empathicfault | IC Inbox

I'm up. Call me when you get this.

Welcome back. -to both of us, I guess.

Did you....ah, you didn't miss the Breach, did you?

No, but I know it just ended. How're you doing with it?

I had a decent job, company support, ate well...honestly, it could've been worse. The only real downside was coming back here and getting slammed with my non-supernatural condition.

But it's just more headaches, I'll be fine. Might have to wrangle with my accent again.

[ His 'R's are still less present than usual. ]

How are you faring?

Between the sword thing and the coma, you haven't had a functioning warden for over a month; you really want to waste time talking about me?

I mean, my friend's also been fairly non-functional, and I made her job harder just before all that. I'm allowed to be a little concerned. But if you'd feel better getting back to work, I understand.

...you should call Eiffel when you can, by the way. He lost Hera, and Neal got murdered in an honestly gruesome way and then fell into a coma.

[Well, shit. She's going to have a very busy day.]

Noted. Thanks.

I'm fine; I'm just sick of failing you.

Who's to say this isn't part of the process? Putting us on equal ground by having us be equally susceptible to things beyond our control? It highlights the things in our control. It highlights where that line has been forcibly blurred by outside forces.

That is to say- I haven't thought you've failed me. Sometimes I think this system fails, but it's still got a better track record than anything back home.

You sound like Jedao.

[Who she knew in the breach; who she's going to have to talk to about that at some point. Her gut clenches, and she exhales.]

Is that actually how it makes you feel, or are you just spitballing here?

[Her tone is mild; she's genuinely asking, not mocking the idea.]

Not a terrible person to be compared to, I suppose.

It is actually how I feel about it. The setup is similar to some desensitization and exposure therapies I've seen. Obviously, more normal therapy usually tries to avoid depersonalization trauma, but...well, we're hard-up cases, aren't we?

Good. I'm glad you're getting something out of it; I mean that.

You make any progress on the Avalon stuff while I was out?

Not that I know of. I haven't heard from Rawne- or Avalon, thankfully. I was going to talk with Kiryu about my feelings on the subject, but the Breach interrupted. I'll probably talk to him the next day or two.

I'll check in with Rawne. Do you still want to talk with Avalon about the subject?

...maybe eventually. Of course, it'd be preferable to have it be in a neutral setting with wardens there. But if they want to talk to me, that'd be fine too.

I doubt they will. They don't seem to know how desire or decision-making works at all. But...if it comes up.

-- Okay, before I went down, we had a pretty solid plan of how we were going to tackle this, but now it's "maybe eventually"; what's changed?

Was that the plan? Sorry, I do still have two lives in my head at the moment.

[ He's less obviously lost, but he has a lot of experience pretending to be more together than he is. It's kind of automatic sometimes. ]

Things have been a mess, Shaw. You know that goes around here. There was the cursed sword- that's what it was making us all nuts, by the way, if you didn't see it. Maggie's a part of the wolf pack now. There was some revenge murders going on, and it's just continued to be tense. Hopefully the Breach calmed some people down, or...tired us out, anyway.

What was the plan?

[She pauses for a moment before responding.]

Yeah, sorry. I, uh-- I get that. Just trying to head the "lots of words, no action" thing off at the pass. You need a break first, though, say the word.

[And she waits, giving him a chance to respond to that first.]

Ah. No, I appreciate that. And I'm definitely starting to see how plans end up getting muddled around here, too. Even with them happening on a regular basis, it's hard to plan around the breaches and the floods.

I think I would like to talk to Kiryu before Avalon. Get my head on a little straighter. He's good for that.

Okay.

The plan we came up with was getting a kind of, uh-- work-study-slash-mentorship program going with Avalon, where people spend time with them teaching them about pro-social crap. Willing volunteers only, other immortals and non-humans preferred. We were also going to sit down with them ourselves and talk with them about what made them interested in you, and help them brainstorm better ways to handle that interest.

If you want, I can get those balls rolling.

Right. Okay, I'm remembering that now. I think that'd probably help them the most. And if they're 'helped' I'm less likely to get attacked again.

Plus, I'd like to try, one more time, to understand their motivations. So yeah, get that ball rolling. I'll see if Kiryu's up for visitors today.

Do you think it'll help you? Besides physically. I'm fine with helping Avalon, but that part's not actually my priority.

If I know their motivations- if they become human-ish enough to have motivations- then I don't have to worry about what they might do next. Who they might hurt in the future. Especially in relation to me.

So...while it's not going to help me a lot, I feel like it's worthwhile to do. For my peace of mind, anyway.

Sure, I'm not saying it's not. But if you still feel like crap about what happened it can't be the end of it, either.

Yeah, that... [ He trails off and then sighs. ]

I don't know if I'm ever going to feel okay about it. There's not a lot of recompense that can fix 'attacked by my own mind's nightmares, and with shadows of people I failed.' Or I guess, if we're drilling down, Avalon really hit me where it hurt.

They're not capable of understanding why they shouldn't have done it, and it seemed like no one even knew what had happened to me when they tried to hurt wardens later, so...I don't know what else could be done about it.

Yeah. I, uh-- I'm not talking about being okay with what they did to you; you shouldn't have to feel okay about that. I guess I'm talking about being okay with the idea of reacting differently next time. Not killing them, not exacting violent justice.

You know, a lot of times when stuff like this happens, one of the wardens involved makes a PSA post about it - sometimes public, sometimes on the warden filter. I didn't; I just wrote about it in the ledger, which I'm pretty sure most wardens don't bother to read. Would it have been better if I had made a post?

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