Visiting Hours

[captainbuzzkill]

Who| closed to Hal and Dipper
What| Hal visits Dipper in Medbay
Where| Medbay
When| After Dipper's network post, before Earth field trip.
Warnings/Notes| N/A

When Hal got to Dipper's room, the boy was bowed over a 3-ring notebook in thought, tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth as he scribbled things in it. He looked mostly in good health. A bald patch near the back of his head was visibly shaved, but the high-tech medical treatments here meant there were no stitches where there otherwise might have been for the same injury in the 21st century.

The newbies were all given private rooms in the Medbay, instead of being out on the main medbay floor like Legionnaires normally were, largely to make it less chaotic as they adjusted -- and to make it easier to restrain them or calm them down if they needed it. That meant that Dipper had felt pretty isolated. The nurses and techs that came in to check on him were nice and all, but they couldn't stay there for long.

So when Hal showed up at the door, his face lit up, and he eagerly sat up and squirmed out from under the sheets to sit criss cross applesauce on top of his blanket.

He was already a small boy but he looked even smaller because of the patient scrubs he was wearing. He was at that awkward size where he was just a little too big for children's sizes but drowning in an adult (human) small.

Dipper held out his noodly arms and made grabby hands.

"Snaaacks," he said in a zombie voice. It was a very good zombie voice, but that was what happened when you fought actual real zombies. "Snaaaaacks."

Comments

[ringslinging]

God, he really was tiny. Images on an omnicom didn't help much with this kind of thing; it had been clear enough that Dipper was young, but his size really wasn't helping the impulse to pat him on the head and sweep him far, far away from intergalactic disturbances.

Hal kept that thought to himself, because he knew exactly what he would've said to it when he was that age. The worst way to keep a teenager out of trouble was to imply that they couldn't handle it.

So rather than comment on that situation, he just grinned, tossed a few bags into Dipper's lap, and grabbed a chair sitting off to the side of the room, turning it backwards and taking a seat straddling it.

"The Korugarian stuff in the purple bag there is spicy. Like, tongue-scorching. So watch that one. Haven't tried the rest before, I just grabbed things I didn't recognize."

[captainbuzzkill]

"Thank you, my good man," said Dipper, catching the snacks and marveling at all the pictures on the packaging. Some of it was very bright and colorful.

Naturally, he picked the package with the brightest and most colorful labeling to try first and opened it up, stuffing crispy, brightly colored roll-things into his mouth and chewing.

"Bleeegh!" he said, mouth hanging open slightly, so that the half-chewed snacks were visible and then he swallowed and laughed. "These taste kind of like feet. Mixed with--" He stopped talking and smacked his lips, trying to figure it out. "--grilled corn?"

He smacked his lips again. "And mint. Wow, this is terrible."

Surely, since it tasted that horrible he was going to throw it out -- nope, he just stuffed more into his mouth and kept chewing. Nom nom.

"Okay," he said around a full mouth. "so what's your name? You never gave it to me. And also, you're a superhero, right? I mean, back home. You have to be a superhero. You said you get lots of head injuries, and you said you traveled to other worlds, and you know a sentient planet. And you're huge. Or, ooh ooh, are you some kind of space soldier-of-fortune, bounty hunter type? It could be that, too."

[ringslinging]

"To be fair, I was getting hit in the head a lot before the superhero thing. I used to box."

He definitely wasn't the "duck and weave" kind of boxer.

"Hal Jordan, anyway. Or Green Lantern, to other capes." He didn't reach over for a handshake, since he was sitting too far away even before factoring in Dipper's short tiny person arms.

[captainbuzzkill]

"Both my grunkles -- um, my great uncles, that is -- used to box when they were younger, too. If you met them, they do seem like people that've taken lots of hits to the head."

The joking around was very, very obviously affectionate -- and a little wistful. Now, even more than before, he'd left them behind. He decided to try not to think about them too much. The best he could do here was record as much as he could about this place and tell them about it when he got back.

Hence the notebook. In between shoving junk food into his mouth, he started scribbling something down as they talked, as if he was taking notes. (He was).

"My great grand-dad made them do it so they wouldn't let people push them around. Luckily, grunkle Stan didn't do that with me; he mostly just made me chop wood instead. I used to think he did it because he hated me, but really he wanted me to toughen me up so I could take care of myself."

The corner of his mouth quirked.

"Looks like that'll turn out even handier than it already has."

Which implied that this wasn't his first time dealing with something like this.

[ringslinging]

"There's a lot that parents - or uncles, or great-uncles, or what have you - do that seems a lot worse than it's meant to be."

Hal hadn't been able to quite wrap his mind around his mother's actions when he was young. He at least had the idea that she was afraid when she made him promise he'd never become a pilot, and not that she just didn't want him to be happy, but he hadn't really been able to understand her fears for his safety. Hadn't been able to get why she'd rather let her fears dictate either of their lives.

He hadn't really understood until he'd been faced with the burned out crater that used to be Coast City.

"So, I get the impression you're talking about more than just punks who want your lunch money, right?"

[captainbuzzkill]

"Mmm hmm. My sister and I went to visit Grunkle Stan in Gravity Falls, in Oregon, and it's like the weirdness capitol of the world. We spent the summer fighting monsters and ghosts and all kinds of crazy stuff."

Many kinds of crazy stuff. All the crazy stuff.

"Then a demon triangle we fought off and on all summer opened a rift in spacetime over the town and unleashed ten thousand screaming nightmares. And we had to stop the apocalypse," he said it very casually.

Way way too casually.

"Luckily we pulled it off, but this whole superhero thing seems easier. Compared to the end of the world, there are definitely way more perks: regular meals so I don't have to scavenge from the trash, I know where the grown ups are and know for sure my relatives are alive this time, someone else who knows what they're doing is in charge, and cool costumes and superpowers."

[ringslinging]

A demon triangle was not, actually, that weird of a thing to hear about, for a guy who worked with a box.

And, well - Hal could understand not taking regular meals for granted, he'd had a few messy evictions in his life.

But mostly, despite a lot of individual elements of Dipper's explanation that didn't make him blink alone, it was the idea of taking that combination and dumping it all on a kid that was making something inside him swear viciously.

None of which made its way to his face. "Sometimes the end of the world and the superhero thing overlap. More than we'd like, really, but we'll deal with it when it gets here. If it does." It was a lot more calm than the idea of all of it made him, but -

For all that Hal could get a little worked up sometimes (vicious understatement), he did know that whatever worries he had about a kid Dipper's age being in the middle of all this - sitting here and ruminating on them wasn't going to make them any less likely to be realized. The best thing he could do would be to do anything...but given the laws here, "anything" was probably going to be more like "keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn't land in anything over his head," because this government was insane and thought this kind of thing was totally okay.

Dipper sounded better equipped for this than he could've been, at least.

[captainbuzzkill]

Dipper just gave a little hapless shrug at that.

"If it happens, it happens," he said. "At least this time I have superpowers."

And that was the real kicker. Superheroes faced the end of the world all the time, but they usually did it with powers. (Or years of training like the Batfamily).

Dipper and Mabel had faced it as just normal kids with a few gadgets.

He scribbled away in his notebook and this time it was for the distraction because talking about this particular part of it was a little harder than talking about the rest of it. He didn't like dwelling on the thought of how powerless they'd been.

"Superpowers tend up to one's chances of not being petrified and shoved into a giant nightmare throne of horrors." Because dying wasn't even the worst thing that could've happened to people during Weirdmageddon. "Ayep, sounds like a breeze this time."

A pause.

"Comparatively. I guess it's all relative."

[ringslinging]

"Superpowers also mean you've got people who will work overtime at finding a way to cancel them, overpower them, or turn them against you." And sometimes not even one's own enemies; Hal hadn't been around when Batman's contingency plans were used against the League, but he'd heard about it. "Which isn't me saying that having them is bad, or that they don't give you a better fighting chance, but they're a tool as much as anything else. They can be used against you."

[captainbuzzkill]

Dipper found himself vaguely annoyed now. It was strange to be on the end of this, to have someone seemingly trying to teach him caution. Sure, Grunkle Stan had done it a lot, but he was his Grunkle and usually his warnings were more along the lines of "don't poke your nose into trouble so you don't have to fight your way out again." There was no assumption that he couldn't fight his way out again, just that it was safer to not have to.

Heck, he'd even given Dipper back his journal and told him to use it in self defense if he needed it -- implying that he thought Dipper was smart enough and competent enough to do it.

And Great Uncle Ford had tugged him along head first into danger with him.

Like all kids or teens that thought they were being condescended to (whether that was a fair assumption or not) he got a little sarcastic about it.

"Oh no," he said flatly. "Whatever will I do if my powers ever fail and I have to fight something while completely powerless -- oh wait. You mean I'd have to do what I did all the times I've had to do it before."

He looked up at Hal, raising an eyebrow.

"Look, I know you're just trying to help. You're probably worried that I'm young and I don't get it, that I don't really understand how dangerous all this is -- because how else could someone be excited about all this, right? Unless they just didn't understand the danger. And I mean, look at me, my arms are literally noodles." He put his pen down and waved his arms in a noodly way. "My sister once poured tomato sauce on them as a joke. An unfunny joke. About how they're noodles."

He loved Mabel but it was times like those he kind of wanted to maybe strangle her slightly.

"But I've already faced down monsters. While being completely powerless. That just means I'll be even more prepared if our powers inevitably get overridden by something terrible. No one's going to expect the fourteen-year-old that's built like pieces of yarn tied to a twig jumping up and trying to find some other way of taking them down."

He went back to his drawing. He had to focus on something else to say what he said next.

"I've already been helpless. I've already had people -- and monsters -- shoving it in my face, telling me that I have no muscles, no brains, that I'm nothing, that there was no room for heroes in the nightmare I was in. All of it just means I'll be better at dealing with it than all of you people that are used to being powerful. Because I bet none of you know how to still find ways to hurt the bad guys when you're just a weak, powerless kid."

Even if some of them were used to fighting bad guys while weak and powerless, he doubted that any of them'd had to do it as noodly small children.

"I know better than anyone that being a hero means fighting back even when it seems impossible -- and if I lose my powers or someone tries to use them against me that's what I'm gonna do. Just like I did before. "

[ringslinging]

Whoops.

"Sorry," Hal said, and it was a genuine sorry, not a sorry-you-took-it-badly one. "I did, in fact, tell myself I wasn't going to do that, and then I wound up doing it anyway."

Which sounded about par for the course for Hal's life, really, because running his mouth was his real superpower, but that was neither here nor there.

"I'm not going to insult your intelligence by saying that you being a kid has nothing to do with me being worried, but for what it's worth, I've given the yeah but it's worse than you think speech to a lot of people who aren't kids, and who do have powers, so it's nothing personal." He knew what his own reaction would probably be to that - yeah, right - so he continued: "I got my powers as part of becoming a space cop. It's not the case for most of my peers on Earth, so sometimes I do wind up being that guy who's like, yes, you were great against the League of Assassins but you don't know jack about Ysmault, shut up and let me do this my way. Sometimes, I'm even right."

(Sometimes. He manages it on occasion.)

"So if you ever think I'm getting insufferable, just remember there's a good chance I'd still be saying it even if you were an emotionally constipated ninja my size who can probably punch through cinder blocks. And that I probably have said it to him, and that I probably also called him an idiot to top it off."

Half-smile.

"And then call me on it again, because with as many times as I've told my bosses they don't know what they're talking about, I'd better be able to take hearing it from someone I don't even have rank to pull on."

[captainbuzzkill]

Okay, the annoyance was mostly gone now. At least it wasn't true condescension. The idea that Hal was treating him more like a possibly uneducated peer was easier for Dipper to swallow. His instinctual desire to prove he was up for the task and not just some weak, dumb kid quieted down.

"I've basically probably helped save worlds, according to my Great Uncle Ford. He said that if Bill Cipher had gone unchecked it was possible he would've destroyed, like, everything."

Dipper emphasized that with his hands, the pen still clutched in one.

"Ev-ry-thing. Not just our dimension. All of existence. He thinks it could've maybe affected other universes even. Technically, me and my family and friends possibly saved your universe, too. And this universe. And everyone else's."

He raised an eyebrow but it was with a little more humor this time.

"So, if we're talking about understanding how big this stuff is? I think I'm good. When a giant rift opens up overhead to nightmare dimensions," he gestured upward with his pen and whirled it around without looking up from his notebook, "and the sky starts raining blood, you develop a pretty strong sense of scale. I might not always know the right thing to do but I at least know what kind of things we'll probably be dealing with. I'm ready for that."

[ringslinging]

Setting the precise circumstances aside, it really felt a lot like looking back at himself. Hal could still remember exactly when in his life he'd truly felt the need to start proving that he wasn't afraid of anything, and he could remember exactly how insufferable he was ready to get whenever anyone doubted him.

(It probably wasn't a tendency he'd really cured himself of, so much as he'd become a lot more self-aware since he was a kid.)

"Okay. So, I try to remember you've seen as much as a career cape and you probably don't need reminding of this stuff, you try to remember that I sometimes even do the 'let me tell you how dangerous you don't get this is' thing to my best friend, who I've been superheroing with for almost as long as I've been one. We're good."

[captainbuzzkill]

"Seems fair enough." A pause. "And I'm still open to learning things. I know that's important; my Great Uncle Ford taught me a lot, because he's been studying all this paranormal stuff for years."

He nodded his head back and forth.

"It was just one summer. A really, really intense summer, but just one summer. I just maybe need the advanced lessons instead of the basics."

He drew in a deep breath and let it out in a frustrated little huff.

"Like the superpowers are definitely great and all? Huge improvement! And apparently the medical people read that I have the potential to be like this crazy powerful telekinetic? But I have no idea how it works."

[ringslinging]

"They don't usually come with an instruction manual. Boot camp, sometimes, if you're lucky."

It was one way being a Lantern had its advantages; he'd never had to try and figure out his basic capabilities on his own like some of his friends had. Kilowog - and Sinestro, even if he was usually a bit more grudging about admitting that - were the reason he'd been able to get his bearings and start acting like a superhero instead of just flailing around when he'd first gotten the ring.

"There's a few ways these things usually work, though. Once you're out of here, it'll just come down to some experimenting to figure out which one is yours."

[captainbuzzkill]

"Boot camp?"

Color him curious.

"Are superpowers so common in your universe that they need boot camp? Preternatural abilities happen in my universe but they're rare. And they're usually attached to something. Like a magic amulet. Or spells. It's rare for normal humans to suddenly develop powers."

So rare that he wasn't sure it even happened. All the weirdness that people could do usually seemed attach to something weird.

Dipper threw his now-empty bag of snacks aside and opened another one. This one had blue, crispy...discs inside.

This time he nommed on them without comment. (They tasted a little like cheesy pizza crackers.)

[ringslinging]

"Boot camp's not part of the package for most heroes, but it was part of joining the space cops, for me. You agree to take the ring and become part of the Green Lantern Corps, you also agree to go to Oa and get put through the paces until you prove you know how to use it." He grinned. "Our current drill sergeant's a Bolovaxian. Over eight feet tall and seven hundred and some pounds, and he yells loud enough that you can feel your skull vibrate."

There was an obvious fondness in his voice, despite that description.

[captainbuzzkill]

"Wooow, so you're a police officer. In space. How many different planets have you been to? Are all the other space cops aliens? Are you like the lone human cop that has to prove he's up to the task to all the alien copes?"

Yes, he hoped Hal's life was like a movie because that'd make it even cooler.

"Are you one of those cops that's a loose cannon, darnit, but one of the best they have?"

[ringslinging]

"Hey, hey, let me take those one at a time," Hal laughed, and started ticking them off on his fingers. "Okay, I stopped counting after the first couple dozen planets. Nearly all of the others are aliens - I was the lone human, though a few more have come on board since then. Surprised some people that humans actually knew how to speak, in fact."

Really, he could probably get a good long storytime just out of some of the ridiculous misconceptions his fellow officers had about Earth.

"And...yeah, you could say that, with the loose cannon." Utterly casual, even if the irony was enough to (almost) make him wince.

[captainbuzzkill]

"That is so cool! I wish things like that existed in my world. I mean, maybe they do, but I haven't seen anything like it. There are definitely aliens, but they're...weird."

He thought of the tiny aliens that had committed ritual suicide when he and Mabel discovered them in that weird robot

And then tried to unthink about it.

"I never got to talk to the ones we discovered inside the person-robot, and the ones that left behind the flying saucer buried under the town were long-dead."

[ringslinging]

"Most aliens should strike you as weird. It's that whole infinite diversity thing, right? The ones who don't seem weird, you probably just don't know enough about yet."

Plenty of his colleagues looked humanoid enough, but then you found out weird things like Graxosians were actually a lot older than you realized and they just went into suspended animation after suffering traumatic injuries.

[captainbuzzkill]

"Okay, okay, so tell me the weirdest alien and/or aliens you've ever met," said Dipper. "I want to see if they're as weird as the weirdest monster I've ever encountered."

Let him compare weirdness, Hal. Let him bask in the glorious weirdness.

Dipper wished they weren't all just stuck here. This situation would've been even more amazing if they could also travel to each other's worlds.

[ringslinging]

Hal considered for a moment.

And honestly, while there were a lot of excellent candidates, the one that kept rising over the rest to the front of his mind...

"So. Dkrtzy RRR." Who even knew how he managed to pronounce that. "Some coot of a scientist was trying to prove that willpower could be derived formulaically. And he found a bio-sentient mathematical equation, who is now an officer of the Green Lantern Corps, stationed to Sector 188."

[captainbuzzkill]

"You told me about that on the omnicom. So it's really -- it's living math? Math that's alive?"

His dreams have come true, Hal. Math. Math that's alive. Amazing.

Dipper flopped back onto the bed dramatically, the snack bag still in his hands.

"Okay, you win. That's weirder than the Time Baby. Or the sweaty one-arm-attached-to-the-giant-head thing. Or the monster made of Halloween candy. It's weirder and cooler. The universe is amazing."

He stuffed another...whatever into his mouth, and said around his full mouth, "I'm eating alien junk food and the universe is amaaaazing."

[ringslinging]

"It is pretty amazing," Hal agreed with a grin. "To be honest, while I'm up there I usually forget to think about that, though. It's just a day on the job. But when I get back to Earth and I'm going through mail and bills and all the 'normal' stuff - that's when it usually hits me, like yesterday I was punching aliens in the face and now I'm filing taxes and trying to remember if the milk in the fridge has expired, and then I just can't wait to get back up there and punch aliens some more."

Not that coming home was bad. The chance to catch up with Barry and Ollie was always welcome, to drop by Jim's and see the kids, to go back to the job that actually paid and take a flight the old-fashioned way, because as easy as the ring made it, there was something lost in translation that just wasn't the same as putting his faith in ten tons of steel and his own skill and reflexes.

But God, the details of living on Earth got old so fast. It never took long before he was back to staring at the stars.

[captainbuzzkill]

"Mostly when I'm done dealing with stuff and go back to normal stuff I'm just glad it's over." Dipper sat up again. "Not that all of it was bad. A lot of the things my sister and I saw in Gravity Falls was just weird or cool or even amazing, but the bad stuff was..."

He dropped that sentence and let it lie there like a dead thing.

"But it's mostly just punching aliens around here, right? No weird, creepy, eldritch abomination stuff? Or zombies? Or living wax sculptures that want to murder you? Or, I dunno, blood rain or something?"

He popped another crispy thing into his mouth.

Superheroing in space sounded way more fun than otherdimensional horrors.

[ringslinging]

"I've had one mission since I got here, and that was pretty standard punching of aliens, but it's not a lot to pick out a pattern from." Hal shrugged. "On the other hand, since my universe is actually this one, just a thousand years further back on the timeline, I'm guessing some things don't change too much. So -"

He held up one hand to count off that list on his fingers. "Punching aliens is most of it. Eldritch stuff...not terribly common, but it's not unheard of. Zombies..."

Slight wince. That one was still very fresh, and even if it had ended well, killing J'onn, even if it was a reanimated bloodthirsty corpse of J'onn, wasn't anything he wanted to repeat.

"I don't think anybody actually said the word while it was happening, but now that I think about it, I'm not sure what else I'd call the Blackest Night. So yes, but again, rare."

[captainbuzzkill]

Dipper thought about that and shrugged.

"Occasional zombies are better than eldritch abominations. I'll take it."

Seriously, zombies could just be killed with three-part harmonies. Or if the zombies here were different, maybe with head shots. Or...something. There was always some way or another to stop them.

Dipper put down his snacks and picked up his notebook again.

"How do you kill zombies in this universe? Standard head shot? Sound harmonics that make their heads explode? I'm keeping notes."

Keeping notes on how to fight deadly crap! Totally normal thing for a teenage boy to do.

[ringslinging]

That didn't seem too far out, really; once upon a time, the first time they'd watched Night of the Living Dead together, Hal remembered his younger brother spending a week afterwards paying extra attention to doors and choke points. Jim was always more about getting out of the way than tackling that kind of thing headfirst.

(Hal, on the other hand, had been utterly unimpressed by the whole thing and never gave much thought to zombie invasion survival plans. So of course he'd been the one who grew up to actually deal with one.)

"These ones were created by Black Lantern rings taking control of the dead - or in some cases, the resurrected." A glowing green replica of the ring in question popped up in the air next to Hal - the wrong color, of course, but then it zoomed in to Nekron's insignia, which was the thing he really meant to highlight. "So unless you take out the ring, they just reform and keep coming at you. But Lantern rings don't go down easily."

The construct vanished as he continued. "What it came down to was light - I don't mean like shining a flashlight on them, though. Light from the emotional spectrum, which meant...other Lantern rings, for the most part. I've seen a few other powers that can channel it, but not many. Green plus any other color, the more the stronger, and that weakens them enough to destroy them."