your dreams are not enough, what i need is love

Yes, their faces were on wanted posters but it was known that they were the guardians of the Girl. In the comics Better Living already knows about her powers and seeing as they kidnapped her at the end of NaNaNa it’s safe to assume they’ve known about her powers basically her whole life, so it’s no wonder they would want to get her guardians, if they’re lucky they’ll get her at the same time  because she’s usually with them, but at the very least it leaves her without someone to protect and provide for her.

WE know they were trying to save the Girl when they marched right into BLI hq, but I don’t think anyone else in the story does. Val says “we call ourselves killjoys after a group of failures” and no one seems to think he’s wrong, even though we know they didn’t actually fail. No one seems to care about or recognize the Girl at all besides the V’s and of course Cherri and Dr. D, and in the summary she’s described as “mysterious”, so I don’t think many people recognize her as “The Girl”, the one who ran with the Fabulous Four. 

Because there are so few people who recognize her, I don’t think many people remember her, and some might not have even known she existed at all. Dying young is common and people from the city come out to the zones pretty much every day, so it wouldn’t be impossible to believe that most people who are still alive don’t know her.

Relating all this back to the Fabulous Four and their fame, no one seems to know or remember the Girl. So it wouldn’t be wrong for a lot of ‘joys to assume the Fab Four were out to destroy BLI from the inside. Obviously that’s stupid, there is no way in hell four ‘joys are going to take down the whole company, but it caught people’s attention. Combined with Kobra already being known for his racing and Dr. D confirming it on the radio, that was enough to get people talking about it everywhere, even neutrals and juvies knew about it. 

There are dozens of variations of the story of course, and none of them are entirely correct, but the ones featuring the Girl became less and less common over the years until people just kind of… forgot about her. Especially because she was on her own and didn’t try to draw attention to herself, no one really even knew she was still around. 

“You might be trying to find some trace of them, even subconsciously,” Dr. Benzedrine continues, currently soldering together two strange pieces of metal that might become artwork when he’s done with it. 

While he’s a transplant to the Lobby from the desert, giving up the life of a Killjoy, the doctor has never been able to change the ability to find art in everything — one of the few things that wasn’t blood-soaked out in the Zones. 

The Girl finds it endearing. A taste of home from someone who can’t possibly give her grief from it — someone who never got along with the original Killjoys in the first place. 

“I’m not, though,” the Girl hums, spinning on the stool she’s been given to sit on. 

Benzedrine has carved out a place in the Lobby for himself, setting up a poorly ventilated lab with spare parts here and there, in a corner of the city too desolate for even the Scarecrows to care about — it’s beneath them to inspect the dirt in their boots. The Lobby’s lighting suits him well, serving to make the mottled purple of Benzedrine’s decade-old lab coat somewhat clean-looking. 

“I would’ve believed you if I was still thirteen and missed them. Why would I make this up, Benze? I don’t — There’s something here, and I don’t think it’s them. It’s just popped up in relation to them. It isn’t the —” 

“Do you believe in miracles?” 

The Girl pays no mind to the interruption. Benze is known for it, after all. “Not when they’re a decade late.” 

“Who’s to say it’s late? Decades are trivial, time is trivial. Your sense of the impossible towers over the improbable yet plausible. You’re an impossible girl, so who is to say there are not impossible miracles?” 

One day, the Girl is going to find some old English testbook from the snobby Bat City primary schools, and she’s going to throw it at Benze’s head in the hopes that it knocks some sense into him. 

“My impossibility doesn’t —” 

“Does it? You’re afraid of hope, but it’s a weapon just as that electrokinesis — something that I still want to examine, by the way —” 

“Never gonna happen, Benze.” 

A girl and her brother, 2018.

out here in the desert, your shadow lives on without you (otherwise known as grief, in five acts)

[ID: a digital drawing of the girl from a high angle —her head is tilted, eyes tearing up angrily. large, shadow-like figures of the fabulous four stretch out behind her, each of them faceless and pictured in the position of their death. party poison’s chin is tilted upwards, jet star is outstretched, limbs askew, fun ghoul raises his arm, aiming their ray gun, and kobra kid falls backward, arm limply falling to his side and head turned away./end ID]