[ the memory corrects itself, like a drifting car jerking back into a lane.
you broke into this room, the second time. you figured out the code through careful analysis and study of your father like a hawk. your mother, your terrified mother, gave you the hint to which of the three codes you narrowed it down to with a tiny nail mark on a piece of paper.
and now fei chengyu has found you.
you are dragged out of the cabinet by your father, who finds you among his things and says nothing, just yanks you out by the arm and tells you to wait.
the porcelain shattering from before - it happens, you remembered that right. you look up to the stairs as fei chengyu swears and makes his way up, and then you hear your mother screaming, at the top of her lungs, fear and desperation and misery. fei chengyu grabs her by the hair and drags her across the porcelain shards on the floor - she's so fragile, so tiny, screaming as her blood flecks the expensive carpet, and drags her down the stairs to the basement. he's made you watch this so many times. he's made you watch him beat her, and instinctively, you freeze, but your flight instinct kicks in when you remember there's another man in the room.
there's another man in the room and you instinctively run - you try and hide behind his legs, hoping, praying this stranger will save you, will see what your father does, that he'll take you and your mother away and call the police or something. the man looks at you behind his legs and smiles at you. he even strokes your hair. you think, for a moment, you're going to be okay, and then he says:
"“You can’t just hide, boy.”
and you realize right then that no one is coming to save you.
fei chengyu looks across the room from where he's holding your mother by the hair and notices you, and your pupils contract, your heartbeat stops. he gets up and retrieves something, and kneels down where your mother is a wreck on the floor, then buckles something familiar around her neck. it's a white metal device, like a collar, with long wires strung out from the edge of it and another ring at the end, a small handheld device hanging down. it is a device you have seen hundreds of times, now, only this time, it's different, and you know what's coming, and -
"Darling." fei chengyu starts, knelt down from your mother, looking at you. "Who gave you the code?”
(the fingernail scratch underneath the correct code; your tireless analysis.)
you're so afraid that you can't respond. pale as a ghost, staring at the white iron collar, your heart pounding so hard you can barely hear him. fei chengyu rises, and comes to kneel in front of you.
"What did you hear?" fei chengyu asks, and his hand smells like blood when it passes by your face. he runs it through your hair. “Good children shouldn’t eavesdrop on adults talking. I know you didn’t do it on purpose. — You didn’t do it on purpose, did you?”
you're scared. you're so scared, you're so scared, that you shake your head. fei chengyu smiles, and turns his head, pointing now to the porcelain covered woman trembling across the room. “The child didn’t do wrong on purpose. If he did wrong, he must have been lured into it by an ill-meaning adult. Should we punish her, then?”
no. nononono, no, no --
you can't look your mother in the eyes, but you're forced to look at her anyway, and fei chengyu's blood soaked hands come up, beckoning you closer. you can't, no, you can't - you step backwards, backwards, until your back presses to the bookshelf, and the man whose legs you hid behind nudges you forward so you can't escape. your legs move of their own accord, like lead, as numbly, you go to your father -
and then.
the other end of the collar is buckled around your neck and the silver wires stretch taut between you and your mother. it's metal and cold and you know it because this is not the first or the fifth or even the tenth time fei chengyu has done this with you, and it hurts, it, hurts, and it's too tight, it's suffocating you --
he places the controls in your small, shaking hands.
two rings buckled on two necks. one end would only loosen a little when the other tightened. all you have to do is squeeze.
if you only clench your fists around the control, you could escape the unbearable feeling of suffocation. you've been forced through this hundreds of times. you're being strangled - you're choking, and your mother is choking, and you've been trained what to do in this situation you have to squeeze the controls so you don't choke - you had to kill the animals you had to tighten the ring to survive you've been forced into this training over and over and you squeeze so you can breathe and the puppy and the bird they die in your hands and your mother chokes and chokes and her eyes are still so numb as she stares at you and you don't want to hurt her you don't want to hurt her you have to breathe you don't want to -
"If you want total control over them, it won’t be hard,” the other man who was supposed to help you says over the sound of your mother's choking, over your tears, over the blood in your mouth and rushing in your ears and it's just so clinical - “You know how you train a hawk? If you want to tame it, you first have to weaken it. You can’t be kind. It’s necessary to starve it appropriately.”
“Starve it?” Fei Chengyu asks. (you stop squeezing and you start to choke as your mother gasps for air and you can only do it for a second, just a second, you squeeze again she's choking you have to live you don't want to hurt her mom )
“If you overfeed it, President Fei, over time, it will become greedy. If a tool doesn’t obey, it has to be honed. What kind of knife honer is afraid of breaking the knife?” the man who could have saved you's laughter is cold and he's still talking and blurry it's blurry and you're choking and squeezing the life out of her and - ]
[ when the memory ends, fei du is gasping like the ring is still around his neck - coughing, violently, his composed expression completely shattered, collapsed into the closest wall. ]
but this is a psychological thing, isn't it? is this something her psych could heal? and even if it was, her psych is channeled through her phone. he probably would not want a photo of himself in this state in her camera roll.
having seen the memory, she can understand precisely why he's reacting like this. she stays standing, because to kneel down might be to remind him of his mother on the floor, or his father kneeling before him. she moves, off to one side, to make sure she's not standing at the angle either of them, or that other man, had been in the memory.
she doesn't reach for him, because she doesn't want the contact to remind him of the violence he had suffered and witnessed in his memory. instead, she speaks softly.]
...can you hear the sound of my voice? You're not there anymore. Please, breathe... gently, in and out. You're going to make it through this.
[ thankfully maybe for them both, he is dissociating too hard to even think about the positioning, mind still trapped in that moment of trauma. fei du's breath is coming in a wheeze, short, and his hands flex closed -- and then open, backing off violently, like he's still there. like he could keep her from being strangled at the cost of himself. it makes the air in his lungs constrict again, and he wheezes, agonizingly in pain.
nahida's voice sounds like it comes through water. you're going to make it through this. is he? what about her? would she? no - she's a corpse in a bedroom hanging from the rafters, staring at him, you raise me up so i can stand on mountains -
another wheeze.
it takes another thirty seconds, but something in fei du is a survivor, and he claws for it - coughs, violently, again and again and again, dropping to the floor in a heap and clutching at his throat as he claws back for normality. ]
he drops, and then she kneels down next to him, her voice still gentle when she speaks.]
...is there anything I can get for you? Water, or...?
[she can imagine it must feel extremely disorientating to come out of a memory like that, and then, with the response he must have been conditioned to have to it... he sounds like he's having trouble breathing. a soft reset might be good.]
[ it sure is, yeah!!! yeah, everything is terrible!!!
he seems to be kind of slowly coming back online. this isn't the first time he's seen this memory this week, so he's, grimly, starting to get used to having traumatic ptsd flashbacks.
he manages to slow his breathing down enough that he's no longer wheezing, and realizes, dimly, that nahida is there. ]
... [ a shake of his head, and a murmured, breathless - ] Sorry. [ after another cough. rip. ]
[ when he's not having a panic attack he will feel some kind of way about this - uncomfortable, maybe. it's not nahida's fault. he's just not used to this, not used to being seen, having his carefully constructed labyrinth ripped violently away from him to reveal the softer core underneath. he'd rather die than tell people about the things that have ever happened to him, considering he barely remembers them himself.
...
he takes another breath as he starts to regulate, and wipes his hand across his mouth. it's trembling; he doesn't pay any attention to it. ] You shouldn't have had to see that.
[it's bad enough that he went through that at all, but - for it to go on display like this now... nahida frowns softly, glancing in the direction the pig noise ran off to. it better not come running back...]
...it doesn't seem like we're going to have much privacy this week, though. So, I'm sorry... for anything else I end up seeing that you don't want me to see.
It's fine. Hopefully that's the end of it. [ honestly, there are plenty of other things he'd rather avoid being shared, but that was one of the worst - he coughs one or two more times, then takes a deep breath, tilting his head back. ]
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no subject
[ when the memory ends, fei du is gasping like the ring is still around his neck - coughing, violently, his composed expression completely shattered, collapsed into the closest wall. ]
no subject
[her first instinct is to try to heal him.
but this is a psychological thing, isn't it? is this something her psych could heal? and even if it was, her psych is channeled through her phone. he probably would not want a photo of himself in this state in her camera roll.
having seen the memory, she can understand precisely why he's reacting like this. she stays standing, because to kneel down might be to remind him of his mother on the floor, or his father kneeling before him. she moves, off to one side, to make sure she's not standing at the angle either of them, or that other man, had been in the memory.
she doesn't reach for him, because she doesn't want the contact to remind him of the violence he had suffered and witnessed in his memory. instead, she speaks softly.]
...can you hear the sound of my voice? You're not there anymore. Please, breathe... gently, in and out. You're going to make it through this.
no subject
nahida's voice sounds like it comes through water. you're going to make it through this. is he? what about her? would she? no - she's a corpse in a bedroom hanging from the rafters, staring at him, you raise me up so i can stand on mountains -
another wheeze.
it takes another thirty seconds, but something in fei du is a survivor, and he claws for it - coughs, violently, again and again and again, dropping to the floor in a heap and clutching at his throat as he claws back for normality. ]
no subject
he drops, and then she kneels down next to him, her voice still gentle when she speaks.]
...is there anything I can get for you? Water, or...?
[she can imagine it must feel extremely disorientating to come out of a memory like that, and then, with the response he must have been conditioned to have to it... he sounds like he's having trouble breathing. a soft reset might be good.]
no subject
he seems to be kind of slowly coming back online. this isn't the first time he's seen this memory this week, so he's, grimly, starting to get used to having traumatic ptsd flashbacks.
he manages to slow his breathing down enough that he's no longer wheezing, and realizes, dimly, that nahida is there. ]
... [ a shake of his head, and a murmured, breathless - ] Sorry. [ after another cough. rip. ]
no subject
There is absolutely no reason for you to apologize, Fei Du.
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...
he takes another breath as he starts to regulate, and wipes his hand across his mouth. it's trembling; he doesn't pay any attention to it. ] You shouldn't have had to see that.
no subject
[it's bad enough that he went through that at all, but - for it to go on display like this now... nahida frowns softly, glancing in the direction the pig noise ran off to. it better not come running back...]
...it doesn't seem like we're going to have much privacy this week, though. So, I'm sorry... for anything else I end up seeing that you don't want me to see.
no subject
It's fine. Hopefully that's the end of it. [ honestly, there are plenty of other things he'd rather avoid being shared, but that was one of the worst - he coughs one or two more times, then takes a deep breath, tilting his head back. ]
no subject
Yes, hopefully...