The Weapon - Resurrection - part 33
By Diana the Valkyrie
Guilt, blame and forgiveness
Update: 11/07/2003 to valkyrie05


Wendy was very quiet on the flight home, and as she deployed those great white
feathered wings for a glide-in landing, I was thinking, I can't take this
again. Wendy on a guilt trip over Duncan had been bad enough; Wendy on a guilt
trip over letting down her eight billion babies wasn't something I wanted to
contemplate. But I didn't have a choice. Here's Wendy, guilting again, I have
to deal with it, because no-one else will. I was sitting in my study, on my
revolving chair. Wendy was sprawled out on the carpet, lying on her side,
wings fully retracted, looking up at me.

"Wendy ... " "David, I ran away for 23 years."

"Wendy ... " "I let you down. All of you."

"Wendy ... " "I didn't ..." "Wendy, stop interrupting me, shut up and listen,
or I'll tell Fiona."

That got her attention. "No, please don't." "Then listen."

I'd thought about this on the trip from India. With a human being, you don't
really have to think about how they think. You know. Not exactly, of course,
but you have a fair idea, because we spend our whole lives communicating with
each other and trying to understand each other. And, of course, you're
starting off with the advantage of knowing pretty much how one human thinks.
Because you know how you think yourself. With Wendy, I couldn't guess how she
thought, except to know that it was very different from how I thought, in a
number of significant ways.

But she was forcing me to try to get into her head. Because it had become
clear to me that you could explode a nuclear bomb six inches from her without
doing any real damage, but there were some very significant weaknesses here
that could leave her totally disabled.

First of all, she had an excessive respect for authority. That was most
obvious when you consider Duncan, who she seemed to see as the ultimate
authority figure, but she'd been treating Fiona in a similar way, and she was
even starting to look at me in that kind of light. Not that I minded. But what
would happen if she decided some villain was her authority figure? I shuddered
at the thought.

And secondly, she seemed to be highly vulnerable to feelings of guilt and
rejection. We all are, of course, but most people experience it in small doses
as they grow up, and that acclimatises them, and blunts the impact of future
hits.

Maybe every superhero has to have a vulnerability? Kryptonite, the colour
yellow, wood. Or maybe it isn't just superheroes. Maybe we all have these
holes in our armour, and you just notice them more when the armour is more
impenetrable.

"Wendy, if I were playing in a tennis match, and I broke my arm, should I go
on playing?" "Of course not." "Even if my absence meant that our side would
lose the match?" "Of course." "You know us humans break bones all the time.
Well, not all the time, but often enough for it to be common." She nodded.
"Yes, it must be horrible, suddenly you find you can't function properly."
"Yes, it is horrible. The worst I've had, is I sprained an ankle once, and I
couldn't walk on that foot for a week." "You poor baby," she said, and started
stroking my left foot. How did she know which one it was?

"So if I break my arm before an important tennis match, I don't need to feel
bad about letting people down. Because I don't actually have any choice, and
where there's no choice, there's no blame." "So you're saying that it wasn't
my fault that I spent 23 years hiding from the world in a waitress uniform?"
"Exactly. Wendy, you were broken, it wasn't your fault. It was your spirit
that was broken, but that's just as bad, no, that's even worse than a broken
bone. It isn't something you can fix, it isn't something you wanted to happen,
it's just something that did happen. Shit happens. The universe doesn't have
any concept of fairness built in to it."

"But the fact remains. I bugged out. Dereliction of duty. AWOL."

"No, not AWOL. Sick leave. You were broken. But even then, you didn't actually
abandon us." "I did." "No, you didn't. If you'd abandoned us, then you'd have
left the planet." "But I couldn't fly" "Yes, and we all know that was
self-inflicted, too. You could have flown if you'd wanted to, you could have
been light-years away by now, and still running. But you didn't. You stayed.
And there's another thing."

"What?"

"You could have hidden properly. You could have changed your appearance,
changed your facial features, or you could have lived far from human
habitation, or you could have made yourself look like an animal. Or a tree. Or
a rock. But you didn't. You didn't change your appearance. People who want to
hide, don't behave that way. Wendy, you wanted to be found, you wanted to be
rescued, the whole thing was a cry for help."

"I'm the Guardian of Humanity, I'm the one who gives the help." "Yes, but that
also means that we help you when you need help."

"And you did."

"Yes. Damn, of course I did, you were like a bird with a broken wing."

She looked up at me. "Thank you, David. You've been so good to me. You're my
hero."

"I'm just the lucky one who found you. I'm no hero. When things get sticky, I
just run and hide."

"Come and hide here," she said, pulling me down to the floor. She wrapped her
cape round us both, and pulled me close. "Uh, Wendy. It's been a long day, and
an exhausting day. I think I want to go to bed." "All right, let's go to bed,"
she replied, "but I hope you don't think that means you're going to sleep. For
a couple of hours at least."

. . .