Happy Boostlethon, axolotl_lan!
Title: ‘Twas the Groundhog Day Before Christmas, Part 2
Author: poisonivory
Recipient: axolotl_lan
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None. Well, besides sheer length.
Summary: Ted may be a Bill Murray fan, but that doesn’t mean he wants to have his own Groundhog Day. When every day is Christmas Eve Day, what’s a beleaguered (and Jewish) superhero to do?
Notes: Part 2! LJ cannot handling my rambling, apparently.
Part 1
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
By now Ted was getting used to cold showers.
He spent the morning at Iron Heights, talking first to Abra Kadabra, who mostly cursed the Flash’s name - any Flash - and did his best to perform magic tricks without any equipment. Once Ted got Kadabra to stop trying to guess the number Ted was thinking of, though, Kadabra admitted that his technology - all of which was either sitting in the evidence room at Keystone Police Department headquarters, or on display under tight security at the Flash Museum - didn’t have much to do with time travel, aside from the device that actually sent Kadabra back in time.
Ted crossed Kadabra off his mental list and went to talk to Zoom, who stared at nothing and whispered “Zoomzoomzoom” for ten solid minutes in just about the creepiest way Ted could imagine. He almost wished he was back watching Kadabra pull an invisible rabbit out of a nonexistent hat.
All in all, Ted didn’t envy Wally. It was a relief to leave Iron Heights, but the relief was short-lived, because Arkham was next.
Ted had only been to Arkham twice before - once as the Beetle, and once as Ted Kord when he was helping Waynetech design a new security system - but twice was enough. He’d often thought that if you weren’t insane when you went in, the place itself could drive you mad quickly enough. It was dark in there, even in the early afternoon, and cold, and it always left him with the sensation of water trickling somewhere, leaking through the rock foundation down in the darkness. And everywhere he went, he could hear the screaming.
He wished he had Booster with him.
An orderly led him down the hallway. Ted kept his eyes locked straight ahead, ignoring the inmates as they cajoled and catcalled on either side of him. Finally they reached the correct cell, where Julian Day, alias Calendar Man, sat on a perfectly made cot, staring across his cell.
“He used to have a calendar there,” the orderly murmured to Ted. “They took it away because they thought it was just feeding the obsession.”
It didn’t look like removing the calendar had solved the problem. Ted stepped forward, as close to Day’s line of sight as he could. “Julian Day?”
“What day is it?” Day asked.
“December 24th,” Ted said. He should know.
Day sighed, a hollow sound. “Tomorrow is Christmas,” he said.
Ted cleared his throat. “What if…tomorrow wasn’t Christmas?” he asked. “What if tomorrow was December 24th again?”
Day turned on him with a look of such bottomless horror that Ted recoiled. “No,” Day whispered. “No no nononononononononoNONONONONONO…”
“I think you’d better go,” the orderly said as Day’s protests rose in volume.
“Yeah,” Ted said, staring. “Yeah, I think so.”
By the time he got the Bug back in its hanger and himself back in civvies, it was four in the afternoon. It didn’t seem worth it to go into the office at this point, and if he was being honest with himself, the trip to Arkham had shaken him enough that he wasn’t sure he could concentrate on work anyway.
His cell phone, in the pocket of his jeans, had a message from Booster. He was willing to bet it was identical to the one Booster’d left the day before. “Hey, Tedbutt. Connie says you took the day off, which I’m assuming means you’ve been replaced by your evil twin from the negaverse, the one who isn’t a workaholic. Do you have a goatee? Anyway, call me if you want to get drinks tonight.”
Ted had ignored it last night, as part of his no-Booster-today rule. He ignored it today, too. Drinks would’ve been nice, but it was time to get serious about this.
“Theories of time travel…” he mused, standing in front of his bookcase. “Okay, Einstein, what have you got for me? You too, Hawking.” He loaded up his arms with books and scientific journals, then headed into the kitchen, since he’d skipped lunch. Making a face at the leftover Chinese food he was now eating for the third time, he stuck it in the microwave for a late lunch/early dinner, and sat down at the kitchen table to read. He could solve this, he knew. He just had to be methodical about it.
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
It took Ted a minute to figure out where he was. He’d been reading Carl Sagan, and then arguing with Carl Sagan, and…oh. He must have fallen asleep while reading. And the universe had plopped him back in bed during the reset, like a parent whose kid had fallen asleep in the car. The universe was such a mom.
A mom who probably wouldn’t have appreciated him calling Carl Sagan a poopyhead in his dream. Whoops.
He was out of time-related villains to interview, but being in Iron Heights had given him an idea. He got out of bed, managed to avoid stubbing his toe, and took his cold shower. Then he checked the time. It was early, but Wally had infants. He’d be up.
Up, and frantic. “’Lo?” Wally asked when he picked up the phone, sounding breathless. Ted resolved never to have kids, if they could make a speedster out of breath.
“Wally? It’s Ted. Listen, I have kind of a weird favor to ask…”
Wally had zipped over for Ted’s explanation. He took a bit more convincing than Booster, but eventually he grudgingly conceded that Ted reliving the same day was no odder than the fact that it had taken him three seconds to run from Keystone to Gotham, and that was while dawdling.
“So you want to use the Cosmic Treadmill to do…what, exactly?” Wally asked.
“Well, first I want to make sure it’s there, and not being tampered with,” Ted said. “And then…I don’t know, it’s your magic exercise equipment, you tell me how to use it to fix this!”
“Hey, Barry built it,” Wally pointed out. “I just run on it.” He stood up. “Okay, let’s go,” he said. He held out his arms.
Ted paused. “Must we?” he asked. “We can take the Bug.”
“Too slow,” Wally said. “I need to get back and take over with the kids. Linda will kill me if she’s late for work again. And I still have some shopping to do for tomorrow.”
“It just always feels so damsel-in-distress-y,” Ted said. At Wally’s look, he sighed. “Fine. Let’s go.” He climbed into Wally’s arms, and they were off.
Being carried at super-speed was always an interesting experience, but Ted didn’t have time to process more than a blur and an enormous sense of wind before they were coming to a halt inside the Flash Museum. He climbed down from Wally in the manliest way he could. Somehow it never seemed quite as embarrassing when Booster carried him.
“Treadmill’s in here,” Wally said, and turned to a closed exhibit room. It was early enough that the museum wasn’t open to the public, but apparently they’d given Wally free run of the place, because he punched a code into the keypad by the door of the exhibit and walked in.
And there, in the center of the room, on a pedestal and surrounded by plaques explaining it, was…a treadmill.
“That’s it?” Ted asked.
Wally closed the door behind them. “What were you expecting?”
Ted shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s cosmic! I thought it’d be sparkly, at least.” He climbed up on the pedestal and looked at the control panel, which was larger than a normal treadmill’s. Instead of the usual fields for speed and incline, there were places to program in date, time, and location. “May I?” he asked.
“Don’t break it,” Wally said, but waved his permission.
Ted popped the top off of the control panel, and - “Ooh,” he said. “Now this is sparkly.” Barry Allen had been an unsung genius, if he could put together something like this. Ted’s fingers itched to take the whole thing apart and see how it worked, but this wasn’t the time, especially with Wally waiting and tapping his foot with impatience. (Well, Ted thought that’s what the blur at the end of Wally’s ankle and the low-level vibration in the floor meant.)
He popped the top of the control panel back on. “Well,” he said, “at least we know it hasn’t been stolen.”
“Not really,” Wally said, hopping up onto the pedestal with him. “It could have been stolen, but returned before we noticed it was gone. Or it hasn’t been stolen yet, but when it is they’ll come back to tamper with stuff now.” Ted’s face fell. “On the other hand, only four people in this time period can even use it. I haven’t, Jay hasn’t, Zoom’s in jail, and Bart…” He made a face. “With his talent for chaos, if he had been messing with the Treadmill, the consequences would be a lot more drastic than you repeating a day.”
“So we can rule out the Treadmill entirely?” Ted asked.
“Well…” Wally hedged. “There’s a lot of future speedsters, and the Flash Museum is going to stand for at least another thousand years. Theoretically, there’s dozens of people who could access and use the Treadmill in that time - my descendents, Barry’s descendents, and God knows who else.” Seeing Ted’s disheartened expression, he clapped him on the back. “Hey, I don’t think they have,” he said cheerfully. “Why on Earth would my great-grandkids come back to screw with you? What possible significance could you have?”
“Hey!”
“Aw, come on, Ted. I meant because you’re not a speedster!” Wally protested.
“Hmmph. I liked you better when all you did was chase girls and complain about people calling you Kid Flash,” Ted sniffed. “Okay, so the Treadmill isn’t behind this, but here’s a thought - what if we use the Treadmill to see who is? Like, we’ll go back to yesterday and see if there’s anything hinky in the timestream on the way.”
“That works,” Wally agreed. He stepped onto the Treadmill. “Just…pop a squat on the handlebars or something. If you’re on the belt when I’m running…well, you won’t be for long.”
Ted perched on the handlebars as Wally plugged in the place and time, and then Wally started to run. Maybe it was because he was being carried along with Wally on the Treadmill, but Ted could actually see him moving, rather than just a blur. The Museum disappeared, and suddenly they were in what must have been the timestream. It was indescribable, vast and minute, full of nothing and everything, rushing along at an unfathomable pace and suspended timelessly, unmoving. And…
“It’s awfully…rainbow, isn’t it?” Ted asked.
“Yeah, I know. Weird, right?” Wally said, his brow furrowed in concentration. “Annnnnd…we’re here!”
Ted blinked. They were in his bedroom. Early morning sun was streaming in through the windows, horns were honking on the street below, and, weirdest of all, there he was - himself, Ted, sound asleep and drooling into his pillow.
“Aw,” said Wally. “My four-month-old daughter makes that face when she sleeps.”
“Shut up,” Ted said. “Will he be able to - I mean, will I be able to see us when I wake up?”
Wally shook his head. “I’m vibrating us just enough that you won’t be able to.”
Just then the alarm clock clicked, and then went off. “…just ignore it but they keep saying we laugh just a little too loud, stand just a little too close…”
Ted - the Ted in the bed - groaned, sat up, and staggered out of bed.
“Nice boxers,” Wally whispered. Ted elbowed him.
Past Ted disappeared into the bathroom and shut the door, and Present Ted turned to Wally. “This isn’t right. I wanted to go back to yesterday.”
“This is December 23rd,” Wally said, pointing to the date on the Treadmill’s control panel. “That’s yesterday.”
“Not my yesterday,” Ted pointed out. “Try December 24th.”
Wally plugged in the new date and ran. They zipped through Rainbow Sherbert Land and emerged, once again, in Ted’s bedroom.
Past Ted was mumbling in his sleep. “Znnkn…don’t mess with me, Sagan…wouldn’t like me when I’m angry…”
Wally raised an eyebrow.
“I have vivid dreams, okay?” Ted hissed.
Click. “…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
“Man, you listen to the girliest radio station,” Wally whispered.
Past Ted blinked confusedly and sat up. He almost ran his toe into the bed leg, then caught himself, and, smirking a little, went into the bathroom.
“No, this is today!” Ted huffed in frustration.
“I don’t know what you want from me, Ted,” Wally said. “You asked for yesterday, we went there. Uh, then. You asked for today, and here we are.”
Ted pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m trying to get to the days in between, all the times I’ve already lived December 24th. But I guess there’s no way to tell the Treadmill that, huh?”
Wally shrugged. “Not that I know of.”
Then Ted had another idea. “What if you just bring me to tomorrow?” he asked. “Maybe that’ll snap me out of the time loop.”
“Now that makes sense,” Wally said, and programmed in the new date. Zoom they went, back into the timestream.
“Uh, Wally?” Ted asked a few minutes later, when they were still going.
“Yeah?” Wally sounded distracted.
“Shouldn’t we be there by now? It didn’t take nearly this long last time.”
“Yeah,” Wally said. “The Treadmill says we’re here, but it’s not letting us materialize in the normal timeflow. It’s like we’re locked out.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound good.”
“Nope.” Wally punched new numbers into the Treadmill. “I’m going to try and take us back to where we started.”
“We got to get right back to where we started from?” Ted asked.
“Yes,” Wally snorted. “Disco references. That’s helpful.”
“Sorry.”
Less than a minute later by Ted’s reckoning, although he wasn’t sure time really counted as such while on the Treadmill, they were sitting on the pedestal in the Flash Museum. “Huh,” Wally said. “That was no problem at all. I wonder why it wouldn’t let me go forward?”
Ted had a flash of intuition. “Try it without me,” he said. “See if the Treadmill will take you into the future on your own.”
Wally shrugged. “It’s worth a shot.”
Ted climbed down from the handlebars, which were getting kind of uncomfortable anyway, and stepped off of the pedestal. The Treadmill flickered out of sight, and then back, almost instantly.
“Well, I know what Linda’s getting me for Christmas,” Wally said, stepping off of the Treadmill.
“It took you to the future?” Ted asked.
“Yeah, no problem,” Wally said. His eyes flicked towards the clock on the wall and back to Ted.
“Sorry, I know it’s getting late,” Ted said. “Just…could we try one more thing?”
“Sure,” Wally said, and stepped back onto the Treadmill. Ted climbed back up.
“I want to see if it’s just tomorrow that’s locked for me,” Ted said. “See if you can get to the day after Christmas.”
After a couple of minutes whizzing through Rainbow Sherbert Land, it was clear that December 26th wasn’t any more accessible to Ted than December 25th. Neither was a year in the future, or ten years.
“I wonder if it’s the whole future, or just my lifespan?” Ted mused.
“You want to try thirty years?” Wally asked. “Forty?”
Ted shuddered. “No thanks. I don’t particularly want to know when I’m going to die.”
“Well, when do you want to try for?” Wally asked.
Ted paused. “Can we go to 2462? No, 61?” he asked.
“2461,” Wally repeated.
“Gotham,” Ted said. “Corner of 86th and 2nd.”
“That’s…awfully specific,” Wally said. “What are we going to see?”
“That depends on whether we can even access the future,” Ted pointed out, sidestepping the question. Wally didn’t push him, too busy concentrating on vibrating the Treadmill exactly right, or whatever he did to make it go.
When they came to a sudden stop on an urban street corner, Ted knew they’d succeeded. He looked around, knowing Wally was vibrating them out of sight. The skyline was different, the vehicles and fashions and signs all alien to him, but there was something familiar underlying the street, something that told him this was a city he knew, this was a street he’d walked down before.
“Well, apparently you do not live until the 25th century, at least if your theory is correct,” Wally said. “Was there something you wanted to do here? I’m pretty sure Jai’s going to need changing in a couple of minutes.”
“Nah,” Ted said reluctantly. He knew the address, but it was a million to one chance that the timing would be right to -
“ - doing the best I can!” said a familiar voice behind him. He whirled. A man and a woman - no, a boy and a girl, really, since they couldn’t be older than 20 - were coming out of the nearest apartment building, yelling at each other.
“Hey. Is that…?” Wally started to say.
Booster. Looking younger than Ted had ever known him, still with a trace of boyish roundness to his cheeks, his blond hair swept sideways into some kind of awful futuristic hairstyle. The girl beside him had to be Michelle - she was his spitting image. It was a little eerie to see all of Booster’s features on a pretty female face.
Booster had told him about the future, had pointed out the spot where the building he’d grow up in would stand, but Booster’s youth had never seemed real to Ted. Not until now.
“This isn’t just some cold, Mikey!” Michelle was shouting. “Mom is dying. And all you can think about is running off to practice or a game or just to party with the team, while I’m working three jobs!”
“That is my job!” Booster said. His eyes were so big, his features so vulnerable. Ted wanted to give him cookies and tell him everything would be okay, even if it was mostly a lie. “Two more years, Michelle. Two more years and I can go pro, and we won’t ever have to worry about money again.”
“She won’t last that long, Mikey,” Michelle told him. “You heard the doctor. She’s lucky if she has two months.” She made a disgusted noise. “Look, you can keep clinging to this ridiculous dream if you want, but I’m late for work. You’d better get back upstairs. Mom shouldn’t be alone.”
She headed off down the street and soon turned the corner. Booster sat down on the stoop, his head in his hands.
It wasn’t until he felt the hand on his shoulder that Ted realized that he had almost stepped off of the Treadmill - that he would have stepped off, if Wally hadn’t stopped him. “Don’t,” Wally said. “Talking to him will just confuse him, and if you change his past, you’ll probably change ours.”
Ted knew Wally was right. Still… “I wish I could do something,” he said.
Wally just gave him a sympathetic smile. “Time travel sucks,” he said with great profundity, and started up the Treadmill.
Once they were back in their proper time, Ted allowed Wally to carry him back to his apartment; then he thanked Wally profusely and let him return to his diaper-changing duties. It was still not even 7:30.
Ted reviewed his mental list. He didn’t particularly want to ask this next person for a favor, but if he was dealing with some kind of cosmic threat, he needed the most powerful tool in the universe.
And his ring.
Midday found him strolling past Super Buddies headquarters, which would have looked more festive if whoever had decorated hadn’t misspelled “Happy Holidays” in twinkle lights, and into the bar next door. The halls were most definitely decked in there, and Ted was surprised for a minute before he remembered how well-run Warriors had been, when it wasn’t being blown up.
Guy was whistling “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” and using his ring to write eggnog specials on the mirror over the bar. He looked up when Ted walked in.
“Oh, brother.” He rolled his eyes. “Listen, Bugface, I already agreed to let Max throw the holiday party and I just provide the booze. It’s not my fault if the bar looks better than your little clubhouse, so he can stop whining about how I’m stealing his thunder.”
“I’m not here for Max,” Ted said, sliding onto a barstool. “I need a favor.”
“Sorry, did I miss the part where we exchanged friendship bracelets?” Guy asked. “Why would I do you a favor? Even though you asked so nice.”
“I need a favor, please,” Ted said. “And didn’t I try to fix Sinestro’s ring back when you first had it? Didn’t I save your butt repeatedly when we were in the League? Didn’t you put me in the hospital once? You owe me.”
Guy tapped his chin. “The way I remember it, I was saving your butt.”
“Memory can be a tricky thing.”
Guy crossed his arms. “Okay, Cockroach, what do you need?”
Ted lifted his eyebrows and lowered his voice. “Well, for one I need you to clam up about the Beetle stuff. I don’t need Big Dick knowing my secret identity.”
Guy snorted. “One, he’s not here, and two, you have a secret identity?”
“Look, just…listen, okay?” As succinctly as possible, Ted filled Guy in on the strangeness of the past few days (or day, as it was). When he finished, Guy was leaning against the back of the bar, arms folded, eyebrows practically disappearing into his hairline.
“Jeez, Bug. Is your favor me carting you off to Bedlam?”
Ted blew out his cheeks in frustration. “Look, J’onn already checked me out, I’m not crazy. Do you want to go up there and have him look at me again? Or we can go to my office, or the bar Booster and I have been going to, and I can tell you everything everyone’s about to say and do.”
Guy waved a dismissive hand. “Okay, okay, untwist your panties. So say you’re not crazy. I’m guessing you didn’t come to me because you need a drink?”
“Well, at this point I kind of do,” Ted said, rubbing his temples, “but no. I was hoping you could scan me with the ring, see if it picks up any…anything. Temporal interference, cosmic interference, magic…I don’t know.”
“And who saved whose butt all those times?” Guy asked, flexing his ring hand idly.
Ted gritted his teeth. “I think the butt-saving was about equal.”
“Since it’s Christmas, and you’ve gone bonkers, I’ll let that slide,” Guy said, and beamed the ring on Ted. For a long moment Ted was awash in green light; then it was done and Guy was looking at him with a slight frown.
“Ring’s not picking up anything,” he said.
“So what’s the face for?” Ted asked.
“Well, it also says you’re not lying and you say J’onn says you’re not crazy,” Guy said slowly. “So if this really is happening, it’s because of something no Green Lantern ring has ever encountered before.”
Ted cleared his throat, which was suddenly dry. “And how long have the Green Lantern rings been around?”
Guy reached below the bar, pulled out a beer, and slid it across to Ted. “You don’t want to know.”
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
It took Ted a couple days of trying to track down Dr. Fate, but he needn’t have bothered, because Fate couldn’t find the source of the problem. Nor could Zatanna, Hourman, Detective Chimp, or the other dozen heroes Ted spent the next week of Thursdays locating and pleading for help from.
The fact that it was Christmas Eve Day didn’t help the solution, since those heroes who celebrated the holiday and had families had their minds more on eggnog and togetherness than derring-do and temporal crises. Ted felt distinctly awkward when he showed up at the door of a quaint Kansas farmhouse draped in icicle lights and asked the pleasant-but-confused older woman who answered if he could talk to her son.
Superman’s mother, who turned out to be named Martha, wouldn’t hear of Ted standing on the cold porch while he talked to Clark, and bustled him into the kitchen. The scent of home-cooked holiday deliciousness was so thick inside Ted thought he might have actually died, and all the repeated days were a purgatory he had to struggle through to reach this heaven.
“Clark, could you come in here, please?” Martha called into the living room. She sat Ted down at the kitchen table against his protests and apologies, and before he quite realized it he had a slice of apple pie and a glass of milk sitting in front of him.
“You really don’t have to go to any trouble…” Ted tried again.
“Oh, it’s no trouble at all,” Martha assured him. “I couldn’t decide what kind of pie to make, so I made six. We can’t possibly finish all that.”
“I can!” called a teenage boy’s voice from the living room.
“Aunt Martha! Make Conner stop using his x-ray vision to see what’s inside the presents!” a girl called.
“Uh, it was an accident! I’m still learning to control my x-ray vision!” the boy said quickly.
Martha tsked, but Ted could tell she was hiding a smile. “Would you excuse me, Mr. Kord - ”
“Ted, please.”
“Ted. I’d better go break this up.” Martha hurried out of the kitchen, and Ted, feeling a little in over his head and a lot out of place, stared down at his pie.
“I’d eat it if I were you. Ma’s pies are the best.”
Ted looked up. Clark was leaning against the doorframe, looking far less imposing in a plaid shirt and glasses than he did in the red and blue pajamas.
“Hi, Clark,” Ted said, standing up. “Listen, I’m really sorry to bother you at your folks’ house the day before Christmas, but the Planet said you were out here and I’m in a bit of a bind…”
“Don’t worry about it,” Clark said, pulling out a chair at the table. “I think Lois has been looking for a chance to sneak my present out of her suitcase and under the tree anyway. Please, sit. Eat the pie.” He sat down as well. “What’s up?”
Ted explained. By now he’d gone through this so many times that he had the fastest, most convincing version of the story down by heart. Clark listened patiently, his brow slightly furrowed.
“Well, your heart rate hasn’t changed, so either you’re a very good liar, or this isn’t you and Booster coming up with a very elaborate holiday prank,” Clark said when Ted had finished. “By the way, did you know you have a slight irregularity in your heartbeat…?”
“Ohhhh yeah.” Ted fought back a scowl by finally taking a bite of pie. He instantly forgot why he’d been upset. “Uh muh guh.” He swallowed. “Oh my God, this pie is incredible.”
Clark beamed proudly. “Told you.”
Ted shoveled in an embarrassingly large forkful. “Is your mom looking to adopt?” he asked through a full mouth. “I’m housebroken.”
Clark laughed. “So, uh…what exactly did you need my help on?” he asked. “I mean, I’m happy to help out any way I can, but…I’m not sure exactly what you want me to do in this situation.”
Ted swallowed and put the fork down. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, you’re Superman! You’re supposed to figure out a way to, you know, be super.”
Clark scratched his head. “Well, I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I just don’t see how heat vision or punching things really hard is going to fix this particular problem.”
“I don’t know,” Ted said again, gesturing helplessly. “Can’t you just pick me up and, like, fly me through the time barrier or something?”
“Ted, that makes no sense.”
“I know.” Ted sighed. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just…I’m getting really, really sick of ‘Single Ladies.’”
“Aw, I love that song!” Clark said.
Ted groaned. He needed more pie.
When he left about a half hour later, he did, in fact, have more pie - a slice of pumpkin and a slice of pecan, both of which Martha had all but forced him to take - a couple of incredibly stupid but kind of hilarious jokes from Superboy that he needed to remember to tell Booster, and a popcorn string from Supergirl, who had apparently made about nine miles of them at superspeed.
He also had a pervasive sense of melancholy. If Superman hadn’t been able to help him - Superman, and Dr. Fate, and Green Lantern - who could?
But no - if he was honest with himself, that wasn’t the only reason for his melancholy. He had just spent almost an hour at the home of an alien, a guy whose home planet had only three survivors, one of whom was a dog. And yet the man from halfway across the universe was spending the holidays with a warm and loving extended family, while Ted, who as far as he knew was human…well, the closest he had to family was an estranged father, and a best friend he was avoiding.
And that last bit, he suddenly felt, was profoundly stupid. Weaning himself off of Booster clearly wasn’t working; he still reached for the phone to call him every morning, still mentally stored funny comments to share with him the next time they talked. So he wanted to see his best friend. So he wanted to see his best friend a lot. Wasn’t that why Booster was his best friend?
Besides, he had two pieces of pie.
“This is incredible,” Booster said around a mouthful of pecans, sitting in Ted’s kitchen two hours later. “Where did you get this again?”
“Superman’s mom made it,” Ted told him.
Booster gagged and reached for his drink. “Ack! Poison!”
“Oh, stop it.” Ted kicked him gently under the table. “She’s a really nice lady.”
“Yeah?” Booster said, reaching over to take a bite of Ted’s pumpkin pie. “How’d she raise such a pill then?”
“He’s not a pill. He just doesn’t like you.”
“Oh, so he’s mentally deficient.”
Ted hid a laugh by knocking aside Booster’s fork and stealing a bite of the pecan pie. “Anyway, I’m kind of out of ideas here. I can’t get in touch with Rip or Waverider or any of those guys who really knows time travel.” He’d explained his problem to Booster over dinner, which Booster had brought from their favorite Italian place at Ted’s call.
Booster looked thoughtful. “What if…no, that’s stupid.”
“What?” Ted asked, flaking off a piece of crust.
“Well…what if it really is like Groundhog Day?” Booster asked. “I mean, maybe this isn’t some spell or time travel thing gone hinky. Maybe this is, like, the universe wanting you to learn a lesson.”
Ted raised an eyebrow. “Is that your atheism talking?”
“Look, I don’t know!” Booster said, spreading his hands. “It was just a thought. Maybe there’s something you need to learn, or do, or…I don’t know.”
Ted chewed thoughtfully on a bite of pie. “Something I need to do…that’s it!” he cried, spewing pie crumbs all over the table.
“Okay, ew.”
“There must have been some horrible crisis today, something that I needed to stop!” Ted said. He was already on his feet, running for the living room.
Booster followed more slowly, carrying his pie plate and finishing the last few bites as he watched Ted scramble for the remote control. “We’re doing what now?”
“Just you watch. I’m going to turn on the news and we’re going to hear about some horrific catastrophe only I could have prevented. Here we go.” Ted pressed the power button, and on came the news, playing…a human interest story about department store Santas.
“Okay, well maybe this channel hasn’t picked it up yet,” Ted said. He cycled through all the news stations, but none of the stories - a piece of the year’s most popular toy, an interview with some teen starlet, the weather report - seemed to be tragedies only the Blue Beetle could have averted.
“I’m gonna finish your pie, okay?” Booster said as Ted clicked through the news channels again.
“Maybe it’s not local,” Ted said. “Maybe the media doesn’t even know about it yet.” He pulled out his cell phone.
Barbara answered on the second ring. “Hey, Ted.”
“Hey, Barb. Listen, what horrible things have happened today?”
Barbara paused. “Um…what?”
“You know, murders, kidnappings, arson, volcanic eruptions, that sort of thing. The worst of the worst. I know at least some bad stuff had to happen today.”
“Well, yeah, of course bad things happened today, but…why do you…?”
“It’s complicated. Believe me, you don’t want me to get into it,” Ted said. “Just give me the highlights.”
“Ooookay…” He could hear, faintly, the sound of Barbara’s keyboard clicking away. “Let’s see. There was a flood in Java that killed several hundred people…a fire in Benin City killed 67…a preschool shooting in the Netherlands…”
“Great, great,” Ted said. “Well, not great, of course, but…listen, can you do me a huge favor and email me the details of those and a couple of other incidents that occurred today? Before tomorrow?”
“I guess, but Ted, what…?”
“It’s a really long story,” Ted assured her as Booster walked back in. “Listen, I promise if what I’m trying to do here works, I will regale you with all the details tomorrow.”
“Yeah, you’d better,” Barbara said. “Emailing now, Bumblebeeb.”
“Much obliged, Rolling Thunder.” Ted hung up.
“So…what exactly is your plan here?” Booster asked as Ted fired up his computer. “You’re going to stop every crime or tragedy that happened today? Even Superman can’t do that.”
Ted shook his head. “I’m banking on it being a specific tragedy that has to be averted. If I stop that one, I stop the cycle. So I just have to stop everything one by one until I find it.”
“I don’t know,” Booster said. “It seems a little…imprecise. How can you possibly stop every bad thing that occurs on a given day, even with infinite attempts?”
“Aw, come on, Booster.” Ted grinned and cracked his knuckles. “I’m a superhero. How hard can it be?”
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
Ted spent the next day laying sandbags and carting people away from the Java coastline in the Bug. He didn’t think he’d saved more than 50 lives, though, tops, and so wasn’t surprised when the next morning was still December 24th. He needed to move faster, bring in more troops, he thought, and so he filled Booster in and tried again. They maybe doubled the number of rescues. More heroes, he thought, and called in all the favors he could - the Lanterns, the Supers, the speedsters, the Marvels.
They came without grumbling, because people needed help, and they were superheroes, after all. They couldn’t avert the floodwaters entirely, but the speedsters could lay a vast wall of sandbags, and the Lanterns could hold off the waters with their rings, and the Supers and Marvels and assorted other heroes could rescue people in danger, far more efficiently than Ted and Booster alone. There was no way of knowing if they’d saved everyone, but they had to have saved most of them.
But the next day was still December 24th. It must be the fire, Ted thought, and spent the day in West Africa, where the Bug’s fire hoses and his own flame-retardant suit could be of some help. Sixty-seven, Barbara had said - sixty-seven were to die in this fire, and so he counted every person that he carried out of the flames. He was pulled out of one building by the local fire fighters just before it collapsed, and an oxygen mask was forced on him, but he was still only in the low 30s.
Faster, he told himself when he woke, Thursday again, and his lungs clear. Armed with an oxygen mask from the Bug this time, he headed back to Benin City. He didn’t have to look for the people he’d already saved this time, could go straight to them, and he reached the mid-50s before the buildings started to go down. He could do this.
But for every person he rescued in Benin City, five people drowned in Java.
The next day, which was of course the same day, Ted got smart. He called in his favors, but parceled them out, sending the bulk of the heroes to Java while he took Booster and Mary to Benin City. At the end of the day, Ted, Booster, and Mary’s tally of rescues was 66, and the heroes in Java had done nearly as well as the first time Ted had brought them in.
But it was still December 24th. The preschool, then.
The shooter was some sort of deranged radical whose political views Ted suspected wouldn’t make much sense even if Ted could speak Dutch. He was so much less imposing than the elemental forces Ted had been struggling against over the past week that Ted disarmed him carelessly and didn’t even consider that he might have a second gun until he felt the white-hot pain of a bullet ripping through his arm. He managed to take the second gun from the shooter, but not before the teacher had been fatally wounded, and he remembered very little between the screams of the children and Booster’s worried face in the hospital after Barbara called him in.
The next morning Ted awoke back in America with no pain whatsoever in his arm. He subdued the shooter more carefully this time, but while he would normally have been content to stand around receiving the gratitude of the school and the parents, he was needed in Java.
The next morning was still December 24th, so Ted worked his way through the rest of the incidents Barbara had emailed him, which he had memorized that night because he’d known they’d disappear from his inbox by morning. A car accident in Star City. A bombing in Rio de Janeiro. A bridge collapse in Pakistan. He watched the evening news religiously, combed the international news sites, and every day turned up another murder, another death, another stupid, senseless, tragedy.
And for every life he saved, all of the ones he’d saved on days before were lost.
He was calling in every hero he knew now, every day. They didn’t mind - they didn’t remember ever having been called in before. But there were lives that they would have saved if Ted hadn’t disrupted their schedules that were lost now, so he wasn’t gaining any ground.
He stopped sleeping. It didn’t matter - he could be sitting in the Bug in New Zealand, gazing at a clock set to eastern standard time as it ticked away the seconds of 6:59 a.m, but by 7 a.m. he was always waking up in his bed at home, always to the same song. He wasn’t sure if he was getting the full night’s sleep of the first December 24th or the no-night’s sleep of the latest one, but it certainly felt like no sleep.
The state of his mind must have shown in his face even if the endless cycle of days left no physical trace, because Booster finally pulled him aside after…he didn’t know how many days it had been by now, but it was one of the days where he’d scheduled Booster with him. They were in Hub City. He thought.
“Ted, are you okay?” Booster asked. “You look about thirty seconds from a nervous breakdown. Actually, you look about thirty seconds into a nervous breakdown.”
“I’m fine, I just…” Ted rubbed his face. “I have to move a little faster, is all. Organize us a little better.”
“What exactly are you trying to do here?” Booster asked, not unkindly.
“Just…save…” Ted waved a vague hand.
“Everyone?” Booster asked. “Ted, you can’t save everyone.”
“But I can!” Ted protested. He explained the time loop to Booster - probably not as well as he had in the past, but he was a little frayed at the edges right now. “I’m basically immortal, Booster. For now, at least. If I just figure out exactly how to time it, exactly who to send where and what I need to do myself, I can stop every awful, pointless death that happens today.”
“And what happens if you do?” Booster asked. “What then?”
Ted blinked. He’d forgotten what the point of saving everybody had been, besides…saving everybody. “I…it…”
“Didn’t you say you came up with this whole brilliant plan to break the time loop?” Booster asked. “You would find the one person whose death needed to be prevented, the reason the universe was keeping you here. Have you found them?”
“Obviously not, because it’s still today,” Ted said.
“Do you think maybe that means you aren’t supposed to save these other people?” Booster asked. “That maybe this isn’t the solution?”
Booster was always smartest at the worst times.
“It…I don’t…it’s not about the time loop anymore,” Ted said. “I can’t…even if I knew, okay, that it was, say, Rosemary Sanders of Des Moines, Iowa, who I need to save from choking in,” he glanced at his watch, “fifty-three minutes, because, I don’t know, she’s going to have a daughter who’s going to cure cancer or reverse global warming or whatever…even if I knew the one person who needed to be saved…Booster, I’ve seen their faces.”
He sat down heavily and pulled his cowl off. It didn’t much matter who saw him unmasked, when they’d forget it by tomorrow. “I’ve talked to dozens of people who are slated to die today. Maybe hundreds. I know their names, where they live, where they work. I know who they love, because that’s who they’re calling for when they’re about to die. These aren’t just strangers or statistics anymore.”
“You can’t give them more than a few hours,” Booster pointed out. “Then it starts all over again. You’ll lose your mind this way, and what happens when the cycle breaks and it’s tomorrow and you’re not able to help the people who can be saved?
Ted stared at his hands. “I can’t just forget them, Booster.”
“Maybe you’re not supposed to,” Booster said. “Maybe it’s your job to remember them.”
Ted spent the next day in bed.
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
Twenty-four hours of lying curled on his side watching the clock and noting a death with each minute that passed hadn’t helped either Ted’s time loop problem or his despair, so the next day he struggled out of bed and went mechanically through his morning routine. Going to work for the first time in God only knew how many days was strange, made stranger by the fact that he felt hollow, drained.
His grief must have been noticeable, because Connie treated him with kid gloves, and the other scientists, down in the lab, kept shooting each other concerned glances. “Uh, you okay, Ted?” one of them finally asked as Ted stood prodding dully at a just-exploded prototype.
“Do you believe in God, Jack?” Ted asked.
Jack blinked. “I…what?”
“God. Jesus, Yahweh, Allah, do you believe in any of it?” Ted scratched at the soot-covered shell of the prototype with his thumbnail, revealing a thin crescent of shining metal.
Jack looked around at the other scientists on the project, who shrugged. “I was raised Methodist, but…I guess I would call myself an agnostic. I believe there’s something bigger than us out there, I just don’t know what it is.” He frowned. “Uh, is that going to affect my Christmas bonus?”
“So what’s the point of all this?” Ted asked, gesturing to the lab. “The purpose of science is to understand the world around us, right? But if there are things that are just unknowable, why do we even bother?”
Jack looked helplessly at the other scientists. “Uh…”
“I mean, you can spend your whole life trying to figure out how stuff works, but the universe doesn’t care,” Ted went on. “It doesn’t care how much you want to help. It doesn’t care who dies. And it’s not that there’s nothing out there. Random chance doesn’t trap you in the same day for eternity. There’s something out there, and it’s big, and it’s arbitrary, and there’s no damn way of figuring out what it wants you to do!”
He picked up the prototype and hurled it across the lab, where it smashed into a computer monitor. His scientists jumped back, alarmed.
“Ted, maybe you should take the rest of the day off?” Madhuri suggested.
Ted barked a laugh. “Yeah. Another day off is exactly what I don’t need.” The others looked baffled, which made sense - as far as they knew, Ted hadn’t taken a day off in months. “What about you, Madhuri? Are you agnostic too?”
She shook her head. “I’m an atheist.”
Ted looked at Sarah. “Uh, Jewish,” she told him.
“Lapsed Catholic, I guess,” Carlos said.
“Atheist.”
“Buddhist.”
“Agnostic.”
“Episcopalian.”
Ted spread his arms. “Well? Anyone have any answers? Because I could really use some right now.”
“You know,” Madhuri said carefully, “even atheists get that there’s more to the universe than we’re going to be able to figure out in my lifetime, or my grandchildren’s lifetimes. The best we can do is figure out the little mysteries, the ones that are solvable. Just because we can’t solve every problem doesn’t mean we can’t help at all.”
Ted frowned, and crossed the lab to extricate the broken prototype from the monitor. He turned it over in his hands as a thought struggled to push its way through the fog of guilt and grief in his mind.
Maybe the universe didn’t need Blue Beetle, superhero, this time. Maybe it needed Ted Kord, scientist.
“Have we tried one of these on full power yet?” he asked, hefting the prototype like he was testing a melon for freshness.
“Are you kidding?” Jack asked. “I mean, uh. Are you kidding, boss? It’ll overload instantly if we do that!”
Ted felt a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, for the first time in weeks. “Give it a shot anyway,” he said. “This project just got an unlimited budget.”
Over the next few weeks Ted tried every idea he had for the prototypes, even the crazy ones. And why not? Even if he destroyed all the prototypes and blew through the budget in an hour, he’d have a whole new set the next day. With unlimited funds and time to try every possible option, he’d soon isolated the problem and moved several major steps further along on the project. The day he came in and, without saying a word, picked up and completed a prototype in under an hour was priceless just for the looks on his teams’ faces alone.
That done, he moved onto the other projects in the lab. A faster computer processer, a more fuel-efficient jet engine. A new video game system. Solar-powered everything. He couldn’t write down his findings or take an invention from start to finish, but he worked out the kinks in every project his scientists were working on, every vague idea on his own back burner. With no limits to what he could try, he advanced his own scientific knowledge by - well, years. Decades, maybe.
That wasn’t the only thing he learned. Thoroughly sick of leftover Chinese food, he’d stopped at a grocery store one night after work, and didn’t head straight for the prepared foods aisle. Cooking couldn’t be that hard, right? Cavemen had done it, and Ted was a genius.
Okay, so his first attempt at heart-healthy grilled chicken breast and steamed vegetables was inedible. But he had time to get this right, too.
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
“Nooooooooo,” Ted groaned, squinting against the sunlight.
Cooking was all well and good, but he was bored. He’d exhausted every bit of scientific progress he could make in a day, and still it was December 24th. There was nothing new to do in the lab, no way to save everyone, no one who could help him.
“What do you want from me?” he asked, hands to the ceiling as if it would peel back and the Almighty would lean down to explain his plan. “Bill Murray had to learn to be a good person. I’m already a good person! I’m a superhero!” He paused. “Is it the masturbating? Because I can stop that!”
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
Ted jerked awake. “Huh. Well, might as well, then,” he said, and slid a hand into his boxers.
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
“Look, I’m just trying to get in touch with Andie MacDowell’s agent or manager or something. I think I’m supposed to fall in love with her. No, don’t hang up…!”
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
Booster stopped short when he saw the fat, furry creature sitting on Ted’s desk. “What’s that?”
“Groundhog,” Ted said wearily.
Booster raised an eyebrow. “Why’s it here?”
Ted looked at the groundhog. The groundhog looked at him.
“I thought it might help.”
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
Maybe it was backwards. Maybe instead of becoming a better person, Ted was supposed to become a worse one.
He supposed every superhero had thought about turning to the other side now and then. He knew how security devices and law enforcement worked as well as any supervillain, plus he’d learned from the mistakes of every criminal he’d ever apprehended. It had taken him weeks to figure out how to save as many people as possible in one day; weeks to make all of his recent scientific breakthroughs. He wondered how long it would take him to become a supervillain.
As it turned out, not long.
Standing in front of the bank in jeans and a nondescript jacket, Ted took out something he’d cobbled together that morning - essentially an advanced radio crammed into a cell phone casing. Looking for all the world like he was texting, he sent a pulse jamming the frequencies of the alarms, with a slight adjustment so that it would loop the past half hour of uninterrupted signal, since just cutting the frequency would in and of itself raise the alarms at GCPD headquarters.
He pulled a ski mask out of one jacket pocket and put it on, pulled a gas mask out of the other pocket and put that on, then strode into the bank and tossed something the size of a marble onto the floor. The minute it hit, colorless gas streamed out of it, and the security guard who’d been approaching him and fumbling for his gun coughed, then fell unconscious to the floor.
With tellers and customers dropping around him, Ted walked through the main room and into the hallways behind it. Usually only the bank’s employees were allowed back here, but as the second-richest man in Gotham, Ted tended to get special treatment. He knew where the vault was.
He also knew how it opened, since he’d designed it.
He could have run the electronic combination lock through a program that would try every possible combination until it found the right one, but he’d programmed a failsafe into the lock that would put the vault in complete lockdown after three incorrect tries at the combination. He could override it, but it was quicker to do this the old-fashioned way.
Well, okay, maybe “old-fashioned” wasn’t the best term for cutting through the door’s weak points with a handheld laser. But it sure was fun.
Having successfully disconnected the lock, Ted swung the vault open, grunting a little at a job that usually took two men. He pulled a collapsible reusable grocery bag out of his back pocket, filled it with cash, and cinched it shut. Then he walked back out of the vault and into the main lobby. He gently moved the unconscious woman at the customer service desk out of the way, rummaged around on her desk until he found a pad of Post-Its, and scribbled something on the top one. He jogged back to stick it to the door of the vault, returned to the lobby, took a deep breath, threw his gas mask and ski cap in the nearby wastebasket, and walked out of the bank with one and a half million dollars slung over his shoulder in a bag with a picture of a dolphin hugging the Earth on it.
No one gave him a second glance as he walked ten blocks, turned into an alley, and used a nondescript-looking button on his nondescript-looking watch to call the Bug, hovering above it, and bring a line down. Stepping onto the handlebar, he signaled the Bug to pull him up.
Once inside, he aimed the Bug towards the Atlantic. It would be best to get clear of Gotham as quickly as possible. If he knew Bruce and Barbara - and he did - they would not be happy to find the Post-It he’d left on the vault door reading “Sorry, Bats.”
They probably also wouldn’t appreciate the sight of him snickering at the security camera as he wrote it.
Ted propped his feet up on the console, put his hands behind his head, and leaned back, looking over at the bag of money on the seat beside him. He’d just robbed a major bank in a major metropolitan area in broad daylight. And he’d done it really well.
“Well. That was oddly unsatisfying.”
* * *
Part 3
Author: poisonivory
Recipient: axolotl_lan
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None. Well, besides sheer length.
Summary: Ted may be a Bill Murray fan, but that doesn’t mean he wants to have his own Groundhog Day. When every day is Christmas Eve Day, what’s a beleaguered (and Jewish) superhero to do?
Notes: Part 2! LJ cannot handling my rambling, apparently.
Part 1
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
By now Ted was getting used to cold showers.
He spent the morning at Iron Heights, talking first to Abra Kadabra, who mostly cursed the Flash’s name - any Flash - and did his best to perform magic tricks without any equipment. Once Ted got Kadabra to stop trying to guess the number Ted was thinking of, though, Kadabra admitted that his technology - all of which was either sitting in the evidence room at Keystone Police Department headquarters, or on display under tight security at the Flash Museum - didn’t have much to do with time travel, aside from the device that actually sent Kadabra back in time.
Ted crossed Kadabra off his mental list and went to talk to Zoom, who stared at nothing and whispered “Zoomzoomzoom” for ten solid minutes in just about the creepiest way Ted could imagine. He almost wished he was back watching Kadabra pull an invisible rabbit out of a nonexistent hat.
All in all, Ted didn’t envy Wally. It was a relief to leave Iron Heights, but the relief was short-lived, because Arkham was next.
Ted had only been to Arkham twice before - once as the Beetle, and once as Ted Kord when he was helping Waynetech design a new security system - but twice was enough. He’d often thought that if you weren’t insane when you went in, the place itself could drive you mad quickly enough. It was dark in there, even in the early afternoon, and cold, and it always left him with the sensation of water trickling somewhere, leaking through the rock foundation down in the darkness. And everywhere he went, he could hear the screaming.
He wished he had Booster with him.
An orderly led him down the hallway. Ted kept his eyes locked straight ahead, ignoring the inmates as they cajoled and catcalled on either side of him. Finally they reached the correct cell, where Julian Day, alias Calendar Man, sat on a perfectly made cot, staring across his cell.
“He used to have a calendar there,” the orderly murmured to Ted. “They took it away because they thought it was just feeding the obsession.”
It didn’t look like removing the calendar had solved the problem. Ted stepped forward, as close to Day’s line of sight as he could. “Julian Day?”
“What day is it?” Day asked.
“December 24th,” Ted said. He should know.
Day sighed, a hollow sound. “Tomorrow is Christmas,” he said.
Ted cleared his throat. “What if…tomorrow wasn’t Christmas?” he asked. “What if tomorrow was December 24th again?”
Day turned on him with a look of such bottomless horror that Ted recoiled. “No,” Day whispered. “No no nononononononononoNONONONONONO…”
“I think you’d better go,” the orderly said as Day’s protests rose in volume.
“Yeah,” Ted said, staring. “Yeah, I think so.”
By the time he got the Bug back in its hanger and himself back in civvies, it was four in the afternoon. It didn’t seem worth it to go into the office at this point, and if he was being honest with himself, the trip to Arkham had shaken him enough that he wasn’t sure he could concentrate on work anyway.
His cell phone, in the pocket of his jeans, had a message from Booster. He was willing to bet it was identical to the one Booster’d left the day before. “Hey, Tedbutt. Connie says you took the day off, which I’m assuming means you’ve been replaced by your evil twin from the negaverse, the one who isn’t a workaholic. Do you have a goatee? Anyway, call me if you want to get drinks tonight.”
Ted had ignored it last night, as part of his no-Booster-today rule. He ignored it today, too. Drinks would’ve been nice, but it was time to get serious about this.
“Theories of time travel…” he mused, standing in front of his bookcase. “Okay, Einstein, what have you got for me? You too, Hawking.” He loaded up his arms with books and scientific journals, then headed into the kitchen, since he’d skipped lunch. Making a face at the leftover Chinese food he was now eating for the third time, he stuck it in the microwave for a late lunch/early dinner, and sat down at the kitchen table to read. He could solve this, he knew. He just had to be methodical about it.
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
It took Ted a minute to figure out where he was. He’d been reading Carl Sagan, and then arguing with Carl Sagan, and…oh. He must have fallen asleep while reading. And the universe had plopped him back in bed during the reset, like a parent whose kid had fallen asleep in the car. The universe was such a mom.
A mom who probably wouldn’t have appreciated him calling Carl Sagan a poopyhead in his dream. Whoops.
He was out of time-related villains to interview, but being in Iron Heights had given him an idea. He got out of bed, managed to avoid stubbing his toe, and took his cold shower. Then he checked the time. It was early, but Wally had infants. He’d be up.
Up, and frantic. “’Lo?” Wally asked when he picked up the phone, sounding breathless. Ted resolved never to have kids, if they could make a speedster out of breath.
“Wally? It’s Ted. Listen, I have kind of a weird favor to ask…”
Wally had zipped over for Ted’s explanation. He took a bit more convincing than Booster, but eventually he grudgingly conceded that Ted reliving the same day was no odder than the fact that it had taken him three seconds to run from Keystone to Gotham, and that was while dawdling.
“So you want to use the Cosmic Treadmill to do…what, exactly?” Wally asked.
“Well, first I want to make sure it’s there, and not being tampered with,” Ted said. “And then…I don’t know, it’s your magic exercise equipment, you tell me how to use it to fix this!”
“Hey, Barry built it,” Wally pointed out. “I just run on it.” He stood up. “Okay, let’s go,” he said. He held out his arms.
Ted paused. “Must we?” he asked. “We can take the Bug.”
“Too slow,” Wally said. “I need to get back and take over with the kids. Linda will kill me if she’s late for work again. And I still have some shopping to do for tomorrow.”
“It just always feels so damsel-in-distress-y,” Ted said. At Wally’s look, he sighed. “Fine. Let’s go.” He climbed into Wally’s arms, and they were off.
Being carried at super-speed was always an interesting experience, but Ted didn’t have time to process more than a blur and an enormous sense of wind before they were coming to a halt inside the Flash Museum. He climbed down from Wally in the manliest way he could. Somehow it never seemed quite as embarrassing when Booster carried him.
“Treadmill’s in here,” Wally said, and turned to a closed exhibit room. It was early enough that the museum wasn’t open to the public, but apparently they’d given Wally free run of the place, because he punched a code into the keypad by the door of the exhibit and walked in.
And there, in the center of the room, on a pedestal and surrounded by plaques explaining it, was…a treadmill.
“That’s it?” Ted asked.
Wally closed the door behind them. “What were you expecting?”
Ted shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s cosmic! I thought it’d be sparkly, at least.” He climbed up on the pedestal and looked at the control panel, which was larger than a normal treadmill’s. Instead of the usual fields for speed and incline, there were places to program in date, time, and location. “May I?” he asked.
“Don’t break it,” Wally said, but waved his permission.
Ted popped the top off of the control panel, and - “Ooh,” he said. “Now this is sparkly.” Barry Allen had been an unsung genius, if he could put together something like this. Ted’s fingers itched to take the whole thing apart and see how it worked, but this wasn’t the time, especially with Wally waiting and tapping his foot with impatience. (Well, Ted thought that’s what the blur at the end of Wally’s ankle and the low-level vibration in the floor meant.)
He popped the top of the control panel back on. “Well,” he said, “at least we know it hasn’t been stolen.”
“Not really,” Wally said, hopping up onto the pedestal with him. “It could have been stolen, but returned before we noticed it was gone. Or it hasn’t been stolen yet, but when it is they’ll come back to tamper with stuff now.” Ted’s face fell. “On the other hand, only four people in this time period can even use it. I haven’t, Jay hasn’t, Zoom’s in jail, and Bart…” He made a face. “With his talent for chaos, if he had been messing with the Treadmill, the consequences would be a lot more drastic than you repeating a day.”
“So we can rule out the Treadmill entirely?” Ted asked.
“Well…” Wally hedged. “There’s a lot of future speedsters, and the Flash Museum is going to stand for at least another thousand years. Theoretically, there’s dozens of people who could access and use the Treadmill in that time - my descendents, Barry’s descendents, and God knows who else.” Seeing Ted’s disheartened expression, he clapped him on the back. “Hey, I don’t think they have,” he said cheerfully. “Why on Earth would my great-grandkids come back to screw with you? What possible significance could you have?”
“Hey!”
“Aw, come on, Ted. I meant because you’re not a speedster!” Wally protested.
“Hmmph. I liked you better when all you did was chase girls and complain about people calling you Kid Flash,” Ted sniffed. “Okay, so the Treadmill isn’t behind this, but here’s a thought - what if we use the Treadmill to see who is? Like, we’ll go back to yesterday and see if there’s anything hinky in the timestream on the way.”
“That works,” Wally agreed. He stepped onto the Treadmill. “Just…pop a squat on the handlebars or something. If you’re on the belt when I’m running…well, you won’t be for long.”
Ted perched on the handlebars as Wally plugged in the place and time, and then Wally started to run. Maybe it was because he was being carried along with Wally on the Treadmill, but Ted could actually see him moving, rather than just a blur. The Museum disappeared, and suddenly they were in what must have been the timestream. It was indescribable, vast and minute, full of nothing and everything, rushing along at an unfathomable pace and suspended timelessly, unmoving. And…
“It’s awfully…rainbow, isn’t it?” Ted asked.
“Yeah, I know. Weird, right?” Wally said, his brow furrowed in concentration. “Annnnnd…we’re here!”
Ted blinked. They were in his bedroom. Early morning sun was streaming in through the windows, horns were honking on the street below, and, weirdest of all, there he was - himself, Ted, sound asleep and drooling into his pillow.
“Aw,” said Wally. “My four-month-old daughter makes that face when she sleeps.”
“Shut up,” Ted said. “Will he be able to - I mean, will I be able to see us when I wake up?”
Wally shook his head. “I’m vibrating us just enough that you won’t be able to.”
Just then the alarm clock clicked, and then went off. “…just ignore it but they keep saying we laugh just a little too loud, stand just a little too close…”
Ted - the Ted in the bed - groaned, sat up, and staggered out of bed.
“Nice boxers,” Wally whispered. Ted elbowed him.
Past Ted disappeared into the bathroom and shut the door, and Present Ted turned to Wally. “This isn’t right. I wanted to go back to yesterday.”
“This is December 23rd,” Wally said, pointing to the date on the Treadmill’s control panel. “That’s yesterday.”
“Not my yesterday,” Ted pointed out. “Try December 24th.”
Wally plugged in the new date and ran. They zipped through Rainbow Sherbert Land and emerged, once again, in Ted’s bedroom.
Past Ted was mumbling in his sleep. “Znnkn…don’t mess with me, Sagan…wouldn’t like me when I’m angry…”
Wally raised an eyebrow.
“I have vivid dreams, okay?” Ted hissed.
Click. “…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
“Man, you listen to the girliest radio station,” Wally whispered.
Past Ted blinked confusedly and sat up. He almost ran his toe into the bed leg, then caught himself, and, smirking a little, went into the bathroom.
“No, this is today!” Ted huffed in frustration.
“I don’t know what you want from me, Ted,” Wally said. “You asked for yesterday, we went there. Uh, then. You asked for today, and here we are.”
Ted pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m trying to get to the days in between, all the times I’ve already lived December 24th. But I guess there’s no way to tell the Treadmill that, huh?”
Wally shrugged. “Not that I know of.”
Then Ted had another idea. “What if you just bring me to tomorrow?” he asked. “Maybe that’ll snap me out of the time loop.”
“Now that makes sense,” Wally said, and programmed in the new date. Zoom they went, back into the timestream.
“Uh, Wally?” Ted asked a few minutes later, when they were still going.
“Yeah?” Wally sounded distracted.
“Shouldn’t we be there by now? It didn’t take nearly this long last time.”
“Yeah,” Wally said. “The Treadmill says we’re here, but it’s not letting us materialize in the normal timeflow. It’s like we’re locked out.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound good.”
“Nope.” Wally punched new numbers into the Treadmill. “I’m going to try and take us back to where we started.”
“We got to get right back to where we started from?” Ted asked.
“Yes,” Wally snorted. “Disco references. That’s helpful.”
“Sorry.”
Less than a minute later by Ted’s reckoning, although he wasn’t sure time really counted as such while on the Treadmill, they were sitting on the pedestal in the Flash Museum. “Huh,” Wally said. “That was no problem at all. I wonder why it wouldn’t let me go forward?”
Ted had a flash of intuition. “Try it without me,” he said. “See if the Treadmill will take you into the future on your own.”
Wally shrugged. “It’s worth a shot.”
Ted climbed down from the handlebars, which were getting kind of uncomfortable anyway, and stepped off of the pedestal. The Treadmill flickered out of sight, and then back, almost instantly.
“Well, I know what Linda’s getting me for Christmas,” Wally said, stepping off of the Treadmill.
“It took you to the future?” Ted asked.
“Yeah, no problem,” Wally said. His eyes flicked towards the clock on the wall and back to Ted.
“Sorry, I know it’s getting late,” Ted said. “Just…could we try one more thing?”
“Sure,” Wally said, and stepped back onto the Treadmill. Ted climbed back up.
“I want to see if it’s just tomorrow that’s locked for me,” Ted said. “See if you can get to the day after Christmas.”
After a couple of minutes whizzing through Rainbow Sherbert Land, it was clear that December 26th wasn’t any more accessible to Ted than December 25th. Neither was a year in the future, or ten years.
“I wonder if it’s the whole future, or just my lifespan?” Ted mused.
“You want to try thirty years?” Wally asked. “Forty?”
Ted shuddered. “No thanks. I don’t particularly want to know when I’m going to die.”
“Well, when do you want to try for?” Wally asked.
Ted paused. “Can we go to 2462? No, 61?” he asked.
“2461,” Wally repeated.
“Gotham,” Ted said. “Corner of 86th and 2nd.”
“That’s…awfully specific,” Wally said. “What are we going to see?”
“That depends on whether we can even access the future,” Ted pointed out, sidestepping the question. Wally didn’t push him, too busy concentrating on vibrating the Treadmill exactly right, or whatever he did to make it go.
When they came to a sudden stop on an urban street corner, Ted knew they’d succeeded. He looked around, knowing Wally was vibrating them out of sight. The skyline was different, the vehicles and fashions and signs all alien to him, but there was something familiar underlying the street, something that told him this was a city he knew, this was a street he’d walked down before.
“Well, apparently you do not live until the 25th century, at least if your theory is correct,” Wally said. “Was there something you wanted to do here? I’m pretty sure Jai’s going to need changing in a couple of minutes.”
“Nah,” Ted said reluctantly. He knew the address, but it was a million to one chance that the timing would be right to -
“ - doing the best I can!” said a familiar voice behind him. He whirled. A man and a woman - no, a boy and a girl, really, since they couldn’t be older than 20 - were coming out of the nearest apartment building, yelling at each other.
“Hey. Is that…?” Wally started to say.
Booster. Looking younger than Ted had ever known him, still with a trace of boyish roundness to his cheeks, his blond hair swept sideways into some kind of awful futuristic hairstyle. The girl beside him had to be Michelle - she was his spitting image. It was a little eerie to see all of Booster’s features on a pretty female face.
Booster had told him about the future, had pointed out the spot where the building he’d grow up in would stand, but Booster’s youth had never seemed real to Ted. Not until now.
“This isn’t just some cold, Mikey!” Michelle was shouting. “Mom is dying. And all you can think about is running off to practice or a game or just to party with the team, while I’m working three jobs!”
“That is my job!” Booster said. His eyes were so big, his features so vulnerable. Ted wanted to give him cookies and tell him everything would be okay, even if it was mostly a lie. “Two more years, Michelle. Two more years and I can go pro, and we won’t ever have to worry about money again.”
“She won’t last that long, Mikey,” Michelle told him. “You heard the doctor. She’s lucky if she has two months.” She made a disgusted noise. “Look, you can keep clinging to this ridiculous dream if you want, but I’m late for work. You’d better get back upstairs. Mom shouldn’t be alone.”
She headed off down the street and soon turned the corner. Booster sat down on the stoop, his head in his hands.
It wasn’t until he felt the hand on his shoulder that Ted realized that he had almost stepped off of the Treadmill - that he would have stepped off, if Wally hadn’t stopped him. “Don’t,” Wally said. “Talking to him will just confuse him, and if you change his past, you’ll probably change ours.”
Ted knew Wally was right. Still… “I wish I could do something,” he said.
Wally just gave him a sympathetic smile. “Time travel sucks,” he said with great profundity, and started up the Treadmill.
Once they were back in their proper time, Ted allowed Wally to carry him back to his apartment; then he thanked Wally profusely and let him return to his diaper-changing duties. It was still not even 7:30.
Ted reviewed his mental list. He didn’t particularly want to ask this next person for a favor, but if he was dealing with some kind of cosmic threat, he needed the most powerful tool in the universe.
And his ring.
Midday found him strolling past Super Buddies headquarters, which would have looked more festive if whoever had decorated hadn’t misspelled “Happy Holidays” in twinkle lights, and into the bar next door. The halls were most definitely decked in there, and Ted was surprised for a minute before he remembered how well-run Warriors had been, when it wasn’t being blown up.
Guy was whistling “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” and using his ring to write eggnog specials on the mirror over the bar. He looked up when Ted walked in.
“Oh, brother.” He rolled his eyes. “Listen, Bugface, I already agreed to let Max throw the holiday party and I just provide the booze. It’s not my fault if the bar looks better than your little clubhouse, so he can stop whining about how I’m stealing his thunder.”
“I’m not here for Max,” Ted said, sliding onto a barstool. “I need a favor.”
“Sorry, did I miss the part where we exchanged friendship bracelets?” Guy asked. “Why would I do you a favor? Even though you asked so nice.”
“I need a favor, please,” Ted said. “And didn’t I try to fix Sinestro’s ring back when you first had it? Didn’t I save your butt repeatedly when we were in the League? Didn’t you put me in the hospital once? You owe me.”
Guy tapped his chin. “The way I remember it, I was saving your butt.”
“Memory can be a tricky thing.”
Guy crossed his arms. “Okay, Cockroach, what do you need?”
Ted lifted his eyebrows and lowered his voice. “Well, for one I need you to clam up about the Beetle stuff. I don’t need Big Dick knowing my secret identity.”
Guy snorted. “One, he’s not here, and two, you have a secret identity?”
“Look, just…listen, okay?” As succinctly as possible, Ted filled Guy in on the strangeness of the past few days (or day, as it was). When he finished, Guy was leaning against the back of the bar, arms folded, eyebrows practically disappearing into his hairline.
“Jeez, Bug. Is your favor me carting you off to Bedlam?”
Ted blew out his cheeks in frustration. “Look, J’onn already checked me out, I’m not crazy. Do you want to go up there and have him look at me again? Or we can go to my office, or the bar Booster and I have been going to, and I can tell you everything everyone’s about to say and do.”
Guy waved a dismissive hand. “Okay, okay, untwist your panties. So say you’re not crazy. I’m guessing you didn’t come to me because you need a drink?”
“Well, at this point I kind of do,” Ted said, rubbing his temples, “but no. I was hoping you could scan me with the ring, see if it picks up any…anything. Temporal interference, cosmic interference, magic…I don’t know.”
“And who saved whose butt all those times?” Guy asked, flexing his ring hand idly.
Ted gritted his teeth. “I think the butt-saving was about equal.”
“Since it’s Christmas, and you’ve gone bonkers, I’ll let that slide,” Guy said, and beamed the ring on Ted. For a long moment Ted was awash in green light; then it was done and Guy was looking at him with a slight frown.
“Ring’s not picking up anything,” he said.
“So what’s the face for?” Ted asked.
“Well, it also says you’re not lying and you say J’onn says you’re not crazy,” Guy said slowly. “So if this really is happening, it’s because of something no Green Lantern ring has ever encountered before.”
Ted cleared his throat, which was suddenly dry. “And how long have the Green Lantern rings been around?”
Guy reached below the bar, pulled out a beer, and slid it across to Ted. “You don’t want to know.”
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
It took Ted a couple days of trying to track down Dr. Fate, but he needn’t have bothered, because Fate couldn’t find the source of the problem. Nor could Zatanna, Hourman, Detective Chimp, or the other dozen heroes Ted spent the next week of Thursdays locating and pleading for help from.
The fact that it was Christmas Eve Day didn’t help the solution, since those heroes who celebrated the holiday and had families had their minds more on eggnog and togetherness than derring-do and temporal crises. Ted felt distinctly awkward when he showed up at the door of a quaint Kansas farmhouse draped in icicle lights and asked the pleasant-but-confused older woman who answered if he could talk to her son.
Superman’s mother, who turned out to be named Martha, wouldn’t hear of Ted standing on the cold porch while he talked to Clark, and bustled him into the kitchen. The scent of home-cooked holiday deliciousness was so thick inside Ted thought he might have actually died, and all the repeated days were a purgatory he had to struggle through to reach this heaven.
“Clark, could you come in here, please?” Martha called into the living room. She sat Ted down at the kitchen table against his protests and apologies, and before he quite realized it he had a slice of apple pie and a glass of milk sitting in front of him.
“You really don’t have to go to any trouble…” Ted tried again.
“Oh, it’s no trouble at all,” Martha assured him. “I couldn’t decide what kind of pie to make, so I made six. We can’t possibly finish all that.”
“I can!” called a teenage boy’s voice from the living room.
“Aunt Martha! Make Conner stop using his x-ray vision to see what’s inside the presents!” a girl called.
“Uh, it was an accident! I’m still learning to control my x-ray vision!” the boy said quickly.
Martha tsked, but Ted could tell she was hiding a smile. “Would you excuse me, Mr. Kord - ”
“Ted, please.”
“Ted. I’d better go break this up.” Martha hurried out of the kitchen, and Ted, feeling a little in over his head and a lot out of place, stared down at his pie.
“I’d eat it if I were you. Ma’s pies are the best.”
Ted looked up. Clark was leaning against the doorframe, looking far less imposing in a plaid shirt and glasses than he did in the red and blue pajamas.
“Hi, Clark,” Ted said, standing up. “Listen, I’m really sorry to bother you at your folks’ house the day before Christmas, but the Planet said you were out here and I’m in a bit of a bind…”
“Don’t worry about it,” Clark said, pulling out a chair at the table. “I think Lois has been looking for a chance to sneak my present out of her suitcase and under the tree anyway. Please, sit. Eat the pie.” He sat down as well. “What’s up?”
Ted explained. By now he’d gone through this so many times that he had the fastest, most convincing version of the story down by heart. Clark listened patiently, his brow slightly furrowed.
“Well, your heart rate hasn’t changed, so either you’re a very good liar, or this isn’t you and Booster coming up with a very elaborate holiday prank,” Clark said when Ted had finished. “By the way, did you know you have a slight irregularity in your heartbeat…?”
“Ohhhh yeah.” Ted fought back a scowl by finally taking a bite of pie. He instantly forgot why he’d been upset. “Uh muh guh.” He swallowed. “Oh my God, this pie is incredible.”
Clark beamed proudly. “Told you.”
Ted shoveled in an embarrassingly large forkful. “Is your mom looking to adopt?” he asked through a full mouth. “I’m housebroken.”
Clark laughed. “So, uh…what exactly did you need my help on?” he asked. “I mean, I’m happy to help out any way I can, but…I’m not sure exactly what you want me to do in this situation.”
Ted swallowed and put the fork down. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, you’re Superman! You’re supposed to figure out a way to, you know, be super.”
Clark scratched his head. “Well, I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I just don’t see how heat vision or punching things really hard is going to fix this particular problem.”
“I don’t know,” Ted said again, gesturing helplessly. “Can’t you just pick me up and, like, fly me through the time barrier or something?”
“Ted, that makes no sense.”
“I know.” Ted sighed. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just…I’m getting really, really sick of ‘Single Ladies.’”
“Aw, I love that song!” Clark said.
Ted groaned. He needed more pie.
When he left about a half hour later, he did, in fact, have more pie - a slice of pumpkin and a slice of pecan, both of which Martha had all but forced him to take - a couple of incredibly stupid but kind of hilarious jokes from Superboy that he needed to remember to tell Booster, and a popcorn string from Supergirl, who had apparently made about nine miles of them at superspeed.
He also had a pervasive sense of melancholy. If Superman hadn’t been able to help him - Superman, and Dr. Fate, and Green Lantern - who could?
But no - if he was honest with himself, that wasn’t the only reason for his melancholy. He had just spent almost an hour at the home of an alien, a guy whose home planet had only three survivors, one of whom was a dog. And yet the man from halfway across the universe was spending the holidays with a warm and loving extended family, while Ted, who as far as he knew was human…well, the closest he had to family was an estranged father, and a best friend he was avoiding.
And that last bit, he suddenly felt, was profoundly stupid. Weaning himself off of Booster clearly wasn’t working; he still reached for the phone to call him every morning, still mentally stored funny comments to share with him the next time they talked. So he wanted to see his best friend. So he wanted to see his best friend a lot. Wasn’t that why Booster was his best friend?
Besides, he had two pieces of pie.
“This is incredible,” Booster said around a mouthful of pecans, sitting in Ted’s kitchen two hours later. “Where did you get this again?”
“Superman’s mom made it,” Ted told him.
Booster gagged and reached for his drink. “Ack! Poison!”
“Oh, stop it.” Ted kicked him gently under the table. “She’s a really nice lady.”
“Yeah?” Booster said, reaching over to take a bite of Ted’s pumpkin pie. “How’d she raise such a pill then?”
“He’s not a pill. He just doesn’t like you.”
“Oh, so he’s mentally deficient.”
Ted hid a laugh by knocking aside Booster’s fork and stealing a bite of the pecan pie. “Anyway, I’m kind of out of ideas here. I can’t get in touch with Rip or Waverider or any of those guys who really knows time travel.” He’d explained his problem to Booster over dinner, which Booster had brought from their favorite Italian place at Ted’s call.
Booster looked thoughtful. “What if…no, that’s stupid.”
“What?” Ted asked, flaking off a piece of crust.
“Well…what if it really is like Groundhog Day?” Booster asked. “I mean, maybe this isn’t some spell or time travel thing gone hinky. Maybe this is, like, the universe wanting you to learn a lesson.”
Ted raised an eyebrow. “Is that your atheism talking?”
“Look, I don’t know!” Booster said, spreading his hands. “It was just a thought. Maybe there’s something you need to learn, or do, or…I don’t know.”
Ted chewed thoughtfully on a bite of pie. “Something I need to do…that’s it!” he cried, spewing pie crumbs all over the table.
“Okay, ew.”
“There must have been some horrible crisis today, something that I needed to stop!” Ted said. He was already on his feet, running for the living room.
Booster followed more slowly, carrying his pie plate and finishing the last few bites as he watched Ted scramble for the remote control. “We’re doing what now?”
“Just you watch. I’m going to turn on the news and we’re going to hear about some horrific catastrophe only I could have prevented. Here we go.” Ted pressed the power button, and on came the news, playing…a human interest story about department store Santas.
“Okay, well maybe this channel hasn’t picked it up yet,” Ted said. He cycled through all the news stations, but none of the stories - a piece of the year’s most popular toy, an interview with some teen starlet, the weather report - seemed to be tragedies only the Blue Beetle could have averted.
“I’m gonna finish your pie, okay?” Booster said as Ted clicked through the news channels again.
“Maybe it’s not local,” Ted said. “Maybe the media doesn’t even know about it yet.” He pulled out his cell phone.
Barbara answered on the second ring. “Hey, Ted.”
“Hey, Barb. Listen, what horrible things have happened today?”
Barbara paused. “Um…what?”
“You know, murders, kidnappings, arson, volcanic eruptions, that sort of thing. The worst of the worst. I know at least some bad stuff had to happen today.”
“Well, yeah, of course bad things happened today, but…why do you…?”
“It’s complicated. Believe me, you don’t want me to get into it,” Ted said. “Just give me the highlights.”
“Ooookay…” He could hear, faintly, the sound of Barbara’s keyboard clicking away. “Let’s see. There was a flood in Java that killed several hundred people…a fire in Benin City killed 67…a preschool shooting in the Netherlands…”
“Great, great,” Ted said. “Well, not great, of course, but…listen, can you do me a huge favor and email me the details of those and a couple of other incidents that occurred today? Before tomorrow?”
“I guess, but Ted, what…?”
“It’s a really long story,” Ted assured her as Booster walked back in. “Listen, I promise if what I’m trying to do here works, I will regale you with all the details tomorrow.”
“Yeah, you’d better,” Barbara said. “Emailing now, Bumblebeeb.”
“Much obliged, Rolling Thunder.” Ted hung up.
“So…what exactly is your plan here?” Booster asked as Ted fired up his computer. “You’re going to stop every crime or tragedy that happened today? Even Superman can’t do that.”
Ted shook his head. “I’m banking on it being a specific tragedy that has to be averted. If I stop that one, I stop the cycle. So I just have to stop everything one by one until I find it.”
“I don’t know,” Booster said. “It seems a little…imprecise. How can you possibly stop every bad thing that occurs on a given day, even with infinite attempts?”
“Aw, come on, Booster.” Ted grinned and cracked his knuckles. “I’m a superhero. How hard can it be?”
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
Ted spent the next day laying sandbags and carting people away from the Java coastline in the Bug. He didn’t think he’d saved more than 50 lives, though, tops, and so wasn’t surprised when the next morning was still December 24th. He needed to move faster, bring in more troops, he thought, and so he filled Booster in and tried again. They maybe doubled the number of rescues. More heroes, he thought, and called in all the favors he could - the Lanterns, the Supers, the speedsters, the Marvels.
They came without grumbling, because people needed help, and they were superheroes, after all. They couldn’t avert the floodwaters entirely, but the speedsters could lay a vast wall of sandbags, and the Lanterns could hold off the waters with their rings, and the Supers and Marvels and assorted other heroes could rescue people in danger, far more efficiently than Ted and Booster alone. There was no way of knowing if they’d saved everyone, but they had to have saved most of them.
But the next day was still December 24th. It must be the fire, Ted thought, and spent the day in West Africa, where the Bug’s fire hoses and his own flame-retardant suit could be of some help. Sixty-seven, Barbara had said - sixty-seven were to die in this fire, and so he counted every person that he carried out of the flames. He was pulled out of one building by the local fire fighters just before it collapsed, and an oxygen mask was forced on him, but he was still only in the low 30s.
Faster, he told himself when he woke, Thursday again, and his lungs clear. Armed with an oxygen mask from the Bug this time, he headed back to Benin City. He didn’t have to look for the people he’d already saved this time, could go straight to them, and he reached the mid-50s before the buildings started to go down. He could do this.
But for every person he rescued in Benin City, five people drowned in Java.
The next day, which was of course the same day, Ted got smart. He called in his favors, but parceled them out, sending the bulk of the heroes to Java while he took Booster and Mary to Benin City. At the end of the day, Ted, Booster, and Mary’s tally of rescues was 66, and the heroes in Java had done nearly as well as the first time Ted had brought them in.
But it was still December 24th. The preschool, then.
The shooter was some sort of deranged radical whose political views Ted suspected wouldn’t make much sense even if Ted could speak Dutch. He was so much less imposing than the elemental forces Ted had been struggling against over the past week that Ted disarmed him carelessly and didn’t even consider that he might have a second gun until he felt the white-hot pain of a bullet ripping through his arm. He managed to take the second gun from the shooter, but not before the teacher had been fatally wounded, and he remembered very little between the screams of the children and Booster’s worried face in the hospital after Barbara called him in.
The next morning Ted awoke back in America with no pain whatsoever in his arm. He subdued the shooter more carefully this time, but while he would normally have been content to stand around receiving the gratitude of the school and the parents, he was needed in Java.
The next morning was still December 24th, so Ted worked his way through the rest of the incidents Barbara had emailed him, which he had memorized that night because he’d known they’d disappear from his inbox by morning. A car accident in Star City. A bombing in Rio de Janeiro. A bridge collapse in Pakistan. He watched the evening news religiously, combed the international news sites, and every day turned up another murder, another death, another stupid, senseless, tragedy.
And for every life he saved, all of the ones he’d saved on days before were lost.
He was calling in every hero he knew now, every day. They didn’t mind - they didn’t remember ever having been called in before. But there were lives that they would have saved if Ted hadn’t disrupted their schedules that were lost now, so he wasn’t gaining any ground.
He stopped sleeping. It didn’t matter - he could be sitting in the Bug in New Zealand, gazing at a clock set to eastern standard time as it ticked away the seconds of 6:59 a.m, but by 7 a.m. he was always waking up in his bed at home, always to the same song. He wasn’t sure if he was getting the full night’s sleep of the first December 24th or the no-night’s sleep of the latest one, but it certainly felt like no sleep.
The state of his mind must have shown in his face even if the endless cycle of days left no physical trace, because Booster finally pulled him aside after…he didn’t know how many days it had been by now, but it was one of the days where he’d scheduled Booster with him. They were in Hub City. He thought.
“Ted, are you okay?” Booster asked. “You look about thirty seconds from a nervous breakdown. Actually, you look about thirty seconds into a nervous breakdown.”
“I’m fine, I just…” Ted rubbed his face. “I have to move a little faster, is all. Organize us a little better.”
“What exactly are you trying to do here?” Booster asked, not unkindly.
“Just…save…” Ted waved a vague hand.
“Everyone?” Booster asked. “Ted, you can’t save everyone.”
“But I can!” Ted protested. He explained the time loop to Booster - probably not as well as he had in the past, but he was a little frayed at the edges right now. “I’m basically immortal, Booster. For now, at least. If I just figure out exactly how to time it, exactly who to send where and what I need to do myself, I can stop every awful, pointless death that happens today.”
“And what happens if you do?” Booster asked. “What then?”
Ted blinked. He’d forgotten what the point of saving everybody had been, besides…saving everybody. “I…it…”
“Didn’t you say you came up with this whole brilliant plan to break the time loop?” Booster asked. “You would find the one person whose death needed to be prevented, the reason the universe was keeping you here. Have you found them?”
“Obviously not, because it’s still today,” Ted said.
“Do you think maybe that means you aren’t supposed to save these other people?” Booster asked. “That maybe this isn’t the solution?”
Booster was always smartest at the worst times.
“It…I don’t…it’s not about the time loop anymore,” Ted said. “I can’t…even if I knew, okay, that it was, say, Rosemary Sanders of Des Moines, Iowa, who I need to save from choking in,” he glanced at his watch, “fifty-three minutes, because, I don’t know, she’s going to have a daughter who’s going to cure cancer or reverse global warming or whatever…even if I knew the one person who needed to be saved…Booster, I’ve seen their faces.”
He sat down heavily and pulled his cowl off. It didn’t much matter who saw him unmasked, when they’d forget it by tomorrow. “I’ve talked to dozens of people who are slated to die today. Maybe hundreds. I know their names, where they live, where they work. I know who they love, because that’s who they’re calling for when they’re about to die. These aren’t just strangers or statistics anymore.”
“You can’t give them more than a few hours,” Booster pointed out. “Then it starts all over again. You’ll lose your mind this way, and what happens when the cycle breaks and it’s tomorrow and you’re not able to help the people who can be saved?
Ted stared at his hands. “I can’t just forget them, Booster.”
“Maybe you’re not supposed to,” Booster said. “Maybe it’s your job to remember them.”
Ted spent the next day in bed.
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
Twenty-four hours of lying curled on his side watching the clock and noting a death with each minute that passed hadn’t helped either Ted’s time loop problem or his despair, so the next day he struggled out of bed and went mechanically through his morning routine. Going to work for the first time in God only knew how many days was strange, made stranger by the fact that he felt hollow, drained.
His grief must have been noticeable, because Connie treated him with kid gloves, and the other scientists, down in the lab, kept shooting each other concerned glances. “Uh, you okay, Ted?” one of them finally asked as Ted stood prodding dully at a just-exploded prototype.
“Do you believe in God, Jack?” Ted asked.
Jack blinked. “I…what?”
“God. Jesus, Yahweh, Allah, do you believe in any of it?” Ted scratched at the soot-covered shell of the prototype with his thumbnail, revealing a thin crescent of shining metal.
Jack looked around at the other scientists on the project, who shrugged. “I was raised Methodist, but…I guess I would call myself an agnostic. I believe there’s something bigger than us out there, I just don’t know what it is.” He frowned. “Uh, is that going to affect my Christmas bonus?”
“So what’s the point of all this?” Ted asked, gesturing to the lab. “The purpose of science is to understand the world around us, right? But if there are things that are just unknowable, why do we even bother?”
Jack looked helplessly at the other scientists. “Uh…”
“I mean, you can spend your whole life trying to figure out how stuff works, but the universe doesn’t care,” Ted went on. “It doesn’t care how much you want to help. It doesn’t care who dies. And it’s not that there’s nothing out there. Random chance doesn’t trap you in the same day for eternity. There’s something out there, and it’s big, and it’s arbitrary, and there’s no damn way of figuring out what it wants you to do!”
He picked up the prototype and hurled it across the lab, where it smashed into a computer monitor. His scientists jumped back, alarmed.
“Ted, maybe you should take the rest of the day off?” Madhuri suggested.
Ted barked a laugh. “Yeah. Another day off is exactly what I don’t need.” The others looked baffled, which made sense - as far as they knew, Ted hadn’t taken a day off in months. “What about you, Madhuri? Are you agnostic too?”
She shook her head. “I’m an atheist.”
Ted looked at Sarah. “Uh, Jewish,” she told him.
“Lapsed Catholic, I guess,” Carlos said.
“Atheist.”
“Buddhist.”
“Agnostic.”
“Episcopalian.”
Ted spread his arms. “Well? Anyone have any answers? Because I could really use some right now.”
“You know,” Madhuri said carefully, “even atheists get that there’s more to the universe than we’re going to be able to figure out in my lifetime, or my grandchildren’s lifetimes. The best we can do is figure out the little mysteries, the ones that are solvable. Just because we can’t solve every problem doesn’t mean we can’t help at all.”
Ted frowned, and crossed the lab to extricate the broken prototype from the monitor. He turned it over in his hands as a thought struggled to push its way through the fog of guilt and grief in his mind.
Maybe the universe didn’t need Blue Beetle, superhero, this time. Maybe it needed Ted Kord, scientist.
“Have we tried one of these on full power yet?” he asked, hefting the prototype like he was testing a melon for freshness.
“Are you kidding?” Jack asked. “I mean, uh. Are you kidding, boss? It’ll overload instantly if we do that!”
Ted felt a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, for the first time in weeks. “Give it a shot anyway,” he said. “This project just got an unlimited budget.”
Over the next few weeks Ted tried every idea he had for the prototypes, even the crazy ones. And why not? Even if he destroyed all the prototypes and blew through the budget in an hour, he’d have a whole new set the next day. With unlimited funds and time to try every possible option, he’d soon isolated the problem and moved several major steps further along on the project. The day he came in and, without saying a word, picked up and completed a prototype in under an hour was priceless just for the looks on his teams’ faces alone.
That done, he moved onto the other projects in the lab. A faster computer processer, a more fuel-efficient jet engine. A new video game system. Solar-powered everything. He couldn’t write down his findings or take an invention from start to finish, but he worked out the kinks in every project his scientists were working on, every vague idea on his own back burner. With no limits to what he could try, he advanced his own scientific knowledge by - well, years. Decades, maybe.
That wasn’t the only thing he learned. Thoroughly sick of leftover Chinese food, he’d stopped at a grocery store one night after work, and didn’t head straight for the prepared foods aisle. Cooking couldn’t be that hard, right? Cavemen had done it, and Ted was a genius.
Okay, so his first attempt at heart-healthy grilled chicken breast and steamed vegetables was inedible. But he had time to get this right, too.
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
“Nooooooooo,” Ted groaned, squinting against the sunlight.
Cooking was all well and good, but he was bored. He’d exhausted every bit of scientific progress he could make in a day, and still it was December 24th. There was nothing new to do in the lab, no way to save everyone, no one who could help him.
“What do you want from me?” he asked, hands to the ceiling as if it would peel back and the Almighty would lean down to explain his plan. “Bill Murray had to learn to be a good person. I’m already a good person! I’m a superhero!” He paused. “Is it the masturbating? Because I can stop that!”
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
Ted jerked awake. “Huh. Well, might as well, then,” he said, and slid a hand into his boxers.
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
“Look, I’m just trying to get in touch with Andie MacDowell’s agent or manager or something. I think I’m supposed to fall in love with her. No, don’t hang up…!”
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
Booster stopped short when he saw the fat, furry creature sitting on Ted’s desk. “What’s that?”
“Groundhog,” Ted said wearily.
Booster raised an eyebrow. “Why’s it here?”
Ted looked at the groundhog. The groundhog looked at him.
“I thought it might help.”
* * *
“…you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it…”
Maybe it was backwards. Maybe instead of becoming a better person, Ted was supposed to become a worse one.
He supposed every superhero had thought about turning to the other side now and then. He knew how security devices and law enforcement worked as well as any supervillain, plus he’d learned from the mistakes of every criminal he’d ever apprehended. It had taken him weeks to figure out how to save as many people as possible in one day; weeks to make all of his recent scientific breakthroughs. He wondered how long it would take him to become a supervillain.
As it turned out, not long.
Standing in front of the bank in jeans and a nondescript jacket, Ted took out something he’d cobbled together that morning - essentially an advanced radio crammed into a cell phone casing. Looking for all the world like he was texting, he sent a pulse jamming the frequencies of the alarms, with a slight adjustment so that it would loop the past half hour of uninterrupted signal, since just cutting the frequency would in and of itself raise the alarms at GCPD headquarters.
He pulled a ski mask out of one jacket pocket and put it on, pulled a gas mask out of the other pocket and put that on, then strode into the bank and tossed something the size of a marble onto the floor. The minute it hit, colorless gas streamed out of it, and the security guard who’d been approaching him and fumbling for his gun coughed, then fell unconscious to the floor.
With tellers and customers dropping around him, Ted walked through the main room and into the hallways behind it. Usually only the bank’s employees were allowed back here, but as the second-richest man in Gotham, Ted tended to get special treatment. He knew where the vault was.
He also knew how it opened, since he’d designed it.
He could have run the electronic combination lock through a program that would try every possible combination until it found the right one, but he’d programmed a failsafe into the lock that would put the vault in complete lockdown after three incorrect tries at the combination. He could override it, but it was quicker to do this the old-fashioned way.
Well, okay, maybe “old-fashioned” wasn’t the best term for cutting through the door’s weak points with a handheld laser. But it sure was fun.
Having successfully disconnected the lock, Ted swung the vault open, grunting a little at a job that usually took two men. He pulled a collapsible reusable grocery bag out of his back pocket, filled it with cash, and cinched it shut. Then he walked back out of the vault and into the main lobby. He gently moved the unconscious woman at the customer service desk out of the way, rummaged around on her desk until he found a pad of Post-Its, and scribbled something on the top one. He jogged back to stick it to the door of the vault, returned to the lobby, took a deep breath, threw his gas mask and ski cap in the nearby wastebasket, and walked out of the bank with one and a half million dollars slung over his shoulder in a bag with a picture of a dolphin hugging the Earth on it.
No one gave him a second glance as he walked ten blocks, turned into an alley, and used a nondescript-looking button on his nondescript-looking watch to call the Bug, hovering above it, and bring a line down. Stepping onto the handlebar, he signaled the Bug to pull him up.
Once inside, he aimed the Bug towards the Atlantic. It would be best to get clear of Gotham as quickly as possible. If he knew Bruce and Barbara - and he did - they would not be happy to find the Post-It he’d left on the vault door reading “Sorry, Bats.”
They probably also wouldn’t appreciate the sight of him snickering at the security camera as he wrote it.
Ted propped his feet up on the console, put his hands behind his head, and leaned back, looking over at the bag of money on the seat beside him. He’d just robbed a major bank in a major metropolitan area in broad daylight. And he’d done it really well.
“Well. That was oddly unsatisfying.”
* * *
Part 3