meteorman | (no subject)

I would suggest that it is possible to do both. As a man who has.

Even a freedom fighter has time to look up on occasion. Or around, as the case may be. That tends to be what keeps you going.

[He isn't proud of a lot of the stuff he did during that thirty years he spent on a revenge-fueled roadtrip across the multiverse, but he is proud that it never burned his sense of adventure and curiosity out of him.]

That's That's a really nice thought. I wish I could Too many people looking at me instead of the sky. Got to be the Big Leader and that's exhausting you know? But It's a nice thought. Glad you could.

[He means that. It's nice to hear not everyone gets sucked into the fight and nothing else.]

What were you fighting?

[Ha. Haha. He never really knows how to answer that. 'My ex-boyfriend' is true, and pithy in that way Ford gets when he's trying to mask something painful by downplaying it, but it doesn't explain anything. 'A demon' doesn't do it justice.]

A powerful being from a higher plane bent on entering my universe and razing it to the ground for fun, and then presumably going through the rest of all of the other infinite existing dimensions in the same manner. To make a long and complicated story spanning many, many universes very short.

Not that I ever led anyone anywhere, despite aiding multiple resistance efforts as I traveled from universe to universe. My mission was one I undertook alone.

[That had felt more dramatic. More heroic. On the dark weird road I travel, I'm afraid you cannot follow. Insert that one really badly pitch-shifted version of Boulevard of Broken Dreams here.

It was probably good he never tried to lead anyone because he also probably would have lost them all.]

When you're young and foolish martyring yourself is very alluring.

Edited 2018-03-02 04:12 (UTC)

[Even with the Upped Emotions, he stares at the text for a while. Not really sure how best to respond. Even with the Attract, even with the endless forgotten horror of war and captivity... that's... more extreme than anything else.]

[Suddenly he feels a lot more understanding for this man, beyond just the Go To For Pokemon Info.]

Sounds like you had your hands full. Definitely way beyond what we were facing. I want to ask if it ended up all right but You don't have to elaborate if it's too hard.

[Another pause. If only because that last sentence hits something. Hits it harder than it should. Very alluring. Right.]

Not really. I... never really thought it was. Didn't even seem like "martyring" at the time. Just something that had to happen.

[It just seemed like the right thing to do. The one way to get someone important out of danger.]

Yes, that is what it tends to feel like. Something necessary. And then it's thirty years later and you haven't made a meaningful human connection in that whole time because you're too busy thinking about what 'had to happen'.

[But this isn't really his lesson to teach. That is, it's one he's learned the hard way and knows by heart, but it's one you need to learn somewhere other than a text conversation with a man you only know in bits and pieces.]

I can tell you that we won. Believe me if we hadn't I wouldn't be wasting time discussing the finer points of Pokémon biology, I would be devoting every waking moment to finding a way back.

Or more likely I'd be dead and you wouldn't be talking to me.

Edited 2018-03-02 07:07 (UTC)

Do you regret it?

[It's not thirty years. It's not even thirty months. It's a year, blank space in his head, a limb and marks on his skin he doesn't recognize. Nightmares and flashbacks. And yet, the way Ford puts it makes Shiro's own trauma sound pale in comparison. So... all he asks is that.]

[Do you regret it?]

[Because he can't let himself be that selfish.]

For what it's worth -- I'm glad you did. That you won. I meant what I said earlier. You're already important to people here, and I'm starting to see why. Even more.

[It's like Ford said to Harry not long ago-- it feels as though some long, complicated story is a unifying factor in the people drawn to this world. If he were a little more predisposed to believe in fate he might think it's something karmic, some good to balance out all the bad. He isn't and he doesn't, but it's difficult not to notice all the same.]

I don't think any man is without regret.

It throws things into much sharper focus to know there are potentially-infinite universes out there in which I did not make the same mistakes, or at least not all of them. I've visited a couple. I was happy in them.

[It rankles deeply to know he was likely the first Ford to fall for Bill's tricks hard enough to bring on the apocalypse, but it made everything make a lot more sense once he realized that Bill had had that many tries to perfect his pitch.]

But there are lessons I have learned and things I have been able to experience that the Stanford Pines heading the respected scientific institute has likely never even imagined. Do you know what I didn't see in that 'better' universe? My family.

[Stanley got on that boat and sailed as far away as possible. Probably dead, or rotting in a foreign jail. Dipper and Mabel? Who knows. He didn't know they existed at the time, he couldn't have known to ask, but he has a sinking feeling that a Stanford with all his childhood dreams of 'showing them all' realized would have distanced himself as hard as possible from his humble beginnings on Glass Shard Beach and everyone who'd been a part of them.]

[I don't think any man is without regret]

[The candy may have boosted his feelings, but it's done nothing to keep him from shoving more personal things deep. From putting them aside. If nothing else, it just makes it easier to do. Because -- does he regret that decision? So long ago now? Does he regret shoving his friend aside, taking his place? Stepping forward into the horror and bloodshed waiting for them?]

[The answer is no. Because Matt is alive. But not everyone gets that kind of payoff, do they?]

That would make a difference. Seeing everything that could have happened. Instead of only what did. I wondered For a long time, I wondered if it was the right thing to do. If I made the right call. Now I... now I have someone here to tell me it was. I got lucky, that way.

[... and if he hadn't made the call, would he have found the others? Gotten back to Earth, met these incredible teens? Met Allura? Or been able to feel the presence in the cockpit of the Black Lion? That incredible swell of partnership there.]

Family It seems like it always comes back to that, in the end, huh?

Humans are social creatures by nature. We seek companionship not only in other humans but in beings of other species and even inanimate objects, when they can be easily ascribed human characteristics. We are hard-wired to seek out and form emotional bonds. That doesn't mean we are all good at it. I never was. And I think the me in the universe where I got everything I ever wanted probably never will be, because he wouldn't think he'd need to be.

[Ford maybe, just a little, has some serious disdain for the man he used to be.]

A choice isn't always a clear matter of right and wrong; it is ultimately only a branching of paths. Somewhere out there there is a world where you didn't make the 'right' call. And that you has likely made different choices and cultivated different regrets and learned different lessons. Ultimately what matters is that you learn and move forward. Not all knowledge is pleasant, but stagnation is universally abhorrent.

And I have found it is easier to move forward when you are not alone.

We're only human, right? Isn't that how the saying goes? If it helps anything -- I feel like you've done fine here, so far.

[Look, Ford he's seen bad with people. Granted it was in the form of teenagers but still.]

[But -- can he really say the choice he'd made, way back then, hadn't been clear? He'd known for certain, if his friend went out there, went out under those lights, he'd die. That was the last clear, "do or don't" moment he could remember. Short of leaving Earth entirely.]

[Nothing else felt like a this or that.]

Sometimes it is that clear. Even if it's just in the end. After... a lot's happened. A lot's changed. If it was the wrong choice, I really would have been alone.

[He wouldn't have the team. He wouldn't have the person he cares about -- he might not even be here. Who knows if he'd even be alive. If anyone would be.]

[Ford's inability to People was definitely at its worst as a teenager. That's also part of the human condition, he thinks. It's just it was compounded by being predisposed to being bad at it mixed with crippling confidence issues, making him even worse than his peers.

Boy howdy is he glad he's not a teenager anymore.]

I've only done well here because of the incredible kindness and patience of the people I've met. And the fact that many of them don't meet me in person, the first time.

[Short 'gear conversations tend to go way less badly, he's found. It's harder to put your foot in your mouth. He'll, he's only given one person an existential crisis so far!

And over the 'gear it's way harder for people to see his hands.]

And the fact that none of my wanted posters seem to have made it to this part of the universe. My mistakes haven't followed me to the degree that they could have.

[Teenagers just don't people very well as a whole. Send them to space or into Ford's Mess and it just gets worse. He'd know. Sometimes he still feels like a teenager, for heaven's sake.]

I remember meeting you. You were having trouble with your starter. I didn't have a problem with you then. Still don't now.

[Look, Shiro's memory is generally terrible, but he remembers there was a stick involved. Or bushes. Something like that.]

Wanted man too huh? Probably Not because you broke out of prison?

My boy, I have broken out of more prisons than I can remember. There are quite a few universes I'm no longer welcome in for precisely that reason.

That isn't the only reason but it did significantly lengthen the list, particularly because I had to keep doing it.

Okay I'm kind of impressed. A little concerned, but impressed. I've just Got the one and I don't even know how that happened.

When one has a mission to fulfill one can justify doing a lot of illegal things.

[Ford isn't exactly going to say he's killed people, but he has absolutely killed people.]

When you are up against one of the most feared and powerful beings in the whole multiverse and he puts out a bounty on your head it becomes acceptable to do whatever you can to get a leg up. Do you know how easy I would have been to kill if I'd stayed in one place long enough to serve a prison sentence?

Also between you and me all prison escapes are like that. No matter how much of a plan you think you have it always comes down to being inside one moment and outside the next with no idea how you got from point A to point B.

Or things that are just illegal under what you're fighting against.

[Yeah funny story about the killing people thing there buddy. You don't get called Arena Champion by making friends, sadly.]

Prisoners make good targets for a lot of things. Not just murder. I... know what you mean there. But I try not to think about it too hard. You don't remember anything? Just suddenly you're out?

More like every carefully-laid plan is almost guaranteed to get thrown off the rails near-immediately. It's one long string of improvisation in my experience.

Really that's all survival is in general.

But you have to remember... parts of it, right? Or else how do you adapt? If you can't remember what happened?

[honey]

I didn't mean it quite so literally. I do not actually enter a zen-like prison-escaping fugue state that I am afterwards incapable of remembering.

[LOOK is it so much to ask for a fellow memory loss buddy]

Oh Sorry I just assumed ...

[Friend if you want memory loss you better talk to Fiddleford. He's the old man from Gravity Falls who knows all about that.]

No, no, I understand. I should have specified. There are beings for whom such a state is natural in times of stress.

There are plenty of stretches of time I don't remember but those are easily explained by mind-altering substances or severe physical trauma caused by injury or alien sickness. Upside: I now have one hell of an immune system.

[No that's okay, this is actually enlightening regardless.]

Physical trauma That causes memory loss? Just for some people, or... can that happen to anyone?

[Hi guess who has yet to connect the dots to his brain trauma.]

It depends on the location and severity of the trauma, but yes it can. Either because the recovery process is particularly draining and you spend most of it in a barely-coherent haze, or because the brain is directly injured, or both.

What

[Okay, this whole thing was prompted by candy. By Emotions. But ... this is different. This is Not Talked About. Not with anyone but maybe Jean. Once.]

What about losing a limb?

I would say that losing a limb could certainly be traumatic enough, particularly if the recovery period was difficult.

Are you asking about your arm?