Inherent Superiority

Chapter III: Reality Ensues

I still don't own Peanuts. I had a lawyer double-check. Or at least, I think it was a lawyer.

…I want my fifty bucks back.

Charlie is very angry, and very bitter. Be forewarned.

PAROLE HEARING OF LUCY VAN PELT, 5 YEARS AFTER OPERATION BLOCKHEAD

"Your honor, this is insane."

Psychoanalyst Christopher Locks desperately searched for some sort of realization of this fact in the face of presiding Judge Hernadez, a 40-something Hispanic man who believed strongly in second chances. Locks did as well, but only after someone had shown contrition for what they had done, not the consequences they faced.

He had interviewed Lucy repeatedly, behind plexiglass for his safety, and her rants and complete lack of remorse, empathy, or even a tenuous grip on reality was unnerving. He had dealt with child rapists, serial murders, drug pushers, the worst of society's dregs, and most of them at least understood the system did not approve of their actions. Lucy's rage was such that she wholly believed the system had acted in error, that Charlie Brown should be imprisoned, tortured, and reduced to a shell so she could become God.

It was a truly chilling mania that unnerved him enough that he took a week off to recover, and in that time Lucy had been given to the care of Dr. Grem, a man with an inflated ego who believed that he could fix the most hopeless of cases. Lucy had seized on the opportunity and provided the tragic tale of severe hormonal imbalances coupled with feeling an all-consuming need to preserve the status quo- namely, that Charlie Brown should remain downtrodden and tortured.

"What Ms. Van Pelt has shown Dr. Grem is nothing more than a façade. I have recording of multiple sessions in which Ms. Van Pelt has threatened me, the guards, and our respective families with severe bodily harm and death, lurid revenge fantasies in which she tortures Charlie Brown in front of an audience, becomes a… a goddess, and damns him to hell…"

"Your honor, while I acknowledge my patient has a history of sociopathic behavior, treatments for such disorders have advanced radically. There's no need to keep her locked up for all time simply because of one mistake-"

"Your honor, this isn't about one mistake! This is about a campaign of advocating torture and abuse of one individual, trying to keep that individual's sister as a slave, all culminating in rallying a community to attack a family en masse all over Charlie Brown getting to graduate and leave! Her actions were planned meticulously, she observed Charlie Brown for days and reported to teachers and administrators the best ways to hurt him, and she threatened to kill his family if he didn't become a whipping boy! That isn't sociopathy, your honor, that's a bona fide dedication to the pursuit of evil!"

A minute of quiet.

"Evil, Dr. Locks? Evil? Your honor, the label of "evil" is the last resort in Locks' arsenal. Locks has a history- and I apologize, your honor, if this appears to be ad hominem- of dismissing patients under his care as being completely unfit to return to society. Before Lucy Van Pelt, there was the case of Jesse Niles, where his demonizing of a patient under his care led to a denial of parole and the consequent decision by Mr. Niles to take his own life."

Locks stared in disbelief. Jesse Niles was a monster who stalked mothers with young children, kidnapped them, killed them horribly, and sent recordings of the murder to the mothers' children. He considered the 'destruction of joy' an art form, and referred to himself as a 'Picasso of Pain'. To have given Niles any chance of interacting with society again would have been nothing short of criminal negligence.

"Your honor, Niles-"

"Mr. Locks, I've seen your sessions, and I've seen Grem's sessions. Lucy Van Pelt, in my opinion, does what is expected of her." Judge Hernadez began. "When she is expected to behave, she behaves. In your case, when you expect her to act completely irrational, she obliges."

Locks had enough restraint in him to keep himself from asking out loud, Are you fucking kidding me? You think she's psychic?

"Lucy Van Pelt, in light of Dr. Grem's progress with you, I am granting parole. I am, of course, trusting you understand this means you are expected not to repeat your mistakes."

"Yes, your honor." Lucy's facial expression was serene and contrite, but underneath, Locks knew there was no change.

During his sessions with her, Lucy, when confronted with the fact that what she had done was ethically and legally inexcusable, would deteriorate into what Locks, for lack of a better term, deemed "Solipsistic Aphasia", where she would scream "ME" over and over, with her recollection being that she was espousing 'goddess wisdom'. Showing her the tapes with audio didn't help one iota- she claimed to hear glorious wisdom about the evils of Charlie Brown.

Now, she was being released into the open world. God help them all.

"All my client is asking for is a ceasefire on his reputation." Protested the blonde bombshell lawyer sitting across the table.

To his credit, Wayler had found a good lawyer. That was where Charlie's respect ended, however.

It did not matter that Wayler was a shell of his former self, scarred and withdrawn, the suit worn for this occasion clearly threadbare. It did not matter that he was working as a cashier at a McDonalds on a probationary basis at the age of 58. It didn't matter that every so often, Wayler would cough, take out a pill bottle containing a few pills, and assess whether his coughing fit was worth taking one of what Charlie knew to be a likely limited supply.

Four years of incessant abuse from the man had scraped away any compassion he could or might have had.

The people gathered were dressed as professionally as each could afford, and the office was well-kept, well-lit, meant to put people at ease during what were often very tense negotiations. It had been Wayler's and his lawyer's insistence that had brought them here, and legal obligations required that Charlie at least hear out Wayler's request.

"The damage brought about by my client's actions to himself, financial and physical, is going to be lifelong and severe. Every time he's recognized, he loses a job, gets assaulted, has his property vandalized, and he has to start all over."

"Not so fun on the other side of the fence, is it?" Charlie spat venomously.

Wayler, the man who had told him he needed to stop passively antagonizing people who tripped him down stairs, looked at him with exhausted eyes. "…my wife left me. My kids disowned me. I can barely hold a job for two months before someone finds out about me and starts a riot. I can't afford to retire, ever. Everything that doesn't go to rent or instant noodles goes to pills to keep me alive. Every day, I find living a little less appealing. You've won. Do you… do you have to demonize me forever?"

"Demonize?" Charlie countered with a laugh. "I didn't need to demonize you, Waylay. All it took to get people to hate you was tell them exactly what you did to me."

Somewhere, in the back of his mind, a vestigial shred of conscience told him that, like the teen hero in any bully-centered movie, he had finally knocked out his adversary, and that stomping his head into the ground cheapened the victory.

He dismissed it. No one else had done him the courtesy.

"If you weren't ready to take responsibility for four years of denying me transfers to other schools, serving me shit at lunch, pardoning bullies, and, oh, right, trying to storm my fucking house, then you should have backed off when you have the chance. You want to kill yourself? Do it. Do something right for once in your goddamned life."

Wayler looked at him. Blinked, as if not believing what he saw or heard. His lawyer sat, mouth agape, floored by the sheer malice.

It was not his own line. He'd heard the 'if you want to kill yourself, do it, it'll be the only thing you do right' routine from hundreds of people. Classmates. Teachers. Wayler himself.

Then he closed his eyes. "We poisoned you, Charlie Brown."

He stood, shakily, sighing. "We ripped every single last good thing out of you, and all the poison we pumped into you is coming to fruition. You gloated over a dead cancer patient. You're happy if people think you caused them pain. And now you just told a sick old man to kill himself. That… that's what really saddens me. Not the fact my life is shot to hell, but the fact you're become so bitter…"

"THEN WHY DID YOU DO IT?!" screamed Charlie, standing up and making both his and Wayler's lawyer start.

Wayler's lip trembled. "I don't know." He said after a few minutes.

Somewhere, Charlie heard something blow in his mind with an audible pop.

This…

Cancer…

When asked about why he did the lies and the shit for lunch and the yes he did rape a girl officer oh wait we're joking and he's a bad sport

Hate…

Can't even give a goddamn reason break fingers

HATE. HATE. HATE.

Jesus would understand it's okay to kill

HATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATE-

The nails-in-blender cacophony of rage induced tinnitus left, leaving an eerie silence and headache in its wake.

Obviously, he could kill him. He was brittle and frail. A thumb to the eyes, a few punches and kicks to soften him up, then stomp on his face until he drove fragments of skull into his brain.

That was when Charlie realized that killing him would be inconvenient.

No, it would martyr him. Something in his mind- maybe that last vestige of conscience, desperately trying selfish logic to dissuade him from murder- showed him that killing a man who had come begging for forgiveness of a sort was going to look bad.

Wayler did not deserve a spot on the evening news, with saddened relatives regretting shunning him, cursing the cruel bald man who had killed him for begging for mercy. Wayler deserved to be found, cold and lifeless, huddled in some dark alley, gnawed on by rats and flies.

Having satisfied that incessant need for revenge, having planted the idea he could do more harm by not exerting the energy needed to break every bone in Wayler's body, Charlie finally spoke.

"Get out."

For a brief moment, Wayler opened his mouth. Maybe to apologize. Maybe to beg. But he shut it without a noise, shuffled wordlessly out the door.

He made a note to invest in a punching bag. A durable one.

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN, 'WE CAN'T AFFORD TO'?!"

A lesser person would be abashed to scream while using a generous stranger's cell phone, much more so when calling their parents. A lesser person would keep it brief and succinct, to not intrude too much on the time of the older man, who, pitying the poor soul without a phone, allowed her to use his.

Lucy Van Pelt was not a lesser person, years in prison for "instigating a riot" and "attempted assault and kidnapping" be damned.

"Lucy," a tired and aged voice, infuriatingly weak, tried to calm her- the voice of her father. "We have no money. No retirement fund. No savings. No cash. Nothing. We're trying to get jobs at McDonalds, for God's sakes. We can't afford to help you 'get back' at-"

"So that's IT, huh?!" she shouted, not caring about the looks of passersby or the concerned look of the man, who needed to be moving 15 minutes ago. "You're just going to let the failure-face WIN!?"

"Lucy, what we did was wrong." Her father's voice cracked, the despair of a man broken by the prison system. "And I'm sorry we didn't stop you. I'm sorry we encouraged you. But he deserves to be left alone-"

"CHARLIE DOESN'T DESERVE ANYTHING BUT PAIN!" she bellowed, now getting the attention of the entire street. "HE DESERVES TO DIE IN THE STREETS, AND MY HOLY GODDESS WISDOM WILL LEAD US TO A NEW MIRACLE-STATE WHERE WE TAKE BACK WHAT IS OURS-"

"Lucy, listen to yourself… you're not making any sense!"

A tinnitus whine filled her eyes.

He had abandoned her.

Her father and mother had abandoned her.

She impulsively smashed the phone against the pavement, and backhanded the elderly man to the ground when he said something that wasn't an apology.

A terrible reality began to fold in on her, as she walked as fast as her unfit, morbidly obese body would let her.

She, the New Athena, was broke. Slandered by a false law, and shackled with two worthless parents who were of no use money or morale-wise.

She called on her righteous anger to support her, to power through, but the facts began to scratch and prick through her armor.

None of her former flock were in any position to help her. Some had died in prison- useless and weak. Some had killed themselves. Useless, weak, and cowardly.

And yet some were trying to…

Move.

On.

Trying to put their holy cause behind them because of one setback, or because society did not yet see the glory of her wisdom and the horrible cancerous rot that was Charlie Brown. These weak fools apologized, they settled for lower class citizenship, and they were content to let the Blockhead win.

Her heart beat painfully, and she leaned against a bench, wheezing and red-faced.

He was going to win.

He was going to live out his life the way he wanted!

To a lesser person, this would be an ideal outcome. To the Holy Goddess of Judgment and Wisdom, Lucy Van Pelt, Who-Would-ASCEND-And-Replace-YHWH, this was a blasphemy of the holy texts!

The difference in their writings should have been enough to show the world her glory. Hers was passionate and free, unshackled by the stupidity of 'grammar' and a thousand needless punctuation symbols that diluted a message of glorious service to her Apotheosis. They were words of guidance and righteousness, warning of the Failure-Face, he who should be punished for existing, for by existing he corroded the very fabric of her glory.

…and his "writing"?

Cold! Sterile! Edited and edited and edited and edited and edited! Soulless and lifeless… if only it was soulless and lifeless! She had seen a copy of 'Blockhead' in the prison, read by a beefy mother who had shot her abusive husband to a red smear. The poor deluded fool! It would have been healthier to be reading a Nazi torture manual made out of uranium! Charlie Brown's abomination was a black hole and atomic blast all in one, sucking in all things of value and reducing them to nothingness, then poisoning the desiccated air with nonsense!

She forced herself to calm down, to focus on the logistics of her ascension.

Charlie had to die. The body could be crucified and paraded later, but she did not have the luxury of condemning him to a public stoning or boiling. It was a sacrifice she would make for her children, born of her wisdom before the stars gave light. The Face-of-Failures must die before he poisoned more minds.

And, with a weary sigh, she knew that she would have to do the deed herself.

Holy logic guided her thoughts, now. None of her allies so far were able or willing to aid her in the final push that would guide her to ascension. Asking her parents got nothing but betrayal.

She had heard what had become of her brother. Something inside her told her that now, given a gun, an ego, and the knowledge he could probably call it justified in a court, her traitorous brother would blow her away without so much as blinking an eye.

The only worse ends she could think to her holy mission would be to die forgotten and alone, or to die by Charlie's hand.

A thought came to her, doubtless a glimmer of the cosmic genius that was to come when she'd ascend- Martin Grey was a ruined man, but a ruined man who probably had more money than she'd make in her remaining years, and with nothing left to lose…

The news that his wife had overdosed came as little shock to Martin Grey.

He'd found, after years of assaults, of being violated to the point where he couldn't shit right, listening through all-too infrequent visits from his lackeys that another piece of the company had been lost to WayneTech or LexCorp or whatever, that his third parole hearing had ending in denial, that whatever deity or force ruled the cosmos had decided he should get what he had dished out.

There wasn't going to be a turning point where things got better.

The fines had decimated the family fortune. What was left was put towards making Violet, his daughter, comfortable during her final days. What was left after that had been drunk and snorted away by her mother, who, if the guards weren't just making up more lies to hurt him, had posted a video of the mother and daughter duo doing… things for men in exchange for money, drugs… or just for the hell of it.

It made sense, all of it. The horrible things that had befallen his family, the cancer, the ruin, the death… they all made sense, and that hurt the worst.

The pills had taken years of favors to get. Favors that had cost him what little dignity he had left.

It was two in the morning. Dead silence as cellmates slept. He retrieved the two cyanide tablets, left his rock-hard cot, downed them with a swig of brackish water, then laid back down.

When the guards began ushering out prisoners for breakfast, Martin Grey was as cold and unfeeling as the granite floor.

Charlie Brown read the headline twice, just to make sure he didn't miss anything.

Martin Grey had made his escape from prison in a very permanent, foolproof way, and with his death ended the Grey family line.

Depending on how you looked at it, he was either burning in hell or he'd ceased to exist, and strangely, neither thought brought any joy to Charlie.

It had been after the meeting with Wayler that he had made it back to his apartment.

For a man his age, Charlie Brown was doing damn well. Yes, there was the lawsuit money that helped, but book deals and the movie played a big role too. It was, he was ashamed and saddened to say, bigger than anything most people would ever imagine renting in their entire lives. The onsite gym. The view of the city, and all its eternal sparkling lights, beautiful and cold. The deluxe queen bed. The customized bathroom he was in now, looking himself over in the mirror.

There was no way the angry, hard face that glared back could have been his, but he'd told himself something similar when he was 13, and the mirror had greeted him with the look of a corpse who died of despair, and at 18 when he'd seen a serial killer in his reflection, he hadn't even bothered to make an attempt at denial.

Scars.

Acid-burn victims should not have to be ashamed of their scars, cruel wounds inflicted by degenerates undeserving of the oxygen they wasted. Soldiers who bore battle-wounds had stories for each one, and to hear them was an honor in and of itself.

He had been fair, he told himself. When Pigpen had washed his hands of the filth, (a metaphor whose irony was not lost on Charlie) he had excluded him from his wrath deliberately. Patty and Marcie had not been demonized. No one who had not wronged him had been harmed.

He had felt guilt over Rerun being put into foster care, until the boy had told him he much preferred his adoptive parents and their habit of forgetting to beat him daily. He'd give the kid a scholarship later on.

He looked at the mirror. The hateful, bald man, his face turned stony after years of abuse, stared back.

Battle scars.

People who talked about forgiveness- that said the only path to healing was to absolve and let go- had no idea what it was like to be in his shoes.

Maybe when his story was told on the big screen, he'd be happy. Maybe never. After nearly a childhood where the highest of highs he'd ever felt was borderline suicidal, he'd forgotten what happy felt like, or maybe he never knew.

The closest he'd felt to happy recently was when he stared down Wayler and realized he was going to die a slow, lonely, painful-

What does it say about someone, when the one thing that makes them happy is other people's suffering?

Memories of smiling as he watched Violet wither from cancer assailed him.

What does it say about someone, when they're happy anyone is dying of cancer- so happy that they go to mock them to their face?

Hate had kept him alive like a morphine drip kept a surgery patient from feeling the agony of having their body ripped open and sewn back together. And the sad fact was, he had learned, that sometimes patients, through just a bad combination of nerves flaring and bad biochemistry, could get addicted to painkillers…

Had he become addicted to hate?

It was easy to justify it.

Very, very easy.

Who in their right mind could look at the unvarnished hell Charlie had been through- not the filtered version his editor and he had agreed on, with the most horrific and appalling elements filtered out so as to not lose a reader via their belief something so awful surely must be a falsification, but the real, bona fide 24 hour nightmare that was his childhood- who could look on that and say he wasn't justified hating everyone?

The students who pelted him with garbage and destroyed his papers?

The lunch ladies who served him steaming human turds, and flung them at him when he threw his tray down in disgust?

The principal who laughed at his latest assault and then lectured him on passive antagonizing, barely able to keep a straight face when he said the Sunday detentions were for his own good?

Detractors to his books have based their criticisms off of disbelief: no one wanted, no one could believe that so many people would devote so much energy to making one kid's life miserable.

But they had, he reminded himself.

This was not simply indifference. This was not simply uncaring teachers ignoring bullying. This was a focused effort to drive him to despair and suicide, or in Lucy's case, an unending hell as the community punching bag.

And when he'd asked why…

No.

It was then that Charlie Brown decided a crucial thing- that the "why" of it all didn't matter.

What they had done went far beyond abuse, and into acts of war. You didn't ask why someone shot a nuke at you, you fired back with twenty more. You didn't ask why your president was assassinated, you found the group responsible and burned their homes and bases until there was nothing but ash.

Acts of war begat war.

The books being manufactured were his missiles, his fans his soldiers, and the movie a nuclear bomb-

He recoiled.

The… man in the mirror looking back, for a moment, had not been Charlie Brown. It had been something else, angry, alien and awful. A mean-spirited monster who had boiled the wonders of life down to a terrible purpose: that all should be hurt and be hated, and hate and hurt others in turn.

"I'm not like them."

The words were hollow. Hollow and meaningless, like-

The excuses.

The insipid, mocking excuses for all the horrors they'd put him through.

Was revenge really worth becoming just like them?

"Am I offended that Charlie Brown didn't mention me?"

"Of course not. Rather, I'm immensely grateful. When someone writes a book, full of legitimate complaints about how people have done everything in their power to ruin the author's life, it of immense relief to note that one's own name doesn't appear."

"To answer a few questions, no, it wasn't as bad as Charlie describes. It was worse. He probably edited out quite a bit just to make it a bit more believable. And yes, on several occasions I and others did try to get the police or some authority to intervene. However, Martin Grey had money back then, and sadly, many people were willing to look the other way."

"I've heard people refer to the downfall of the Grey legacy as a tragedy, and nothing could be further from the truth. I can say with complete sincerity that the fates that befell each member of the Grey family were just. Violet and her mother were known drug abusers. Violet started with weed on weekends in junior high, and graduated to heavy drinking, cocaine, and God-only-knows-what in high school. How do I know this, you ask?"

"We saw her snorting lines in algebra. The teachers would go along with the claim it was nasal medicinal powder, but with the way she acted and the nosebleeds… everyone knew better."

"And so the deaths of both Violet Grey and her mother reinforce that age-old lesson that drugs are bad. But what of Martin Grey? As far as we know, he wasn't one for substance abuse. No, Martin Grey preferred abuse of power."

"We know now, after so much legal brouhaha, that Mr. Grey used his considerable resources to stymie attempts by the Brown family to move, to cover up incidents that would have gotten his daughter arrested, to ensure maximum misery at all times for Charlie Brown. No, it is not sad, the way he died. It is not tragic. It's poetic justice that he died, alone and miserable, in a prison cell. Because that's what he tried to do to Charlie."

"And you may think that's harsh. You may say that I'm being cruel, saying that's justice, and that Charlie's being unforgiving for calling everyone out who hurt him, and that we're all monsters because for once in the man's life, he found an audience that would hear the outrageous and unconscionable injustices done him day after day for all his childhood."

"Harsh is having human feces served to you, thrown at you, and then being punished for wasting 'food'. Harsh is being given weekly weekend detention so you can't go to church. Harsh is having your assignments torn up in front of your face. Charlie Brown's life was horrific, the things done to him are unforgivable, and to say he should be silent about it is to approve of every last awful thing the monsters in his life did."

"…on a final note… yes, the rumors are true, Lucy Van Pelt did repeatedly try to seduce me. It is something I try very hard to forget through therapy and the occasional scotch."

-Interview with Schroeder Grastiger, musician.