Outside the airport the storm was brewing, but even the sheets of rain and nasty gusts of wind cowered in fear before the pitch-black clouds gathering over Angelo and his men.

So this was the situation. The car had arrived at the airport. Then the car had disappeared again, without Angelo's men getting a chance to rent it out. Where exactly it had disappeared to, let alone who had taken it, was anyone's guess until their man at the car rental service finally managed to access the database. Which he should have managed about half an hour ago, and if he didn't report soon Angelo would start suspecting the database was some kind of physical place that you needed a rental car to get into.

Beside him, Luca was very busy tapping away on his phone, but he had yet to tell him about any results. Angelo waited patiently. Well, patiently-ish. As patiently as anyone could reasonably expect him to be when he was tired, cold, stressed, and nursing a nasty headache. More than ever he found himself wishing for a seat outside the family home in Sicily with his grandmother's homemade focaccia and a cup of coffee that was actually good.

"Still nothing?" he asked Luca after a while. "What are you doing on that phone of yours?"

Jolting, Luca glanced up from the screen, nearly dropping his phone. "Still waiting for a report back, signore," he said.

"Then what are you doing tapping away on that screen?" Angelo replied, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Luca squirmed on the spot, looking caught, then he held out his phone. "It's a game, signore," he said. "My daughter introduced me to it. You take care of kittens, it's very relaxing."

Screw a seat in the sun. Angelo wanted to be back at his desk, if only so he could slam his forehead against it as hard as possible.

"Fewer kittens, more information!" he said, settling for burying his head in his hands instead. "What am I paying you for? And stop calling me signore, you only do that when you feel guilty about something."

"Yes, si—Angelo."

The minutes ticked by. The storm outside was raging, but the dark clouds over Angelo's head warranted a Category 5 hurricane warning and a mass evacuation.

Finally, finally, their rent-a-car man came back. Angelo magnanimously chose to forgive his tardiness and not yell at him; he was, after all, just some kid, a scraggly twentysomething who seemed to consist entirely of joints and limbs. "Good news and bad news," he said.

Angelo knew you were supposed to ask for the bad news first, but he was in no headspace for them, so screw it. Any glimmer of hope would do for him right now. "What are the good news?"

"The police hasn't found the money yet."

Angelo slumped back in his seat.

"Hopefully," the kid added.

"Don't ruin it," Angelo gritted out. "I'm already terrified to ask for the bad news."

"Someone else rented the car."

Yes, Angelo thought. A nice desk to head-desk would be amazing right now.

"Who?" he said.

"Two musicians," said the kid, lighting up. "They're from a band I really like, the guitarists—"

"There is no string of words in Italian, English, or any other language I speak," Angelo cut him off, "to describe how little I care."

The kid's scrawny shoulders drooped in disappointment. "But they're really good," he muttered.

"Oh, we'll make them sing if we get our hands on them, that I can promise you. Now where did they take that godforsaken car?"

"Well…"

The kid squirmed awkwardly under his gaze, and Angelo instantly knew his answer was going to suck.

"Spit it out already," he snapped. "I won't kill you over it, who do you think I am?"

Everyone in the room instantly turned to stare at him.

"What?" he burst out, making a grand gesture. "I'm not some common crook on the street! I'm a crime boss, I have honor!"

His men exchanged a glance, then they shrugged, as if to say, Fair enough. The kid swallowed and ran a hand through the bird's nest on his head that he called hair. "Well," he said again, "the database said they're taking it to L.A."

Angelo stared very intensely given the fact that he wasn't staring at anything in particular. "Los Angeles," he repeated.

"That one."

He took a deep breath.

"How long ago?" he said, already dreading the answer.

"…About an hour?"

Angelo closed his eyes.

"And a half."

"Mother of God."

Rubbing both hands over his aching face, Angelo rose to his feet, resisting the urge to walk head-first into the nearest pillar. "Well, it can't be helped," he said heavily. "At least now we know where to look. Get the car!"

Several of his men ran and scrambled off at once.

"Oh, and Luca?"

His right-hand man paused.

"I'm going to need the name of that kitten game."

~ ~ ~

In another place, at another time, the car in question was still speeding down the highway with its two passengers happily oblivious to the dangerous cargo they carried.

For some time they had moved in blissful silence, always slightly ahead of the storm. The only interruptions had come from the navigation system on Neo's phone, speaking its tinny directions from under the seats, and they had actually managed to put some distance behind them for once.

But of course Neo should've known better than to expect it to last.

"Neo," said the inevitable voice from the passenger seat. "Neo. Neo. Neo."

Knowing better than to ignore him by now, Neo sighed and sped past a row of trucks. "What?" he said instead.

"I'm bored," Zeke replied, kicking his legs back and forth. "Can we stop somewhere fun?"

Neo overtook another baffled manager in a business car. "No," he said.

"Why not?"

"No time! How many times do I have to tell you that?"

"But we're already way ahead of time! Where's the problem?"

Neo was a very mature adult. Perfectly level-headed, and entirely sensible. Which was why he didn't stoop so low as to ignore the annoyance beside him, choosing instead to explain the point to him once more. Very patiently, of course.

"The problem, you brainless potato-head," he said calmly, "is that we still have a long way ahead of us and we can't waste time here, because what if we run into problems later? So what if you're bored, be a professional and suck it up."

"Easy to say for the guy who's driving."

"Sucks to be you." Neo narrowly avoided a collision with a too-slow camper van. "Maybe when the tiny wittle baby turns twenty-five, he can try to drive too."

"That rule is dumb and you know it!"

"You're dumb," said Neo, and sure, it wasn't his wittiest comeback, but the part of his brain that wasn't occupied with driving was quickly being put out of commission by Zeke's proximity. "What do you even want to do?"

Zeke studied the signs along the road. "We can stop in the next city," he mused, "and sightsee for a bit?"

"What even is the next city?" Neo retorted. "Is there anything to see?"

"Uh…"

"Exactly! This isn't Europe, you don't get a pretty old town around every corner." Neo motioned to the repetitive landscape outside. "This is America, where you travel from nowhere to nowhere and think you've seen the world!"

Zeke made a face. "I forgot about that," he admitted.

But at least he understood, Neo mused. The others wouldn't. But Zeke Carraway had something Neo didn't share with anyone else in the band: a childhood and adolescence spent (mostly) in Europe, even if some people in the UK had done their damnedest to drift away from the continent lately. And sure, Brighton was still vastly different from Neo's back-of-the-woods hometown, but it was also far less different than anything happening on this side of the big pond.

"But," Zeke said at length, "it's still gotta be more interesting than the highway."

"Anything is more interesting than the highway," Neo admitted. He wasn't acknowledging a losing point here; it was just an objective statement of fact. Highway journeys on non-scenic routes were duller than dishwater.

"Exactly," said Zeke. "So can we at least do something about it?"

Neo sighed. He could shut him down again, but that would only lead to more nagging and pestering, and that was the last thing he could use right now. So he needed something else, something to keep the overgrown man-child in his passenger seat busy in a way that didn't involve stopping in inconvenient places and getting lost in random cities.

"Play a game on your phone," he suggested.

Zeke's face fell. "I'm all out of battery," he replied. "I forgot to charge it."

"How do you forget to charge your phone?" Neo burst out, nearly colliding with a pickup truck and yelling a curse at the driver as he passed. "That's like forgetting to put on pants in the morning!"

"To be fair, I've done that too," Zeke mused, suddenly looking pensive. "But only when I was really, really hungover."

Neo made a face, pushing down a bleary mess of repressed memories of the mornings after their band's wilder parties. "Didn't ask," he said.

"Told you anyway," Zeke retorted.

There was a moment's silence.

"Can I at least get your phone back," Zeke said at length, "and play some music on the drive?"

Finally, a productive idea. "Whatever," Neo replied with a dismissive wave of his hand. "But I'm not stopping so you can pick it up."

Giving a thumbs-up, Zeke dove under his seat with the expertise of someone who had to retrieve items from under car seats a lot, emerging with Neo's phone in his hand a moment later. "Ta-da!" he said triumphantly. "Where's the aux?"

Neo reached over and held it up, and Zeke plugged the phone in, searching through his music library. Moments later a single piano note resounded through the car; and as a tried-and-true emo, that was all Neo needed to recognize the song.

Moments later the unmistakable voice of Gerard Way came out of the speakers, and Neo relaxed at once. No matter how stressful things were, some songs were still better than therapy, hell, even better than getting positive attention.

"This is nice," Zeke said quietly, drumming his fingers to the beat of the song. "Still one of the best songs out there."

Nodding, Neo slowed the car to a regular highway pace, watching the world drift by to the beat of the marching drums and a fast-paced guitar. His fingers flexed against the steering wheel, the chords carved deep into his memory like an ancient river into the land. If someone put a guitar into his hands right now and told him to play the whole thing from memory, he would do it without hesitation and without missing a single note.

"It is nice," he muttered. "Takes you back to childhood."

"Hearing My Chem for the first time," Zeke said distantly, sounding like he was talking to himself more than Neo. "Saving up for show tickets."

"Learning to play the songs in your bedroom," Neo added.

"Dyeing your hair black," Zeke continued. "Wearing eyeliner just to look like them…getting beaten up at school for it."

"Mhm."

Silence fell again, but this time it wasn't a trip and tumble; it was a slow, graceful fall into a soft mattress and a fluffy blanket, settling comfortably on a cloud of down and feathers.

"Crying when they broke up," Zeke added after a while.

Neo snapped back to reality. "I didn't cry," he said.

"If you didn't cry over that," Zeke retorted, "you were never really emo."

Neo pondered that.

"I still didn't cry," he said.

Okay, maybe he might have. Shed a few tears, that is, in the privacy of his room where no one could see him or prove anything. Maybe he might even have broken down sobbing, burrowing under the covers and feeling like no one would ever understand him now. It was a possibility. But there was no proof.

"Still great music, though," he added after a while.

Zeke nodded distantly. "Keeps you sane," he said, "when you're fourteen and the world hates you." He studied Neo's face, then he scoffed. "Not that you'd know how that feels."

Neo didn't reply. Better not to; otherwise he might have to share things he had safely and carefully stored away in the box of memories he didn't think about unless absolutely necessary.

For now, they just kept listening.

Outside the windows, the road went on unchanged, and the rain was still pouring.