Thursday, Haller's office

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After a long day of culinary therapy, Lorna disposes of the food via following up on her threat to feed Haller. They have a rambling conversation about almost nothing but manage to communicate quite a bit.



Lorna looked around the kitchen at the almost inevitable overabundance of food and decided she really needed a new coping strategy. Not that the students weren't grateful but it really did do terrible things to the grocery bills. And just making the food didn't really help when she was this upset. Still, Lorna didn't want to talk to anyone well meaning just yet.

After a moment, she smiled and gathered up a plateful of samples. There was a new counsellor and he'd admitted he was too skinny. It was like an invitation and a duty all at the same time.

Jim glanced up at the rap on his office door, then at the wallclock. It was almost 5. He was prone to staying late when his morning or afternoon had been occupied by a session with Charles, but most of the kids didn't come around this late in the day. "Come in," he called, saving the document he'd been working on and pushing himself away from his desk.

Lorna pushed open the door, both hands full of plates apparently balanced as precariously as a waitress in an over-crowded diner. "Hi! I'm Lorna. You're the tall one who needs to eat, yes?" she chirped at him, blissfully shoving down her more miserable feelings.

"Um -- yes," Jim said, momentarily taken aback by the appearance of an unknown woman his own age. "I'm David." He noted the green hair, replayed the statement, and took a guess. "You would be Lorna?"

"What was your first clue?" She stopped in front of his desk and frowned down at it. "You're going to need to clear that off. You don't have any wacky dietary restrictions do you? Chocolate doesn't make you see dead people or anything?"

"No. I'm surprisingly normal in that respect. Something had to be, I guess." He looked at the plate in her hands, then at his desk, and automatically moved to obey her declaration. He'd found it was safer to do what he was told in these situations. "Jamie tried to warn me, but you were still in Hawaii. I thought I was safe."

"I usually find a way." Once there was sufficient space, Lorna set down the plates and produced a set of silverware wrapped in a napkin. "There's a little bit of a column a and pretty much all of column b here so if you don't like anything, let me know." She flopped back in to one of the other chairs in the room and dragged her knee up to her chest, resting her chin on it. "So how are you liking the job?"

"It's keeping me busy. In a good way." Jim stared at the plate. His limited culinary experience had not provided him with the proper background to identify most of what Lorna had just presented him with. Whatever it was, it seemed well-rounded. He could identify plenty of component vegetables, at least. It was when they were combined with other things and covered in mysterious sauces that he was at a loss. Jim unrolled the napkin and remembered enough etiquette to place it on his lap, glancing back up at Lorna before he began to eat. "Um, thank you," he said belatedly.

She waved a hand. "Coping mechanism of mine. Cooking. Feeding people. You probably noticed the tantrum my ex-fiance threw a couple of days ago. When I suffer, everyone wins. Try the canapés."

He had, but he hadn't been planning on mentioning it; after his conversation with Scott earlier this week Jim hadn't been eager to take his chances with Lorna. Instead of pushing, he only smiled faintly. "Ah, coping by displacement. I'd throw a stone, but I'd break the wall of my glass house. Um" he looked back at his plate, embarrassed, "which one is a canape?"

"The little rolls there. Yeah, I thought I should acknowledge it otherwise, hi, this is the elephant in the room, pretend you don't see him. But don't worry, I'm not here to whine and moan over it. I'm just here to feed you." She dragged the other leg up to join the first, now totally curled into the chair, her attire absurdly still more suited to Hawaii than New York. "You really are horribly thin, aren't you? You look like I did two years ago."

Jim smiled at her. "I'm glad you didn't see me when I got here. I got a little over-involved in work. I tended to forget the little things. Like eating." He tried a tentative bite of the canape, a little wary. His fears turned out to be unfounded. "This is good," he said appreciatively. "You make these a lot?"

"Sometimes. They're pretty quick and easy so it's usually not on my list of culinary therapy recipes but I was having to make do with what was in the kitchen. Dani is going to murder me when she sees the grocery list I made for her." Lorna grinned. "When I'm not here they get to stop shopping at the specialty stores."

"Speciality stores? This place must induce a lot of coping," Jim grinned, finishing off the appetizer. "How long have you been around? At Xavier's, I mean, not back from Hawaii. I wasn't what you'd call social when I was here, but I'm pretty sure I would've remembered food like this." He attacked something be-sauced with cautious but increasing enthusiasm.

"Um, three years this last December, I think. It's what now, oh-six? I graduated high school in '02, spent a semester at USC then decided that I really wanted to learn more about my powers so I enrolled here. I could afford the time thanks to all my APs and such." She was watching him eat rather closely, noting what he liked versus what he was sampling and leaving and making mental adjustments. "Of course, then I got sidetracked by everything and just now am getting back to school."

"Over-achieving honor student?" Jim laughed, prizing out a piece of elaborately sliced carrot. "I used to be that. Or tried to. I really should see about my GED while I'm here. My education was a little sporadic. I only made it to . . . fifth grade, I think? Thank god for telepathic recall."

"Over-achieving school actually." Lorna laughed, "I'd have been downright strange if I hadn't taken at least three APs senior year. My GPA was only a 4.2 weighted. Not really that impressive when you think about it. Telepaths are seriously lucky. I'd have died for your memory back in AP Econ."

"The ability to remember everything down to the flicker of a light and the stains on the tile isn't as much fun as you'd think. The stuff you don't want to remember usually stands out the most." Jim concentrated on slicing a piece of beef into neat squares. It had some kind of marinade. Wine, maybe? "But it's useful. If I'm concentrating when I read a book I can quote it word-perfect years later. It's probably good I never made it any further in public school. You don't want to be the kid who wrecks the grade-curve when you're this skinny. Mm." He indicated the beef. "What's this?"

"That's the way everyone's memory is. I have entirely too vivid memories of...well, you're eating so I won't go there." Lorna leaned forward, "Beef marsala. It's not too tough is it? I was making it up as I went along."

"You'd be surprised how little disturbs me anymore. Most of the kids have been. And this is good." Jim wasn't sure he'd recognize something wrong if he found it, but he didn't much mind. The beef seemed well within the normal parameters of beefiness, anyway. "You improvised? The most I can do is change the setting on a microwave."

"Well, we didn't have any veal. So I shifted the recipe for what we did have and...yeah. I don't like microwaves." Lorna shifted in the chair, kicking her legs over the side. "It's not really proper mealtime discussion even for the unsquickable. Besides, it's also old news."

The telepath gave her a quick smile from over the plate. "Well, if you ever feel the need to trade trauma, feel free. We've discovered that when it comes to psychological scar-tissue I can go a few rounds with Nathan. Which is something we probably shouldn't think too deeply about." He crinkled mismatched eyes at her before turning back to exploring the platter. "The excruciatingly personal talk isn't required. I'm not that sort of counselor." He collected the last of the beef at the end of his fork, mopping up the marinade before raising it to his mouth. "Whatever you did to the recipe, I like it. How long are you here for? Do you know?"

"See, there are only a couple of things you could say that are more frightening than that because Nate is rather freaksome about his amount of trauma. I'm both impressed and dismayed at you." She waved her hand at his plate again, pulling the fork (and his hand with it) over to a dense chocolate cake, "Try that. It's a new recipe. I'll probably be here for a couple of weeks. I'm waiting to hear back from a program in Berkeley. Fierce competition and all that but I'm the only applicant who can feel the shift in a magnetic field. The rest require expensive equipment."

"Many people have that reaction to my relationship with Nate. I am something of a freak." A background which, fortunately, had given him more than adequate experience with stern women determined to enforce actions they classified as for Jim's own good. He obligingly separated a sliver of the cake, pausing to take in the flourishes in the frosting. Jim raised an amused eyebrow. "You must be coping with things 24/7 to get to this level of intricacy," he noted. "What are you majoring in?"

"Geo-physics. And yes and no. I mean, lots of coping but also years of training. It wasn't a hard recipe, just not one I'd tried before." She leaned forward, "So is it good?"

"It is." Jim lowered his fork with an apologetic grimace. "I'm sorry, there's much more food than I have adjectives right now. You caught me unprepared. Next time will be better."

"I don't want you prepared. I want you honest. It's much more helpful. So how much do you weigh anyway?" It wasn't really all that pushy a question in Lorna's mind, though she would have seen how it could be construed as that if she'd thought about it.

"160? 170? Somewhere around there. I've never paid much attention. And for the past few years it's been factored in stone." Jim took another bite, although one of his occasional preference-conflicts was happening. He tried one of the other desserts. Vanilla was a bit easier. "I'm generally honest. I think it comes of working with a telepath from a young age. Lying's not really an option."

Lorna shrugged, "Lying is always an option, even to a path. You just have to believe it so much that you don't know it's a lie. The polite ones don't generally dig deep enough to prove to you how wrong you are." She noticed the dessert switch. "Are you not going to eat the cake?"

"It's a little rich. At least right now." Jim smiled wryly. "I'm a little inconsistant. Repression . . . doesn't end well with me." He blinked, realizing something. "Did you get the note on me to the staff when I arrived? I know you weren't at the time, but . . ."

Lorna concentrated long enough to form a small spatula out of the lump of steel in her pocket (never know when it will come in handy) and swiped the rest of the cake. "No, I'd resigned from all the staff and team stuff back in August so I don't get those memos anymore."

Jim smiled. "Well, now that you're back I should probably give you fair warning. I'm a recovering multiple personality. It's not too bad now, but I still have dissociative episodes." He raised another forkful of cake. The strawberries were a nice addition, he thought absently. "I told the staff when I came because in the past trying to hide it has made things a little -- difficult, sometimes." He shrugged. "I say I don't have good results from repression because the things I tried to push away had a tendency to manifest in a different personality. Sometimes it ended in an 'incident.' With the air-quotes."

Lorna stared at him, her newly created fork in the air. She blinked several times then slowly tilted her head to the side. "I...wow. And here I thought I got extra crazy points for having an eating disorder but that's even more legit." She finished her bite of cake and shook her head. "Okay, so no repression for you. Good, then I don't have to worry that you're just being nice about my chicken cordon bleu."

That would explain the remark about her weight two years ago. He'd encountered plenty of patients with eating disorders in the sanitoriums, and although Lorna was slightly on the thin side Jim didn't get the sense the admission had been a passive cry for help. Jim knew what it was like to have concerned strangers prying into your life. Unless he saw specific warning signs, there was no need to intrude on her privacy. He filed the information away without comment.

"It's amazing how little credit having been institutionalized warrants around here," Jim mused, taking a drink of water from the bottle on his desk. "Of course, this place also seems to breed new and exciting forms of damage. And I'm fairly tame as multiples go, anyway. There was no systematic abuse, so you're not going to find yourself stepping on any uncomfortable family issues. Just one traumatic event complicated by emergant psi powers." He shrugged and returned to the dessert with a smile. "I'm an interesting case-study."

"Far too many people around here are interesting case-studies." Lorna sighed. She honestly hadn't considered why Haller would have that particular issue. "Nearly as many as are interesting looks at how to break the laws of physics. I'm glad I have a nice normal mutation with simple traumas and a good therapist. And of course, seven years of cooking lessons so I can cope productively."

"Psi is a perfectly normal mutation. It's only when the owner's a little" Jim raised his empty fork to rotate the utensil next to his head "that things get weird." He sampled what he was able to identify as chocolate mousse. It was still rich, but this time chocolate was sitting fine with him. It was easier when he worked up to it, he'd noticed. Jim grinned at her. "Thanks for going to the effort of developing your coping skills. As long as you're going to be inflicting them on me, I appreciate it."

"Actually, I was taking cooking lessons long before it became a coping mechanism. My mother wanted me to be well rounded and then later when I first decided that I was fat and needed to lose weight, taking them was an easy way to control what I was eating. I stopped when I graduated high school but I've picked up classes here and there. Chef Marcel pouts terribly that he's not my sole teacher anymore but what can you do?" She took another bite of cake in a satisfied manner, "Anyway, psis are freaky and wrong and I'm sticking with that opinion."

"We are," Jim nodded. "Funny. That's pretty much how I settled on psychic therapy as a vocation. My own brain may be flaming wreckage, but at least I know how to fix other people's. Guess there's a reason people tend to specialize in their area of personal concern -- it helps you make sense of yourself. Or at least illuminates how screwed-up you really are." He scraped the last bit of mousse from the glass serenely. "Which, in my case, is a lot. Ah, well. Can't win 'em all."

"All therapists are crazy. This is just a universal truth," Lorna agreed. "So okay, you know that I cook for fun and study geo-physics. What do you do for fun?" Lorna had decided early on that she liked the new counselor. Prying was almost inevitable.

Jim scratched his head. "Um. I'm more of the 'work until unconscious' type. When I feel really exciting I'll read something other than psychology texts. There's the art, I guess, but that's therapeutic. It can be a little weird." He swished the water in his waterbottle around before taking another drink. "And then there's the stuff I draw when I think I'm a ten-year-old, but that's a completely different level of relaxation."

The casual admission of thinking he was a ten year old boy threw her only for a second. "Christ, I'm surrounded by workaholics. What's wrong with you people? There is life outside your office, David." She flung herself out of her chair, "You look like you're pretty much done eating, yes?"

"I'm full," Jim admitted, laying the fork across the plate. He noticed her expression and gave her a wary look. "Why?"

"Because we're going to go find fun. You're a workaholic and I'm super-depressed thanks to walking out on my fiancé so we're going to go find something fun to do that will give us both a break from being inside." Lorna grinned at him then gave him a pleading look, "Please?"

"Umm, okay." Why did I get stuck with this response as an emotional baseline? I miss the days pretty women didn't do this to me.

Lorna bounced with glee and darted around the desk to pull him out of his chair. "No bars because bars encourage moping. How are you around crowds? Do you dance?" It was always wise to take even the slightest agreement as wholehearted support. Most people were too polite to back out again if you did.

There was the slightest suggestion of deer-in-headlights in the way Jim was looking at her now. "Crowds? I'm okay. Dancing? Uh, not -- well." Jim wasn't the one who had bothered trying to learn. "Where am I going?"

"That's alright, neither do I. Well, not well. We'll completely fail at swing together then." Letting go of him, Lorna piled the dishes on his desk quickly then created a strap of metal to hold them. "Go change. I'll steal a car and we'll go find someplace fun where no one will ever recognize us and see if we can't learn to dance."

Jim watched her depart, then mechanically shut down his computer and put his files in order before rising to follow. There was probably nowhere on earth a man who was 6'5" and a woman with green hair were not going to be noticed, but at least Moira wouldn't be able to complain he never got out anymore.