Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.
Note to All: Sorry for the long delay in updating stories. I was REALLY sick the past two weeks. Thankfully, the third type of antibiotics seems to have done the trick. I didn't get any writing for this story done while convalescing, sadly, and only just did overdue editing on this latest one, so the next update might be awhile. In the meantime, I may start posting "The Outstanding Balance of Morality". And just *maybe* there is a sequel to "This Side of Paradise" in the works as I *did* binge-write an idea yesterday on the half-remembered pieces of a fever dream while binge-watching the Olympics. It depends whether or not I can connect the two halves. Anyway, sorry again, readers, and enjoy some wackiness!
PART II
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
HOW HOOK GOT FAT, TINK IS A DRUG DEALER, AND OTHER TALES FROM ASSHOLES ANONYMOUS
ALL DICKS AND ASSHOLES ANONYMOUS
EVERY TURDAY NITE
7 PM
With a sigh, Dr. Archie Hopper picked up the discarded letters on the grass bellow the chapel marquee and fixed the sign to read "Addicts Anonymous Every Saturday Night 7 PM All Storybrooke Residents Welcome".
Addicts Anonymous had turned out to be a rather lucrative after hours therapy gig. With a little help from Not Chief, Archie provided glamours that allowed everyone to be anonymous, so they felt safe sharing their problems with a group - even if some of them were pretty bad at delivering their secrets in such a way that didn't make it instantly obvious who they were to anyone who listened to local gossip.
But it saved Archie from having to see those particular whackjobs in private one-on-one sessions, which was the biggest bonus of all.
A number of residents were already inside, picking at the juice and cookies that the nuns somewhat grudgingly provided for being paid a stipend to use the chapel which otherwise only got used for weddings and funerals since the residents had returned to their quasi-pagan or agnostic ways.
By the time the clock tower chimed seven o'clock, the pews were packed and Archie made his way to the pulpit where the infamous baby-naming bingo basket was waiting on the alter.
"Welcome everyone to what I hope with will be another productive meeting of Addicts Anonymous. I see some new glamours here tonight. Don't be afraid to share. Everyone here is anonymous. Let us all support you in working through your problems. Now... to start things off..."
Archie spun the basket and pulled out, "P48."
"Woohoo!" exclaimed an old man with his pants hiked up to his ribs and everyone groaned.
"Wonderful," sighed Archie, "the pulpit is yours, Roger."
Roger took the pulpit and cleared his throat. "M'name's Roger and I'm an addict," said Roger in a thick southern accent. "As y'all know, I've been strugglin with my drinkin and wantin ta hit on all the purdy whoamen in town-"
"No one cares!" someone called out.
"Shuddup!" Roger retorted. "If brains wus dynamite you couldn't blow the wax outer yer ears!"
"Let Roger talk, Rosalind," sighed Archie.
"Ah thank ah very much, Doctor," beamed Roger.
"As y'all know," he started again, "I yousta only drink but now I druther eat. I think it goes back to when I wus a youngun and I toad my paw we was havin liver puddin fer dinner and he said he planned to stop fer a mess of butterbeans but plum dissermembered and uppin left fer a week. But today I hain't had sump'n teet since dinner."
This got halfhearted encouragement from the audience.
"My paw was never the sort ta give affection," continued Roger. "He'd always say 'Ahm agonna gichew ifn yew don't quit bothern me!' So twas mostly just me and ma bruther fending fer oursevles even bafor he uppin left. One day I wus out fer a walk in the woods and dis man says, 'Yall come ahere. I got sumpn a show yuh.' I thought he wus just wantin help 'n check duh ropes in his cart but he ended up touchin me inapproprite like. I think that's why hit took me three ares just to git my gumption up anuff to ask Lesabeth to the village dance. Which didna go well. I says, 'What is that air thang you got air in yore han', Lesabeth?' Twas her dead pet rabbit'. Neighbor had let dem hunt'n dogs of his out and dey was afixin tuh catch dinner..."
Archie tuned out the drawling man only shaking himself back to awareness when his watch beeped.
"... and my brother bard my coat in never brung it back," Roger was saying to a half-asleep crowd. "He was the chinchiest sonnovabitch I ever seen. I remember when we wus nearly drown and someone wus shoutin 'he cain't breathe. . . givvim some err!' and he pretended he couldna reach me. Thought fer years I dissermembered on account of bein' drunker than a skunk. Twas after that he wus a-tawkin to me when hit hit me dat he warn't a-movin his lips. That's when I knew I had a drinkin problem so I sobered up fer work. But I dun falled off the wagon when he died. Dunno why I cared. Bafur then I ain't heard from him in munts and then he went plunderin 'round in my underwear drawer 'n mixed up the dirty stuff with the clean stuff..."
"Um, thank you, 'Roger'," Archie interrupted and gestured for him to head back to his seat. As the others attempted to rouse themselves from their stupor, he continued, "It's not uncommon to find a vice to replace another. It's a way of deflecting from the root cause the addictive behavior. It can be difficult to dredge up childhood traumas, but as Anna demonstrated last week," he nodded to the middle-aged black lady in a polka dot dress, "it can help start the healing process. Many of us here have been abused physically or emotionally, by parents, guardians, or other perverted individuals. We did not grow up in a world that protected its children, but we can ensure Storybrooke is not like The Enchanted Forest, that such behavior is not tolerated and the next generation doesn't have to fear being molested by strange men in the woods."
After fixing his glasses, Archie asked, "How about one of the newcomers? You there, Shayla."
A small girl of about ten in pigtails slumped her way up to the lectern.
"Ah, hey," the little girl began, "like my name-tag says, I'm... ah... Shayla."
"Hi, Shayla!" everyone greeted.
"Right. Hi. So... I'm, well... sort of a drug dealer," said Shayla. "Which isn't why I'm here. See, I'm a drug dealer with a drug problem, so I'm not making any money on my own product."
"AHEM!" a pimply teenage boy called out.
Shayla rolled her eyes. "Okay, fine, it's not my product! But I was giving you a cut, okay? Until I got hooked again. I spent a year getting clean after Pan kicked us all back to The Enchanted Forest, but I thought I could make some quick cash but then I thought I'd just try some and see how good it was, and now I can't pay my debts and I'm snorting dust off strange women's asses!"
"Details!" the pervy old man called out.
Rosalind threw her empty juice cup at Roger.
"Roger! Rosalind! Behave!" Archie exclaimed.
"Well, that's it," said Shayla. "Thanks for listening... I guess..."
Archie shot another glare at the bickering duo and told Shayla, "Thank you, Shayla. You're not alone in your addiction problems."
"Yeah, you're the reason half of us are addicts!" someone else called out.
"Oh, stuff it, Fatima!" Rosalind retorted. "Last week you admitted to personally torturing, maiming and killing dozens of people in your Enchanted Forest racketeering business."
Fatima grumbled and Archie sighed, pulling another number from the basket that belonged to a man with thick glasses and receding hair.
"Right, so, I'm Warren."
"Hi Warren!"
"And I'm addicted to whiskey and unhealthy relationships."
"You should ask out Anna!" called out Roger. "She's into those!"
Anna gave Roger the finger.
"Also, I'm gay," amended Warren. "Which isn't important other than under the Curse I wasn't, so it feels extra rapey, I guess. Anyway, lately while trying to kick my drinking habit I've found myself dating two different guys at the same time-"
"MAN-ON-MANWHORE!" Roger called out.
"Roger!" Archie growled, "out. NOW!"
Roger glared and shuffled his magically arthritic ass out while Rosalind sniggered and Anna called after, "Don't let the door hit your wrinkled ass on the way out!"
Sighing, Archie told Warren, "Using sex, particularly of the dysfunctional variety, is never a good way to deal with other problems. I know many here, not just Anna, have struggled with alcohol and bad relationship decisions. Simply replacing one addiction with another is not the way to beat it. You have to address the root of the original addiction."
"Well, I did sort of kill my brother," sighed Warren.
There were rather an alarming number of 'me too' nods in the group with a smattering of other family member homicide admissions. Really, about half of the group had killed either directly or indirectly at least one member of their family. Archie wished he could judge them, but considering he'd tried to kill his parents...
"Perhaps next week," said Archie, "we should focus on issues of fratricide, sororicide, familicide, patricide, matricide, parricide, neonaticide, infanticide, filicide, prolicide, nepitocide, avunculicide, senicide, mariticide, uxoricide, ... and I suppose we can throw in cousin-killing since rather an alarming number of you were married to cousins that you or an immediate family member killed. Considering I've had to learn all of those terms, there is clearly a rampant problem of relative murdering in this group that needs to stop and those of you who did the murdering hold yourselves to some kind of accountability as part of your recovery.
"Part of Addicts Anonymous is owning up to past mistakes and crimes and accepting moral responsibility for the consequences of those actions regardless of any laws passed by Mayor Mills to pardon crimes committed prior to the Dark Curse or making those committed in The Enchanted Forest or other magical lands unprosecutable here."
"That's bullshit!" Anna called out. "Murder is murder!"
"Now, Anna," Archie tried to placate the scowling woman, "I know you're not alone in that view, but The Enchanted Forest was very different in its laws and social norms. Certain kinds of murder were considered acceptable honor killings. Rape was commonly accepted as male privilege to obtain a woman's duty. And we could spend hours talking about the problems of racial, species, and class inequality that in some cases bordered on slavery, genocide, and caste systems, all of which were perfectly normal and accepted-"
"And promoted by those fairy bitches!" Shayla called out.
"Yeah, fuck the fairies!" someone else shouted. "Why wasn't my family good enough to have a fairy godmother?"
"YEAH!" a dozen other people agreed.
"That's the real racketeering going on!" Fatima called out. "Making everyone dependent on magic and then showing up to fix the problems magic caused! They've even got us using their church!"
"YEAH!"
"EVERYONE CALM DOWN!" Archie shouted above them, wincing, as he wasn't usually one to raise his voice. "We're not here to vilify anyone. We're all here to work on our individual problems."
"The fairies are useless here anyway," scoffed a young boy. "Have you seen their pathetic attempts at magic? They only called it 'The Land Without Magic' because they can't make theirs work for shit here!"
That got some laughs and hoots.
"All right!" Archie huffed. "Enough of this. Let's have another speaker. How about another new member? You there with the mohawk."
A very butch, slightly overweight forty-ish woman came up to the pulpit. She cleared her throat uncertainly before starting, "Hello, I'm Gwen."
"Hi Gwen!"
"... and I'm addicted to people liking me," said Gwen. "So I think I do things that will make people like me or that I think are expected of me. Like... all my life I told myself that my happy ending was supposed to be getting married and having children, but now that I have children I'm not sure if I actually wanted them or if I felt... indebted into it by a... situation. I don't think I was ready for my first child, so I told myself I had to have another child to prove that I could do it right, that I would have those motherly feelings, so the truth is, it was all about wanting to make myself feel the way everyone said I should feel. But every morning I get up and I try to find excuses to call a baby-sitter because I don't feel fulfilled. I used to be badass. I kicked butt. Now I can barely fit my mom butt into granny panties under sensible khaki high-waisted pants and I'm pretty sure all of the friends I used to have ignored my calls after we got back from Pan's Curse because they think I'm either a suburban housewife joke or a terrible mother or both... though to be honest, I didn't make a very big effort to get together with any of them outside of play dates to try and prove that I was a good mother.
"I just don't know what to do!" cried Gwen. "I love my kids, but I'm bored to death by all this child-rearing stuff and I've lost my street cred on top of it! Mom Gwen is killing Badass Gwen and I feel so guilty!"
Archie handed Gwen a box of tissues and a card with his number on it. "Thank you for sharing, Gwen. I know we all have moments since being given second identities when we feel like we're divided against ourselves. Sometimes these condensed negative-trait personalities and warped memories interfere with our true nature and feelings. They make it harder to overcome our fears, because they were dominant, unchallenged for so long by our strengths which were always hampered in some way by our insecurities. In some ways, those of us who were cursed have to work just as hard to let our true selves shine as those battling drug addictions and criminal tendencies."
"Except the actual psychopaths who are empty inside," muttered Rosalind, not that one could mutter in the echoing hall.
"Takes one to know one!" Roger shouted back, peaking out of a confessional.
"OUT!" Archie exclaimed as a sniffling Gwen made her way back to her seat.
"All right, how about you, Jesse," he gestured to a freckley, red-haired man in a suit. "You haven't spoken for awhile."
Jesse made his way to the stage and began, "I'm Jesse."
"Hi, Jesse!"
"Well... last time," Jesse said, "I talked about my alcoholic father who died. Seems most of us here had one alcoholic parent who died or left us."
This got lots of nods.
"Anyway," continued Jesse, "lately, I've been wondering if some of the negative things people have said about me are true. If I'd grown up differently, with wealth and power like some of the, um, villains here, would I be a vainglorious tyrant? I try to tell myself that I'm a good person, that I only want to do the right things and if I was in a place of power like that, I'd be a good ruler, but the truth is, I have a dark side just like my brother, and there are times that I really really want to hurt someone who's hurt me or my family. There are also times when I envy those criminals, those villains, and a part of me wants to live vicariously through them, let them get away with the bad things I can't to take care of business the way heroes shouldn't."
This got some sympathetic nods and mumbles in the crowd.
"Also," Jesse concluded, "I still haven't been able to find my actual wedding ring. If anyone has a ring from the Curse that isn't theirs, maybe we could meet at the refreshment table after? I had to get Rumplestiltskin to bewitch an old fake class ring to look like it but I'm worried it's going to make my finger fall off if I ever cross him."
Rosalind interjected, "Better than you d-"
"Rosalind!' Archie snapped. "Why don't you talk next?"
"Damn it!" swore Rosalind and the small Asian woman in glasses stomped up to the pulpit.
"I'm Rosalind."
"Hi, Rosalind!"
"Hello, fellow assholes," she said, getting laughs from some in the crowd and a glare from Archie. "What? It was on the sign. I don't really know what to say. I already talked about my stereotypical abusive, neglectful, and murderous parents that most of us have. And admitted that maybe I drink too much wine in the evening. I think maybe that's because I don't have any real friends."
Archie gave her an encouraging look and Rosalind sighed and continued, "I have people that say they're family and those who declare friendship, but we don't do friend things other than drink together over relationship problems like a bad sitcom. We don't go shopping together or have lunch together unless it's for talisman to protect against the next magical calamity or while brainstorming to not get killed by the next magical calamity."
"Why do you think that is?" asked Archie.
Rosalind shrugged. "Well, apart from having very little free time to socialize between magical calamities, probably because I didn't have any friends growing up. Well, I had one, but he died. After that I was stuck in an arranged marriage. There were a few times I thought maybe I'd made friends, but every time they betrayed me, bought by one of my parents or with their own agenda to use me for their own ends. I did have one friend who was a villain, but then I became a villain, and she didn't want to be friends anymore. Like I thought becoming a villain would make my mother proud of me, but still nothing I did was good enough, and then she'd confuse me by pretending that she cared and was doing things out of the goodness of her heart, which I should have known was a lie, and my father just let her hurt me, but I just kept hoping I'd make my mother proud enough to be supportive or that I'd reach some tipping point that my father would act like he really cared and try to help. Instead I got a psycho and a doormat for parents and an apathetic jerk for a husband and I just wanted so badly to connect emotionally with someone - anyone - but the only people I seem to really do that with end up dying," she sniffed.
Archie handed over another box of tissues and gave an encouraging, "Thank you, Rosalind. I know it's difficult to have awful parents who mistreat you. A lot of us, myself included, have been there. No matter how horrible they are, a part of us remains that small child who wants their affection and praise. But we have to realize when that's not going to happen and not dwell on the pain they caused us. That's the past. Your parents can't hurt you anymore. And they can't try to tell you who to be. Don't let their warped definitions of love and success guide you anymore."
The clock tower chimed and Rosalind looked relieved.
"It seems our time is up," Archie concluded the meeting. "Just try to remember that the most important thing is to be proud of yourself. Trying to aspire toward the expectations of others to create your own sense of happiness is doomed to failure. You need to be happy with who you are, and this is a place to help everyone find out who that is."
The crowd began filing out, some stopping for snacks and chatting in a way they probably never would have if they'd known who they were talking to.
Archie cleaned up the plates, cups, and napkins when the last made their way outside and grabbed his umbrella from the holder by the door before heading into a cool drizzle and past the chapel sign.
SKANKS DICKS AND ASSHOLES
CUM EVERY NITE
7 PM
There was a suspicious soggy Funyun on the ground with the scattered unused letters and Archie growled an exasperated, "ROGER!"
AN: This chapter was kinda half-assed. Sorry about that! Apologies to anyone from the South for my butchering of Dr. Goodword's A Glossary of Quaint Southernisms for Hook's ridiculous accent change-up. The opening (and end) with Archie and the sign is a nod to Preacher in which someone changed the "Open your hearts and souls to Jesus" sign to read "Open your ass and holes to Jesus". I would rather kiss Arseface than watch CS makeout, tbh!