LOG: [Haller, Marie-Ange's brain] Broken connections

[x-legion.livejournal.com]

After the probable source of Marie-Ange's psychic damage is determined, Haller demonstrates just what qualified him for the counseling job in the first place.





Psionic defense-mechanisms were highly personalized things, Jim noted as he stood at the threshold of Marie-Ange's mind. He'd seen many different representations in his time. With him it had been a simple wall, but in the past he had encountered moats, and armed guards, and labyrinthine mazes out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Every mind was different, and presented itself as such.

He had never seen a raven the size of a draft horse.

The guardian stood before an elaborately carved wooden door, twisting its great head this way and that. At Jim's step forward its mouth gaped in a hiss, wings mantling in warning. In the distance he felt the question in Charles' mind as the man monitored him, but Jim shook his head. He didn't need help for this. Three more steps, and he was within range.

The raven darted for him, a mass of darkness and fury, but the attack had been anticipated and in spite of her training Marie-Ange was no telepath. As the huge, wicked beak snapped at him Jim was already moving aside, one hand outstretched to drag his fingers across the slickness of its crown as it passed. With thought came reality: a well-worn leather hood that fit securely over the searching eyes, a temporary measure to disarm the girl's natural defenses. The guardian squawked and scrabbled, as any creature would against sudden blindness, but it could do nothing. Flicking the ash from his cigarette, Jim calmly ducked beneath one flailing wing and walked through the door, his shadows striding behind him.

On the other side Jim found himself standing in a vast forest at the foot of an enormous tree, safe and secure in his mask. Here we go. At his feet ran a clear stream, voices whispering among the rocks with each babble and swell. Mismatched eyes taking in his surroundings, Jim followed the stream as it curved around a trunk massive enough to dwarf a redwood's, stepping over and through loops of roots and creepers thicker than his body. At times, too, he had to duck. The tree was ringed with broken statues; stone likenesses of gods and monsters suspended on some invisible pedestal, headless, limbless. Truly broken, Jim wondered, or never fully formed? It was difficult to be sure. Astral representation was a strange thing.

His eyes traced the curve of the tree as he walked. Symbols and runes crawled up the trunk -- subtly-shifting carvings he suspected were decipherable only to Marie-Ange. Far above in the canopy dark shapes moved. More ravens, from the sound of them, but the normal size. Jim was noticing a motif.

It was quiet here save for the distant calls of the birds, the murmuring of the brook, and the four footfalls that stirred the humus beneath his feet. Jim walked until one step around a fall of roots brought him to a distinctly Greco-Roman temple nestled at the base of the tree, white marble shining against the brown and grey of the wood. A small construction, simple and pristine, built of stones that seemed to grow out of the fabric of the tree itself. Jim approached the steps, then stopped.

Where the sanctuary entrance should have been was only coruscating darkness, as if the temple had been erected around a miniature black hole. The void pulsed like a beating heart, roiling the air around the pillars like a heat-mirage. Sensing that drawing any closer might be unsafe, Jim paused and took a drag on his cigarette, considering.

He hadn't long to wait. As he studied the strange phenomenon a raven dropped from the branches like a swallow and arced into the portal, only to emerge a moment later . . . changed. What had been a bird now swirled up the trunk of the great tree in a pulsing ribbon of shadows, beads of bone-white spine trailing like a string of pearls. Each wingstroke away from the void throbbed the abstract shapes closer to cohesion; by the time it reached the upper branches it was once again a raven.

The telepath blew a stream of smoke, fascinated. So the ravens were specially adapted parts of her mind, then, representative of the interchange between the formless abstraction of the void and the concrete structure of Marie-Ange's psyche. Far above him, Jim observed the bird perch on a knob of bark and thread a new, glimmering sliver into the riot of vines that knotted the tree, and the surrounding runes swarm to receive it.

The ravens weren't the only thing going in. The telepath's mismatched eyes tracked the stream around the side of the temple, where it vanished beneath the white stones. Glancing back to the void, he noticed globes of crimson liquid spiraling from its edges off into the canopy. He frowned and squinted at the strange substance, as close as he dared come to the entrance. Too dark to be blood -- ah. Jim smiled. From water into wine. Very nice.

This was the seat of Marie-Ange's power, and of the damage he had come to repair. The evidence of destruction was obvious. Now that he'd adjusted to the essential strangeness of the place Jim could see roots twinned around the temple's foundation stones had been pulled up, deforming the shallow stairway and one of the pillars. The roots themselves were damaged; the intricate carvings strung across the roping coils were frayed, exposing shining white pith. Fresh defilement. This, Jim was willing to bet, was the source of the unwanted apparitions.

And there was more damage here than that wrought by Quentin Quire. There was older scarring in this area, too -- creepers broken apart and knit back together wrong, like a curtain of unset bones. His scan told him that many of the injuries extended beyond the surface, rippling distortions into the core of the tree. Not powers-damage, though close to it, but disruptions of emotional connection. Marie-Ange's mind had been hurt before.

The telepath squatted by what he sensed to be the oldest injury. Jim extended a hand to stroke the afflicted root, heedless of the muffled clink of bracelets as other hands followed to mimic the motion. Of the three apparent instances of psychic wounding, this first was the least dramatic. It was more of a puckered knot than a break, as if some infection had set in and eaten away at the living pulp inside. Small, but troubling, somehow. Something about it . . . the patterns beneath the scar tissue were . . . amethyst, almost . . .

No.

His hand drew back as if burned. He knew that power. He knew it. He'd felt it before, tangled around him in his head and in their bed. The power that had first scarred Marie-Ange's mind was one Jim knew as well as his own, or Charles'.

Betsy.

Except . . .

No. Wait. The power signature was the same, but there was something wrong with the style. Dissonance. It was like a calligraphy piece drawn in the same ink by the same brush on the same paper, but stroked by different hands. Betsy was direct, but she'd never been brutal. This wound was a precision-strike, dealt by a hand that hadn't even cared to disguise its path -- so quick the victim had never even noticed, but easily apparent to one who knew to look.

Betsy's power. Not her mind. Someone had been . . . making use of her.

The implications tore at him like a razor. For an instant Jim's grip on the mask faltered, only to tighten again as he wrenched himself back to the task at hand. Later. This was a question for later, and entirely irrelevant to the work before him. Pulling himself back together, Jim met his mentor's distant concern with reassurance, and a promise to confer when this was over. Charles would know, he believed, and be able to explain. But not now.

Turning his mind away from his unsettling discovery, Jim took a deep breath and assessed the situation. Repair the damage, oldest first. Right. The fastest way would be a swift break and excision, but such measures carried their own stress, and Jim avoided them when he could. Marie-Ange's mind needed no more trauma. Instead, the young man lay his thrice-mirrored hands on either side of the scarred root, and pulled.

Slow, steady pressure, applied with infinite control. It was the difficult route, but Jim could afford it. On the astral plane will was power, and he had been using his like this for a very, very long time.

The wound was old and reluctant to open, but his patience was rewarded. As the edges parted Jim poured in the pearl-white of his own telepathy, purifying, debriding. The aggregate scar tissue dissolved under his hands like a clump of dried mud in a swift-moving stream, broken apart and carried away, leaving the puncture fresh and livid. The field was again clean.

Reversing his grip now, Jim brought the dead, grey lips of the wound together even as he stretched out with his mind to guide the reknitting. Fibrous growth stirred to life and began to weave, restoring healthy connection. Carvings that had been cleaved through and obscured by bulbous growth flowed back along their natural channels until their passage across the wood was once again smooth and uninterrupted. It wouldn't be seamless, because a wound so deep and old couldn't help but leave a scar, but it would be close enough that it hardly mattered. However the injury had been inflicted, it could be healed. That was what was important.

Jim lifted his hands and sat back for a moment, taking a drag on the cigarette that would never burn down as he probed his repairs for flaws. Finding none, the young man exhaled a column of smoke and shifted his attention to the next area of damage.

One down, two to go.