Dipper Pines (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
captainbuzzkill) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
legionworld2016-07-25 11:38 pm
captainbuzzkill) wrote in legionworld2016-07-25 11:38 pm
Entry tags:
Between the Lines [open]
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 trianglenot 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."
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:
Child labor?
Parents locking us in a closet = time outs in the corner, annoying but harmless
Demonic triangle
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."
no subject
"She's my twin sister. Mabel." He had an inscrutable expression on his face, one filled with several emotions all jumbled together. He looked like he felt lost and found all at once. "They messed everything else up. My family, when I was little, my time with the team here in the Legion's universe. But they couldn't mess up my memory of her."
They could put an alternate history in, but it had to layer over the real one. Trying to put fake bad memories over her didn't work when the real Mabel shined right through them, and trying rip her out of his life altogether had been impossible. She was too ingrained in, too much a part of it.
"They even tried to erase her but there were all these holes and they were too big. And too Mabel-shaped."
He smiled, even though it was a pained one. It was the kind of smile that came of hurting and having some soothing balm applied to the wound in a way that made the pain of that wound more noticeable even as it stopped.
Dipper looked down at his wrist, where he was wearing the pink and purple friendship bracelet Mabel had left behind after her brief time in the Legion's universe -- the same bracelet that had been used to distract him long enough for Hal and Hiccup to bring him in. His fingers brushed against it.
"If you're not a twin, you can't really understand what it's like being one. You have this person who's like your best friend in the whole world, and you're lucky enough that you have them from the day you were born."
He'd been especially lucky he'd had her from that moment onward, given what happened the day they were born.
"I even remembered one thing right and it's this story our parents used to tell us a lot about the day we were born. Mabel was born first and she was fine, but they said I was all blue. The umbilical cord got wrapped around my neck or something."
He briefly mimed being choked around the neck by something.
"Everyone was really scared for me and they were getting ready to send me to the baby icu but the nurse put me in the same bassinet as Mabel for just a minute. And she wiggled her arm out of the blankets and put it around me."
His eyes watered slightly and he wiped at them with a balled up little fist.
"And then I was okay. They said I started breathing okay and my skin stopped being blue and I was fine. That's what it's always been like. As long as we're together, it's like we can do anything, and somehow everything will always be okay. It was even that way with the both of us facing the end of the world."
no subject
He does glance over his shoulder at the far wall as Dipper finishes, at a drawing of what looks like the sky itself torn open and monsters pouring out of the rip. Yeah, that looks pretty apocalyptic, all right. Evidently this isn't the first hell Dipper's been through, though it sounds like he didn't go through that one alone.
He looks down at Dipper and puts a hand on Dipper's shoulder - lightly, ready to pull it away if Dipper doesn't want to be touched. "She sounds pretty great." He doesn't have adequate words, but he doesn't think he needs them for that - from the look of it, Dipper already knows. Instead, he lets the silence settle for a few moments before starting again. "When I said I had coping tricks you might want to try - the biggest one is to find an anchor, something that you know is absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt true, because that's what you cling to when things get rough. When everything gets too loud, when you don't know what's real and what isn't - that's when you need your anchor. That's when you remind yourself what's true and you let things unfold from there." He looks back up at the wall covered in pictures of Mabel. "It sounds like you already have your anchor."
no subject
He nodded at Wash's advice.
"I know she loves me. And a lot of the things they tried to erase about her came back. Those memories are the easiest to remember right."
He rubbed his temple with his finger.
"And that helps the rest unravel a little bit, too. Remembering the happy stuff with her makes it easier to remember the happy stuff with my parents and my grunkles."
no subject
"And that's what's supposed to happen when you have a good anchor." In his experience, anyway. "The pieces will eventually click into place - for now, working on it and taking notes and remembering Mabel when things get rough is the best thing you can do."
no subject
And then he frowned.
"You said that something like this...it happened to you, too?"
He didn't like that. He didn't like the idea that someone else had been all confused like this. Which was empathy, so it was probably a good thing he was starting to feel that way again.
"I'm sorry. I wouldn't -- I wouldn't wish this on anybody." A pause. "Well, except for the people that did this to me, which is probably pretty vindictive, but I don't really care."
A pause.
"But not anybody else."
no subject
"Yeah. It did." Wash looks away from Dipper, back up at the Mabel wall. He hasn't really talked about the details of his breakdown and haphazard recovery with anyone; a few people had carefully curated bits and pieces, but nobody has the full story. Keeping it that way - evading and stonewalling whenever the topic comes up, even tangentially - is habit by now, a survival instinct honed by months of being broken and watched by people he knew would kill him if they had any idea of the full extent of what he knew. Talking about it goes against everything he'd taught himself and been forced to do during those months.
But Dipper needs help, and that's why he's here. He still won't tell Dipper the full story - the kid has enough horror in his life and Wash sees no reason to throw yet another flavor of hell onto the pile - but he can still talk about it.
"Circumstances were pretty different for me, though. What happened to me was an accident; what happened to you was on purpose, and I can't blame you for wanting revenge." He thinks about what he's just said for a moment. Um. "Though trying to get it is probably one of the worst decisions you can make. Take it from someone who made that mistake."
no subject
They were gone and that meant he was safe. They couldn't mess with his brain or hurt him anymore. He didn't want revenge if it meant facing them again.
"So mostly I just want to be angry. Even though it won't really go anywhere or do anything. Does that make any sense?"
It felt better than trying to stuff it down. He hoped that after he felt it for a while it'd just eventually go away.
"Dr. Ry'kerr said that's called 'working through the process' or something."
no subject
It's good to hear that revenge isn't a priority for Dipper, at least. "It does," Wash replies slowly. "Just don't let the anger become more important than everything else. It's fine to be angry; it's not good to only be angry."
wanna move this towards close?
Then he looked at the Mabel wall, at the good he needed to focus on. He turned and looked some of the darker things on the messed up wall, at all the monsters.
He waved towards a section of it.
"I already have this stuff figured out. This whole section right here," he gestured to it carefully, picked up a black marker, and held out another black marker to Wash. "Wanna help me go to town on it and draw mustaches on all the monsters?"
There was nothing Dipper could do to help Wash with his own mental...thingy. It had apparently happened a long time ago. But it still had bothered Wash enough to make him seek out a total stranger to try to help.
So Dipper figured it'd maybe be cathartic or something if he could help someone else just utterly destroy all the darkness.
Sounds like a plan!
He's on his second mustache, and trying to figure out how and where to give a mustache to a set of teeth with legs, when he glances at Dipper. "Hey. What I told you about my breakdown...I don't usually like talking about it to people. Can you keep it a secret?"
no subject
Dipper could tell Wash wouldn't go around talking to people about how messed up he was. It was only fair that he do the same in return.
He briefly looked at the wall and the picture of Romat-ru, the yellow Lantern that had attacked him and Sam.
"I keep a lot of secrets," he said simply. "I'm good at it."
Then he scribbled away, covering up the monsters bit by bit.
no subject
"Thanks."