ya_assemble | [LN] The Princess returns in glory

Entry tags:

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

She'd been home.

Molly had been home, she knew that much, but for almost no time at all - enough to wake up from her nap and recognize that she was in the Leapfrog, Victor and Chase arguing about something up front and Karolina laughing at them. It was a little stuffy and the seat vibrated a little and there was that slight tug at her stomach as they Leapfrogged homewards--

And then she was at the North Pole, dumped unceremoniously onto a pile of teddy bears, to the surprise of one of the Yetis. She blinked at him for a moment, then scrambled out of the pile and took off running. The elves that saw her immediately started trying to follow her, excited to have their fellow toy-tester back, and it was that... rather unique tableau that she presented to anyone who happened to be watching as she raced upstairs looking for people she recognized.

"NICOOOOOOO!"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"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)

"That is so cool!" Molly said, then made a face. "I mean, no it's not, 'cause that all sucks a lot, but you're from maybe my future or something, and that's so cool!"

She bounced a little. "The X-Men were my favorite before they were big jerks and tried to make me live in some mutant school. Were there any X-Men?"

"Yeah, a couple of 'em."

He thought back to all the profiles they'd made him memorize (in case he had to kill them all.)

"I remember reading casefiles on some dude named Beast, the Phoenix, and some dude named Cyclops was catching the government's eye in San Fran. Phoenix was the only one on the Defenders."

"I know them!" Molly cheered. "Well, okay, I don't KNOW them, but they were on my X-Men!"

"Wow, I wonder if it's our earth. Oh! If it's in our future, maybe we can try to rescue you after it happens and you come back!" She sounded so utterly delighted by that idea. "Then maybe we can change the future and you won't ever have to do things you don't wanna!"

"Ah, having been on more than one little jaunt up and down the timeline, I don't know that that'd be a good idea. Especially with the big crisis fight. Change anything with me and maybe that changes that I was there in the fight, you know? Doing my part. Too risky. Besides, you could be from an alternate one."

As much as he wished he could erase it all, he'd had his fair share of time travel shenanigans with the Legion. He knew how risky all that was.

And it said a lot about his character that he was willing to go through that kind of suffering if it meant not risking the fate of two worlds.

"It doesn't matter, anyway, I'm free now and if that nanochain thing wasn't already destroyed by me turning into a myth, I can find some way to get it out before I go back. Some...spell or something. If I go back without that, they can't control me anymore. I can fly off to the good guys, tell 'em what the government did to me, and we can take 'em down."

"Well, we'll see!" Molly said blithely. "I guess we'll try to make sure we don't break anything, though, if it does happen in my universe."

No promises on the attempted rescues, though. She's 12, there are more important things to worry about.

"Ooooo, a spell? You should talk to Nico, she's got this really cool staff that can do anything! I bet she could get rid of the nanothingy if you still have it."

"Yeah? That might work. I've got invulnerability but one thing that can usually put the whammy on me despite it is magic."

He drew in a deep breath at the thought of that.

"Then I'd be home free. Which isn't just good for me, it's good for everyone. The government had me hunting down anyone they didn't like, anyone messing with the system, even when they were doing it for good reasons and picking at all the corruption. I was always trying to flub up to let them run away and make it look like an accident. Like all the aliens they were trying to make disappear."

"That's good!" Molly exclaimed, enthusiastically. Look, she was trying to be encouraging, and look at how hard he worked to get around the evil government people! "That's super heroic, you know. It's like only doing what your parents TECHNICALLY tell you to do, like getting in bed but not going to sleep, only actually important."

She bounced on the balls of her feet excitedly. "I bet even if she can't do it right away, Nico can totally figure out how to get rid of it! And if she can't, probably Sam or somebody could, so you're totally in the right place!"

"It also means I'd be able to expose the bad guys behind it all and get them out of the government."

Her enthusiasm was contagious. Finally, he could stop being the bad guy. He could fight the actual bad guys again.

It meant he was forgetting his audience and the fact she was a little kid. He was so used to being in the thick of it, forgot what it was like to be around people, forgot that violence wasn't a normal part of life.

"It'll be such a relief. There've been way too many close calls with the stuff they nearly had me do. Like the time I almost killed that Majesdanian chick. Luckily her Skrull girlfriend jumped in and forcefielded me in the face before I had to snap her neck. I mean, I'm pretty sure she survived, at least, she was hurt pretty bad. Too many close calls -"

Molly wouldn't really bat much of an eyelash at that statment, honestly, if it wasn't for six words: Majesdanian chick and her Skrull girlfriend. Sure, it could be different people.

But it probably wasn't, and even if she'd been thinking of that, Molly would still have assumed--

"That's Karolina and Xavin!" she yelps. "They made you attack Karolina and Xavin?!"

She's not mad or upset at him, for what it's worth - just startled, and mad at the government. Just goes to show you can't trust grown-ups, clearly. But that's a nuance that Kon probably won't pick up on.

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

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)