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

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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," 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?

Not at first. She studies him, trying to decide what she thinks of this - it reminds her for a moment of another time in Baedal, with someone else who had looked at her and seen more than she was accustomed to, when Remy tried to get her to fistbump him and she'd just given him a funny look, to begin with.

She misses him. When she takes Drake's hand, her eyes are black, red pupils; a little borrowed braveness.

Drake covers her hand with his other one, although so lightly that it would be supremely easy to pull away. There is no grabbing, here, no curling of the fingers beyond what his tendons do naturally when relaxed.

"I think," and he is very intent about this point, which is what the hand thing is all about. One can nearly feel how firmly he believes this, "that because you worry about this, and to a lesser degree because you're willing to speak to a therapist -- who it is doesn't matter as much as that willingness -- that you will be a fine parent."

The sight of her eyes doesn't even register a blip on the reaction-dar; he already knows she's something not-human. And he knew when he first touched her hand that she was using some kind of illusion, since her skin doesn't feel the way it looks.

"No parent is perfect, trust me. Mine weren't, and I'm not, and in thirty years as a kestra'chern -- a therapist -- I've never known a single person with perfect parents. But I truly think you'll do more good than not, and that's what it really comes down to."

Underneath the illusion, her eyes are bottomless dark - so blue as to appear black in almost all lights. Bigger, too, bigger than is the norm for humans. For now, though, she has Remy's eyes and the thought that maybe he would think this is a good idea, coming here. Maybe he would be a little bit proud of her, even. It'd be nice, if someone were proud of her.

“Worrying isn't enough on its own,” she says, because she'd got that far down the logic path all by herself - but she's here, isn't she. And it's good that she's here, isn't it. And if she isn't significantly less terrified of her own future, then at least the notion of coming here again doesn't feel completely crippling.

"True, worrying without action can make one complacent," the kestra'chern agrees, "and allow the very thing you were worrying about to happen, after all. But, you're doing more than just worrying, you're taking action."

And perhaps that's occurred to her, sure, but hearing someone else say it out loud can't hurt, can it? A total stranger is acknowledging her efforts, out loud.

For someone so prone to looking outside of herself for validation - of many kinds - it's necessary, which is in and of itself something indicative of troubles that go all the way down to the bone. It's a first step, though, and coaxing her through taking it helps; she checks herself against the people around her, and to not find herself utterly lacking for once is no small thing.

She reminds herself, as if she could forget somehow, that it is just one step. She hasn't solved anything. Maybe she can't. Her father couldn't. What makes her think she can do better than he could? (Well, she successfully killed herself, he never managed that one, either-)

She tries not to think about what her mother might say, and instead says, “That's true.”

All things that kestra'chern are accustomed to. And a need they often fill.

"I think it was very brave of you to come here," Amberdrake risks giving her hand one small, harmless squeeze before releasing it, "I know it wasn't easy for you."

He picks his tea back up, giving his hands something to fiddle with. "I think we should concentrate on the present and the immediate future, for now, rather than the past or the far-off future. I know it is difficult, but there is nothing to be done about the past except learn from it, and the far future is mercurial. I am not suggesting that it be ignored, but to try to keep in mind that you are doing everything you can in the present, and that is the most anyone can ask for."

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

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