Chapter Text
The doorbell rings. Strange. Gem hadn’t been expecting anyone today, but maybe Joel was? It would be weird of them to arrive while he was still at work, but oh, well. She pauses her show and walks over to open the door.
Standing on the other side is a marginally terrifying array of characters; Solstice and Mirage, two of the city’s most beloved heroes. GoodTimes and Father Time, two of the city’s most feared villains. All of them staring at her with an intensity that freezes her in place at the doorstep.
“What’s going on?” Gem asks as casually as possible, standing tall despite the unimaginable scope of whatever the hell is happening on her front step.
Solstice levels her with the most terrifying death glare she’s ever encountered. “Where is Astral?” he demands. Gem swallows.
Of course this is about Joel.
2 months earlier...
The moonlight that filters through Joel’s blinds is pale and cool-toned. It creates thin lines on his comforter as he opens his eyes, gradually adjusting to the darkness, and he sighs into the quiet room.
He has the headache of a lifetime. Truly the migraine to end all migraines, and he’s been laying in his bed with the shades drawn for hours desperately praying for it to go away. The nice girl who picked him up from the hospital—Gem, she said her name was—didn’t have any abortive on her, and didn’t have any abortive in her house.
(Their house? There’s a bedroom for him here, with his name even on the door in shaky chalk handwriting, but none of it is familiar. None of it is familiar, and yet the migraine intensified by half the moment he stepped through the front door.)
He squeezes his eyes shut—the added pressure, if anything, makes the headache worse, but it makes him feel safer—and swings his legs out of the bed. The worst part is the initial movement, like an ice spike through his skull, but once he pushes through the nausea, he’s mostly okay. He stumbles out the door, down the hall, into the one bathroom (barely big enough for one person) and scours the medicine cabinet for paracetamol.
(Trying to figure out why he knows where everything is just makes his head hurt more, and that is the opposite of what he’s trying to achieve, thank you very much.)
He swallows the pills and sets the bottle on the counter, reaching for what he knows—why do you know, why, why, why—is a little lava lamp he could switch on in his sleep. In the dim orange light, he stares at himself in the mirror, trying to take stock.
His name is Joel. That’s just about the only thing he could remember about himself when he woke up in the hospital. His face is round, a little pudgy, and he has ratty brown hair. At the moment, he’s wearing plain pajamas—the first thing he grabbed out of the dresser when he came home. Even that was too much for him to think about—and his feet are bare on the cold tile.
Who is he? He’s definitely someone. He means, he’s looking at himself in the mirror. He’s a person. He has an identity, or he had one, before yesterday. But when he reaches for any details, nothing comes.
The ginger who took him home, who drove so carefully and kept glancing sidelong at him every thirty seconds, whose hand kept twitching over the gearshift like she wanted to put her hand on his knee. Her name is Gem. She’s his sister.
He doesn’t remember her.
He doesn’t remember anyone.
(When he thinks hard enough, there’s almost an outline of a smile, an echo of a laugh, a ghost of a touch on the back of his hand, but his head throbs and the image is gone before it comes into focus.)
He stares at himself for long minutes, or maybe hours, trying to see if he can call anything up from the depths of his mind. If there’s anything inside him that’s accessible. He doesn’t find anything, just a numb whiteness, pulsating in time with his heartbeat, echoing his own voice back at him as if in a empty cavern of his eternal torment.
Maybe it’s just the sleep deprivation getting to him. Maybe he’ll feel better when he gets some shut-eye.
Unfortunately, it seems, thirty minutes later when his headache has barely dulled and he’s still staring at the inside of his eyelids, that’s not going to happen tonight. So he sighs and gets out of bed again and decides to click around on his computer.
(That gets him all the way to the lock screen before he realizes that, of course, he doesn’t know the password. What can he do?)
Eventually, Gem finds him sitting at the kitchen table, looking over the newspaper from yesterday, trying to find something, anything that he can latch onto.
“Have you been up all night?” she asks, her voice touched with that same note of concern as everything she said to him yesterday. “You’re not usually awake before me.”
Joel sighs, dropping the newspaper and taking a drink of his coffee. “Couldn’t sleep,” he answers roughly. “Migraine.”
Maybe it’s not fair to her to keep answering in two-word sentences, but this whole bloody situation isn’t fair. He’ll get over it. Probably.
Gem pauses, looking down at him like she’s going to say something else. Her eyes flick to his drink, then back to his face. Then she sighs and steps into the kitchen, fixing herself a piece of toast before taking the seat across from him. “Anything interesting?” she asks him, indicating the newspaper at his elbow. He glances back down at it, then shrugs.
“Just a spotlight on someone called…” He picks it back up to check it again. “Solstice?”
Gem nods. “Oh, yeah, he’s one of the superpowered people here in the city. He came up as Parrot, a superhero with his crime-fighting partner Canary, but now he’s in a trio called the Bad Boys. They changed their names.”
Joel blinks. “We’ve got superheroes?”
For the first time since she showed up at the hospital, Gem actually cracks a smile. “Yeah. No one really knows where the powers come from or why people get them, but some people, usually around puberty, end up with wicked abilities that no one can explain. The Bad Boys are Astral, Solstice, and Mirage. Astral has teleportation and incredible jump abilities. Mirage goes invisible, and no one really knows Solstice’s power. It kinda seems like he can do everything. There’s lots of debates about it on the internet.”
Joel stares at the picture of Solstice. He wears a red bodysuit under a pair of tight leather pants and a leather jacket. (All that leather doesn’t seem that great for crime-fighting, if you ask Joel. Too tight and not enough flexibility. But then, Joel’s not a superhero, so what would he know?) He has short, fluffy brown hair and his eyes are hidden behind a pair of dark sunglasses. “Huh.”
Gem leans forward. “Do you wanna like… talk about what’s going on? Or… I don’t know. Do you have questions for me?”
Joel takes another sip of his coffee. It’s bitter, and he’s not sure he actually likes it. (It takes him a moment to put together that that’s probably why Gem was confused earlier. He sets it aside.) “I don’t know what to ask, Gem. Or if I even want to know. Do you have any idea what did this to me?”
Gem takes a bite of her toast, probably stalling. “You were in a building that got blown up. The doctors said you probably had some kind of head trauma, although they’ve never seen a case like this before that wiped your entire autobiographical memory. It’s completely unprecedented.”
“Well, that makes me feel great,” Joel mutters. Gem gives him an apologetic look.
“Are you sure you don’t have more questions?”
What would Joel even ask? Is there anyone I loved? Was I lonely? Was I bored? Do I matter to the world? Nothing seems quite right. Still, Gem’s head tips to one side as she watches him, like she can hear him saying it anyway.
“Yeah,” Joel says finally. “Wait, no. Do I have any hobbies? And do you know the password to my computer?”
Gem’s smile softens. “Yeah, I do. You like running, and painting when you have time. Finish your breakfast, I’ll unlock your computer for you and write it on a sticky note.”
Joel takes the last couple bites of his cereal. That’s something, at least.
The world comes into vision in segments, blurred hues of white clearing slowly into the still-cloudy image of a popcorn ceiling. He takes a long time of staring at it, taking in the patterns, tracing each swirl and following it to the next, before Bdubs properly registers that he's awake.
Bdubs. That's his name. Or that’s the name they keep calling him at least. A name they only know because a nurse on staff who recognized him as an estranged cousin, and had the endless grace of allowing him into his home. He wishes he remembered going by that name. He wishes he remembered anything at all.
Amnesia, was what the doctors called it. Bdubs prefers to think of it as just his luck.
He can't remember the last time he's been this tired. Ironic, really, considering that he can't remember any other time in his life where he would have been this tired or not-tired or any other variation of the sort, but some stirring feeling in his gut that he can't name or place seems to be telling him that this kind of tiredness is not a thing he often experiences.
Then again, that could also be explained by the splitting headache rattling his skull.
With a tired groan, he forces himself to roll onto his side, hissing as pain radiates from his back, acoompanied by the crinkling of gauze. Oh, right. The burns. Now that his attention is drawn to it, the pain only seemed to intensify, twin pulses of heat resonating from his forehead and shoulderblades alike.
Bdubs wishes he could remember a world without pain.
Maybe he’s just being dramatic, but sue him, it's mid-morning and everything hurts. He's allowed a little melodrama now and again.
Pushing himself out of bed is a monumental task, every movement of his shoulder tugging at the bandages coating his back, and sending a dull ache of pain rippling through him until he finally makes his way into being vertical, stumbling to the door. His efforts are rewarded with the smell of breakfast, making his mouth water and his stomach remind him of its presence with a growl.
At the kitchen table is the nurse, his cousin, who picked him up from the hospital, as well as a girl who introduced himself as the nurse's sister, after taking great care to reassure him that he wouldn't have recognized her anyways. She seems entirely focused on the paper she’s been scribbling notes on, only looking up to say something to the nurse before letting her work capture her attention again.
From his position, he can just barely see the name Pearl written on the top of her notes. Eyes flicking back to the nurse, his eyes catch on a lanyard sitting on the table. Mumbo. Mumbo and Pearl. He resolves to do his best to remember that. (Ha.)
At the entrance to the kitchen, Bdubs hesitates, unsure if he wants to make them aware of his presence, if he can stand any sort of social interaction, but the choice ends up taken out of his hands as Mumbo looks up, catching Bdubs' gaze. Immediately his own gaze softens, and he rises at once to come towards him, hands fluttering around his sides, ghosting over his injuries.
"Bdubs, good morning! How did you sleep? Any pain, any soreness?"
Bdubs' back stings, growing more painful by the second, and his head feels woozy the longer he stays standing. "'M fine."
"Good, good. Let me know if anything changes, alright?" Mumbo puts a hand on his shoulder, careful not to touch any of the bandages as he guides him to the table, before rushing off somewhere. Pearl looks up from her work to shoot him a quick smile before returning to her work, allowing Bdubs to sit in blissful silence for a moment until Mumbo returns with a plate of scrambled eggs, and a pastel pink mug of tea, with a little carton image of a horse and its rider imprinted on the front.
Abruptly Bdubs' headache intensifies dramatically, enough to have him squeezing his eyes shut, dropping his head to rest in the palm of his hand.
"Oh!" Judging by the choked noise coming from Mumbo, Bdubs guesses his reaction was noticed. "Oh dear, one second. Let me get you something for that."
Feeling a little helpless, Bdubs manages to pry his eyes open enough to watch Mumbo make his way around the kitchen with an easy confidence, pouring a glass of water and procuring some pills from somewhere to hand to him with it. Dutifully he swallows them, chasing them with the cool liquid as he tries to breathe through the invisible hooves trampling his skull. Just thinking about it made the ache worse.
Somewhere behind him, the lights dim, accomplanied by the swishing of curtains, and the smallest bit of tension loosens behind his strained eyes. Feeling marginally better, Bdubs reaches for the mug again, turning the picture to the other side before bringing it up to his lips. The taste of lemon and something floral wasn’t what he expected, but as he took another sip he found himself enjoying it.
For a single moment, Bdubs fears that one of them is going to start a conversation with him, full of questions that he doesn’t know how to answer. Fortunately though, Mumbo senses his uninterest in conversation and directs his attention to the other person at the table. "What's the scoop today, Pearl?" Mumbo asks.
Pearl startles, not expecting the sudden addressal, but she recovers quickly. "Just covering the attack from a few days ago still." Bdubs pretends not to notice the glances both Pearl and Mumbo send his way. "You’d expect the TIES to be out in full force, but they haven’t been seen anywhere. Well, Remedy made an appearance yesterday but it didn't seem like anything worthwhile. We're waiting on a statement from the Bad Boys, but they haven't been seen yet."
The words slip from Bdubs’ lips before he can stop them. "Who're the TIES?"
Pearl looks up from her work sharply, shock coloring her features, followed by realization, than a look of pity that Bdubs wishes he'll never see again. "TIES are one of the most well known vigilante groups in Lemongrass City. Not aggressive enough to be villainous but they certainly aren’t heroes either. Dr. Blaze provides the technology for everyone, heroes and villains alike. Remedy’s a healer, and he’d be classified a hero if he didn’t heal villains as well. Pixel is a teleporter, loyal only to Remedy, and he only gets involved when he thinks Remedy’s in danger. And… Oh goodness, I’m rambling! Sorry mate.” She abruptly cut off, light blush dusting her cheeks.
Too invested to let the moment pass, Bdubs leans forward, eyes wide. “And? Who else?”
“Well… Not much is known about Tempo. He’s a former villain, but vigilante isn’t that much better. They're the ones who started this whole disaster, Dr. Blaze especially. Their involvement is only suspected of course. They haven't come forward to take credit yet, but I'm almost certain they will. It’s only a matter of time.”
"Villains?"
“Villains, yes." Pearl's tone darkens as she utters their name, an abrupt tone shift that has Bdubs leaning back. “Don't worry about them, though, the Bad Boys will protect us." Bdubs gets the feeling that she has no intention of expanding the topic further, and decides to drop it.
Bdubs feels something off about that statement, but trying to think about it sends another wave of agony through his skull. Will that happen every time he tries to remember something? Void, He hopes not.
Instead he just nods, going back to sipping his tea as Pearl goes into talking about the heroes, making scribbled notes as she talks. Mumbo chimes in every now and then with his own comments, but Bdubs turns his focus back to his plate, taking slow bites of the eggs, which seemed more and more unappetizing with every bite.
Does he not like eggs? Does he not like the way Mumbo cooks them? Questions swirl in his mind, bumping against the unforgiving void that had consumed everything before the past couple days. A void he wishes more than anything to be able to push into and reveal its secrets, decades of memories held just out of reach.
Instead, he takes another sip of tea, and wishes more than anything to go back to wherever home is.