Work Text:
"I didn't have friends because I didn't think anyone deserved me, Morton. I couldn't offer anyone even the bare minimum when I couldn't get through a single damn day the way a 'normal adult' should. So I made peace with the idea that rest of my life was going to be spent alone, a revolving door of dead-end retail jobs and getting lost in video games, because that was the best it was ever going to get for someone like me. Then the Visitor came and, well, sigh my mind is still the same, the disorders will be there forever, but now the whole world it… now it's sort of like me. Broken."
"That word is not one I would ever use, not for the world and verily not for you. Broken is for ehh… trinkets and things that have lost their use. You are neither, Sam."
"Mmm. Maybe it's a harsh word. But I still feel broken in some ways - like when my mind screams at me that I'm a horrible person for needing an apocalypse to find family or have something that resembles a normal life. But I feel like it's the truth. Before the Visitor, my mind was incompatible, inconvenient, a burden, and broken - but then the already broken world broke, changed, and this new world took it over in all its ugliness and beauty and now I feel like I'm finally a part of it. It's fucked up."
"You did not feel like you were part of the world before?"
"Not really, no. My life was four walls and screens, interrupted by only the most casual human interactions. You know, 'hey how are you doing, Sam?' 'oh Super Jumplad 2 is really fun!' 'do you have change for a dollar?' Those sorts of bare minimum interactions that still could be too much for me. Sometimes, my brother or sister would visit with the kids, and that was great, but compared to them it was clear I was… broken. They had families, careers, houses with pretty yards, friends, everything I wanted - but I was just this messed up mentally ill loser who sat around all day in an apartment he could barely afford that was incapable of making friends."
"No no no, Sam."
"So a broken mind like mine needed the world to break and end for it to feel even a little bit compatible and worse - thrive. It keeps me up at night sometimes. I know the world needed to change, but not like this. How many people died? How many continue to suffer even if the world in some ways is better? I go through all stages of grief, guilt, regret and remorse because of it. It took the ruin of everything to find happiness."
"You are being cruel to yourself. Stop it."
"It's the truth and the way the mental illness is. And yet. sigh. And yet even through all of the chaos we experienced when the Visitor was here, I never thought I needed to be remade."
"You are referring to Spine's ehh… offer?"
"I often joked about wanting my brain taken out of my head then put back in my skull remade and fixed so I was normal - but it's a lot different when I'm the one making the joke and someone is being serious about changing me. I might be broken, but it's, I dunno, my broken - and just because I'm broken doesn't mean I need that. Spine wanted to remake me into something that she thought was better for me, but it wasn't. Her offer had nothing to do with actually wanting to help me."
"Were you ever tempted by her offer?"
"… No."
"You hesitated to answer."
"Like I said, I never felt like I needed to be remade, not with those terms. But…"
"But?"
"She was lonely, and so was I, and sometimes when you're so lonely an eternity with someone that reminds you just a little bit of yourself does sound… nice. Even if it means accepting that you're some sort of irreparable defect - that you're so messed up only an equally lonely and messed up monster can love you."
"Ehh… Forgive me if my observation is inaccurate, but then it does seem like you were tempted by her offer, if only tangentially."
"It was like fantasizing about suicide, Morton. You don't really want to kill yourself or die, you just want the bullshit, pain and misery to end. You want it to stop, and suicide is an option, a permanent irreversible forever option - but it is an option. I never wanted to die. I never wanted to stop being me. But fuck, I wanted to stop being lonely and being burdened with me in an intolerant world and Spine had a solution - a fucked up and selfish solution, but she did have one."
"The terms were unacceptable and I agree with your choice, dearest Sam. I have quarrel with your choice in words, you are not broken, but they are ehh… your words to speak."
"A lot of people will agree with you, I'm surprised Xaria hasn't popped up yet to yell at me about the 'implications of mental illness being stigmatized' or whatever. I'm already a marginalized mentally ill almost middle-aged brown bisexual man missing an arm - I think I have the right to say I'm a little broken in the brain even when on medication."
"Then we may agree to disagree, as they say."
"Yeah."
"I do have one further question, Sam."
"Hm?"
"Earlier you said that you kept people away because you felt like people didn't ehh.. deserve you, because of the way your mind worked and its challenges, and you made peace with your loneliness, yes?"
"That was the most gentle way I have ever heard someone describe my fucked up mental issues, but yeah, I said that earlier."
"You deserve gentle things. Do you still believe that people do not deserve you?"
"… No."
"Good, good, yes. One more question, and it is an important one; are you still lonely?"
"No. Not a bit. I might not have changed physically when I was exposed to the Visitor, but my life was changed. The change came from me and all our experiences as the world uh… I don't know the word to use. A word meaning to change in a striking way, horrifically and beautifully."
"Metamorphosed."
"Yeah, that. We all metamorphosed. Not everyone benefited, not everyone became a beautiful butterfly, most didn't. Fifteen days of horrific world-wide metamorphosis taught me some things about myself I forgot; I'm alive, I do belong in the world, and the world is me."