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There is no place like home.
—L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz
There is something to be said for the fact that when you’re a nerd growing up with few acquaintances and even fewer friends, you find yourself falling for fairytales. That is the way of lonely children since the history of man began, isn’t it? You fall for the version of reality where the lonely child living in the tower, the child separated out from the rest of society, gets to be rescued.
And then, when you grow up, you have that naivety shattered. You have that hope thrown against the ground and destroyed because the world can’t hold itself up to the version of life that you made up in your head, a world where lonely kids are sought out, a world in which the girl doesn’t have to confront her fear of the outside world because it comes to her.
Marsha didn’t grow up reading fairytales. She grew up reading comic books.
But, as she’d come to learn, that was much the same thing, at the end of the day.
She grew up idolizing Team Zenith. Falling for the image of Zoom and Concussion before he lashed out and betrayed everyone and killed his entire team.
(She grew up dreaming of darkness. Of the day that the world ended and all that was left was the shimmer of her breath against the oil-spill darkness of the end of days.)
She’d thought, for so long, that Zoom was the hero that she couldn’t be.
And for so long, it was that faith that got her through it all. Through the bullying of kids at school, through having to tuck away her powers where no one could see them, through her parents’ divorce and the soul-sucking press of grad school and all the rest of the shit that the world threw at her.
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And then she meets Jack Shepard.
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They say never to meet your heroes.
Your faith will end up getting shattered, just like other children’s belief in fairytale princes did the same. That you will find yourself not pulled up to Oz via tornado, but rather tossed to the ground, the building falling on top of you to crush your childhood dreams.
Marsha had thought that Zoom would be the superhero that he was supposed to be. That when she breathed, when she spoke about heroes, would get it, that he would understand what it is to live in a world where you stand apart, where you make the choice to be more than they ever told you you could be.
She had thought that he was more than she was. That where she had tucked away her superpowers in the aftermath of the wreckage of Team Zenith, he had been proud of his powers, enough to be on the team in the first place.
But Jack isn’t Zoom. Not anymore. And maybe Zoom was never what she thought that he was. He proves to her that being a superhero has less to do with the super and more about the hero, about the choices that a person makes, that she has spent a decade clawing her way through undergrad and grad school and her doctoral program, sacrificing all-nighters and mental health and thirty fucking years of her life to a dream that he has wasted away and let wither on the vine.
Jack fails, and he doesn’t just fail her- he fails the kids that he’s supposed to help out.
And she looks at these kids, these kids who have the sort of possibilities for their future that Jack has crushed by his own apathy, his own depression, his own ache, and something squeezes inside of her chest.
Some of them that believe in superheroes, in the good of Jack, and she was one of them, once upon a time. She was someone who made her faith out of the pages of a comic book instead of the bible. Someone who believed in good.
And Jack, at the end of the day, is just a guy. A guy with dead teammates and dead superpowers, who let the haunting of ghosts drive him into the ground.
And she doesn’t want to ruin that for them. She doesn’t want to break their hearts like hers has been broken.
So she grits her teeth and she starts digging. Starts digging up the answers that she should have sought out to begin with, the information about Jack’s team, about what happened to Concussion before he was Concussion and he was just Connor Shepard, the reckless superhero with more restlessness than sense and too much gamma radiation exposure.
Because if Jack isn’t going to be the hero that they need him to be, if he refuses to let the kids believe in something, then like hell Marsha is going to let him be the reason that these kids get crushed.
She is going to find out what happened. She is going to find out what is going to happen.
Tornado warning, Marsha thinks, staring at the stats that were once ascribed to Team Zenith, to Zoom specifically.
It’s a dangerous thing.
They used to talk about Team Zenith like that, in the records. That once Zoom got going, the world ground itself to a standstill as everyone held their breath.
And nowadays, Jack is nothing more than a stop sign. A single human man who let his powers ground out, all because—
If meeting your heroes is enough to crush childhood fairytales, then Marsha doesn’t even want to begin to imagine what your brother turning into a villain could cause, and for the first time since she met him, Marsha has sympathy for Jack Shepard and his crushed dreams, because she understands what it's like.
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Marsha doesn’t want to take advantage of the kids, but she knows that Dylan spies when he shouldn’t, and Marsha is determined to get to the bottom of all of this.
So she asks Dylan to poke into the military records, into the military's minds, and she discovers the truth: that the military is determined to expose the kids to the same gamma radiation that turned Connor Shepard into a villain.
And Marsha might not have the most powerful ability in the world. She might not have the flashiest ability in the world.
But just because she is more of a breeze, a blizzard, than a tornado, doesn’t mean that she can’t do something to save the story from collapsing into destruction.
The military wants to drop the house on Concussion’s head. They want to warp the kids up in the same gamma radiation that turned Connor Shepard evil. They want to sacrifice the kids- her and Jack’s kids, at the end of the day- to the wood chipper, to the tornado, on the off chance that it might work, that they might just get the edge on Concussion.
And Marsha has spent so long fighting to prove herself. To work for the very team that she looked up to when she was a kid.
But at the end of the day, she is more than what they told her that she needed to be. She is more than the child that hid and cowered and cried when she was forced to hide what made her special.
She refuses to let the wreckage of one team wreck another one. She refuses to let her and Jack’s fears destroy these kids’.
She is going to make Jack listen. She is going to make sure that he helps these kids make it.
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Jack doesn’t get his powers back, at the end of the day.
But Marsha does have her powers, and so do the kids, and even if Jack doesn’t have his powers, he’s still here, because he listens, because more than anyone else, he's the one who is convinced that they can save Connor Shepard when he falls through the portal back onto earth. He’s still here to talk to his brother.
Because when Marsha and the kids show up to him to tell him about Connor's impending arrival, Jack swallows hard, looks at them all, and he tells them that he isn't going to let his brother go again—but neither is he letting any of them get hurt to save his brother.
It's a suicide mission, to send a man without superpowers into the middle of an approaching storm, into the tornado, and the kids know that, too.
So they all look Jack in the eyes, and every single one of them refuses to let him go alone. All the way down the line, each one of them—Dylan, Summer, Cindy, Tucker, Marsha herself—they are all throwing themselves onto the battlefield to help Jack get his brother back, because they believe in him, because they believe in saving someone who was forced through the same things that the military is trying to do to them.
It's a terrifying thing, to head right into the tornado warning, to ignore all the sirens, but they're going to do this, because they understand a thing or two about choosing your family. About saying fuck you to the cautionary tales and deciding to build your own fairytale.
So Dylan finds out where Connor’s supposed to arrive, and then it's just a question of getting there first, before the military can stop them.
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When Connor Shepard emerges from the portal, they are all there. Marsha blows the air, churning up a storm, and Cindy knocks Connor into Tucker’s stomach, and Summer uses her powers to force the air from Marsha’s mouth up into the sky and back down, hot into cold into hot again, and Jack is reckless, fearless, sticking himself right in the middle the blast, talking to his brother, keeping the wicked witch from arriving to Oz, keeping the house from collapsing down on the head of the not-so-wicked witch.
Concussion collapses back into Connor, red eyes fading into brown, and Marsha thinks tornado warning. She thinks Oz. She thinks—Dorothy's home, and I brought her here.
Connor Shepard wakes up on his brother's lap, and three decades of believing in heroes is proven right as Dr. Marsha Holloway's fairytale comes true, proving dread wrong, proving the military wrong, because at the end of the day, Connor's brother and all of the rest of the heroes, the underdogs, the outcasts, the lonely children aching for their happy endings, bring him home.