Marian (sweetspring) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2021-03-08 19:06:00 |
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Marian wakes in the late hours of the night, and in the darkness of her room she doesn't know who she is. It had taken Marian nearly a month of being home before she turned her computer on. She’d replied to a couple of things on her phone and been in contact like that, but her beloved computer – built from the ground up through hard work and focus – had remained silent and dormant. She wasn’t completely sure why she had been avoiding it, only that it felt like a thing connected to someone else. The day after getting home she’d seen it and thought, I should boot that up. The next thought had followed instantly: that seems like too much right now. So she left it off. And then every day after that she didn’t turn it on, that feeling grew inside of her. That seems like too much. It wasn’t logical. It was sensible. It wasn’t productive. But with each passing day it became a bigger thing inside her head, even though she knew it wasn’t. She knew that to squash that feeling she needed to push past it, but it felt pathological by now. It’s just too much. If she blamed the computer, Marian didn’t have to pretend that it was every part of her life that felt overwhelming. She was back with her boys, back with Robin, back in her pub, in her apartment, in her life but… every time she showered, she thought of the Sheriff tenderly washing her body while she sat there unmoving. Every time she cooked for herself, she thought about cooking with the Sheriff. Distracted one evening, she’d cut her hand with a knife. Robin had brought her a band-aid and when he’d tried to put it on her, Marian had violently torn her hand away from him. She’d snapped ‘I don’t need to be babied!’ before realising she was yelling at the wrong person. She’d apologised (trying not to cry or sit down heavily on the kitchen floor) and they’d ordered Thai instead. She was home and safe, but the sheriff was still sitting in every room, hiding behind every curtain, standing in every doorway. He was omnipresent and suffocating and she felt constantly as though she was on the verge of some panic attack that, if it started, might never stop. Robin was good to her. He was kind and loving and better than he’d been to her in so long, and she felt bad every time she snapped at him. Felt bad every time she drew away suddenly from his touch. Felt bad every time she kissed him and then changed her mind so suddenly about doing that. Marian had always thought of herself as so tough and resilient, as one of the guys, who could take anything they could take, but she felt so weak now. She felt like a powerless girl, like the damsel she'd proven herself to be. It made her want to prove to herself even more than she wasn't a scared weakling. It was that idea of weakness that spurred her to finally turned her computer, but when she heard the whirr of it coming to life and saw the lights behind the keyboard glow, she felt physically sick. It was dumb! Why was this upsetting her so much?? Why couldn’t she just have something she used to love?? Was it because she thought she didn’t deserve it? Was it because there felt like such a disconnect between the Marian who was Before and the Marian who was After? She didn’t know, she couldn’t pin it down. She just knew that while she was sitting in front of the screen asking for her password, her hands were shaking and she thought she might vomit. She made herself log on. She made herself open a browser. Anxious and uncomfortable and breathing unsteadily, she scrolled mindlessly through Reddit for a few minutes before she couldn’t take it anymore. She switched off the computer and walked away. What was wrong with her? The next day she forced herself to turn it on again, this time finding a post from Will Scarlet and replying to it. See? she told herself in the most soothing inner voice she could muster. There’s nothing wrong here. Everything is okay. You’re okay. She just needed to encourage her own mind to stop associating something benign with disaster. Marian was so good with computers, and she was sure that she could rewire whichever weird internal biological network that had decided to go fubar. Brains were just computers in a way, suitable to be programmed. Marian felt like she knew that better than anyone now. She felt as though the Sheriff had programmed her, with his words, his actions, his hiring of the demon. Everything he’d done had been an attempt to change the way she thought, and in some ways it had worked. Not as truly as he’d wanted, but maybe that was just a matter of time. By the time they’d all come to get her, she’d been laughing at his jokes, she’d been enjoying his company, she’d been growing easier around him. She’d made choices she never would have made without his work. And sometimes, when she sat on the couch with Robin, when she watched his profile as he read, she thought: this is all going to disappear. One day (maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe six months from now) the sheriff would stand up from his seat, slip out from behind the curtain, walk through the doorway. He would do that and anything she had tried to rebuild out here would be torn away with such violence that Marian wasn’t sure she could survive. How was she supposed to just go back to who she’d been before, when his hand was always ready to grab her? How was she supposed to live her life when she kept picturing another life that was running right alongside it, another Marian who was still there? Marian hadn't ever put much stock in the idea of alternate timelines (despite knowing there were literally other version of her in the world), but she truly felt like she had been at the fork of one. When she slept and had nightmares about being back there, they never felt like memories or stories made up by her traumatized brain: They felt like glimpses into another world that she had escaped from. She had escaped, but she'd left another girl there in her place. Was there a girl in Arizona sleeping beside her enemy and dreaming of Marian at the Fox? God, she had to get a grip on herself. Sitting at her kitchen table, Marian realised she'd been staring vacantly at the window for over an hour. Running a hand through her knotty curls, she pushed herself back from the table and stood up. Go turn on the computer, she told herself firmly and with a nod. Just keep pushing through until you see daylight. |