The thing is, it doesn’t make sense for me to have therapy. I’m not the one who needs it.
And I don’t mean that in a “therapy is for crazies” way.
It’s just that I’m not allowed to cry.
And I don’t mean THAT in a “real men don’t cry” way.
It’s just that, in comparison to what Alvin’s lost, to what Doc has lost–hell, even that fucking cat burglar, though no way she’d end up in a position where a judge would send her to therapy instead of straight to jail.
In comparison to them, my loss isn’t that bad. Barely anything.
I don’t get to cry over a paper cut when everyone else has a bleeding gut wound.
Metaphorically speaking, of course.
I’ve never gotten a paper cut in my life.
—
“Are we actually going to talk today?” I ask, sitting, waiting. I’ve wised up to what’s-her-face’s plans and I’m not going to fall for it.
She looks at me skeptically. She’s always looking at me skeptically.
Then again, it’s not like I’ve done anything impressive in this room.
“Do you want to?” she asks, instead of answering. And doesn’t that just rankle.
“Fuck no,” I spit out, like the very thought is disgusting.
“Then we won’t,” she says simply and. That’s just.
“What the fuck are you here for then?” I ask, getting to my feet, and now her look is changing. Now she looks afraid.
As she should be, Apex can punch through solid steel.
That just makes me angrier.
“What the fuck am I here for? What’s the fucking point of all of this?”
It’s tempting to just throw the chair against the wall. To pick up the entire table and throw it. There is rage and frustration and sometimes you just want to break something.
Usually there’s a villain’s face that needs punching, or an army of killer robots.
Here in this room it’s just me and what’s-her-face and all her shitty government subsidized furniture.
“How is this fucking helping anything?” I shout and I can feel my throat close up, my voice crack, “This can’t change shit.”
There’s a tin of individually wrapped candies on her desk. It hardly weighs a thing, but the spray of bright colors against the wall is soothing in its own way.
What’s-her-face looks calm again, as if she knows that childish minor outburst was enough to vent.
I sit back down.
“I don’t want to talk,” I say, ashamed.
She stands up, walks around her desk.
For a moment, I think she’s going to go for the door. Get out of range of the mad meta. That would be the smart thing.
Instead she goes to where the candy tin has fallen, kneels down and begins picking up the little wrapped colorful pieces.
Musingly she says, “I hate the blue ones,” as if that were at all related to what just happened, “I mean, what is blue supposed to be? The other colors make sense, red is cherry, orange is orange, yellow is lemon, green is lime… or green apple I suppose, and purple is grape. But what the hell is blue supposed to be?”
Some of the pieces have bounced back to land near me. Even more ashamed I crouch down to help her pick them up.
“Not that artificial cherry or grape taste good, but at least they correspond to actual fruits. It’s not as if the blue ones are blueberry flavored.”
The tin is dented slightly–super strength aside, it was like trying to throw a feather and the impact was less than stellar–but still functional. Carefully we both gather our sugary loot before going back to our seats.
“Here,” she says, holding out a candy to drop into my hand.
It’s blue.
“You just said how shitty these were,” I snort, but begin unwrapping it anyway.
“No, I said I hated them. They’re pure sugar trying to be a color, that’s just wrong.”
“So what, you’re foisting them off on me instead?”
“You have one, and I’ll have one, and we’ll both decide what bullshit fake fruit they’re trying to be,” she has a blue candy in her hands, too.
Thirty minutes and the session ends with no agreement as to whether the blue candy is meant to be bubblegum or blue raspberry.
JackSGreyson Says 