[network] Event: Lavender's Green, Part One; Morning 192 [open]

[snowblindmods]

[You are lost in white infinity, but at least the network is here for you. Make sure to note any warnings in your subject lines!]

Comments

cw: description of panic attack

[ecks]

I do not --

[She doesn't know, but this order helps. She does know, it's like a test, and this command succeeds in grounding her. Her voice is still raw and its tempo uneven, but she does as she's told.]

The ocean is water. The ocean is a lot of water like a pond except you cannot see the other side of the pond because it is too far away, and the people who live in it have tails like fish and gills like fish because people who aren't like fish can't live in water.

[She continues from there. It's very much the description of someone who's never been to the seaside -- there's nothing about what a beach is like, or the smell, or the vastness of it beyond that initial statement. She describes what water looks like, and what fish are, and she gets some things terribly wrong because she doesn't know about tides and waves and because she doesn't know what lives in the ocean other than merfolk and a vague concept of the presumed existence of multiple varieties of fish.

It goes on for a surprisingly long time, until her breathing is calm and she's running out of things to say about what rocks at the bottom might be like.]

cw: description of panic attack

[rubikscomplex]

[And when she's finished, House picks up.]

No. The ocean is more than that.

[House fills in the blanks, he covers what she missed: beaches with sand in different colors based on the origin of the sand, palm trees and beach grasses and sand fleas and sea gulls and sandpipers, piers and ships bobbing on the water, and the crash of waves with the tide. How tides happen, the moon and its pull. He talks about gravitation and the fundamental forces of the universe because his mind tends to turn toward physics when it's not turning toward medicine, and he mentions electromagnetism again, something she might remember, and strong nuclear and weak nuclear forces.

He'll drone on if she has questions about any of those, but he stops maybe a half-hour into the lecture to see if he even needs to keep going.]

[ecks]

[She's silent at first, but then every once in a while she pipes up to ask a clarifying question or to tell him about the mark of the Archmage on the moon in the sky at home. Mostly, though, she just listens, and she's been silent for nearly ten minutes when he pauses. It takes her a long moment to come alert to the silence and to speak up.]

Doctor House?

[rubikscomplex]

[And he'll clarify on request when she asks.]

Go to sleep, Ecks. Something's coming after this.

[ecks]

[She's quiet. Exhausted.]

Acknowledged.

[She'll do as she's told, but she doesn't turn off her audio feed even as she shifts into a slightly more comfortable position and goes quiet and still. It will eventually shut off on its own if House doesn't hang up.]