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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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."

“Maybe,” after a slight pause. Certain things had become clearer to her, after all; that lingering uncertainty, that deep down belief that something had to be wrong with her. That she didn't fit because she was broken somehow. (Except knowing what she is doesn't make it go away overnight - it's never as easy as just knowing.) “I don't know. He was never happy - not really.”

Has she been? She isn't sure. Probably. It seems so melodramatic to say you haven't ever known happiness.

Drake mulls this over, both spoken and felt. He's not a mind-reader; her specific thoughts are a mystery. But the subtle flavors of them, the tiny shifts and flick of emotion, that's a language he's at least as fluent in as the spoken.

"And yourself?"

“I never went to therapy.” A willful misunderstanding, but the quicksand of her emotions are a tell; just enough shame in the mix to suggest that all has not been well with Emery's principessa for longer than she'd like to admit. It would be easy to blame everything on what Prometheus put her through - five years of torture and captivity isn't something most people would shrug off, and she hasn't - but she'd gone into their hands already a little damaged.

It is, although she doesn't know it, something that runs in the family on her father's side. Emery's not the first one of their bloodline to try taking his own life, although the woman that their fae ancestor had loved so much had been more successful, and more vindictive in the scene she set with her death. Mental illness can sometimes be a little hereditary, and the de Laceys have carried it ever since Camilla.

But it's part of a kestra'chern's job to drain those emotional wounds, and sometimes a warm compress won't do. Sometimes, it takes a lance. Thus, no matter how accommodating and mellow Amberdrake normally is, he's quite capable of being firm and unyielding.

"You know quite well that isn't what I meant," he says, although he softens it with a warm smile. "It's my job to ask the tough questions, sometimes. I can ask as many times as you like."

Edited (I am redundantly redundant sometimes.) 2012-11-03 11:02 (UTC)

Her first impulse is that she'd like him to ask no times; she could always leave. He isn't, she's been promised several times, going to coerce her. She has to choose to be there and although it's hard to trust that - harder since Xavier disappeared and she lost the support from him that she's relied on these past months - she thinks she understands at least intellectually that it's true. That she could stand up and leave.

She sits quietly with her tea for a long time.

“Once he forgot my name.”

(She has been so sad, for so long.)

"Ah," it may or may not be meant as the answer to the question he was pressing with, but Amberdrake seems to take it as such. "So, you were never happy, either. And then after the storms?"

“Five years,” she says, splaying her fingers over the teacup, tips to rim, like she's counting off. “Roughly, five years. After my body changed, they sterilized me. So that I couldn't pollute the population. Finnegan,” there are so many emotions attached to that name, all of them ugly - rage, fear, hatred, shame, and a vicious, cruel sense of triumph, “called it 'spaying the females'.”

And then Sonja had taken what they needed from him and ripped out the part that made him who he was, kept him in a bottle in case they ever needed him, and killed the shell. She had promised him a quick death for information, but she hadn't promised him that death would be an ending. He should have got the fine print on that agreement.

“Sonja came, with the enclave.” Sonja came for me. “Let everybody go. Destroyed the facility. When they had the survivors of the staff left, outside, she gave me a knife and told me that I could kill whichever of them I wanted. Most of us got that- not everyone did it.” Ilde had. She'd known the scent of the man she'd scarred with her teeth, and she'd finished what she'd started, and for the first time in so long she had felt something beyond the drive to keep breathing.

“Then she said that she was building an army to destroy the rot in New York. And that we could come if we liked, or not, if we liked. I went with her. I died in New York.”

The idea of being kept captive, tortured and operated on and brutalized, are also not foreign to Amberdrake. Though he avoided that fate himself, none of his family did.

And who was it that was called in whenever a gryphon escaped Ma'ar's torture, to put their crushed wings back together again? Drake had been one of perhaps three people in the entire army who was capable of such a detailed procedure.

Not to mention his duties as kestra'chern.

"And now you're here, not dead and not... 'spayed'," why yes, one can hear the air quotes there, and the distaste at the idea. "Some good has obviously come of this place, for you?"

It's clear that it has, but he frames it as a question anyway.

“I don't want to leave.” It's an admission she makes very quietly - there's guilt mixed in with the strong attachment she feels to Baedal. She can't leave, now, she thinks - she's dead. She died in her own world. That's it, there. She thinks Sonja would be perfectly happy to defy reality to keep her, but she isn't sure if it would work, and- she doesn't want to go. Baedal has been good to her.

And it feels selfish. And she knows that it's more than likely she will never see her father again. And she's afraid of forgetting what's important. And she feels less and less every day that she knows who she is, any more, when so many of the things she used to mark it by are gone. When she can hardly be a part of any of the things that meant so much to her to be a part of.

After a moment, “A woman here in Baedal - she came to me. She said that she knew what had been done to me and that she could reverse it.”

"I understand," Amberdrake says quite gently, "I don't want to leave, either. Though there are many, many people who desperately need me back on my own world... though I have a daughter, there, and a whole city to take care of."

So he is familiar with that guilt, even if he hasn't been bearing it for nearly as long. But this, too, is different from a standard therapist with their standard clipboards... Drake understands things. And what he doesn't immediately understand, he tries to.

(Of course, if Sanzo was to vanish from Baedal, Amberdrake's views on wanting to stay would veer drastically in the opposite direction. But saying that would be straying toward explaining too much, he thinks.)

"I am not surprised, I myself can fuse a severed limb back onto its stump. Medicine and Healing varies drastically between worlds."

Edited 2012-11-03 12:08 (UTC)

Meg gave Ilde an opportunity she'd gone at with both hands - the fruits of that, so to speak, are clearly apparent already. She'd made plans and she'd budgeted and she'd made sure she had people in her life to rely on and she'd forced herself to be willing to submit to anything the doctors needed to do to make this healthy and safe, and...if she's brutally honest with herself, then she looks at the way her hands tremble when she sits in the bath at night when she can't sleep because of the things she dreams and the things she remembers-

Then she worries that she's making a mistake. That she's being selfish, that she's not cut out for what she's taking on, and the worst part of it is that she knows intimately that this is not an irrational fear. Her father loved her more than he ever loved anything in his life, and she loves him for that, but it hadn't made him a good parent. Love doesn't always cut it, on its own. That's why she's sitting here, hands clasped so tightly around her teacup that she'd be whiteknuckled if she let the illusion reflect that. Because maybe what she has to protect her baby from is herself, and that isn't something Sonja can help her with. She doesn't have as much of a safety net as Emery had, once upon a time, and she remembers the things even money couldn't protect her from. She doesn't want for her own child to learn the hard way about the things it had.

Sometimes she doesn't miss her father, and she feels a lot of different things about that.

“I was in Baedal between- um, we went to Boston, to meet with the gangs, and then we were in Baedal. And then we were here for about...a while less than a year, maybe, and then we were in our own world. And the siege happened, and then after I killed myself, I came back here. To the arrival room again.”

The response she has to that room is visceral, and a ghost of it comes even here, just from thinking about it - she doesn't go anywhere near the Valhalla if she doesn't have to, now. She has two reactions to helplessness, now, withdrawal or violent rage, and neither of them are pleasant.

Amberdrake watches her through all of this, his own calm making it easier to feel out the subtle details within the roiling ball of emotion. He sips his tea while watching, steady, focuses absently on the way the room already smells vaguely of massage oils and foreign teas despite how little time he's lived and worked here.

It keeps him steady and calm. Empaths are reactive; kestra'chern can't afford to be reactive. This is the dance that one who is both must contend with, always.

"You were very tense about something, there, before your explanation just now."

He can figure out what the trigger after was, for someone who had been captive...

“He loved me so much.”

She will defend her father to the ends of the earth - she would do anything for him. She's lied for him, she'd kill for him. He means everything in the world to her, and- it's not because he was a good father. He was a terrible fucking father to her; six year olds should be able to rely on the adults in their world, not carry the burden of their failures. She should never have had to feel that protecting him was her responsibility. She shouldn't have had to learn where he kept the keys to his liquor cabinets so she could take them if she was afraid he wouldn't stop before alcohol poisoning set in. She shouldn't have had to climb into the bed beside him on the days when he wouldn't get up because she needed to put her hand on his chest and feel him breathing to feel safe.

She remembers how Ivan had cancelled all of her appointments for her, that week. How worried he'd seemed. How fucking surreal it had been to watch him make her sandwiches because she had to eat, because opening a vein doesn't work for people who aren't fucking vampires. She remembers how she hadn't wanted anyone else to see her like that - how she hadn't wanted him to see her like that.

And she loves this baby so much.

It's a lot of unsaid to take in. Drake quietly considers it, for a lot longer than the little bit of said to probably warrant. Perhaps he's just reviewing what's been said so far?

A bit of both, really.

"But he forgot your name, once," Amberdrake says quietly, because that's the trouble with trying to deflect a kestra'chern of his caliber -- the information you invariably end up giving can always come back up again!

"You're worried that your kid might have something similar to say, in the future," it's almost a statement instead of a question.

The moment after he says that she looks down instead of keeping her eyes on him or answering - and it's telling, that. For a moment she has nothing to say, and she doesn't want to hear anything else. She curls her hands around the teacup, uncomfortably warm to her, and closes her eyes. He's sharp enough to have caught that she's lipreading, she already noticed, he won't say anything until she opens them again. It's a little bit of breathing room.

(It's a child's game - I can't see you so you can't see me.)

Admissions like that tend not to be something she makes directly. It isn't accidental, or at least not entirely, that she drew that parallel - maybe she wanted to be understood without having to declare certain harsh truths out loud. Maybe it's easier to be heard when she doesn't have to shout to do it, though she is by her very nature a bit like a fucking foghorn to any empaths in her vicinity. A standard side-effect of the different way fae process their emotions, and not particular to her or her pain.

Then she says, “Bad poets and lucky children think love conquers everything.”

It just gives Drake more time to mull it all over, of course.

But she has to eventually look back up at him, and when she does, he's ready with a gentle smile. He's set his tea aside, and holds out his hand. Will she take it?

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

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