Chapter Text
Senior year of high school, October 1st.
Two friends sat at a lunch table, isolated from the rest of the cafeteria in a bubble of their own.
The two had always dreamed of starting a band together. Ever since they went to their first concert back in middle school. Ever since Mike's parents let him take guitar lessons. Ever since Joker had learned that he could play the hell out of a keyboard. Ever since Mike realized he could carry a tune.
Even with these things, there were still problems. Three big ones in particular.
First of all, Joker was painfully shy. He was very awkward, and with the addition of his peg leg, he often drew negative attention, and between the normal bad attention and the harassment- read, bullying- he'd been receiving from certain school adjacent individuals for years, he was reluctant to do anything that got more people looking at him than normal.
Second of all, they still had no idea what kind of music specifically they wanted to play.
Third of all, they were short at least one member.
"Two-man band just isn't going to work." Mike reiterated to Joker after swallowing, as if it wasn't a point they'd already agreed on a million times. Mike took another bite of his sandwich and watched the other boy as he shook from top to bottom of his body.
"We're bottom of the chain, Mike. Losers, nobodies. Your parents are taxidermists and mine are literal clowns. Nobody's gonna want to join our band... no offense." Joker said, an awkward smile racking across his face. Mike shrugged.
"And you asked your cousin if she might join want to join?" Joker asked, not for the first time.
"Yes I did dude, but she said she wants to focus on her tennis right now. Season's starting up again, and she'd hoping for a scholarship." Mike said sighing.
Joker took a bite of his pizza, looking around the cafeteria.
From across the room, shiny blonde curls caught his eye, and he turned to watch Natasha, the girl he'd been crushing on for the past, well.... since she'd moved here in middle school. She was sat at her and her friends normal table, surrounded by her friends, chatting and laughing. And of course, her boyfriend, Sergei.
Sergei, captain of the football team, primary nuisance bully of Jokers life, and a completely brainless moron- if you asked Joker, at least.
Natasha was cheer captain, and also part of the dance team. She was extremely talented, extremely athletic- and absolutely beautiful.
Mike had at this point noticed his distraction, followed his gaze and snorted when he realized who he was looking at.
"Dude, she's so out of your league." Mike said, half laughing. Joker looked back at his face. Joker nodded and frowned, and Mike quieted down, noticing his friends dejection, but before he could say anything he heard a female student passing behind him say something to one of her friends.
"Did you guys hear that there's going to be a talent show? Not just for our school even. District wide! How cool is that!"
"I even heard that there's gonna be some talent scouts there. Are you gonna..." The voiced faded as the speakers moved away, but Joker and Mike looked at each other.
After lunch was over, the pair walked to a message board in the hallway and, and very quickly found a poster with information. Mike was practically shaking with excitement, and Joker felt a pit in his stomach open up.
"December 2nd. Sign ups end November 10th. Dude. Dude. DUDE!" Mike seized Joker's shoulders and shook. "We have to sign up! This might be our chance to get our name out!"
"We don't have a band name. Or enough members. Or even a genre!" Joker rebutted, his forehead creased with anxiety.
"We have time. We can totally figure all that out by then! Come on, practice after school at your place." Mike said. Joker sighed and nodded, giving up in the face of Mike's excitement.
Three hours later, Mike and Joker met at Joker's locker preparing to head out to Jokers house. Joker closed his locker, seemingly just in time, before feeling a rough shove on his backpack and smashing hard into his locker.
The two whipped around to see Sergei and his friends, William and Kreacher. William was an asshole but wasn't really a bad guy, and always looked uncomfortable when Joker and Mike saw him alongside Sergei during one of their.... altercations.
Kreacher, on the other hand, was a grade A creep, and a bad guy all around. He'd been cited many times already on various charges ranging from sexual harassment to normal harassment to peeping to assault, and also had been to juvie before for petty theft. Nobody was really sure how he hadn't been expelled. Luckily, his primary "target" nowadays was the daughter of a particularly scary looking teacher, so she wasn't particularly alone in her struggles. Unluckily, she didn't have very many friends, being sort of weird in her own right, so her father was kind of her only support.
Sergei was the worst of them all though, for sure. Far more popular and socially fluent than Kreacher and way more genuinely bad then William, he was an asshole to his core, obvious to anyone who was willing to see it- but many people were totally unwilling.
Privately, Joker completely understood how he'd been able to win Natasha's affections. His family was wealthy, he was charming, handsome, and very confident- not to mention he'd gotten in there before anyone else had been able too- they'd been dating before she'd even moved here. He'd likely swept her off her feet, and he kind of doubted that she even realized how cruel he really was behind her back to those he didn't like.
He didn't know her well by any means, but he'd been observing from a distance for a long long time. Not in a creepy way, he didn't think. He'd just been crushing on her since he saw her for the first time, and hadn't ever gotten the opportunity- or the nerve- to introduce himself. But she was a sweetheart, nice and kind and pretty and spunky and everything he'd ever dreamed about. And he doubted she'd really be okay with her boyfriend, knowing how much of a messed up mother fucker he was.
Back to reality, Joker realized that Sergei had been speaking, laughing loudly with his friends and was now seemingly waiting for him to respond. The longer it took for Joker to do so, the more Sergei seemed to realize that he hadn't even been listening, and his face suddenly turned red with irritation.
"You deaf on top of crippled, bitchlet?" Sergei got up close to Joker's face, his breath hot and stinky.
Sergei and his friends whipped up at the sound of a door clanging open from down the hallway, and the head of Ganji Gupta- a somewhat popular, genuinely nice, recently transferred student who while Joker and Mike hadn't ever spoken to personally, had a fairly good impression of him anyways- poked out of the doorway, looking down at them.
Sergei quickly stepped back from where he'd been crowding Joker against the lockers, and he and his friends brushed their way past them, past Ganji, and away.
Ganji watched them go, and turned back to where Joker and Mike stood.
"You two okay?" He asked.
"We're fine." Mike said hurriedly, not excited by the prospect of actually causing an issue.
Ganji studied them for a few seconds more before sighing, nodding, and turning back into the classroom. A nice kid indeed, Joker thought idly. If only this were the type of school where nice kids could actually make a difference.
An hour later found Joker and Mike in Joker's garage slash unofficial practice space. His parents shared one car, and because Joker was an only child, the space had basically been guaranteed to him the second they'd moved in.
Joker was tuning Mike's guitar, having learned to play as well a few years back but preferring keys and so ending up mostly using that skill to just tune the guitar pre-practice. Mike was sitting on the large raggy couch that spanned most of the leftmost wall and part of the back, sipping a warm soda and looking up songs.
"So pop songs are a definitely no, right? Like not our thing? I think I could pull it off, vocally or whatever, but like... I'm not feeling it, y'know?" Mike voiced idly as he scrolled.
"I mean. We could try techno?" Joker suggested noncommittally.
Mike raised an eyebrow and caught Joker's eye. The two collapsed into laughter after just a moment, and Mike shook his head and went back to scrolling.
Then the door to the garage opened and Joker's mother walked in.
Joker had been abandoned by his birthgivers at a fire station when he was an infant. He'd been circled through the system for a little bit, but had the advantage of having been a baby, and there were plenty of couples looking to adopt babies.
His parents were two of those hopefuls. They were also professional clowns, and had met in the circus business before marrying and settling down when they got a bit too old for the dangers of circus life- which is to say, when they hit 30. They adopted Joker a few years later, and as embarrassing as it was that they had named him 'Joker'- or renamed, who really knew- they were the best parents Joker could've ever hoped for and he loved them endlessly, and he knew that they loved him just as much.
However, they were human, and as with any other human, they had flaws. Like the fact that in spite of their being named Daniel and Heather Groves, they'd named their child 'Joker'.
"Jay honey, your father put some more costume magazines out in the living room. Take a look at those when you can, please? His mother said. His mother was dressed in a bright pink dress with one of those seashell bra prints on the top and a mermaid tail running down the front of the skirt. She didn't have clown makeup on at the moment, but Mike thought if she had been it wouldn't have been strange looking in the slightest, her clothes always looked like she was two steps on from donning a clowning hat. She was however wearing a long wig with bright pink hair, almost matching the color of the dress. Mike knew she was a natural blonde under the wig, but by now he understood that the wigs were almost as much a part of her personality as the clowning was.
"Mom!" Joker yelled, embarrassed by her clothing, but his mother just giggled. She left and closed the door behind her, but not before putting down a tray of pretzels- homemade, somehow- and calling that everything in the fridge was up for grabs.
After the door swung shut, Joker slid back down onto his bean bag chair and sighed.
"Your parents still want you to join the family business?" Mike asked, grinning.
Another major flaw of Joker's parents was that they were both so passionate about their love of clowning, and impassioned by the ridicule and rejection they so often received from other people about their career choice, that they refused to accept that Joker didn't want to do clowning himself- or more accurately, refused to see his disinterest whenever they brought it up with him.
"Yeah. You know how they are. They don't think this band thing will work out. And, like I don't mind doing clowning with them, or theoretically even as a part-time job, but not as a full-time job for the rest of my life, and that's what they're dead set on. They even gave me a idea for a clown name." Joker complained.
"Oh, what is it?" Mike asked, all excitement.
"The Weeping Clown." Joker said with a big frown.
"Oh dude, you could pull off a sad clown so well." Mike joked and laughed. Joker sighed and frowned. He knew his friend meant well, but his "resting depressed face", as it was fondly called by Mike, wasn't something he was particularly proud of, especially with his two highly extroverted, constantly smiley parents.
When the day got late and the sun had just begun to dim, Mike headed home, waving his goodbyes and tearing off on his bike. Joker sat in the dining room, with his parents, picking away at a lemony tasting fish dish he wasn't that fond of, talking about his day at school- and lying about it- and listening to how their day had been.
They had a pretty regular gig, on top of the obvious party clown stuff, at a Ren Faire the town over. Joker had gone a few times with them, it was pretty cool, but even that... it just wasn't the kind of stuff he wanted to do.
But he loved his parents, and he knew they loved him, so he was willing to sit there and listen. He could feel his sanity melting out of his ears with every bored minute, but he'd do his best.
For them, he thought as he winced at another godawful dad joke.