xp_logs | LOG: [Nathan, Rachel, Haller] Ghosts (Reply)

After the quarry, Nathan attempts to destress by spending some quality time with Rachel. Although his first encounter with the new counselor reopens the wound all over again, it turns out Haller's 'speciality' leaves him imminently suited to address at least part of Nathan's problem.

"If you fly away, your mother is going to have my head," Nathan murmured, crouching beside the baby sitting in the snow. Rachel squealed at him joyfully and stuck her mittened hands into the snow, coming up with handfuls that she peered at in fascination. In her snowsuit, with the ears on her hat, she was absolutely adorable.

Jim had only been intending to return a few used dishes, but he'd been mildly startled to sense the shape of a familiar mind nearby before he'd even entered the kitchen. Frowning slightly, he used the handful of moments spent in loading the industrial dishwasher to seek out the source with a tentative psychic probe. A glance out the window a moment later provided visual confirmation of his findings.

Rachel, and a man who could only be her father. Jim hesitated for a moment, then moved to retrieve one of the winter coats he'd left on the kitchen's painfully overburdened coatrack. He hadn't been planning on an introduction today, but as long as the opportunity presented itself . . .

"Heehee!" Rachel squealed, and Nathan tilted his head at her, then deliberately reached out with his telekinesis and spun the loose snow into a small whirlwind. "OOOOOOOO!" Rachel shrieked in pure joy, levitating a few inches off the ground.

"We really need a leash on you, don't we?" Nathan asked, very carefully preparing to snare her telekinetically if she really took off.

"I think that was my fault," Jim said, smiling apologetically as he closed the kitchen door behind him. "We've already met, and I made the mistake of encouraging her."

Nathan blinked and looked up at the unfamiliar person approaching. He had been so closely focused on Rachel - it was such a temptation to stay focused on her, when her mind was so restful, so beautiful - that he hadn't been paying attention to the rest of his surroundings.

"Uhhhh." Think, Dayspring. "You would be... the new counselor, right? David?" He mustered an apologetic look. "Been a little distracted this last week..."

"Don't worry about it." Jim wandered out to join them, the snow crunching under his footsteps. He squatted in the snow a few feet away from Rachel to drop himself closer to her eyelevel. Hopefully it meant she would no longer feel the need to levitate. "But yeah, I'm David. You're Mr. Dayspring, right?"

"Nathan, please," Nathan murmured a bit wryly as Rachel sank back towards the snow. "My last name is a complicated and confusing issue and I prefer to ignore it entirely."

Jim laughed. "I know the feeling. I was wondering why the prodigy here ended up with Kinross." He met Rachel's big grey eyes. #And here I thought you were just laying the groundwork for a nefarious double-life.#

"Because that's what we both wanted her to be. Moira and I, I mean," Nathan said, taking the question seriously. He didn't have the energy for beating around the bush, and it was a perfectly fair question. "My little Scots lady with family that goes back to when rocks were soft, right, Ray?" Rachel bobbed a little in the air, staring at her father, and the joy and affection she customarily projected at the world was magnified by a factor of ten as she reached out to touch Nathan's mind in response.

The ripple of affection that washed over Jim was like walking into an unexpected current of warmth in the middle of the snow. The acuity of his awareness left him a little unbalanced. "Sometimes it's . . . good to start over," he said, instinctively withdrawing a little further behind his shields. Then he shook his head, laughing a little at his own paranoia. "I don't think she's got anything to worry about. Seems to me she's already got the world eating out of the palm of one adorable pink hand."

"Her parents do enough worrying for her," Nathan said, reaching out his arms. Rachel floated into them, and he rose. "Walk?" he asked, and she made a little burble of agreement. "Want to join us?" He proferred the invitation a bit hesitantly, but he should be trying to be more social, really.

Jim smiled, straightening. "Wouldn't mind it. I've been going over student dossiers all day. After the mental numbness actual cold is almost a relief."

"It's strange not to have had much start-of-term work to do," Nathan said, shifting Rachel in his arms as they started down one of the walking trails. "I'm doing a few independent studies this term, but it's a far cry from the days of six classes."

Jim chuckled, shaking his head. "I'm grateful I can still claim technical student status. Application I'm fine with. Teaching, well .. . I'm a little worried about the day Charles ever decides my education is complete." He scanned the trees that lined the trail, traces of last night's snow clinging to the branches to throw the naked bark in stark relief. "It's weird being back after all this time. And even stranger being on staff. It's . . . disorienting."

"This was all new to me, when I came," Nathan said as Rachel made a noise and tried to turn upside down in his arms. Tolerantly, he upended her, and she gave a shriek of delight. "Became home... pretty quickly."

"Charles seems to be good at promoting that." The other man's solemn, almost resigned commitment to indulging his daughter's whims made him grin. "I've been moved around a lot. The time I spent here wasn't the happiest, but . . . it's good to be back."

Nathan waited until Rachel gave the 'let me up' squeak and then righted her in his arms. She chortled and clung to his coat, and Nathan smiled. "Sorry," he said, his eyes sliding sideways to David for a moment, somewhat sheepishly. "I've been... well. Discovering how successful it is, distraction-wise, to lose myself pandering to her every whim. It's been a rough couple of weeks."

"So I had heard." Even if he hadn't been told as much by Moira, Jim wouldn't have been able to miss it. By some sad quirk of fate, the flight Jim had booked almost two months ago had been scheduled to arrive on what had become the day of the funeral. "I'm sorry about your friend," he said, and the regret in his voice was genuine.

Nathan's jaw clenched, just for an instant. Rachel made a woeful noise and his expression smoothed out again. "Thank you," he said, then made a face, kissing Rachel on the top of her head. "That's a strange thing to say, isn't it? Thank you, in response to an expression of regret. That never made sense to me. But when you say things like 'So am I' people tend to think you're not dealing." He tried to make it sound light and couldn't quite manage it.

Jim gave him a slight smile. "It's not that strange. It . . . knowing you aren't the only one takes you out of yourself, a little. Doesn't really help what you're feeling, but at least it's there intellectually. That's what I always found, at least." Jim sighed, turning his eyes back to the path. "Words aren't any use against that kind of loss, but sometimes the effort of saying them is worth something."

"Maybe you're right. It would be too easy..." Nathan trailed off, all too aware of the baby in his arms. But then, she was locked in a staring contest with a squirrel jumping from tree to tree, following them, and he thought that if he kept his thoughts level, it might be fine. "I was in contact with his mind," he said somewhat vaguely. The other man was a telepath; he'd know what Nathan meant, most likely. "Words have sometimes felt like the only anchor I have, since..."

Jim shifted his gaze back to Nathan, and found the man's admission left him more saddened than surprised. The way Moira had spoken of it had made him wonder, but she'd given only the most basic details. It hadn't taken telepathy to see that the most basic details were all she could bear. "It's . . . a horrible thing when the world in your mind feels more real than the world outside of it," he said at last. "I understand what that's like, better than I'd ever wish on anyone."

"I should be getting used to it, at this point. The dead not really being dead, in my mind..." Nathan actually smiled, if tiredly. "And that would lead to explanations of dead precognitive ghosts from the future and usually I try to let people settle in a little more firmly before I go there."

The answering laugh took even Jim by surprise. "When it comes to astral phenomena, I'm a little more credulous than most. I know Charles probably told you I was here to pursue training for psychic rehabilitation -- did he happen to mention what my speciality was?"

Nathan gave him a thoughtful look. "He may have - to be honest, I haven't been absorbing things very well. Walking around in a bit of a fog. What is your specialty?"

Jim smiled faintly. "Psychic trauma. Which includes telepathically experienced death-trauma, among other things." His smiled widened the slightest bit. "So you're welcome to try me."

Rachel abruptly shrieked, and the squirrel let out an alarming squeal as it suddenly went flying off its branch and landed in the snow. Immediately, it was scrambling back up the tree trunk, chittering indignantly at the baby, who erupted in those alarming baby giggles. Nathan, in the midst of replying, raised an eyebrow and very slowly held Rachel up to his eye level.

"Stop," he said very clearly, "being evil."

"Mwahah!"

Jim laughed again, a softer sound this time. "I think I'll be trying to stay on the good side of the world's future despot. Although frankly, I'm not so sure flinging a squirrel every time the conversation gets too serious is such a bad trait in a tyrant."

Nathan shook his head and resettled Rachel in his arms. "She has a funny sense of timing. I'm noticing it already." Rachel settled down, seemingly content with her act of squirrel-flinging, and Nathan looked sideways at the younger man.

"I wasn't being facetious when I said I should be used to it," he said. "I've... gotten into the habit of giving the dead something of a telepathic afterlife. At first, it was these precognitive ghosts. They were real, they were just... from two thousand years in the future."

"Dead who hadn't been born yet?" Jim said, curious almost in spite of himself. He didn't want his questions to reopen old wounds, but this was a type of trauma he'd never encountered before. It was hard to suppress the clinical interest.

"Precognition is my secondary mutation. It developed a bit of a... kink, not long after the worldwide headache." He didn't know how much the other man actually knew about the incident at Alkali Lake. "I developed... well, closer to a telepathic connection with a specific clan of people in that era. Unfortunately they were in the middle of being wiped off the face of the planet at the time." Nathan mustered up a faint smile. "Genocide from the inside out is not a pleasant experience."

Jim winced, both at the memory of the event and the implication of what Nathan had said. "No, it wouldn't be. So . . . you made contact with them as they were being annihilated. What happened then?" From what Nathan had said Jim had a general idea, but the event itself had two different outcomes. Neither was pleasant.

"I watched them die," Nathan said, wrapping an extra layer or two of shielding around Rachel, who seemed blissfully ignorant about the content of the conversation. "Started having physiological effects -cardiac arrest and the like, until there was a... transfer. Then I had her... the ghost of the leader of these people in my mind, for almost a year and a half. Her, and memories of all of her people so strong that they took on independent lives of their own."

He shrugged a little, bouncing Rachel a bit. She cooed at him. "I learned a lot from them. We made our peace with each other, were actually going along quite happily, until I started to develop epilepsy. It was the psionic overcharge, doing cumulative damage to my system. She wanted to leave, and got the chance to go out in style not long before Christmas. It's been very empty in my head ever since."

Jim nodded slowly. "There are . . . two types of damage associated with this sort of experience, generally speaking," he said, a little distantly. "When a psi links with someone who's dying, he receives impressions -- experiences thoughts as they slip away, feels the tug on his consciousness as the other person's death tries to drag him along with it. The mind abhors a vacuum. It pulls back, violently, to keep itself from going over the edge. The psychic recoil, combined with suddenly facing a void where there was life just a moment ago --that's death-trauma." His hand went to his jeans pocket, withdrew a much-abused pack of cigarettes. He extracted one, put it in his mouth, and lit it with a lighter he produced a moment later. He took a drag and continued.

"This is where it gets less clear-cut. Same experience, different effect. The first is the normal sort, if there can be a normal for something like this . . . well, it's fairly straightforward. Experiencing each thought as it winks out is to the brain like a flash-bulb is to the retina of the eye. It leaves after-images. The quality varies depending on the circumstances, but basically it means that, for a while, the psi's brain retains what it saw. Just a copy of a pattern that fades over time." Jim took another drag, turning from Nathan and the baby to exhale the smoke. "The second possibility is less common. Sometimes the imprint is so strong it actually takes on a life of its own, separate and independent. It's possible for two living matrixes to exist in the same mind, but the energy it takes to sustain the extra pattern has to come from somewhere -- in this case, the mind of the psi. It's like two divers sharing the same tank of air: a temporary solution, but impossible to maintain in the long run. It usually results in the complete deterioration of one or both of the minds involved." Jim turned his attention away from the cigarette in his hand to glance back at Nathan. "In your case, it sounds like the patterns you took on came with their own share of power, which probably mitigated the effects somewhat. You're incredibly lucky in that respect, if nothing else."

Nathan nodded slowly. "To me it was all about learning to live with them," he said after a moment. "Not wondering how they were there... can you get used to doing that?" he asked, a bit uncertainly. "To retaining a strong imprint. Because GW... my friend wasn't the first of my friends to die this year. I've seen some of the others from time to time, too. Although... not for a while, I suppose."

Jim shook his head with a small, tight smile. "You can learn to live with them, but you can't maintain them indefinitely. You can hold your own pattern or someone else's. Not both. Not if you want to keep your own mind intact. And even if you're willing to do that to yourself, if the person you're trying to hold was your friend, he won't thank you for it." He rolled the cigarette in fingers gone numb and clumsy from the cold, scattering ash across the snow. "Trust me on that."

"I need to stop losing friends," Nathan said quietly. "That would be the solution, wouldn't it?" Stop seeing them die in front of him. "It's just so hard to want to let go. Even when you're there, and you see it, and you know they're gone."

"But in a way, they never are. Not if you were linked. The pattern falls apart, but that doesn't mean the pieces are gone. That's one of the things that makes recovering from death-trauma so hard. You can't move on because the dead are still with you." Even if you don't want them to be.

"Then I'm probably screwed," Nathan said tiredly, finding the conversation profoundly depressing all of a sudden. Rachel sniffled at him and then smacked him in the mouth. Nathan sighed at her.

Jim almost snorted his cigarette. "At least that it wasn't a squirrel," he managed once he'd gotten the coughing fit under control. "She doesn't have much tolerance for drama, does she?" He wiped his eyes and tossed the remainder of the cigarette, grinding it into the snow with one heel. He didn't need to be smoking right now. It had been a long time now since he'd even felt the urge -- the pack was supposed to be a comfort, not a habit.

"I think she was put on this earth to remind me not to take myself so seriously." Rachel blinked up at him with wide, thoughtful gray eyes, and he kissed the top of her head, right between the little knitted ears on her hat. She made a happy little noise and cuddled.

"I haven't sat down with Charles since what happened," Nathan said. "I'm gathering from the sounds of it that I should, whether or not the echo's fading..."

"Never a bad idea," Jim nodded. He hesitated for a moment, then decided simply offering couldn't hurt. "Although if you're worried about it, I'd probably be able to get a decent sense of what's going on with a topical scan. I've had enough experience with this particular issue to be able to identify the signs without actually needing to go into a mind."

Nathan blinked at him, then eyed Rachel. "What do you think, munchkin? Should Dad let the nice man take a look at his brain?" Rachel blew a raspberry at him gleefully. "Would be good to know if it is something I should be going to Charles about," Nathan admitted, looking back at him. "I so often feel like I'm an attention sponge."

Jim laughed. "I required almost two years of private sessions before I was able to function anywhere near consistantly in the real world. I don't think Charles would begrudge you a few hours a week." He turned to face the other man fully, giving the child in his arms a reassuring smile. "Don't worry," he said, half to her and half to her father, "it's non-invasive. I don't know how sensitive she is, so she may notice some activity, but nothing that feels like daddy's mind is being messed with."

"I've got her shielded, not to worry," Nathan said, and thinned out his own shields a little. He'd been keeping them pretty tight, not wanting to leak what he was feeling to any innocent bystanders. "I'm more worried about her figuring out how to imitate you. She's a terribly apt mimic. I blame Jean for the flying."

The other man grinned. "She already does it. All telepaths do, on a subconscious level. The only reason I'm so good at using it as a diagnostic tool is because the psychic background noise most telepaths have to deal with tends to overshadow passive details like the shape of the mind. It's largely a matter of recognizing what you're looking at."

Rachel blinked big eyes at her father, then gazed at Jim, making an oddly kittenish noise. Nathan waggled an eyebrow at her, and she smiled hugely. "I was largely untrained until I got here, telepathically speaking," he said to the younger man, although he didn't break eye contact with his daughter. "Could shield, more or less, and I was good at picking up stray thoughts, but mostly I used it as an early warning system."

Jim nodded. "Mine developed atypically. After the initial manifestation, all telepathic awareness turned inwards rather than outwards -- I had to learn sensitivity. It's still not natural, but it did have the benefit of forcing me to analyze the things most psis use instinctively." He indicated Rachel with a small dip of the head. "The munchkin there is actually one of the few people I can sense without actively trying. You can understand my suspicions of impending overlordship."

"Heehee..."

"You're not helping your case, my innocent little angel," Nathan said, and got another raspberry for his pains. "So," he said. "See anything interesting?"

Jim's lips quirked at the display of shameless self-incrimination, but he refrained from comment. "This should only take a minute," he said, and closed his eyes for concentration. A moment to center himself, and he tentatively lowered his shields to allow his telepathy to bleed outwards.

Avoiding Rachel's mind was an effort; it shone pure and uncomplicated against the relative isolation of the grounds, and the desire to focus on it presented the same danger to him as staring into the sun. Jim felt more reluctance than he cared to admit to fix his attention on her father, but considerably less effort to maintain it.

Jim had seen many forms of trauma in his time, but rarely so many collected in a single mind. The first thing that struck him were the traces of some kind of artificially imposed structure. Some fragments bore signs of past repair, but whatever rebuilding had been accomplished had ultimately been demolished with the rest of it. Beyond this there were traces of more organic but equally foreign influences; knowledge and memories disconnected from the mind they occupied, drifting like asteroids in loose orbit. Some of them displayed damage that indicated they'd been introduced through death-trauma, torn from their original context and transplanted here, but others . . . others had no discernable connection to anything, as if someone had cut a piece out of a picture and pasted it onto an entirely different canvas. Astral expression of precognition? Jim had never met a precog with any range greater than a few hours, and then the knowledge had involved only events the precog himself would experience first-hand. Those fragments had been absorbed into the body of his psyche once the events occurred. Jim had no frame of reference to judge what the mind would do with images from events that would occur centuries after the precog's death.

But it was the main body of the psyche that was most painful to look at. Even normal minds had the tendency to blur, if not bury, memories that were unwanted or unimportant over time, but from Nathan's huge chunks had actually been excavated. And not by Nathan himself. The contrast between external and internal effort was as distinct as the difference between a hole dug by hand and one dug by a spade. Jim could still make out the signs, even beneath the scar tissue that had formed. The damage was too precise, too artificial. The scars that had developed to close the wounds were natural, the mind's instinctive need to fill the gaping holes a foreign influence had left behind.

Abruptly stricken by an overwhelming sense of voyeurism, Jim forced himself to turn away from the damage and seek out what he'd come looking for. It wasn't difficult; in fact, the very cohesiveness of the alien imprint on the constantly frayed and repaired psyche of the host-mind made it almost impossible to miss. Jim looked away and drew his shields back into place, his breath hitching sharply as the too-intimate awareness abruptly ceased.

Nathan raised an eyebrow. "I guess the answer's yes," he murmured. "Some of that damage is new, or at least recently uncovered. Charles has been trying to figure out what precisely my... well, I had family who liked to play with my brain when I was a child, let's just leave it at that for now. You wouldn't have been able to see the worst of that scarring a few months ago. There were blocks overlaying it." He tilted his head at David. "Did you see what you were looking for?" he asked a bit more hesitantly.

"Yes," Jim said, consciously turning his thoughts from the nausea he felt. He gave his permission. If didn't want anyone to see it he wouldn't have given his permission. "I don't think you have anything to worry about. The imprint's been . . . active, to an extent, but that's a normal consequence of trauma like this. Your mind acknowledges two strong patterns, so it's giving each the opportunity to function to the best of its ability, but I didn't see any evidence that it's in danger of gaining independence. There's already some sign it's beginning to fade. It's a little unusual that the matrix is still so distinct, but the imprint was . . . strong." Because the loss of a familiar mind left a deeper impression, and the mind Nathan linked to had been a friend's.

"He's around less," Nathan said, his eyes very distant for a moment. "And not for as long as he was last week... it's strange, but part of me thinks he just wants to make sure that I'm all right."

"It may just be an echo, but while the pattern holds, there's not much difference between what you see and the person you knew." It was a dangerous thing to admit -- Jim had known some people who would have used such a statement to disregard the inevitable cost and try to hold on -- but somehow he felt like he owed Nathan the truth, even if the lie would only have been one of omission. His hand made an abortive move for the cigarettes, but Jim forced it into his jacket pocket instead. "Usually I tell people this is your mind's way of protecting itself from shock, giving you time to come to terms with it. That's not a lie. But there's also no reason to believe your friend isn't working to the same end."

"It would be like him," Nathan said more quietly. "Perfectly in character, actually." He shook his head, trying to shake off the renewed sense of loss. "I'll... keep this in mind. No pun intended. And it makes sense. This was so sudden... there was a lot that was left unsaid."

"There always is. No matter when it happens." Jim turned his gaze to the bell-clear sky, so pale blue it was almost grey. He felt strangely hollow, as if the wave of nausea that had come and gone had taken the weight in his chest along with it. Empty, but calm for all of that. "It . . . don't let yourself think of it as a cruel illusion. Use it for what your mind intended it to be. And what your friend wants it to be, too, maybe. Take whatever peace you can find in it. Most people never have the chance. It'd be a shame to waste it."

Rachel made a noise, and Nathan looked down at her, then touched the tip of her nose. She giggled. "I think someone's starting to feel the chill," he said, then looked up at David with a somewhat hesitant, yet real smile. "Thank you," he said quietly.

"You're welcome." Jim turned to meet eyes the same color as the sky above them and returned the smile. Just as genuine, if a little sadder. "But I wish you didn't have to be."