Private Returning Yet Again: Ishvi

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Ishvi didn't even have to think before he replied, "She chose to, to have me and even after the consequences, she did whatever she did to fall knowing she'd be exiled. She-" his voice caught - he'd rushed ahead so quickly with his speaking that it had taken a moment for the emotion to seep in. "She abandoned home. She was a full angel and she just left it behind."

He wouldn't cry, but his words were spilling out now that he'd started, and he flickered again briefly as he got to the heart of the matter. His voice was quiet, "She gave it up. The angels here are fallen and living and the ones who didn't, didn't just throw it away are, are gone."

Ishvi's voice was barely above a whisper and he stared resolutely at Valli's feet. "My family didn't need to be punished and they're not coming back."
 
Romi

Romi

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This was, to say the least, complex.

Because the fact was that by the standards of Ishvi's home, Valli was a monster. An abomination. He was the child (grandson, technically), of a pagan god. He did not follow their rules, and did not obey their laws.

Which was one of the reasons it was so difficult to handle things. It was almost impossible to strip away the theological underpinnings, to separate it all out.

His past attempts were obviously not working, so he was just going to have to take things another way.

"When you deal with religion, things are never as easy as they seem. Your mother's choice to leave your home is not the same as someone else's parent making a choice to leave them. Abandonment can't be considered in isolation. Can you think of any reasons why she might have left, separate from making a choice to leave you behind?"
 
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Ishvi blinked slowly, shooting a somewhat surprised look over at Valli. "This isn't- I don't think she abandoned me. My parents, the ones I was given to, they raised me. And she, she had to know that she'd be exiled. She's a real angel and I don't know why she'd chose to make something like me and then keep doing wrong things until she fell. "

His voice was speeding up, so he clenched his fists and took a breath before continuing in a more steady tone. "It doesn't matter anyway." Ishvi winced as he spoke the lie. Obviously he wouldn't have brought this up if it didn't bother him. "Whatever her reasons, it means she's here. She's here instead of anyone else from home. And it's not- it shouldn't- fallen angels shouldn't be the only ones left."
 
Romi

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Oh, it really was turning into a theological nightmare, wasn't it? That was the crux, really: she'd been kicked out because she was bad, and it wasn't fair that only bad people had survived.

The rub, of course, was that they weren't bad. Good and evil were hard lines being drawn through a sea of grey, and Ishvi didn't seem to have realized that. He still thought of the angels of his home as good. Falling was therefore bad.

The question was how to address that.

Not exactly an easy thing to do.

"I want to take this conversation back to the basics," Valli said. "I feel like a major crux of this conversation is based around assumptions you've lived with your whole life, and I'd like to help you reexamine them. So, lets go from the absolute basics, even if they're obvious: How do you know she fell?"
 
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For a moment Ishvi forgot himself enough that he just stared at Valli. The question was basic, so simple it threw him. And he couldn't even answer at first, then when he did it was a hesitant mumble. "Usually they have black wings..." But he knew that wasn't much of an answer, even if it was true. Besides, he wasn't sure he'd ever seen her wings. No, unlike his own state, there wasn't any way to tell just by looking at her if she wasn't showing those wings, and even she didn't seem to want to parade her fallen status.

"It might, it might be hard to tell now." He had to admit that much at least, but he rushed on. "But I was there when they exiled her. When they announced it-" his face twisted into a bitter grimace at the memory. Everyone had made sure he was paying attention to that announcement. "The leaders said she'd fallen and so she was punished for it. It's something... everyone from home would know what happened."
 
Romi

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It was clearly a painful, awful memory, but sometimes therapy meant digging through things like that to find what had been buried.

"When people are struggling to come to terms with something, I often find the best way to handle it is to break the situation down to it's fundamentals, and re-examine things piece by piece to determine if you've made any flawed assumptions. To give an example, a patient of mine recently was devastated by a close friend going no contact with them. While extremely painful, as we worked through things they came to the realization that while they'd assumed the friendship was mutual, in reality it was anything but. They'd invested a lot of time and energy into someone who didn't feel the same way, and that was the reason their friend had cut them off."

Valli paused for a moment, shifting in his seat, and then leaned back.

"So it's often helpful to break things down and make sure you haven't made any assumptions. So, in this case, the elders have told you she had fallen, and that she was exiled as a result. But you don't know that for sure, and you don't know the reasons behind it, correct? So break it down further--what's a simple question someone might ask about the situation that might warrant reexamination?"
 
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In a way it was comforting that Valli was trying to get Ishvi to look at this situation logically. Even though it bothered Ishvi that there was a situation in the first place. He hadn't expected to be so emotional over his biological mother still, even though he'd come here to talk about her. Really he just wanted to bury the conflicted feelings, and remembering how she'd always been pointed out to him, knowing that falling might have saved her life - it didn't help.

So he listened to Valli's story, breathing deeply a few times to get back some balance, and attempted to think carefully. However some things were still ingrained. "I do know she left and didn't return. And the announcement that she had, she had fallen and was being punished by exile was given to everyone, not just me. The elders wouldn't lie... about a real angel falling. " He'd had to hesitate on that, wincing because hadn't he been told the elders had lied about him? And he had only fallen later... Ishvi suddenly felt a little sick, not quite managing to keep the conflict off his face.

"But I, I'm not-" He stuttered to a halt, trying to regroup. "She didn't go back. And.. I don't know what to ask about the situation now. We can't go home or fix things."
 
Romi

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Valli was planning to go even farther back. Really, Ishvi had only scratched the surface with his summary. He was still operating on a set of assumptions, and Valli didn't see a way to address things without directly pointing them out.

"While I'm sure your first reaction will be it's obvious, I'd like to take you a moment to consider before you answer this next question: How do you know that the elders were morally right?" It was a simple, basic question. Really, it was the kind of question that almost no one ever gave any real thought to, because why should they? People didn't do that kind of deep-diving analysis of the world they grew up in, because if you questioned everything all the time you'd go insane.

But Valli thought there was value in it right then. Ishvi's entire mental dilemma was predicated on the belief that the angels from his birthplace were correct and good and just, and that because he'd fallen away from them, he was a monster.

But nothing said that was actually true.
 
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Ishvi's first reaction was, in fact, it's obvious. His second was to sputter out, "They're the leaders!" Before realizing that was probably the same thing that Valli wanted him to think about. He grimaced and flickered, feeling sick to his stomach. Questioning his superiors was just not done. It seemed treasonous to even contemplate it.

"The elders are the oldest of the angels. Were the oldest... They knew the rules and they, they never fell. And they gave me a chance. They took me away from my birth mother and gave me a proper family and raised me even though I'm not a full angel. I just, I was supposed to fight and not fall. But I left. I thought I could prove I was good enough... But all the angels that were good, and pure, and and right... they're dead. I shouldn't get to escape only to fall."
 
Romi

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Valli Bryndísarson

Sometimes it was just very, very difficult to not explain to someone why their line of thinking was wrong. But if he gave Ishvi the answers it wouldn't be a success, so instead Valli opted to give him a story: another patient, long ago, the details changed.

"I had a patient once, back when I first started my practice, who was similarly convinced. They had been raised in a community that believed that all supernatural life was evil. God, after all, had given Earth to man. The only non-humans on Earth, therefore, would be those rebelling against god, or demons come to tempt people. They hunted down a great number of werewolves and vampires before they were almost all killed, and then my patient came to the island and had to come to terms with what had happened. For him, the logic was self-evident: the Earth was given to man, therefore anyone else was an interloper. It took a long time for him to be open to other options. To really think things through, and to realize that even if he accepts the basis, that doesn't mean the logic he's been following is true. Eventually, he accepted that just because God had given the Earth to man didn't mean that everyone else was a monster who had to be destroyed, but it took him a long time to get there."

 
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