in which there is no attempted torture or flaming ragepuke

[headinjuries]

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?"

Comments

[sofresh]

"Maybe he was lookin' out of the wrong pair of eyes?"

He had no idea if that was how it worked when you had multiple sets of eyes, but hey, that totally seemed like it could be a problem. Actually, he had no idea how this game worked at all, but like Sam, Kon was very much in the mood to do anything that wasn't even remotely responsible, hence his presence now, once again uninvited and crashing someone else's party without a care in the world.

Kon kept his eyes on the screen for a few seconds, trying to glean what he could about the sport, but...

"I don't get it. Is this like, supposed to make sense?"

[notwithoutafight]

"He probably is," Videl answered, coming up behind the couch to lean over the back. The telltale sounds of sports had drawn her into this common room, diverting her from her original destination: the cafeteria. "Isn't this the one where everyone relies on like sonar or something?"

The weird future sports were entertaining and all, but difficult to distinguish from one another sometimes. Even the Earth-based TV stations didn't broadcast anything she recognized. The closest thing to baseball that Videl had ever seen on weird space future TV involved four-wheelers.

She folder her arms over the back of the sofa, surveying the table in front of the TV. It was a graveyard of junk food and canned drinks (or, rather, the empty husks left behind by junk food), all in languages she couldn't read, but the sight of them made her stomach grumble all the same. Her roaming gaze fell over the pizza, and even it's questionable age and tepid temperature weren't enough to dissuade her appetite. "You going to eat that?" Videl asked, motioning at the neglected pie.

[headinjuries]

"Maybe if he had a few pairs closed. If you have that many, your brain kind of fits everything together, it's not like you really use a certain one for something..."

As poor as Sam's school record was looking, he was a lot more comfortable on the kinds of science he encountered on his adventures in space, and multiple eyes were a pretty common trait across the galaxy. Distances between stars, the amount of shielding a ship would need for atmospheric re-entry (and how much damage that shielding could take), relatively common traits of alien physiology? Sure.

Too bad none of that was ever on his exams.

"It took me like three games to figure it out. There are over thirty different ways to score in splatterball, and seven of them can't even be distinguished from each other unless you can see into the ultraviolet range."

[headinjuries]

"Nah, this is the one that humans really suck at, because our visual perception only gets like a third of the range of light you need. I know which one you're talking about, though, I watched a couple of those but I couldn't really get my mouth around the name." He frowned. "Piezol....it's consonant soup after that, I'm not sure how you say the rest."

Consonant soup didn't even have the courtesy to be tasty. How rude was that.

"I ordered too much, go for it." To be fair, he hadn't realized that the sentient taking the order was several times human height, and had very different ideas about what constituted small, medium, and large.

[got_gud]

"I'm not entirely sure what the goal of this contest is."

Much like Sam, Alexander was quite content trying to forget the events of the last mission. Turning into a grimdark edgelord zombie thing wasn't a pleasant experience.

So he found himself standing behind the couch, fascinated and confused by the sports spectacle on the view screen.

His world still hadn't caught onto the whole idea behind sports beyond jousting and individual feats of strength, but it seemed interesting (and distracting) enough that Alexander sat down on the other end of the couch. Out of curiosity more than anything, he reached into the monumental pile of junk food, pulling out a garishly orange bag to read the label.

NEW BLAFCO CHEEZ DOODZ! MADE WITH 100% REAL CHEEZ!*

We here at Blafco foods take pride in our products, and so we're proud to announce our new 100% CHEEZ DOODZ! Produced right here at our Blafian Dood farms, we only pick the freshest Doods to go into our product.** We hope you like them just as much as we do.

BLAFCO CHEEZ DOODZ! EAT 'EM!

* - 'Cheez' is not a recognized category of food, and Blafco Cheez Doodz contains 0% real cheese
** - Does not contain freshly picked Doods. Contains 27% Dood byproduct, 10% freesha vocadoo, and 63% artificial flavorings

Alexander shrugged, popped open the bag, and tried what looked like a horrifically neon-orange cheese puff.

"These are terrible," he said, before turning back to the TV, eating more Cheez Doodz.

[headinjuries]

"They looked like Cheetos, so I figured, how bad can they be?" Sam hadn't actually tried them yet, however. "On the other hand, the things that looked like Corn Nuts were really weird, so then I started rethinking that theory."

Future chocolate, at least, he'd eaten enough of to be sure it was pretty safe.

He hadn't talked to Alexander at length before, but he'd seen enough that the Ye Olde Knight vibes were pretty obvious. Did they even have sports back then? He was pretty sure they didn't do much besides knocking each other off horses or whatever, so maybe he should do the really basic version.

"So, they've got a certain amount of time to try and score more points than the other team. There are like thirty different ways to score, though, splatterball's kind of complicated."

[got_gud]

"I see, a contest of arms and wit, then," Alexander replied sagely.

Or, it would seem more sagely, if he didn't have Cheez dust in his beard.

Still, Alexander watched intently, picking up on the overall gist of things relatively quickly.

"Number 48 seems very unsporting. He's purposefully harassing the enemy defense without giving them room to maneuver. Unless that's allowed. I'm still not entirely sure."

[headinjuries]

"As far as I can tell, it's allowed but if he hits him, it has to be with his stick and it has to be above the belt," Sam said, fishing a candy bar off the table and unwrapping it. "But I'm not sure how that gets adjusted for like...number 27 there?"

Number 27 was a gelatinous blob with three eyestalks poking out from one end. Nothing else about its shape seemed to stay consistent for more than a few seconds at a time.

[sofresh]

"Whoa. These future types must think football is a total snooze fest."

It was so much simpler in comparison... He walked over, helping himself to a slice of not-so-warm pizza (yeah, he was going to be that kind of friend) as he continued:

"Not that I've ever played it. Or watched it. But, I mean, at least it makes sense."

[notwithoutafight]

"With the way people talk, you'd think all sports were 'the ones humans suck at,'" Videl scoffed as she rounded the couch and fell back onto it. She sunk right into the large, soft cushions, so deep that it felt like the sofa could swallow her whole.

"Speaking of consonant soup, you should see some of the sports on Bgztl," she remarked, her pronunciation surprisingly on point. "There's one really popular one there that's kind of like an obstacle course, except the only way to actually complete it is by phasing through stuff. The Bgztlians swear it can be done without phasing, but I think they just say that because they like non-phasers fail." Videl waved her left hand in a dismissive motion, annoyance clear on her face.

[got_gud]

The look on Alexander's face betrayed the fact that he'd fought something blobby and gelatinous like number 27 in the past, and that it was an extremely unpleasant encounter. Goop got everywhere.

"I...see. That is definitely a conundrum."

By now, he's moved on to a much safer looking bag of PROTATO CHIPS! Now packed with MORE PROTEIN!

"Ah, it appears number 33 intends on making some kind of special play. Look at their footwork, much different than how they have normally been playing."

Sam, you've somehow managed to hook a 300-something year old undead knight on future sports. Congratulations.

[headinjuries]

"I was looking for football, at first. But after some digging around the net, I don't think it's actually had a professional league in centuries. All my searches just got stuff from museums on Earth."

Every now and then, the future found another way to remind him that oh, by the way, you really don't belong here at all. Which wasn't to say he couldn't get used to following splatterball or something else, but it really wasn't the same as cheering for the Cardinals.

[headinjuries]

"Sounds kind of like American Ninja Warrior," Sam mused, reaching to snag a half-finished bag of chips from the table. "And I'm pretty sure half the people who watch that are just waiting to see someone miss a jump and fall into the pool, so yeah, the Bg...uh. Those guys probably think it's funny, too."

He was going to need to go another few rounds with Bgztl before he got the hang of that one.

[headinjuries]

All in a day's work.

"I'm still impressed at how he never trips even with six of them! I mean, I know that if you're born with six feet, you're actually used to it, but it looks so complicated to get around like that." Sam leaned forward, watching 33 with increased interest.

[captainbuzzkill]

One of the medtechs was with Dipper when he came to where Sam was. He was still wearing his patient scrubs and had multicolored marker all over his hands. He was still wearing the baseball cap that was usually part of his uniform, though, the one he usually wore even in his civvies.

The medtech smiled at Sam, and said, "He'll need to stay with you, another Legionnaire, or Medbay staff while he's out of Medbay, so if you need a tech or nurse to pick him up, or he starts to get disoriented, contact the Medbay. The telepathic treatments are helping reorient him and helping him remember his real memories, but sometimes patients get a little confused during the period right after the treatments."

"Sam won't let anything bad happen," Dipper said irritably, though he sounded like he was at least trying to be patient with being coddled so much. It was their job and he was with it enough to at least know how not with it he was. "He saved me, even though he was out of it, and he would've done it anyway if he hadn't been out of it. So I'll be fine."

"Of course. Have fun, okay?"

As the technician left, Dipper plopped down next to Sam on the couch, kneeling there and looking at him intently, as if trying to figure out how to place him in his memories. He was a friend, right? Friendly, at least. He wasn't bad. He could see the real memories under the layers that covered up the truth, that acted as filters to view his life through that made it look a whole lot darker than it had been.

He could see both now. The real Sam wasn't a bully that had made fun of him. The real Sam was nice enough, even if he got cranky on the comms sometimes. The real Sam was just another kid close to his age (thought perhaps not as close as Sam'd originally thought).

The real Sam was someone who hadn't deserved to be brainwashed just like Dipper hadn't.

"The last time I was possessed, a demonic triangle stole my body? So it was different than this time, because I was an invisible free-floating apparition. I had to communicate with my sister using sock puppets."

He flapped his hand, mimicking the puppetry.

"You're okay, right?" he said poking Sam's arm, as if verifying he was real. "I mean...sort of. Like in the 'will be okay' way not the 'I'm totally already fine' way because it never works that way, being 'I'm totally already fine.'"

[headinjuries]

It was a little weird, being scrutinzed like that, but Sam didn't comment on it and tried not to fidget or anything. He was used to being judged, after all, and if there was one thing Sam hated, it was taking shit from people who had no idea what he was really dealing with.

So he accepted the staring, and accepted the poking, and just...went with it.

"I'm okay," he replied, almost automatically. Because that was how it worked, right? He was always okay, because he couldn't afford not to be. Because his mom and his sister needed him to be, because he didn't want to look like an idiot in front of a bunch of other superheroes who already didn't take him seriously enough, because showing weakness at school was like being a wounded gazelle walking through a pack of lions.

But if anyone would get it, wouldn't it be Dipper?

"...sort of," he added, a little sheepishly. Because yeah, if he was honest about it, he still felt incredibly crappy about everything. He'd hurt Rich. He'd killed people (and at least the first one had definitely deserved it, but everything else had been a blur and he really didn't know).

And all this after Rich had just explained to him why you didn't do this stuff out of anger, because that wasn't ever the right way to go.

[captainbuzzkill]

Dipper kept staring, but it wasn't because anything was wrong with Sam. He was just trying to remember what he was supposed to do at a time like this. It took a moment for the impulse to reroute away from "punch him in the face while he's weak and exposed" to the proper pathways in his brain.

Empathy. He still had that. Not that he'd ever been the best at it, but it was still in there.

Dipper held out his hand, not to poke Sam again, but because he wanted to offer comfort somehow and he didn't know what the appropriate way to do it was right now. Teenage Boy Rules dictated that this was probably not a hug moment, as it wasn't properly emotional enough to excuse it, but it wasn't a do-nothing moment, either. He settled for gently placing his hand on Sam's arm.

The problem was that his sense of what was appropriate was entirely skewed. Dipper knew that the needy feelings that he felt right now weren't right. He wanted to crack open the ribcages of the people that were friendly to him and crawl up inside, next to their still-beating hearts, where it was safe. He wanted to hide where he'd be closed off in the dark, away from the yellow light, so it could never be poured into his brain again. Every time he opened his mouth to say something, he felt like his entire self was about to pour out on the floor -- his mind, his soul, his guts, everything.

He still tried, because Sam was only 'sort of' okay, and he understood 'sort of.' He'd come into the Legion's universe in a state of 'sort of' already, not that he'd been honest about that with anyone. But he'd at least been honest with himself. He'd never lied to himself about being afraid of Bill, about being terrified by the apocalypse. He'd still had nightmares sometimes, where Legion World burned and his laughter echoed through the melting corridors. Maybe he hadn't told anyone else about it, maybe he'd kept it all to himself, because he hadn't known how to talk to anyone about it, but he'd never pretended to himself that he was perfectly fine, either.

It was just that he hadn't been able to figure out the right things to say ('help me' wasn't right when he'd actually been mostly okay) and no one else had known to ask.

"The sky burned and it was bleeding neon." He went on, "And I was alone. And I thought my family might be dead." He looked for the words. "That was before. Before I got here. That was real. The yellows put things in my head, but I can see what's not-real now, and that was real. That won't go away, even after the telepaths fix everything. Because of him."

The 'him' was said with a ferocious hatred, with the kind of inflection that made it clear he was talking about something otherworldly and wrong, just like Chronoblivion.

"The yellows weren't the first one. He was yellow." He nodded somewhat frantically, clinging desperately to Sam's sleeve. "My sister and I cried when Grunkle Stan's memory was gone and then he got it back, but we still had to sleep that night and we cried again when Grunkle Stan and Great-Uncle Ford weren't there to see -- just the once -- and that was okay."

Dipper finally found the words. He tapped his chest with his free hand. He was wearing a friendship bracelet on it, bright pink and purple, one that'd been left behind during Mabel's brief stay in the Legion's universe.

"My point is...it's okay to not be okay."

Even despite being so lost himself, he was trying to help Sam. The younger boy still gently clung to Sam's sleeve, staring at him with wide eyes, hoping that some of what he said made enough sense to actually help, even despite how confused and addled he was.

Because the one thing he did know was that the first step to getting past 'sort of' was admitting it was 'not really.' He and Mabel'd had no problem with that part, whispering secret fears and reassurances to each other in those quiet nights while the Shack was still in shambles, until they both had said and heard all the things they needed to say and hear from each other.

Then their birthday had come, and the darkness had past, and the world started to get at least a little lighter again, as they were reminded of the future they'd helped save.

[headinjuries]

Sam didn't know the context. It didn't really matter, though, that it wasn't even half a story and he didn't have the rest of the picture around it to fill in the blanks, because the point of what Dipper was saying - that came through loud and clear, even before he'd spelled it out.

It was okay to not be okay.

That was a thought Sam had...just about never. Because there were always people relying on him, because without his father there he had to be the rock for his family, because even before his father had disappeared Sam had been the rock for him, however grudgingly. If he wasn't okay, they weren't going to be okay.

But they weren't here, and they never had to know.

"Technically, I guess that wasn't the first time I killed somebody." Lacking in context, again, but he had a feeling Dipper wasn't going to mind. Because it wasn't the details of the story that was important. It didn't really matter who Titus was or where the Chitauri came from or how he'd gotten the Ultimate Nullifier away from them.

"But that time it was...different, you know? I didn't want to. I got their weapon, I tried to give them a chance to just back down, but they didn't take it. Titus just jumped me and tried to take it back, and it went off while we were fighting, and it wasn't supposed to happen, but it's not like I could save him from himself." Sam didn't beat himself up over how his first fight had gone. He'd given them a chance, he'd done what he could, but in the end, he'd rather the Chitauri got erased than let them any closer to Earth. You reaped what you sowed.

"This wasn't like that. I wanted it. I really, really wanted to kill him. And I know that wasn't because I got the ring, I got the ring because I wanted to kill him." He'd wanted it before everything went red and his memories started to blur.

[captainbuzzkill]

Dipper still clung to Sam's sleeve like it was a lifeline, his eyes wide.

"I can't -- I can't say it." He reached his other hand up to his neck as if there were words he was trying to pull out of his own throat and couldn't. "There's too much."

He climbed back off the couch, his slippered feet sliding a little on the floor, and kept tugging on Sam's sleeve.

"I can show you."

Back in his room, he could show him. He could show him the reasons he hated. And explain what it meant -- and what it didn't have to mean.

[headinjuries]

Sam blinked, but after another tug on his sleeve, he nodded and got to his feet. "Okay."

Because really, what was he missing in here if they took this somewhere else? Someone's scintillating commentary on a team playing a sport he barely understood on a planet he couldn't pronounce? Half a cold and depressingly vegan pizza?

Whatever.

There were more important things.

[captainbuzzkill]

Dipper led Sam by his sleeve, still clinging all the way to the Medbay. One of the med-techs approached him but he held out his free hand.

"I'm fine," Dipper said a little more sharply than he needed to. Every time someone handled him with kid gloves, it was just a reminder of how wrong everything was -- how wrong his head was. Dipper knew that his greatest strength was his brain and he hated that it was betraying him right now.

The med-tech backed away, holding up a hand placatingly. "Just let us know if you need anything."

Dipper led Sam into his Medbay room, which looked like something out of a horror movie. Most of the walls were covered up in scribbled notes and marker drawings. One wall wasn't as bad as the others, with drawings of a happy little girl that looked just like Dipper. The name "Mabel" was scrawled all around those pictures. The other walls were horrible. There were monsters all over them, and the words scrawled along with those monsters were just as alarming. Some of the writing was in code. Some wasn't.

Important: Don't shake anyone's hand!

Check for yellow eyes.

"Real," he said pointing to a picture of the shapeshifter. Then to the giant killer island head that tried to eat him and his sister, then to some of the henchmaniacs. "Real. Real. Real Real Real."

Dipper picked up a black marker and found a patch of wall he hadn't drawn on yet. Then, his hand shaking, he drew the one thing he hadn't drawn yet, because he couldn't stand the idea of it staring out at him from a wall.

What if he could still see? Just because Grunkle Stan had flattened him through the floorboards of reality, erased him, that didn't mean they knew for sure that he was gone forever.

When he was done drawing, the drawing looked a little like this:



He took a red marker and drew flames all around the triangle-creature, then turned to look back at Sam with wide eyes.

"Real," he whispered. "And he made the sky open up and he kicked me out of my body and he locked my sister in a bubble and he tried to steal things from Grunkle Stan's mind and he tried to end the world."

He started frantically drawing something else, something jagged and wrong, the shape of a throne, but it had tiny arms and legs sticking out of it, like it was made of dolls.

"And that's what he did to everyone in town."

[sofresh]

"I'm tellin' you, dude, the future is a mess. Sure, I guess the technology's kinda cool, but the food sucks and there's nothing good on TV."

What was the point if they didn't have this one very specific Earth sport that was probably doomed to change or eventually die out, anyway? God. Despite what he said, he didn't actually mind the future all that much—he'd technically been here longer than he'd been in the 20th century. But even then, it just wasn't as familiar as "home."

[headinjuries]

"And if we're just finding out what we're fighting after a few months, think of how long we might be stuck here."

What if it took a year? Two years?

Two years without a real hamburger.

And people thought the Yellow Lanterns were scary?

[headinjuries]

It was a lot of weird stuff, but Sam was used to weird. Some of the aliens he'd seen were comparable. So he didn't comment on the drawings that were already there, and just waited for Dipper to finish the last one.

He'd seen a lot of weird stuff, but unlike the rest, the triangle didn't look much like any of the aliens he'd already seen. And the description of what it had done -

"You know, my alien invasion fleets suddenly aren't sounding so bad." The Chitauri were nasty, but things were more straightforward when you had an armada hanging out past Jupiter and you just needed to get them to turn around. Even the trickier things he'd run into, like Adomox poisoning him and Rocket to blackmail his helmet out of him, were still a better deal than mind tricks or out-of-body experiences, as far as he was concerned.

A threat you could punch in the face was great. Mental stuff? Not so much.

[captainbuzzkill]

"I hated him." Dipper started scrawling black marker over the drawing, viciously, then smeared it over the drawing with his hands, until the picture of Bill was just a giant black smudge. Dipper's hands were left covered in black ink. "For what he did. To me, to my family, to everyone."

Dipper looked up at Sam.

"That's the difference. I hated him for what he did, but the yellows made me hate everyone." They rewrote his life to make him become the kind of person that wanted to inflict pain on the world around him. "You hated that Yellow Lantern for what he was doing to the both of us. The red ring made you hate everyone -- and it took away your choice. On how to hate. What to do with it."

He pointed to the throne.

"I hated him but saving the town mattered more. So that's what we focused on." He looked up at Sam. "Hating people who do something bad to people is okay. Hating everyone isn't -- and you should've had a choice on how to deal with it. I should've had a choice. They didn't have the right to take that choice away."

Dipper sat down on the floor, looking at his ink-stained hands.

"We didn't make those choices. Because we weren't us when we made them."

They'd changed who they were. Temporarily. Maybe Sam had been angry, furious, hateful even, but he hadn't killed anyone until the ring had been on his hand. They'd taken away his choice on what to do with the anger.