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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[She's curled up on the bed, her entire body wrapped around the blankets and the bear in the fetal position. When the door opens, she starts, but doesn't move off the bed once she realizes it's Ben. Just smiles weakly and lifts her head.]

Hi. 'M sorry. It's so late.

Hannibal said he'd help me with nightmares. [It's all the explanation she can manage in this precise moment before she starts crying again.]

[It's all the explanation he really needs.

Ben glances around the room out of ingrained habit, clearing the corners, the closet, the window with reflexive efficiency; a second later he's slinking across the room to her and, after a moment of indecision, crouching beside the bed to bring himself eye level with her.]

Need does not run on a schedule. I'm here.

[Ben doesn't frown, glancing her over for any physical damage, but of course there's none. That he could fix with certainty and a degree of ease. No, this damage is much harder to reach, and he is unsure of his ability to do so, but he will try. He will always try.Undeterred by the tears, his voice stays low and smooth between them; he was not, as a child, any more prone to nightmares than any of the rest of them, but he is familiar with this kind of caretaking.]

Now I will help you with nightmares. They will not harm you. May I turn on a light or would that be harder?

Light. Please.

[Ben is her light. She remembers what she told him when they were both someone else, that they are bright stars. He's helped immeasurably just by being here, more than she can express.]

[She wants to cling to him, but she wants to stand alone. Finding the balance is impossibly difficult.]

[Ben remembers, too, somewhere in the vagary that is the last month of his life; sometimes he remembers more clearly than others, but it had made perfect sense to him when he came back to himself. Moreover, it had confirmed what he had already known: Abigail cannot be forced. She can only be accompanied.

He wordlessly rises and turns the light on, for her benefit more than his own, and he does not make the comparison in his mind but it drives him nonetheless. Be near her. Shine. She will be magnificent on her own. Ben settles again, not comfortably but not uncertainly, into a crouch exactly where he had been before, brown eyes intent on first her grip on the teddy bear and then lifting to her face.]

Would telling me be helpful? Can you?

I don't - know.

[If it would be helpful - if she can. She swallows. She ought to try. She always ought to try, with Ben, because he never stops trying for her.]

I don't remember all of it. Just pieces. Just, um.

Being an animal. I'm an animal. And I'm not being chased, I'm not running, but I know there's something close by that wants to hurt me. I don't know where it is or where I should go to get away from it. And it's so - pretty everywhere, covered in flowers, smelling good the way the woods smell, that I don't want to believe I'm going to die.

And then I start bleeding. It doesn't hurt at first but then it does, it hurts so bad, and I look down and my legs are full of hooks stuck in me and there's blood all over and I'm dying. I can feel I'm dying, like there are hooks in me too. And someone's singing a song and my mouth is full of blood and I'm screaming but I can't move or make a sound. And there's something behind me.

And then I wake up.

[He listens. Dreams, he knows, are not unlike the stories he tells: often metaphor, loosely attached to reality and yet somehow more accurate. More truthful. But sometimes they also mean nothing at all.

So he listens and, when some of the themes are indeed familiar from her file - he reads it daily, to make sure he's forgotten and that he forgets nothing - from the things he's learned from Abigail and Alana, he is first and foremost honest.]

I am not very good with dreams. What are your thoughts? Do they mean something, or are they random?

[She worries her lip, shrugging.]

I don't know. Some of it's . . . real. Some of it's memories. I remember the song, it's the one Hannibal - when he killed me. The rest of it . . . I don't know.

Sometimes I feel like an animal. Like I'm less than human. And sometimes I feel like other people are the animals. I know that's what he thinks.

It's all just - stupid symbolism, and I shouldn't be scared of it but I am. I don't want to be scared anymore.

You do not need to think in terms of "should," Abigail.

[This is a segue, though, a reassurance to steady her while he considers what else she's said. There isn't much to go on, at least not much that he didn't already know. He'll ask about the song later, he thinks, and even if he's almost guaranteed to neither recognize it nor know the significance of it, he can always research it. He is even familiar with her statement: she does not want to be scared anymore. He doesn't want her to be scared.

He should, he thinks, have done more for that by now than he has.]

What most people fail to understand is that humans are animals. Humans themselves taint that knowledge with a negative influence, as though merely being born one species instead of another makes a life inherently worth less. As though humans are not, to a deer or a dog or a bird, every bit as absurd and unnecessary to survival.

Is the forest familiar to you? The one in your dream, do you know it?

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

[She stills slightly at his logic. Which is what it is. If nothing else, Ben is intensely logical when he's not perfectly insane. It calms her, this sensibility, this truth. Yes, humans are animals. Who made that negative for her? It wasn't her father, at least not at first. He wanted to honor the animals they fed on - to treat them as equals.]

[But then he lost his way. She's shocked to think of it in such gentle terms. Should she be angrier? No should. She doesn't need should.]

[She lowers her eyes, acquiescing, then looks up at her warden again, trying to remember.]

I - don't know. It might be familiar, but everything's so confused.

[Ben meets her gaze, steady and intent, tired eyes on tired eyes without expectation as she looks back at him. His hands dangle loosely in his lap, and he does not fidget.]

Is it the same dream? Are there more?

How often?

[She shakes her head like she's trying to shake something off. To get something to let go.]

I've just had the one so far, here, but - there are similarities to nightmares I've had before. Except there were more of the girls my father killed, in the old ones. Sitting all in a ring around me and telling me I should have died.

You did.

[This is not an accusation, not a justification, but merely a fact. Facts themselves, he has always known, are neither good nor bad. They are just facts, data, knowledge. How they are applied, the angle they are approached, this gives them weight, edges, consequences.

Maybe this one can take the weight off the part of herself that blames her for the dead girls. Once Ben had had room for it in his own head and heart, the knowledge - that fact - had helped him move on from the men and women he'd killed in his darkest moments.]

In the dream, you are helpless. You are unaware of your surroundings, you are unable to escape them, you are unable to identify your attacker.

But you are not helpless, Abigail. Not outside of the dream.

Died to protect them.

[But even in her dream it never made sense. Why die for girls she's never met? Why sacrifice herself for strangers? It's not right. It shouldn't be expected of her. She is only a little girl, she is only her father's monster, she shouldn't have to be a hero. She never wanted to be a hero.]

[She just wanted to live bigger and louder and more than anyone had ever lived before. She had ambition. It wasn't this. It was never anything like this place. She wanted . . .]

[She squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head.]

I feel helpless less than I used to. But I still - can't -

I know who my attacker is. My attackers - are. I know how to identify danger. But I don't know how to beat it. You said it yourself, even you can't make this place safer. You can't make people not want to do me harm.

I'm not helpless, but I'm not strong, either, and I'm not safe.

I do not truly believe your death would have stopped your father. Without knowing him, without having your experience - or any at all with this particular situation - I should think you'd only have been killed, too.

And when that isn't enough - [Something Ben does have experience with, in spades.] - he would have gone on exactly as he did before. With more difficulty, perhaps, but all the same.

[But her eyes are closed and she's shaking her head, and Ben waits. He never had that kind of ambition, but he had wanted more from his life - for himself, for his family - than they had. Without any concept of what else there even might be, he had wanted it.

He's still working on wanting it, still working on finding out what is possible, but here and now he must draw from what he knows. Dreams are a particularly tricky opponent, because they cannot be anticipated, cannot be controlled or combated in any way that makes sense in the waking world.

But.]

No. Not here. But in your own mind, you can be anything you can imagine.

Or, if it is easier to believe, anything I can imagine.

[Abigail understands the pattern of serial killers, the way they seek the ultimate kill and keep killing even after they get it, because it will never measure up to what they wanted it to be. Still, she somehow thought her case was different. She still thinks that, because she still finds it so difficult to think of her father as a serial killer; he is her father, first and foremost, and she doesn't know how to separate from him as a part of her.]

[Her brows draw together in confusion. If she wouldn't have saved those girls, she doesn't understand what she's guilty about. Nick Boyle's death? Sometimes, but not very often. What his death made her? Maybe - maybe it's that. Maybe Nick Boyle's death really did change her, like Hannibal says. It could have made her something else, elevated her.]

[She folds her hands in front of her and shrugs, noncommittal.]

You can imagine anything, though. It's not exactly realistic, when it comes to me. I can't be anything.

[Ben has wrestled with guilt as a vague, shapeless thing, present but less pressing, less motivational than other emotions such as anger and fear. The intangible equivalent of a toddler's scrawl, inconsistent and unsteady. Awkward black and white.

He honestly feels more remorse for the things he doesn't feel than the things he does. But this time, he shakes his head, eyes still on her.]

Dreams are not realistic. You are not a deer. You would not be held immobile by hooks you did not see and could not fight. You would not be left to your fate.

They are not real.

But I was left to my fate.

[She looks down, away, no longer able or willing to meet his eyes.]

I died, and nobody even found my body, I don't think. The only way you couldn't say I was left to my fate was because Hannibal was there with me. That's real.

Nobody saved me. And I couldn't save myself. Just like in the dream.

All past tense.

[It makes him angry, all of what she says, in the way he's learned to detach and shuttle off to somewhere out of his immediate focus. He knows all of that, of course, both from speaking with her, watching her, and from reading her file. If he could go back and fix it some way, any way, he would not hesitate but he has long known that there is no way back. There is only forward.

There is only what he can control in and of himself, and whether or not he's willing to surrender that to someone else. Abigail looks away, but Ben does not.]

How much of that is still true? Here, today, right now?

[She wants to say she would be able to save herself now. That she could look after herself, be strong in her own right. That's what she wants more than anything, she realizes now - to not need help.]

[But she does need help. She is not strong enough to defeat someone like Hannibal. She isn't strong enough to defeat even someone like Anya.]

I still can't save myself. And there's no one in my dream but me.

[Of the two, Ben would easily rank Anya as more powerful. Her power is different but undeniable, the peel too thin and flexible to be cut, too tough to be torn. Glass framed in iron until it is unbreakable. Anya would destroy Hannibal if he gave her a reason to do so.

Abigail has the same kind of strength, tracing off a different way. A tributary of the same power. It makes Ben's voice steady with certainty.]

You will.

And until then, I will.

I believe that you will.

[She hesitates, gnawing her lip.]

At least, I believe you'll try. And part of me thinks you'll succeed.

I don't know. It's hard to know what's sure anymore. I feel like the ground is slipping away under me.

But you won't let me drown.

Then that is what is most important, for now. That is the hard part.

[Some people would be offended to hear incomplete confidence in them, but Ben is practical in this. It is better, to him, to have his intentions believed than unproven results. Abigail knows he'll try.

And he will.]

What would best serve you now? Shall I stay, tell you a story? [He hesitates, glancing quickly at the walls, at the light he turned on, considering them critically.]

[She pushes her hair back from her face, flips her pillow over to the cool side, and hesitates.]

A story. They make me think so much.

[Yes. Something else to think about. To dissect and analyze. That's exactly what she wants.]

I want a story. Please.

Then a story you shall have.

[While she gets comfortable, Ben moves to the floor lamp, tilts the shade of it a little before bringing it back with him. He passes his hand experimentally over the bulb, once, and then shifts it again.

When he's satisfied, he glances back at Abigail, uncertain for but a moment. Then he twists his fingers together and raises them between the lamp and the wall, casting a long shadow away from himself.

And then moving his thumb and his fingers to make the duck's mouth open and close before it breaks apart and comes together again: a bear, clumsy with his inexperience but recognizable, menacing for a black outline on a blank wall. He says nothing, but walks the shadow-bear along the impromptu stage, as she once did for him in a church when she was young and he did not belong.]

[At first she doesn't recognize it. When she does, the brightest smile he's probably ever seen passes across her face. Because even though she doesn't exactly remember, she does.]

From the church.

[Her voice is quiet, reverent. She feels like she's in church now. Glancing at him, she ducks her head, hiding the brightness of her grin so it doesn't blot out the shadow of the bear.]

[Then she forms her hands into claws and roars quietly, like you do when you're pretending to be a bear. It's a joint effort.]

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fourteen ♢ text & audio & spam

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