Text Key

"Audible speech."

'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'

F.A.Q.

Chapter 41 - The Soapbox Spectacular! The Death and Rebirth of Craig Phillips, Part Three

A Forewarning - this chapter contains discussion about bullying, abuse, poverty, racism, dehumanization, music, comics, poetry, comic bullpen politics, death of a child, and other stuff. That's what spawned the title.

Craig, Rose decided, didn't look all that much like his mum. Really, Trudy was a closer resemblance, though the girl didn't have Mrs. Phillip's constantly anxious energy. That bit was all Craig, as was the ease with which the woman had caved to the story that Rose was a police-counselor (was that even a thing?) who was going along with one of Craig's teachers to review the case one more time.

"Please, please, make yourselves comfortable - I'm starting to get… entirely too familiar with how long these interviews can take," Mrs. Phillips said as she bustled her way to the kitchen to prepare tea.

"Can't believe you knew their address off the top of your head," Rose whispered to Miss Lloyd as they settled into the sofa. "Do you stalk all of your students, or is Craig just special?"

"It's called 'investing in a troubled student'," Miss Lloyd said, giving Rose a withering glare. "And you saw how much Craig needed someone to help him. And not from the likes of Trudy."

That was true. Rose could only hope that the Doctor was safe and doing something to fix the situation on his end - right now, she was just doing the best she could to chase the closest thing she had to a lead from her side of things. And right now, it didn't feel like a particularly good one.

"I'm sorry I didn't remember you, Miss Lloyd," Mrs. Phillips said apologetically as she set down the tea set. "I- it's really hard to keep track of things lately, between how the staff changes around at the school and - and my Craig going missing. I've been running a bit ragged the last month, I'm afraid, so names aren't exactly…"

"Perfectly understandable, Mrs. Phillips," Miss Lloyd said, with a graceful calm that Rose envied. "And I've found that I'm a rather… forgettable person, as of late. I'm hardly going to take you not remembering me personally."

"So Craig has been gone for a month?" Rose asked.

"Three weeks, five days," Mrs. Phillips corrected. "I could even give you the exact time of day too, if you wanted; I went up to his room to give him a parcel and stepped away for just… two minutes, and then by the time I came back to see what it was, he was gone," she said. "But - I'm sure that this isn't anything new. You've probably seen the police reports…"

Rose hadn't, but part of the point of 'lying' was not to give away what you didn't know if you could help it.

"It's good to check in with people again, see if anything else has managed to turn up since then," she said instead. Not a full lie, but a trick she'd learned from the Doctor. Say something vague but true and people would ignore the part you didn't say anything about. "Letters, texts, phone messages - or maybe something in his room that you might have missed, if you were in there cleaning at any point. My mum could probably write novels about the stuff she's found mixed in with my dirty laundry…"

Mrs. Phillips looked uncertain for a moment. "I… I try to give Craig his space. Some amount of privacy - his room is his sanctuary, and I… it's not helpful to him if I'm constantly invading it. I can ask him to share things with me, but just… going through his things without his permission? That's not… I learned not to do that."

There was a story there, Rose could tell. Probably one with a diary involved. Personal things and privacy always came back to diaries in the end. Either that or personal entertainment toys, but Craig was probably a bit young for that.

"A completely understandable boundary, Mrs. Phillips," Miss Lloyd said, surprising Rose. They were there for information, not there to turn it down. "Maintaining relationships of trust and avenues of communication with your children is vital, and asking you to betray that, even with Craig unavailable, is something we, as strangers, have no room to right to demand."

Mrs. Phillips relaxed. "Oh, thank you. You know, the last police officers to talk to me weren't nearly as understanding about the subject…" the woman sighed before forcing herself to proper posture. "I can get the parcel, if you like. It's not really… anything private. Craig said he didn't know what it could possibly be back when it arrived."

"Oh, yes, that would be very helpful," Rose agreed. "It might even be the key to figuring this all out, if we're lucky."

As Mrs. Phillips disappeared in the direction of the stairs, Rose and Miss Lloyd were free to sit and talk openly.

"So you think that Craig was captured by a parcel?" Miss Lloyd asked. "Really? A misaddressed parcel kidnapped an entire teenager from under his mother's nose?"

"Is that really any weirder than getting forgotten by everyone you knew? I've been tangled in all sorts of alien business," Rose said, waggling the psychic paper. "Like this - you just see blank paper but everyone else sees things like badges and permits and such like. I've traveled through time and space in a wooden police box that's bigger on the inside. It's a whole universe of weird stuff out there. Alien kidnapping packages are hardly the oddest thing compared to all that."

"And yet, the idea of not going through someone's diary was too much for you?"

"It's not like my mum ever hesitated to do the same," Rose pointed out. "She read my diary all the time and it didn't do any harm. Well, besides making me hide it a bit better."

Miss Lloyd didn't look all that convinced by that argument. "Well, then I think you might need to reassess the sort of boundaries you have with her, because that doesn't sound like a healthy relationship to me."

"That…" Rose stopped to suck on her teeth. "Look, Miss Lloyd. Me and my mum, we fight. Not like, in an actually serious way, but it's like the natural state of things for us - I do something, she whinges about it, I say something catty back, the world moves on and we do it again the next week. And it stops the minute anything actually gets serious. And that's kind of how everyone I've ever been around is. My mum's friends, other people at the council estate - with my old boyfriend Mickey, it was his gran, 'cause his mum died after his da walked out."

Miss Lloyd nodded. "So you've found yourself in repeated patterns of abuse and seeing healthier family relations is confusing."

Rose bristled. "It's not abuse. Nobody was hurt or hit - least not in like… a way that was real. I've seen that, properly." It actually made Rose a bit sick inside, now, thinking about Tommy Connolly. How she'd told him to go talk to his dad, even while the boy was looking at her with half his face bruised.

But then again, it wasn't like Mickey's gran had been light on her love taps, when he'd been acting thicker than usual. And that wasn't abuse.

…was it?

Maybe Delaine was the one to ask. If they had the time, since she had… clearly a lot of experience with that sort of thing.

"Look, Miss Tyler, you are right that I don't know your situation, but I think… I think you need to put more consideration into the fact that, even if you and your mother have a system that works for you, even one that looks like it may be considerably different in action… and not every form of abuse involves hitting someone," Miss Lloyd said with a gentleness that made that sick feeling turn over into something worse. "Craig's mother has put a lot of effort into being his best supporter, which isn't an easy job as a single parent, and it's not not made any easier by Craig's school situation, because… to be frank, there's not a lot that can be done about bullying, at least without systematic reform."

Miss Lloyd shifted in position to better face Rose, tea completely forgotten as she kept talking.

"Us teachers are often unable to witness enough of the situation to get a clear picture and, even if we do get a full idea of the situation, there are the matters of how limited our powers are in being able to address the situation. What little we can do in class can result in reprisals outside of it, those higher than us in the school can reverse our actions, and sometimes… some of us simply don't know how to address the subject in the first place, either through ignorance or through outdated, conservative beliefs. And that can lead down some very bad roads, having a teacher give bullying a pass. Parents have their own power, but that in itself is limited by how much they know about the situation… and it's often levied against each other, because they're often on their own child's side, rather than admit that there may be a fault in their parenting style."

"So what about the system then?" Rose asked. "What's there for you to use then?"

"Effectively? There is none. There was a recent… 'reform'," Miss Lloyd said with a hint of displeasure. "Which on paper was meant to improve things all over. As it is… all it required was that the schools make a 'behavior policy' concerning bullying in 'all its forms', which would then be distributed to all staff, students, and parents for their perusal. The exact details are left to the discretion of the school… and I'm sure that you know how well that works out, when there's an emphasis on attendance and test scores before actual involvement with the human beings we're helping raise. To think that a single person can change the system on their own from the inside is… the very height of foolishness."

"Which is why you unionize," Rose pointed out. "Cause you can do more as a group than on your own. Teachers, parents, students. I once unionized the girl's choir at my school to go on strike! Got suspended for three days, but it worked."

Miss Lloyd smiled. "Well, aren't you high minded? Yes, to protest together is to lend strength to each other's voices, but that first requires everyone be willing to try, to put in an effort to make the world better. And not everyone is willing. Either because they think that, since they suffered, the next generation should do the same on principle, or because it's just… easier not to change. And then some are perfectly content with the system as is - because they think that the 'weird' and 'queer' should be beaten into a 'proper' form, through force if nothing else works."

Rose remembered the type from her time in school, at the Jericho Street Comprehensive. That one teacher who made no bones about the fact that her one joy about the place was beating down on the council kids. Calling them worthless, stupid, loud, annoying.

She'd been positively gleeful after Rose had dropped out to be with Jimmy Stone.

'See? I said you'd come to nothing!' the woman - old enough to have grandchildren, if anyone could have put up with her horrible personality to marry her - had crowed, as if that wasn't a poor reflection on her skills as a teacher. 'Trash remains trash!'

The laughter had cut off after Rose had kicked her in the shin, turning to cursing as the sixteen year old ran, but the interaction still was memorable.

"Cause it's easier than making an effort on themselves," Rose said, still thinking about that teacher. "They're cruel and they want everyone else to think that's normal, so that they'll come off as smart and ahead of the curve instead of just awful."

"Exactly. And leads to situations where students like Craig get taken advantage of - because he's easy to exploit under that system, either by the bullies who want to attack him… or the ones that want to manipulate him into doing what they want for the barest scraps of affection. Like Trudy."

There was a thudding noise that snapped Rose's attention back to the door to the sitting room, where Mrs. Phillips was standing, a large box covered in strange markings fallen at her feet.

"D-did you say 'Trudy'?" she asked.

I breathed out and in again, maintaining a calm internal atmosphere as I walked alongside Craig as he headed… somewhere, the boy perched on the back of the equestrian statue pulling the cart-cage with the Doctor and Trudy inside.

"Don't you have anything to say?" Craig asked. "You were talkative earlier. Talking about… mental and emotional equilibrium and all that. Where's all that zen positivity now?"

"If you ask someone for their thoughts on something, you'd rather them take it seriously, yeah?" I shot back. "You already got mad at the Doctor for telling you how to feel, and you don't like it when people talk at you, so y'know. I'm trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do with that."

"I…" Craig stumbled over the realization that he'd effectively painted me into a corner. "...maybe small talk?" he offered lamely.

"Alright, I can do that," I agreed. "You're a comic fan - you do any art of your own?"

"Not really. I'm not - I'm no good at it," Craig said. "It just… mom never liked my drawings and I can't ever seem to get the pencil to do what I want. I -"

"I get it. It makes it hard to stick with it, if you don't feel like your efforts are appreciated," I agreed before changing tracks. "What about music? I see you have an Atomicide hoodie. Cool to see Chilean death/thrash metal merch this far out."

That did get Craig to brighten up. "Oh, you know them? They're on the harder end, but they're really cool. I got a hold of their demo and it's been really great stuff."

"I try a lil bit of everything. Ska, jazz, rock, metal, pop, rap, classical. It's all worth sampling around. Picked up Linkin Park and Green Day from the radio, one of my first friends got me into Weird Al, Static-X, and Blue Stahli, and my brother… step-brother," I corrected. "- got me into Neutral Milk Hotel, Modest Mouse, and They Might Be Giants ages ago. He played the drums and guitar and a shitload of other stuff, so I can really appreciate the technical end of things. I play a bit of flute myself, after one of my friends threw one at me and insisted I make some noise at them."

Selby had been a bit of a brat like that, early on.

Craig mulled that over. "I've never tried music. Playing, I mean."

"Guitar is pretty accessible. You can get lessons for that anywhere. Other instruments? Trickier. Piano is easy to get lessons for, but price and space are problems with the instrument. My brother inherited his baby grand, but it took him over ten years to actually get a home that was actually big enough for the damn thing. Pissed his mom off having it taking up her living room for so long," I said. Admittedly, my step-mother had found most things in life annoying, particularly the fact that I'd existed. "But back to comics talk; favorite non-A lister character?"

"Uhhh. That's actually kind of hard - I like a lot of the horror-esque monsters. Y'know. Swamp Thing, Simon Garth the Zombie, Werewolf by Night. But I think I like Jade and Obsidian the best. Who's yours?"

"Good taste." I wasn't even being polite; the old horror titles were fun, so long as you didn't look too closely at the parts where they'd aged like milk. "Well, if we can pick more than one… I like Darkhawk, Catseye from the Hellions, Man-Thing, and the less stereotyped symbiote characters. Like Toxin, Sleeper, and Hybrid," I smiled. "I'm a bit more of a Marvel than a DC, if you can tell."

Craig looked at me blankly. "Hybrid?"

"Y'know… the Life Foundation symbiote fusion?" I offered, thankful that I could skip over the one that was more than ten years off of even being a thing. "Right, they're a bit on the deep end of obscure…"

"I remember them as the symbiote team from the Lethal Protector mini-series. I thought they were killed off, not fused."

"Yeah. Well, a different Venom limited series unkilled them, but realized that none of them really had anything distinct going on except for Scream, so they were fused together in an in-universe experiment to give them a more unique gimmick. This security guard in the story felt bad for them, so he let them go, got fired, had a tragic superhero origin story, and then Hybrid came back to help him become a superhero," I said, rattling off the barebones of the character's situation. "It's actually really interesting, because it was really about mutual kindness, with Hybrid being the reasonable one of the pair. But y'know how it goes; if you aren't immediately successful, you get shuffled out of publication, forgotten for a few years, and then brought back as C-List Fodder, turned into a joke, or killed offscreen to have your gimmick passed on to someone else."

"Which in Marvel means 'evil symbiote time'," Craig said, immediately understanding both the theme… and the deep annoyance tied to it. "Like what they've gone and done with Venom again - Eddie Brock got too sympathetic and now they've gone and shuffled the symbiote off to Scorpion for some reason after they gave Eddie cancer and did that whole John Carpenter's The Thing ripoff with the tongue clone."

God, I forgot how stupid the Mania symbiote's origin story was. "Yep. Same thing happened with Toxin - introduced in a Venom focused limited series, had an interesting dynamic between symbiote and host, great story potential, host killed off after a short run and a lull in action to make drama and recycle the symbiote back to the 'evil' side as a Venom substitute."

…which was also post 2010. Eh, he'd get to it eventually. Or never realize it at all, since he didn't seem to like Venom all that much and seemed straight up done with the character.

"Why do they do that? I don't like Venom - he's not a hero if he kills people over barely anything," Craig said. "But people try to pretend that somehow someone who kills all the time is capable of being a hero, even when it's barely different from when they were a villain, besides them not killing as many civilians in the off-season between fighting the actual heroes. I don't - I don't get why that's supposed to make things better."

Venom was a bit more complex than that, but the writers generally didn't care about it, so I couldn't really blame Craig for being frustrated with the character. But, I could educate him on what his problem actually was.

"It's a reflection of the dehumanization of 'criminal' behavior - and of outliers in general, given that you can see the general demographics of your generic thugs shift over time. What used to be white adult mobsters in suits turned into minorities, teens, and Quincy punks, because 'normal' people don't commit crimes," I said, making finger quotes. "You can also see it in the views of how criminals are treated in general in media; no such thing as justified theft, all crimes are equal, guilty until proven innocent, kill them all and let God sort them out, acceptable targets, anything is fine so long as it's the guy we're supposed to like doing it… it's all stuff that stacks. Tell me, do you think that stealing a sandwich from a 7/11 is on par with serial killing?"

"No, but you still shouldn't stea–"

Ah. So somebody hadn't yet been introduced to the joys of internet piracy. Funny, considering his music tastes for the obscure and unusual. "Generally, yeah, you shouldn't. But a 7/11 isn't going to be deeply affected by the loss of one sandwich, especially if it's something they'd be throwing out at the end of the day. The person who stole it probably needs it more and is barely impacting the place they took it from."

I'd been involved with much, much greyer crimes than that, but I was inclined to follow Victor Hugo's example; a starving man and food was easy as hell for a normal person of normal means to sympathize with.

"It's the fundamental problem of treating companies like people with rights, despite them not being able to be harmed or held to standards of acceptable behavior in the same way… would like to see some companies charged for murder, though, now that I'm thinking about it," I said, almost as an afterthought. "Given how many food places have policies about poisoning any food they put out at the end of the day just to deny the homeless resources."

The horror on Craig's face was one of the first proper emotions besides annoyance and anger I'd seen on him so far - and this one wasn't breaking the simulation around us into a danger zone. "Food companies do that?"

"Oh yeah. Fast food places, bagel places, pizza joints - they say it's to keep down 'pests' but corporate thinks anyone who's not management is vermin, so…" I shrugged, the gesture probably slightly comical considering I was doing a brisk walk to keep up with Craig's literal iron horse.

"That just seems like plain, textbook evil."

I laughed hollowly as we passed by an empty convenience store. "Welcome to end stage capitalism. But yeah, that's part of where superheroes came from - the wish fulfillment of being able to do something about that deep, systematic evil. Superman started out fighting landlords and domestic abusers, after all."

Craig's expression blinkered. "I thought his alignment was like… hard Lawful Good. Truth, Justice, and the American Way, no breaking international law or anything like that."

"Eh, it was a migration, and a good writer remembers the roots and the heart of the matter, rather than the spectacle and the underpants. But that happened with a lot of American media after the Hays and Comics Codes got pushed," I said before slipping into an slightly overdone announcer voice for the next bit. "'Authority figures and the government cannot be depicted in questionable light', 'all criminals must be punished and can never be sympathetic', 'obey all the rules, even the stupid ones', 'no heroes killing people at all, not just the villains you think might be popular later', 'no drugs, we don't need kids becoming dope fiends, even if they technically pick that up in other places', and so on. Enforcement of the authoritarian on the primary fiction accessed by children and teens to serve as propaganda and nudge them towards being 'good, non-communist citizens' and all that."

Craig nodded in understanding. "And that's why a bunch of supervillains are Russian, I guess."

"Yep. Red Scare, commie bad, Russia scary, easy shorthand to exploit for characterization at speed once the pattern got established in the 50's," I waved my hand. "Anyway, it took a bit for everyone to get sick of the Comics Code and start pushing back against that whole thing - bringing back drugs, sex, and murder in varying degrees of thoughtfulness, among other things -, though unfortunately the 'Big Blue Boy Scout' image getting locked into the public consciousness by the Reeve movies ruined any chance of Superman getting to recover specifically, because nostalgia has poisoned the people who are theoretically against fascistic practices in a way that they'll end up advocating it so their Superman can remain 'pure'," I said, adding finger quotes.

Craig grimaced. "I did think some parts of those movies were a bit naff."

Damn, a Superman fan admitting that? Craig Phillips was a rare bird indeed.

"I liked the Quest For Peace, but yeah, mixed bag. Say that in an internet space and get ready to get howled out to hell, though," I agreed. "And so, thanks to that environment, you ended up with this evolution of the Anti-Hero. Because Heroes weren't allowed to be that thanks to that perpetuated image of the perfectly law-abiding paragon - I mean, fucking Batman was an official deputized cop from the 50s to the 70s, complete with a goddamn badge -, writers got sick of it, and the 'answer' was to go increasingly harder than necessary in the other direction. Early Superman, and Batman throughout most of history might frighten or scare people doing crimes, but they'd rarely kill anyone. At least not in an overt way." I coughed. "We'll overlook all the times Professor X and other telepaths fucked with people's brains or the time that the Fantastic Four accidentally got some Skrulls killed and eaten because their 'peaceful' solution for a forced retirement was poorly thought out."

"Yeah, brainwashing is kinda worse than just dying," Craig agreed. "I mean, 'total violation of the mind' isn't exactly heroic. Regular death is at least… clean, I guess you could call it."

Ha. Didn't I know it. "Oh, absolutely. But 'well there wasn't any blood' and 'what measure is a non-human' is always in play for these things. It's why it was 'okay' to blow up aliens and robots, even if they proved that they were just as cognizant and feeling as a regular human being through the story, and mind whammying a human into a vegetative state or thinking they're someone else entirely is 'pacifistic' despite the inherent violence in taking someone's mind like that. Personally, I think more fans need to interrogate why they're anti-murder when they're pro-torture and pro… whatever the fuck the last one is. Lobotomization?" I said, trailing off, before an idea occurred to me.

It was on point for the conversation. Almost perfectly so. But…

I stole a glance back at the cage the Doctor was in. It was sound blocked by Craig's own demand, but I didn't know if that was one way or not.

Well, whatever. It was an essential part of the conversation.

"There's actually a… kind of obscure sci-fi time travel series I like that had a particular run where the main character was… super against violence. No guns, talked down on soldiers and war - not that that that part was anything really new for the series, 'cause they'd always been pretty much on the side of peace, the environment, and other such arguments," I clarified, trying to condense the essence of Doctor Who down into a form the Doctor himself wouldn't readily identify. "A bit more sci-fi than superhero with an edge of edutainment, so y'know. Trying to be progressive and high brow, but also having that 1960's spawned schmaltz."

Craig nodded. "Yeah."

"But this particular era was… the protagonist did a lot of that… hypocritical pacifism thing. Y'know, that thing where 'well this is how I did it, it was easy' and it's literally just the person exercising a privilege you simply don't have. He was the man who never would use a gun or a bomb - except the times when he did - and would judge everyone else for doing anything remotely violent, but that didn't stop him from locking a set of aliens into multiple high end, 'fate worse than death' fates from which there was no escape at the end of one story. I mean, trapping someone in the reflection of every mirror in existence? Balancing someone on the edge of a black hole's event horizon, to continually suffer spaghettification? It's kinda fucked."

Craig stared, mouth slightly agape at the intensity. "And that's supposed to be the hero of the story? Some… Stardust the Super Wizard-type monster?"

I flashed Craig a smile. "Deep cut! But yeah, a bit - I mean, he wasn't that awful, not most of the time. It was… I'm pretty sure the audience was supposed to question it more, but the praise for the character and his goodness was laid on so thick that most people missed it," I said before sighing. "And then when a writer came on that did like having the conversations about how 'having godlike power doesn't mean perfect morality or the ability to fix all the problems' and 'if you do fucked up shit, even to 'evil' people, everyone will be scared of you, even if you've stopped', a bunch of fans started complaining."

Craig looked baffled and more than a little disgusted. "That just seems stupid, people aren't really that stupid, are they?"

"Craig, I am so happy that you've avoided internet fandom spaces. Continue to do that and you'll probably be happier for it, because, god, can they be rancid." The internet wasn't perfect in 2006, but it was still a ways off of what it would become. "But anyway, back to the rise of the 1970's Anti-Hero Archetype."

I quickly organized my thoughts before launching into the lecture.

"It's actually an interesting trend, because of how many factors led to it. The Punisher was based on the Executioner and the Death Wish movies, the last of which was based on a book that was criticizing the current trend of vigilante media, at a time when most large cities in America were treated as… well, disaster zones," I said, gesturing for emphasis. "Which was mostly a racism based cycle - white people were leaving more ethnically diverse areas to form white suburban exclaves, leading to politicians stripping money away from cities because of their own biases, so conditions declined and people started turning to desperate measures because their world was literally disintegrating into trash around them, which wasn't helped when cops start pushing propaganda pieces about how dangerous it was to exist in New York or Chicago or Detroit and why they needed to be paid more to continue to do less for the community-"

"Paid more to do less?" Craig asked, interrupting. "What does that mean?"

"Good question!" I said as we passed a rather impressive Gothic Revival church. "American cops have literally spent decades winning multiple court cases that say that the police don't actually have to protect people or do their actual proper jobs, especially if it puts their own lives at risk or involves putting in effort, despite their whole concept and public relations image being built on that sort of thing. Also the general state of corruption. Framing people, torture, bribes, theft of random belongings. It's actually genuinely disgusting."

"But how does that apply to me? I'm British."

I gave the kid a sad look. "...baby, you do know that everything wrong with America was wrong with England first, right? We're just louder assholes about it because we think that gunpowder is the universal problem solver and that if it's not working, we just need more of the stuff. Besides, don't you think the BBC's measures about the TV License are a bit excessive and dystopian?"

Craig didn't entirely have an argument for that, mostly because there really wasn't a way to argue that having a fucking semi-public knowledge spy van with electronic-detection equipment rolling around - not to mention door-to-door harassment agents - to shake down people over a potential extra screen in their house wasn't batshit and more than a little draconian. Even America's bug-up-its-ass attitude about video and music piracy was a different, tamer animal than that.

"But yeah like, that's where the original murdery anti-hero concept came from. Because comic writers saw cops doing fuck all, knew their usual heroes weren't really in a position to do a lot about it - even Batman could only migrate so far into the dark before people cried 'bullshit' -, and wrote something to fill the gap, usually with an accompanyment on the futility and hollowness of the pursuit of vengeance, and then it kind of spun out from there to where cops will put Punisher stickers on their patrol cars because reading comprehension is dead. His creator hates the fandom that's grown around the character, because Frank Castle was meant to be a criticism of the trend, not an example of it. Same deal with the Death Wish movie series - original book author hated every single one for missing the point that you didn't really need 'a good guy with a gun' to fix issues through a further escalation of violence."

"Didn't know that the Punisher was supposed to be that deep."

"A lot of stuff is deeper than you might assume at first glance. But it doesn't help when people put effort into making things shallow. Like how some people watch Gundam for the cool robots but ignore the whole 'war is bad' message, but on the other hand, unclear and mixed messages muddy the waters because… well, sometimes you have deadlines and you also have to make stuff cool enough to sell so you can live." Such was the plight of the artist.

"Mrs. Phillips, who is Trudy? I know she doesn't go to Craig's school-" Miss Lloyd began to say.

"I mean, of course she doesn't!" Mrs. Phillips said, voice hysterical. "She's- there is no Trudy!"

"What?" But Rose had seen her. She had looked real enough. "But…"

"I mean - no. That's a lie. There… there was a Trudy," the woman said, wilting. "Craig's… imaginary friend. We just… thought she was gone. That the psychiatrist had gotten her to go away, that Craig had forgotten…"

"Excuse me for not being an authority on the subject," Miss Lloyd said. "But as I understand it, most imaginary friends leave on their own. Why was it important that Trudy be… removed?"

"Because she went from just being a… a playmate to something… else," Mrs. Phillips said, pulling a small book from a high shelf and handing it to Rose. "Here, just… look for yourself. You're a counselor. You should understand what… what this is."

Rose took the book gingerly, reading the words 'My Diary' at the top before carefully, carefully opening it.

Abruptly, something occurred to me.

"Where are we headed anyway?" I asked as we turned a corner.

"The All England Club," Craig said, before a spark of realization struck. "That's-"

"The place where they do the Wimbledon. I'm not completely ignorant." Though in this matter, I kind of was. Venus and Serena Williams were the only reason why I knew that, and I hadn't exactly been watching as a sports enthusiast, back in the day.

"I… yes? It's a bit more important than that…"

"Consider though - American's hate non-contact sports. I think we only give basketball a pass because it's something we came up with."

"...I thought basketball was a contact sport."

I wobbled my hand as the sports facility drew nearer, though we still had a bit before we hit the actual doors we wanted. "Eh, it's debatable. But I'm of the opinion that if there's rules specificaly saying 'don't even fucking think about touching the other players' and you get fouled for doing so, it's at least supposed to be a non-contact sport."

"Suppose I can follow that logic," Craig allowed. "But they really should make it clear, rather than something you guess at."

We entered the building with surprisingly little fanfare, the doors opening at Craig's silent command, even going so far as to adjust themselves to allow the cage-cart through, the cart's wheels turned to feet, trundling up the short bit of stairs in a way that could have been deeply disturbing to anyone unfamiliar with Twoflower's sentient pearwood Luggage.

I eyed the inscription over the door as we passed beneath it.

'If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same.'

"Not exactly the line from that poem I'd think is most relevant to the situation," I said, mostly to myself. "But fitting enough."

Craig's head turned towards me. "What's that?"

"Kipling's 'If—', that's what that bit's from," I said, gesturing at the words as we passed beneath them. "The line doesn't really work orphaned like that, but y'know. Only so much space to work with."

And the English could be oh so insufferable about 'well it works if you're cultured' if you made a thing out of it.

"Oh, that. I know it. We study it in school. Do you do that in America?" Craig asked as we moved through the halls of Centre Court, gradually drawing closer to the actual tennis court at the center of it all.

"Study Kipling? I mean a bit. We got Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and a few bits of the Jungle Book. Most of the time we end up with short stories and novels from America - To Kill A Mockingbird and the Outsiders are where we usually tap out in difficulty… and poetry doesn't usually get much further than Frost," I said. Really, the American education system I had experienced had gutted the arts, a process I'd watched in real time in my first life. "There's some Shakespeare too, but that's partially because American drama theater is treated as some sort of mutt - not dignified enough for our noble institutions of education. As if Shakespeare wasn't on the exact same level back in his day."

Or maybe it was because American theater was and had always been the territory of the queer before all else, with a handful of notable exceptions.

"But if it must be said - I favor Ehrmann's 'Desiderata' over Kipling's 'If—'," I said. "'You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.' 'With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy'. It's nice. Not this weird pressure to be everything and it's opposite all at once if you want your father's respect. Been there, done that, it wasn't particularly fun."

"...that doesn't rhyme," Craig said after a moment of silence passed.

"It's a prose poem; it doesn't have to. And I skipped a few lines - those are just the ones I like the best off hand." I shrugged as we stepped out into the tennis court. "There's also the Deteriorata parody that National Lampoon did, but that's an entirely different conversation."

I took a moment to look at the area around us. Centre Court was a modern Colosseum in its own fashion - meant to sit somewhere around fifteen thousand people within its bounds, and equipped to broadcast to even more, given how big a deal Wimbledon was as an event.

The Colosseum in Rome proper was larger, true, but it was built for… greater, bloodier things than mere tennis.

"What's your favorite line from that, then?" Craig asked, bringing me back to a lighter conversation topic.

"Pfft. The whole fucking thing is gold. You should take a listen to it on your own time… maybe after you get a bit of space from the negativity you're dealing with right now," I added, remembering that the chorus was literally 'you are a fluke of the universe', 'you have no right to be here', and 'whether you can hear it or not, the universe is laughing behind your back', none of which were things Craig really needed to hear right now, even in joke format. "It's basically all the gentle positivity of Desiderata turned on its head and then spun around like a top, interspersed with random shit. That's why it was popular on Doctor Demento."

"...sure. If there's time after," Craig said, before looking up at the clouded sky over the tennis court. After a moment, he spoke again. "Your Doctor said I could reshape this world, make it into whatever I wanted, if I just knew to ask in the first place."

"Yeah. It's no different than making Superman and Venom punch each other out, just bigger," I agreed. "...so what are you going to turn this into? Cause I know that tennis is the last thing on your mind right now."

Purple-pink light sparked from Craig's eyes. "A courtroom," he said, lifting his hand as the space around us warped - the stands remained, but gained verticality, while the Royal Box gained pillars around its feet, becoming more officious and intimidating, as the grassy playing field turned to polished stone.

The court remained open to the sky though, letting the storm clouds overhead roil and rumble.

"You're putting the Doctor and Trudy on trial?" I asked, raising an eyebrow. "On what charges?"

"No! I just…" Craig deflated. "I want some answers from Trudy. Real ones."

"Fair, but… do you trust her to give them to you?" I pointed out. "I mean, yes, you do deserve the truth, but sometimes… sometimes there's just some people who will never give it to you. And when you give them the space to do so, they'll just use it as another opportunity to dig their claws into you - to either try to take back control, make you second guess yourself, or just because they have one last guaranteed opportunity to hurt you. Believe me, I've been there."

My shoulders sagged as the weight of thousands of years settled on them again. I'd been there so, so many times.

"I still want to do it," Craig said.

I dipped my head. "Then that's your right."

I could only hope that it wouldn't immediately go to hell.

The Doctor was just able to turn his fall into a semi-purposeful crouch as the cage ceased to exist, though Trudy wasn't quite as lucky.

"Oh, someone's feeling officious," he said, looking around the outsized judicial surroundings. "Love how you redecorated the place. Very… grey. And imposing…"

The Doctor paused.

"Are you compensating for-" he began to ask.

"Doctor, please," Delaine said, sounding tired.

"Fine, fine. Saying less," the Time Lord said, miming zipping his mouth shut.

"Trudy- Trudy Trudy Trudy," Craig said, leaning forward. "I just want to ask you one thing. And I want your honest answer to that question."

"And what question would that be, Craig?" Trudy asked, standing up and rubbing her rear. "'Are you hurt, Trudy?' 'How can I make up for this humiliation, Trudy?'" She made an overdone thoughtful expression. "Oh, here's an idea - 'how would you like to get out of here, Trudy?' I think I'd like that one."

"Nothing that complicated," Craig said. "Just one word, really. But it will speak volumes."

A beat passed.

"Why, Trudy?" Craig asked. "Why did you hurt me?"

"Me? Craig, you know I never laid a hand on you - after all, I'm not real… well," Trudy corrected. "Not real in a conventional sense, at least. I'm just someone you made up; a more attractive, more talented, smarter, cooler person than you, who doesn't make everyone's life worse by existing."

The boy trembled. "I want the real answer!" Craig snapped, slamming his fist down against the railing.

"Alright, the real answer - the real answer is that you're a born follower. A loser, who needs someone better to tell you what to do. What to be. You wanted to be led and your mummy - sweet, overprotective, inoffensive mummy - wouldn't let you play with the other children. Because she was too scared of losing the pathetic excuse for a kid she still had, since there was no replacing you with a better model. Does that make you happy? Knowing that you're the reason why she doesn't have any other children? That she can't have any other children?"

"The answer, Trudy!" Craig screamed.

"Fiiiine," Trudy said with a put-upon sigh. "Because you were so lonely and pathetic and you needed someone to play with, you made me up - a better version of yourself. Because of course you didn't have a concept of anything outside of your dinky little world of comic books and tears."

"...a better version of me is a girl?" Craig asked, distracted.

"You can read into that part later," Delaine said. "But seriously, Craig, you can stop listening to her. You can make her stop-"

"And really? Even if I had hurt you a little, I'm still the only friend you have, Craig, and friends are allowed to be a little rough with each other - especially if it's to help improve them. How were you going to learn without a little instruction," Trudy continued, apparently uncaring of the emotional reaction she was getting - or, the Doctor suspected, was actively enjoying it. "And you're remembering it wrong anyway; I only gave you the ideas. I never laid a hand on-"

"And does it make it better that you never did the dirty work yourself? That your only weapons were words?" Craig snapped, energy sparking off of him. "I guess that does go to show me how pathetic I am as well - if you're the best I can manage for an imaginary friend! But I think you might be right, about how friends are allowed to be a little rough with each other."

The court shifted, stone floor turning to sand. A handful of swords and shields, sprinkled with other weapons of a Roman taste, appeared, even as the decor around them shifted from the stern austerity of a court to something more ancient. More brutal.

"Since you're so fond of the question, who can beat who…" Craig said, energy sparking off of his hands as he reached out into the air, tracing the shapes of large, hulking creatures with wings, scales, and fangs. "Let's see how this matchup works out! Trudy and the Doctor versus the Monster Mash!"

"It's full of drawings," Rose said, watching scribbles take over the pages, even between scrawled snippets of a child's life events.

'June 15th - Teaparty w/ Trudy, there was a dragon and a princess…' was comprehensible enough, even with a child's crayon drawing of said events crowding out the text into a little ball and eating up the last few consonants. There was a small orange headed stick figure in a blue shirt, while a pink dress with a crown grinned away… and a vague red blob sat between them, smiling with a jagged mouth and hot pink eyes.

The next page was a storm of flowers springing from a thorny thicket, even as the orange headed stick figure crawled its way through, the red blob just ahead of it, grinning all the while.

"Yes, Craig… loved to draw when he was young," Mrs. Phillips said. "...you should try August."

Rose dutifully turned the pages, only giving the most cursory attention to the drawings and entries until she found the right one - a nearly full two page spread of scribbles that scrunched the paper like the artist had tried to rip the pages out entirely before changing their mind at the last moment.

"'August twelfth'," she read, carefully picking through the mess. "'Trudy said I shouldn't tell mom about the bruises. That I should lie. So I said I fell out of the tree in the yard. I don't know if mom believed me, but I couldn't tell her it was Trudy.' But… wait, I thought that Trudy wasn't…"

"She's not. She's… she's entirely imaginary. But that didn't stop her from telling Craig to do things. To slam his head against the door frames, to burn himself, to throw himself down the stairs… the way the psychiatrist put it, it was supposed to be punishment. For being bad. But I hadn't done anything and… and my husband…" Mrs. Phillips looked down. "Flaws aside, he wouldn't have done anything like that to Craig."

Miss Lloyd looked as disturbed as Rose felt. "That is… an entirely extraordinary case," she said. "I would assume that… schizophrenia was discussed, or that Trudy is some sort of malformed coping mechanism - perhaps a trauma response to the death of a sibling or a loved one - but I know that Craig is an only child, so that couldn't be it..."

Mrs. Phillips swallowed. "That's… not entirely true," she said.

Rose turned another page in the journal, finding a picture of a family - with a messy red blob grinning up from where it half covered the little boy, shoved into the slight gap between him and his parents.

"You see, Craig was born a twin. He had a sister, but there were… complications," Mrs. Phillips finished. "Only Craig survived. And only just. He was a very, very weak baby."

Rose stared at the blob figure and its grin. It was subtle but menacing, despite being nothing more than colored wax on glossy photo paper.

"And Trudy… Trudy apparently thought it should have been the other way around."

Author's Notes

I have no idea how these updates are managing to be perfectly weekly on F.A.Q. It's beyond me. Some of it was pre-written, yes but I adopted two kittens and they are Huge Time Demands that also like to Bite Me along with the more expected feline style mess making, so I was expecting more delays.

Yes, this was… a very dialogue heavy chapter. And one that brought out a series of various soapboxes to stand on. The conversation about anti-hero migration and the real world environment that spawned it along with dehumanization of criminals was the oldest part of it - seriously, it was like, a month or so older than the rest of the fic, Because That's What You Get When You Ask A Comic Nerd Who Write And Another Comic Nerd Who Loves Studying Themes To Talk About Things When They Both Have Deep Thoughts About Socio Political History.

If it's any consolation, there's not likely to be another 'tract episode' soon - there tends to be gaps.

The bit about Rose's relationship with Jackie is based on… well, the TV Canon, obviously, but I was intending to do a more direct quote from the Rose Target novelization, but I couldn't find an excerpt to check against online and buying a copy just for that was impractical, both in purpose, financially, and with regards to time constraints. Let's just leave it at there's a Specific Vibe of tension that would make it hard for Rose to gauge where the exact line that proves 'abuse' is and why an entirely soft-touch, no criticism home situation would strike her as odd.

Miss Lloyd is referencing the Education and Inspections Act 2006. While I didn't do a lot of in-depth reading on which ways this act may have had less than stellar executions, the wording makes it clear that the opportunity for such was obvious and very feasible. As was the fact that recently I got to see a Brit post about how they understood the motivations for 9/11 after it was announced that the USA would have slightly better hours for streaming the upcoming new episode of Doctor Who (which, y'know, we could unpack six ways from Sunday, but this chapter has enough tracts already without throwing in the exploitation of Afghanistan for the sake of political games with Russia by both Britain and America for the last two hundred and twenty-five years), so clearly some people learned nothing.

Yes, there were a lot of conversations had about the different merits and nuances of anti-heroes and the factors that created them… because there are a lot of conversations to be had. Hell, we didn't even do all of them. The pleasures of having two comic enthusiasts who love picking apart characters personalities and motivations (and sometimes the background influences from the writers/time frame of creation, especially with the Comics Code) working together.

The TV License fee enforcement is actually rather drastic, as learned from this video here: Youtube - /QC7PJwIl2lY, which is Britain's Controversial TV Licence | Tales From the Bottle, by Qxir. You'll have to punch it in manually, since I forgot that FFnet Hates Links.

Yes, I think Kipling's 'If—' is overrated. I'm not saying I hate Kipling, I just don't like that particular poem and I agree with the critiques leveled against it.

Most of the conversation about Trudy's nature was lifted from the original comic, but the bit about schizophrenia is based on the actual symptoms displayed.