Lorna, Haller -- Thursday, backdated

[x-polarisstar.livejournal.com]

After talking to Scott, Lorna's ability to cope is a little strained. Then Haller comes by to talk and the ways in which they're too much alike get discussed. Both temporarily lose their facades.




Jim paused in front of the door, wondering if this was a good idea in the mood he was in. Waking up in the infirmary to the knowledge he'd shorted out his brain in front of Charles and the team had left him . . . cranky. He wasn't unused to being placed under medical observation, but it wasn't exactly an enjoyable experience -- and the nature of the incident had only served to compound his irritation. Still, he told himself as he raised one hand to knock, he would take this sort of emotional imbalance over the DID any day. He could deal with it.

Besides, he was worried.

Lorna groaned when the knock on the door came. Her head was throbbing dully still despite the cocktail of painkillers and vitamins Amelia had unsympathetically included along with her lecture on abusing your powers to the point that your body revolted. Lorna rather resented being compared to Nathan.

She stumbled over to the door rather than open it in her usual fashion. Bending a spoon at this point was too much for her. "Hello?"

"It's just me," Jim said, slightly startled by the visible greenness to her face but saying nothing. He motioned to the tray balanced in his other hand. "I heard you weren't feeling well, so I made kateh."

She smiled, pain lingering in her eyes. "David, hi. Come on in. I heard that you were downstairs too but Amelia threw me out pretty quickly this morning." She took the tray from him out of habit and went back to the couch where she'd been attempting--and failing--to nap. She shoved the afghan out of the way and sat down, setting the tray on the coffee table. "The next time I try to hold up a building someone hit me and remind me that I'm not actually anywhere near Magneto's level?"

Taking a seat next to her, Jim gave her a lopsided smile. "As long as you remind me why I don't send myself out looking for unknown minds. I don't think I'm ever living down the self-induced coma." David would have a psychic glass jaw, he thought irritably, then had to suppress the urge to stick out his tongue at himself. Jim sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. Come on, let's all play nice . . .

"At least you didn't kill anyone when your powers tapped out," Lorna replied bitterly without thinking then winced. "Sorry. Did you get anything before you...um, went coma-boy? Do you know who he was or anything?"

Having learned of the mission's completion from Charles, Jim recognized this as dangerous ground. He shook his head. "I didn't feel anything remotely human. No sense of self, just hatred . . . and emptiness. As if the void had swallowed everything he was."

What did that mean? If it didn't think it was a person... Cogito ergo sum. Lorna sat back, tilting her head back to look at the ceiling. "I guess that will make the victims happy anyway. They get a brand new objection to mutants to point to. More than one if that kid tells people who was assisting. If we didn't need the bodies...it would probably be better for me to quit the team."

For all his mixed feelings about the professor at times, there was one trait for which Jim would always be grateful: Charles never intentionally sent him into a crisis unprepared. When Jim had asked him about the exchange he'd overheard on the comms the night before the professor had outlined the situation as succinctly and directly as patient confidentiality with Lorna would allow. There had been no judgement or pathos there, only simple fact. Despite the circumstances surrounding the incident, that professional impartiality had helped Jim regain a hold on his own in a way that hadn't been possible when dealing with Scott; he was in a different state of mind now. It seemed the mission had done that much for him, at least.

"I know it's almost impossible to believe," Jim said quietly, "that you're allowed to have a life beyond doing the unforgivable. That you still get to live when someone else doesn't, and it's because of you."

Lorna wouldn't meet his eyes. He only sat back and gave her a sad smile. Maybe it was better she not be looking at him while he told her this. The internal conflict had ceased now, settled back into the depths. All parts were turned to his next words.

"If you should leave the team, then so should I. I -- it sounds hollow, but I know. I've used my powers to kill, too. Murder. The fact that I wasn't entirely in control when I did it . . . doesn't matter. Maybe makes it worse, because then you have to ask yourself: 'Why couldn't I stop it? What if, deep down, I didn't want to?'." Now it was Jim who turned his eyes away, fixing them on the tray of food on the table in front of them. "Ask, and know that no matter how you answer they'll still be dead, and it was your fault."

Lorna closed her eyes tightly, her face still tilted to the ceiling. "It's more than just Karen and Josh, you know. What I did to them…well, when Manuel has the moral high ground things are already going to hell. They're alive at least. Which is more than I can say for Alison's father. Did they tell you about that? Did they tell you that I almost killed Remy?

"When I got back, everyone was falling all over themselves to tell me that it wasn't me and it wasn't my fault. You know when that's easier to believe?" She looked over at him, her face drawn, "When you haven't already done it once. It's a lot harder to believe people when they say 'you would never have used your powers to kill someone' when you haven't already done that without any kind of excuse to back it up."

She sighed and closed her eyes again, "I've never accidentally killed someone with my powers. It was always deliberate. Always."

"They told me about those things." All but that last. Charles hadn't gone beyond the scope of the Malice incident in his summary. Jim thought of what he knew of Lorna. He couldn't believe it was as straightforward as she made it sound and sensed this wasn't the whole story, but also that she was unlikely to qualify it. Lorna could be brutally unsparing, of herself most of all.

He knew, too, that arguing semantics would do no good. To her, that was the truth. That was what mattered. As he had read once, the issue was not "how serious is the illness?", but "how ill is the patient?".

"People used to tell me that, too," Jim said after a moment. "That it was an accident. That I didn't mean it. But the thing is . . . I did. A part of me did. I wasn't just scared when I did it, I was . . . angry. It didn't matter how many times people told me I wasn't to blame, because I knew differently. Part of me wanted them dead. He would tell me that. All the time." Jim exhaled slowly, rolling his head back to look at her. "When no one wants to hold you accountable, it's up to you to make it right again. To live your life facing up to what you did, even if no one else will admit you should. That's how we pay. Giving up would be easy. We don't have that right anymore."

Lorna gave him a confused look, wondering who had told him that but assuming it was the Professor even if it was a very un-Professor-like thing to say. "It's very hard. It's hard to do anything even remotely normal or to....have anything good. It's hard to be with someone when they don't deserve to have that kind of crap in their life."

"But for some reason they refuse to give up. Or let you. No matter how ugly you are inside, or how much you don't deserve it." Jim laced his hands together in his lap, thumb rubbing against the scars. "But you are alive, and that's something that comes with its own responsibilities. It's self-indulgent to let yourself be swallowed by guilt. If you never live, your life never moves beyond that terrible thing -- and if it doesn't, that means that that's what you are. Giving up means letting yourself be defined by the worst thing in your life. You can't give it that power."

Lorna dragged her legs up onto the couch, winding her arms around her knees. "I never thought of it like that. I just...it seems disrespectful and wrong to let go. How can I just...move on when they won't? That boy yesterday--they were his friends and he has to live everyday knowing that they're never going to get better? They can't think. They can feel, Manuel tells me, and they remember terror. But they can't speak, can't recognize a face... How can I move on from that?"

Jim shook his head. "It's more disrespectful not to. If you're alive, you change. That's what living things are supposed to do. The dead, or the people close enough to that it makes no difference -- they can't. You can't take that back. But to live wasting what you have when you realize how precious it was to someone else . . . that's an insult to all they've lost."

"I don't think that their families would feel the same way." She put her head down on her knees, her headache was getting worse. "How did you do it? How did you move on after this? Because I don't even know how to start."

He gave her a slight smile. "Don't confuse 'moving on' with 'forgiving yourself.' For forgiveness . . . I don't have an answer. I don't think I ever will. I destroyed lives. You don't deserve peace after that."

For a moment he just looked at her, mismatched eyes on the curtain of green hiding her face. Not reaching out to touch, not yet. Just being there. "I spent a long time unable to move on. The people around me suffered for it. Watching me fall apart. Always trying to help me, and always failing. They tried so hard. I just wouldn't let go of the guilt." He thought back to his first months at Muir, of Charles and especially of Moira, only a year after losing her own child. Their efforts had cost them so much at times.

His hands had clenched, almost without him realizing. He breathed out and eased them loose again, centering. "I was hurting people again, and this time it was my choice. Wholly and completely. So . . . I made a decision. If no one could help me but me, I had to make the decision to save myself. Not because what I did should be forgiven, but because I couldn't let it own me. I did a terrible thing. It was time to start making up for it. To everyone else, and to myself."

"I...I know this is selfish. I do. And I'm sorry to be doing this to you...I don't usually let other people see this because you're right about it just hurting people." Lorna's breath hitched and stopped talking, biting her lip against the lump in her throat and the tight feeling in her chest. After a long moment, she went on, more softly, "I...there was a little piece of me that was glad that Alison left. It's easier with her far away. She can't see through me anymore."

"I know. Not letting people see is . . . safer." Jim lay a hand across her back, rubbing slowly. The conversation in his room with Moira came back to him.

"Hey," he said quietly, gently squeezing her shoulder. "You don't have anything to apologize for. It's okay to crack once in a while. Sometimes it's just -- too much. You aren't throwing anything on me. I came because I know what it's like, a little. I wanted to come." He reached up to tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear and gave her a lopsided smile. "We . . . sort of have a lot in common."

When he'd touched her, her impulse was to push him away because she desperately didn't want to. She held still instead, just listening, only looking up at him as his fingers met her hair. Her eyes were bright with tears but she looked more tired than anything as she returned his smile. "Don't you think that's just the wrongest thing ever? People shouldn't have this kind of crap in common."

After minute, she shifted just a bit closer to him. "I hate leaning on people. Breaking down. I feel like I've been broken for years and that's just not a fair thing to dump on someone. I...well, you probably know, it's like you have only so much grace period then you have to be better. People don't want to know that things aren't getting any better. So it's safer to hide but it's also...courtesy."

Jim laughed softly, shaking his head. "No. No, I understand." Moving to close the rest of the distance between them, Jim wrapped his arm around her shoulder in a half-embrace. She'd showered since the infirmary; her shampoo smelled like roses, and something else he didn't recognize. Flowers.

"That's . . . I haven't really been able to handle things the same since the trauma," Jim said, hugging her a little tighter, "but that's what I was like before. Like when my parents died. It was fine to be sad for a little while, but then I felt like people got tired of it, or thought it was too much and got worried, so I just stopped showing it. Made an 'okay' me to be for them. It was easier for everyone. At the time." He hadn't even thought about it back then. It had seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Later, he'd learned that was where he'd gotten into trouble. Jim pulled away enough to give her a sheepish smile. "Just remember it's all right to show people you're not-okay sometimes," he added, "or else you end up repressed and crazy and leaving bad marker art all over Moira's lab."

"I...I think a certain amount of it is good." Because giving up her coping mechanism would result in very very bad things. Lorna leaned against him, letting one arm sneak around his waist, indulging just a little bit in having someone else there who understood. "Leaving everything out there...it's like any wound, you have to cover it or stuff gets in and things get gross."

"A little is fine. Normal and healthy, even. It's just the excess you have to watch out for. Like anything." This was probably as much as he was going to get her to concede, Jim realized, but that was all right. For now, at least. It wasn't as if he had much room to criticize.

"Okay," he said with another brief squeeze, "now that we've worked through our disturbingly similar issues, give me your opinion of my cooking attempt? I didn't want to eat it alone in case I ended up poisoning myself. I think it's all right. I didn't make too much just in case, though."

Lorna looked up at him with a raised eyebrow, having far more practice in getting people to eat without them noticing the manipulation than he did. "All right," she said quietly, willing to let him do this. Taking care of people made things easier sometimes. Carefully, she extracted her arm from around him and reached forward to pull the tray onto her lap.

Jim grinned at her, aware of how big a victory that simple agreement represented. Repositioning himself slightly but still keeping his knee in contact with hers, he slid his own plate to one side of the tray and claimed a fork. "It's really just rice cooked with a little butter," he said, uncovering the small bowls. "Ummee used to make it all the time when I was sick. I brought some cheese and garlic to try on it, if you want."

Lorna looked down at the dish. Butter, cheese...why couldn't anyone come up with comfort foods involving raw vegetables? Weren't salads comforting? She gave him another look and added some garlic. "Here's hoping you don't poison us," she said dryly.

"Yeah, let's," Jim smiled, and took a bite.