Tree of Knowledge
Summary: Ignorance is bliss. Set (tentatively!) post-"Sign of the Craft"
Rating: PG
A/N: And I thought the first few were hard! This one damn near killed me, plus it turned out to be inconsistent with "Old Maid." However, I like it too much to scrap it entirely. The ending quotation is from Genesis 1:16-17 (New Revised Standard Version.)
For meris ann, who encourages me.
When I was a girl, I used to read fantasy novels. You know the type – the sword-and-sorcery books in which the heroine has a special Gift she must come to terms with. She always ends up on a journey to learn about her powers, and then she returns to save her world and accept her rightful place within it.
Now, more than ever, I know that those books were a lie.
There are plenty of Craft-using Hunters that Solomon considers a higher 'rogue risk' than me. Compared to telekinesis or an elemental Craft like Robin's, my 'scrying' must seem relatively benign. I certainly can't use it to kill or maim, or as an aid to stealing. If I were to be Hunted, I would have no defense, none at all. Sometimes, though, I think mine is the most corrupting of them all.
The thing most people don't realize is that human beings are inherently self-centered creatures. Everyone, consciously or unconsciously, wants the world to revolve around him or her. We tend to shape our own perception of ourselves based on what other people think of us. And so, we always want to know how others see us. My Craft allows me to tap into that, to invade someone's thoughts. I rarely find anything good there.
At first it was almost a game. I wander around a bar or a bookstore, picking up items and reading what I could from them. It was so easy to learn that the guy on the corner barstool just wanted to drink himself into unconsciousness, while his friend was more interested in not going home alone. The woman who has just put down The Handmaid's Tale was pregnant and unhappy about it. The girl browsing the poetry shelves was caught up in her first great love affair ... and so on.
Soon I started reading people I knew. That was more troubling, because most of them were people I cared about, and I wanted their thoughts to be about me. Instead, I learned about my mother's frustrations, my parents' fights, my elder brother's restlessness and boredom. Fear and pain left deep stains on objects, and I started to draw back, to shield myself. But I still wanted to test out my powers, and I only had myself to experiment on. That was the worst of all.
There are places in the human mind, where conscious thought has no place. Once I looked into those places ... there was nowhere left to run. I pulled away from emotion, channeled all my energy into my work, because I had seen what was within my heart, and it terrified me. All the indoctrination during my SOLOMON training was unnecessary after that shock. Classes with Father O'Reilly, my Inquisition – all child's play after the horror of that one moment, when I learned what I could become.
And the Lord commanded the man, "You may freely eat of every tree in the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.