somethingwithturquoise | MHA #4; Friday Evening [08/26].

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MHA #4; Friday Evening [08/26].

So there was at least one good thing about spending the week where one of your bestie's other job completely exploded in an inglorious series of very dramatic, very cool events that changed everything in a galaxy far, far away....and that was that when it came to making the absolutely now required aftermath sangria, Summer could make it using space shit.

There was just something about space sangria that just made it better. Probably because it involved using booze meant to knock out individuals with much higher constitutions than the average human.

Either way, she was glad that she brought her portal gun with her on her trip with Lana so that she could duck out when necessary, and she was particularly glad that she had not needed to use it for some catastrophic emergency (although one could argue that a sangria night of this magnitude kind of was an emergency).

But she was back, she had her space sangria ready, and now all she had to do was wait for Annie to make that long and arduous trek down the hall from her apartment to Summer's, all the while fending off a whole wave of passive aggressiveness and irritated looks from Pancakes, who had clearly not appreciated Summer's absence this week.

"I could have just left you with Barry for another day, you know," she reminded her, a point that Pancakes begrudgingly acquiesced to her before stalking off to find the best position to just sit and sulk at her while she had her sangria.

[[ for the ex-Miss Starlight, pls! With a big fat CW for discussions of violence, SA, death, and everything you'd expect from a drunken aftermath thread of this magnitude ]]

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Annie was not going to simply turn up empty-handed when she'd been invited over for space sangria, even if she herself was not bringing any sort of spacey ingredients -- rather, she had a couple bottles of pretty basic red, figuring that they could always use more alcohol base if they needed?

She shifted one bottle to the crook of her arm so she could knock -- though, really, she could have made multiple trips given the like...twenty feet between this apartment and her own.

(And on that note: very grateful Summer had been in space when she and Diego had gotten home on Wednesday night. Very grateful.)

One quick peek through the peephole before throwing open the door (look, it was Fandom, there'd been incidents, it certainly didn't hurt), and her open arms would have instantly gone around Annie in a hug if it weren't for the fact that Annie's arms were already occupied.

But they were occupied, clearly, in the best way.

"You brought reinforcements!" she observed approvingly.

"I figured they wouldn't hurt?" Annie offered with a smile, going ahead and stepping right on in so she could set those bottles down on the nearest surface and go in for a hug, because yes, please, bestie hugs were even more necessary than the sangria right now. "Though I realized late it might not match your space fruit."

What if space fruit was more of a white sangria thing??? Annie was flying blind here.

Sangria night sangria was classically red, so Summer definitely picked space fruits to match. And, even if not, hey, you know what? Variety was, like, the spice of life, or whatever, and by the time they dug into the reinforcements, it was hardly going to matter, anyway.

But for now? Hugs. So much hugs, especially once the hug got going and really reminded Summer of the insanity Annie had been going through these past few weeks, and the squeeze of her hug was definitely going to match that accordingly.

"It is so good to see you again," she said, into Annie's shoulder. "I'm so glad you're back."

A statement that didn't have so much to do with the fact that being back meant that Annie was here, so much as it did with the fact that being back meant that Annie wasn't there anymore.

Oh, God, they hadn't even gotten into the booze yet and Annie was already getting kind of emotional. Maybe it was the fact that she hadn't hugged anyone except Diego (and Kimiko, which had been an adorable surprise when they'd left New York) for weeks and weeks? Or maybe it was the way that actually being here, and hugging Summer, made it feel like things really were over the same way that crawling into bed finally on Wednesday night had. It was just another way of coming home.

"Me too," she said softly, relaxing a little in response to that squeeze. "And I'm back to stay. Space was good?"

She kinda felt bad, if her whole superhero shitshow and burn-down-the-internet everything had had any kind of a negative impact on Summer's visit.

"Space was good," Summer assured her, because, please, it was just a little jaunt out there because she was physically incapable of refusing a space trip if someone invited her. "Got in good with a trader who hooked me up with some sweet vintage swag for the ship."

Yes, including the lovingly deemed Pimp Stick. What could she say? Little dude was adorably convincing.

One more good squeeze before Summer pulled back, her hands still on Annie's shoulders, though, as she looked at her, and just gave her a soft, reassuring smile. "I'd ask how New York was, but...we're not even touching that until there's wine in our cups in our hands."

"Oh, if you think New York was bad," Annie noted a little wryly, "wait until you hear about Vermont."

Which -- Summer had already kind of gotten the sketches of details there, but...look. Annie had tried to tell Rey about Baby's First Orgy yesterday, with full knowledge that she had other friends (and in-laws-to-be) who would love the details there, and she suspected that, much like Frenchie, Summer was going to be devastated to have missed this firsthand.

"But I'm glad space was good. It wasn't Rey's...version, right?" Confusing. She had a vague idea that it was, in fact, Rey-Space (as opposed to, like, Stark-Space or Other Dimension-Space or whatever), but not actually Rey-Space.

Edited 2022-08-26 13:35 (UTC)

"No," Summer confirmed, "it was, like, same general galaxy, different dimension, and a thousand years in the past, or something absurd like that, because it wasn't, like, a thousand years in the past here, where, like yeah, 1022 is gonna hit way different than 2022, but out there, it's like they reached a certain point in technological advancement and then just...stopped." Her eyes widened a little at that concept, because, well, her whole life had been infused with insane technological advancements shoved into a few short decades that most people over a certain age probably couldn't even dream of. "And then proceeded at, like, a snail's pace forward.

"But whatever," she shook her head, waved a dismissive hand, and then picked up those bottles of wine where she could move them to the living room and plop them on the coffee table before going to the kitchen to pluck out a massive pitcher of sangria and two very large wine glasses because who were they trying to kid here?, talking all the while. "We're not here to talk about space, we're here to talk about you, and what happened, and, most importantly, everything that happened that I couldn't read on social media."

Which the social media had been a lot, but Summer knew this was a fucking iceberg if she'd ever seen one.

Edited 2022-08-26 13:47 (UTC)

Okay, that was actually legitimately kind of fascinating? Because yeah -- a weird, recurring worry of Annie's for awhile had been that when they were trying to find the errant Hargreeves, they might land in the distant past where she and her electricity powers would be no use. But it sounded like certain other far, far away galaxies had figured their shit out a bit better than things over here in the Milky Way. Maybe they'd get that way here, eventually? Like, they had spaceships now, and didn't seem to be making many advancements forward except changing the size of cell phones?

But anyway. Summer was very, very right that the social media had absolutely been the tippy-tippest of the iceberg of what was actually happening, even after Annie had started with her truth bombs. They'd still been sort of vague bombs, for the most part.

"Where," Annie asked, going to take a seat on the couch and she would love one of those massive glasses, thank you, "should I start? 'Cause I haven't seen you since...like, the premiere and the promotion, right?"

And so, so much had happened out of the media's sight since then.

Vague-posting at its finest, really. She'd practically elevated it to a perfectly balanced art.

Summer very carefully, but very quickly (professionally, even, some might say!), poured some of the sangria into one of the glasses, filling it up almost practically to the top, before she handed it smoothly over to Annie and then took care of filling her own cup before setting the pitcher very much in arm's reach and sitting down, sipping from her own overfilled glass out of precaution against spilling, obviously, getting settled while she tried to think.

"Oh, shit," she realized, "yeah, I think you're right. And that feels like practically ages ago, but it really wasn't, really? It's just a lot," her eyes widened with that emphasis because she knew she didn't even know the half of it, "has happened since then. Damn, girl. That's almost some Smith-Sanchez level of expediency right there."

She'd developed a whole planetoid civilization from dying within a few hours after birth to having space travel in a single weekend before. She didn't fling that kind of praise around lightly.

Edited 2022-08-26 14:15 (UTC)

"Well," Annie said, taking the glass and taking a sip right away, gratefully, "it turns out that when you decide to promote a woman fifteen years younger than the current unhinged team captain, give her more authority than him, and then poke the bear over and over again -- that unhinged bear is gonna escalate things really quickly."

Mixing her metaphors all over the place here, but she was trying to think of where to even start.

"It was Homelander's idea to put Deep back on the team," she offered, slanting a look over at Summer. "I had two different super-qualified women I wanted to bring on, and instead, asshole blindsided me with my fucking would-be rapist."

It probably said a lot that Annie could refer to The Deep that way, when just a little over a year ago she'd stumbled through a different sangria night just trying to tell Summer what he'd even tried with her.

"Just -- constant mind games like that, for the first week or so I was captain," she added, taking a much larger sip of sangria at the memory.

Edited 2022-08-26 14:31 (UTC)

"You know," said Summer, shaking her head and making quick work of at least the top portion of her glass while listening to Annie all at the same, "I didn't want to say it, and please know that I'm only saying it now out of love and acknowledgement of understanding and to progress the storyline along, but I told you so. I fucking told you that souped-up megalomaniac golden boy was not going to be able to fucking handle it, and, Jesus Christ, does no one at that fucking place have even a hint of a sociology degree? A first year med-psych major at a local community college could have seen that one coming."

She stopped, for a drink.

"Well, maybe not to that level, but, come on, the guy looked like he was constantly on the loosest of hinges....And what a fucking asshat, low-tier, bottom-of-the-barrel ass attempt at a power move with that budget-ass sea scallop." No offense to any actual sea scallops, oh-em-geeee. "What a fucking tool. I'm so glad you didn't put up with any of that shit, Annie.

"I mean," she amended, "overall, that is. Like, obviously you had to put on a smile and deal with it on a certain level, but you fucking took it in stride like a goddamn champ."

And then exploded from within gloriously, and, yes, Summer had definitely re-watched the Starlight Ragequit Video several times, just for that sweet, sweet hit of empowerment and That's my girl! I'm so proud of you, bb serotonin.

"You did tell me so. You did. But here's the thing," Annie told her, accepting that, yes, she had indeed been told so, and she should have listened better, but she'd really thought she'd had a secret weapon, there. "I didn't tell you this before, but -- I kind of had something on Homelander. Something really, really incriminating. It would've tanked his reputation completely. And that's how we've been keeping him in check the last year or so. But the day he told me he was bringing Deep back, I told him I'd release the video...and he told me to do it."

She took a long draw from her sangria. "And that's when everything kind of started falling apart. We had a means to keep him under control. Without the Flight 37 video, I wouldn't have taken the promotion. But like, a week into it, he decided he didn't give a fuck about my leverage, and everything just...got so much worse from there."

So, so much worse. The Flight 37 video, honestly, was just a drop in the bucket now. No wonder Homelander had been practically daring her to release it.

Summer sighed a little, shaking her head. "Yeaaaaaah," she murmured, "that's the problem with something like blackmail that you're only keeping in your pocket, that shit's got diminishing returns. Eventually, you push someone enough, they're not going to care what they lose, because they're at a point where they've lost everything else. And, like, Vought had to go and pull at the one thing he probably felt he had locked down by making you co-captain."

She snorted a little, took another deep drink.

"I totally don't blame you, by the way," she added, holding out a hand toward Annie. "You did amazing with what you had to deal with, you are amazing, in a totally better world, you would have made the best leader of the Seven they could have ever asked for. But your world is not a better world, your world is dumb and filled with dumb people, and from what I can tell, you just got wedged into a no-win situations by a bunch of complete morons high off the farts of their own self-importance and leverage, and, honestly, I'm kind of super pissed that they had the sheer audacity to be that idiotic around my friend."

Because it was clearly that personal.

Summer tilted back her glass, drained a significant portion of it, and reached over to grab the pitcher, to top them both off, especially as she asked, "So. How much worse are we talking here?"

That was all very bolstering, and did make Annie feel a little better for believing so long that she could make it better from the inside. Hindsight was kind of a bitch, and with a little distance from all of this, she really did wonder sometimes how she could have done better than what she had done. There were plenty of regrets to be had there, but the biggest mistake she'd made was trusting Stan Edgar at all -- this had always been more about fucking with and diminishing Homelander (and look how that had backfired, given his new surging popularity in response), and barely about elevating her. She hadn't even gotten her promised new team members.

Well. She'd gotten one of them.

"I know you know Supersonic didn't die of an overdose," Annie started softly, looking down at her sangria. "Because -- yeah, duh. But...Summer, it was so horrible."

She was going to need to pace herself on this one, because it was already threatening to make her cry, just thinking about this.

"Maeve had a plan." And at some point here, she was going to have to share the truth about Maeve, too, but that could wait. Right now, this wasn't really about Maeve as much as it was about Alex. (And like how things were always kind of about Robin, for Hughie -- everything Annie did going forward to stop Vought and Homelander would always be a little bit about Alex.) "She's been training in secret for months to try to take down Homelander. And I found out, and...look, she's -- she was the strongest woman in the world, but she wasn't going to be able to do it alone. So I said I'd get together a team. And I recruited Supersonic, 'cause I've known him for like -- years. We're really old friends. He was my first...everything."

Annie took a sip of sangria rather than elaborating -- though, you know, if she couldn't tell Summer that she'd lost her virginity to a fellow Christian superhero in some very fumbly and kind of adorable attempts at sex when they were much younger, who could she tell?

Even though Summer was feeling like she was riding on a really incredible rant wave right now, the moment she saw the look of tears threatening Annie's expression, she pulled herself off of that ledge and decided to just save it for Twitter. She leaned in a little, she listened, and she waited a moment when Annie had finished to make sure there wasn't anything else lingering to add after that, and she nodded a little.

"You don't have to go into the gritty details," she assured her softly. "I think I can put the pieces together enough. So....what then? They probably found out, right?"

She'd guessed about Supersonic's 'overdose' and had plenty of theories about everything with Maeve's little stint in 'rehab', and then some, but this was definitely putting more than a few of them into some interesting light.

"Alex -- Supersonic -- believed me when I said we needed as many people as we could get," Annie continued softly, still addressing her glass. This was, no matter what Diego had assured her or what Annie herself knew logically, the part that made it her fault. She needed to have been clearer, there, about who they could approach for help. "And so yeah, Homelander found out, because Alex tried to recruit A-Train, and the fucking weasel -- "

She cut herself off, huffing out a little breath. "But -- Homelander didn't just kill Alex, Summer. He -- he ripped him apart, staged the body, and showed it to me. And then told me that if I didn't fall in line, it'd be Diego, next."

Because it wasn't enough to kill Annie's very good friend; he also needed to make sure she understood it could always get worse.

"Of course he fucking did," said Summer, with a sigh, an incredibly deep one, almost as deep as these glasses, which suddenly didn't seem deep enough.

And she could really use a better word than deep for it right now, too.

Because as soon as Annie said Alex had tried to recruit one of the main guys without thinking oh hey, maybe if this was a viable option, Annie and Maeve would have, you know, DONE THAT ALREADY, she was thinking that this guy was clearly not cut out for this level of Vought shit, and then when she mentioned what Homelander had done, her next thought was just whomp, there it is...

But the sarcasm was staying inside. Outwardly, there was nothing but an outpouring of sympathy.

"I'm so sorry, Annie," she said, which wasn't nearly enough, but it was still something. And she knew that, to Annie, it wouldn't matter if Diego was good enough to watch out for himself, it wouldn't matter one bit.

Oh, she wasn't wrong at all about Alex's naivete -- say what you will about Annie when she first arrived in New York, she had not been so foolish as to try to confide in A-Train -- and really, there was a part of Annie that would always be a little angry at him for not thinking about that for, just...like a half-second longer.

"Yeah," Annie sighed, before taking a rather long drink from her sangria. "And like -- there was a lot of just kind of fucking with Diego in general before that. And he can hold his own, seriously, he's amazing and I'm not just saying that because I'm marrying him, he's a better fighter than I am and he's so graceful and his powers are so fucking useful in a fight, but -- like, if you don't have the invulnerability back home, you might as well be made of glass, you know?"

Obviously. But the sangria was kind of doing its thing, so that was all just kind of pouring out of Annie.

"At one point, we were pretty much being held hostage by Homelander," she concluded, shaking her head. "And meanwhile my contacts are off in Russia trying to find a weapon and telling me to stay put whatever it takes, and it ended up taking -- a lot."

And maybe she was kind of mad about that? Or at least, the sangria and Summer's company were giving her a sort of freedom to be mad, right now.

Pure, unbridled rage on this situation would tooootally be entirely legit. In fact, in Annie's shiny boots, that would be the emotion first and foremost for Summer, really, and she shook her head, reaching for the pitcher, to make sure Annie's glass was plenty full before it had a chance to even think of being empty.

"Jesus," she said, "what a goddamn mess. And, of course, as we know, Russia was a total dead end this whole time.

"Well," she amended, after a little top-off and a quick sip of her own, "not totally, but you know what I mean. Less of a dead-end, more of a....cul-de-sac."

Sure, that worked!

A cul-de-sac where they'd turned around and brought back the most attractive human bomb Annie had ever seen, exactly.

"Honestly, I wish it had been a dead end," she sighed, shaking her head. "A dead end would have been a bunch of nothing, at least, instead of shit just getting worse." She took a sip, trying to retrace her mental steps, and frowned. "You haven't met Hughie and Butcher and MM and everyone, right? I know a couple people ran into Butcher and MM at Believe Expo -- you haven't meet a loud British guy using the C-word really liberally, right?"

She was pretty sure Summer had been busy during Believe Expo. (You know, amassing followers, maybe?)

Funny you should say that, narrative, becauuuuse....

"Oh, no," said Summer, snorting easily into into her cup. "I was waaaay too preoccupied with building my Punch the Devil cult and keeping an eye out for hot older pastor types to help get your mom to fucking relax a little at Believe Expi for much else."

Aahhhh, what simpler, more innocent times those were!

"He sounds lovely, though."

Edited 2022-08-26 19:43 (UTC)

"Oh, he sucks," Annie assured her, before circling right back and remembering, "I totally forgot you tried to get my mom laid at Believe. God. That would have been amazing."

Amaaaaaaaaaaaazing. Though Annie didn't want to think about it too much.

"I don't know if I knew about the cult," she admitted, though she was far too into this glass of sangria -- and, moreover, far too the fuck over Vought and Believe Expo and, let's be honest, kinda God Himself -- to be, like, outraged.

"I think it may have come up?" Summer said, shrugging, and drinking, and figuring that, really, the whole indoctrination of impressionable youths thing was pretty small potatoes, and, really, anyone at Believe Expo getting mad about it should just look in the goddamn mirror, maybe. "But, you know, all that was pretty overshadowed by something slightly bigger back then."

But, thinking back to that event, Summer shook her head again. "God, Homelander had massive tool written all over him even, too. And you," she gave Annie a significant look over her glass, which she lifted, as if in a toast, "have been through some real shit with those guys, so allow me to take a moment on congratulating you for finally saying Fuck You Assholes, and GTFOing. I'm proud of you, Annie. I know it's been hell to go through, but you got there, and fuck them aaaaalllllll."

"Fuck them all," Annie agreed, lifting her own glass proudly, and...holy shit, did that feel great. "Oh my God, fuck all of them even that far back. I can't believe I stayed so long."

Like, the fact that she'd left Believe Expo kinda worried they'd fire her, when in reality she should have been running as fast as those gold boots would have taken her....

But thinking about Believe Expo made her think about the last time she'd lost her shit publicly, and that made her think about why, and that had her turning to Summer with something sort of like glee. "Oh my God, I have to show you something. Want to see the grossest thing?"

She needed to work on her invitation. Diego had, weirdly, not been excited to see the grossest thing? But hopefully Summer would be.

Edited 2022-08-26 22:32 (UTC)

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