(Untitled)

[thegooddrjones]

Who: Libby and Martha
When: Today.
Where: CES
What: Therapy.
Warnings: Flood and life trauma.

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[thatlibbychick]

Libby had waited outside of the Enclosure for a minute or so after arriving, which was a minute or two later still than Martha had gotten there; finally, she figured she'd wait for her friend inside.

As it happened, not only had Martha thought along the same lines, but she'd also shown up first.

"Hey," she called out, giving a small smile and a wave to match as she made her way over to the spread. Inside, of course, she was nervous and ill at ease.

[thatlibbychick]

"I could have gotten out!" she cried, taking her hands from her eyes to finally look at Martha. "My mother was the only one in the family who liked me. I could have walked away before taking the job with minimal interference, but I stayed. I knew they had nothing but contempt for me, and I didn't like any of them...but for some stupid, unfathomable reason I just wanted their approval."

Her hands were clenched so tightly that her nails were cutting crescent-shaped gouges into her palms. "You need to understand: they didn't have me institutionalized because they were worried about me. I was doing everything they wanted, just as they wanted it. They locked me away after I lost my mind when my husband died in a work accident, and I became a liability."

[thegooddrjones]

"Libby. you have abandonment issues, of course you stayed. People with them will put up with nearly anything in hopes that they'd love them someday. It makes perfect sense to me. And I think it makes perfect sense with the intellectual part of your brain as well." Martha frowned even harder upon hearing what came next.

Her hands gripped Libby's quickly, holding them tightly in order to try and stop her from hurting herself. "Libby, did being locked away help you? I mean really help you? Are you glad for it now?"

[thatlibbychick]

"That place didn't help me, but I'm glad. It's where I first got to see him. Hugo, I mean," she murmured. "He was a patient, too, but he's not crazy!" she insisted. "He can see things that other people can't, and I realized that when I saw David--my dead husband--talking with him. I could see David, but I couldn't interact with him. Hugo was special."

She wiped at her eyes; she was crying again. "So I reported his talents to my family, and they let me be discharged only a month after my admission...if I would follow him and report to them concerning his activities." She couldn't wipe away the tears fast enough; they just kept coming.

"And I did. He never knew I existed, and when we finally met, he had no idea of what I'd done."

[thegooddrjones]

When she said that Hugo wasn't crazy, Martha nodded quickly. She hated to see people in pain, and she was incredibly worried about Libby. When her friend started crying again, Martha moved so that she was sitting next to her friend and then she just held onto her quickly, wrapping her arms around the frail form.

"Libby, it was what they had made you do. You can't keep beating yourself up for a situation that you didn't have control over. The gun was loaded against you before you ever decided to go to school."

[thatlibbychick]

She allowed the embrace, but did not return it. She merely sat passive in Martha's arms. "No. I came forward with my discovery unprompted, and that's when they made me their offer. I hadn't expected anything from them in return...I was just acting like a dog, bringing something to them because it was how I'd been trained. They wouldn't have ever known about him if it hadn't been for me."

Suddenly, her voice turned cold. "Don't suggest I had no choice in any of this. There was always a choice. Being warped by my family doesn't make me innocent of the things I've done; for the pain and suffering I've caused so many people, and the danger I put Hugo in. I can't refuse to lay blame upon myself anymore."

[thegooddrjones]

"It doesn't make you entirely guilty, either! Libby, don't you see that. I'm not saying you're all innocent, but without their interference, I doubt that you would have done the things you did. You should take responsibility. But you don't own the whole thing. I think you're trying to punish yourself with this."

[thatlibbychick]

Libby laid her head against Martha's shoulder, the closest she'd come yet to returning the hug. "I got off easy, Martha. After I was murdered, I was made an offer to come here as a Warden. I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure I've done far worse than some of the Inmates here."

She sighed, not sure how to put the exact emotion she was feeling into words. "I came here to make up for what I did; that was my deal. That's really it. I should have been an Inmate, and sometimes I wonder why I'm not. It's like I'm the only person willing to hold myself accountable--even when Hugo was here in my place and everything dawned on him, he still forgave me."

[thegooddrjones]

Martha frowned quickly when Libby said that she was worse than some of the inmates here. The hug tightened, and one hand moved onto Libby's head as it rested against Martha's shoulder. She took a deep breath when Libby said that she was the only person to hold herself accountable. Martha wasn't sure what to do with that, but she spoke softly. "Libby, the fact that you wanted to come here to make up for what you did? That says that you have been redeemed. Really. I can't imagine any other inmate coming here with that attitude. Ever. And that's why you're not, I think. You want to fix what you've done..."

There was a pause before she spoke again. "And you want to be held accountable for what you've done, I understand that... but this. The not sleeping the hating yourself, the nightmares, the thinking you need to be punished... that's not being accountable. At all."

[thatlibbychick]

"It was enough to fear that Hugo would hate me if he knew the real me, before. Even when he let me know that he doesn't, I was relieved. I felt free. But since that flood, all I can think about is how much I used to be like that version of myself, and without that fear to fall back on

[thegooddrjones]

She listened to the explanation, nodding a few times as she kept stroking Libby's back and making cooing words. Having met Hugo, and seeing what a good person he was underneath it all, she could see why Libby would have the fear of disappointing him. When the hug was returned, Martha was a little more relieved, even with the tears that she had. "Libby, if you feel this strongly, you really don't need that penance. Really. It's a bit like Dumbo with the feather. You have the fear of falling back to that to fall back on. You have the fact that you don't want to be that person. Libby, you don't need something to use to punish yourself with in order not to be her. I know that because you want not to be that person so desperately. You have to let yourself see that."

[thatlibbychick]

She shook her head vehemently. "No, no, I need to feel something, some hurt...because I need to remember what I did to those people. I was never made to face any consequences for my actions. I got off free after making people suffer and it makes me sick, and I've done things here that are little better than what I did back then."

Sitting on a murder confession, trying to torment Saxon to get even...committing suicide because she couldn't forgive her own murderer.

"I can't let go of this...I don't have the right to let go until I can do something to deserve it. I need to save someone. I let myself get comfortable here and that's not what I need to do. This flood was a wake-up call."

[thegooddrjones]

"Libby, in medical school we were always taught one very important lesson: you cannot save anyone else until you can save yourself. It's why they tell parents to put their oxygen masks on airplanes, before they put the ones on their other people. Libby, listen to me... you've done horrible things, I'm not saying that you haven't... but we have to work on saving you before you can go off and decide this. Honestly." Martha was terribly, terribly worried that she was saying eight million shades of the wrong thing, but she didn't know what else to say. Not really.

Maybe she wasn't the right person for this, she thought as she squeezed Libby even tighter. "Libby... you aren't free. This isn't getting of free. Do you think you're free now?"

[thatlibbychick]

"I don't deserve to be saved. I don't even know how I could be."

Libby had always felt somewhat out-of-place among her fellow castaways, like she was some sort of monster hidden among them...although she never showed it. She hadn't known the history of anyone but Hurley, who was completely inoffensive and good-natured. She wasn't aware that she had lived among a former military torturer, a cop who had taken revenge in cold blood and gotten away with it, a conman who had destroyed countless lives and killed an innocent man, a woman on the run for planning and executing the violent murder of her father... She didn't know the Catholic priest she'd befriended had stumbled into his job out of practical necessity after being a crime lord and drug-runner in his native land.

In short, she hadn't known that she wasn't an anomaly. She hadn't known she deserved that second chance just as much as the rest of them had.

"And no," she finally decided, answering Martha's question. "I guess I'm not."

[thegooddrjones]

"Libby, if there's one thing that this whole place is about, it's about how anyone can be saved. Really. And despite the horrible things you did, you're not a bad person. You're just not. You made bad choices, you make bad choices, but that doesn't mean you don't deserve to be saved. You haven't gotten away with anything. You're not free of it... so now we start from the beginning, yeah? We talk about your past and the things you've done. We talk about the present... we can talk about whatever you want to talk about. Really. I'm not going to judge you. Or the things you did."

She swallowed for a moment, and she pulled away slightly, looking into Libby's face. "And I'm probably going to make mistakes. I'm sorry." Libby needed to be warned about that; Martha hadn't done anything like this before.

[thatlibbychick]

"I've made worse mistakes than whichever ones you might make right now," she said, "so don't be concerned about that.

"My Inmate's disappeared," she admitted; that was the other big thing that had recently started to eat at her. "My passport--my item--isn't monitoring him anymore. I feel like I failed him, but I'm not terribly upset about it...and that makes me feel guilty, because I don't feel like that's anything next to how badly I failed Dru."

She swallowed painfully at the lump that had built in her throat.

"I made Soubi assist me during the flood." Once again, she was equating the mirrorverse version of herself with her actual self. "He watched while I tortured Saxon, and helped me with Swing. Shouldn't I feel worse about that than I do about a year I utilized poorly? What does that say about me?"