A group of Deregger rescues have recently been released from therapy. It took a while, there was a lot of pain to work through. They go to Respite Station to live, and find the owner, or whoever runs the place, to ask if they can work here.
@internutter/challenge-03549-i260-time-enough-and-care -- The New Guy
Two kind hands, it is said, can change the world around them. Hands aren't even necessary, but it does make the saying that much snappier. Respite Station abounds with them.
Not just the officers of the CRC, the Cogniscent Rights Committee, but also all the people staffing the immense garden station. There's need for all kinds of workers. Mediks are always in high demand. As are therapists.
Sometimes, what a Deregger refugee needs most is to see someone who's been through it all. Someone like them.
Someone with enough literacy to read directions and enough education to bus tables or carry things from one place to another. Someone who has escaped in body, and may still be working on the 'mind' part.
They also say that wherever you go, you take where you have been with you. Such is certainly true for Dereggers who escape their despotic CEO's.
Any room they enter, they look for the securicams first. They find the guards and look for their weapons. They look for the pictograms telling them what not to do or else and mildly panic when they can't find any.
Deregger reflexes.
Then they see someone like them with the Deregger Look. The way of almost always looking down. The habit of skirting around Security Representatives. The glances up at the securicams and the wariness of anyone approaching from the wrong angle.
They see someone just like them. An ally in experience. And other little details slide into awareness.
How this fellow Deregger expatriate is so much healthier than them. How they're happier in their life, regardless of the old habits. How they occasionally forget to check a securicam or wander too close to a Security Representative and don't panic about it.
How some of them have almost lost the old habits completely.
This is the Alliance saying, Here's someone we rehabilitated earlier. Welcome to the journey.
Some approach. Some introduce themselves. Some offer to talk over their choice of meal or beverage or both. And that, it's agreed, is better help than all the medicines and therapists' efforts combined.
Two kind hands may lift someone up, but it also takes a kind heart to embrace someone learning to change.
[Image by kayleigh harrington on Unsplash]
If you like my stories, please Check out my blog and Follow me. Or share them with your friends!
Send me a prompt [70 remaining prompts!]