wildestlogs | FLIGHT TO THE FORD

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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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Dan lowers his hand, looking a bit sheepish and then fiddling around in his pocket for his wooden box of opium.

"Reckon that depends on what you want to tell him."

Dan, for all his time with Price and all his powers of social observation, can't accurately predict how Price will react to most situations. He doubts even Price has a real understanding of how he'll react to people.

She nods, because that's fair.

"I can help him understand, if he's willing to listen."

Because that's what it comes down to, right? If he doesn't understand then he'll never be able to change his behavior. She starts fiddling with a tuft of grass she's sitting next to.

"I'm good at framing things in ways to help other people understand," she glances to the side and gives a small smile. "I figure that's a good place to start, with Price."

What did he say his first name was? Aiden, that's right.

"You might could be a little overconfident, there."

Dan says it in the most gentle way possible, and he does consider that maybe Elle's right - but he doesn't understand enough about the context Price abused others in to describe it to her, or to relay how it could be explained. As far as Dan understands, it involved a lot of very personal violations over a long period of time, and then when Price was removed from that power he tried to use a public apology as a way to Trojan horse in an agenda. It's enough to make his head spin.

"But I do know that right now, he thinks that we're an unpleasable group of people. We don't accept his apologies, we don't like him behaving the way he knows how to behave, and when he asks what he needs to do to be a part of the group we either tell him to drop dead or to give us an apology...which we won't accept. So he reckons it's some broken part of him and that that gives him license not to try."

Dan takes a breath. He's spent many nights up late thinking over the barrage of damage and mixed signals Price sends him.

"I don't know if it'll be the same for you, but he appreciates when I call him Counselor. That was his old title, when he was some sort of military therapist. I been letting him try and practice on me, you know, in the hopes that if I treat him as trustworthy he'll rise to my expectations."

Edited 2022-01-09 08:05 (UTC)

Elle can feel her brain short circuit at Dan's confession.

"Dan."

It takes her a minute to get past that one word.

"Dan," she repeats, very, very calmly. She is doing her best not to have any judgement in her tone, and is mostly successful.

"You're giving a known abuser, who doesn't understand why the things he did were wrong, power over your medical and mental state without any boundaries to protect either of you... to give him room to behave differently when he has no understanding of why he should do so?"

Please say no. She knows Dan's not going to, but please for the love of God and Gaia say no.

She knows Dan hates being told what to do. She knows if she flat-out told him to stop he'd just dig his heels in deeper. This is the only thing keeping her from yelling at him right now.

Dan raises his eyebrow at Elle in a defiant expression. A you're not the boss of me expression. Pushing Dan around is a surefire way to get Dan to terminate the relationship with anyone except Bunny, and even with him, Dan feeling steamrolled has been a source of extreme contention.

"No, Elle. I'm letting a friend play-act out a profession he misses. It's just talk therapy. It ain't like I'm letting him jab me full of needles." Dan rolls his eyes a little. "He knows I expect him not to hurt or take advantage of me. So far, he's met that standard. I reckon it's been good for him."

Dan doesn't know if it was, but as he's rationalized it to himself: if he treats Price like a threat, the same way everyone else does, Price will dig down to that low expectation. If he treats Price like someone worth trusting and believing in, Price will respond to the good faith with good faith of his own.

The idea of Price being treated like a burden, threat and liability by everyone in this camp breaks Dan's heart. The pain he sees in Price is very real, and Dan feels a calling to ameliorate pain where he sees it.

Elle takes a deep breath. "Dan. I respect you and your decisions, even if I disagree with them. But there are several reasons why what you said concerns me, and I'd appreciate it if you'd hear me out."

Please, Dan. Please actually listen to what she has to say, here. This isn't just about his well-being, but Price's too. She's so fucking tired of people not listening when she has something important to say, and so far Dan's been a huge exception to that. Please Dan.

Dan folds his arms, but he gives Elle a look like go on. "Alright. Tell me all the ways you think you know better about this than I do."

He can't help but sound a little snarky about it, but he truly is so, so loath to take directions from anyone else. Dan is passive, Dan is accommodating, Dan is so rarely proactive that he hardly knows what it means - but his sense of independence is wound through his very spine.

Elle purses her lips.

"I don't want to tell you what to do, or how you should think. I just... you said something that sounded really concerning to me."

How can she make Dan understand? She doesn't want to go through what she wants if Dan's not even going to listen. She looks down at her hands.

"My mother was. She was emotionally abusive," she says quietly.

Elle doesn't talk about this. Not in this way, at least. She'll talk about her mother being controlling, and abut how she hasn't gone back to see her in years, but not about what Elle actually experienced. She'll talk about the facts of the situation all day, but rarely how it felt.

"I didn't really realize it until I left home. At least, not the full extent."

Dan's face softens, but his resolve doesn't. He holds two feelings at the same time, the empathy for Elle and what she was experienced and the certainty that he's dealing appropriately with his most troublesome friend. He can see how Elle's blurred the lines between the two - he likely would too, in her position - but he sees the two issues as indisputably distinct.

"I'm sorry." He means it. Dan doesn't apologize about these things out of just searching for something to say. "That must have could been a horrible series of revelations."

Probably similar, Dan thinks, to how he lost his religion after leaving the bunker and the farm. The disintegration, ugly piece by ugly piece, of those truths which he had always just taken for granted. It must have been agonizing to have those little realizations over and over of something so foundational as a mother's love.

Elle shrugs. She's dealt with it, for the most part, but that doesn't mean she likes going over it.

"It sucked," she said frankly. "But once I realized how unhealthy her behaviors were, I did a lot of research. I'm going to use the term abuser, but I'm not using as a moral judgment, just as a descriptor for a set of behaviors."

Elle isn't trying to pass judgment. Not on Price or on Dan.

"And I know you're an adult, and you can make your own decisions. I just. I want to make sure they're fully informed. So if you'd hear me out, you can choose to do whatever you want with it. I'm not-- I'm not trying to tell you what you should or shouldn't be doing, or even that I know better. But I have my own set of information and experience that could help you do what's best for you and Price, even if that's continuing as you have been."

Elle has no real power to exercise over Dan and his decisions, but she suspects that Dan's trauma makes that difficult for him to see.

Dan feels his teeth grit at the back of his jaw. He doesn't really trust any sort of research that could come from books, only from folklore, from word of mouth, and from his own experience. Most research has been in institutions locked to him, and as such unproven to him.

"Alright. I'm listening." She's respecting his right to autonomy, which is such a hair-trigger for him. He nearly burned down his marriage over his right to make his own decisions. He's defined his entire life by not having to answer to anyone but his own heart. The idea of relinquishing his own judgment to someone else is uniquely terrifying to him, since he's been living out the consequences of his parents' poor decision-making for two decades and change.

When Dan can't run away from conflict, he tends to just shut down.

"But please bear in mind that I've known Price the better part of a year, and you know him mostly from a brief conversation with me."

A good portion of Elle's research was done word of mouth, incidentally. Not all of it, but a lot of it.

"Which is why I'm talking to you," she reminds him. "You're free to make what judgment call you please on what I have to say."

This is probably the most receptive Dan's going to get, so she takes a deep breath.

"Like you said, most of the time emotional abusers are trying to protect themselves by lashing out and controlling others. That tends to happen in two ways: not establishing boundaries in a relationship and putting the responsibility to change exclusively on the other person."

She pauses to see how Dan's reacting so far. "My mother-- there were no boundaries. There were the things we hid from her, and the things she felt entitled to. And whenever something didn't go the way she wanted, it was on us to change our behavior rather than her.

"When you said that Price is practicing his profession with you, there are a few reasons why that concerned me. First of all, therapists are not supposed to have personal, emotional relationships with their clients, and they aren't supposed to practice on people who they have established personal relationships with. That's just an issue of professional ethics. These rules are in place to protect the counselor and the client."

The professional concern seems like a good place to start, especially because that has little to do with Dan's own decisions.

"He may not understand why those rules exist in the first place, but there's also the possibility that he's trying to take advantage of a situation where the other person isn't fully informed."

She uses the term 'fully informed' on purpose. She knows Dan has been a sex worker in the past. He should at least understand why 'fully informed consent' is important, even outside of sexual situation.

Dan listens, but he doesn't absorb most of it. He absorbs the parts about Elle's mother, filing it away in his heart. It's important to him; her history, her wellbeing, is important to him.

It's everything else that just glances right off. He isn't sure how to express to Elle that she's making an assumption that's fundamentally wrong: she's assuming Dan cares about preserving himself, that he would shrink away from harm instead of just race towards it.

Dan can consent to taking his own risks.

"He ain't gonna find anyone else willing to do this with him. Don't no one else trust him. Don't no one else want to put their neck on the line like that, and that's fine, I wouldn't might expect anyone to." Dan sighs. "I believe it's important for him to feel like he's providing some kind of skill or service to the group. Feel useful, you know."

Elle has gotten the impression that Dan doesn't give a shit about himself, which is why she's trying to frame things around Price.

"Dan, I am asking you to please genuinely listen to just one thing I'm trying to say. After that, I'll drop it. You've expressed a boundary and I am trying really hard not to cross it. I know you can't get up and leave so it feels like you're trapped here, and that's the last thing I want. I just really need you to hear this one thing. Please."

Where before her voice was very purposefully calm, now it's beginning to sound desperate as emotion leaks in.

Apparently Elle isn't above begging, but this is important and she needs Dan to actually hear her. She doesn't want Dan to be another person who dismisses what she has to say.

He was fine with her making observations earlier. Why is it that, when it's truly important, people always stop listening?

Dan sighs and runs his hands over his face. He doesn't want to hurt Elle. He doesn't want to catch other people up as collateral damage in whatever happens between hum and Price. That's what he's most afraid of, that whatever injury Price inflicts on him - or that he unwittingly inflicts on Price - will become other people's problem.

"Alright. Go get me some of those poppies so I got something to do with my hands as we discuss it." Dan hopes that that's indicator enough that he's taking Elle seriously.

Her shoulders slump in relief.

"Okay," she agrees, standing up and grabbing more flowers. She passes them over to Dan and sits back down. She's facing the same direction as him, allowing the both of them the luxury of not having to make eyes contact.

Her voice is much softer when she starts speaking again.

"If Price tries to control the people around him to protect himself, he's a deeply unhappy and fearful person," that's just a fact. "And giving him the opportunity to continue that behavior, even when you're aware of it and allowing it to happen to just yourself, is going reinforce that fear. You're right that Price needs an outlet to feel helpful and useful, but allowing him to practice his profession on you without boundaries isn't just hurting yourself. It's hurting him, too.

"Abusive people don't establish boundaries in relationships because they try to control the way other people act, therefore making boundaries unnecessary. Letting Price act however and hoping he'll meet your expectations is just teaching him that all the ways he's hurt people in the past is still the best way for him to operate."

The way Dan and Price interact is going to effect the way Price interacts with everyone else.

"Trying to make sure you're the only one he hurts is going to isolate him even more, and him focusing on you is, even well-intentioned, is a way for him to deflect from himself. If he's focusing on you-- even helping you-- then he does not have to focus on himself. That's the biggest thing. Abusers do everything they can to control and change the people around them so they don't have to change their own behavior. The only way for an abuser to grow is to start focusing on themselves."

She hopes that Dan understands what she's saying. This isn't about just him and Price-- this is about the way that his relationship with Price potentially enforces Price's unhealthy patterns of behavior.

Edited 2022-01-09 23:44 (UTC)

"I ain't giving him an outlet for his aggression, Elle. Him playing doctor ain't inherently an abusive act. So far, he's been nothing but gentle and patient, even when I'm sure he's been tempted to be otherwise."

Dan's aware, as little as he cares about his own wellbeing, that the solution to Price's antisocial behavior is not to just let him continue to just corral off Price's sadism into relationships with people who don't mind being hurt.

"I am trying to change Price's behavior. Far as I can tell, up until now, I'm the only one who's believed he can change it."

He starts cutting away at the poppies and bleeding their gum into the wooden box, licking his fingers as he does.

"What I'm trying to do him is give him the space to change it, knowing I can shut it down if he continues to act out. So far, he ain't acted out. I'm taking that as a good sign." He squeezes a poppy pod. "I've had success doing this with monsters in the past. It's the only thing that's kept them from having to be put down."

Dan. Dan why are you being difficult.

"I know you can shut it down."

Elle is trying to decide whether she keeps trying to explain things or whether to just go for the metaphorical throat. She finally looks at him and attempts to catch his gaze.

"But Dan, I'm genuinely asking you this: will you?"

He meets her eyes.

"Yeah, I will."

Dan's a very skilled liar. He can hold eye contact, sound sincere, suppress any body language tics enough to beat a polygraph before breakfast and after six shots of tequila. And he's particularly adept at omitting information, which is why he doesn't say for his sake if nothing else.

Elle lets out a breath. She can't tell if Dan is lying, and that's fucking infuriating. She doesn't think she believes him.

"One last question, then I'll drop it."

She knows she's pushing Dan. She knows if she pushes too far it could completely fuck up what relationship they've built so far, but this is important.

"Are you able to draw that line before he goes too far?"

Edited 2022-01-10 01:05 (UTC)

"Yeah, I am."

Dan's definition of going too far is probably more lenient than what Elle's envisioning, but as much as Dan's putting his trust into Price, he also doesn't want to have his trauma used to hurt him. His trauma hurts him plenty without prompting. If Price seeks to weaponize it, Dan does think he'll shut it down.

"But that's because I know him and what I'm doing. I appreciate the concern, and I'm concerned for your wellbeing going up and trying to explain to him the things he done wrong for the same reason."

Boom, deflection.

Once again, Elle isn't sure if she believes him, but she's going to leave it for now. At least these questions are out there, now. Maybe they'll pop up in his head next time something happens with Price.

"Okay. Thank you," she says almost painfully sincerely.

Because she's well aware that whole conversation was worse than pulling teeth, for Dan. If she pushed any further he probably would've tried to get up and walk away, injury or no.

Elle raises an eyebrow at Dan's 'concern'. She's sure it's genuine, but that has to be the sloppiest misdirect she's heard in a while.

"Dan, I've spent the last three years of my life trying to get abusive jerks to pull their heads out of their asses for five seconds, and been pretty successful for the most part. And I know where my boundaries lie and am perfectly willing to enforce them.

"Also, I'm not going to just go up to him and explain the things he's done wrong. I'm not an idiot."

She gives him a look that says 'give me some goddamn credit here'.

"How did you and him become friends, anyway?" she asks with honest curiosity. She's moving on from the whole 'telling Dan what she thinks' part and letting him take the lead now.

Dan almost defiantly pops a poppy pod into his mouth, raising his eyebrows at her insistence that she knows exactly what she's doing and how to protect herself after she just dragged him for that exact concern.

"We were back on the Rig together, and I was real fucked up at the New Year's Eve party. You know, being allowed to drink openly instead of just sneaking it in the hall closet and getting by on cooking sherry." Dan had had a patch from the pharmacy that was supposed to prevent going into withdrawal, but the chemical dependence is only part of it for Dan. He didn't stop needing alcohol just because his body did. "Price went out of his way to make sure I got home safe, then we just started spending time together."

And Dan quickly identified that Price wasn't going to bond with anyone else, so he opened his heart.

That's... fair. But also she's not going to use Price as an outlet for her own self-destructive urges, so she doesn't think their positions are completely comparable.

"That was kind of him. And of you. I'm-- I don't think you did anything wrong. I just got worried."

That's mostly true, at least. She does think he should be protecting himself more, but that's not necessarily something he's doing wrong.

"I know. But I don't need you worrying about me."

He takes a moment, biting his lip, and then clarifies. "I ain't comfortable with you worrying about me."

He spent a long time with no one worrying about him, and that was deeply freeing. It was a blessing as much as a curse, he feels. It's hard to give it up.

FLIGHT TO THE FORD

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CW: discussion of emotional abuse

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