Hang on. Fuck. New suitehearts au and new backstories for it. Okay so technically killjoys like they choose to fight but also like. Total Freaks and nobody in the zones trusts them. Most people dont even know theyre real, the Suitehearts are just a ghost story. But they're real, haunting an abandoned amusement park in the real fringes of the zones, someplace nobody in their right minds would live. You could spend a night there, maybe, and survive, but living there? Its way too irradiated. But it doesn't seem to bother the suitehearts.

They're all.. off. Physically and mentally. They should be dead from radiation, instead they thrive in it. And they're just sane enough to pass as people but really they’re all more than a little Fucked Up, in their heads, in their very cells. They’re more like wild animals. They’re unwell in some way but formidable all the same. The killjoys that do know them are glad they're on their side and not Better Living's.

Benzedrine grew up in death valley, the scorching, radioactive wastelands beyond the zones. His parents were a couple rich fucks that waited out the helium wars in a bunker in the hills by Vegas, he was just a kid. It was.. a mess. The peace between his parents who always had a strained relationship didn't last long. The longer they were stuck in the bunker the more the three of them went mad. His parents refused to tell him what was happening, having shut themselves in the bunker at the first sign of war. He just knows hes stuck in this place and the ground shakes and he wants to see the sun again, he doesnt understand why this is happening. Eventually the television isnt getting any channels and the radios all static and his parents dont know whats happening either. They all get crazier. His parents argue, becoming more violent towards eachother every day. He stays shut in his room, reading the few books he has until he can practically recite them from memory. One day something changes. He hears a gunshot. Then another. He finds his parents dead in their bedroom.

He wants to leave but he grounds still shaking. He knows it isn't safe. He keeps his parent's rooms door shut and pretends that nothing is wrong. They were running out of food but now that its just him it lasts three times as long. Eventually he convinces himelf hes always been alone here, theres not rotting corpses just down the hall. Eventually, months go by without the ground shaking, and he's getting low on rations. He ventures outside. Up into the nuclear sunlight. He knows he has to find somewhere else to go. Hes young, he has no clue what to do, he has no vehicle or anything, but his instincts guide him towards the city on the horizon. That city is familiar, despite the fact that it should be unrecognizable in the ruins it is, he knows its Vegas. He starts walking. After a few days he starts to get sick. It's the radiation. He has no idea he emerged from that bunker straight into an irradiated wasteland. He finds a town, scours it for water. He's getting sicker by the day, something is very wrong with him. He doesn't feel like a kid, he feels like a fucking soldier, pushing through the pain and delirium, still walking as his skin blisters and hair falls out and guts twist, rotting from the inside out. He feels like he should be dead but somehow he stays just well enough to keep going. Eventually he enters a kind of in between state, where he isn’t quite getting worse, but he’s still rotting. He isn't dying but he isn't getting better either.

After a couple weeks he finds the others. Or, well, the others find him. He passes out, from the radiation or sunstroke, could be anything. He probably would've been fine, woken back up after a few hours, maybe a few days, with his throat dry and screaming as the sun sets and the desert cools. But instead he was found, waking up in a van with bandages covering his blistered skin.

Its other kids, that don't feel like kids anymore. He learns about radiation sickness, thats he's lucky to be pulling through it. Sandman, he learns, has a similar story to him, minus the bunker and parents killing eachother. He's from Texas, saw the pig bomb that started the wars fall with his own eyes. The light, the mushroom cloud. The wars started, his dad fought and didnt come home, he drifted through orphages and survivor groups until he decided to run away, hearing about safety to the west. He stole a motorcycle from someone in the group and left. Hes been wandering the wastes for longer than any of them and apparently went through the same sickness from radiation, but not as bad as Benze, or Donnie did, for that matter, since sandman was somewhere where he had medical help when it came. He's.. strange, right off the bat. Quiet and withdrawn one minute loud and boisterous the next. He laughs too much at things that are entirely not funny and he has a dark sense of humor. At night his eyes shine like crazy and his teeth are a bit Too sharp. Apparently he met Crab after a little while. The stolen bike ran out of gas in the middle of the wasteland and he had to walk. Crab came with an old van and picked him out of the sands and they became fast friends. Crabs the oldest of the group behind Donnie, hes the one that acts the oldest, the most responsible. Apparently he just drifted around, driving where his gut took him, scavenging. Sandman told him about the rumors of the far west and they headed out. They found Donnie after a few weeks together, when they stopped at Vegas, daring to venture into the ruins for supplies. They found Donnie, and after a very tense standoff told him about the rumors too and that they had room in their van. Donnie basically went fuck it and decided to join them, but didn't really get along with them until, a couple days later, when they found Benze, picking him out of the static. Benzedrine's a mystery to the rest of them, who all went through the wost of the sickness ages ago, and here he is like the bombs just fell again. He's got it real bad, too. Sandman had it easy, but he’s seen others die of it, rotting from the inside out. Benzedrine doesn't look that bad, but he looks like he should be a lot worse off than he is when he wakes up and demands to know where he is and who they are.

They quickly learn he's a wild animal. They're all broken in some way- Sandman, his shit always dialed to eleven, eyes glowing, harboring a billion secrets he only tells in riddles. Crab, always on edge, paranoid, in the surface he’s the most level headed of the bunch but he’s far from fine. He walks off when they stop to rest at night to be alone and do god knows what, and he goes long periods of time without speaking. Donnies quiet, secretive, grumpy, his eyes glaze over at particularly loud sounds, breath speeding up like hes having a flashback. Other than that, his face always flat, expressionless as he stares into the distance. Something about him feels dangerous.

And Benzedrine, fucked as well. He spent so long convincing himself he was fine and then longer running on autopilot, that when he wakes up, once the panic fades he's all unnerving smiles. He seems way too normal for someone that should be dead. He's always optomistic, except for when hes annoyed or angry. He has moods that last for days sometimes and when hes in one, hes someone else entirely. Snarling like a rabid dog at the littlest things. The sickly little guy gets fucking terrifying.

But he heads west with them and they keep him around and surprisingly, he gets close with Donnie after a few late night talks when their minds are clearest. They have a really weird thing, they dont seem like they’d work but they do, they can basically read eachother's minds. The quiet grumpy one with the far too bright one, and theyre both secretly the opposite. Once Donnie lets Benze in he starts letting the others in and they really start to become a Crew.

They make it to the zones, become killjoys and claim a base where they know they'll be safe, in the borderlands, where neither killjoys nor bli would venture. Because most all the killjoys here, they've got a certain amount of resistance to the radiation, but they'll never walk right into it. But the Suitehearts? They're survivors, they faced the radiation and survived it and now it lives in them and they can live in it. They become urban legends but they're just a crew like anyone else, safe in their freaky amusement park base, all of them Wrong in some way. Crazy bright eyeshine or Sandman's too-sharp teeth or the way the sun and weather and sickness seems to have no effect on Benzedrine. The way Donnie can hear the smallest thing from across a valley or the way Crab could navigate with his eyes closed. All of them changed, and all of their minds fucked, cracked. Wild, unnatural laughter that will give you chills. The way they're all a little too good at killing. The first time Benzedrine did he stared between the gun in his hands and the drac on the ground and smiled, this new thrill something he quickly became obsessed with, blood something he all but hungered for. Think ybc. Literal bloodlust, maybe. An alter ego, where all he can see is red(or, well, I guess it’d be yellow lol). Anyway, the four of them, each a little inhuman in their own ways, strange and deadly.

I'm obsessed with them, radioactive wasteland survivor freaks. They're not quite monsters but they're definitely inhuman in some way. They came back wrong except they didnt come back they were just changed as they survived. Radiation mutations and pstd and mental illnesses and concerning obsessions with blood.