meta review.

You like clarity and intelligent simplicity and you get frustrated at messy thinking. This can make you seem unreasonably pushy to some, but it is actually a virtue: you are motivated by a horror at pointless effort and a longing for precision and insight into how things and people work. Your ability to synthesise and bring order is essential in producing thinking which is truly helpful.

REVERENCE 

One part of you dreams of giving yourself up – perhaps just for a while – to a hero or mentor. In the right circumstances you can flourish by letting go of your ego. In your inner life, reverence plays out as a willing submission to your own conscience. In the outside world, you might get frustrated searching for something worth believing in – a country, a person, a company – but you will always be open to feeling respect, admiration and wonder.

INDEPENDENCE 

You don’t set out to be different for its own sake; you are more easily guided by what interests and moves you. You are more concerned about what is right for you than about the pressure to fit in. In sex you are more aware than others of impulses which are not entirely conventional. You know the value of selective irresponsibility, of forgetting occasionally about being ‘good’.

AGGRESSION 

One part of your character is anger in all its forms: frustration, outrage – and when anger is suppressed – bitterness, grumpiness, and bodily aches. Fundamentally, frustration comes from hope: you get upset because you expect your life will be more than a valley of tears. One way to deny aggression is to direct it inwards, as self-criticism. But you’re at your best when you acknowledge anger, and act it out clearly and in a focussed way, with honour.

             she has never been big on small talk.  elevator rides with hoIden are the worst  —  biII smokes quietly in the corner and grunts a  morning,  but  hoIden  asks questions about her weekend that he doesn’t want to know the answers to, and questions that he knows she isn’t going to answer. it’s why she’d rather take a cab than sit in the same car as him, and it’s why she keeps her personal life tucked tight under her rib. (there is nothing about the kind of wine she likes drinking, or the hobbies she keeps outside of the office which make her better at her job. there’s nothing about bowling or literature that makes her better at listening to the gruesome details of mass murderers. it’s all... obsolete.)

“not particularly.”     as if to prove, it’s the only information she parts with in that moment. wendy takes a long drag of the cigarette tucked between her two fingers and watches the smoke plume in front of her face before elaborating further:

          “in the sense that i’ve never been particularly forthcoming about anxiety.”     she’s never been particularly interested in letting people  in  like that. annalise gave as little as she could  —  wendy can only remember how she’d break her fucking back to try and get any kind of accolade from her mentor, or how she treated her like a petulant child when she didn’t. (she kept her on the hook. on the edge. it pushed her, further and further into the thrall of academia and education, so in some ways, she has nothing but thanks. but all she was ever looking for was some kind of recognition. acceptance.  respect.  it was all just empty words and empty wine bottles in the end.)

@metareview​

Sylar’s lips curled up into a smirk as Wendy walked into the room. They’d only met once, but she was an amusing woman, reminding him somewhat of Danko and Noah. And maybe himself a little. That DESIRE to understand was something the two of them shared, the serial killer was just…a natural. 

His eyes darted from Dr. Carr to the dead body on the floor in front of him. “Took you longer than I thought.”

           “i know it’ll surprise you,  but you are not my only objective.”     not one even on her radar, she wants to add. she has always said that she has no interest in wielding a gun and badge  —  she provides the background, and the trigger-happy g-men are the ones who go trawling through the trash to try and find burger wrappers from their infamous boogeyman. her involvement is purely academic  —  any toe-dipping into active cases is sincerely against her will, and through gunn’s arm twist. she much prefers them when they’re already behind six inches of steel.

her arms are folded across her chest as she watches on. it always seems to be the men  —  men argue and, without the use of subtext or even the mere attempt to understand one another, end up throwing fists and figuring it the fuck out that way. god, the fbi is tiring.

it’s starting to get late, and at some point, she has to make the conscious choice to switch from coffee to something a little harder. (not through any real  choice  in the matter, but because she’s been up before the sun has and these heels are starting to hurt the soles of her feet. the basement office is particularly dreary when the sun comes out  —  she sometimes considers it to be a vacuum. there’s no windows, no way of telling how long you’ve been chained to a desk, rewinding and replaying when a killer talks about how their crime made them  feel,  unless you stare at the clock on the wall that’s a little too loud.)

wendy has never considered herself staunchly counterculture  —  she disagrees with the way law enforcement handles itself and as far as fighting crime goes, she’s more than happy to spend her life in the basement trawling through tapes and putting together the research needed to further her own academic standing. her involvement with quantico is strictly on a  research  basis, and the more hoIden manages to infiltrate current crime scenes with their work, the more she shirks responsibility and focuses on the tapped-out transcripts sitting down on her desk. but the implication that she’s shielding a badge under her shirt and a gun down the back of her skirt is just the toxic law enforcer ego she was attempting to avoid.

              “i’m not an fbi agent.”     that is, she doesn’t own a gun. and she never has. frankly, she finds the idea repulsive, and manages to move out of range when biII unclips his holster and lets the heavy metal clatter down against his desk.

“and frankly, i find that more than a little insulting.”    arms are folded across her chest and she turns, unsmiling, to the bat. he’s more of a legend than anything  —  something almost entirely ethereal, but something more along the white-collar-crime lines which she’s used to than murderers on the tapes.

there are two disposable coffee cups  sat between them, both cooling and three-quarters empty and wendy’s sits like a black, cold stone between them and her eyes keep drifting from it to the wad of notes at her side. it’s not that she believes everything’s clear cut  —  they work in the grey areas of the human psyche that are entirely different from killer to killer, but they still have overlapping characteristics of bittersweet  humanity  that biII and hoIden try and tar with the same  sequence killer  brush bullshit.

     “it only doesn’t make sense because people haven’t bothered  trying  to understand it.”

it’s a throwaway statement, but wendy shifts her fingers through two photographs to reveal the one taken from the first step of the crime scene; she takes out the one of the body, and places it carefully between the two coffees.     “we have methods now  —  we have...  ways  of digging into the human ego in ways we never have before.”

she pauses, stares at the photo, and continues without so much as looking back up at the detective before her. (she does this a lot with hoIden  —  he stares with bated breath and she hypothesises aloud.)