Crack fingers and bury my face into my scarred palms sobbing. Okay so. Here’s the thing about Marsha that makes me want to chew through drywall.
She can manipulate hormones. She can flood herself with dopamine and serotonin and oxytocin whenever she wants. She can suppress cortisol and adrenaline and everything that makes her fear fear.
But here’s what the Order taught her, right? Emotions are a whole cascade. The racing thoughts, the memories that surface, the way your chest tightens or your hands shake or your vision tunnels. The amygdala firing, the hippocampus pulling up traumas, the prefrontal cortex trying to make sense of them all in the present context. Hormones are just one part of the equation.
POV: You’re Marsha. You’ve learned to freeze your freeze response in the triangle of fight-flight-freeze. You dial down the cortisol, you keep adrenaline at functional levels, you maintain steady dopamine so you don’t spiral, especially into hallucinations. But the thought patterns? They’re still there. The knowledge that you should be terrified is still present. You’re not calm per se, rather you’re suspended. You’re in this uncanny valley between feeling and not-feeling where you know intellectually you’re in mortal danger but your body won’t react appropriately.
You’re watching yourself from a third person point of view. Clinical. Detached.
When you’ve spent years telling your body’s spontaneous reaction is just a cocktail you can dilute, when, say, ghrelin is a notch you twist to zero when someone else needs the rations more… how do you know you’re real?
Armor that doesn’t work, not technically. Modern bullets punch through steel like paper. She knows this. Yet, she keeps wearing it anyway because “I want to remember,” she confesses to Charon.
Remember that she has a body. The armor is weight. Pressure. Sensation she can’t optimize away. Every time she moves, she feels it pulling at her shoulders, restricting her breath, digging into her collarbones. It’s proof she exists in physical space and not just as a consciousness piloting a flesh puppet she’s hacked into submission.
And, on the God Marianne prays to, those scars on her palms. The ones she hides under gauntlets. The ones when Marianne's bayonet tasted skin and she clawed at the blade, hands slipping, blood everywhere, her control finally slipping away in that moment of pure animal terror –
They are the last honest wounds. Injuries she couldn't regulate away fast enough. Pain she actually felt before she retired to hone her arcane skill to train as a medic. They’re proof that once, briefly, her body betrayed her control and she was just… vulnerable. More human as an arcanist than humans. “Only in death does duty end. Yet [Marsha] lives again with the Foundation.” But does she?
Or does she start to forget what her actual emotional baseline even is?
When you can just… adjust your neurochemistry on command, what does “sadness” even mean anymore? Are you genuinely happy to see a friend, or did you just give yourself an oxytocin boost because you knew you should be delighted? When you comfort a dying soldier and you feel that warm swell of compassion, is that you, or did you just dose yourself because you needed to be kind right then right there?
She puppets her body but in return it puppets her.
The Order taught her this was control. And it is. Marsha survives things that would break other people because she can prevent her body from melting down completely. At the village with Paravyan: “I’m bleeding profusely from several wounds. That’s what I get for suppressing all my pain. Ah so, just a little shrapnel. Nothing too serious.” ARE YOU HEARING YOURSELF???
Here’s the catch: Suppressing the physical response doesn’t erase the emotional memory.
You still remember watching your fellow soldiers die. You still know you took people’s lives. You’ve seen things that should haunt you.
Your emotions are overdue to be processed. You’ve been hitting pause on your grief and your trauma and your rage over and over and over. You heal others with your own hands yet you can barely do it to your own self.
Worse? Love might be the one thing she can’t fake or suppress.
Sure, you can chemically simulate the components of affection. But attachment? That's your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex and your memory centers and your mirror neurons all firing in this symphony you can’t conduct to a T. The kind that makes you trust your gut instinct in the very gargoyle with a sniper rifle who just killed a commander and also scarred you six years ago?
Marsha: I am. But that battle is long over. You and I are no longer enemies.
The howls of their deadly melee still ring in her ears.
Sentinel: It was a senseless fight. I hurt you.
Marsha: It wasn't your fault.
Marsha: In fact, I thank you for it. They thought I died fighting you—I used that as my opportunity to leave.
No wonder her surname is Rosenhart. A heart of rose. She still clings onto the belief that Marianne, her Marie, didn’t hurt her, the war did, and they were both just trying to survive it in the only ways they knew. She even thanks Marie for it, for the leave where she can now use her hands to treat instead of kill people, how these scars brought them together in the end, and she wouldn’t trade knowing Marie for anything, not even unmarked hands. After all, Marianne is a lovely name and she doesn’t have a face one forgets.
In fact, when they walk down the roadside near a windmill and find Andreas to ride in the meadow of grass, it’s described as “the first moment of true peace they’ve felt since the war began.” Enough peace to act more like “children than soldiers for the moment, however brief” where Marsha throws dirt at Marie to get her back for a smoke grenade. Yet it is in peace that gave Marsha the courage above any battlefield to ask if Marie wants to return to Paris to open her dream atelier after the war, whether or not she can visit her still to fit into a dress she tailors.
Marsha: If all this—when all this—comes to an end one day, I hope ... I hope to see you again.
Love, as it stands, may be the first uncontrolled emotion she’s experienced in years.
The war taught her to control everything except the thing that can either be wielded to make people complicit or against its atrocities. Fight for your honor, defend the mother/fatherlands; or love your family, friends, even strangers who are still alive and do not wish to be dead any time soon enough to desert, to become the Sentinel who puts a stop to the war yourself. Marsha’s reassurance follows Marianne into the “Gates of Hell” that is Hill 299 chock full of poison gas and Manus combatants, her wish to see her dearly alive on the other side. Marsha cannot stop her from a possible suicide mission, cannot suppress her moral objections to Marianne’s plan to herself bear the burden of taking 10000 lives and reckon with the demon of her lineage – probably just lower the cortisol, keep her rational brain engaged.
She can’t stop loving Marianne, both despite and for the choice she committed.
Does she even want to try?
Marsha chooses to keep helping people after the war. Stays with the Foundation. Partially because if she stops moving, she’ll probably have to face it. Every death. Every wound. Every moment of terror she should have felt but didn't because she couldn't afford to. Now she can put a face to emotions, to look forward to healing with Marianne.
Maybe it’s Marsha’s own demon she must reckon with even if it must break her down first to rebuild her.
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