Brightness 4.11
C/W: this chapter contains graphic depictions of body horror, dysphoria, panic attacks and self harm
There are points in a person's life when the immediacy of a stimulus or the overwhelming nature of a sensation can completely bypass their ability to process the events of that moment. Be it from a combination of stress, hormonal reaction, or memory distortion, the person's thoughts are left fragmented. Disjointed. Broken.
These moments are rare, but because of their extreme nature they overwhelm our psychological defense mechanisms and leave us vulnerable and raw, stripped down to the animal under the veneer of civilization. The potent mix of chemicals that feed the fight or flight response – adrenaline, norepinephrine, cortisol – flood the body within seconds.
The immediate result is biological arousal. Elevated pulse, higher blood pressure. The lungs have to work harder to keep up, forcing breathing to speed up, and often get shallower. The body realizes the danger and quickly constricts blood vessels serving nonessential functions such as digestion. The skin pales as circulation increases in the muscle tissue, flushing them with oxygen in preparation for exertion. Pupils dilate to let in more light, just in case some small detail makes the difference in survival.
But comprehensive though they are, these clinical descriptions fail to capture how such moments grab your chest and refuse to let go. Your palms feel clammy and sweaty; if you clenched your fists the skin would stick to itself. Your calves and thighs tremble as chemical panic and misfiring nerves ruin fine motor control; muscles twitch and shudder with the impulse to run, jump, move, get away. Your vision narrows even as your pupils dilate; your focus tack sharp as the world around you falls away. Sometimes the tunnel vision is so literal as to genuinely blind you to everything that's not right in front of you, and hearing fares no better. Your head feels light, your face goes cold and numb, but you've never felt more alive, more present, than in that terrible, brilliant, all-consuming moment. A distant part of you notes that you need to pee, even as your heart flutters in your ear like a hummingbird and the parts of your brain that deal with reason and consequence and considered action shut down in the face of the amygdala's chokehold on the hypothalamus.
It all happens in the space of three heartbeats.
My skin split like a ripe peach with a sick, wet pop that reverberated all the way through to my jaw. A section of my back peeled away with the ripping sticky sensation of a bandaid, but the wound didn't stay at the surface. A growing pustule burst and overripe flesh spilled out and over itself. But it didn't hurt. I wished it hurt. I wished for the screaming of raw nerves, the agony of flayed muscle. For sharp, hot pain that would drown out anything else.
But I wasn't so lucky.
I felt everything.
I felt the sweat and slick wetness between the folds, the heat and the pressure it forced on the rest of the skin. It felt like a skin tag or a scab, but as it grew it started to droop, hanging off me like a limp tumor. It started under my left arm, trapped between my bicep and my ribs. But the bigger it got, the more it started to force my arm up and away from my body.
The sob welled its way up in my throat, clawing desperately at my trachea, but I couldn't even manage that much. The cry stuck to my uvula like cough syrup, tacky and bitter, and drowned in muted silence.
The awful twisting in my chest only worsened as my shoulder finally gave out. Stretching and cracking, the joint gave way and my shoulder twisted out and above me with the nauseating, painless sensation of muscle and gristle wrenching around in ways they were never meant to move. And where my arm had hung was that thing sprouting out of my ribs. I tried to push it down but that only brought my stomach up into my throat, like a seesaw bringing bile up as I tried to force my shoulder back. The new protrusion pressed against my side, my arm, my chest–
My eyes shut, but that didn't help. I could still feel the moist warmth of it plastered to my skin. That wasn't my body. There wasn't anything there. I wanted to tear it, pull it off, anything to make it go away. I spasmed, clawing at the air, and felt a burst of merciful pain as I bit through my lower lip.
What was happening? What was this? This wasn't my power, this wasn't my power, where was this coming from? I wasn't a Changer! This wasn't me it wasn't me it–
My thoughts stuttered. It wasn't me. It was my passenger. Forcefield. Whatever. So I could push it back. I focused and pushed my arm against my side as hard as I could, the sickening painless feeling of bone and ligaments and tendons grinding past each other making me gag. My breath came in short, fast, sour pants, and I could taste the vomit across my tongue. For a moment, I thought it was working.
Then the skin of my back started crawling.
Taylor first realized what had happened when I screamed. But by then it was far too late.
The symptoms of hyperarousal only cover the immediate response to a traumatic event. But they're critical for the understanding of the survivor's response afterwards. Psychologists started observing trauma responses in the 1990's, mostly as a reaction to domestic abuse cases starting to get traction in the feminist counterwave of the 1970's. But the true origins of the movement can be traced back as far as the 19th century, when Sigmund Freud used the works of Chaucer and others to form a cohesive narrative about the long term effects of trauma during childhood on adult behavior.
Naturally these theories were… crude at best. While Freud started his career with a genuine exploration of and contention with the abuse these women suffered, he later changed tack to completely deny the lived experience of these victims. He instead claimed that they were either lying about the particulars of their encounters, or secretly desired the abuse themselves. The damage this movement did on early psychology and victim advocacy is impossible to truly calculate.
It was only later – after several feminist pushes in the field, and existing studies on PTSD in WWII veterans – that the accounts of victims of childhood physical and sexual abuse began to be taken seriously again. These movements fought long and hard for what little gains they made, but the recognition came with it.
Part of the issue with these accounts is that the experience of trauma described earlier doesn't just stop at the event itself. It propagates outward, affecting your actions and experience long past that moment and ricocheting back to taint memories of the time before.
The body reacts in certain ways when it's threatened. The sympathetic nervous system's reactions, the concentration of attention and focus in the immediate moment, the heightened sense of fear or anger. All of these things prompt the person to more readily deal with a threat in front of them, so they might live and have time to process at some future point. Evolutionary adaptations to a dangerous world.
A traumatic response is different. It occurs when action no longer solves the problem. When a threat renders you so helpless, so trapped and cornered in a place of danger, that no action on your part could save you. When all you can do is suffer and hope the horror ends.
The problem born from such ordeals is that your body no longer has the ability to slow down. Your body's response doesn't decrease the threat or improve your situation, it only serves to make you more aware of it. This results in a positive feedback loop; the danger heightens your feelings of fear and anger, which triggers an elevated biological response, which highlights your inability to save yourself, which drives your emotions higher still.
At this point, pushed beyond their intended purpose, the basic functions of the body begin to break down. The so-called amygdala hijack occurs because the emotional brain processes information milliseconds faster than the rational brain. When it recognizes a threat, it acts before the neocortex can respond, and should its response worsen the perceived threat, it ends up racing far ahead of conscious thought. It shuts down the frontal lobe; the area of the cerebellum responsible for planning, self-control, memory formation, empathy and attention, leaving the brain unable to rationally adapt to its circumstances.
Each facet of the threat response, robbed of purpose, is distorted into an exaggerated, harmful form. And since the functions become decoupled from the associated action or response to the threat, they also tend to persist long after that threat has passed. In a sense, the threat never really goes away, even when its physical source does. To the body's stress response, it lingers, tattooed into the skin. For years or decades afterwards, it continues to provoke that same spiral of panicked defensive feedback whenever the hindbrain is reminded of its presence.
This is why it is so hard for you to remember the exact details of traumatic events as they've occurred, and why it is so difficult for experts to navigate these cases themselves. Memory formation is clouded or outright interrupted by the chemical turmoil that floods your hysterical brain, fraying rational thought and scrambling episodic recounting of events.
You might remember the physical progression of events, but not how you felt about them. You might perfectly remember the emotions that you went through that night, but not be able to match them with anything that actually happened to you. You might be able to picture everything from the stained and peeling wallpaper of the motel room to the flickering overhead light.
Or you might not remember anything but the smell of her greasy hair as she leaned over you.
The new flesh slumped as its own weight pulled it down, pressing skin flaps against fat rolls in smothering pleats. The cloying warmth was inescapable, like sweat on a hot summer day. It stuck out to me even through the horror of feeling the things protruding from my body, the shape of the malformed abomination I'd become.
It was hard to describe because there wasn't anything there. My forcefield had always been invisible, and that alone hadn't changed. So the only thing I could feel was the skin on skin on dirt. The folds and joints and creases of the body she'd left me with.
I couldn't speak. My wordsthoughtsbreath were lost between my lungs and the spiraling passageways to my mouths. My torso twisted outward and split apart like the branches on a misshapen tree. It was impossible to distinguish when one started and the next began. Long locks of hair sprouted from heads, from armpits, from pelvises, dragging over defined abdomens and exposed breasts. The slick drag of glass-like shield over glass-like shield felt slick and smooth on the sensitive surfaces; hair and skin alike.
The next thing was the hands. They grasped and clenched uselessly at the ends of my arms – 2, 4, 7, 13; I lost count. I could feel them, though. Pawing and twisting at the air like a newborn, reaching for their mother. Even as they moved, the misshapen joints and tendons inside ground against each other with a scraping sensation that made my stomach roll.
My legs were sprawled out beneath me, digging into the dirt in a vain attempt to hold up the bulging mass of my body. But the hips they were attached to were half formed, grafted onto ribs and femurs and vertebrae and sternums. They couldn't support me, even if I hadn't been so obscenely heavy. They scraped the fresh soil instead, digging into the mulch and tree roots in long divots.
My screams echoed through the trees until my throat was raw. I curled my arms in against myself as best I could. Tears and snot poured down my face. I couldn't see through my screwed-shut eyes. I couldn't hear over my own wails. But I could feel everything with awful, perfect clarity.
It was too much. I couldn't. Wouldn't. Deal with this. I just wanted it to go away. To have my body back. That was all I wanted, even if I needed to give up everything else. To have this one thing.
Please
I didn't care what it took
please
just make it stop–
There was a pop and a rush of displaced air.
And I was curled up on the forest floor again, blessedly, nakedly free.
The after effects of trauma linger in various ways, often more physical than most realize. You may have trouble eating or sleeping, to name a few of the more obvious cases. But if the trauma is severe enough, it can result in more long term prognoses. Autoimmune disorders, heart attacks, diabetes, strokes, and more are all possible. Trauma and stress take a severe toll on the body, especially when left unaddressed.
And likewise the psychological impacts, while profound, are often not immediately attributable to the trauma itself. A veteran may flinch at the sound of fireworks, or he may have flashbacks when stepping barefoot on the sand at the beach. You may be fine around people of the same gender as your assaulter, but suffer panic attacks whenever you see someone in a yellow t-shirt.
The human brain isn't good at associations. Or rather, it's too good, often in ways that are counterintuitive to purpose. Your body is designed, broadly speaking, to keep you out of danger. And because of this, trauma responses that keep you from danger but sometimes trigger when you're safe are valued more highly than those that never identify threats that aren't there but sometimes miss threats that are. Better to tolerate a false positive than risk a false negative; rather mistakenly warn twice than be wrong once when it actually matters.
But because of this mechanism, the triggers that result from trauma don't always have a strong association to the event itself. Your brain identifies a certain element or pattern within the event and latches onto it as a predictor of any potential reoccurrence. This could be something useful like the weapon they used or utterly innocuous like their height. It could be the key to saving your life, or a response you have to train yourself out of for decades.
You never really know until it hits you in the face.
"It's okay, it's okay."
I blinked.
Taylor was talking to me. Her arms were holding me close against her chest. The insects were quiet and still. The forest seemed to be holding its breath. It was only a moment later I realized that I was doing the same.
My skin crawled. The air prickled along my nerves; pins and needles raced up and down my arms. When I looked closer I realized the baby soft hairs on my forearms were standing straight up.
"Tori?"
I blinked, and looked up. Taylor was staring at me. She hadn't moved. A distant part of me was grateful for that. A wing brushed my palm. Meepy.
"Are… you okay?"
I swallowed. Was I okay? The floor around us seemed to tell the story well enough. Even now I could see the gouges and scars around us that thing had left behind.
A sob caught in my throat. It felt like a cruel joke. Like this whole experiment was made purely to hurt me. My own protection had been turned against me. Of course it had. How could I expect anything different? Why had I thought the changes to my power might be easier than the rest of my ruined life? Since when had powers ever done anything to help with trauma?
"Hey." Taylor's voice caught me. "It's okay. We can try something else. That's enough for today anyways. We can talk to Tattletale and–"
I squeezed my eyes shut, and shook my head violently as I pushed her away. No, I couldn't let myself do that. To retreat into security. To depend on her for this. Or anyone else. This was my power. My body. My past. Mine.
I took another step back, digging my nails into my palms, and took one last deep breath. I turned my forcefield back on with a scream.
It screamed back.
Realizing that memory can be so unreliable is often difficult for victims of trauma. Especially during the later stages of recovery. The world can seem uncertain or clouded, familiarity and comfort veiled behind shapeless forms and broken mirrors. Doubly so when every misstep could result in all of that pain rising back to the surface. The amygdala hijack is not constrained to the ordeal itself. With every flashback and every trigger, the sudden onset of an overly strong emotional reaction can trigger the limbic center of the brain to take over all over again, disrupting neocortex activity and any sense of the world as a rational, consistent place.
You'd known all of this before. You'd covered it in class, and again when you'd triggered. Trauma victims are difficult to work with, and every Hero needs to be ready to deal with at least one, if only for long enough to get them to the experts whose job it was to help those people.
But none of that knowledge helped when it happened to you. Every step into something new became a tightrope walk over the abyss. The slightest touch or tremor could take you from calm and controlled to the lowest you'd ever been.
After this long, you'd thought that you'd known that much. You had, if not boundaries then at least a mutual understanding with Taylor. That there were some things, situations, people she needed to warn you about. She respected that. Even when it was hard. You'd thought that was enough.
It wasn't.
I came back to myself in piecemeal fragments of awareness. The hard bark of the tree behind me, scraping against my bare arms. The soft dirt beneath my pants and the grit under my fingernails. Leaves and twigs and branches surrounded me, as if something had shaken them loose from the canopy.
As I looked around me, I realized that's exactly what had happened. There was a clear line of broken trees, torn dirt, and sundered soil in front of me. Where I'd come from.
My palms were bloody. I could feel the stinging, tacky pull of clotting blood as I flexed my hands, and it was such a relief in contrast to the smothering press of a body gone wrong that it took me a second to even register it as pain. I coughed, and I wasn't surprised to see red against the back of my hand. My throat felt like I'd been screaming for hours. Maybe I had.
I didn't know how long I sat like that before Taylor found me. Her footsteps were uncannily loud in the sucking silence of the forest, the only thing crunching on the leaves and twigs I'd left in my wake after all the local animals had fled. I couldn't quite bring myself to look at her.
"...Tori?"
I swallowed, the pain sharp against my windpipe, and hid behind my hair. Meepy found me, alighting gently on my right knee. I didn't have the heart to push her off.
Tentatively, I looked up at my partner through a gap in my bangs. Her eyes were… full of some blazing emotion. I wished I could tell which. Her mouth was open as if she didn't quite know what to say. But I already knew.
I'd broken my forcefield. And I couldn't fix it.
Taylor told you that the whole thing lasted about twenty eight minutes. Just barely less than half an hour. It's funny how little time it takes to change someone's life forever.
You never fully remember the details. She had to tell you in halting, careful terms, and repeat it half a dozen times over the next few days until you retained the information. What had happened to you. What you'd done. What you'd managed to tell her, between the sobbing and screaming. What you'd made her promise.
There are flashes. Moments when you think it's almost within reach. But the emotions always come first. The fear. The pain. The certainty that you were trapped, that you were alone in that room with her again and you couldn't speak, couldn't move, couldn't so much as blink without her permission. That it would be like this forever and you'd love it–
That's always enough to stop you from prying any deeper. No one could fault you, really. Taylor certainly didn't. She didn't ever ask, when you came back to yourself. How much you remembered. If you blamed her. It was a small mercy. Because sometimes, when you look at your skin and feel the cool breeze against your arm, you don't know what the answer would be.
She says you didn't hurt her. That you had enough control over yourself to pull away. To launch yourself in the opposite direction before that… thing tore its way out of your skin. Before it lashed out with all the hate and fear and disgust you'd felt that week. It was obscene. A sick, twisted mockery of everything you despised. About her. About yourself.
Most days, you believe her. Because to ask if she was lying to you about that would be too much. Too close to wondering if any of it had been fake. You're careful with who you trust, and with what. But there's only so much you can afford to question. And there are things you'd prefer not to know.
She didn't tell you what it looked like.
You didn't need to ask.
A/N:
I'd normally have a quippy line here or something. But I really don't. I asked Aleph to go hard on this chapter, and she responded with a grinch gif. So if you want to blame anyone, blame her. As if I wasn't just as sadistic while writing this. Hope you're all taking care of yourselves out there.
If you need a palette cleanser, here's something that's wholesome and nice. Want by IvyMarch is an extended one shot following Taylor and Bitch, as they find out what they are and aren't to one another. It's a refreshing exploration of the intersection of queerness and ace/aro pairings, in a fandom devoid of such. Highly recommended.
There are points in a person's life when the immediacy of a stimulus or the overwhelming nature of a sensation can completely bypass their ability to process the events of that moment. Be it from a combination of stress, hormonal reaction, or memory distortion, the person's thoughts are left fragmented. Disjointed. Broken.
These moments are rare, but because of their extreme nature they overwhelm our psychological defense mechanisms and leave us vulnerable and raw, stripped down to the animal under the veneer of civilization. The potent mix of chemicals that feed the fight or flight response – adrenaline, norepinephrine, cortisol – flood the body within seconds.
The immediate result is biological arousal. Elevated pulse, higher blood pressure. The lungs have to work harder to keep up, forcing breathing to speed up, and often get shallower. The body realizes the danger and quickly constricts blood vessels serving nonessential functions such as digestion. The skin pales as circulation increases in the muscle tissue, flushing them with oxygen in preparation for exertion. Pupils dilate to let in more light, just in case some small detail makes the difference in survival.
But comprehensive though they are, these clinical descriptions fail to capture how such moments grab your chest and refuse to let go. Your palms feel clammy and sweaty; if you clenched your fists the skin would stick to itself. Your calves and thighs tremble as chemical panic and misfiring nerves ruin fine motor control; muscles twitch and shudder with the impulse to run, jump, move, get away. Your vision narrows even as your pupils dilate; your focus tack sharp as the world around you falls away. Sometimes the tunnel vision is so literal as to genuinely blind you to everything that's not right in front of you, and hearing fares no better. Your head feels light, your face goes cold and numb, but you've never felt more alive, more present, than in that terrible, brilliant, all-consuming moment. A distant part of you notes that you need to pee, even as your heart flutters in your ear like a hummingbird and the parts of your brain that deal with reason and consequence and considered action shut down in the face of the amygdala's chokehold on the hypothalamus.
It all happens in the space of three heartbeats.
My skin split like a ripe peach with a sick, wet pop that reverberated all the way through to my jaw. A section of my back peeled away with the ripping sticky sensation of a bandaid, but the wound didn't stay at the surface. A growing pustule burst and overripe flesh spilled out and over itself. But it didn't hurt. I wished it hurt. I wished for the screaming of raw nerves, the agony of flayed muscle. For sharp, hot pain that would drown out anything else.
But I wasn't so lucky.
I felt everything.
I felt the sweat and slick wetness between the folds, the heat and the pressure it forced on the rest of the skin. It felt like a skin tag or a scab, but as it grew it started to droop, hanging off me like a limp tumor. It started under my left arm, trapped between my bicep and my ribs. But the bigger it got, the more it started to force my arm up and away from my body.
The sob welled its way up in my throat, clawing desperately at my trachea, but I couldn't even manage that much. The cry stuck to my uvula like cough syrup, tacky and bitter, and drowned in muted silence.
The awful twisting in my chest only worsened as my shoulder finally gave out. Stretching and cracking, the joint gave way and my shoulder twisted out and above me with the nauseating, painless sensation of muscle and gristle wrenching around in ways they were never meant to move. And where my arm had hung was that thing sprouting out of my ribs. I tried to push it down but that only brought my stomach up into my throat, like a seesaw bringing bile up as I tried to force my shoulder back. The new protrusion pressed against my side, my arm, my chest–
My eyes shut, but that didn't help. I could still feel the moist warmth of it plastered to my skin. That wasn't my body. There wasn't anything there. I wanted to tear it, pull it off, anything to make it go away. I spasmed, clawing at the air, and felt a burst of merciful pain as I bit through my lower lip.
What was happening? What was this? This wasn't my power, this wasn't my power, where was this coming from? I wasn't a Changer! This wasn't me it wasn't me it–
My thoughts stuttered. It wasn't me. It was my passenger. Forcefield. Whatever. So I could push it back. I focused and pushed my arm against my side as hard as I could, the sickening painless feeling of bone and ligaments and tendons grinding past each other making me gag. My breath came in short, fast, sour pants, and I could taste the vomit across my tongue. For a moment, I thought it was working.
Then the skin of my back started crawling.
Taylor first realized what had happened when I screamed. But by then it was far too late.
The symptoms of hyperarousal only cover the immediate response to a traumatic event. But they're critical for the understanding of the survivor's response afterwards. Psychologists started observing trauma responses in the 1990's, mostly as a reaction to domestic abuse cases starting to get traction in the feminist counterwave of the 1970's. But the true origins of the movement can be traced back as far as the 19th century, when Sigmund Freud used the works of Chaucer and others to form a cohesive narrative about the long term effects of trauma during childhood on adult behavior.
Naturally these theories were… crude at best. While Freud started his career with a genuine exploration of and contention with the abuse these women suffered, he later changed tack to completely deny the lived experience of these victims. He instead claimed that they were either lying about the particulars of their encounters, or secretly desired the abuse themselves. The damage this movement did on early psychology and victim advocacy is impossible to truly calculate.
It was only later – after several feminist pushes in the field, and existing studies on PTSD in WWII veterans – that the accounts of victims of childhood physical and sexual abuse began to be taken seriously again. These movements fought long and hard for what little gains they made, but the recognition came with it.
Part of the issue with these accounts is that the experience of trauma described earlier doesn't just stop at the event itself. It propagates outward, affecting your actions and experience long past that moment and ricocheting back to taint memories of the time before.
The body reacts in certain ways when it's threatened. The sympathetic nervous system's reactions, the concentration of attention and focus in the immediate moment, the heightened sense of fear or anger. All of these things prompt the person to more readily deal with a threat in front of them, so they might live and have time to process at some future point. Evolutionary adaptations to a dangerous world.
A traumatic response is different. It occurs when action no longer solves the problem. When a threat renders you so helpless, so trapped and cornered in a place of danger, that no action on your part could save you. When all you can do is suffer and hope the horror ends.
The problem born from such ordeals is that your body no longer has the ability to slow down. Your body's response doesn't decrease the threat or improve your situation, it only serves to make you more aware of it. This results in a positive feedback loop; the danger heightens your feelings of fear and anger, which triggers an elevated biological response, which highlights your inability to save yourself, which drives your emotions higher still.
At this point, pushed beyond their intended purpose, the basic functions of the body begin to break down. The so-called amygdala hijack occurs because the emotional brain processes information milliseconds faster than the rational brain. When it recognizes a threat, it acts before the neocortex can respond, and should its response worsen the perceived threat, it ends up racing far ahead of conscious thought. It shuts down the frontal lobe; the area of the cerebellum responsible for planning, self-control, memory formation, empathy and attention, leaving the brain unable to rationally adapt to its circumstances.
Each facet of the threat response, robbed of purpose, is distorted into an exaggerated, harmful form. And since the functions become decoupled from the associated action or response to the threat, they also tend to persist long after that threat has passed. In a sense, the threat never really goes away, even when its physical source does. To the body's stress response, it lingers, tattooed into the skin. For years or decades afterwards, it continues to provoke that same spiral of panicked defensive feedback whenever the hindbrain is reminded of its presence.
This is why it is so hard for you to remember the exact details of traumatic events as they've occurred, and why it is so difficult for experts to navigate these cases themselves. Memory formation is clouded or outright interrupted by the chemical turmoil that floods your hysterical brain, fraying rational thought and scrambling episodic recounting of events.
You might remember the physical progression of events, but not how you felt about them. You might perfectly remember the emotions that you went through that night, but not be able to match them with anything that actually happened to you. You might be able to picture everything from the stained and peeling wallpaper of the motel room to the flickering overhead light.
Or you might not remember anything but the smell of her greasy hair as she leaned over you.
The new flesh slumped as its own weight pulled it down, pressing skin flaps against fat rolls in smothering pleats. The cloying warmth was inescapable, like sweat on a hot summer day. It stuck out to me even through the horror of feeling the things protruding from my body, the shape of the malformed abomination I'd become.
It was hard to describe because there wasn't anything there. My forcefield had always been invisible, and that alone hadn't changed. So the only thing I could feel was the skin on skin on dirt. The folds and joints and creases of the body she'd left me with.
I couldn't speak. My wordsthoughtsbreath were lost between my lungs and the spiraling passageways to my mouths. My torso twisted outward and split apart like the branches on a misshapen tree. It was impossible to distinguish when one started and the next began. Long locks of hair sprouted from heads, from armpits, from pelvises, dragging over defined abdomens and exposed breasts. The slick drag of glass-like shield over glass-like shield felt slick and smooth on the sensitive surfaces; hair and skin alike.
The next thing was the hands. They grasped and clenched uselessly at the ends of my arms – 2, 4, 7, 13; I lost count. I could feel them, though. Pawing and twisting at the air like a newborn, reaching for their mother. Even as they moved, the misshapen joints and tendons inside ground against each other with a scraping sensation that made my stomach roll.
My legs were sprawled out beneath me, digging into the dirt in a vain attempt to hold up the bulging mass of my body. But the hips they were attached to were half formed, grafted onto ribs and femurs and vertebrae and sternums. They couldn't support me, even if I hadn't been so obscenely heavy. They scraped the fresh soil instead, digging into the mulch and tree roots in long divots.
My screams echoed through the trees until my throat was raw. I curled my arms in against myself as best I could. Tears and snot poured down my face. I couldn't see through my screwed-shut eyes. I couldn't hear over my own wails. But I could feel everything with awful, perfect clarity.
It was too much. I couldn't. Wouldn't. Deal with this. I just wanted it to go away. To have my body back. That was all I wanted, even if I needed to give up everything else. To have this one thing.
Please
I didn't care what it took
please
just make it stop–
There was a pop and a rush of displaced air.
And I was curled up on the forest floor again, blessedly, nakedly free.
The after effects of trauma linger in various ways, often more physical than most realize. You may have trouble eating or sleeping, to name a few of the more obvious cases. But if the trauma is severe enough, it can result in more long term prognoses. Autoimmune disorders, heart attacks, diabetes, strokes, and more are all possible. Trauma and stress take a severe toll on the body, especially when left unaddressed.
And likewise the psychological impacts, while profound, are often not immediately attributable to the trauma itself. A veteran may flinch at the sound of fireworks, or he may have flashbacks when stepping barefoot on the sand at the beach. You may be fine around people of the same gender as your assaulter, but suffer panic attacks whenever you see someone in a yellow t-shirt.
The human brain isn't good at associations. Or rather, it's too good, often in ways that are counterintuitive to purpose. Your body is designed, broadly speaking, to keep you out of danger. And because of this, trauma responses that keep you from danger but sometimes trigger when you're safe are valued more highly than those that never identify threats that aren't there but sometimes miss threats that are. Better to tolerate a false positive than risk a false negative; rather mistakenly warn twice than be wrong once when it actually matters.
But because of this mechanism, the triggers that result from trauma don't always have a strong association to the event itself. Your brain identifies a certain element or pattern within the event and latches onto it as a predictor of any potential reoccurrence. This could be something useful like the weapon they used or utterly innocuous like their height. It could be the key to saving your life, or a response you have to train yourself out of for decades.
You never really know until it hits you in the face.
"It's okay, it's okay."
I blinked.
Taylor was talking to me. Her arms were holding me close against her chest. The insects were quiet and still. The forest seemed to be holding its breath. It was only a moment later I realized that I was doing the same.
My skin crawled. The air prickled along my nerves; pins and needles raced up and down my arms. When I looked closer I realized the baby soft hairs on my forearms were standing straight up.
"Tori?"
I blinked, and looked up. Taylor was staring at me. She hadn't moved. A distant part of me was grateful for that. A wing brushed my palm. Meepy.
"Are… you okay?"
I swallowed. Was I okay? The floor around us seemed to tell the story well enough. Even now I could see the gouges and scars around us that thing had left behind.
A sob caught in my throat. It felt like a cruel joke. Like this whole experiment was made purely to hurt me. My own protection had been turned against me. Of course it had. How could I expect anything different? Why had I thought the changes to my power might be easier than the rest of my ruined life? Since when had powers ever done anything to help with trauma?
"Hey." Taylor's voice caught me. "It's okay. We can try something else. That's enough for today anyways. We can talk to Tattletale and–"
I squeezed my eyes shut, and shook my head violently as I pushed her away. No, I couldn't let myself do that. To retreat into security. To depend on her for this. Or anyone else. This was my power. My body. My past. Mine.
I took another step back, digging my nails into my palms, and took one last deep breath. I turned my forcefield back on with a scream.
It screamed back.
Realizing that memory can be so unreliable is often difficult for victims of trauma. Especially during the later stages of recovery. The world can seem uncertain or clouded, familiarity and comfort veiled behind shapeless forms and broken mirrors. Doubly so when every misstep could result in all of that pain rising back to the surface. The amygdala hijack is not constrained to the ordeal itself. With every flashback and every trigger, the sudden onset of an overly strong emotional reaction can trigger the limbic center of the brain to take over all over again, disrupting neocortex activity and any sense of the world as a rational, consistent place.
You'd known all of this before. You'd covered it in class, and again when you'd triggered. Trauma victims are difficult to work with, and every Hero needs to be ready to deal with at least one, if only for long enough to get them to the experts whose job it was to help those people.
But none of that knowledge helped when it happened to you. Every step into something new became a tightrope walk over the abyss. The slightest touch or tremor could take you from calm and controlled to the lowest you'd ever been.
After this long, you'd thought that you'd known that much. You had, if not boundaries then at least a mutual understanding with Taylor. That there were some things, situations, people she needed to warn you about. She respected that. Even when it was hard. You'd thought that was enough.
It wasn't.
I came back to myself in piecemeal fragments of awareness. The hard bark of the tree behind me, scraping against my bare arms. The soft dirt beneath my pants and the grit under my fingernails. Leaves and twigs and branches surrounded me, as if something had shaken them loose from the canopy.
As I looked around me, I realized that's exactly what had happened. There was a clear line of broken trees, torn dirt, and sundered soil in front of me. Where I'd come from.
My palms were bloody. I could feel the stinging, tacky pull of clotting blood as I flexed my hands, and it was such a relief in contrast to the smothering press of a body gone wrong that it took me a second to even register it as pain. I coughed, and I wasn't surprised to see red against the back of my hand. My throat felt like I'd been screaming for hours. Maybe I had.
I didn't know how long I sat like that before Taylor found me. Her footsteps were uncannily loud in the sucking silence of the forest, the only thing crunching on the leaves and twigs I'd left in my wake after all the local animals had fled. I couldn't quite bring myself to look at her.
"...Tori?"
I swallowed, the pain sharp against my windpipe, and hid behind my hair. Meepy found me, alighting gently on my right knee. I didn't have the heart to push her off.
Tentatively, I looked up at my partner through a gap in my bangs. Her eyes were… full of some blazing emotion. I wished I could tell which. Her mouth was open as if she didn't quite know what to say. But I already knew.
I'd broken my forcefield. And I couldn't fix it.
Taylor told you that the whole thing lasted about twenty eight minutes. Just barely less than half an hour. It's funny how little time it takes to change someone's life forever.
You never fully remember the details. She had to tell you in halting, careful terms, and repeat it half a dozen times over the next few days until you retained the information. What had happened to you. What you'd done. What you'd managed to tell her, between the sobbing and screaming. What you'd made her promise.
There are flashes. Moments when you think it's almost within reach. But the emotions always come first. The fear. The pain. The certainty that you were trapped, that you were alone in that room with her again and you couldn't speak, couldn't move, couldn't so much as blink without her permission. That it would be like this forever and you'd love it–
That's always enough to stop you from prying any deeper. No one could fault you, really. Taylor certainly didn't. She didn't ever ask, when you came back to yourself. How much you remembered. If you blamed her. It was a small mercy. Because sometimes, when you look at your skin and feel the cool breeze against your arm, you don't know what the answer would be.
She says you didn't hurt her. That you had enough control over yourself to pull away. To launch yourself in the opposite direction before that… thing tore its way out of your skin. Before it lashed out with all the hate and fear and disgust you'd felt that week. It was obscene. A sick, twisted mockery of everything you despised. About her. About yourself.
Most days, you believe her. Because to ask if she was lying to you about that would be too much. Too close to wondering if any of it had been fake. You're careful with who you trust, and with what. But there's only so much you can afford to question. And there are things you'd prefer not to know.
She didn't tell you what it looked like.
You didn't need to ask.
A/N:
I'd normally have a quippy line here or something. But I really don't. I asked Aleph to go hard on this chapter, and she responded with a grinch gif. So if you want to blame anyone, blame her. As if I wasn't just as sadistic while writing this. Hope you're all taking care of yourselves out there.
If you need a palette cleanser, here's something that's wholesome and nice. Want by IvyMarch is an extended one shot following Taylor and Bitch, as they find out what they are and aren't to one another. It's a refreshing exploration of the intersection of queerness and ace/aro pairings, in a fandom devoid of such. Highly recommended.
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