Destroyers

Live Stream #285: Live from the Resistance

There's a whole recording studio down here in the Destroyers' bunker. It's far nicer than anything Marie had set up at home - although it's not too hard to be nicer than a pressboard desk covered in fast food wrappers and sticky soda puddles.

This room is bright and clean, with some very impressive camera equipment set up on a tripod in one corner and pointing at a perfect replication of the Dystopia Today setup in Marie's former apartment. The fluorescent overhead lights aren't quite right, and the food wrappers are a little too neat - a little too intentionally placed - but they got the desk right, and the old computer.

They even got the Emoji movie poster on the wall.

And sitting in the middle of the artfully arranged, messy desk, there's a familiar mask.

Marie goes to it while Rosa stands in the doorway with Joyce. She can actually feel their anticipation in the carefully regulated air of the subterranean room. Marie puts on the mask. She becomes Elvis again.

When she turns around, there's unchecked admiration in Joyce's eyes. Why? Everyone else in the world hates her.

"You can't really think that I'm the right face for your revolution," she says, her voice muffled through the rubber in a familiar, comfortable way. She's been wearing the mask for so long, she actually missed it when she was in prison.

She catches a whiff of fast food - that stale, unpleasant smell that the stuff leaves on your clothes like lipstick on the collar of a cheater. Pig, it says.

She frowns and asks, "Is this my Elvis mask?"

Rosa nods.

"How did you get it?" Marie follows up.

"Your apartment was looted after word got out that you were jailed," Rosa explains.

"And you participated?" Marie asks, incredulous. Rosa just shrugs.

"It was either us or someone with worse motives," she says. "That's your computer, too."

Marie's mouth drops open but Rosa can't see it behind the oversized, droopy mask. Her outrage is poorly spent here, anyway, so she changes direction. "Look, I appreciate the two of you breaking me out of prison - I wasn't looking forward to another year of that abuse, and I might not have survived it. But everyone hates me - I'm not somebody you want on your side. The whole reason I was in prison was because it was either that or get killed in the streets."

"We're about to take down the Watcher system," Rosa says. "We can use everyone we can recruit."

"Besides," Joyce says, finally speaking up, "more people are supporting you than you realize." Then, a little more tender, she added, "And nobody's going to hurt you anymore - not if I have anything to say about it."

Marie feels her chest swell momentarily - there's something comforting about that, about Joyce.

Maybe it's just the Stockholm syndrome of relying on her for safety inside the prison walls - it hasn't worn off yet - but Joyce's words feel true to her.

It seems like she can read Marie's face even through the mask, because after a moment, she says, "Look, I'll prove it."

She walks around the desk and sits down in the chair - Mine, too? Marie wonders - and she's surprised when Joyce grabs her hand and pulls her around the desk, too.

She logs into the computer and pulls up the old Dystopia Today page. There's nothing broadcasting, of course, but Marie's surprised to see how many of her old regulars are in the chat room at that very minute.