the worst is over.

I've decided tonight.

Buried beneath her stubborn pride and her paralyzing fear, she knows she needs help.
She knows that Clint is right, that Maria and Tony are too.
Go to Diana. Let her use the lasso to help you.
There's an even more frightening part of her that convinces her against it initially. A part of her that convinces her that what her fear is is really just the truth, that it's the ugliest version of herself that she fears and that version is alive and is well and is here and now and staring back at her in the mirror in Clint and Bruce's guest bathroom. She can hear them talking quietly in the next room (moreso Clint than Bruce because he keeps his voice low, even and it's soothing even if she can see fear in his eyes, too) but she doesn't want to know what they're saying, doesn't want to intrude even as she curls herself into a ball and weeps into their fresh linens and disappears in the morning even though Bruce has cooked and none of them are hungry.
She's in the way again, that's what the fear tells her. She's in the way and she's a nuisance and she's only ever been a detriment to the ones she loves, to the people who were supposed to care. Her heart is broken and she's broken and the thoughts she begins to entertain are venomous and cruel and she can no longer live with this ghost she's become.
Go to Diana. Let her use the lasso to help you.
She swallows doubt and fears and lies and makes the call.

I'm staying alive.

"Tell me what you're afraid of, Jane."
Diana is seated across from her, all regal calm and impenetrable power while Jane shakes and weeps and tangles her fingers in the lasso and clings to it even as she repels it's influence, cowers from the threat of a tell-all. Diana is strong, an anchor as Jane drifts into the darkest waters of her subconscious, the murkiest pools of doubt that feel like oil on her skin.
"Worthless."
The single word slips out before she can catch it mid-air and she can almost see it hang between them, suspended in black block letters that spell useless and ugly and unworthy. The lasso is powerful and the truth spills out of her like so much water in a too small teacup and she's telling a stranger, a goddess that she's afraid of being worthless, she's afraid of being alone, she's afraid, she's afraid, she's afraid.
"I loved someone. I love him still. And he made me believe he loved me, too. Loved me the same way that I loved him. But he didn't. And I can't help but feel that it's punishment somehow. For what I did to ... "
She can't say the name but she knows she doesn't have to. Or does she? Does saying his name absolve her of the pain?
Loki. Luke.
They're identically different, two halves of one nightmarish whole but ... "He loved me. So much. He did. And she hurt him. I hurt him. And now she - I - we hurt, too. I count the days since I last saw him, saw Brian. The anger and the bitterness and the jealousy is all I have of him but I love him anyway, even when I hate him and I'm terrified that that's all there is for me. That this is all I'm good for. That I am worthy of exactly this. Loneliness."
The lasso doesn't make her feel better. They'd warned her that it wouldn't. But it makes the fear manageable and it takes some convincing to resign herself to that fact. And truth be told, she wakes up the next day, the next two days, the next three and she can breathe a little easier. She can return to her research and carry on as best she can. She can forgive herself; she can recognize that she really needed only to forgive herself all along. And she can be what so many of them need her to be: strong.

Kicking and screaming.

The man that opens the door isn't her friend Doug. She doesn't need a name to know this. But stranger or no, she comforts him all the same because these shifts are never easy the first time around and there are far more questions than there are answers, even for someone as experienced as she. She sees fear in his eyes and knows that she has to help, knows it with such certainy that she's inviting herself in and setting him down and taking his hands in hers before she considers against it.
""Tell me. Tell me what's really going on."
She watches as he processes, runs a soothing thumb over the back of his palm as he digests parallel universes, infinity gems, impossible abilities. She anchors herself to him as Diana did for her, a weak substitute for the lasso but no less a point of focus amidst confusion and terror.
"Were you always this damn informative?"
She smiles for what feels like the first time in months at that. Smiles because despite the confusion and the terror, her friend Doug emerges through the fog of this Garfield's new memories and for a brief moment, there's a glimpse of his unwavering optimism to be seen behind bright eyes and a head of unruly hair. She's helped. She's helped in some small way and that fact alone resonates deeper, more true than any lie that she or any other entity could ever tell.