godsays | 13th metal . spam & text . cw: self-harm

Entry tags:

13th metal . spam & text . cw: self-harm

[ He winds long bandages around his arms before he goes to take a shower, covering himself from elbow to palm. He makes it look more like gauntlets than anything else, to minimize any questions asked, moves furtively and quickly, dodges out as soon as possible. And he longs for the days when the servants had to bring him a bath, and he didn't care what they saw - let them gossip, let them spread the word that he hurts himself. Let it add to the terror they see in him.

Here, it only adds to his shame and frustration. The voice is gone, and he shouldn't need to control himself this way, but the longer he resists, the greater the need becomes, and he always gives in eventually.

It seems wrong to him, anyway, that his arms are mostly bare of scars. That his chest, too, is unmarked. That the other evidence of his violent life is erased, leaving his skin as ordinary as a child's. Sometimes he remembers the scars and he feels the temptation to bring them back.

He has also often been stepping into the gardens and the greenhouse lately, mostly just sitting still and watching the plants. He recognizes their progress. Tries, though it makes him feel a little ridiculous, to murmur things to them sometimes. To talk to them. ]

[ text ]

If you have scars, are they important to you? Do you think they matter?

[ video ; private to Charles ]

I told Megamind you wouldn't object to me attending school. I knew it was the kind of thing that you like.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

All the scars I had are gone.

It bothers me. More than I thought it would.

Because your body feels less like yours, or your history does?

There's detachment between the two.

Do they have to be detached if the one doesn't reflect the other? They're both part of you. They've diverged, a past and a future, but you encompass them.

It could mean being more, instead of less.

[There's nothing flippant in it. She knows it isn't eacy to just choose to thing of things in an opposite way. But she offers the framework of it anyway.]

No. It's - a lie, written onto my skin. Things that are gone but they're still there - like Iris says, on my timeline.

My timeline has all kinds of things in it that aren't on my body. I don't think that makes them lies.

Secrets, maybe.

That's not what it is.

The spike's gone. I should be better now. But I'm not.

[She's not entirely sure what that's about. She remembers the spike from the pirate island, though.]

Zane, you're a person, not a motorcycle. You can't just...toss out a bad rotary piston and expect everything to suddenly run smooth.

People need a lot more healing than bodies do, sometimes. And that's not a lie, just...a distinction.

You don't understand.

It made me insane.

Okay. I don't.

But that still sounds like something that would take awhile to recover from.

Are you going to do anything with what I say?

[She looks a little nervous, less sure of herself. She's still shaken by some things Cassel said to her awhile ago.]

Do anything, like what?

I won't tell anyone if you don't want me to. I certainly wasn't planning to. But I'm not, like...ignoring you and just preaching. I'm not trying to be like that, anyway.

I don't know. I think you're less predictable than most people here.

[This is. Probably true. And sort of a compliment. She's going to try to take it that way.]

I guess I'm not. But these two things are true: I like and want to help you, and I really hate people who try to do things 'for your own good' whether you want them to or not.

Anything you tell me, I won't use against you unless you've flipped out and started threatening people I care about.

[And she's trying really hard to be 100% honest right now.]

I believe that.

I also believe that circumstances can occur that are... unexpected. And that whatever I tell to you is no longer under my control.

[ And that's a feature of his life in general, but that he couldn't control he could at least analyze and try to predict. But mostly that depended on the other person not being quite as keen as him.

He would guess, for example, that he is smarter than Cassel. ]

[She bows her head for a moment, then lifts it, chin angled up.]

There's one scar I wish I had. Right here.

[She drags her thumbnail across her jugular, steady and precise.]

Before you were on the boat, some of the inmates created a disease. Mild fever and nausea at first, nothing terrible. But it made you scared. Suspicious, and angry, and vicious. It was based on rabies. It made you crazy. And then in few days, it made you dead. It wasn't like a flood - it was a gradual change, as the sickness worked on your brain. You could feel yourself slipping away.

I was already a lot more paranoid, in those days. And Erik's room was right next to mine. I was going to kill him. It would have been easy. I had the whole thing planned before I even realized I was considering all the reasons I should really do it just to make sure -

So I took a shard of glass and went to the bathroom and slit my own throat instead. Because I didn't want to do that, and I knew I was going to become someone who would.

The point of all of which is - yes, if the barge is spiteful enough, I might become someone else who would hurt you. But so could anyone else, and being able to predict them helps a lot less when they aren't the same people any more. You wouldn't be asking about whether I'll do anything with it if you didn't want to tell me.

So you just have to decide if your reasons for wanting to are worth the risk.

[And she won't make that choice for you.]

I heard about it.

[Taking risks has done nothing but help here. Chasing that echo of understanding that he feels in her - that's helped, too. When he found it in Cassel, it might have been the best thing that ever happened to him.

He manipulates people now, reads them and pushes them in the ways he thinks they need to be pushed. He manipulates them for them, and couldn't she do the same for him?

And in the end he has only one real defense against someone whose personal willpower could bring them to suicide instead of hurting someone else. It is manipulative. But it's real, too. Honest. And his voice is softer when he says it, disliking the weakness of it and the truth of it.]

Please don't hurt me.

[She recognizes the manipulation of it, because it's the very first thing she learned how to do, and she recognizes that it's real, too. Both halves of the familiarity strike a pang of sympathy in her, but she's perversely pleased to find that it doesn't actually change her answer at all. She spreads her hands.]

I'll try my best not to.

[And they've just established exactly what her best is.]

When I say it made me insane, I mean there was something trying to control me through it. It changed me.

Like soothing and rioting, or more like a flood?

[Trying to get a sense of it in contexts they both understand.]

Like a telepath.

Except... a god.

[The crazy thing is that she has more experience with Erik as a telepath than Charles; he's been scrupulous about it or too subtle to detect. She remembers pouring her madness into him, prying and meshing, using her thoughts like weapons, emotions crashing and echoing in deafening chords. If that were one sided...she shudders. Faintly, but it's there.]

Changed you how?

Memories. Thoughts. It made me forget about it, and it made me want to kill things.

[It was one of the very first things she said: I don't need them to know who I am, or what's happened to me. She hadn't thought of it as a luxury.]

Oh. I'm sorry.

I thought it was just me, going insane. I found out it wasn't after I came here.

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