Drizzt Do'Urden (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
naturaltwohands) wrote2016-09-08 03:40 pm
naturaltwohands) wrote2016-09-08 03:40 pm
Entry tags:
Drizzt Worries About Everything, Then Makes Fun of Himself
Never in my wildest dreams had I expected to speak with my father again in this life, having lost him to death twice over, once in sacrifice at my mother's hand and secondly at his own in defiance of her will. Seeing him again was an impossibility, and I knew I could only meet him again after my own life was at its end, however many years or centuries that may be.
And yet I am with him, and he is alive! His heart, once taken from him, now beats strongly, and he draws in breath with lungs left unused when he was imprisoned in his own body by Zin-carla. In every way, he is real, here, and alive.
But I do not believe Zaknafein is well. There is something different about him, or perhaps my memories of him so long ago have failed me, but to it seems to me that he has changed. I am unsure of how to explain it, and I do not fully understand, but there is something that has muted my unbridled joy at our reunion with worry.
Part of it is simply that this world is so different than the Underdark, than Menzoberranzan. For over four centuries, my father has lived by the rules of drow society, trapped within their faulty logic. Now suddenly, he has been thrust into a world more akin to the surface of our world, where I have lived for many years, and my father feared to travel. It is quite obvious that he does not know what to make of it.
The paranoia that our people call the edge of readiness, the very thing that kept him alive over the centuries, has now become a hindrance. It is not just the environment that is different, especially the now ubiquitous presence of bright light, but the very fabric of society itself is so alien to everything he has ever known. While I am pleased to see that Zaknafein asked for and received help for necessary items after my arrival, it took my presence for him to reach out. This place does not hold the same racial discrimination for drow as exists back home, but he was not capable of seeking help from others until it became a critical need. That in itself is one good sign, but I know it is because he cannot trust. Trusting in another can be a fatal flaw in Menzoberranzan, but here in Liminal Space, it is a necessity.
One cannot survive alone here. Not only must one learn skills from other Travelers to grow stronger, but one is expected to be part of the cohesive whole. Zaknafein is used to being alone, trusting no one, depending on no one, and I am the only exception that he has allowed himself. That alone came with great difficulty, as we had for a time each believed that the other had fallen to the evil ways of Lolth. I do not know if he had ever trusted anyone as much as he had myself, and less than a day after we had formed that bond so strong that it could never be broken again, he was murdered.
This became evident from the moment I stepped foot in Liminal Space; upon hearing that a drow was sighted, Zaknafein had charged in to kill him, angrily refuting any of the others who told him to stay his hand. He decided to enact his own solution when surrounded by a group of individuals more than capable of handling a rogue drow, no matter the drow's might. His anger, his conviction, his sheer determination to kill the drow without asking questions has, in hindsight, left me horrified. If I had not been trained by his hand, he would have slain me, and destroyed the thing he loves more than anything--the very drow he had died for twice to protect.
If another goodly drow such as ourselves appears, I do not know if I can talk my father down from once again taking the same steps before knowing the drow's nature. While it is good that he felt strongly enough about those here to rush to defend them from what he assumed was a dangerous threat, I know it will only get worse now that I am here. Even Guenhwyvar's presence, constant without somehow taxing her in this place, may not be enough for him to feel that I am safe.
His thoughts before my arrival often drifted to me, I suspect, and now that I am here, it seems that they revolve around me fully. It is not often that one of us leaves the side of the other, as we have many years to lost between us, but it is something more than that which worries me. His love for me, I believe, is the only one that he has ever known in his long life, and it shows. There is a desperation to it that has lead me to one horrible conclusion:
My death would absolutely destroy him. My injury would cause him to fly into a rage. He sees me as his child, and he sees me a child that needs his protection instead of as the skilled fighter he trained with his own two hands. It is the same fatal flaw that lead to Wulfgar's death protecting Catti-brie, except magnified a thousandfold.
How do I correct his perceptions? This I do not know, and I will not truly have the answer for quite some time. I fear I may have incontrovertibly made it worse by sharing a bed with him since my arrival due to my own paranoia. What I had done in order to easily sooth both our fears that the other might vanish has now become a lifeline that cannot be so easily cut.
Often, I wake with him watching over me, leading me to wonder how often he ever sleeps. His sleep seems disturbed by nightmares, and more than once I have been suddenly awoken by him jumping up in bed. Other times, he has not awoken at all, but thankfully responded to my touch when I sensed that the rhythm of his breath had changed to something faster and more fearful. Zaknafein's arm is possessively draped over me more often than it is not.
It is stupid, and foolish, and we should have slept in separate beds from the very beginning. A single moment of weakness on my part has lead to making my presence into a crutch for Zaknafein. My father constantly needs to touch me when I am in his presence to show years of pent up affection that he could not when we were last together, but I fear he uses it more to convince himself that I simply exist. He almost seems to doubt his own senses, even though they are so finely tuned that I suspect they have rarely mislead him. In this place so new and strange to him, the truth that I am the only thing he intimately knows has only caused his obsessiveness over me to grow boundlessly.
I do not know what to do or how to rectify the damage I may have done to him by rewarding such protective behaviors. I must fight to keep the memory our reunion untainted, knowing that breaking down in his arms might have been the very start of everything. Through the network, I felt his love--a word "spoken" to me by him first through the network as it is called here--and that beautiful moment I refuse to tarnish by negative thoughts. Someone here had taught him what love was, and he understood the feeling he felt for me, and that indeed is a very beautiful thing.
There are many other things beautiful about seeing him again, and they give me hope.
His desperation to protect me is still clearly there, but the edge of it has been removed as he accepts that I am indeed safe, or at least as safe as one can be. Zaknafein smiles more than I have seen since the years in the training hall, and perhaps even more than he ever did back then. There's laughter between us at times and gentle barbing between the two of us in a way that had never existed before. Even though he feels strongly about keeping me safe, there is a calm in his eyes that was not present upon my arrival.
Zaknafein has also made progress in understanding the world around him without my presence. The understanding of the word love is the most obvious example. His introduction to "sunglasses" to help him adapt to the bright light is another. Without me, he has at least understood that people will freely give help to others without expecting anything in turn, although the reality has been hard for him to accept. In time, and with my help as well as the help of other Travelers, he will begin to find a new place, and he will be far happier than he has ever been.
So my worries are not so much with the future but with the present moment in Zaknafein's life. Until I can understand how to help him more deeply, I can only do little things to help lessen his anxieties. They are only enough to take the edge off, but they are a start, and I will take what little I can find to help him.
It is in some way amusing that one of them is to do something as simple as wash daily as I did back in Menzoberranzan! There is nothing wrong with daily bathing, of course, but one does not have the luxury of the public bath houses of Menzoberranzan while on the road, in the wilderness, or on a sea-faring ship. Even when you are in the middle of town or city on the surface, many people do not have the luxury of bathing frequently. One gets quite used to the smell. At least here I can afford him the luxury of not smelling like a "beast", as he has taken to calling me.
He fusses over the state of my hair even more, as its state is not so easily returned to the state it was in Menzoberranzan. Back then, I was expected to keep it in very fine order as a noble, a prince, of Daermon N'a'shezbaernon. Males especially were expected to take great care in their appearance, partially as a necessity for survival. I am certain that if I had treated it the way I have the almost four decades after leaving Menzoberranzan during the three decades I had lived in the city, I would have been severely punished.
The threat is gone, of course, but Zaknafein fusses over it all the same. He sometimes has a tendency to inspect the state of it, running his hand through my locks until his fingers become caught, as they always do, no matter how often I have combed the knots out. I do admit that I find some amount of pleasure regarding his looks of disapproval, but they are not worth it.
To me, it seems utterly silly for my father to be so concerned with it, but I know he will be far happier if his ranger child becomes a bit more domesticated. Unfortunately, I do not know how to repair the damage I have caused, which vexes Zaknafein greatly. I suggested that perhaps I should shave myself bald and start anew, but that only made him regard me with a look of sheer horror.
Perhaps I should look around for someone who is skilled with hair, but I must admit that it is a bit embarrassing to me that I may need to do so. One's hair never reaches this state in Menzoberranzan, unless perhaps they are a slave or live in the streets, so we are both out of our element. This necessitates asking for help from others, but after the embarrassment of my stench being broadcast so clearly across the network (and I will be the first admit that it could only be described in such a fashion!), I am hesitant to embarrass myself further. It seems many of those here observe levels of cleanliness more in line with drow standards than in what can be provided on the surface of my home world.
Thus, my hair is in a sorry state indeed according to my father's standards and to the standards of many, if not most, of the other Travelers! How utterly mortifying! I have had to throw away a comb and pretend I lost it rather than admit my hair had defeated it, breaking some of its teeth. Thus it is not surprising that we cannot even get a proper brush through it, as my hair rebels even fiercer against it. Zaknafein has more than once taken the brush from me after I became impatient, only to yank my head roughly as he, too, could not pull it through.
I can only hope that I make a friend whom I can confide in and guide me towards how to repair it properly, perhaps through some use of Liminal magic. I must also hope that I can successfully hide this journal so that no one will ever discover it, or I will be thoroughly and unbearably teased. Never had I thought that I would again care about it so greatly as I do now! It is thoroughly exhausting, and I wish I could be done with it!
But in time
[Then, in very quick and scrawled writing, as if he was interrupted:]
-Drizzt Do'Urden
And yet I am with him, and he is alive! His heart, once taken from him, now beats strongly, and he draws in breath with lungs left unused when he was imprisoned in his own body by Zin-carla. In every way, he is real, here, and alive.
But I do not believe Zaknafein is well. There is something different about him, or perhaps my memories of him so long ago have failed me, but to it seems to me that he has changed. I am unsure of how to explain it, and I do not fully understand, but there is something that has muted my unbridled joy at our reunion with worry.
Part of it is simply that this world is so different than the Underdark, than Menzoberranzan. For over four centuries, my father has lived by the rules of drow society, trapped within their faulty logic. Now suddenly, he has been thrust into a world more akin to the surface of our world, where I have lived for many years, and my father feared to travel. It is quite obvious that he does not know what to make of it.
The paranoia that our people call the edge of readiness, the very thing that kept him alive over the centuries, has now become a hindrance. It is not just the environment that is different, especially the now ubiquitous presence of bright light, but the very fabric of society itself is so alien to everything he has ever known. While I am pleased to see that Zaknafein asked for and received help for necessary items after my arrival, it took my presence for him to reach out. This place does not hold the same racial discrimination for drow as exists back home, but he was not capable of seeking help from others until it became a critical need. That in itself is one good sign, but I know it is because he cannot trust. Trusting in another can be a fatal flaw in Menzoberranzan, but here in Liminal Space, it is a necessity.
One cannot survive alone here. Not only must one learn skills from other Travelers to grow stronger, but one is expected to be part of the cohesive whole. Zaknafein is used to being alone, trusting no one, depending on no one, and I am the only exception that he has allowed himself. That alone came with great difficulty, as we had for a time each believed that the other had fallen to the evil ways of Lolth. I do not know if he had ever trusted anyone as much as he had myself, and less than a day after we had formed that bond so strong that it could never be broken again, he was murdered.
This became evident from the moment I stepped foot in Liminal Space; upon hearing that a drow was sighted, Zaknafein had charged in to kill him, angrily refuting any of the others who told him to stay his hand. He decided to enact his own solution when surrounded by a group of individuals more than capable of handling a rogue drow, no matter the drow's might. His anger, his conviction, his sheer determination to kill the drow without asking questions has, in hindsight, left me horrified. If I had not been trained by his hand, he would have slain me, and destroyed the thing he loves more than anything--the very drow he had died for twice to protect.
If another goodly drow such as ourselves appears, I do not know if I can talk my father down from once again taking the same steps before knowing the drow's nature. While it is good that he felt strongly enough about those here to rush to defend them from what he assumed was a dangerous threat, I know it will only get worse now that I am here. Even Guenhwyvar's presence, constant without somehow taxing her in this place, may not be enough for him to feel that I am safe.
His thoughts before my arrival often drifted to me, I suspect, and now that I am here, it seems that they revolve around me fully. It is not often that one of us leaves the side of the other, as we have many years to lost between us, but it is something more than that which worries me. His love for me, I believe, is the only one that he has ever known in his long life, and it shows. There is a desperation to it that has lead me to one horrible conclusion:
My death would absolutely destroy him. My injury would cause him to fly into a rage. He sees me as his child, and he sees me a child that needs his protection instead of as the skilled fighter he trained with his own two hands. It is the same fatal flaw that lead to Wulfgar's death protecting Catti-brie, except magnified a thousandfold.
How do I correct his perceptions? This I do not know, and I will not truly have the answer for quite some time. I fear I may have incontrovertibly made it worse by sharing a bed with him since my arrival due to my own paranoia. What I had done in order to easily sooth both our fears that the other might vanish has now become a lifeline that cannot be so easily cut.
Often, I wake with him watching over me, leading me to wonder how often he ever sleeps. His sleep seems disturbed by nightmares, and more than once I have been suddenly awoken by him jumping up in bed. Other times, he has not awoken at all, but thankfully responded to my touch when I sensed that the rhythm of his breath had changed to something faster and more fearful. Zaknafein's arm is possessively draped over me more often than it is not.
It is stupid, and foolish, and we should have slept in separate beds from the very beginning. A single moment of weakness on my part has lead to making my presence into a crutch for Zaknafein. My father constantly needs to touch me when I am in his presence to show years of pent up affection that he could not when we were last together, but I fear he uses it more to convince himself that I simply exist. He almost seems to doubt his own senses, even though they are so finely tuned that I suspect they have rarely mislead him. In this place so new and strange to him, the truth that I am the only thing he intimately knows has only caused his obsessiveness over me to grow boundlessly.
I do not know what to do or how to rectify the damage I may have done to him by rewarding such protective behaviors. I must fight to keep the memory our reunion untainted, knowing that breaking down in his arms might have been the very start of everything. Through the network, I felt his love--a word "spoken" to me by him first through the network as it is called here--and that beautiful moment I refuse to tarnish by negative thoughts. Someone here had taught him what love was, and he understood the feeling he felt for me, and that indeed is a very beautiful thing.
There are many other things beautiful about seeing him again, and they give me hope.
His desperation to protect me is still clearly there, but the edge of it has been removed as he accepts that I am indeed safe, or at least as safe as one can be. Zaknafein smiles more than I have seen since the years in the training hall, and perhaps even more than he ever did back then. There's laughter between us at times and gentle barbing between the two of us in a way that had never existed before. Even though he feels strongly about keeping me safe, there is a calm in his eyes that was not present upon my arrival.
Zaknafein has also made progress in understanding the world around him without my presence. The understanding of the word love is the most obvious example. His introduction to "sunglasses" to help him adapt to the bright light is another. Without me, he has at least understood that people will freely give help to others without expecting anything in turn, although the reality has been hard for him to accept. In time, and with my help as well as the help of other Travelers, he will begin to find a new place, and he will be far happier than he has ever been.
So my worries are not so much with the future but with the present moment in Zaknafein's life. Until I can understand how to help him more deeply, I can only do little things to help lessen his anxieties. They are only enough to take the edge off, but they are a start, and I will take what little I can find to help him.
It is in some way amusing that one of them is to do something as simple as wash daily as I did back in Menzoberranzan! There is nothing wrong with daily bathing, of course, but one does not have the luxury of the public bath houses of Menzoberranzan while on the road, in the wilderness, or on a sea-faring ship. Even when you are in the middle of town or city on the surface, many people do not have the luxury of bathing frequently. One gets quite used to the smell. At least here I can afford him the luxury of not smelling like a "beast", as he has taken to calling me.
He fusses over the state of my hair even more, as its state is not so easily returned to the state it was in Menzoberranzan. Back then, I was expected to keep it in very fine order as a noble, a prince, of Daermon N'a'shezbaernon. Males especially were expected to take great care in their appearance, partially as a necessity for survival. I am certain that if I had treated it the way I have the almost four decades after leaving Menzoberranzan during the three decades I had lived in the city, I would have been severely punished.
The threat is gone, of course, but Zaknafein fusses over it all the same. He sometimes has a tendency to inspect the state of it, running his hand through my locks until his fingers become caught, as they always do, no matter how often I have combed the knots out. I do admit that I find some amount of pleasure regarding his looks of disapproval, but they are not worth it.
To me, it seems utterly silly for my father to be so concerned with it, but I know he will be far happier if his ranger child becomes a bit more domesticated. Unfortunately, I do not know how to repair the damage I have caused, which vexes Zaknafein greatly. I suggested that perhaps I should shave myself bald and start anew, but that only made him regard me with a look of sheer horror.
Perhaps I should look around for someone who is skilled with hair, but I must admit that it is a bit embarrassing to me that I may need to do so. One's hair never reaches this state in Menzoberranzan, unless perhaps they are a slave or live in the streets, so we are both out of our element. This necessitates asking for help from others, but after the embarrassment of my stench being broadcast so clearly across the network (and I will be the first admit that it could only be described in such a fashion!), I am hesitant to embarrass myself further. It seems many of those here observe levels of cleanliness more in line with drow standards than in what can be provided on the surface of my home world.
Thus, my hair is in a sorry state indeed according to my father's standards and to the standards of many, if not most, of the other Travelers! How utterly mortifying! I have had to throw away a comb and pretend I lost it rather than admit my hair had defeated it, breaking some of its teeth. Thus it is not surprising that we cannot even get a proper brush through it, as my hair rebels even fiercer against it. Zaknafein has more than once taken the brush from me after I became impatient, only to yank my head roughly as he, too, could not pull it through.
I can only hope that I make a friend whom I can confide in and guide me towards how to repair it properly, perhaps through some use of Liminal magic. I must also hope that I can successfully hide this journal so that no one will ever discover it, or I will be thoroughly and unbearably teased. Never had I thought that I would again care about it so greatly as I do now! It is thoroughly exhausting, and I wish I could be done with it!
But in time
[Then, in very quick and scrawled writing, as if he was interrupted:]
-Drizzt Do'Urden