Couple of screws loose (quite_vexing) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2018-06-23 18:02:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, blake belladonna, harley quinn |
Who: Harley and Blake
What: Therapy session
When: Sometime after Ilia was rescue
Where: Harley's office
Status: complete
Rating: PG-13 for discussions of abuse and trauma
It had been a while since Blake had last been to see Harley. At first it had been dealing with the immediate aftermath of talking to Yang and her brain telling her she’d been wrong for doing what she’d done. Then it had been just trying to adjust to being around people again, mostly just Ilia, Logan, Jing-Wei and Ruby (once she’d stopped being stupid regarding Ruby, that was). Then once she felt that she could face people and even come to see Harley again, but that was when Ilia had gone missing, and then it was focusing on finding her, then rescuing her.
Not to mention she’d been dreaming as well. Luckily nothing traumatic, and if anything the dreams had been helpful in helping to drive her to go rescue Ilia. Because for once she’d wanted to rescue her friend instead of running away or waiting for someone else to do it. And it had showed her that she could actually help her friends instead of watching her worst fears happen to them.
To make up for lost time, she brought Harley a full dozen powdered sugar donuts. Walking into her office, she had a little bit of a sheepish smile on her face.
“Consider this payment for canceled sessions as well as today,” she said, holding the package out to Harley. Despite everything that had happened, Blake looked good. She was still wearing oversized shirts, but that was nothing new.
Harley looked down at the box, then at Blake, and flashed her a grin. “I’ll take it! You look good, Blake.”
She gestured at the seat, as she always did. Most sessions she waited for Blake to talk. Sometimes that took awhile. Other times, not so much.
But it was good to see her and she hoped this would be a good day.
“Uh, thanks,” she responded, still not used to taking compliments. Blake took her seat, and today it wouldn’t take her long to start talking. It was a good day, and she was still riding the high of having been able to save Ilia.
“It’s been quite a roller coaster recently. And none of it was from the dreams.” Everything had happened within this world and this life. She didn’t know if that made it better to deal with or not, but at least she didn’t have dream crap happen on top of it all.
“Whatever you’re willing to share, I’ll listen,” Harley promised, picking out a donut to snack on. Sometimes real world adventures made for fantastic therapy, but sometimes they could also not be that healthy for coping.
“It all started when I finally decided to tell Yang how I really feel, that knowing she was in love was messing with me. I couldn’t take being so anxious around her and second-guessing everything she did and risk falling into bad habits that my ex programmed into me. And I’d realized I had started falling into those bad habits, just remaining silent and never saying if I was upset or anxious. So I told her that I needed distance so I could actually work on my problems, but of course going against my programming wasn’t easy. I locked myself in my room for three days and had nearly convinced myself to call Yang and tell her that I took it all back and didn’t mean it. Which, obviously I mean my programming nearly convinced me of that.” It had been a really bad three days.
Harley nodded along, letting Blake speak. Her boyfriend had fucked her up royally, but that’s what abusers did, and Blake’s had been one of the best gaslighters that Harley had ever had the displeasure of hearing of. “But you were strong enough to buck your programming.”
It can’t be easy for the other girl, but Harley’s focus was entirely on Blake’s needs. “That says a lot.”
“I’d say it was more desperation than strength. I just couldn’t keep going the way we were. It wouldn’t be fair to her if I kept having panic attacks around her or just slipped back into how I was with my ex. She deserves better than that.” Yang and Ruby deserved better than her in their lives, but that was just her extremely non-existent self-esteem talking. But the fact that Blake wasn’t even talking about how the situation hadn’t been fair to her either was also telling of her self-esteem. She did honestly believe she deserved it.
“And even then, Ilia finally got through to me. After three days she finally talked me out of my room and helped cut through the bullshit my mind was feeding me.” Which it still was, but to a far lesser degree given she’d been solely focused on finding Ilia the past couple weeks.
Harley nodded again. “None of this is fair, Blake. And it ain’t your fault, either. Maybe that’s one of the harder things to admit. That it ain’t fair that it ain’t actually your fault, and that you deserve better too. But this is progress. A good start an’ maybe you’ll get close to a middle sooner insteada later.”
“I don’t know what I deserve, but I know people deserve a better friend than I can be right now. And I can’t be a good friend until I take care of myself. That saying is true, that you can’t help others until you help yourself first. If you aren’t taking care of yourself, you can’t have the energy to be there for others.” It wasn’t an easy lesson to learn, and Blake was still learning it, but she was at least trying to focus on herself.
“But Ilia has helped. She tells me when my brain is being stupid and tells me what I need to hear, not what I want to hear.” And that was an important part in all of this. Blake couldn’t trust her own mind sometimes, which is why she needed someone like Ilia who wasn’t afraid to be honest, even if it hurt.
That Blake had realized that she needed to learn that lesson was a huge step, one that made Harley proud. She felt like she’d been doing her job (and usually, if she was doing her job it didn’t look like she was doing it at all. “Our brains do kinda like to throw us the worse case scenario. There’s a trick I learned once. To give a name to those thoughts. Someone you can yell at and ignore and put in a box. I call mine Bob.”
Fuck off Robert felt good sometimes.
“That sounds...rather strange. But maybe worth a try.” It couldn’t hurt, right? It would also help reinforce Ilia when she told Blake her brain was being stupid. “I’ll try to remember that one.” Of course in the heat of the moment, it wasn’t always easy to utilize some of these things, but she could at least try.
“But yeah, after Ilia got me out of my room and all of that, I was just trying to adjust to being around people again. My room was safe, but I couldn’t stay in there forever. Hiding from everything wouldn’t solve anything. Things were starting to get better when Ilia went missing. A friend of hers came and asked where she was, and we realized something had happened. So I stopped focusing on me and was fully focused on trying to find out what happened to my friend. It turns out that she was kidnapped and being brainwashed to be turned into a weapon or something to be used. But we saved her, along with the other girls that had suffered the same fate.”
Blake took a breath. “It was...really really important to me to find her and save her. I left her behind in the dreams and never told her why. I just disappeared one day, and that was a mistake. In my dreams, I met her again when I went back home, and in the last dream I had, I resolved to save her from what the White Fang was turning her into. And as far as this world went, I needed to prove to myself that I could actually save a friend.”
Harley felt a flare of anger, but let Blake talk. As long as that girl was safe now, anything else could be worked out. She’d ask Blake if Ilia would like to see her later, for now she needed to focus on Blake, “And you did.”
“I did. It was...nice to know that it worked. For a little while, I was scared I would never see Ilia again.” And Ilia’s friendship was extremely important to her, not just because of the dreams, but because of the friendship they’d formed here. The lengths that Ilia had gone to help Blake work through her problems, and Blake had wanted to help her in return.
But there was also the added dynamic from the dreams, mostly the fact that Ilia was Faunus and innately understood what it was to be one. She understood the hatred and racism that their kind experienced on a daily basis. That was something that no one else that dreamt of Remnant here could share. And Blake really liked not being the only Faunus. Ilia being Faunus would no doubt help her to ultimately better accept being Faunus herself. Which was something she still struggled, but she hadn’t been able to really address it given she’d had other issues to deal with.
“Hope is powerful, Blake.” That wasn’t just her training speaking. Hope was powerful. One just had to accept themselves before that hope could manifest, “Setting aside everything that happened, how are you feeling, now? Feel like you’re on stable land?”
“For the first time in my life, yes, I feel like I’m on stable ground. I feel...I don’t know how to put it into words. I’m not fine because I’m not going to be fine for a very long time yet. But I don’t feel like I’m drowning in my problems either at the moment. But my dreams have also helped in that respect. I found my footing in my dreams as well, it seems.” She took a breath. “It does feel good to be able to do this, to prove to myself that I can do this. Me, not someone else. Standing on my own two feet is the most important thing to me, and it’s also how I can discover who I am. Because I still don’t know who I am without someone telling me what I should be or how I should act.”
And that was the biggest problem, perhaps. Finding her individuality and discovering herself on her own. That’s what made her feel lost more than anything else. And that had been another reason for the distance from Yang. Yang wanted to help, but Blake needed to do this on her own. It was her journey and no one else’s. And she liked relying on herself for once instead of constantly relying on others.
Whoever Blake had been before her ex was someone who was lost. Harley thought that Blake didn’t even know, but that was fine. People, whether they be human, faunus or metahumans were collections of all their life experiences. “Well I like who I’m seeing now, and I can’t wait to see who she ends up being.”
Blake couldn’t quite remember what she’d been like before everything went to shit. She knew she was happier, and she really missed her parents. Seeing them in her dreams, in Menagerie, just drove that point home. Perhaps she would see if she could find her parents and see if they wanted to see her. Assuming they were even still alive, of course. Anything could happen, after all.
“Um, thanks,” she said, not knowing how to take compliments like that. “I suppose we’ll see how things go. But at least I feel like I can breathe again. I can take a breath before taking on my next fight.”
Blake seeing her parents was high on the list of things Harley would prescribe, but she had to come into that decision entirely on her own. “Take a little break for yourself while you’re taking care of your friends, okay? Ilia needs you, but you need you, too.”
“I know, and I do what I can for Ilia. But right now it’s mostly just being a supportive presence as she needs it. She also has another friend she can turn to for other types of outlets.” Ilia was also getting what help she needed from Natasha’s friend that understood what had been done to Ilia.
“Good. That’s all that you can do sometimes. But my office is open for her if she wants it. Same payment arrangement,” Harley winked. It was a good thing she was independently wealthy at this point.
“I’ll let her know, but don’t hold your breath on it. I’m not certain how open she is to this.” Ilia would need help to unpack the trauma she’d been through, and Blake would extend Harley’s offer. But she knew to not push the subject and let Ilia handle things the way she wanted to.
“It’s entirely up to her,” Harley promised. “It’s probably too soon anyway, you gotta know when to nudge, and when to leave things alone.”
Like right now, she thought that while she’d given Blake a few subtle nudges (Bob as an example), she mostly as already headed in the right direction. Though Bob was more or less a self-help trick.
“Most likely too early. But I’ll let her when I think she’ll be able to at least hear the suggestion without freaking out.” Blake couldn’t understand what Ilia had been put through, but she knew to approach it carefully. Mostly she simply let Ilia know she was there, and let her come to her if she wanted to talk. Blake definitely didn’t push the subject at all. That was about the worst thing to do at the moment.
“Got anything else for me?” Harley asked, as she opened a drawer, “Or do you want to take out your frustrations with Mario Kart Therapy?”
“Um, I think those were the main things? It’s...been a lot to happen in a short span of time. But at least I didn’t do anything too drastic to cope?” Aside from locking herself in her room, of course. Though at the question, she tilted her head a bit. “Mario Kart Therapy?”
“Thing about a lot happening in a short time is you don’t have time to really think about it. But then when you do have time, it kinda all comes crashing onto you,” Harley commented. “So we’re gonna play a game, relax your mind. Throw some shells at people you can pretend are your problems.”
A tv slid down from the ceiling, and Harley slid Blake a banana yellow controller as the Mario Kart logo appeared on the screen. “Video games are a great way to decompress.”
“Yeah, exactly.” It had been a lot, and Blake hadn’t exactly had time to really think about much of it. But she supposed that she could get behind decompressing with a video game. She took the controller when it was given to her. “Okay, though I’ve never played this, so I’ll probably be terrible at it.”
“You’ll be terrible at it until you’re not,” Harley said. “It’s like life, just need practice!”