Work Text:
“Becoming” is a funny word.
A child becomes an adult. A seed becomes a plant, and a leaf. Batter becomes a cake. An idea becomes a project. Linear progression.
There is no real change here, not at the basest level. A grown man is the same person he was at eight, only with a few more layers added. A seed always had the beginnings of a stem and basic leaf within it, just below the surface. Nothing is added in an oven but heat. An idea simply becomes realized. One source to a final product.
What Helen was is multitude, binary, so can it really be said that she has become Helen? She did not spawn from nothingness, and she did not grow from an undeveloped state into a final form. She was Michael and she was Richardson, and now all at once she is Helen. There is no transformation.
What Helen is is a maze. Her mind is nothing but one hundred curves all together, and she has no brain to speak of. She is hallways and she is an uncountable amount of people within them and she is pretending. She is lying and she is a lie, and both origin points despise her.
Something in the thing Helen was made into hates. It hates everything that is not it, and a newer addition hates archivists especially.
She does not listen. She is Helen. There is more to her.
Something in the thing Helen was made into hates. It does not hate everything, but it is almost there, and a newer crossing of neurons that are no longer organic matter hates mazes especially.
She does not listen. She is Helen. There is more to her.
Sometimes, the twisting that is Helen almost abhors being Helen, but she stops it. That was for Michael, and she is Helen now, and she will adjust. Helen will not deny what she is, but she will deny what she is no longer. She is not Michael, and she is not Richardson, not quite. She is Helen and she is a thing and a what and she has not become anything. There is only Helen, who stepped through a door one day and existed. There has never been any other name for her.
Helen is new despite her age, and so Helen will be different. She pushes past everything she was, and she will be helpful. She is determined to be helpful.
It is against everything she used to be, both sides, heads and tails all together, so Helen makes a compromise. She stops feeling the screams within her, shuts something off. It is a returning, of sorts.
The Archivist has never liked any of her, and he is a hypocrite, but he will understand soon enough. Helen understands perfectly well, but in an obscured sort of way, as is the nature of what she is. He is a thing, and a what, and he cannot see it even with all the vision in the world. People change, she tells him. Sometimes they change into not-people, but the ingredients are all the same.
It is of no matter to Helen, like everything else that is not within her. She is going to be helpful; she is going to be Helen. She makes a couple thousand compromises.
Melanie is almost like her. She understands the delight. She is not a thing, not yet, but she is on her way, like many things that are Helen once were. She is almost a friend, not quite the first and almost the last in a line of them.
She is an opening and she is a closing. She is an alteration, and she can do nothing to change anything. It makes sense to the spiral where her brain should or shouldn’t be.
She is Helen, and she stops tolerating the knowing. It is an affront to what she is. There is no truth for Helen, no end or beginning, nothing concrete. Being in the dark is the natural state of things, and the state to which all else will return, a new part of Helen sings.
Helen knows nothing except for other things and people on their way to becoming things, and she laughs and she laughs. She is not Michael, she reminds herself, but the components for Michael are contained within her, and she laughs.
Helen is nothing but a swirl of emotions and connections, and she will be helpful, because if she is not helpful she is not Helen. He does not want her help, but she will be helpful, repaying the debt she is owed as she grows and grows. It is the only fact. It is a compromise.
She does not trust him, and he does not trust her. Such is the way of things. Helen has never asked for trust; it does not suit her.
She will be helpful. To whom, she fears she does not know anymore.
Helen is fear, and so Helen fears. It is not logical, and therefore it makes perfect sense.
Helen has never lied to anyone, only obscured. That is what the thing she is and the parts she used to be tell her, and she does not stop to question if this, too, is not what it is. She is Helen, and she is new. She has to be. A mountain of promises and exchanges pile over her and steal away her vision.
He hates her, because she has spiraled in the same way he has, and he thinks her a monster. He is funny, throwing around that word as if there is one thing or being left that it does not apply to. Helen cannot think this, because she no longer has a mind. It is simply known, as he advances upon her.
Helen is afraid, and it does not occur to her that she is, so she is not lying. A lie means something, and what Helen is has never told a lie. Everything is obscured. She merely offers one perception.
She will not claim to be the truth. She is Helen. That is someone else’s job.
It is not an unraveling. That would be too well suited. Every twist straightens out. Every corner reverses its turn. Every curve and spiral is unbended, until she is Not.
She is not Helen. It is not Helen. There is nothing but a pile of wire, unrounded, wonky in the places where it has been forcibly folded back onto itself.