[FIC] Prankster
See, the thing is – Ted always had a predilection for practical jokes, but that didn’t mean they were good jokes, or that they didn’t backfire on him as often as not. Booster’s seen the list he used to keep taped to the underside of his bottom desk drawer, of pranks that ended in him getting his eyebrows burned off, or writing a long, apologetic letter to Batman, or being eaten by slime aliens. His failure had never been much of a deterrent; half the time he’d still been growing his eyebrows out and washing the slime out of his hair when he came up with a new scheme for sneaking sex pollen into the Embassy’s ventilation system.
At the distant back of his mind, it hadn’t escaped Booster that this could be one of Ted’s more ill-considered practical jokes. Lying in bed, blissful on a morphine dip, it didn’t even seem like such a stretch. Maybe in a fit of self-pity Ted had decided to fake his own death, to make his friends feel properly contrite for not appreciating him enough. Maybe the explosion at his house had been an accident. Maybe he had a safe house somewhere with a freezer full of microwave burritos and a radio set to eavesdrop on the JLA frequency. Maybe he was walking around another city, hair dyed red, beard grown out, calling himself Karl. Maybe he was waiting for this all to blow over so he could jump out and say ‘just kidding!’, and then he and Booster could go out for a beer.
Maybe Max was in on the joke.
It was a convenient lie, one that took the hard edge of reality off of everything that he did. When he left the hospital, when he listened to Diana talk about Checkmate, when he went home after another day with no answers, it was the reassuring whisper in his ear, repeated so often he half-convinced himself it could be true (None of this is happening. None of this is real. Everything will be okay). And if another voice whispered that Ted’s jokes were never this cruel, he didn’t –couldn’t – believe it.
Sometimes, Booster felt sure, denial was a man’s best friend.
When he left the satellite, Booster took Ted’s goggles with him, clinging to them hard enough to feel the shattered plastic dig into his palm through his glove. He didn’t ask permission to take them, not trusting himself if Batman claimed them as evidence. But Batman didn’t say a thing, no one did; and if he knew it wasn’t his decision to make, or if he had more important things to worry about, or if he just didn’t notice them in Booster’s hand, Booster didn’t much care. He took them home and left them on his dresser, but he didn’t brush them with his fingertips when he left the room, like a macabre luck ritual, and he didn’t glance at them last thing every night just before he fell asleep, and he didn’t think about them much at all, except to push further out of his head the frantic insistence that there was some reason for the sour, tacky stain discoloring the lenses that would explain the grand cosmic joke of his life.
On the flickering television screen, Wonder Woman snaps Max’s neck over and over again. Booster watches, Ted’s goggles pricking blood from the fist clenched in his lap, and laughs until he sobs.
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