Crossing a Personality's Borderline

Mirror and Image

Author's Note: This isn't fanfiction. Well, it is – it's fiction based on a show that we're fans of – but we don't consider this fanfiction. The order is different, the context is different, the details are different, but everything that Pidge's Mom says/does/behaves are things that we experienced. This was a story that needed to be written – not for the readers but for ourselves - and for all the fandoms in the world Pidge was the only one to offer us a voice. Take that as you will.

Loss of Childhood

Katie and her brother Matt were told over and over again that they were lucky.

They were lucky to have a brilliant father who traveled space and worked long hours so there could be food on the table and they should be grateful they ate at all because there were so many children who went to bed hungry.

They were lucky to be intelligent and receive the education they were getting – they were going to the best of schools and they should be grateful that they could handle the pressure because so many children couldn't even do basic calculus in middle school and they were beautiful children that made their mother proud. So proud she made a point of talking about them whenever company was over, singing their praises and listening as all the friends and parents and teachers say Mom did such a good job raising them.

They were lucky to have the money to get their education and to live the lifestyle they had because money was the only thing that mattered to people and so long as you looked expensive people would take you seriously but go get your clothes at consignment we can't afford frivolities because all of that money is going to your education and you're so lucky you're even getting it.

They were lucky to have a mother that had managed to stay sane after everything she had gone through in her childhood because life is hard and life is scary and life is war and I'm constantly balancing between trust and not-trust it's hard so hard to be as giving as I am but I do it for you and I don't have to be this generous!

And, in the dead of night when everyone was asleep, and Katie and Matt looked at each other across the dark room, they would tell each other:

They were lucky because they had each other.

They were lucky because they shared the responsibility of being all-good children.

They were lucky because they shared the responsibility of being no-good children.

… They were lucky because they had a father who believed them when they talked about Mom.

Oh, when they were children they thought their lives were great.

Katie and Matt would take their stuffed animals and fly them through the air pretending to be in space like their dad, zooming around and discovering galaxies and nebula and black holes and blue stars and riding comets while mining for minerals. They bounced on the couch to see how high they could get into the atmosphere before Mom came in and started yelling at them. If there were afternoons when Mom sat in her rocking chair and Katie and Matt sat at her feet as she explained how hard her life was, well, neither child thought anything of it. It was the only life they knew and because of that they thought it was normal.

If neither of them could understand why Grandma changed when she "drank," because everybody drank (milk, juice, water, even soda if they were really lucky), it must have been something specific to Grandma.

If neither of them could picture what emotional abandonment was, they figured it must be bad because of how Mom described it.

As the two of them got older, they understood implicitly that there were things that made Mom mad. Not irritated mad, not frustrated mad, mad like she would yell and one could hear her through the entire house. It wasn't until they were at a much higher reading level that they understood one of Mom's favorite sentences when she was mad – You deliberately disobeyed me!

To disobey was to do something counter to her orders, that made sense since they were little.

Deliberate was a word neither of them knew, and when Matt learned it and rushed home to tell Katie, they were both deeply, deeply confused, because to be deliberate was to do it on purpose, and both of them understood very, very well to never, ever, deliberately do something to make Mom mad.

Katie tried to explain it once – Mom had been talking about something and Katie had missed a sentence or two. Mom started yelling about how she didn't listen she never listened nobody listens and I have to repeat myself and you deliberately disobeyed me!

Katie looked up and shook her head. "Mom," she said, "You're not using the word right – it wasn't deliberate it was accidental."

For the next forty minutes Mom explained to Katie in abject detail why she was wrong, and when Katie went to bed sick to her stomach she look across to Matt, who had been listening in sympathy from the top of the stairs, and they both agreed that correcting her would never be worth it.

Marrying Dad had been the second best thing that happened in her life – which never made a lot of sense to Katie and Matt because the fights their parents had were scary – and for days after a fight she was sit her children at her feet in the rocking chair and explain how terrible their father was.

They, of course, were the best things that happened in her life, because Katie and Matt understood her when no one else in the whole galaxy did.

If that was true, Katie asked once, then when did she say she wished she never gave birth to them when she was mad?

"Well," Mom explained, "I feel things very deeply because of my childhood. Everything hurts me, and I try to put it aside and let it go. I try to be magnanimous and not comment on the slights that are done to me, but the build up over time, and eventually get so big that it just explodes out of me. I'm a giant pillar of pain and all I can do it get it all out of me."

Matt, older than Katie, wondered at night (when it was safe) if it was normal to yell and shout about never having children over something like forgetting to clean the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher.

When Katie was old enough to name what she was doing, she labeled it the Mom Algorithm. She tried to break Mom down into her different functions and reverse engineer what the triggers were that made her mad. She eventually broke her Mom down into four major sub-functions: Waif, Hermit, Queen, and Witch.

By far, the function Mom spent most of her time in was the queen: the house was spotless and filled with rich furniture. All her clothes were brand names, they ate out at least twice a week, she got a new car every year. At parties she made a point of dressing her children in their best and put them on either side of her. Katie and Matt were bored out of their skulls, but they did it because they knew it made their mother feel good when so many adults told her she did an amazing job raising them. The two of them sometimes liked the excursions – it was one of the rare times Mom complimented them, but usually they were being careful not to talk about what Mom was like behind closed doors.

Mom wanted everything done her way, on her schedule, when she said so. This was the cause of many fights with Katie's father, because Dad was an engineer and wanted to do things a certain way. Mom was a biologist and didn't know the first thing about fixing cars or installing lights but by God if you didn't listen to her that was a problem.

There were very few chores she did herself. At first she did everything, but moaned and lamented that it was so hard to do it all. Katie, loving her mom and not wanting to see her like that, offered when she was eight to do the chores. By the time Katie was thirteen they did everything – cooked all three meals, cleaned the house Mom's way, cleaned the bathrooms, did the dishes and the laundry, did the lawn-mowing and gardening, fixed all the incidental things that broke and assembled all furniture that was bought. It never occurred to either of them they were too young for that much responsibility.

It was very important to listen to Mom. Nobody in her life listened to her and her children needed to understand why feeling not-listened-to bothered her so much. Her opinion was Very Important, and if anyone suggested something to the contrary, or even just said they disagreed, the next one to three hours were spent with her either trying to convince you you were wrong or explaining her opinion over and over and over again until you just agreed that she was right.

The biggest reason Mom and Dad fought was over her opinion. According to their mother, Sam Holt was a narcissist – self absorbed and quick to dismiss her concerns and points. One of her favorite sentences in a fight was "What about me?!"

Once Matt was thirteen the two of them were brought into Mom and Dad's fights. According to Mom they were very intelligent and mature for their age – and from then on they were trucked into every fight to explain Mom's opinion to Dad since Dad never listened and they were the only ones who understood her.

The second biggest sub-function was the Hermit. Mom wanted to be adored at the parties, but if it wasn't a party she wanted desperately to be left alone. She never answered the door unless no one else was home. The house had two answering machines to make sure nobody bothered her. Before the answering machines, when Katie and Matt were smaller and Mom had to answer the phone, she would hang up on telemarketers and spend an entire afternoon talking about how uncaring and cruel telemarketers were.

Going out was an event. Katie and Matt and Dad had to wait sometimes twenty minutes until Mom was ready, making sure that all her diabetes medication was packed, extra curling irons and hair products if the car wouldn't start and they had to stay in a hotel, three battery chargers for phones, printed maps in case the phones still died, snacks and food in case her blood sugars dropped. So much was packed that Katie and Matt had to sit in the back seat with all of it spread across their laps and unable to move until they parked - and waited another fifteen minutes for Mom to shoot herself with insulin so people wouldn't see her do it and assume she was taking drugs and judge her. Mom always had to pick the parking spot because Dad didn't always think (you're so insensitive you don't care about me you don't love me why did I ever marry you!) and would park where there was a five percent chance or higher of being seen. It was terrible parking in the city if they couldn't find a parking space facing a windowless wall of a building.

And then they would go in and eat for half an hour, and go home.

This was done at least twice a week so Mom's Queen function could feel fulfilled. Eventually Katie and Matt took over packing everything for their mother because they could be more efficient about it - but the price they paid for that was if they ever forgot something. Then Mom would scream about how thoughtless and insensitive they were for the entire drive home, tears streaming down her face: "If you love someone you try to be considerate to them! You try to think about their needs! Why didn't you think about me when you knew we were going out?"

Once they drove all the way to the coast to attend some kind of function, but Katie had forgot to pack a needle for Mom's insulin. It was an hour drive (with Dad speeding) back to their house and Mom cried the entire way home. Katie felt a pit in her stomach as her mother berated her, and through all the bags and packing Matt slid his hand over to hold hers in hidden support.

As compelled as Mom felt about going out for the Queen sub-function, the Hermit sub-function hated it. She found excuses to talk herself out of leaving, and if she did go out for something like going to a mechanic every conversation was reverse engineered for the rest of the afternoon to find out how whoever she was talking to was judging her. Natural pauses in conversation were dissected down to their subatomic level by their mother, and always the other party was determined to look down on her in some way. They went to six different auto mechanics and four different pharmacies and eight different endocrinologists because someone always ended up judging Mom, or giving her a nasty look, or saying something in the wrong tone, or were incompetent, or was too pushy… There was always a reason to change. Eventually Katie and Matt and Dad took over as many of those chores as they could so they didn't have to change again. Dad took care of the mechanic and went with Mom to doctor appointments, Katie handled all prescriptions and if anything had to be done at the bank Matt was just old enough to handle it.

Mom lived in terror of someone disrupting her sleep. She had never been a good sleeper, and even waking up at nine in the morning it took her an hour to wake up and two hours to get ready. What if someone comes at the ungodly hour of seven or eight o'clock, she would ask in desperation. Your father's not here and I would have to answer the door and then I'd be up for the day and I'm already so tired and sleep is so hard to come by! I'm so overwhelmed!

Nobody ever came.

She utterly hated having people over at the house to fix something. She couldn't leave them alone for fear of them stealing something or breaking something but she knew they were going to judge her some way for doing so. Katie and Matt, when they were old enough, were sent to whatever room the handyman was in to watch and make sure they didn't do anything. Both of them learned a lot about building codes and procedures and the rules that existed to be certified to do something, which was interesting, and both of them learned how to give glowing reports of the work that was done and how to couch things that weren't fixed in one day in terms so that Mom didn't react (too) badly. The best times were when Dad was home and he took care of it.

The Queen and the Hermit sub-function were the biggest, but Matt told her about the third sub-function, the Waif. Katie had to ask what that word was, and Matt explained it was a person who would would be knocked over by a gentle breeze. This was the part of Mom, Matt explained, that hated herself.

Mom saw herself as a weak person. (She was, but it was never safe to tell her that.) She knew she wasn't strong and utterly hated that things affected her so deeply. When the mood struck her she could talk for hours about all of her faults and explain how she got them. Her childhood was terrible:

Grandma and Grandpa divorced when she was ten. A few years later a strange man slept in Grandma's bed, and after six months Grandma told Mom that she had remarried, but kept it from her children in case her children tattled to the rest of the family. Grandma and Step-Grandpa both enjoyed drinking, and that was the reason that Katie and her brother never saw them. Grandpa only wanted his children to entertain him, and was never once responsible for their care. He loved it when it was his turn for custody of Mom but never once paid alimony – whatever that was. Mom was bullied all through school, told she was over sensitive and petty. There were days when she just sat on her front steps as a child and disappeared into her own mind where she pretended her life was better than what it was. It was step-Grandpa who noticed something was wrong and insisted she go to Guidance.

Mom felt like she never measured up, felt stupid and ugly. A family member once told her that her hair looked like the rats had been chewing on it, she wore make up at the age of twelve to try and look passable, she dreaded her mother picking her up if she had been drinking. She was locked out of her home by her mother when she had to put out the garbage simply for putting on a rain hat. There were dozens of little snapshots of her life that Katie and Matt learned before they really understood what a lot of it meant.

All of this explained why she was the way she was, and why she hated herself so deeply, and since she had never received understanding in her life she needed it more than most people.

"If I'm hurting," she would say, "Wouldn't the natural reaction be to say, 'Why are you hurting?' Wouldn't the natural reaction be to ask what happened to make me so upset? Wouldn't the natural reaction be a desire to help me?"

"But," Katie said, "Isn't it really hard to feel that when when you're saying mean things?"

"But you caused it!" Mom shouted, and Katie realized too late she had said the wrong thing. "If you don't want me to say those things then don't cause it! I will repeat: you have to be more understanding! I don't know where I went wrong raising such and unfeeling, uncaring, disrespectful daughter! Maybe I should have beaten you as children, then you would have learned to show respect! After everything I've done for you!"

(Matt held her that night as Katie felt like the worst person on earth.)

That, that was the fourth sub-function and the most scary. That was the Witch. Named after a certain movie that took place in the magical land of Oz, the Witch protocols were activated whenever Mom was mad. Katie and Matt learned as fast as possible to never be the target of the Witch, and when the inevitable happened and either of them did become the target, the safest thing to do was to keep the head down and be passive, agree with every hurtful thing that came out of Mom's mouth, apologize for the transgression, grovel at her feet and beg forgiveness. Eventually Mom would leave, and the other sibling would come in and just sit, silent support as the other felt like less than nothing.

Passivity was the safest course of action, but Dad never seemed to learn it. He kept trying to point out when his points were valid (which was the worst thing to do) or accuse Mom of taking after her parents (which always got her angrier), and the two would scream and yell at each other until Mom pulled one or both of them into a fight to tell Dad she was right and to make him listen.

Katie and Matt lived in terror of the Witch sub-function ever being activated, and went out of their way to make sure they never triggered it. That was why the Mom Algorithm was even developed in the first place.

Most of the time Katie and Matt were all-good children. They were smart and hyper-self-sufficient (there simply was no other option), they listened to Mom when she needed them to and they were huge sources of pride. If things when wrong at school it wasn't their fault - it was the teacher's, or the classmates, or the coaches. It was only a matter of time before the proverbial shoe dropped, however, and Katie and Matt did everything they could to maximize their time as all-good children.

But, in the end, it was all a lie, because eventually the Witch would come out and let them know what she really thought of either of them.

Once, Mom was explaining yet again why Katie didn't support her and Katie had the audacity to ask, "Mom, do you understand that it's frustrating to tell you multiple times a day that I understand and support you and then have you tell me I don't?"

"Well I'm sorry!" Mom shouted, suddenly angry. "I should know better than to come to you! I'm tired of repeating myself; I say the words over and over!" For the next two hours Katie was lectured on everything she did wrong in her life, and the only safe option was for her to sit there and take it, nod and agree with everything her mother said, until the woman had talked herself out and Katie apologized for not being a good enough daughter. For the next three days she was no longer the all-good child, she was the no-good child: cold looks, snide comments and back-handed digs, deliberately asking Matt for help since Katie won't do what needs to be done. Katie passively accepted it, head down, and Matt very carefully – when Mom wasn't in the room and it was safe – would rub her shoulders or nod his head. Both of them had their turns at no-good children, both of them understood the only way to survive it was to quietly take it and never once say anything contrary to to Mom.

This was their lives. This was how Katie and Matt lived, and they didn't know anything else, didn't understand that it could have been, should have been anything different. As children they would watch TV, see all the cartoon Moms that were sometimes embarrassing or sometimes clueless, all the cartoon Moms that universally without deviation looked out for the cartoon children's needs first and let them be what they needed to be, and Katie and Matt wondered why the shows always got it so backwards. Mom's didn't look after the kids, kids look after the moms.

Katie had dim memories of a parent meeting at school. It must have been for Matt, because she remembered sitting on her dad's lap and playing with a paper clip, trying to see what shapes she could bend it in while all the adults talked. She remembered looking at Matt and seeing him fiddle with his glasses, a bad sign.

Matt, older, explained why the parent meeting had happened: He had been explaining his morning to his teacher – Mom had been mad that he had forgotten to tie his shoes before running out the house and had tripped on the grass. Mom had come with water and band-aid and a fierce lecture about being careful. Matt had told the teacher that Mom wished he hadn't been born for all the fear he caused her, and the teacher had asked if that was something he heard a lot. He told her a bunch of stories about Mom, and that was why they had the parent meeting. Matt remembered the meeting very clearly, because Mom was personable and charming and funny and social. Mom explained what really happened and the teacher agreed with her.

Katie, however mostly remembered when they got home: Mom berated Matt for over two hours for the humiliation she had to suffer – imagine, going to school because you lied about me being abusive! (Katie didn't know that word yet, only that Matt was getting yelled at and was having his turn as a no-good child) Matt was ungrateful for everything she did for him and what she sacrificed to have children and how much she suffered for his sake. Dad tried to insert himself, to say it wasn't that bad, that the perception of children was very different than adults, and that turned into another hour of yelling at Dad, and with both of them being no-good all that was left was Katie, and Mom held her very tight and said she was the only one who understood her. Even at such a young age, the memory was crystal clear to Katie, because she remembered being told that and having the thought that she didn't understand anything. That was when the Mom Algorithm started.

Katie started coding when she was six, simple Hello World programs at first, but she found she liked code a lot. There was structure and grammar, all mistakes could be identified and fixed in a few keystrokes, and everything made sense.

… Everything made sense.

Heaven was when Dad came home from space. He always took a year between travels – something the press adored because he always told them it was to spend time with his family. Mom loved it too, good optics and kept him in the limelight – nobody could judge him and by extension her if he said things like that. He would spend that year teaching at Galaxy Garrison, the most elite space program in the world, and would always be home by three o'clock on the dot. He gladly took over everything that needed to be done in the house, letting Katie and Matt be children and giving them the time to play. He was the buffer, running interference for Mom and being her primary source of stimulus as Katie and Matt could risk going over to friend's houses, or stay after for computer lab, or tutor high school students in trigonometry and calculus, fun things they were too responsible to do while Dad was away and Mom needed them.

Sometimes, Dad would look at his two children and simply nod, and both of them understood: He knew exactly what Mom was like, and he was here not for the family but for them, to spare them in whatever way he could before his work swept him away again. Very carefully, in the early morning when Mom was still asleep, the three of them would talk downstairs in whispers so Mom wouldn't have the off chance of hearing them.

"Can she help it?" Matt asked once. "Can she really not control herself? Does she have to say all those things?"

"The answer to that is yes and no," Dad replied. "Her feelings, the emotions that cause all those reactions, they can't be controlled. She is right when she says her childhood hurt her, but her behavior can be controlled, and that's what we have to try and teach her."

It was cold comfort, Katie and Matt were both old enough to understand they they weren't trained for this: Mom needed more than either of them could give. They were her constant cheerleaders, always trying to promote positive self esteem, telling her how to feel good about herself and praising the smallest things she did to try and make her feel better. They listened and offered advice on her childhood, tried to get her to see things differently and understand herself better. They were... they were her therapists, and neither of them had even entered high school.

They tried. They tried very, very hard.

But it was never enough.

Mom and Dad's relationship was... rocky. Dad never talked about it because, he explained when he was home, children didn't need to know the blow by blow of their parent's grown-up lives.

Mom was, of course, not nearly so protective of them. Since Katie and Matt were her only sources of emotional support, she went to them for everything. Mom and Dad often fought at night, and the next morning when Dad left for the Garrison she would pull them to her rocking chair and explain what happened in the fight. It always started the same way: Dad didn't listen to something Mom said, because Dad never listens, because Dad didn't love her the way she needed to be loved.

"There's a narcissism about him," she said, "He's always thinking about himself first. He doesn't think of others, and I don't think he ever thought of me."

Mom's way to break through his selfishness was to deploy her children as weapons, to bring them in to fights and explain her side of things, giving her a numbers advantage. (Dad always apologized to Katie and Matt when they were dragged in, he never wanted them to know about their fights but nobody could control Mom.) Matt figured out quicker than Katie to very quickly go to bed when their voices got loud and pretend to be asleep as soon as their lights were out. They had to listen to the yelling and sometimes screaming – and sometimes pretending wasn't enough, Mom would open the door at one or two in the morning and drag them out of bed anyway to explain to Dad why he wasn't listening to her.

If ever there was a person the Witch subfunction was directed at – it was Dad.

Katie hated listening to Mom berate Dad, because he was Dad, and Mom often said, "I know you don't want to hear it. You love him and don't want to hear bad things about him. But if you're going to love him you should know all about him. Because when the respect goes the love goes..."

Katie and Matt knew everything about their parents' marriage, even when they stopped having sex; Mom left nothing to the imagination and – because they were young and impressionable and didn't always realize that Mom's reality was... off – they believed their mother. Sometimes after a fight they would talk to Dad, explain how they were able to get away with never activating her Witch subfunction and how to deflect it when it was active but not yet targeted. Dad always looked his saddest in those moments, and sometimes all he could do was hug them and say he was sorry, that he was trying his best.

At the time Katie was still too young to really understand – if he was trying his best, then why didn't he do as they explained? Was that the selfishness, the self-serving narcissist that Mom always spoke of?

The marriage when from rocky to sour as Katie grew up – she remembered when she was a kid when Mom would talk about why she loved their father, but as she got older all Mom wanted to talk about was how horrible Sam really was – he didn't love her and probably never loved her – not the way she needed and not the way she deserved. She deserved better, but she willingly sacrificed a lot because the marriage produced Katie and Matt – and that was worth all the abuse their father did to her. "And make no mistakes," she said, "He is abusive. Just like my mother. Just like my father. I don't know how I keep finding them, but I put up with it because God gave me you two."

Mom was Catholic.

Very Catholic.

She stopped going to church of course because the priests were abusive and drunk on power and the Catholic church was little more than a cult, but Mom watched Mass on TV every Sunday and followed the Catacism to the letter. Katie never understood why, because according to Mom God hated her more than anybody else in the world. She and her brother would spend hours on end explaining that God wasn't really making her suffer, that God wasn't really at fault for Grandma and Grandpa and Step-Grandpa and Dad. Mom believed in God with every fiber of her being, and with every fiber she believed that God falsely-judged her the same way everyone else on the planet falsely-judged her.

Mom begged God for signs, for ways to cope with how hard her life was, and He never answered her. Eventually she stopped praying, because God doesn't listen to me, and instead asked her children to pray for her, He seems to listen to you, and maybe He won't realize the prayers are from me so He won't laugh at me and spit in my eye and make me more miserable.

Katie prayed dutifully, but she doubted God could be bothered with something as insignificant as one tiny human's suffering if He was busy making nebula and dark matter and black holes and galaxies.

… It wasn't like he answered Katie's prayers about her mother.

Matt was, of course, older than Katie, and the natural consequence of that is that he entered high school – aka Galaxy Garrison – before her. The summer before he moved into the dorms was spent making all sorts of plans. Matt was expected to call Mom twice a week, of course, but he promised to pick up for Katie even in the middle of class so that she had a person to go to if things went bad. Dad was in space at the time and they both implicitly understood that nobody would understand what their mother was like and that they only had each other. Matt was terrified that Katie would permanently become the no-good child without anyone else for Mom to interact with, and Katie was terrified that all the excitement of Garrison and space and piloting would make him forget her the way Mom always forgot them. Matt resolutely told her there was no way that was going to happen, and that he was going to tell her every little detail possible so that she could feel like she was there with him.

Katie kept her calls very sparse – she didn't want to burden Matt with her problems the same way Mom burdened Katie with hers. Everyday annoyances like going out to dinner or listening to Mom complain about something weren't major events, and Katie had promised herself that calls were reserved exclusively for when the Witch sub-function was activated. She couldn't quite adhere to it, however, because sometimes Mom was just so frustrating and she was left so exasperated.

Matt always picked up, and a quick motion of his fingers told her if he was in class or not, and he would put in an earbud – one ear only – and Katie would talk as much as she needed to, just vent about whatever was happening and verbally pour all the buildup of negative emotions out of her. If class finished, Matt immediately turned all attention to her, or if not and she finished, he would call that night and they would talk some more. Sometimes the verbal purge was all she needed, sometimes she waited on baited breath for his call so she could whisper-scream everything she couldn't in front of Mom.

The first time the Witch protocols were activated when Matt was away was because... Katie didn't really remember. The incidents that caused them were always so trivial and so out of the blue, she couldn't fathom how other people could remember the details of fights and how they started – there were too many to count. (It wasn't until much, much later, when she had a different name and a castle as a home, that she realized why her memory was sometimes a little blurry – it was a natural defense mechanism the brain activated to protect itself from prolonged trauma) But she does remember standing in the kitchen and the moment all Mom's anger turned with laser-guided focus to her. Katie hadn't been the center of Mom's anger for years, had learned to only ever get side-swiped by it or deescalate before all the subroutines activated. She hadn't done any of those things, and Mom had never seemed so loud or so scary as when Katie was the target. She backed into a corner, shoulders bumping into the walls as Mom shouted at the top of her lungs such terrible things – again, she couldn't really remember the details – and no amount of keeping the head down and being passive made it stop. By the end Katie's insides were shaking as much as her outsides, and once she knew it was safe she hid in her room and called Matt.

He picked up and all Katie had to say was, "It was bad." She watched Matt raise his hand and ask to go to the bathroom. The screen became a jumbled blur as he all but ran somewhere he could take the call and demanded, "What happened?"

She recited everything in perfect detail that would fade just a few hours later, unloaded everything that had happened. Belatedly she realized tears were streaming down her face, but her voice had a detached calm to it as she explained everything that happened.

Matt's face was hard as he listened, nodding and for a while saying very little, understanding how important it was to get everything out in the open before offering support. "What do you need me to do?" he asked. "I can come home for the weekend if you need me to."

Katie blinked, wide-eyed, as she realized that Matt had just offered to skip school, just go AWOL from Galaxy Garrison, in order to be there for her emotionally. The moment crystallized in her head, because her first impulse was to say yes, yes please, but that reaction was a Mom reaction. The last thing either of them wanted was to turn into Mom, and she would be damned if she stopped Matt from going up to space. She explained all of this to Matt, and broke even further, because for the first time someone was offering something she needed, giving it without expectation or payment, everything she had ever wanted from her mother, but it wasn't the right thing to do. Matt was upset too as he realized just what the two of them were turning into, and Katie would never know what they might have decided before a foreign voice interrupted their conversation.

"Cadet," the voice said, stern and making Matt's picture jolt as he fumbled to stuff his phone into a pocket.

"Sir! Captain Shirogane, sir!"

The image was darkness, and the noise muffled, but the voice was very clear.

"I believe restrooms are used for activities that don't require phones."

"Sir, yes, sir!"

"Hand it over, cadet."

Katie didn't see much, florescent ceiling lights and a strong jaw before the line went dead, and all she could think about was she had lost her one lifeline to living with her mother. Then her next thought was what kind of trouble her brother was about to get into. Then her next thought was to feel guilty that that hadn't been her first thought. She was a jumbled mess and she just stared at her phone for an eternity, silently wishing she could learn what happened and slowly realizing she probably never would. The finality of never talking to her brother again until leave sank in slowly, and for the rest of the day she was just... numb.

Mom's lecture, later, explaining why Katie had been so wrong and what she had to do to make reparations, never sank into her head as she just nodded and repeated the same empty promises of listening better and changing to become a better daughter. Her mother actually asked if she was okay, and Katie looked at her confused, a part of her mind shrieking at the top of it's lungs OF COURSE I'M NOT OKAY but I can't explain that to you because you'll blame me for it and I have no one to talk to because Matt JUST LOST HIS PHONE. She said none of those things, only mumbled that it had been a long day, and Mom hugged her and told her to lie down a rest – a motherly thing to say but empty of whatever emotion was supposed to be there, because Katie knew the sentiment was only temporary.

She wrote parsers after dinner for three different computer languages just to try and jump-start her brain, try and focus on her school work and hope that it would be enough of a distraction. She looked at the computer clock, mentally ticking down to Garrison's lights-out before shaking her head and knowing it was never going to happen again. This would bother her for days, she knew, before she could put herself together again, and she couldn't let that happen because her mother needed her to be perfect and she couldn't be perfect if she felt like this.

The clock passed another hour, and to her surprise her phone vibrated. She picked it up, confused who would text her at this time, and had to drop the phone and cover her mouth to prevent shrieking as she saw her brother's name on the message.

I'm back! What happened with Mom?

Katie started typing furiously.

HOW DID YOU GET YOUR PHONE BACK?

Capt Shiro gave it back. Just now.

… HOW?

he called me to office. We talked. He gave it back.

Katie was beside herself. She stared at the phone in blank incomprehension before typing Details! Her phone rang and she picked up, getting off her bed to close her bedroom door so Mom wouldn't have a chance of hearing her. She never felt so relieved to see her brother's face on the screen.

"Oh my god," she whispered. "How did you even get your phone back?"

Matt's grin was spread from ear to ear, eyes wide and for a second all he could do was smile at her, unable to articulate whatever had happened. "Sorry," he said, covering his face and rubbing it. To Katie's shock he was talking in normal tones. "Sorry," he repeated, "I just can't believe it all happened and I'm still kind of trying to process." And... did he just giggle? "Okay, okay. Do you remember a couple of years ago, Dad was teaching and there was this one student he just kept bringing up?"

"TS, right?" Katie asked, trying to remember. "He might have said the name once by accident; I sort of remember it wasn't Eurpoean and I didn't know the language enough to remember the syllables."

"I know who it was!" Matt said giddily, not even trying to be quiet in... wait, he wasn't in his dorm room. Where was he? "Takeshi Shirogane!"

Katie blinked, mind still fixated on figuring out where Matt was, but then the name washed over her and she stared at Matt's image on the phone in unhindered surprise. "Wait, wait," she said. "The superstar cadet who was going to do great things that Dad never shut up about was the same guy who was recruited for his first deep space mission before he graduated the Garrison?"

"Yup!"

"TS was Cadet Takeshi Shirogane?"

"Wasn't it so obvious?"

Katie had a different thought. "... And this guy gave you back your phone? Why? Didn't his record say he was, like, the most by-the-books person in the whole planet? That's what all the news reports said when he went on his first mission, right? That he was not only a star student but also he had the squeakiest of squeaky clean records for the commanders to make the recommendation, something like that?"

"He wasn't really that squeaky," Matt said, still with that shit-eating grin. "He told me he took a lot of calls for someone he considered a brother, that he understood."

"You told him it was me?" Katie demanded, incredulous before catching herself and switching back to a whisper.

Matt shook his head, and Katie still couldn't figure out where he was. "My phone was unlocked, he looked at the call log, he saw your name. He took the phone and I spent the whole day freaking out, you know? But then after dinner he paged me to his office and we talked. Like, we talked. He asked who 'Pigeon' was and I had to explain about you and why I call you that. He told me about this kid he knows that he considers a brother, how he took calls in class for the guy when he needed to; he told me how much he looked up to Dad and said he heard a lot of stories about us when he went to the international space station – Dad was up there at the time before he left for Saturn. And then he gave me back the phone and said to be better about deciding when to take a call. And then he told me about the roof!"

"The roof?" Katie whispered. "Is that where you are now?"

"Yeah, he took me up here and told me, he said, 'I'm going to do a bit of star gazing in an hour. I expect it to be private by the time I get up here.' So we have..." Matt's gaze focused as he shifted his attention to a different part of the screen, "well, we've got until the next hour mark before he comes back. He is, like, the coolest guy I've ever met, I hope he's teaching when you get here. Now what's going on with Mom? Has the witch function shut down?"

They talked until it was quarter of, and then Matt signed off and Katie held the phone, looking down at it.

She could still survive her mother.

What a relief...

Two days later Katie got a call from her father, Dad saying that one of the Garrison instructors had sent him a message all the way up at the international space station to let him know his daughter might have had a bad day. Katie was flabbergasted, both that Dad had put in the effort to make the call, and that the captain Matt had spoken so highly of was so... thoughtful.

She wasn't used to adults being thoughtful. Not in regards to her. She didn't quite know what to think of it.

Things were different when Matt was on leave from the Garrison – the whole experience changed him in a way Katie didn't completely understand, except he backed down from Mom less, tried to stand up for himself the way Dad did. It never ended well, and sometimes the entire visit was Matt being the no-good child, and Katie would have to listen to Mom drone on about how they must not be doing right by Matt, because he doesn't listen anymore, and he was proving to her that he never took her feelings into account. It was everything Katie could do to not react, because she and Matt spent their entire lives living and dying by Mom's feelings, and they both avoided every pothole and trigger and warning sign they could to prevent her witch subfunction from activating.

Matt explained that life at the Garrison was different. "You'll get it when you're there," he promised. "It's like... you're free. I mean, it's still school and the instructors and sergeants will still punish you, but it's not like here," he said, gesturing to the house. "There's no land mines to navigate. There's no jump-scares or hidden traps that make them berate you. Commander Iverson, he makes examples out of people – but it's honest mistakes, you know? Not petty little slights."

"Do you even hear yourself?" Katie asked. " 'Petty little slights?' Do you know what Mom would say if she heard that?"

"I do," Matt said, solemn. "But I understand now that that's exactly what it all is. She's wrong when she says she lets things go until they build up. If they build up then she's not letting them go, and that's not healthy. She's manipulative, you know that right?"

Katie blinked, not quite connecting "mom" and "manipulative" in the same way Matt seemed to. Her brother saw her confusion and explained.

"You forget to pick up her prescriptions," he said as an example. "You feel bad about it, right?"

"Yes."

"But is it the end of the world?"

"It is for Mom."

"Ignore Mom. Is it the end of the world?"

Katie shook her head. "No, I just have to go back and pick them up. It's a special trip but so what?"

"Then Mom finds out and how do you feel?"

"Miserable."

"And coupled with that feeling is the understanding, the promise, and it will happen again if you dare forget," Matt said. "That's manipulation. Heck, why do you even pick up the prescriptions?"

"Because it's hard for Mom."

"But why is a teenager picking up prescriptions for her mother?"

And, for the first time, Katie asked herself that as well. She had been picking up prescriptions for so long that it never occurred to ask herself why. Yes, Mom's hermit partition hated going out; and yes, Mom's queen partition hated doing things herself, but normal adults – regular people – picked up their own prescriptions. Normal people didn't need to over prepare for going out to eat, normal people didn't start yelling when they stubbed a toe and didn't start screaming if things weren't going their way. Their Mom wasn't normal, and Katie couldn't quite reconcile that sentence. Her mom was everything she knew, she couldn't fathom living another way, and yet thousands of people did every day.

Katie mourned for a long, long time, after realizing the truth. Matt held her the entire time, rubbing her arm and letting her grieve, giving her the time to yearn for what could have been, a dozen different child cartoons flitting through her head and realizing they were actually true, and that it was she who had everything backwards because Mom was so backwards.

"What are we going to do?" she asked, late at night when it was safe.

"We find freedom," Matt said.

"But how?" Katie asked. "The only way we're free of her is if she dies, and that's not going to happen for decades!"

"We move out."

… What?

"... What?"

Matt looked passed Katie's shoulder to the door, making sure it was shut and that the hall lights were still off. "We move out," he repeated. "I have an escape plan. Once Dad's back on earth we can tell him about it. When I graduate I also turn eighteen, remember? Legal adult. Well, why do I have to still live at home if I'm a legal adult?"

Katie frowned. "But I'm still here with her. I'm not even in Garrison yet, I don't know if I can survive this for another-"

"Not if you come with me," Matt interrupted. Katie blinked, slow to pick up what he was saying. "Wherever I move to will be small – like, really small; one, two bedrooms max. So small she can't up and decide to move in with us when she up and decides to divorce Dad. It'll be near the Garrison – that'll be the excuse – so you can focus on your schoolwork."

"But she'll flip out at even suggesting it," Katie said. "We'd be abandoning her the same way everyone else abandons her, it's the ultimate betrayal. Her witch subfunction would be active for days, maybe even weeks."

"Yeah," Matt said, a hungry gleam in his eye. "Too bad we won't be there for her to yell at."

The logic of the statement hit Katie hard as she realized just how profound something as simple as not being there was. Her eyes dilated at even the hope of never being in the house when the witch subfunction activated, and she was too afraid to think of it as anything more than hope.

"But what about Mom," she asked, still trying to figure out how this could work. "She doesn't do anything anymore, she couldn't survive without us."

"She's forty-eight years old," Matt said, voice bitter but also filled with backbone. "I think she can handle living alone."

"But-"

"Pigeon," Matt said, "I won't do this if you don't agree to it, but think about it okay? You've got a year to think about it. Dad'll be home in a couple of months and it'll be a while before he picks his team for the Kerberos mission so enjoy it."

Katie nodded slowly, and she dreamed of life outside of the house, outside of Mom, and tried to taste what a release of pressure that big would feel like.

When Dad came home from the space station, Katie urged Matt not to tell him of The Plan, of the move out. She wasn't ready to accept that escape was possible, let alone an option for her. She had spent her whole life just... assuming Mom would be there for all of it, and that Mom would yell and moan and lament and shift between her four functions for all eternity, until she passed away from old age – probably when Katie was, like, fifty or something and old herself. Katie had long ago resigned herself to the fact that her life was her life, and that nothing would ever change.

And then the Garrison selected Matt to join his father for the Kerberos mission.

Matt was equal parts upset and excited – the only other person who had been selected for a deep space mission before graduation was Captain Shirogane – who was also part of the team. It was the chance of a lifetime, but it meant that for the better part of two years Katie would be by herself with Mom, and Matt simply couldn't abide by that, because it meant putting off The Plan and he couldn't bring himself to do that to her. She wouldn't even be able to call him, contact would be sporadic at best, it took weeks and months for transmissions to reach earth from that distance, and he was so panicked over his ambivalence that Mom actually picked up on it.

"I love you, sweety," she said gently, putting a hand on his shoulder. "I love that you care enough to worry about me, but I never once stood in your way-"(that was a blatant lie she always stood in the way whether she knew it or not)"-and this is a chance that doesn't come by a second time. I'll be fine, I have Katie to keep me company."

Katie and Matt shared a look, because that might have been meant to be encouraging but it was actually a death sentence. Matt paced back and forth at night, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do. Katie was fine with him going – wanted him to be successful, but Matt just couldn't let Katie go through two years alone with Mom – no back up, no one to talk to, no one to help her stay sane. It wasn't until he got a call from Captain Shirogane – an hour long conversation that he had outside the house where Mom couldn't hear that he finally decided to go. He didn't talk about it much, said only that the captain had convinced him, and then told Katie in no uncertain terms that it was her responsibility to look for apartments near the Garrison for when they came back. He had already been looking, had a list for Katie to look at first, and said she had one month while they were on the space station for prep to call him as much as necessary.

"Don't hold back," he said, "Don't put it off, don't settle for an email. Get as much of me and Dad as you can, store up all the conversations and the memories, think about all the things we'll probably share with you, and use it to get you through it. Look at apartments, look up insurance, I'll leave all my financial information with you: plan a budget, make the Plan as real as you can so that when Dad and I run out, you can use it to get you through it. It's a countdown: two years and three months. That's how long you have to last. Two years and three months. Do you understand?"

Katie didn't, but she nodded and let Matt go to space with some semblance of solace.

She lamented for weeks that she wasn't going with them, knowing the special kind of hell she was about to enter and knowing that there would be no escape. Not like Matt and Dad got. She understood on a different level why Dad must have loved space – to get away from Mom.

The night before the launch they had a family dinner. Mom was preening over the prestige her husband and son were receiving and was too happy to notice the dour mood Katie had brought to the table. Dad did, though.

"Something tells me that you're gonna have your own crew someday," he said, "and you're gonna fly with them to worlds so far away we can't even imagine! I bet my bottom dollar you're going to be part of something that makes the whole universe sit up and take notice."

The words were soft and inspiring, like Dad's words tended to be, but the way he held her gaze the look on his face, made her wonder if there was subtext to the words: a crew of her own... worlds so far away... it was almost like he was suggesting her world would... would grow, grow to encompass more than Mom, more than the subfunctions and the fear of the Witch. Matt was so focused on getting themselves out of the house, but Dad said something in regards to her very future and... and she... she couldn't see what he was seeing.

It... It wasn't until they were gone that she really started thinking about it – not fantasize, but actually think about what living without Mom would be like. There weren't going to be any sudden chores she didn't think of, she and Matt did literally all the chores at this point, so there wasn't going to be a sudden influx of responsibility. Galaxy Garrison was a recruitment office, it took the best of the best and its payment was picking such students for their space program. Could they afford it?

That was the question that made Katie look at her brother's files. She saw the spreadsheets of Matt's projected income and the estimated bills they would be paying: water, gas, electricity, communications; home, vehicle, health and life insurance; retirement, food, and spending money. It would be hand-to-mouth while Katie was at Garrison, but once she graduated they would be raking in money.

… that was when it became real to Katie. That was when she realized escape was possible, even necessary, and her mind salivated at the idea.

It became her new project, looking at the apartments Matt had picked and narrowing it down, calling him up at the space station and making lists and plans, organizing and reorganizing and reorganizing what they were going to do and how they were going to escape.

Matt called it the Plan, and it was certainly an appropriate moniker, but Katie thought a more accurate name was Escape; they were going to escape their mother and be free to do what they wanted. God, Katie wasn't even sure what she wanted to do. She had always toyed with the idea of being a pilot, thought about engineering and information service technology, but now she could actually be those things, not a biologist like her mother had (not subtly) indicated she should be.

Every day she called the space station, and Matt or Dad answered, and sometimes she could hear Captain Shirogane quipping something, but for two weeks she did what Matt told her, soaked up their support and stored it away and got as many details from them as possible, before the shuttle was ready and their only contact would be thirty second video messages and emails that took longer and longer to travel to her.

Katie held her hope close to her chest, she picked the apartment she wanted and sent the intel to Matt, even managed to sneak away from her mother's prying eye to visit the complex and talk to the leasing office, getting to walk through a show place and picturing where her bed would go and what they would do for food and how to set up a TV and gaming center. She – very slowly, very gradually – carved time for herself away from the house where she would just... do whatever. She told Mom she had computer club and a robotics competition coming up – a blatant lie – but it gave her the excuse to say out as late as four or five if she didn't want to go home and instead brought her laptop to the library and continued to build her future.

And then the news hit.

And men in uniforms knocked on their door.

And there was a funeral.

… And everything changed for the worst.

Author's Notes II: As stated before, the order is different and the context is different but that is someone in our life.

More than anything else this fic is catharsis. We take something intensely, painfully, intimately traumatic for us and we pour it out all on digital paper to get it out of our system and try to turn it into something positive.

Katie/Pidge is as close to her character as we can stay while still using her as a mouthpiece for some of the things that happened to us. We didn't dream about galaxies, and while we did get interested in coding it wasn't until we were in college and we certainly aren't geniuses. We also very deliberately made a difference between Matt and Katie/Pidge - Matt is the adult mouthpiece of us, what we sounded like after entering therapy, after realizing exactly what our lives were like.

Katie/Pidge doesn't learn the name of what her mother has, because we couldn't get her into therapy in a way where she felt safe to talk about her mom, but we did leave a hint here and there, and will name it later.

Next chapter: Loss of Family. See you next week.