MOA ENQUIST!!! (moquist) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2012-12-17 13:24:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! log, moa enquist |
WHO: Moa and Joakim [NPC] Enquist
WHERE: Their family home, Östersund, Sweden
WHEN: Monday the 17th, evening
WHAT: Wearing a bracelet without having a mental breakdown is HARD, you guys. Big brother to the rescue. And thanks to Larissa for playing the brother!
WARNINGS: Feels, sads, you know the drill.
STATUS: Complete
She’d been doing so well. Four days. She’d managed almost four days without that awful anxiety, without that crippling fear creeping closer. It hadn’t been easy, but she’d done it. Somehow. Until now.
Moa could feel it cornering her where she sat, on the chair that was hers, that had always been hers. The kids were running around, stealing the show, as always. She was grateful for it, glad to shrink into the wall while the others grew louder with each glass of wine. She’d only had one – the first alcohol she’d drunk since the famous seven drinks a month and a bit ago – and it had been a bad idea. A very bad idea.
Or maybe it would have caught up with her no matter what. Maybe she would’ve felt the anxiety crawl through her anyway, each scrap and twist of worry digging through her with the same destination. The ankle bracelet. The one she shouldn’t even feel, that weighed nothing and wasn’t the least bit uncomfortable. How could you be so aware of something that you couldn’t feel? That was one thing Moa couldn’t figure out.
What she did know was that she couldn’t do this anymore, that she couldn’t stand another moment. Very quietly she pushed her mostly empty glass of wine aside and left the table. Joakim glanced her way when she snuck out of the kitchen. He had the baby on his lap, though. Maybe he wouldn’t follow.
She ran up the stairs and into her room. She’d missed it so much – the purple walls, the wide windows, her posters and books and her bed, the one she’d had since she was tiny – but right now she couldn’t appreciate it at all. The only thing she could think of was getting the anklet off. That she couldn’t stand another minute trapped like this.
====
They didn’t speak very much these days. It was difficult, through computers and time changes, through wrestling the kids as they vied for attention in front of the camera, and most of the time that was so Agnes could look at herself in the tiny square in the corner of the screen. When they did speak, Joakim felt the distance stretch out between them, a vast space of helplessness. He recognized it in Moa, he recognized it within himself.
It was worse that he knew he didn’t devote enough time to her. His attention was already torn four different ways within his own family, and it never was evenly divided. It was impossible, he realized, for it to be evenly divided, despite all good intentions. And Moa, he thought with no small amount of discouragement, was suffering for it. She suffered for it because she didn’t complain, and because she had not collapsed into a heap of despair, it was easier for the rest of them to pretend nothing was wrong, or at least, to ignore it for a little longer. Until she comes home is what he’d told himself time and time again. It was why he’d encouraged her to return, why he’d encouraged the children to tell her how much they missed her, and why now, with Emil in his lap, he felt a creeping paralysis cementing him to the chair.
Because what could he do? What could he do? He asked himself that a hundred times, but no answer came to him. They didn’t talk to each other about personal problems on the best of days, though that did not mean they weren’t aware of each other’s troubles. But even as he passed the baby off, forcing himself to his feet to find Moa, he struggled with absent wisdom. His little sister was long past needing help with tying her shoes, or with homework, or with him ploughing a path ahead of her in the snow. That was the kind of help he was accustomed to now, as a parent, but Moa needed something else, and he was afraid he might fuck that up royally.
The knock on her door was for courtesy, but he pushed the door open before she could dismiss him and claim she was fine. “Don’t think you can hide that easily,” he said, a nervous smile fluttering at the corners of his mouth. “If it’s not me who will come and find you, it will be the kids, and then you’ll never have a moment of peace.”
====
Moa was sitting on the bed when her brother came inside, legs pulled up towards her chest, one arm holding her together, as usual, while the other was touching the ankle bracelet through her jeans. She tried to remain calm, tried to keep it together in front of him, but the smile she gave him was nothing that could, even if you were being generous, be passed off as a sign of happiness.
“I’m not hiding,” she said automatically, just as she’d proclaimed she was fine to so many of her friends, so many times. “I’m just feeling –” But how did she even explain that? There was no way to explain the creeping dread and how it made her leg feel numb, feel hot, feel so many different things, none which made sense. It couldn’t be hot and cold at once, it couldn’t be numb and painful and there and not there. Not at the same time.
“I need to get it off,” she said quietly, more to herself than anything else. “I can’t... I can’t do this. I can’t.” She could hear the panic in her voice with every word, she knew that she needed to push it down, push it away so he wouldn’t worry. He shouldn’t have to worry. “Sorry. I just... I just need a minute.”
====
Joakim said nothing as she protested, though his skepticism rested heavily on his face, across his brow and each end of his mouth. He thought he could probably supply her with a chain of appropriate words to finish off what she’d left unsaid. If he was lucky, one of them would resonate like an alarm bell and he’d know exactly what was wrong.
But, he decided, he did not want to put words in her mouth. How would that be any better than ignoring her? And Moa, God help them, would probably agree to some lesser feeling so she wouldn’t trouble him. The worst part about that, he thought soberly, was that he would probably let her.
“A lot,” he said instead, taking a few tentative steps further into her room, until he was sitting on the bed next to her. He wasn’t close enough to breach her personal space, but he had to seize the moment like he seemed never to be able to do when she was in Australia. “I can tell.”
The frantic pitch of her voice deepened the creases in his face, and he watched her as she capped the lid on what she was feeling. “I can sit for a minute. I can sit all day. Here? With no kids? This is my holiday vacation.” He tried out a smile that was only marginally better than the one she’d given him, and when it petered out, he added, “Does it hurt? Is there anything we can do?”
====
She had almost forgotten how hard it was to hide things from Joakim when he was right there with her. She was good at deflecting, always had been. But it was harder now, having decided (to try) not to lie to people she cared about. The medicine made it easier to breathe, had helped coaxing her away from the very deepest desperation, but some things it couldn’t do. It didn’t make it easier to tell the truth. It just made her remember why she’d want to.
She could’ve said so many things, but in the end she went for something very unlikely. Something that she hardly even knew how to say, because it just wasn’t what her family did.
“I missed you.” Three words she’d almost never heard spoken at home. Saying ‘I love you’ was out of the question, ‘I care about you’ a little less so, with ‘I miss you’ somewhere in the middle. Because you didn’t say these things. You didn’t need to. You were just supposed to know that your family loved you, that they cared about you. That they missed you when you were gone. There was no need to say something that was obvious. It was nothing but a waste of time.
Maybe she’d spent too much time around people who did not find saying that sort of thing out of the ordinary. Or maybe she just didn’t care anymore. “I missed all of you and you can sit here if you want but I’m still not good at talking and you probably don’t want me to be either because you just don’t want me to. I don’t think.”
Because if she said what was on her mind right now he’d worry. He had enough of that already. Three kids. Wife. House. Unemployment. Paternity leave. He didn’t need her on top of all of that.
“No.” It was a whisper, almost. She peeled back the leg of her jeans to look at it. It was nothing. Much smaller than she’d imagined before it was fastened around her ankle. She felt like the skin around it should be burning, should be red and hot. It wasn’t. So why did it prickle so much? How could she feel it that deeply? “It doesn’t hurt. I just... I need to get it off. I can’t do this. I can’t.”
She was saying the same thing over and over, she knew that, but her mind was oddly circular as well, spinning around the idea of freedom. Not freedom from IVI; freedom from this constant feeling of claustrophobia, of walls closing in around her.
====
I missed you.
Both of Joakim’s eyebrows shot up, though it was hard to say what he was surprised about - the fact that Moa had said it, or the fact that she thought it needed to be said.
“Good,” he told her, expression softening. “Because I missed you too, and it’s hard to pencil in time for that when you have three kids.” His joke fell a little flat, but he rocked towards her on the mattress, still not quite invading her space.
“If I didn’t want to hear you talk, I wouldn’t be here. I’d take silent refuge in the bathroom. Or the car.” They never got to talk anymore, just him and her. Should he be worried that was part of the problem?
HIs lips practically disappeared as she rolled up her jeans, revealing an anklet that didn’t look painful, for which he was thankful. It made his sister’s words no more easy for him to comprehend. He shook his head slightly, though that didn’t help, either.
“Moa,” he said slowly. Finally, his concern had built up enough to give him the impetus to reach out to her, but it was a twitch of a movement, and he was embarrassed of his own awkwardness. Whatever she couldn’t do, and he assumed this had something to do with home, he felt partially responsible for it. It wasn’t a good feeling. “What is wrong? You can tell me. You should tell me. I want to know.”
====
It was the sort of joke that didn’t make her want to laugh. It made her want to cry. She’d done too much of that, though. If she burst into tears every five minutes she’d never get to talk to anyone. About anything. Not about things that mattered, to people who mattered.
“I’m not good with words. I just make a mess. And you don’t need that, you don’t need me to – to make it worse. I’m not... I’m not okay. But I’m getting better. I’m trying to get better.”
She wasn’t much for touching, or hugging or any of those things. None of them were. It was for other people, other families. When she saw him shift towards her, though. That was when she inched closer. A bit. Not close enough for a hug, but enough to lean against his shoulder as she talked.
“I’m scared,” she said. “I feel trapped. It’s just anxiety they say, anxiety and depression and things and I know Mum doesn’t really believe in that but it’s happening again and this time...”
She couldn’t tell him about the lake. She had told Oden (sort of) and she’d poured it all out at whatever counsellor he’d taken her to because she was too overwhelmed to be smart about it right then, but other than that? No. Nobody needed to know. Especially not someone who might tell Mum and Dad; Mum who had so stubbornly made the case that her daughter was not crazy after her power manifested itself, who was more okay with her being a vol than unstable in any way, and Dad who ignored feelings until they whacked him in the face. But Moa had to tell her brother something. She couldn’t keep it all in. She’d promised herself not to.
“This time I think it’s for real,” she continued, pulling on but being unable to shift the ankle bracelet. It sat way too tightly for her to rip it off, even though she really wanted to. It dug deeper into her leg as she tried to pry it off, the imagined pain becoming real. “It’s for real and I can’t get away and this isn’t helping.”
====
There was a long moment before Joakim responded. He needed to stop her from reducing herself to insignificance; skirting her feelings wouldn’t help either of them, and she could piece together her feelings better than the kids could. He still managed to interpret their needs correctly. Most of the time.
“I’ll help you get better,” he told her quietly but firmly. He put his arm behind her for more support. “Don’t let Mom fool you. She knows anxiety. Probably depression, too. She’s a parent.” He had dealt with those feelings himself, though he could not say whether they were to the same degree as Moa’s. Perhaps he had better coping skills, but he was also surrounded by family. Moa wasn’t.
“She doesn’t understand because your problems are not the same as hers. And Mom is at the age where she will wrestle problems to the ground and stand over them waving her fists, whether that is a good decision or not. You...” He took a breath and looked to sideways, trying to catch her eye. “Okay, you will probably never be like that, but that’s not a bad thing. At least in my opinion. I have too many bossy women in my life.”
He looked down to where she was clutching the anklet. “This is not the problem,” he told her gently. “This is just something so they can keep you safe. So you can be with us. If you take it off, when will we see you again?” Did that sound selfish? Probably, but it was true. “Your problem is not here,” he told her, gesturing to the anklet. “And it won’t last forever.” Silence stretched out after his words. Would it? he asked himself. He was not evolved, and he knew nothing about Moa’s power beyond what she told him. Still, he told himself, that was why IVF had sent her to Australia - to better cope with people who could understand the nuances of being evolved better than him. He had to put his faith in him, because the alternative - the idea of his sister’s downward spiral - made him deeply uncomfortable.
Finally, quietly, he added, “Are you getting help?”
====
Moa managed not to pull away as Joakim put his arm around her, but only just. It was strange, the way she couldn’t stand being touched but needed it all the same, needed the physical evidence that she was, in fact, not alone. She’d been convinced that she was. For so long she had tried to handle things on her own, sure that nobody would understand. It had been hard enough to get used to the idea that her friends did. Her family was another thing altogether. They rarely talked about things, and although Moa was supposed to remember that it didn’t meant they didn’t care... it had been hard to remember over the last year.
That was also why her brother saying he would help was so surprising, and made her wonder if she’d misjudged them. Maybe she’d been too wrapped up in her own misery to notice that they cared. Maybe they simply weren’t good at expressing it. She certainly wasn’t. “I don’t know if you can,” she said quietly. “I am trying but it’s hard to talk about and I don’t want people to think I’m...” She hesitated. Broken. She felt broken. On the mend, maybe, but still with lots of cracks that still needed to be patched up.“I don’t want to be a project. Or someone you feel like you have to think about even when you’d rather do something else except I told a friend that and he got kind of upset. It was an unfair thing to say too, because he’s helped me a lot. More than most, I guess. I don’t really trust the counselors at school, they’re just... they belong to the IVF and I don’t know what they do with what we tell them and it scares me. But he listens and tries to help except I think I’m not doing too well with his advice half the time. So I guess I’m getting help. A little. Or people are trying anyway except I’m not very good at realising that.”
It was terrifying, saying all of this. It made her feel uncomfortable, vulnerable. Naked. She tried to relax into her brother’s arm, tried to not push him away but it was hard. Impossible, almost. There was one more thing she had to tell him, though. A big thing. The one she had been dreading.
“I’m, I’m taking... pills. To make me not so sad and I tried not to, for a really long time I tried not to do that but I just couldn’t anymore so now I am and I think it’s helping a little. Don’t tell Mum, though. Or maybe do, so I don’t have to. I don’t know what is best but I feel like I shouldn’t need them but I do I guess. I just know she will freak out because she did when they gave me something so I would calm down that one time and I should be able to do this without them but I can’t. I really can’t.”
It was confusing. It was all so very confusing to tell him all this. To include other people in what had only been about her up until now. It made things more complicated because it felt like they weren’t just about her anymore. And even if people did it because they cared each question made her feel like a deer in headlights.
The tracking help either. It made her feel even more cornered. Even more out of her depth. Moa let go of the anklet again, brushing the leg of her jeans down so she wouldn’t keep pulling on it. The compulsion to do so was still twisting through her, but she needed not to. She knew that she needed to keep it on. For her family’s sake, if nothing else.
“It’s too much,” she said. “It’s all too much and I don’t know what to do anymore.”
====
Moa was talking a lot, and quickly. Joakim tried to piece together what she was saying - what it meant, but only certain words seemed to stick in his mind. Project. Friend. Don’t trust the counselors. Scares me. Moa was spilling out a mass of unsorted emotions and he wasn’t sure of how he could stop the flow, or if it was right to. He nodded, wishing he could make more sense of it all, trying to be supportive like he knew he ought to be.
“The counselors at your school are supposed to help you,” he said, committing to that thought because the alternative bothered him. The staff at IVI were supposed to be supportive in the way family couldn’t, particularly because most families were so far away. What did it mean, that Moa was scared of them? “But it’s good you have a friend. You need to do what you’re comfortable doing, without moving backwards.”
Did that even make sense? He had just started to question his own advice when Moa admitted she was taking pills. Although he was slightly surprised to hear it, the greater emotion he felt was relief. The stigma on medicating mental health hardly mattered if it was helping, even a little. “Good,” he said, nodding. “Keep taking them if they help.” And then, “I won’t tell Mom. Not until you want me to. We can wait until you’re back in Australia and she can’t corner you.”
He was quiet for a long time after Moa finished speaking. A deep breath - a frown - and then he bowed his head, trying to come up with a solution for her. But sometimes, and this was a life lesson he’d learned already, there wasn’t an easy one.
“It’s a learning process, right? Sometimes you have to fail to learn your lesson. So you keep trying new things until something works. You can do it, Moa. I know you can.” Especially if she was getting the help she needed, and how on earth could he find that out?
====
These moments of self doubt, of being scared of herself and the things she felt, didn’t happen as often now, but when they did they cut so much deeper. Moa had hoped they wouldn’t. That the medication would make her a different person somehow. More together, more rational, able to focus and think clearly. Not so emotional. Less rambly.
Most of the time she knew that this wasn’t how it worked. They worked on her mood, not her personality. She’d always be her, no matter what. She was just so very tired of herself. Of never being good enough. She didn’t want to say that, though. She’d already piled far too much on her brother.
“There was this one girl who went crazy. They locked her up. Permanently. I don’t want them to do that to me. If I tell them the truth... if they know what I’m really thinking, maybe they will do it to me too.”
They don’t want broken vols.
She couldn’t let go of that thought. Not completely. She’d tried. She’d tried but she wasn’t strong enough. Confident enough.
“It’s irrational. I know that it is. I just – I don’t know. I can’t let go of it.” Moa wrapped her arms around herself, like so many times before. She still needed it; still needed to physically hold herself together sometimes. “And I guess I should tell her. I just don’t want it to be about her again and I don’t know how to not do that.”
She needed that Skype date. She knew Jace could make sense of all of this. He could tell her how to go about it, how to do it. Moa wanted to do it on her own, though. She didn’t want to be his responsibility. He said it wasn’t like that and she knew it too. But sometimes it was hard to remember.
“I can try,” she said quietly. “I will try. It’s a little easier now. With the meds. It’s just unfair. All of it. I don’t want to be like this. I just want to be normal.” She sounded childish. She knew that she did. But maybe that was what she needed right now. Maybe this was exactly what she needed. She just felt bad for Joakim. For having to deal with this. He already had three kids. He didn’t need another one.
====
“She was crazy?” Joakim repeated. That took a moment to sink in, and then he shook his head vigorously, like he could shake the idea off again. “No. You’re not crazy. Feeling anxious is not crazy. They lock up people who are a threat to themselves or others, or who can’t monitor themselves. You’re not like that.”
He also thought she was being irrational, but hesitated in his agreement because he didn’t want to hurt her. But then, would not hurting her help her? He doubted it. “You need to let go of it, Moa,” he implored. “Don’t think that way. And tell Mom when you are ready. She doesn’t know now, what will it hurt if she doesn’t know for a little while longer?” He pushed his eyebrows up. “You don’t think I tell her everything, do you?”
At least, he thought, the meds were working. And maybe in time they would help Moa even more. He couldn’t tell if they were doing much by the way she was describing things.
“You are normal.” He looked down at her, face serious. “I know you’re a Vol, and you go to school in Australia, and you’re struggling to keep your head above water, but everyone has days where they feel they’re going to be pulled away by the current. Everyone. You’ll learn how to cope.”
====
It all sounded so logical when he said it. Anxious wasn’t crazy. Anxious was... being worried. About stupid things. Except when everything was spinning out of control, when you couldn’t remember what was rational and what was sane, then you did feel like you were actually, truly going crazy. And she had been a danger to herself. That one night. But at least she’d understood it, and been able to tell someone. Maybe that was the difference between her and someone like Anika.
“No,” she said after a long pause. “You never used to, when we were little. Even when I bit Jesper didn’t tell. Which I don’t remember why I did by the way. Was it the Playstation? I think it might’ve been.”
Her other brother, Jesper, had guarded that thing with his life. Moa used to sneak in and use it when he wasn’t home, which occasionally led to badness, should he come home while she was still playing. She’d always fought more with him than with Joakim.
She nodded, still not quite able to believe what he was saying, but she was trying as best she could. Or she would. She just had to work on it. “Okay. Sorry. I don’t want you to worry about me. There’s just... a lot. But my power is working a little better now. Not a lot, but a little bit. And that helps.
Moa wasn’t sure that he understood the correlation between the two, but it did help. The realisation that it worked with emotions and that relaxing herself (or trying to) and doing her best not to think about anything but what she was doing made a difference had been huge.
“And thank you. For listening.” She leaned in towards him a little more, and gave him a squeeze. Closer than that she probably wouldn’t get to a hug that hadn’t been thrown at her without warning, but it was something. “It’s,” she wasn’t sure how to express this, but she had to try, “important. Means a lot. You know? Or I hope you do anyway because this is kind of really hard to talk about, so I don’t do it a lot. Except I just did, I guess.”