Begin Again (Complete)

[Ax L Rose]

"It's impossible for me to predict how sensitive someone might be to my semblance. Sometimes I don't connect with a person at all. Sometimes, people feel what I feel so intensely that... it's... it's like the mind fabricates a reason. People's minds are mostly not hardwired to comprehend foreign emotional signals in my experience," Ax added.

Aside from that interjection, she remained quiet as Bartok spoke his part. While he was clearly seeking to validate her struggles, she couldn't help but get the vague feeling that he was sort of doing it at the cost of himself. She couldn't really speak to whether or not her struggle was more or less difficult than his, but she definitely got the impression that Bartok was able to understand at least some of the issues she dealt with better than her average listener. She also absentmindedly lamented the fact that like many other people she knew, Bartok's semblance sounded way more directly useful in a fight than her own semblance.

"Well, I am a little crazy," Ax conceded with a weak grin. "And don't worry. I get you," she opted to reassure him. She did the same thing sometimes - talking about herself to show that she could relate.

She seemed to tilt her head in thought at Bartok's suggestion. On one hand, she felt more confident in her ability to control her emotions than she'd ever felt in the past. In the last two years she'd made leaps of major progress. She generally considered herself more self-aware and less impulsive than she was when she began at Beacon. Could Bartok really give her anything that had helped more than therapy and psychiatric help had given her? A part of her wanted to believe maybe he could. It wasn't like anyone else she'd ever known could say they were speaking from personal experience when it came to regulating one's personal feelings while juggling competing foreign emotional signals from others. It sounded like he knew what it was like to lose himself in what others felt.

"I've never met another empath, and I never had any guarantee I would, so honestly, the thought has never even occurred to me to try and find one. But I... I don't know if my semblance can be meaningfully controlled. Ever since I first unlocked my semblance, my mind hasn't known any peace... except..."

Except for when her aura was broken. She could still remember the fear in Nym's eyes, but that time she couldn't feel it. And despite the cold, despite the dimming of light at the edges of her vision, she felt... relieved. Relieved to know some little bit of peace.

A shimmer of a dark memory floated across Ax's mind, and a chill ran down her spine. She felt an itch in her right arm and she anxiously moved to scratch it, only for the sound of metal on metal to run up her cybernetic arm and into the bone further up her limb. She felt no relief even after scratching it for a few seconds. She quickly spoke up, suddenly anxious that she could end up lost in the emotions of a bad memory. She didn't really want to put Bartok through her traumas... at least not so suddenly, so unceremoniously, but another part of her was intrigued. Did Bartok really know what he was offering?

"Except maybe when I sleep," Ax said uncertainly. She felt suddenly more aware of how she was unconsciously grinding her teeth.

[Bartok Evergreen]

Bartok listened as she spoke, and kept quiet as something came over her. She scratched at her metal arm, her nails scratching the metal obvious to his ears. He, well, he could only describe it as catching a whiff of cold, a chill that ran down his spine. She was remembering something, something that dealt with her prosthetic and being free of her Semblance. It wasn't too hard to make the connection. Of when her Aura was broken, she lost the use of her Semblance, and her arm.

She quickly said that it was only during sleep that she felt peace from it, and Bartok felt that whiff of cold dissapear. She was hiding it. Maybe she did feel the peace when she was asleep, but that wasn't the true answer. Bartok would be silent for a long moment, a hand on his chin as he thought.

He had never thought of this before, but because it was possible for people with enough skill with Aura to unlock other's, was it possible for the reverse? If both were willing, was it possible to have someone turn off the Aura? Allowing the owner to wait to activate their Aura, and thus their Semblance? That was one possibility, though she would become very dependant on somebody who could do that for her. Her Semblance would become a fear for her, something she would run from to get peace of mind. That was no way to live, and would eventually catch up to her. It would end badly, for her and anyone that was near.

"It may not be possible for you to activate and deactivate your Semblance, but our Semblance comes from our Aura, which is a manifestation of our soul. Your soul. That Semblance belongs to you, you don't belong to it. That's the advice I was given that helped me direct my Semblance." He moved to sit facing her squarly. "You can control your Semblance, at the very least to put a chain on it. I know you can. We are the masters, not the power."

[Ax L Rose]

A lot of the time, Ax liked to think she was handling her trauma pretty well. It crept up on her at times, though. That was the thing about trauma though... it demanded its eventual toll in emotional processing, and if she didn't make time to process this sort of thing deliberately, it'd happen whenever it happened. She suddenly felt very self-conscious about what she was suggesting about her semblance. It was tempting to wallow in the difficulties and struggles of her emotional telepathy, as evidenced by the fact that she was more or less currently doing that.

But her semblance was more than the struggle. She wasn't presenting the whole story to Bartok. There was also a part of her that was slowly adapting to the ways her semblance functioned. She understood a lot of its quirks and peculiar rules. It protected her from other, more invasive mental effects. It reflected something about her inner spirit. The struggle with her semblance had made her more honest, more genuine, more appreciative of the connections she formed with others... it strengthened bonds and it helped her understand others. Still, she supposed it wouldn't be so bad to have an off switch. Unfortunately it didn't seem to work that way. She and her mentor, Rose Valiente, had tried a lot of different things to gauge the impact as well as the limitations of her semblance. She couldn't help but feel skeptical about what Bartok was suggesting.

"I have learned some techniques for managing it, recognizing patterns, distinguishing between my emotions and the emotions of others via mindfulness and such... I've learned to tune out certain things, and I've learned a lot of techniques that help with mood regulation and distress tolerance. When I can calm myself down and restore myself to a sort of emotional baseline it helps a lot, but..." Ax shook her head, her eyes falling shut for a moment. Her lips were a flat line, nearly a frown as she explained further.

"I can only control how I react to it. I can do things to change my responses, control my thinking, my emotions. The same way a person can cover their ears to hear less, I can sort of utilize certain techniques to dampen the strain my semblance sometimes puts on me. But I can't turn my hearing off. I can't turn my sight off. And I can't turn my semblance off. And I'm... I'm being a little dramatic about it right now. But my semblance isn't all bad. I know I was just whining about it, but seriously. My semblance has also been... really useful more than a few times in my life. And while it bothers me, I'm also used to it in a lot of ways."

Apparently Bartok's input had really gotten Ax's motor running, because Ax just kind of kept on talking, not really giving Bartok a chance to speak for a bit. Her expression seemed to suddenly demur along the way as she realized what she was doing. She had to finish her thought, but she resolved to not motormouth too hard going forward. She raised a hand and awkwardly rubbed the side of her neck, slumping slightly where she sat, looking down and toward the ground as she spoke.

"I uh... I don't know how much the trauma is talking sometimes," her eyes turned back to Bartok. "Look, when I said I was crazy, I wasn't like... just being funny. I'm pretty mentally ill too. I usually feel like I'm mad oversharing when I talk about this shit, but I figure since we're talking in-depth emotional states between two empaths... you might as well know about that particular complication too."

She finally stopped talking, even though she knew she could keep babbling. She wasn't sure why this conversation was making her feel more tense, more alert. Was this fight or flight? It was probably just anxiety about revealing so much about herself to someone she still didn't actually know that well. That, and there was a part of her that perhaps felt... indignant? Just because he could control his semblance didn't mean she had to be able to learn to turn hers off, did it? Wasn't it a little presumptuous of him to assume anything about how her semblance worked?

[Bartok Evergreen]

Bartok listened to her talk. She did kinda make it seem worse than it was, he had to be honest. She seemed to have found some things out about her Semblance and how to control herself a bit, but what she said before were still problems or else she wouldn't have brought them up. Still, she had learned how to deal with it so far.

Once she was done, he started talking. "It's fine for you to explain things, it's a complicated matter, and I may have been a little hasty with my assumption that you couldn't control it well. It just sounded like a big hassle." He turned to face forward. "Sounds like you've done a lot of what I was talking about already. Well done." He was feeling a little chagrined now, having gone full in on wanting to help her but being turned away because help didn't seem to be needed at all. She mentioned mental illness, something he had not caught from her at all and also something he couldn't exactly help with or had any experience with.

"I don't know much about dealing with mental illness," He admitted, "Unless you count being a 'Hopeless Romantic as one. But I'm still willing to help out to deal with things if you need me."

[Ax L Rose]

Ax seemed grateful, relieved even, at Bartok's response. She exhaled a little breath and her shoulders slacked a little as she looked over at him.

"Thanks for reassuring me," Ax quickly interjected as he spoke. She then let him finish before speaking again, raising a hand and brushing her hair behind a feather-tipped ear.

"You've got a generous soul, and you've been a good listener," Ax noted lightly. She then reached for her pocket. She needed to squirm a little in place in order to pull her scroll from her tight side pocket, but when it was free she rose it and unceremoniously snapped a picture of Bartok with a little flash from the camera. She then started to tap the screen with her thumbs.

"You've got a scroll, yeah? We can add each other as contacts if you want," she suggested. She was already setting her scroll to scan and accept a contact request wirelessly, but... she didn't actually know how this worked for him. Would he need a hand? Was there a way he could use scrolls reliably without good vision?

[Bartok Evergreen]

Bartok smiled but it was only a genuine, honest smile for a moment after being complimented. "It's what the ladies love." He said, trying to save some face, even though he knew it wouldn't take with her. She seemed too insightful for that. "And I have four ears, two of which have been compared to satellite dishes. I better be a good listener."

She was rumuging something out of a pocket, and he kept his debonair smirk on until he heard the small sound of a picture being taken using a scroll. She had taken a picture of him. He hadn't gotten many pictures taken of him, though there was one girl at his previous school that had stalked him for a little bit. She had been odd.

At Ax's request he dug out his own scroll, opening it up with memorized movements. He knew he got onto his contacts page, but now it was fuzzy on where to go in order to add people to it. "Uhm, here." He handed her his scroll. "Go ahead and add me." If she took the moment to look, she would find that he only had three people in his contacts. The top one was somebody by the name of 'Erin Cherrywood'. Her picture was lopsided and only had about half of her face, and it seemed that the picture had been taken when she was in the middle of saying something to the person holding the phone, eyes not looking at the camera. The other two were named 'Mom' and 'Mom #2', and they didn't have pictures.

[Ax L Rose]

She sat her scroll down on her thigh and accepted Bartok's. She noticed his sparse contacts, which further reinforced the impression she got that this guy she was talking to was either a first-year or a recent transfer from another academy. He didn't recognize Erin Cherrywood, and with luck Ax wouldn't know Mom #1 or #2 either. She rose Bartok's scroll and snapped a quick little selfie of herself with a dazzling little smile as a formality - sure, he might not see it, but maybe someone else helping him out would. She took a brief moment to admire her handiwork before she finalized registration as a contact and offer Bartok his scroll back.

"Well, there you go bro. If you're in the mood to do something fun in the city or anything feel free to hit me up, or text me any time. We'll see if maybe we can add a few more names to that contact list too, m'kay?" Ax reached out and patted Bartok on his shoulder before the sound of her clothes shifting would herald her imminent departure from the bench.

"As for me, I guess I oughta get movin' and quit wasting time. Got a big long to-do list and the day's only gettin' older. You take it easy, aight man?"

She rose from her spot and grabbed her guitar case, starting to put Electra Heart away.

[Bartok Evergreen]

She took his scroll, took another picture of something and by how her arm raised and her body bent back slightly, it was probably a selfie. He accepted the scroll back and put it away. "Yeah, I'll hit you up sometime!" He said, happy. "And don't worry, school year just began. There'll be more in here before we see eachother again, probably." He stood up with her. "But if you have any friends who find their fancy in men rather than women, I'd be happy to get their contact's as well."

"Yeah, I kinda skipped class to come investigate what that gorgeous music was, so I gotta head off to my next class. Maybe I can squeeze in before class is over, that way I'm not tar-" He was saying right as the bell rung. He jerked his head down a little, his ears moving halfway down his head even though the nearest ringing bell was around two corners. "I... guess that's not happening. Well, you take it easy too!" Bartok would start walking away as she put her guitar away, happy to have made a new friend.