A person is always divided.
On a basic level, a person is divided as well as united based on their emotions. Sadness, happiness, anger, rage, contentedness, we are all a veritable mess of feelings in a raging cyclone that must continue to pivot as the daily doldrums come, least we be left to rot. You cannot choose to be one thing or the other just as one cannot choose to be healthy or sick, but these are our governors. They push our buttons and pull the strings on our perception of reality. Such a fickle thing; we are born into this universe, thrust right out of the ether of the great unknowing before our lives begin, only to be left drowning within stews of chemicals in our pathetic little monkey brains. Such is our division based on intricate science.
In terms of fate, it's known as 'the paths not taken'. We wonder, constantly, about who we might be if we turned left instead of right at that corner, or we went up the stairs instead of down, or any other plethora of decisions to shape our destiny. Every single mistake, every single victory, every absolute and inabsolute facet of our existence is the culmination of things done by us and things done to us. No person is too jaded a sculpture that cannot be modified with anymore, nor are any of us a fresh slate that presents nothing about what we've done and who we are. We are ever changing, amorphous, and inconsolable in our uniqueness within the human condition.
John Doe is no exemption. He experiences something far different, though.
Life had not been easy to this young man. Just living in a world of hardship, struggle, hatred and brutal prejudice is enough to drive anyone up a wall if they do not or cannot possibly conform.
When he even tried to conform in his own way, the world eventually caught up to him and shut that down. Living life as a cripple, one without powers in a world of superpowers, was nice for a while. Sure, the constant beatings and harassment were taking their strain day after day, but through all of it he found a comfortable place to be in. He even made a friend; her name is Seraphina, and although she looked like just another supremacist in a world of insane, deluded supremacists, she was different.
The thing is is that Seraphina, like him, was trying to break out. She wanted to be her own person and not a plaything of her mother's design, nor the perfect image of a master-race that this corrupt society venerated in the most powerful. It hollowed her out, the expectations and the privilege that came with being so naturally gifted with the ability to stop time. A prodigy that was due to become a leader and a reaper of the spoils of the great pitched-battle for dominance that was life itself.
When she met a defiant, powerless John Doe, she was shocked and disgusted. How dare he resist what everyone expected of him, to be compliant and obedient? How could he even hope to live his own life the way he wanted and not the way others designed for him?
How could he do that when even she couldn't?
They were thrusted together by a class that wanted them to work together, and at first she despised him. His laze-about attitude, his nonchalant rejection of hierarchy and position. Survival of the fittest subverted by survival of the dimmest? Absolutely not!
But slowly, as he wore down her defenses and threw away the sensibilities and etiquette drilled in to make her prim-and-proper, the Seraphina of old was replaced. She saw a way out, a way to become not just a 'Seraphina', an angel of other's design, but now also a Sera.
Still gifted with immense powers, but she willingly squandered them for a new friend that didn't ask anything of her expect to just be her friend. And without even a punch thrown or a shot fired by him, a cripple brought someone tantamount to a god-tier down to Earth and let them be a regular, boring, fun-seeking human like he was. She loosened her sense of fashion up, letting her uniform become more disheveled and comfortable instead of meticulously crafted, and she cut her magenta hair down to size so she could get extensions for them with the same kind of yellow-tipped highlights as she got for her real hair.
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The Five Stages of Being John Doe
FanfictionJohn Doe has spent his entire life dividing himself between who he is now and who he just was. Compartmentalize the grief, the trauma, the pain, and let it be someone else's problem in your head. You're not a new person now, of course, that couldn't...
