hadriel_logs | CLOSED; Along the Way I Find Myself

Who: Cole

fadeling and Flick

saltrock_imp
What: Flick needs some serious help. Cole is nice like that
Where: Outside Fear's temple
When: Nov 7
Warnings: Violent imagery, gore, and rape will be talked about.

-----

It had been days since that blinding hot pain that wasn't even his and he still couldn't forget it. He'd tried, but he could still feel the edges of it, still in the city. Still hurting. He couldn't make himself forget if it wasn't healed. And it wouldn't ever be--not by itself. It was just...left there, rotting from the inside out. Taunting, teasing, calling him closer. Maybe because he'd already been so close.

The bright side being, he wasn't that hard to find. The hurting was loud enough to follow, even if he tried to hide it. But it was always like that. He could always hear it. And he could be small and silent, unnoticed and ignored when he wanted to be.

He was outside a temple when he finally decided to slip out of the shadows. If he hadn't known whose temple it was, the terror drawn in around it would have told him. He hated it here. The feeling was too strong to ignore.

At least he was quiet when he started speaking from behind the poor man--woman?--careful to stand a few steps away. He'd been swung at before.

"There's too much fear here, faceless and frightening. I don't like it. Does it help to look?" Maybe it helped him to forget. Maybe it was just strange enough that no one had to think about what hurt.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Flick turned to the familiar voice. He hadn't spoken to Cole since the incident. Since he found the knife. He never wanted to see that thing again, part of him he could never get clean, part of him that had been used to kill the very har that made him who and what he was. Orien was a part of him, some of his blood in Flick's veins. That made it worse, didn't it? He was complicit.

"I thought it might. I'm tired of being afraid. But I can't make myself go inside." Fear was like an old friend he didn't want to hang around but couldn't make go away. Hope never seemed to stick around for very long, delight, by nature seemed dangerous too him. Too much like love. Love drove people to do horrible things. Confusion, Flick wanted nothing to do with. That left Fear and Sorrow.

"Everyone is afraid." Not even just here. Maybe that's why it always seemed so powerful. He looked around at the temple for a few moments of silence, but it didn't give him any answers. He hadn't expected it to, but sometimes things liked to talk too, and he was there to listen. No one else would.

"It's alright to be afraid if you don't get stuck." That was always the problem. Fear could help, but it could hurt too, like his knives. The struggle was in knowing which was which.

"Why are you afraid?"

That was the problem. Flick was stuck. He'd been stuck for along time. No, not just stuck. He'd retreated. Abandoned everything he had worked on before, his own creations. The Dehara.

Flick just shook his head. He couldn't bring himself to say it out loud. Like that mattered. Did that make it worse? Did fear stagnant or ferment? Twelve years of stagnation, wounds that healed but didn't.

"Bad things happen when others pay attention to you." Wasn't that the root of all his problems? Orien? Cal? Wraxilan?

He could have looked. That wouldn't have helped. He could still feel how much it hurt--how broken he was. He'd seen enough with that knife to know that it wasn't pretty, but...there was more. More he hadn't tried to dig for, trying, at least, to give him some sort of privacy. Let him keep his secrets. Like he'd asked.

"Yes." He didn't bother to deny it. It was the truth, after all. Bad things happened--they always had and they always would. Otherwise the world wouldn't need spirits like him. "But good things happen too. Closed and closeted hides the hurt, but it hides from the healing too."

"I'm afraid if I let it out, there will be too much pain. I've been hiding for too long. I can't let it out now." What if Flick let it out, and the pain was too much? What if he just let it grow and grow until there was nothing left but the hurt?

Flick shook his head. "No, nothing good happens when people notice you." Except he was wrong of course. Good things did happen when people noticed you. Because he had been noticed, because Orien had seen something in Flick, he had taken him aside, taken him alone to Saltrock, leaving the other boys to go elsewhere, and incepted him. Good things did happen. Sometimes.

"If you hide it it still hurts. It won't heal." It would only make it worse. But it was always difficult to learn that some pain now would mean less later. No one liked to hurt, even if it would help.

"If it's hidden no one can help." People liked to hide it, though. For more than one reason. It would make them look weak, it could leave them open to be hurt again...whatever it was, it only made things worse later. That was why he existed, though, wasn't it? To help?

"I can help it hurt less."

"How can you help it hurt less?" Flick asked, curious. Cole was a little like Itzama, that ancestor spirit he had met in the desert, but not quite. Cole was different, he saw the world differently, and the people in it.

"I think hiding it is the only way I know how to function."

"I just do." There really wasn't an explanation for it. At least not that he could come up with. Maybe there was a way to say it, but the words were too hard to find. "I hear it hurting and I help with what you need." Whatever that was.

"Or I can help you forget. Not that it happened. Just that it hurt."

"I'm not sure if it will work with me....but I'd be willing to try." Flick wasn't sure how Cole's abilities worked, or how they would mesh with his own. Or if it would interfere with his own journey. He drank from the Well of Memory, solidified the pain and sorrow, made it permanent.

That was always the hardest part--agreeing to try. At least they'd made it that far.

"I have to see it--all of it. I have to hear. Will you let me listen?"

Flick looked sideways, as if avoiding Cole's eyes would make him and this entire conversation disappear. Too bad. It didn't. He nodded, doing his best to open himself to his friend, and let his pain sing. Knife. Blood. Guts. Memories of Cal, how they'd rooned every place he had with Pell. Trying to wipe out his memory, purge Cal's pain. Until Flick jokingly suggested the Nayati. How Cal's eyes had gone cold, all while joking that he'd have to roon Orien, not Flick. How Flick had woken up that night. Gone for a walk. Followed the blood trail. Saw Cal and the bloody knife. And how he'd gone back to bed, Orien's blood staining his feet and the sheets.

It hurt--it always did. But when the waves washed over him he struggled to breathe. It was too close, too chaotic, too tangled in everything else. The want a way to dig through it without touching everything. It would take a long time. The hurt went too deep.

Damned if he wouldn't try though. It was overwhelming enough to hear it and it wasn't even his own. He must be suffocating under the weight of it, of carrying it and hiding it from the rest of the world and anyone who could help.

Had he been more human he might have cried. He was still breathing hard when he came back up from underneath.

He'd been used and deliberately broken. That was always the hardest because the pieces were made not to fit together again.

"Thank you." He knew it was a hard thing to do to share like that. "The song is...scattered but I can bring it back. It might take a while and it will hurt more before it gets better."

CLOSED; Along the Way I Find Myself

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject