River Tam (river_dance) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2015-01-05 21:11:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log, river tam, simon tam |
Who: River and Simon Tam
What: River has a nightmare
When: Backdated to toward the end of December
Where: Their room
Warnings: Vague references to Hunger Games-level of sexual abuse
They drifted into her head sometimes, without warning. She’d tried to tell Simon, messily, haphazardly. Knew he didn’t understand. But the memories were there all the same, untapped until she stumbled into them, brain suddenly alight with panic, anger, love, an overload of emotion that wasn’t hers. These things were never clear, flitting shadow images that were more sensation than concrete.
(Was it the strength of the emotion that imprinted them on her? Someone else’s mind crying out so strong that hers couldn’t help but respond, an answering cry that provided no comfort for any of them?)
She’d tried to say too, that she could feel two of the new arrivals so strongly, Katniss and her friend. Lashed over with scars of emotions, still bleeding raw. Wounded.
She dreamt of him: Bound with shadow hands chasing everywhere, touching everywhere. Something hurt, burning, burning, but she was still smiling, saying words she didn’t know the meaning of, whispered into the darkness of the room. Revered and wrecked in the same instant.
This was a secondary pain after all, nothing compared to the hurt of loss, nothing compared to the hurt of losing self. (Blood, splashed liberally across hands, but no remorse shown. That would be a weakness, and weakness is not allowed here, not in this place, because weakness is death and--
River woke herself up screaming, clawing at blankets, her body pulled in against itself before she scrambled out of bed all together and shook on the floor. She pushed her head in against her knees, arms wrapped around herself, trying to make herself as small as possible.
...
At the sound of the scream, Simon was out of bed within a second. It wasn't the first time he'd rolled to the floor and scrambled to stand before dashing to River's room, uncertain of what he'd find. She had bad dreams, she had wild fits of panic, she broke things and tore at her hair. Other people could afford to forget the fact that she was insane. They could find her charming, and funny, and even sweet, but they didn't live with her. They didn't deal with the more complicate aspects of what had been done to her, didn't have to deal with the violence and the screaming and the erratic behavior.
Simon was her caretaker, her protector, and he'd given up everything to take care of her. Even now, while he was rebuilding a new life, he had to stick to a part-time job at the clinic instead of being aggressive about his career. His life was tied up in hers, and perhaps some days he felt resentment for it … but he'd rather deal with this than not have her at all.
"River?" He practically crashed through her door, in a pair of flannel pajama pants. He'd realize later that it was cold, and he needed a shirt and socks, but he hadn't been in the mood to waste time. "River, hey, I'm here…" He approached her carefully, crouching down beside her on the floor.
…
“No!” River shouted as soon as he came closer. She curled closer in on herself, if that was possible, turning her head away from him, even though she had barely been able to see him in the first place.
“Don’t touch me!” she tacked on mere seconds later, the end of the sentence hitching as she broke into a sob.
Her mind was chaotic, racing, and she was in a thousand different rooms all at once: back in one in the Capitol, held against the floor, in a place and a time she’d never been; back at the Academy, and they were monitoring her dreams, asking her questions, making her dreams these times and places she’d never been; and she was here, too, crying and struggling in vain to sort out which slices were real, which were imagined, which were hers, and which were a boy’s she had never met.
…
"Okay — okay, I won't," Simon said, holding his hands up to prove they weren't coming anywhere near her. He didn't move in closer, but he didn't dare move away. This was always the most frightening part for him, not knowing if she was aware of her surroundings or if she was going to lash out in violence all of a sudden because of something in her mind.
"River, it's me. Do you know me?" he asked gently. When the answer was "no", it was bad. When the answer was "yes", River always made him feel like an idiot for it. Too bad, he had to ask anyway.
…
Simon -- Simon’s voice -- always had been an anchor point, even when she was at the Academy and he wasn’t there. Then, every part of her had been obsessed with formulating how to get messages to him. How to see him again. As things had started to fray away, as she had started to unbecome who and what she was, she’d clung to her memories of her brother with a tenacity she hadn’t known she’d had.
The sound of her name coming from Simon coaxed her back a little, even though she could still feel phantom pains wracking throughout her -- bruises on her wrists, against her hips. Hurts she had never felt before.
She didn’t answer Simon out loud, but nodded, her hair cascading in a wave over her knees.
...
"Shh…" He didn't touch, but he did inch a little closer. "It's okay, River. I'm here, and you're here in your room. Safe. It's just a nightmare, none of it's real." He moved to sit more comfortably, casting a quick glance at the clock. Thankfully, he didn't need to work in the morning, or else his concern might have been peppered with impatience. Even though he'd willingly given up his life to take care of her, there was still this feeling of why aren't you better yet? He'd been derailed, his life uprooted, and part of him just wished that rescuing her had been the whole battle. He had no way of knowing that it was only the beginning.
"Do you want to talk to me? Tell me what's going on?"
…
“It is real,” River insisted immediately. She never knew how to explain to him, couldn’t explain to herself. These things that happened, the fragmentations in her mind, they were always more sensations than anything concrete. It was an innate feeling rather than something that could easily be put into words; she didn’t have the words for it -- she didn’t know if they existed -- and couldn’t begin to explain to herself what it was she had seen or why she knew it was more than just a nightmare. Let alone begin to explain to Simon exactly what it was that was happening.
“Real,” she insisted again, stumbling for words. “Different time, different place, different person.”
…
"You … think what you're seeing comes from someone else," Simon tried to clarify. He knew River had an uncanny knack to understand people, but he'd always been skeptical when it came to the idea that she could actually read their minds. That kind of thing wasn't supposed to exist. People weren't supposed to reach beyond the scope of their own thoughts, but they'd been messing with her brain at the Academy. They'd been trying to achieve supernatural results, and Simon was half convinced they'd succeeded — while breaking the rest of her in the process.
"Who is it coming from? Do you know?" Half of him didn't want to indulge this, like if he told her it wasn't real, then that was the truth.
…
River rocked back and forth as he spoke, her fingers itching for something to hold onto besides the brace of her knees and the push of the floor.
The name buzzed around in her head at Simon’s prompting, but it felt strange to say it loud, to give voice to anything that echoed about in her head. It seemed to exist in another world and speaking it never seemed to translate it well into this world.
But it was the best she had, the only means of communication to try and help Simon.
“Finnick Odair,” she mumbled into her knees.
...
Finnick Odair? Simon frowned, leaning back slightly. "The one I helped at the clinic?" The one who'd kissed him and attempted to pay for medical care with sex, the one with the cagey friend. He'd had a feeling they weren't from a good place, that they had things that haunted them at night.
He felt for them, he did, but selfishly he didn't want those thoughts anywhere near his sister.
"I…" Simon felt at a loss. He could heal wounds, he could scan her brain and figure out, medically, parts of what was wrong, but when it came to actually coping with this he didn't know what to do. He couldn't sew up a gash or administer an analgesic to make it better. Surgery and bandages wouldn't fix her. "What do you need from me?" he asked softly, helplessly. She didn't want to touch; he couldn't even offer a hug.
…
River nodded at Simon’s first question, but froze up at the second. She started to cry again, unable to help herself, although these tears were solely her own, born of her own struggles and not merely the visage of someone else’s.
“I don’t want to see,” River protested, her voice going high, punctuated by the cries. “Hide the bad things, and see them anyway, but I don’t want to. Don’t want to. Secrets should stay hidden away.” She was talking too fast again, scarcely aware of the words that were flowing from her mouth, but she found that once she started, she couldn’t stop herself.
…
Simon moved closer, finally reaching out to take her hand. "Hold onto me," he said firmly. "Look up, look at me, River. Look at me, focus on me. I want you to look at me."
He held her hand in both of his. "Deng gao wang si hai, tian de he man man, shuang bei qun wu qiu, feng piau da huang han …" It was a poem, ancient and familiar, the kind of thing that students learned. Climb high, gaze four seas; heaven, earth — vast, vast... All he wanted was for River to snap out of Finnick's nightmares and find reality here.
…
River peered out from underneath her hair as Simon took her hand. For as vehemently as she had insisted that she didn’t want to be touched, it was actually reassuring to have Simon take her hand carefully, gently. In a way that was uniquely Simon, with his steady, surgeon hands, freshly calloused from their days spent on Serenity.
But it was a far cry from anything she had felt or seen or experienced during the horrors of her nightmare, and she suddenly found herself clinging to her brother, listening silently to the rise and ebb of his words, which were quietly and reassuringly familiar.
...
Simon remembered most of it, despite it only being kept in the back of his mind for years. He fumbled on a few words, and his Chinese wasn't as good as it probably should have been. It resulted in a couple of awkward pauses, a few nonsensical words thrown in as he got them wrong, but his voice was soothing.
When River moved to him, Simon wrapped her up in his arms and held her tight so he could rock her gently and stroke her hair. "Shh, mei-mei, it's all right. I've got you, and I'm not going anywhere."
…
River settled into Simon’s arms when he wrapped them around her. She had been afraid to be touched when she had first woken, the destructive way people had harmed each other too strong in her mind; she had been scared that anything would be remind her of that again. But Simon had always been gentle, strong, confident, and it wasn’t only a contrast to what she had dreamt of. It overpowered and blotted out the other memories entirely.
“I don’t want them in my head,” River said, but it was a low murmur this time, the anxiety and panic she had spoken with earlier bled from voice.
…
"I know," Simon said softly. He could watch her, he could try to find treatments, but none of it was good enough until he could find some kind of a cure. All of his medical knowledge was telling him there wasn't one, but he wasn't going to tell her that.
She'd probably read his mind, anyway.
He held her a little closer, smoothing her hair behind her ear. "I'm going to take care of you. I'll figure this out, I'll find some way to keep them out, quiet them down … we can find a way to stop the dreams. Someone here has to know."
…
His words were mostly a blur to her now, indistinguishable individually, but their intent clear all the same. She shut her eyes again as he kept moving out her hair. His voice, even now, even when he wasn’t reciting, was a comfort all the same: perhaps the last anchor she had to the world after everything else familiar had dropped away.
She pushed in tighter to Simon, curled up against him, and tried to fall back into a dreamless sleep.