Emma, Amanda - backdated to June 29
Jun. 29th, 2008 10:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xp_daytripper posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
xp_logsUpon Amanda's return from France and before Emma goes to India, they have one of their regular psychic therapy sessions. Emma decides to take decisive action to help the witch function.
She hated this part. She really did. The whole 'letting someone rummage around inside your head' thing made her twitchy these days, but when your brain was a mess, Amanda knew it was necessary to work on cleaning it up. The patches of memory loss weren't so bad, but the flashbacks when those memories returned were getting frustrating - and dangerous. Who knew what would happen if she got one in the field? She'd been lucky in Indonesia, but she hadn't wanted to risk what might happen if she'd run into Amora and Beaumont-les-Bains had been a stopgap measure. If she wanted to sort herself out properly, she had to keep up with the psychic therapy as much as the more mundane version from Sofia. Yay for being sensible.
With a sigh, knowing she was procrastinating, Amanda tapped on Emma's office door, wishing she'd had time for a smoke before reporting in.
"Come in," said Emma, sitting back from a range of reports with a sigh. "And I'm glad you didn't have time." She wrinkled her nose, an incongruous look on such porcelain-perfect features. "The smell tends to linger." She looked at the small blonde and obviously uncomfortable witch for a long moment and then gestured at the chair opposite her. "I was going to suggest going somewhere more comfortable to start this, but there's no such place, is there?"
"Not really, no," Amanda agreed, taking a seat with the same degree of reluctance as someone sitting in a dentist's chair. "'S not that I don't appreciate it, mind, just..." When you'd been one half of a psychic link and had psionic as well as physical damage from removing it, you tended to like keeping your brain to yourself.
"Some of us don't have any choice," replied Emma. She elaborated as Amanda looked puzzled. "At keeping our brains to ourselves." She settled back in her chair slightly. "I don't rummage," she said. "Or fondle. Or scramble. I can hear what you think - in fact, I can hear what everyone in this building is thinking right now - but that's not the same as accessing memories. Memories use different pathways to conscious thought and that means that I have to use my telepathy to go inwards instead of having everyone shout their thoughts out at me. So yes, I will be going into your mind to try and assist you and I will work on your neural pathways to mend the damage Bedlam did to you. But, if it's any reassurance to you, I'm very, very good at what I do. If it didn't make me sound like a certain short, hairy berserker of our mutual acquaintance, I might even say that I'm the best there is."
Amanda had the grace to blush slightly. "'S nothing personal," she said. "Just a bit twitchy after all the stuff with Manuel and Selene. Which you already know about since you were there for it. The end part, any way." She took a breath, settling into the chair. "And since memories are the problem here, 's just as well you're good at this sort of thing. Ready when you are."
"Twitchy is perfectly acceptable," said Emma. "Particularly after psionic links. And the mess we're still cleaning up in there. But I've got enough of the damage under control now and shored up enough places that we should be able to start work on the memory issues themselves." There were so many ways to deal with minds and the messes inside them, Emma had discovered, but most of them weren't suitable with what she was attempting to do with Amanda. So there was no brute force, no forced repairs, no structures or failsafes that she could trigger to wipe or re-mould. Each step involved gaining Amanda's permission and doing the work in the quietest and least disruptive manner possible. She wanted to keep the witch working in Snow Valley and that meant letting Amanda take control of the process. It had taken this long just to shore up some of the more fragile sections of her mind and repair enough of the damage to allow Amanda to stay conscious and in control as she began to work on the memories. "What I'm going to do is start using some trigger words to access some of the memories that are causing you difficulties. Did you bring your list? The memories that have been causing you the most problems?"
Nodding, Amanda leaned forward and pulled the piece of paper out of the back pocket of her jeans, unfolding it before she handed it to the older woman. "A lot of it is names," she remarked. "Which is why I think I use the fairy tale versions even now sometimes - saying the name brings back the memory and sometimes my brain doesn't seem to think it's ready for it."
Emma scanned down the list and nodded slowly. "I'm not that surprised at your brain using self-defence mechanisms," she said. "You seem to have cornered the market on magic-related mutant teenage traumas. With just a touch of slavery thrown in for fun." She looked up at Amanda. "I think we should start on the gentlest of these. I need a template for what your mind is going to do when you go into these flashbacks. I'd prefer to do it without some of the more spectacularly bad memories coming along for the ride. Ruins my concentration," she said dryly.
Amanda snorted a brief laugh despite herself. "Believe me, I'm happy with starting slow. I've got glimpses of some of what's in there and that's been enough for me." There was the briefest flash even as she mentioned it - Manuel on his knees in front of her, blood pouring from his nose - and she grimaced. "Yeah, the sooner we get this sorted, the better. I can't work like this."
"Just a moment," said Emma and, closing her eyes, twisted her powers slightly, slipping into the centre of Amanda's mind-scape; the strange place she visited that was partly Amanda's internal view of her own mind, partly Astral Plane and partly the physical structure of Amanda's brain. She checked the structures she had built in some of the more damaged sections and confirmed they were holding and then opened her eyes to see Amanda looking at her through a transparent overlay of mindscape. Emma's voice seem disembodied to her, coming from a long way away as she said, "Bethany."
The witch sucked in a breath, hands clutching the arms of the chair. Almost immediately, her mindscape shifted, revealing the lakeside dock at the mansion. Two girls, both dark-haired, stood there, arms around each other. The slightly taller of the two spoke, voice tight:
"Guess it's just my lack of trust for assholes. Too many bad experiences." She paused a moment, before adding something more muffled by the witch's shoulder. "I'd like t'think I do all that without bein' a bastard on top of it, but hey. He's first in line. My fault for sleepin' at the bat."
It came at Emma like a hammer-blow. Not because the memory itself was particularly bad but because it was not recalled consciously and it was overwhelming in its intensity. Less a memory than an immersion in the time and place that were conjured up by the word. It was rendering Amanda helpless, caught in the grip of the past to such an extent that the present had faded entirely from her consciousness. Emma drew in a deep breath as she strengthened certain shields, altered aspects of the way she was looking into Amanda's mindscape. Then, as the dock began to fade from the centre of Amanda's mindscape, she repeated the word. "Bethany."
As Emma shored up her shielding, created the barrier between memory and reality, Amanda's breathing eased a little. But as the name was spoken again, there came another shift, and with this one a searing pain along her left side. Medlab, after the Repodemon, awakening to find Bethany watching over her. As the scene unfolded, the pain was joined by another, a tightness in her chest, a gnawing fear and loss.
"But…" Bethany was on her feet, already toeing off her sneakers - the protest was token, at best. She eased herself into the bed next to Amanda, wrapping her arms gently around her, careful to avoid the stitched and bandaged gashes in the witch's side. "Are you… you feeling okay?"
"Been better," Amanda admitted, resting her head on Bethany's shoulder with a sigh. "But I'll be all right. You?"
"Fine." It came out a little too quickly, a little too forced. Bethany rested her cheek against Amanda's forehead and closed her eyes. "So, that was a demon."
"It was." Amanda felt the sudden tension in the other girl's body, wished she could make it go away. "Welcome to my world, Beth."
"It's scary, your world," Bethany said quietly.
"Too scary?" Amanda said it calmly, but a sudden fear gripped her.
"I… I don't know, babe." She remembered the dock, Amanda telling her she could always tell her the truth. "It's too soon."
It came at Emma again, hammer-blow, slightly softened this time by the changes she'd made to her shields, but joined by a searing pain that gripped Amanda, a memory of agony that sang in her thoughts and into Emma. And there it was; a fading red streak across Amanda's synapses as memory burned its way across her mind. Emma traced the red streak back as far as she could along the physical path that took it out of long-term memory and placed it into Amanda's consciousness in sudden and vivid experience. But the memory began to fade at the same time as the red streak. Frustrated, Emma was prevented from following the memory back to its roots as it loosened its grip on Amanda. With a silent curse, she moved her shields again, cut off some of the more sensitive pain receptors, opened a small hole in the shoring she'd placed around Amanda's long-term memories to try and stop them crippling her. Hopefully she would reduce any associated pain, but whatever else was associated with Bethany was going to dam up behind that hole and burst through even more vividly than the last. Emma hoped that Amanda would forgive her, but the damming would give her more time to trace that memory back to its source. Holding Amanda's mind carefully in her psychic hands, Emma said again, "Bethany."
The memory this time was Amanda alone, sitting at her computer and reading the series of emails that told her Bethany was leaving, going to Atlanta. Betrayal, guilt, loss... they were all there, and the emotions brought echoes of other memories, a boy lying in a pool of blood with his throat cut, a man whose stony grey eyes told her she was no longer family, Manuel on his knees before her as she tore out the link... Images began overlapping, oozing through Emma's shielding, threatening to overwhelm them both, and of its own accord, Amanda's hand jerked and moved to her pocket, searching for something to draw with.
#No.# Emma aimed her psychic command at Amanda's hand, cutting off the need for Amanda to draw. It was a distraction from memory and Emma needed the strength of these memories to trace back to the damage. Memories battered at her, beyond Bethany and into the more dangerous items on the list. Interconnected memories meant interconnected damage and she had to find out what was disabling Amanda. Because it was disabling; the intelligent and fiesty young witch she had known was being reduced to a mewling child before her eyes. For a brief moment, Emma slipped out of Amanda's head, turned inward on herself, cutting off emotional responses, pain responses. The maelstrom behind the wall was waiting for her and she needed to approach it coolly, without compassion.
Clinically, Emma drove back into Amanda's mind, drilled through the small hole she'd made in the shoring around Amanda's long-term memory and fell into hell.
The knife bit into her flesh and Charlie bled, eyes blaming her for not being there as Amora whispered in her ear that she had found her daughter again and Rack, his flesh blackened and hanging from his skull reached for her, rasping that she was his, bought and paid for... Remy lay twisted and broken under her hands and she pulled the energy from the cultists she needed to save him, only it was Bethany and Moira and Angelo and Rachel and Nathan who fell dead around her as the spell drained their lives... Alphonso laughed as she was beaten and Manuel shattered into a million pieces as Selene smiled and gestured for her Black Knight to join her while Chandra stood behind and told her it was all right to scream...
Emma flinched backwards for a moment from the flood of impressions that howled past her, battering at Amanda's shields and trying to escape. This wasn't damage caused by London; this was older, deeper traumas all connecting and bleeding into each other and Amanda's conscious mind, whenever one was re-awakened. It was no wonder the girl almost went catatonic every time she was reminded of some part of her traumatic past; she wasn't recollecting some distant past, she was being flooded with every trauma all at once. Almost certainly the impulse to draw came from trying to compartmentalise the memories, impose order on chaos by separating them out into discrete memories that Amanda's mind had the capacity to handle.
Emma frowned as she let the howling traumas slip past her shields, fruitlessly gibbering at her. There was something more than trauma underlying this; it was as if the experience with London had torn open some old scar in Amanda's mind and that wound was poisoning old memories even further. Or using them as defence perhaps? This was not the time to attempt to resolve whatever lay under this assault of memories; what was needed was simply to make Amanda functional again and as close to sane as any of them could call themselves.
Emma checked behind herself, keeping the small hole in the shields open to ensure that she could access Amanda's conscious mind if she needed to, then recalled the list of words that drove Amanda's traumas. The worst was obvious, the one that would render Amanda's special skills unusable by Snow Valley.
Emma spoke a single word into the howling chaos outside her shields.
"Demon."
Amanda's mind shuddered violently, catapulting Emma into a scene from Amanda's oldest nightmares - Rack standing over her with the knife, blood running from the runes carved into her flesh and the earth opening up to reveal the demon summoned as part of the pact. There was a moment of overlap as the images shifted briefly to the Halloween party and the same demon rising to claim her, and Candra's ritual in Louisiana, the same spell carved into her back. The wail of the child was melded with the scream of the adult, Candra merging with Rack, the demon reaching to take her, strip away her humanity, make her a monster like the man who had raised her...
Emma reached out with her power, hauling memories towards her, seeking to disentangle the knotted strands that led back to their origin, disconnect those that related to the demon to those that led elsewhere. She picked at red strands fo memory, trying to sort weft from warp as they slipped through her fingers, heading towards the hole in the shields that led to Amanda's conscious mind. There was something in her unconscious driving this, something London had woken or torn or broken and the witch's unconscious was seeking to flail/punish/destroy her with her own memories. Emma struggled to hold onto them, to stop them escaping and overwhelming the witch again, but whatever drove them onwards was determined and Emma knew she was going to lose this fight.
Emma cursed and, reaching out with her power, closed the hole in Amanda's shields, cutting the memories off from Amanda's conscious mind completely. Deprived of a target the memories turned inwards, reaching out at Emma, trying to batten through her shields, pinpricks of old pain and terror needling into her mind.
"Enough," said Emma, sternly. She reached out a psychic hand and grasped the red threads of memory, gathering them to her with both hands, her grip elongating and broadening to encompass all of the threatening memories, drawing them into a twisted skein in her psychic hands, tightening them until she could grasp them in one fist. "Enough," she said and a pair of scissors appeared in her other hand. Emma's power sheared through the red threads of the memory, cutting them short, the tethered ends snapping back into the darkness of Amanda's long-term memory.
Emma pressed the tangled skein of Amanda's memories to her chest, drew them into the depths of her astral body, keeping them safe for the girl. One memory caught her attention for a moment, Amanda and her sister, Adrienne telling of how she had read the brownstone. Emma smiled mirthlessly, stored that bit of information away for later analysis. She re-created the hole in Amanda's shields, stepped through it and closed it behind her. With deft touches she made small adjustments to Amanda's emotions, cutting off curiosity, reducing Amanda's capacity to be distressed by the sudden gap in her memories. Then she closed her psychic eyes and snapped her perceptions back to her physical body.
Amanda sat before her, looking suddenly - bereft, thought Emma. "That was - messy," said Emma with a certain wry understatement. "You will be functional, at least. But I've closed off your access to those particularly traumatic long-term memories for now. There will be gaps in what you remember but I've made some adjustments to your emotional state that should stop this from causing too many problems. I'll need to restore the memories over time, once I've untangled them. Made them singular. Bearable." She reached out with her power for a moment, slipped back into Amanda's mind, showed her the tangled skein of memories she held within her hands. Back at her desk, she said, "They'll be safe with me."
Brushing her hand across her eyes, Amanda tried to focus. She felt both heavy and light, exhausted by the long session but somehow her mind felt... calm. Still. Aware Emma was still watching her, she nodded, not sure of her voice yet. "T-thanks," she managed, her voice sounding rusty. She tilted her head, feeling almost like she was floating. "I s'pose it's going to take a few sessions with you and Sof to get it all untangled?"
"Oh, quite a few, I would suspect," replied Emma. "But we've done enough for today. I would suggest sleep." It wasn't really a suggestion; with a deft touch of her mind, Emma made sure the young witch would head straight to bed and sleep heavily for a few hours; enough to shake off the worst of the psychic residue. "I need some time to untangle the worst of what I've pulled out of your head. At least a week."
"Just a week?" Amanda joked weakly, smothering a yawn as she got up to leave. "You'll be giving my issues an inferiority complex."
She hated this part. She really did. The whole 'letting someone rummage around inside your head' thing made her twitchy these days, but when your brain was a mess, Amanda knew it was necessary to work on cleaning it up. The patches of memory loss weren't so bad, but the flashbacks when those memories returned were getting frustrating - and dangerous. Who knew what would happen if she got one in the field? She'd been lucky in Indonesia, but she hadn't wanted to risk what might happen if she'd run into Amora and Beaumont-les-Bains had been a stopgap measure. If she wanted to sort herself out properly, she had to keep up with the psychic therapy as much as the more mundane version from Sofia. Yay for being sensible.
With a sigh, knowing she was procrastinating, Amanda tapped on Emma's office door, wishing she'd had time for a smoke before reporting in.
"Come in," said Emma, sitting back from a range of reports with a sigh. "And I'm glad you didn't have time." She wrinkled her nose, an incongruous look on such porcelain-perfect features. "The smell tends to linger." She looked at the small blonde and obviously uncomfortable witch for a long moment and then gestured at the chair opposite her. "I was going to suggest going somewhere more comfortable to start this, but there's no such place, is there?"
"Not really, no," Amanda agreed, taking a seat with the same degree of reluctance as someone sitting in a dentist's chair. "'S not that I don't appreciate it, mind, just..." When you'd been one half of a psychic link and had psionic as well as physical damage from removing it, you tended to like keeping your brain to yourself.
"Some of us don't have any choice," replied Emma. She elaborated as Amanda looked puzzled. "At keeping our brains to ourselves." She settled back in her chair slightly. "I don't rummage," she said. "Or fondle. Or scramble. I can hear what you think - in fact, I can hear what everyone in this building is thinking right now - but that's not the same as accessing memories. Memories use different pathways to conscious thought and that means that I have to use my telepathy to go inwards instead of having everyone shout their thoughts out at me. So yes, I will be going into your mind to try and assist you and I will work on your neural pathways to mend the damage Bedlam did to you. But, if it's any reassurance to you, I'm very, very good at what I do. If it didn't make me sound like a certain short, hairy berserker of our mutual acquaintance, I might even say that I'm the best there is."
Amanda had the grace to blush slightly. "'S nothing personal," she said. "Just a bit twitchy after all the stuff with Manuel and Selene. Which you already know about since you were there for it. The end part, any way." She took a breath, settling into the chair. "And since memories are the problem here, 's just as well you're good at this sort of thing. Ready when you are."
"Twitchy is perfectly acceptable," said Emma. "Particularly after psionic links. And the mess we're still cleaning up in there. But I've got enough of the damage under control now and shored up enough places that we should be able to start work on the memory issues themselves." There were so many ways to deal with minds and the messes inside them, Emma had discovered, but most of them weren't suitable with what she was attempting to do with Amanda. So there was no brute force, no forced repairs, no structures or failsafes that she could trigger to wipe or re-mould. Each step involved gaining Amanda's permission and doing the work in the quietest and least disruptive manner possible. She wanted to keep the witch working in Snow Valley and that meant letting Amanda take control of the process. It had taken this long just to shore up some of the more fragile sections of her mind and repair enough of the damage to allow Amanda to stay conscious and in control as she began to work on the memories. "What I'm going to do is start using some trigger words to access some of the memories that are causing you difficulties. Did you bring your list? The memories that have been causing you the most problems?"
Nodding, Amanda leaned forward and pulled the piece of paper out of the back pocket of her jeans, unfolding it before she handed it to the older woman. "A lot of it is names," she remarked. "Which is why I think I use the fairy tale versions even now sometimes - saying the name brings back the memory and sometimes my brain doesn't seem to think it's ready for it."
Emma scanned down the list and nodded slowly. "I'm not that surprised at your brain using self-defence mechanisms," she said. "You seem to have cornered the market on magic-related mutant teenage traumas. With just a touch of slavery thrown in for fun." She looked up at Amanda. "I think we should start on the gentlest of these. I need a template for what your mind is going to do when you go into these flashbacks. I'd prefer to do it without some of the more spectacularly bad memories coming along for the ride. Ruins my concentration," she said dryly.
Amanda snorted a brief laugh despite herself. "Believe me, I'm happy with starting slow. I've got glimpses of some of what's in there and that's been enough for me." There was the briefest flash even as she mentioned it - Manuel on his knees in front of her, blood pouring from his nose - and she grimaced. "Yeah, the sooner we get this sorted, the better. I can't work like this."
"Just a moment," said Emma and, closing her eyes, twisted her powers slightly, slipping into the centre of Amanda's mind-scape; the strange place she visited that was partly Amanda's internal view of her own mind, partly Astral Plane and partly the physical structure of Amanda's brain. She checked the structures she had built in some of the more damaged sections and confirmed they were holding and then opened her eyes to see Amanda looking at her through a transparent overlay of mindscape. Emma's voice seem disembodied to her, coming from a long way away as she said, "Bethany."
The witch sucked in a breath, hands clutching the arms of the chair. Almost immediately, her mindscape shifted, revealing the lakeside dock at the mansion. Two girls, both dark-haired, stood there, arms around each other. The slightly taller of the two spoke, voice tight:
"Guess it's just my lack of trust for assholes. Too many bad experiences." She paused a moment, before adding something more muffled by the witch's shoulder. "I'd like t'think I do all that without bein' a bastard on top of it, but hey. He's first in line. My fault for sleepin' at the bat."
It came at Emma like a hammer-blow. Not because the memory itself was particularly bad but because it was not recalled consciously and it was overwhelming in its intensity. Less a memory than an immersion in the time and place that were conjured up by the word. It was rendering Amanda helpless, caught in the grip of the past to such an extent that the present had faded entirely from her consciousness. Emma drew in a deep breath as she strengthened certain shields, altered aspects of the way she was looking into Amanda's mindscape. Then, as the dock began to fade from the centre of Amanda's mindscape, she repeated the word. "Bethany."
As Emma shored up her shielding, created the barrier between memory and reality, Amanda's breathing eased a little. But as the name was spoken again, there came another shift, and with this one a searing pain along her left side. Medlab, after the Repodemon, awakening to find Bethany watching over her. As the scene unfolded, the pain was joined by another, a tightness in her chest, a gnawing fear and loss.
"But…" Bethany was on her feet, already toeing off her sneakers - the protest was token, at best. She eased herself into the bed next to Amanda, wrapping her arms gently around her, careful to avoid the stitched and bandaged gashes in the witch's side. "Are you… you feeling okay?"
"Been better," Amanda admitted, resting her head on Bethany's shoulder with a sigh. "But I'll be all right. You?"
"Fine." It came out a little too quickly, a little too forced. Bethany rested her cheek against Amanda's forehead and closed her eyes. "So, that was a demon."
"It was." Amanda felt the sudden tension in the other girl's body, wished she could make it go away. "Welcome to my world, Beth."
"It's scary, your world," Bethany said quietly.
"Too scary?" Amanda said it calmly, but a sudden fear gripped her.
"I… I don't know, babe." She remembered the dock, Amanda telling her she could always tell her the truth. "It's too soon."
It came at Emma again, hammer-blow, slightly softened this time by the changes she'd made to her shields, but joined by a searing pain that gripped Amanda, a memory of agony that sang in her thoughts and into Emma. And there it was; a fading red streak across Amanda's synapses as memory burned its way across her mind. Emma traced the red streak back as far as she could along the physical path that took it out of long-term memory and placed it into Amanda's consciousness in sudden and vivid experience. But the memory began to fade at the same time as the red streak. Frustrated, Emma was prevented from following the memory back to its roots as it loosened its grip on Amanda. With a silent curse, she moved her shields again, cut off some of the more sensitive pain receptors, opened a small hole in the shoring she'd placed around Amanda's long-term memories to try and stop them crippling her. Hopefully she would reduce any associated pain, but whatever else was associated with Bethany was going to dam up behind that hole and burst through even more vividly than the last. Emma hoped that Amanda would forgive her, but the damming would give her more time to trace that memory back to its source. Holding Amanda's mind carefully in her psychic hands, Emma said again, "Bethany."
The memory this time was Amanda alone, sitting at her computer and reading the series of emails that told her Bethany was leaving, going to Atlanta. Betrayal, guilt, loss... they were all there, and the emotions brought echoes of other memories, a boy lying in a pool of blood with his throat cut, a man whose stony grey eyes told her she was no longer family, Manuel on his knees before her as she tore out the link... Images began overlapping, oozing through Emma's shielding, threatening to overwhelm them both, and of its own accord, Amanda's hand jerked and moved to her pocket, searching for something to draw with.
#No.# Emma aimed her psychic command at Amanda's hand, cutting off the need for Amanda to draw. It was a distraction from memory and Emma needed the strength of these memories to trace back to the damage. Memories battered at her, beyond Bethany and into the more dangerous items on the list. Interconnected memories meant interconnected damage and she had to find out what was disabling Amanda. Because it was disabling; the intelligent and fiesty young witch she had known was being reduced to a mewling child before her eyes. For a brief moment, Emma slipped out of Amanda's head, turned inward on herself, cutting off emotional responses, pain responses. The maelstrom behind the wall was waiting for her and she needed to approach it coolly, without compassion.
Clinically, Emma drove back into Amanda's mind, drilled through the small hole she'd made in the shoring around Amanda's long-term memory and fell into hell.
The knife bit into her flesh and Charlie bled, eyes blaming her for not being there as Amora whispered in her ear that she had found her daughter again and Rack, his flesh blackened and hanging from his skull reached for her, rasping that she was his, bought and paid for... Remy lay twisted and broken under her hands and she pulled the energy from the cultists she needed to save him, only it was Bethany and Moira and Angelo and Rachel and Nathan who fell dead around her as the spell drained their lives... Alphonso laughed as she was beaten and Manuel shattered into a million pieces as Selene smiled and gestured for her Black Knight to join her while Chandra stood behind and told her it was all right to scream...
Emma flinched backwards for a moment from the flood of impressions that howled past her, battering at Amanda's shields and trying to escape. This wasn't damage caused by London; this was older, deeper traumas all connecting and bleeding into each other and Amanda's conscious mind, whenever one was re-awakened. It was no wonder the girl almost went catatonic every time she was reminded of some part of her traumatic past; she wasn't recollecting some distant past, she was being flooded with every trauma all at once. Almost certainly the impulse to draw came from trying to compartmentalise the memories, impose order on chaos by separating them out into discrete memories that Amanda's mind had the capacity to handle.
Emma frowned as she let the howling traumas slip past her shields, fruitlessly gibbering at her. There was something more than trauma underlying this; it was as if the experience with London had torn open some old scar in Amanda's mind and that wound was poisoning old memories even further. Or using them as defence perhaps? This was not the time to attempt to resolve whatever lay under this assault of memories; what was needed was simply to make Amanda functional again and as close to sane as any of them could call themselves.
Emma checked behind herself, keeping the small hole in the shields open to ensure that she could access Amanda's conscious mind if she needed to, then recalled the list of words that drove Amanda's traumas. The worst was obvious, the one that would render Amanda's special skills unusable by Snow Valley.
Emma spoke a single word into the howling chaos outside her shields.
"Demon."
Amanda's mind shuddered violently, catapulting Emma into a scene from Amanda's oldest nightmares - Rack standing over her with the knife, blood running from the runes carved into her flesh and the earth opening up to reveal the demon summoned as part of the pact. There was a moment of overlap as the images shifted briefly to the Halloween party and the same demon rising to claim her, and Candra's ritual in Louisiana, the same spell carved into her back. The wail of the child was melded with the scream of the adult, Candra merging with Rack, the demon reaching to take her, strip away her humanity, make her a monster like the man who had raised her...
Emma reached out with her power, hauling memories towards her, seeking to disentangle the knotted strands that led back to their origin, disconnect those that related to the demon to those that led elsewhere. She picked at red strands fo memory, trying to sort weft from warp as they slipped through her fingers, heading towards the hole in the shields that led to Amanda's conscious mind. There was something in her unconscious driving this, something London had woken or torn or broken and the witch's unconscious was seeking to flail/punish/destroy her with her own memories. Emma struggled to hold onto them, to stop them escaping and overwhelming the witch again, but whatever drove them onwards was determined and Emma knew she was going to lose this fight.
Emma cursed and, reaching out with her power, closed the hole in Amanda's shields, cutting the memories off from Amanda's conscious mind completely. Deprived of a target the memories turned inwards, reaching out at Emma, trying to batten through her shields, pinpricks of old pain and terror needling into her mind.
"Enough," said Emma, sternly. She reached out a psychic hand and grasped the red threads of memory, gathering them to her with both hands, her grip elongating and broadening to encompass all of the threatening memories, drawing them into a twisted skein in her psychic hands, tightening them until she could grasp them in one fist. "Enough," she said and a pair of scissors appeared in her other hand. Emma's power sheared through the red threads of the memory, cutting them short, the tethered ends snapping back into the darkness of Amanda's long-term memory.
Emma pressed the tangled skein of Amanda's memories to her chest, drew them into the depths of her astral body, keeping them safe for the girl. One memory caught her attention for a moment, Amanda and her sister, Adrienne telling of how she had read the brownstone. Emma smiled mirthlessly, stored that bit of information away for later analysis. She re-created the hole in Amanda's shields, stepped through it and closed it behind her. With deft touches she made small adjustments to Amanda's emotions, cutting off curiosity, reducing Amanda's capacity to be distressed by the sudden gap in her memories. Then she closed her psychic eyes and snapped her perceptions back to her physical body.
Amanda sat before her, looking suddenly - bereft, thought Emma. "That was - messy," said Emma with a certain wry understatement. "You will be functional, at least. But I've closed off your access to those particularly traumatic long-term memories for now. There will be gaps in what you remember but I've made some adjustments to your emotional state that should stop this from causing too many problems. I'll need to restore the memories over time, once I've untangled them. Made them singular. Bearable." She reached out with her power for a moment, slipped back into Amanda's mind, showed her the tangled skein of memories she held within her hands. Back at her desk, she said, "They'll be safe with me."
Brushing her hand across her eyes, Amanda tried to focus. She felt both heavy and light, exhausted by the long session but somehow her mind felt... calm. Still. Aware Emma was still watching her, she nodded, not sure of her voice yet. "T-thanks," she managed, her voice sounding rusty. She tilted her head, feeling almost like she was floating. "I s'pose it's going to take a few sessions with you and Sof to get it all untangled?"
"Oh, quite a few, I would suspect," replied Emma. "But we've done enough for today. I would suggest sleep." It wasn't really a suggestion; with a deft touch of her mind, Emma made sure the young witch would head straight to bed and sleep heavily for a few hours; enough to shake off the worst of the psychic residue. "I need some time to untangle the worst of what I've pulled out of your head. At least a week."
"Just a week?" Amanda joked weakly, smothering a yawn as she got up to leave. "You'll be giving my issues an inferiority complex."
