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Who| Agent Carolina & Agent North, Agent Connecticut, Theta, and open to others
What| Arrival/recovery/training
Where| The medbay, and then the training rooms.
When| After “The Reject Pile” and “An Eye for an Eye”
Warnings/Notes| to be added

[ CLOSED TO THETA AND NORTH ]

It had been a hell of an arrival. She’d just wanted a moment to catch her breath, to gather her strength so they could get the hell out of that hell hole of a base, only she didn’t have the chance. She’d arrived with warnings flashing on her HUD, unable to really comprehend what was knocking her out before she was knocked out.

And then, waking up in this medical ward. They’d at least answered her questions as soon as she started demanding answers. Shvaughn is quick to appear, to explain what’s going on. Carolina might be dehydrated and hurting, but she takes advantage of someone willingly answering questions to keep asking them.

And when she’s done, and rests, the next time she wakes up, Brande is there. Even though she’s not done recuperating, she’s quick to agree to become a Legionnaire. Even with everything going back home - but Shvaughn had assured her they wouldn’t be in danger.

Which is what leads to this - her having the ring nearby her hospital bed, turning over the omnicom in her hand. She’s still relegated to bed rest, and she thinks she’ll catch up on any information she can get a hold of, while she’s figuring out what the hell kind of outfit she’s going to have.

Unbeknownst to her, though, agreeing means she’s registered - means she pops up in a scannable database.

[ CLOSED TO CONNIE ]

Carolina’s been in the recovery wing for another day when they bring someone else new in. She’s looking at the omnicom when they bring her in, and so she misses it at first, until she hears the voice of a nurse checking her over. It’s the name that catches her.

That drags her gaze away, locking on the other hospital bed. That’s someone she didn’t quite realize was here, the literal definition of seeing is believing.

“CT?”

[ HOSPITAL (OPEN) ]

Carolina will be in the hospital for a few days, from her arrival to her release. She’ll easily accept visitors… no matter who they are, or why they’re coming by.

[ TRAINING GYM (OPEN) ]

She knows she’s developed powers - discovered the use of some of them in the hospital. Accidentally phasing through her bed had been one of them, and they’d been lucky she hadn’t ended up with a metal wheel through her body before she phased back.

She’s been having training lessons, but even though she was stuck for days on end in her own armor - she’s not going to take it easy. Even though she’s only cleared for light duty and training, here she is in the training gym.

She might be spending some time kicking and boxing a punching bag - but she’s also stopping to test out her new powers. She’ll move forward to move through the punching bag, or give it a hard hit and then brace herself against it coming back, seemingly becoming as hard as rock given that it bounces back without her giving an inch.

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"It's a talent," Dipper says. He's not going to disparage girly stuff because girly stuff seems just as hard as other stuff. "You have to give them credit - at least it wasn't ventriloquism or playing the glockenspiel."

He beams an even wider smile her way.

"I'm Dipper, by the way. Dipper Pines."

"Yeah. It'd be even worse if they were combat heels. Although I have no idea what a glockenspiel is."

Carolina, Carolina, don't disparage Judge Beeny's choice in footwear, you two haven't even met yet. When Dipper offers his name, Carolina offers a hand. He might be a kid, but it seems only fair - he's a legionnaire, even if she doesn't agree with that.

"Nice to meet you. Mind if I ask what 'cool power' you ended up with?"

The handshake gives a vague impression of damp and noodles.

"Telekinesis."

He doesn't even need to move to show it off - he's gotten his teke refined to the point of not needing exaggerated physical gestures. It's like having another sense and another set of limbs all in one.

Blue tendrils of teke just suddenly roll around him, lifting things in the near vicinity. Barbells, medicine balls, one of the large weights that the people with super strength use, that weigh several tons.

"Basically, I can move and explode things with my brain."

She can't say she's shaken worse, but at least he did it.

When the blue shows up and thing start just - lifting up, like they're nothing, her reaction is small but there - her shoulders tensing up, eyes jumping to the first object before she realizes he's the one doing it and forcibly relaxes herself.

"Well, I can't say I've seen that before, but that's impressive." She sounds impressed too, maybe a little envious, but that second emotion is easier to miss.

"It kind of has to be. If it wasn't I wouldn't even be able to be on the team. I mean, look at this."

He waves his floppy noodle arms in a way that makes how noodly they are pretty clear.

"The Legionnaires from this universe give us lots of training and Wash gives me extra training, but I definitely know where my strengths lie. And one of those strengths isn't...uh. You know. Strength."

He nods towards her.

"You, on the other hand, look like you could beat somebody up with no powers and both hands tied behind your back."

More Freelancer drama was essentially what she was saying, and he was used to it. They all were; it wasn't even a thing that phased them anymore as if it had been burned out of them by a million previous near-death experiences.. Besides, as important as that was, the actual vital section was glossed over.

We didn't find who we were looking for.

What the hell did that mean? Was someone impersonating Alpha? Was someone just fucking with them? Was he even alive?

"If we didn't find him, then who did we find?"

But wait, as if that wasn't enough, well, there was more, wasn't there? More surprises, more shockers, like this was the cliffhanger ending of a mid-season break. What he had gathered about Locus so far wasn't allowing him to be as shocked as he had been that Mr. Three-Word-Vocabulary would return, but Grif? Grif...who was being decidedly himself?

"Grif? Why the hell did he come back? I thought he hated us." Even if he knew fullstop it wasn't true. For all the bullshit he spewed, Grif hated them in the same way Church hated all of them: loudly but without absolute conviction.

"When I landed here, I hadn't even met Wash," says Grif. Talking about what's going on here is... well, yes, it's talking about being superheroes to fight the apocalypse, but somehow it's easier than working through this horrible new spike of anxiety about home.

"Once he figured that out, he wouldn't tell me anything." He perks up a little as he adds, "So you know, you have that one over him right now."

Because Grif favoritism points are highly coveted, right?

"If you hadn't met Wash yet, and he wouldn't tell you anything, how do you know about back home?"

She doesn't sound suspicious, just confused - since she is, genuinely, confused about that. The favoritism points aren't exactly what she's aiming for - she just doesn't want to go home and get stuck in the murder fridge again.

She looks at Grif, and then tilts her head. "Wash was talking to Big Bird after Locus rescued us."

I was trying to bring her back, you know.

[ it's... she doesn't know why she says that. but her expression is a little sadder, even if she covers it fairly quickly. ]

But yeah, thanks for the heads up. How've you been?

"Yeah. One of them has been working with me and my powers," Carolina notes when Dipper says that the universe gave them lots of training. She's certainly grateful that they've been doing that, and she can't stop the little smirk when Dipper waves his arms.

Yeah, he's not a puncher. But when he says she looks like she could, she laughs, putting her hands on her hips.

"Well, I can't say I've never done it before," she answers cryptically. "I am pretty good at hand to hand combat, though. I'm sure Wash has been showing you some stuff too, though."

Well this was an uncomfortable instance of deja vu with an extra dash of nightmares. The last time Connie woke up in the medbay had been seconds before she should have rightfully died. Technically if the right facilities and people were around back home that first time, she might've been able to pull through. But she'd been conscious long enough to watch a friend put her out of her misery when she'd first been infected, there wasn't supposed to be any waking up after that; never mind waking up in suffocating darkness and then clawing her way out of some sort of shell. There may or may not have been an attempt to break away from the nurses and out of the room, even with her limbs feeling sluggish she can teleport those few, jumping zips across the room before a sedative hits her system and she's eased back into a cot by unfamiliar hands.

As she's wheeled out into a larger, partitioned room her head tilts slowly this way and that, trying to find something off, something wrong, something that proves this is all just a trick and this is all fake. Her vision still swims, even after her cot's come to a stop and the nurse has left. It feels like she's sinking, falling back into that cold, familiar darkness of when she'd been bleeding out. She wants to scream, wants to run, to fight, anything- and that's when she hears her name.

Blinking hard her head turns towards the familiar voice, and for a good minute all she can do is stare at the woman seated in the cot beside hers. The voice is the same but her face...Carolina's just as shockingly different as Wash when Connie had first seen him. When Connie finally finds her voice, it comes out rough and a little slurred.

"Carolina...?"

"There wasn't anyone at the shack." And she misses that - that he's asking about Alpha, when she's talking about Illinois. "We didn't find anything until Temple showed up."

As for Epsilon or Alpha's fate... he would have to ask her about that. The comment about Grif, though, makes her shrug a little bit.

"I don't know. Locus said he came to help - I wasn't exactly in a position to doubt him," she says, indicating herself. "I haven't seen any of you for six days. I wasn't even rescuing you - that was Locus, so Wash and I could rest for a bit."

CT doesn't look good. North had mentioned that CT was around, but Carolina had assumed that meant 'okay', not confused and probably drugged, if the way she slurred her words was any indication.

Carolina pulls herself up into a fully sitting position, ignoring the protest of her body. She needs to be able to see Connie, to make sure she's - okay?

"It's me," she ends up saying, because - it is. "Holy shit, Connie, what happened?"

She hasn't heard how those infected recover, yet.

Disoriented is a word for what she is. If she were more present she'd be grateful that her armour seems to have made it out of the ordeal without too much trouble, minus the tears where the techno-zombie had got her.

"Mission went south. Caught me in a bad way and...I died. Again."

Connie frowns as she watches the other Freelancer move to sit up. Why was Carolina in here? How- When did she get here? If here is really anything at all and not just some elaborate hallucination.

"Why are you here?"

Here being a fluid term. Why the medbay? Why here right now?

"Some of us got extra bonus time travel," says Grif. It's very nonchalant. This is just his life now. "Wash was still on Chorus, he hadn't seen how the thing with the Tartarus turned out, and Locus is... probably somewhere there? I'm when you guys left. Tucker's a little bit later. So far, you're the winner at future stuff."

...Should he explain the dead freelancers thing? Maybe? No? It doesn't feel like it's his place. Carolina will find out eventually. Doing nothing is, as always, easier.

Wash on the other hand, Wash he can talk about. The mention of Big Bird at least gets a snort out of Grif.

"I'll have to find something to trade Locus for that helmet log."

It's not as funny as it could be, though. Grif is finding that he really doesn't like seeing Carolina like this, or hearing about Wash being just as bad off. After almost a year on Legion World, he's started to get very tired of things hurting his friends.

And they are his friends.

"I'm sorry," he says, breaking eye contact. It's worry and regret he's been chewing over since moving forward in the timeline a month and a half ago, and it just slips out. "If I knew you guys were going to actually need me..."

They shouldn't have. They had Wash and Carolina, who are good at things, and the not-good-at-things part of the team is just so big it wasn't like they needed one more, right?

Grif was angry, and in some ways he still is, but he knows he was also an asshole. He regrets staying behind, he regrets what he said, and he's had nobody he could even apologize to if he wanted. Wash hasn't been there yet and Tucker... It's better to just not think about how things are with Tucker. Fuck Tucker.

Maybe Grif has never been the best of friends with Carolina, but he knows her better than he did before they moved to the moon. And she's here, telling him that they did need him and he showed up to help them. It's too much. Grif can lie, he can lie a lot for a very long time, but he's started to find that there are some things that are too important to keep lying about.

He's sorry. He may not be willing to say how much he cares about them, but he wants at least one person on this stupid goddamn team to know he's sorry.

Oh, I'm sure you can imagine. Fantastic powers, actually running on the side of the angels, no war going on constantly in the background . . . [He huffs a laugh under his breath.] It's been months and it's still completely bizarre.

Well - at least that answers when Connie is from, which is a whole other can of worms that Carolina has to deal with eventually. The question, though, has her frowning a little.

"Mission went south back home. When I got rescued, I somehow ended up here," she says by way of explanation. Already, Carolina is leaning over and flicking the button on the side of the bed that drops one of the arms, allowing her to swing her legs over.

She's in a scrub-dress, and it's clear she's gained more scars. But right now she's more interested in getting up, taking her IV with her, and making her way over to Connie.

He's sorry.

He says he's sorry and that he would have gone if they were going to need him - and maybe the truth is they didn't, but they needed him at the end. The apology, more than anything, surprises her. She doesn't expect that from Grif.

Because in a way... he's right. It's their freelancer stuff that he keeps getting dragged into, that keeps messing with their team. Wash has mentioned to her, before, Tucker being upset about missing Alpha, and she knows that losing Epsilon had hit him hard. Grif doesn't even have that - so it makes sense that he would be one of the ones that resents it.

So she looks at Grif, and then looks away herself, at one of the walls.

"I'm sorry," she says, and her tone is subdued. "It's Freelancer stuff - and this time my Freelancer stuff," more like again, Carolina, "That everyone got dragged into." She made them come help her, the first time. She also pointed a gun at them, like they were just meaningless pawns to move around. The way her father had treated people.

"You're my team." She can't quite admit to being like family, yet. "I'm not Sarge, I don't actually want you to get hurt."

Edited 2017-09-05 06:31 (UTC)

"You got rescued..."

There's an odd feeling of relief in thought, knowing that Carolina wasn't taken out of the fight just yet. That both she and Wash were still kicking, still living after all the hell they had gone through, both during Freelancer and after, it seem. Hell, long before Freelancer even started in Carolina's case.

As Carolina starts to make her way over to Connie's cot she can't help but tense, her gaze sliding momentarily around the room, checking her possible exits. Not that she could run far in this state, but she could make a break for it if she needed to. But after that first glance, Connie watches Carolina and lets her head sink back into her pillow a bit more.

"You know how I left. Don't get far with wounds like that. Definitely don't with a bullet in your head. I...I shouldn't be here, but I am."

Whole lotta good that seems to do, nowadays.

"...Shack?" And their wires were crossed, unless later clues meant Alpha was at the mystery place, but that didn't seem right. What the hell was she talking about? Tucker was too wrapped up in Church to see beyond him, it; angered and desperate at the same time, these rivers of convoluted bullshit that ran way too deep to put into words that he would share with anyone.

Okay, maybe with her.

Grif, though, that was another conversation entirely, that asshole. He frowned a little deeper, their parting words on their last argument here still haunting him like hungry ghosts. That selfish lazyfuck? Rescuing them? Ha.

"Yeah, well, unless Grif was being held at gunpoint and it was to save his own ass, I doubt he would have chosen to do shit for any of us." And let the bitterness permeate for a bit.

She finally gets up - it's a stumbling start, and a slow shuffle of a walk over to her, but the medical here in Legion is good and she gains strength even as she moves over. She leans on the edge of the cot with one hand, looking over at Connie.

She doesn't know what to say. Well - she does, the thing that she never got to say before.

"I didn't want that to happen. I didn't know what he was doing until after," she says, her voice thick with an emotion she's trying to swallow down. "Connie, I'm sorry."

"I don't blame you for it. He used you...more than any one of us."

Damn the sedative making everything foggy, Connie has to refocus her attention on Carolina when she draws near. It's...odd, speaking so freely. But if Connie's lucky, this is all a trick. One last illusion before the end hits, or the virus she fell to takes over again.

"You got out. Hell, I heard you retired...you got what I wanted us to be able to have after everything."

A soft snort escapes her as her lips twitch with a dry smile.

"So...it was worth it."

It was worth it.

"Nothing was worth what happened," Carolina says, and if she sounds harsh when she says it - it's the truth. What happened to North and South when she learned of the files later - pitting them against each other. What happened to Wash - to York, to Connie herself.

And that has her oddly emotional, especially given Connie's state of being right now. Carolina hesitates, then reaches out, touching her hand to Connie's wrist.

"You know I'm bad at retirement, right."

Not that Connie knows all of the consequences. She knows how York dies, knows that Wash and Carolina survive until Tucker's time years in the future, knows that North and South both escape Freelancer before the Project goes down in flames but...that's about it.

"Worth trying to stop it," Connie counters when she glances down at the touch to her wrist.

Huh...somehow she didn't expect to actually feel it. Tentatively she lifts her hand to catch Carolina's, giving her fingers a squeeze. She feels real, her fingers are just as rough and calloused as Connie's. There's silence as she takes a few moment to swallow past the sudden lump in her throat, blinking back the sudden surge of emotion as she squeezes Carolina's hand again, clinging to the clarity of her presence through that connection.

No illusion is that convincing. This was real.

"So I've heard," Connie says with a rough chuckle, "Heard something about a burning waterpark?"

Connie squeezes her fingers, and Carolina finally shifts her hand to thread her fingers through Connie's. She looks suddenly like she's less about to drift off, fighting the drugs a little more - and Carolina will do anything she can to encourage that, even if she knows eventually, Connie might fall asleep.

"I'm glad you tried." That is the truth, even if ultimately it lead to her death. And then Carolina hears that comment, and she laughs, high.

"Yeah. They're the only teams I've ever met that could pull something like that off."

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