Julianne didn't know why her co-workers all seemed to think she was so weak. Actually, she amended, that wasn't quite true; she knew exactly why she was perceived as weak. She knew that after her... Ahem... Incident, Ray would always see her as his responsibility, his rose whose four little thorns were no defense against baobabs. That was Ray- she expected that from him. What she didn't understand was why everyone else had gone along with his interpretation.
Ray really dressed Charlie down after the last time he lambasted her for not working fast enough. Whatever he said made the man listen, because from that point on, he treated her like she was liable to break. He'd spent the day asking her for favors in low, soothing tones that made her teeth grind.
Julianne knew the cons saw her as weak, too, but for a different reason. She hoped she'd shown Shea that she was no pushover after his fuck break with his girlfriend, but while he seemed to look at her with a hint of wariness in his eyes, she knew that he knew that she wasn't going to turn him in for it. She inspired fear in the hearts of none.
But when Lloyd called her Bambi... Did the guy really not know that she had trained to be a U.S. Marshal? That she could do thirty pull-ups, and run an eight-minute mile, and wield a gun, for Christ's sake? She could kick his ass up and down the sidewalk, and he thought she was a 'sweet' little doe-eyed Disney character?
She knew she had issues. She had so many issues that her other personalities didn't like to talk to her anymore. (A little mental health joke that she'd picked up from some office or other. It was no Dennis Miller, but it caught her fancy anyway.) But her agoraphobia- her social anxiety, her depression- they didn't stop her from being strong. She learned to cope with them, to push through them a little more every day, and they made her stronger than ever.
She still got mad, she still felt joy and love and humor, she still stood up for herself. She had been a strong, whole person, once upon a time. She knew- she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt- that that girl still had to be buried inside her somewhere. She fucking had to be.
And the next time anybody questioned that, they'd get a piece of her mind.