legionworld | beneath the stain of time [closed to Grif]

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beneath the stain of time [closed to Grif]

Who| Locked to Grif
What| Blargh Fhtagn Aftermath
Where| Medbay
When| After the team returns to Legion World
Warnings/Notes| cw: mental illness, ptsd, dissociation.

He'd asked for a shower - a real one - and Brainy had provided. Somehow. Apparently, he'd felt bad enough for Rich to do something about him wanting a normal shower, with water, despite the fact he wasn't allowed to leave Medbay.

So now the bathroom of his Medbay room somehow'd had the shower converted into one that used water. Who the hell knows how Brainy did it.

But even after a nurse tells him he can brush his teeth and take a shower now, that there are towels and some Medbay scrubs to change into, he just sits there after the nurse leaves, staring ahead at nothing.

There's still black gook staining his chin and his mouth still tastes sour. He doesn't really notice.

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"I heard Brainy made you a real shower."

Grif skips straight past hello, as usual, and his first act of visitation is to go squint at this marvel of space-future science. "If I knew all I had to do was ask..."

He trails off, an invitation, but there's no reply. Right. Shit. Grif backs out into the room again and looks Rich over. Something twists in his chest, seeing him like this.

"What are you doing, Rich?"

His voice lowers as he walks over. There's no fun in this, he's worried.

It takes him some time to respond.

He'd been subsumed. Dragged down and buried in black depths, underneath oily putrid masses of squid. Physically and in his mind.

It's like the real Rich has to unearth himself each time he reacts to the outside world. Like he has to be excavated. It's like one of those nightmares where you're stuck in a car that's skidding out of control and have to drive it from the backseat somehow.

Also, PTSD is just a bitch.

"I..." He looks around the room, at the bathroom door. "I have to take a shower."

It only clicks now that he's not moving towards the bathroom to do it. He gets up, and starts unfastening his prosthetic, which was given back to him post-mission. He leaves it behind on the chair and walks into the bathroom, looking dazed.

He doesn't think to lock the door. He knows Grif won't just swan in and he's a little too dazed to focus on the little considerations of anything right now.

Only a few seconds after he walks in there, the sounds of vomiting echo out. He'd gone to brush his teeth, remembered what it felt like yanking the squids out, and started throwing up.

You don't leave friends to hurl alone, especially friends who don't seem to be totally with it at the moment. Bad shit can happen.

"...Goddammit."

Grif's there. Water runs. A hand presses a cool, damp pad of paper towel to the back of Rich's neck. It's taking-care-of-your-stupid-sister-who-partied-too-hard medicine really, but puking feels like garbage no matter why you're doing it.

Normally, he'd feel ashamed of being seen in such a vulnerable state. It's not like he thinks he should never be vulnerable ever, but he didn't get to be a Big Damn Deal (tm) space general by getting grossed out and needing someone to basically hold his hair while he tossed his cookies in a toilet.

But he doesn't really feel ashamed. It doesn't matter because of who's there with him.

It's comforting to have Grif fussing over him. He's not even going to pretend it isn't or think too hard about it. There's even a raw, needy part of him that almost wishes Grif would pet his hair.

Grif doesn't touch him or let himself be touched often enough for Rich to really know, but he imagines that his hands are probably warm. Speedster metabolism.

When his nausea is under enough control for him to talk, he says, "S'okay. Dr Gym'll said this might happen."

It's not actually okay. He's puking up black sludge that looks like it belongs in the bottom of a gutter, and now he remembers squid-monsters tearing his body apart a thousand times over.

His body doesn't belong to him anymore. It isn't his. It's just something he's trapped in, a torture machine that was used against him, a vehicle for pain. This is just that vehicle spasming with familiar discomfort yet again.

"It doesn't look okay." Grif is tense, he can't hide the worry in his voice. He hates seeing Rich like this, it's obvious that things are still very wrong, and he's... well. He's Grif. He's not cut out to fix normal problems, much less something like this. But he's the one who's here, so he has to try. It's what friends are for.

Grif puts a hand on Rich's shoulder, bracing with his arm as he reaches up with the other to get something he left on the edge of the sink: a cup of water.

"Here. Rinse and spit," he says. His hand and arm stay where they are on Rich's shoulder.

"It's not blood or anything."

It doesn't taste like blood, it just tastes like Awful. He rinses and spits way more times than is actually necessary. It isn't just the taste he's trying to banish away, it's the feeling too, a phantom sensation of something throbbing and alien clogging his throat.

This whole thing really put him in facehugger territory didn't it.

With the last of the weird goop finally expelled, the nausea's less bad. His stomach still feels a little raw but in the way your stomach did at the tail end of a bad stomach bug, finally less irritated and starting to heal.

"Thanks. M'okay."

He pushes himself up and goes over to the sink, the damp clothe still on his neck and starts brushing his teeth with the sonic tootbrush they provided.

Grif gets up. Good. He doesn't believe Rich is okay because he's not, full stop, but he's better than he was a couple of minutes ago. That's enough.

"I'll wait up." Grif says it like it's nothing and things are fine, and slips back out into the room. It's not like he has anywhere else he needs to be, he's still supposed to be in recovery himself. He can screw around on the comm and kill time while Rich cleans up. Then, if he's up to a visit, cool.

Edited 2017-12-01 04:48 (UTC)

The only thing is Rich takes a really long time in there. Like, it starts normally, with the normal sounds of someone lathering up and washing their hair. But then it goes strangely quiet. There's just the sound of water beating down on skin and on the plastisteel walls and floor, and circling down the drain into the vaporizer.

The amount of time that passes is too long for it to be Rich just having a good soak or needing to use the toilet for a long time or any other normal reason. Far, far too long.

Grif checks the time, and it's completely inexplicable. Something has to be up.

He pokes his head into the unlocked bathroom.

"...Rich?"

Please don't be dead or unconscious, please don't be dead or unconscious...

When Grif goes in, the shower curtain isn't pulled entirely closed, and Rich is sitting curled on the shower floor, knees drawn up and barely granting him any modesty. He's leaning sideways against the shower wall, cheek pressed against the plastisteel, hair hanging wet in his eyes.

He's not unconscious or dead.

His eyes are wide open, staring at nothing, and he's silent. It as if getting warm and clean has caused something to shut down, like the urgent need to do so had been the only thing keeping him moving, and now that he's comfortable and the last of the slime has sloughed off, he doesn't have the energy left to fight for anything more.

When Grif comes up he doesn't look up, doesn't even blink, just stares ahead with a blank expression on his face.

Oh, Jesus.

"Rich? C'mon, Earth to Rich!" Grif says. He moves to the shower and kills the water, because at least that's doing something maybe helpful. He's this close to panic, and if Rich doesn't respond he's going to have to get someone in here who knows what they're doing. Hell, he's probably going to have to do that anyway, but he'd at least like to have Rich off his shower floor first.

That's... you want to help your friends avoid being seen like this. It's already bad enough that Grif's seeing it. This wounded state is something impossibly personal, this is an intrusion, and it's a mark of the strength and seriousness of this friendship that Grif isn't backing out.

"Talk to me, dude."

It's only then that he looks up at Grif and his gaze is slightly wild.

"I don't ..." His brain seems to be having trouble with more than a few words at a time. "I can't..."

He's trying to find the words to explain that nothing matters anymore, that there is no way to pull him out of this, that he should just leave him alone in the warmth and dark. That's the best he can hope for in life, warmth, and dark, and no pain. Just to be and to not have that existence be endless agony.

His brain finds old words, words he hasn't read in a very long time, but that he remembers. They're the easiest ones to remember, all the quotes that have to do with how you can never really go home again, that have to do with how sometimes home can't be saved for you even after you save it. Those have resonated with him so strongly ever since the war.

He can't find his own words, so he uses those.

"'I'm naked in the dark. And there's no veil between me and the wheel of fire.'"

The stargate, the portal, the doorway to them. It burns. The sight of the gate burned itself into his waking eyes.

"I'm still there. In all the ways that matter. A part of me'll always be there. With them. Always dying."

People aren't supposed to survive this. In the horror stories about nightmare-things, whenever people live those living deaths, they either stay dead or go insane. So if he's not staying dead, if it's not the one, it's the other, except he's still here. As far as insanity goes, apparently this isn't the useful kind, that makes you just check out entirely. He's crazy but still here, trembling, hurting, dying inside over and over even though he's no longer dying on the outside.

He sucks in a choked breath, his heart and lungs compressing, and the tears that well up are visible despite the fact he's soaked.

"Some people, they don't get to go home again, even if they get there," he chokes out. "I never get to go home. Last time, it was because home was gone, it'd changed and gone all wrong." Home had become a place where most of his friends were dead and a friend that may as well have been another little brother had been tormented into a shell of his former self. "This time it's because I'm not me. He's dead. Rich Rider. I'm not him, I'm not anyone, I'm just - I'm just eyes, looking out from someone's head. Somebody else's."

He isn't an I. There is no "I" or "me." There is no self, just something watching, a brain hanging out in the empty blackness of skull. Not a person, not something that thinks, just something that feels whatever violence is done to it.

He curls up, head buried in his knees, trembling like he's caught a chill that will never truly go away.

"Just let me stay here," he says distantly, like he's somehow drifting away, even as he sits there. "I like the water. It's warm here."

And Grif is continuing to fuss, biting the tip of his tongue a little in focus. Trying to get a towel around someone who's curled up on a shower floor is surprisingly hard.

"Rich, I don't know anyone else who would be quoting Lord of the Rings at me right now," he says. "The Cancerverse is dead. Maybe you're not home, but you know what? Fuck it. Home's overrated."

He's taking it at the wrong angle, and it strikes a nerve. 'Home' means something very specific, when you're superheroing it up as a temp in an alternate universe. This isn't home, but it's still good. It's still the best place Grif's ever been, and part of that?

Part of that is because Rich has been here with him.

Grif's hands are on Rich's shoulders, he's locked eyes with him like he's afraid Rich is going to slip off into his own head again and never come back. This is important, he wants Rich to listen. "I don't care if you're different," Grif says, and there's a sudden intensity in it. He's angry that this happened to Rich at all, he's angry at Rich for not listening, and this talk has him scared he might really have lost his friend even if they did pull him out of that hell dimension.

"I don't. I care that you're here. You're here, you're alive, and you..." Grif can't find a good third thing for his list, the thread breaks, and when he continues it's with something just a little softer. "...You can't just live on a shower floor forever."

He notices that intensity and it strikes a chord. It's...it's not just a friend being concerned. He's blessed with friends that care an awful lot about him and that's the only reason he's alive right now, but there's something about the look on Grif's face that suddenly makes it clear that the way Grif cares about him isn't the same as the way Vance or Robbie or Sam or any of his other friends care about him. It's not even the way Peter does, which has its own intensity because a war buddy is its own special and specific thing.

No, he's seen this before. More than once. He's seen someone else look at him this way. He's seen this kind of love somewhere else and not in his platonic friends, not in his family...

Then it finally clicks and he wonders why it took him so long to see it.

("Really, punk? Then explain why I get straight A's and you go begging for B minuses. I'm not only stronger than you, I'm smarter than you, too!" "Blow your own horn much louder, Mike, and they'll arrest you for disturbing the peace!")

Ginger Jaye. She'd always had that look in her eye when she'd torn into Mike Burley for bullying him.

And he remembers Nita's face when she'd ripped Ship out of that tunnel the one time she'd slipped through his fingers after getting kidnapped, fighting against Undertow's control all the way, risking getting herself blown up too for a chance to save him.

And he remembers Gamora's, during one of the more brutal battles of the war. She'd screamed his name and fought even more ferociously than usual. Her blood-splattered fiercely protective expression had been the last thing he saw before getting dragged down under a wave of biting, slashing bugs, and it was the first thing he saw after she dragged him back up to the surface out again, a mountain of bodies around her.

It's that look. It's been that look these least few times that Grif has charged forward into certain death to save him or cover his back.

It just confused him at first because he wasn't used to seeing it on a male face. He thinks about whether or not that bothers him. He decides it doesn't matter. He still likes seeing it there.

Grif's pupils dilate a little as he looks at him and Rich wonders if his are doing the same.

"Oh," he says in understanding, and there's no way for Grif to know what he's saying it about. It probably just sounds like a response to what he said about living on the floor, but it's not. It's a soft little 'oh' of finally understanding something he should've known all along and being faintly pleased upon figuring it out.

Rich was right about Grif's hands. They're warm where they're holding onto his shoulders.

He knows he shouldn't angle for any affection. It's awkward. He's naked. Nita's not there for him to talk to about their relationship or any confusing feelings. He might even be wrong about this, about seeing what he thinks he's seen. And even if he's not wrong, he knows Grif has that dumb, weird hypermasculinity "no homo" thing, so even if he's right, this might never be okay.

But it doesn't matter. Grif is always telling him to be more selfish, and this is when he finally decides to listen. He wants to be held right now and realizes he wants Grif specifically to do the holding, so he leans against him - clings to him - tucking his head in the crook of his neck.

He likes his arms. Grif has caught him or hauled him to safety enough times for him to know what they feel like and he wants to feel that right now.

People don't hug Grif. They don't look to Grif for physical comfort. That's just how life works, and this sudden change to that situation startles him.

Grif is warm, especially compared to bare, wet skin in the cooling air. His body is broad and, even after a year of Legionnaire work, still soft on top. So is the curve of his neck and throat, despite a little unshaven scruff. So are his arms, around Rich before he can even think about that response. It's done. He can't regret it.

More than anything, it pisses him off and he has no outlet for that. He's not angry at Rich, he's angry at the fact Rich is like this, that he was this badly hurt. There's nothing Grif can do about that. The monsters are dead, were beyond Grif's ability to stop when they were alive, and he can't go back in time and prevent things that happened in another universe before he even met Rich. Grif is used to lacking motivation, it's a cornerstone of who he is, but having it with no way to act on it is so much worse. He wants to protect Rich with the same fervor he's tried to protect his sister, it's the most he can ever remember caring about another person. Maybe he doesn't know what it is, it's not quite familial and it's not quite... Blood Gulch Crew familial, the only categories of strong feeling Grif even has to compare, but it's undeniable. Usually, he can deal with feelings of inadequacy by insisting he never cared. But this? This is too much.

He doesn't say anything. He holds Rich. He lets himself be hugged. He lets water soak into his uniform. He lets a long, exhausted breath escape as all commentary completely fails him.

Some time passes. A couple of minutes, probably. Grif's not counting.

"C'mon," he finally says, already bracing in preparation. "Get up."

Edited 2017-12-02 06:58 (UTC)

He feels a little better. Not better better, but the reminder that things can be comforting, safe - even blissful - is exactly what he needs right now. He's still dazed and shaken but he feels a little more grounded.

He now has the energy to move again.

He snags the towel Grif tried to wrap around him with his fingers and dries himself off at least a little. Fortunately, the patient scrubs don't have any complicated ties so he's able to dress himself one-handed, too.

Grif backs off a little bit when Rich starts taking care of himself, but that's okay. He's still nearby when he turns around again.

"I..." He breathes in and out slowly like it's still hard to breathe, like it takes too much energy to. His voice is small and quavery when he finishes his thought. "Can you stay with me? For a little while?"

It's a relief when Rich gets moving under his own power, and Grif is perfectly happy to stand back and let him. It's still awkward being here, but...

"Can you stay with me? For a little while?"

HIs presence is wanted, and it's helping. That's worth being awkward.

"Sure," he says. "I'll stay."

The Medbay bed is situated so that the back has been left upright, so Rich can sit up in bed. He climbs in and slips his legs under the sheet and blanket, sitting with his back propped against it. Before Grif can take a sit in the visitor's chair, Rich tugs at his elbow, scooting over so Grif can sit next to him.

The look Rich gives him is expectant. Needy.

And it's not that weird, right? They've lounged next to each other on the couch and watched sports and movies together. The only reason this is different is that it's actually important this time.

Those missing years that got dumped into his head didn't exactly get put there in order. His memories are a mess. Even though his time in the Cancerverse had technically happened before his time in the Legion, it still feels like they're the most recent.

He feels like he's drowning in it all, in the misery and loneliness and years of pure, raw hatred that'd been directed his way, and now...now he wants to be close to the people that care about him.

Grif hesitates. Wait, really? says his facial expression. Really really, says Rich's. They've sat together on furniture before, sure, but neither of them is a small person. This is going to be close, and therefore kinda weird.

"I get it," he says. "You're in league with the doc. You both want me to sit down."

For all Grif's bravado and mostly-okayness, he's bone-tired and really should be resting right now. It's a bizarre turn of events. Sleep used to be his first priority at all times. Other things, like hurt friends and team morale, have somehow become more important.

Things have changed. So many things have changed.

Grif, despite his uncertainty, does climb on. His posture is stiff, though. This is weird, and would probably look weird to other people. Rich is more important than that, but it's still there. Since when does somebody want him this far into their personal space? It's probably just another sign that his friend isn't rational right now. Grif's not... good for this. He's never tried to be, always happier to keep people at arm's length, or (ideally) even farther. It's not a bad place to be. It's soft and warm and might even be pleasant. Grif just can't get to that over the thirty I-am-not-supposed-to-be-here alarm bells going off in his head.

Edited 2017-12-03 15:42 (UTC)

Rich reaches for the TV remote and puts on the TV, clicking until he finds a magnoball game. Then he hands the remote to Grif. It's just...pretense. He knows it'll make him feel less weird about this.

Just bros being guys, and guys being dudes, watching a sportball game.

Rich doesn't watch. He stares ahead but he's not watching. The world is swimming and it's like he keeps dipping under the surface of reality into another place, into that place, with red mists and screeches in the night and squirming ground. He's like a drowning man, dipping under the surface into a waking nightmare, and then clawing his way up to reality again so he can breathe.

But then he leans sideways just a little, and rests his head against Grif's shoulder, and something finally stays still. Whether he sees the Cancerverse or the Medbay room, there's someone's shoulder to lean on, sturdy and reliable, and he knows it's not going away. Cancerverse or not, he knows the person it belongs to won't leave him.

His eyes flutter and half-close, and then him zoning out starts to turn to actual sleep as he finally relaxes and his mind finally acknowledges his current state of being.

Safe.

It's safe to sleep now. So he does, leaning against Grif's shoulder.

Edited 2017-12-06 02:49 (UTC)

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beneath the stain of time [closed to Grif]

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