Dear Readers,

Hi.

Yeah so I don't know if anyone reading this is anyone who's actually followed my past work, but if you are, I apologize for the ridiculously long hiatus AND for jumping fandoms yet AGAIN instead of finishing any previously unfinished stories! Yay! But after seeing Incredibles 2 (took Pixar long enough) I've had a million different ideas and this is one of the ones that's been eating away at me. I hope you enjoy.

Best Regards,
Pooka

P.S.: I apologize if the brief dialogue doesn't exactly match up with the movie; I was purely going off memory.

For Your Own Good

"Sit down," she hisses, her voice tinged with fury and a hint of desperation.

The gears that have slowly been turning in Winston's head since his sister wrenched him away from the crowd of supers and dignitaries begin to gather momentum, overcoming the temporary rust of…whatever induced his sudden brain fog back on the boat. Like keys turning a series of complex locks, several things click into place simultaneously. The giant screen, their abrupt escape, the summit members standing eerily frozen as if an invisible force was keeping them there…

"What did you do?" Winston hurls at Evelyn accusingly, the answer already forming in the back of his mind, accompanied by a sick sense of dread.

"It's for your own good!" his sister yells.

And with that one simple phrase, time comes screeching to a halt.

It's only a split second, but in that second everything Winston has ever known about his sister comes crashing into his consciousness. A tidal wave of memories flooding every corner of his brain until he's drowning in a narrative he thought he'd carefully filed away piece by piece.

Except now, for the first time in his life, the pieces are finally fitting together.

That time at the county fair when he was five and she was eight and she made him order a vanilla ice cream cone instead of chocolate because vanilla was her choice and they had to have the same flavor. That time when he was eight and she was eleven, and his beloved hamster – the hamster she notoriously hated and openly told him was a "frivolous distraction" from his studying to win the math-a-thon – mysteriously disappeared. That time when he was twelve and she was fifteen, and she pleaded with him to drop out of drama club so he could do "something more challenging" because he was "too smart to waste his time playing make-believe," and he turned down the lead role – the role he craved more than anything – to obey her advice and join debate club instead. That time when he was fourteen and she was seventeen, and he brought home his first girlfriend, the captain of the freshman cheerleading squad, to dinner. The girlfriend who ultimately fell victim to Evelyn's disapproving glares, the girlfriend who dumped him out of the blue two weeks later and then switched schools without explanation, the girlfriend he confronted Evelyn about after the fact, to which his sister's response was merely a cold, hard stare that told him everything he needed to know about why said girlfriend suddenly walked out of his life without so much as a glance backward.

There are many more times like these in his memory. More than he could possibly count, all adding up to an insurmountable sum, snowballing until the tangled mass of recollections is hurtling through his mind at a frightening pace. But every instance is held together by a common thread, a thread that is far more intricately woven into the fabric of his and Evelyn's relationship than he initially realized. A thread constructed of the same five words spilling from her lips time and time again, stitching him tightly to her side so he would never be too far out of her reach.

It's for your own good.

The epiphany hits him in full force, an icy blast of reality threatening to topple the long-held perceptions of his very existence. The puzzle pieces, once hopelessly jumbled, are now falling into the their rightful places, at last forming the full picture he could never before see because he was far too close to it all to see clearly. Now, stepping away from the frame, he can finally view the image he was always meant to – a blazing warning sign made only brighter by the ever-constant flow of these moments, now memories. A warning sign that his precious sister was always standing precariously on the edge of a cliff, a warning sign he wishes he could've seen for what it was before their parents' deaths finally thrust her over the edge into the abyss. A warning sign that foretold the damage she could possibly do, the damage that has now already been done.

He opens his mouth to speak, and time suddenly rushes back to full speed.

"NO!"

He thrusts the escape door open and launches himself out of the plane without a second thought. And for the first time in either of their lives, the thread breaks.

Winston thinks he hears Evelyn shriek his name as he falls, but it's drowned out by the deafening roar of the plane's engines and the sickening thud of his body slamming against the side of the boat. When he finally overcomes the shock of the fall, he twists his body round, ignoring the scream of pain in his limbs, and stares up at the plane as it ascends farther into the clouds.

She never would have let him go. Not by her own choice. He knows that now.

She never knew how to.

A/N: So I literally just came up with and wrote this in one sitting because I figured if I ignored the urge to write it it would never end up being written at all. I wanted to explore the possible idea that Evelyn's need for control and use of emotional manipulation started in childhood and merely escalated after the deaths of her parents, since she does show some legitimate psychopathic tendencies in the movie (typically that kind of behavior can and does start pretty early in many cases). I do think deep down she does care for Winston, it's just tangled up with a lot of her own personal issues and desires, and in my mind I felt like that would've manifested itself as extreme overprotectiveness, even if it was subtle or from the shadows (I've written more about this on tumblr because I watch too many crime shows and have a weakness for over-analyzing these types of characters, lol). I want to write a slightly longer piece on this topic that actually delves into scenes from their childhood, but I decided just to start with this to get back into the swing of writing things. Anyway, thanks for reading, and please don't hesitate to leave a review! Guests are welcome :)