Words people don't hear often: Grif was right [open]

[iamresponding]

Who| Open to Rich and anyone who might happen to swing by Medbay
What| Rich being not-dead! Visitors welcome! New characters can possibly meet him during their own Medbay stays
Where| Medbay, on the main floor instead of a private room
When| The day after Galactus plot, and after Rich's message on the network, but before Rocket shows up
Warnings/Notes| N/A

Rich felt like death warmed over. Because really, he kind of was death warmed over. After his lungs had kicked out an embolism when he was in the healing tanks, he'd apparently had a pretty close call on the operating table.

But then they got him breathing again, back into a tank, and the riskiest part of the twenty-four hours had safely passed on by. Now they'd gotten him into a normal bed on the Medbay floor and he was mostly out of the woods. Mostly.

Still feeling it, though. You didn't get an arm shoved through your chest without feeling pretty miserable the day after. Luckily, they had some real good pain meds in the glorious robot future. The part that was the most miserable was mostly just that he was so short of breath.

He was at least used to this. For someone who had invulnerability back home, he'd found himself in a Medbay bed being tended by medicos more than once. War was hell, after all.

At least this time nobody's gotta grow me a new leg.

Also: pudding. The Medbay had good pudding. He could barely tell it was made from soy. Their combat support hospitals during the Annihilation war never had pudding, just the usual protein paste and dehydrated carb rations. He was pretty much demolishing a new cup of it every other hour. Anyone that visited him would probably find him mid-pudding cup. Always chocolate.

Comments

[whyarewehere]

"They say 'unpleasant' to try and make you not do it again," said Grif. He paused to lick pudding off the label, then added, "No fun allowed."

Only now that he'd triumphed over the cup did Grif realize that he'd forgotten to steal a spoon, too. This might have stopped some people. Lesser men would admit defeat, but not Grif.

He stubbornly began to eat it with only his face and some creative squeezing of the plastic. It was unpleasant to see, but he wasn't actually making a mess. More troublingly, he was so casual about it. Grif apparently had a lot of practice eating things with a less than ideal utensil situation.

[iamresponding]

"There is no way I'm sitting here watching you eat pudding like that. Crime against nature."

Rich rolled his eyes and tossed him an unused plastic spoon.

"How's everyone taking the cosmic horror apocalypse thing?"

[whyarewehere]

"Oh c'mon, I totally had it!" Grif protested with wounded pride, but he accepted the spoon. Instantly, the conversation became 20% more tolerable.

At the question, Grif paused in attacking the plundered dessert.

"Everybody's taking it about as well as anyone can take that stuff," he said. Having his face in the comms as often as he did, Grif felt pretty qualified to make a high level statement like that.

"It's kind of terrifying, but we just finished dealing with another terrifying thing that was going to screw us a lot quicker. I think we earned ignoring our problems and partying for five minutes."

[iamresponding]

"The fact we won against one of the terrifying things is promising," said Rich. "Galactus has destroyed countless worlds and we've turned him away from Earth more than once, but it usually took all we had and a super-genius of Brainiac's caliber working some magic. Everyone really came together with this."

He'd watched the footage and he was impressed.

"Back home, I had the New Warriors. But up in space, people would come together to fight things like this -- and it wasn't always easy to make it work. The team's actually looking out for each other and it's not just out of practicality. That's not a bad thing."

[whyarewehere]

Grif shuddered. "What did I just say about ignoring our problems? I've probably got a nightmare backlog that's gonna last a week and you're not helping."

He could help. He could face down things like the Silver Surfer for a little while. But Grif wasn't brave, and Grif knew that. Thinking about how close that had been and how badly they needed one another here, even if he could laugh it off and pretend otherwise most of the time, still made something twist under his ribs.

"You'd better hope the power of friendship's enough to see us through. I'm kind of used to it not being worth much, though."

[iamresponding]

"It worked for the Legion until now. I read up on some of their casefiles. They did amazing things for years, and even after losing their friends, the ones that're left refuse to lay down and quit."

No one could say that they hadn't accomplished things by working together.

"Hell, one of the files said they actually already saved all of time and space before. All of it. Every timeline. Saved our asses without us ever knowing it."

Fortunately for them, they were working with people that could see it through.

"And it always worked that way back home, too. You people that are from places where it's not like that just never had the chance to see it could be that way. Maybe it's the wrong people you're fighting side by side with, or the wrong fight, or the wrong idiots in charge, but when it's something like this..."

He shrugged.

"People figure out how to work goddamn miracles sometimes."

[whyarewehere]

Grif snorted like a bratty teenager, but held in an eyeroll. It was all so much more optimistic than he was comfortable being.

"I'm starting to think most people just get luckier than I do, Rich. That's how the world works. Hopefully you guys are enough to balance me out in that department. I'm not really a miracles guy."

It was kind of a joke, one of the bitter ones Grif usually told when things got too serious for him. He took an equally serious bite of pudding.