#because of alan fucking around with the timeline and rewriting shit to ~fix~ everything

[miswaken]

      I think one of the hardest things for Alice to deal with is the fact that literally no one has ever validated what little she remembers about what actually happened in Bright Falls. She doesn’t have concrete memories of being in the Dark Place beyond a few disjointed snippets, but she does more or less remember everything about the night it all went wrong -- the cabin, fighting with Alan, the lights going out... and then it’s a lot of nothing until she dragged herself out of the lake. But then the cabin’s not really there, and she has no proof other than her memories that it ever existed in her reality. And that’s probably something that so many people -- therapists included -- chalk up to a warped recollection in a traumatized mind. Even the FBC just says she’s experiencing “severe mental trauma in the form of [redacted] memory loss” -- and they acknowledge that she was probably at the epicenter of the whole event but obviously don’t tell her that, just that she’s traumatized and should see a professional.

      Alice says herself that she’s not really the type to dwell on the negative, and I imagine it’s easy for a little while to convince herself that yes, whatever she “remembers” isn’t a reflection of what’s real. But at the same time how could there not be a little bit of uncertainty in the back of her mind? She can tell herself all she wants that Alan is dead but there will likely always be some small part of her that cannot let go of those pieces she remembers. But there’s no one else to talk to about it. She’s not on very good personal terms with Barry or anyone from Bright Falls -- not enough to ask if they remember anything differently from what the ‘official’ reports say. And it has to be so incredibly isolating.

      In that way I can see it being almost relieving when Scratch shows up years later and she’s finally -- finally -- able to get a shred of evidence that something is very very wrong. It’s got to be the first time her memories feel a little bit justified. Not that she can readily identify what Scratch is and where he came from, but assuming she has some lingering connection to the Dark Presence she can probably at least recognize his relation to it -- and what happened in Bright Falls. Here is the hard proof that something other than death happened to Alan, and suddenly all of those memories she’s spent years hand waving away don’t seem to crazy. Of course when she goes to the FBC with it they aren’t super helpful, and then everything happens with Hartman and the whole Investigations Sector folds and she (presumably) never hears from them again. Alice gets that one little glimmer of hope, just starts to let herself believe that help has come at last, and then that’s snuffed out too. Right back to that feeling of loneliness in the truth -- which is why I have to assume she decides to start looking into matters herself.

      Even then, consider that Control takes place two years after Alice sees Scratch again. And since the game ends with the FBC still on lockdown, that means it could be some yet undetermined amount of time before Jesse could contact her about what she saw in the Motel -- presuming she even would. And if Remedy’s going with real time passage between games and AW2 comes out in 2023... that’s 13 years since the first game. 6 years since Alice tried to get the FBC involved again to no avail. Obviously that means Alan has basically been trapped in hell for 13 years -- but here Alice is on the other side of it just carrying around these awful half memories and no one in that whole amount of time has ever told her that what she remembers is real. And that’s a burden all its own.