xp_logs | LOG: [Betsy, Haller] A visit

After hearing of the situation Betsy comes to visit, with the best of intentions -- and disastrous results.

Her heart had been hammering. Already turning away from his door, Betsy trampled down the stairs. She'd been to his room. Seen the toys. Betsy gripped the handle to Haller's door, felt shattered glass pushing back against her, and boldly went inside.

In, out. In, out. The passage of breath through his body filled his world, as slow and regular as the tide. Attention centered on the rise and fall of his diaphragm and the hands cupped across his thighs in a mudra, left cradled in his right. Feet flat on the floor, skull tilted parallel to the ceiling, spine straight but muscles relaxed. Inward. Everything inward. His mind wasn't empty, but you couldn't force stillness. Jim knew that from experience. He let the thoughts come as they would. Ripples blown across the surface of a pond; do nothing, and they would still. Breathe in, breathe out.

Sunk into himself and still suffering from the effects of overstressing his powers on the beach in San Diego, Jim was completely unprepared for what he saw when he opened his eyes to the sound of the door.

"Be . . ." The name faltered on his lips. All pretext of tranquility abruptly fractured. "Betsy?"

"I'm, I'm sorry," Betsy stammered, closing the door behind her and awkwardly avoiding Jim's gaze while he sat slumped down within his chair. "I should've called." Looking around the room and realizing there wasn't a phone in sight. She started again. The floodgates open. "I mean, I should've let you know I was coming but see this pesky staff was under the impression you didn't want to see me and you want to see me, right? Not like staving off a large mass of water would suddenly make you unsociable?" Betsy looked out from wringing her hands together to see the haunting sight of a man that hadn't seen any semblance of rest in days.

She took a step closer to him, peering down at him. "David?" She shook her head. Silence. "Jim?"

"I'm . . . here." The assurance sounded far-away even to him. Thoughts scattered and bounced like spilled beads. Hahahaha, oh, this is too perfect, it's the girlfriend. No, no, how did she find out? Well gee, your respective places of work have regular contact with one another much, you think? Activity. Too much activity. Jim tried to pull up his meager shields, but he knew it was a futile effort. His concentration was shot, and it was impossible to mask the full extent of the damage. Sensitives could see the shifts like light dancing off a broken mirror. She can see you.

Talk. Use his words so she didn't focus on what was in his mind. "Sorry, I, I'm a little scattered," Jim said, attempting a smile through days' worth of stubble. The mudra had twisted into simple clasped hands, tight and tense. "I should've called. You, I mean. I'm . . . sorry." He closed his eyes against Jack's harsh laughter at the feeble response. "If I made you worry," he whispered.

In the silence, she heard a dark malicious laugh. Betsy's attention snapped forward. A whisper. She can see you. One look into his mismatch pair of eyes and Betsy knows they're not alone. Standing in an empty room filled with strangers, and then feeling the slight pull of energy, a meager show of shielding from him and Betsy sees. Looking down into her satchel, Betsy tries to focus on the reason for her visit. "I brought you some things....from your room. Thought they might help you relax."

Jim stared at the bag in her hands, any possible response dead before it could reach his lips. He knew that bag. It was his. Supplies. She'd brought his art supplies, and even before she said it he knew there was only one place she could have gotten them.

The sketches and paintings created with no intention of ever seeing an audience. The box of toys by his bed. Books of psychology and sacred text piled next to crude marker-drawings on the coffee table. A half-finished, badly spelled letter to Moira resting beside the ashtray on his kitchen counter. The assorted action figures positioned on top of the pile of casenotes at the foot of his couch. His room, his safe-space. Everything that was wrong about him, all the things he'd kept from touching her, all of it given physical form and laid out for anyone to see.

Betsy had stood right in the middle of it, and there was nothing he could do to pull it back.

"I hope that's alright," Betsy said, shifting uncomfortably. Though she knew it wasn't. It was the farthest thing from all right. Wrong. Betsy looked down at her right hand within it a small toy car. She tightened her hold on it and again. She felt them like splinters position right behind her eye socket. Betsy huffed slightly, moving next to Haller, placing her hand on his temple. "I just wanted to make sure you were holding up. I didn't mean to...." A loving caress. A familiar, reassuring presence. Betsy exerted herself within his mindscape hoping to....connect. "I was worried. Still am."

He was so numb he didn't realize what she was doing until too late. A gentle touch to his mind, and suddenly the room was replaced by another -- smaller, sparer, the loan window overlaid with solid wire mesh. Distortions creased the scene, each section just subtlety off-center as if fused together from fractionally misaligned pieces. Jim flung his mask up, but the construction was panicked and imprecise -- it fell strangely flat against their surroundings, the movements failing to sync with the astral form it covered. In the split-second before his defenses could raise there was a flash of something else, different and . . . wrong, and then Jim wrenched away, arms thrown up to shield his face.

Two figures stepped forward from Jim's shadow to overtake the telepath as he stumbled back, gaining in solidity and detail as they did. An older man, Jim's height but all muscle and rage, and a wild-haired girl whose face flashed with piercings. Together they seized Betsy by the arms and snarled as one,

"Get out."

Dull gray walls, one solitary door that closed from the outside. She'd never seen this place but had visited enough in her time to know. A sanatorium. Betsy grabbed at her chest, fought against the feeling of bands constricting around it. She looked down to find nothing there. But the air she had been breathing had thinned drastically, pulled away from her in bold sweeping folds of wind. Her hair wisping around her face, while the dark gleam of her eyes darted around her new surroundings.

"No," she whispered. Betsy hadn't meant to come here, her intention was not to invade, simply to remind of what waited for him on the outskirts. But somehow, she found herself here in this place, suffocating on the familiar shadow of what was once Jim's mind.

A sound from behind had her quickly turning on her heels. And there he was, standing a few feet away but something was off. With his face. She moved closer but a forced shift in his appearance, revealed a mask that looked disconnected from the rest of his body. It was unnatural, darker colors playing on his skin in patches. He looked broken, unhinged, in uniform white scrubs. Betsy moves closer still, transfixed. "Jamie?" She whispered. reaching out to touch him but her hands wrapped around smoke and Haller twisted and faded before disappearing entirely.

In this place, the sounds of obstinate voices, grow louder with each passing moment, painful in their intensity. And it was then she noticed the bodies coalescing with increasing fervor into a man and a young girl. Betsy eyed them as they grew, the two could be no more different in their appearance as they formed and it was then the voices stilled. Hands around her, they regarded Betsy for what felt like eons but within the astral mindscape, it was only a fraction of a second before in one sweeping force, they unified in their purpose. And Betsy felt the world light on fire from within, brilliant in its fiery fury, and then she screamed as she was ejected into the dark.

As Betsy stumbled back Jim's body surged to its feet -- but only his body. Facets of red and gold danced in the mind behind narrowed green eyes, outrage strung in every line of him.

"Fuck you, lady!" Cyndi screamed, slamming her hands against the stricken woman for a physical shove to match the psychic. "What the fuck gives you the right? Stay out of our head, stay out of our place, get out, get out, get out!"

There was only one response to threat. Fire was as natural as breathing, and no amount of warnings about exerting her strained powers could change that. Just as had happened in the mindscape the air between them erupted into flame, close enough to scorch. The effort cost her; Cyndi doubled over as her head shrieked agony, pressure which was answered by the bursting of something in her nose. Behind her in the black Jim was thrashing to come forward, but too much of him wanted Betsy out, to end the misery of being seen reduced to this. Part of him didn't want to be the one facing her, and with his center crumbling beneath him the rest was a foregone conclusion.

Cyndi ignored him. Jim might be trying to walk in five different directions at once, but things like this were her job. She grit her teeth and staggered upright, the blood that streamed from her nose lit black in the glow of the fire. Raising her heat-reddened face to Betsy she spat, "Go!"

Fire. And then pain.

Forcibly and unexpectedly ejected, Betsy laid dazed on the floor. Sights and sounds felt muffled and her brain worked its way back to one. Her hands were firmly on her temples, singularly focused on keeping anything from oozing out from the pressure she felt building. Out, out, out! Blinking painfully up into the light, to the towering figure standing fuzzingly over her. David finally came into view after a few harsh shakes of her head, but his image kept jump-cutting between the Haller she knew and the young girl within his mind. Her mouth grasping tightly to the name. So important, she knew her life depended on it but all that came out was....."Jamie."

Betsy felt another cry die off in her throat as time caught up with itself and the smell of burnt ozone and hair flooded her nostrils. It felt like pitchknives were being jammed through her thoughts, jumbling them. Noticing blood splattered on her hands and face, Betsy instinctively crawled away from the threatening form bellowing at her from all sides, blood leaking down its face. Her back hit the door and she found her hands already scraping to open it.

Cyndi watched Betsy flee with grim satisfaction. She wasn't feeling any struggling from Jim anymore. Or much of anything at all. He'd gone somewhere deep into the black, curled up in his own little world. Cyndi rolled her eyes. That wasn't much of a surprise. David never had been able to take care of himself. At least the retreat would shut up Jack for a while.

Quick check. Nothing on fire. Her nose was still gushing, though. Well, it happened. She went to the adjoining bathroom, and didn't quite manage to avoid the mirror over the sink. For a disjointed moment her eyes settled on the reflection it cast, tall and gaunt and male, and one lip curled in distaste. Irritated, Cyndi grabbed a towel from the rack and pressed it to her face, letting the crimson soak in while she waited for the bleeding to pass.

"Thought she'd never leave," she muttered, tilting her head back. She frowned. "Who the hell is Jamie?"