better: (✗ at her side)
Erica Reyes ([personal profile] better) wrote in [community profile] assguardians 2013-06-10 03:46 pm (UTC)

ugh puppy eyes. also I am gonna tl;dr over here instead. TAKE THAT.

So, right now, Erica is definitely torn between two lives. She has this future life that SOUNDS amazing and incredible and let's be honest, she figures if it nets her a friend like Isaac who right now is pretty amazing, she's going to think that her future self is pretty rocking. The trouble is that she knows that's the version of herself that he's familiar with. That's what he expects to see and instead he's stuck with this version of herself. And she does see it as him being stuck with it. There's no one to bite her and make her the way he needs her to be. There's nothing she can do to try and recreate it, because she has no clue who that girl is. He could show her a picture of the Erica she becomes and I guarantee you that she would just have no clue how to even ATTEMPT to feel okay enough with herself to do that. She would want to try, but she would just be really uncomfortable with it.

So the big thing for her now is that she's trying to be more open and less quiet. Stiles in their thread right now even notices that "this erica is really quiet" and she's trying hard to push past that shell of quiet and wanting to be ignored. She's never had friends that would want to hang out with her and she desperately doesn't want to lose that. So she's trying to be the best version of "this version" of herself that she can be.

There's also the part of her that feels like she owes him something for hanging out with her. The offer to cook for him, to make sure he's eating, and she probably wants to clean his room for him - just to prove her value in the friendship. That she might not be the Erica he needs, but she can be an Erica that is needed. The fact that Derek referred to her as useless is really going to push that forward too, because she needs to make sure that she doesn't lose him because Derek doesn't want her around.

But she respects Isaac and likes spending time with him. The fact that he wants to spend time with her probably matters more than anything they actually do. The zoo, definitely brought them closer together because it was doing something and there were things to do that weren't dependent on one of them figuring out what to do next. It also showed her that he wasn't afraid to hang out with her in front of other people from home - like Scott.

Basically, her life is really confusing right now but she feels like she has this beacon that's showing her that things aren't always going to be this difficult and it's giving her the courage to try and find that on her own. I think that's a lot more important to her than the actual process of being bitten, because while that's the easy way, this is going to be a much larger accomplishment if she gets there.

The other thing that I'm really looking forward to is when I do canon update her, that she'll be able to balance the new self with how he treated her before that point. So, it won't be so much of a front/act for her. I think she won't have to push so hard and be quite so extreme in her behaviors because she will have had actual good moments in her life where she felt valued by other people.

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