#understand.

BUT, if someone like MAVERICK can admit the adults in his life failed him, I can too.

This, on my laundry list of metas including her fears and why she's more afraid of people than she is things that are notably associated with what's commonly 'scary'; she doesn't find eldritch horrors, shadows in the dark, impossible creatures with dripping maws, or creeping eyes across the wall or in the pitch black of night scary. She finds people scary. Individuals. What they could do. Her parents primed her on that. (Thank you Shrike, our convo helped me realize this)

Because I find Charlie's psychology especially interesting (and nonetheless more intricately complicated which on one hand, pro because she's a highly nuanced character, and on the other, con because it makes all those little threads I mentioned struggle to tie in together; there are so many different parts of the grand picture that make her up entirely)

And a big part of what she doesn't understand, vis a vis her ongoing conversation with Husk and finds hard to rationalize for herself is the idea that there are people who cannot be helped no matter how hard she tries and that they need to find that themselves.

As someone who quite literally would put herself on the sword for the sake of 'saving' those around her, understanding that her altruism does come from a place of self serving ego to make herself feel 'better' isn't an easy thing for her; and that she can't force her views on other people i.e her sunshine monologue, because it doesn't work that way for everyone. She made it through her life surviving on that alone, and it is both choice as well as a way of life for her to be able to go on. If she doesn't have that, then she has nothing, she is nothing, and everything her dad told her, everything Seviathan told her and her peers growing up were right; It proves the theory correct, she is useless. She is worthless, her ideas mean nothing. And she can't BE useless.

There's a whole laundry list of why being useless for her is basically the near end, rock bottom, complete crash out. and her passive rosy ideals of reuniting her family are at the forefront of that.

Impossibly hard pills to swallow because she's lived this way for centuries, how does someone like her shape that into a way she can understand without it completely changing who she is as a person? And THAT'S fascinating.

She understands loss, she understands carnality, she understands the warring between kindness and brutalness, what does it take to be good? what does it take to be gentle? and the uncomfortable tangle between the two because she lives inbetween that tangle, she is both prey and predator, the lamb and the wolf who walks into the jaws of many others knowing she, too, has teeth.