Work Text:
21 Years Ago
Doc
“And that’ll do it!”
The second bedroom was serving as a spare room at the moment, and the box hit the ground with a thud that rattled to make clear that it was full of redstone components. Etho straightened up as Doc pulled the door shut behind them and turned the deadbolt. The hum of the glamor lock engaged, but he also had keys in his pocket. Glamor wasn’t the easiest thing for him to begin with, and that certainly hadn’t improved with his augmentations. So he had to depend on a set of keys instead of using any glamor beats.
Would he complain about them?
Well…it is certainly more complicated than that…
His archival eye was a steady red haze, and it melded perfectly with his natural eye, his vision was no different so long as he didn’t ask it to be.
Ask it?
Again, more complicated. Difficult to explain, to parse though, it had taken Doc months to feel like he was actually using his archival eye to even a tenth of its capabilities. Its capabilities had served them well.
Now they were here.
Retake the main branch and centralize power…expand from there…show the people we can be trusted…it won’t be like before.
Easier said than done. It was a better plan than whatever he and Etho had been up to before they’d met Cleo, though. She and Bdubs had also moved into their new apartment this week, now that the near-surface was secure.
Y’know.
Mostly.
They were still working on it.
Doc trailed Etho into the main area of their apartment. A couch and TV that was due to be jacked into the over-city connection, something Doc was working on getting sorted. There were a lot of things to work on. The table was too big, in his opinion, they didn’t need so many chair just for the two of them, but Etho had insisted. They were going to have Cleo and Bdubs over all the time, and besides, a bigger table meant more space to spread things out.
More space for clutter…but that was fine.
It was all fine.
Etho spun around once, his arctic fox tail was fluffy and shone in the yellowish can lights from the kitchen, the one for the living room was off. It was late, the night cycle had long since descended, and Doc was still just grateful for the access elevators that wormed their way around the foundational towers, which had helped them get much of their stuff up from the Depths. The rail cart system was still an absolute mess from the destruction of the Anarchy, even if it had been a couple years since total mayhem had consumed the under-city.
It had struck like a tidal wave in the days after the Directors death. Doc and Etho still in some small way felt responsible, which is why they were doing all this work.
Yet, within it all, they’d gotten some small benefits.
This apartment at the very top of one of the foundational towers, the closest you’d get to a penthouse here in the under-city, was one of those benefits.
Doc watched from the hallway gap as Etho toppled over the back of the couch and flopped down, feet kicking in the air, fur-covered hands with paw pads tossed up like a rag doll.
“I’m beat!”
Doc strolled over to the couch and leaned over it.
Etho creaked his functional eye open, and lowered a hand to hook the top of his black gaiter mask, pulling it down beneath his chin, where it slipped to hang loosely around his neck. The scar across his face cut over his left eye from a couple inches above his eyebrow all the way down, nearly to the corner of his mouth. Its jagged path crossed over Etho’s left eye, and while he’d healed nicely and hadn’t needed to have the eye removed, his vision in that eye had never fully recovered. Add that to the stiff scar tissue over his eyelid, and he preferred to just leave it closed.
He smiled up at Doc from where he sat upside-down on the couch, booted feet still idly kicking to a made-up rhythm.
“Hiya.”
Doc sighed and rolled his eyes. “Did we not say house rules are no shoes past the hallway?”
“I’ve always been a rebel.” Etho replied with a deadpan delivery.
Doc laughed, and the sound hissed and clattered against his ribcage, rumbled in his throat. “Oh, is that so?”
Etho tossed his arms over his head and then thrust them forward to rock up, catching the back of the couch with his fingertips. He tilted his head, fluffy fox ears standing tall from his silvery-white hair.
“What, don’t you like bad boys?”
Doc clapped his left hand, the one still of flesh and blood, over his face and shook his head with another half-smothered chuckle.
When he dropped his hand again, Etho was grinning up at him, fanged protruding over his lower lip. “To be fair, you look more intense than I do.”
“You’re the mobster.”
“You’re a mad scientist.”
“Define ‘mad’.”
“Hmmm…” Etho released one hand from how he was holding the back of the couch to keep himself sat up with his legs still kicked over. He stroked his chin a few times as if deep in consideration before another teasing smile tugged at his lips.
“How about tall, strong, and handsome?”
Doc snorted, raking a hand between his spiraling horns where longish dark brown hair was swept neatly back. He rolled his natural eye, even as he felt a warmth burning into his cheeks.
You would think he’d get used to this.
We’ve been dating nearly four years, after all.
Four years.
Four years ago, Doc had swung his green puffer coat, one that had always been too small for him, around Etho’s shoulders. As if it could serve as some sort of shield, a pathetic defense all he could offer to this person who’d so quickly become his everything.
And maybe that wasn’t high praise because back then, Doc had nothing.
When he’d escaped from the labs, he hadn’t even had his own name.
Taken in by the wardship program before he could even remember, if he’d ever been given a name before coming under the Directors care, then it was lost.
But going by his case file number wasn’t about to happen.
If he had to hear anyone else call him ‘M77’ he would probably snap.
So…Doc.
Doc worked. He didn’t have any sort of formal education, he didn’t have any kind of degree, hell, where would you even get something like that in the under-city? Most people down here were lucky if they received any proper schooling at all unless they went through the acclimation program
Which had gone south, too. That was also something they were working on.
Working.
Working.
Working.
Doc had run from the labs wanting to protect himself, willing to let the world burn so long as he survived it, sick of the hurt, sick of the experimentation, sick of being treated like a number.
The first time he met Etho, he’d poached his steal.
The second time they’d met was in a trash heap, and the fox hybrid had threatened to stab him.
A year past that day, and they’d been caught in an embrace, a first kiss that Doc had been convinced at that moment was their last.
I gave myself back for him.
The most terrifying thing in the world was the Director.
A fate worse than death was to fall back under her control.
Doc had gone willingly.
Or at least, he’d tried too, but Etho hadn’t been on board with that plan.
The memory of that moment was white-hot in his mind. He saw it once in a while, when he gazed down into his boyfriends face and saw the scar, the scar that did nothing to reduce how gorgeous he found the fox hybrid to be, never, never, never would that change.
Doc would have given anything in that moment to keep Etho safe.
Perhaps he hadn’t realized that Etho felt the same for him.
Truly felt the same for him.
He tried to stab the Director, got slashed across the face, Doc got an archival eye, Etho killed the Director, the Anarchy broke out, honestly? It was such a long story. A mess of a story. An absolute nonstop train wreck of a story, but Doc wasn't able to look away because since when had he ever been able to tear his eyes off of Etho?
“What did I do for the flirting, today?”
“Since when do you have to do anything?” Etho asked him, before hooking his knees more firmly over the back of the couch and releasing his arms, making grabby hands at Doc.
The creeper mutant sighed fondly then took his hands and pulled him up off the couch. Ethos boots hit the ground, and just as quickly, they left it. Doc released his hands only to hug him around the waist and easily lift him clean off the ground.
Etho was a force to be reckoned with…but he was also a light, petite little fox hybrid, and the fact that Doc could sweep him off the ground like nothing had always been fun to the both of them.
Doc could recall tender moments in their doomsday dungeon when he’d carry Etho to the pile of bedding that they passed off as a bed from where he’d fall asleep at the table with the shortened leg.
He also remembered grabbing Etho, pinning his arms, and having to physically restrain him from stabbing one of the Depths gang leaders, specifically one of the ghast mutant clan leaders who was trying to negotiate for the continuation of his trafficking industry under the new Labs regime they were trying to establish.
“I’m gonna kill him! I’m gonna kill him!”
“You are not Etho, stop, stop, stop! Let Cleo talk!”
“LEMME AT HIM!”
“LET CLEO TALK!"
"DOC LEMME GO!"
"OW! DON’T KICK ME! WELS GET HIS LEGS! WELS!”
“What are you looking so smug about?” Etho asked him. He’d thrown his arms around Doc’s neck, having gotten well used to how his boyfriend enjoyed scooping him off the ground without warning.
“Ah just…reminiscing,” Doc replied vaguely, and Etho hummed without comment. His gaze trailed past Doc’s face, along the cramped kitchen behind him. He sighed, just barely, but also sounded someone so fond.
“And what about you?” Doc asked him.
“I’m too tired to walk down memory lane.” Etho played the words with false complaint, returning his eyes to Doc’s face.
His face, with grafting scars and metal plates and a gleaming red augmented eye.
Neither of them looked as they had when they met, confronting each other over stolen glowstone dust in a sketchy tunnel off the Depths.
I left a tip for the distraction. It’s not seventy-thirty, should’ve taken me up on the deal while I was feeling generous.
Better luck next time, sweetheart.
“Sweetheart,” Doc murmured the term under his breath.
“Eeeeyes?” Etho replied no differently than if Doc had said his name.
Doc smiled, let his arms grow a touch tighter around Etho’s waist, and knew his touch was welcome even if half was from cold metal and half was flesh and blood. Even if he sometimes felt that he might be more machine than man, even if his brain ran partly on redstone circuits and biotech wiring, it didn’t matter to Etho.
The two of them were a mess.
A half-blind mobster who could turn violent in a heartbeat and an experiment who’d nearly been driven mad then turned to the very work that had created him.
Stars, there was no reason they should’ve survived, much less managed to stay together all the while. There had been so many moments they’d nearly broken. It had all been so much, they’d butted heads over the major decisions they were making, and as hard as it was to believe, they were barely even adults at this point.
Doc was twenty.
Etho was still just nineteen.
They had no right to work.
But work they did.
Work for a better world, work for a safer place, work for each other, and work for some distant peaceful moment that might happen in this very same apartment.
Not so distant, it seems.
Doc leaned his head forward and kissed Etho, who still had his mask down, the gaiter having fallen loose around his neck. It was familiar. It was something four years old, and yet there was still hidden within a spark of the bruising clash that had been their first kiss under such duress.
They broke apart after another few seconds.
“If you’re tired, I don’t mind carrying you,” Doc commented in a low tone, under breath.
Etho snickered. “What a gentleman.”
“Is that what it takes to qualify?”
“I’m a gutter rat, sweetheart. The bar is pretty low.”
Doc snorted. “Hey, considering you’re dating me, that is an insult.”
“What? Never. You’re a ten.”
“Out of?”
“…seven.”
“Why seven!?”
Etho gave a tittering laugh, his tail whipping back and forth to mirror his amusement, feet still kicking lightly, considering their rather large height difference meant that when Doc held him like this, he was well over a foot off the ground. The fox hybrid then dramatically flopped his head forward, nuzzling into the crook of Doc’s neck and settling there. Doc felt the flutter of his eyelashes against his neck, the flick of the tip of one of his fluffy ears.
“Take me to bed.”
“I thought you were tired,” Doc answered him immediately as he turned on his heel to carry him toward their bedroom door.
Etho groaned against his neck, not bothering to raise his head. “Not like that, get your mind out of the gutter.”
“I thought you were a gutter rat?”
“Stars, Doc…” It devolved into exhausted giggles, and Doc mirrored them, his chuckles hissed and clattered in his chest.
We’re going to make it, I think.
It was a distant dream of forever that started today.