After the last week and my ruminations on the hurt I’d caused through my real-life actions, I did something I’d never done in my life last night: I prayed. I made an appeal, noting out loud that life never works like this but nevertheless begging a higher power to turn back the clock so that I would never have accidentally set the course of events that would cause my dear friend to get hurt in the way they did. I even offered for my current self to “die” and that the past version of myself to be piloted by an alternative consciousness that knew better. I told myself that if tonight was the last night of “my” life, I would be eternally grateful, just accepting that in that case, undeserving sufferers would be made happier. I didn’t want it to happen for my own sake, but rather for the sake of others. Despite never once considering myself a God-fearing person, I begged to the God I never once truly believed in for that outcome. I woke up this morning and accepted I had to life with the consequences of my actions, to my dismay but to no one’s surprise.

Off the bat, that probably tells you a lot about the type of over-emotional annoying git I am in real life. Never meet your heroes.

Even when one is thinking for the feelings of others, it’s sometimes hard to come to terms with the fact that a terrible, terrible event happened. It’s awful knowing something terrible has occurred and that we have to just accept it and move on in life. Grief is often framed as that in its purest form, but I’ll go a step farther. Sometimes it can feel even worse to know someone is negatively affected for the rest of their life and will have to carry that, especially thanks to your own actions. Sometimes, that feels even worse than if someone has died. At least in the latter case, their suffering is over. It can feel unfair that they don’t get another day of life, or that you couldn’t spend any more time with them. Maybe you weren’t going to spend any more time with them, but even knowing they’re gone still feels deeply unfair. Maybe this even applies to people you never met. Maybe this could even apply to people who never actually existed in the first place, but just feel so real that their death still feels unacceptable. Especially when someone could wield the power to fix it.

Spoilers for Consequences and The Good The Bad and the Molly below.

You already know where this is going. Just like how I prayed to a God I don’t believe in, the most common comment on Chapter Twenty of Consequences pleads for me, the only person with the powers of canon, to turn back the clock and bring Nicole Baker back to life; to write an alternate ending where she’s fine. I am going to save you the empty comfort of a “maybe” and tell you right now that I have zero plans to do that, because if I did that, it would be erasing not only the impact of her death in the first place, but, to be frank, the whole point of Consequences.

If death can be erased, it erases the point of dying in the first place. If Nicole can be brought back, why did her death impact you so much? If Nicole never killed herself, were any of her spirals were indicative of anything? And most importantly, if I rewrite Consequences’ ending to bring her back to life, where are we branching off from? The end of Chapter 19, where she ruined her hand for life and told Adam she loved him in a state of manic near-incoherent euphoria? Would that make everything better? Maybe you’d want it to be taken a little farther back to prevent that, too. Not only would that erase the impact of those moments, but it would then imply she got taken off of the Council and booted out of school, and it didn’t impact her as much as it… should have. Is that truly a better ending to Consequences?

And here’s an uncomfortable question: if Consequences, of all stories, with its name, ended with everything terrible happening to Nicole, and she shrugged it off and lived happily ever after with Adam… would you truly see nothing wrong with that?

Denial is a powerful tool, and it’s the first stage of grief. With both of those things in mind, of course readers grieving Nicole would, first and foremost, deny the inevitability of Nicole’s death, just as I denied that my own consequences would stay permanent. They would bargain with me, asking me to write an alternative ending, ignoring how… absurd such an ending would look after the first nineteen chapters. They’d get angry, they’d get sad. These are reasonable reactions. Still though, my favorite comment came from Paul Reynolds:

Goodbye Nicole, sleep well.

Really sums it all up, doesn’t it? Quite the powerful statement of acceptance. No one is stupid or even naive for wanting a happy ending for Nicole. But much like real death, and much like real pain, it simply isn’t… fair to just pretend like something like that can be undone.

In this way, my most unrealistic story is The Good The Bad and the Molly. Not because of its more outlandish choices, like the sexsomnia or the 12-year-old genius/sex therapist. Well, not just because of those. The most unrealistic thing about that story is how in a few short years, a girl forgave someone who assaulted her with zero baggage. It’s almost comically naive. Even the fact she decided to keep talking to the guy within months is… unusual. I’ve seen relationships like that before, but it always leaves… scars. I’ve seen confusion and even anger directed at me for having that story be my only longform story with an unambiguously happy ending. And… yeah. Reading Consequences and then Molly and seeing the difference in treatment should make you upset. Aaron doesn’t deserve a happy ending.

And yet, Aaron got a happy ending, and Nicole didn’t. What can you do about that? Nothing.

People seem to enjoy that my stories take place in a self-contained universe, and that a lot of my stories feel true-to-life. And what’s more true-to-life than the fact that a person that made clear mistakes like Aaron ultimately got to get away with what he did, whereas Nicole (no doubt a flawed and toxic character in her own right) did not? We all knew we were reading Consequences and expecting Nicole to ever get a happy ending were on a wing and a prayer. And we’re not done seeing that kind of injustice, even on a small scale, in my stories. Heck, I think it’s coming up faster than we expect. We can’t just pray the bad away – and we all, myself included, need that bitter reminder from time to time. I’ll talk to you all soon.