legionworld | (no subject)

Who| Robbie and any injured Legionnaires.
What| Visiting hours.
Where| Medbay
When| After Cancerverse.
Warnings/Notes| None.

Visiting teammates in medbay is far mandatory, but it’s just what you do, even if they’ll probably be out by dinner. Then again, Robbie’s technically been a medbay inmate himself for more than a day.

He’s allowed – encouraged – to move around at this point. He had several dips in the goo tanks and robotic surgery to repair the puncture wounds, but broken ribs are still broken ribs 1000 years later. They can accelerate the bones knitting back together, but it’s just pain management and keeping mobile enough to prevent things healing too tight and help his lungs stay clear.

Despite this, he still had to enlist one of the nurses to get him gag gifts for the other Legionnaires getting treated. Because flowers are great, but laughter is the best medicine.

Robbie approaches the bed quietly with only a wave and waits to see if his teammate even wants company at the moment.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There’s no escaping the hug of the former Elder God. Seriously, Robbie can’t disentangle himself in good conscience. Rich needs a hug, so Robbie will do his best to hug the stuffing out of the larger man without making either of them say ow. It’s delicate work and obviously requires both arms to ensconce one so broad.

So there are no extra fingers to plug his ears and keep himself from hearing. Robbie tries to not listen to them, but they seep into his brain and the effect is immediate. Like putting a paper towel to a spill, everything tinges red.

It was the squids, and not Rich, giving the advice. Robbie hadn’t really believed it until now, despite seeing the purple tentacle mess they made of Rich. Despite getting personally attacked. The advice was Rich, and the latter recitation to Grif was the squids. It had to be.

Robbie feels sick, and he’s not supposed to strain his ribs. Heaving would do that… and throwing up on Rich’s shoulder is a bad plan.

“Shut up,” he whispers. Disassociation used to come so easily, but now, when he needs it, Robbie can’t force himself into that zone where nothing that happened to him mattered and he could hear all manner of insults without blinking, because nothing was worse than what was in his own head. He was safe there. He knew all the demons. His own personal Kingdom of Yr. He’d liked that book, what was it called again? (Think about that, don’t think about Vance.) “Just shut up about it. It’s over with.”

I Never Promised You A Rose Garden. (Truer words were never written.) How did they say hello in the book? “I texted Vance that day and took care of it.”

Oh, right. Suffer, victim. No one loves you. (Think about the book, don’t think about what Rich is saying and it won’t hurt. Don’t think about it, don’t think, don’t think…)

He can hear the thick, wet sound in his own breathing. Maybe he could’ve hid how upset he was in the hug, Rich can’t see his face, but he had to go and make noise like Rich isn’t dealing with enough. “I’m just glad you’re safe, buddy.”

"It...hurts. Everything. Everything hurts. Being here."

He's not going to lie. Not to Robbie. Not after the squids messed with him like that.

And he knows Robbie will understand that feeling. Everything hurting.

"Right now I can't be glad to be here. I don't have it in me. But I think eventually maybe I will be."

He hugs Robbie tightly.

"We didn't know if I had to go back. To die. But I never died at all, I guess. Or at least I did and came back. And now I don't have to go back. Now I can just go home. With you and Vance and Sam."

It'd been hanging over their heads, all this time. Schrodinger's resurrection. Was the Time Trapper going to send him back to his death or not? Only they were asking the wrong question the whole time and that death wasn't waiting for him.

Now they have an answer.

And Robbie now has has some truths to replace the falsehoods.

"And I'm proud of you. For getting help. You're not...I never would've called you..." Crazy. It's not what he'd really felt and the words had felt alien on his tongue for a reason, even with his own strange double standard that he held for himself. "It's a hard thing to do. It's been hard for me and I'm only doing it 'cause...'cause I'm that far down that I can't...I can't get away with not doing it. But you keep trying to get better, even when it's a fight. I'm proud of you. For...for confronting the kinds of things I fly away from."

It's okay if he needs to hide everything in the hug. Rich is glad to give it, glad to hold onto the people he loves since he still can.

It'd been so lonely. He and Worldmind had tried to keep each other sane - and failed.

Edited 2017-12-09 10:33 (UTC)

With the smorgasbord of topics Rich offers up, it’s so much easier to keep his train of thought chugging along. The mess with Vance, the squid advice, it fades into the background.

“I know. I know how much it hurts, but it gets better. It gets easier to keep breathing,” Robbie says softly, giving Rich a good squeeze. It’s more of an estimation, but Robbie thinks that working with bad facts and being ground down into dirt by everyone else in the world can, in hindsight, look and feel as if he hadn’t had any free will. With informed volition, he might as well have been a squid puppet.

“I’m still glad, all right? I’m happy enough for both of us – I get to have a friend back, permanently. We're going to give you the Mount Wundagore penthouse, you wait and see.” He can feel his mood swinging wildly upwards with the idea that he has something so powerful to give: a room, a home. For his friend who is finally coming back. “And you won’t have to do anything you don’t want to – you don’t have to now, either, screw anyone who says different.”

Having blinked away the tears and replaced them with a fiery willingness to beat up anyone who dares force Rich's compliance, Robbie pulls out of the hug to look Rich in the eyes. “I don’t think you’re crazy, and I think you should try and work through it, but the only thing you have to do is what you want. I want you to be happy and well and know that I was always proud to be your friend. Nothing you decide'll change that. I’ll support any path you want to take.”

He means it with the ferver of a zealot, too. If Rich told him it was helping, there’s nothing Robbie would try to talk him out of.

The thing is when Robbie says it gets better... Rich believes him. He knows that Robbie still struggles, but he's also seen how far he's come, from being someone trapped into his own pain to now being someone that can feel joy again sometimes, that can lose himself in caring about people.

It makes him have hope. People can get better. The hurt doesn't get undone, no, but still, they can get better.

And he has a future again to get better in now. The possible death sentence isn't hanging over his head anymore.

Rich turns away from Robbie but it's to finally pull on the robe Robbie gave him as a gift.

"This is nice," he repeats. "Really."

It's warm and cozy. He can be warm and cozy again, there's a world of sensation he's allowed to have again that isn't just pain and deprivation.

His words become clearer and as he talks it's clear that he's getting a little more tethered down to reality again.

Tethered back down to Earth. That's what all this has taught him. He doesn't have to take it all alone anymore. Even Peter told him to rely on his friends, but then Peter was the one person in space that tried his best to make it so he never went into the fire alone.

"I'd like that," he says. "The penthouse room. Ain't never had a penthouse before. You know how it was: sometimes I was lucky to have somebody's else's couch."

He has a home to go back to. And a second family besides the one he was born into. (And the one he was born into isn't perfect but they love him, too).

Robbie grins when Rich tries on the robe. It’s not because he thinks a robe is that awesome or that he’s naïve enough to think Rich is miraculously and permanently improved from the blank stare that had greeted Robbie. He's engaging with his surroundings. Rob knows how difficult it can be.

Well, the fact that the robe looks like an overcoat is a little awesome, but Robbie just wants to encourage progress with familiarity. “It's not bad – can’t do anything about your face, though.”

He went with the robe because it’s warm, covers a lot, and doesn’t require much effort. It’s way less dysfunctional to answer the door in a robe than swathed in half your bedclothes. Robbie thinks about these things, what works when he himself is low and what he would do if Rich were Penance.

Put him somewhere warm and safe and let him know that he was completely in control.

“There’s no security on Mount Wundagore in the Hab Deck, so you can go pick out what you want. Most of the rooms have space nazi names like Genocide Planning Room - we'll get you a new plaque that says penthouse,” Robbie explains with way more chipperness than one should discuss genocide rooms. “Speaking of security, I went and had you added to my quarters subroutines. Totally open door policy, you don’t have to knock.”

He hopes it sounds casual. Robbie wants him to know he'll always listen, or just be , sometimes all he wants is to hear a friend breathe and know that they exist and are safe. That's kind of a creeper move though.