somethingwithturquoise | MHA #4; Saturday [07/08].

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MHA #4; Saturday [07/08].

As Summer had suspected from all the dreams she'd been having and that stupid urge to go traipsing through the woods to find some dumb rock, Morty had shown up at her apartment last night after getting ice cream for himself (you'd think, wouldn't you, that if you were going to come back from the dead temporarily to crash at your sister's place for a weekend, you could at least bring her some ice cream, too, but nooo~oooo), and they ordered pizza and she totally schooled his ass at Italian Plumber Franchise Racing Game, and she had to ban fighting games because he was such a button masher, and now it was Saturday, and she was just trying to figure out what to do with him now.

"Like," she said, as he sat on her couch, legs folded underneath him, tongue slightly out of his mouth as he intently button mashed against the video game itself since Summer refused to deal with it anymore, "what do you even want to do? Should I, like, take you to the park or something?"

"I'm fourteen, Summer, you don't need to take me to the park."

"I don't know!" she argued back. "It's been a while. Like, a really long time, you're practically a baby to me at this point. I don't know. There's an arcade at the bowling alley. I'm friends with the guy who runs the place, I can probably get you some free play in exchange for some weed, or something?"

There was a pause, filled with a clattering of buttons on the controller, before the computer totally demolished Morty, the fatality screen came up on her TV with a booming voice reminding him of how much he sucked, and then he sighed and set the controller down in his lap and looked up at Summer.

"We don't need to do anything, Summer," he said. "Maybe I...maybe I just wanted to come...and...and...and, you know, hang out with my sister again."

"Morty," said Summer, "we never hung out together."

Morty looked down at his hands and the controller in his lap for a moment, before looking over at her hopefully. "Sometimes we did!" he insisted. "Y-you know, not...often, or anything, but sometimes we did! And...and it was really nice, when we did and we got along, and I thought, y-you know, it's pretty cool, having a sister like you. You...you weren't perfect, and you're....you're definitely a bitch sometime, but you're not bad, either, and maybe....maybe I just wish...we could have spent more time just...just hanging out, you know?"

And Summer looked at Morty for a moment, and she felt a little twinge of guilt for all the ways in which she'd made either of her Morty's life a living hell, and how it was kind of nice, wasn't it, that even despite all that, he still just wanted to come visit and hang out?

"Yeah, okay," she said, reaching over to ruffle his hair as she moved passed him on the couch and plopped down to pick up the other controller, "but I swear to god, if you just button mash again, we're switching back to a shooter."

"But I'm not as good at those!"

"Explain to me again how that's my problem."

He totally did start button mashing again, but Summer, for now, decided to let it slide.

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Summer shrugged a little. "I mean," she said, as she worked on plucking the shots out of their molds and putting them onto a little tray, a small selection of colors and flavors: red for strawberry, blue for blueberry, purple for grape, orange for...well, orange, "yeah, I guess. He is one of my best friends, and we've known each other for a while now..."

"I'm glad he has friends here still." Zhaan was still watching the jello process with an air of vague amusement.

"How long have you known him then? He seems very fond of you." Had she said that already? If so perhaps it bore repeating.

Did it, though?

"Oh, god," said Summer, shaking her head a little. "I don't even know anymore. A while, I know that much. More than a few years now..."

She knew it was probably after everything with Faye that their friendship really cemented itself in as a definitely thing, and clearly they were friends before that, too, but it wasn't like Summer could remember exactly how long it had been.

"You may have known him longer than I did before I went to meet my Goddess," Zhaan said lightly. Was it a forced lightness? Who could say.

"With everything it was less than 2 cycles, I think, that we actually spent together on Moya."

"Huh."

Summer...wasn't sure what she was supposed to do with that information. If anything. Probably nothing. But Zhaan's presence seemed to loom so massively over so much about Stark that the idea that she'd somehow actually known him longer than she had was just...

Fucking bonkers.

She held out the tray for Zhaan to take her pick of a jello shot.

"So what happened?" she wondered. "When you....went to meet your Goddess. Is it rude of me to ask?"

"He hasn't told you?" Zhaan asked as she picked up a blue shot. When you had a brand...

"Moya was dying, entwined with another ship when they met inside a wormhole. Someone needed to separate the two. I was already very ill. I volunteered. He was with me, at the end, as much as he could be with so many closed off passageways between us."

Pffft. Color branding, how gauche, Summer would never.

She wondered now if Stark had told her, and it just got shuffled to the back of her memory, because that did seem vaguely familiar, but honestly? It could just be similar to something in the jumble of her own memories, too.

She plucked up a red shot for herself.

"I'm sorry," she said. "That sucks. But...at least there was some meaning to it, right? That it wasn't just senseless or entirely meaningless."

"I was able to save the people I loved," Zhaan agreed. "And I was ready. I know, at least in Stark's experience, that is vanishingly rare."

"Summer," she added after a brief pause. "How am I meant to consume this?"

"Traditionally," said Summer, after a moment of her own and a faint smile, "with these ones in the cup, you just use your tongue to loosen in and them, fwoop, right down the hatch."

And, naturally, she went ahead and demonstrated, running her tongue along the edge and then tilting her head back to pour it in and swallow, then held up the empty cup as proof.

"Ta-daaaah. You could also squeeze the cup or dig it out with your fingers, but those are clearly inferior methods."

Zhaan let out a delighted laugh and followed suit with her own shot.

"That is a very amusing sensation. Thank you. And Stark does this often with you?"

Her brows were raised again.

That laugh felt an awful lot like an approval that Summer hadn't even realized she was aiming for, so she just going to smirk for a moment with a sense of accomplishment before nodding at the tray that she'd set on the counter and grabbing another one, this time purple, for herself.

"Well, there's plenty more," she said, "and I can always whip up extras, so help yourself. Obviously, I don't know how you metabolize alcohol, but keep in mind that they can kind of sneak up on you, though."

Did she secretly hope they actually really snuck up on Zhaan? Maybe. But that laugh got Summer thinking that she'd probably be a lot of fun in that state, actually. Looser, at least, and less likely to make Summer feel like her every move was being judged and critiqued.

"And some of the fancier ones," she said, "use molds rather than the cup, so you don't have to go through the whole....extraction process, with those, but, yeah, every Wednesday, I make them for my bar shift, and Stark's one of my regulars," could that be any more downplayed than that? Probably, actually, the faint grin on her face seemed to work as an interesting contrast to it, "so...he usually tries most of them, too."

"No need to worry about my alcohol tolerance," Zhaan said. "I can hold my own."

Or she could when she was alive. She hadn't really tested it on any of these visits.

"Only most? He's usually open to new things. Or do you get him too intoxicated to continue?" She saw that grin. She'd seen similar smiles on Stark's face.

"Oh, no," said Summer, with a dismissive wave of her hand before employing a good mix of the squeeze and tongue techniques on her next shot. "Nothing like that. I just put really gross shit in them sometimes."

"Oh? Like the foods in the classes you've been teaching together?" Zhaan asked before picking up one of the purple shots.

She was going to stick with the tongue method.

"He seems to enjoy those. I'm just pleased he seems happy."

"Exactly like the foods in our classes," Summer confirmed, glad that Zhaan already had context for the sort of monstrosities she was referring to. "Shrimp and weird cheese and mayonnaise and all sorts of things that no one likes to associate with jello or alcohol."

But that happiness on her own part seemed to falter a little, as she then frowned a little thoughtfully at her now empty cup.

"And he is," she said, "I think, but I also think he has a long way to go still on not depending on other people for his happiness, you know? But he's getting better. I think."

She was going to need another shot before she could let this next phrase past her lips, an orange one this time.

"It's a work in progress."

"He is unused to happiness."

Summer probably didn't need to be told that. Zhaan was going to say it anyway.

"Much more used to losing it than holding on to it. I would take back the pain I caused him if I could."

And Summer was just going to look at Zhaan for a very, very long time as she figured out what the fuck she was even supposed to say to that.

"But you can't," is what she'd ended it up with, and maybe it was Morty being here, or all the dreams and the other Morty's speech about how the universe was just bullshit leading up to it, or the fact that she couldn't help feeling that attitudes like that that lead Stark to his current state of dealing with loss when you'd think, by now, he should be a goddamn expert...

She shrugged, picked up a blue shot, holding it with one hand while the other moved as she talked.

"And you were going to cause him pain anyway," she said. "You said you were already sick, right? So you were pretty screwed on that regard any way, at least you got the chance to go out like a hero instead of just a whimper in the night like most people. You can't protect people from pain, pain is inevitable, that's just part of life. So what really should matter is that, despite the pain, you were able to make him happy, too. And your death actually did mean something. You said so yourself. Most people don't even get close to that."

Stark had told her once he was an expert on dying but not an expert on her dying. It made a difference when it was someone you truly cared for.

"I was ill because of a choice I made to save Aeryn with Stark's help. Unwitting help. I took his choice from him. I'd already hurt him deeply before I made that final sacrifice. I was ready to go. Ready to move on."

"He did the same, once, you know. Has he spoken of that? Allowed himself to be sacrificed to save the rest of us but he is what he is and he survived his execution."

"But we were happy," Zhaan added softly "For too short a time. I only wish for him to find happiness again. And peace. He deserves that."

"He does," Summer agreed,because, hey, she might not have been herself when she kissed Stark at that wedding, thinking he was her boyfriend, but when she said as much all the way back then, there were kernels of truth there. "And he can. He just needs to get the fuck out of his own way first."

Down went the next shot, and Summer reminded herself she might need to slow it down a bit.

"But, yeah, no," she added, "I think I missed the 'whoops, my sacrificial execution didn't take' story. Gotta love it when that happens."

Zhaan reached for one of the red shots.

"He's very good at getting in his own way," she agreed, giving this cup a little squeeze to loosen the jello. "Though he seems calmer now. More settled. As you said, a work in progress."

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MHA #4; Saturday [07/08].

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