Dodging bullets while you're trying to find your way
Everyone's around but no one does a damn thing
It brings me down, but I won't let them
If I seem bleak, well you'd be correct
And if I don't speak, it's cuz I can't disconnect...
When I ran I didn't feel like a runaway
When I escaped I didn't feel like I got away
There's more to living than only surviving
Maybe I'm not there, but I'm still trying..."
The Offspring, Staring at the Sun
February 2012
Right. Never has been pitching a bitch that this recovery shit doesn’t work if I don’t do it right. Correction: He maintains that I have never done it right, but that this cryptic brevity bullshit has especially got to stop, because the next time the Abyss stares back at me I may need to remember what the fuck just happened. So, because he's the closest thing to a therapist that I've got right now (and really, the closest thing I want), I'll give this a shot.
From the top, as I understand it:
The Labyrinth started falling apart, Mikaboshi started creepy-darkness-tentacle-fondling the doors-that-didn’t-open-until-my-dumbass-friends-came-to-save-me, and Harlan had his Valkyrie friend Bronwyn, the one who helped us way back in Niflheim, take me and Jaime out. Well, me, Jaime, and my daughter, if you’re being picky. I guess with the kind of power it takes to transport three souls from a terra incognita to some fucked up house in the middle of nowhere, it’s worth being a little bit picky.
Aisling – Brendan’s fairy wife – was there at the fucked up house. It was kinda like a TARDIS; bigger on the inside and all that. The house, not the fairy. There were extra rooms and doors that did fuck all. I guess that was how everyone else got into the Labyrinth.
There was also a dragon.
I’m still not a fan of dragons, and while I could probably justify the running of my mouth by pointing to the way my month has been going – kidnapping, mutilation, and what Valentine's Day would be complete without an attempted rape? – I still think I might have overreacted just a smidgeon.
At first I thought maybe the dragon had been laying there in wait or something. Maybe this was another one of Kane’s friends, or Ixion’s, trying to finish what they’d started in the Labyrinth. Maybe they’d changed their minds about leaving me alive. Maybe they’d decided to go ahead and fuck me over and try to take my daughter from me, after all. The demigod was out of the bag – my friends obviously knew where I was – so there was no point in trying not to hurt me anymore. It’s not paranoia if they really are all out to get you, I hear.
Um, well, it turns out that this dragon – this one dragon, unique among all of the other dragons I’ve ever met – was not, in fact, out to get me. I immediately went on the defensive. I set Jaime down, who I’d been holding on my hip since the second I saw him in the Labyrinth and wouldn’t let anyone take him from me, I shielded him with my body and I asked the fairy what the fuck a dragon was doing here.
Fairies, for the record, are not exactly a font of information.
The dragon was, though. She actually started the conversation, speaking to me in the tongue of the Aesir.
I guess, if you’re in the business of being accurate and truthful (and I try to be, since my dad certainly is), I should point out that she was kind of nice. Alright, I should probably point out that she was actually a hell of a lot nicer to me than I was to her. She just looked at me while I was freaking out and trying to keep Jaime out of sight. She wasn't even giving me like, a menacing “hide yo’ kids, hide yo’ wife,” look (Never tells me that’s a thing). She sniffed the air, then she congratulated me on being pregnant. I guess she could just smell that.
Anyway, the dragon didn’t try to attack me and she didn’t try to take anything from me. More importantly, she didn’t lay so much as a talon on Jamie. In fact, she gave me, Jaime and Aisling a ride to Chicago so we could meet back up with everyone else at Gunnar’s.
I’m not sure why Aisling came. She just kinda takes up space, and not just convenient fairy sized space, anymore. She takes up more space now that’s she’s human sized. She used to be kinda like Never and at least do aerial recon, but now… I don’t even know what she does anymore (besides Brendan).
Uh, yeah. I digress. Point is, the dragon was kinda cool. Apparently Kas found her while Gunnar and I were off in the wastes of Duat – doing shit besides taming dragons just for the fuck of it – and has decided this dragon is going to be “omgthebestfriendever.” Not sure what the dragon thinks of this. She called herself Hefnd. It means “Vengeance.”
I think we might get along.
I also think I was probably a little bit of a jerk. Okay, I said, “Thanks” when she congratulated me, but since I’m in the habit of being honest I have to admit it was kinda delivered in a sort of “I wish you and all of your kind would just go somewhere else and die,” type of tone.
Maybe I should apologize. If I live through this, and if I remember.
So when I got to Gunnar’s I had mail.
I haven’t gotten mail in more than a year. Never tells me that, as a consequence, I’ve apparently forgotten the rules of mail. I didn’t know there were rules. Never tells me I should have been worried about, and this is more or less exactly what he said, “Anthrax, or nano-bombs, or a quantum entanglement booby trap.”
…I don’t even know.
I read it without saying a word. It was a normal letter, from one of our normal nemeses, asking us to meet him somewhere normal and cold. Not like Niflheim cold. Like… Norway, or Sweden… Fuck, I don’t remember. Somewhere cold. Scandinavia covers that, right?
I crumpled it up, and then I threw it across the room. Which I guess is kinda rude of me, just throwing stuff onto Gunnar’s floor. And not very mature.
Um… he probably won’t hold it against me forever.
It probably would have been polite of me to actually let anyone in that room know what was in the letter, but on this particular day I was not very good at being polite. Honest, I can do. Quiet, no problem. Polite kinda conflicts with the other two. Besides, I’m pretty sure they are all themselves capable of reading.
I really just wanted out of that room. I didn’t want to keep standing around in Gunnar’s apartment with everyone staring at me. I hate being that girl, the one you don’t quite know how to handle because you’re pretty sure she’s on the verge of some sort of break down and the wrong word or gesture might set her off and when she does explode you’re not sure if it’s going to be into tears or violence.
Violence would probably have been a safe bet. Once I tossed the letter away, I realized Icarus and Iapyx were there, too.
I was… less than happy to see them, though by some miracle I managed to resist the urge to tear their faces off with my bare hands. It took effort, and probably only Never really appreciates how much. The only interaction with the two that I found appealing was the forcible extraction of their skulls from their skin.
They were just as culpable as Kane and Ixion for holding me captive.
They had taken me from my job.
They had taken me from my friends.
They had taken me from my husband.
They took me from the happiest day I can remember and they carved their cowardice and hypocrisy into my back.
They had wronged me and every time I looked at Iapyx, all I could think was that he was callow and duplicitous and stupid – like wax in his ears would really have saved him from me, if I’d really wanted to fuck with him (in the purely figurative, not-cheating-on-my-husband sense). He’d have had to put out his eyes, first, and even then I might have been able to get in his head like I have with Gunnar.
I had kinda hoped Iapyx and his brother had just died in the Labyrinth and solved that problem for me.
But they weren’t dead. They were standing here in my husband’s living room, like someone had invited them in. Like guests. Nobody else had tied them down or put them in handcuffs or restrained them in any way, despite the part they’d had to play in my kidnapping and detention and (allegedly gentle) flaying. And, much more intolerable than anything they’d done to me, no one had punished them for the part they had played in keeping Jamie stuck in the Labyrinth. The kid had to have been somewhere since Ixion took him from his mom.
But I guess, like the intentional combustion of innumerable souls, kidnapping and child abuse just don’t count. I guess we don’t cuff anyone for anything less than a fucking headshot.
And I guess what I’m supposed to take away from this is that I’m just important enough for them to drop everything and leave Midgar unguarded while they came after me – when they should have been fucking following up on the intel Gunnar and I got from Marie – but not quite so important that any of them could be bothered to punish those who had helped mutilate and imprison me – not even Gunnar. Which, ultimately, is fine.
I can happily figure out how to do the punishing myself.
I looked over all of that “company” stuffed into Gunnar’s living room and decided for the sake of everyone I have to deal with on a regular basis to just go and be somewhere else. I tended their wounds first – starting with Harlan, who always seems to be just this side of dying and beyond that I wasn’t in the mood to talk to any of them. Not the Band, not my darling husband, not the fucking sons of Daedalus. And at the time I couldn’t see or hear Nevermore, which was probably for the best, because when he gives advice he means to be like Jiminy Cricket but it comes off a whole lot more like Tyler Durden.
I thought maybe I should at least talk to Gunnar, whether I felt like it or not. That's kinda what marriage is, right? It’s doing shit you don't want to because it's what you should do and you care more about treating someone the way they deserve than just doing what you want. It’s doing your best to keep your shit together because your husband’s got way better things to do than worry about your impending breakdown.
In this instance, I decided that keeping my shit together meant keeping my mouth shut. Yeah, we needed to talk. We would still need to talk when I wasn’t so angry I could hardly see straight, though. And I was pretty sure that if I did start up a heart-to-heart to Gunnar I would totally mean to say, “Thanks for coming for me, I love you and I missed you and I’ve never been so happy to see you.” But that’s not how it would come out. That’s never how it comes out. I was pretty sure my unique brand of gratitude would start with a, “What the fuck were you thinking” and end with a, “You asshole.” Both sentiments are equally valid, but one of them is not really what Gunnar needs to hear right now.
I stuck to nonverbal communication of my gratitude. I left Gunnar’s living room, away from all of the people who’d been stupid enough to drop everything and come save my ass. Away from Icarus and Iapyx, the mere sight of whom made me itch for a scalpel to tear the skin off of their backs, like they had done to mine. It would be beautiful and just and poetic.
I had this persistent feeling that that – poetic justice – and a pint of green tea ice cream would make me feel all better.
I didn’t have ice cream, and I didn’t wanna get cuffed again if I started meting out some justice on the Daedalus kids. It just wouldn't be worth the drama of slipping the cuffs, so I settled for knowing that, for now, one more kid was safe. I took Jamie out of the room with me and sat with him where it was quiet until the Band was done talking.
Jamie didn’t have a lot to say, either. We sat in the dark, in the quiet and let the world forget about us both for a little while.
I had calmed down a bit and I decided to do my very best to be okay, and Icarus and Iapyx had removed themselves from my immediate vicinity. I felt like maybe I could handle talking to Gunnar without figuratively exploding on him, so I asked Dorthen to keep an eye on Jamie, I got dressed in something that wasn’t a sticky, bloody sheet, and Gunnar and I decided we needed to take a walk. We were two steps out the door when Gunnar turned me around, told me that the Baron’s kid had told Nate I had been poisoned and Nate said I should come back, and we all started talking about how to fix me.
Well, when I say “we” I mean, “I did a lot of arguing with myself out loud and everyone else kinda waited for me to make up my mind and Gunnar just kinda looked like he’d go with whatever. Including drinking my blood and using his stomach to scrub it clean of Ixion’s poison.”
And if that’s not love, I guess I just don’t know what is.
I did freak out for about twenty seconds after Gunnar said “poison.” I thought maybe the freaking out would last a little longer, that I would go into nervous-wreck mode and never come out of it again. But I freaked out long enough to share with the band that being poisoned was really bad, and oh yeah, I was pregnant again. I think they were too busy being worried that I was poisoned to hear that I was pregnant, though Nate did take a moment to ask me whether it was Gunnar’s. I deserve a medal for not going ballistic on him.
Then I stopped freaking out because I had shit to do, important shit like: stop being poisoned. And to that end I switched to best-fucking-doctor-in-Midgar mode, which makes my head get really quiet. It felt normal, and normal felt really, really good. I couldn't fix being angry at my bandmates, not quickly. I couldn't fix being upset with Gunnar. I didn't even know how damaged I was psychologically from my stay in the Labyrinth and I probably wouldn't know until I tried to do normal stuff like sleep and have a conversation that didn't involve who I wanted to kill next. Even once I did know, I wouldn't know how to fix me. I don't know how to fix Jamie, not yet. But being poisoned, I could fix.
I forgot all about revenge, which I wouldn’t have even thought possible, but I learned I can change my mind pretty quickly about what’s possible when my baby’s good health is in question. I managed to completely shut down all the rage and wrath-type bullshit, rather than just put it on mute, and just focused on the medicine. There was nothing besides the affliction, the treatment, and the safety of my daughter. Everything else – my hurt feelings, my stinging back, my own safety – was just not as important.
For treatment, I had options. Most of them weren’t even likely to kill me. Okay, yes, all of the options seemed to build on the foundation of completely exsanguinating me, which would in every possible variation hurt like a bitch, but still. I’m sturdy enough that in my professional, detached medical opinion, it didn’t seem like the exsanguination would be so much of a shock to my system that I’d be at risk of suffering a miscarriage, so at least the necessary first step was almost definitely not going to have catastrophic consequences. Probably.
Then, once all of my blood had been drained the treatment plans began to diverge.
I could, to put it crudely, refill my veins with normal mortal blood. But that might leave me completely powerless, and I’d had enough of feeling powerless while I was in the Labyrinth.
What if all the cool shit I can do is dependent on the ichor that flows through me? If it’s all removed, how long will it take me to replace it? Can I replace it? Fuck if I know.
So I started considering different treatments that would not leave me ichor-less. I could get a transfusion from another Scion, or I could take what had just been removed from me, have it cleaned of poison but leave my ichor, and then put the cleaned blood with my ichor back into my body.
The option of getting a transfusion from someone with divine-ness running through them, was tricky on a metaphysical level. I mean, getting a blood donation from someone who actually had ichor sounded like a great idea… until I really thought about it.
I don’t know a whole lot about how divine physiology works – except that it does. It’s possible that ichor of different pantheons would interact much in the way differing blood types do. It could make me sick, it could make me insane. Or it could be worse, the worst thing I could think of. It could kill my baby.
So that eliminated the possibility of taking blood from someone from another pantheon. So I started going through the list of all of the members of the Dodekatheon I knew well enough to ask for help. It wouldn’t be weird at all getting a call from me: “Hey, this is Laurel. Just wondering, you don’t happen to be O negative, do you? Great. Can I have like… all of your blood? You’re not using it, right?”
I mean, I knew several people from my pantheon. Susan, Don, Angela, Jamie, Alex, Jack, plus there were the gods. But if I could get ahold of the gods to ask them for a transfusion, it just wouldn’t make sense to do so. And if I still had his phone number, I probably wouldn’t call Don because he has motherfucking Cyclopes for bodyguards and that’s just weird.
So the list of people who’d answer the phone when I called was pretty short, and the list of people who probably wouldn’t hang up on me was even shorter. There was Susie, Alex Vance, Jack Cook, and Jamie. Alex was off with Gunter, presumably doing very important things. I would expect that Susie was similarly occupied. Jack was in Mexico and busy taking care of Alexander and Erik, a job I certainly was not going to interrupt. Jamie was right next to me, but I wouldn’t put a needle near him for… anything. There isn’t any reason I can think of that’s good enough to put that kid through more hell than he’s already known.
So I’d concluded that getting blood from another Scion was out of the question. The only other option that didn’t leave me ichor-less was getting my blood cleaned of whatever mess they’d put in me. We know since our encounter with Pan at Hotel California that poison-type stuff just doesn’t seem to bother Gunnar, so we (I) talked about using Gunnar’s stomach as kind of a scrubber. But I couldn’t think of a way to build a filtration system which would separate only the stomach acid but leave all of the components of the blood intact. And even that step would be contingent upon his body not treating my ichor as a toxin and deciding to filter that out, too.
Plus, we’d have to get him to ingest all of my blood (which, in my professional medical opinion, is super-gross), and hope that we got the timing just right before he regurgitated the “cleaned” substance so that my blood was cleaned of the unknown toxin but not completely broken down into the sub-components that would do me absolutely no good if I tried to put the mess back into my veins.
But anyway, in the unlikely event that he was able to ingest all of my blood without immediately becoming ill (Never tells me he learned from Fight Club that an ordinary human can swallow a pint of blood before he gets sick), and was able to keep it down for just the right amount of time so as to remove the toxin but not destroy the blood cells, I couldn’t figure a fucking way to build the post-regurgitation filtration device. Well, that’s not entirely true. I couldn’t figure how to do it in less than a day, which was about twice as much time as I was willing to let this shit keep creeping through my veins and possibly hurting my baby. I worked on the design for about an hour, swore a few times, and decided to just go to the hospital.
So the best approach, for my daughter’s sake, would be one with the least possible complications and the fewest variables, divine and otherwise. Removing the tainted blood and replacing it with clean, mortal blood seemed to be the best and most straightforward solution.
This way I could ensure that I was getting the right blood type – there would be no conflict of antibodies, either with my blood or with my daughter’s. Right about now my girl’s heart is starting to beat, she’s got her own blood coursing through her veins, and if the gods have granted me any luck at all, she’s safe from whatever Ixion’s got coursing through my veins.
Again, if I weren’t pregnant this wouldn’t be quite so complicated and I wouldn’t be quite so worried about fucking this up. I’d be more willing to just put a bandaid on it and carry on. But I am pregnant, and more than that, the evidence indicates that I’m pregnant with a future Fate. So I should probably take some extra care not to fuck this up.
So the hospital seemed like a smartly unavoidable destination. Gunnar didn’t have any medical equipment at his place, which, now that I think about it, probably would have saved him a lot of time on his past jobs. Of course, he’d have to know how to use it and I’m not even sure he knows how to really put on a band-aid… Anyway.
Gunnar offered to come with me, which is a point in his favor. It would have been a billion points against him if he didn’t think to accompany his (pregnant, poisoned, recently rescued from kidnapping and mutilation) wife to the hospital to have her blood scrubbed of gods-know-what. He would be sleeping on the couch for at least half of eternity. If he slept. And if I had a couch. Fuck it, you know what I mean.
Kas offered to come too, which I was okay with since I’d seen her handiwork with Dorthen. So I had my husband for moral support and I had Kas for actual medical usefulness.
As we were leaving, Nate tossed me one of the many swords in his collection. What does this one do? It does Death, apparently. As soon as my fingers touched the hilt, I could hear my dead bird talking to me again. Oh. Fucking. Joy.
“And how the fuck did you even find the time to get knocked up again, anyway?! You were supposed to be saving the world, love, not playing “hide the relic” with Senor Libido! However, after some consideration I have decided that I will allow you to make it up to me. The least you can do is name her after me, and you should use your maiden name. Nevermore Kladakos sounds much more dignified than Nevermore Esparza,” he stated imperiously.
So now I’m back to acting like I have Tourette’s.
Aside from Nevermore being… himself, it was a quiet walk to the hospital. Too quiet. So of course I wanted to fill the silence. Unfortunately, the best way I know how to do that is with awkwardness and crazy. So I turned to Gunnar, while Kas was with us, because it never fucking occurred to me to restrict the awkward to just Gunnar and I.
“So,” I said to Gunnar, “I just have two questions. Why the fuck would you leave Midgar unguarded and what the fuck was Tesla doing there?”
He didn’t answer the first question because I’d already assaulted him with the second. Gunnar explained that he wasn’t the one who made the deal with Tesla. That was apparently Nate. Apparently that precludes Gunnar from taking any responsibility, because Gunnar didn’t make the deal. Gunnar just didn’t bother to stand up and do anything about it.
After that, silence seemed like a pretty good idea. I didn't have anything nice or uplifting to say. All I could think of was just how wrong life always seems to go. And the worst part is that the next time life goes all wrong, it probably won't kill me. I'll do what I've always done: survive. Physically, anyway. Mentally? Emotionally? I don't know. Maybe I'll always be just a little bit broken on the inside. See? Not really the type of thing I figured Gunnar needed to hear. Shit. I hope Gunnar's a lot better at this if things go sideways and I end up being the one who dies. Don't get me wrong, I'm going to do everything I can to make sure I'm alive and around for my kids. But recent events have served as a powerful reminder that the odds... are not exactly in my favor.
Anyway. So then three demigods walk into a hospital and one tells the doctor, “I need a dialysis machine, 15 pints of O Negative, and your three toughest medical cases.”
No punchline. That’s just how the rest of the day went.
And Nevermore, who has resumed his self-appointed post as my proofreader, is pitching demanding that I acknowledge that it’s not funny if you tell it how it really happened.
Well… Fuck you, Mr. Dead Bird.
It wasn’t funny to begin with.
The doctors, nurses, and orderlies seemed a little put off by a woman wandering in off the street and telling the staff that they’re going to give her fifteen pints of blood, a dialysis machine, access to lab equipment and fuck tons of privacy.
So I offered the grand poobah a deal.
Well, no I didn’t. I told him he was going to give me all of those things and in return I would solve his three most difficult diagnoses. He wasn’t happy, but he was placated. Well, maybe he wasn’t even that, but he stopped arguing with me and started giving me what I wanted.
He brought me the files, which I suppose makes sense when the patients are mortal and bedridden, as he explained to me. I’ve gotten used to being around people who take a grenade to face and fucking walk it off, like a real man should.
I had wanted to see the patients. It’s easier for me to heal a person than a piece of paper.
So I started to get up and felt the tug of the IV needle hanging out in my arm.
Right. There was still that whole “blood-cleaning” thing going on. At least I had figured out how to overclock the machine and make it go faster. Um, but I don’t remember whether I put it back the way it was when I was done.
Probably not. Oh well. You’re welcome, Chicago General.
I asked Gunnar to carry the super-efficient machine while I wandered around the hospital, visiting my new patients. They were hurting, and just wanted someone to make it stop hurting. They made it easy to stop thinking about myself, because I could see their pain and I wanted it to stop.
The first case was cancer. Invasive, ugly. I knew it as soon as I looked at the patient. Her colors were all wrong. Sickly, splotchy bits all over the other colors around her. Second verse: same as the first, a little bit more virulent and a whole lot worse. I told the doctor which tests to run in case he needed more than “because I just fucking know, alright?” Turns out “because I fucking said so” does not really equate to “medical credentials.”
The third case was different, though. I would almost say it was baffling.
Well, alright. Baffling if you’re not me, and you don’t see weird godly-shit on a daily basis.
The guy was from Sweden, had been stuck here in the States since the arrival of the dragons, and had been brought into the hospital on account of chronic and violent crazy. It wasn’t really anything I had ever seen, but it sounded like something I’d heard about. So I took some blood, ran some tests, and most people who aren’t me or have never been around the Aesir probably wouldn’t have known what the fuck they were looking at.
I was looking at a guy who was going to die, slowly and painfully, of Jotunblut poisoning. Maybe one of the Aesir could have fixed him, one who’d made use of their giant-bloody type abilities. Beowulf, though he’d been called back to the mountain in that vision with Odin. I’ve seen Harlan plenty bloody, but I’ve never seen him do anything really giant-bloody. And Gunnar was, as with most situations requiring medical analysis and treatment, not very helpful. The only other Aesir I could think of were Gunter, who was who-the-fuck-knows-where, Sly, who was who-the-fuck-cares-where and also probably not ever going to help me, and Ty, who screamed at me for being a racist before he puked all over my guest bedroom last summer.
In my professional medical opinion, this Swedish dude was boned.
I couldn’t help him get better, so I helped him die, instead.
He didn’t really seem too torn up about it when I started talking to his ghost. He was kinda glad not to be in pain or stuck in bed anymore. I offered to try to take care of him, to take his soul to the afterlife when I had time. After a couple of questions he just kinda shrugged and said, with more enthusiasm than I would have expected, that he was going to go haunt his friends in Sweden.
Ghosts, man. Whatever.
So I let the overclocked machine do its thing, and I was pretty much ready to leave, then.
Well, I wanted to get an idea of what to expect from the future, first. We talked about me just consulting the Fates on the way back, but I’ve never asked for guidance without Sibyl’s help, and without it I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know if this might go bad, and figured it I started having seizures again it should probably not be in full view of the public. No, a private room in a hospital suited me just fine. At least I was already around all the doctors, if things went really wrong and one of my arms exploded or something.
