The Host Recap – Separated (Chapter 52)

I’m just gonna dive right into this one, because that seems the best way to get it over with.

The chapter starts with Meyer having skipped the entire scene where Jared and Wanda get the cryotanks, because they’re back at the caves, bringing in their ‘plunder’.  Part of me is happy about this, because it means I didn’t have to read all the details of them stealing the tanks and travelling back to the caves and whatnot, but at the same time, this feels both lazy and (once again) too convenient to me.

Meyer spends so much time going on and on about crap that doesn’t matter, and repeating herself, and describing things that absolutely no one needed described, and then she just skips over major sections like this, and it pisses me off.  It could be argued that the scene she skipped here was not an overly important one, but it was certainly more important than many she kept in (including the stupid Bear/Claw Beast story in the last chapter), and it is a bit important that Meyer prove that the humans could have acquired cryotanks without Wanda around, and to prove that, you need to show us what the process of getting the tanks would be.  But she just couldn’t be bothered, and she didn’t want to give us the chance to doubt that Wanda’s plan would work for any reason, so here we are.

It sucks that Meyer passed up yet another chance to include some real action/adventure in this book, as she could have had something happen during their tank collection that was actually, y’know, interesting.  Suspenseful.  Fun, even.  But no, here we are, with the same old boring crap.  Awesome.

Anyway, they’re bringing the stuff in through the south vent (the one that goes through Doc’s office) because Wanda is worried that if she goes through the main entrance, the Seeker will hear the commotion caused by their return, and will then figure out what Wanda is doing and do that brain shredding thing.  Though again, Meyer already set up the Seeker’s character as a closet coward and too in love with life to kill herself, so that’s not going to be a problem anyway.

When she gets inside, Wanda finds Doc at his desk, tools laid out, preparing for the procedure he’s about to perform on the Seeker.  He’s got a propane lantern, which surprises me a bit because I would think it would probably be a bit difficult to find propane, since the aliens don’t use the same things we used to power their vehicles and so on, so I would be surprised if this many years after the invasion there was still much (if any) propane around…though now that I’ve said that, I’m not actually sure if Meyer did say they use other methods for fuel or not.  I think she did; I seem to remember that being mentioned…but maybe not.  But I’m not going to look back through the book to find out, because if she can’t be bothered to check her own facts (and she’s proven multiple times that she can’t) then why should I?

Seeing Doc preparing to do exactly what she made him promise to do makes Wanda feel nauseous, but she’s not sure whether it’s because of what she knows is to come, or because she’s still sickened by her memory of ‘catching’ him ‘with blood on his hands‘ a few chapters back, despite that it’s been established multiple times that that was not something that she should hold against him so much for multiple reasons.  Either way, though, she’s getting what she wants and is not happy about it yet again; what else is new?

Doc is apparently relieved that Wanda and Jared are back, even though it means he’s going to have to go through with Wanda’s plan instead of just killing the Seeker, and he’s very happy when Jared reveals to him that they have brought back two crates of Heal for him.  Now he can needlessly waste as much as he wants every time someone gets hurt!  Yay!

Jared also mentions that they’ve found a better way to renew their stores than to have Wanda stab herself, but Doc doesn’t laugh, he just stares “piercingly” at Wanda.

“We both must have been thinking the same thing: Convenient, since Wanda won’t be around.“

What the…seriously, Wanda?  This is what you really think Doc is thinking right now?  Who the hell has such a cold thought about the death of someone?  I’m pretty sure he’s looking at you piercingly hoping you see how much it’s going to hurt Jared (and everyone else) to lose you, with perhaps a bit of anger at the fact that you haven’t told Jared what’s going to happen.  But whatever he’s thinking, I can guarantee it’s not that anything is fucking convenient!  He is obviously a caring, emotional person; that’s been proven a thousand times…so he would NEVER be so nonchalant about death, especially that of a friend!

Doc changes the subject, asking if they got the cryotanks, as Jared notices the tension between Doc and Wanda.  Wanda answers that they got 10 tanks, as that was all their car could hold, which verifies that it was the car they took, not the van/truck, so they really would have stuck out like a sore thumb when they were driving around the loading area the way they were, which is probably part of why Meyer skipped that scene.  Didn’t want to have to get into what would really have happened had they attempted things the way they were.

Why didn’t they just take one of the bigger vehicles, though?  It would have offered at least a chance of fitting in better, as well as providing them more space to bring back tanks and supplies. If they have those available, I just can’t see why they wouldn’t utilize them when they know they need a supply of something.  But I’m pretty sure I won’t get an answer to that.

After Wanda reveals how many tanks they got, Jared pulls on a rope behind him, and the second box of Heal and all 10 tanks clatter down onto the floor behind him.  …What?  Meyer says something about loose rock related to this, and I just don’t understand how or why this happened.  Is that really the most efficient method to get them inside?  What was the rope attached to?  What’s with the loose rock?  Why bother adding this to the scene at all; why couldn’t they have just carried the tanks in??  Why the fuck do you do this shit, Meyer?!

In the last chapter, Wanda specifically mentioned that the aliens were moving the tanks carefully, but apparently that’s just because they were occupied tanks; the unoccupied ones can be “treated roughly” without a problem because they are made of “no element that exists on this planet“.   Yeah, because if they weren’t then you couldn’t just treat them however you want without having to think about it, right Meyer?  Though really, when it comes right down to it, why the fuck do we care what they’re made of or how strong they are?  Is it going to be relevant later for some reason?  Cause it sure as hell isn’t now.

Doc picks up one of the cryotanks and looks at it, then asks Wanda if they’re hard to use.  She says they’re extremely easy to use (of course they are; they have to be for her to be able to use them and Meyer to be able to describe their use. Wouldn’t want anyone to have to think, now would we?)  and she’ll show him how, then asks what Jeb, Brandt and Aaron said about her plan.

Doc says the guys are in agreement with her terms, but she says she won’t show him how to remove the souls unless she believes that that’s true.  Doc says that’s fair, but Jared is confused, so Doc asks Wanda what she’s told Jared…which seems a very stupid thing to do right in front of him.  She says she’s only told him that she’s going to save the Seeker, then turns to Jared and explains that Doc has promised her that he’ll send the souls to another planet if she teaches him how to remove them, and that he won’t kill anyone.  I would have to think Jared would have figured that out by now, since they brought more than one cryotank back; he’d have to be pretty slow if he didn’t, at any rate.

Jared says he can agree to those terms as well, and that he’ll help the others follow through, then asks if she’s got a plan to get the souls off planet.  Wanda responds that doing that will be no more difficult than what they did in stealing the tanks; they’ll just add tanks to the pile instead of taking them away.

You have got to be kidding me.  You have GOT to be fucking KIDDING me!  Are the souls really so dense that they won’t notice a bunch of extra cryotanks being added to their load, especially when Wanda has said that so many less are going off planet than are coming in?  Even if they don’t label the tanks, you’d think they’d still notice the extras, given there can’t be many there to start!  And I’d especially think they would notice if they get a bunch of new tanks showing up more than once!

Does she expect them to just take the tanks back to the loading facility one at a time or some shit?  Because that would be the fucking stupidest idea ever.  She’s already risking their lives just having them pick up the empty tanks at all; making them also go drop off new tanks is definitely going to get them noticed at some point!  Unless the aliens are completely brain-dead, they will notice that every so often a bunch of empty tanks go missing, and then a while after that, a bunch of full ones show up!  COME ON, Meyer!  It only takes one of the humans getting caught ONCE to kill them all!

Aggggh, this is so fucking stupid!  There’s NO WAY it can be that easy, and even if it was, it’s not like Wanda showed Jared where they’re supposed to drop them off, since he’s only just finding out that that’s what they have to do now!  They wouldn’t put the new tanks with the occupied ones they saw coming in, because then they wouldn’t be sending the souls off planet, and they sure as hell wouldn’t put them with the unoccupied tanks, so how is this anywhere near as easy as she’s making it out to be?  This is illogical fucking bullshit!

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again; I fucking hate this book!  NONE OF THIS SHIT MAKES ANY SENSE!  You can’t make everything up to this point oh so fucking dramatic, then have the BIGGEST HEIST THEY HAVE TO PULL OFF be a piece of cake!  This SHOULD NOT be easier than raiding empty houses at night!  If it was, I CANNOT see why the humans wouldn’t have invaded at least the stores of medical supplies already, but also probably every single loading area the aliens use, since they’re not guarded and that makes for much easier raiding!  I am so fucking pissed off!  Okay, I need to go take a breather now, before I end up stabbing something.  I’m normally a huge fan of reading, but this book makes me never want to read again.

Okay, so after all that stupidity, Doc asks Wanda if she has a “time schedule” in mind, and Wanda thinks she hears eagerness in his voice, so she has to convince herself that he’s just eager to learn how to remove the souls, not to kill her.  I have to think she mistook the inflection in his voice, because as eager as he probably would be to learn this sort of thing, I’d think that more than that, he’d be nervous about what might happen and what he has to do to Wanda, and I think that’s probably what she’s actually hearing.  Different people express nervousness in different ways, and I just can’t imagine Doc is in a huge rush to deal with all of this right now.  But at least she didn’t completely assume the worst of him.

Jared asks if they can wait until he takes the Jeep back to its hiding spot, because he wants to watch, and Doc says they can.  Poor Aaron and Brandt.  Jared leaves, and once he’s gone, Doc asks Wanda if she talked to Jared about Stryder.  Wanda says she didn’t, but she thinks Jared knows where this is all going.  She feels he must have guessed her plan, and I feel the same way, because they’re not exactly being subtle about it, but it really seems like he actually hasn’t figured it out, so we’re still going to need to deal with dramafest later on, I’m sure.

Doc tries to argue that Jared won’t allow her to kill herself once he figures out that bit, but she cuts him off, saying that Jared won’t get a say, and reminding Doc that the deal was all or nothing.  Doc gives up on arguing with her, and decides to go talk to Jeb about getting things ready.

“He reached for a bottle on the table.  The chloroform.  I was sure the souls had something better to use.  I would have to try to find it for Doc, before I was gone.”

Yep, there’s that chloroform again that I’m not sure how they got such easy access to, especially since they seem to have a fair amount of it, as well as the obvious reference to the Still that Wanda saw when they were driving around looking for the cryotanks, that I mentioned would surely come up later.  You’re not getting any less transparent, Meyer.  Not mentioning the Still by name here is not clever, it just makes Wanda seem like even more of an idiot for not thinking of it, when she just saw and commented on it an hour or so ago.

Before Doc can leave, Wanda asks him who knows about what they’re doing, and he says it’s still only Jeb, Aaron and Brandt, and that they all want to watch.  Wanda is okay with that, but tells Doc not to tell anyone else about it, which he agrees to and then leaves.

And this is where this chapter gets absolutely fucking stupid.

With Doc gone, Wanda goes to sit against the wall, wanting to be nowhere near the cot they’ll use to perform the removal.  She realizes, while trying to distract herself from thinking about her own death, that she hasn’t heard from Stryder in a while, and at first I was glad that she noticed that because I thought it very strange that neither she nor Jared thought to consider Stryder’s feelings about this at all, but I’m now not glad for it because of what Stryder’s presence does to the next couple of pages.

Wanda is surprised that Jared spooning her didn’t wake Stryder up and piss her off, and I’m not at all sure why Jared didn’t notice that Stryder didn’t show up there, unless he’s started forgetting about her in favour of Wanda, but even thinking about that again and attempting to call out to Stryder doesn’t elicit a response.  Wanda can still feel Stryder’s presence, unlike when she disappeared completely, so she’s not worried about Stryder, but she is afraid that Stryder is ignoring her, so she keeps trying to get a response from her.

It’s not until Wanda “apologizes” for spooning with Jared by blaming him entirely for it happening because she says she “didn’t do anything“, so she doesn’t think it’s fair for Stryder to be mad at her, that Stryder says anything.  Yeah, Wanda, because Jared was totally pinning you down to the ground, and there’s no way you could have moved if it made you uncomfortable or feel guilty.  You had to stay there, and it’s all Jared’s fault.  Childish bitch; learn to take some responsibility for your actions.

Stryder is annoyed at Wanda but says she’s not mad at her, she just wants Wanda to leave her alone.  Wanda asks Stryder why she won’t talk to her, but Stryder just ignores her again, so Wanda prods around trying to find out what Stryder’s thinking.

“She tried to keep me out, to put the wall in place, but it was too weak from disuse.  I saw her plan.”

Too weak from disuse?  The fuck?  It’s not a physical object, Meyer; if she could do it when she barely existed and was new to having an invader in her brain, she sure as hell could do it now when she is stronger and has good reason.  Quit it with the fucking convenient bullshit, you talentless hack; I’m not buying it!  I’d love to say that goes for everyone else as well, but I’d clearly be wrong about that, so I’ll just toss a big ol’ fuck you over to you on my own behalf.

Wanda asks Stryder if she’s lost her mind, because she realizes that Stryder’s ‘plan’ is to make herself disappear so that Wanda won’t kill herself, because she can’t think of any other way to stop Wanda.  Wanda says she doesn’t get why Stryder would do that, because she knows Stryder wants to be with Jared and Jamie again, which Stryder admits to, but says that at the same time, she can’t stand the idea of being the death of Wanda.

Oh, for god’s sake, this is such fucking bullshit.  Stryder has been fighting since day one to get her body back, and as much as she may want Wanda to stay living, she would NOT erase HERSELF to accomplish that.  There is just NO FUCKING WAY that would happen.  Stryder is not THAT stupid.  But I’m sure it’s because at least in part she’s jumping into Wanda’s normal self-pity mode too, where she thinks Wanda should live because she’s more useful, so she (Stryder) should just martyr herself, especially because she just couldn’t live with the guilt of knowing that she killed Wanda even though she didn’t because Wanda made that stupid goddamn decision herself and Stryder tried to fight her tooth and nail on it…aggh,.  Holy fuck, Stryder, is this ever stupid.

You’ve seen how she thinks and what she does, and I don’t care how much you ‘love her’ (as ridiculous as THAT even is to consider), you would not kill yourself so that she could have YOUR body, and YOUR boyfriend, and YOUR brother.  Fuck that.  I will not believe this shit for a single second, and I don’t know how any reader has.

Wanda tells Stryder she loves her too, and for some reason that grates on me like nothing else, and then she says that there’s not enough room for the both of them in her body, in the caves, and in Jared and Jamie’s lives.  Um…why, exactly?  You guys seemed to come to a peace on this, and you would never have thought this way if the Seeker hadn’t shown up; in fact you were super excited to get back to life in the caves before that.  So you know damn well you’re full of it.

Stryder says she disagrees about there not being enough room, so Wanda simply tells her to stop trying to annihilate herself, because if she thinks Stryder can do it, she’ll make Doc remove her right away, or she’ll tell Jared about Stryder’s plan.  Telling Jared is a threat because of what Jared said before to Stryder about giving no guarantees as to what he would or wouldn’t do to keep her around, so Wanda starts to picture the kiss she had with Jared, as well as various times Stryder and Jared made out or had sex.

Stryder is clearly displeased by this, though I’m not sure why if she’s planning to give up her body to Wanda, meaning that that stuff will only continue to happen anyway, and she (Stryder) just won’t be able to stop it…but she says she won’t give up anyway.  Wanda tells her that she’s been warned, and that she expects no more silent treatment, and then they decide to think about something else.  Yeah, okay.  Sure.  That’s absolutely realistic.

They start thinking about where they’d like to send the Seeker, and Stryder votes for the Mists Planet because of the Claw Beasts, but Wanda thinks it would be better to send her to the Planet of the Flowers.  She thinks that would be more fitting because it’s so mellow, and she believes the Seeker needs a “nice long lifetime eating sunshine“.  So…in other words, your punishment for her is to give her an easy life?  I get that you think that’s oh so clever because she’s evil and angry and you think she would hate that, but you don’t know that she wouldn’t enjoy it.  That’s like sending a serial rapist to a resort for the rest of his life.  It is NOT appropriate for the crime she committed, and there should be no chance that she’ll enjoy herself.

After that, they flip through some of Wanda’s memories because apparently they’re like fairytales to Stryder, so Stryder tells Wanda some fairytales too, and this is SO FUCKING STUPID!  I have no idea why we’re wasting time talking about this when action is supposed to be happening!  You skipped an entire scene that at least had the potential of having something interesting happening, all to gives us stupid crap about fairytales?!  What the hell kind of writing is this??  It’s HORRIBLE!

Luckily, Wanda hears Jared coming back, so we don’t have to spend any more time on that bullshit, and since he decided to come through the main entrance when he returned, Jeb, Brandt, Aaron and Doc are with him, as is the Seeker, being carried by Jared, because Meyer wanted to spare us another chance of anything exciting happening by just skipping over the whole process it must have been to subdue the Seeker.  Yay.  At this point, Wanda realizes that it’s time for the “first stage of her death”, which upsets Stryder, but Wanda just tells her to pay attention because she’ll need to help the humans with it when she (Wanda) is gone.

Stryder protests the idea of Wanda dying, but not the idea of paying attention, and then everyone is in the room, the Seeker unconscious.  Jared lays the Seeker on the cot gently, so that we can be reminded AGAIN that Wanda was not treated as nicely as that, but Wanda is sooo wonderful that she appreciates the ‘gesture’ (FUCK OFF MEYER), and Wanda asks Doc for the No Pain, which he goes off to get.

“I stared at the Seeker’s face while I waited, wondering what it would look like when her host was free.  Would anything be left?  Would the host be empty or would the rightful owner reassert herself?”

Again, as mentioned in the previous chapter, we already know the answers to these questions.  You know what will happen, Wanda; we both know that.  You know the host mind will come back, because this has happened before, and because of all the stuff with the Seeker wanting to take Stryder’s body for her own.  So just stop.  Please.  I’m tired of dealing with the same shit over and over with you, so seriously, just stop.

Doc gives Wanda the No Pain, which she administers to the Seeker while we get a completely pointless description of how small the Seeker’s face is as compared to Wanda’s hands.  She asks Jared to flip the Seeker over onto her stomach, which he does, and then someone turns on the propane lantern and Wanda realizes that Doc spent the time she and Jared were gone covering up the holes in the hospital walls/ceiling that allowed for sunlight, so that they could have the light on without any Seekers noticing.  Seems like a totally doable task for one man by himself.  Sure.

Blah blah blah, descriptions of people’s breathing and shifting positions, and then Wanda asks for some Heal, Clean, Seal and Smooth, which Doc gives to her.  She brushes the Seeker’s hair aside to make the cut, but then decides she doesn’t want to, so Doc agrees to do it for her.

It takes a long fucking time for Meyer to get to that, though, because she decides she has to lengthen out everything Doc says and does, and then have Wanda suddenly realize she’s an idiot because she hasn’t prepared the tank for the Seeker yet.  She gets Jared to get one of the cryotanks, then explains to him how to power it on and open the lid, which really doesn’t sound, when I describe it that way, like it’s a long process, but it actually takes an entire page for Meyer to describe it.  It was truly riveting.  Or not.

Jared is, for some stupid reason, surprised that a cryotank is cold, and then he asks how it’s powered. Wanda says she knew the answer to that when she was a Spider, but she can’t remember now.  Yet another thing Meyer knew her audience might wonder about, but didn’t want to be bothered having to describe.  Ah, the writing just gets lazier and lazier.

Wanda finally tells Doc to make the cut, so he does, and then Wanda asks him to hold the Seeker’s hair while she goes in to get the soul.  She knows he won’t be able to understand what she’s doing this time, because it will need to be fully explained to him, so she just goes about reaching in and holy fuck it takes almost an entire page for Meyer to describe the process of removing the soul.  I am so not talking about all that.

One thing I wonder, though: How the hell is there enough space at the back of a human’s neck for Wanda to stick her entire finger into it without causing other damage?  That just does not seem right to me.  It’s also quite disturbing.  I want to move on, but I have to finish this chapter, so I can’t, but daaaaaamn I really want to because my god, I hate this.

However she does it, Wanda does get a finger in there, and starts feeling up the alien simply so Meyer can describe it, and then blah blah blah blah blah, so much description I don’t care about as she massages the entire damn thing, and then finds an arbitrarily numbered connection that is apparently the vital one and massages it to try to relax the alien, because “Kindness was always the way of the souls.  Never violence.”  -_- Stabstabstabstabstab.

The alien lets go after she massages it in its special place for a while, and then she feels it wriggle free and begin to twist its way out of the human’s neck.  When it’s out a bit, she wraps her fingers around it and pulls it out the rest of the way, and then we get to hear about how beautiful it is again, just like we did at the beginning of the book when Fords inserted Wanda.

Apparently Wanda feels love for the Seeker when she sees her in this form; maternal love…and I fucking hate this.  I’m a mother, and I would never love something just because it was beautiful if it was also EVIL and a MURDERER.   It’s not her child; I don’t care what reasoning Meyer tries to use here.  Fuck, she (Meyer) is just constantly throwing the good messages at us, isn’t she?  So glad young girls read this book.  We need more girls in the world who’ll love anything as long as it’s beautiful, even if it’s severely dangerous and horrible.

Wanda tells the soul to “sleep well“, then puts it into the cryotank and closes it up.  She takes the tank from Jared and begins to cradle it against her chest, and I’ve gotta say, if I was one of the guys in the room right now, I’d be really worried.  She should not be treating a murderer this way, and that she does just because it’s an alien does say a lot more about her than she, Meyer or anyone else seems willing to admit.  And only Doc knows what she intends, so it should just be alarming to all the others.  But, of course, it’s not.

Wanda looks back to the human body on the table and sees that Doc is already to the point of applying Smooth to the wound, so clearly she did not actually give a fuck whether the host was harmed or not, because she just left it to bleed out while she hugged the soul.  Not that it would have in that little time, she just obviously didn’t care one way or the other, so it’s good that Doc did.

She doesn’t see it that way, though; she just sees it as them being a good team, because she took care of the soul while he took care of the body.  Yeah, yeah, that’s a fitting viewpoint from her perspective and mine is from mine because I hate her; I know.

When Doc is done, he looks up at Wanda and tells her that what just happened was incredible, so she praises him for doing a good job.  Doc asks Wanda when she thinks the host body will wake up, and she says it’ll depend on how much chloroform she inhaled (which is apparently not much) and whether the host’s mind is actually still in there (which we already know it is).

“Before I could ask, Jared lifted the nameless woman tenderly from the cot, rolled her face-up, and laid her on another, cleaner resting place.  This tenderness did not move me.  This tenderness was for the human, for Melanie…”

Holy fuck you are such a fucking selfish bitch!  You’re moved by Jared’s ‘tenderness’ toward the Seeker because you know he’s only doing it to make up for not doing it to you, but you are bitter about him being tender toward a human body that’s just been through a horrifying ordeal and is recovering from surgery, because you think he’s doing it for Stryder?  Maybe he’s just doing it because it’s the fucking decent thing to do; ever think of that??

And hell, even if it was for Stryder, not just because she’s a human and he is a fucking half-decent person who doesn’t just toss people around nonchalantly, Stryder just ATTEMPTED TO KILL HERSELF TO SAVE YOUR LIFE, AFTER YOU STOLE HER BODY.  How DARE you act like you should be bitter about kindness toward her??  Seriously, what the fuck is WRONG with this character?  How do people like her?  How do people identify with her?  Why does ANYONE want her to stick around???

Doc checks the human’s pulse, then peels back her eyelids to look at her eyes with a flashlight, finding that they are back to normal.  He and Jared are both amazed, as is Jeb, though he also admits he’s conflicted, like he thinks Wanda is.  But Wanda is not conflicted for the right reasons, Jeb.  That’s what you don’t know.

Aaron and Brandt are apparently small children now, because they start talking in excited but immature ways, even though I’d think they would be feeling some conflict about this too…especially Brandt.  This should not be what Brandt wants for the Seeker, as much as he may want it in general.  That would have to cast somewhat of a shadow on the occasion, though I do imagine he’d be excited otherwise.

They want to go get more bodies to perform the procedure on, but Jeb tells them to wait because there will be no more “soul snatching” until the Seeker’s cryotank is safely on its way to space.  Wanda agrees with this, so…they really are supposed to send them off one at a time, and expect no one to notice that they keep fucking showing up there?  Seriously?  Agggh!

Wanda thinks about how she’s going to need more people to help with doing these things, because Jeb, Doc and Jared aren’t enough, which leads her to realize that she’s going to have to talk to Ian about it.  Realizing this apparently upsets her greatly, because she doesn’t want to have to tell Ian goodbye, and the thought of doing so brings her even more pain than the idea of pointlessly giving her life up for the Seeker does.  I can’t go any further into this, because I cannot at all support that she’s feeling anything positive for Ian.  I just can’t.  So I won’t.

She thinks the only thing worse than saying goodbye to Ian will be saying goodbye to Jared, but that’s because she thinks Jared won’t feel any pain at the thought of losing her, because he’ll be happy to get Stryder back, whereas the hurt of Ian is because he will feel pain when he loses her.  Yep, she’s so selfless that she doesn’t want Ian to hurt, but she also doesn’t want Jared not to hurt, because his happiness is not more important than what she perceives as his slight against her by not loving her back.  Have I mentioned how much I hate this bitch?

She says she’s not even planning to say goodbye to Jamie, which is really fucking nice of her since she knows Jamie does care about her, and that will hurt him a lot, but what the fuck does she care about abandoning someone who loves her and who she supposedly loves, without even saying goodbye, when she knew in advance that she would have to do so?  Remember, she cares about how people feel only when their feelings are inconvenient to her!  She cares how Ian will feel because she’ll have to face it, but if she can just go ahead and ignore Jamie, well then, she won’t have to feel anything for him, will she?

I get it, it would be much harder to say goodbye to Jamie, but if she’s so selfless and whatever the fuck, she should care more about how it will feel for him than how it will feel for her, but she clearly doesn’t.  So fuck her.  I will NEVER believe that she is selfless, no matter what she does.  Not at all, ever.

Doc calls Wanda over, because apparently she went somewhere at some point, and when she gets over to the bed where Doc is standing, she sees that the human is beginning to wake up.  The human begins to moan, and everyone goes silent, so Wanda tells Doc to talk to her because she doesn’t know what to say.

Doc tells the human she’s safe, and she opens her eyes and looks at Doc for a moment, then looks around the room.  When she sees Wanda, she recognizes her, then scowls…which I can only assume she does because Wanda is an alien, not because of the Seeker’s history with Wanda, unless the human host is evil too.  She says it feels good to have her head back and thanks them, and that’s the end of the chapter.

Soooo she woke up from the chloroform too quickly, in my opinion, and she really shouldn’t be that clear of mind right after waking up from chloroform, no matter how wonderful the No Pain is, but hey, whatever, it’s what happened and the chapter is done and I can’t muster the energy to talk about it anymore.  I did what I had to do, but these chapters are incredibly fucking draining, so that’s it for me!

(See Mike’s take on this chapter at http://emptystress.wordpress.com!)