fridgetothefire | 041 ☣ something for everyone

[Filtered to graduates/wardens who were once inmates]

What did you sacrifice, to graduate?

Someone asked me recently, and I didn't have an answer. I'm wondering if that's strange.

[Filtered to wardens who were never inmates.]

Do any of you feel trapped here? Or have you, in the past, because you needed your deal so badly? It just - it seems like a much more important distinction, in some ways, between wardens and inmates, than being able to get a drink without asking someone to buzz you in first, that we can walk away and they can't.

But I'm not sure it's that straightforward.

[Filtered to inmates]

How many of you want to change? Not to graduate, that's a very different question, and not necessarily into - whoever the admiral wants you to be. Just change, in general.

Do you want to be different than you are, in any way, or not?

[Private to the Admiral]

[Wryly, amiably.]

I don't suppose you'll tell me what you're getting out of all this.

[Spam for Harvey]

[For a long time, she practiced in private. In Bruce's room, in Cass's. She'd work with Natasha or Sokolov or Bea in the gym, because that's where they were, but when she was on her own, without the clear label of 'student' hanging over her, she'd do it with a yoga mat and a locking door. Old paranoid habits, needing to be underestimated. She's realized, lately, how much more convenient the gym is, has been gradually trying to acclimate herself to working through drills under anyone else's eyes. She's there now, moving through forms and combinations Bruce taught her, counting out her breaths. Her lungs are - compensating, slowly, better than they were, even if she'll never quite hit the same caliber of athleticism that she might have otherwise. It feels good, not just to push herself, but to know she's going somewhere.]

[Private to Abigail; wibbly timed to after their conversations with Ben.]

I told you once that I was being as straightforward with you as I knew how to be. In the interest of resurrecting that - this scares me. Not what Ben's doing, me and you.

But I will do everything in my power to take care of both of you, as much as you need.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yes.

Why?

[Not in an incredulous way, simply investigative. Because he was better, or because it was easier, or something else.]

I killed off the population of four countries.

...I don't know how many countries I destroyed, actually.

[She should check. She doesn't want to.]

Not, like, in person. But I feel like that shouldn't matter as much as people think it does.

Those are human lives. It matters.

No, I mean - it doesn't matter how I destroyed them, how many moving pieces were in between my hand and the consequences.

Just that I did, in the end.

I'd say that matters, too, but we're getting off the subject. I wasn't that person from the beginning. I had to become this.

I never imagined you were.

[This is true. Even when she didn't know him at all, even when he was only a shadowy, hulking outline, a cipher in her consciousness for barge heavy hitters, 'Not To Be Trifled With,' she didn't imagine he'd always been what he is, or what he was, in the terrifying glimpses she sometimes got of his more recent past. Even Magneto was once Papa - already himself, already traumatized and ambitious and obsessive, but not what he became.]

I'm smarter for it, having come out the other side. But I'd still rather it hadn't happened at all.

Yeah. I know what you mean.

[She does, can clearly imagine it even if she doesn't quite share it, can imagine being someone who had something besides her soul to lose, before she committed all her worst regrets, someone who might trade what's she's found for something she had before. She told Cassel she never sacrificed her family: you have to have something in order to give it up. But she has lived enough breaches, she can imagine.]

Wasn't that a good change, then? Going through when you can't go back, getting out...scathed. But out.

[Arthas laughs, humorless and bitter.]

Why? To be trapped here, unable to control any part of my own fate but still able to regret it?

I would rather have stayed dead.

You control more of it than that.

[She won't deny the pain of regrets, or his own desire for death. But his mind is his own half the time and his choices more often than that; it's not nothing.]

What parts? Who I talk to? What mindless thing I kill to keep the hunger at bay?

I don't control my own freedom, or my fate. I either die, or I wait until he's happy with me.

I don't want the Admiral's approval. I don't want my progress to satisfy whatever obscure motive he has for doing all of this.

You control - more often than not - who you are. Everyone dies, sooner or later. It's what we are in the meantime that matters.

I put my neck in your hands, and you could have tricked me and used me and hurt me. And you gave me exactly what I needed instead. You didn't do that for him or his approval.

No. But he would have approved. And I hate him.

Why do it then?

Don't push me. I still have time to change my mind.

I'm not pushing just to push. There's a point here.

Being contrary is - okay, a little bit satisfying, yes, but it is still letting someone else's standards manipulate you, define you. Whatever your reasons were, they were your own. That matters.

He can't manipulate me if I do what he doesn't want.

Shape, then, even indirectly, even by counter-reaction. You aren't limited by resistance or acquiescence, is my point.

I know you're trapped, and in pain, and I know how intolerable that is. I do. But you are yourself, and you aren't alone.

It's worth remembering, that's all.