When you've been fighting for it all your life

[pythianjudgment]

Who| Terezi and Sam Wilson
What| Terezi has a delivery to make to one of Initiate's friends. Time to get to know this dude.
Where| A randomly selected blindspot in the Capitol
When| Half an hour after the Rebellion Network post
Warnings| None yet.



The particular spot that Terezi's chosen this time is a back alley near a particularly tasty doughnut shop. She arrives a little bit ahead of schedule in order to wander in and sniff about the shop for a minute or two, before selecting a cherry-pie-filled doughnut from the display case by the register and a hot chocolate to go. Collecting her treats and paying the shop owner, Terezi exits the shop and wanders down the alley to find a place to sit that's shaded and out of the way of the public foot traffic. Conveniently, she seats herself close to the graffiti that decorates one of the alley walls.

Comments

[sizeofyourbaggage]

Sam's own brows furrow as well at her question. "If the Capitol doesn't bring you back when you die here, you end up back where they took you from. Somehow."

Honestly, Sam can't figure out the logistics of it all, but he can't really explain the couple of thousand years difference between Kurloz and Terezi or even the five month difference between him and Steve, despite them coming from the same time back home. Knowing that is a relief for some - it's the main thing that'd soothed him when Natasha hadn't come back, though it hadn't been much help with Albert, seeing as Sam'd still thought he'd never see him again - but for others like Kurloz, it's an even worse fate.

[pythianjudgment]

"Back...?" Terezi stares blindly up at Sam, her brow furrowed and her mouth slightly open. Back? Back to where they took them from when they died? No. No no no. Her brow furrows deeper as that really sinks in. Back to Alternia. For Kurloz, that meant either a life of cruelty and destruction of himself and everything around him... or being snuffed out by paradox time. And for her, that meant going back to a useless life on a meteor that might never reach its destination, spiraling out of control until she was only a shell of her former self. Neither one of those things are anything less than horrifying.

And he's telling her that it's unavoidable?

"...How do you know that going to your world is going to change that?"

[sizeofyourbaggage]

That question makes him pause a little. He'd half assumed that the revival mechanism was arena related only, since he'd been warned that if you die here in the Capitol, or anywhere not in the arena, you're not coming back - but he does wonder if it's that the Capitol can't bring them back outside of arena, or that they won't. He doesn't know how any of it works, and he can't promise that world hopping is going to change anything.

So he doesn't, he just goes with honesty. "I guess I figured if we figured out how to use whatever the hell technology's the Capitol's got that lets them take us well enough to choose where we wanted to go back to, we could figure out how to break that."

[pythianjudgment]

'We'll figure it out' is not necessarily the best motivator, but at the moment it's really all that they have. It might not work, but to be honest, there's no saying that anything will in the face of the information that she's just been given. It's something to hope for, and hope can be a pretty powerful thing.

"Okay," she says, exhaling a sigh. "Alright, sure. It's worth a try." She doesn't have anywhere else to go, and she's not going back to her own world, that much is for certain. Where she ends up after they've brought the Capitol down... It doesn't really matter to her. "I want to stick around long enough to help fix this place. I'm not just abandoning everyone here. But after that.... Sure. Whatever." Her thoughts trace back to what they were talking about before that tangent about going back, and naturally there's really only one question to ask:

"What's that Avenger thing you were talking about?"

[sizeofyourbaggage]

Hope's all they've got, right about now. But it's enough for Sam. "Me neither. Might not've been my choice to get involved in this, but now that I am, I'm in it for the long haul." There's too many people here that he wants to fight for, now.

He grins a little when she goes back to the Avengers thing. "Back where I'm from, we got a team of - well, superheroes. When something comes along that's big enough to threaten most of the planet, they're the ones that fight back. I'm... kind of one of them."

Not really, not officially, but he's more involved now than he had been when he first got here. He'd already been ready to follow Steve, and between Tony claiming him as part of the team and Clint being his partner, Sam's going to have to accept it at some point.

"They're the reason I don't think you and Kurloz'll have a problem fitting in."

[pythianjudgment]

"Superheroes?" Terezi looks like she's caught between skepticism and interest. That's...kinda cool, even if she's reluctant to admit it just yet. She still has a few more questions, just to make sure they're not a bunch of nerdy dorks.

"Like the kind that dispense vigilante justice on unsuspecting criminals? Punishing those that the law can't touch? Cool outfits and cooler accessories? Fighting for truth and protecting the innocent and... and all that stuff?" Careful there, Pyrope. Your excitement is showing. "Or is this more of an underwear-on-the-outside kind of superhero? Because I'm not really about that."

[sizeofyourbaggage]

Sam laughs, eyes gleaming a little in amusement. Yeah, he caught that excitement there, but he can’t blame her. Shoulda seen him the day he found out he was being recruited for the EXO-7 project.

“Only time I ever saw anyone wearing their underwear on the outside was when they were really, really drunk, and I gave him so much shit for it afterwards.” He shakes his head with a smile, focusing on the memory of Riley for a moment before letting it go. “I like to think they were pretty damn cool, anyway. I had wings, before I came here.”

[pythianjudgment]

"What. Really?" That seems to pique Terezi's interest even more than the mention of superheroes. She was pretty accustomed to humans being able to weird things, but... She's pretty sure she never met a human that was also part bird.

"Like, actual wings? Feathers and everything? Did they have to pluck you clean when you got here?"