sam "flying jackhammer" alexander ✧ nova (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
headinjuries) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
legionworld2016-07-20 08:20 pm
headinjuries) wrote in legionworld2016-07-20 08:20 pm
Entry tags:
in which there is no attempted torture or flaming ragepuke
Who| Sam, open.
What| Downtime, pretending that mission never happened okok.
Where| One of the common rooms.
When| After the Lantern plot.
Warnings/Notes| Nothing yet, will edit if necessary.
Well, that had felt like the longest mission ever.
Or it might've if Sam hadn't spent such a significant chunk of it without the mental faculties to think about pesky things like "time" or "comparisons to other hard missions" or "anything other than blind frothing rage." That kind of ruined it. But once the ring came off?
Longest mission ever.
He didn't really want to think about it, but Sam had a well-established procedure for not thinking about things, and thankfully he'd been able to translate it to a thousand years in the future without too much trouble. Sure, the candy bars had some kind of alien nut he couldn't pronounce instead of peanuts, and the soda tasted like snozzleberry (whatever that was) instead of Mountain Dew, and the sports were completely different and it had taken him a good three games to figure out how the heck scoring worked, but other than that? Just like home.
He'd commandeered one of the common rooms. There was an impressive array of junk food and an even more impressive array of discarded wrappers and empty cans on the table, and the TV (he didn't care what they called it here, he still thought of it as a TV) was blaring a heated semi-final match of splatterball, which looked something like the illegitimate child of hockey and paintball, but with a low-gravity arena, a lot of weird obstacles, and impenetrably dense scoring rules that were most easily summarized as "you get a lot of points for hitting things."
And if anyone was keeping track, he'd had command of that room for...a good long while already, to be honest. But he didn't look like he was planning on going anywhere - curled up on one end of the couch, knees tucked up to his chest, a half-empty can of soda next to him and half a pizza forgotten on the table.
It wasn't his usual "occupy half the couch" posture, at least. There was plenty of room for one (or more) more.
"What the - that was totally a red card! Is this ref blind?"
What| Downtime, pretending that mission never happened okok.
Where| One of the common rooms.
When| After the Lantern plot.
Warnings/Notes| Nothing yet, will edit if necessary.
Well, that had felt like the longest mission ever.
Or it might've if Sam hadn't spent such a significant chunk of it without the mental faculties to think about pesky things like "time" or "comparisons to other hard missions" or "anything other than blind frothing rage." That kind of ruined it. But once the ring came off?
Longest mission ever.
He didn't really want to think about it, but Sam had a well-established procedure for not thinking about things, and thankfully he'd been able to translate it to a thousand years in the future without too much trouble. Sure, the candy bars had some kind of alien nut he couldn't pronounce instead of peanuts, and the soda tasted like snozzleberry (whatever that was) instead of Mountain Dew, and the sports were completely different and it had taken him a good three games to figure out how the heck scoring worked, but other than that? Just like home.
He'd commandeered one of the common rooms. There was an impressive array of junk food and an even more impressive array of discarded wrappers and empty cans on the table, and the TV (he didn't care what they called it here, he still thought of it as a TV) was blaring a heated semi-final match of splatterball, which looked something like the illegitimate child of hockey and paintball, but with a low-gravity arena, a lot of weird obstacles, and impenetrably dense scoring rules that were most easily summarized as "you get a lot of points for hitting things."
And if anyone was keeping track, he'd had command of that room for...a good long while already, to be honest. But he didn't look like he was planning on going anywhere - curled up on one end of the couch, knees tucked up to his chest, a half-empty can of soda next to him and half a pizza forgotten on the table.
It wasn't his usual "occupy half the couch" posture, at least. There was plenty of room for one (or more) more.
"What the - that was totally a red card! Is this ref blind?"
no subject
"No no no no no. You -- I'm trying to --"
Struggling to find the words, Dipper banged his head against Sam's upper arm and rested it there.
"They do this. Bad people...bad things. Do this. They trick you and make you not yourself." They did things like pulling your soul out of your body and possessing it. They did things like making you paranoid and afraid. "And it makes you feel...small."
Dipper drew his head away from Sam's arm so he could look Sam in the face. His expression was full of desperation, and his fingers were still tangled in Sam's sleeve.
"You're a superhero. For me, it was no powers, but just one summer. One end of the world. Not a whole life fighting bad guys and monsters."
That was what superheroes did, they dedicated their lives to that kind of thing.
"You made a big promise and that's why you're not small. Inside. That's why the bad guys had to do something that drastic to make you feel small." Dipper shook his head. "It took a psycho kid-killer and a mind-altering rage ring to drag you down. It took all that. And in the end, you're still you. They couldn't break you and they couldn't change you for good."
Dipper waved his hand at the walls.
"Like everything changed me. Everything from before all this." The yellows weren't the ones that had made him paranoid. They weren't the first ones to shake his foundations, to make him afraid. That was all Bill. "The reasons the yellows were able to do this to me in the first place was because there were...there were cracks. I wasn't strong enough for there not to be."
no subject
Dipper's stuff looked worse, to him. Sam felt overwhelmed sometimes, but when an alien fleet was trying to blow up your planet, the course of action was still pretty obvious. Get the weapon. Beat them back. Physical threats were straightforward. Pain was just pain. Fighting the Hulk might hurt a lot worse than hitting his head when he fell off his skateboard, but it was still something he knew how to deal with. How to power through.
This stuff...who wouldn't have a hard time?
no subject
"...You really think so?"
It meant a lot to him to hear that kind of thing from a superhero, from someone that chose a life full of bad guys and monsters. It felt less bad that he was a little shaken, a little knocked around.
And it was true, right? For someone with no powers who'd had to fight that much scary, they'd done pretty well, hadn't they? He and Mabel had gotten their Grunkles into a position where Stan could face down Bill. Dipper had survived those days alone in the apocalypse and helped free Mabel from her prison. They'd led the town in an attack against Bill and his henchmaniacs that had done some real damage and given them a chance to fix everything.
no subject
His free hand waved to indicate everything on the walls. "But I mean, stuff messing with your mind, getting kicked out of your body...? That's really not the same. That's not like, grit your teeth, pop a Tylenol, and sleep on your stomach for a month." All of which he'd done more times than he could count. Sam was probably understating just how much some of the trouble he'd gotten into hurt, but pain didn't mess with who you were. If anything, it just brought the heart of Sam to the front: the part that said fuck you, I'm not letting you get me down.
no subject
It made him feel like a hero that was just down and out at the moment, not someone that had just survived getting hurt more than once.
Dipper looked at the floor, his hand still on Sam's arm. He finally, reluctantly, pulled it away, feeling that he'd held on for too long. He drew his legs up and wrapped his arms around his knees.
"You're not going to tell anyone what I said, right?" he asked, his voice hushed. "About my age?"
His expression was pleading.
"I -- I need to help. I don't want to be stuck here, sitting back and doing nothing while the multiverse is ending. And I can help. I already have."
He looked up at the wall again, his voice going thoughtful.
"In more world than one."
no subject
Everything Dipper said was familiar. Sam knew what it was like to have people assume you couldn't handle things, because of your age; even more than that, he knew the feeling of not wanting to do nothing. If everything went badly, and you could've done something about it -
(And for a moment, his thoughts went to the moment he'd left from, the Hulk's fist winding up and time seeming to move in slow motion and thinking ohgodohgodohgodohgod - but he'd take that a hundred times over letting his hometown get flattened, no matter how many times he'd complained about Carefree being a hole in the middle of nowhere.)
"Just, uh." He fidgeted, glancing in the other direction. "I mean I guess you might've already, since you told them that I went red-crazy in the first place, but if you haven't...don't tell anybody I killed someone? ...I think more than one someone."
no subject
He lifted his hand and made a little gesture -- the one he remembered that he did with Wendy -- of zipping his lips.
no subject
The guy who lost it and fried a few (?) people in flaming vomit. That wasn't really a reputation anybody wanted to have.
no subject
Dipper frowned.
"Like now I'm the crazy-drawings-on-the-wall guy."
And that was something he couldn't take back. He just had to deal with it.
"I won't tell anyone. So that doesn't have to happen to you, too."
Sam was his friend now, as far as he was concerned. Maybe they didn't have a ton of things in common, but he'd seen how good a person he was.
no subject
Not that getting brainscrewed was a good thing, but overall, it was a far better thing to be.