john.mainer

There are some pretty toxic attitudes about seeking therapy mentioned in this chapter. I was a soldier, and let me tell you that while the organization, like all military, law enforcement, and government agency has written policies supporting and encouraging seeking mental health assistance, the reality is that it remains career suicide.

Seeking therapy means admitting you have a mental weakness which identifies you to the team as a point of failure. This is STUPID. This is the exact opposite of wise. Seeking help when you are failing to cope is responsible, is strong, is preserving your effectiveness as a team member, but we will punish you for it. That is the reality.

It needs to change, but that is the fact.

Duty 
 
Therapy sessions sound like something that losers do. I mean, I remember when I only thought of myself as a SHIELD agent. We sent those people who had run into things that broke their body and mind off to therapy and told them that no one would think less of them for getting wounded in the field, even if the wounds were mental.  
 
Then around the coffee pot we would talk about “yeah, but thank god they aren’t on our team.” The stigma was real. Sure we told everyone who got messed up, and when you run infiltration on organizations that start at torture and progress through mind wipe and reprogramming, there are a whole lot of fates worse than death that up to ten percent of field agents will experience before they die. Many of those agents either end up crossing the line and comitting suicide by SHIELD or quietly having single car accidents with a telephone pole at 120mph in a straight dry road. Many more quietly eat their gun, or overdose on the medications we told them would help them get it together while quietly shuffling them out the door. 
 
Therapy with Emma Frost was non negotiable. She could tell who was too dangerous to be let loose around her people until they had themselves sorted out. You either did therapy or she would dispose of you. I don’t know how many she has killed, because most of those she kills will pass any coroner in the world as natural causes. Proving to the White Queen that you are not willing to deal with your issues, and powerful enough/proximal enough to her people that you represent a threat is a natural cause of death. The part of me that is a SHIELD agent and Kree spy cannot believe she arrogant to herself the right to decide who lives and who dies based on something as foolish as “out of control and prone to killing” as opposed to the morally superior version of “kill who you are told to for reasons that are classified above your pay grade and you do not need to know.” 
 
I had been programed both by SHIELD and the Kree to respect Authority without question, and that those who chose what orders to obey and which to disregard based on something as vague and weak as personal ethics or laws were both weak and traitors. 
 
Emma Frost calls them “functional autonomous moral agents”. Magik calls them grownups. Warpath calls them warriors. To Warpath, soldiers kill who they are told and hope their cause is just. Warriors accept the personal responsibility for their use of force, for every action and every hesitation, knowing they will never have all the information and that when they make a mistake, the blood will be on their hands and soul. 
 
Therapy in my case was helped more by my Mind Flayer abilities than you would believe. While every one of my consciousness was pre-programmed lies, and all three of them were emotionally stunted, the Mind Flayer had amazing tools for psychic surgery, for identifying, placing, and removing programming. Given their own programming it would never occur to them to fix themselves (supreme beings don’t need fixing!), but they have the tools. 
 
My human self became my “save file”. Sorting out implanted from real memories in my Kree and Mind Flayer consciousness was problematic. I need the skills and training contained in the programmed false memories. I cannot cut them out without losing the skills. 
 
My SHIELD human conciousness, a cover identity created by the Kree as the shadow to hide their own sleeper agent did not have any of those life saving skills. Its memories were not required for any of my core abilities. They could be trimmed to remove the bits only installed to make me a tool. 
 
The free thinking part of me, the Kree-Flayer that was Lovecraft, was built in that gutted shell. Biologically I was two different species, but the person I was becoming was built almost entirely in that totally fake human save file. Cut and paste, drag and drop, build yourself a human being. Blue, with tentacles, but a human being. Emma calls me a Gestalt.  
 
I had chosen a side. I was a mutant, and as Emma taught it, mutants were part of the human species. Mutants were humans, just ones that the majority of humans with power based on money, political influence, criminal organization, or inherited status find threatening enough to need to control or attack. 
 
I may have turned my back on the organization of SHIELD, but not their purpose. Who more than me knows that there is an alien threat? I am TWO of them! 

Therapy means taking responsibility for my identity, my choices, and my purpose. 

 
I am Geralt Lovecraft. A play on words, for a Gestalt of Lovecraftian horror, but it is my core identity. I am a Gestalt of three pre programmed lies that have chosen to become a truth. I am a soldier in a cold war in which no side accepts me as friend, and even those I would defend label as enemies. 
 
My therapist, my jailor, my educator and patron, Emma Frost the former White Queen of the Hellfire club took a long time in answering my question. She asked what I was going to do with my life and I told her. 
 
“I am going to defend humanity, whether they want me to or not. Does that make me insane?” 
 
She looked at me a long time. She was not reading me with telepathy. I was paying really close attention to the passive detection skills she had been drilling me in. However she was weighing me, it was not with the psychic skills she was beyond a master in, and that I was an overpowered very low journeyman with. 

 
She counted my question with one of her own. 
 
“Do you expect, or require, them to thank you for it?” 
 
I opened my mouth to shout “Of course not!” 
 
Her gaze stopped me, as I realized my Kree “Noble Warrior Hero” and my human SHIELD pre programmed boy scout both demanded and expected to be recognized and honoured as heroes for doing our duty. My Mind Flayer, being a recovering sociopath but with no programming deluding him that people would necessarily thank him for alerting them to dangers, revealing they had been deceived, and provoking dangerous confrontations with the enemies that had been beside them the whole time, had the conviction that we would generate equal parts hatred, paranoia, and fear from everyone we helped. 
 
I did not answer her question. Emma sighed and ran her hand through her long blonde hair while she thought. 
 
“Foolish, but not insane. Do not expect to be thanked, do not expect to be allowed to walk away even if everyone admits you saved the world. You will not be a hero, you will be a weapon to be disassembled, analyzed, and either replicated or weaponized as a single use expendable.” 
 
Emma said coldly, and an image of her facing five of her daughters, the Stepford Clones, born of her own DNA, created by her allies of the Hellfire Club as a final solution to the problem of what do you do about a telepathic member who will know when you plan to betray her, flashed through my mind. 
 
She at least looked human. There would be a lot less resistance to using me as a lab rat and weapon. I look like a horror movie villain, even to two thirds of my own mind. Which two thirds depends on the day, but to say I am don’t still have fears based on two warring biologies that make me a threat to everyone around me based on instincts and programming would be lying to myself, and that path leads ugly places. 
 
So. 
 
I am an army of one. I have a mission, to reveal to SHIELD that it has been infiltrated by two different alien species intent on using earth for their own ends. I don’t actually know what the Supreme Intelligence of the Kree intend to use Earth for. I was a tool, a weapon, a sleeper they didn’t intend to awaken. I don’t know what the Skrull intend to use Earth for. What I do know is that SHIELD is Earths defence against the alien threat, and it has been compromised at the highest level, and I am the only one who knows.  

SHIELD is hunting for me. The Skrull are hunting for me. The Kree are most likely hunting for me. I haven’t a clue if other Mind Flayers will come after me, but I know that my dead progenitor was sent, which implies a command structure, to harvest Hydra’s manufactured superbeings. 
 
I had no idea how to go about warning SHIELD. Every approach to SHIELD points of contact that I could think of that I discussed with Echo, Warpath and Magik they quickly spun into at least three different capture scenarios. 
 
You would think being a grown ass man with two different memory sets of commando and infiltration training I would be an expert. Let me tell you, sitting in the gym pumping iron with my tentacles while I work the stairmaster and Echo gives me a mind blast every time I cheat and try to use my telekinesis to cheat my tentacle workout and spit balling approaches, I learn the gap between the best SHIELD can do, and what the surviving New Mutants and Hellions consider first glance off the cuff suggestions. 
 
It was Warpath who finally gave me the solution when he bailed me out from an overestimation of my bench press ability. As he took the weight (700kg is too much, I cannot lift it) and set it back on the rests he quietly solved my problem. 
 
“There is no way I can infiltrate SHIELD and not end up locked in a lab someplace getting experimented on, unless I get killed before I can warn anybody.” I complained. 
 
Warpath made lifting 700kg look easy, as he did’t even have to breathe hard to do it. He replied with a shrug that did not even sway the heavy bar as he settled it on the rests. 

 
“Infiltrate Hydra, then find SHIELD who infiltrated them, or wait until they snatch a SHIELD agent and simply steal them. Easy-peasy.” Warpath said with a shrug. 
 
Echo, Magik, and Warpath shared a glance and a nod. 
 
You have got to be joking. I am going to try to save SHIELD by infiltration Hydra. 
 
I read the book on infiltration tactics at SHIELD. I read the footnotes. I read the source material. I even watched the video lectures of optional talks from field agents in SHIELD on advanced techniques. No one every suggested the way to seek contact with the CIA is to infiltrate the KGB and see who the CIA has snuck on the inside. 
 
I am new to being technically sane, and according to my therapist, Echo, Magik, and Warpath are all more stable and fully integrated personalities than I am. By any measurable definition saner than I am. 
 
I guess it's just me that thinks this idea is crazy. What do I know? I am a Smurf space squid who thinks he’s human.  
 
I have a plan to save the world. Step one. Infiltrate Hydra. 

I mean, it has to go better than last time!