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roseseabiscuit-blog · 5 years

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Create and Destroy

So hey. This is my first fanfiction on here. It's a Frerard because I'm actually fucking trash. It probably won't be great because I'm writing it on my tablet which has the shittiest keyboard ever so any mistakes I make and fail to correct immediately, I apologise, grammar police. ---- This is set in the Killjoy era, before the boys ever became the Killjoys. To be honest, I don't think they'll ever become the Killjoys, so this is more like an alternate timeline when they were younger but still refused to stay quiet. Set in Battery City and with the looks of the Killjoy boys. So sit down, buckle your metaphorical seatbelts and get ready for a depressing story with red hair, riots and rulebreakers. By the way, this was partly inspired by the story 'Deathwish 5000' that's on here so I highly recommend that.

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The street lights were casting a green glow on the whole city, faded shadows of passing figures outlined with a neon haze that made everything seem futuristic. Frank's legs hurt, more than usual that is. They ached from a long day at work and he wouldn't be able to get any more medication until he'd worked at least another week at that shitty labour job. Just hauling bricks for eighteen hours for a meagre salary of a couple hundred Carbons at the end of the month. If he didn't have to pay rent or live, Frank would've given up the hard labour jobs to work as a freelance engineer, but unfortunately life happened.

The air was cold. Colder than it should have been for that time of year. He could see the tall black smoke clouds towering over the buildings that came from the factories and he felt his chest tighten, threatening to start making him cough. No matter how long you lived in Battery City, your lungs never adjusted to the air pollution. Everywhere else had it better. Even the Zones below them had better air.

Groaning with the effort, Frank pushed open the door of his wooden shack to call home. His roommate and best friend, Ray, was lounged on the sofa eating that God awful Power Pup tinned food. Tasteless mushy meat substitute that refused to taste of anything apart from water apparently. He scrunched up his nose in disgust, having to blow his hair out of his face to see Ray properly. It needed cutting. Maybe he could trade Ryan something for some scissors? What did they even have left to trade?

"Stop pulling faces. You'll get wrinkles and then none of the pretty boys will want you, just the old ugly ones from the really rough side of Battery," Ray mumbled through a mouthful of synthetic mush. He simply flipped him off and pulled his face into an uglier expression that soon morphed into one of pain. His legs burned with excruciating pain and he fell back into the mattress that did nothing to ease him. " Shitty day, huh? " He could hardly nod. "Ask them to give you those upgrades for your legs. They're obviously giving you grief again and they'd lose a valuable worker if you couldn't get up at all. It'll happen one day, Frank."

"No it won't, Ray, and you know it. I'm disposable to society. Early twenties, no living family, only one real friend with not enough money to sue them. For all anyone cares, including myself, they could arrest me for one of the many fights I've been in and blow my brains out."

"I care," Ray muttered after a few minutes of quiet.

Frank chuckled painfully. "I know you do." He glanced at the clock on the wall, seeing the letters indicate that it was a Friday. "Hey, aren't you going to town with that Mikey kid today?"

"Nah. His brother's moving in around here and he's going to meet him at the Elevators. Apparently the guy wouldn't survive a day around here without him. Needs teaching the ways of Battery, hey?" Frank almost felt bad for this kid who he didn't know. Why was he coming to a city like theirs if he couldn't defend himself? Everyone he knew carried some sort of weapon - Frank himself had a knife and his reputation to get into fights too big for him (and winning) and Ray had a stolen ray gun because 'come on Frank, it's perfect!'. As much as he hated to admit it, it was pretty perfect and he sort of wished he had a weapon named after him that he could carry around.

With much effort, Frank sat up, leaned down and began detaching the metal that he had on his legs. It always burnt when they were removed; the ancient wiring in them had the tendency to overheat and the cold air stung like a bitch. He always ended up staring at his legs for a while afterwards, sometimes needing Ray to break him out of it. His legs were skinny and frail from years of malnourishment, not much different from the rest of his body, but they were always redder than they should be and felt charred under his fingertips. It made him feel like a freak, like someone who should be locked up in one of those mental places that they had near the hospitals. An outcast.

For his whole life, Frank never felt like he had fit in properly. In the first stage of school - it was simply called First (no fancy names) and ran from ages four to seven - he was picked on for being smaller than the other boys. In Second, he was picked on for having a poor family and bad legs. Third was for hating running because he physically couldn't and Fourth, the final compulsory year, was for liking the other boys. But towards the end, he built a robot for one of the underground fighters and it got around that he was fighting in back alleys with dickheads who refused to back away. A few of them cornered him on his way home and safe to say they came in the school the next day covered in bruises and with a few cuts and broken bones. No one crossed him again after that day.

And yet he still didn't fit in. His family couldn't afford to pay for him to get an Implant, a newly developed technology that fitted into your brain to let you stay connected at all time, so the few friends he had started drifting away from him. Then they all got girlfriends and married, and he was left alone again. Installing security systems for a few Carbons in the day, building fight bots at night and sleeping on the streets. It sucked, but at least he could send the money to his family. But then his father died, then his mother, and then he was truly alone. So he bought a house and invited guys back to sleep, and one of them just happened to be Ray. Once Ray realised that Frank was just lonely, they became friends and the rest is history. Literally.

He breathed out as the pain finally began to subside and shuffled backwards so his head was resting on the lumpy pillow. He wished that he had enough money to buy a half decent house or so that he could start building those bots again. Over the few years that the pair had lived in the house, Frank had never built a bot. They simply didn't have the materials or the money to buy some that were good enough to hold up in a real robot fight. Those could get bad; he'd gone to one once with Ray (Mikey was supposed to have fought but never did) and the robot fighting had pulled a knife on the other one and ended up slicing the operator.

"Hey Frank?" He hummed to show he was listening. "If we had enough money, would you move away from Battery? "

He thought about this for a long while. There was so many good memories from living here - the girl he'd met when he was younger, Sarah, who used to be his best friend: his first kiss with a boy in a alleyway after he'd beaten the same boy to a pulp in a fight: the time he'd climbed up onto the roof of one of the tallest buildings in the city with Ray and felt so alive. But that had left his legs in a terrible state for days on end and resulted in him getting the metal support legs from BLind. And there were bad memories on most streets that he used to roam.

He came to his conclusion pretty easily, actually. "No. I think... I think I'd stay here, maybe move to a better house, you know, as a huge fuck you to BL, but I'd stay here. It's my whole life here. I've never lived anywhere else. Plus, I'm pretty sure the guy I'm going to marry is out there somewhere. In this city right now."

Ray laughed and fell quiet again as Frank began to think. What if he was right? The guy who he would marry could be so close to him. They could have passed on the street this morning, or an hour ago. What would he want him to look like? Less wild looking than he was; short natural hair, hard working, strong. Not frail and weak and only good with his hands, but really talented and strong. A good job, hopefully, but it wouldn't really matter of they were happy. Maybe some tattoos, but hopefully no glowing ones like Frank had. That shit hurt like hell.

Whatever. He could be out there, in that smoke enclosed city, amongst the crowds. He could be alone, or in love, or hurting. He could be fighting or sleeping or working and Frank would never know.

#frerard #ryden #fanfic #frerard fanfiction #killjoys #petekey #party x ghoul

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