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FLIGHT TO THE FORD

The Palace is not a safe place. It's far too open and elegant, its walls broken down, its doors thrown open. There are far too many places their enemies can crawl in through. But there is an entirely different land on the other side of the palace, with an entirely different climate.

It's a land of cool temperate forests. It has a gnarled look to it. While things glow, they're knotty and thorny and a little dreary. Every so often a petrified troll can be found, covered in moss. These aren't like the trolls some of them saw frozen in Trollmarket - they're larger, uglier, and more menacing. But they're permanently frozen and no longer a danger.

Otherwise it's just misty forest. Mountains can be seen in the distance. In some areas, a road is visible, but it's perhaps not a safe place to travel, given they have enemies after them. The forest is a genuinely good place to hide. The Shadowhunters have given up chase, frightened off by the Nazgul.

And while the occasional Nazgul screech can be heard far off in the distance, they don't try to attack again.

But this is not because they've given up. They're simply waiting. Because some of the group have been poisoned by the shards of Morgul-blades. They're simply biding their time until those people turn into wraiths under their command.

They're biding their time until they can command them to destroy the group from within.

OOC DETAILS
❧ Quest magic: Players can handwave that the quest bond magic is tugging the group together, so they can regroup.

❧ Archivist Spells: There will be little eddies of magic left near the occasional little bit of human ruins. These spells run a little dark.

Death flashback spells: This spell causes a target to get stuck in a 15 second traumatic flashback of a death of a human warrior in the ancient realm of Arnor, a place that was once filled with people that were gradually culled by the dark forces of one o the Nazgul - the Witch-king. The target is completely distracted during this time. Archivists can bank up to 3 iterations of this spell. Casting the spell causes a temporary Necromancer style curse effect on the Archivist: eyes going completely black for 2 minutes, and plants withering and dying around the caster. The effects are not permanent.

❧ Network: Feel free to use the network in parallel with the log events. The log can be where characters regroup, get first aid, etc. A network post can go up to allow everyone to coordinate their efforts. The mods will leave that up to one of the players.

❧ Resources: As far as food goes, there are not many edible plants in the area, just the occasional edible root. Deer and rabbits can be found but they're rare. The occasional beehive can also be found but one has to somehow get rid of the bees or mop up honey that's dripped below it. There are not many supplies to be found here. However, there are a few plants and substances that can be used for first aid, if some among their number know about them:

Athelas: A sweet smelling green plant with small blue flowers. It can be used to cure the Black Breath by boiling it in water and allowing the victim to breathe in the vapors. It can also slow the transformation caused by Morgul-blades if the wound is washed by water that has had athelas boiled in it. This can also help relieve some of the pain and cold. It smells extremely fresh and sweet, often reminding people smelling of it specific scents that remind them of home. This means it can smell different ways to different people, such making one person smell apple orchards from back home, and another fresh cut grass after a rain. Use of this herb is more potent in the hands of a king. Thanks to the magic affecting the land, it will do so for any king.

Honey: This can offer some help for disinfecting puncture wounds, but works especially well for burns, like ones caused by the grazes of the Shadowhunters' angel blades.

Foxglove: A mashed poultice of this can be put on wounds to help with healing and prevent infection.

Pine sap: Can be used as a wound disinfectant.

Willow Bark: A tea made from willow bark can be used for pain but is not recommended if someone is still bleeding heavily, as it is also a blood thinner.

Poppies: There are a few small patches of poppies. Poppies can be used as an opioid pain reliever, by eating the seeds or making a tea out of them.

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Her ears twitch slightly with the last example, because in some way it reminds her of how her dad died. He'd always had complications from his injury, but... the way he seemed to just decline so rapidly after her mam went missing. The way it seemed that losing the twins and her mam within only a few years just did him in, that only having Cammie left just wasn't enough to help him push through anymore.

She shakes that thought away. She doesn't want to think about that, right now. Getting into this at all is weird enough. She's not even totally sure why she said anything at all, maybe Dan reminds her more of Chase than she thought, even for all the ways they're different.

"It wasn't even my nervous system that went through it. I mean, it was, but not— but not really. Sure, bein' decapitated sucked, but it wasn't really real. This is the first real injury I've ever had that wasn't scrapin' my knee as a wee babe."

Dropping it like that is about the only way she can bring herself to. No fanfare, no big 'so this is what happened'. Just as if it's a normal thing to go through, being decapitated and coming out the other side.

Dan doesn't show shock. He lets Cammie's statement hang in the air for a moment.

Maybe it's because he's used to dealing with spirits. Maybe it's because his daughter was a ghost, and she once told him about how her body was obliterated, ripped in pieces by the front of a car and the tar of a bridge. Maybe it's just that Dan's seen enough suffering that he understands how useless responding with shock is.

That doesn't mean that he doesn't feel a swell of deep, sorrowful sympathy, of sadness that this ever happened to her, no matter what the context and no matter how much her head is still attached to her body here and now.

"Did it hurt?" he asks, quietly.

Cammie considers her words for a moment, staring off into the trees opposite. It's easier that way, she doesn't have to overthink any visible reactions Dan may have. Eventually, she settles on honesty. "...hurt like hell, aye."

She rubs her neck, but in a distracted, subconscious sort of way, not really aware she's doing it.

"We were on our first real mission, the five of us were spread out along a perimeter. I was keepin' watch on one side, an' this other mecha appeared. Thought it was Kazu, at first, so I didnae try to get away before it was too late. He penned me in with nano, then..."

Grabbed her, one large clawed hand on her shoulder and the other ripping her head off her shoulders.

"He knew it wouldn't kill me, Holons and all. It was just easier to pin me down to try get to the brain in my chest if I was freakin' out about bein' headless, I guess." She shrugs. "My team came an' beat him back."

"So, and don't take this the wrong way...your very first real mission, someone trapped you, held you in place and made you feel pain." Dan lets her break eye contact. This is about her comfort, not his. "And you're wondering why you still have nightmares?"

There's so much there to have nightmares about. The sense of powerlessness, the sense of being unable to trust her own judgment, the hurt itself. Dan doesn't know who put it in her head that she should just be able to overpower that, whether it was someone specific or just a set of expectations that turned into her own voice in her own head, but it breaks his heart.

Which is why he divulges.

"What happened to me, what I saw...it wasn't real either. Or, I mean, it was, but not really. No one died for good. No harm, no foul." He sighs. "And like I said. I've had nightmares twenty years now. So if you're going to say that something being real determines how long it should haunt you, I need you to look me in the eyes when you say it."

It's a set of expectations she's internalized almost entirely on her own, if she's honest with herself. No one told her she had to be perfect, to come out the other side of something like that just fine. Quite the opposite, really. Her team have told her time and time again that it's understandable, that she can talk to them, but it's too hard. She feels like she's failing them.

Her first instinct as Dan speaks is to draw in on herself, curling tighter into a ball, as if she can hide away from the truth he's speaking. He's put it in words in a way no one else really has. She was terrified when it was happening, alone and trapped and unable to call for help because of the nano interference. That comes up time and time again in her nightmares: she calls for the others, but they're not there. She's alone and can't escape without help.

And then he keeps going, and her ears flatten out backwards, this time, tense and uneasy, because fuck. That's almost unfair, the corner he backs her into. It's not, not really, but it feels it in the moment. She can't deny someone else's suffering, she couldn't even do that to Nemesis and he's the one that pulled her damn head off.

"Oh, ye cheeky bugger..." she mumbles, with a note of humourless laughter. "I— it's— it's different, that's what Holons are for, y'know, we're meant to be able to take that kinda damage and... and..."

Chase's voice echoes in her head again. 'Just 'cause you don't take physical damage doesn't mean you're not affected.'

"...ugh." She covers her face, breathes, and then looks back at him. "I cannae do that, you know I cannae do that, it's... it doesnae matter how real somethin' is, it doesnae need to be real to hurt. Whatever you went through, 'course it can still hurt decades later. S'just..."

It's just her, she holds to these standards. Not even her team. If one of them displayed the same problems, she'd never hold it against them.

"It's just that you're holding yourself to a different standard," he finishes for her.

Dan doesn't like to talk about what happened to him and his family, about watching all those little kids die and lose their hope first. But when he does talk about it, it's tactical, it's even manipulative, a way to get what he wants. What he wants is, in this case, to let Cammie identify that the problem isn't that her pain isn't real enough.

"So it ain't about the experience. It ain't about the validity. That's just a smokescreen for something else." He meets her eyes. "You don't got to tell me why you think you're the one exception to the rules about how people process horrible things that done happened to them. It don't matter. You ain't."

She's not sure she could explain why even if he wanted to hear it. She could sit here and come up with reason after reason, but every reason she has she'd give an exception to for someone else.

Maybe it's some vain hope that if she tells herself she should be over it by now, it'll come true. Maybe it's just a desperate desire to be good enough, whether that's to do what she has to do or simply to exist. Maybe it's something else entirely. She doesn't really know.

Her mouth opens and closes a few times as she tries to think of some kind of response, but she can't find any words that feel right. In some ways, it's a lot like what Chase has tried to tell her, about how someone having it 'worse' doesn't negate her pain, but in some ways Dan hones in on the core of something no one's quite reached yet.

Whatever piece of her was holding up all the stress in her life, but especially from the last few days on the rig and their time here in the Wilderlands, falls aside and her eyes are suddenly all wet and threatening to overflow. Groaning, she curses under her breath as embarrassment hits like a truck, "Ach, hell..."

"Hey."

He sits up as best he can and opens his arms to her. He doesn't know what else to do.

"You could use a hug. I could use a hug."

He can't go back and make it so that no one ever hurt her that way, can't make it so that rescue came in time for her, and he can't make it so she doesn't have nightmares. He would if he could, but all he can do now is stand as witness to the wreckage and cheerlead her attempts to carry on. It doesn't feel like enough.

Maybe he shouldn't have ripped open this wound of hers and zeroed in on the problem. Maybe he should have let her keep it under wraps, but then what? Should she go on believing that no one else here would understand?

Hugs don't really fix anything. Talking it out doesn't really fix anything. Cammie's always going to have a wound, same as Dan, and that hurts Dan to see this part of him reflected in someone else. All he can do is treat that wound of hers with the kindness he's learned to treat his own with.

Cammie sniffles, wiping at her eyes. Even a few minutes earlier she'd probably have denied needing a hug, or being a hugger, at all—futile as that'd be, considering she's happily accepted Bunny hugs—but now, with that wound opened up, she's not got it in her to really deny anything.

So she shuffles over, lets Dan hug her and hugs him. If her shoulders start shaking as she lets out weeks, months, worth of bottled up emotions, then she just hopes he won't draw any more attention to it than the comfort of the hug itself. She'd like to keep a little bit of her dignity, though she's pretty sure that ship's already sailed anyway.

She's never even cried in front of her team back home—she couldn't, she had to look strong enough to keep up with them, she had to look like she had everything under control. In hindsight, it feels stupid. They care about her, she knows they do. It's just that caring about them in return means not wanting to let them down.

Edited 2022-01-08 18:26 (UTC)

He rubs her back as she cries into his shoulders, squeezing her tight, his own eyes wet and glassy. He wonders how long it's been since she had someone she could cry to without any fear of judgment or of somehow abandoning her duties. He wonders if she ever even let herself cry alone.

There's no need to draw attention to any of it. He'll hold her as long as she wants him to, whether that's just a few moments or until she's spent herself entirely.

He knows how this feels. He remembers the keen, crushing feeling he had when he realized that just because Bunny fixed the timeline, just because Dan's family never did end up dying in so many terrible ways, didn't mean that Dan's deep pain went away. The panic attacks, the addictions, the shaking hands and headaches and stomach pain and the way he so often wakes up hoping that he doesn't survive until the next day, didn't go away. The nightmares didn't go away.

Dan doesn't think brains really absorb trauma. They just get craters from the impact, and there's no fixing that.

She thinks the last time she cried, really cried, might be when her dad died. After that, it was always easier to channel the emotion into something else; she remembers all the time she yelled at her Gran when she was just trying to help, the way she really started to throw herself into her hacking and games to escape the real world.

She thinks of all the times she's shut the others out instead of letting them help, both because of all those expectations she's built for herself but also because she's spent so long bottling everything up instead of facing it that the idea of uncapping it was all just so— daunting. Even the little time she spent talking to Chase was harder than just about anything.

Letting it all out comes with a sense of mortification that she's letting herself be seen like this, but also with a sense of relief as all that built up tension is finally released that outweighs it.

The relief doesn't stop her muttering a quiet little, "Fuck..." into Dan's shoulder, but the embarrassment doesn't stop her clinging tighter than she'd like to admit, either.

"No kidding," Dan says to her profanity.

Bunny was the first person to ever hold Dan, Dan as an adult, when Dan had a meltdown. It was almost twenty years after the events that so damaged Dan kicked into motion. Almost twenty years of stuffing things down, drowning them in liquor, smearing them into hazy drugged-up nights and letting his body process grief somatically, without ever being held through his tears.

At least it hasn't been that long for Cammie. Dan suspects it's been too long, but at least it hasn't been twenty years of letting her behavior calcify around repressing and hiding all that hurt.

She clings tighter and he squeezes her in a little comforting pulse. He doesn't want to interrupt her, wants her to take as long as she needs. He breathes deep, then jokes: "don't worry, I won't tell nobody you're a human being with emotions or nothing."

That earns a choked up little laugh out of her. She sniffles, takes a deep breath of her own and composes herself enough to speak. "Y-Ye sure better not. Got— got appearances to uphold."

There's a joking tone to it, but she would rather keep this mostly between them right now. She's already thinking about how she's going to have to sit until her eyes aren't so red before she can actually find Miranda, or face any of the others. She needed this, and if she's honest with herself she knows she did, but one step at a time.

The sobbing slowly tapers off and when she eventually pulls back from the hug, the tears are on their way to drying up. She sniffles again, rubs at her eyes with the heel of her palm. Eugh, she does not like how gross her face feels after crying.

"...thanks. An'— sorry."

"You don't got to apologize." He reaches into his jacket and fishes around, producing a patch of soft fabric that he's hemmed around the edges to make into a handkerchief. He hands it over to her. "Here, you can keep it. You can make me one in turn. You know how by now."

It's a simple technique, and he's confident in everything Cammie's learned about sewing by now.

He hopes that says without elaborating that she can stay here with him as long as she likes to regain her composure.

"Right, aye. Thanks." She can do that, and it gives her something specific to do during some of the time she's inevitably awake.

She wipes her face and feels a little less gross, blinking back any lingering tears before they can fall. Her breathing evens out slowly. She feels both heavier and lighter at once, which doesn't make sense, or maybe it does, who the fuck knows. Emotions at stupid complicated and she wishes they weren't.

She grabs her water container to take a long drink, then puts it away and heaves a dramatic sigh.

"...probably been almost four years since I had a cry like that. Christ."

"No wonder you were all pent up."

Dan smiles. "I used to cry on my own a lot, but never in front of other folks. It turns out it's not so bad, crying in front of folks you trust, once you get over the self-consciousness. You feel better at the end."

He pats her shoulder. "So thank you for giving me that trust."

She manages a smile in return, and her ears match it naturally, so it's not put on; it's genuine. There's still some self-consciousness there, but that wasn't so bad.

"You've been... nice." Which really doesn't cover it, but hell if she knows how to put into words the things about Dan that've opened her up. She knows what they are, in her head, but out loud is another matter. "Chase an' Val are gonna be right jealous."

There's the hint of cheekiness returning to her eyes, as she says that. It's partially truth, considering how hard members of her team have been trying to get her to be anywhere near this honest, but it's mostly joking. They'd just be glad she was talking about it at all, she thinks.

Edited (very late addition) 2022-01-09 01:15 (UTC)

"Well, if there's one thing about me that's good, it's that I'm real nice."

There's no bite to Dan's self-deprecation. He knows he has a lot of virtues, even if sometimes most people don't see them. The compassion, the ability to hold space, the way he can give people enough room and guidance to be vulnerable and yet secure all at once - that's just the trait most people remember him for.

There are worse traits to be remembered for.

"I hope I get to meet Chase and Val someday. Chase especially seems to have some good things to say."

"He's been through a lot." She fiddles with the handkerchief idly, not so much an anxious tick this time. "He was there, for the first battle of the war. Woulda died there, sacrificin' himself, but he was the first of us identified as compatible. So... they fought real hard to save him."

It really didn't take long for gen:LOCK to get militarised. They'd known from day one that it was going that way, she thinks.

"He was so badly injured he was stuck in a tank, Holon was his only way to move around physically. Everyone he knew thought he was dead for four years. Then..." She sighs. "The thing that attacked me? It was another version of him. The original, really. The Chase I know was the back-up they put back in his body after the original got captured by the Union. An' eventually, he sacrificed his body, so now he's just the Holon. An' we had to kill that first version of him, too; he was in so much pain, an' he woulda kept comin' after us if we didn't."

Her ears are down, but just because it's a dark topic. Chase really has been through the most of any of them, but it hasn't made him bitter. She wishes looking at his Hologram didn't terrify her sometimes, remind her she could end up like that if something went wrong.

"Made it hard to talk to him at first, y'know? Felt like I didnae have the right, when he'd been through so much worse. But he's a good guy, an' he's had therapy and stuff, and worked a lot out on his own. He said everythin' right, I think it was just hard for me to really hear it."

Dan can't follow along with all the details and logistics of what Cammie is telling him, but he gets the gist: Chase was one of the people on the ground floor of this project, the first chosen, and then he went through hell that divorced him from his body, and now he's taken a sort of big brother figure to the other combatants.

He hates thinking of Cammie, or anyone else, really, as a combatant. He's quite the peacenik for someone who's carried a firearm since he was four years old.

"You know, maybe we ought to consider therapy, if it's done so right by him." Dan laughs, because like hell is he ever going to real therapy. Humoring Price doesn't count. "Sometimes you got to hear things from a multitude of sources before it sticks."

"Y'know I told him I'd think about it, actually, but— think if I'm gonnae talk to anyone, rather it be my friends. Not some therapist."

And she doesn't think Chase will get on her arse about the idea of talking to an RTASA therapist if she actually talks to him, or the others.

"Embarassin' as all hell as it'll feel. 'cause no offense," she throws him a wry little smile, "that was kinda mortifyin', an' I ain't been hidin' this shite from you for nearly as long."

Dan smiles back. His is a little less wry, a little more sincerely warm. "The good news is that I keep secrets real well, and I ain't judged a person in my whole life. Or, well, close to it."

It's a bit of an exaggeration, but there is some truth to it; Dan is uniquely capable of withholding judgment from others, like they discussed back in the desert.

"Heh. Sure coulda picked a worse person to get all weepy with, aye."

Her own smile's a lot more sincere, this time. Who knows how long she'd have managed to go without cracking under the pressure and freaking out in front of someone she'd really rather not have if this hadn't happened. Yeah, if it was gonna be someone here, especially any of the adults, she's relieved it was Dan.

He gives her a pat on the back, gently avoiding jostling her in any way that would aggravate her stitches. "Someday you might could got to return the favor. Or pass it forward to someone else."

Dan's of the opinion that both kindness and hurt have ripple effects.

"Aye. I'll sure try to."

She'd like to help folks as much as she's needed help in return. Here in the Wilderlands she can't really do that in some ways—teaching useful skills, and the like—but she can at least try and help in other ways. 'course, she's not always the best at saying the right thing, or at people stuff in general, but she's not weird about other people's emotions and traumas. Just her own.

She's more than got it in her to be plenty kind.

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FLIGHT TO THE FORD

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