Private Shoulda Coulda Woulda

Kait

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It would have been so easy. That was the part that was killing her - it would have been so easy! They were just mortals in stupid metal armor. She could have struck all of them down like nothing, she told herself. Scrap metal and red mist. It would have gone just like this:

BANG!

BANG! BANG! BANG!

CRACKOOM!


One of her foster parents ran out their back door, deeper into the forest, to find out what had happened. There, they found big new hole in the ground. The air was still warm. Andrasta was still there. She was crying her eyes out, curled up against a tree.

She insisted between sobs that she was fine. Physically speaking, she was.

.—-.-.. .—….- .—.—-. .—-.-.. .—-..-. .—-.-.- .—.—.-​

Five days later, Andrasta had an appointment with a therapist. Her previous experiences with therapists were less than stellar, but after her little tantrum, people were worried about her. She suspected they were worried that she'd lose control and hurt someone or wreck something, and even though nobody had said it out loud, she felt insulted.

Soon, Vito would have a grumpy redhead plopping herself down on his couch and staring at him. If he smiled at her, she wouldn't return it.

 

Romi

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VITO SAVOIA

Vito did indeed smile at her. He smiled at everyone, and offered his hand for a shake, but he severely doubted she'd take it. He hadn't been doing therapy for very long, but it was still painfully obvious to anyone with two eyes (and a lot of people who didn't have two eyes) that Andrasta was not there because she'd chosen to be there. She was young, so here parents or guardians had likely forced her, which meant, almost without question, that something had happened that had scared them.

That was how it tended to go. Parents rarely sent their kids to therapy because they'd noticed a long downhill descent. No, they called because there'd been an outburst, or someone had gotten hurt, or something along those lines.

It didn't really change things, though. Whether she wanted to be there or not, Vito was still going to try and help.

"My name is Vito," he said by way of introduction. "I'll be the one seeing you for your appointments. Before anything else, I thought I should ask what you want out of our appointments, because it's helpful to set goals and things to work towards."

 

Kait

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Andrasta may not have been smiling, but she did accept the handshake. She made eye contact, too.

What did she want? She took a breath and thought about it for a moment. "I guess I just want to get over... uh, all that crap that happened a couple weeks ago," she said. "I was one of the people who went missing. And showed up when the new dragon mountain did. You prolly saw the bit with the new mountain on the news. Kinda hard to miss, innit?"

She paused a second, then realized he might ask what happened when she went missing. "Basically I made some new friends, then watched one of them get stabbed fatally in the neck while another got poisoned. And then I got bled out and had to go to hospital. So... Yeah." She shrugged.
 

Romi

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Ah. Even if he didn't yet know all the details, even that short explanation gave him a very good idea of what to expect. Andrasta was no doubt dealing with a lot of things: with the pain of losing a friend. With survivor's guilt. With their own injury and trauma.

It was a lot, especially for someone so young. A lot to deal with. A lot to process. And a lot of expectations by the people around her about how she should be handling things.

It was probably as good a place to start as any.

"When you deal with something as intense and stressful as you went through, some of the biggest hurdles to recovery can be expectations for how you handle it. Society and the people around us have some very firm opinions on the correct way to navigate trauma, and learning to set those aside can be an important part of the process.

"There's no such thing as too fast, or too slow, even if people will tell you otherwise. Some people will just get over it in the span of hours, while others will have it stick with them for a long time. It's important to be realistic about your ability to handle things."

 

Kait

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Andrasta frowned.

"I think I'm being too slow, though. Like... I've sorta lived through other lives before this one. I have memories about my whole planet getting destroyed. And living through wars and stuff. So you'd think... I mean, those are kinda someone else's memories and kinda mine too, but you'd think I'd build a tolerance or something."

All this struggling with mere memories just made her feel weak. Mortal. Powerless. She was supposed to be indestructible.

"Nobody else is pushing that on me," she told him. "It's just that I should be better at this." And she shouldn't need his help.
 

Romi

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Well, that was a new one. It was hard to make any absolute statements about something like past lives, because it manifested differently for every person. How connected she was or wasn't would vary, and he didn't want to say anything until he knew for sure how it worked.

"Well, I have to admit that's a new one for me." Vito often felt that being honest with patients was the best way to earn their trust. "Can you explain a bit about how it works, so I can understand it better?"

 

Kait

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She paused, leaning back, gathering her thoughts.

"Well... sometimes I sort of get new memories beamed into me. Sometimes they take the place of dreams, sometimes they just sorta hit me in the middle of class or whatever and then I'm just, lights-on-nobody-home for a minute. I know it happened in the past, and I know those other people I remember being are me, kind of, since we've got the same soul.

"My dad used to say I'd get all my memories back some day and become the real me again, but I think maybe he just made that up. November gave me the gift of being able to talk to some of my past lives, and... well, none of them are exactly the same person as each other, and I'm not the same as them. And... I don't think any of us properly knows how this works, I guess."

It was hard for her to admit that last part. She remembered all that talk about why she was supposed to be honest with therapists - but this was something that generally only stayed in her head, or between her and her ghosts. She didn't tell other people. She kind of regretted telling Vito, after all the time she'd spent acting like she knew how it worked.

"You're not allowed to tell anyone that, though," she mumbled.
 

Romi

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Vito definitely got the impression she hadn't meant to let that part out, but that was something that happened a lot in therapy: things slipped out that were on your mind, whether or not you'd planned to talk about them.

And he had to do what he could to reassure her that the slip wasn't going to cost her.

"Even though you're a minor, you still have the full right to privacy here. I can't share anything you say with anyone else, except under very specific circumstances... basically, only if I think either you or someone else is in imminent danger. It's something therapists take very seriously - if I shared anything I heard here without an extremely good reason, I'd probably lose my job."

Vito actually wasn't even clear if it would be legally valid. If someone confessed to killings on the island, would a therapist breaking their oath even be enough to hold them?

Probably not.

"You might have the same core, but it sounds like you're still very much different people. Even if you take two identical people and put them in similar situations, there's no guarantee they'll act the same. People are varied. Even tiny experiences can change how we react. And in a case like yours... well, think of it like an art project. If you give a class of kids the same page from a coloring book, what are the odds that even two are going to hand in identical results? Everyone does things differently, and even if your core is the same, everything around the core is different."

 

Kait

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While Vito went on about her right to privacy, Andrasta just nodded. She'd heard all that a few times before, and she almost wished she could just skip hearing it.

She'd started fidgeting. Vito's metaphor about the coloring book page made her go still and thoughtful, letting the idea sink in. "...You know, yeah," she decided after a little while. "I think that's the best way I've ever heard of describing it." Andrasta almost felt embarrassed for not having thought of something that good on her own.

"But... yeah. I've kinda heard the whole right to privacy thing a few times. The first time was actually when I was on juvie island, actually. And I was pretty sure they were lying, which was an entire thing. I dunno if you heard anything about how I ended up in there. I pretty much spent my first year in there after they took me from my parents. That was kinda traumatic too."

Those scars had healed over, making them easier to poke at than the fresh ones. She honestly dreaded talking about the things that Ycroma did. She was still skeptical if Vito would even get the way she felt about it all.
 

Romi

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"I haven't heard anything," Vito confirmed. "I try not to look up my patients before they arrive, whether that be pulling reports or checking the news for their reputation. I prefer to let patients speak for themselves."

Which she was. He was getting a lot of good information, and a much better understanding of what he was dealing with as the conversation moved on.

And new avenues of discussion, which he could hardly just ignore.

"It's not what you originally came here for, but did you want to talk about that?" She had explicitly described it as traumatic, but considering it wasn't what she'd come here for...

Well, maybe she felt it was more important, or maybe she wasn't ready to talk about the more recent stuff. It happened - it was common, really.

 
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