Scratch Your Name: Part 1

[harborshore]

Master Post | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Epilogue



--


Lindsey’s backstage, pushing herself into the tiny space between a stack of cardboard boxes and the speakers and the wall. Her mouth tastes like blood; she’s biting her lip hard to stay quiet. Watching.

Let him go let him go let him go.

She can’t see him--he’s on the ground now--she can’t see him anymore but she can hear everything and she can hear when he just. Stops. No more noise, no more fists, no more.

Steve, she thinks, digging her nails into her palms until she’s shaking, Steve Steve Steve Steve.

He’d started the shows about fourteen months back, after playing too many underground shows in little backroom closets where no one could hear the music, because there was no sound system and no way to rig one up. The audience would sometimes come and scream their way through song after song, but sometimes there wouldn’t be anyone there but the band.

After living with that, playing like that, and dealing with all the bands that broke up because everyone, everyone was scared, Steve had finally said, fuck it.

Within six weeks, he’d mapped out all the locations in the city where you could stay under the radar, put on a show, and not have it sound entirely shitty. And people came to see them, of course they did. Even though the shows had to be in abandoned buildings, in neighborhoods that had been declared unfit to live in; even then, they came.

Another three months and the bands began to stay together, the shows became regular--New York City's worst- and best-kept secret--because the Riot Squad couldn’t catch them as long as the randomized system worked. Well, as long as Steve was the only one who knew in what order the locations were used, and he was the one to send out messages to the right people at the right times. No one else knew beforehand, and no one tattled once they did know. Or, they hadn’t until today.

Lindsey joined Steve's band because he called her up and asked, but what started as helping out a friend soon became a hell of a lot more: it meant having somewhere to go, somewhere to run off to, somewhere to play bass.

The stage was like--the stage felt like home, was what it was, and Lindsey spat at Steve and screamed and fought her way through the songs, wearing shit-kicker boots and her old butchered school uniform. Sometimes she thought about wearing it out, after the show, because people would think she was a school girl, but then they’d see just how short the skirt was, and then they’d think she was one of the hookers who catered to those who wanted little girls, and then they’d realize that she was so not in the right area of the city and that her boots were all wrong for the costume. And then, then she could get some use out of the knife she carried. Some people just didn’t deserve to have balls, you know? But she’d never been stupid. Getting caught impersonating a hooker would have been stupid, and so she only wore her stage costume on the actual stage.

She holds her school uniform now, bundled in her lap. Lucky, she's lucky. She'd been backstage changing into regular clothes, so she could run home right after the show and get back before her sister noticed Lindsey had been out again. But then the Squad came in. And now there’s nowhere to go.

Some of the officers are taking the members of the audience away, cataloging pink hair and green hair and piercings or tattoos (normally hidden by long-sleeved shirts) that carry a heavier penalty-count than going to a show does (perverting the sacred truth of your body, Lindsey can hear her sister in her mind). Some of them are staying on the stage, and they’ve lined the musicians up at the edge.

Everyone had been watching Pete and Greta and Andy play from the wings; it had been so easy for the Squad to round them up. Lindsey’s the lucky one. Lucky.

It’s funny, even though she’s shaking as hard as she is, even though she thinks she’s going to throw up any second now, everything is so clear in front of her, every noise is so loud. She watches her friends standing up under the still-lit stage lights, bathed in red and yellow and blue. Watches the backs of their heads and their shoulders. Their jeans and loud-colored shirts with slogans that break decency codes. Andy's bare back and swirling tattoos. The sweat stains on their clothes. Greta’s little finger occasionally nudges Cassadee’s hand, just a touch, too fast to notice unless you’re looking. Lindsey is.

The officers are talking, telling the few audience members still in the building to stand and watch some more entertainment, because the Squad’s going to hold some executions. They beat Steve to death because he was the organizer (they’d made the whole audience watch that one), but they’re going to shoot the musicians. If Lindsey hadn't been hiding back here, she'd be waiting to get shot as well. Part of her wants to stand up and scream until she gets added to the line-up, because none of it makes any sense and none of it is fair at all, because Steve is dead. Steve is dead.

But she doesn’t move. She’s not stupid. She sits there until every last musician has taken their tumble off the stage: one, two, three, four, gunshots sounding like approval, applause (they are all so strangely graceful when they fall). Last of all, she watches when the officers kill the snitch that got them here (she knows who it was, knows who Steve kicked out only this morning for being a talentless hack) because no one gets to make music, not even people who kill their friends.

And then she walks home, dressed in black for mourning, black for every-day and walks through her front door right before curfew kicks in, and she lies on her bed with her boots on and doesn’t sleep, because she keeps seeing Steve go down, keeps seeing Cassadee’s upturned face, keeps seeing Pete’s smile break open, keeps seeing Greta’s curls, flying.

The colors in her mind won't stop moving, stage lights and spotlights and red spilling dark on the floor.

She never paints in color, normally; she stays within the Guidelines in style if not in subject matter. Somehow it’s harder for her teachers to notice that the picture of Mother with Child doesn’t look like it’s supposed to (the mother’s grip too tight, the baby twisting in pain) if she does it in soft pencil on off-white paper. Ann had said something about it once, about how Lindsey’s art was made up of gray scale subtleties hiding all the edges she's trying not to show.

Lindsey always tries hard to make her art unobtrusively subversive, but she’s so certain, just now, that it’s not enough, that it needs to be more like her music, like kicking and screaming and spitting in people’s faces.


--


In the morning she has breakfast and answers her sister when she asks how she slept: “Fine,” says Lindsey, still in yesterday’s clothes, lip still stinging from where she bit through it. She's leaning to the right to make the rickety kitchen chair stay steady, eyes on her cereal bowl, on the little blue flowers around the rim.

Ann nods and butters her toast. “I’ll be back late; the Academy is hosting a dinner for the graduating students. Are you sure you don’t want to--?”

Lindsey shakes her head, quickly. “Nah, no worries. I don’t feel like sitting still tonight, and the speeches are bound to be dull as fuck.”

Ann sighs. “Lindsey, I know you think it's stupid, but could you not--”

“Sorry, sweetie, I meant they’ll be extremely dull.”

“Thanks. Will you be okay for dinner?”

Lindsey manages a smile. “No, I actually don’t know how to cook and have never learned anything ever because I am in fact useless.”

Ann grins ruefully. “So sometimes it’s hard to remember you’re not my kid sister anymore, okay?”

Lindsey gets up and puts her mug in the sink. On an impulse, she leans down and hugs Ann from behind, murmuring into her shoulder, “I’ll always be your kid sister, Annie, don’t worry.”

Ann’s smiling down at her plate when Lindsey leaves the kitchen, so that was probably a good thing to say.


--


They have Inspector visits, so school is even more unbearable than usual. Inspectors make Lindsey's teachers even more vigilant and conforming than they normally are, so if they notice her sketching when (what) she's not supposed to today, it won’t just be another reprimand. Therefore, Lindsey has to sit up straight and follow the crap Instructions for Today's Work (drawing is supposed to be done in the appropriate style and of the sanctioned subject matter only) instead of falling asleep or working on something else.

Tonight, she promises herself, trying to still her itching fingers, you can start tonight.


--


And start she does. Bent over her desk, Lindsey sketches out the images in her head, stylizes them, simplifying so they can be stenciled and painted on walls quickly: outlines of bodies falling and flying, blood pooling all over, flooding the stage floor, the spotlights with red. There are words wrapping around the bodies and scrawled down the sides of her images: MUSIC IS FORBIDDEN BECAUSE MUSIC KILLS. NO, MUSIC IS FORBIDDEN BECAUSE IT WILL MAKE YOU SEE. NO, MUSIC IS FORBIDDEN BECAUSE IT’S REAL. THEY KILL THE MUSIC IN YOU. She has Steve in there, dark face nothing but a blur where he’s surrounded; she has Greta, nothing but light and glow.

Patrol’s going to wash her paintings off the walls or paint over them faster than she can get them done, but Lindsey looks at the stencils on her desk and promises herself to keep drawing new ones for as long as she has to.


--


It takes her three weeks to map out a route where she knows all the hiding places, knows where she can climb up a fire escape or jump into a dumpster if Patrol comes early or late, or if she forgets time while she’s painting, if, if, if. She likes that she has back-up plans and she likes the secrecy. It makes it safer, but mostly it makes it more real. Like if she can stay anonymous, her art is what people will see; the words and faces she puts on the walls will be the ones that do the talking. Feels like screaming in color, snarling and slamming through walls in acrid shades of spray-paint.

She starts small, at first. Outlines figures dancing along the edge of a park bench and paints pictures behind dumpsters or trash cans. The absence of streetlights in certain parts of the city works out well, too--once she’s gotten up the courage to stay out longer, Lindsey spends a few nights in Greenwich Village covering entire walls in paint.

At night, she waits until Ann leaves for night patrol or goes to sleep, then rolls out of bed, pulls her balaclava on and climbs down the fire escape. It’s not scary; the night’s quiet and still (no breaking curfew), apart from the occasional officers that you have to stay out of the way of, or stray cat. New York got real quiet, ten years ago.

Ann figures out that something is going on, of course she does: she’s not dumb, Lindsey’s sister, or they wouldn’t have picked her for the Academy or for Squad training. She makes noises about sending Lindsey back to live with their mother, but Lindsey reminds her that, hey, “You can't actually decide shit like that for me anymore. Besides, I want to be here. Don’t you want me here, Annie?”

Ann bites at her thumbnail, a nervous habit she's never managed to shake: “That’s not fair. I’m just worried. You’re out past curfew, you don't talk or act or look like you're supposed to so you know what’ll happen if you get caught. I'm just trying to protect you, I just want you to stay in at night.”

“I won’t get caught.” Lindsey sees the look on her sister’s face. “No, I won’t, I’m so careful, I promise.”

“You’d better be.” Ann puts on her gloves, the last of her uniform in place for Patrol. She does two shifts every week; works through two nights and sleeps in afterwards. “I love you, you know.”

“I do.” Lindsey does. She can even admit that it might not be fair to Ann, what she’s doing.


--


The next morning, Ann comes home white-lipped and refuses to tell Lindsey what she’d seen last night, but she teaches Lindsey three code phrases that will tell any guards that catch her that she’s a Trainee for the Squad.

“That means you’ll outrank most of the officers on Patrol, and that should get them to back off. Or, well, it won’t fool them if you’re doing anything illegal, because you wouldn’t if you were actually in the Squad, but if you’re just by yourself, it might--oh, couldn’t you just stop?”

Lindsey looks at her sister, dark eyes under the uniform hat, so worried but for all the wrong reasons. She gave up discussing politics with Ann years ago; it’s one thing to love someone and want to put them right, but when the someone in question just doesn’t know why they're wrong, has no idea what the real issues are, and doesn’t have the framework for ever understanding, god. There’s nowhere to take the conversation.

“No, no, I can’t just stop,” she says, as calmly as she can.

Ann’s hand clenches on the table. “Then repeat them again.”

“I know them.”

“Repeat them again.”

Lindsey rolls her eyes and repeats the code phrases over and over until she's word-perfect, rattling them off without thinking.

Ann breathes out, shakily. “Just--just remember them, okay?” And she gets up, pulling her gloves off and dropping them on the table. They're weirdly monochromatic (all dark blue) against the peeling paint. “I’m going to sleep,” she says over her shoulder.


--


Of course, the one night Lindsey could have used the code phrases she learned so painstakingly, she gets caught in the act.

THEY KILL THE MUSIC IN YOU is drying on the wall and she's adding the last bit of yellow to the stencil of Greta’s silhouette, when she sees the two Patrolmen moving into the alley. Lindsey grabs for her backpack with her left hand and swings her right arm out, mace held high (so illegal, so illegal, but that hardly matters at this point), and manages to get the officer closest to her.

He curses and fumbles, clawing at his eyes, and she takes advantage of the ten seconds it gives her to push him into his buddy who’s coming up behind him. Thank fuck they walk in pairs, no more than two, but she has to get away right the fuck now if she wants to avoid the rest of the unit.

Lindsey turns the corner too fast, she can feel it, and she slips, faceplanting spectacularly and slamming her right knee into the concrete, scraping it open, scrabbling to her feet to keep going despite how much it hurts.

Not getting caught would be a great ending to a shitty, shitty night, she thinks. Fuck, if I'd worn gloves I could have just tossed the paint cans. The backpack isn’t exactly helping. And why hadn't she worn her balaclava, anyway? Goddammit.

Oh, hell, why can’t she figure out where to go? She knows these streets, knows where the alleys turn, but right now she can’t even keep track of the street names. Shit, what comes after Legacy Lane, where the hell am I now, how the fuck am I supposed to get out of this?

She almost trips over that water post that some genius put up right behind a corner, the one she knows is there, and she can hear them behind her, closer and closer, shit fuck shit shit--and of course some genius has removed the dumpster she was hoping to hide in; there’s nothing but bare brick wall and a torn-open bag of trash left on the ground.

Damn, damn, damn. She turns to keep going. forgets about the grate and trips and falls again, this time wrenching the knee she scraped a few turns back and almost passing out from the pain. Fuck, how does she have such shitty luck, seriously?

“Over here!” She looks up--what the hell--and sees a face, dark eyes, someone waving from a fire escape. “Get up here, but do it fucking fast, okay?”

And yeah, what else can she do, so she hops over to the fire escape, awkwardly climbing up the metal ladder. She's trying hard not to hit her knee against the rungs or put any weight on it because it just hurts, spikes of pain lancing up her leg. This makes climbing seriously complicated, but she finally reaches the level where he--no, there’s two of them--they’re sitting, an open window behind them.

“Get in,” one of them says, dark hair in his eyes, “Bert’ll distract Patrol.” Bert giggles, high and sharp, and starts climbing down the outside of the fire escape, disturbingly limber and fast.

Lindsey half-crawls, half-falls through the window, catching herself against the wooden floor, wincing at the sting of the splinters in her palms.

Shuffling around, she sees him manage a much smoother slide through the window than she did.

She clears her throat. “So who are you, exactly?”

“Frank,” he says, not adding anything else, like, oh, why he’s breaking curfew, for instance. He’s turning back toward the street, listening intently, probably for whatever his friend’s planning to do to distract them. Lindsey’s not sure how that scrawny little dude is supposed to do any good against two Patrol officers plus backup, but whatever. That's his headache, and his friend’s.

She can’t ignore her knee anymore, so she stretches her leg out in front of her to see if she can figure out how bad it is, all the while keeping an eye on Frank. It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate the rescue, but--yeah.

Taking stock of her surroundings, she notices the bare floor and tattered wallpaper, strips hanging down and making freaky shadows in the cold light from the street. Probably no one has even lived here since the great “cleaning” efforts of ten years ago, when the less-than-savory parts of the city were stripped of everything, down to electricity and water, and thousands of people were forcibly moved. They’ve started to move people back in, mostly low-level government officials (Lindsey and Ann live in one of those apartments about an hour away) but she knows they haven’t gotten far with the efforts to get people to return. It’s common knowledge that the electricity doesn't work properly here yet, that the heating is patchy and the communication networks go down at least once a day. Just as it’s also common knowledge that Patrol officers never come down to these neighborhoods when you actually need them, as opposed to when there's a demonstration or illegal handouts of food going on. Or in the middle of the night when you’re trying to paint.

Ann tells Lindsey about the move-back initiatives sometimes, like it’ll be an encouragement to stop going out at night and play nice at school, because at least the government is trying. Right.

Not that tonight doesn’t make Ann’s pleas to stay at home sound like a fucking great idea. Lindsey picks at her jeans gingerly, trying to get the fabric to separate from what must be pretty fucking nasty scrapes underneath, given that she’s still bleeding through the fabric. It hurts, dammit. She can’t get her breathing to slow down and her hands are shaky.

“Fuck,” she mutters, fighting the low, pain-laced nausea. Throwing up would be epically terrible and potentially loud.

Frank turns. “Oh, for--,” he kneels next to her, bats her hands away. “Let me--I do shit like this all the time.”

He pulls a knife out of his pocket, slits the jeans and peels the fabric away fast, and fuck, yes, that hurts. Lindsey bites her lip.

“You ok?” he asks.

She shakes her head irritably. “I’m fine,” she says, “It’s not the first time I’ve fallen down or anything.”

“Pretty nasty though,” he says. “Bert has some booze; we can pour it on your leg when he gets back.”

“He’ll be--I mean, there were a lot of them.”

Frank grins. “Nah, don’t worry; Bert’s good at this shit. He’ll get them some blocks down, then get Mik--huh.” He trails off, shaking his head. “I probably shouldn't just babble about our secrets to you, right? Since we just met and all.”

“I’ve no idea where you were going with that, don't worry.”

“All right,” Frank says easily, and bends back down to look more closely at her cut. “You’ve got some dirt and stuff in this too, and it's swelling a hell of a whole lot.” He sits back and looks at her consideringly. “Actually, you know what? Forget waiting for Bert, I'll take you back to ours and then we can help you out.”

She grits her teeth. “Or I could go back to my apartment.”

“You could, but I bet that shit’s hurting. You totally wrenched it when you fell, I saw you. And we’re close; you live pretty far away, right?” He looks like he thinks he's being clever--all smirk and earnest eyes.

She wants to tell him that mixing the two doesn't work, but settles for glaring. “How the hell would you know that?”

“We know the people who live around here, and dude, you don’t. But it’s not like we didn’t notice your drawings.”

She knows Patrol usually washes her stuff off two days after it’s painted at the most, so Frank and Bert and--other people?--must really have been watching her. Weird.

Something buzzes and Frank clicks open the phone on his wrist.

“You done?”

Lindsey can’t hear the answer, but Frank’s shoulders slacken under his thin T-shirt, so she guesses it’s good news, anyway.

He clicks it shut again and says, “Yeah, Bert got them to go away, but he’s not coming here again, in case this batch of assholes are smarter than the usual idiots. So. C'mon, you know you have to deal with the knee before you can get yourself home.”

“I--fine.” She’s still a little suspicious, but he’s right about the knee; it’s getting pretty fucking awful. That last fall pretty much made sure she won’t be able to walk on it without help or painkillers or both. Ann will just have to be worried, again.

Lindsey swallows down the bad taste in her mouth and motions at Frank, who promptly helps her up. For someone so short, he’s surprisingly sturdy. They manage the fire escape without any terrible accidents (though they have a couple of close calls when his elbow knocks against her cheek and her hair gets tangled in his lip ring. But then they navigate the two blocks to the--giant warehouse? Huh. Frank doesn't seem to be concerned about the patrols at all, and they don't meet any, so maybe Bert actually managed to provide a sufficient distraction.

Some kind of secret button-pressing business goes on by the door, and then they’re let upstairs.

It’s basically one giant room with a lot of mattresses on the floor, one corner filled with fancy-looking screens and equipment and another with a bunch of gray filing cabinets with stacks of paper on top of them. Some guy is fiddling with the screens. She’s honestly not that concerned, because she thinks her leg might be trying to fall off at this point.

“Frank,” she says, tightening her fingers on his shoulder. He winces and she feels bad, but she needs to sit down right the fuck now, and she tells him so.

“Shit, yeah,” Frank responds, clearing off a chair and easing her into it.

He digs out a first-aid-kit from a box under the closest table and upends the peroxide bottle over her leg, looking perplexed when only a few drops fall out. Rolling his eyes, he digs into the kit again and pulls out some packets, ripping one open. “I hate it when we run out, these napkins are fucking stupid,” he says, dabbing at her knee and opening a new packet when the first wipe gets dirty.

Lindsey grits her teeth. “Maybe some alcohol, like you said before, in the room?.” Frank nods and scrambles up to rummage through a blue sports bag.

“Aha!” He says triumphantly and returns to her, holding a bottle of vodka aloft. “It’s a waste of good booze, but whatever.” The vodka stings like fuck and she swears, kicking at him. Dodging her leg, he grabs for the wipes again and finishes cleaning her wound. “What’d you trip on anyway?”

She knows he’s trying to distract her, but decides not to call him on it. Not like she doesn’t need a distraction. “The curb first, and then there was that last grate,” she says, trying hard to ignore how much her knee fucking hurts. Usually, she’s not this much of a pussy about getting injured--can take a lot, Steve always said-- but tonight’s a special case for real.

Frank’s looking at her leg. “You should probably…” He pulls at her pants.

She manages a look of amusement. “If that’s your come-on, you’re gonna have to try again.”

“Man, no.” He’s grinning again, “Just, it’s pointless to bandage it if you’re going to scrape it open again getting out of your jeans. Mikey’ll lend you pants, or, I mean, you can have some of mine, but I think they’d be a little short.”

“Maybe a little.”

“You shouldn't make short jokes about the man fixing your knee, you know.” She waves her hand airily, and he snickers, raising his voice. “Mikey! Can…” He pauses, gestures at her.

She realizes he's waiting for her name. “What--oh. Lindsey.”

“Can Lindsey borrow some pants?”

Mikey doesn’t seem to be reacting, hunching across the keyboard and staring at a screen that flickers through image after image super-fast fast– she can’t see what’s on there from where she’s sitting, but he certainly seems to find it interesting enough. It’s hard to see much of him, since he’s wearing some kind of a hat and a black hoodie that looks like it belongs to someone much less scrawny (he’s swimming in it).

Frank sighs. “Mikey! Come on, pay some--”

Mikey finally looks up. “What?”

“Pants, I mean, I need, Lindsey has to borrow some. Of yours.”

Mikey gets up, pushing the rickety chair away and walks over to them. He's tugging at his knit cap and trying to push his hair back underneath it. “What pants?” he says, slowly, peering at them both over his glasses that have slid down his nose.

“Maybe not ones you like, I think we have to cut them open so she can get them on, see?” Frank indicates the slash he made in her jeans.

Despite being in kind of amazing pain, Lindsey has to stifle a giggle. It’s possible they’re not all that practical. Pants, sure, but-- “Ice?”

Frank looks at her. “Ice! I’m a fucking idiot. Shit, do we have any ?”

Mikey nods. “Kitty and I just got the electricity to work again a few hours ago, rerouted power from the neighborhood grid, so, uh, yeah. There’s ice.”

Lindsey’s pretty much resigning herself to spelling everything out for these boys. “So could someone maybe get me some? I’ll take my pants off, I promise.”

Frank waggles his eyebrows and she just knows he's going to make a terrible joke, but Mikey flicks him in the forehead and quirks an eyebrow at him, and Frank subsides. Lindsey's impressed, actually.

They manage the pants-removal and the icing of the knee with as little damage to Lindsey’s dignity as possible. Mikey’s quiet, mostly shuffles around and hands Frank things when he asks for them; he probably wants to get back to his screens. They both agree that Lindsey ought to stay the night.

As Frank puts it, “No need to make your knee swell even more--people are going to think you have three boobs and one just slid really low down.”

Mikey rolls his eyes. “Frank, shut up. No, but we have a mattress. Over there. An extra one, like.”

Bert walks in just as they’re pulling her new pants up. They’re a pair of raggedy sweats that are apparently Mikey’s or possibly communal; she doesn’t think they’ve been washed for a long time, but that mostly makes them soft. Whatever, they’re gray anyway, it’s not like dirt shows on gray.

He’s jittery, Bert, coming over to them and tugging on Frank’s arm to get him off to the side, talking to him in a low voice. From the hand movements, Lindsey thinks Bert is probably demonstrating his great diversion maneuver.

And then Frank slings an arm around his neck and tries to climb onto his back. Since Bert’s not nearly big enough to hold him up, they fall over and end up in a giggling tangle on the floor.

Lindsey looks at Mikey, who’s still standing next to her, and his mouth actually quirks a little in what looks like a smile.

“They do that a lot?”

Mikey nods. “Yeah, they--they’re kind of a menace.”

“Seemed more dangerous than silly, earlier.”

“They can be, I guess.” He gives her that tiny half-smile again and offers her a hand up. She takes it, grabs her backpack off the floor and he steers her carefully over to the corner, clearing off piles of what looks like blueprints from a mattress. “You can sleep here, if that’s okay?”

She nods, smiling. He’s sweet. Fidgety and weird-looking, but sweet. “Yeah, that’s fine. D’you have a blanket or something?”

“Uh, yeah, I think--” He roots around in one of the piles and comes up with what she thinks was probably once a bright-blue blanket with cloud patterns, and hands it to her. It’s soft and smells like cigarette smoke, or maybe like someone's grandpa's cologne.

“Thanks,” she says. “I really appreciate--” she waves her hands around, “all the help and stuff.” She looks over to include Frank in the thanks, but he’s not looking, hands tight on Bert's shoulders, talking low and fast.

Mikey pokes at her to get her attention back. “Bert is sad,” he explains, but doesn’t volunteer any other information. She doesn’t ask. There are a lot of reasons people could be sad.

“Thank them in the morning,” Mikey advises, and she nods. He ambles back over to the first aid kit and comes up with some pills, which he gives her together with a bottle of water. She accepts them gratefully and swallows them before settling in. The mattress isn’t what she’d call comfortable, and she has to squirm around a bit, arranging a pillow to support her leg before she can lie down without making her knee hurt.

She’s sure she won’t be able to sleep; she hates sleeping in strange places, and tonight was such an epic fucking disaster that by all rights she should stay awake and figure out how to make it never happen again. But apparently running from Patrol and getting hurt takes energy--she can feel herself crashing as soon as she closes her eyes.


--


It seems like barely any time has passed at all when someone shakes her insistently. She opens her eyes to another tiny guy with tattoos and a lip ring (god, this is an underground group if she ever saw one--Frank’s arms were covered in tattoos, and so is this guy’s, damn, how do they not get discovered) who’s looking furious, in a he-might-attack-any-second way.

“So, how about telling me who you are and why we shouldn’t kill you, hmm?”

She struggles into a sitting position and glares right back at him. “It’s not like I fucking asked to be brought back here. Why the hell should I tell you who I am? You can go first.”

“Fine, we can start over: I’m Brian, I run this show, and now you can go right ahead and tell me who the fuck you are.”

“Lindsey, and Frank brought me here because I’d hurt my knee and I couldn’t make it back home.”

“How did you hurt your knee?” His arms are crossed in a way she can tell means Serious Business and she's just too tired for this.

“Trying to not get caught by Patrol,” she bites off, really furious now. Last night was fucking enough, this shit is just not on, and her knee’s throbbing so badly she thinks she might throw up if she doesn’t get some kind of painkillers soon. If this asshole keeps talking at her, she’s not going to be responsible for what she ends up saying. Or doing.

“And what were you doing? Sneaking back from your boyfriend’s?” And fucking shit, of course he’s going there--like the only reason she’d be out would be the only sneaking-around the government doesn’t care about. Sex, as long as you’re safe about it and it’s with the appropriate person, doesn’t even rate a reprimand: it gets you a stern talking-to from a preacher, but no more than that.

“I was painting,” she says, shortly. This guy doesn’t need to know what or where.

“Brian, lay off,” comes from behind them, and Mikey shuffles into view. “Frank says she’s the one who’s been doing the music series and that he and Bert got her out of the way of the 3 AM Patrol last night.” He hands Lindsey a water bottle and two blue pills that she recognizes as the same kind he gave her last night, so she swallows them and smiles at him with gratitude.

Brian looks calmer. “Those were a lot of words, Mikeyway,” he says, sounding mildly amused, and then turns back to Lindsey. “Is he telling the truth? You’ve been doing the music series?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh. They’re not bad.”

She looks at him incredulously; she can’t help it. “They’re not bad? What happened to ‘tell me why I shouldn’t kill you’?”

“Oh, the jury’s still out on that, but decent art is a point in your favor.” And he turns and walks off, leaving Lindsey to stare at Mikey.

He shakes his head. “Brian isn’t--he’s not himself right now.”

“Fucking crazy,” Lindsey says decisively, taking the hand Mikey offers to stagger up onto her feet.

“No, that was always true, I think. He’s just--I guess he’s kind of sad too, like Bert.”

“Okay,” she says, concentrating on not tripping over any of the debris on the floor. “So, is there any breakfast to be had around here, or should I just make my way home?”

“No, no, we have breakfast stuff. Coffee?”

“Fuck yes,” and they grin at each other. Well, his is less of a grin than a little quirk of his mouth, but based on what she's seen so far, she thinks that might be what he does when he smiles.

After a while, everyone (and there are a fair amount of people up now, rising from mattresses or coming out of the hallway off to the side) has grabbed something to eat. Breakfast is served on a big table that two guys, one tall goofy-looking one and yet another short tattooed one, unfold and load the food onto.

Lindsey and Mikey are hunched against the wall, splitting a stale doughnut and working on one cup of shitty coffee each. Somehow all of it tastes good, even after her earlier nausea. She supposes she had a long night, so it stands to reason she'd be hungry now.

Most people aren’t saying hi, just giving her a once-over and walking away, and she guesses why even before Mikey says that, “No one here is big on new people.”

“It’s important to know you can trust someone, right?” she says, thinking about people who shouldn’t be told things and are anyway, and Mikey nods, eyes on his coffee.

After a while Frank comes over and settles in against her other side, and grins at her when she offers him the other doughnut she’d gotten off the table. “Awesome!” he says. “I hate it when I’m late for breakfast, all the good stuff is gone.”

“Bert asleep?” Mikey asks.

Frank nods, looking tired.

“Did you sleep?” Mikey persists.

Frank looks up, a quick smile fleeting across his face. “If you’re telling me to take better care of myself, Mikeyway, the world might truly be coming to an end.”

Mikey looks mutinous. “You get sick a lot,” he mutters.

Frank’s giggling now. “Yeah, but I never took a heater into the shower with me.”

“Shut up.”

Lindsey looks between them and Frank grins. “We lived together,” he explains.

“Aha.” She turns to Mikey. “Is that true, a heater in the shower?”

“I was cold,” he protests, his cheeks going a dull red.

Frank’s laughing for real now. “Yeah, his bro--” he swallows, “I mean, all our friends used to leave me little notes about crazy shit Mikey did, so I could make sure he didn’t die.”

“That’s nice of them,” she says, nodding earnestly and trying not to laugh, since it seems like Mikey is pretty embarrassed about all this.


--


After breakfast, about ten or so of the people who were hanging out around the table, including Mikey and Frank and Brian, walk off and disappear through a door Lindsey hadn't seen before.

“I guess I can show myself out,” she says to herself, trying not to be hurt that Mikey and Frank didn’t say goodbye--they’d just met, seriously, it’s not like they were friends--and starts the laborious process of getting up off the ground on her own.

“No, you're not leaving before the meeting is over,” she hears, and it’s one of the guys who didn’t join the meeting, standing uncomfortably close. He’s big and tall, so it’s sort of intimidating. Even if his small glasses don't inspire a whole lot of terror.

She backs up too fast and bites down on a curse when her knee protests loudly and she almost folds. “Says who?”

“Says Brian, actually, and Chantal. No leaving until we know more about you.”

“Actually, she shouldn’t leave at all,” says the dark-haired curvy girl sitting at the computer, and waves them both over. She grins crookedly and holds out her hand for Lindsey to shake. “I’m Kitty,” she says, “it’s nice to have you here, but--did you see if the Patrol who nearly caught you last night had cameras?”

Lindsey shakes her head. “No idea.”

“I’m pretty sure they did,” Kitty says, clicking and enlarging a window where, shit, there’s a fairly clear photo of Lindsey in the alley, face half-turned toward the camera; it must have been taken right when she heard them coming. “It’s on all the police scanners,” Kitty continues, sounding sympathetic, “I haven’t seen a name attached to it yet, but IDs usually don’t take too long.”

Shit, shit, shit. That means Ann will see it, that means--does that mean Ann will ID her, turn her in? Lindsey’s actually not sure. Oh, they're trying to talk to her. “What?”

“You're definitely going to need to stay here now,” Kitty says, biting her lip and adjusting the strap of her tank top. “At least until it gets buried or you figure out a way to fly under the radar.”

“She's staying for other reasons too,” a sharp voice comes from behind them. Great, Brian again. Lindsey turns to face him, bracing herself for another yelling session, which she is fucking not in the mood for, thanks. He's got a woman with him now, short and curvy and redheaded, mouth tight like she's angry too. Why does everyone here persist in being angry at her, when she's doing something they should like? It makes no sense. Frank had seemed enthusiastic about her art and he’d practically talked her into coming back with him, so his friends could at least pretend to trust his judgment, right?

She opens her mouth to tell them how they might consider being more open minded; she knows they're underground revolutionaries and therefore suspicious by default. It’s just, they know she's doing illegal street art, shouldn’t that be enough evidence that they’re all on the same side here? Before she can say anything, though, she sees Frank behind the stone faced duo; he's making frantic shushing gestures so she subsides, waiting for them to talk first.

The woman speaks first. “Brian says you nearly got caught by Patrol doing street art.”

“That's true,” Lindsey says cautiously. “I got hurt and Frank helped me get back here.”

“And now there's a convenient picture of you out there, so you have to stay.”

Kitty intervenes. “Chantal, that's not fair.”

Chantal shrugs. “I call 'em like I see 'em. Now if Miss Ballato here could maybe elaborate on her reasons for being out late at night, painting pretty pictures on the walls, I'd be a happier woman, seeing as how we have to let her stay.”

Lindsey flushes. “It's none of your business why I do what I do, and you don't have to let me stay. I can leave, I can hide somewhere else, and, and how do you know my name, anyway?”

Brian crosses his arms. “We know your name because it was on the ID card in your wallet and we ran a search, which is how we know your sister walks the night patrol down in the Bronx and is in the process of being recruited to the Squad.”

She bristles. That is so fucking not on. “You went through my stuff? You had no fucking right--”

Chantal's gaze sharpens. “We have every right. You came to us, princess; feel free to go hide with your sister, Grade-A Captain candidate instead. I'm sure she'd be thrilled. Actually, I'm sure she'd get you out of it if you just asked.”

Flaring up, Lindsey can't keep herself from sounding angry. “Don't fucking bring my sister into this. She thinks I go out to get drunk and she lets me, because she doesn't believe in the curtail-and-restrict system, and she thinks if I see enough bad shit happen, I'll start acting like a normal person and she won't have to worry anymore.” She stops, horrified at how much she just told them.

They're both looking at her now. Chantal half-turns to a guy standing behind them. “Ray, what do you think?”

Ray clears his throat, fiddling with the pen he's holding. “I guess,” he says, in a high squeaky voice, “she might end up being useful, if she's Ann Ballato's sister, maybe?”

Chantal tilts her head a little and nods.

“Okay,” Brian says, looking at them both. He turns back to Lindsey. “Okay, you can stay.”

The implications of that are too much to deal with: they're not going to fucking use her against her sister, she just won’t let them do that. She's trying to figure out if she wants to just march out or yell or throw something or sit down and get the weight of her knee, but she takes too long, so they walk off, deep in a new conversation about Patrol changeovers. There's nothing much left to do but to sit down in frustration, then. She wants her sketch books; she wants her knee not to hurt; she wants, wants, wants to call her sister and apologize but she's not going to give in like that.

Looking up, she sees Mikey and Frank whispering furiously and then Frank sidles over to her. “You're not spying, are you? I mean I don’t think you are, but I hope you aren’t. Because that would be shitty.” Behind him, Mikey sighs audibly.

“Real subtle interrogation skills, Frank,” he calls and walks over to them.

She shakes her head at Frank. “I'm really not. Spying, I mean. And why’d you tell me to be quiet, back there?”

Frank shrugs. “Wanted to see how you’d react, I guess. You seem legit, but I still don’t know why you do what you do.”

Lindsey tries to figure out a way to answer him that won't--she doesn't want to tell the whole story, she doesn't, even if he seems like a good kid. “I was,” she starts, and pauses, rubbing at her face, “I was there when a bunch of bad stuff happened, when Patrol did a bunch of awful shit, and people died, and I just--I wanted to paint about it, so I just did. I do.”

“You do, a lot,” Frank agrees. “Bert found one they didn't paint over a few weeks back, in that junkyard on Main, you know?”

She nods. That was practically the first one she'd done: Steve and Pete, spread-eagled on the wall, dark silhouettes against exploding red behind them. THEY KILL THE MUSIC IN YOU.

“Anyway,” Frank continues, after glancing at her to make sure she's not going to say anything, “We liked it and then you did more, so we started keeping track, and then we told Brian about it, and he told Chantal. I don't know why they were so weird just now; they were totally excited when they saw the pictures--they're fucking good, you know, and Ger--I mean, people liked them. A lot.”

Mikey looks tired. “You can say his name, you know.”

Frank reaches for him, curves a hand around his shoulder, fast, a little brush of a touch. “Fine, fuck,” he says, tone gentle, “Gerard liked them.” He turns to Lindsey. “Gerard wa--Gerard is Mikey's older brother.”

She doesn't want to ask, but has to: “Where is he?”

Mikey shakes his head at Frank. “Not here,” he says to Lindsey. “He's not here.”

She gets that they're not telling her everything. Fine. “So,” she says, “Now that I'll be staying here for the foreseeable future,” and doesn't that just twist uncomfortably--she's never liked being stuck in one place, and now she really, really is, “what is there to do in this fine establishment?”

They look at each other again, and it's obvious like this, how long they've known each other. She and Steve--she swallows hard, blinking--she and Steve used to do that, communicate with hand gestures and telling looks that no one else could decipher and she misses that, dammit.

Mikey clears his throat. “You could help me, I guess. I watch a lot of networks and communication lines and you could help, I think.”

She can't help herself. “Isn't that kind of a dumb idea, if I'm a spy?”

Mikey shrugs. “Nah, I pretty much know how much information should be coming in and from whom, so I'll be able to tell pretty well if you're hiding information.”

Frank grins at them both. “This is going to work out well, I can just tell,” he sings out the last line in a high, nasal voice and giggles at himself, then starts dancing around Mikey, repeating the line, getting louder and poking at Mikey's face.

Mikey rolls his eyes. “He's obnoxious,” he informs Lindsey, deadpan, trying to fend off Frank's flailing arms and failing because Frank just moves a little faster than him.

She grins, she can't help it, “So why do you put up with him?”

“He grows on you. Like mold.”

“Like the mold in your sink, you mean,” Frank says, attempting to climb onto Mikey's back. Given that Mikey's insanely scrawny, Lindsey's not surprised when he folds. Frank pushes at him. “You suck at this.”

Better head this off before it turns into amateur wrestling night. “Boys, boys,” she says, “Teach me how to keep track of intelligence reports instead, I can't referee wrestling matches with my knee like this.”

Wonder of all wonders, they actually listen to her and walk over to what Lindsey's already dubbed Mikey's corner in her head, the one that is three tables away from where Kitty has her stuff set up.

They spend a few hours showing Lindsey how to work the screens. Thankfully, they're not hugely complicated; she just has to keep track of which report she's accepted and downloaded and which ones are still on the network. It’s fun to learn--the equipment is set up to be a mix of old tech and new tech, and while she learned new tech in school, she’s never seen some of these older screens and units before. Mikey shrugs and says using old tech makes it easier to break into the governments communication systems, because those systems were built on older coding.

Lindsey also has to make sure she gets certain key sequences down, because, as Mikey puts it when he demonstrates, “If you press the green key before the Enter key, doom and disaster will strike.”

“Doom and disaster?”

“He means the network will go down, and it'll be a bitch to get it back up,” Frank clarifies from where he's leaning on Mikey's chair. He gets bored fast, so when the demonstration keeps going for more than fifteen minutes, he wanders off and comes back periodically to pull at Mikey's hair and steal his glasses or his hat. Mikey mostly rolls his eyes and hits at him ineffectually in retaliation.

“It wouldn’t work,” he says, when Lindsey asks why he doesn't smack Frank for real. “Or, I mean, if I yelled or did stuff every time he was annoying, it wouldn’t work when I needed it to.”

“I can't believe you haven't killed him yet,” she says, grinning.

“Usually I just get back at him later, it’s totally easier. And it’s fun to, like, try and think of something appropriately devious, that is. Come on, show me that sequence again.”

“When are you going to let me at it by myself, man?”

“After you show me that a few more times and you can time it with the other fiddly bits.”

“I like your technical terms there,” she says, and concentrates again. Technical stuff has always been something she has to work at, has to repeat a bunch of times until she remembers, but then she's rock-solid on it. She'll get this down too, she knows; it just might take her a while. Learning the bass took a while, too.


--


Master Post | Part 2 |