The Ones That Walk Away From Omelas

[isahellofadrug]

The last thing Robbie wanted to deal with right now was this nonsense. The world had gone kerboom and then...un-kerboomed and everything was a mess. The new world they were facing had strange faces no one had seen before and a lot of broken things to deal with in the aftermath.

Now was not the time for him to be stuck doing some stupid interdimensional adventure.

Yet here he was in an alley in a town that looked all old-timey, like something out of Lord of the Rings.

Oh well. He guessed he just had to deal with it and get it over with as best as he could. Once this little adventure was over, he could work on getting home.

"'Undo the injustice at the heart of Omelas,' care to vague that up a bit, Timebroker?" Robbie muttered to himself.

He'd been told by the Timebroker that he wasn't doing this alone, that someone from his world would be doing it with him. When he heard that he figured on Vance or one of his teammates, or someone like Spider-Man or the Thing (since they sure got around).

So when he looked around to see who'd vorped here with him he definitely wasn't expecting --

"...Rina?"

Oh no. No no no. After Stamford, someone he'd once had a little crush on was the last person he wanted to be stuck with. It was his fault she'd been chased by mobs and it was public knowledge now that Robbie Baldwin and the freak in the gimp suit known as Penance were one and the same.

His face turned a bright shade of red as he stood there facing her in the alley and the way he shrank away from her was filled with shame. He cast his gaze to the ground, as if he felt he didn't even have the right to look her in the eyes.

Comments

[dekhnewali]

The Tallus couldn't have been a set of pretty red glass bangles? The thing that Rina Patel had been given was huge, clunky. Technological. Sure, give the Indian girl the piece of tech.

One of the last things she'd remembered had been her lost powers slowly coming back...followed by being chased by an angry mob. Her powers hadn't returned fully enough for her to actually be able to fend them off either.

But then things had happened - as Rina had learned that they did - and here she was, out of time and space, to help someone on a mission.

Out of everyone, she hadn't been expecting Robbie.

Cheeks flushed, and eyes lowered. For the briefest of moments, she felt like Kajol in the second half of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, faced with a man she'd once cared for.

Then she remembered that she wasn't a Hindi film heroine but an Indian superheroine and her gaze snapped up again.

"It's a small multiverse, isn't it?"

[isahellofadrug]

Robbie risked a tiny glance up at her. Okay, she wasn't yelling, she wasn't looking at him like he was a freak. On the downside, she wasn't looking at him at all. He didn't blame her. He looked away again before she looked up.

There were things he had to say. Important things. But he also couldn't say them and face her at the same time so he turned away from her, his back to her, and pressed himself against the nearby wall, leaning his head against the cold brick, looking as if he wanted to be absorbed into it.

"I heard from Vance that people chased down other New Warriors. That Carlton --" here his voice was filled with hatred because even though it was his own actions that brought hate down on everyone, they wouldn't have found them if Carlton hadn't betrayed them, and he hated him for it "--exposed a bunch of your secret IDs."

He closed his eyes tight, expression pained.

"But he never would've done it in the first place and no one would've gone after you guys if I hadn't brought all that hate down on you all. I'm the one that did that. I ruined some of your lives."

One more group of people hurt among many. Rina was one more friend he'd let down among many. He'd been feeling a little better lately, especially after finding a good psychiatrist and getting on medication that didn't leave him sedated in a padded room not knowing who he even was, but seeing someone he'd hurt yanked him back into a dark place at about a million miles per hour. It made everything that had happened with Miriam Sharpe and Stamford and all those small towns he'd helped fade away so they were lost in the black morass of all the wrong he'd done.

He always felt this way when he faced someone he'd hurt.

There was an ugly little voice in his head sometimes, the one that always chimed up with all the terrible things other people'd said he was.

Babykiller. Murderer. Monster. Scum.

Right now it said, Your fault. You hurt her, you messed up her life and put her in danger because now people know her secret ID and nothing can take it back. She spent all that time trying to save your life when you were just a stranger and all she got back in return was pain. That's all you're good for, hurting people.

"I'm sorry." His voice cracked. "I was the only one that deserved to be hurt but I brought all that down on you. I'm sorry."

He didn't even realize 'I was the only one that deserved to be hurt' was a sick thing to say. He'd internalized too much hatred for himself, still thought it was normal for the rest of the world to think he deserved to suffer. It wasn't always this way -- sometimes he even forgave himself for a little while -- but when he fell face first into the dark places in his head, he went right back to that place of feeling like he deserved suffering.

[dekhnewali]

"To be fair, it's not like I wore a mask," Rina said lightly. "Eventually, the internet being what it is, someone was going to figure out who I was." Which was the truth. She wasn't someone like Spider-Woman who hid behind a mask. And how many Indian superheroines were there running around, anyway? Wearing one might have been a smart decision, but it was too late to do anything about it now anyway.

Tentatively, Rina took a few steps towards him, reaching out to place a hand on his shoulder, before letting it drop. He was being hard on himself, and though she knew that human contact was soothing when in pain, she also something of what he'd been through, and she didn't know where their boundaries lay. They were facing each other after a very long time, after all.

"You can't take all the blame for yourself on this. I don't know what it is that I can say here, Robbie, that you haven't heard before. But look at this, our world. Not the one we're currently standing in, of course," she said, looking around, "but the one we're from. Probablility. This was going to happen at some point." She sighed softly and crossed her arms. She'd wondered, since the incident, if she could have done anything to change. Maybe, if she'd still had the full functionality of her powers, she could have seen the incident and warned someone.

But such thoughts were useless. Her mother had always said that certain things were fated to happen, that no matter how hard one tried to avoid a fate, it wouldn't be avoid. Fixed disasters in time or something.
"I don't blame you for any of it."

[isahellofadrug]

He finally turned to face her and when he did, a few tears dribbled down from his eyes, silently, and he had to lift his goggles up to wipe them away. Even he couldn't tell if they were because of guilt or quiet relief or some complicated mix of both.

He'd been doing a lot of crying lately. Dr. Kinderman had said it was because of the combination of the medications working and him no longer repressing everything. It was finally safe enough to not be numb and after so long of feeling nothing, sometimes it seemed like he felt everything. And it hurt.

But at the same time it also felt better, finally processing things or feeling whatever he felt and then letting it go. That left room for feeling things that weren't pain. That kept the world in color instead of gray.

He couldn't let himself feel like he wasn't all to blame, not yet, but he tried to accept the fact she didn't blame him. The guilt weakened and ebbed away, and his brain clawed itself out of the pit, and what was left in place of the pain and darkness was fondness.

He managed a tiny smile, even if it was a little weak, and moved towards her slightly, out of old instinct, as if he wanted to hug her, but then his hands curled up and he stopped, hesitating. He was used to most people not really wanting him to touch them now.

"I don't know about any of that, about it not being all my fault. I'm still...working through some stuff." He looked at her gratefully. "But as far as probability goes, I gotta say, the universe tossing me together again with you instead of, say, one of the Great Lakes Avengers? I like them odds. I just wish it was under better circumstances than this."

His tone went a little more glib, the way it used to be, "You know. Like ones with less interdimensional kidnapping. Maybe more riding in spaceships and doing barrel rolls."

He twirled his finger around in a little loop. One of his favorite memories of Rina had been the two of them horsing around in their little ship while waiting to confront Volx, cracking Star Wars jokes and making Garthan Saal flip out at them.

As he stood there, he clenched and unclenched his hands like he was dying to throw his arms around her. Everything about his body language was screaming that he wanted to hug her, wanted to show her how glad he was to see her, wanted to be hugged by a friend.

[dekhnewali]

"Ish. Come here, Robbie," Rina said softly. She walked up to him, gentle steps, and pulled him into a hug. Given their history, she was trying very hard to make the hug come across as one of platonic comfort, but feelings - given what they could be - there was probably more coming across in that hug than just simple friendship.

If it lasted longer than she was comfortable with, it didn't show. Possibly because the hug felt all-too-natural. She pulled away from it and gently caressed his cheek. "Take all the time you need to work through your stuff. No one expects you to bounce back right away. You need time to heal, to think, to stop blaming yourself. There were so many events and..." she froze and bit her tongue. "I'm sorry, I don't want to dredge up any bad memories. But I'm also not going to let you wallow and feel sorry for yourself, cowering under the blame for all that happened. You have very capable shoulders, but they aren't responsible for bearing all of the weight. You don't see it now, but you will." Smiling, she added, "Really, I think that Flatman would have come quite in handy." Granted, The only one on the GLA that Rina personally took very seriously was Squirrel Girl, and that's because she'd heard stories.

"We'll find a place to commandeer a space ship after this and have some fun, I promise. Maybe I'll even throw my hair up in precious little cinnamon buns," she laughed. "First, we just need to do what the Timebroker sent us here to do. Whatever it is he actually meant by that."

[isahellofadrug]

A hug. An actual hug. For a second, he was almost positive he was hallucinating or something because hugs were such a rare thing in his life anymore. Sometimes Hummingbird hugged him and Vance would throw an arm around his shoulders but that was about it, and it didn't even happen that often. So when she hugged him, he hugged her back, warmly, gratefully, even resting his chin on her shoulder a bit.

It felt like it belonged there.

It felt so good to be touched again, in a way that wasn't painful. Even aside from the hurt he'd done to himself, so many people had hurt him. The people that beat on him and shanked him in prison. The man that shot him. Moonstone punching him into a wall at four hundred miles an hour...

No one had cared enough to cause him anything other than pain and the people who would've been kind to him, his friends, had no idea where he was during that time.

But aside from the desperate need for human affection, there was something else he gave in that hug, too. He'd thought Rina was cute from the start, and finding out all she'd done to try to save him during the time he was in the kinetic energy dimension had made him flirt like crazy with her back in the day. Maybe it was Darrion Grobe pretending to be him that she'd mostly gotten to know but when he got back and starting hanging out with her, he'd felt...a connection.

It felt like fate or something, that'd thrown them together the first time because of her vision. But then she'd lost her powers and had to deal with that, and he and the others had done the show, and then he hadn't been in a state to talk to anyone for a while...

But she was here now. Again. And if there was a little extra tenderness he put into the hug beyond "thank you for being a source of human affection and still being my friend" he could be forgiven for it, right? After all, this was the girl -- the woman -- who'd bent over backwards trying to save him. And now that he valued his life even less, it made her actions in trying to do it matter even more in his eyes.

Then she pulled away from him and...and caressed his cheek. Wow. And said things that very few people had said to him. Also wow. (He couldn't really take them to heart yet, but...wow.)

So by the time she got to talking about putting her hair up into the cinnamon buns, he was actually able to give her a genuine smile, wide and practically radiant. It was one of his old smiles.

"I still think that'd be a good look for you. Not that there'd be many bad looks for you."

And there he was, cheerful and goofy and even a little flirty. Apparently, he was there under all the pain and guilt and sadness and it was still possible for him to be him once he got past each of these dark moments.

He finally looked around again, thinking back to what the Timebroker had said.

"I don't think we're going to know what he meant until we look around. 'Undo the injustice at the heart of Omelas' is about as vague as the directions that come with cheap Swedish furniture. We have to find out what - or where - Omelas is."