Distant

Lou stares out the window, watching snow slowly fall outside. She feels bittersweet as it snows. Where the holidays used to fill her with absolute joy, she can only remember the Christmas she was alone. Or the holiday before everyone died. Or the last Christmas in the other hero universe, where she stayed out of the way and kept her head down and wasn’t allowed to do any of the cooking for fear that she’d hurt them all again in some way. Not that Lou blamed them for any of it. She was the reason so many of them were so hurt.

She blinks when she realizes there’s tears in her eyes. It’s been hard for her to feel much of anything, lately. It’s only been a week since everything returned to…to normal. And everyone has been in their own little world. They all experienced their own little horrors, and none of them want to talk about it. Lou’s picked up that everyone remembers every world, like she does. Which is horrifying. They all know what she did in so many of those worlds. They know what she’s really like, the side of her that she didn’t even know she had until this whole venture.

Sometimes Lou wonders how it would’ve been if she let Lindsey kill her in that blank space instead of constantly sending her to a new world. She knows that everyone can remember everything. It’s overwhelming for all of them from time to time (okay well...most times). So they remember what she did. And they haven’t really said anything to her about it, but she knows that they remember. She knows that they remember when she wasn’t able to save them in the explosion, or when she mysteriously “disappeared” because she didn’t want to be responsible for hurting them again, or when she killed them off one by one with a gun and a silencer, or when she was a part of torturing Carter and then nearly killed Damien and then did kill Seth, in front of Devon, probably traumatizing the poor kid.

Lou’s pretty certain that it would have been better if Lindsey had just killed her. It could have saved everyone so much heartache and pain that they carry around with them now.

But, god, it’s the good times that she hates the most. The times that she enjoyed herself in those terrible worlds. There was the man who took care of her after narrowly surviving the explosion, how he had nursed her back to health and let her stay with him since she no longer had a home. She can still remember his smile and the funny stories he told and how lovely his food was, but she doesn’t think she’s ever met him anywhere else. She can’t remember him in any other of her memories. Or there were the two kids who Lou took care of after killing off all her friends, as though she wasn’t a monster, as though she could really be responsible for two innocent children. It was really nice until it all came crashing down and she was found out as the murderer she was. Is. Or even the quiet mornings spent with Carter. Despite every reminder of how she was involved with his torture, those mornings where she would knit and he would watch the snow or they would even talk...They were nice. They were so fucking nice, and Lou keeps thinking about them when she’s not thinking about all the bad things she did. But why should she get good things? Why should she believe that she’s deserving of anything good?

Lou wipes some stray tears from her face and watches the snow. She stands up and goes outside, hit with a blanket of chills. Small flakes pepper her hair and melt against her skin. Lou lifts her face and stares up into the sky, letting the frost kiss her cheeks and fill her with ice. She outstretches her arms and falls back onto the snow with a soft tutt as her body hits the cake of snow. Lou keeps her eyes closed and feels more and more snow slowly filter on top of her. She feels cold, but it’s nice. She thinks about those early mornings with Carter again, how they’d be freezing by the time they get inside and they’d have to sit by the fire. She’d make him cocoa, after he began trusting her enough not to poison him. That took a long time, though. Lou can still remember knitting those sweaters, how she’d knit them even in the cold. The motion became so repetitive and second nature that she didn’t have to feel her hands to be able to knit. Can she feel them now?

“Lou!” a distant voice calls. She thinks that she is imagining it until she hears it again. She cracks open her eyes and sees Damien hovering over her, eyes wide and scared. Lou remembers that same expression on Damien’s face once...twice...many times before. It’s always when he looks at her. “You’re half buried. What happened?”

“I...must have dozed off,” she says. “I just wanted to make a snow angel.”

“Liar.” Damien takes her hand and pulls her up. Lou realizes just how cold she feels when she can feel Damien’s warmth through her coat. “You don’t even have a hat on. You’re red in the face--Come on, go inside and warm up. I’ll make you soup.”

Lou walks numbly alongside Damien and warmth envelops her as she steps back into their house. “It’s fine, Damien.”

“No it’s not. You could freeze to death. What’s with all of you and getting trapped out in snow? Like all of you!” Damien grumbles under his breath. He sheds off Lou’s coat and brushes the snow from her hair. He sits her down by the fireplace and wraps her in a blanket, and then two more. “I’m going to make you soup.”

“You don’t have to.”

Damien’s already headed towards the kitchen. Lou holds onto the blankets tightly and stares at the fire burning on the logs. There wasn’t a fireplace at Westwood tower, but Damien--the other Damien--always liked to put on videos of fireplaces on the hologram screens to give the illusion of it. Lou shuts her eyes and tries to push the memory away.

“Lou.” She looks up and Damien is there with a bowl of soup as promised. Did she doze off again? Has she been losing time? “Sweetheart. Please eat.”

Lou nods and takes the bowl. Damien sits beside her as she eats. Lou stops halfway through and lets the spoon rest in the bowl. The soup tastes wonderful. Almost too good. It amazes her how something made for her can taste so much better than anything she makes herself.

Damien touches her hand. “Your thoughts are scaring me,” he whispers. There’s a trembling in his voice that makes Lou’s stomach twist. She hates causing that tremor.

“I’m sorry,” Lou whispers.

Damien looks at her and runs his fingers through her hair. It’s somewhat damp from the snow. “I’m not angry, you know.”

“You should be.” Lou grips the bowl a little tighter. “You should be...so angry at me.”

“Why? You were put in an impossible position,” Damien says. “I did terrible things because of Lindsey too. I did terrible things even without Lindsey. It’s okay, you don’t--Lou, you don’t have to blame yourself so much for this.”

Lou feels a burning behind her eyes and she shuts her eyes tightly to keep from crying. “It’s different, Damien. You tried to make things better with the shit Lindsey gave you. I just gave up. I decided, fuck it, what’s the goddamn point? And of course there’s a point. But I was just so tired. I hoped that by going along with things, maybe I wouldn’t get all of you hurt. But I still did. I did badly.”

“And it’s okay-”

“No it’s not! It’s not okay!” Lou suddenly sobs and she covers her face. “You know it’s not okay!”

Damien bites his lip and he sighs softly. “Okay,” he murmurs, “it’s not okay. It isn’t.” He leans against her and rubs her back. “But that doesn’t mean you should continue beating yourself up over it. You’re a good person, Lou, you were just given impossible choices.”

“What if I’m not a good person?” Lou whispers. “I went through so many universes, Damien. And I was a fucking terrible person in all of them. Not even just what I did, I mean who I was before. I was always going to do terrible things. How can I say I’m a good person when there’s so many universes where I’m just not?”

Damien shakes his head. “Lindsey purposely chose a series of universes where you would be a villain. He wanted to fuck you up, to make you feel like you couldn’t do anything to make things better. It’s what he did. That’s not reflective of who you are.”

Lou shakes her head slightly. “What if it is? What if this me is the fluke?”

“Then embrace this you. Lou, even with all that shit you went through, even with seeing every version of yourself in your head, you’re still a good person right now. Doesn’t that amount for something?” Damien asks.

“I don’t know.” Lou deflates and leans against Damien. “I just...I...I want to forget it. Everything I did, I just want to forget all of it. Isn’t that ironic? I spent so long trying not to forget anything and now I want to forget everything.”

Damien strokes her hair. “Lou...I can’t say I don’t understand. Because I do. There’s plenty I want to forget. But I can’t. And it’s good to not forget, because then I might make the same mistake. I hate the things I did in this universe, before I joined you all. I hate it so much. But I wouldn’t want to forget it, because what I remember prevents me from becoming that again.” He takes her hand and squeezes gently. “It’s shitty. It’s really, really shitty.  But it’s important you still remember.”

Lou whimpers and presses her face into Damien’s chest. “I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “I’m sorry I did all those things to you. And everyone else.”

Damien kisses her forehead. “I forgive you. And I know everyone else does too.” That makes Lou cry harder. Damien just continues rubbing her back, murmuring softly as her soup gets cold.