ya_assemble | [LN] Candy Mountain [locked to Molly]

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[LN] Candy Mountain [locked to Molly]

"So let me get this straight, you're gonna spread around on the internet that we're real to get kids to believe in us?"

Right now, Raph and Molly were seated on the floor of Jamie Bennett's room. In a rare show of trust, Nico had actually let Raph take Molly by himself, as her magic was needed on a mission. The caveat had been, of course, that they had to go to Jamie's house - which was warded all to hell and back - and come right back to the Pole after, but Raph still understood the signifance of it - and the unspoken threat of retribution that would happen if he didn't bring Molly back safe and sound.

Jack had arranged for them to talk to Jamie - insisted on it, in fact - since Jamie was the primary believer of all the new otherdimensional myths being pulled in. More than that, Jamie was the one trying to spread belief of them around so that they had more believers than him.

At the moment, he was trying to explain the nature of belief and what he could do for them - and what he couldn't do.

"How many kids that believe in stuff even use the internet?"

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"What tools?" asked Raphael. "And if you are giving us tools, you'd better not be giving them to just me and Molly. This sounds like an all-hands-on-deck kinda thing."

Especially since some of this might be dangerous. There was no way they were going to force Molly - or let her, given how willing she was - to go into dangerous situations all the time to fix reality falling apart.

Molly nodded agreement with Raph's all-hands-on-deck comment. "Yeah! There's loads of people back at the Pole that'll help! And anyway, Nico'll get really mad if I have to do universe-savey stuff that she can't help with."

Well, it's true.

"Check your hands."

Death snapped her fingers and all of a sudden a glowing mark appeared on both Raph and Molly's hands. They didn't hurt at all. At most, they felt just a little bit warm.

"Those brands on your hands are very special. Whenever one of the shards falls into a nearby universe, you'll be able to use them to open a door and track it down. They'll also let you open the door back to the Guardians' dimension. All of the Guardians and new Guardians have been given them too - you'll need to be the ones to explain what they are and how to use them. Anytime a new myth joins you, they'll receive one, too. They'll be invisible whenever you will them to be. And you can make them look like whatever you want."

Edited 2015-01-22 06:04 (UTC)

Raph looked at his hand, the sigil transforming to look like the symbol of Master Splinter's clan.

He practiced willing it to appear and disappear.

"Thank you for letting us personalize the thing we have to use to throw ourselves into even more danger, we appreciate it."

He gave Death a stony stare.

"So, what now? Reality broke, how do we fix it?"

Edited 2015-01-22 06:09 (UTC)

Molly stuck her tongue out a little, and made it look like a unicorn, then a rainbow. But, despite... well, a lot of issues with the X-Men, she finally settled on the X-Men's logo, for now, at least.

What? Wolverine might be a jerk, but they were still her heroes in a way.

"How do we open up doors with them?"

"You have to think up a happy thought and click your heels together."

When she saw Raph's flat look, she laughed.

"I'm joking. Just give it a good think and a door will open where you need to go. The shard can look like anything but the brands will help guide you in the right direction. Once you find it, you just have to make it back to the door and it'll snap back into place. The good news is no time will pass while you're gone. The bad news is time will still pass where you are. The brand will give you hunches on how much time you have left. If you don't return the shards in time..."

"Then everything goes some variation of 'boom.'"

Raph held out his hand and an intricate door suddenly appeared and opened. Light spilled in from beyond it.

He fixed a look at Death and then looked around at the many strange entities staring down at them.

"No pressure or anything."

"We can do it, just you watch!" Molly said, then grabbed Raph's hand, tugging him to (and through) the door. "We'll save the world Miss Death, we're superheroes!" She called over her shoulder.

And then they were through the door and gone, into whatever world awaited them.

"I don't doubt it," Death said with one last smile and then the door clicked shut.

It was still there, though, so they had a way out to return to.

Raph was very glad they had a door out. So glad. Immeasurably glad.

Because the world they'd just walked into was made of candy. It was a multi-colored riot of confectionary delights, from the lollipop trees to the hard candy blades of grass to the peppermint cobblestones.

The marzipan birds on the lollipop trees were singing. Not bird song, actual singing.

"Tra la la lally! We love our sweet valley!"

Raph stood there, an eye twitching.

"I'm going back to the empty nothingness between universes," he said, pointing at the door. "You've got superstrength, you got this."

He made no move to actually do it, though. All jokes aside, he wasn't leaving Molly alone.

Molly laughed gleefully, hands clasped under her chin as the magenta glow left her eyes. The singing marzipan birds, and little gumdrop-like butterflies fluttering over flowers made of spun sugar, and the smell of sugar in the air.

It was sugar. Rush. HEAVEN.

"This is so super cool!" She squealed and bounced a little, then tugged on Raph's hand, more gently without her powers active. "Come on, doofus, we've gotta find the universe piece!"

Raph rolled his eyes skyward and then clamped a hand over his face, shaking his head.

"Fine. But I refuse to be delighted by anything."

He still held her hand though, not really wanting to let her get too far. For all they knew, they were going to get attacked by giant licorice wasps any second now.

His experience with alternate worlds that had cute things in them had told him that cute sometimes could be deceptive. Very deceptive.

As deceptive of sugar-sweet smiles and bunny rabbit hats, sometimes.

"It's okay, you don't have to like it. Chase wouldn't, either. Do you think they're really alive, or if it's just magic?"

She peered into flowerbeds and down at a stream full of cola (that they crossed via a bridge of shortbread) and at basically everything surrounding them as they followed the draw of their new brands down the path, fascinated by the fact that literally everything seemed to be actually made of candy and sweets of some sort.

And she didn't even try to let go of Raph's hand.

Of course, it didn't take long before she got a little bored and started thinking something other than the candy she was entirely sure Raph wouldn't let her eat.

"Are you in love with Nico?"

If Raph had been drinking something (like said cola in the cola stream) he'd have sputtered it out all over himself.

"What? No!" he declared, waaaay too defensive about it. Technically, the 'no' was true. 'In love,' was such strong, strong wording. "We're just, you know, friends. Really good friends."

Friends that hung out every day, lounged around half-cuddling, and stole away different places to talk about their feelings well into the night.

He was just her friend...who sometimes stared at her when she wasn't looking like his heart was full to bursting.

"Come on, you're her friend, right? You and her and your friends are like a little family. She's easy to be friends with."

Molly rolled her eyes dramatically.

"Older kids are weird," she declared. "I don't get it. Also she's kind of mean sometimes if she doesn't know you." So no, Raph, she wasn't just easy to be friends with.

"Anyway, she likes you and you like her, and I guess that's cool. Just, the last time she got smoochy with somebody, she ended up crying a lot."

She slipped her hand out of Raph's, but didn't go running off or anything, just laced her fingers behind her back. She was very very innocent, she just didn't like Nico crying, right? She was just saying she was worried Nico might cry again, right?

"Ooo! Did you know?" she started, turning to walk backwards, facing Raph. "That one time we were fighting some bad guys, and one of them hurt Nico? And I punched him so hard he landed a block away!"

She beamed at him a bit.

It was totally unrelated, honest!

"She is totally easy to be friends with - it's just you have to not be a terrible person."

As for her liking him? Eh. As a friend, sure, but there was no way she dug him in any other way than that. No way. But before he could ask Molly anything about it, she mentioned Nico crying and dropped that little line about hurting Nico.

Raph narrowed his eyes.

"You just threatened me."

Had Molly just gone along acting all cutesy forever he might not have gotten suspicious at all of her general cheer and adorableness. But he was a naturally suspicious person, raised to be cunning and tactical, and while Leo was better at it on the whole, Raph was the one that was the least naive and the best at figuring out deception.

He'd been suspicious of Karai all that time, hadn't he? And even when she had Leo convinced, he knew she was planning on betraying them - and he'd been right.

Now, he'd been hesitant to let that suspicion go when it was finally time to, but he'd given it up in the end, and been willing to help save her from Shredder and willing to search for her after he'd been mutated. But his intial instincts at the time she was most deceptive had been right on the money.

So, it was with the kind of suspicion that one needed when fighting the masters of deception that ninjas were that suddenly fixed itself on Molly.

"How old are you again?"

He hadn't really ever been around little kids but he'd been one himself and his brain was feverishly working its way backward, trying to remember what he and his brothers had been like at various ages.

"Uh-huh!" she grinned and bounced a bit, and turned back around, letting him catch up so she could fall into pace next to him.

"And, um.... well, I was twelve when I first came here, but it was almost my birthday, so... I'm probably 13 by now!" She's very proud of that age. A teenager! Though she intends to avoid all smooching ever.

"I remember what me and my brothers were like at thirteen." He leaned in closer and narrowed his eyes, still walking along beside her. "Since it was all of three years ago."

He was at that age where he wasn't so far off from childhood to forget what it was like but old enough to have a sense of people and himself.

"If you're going to outright threaten somebody who fights ninjas on a day to day basis; you pretty much might as well drop the cutesy act while doing it. Me and my brothers have had people deceive and manipulate us tons of times to try to get in close to kill us."

A lot of Molly's shenanigans seemed sincere but this made it clear not all of the cuteness was and when he looked at all the little pieces, when he really thought about her age, when he thought about how that adorableness could be used to manipulate...

"Because we're ninjas that fight ninjas and deception's pretty much the standard ninja MO." Which was why he was now critiquing her. "If you want to threaten someone but not break character with the cutesy thing you should just drop something like 'you better not be mean to her, I have superstrength, Mister Turtle' and leave it there. But you went a little too dark on the imagery and drew attention to it. Cutesy kids don't threaten to drop kick people a whole block, they keep it simple because they don't understand intimidation needs something solid and scary behind it."

Edited 2015-01-22 08:47 (UTC)

"Oh, I'd kick you way further than a block," Molly assured him, completely seriously and still in that bright chipper tone.

"Anyway, I usually don't gotta threaten anybody, usually they're already threatening us so I just punch 'em."

She paused for a moment, considering what he said. It was true, she kind of went overboard, but to be honest, she was kind of banking on the idea that her being more outright threatening while sounding like a bubbly little kid would be kind of creepier than a cute little threat. Still, it was worth keeping in mind.

In case she needed to pull it out in the future, or in front of Nico.

"I'll remember that next time, though," she finished serenely.

"Intimidating message received but you won't have to worry about it," he promised her. "If someone ever tried to hurt Nico, I'd be right in line with you to hurt them back."

Tenfold.

But now he was curious.

"I'm guessing a lot of that's how you really are - just like Mabel - but why the act when you're being serious?" Raph asked her candidly.

Her grin dropped, really dropped, while she thought about that. It was amazing how much more grown-up she looked without the sugar and the wide eyes. There were a lot of reasons, but...

"Well, mostly 'cause I think Nico and the others back home would all completely freak out," she said, nodding to herself as if agreeing with her own point. "If I was just suddenly not acting like me, they might think something was wrong."

"Yeah, but obviously that's not you."

Like, super obviously, given the sudden change right in that moment. There she was looking just as serious as him and his brothers sometimes were. ~~Minus her eyes going white and narrow.~~

"Or at least the cheerful little kid thing isn't always you. Nico's pretty open about when she's angry or threatening someone so I don't know why you can't b - oh." He just got it. "Oooooh, I get it."

Oh, wow, the implications of that were pretty terrible.

"You're not showing off that side of yourself so they can feel like they were able to protect you from it all, aren't you. That's probably all they wanna see, so they're ignoring how you can't go through all that life or death stuff and still just be a goofy little kid all the time."

A pause.

"Unless you're Mikey, but my brother is a weirdo." A pause. "And we were trained pretty much from when we mutated to be able to handle life or death stuff. Totally different thing when you're trained to handle it."

Molly made a face that was almost back up to her normal levels of adorable - wrinkled her nose and stuck her tongue out at him. "Well, I guess you're not super dumb or anything."

She didn't say anything more for a minute as they walked, kicking a rock candy pebble down the path in front of her. She didn't have to talk to Raph about it. She didn't have to talk to anybody about it. Or, conversely, she could talk to Bunny, or Jack, or maybe Tooth. It didn't have to be now.

Except... honestly it was kind of a relief that he'd called her on it. And the idea of talking about it was enough that the words just started tumbling out almost on their own.

"They all tried so hard, you know? And it was just a little bit at first, so it wasn't a big deal, but..." But life went on. Life got harder. She grew up, fast, but couldn't let anyone know. "I mean, I know I can't do it forever, and it's not all pretend, but it's just... They tried so hard. Even Chase. The only one who really tried to help me deal with stuff was Gert, but I didn't..."

She sighed. "I didn't realize I needed her to, and then she was gone. And Nico and everybody just tried so hard to keep me from knowing about the worst stuff, but I'm not stupid or anything, and I'd listen in on them sometimes, and... and I do like ponies and my cute animal hats and stuff, so it's not totally a lie, and they'd all be so upset if they realized it didn't work." She looked at Raph sidelong, not quite meeting his eye, and then back down. "So much stuff got screwed up and didn't work, and I figured I could be the thing that did"

Raph shook his head.

"You can't be responsible for their happiness, though, kiddo. It's not fair to you that you can't just be yourself. There's a lot that comes with dealing with bad stuff, that comes of being the kind of person that would drop kick someone a couple blocks that you have to learn to deal with and work through, you know? Trust me - out of my brothers, I'm the one that's most okay with caving people's faces in and there's stuff I have to deal with that they don't, that my dad always helped me work through. You know, when he was alive."

A pause.

"Nico and I talk about it now. And I wouldn't be able to work through that stuff or talk to a friend about it if it was always a secret. With it not being a secret, with being myself, I can deal with it by talking about it to someone. Or my brothers can help me with it even if I have trouble talking about it with them. Like Mikey knows how to help me work through it even if we don't really talk about what's going on."

He knew the right times to hug, the right times to play video games, the right times to try to make him laugh. Because he knew Raph. Because Raph was himself and that meant the people he loved knew when and how to help him deal with some of the struggles that came of being himself.

"It'll hurt 'em more if it goes on and someday you have a moment where you just have to be yourself. Where you do have to dropkick someone a couple blocks. How do you think they'll feel if you wind up in that place and have to be true to yourself in that moment and all of a sudden they realize they already lost that fight a long, long time ago?"

She shrugged a little, drooping. He was right, of course. It's not like they wouldn't figure it out eventually, but...

"I could just wait a year or two and then get really angsty! Teenagers do that a lot because of hormones. And then they wouldn't have to know, either!" It was a very bad plan.

She knew it was a bad plan.

"I'll figure something out," she amended, only slightly more realistically. "I always have so far."

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