ya_assemble | [LN] The Princess returns in glory

The young man that was floating in front of the fridge (drinking milk right from the carton) put the carton back in and flew out of the kitchen slightly when he saw her and her elf trail passing by.

It was...actually pretty funny. In the past he might have chuckled but laughter didn't come easily to him now. The tendency to express feelings of any kind, happy, sad, whatever, had been pretty much beaten out of him by his "training."

Still, he was free from that now, and that meant that even though he didn't laugh or smile, there was a bit of a twinkle to his eye.

"Hey, kiddo, is there some kinda holiday going on that I don't know about? You know, since you're leading the elf parade." He looked at the elves trailing behind her. "When are the floats coming? We're still gonna have Snoopy this year, right?"

His joking was a little rusty but it was better than nothing.

He flew out in the air above her, in such a way that suggested that he was more comfortable flying than walking, as if he'd been born with the ability. (In a way, he had, even if he'd technically never been born.)

He cut a slightly intimidating figure with that severe crew cut and all those muscles, but even if he was a particularly large teenager, he was still obviously a teenager, no older than eighteen or nineteen, dressed in normal teenager clothing - jeans, black boots, and a plain black t-shirt.

Molly skidded to a stop, the elves failing to do so in a timely fashion and causing a pile-up against her calves. She didn't really notice, too busy eyeing this new guy suspiciously.

Sure, he was at the Pole, and nothing seemed to be amiss (or more amiss than it was when she'd left) given that the Yetis seemed to be fine, so he probably wasn't evil. Unless evil snuck in to drink their milk. Which it could, she guesses. He's all dark and big and FLYING and possibly one of what her dad called "street toughs" when she was little, and Chase called "gangbangers" when he thought she couldn't hear.

Or what she thought they probably looked like when they were at home and not wearing all their jewelry and bandannas and stuff.

Still, he'd sounded friendly enough, and he wasn't a grown-up. CLEARLY TIME TO INVESTIGATE.

"Who're you?" she asked, a bit less suspiciously than her expression probably seemed to warrant.

"I'm M-" It was almost second nature now, the lie.

But now he could tell the truth. Now he could say he was Superboy.

Except...that was maybe a name he no longer had a right to. He was still working all that out, whether or not he deserved the 'S' anymore when he'd been forced into everything.

One thing he did deserve was the true name Kal had given him. He knew if Kal knew about everything he'd done, that he'd still think he didn't deserve to have it taken away, even if he might be disappointed enough to never want him to wear the 'S' again.

"My name's Kon-El. Who are you, tiny, demanding little girl?"

It's a good name. And something about the way he answered makes him think of all her friends when they'd first run away and picked new names but couldn't remember them all the time. She nods like she's decided something.

"I'm Molly, and I'm not that demanding, you just weren't here a few minutes ago and I wondered where you came from. Do you know Nico? I need to tell her I went back home for a couple of minutes."

"I heard there was a girl named Nico here but haven't met her yet. I, uh, needed some time to myself after showing up. Just to...figure some stuff out."

Because he was a wreck. He was a walking wreck of a human being that wasn't even quite sure how to talk to people anymore and was only just re-mastering such normal human behavior as eating at the table instead of on the floor.

"Are you one the people that was here but got snapped back home for a little bit? They told us that was a thing."

A thing he hoped desperately wouldn't happen, at least not until he was sure the stupid nanochain was out of him.

"I can help you look for her if you tell me what she looks like."

Edited 2014-11-10 05:58 (UTC)

"Yeah!" Molly stops and gasps dramatically. "Ohmygosh have I been gone? Like for more than a couple of minutes? LIKE NARNIA?"

This is mindblowing. And also encouraging. If it works like Narnia time, they'll always get home right when they left, so nobody will worry! ...It might NOT work that way, really, but hey, nobody needs to tell Molly that just yet.

"Oh, oh, okay Nico's taller than me but not as tall as you, and she wears lots of black and dark colors like you do, and she makes all her own dresses and usually they have lace and ruffles and stuff, and sometimes she has a big magical staff!"

"I've been here a little while now and this is the first time I'm seeing you, so yeah, probably. Bunny and Jack said weird timey-wimey stuff might happen if we got bounced home so maybe that's what happened to you. Your friend probably has a better idea of how long you've been gone."

He looked around, eyes briefly flashing bright blue.

"Eeeh, my X-ray vision's still on the fritz so we're gonna have to do this the hard way. Let's just take it floor by floor."

Something he planned to do from the air, apparently, though he made sure to not fly faster than Molly could walk.

Edited 2014-11-10 06:21 (UTC)

"You have X-ray vision?" Molly asked, falling into step next to him. Even if it was currently on the fritz, that plus the flying kicked him up a notch or two on the Princess Powerful Cool-O-Meter. "That is awesome. Do you have any other powers? Oh, can you shoot lasers out of your eyes? Or lift really heavy stuff? I'm super strong, I knocked Demon Godzilla over once."

Pay no attention to the small child with a creepily accurate imagination. It's probably just a coincidence.

A part of his brain screamed that his full power set was confidential military intel and that if he told her, he'd have to kill her.

Another part of his brain remembered that he used to brag about his tactile telekinesis roughly every thirty seconds once upon a time.

"Most of my powers are dialed down or gone in this place, but I have a ton of 'em back home." He started ticking them off on his fingers. "Superstrength, invulnerability, flight, X-ray vision, heatvision - i.e. I can basically shoot laser beams from my eyes - telescopic vision, super-hearing, freezy breath, and tactile telekinesis. Which is telekinesis but it only works if I'm touching stuff, or touching something that's touching the stuff I wanna move."

He had a metric buttload of powers. Normally.

"Super cool!" He was very awesome and Molly decided that he gets to be her sidekick. Even if he DIDN'T have all of them here.

"I'm super strong, and really really hard to hurt, like SUPER hard. Back home I'm even super stronger and when I have my powers up I can't get hurt. Somebody broke a shovel over my head once," she said proudly. "I didn't even feel it."

He swooped down slightly and held his hand out for a low five.

"Always awesome to meet another walking brick. Down low, kiddo."

He'd missed this. Talking to kids. He'd always loved talking to kids, especially the ones that got all hyped up over meeting him. No one had ever needed to twist his arm to make him do those Make-A-Dream things or the visits to children's hospitals. He lived and breathed this stuff.

She grinned, and her eyes flashed magenta, just for a moment, as she brought her hand down - not unreasonably hard, but harder than she'd ever thump any friend who wasn't a walking brick.

Now she needed to find Nico so she could show off her new friend.

"So are you a superhero? We are, even though Nico and Chase and everybody says we're not. But we help people, sometimes, when we aren't hiding from the grown-ups and somebody needs help, so that makes us superheroes, right?"

He actually smiled, just a bit, as she slammed his hand with superstrength. The way it stretched out his face made it seem as if it was something he used to do a lot of once upon a time but had recently fallen out of practice with.

Then she asked her question and the smile faded away.

"Sounds like you're superheroes to me," he said, because it did. Though he was wondering why they had to hide from grown ups - something he'd ask questions about in a second.

He considered asking questions about it first, to change the subject, but he knew kids were a lot less stupid than most adults thought. She'd notice the evasiveness.

"As for me, that's, uh, that's the million dollar question right now: whether or not I'm a superhero anymore. I used to be." He drew in a deep breath. "I used to be a good one. Died saving the world once - I came back, obviously. I don't know if your world full of superheroes has that revolving door o' death thing, but in ours, death doesn't always stick."

Edited 2014-11-10 07:15 (UTC)

"Sometimes they come back," she says. "Not always, but I know about some of them that did."

She tilts her head a little, questioningly, and looks up at him. "How come you don't think you are anymore? Don't you want to still help people?"

"See, uh -" Man this was awkward, especially explaining it to a kid. Once again, he considered evading stuff, but with her apparently distrust of adults, he didn't like that idea.

He wanted the people here to trust him - or at least trust that they knew what he was, whether they liked him or hated him for it. He didn't want to hide it, even if it made him ashamed, because he deserved to feel ashamed.

"There was this big crisis, right? These two cosmic level baddies teamed up and started messing with time and space and it meant that my world and this other world full of superheroes got pulled into this massive crisis. So us and these other worlds' superheroes, we teamed up to fight the bad guys together in this weird place where time and space were all twisting up. Our memories are all fuzzy because time was so bendy but I'm pretty sure I was tangling with one of the main baddies when he knocked me clean out of the fight."

He drew in a deep breath.

"And the thing of it was, we won. Sort of. We stopped the bad guys, but we didn't win entirely, so both our world and the other world of superheroes merged into one in this huge catastrophe, where the population of the world doubled overnight - but at least both survived. All the heroes sort of fell back at different times because of the time-bendy stuff. A lot of them didn't even show up again in normal time and space for a whole year and a half because reality was so weird. Anyway, I got knocked out of the fight so hard I was one of the first to come back, a year and a half before everyone else. So, one second I'm fighting the bad guys and we're winning and next thing I know, I'm reeling because it feels like I got hit in the face with a truck and falling back to Earth, to the new combined world."

He briefly ground his teeth together.

"And I was one of the first to come back. You know, chronologically. So I was alone, with none of the other heroes to watch my back, and - and I was all beat up, lying in a crater. I was too hurt to fight anybody - and the government came for me before anyone else could help me. And they - they took me away and did a lot of stuff to mess me up and make me into a weapon. I couldn't leave, because they put this weird nanochain thingy in me that'd shock me from the inside if I disobeyed them. So, uh, so I was kinda stuck doing a lot of stuff they wanted me to do. Bad stuff."

Murderous, terrible, terroristic stuff, in the name of Uncle Sam. Mercifully, a lot of his targets had been criminals, military targets, and terrorists, but his handlers weren't exactly careful in helping him avoid collateral.

"Then I was brought here. So I don't know if I'm a superhero anymore. I don't know if I can be anymore, even though I'm gonna go back to helping people again now that I'm free. You don't just - you don't do that kinda stuff and get to pretend you're still one of the good guys, no harm done."

The first thing Molly did was hug him. Abruptly, tightly (though not super-powered tightly), and with as much emotion as she could pour into it from her tiny body.

Because that's awful.

And what was even awfuller, to her, is that he thought that made him not a superhero anymore. It didn't help that he reminded her of Victor, and all the stuff he had to figure out when he learned that Ultron was his dad, and that she adored Victor.

"You're totally still a superhero," she said firmly, into his shirt. "You totally are. Lots of superheroes get brainwashed or controlled or whatever, and once they get better, they get to be heroes again, so you do, too. And if anybody says you can't be, then... then... then I'll punch them, really hard!"

It didn't matter that she'd only met Kon a few minutes ago. He was cool and had a nice smile and gave her a high-five and was gonna be her sidekick (not that he knew that yet), and she was going to hug him until he smiled again, gosh darn it.

He breathed in a shuddered breath as she hugged him, his heart swelling with guilt and sadness and immediate, terribly powerful fondness.

What a good kid. Clearly this place knew what it was doing when grabbing good-hearted people, himself notwithstanding. He could tell he was gonna like this one. She reminded him a little bit of Lian Harper.

So he hugged her back, grateful for the kindness even if it was from a stranger, and understanding it for the generosity it was.

When he finally let go, he scratched the back of his head awkwardly, taking to the air again to discourage any future physical contact. Much as it'd been nice, he was still getting used to be touched in ways other than ones that hurt again. There was only so much physical contact he could take at a time.

"Would you believe it but it was my second time being controlled by someone else? I'm a clone and half my DNA came from Superman, who's like pretty much universally recognized as the greatest, nicest superhero in the world, and from his arch-nemesis, Lex Luthor, one of the worst supervillains that's ever lived. Luthor pulled a mind whammy on me once and triggered this control programming in my brain and had me attack my friends. I broke free from it but this whole thing recently was only entry number two in the 'Kon gets controlled by jerks and supervillains' series."

He'd only just finished dealing with the baggage from entry number one before all this business with Project: Gladiator started.

Molly wasn't too dense, thankfully. She hugged quickly and gladly, but the little "off the ground" thing was enough to clue her into "maybe no more hugs right now".

"My parents were evil supervillains, too," she said, matter-of-fact but in a resigned way. She tried to pretend, usually, that it didn't bother her, but she did miss them... kind of a lot. They hadn't been awful to her at all until the kids ran away. "They never mind controlled me, but they'd make me sleep, sometimes. They were psychic."

"That's rough." Especially with her being so young. "Did they raise you up in it or did they hide it?"

That made a difference, whether you were raised by lunatics or not. Or raised by anyone. He'd mostly raised himself, though Dubs had tried his best to guide him.

"They hid it. And then they killed somebody - me and Karolina didn't see it, but Nico and Chase and Gert and Alex did - to feed these big ugly demon guys who were gonna destroy the world except for us kids and start a new one, which is super gross because I guess that means we were supposed to kiss and have babies and stuff with the boys and ew." She made a face. Very, very disgusting, that thought. KISSING. Yuck.

"We ran away, though, and eventually the Gibbermen ate them, so we don't have to worry about them anymore. Just the rest of the grown-ups."

Poor kid. Poor kids, plural. His brows knitted in concern as he listened to her.

"What's wrong with the rest of the grown ups?"

"Well," Molly started. AH SOMEONE TO LISTEN TO HER RECITATIONS OF THINGS CHASE HAS SAID. "They don't think kids know anything, so they don't let us do anything, and they won't listen to us. They think because they're older they have all the answers and are sub... subjugating us based on our age."

She stopped, then shrugged. "That's what Chase says. Even the subjugated part, sometimes, and that's a pretty big word for him." She made fun of her big brother thing even when he wasn't here. Cold, Molls. So cold. "Really it's 'cause they never listen and they didn't help, and then they tried to split us up and send us to all sorts of different schools and foster homes and stuff really far away from each other, even though we were a family by then. And the Avengers - they're one of the big teams of superheroes who are kind of in charge, but they're stinkbutts - tried to take us away again, and they brought guys with guns to where we were living!" She throws her hands up to emphasize.

"So basically there are a couple of okay grown-ups but most of them aren't, so you can't really trust any of them," she finishes. She's mostly parroting at the end, though she does believe it to an extent. It's a lot easy to change her mind on an adult's trustworthiness than the rest of her family's.

"The adults in your universe sound stupid. The superheroes in ours would never - wait a second, the Avengers? You have the Avengers in your universe?"

Because, well, technically he was one. Not a real one, since the team was a sham, but he was one of Norman Osborn's New Avengers, along with all the psychos and supervillains that were masquerading as superheroes.

"You do too?" Molly asked, wide-eyed. "But there wasn't ever anything about earths crashing into each other or or or some guy named Superman or--"

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING. Somehow.

"They weren't from my original world but they were on the other world ours merged with. I'm actually technically a member of the New Avengers. If you can even call it that when most of them are criminals and psychos Norman Osborn put together. They even stole Cap's shield and were making me wave it around like that wasn't a major superhero faux pas."

He went on, "The actual good guys are a bunch of superheroes from my world working with leftover Avengers and people from various superteams from the other world. They call themselves the Defenders."

His face wrinkled in thought.

"I'm thinking I'm either from your future or my world merged with an alternate universe version of yours."

Edited 2014-11-10 08:51 (UTC)

[LN] The Princess returns in glory - or at least with enthusiasm

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