Karolina Dean (glowgirl) wrote in momadness_log, @ 2022-04-24 15:20:00 |
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Entry tags: | marvel: nico minoru, ~inactive: karolina dean |
Who: Karolina Dean and Nico Minoru
What: Reunited
Where: Their room at the Mortuary
When: Right after Karolina's return
Warnings: none
Status: complete
The whole randomly popping from one universe to another thing was getting really old, though Karolina was happy to realize she was back in New York at the Avengers facility this time. She’d lost track of time during her adventures in Oz with Lydia and Klaus and hoped that Nico was still here and hadn’t done anything rash at her disappearance.
She didn’t waste any time getting back to the Mortuary and finding her girlfriend sitting on their bed with Chase. “Hey,” she said softly, pausing in the doorway for a few moments so Nico would be aware of her presence and not accidentally attack her with magic.
*
After she'd lost it and dragged people into their own variety of hell, Nico had mostly stayed at the Mortuary by herself. Any venturing she did felt like revisiting an apology tour, which got exhausting really quickly. She missed her friends. Missed Karolina. Chase huffed a puppy sigh, which was her signal to go back to petting his head where it sat on her lap. "Sorry, boy. Just got caught up in my own head for a second. Thanks for the reminder."
She rubbed gently at a velveteen ear and tried to go back to the passage she'd been attempting to read for at least ten minutes. Two and a half weeks. It had been two and a half weeks, and all Nico could do was remind herself to breathe and not listen to the little voice in her head that told her to bring out the Staff and try again. That voice could go straight to hell. Or the Dark Dimension. Whichever would hurt more. (She knew what her money was on.)
With how quiet the house had been, it wasn't hard at all to hear someone moving through it, although Nico was so surprised by the noise, she couldn't make sense of what she was hearing until the door was opening and there was her girlfriend. A sound came out of her throat, but it got lost in Chase's excited bark, after which he literally launched himself at the bed toward her, tail going a mile a minute. "Hi. You—" Nico blinked stupidly at Karolina, and wariness warred with hope in her chest. "Are you—are you real?"
*
“Yes, I’m real,” Karolina said, giving her a bright smile as she leaned down to pet Chase. “I’m so sorry, Nico. It only felt like a couple of days on our end, but I guess it was a couple of weeks here?” She couldn’t begin to imagine how much pain her absence caused her girlfriend.
She shooed the puppy away and made her way over so she could reach for Nico, wanting nothing more than to pull her girlfriend into her arms and hold her. The only thing preventing her from doing just that was wanting to make sure that Nico knew this was real and not some trick of the Dark Dimension or Morgan or someone or something else that might be messing with her. “I missed you.”
*
Nico's entire body was shaking. She became aware of this as she leaned toward Karolina. It got worse the closer she got, because she was not going to survive if this was some crazy, stupid hoax or hallucination. The room dimmed around her, but it could have had something to do with the fact that she'd stopped breathing. And she didn't start again until the tips of their fingers were touching, and it all came rushing back in great juddering gasps and sobs. There was little to no finesse to how she scrambled the remaining distance and caught her girlfriend around the waist to pull her onto the bed, nor in the way she sought out and caught those soft lips she'd never take for granted again.
*
Hearing her girlfriend sob nearly broke Karolina, and all she could do was wrap her arms around Nico and return her desperate kiss. She hated seeing her like this, though she knew if their situations were reversed, she’d be at least as much of a wreck. There was so much she wanted to say, but instead she found herself whispering reassurances between kisses. “I’m okay. I’m really here. I missed you. I love you.”
She had no idea how long they stayed that way and despite her overwhelming need for both a long shower and a hot meal, she didn’t care.
*
Far too slowly for her liking, Nico managed to pull back to finally look her girlfriend over a bit more closely through something other than the eyes of shock and disbelief. Karolina looked… well, she kind of looked like a mess, but she didn't appear to be injured or doing anything particularly un-Karolina-like. Nico knew down to her toenails that she would know those lips anywhere, know the soft lilt of her voice, see through any illusion, so this was the real deal. She took a deep breath as wave after wave of questions broke against inside of her head.
"Okay." Another breath, this one accompanying the way her hand fluttered down her girlfriend's arm until she'd taken her hand. "Okay, you have to know I have, like, hundreds of questions, so let's start with the most salient: where did you go? What happened?"
*
Karolina knew she was in desperate need of a long shower and clean clothes. They hadn’t exactly had any sort of modern conveniences, and she was glad they weren’t actually stuck there for two weeks. “I ended up in this really weird and creepy version of Oz. Like The Wizard of. Except it was all run down and there were these terrifying wheely things that tried to attack us and Scarecrow wasn’t King anymore.”
In the back of her mind, she had some vague recollections of reading some of the books when she was younger and some of the things she’d seen might be in them, though she didn’t expect she’d be able to read them to find out for a long time, if ever.
“Do you know Klaus and Lydia? They were there too. It was scary, but I was glad I wasn’t alone.” She paused, squeezing Nico’s hand. “I wish you would have been there though.”
*
Now that her emotional outburst was out of the way, some of Nico's situational awareness was starting to come back, along with a few practicalities. It took her a second to unpack what Karolina was saying, and even then she was having a hard time wrapping her brain around it. The whole thing seemed vaguely familiar, but Nico couldn't quite get at why. She had more important things to spend her mental energy on, anyway. "Sounds like it really put the terrible in 'The Great and Terrible'."
She opened her mouth to ask if it was as bad as the Dark Dimension, but it wasn't something she wanted to admit just yet, that she'd lost control yet again. "I know of them, mostly. From the network." A squirming sort of discomfort moved through her. It should have been her there with her girlfriend, not some randos from other worlds. Of course, that wasn't how any of it had shaken out, and there was no changing it now, so she was totally being irrational. She physically swallowed to give force to pushing down her unhelpful emotions, and squeezed the hand she was holding. "I wish the same thing, but wishing never really got us anywhere good. Or helpful. Why don't you run take the world's longest shower, and I'll get some food together? You have to be starving."
*
“And we can spend the rest of the day cuddling?” Karolina asked. She had an almost frantic need to be in physical contact with Nico now that they were together again. Being separated, even though it had only been a few days for her, was not something she enjoyed. After everything they’d been through back home, she relied on her girlfriend’s presence, both for comfort and for backup.
Chase barked then and ran back over to the bed with his toy. “Yes, you can cuddle too,” she said, leaning down to run her hand over his head. “Food sounds good. Chinese?”
*
"Yes and yes and yes." Nico nodded bobble-head style for a few seconds, and then drew her girlfriend into a lingering kiss, where she also mumbled a quiet, but fervent, "I love you," before packing her off to the shower.