NEON HEARTS

Chapter Four

If Dib thought dealing with his classmates as the 'new' kid was bad, being the 'new emo kid hanging around with the green kid' was outright hell. If it wasn't the outright jeering or the pointing or the staring it's the whispering. He’s so sick of being whispered about.

What's wrong with that kid?

Just another new foster kid...

Heard his parents gave him up.

Isn't he that professor's kid?

He’s fucking crazy-

Not even his family wanted him-


"God DAMMIT." Dib tried to push the memory from his head, lashing out and hitting whatever was nearby. The thing was, in fact, a wall. Now his knuckles stung.

He shook his hand, hissing at the pain, when he noticed he was still stopped on the sidewalk and people were looking at him. Staring at him. When weren't they? Dib scoffed and kept moving, throwing up his hood. The sooner he got away from them all, the better.

He walked with his headphones on but without music, just listening to his blood pumping and his footfalls on concrete. He focused in on the sound, pushing out the rest of the world. He needed something to hold on to, something to do with his hands.

Dib stopped in his tracks and looked around himself, actually thinking about where he was. If he was on West 32nd then...

At the corner of the block, he saw a convenience store. An old, grimey convenience store that he was 100% sure had rats, but a convenience store. Dib was so glad he kept all his important stuff on him when he went out.

When he was a kid, that meant his lap top, his binoculars and all his little paranormal investigator shit. Now, it means when he dug into his bag to find his wallet, he found his fake ID. Hand made by the antichrist, thank you Pepito. For all his gripes about the stupidity and blindness of humanity, it also meant that he could do basically anything with a half assed excuse or alibi.

So when he went into the store, as long as he acted confident and didn't give the cashier a chance to think about it, he was home free with a new pack of cigarettes. Didn't matter that he was obviously underage and a head shorter than the literal high schooler across the counter. He got his menthols, and that was good enough for him.

He grabbed his lighter as soon as he was back on the street, and lit one, the cool numbing heaven on his lungs after a few days of cloves. He liked them, don't get him wrong, but his literal organs could only take so much. Menthols were still bad, but at least they felt a little better. Don't smoke, kids.

God, do you smell that? Bet it’s those freak foster kids again.

Have you heard him coughing in his room?

Heard they hot boxed the bathroom again...

Dib leaned against the bricks of a building to think for a second. He didn't want to deal with this anymore. He didn't want to go home yet, and he didn't want to go anywhere he might run into people from school, so that crossed out the mall, the arcade and the Super-Mart. He also didn't know how much had changed in the city since he'd been gone, so just wandering was out unless he wanted to get lost.

That left the park.

~~~~~~~

By the time Dib found a bench at the far end of the park, most of the parents with kids had gone home, leaving him and the few sad adults with nothing better to do than choke down pollution outside of the comfort of their own homes. Didn't bother him as long as no one tried to talk to him. He took advantage of the quiet to take a few pictures.

X files
[Image Attachment] [Image Attachment] [Image Attachment]

Blog worthy?

abductee
Wow forgot how red everything is in the city

But yeah, blog worthy

X files
Really makes you appreciate all the air purifiers at olivarez’ huh?

abductee
rip the filter budget

X files
Those things were nasty...

Dib smiled at his phone, remembering. Mr. Olivarez had been so upset, he made them change all the filters until they found a place outside to smoke. To be fair, he wasn’t exactly ecstatic about them smoking in the first place, but it’s not like he could stop them. Harm reduction was good enough. At least they weren’t drinking.

He pulled out his laptop and connected to the park wifi, the only good thing he'd give his dad, and pulled up his browser. His email was full of messages from people on his blog, his webrings and things Squee had sent him since he left. He deleted the obvious spam and things from his old contacts with the Swollen Eyeball Network.

He knows that the Network didn’t have any real respect for him when he was younger, but at least they humored him. Someone must have been keeping an eye on him back then though, because he started getting a lot of emails from them when he was sent away. Where was he, was he alright, was he on some kind of mission, the works. By the time he got online months later and saw them, he was already beyond caring. He just deletes them now.

Why is he so obsessed with that show?

Yeah, sure Dib, you totally have a cool secret society to get back too-

Dib hooked up his phone to his computer and sat back while his pictures uploaded, pulling out his journal while he waited. He grabbed a sharpie and doodled, scribbled over some old poems, and when he got bored of that, took the marker to his arms, scribbling on whatever skin he could find. When you’re not constantly obsessing over the same thing day in and day out, you get really good at passing the time.

He was half way through trying to get the Breaking Benjamin logo just right on his forearm when his computer chimed, letting him know everything was moved. Dib uploaded them to his blog with a suitably depressing caption and was all ready to pack up and find something else to do, when he got interrupted in just the worst way possible.

"HEY! Aren't you, uh..." the man who ran up to him stared blankly for a few long moments before perking up, "THE PROFESSOR'S kid! You're the kid, right??"

Alright. No point staying here, then.

Dib got up to leave, throwing his stuff back into his bag, but this guy didn't seem to wanna take the hint.

"Where'd you go till now? No ones seen you in years-"

"Did you really get sent to a nuthouse?"

"Aren't you glad to be back home?"

Dib didn't need this in his life, so he did the mature thing and punched the guy square in the nose before running away.

~~~~~~

Dib had to go home eventually, sure, but that didn't mean he had to go inside. He slipped into the garage, moving past his old experiments and tech to get to what he really wanted.

"Hello, Ship."