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

[headinjuries]

"I guess we kinda see more of the big stuff."

Not that there wasn't plenty of big stuff that came knocking on Earth's door - that had been why Sam got dragged into it in the first place; the Chitauri had wanted to take Earth out of the picture because of humans' annoying habit of showing up at just the right time to interfere with everything big that happened on the galactic front.

But if there was one thing that was hard to forget, every time he flew out of orbit - space always made Sam feel small. When there was nothing around you but stars in every direction, and you had a helpful database telling you just how many of those had their own planets, some even bigger than your own - how could anyone not?

[iamresponding]

"Yep. There's that expanse -- a big, wide universe full of all different things, and sometimes things in it come to Earth. But people like you and me that go up into space, we go into it. We get to see how big it all is. And how small we are, in the face of it all."

It made it a little harder to get a big head, to get all caught up in your own little world.

"On Earth, as scary as it gets, it's easy to feel like the good guys will win every time -- because we usually do. Up there, you can see how scary it really is. How easy it is for a whole world to die, or a whole species to get wiped out. Or more than one."

Wow, that sounded depressing, but that's not what he meant.

"So we care about worlds. And we care about people. And we have what we need to make sure that's what we always care about the most."

[headinjuries]

Sam leaned back, flopping onto the edge of Rich's pillow (because the edge was all the space he really took up) and stared at the ceiling.

"It's just...it's kind of overwhelming. To think about something that big, and it goes on forever, and - you have a planet with like billions of people, and that's just a snack for a guy like Galactus..."

[iamresponding]

"That's what we're for, Sam. It's a snack to Galactus, but they'll always be people to us. Somebody has to understand the scary parts of how big it all is without losing sight of the fact that the billions and billions don't even matter."

He held his fingers a hair's breadth apart.

"For just one tiny little person, in one tiny little town, in one tiny little country, on one tiny little continent, it'd be worth it. Fighting back against monsters like that. Never mind the billions and billions."

They had to be able to taken in the bigness without losing sight of how valuable the small was.

[headinjuries]

"Right. No pressure."

If that was what they were for, that seemed about as daunting as contemplating the size of the universe itself.

[iamresponding]

"As far as not losing sight of what's important and not forgetting it's about people, I don't think you'll have much trouble with that. And that's the most important part."

Rich gave him a big reassuring smile.

Sam was a good kid that tried his best and learned from his mistakes -- and that was enough. That was more than enough, really.

"You don't exactly strike me as the kind of person that'd get so caught up in your own drama that you'd stop caring about innocent people getting hurt."

[headinjuries]

"I was kind of stupid about that for the first couple weeks. I mean, less about people getting hurt and more about like...cleaning up after it." His mother had been quick to call him on that, and while he'd grumbled a bit at the time...she was right, of course, and he knew it.

And by the time the Hulk came knocking (or smashing, as it were), he hadn't even stopped to think about himself at all.

[iamresponding]

"You're fifteen."

Come on, Sam.

"I didn't become a superhero until I was seventeen, and even then, I didn't get my priorities 100% straight until life went all Starship Troopers on me." It'd taken way too long. "You're doing fine."

A pause.

"Geez, people really did a number on you with making me out to be some paragon of virtue or something, didn't they. Or else you'd know you were already ahead of the game." No way would Sam be fussing over rookie mistakes if he knew that Rich himself had been a world-class screw up through huge chunks of his superhero career. "You wanna talk collateral damage and terrible priorities? I spent most of my twenties worried more about getting famous than civilians. When I got back from the war, most people could barely recognize me, 'cause I stopped tooting my own horn so loud that everyone around me went deaf."

[headinjuries]

"You're the first person to tell me about all of that stuff."

Blaze of glory, noble sacrifice. Saved the galaxy. Blah blah blah. He'd heard plenty about the hero, plenty about the martyr...but not really much of anything about the man. Which, admittedly, made a lot of sense; people had that tendency to blur over the bad things when they were talking about the dead.