It really is a pity that pub doesn’t have alcohol, because Jo would like to be drunk.
It’s like watching a movie she’s seen too many times. Lived too many times. The argument is the same. The answer is the same. The choice at the end will be the same. The only option they can see always — take the risk, trust that your abuser, who kidnapped you, stripped you of you world, your resources, your clothes, and now even of powers, when they hand you something you need after denying you for so long. Because you have to. Because you believe you won’t survive any other way.
So that you are grateful. So that you can’t turn it down. She hasn’t gotten a magical box from the sky, but she’d felt the same way about them.
But Jo’s been to worse. Jo’s been to no resources, no food, no water, and no sleep, to being terrified every minute of every day and every night, any real demons were at every corner, in every face, when night and day didn’t even exist, and every cut in her skin, down to a splinter, might mean in five days she might pop from the inside like balloon made of blood and bone confetti. This was plentiful peas and carrots compared to that. Or even Silent Hill.
(Or shooting her own mother in the face for her own survival.
Not her mother. Not her mother. Remember.
B-A-N-G.)
How this will play out is already written on the walls of this room and the faces of those talking. Some of them will take the weapons to hunt. Some of them will take them to domesticate and settle this land. All of them will call it survival, and an acceptable risk. Price. Choice. And they’ll take her with them. Because she’s just as trapped here.Because none of them will understand, none of them will believe as much, what either she or Kol will say, until it’s happened to them. It’s a scary what-if, but okay you, but maybe not us, story until then. The same as it is in every place she’s ever been pulled.
It’s not even that she doesn’t understand them. Empathize even. She understand them too well. She’s been in this pit too many times.
If anything she’s more interested in one of the few things Killian says in the middle, wrinkling her brow. She’d known who Emma was when she came in, but she’d never known Emma had magic. There are limits to everyone’s knowledge. Even hers. She’s so well aware. She never stops being aware of that. Of that quote. About how the more they learn, the more they realize how little they do know.
Jo tilted her head and looked at Kol, who she was almost too relieved to hear sense from, and then back to Killian. “You and I have already touched them. To get them here, to lay them out, to show them to everyone.” She already took that risk. She made that choice. She lived a foot off the cliff. It’s what worried half the people that loved her, liked her, followed her, partnered with her, in every world. It made her predictable, and sacrificable.
It made her a hunter. Dying in the dark, for others, in the face of monsters. She signed up for that at birth. The multiverse only expanded what ‘monsters’ could mean.
“We could wait a few days.” She shrugged. “A week. I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell they want with this anymore than any of you. We could see if anything happens to us. It could be now. It could be months from now. It could be never. But I don’t like giving them anything. Trusting in anything from them. What Kol's talking about, it's happened in every place I've ended up, in some way or another.” She looks at them all, but especially Sam and Kate, who seemed to think the only answer was we do this or demand Kol and Jo, specifically, give them a better answer. That there were only two paths. Only the x’s or the o’s in this tic-tac-toe game of Stockholm logic.
“I told you the first day we got here. I don’t have any more answers than any of you. Just the facts of where I’ve been and what I’ve been through. If I did—“ Because this is so obvious she thinks it’s deeper than breathing. “—I wouldn’t be here, for a fifth time.”
A drink. Her kingdom for a drink. And a different path. A real answer. Anything that made them non-complicit in this game. Again.
no subject
It’s like watching a movie she’s seen too many times. Lived too many times. The argument is the same. The answer is the same. The choice at the end will be the same. The only option they can see always — take the risk, trust that your abuser, who kidnapped you, stripped you of you world, your resources, your clothes, and now even of powers, when they hand you something you need after denying you for so long. Because you have to. Because you believe you won’t survive any other way.
So that you are grateful. So that you can’t turn it down.
She hasn’t gotten a magical box from the sky, but she’d felt the same way about them.
But Jo’s been to worse. Jo’s been to no resources, no food, no water, and no sleep, to being terrified every minute of every day and every night, any real demons were at every corner, in every face, when night and day didn’t even exist, and every cut in her skin, down to a splinter, might mean in five days she might pop from the inside like balloon made of blood and bone confetti. This was plentiful peas and carrots compared to that. Or even Silent Hill.
Not her mother. Not her mother. Remember.
B-A-N-G.)
How this will play out is already written on the walls of this room and the faces of those talking. Some of them will take the weapons to hunt. Some of them will take them to domesticate and settle this land. All of them will call it survival, and an acceptable risk. Price. Choice. And they’ll take her with them. Because she’s just as trapped here.Because none of them will understand, none of them will believe as much, what either she or Kol will say, until it’s happened to them. It’s a scary what-if, but okay you, but maybe not us, story until then. The same as it is in every place she’s ever been pulled.
It’s not even that she doesn’t understand them. Empathize even.
She understand them too well. She’s been in this pit too many times.
If anything she’s more interested in one of the few things Killian says in the middle, wrinkling her brow. She’d known who Emma was when she came in, but she’d never known Emma had magic. There are limits to everyone’s knowledge. Even hers. She’s so well aware. She never stops being aware of that. Of that quote. About how the more they learn, the more they realize how little they do know.
Jo tilted her head and looked at Kol, who she was almost too relieved to hear sense from, and then back to Killian. “You and I have already touched them. To get them here, to lay them out, to show them to everyone.” She already took that risk. She made that choice. She lived a foot off the cliff. It’s what worried half the people that loved her, liked her, followed her, partnered with her, in every world. It made her predictable, and sacrificable.
It made her a hunter. Dying in the dark, for others, in the face of monsters.
She signed up for that at birth. The multiverse only expanded what ‘monsters’ could mean.
“We could wait a few days.” She shrugged. “A week. I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell they want with this anymore than any of you. We could see if anything happens to us. It could be now. It could be months from now. It could be never. But I don’t like giving them anything. Trusting in anything from them. What Kol's talking about, it's happened in every place I've ended up, in some way or another.” She looks at them all, but especially Sam and Kate, who seemed to think the only answer was we do this or demand Kol and Jo, specifically, give them a better answer. That there were only two paths. Only the x’s or the o’s in this tic-tac-toe game of Stockholm logic.
“I told you the first day we got here. I don’t have any more answers than any of you. Just the facts of where I’ve been and what I’ve been through. If I did—“ Because this is so obvious she thinks it’s deeper than breathing. “—I wouldn’t be here, for a fifth time.”
A drink. Her kingdom for a drink. And a different path. A real answer. Anything that made them non-complicit in this game. Again.