006 ♕ Video (Memory Theater)

[lefthandedgenius]

[Lydia's leaked memory is four and a half minutes long, and it's hard to tell if it's real, or if it's a hallucination.]

[Regardless, now everyone has an idea of exactly what Peter Hale had been doing to her.]

[ooc: The first 4:30 minutes/seconds of the episode linked above. Warning: assault and horror triggers. Please ignore the "previously on TW" bits!]

Comments

[velveteenwolf]

...Lydia?

[She's frowning, but more than that, Peter looks uncomfortable, concerned, this sort of queasy feeling where she just wants to stop all the pain.]

Are you okay?

[lefthandedgenius]

[Lydia looks like she can't decide if she wants to burst into tears and become furious.]


I'm...I'm okay. I can't get this off the network.

can this weekend get more exciting? :(

[saturniapavonia]

Who the fuck is that?

[lefthandedgenius]

[Her lips thin, pressing together tightly in that way she has when she's frustrated. Right now she's riding the line between between upset and anger, and of all things, shame.]

Peter Hale.

[saturniapavonia]

[Which sort of actually rings a bell.]

Is he dead?

[Wait strike that.]

Really dead?

/private

[lefthandedgenius]

[She's silent for a long, long time.]








Not anymore.

/private

[saturniapavonia]

[Fuck! Fuck that in a big, big way.]

Hey. Listen. You got friends here. Me and Peter too. If he shows his face he's as good as dead.

[lefthandedgenius]

It's my fault that he came back. Everything that you saw. That was him making me bring him back.

He's really dangerous. If he shows his face I would just want you to stay away from him. I'd be really upset if you or Peter got hurt.

[She wants to tell Roman that Peter Hale is a werewolf, but that would open the floodgate for a whole lot of questions about the rest of her friends that she promised she wouldn't allow.]

[velveteenwolf]

I'm no good with this stuff, I couldn't even figure out Roman's iPhone.

[Back home, that is. She frowns, looking a little bit lost as she tries to figure out what to say, what to do. Being a girl doesn't actually make her any better at this.]

I won't ask. But if you ever wanna talk about... shit, about anything, you can talk to me.

[It's an offer she's a little bit awkward about. It's an offer drenched in his usual caveat against people's feelings, their expectations, and it was enough to make you drown. But Lydia was different. And fuck, but she put up with his.]

[lefthandedgenius]

Thanks. I thought, you know, I've kind of had to move on from this. But seeing it all and everybody else seeing it...

[She's in a bizarre emotional spin of anger and sadness and guilt and shame, and for the usually highly articulate Lydia she is having a great deal of trouble trying to quantify it. Outing herself was not a problem; this is has left her feeling exposed and vulnerable.]

[saturniapavonia]

You're kidding me, right? That looks like he manipulated you. How the hell can that be your fault?

It's okay. Really. I can take care of myself. Peter too. We got this.

[Or they should. They're self styled warriors, werewolf hunters and shit.]

[lefthandedgenius]

I could have told someone. I could have made someone believe me. He made me do things that hurt a lot of people. That hurt my friends.

I know you both can take care of yourself. The really horrible part of this for me, though? Is that in the end, he may be the only person who can explain this whole banshee thing to me.

[saturniapavonia]

Lydia, you're not Jesus Christ.

Might be, sure. That doesn't mean that he is. That's what he wants you to think.

[lefthandedgenius]

I don't recall ever saying I was.

For one thing, I'm not Jewish. Or a carpenter.

[See, a little humor there. She'll be okay.]

I think he may have known exactly what would happen when he - when he did what he did to me.

private voice

[affectioning]

[ he doesn't mean to watch it. but it involves lydia. when he speaks up, he doesn't quite know what to say. ]

I didn't know he'd threatened you before your party. [ He never asked. But, he also didn't know the extent of what Peter Hale did. ]

[lefthandedgenius]

He'd been messing with my head since way before that. It wasn't something I wanted anyone to see.

[She finds it oddly easier to keep what she's feeling out of her voice over a call. Or maybe because it's Scott.]

video // private

[candothat]

[He never means to watch memories that find their ways to the network, and he really intended to look away, but.]

Lydia, what is this? Who is that?

[lefthandedgenius]

[She's going to get this question a lot. She's had a little time to brace herself for it, now.]

I can't quite call it a dream, but it's not a hallucination. It's...a projection, I guess you could call it.

[Every time. Every time someone asks, she feels ashamed and angry and like she wants to curl up into a ball. But she's not going to. She's not going to let that bastard win.]

His name is Peter. He used me to bring him back to life. And he made me hurt people I care about.

[candothat]

[The psychologists at Starfleet always say that the best way to recover from traumatic events is to talk about them, preferably with people who do not have shared experiences. Pavel happens to think that those psychologists are full of crap and tries to reign in his curiosity to avoid making Lydia more uncomfortable. There's really only one question that needs to be asked, anyway.]

And then was he killed for this?

[lefthandedgenius]

[She shake her head.]
No, he's still alive.

[candothat]

But not in the City?

[lefthandedgenius]

[Relieved.]

No. He's not in the City.

[Which isn't to say he might not show up someday.

He's the one who made me a banshee. And probably the only person who can actually answer my questions about what that means. [And that makes her kind of sick.]

[candothat]

Good, although you would have help if he was.

[He doesn't know what else to say. "Sorry" seems inadequate, however sincere it might be.]

Is this something you would like to not discuss?

[lefthandedgenius]

I'm not sure what about it there is to discuss. It happened, right? I thought I'd gotten past it, but seeing it all with that amount of clarity was almost like living it all over again. Square one.

[candothat]

That is difficult--recovering from something, only to have it come back. Would anything distract you? We could talk about the possibility of detecting intermittent cyclical vortexes and the potential to stabilize one--theoretically--with a matter-antimatter device, or theoretical inter-universal navigation.