"...And that's everything that's happened since I was here last," I finished.
I was sitting across from, well, a representation of myself. Except, faded, cracked, and hollow... I'm not sure I'm ready to confront what that means yet.
"That's quite a story, Maria," my doppelganger replied. Or, really, my therapist. Terrace Ward, alias Trauma. I felt it would be rude to ask him the whole story but apparently his biological father was some sort of nightmare demon and because of it, he had the power to turn into the greatest fear of whoever he's near bye. When I was a client of his for the first time, he looked like 'my' symbiote had when it'd possessed the poor man who I uh, self-defense, even after we talked about that at length... Mostly because I don't know what it looked like on me before I took control of it if I had to hazard a guess.
"And uh, yeah. After that, after... You know, I spent so much time plotting on how to become a god but I've never really thought about what would come next until Venus asked... No sign of Carnage yet, so..." I had my thumb on the pulse of the symbiote hive mind, but until then, "and... If I'm going to be a god, I want to be a good one, and that means... Like, I feel like I know myself better than I did before, but there's still work to be done and..."
"...And that's why you decided to start seeing me again," Trauma concluded.
"Yeah," I answered back... "No, that's not all of it. I told you about Kelda. She's wonderful, and... I haven't known her long but I want to make this work with her, which means I need to be right for her and... I was showing her some different earth music and... Do you know that one Sammy Davis Jr. song? 'I can't be right for somebody else if I'm not right for me.' That... I've heard the song before, I listen to all kinds of music, but that... It hit me differently this time. If I want to make it work with her," I reasoned, "I need to be okay with myself first. The 'be a good god' stuff is part of the reason I'm here, but that's only one reason to do the work, and... I'm doing it for me, but I'm also doing it for her if that makes sense."
"We're all complex people, Maria," Trauma said, "not just two-dimensional characters on a page. You're allowed to have more than one reason for doing something. On that note, you said that you believed that you were mistaken about why you first started gaining power?"
"Yeah," I explained. "At first I thought I was doing it just to be safe but... I had other options and, I made bad choices that in hindsight didn't quite... The truth is I just like it."
"Are you sure?"
"Pretty sure, I mean what... You think maybe I started because I genuinely thought I needed to be stronger, but then realized that I liked it and..."
"You told me yourself that your brief phase of rejecting your humanity and answering only to your alias was a defense mechanism," Trauma reminded me, "so why wouldn't rejecting the 'human' reason you did something be part of that?"
"...When the truth is, I had a complex reason for doing it all along?" I finished "Yeah, that makes a little sense. but I'm not sure."
"Of course, you almost certainly understand yourself better than I do," Trauma agreed. "I'm simply saying that, based on what you've told me, it seems that you may be being a bit too harsh on yourself. As for the bad choices you made... You went through an incredibly traumatic experience, then before you could properly begin to recover you went through it again. Running away, until you found somewhere safe, was reasonable at the time, but then you were alone with limited human contact for far too long. It's only natural," he finished, "that you'd lose perspective and make some bad decisions."
"Yeah, I guess... That doesn't make it okay but..."
"It makes it understandable," Trauma insisted.
"I still feel bad about it," I replied. "...Well, most of it. Some of those people were dicks."
"And what do you intend to do about that?"
"At a bare minimum," I said, "I need to apologize to some people... I'm actually going to see if I can make contact and do that for some of them today." Kelda was coming with me, said she wanted to be a 'supportive girlfriend.' "There's probably some other stuff I could do to make amends but, I'm not sure how... Those cops and national guardsmen who got killed by Cortland Kassady? I could have saved them if I hadn't stooped down to that one jackass's level. Apparently, they're holding a donation drive to pay funeral costs and help support the widows. I made a pretty hefty donation but I don't think—"
"I'm sorry, how?" Trauma asked.
"Did I leave that part out?" Yeah, yeah I did. Turns out perfect memory doesn't mean remembering to say everything you meant to say. "either Olympus takes the 'metaphysical marriage' thing more seriously than Loki implied was standard or Venus is a hopeless romantic and... Honestly, it's probably both. Anyway, her 'wedding present,' which was also from Hebe I guess, was a 'head start.' She had this house and a private stretch of land on the California coast that she bought when she was trying to find herself," a really swanky place. A two-story townhouse big enough to comfortably house nine or ten people, loaded down with modern amenities with spells to run the utilities without tapping outside power or water lines or the like, a good sized chunk of private beach, and more spells to keep unwanted visitors from finding the place or spying on the people on the property, "There's some magic on the place that was powered by her but she transferred it over so now it's running on my power instead." She also insisted to a distressing degree that all of the furniture had been replaced and the house had been thoroughly and professionally cleaned. "She still technically owns it but there are also lawyers from the Olympus Group who are trying to get me legally emancipated and she's going to sign it over formally if that goes through. If not, it'll be mine when I turn 18."
"And the money?"
"I have, and I quote, a 'meaningless executive position' in the Olympus group, which comes with no actual duties or obligations but still comes with what Hebe insisted was a middle manager's salary," the multinational corporation that was literally run by gods must be doing pretty well for itself if it can pay that to middle managers and also just give me that kind of income indefinitely as a gift. "If I'm smart about it, I'm never going to have to worry about money." I should probably look into finding some worthy charities or learning how to invest or something.
"Also, someone told Styx about the results of the ritual. Very concerning to get up in the morning and see the Titanian Goddess of Dread standing on your doorstep."
"What did she want?" Trauma asked.
"She simply said that I should have told her that the ritual would have turned me into the head of a new pantheon and that I was going to encourage others to fill it out," I explained. "she offered, as a gift to the new Skymother and Earthmother, to purify 'several worthy mortals' within reason to help me fill out the roster of my Pantheon's first generation but... It kind of felt like it was partly a threat, or that she was getting something out of it. Not sure if I'm going to take her up on that or not." At the very least I should probably talk it out with some people, I'm not sure if I even want my Pantheon to be bigger right now. "Honestly, I was too nervous to correct her that we prefer Skymistress and Earthmistress."
"And you're staying alone in this house in California?"
"Kinda?" I said. "Kelda's been staying over most nights, which is nice because the master bedroom feels too big for one person—" I blushed, "not that we're doing more than just, you know, cuddle or anything. She's been splitting her time between spending time with me and staying back in her home village testing her new powers and settling up her affairs. She still has some commissions to work through and jobs lined up before she's free to just be a forge god. And uh, I've had some people come check on me."
"Alright then," Trauma said while checking the time, "it seems that we're just about done with this session. From what you've described you backslid a bit from the progress you made before in your short time together, but you've also done quite a lot of work on your own to get back, and choosing your own will to seek help is a very big step. In the weeks to come, I'm confident that together, we can get you to where you want to be."
"Thanks, doc," I said and offered a hand to shake, which he accepted.
Trauma walked me out into his waiting room. Kelda was waiting for me. She'd assimilated rather quickly to Midgard fashion, probably helped by the fact that since she had her own symbiote suit now she could conjure whatever clothes she wanted. She pulled off the blue jeans and white-tee look very well, though honestly, I feel like she could pull off anything, even a ratty robe and curlers.
Or I'm just biased.
She got up to hug me as I approached.
"You must be Kelda," Trauma asked upon seeing her. He'd revert back to his true form, that being a standard white man with crazy brown hair. "Maria told me all about you."
"That I am," she said, "and you are the mind healer who helped her before and is helping her again?"
"Yes."
Kelda hummed. "You seem to be capable."
"Thank you."
Kelda and I left the office just after that, and hand in hand made our way through the streets.
"My parents want to meet you," Kelda told me as we made our way to my next destination, the Morlock tunnels. "Properly, I mean. They were prepared that I might come home a goddess. They were not prepared that I come home a courting a girl I'd only just met, let alone..." She waved her hand to summarize the convoluted metaphysical aspects of our relationship.
I'd been afraid that would happen. "I'm surprised that they only just asked."
"I suppose that it took them a brief time to settle on how they felt about it."
Well, one thing at a time: Next stop, the Morlock Tunnels.