trans_9 | Aloha Means Hello and Goodbye [closed]

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Aloha Means Hello and Goodbye [closed]

Relaxation time! What? He'd actually been training pretty hardcore using the Sensoriums lately. He'd earned the break as far as he was concerned.

The door was left open in case any newbies wandered by, so he could helpfully show them the many holographic wonders of the Sensoriums, and hey, to meet some new people, just in general. That was always cool. Otherwise, Superboy was chilling hardcore, laying on a hammock under the Hawaiian sun, in just sunglasses and some board shorts (with a little S-shield on them, of course).

Not far off was the beach, the waves crashing away against the sand. The palm leaves made hushed rustling sounds in the wind.

"Stace, crank up the breeze just a bit?"

The sea breeze blew in just a little bit stronger and cooler, and Kon squirmed to get comfy in his hammock.

"Oh yeah. That's the stuff."

Hawaii was one of his favorite places to relax in the Sensoriums. Between that and Kansas fields, all his relaxation location needs were usually covered.

Still, he wasn't always in the mood for a good beach nap. Much as occasionally basking in the sun and trying to get into an aloha state of mind were beneficial, there were the bad memories tied to the islands that he never could quite get away from. It made visits something of a double-edged sword, though it helped that he always picked a location that wasn't quite like the beaches he went to most, or near the ol' compound.

Superboy wasn't quite sure why he'd picked the beach today, why it had called out to him, but it had. And it felt good to be here. And it hurt, as it always did, for what it reminded him of.

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Speaking of reminders, Tana wasn't sure why that... Gladys or whomever it was decided to snap her up the minute she fell out of her gooey pod naked, but the next few days where she ended up running around wildly and looking for other people had been an exercise in frustration.

She had seen some other people, but they were always just leaving a maze as she entered. Actually, maybe she shouldn't think of them so much as mazes. It made her feel like some kind of labrat.

So, when she continued to stumble around the ship, it didn't really surprise her that one of the doors she entered was totally Hawaii at its best. After all, she was dead, right?

Why wouldn't there be a Hawaii just smushed into it somewhere? It was home. Her plantsuit became a bikini, she could feel the sand in her toes. And off in the distance, swung a vaguely familiar figure.

Mostly because she remembered him a lot shorter, and a lot less... Well. She strode over to the relaxing occupant and looked down on him, hands on hips.

"Kid?" Well, she could be mistaken - but Tana was almost positive she wasn't.

At the sound of that word, said in that voice, Kon sat up so abruptly that he fell out of the hammock, glasses falling right off his face. Now in a pile at her feet, he looked up at her, expression stricken, astonished--and in the end, disbelieving.

Then that expression turned to one of disgust, not at her. No, he was disgusted with someone else.

"Stacy, that's not funny. I know you dig around in our subconscious sometimes for sims, but that's a never when it comes to her, okay?" he said to the ship, pretending Tana wasn't there. "Get rid of her."

Well, good to know she wasn't wrong, but God, the stab in the heart she felt was unpleasant and equally unexpected. Tana frowned at him, "Unless she's going to open up a hole in the beach and drop me through it, I'm not going anywhere."

Dammit, Stacy!

"Dammit, Stacy!" Standing up, Kon held up a hand to silence what he thought was an errant hologram. "Look, parading around a hologram of my dead girlfriend? Not freakin' funny, okay? I said turn it off!"

Nope, still there. This wasn't funny, this wasn't funny at all. It was sadistic is what it was.

"Fine, if you're gonna be that way, turn the whole sim off!"

It flickered off, and gone was the Hawaiian beach, the swaying palms, gone was his swimsuit, and in its place, his jeans tucked into space-age looking boots, and his specially made t-shirt he got on shore leave.

Tana's swimwear would flash back to the plantsuit, but... but she was still there.

"Stacy!" She was still there. "Stacy--Stacy, it's not--"

She was...

"Not funny..."

As realization came to him, Kon turned to look at Tana, eyes wide, looking all the world like he'd just been shot in the chest, and not only that, but like he was someone used to getting shot in the chest and having it bounce off but had been shot in the chest. There was pain there, and guilt, and regret, and maybe more than a little hope.

There'd just been a podpop, right? He hadn't seen her, but it was a big crowd, and maybe she'd wandered off to be nosy, maybe she'd run into GLaDoS, maybe...

Maybe it really was...

His voice, hushed, now deeper with age, rumbled quietly in his chest, and tears started to prick his eyes.

Edited 2011-01-13 06:54 (UTC)

If Tana had eyebeams, she was fairly sure that Kon would've been cartoonily barbecued. But she didn't, so she settled for glaring at the hand he'd put up to silence her.

It had always been hard to watch him hurt. Mostly because there wasn't anything she could ever do about it. That took some of the wind out of her sails. "It's me, Kid," she assured him. She glanced down at him, and back up. "You look... different." To put it lightly.

There was a moment longer where he just stared at her, eyes filling with tears, and then he staggered forward, and pulled her into a grip that was not unlike being hugged by some bending steel bars. She couldn't have escaped from that hug if her life depended on it.

He wound up collapsing to the floor of the Sensoriums with her in his arms, kneeling there, holding her close, burying his face in her neck, so that it was hidden by her hair.

That was when the crying started, and no attempted macho-ness, no force on Earth could stop it. It was quiet crying, to be sure, and mostly just little breathless gasps, but it was crying, and she had likely never even seen him openly cry like this before.

If she'd had any doubts at all that she'd died...

Then it was gone. Totally gone, and she leaned her head against his quietly as she took that in. It had just kind of been a running joke as she ran around the mazes and looked for a way out in the back of her head.

No... no, it hadn't. She remembered that sudden flash of searing pain, but there wasn't really anything else to go with it. She'd hurt, and then she'd woken up covered in alien snot. But, with the way he looked now... it must've been ages since then for him.

Tana wasn't sure which felt weirder, the fact that she had him crying into her hair, and couldn't feel it seeping through her plantsuit, or the fact he was crying at all. So, Tana did her best to soothe him, reaching up as best as she could to smooth a hand over his head, but when that failed, settled for murmuring in his ear. "Look, look. I'm... not sure what happened to me, but I'm here. It's okay, Kid. Everything's okay."

It was hard to talk, hard when he could barely breathe, but he managed to gasp out,

This had been with him for years, the pain of this. The guilt. The horror of seeing her die like that. In other fights, sometimes there were bad smells. Bad things happened sometimes, when superheroing, sometimes people got hurt, sometimes the smells, the smells were--and whenever he'd smelled burning hair after that, he'd always had to fight the reflex to throw up.

It was a gross enough smell on its own without it reminding you of the time you watched your first love's face burn off.

The only reason she'd been there was so Spence could hurt him. The only reason she'd died was because he hadn't reacted fast enough. It'd just been shock, simple shock that'd had him freezing in place a second too long.

His fault. His fault he'd lost the woman he loved.

And he did love her. Part of him still did. Part of him always would. So to have her here, in his arms, felt like having a bandage ripped off a partly-healed wound, and it felt like even though it hurt, maybe it'd finally heal right now. He could tell her he was sorry, tell her how he felt, tell her all the things he never got the chance to tell her.

Time-traveling hokery pokery aside, her probably being grabbed from before she died aside, she was alive. He had a chance now to resolve all those things left unresolved, and she had a chance now just to live. As he held her, he decided right then and there that he was going to make sure she never lost that chance again.

Edited 2011-01-13 09:31 (UTC)

She didn't know what to say, exactly. If she said, It's not your fault, it would sound trite. If she said, There's no way you could have stopped that, he would say he could have, somehow. Superheroes.

So Tana bit her tongue and stayed silent for a minute longer. "Kid, you have to let go of me sometime," she said softly and pressed her lips to his temple in a friendly gesture. Still, that... trite phrase kept edging it's way into her mind.

"I don't blame you for what happened." She would never blame him. It had been her fault that she'd been in the right place at the wrong time. Not Superboy's. She'd been there because she wanted to be with him to make sure he'd be okay, somehow, and because she loved him. Wasn't on him. It was on her.

Oh god, her eyes felt wet. When did she start crying? She blinked a few times and tried to take a deep breath (which, when one was being held in place by the fleshy version of steel bars, wasn't easy), to get herself under control.

Of course she didn't blame him. She was Tana. She'd always been a little too forgiving of his faults, and sometimes, not forgiving enough when he'd needed that boot to the butt to be better.

Always, even when doing what was best for herself, it had helped him, made him better. It had helped teach him one of the most important things he'd ever have to learn: what love was--what real love was--and when you got right down to it, it was making good choices that were best for yourself, but also for the other person.

The choices she'd made had helped him grow up, become more responsible--even when they'd hurt.

It took a while for him to calm down, and when he did, he finally sat back a little to face her, even if he stayed close, his forehead occasionally ghosting against hers, and even while ignoring the tears all over his face, he smeared hers away with his thumb.

"I guess, despite all this time travel stuff and the fact I'm probably not supposed to tell you the future, trying to tell you everything turns out okay would be a pretty dumb idea, huh."

It's not a joke, really, just a statement of fact.

"Yes, and I think I know what happens, anyway." Tana took an uneasy breath and smiled weakly. You'd have to be heinously stupid to imagine she would've survived that.

Even if a little part of her wanted to believe otherwise. "You know, kid? I think this is the first time you've caught me without something else to say." She lifted her hand and wiped the tears off his face. "I'm just happy to see you."

"I don't think I really need to tell you how happy I am to see you, Tana."

Seriously, take a wild guess.

There is a moment that he just sits there, quietly relishing her touch, just looking at her, taking in her features again. It was different seeing someone alive and well than just remembering them. There were things he'd forgotten, like the crinkle around her eyes when she looked concerned.

"Did anyone explain all this?" he asked. "I didn't see you on Obs Deck."

"No, you're pretty much the first person I've seen. Someone called Gladys?" She arched an eyebrow, "Got a hold of me as soon as I fell out of that goopy pod thing."

"Except for other people in the mazes, anyway, but even then, they seemed to be ahead of me. By the time I got to the end, they were already gone." Tana shrugged. "I was kind of hoping this was just some kind of freaky afterlife."

"GLaDoS, she's--it's a long story."

He didn't want to have to explain avia right now.

"It's not the afterlife. You're alive, Tana. It's time travel. Stacy--the ship--she pulled people from different worlds and times. If you thought you were dead, it sounds like the last thing you remember is--she must have gotten you right before--"

Kon winced. He couldn't help it, and for a moment, all he could do was press his forehead against hers.

"If that's the case then I should probably thank her." Except for the fact the whole, Ship-Has-Taken-You-From-Time business sounded like it needed to be in a comic book. Or something.

She liked her 'throbbing afterlife' theory a lot better. She pushed his swoopy little forelock away from their faces, even though it stubbornly returned. "Take your time explaining, I want to know everything."

Tana, your lives are a comic book.

Kon shrugged, wiping his face on the shoulder of his shirt. "We should probably go somewhere--or I guess create somewhere to sit down and talk, huh? How's Hanalei Bay sound? Or oh--oh! Pololu Beach?"

Despite not living there for years now, he remembered all the best spots, including the little secret ones only native Hawaiians knew about that she'd shown him, and the ones he'd found by air.

"Hanalei," Tana replied. Blue water and white sand? If she hadn't just been standing in one of his illusions, she would've asked how he thought he was going to make an entire Hawaiian beach. "How's this work, anyway?"

Sand appears at their feet and stretches out into the distance, waves crash to the beach out of nowhere, an expanse of blue sky stretches out along with it, and the sun starts beaming from overhead.

"You think it, and it happens. Easy as that."

He slips his hand in hers and gently leads her along to sit down on a blanket spread out on the sand. It's not just any blanket, either, this place is steeped in memory, so it's that old, red, worn down beach blanket that they'd kept until it was nearly in tatters.

It even smelled like Hanalei, . This was either really interesting, or... really creepy. But she could figure that out later, there were other things to be interested in.

"Wow." To all of it. To the beach, and the blanket, and... and everything. Tana settled herself next to him and squeezed his hand. "But I didn't think about that bikini." She raised an eyebrow at him.

"Is it really my fault most of my memories of you are in bikinis and daisy dukes?"

Kon tsked at her. "You never stopped to think about what all those revealing outfits would do to my impressionable young mind."

Still as naughty as he ever was.

Tana tossed her hair over her shoulders and bit back a laugh, "I was fully dressed a lot of the time, thank you." But she was fairly fashionable when she wasn't dressed in a suit while out on location. And they did live in Hawaii.

Whoops. Well, maybe she'd start wearing parkas. That'd show him.

The smirk was there, and then, as he considered the prospect of everything that was going to come next, the smile slowly faded off his face, and he looked out at the water.

Kon squeezed her hand, gently, comfortingly.

"I don't know--how to explain all this, because the way we found out was--it was..." He grimaced. "We had to fight to find out, and we were looking for answers, and we knew we might not like them. For everyone else after, it's an infodump when they first wake up in a strange place."

It was easier to do that to a stranger or even a friend than to the first person he ever loved.

"So what I'm going to say first is we've been told our families are all probably safe. Probably. In the Pod Caverns. That's why there's so many in there. If you were in there--when, you know, you've been gone for years for me, then maybe it means that's true. I've had a lot of other family and friends show up too, y'know?"

Another pause. "And we've been told...there's a way to maybe undo all this, and fix things."

But was that a good thing? If they could bring their worlds back, didn't that mean she had to go back to die or risk messing up the timeline? Didn't that mean he had to, as well? But unlike him, she wouldn't come back.

Of course, he still had to explain what "this" was, that they could possibly undo.

Edited 2011-01-14 09:59 (UTC)

Tana felt a sliver of relief; that meant her brother and his kids were okay, right? If they could save her, then surely he was okay.

But maybe she'd only been brought for Kon. Logically, that made the most sense... as much as she hoped it wasn't so. She nodded as he spoke, even though her expression was clearly becoming her Work Mode face. "And this is... what, exactly? I remember someone saying that it was the.. Ohm? We had to fight the Ohm?"

Boy, would she kill for a notebook and a pen right now.

"The Ohm, they're these horrible bug-aliens that just...rip planets apart. Dimension after dimension, world after world. They can even mess up their timelines and rip backwards through time. That's why the Daligig--the aliens that grabbed us--were able to grab people from different parts of timelines without messing 'em up by affecting future events."

It hurt, to tell her this.

"Tana, this ship is an ark. For the survivors." Soft blue eyes looked up at her as he spoke. "Our world is gone."

Tana's mental processes careened to a stop. Then it burst into flames. "Gone? Just 'gone'?" All of this they were sitting on was gone. "No. No way." How could someone just... destroy a world? Billions of lives? "There's no way..."

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