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thetomorrowshow · 4 months

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seven

empires superpowers au masterlist (not up to date)

this story takes place about a year after the end of ‘poisoned rats’.

cw: light eye horror

He’s still new to the whole going-to-work thing. It’s kind of like school, and Jimmy had never liked school, but it’s different in the way that he’s getting paid for his work. And it’s a decent bit more enjoyable than school—he’s learning about cars, getting familiar with the inner workings of machines, and he hasn’t properly had the chance to pop open a hood since he was a teenager and would help his dad with checking the coolant and whatall.

It’s nothing glamorous, but Jimmy really likes his job—more than when he worked as a call service agent, at least. Today he’d learned how to even the weight of a motorcycle, and even though he’d pinched his fingers between the exhaust pipe and the engine, his boss had praised his efforts and let him off early.

Scott usually picks him up from work—they’ve got a second car, but Jimmy doesn’t take his driving test until this weekend so he’s not really meant to be driving himself anywhere—but Scott isn’t free for another hour, so Jimmy meanders around downtown.

He used to live on these streets, so it’s more instinct and less purpose that leads him down to the park across the block from his old apartment building—now closed, he observes, for renovations. The park is lonely at this time of day, two rusting swings hanging silently and a plastic slide gleaming in the sun.

Jimmy stops for a moment, stares at the yellowed grass and bleached plastic playground equipment. He’d never allowed himself to go anywhere near this park, a spot of joy for the kids living in the rundown neighborhood.

He can’t hang here long for risk of being chased off by some bathrobe-clad mother, accusing him of being a predator, so Jimmy turns back to the main part of downtown and heads back in the direction of the mechanic. Maybe Scott’s patrolling in the area, can show off some ice tricks.

There’s a handful of other walkers starting to appear when he makes it back into downtown proper, mostly those returning to work from lunch and high schoolers skipping out of school early. Once upon a time, Jimmy knew how to blend in perfectly with this crowd. Once upon a time, he could never stay in one place for too long.

He slides in among them just as easily as he once might have, moving at the same speed and keeping to the common footpath. He keeps his eyes down and dodges anyone coming from the other direction without issue.

Which is why it’s weird when someone runs right into him.

“Oh, geez—sorry, can I—”

“Well, isn’t it great to see you!”

Jimmy blinks, flinches as the man he’d run into slaps him on the back a couple of times. He . . . he has no clue who this is.

His mind instantly cycles through various brutes from Xornoth’s manor, but this face doesn’t match any of them. This man is a bit stocky, straw-colored hair hanging over his forehead, thin beard a bit darker in color. He’s smiling widely, even as he takes Jimmy by the hand and starts dragging him off.

Jimmy can’t help it—some strange man is pulling him away and he panics—with a snap of adrenaline—

The man jumps back, Jimmy coming with him, as a chair is thrown out of the window of the building beside them, narrowly missing them. He chuckles, taps his nose knowingly.

“You aren’t getting me with that one! Don’t worry, I just want to talk. How about in that deli?”

He doesn’t point anywhere, strangely enough, so Jimmy just glances around until he sees a deli.

All the well-trained alarm systems in Jimmy’s brain are firing, but. . . .

Now that he thinks about it, there is something familiar about this man. Maybe it’s his cadence, or his eyes—

And Jimmy realizes with a start that the man is blind, his eyes clouded over, faded scars stretching across them.

He’s shocked enough that he lets the man lead him into the deli, grab them a table, and order himself a sandwich.

That’s when he notices that the man is not only blind, but has earplugs in.

“I’m sorry,” he finds himself saying loudly as the man tucks into his sandwich, “I think you may have mistaken me with someone else.”

The man winces. “You don’t have to shout, I’m right here,” he says around a mouthful of sandwich. “And no, Tim, I know who you are.”

If that isn’t ominous. And also the wrong name, though it once again scritches at the part of his brain that finds something about this man so oddly familiar. “Jimmy,” he automatically corrects. “Not Tim. And I really ought to get going—”

“Back to Scott?”

Jimmy freezes, halfway out of his seat.

“Because I’m pretty sure he’s patrolling around the East side of the city, y’know. Unless you want to call Lizzie. Pretty sure she’s not busy at the minute.”

The man takes another bite out of his sandwich, scratches his beard.

Jimmy’s stomach goes cold. How did he—how can—it’s—

“See Tim, there’s not a lot that I don’t hear about,” the man continues. “However, there is something that I need to know, if you wouldn’t mind answering.”

He needs to get away. Fight or flight has fully kicked in, and Jimmy needs to run. Jimmy raises his hand, ready to do—something, shatter his chair or collapse the table or hurt him in some way—but the man only tsks.

“Come on then, none of that. The three of us have got to stick together, really. Wouldn’t be good to start fighting, especially with the way Nine acts.”

Slowly, Jimmy sits back down. It’s not because he’s intimidated, he tells himself. His fingers twitch. He could kill this man in an instant, and no one would ever know.

The man puts down his sandwich in its wrapper and leans in, head tilted a bit to the side. “So,” he says lowly, “did you kill them?”

Jimmy knows, instinctively, that he means Xornoth.

And it’s not intimidation that makes Jimmy answer. It’s some strange feeling that he knows this man, and cares about him. Something familiar in the line of his nose and the color of his hair.

“Yeah,” says Jimmy in the same low tone. “Yeah, I did.”

The man sits back, a wide smile spreading across his face. “Good. I figured you did, y’know, but I was sleeping when it happened. You could’ve pulled a runner, y’know? Could’ve been someone else to get them. That wouldn’t have been right, though. It had to be one of their . . . erm, what did they start calling them? Subjects?”

Jimmy swallows, then mutters an answer in the affirmative. He keeps having to remind himself that he doesn’t know this man, as familiar as he is. How does he know so much?

“Right. Back in my day, we were ‘participants’. What a joke.” The man shakes his head, then takes another bite of his sandwich. “Well, thanks for the info. I won’t tell anyone, promise—well, I’ll tell Nine, but Nine isn’t much of a talker, so it won’t get out or anything.”

“Right,” Jimmy manages. He checks his phone; Scott should be coming to pick him up soon. He casts his eyes about, trying to think of anything to say to the strange man with white scars and earplugs.

“What happened to your eyes?” he asks eventually. The man smiles ruefully, one hand going up to trace over the scars. They aren’t precise in any way, some smaller ones littered around the corners, long ones down the middle. If Jimmy looks closely, he can even see the places the irises are entirely missing along with the scar, leaving the man with cloudy white streaks through his eyes.

“Let’s just say—next time those scientists of theirs have you on the table, make sure and ask ‘em to strap down your hands,” the man says. “Not that that should ever happen to you again, but you never know, y’know?”

Well.

Jimmy feels slightly ill, staring at those scars. Most of his aren’t self-inflicted, nor nearly as visible as those. Sure, he has one across his cheek, and a small one above his eyebrow, but they don’t usually attract much attention. Scott even thinks they make him look rather dashing. He can only imagine the stares and questions this man gets on a daily basis.

The stranger finishes his sandwich, wiping his fingers off with the wrapper. He stands, tips an imaginary hat toward Jimmy.

“Well, I’ll be off. The city’s a bit loud, don’t you think? Oh, and thanks for footing the bill.”

And then he’s gone, and Jimmy sits there in stunned silence until he shakes himself, heads up to the counter, and pays.

He tries to forget about the man. As weeks pass, he moves on, his days taken up by work and Scott and his friends. And he mostly does forget about the familiar stranger, too busy to spare the mental energy needed to try and figure out who he was.

That is, until one night, nearly a month later.

Lizzie had managed to get a hold of their high school’s yearbook from when she was a senior and Jimmy a sophomore, and together with Scott and Joel they paged through it, laughing at Lizzie’s galaxy-themed outfit and Jimmy’s unbrushed hair.

They stop on the page of the soccer team, and Jimmy knows from the coos and laughs that they’re looking at him and his ridiculous hair, but his eyes are caught on a familiar face.

“Who’s that?” he finds himself saying, pointing to the boy beside him, the boy who has his arm slung around his shoulders, the boy who—in one small picture off to the side, is knuckling Jimmy’s head.

And then he remembers.

He pages through the yearbook until he finds him.

A senior that year. One of his friends, and one of the only people who tried to still hang out with him after his powers got out of hand.

He’d almost completely forgotten about Martyn.

Martyn, the dude with the new Playstation. He’d been powered—not strongly, but with some fairly average super hearing and far vision.

Jimmy thinks back to the man he’d met, blinded by his own hands, hearing so intense that he has to wear earplugs at all times.

And then he wonders, dreading the unknown answer, what kind of mistakes had been made with the experiments before his own—and who on earth Nine might be.

#empires smp #empires smp fanfic #empires superpowers au #esh au #jimmy solidarity #scott smajor #flower husbands #martyn inthelittlewood #mas writes #051424 #finally. he's here #after all the fighting he did to get here #when i explicitly told him no #martyn: that sign can't stop me bc i can't read! im blind!#the number seven really just suits this man huh #somebody guessed that martyn would have been one of the subjects lol #you were correct! congrats!#lmk what you guys think #love you guys

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