wildestlogs | The Straw That Breaks The Cat's Back

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The Straw That Breaks The Cat's Back

Who: Elle & whoever wants to find her
What: Finally reaching the end of her rope.
Where: Rivendell
When: Day two of being inside the walls
Warnings: Panic attacks, mental breakdowns.

They’re safe.

They don’t need to find their own food water, or shelter anymore. The injured parties are being taken care of. By all accounts, things are the best they’ve been since the group got stuck here in the first place.

Which leaves Elle in a weird place. She’s full of anxious energy and the need to do something. It won’t go away. But they can’t meet with the Green, Elrond is still healing the injured, and there’s no crisis to manage at the moment.

Sometimes Elle pats herself on the back for being relatively well-adjusted. Then times like this come where she can’t handle any amount of downtime and she remembers that she really is incredibly dysfunctional.

On their second day of being actually inside Rivendell she goes through her supplies and catches an all too familiar scent. Her breath stutters and her heart pounds in her ears as she instinctually looks around— but no. The smell is coming from a sprig of Athelas she had put in her belt pouch.

She brings the leaves up to her nose, inhales deeply, and tries not to cry. This has been the longest she’s gone without her pack in… well, since they formed. Every instinctual tug on their pack link is met with an empty silence. But she hasn’t truly sat down and tried to connect, yet. There hasn’t been time.

So maybe…

It’s probably a bad idea, but Elle doesn’t have anything to do with herself and her heart is aching. She wants to be with her pack— her family. Marcus’ scent is overwhelming her senses but he’s not even here.

So Elle finds herself a quiet, hidden-away corner, sits down, and delves deep into her own mind.

She isn’t sure how long it takes. She goes into a semi-meditative state. She’s only just barely aware of her physical form as she’s focused inward, focused on the parts of herself that haven’t known true loneliness in years. On the parts of herself that are bound to the people she holds dearest in the world.

She doesn’t just tug on her pack link, she follows that mental thread as far as it will take her. She's just hoping to find something-- anything. The smallest glimmer of connection that she can hold onto until she gets home.

Then the thread snaps.

Elle barely notices as she’s wrenched back into her body with a gasp. The only thing she can think or feel is alone alone alone alone alonealonealonealonealone—

They’re gone. They're gone.

Dread and fear and grief and nausea fill her gut as sobs wrack through her body. Where before it was an aching absence in the back of her mind, it’s now a painful wound. It feels like a part of her is missing. Like the pain of a phantom limb.

She loses awareness of her surroundings as her whole being focuses on the emptiness inside of her head.

This world doesn’t have the same magic she’s used to. It wasn’t built to sustain things like her. The combination of spirit and flesh aren’t natural to this place, and she can feel it warring inside of her as her spirit tries to connect to something that isn’t there.

She so removed from herself that she barely registers her own quiet screams of grief and pain.

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For lack of organic reasons to be busy, Dan’s been making work for himself, coordinating a big party that he hopes will be a much-needed release valve for many of the harried, weary adults in Rivendell, squad or not. Elf magic has cleansed his body of infection, and though he’s still using a crutch, now that his leg wound is healing he’s up and about meeting new people and arranging supplies and practicing clavichord.

It’s left him not checking in on his people as much as he might have wished.

He hasn’t spoken with Elle since the incident with Price, and he realizes that only when he hears her pained groan bouncing around a hallway as he hobbles back from the kitchen. He picks up his pace, turning the corner to find her sitting there against a wall, looking at nothing and yet in some sort of profound agony that is evident on its face as grief.

He clacks his crutch against the floor as he goes over to her and kneels, hoping that the sound will alert her to his presence before he has to potentially startle her with physical contact.

“Elle-!” he says firmly, not harshly, choosing to speak between her screams so he doesn’t have to raise his voice to try and get her attention. “Elle! Elle, you’re here. You’re safe.”

Elle jumps back at the physical contact, hitting her shoulders and head against the stone wall. She instinctually curls into herself as her eye dart around to find the danger. Her vision isn't quite able to focus on anything, so she only sees the shape of a person in front of her.

Her lungs catch and she no longer seems to be able to draw a proper breath. Her hands dig into her head and pull at her hair as a static-like noise fills her ears. Any attempt to talk comes out as frantic, high-pitched exhales rather than anything resembling words.

She has two thoughts, now. "They're gone" and "I can't breathe."

"Hey, hey..."

He places his hands over hers, letting her curl her fingers in her hair without prying them away, without trying to cage her, but maintaining contact. He feels like he's on the outside looking inwards, watching her struggle to breathe. He feels like he's either watching himself, the meltdowns he's had, or, more than that, watching as his little siblings fell apart under the weight of how doomed they all were. Fear serves you when it guides you away from danger; grief heals you when it processes a wound. Whatever's happening now isn't doing either.

"You can breathe. Just hold that exhale as long as you can. There's so much breath in it. You couldn't breathe out so much if you weren't also able to breathe in, right?" Dan's voice is usually very monotone, but there's a steadiness to it here that's remarkable, as if he's laying out the words like solid footing for her to stand on. "Your exhale is a fact."

Elle hears someone speaking and feels gentle hands on her own. She flinches back and hyperventilates even more for a moment, before minutely relaxing into the contact.

She can't really parse what the other person is saying, but it's low and comforting in a way that some part of her says is safe.

She doesn't know how to communicate what's happening. Hell, she doesn't really know what's happening in this moment. So she just shakes her head back and forth and curls forward, further into herself and slightly toward the person with her.

Dan takes the way she's curling towards him as a request to be held, and so he gently wraps his arm around her shoulders and pulls her in, shielding her from the rest of the room with his back.

He's suspected something like this might be coming for a while, he realizes. Maybe not consciously, because if he'd be actually anticipating this, he wouldn't have left Elle alone without checking in on her more frequently. But he wasn't surprised to find her in this state, just concerned, because for all she does maintaining self-discipline, for her pretenses of adulthood and her mostly-successful attempts at levelheadedness, she's still a kid, far from home and far from her loved ones, and this situation still sucks.

Eventually, it was going to grind her down.

"Keep exhaling. You're okay."

She can feel steady breathing, now, and starts to match it. When she finally manages a proper inhale, she recognizes Dan's scent, and all put collapses into his arms. Her hands shift from her hair to Dan's back where she clings like it's life or death.

At one point, after the hyperventilation has died down, Dan will be able to pick up Elle speaking softly.

"They're gone they're gone they're gone they're gone," repeating over and over. Her brain is caught in a feedback loop and can't move past that one thought.

"They're not here. They're just not here."

There's a big difference between gone and absent. Dan didn't learn that until Bunny went back and changed the timeline Dan grew up in to save Dan's family. Dan still goes through the same cycle each morning; he wakes up, he wonders whether his brothers and sisters are awake yet, and then he remembers in painful harshness that he isn't home anymore and every other person he loved died in pain. Only now there's an additional step, remembering that they aren't dead at all, only dead to him, locked in a timeline he can never get to.

Absent, not gone.

Having just counseled Cammie through the horrors of learning that things weren't well back home, that Cammie's loved ones weren't safe and sound in her absence but starting to die as casualties in a war that would not yield, he can't say that Elle's people back home are in one piece. He can't guarantee her that. But to recognize that the pain at this moment is hers, not theirs, puts it into her control. Managing sadness over the suffering someone else is going through is harder than managing the grief of not having them near, in Dan's experience.

The grief is still there, no matter what. But it's easier.

He rubs her back and pulls her in close. "I've got you."

"No," she corrects him. Suddenly it's important that he understands. Suddenly Dan understanding is the most important thing in the world.

She brings one hand to her head and taps it once before grabbing onto her hair again.

"They're--" her breath hitches. "They're gone. I can't-- I can't--"

Her breathing starts picking back up.

"Can't. Feel."

She stops talking because she's about to start hyperventilating again and she can't. She just can't.

"Okay."

There's no point in arguing with someone in this state when he should just listen, and so he does. He doesn't try to prescribe to her how to feel. He just turns over in his head what it is she's trying to tell him.

"They're gone from here," he says, brushing some hair away from her forehead. "I'm sorry."

He can't imagine how lonely that is. He pulls her back in, giving her a squeeze that he hopes is comforting instead of claustrophobic.

She leans into the touch, remarkably like a cat, desperate for some sensation in her head other than the aching, burning emptiness of parts of herself that were forcefully ripped away.

She burrows into his arms with a quiet whine.

"It hurts," she whispers like a confession. The Green ripped her away from her pack in way that was never meant to be, and it left a wound on her Spirit. And that wound hurt.

“Yeah.”

He’s sure it does. He pets her hair, rests his chin on the crown of her head, trying to give her something tactile to cut through something heavy and complicated and painful enough that it can’t be described as anything but hurt.

“I wish it didn’t. I wish there were something we might could do about it.”

He wishes, as much as he likes her, that she weren’t dragged into this nonsense. It’s not fair to uproot someone like this, to steal them away from their loved ones. It’s not kind. It’s not good for them.

“Do you need to tell me about it or do you want me to just be here with you?” He wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t know yet.

Elle doesn't know. She's too overwhelmed with the sensation to make that call. So she just shakes her head.

The hyperventilation has died down, so now she's just crying. From pain or fear or grief, who know. Probably all of it. But she's crying quietly, her body tense and shaking, and she's definitely getting snot all over Dan's shirt. She'll be embarrassed about this later.

She can cry as long as she wants. Dan continues to hold her, staring past the wall, keeping an ear out for anyone who might walk in on them in the hopes that by being vigilant, he can give her some space to not have to be so guarded, or at least not feel vulnerable in her unguardedness.

He lets himself fall into that tunnel vision of just putting one step in front of the other, addressing the problem at hand. Elle's in pain, she's overwhelmed, she's scared, she's cut off from the source of comfort and support she's been relying on for a very long time. That's an easier problem to confront than the horror of how much that bothers Dan, that it isn't just the impersonal pathos of a stranger suffering but is, instead, something he has a very pointed investment in. He cares about what happens to her.

He can't think about that. Bunny already called him out on doing just this to Stacia, pulling her in during a moment of need only to shove her away in fear afterwards. He still has apologies to make there.

"Don't worry about the shirt," he murmurs at some point, when she tries to brush away a bunch of snot and tears from the cloth around his collarbone. He brushes tears from her cheeks. "I didn't have no plans on keeping it anyway."

She lets out an exhale that could almost be laugh. The shaking begins to subside and the sobbing dies down to just crying. The pain is still present, but it's no longer overwhelming.

After a few minutes of quiet and stillness, she finally shifts. She doesn't move away from Dan but does adjust a little so she's not hiding her whole face in the crook of his neck. Now the side of her face is pressed against his shoulder and she faces his throat.

"Fuck." Is what comes out when she finally finds it in herself to speak.

“No kidding.”

Nothing quite captures this entire adventure like a four-letter word. Dan’s laugh is dry and dull, grim.

He adjusts position so his arm is wrapped around her still, both of them with their back to the wall, seated.

“That the first time it hit you that hard?”

Elle doesn't answer for a moment.

"I tried to follow the link," she says quietly, "to see if it was still connected to them."

Another long pause.

"The connection's broke," her voice is even smaller.

"For now."

Dan knows that that's cold comfort. There's no guarantee she'll get that connection back, and there's no way to get around how painful it is in the moment even if it were certain to return.

When he thinks of how much he misses his own family, he can't deny that no one has ever found the magic words to take any of that burden away. There's never been any sentiment that's successfully taken the edge off the pain, no way to reframe it that doesn't feel like flimsy and fake. So he doesn't try to talk her out of her sadness.

The only way he's ever known to get around it is distraction. He gives her another little comforting pulse.

"When was the last time you ate?"

"Dan," her voice breaks on his name. "Packs are-- They're--" she takes a moment to steady herself.

"They're a connection of the spirit-- of the soul. We exist in each others minds as well as our own. We're individuals, but we're also more. It's-- it's--

"There are parts of me missing. I can feel the wound. I can feel where those parts are supposed to be," she looks down at her own hands. Missing isn't quite the right word. It doesn't accurately convey the violence of the act.

"The Green tore my pack out of me."

Her hands clench into fists as she again bursts into tears.

"I'm so sorry. It weren't right of it to do that to you. Not at all." He fishes in his corduroy jacket and pulls out a handkerchief; between Elle and Cammie, this is the last one he has on hand. For lack of better things to do and in spite of it being wasteful, he's embroidered the image of a horse onto it. "I still reckon it'll be an easier hell to bear if you got a meal in you."

He moves his hand up and down her shoulder and upper arm in a soothing gesture. "Grief takes it out of the body."

"Probably," she concedes. She takes the offered handkerchief and smile sat the decoration. She carefully dabs and wipes her face with the non-embroidered parts.

"Can we eat where you 'n Bunny are staying? I don't want everyone to see me."

She doesn't really mind if Bunny does. He's going to be hearing about this later, anyway.

"Of course." Dan knows he doesn't even have to ask if Bunny will be alright with it. As with most things, he and Bunny are very much on the same page regarding how to receive the hurts of young people. "We're in a room just down the hall. We got a door and everything. You can stay as long as you want."

"I don't think I can refuse an offer like that, having a door and all."

It's not her best attempt at a joke, but it's a start. She sniffs and wipes her face another time on Dan's handkerchief.

"I don't think I can deal with being alone right now," she admits. She hates to say it out loud, but it's only fair that Dan should know where she's at. She knows he would never turn her away, so the least she can do is make sure he's informed about what he's getting himself into.

"Well, that's serendipitous, because I ain't got no plans to leave you alone. I'm going to hover like a helicopter."

Dan laughs, but it's not that funny, how worried he is about her and how uncomfortable he is with all that concern. He undoes his arm from around her shoulder and starts to get up, using the wall to avoid putting weight on his injured leg.

"We got snacks and we got our own blend of tea. Bunny makes it for me when I have trouble sleeping." Which is almost every night. "In my world, it would ward off malevolent spirits, but here it just tastes like ginger. Let's see how you like it."

If Elle weren't such a mess, she'd probably notice a hint of Dan's discomfort (she's hyper-vigilant like that), but she is a giant mess so it goes unnoticed. For now.

She takes a moment to compose herself before standing up as well. She hasn't made eye contact with Dan since he arrived. It's just too much, right now.

"I can either help walk or carry you there, your choice," she says in a joking tone. She's completely serious, but she's willing to admit to the absurdity of the situation. Her metaphorically leaning on him and him literally leaning on her.

"Bunny's done needed to carry me home too many times. If he sees I'm making you do it, he'll get jealous you're taking over his job." Dan grins at her, as if Dan's occasional benders have been entertaining larks and not sources of fear and strife for his relationship.

He holds his arm out and gestures with his chin to his crutch on the ground. "I'd much appreciate the extra legs, though. This one can't heal up fast enough."

Being out of commission has been draining on Dan, even though he's happy to be here in Rivendell. He doesn't want to just accept help from Elle, but he suspects that she, like him, receives some benefit out of solving problems for other people. Some sense of purpose, or distraction, or validation - it doesn't really matter. Letting her help him is a mutual favor.

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