hadriel_logs | Event Log: Dreamwalker the Second

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Event Log: Dreamwalker the Second

Who: All characters participating in the event
What: The event log for the Dreamwalker part 2 event
Where: In your dreams
When: October 14th-20th (the second log will go up on Oct 23rd, please keep the two weeks of the event separate!)
Warnings: All different kinds of dreams falling under the umbrella of Delight, Rage, Sorrow, and Hope.

This time, the weird stuff doesn't happen when you're awake- as a matter of fact, your waking hours are the normal ones. That's because you're forced to sleep by some unknown entity, getting more and more exhausted by the moment as night falls. Better make sure you're always around a soft pillow.

Once asleep, it doesn't get any less weird- your dreams will be influenced by one of the four gods that make up the first week. Something to make you smile, something to make you angry- or something that reminds you of your deepest regret or most vulnerable hope, they're all things that you're dreaming about now for some reason, no matter how hard you may try to pull away from them.

To make matters more complicated, there are others intruding on your dreams who definitely don't belong there, and while they may seem like manifestations at first, it becomes clear that these others are actually the consciousness of other members of Hadriel, getting some top quality exposure to your angriest, happiest, most sorrowful moments. Hope it doesn't get awkward when you see them tomorrow...

► This log covers October 14th-20th.
► Feel free to make your own logs as well
► Please tag headers of threads with content warnings where they apply
► Please put your character's name and open/closed in the subject line of your starters!
► If you die in dreams you don't die in real life, but if you somehow die in real life anyway, please let us know here.

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[Once he's got some blood flowing, he stops scratching himself long enough to stare at her blankly.]

I know that already. This is different.

[And it is, somehow, even if he doesn't have the words to explain why yet. Maybe not this thing in particular, though. He's doing this for a reason. He rubs the brick against his skin again until a trickle of blood drips down his leg.]

And now I can tell Mom that I fell and that's how the blood got there.

[Abigail can understand the worry of what a parent will think. For her, her father is the scary one. Even with him dead, she feels his presence.]

She might think you were being careless.

[It brings up so many old thoughts. Can't be careless. Can't let the police find out. Can't say no to her dad or he'll kill her. Can't let the FBI find out what she did.]

Tell her you were pushed.

[It's easier to gain sympathy when seen as a victim. She knows that well.]

[The look he shoots her suggests he thinks she's the dumbest person on the planet. It's condescending, but also filled with legitimate disappointment. Big kids are supposed to be smarter than this.]

Pushed by who? Then she'd think I snuck out and I'll get in more trouble. [He rolls his eyes as if this is obvious.]

She'd know I was lying. Other kids don't want to play with me ever.

Pushed by me, the crazy stranger that broke into your backyard. Your neighbours might have seen me here by now anyway.

[She looks around to the nearest house]

You don't need them. I didn't want to play with other kids. I didn't want them to know what my dad did. And I didn't want him to do anything to them either.

[She looks at back at him curiously.]

Is that why they don't want to play with you? Because of your mom?

[She wonders if it is also because he kills their pets. But she doesn't ask that. Yet.]

[He frowns, unsure. This is a suburb, technically, and there are houses nearby, but his house backs up to the forest and this neighborhood is shrouded in trees. A crazy stranger breaking into their yard sounds reasonable, but Mom will freak out, and he doesn't want to deal with that.]

No... I don't think my neighbors notice a whole lot.

[Anyway.]

Um. Maybe. [He's not answering any question in particular. He chews on his lip. She's brought up an interesting point. He does want to play with other kids, but he doesn't want them to know about Mom, either. It's supposed to be a secret. And... She wouldn't do anything to the other kids, would she? He turns that thought over in his head for a long moment.]

I don't think they know. [He hopes they don't, anyway.] What does your dad do?

They don't notice what your mom does, huh?

[Abigail feels a bit of sympathy. If Mrs. Schurr or any other neighbours had suspicions about her father, they stayed quiet until after he was dead. And then the rumors flew.]

[She takes a moment to think of how to answer his question in a way a child would understand.]

My dad was sick, so the way he loved me was sick. It made him do bad things. And he made me do bad things.

[She reaches up and touches the scarf around her neck, hiding her scar.]

He can't hurt anyone anymore. He's dead.

[She pauses.]

What about your mom? What does she do?

[His face gets hot. The neighbors couldn't know, could they? Mom wouldn't let that happen... But what if they do know? He recoils into himself, suddenly self conscious.

It's interesting, thinking of his mother as sick. It's not something he's ever thought about in that way before, but it's probably true. She's certainly not normal, if the way other kids talk about their moms is anything to go by. It's difficult to see outside of his bubble at this age. He wishes he could swap places with another kid, just for a day or two, so he could get a better hold on how his situation compares to everyone else's.

On the rare occasions when he's brought up the kinds of things his mother does--not what she does to him, of course, because that's a secret he has to keep--the other kids never know what he's talking about.

But Abigail said her dad was sick too, so maybe she'll understand? He picks at the blood clotting on his knee.]

Um... She talks to herself sometimes? Mostly at nighttime, when she lets me sleep in my room but locks the door. I think she thinks I can't hear her, but she gets loud and sometimes she breaks stuff. [He shrugs. It sounds silly, saying it out loud.] And then sometimes she does the opposite and she won't let go of me ever. She makes me stay in bed with her. It's really boring.

[Abigail feels another, stronger pang of sympathy. Her father never locked her in physically. She'd felt trapped though, knowing that he'd kill her if she ever said no to him, let alone tried to leave him.]

Is there another way out of your room, other than the door?

[She looks up at the house.]

Is one of the windows yours? I never left my dad but after he died, I was in another place. To get out, I would climb over the walls. You should have a way out in case you need it when the door's locked.

[She keeps looking up, hoping that she won't break down if she doesn't make eye contact. Her father had been a monster, and it sounds like this kid has a monster for a mom. It might explain the rabbit thing. He's trying to find a way to feel powerful when so much of his power has been taken away by his mom.

His mom may have even crossed the one line that her father didn't.

Abigail isn't good with kids or other trauma victims. Doesn't have Will's empathy, Hannibal's shrink skills or Alana's compassion. But she won't be like the all the people who ignored the trouble she was in.]

My dad would come into my room. He'd whisper things to me. Terrible things. Does your mom say things to you when she makes you get in bed with her? Or anything else? Does she ever, um, does she touch you?

[He follows Abigail's gaze up to the house. A window...? Yeah, one of them is his, but he doesn't see how this is relevant.] I don't want to get out. I like getting to sleep in my room. I know how to unlock it, anyway. [He's only eight, yeah, but they've started teaching cantrips in school. He was born with a natural talent for magic, so Prestidigitation was easy enough for him to master.

But then, she's talking about her dad, and then his mom comes up, and she asks questions he doesn't know how to answer. Well, no. That's not true. He knows the answers. He just doesn't know what he's supposed to say. Why would she ask that? He thinks back over their conversation. They talked about rabbits and getting pushed. He didn't say anything wrong. He didn't.]

Um... [He shifts his weight and digs his fingernails into the bloody spot on his knee.] She loves me.

It's always good to have a second way out. In case something's block the door. A fire or something else.

[She means in case his mother is blocking the door and hopes that's obvious even if she doesn't use those exact words. Of course she can't go back to dancing around the issue when she's already mentioned her father. And there's that word love. It's such a complicated concept. Hannibal has taught her that all love is different. That her dad loved her and she still loves him. It doesn't change what he did.]

I believe she loves you. I think you love her too. I loved my dad. He loved me and my mom. The way he loved us hurt us though. I wish I had told someone about that. There might have been help for my dad, so he could have loved us in a better way.

[She is an excellent liar. Nothing could have stopped her father's obsession. But she doesn't know what the situation is with this kid's mother. Maybe there's hope in this case.]

Edited 2017-11-26 19:14 (UTC)

That's not, um... [He isn't sure what to say.] I guess.

[A lot of adults have tried, or will try, to tell him how he feels about his mom. How he should feel about his mom. They're never right, though. He won't even figure it out how he feels until he's an adult himself, but whenever an adult tries to put words to it, they always miss something. It's very complicated. He knows that even as a child.

He also knows that he can't trust his feelings. He'll never be able to, really. He can feel it when she uses her magic to alter the stuff in his head, but she's done it so many times that he can't tell which way is up anymore. He loves his mom, yes, but he doesn't know if he loves her because he loves her or because she told him to. He doesn't know if he wants her to touch him or if he wants it because she tells him he wants it. Either thing is bad, but they're both a different kind of bad. The thought of loving her on his own, after everything she's done to him, makes him feel like the room is spinning. But the thought of not loving her when she's the only person he has to love isn't much better.

It's complicated, and it occurs to him that Abigail is trying to give him advice without really knowing the situation. She's never even met his mom. She doesn't know what it's like, even if her dad was broken too.]

She's not sick. Sick people either get better or they die. And they don't want to be sick. Nobody wants to be sick. She's just a bad person. [He stands, picking up the chunk of brick again. Blood trickles down his leg.]

But you don't get to say that. She's my mom, not yours.

Not always. My dad was mentally sick, and that gave him bad thoughts. It didn't make him die.

[Abigail knows that isn't entirely true. His sickness led to his crimes, which led to the FBI investigation, and eventually to Will shooting her father.]

He didn't get better either. He got worse, and he started to control me, trying to make me think like he did. He killed people. He killed my mom. He tried to kill me. He was so sick that he thought killing me was an act of love.

[She does think of her father as a bad person. A monster. And as a victim too. It's all so complicated. She hopes something she says will get through to this kid. That his life can be better.]

I don't know what kind of person my dad was. If he was bad or if it was all his sickness. I'll never know. It's too late for him. It's not too late for me though. I have a chance to have better now. It's not too late for you either.

[Hannibal taught that she doesn't have to be her father's daughter anymore. He gave her a second chance. Maybe she can give this kid one, and without going to such extremes.]

It might not even be too late for your mom. Why do you think she's bad? What does she do?

[It might not even be too late for your mom.

Some part of him cracks opens at her words. He remembers things that haven't happened yet--his interviews with the police, reading Mom's testimony in the court transcript years after the fact, changing his name so that she wouldn't find him when she was released from prison after barely more than a decade. In some ways, his life synced up with hers. Foster care as a kid with special needs like his felt on par with a prison sentence. He moved to New York to start over around the same time she was released, the first time he was really able to do anything for himself. He hasn't seen her since CPS picked him up after they were tipped off by his teacher, but he doubts her life has been more of a struggle than his own. Hell, he's still picking up the pieces thirty years later, and by now, he's accepted that he always will be.

She got off easy. He's not sure what an appropriate punishment would be, even, as an adequate price for destroying his life, but Abigail's right. It's not too late for her. It should be, though. Why does she get a second chance? That's not fair.]

Who cares about being better? I'm never gonna be better. [He says this with the authority of someone who can see into the future. Somehow, he knows this is true.] If your dad killed people, he was a bad person. Once you're a bad person, you don't get to be not bad anymore because you can't just undo stuff. I don't get to make the rabbit alive again just because I'm sorry about it.

[He gestures at the fence he tossed the rabbit over. He does feel a little bad about it, but mostly, he's angry. He wants to kill another rabbit.]

The only good thing a bad person can do is just die 'cause then they won't do bad stuff anymore. I think you got it backwards about how it's too late for your dad but not us. It's good that he's dead and maybe we all should be dead too.

Killing isn't always bad. Cops kill people. Soldiers too. Even God kills people. He dropped a church roof on thirty-four of his worshipers in Texas while they sang at him.

Abigail isn't sure what she wants to accomplish. Maybe give him permission to think about killing his mother, if he does. She didn't consider killing her father when he was alive; she was too far under his control. When she looks back on her past, she wonders if she could have saved those girls and her mom from him.]

You can't bring the rabbit back, but you could have given it meaning. Honoured its life.

[She shakes her head.]

If you're dead, you can't honour anyone. All the bad stuff is just that. Bad.

[She thinks about suicide at times and wonders if she could make all her pain go away. The one thing that stops is her that all the girls her father killed so she could live, the girls she helped him kill, would have meant nothing.]

Do you think you're a bad person? Have you killed people?

[Someday, he'll agree with her about killing being more complicated than he's making it out to be, but right now, it's his singular universal truth. The world is easy to sort into black and white, at least so long as it exists outside of his household.]

Who cares about honoring it? It's already dead. It doesn't know.

[It's the next set of questions that gets him, though. Has he killed people? No, he hasn't, and he won't. Not in the way that she means. That's not enough to make him a good person. It's not even enough to make him not a bad person.

But he doesn't want to talk about that. He doesn't know how to talk about it, and he's not going to try, not with her.

He squirms for a moment, picking at his leg as he tries to think of a more graceful way to answer her question without raising any red flags, but he doesn't know how. He's too distracted. His heart is racing and Mom is going to be out of the shower soon and who even is this girl, asking him questions like that? Acting like she knows stuff? It's not fair. None of this is fair. He wishes he had saved the rabbit so he could kill it now instead. He wants to hurt something.

So he hurls the chunk of brick at Abigail and darts for the back door, not stopping to look if it actually hits her or not. He slams the door behind him, ending the dream.]

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Event Log: Dreamwalker the Second

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cw: suicidal ideation

Re: cw: suicidal ideation

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