multiversallogs | When you do not like to fight, change the rules.

Entry tags:

When you do not like to fight, change the rules.

Who: Amberdrake and Ilde
What: Ilde's been referred to Amberdrake for therapy, this is a first session.
Where: The old dojo in Howl Barrow
When: Present
Notes: Kestra'chern do kestra'chern things.
Warnings: Talk of suicide, mental illness, etc. It's a therapy session, yo.

Amberdrake rather misses having an assistant. He finishes straightening up one of the twin work-rooms from his last client, who wanted a hot stone and hammer massage and a debate, and takes a moment to re-center himself and relax.

Then he heads for the hallway, and beyond it the walkway, and beyond that, the red gate. He's still wiping faintly lavender-scented massage oil off his hands with a cloth while he waits, humming faintly to himself.

It's hard work, but it's good to be doing his own thing again! He can stop being a glorified spa-worker and get back to being a kestra'chern, and all the things that entails.

Like actually getting to talk to my clients. Even if he has to do it all without an assistant! But I managed fine on my own before Gesten stomped into my life, I can manage again.

Indeed. So here he waits, giving his shoulders an experimental roll as he wipes his hands off. He's in his full kestra'chern garb, complete with the little bells in his hair.

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"I see," is that a little relief he feels? Why yes, it is. Because he's learned just how weird some people are about magic-users in this place, and how arbitrarily they decide how much is too much. Healer could mean someone who simply knows some herbs and how to set bones, but...

It doesn't on his world. And it doesn't on many others, besides.

"You are concerned that I may be of some threat, or be less helpful, then? That perhaps I am bigoted against non-humans?" Naturally, the question is neutral enough, maybe even understanding. He's been learning more of this place as time goes on, and even on his world, problems spring up between the races.

Even among humans, those who are perceived as different...

Well, it's something he has quite a lot of experience with.

Her shrug is a little awkward- “Probably.” It's nothing so coherent as actually giving thought to any of those worries; it's an instinctive mistrust, a moment of pause that she can choose to push past or let pull her away. In the singular, it isn't impossible to shift beyond - sometimes. Other times that mistrust lingers, and how she feels about that is something that varies, from day to day.

Magic, though, that isn't something she worries about. Not when she's innately made of it; when she uses it constantly both consciously and unconsciously, throughout every part of her life.

"You have no reason to believe me, of course," Amberdrake holds his tea in both his hands, turning the cup this way and that way without looking down at it, letting the warmth seep into his fingers. She may like the cold, but he doesn't! "But I am from a world with five sentient races. Although there is little other proof, there are people at Madrasati and Thames who can at least vouch for my knowledge of several non-human anatomies."

Which isn't something you can just make up on the fly upon hitting a new world!

"While there are tensions between the races of my world, it tends to be the exception and not the rule, where I am from. I have been Healer and therapist to everyone who has need of either. But there is no way to prove any of it, other than through time, should you allow me the chance to."

In her world, there are many different intelligent species - but humans are the only one everyone knows about. She thinks it and chooses not to say it, to make at least this much effort not to spend all of her time here doing her level best to pick apart everything he says. Maybe if she doesn't say it out loud, she won't have to untangle why it's her first instinct.

“I already have doctors. For anatomy.” Her head tilts, slightly, like she's about to ask something - which she doesn't, cutting her gaze away at the last moment. “My father didn't like therapy.”

(She hasn't seen him since she was sixteen, but he looms large in her life, even now. He always will.)

"It's a natural distrust, regardless," Amberdrake says more on that topic, "and perfectly understandable."

That he can empathize with it on more than an intellectual level, that he once internally flinched at the sight of paler skin, he does not say. The War and all of Ma'ar's atrocities committed against the Kaled'a'in and their non-human allies haunts his every living moment, it need not haunt his every conversation as well.

"Did you like your father?" he asks instead, because it isn't a given.

“Yes.” It's almost flat - defensive, abruptly, but not of herself. Her instinct is to defend her father; as if she knows there are reasons why she, particularly, might not. As if those reasons come quickly to mind, more quickly than she might like them to. A moment later she's quiet, again, consciously leveling herself out - at least outwardly. Then, “I lived with him, before.”

Before Prometheus; she remembers, still, the last thing she heard him say. The voicemail she'd listened to a few times after landing in Boston. He'd promised she could come straight home if she didn't like it, that he wouldn't be angry with her if he had to buy another ticket, that he'd just do it and it would be all right. He had wanted, she knows, for her to hate it. He hadn't been willing to forbid her from going, but he'd wanted so badly for her to hate it and change her mind and never go again. Sometimes she wishes she'd called him as soon as she listened to it the first time; sometimes she feels guilty for wishing it.

Before what?

That would be the most obvious question, but Amberdrake doesn't pursue these things in the most obvious ways.

"And did he tell you why he didn't like therapy?" he asks next, using past tense since she herself has been. He nurses his tea when not speaking, enjoying being able to drink something that doesn't taste like it could melt a spoon, for once... or willowbark, which tastes like chewing aspirin.

“We never talked about it.” Ilde knows that he didn't because she watched, she listened. She knows that he never attended an appointment that he wasn't absolutely obligated to show up for; she remembers that when they left the hospital, the tension hadn't left him until they were safely in their own home again, until days later when he felt sure he was staying. She hadn't been supposed to go with Septimus to collect him, but she'd thrown herself down in front of the parked car and sobbed, ugly and violent tears, until he'd set her in the passenger seat beside him.

Uncharacteristic behaviour, for her; she'd learned quite young that she could make Septimus Beauchamp do anything she asked, and she'd so rarely taken advantage of it that she thinks he probably still (if he's alive) hasn't realized she knew. She misses them both, suddenly and fiercely, and- makes herself uncurl her fingers before her nails can press in, reaches for her teacup.

Then, “After he tried to kill himself, we went away for a while.”

(She talks around herself.)

There's a lot going on there that Drake doesn't know about; a lot of context that's completely missing... nothing he isn't used to, really.

"Most will admit to the need for a Healer of the body," Amberdrake addresses this, instead, "because the wound is visible, the pain is registered very intensely in the here and now. But very few, in my experience, will easily acknowledge that the heart has its own wounds."

He is very serious, almost solemn. "Fewer still will acknowledge that they are just as grave as wounds to the body. If he had experiences with therapy, they obviously weren't good ones, but it sounds as though he could have used a good therapist."

Drake has talked many, many people down from suicide in the past. He'd been a therapist in a War; survivor's guilt, sheer grief, trauma... and a dozen other issues are dialed up during active warfare. Thus, he doesn't even blink at the mention of someone trying to kill himself. It's a normal part of life.

Instead, he just remains calm and serene, as usual. The proverbial candle in a storm that simply refuses to go out.

“Maybe.” Yes; Emery's alcohol problem is, itself, a symptom of the illness he's been trying to medicate with it for longer than Ilde has been alive. If he'd ever been willing- but he was never very cooperative in his dealings with psychiatric care. The bare minimum to ensure that he could leave and that no one would take his daughter from him, no more and no less.

She didn't see as much as she thinks she did; she saw much more than he thought she could.

“I lived with him.” She's said that, already. “In Italy. Before that, Paris. With my mother. I'd been living with him for a few months when he tried it. I was with them near the hospital between terms. I stayed at home during the school months with my nanny.” The kind of timeframe she's describing indicates, even without any other detail, the severity of the situation. “We came home and didn't talk about it any more. I think,” very deliberately, “that when I was taken, he might have thought I'd done something to myself, too.”

She knows that there'd have been reasons to dismiss it, but she also suspects his mind might go there first, before he knew those reasons. It wouldn't have been so hard to believe. It isn't, as she sits here, slowly and carefully unfolding her story. She's told it before much quicker than this - sharply, brutally honest, using her own truth as a weapon. It's easy to do when she doesn't have to feel anything about it, when she doesn't tell anyone how she feels about it. She can describe the cell, and the wreckage she emerged into, and picking up the knife for the first time. She can describe it factually without changing her expression- she knows better, at least, than to try to do that here.

Of course, Amberdrake is completely unfamiliar with the idea of mandated therapy. The entire concept of 'go to this random therapist who may or may not give the slightest damn about their patients or be in the least bit skilled or else' is not a thing that happens on Velgarth.

"Taken?" Now, he goes after that tidbit.

“Prometheus.” A moment later she corrects herself with the less familiar, “Numen. The government arm of Numen, in America. I was visiting. Family, sort of.” Her father's birth parents; Allegra had had something to tell her. She'd been waiting for her younger son, Gervase. A scientist, Ilde remembers. She thinks they were going to tell her the truth- she thinks, abstractly, that Allegra is probably dead now, and Edmund.

(Gervase, maybe not. She can't guess.)

“Because I wasn't human enough. I was- sixteen. And then the world ended.” The way she says it is very matter of fact; even here, even knowing the little good it can do her, she takes refuge in that calculated distance. As if she can live with it only clinically. “There were storms - I never saw them. I didn't know, for years. But aboveground, there were storms. Everything was different after that. I...”

She hesitates to say 'changed', looks for an alternative.

“Became more myself. So I had these new teeth. Anyway, after what I did to the guard, they moved me to a different wing. I stayed there until Sonja came for me.”

(And Sonja is the star she follows to make the world make sense.)

Storms? Amberdrake is startled enough at that, that his kestra'chern demeanor slips for a moment. His eyes widen at the mention of storms that changed everything. She doesn't have to say it for that word to come immediately to mind.

He's quick to grab onto his mental ropes and haul everything back into order, and takes a moment to refill his tea, holding the pot up in a way that indicates he'll top hers off too, if she wants.

"These storms, they altered your appearance? Even though you weren't near enough to see them?"

She accepts, tilting the cup slightly towards him. “Not my appearance- yes, but, not...”

Ilde stops, regroups. Starts again.

“Most people just died. There aren't...cities, any more, like there used to be. What's left of Boston was gang controlled...the first time I came to Baedal, it was from there. We'd made a deal with them to go to New York for the assault.” And although this sort of conversation sits familiarly on her, now, it- seems like a far cry from what her upbringing was molding. “But not everybody. Some humans developed psychic abilities that they didn't have before. People like me, who were descended from people who weren't human- for us it was good. For me, it was good.” She shouldn't presume that her experience was everyone's. “Now I have everything I should have had. My own body. Properly. Not human.”

At all, she means.

“Other humans, more of them- mutated. Violently. Psychotic. Not people any more, exactly. Irradiated. They're dangerous.” Her fleeting smile is humorless. “Most things are dangerous.” Even her.

All of these locations she lists are utterly foreign to Drake, of course. He's not from an Earth-based world. But he's gotten used to hearing of places that have no ring of familiarity to him, between his time in Haven and his far shorter time here.

"We had similar..." similar may not even cut it, with what she's describing, "no -- perhaps even near-identical -- storms on my world. Although our world already had mind magic in abundance, and non-humans in open society."

As for things being dangerous, he makes no comment. Pretty much everyone is more dangerous than he is, as he'd tried to explain to Severus, so he's made it his policy to simply not care.

Whatever she is, whatever her teeth are like... his own sworn brother has a beak that could sheer even his strong body right in half in an eyeblink! It's perfectly normal to him to sit and have tea with dangerous people.

A question of degree; Ilde knows better than to think of herself as more dangerous than a lot of people, and she lacks the physical strength of even many humans. What about her is most perilous is something she makes a point of almost never doing - only when it's going to be fatal. Mind control is the only hard limit she's been taught by Sonja, but the lesson sticks. Sonja doesn't like it, she shouldn't do it. Not unless the purpose is death.

(Sometimes it makes it easier. She wasn't built for battle, and needs every edge she can find. Her death proved that.)

“Lots of kinds of magic were already...abundant. But not, um...visible? Not commonly known to most humans.” She's quiet, then says, “I never believed in faeries until I was one. Funny. But it's hard to ignore something that tears the whole world apart around you, I think. I mean, you could try. Ivan likes humans being ignorant because they're prey, but I prefer Baedal. I don't think we should have to hide anything.”

This is both necessary - her context is key, if she's getting anything out of this - and also something that she's used to explaining, that makes it easier for her to slide into the sort of conversations therapy produces. Retreading familiar ground, words she's already used out loud.

Ah, but Drake can barely harm a house fly. His Gifts have forced him into pacifism, although he has no problems with those who can fight.

Even pure self-defense is difficult for the kestra'chern to manage. Never mind how strong he is, physically, which is very (although he hides it with his layers of loose clothing). Never mind how potentially devastating his Gifts could be if used negatively on another.

He's pretty much incapable, save for those circumstances that require him to get away.

"That is how humans were in one part of my world, as well," Amberdrake sets the pot aside, having poured them both refills and then sort of hovered with the thing while the shocking idea of someone else's world having the Mage Storms ran through him. "I wonder what they thought, when the Storms hit."

It's a pretty dispassionate thought. The people he would have cared about dealing with the shock and confusion had long since been killed by then. Fast, if they were lucky.

But Ma'ar had never done things fast when slow and horrible was an option.

"I think I would tend to agree with you on that point," he says simply, "Predain was in many ways a backwards country, before the War, with their disbelief in magic that was all-too real. It made them ripe for manipulation by those who knew better."

“My father didn't know. What we were- I know he didn't.” Even if he'd have wanted to keep it from her (he wouldn't have), Emery Featherstonehaugh is a talkative drunk. He told her lots of things, when they'd curl up and watch old silent movies. He would have told her this. “But, um. Whenever he played a charity concert, they always heard him. The audiences always cared.”

The donation goal was always met - at least. Her obscure little smile hints at something other than the dubious compassion of Europe's wealthy.

"Was he an Empath?" Amberdrake blinks at that, running through possibilities, "Although I suppose he would have known, if he was. An untrained and unshielded Empath..."

Unless that had been the source of his troubles, too. Like Sanzo, who hadn't known what he was, but knew that the world pressed down on him too hard. The priest had thought he was weak, before meeting Drake and having the real problem shown to him.

"Although I have known some who never knew." So it's a possibility, in Ilde's father's case. "They blamed it on other things, rationalized it, toyed with suicide."

It isn't just Sanzo he's thinking of, here, but also himself as a teenager in the Chirurgeon's College of Predain, where they didn't believe in such things. And a half-dozen other people, besides.

Untrained and unshielded Empathy was a horror.

Ilde shakes her head. “No. We're- do you know what a siren is?”

Not exactly what they are - but similar, and somewhere to start if he has any kind of mythological context for it.

"No," Amberdrake shakes his head a little, though he can guess at the nature of the question, "I am not from an Earth-based world."

Because he's pretty sure some of those places she listed are. Maybe.

“Then it's irrelevant, anyway. I'm a Nixie- a rhinemaiden. A fae of fresh water - lakes, rivers. That kind of thing. One of our traits is music, and influence. Sometimes subtle, sometimes...not. I have to concentrate, when I play, not to do anything more to my audience than give them really good music.”

'Really good' is something of an understatement.

"I see," to Drake, it still sounds like Empathy. Maybe Empathy that focuses through music, but Empathy nonetheless.

But instead of continuing in that line, he says instead, "So that is why your skin is smooth and cool? For the water?"

It doesn't seem to trouble him, just as it didn't when he briefly had her hand. It wasn't quite like touching a hertasi, but mostly because they have scales. Smooth as river pebbles and quite tiny in places, but they still have them.

Similar enough; the first time she used it deliberately was clumsy, forcing a man to be still and silent when she stabbed him, unable to scream the way she'd been unable to be heard. That moment had been a gift to her from Sonja, forcibly taking back her own agency from the people who had taken it away from her. When she thinks about it, it calms her, a little.

“That's why. Cold water. We're building a pool in our basement, now. For the baby.” Somewhere safe to sleep at night that's got more elbow room than the bath upstairs.

"Sensible," Amberdrake smiles at that thought, though he has no idea what a Nixie looks like under the illusion she has going right now. (He's not rude enough to look her over with the Gift just to see!)

Still, he is a father, himself, and the uncle to a pair of incredibly rambunctious twin gryphlets. He knows the kind of trouble a kid can get into!

"And so your father simply didn't know, because these storms hadn't happened yet," he nods to himself, "do you suppose it was this not knowing that troubled him most? Clearly aspects of your shared heritage were working, even unknown."

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