SING.

“What would you want, Gerard?” god, was it sad that I even found her appalling tense usage, on paper, cute? I wasn’t even looking at her and this annoyed me, she couldn’t have made me feel this. She was probably drugging me, and that was certainly what the terrible sentiment was. The things I was feeling towards her, the angry kiss, it was an overstepping Better Living spy drugging me and cooking for my friends, but no more. She was taking over my life like a cankerworm flooding my chest with unwitting salvage and taking all the nutrients from my poor body. No more of this.

“I want you to leave.” The room around me fell silent as I confronted her, the venomous sore worming its painful path into my heart, my family. Girl looked at me with hatred in her eyes. I had already lost her to this demon, who else was I going to lose? Motorbaby approached me with determination creasing her facial expression.

She wagged her finger at me, motioning for me to lean down, conspiratorially, and so I did. Crack! She slapped me, her small palm creating a red crease in the desert scorched line of my jawbone. It wasn’t so much the sharp pinching pain of that refrain, but the cold look in her blue hued gray eyes that made me want to curl into a small ball and cry for forgiveness. In lieu of that I bit my lip, resisting one of my ‘long gone’ cowardly urges. She stalked to the other side of the room, haughtily rejecting my sadness with her reproaching footsteps. Doctor Death-Defying wheeled over with her, supporting her with his arm around her back. Show Pony sided with him, for the obvious reasons of my supposed new lack of authority. I was a sub-leader, in previous tenses, but Battery changed all that. She couldn’t just leave and let me live with the reproach, she couldn’t just prove herself to be a spy so that I could have the glory. She had to be the one on the side of right.

Women.

Mikey and Ray began to crawl towards the group opposite, though Battery still stared at me, as I watched my life fly away in wisps of gaseous tears, never formed, and graceful steps, filled with hate, before me.

“Mikey, come on, you’re my brother!” He nodded his head solemnly, his expression plastered into one of stolid impassiveness. Frank followed the rest, his head hung low, unable to meet with my pleading eyes. I felt the red mark where Girl had slapped me burn in fluctuation with the new rouge of my cheeks. Rogue battlements still burned my heart where she had stomped on it, and thrown it away like worthless trash, though.

“Gerard,” The Doctor’s voice flew and shattered through the power chord of my breaking ego as if he were a tall man, standing stagnant at nine feet high, “We made contact at the rendezvous with NewsAGoGo, that’s to say Mikey and Ray did. I told them to ask about any spy activity in the desert and about Korse finding us and turning our station into a fireball. It wasn’t that he found the station through an informant; it was that automated drones called flies on the wall attach to anyone leaving the city. They were trying to track down a citizen gone reprobate and they found us instead. It was an accident, Battery couldn’t have known.” I looked at them all, lined up as if they were my executors, but still thinking they were my saviors. It was a hideous site.

“But there was a chance that she was… there’s still a chance!” I grabbed t my tormentor’s arm, Battery, and threw her to them, “If you want her so much, have her. I won’t go down with you. She’s still bad news.” I looked to them, hoping, praying that they would stop me from taking the step out the door. Hoping I could retrace the step that flew so easily out of my mouth, but paralyzed my feet at the thought.

“She’s not a traitor, Better Living can’t even penetrate the desert with spies, News is at the top of the food chain and he knows of every spy, she’s not one. Even wait until next week! CherriCola will say the same, and she’s in charge of spies and task forces!” This was Frank now, clearly looking for some reprieve to my tirade of leaving.

“You’re my family and she’s not part of it. If she wants to be part of it, she could have left back when the pills first started, she shouldn’t have taken pills, none of us did, why does she get a free pass?” The gelidity of their stares and wide open mouths shocked me even more. They never understood did they? All those years of friendship and they didn’t know the way my mind worked; they couldn’t have guessed that it would come to this confrontation?

“I never took the pills.” That was Battery, her mousy voice finally perking up. Dr. Death had been helping her with speech therapy, though she still used the notebook as often as she could. It wasn’t fair that her basic weapons training was neglected for speech, she should have been talking her entire life, it wasn’t right that she got special treatment because she was a mute.

“That doesn’t mean you never wanted to. Didn’t it hurt? Seeing mommy and daddy waste away in their emotionless wreck of a world? Didn’t you just want to shut your pouty little mouth and be rid of it, the voices in your head? Did you ever think of just taking all of their pills and offing yourself? At least it would be painless, right!” Heavens, did that bring back memories, the remembrance of feeling that way, so long before the pills were even circulated, before California was decimated.

“Funny, I never thought about killing myself. Have you ever? Maybe that’s why you’re so goddamn unstable!” She shouted now, her voice cracking at inappropriate intervals, making it even more terribly infuriating.

“I’m unstable? Talk or shut the fuck up, don’t do a mixture Little Miss Muppet! And at least I’m alive, you’re just a husk, breathing in the sunlight until it chokes you.” She gasped in sarcasm, mock horror crushing her features beneath the over theatrical mask. Who knew she had a personality, anyone?

“At least I don’t kiss people when I’m trying to kill them!” The reactions of people around the room were mixed, but clearly they didn’t know what was going on. We came closer to each other, our steps escalating as our interminable anger did so.

“At least I don’t put people I’m supposed to love in danger!” She turned away from me, and faced the others. An arrogant smirk crossing her face as her retort came spinning out of her tiring mouth.

“Whatever, cold blooded killer!” Oh, how painful. I’m dying, seriously, that hurt. (Note the sarcasm consciousness)

“Whatever, home wrecker!” I turned away from her. Now we stood, back to back, arguing futilely with the best insults we could come up with in the split nanosecond that one person’s speech desisted, whence the other commenced speech.

The family, which I once had, looked on in bitter morbid fascination, until they decided it, was enough. Mikey, peacekeeper as he ever was, cut in, just as we were coming to blows.

Hesitating, he spoke in a soft voice as we lowered our ascending fists, “I’m confused, and so is everyone else. Tell us what’s going on between you two.” It was almost plausible, his nonviolent way of dealing with the situation, but the only way to keep the tuberculosis out was to cut it out or kill it, leaving it alone was not an option.

“I hate her and she keeps confusing that with affection. Maybe daddy beat on her and that’s why she likes men that hurt her.” Pain crossed over her face and she raised her small ineffectual fists again, whopping them on my chest without any headway.

“Gerard!” Mikey, again, “This isn’t you. You’re a caring person, we traveled to the end and back again with you and you never stooped to their level, do you really hate her that much? Have you let her make you one of them?” My mouth gaped open. I hadn’t even realized I crossed the line, I didn’t see it. I didn’t have control.

“I… I’ve got to go. I’ve got to…” My crisis of faith in my own self-terrorizing conviction wasn’t just a matter of sitting down somewhere and having a little chat with the devil and the angel on my shoulders, it was life or death.

I couldn’t live as this person, around the people I love.

“You don’t need to leave! We can help you!” shouted Girl, running towards me with bittersweet hope in her eyes.

“No. I can’t be this person around you guys, it’s too dangerous, I have to leave. I have to get better…” I stalked out, my feet never once questioning the order my mind gave them, and my mind never questioning it either. I needed to calm down.

I needed to get Gerard back.

This was when I realized I couldn’t be Party Poison anymore; I had to be the loving, caring man I once was.

I have to take off my mask before it becomes me.