Work Text:
about your day
“Ted, you’re not gonna believe this,” Booster says, throwing himself on the chair the nurses stopped bothering to put away.
One of them is in the room now. At Booster’s entrance, she pauses her note-taking. They used to scold him for how loud he is, how much he talks; the patients need rest, they say, like Ted—and the Atom—isn’t getting it every minute of every day he’s lying there, breathing and eating with the help of tubing. The drug cocktail they’re pumping into him probably doesn’t let him exist in much but a dream.
But the real world makes it into dreams, and so Booster keeps visiting. Keeps talking. Keeps ignoring the looks everyone else gives him.
“I had a shoot for a cologne today. I’d never heard of it before, but money is money, so my agency sent me. Anyway, after it was done, I got to sniff it—the bottle we used for the ad was empty!—and it was so familiar. You know when you smell something and it immediately puts you somewhere you’ve been? I was in the run-down apartment I grew up in. Which made no sense. If the cologne was around in the future, I’d remember the name, or at least the stupid bottle, because it’s shaped like a gun. I couldn’t remember the exact reason I thought of my old place, and it kept bugging me, and then when I thought about how much I wanted to tell you about it, it hit me!” He slaps his thigh. “In the future, that cologne is sold as an insect repellent!”
The snort-laugh is out of the nurse. Not Ted.
“Excuse me,” she says when Booster turns to her. She dips her head and leaves.
He turns back to Ted. “Funny, right? Not like I’m telling the cologne people that… But I’m definitely not going to model for them again!” He crosses his arms and leans his full weight back on the chair. “Besides that, the shoot was fine. It paid really well. First thing we’re doing when you wake up is having a fancy dinner somewhere, and I’m paying. On my way home from the shoot, I passed a new French place that caught my eye. Maybe there?”
There is another memory seeping into Booster: Paris, a handful of years ago, a spurned date and a consequent pity dinner with Ted.
“Once you wake up,” Booster says, swallowing a lump in his throat, “we can do whatever you like.”
about your night
With each step Booster takes, a dull knife sinks into his heels. It’s only exertion: a day of risking his life, an evening of mingling with sponsors, and a night of meandering alone. Sitting down would be a relief if it weren’t for where he is.
“How is he?” he asks the doctor on duty, packing up her bag. The end of her shift. Those whose jobs it is to keep others alive have to rest themselves.
“There’s been no change in his condition since the morning, Mr. Gold. Worse than yesterday, as I’m sure you remember. Would you still like to review his test results?”
His smile is thin. “I wouldn’t know what to make of them. You’d think I would, with how often I stare at them.”
“They do look like gibberish to the average person… Don’t be hard on yourself, Mr. Gold. I’d like my degree to mean something, anyway.” Chuckling, she slings her bag over her shoulder. “Goodnight, now. You know where the phone is, should Mr. Beetle wake up.”
“Yeah.” He grips his knees. “Night.”
The doors are automatic: they hiss open and shut, and with them, something in Booster gives quietly, too.
“I had to talk to so many people today, Ted. I feel like my jaw’s about to fall off.” He rubs it and tries on another smile. “Still have time for you, though. You know that.” He moves his hand up to his hair, grimy from concrete dust and confetti; and in his stomach churns cognac, provided at the sponsors’ party and by their very money at the bar Booster shuffled to as himself, alone. “I came to the past to be famous, and I’ve gotten it. But it can get tiring sometimes. I need a long, hot shower and about a week’s worth of sleep.”
His horror at his indiscretion has him flinching, stuttering out an apology, reaching for Ted—how familiar and rote the motion is.
People talk. There’s no one else around to add to that unwanted conversation, but the guilt from Ted being unable to reply has Booster pulling back. He slides his hands under his thighs.
“I’ll be going,” he says. “Just wanted to complain about the life I chose and then say goodnight. You need to sleep; the doctor told me about the brain wave differences.” He pats the mattress. “Night, Ted. We’ll drink the vintage wine a sponsor gave me as soon as you’re given the all-clear. Drinking alone isn’t fun, you know.”
a joke
“I can finally talk about something other than myself, Ted!” Booster says, bounding into the room, waving a magazine.
The doctors in the room politely greet him and resume their examinations; the nurse is chipper in her greeting and asks him, “Is that this month’s Reader’s Digest?”
“Yeah. I stole—uh, am borrowing it from J’onn. I heard him laughing.” He sits at the edge of Ted’s bed and smacks the magazine. “It was ’cause of something here. I want Ted to hear it, too.”
“And not Mr. Atom, who’s been ignored here the entire time?” says the nurse, grinning.
It’s probably a friendly grin. It might not be. Booster makes himself smile back as he says, “Sure, he can hear it if he likes.” He flips through the magazine, looking for anything funny and something mentioning a tomato; he’s sure he’d heard J’onn mutter that to himself in his laughter. He thinks he finds the relevant story and reads it aloud.
The nurse laughs; the eavesdropping doctors stifle their own. Booster frowns at the page as if there is more to it.
“Not your kind of humor, Mr. Gold?” a doctor asks, rounding Ted to study the readings on the Atom’s equipment.
“It’s an okay joke. I think maybe because I read it instead of getting told it is why I’m not laughing.”
Or maybe because nothing has been funny since Ted was nearly fatally injured. He’d have been laughing the hardest out of them, right from the depths of his stomach; he’d be doubled over, reaching for whoever was closest—and it would have been Booster, like always—for support. And then they’d have looked at each other and found an inanely, utterly incredible humor in that, too. Ted would’ve leaned his forehead against Booster’s arm, trying to hide himself and his laughter away. He would have gone on ’til night with that glee of his; and the next day, he’d have been grinning from just remembering what a good joke Booster had told the day before.
“You should find someone to tell you jokes, then, Mr. Gold,” the nurse says. “You could certainly use a good cheering-up.”
He does have that someone: he’s right there, getting turned on his side to keep bedsores away. Booster rolls the magazine up and tap, tap, taps it on his knee. “How’s he doing today?”
“Mr. Beetle? The same as yesterday, unfortunately.”
“You’ll be the first to know if he wakes up, Mr. Gold,” says a doctor, smiling at him—is that pity? A sneer of disgust? “It isn’t good for your health to be cooped up here. Even we doctors take shifts!”
“And the nurses,” she mumbles.
“Right, right. So, Mr. Gold, it is my professional recommendation you go out for a few hours daily. Exercise, get some fresh air and sun. You need to stay in tip-top shape as a hero yourself.”
But his power suit is ruined, and the only person in this century who can cobble up something like it is on that goddamn bed. Like this, Booster is useless to the League—everyone is too polite to say it, but it’s thick in his absences from every ongoing crisis—and he’s useless to Ted, too, not knowing anything about medicine or health. All he can do is come by to talk and talk and talk. And they won’t even let him have it.
Booster gets up, nodding absently. J’onn will want his magazine back, at least.
a plea
There are no doctors around. It’s too late at night and too early in the terrible hours of the morning, where the dark from one day bleeds to the next. The equipment Ted is hooked up to is the latest tech; he can go eight hours unsupervised, the doctors say, themselves the best of the best. They say he may not be awake, but his brain still needs to sleep. The waves on the EEG are peaceful.
It’s what they say. It’s not what Booster sees. If sleep is like temporary death, what is a coma? No tossing about, no god-awful snoring, deep from the belly, deep as laughter. In between the equipment’s beeping and humming, Booster can’t fool himself into thinking he hears Ted laughing; and in their pallid glow, he can believe the equipment is lying and Ted is—
Booster steadies his breathing, forced, pained inhales through his nose and stuttering out his exhales. It does nothing to tamper his nausea or the burning of tears in his eyes. He sits, the chair melded to his shape. Doesn’t help, either. He buries his face in his hands and the darkness is too much to bear.
“Ted. You have to wake up,” he says. Breathe in; try not to vomit out.
Beeping and humming and nothing at all.
Booster’s chair scraping is an insult to the stillness, the stiffness. “I know you’re in there. I don’t mean—the machines, they can say whatever they want, but I know you’re in there. What I don’t know is if you can hear me. Maybe I’ve been talking to myself.” He rubs the tears from his eyes with enough violence light prickles behind his eyelids. “I don’t believe in God. You know that. Sometimes, though, sometimes I—sometimes I want to pray… If that’s what it takes to get you back, I’ll beg anyone or anything who can bring you back.” He can’t look at Ted, who can’t look at him. “Teddy,” he croaks, kneeling against the bed, his forehead to the mattress and his hand clutching Ted’s. “Please wake up.”
Beeping and humming. And nothing at all.
nothing at all
If the equipment keeps Ted alive, it can also fill in a conversation that will not be requited.
your love
There are no doctors around. It’s too late at night and too early in the unknowable hours of the morning, that liminal murk where anything could happen, anything like returning to the same room to the same comatose person and seeing he’s awake.
He’s not.
Booster sinks into the chair at Ted’s bedside, slumping his shoulders and pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes. It’s painful, but it means he’s alive. It’s a pain he can control; a pain he can choose to obsess about, for once, instead of the years-old twist in the very stuff of him, some place no doctor can find and cure, only ever twisting when Ted is concerned.
A twist. A bend. In the future, nobody minds much. Here…
Ted has no powers, either; he’s more sensitive about it than Booster, but he takes it out as anger and seclusion. Same thing goes when rumors get to him, and there Booster goes every time, lying through his teeth just to have his best friend at his side. Their friendship isn’t a lie—there is no other person Booster would go so far for. The blurring of friendship into something more had happened somewhere, somehow, and the one person he wants to tell about it can’t know, because he is the one person it’s about.
But here Ted is, deaf and blind and mute. The doctors have abided Booster’s constant barging in because the patient has no awareness of who’s around—his talking and pretending Ted can hear have been one delusion after the other; he knows it, and he knows the doctors know it, but could not find it in themselves to tell him. They were nice delusions. Delusions still. Reality is harsh as the single emergency light, fluorescing on Ted’s undereye circles and dried lips, this wonderful, ridiculous genius who is the nearest thing to a pillar of faith Booster has ever leaned on. They’re both only human, outcasts in a League they’re too free-spirited for. Ted is the one worth something without the costume—he’s smarter than Batman and nobody except Booster realizes it because nobody gives Ted a chance. And it wears Ted down, has him withdrawing somewhere Booster can’t reach, and now here he is. Deaf and blind and mute.
Booster puts his hand on the mattress, close to but not touching Ted. “Hi, Ted. It’s me. Still me. Always me.” The bedsheet rasps louder than his speaking as he slowly, so slowly, shifts his hand to Ted’s. “I don’t think there’s any use pretending anymore you can hear me. I dunno why I’m still talking. It helps, I guess. Instead of letting what I’m thinking and feeling rot in my head, it has an out… I’ve talked a lot, I know, more than when you can talk back, but it’s not—I haven’t told you everything. But every day the doctors tell me the same thing, or that you’re worse, and I can also see you’re not getting better, I want to tell you more and more. I’m scared to, though. Like if I tell you, I’m admitting I also think you won’t…”
In his shaking, the words barely make it out of his mouth. Curling his hand around Ted’s brings him back to himself the slightest.
“You’re going to wake up. Maybe it’ll take months, but you’ll wake up. I’m going crazy in the meantime, and I think if I… get this thing out, I can be a little more normal about having to trudge about my life without you. Because if you can’t hear me, it won’t matter, and that’s good; everything will be like it’s always been when you wake up. And if you can hear me, you’ll pretend you couldn’t, and we can go on like normal. See? I’m not a genius and I can see it’s best to tell you…” A quiet sigh. “I’m talking in circles to avoid it. I think everyone knows why I come here every day, and I still can’t say it.” A trembling exhale. “You also know. We just pretend otherwise… Your century’s not nice about it. You especially. And I don’t want to lose you, even if I have to lie, but—I don’t know. No, I do know. I’m just scared.”
Booster holds his breath until the pain, bright in the corner of his eyes, bursts out of him with, “Ted, I love you.”
He hasn’t let Ted’s hand go. He can’t hear anything through his heart thumping in his ears, loud as the equipment here used to be. Should be. And he can’t make sense of the things Ted is hooked up to, but none of them look any different than before. He’s finally spoken it and it isn’t worth much.
But it’s not worth nothing. Booster runs a hand through Ted’s hair, thick and unruly. “I haven’t gotten everything I wanted in the past. But I did meet you.” His hand stills. “You can’t leave me alone like this, Ted. You have to tell me more unfunny jokes and drag me into your get-rich-quick schemes that never work. You have to be the one who’s there for me when no one else is, like I’m there for you, and you have to stay there until we’re both really, really old. And we’ll die in the same place at the same time, because I don’t want to die before you and leave you alone anymore than I want to go through this again. You don’t—you don’t need to love me back. I just need you in my life, Teddy.”
He pulls away, staring at the tiles, counting the heartbeats it takes to pass them off as normal. He stands and sniffs.
“Goodnight, Ted. I’ll see you in the morning.”
The doors swallow him into the hallway. He never sees the infinitesimal spike on the cardiac monitor.