My heart's crippled by the vein I keep on closing

[ryuu_no_hime]

A few days (possibly a couple weeks) back,
magistrate and I were talking about Jack's and Mio's issues with love, namely that they both associated it with torture. Mio was strangely okay about the concept if it was someone like Jack, and I couldn't quite figure out why.

It wasn't until I was having a conversation with
whatawaytoburn a couple days ago that I was finally able to fully articulate her reasoning.

First off, Jack's issues (extremely loosely paraphrased from my conversation with magi):

1. Jack falls in love with a lot of people. However, thanks to Time Agency training, Jack has a severe aversion to actually telling anyone he loves them.
2. Also thanks to the Time Agency, Jack views love as an effective method of torture.
3. Due to a lot of factor (plus, as usual, the Time Agency), Jack has about thirty-five brazillion metric fucktons of issues with psychics.

Okay, now for Mio's issues.

1. Thanks to the fact that everyone in her family was a nutcase, Mio grew up with the expectation that all interpersonal relationships would inevitably end up with one party betraying the other. Therefore, she believes she shouldn't ever place full trust in anyone, especially not emotional trust. She did get somewhat more trusting during her time in the Nexus, but just about everyone in the Nexus was about as socially maladjusted as she was, so the few close friendships she formed tended to be the exception rather than the rule.
2. The first thing Mio ever felt empathically was the experience of her college roommate getting date-raped. That only served to reinforce her negative attitudes about people in general and introduced a whole set of negative preconceptions about romantic relationships in particular.
3. Mio discovers that breaking people's brains is an addicting power trip. Combined with her anger at what happened to Keiko, she spends the next 8 years (ish) breaking the minds of sexual abusers, giving herself a good few shitloads of vicarious trauma in the process that she refuses to acknowledge. She starts viewing abuse in 'romantic'/sexual relationships as, while not acceptable, only to be expected, and views sex as essentially a struggle for power and dominance. In other words, allowing yourself to fall in love with someone will only enable them to control you and abuse you.
4. (In reference to Jack's issue #3) Mio is an extremely powerful psychic.

Considering all that, then why is Mio so okay with the concept of a (potentially romantic) relationship with Jack?

1. Sheer chemistry. Even while she's desperately trying to push him away so she doesn't have to think about or admit her growing feelings for him, she can't help but engage in snarky banter with him.
2. Desire for acceptance from authority figures in her life. She might not show it very much with her actions, but Mio actually has a lot of respect for Jack as the leader of Torchwood. Any kind of love from Jack--even twisted love--is a sign of the acceptance that she craves.
3. Mutual brokenness. She doesn't feel like she has to pretend to be whole or normal with him, or try to spend all of her energy trying to hide her sharp edges in her interactions with him. The sharpness is part of who she is, and she's always been most comfortable with people who understand that through personal experience.
4. Previous level of trust in other areas.
5. Understanding of where Jack's feelings come from. More than almost anyone else in the game, Mio understands abuse from the standpoints of both the abuser and the abused, and torture from the perspectives of the torturer and the victim. The main reason Mio didn't go out and weaponize love, relationships, and sex in her own life after what she's seen/experienced is because she has other methods available to her that are easier and more reliable to get what she wants from people.

What I realized this morning is that Mio would essentially view a relationship with Jack as a form of kink. While it's true that Mio views love as a potential form of torture, in some ways she also has a psychological need to be tortured. Part of the reason she insisted on continuing to work with rape survivors over the years, above and beyond using them as a method to find information on potential targets, is that she felt a need to punish herself for what she was doing. She needed to hurt herself as much as she hurt other people.

By structuring a relationship with Jack in the framework of kink, it would be possible for her to still fulfill her need for torture, but in a safe(r) manner. Mio trusts Jack enough that he would not let torture slip into abuse. She trusts his skill as a torturer enough that he'd know when it was getting to be too much for her and stop, and she trusts him as her chosen leader to listen to her when she tells him that she can't handle any more. And, by the same token, she also trusts him to understand why she needs this. A relationship between them can never be safe or sane, but they can at least work together to manage the risks. (RACK rather than SSC, basically.)

Honestly, the thing that bothers Mio the most? Jack's dislike of psychics. She can completely understand why, of course, but it's painful that he hates and fears something that is an integral, inseparable part of of her. Sure, she can shield, and she does, most of the time, to keep herself from being distracted and overwhelmed by background chatter, but trying to keep herself shielded from him all the time and never touch his mind feels a lot like trying to work with one hand tied behind her back. Sure, she can still do things, but it's frustrating because she feels like she's deliberately reducing her effectiveness, and it hurts because she feels like she has to censor an important part of her life from him. But at the same time, she doesn't want to force it onto him either (except in her batshit psycho moments). That, more than the prospect of torture, I think would prevent Mio from getting into a relationship with him. This entry was originally posted on Dreamwidth. (
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