introspection

Today I had a check-up. I had to face down Sparkles and all I could feel was a vague sense of discomfort. I know he’s died. I know he died at the hands of, in that world, one of my best friends. I know he would despise him for that. I know he should despise me for having forgiven him despite what he’s done. And he’d be right. But that was all I had to cling to, there. I had my sister, I had my husband, I had Reva, and I had him. They were the people I could bring close, and I needed that desperately.

But it got me to thinking. Am I a monster by extension? For looking past what happened in the heat of the moment, to the person underneath? Am I just an apologist? Maybe I am, for making friends with someone like that. I don’t know.

There were people who called him a sweet guy despite the fact that he’s killed someone, and I knew that. It struck me that people said the same things about me. I was a good person, a sweetheart, who deserved so much better. Despite the fact that I killed and ate two dozen people in a fit of rage and hate. Despite the fact that I had two preserved hearts in jars and an assault rifle in a closet as trophies.

What makes me somehow a good person? I’m worse.

And I know I shouldn’t let it affect me here, in my reality. But seeing Sparkles and getting hit with that wave of unreality made me realize that I’m no different here. I mauled a man for feeding me pills until I was in the hospital. I turned a medical office building basement into a bloodbath. I tortured a man on the basis that he tortured me in a totally different world.

Why do people put up with me?

I should be locked up with the worst of them.

After the check-up, I went back to my between and sat in front of the seedlings my husband provided me for a while. I fertilized them with the ashes of the man that I brutally tortured. Even this place was stained with my own cruelty.

In one world, I went insane because I was forced to god tier and became the very scourge of paradox space. Hundreds of thousands of ghosts met oblivion by my hand because I just couldn’t not be fucked up. In another, I nearly wiped out an entire conservation foundation because of what their president did to what I somehow intrinsically knew was my daughter. That world got hit by the reset button, I think. But I still remember. It still sits there in my mind.

And yet, people still like me. Somehow, people still forgive me despite the blood on my hands. Why?

What makes me likeable?