Work Text:
Valentine did not consider herself a good person. At the same time, she wasn’t really sure what constituted one.
She had been raised on typical evangelical values- modesty, grace, generosity, forgiveness, etcetera- and thus was told that they were what a good person should strive to embody. She was 23 now, though, and she knew better. Even when she was a child, she’d had a stubborn streak a mile long- she had never been the type to believe something just because someone else had said it was true.
Still, it had been all that she’d known at the time, and as her upbringing continued to fail her- falling apart in her hands the closer she scrutinized it- she had been given nothing to take its place. All she could do was start from scratch, and look to the people around her for some sort of clue every now and then.
Valentine may not have known what a good person was or how to be one, but she liked to think she was learning more everyday. She saw it in the way that Penelope woke up before everyone else to get a headstart on putting together the day’s agenda, always aware of what needed to be done. She saw it in the curve of Willow’s warm smile as they spoke to the pups, a seemingly endless fount of patience. She heard it in the cadence of Sinclair’s laughter, how her brightness seemed to spread to everyone around her as if she were the sun itself. She saw it in the scrapes and bruises that litter Ash’s knees and elbows after she climbs an old pine to return a baby robin to its nest.
Valentine’s hands clench and unclench in her pockets, itching for a cigarette, or even for her old lighter to fidget with. She’d deliberately left it at home, as if it were supposed to provide a significant deterrence. As if she didn’t know where to find nicotine and a light if she were feeling particularly determined.
No, she thought, swaying idly on one of the tires suspended from rope nearly 10 feet off the ground, I’m not a good person. They had convictions, didn’t they? They didn’t turn to vices to escape whatever void was swallowing them up and chilling them from the inside out, inhaling smoke and ash and hoping to whatever god was out there that it would be enough to kindle something inside them. It wasn’t, but it felt like something. The illusion of warmth, maybe, the way frostbite makes you burn.
She thought of Sinclair, and their surprising similarities. Despite them, the latter still harbored many positive qualities, and Valentine figured that it balanced out in the end. Good people were allowed their flaws, of course. Valentine did not have flaws so much as she was a flaw- something so intrinsic it was probably embedded in her DNA. She flexed her hand and looked at it, observing the array of bandaids and scrapes and old scars. If souls existed, or anything akin to them, she imagined that hers must have looked the same.
There were many reasons Valentine kept her distance, and while this was only one of them, she considered it a fairly significant one. Her eyes settled on the bruise spattered across the knuckles of her right hand, dark and fresh- a reminder of what happened when she got too close. The memory sends a fresh wave of shame coursing through her, and she hunches in on herself as if she could hide from whatever may be responsible for casting final judgement upon her.
“I didn’t… I didn’t want…” She murmurs into the air, pleading her case to an invisible jury. Ash wasn’t fragile, and Valentine knew that- it was one of the many ways she had earned Valentine’s respect in the first place- but it wasn’t about that so much as the knowledge that Valentine was capable of hurting even the last person she wanted to. It weighed particularly heavy on her. Maybe she had still been harboring some tiny spark of optimism- hope that perhaps she wasn’t destined to be alone for the rest of her existence- that the events of the previous day seemed to have extinguished like a flickering candle flame between the universe’s callous fingertips.
And yet… she was still here, wasn’t she?
Valentine was still here, in these woods, in this godforsaken camp. Perhaps it was a testament to how little she valued herself, that she had turned down an escape not one, but three times. There’s no telling where I would have ended up, she reasoned, but it sounded hollow even to herself. Valentine knew the real reason she had stayed. It was a stupid, sentimental, infuriatingly childish reason- yet it had still been enough to keep her here, like an invisible but surprisingly sturdy tether. Fishing wire that would no doubt end up wrapped around her throat and choking her in the end.
“So be it,” Valentine exhaled into the night wind, and it carried her words further away into the forest for safekeeping, like a promise. An oath.
She wasn’t a good person- that’s why she needed to protect the ones who were.