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English
Series:
Part 1 of A Groovy Kind of Love
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Published:
2019-02-17
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3,354
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1/1
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34
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How Will I Know

Summary:

It's 1987 and Ted doesn't know what to think about the newest addition to the Justice League. A fateful meeting in the brand new League gym room might change that.

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

"...I got something to tell you, I got something to say..."

Warm golden streaks of sunlight spill through the shutters shielding the brand new gym at the Justice League headquarters. They fall on Ted Kord’s deep copper curls as he leans over an as-of-yet unboxed treadmill.

"...I'm gonna put this dream in motion, I never let nothing stand in my way..."

Ted laughs and is met with a frown from Scott Free, hunched over yet another box, reams of torn packing tape in his hands. He throws the tape aside and it lands soundlessly on the boombox in the corner of the room.

“For the love of --” Scott pushes the box aside and squats down to look at another. He begins pulling off yet more packing tape with his hands, carelessly, large swaths of the cardboard coming with it.

“Oh this time I’m sure you got it,” Ted grins.

“I don’t understand,” Scott mutters. “The twenty-fives are both over there, the thirties, the thirty-fives.” He roots through the box, plastic packing peanuts flying, only to reveal a pair of stackable aerobics steps. “WHY. IS. THERE. ONLY. ONE. FORTY. POUND. DUMBBELL?!” He kicks the box across the room and looks wildly about him.

Ted can’t contain himself anymore and doubles over laughing, the sound bellowing through the big room filled with boxes and boxes of gym equipment in various states of unpacking.

“You're not helping,” Scott glares at him, his voice low and pointed. “You didn’t come down here to watch me search through this mountain of --” He bends down to rip off a ball of used packing tape stuck to his sweatpants. “Of expensive trash!”

“No, no,” Ted calms his laughter down to a chuckle and wipes away a tear. “But I’m getting one hell of a belly workout!”

“Beetle --”

“No, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." Ted straightens himself up and purses his lips trying not to grin. "Let's see. You got a pair of twenty pound dumbbells, don’t you?” He motions to the corner where the shining new dumbbells are stacked up. “Maybe you could --" A snort escapes him. "Stick them together, you got enough tape!” He can’t help himself, he doubles over laughing once more.

“I swear --” Scott steps towards him, and for a moment Ted thinks he might actually lay one on him. But Scott stops himself, breathes through clenched teeth. “I swear this Maxwell Lord character, he’s only bought us all this for the chance to drive me mad.”

Ted grins. “That must be it. A gajillion dollars in gym equipment and only one forty pound dumbbell to drive the esteemed Mister Miracle from his senses.” He raises a clenched fist. “The perfect crime.”

“And I don’t trust that kid he brought with him,” Scott frowns. “For a year I haven’t been able to escape Booster Gold ads, Booster Gold merchandise, Booster Gold vanity interviews in tabloids. He breaks into our headquarters, and we reward him by letting him into the League?”

“I mean he did handle the Royal Flush gang...” Beetle interjects weakly.

“You don’t think they could have been bought wholesale by a millionaire who wanted to show off his golden boy to the world? You don’t think the two of them are --”

The metallic rattle of a door handle cuts Scott short, and both them turn towards the gym room entrance.

It’s him. The Gold kid. The door shuts behind him with a soft bang and he stands for a moment, looking the room over. Ted can see him frown and quickly pull his fingers through his short hair -- hair shorter than it's been on the cereal packets and magazine covers Ted knows him from. And what is he wearing? Is that a neon green crop top with the Sunstrand Athletics logo? Hot pink shorts, tighter than anything Ted would be comfortable wearing, and a goddamned purple headband. On the whole, a good deal more ostentatious than the sweatpants and cotton T-shirts both Ted and Scott are wearing. He looks ready to promote some kind of glamorous aerobics video.

For a moment the only sound in the room is the tinny voice of Huey Lewis from the radio; "Those that were the farthest out have gone the other way..."

Finally he spots Ted and Scott standing over to the side. “Hi,” he smiles with a hesitant wave.

Ted raises a hand to quietly wave back, while Scott turns back to Ted and shrugs. “I give up, I’ll consider that dumbbell missing in action,” he gives Ted a look and starts heading for the door. “Anyway I promised I’d call Barda about now, she wants to know how the new team is getting on.” He gives Booster a curt nod in passing, and then he’s gone.

Booster stands for a moment, rubbing his arm in thought, and then he approaches Ted.

“I, uh,” Booster smiles as he walks over. “I almost knocked the lockers over trying to get to the towels on top. Whoever does your washing must be really tall.”

Ted looks up at Booster, almost a head taller than him, and is on the verge of cracking a joke but stops himself. “Oh, I think those are just the surplus, most of the towels are in the gray locker at the end of the row.”

“Oh,” Booster says. “I didn’t know.”

They’re both silent for a moment, not meeting each other's eyes.

Ted coughs. “So... You didn't just fly up there?”

“No, I’d already taken off the --” Booster pauses and shrugs, still smiling. “I can’t really fly, I got a... ring.”

“Huh,” Ted’s interest is officially piqued. “The ring lets you fly? How does it work?”

Booster smiles sheepishly. “I have no idea.”

“But do you know who invented it? Does it work for anybody or is it encoded to you somehow?” Ted frowns in thought. “I suppose some sort of opposing forcefield matrix could be programmed into it, but how does it encompass your entire body and not just your hand?” Ted turns to him, eagerness shining in his eyes. He’s been thinking to upgrade his ship, the Bug, for some time, but flight is always so fuel inefficient he’s been stuck with his old hover engine for years. “You have to tell me.”

Booster seems taken aback. “I’m sorry, I really don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Ted’s smile fades. “You use it every day and you,” He pauses for emphasis. “Don’t know. How it works.”

“I mean,” Booster pulls his fingers through his short hair and doesn’t meet Ted’s eyes. “I guess people use tons of stuff everyday without knowing exactly how they work, right? Like, uh,” he looks to the ceiling. “Like cars.”

Ted gives him a look. “The internal combustion engine has remained conceptually unchanged since the eighteenth century, but okay...” He intentionally lets the sentence trail off, and he feels a sting of disgust at himself, for letting the silence imply Booster is an idiot. It’s like he’s back in high school, the fat nerdy kid whose only sense of superiority comes from his intellect.

Ted’s about to apologize when Booster, obviously embarrassed, excuses himself and crosses the room towards the bench press.

Great first impression, Ted, he thinks to himself. Whether that kid's a millionaire's double agent or not, you sure know how to make someone feel like they wronged the popular mean girls at school.

But nobody really knows much about this brand new superhero who just showed up out of the blue last year. Ted looks over at him, picking up freeweights to add to the bar. So he can’t really fly and he needs to maintain his physique, Ted thinks to himself. Two more things he knows about their newest League member.

Ted starts rooting through the boxes and plastic, trying to find some sort equipment for a workout. He's been working on the Bug for days, upgrading everything he can think of now that he's a fully fledged Justice League member, and that familiar tightness in his shoulders from soldering electronics and tightening bolts is back. When he came down here he’d been in the mood for some gymnastics, to loosen up, but if there are rings or bars in the tons of equipment Maxwell Lord has gifted them, they haven’t been unpacked or set up yet.

Instead he finds a 50 pound dumbbell and settles for some goblet squats. The disc jockey on the radio babbles on and eventually leads into some whiny new power ballad about someone called Carrie. Not a great song to get the heart pumping, for sure.

He looks over to the new kid, that face already familiar to him from Flakies commercials and magazine covers, and sees he’s loaded up a fair amount of freeweights on the barbell. So the kid’s strong, he concedes. If that isn’t also some sort of boon he got from technology he doesn’t understand.

Down, Ted, he admonishes himself. Maybe the guy doesn’t know how a car works, but he seems to be smarter than Guy Gardner in any case. Not that that’s a high bar to pass.

He sees Booster position himself on the bench, ready for his first set. The golden boy swivels his shoulders, breathes deeply, raises his arms, and grips the bar.

“Wait wait wait wait!” Ted yells, flinging the dumbbell in his hands aside with a loud bang that echoes through the room. Booster jolts in response and sits up, startled as Ted rushes over.

“What?”

“You have a death wish, kid?” Ted stands over him, out of breath. “You’re just gonna silently kill yourself with me on the other side of the room? Why in God’s name are you gonna bench all that with a suicide grip?”

“I, I dont --” Booster looks confused at him, then at the bar, and back at him. “What’s a suicide grip?”

“It’s what you were doing! Holding the bar with your thumb on the same side as the rest of your fingers,” he reaches over and demonstrates with one hand on the bar, all his fingers gathered. “When you don’t grip it with your thumb, you extend your arms, the bar rolls off your palms and breaks your sternum! Or snaps your neck! A.k.a., a suicide grip!”

“I didn’t know,” Booster replies weakly and pulls his fingers through his hair.

“Well how can you not know?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never done this before!” Booster motions to the bar. “I did it for a photoshoot a couple of months ago, I thought I knew how to do it, it seemed so simple.”

“Let me guess, they added the weights in post,” Ted adds. He takes a deep breath, and softens a bit at how overwhelmed this kid seems. He sits down next to him on the bench. “Well... How did you get to look like that,” he motions to Booster’s body, “Without doing freeweights? You get all that from machines?”

“I mean, yeah,” Booster rubs his arm. “Kinda. Not like the machines you have in gyms here,” he nods towards the mountain of equipment. “Back home we had tension chambers and dynamic el-strips and zoom pads and --”

“Zoom pads?” Ted smirks.

“And no, I don’t know how any of them works,” Booster adds unhappily, and Ted can’t help smiling in full. “I just did what Coach told me to do, and I kept doing it.”

“So essentially they just zapped you with a ray gun and you came out all... muscled and strong?”

“No!" Booster clenches his fists in frustration. "I’ve worked hard, I’ve worked out for hours and hours and hours, for years and years and years. I know how to work out, I just --” He sighs in exasperation, so deeply it’s almost a sob. “I just don’t know how to do it with your... retro equipment.”

“So you really are from the future,” Ted studies him, wide-eyed. When he’d first read about this gold-clad superhero from the 25th century he’d assumed it was a marketing ploy. Why would anyone come here from the future to do Flakies commercials?

Booster nods unhappily in reply.

Ted's mind is racing. The things he wants to ask. What’s happened to humanity in all those years? What great events have shaped the course of the world? Which names are still remembered, if any are remembered at all? The environment, the world wars, technology -- what strides, what setbacks have taken place? He could pick his brain for weeks, for years, trying to map it all out.

Instead he gently slaps him on the shoulder and stands up.

“Come on. I’ll teach you how to bench.”

They start out slow, with just the bar, going through the basics. Ted demonstrates proper grip, positioning, activation of the pecs, breathing, everything he knows, and they start adding weight. Booster turns out to be an eager student.

Between sets Ted goes through the gist of other lifts, talks about compounds and isolation work, concepts Booster knows from experience but not from books.

Set after set goes by, until Ted can tell Booster is getting fatigued, but Booster wants to keep going. He’s smiling, a smile brighter than the ones Ted has seen on the magazine covers. Just happy to be told what to do, to feel that simple sense of accomplishment.

Booster throws the purple sweat band away. "Sponsors can't see me now anyway," he shrugs.

Ted groans, and Booster looks at him in surprise. "What?"

"No, I just can't stand that song!"

Booster turns his head to the boombox in the corner, listening with almost comical focus.

Ted sings along in a whiny voice, "I am a MAAAAYN who will FIGHT for your HOOONOR... If you didn't believe a man could have vocal chords in his nose, you haven't heard Cetera."

Booster giggles.

"I just got so sick of that song last summer when it was everywhere, didn't you?"

Booster brushes his short hair with his fingers. "I guess I wasn't here when it dropped."

"Not here, like..." Ted frowns with the realization. "Oh."

Booster didn't exist at this point in time until he came here. He's in his mid-twenties, but those years weren't spent in the seventies and eighties like Ted's had. He hadn't really thought the implications of the time travelling thing through.

Booster hadn't been here for Star Wars or Watergate or the Teen Titans showing up or the Pac-man craze or any of that. He'd been in a whole different set of years, experiencing completely different events and milestones.

Right now there's probably some distant ancestor of Booster's walking the earth, unaware that they will birth a person who will birth a person who will birth a person and on and on until they make the guy sitting in front of Ted right now. Right now.

Ted has to sit down.

Booster, unaware of Ted's mental crisis, scrunches his nose. "Yeah, that really is a terrible song." He turns to Ted. "But I like the variety in music you have now. When I came here I went to a record shop and just bought a ton of different albums. There's so much different music."

"Huh?" Ted blinks, forcing himself to the present. "You don't have that where--" He corrects himself. "Uh, when you're from?"

"Not really, like..." Booster tips his head back, trying to find the words. "I guess I feel like all the music I grew up with sounds the same because that's all the music I listened to, you know? But I come here and there's like a hundred years' worth of music!"

"So what do you listen to?" Ted asks, trying to figure out what he would feel listening to music from centuries back. He supposes it would all be Latin chanting. Or lutes and things.

"I like The Shirelles, I guess."

"The Shirelles?"

"You know, 'Will you still love me tomorrow', 'Mama said'," Booster smiles to himself. "And The Crystals, the Marvelettes..."

"Wait," Ted smirks. "You mean like fifties' girl bands? The kind of music my mom would listen to?"

"Like I said, I just bought a ton of records," Booster shrugs good-naturedly. "I didn't really make sure I bought the current ones. I'm still figuring out what you think of as old music and new music. It's all new to me."

Ted grins in spite of himself. He figures the existential dread can wait, obviously he has to guide this lost soul through the infinitely awesome things happening in pop and/or rock. Just wait until I show you the Thriller music video, he thinks to himself as Booster urges them to do another set on the bench.

The kid really is strong too, Ted realizes. They still haven’t found Booster’s working weight, and they passed Ted’s one rep max a while ago. He stands at Booster’s head, spotting him should he fail to raise the bar, and he studies this golden-haired boy who shouldn't exist yet. That future certainly gave him quite a physique. That six pack tensing with each lift, those strong long legs gleaming with sweat in the sunlight from the half-shuttered windows. The crop top shows off Booster’s V-tapered torso (not like Ted’s, solid and thick and almost squat in comparison) against the black pad of the bench.

Alright, Ted thinks to himself. Maybe I wouldn’t mind dressing like that if I had a body like his.

They've reached the final set, and Booster is grunting with effort, grinding out a last rep. The bar dips on its way up, and Ted hovers his hands underneath, ready to support it if Booster’s strength should fail.

“No, no, come on, Booster! Last one, I know you’ve got it in you! Get it get it get it!”

Booster sneers with clenched teeth in effort, sweat drenching his crewcut, and with a groan he shakily pushes the weight upwards, upwards, until his arms at last are fully extended.

“Good boy!” Ted exclaims in genuine excitement and helps Booster place the bar back on the rack. Once it’s securely in place Booster lets his arms fall down limp on either side of the bench.

Booster's eyes are closed, his chest heaves with every heavy breath and he lies still for a moment. Ted looks at him, strangely proud, looks at the flush in his cheeks, the gentle trembling of his blonde eyelashes. Then Booster's eyes are open, and they look at each other, both flushed with effort and excitement, and for a moment Ted can't think of anything to say. He looks away, strangely out of breath. “You're pretty strong, futureboy.” It’s a dumb thing to say, and he regrets it immediately.

“Right now I feel like I couldn’t lift a pencil,” Booster grins and sits up. “I have no idea how I’m going to eat, I won’t even be able to raise a fork for days.”

“Only the finest feeding troughs for Booster Gold from now on,” Ted announces to the room, and he realizes today is the first time they’ve met out of costume, first time they see each other in civilian clothes. He sits down next to Booster and extends a hand. “I’m Ted Kord, by the way.”

Booster smiles brightly and exaggerates raising his limp arm. He grabs Ted’s hand. “Yeah, I’m Booster Gold.”

“Oh I thought --” Ted begins, taken slightly aback. “We’re not doing civilian names?”

“Sure, I mean -- it’s just...” Booster stammers with a smile. “Everybody’s always called me Booster.”

Figures, Ted thinks. This guy barely covers his face when he's in costume, he's Booster wherever he goes. Ted stands up and stretches his back. “Well, everybody’s always called me jackass but I don’t introduce myself like that.”

At that, Booster bursts out laughing. Not like before, not embarrassed or trying to defuse tension, just a roaring belly laugh, echoing through the empty room, and Ted, even if it was his joke, can’t help laughing as well. Their voices drown out the earnest voice from the boombox; "...I say a prayer with every heartbeat, I fall in love whenever we meet..."

Maybe this blonde double agent from the future isn’t all bad after all.

Notes:

One of my pet peeves is how cape comics (and all mainstream creative media, really) is obsessed with muscular gym-built bodies while pretending gyms don't exist, and that heroes never work out if it's not specifically "to train". This fic is me raising my little calloused fists to the sky in protest.

This is the first chapter in a set that I plan will lead to bodies in other kinds of motion, ifyouknowwhatimean. I don't know if the heavyhanded music motif will stay, but I had a lot of fun with it here.

Songs [Spotify / Tidal / YouTube Music] :
When the Going Gets Tough (The Tough Get Going) - Billy Ocean
Hip to be Square - Huey Lewis and the News
Carrie - Europe
Glory of Love - Peter Cetera
Will You Love Me Tomorrow - The Shirelles
Mama Said - The Shirelles
Thriller - Michael Jackson
and of course: How Will I Know - Whitney Houston

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