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Marc was starting to worry about Steven.
Well, "starting" was perhaps not the word. Marc had been worried about Steven for some time now. Which was odd, when you thought about it. Steven had come into being to protect Marc, or, at least, the softest bits of him. Yet somewhere along the line Marc had gotten it in his head that he needed to protect Steven. Protect him from the supernatural world, yeah. But also protect him from the truth.
Marc had failed. Steven had not only faced the absolute worst the gods had to offer, but he’d also faced the truth. About their DID. Their abuse. Their mother. And all of it, Steven had taken in stride. Well, maybe not in stride, but close enough. Steven had taken it and kept going. It hadn’t destroyed him the way it had destroyed Marc.
Or so it had seemed. Now, Marc wasn’t so sure. Steven had just been sitting there, staring at Not-Gus, for far longer than was reasonable. Not moving. Not speaking. Just staring.
Emotions were Steven’s thing. Marc preferred to avoid them. But if he’d learned anything in the asylum/afterlife, it was that he needed to be open with Steven. Or maybe, in this case, Steven needed to be open with him.
Marc pushed himself further to the front, and waved about, hoping Steven would notice him in the tank’s reflection. Even that, though, didn’t seem to break Steven from his trance. Now Marc was really worried.
“Steven? Are you okay?”
“What? Oh yeah, I’m fine.” Steven slurred the words, as if he was drunk. Marc was decently sure his alter didn’t drink, though. He’d searched the apartment many times for something, and always been disappointed.
Perhaps he was disassociated? That seemed like that kind of thing that might happen to a person with DID. But if he was dissociated, why was he still fronting? Marc pressed closer to the front, testing if Steven might want to switch and just didn’t know it. But Steven held firm in the body.
“Yeah, fine. Just…thinking,” Steven repeated, sounding a little bit more like his usual self. The accent wasn’t as strong, though. And he certainly lacked the trademark pep.
Still, Marc had done his due diligence. He’d asked if Steven was okay. Steven had said he was. There was nothing else for Marc to do. And it was probably for the best. If something was wrong, Marc wouldn’t be able to handle it. He wasn’t good at things like that; hence, Steven’s whole existence. Layla and Steven were getting dinner tonight, weren’t they? She loved talking about feelings. She’d get it out of him.
Marc, relieved beyond measure, began his retreat. Of course, Steven chose that exact moment to open up. “Did we drown?”
“Wha..What? When?”
Steven’s voice was half a whisper, “In the cave.”
Fuck. Fuck. This was why Marc didn’t fucking do emotions. Immediately, he was overwhelmed. He could feel the cold water engulfing his legs, then his chest, then his head. He could hear Randall screaming his name—Marc, Marc, Marc—until the moment when he couldn’t. That moment was the worst of all.
Marc slammed his head against a wall, trying to force the memories out. Except the wall he was slamming himself against wasn’t real, nor was the head he slammed. Marc had no body at all. Marc wasn’t even real. Marc was real and he wished he wasn’t.
Falsifying enlistment forms was a felony. When Captain America did it, he was offered superpowers. When Marc Spector did it, he was offered an other-than-honorable discharge. The only thing that kept him from simply getting a dishonorable discharge—and three years of prison labor—was the fact that he didn’t even remember going AWOL. He hadn’t, at that moment, remembered joining the military at all.
(Insanity at the time of the crime could get you out of a court martial. Marc would have preferred prison to pity.)
“Look, Mr. Spector—” and didn’t it hurt more than anything, that the Colonel on the other side of the desk had already stripped him of his rank—“I want to be frank with you. You won’t be eligible for VA benefits, but you need professional help. Based on everything you and the others have told me—"
“My squad have no idea what happened. Don’t bring them into this,” Marc snapped.
Colonel-Doctor Fraser was a tiny slip of a woman. She leaned across the desk, more intimidating than any CO. “Mr. Spector. I was not referring to your comrades. I was referring to your alters.”
“What the fuck is an alter?”
She studied him more, and Marc felt ready to crawl out of his skin. His heart was pounding, and he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten to this appointment. All he knew was he’d been kicked out of the military and was utterly screwed. And now this woman was throwing around words he didn’t understand. Fancy academic terms for whatever was broken in his head.
“Mr. Spector. I believe you are suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder, previously referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder. An alter is what would have been considered under those terms an alternate personality. Now the disorder was recategorized because it shares more traits with dissociative disorders than personality-based disorders, but the fact remains that…”
Marc clenched his fists tight, no longer listening. Alters. He had alters. Other people living in his body he’d never even known before.
“Am I real?”
He’d interrupted Dr. Fraser mid-sentence, he realized too late. But she took it in stride. “Of course you are real, Mr. Spector. However, derealization and depersonalization are two characteristic features of the disorder.”
More terms he’d need to Google. But these fancy words didn’t answer his question. “No, I mean… Is Marc Spector real? Or was I just made up by someone else?”
“Ah. You’re asking if you are the host. Yes, Mr. Spector. Your name is the one which appears on the birth certificate. However, it’s important to understand that the ego does not fully form until around nine years old. Intense trauma experienced by young children can prevent this fusion. Thus, while you are certainly “real,” the others are too. You are all a part of the same whole. With professional help, you may find ways to heal the system, merging these parts back into one whole. But even if you never succeed, you will always be real, Mr. Spector. Nothing can change that. I must ask, though. Do you have any idea what may have occurred during your childhood to prompt this?”
Marc did not finish the session. Steven got to meet a nice army doctor, and explain to her why pacifism was really the only solution. When he left the office with a paper full of referrals and got overwhelmed by the busy DC street, Jake took them all home, and tossed the paper in the trash.
Marc didn’t know if minutes or days had passed, because Steven was still staring at the tank.
He was talking openly now, though. And while Marc had wanted that before, now he just needed Steven to stop, stop, stop.
“I don’t really remember it, that’s the thing. I guess I didn't exist yet? Or maybe you and I were the same then. I keep asking the internet, but they’re not really certain. But I’m certain. I’m certain I don’t remember him. Not for real. But I remember seeing it in the Duat. He was drawing a one-finned fish. Just like Gus. Real Gus, that is. Not Not-Gus, who we love equally, even though he’s not the same.”
Steven never even paused for a breath. This wasn't why Marc couldn’t breathe.
“So I guess, even if I hadn’t been born yet, even if I don’t remember him, I carried him with me. Because when I saw Gus in that pet store, I needed him. They warned me he probably wouldn’t live long with one fin. But I knew, he was the one. Even if I could only have him for a short time, I wanted to enjoy every bit of it.”
Marc had always felt bad about killing the fish. Was this Steven’s way of making him feel even worse? Had his alter finally come to his senses and realized that Marc deserved to be tortured for every one of his failings? It felt like it.
“And so, I started thinking about parallels. Like how, if Gus reminded me of Randall, that’s really messed up, innit? Neither of them could swim very well. But Gus, well, Gus was a fish. He needed water to live, right? But water killed Randall. And both of them died on your watch.”
“Steven,” Marc managed to gasp. “Please. Stop. Please. Just stop.”
Steven shook his head, ever difficult. “No, you need to hear this. Because we’re one and the same, aren’t we? So if I can think like that, you must think like that too. But the thing is. That’s only half of it, and I’m not sure you’ve accepted the other half. Because you didn’t kill Gus, did you? Goldfish can go way more than two days without eating. You didn’t kill him. He just died, like the people in the fish store said he would. And you didn’t kill Randall either. He—”
“Just died,” Marc whispered to himself, and inhaling deeply. The darkness which had been creeping up on him faded, and Marc found himself fronting. He reached up against the fish tank half caressing the fish, half caressing his reflection. For the first time in his life, he held on to a memory. He thought of that stupid fish RoRo had always drawn. Finding Nemo hadn’t even come out yet. He’d just thought it was cute.
“And if I was a fish, I’d have to be a one-finned one,” he’d told Marc the day they’d gone to the local and spent the whole time sitting on the edge. “Because I’m such a bad swimmer!”
“He just died,” Marc repeated, and then, he let himself weep.