it's been a long, long time since i've worked on anything danger days, but I was curious about if I was still familiar with it, so take this. post-SING by 10 years, deviation before the true lives.
“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.”
“Right. So you’ve said. Anyways, hope is a weapon; it’s the first thing you learn as a Killjoy, and yet you’ve forgotten it. The impossible is only what you haven’t hoped enough for. Your loneliness has turned you into something like stone, unwilling to accept the weathering of the future, you know. Do you wait for miracles?”
