☢ loyalty + how does y/c deal w upset people?

8/01/18

There was no distrust among them- or, as very little as possible. They got in trouble sometimes for getting stuff without Dimitri’s permission, or acquired stuff for eachother. Dagon had gotten Dimitri’s piercing some time back, and didn’t hear the end of it for days.
They all had their purpose, and they felt they had some amount of loyalty to each other. They had learned over time that fighting was fruitless and it was better to try to work in equilibrium. They were used to being alone for a long time. Working together to keep Dimitri okay and keep Dimitri’s body alive. Seeds of distrust were sewn with the alters sometimes. When Donovan had fully realized who he was, and wanted to explore himself more, Dimitri and Dagon had to rein the sexual alter in at the time. Even if Donovan had shifted into his own body, Dimitri’s body was still under there. Donovan’s purpose stemmed from Dimitri’s nervousness and inability to talk to others. The tom had massive anxiety when it came to expressing how he felt about someone and Donovan…. Was the opposite of that.
Dimitri wanted the best for the alters and felt he had some responsibility for them. He made them. They needed each other. They couldn’t just wrestle for control or do something nuts. Dagon held natural distrust of the new alters for a long time, but knew to eventually trust them. Dagon liked to think of them as a band of brothers or some weird family. That’s what they were, to an extent. They couldn’t be disloyal to eachother. Not when they shared a body and not when they all had to take turns. They had to be open with each other and had to share with each other. There was no hiding secrets from Dimitri- not when Dimitri could look into their memories if they had to. They pressed together and they tried to work together in symbios.

Dakota’s purpose was the father figure. At least, that’s what the alter believed. Part of his duty was keeping everyone in line and okay. The old, black persian was the great compromiser and to an extent, everyone’s grandpa. He made sure to be there first when someone was upset. Dakota’s purpose normally tied him to the headspace. That was why the elder rarely made an appearance. His duties mostly pertained to the headspace. He mostly started by wrapping his big, fluffy self around them, trying to give them licks and expressing, “hey. It’s okay. I’m here. Need a hug?” He tried his best. He was calm and well-meaning, stoic and large. He was actually shorter than the others but made up for it in his pure fluffiness and his presence among them. Maybe him just being there made the lot of them calmer. Dakota had some kind of expectation for them and wanted the best out of every alter. He tried to cheer them up and gave advice using his own stories (none of his stories were things that had actually happened to him. They were just programmed into him.) Dakota found the mentor figure to be best for him, and wouldn’t have it another way.

"speech"

2. hurt + when has y/c lied before?

Lying was something he was used to. He had never felt good about lying, but it was easier than explaining to everyone he met that he had multiple personalities and you had the fortunate happenstance of meeting Dimitri first. He’d been lying to the clan for at least a month before he finally confessed their problems. He just wondered how long it would take everyone to learn his Alters. Meeting a group meant wondering whether to introduce themselves as a singular or a the group. A single was just… easier and less complicated to appear as. It made him feel bad for his alters. They had to adjust and act like him. That hadn’t gone over so well in Snowbound. Revealing that they were a group was all around relieving. Dimitri was glad they wouldn’t have to pretend anymore, but he worried more the others stepping out of line or causing trouble.
They’re trapped.
Dimitri sometimes wondered how much control he should have over his alters, or let them run fee. Mostly because he had to let them be themselves and roam free, but, he wasn’t fine with them doing that in his body. He wasn’t fine with Donovan running around and being such a… Donovan. He didn’t wanna call the sexual alter a slutty, slutty man. He didn’t know how else to express it. He worried about Donovan getting into relationships without the group’s consent and didn’t even know what they would do when they would get into a relationship. Would they… take turns?
He didn’t know.
He remembered…. lying to his parents. He remembered Dagon lying to them, too. Especially to his father. Anything to get the large tom to leave him alone. He remembered once, his mother grabbing him an sinking her claws into her infant’s shoulders, shaking him, asking him what he had done with her drugs. His mother thought of the world as her cage and her drugs were once her escape to put her in a drunken stupor. She didn’t love her son. She never loved her son.
Dimitri. Stop.
He wanted so bad to believe his mother had loved him. The black and white tuxedo sometimes lulled him into a sense of false security, take him around her tail and holding him close, grooming his fur and telling him stories.
They didn’t know why she had pretended like that.
Maybe they never would.
His father had been worse in some ways- the abuse, the belief his dad would change. The lie that someday they would all be a happy family. Dimitri had lied to himself more than anyone his whole life.
“Why did they never love me? What did I do?” That question had haunted him as a kit. Sometimes it still did. Dimitri’s head turned, as if he was listening for someone’s voice.
“I don’t know, Dimitri.”
There was one lie he had told himself for a long time.
Dagon, as a prosecutor, had been initially modeled after his father.


"speech"

4. what does y/c fear most?

Sometimes, he imagines bad things happening to him. He would lay in his basket and stare at the wall, and the imagines him finding them. He can’t anymore. They… they ran away. He was pretty sure he preferred death over them coming back for him and forcing him to live with them again.
We didn’t fight back then. That was true. He was an adult now and they took care of themselves. They were his new family and all he needed to survive. He feared the idea of his parents returning. He feared someone would hurt them again and feared being hurt again.
Dimitri… couldn’t just die, either. He couldn’t do that to his alters. One of them was a baby! And- a sigh escaped him, tilting his head back, shutting his eyes, and rolling over. He could imagine it- his father breaking into his home and grabbing him by the shoulders, biting down on his scruff. A comment on his size, being dragged and being forced onto his stomach, being held down and struggling-
He recoiled as he felt a buildup of pressure and bared his teeth, standing up and heaved his breath, rolling his shoulders and shaking his head. “No. I don’t- I don’t wanna go right now. Stop.” He gasped, Dagon taking his place and the alter faltering a bit until he was able to stand up in Dimitri’s body. He panted and Dimitri’s tail wrapped around him. Dimitri’s fur stood up, but it seemed to ripple as Dimitri’s body lost it white marks and the tom’s eyes turned black.
Dagon feared the same. He’d taken the brunt of Dimitri's beatings as a boy. It was debatable what Dagon was originally was. They thought Dagon showed up when Dimitri reached a year old. They were the same age, so they had some fighting about the time about who was the original. They hadn’t fought for dominance since they were little. Dagon was different too, in that he grew with Dimitri’s age. Unlike Daisy, who was trapped as a child without a care in the world.
The touching. The pain. He shook slightly, pacing around the cabin and moving to his whiskey. His right arm started to shift into a monkey’s, twisting off the cap and pouring half a glass. His arm shifted back and he hopped onto the coffee table, bending down to start lapping up the up the whiskey. He let the acidic brew go down his throat and continued suckling. He kept drinking and drinking until he finished the glass and sat back, his mind numbing.
He drank for the numbness. It kept away the fear. It kept him calm as it destroyed their body. It made life, somehow, a little less scary for him.
No. No. He slapped the table with a paw and started shifting his arm again, trying to pour another glass as he felt more memories trying to bother him.


"speech"

6. Jealousy

jealousy + what’s the worst thing y/c do to somebody they care about?
Dagon felt jealousy. That was a part of him. When he was young, when it was just the two of them, he had been jealous of Dimitri. Because Dagon had to bear his pain and his suffering, but at what cost? No thank you? Dagon’s purpose being simplified to a trauma holder like- like- AGH! The tom found himself knocking over his whiskey and breathing heavily.
He fought with Dimitri when they were little. Fought over control and who had the right to be the core. The first personality. The main. Maybe some part of Dagon, deep down, had wanted it to be him. He wanted to be the main personality. It gave him validation and justification that he was real. He had just as much a right to the body as Dimitri.
When he was young, he knew his belief that he was the main personality was a lie after he had looked in a mirror. Dimitri didn’t look like him- they weren’t the same. He had been stuck wondering if he was real and at that time…. they couldn’t talk to eachother about their problems. Dagon was alone in Dimitri’s small city, isolated by tall buildings and with no one to talk to.
Maybe that was why Dakota was second. Dakota came to give them company and keep them in balance. The old tom had given them company. He’d known his name, and quickly took up the father role.
Dagon wondered certain things. If Heaven was real. Would they all die together and be separate souls? Would he go to hell or were they all tied to each other? Would they only be free of Dimitri’s body in death?
He stared at his whiskey and found a sigh leaving him. He was Dimitri’s persecutor. Sort of. His job was to knock Dimitri down so the others could build him back up again. But they were all stuck in the same body, so if he was destroying them, then what was the point? Control? Being self-destructive for fun?
Dagon moved to the whiskey and started shifting his arms, to pour some- no. He pounded the floor boards with his fists. No. Why couldn’t it have been me? Why did he have bear Dimitri’s burdens? He didn’t ask for this. He didn’t ask to be made! He didn’t- he didn’t- he broke his glass.
Dagon wheezed and grabbed the bottle, forcing it open and turning the rest of his legs into monkey legs, and hoisting up the bottle to swallow it down.
He was jealous of Dimitri. He hated that he got to be in charge, he got to make the rules. They shared trauma but Dimitri got to dictate who had a turn to use the body. He got to decide everything. And he? Dagon? Dagon never got so much as a thank you. He never got a thank you because it was his
He grabbed the table and tipped it over, releasing a scream from his body. He wanted what Dimitri had. He wanted to be in charge.

7. memories + what does y/c do to calm down when stressed?
Stress and trauma were familiar things to him, but they never stopped hurting. Dimitri still remembered some of his trauma and wasn’t ready to talk about it. Dimitri “my life is trauma, my body is small, my emotion is nervous” tom cat with no last name and no family to speak of probably would never talk about his problems. He’d told them about his… other personalities but didn’t plan on leasing any other information. Dimitri didn’t liked to bother anyone with his problems. Like he told Atbash- he was one of those people that liked to suffer silently.
When they were little, his main method of dealing with his trauma was letting Dagon take the blow and he would retreat into the headspace, Dakota trying to calm him down and Delta wrapping her tail around him, holding him in her arms and giving  him an affectionate lick on the top of his head.  Dimitri, as he got older, had tried other methods to deal with stuff. Other ways to deal with memories and their trauma. He’d tried breathing exercises, candles, calm music. Nothing much worked. What he got was an increased heart rate, higher blood pressure, and his brain panicking and basically calling: “CAN’T COPE, NEED MORE!” and his whole essence spinning and the feeling he was losing a part of himself. Parts of him being ripped or peeled away and would result in a new personality. The only thing to do was to let his brain do it’s thing and suffer….
Memories were fuzzy to him. They were a part of what he had experienced in his life. His brain had locked away some of these memories in the weird way his brain coped. Putting them on someone else. It was a around about way to deal with his problems, and was glad nobody had asked him about where his alters had came from and why he had them. He wasn’t quite sure himself. That was something that was too fuzzy for him to remember.
His alters… had been programmed with backstories. Some of them, at least. Or they had come up with their own.
Dakota had a wife. They’d grown old together and loved each other. He imagined they had grandchildren or had and took care of children, giving Dakota his ability to take care of kids so well.
Divertimento liked to imagine he was… human, possibly. As impossible as that was. Perhaps he had been a party planner or a board game maker or just… something fun! An inventor who did his best and made stuff.
Delta imagined she had been a soldier. She held onto to some of Dimitri’s trauma too, she was a protector and held onto some of the physical problems. She imagined she’d been trained in physical combat by adults and then trained in the art of holding the claw-like weapons from her mouth and using them for stabbing.
Donovan knew he’d been someone who used to be shy and nervous about himself- maybe that was to help him empathize with Dimitri. He had grown to become more confident with his body to do.
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8. alone
He felt like no one was there for him when he was young. When the suffering started. He remembered his father, a large brown tom,  He… didn’t quite remember how he made Dagon or what led up to it- he remembered the pain of splitting. It hurt when Dagon split, more so than the others. He had figured that that was because Dagon was a persecutor. Before that? He’d been curled alone in the trash heap he had called a bed. Cardboard and little bits of metal that stuck in his sides.
He remembered not knowing it was wrong, for a long time. He remembered being accepting of what his father had done to him. His dad cooing and trying to coax his crying son. That it was suppose to hurt and that this was okay. He remembered trying so hard to appease him and do what he said.
He was never able to make him happy. When he tried to seek help from others, they had shoved him off and told him to ask his mom. He asked his mom, tried to get an explanation if this was the right thing and if it was suppose to hurt. His mom told him to just do whatever his father said as he watched his mother continue in her drunken stupor.
He wondered if he ever had siblings. Cats normally had more than one kitten, why didn’t he have any brothers or sisters? Why was he alone? He asked his mother about this once. Her reply? “Yeah. I don’t know. Probably dead or somethin’.” So, he had siblings?
If so, why didn’t she care?
Maybe that was something he had wanted for a long time. He didn’t want to be alone. He wanted a family and friends that loved him and were around him. Maybe that was why he had started boxing up feelings and started imagining friends and other people to talk to. Nice people. Anything to escape. Anything at all. Dimitri had wanted a way out.
Dagon found that way out to be running away. He didn’t regret it and he much more doubted that Dimitri would care. They had nothing to their name and no one to rely on on Eve after escape, they were a lonely kitten. It was the four of them- Dimitri, Dagon, Dakota, and Delta. That period was fuzzy for him. He knew he had met someone in their that had given them their journal and told them to read and write. Another stranger had told them about God. Even so… childhood had been lonely. Fighting other, larger cats in the city for food. Being thin and dirty. Donovan fighting to keep them clean. Discovering their shapeshifting and having the opportunity to become top cat among the city… But Dagon and Delta said they had to move to new territories. Somewhere they wouldn’t attract attention. They’d been alone and hadn’t stepped into the woods until they were 15 moons old.

9. Change
They were used to change. That didn’t mean settling down and doing nothing wasn’t a nice idea. Dimitri changed everyday. One of his alters came out? After revealing himself, it was easier on the alters now. They would shift into their true selves. The alters, in Dimitri’s body, suffered from body dysphoria. Daisy stumbled around in Dimitri’s form- he was bigger and taller than him. Darby didn’t feel the same amount of strength. Dagon didn’t like his small form. Delta… tried to ignore his parts but knew that they didn’t ultimately matter. So on….
Change was familiar to him, that’s the point here. His life changed for the better when they ran away from Dimitri’s parents. Whether or not their lives were somewhat worse after leaving was debatable. They were fighting for their lives and starving every other night. Something they had to push for as Darby joined the team and was in charge of scavenging and keeping them from starving. That was part of why the alter was so stubbornly brave. He didn’t mind getting into trouble and getting them hurt so much. Anything for food.
It was around that time Dimitri gained access to the headspace, and he had confessed something to the brave alter.
“I don’t really mind dying anymore, Darby. It definitely scares me… but my life has never really mattered to anyone. If you get us killed, I don’t think I would mind too much.”
Even though Dimitri had said that when he was young, and that couldn’t guarantee how he felt now. However, it still bothered Darby sometimes.