The Iowa group?
Well, there's Jackie, of course. No-one knows what she wished for, not even those in her motley group who have the dubious honor of being her 'friends'. For whatever reason, the topic just never comes up - and you might think that's because of who she is and how she interacts with people, but no, she's not that scary. It's been several years since the last time she had to cut a team-mate in half from crown to crotch without bothering to shatter their Soul Gem; these days, she saves the excessive violence and dismemberment for the people who are too smart to listen to her talk.
And we can't forget Willow. She was just so tired, you know? Why was it that no-one would adopt her? What was wrong with her? Was she too old? Too ugly? Too much of a fuck-up? Even her mother had thought she was unlovable, obviously, or else she wouldn't have been left at the orphanage. Sometimes she wished that her mother was actually dead, because it would mean the woman hadn't actually wanted to abandon her - but wishes weren't real.
Except that wishes were real, as it turned out, but even when the Incubator came to contract with her, she couldn't find it in her to reinvent her mother as a good parent. She just wanted someone to take her away from the orphanage, and protect her, and tuck her into her own bed in her own bedroom and read her bedtime stories and give her enough to eat. But maybe - even if she wouldn't, couldn't, shouldn't put it into words - maybe she also wanted to be better, maybe she wanted to be the kind of girl who would be adopted by a real person, and loved genuinely, maybe she wanted to be the kind of girl who wasn't an ugly fuckup who could never do anything right-
So her unreal older sister Siobhan came to the orphanage to try to adopt her. But she wasn't much older than Willow in body, and someone like Jack knew that Siobhan was only a few minutes old when she came for Willow, or maybe she was exactly as old as Willow was; all a matter of perspective. The matron certainly didn't know, but she could guess. She laughed Siobhan off, and told the girl to get knocked up if you want to be a teenage mother, like everyone else in this city-
Was it any surprise what happened next?
The funny thing is, Willow started out well-centered. She just had Siobhan to take her hand and guide her through Barriers and through the world. But it's almost easier for Willow to project Siobhan's pale shape than it is for her to keep her real body taken care of, even magically speaking. It had always been easier. What was the last time Willow bothered to take her own body with her, instead of leaving it in one of Riley's preservatives? Letting Siobhan carry her Soul Gem about is simple and elegant. She looks at the world through Siobhan's yellow eyes at all hours. She lives through Siobhan's form; she pretends she still needs to breathe, pumping Siobhan's lungs. It's almost like she is Siobhan.
As for Riley? Surely you can guess. It was such a sad story, perfect fodder for the gossipy nurses during the break in the middle of their grueling shifts at the hospital. That poor woman, wasting away. That poor girl, who has to watch it happen. It was such a sad story, perfect fodder for the Incubator to seize upon, a nice high-potential recruit with almost no effort whatsoever. Riley wished that she could make her mother better, and she did make her mother better. And then she did it again, and again, and again, and again, but the enchantments never stuck for long, and then the enchantments weren't enough, all because the sick was just too deep, and because she had the ability but not the skill. And then at the end of it all... well.
What was a girl to do? When you don't get what you want - when you fundamentally can't get what you want - you can suffer, or you can learn to stop wanting.
She never needed to interfere with her soul directly, but what did that matter when she could sculpt bodies like clay? A Soul Gem was just another kind of brain to shape, after all, and it was trivial to box up her Witch inside the gemstone, where it could never get out. It made such a din in her head, putting up protest, crying and screaming, what is oh my god what are you let me go i didn't want this please stop please i just wanted please please PLEASE-
She couldn't find it in her to bother to be nice. She cut out its tongue so it couldn't shape telepathy, and sewed its lips shut so it couldn't wail in the back of her mind, and then she nailed it down to the metaphorical backboard of her Gem. The senseless and helpless thrashing of the thing is so perverse it's beautiful. She's caught loveliness in a dry bottle, like her mother's old habit of putting pins through butterflies to hang their corpses on walls.
Her dumb team-mates don't think it's nearly as amazing as she does. Even Jack and Siobhan, who do dote on her so, seem to take in her enthusiasm with a kind of condescension. And Jack is quick to confine the burning spark of her creativity, even if she feeds that fire with all of the kindling she can scrounge up. Most of the others can't bear to look Riley in the eyes. But at least they all appreciate her boring healing magic and her normal enchantments, every last one of them but Natalie.
Natalie... where to begin? Natalie wanted not to feel like a monster. Her therapist always told her that she had to be able to love herself. Why would she not? She was so very much the kind of person that many would envy - which was sort of a part of the problem, because Natalie was a creature of craven envy herself. She wanted what came so effortlessly to others, and others wanted what came so effortlessly to her.
So she looked in the mirror and she - what? What did she see? It was like staring at some foreign, distant, lost thing. She was looking at something that looked like a monster, but it was what people saw when they looked her in the eyes. She wanted to get rid of the monster. She wanted to kill it. She wanted to kill the silhouette, the absolute border and shape of her sadness, but she couldn't even imagine how it could be done. The monster wasn't even quite real; it was there in her bones, but it was as much a shadow of being meted as it was a corporeal thing. There were boundaries and markings and divisions, and those measures and meters couldn't be defeated or escaped by any means that she could think of. Maybe they were all in her head.
She wished to transmute her boundaries. She wished to be able to change the shape of her sadness, her heartbreak and dim nostalgia, until it was all something bearable. She knew that some people in her life expected her to be a monster, and she left room for that. But she also knew that once she had experienced life in the world in a way that she could bear, it would be so much harder to go back to being a monster; it would always be easier to be something else.
And perhaps that was why her wish and her magic took the poisonous form that it did. It was easier to be whole, and so that was who she was, in the baseness of her flesh. And just as it was always so much harder for anyone to Transform and don her raiment, it was always so much harder for Natalie to Transform, because the monster followed her in subtle ways. Her raiment would be shredded time and time again only to be sickly restored, a hideous tatterdemalion that grew stronger and stronger and stronger until it eclipsed her own magic, until it eclipsed her own body, until she might as well have been the monster again, until she was more of an alien monster than she had ever been. A screaming itch, the scarred and raw nerve of her private obsession.
Natalie and Nicole and weren't anywhere close to being normal recruits as Magical Girls, albeit for different reasons. Nicole, perhaps, felt too old, even though most people would say she was all too young... and even if she felt old, she still felt like she had never grown up. How had she gotten here? What was she doing? Something inside of her had been beaten into shape and cauterized, and maybe it was because something had been done to her, or maybe it was because she was just of the wrong shape to fit in the world without the touch of hammer and anvil. She was pig iron, and there wasn't a fire in the world that could make her into ore again, or purify her into steel.
It was the perfect opportunity she had been given by the Incubator, worth the price of her soul. To grow up again, for as long as it would take in order to get it right. But what would that even mean, getting it right? What would it mean for her to grow up? She wanted the feeling of being-an-adult, of riding on top of a wave and being in control of her life and her self, she wanted not to be dragged away under riptide and not to have her body dashed against the rocks. But that feeling - if it isn't just a lie to children - will never come to her, not by her mere living, and so she hasn't aged a day since the day she made her Wish and became twelve again.
What she wants is a future she will never experience, and she wanted to be a child in a way that maybe she never really was to begin with, looking for a gray ghost, the color of anemoia. She fears the riptide in the wake of time, but even her team-mates fear that riptide more than she does, because they know that they could drown for a very long time.
Nicole always says they could drown until the end of all things, and only Jack ever dares to refute her.
] Take a cookie. Feed it to Mami.
