Greetings to the fellow Bachelor from this ask. villainkinconfessions (dot) tumblr (dot) com (slash) post/752105191859519488
Your reaction to the town was understandable. They are close-minded, wretched people. You don't deserve to be manipulated and hated by everyone. You were doing your best, and it mattered.
In my timeline, the Changeling was an adult. She seduced me and appealed to my lack of belief in magic. Her blood had no plague, so I told others she was not the carrier. She used me to get a standing in the Town. She also explained to me the other Utopians' manipulations, and how must I best circumvent them. I used her to get a steady amount of supplies - after all, she was a thief.
The Changeling was one of the few people in Town who wouldn't misgender me (the Haruspex, Ravel, Grief, Rubin, and Stamatins didn't either). I was a six-foot tall genderfluid trans woman with no HRT (I never had time for it!) - I had been using the town as an experimental ground for gender expression - and people would not only loathe me for my emergency power, think of me as heartless for quarantining them away from their families, blaming me for the arsonists' and orderlies' murder-happy management, and call me shit just because I'm trans, I'm from the Capital, I dress "weird".
Later, the Changeling manipulated me into her plan, which would preserve the Tower. I healed her bound. She sacrificed most of it. And just when I wanted to say "what the fuck?", she was hailed as a hero and accused me of baseless crimes. People would hunt me down in the streets. Vendors would refuse to sell to me. And so on, and so forth.
The Haruspex and Lara Ravel had a crush on me. I didn't indulge them. I had no empathy, and multiple partners (in Thanatica or otherwise) had broken up with me because I was "heartless" and "married only to work". In this new body, maybe I could consider using the term aro-spec.
I decided to use the people Changeling sacrificed every year for my experiments. I asked Rubin to help me - he obliged. Enthusiastically. He wanted a second chance as a doctor after failing Isidor. the Haruspex was disgusted with my actions and disrespect for his culture - I was cutting into bodies and hooking them into machines. Thanatica would live on. It did live on. Eventually, people could control the rate in which they aged and whether they died. Many didn't die anymore. Lara pledged to serve me in my crusade against Death and let me be married to my work. This is a much better arrangement than my feeble attempts on romance with Artemy and Clara.
I won. No more plague, no more sacrifices. I, the clown villain doll, the scary Capital snake, the evil trans doctor, WON!
Screw this world for saying that the Bachelor's victory is the Worst Ending. I was victorious against my birth assignment and now victorious against mortality. The Powers That Be can't destroy my laboratory because my findings have been spread around the world. The Changeling can say it's unfair and wrong and "not how it's supposed to be" and it doesn't change the fact that I, Bachelor M. Dankovskaya, have steered the story well past 10 years and counting. The Utopians lavished me and my new laboratory with all my needs. I deserve to rest on my laurels now.
-The Bachelor (source: Pathologic, pronouns: she/her)
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