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trans_92011-07-30 03:11 am
so-pregnable.livejournal.com) wrote in trans_92011-07-30 03:11 am
Adjustment Period [open]
The first thing he'd insisted on them fixing was the clone brand, but the surgery to fix his arm had come first, to allow all the tissue to heal right. His tendency towards fast healing was taking care of the rest. Then they got rid of the stupid clone brand after.
His hand was gone.
It was still a thought he had to get used to. One second it'd been there and now it was gone. It hadn't even been all the dramatic, like things like that were in the movies. It wasn't some moment over a gaping pit, with a villain chopping off his hand and revealing he was his father. He didn't have to saw it off to escape from some deadly trap, horror movie style.
There'd been a fight, he'd fallen on the teleporter pad, there'd been a bright light in front of his face and that was it. Apparently, it could happen just that easily.
Then again, it wasn't the first time he'd lost a hand--that same hand, in fact--but after healing for a thousand years under the North Pole, all the damage from the fight that had killed him had disappeared, and the thing had apparently regrown. So losing limbs wasn't exactly something he never expected would happen, when it already happened once. This time, he was fairly sure it wasn't going to grow back, though.
Ultimately, he decided that was okay. He was a little freaked out about it, but he'd cope. You rolled with the punches, right?
Sometimes you have to roll with the accidental amputations, too.
It was war. This stuff happened, it was going to keep happening, and at least it hadn't been his head.
It was war, and people got hurt in wars, just like you made decisions you weren't sure were the right ones. Just like his decision to let Moses free all the clones was one that was weighing on his mind. (He was just WAITING to hear from Leon on that one).
Superboy sat upright on his bed in Medbay, arm bandaged and in a sling, and played Tetris on his omnicom one-handed. Hopefully, they'd let him out of Medbay soon, and then...then he'd figure out the rest.
His hand was gone.
It was still a thought he had to get used to. One second it'd been there and now it was gone. It hadn't even been all the dramatic, like things like that were in the movies. It wasn't some moment over a gaping pit, with a villain chopping off his hand and revealing he was his father. He didn't have to saw it off to escape from some deadly trap, horror movie style.
There'd been a fight, he'd fallen on the teleporter pad, there'd been a bright light in front of his face and that was it. Apparently, it could happen just that easily.
Then again, it wasn't the first time he'd lost a hand--that same hand, in fact--but after healing for a thousand years under the North Pole, all the damage from the fight that had killed him had disappeared, and the thing had apparently regrown. So losing limbs wasn't exactly something he never expected would happen, when it already happened once. This time, he was fairly sure it wasn't going to grow back, though.
Ultimately, he decided that was okay. He was a little freaked out about it, but he'd cope. You rolled with the punches, right?
Sometimes you have to roll with the accidental amputations, too.
It was war. This stuff happened, it was going to keep happening, and at least it hadn't been his head.
It was war, and people got hurt in wars, just like you made decisions you weren't sure were the right ones. Just like his decision to let Moses free all the clones was one that was weighing on his mind. (He was just WAITING to hear from Leon on that one).
Superboy sat upright on his bed in Medbay, arm bandaged and in a sling, and played Tetris on his omnicom one-handed. Hopefully, they'd let him out of Medbay soon, and then...then he'd figure out the rest.
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He focused on his Tetris.
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It wasn't like he'd known for sure Kon's clone had been taken out the second time.
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Although it's a lie. Howard doesn't know when he turned into the person who takes those sorts of risks, but it's a recent development. One he's not sure he likes.
"You just missed a chance to eliminate like, five rows at once." He continues to be unhelpful to Kon's game.
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"Anyway, superheroing's my job. It's more than a job. It's... I don't know, a calling. There's things I can do that other people can't, and doing them saves lives. Despite people being...people, I generally like people, and I definitely care about my friends and other heroes. If I'm saving the world, it's because I don't want the people I care about to die. Then from caring about them, it's pretty easy to think about how there might be lots of other good people like them worth saving out there--which means saving everybody just in case."
It wasn't the prettiest picture of morality he could paint, and wasn't like how someone like Superman might have justified what they did, but it was how he thought.
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Howard sticks a checkmark in the 'dumb hero' box for Kon in his mind. Kon lost Howard somewhere at 'I generally like people' and then proceeded to shake him off his trail around 'lots of other good people'.
"Wow. That's a really naive view on other people. The fact that other people use up all the resources and would stab their own kids in the back when the situation goes bad, that doesn't really factor in?"
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He went on, "Maybe it was just a crappy town full of crappy people, but it doesn't mean everyone's crappy in every town on every world ever. I've got anecdotal experience, too, or else I'd have had the drive to do the hero thing beaten out of me ages ago. Some people are unbelievably good to the point of probably being slightly insane, and since telling them apart from the jerks isn't one of my superpowers, I tend to just play it safe and prevent the world-ending, world-enslaving stuff from happening. Which is would the supervillains and alien invaders and stuff would do if given free reign. They've tried."
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"Okay, whatever. Your world's special and it'll never happen to you, because that sort of thing only happens in crappy towns like mine. You can just deal with the fun, over-the-top cartoon bad guys, and kids like me will fight basic human behavior. Whatever helps you sleep at night."
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He went on, "Supervillains-- supervillains do things like fry your girlfriend's face off in front of you, clone her, then kill the clone in front of you, just because they like to see you suffer."
His look was stern, hard.
"They're not cartoons. They're bad people that do horrible things--but do it on an even bigger scale--because a lot of them don't care who gets in their way or sometimes because they just like to watch the world burn."
There were noises from the omnicom as the pieces stacked up and he lost the game. He looked back to it and restarted it.
"I don't save people because I'm naive. I don't do it because I don't think people are capable of being awful. I don't do it because I haven't seen awful things. I've been tortured on alien death worlds, seen people I love die, and seen soldiers with their guts hanging out in Zero-G--begging for their mothers and looking at me to put them back together when nothing could."
This wasn't exactly the first war he'd been recruited for, and though his stint in the Paradocs hadn't had him on the front line, it hadn't been any less traumatizing going through wreckages and looking for survivors.
"I do it just because I can see that stuff without becoming jaded and miserable. Everyone's capable of evil, but what matters is what you do, and out of a crowd of people, about to die, most of 'em are going to go their whole lives without doing more than cutting off someone in traffic or lying on their tax return. Fact."
A pause.
"I make sure people are at least given a chance to not screw up, so the world still rolls on--without everyone having alien parasites on their faces or having to bow to a dark alien god. I don't fight for the goodness of all mankind. I fight for things to just be normal. Normal enough that people can at least try to be good people."
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"You can keep your temporary, fleeting normal. Get everyone nice and soft for when things really go bad, and then watch as they're totally unprepared and eat each other alive - literally, maybe - and get some warm fuzzies out of it. Whatever. I don't even know why I asked."
He winces as the boiling coffee takes the top layer off his tongue. "Also, just so you know? You suck at Tetris."
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He was playing hardball now.
"You came from a nasty place. I can tell that much from everything you've said. I get that. I also appreciate what you did to help me, I really do, but you have your way of looking at the universe and I have mine, and while I can't argue, for sure, that mine is right in all places, at all times, yours is wrong when it comes to my world and the people in it. I've seen too much of them, at their best, and at their worst, to not know that at least some of them are worth being saved."
He went on, "I also know from experience that someday you being a cynical little weasel is going to blow up in your face, just like my being an idealistic moron is going to do the same, because that's just how life works. Neither one of them is a shield against reality. Expecting bad things to happen doesn't save you from them. Expecting the worst of people doesn't stop them from doing the worst."
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He just goes where Stacy points, gets dragged around by divided factions of worlds he doesn't care about, and if he protests too loudly or too rudely, he gets slapped down by his deepest insecurities. The fear, no, knowledge, that he can do everything in his power, put up with any form of abuse without complaint, and still not be worth staying with.
"Fine. Your world's great and everyone follows evacuation procedures to a T and tips their waiters. Let's take a poll of this ship and see how many people can say the same thing about their worlds."
His eyes narrow at the 'weasel' assessment. It's not the first time he's been called that and undoubtedly won't be the last. He barely hears that Kon tempers it with some self-deprecation. "So what, we should all just let our guards down because it worked for you?"
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Not that thinking them capable of evil has been an impervious sheild either, obviously.
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It was hard to explain the dichotomy.
"What it comes down to is my ideas about human nature don't dictate my actions completely. I don't treat every single fight or situation the same, because the people in them could be good, bad, or somewhere in between. The right thing to do is never exactly the same. And just because most people are capable of being good or at least harmless doesn't mean that some people aren't above faking being good to take a cheap shot."
Words often failed him and they were right now.
"People are complex, so how you deal with them has to be complex, too. You go too simple and either you write off everyone when some are actually worth saving, or you open yourself up to a world of hurt when maybe some are actually pretty rotten."
It'd taken him a lifetime to start to understand shades of gray, but he was learning.
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To himself, Howard asks, what's the point in even having a view on human nature if you're not going to act on it? But isn't that just what he did on the battlefield, broke from his deeply fatalistic view on others to get his job done? What does that make him?
Where does Kon get to tell him he's living life too guarded, writing off too many people, when Kon's the one in a hospital bed, missing a hand?
"That's a pretty big assumption, to say that just because I think you're going through unnecessary, stupid risks that I'm too simple to take context into account."
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A greater impetus seemed to be that he'd been in love with Moses or something. And the arguments people were making.
As for the hand, well, he'd been suspicious of the Council from the moment they did the swabbing and all that. All the distrust in the world didn't save his hand.
"Why do you care if I'm taking on the risks so other people don't have to? We don't really know each other well enough that you'd care about me yet, except maybe beyond some general altruism enough to save my ass. So what's this all about? Are you trying to understand me or...?"
A pause.
"Or are you trying to understand yourself?"
It was strange, that he was talking like people weren't worth saving and yet he ran across the fight to help him. Twice.
"You saved my life. The way you talk, it's like you think there's no one worth giving a damn about, so why'd you help me? Do you even know why?"
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His cheeks are a bit flushed and his excuses tumble on out. Kon's put his finger on it, and Howard doesn't want to admit or acknowledge that.
"Whatever. If you want to get all Doctor Freud on me, I'll just go talk to someone else, thanks. You're not turning the tables on me the way you think you are."
Not a dumb jock after all. Surprising. Howard passes the coffeemaker as he storms off, unplugging it and taking it with him.
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Finally, he had some peace.