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 Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2013 2:02 pm
"I like you better snippy," Oliver muttered, looking up from the cup and then back to the tea pot. Deciding Leevi couldn't care, he shifted and filled up his tea cup again. He paused, head tipped before setting the tea pot down and picked up his cup, turning it about in his palm before drinking. Oliver let the silence stretch a bit longer, thinking.
"I think I finally figured it out... at least why Mindhealer's irk me so much," he started, trailing off, eyes nearly shut in thought. "I'm expecting some sort of professional courtesy from two people sharing a profession to another. I'm not getting it... frankly you are just as patronizing as Jessan." He snorted, and sipped from his cup again.
"I can't stop being a healer, but healing you inform people what you are doing, usually." When someone was unconscious all that went out the window." Mindhealing... you are not informing me what you even want. Instead you pry around and ask me about my childhood and scribe notes and act like I should be in time out then taken seriously." Oliver stared at his tea, watching his breath make ripples in the liquid. "If I was a official healer, you wouldn't appreciate me stripping you down for a physical without your consent..." Oliver chuckled, lips twitching in rueful smile. " Unless you have a fetish of some sort."
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Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2013 2:54 pm
When Oliver broke the silence, Leevi looked up from his work to listen politely. Concern didn't really cross his face; it parked there, like a rusted old camper that no one could figure out how to move. It didn't look particularly good either. “Patroni... oh, I'm sorry,” he said genuinely. Running a hand through his curls, he sighed a bit before continuing. “I'm actually new to the whole 'interviewing patients' thing. The issues here at Warden's are very different than the issues people back at High Reaches have to deal with.”
Some little voice in the back of his mind piped up, suggesting that maybe Oliver was simply irrationally sensitive to any sense of condescension. But the young mindhealer really was new to this part of the job. Maybe he was coming off as patronizing instead of 'here, I want to help you'. “Anyway, the point is, I'm still trying to work on how to get patients at ease. It's not easy, as you know.” Still, he could take lessons from this.
At least he thought he could right up to the point where sex was mentioned. Mouth slightly open, he just blinked at Oliver for a few seconds before shaking his head minutely.
“Well, there's a large difference between mindhealing and Healing,” he pointed out, quietly edging away from the topic of sex in general. “If you're really curious about what I'm doing and why I'm asking these questions, I'll be happy to explain. I have this theory that it's possible to track down a killer just from looking at the scene.”
He paused, just in case there was a dramatic flash of lightning or clap of thunder waiting on the horizon. There wasn't, of course, but he could always hope. And, he dimly realized, this probably didn't sound impressive. Killers left clues behind all the time, like strands of hair and suchlike.
“I mean like... clues about who they are as a person,” he tried again, one hand waving vaguely in the air. “You killed because you were ordered to. You made kills clean and impersonal. You tried to minimize suffering. That's a particular type of killing as opposed to the guy who kills because he's angry at the victim. When a killer knows a victim, you get a lot of facial wounds. I want to know how these things develop. That's why I ask about childhood. Everything, sooner or later, comes back to how a person was raised.”
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Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2013 8:25 pm
"Mmhm, I think it the way you are attempting to put me at ease that is coming off as patronizing. Well, for Jessan at least. I was being irritable and cranky, but you responded like I would to my younger sibling not to an adult." Oliver chuckled softly, smiling fondly remembering dealing similarly with his little sibling till they managed to come to an agreement. "That doesn't even work on Hollin anymore. So I apologize but you look young, and soft and it helps when I know the reason you might poke on sensitive subjects."
Oliver peered thoughtfully at Leevi and then at the tea pot as the healer spoke, debating on a fourth cup. Nope, I'll be bouncing off the walls. He regretfully put the ugly tea cup down. "I wasn't even aware they had that story down." He had not been very vocal about what he had or had not done, be mostly silent and frosty to the watch.
"I don't know how much it will help you, but I like you more than Jessan." Oliver shut his eyes, tapping his fingers against his knee in thought. "I speculated my mother was working girl. Street prostitute most likely. I know Hollin's mother was and I remember a steady stream of strange women coming and going when I was younger. I guess they were my father's type."
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Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2013 9:41 pm
What Leevi was thinking was, well, I was dealing with a child. But he didn't say it out loud because, unlike some people, he had a good learning curve. Saying things like that to violent men was likely to get one shanked. “I'll work on that,” he promised. “And. Uh. On looking less young and soft. I can't tell if that's an insult or not.”
It didn't exactly sound bad on its own, but everything took on a slightly darker turn of phrase when you knew you were talking to a murderer. Either way, at least Oliver was calming down now and willing to talk. Leevi was willing to chalk this up as one for the victory column. Since the losing column included such things as, 'getting stabbed', he was all too happy to accept a win.
“You'd be surprised at how much this can help.” As Oliver started talking again, Leevi flicked out the file so fast that it was just possible that he'd been practicing for hours, just in case he had an opportunity to show off. Because nothing impressed prisoners like being able to produce paperwork. “So no permanent mother figure?” he asked.
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Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 6:11 am
"It's not an insult. More that you're lucky," Oliver replied, tapping his knees slightly in thought. "Mmh? No, the longest anyone of them stayed was the girl pregnant with Hollin. I was ten when she showed up, Hollin was born a few months before I turned eleven and she stayed till the next spring." Oliver paused. "So about a year and a half... looking back I think she was a bit older then Hollin was now." That gal had been a tiny, frail thing.
"My father was ... is a dust addict. I don't know if he is alive, after the raid and not really finding it in me to care at the moment." Oliver hummed. "He got worse after the girl came and told him she was pregnant and that it was his. He actually went out and got completely stoned and ended up in an inert dust coma when Hollin was born."
"I ended up naming Hollin and taking care of him... he's a good kid." Oliver added, a tad defensive as if being raised by an eleven year old result of a crack addict and a street walker would make Hollin a bad kid.
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Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 2:05 pm
Outside Warden's, the terms 'soft and young' were... actually, no. They were still mildly creepy, since it wasn't exactly comforting to hear that. Hearing them from a murderer was worse though. “Nicest thing I've heard today since the appointment earlier said that I'd make a lovely pair of shoes. I'm pretty sure he wasn't talking about my ability to make shoes either,” Leevi said, since going, 'yeaaaaah... this is creepy' was probably a bad idea. It was like rule number one in the mindhealer's book: don't ever call your patients monsters or creepy.
H cntrl issues, Leevi wrote down carefully. Healing was, undoubtedly, Oliver's only method of control over anything. With that taken away from him, it seemed as though the man was forced to seek out other methods of control (such as unsettling the younger mindhealer or attempting to bargain with Jessan). Perhaps it was the lack of control in his childhood----constantly changing mother figure added to a lack of stability in his life-----that made him need to overcompensate for it later. “So not much of a father figure either,” he confirmed.
Yes. The kid who killed someone else was a 'good kid'.
Leevi's quill stopped and started again.
Prtctve. V. he wrote, underlining it twice for emphasis.
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Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 2:37 pm
Oliver snorted, amused. "Yeah... probably not the most graceful compliment I could give you but you have baby cheeks and curls. You look a lot younger than your age... which I'm guessing is at least early twenties." If mind healing was anything like actual physical healing, Leevi would at least be a journeyman to take cases by himself. "I've never heard shoes though... I had a woman threaten to tear off her my bits and feed them to a dog, but she was having a baby at the time." Oliver shrugged knowing well enough not to dwell on that topic too long.
"Their vocabulary can become rather impressive." Oliver snorted. "He tried to sell my brother to a brothel, so no. He really wasn't much of a father figure." He rubbed his cheek, grimacing slightly. "I was lucky he dusted himself into a coma most of the time."
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Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 10:28 pm
Sooo... it was a compliment then. Well, so long as they had that figured out, he supposed. Almost definitely an attempt to unsettle Leevi, he supposed. Unfortunately, if that's what it was, it was working. Maybe it was the whole shanking incident, but Leevi just wasn't sure if he could trust inmates ever again. Sad, wasn't it, when you couldn't trust another human being who simply happened to kill a few other humans over the years. Absolutely tragic.
“Yeah, amazing how shoving seven to eight pounds of a small human through one's genitalia can bring out the worst in people, temperament wise.” Alright, no father figure either. More notes were scribbled down in Leevi's rather crabbed handwriting. “Do you feel like the gang you were in was your family then?”
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Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2013 7:51 am
"I..." Oliver crackled, folding in on himself in laughter, hands against his side as he snorted and nearly fell of his chair in laughter. Ooh, oooh by the void were mindhealers dumb. He wiped his eyes, nearly upside down and pffed, green eyes wide and incredulous and laughing. "You know that was the most dimglow thing I have ever heard any of you say. Was the gang, who was run by an man who was rather insane my family? Shafting no. The b*****d flat out hated me."
"How can you even ask that question? That has to be the most dead glow question ever to ask if it was actually recorded why I killed those poor dead crackskulls." The gang being his family... right, and his father was secretly a bronze rider and he would have tea with the lady holder before breakfast every morning.
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Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2013 1:37 pm
The only result of the laughter was more industrious scribbling on the part of Leevi. Quite a few scribbles, in fact. Stupid question it was, but... well, it gave Leevi a lot of answers that he didn't know before.
“You do realize you just confessed, right?” he pointed out the obvious. As far as his notes went, all of the proof against Oliver came from his former gang-mates (which Leevi personally found to be just a bit disreputable). Confirmation was important. Leevi's eyes flicked towards the hour glass and he sighed as the last few grains of sand slipped through.
“Sorry, we're out of time. Do you want to pick this up next week? I think I've got a spare appointment sometime then.”
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Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2013 1:49 pm
Oliver shrugged, lips twitching as he peered up at Leevi. "I also kneecapped a guard in an attempt to escape custody and set fire to a large amount of dust. I would have ended up in the violent crime section by those two acts alone." He shrugged. " Also... here, I'm not trapped in Fadh's sick mind games. It is sort of a plus."
He righted himself and dragged a hand through the short buzz length hair. "I guess... not much else to do around here. Though you could use that time to take a self defense course." Oliver looked Leevi over and shook his head. "It might do you some good."
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