Between the Lines [open]

[captainbuzzkill]

Who| Dipper and YOU
What| Visiting time in Medbay
Where| Medbay
When| After "In Brightest Day"
Warnings/Notes| Dipper is seriously out of it from brainwashing and may say creepy things or show signs of mental illness. Also there is creepy scribbling on the walls

Dipper had a special room all his own in the Medbay now. Normally injured people were on the main Medbay floor, but when displacees were waking up for the first time in the 31st century, or when someone was judged as needing their own room due to their condition, they got a private room.

They had decided he was to be under observation for the first day or two after each of his telepathic treatments, which meant he'd have to stay in his Medbay room or be chaperoned by a nurse, medtech, or fellow Legionnaire if he wanted to go around Legion World. After the brief periods of observation for each treatment he'd have more freedom, but telepathic restructuring wasn't something to take lightly, and could have negative effects in the immediate time after sessions.

Since he'd shown some regressive behavior and since he'd have to keep coming back to it, the nurses and medtechs had changed Dipper's room to be a little more kid-friendly. The room could easily be restructured with a few simple commands, so the wall sconces had been changed to look like colorful seashells and the HD mural wall had been changed to a cheerful underwater view filled with colorful and beautiful alien fish darting around, making it look as if the wall was really a glass wall in the side of an aquarium.

But the other walls were blank.

Well, they had been blank originally. They'd given him a tablet and stylus to draw with but after they'd taken it away for the pictures to be examined at times, he'd decided he needed to draw and write on something that was harder for anyone to confiscate. In his current state, only the walls had seemed like something that had enough permanence, so he'd rummaged through the belongings they'd let him have in his Medbay room and found markers.

The doctors and telepaths started debating over whether erasing what was on the walls and/or taking his markers away would help him or just cause more trauma, but Aven and Dr. Ry'kerr had ultimately told them that this was their purview, as a telepathic master and psychiatrist, and that the drawings had to stay. Now that the telepaths had started fixing the damage that was done, he had false memories to sort through and throw away so the real ones could resurface and be sorted out.

So far he had filled two walls with drawings and scribbled notes. They stopped halfway up because that was the highest he could reach without a chair, but below that line it looked like someone's darkest nightmares had exploded out of someone's head and splattered directly on the walls. There were pictures of horrible monsters, both in Sinestro Corps uniforms and without them. A repeating one-eyed triangle pattern showed up everywhere, sometimes in the eyes of the monsters that wore Sinestro uniforms, as if the triangle-thing was looking out from them. There were also partly-nonsensical notes that said things like:

Kidnapping by great-uncle? Summer vacation in small town in Oregon wilderness, see: Stancakes, breaking into golf course, zombie defense/karoake

Child labor? False True Technically true but not that bad

Parents locking us in a closet = time outs in the corner, annoying but harmless

Blood murals Mom gave us normal finger paint, walls were Mabel's idea

Demonic triangle not real real. Very real. See: Bill Cipher, body theft, Weirdmageddon

Gravity Falls weirdness = mostly real. Piedmont = normal. Parents /= mean. Parents = nice

DON'T FORGET: Mystery Twins! Mabel is real, Mabel is real, Mabel is real

While most of it was the horrible brainspew of a child trying to figure out which horrifying memories were real and which horrifying memories weren't, one wall wasn't as scary as the others. On that wall there were the crude drawings of a little girl that looked just like Dipper, except with braces and long hair, and all of them were positive. In one, there were gemstones on her face, colored dots made by his markers. In another, she was hefting up a scribbled red water balloon. In yet one more, she was younger, braces-less and with pigtails, covered in mud.

In all of them, she was laughing or smiling.

In the one where she was youngest, she was clearly just a toddler surrounded by stuffed animals. That one could've easily been mistaken as a random memory from when they were still 2 or 3, but it was much more important than that: it was the first memory. The very first thing he remembered, the exact moment that he was aware of existing -- aware enough to realize that he was really a them, that I was really we.

A name was written over and over and over around the pictures, in thick, awkward handwriting:



It wasn't his handwriting. He was trying to imitate hers, as if copying the way she wrote her name would suddenly make her real, make one of the drawings come to life so that she could hop out of the wall.

If anyone came to see him, they'd find him in patient scrubs, his hands covered in multicolored ink from accidentally touching it in places where it was still wet. He was wearing a friendship bracelet made with bright pink and purple thread on his right wrist -- something left behind by his sister after the brief time she'd showed up in the Legion's universe.

"Talking is fine," he told whoever it was that came in, because people who came in liked to talk to him apparently, even though he was clearly busy. "You can talk, I can talk, it's fine if you talk but don't. Touch. The walls. The doctors kept wanting to touch them, nobody's allowed to touch them, don't touch them."

Comments

[ringslinging]

Hal didn't bat an eyelash at the walls, or at being told not to touch them. He just walked in like he owned the place, grabbed a chair, and dragged it backwards near where Dipper was working on the wall, then straddled it and said nothing for a moment, looking over the writing and the drawings.

As weird as it all looked, it did fit with what Dipper should be trying to get back to - that kid who missed his sister and was determined to put together all the pieces of everything. So that, in itself, meant there was less to worry about now, as far as Hal was concerned.

Or maybe it was just that since he'd been there for what put Dipper in this state in the first place, he was just intensely relieved that the kid was away from it, even if he clearly had a lot to work through.

"Hey. How're you holding up?" He held up a few bags - the same selection of weird alien snack foods he'd brought Dipper during his first stay in medbay, back when he'd first arrived. "Special delivery, by the way."

[captainbuzzkill]

"Ooh, you got me the kind that tastes like feet!"

It didn't taste all that great, but he enjoyed having the little culinary adventure all the same. He popped open the bag and started shoving crispy things into his mouth.

Then he stared up at Hal, working through how he was supposed to feel about him in his head. One the one hand, he was the enemy. On the other hand, he was the enemy that was supposed to be brought into the fold, the one that Sinestro had wanted as a yellow. On the other other hand, he was the one that had stayed with him through it all, trying to escape with him at every opportunity he could. Just because the mind control on Hal had failed, that didn't make it any less horrible that they'd tried it at all.

He'd also helped him remember his sister.

On the other other other hand, Dipper was smart enough to understand that the yellows hadn't had some burning desire to add a barely-a-teenager into their forces, whether he was terrifying them on the battlefield or not. Oh sure, they probably felt he was a solid addition, but he knew what most of that had been about.

He'd been bait. He'd been grabbed and brainwashed as a way of manipulating Hal, making it harder for him to cut and run.

Dipper wasn't sure how he felt about that, about being used. He was angry over it but he was too mixed up to figure out if Hal was one of the people he should be angry at. He ultimately decided to table it for now, to figure things out when he had a clearer head.

"Less crazy. Still crazy. One of the telepaths that was going through my memories threw up." Not Aven. Aven was one of the great Titanian telepath masters, but one of his assistants had lost it a bit. "I think he was going through my memories of Bill trying to give me a head that was always screaming and stripping the skin off of it."

Something he'd flinched at a bit but was one of those bits of weirdness he'd just quietly accepted. (It was funny, the things others found horrifying that he didn't.)

"They seem to be able to handle the fake yellow stuff just fine, but they keep getting really squeamish about the real stuff that was already there."

[ringslinging]

Hal was getting pretty good at not blinking an eyelash when Dipper described another bit of crazy stuff from home, thankfully. Because he knew perfectly well how much the kid hated when people got weird about it.

"Nothing's as bad when you know it's fake. They don't want to think that you went through any of that for real. Kind of like - you might get some people disapproving if you watched a slasher flick, but they'd be a lot more upset if you were actually being chased by a serial killer."

Hal wasn't really one to get scared by fake anything - hell, he wasn't fazed by those kinds of horror movie things happening to him in real life - but he had to give Sinestro credit for knowing exactly how his mind worked. Nothing threatened against Hal himself would bring out the fear in him.

Other people, though?

Not so much.

[captainbuzzkill]

"I guess that makes sense." A pause. "I still hate it anyway."

He jammed more snacks into his mouth and chewed for a little while, thinking before he said anything next.

"It just makes it even more clear that I'm a total weirdo." It felt stupid to not be honest right now so he said what he thought. "But that's what started all this, right?"

He dusted the crumbs off his hands and gestured at the wall in a grandiose fashion. "I was enough of a weirdo that it attracted a yellow ring! And I'm still enough of a weirdo that the people looking at my actual real life get disturbed and barf over it. Or take my drawings full of crazy away because they want to write about me in psychology journals."

He picked up his markers and got back to work.

"Dr Ry'kerr and Aven, the telepathic master guy, told the one doctor-telepath to basically shut up about it, and that he wasn't even allowed to ask me if he could do it -- but none of them knew I was only pretending to sleep when they were talking about it in my room."

That was why he'd started drawing on the walls. Nobody could take those away. Even if it meant everyone could see.

He stopped and suddenly banged his head against the wall, as if he was frustrated that the contents of said noggin wouldn't just splash out of his head in perfect order the way he needed them to.

"But it's still like everyone thinks there was always something wrong with me. Like... like --" He broke off into inarticulate angry noises and scribbled over the picture he was working on, one filled with eyes and darkness. Then he knocked his head against the wall again and left it to rest there. "I didn't want it to be this way. Despite how bad it all was, I didn't want to see myself as some...victim or something. Even with Weirdmageddon, even with all the monsters, even with everything Bill did to me and my family. But they keep treating it as if everything that's wrong now isn't the only thing that's wrong with me. They keep wanting me to talk about before, too."

As he sorted it out and figured out what the before even was they wanted to talk to him about Bill and the end of the world. They asked uncomfortable questions about why he'd accepted the yellow ring, knowing what it fed off of, what he'd been thinking at the time. They asked questions about times in the past that he felt powerless and if he thought that maybe, just possibly, that might have affected some of his decisions with picking up the yellow ring.

[ringslinging]

"Your life's weird. Doesn't make you weird. Other people aren't used to that stuff because they were never in a position where they had to be."

Hal was not exactly a shining beacon of well-adjusted mental states himself, and possibly he shouldn't be encouraging a still impressionable kid to blow off the psych staff, but - "I was shot down in Chechnya a couple years ago. A few of us were - spent a few months as POWs before we got out and got home. But once we did..." He shook his head. "They wanted to run us through a lot of therapy before we could go back on duty. We blew off most of it, because there's a difference between talking to someone who's going to put a nice academic name on whatever your problem is, and talking to someone who's been where you are and knows what you're going through from experience, not from reading case studies."

One was helpful to him. And one, not at all.

[captainbuzzkill]

"I really doubt there are many psychiatrists or telepaths that personally know what it's like to face unholy abominations from outside of time and space," Dipper said thoughtfully. "Dr Ry'kerr is at least good about not trying to pretend she understands, though."

In some ways it helped, in some ways it didn't.

"But if it's the kind of thing where it's better to talk to someone who's been there--" Dipper shrugged and shook his head. "Nobody has. Nobody here."

Nobody had been in circumstances that were that similar.

"I know some of you have faced the end of the world -- sometimes more than once. And all kinds of scary things. And had all kinds of bad experiences. But most of you at least had powers. Or did it as grown ups. Or both."

He looked over at the Mabel wall. "Back home I had my sister. She was there with me through most of it. She even saved me from some of it. And she didn't pretend she knew what it was like during the times I was all alone."

When he was scared and miserable and hungry and exhausted and had to dodge eyebats and monsters trying to eat him.

"I guess you're right, that it's not me that's weird. That it's just that my life is. And maybe the doctors are right that it affected me more than I thought. But I don't know what to do from here, not when they don't know what it's like, and when nobody else will really get it. Hiccup was right that he's faced things while small and powerless before, but not the end of the world."

He surprised himself by being honest.

"I mean, if it was only a few days, but I had to pick through garbage to find food."

He quickly shut his mouth.

"What the yellows did was terrible but the worst part of it is making me have to sort through all the bad things that already happened to figure out which are real and which ones they made up."

[ringslinging]

"That's true," Hal admitted. He'd blown off therapy, but he'd had his fellow pilots to talk to - and even if doing that usually stirred up all kinds of guilt about how he could've gotten them out of it, if he'd been wearing the damned ring, Cowgirl never let him take that train of thought very far before she shot it down. "But nobody's ever going to get everything. You wind up going to people with the parts they'll get, and taking the other ones somewhere else. I have friends who get the POW stuff, but not the superhero stuff. Friends who get the superhero stuff, but not the dying and coming back to life part. Friends who've also walked back through death's door, but who haven't been homeless and unemployed. You break it down far enough, you'll get people who understand pieces of it. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing."

[captainbuzzkill]

Dipper looked at the floor, unable to bring his face up to look at Hal.

If all he could do was break it down into parts, there was one part he could deal with right now.

"You said you were a host to that thing -- that thing that was living fear. That you used that power before."

Hal's connection to the yellows was pretty obvious.

"It felt good. To use the ring. To make the bad guys afraid. It felt good to have power over other people, especially when they were the kind of people that wanted to hurt everyone."

He shook his head.

"But I know that even though they were bad, feeling that way is messed up." He closed his eyes tight, clearly trying to keep his teary eyes from actually tearing. "Still, it felt good. Even before they messed with my brain."

His voice went very quiet and small. "Does that mean I'm a bad person?"

That was the worst part of it all. How good it felt to use the ring, to scare and hurt other people. That wasn't supposed to feel good.

[ringslinging]

This was too much.

Hal got up, moving in next to Dipper and putting an arm around his shoulders. "No. Hell, no. You're not a bad person for that. That's as normal as it comes, kid. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something."

Dipper was a skeptical kid, though. Just saying that wasn't going to be good enough. So he went on.

"People aren't perfect. None of us. We've all got our moments where we do something mean or petty and it feels good, and we know that's a bad thing - but that's why just thinking it doesn't make you bad. It's how you act on it. Whether you embrace it and keep on doing it, or whether you try to be better because of it - that's what's important." He exhaled slowly. "I had that thing in me for a long time, Dipper. A few years. I did some pretty nasty stuff, torpedoed a lot of my relationships in the Corps and with other superheroes. Nobody's ever going to forget about that, me least of all - but a lot of them have seen me trying to make up for it, and they've stopped holding it against me."

Or at least, they weren't vocal about it. Hal wasn't going to entertain too many illusions about people's opinions of him. But that wasn't the part Dipper needed to hear.

"One slip doesn't make that who you are. Everybody slips, everybody. Some of us do it a lot worse than others, but it's how you handle yourself the rest of the time that makes the difference."

[captainbuzzkill]

Dipper wiped at his eyes.

"I guess the fact I'm not usually homicidal, and not interested anymore in trying to overthrow all world governments to instate a terror regime that will intimidate society into a state of order, means I shouldn't be that scared I'll keep doing bad stuff all the time."

He didn't usually want to do bad stuff.

"I'm starting to remember all the good stuff I did. And starting to remember how much I like doing good stuff."

It felt good to help people.

[ringslinging]

"That's because you're a good kid, and I think that you're always gonna be able to find your way back to that, no matter what anyone does to you. Because you're tough, too."

He reached over to give him what would've been a hair ruffle, if not for the baseball cap, so it came out a little more like a noogie.

"And if anyone can't see that from talking to you for fifteen minutes, they must be blind."

[captainbuzzkill]

Dipper gave him a watery smile, but it was genuine. Who he used to be -- the real him --was peeking through all the darkness and confusion.

"You know, you're not so great with the plans, man, but you're good at all the other mentor-ey stuff."

[ringslinging]

"Well, you've got the plans covered pretty well yourself, so I'm not going to beat myself up about being a little lacking in that department."

God, this kid was going to grow up into one hell of a hero, Hal was sure. He was already pretty great as it was, and a hundred times more together than Hal had been when he was ten years older than Dipper was now.