A Long Time Coming (Revised)

Disclaimer: "Beyond: Two Souls" is owned by Sony Computer Entertainment and Quantic Dream.

Author's Note: Okay, I know I had done one of this already, but this is a revision. I shall give some credit to MovieVillain, who gave me an idea on this. You'll see the difference in this version and the other version, even though a lot of it is similar. Enjoy!

Ever since the Black Sun was destroyed, my memory has been disintegrating. I spent too much time on the other side. Now it's eating away at my mind, erasing what's left of it. My memories are all confused, slowly self-destructing, fading like a dream when you wake up.

I'm losing my sense of time. I no longer know what happened before or after. Everything's playing inside my head at the same time. It's like watching the same film looping over and over again, a chaos of images with no order.

So I've been writing night and day for weeks, trying to put my life down on paper. If I forget everything, these pages will be my memory.

A news report stated:

Three months after the fact, the investigation continues, in an effort to determine the cause of the accident that cost 283 lives on a Pentagon military base. Government representatives confirm that the authorities are working hand in hand with the investigators to shed light on this appalling tragedy.

The CIA is leaving me alone for the moment. I suppose they're too busy building another condenser to worry about me. I know they'll never abandon their experiments, now that they know what's on the other side.

Honestly, I don't give a damn. Now I need to reconstruct my life, my life without Aiden.

For as long as I can remember, I dreamt of living without him, untied, without his constant presence by my side. I got what I wanted. I've never been so unhappy in my life. I feel like a part of me has been amputated. I'm crying all day. I know it's stupid. Shit, I miss him so much.

It took months, months of nothing passing by. I woke up. I knew it was time, time to start again, to build a new life.

It was so obvious. Deep inside, I always knew. I just needed the silence around me to hear what I was feeling.

I know that deep down I loved Ryan, despite all the shit he put me through. There was also a side of me that wanted to reconnect with Jay, maybe see how he, Cory, and Paul were doing at their ranch. Most of all, I wanted to see how Stan, Tuesday, Jimmy, and Walter were doing, and also Tuesday's baby girl, Zoey.

But there was one other thing that I wanted to do. It's been more than 15 years. I had only talked to them a handful of times since Nathan and Cole took me in. I can't say much about Philip, and even though she was not my real mother, Susan loved and cared for me like I was her own. They never told me this, but I know why she loved me dearly. It made me cry when I found out as a little girl that they had a child previously, but he died. While I had to see Norah before she died, I knew that there was someone else who I wanted to see.

It took some time for me to locate them, but after that amount of time, I finally tracked down Susan Holmes and her husband. I know that I am referring to him as her husband, but it would be hard for me to call him my father after I saw how he felt about me. After all this time, could he have gotten over it?

I remember the day they had told me that they were moving away. I guess they needed to be away, especially after Aiden had choked that boy for trying to suffocate me with the snow. After everything I had been through, it was better that we were not in contact for a long time. Imagine how they would have felt if they had heard that Aiden nearly killed those kids at that party.

I found my way to their current home. They lived in a smaller home than the one that I remembered. They had no children to take care of, so it was understandable. I knocked on the door. The door opened, and I saw a woman answer.

"Hello, may I help you?" The woman said.

"Hello, is this the Holmes residence?" I said.

"Yes, it is, who are you?" The woman said.

"Is your name Susan Holmes?" I replied.

The woman did not look much different than how I remembered. She still had some of that auburn hair, but it had some gray in it at this point. However, she still maintained her beauty, as she still looked like the same beautiful woman who I once considered to be my mother. She had aged, but did not look different than I remembered.

"Yes," the woman said. "Can you tell me who you are?"

"It's me," I said.

It didn't take long for her to figure out who I was, as the woman looked at me as she tilted her head and moved closer, with the first thing that came out of her mouth was, "Oh my god, Jodie?"

"Yes, it's me."

Just then, I noticed that she shook a bit as a tear trickled down her eye and smiled once she found out who I was, as she did not waste time to hug me right then and there. More tears of joy ran down her eyes, like she had been waiting to see me again for so long.

"Oh, Jodie, I missed you so much!" Susan said. "I'm sorry that I didn't come visit you much after a while."

"I missed you, too," I said, as a tear trickled down my face at that moment. "I still have that picture of us."

The way she hugged me and her reaction felt like it was a long overdue reunion. Even though I was placed under the care of Nathan and Cole, I was still her daughter and the way she reacted, it was a long time coming for her to see who was once her little girl again.

"Come on in, Jodie," Susan said. "We have so much to catch up on."

I went inside her house and Susan and I went right into the living room at sat on the couch. I had explained to her about everything that I went through, like my time in the CIA to meeting my real mother and also stopping the Black Sun. Susan had told me that the reason she and her husband had moved out of the old neighborhood was because of what Aiden did to that one boy, when he could have killed me. There was one thing that I did not expect her to bring up, though.

"What happened to Nathan Dawkins?" she said.

I sat there in silence for a minute, with a lot of hesitation in my body to even respond to that question. I responded, "He died. There was nothing I could do."

"I'm sorry, and like I said before, I am sorry did not see you," she said. "I wanted to. I really did want to see you, but Philip really did not want me or both of us to. I thought about you every day for the past 15 years. I really would have gone by myself, but your father wouldn't let me."

And then came something that I did not expect to hear from her.

"I even heard that you were on the run from the law or something. It was all over the news."

"I went through some hard times for a few years. I really don't want to talk about when I was on the run from the law, or any of the other stuff."

"The things your father said after you were gone, they broke my heart. He said that you were not human. Referred to you as 'it,' instead of 'her.' He called you a monster."

Being that I had a strong mother-daughter bond with her in my childhood, a tear started to drip from my eye, too. I thought that what was lost from me was Aiden, and while I got to see my real mom, whether it was through channeling her through Aiden or in the psychiatric hospital she was in, Susan was the one woman who loved me like I was her own, despite a lot of the things that Aiden did. I leaned over to hug her once again.

"Can I ask you something?" When Susan had mentioned Philip, I started to see that there was nobody else in the house. I looked around and saw pictures of me and her. Some pictures of Philip were still around, but not a lot.

"What happened to Philip?" I asked.

Dead silence plagued the air the moment I asked that question. The look in her eyes really spoke volumes and then she looked down at the floor and a tear started to emerge from her eyes. Susan quickly put her hand against her eye. I just knew that he was no longer around. Not from a divorce, but from something else. I know that man didn't like me, but I still felt for her.

"For years, there were times when we would feel a presence inside our house," Susan said. "Philip thought it was some stuff that you caused. He blamed it on you, even though you weren't with us anymore. One night, things started getting crazier than ever. These weird spirits came out. It was those same spirits that I remember you talking about when you were little. They had a bright purple light around them. One night, they grabbed your father and took him away through a weird portal."

I sat there and looked at her with so much shock on her face. The way she described that entity to me sounded just like the same ones that I dealt with as a child. The very same ones that Aiden and I had dealt with when I helped close the original condenser.

Susan added, "After a few hours, he came back through that same portal. I wanted to think it was a nightmare, but it was all real. For a while, we both went through therapy. He tried to blame this all on you and on me, too. He tried to tell me that I didn't see you for what you were. His words, not mine."

I figured that Philip would say that. I still remember that one day when he and Susan left me. The same day that they told me that they were moving. He couldn't wait any longer to get out of there.

Susan continued, "It reached a point where we started having problems in our marriage. We went through a break for a few years. This was long after we left you at the DPA. I wanted to try work out our marriage again. I know Philip was an asshole. He wasn't just an asshole to you, but he was also an asshole to me, especially when dealing with all of the shit that we went through. But deep down, I still loved him. When we tried to work out our marriage, at some point those dark spirits came, the same kind that bothered you when you were a little girl. They came after us, but they only targeted your father. They were stronger than before. They had picked him up and threw him to the wall and then had possessed one of my neighbors and then killed him and then my neighbor killed himself."

What she said made me remember the night of when Nathan took me to the DPA to close the condenser. That was during the time when those same entities had broken out and started to run wild everywhere. Some of those same spirits had even possessed people.

Those spirits also had fed on negative energy. That same negative energy that was around when Ryan and I went into that underwater base that those Chinese soldiers ran. Philip was a negative person, so I think that the spirits fed on all of his negative energy.

To this day I wonder why he had me do it, being that I was only a teenager, but I had no choice. I ended up fixing the problem, but even at that age, that was beyond anything I could do.

Susan looked down and couldn't help but feel sad. My question had been answered about what happened to my father. I didn't like him, but I felt her pain. I got closer and gave her a hug.

My personal feelings towards Philip didn't matter in that moment. It's been said no matter how hard things get, even when things get rocky in a marriage, the person can maintain those feelings towards that person.

Susan cried into my shoulder. I started to cry, too. After everything that I have been through, I was more than happy to see Susan again. She showed that she had wanted to see me again after all these years.

Susan backed up a bit. "Listen, Jodie, I'll be right back."

When Susan got up, I sat there and then the TV came on. It went into static and on the screen, something came on the screen. It said "Still here."

What did that mean? Did it mean it what I think it meant? I smiled. It had to be Aiden.

I stayed at Susan's house for a little longer than I had originally planned. At some point, a man came to the door. It turned out to be her new husband. Though Susan broke down after she told me what happened to Philip, I found that she had moved on from his death and met someone. The man turned out to be a much nicer guy than Philip. He even told me that he had heard about me and about a "special gift" that I have. I ended up staying for dinner.

Sometime after we had dinner, I took off. There were some things that I needed to do, and other people to see. Before I left, Susan stopped me and hugged me once again.

"Listen, Jodie, you are welcome to come by anytime," she said. "Also, feel free to call me once in a while."

"I will do that…Mom."

I was so hesitant in calling her that, because I had not had any contact with her in so long. However, despite meeting Norah, my real mother, I still considered Susan to be my mother. I was happy that I got to see her again and I was also happy that she had found happiness in her life.

Another note: Well, that was my revision of the "Life" ending choice I made. Like I had noted in the other version, I felt that there should have been a reunion between Jodie and Susan. I also mentioned that if Jodie had gone "beyond," that her spirit would likely watch over Susan.

As for the part about when Susan and Philip left Jodie, you could interpret it one way with Aiden just letting Philip walk off or choke him. Even if Aiden choked Philip, I would imagine that Susan would find it in her heart to forgive Jodie for it. I'll leave you to decide about the choice made in that stage.