fandomtownies | Fandom Counseling, Tuesday

Jack was bored and thinking and nothing good could come of either of those things. She saw Dr. Lecter's office was open and went in, squawking back at the flamingos in a manner that made them blink at her in birdy confusion. Comfy chair? Flopping Jack. "Hi," she greeted him wryly, "I need some counseling. You busy?" He didn't look busy. He looked, if anything, bored.

Hannibal smiled. He had indeed been bored, and a bored Hannibal was a dangerous Hannibal, so some rude person somewhere was (temporarily) thanking you, Jack.

"Not at all," he assured her. "Would you like some tea or coffee?"

"Coffee'd be great, thank you," Jack said, "If it ain't trouble."

"Of course not." Hannibal walked over to the little table he kept the service on. "I brew some every morning and keep it hot in a carafe." He poured her a cup. "Cream? Sugar?"

"Black's good," Jack answered, "Not really into milk or sweet in my coffee. Thanks for asking though."

Hannibal nodded and brought the cup over, handing it to her.

"Are you actually looking for therapy, or were you simply bored as well?"

She thanked him and promptly took a sip. It was good coffee. "Both, kinda," Jack said when she was done with the sip. "I'm bored mostly because there's a whole heap of shit I don't know what to do with. All my boys are fucked right the hell up and I don't know .. anything. Jon's traumatized and fucked off the island completely, Kaidan's up to his neck off-world with his fucking heart in pieces, Kanan's a fucking mess too because.. fuck, man, last week he got marched into what was supposed to be a goddamn death squad and I was stuck to the fucking floor and couldn't help him, Sparkle's brain's been broken for weeks and I don't even know what that's about nor what the fuck to say to even ask and I'm not exactly Mother goddamn Comfort here even if I had a fucking clue."

She took another sip and said, far more quietly, "I don't know what the fuck to do. I can't help. I hate this."

Hannibal sat on a chair nearby. "What would you like to do, if you could?"

"Burn this entire fucking island to ash and clinkers," Jack answered immediately.

A beat.

"Not the most useful coping mechanism in the world, probably." Probably.

"Perhaps not," Hannibal agreed. "Would it help?"

"Don't know but it'd make me feel better and might have a chance of not giving people I care about more goddamn trauma until the fucking sod layer grew back," Jack noted, turning the cup in circles in her hand. "I'm bad at this. Emotions aren't a thing I was ever supposed to have and I don't know what to do with the ones that aren't 'kill something' and 'destroy shit'. And that'd make me feel better but it wouldn't do sweet fuck all for any of them. And.. it ain't supposed to be about me. Cuz fuck that, whatever, I can handle whatever bullshit trauma this fucking place thinks it can send my way but here I am, all wibble fucking wobble because I don't know what people do for other people. I never learned."

Hannibal nodded. "Would you like to?"

Jack gave him a sharp, piercing look. "Like? There is no fucking like. Doesn't fucking matter if I like it, cuz I surely fucking don't. I hate this but I hate feeling helpless more. So I need to learn how to be more like a person and that's not anything I was ever meant to be." A hand ran over the stubble on her scalp. "This blows."

"A colleague of mine" that he was using as his own therapist "once called it a person-suit. Think of it that way: a finely tailored face that you can pull on when you need it. Yours simply needs a little patching up."

He spread his hands. "All of the things you're looking for are behaviors that can be taught. They aren't things that anybody is born knowing; you simply have a later start at learning them. It's just another language. Are you good at languages?"

"That's what I do every damn day," Jack said a little tonelessly, "I pick up Jack and I put her on, zip her up, and walk out into the world." Her hand ran over her scalp again, absently tracing the scars. The places where they'd cut into her head and changed her brain with drugs and lasers and scalpels and implants. Took the person out. Made the monster. "Yeah, I'm good at languages," Jack muttered, "I speak all the languages in my galaxy at least enough to get by without the translator implant. I'm a real good fucking mimic if I gotta be. That's different. That's not like.."

Her hand flailed, "Feelings. You can't teach someone how to feel. Or to feel the right things. I can see their feelings, I can see they're upset or hurt or ..whatever. I know what that looks like. I know what pain looks like every way a person can feel it. It makes me angry. I only got that one feeling. And that one is usually the wrong one. It won't help them. Everything becomes anger, Dr. Lecter. Every damn thing. And my anger.. it won't help anyone but I don't know how to be anything else. To feel anything else. Pain? I don't feel it. I know how to cause it, I know what it looks like. I don't feel it, though, and I don't know what to do to help anyone not feel it." A beat. "Short of killing them. All pain and all bleeding stops - eventually."

"What is it you would like, then?" Hannibal asked. "I could teach you to better mask or manage your anger, to better determine what actions are appropriate, what feelings are expected." He spread his hands. "Or I could simply listen without judging if that's what you're looking for.

"I could try to help you find other emotions in yourself, but that would involve meditation, hypnosis, perhaps drugs. Am I right in thinking that would be more invasive than you would prefer?"

"I don't care about me," Jack said with a shrug, "I just want to know what to do. Other people, they see someone hurting and they got something to offer, seems like. Me? Anger. Which isn't helpful. So that's what I'd like. To know what the hell to do. What do you do when Sparkle's all fucked up?"

"I have him come to my house, because left alone he will stew in his problems," Hannibal said. "I offer him coffee or hot chocolate, because he finds warm drinks soothing. I ask him to cook with me; that gives him something to focus on outside of himself, something that will have a tangible result, and gives us time to talk, should he be ready to do so. What do your instincts tell you to do for him?"

Jack nodded slowly. It helped. Hannibal was explaining the whys to the whats and that ..

Helped.

"I mean, the last time I dragged him off for a tattoo but .. that was different. A different sort of upset. He needed to do something. I don't even know what this is that's eating him but he looks.. different." Her hands scrubbed over her head in agitation, "My instincts tell me to grab him by the shoulders, shake him like a rag doll, throw him up against a wall and scream at him to stop it. To stop looking like that. To stop wearing that face, that sad sick scared little-boy-lost face because it doesn't belong on him and I don't want to look at it there. I don't want to see it on him. I don't want to see it on anyone ever again. I know better than to do that. That instinct, that reaction, never helped anyone ever." She hadn't seen but flashes of it, hadn't really seen Sparkle except in passing lately. And.. she'd kind of been avoiding him for exactly this reason.

She looked up and looked right at Hannibal. "It tells me to start looking around for the cause. To put someone in front of him so Sparkle don't ever have to see anything but someone else's back, so whatever it is that's causing it ain't something he'll ever see. Find whatever's causing this and tear it into bleeding chunks with my bare hands and leave it dead and rotting.. and.."

And the fight went out of her and she slumped. "And that isn't what he'd want. I know that. He's said as much. Anything I do for him, he's gonna feel the blame for. He'll pick it up and wear it like a fucking coat and he'd hate himself in it. I could maybe never tell him but that means lying to my friend forever and if I gotta lie to him forever.. that makes me someone he shouldn't be a friend to. He deserves better people than that."

Picked at a scab on her hand. "Could maybe talk to him. Don't know how but maybe just.. be there if he wants to talk to me. Don't know what good it'd do." She shrugged, "I'm not good at talking."

"I won't tell you what's going on with him; that's his to tell," Hannibal said. "But I can assure you it is something difficult but not necessarily bad."

He smiled. "Your instinctual reaction might indeed help in some instances, but no, not for him and not now. Being there to talk - or more to the point, to listen, is much better. Remember that just as things that are obvious to others elude you, those that are obvious to you may be less so to them. Let him know that you've noticed, because he may not be aware of how he appears to you. Let him know that you are there, should he wish to talk. Much of knowing what to do is making yourself available and letting the other person tell you what they would care for."

He let her think about that for a moment, then sighed. "And yes, in this case, it would be wonderful to create 'bleeding chunks', but he would not thank us for that. Did he ever tell you what I did with those names that you gave me?"

Jack nodded and sort of took that in. Difficult but not necessarily bad. Maybe Sparkle didn't know how he looked or what she could see. Without her normal reaction to someone acting like prey. Might be able to do that. Maybe.

Looked up silently at Hannibal when he concurred with the bleeding chunks part of it. "No," she agreed slowly, "He wouldn't. He's gentle inside. It'd hurt him. If it just happened, maybe not, maybe he could live with it but not if someone did it for him. He'd feel like it was him doin' it just with a different set of hands. Which is dumb. What I do ain't on him. But he wouldn't thank us and it'd hurt him and it ain't fucking worth it if it hurts him."

Shook her head, "He didn't say. What did you do with 'em?"

Hannibal crossed his hands on his knee. "I counseled them. Spoke with them, worked on their minds to make them average," his tone made that a curse, "fairly empathetic individuals. And also ensured they will never forget a moment of what they've done. No physical harm at all, but they will spend the rest of their lives in horror at themselves."

"Then I hope they have a nice, long life behind bars," Jack said, mouth twisted in an appreciative smile. She could appreciate the cruelty in that, letting them stew in the horror of their own making. "And I'm still bitch enough to hope that when they meet their end, it's slow and painful as fuck."

Hannibal smirked. "Apart from their own horror, despairing individuals who believe they deserve the worst rarely do well in prison."

He waved it off. "But that is the sort of justice that Sparkle will accept." He eyed Jack pensively. "Has he told you much about his biological family?"

"Yeah, there's always someone in prison willing to dish out all the punishment those kind of people can take," said the person who usually fulfilled that role when she was in prison.

She met his eyes and shook her head, "No but he didn't really have to. I've seen his arms. And he knows what I saw when I was looking at them. Kaidan said Atton is the only family Sparkle admits to having and I know that's not biological in the slightest." She'd seen the burn marks, the round ones old and faded and stretched, on Sparkle's arms. She knew what those meant. Knew what it meant had come before them, because abusers never started with those. That was some high level escalation shit they worked up to.

"I know he wasn't with them very long. His biological family."

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