Chapter Text
The first thing Theodore Roachmont noticed as he was waking up was that the pant leg of his pajamas had rolled up a little on his ankle overnight.
Sometimes he was a bit of an… active dreamer, so it did happen from time to time. It wasn’t necessarily unpleasant, just odd.
There were a lot of things the Roach found odd. Why the bacon grease leaked into his eggs. Why one of his sweaters had a wayward loose thread. Why school buses never had seatbelts but cars did. How many plastic can holder thingies floated in the ocean? All of these thoughts were fascinating at various times during his morning, and before he knew it, Roach was already in the car, off to school.
There were a lot of things that moved around in Roach’s head. Some moved with clear purpose. Some jiggled. Some shuffled. Some floated. Each was like a little toy inside the teenager’s carrot-topped mind; when he was done with it, he could put it down and pick up another one. Some had importance attached to them, like remembering his homework for third period. Others were more frivolous, or at least that’s what his friends thought about them. All of them were valuable, in his mind.
If there was one way that Theodore was regularly described by a lot of the people he met, it was the word “weird”. He wasn’t entirely sure what gave them that impression. Was it the way he looked, his long orange curls and almost-matching sweater giving him an air of mystery? Was it the way he talked, or the things he liked? Was it just that he was friends with other people who also were called “weird”? Maybe it was just the fact that he didn’t conform to the many rigid stereotypes that other students gave social preference to. Maybe it all didn’t really matter.
Whatever it was, the Roach wasn’t really bothered by it. He had friends, in Tyler, Kevin, and Shope, and he was increasingly getting to know Yolanda as well. He had loving, successful parents who saw him as a good kid. He had exciting adventures, especially now that he was one of the local superheroes. As long as he wasn’t too impeded from his pursuit of happiness, he didn’t really have too many things to worry about. Really, what more from life would a kid want?
If the way Roach looked and thought and acted and lived was “weird”, then he almost wondered what “not weird” looked like. Comparatively, it must have been quite strange, but it wasn’t something the ginger boy felt interested in comprehending at the moment.
After a stop at his locker, Roach managed to catch up with his friends, though one in particular looked a little worse for wear.
“You look like you’ve been attacked by a bear,” the ginger commented bluntly.
“Worse,” Kevin replied. “Attacked by a Jock.”
Kevin’s face was scuffed, his hoodie a little dusty and muddy; it was clear a bit of a brawl went on, or instead that he hit the floor quickly and roughly. He could discern Kevin was in no mood to elaborate, and the incident had dampened the moods of Tyler and Shope beside him as well.
“Is it just me, or do you guys wish you could secretly use your battle balls to get back at Jock too?” Kevin asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tyler replied. “We can’t just use our battle balls against people like that. We’d be bad heroes!”
“We’ve used our battle balls for a lot of other things we probably shouldn’t have,” noted Shope.
Ooh, Roach could add to this discussion! He began to list off their superpowered misdeeds. “When we used them as toys, when we used them to play on the football team, when we used them to pose as adults and sneak into that concert…”
“Okay, okay!” Tyler insisted. “So we haven’t been making the best examples of ourselves. But that doesn't mean we can’t start now!”
“Ugh, I hate that you’re right,” agreed Kevin. “We should really be more reh — ” The black-haired boy made a harsh retching sound. “Reh — ” This was followed by a series of coughs and fits and near-hurls, as the boy struggled to get the word out. “Responsible.”
“Good luck with that,” added Shope snarkily.
“I could totally be reh — reh — that R word!” Kevin responded, for some reason taking offense to the idea.
“You’ve never been responsible a day in your life,” Shope taunted. “You can’t even hand in your homework on time! It’s almost an achievement that you didn’t flunk like Jock did.”
An argument like this between Kevin and Shope was nothing new for the Roach. It seemed like it was going to be a perfectly typical morning.
“Alright class, time to hand in your homework. While you’re all getting that out, I’ll hand back your book reports from last week.”
Nothing inspired panic like the frantic mental check to make sure you remembered your homework for third-period English. At least nothing outside of what Roach faced as a superhero did, anyway. But thankfully, there was no reason to worry, and Theodore could easily place last night’s homework on his desk for the teacher to collect. It helped that she was pretty.
“Thank you, Theodore,” the teacher replied. “I had an absolute joy grading your book report. You framed so well the hidden conflict between the deuteragonist and the protagonist during chapters eight and nine, along with considerations for the setting, themes, and even the class conflict of the characters! Truly an analysis worthy of my only A-plus this period.”
Roach blushed. It’s not like it was a difficult book report to write last week; the lives and loves of two magnates in the Roaring Twenties, as they hoped to paper over the cracks in their relationship with each other, their lives, and the state of the American economy at large at the time, was gripping fiction. He just had to jot down what he was already feeling. The masterful writing helped the boy empathize with the yearning hearts that never seemed to be fully satisfied.
A few classmates nearby gave puzzled looks towards Roach as they sat in front of their A-minuses and Bs. To hear his friends tell it, apparently, his body language during class sometimes suggests he’d rather be anywhere but here. Doodling, fidgeting, looking out the window, half-asleep, fully asleep that one time they all had a late-night virus battle… But how does that have anything to do with how Roach is as a student? Much like the deeper meaning of assigned reading, it was probably something he could figure out… but it didn’t really bother him.
According to Kevin whenever he’s having one of those days when he’s obsessed with being ‘cool’, apparently lunchtime is a time of day that people put a lot of effort into. Did pasta and chocolate milk really take that much work to chew? Surely the meat of unknown origin was harder. Or maybe there was something to his friend’s yammering; some days he took in the atmosphere around him, other days he didn’t. It depended on what he felt like.
On his way back towards his friends’ table at the back of the cafeteria, he passed by the table where Jock Jockerson and his football player friends always sat. Supposedly this table was important, but personally, he didn’t see what was so attractive in the guy who lobbed stinky gym socks at him in the halls twice last week. But the bully wasn’t the only person he recognized huddled around that table: two seats further down was the stylish brown-haired boy that was also secretly their super-powered teammate. Without reservation or filter, Roach made a sound in response to that thought.
“Hi Josh!”
The entire table — Jock, Josh, their friends, other students — all turned and looked at him. Their collective gaze expressed shock, antagonism, curiosity; probing the boy with their eyes, almost as if he was an alien. Roach focused in on Josh, specifically, who looked surprised at first, almost confused as to how to react. After several aching moments of undisturbed silence, the trendsetting teen gave the sweatered boy a dismissive snort. A beat later, it turned into an outright incisive laugh. Almost instinctively, the table joined him.
Roach didn’t need Kevin’s harebrained attempts at decoding cool kids to figure out what was going on; it was pretty clear they were laughing at him, as if his entire presence there was some sort of worthless joke.
Then the insults came in.
“Loser!” “Nerd!” “Carrot mop!”
Everyone at the table had a chance to get their fix of verbally punching down at Roach. Some were the kinds of standard attacks he’d heard plenty of before; others were specific and incisive, attacking his looks, his hair, his voice. A few were clear duds, insults that didn’t land because they didn’t apply to him, or so contrived that they were wimpy lines of attack. But even those missed blows did nothing to interrupt or lessen the barrage of derision and condescension that emanated from that table. It made Roach feel small and unwanted. When the boy had had enough, once it was starting to visibly impact him, Theodore walked away, back to the forgettable corner of the room where his friends sat, off to sulk in relative anonymity.
“Ouch, you could feel that all the way from here,” Tyler commented about the situation as Roach arrived.
“That was practically a social suicide mission!” remarked Kevin. “What did you think was going to happen?”
“Well they didn’t have to do that to him!” Shope replied.
As the boy sulked into his chair, the gears were still turning in his mind, trying to process how the last few minutes could go so very wrong.
“Maybe he did,” Roach finally stated.
“Huh?” wondered Shope.
“As much as Josh actually doesn’t like us, he also wouldn’t want to show that he didn’t not like us in front of all of his friends,” the ginger-haired boy explained.
“He was trying to save face…” Kevin realized. “It sucks, but I hate that I get it.”
“Because any other reaction would be suspicious, I see it now,” agreed Tyler. “Doesn’t mean it still doesn’t hurt, or that you deserved it, Roach.”
“I’ll live with it,” Roach replied with a degree of nonchalance. The instinctive emotional pain he felt in the moment was fading. A certain logic tried to rationalize the situation: the kind of world that Josh lived in was a different world than the one inhabited by himself and his friends. Whenever Josh did show up on the Galacticus for training, or the many times Tyler tried to talk it out with him, that world was the one thing that was rarely far from his mind. Roach didn’t fully get how it all worked, and why it was so important to him. But sometimes, the fact that they found it important in itself was all that mattered, which was something he could relate to.
“You know, I’m really starting to think that Count Venamus has a thing for attacking the Earth,” Tyler commented as he, and the other Superdudes, arrived on the Galacticus. The sun was just starting to dislodge itself from its place in the sky and begin its descent; the virus warriors looked exhausted, having just spent all afternoon knocking out the latest shiny metal object Venamus had cooked up. The Roach’s penchant to move fast and smash things in battle happened to prove quite useful today, though they all could take pride in their own roles in turning this extraterrestrial weaponry into a mangled heap of metal. Given the way their bodies currently felt, however, self-congratulation was probably the furthest thing from the group’s mind.
As the wearied heroes took to slumping in various positions around the room, Roach didn’t feel as tired as his friends looked; boredom felt like it would set in more quickly than soreness. Digging through his mysterious hair, Roach managed to find something fun: a handheld gaming console, which he also remembered he had been looking for ever since it went missing after a late-night high-score chase in Gem Match: Isles of Mystery the other night. Feeling like starting another run up the leaderboard, he began to play.
It only took a few minutes for Roach to get lost in the strategy (and nominal story) of swapping gems to land three in a row and rack up combos. His sense of awareness was only briefly disturbed by the entrance of Mem and Zen into the room, fresh from a post-battle debrief and looking to check up on their trainees. Gauging that none of them seem to be up for dense reviews of what could be improved for next time, the aliens agree to let them rest for a little while… whatever that seemed to look like.
“What is it about the Roach anyway?” Mem knelt down to ask Tyler, who was now also wondering how his ginger-haired friend could be up for a game when seemingly everything ached. “He’s… different from the rest of you noobs.”
“Roach is a boy of many talents,” Tyler began to explain, his voice a gentle tone, perhaps influenced by how he felt too worn out to speak much louder. “But whether you get to see those talents — or see them as talents — is entirely up to him.”
“Strange…”
“Yeah, that’s one thing you could call it,” agreed Tyler. “He can feel like a mystery until you get to know him.”
When they began to think about it, perhaps that was the one thing that was most puzzling about Theodore Roachmont. He knew a lot, he could do a lot, he could be friendly and funny and poignant and mischievous and odd and wholesome. But usually, he didn’t seem to preoccupy himself with anything in particular, or being anything in particular; the only thing that seemed to matter to him was being himself, no matter what exactly that looked like in any given moment, or if it was wildly different than what it looked like in the last one. He didn’t seem to align to any specific stereotypes or expectations, he was just… ‘the Roach’, and that was the best way to describe him.
It was something that it took his friends a little while to understand, and most people outside of them didn’t seem willing to put in that kind of effort for him. But Roach didn’t have to do these kinds of logical gymnastics himself, because in his mind, it all made sense, no questions needed. He was just as happy mining the depths of a tragic play role as he was mindlessly swapping gems into order on screen. And he moved through these vastly different spaces of thought without skipping a beat, even though either of them seem far from the first thing you’d have on your mind after battling a monster infected with an extraterrestrial space virus triple your size. Other people may have called him weird, or strange, or unusual, or even worse things than that, but the ginger-haired boy didn’t necessarily get how they saw it that way. It was simply another of the innumerable ignorable intricacies of being Theodore ‘The Roach’ Roachmont.
