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supernovasilence · 2 months

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The Song Stuck In My Head

Late, but I'm determined to keep going with Futuristic Four Week. Prompt 2 was Role Swap, so please take this offering of time traveler!Hiro, actor!Wilbur, superhero!Penny, and scientist!Violet. I just want to get this posted so this is rushed and wildly unedited; I might clean it up before posting to ao3.

Summary: Something is wrong with the timeline. Gen/friendship, drama, mention of injuries but nothing super graphic.

Hiro’s hands shook, but he gulped in a deep breath and forced them steady. He couldn’t afford to spill any fuel.

He only had enough for one jump left as it was. If he ran out mid-travel…

Well, one way or another, he wasn’t redoing this.

He finished loading in the fuel, triple-checked that he had everything packed, quadruple-checked he had the right coordinates punched in, and drew in another deep breath.

A photo beamed at him from the dashboard: an old-fashioned polaroid, faded and crumpled now, the faces of the four kids in it starting to blur. The energy from repeated jumps was corroding the film. Sometimes it felt like it was doing the same to Hiro’s memory.

He pushed activate.

Flash!

Wilbur grinned into the light bursting across his face. He waved, paused for another storm of flashes, and kept weaving through the crowd. Flash—flash—flash; it seemed to take forever for him to reach the sanctuary of a bathroom.

Thankfully, it was empty. Wilbur exhaled hard and leaned on the sink. Looking up, he saw his reflection staring back at him. He was still grinning widely.

He shook his head like a dog shaking off water, grin dissolving somewhere along the way.

“Come on, Wilbur, keep it together,” he told himself.

He didn’t know why he felt so off tonight; premieres were easy. No acting to do except act like a cool, handsome TV star, and that Wilbur Robinson didn’t have to fake. Smile and wave and make sure to be seen by all the cameras, and don’t say anything rude to anyone. Easy peasy.

He was just…tired of events right now. He’d just come off a flurry of interviews to promote the new season, and now had bunch of premiers to attend (movies from the same studio they wanted to drum up publicity for), and after that they were jumping right back into filming for next season—Wilbur couldn’t remember the last time he’d been home.

One of his family members was always with him during shoots, of course, and he called the rest regularly, but it wasn’t the same. And just hanging out at the mall or park or chargeball court with friends seemed like a dream anymore.

For a moment, it really did seem like a dream. The mirror in front of him shimmered, and instead of pretentious tile, he saw funkily patterned carpet and neon lighting. A retro-style arcade, a Japanese boy with a robot hoodie leaning against a pinball machine, the redheaded girl playing scolding him not to make it tilt, mouth moving silently across the glass while the boy laughed just as silently, and the black-haired girl walking up to them with bags of gummy frogs and popcorn turned and looked back at—

Wilbur was standing in a glitzy bathroom staring at his own reflection. He felt dizzy for a moment, and then he had a headache, but by the time he rubbed at his temples, it had already gone.

“What the—”

He tapped the mirror. A second later he looked frantically around, but luckily the bathroom was still empty.

“Okay, I think that’s enough soda for one night. There’s no way I actually…”

Actually saw…he’d seen something right? He couldn’t remember what he’d thought was so strange about the mirror now.

Shrugging, Wilbur splashed some water on his face, checked his hair was perfect (it was, of course), and went back to rejoin the paparazzi party.

Penny climbed in her window and closed it as quietly as she could. It was harder than usual; her shoulder throbbed angrily. Peeling off her supersuit, she saw a nasty purple-black splotch across her upper arm.

She groaned—quietly; her mom did not need to know Penny was sneaking out to fight supervillains—and dug around for the first aid kit she kept under her bed. Crouching down and stretching out her arm didn’t play nicely with her tired body, and she teetered. A wave of vertigo swept her.

She fell, and while she fell her hands rubbed antiseptic into a cut on a girl’s arm, serious scarlet-and-black supersuit tied about her waist to reveal a cheery bubblegum pink tank top and a circus of bruises across her skin.

“Ow,” yelped one of the boys beside her, the one in the purple armor, as the one with hair like a black cockatoo’s crest tried to pull the armor off without jostling the other’s sprained wrist.

“This is exactly why you need our help,” complained the crested boy. “If you let us fight with you, you wouldn’t come home all banged up.”

“You don’t have any powers.” The armored boy shook his head. “It isn’t safe.”

“Neither do you!”

“I have genius intelligence and high-tech armor.”

“So why can’t you make us armor?” Penny asked.

“Do you really want to go through this every day?” the girl said, gesturing at her scraped up arm, as sarcastic as she was kind. “You two should—”

And then Penny slammed onto her bedroom floor, breathless and stinging with rugburn.

She just lay there, her shoulder aching and her eyes watering, but a moment later she realized her mom might have heard the thump and come to check on her. She grabbed the first aid kit and jumped under the covers with it.

When fifteen minutes had passed with no sign of her mom, Penny decided she was safe, and climbed out of bed again.

It took a bit of willpower; her bed was soft and she just wanted to go to sleep. She wasted no time changing fully out of her costume and into pajamas. Something flicked inside her head as she opened the first aid kit, pressed against the inside of her skull as she scrubbed dirt from her skinned palms and raw knuckles.

Crime-fighting would be so much easier in a team, she thought—and then was struck by how familiar the question was, like she’d asked it a dozen times before. Whatever it was pressed harder against Penny’s thoughts.

She almost had enough energy let to be curious about it. But the feeling came with a sense of vertigo, and she’d already fallen enough tonight. She shook her head, and was surprised to find her eyes wet; they shouldn’t still be stinging from her fall. She wiped them and pulled out ointment for her aching shoulder. A thought tried very hard to get into her head as she rubbed the ointment into her arm, but it wouldn’t come clear, and she was too tired to chase it. Maybe it wasn’t a thought at all, only exhaustion.

Shoving the first aid kit back under the bed, Penny climbed back under the covers. This time, she didn’t fight her weariness.

Violet rubbed her eyes, then looked at her worksheet again. The numbers refused to come clear. She glared at them.

“Oh, sure,” she mocked her past self. “I’ll just do a quick little investigation into the weird readings, even though Mr. Harrington told me it was just the sensors glitching. How long could it take? It’s not like being a teenager in college is hard enough.”

She sank back in her seat and sighed in frustration.

The thing was, the sensors were getting weird readings. And these weren’t the local weather station’s thermometer and windsock. These were state of the art pieces of equipment from a college science department—and a pretty good college, too; Violet’s scholarship afforded her that. Atmospheric pressure, gravitational shifts, a dozen other things that shouldn’t all be interconnected but were, somehow, in some pattern Violet could not figure out: they all said something was strange about the world.

Violet was pretty sure they said something was wrong.

But she couldn’t prove it, and if she didn’t do her actual homework, she was going to flunk right out of her scholarship. Shoving her hair angrily back from her face, she turned to grab her calculus notebook.

The cover shifted as she reached for it. It shook again, and again, harder each time, and then it flew open. The pages flipped past at high speed and the papers she had shoved inside it went flying. Violet shrieked and grabbed for them, but the whole room was suddenly filled with papers and empty chip bags and clothes and everything else light enough to be swept up by the wind buffeting the walls. Violet leapt for the window only to slam into cold glass; it was already closed. She whirled and stared at the room, clinging to the windowsill.

There was a flash of light—a deafening silence that left her ears ringing. And then everything was still. Lying on the floor in the middle of the room, where the chaos had been worst, was a small, metal object.

Violet walked over cautiously, waiting any moment for the laws of physics to go haywire again. They didn’t. She crouched down and peered at the object. It looked a little like a cellphone, and a lot like a prop from an old sci-fi TV show, assuming that prop had spent the last few decades being dropped and tossed in basements and dug out by kids who repaired it with duct tape and aluminum foil so they could use it to play space invaders. The cracked screen was blank and dark.

“You better not be giving off radiation,” Violet muttered, and picked it up.

The screen flickered to life.

“…ome in…nny? Wilbur? Anyo…Guys, if you’re there, please come in.”

Violet yelped and almost dropped the whatever-it-was (a communicator, apparently).

“Hello?” The crackly, compressed voice came again. “Is someone there? Hold on—”

The static covering the screen jerked, wavered into a different pattern of static, jerked again, and cleared enough for Violet to see a boy her own age looking out. He had either ash or a bruise smudged over his cheek, and around him Violet saw glimpses of tangled wires and control panels askew in their settings in…what? A machine? A lab? Wavering, distorted images moved nauseatingly on a glass panel behind the boy’s head.

He looked up from whatever buttons he was worrying over and at the screen with a rather desperate expression. His entire face lit up.

“Violet?” He laughed in disbelief, then whooped, pumping his fist in the air and directly into the glass overhead; it must be a dome, because the entire thing bonged ominously. He flinched away, looking fearfully at it, but nothing happened. He shook his hand. “Ow… Violet, are you okay?”

“Who are you, and how do you know my name?”

He stared, and then his frantic look came back.

“No, no, you have to know me. It wasn’t supposed to be this long—you should still remember—”

“Remember what? Who are you?”

The boy looked at her, and for a moment she thought he might cry. She was left breathless at how much it hurt. Something inside her sat up and whispered inaudibly along as the boy said:

“Hiro. I’m Hiro Hamada. I’m your friend.”

“I’ve never met you before.”

“But you should have; don’t you get it?” Violet just stared at him. He shoved his hands into his hair. “We’re best friends—us and Wilbur and Penny. But something happened, and now everything’s wrong.”

He stopped to draw in a breath. This was Violet’s chance to tell him whatever he was mixed up sounded dangerous, and if he kept stalking her, she was going to call the police. And then turn off the communicator. But he looked so upset, and the communicator had appeared in her room in the middle of indoor storm. And something was wrong. She knew it was.

Hiro was the first person who’d believed her.

She sat on her bed and tightened her grip on the communicator.

“What do you mean, ‘wrong’?” she asked.

“I don’t know exactly.” Hiro gestured in frustration. “I think the timeline got changed. I just keep getting weird readings on everything, but I don’t know what they mean! I think maybe time travel’s not actually my field, so I don’t really know what I’m doing. Except I don’t know how I know that, and—”

“What’s the tensile strength of steel?” Violet blurted.

“Uh—” Hiro blinked at her. “It’s, it’s not a constant. It depends on the grade of the steel and thickness of your material.You want to consider yield strength and elongation percentage, too, so depending on what you’re building…”

He trailed off, then drew in an uneven breath. He looked at Violet with wide eyes. She looked back with a hammering heart.

“Let’s not go off in a spiral,” she said, snarky tone rather shaky.

“How did you know to do that?” Hiro asked.

Violet shook her head.

“I don’t know.”

They stared at each other for a moment, and then she watched determination spark in Hiro’s eyes.

“Something’s wrong with the timeline, and now I have to put it right. We have to put it right.”

“Who’s we?” Violet asked, even though part of her felt she already knew, lost names on the tip of her tongue…

“You and me, Wilbur, and Penny. I—” Hiro suddenly looked sheepish. “I don’t really know who they are, or you. But the anomalies all center around the four of us, so either we did something in the original timeline, or someone else was messing with time travel and we’re involved. Does that makes sense?”

“None of this makes sense.” Violet’s head was spinning. “How do you even fix a broken timeline?”

“I think we can if we put things back the way they were. There are rules about time travel—key events? I’m kinda guessing here. I was hoping you’d know.”

“I don’t know.” Violet hesitated. “Maybe one of the others does.”

“You see what I’m dealing with?” Hiro cried. “I know things, but I don’t know how I know. I definitely think one of you knows more about time travel than I do. I was trying to fix things, but I messed up. The last jump stranded me…whenever this is, and now I don’t have enough fuel to get out. I barely managed to get the comm out.” He looked around at the swirling colors. “I think I’m between whenevers, actually.”

Violet realized the wavering scenes weren’t on the glass, but behind it. A shiver of horror went down her back.

“Is there anything you can do?”

Hiro looked back at her, and the fear in his face softened away again. He grinned at her.

“I have a plan. But I need your help—Wilbur and Penny, too, if we can find them.”

Violet hesitated again. This was insane. And if it wasn’t insane it was wildly dangerous, not just to her but potentially to the entire world—the entire time-space continuum. But she liked Hiro’s grin. She felt like she could take on the world with that grin at her side. Maybe the four of them had, in the old timeline.

“I’m going to be grounded for a decade if we destroy the universe, you know,” she said. “What do you need me to do?”

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