She didn't know what to say. She didn't know what to do.
She supposed, after so long being away from home... She must not have known anything at all.
Dexter sat in front of her, facing away. He was bigger than she had ever known him to be, much biggger. On par with the superheroes she had know to care and work with. He was braver than any of them could ever be.
She didn't want to be gone so long. None of them had, and if they'd known what would happen to world when they left, they wouldn't have gone at all.
It had all started with a distress call from across the galaxy. The Nulonrians, the aliens, had requested aid. The Justice Friends had jumped on the case, but after fpur moths away from the planet, the other super heroes of the world chased after them.
She remembered, quite clearly, Monkey holding out his hand to her what seemed like just a couple years ago. It had been decades.
She had taken that hand.
She was dragged into what seemed, to her, a three year war between the nice but weak Nulonrians and some other race with hard to pronounce names. It turned out that, at least when they were returning to Earth, they needed to go into cryosleep. They couldn't guess the time it would take for the ship to return to Earth, but they assumed it would only be a week or so.
It had been sixteen years.
They had been mortified.
She had cried, but she didn't know how long. She remembered right after the war ended, she had been talking about Mom's homemade cooking, and how much she was looking forward to eating it again. She told them that her mom always made too much food, and she would bring them some. She didn't think she'd ever get the chance. They had been presented to an Earth that had suffered some great tragedy, but at that point they could only guess what it was. The ground was barren and red, almost like blood, and it reminded her terribly of the battlefields she left behind.
She wanted to see her friends again. She wanted to see her family again. She wanted to see anything of the home, of the world, she had grown up on, but it seemed like there was only desert for miles. But they had been wrong, thw world wasn't broken.
It was healing.
They all split up and wandered after that, and found groups of very happy people, they sang and celebrated the heroes, the older ones kept telling their children: "look, son! The heroes have returned!"
And if they wandered far enough, they would find little budding grass seeds all around, turning the ground green once more.
And Dee Dee had found someone she almost didn't recognize.
They stumbled across it, almost by accident, the largest camp of people they had found thus far. It was the town where the grass was the greenest and the sun shone the brightest and sky seemed the bluest. And there was a huge figure, she nearly mistook for one of her hero friends, walking toward them.
He stopped in front of her, looking speachless. He stared like he couldn't believe his eyes, and he reached out his hand, his gloved hand, but dropped it halfway.
He hadn't spoken a word, but she could tell, somewhere in her heart, this was Dexter. He was alive, and if he was okay, then that was enough hope to keep her happy. She hugged him, and to her surprise he hugged back and tried not to cry.
Her first words to him, after nineteen long years, were:
"You're bald, Dexter!"
And he grumbled about it in the way only her brother could. And he was technically older than her, and definitely taller than her, but she still treated him like her little brother which annoyed him to no end like it used to. And she poked at his inventions like she used to, and Dexter would scream at her and tell her to stop touching the delicate equipment. And she'd laugh and do it anyway. It was almost like before, but it was different too.
Too different to ignore.
He was... not all there, anymore. His arms were tanned, but also littered with scars, all in different stages of healing. Under his gloves, he was the same baby pale as when he was young, but his fingers were calloused. So calloused and scarred, on his arms and his hands and his face. And his eyes didn't even seem to exist under the tinted glasses he now constantly wore, and he'd shriek in pain, actual pain, if his eyes were touched by the sun.
But she didn't know the half of it.
She didn't know anything.
Back on their ship, there was a pool, and a hot tub. Commodities she had greatly enjoyed on the other planet in the off times of fighting. They had naturally offered her brother a dip in the pool, and he quite literally demanded it.
"I have not properly bathed in years. You could not stop me if you tried." He had said, his ever present ego shining through all the wisdom he had gained. Somethings never changed, but he was allowed to be proud.
Dexter had indeed spent a long time cleaning off the nineteen years of built up grime off himself. He came out if the showers looking, and smelling, much nicer than he had probably felt in years.
She had then taken it upon herself to dump his old clothes and pick out new ones for him from the other heroes' dressers. It wasn't easy, but she had picked out a large array to choose from, all the pink clothes the others never wore for some reason.
To her disappointment he didn't want any of the offered clothing, and fished his dirty clothes out of the trash.
"Well at least wash them fisrt!" Dee Dee said, hating the nasty smell the garments emitted. Dexter threw his hands up in the air, and still in his bath towel, dumped his lab coat in the washer. He then sat next to her, seemingly mad at her for trying to throwaway his precious labcoat. His back was turned, and his arms were crossed.
She turned to try and explain that the shirts she had given him were not too lacey like he had said.
Which brought her to the present.
She stared at the crisscrossed scars that covered nearly every inch of his back.
These were not the scars of war, no, she was familiar with those. And they were no accident either, they couldn't have been.
These were scars of a whip, of someone who overpowered and hurt him.
She didn't say anything.
They were old scars, and the only discomfort they could have brought was the occasional pull and stretch of tender muscle. If he wasn't bothered by them, and he didn't feel like he needed to hide them, then neither would she.
She supposed, maybe after all this time, she had changed too.
But what did she know?