Self-Para: Vindication
Equipment M had told him that he needed it, and Maxwell hadn't questioned it even though he didn't understood as he whipped the young man to virtual pieces. What am I doing? He had asked himself, as he watched skin break open and blood bloom and groans of pain muffled by the slave's blood red lips. Only more guilt can come out of this, more trauma, more pain for him. Yet he hadn't stopped, and he was eventually grateful that he did not, that the slave did not stop him and continued his litany of "You need this". Because damned if he didn't.
Once he knew the slave would live, there was a weight lifted off his shoulders. Not just the weight of the feeling of responsibility for the state he left the slave in, but all of it. The weight of responsibility for Anna's death, for his failure to protect her, for his direct involvement in her death simply by loving her and trying to prove to the world that she was not the cast-aside slave girl that they made her out to be. Most of all it was the weight of knowing he wasn't guilty, everything that so many others, and most recently Annette Miller had spoken to him, absolving him. His inability to absolve himself of the crimes he believed he committed against her because it would have made him passive in her life and in her death, useless, unmoving, paralyzed, unable to do anything. Responsibility somehow seemed better. The guilt was justified and he could finally feel it all.
The vindication of his guilt was a kind of release. It washed away the feeling that he had gone mad when he saw her face worn by another, her scent and her laugh gifted to another human being who was so close yet so far from her. Who disappeared, mysteriously, just as she had arrived making him think she was just a spectre of a memory, come to haunt his deteriorating mind. Accepting and feeling the responsibility for her death made him know for certain that what he had seen in the mysterious Sarah Turner wasn't real. A mere projection. wishful thinking, the repressed guilt talking.
He spoke to Annette Miller of still feeling that guilt as she tried her very best to reel him in, sexual or romantic or plain platonic, anyway she seemed to be able. He could not explain to her how his transformation came about, out of selfish self-preservation though he did wish all these beautiful young women who took an interest in him did know about the side of him that had been unleashed with the slave. That he was capable of so much wrong, that he was dangerous, that he was not entirely the man they saw him to be. But at the same time, now he wanted to be that person, to atone for the crimes he now recognized as his own and he could not be with that shadow of his actions lurking behind him in the public's gaze. He had M's silence by virtue of his profession, as well as that of the doctor. No one else needed to know and public acknowledgement of his crime was not a necessity. As they could go on thinking he bore no responsibility for the death of his beloved.
But atoning for his responsibility for her death meant letting go of the past, letting go of the things that had driven him to her, letting go of the desperate loneliness that had made him so unwilling to let go of her when he had the chance. Annette was right, at the end of the day, though he would not recognize it out of sheer pride. It was a risk worth taking, loving again, but he had to do it wisely, and not be as careless as he had been with Anna. Never again.