008 - public, voice...word-vomit ahoy

[intofireforever]

I'm glad that's over. It was terrifying. I don't know why I thought it was the owls' doing. It felt nothing like that. That thing seriously messed with my head, and I've had more than enough of that for one lifetime...

...After-lifetime? I don't know. Whatever it should be called. I might have a pulse here, but I don't consider myself alive. No deal I could make here would bring me back in my world, and I think I prefer it that way. The White Lodge is peaceful, and there's no pain there. I've been tormented and abused since the time I was four or five years old. Death is better than that, even death at seventeen. So as terrible as this place can be, I'm grateful for it because it let me ascend to the White Lodge. I don't think I could ever completely hate it here, even after things like this.

Wanda? Are you feeling better now? I know I was screwed up at the time, too, but I still feel like I completely failed you. I miss Paddy, you know. He was a better father-figure to me than my real one. I feel so lost as a warden sometimes and I wish he could give me some advice. I think I'd do better by you if he was here to help, even though he made a big mistake with me that one time. He was mostly right on the mark and knew exactly what I needed.

I'm sorry I'm not as helpful to you as I feel I could be, but I really, really care about you. I'm doing my very best.

Comments

[darknessb4me]

The living have no perspective anyway.

You worry me.

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[fridgetothefire]

I'm a lot like him. All the ways you said - more than I've let you see. More than I wanted to think about, but I really am.

I'm so glad you're not going to be like that. It's awful.

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[scarlet_discord]

You gotta get away from it. I'm serious. It's the same poison that lives in him and makes him such a monster. No matter what incarnation. Seriously, if I hadn't backed off on wanting to kill him I would have murdered the guy I have the biggest crush on on the Barge when I was tripping on that horrible smoke. That's the kinda stuff that happens. You can't change the past, but...I put it aside for the sake of a better future. I don't care if anybody understands.

I know that the one here isn't my father or your father but he's a Magneto and he can't be trusted. I don't care how huffy and offended he gets because I avoid him. Everything is not about his pride and his feelings. My sanity and yours, they come first.

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[fridgetothefire]

Wanda...it's too late for me, okay? It has been for a long time.

[Her voice is fractured, full of raw edges.]

I killed my sister too. Years before Magneto, I never could have struck him without manipulating everyone around her death. She was the only person left who cared for me at all, but she still sided with them and I was trapped and I was so furious and betrayed and lost, I didn't know what else to do.

And you can't - you can't ever undo that, you can't ever not be the person who did that again.

I didn't escape it, but you can, you are. Don't ever let that go, please.

[intofireforever]

He's not a person. He's more like a force of nature. He's existed since the beginning of everything, and he's been taking hosts since humans have been around. He got into my father's body the first time they met. I don't blame myself anymore for becoming a prostitute, because the fact that I kept him out of my body is...something I can still hardly believe I managed to do.

I don't want you to make it up to me. There's nothing to make up for, really. Wardens are supposed to deal with their inmate's baggage. I dumped mine all over Paddy without a second thought, so I knew what I was signing up for when I made my deal. I'm thankful I get to help someone like you.

This is why it's such a big step for you. You restrained yourself from killing him even though you don't forgive him, even though you think he deserves to suffer. I think he deserves to suffer too, to tell you the truth. But that you can step back and say you won't have a hand in it is huge, really huge. You won't turn into that other Wanda as long as you can do that. You won't let a desire to make him pay consume you, I know you won't. You're strong.

[intofireforever]

BOB took over Agent Cooper's body. He's the man who solved my murder, and now he's trapped in the Black Lodge. My deal is to save him.

[intofireforever]

I didn't know you killed anyone. Was it in self-defense?

[intofireforever]

It's hard to have a perspective on something that doesn't make any sense. Death isn't anything like I was taught in church, that's for sure. I still sort of believe in God or something like him, but he's not the Sunday school kind.

Why do I worry you?

[love_slave]

That's terrible! [She sounds absolutely horrified. Mind-control isn't something that appeals to her, either.] I think you'll get it, but can you get rid of BOB forever?

[intofireforever]

[Laura sounds surprised at the suggestion, because the fact that she can't is so obvious to her.]

Oh God no! I can save Agent Cooper, but I can't kill BOB. He's more of a force of nature than anything else, and he's existed since the beginning of everything. There's no way to stop him forever. I'm sure he'll take another host.

[love_slave]

You can't even trap him so he can't possess people anymore? [Some forces of nature are kind of horrible, she thinks.]

[intofireforever]

The only being he's ever feared can't do it.

[She'll let that speak for itself.]

[yeahscience]

Sort of, but... not exactly. [It's a little easier to talk about Gale these days, but not by much. He glances down at his hands and doesn't look back up.] Me and my partner... needed him out of the way. It was like competition, him or us. I picked the wrong one.

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[scarlet_discord]

[There is a long, long silence as she absorbs this, her face going sickly pale.]

You killed your sister. Your Wanda.

[She literally does not know what to say to this. She hides her face in her hands.]

...oh God, this family...

...is Shakespearean levels of fucked up no matter what world we're from.

[She swallows tears and lifts her chin.]

But you're wrong about it being too late.

[scarlet_discord]

Well...okay, I'm just saying. I would.

[She thinks about this.]

I think I've realized that it's not even him I hate, at the end of the day. He's not the start of the misery in my family, he's just a carrier. I can't forgive him, but...I can keep from becoming a carrier myself. Of...it. The family demon, I guess you could call it.

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[fridgetothefire]

We really are. [She laughs, a little bubbling broken sound.] I used to picture Titus looking like Dad.

And I didn't want to hurt her. Mostly. I'm sorry. God, I am.

[She gulps, shoves a hand through her hair.]

I don't understand how you can say that, think that, but. I think it's amazing that you can. You were always the best of us. And I don't know if it's worth anything, but I think Mama would have been really proud of you. I am, even though I don't have the right.

[intofireforever]

Is your deal to bring him back?

[intofireforever]

"The family demon." I like that term.

[For obvious reasons.]

You won't turn out like him. Just wanting to be nothing like him is a step in the right direction, regardless of anything else.

[darknessb4me]

I have a very vague idea of what Earth's religion is about, but it doesn't seem very useful if your priests can't heal people.

I don't want you to vanish before you can go back into the Light. I assume that's where the White Lodge is. We don't know where the people that get taken from here go.

[yeahscience]

Nah... the Admiral let me have that one as a freebie, actually. Except-- only in one timeline, I guess, or only in half of them, or whatever... I just know, I mean, I know I took it back, but when I went home he was still dead. [And now he's frowning, because that's really been bothering him.]

I think the Admiral did it to show me what could've happened without the Barge. What did happen, in some worlds.

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[scarlet_discord]

Look, I believe that you're sorry, because you're not a fucking sociopath, and if there's a way to fix it I would help you find it. Because my Anya didn't even get the chance to live. You're not her, but you're connected to her. And the thing is, now I don't know if she'd have had any kind of a good life if she'd survived. It's forced me to think. About a lot of things.

You say I was the best of us, but there's a me out there who lost her mind one day and committed a horrible crime. And I bullied Pietro. Didn't kill him, but I start to understand why he stopped giving a damn, you know? I did it for information. To get to our father. And because I hated him for being more loyal to him than to me. The only thing that kept me from murdering my father was Pietro's rescuing him at the last moment.

Neither of us are really right in the head, I guess. But that can be fixed, and we both have to fix it somehow. Especially me. I can't become someone who flips out and uses my depowering ability against nearly every mutant on Earth. I don't want to kill my friends or any of that. And neither one of us wants to live mired in the past.

There's this thing, you know, this sort of...demon, almost, or family curse, that tries to infest everyone in the family, all across the multiverse. I spent my life blaming Erik Lehnsherr for it, but the truth is, that thing that lives in us didn't start with him. It started with what was done to our family.

It poisons us. Against each other and against the world. The hatred and bitterness and need for revenge. Erik Lehnsherr is just another carrier. Like me, like you.

I hate it. I don't forgive my father, but taking revenge on him just lets that...thing...dig in deeper. I'd rather reject it, and deal with my own pain. Because otherwise I might...do what that other me did. Or worse.

[scarlet_discord]

I screwed up with Erik Lehnsherr here, Laura. I should have kept to my ideals that I tried to, but I was too messed up, you know? I'll have to figure out how to explain it to him.

Anyway, I don't want to carry around all that hate and vengefulness anymore. It clouds my judgment. Makes me into the kind of person I hate.

[intofireforever]

There are many religions. And priests aren't doctors or anything.

I'd just go back to the White Lodge; I don't have anywhere else to go. But the point is moot because I'm not going anywhere until I've done everything I can for Wanda.

[intofireforever]

I don't blame you for straying. The stress his presence put you under...I understand.

All you can do now is be better, and you already are. You have remarkable self-control.

[intofireforever]

You got to see multiple timelines from your world? Like...parallel dimensions?