trans_9 | Coping at Ke'e Beach

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Coping at Ke'e Beach

So, what do you do when you find out you're going to die? Kon's seen how thrown Kal is from his death--but Kal comes back. Even if he doesn't believe it now, Kon knows this, and he knows that he's not likely to have the same thing happen to him. He's not Kal. The world doesn't need him like it needs Kal, so why would he come back?

Heh. The Good Ship Stacy: two good-as-dead Super-guys enter, one super-guy leaves.

...Okay, that's kinda not funny.

Superboy doesn't know if he can take his mentor's tack of playing it by ear and trying his best to help everyone else. He doesn't know if he can get over the whole feeling lost part of it to get to what he needs to do, and just deal with their situation here.

Even after all his talk to Tim of not avoiding people, Kon deals at first by avoiding the others. But it's just for a bit, just a little while, not like all that time he spent on the farm, hiding, after Luthor made him hurt everyone, and the difference is, he's not hiding from coping, or repressing, this is how he copes. He just doesn't like people to see the initial anger--and it is anger, that he expresses by punching robots in the Sensorium until his knuckles start to bleed.

Heh, and that leads to his other problem. Not enough sunlight. The stuff in the Sensoriums feels like the real deal, but it's obviously not, if he can't process it so that his powers stay at full super-levels, and the light that Will kid's been conjuring up for him is weak. He's going on empty now. He can be hurt.

And it just drives it home even more exactly how...mortal he is.

But if anyone comes looking for him and poke their head in the Sensorium, they'll find him not punching robots or moping and brooding. If they peek in, they'll see him sitting on a rock on a beach bathed in the glow of a Hawaiian sunset. He hasn't availed himself of holographic clothes, but his plantsuit is stripped down to his waist, and he's writing things on one of the media pads from the Media Library, a thoughtful look on his face.

"--Have I ever been sledding? No. Better put that on there..."

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression... is he at acceptance already? Maybe his general attitude of rocketing through his life at warp speed is benefiting him for once.

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"No. It's--"

Now he's getting a little annoyed.

"Lady, I'm five. I'm five years-old. I'm just artificially aged up. If that's what I die for, it means my life...I guess it means it meant something."

He goes on, "If I survive it, and my being willing to die for it, is why I can pull it off, it means my life means something, too."

Shaking his head, he finishes, "What's supposed to happen right beforehand... it means either way, I could die--or live--happy. And knowing I'm gonna do that just makes a lot of questions about myself go away."

Biting his lip a little, he tries very hard to figure out what he means.

"I've only lived five years and... it's not dying, it's what I'll be fighting for that makes it so I can be proud of my life, whether I die or not." He goes on, "What I'm supposedly going to do means people will be alive to remember. That's the part I'm proud of, and I'd be proud of it if I got to survive it."

Lyta offers him a sad frown.

"Your life doesn't mean something now?" she asked. "You have friends, Kon. From what I've seen, you have quite a few of them. And they all seem to care about you, and that's quite something."

Not having friends is something Lyta is familiar with, intimately.

"Why does whether you die saving the world, or just one person, or just tripping and falling down the stairs change any of that?"

"I kinda... well, I guess I wouldn't care if it was a dumb death too badly. I just don't wanna go like a chump, but I guess it wouldn't be too bad--if stuff wasn't the way it was when I left."

Scratching his head, he says, "The main thing is... I just wanna know the world'll go on after me. That all the people I care about will live. It's just comforting knowing even if I croak, I won't flub up and get everybody killed. I just... it's just a relief. I want them to all have a chance, even if I don't live to see it. And they will have a chance. I'm gonna lose my life, but I have have knowing my girlfriend survives, that my friends survive, that the people who take care of me make it. The world goes on, and apparently I'm gonna help it do that."

He can't really explain it adequately.

"It just...it feels like I'm losing less, because they're all going to be okay. All those innocent people will have a chance. It's comforting."

She nodded again. Meanwhile, all the rather disparaging things she'd said to Brainy--about Kon and the other superheroes--replayed in her head. It seemed that, in the midst of all the things she saw as 'screw ups', she'd forgotten that, despite their abilities, they were still people. Even if others had tried to point that out.

"No, I understand what you're saying," Lyta said. "Well, I'm not exactly an authority on it, and I know you didn't ask, but if you want my advice: I wouldn't do any of this alone. I mean, what's the point of experiencing all of this if you're not doing it with someone who'll remember doing it with you?"

"I guess." He snorts. "I guess I'd be a total hypocrite if I told Robin the same thing and did the opposite."

"I suppose that's one way of looking at it," Lyta replied. "For what it's worth, you've already given me a lot to think about."

Kon looks immediately confused.

"I have?"

"Yes, you have," she nodded. Folding her arms, Lyta turned and walked back over to the tree and sat back down on it, sucking in a deep breath as she steeled herself for her confession.

"After what happened with the roaches and the incident in medlab with Kal, I've been a little concerned," she said. "That you and your friends have been behaving recklessly and, given your obvious abilities, that you might be a danger to the rest of us."

"Well, duh. Superpowers plus teenage idiots typically equals Bad Thing."

He goes on, "The thing with Kal was different, though. He was confused--he just came from getting brained literally to death by Doomsday and it was only a freak thing that he survived it back home anyway. That was around when I was cloned from him. And I can tell you every one of us Supers has reacted to Brainy that way, at some point. It's a Brainiac-Super thing. Give the original Brainiac two seconds, and he's already taken you out, and he's got all the doofy clones and probes and stuff... and he just--he'll do whatever he wants to people. En masse. He just sees them as things. But Kal's usually not like that-- he's all calm and cool-headed, and super-responsible. He's a freakin' boy scout compared to the rest of us, most of the time. I've never seen him screw up once, my whole life--he always knows the right thing to do, he always protects everybody, he always makes sure no one gets hurt--the only problem is he can't be everywhere at once, you know?"

Shaking his head, he says, "Don't take my screw up with the Bugs as something we all do. Robin never screws up like that, neither does Cassie, and I think that Danny kid is used to soloing it because he's the only one in his world--you really do have to practice as a team to not trip over each other, just like any other team thing."

He scratches his neck. "I'm just an idiot sometimes--and I know that's bad, with how strong I am. I'm not really the best at being a hero--I'm trying to be a better one, though."

She nodded as he spoke. Maybe it was that he'd just confessed he knew he was going to die and wasn't trying to find a way out of it, maybe it was just his tone--which seemed incredibly genuine and apologetic, maybe it was that he didn't appear confidant that he would be able to change her mind, or maybe it was because, as an impetuous teenage boy with super powers, she expected Kon to be the worst possible offender that made what he had said resonate with her. She didn't know. Whatever it was, it did. Even if Kal and Brainy had tried to tell her the same thing, something about the way Kon had said it--in an almost self-deprecating manner--had made her finally hear it.

"Maybe you're right," Lyta finally admitted. "Maybe I'm being a little harsh."

"If you wanna harsh on somebody, harsh on me, 'cause, um, I totally blew it with the Bug thing."

He rubs his neck.

"Which, honestly, makes the whole 'you're going to die saving the world' thing just a little surprising, with the actual saving the world part, but perhaps the sucking is what explains the dying."

"I doubt it," Lyta replied. She eyed the boy for a few moments before asking: "Do you mind if I tell you a story?"

"...Sure, I guess." He's listening.

Lyta settles into her seat.

"Where I come from, about twenty years ago, Earth had just come out of a war with a race called the Dilgar. They were barbaric. They invaded the League of Non-Aligned Worlds and massacred and tortured billions in the process. None of the other major powers would do anything. So, Earth intervened. A few years later, Earth had won, the Dilgar were all dead after their home world was destroyed when their sun went nova, and the League looked to Earth as their savior, their protector."

She continued, "Eventually, the government decided it was time to expand our sphere of influence, but before they did, they wanted to make sure that none of the other major powers were going to get in the way. So, they sent an expedition to system just outside the territory of a race called the Minbari. We didn't know a lot about them at the time. They were isolationist, even the races that had met them before had had dealings with them in years. But, we wanted to make sure they wouldn't intervene, so we sent the expedition.

"When it arrived, it encountered a Minbari fleet and, not realizing that the Minbari opened their gun-ports as a sign of respect, our fleet captain open fire inadvertently killing their spiritual leader, Dukhat. We were at war again. Our arrogance had led us back into war. Only, this time, it was different. This was not the Dilgar. Next to the Vorlons, the Minbari were the oldest, most powerful space-faring race in the galaxy. Their technology was at least a thousand years ahead of our own.

"And to make it worse, we were alone. No one was willing to challenge the Minbari on our behalf. To do so would be suicide. So we faced them alone. One by one, the Minbari fleet tore through the outer colonies, wiping out defenses that had taken years to build in a matter of minutes. No ship that confronted them was ever heard from again. In four years of war, of fighting for the very survival, we only ever destroyed one Minbari ship.

"We didn't stand a chance. We'd lost the minute that captain ordered his batteries to open fire. No matter how hard we fought, no matter how much we tried, we couldn't beat them. We tried to surrender and they ignored us. We begged and we pleaded for mercy and, still, nothing. Earth was going to fall. We were going to die. The human race was going to end.

"So, we only had one choice. Keep fighting. And that's what we did. We were defeated. We were already dead. But we made them pay for every inch of space. We made them pay for every planet, every outpost, every colony. Until they reached Earth. We knew we were going to die but we still fought anyway. Every ship capable of fighting was sent to stand between Earth and the entire Minbari fleet. None of them expected to come back. Survival wasn't an option. Their only goal was to delay the inevitable. To give us time so as many civilians as possible to could get off the planet and escape into safety in neutral territory."

She paused then.

"It takes a lot more bravery, a lot more heroism, to go into a fight that you know you're going to lose than it does to go into one you actually stand a chance of winning."

"Just because you might lose more than the others doesn't mean that you're less than they are. In fact, it might make you more."

Kon sits there quiet for a moment, and then chews on the nail of his thumb, mulling it over. The relative indifference he'd been projecting drops, and he looks up, his eyes just a little glassy, and at once it's apparent how much all this has really gotten to him, how much he just... he just wants to be more than he is right now, and how daunting the prospect is that he such little time to be it.

Kon'd come into the world in such a strange way, and because of it, he wonders so many things. He'd wonders how it was he managed to grow his own soul (if it's as small as Raven said, does that mean he didn't have one at the beginning?), wonders if he's a real person and who he really is, wonders at his worth, wonders if he's rotten from the inside out because of where he really comes from--half a good man, half an evil one.

Ma Kent said the world needed a Superboy, and he believes it. He knows he can be what he wants to be, he doesn't have to be Luthor's lackey "son"--he wants to choose Kal's way, and make it his own way.

Still... can someone half-cloned from one of the worst supervillains in the world really save it?

"You really think so?" asks the Boy-Who-Might've-Been-Superman.

"Yes, I do," Lyta said. And she meant it. Despite the distrust and the awful accusations that she'd made against Kal, Kon, Brainy, and the other superhero kids, she meant this. Her mind had been, at least, opened to the idea that she may have jumped to judgment too quickly.

"I have an idea. I may be able to help you, at least, with Brainy's cooperation," she then said. "I don't know a lot about cloning but if you were cloned in your universe like you said and if Brainy's from the future of your universe, I would assume that he does.

"Before we leave here--if we leave here--I might be able to copy your memories and your personality into a clone of you. Maybe we could send him back with Paco, since he's obviously from a point after you've died."

She pauses.

"It's not exactly ethical...but it's there if you want it."

At 'Maybe we can help you,' he perks up.

At the cloning, he looks shocked, enraged, and a little disgusted.

"No way! You can't just play with a clone's life like that! I couldn't steal its life away to force it to be me! How can you even suggest that?"

Despite being a clone, he has a thing...about frivolous cloning. And you can't copy a soul.

Even then, what about the soul the clone would develop on its own? Stealing its life away for his?

No. Never.

"'Not exactly ethical'--that's evil."

Lyta is quiet as she thinks over Kon's reaction. Finally, she nods slowly.

"You're right, it is," she admits. "I don't even know what the hell I was thinking... Now who's the reckless one?"

He still looks a little suspicious of her apology and looks back at his little To-Do-or-Die list.

"I kinda want some alone time now," he says sullenly.

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Coping at Ke'e Beach

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