad; it was the worst thing he would ever see. He was aware of the foreboding gnawing at his resolve, his subconscious unease surfacing and holding him to the spot with more strength than Cam. He did not want to go in there; he had never been surer of anything in his life or death.
But he knew, with the same certainty, that he had to go.
Cameron frowned, protesting more violently as Sweet Revenge drew himself up and resumed his walk toward the curtains. Revenge looked down at him kindly, with an expression that said, I've made up my mind and I'm going. You don't have to if you don't want. Cam composed himself remarkably well for such a young child, and looked right back with a fiercely loyal determination. He was along for the ride, it seemed.
Revenge took a deep, relaxing breath (that did nothing whatsoever to relax him), and said, "Let's go."
The curtains swirled around them, swishing and snapping in their wake, parting easily before them to invite them in, while closing off their escape, in the perfect trap. Sweet Revenge and Cameron were soon lost in the maze, disoriented by all the identical drapes that continuously shifted and changed in the wind, so that a wall never stayed in the same place or held the same form for more than a second. There was no path, even, just the ones they made themselves, pushing between the breaks in the nearest curtains.
But in the midst of this indecipherability, Sweet Revenge had a sense of familiarity; he knew what was coming, had known all along. It was so close he could almost touch it…
A shade appeared up ahead, a single dark spot in the sunlit gloom surrounding them. As they got closer, they could see it was a human shape, a little taller than Revenge, that almost seemed to be floating above the ground; it cast a quavering shadow over the curtains and he caught glimpses of color as they neared the edge of the drapes just in front of it. A flash of blue jeans and a yellow shirt brought recollections of Revenge's childhood, Cameron's present. He knew whose clothes they were, but couldn't quite recall until-
- he parted the last curtain and saw, just as he had when he was six years old, his mother, hanging by her neck from the living room curtain rod, dead.
It was a good thing that Cameron was too young to think of saying "I told you so."
The few weeks of excitement and shredding in the musty music store passed quickly, and during that time Jet Star and Kobra Kid kept meeting people and gathering strands of lives, or at least Jet did.
There was Emily, who had died at fifteen in a car crash that the Killjoys had caused in an attack, and she interrupted Jet's consoling apology with an overjoyed exclamation that she'd never have gotten the chance to work at Water World in her life, not after everyone had forgotten what that was, but she held onto a few snatches of commercials and pieced together what she could, and she was happy with the water park she shared with everyone.
There was Dan, a twenty-something one-time Drac who had never known love because he'd never realized he was gay, and BLI would've forbidden such a deviation if it had ever come to light anyway; now he and his boyfriend Shane were happier here than they'd ever been in the oppressive life they were born into.
Jet Star thanked each of them for their time and invited them to the concert, and in between such discussions he thought about what they'd told him. Dying was obviously not as bad as everyone said; in some cases it seemed even better than life.
He entertained the distressing notion that if that was the case, all the kids whose lives they'd saved back when they were a band were missing out on this. But he dismissed those feelings when he figured out that the reason these dead people were so happy was not that death was always awesome (hadn't he recently been tormented himself, hunted by the merciless wolves that he'd thought were gone?), but that here they had control of their lives and they could choose their fates. The disturbed kids he'd met didn't have that option, for whatever reason, or they didn't think they did.
And something Frankie had said once came back to him: "We don't save their lives; they save themselves." Those kids did have a choice in their fates, to an extent, the choice to live or die, to give up or keep going.
In that respect, the dead he met weren't so dead, really.
He kept watch on Kobra too, trying to see how he was handling the pressure he'd placed himself under, whether Jet's wolves were gaining on him. Kobra held them at bay well enough, though: The only times Jet ever caught a sign of the hatred he was hiding behind his sunglasses or the rage he restrained for Jet's sake (he could say it was to spare the ex-Dracs all he liked, but Jet knew the truth, and was grateful) were when Jet would glance out the window of a memory-crafted house and see the smoke wafting up from an explosion in the distance. Kobra's contribution to Jet's plan of atonement was to stay far away, construct huge buildings- Jet had glimpsed mansions, skyscrapers, palaces- and then blow them up and burn them to the ground. It was for Kobra what hearing the stories of the dead were to Jet, and he didn't question it for a second.
Adrenaline Angel played her fingertips nearly bloody in their practices, but she never complained, never gave up or let frustration set in. If she had trouble with a part, after the sour notes and accidental open strings had rung themselves to unsatisfying silence, she'd close her eyes and breathe, then look to Kobra. He'd give her a brief nod of encouragement and, if the opportunity was there, a tip or two on technique, and then she'd go right back at it with twice as much enthusiasm and half as many mistakes.
Of course, it helped that she was already freakin' amazing at guitar.
The concert was set for three weeks from the day they'd met Angel, and by that time, Jet Star was sure that all of them were as prepared as it was possible to be, because they'd practiced every day and often into the night. Jet had remembered all the parts for the setlist they'd created, Angel had dutifully learned them (often it took her less time to pick up a new part that it had taken him to recall how it went), and Kobra had accompanied them on bass. He was sure that everything was ready, except for one last issue.
That was Kobra, and his ever-present reluctance to perform. Jet Star had not given up on trying to convince him that'd it'd be okay in the end, though inside he knew that no amount of wasted words would make Kobra more inclined to agree; if he was going to play, he would, and if not, then Jet and Angel would go on together, bass-less.
Kobra had taken most of Jet's guilt-tripping tendencies, but he couldn't help feeling little twinges when he saw half-dried tear tracks on Kobra's cheeks, or watched the smoke from one of his soul-searing fires fanning out over the sand. One day, when he came back to the music store after talking with a gruff, good-natured Helium War vet who called himself Joey, he saw Kobra Kid leaning against the counter and crying while trying valiantly to pretend like he wasn't. Angel was rubbing his back comfortingly, clearly not fooled.
Jet knew that this was partly Kobra's own fault for taking his depression, but it was Jet's fault for letting him keep it, too. He was grateful that Kobra, who had been through depression once or twice already and was aware of how awful it could get, felt their friendship to the point where he was willing to sacrifice his well-being for Jet, but the latter realized that it was now his turn to show the same loyalty.
The day of the concert arrived in a blaze of sweltering heat and ridiculous amounts of excitement on Angel's part, when she woke them up with a series of high-pitched squeals to the effect of how awesome this was going to be, and how much everybody would love them, and how could they sleep in when they had to rock out?!
Jet heaved himself off the floor, yawning openly and prompting laughter from Angel about his laziness, and gave Kobra a hand up off the deflating air mattress. Angel hurried back and forth around them, pulling up the blinds, making Jet squint in the light streaming into the store (he could only assume that Kobra, in his sunglasses as always, was unscathed.)
"Well, let's get started," Jet said, picking up his guitar and kicking off a few quick final touch-ups on the more complicated solos. Kobra's face darkened to match his shades, but he grabbed his bass and played along.
Angel's enthusiasm- and, luckily, her alertness- spread to both of them as the hours passed. They finally left for the concert, arriving at the community bandshell in plenty of time to run soundcheck and for Jet to marvel that the land of the dead had its own, elegantly structured bandshell. He mentioned this to his friends, and Angel did not interrupt the flow of her chatter but spread it to encompass the comment, "Well, I should hope they have a stage for people like us! Otherwise we'd have to be street musicians, though that'd be kinda fun too. But this has better acoustics," before resuming her ramble about how she hoped that the spotlights didn't make it too hard to see. Jet assured her they did not.
Kobra said nothing, just went back to tuning his bass, looking like he resented everything in the world, especially the bandshell and the spotlights. Jet strolled over and sat next to him, asked to borrow an E, and turned to him with the same it's-gonna-be-okay smile he'd been using too often for his tastes. "Kobra, I just wanted to tell you," he began, resting a hand on his friend's back; he could sense him rolling his eyes, suppressing the urge to tell Jet to fuck off. "I wanted to tell you that you're not gonna have to deal with my problems anymore, or at least you won't have to carry them around."
He casually shifted his hand onto the skin at the back of Kobra's neck and finished, "Because I'm taking them back."
Kobra realized what he meant just as he began draining the slow, toxic liquid of depression out of Kobra like poison from a wound. He could feel it roll over him like fog, as he breathed in sadness, exhaled regret, existed in painful lethargy. Kobra jerked away a little too late, and Jet's darkness was complete, taken from his friend's sunglasses straight into his mind. His consolation was the subtle brightening of Kobra's face and the visibility regained around his eyes.
Jet retreated to a separate corner to finish tuning, fighting off his demons the whole way. He flattened his A string while trying to suppress the ever-present remorse and sorrow (he'd sold them off for a time, but they'd made their way back); his D string plunked dully into pitch with the same lackluster thudding as his heart; he sharpened his G string, the note grating off him like a knife on a whetstone; his B string quavered up too high at first and brought with it the icy tones of sleepless nights; the bottom E string tuned with the sound of screams, a reminder that he really didn't need right then.
Adrenaline Angel came in with a teenage girl in tow, who she introduced as Mackenzie, their lead singer for the night. The girl looked about as nervous as Kobra, who was sitting rigidly in his chair, staring blankly at the door that led to the stage. Jet salvaged the remainder of his sympathy to go over and greet her with a handshake, trying to make her feel comfortable in the presence of her "favorite, favorite rock stars and people in general," as she called them breathlessly.
"We're on in five," Angel said, picking up her guitar and heading to the stage door.
"Where are you going?" Kobra asked in a strangled voice, a hint of desperation creeping into his face. "I thought we had five minutes."
"I meant five seconds! C'mon! Let's do this thing!" Angel grinned, bouncing up and down on her tiptoes.
Her inexhaustible excitement radiated through them, poking a small pinpoint of light into the dark haze in Jet's brain. He stood up, and followed her and Mackenzie, with a glance back to see if Kobra was coming too.
His friend sat as still as ever, tense and terrified, clutching his bass like a shield in front of him. "Go on without me," he whispered, and Jet knew it would do no good to argue. At least I tried, he thought, as they left Kobra alone. I did all I could, and I took responsibility for my problems, which helps me even if it doesn't cure his stage fright.
But try as he might to convince himself that a resurgence of the inexorable waves of sadness he was drowning in was a positive thing, it did nothing to cheer him up in the slightest.
He found it difficult to brood about his guilt as he would've liked, though, once he emerged onstage to the roars of the massive crowd. He hadn't expected this many people, but the ones he'd invited had clearly invited their friends, and they had invited people they knew, and so on, and so the lawn's cheering multitudes nearly outnumbered the stars in the evening sky above. They were all there to hear their band play, and as damn tired as he felt, Jet would always feel like playing guitar- now especially because it would distract him and keep him from staring too hard into his memories.
The three of them started in on "Famous Last Words," and Jet smiled sardonically at the fact that he'd written this to help Mikey overcome his depression, and now Kobra was missing it because he'd helped Jet with his trauma. Still, he was determined to make the most of what they had, and tried to look like he was rocking out.
Angel really was enjoying herself, and she seemed to be channeling Frankie's sprit as she jumped around, shredding guitar parts like she'd been doing it for years. Mackenzie, too, was getting comfortable; she still had a bit of a deer-caught-in-headlights (spotlights, really) look around her eyes, but sung with her own vocal style, imbuing the song with new meaning, and it made Jet proud to sing backup for her.
They got through the first chorus, not without another pang of irony at Kobra's absence, but when they hit the second, the crowd's cheers swelled again. Jet wondered why, and no sooner had the thought crossed his mind than the answer arrived in the form of the deep rumble of the bassline. Jet turned and saw Kobra, his face set in steely determination, standing behind the others like he halfway wanted to hide, but he was there and he was playing better than he'd ever done. He glanced up for a second, during which Jet flashed him an honest smile, one that he returned for the first time in weeks.
His friend's willpower encouraged Jet, cleansing him of what little sadness and pain still remained, and he sailed into the solo on a wave of unrelenting happiness. He and Kobra played back-to-back, standing together and rocking out.
The only thing now that made Jet sad about that night was that it had taken them so long to come back to this way of life. It had been too long since he'd headbanged his brains out for the audience; since he'd heard hundreds of voices singing Gerard's super-shiny lyrics in harmony, led by Mackenzie's amazing vocal skill- she definitely deserved this chance to be a rock star- and raised his voice along with them; since his lead guitar parts had had rhythm entwined with them, and a bass to back them all up. But they were here, right now, enjoying it, and that was all that mattered.
He didn't feel bad even when it ended, didn't grieve for the hours or songs they'd killed, but let his joy carry him backstage. He laughed as much as Angel in his semi-delirious relief and exhaustion (he was sweat-spent, not sorrow-spent, and that made him glad, too).
They gathered their music stuff and stepped outside, to be greeted by not the fans they'd expected, but a group of about fifty angry-looking men and women, some still dressed like the Dracs they had once been, brandishing various weapons. Jet felt the happiness drain out of him like air from Angel's messed-up mattress, turning quickly to sickening dread.
His one consolation was the thought that the ex-Dracs couldn't kill them again-but that, too, turned sour when he realized that their enemies (and he wondered what they had done to provoke people to such rage) could torture them for as long as they wanted and never have to worry about accidentally taking their lives.
The one in front, the assumed leader, said to Mackenzie and Angel, "You don't have to stay; we're just here for the Killjoys." And in that frighteningly familiar speech Jet had his answer: the voice and the British accent, which could now ring out without suppression from BLI, belonged to the Drac who had taunted Jet just before shooting him in the face.
Mackenzie bolted, but Angel stayed with a defiant glare. "I'm a Killjoy too, and if you have a problem with them, you have a problem with me."
The man shrugged, said, "Fine," and then introduced himself. "I don't think we were properly acquainted last time we met; I'm Stan, the leader of the Outpost 9 Militia."
"What do you want?" Angel snapped, crossing her arms.
"Well, your Killjoy friends in the living world didn't take your deaths very well and decided that brutally murdering us all and destroying our outpost was the best way to deal with that. They were particularly harsh on me, because I killed you, Jet Star," he added, with a nod at his past victim and present prey.
Jet could think of nothing to say to that, but his friend could.
"Serves you right," Kobra interjected, eyeing Stan warily now that he recognized him, but Stan ignored him.
"We're here to pay you back for the wrongs done to us by your so-called heroic rebellion."
Someone in the group behind him shouted, "Yeah! Let's kick their asses!"
Jet Star tried to be the peacemaker, to help Stan see reason. "Look, we didn't hurt you, and I am very sorry that you went through all that because of us, but it's not our fault. We can't control what our friends did, but I can assure you that if we had been alive, we would never have approved of that kind of thing." "Speak for yourself," Kobra said.
A guy standing to Stan's left started to say, "What about the attack on the Party Bus?" but Stan cut him off and turned to Kobra, who was clearly easier to argue with. "Go on, then, you bastard. You want us all dead, don't you? I've heard about your secret little serial-killer raids on us. I'm just glad that I got to be there when Korse did what served you right and shot you. You barely put up a fight, but then, all cowards are like that- "
He had barely gotten the last words out before Kobra charged forward, his bass still slung over his back, to tackle Stan to the ground and beat the motorpulp out of him, the way he'd threatened to do to countless other Dracs on a regular basis when they were alive. Stan, however, had been expecting that move; he sidestepped causally- he almost gave a bored yawn- and let Kobra fall into the midst of the mob. They set on him, and while the fight he put up could hardly be described as cowardly, he was vastly outnumbered and soon hung limp from pain, his face bleeding, in the grip of four members of the Militia.
Angel took off her guitar and held it over her head like a battle-axe as she advanced on them, bashing a few of them upside the head with it, but then they descended in a horde upon her too, stripped her of her makeshift weapon, and held her down.
"Well, Jet Star?" Stan prompted, with the arrogant smile his advantage warranted. "Aren't you going to attack us too and save your friends, or did you leave your hero complex in the brains I blasted out of you?"
Jet could see his friends struggling vainly in the grips of their captors and quickly ruled out fighting as an option, not that he had really considered it to begin with. "No," he replied quietly. "I don't think it has to come to that. You don't need to hurt us for the pain others have caused you. You can always choose to accept that you beat us once already, and be satisfied and leave. And as for the rest of you," he addressed the Militia as a whole, meeting each set of narrowed eyes in turn, "you don't have to get our blood on your hands. I know we've done some things as Killjoys that have hurt you, even if we've never met face-to-face, but we're through with that now. We won't hunt you down and hurt you anymore, and I for one am truly sorry we did that at all. I am sorry," he repeated in conclusion, dwelling on each word with deep sincerity.
To his relief and gratitude, about half the Militia's members looked at each other sheepishly, put down their pipes and rocks, and simply walked away.
Stan watched them go with disdain and redoubled his taunts to appease the remainder of his army. "That was quite a rambling speech; pity it was so long and dull, or I might've actually listened to some of the points that I don't care about. Very holier-than-thou, too. Are you trying to tell us that God Himself appointed you to rule over the morals of the whole West Coast or something?" They all laughed and joined in with jeers of their own.
Jet ignored the digs; any wounded animal would lash out at what it saw as a threat. He swung his guitar around, hoping it was still in tune, hoping more than he dared that he wouldn't have to use his last defense. He would have to thank Kobra, once they were out of danger, for giving him the idea for it.
The man who had asked about the Bus (Jet was not so distracted that the mention didn't itch with the memory of pain, like an old scar) was rubbing his head after being one of Angel's unfortunate victims, and spoke up again. "Are you gonna go for us with a guitar too? 'Cause you can see how well that worked for your friend." As if on cue, Angel suddenly started fighting against the people holding her down, but it was still useless, and she was quickly subdued with a blow to the stomach.
Jet smiled at him, not pityingly, but honestly, to show that he was telling the truth and his words were not empty threats (he found threats bitter and distasteful, anyway, so he preferred to think of this not as a threat but a warning) when he said, "No, I'm not going to hit you. But if you don't put your weapons down and follow the others by the count of three, I'll make you leave."
They all responded with noises of disbelief and sarcastic fear, and Jet counted up slowly, to give them time to change their minds if they wanted. "One." He surveyed them all in turn once more, to make it clear that he didn't want to have to do this, that they still had a chance, a choice.
None of them took it, instead meeting his eyes with their arbitrary hate.
"Two."
Stan added in a final taunt of, "Oooh, scary, scary! Just like his friend, too, making his little threats to get us all to run away from the Killjoy menace! What're you gonna do, sing at us?"
The militia's loathsome laughter rang out for half a second before Jet Star said, "Three," channeled all his fear and anger down to his fingers, and called out rock and roll's traditional battle cry: "One-two-three-four!"
And for once he didn't care how much damage he did.
He ran as fast as he could, faster than he'd ever gone in his life, and somehow his companion kept pace. Their footsteps scattered the ground behind them as they streaked across the sand, leaving specks of displaced dust and blood in their wake.
He could keep going, never stopping, never tiring, caught up in the crazy panic of perpetual retreat. He could run past days and nights, past all the places he'd never known, maybe even past Cameron once he grew bored and his cheap loyalty waned…
But Sweet Revenge knew it was useless, because he couldn't outrun his memories.
He stopped on the edge of a road, the first sign of civilization he had seen here, and picked a direction to walk along it. It was empty, and even though Cam was next to him as always, he felt more alone than ever. He noticed that the kid was crying silently. He probably was too.
"Cam," he said, and the kid looked up. "I'm sorry you had to see that…again." I'm sorry I had to see it again, too.
Cam shook his head. "It's okay," he responded, without resentment or anger at Revenge for dragging him back to that horrible place in his mind. "Now you get it."
Sweet Revenge stared at him in amazement for a second, before he figured out just how wise of a child he had been, how wise his kid self had made him now.
They arrived at a bus stop, where there was already an old man sitting. Revenge sat next to him and smiled courteously, conscious of the way the old man stared at his bleeding wrists.
"Still messing yourself up, eh, son?" the man asked casually, as if he didn't really care.
Those few words sparked catastrophe in Revenge's mind, floods and fire and windstorms released at last from careful lock and key. He had not gone to his father's funeral out of pure spite, because he had work to do and dependence to shed. And now here he was, the man that Sweet Revenge had spent most of his fragmented childhood and adolescence antagonizing with all he was worth, talking to him as easily as if he'd just got home from work and wanted to hear about his son's day.
Revenge rolled up his sleeves, so his father could see that those were the only cuts on his arms, the only self-inflicted wounds that had ever bled. "Still think I'm a weakling, dad?"
"You died too young." Was that the same sickening pity as always?
"I…had a disagreement with my boss. He didn't take my betrayal too well."
His father's eyes were beaten-down and tired, but narrowed with the same frustration, the same promise of anger that his son had learned to fear, to hate, and then to forget. They stared at him from the past he had tried so hard to escape. "Of course, dying a traitor! I should've known. You live like a rat, you die like a rat."
"I could hurt you," Revenge replied, as years of infuriation welled up in him. "I could beat you the way you beat me."
"I never hit you!" His father's scandalized tone masked his guilt, a technique that had always been one of Revenge's favorite ways of getting critics off his back; he quickly vowed never to use it again. "I never hurt you at all. Don't lie like that."
"It's not a lie, dad," he said quietly. "You might not have left bruises, but you hurt me all the same."
"Oh," said his father, quickly growing harshly sarcastic. "Did I injure your poor, poor, delicate little soul?"
Revenge cut him off before he could start ranting. "Have you heard from Mother?"
His father flinched as he was deftly struck on one of his own soul-bruises. "Yes," he replied after a minute. "I met her down here first thing, like she was waiting for me."
"What'd you say?" Revenge asked nonchalantly.
"We had a fight." Surprise, surprise. "She didn't want to admit she was wrong for giving up, for abandoning us. I said that you might try and take after her, and if so, it'd be her fault. She was furious. We must've screamed back and forth for hours"- just like old times, huh?-"and at some point I admitted to myself that I didn't love her anymore. I don't know when that happened, maybe we just grew apart, but that day I told her goodbye for the last time."
Sweet Revenge wanted to laugh at his fool of a father, stuck in the same rut as always and thinking he was free to judge everyone and be right all the time. But then he noticed the slight crack in his voice, the tears that were rarer than diamonds glistening in the corners of his eyes, and remembered the only time he'd seen his father like this was at his mother's funeral. His father was opening up to him, showing vulnerability.
And for the first time, Sweet Revenge felt sorry for him.
They would have no heartfelt talk, no emotional embrace; his father wasn't that kind of man and neither was he, but they stopped arguing after that. They talked about little things, like the nearby city, how mind-building worked (Revenge had a lot to learn, it seemed), and about the bus stop that had brought them together.
"When does the bus get here?" Sweet Revenge asked, glancing down the road in both directions to see if he could spot it. He couldn't.
"It gets here when you want it to, and no sooner," his father told him. "Makes bus schedules a thing of the past." He smiled an awkward, crooked smile that fit the moment well.
"And where does it run to?"
"Wherever you have to go. It's pretty damn cryptic; took me a while to figure out. It's never the same bus, either. Different people have different buses. Speaking of which, I think this is yours." He glanced down the road the way Revenge had come, and sure enough, there was the bus- if it could be called that.
He recognized it as the scorched, rickety remains of the Party Bus, looking like it had been to Hell and back, literally: it was more a skeleton than a bus with its blown-out windows, broken lights, and decimated remnants of a roof. It screeched to a stop, and a guy he thought was named Johan waved at him from the driver's seat.
The doors creaked open with an awful grinding of broken metal, and Johan called out, "Come on, Leonard! The ride's free!"
His father nodded his approval, and Revenge crossed half the distance to the door before he turned and said, "I'm not weak, dad."
"I know, son," his father replied. "And I'm through sitting here; I found what I was waiting for." He waved, and Sweet Revenge waved back with dry wrists and shirtsleeves as clean as the day he'd got them, and his father walked away.
He realized his tagalong wasn't with him anymore, and started to glance around for him. He was on the point of calling his name when he felt, inexplicably, okay. He no longer felt alone.
He boarded the bus, and before he sat in what was left of a seat, he told Johan, "One thing you should know: Leonard was never my real name. I'm Cameron. It's nice to meet you."