Orion never regarded in past or present darkwing as anything more than a minor annoyance, but undoubtedly darkwing’s behavior affected certain aspects of how she would later conduct herself. Darkwing was not so much a person to her as an acceptable outcome of her as she stood then. Not to downplay — she made Orion’s life much, much worse (quote unquote ‘worse’ in the colloquial sense of the term). Orion’s early suicidality could be attributed to her actions. But the suicidality had less to do with Darkwing and more to do with what she came to understand through darkwing. She pivoted tactics after she was removed from the mines— essentially, she became more adept at simulating interiority. She came to understand that to ‘live’, being liked is less important than being unnoticed. Importantly — suicidality, even, cannot be said to ‘bother’ her. The prospect of her death does not bother her. She has no boundaries. Her only transition point was a transition of circumstance. Orion’s thesis statement is stagnancy; there is no point where she has changed, ever. Were she placed back in the same situation, after a lifetime as an archivist, she would make the same choices again. She would let Darkwing do it all over again, because she simply sees no reason to prevent this! We can consider darkwing’s actions towards her a sort of accidental revenge for the crime of Orion never having been able to consider Darkwing a wholly formed person — the crime of being self absorbed, and thinking of darkwing only as an insentient concequence to Orion’s own actions — the only consistent point of reference in her decision-making, maybe, though even those are entirely weightless. Orion learned very early that something called happiness was either (literally, experientially) beyond her reach or unrecognizable to her — all logic follows from this point.
Darkwing tended to offload her own fears and frustrations onto Orion in a power trip on Orion’s implicit agreeable permissiveness. She was not a bad person, or she was, but she could not be blamed for having been that way — she was much younger than Orion, quite literally newly formed, and she was scared, and temperamental. She found in Orion first someone with more life experience she thought might understand her, and offer her guidance, and later came to realize Orion offered something better than any of these things — a person to hold power over. Orion offered this to her on a silver platter. She freely made known her hollowness, her inability to be bothered. Could Darkwing be blamed for having taken it? I don’t think so. No one was there teach her boundaries and morality, but Orion, who failed utterly in this task. She forced Darkwing to forever be maladjusted, malformed, and malcontent. And even so, Darkwing did it incrementally, pushing the boundaries a tiny bit day by day, and waiting for any sort of pushback. But there was none. Whose wrong could that have been, but Orion’s? Orion has always been a guilt free vesicle for blame; this is her entire purpose. We can transfer the fault to her, and leave Darkwing as an innocent girl, who was frightened that she was caught in something she could never escape. Darkwing did care for Orion, in some way, shape, or form. She could have killed Orion, and she might have, if Orion remained, but she did care for her, deeply. Orion was her lifeline. She was the very first person she trusted in her life — and she did trust Orion, to inflict pain on her like such. Darkwing had no leverage. Orion could have ruined her easily with decades of evidence, but she did not. She was accomplice and complicit in Darkwing’s crime. Darkwing trusted her, and even loved her. She might have died without her. And without her, Darkwing did die anyway
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