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

<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.>

It will take time to acclimate to the new reality of things.

I sometimes find it hard myself... and I've been here for months now and the war was already ending when I found myself here. You just have to... let your mind and body realize the danger is not here in their own time. These things can't be forced.

<The war's definitely not ending at home, so... it's hard. But I've been here... maybe a few weeks? And it's only been a little bit since that weird forest let us all out.>

[He ruffles his feathers a little and starts preening himself. He's nervous about all of this, and just... he's not sure what to do.]

<... There's someone else from my world here. She's... she's got a lot of problems with being - what did you call it? Hypervigilant? She didn't used to be. And she doesn't naturally have to be to survive when we're not on missions.>

A few weeks is nothing if you've been living in a constant state of paranoia and vigilance. The body becomes used to being on edge and it takes time for it to wind down again, your mind won't follow until then.

[In other words... it's going to take time.]

That's what my healers called it, at least. If it's a new developement I can only see it being one of two reasons. Either something significant has happened to her fairly recently... or she is having a hard time letting herself aclimate to not having to fight anymore. That can also happen. You can become too used to living in a constant state of war...

<Oh, no. I mean before the war. You would have never guessed she would turn out to be our fiercest fighter. The way she fights... it's ruthless. And it's not like she was gentle before, but she's... blunter. Faster to get to the point. The 'cut the crap' sort of person, now. I worry about her a lot.>

[Not himself. Who'd worry about him? But the others do, and Rachel most of all.]

<But she's still on edge here, yeah. Not that I'm not... I just have less to lose. Even if the others say that I don't... I'd put myself in the way before she gets seriously hurt.>

It's not entirely unusual for such changes to occur when you're thrown into such stressful situations again and again. Sadly enough. I think most people who knew me when I was younger would not have imagined I'd become... so well-suited for war as I am either.

[But it does worry him as well, a bit, to hear about a child that has likely forged herself into a weapon of war.]

I can imagine. Well, you and your friend have a standing invitation to come visit me, should you ever wish to speak to me about anything or just have a quiet place to rest if the confines of the city ever gets to be a bit much. I don't really mind others dropping by from time to time... and I do like to try to be helpful when and where I can be.

<... It's. Uh. Appreciated. I'll let her know. We were talking about how we need therapists. Like... doctors who take care of mental stuff if you're not familiar. And it's not like you're one but you... get it.>

[He shifts a little and looks down at Maedhros, really studying him. ... Sure is some kind of elf or something. But he's not here to talk about the elf, as much as he'd like to deflect the subject.]

<In our world the government is supposed to take care of soldiers both in and out of war. But we're soldiers who are fighting a war where the government is infiltrated and no one knows that it's happening. ... So we can't exactly try that. It's... kind of awful to be without help. Without resources - or even to have anyone care that we're fighting because we can't tell them. So like... not to put you down or anything but this is probably as good as we're going to get.>

It's the least I can do. We... don't exactly have something like that where I'm from. Not outside of Valinor, at least., and even there it's more of a... spiritual healing, I suppose. I'm not much of a healer, that is true, but I do understand what it's like to struggle with these things.

[And he doesn't want anyone to have to dit alone.]

No. Your options are unfortunately limited in that way. It is awful, fighting a war that never seems to end and where the odds are so stacked against you is a very lonely thing. Don't worry about 'puting me down,' as you say, my feelings are not so easily bruised as that. It is only the truth you speak, after all.

Passive Dream Recording | The Box

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)