versusnurture | fourteen ♢ text & audio & spam

fourteen ♢ text & audio & spam

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[She wakes up screaming at what is, relatively speaking, three in the morning. It's a nightmare, the first really bad one since she died. She tries to remember what it was, what exactly, but it's all a blur; she remembers screaming in the dream, too; she remembers a lure; she remembers blood, lots of blood; she remembers a song. Ein Männlein steht im Walde . . . She remembers not being able to breathe. She remembers her mouth was full.]

[The first few nights, she calls people. She asks for help. After that, she wanders the halls, unable to get back to sleep, unwilling to lie in the dark any longer. Her hair is tied back, a scarf tucked around her shoulders, but her scar still stands out against the pale clamminess of her neck.]

audio } ben

[Night one, she calls Ben. She is crying, her voice muffled (she is using the bear as a pillow, as something with which to dry her tears).]

I'm not hurt. [She has to clarify this first, so he doesn't fear for her, so he doesn't hurt for her. This is how she protects him.] But I need you. Please. If - it's not too late.

audio } blight

[It's instinct to contact him. Maybe it's bad instinct. But it's what she reaches for the second night, once she's calmed herself down enough that she's no longer hyperventilating. Once she feels mostly human again.]

[It's midnight. She sounds as chipper as if it was noon.]

What do you know about brain chemistry?

text, filtered away from hannibal } public, april 7

who has nightmares

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Purple.

I don't understand why purple.

I didn't think anyone could eat someone like you.

But dreams. Logic doesn't. Sorry.

Maybe they can't. Okoya couldn't, and he was their...kind, I think, but weaker.

I'm not sure it matters. I see it as myself but I feel it as Earth. Humanity. All of us.

[And he still wants to think of himself as part of that.]

I used to dream about shatterpoints. The moment possibility becomes consequences, and a town becomes a war zone, or a mind becomes gibberish. The world ripping itself apart, unraveling, rippling out from me. Things I'd done, or might have done. But for months, before I came to the barge, just those three.

I don't know why purple.

It's a color of power.

Do you still want to rip things apart, Dillon?

It's not royal purple. It's...almost lilac-y. Cloying, sweet.

Sometimes.

Right when I'm waking up, and I haven't remembered yet that I don't need it anymore, that I hated it when I did. When all I can remember is the first edge of the rush.

I want to rip things apart all the time. Even though I know for a fact now it doesn't help.

I hate the smell of lilacs. Almost as much as I hate rosehips.

No, it doesn't.

But I'd fix things you broke, if you wanted.

No. Then what's the point of breaking them?

You have to know I killed people. I was a little disappointed when they came back. Not very. But a little.

For the moment when it happens. That's the tempting part for me, anyway.

[For the relief of it, the soft puff of dust, the tension cut like wires around his wrists, caught breath blown out after a card castle collapses, the way it was just waiting to. For the rush, the beauty, the truth revealed, like smashing open a stone to see crystals, to see what it's made of. For the sound things made. The things his mind noticed at the moment that chaos spread and the energy was released, and the thing inside him feasted and relented awhile, the part he's associated with catharsis, with the brief suspension of craving, starvation, pain. He doesn't know how to say any of that without sounding like a stranger, weaker monster than Hannibal.]

I know. But I haven't really picked up details. I could, if you want me to know, if that would be easier than explaining.

I think maybe it's natural, to feel that way. Dying is natural even when it's horrible. When people come back, it's like everything that felt so big about death matters a little less.

[If that makes him a weaker monster, then Abigail is weakest yet. Even as she's doing it she has no conviction. It is a release of pressure more than anything, pressure she's still uncertain how else to relieve.]

[She would be all right with it, though, if she was a strange, weak monster with Dillon.]

That's not why I was disappointed. I was disappointed because I wasn't even that powerful anymore.

[She could exert only the barest breath of control over her environment, and then it was taken away.]

I didn't like killing. It made me feel sick. But I liked it, too.

You can know things about me. I don't mind, with you.

My parents were the first people I killed.

They were good parents. I loved them. I didn't even know I was doing it until it was too late.

I had all this power in me, from me, but I couldn't control it, not when it mattered, never when it mattered.

[He thinks of the town where he spared the half-block with the preschool in it. How proud he was. A little sliver of control, while the beast fed and the people below seethed into a war zone. He thinks of the power wreaking itself on the world while he was unconscious, carried along by it and the river in tandem. He thinks about the people he healed at Hearst Castle, thinking it mattered, before he discovered where they came from.]

When everything else is out of control, every little descision, everything that's yours is precious. Is sustaining, helps you keep going through everything happening around you. That's just human, feeling like that.

[He thinks, would like to think, of himself as human still.]

Edited 2014-04-23 18:07 (UTC)

It's just human?

[She's never heard it framed like that. It's only ever been monstrous, for given values of positive and negative in the face of monstrosity, true, but never just human.]

You mean human beings strive for control, even if it's false, and if they can't find any control they make some up, and if they can, they take it. It's human nature.

But isn't that evil? Ben says not to use labels. That they don't help. But it sounds like evil.

[He thinks of the patterns of cities. He thinks of Lourdes, and her puppet drills, and he aches.]

It is human nature. It's literally how we evolved. 15,000 years ago humans were building houses out of clay bricks in Turkey to control their environment, to keep out the rain and wild animals. We came up with laws and priests and kings mostly so we could live together without destroying each other over resources because we could make more working together. Plumbing and the domestication of dogs and the moon landing and art, all of those things are only possible because of organization. Because of the impulse to control things around us and change them to suit us. That's how we survived and it's wired in really deep.

Control hurts people sometimes, either on purpose or just out of ignorance. A lot, if people aren't careful, and compassionate. But it doesn't have to, and that's not all it does.

[Dillon believes in evil. But he doesn't know how to define or explain it. Some choices hurt people: that's empirical, that's easy.]

Then control itself is not evil. It's what and how you choose to control.

Yeah. What and how and why.

And I don't think it's evil to want things you know are wrong. You can't help what you want. Only what you do.

[He who has sinned in his heart - but that's everybody. That's the point.]

Edited 2014-04-29 15:18 (UTC)

Okay. Because I can't imagine not wanting to feel powerful. I don't think I'll ever stop wanting that.

Do you want to feel powerful, or do you want to be powerful?

[He's honestly not sure which one applies to him. But he'd take being less powerful and more in control in a heartbeat.]

I can only have one?

It's useful to understand your own priorities.

Then I want to be powerful, I guess. But if I don't realize that I am, I'll never be happy. I'll never feel safe.

I'm sorry.

I can't figure out if power made me safe or not.

I'm not sure I have a common or meaningful concept of what safe is.

You should try to find one. I want you to be safe.

I mean, it doesn't have to be common. It just has to feel right.

I want you to be safe too.

I'm trying. It's so much harder than it sounds.

[That's the thing about life, he thinks: no one gets out alive.]

Yeah. It is.

If you ever want to do 3AM hot chocolate or whatever, my sleep schedule is pretty out of whack anyway.

[You don't have to try alone.]

Okay.

But it has to have marshmallows.

[She means thank you.]

[private]

orderfromchaos - 2014-06-01 05:55 (UTC) - Expand

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