When Selah arrived at the DEO the next day, she could feel Alex's presence almost immediately. Her powers were still lessened by the cuffs, so she couldn't psychically move things or conjure anything, but for the most part she could still hear thoughts. The agent's were louder than usual, and they seemed to be a bit more on edge than usual. It made her feel guilty, knowing the stress that she had caused for her the previous night.

As the elevator doors slid open, she found Alex standing nearby. Her hands were on her hips, and she was clearly waiting for the girl to show up.

"Good morning," she said in a no-nonsense tone, striding over to Selah.

"Hi," the girl replied. "I'm sure that Nia reported back that I was very responsible last night."

"She did, and I appreciate that." Selah shoved her hands into the pockets of her hand-me-down jacket, not sure of what to say as she glanced up at her.

"I'm sorry," she finally stammered. "I shouldn't have..."

"It's okay. All that matters is that you're safe." Checking her watch, Alex began leading her into a hallway near the conference room. "Kelly will be all set up for you soon, are you ready to talk with her?"

"Not really."

"Well, tough luck. You're going to anyway."

"You asked me a question," she stated. "I was just giving you an honest answer." The agent rolled her eyes.

"I'm already doing you a favor by not telling Kara. Don't push your luck." They arrived at a door, which she pulled out her keys to unlock. Selah's stomach lurched a little bit, but she didn't have much time to focus on it before Alex pulled her into a hug.

"What's this for?" she asked uncertainly.

"I'm just glad you're okay." She let go almost as abruptly as she had started the hug in the first place, but left a hand on Selah's shoulder. "I wanted to hug you earlier, but we just got some new recruits and I don't want them to know that I have emotions quite yet." A calm, lavender colored energy began rolling into the hall, which she guessed was Kelly, and she glanced at Alex nervously.

"Hey," Kelly said as she approached, greeting her girlfriend with a hug, which was happily returned.

"Hi," she answered. Pulling away from the hug, she turned to Selah. "You'll be fine," she promised. The girl nodded, and she smiled reassuringly as she left.

"You must be Selah," Kelly said, extending a hand out for the girl to shake. She did, albeit somewhat warily, hoping that the woman couldn't sense how nervous she was. "Let's head inside, okay?"

The girl followed her into the empty room. Alex had clearly tried to make it look less like an interrogation room by putting a few armchairs into it, but it still felt very institutional, and that didn't do much to calm Selah's nerves.

"It's nice to finally meet you," Kelly said as she sat in the chair that was further from the door and set her bag down beside it. "I've heard a lot about you from Alex, of course, but I've been excited to actually get to know you first hand."

"You too," the girl said, her throat dry. She realized a few seconds too late that she was still standing somewhat awkwardly in the doorway, so she shut it and tentatively sat in the other chair, facing Kelly.

"So," she began, pulling a notebook out of her bag and flipping to an empty page. "As I'm sure you've assumed, Alex told me what happened last night. Do you want to dive right into that, or should we work our way up to it?" Selah shrugged. The clock ticked, narrating each second that passed, until Kelly finally unclicked her pen. "I know that you've never done this before, but the main point of talk therapy is that you have to... talk during the sessions," she teased.

"I don't really know what to say. Aren't you supposed to tell me how all of my trauma is rooted in my bad relationship with my mother and a sense of abandonment from my father, or something? That's why I have difficulty following authority figures, and vulnerability terrifies me?"

"Do you feel that way?"

"I don't know." The papers on the notepad rustled nervously, as uneasiness pulsated off of the girl. Despite the distraction, Kelly didn't tear her gaze away from Selah, who was visibly uncomfortable. Her leg was bouncing aggressively enough that she could already see an indentation beginning to form on the floor beneath her sneaker, and her hands were tugging at the curls at the back of her neck.

"Do you want some water?" Selah jerked her head up in a nod, and Kelly stood, opening the minifridge in the corner. Taking out a bottle of cold water, she passed it to the girl. Despite having asked for it, she didn't seem to show much interest in drinking the water, and instead began peeling the label off and tearing it into little strips.

"I'm sorry," she muttered. "I don't do well in situations like this."

"Yeah, that makes sense. You did just say that you're terrified of being vulnerable." Selah glanced up at Kelly, her expression guarded and unreadable. "We don't have to talk about anything that you don't feel comfortable with. Your body language is telling me that you're not comfortable right now, what can I do to help alleviate that?"

"Are you trained in like, psychoanalyzing non-verbal communication to figure out exactly what I'm thinking and feeling?" the girl asked suspiciously. Kelly bit back a smile.

"You seem to have some preconceived ideas about what therapists are like," she commented. "What exactly do you think I'm here to do?"

"You're going to tell me some Freudian crap about how everything that I do is a defense mechanism and it's rooted in my unconscious fears of never being worthy of love, and you're going to analyze all of my childhood trauma, and how that's predetermining my behavior, and then you'll try to tell me how to fix it all."

"Let's unpack that a little bit," Kelly said, chuckling. "First of all, for the most part, modern therapists don't practice Freud's theories. He had some weird ones. Also, I'm not here to give you a universal answer that will solve all of your problems. As a therapist, my job is primarily to ask questions and to state my observations, with the goal of that being that I can lead you to find answers yourself. Frankly, I don't think I would ever be able to give you all of the answers, because these are complex and multifaceted issues. I doubt that anyone would be able to do that. What I can do, is help you to find an answer that you feel okay with."

"Okay," she said quietly. Her leg's bouncing slowed a little bit, but she was still tearing up the label from the bottle of water, dropping small bits of the paper onto the floor. "What observations have you made about me so far?"

"You don't trust very easily. That's not surprising, considering your past. You process your emotions physically, through things like repetitive tapping, tics, and fidgeting. This is probably a mechanism that you use to displace your negative emotions and your stress, as opposed to expressing them directly. It could also be a way for you to exert excess energy, as I think that you're just kind of a sensory person. You've also directly told me that you dislike being vulnerable, and that you feel unworthy of love. Not to play into stereotypes, but that definitely would have ties to your relationship with your parents, and the feelings of abandonment and betrayal that you have there. The people in your life who were supposed to love you unconditionally didn't give that to you, so you're afraid to give and receive love from anyone now, because you know how it feels to have it taken away from you. How did I do? Did I miss anything?"

"You forgot that I'm scared of authority figures because I don't want to let down people who I look up to."

"Right, because if you do let them down, that results in them viewing you differently and potentially withholding affection. A fear of failure is very common in people with abandonment issues." Selah frowned.

"Who says that I have abandonment issues," she asked, still looking down at the floor.

"You did. Five minutes ago." The girl jutted out her chin and crossed her arms, but Kelly could tell that she was holding back a smile.

"Can I tell you something about traumatic experiences?"

"Let me guess, they somehow contribute to an Oedipus Complex?"

"Okay, seriously. Stop it with the Freud stuff." Selah finally cracked a smile, and she shook her head, although she was glad that the girl seemed a bit more relaxed. "It's an insult to my profession."

"Sorry," she muttered, not looking very apologetic.

"Traumatic experiences," the therapist began. "Shape how we view the world, and how we recognize threats. You have been through so much trauma in your life, and that will desensitize your ability to identify a crisis. That's not to say that you don't feel things, or that you can't experience emotion, but it does mean that when bad things happen, you might not respond to it in the same way that an average person might."

The girl looked skeptical, so Kelly continued.

"Most people have receptors in their minds that pick up on warning signs, and potential danger, right?" Selah nodded slowly. "So if you were walking down a sidewalk, for example, and you turned a corner and found yourself face-to-face with a tiger, almost everyone's body would immediately initiate the fight or flight response. Their brain would assess the situation, probably decide that flight is the best option, and then they would get themselves away from the tiger to someplace safe."

"And you're saying that my brain wouldn't do that?" she asked.

"I'm not definitively saying that. I'm sure that in an example as extreme as the one that I gave, you'd be able to clearly see the danger. Well, at least you would if you were human."

"Okay, so let's say that my tiger has a power dampener and it's going to shoot me," the girl supplied. "What happens then?"

"Trauma causes a dysregulation in your emotions. You might not immediately recognize a power-dampener-wielding tiger as a threat, as obvious as it seems, because your brain is already firing off danger responses to everything around you." Kelly saw Selah narrow her eyes, so she lifted up a hand before she could interrupt. "Again, that's not to say that you don't understand that this is a threat to you. You just might underestimate the severity of the situation, because maybe you heard a car door shut down the street, and you're thinking that someone could be trying to sneak up behind you and that they are going to abduct you. Or you're thinking about a conversation you had with a friend where they responded a little bit more curtly than usual, and you're afraid that you said or did something to upset them. You don't know what it was that was wrong, but you're scared that they're going to leave, since clearly you aren't a good enough friend to them if you don't even know what you did to make them upset. Maybe your brain was already firing off signals about the tiger being there from the time that you stepped out onto the street, because in your experience, every corner has had a Bengal tiger lurking behind it. You've learned that it's safer for you to be always preparing for the worst as opposed to being caught off guard and ambushed. Does that sound familiar?"

"Maybe a little."

"I thought that it might. And so, when you have all of these thoughts going through your mind, conscious and unconscious, it creates a sort of numbness. It's like white noise, eventually you get so used to hearing a constant barrage of sounds, that you forget what the quiet feels like. And when you spend enough time feeling everything while simultaneously feeling nothing, it puts you onto a see-saw of either feeling overwhelmed or under-stimulated. There's no in between. When you feel overwhelmed, you find yourself falling back into old habits, because even if you know that they aren't necessarily healthy, they're familiar. And if you're under-stimulated, and you need something different, you begin engaging in wild, dangerous behavior."

"Why do I do that?" Selah asked.

"I don't give answers, remember?" The girl deflated a little bit. "Why do you think that you do?"

"I'm not sure."

"In my assessment of this, I'd say that you have already lived through the worst. Do you feel like you're always preparing yourself for things to get bad again?" Selah nodded. "Alex told me that Kara ended up with the Agenda because they abducted her instead of you. How did that situation come to be?"

"I was walking home, and I sensed that Beta was nearby. I went to her, and I was going to turn myself in."

"You were going to go willingly?"

"Yeah."

"And you knew the danger in that situation? You knew what was going to happen, and what they were going to do to you?" The girl nodded again. "Then why did you choose to go back?"

"Because it was the right thing to do. The whole city was being put into danger because of me, and they didn't deserve that."

"Did you deserve it?"

"All of the bombings were happening because of me. People were dying because of my inaction."

"That doesn't make it your fault, though. They were committing acts of terrorism in order to elicit a response from you. They were doing terrible things and then manipulating you into feeling responsible for what happened afterwards." Kelly said. Selah didn't look at her, instead kicking the scraps of paper on the floor around with the toe of her sneaker. "They chose their actions, and in doing so, they chose the consequences that came with. None of that was your fault." Selah briefly met Kelly's gaze, but quickly looked away. "So I'm going to ask you again, did you deserve what the Agenda did to you?"

"No," she said in a small voice.

"Did Alex tell you that I'm a veteran?" Kelly asked. The girl shook her head. "I am. I did two tours in Afghanistan. Early on in my second tour, I was selected to be trained in crisis negotiation, to learn how to help defuse dangerous situations. During my training, one of my colleagues, Micah, always said that he wouldn't be able to be a hostage negotiator. He said that he didn't have the patience for it. Negotiating is kind of like playing a game of Jenga, and instead of walking on eggshells, and doing your best to keep that tower up, he said that he'd rather just knock it down and get it over and done with. Then, he doesn't have to deal with the rollercoaster of emotions and uncertainty that comes with keeping a situation stable. Instead, he'd prefer to focus on cleaning it up and rebuilding something new."

"I think that it's a good thing he never was a negotiator," Selah muttered. "That doesn't sound like a very good way to talk down a terrorist."

"It is absolutely not," Kelly laughed. "The biggest part about conflict resolution is that you have to walk that tightrope of uncertainty and work towards de-escalation. That's not an easy thing to do."

"So you're saying that me going back to the Agenda was the equivalent of me knocking down the Jenga tower?"

"I think that living in instability can be very difficult and draining, and sometimes it's easier to face danger than it is to deal with uncertainty."

"I just didn't know what was going to happen if I kept waiting around. Maybe it would have gotten better, and maybe the DEO would have been able to step in to control the situation. But it also could have gotten worse. And if it was going to get worse, at least then I could know exactly what parts of it were going to be bad."

"So you chose the danger, because then you could prepare yourself for it. You wouldn't be caught off guard."

"Yeah."

"What were you feeling last night, when you went into the drug cabinet? What was your motivation?"

"I don't want to be a selfish person. I don't like letting people down or being vulnerable because it makes me feel like I'm being selfish. If I disappoint someone, then they have to compensate for my mistakes, and they have to deal with my mess, and I don't ever want to be someone else's problem. If I was better, if I was strong enough to beat Beta, she wouldn't be a threat anymore. I could have killed her before she took Kara, before she got me. I could have stopped all of this from happening. Or if I wasn't so easily manipulated by her, and if I trusted in Alex's leadership, then I could have helped them get Kara back. That way, Beta would never have had the opportunity to implant herself in me. If I was stronger psychically, I would have had the strength to overpower her in the mindscape. I couldn't even beat her inside of my own head. And now, after I have failed all of those times, the problem is snowballing and it's getting worse and worse. Pretty soon it won't just be my problem anymore. It won't be only me getting hurt, everyone that I care about will be hurt along with me. If I don't stop this, they're the ones who will face those consequences."

"So how did the sedatives come into play?" Kelly asked

"I was going to put myself back into the coma. Then it would have to end, one way or another."

"What about that choice alleviated some of the guilt for you?"

"Either way it would end. If I won, and I beat Beta, I would get to go back to normal life. And if not, she would be stuck. She wouldn't have been able to hurt anybody."

"So going back into a coma was your way of taking away her power?"

"Yeah."

"Did you consider the cost that comes with that?"

"If that's what it takes, then I am more than willing to make that sacrifice. I'm at peace with it."

"May I make an observation?" she asked. Selah raised her eyebrows, waiting. "When I look at you, and I watch how you behave as we are sitting here, I don't see peace."

"I am," she insisted unconvincingly. "I have to be."

"Your worth is not defined or limited by what you can offer to others."

"It's not about my worth, I need to fix these mistakes."

"Whose mistakes are they?"

"What?"

"You keep referring to the whole situation as being a mistake. Whose mistake is it?" The girl didn't have an answer. "Did you choose for any of this to happen?"

"No," she admitted.

"Did you ask for Beta to do these things to you?"

"No."

"At any point along the way, did you enjoy what was happening to you, or did you ask for it to continue?" Selah shook her head. "Then how is it your mistake? It seems like this situation was made for you, not by you."

"If I was stronger-" she began.

"It has nothing to do with your strength," Kelly interrupted. "This is not your fault." The girl shut her eyes.

"That doesn't make me feel any less guilty," she said.

"I know. But making a drastic decision based on your guilt and trauma is not a good idea. You say that you're at peace with it. Are you really?" The clock ticked, anticipating her response.

"No," she whispered.

"How old were you when the Agenda took you?" Kelly asked, switching the topic.

"I had just turned fourteen."

"That's pretty young to go through something so traumatic." Selah shrugged. "If you could go back to fourteen year old Selah, what would you say to her?"

"I don't know."

"Would you tell her that she's going to be okay, or that there will come a time when these experiences no longer shape her? Would you offer her advice?"

"I don't know if I would even recognize her."

"Why not?" The girl sighed as she tried to sort out her thoughts.

"People tell me all the time that I'm tough, or I'm brave, or I'm the strongest person that they know," Selah began, crinkling her eyebrows. "And a part of me always wants to tell them, like, 'thanks, I really wish I didn't have to be.' I survived. And I don't take that lightly, I just..."

"A part of you didn't," Kelly supplied.

"That fourteen year old kid, she's not me, and she never will be. And I'm not her, not anymore. If I had never met Beta, and I'd never been with the Agenda, the person who I would've grown up to become wouldn't be this version of myself. When I was fourteen, sure I'd dealt with some stuff with my mother, but I still had hope for things. I had ideas and plans laid out for a future that I'm never going to get to have. I don't even want those things anymore, my priorities aren't the same, but I used to know what I wanted in life."

"What kind of priorities did you have at fourteen?"

"I wanted to graduate high school." She laughed quietly. "And I wanted to move somewhere else, far away from National City. I wanted my mom to care about me. Even just a month ago, I was telling Kara how someday I wanted to have all of the normal people things, and I wanted things to feel okay, but..." she trailed off.

"Do you not feel that way anymore?"

"I don't know. I don't know how I feel."

"Imagine that instead of you talking to your younger self, that you were visited by twenty-five year old Selah. What do you want her to tell you?" The girl frowned, and her leg began to bounce slightly again.

"You know how Nia can dream the future?" she said abruptly.

"Yeah."

"If I could choose to have any power, I'd want that one. I'd give anything to just know for sure how things end, and what's going to happen next. I'd want twenty-five year old me to just say that... things turn out okay. I'd want her to tell me what I'm supposed to do, and what the right choice is."

"Selah," Kelly said, leaning forward in her chair and resting her elbows on her knees. "I'm going to tell you something very important, and I hope that you will take it to heart." The girl chewed on her lip as she slowly met her eyes, squirming at the intensity. "You do not have to be able to see your future to know whether or not you deserve to have one." Selah swallowed hard, shutting her eyes.

"What if I make the wrong decision?" she asked.

"Then we will address the effects of that choice, learn from it, and move on."

"But it's not that simple," she insisted. "If I choose wrong, that means that I will put everyone that I care about into danger. I won't be around anymore to fix any fallout from that choice, I don't get to move on, and neither will anyone else."

Selah jumped as a sudden knock came at the door, and Alex's face appeared in the small window.

"Hey," she said, opening the door a crack. "Sorry to interrupt. I scheduled another EEG for Selah this afternoon, but it got pushed forward. Are you okay with getting that done quickly now?"

"Yeah," she said, a bit too eagerly. "If, um, that's okay with you, Kelly?"

"Of course," Kelly replied, shutting her notepad. "Thank you for being vulnerable with me today, Selah. I know that it wasn't easy for you. We definitely covered a lot for you to process and think over. Do you want to meet with me again tomorrow morning, for us to circle back on some things that you might want more clarification on?"

The girl blinked, cracking a few of her knuckles before she responded, looking the woman directly in the eye.

"Yeah. I think that would be good."

"Okay."

.

Nia flinched as another clap of thunder shook the apartment, this one louder than the last. The building was old, with questionable electricity, so the power went out almost every time that it stormed. She was rummaging through the cupboards trying to find all of the candles that she could. She had taken candle making classes for the past three (three!) summers in Parthas, so she was certain that there were plenty of them hiding somewhere, but so far all that she had managed to find were a few half melted stubs and an unopened bacon scented candle that Brainy had gotten her as a joke. Shutting the cupboard in annoyance, she was glad to have a distraction from her search as she heard a knock on the door. She ran out of the kitchen and opened the front door to find a slightly rain-soaked Kara standing in the hallway.

"Hi Nia. Is Selah here?" she asked.

"Yeah, she's in her room," Nia replied, a little confused. Kara often would visit, but she usually texted before showing up. "Do you want me to go get her?"

"No, I'll just go see her." the woman nodded, swinging the door open fully to let her into the apartment.

"Is everything okay?" she asked, tossing a book of matches onto the couch as she followed Kara down the hallway.

"Yeah, I just wanted to talk to her," she replied, knocking lightly on Selah's door. After a moment, the girl pulled it open.

"Kara?" she asked. "What's going on?"

"Can I come in?" Selah made eye contact with Nia, who was still standing behind Kara in the hall, but the woman only shrugged.

"Yeah, sure," she said, quietly taking a step back. Kara entered her room, closing the door behind her. It was still barely decorated, and a few books littered the floor. Selah kicked some of them under the bed in an effort to clean up, before she leaned against the wall next to the bed, waiting for Kara to explain why she had come. The hero stayed standing near the door, trying to gather what she wanted to say.

"You've been avoiding me," she said finally. "And that's okay, you don't have to be around me all the time, and constantly telling me everything, I just... I need to know if you're okay."

"I'm okay," she said softly, looking away as the thunder rumbled again.

"Something is wrong. I can tell."

"It's just been weird coming back to reality, I guess." The girl reached into the pocket of her hoodie and pulled out a figure-eight shaped piece of plastic that she began twisting in her hands.

What's that?" Kara asked, pointing at it.

"Uh, Kelly gave it to me. Apparently I have a tendency to fidgeting?"

"Really?" she replied, in mock surprise. "I hadn't noticed at all." Selah rolled her eyes. "Wait, have you been talking with Kelly?"

"Yeah. Alex made me."

"Why?" The girl looked slightly caught off guard at the question.

"She didn't say anything to you?"

"I wasn't aware that there was something that she needed to tell me about," she said suspiciously. Selah avoided looking at her, and instead she sank down onto the bed, still playing with the fidget toy. "Selah?"

"I almost did something. I didn't do it, but Alex found out about it."

"What kind of a something?"

"A stupid, reckless something." Kara dropped her bag by the door and sat next to her on the unmade bed.

"What's going on?"

"You know how Alex made sedatives for me so that she could do operations and stuff?" she sensed the direction that the girl was going in, and she pursed her lips. "I thought that if I was to go back into the coma, then Beta wouldn't be able to hurt anyone."

"Selah," she sighed. "Why didn't you talk to me about this? Why didn't you tell me that you were feeling this way?"

"I didn't know how to. You worked so hard to get me here, I didn't know how to say that I was thinking about going back."

"Why would you even think that was an option? That's not a sustainable solution to the problem." Rain drummed against the windowsill, and she pushed further. "It was just to put you back into a coma? Nothing more?" The girl didn't reply. Shutting her eyes, Kara put her arms around Selah and held her tightly.

"I," she began, but the hero shushed her.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"I'm okay. And I'm not going to do it, I didn't even want to, really. I just didn't know what else I could do."

"That is never going to be the answer," she insisted. "Ever."

"Yeah," Selah muttered lamely.

"Is that why you've been avoiding me?"

"I haven't been avoiding you," she tried. Kara crossed her arms. "I didn't want to be avoiding you."

"But you were."

"I just..." she dropped the fidget toy onto the bed, rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands. "You know how I had dreams or hallucinations or whatever in the coma?"

"Yeah."

"I saw you a lot. And I know that none of that was real, and that this is real, but it's hard for me to remember that sometimes. I wasn't fully aware most of the time that I was stuck in my mind, and I was always so confused and scared. And sometimes I see you, and I feel all of that again, because I think that you're Beta. And then I feel bad for feeling that because I know that you're not Beta, and that you have been nothing but kind to me for the whole time that I've known you for, so you don't deserve that reaction, but..." her words died off into silence. "You have been the most consistent, most kind, genuine and caring person I have ever had in my life. You've stuck by me through everything, and you never gave up on me or blamed me for any of this. Not even the stuff that was absolutely my fault. You're so important to me, and I'm really grateful that I have you, but whenever I see you, I flinch. And on instinct, I want to run. You don't deserve any of that, but I can't stop being scared."

"That reaction isn't your fault," Kara said gently. She put her hands on Selah's shoulders, staring directly at her. "And I get that this has been hard for you, I can't even imagine how hard it's been, but I am here. I am real, I am with you, and I'm not leaving. I am never going to leave. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Good. Now, with that said, tomorrow evening, I will be ordering an exorbitant amount of Vietnamese takeout and ice cream, and everyone is coming over to my loft. I expect you to be there as well."

"It just feels weird to be doing normal-people things right now," the girl admitted, poking at the cuffs on her wrists.

"You deserve to be a normal person. You can't put your life on pause until we get this figured out."

"Can I think about it?"

"Think about it all you want, but if you're not in my apartment by seven I will show up here, and I will kidnap you."

"Fine," she caved. "You'd better get spring rolls though."

"Duh."

.

.

.