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24 Years Ago
It was a daily routine by this point, even as explosions rocked the world around him. Bdubs, in his oversized jeans, cuffed up and folded over a few times, and a dirty old tee shirt that had certainly seen better days, all of ten, maybe eleven years old, sneaking around through Depths. Sticking to gutters alongside the narrow, twisting streets that roped around the base of the massive foundational towers. As of now, it was the day cycle, so the yellowish lights were buzzing alongside the redstone circuits that pulsed along like twisted veins through the darkened stone. A glow that was a poor imitation of moonlight, just enough to see by, but everyone down here was well adjusted to that. Bdubs’ hair was a messy dark brown curly mop, and his eyes were a mossy green, large and round. They scanned the street side, keeping watch for any sort of useful material or perhaps some scraps that might be of any worth.
Mom’s waitin’ for me!
They’d found themselves a small enclave off a tunnel near the trash heap where they’d first met and turned it bit by bit, piece by piece, into a tiny shred of a safe haven. After he’d made Cleo a cobbled-together crutch with old pipes and tied their augmented leg with a torn old bedsheet that had tumbled down from the labs with some worrying stains on it, she’d at least been able to begin hobbling around again. She still wasn’t the most mobile, so it fell to Bdubs to take care of finding food and water for the both of them.
Lucky, I’m already real good at that!
He dug through dumpsters or other trash heaps.
He stole when he had no other options, from the sparse market stalls that usually only popped up around the rail cart station and the labs depot. Or at least, he used to. It had been nearly four years since he’d first met his mom, where she’d been dropped into a trash heap and left for dead with a malfunctioning, experimental augmented leg. In all this time, they’d moved around together, but recently, he’d started refusing to take them out with him.
Before, with their augmented leg tightly wrapped and covered up, she was at least capable of walking around and not in any more immediate danger than any other given Depths dweller. Things had changed, though.
Bdubs wasn’t clear on exactly what. Cleo had tried to explain it to him, some of which she understood from speaking to a few of the others around who weren’t an immediate threat.
The Director was dead.
Who’s that again? I think she was in charge of the labs…she’s the one who hurt Mom…and gave them that awful mess of a leg…
After she’d died, a power vacuum had been opened up, and the under-city had fallen into chaos within hours. The initial explosion of violence, territorial clans vying for control, gang wars, and folks looting and gutting labs depots and other lab-run facilities had died down somewhat. It had been a few months. An uneasy sense flooded every hour, every moment, like one wrong move would shatter the relative calm and lead to another outbreak of violence.
Bdubs had been witness to several such ‘wrong moves’ though thankfully, he hadn’t made one yet himself. Cleo was always worried sick about him. That’s why he tried to wrap up his ‘chores’ as fast as possible, and right now, he headed back to their hidey-hole with little show for his trip. That happened more often than he wanted. He was hungry. He knew his mom was, too, but she wouldn’t take the saved-up food before him. He’d have to lie and claim his stomach hurt or something. Yeah. That’d probably fool them. Maybe.
Bdubs hurried along the outer wall of the cavern, looking up would’ve delivered a few into the light haze, bridges of metal and scrap that crisscrossed the vast expanses between the foundational towers and the corkscrew street that led all the way from the Depths to the near-surface.
The boy made it to round the corner down the tunnel where Cleo was and bounced right off someone's leg. The person was taking a step forward, so he ended up, thankfully rather lightly, kneeing Bdubs in the chest and sending him toppling onto his back.
“Oh! I am sorry, little one. Are you ok?”
Bdubs looked up.
And up.
And up.
The man he’d bumped into was huge.
A towering creeper mutant with a red archival eye that was dimly flickering, dark brown hair swept back between a set of spiraling dark goat horns, and an augmented arm that gleamed with delicate redstone wiring, the panels subtitling clicking and adjusting with every breath.
Bdubs stared up at him with enormous green eyes.
The creeper mutant stared back, tilting his head slightly. He slouched his shoulders and stooped his back a bit, probably trying to make himself seem a bit smaller so as not to scare the boy he’d just knocked over.
As if that was helpful for someone well over double Bdubs’ size.
But despite how the sight of someone like this would usually be terrifying for the little glare mutant, all he saw were the augments of the creeper mutant's arm.
He stared at them for several long seconds, and the man made an awkward noise in his throat.
“D-Did I hurt you? Here, let me help you up.” He offered his left hand, the one still of flesh, but Bdubs popped to his feet like a fired rocket and reached for his other hand instead.
“You’re like my Mom!” He shouted, eyes practically sparkling in awe, and the creeper mutant’s expression shot toward surprise, his head pitched to one side in a confused fashion.
“Like you…your Mother has augmentations, you mean?”
“Uh, y-yeah, uh-huh, sure does!” Bdubs replied, nodding eagerly as he turned the creeper mutants hand over in both of his own, watching the redstone circuits flash minimally through the thin lines in the metal.
“But I never seen’em flicker like this!”
The creeper mutants brow furrowed, and he hesitantly closed his metal fingers around one of Bdubs’ much smaller hands. “My name is Doc, by the way.”
“Doc? M’Bdubs! Nice ta meet you!” He shook the hand he was already holding, then finally let go, gazing up at Doc with a fresh perspective.
He seems nice.
Not like Bdubs had had that many encounters with good-hearted people, or at least, those with good hearts who were also free to pursue where those hearts led without fearing a threat to their mere survival.
“So-uh, your name is Doc? L-Like a Doctor?”
There was a moment of silence.
“Well, that depends on what you would count as a Doctor. How come? You say your Mothers augments do not…’flicker’…?”
Bdubs wagged his head ‘no’. “Never have! She’s got an awful mess of a leg, she calls it! No stars! Bad job!” He waved his hands around excessively to forward this concept.
Doc chuckled, the sound hissed and sputtered in his chest. “I see…well, I do know how to work on augmentations.”
Bdubs let out a tremendous gasp and then seized Doc by the hand, this time his left, and began dragging him along the tunnel. “You gotta come fix my Mom, then! Come on, come on!”
Doc stumbled a few times before picking up the pace to follow him. “Y-You want to take me to your Mom just like that?”
“I-uh, I never met anyone who coulda helped them till now! I just gotta!”
Doc tried to protest, or maybe he was trying to agree, or maybe…well, whatever, Bdubs didn’t really care because he wasn’t letting go of his hand for nothing. He towed Doc along the tunnel toward the trash heap where he and Cleo had first met and stopped in front of the thin crevice through which they’d found their hiding place.
He took one look at the crevice, then looked up at Doc, and sucked down a large breath.
“Mom! I found someone to fix yer, uh, yer stupid leg! But he’s too big to fit inside! You up?” He shouted into the crevice, and immediately, he could hear the scrap and rattle of metal.
“You what!?”
A few seconds later, Cleo’s head popped through the crevice. Their orange hair was stringy and caked with grime, and their minty green skin was crisscrossed with silvery stitches, Their eyes narrowed drastically at the sight of Doc, whom Bdubs was still clinging to by the hand.
“You’re…”
Another moment. Bdubs let go of Doc’s hand and looked between the two of them with wide eyes. Doc gave a nervous chuckle and reached up to rake a hand over his dark brown hair, then tugged at one of his goat horns like an anxious habit. “I’m sorry to disturb you…he kind of insisted on bringing me over here.”
“I’m sorry if he bothered you,” Cleo replied, seemingly having made their judgment on Doc. They carefully eased the upper half of their body out of the crevice and then maneuvered their crutch through.
“Bdubs, would you please?”
“I’ve gotcha!” Bdubs sprang into action, reaching up to take the crutch and then stepping aside as Cleo pulled through. Doc took a half-step forward as if to help but was scared off by the glared daggers Cleo shot at him.
She thinks he’s ok…but no touch yet…huh?
Bdubs thought as he handed the crutch back to Cleo once she was out of the crevice. Their augmented leg was folded in half, calf lashed to thigh with a few knotted old strips of cloth they had scrounged together over the years. Then the entire thing was wrapped up in an old, worryingly dark stained bedsheet that had been in one of the labs trash heaps. It covered the augmentation entirely, and since the redstone within the augmented leg had long since died, never replaced since the thing never worked anyway, there wasn’t even a faint reddish glow through the bedsheet as there had been when they’d first started wrapping it like this.
Cleo hooked their crutch under their left arm and carefully set their balance. She’d gotten very good at walking with the crutch and their single good leg, the one still of flesh, also minty green skin crisscrossed with silvery stitches. Cleo looked up at Doc with a stern gaze.
“You’re from the wardship program too, aren’t you? She worked on you.”
“Ah, what gave it away?” Doc replied, and Bdubs thought he sounded amused.
Again, he stood between the two grown-ups…or at least, he knew his Mom was a grown-up, as for Doc, he wasn’t entirely sure how old he might be, but he was huge so surely he had to count.
“Very funny…you work on augments?”
“I do.”
Cleo hesitated. Doc looked down at Bdubs, who eagerly nodded at him a couple times, fisting his hands and bobbing them up and down, rocking from heel to toe. Doc sighed weakly. “Listen…your son says you have a damaged augment…I assume it’s under all of that?”
He pointed a gleaming metal finger at Cleo’s bedsheet-wrapped leg, and she huffed.
“It’s fine. I’ve gotten on alright for years now.”
“But things have changed.”
“Oh, certainly, but that doesn’t mean trust is easier to come by.”
Bdubs didn’t quite understand what the problem was, and he’d never been one to keep his mouth shut.
“B-But Mom…? He’s…he’s-uh, I mean, look at him!” Bdubs gestured up at Doc with a dramatic series of waves.
“H-He’s got the same sorts a’things that your leg is! What if he can fix it?”
“What if he wants to rip it off and scrap it for parts?” Cleo replied cooly, and Bdubs let out a horrified gasp. He then darted in between Cleo and Doc and planted his hands on his hips, looking up at the creeper mutants.
“You wouldn’t!”
“Why am I being accused when you dragged me over here?” Doc muttered under his breath. Bdubs continued to stand between him and Cleo, only for him to feel the zombie mutant place a hand on his shoulder. She squeezed.
“Sorry, Bdubs, I shouldn’t have said that…that was too harsh…” She looked up at Doc again.
“So? You actually were in the wardship program?”
“I was. I guess you were as well?”
Cleo nodded, then tipped their head once downward to indicate their augmented leg. “I…well, as you can see, I wasn’t exactly a success. If you’re down here, then you must not have been either.”
“Oh no, I was. I just ran away.”
“You ran away? You got away from her?” Cleo asked, looking stunned.
Bdubs looked over his shoulder to see their face, then snapped his chin to look up at Doc. “Her like…like-uh…the uh…Director?”
“That’s right,” Doc confirmed, and Bdubs frowned.
“But she…didn’t you say she was super scary?” He looked over his shoulder at Cleo again, who nodded sagely.
“Terrifying.”
“A real monster,” Doc concluded succinctly.
Bdubs didn’t like the way he said that. It made his skin feel like crawling, not because of Doc, no, he still found Doc to be rather the oddly assuring sort of presence. It was the way both of their tones of voice changed when discussing this woman he’d heard about only once or twice from Cleo, only when she’d needed to explain to him what had happened, why it felt like the whole city was coming down around them.
Bdubs swiveled on his heel and flung himself against Cleo’s chest, wrapping his arms around their middle and squeezing them into a tight hug, burying his face against their chest.
“Bdubs!? What’s wrong?” Cleo switched at once, back toward the warm, comforting voice that she used with him, that Bdubs knew was a bit different from their usual, that he adored because he liked to think it was reserved especially for him. He and his mom had been together, just the two of them against the world, for years now. After the Anarchy hit, it became too dangerous for Cleo to be out and about within the main cavern. She had an augmented limb, which were being scrapped for spare parts by some of the gangs who were willing to get their hands dirty.
Which, to be fair, was all of them.
“I-uh…nothin! J-Just felt like it, s’all!” He insisted, but he didn’t let go of them, and Cleo continued to hold him as best she could while still half-supporting themself with their crutch.
Bdubs kept his face firmly buried against the dirty old white button-down his mother was wearing, so he wasn’t sure what went on above his head. Cleo and Doc probably shared some sort of look, or so he’d imagine.
“…alright. Do you think you can help me?” Cleo finally asked.
“I am certainly willing to try.”
Bdubs thought he felt Cleo’s mint green, stitched-on fingers dig in a little tighter against his shoulders.
“…then I suppose we ought to try.”
“Simple, isn’t it?”
“I’m not much for complicated things unless they suit me. Besides…I think I’ve heard about you here or there…haven’t I?”
“…maybe.”
“I’m curious.”
“That sounds bad for me.”
“Is it? Aw, don’t be a pessimist.”
“Mom, what does that even mean?” Bdubs pulled back to stare up at them with massive, mossy green eyes. Cleo looked down to meet his gaze, and their plump lips pulled toward a smile. Their eyes half-lidded, and Bdubs thought he’d never get sick of that look, of knowing after so long running alone he was loved. It was enough to make him cling tighter to them around the middle.
“It means a glass-half-empty person. Remember that?”
Bdubs’ eyes lit up. “Oh! Uh-huh!”
“I have the materials to attempt a repair back at my lab.” Doc cut in, and Cleo matched eyes with him again.
“Worth a shot, isn’t it?”
She flicked their eyes down to Bdubs, and there was something steeling there. She nodded firmly. “It’s worth a shot.” She repeated.
“Right this way, then.” Doc took a few steps, and Bdubs finally released Cleo from the embrace only to eagerly dart around them and set himself at their left side just in case they needed extra support.
“Let’s go, Mom! C’mon, he’s gonna fix you!”
“It’s not me that needs fixing, it’s this mess of a leg.”
“R-Right, uh-yeah! A’course, the mess of a leg! Stupid!”
“Don’t call your mother that.”
“That’s not what I meant! Never!”
Cleo’s laugh made a few streaks of white flash through his hairline. Bdubs beamed at them. He stuck by their side, even as she hobbled at a slow speed. Doc fell back in his stride and kept his head on a swivel, surveying the street to ensure their safety.
Bdubs hoped this would work out.
After all.
I wanna go for a nice long walk with my Mom one day.
And if Doc could help with that, then off they went.