fandomtownies | The Park, Late Sunday Morning

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The Park, Late Sunday Morning

Crazy Apple was sitting on a park bench, her legs folded beneath her in silence. Her breathing started off slow and steady, almost like she was meditating or something.

The thing about Crazy Apple was that she knew she wasn't really some sort of other personality of Ringo's. Not in the way people usually meant when they talked about that sort of thing. It wasn't the same sort of thing as what Agito and Akito had back home. Neither of them really remembered much of what the other had done, leaving some odd fuzzy areas in both of their memories. But Crazy Apple knew everything Ringo had done, and Ringo, underneath it all, could see and hear what Crazy Apple did.

Crazy Apple was who Ringo became when she felt overwhelmed and couldn't deal with the things she was seeing or doing, but she kept seeing and doing whatever it was, which meant she'd either have to deal with it eventually or keep being Crazy Apple.

Still, Crazy Apple was independent enough to make decisions, and while she wasn't particularly interested in what Ringo ultimately decided to do, she still had little ways to influence that sort of thing. Like what she was doing now: sitting still, clearing her mind of distractions, leaving herself with few ways to avoid mulling over the thoughts swirling in her head.

Or maybe you can start dealing with your own shit like the rest of us do, Ringo, Dante had said. Fake split personality bullshit ain't cute.

Her breathing slowly sped up, becoming a little more ragged, as unformed thoughts of outrage and betrayal and an undercurrent of shame and worry slowly swirled beneath the surface of Crazy Apple's active thoughts. Ringo's emotions. The ones she didn't want to deal with. They weren't enough to push Crazy Apple aside. Not enough to pull Ringo to the surface where she could curl up and cry herself out from too many competing feelings. So Crazy Apple continued to sit there, trying to keep her breathing under control and let those emotions keep swirling.

Wondering if anything would come of it.

[ooc: Open.]

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"All of the above and more?" Kathy said, not moving in for a hug, either. "I don't eat meat anymore. I want to, too much. It smells delicious and makes my stomach roil. Hell, I don't eat much, because it reminds me too much of being an ex. I snap my teeth at things when I'm afraid, too. Just, like, a reflex. But mostly...I just feel guilt. Regret. And self-loathing I don't think I'll ever get over."

Self-loathing.

Crazy Apple went absolutely still at those words.

"Hmm."

She'd miscalculated.

"Perhaps your situation and Ringo's are more similar than I'd thought." Her small smile was cold enough to be bitter in someone who emoted more. "Though it sounds like you've got more cause."

Edited 2017-04-10 23:19 (UTC)

"I hate the me I am and I hate the me I was," Kathy said with a shrug. "Me, for being so fucked up and her for having it all and throwing it away. Why does Ringo hate herself?"

"When we went to LA to find you, she ended up fighting, killing, a bunch of exes." Crazy Apple shrugged. "The killing she could have dealt with, especially given that they weren't really people, no matter what they looked like."

"But there's enough of me in her that she enjoyed it. Not the killing, but the winning."

Crazy Apple's lip twitched in an expression very few people would be generous enough to call a smile. "Ringo tries to enjoy being good at things. I enjoy being better at things than other people. When it was just inconsequential stuff like a race or whatever that made her feel that way, she could deal with it."

When it was killing? Not so much.

"And so now she feels guilty that she enjoyed winning more than she thinks she should, because the winning was bound up with killing," Kathy said. "She's upset she's not shocked and appalled and traumatized in an appropriate way."

"Pretty much."

Crazy Apple shrugged.

"She doesn't like that she likes being good at killing."

"You being here isn't going to get her more used to the idea," Kathy pointed out. "Probably the opposite."

Another shrug. "I don't make those decisions." She was only here as long as Ringo wanted to be somewhere else.

"Though distance has helped occasionally in the past." Sort of.

If you squinted.

"At least I'm making sure we get some sleep." Rather than trying to stay up to avoid the nightmares.

"This isn't the kind of thing you can get distance from," Kathy said. "It stays with you. And the more you run from it, the more ways it finds to lurk around corners to surprise you. Believe me."

She scrubbed her face, perpetually tired. Unlike Ringo, this new version of Kathy wasn't getting a lot of sleep. Or food. Or...well, a lot of things.

"I'm sorry," she offered finally. "A lot of this is on me."

Crazy Apple glanced over at Kathy and shook her head. "You're not responsible for this."

In that, both Crazy Apple and Ringo were in total agreement.

Look, it wasn't all that much more guilt to add to the pile she already had.

"Why did the nightmares start again?" Kathy asked. "Where'd you go? Why?" She shook her head. "And I didn't check up on you more. Enough. At all. I should have. Someone should have. You've never seen anything like that before, and I knew it."

"I don't think anyone had seen anything like that before." A pretty much literal wave of human bodies?

"As for why we ended up going?" Ringo would have looked uncomfortable about this, but Crazy Apple just looked uncaring. "It was more for Alluka than you, to be honest. Couldn't leave her stuck as Nanika." Though it was also for Kathy. That much had been true.

Her lip twitched slightly.

"And if anyone needs to apologize for not checking in, it'd be Ringo. She's not the one who lost everything." And, again, this was one of those places where Ringo would go for a hug, but Crazy Apple didn't move.

Kathy gave a bitter laugh at that. "You know, you're not the first person who's told me that."

She was pretty sure that the only people who'd actually come for her were Alluka and Raven.

"And calling it 'losing everything' makes it seem like I was an innocent victim of circumstance," she said, still so bitter it practically left an acid tang in the air. "I gave it all up. I threw it away because I thought I could make a difference by playing superhero."

Ringo would probably have added that once she'd known it was possible to get Kathy back, she was all in, but that she'd given up looking for ways to do it.

Crazy Apple didn't feel like the clarification was important.

She did look curious, though. "Do you regret trying to save people? Or being wrong about how many you could save?" Or something else that was more complicated?

"I regret accomplishing so little when the cost was so high," Kathy said. "If I'd actually done something, maybe it would have been worth it. If my world had been saved or even just my family survived, maybe I could justify it to myself. But I did nothing and so all it does is make me realize how much I threw away because I was a little girl who thought I was a superhero."

She looked at Ringo. "Would being Queen of the Thorn Road have been worth it if you'd failed to get the Regalia and all your sisters paid the price anyway?"

"I don't really have regrets about taking the role of Queen, but Ringo, hmm." Crazy Apple looked thoughtful.

"I don't know. Though I suspect she would regret having failed to stop Sora, I don't know if she would have regretted trying."

A pause.

"Or, maybe that's not right. Maybe she just would regret trying less than not trying to stop him."

She shrugged. Emotional might-have-beens weren't really her specialty. Or, you know, emotional anything.

"What would Ringo have given up if she'd tried and failed?" Kathy asked. "Who did she leave behind feeling hurt and betrayed? Who did she make cry? Who did she hurt by trying?"

"I can't provide an exhaustive list, but since that's the path she actually chose, I could provide some highlights. Dreams crushed, spirits broken, bodies destroyed. I did what I had to do." Crazy Apple had.

She looked at Kathy curiously. "Are you asking if I would regret them more if it had turned out to all be for nothing?"

"Yeah," Kathy said. "I guess I am. Though honestly, I'm more thinking about what I did to people I loved and who loved me, rather than randos in the street." She frowned and added, "I should though. Considering the people I killed as an ex. Because I didn't stop hurting people when I died. I got back up and starting hurting more."

Crazy Apple's eyes narrowed slightly. "Are you saying that you would regret hurting people less if you'd managed to save the world?"

There wasn't any judgment in her tone or question. Not even any curiosity. Just something to ask. A piece of information she wanted.

Edited 2017-04-12 21:45 (UTC)

"No, the regret would still be there," Kathy said wryly, "but it would have something to balance it. I'd be able to say with conviction that it was worth it. This was pointless and futile, pain for no reason at all. I gambled everything and got nothing."

"So it's the failure that you regret?"

"I regret it all," Kathy said. "I'd rather have kidnapped my sister and left LA die than anything else. I would be guilty and horrified at being so callous, but it's still more than anything else I managed to do." She looked off into the sky. "I'd have regret either way," she said. "It's the failure that makes it bitter."

"Bitterness. I can understand that."

"But you seem especially focused on the regrets." Crazy Apple shook her head. "As far as I can tell, regrets are part of any hard decision. No matter what you pick."

Her lip twitched slightly. "Ringo still regrets coming to Fandom sometimes. Leaving her sisters, her friends, Ikki." But she'd probably make the same choice all over again.

Kathy's own lip curled. "Those aren't even in the same order of magnitude," she snarled, teeth clacking together on every hard consonant. "You don't get to act like regret is all the same thing and a sip is the same as a draught!

She was shaking now, and had to get up and start pacing to let some of the energy burn off. "You wanna know what regret is? It's the bile in the back of your throat when you look at steak because you know what human flesh tastes like and it's delicious. It's the blood under your nails because you've dug them into your skin in an attempt to feel because it's the one way you can tell you're alive and not an ex still. It's the way your eyes burn when you look at the space you used to occupy in people's hearts and realizing you no longer fit there anymore. That's the regret I'm talking about! Regret is an anguish that coats everything and makes it impossible to even make the changes you know you should because you don't deserve anything better than what you have. It's looking at the club drugs getting passed around and wishing you were braver because oblivion is the only thing you can think of that sounds even remotely appealing. You miss your sisters? So do I! But mine died in a welter of blood and pain and fear and got eaten by my father before my best friend stepped in and crushed his head!"

Stopping directly in front of Crazy Apple, she glared down into the other girl's eyes, making sure that she had her full attention. "Regret is when you finally push this you aside and realize all the fucking time you wasted being afraid, Ringo. All the time you could have been working through this or talking with friends or doing anything but pushing people away so you can hide behind this two-dimensional version of yourself because it was easier! You have the capacity to fucking change, Ringo! So stop throwing it away or your real regret will be that you're going to fucking end up like me!"

Edited 2017-04-12 22:45 (UTC)

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