Karen is still huddled on the couch.

Hi.

Got him back.

How're you doing?

Bad.

He comes inside. 

Can you do something?

We should probably not resurrect the baby. We did discuss it.

Yeah, I don't - I think there are things that are not that.

Would Karen like a hug.

Nodnod. Hugs are OK.

Alex told me what he knows of what happened in the alternate dimension. 

Well. That's good, I guess. It kinda sucked.

I would think so.

Can I maybe - make a confession or something -

Of course.

Everybody else's gotta leave. Or we do. I guess.

Is there a good place for us to go?

There's a basement and some rooms upstairs, I guess.

That sounds like she doesn't want to leave particularly. He shoos everyone else instead.

Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It’s been, like, I dunno, a year and a half since my last confession. I think. I lost track.

I can’t do it as a list, I don’t think, I’m just gonna - I know you already know most of it, but it’s -

We ended up in this other dimension that was like our dimension’s past. During the war you guys had against Melkor. So we were just gonna kind of - I dunno, sit around and twiddle our thumbs until I died of old age. And then Wishbone told us that he knew how to cast a spell for sealing gods inside of human infants. We didn’t, like, have a human infant, but we had the… raw materials. I guess. So we - we being me and I guess Wishbone and Ryan, Alex wanted to wait until the other humans showed up - we decided we were gonna do that.

So, uh - I guess, I convinced Ryan to have sex with me, which sucked, and then we had sex, which also sucked, because apart from all the normal reasons why you would expect it to suck I also have some kind of problem where that’s like the most excruciatingly painful thing ever, and I didn’t wanna tell him about this so I just kind of ignored him after and I think it made him sad. And then I got pregnant, which kind of sucked but really it was kind of less horrific than anything else that happened, and I learned how to do the ritual, and I gave birth to Ryan’s kid, and I sealed a god inside her by appealing to and making sacrifices of a bunch of other heathen deities. And then everyone else forgot what had happened, the spell did some kind of thing where it erased all of the evidence that it had been cast. And - Ryan sort of fell in love with his kid, and apparently Alex told him to marry me, and so he asked if I wanted to marry him, and I was like “I have to think about it”, and I waited for people to bring back some evidence that Melkor wasn’t out and about and the spell had worked. 

And then I killed her. And other people did other things and got the Silmarils back or whatever. And I spent like nine more months just kind of… rotting. And having feelings. And tangling the feelings up into worse feelings and watching those feelings rot. 

I’m not really - sorry, about any of this. Like - I’m sorry I ignored Ryan and stuff and made him sad, and I’m sorry I’m such a miserable excuse for a person right now, and I’m sorry I’m not, I dunno, more capable or smarter or better or able to figure out whatever the right answer was, maybe? And I feel awful and I kind of wish I'd never been given responsibility for any of it? But - given the person I am, I don’t think - I’m not sorry I made her and I’m not sorry I cast the spell and I’m not sorry I killed her.

So now I get to go to hell. I guess.

I think that the state you describe being in is not one where you should be drawing too many conclusions about how things will work out eventually. 

I guess.

It's just, like - I don't know. I think I broke something doing it. Like I decided I didn't care about being right anymore.

It seems very likely that you broke a lot of things. It seems impossible that they're beyond fixing.

I guess.

Or are you saying that you don't think you actually want to ask forgiveness for stopping Melkor?

I mean - it's possible that maybe there was another answer. A good answer, where nobody does anything wrong and everything turns out - not horrible. But I dunno what it was. It looked like there wasn't. And if there wasn't, then -

I hate being this person. I wish I could go back to being the one who left, but - she decided to make these decisions. And - until I figure out what the good answer was, if there was one, then - I don't really think I wanna become someone who wouldn't've.