The Weapon - Resurrection - part 18
By Diana the Valkyrie
Blame and forgiveness
Update: 11/06/2003 to valkyrie05



We hiked round Kew Botanical Gardens, and admired the magnificent collection
of exotic plants. I persuaded her to stop for an hour while I rested my feet
and had lunch at the cafeteria there, and a cup of coffee, then she dragged me
on to Kensington Gardens, where she particularly wanted to show me the statue
of Peter Pan "I was named after his Wendy, you know?" And she told me about
her friend George. "He got married to Felicity" she explained. Then on to
Green Park, where we'd spent the first evening together "David, remember how I
held you to warm you up?" and she gave me a demonstration, together with
another of those toe-curling kisses, and I told her I had to sit down to
recover.

So we sat on the grass, and I asked her what Duncan thought about her kissing
me like that. "Oh, it was his idea, actually. He reckons I've got enough love
for him and you, and I can't kiss him, so you're in the hot seat." "Wendy, I
think you've got enough love for all eight billion of us." She smiled at me,
and I melted in the warmth of her happiness. She pulled me towards her, and
put her arms round me and hugged me, and I was in heaven. "Pity you aren't
wearing your cape," I suggested. "Oh, but I am, it's part of me, you just
couldn't see it," she replied, as it draped and folded around me. Bliss.

We sat there in the cold sunshine, and I explained to her my theory of how
she'd lost her ability to fly. "There's nothing that can hurt you, right?"
"Right." "Wrong. I've seen you crying, lots of times. I was nearly deafened by
the howl of pain you screamed when you thought Duncan was burning in hell. You
most definitely can be hurt." "Yes, but that's emotional, not physical."
"Right. And next, you'll tell me that you can't be damaged, right?" "Yes, I
can, but I can fix it, because it's only a force-sheet that you see and feel;
the thing inside, the four black holes, that's pretty much undamageable."
"Wrong again. You're talking about physical damage, I'm talking about
emotional damage." "Oh. Yes, I suppose so."

"When Duncan died, you blamed yourself for not being able to save him. So you
punished yourself. And the way the Guardian of Humanity punishes people, is
you take away whatever it is they love most." She looked at me with those big
blue eyes. "Duncan was already gone, so you took away from yourself the thing
you loved second. Your ability to fly." "You're saying I did this to myself?"
"Yes." "That's crazy, why would I want to punish myself?" "People punish
themselves all the time, it's extremely common." "Hmmm. But if you're right, I
should be able to fly now, and I still can't." "No, you're still punishing
yourself. Because it's as true now as it was 23 years ago, Duncan died and you
couldn't save him." "But now I have Duncan inside me, as it were." "No, you
don't. Duncan's dead, what you have is an emulation." "True."

We sat in silence for a while.

"If this is common with people, how do they deal with it?" "Most of them
don't. Most of them go through life punishing themselves for something that
happened so long ago, they can't even remember it." "If it's common, you must
have some idea how to deal with it." "I guess." "You guess?" "I mean, I know
how people try to deal with it, but you don't think like we do. Maybe it won't
work with you." "And maybe it will. It sounds like a good thing to try; if it
doesn't work, we'll try something else. David, I have *got* to be able to fly,
or I can't fulfil my primary function here."

"Well, the first thing you have to do, is forgive yourself." "David ...." she
whined. "How do I do that?" "You have to convince yourself that it wasn't your
fault that he died." "You mean, I have to learn how to lie to myself like you
folks can?"

Uh.

"Look, baby," she continued, "I do tell lies, I've told lots of lies. I tell
people I'm going to hurt them when I know perfectly well that I wouldn't, I
tell people they look fine when actually they look terrible, I tell people
that everything's going to be all right when I'm really quite uncertain that
it will be. I can lie, I'm no angel. But how on earth can you lie to
yourself?"

Uh.

"I don't know. When you put it like that, it does sound pretty impossible. But
people do it all the time." "Sure, and I can fly to the moon in half a minute,
or at least I could before, but you can't."

"OK, how about this. How do you fly, what's the mechanism, how does it work?"
"It's really complicated, I don't think about it, I just do it. How do you lie
to yourself, how does that work?"

"Touche"

"OK, let's try this. All humans are mortal, we all die. The average is
eighty-something, a hundred in exceptional cases, no-one ever reached 120.
Duncan would have died, there's no way you could have stopped it." "But he
could have died later if I'd carried on keeping him alive." "But you were
keeping him in pain, it was so bad he wanted to die, he had no hope any more."
"Maybe I should have given him hope." "You could only have done that by lying
to him, giving him false hope." "Yes." "So you just gave him what he wanted."

"David. Don't you think I've gone over and over that, again and again for 23
years? You think you're telling me something new? I've spent more that two
decades thinking about this. There's nothing you can say that I haven't
already thought about."

I sighed. She was right. I didn't have anything for her that she hadn't
already chewed over. What she needed was a new fact, a new idea. A new
opinion. Of course!

"Wendy?" I said. I closed my eyes to keep the sun out, and leaned back against
her, so she was supporting me. A shadow fell over my eyes, blocking out the
sun; I opened them a fraction, and saw she'd moved her hand to shade me.
"Yes?" "Ask Duncan what he thinks. And whether he forgives you."

There was a long pause. I relaxed against her body, wondering what internal
conversation was going on. She was keeping perfectly still; the comfortable
position I was in, plus the exertions of the earlier part of the day, combined
together and I fell into a light sleep.

When I woke up, it was quite a lot later. The sun was lower in the sky, and
was glancing off the low clouds to give one of those red-golden sunsets that
you get so often in England, even in winter. Wendy was stroking my hair, and I
looked up at her. "Oh good, you're awake. Have a nice sleep?" My body was
cramped and sore from falling asleep in a non-horizontal position. I almost
told her I was fine, then I remembered that she'd know I was lying, so I said
"The sleep was fine, but I need to lie flat on my back for a few minutes to
get the kinks out."

She helped me to get flat on the grass, and as I lay there, the pain eased,
and I asked "So what did he say?" "He said I did the right thing. And he said
there's nothing to forgive, I did nothing wrong." Well, I knew he would say
that, assuming she'd done a good job on the emulation. After all, he'd asked
her to let him die, obviously he'd think she'd done the right thing. "And?"
"And what?" "And how do you feel now?"

"I feel a lot better."

"And?"

"I had a handler spinning. All the time. It was asking whether I'd done the
right thing in letting Duncan die. Asking over and over again, looking at it
again and again. Each time it came to an answer, it restarted."

"That sounds pretty horrid."

"Yes. But now it's closed down. I don't need to re-examine it any more. I know
now."

"Excellent. But Wendy, it's getting late." She looked down at me, and offered
her hand. I let her pull me to my feet. No false macho pride here, she could
lift an elephant with one hand. We walked slowly through the park, my arm
round her waist, her arm across my shoulders. "I know a nice Indian restaurant
near here," I said. She looked at me. "They'll recognise me." "So what?" "I'd
rather they didn't, they'll start asking awkward questions." "So wear a
disguise."

"Hmm. You know what? I quite fancy being a blonde. In a white dress with a big
skirt." She twirled around, and her skirt flew out and up. I was looking at a
tall version of Norma Jean, with longer hair and not quite such a soft body.
"Mmm, nice," I commented. "Duncan likes it too," she said, "maybe I'll keep it
this way." "They certainly won't recognise you in the restaurant." "And I
ought to wear heels" "Wendy, you're quite tall enough already." "She would
have, so I will." And she rose another four inches above me. "This is bad,
Wendy." "Bad? Why?" "How am I going to kiss you?" "Like this," she said,
lifting me up with one hand while she pulled my head towards hers with the
other. After several minutes, she put me down again, but held on to my
shoulders to steady me. I needed it, Wendy's kisses didn't only curl my toes,
they also turned my knees to jelly.