dreamcrystals | Passive Dream Recording

Entry tags:

Passive Dream Recording | The Box

Sender: Tobias
To: Everyone
Subject: Passive dream recording
Warnings: Torture, PTSD, hunting

You fly on auburn wings high above the field, looking down at it. It's far below you, and yet you can clearly see the rats scurrying in the grasses, the rabbits hopping into their burrows as your shadow passes, and you know you could swoop down and kill them in an instant. All of them, if you really wanted - the mother and her babies. You can almost taste the meat and blood and fur - but no. You're not hungry right now, and better to let them grow so you can hunt them later.

You turn, wheeling up towards the sky. There's a forest nearby, and you have a destination. You tilt your wings downwards until -

Wham! You slam into what feels like a glass window. Shrieking, you try to go around it, to find where the edge is and - and you hear a teenage girl's voice.

"You are obviously not a leader. You are not even second-in-command. You are a nobody." The voice makes you panic more than the words, and you kick off of the 'glass' to try to dive towards the field and -

Wham! There's another 'wall' - floor? - beneath you. You push off again and panic, trying to find the exit -

Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham! Four more walls, making a cube. You're trapped. You're trapped and you know it's closing in and you can hear the girl laughing. It's a dark chuckle, and you know what that means. You're in the box again. You're in the box again and you know what that means, you know that she could pull you back to reality once again and cause you pain and you're panicking. You flutter around the box, trying to find something, some exit - but you know it's useless.

"Demorph!"

<No!> You shout it wordlessly, struggling against the inevitable. You reach up a wing in front of your face and see - a hand? But it's also a wing? It doesn't make sense, and you hear a gruff man's voice - older, raspy, cold.

"What good is it?"

What good is it anyway? You're going to die here, you're going to die and no one is going to help you and all you can see is your wing/hand and the blue sky and you tense your body, ready for the pain and -

Blackness.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Are you still in the area where I ran into you before?

[By this point it's probably nearing morning, so at least there'll be light that he can see by. He doesn't really like morphing other birds on principle.]

Not very far from there, and there will be little trouble to make my way there now.

I'll be there soon.

[He needs to hunt anyway. So he tells Rachel he'll be back in a bit and heads out, flapping his way to the forest in the cool morning air. He soars where he can and flies down to where he met the elf before, looking around for him.]

[He doesn't want to just randomly call out - who knows what might want to attack a 'talking' hawk?]

[Maedhros is not hard to find, not that he couldn't keep himself hidden if he wished to, as he was sitting patiently underneath one of the trees there. Waiting for the 'talking bird' to come meet him.]

Well met, friend. I hope the journey was swift and uneventful for you.

[He's chosing to speak with words today, feeling that it will perhaps be easier for the child to speak without someone being in his head today.]

[He flutters down and sits on a branch. It's a little weird, but...]

<Yeah. I told the person I was with that I went to hunt, so I'll do that later. Morning air's a little harder to fly in, but it's not that big a deal.>

[There's an awkward silence for a bit before he speaks up again.]

<I'm just going to tell you up front - this is weird. And I can't tell you everything. I won't put my friends in danger.>

There's plenty of prey in these woods, so you'll find little problem later on today in finding something to eat.

[It might just be that he has a very good poker face, but Maedhros does not seem very bothered by the somewhat awkward silence.]

And I will not ask you to do so. I'm not entirely unfamiliar with the need for secrecy when it comes to certain things. What I am offering is advice and a sympathethic ear when it comes to... what you have endured.

<Torture. You mean torture, right?>

[Because that's what it was. It was necessary, the plan worked, he was the obvious choice. And having been through it, he's not sure that the others could have taken it. That they could have both fooled the enemy and lived through the pain. Except... well. She would have morphed and she would have died.]

[So no. He was the obvious and only choice.]

<... They dragged memories out of me, good and bad. They didn't see them, but somehow they messed with my head. And then there was a button that was just pain.>

[So both mental and physical. He's aware of how flat his 'voice' is when he talks about it. It has to be, or he'll be... he's not sure. Angry? Sad? It doesn't matter.]

...Yes. That is what I mean, and I'm sorry you had to suffer through that... it tends to leave marks that go deeper than simply physical scars.

[His eyes seem terribly far away as he speaks, his hand nervously rubbing his wrist where his other should have been. But then he simply shakes his head, rousing himself from whatever memory was playing in his mind at the moment and turned back towards his companion.]

It is good they did not see them. [For it would have simply been another knife for them to cut him with if they had.] But that is cold comfort, I'll admit. I wasn't grateful for it myself until it was already decades behind me.

[He supposes it would have been too much to ask for to have only been one or the other. It made his blood boil, knowing it had been done to one so young.]

How did it come to pass that you found yourself in such dire straits, if you do not mind me asking?

[And his voice makes it clear that he will not press the issue should the boy mind it.]

<That's what I've heard. But I don't really know much about it. The resources I can access aren't... a lot.>

[How to explain? The basics should be enough.]

<Our enemy had a tool - a weapon, really - and I was the only one who could fool them into thinking it wasn't working. ... The torture, we had no idea that it might happen. Not that way, at least.>

It... changes how you think. The way you look at things, the way you look at yourself... and not necessaryly for the better in either case.

[It always seemed strange to him. How often people thought going through great suffering made you better, somehow. When in reality it made you feel like a broken mirror, a distortion of what you should have been had you been left alone.]

I see... a calculated risk that you didn't have all the information to make yet. It is hard to truly fathom such things before they are already happening. Our minds aren't really built for it, I think.

<I know people who had family who were in wars. But it's... a different kind of war. I don't... you can't just point to a group of people and say 'all of those are the enemy' unless you're literally in their base. And even then, not everyone is there by choice.>

[There's 'laughter' but it's dry and very tired-sounding.]

<I mean we've calculated all sorts of terrible things happening, but this was technology that's totally new to us. How could we have planned for that kind of torture? We couldn't. And our minds aren't built for torture, either. I just... had to retreat into instincts.>

War is a terrible buisness, even more so I suppose when it sounds like you must mistrust almost everyone. It must have been terribly lonely...

[And loneliness he can understand, though his had come more from an inability to trust himself more than a distrust of others.]

Pain does have that effect on you. You can withstand it for a time, it is true, but not forever... it brings out the animal part of you. For it is the only way you have to protect yourself. To let your mind scurry away into some deep dark corner of yourself while all... that is happening to you.

<It is. I guess.>

[... Yeah. Yeah, he agrees with that. The elf-man's got it right there.]

<Exactly. It's... you just go away. You can't be yourself anymore. You just have to react.>

It is.

[He agrees, almost to himself.]

It is a survival tactic. If you were to stay they would end up breaking you completely, and so you need to break part of yourself instead to be able to keep some part of yourself intact and hidden. It's just... hard to crawl your way back from that mindset once it is over and done with. You come to expect the return of the pain, for your memories to betray you once again... for your escape from it all to have been yet another cruel trick of your captors.

[This is risky. He can't tell him anything, but...]

<I've had to deal with fighting my instincts for a long time. And I'm never going to be able to fully pull away from them. But the pain... maybe not the physical pain, but I've... it's not new.>

[He had a roof over his head. He should have been grateful. He knows what they'd say.]

The thing is you don't have to, not completely at least. That's one of the traps most likely to get to you after going through something so awful. You think you need to go back to how you were before... but you can't. You're not that person anymore after that, not entirely, and that is one of the things you have to come to terms with. Hard as that is to do.

[Building himself up again had been the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life, and he'd mourned for a long time for all the parts of himself that he had lost.]

<I know that. I'm not as gentle as I was once. I'm a predator. I'm not shy anymore, not in that way. But I need to be me again in some way. I can't... they need me to be me.>

[He can't go back, but he doesn't know how to go forward.]

You are not the you of back then, but you are and always will be you. Change is inevitable... this kind of change just tend to be swifter and less smooth than what is natural.

[Moving forward is hard. Sometimes all you want is to go back, back to when things were not so painful and complicated... but you can't.]

You need to look into yourself and find the parts that still fit somewhat, and start building from there. It wont ever be the same again, but... one day you'll look upon yourself and feel like you can see something of that boy you were once again. It will hurt a bit, but it will be the kind of hurt that does not feel all bad. Like waking up and finding you have left childhood behind, almost...

[But it was a long and hard road to reach that point.]

Edited 2024-03-05 20:31 (UTC)

<I don't want to. I don't want to be the victim anymore. I don't want to hurt anyone if I don't need to, but I'm not going to let myself get hurt if I don't have to.>

[He can't. He won't. And he doesn't want to. He doesn't want to be the person he was, he doesn't want to hurt like that anymore. To go through every day being bullied, harassed, and forgotten.]

<But I don't know what fits anymore. All the pieces have ragged edges. And half of them are hidden under the couch.>

Edited 2024-03-05 20:46 (UTC)

Those are not the only paths open to you, though I know sometimes it may feel that way. You can be yourself and be someone entirely new at the same time, for a person is a complex thing. Filled with a multitude of facets. Find the parts of yourself that you want to be and build yourself around those until you feel like you finally fit inside your own skin again.

[He is silent for a moment, thinking how to best put it into words.]

Ragged edges can be filed down and smoothed out, couches can be moved. Things may not fit now, which means you must put them together in a different manner. Make new pieces to fit with the old ones... discard those that cannot be salvaged. It wont be the same, no, but you will eventually be whole again.

<Want to be? Or have to be? Because they're very different. I'm never going to fit into my own skin again. I've accepted that. I've accepted myself. That doesn't mean I have to like it.>

[He's not sure it's ever going to stop hurting. But that dull ache, he can live with. It's the pain that comes with remembering things sharply that he has trouble with.]

<... Whole again is... I don't know. I can't even imagine that at this point.>

Either? Both? Only you can truly awnser that, young one. Acceptance is good enough sometimes, I think. I too have accepted I am who I am now, even if I do not always like that person.

[Somewhat of an understatement, since he can genuinely say he hates himself most of the time. But he has come to accept that too.]

It is still a fresh wound for you, I suspect. One that has had little time to heal with all the rest you have had to focus on. It will come in time. Do not try to rush it or you will end up doing yourself more harm than good.

<It's been a bit. Several months. It's hard to tell sometimes, other than the animals in the field starting to hibernate. It's not like I have any use for a calendar.>

[But he suspects 'months' isn't what he's talking about.]

<We haven't had time, no. We keep having mission after mission, but we can't stop. We're the only ones who can do what we do.>

Yet you have been blessed with time to work through it here. My suggestion is to make the most of it while you still have the opportunity.

[He smiles wrily.]

But it will take some time, I suppose, before the hypervigilance and being constantly on edge that comes with fighting a war subsides enough for you to truly believe it.

<I... I guess. It's still hard to believe that our enemies aren't here. They're everywhere, like I said. Resting... it's not even an option. You're right that we're constantly on edge. ... We just don't have a choice.>

<I'm not sure what we'd do with a break. Probably spend all of it worrying that it's not a break.>

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