Vanilla #29 // Like Mother, Like Daughter (What's Wrong Here?)
Author: C
Rating: PG/PG13?
Wordcount: 1,000
Story / World: Cause AU, White
Challenges: Vanilla #29: my favorite thing(s) / fetish(es).
Toppings / Extras: Malt: Prompts From a Hat [#29: my favorite thing(s) / fetish(es) + Catherine, Belinda: without the mask where will you hide?]. Chopped Nuts, Butterscotch, & Whipped Cream.
Notes: Whoo, being raised by parents who want you to know that everyone's out to get you and burn you at the stake! ...yay...
She’s had to learn this since she was barely young enough to understand, told in a furious undertone whenever her father wasn’t around by a mother whose anger, she had to understand, wasn’t at her, but at the whole situation (she said, anyway, Helena said so, and what was a world worth where you couldn’t even trust what your mother said?). As her mother would say later, when she’d managed to impress on her as well as she thought appropriate how important it was that people never know, it can vary incredibly at what point one discovers the extent to which one can do things that other people can’t (cut your finger and you’re gone, she has to understand why that appeals to her daughter if she can do it too) and Belinda had just been unlucky enough to find out almost too young to be saved from herself.
That was a common refrain with her mother. Belinda had to be saved from herself, yes, but from everyone else as well - because when people find out what you can do they will hurt you. That was how Helena would put it (though at length), when they find out, they will hurt you, without the benefit of the doubt that if they find out they may hurt you would give.
Probably because in Helena’s worldview it was a benefit of false hope, but still - Belinda wouldn’t have minded false hope, anything that wouldn’t kill her and that wasn’t the nightmares of faceless mobs who’d seen her get something slightly wrong one day and vanish, not a nightly recitation of the fates that sooner or later all the Travellers in the stories suffered (because they weren’t human, they were worse, they deserved it) would have surely been better, at least in the short term, than what she dealt with.
Whenever she’d ask her mother why it had to be that way the main issue, there, would seem to be if Belinda had any suggestions as to how else it could be. In Helena’s world the fear was something you lived with; more than that, it was something you were used to, something hanging off your arms like bracelets and keeping you warm at night. Perhaps she hadn’t been like that when she was younger, but she’d spent long enough among so-called normal people that she’d learned fear better than most of them.
In contrast to that, in such contrast that it nearly blew Belinda’s mind, Derek was so incredibly loose with his abilities; certainly he tried to be discrete, but he didn’t make himself out to be completely normal around her (for example), even the day they met. It always amazed her, and perhaps it was her experiences with him that, first, led her to realize there might be other ways than what her mother had done.
(Of course, the fact that Derek’s side of the family had the rather heavy mandate of always guarding the so-called Gate and thus a wonderful excuse to remove themselves from the bulk of humanity for almost all their respective lives probably helped him be so open about it. She was still impressed.)
- - -
Neither Catherine nor Aaron were told much about what they could do, although one assumes that Aaron should have at least been pulled over at some point by his father (Belinda, while able to acknowledge if she had to that she was, indeed, a Traveller, couldn’t really talk about it even so) and told the very basics. Catherine was certainly never introduced to what she was capable of by anything gentler than being thrown down a hill and disappearing before she touched more than enough granite to give her a bloody palm, and Aaron would hold out knowledge in return for anything Catherine didn’t want to do or tell him (he had so much in advantage of her, he wasn’t picky).
Catherine knew things in terms of what she’d been able to weasel out of Aaron or discover for herself; things like that cutting a finger and touching her eyelids and lips and ears would let her understand any language that was spoken by human beings, and that she could orient herself by thought or by drawing patterns (she only knew the latter because she’d seen Aaron do it, she’d never quite gotten the hang of it herself), and how to not disappear off the face of her world because she scraped her knee or bit her lip and the blood was tugging at her that way. She knew things in terms of trial-and-error and a very gradual learning curve.
There were things she could know from books as well, though, and one sort of knowledge Aaron was never stingy about. Her mind was as chock-full of the fates Travellers had in the myths that were all that remained of what must have at some point been histories as her mother’s had been, and it didn’t help that Aaron was always doing his best to “help” her find out new ones.
Perhaps in Catherine’s case they hadn’t advanced as much as they hoped; maybe Belinda’s dreams that Catherine and Aaron would turn out well-balanced in that respect if left on their own was still too little. Aaron did better than her, logically speaking; after all, he was comfortable enough with the things he should and rightfully could have feared to use them to frighten his sister instead, the equivalent of the histories’ aforementioned transitions into myths that no one would take seriously.
(That no one would take seriously unless they were a walking, talking, breathing, and theoretically human example of the so-called “creatures” that the myths so hated. That no one would take very seriously unless they were Catherine, or Belinda before her, unable to sleep and staring up at the ceiling wishing this was a good enough reason to go disappearing in the hopes that nightmares didn’t travel from world to world like she did.)
Rating: PG/PG13?
Wordcount: 1,000
Story / World: Cause AU, White
Challenges: Vanilla #29: my favorite thing(s) / fetish(es).
Toppings / Extras: Malt: Prompts From a Hat [#29: my favorite thing(s) / fetish(es) + Catherine, Belinda: without the mask where will you hide?]. Chopped Nuts, Butterscotch, & Whipped Cream.
Notes: Whoo, being raised by parents who want you to know that everyone's out to get you and burn you at the stake! ...yay...
She’s had to learn this since she was barely young enough to understand, told in a furious undertone whenever her father wasn’t around by a mother whose anger, she had to understand, wasn’t at her, but at the whole situation (she said, anyway, Helena said so, and what was a world worth where you couldn’t even trust what your mother said?). As her mother would say later, when she’d managed to impress on her as well as she thought appropriate how important it was that people never know, it can vary incredibly at what point one discovers the extent to which one can do things that other people can’t (cut your finger and you’re gone, she has to understand why that appeals to her daughter if she can do it too) and Belinda had just been unlucky enough to find out almost too young to be saved from herself.
That was a common refrain with her mother. Belinda had to be saved from herself, yes, but from everyone else as well - because when people find out what you can do they will hurt you. That was how Helena would put it (though at length), when they find out, they will hurt you, without the benefit of the doubt that if they find out they may hurt you would give.
Probably because in Helena’s worldview it was a benefit of false hope, but still - Belinda wouldn’t have minded false hope, anything that wouldn’t kill her and that wasn’t the nightmares of faceless mobs who’d seen her get something slightly wrong one day and vanish, not a nightly recitation of the fates that sooner or later all the Travellers in the stories suffered (because they weren’t human, they were worse, they deserved it) would have surely been better, at least in the short term, than what she dealt with.
Whenever she’d ask her mother why it had to be that way the main issue, there, would seem to be if Belinda had any suggestions as to how else it could be. In Helena’s world the fear was something you lived with; more than that, it was something you were used to, something hanging off your arms like bracelets and keeping you warm at night. Perhaps she hadn’t been like that when she was younger, but she’d spent long enough among so-called normal people that she’d learned fear better than most of them.
In contrast to that, in such contrast that it nearly blew Belinda’s mind, Derek was so incredibly loose with his abilities; certainly he tried to be discrete, but he didn’t make himself out to be completely normal around her (for example), even the day they met. It always amazed her, and perhaps it was her experiences with him that, first, led her to realize there might be other ways than what her mother had done.
(Of course, the fact that Derek’s side of the family had the rather heavy mandate of always guarding the so-called Gate and thus a wonderful excuse to remove themselves from the bulk of humanity for almost all their respective lives probably helped him be so open about it. She was still impressed.)
- - -
Neither Catherine nor Aaron were told much about what they could do, although one assumes that Aaron should have at least been pulled over at some point by his father (Belinda, while able to acknowledge if she had to that she was, indeed, a Traveller, couldn’t really talk about it even so) and told the very basics. Catherine was certainly never introduced to what she was capable of by anything gentler than being thrown down a hill and disappearing before she touched more than enough granite to give her a bloody palm, and Aaron would hold out knowledge in return for anything Catherine didn’t want to do or tell him (he had so much in advantage of her, he wasn’t picky).
Catherine knew things in terms of what she’d been able to weasel out of Aaron or discover for herself; things like that cutting a finger and touching her eyelids and lips and ears would let her understand any language that was spoken by human beings, and that she could orient herself by thought or by drawing patterns (she only knew the latter because she’d seen Aaron do it, she’d never quite gotten the hang of it herself), and how to not disappear off the face of her world because she scraped her knee or bit her lip and the blood was tugging at her that way. She knew things in terms of trial-and-error and a very gradual learning curve.
There were things she could know from books as well, though, and one sort of knowledge Aaron was never stingy about. Her mind was as chock-full of the fates Travellers had in the myths that were all that remained of what must have at some point been histories as her mother’s had been, and it didn’t help that Aaron was always doing his best to “help” her find out new ones.
Perhaps in Catherine’s case they hadn’t advanced as much as they hoped; maybe Belinda’s dreams that Catherine and Aaron would turn out well-balanced in that respect if left on their own was still too little. Aaron did better than her, logically speaking; after all, he was comfortable enough with the things he should and rightfully could have feared to use them to frighten his sister instead, the equivalent of the histories’ aforementioned transitions into myths that no one would take seriously.
(That no one would take seriously unless they were a walking, talking, breathing, and theoretically human example of the so-called “creatures” that the myths so hated. That no one would take very seriously unless they were Catherine, or Belinda before her, unable to sleep and staring up at the ceiling wishing this was a good enough reason to go disappearing in the hopes that nightmares didn’t travel from world to world like she did.)