ximilialog | (August Catch-All) The Things We Do

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(August Catch-All) The Things We Do

CHARACTERS: Sam Wilson & You (Open + Closed Starters)
LOCATION: Various aboard the station
DATE: Immediately post mission + the days after.
CONTENT: Catch-all prompts for post mission feelings
WARNINGS: Will be added to Top Levels

[ Top Levels in comments:
Infirmary: angsty hurt people after returning from the mission
Mess Hall: the evening post mission, after the food delivery, alcohol is on the table
Simulation Room: the day after the mission, sam disappears and can be found zoned out in the simulation room
Training Room: hot dude working up a sweat while training, various days post mission
Lab and Tech Storage: redwing is the best boi, fight me (and Sam)
TBA: maybe closed starters for Bucky/Natasha?

If you'd like a closed starter or have a different kind of thread idea for which none of these setups work, feel free to hit me at

inkcharm, Discord inkcharm#4573 or send me a PM. ]

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[ He genuinely hasn't even noticed the passage of time, and looks perplexed when Rosinante approaches, as if it takes him a moment to reconcile the setting with the man's presence. Sam's mind was far away for a while there, drifting in a haze of physical pain - he took a few hard falls, body littered with scrapes and bruises, and there's a nasty electric burn on his shoulder from their shared chase, and that energy blast that took out Sam's jetpack and sent him careening into a tree.

Sam's ego is just as bruised from that, honestly.

More than anything, though, his mind's preoccupied with the non-physical wound the mission has reopened so viciously via the transformation and hallucinations.

So for a good long moment, Sam just stares at Rosinante as if he can't decide whether the setting is real and Rosinante isn't or vice versa - or if perhaps he's just entirely lost the plot. In the end, Sam sits up a little, wincing, when simulation and reality click back into the proper slot in his mind. ]

Half of it, technically. She's been in the family business a while now.

Fishing?

[Obviously, but he smiles gently at Sam as he walks closer while inspecting the boat. Well cared for, clearly. It's a surprise to think that someone with a laser-firing robot and a cool power suit would have anything to do with a simple fishing business, but people are full of apparent contradictions until you get to know them. It's actually sort of comforting, seeing this when he would have expected a world full of slick metal castles and flying machines. Or, what was it Ed had spoken of? Cars. Trains.

He finds himself a seat so he can enjoy the sight of the waves.]

After what we all just did, I wouldn't have taken you for a fisherman.

Nothing beats a humble origin.

[ Sam returns the gentle smile. Something wistful tinges the edges of the expression, but mostly it's genuine amusement, a sort of warm and cozy nostalgia for his own roots. ]

Seafood business been the first thing my family ever owned. Been ours for a couple generations now. [ He hesitates, briefly, weighs remaining closed off against sharing this place with a stranger who's proven himself a damn good ally. Ah, what the hell. ] My sister and I spent half our childhood on this boat.

[ He raps his knuckles against the bow. Hand uncurling he then runs his fingertips along it. The boat had been in a sorry state of things, and it still gives him an immense sense of peace to know they were able to fix it back up again. That his sister changed her mind on selling it. That he didn't have to paint over his parents' names on the hull. ]

But yeah, no... the family business never been my calling, I suppose.

[ It's a mild way of putting it. When his father died, Sarah was old enough to take over, and Sam had run off to join the air force, lured by the promises of steady pay to help foot his mother's rising medical bills. And from there, he'd soared ever higher, even at his lowest moments. ]

[The way the man talks about his childhood, his family, is genuinely heartwarming. It's only a few words, but the tone is all there, as is the love in his gestures, the affection for this little boat that ties him to his upbringing. He finds himself longing, ever so slightly, for a past he never had. One where normal kids are raised by normal parents, doing things like hauling up shrimp and shining silver mackerel out of a warm bay and cooking crab and lobster with their neighbors.

Some experiences are truly worlds apart.]

You say humble, but I'd call it grounding. That's the sort of thing that keeps a person's head rooted in the things that matter. Everything we're doing now, like back in Gyeongje, makes sure people get to live those lives the way they're supposed to.

[There's a brief pause where he has a draw from his cigarette, then:]

So, what's your calling? How does a kid from a fishing family end up with wings and lasers?

[ The air becomes rich, for a moment, with the sound of a couple children shrieking and laughing. Something around Sam's eyes that still looks haunted softens ever so slightly.

Still, at the question, Sam shifts in mild discomfort. Here's a man who looks like he's happier not talking about himself. So he shrugs, and wraps the truth - the grief, the loss, the pain - in something smaller, almost dismissive of his long and hard road through life. ]

Ran away to join the army. Trained to become pararescue - means people you send into the field to fix other people up, or drop them behind enemy lines to rescue soldiers who can't get back out. Can be deployed or natural disasters, too, but I was deployed on two combat tours. The wings were experimental tech. Project was shelved, I left the army. Years later I took the wings back and joined some super heroes in saving the world a little bit.

[ Sam shrugs, smiles a little, and doesn't quite succeed in not still looking haunted by several things he's left out of the story. ]

That's about it, really. So what's your story?

[Is the "super heroes" thing supposed to be tongue in cheek? The rest sounds so earnest. It's hard to know what to make of that one line.

The rest, though, he nods along with, truly impressed. Pararescue - that sort of thing takes a lot of bravery, and a real depth of honor and selflessness.

These are good people. He keeps finding that to be true of every one of them he's worked with so far and learned about. Up to this point Rosinante has sidestepped questions about what he does both out of habit and caution, because in his line of work honesty gets you killed. But things are different here, aren't they? Maybe it's time to tell a few simple truths. Sam especially seems trustworthy.

He focuses on the cigarette smoke and water.]

My parents died when I was young. I was taken in by a Marine officer who had been visiting the island when he found me wandering. I didn't really know what to do with my life, I guess, except join up as soon as I was old enough. I figured, he'd saved my life, the least I could do was pay it forward. Mostly now I take assignments where pirates are causing long-term trouble, doing things like black market trade in guns, drugs, or whatever, and try to work out who's criminal and who's innocent. Round up the former, protect the latter. I just want to make those areas safer so kids can have normal lives without getting sucked into drug rings or slaver networks.

[The short, simplified version of it, but for the first time since arriving he didn't actually make any of it up. Feels weird. But, well, good.]

[ Rosinante isn't from the same world Sam is - that much is pretty damn easy to assume just by visual cues alone. So he can't know how different it hits - to sit here, on a fishing boat in the depths of Louisiana, where the bayou is teeming with long lost slave graves, talking to a black man whose family had been dragged here via a port less than an hour's drive away kicking and screaming generations ago, and never left, and mention almost casually that he's busting slaver networks.

Sam takes a breath, and releases it, a little too sharp. Good isn't something you are, it's something you do. ]

So you're a good man. And a hero to boot.

[ He says it lightly, but not without a genuine warmth to it. Sam swallows. ]

Slavery a common thing where you from?

[The reaction is subtle, but Rosinante notices. He can't understand, though, of course. Not really. Slavery is despicable and something he hates deeply, and so that Sam should pick up on that as the most detestable among the things he listed doesn't surprise him, but only because it is awful to treat people as property. People should be upset about that.

And yet too many in his own world either willingly participate, or turn a blind eye.]

Unfortunately. The fishmen tend to get it the worst. People look down on them because they're not human. Mermaids don't fare any better, since they're popular with the wealthy. Like having an aquarium, but...

[But, you know, people instead of fish, and it is so deeply fucked up that he loses the stomach to continue with that thought out loud, and shudders instead, eyes narrowing.]

Humans do it to each other too, though. And I - you know, I'm not much of a hero. Feels like the work's unending, like I'm hardly ever able to make a dent.

[ Sam almost wants to laugh. Are humans just... like that, then, in other worlds as well as his own? It's a chilling thought, that all of it isn't just a product of his Earth's specific circumstances, but part of human nature. To chain what they deem 'other', and want to own in one twisted way or another. ]

We just got humans... [ He thinks briefly to the people Daisy referred to as Inhumans, and tries not to shudder at the naming. ] Different skin color, though. My great-great-grandparents were born into slavery. Lived to see it abolished. Last generation born into it.

[ Sam gestures towards the dock, points at the sign that proudly declares this 'Wilson Family Seafood'. Most of the people milling about there, adult and children, have dark skin like Sam. They're clearly not all one family - but they're one people, descended from those who were stolen, those who were born into it, those who saw it abolished and toiled to make something of what this country proudly called 'freedom'. There are implications there. ]

First thing we ever owned.

[ And it hurts, to think about how little time passed. To remember, vaguely, his great-grandfather, already old and wizened when Sam was a little boy. To think that Sam as a child talked to a man whose own parents were born in chains, who himself was lucky to be born just late enough.

Sam's eyes linger up there. On children, laughing and playing. ]

Seems like hardly a dent to you. Makes all the difference to every single one person, and everyone after them.

[Rosinante follows Sam's gesture, eyes slowly widening as the weight of all he says sinks in.

In the absence of non-humans to subjugate, humanity picks on its own - he knows this. Skin color is arbitrary, but it would always be something arbitrary anyway, wouldn't it? There's no good reason to enslave anyone. He can't help but wonder who, in Sam's world, are the equivalents to his own kin, his ancestors as well as not-so-distant family, who perch at the top of their castles and manors and declare all else below them?

And then decides never to ask, because those people don't matter. Slavery abolished, for good, that matters.]

How did it change? Your world's heroes - how did they manage to end it?

Ain't as easy as all that.

[ Would be simpler, wouldn't it, if slavery had just been a bad thing some bad people did, instead of something that the entire western world profited from, something that America was built on. Just something you needed a few heroes to roll up for. Defeat the bad guys, free the enslaved.

He rubs the palms of his hands against one another. ]

Global problem, honestly. Slave trade was a massive market. The trade was outlawed first, country by country. There were shifts of morality in some populations. Elsewhere there were slave uprisings that managed to stick and influenced revolutions. Then some places you had freed slaves advocating for abolishment. And... not to be jaded, but I guess it also simply became less economically and politically viable.

[ Sam's an optimist when it comes to people - not so much when it comes to institutions and governments. ]

Whole system was baked into the foundations of this country, so there was never gonna be a fast or easy fix. We had our heroes, though. And a civil war.

[ It matters. The generational trauma will never be forgotten, and things are still... but perhaps they can focus on the good of it, for Rosinante's sake. There are worlds out there that for all their flaws managed to take the steps not quite yet seen where Rosinante's from. Means his work ain't meaningless, not for the people he frees, and also not in the large picture. Those deeds won't be forgotten either way. ]

[Oh, it would never be easy, he wouldn't expect it to be. Still, the scale of things sound even more vast, more awful in Sam's world than in his own. Hard to imagine, but it seems to be the case.

And yet things did change, despite all that. Justice, or some bright and shining part of it, did eventually prevail over all that cruelty.]

Just a couple years ago, my world had its first major rebellion. A former slave, a man named Fisher Tiger, slipped past the defenses of the country responsible for his imprisonment and freed hundreds more. Last I heard, nobody had found them.

I'm sure their success will inspire others, and it wouldn't surprise me if war is on the horizon as a result. People who think they're owed everything don't like to give power up easily.

[There's a lot of context Sam is missing, Rosinante knows. His world has two sets of laws, after all - one for everyone, and one for the men who think themselves gods. And the Marines are expected to uphold those laws. Both sets.

A fact he's lived his whole life with, has had to accept for the duration of his career, because to rock the metaphorical boat could bring the weight of that world crashing down on his head. He's no hero. He spent too much of his life hiding, working within the system rather than against it, to really qualify for a title like that one.]

They really don't.

[ It's not an easy truth to swallow, but it's a truth all the same. Plenty of people would rather have more than feed their neighbours. ]

You gotta find the people you can reach, and demand of them to do better. Show them how to do better if you must. Help them do better if you can. People are all about community - and in the end, if you reach enough people who are looking out for another, you can move a lot. You're gonna have your Fisher Tiger and Harriet Tubmans freeing hundreds, 'cause just getting out themselves wasn't gonna be enough for them.

[ Sam leans over a little, nudges Rosinante with his elbow. ]

Get you some people like yourself fighting the same good fight for a different angle... You do good where you can, when you can. Like what we did with the orb. Coulda done a little better overall, but I'd like to think we did mostly alright.

[He gives a bit of dry laughter at the nudge. He sure didn't intend to come in here and ask for a pep talk on the subject, but you know, it is kind of nice to hear all this.]

Yeah. We did. I'm impressed with all of us, actually. Everyone really pulled their weight. I have to admit I was worried, going in. We have a really varied group and yet we all managed to work together, mostly.

[There are still things he has reservations about. The willingness of the majority to let the locals do as they will with their leaders - which sounds nice in theory but can all too often dissolve into violence. He would prefer a neutral trial and fair sentencing, where angry townsfolk might react with a couple beheadings instead.]

It's different from what I'm used to. There's no real leadership other than what we all come together to decide. But somehow, we ended up with a lot of people who mostly seem to agree on what's right and wrong, at least in broad terms. And more than a few of us come from military backgrounds, so maybe that's part of it too. Similar notions of how to operate under stress.

[ Well, it's what Sam's good at. Even deep in his own feelings, something in him rattled loose over his own trauma, he's gonna find a way to lift someone else up if he can, or try his damn best to do so at least.

He also happens to be very much in agreement on the outcome regarding the leaders. While Sam knows that the Orbers aren't in any way in a position to pass judgment for the local population, he'd have preferred to stay there a while longer, help clean up the damages from the fight, help the locals organize and run whatever their form of a trial would have looked like, with the Orbers present to assist and smooth over the transition phase. It would have allowed So Yeon to spend some more time with her people after accomplishing all that, too. Sam understands that the orb couldn't have been extricated from her without her death, and in the end she gave it on her own terms. And perhaps it would have killed her either way, one day, sooner or later. It just doesn't sit right with him that it happened immediately, that they didn't push harder to afford her more time to see a new beginning for her people take root. They didn't quite stick the landing on that with their involvement, even if overall they did a whole lot of good. ]

Are you at all worried about how far some of us might go to get what we want? 'cause I know I ain't gonna compromise on myself just to undo a regret, but... I wonder if that holds true for some other people.

[ Sam stretches his legs, gaze briefly flickering over Rosinante's - amusement pulls on him for a moment. The man looks comical on this ship, honestly. The Paul & Darlene isn't exactly a tiny rowboat or anything - but still. ]

Last mission, I was supposed not to help anybody. I didn't even think about trying with that one, honestly.

[Rosinante nods slowly. Yes, he's worried, but also it strikes him that he's far less honorable than Sam is. An honest man doesn't do his job. A good man ought to be a lot more reluctant about it. Sure, he still feels awful any time he has to harm someone to get something done. The poor kids his brother tried to drag under his wing, for example - working daily to try and frighten them off, to drive them anywhere else by making their lives hell wasn't pleasant. But he did it. He learned a lot about what he could and could not do during those years.

But even so, he does have his limits and there's no telling yet if there are people here who don't.]

I've definitely thought about that now that we're all back and that we can see what the orbs might push people to do. I'm less worried about individuals here with those whispered goals, and more worried about the scale of the damage from us removing an orb from a world. People died there who shouldn't have had to and I've got a feeling we're going to see an awful lot more of that. Might be times when leaving an orb in place is better than recovering it, despite what Viveca seems to think. But then, maybe she knows better. She's done this before.

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(August Catch-All) The Things We Do

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