Chapter Text
Day Thirty: “Do you trust me?”
This is a terrible way to go, Roscoe thought to himself as he surveyed his surroundings. He’d already died a few times, and this situation was looking worse than anything he’d experienced before.
He tried to wiggle his leg free for the hundredth time, but it was wedged under debris and couldn’t move much more than a few centimeters. At least it wasn’t pinned so tightly that the blood flow was cut off.
He’d activated an old emergency beacon a few hours earlier, although none of the guys had showed up. The Rogues were still snubbing him, it seemed, which wasn’t surprising, but it was disappointing. Cold liked to talk a big game about the Rogues being family, but it was rarely borne out when it came to the Top. No doubt they’d help Digger if needed, despite his own long absence from the group.
So he sat there and waited, and pondered what to do. If he faced a long death by starvation, he decided he’d simply evacuate from his body and skip some drawn-out suffering. In the meantime, he would continue trying to free himself; he was accustomed to doing things on his own, and self-reliance had already gotten him through several deaths and rebirths.
But soon he heard a stranger’s voice, youthful and curious. “Hello?” Axel called, searching the area above ground with a flashlight.
“Down here! I need help!” Roscoe shouted. He didn’t recognize the voice, but a person was a person.
Within a few minutes the teen had figured out where the voice had come from, and he shone his flashlight down the opening of the old well. Roscoe squinted in the harsh light and shielded his eyes as best he could.
“What are you doing down there?” Axel asked cautiously, and the injured man wearily exhaled.
“The Reverse Flash threw me down here and left me for dead…but I am not dead. Well, not exactly.”
Axel looked shocked. “Why the hell were you tangling with a guy like that? Who are you, and how’d you activate a Rogues emergency beacon?”
“I am a former Rogue, and I designed it with the first Mirror Master. I am known as the Top.”
“Yo, for real?? The crazy asshole guy??” Axel exclaimed, and Roscoe forced himself to swallow his anger. The last thing he wanted was for the kid to run off and leave him, no matter how irritating the boy was.
“Yes, the crazy asshole guy. Will you help me or not?”
Axel sat down at the edge of the well. “I can call Cold, but I really don’t think he’d help. He kinda hates you, y’know.”
A slight sigh. “Yes, I know.”
“But I got tech, maybe I can do the job. What’s the problem, why are you still down there?”
“Thawne beat me rather badly, so I am generally in rough shape –- he probably would have killed me if not for my ability to heal some of my wounds. But the primary issue is that my leg is pinned, so I cannot pull myself out. I am not sure you can do it, either.”
Axel thought about the situation for a few minutes, tapping his fingers on the stone structure. “So, I might have something that can do the trick, but I’d have to go get it.”
“I have all the time in the world.” He sounded tired and defeated, and Axel frowned with concern.
“I swear I’ll be back as fast as I can, okay? Just…stay calm or something. Don’t get crazy!” Axel told him, taking off his hoodie and tossing it down the well. “This is my favourite shirt and I want it back, but you can use it for now to keep warm or whatever. All right?”
“Yes.”
Axel wanted to ask why he was so quiet now, but figured it was far more important to free him quickly, so he started running on air to the Rogues’ hideout to find his heavy-duty gear.
It took a while of rummaging through James Jesse’s stash to find what he wanted, but he lugged the weighty monstrosity back to the old well and fearfully peered inside; it occurred to him that the trapped man could have died during the three hours he was away.
But no, Roscoe was just dozing, and his breathing was laboured and very loud.
“Yo, Top Guy. I’m gonna come down there and try to get that thing off you,” Axel announced. “If this works, you’ll need to move your leg once it’s off you, `cause I can’t do both.”
“Understood,” Roscoe nodded, absolutely not convinced the kid could manage this feat. Certainly not on his own, without a more experienced person’s guidance.
Axel used his airwalkers to carefully descend into the well, mindful of the rocks and other fallen debris…as well as the injured man who was the focus of the rescue mission. He held up the heavy object he’d been dragging around.
“This is a mechanized jack, and it’s pretty strong, but I guess I don’t know if it’s strong enough or if we can position it properly to make it work. We’re in tight quarters here.”
“Probably our best bet. My telekinesis is not strong enough to lift the rock by itself, but it might be able to assist the jack if needed,” Roscoe said in a quiet voice, and it seemed to Axel that he was becoming weaker.
“Do you trust me?” Axel asked carefully, and Roscoe gripped his side painfully as he coughed up some blood. His breath was now coming in ragged wheezes.
“Not in the slightest. But I have no other choice.”
“Okay, with that vote of confidence…” Axel said as he positioned the jack and hoped it wouldn’t cause the debris to shift in a way which might crush one or both of them. Roscoe couldn’t see what Axel was doing and couldn’t offer any input, so he just had to accept that his safety was in the hands of an undersized teenage boy who wore clothes which were noticeably too large for him. It was a bleak proposition.
“I’m ready to start it up, and you be ready to move if you can,” Axel said. “But, um, I have to warn you ahead of time that this thing makes farting noises while it’s running, just so you aren’t surprised. It’s Trickster tech.”
“This is my life now,” Roscoe muttered softly, shuddering with pain.
Axel crossed his fingers and switched on the mechanized jack, which did indeed make ridiculous fart sounds as it powered up and began to exert force on the rock which trapped Roscoe’s leg. It wasn’t enough to move the boulder at first, but he slowly began to feel a lessening of pressure which suggested it was working.
He shifted his leg a few millimeters within the newly created space, but didn’t want to move too quickly while the jack was still operating.
“Easy does it,” Axel warned, concerned about the same problem. He could see the rock beginning to move, but it stalled after thirty seconds and didn’t seem to make any more progress. He adjusted the jack slightly and it briefly moved the rock further, but it soon stalled again. “You think you could try the telekin-whatever?”
Roscoe concentrated, and the rock shifted a bit, but it was too heavy for him to do much more. However, it moved the rock just enough for Axel to re-adjust the jack, and suddenly the jack moved it even farther.
“Try squirmin’ out!” Axel urged, and Roscoe began to pull his leg free. It hurt, and his striped uniform shredded from the sharper edges of the rock, but eventually he freed himself with a sharp gasp of pain.
Roscoe took a few moments to catch his breath, but then a thought occurred to him. “There is no way for me to reach the surface,” he noted, utterly exhausted, but Axel grinned.
“I thought of that already, so I brought a rope to pull you up.”
He secured the rope to a safety harness and began hauling up the injured man after exiting the well via his airwalkers. It took only a few minutes to drag Roscoe up to ground level, at which point he lay flat on the grass with an incredible sense of relief.
“You saved my life. Thank you, Trickster.” He had guessed Axel’s identity from the obnoxiously loud clothes and his earlier mention of Trickster tech.
“I did good, didn’t I? Genuine Rogue shit!” the kid said with pride, thrilled by a job well done.
“You did.”
Axel then realized how tired and injured the man was, and knelt on the ground next to him. “I’m gonna call an ambulance for you, bruh.”
“No, they’ll only arrest me, and I don’t feel like going back to Iron Heights. I’ll be fine, unless Thawne returns.”
“Pretty sure your legs and right arm are broken, and uh coughing up blood’s never a good sign.”
“The one benefit to being dead is that I heal very well, since I need to repair the injuries to my host bodies to get moving again. I just need time to rest…and I’ve got nowhere else to be right now,” Roscoe said, his voice weak.
He’d closed his eyes, so Axel sat next to him and covered him as best he could with the hoodie. It was tiny on his massive frame even though it looked comically large on Axel, but Roscoe appreciated the effort.
“You gotta tell me about the being dead stuff,” the kid said excitedly, and thought he saw a flicker of a smile in response.
“Not much to tell, Trickster.”
“Hey, call me Axel.”
That smile flickered briefly again. “Roscoe.”
They remained there until morning, just resting, healing, and conversing.