xp_logs | LOG: [Jennie, Haller] Progress

Tuesday morning Haller gets his first assignment back. The fact that it's technically before he's even been accepted doesn't really matter to either party.

This was awkward, Jennie mused, as she turned down a familiar set of hallways. It was the first time she had left her room and actually walked the mansion's hallways since she'd been back. There were so many faces she didn't recognize. The few that did, either quickly averted their eyes or openly gawked. Jennie had tried to cover up the weight loss with baggy clothes, but her face was still too sharp, and the tendons in her neck moved like puppet strings whenever she turned her head. She really couldn't blame them.

One of these days, I'll figure out something to tell them. One of these days. Thankfully all of her teachers had agreed to give her make-up work which she completed in her room. She still wasn't ready to rejoin the real world.

She stopped at a door and tentatively knocked. Samson had suggested she do it after their emergency session last night. But still. The last time she'd been here, it'd been March.

"Come in," Jim called, shuffling one last file into the drawer before turning around. He still felt mildly uncomfortable having anything to do with his office before he had Scott and Ororo's replies. After Charles' say in the matter he didn't need any, technically, but he wanted them. Much as he wanted this job, he didn't want it at the expense of someone else.

However, lot of paperwork had accumulated since July. Student records, and correspondence with parents, and updated contact information. Regardless of whether or not he was going to be the one taking advantage of the updating Jim consoled himself with the fact that the work was getting done for someone. He was ready to work again. Who ultimately benefitted from it didn't matter.

That being the case, it was a little surprising to get a call from a living breathing member of the student body. Still, Jim smiled when the door opened and he saw who it was. The visitor wasn't entirely unexpected. In fact, it was kind of a relief. "Jennie, hey. It's good to see you again. Sorry it's kind of a mess. Let me excavate the chairs real quick -- okay." He glanced up at her as he did so, blithely dumping the offending paper into the box he'd have been putting it in anyway. It was just outdated files. "Okay. Now we at least have the option of sitting. So, what can I do for you?"

"I, um," Jennie wrung her hands. "I'm supposed to talk to you. About my. . .condition? Doctor Samson said that I should." Even now, the mess in the office was playing merry hell with her concentration. Good God, how did people live like this? How would she?

Jim nodded. He'd been aware of an emergency session with Samson after Marie had found her in her suite Sunday; while he could speculate on the content, there was a limit to what Leonard could disclose. The fact that Jennie was here voluntarily was a very good sign, and just as telling as a clinical profile would have been -- just as the fact that the psychiatrist had apparently been making provisions for Jim's resumption of his duties before he'd even formally been accepted, Cyndi was noting in the back of his mind, had a lot to say about the professor.

"We can talk. Talking is definitely good." Jim folded himself into one of the chairs, motioning for her to do the same. "Okay, so. That's a pretty broad subject. Is there something specific you want to focus on, or just a general thing?"

Jennie shrugged a little helplessly. Her session with Samson had involved her rambling and crying at the same time, trying to explain why the hell she felt the need to scrub at a floor until she bled, while Samson had merely nodded. When Jennie had exhausted herself, the man had taken charge. He'd prescribed her an anti-anxiety medication and explained exactly how they were going to work on this. One of these things, involved talking to the counselor.

"I, um. It's my OCD. Samson--Doctor Samson," she corrected herself, "said he was going to work on that with me. But that I also had to talk to you. Or something."

Jim gave her a lopsided smile. "'Have to' is probably a little strong -- technically you really don't need to unless you want to. But I think the reason Dr. Samson suggested it is that I can offer a different perspective. The one without the degree in psychiatry, which can be good sometimes." He nodded at her again. "That's the big question. Before we go any further, knowing you don't have to be here if you don't want to -- do you want to? It's up to you."

The girl blinked and looked at the hands in her lap, still sporting a couple of bandaids from Sunday. She looked back up into Haller's mismatched eyes. "I do. I want to be here. I don't want to be this way anymore. It. . .sucks. And if you can help fix me, then," Jennie shrugged again. "Let's fix me."

The uneven smile turned into a grin. "All right. That's all I needed to know."

The telepath sat back, setting his hands on his knees. "Okay. So, the reason you're here is because of your OCD. Let's start there. You've had it, to some degree, for a while, right? Has it ever been a serious problem before?"

Jennie shook her head. "No, not like this. It's always sort of been there. But I'm not obsessed with having my hands clean or anything." Jennie absently picked a cuticle while she talked, "I just don't like losing things. I gotta know where the important stuff is, otherwise I can't relax. Then I stick them in patterns that make sense to me. It makes me calm." She sighed. "It sounds so lame talking about it."

"It's not actually that weird. Everyone's got something that could be considered a potential symptom of OCD. Some of it has a logic to it, like checking over a big presentation multiple times the night before it's due. Some of it's just arbitrary, like wanting to eat M&Ms in a certain order. Things that make you feel comfortable, sometimes not even in a way that makes sense. It's only unusual when the habits feel like necessity to the point it starts to interfere with your life." Jim rubbed one hand over the other absently. "When did you start noticing a change?"

"I..." Jennie trailed off, thinking. "It got a little bad, when I first got here. But I got better, calmer. I mean, I still had to touch the bottom part of the bannister on the main staircase, and my room had to be just so," she chewed on the offending cuticle for a bit and continued, "And a bit after my Mom died. But when I got back after...when I got home this time. Nothing felt right. None of the old stuff worked. So I tried to fix it. It's never been so hard to leave my room before."

"It does get worse in response to stress -- which you know, obviously, so we don't need to get into that," Jim agreed. He steepled his fingers in his lap, tilting them towards the girl. "Okay. Now the dumb question, but one I need to ask. Knowing the increased compulsions are a reaction to anxiety . . . what are you anxious about?"

"Uhhh, well, letsee," Jennie said, a little sarcastically. She began to tick off on her fingers, "I've just gotten back from two months of hell, where I lost thirty pounds, my powers took out two city blocks and critically injured a friend, and my best friend kidnapped and controlled me." She crossed her legs and continued, "Meanwhile, I get back and find nothing the same as I left it. Nothing feels safe anymore."

Jim nodded, unbothered by the tone. Right now bitterness was more than understandable. "Like I said, it was the dumb question. What do you mean by safe, exactly? What makes something safe?"

"It.. I don't know. I feel safe, when things make sense. I feel safe when I can relax and be myself. I don't have to be on guard. Alert. There's just so many new things now, that I don't know how to react. And the thing with Marius... what am I supposed to do when someone I trust does something like that? I can't even let my guard down around my best friend." She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, and fought to control the tight feeling in her chest. "When stuff is in order, when things make sense, that's when I feel safe."

"I think I see. In this case you trusted someone, you helped him, and then it turned out it wasn't really your choice at all. That what you thought was real was a lie." Jim regarded her for a moment. "You like to put things in order because it makes the world make some kind of sense, right? Would you say that for you, part of being 'safe' means having control, do you think?"

Jennie was taken aback for a moment. "Yeah, I guess I never thought of it that way. But it makes sense. Ordering things, I can control that. It's people or situations I can't control." The last was said with just a touch of bitterness.

"Chance . . . well, okay, probability-snaps aside maybe the talk on chance is a little different for you," Jim conceded, spreading his hands. "But it is true that we can't control the things other people do or don't, or the mistakes they make. The only thing we can control are our reactions to them. And sometimes, like you've found, even that can be pretty damn hard."

"Yeah. I go crazy and try to clean glass that isn't there." Jennie looked at her hands again. She'd torn out the cuticle and a tiny bead of blood was beginning to form. She stuck it back in her mouth.

"It's not crazy to want to find some way to feel in control your own life. Unconventional, yeah, but not crazy." Like making up other people to be you when you couldn't stand to be. Jim smiled. "The thing is that some coping mechanisms turn into more of a problem than the stress they're supposed to be helping you deal with. You ritualize because you're stressed, and then you get more stressed because you can't stop, which leads to even more ritualization -- vicious cycle. Behavioral therapy and medication will help with that, but really what you want to be dealing with is the anxiety that caused the escalation in the first place. Once you deal with the source the symptoms go away. Make sense?"

"But how do you fix the source when it's something you can't control? I can't control how whacked out my life is. I haven't even before I came here. It just, it keeps happening. My life keeps changing and going from bad to worse to completely shitty," Jennie's voice rose steadily, "How the hell do I make it stop?"

"Like I said, sometimes all you can control is how you react. That's when you have to make a choice. Do you just accept it, and stop your life because something could go wrong, or do you keep moving forward in spite of that, and take the chance that it could also go right? That's a decision only you can make." Jim shook his head. "I won't lie. Things can go wrong. Sometimes you'll be hurt for taking the chance. But other times . . . it's worth it. If only for the knowledge that as much shit as life can throw at you, it doesn't control you."

The telepath levelled his odd-colored eyes on her and said quietly, "Sometimes the worst happens no matter how hard you try, but you have the final say. Always."

Jennie stared at her hands and sighed. "So, I can't control what happens to me, but I can control how much it bothers me that....that kinda makes sense. I guess." Jennie had no idea how to go about achieving that, but it was something to think on. At any other time, Haller's words would have seemed hollow and meaningless. The sort of patronizing "friendly advice" that an older person would give. But for today, they rang true.

"It's all a matter of perspective, and you can learn perspective. And after a certain point . . ." Jim shook his head. "Changing yourself is better than waiting for the world to do it for you."

The girl snorted again. "Yeeeeah. Considering the world seems hell bent on doing it." She looked around herself, at the clutter in Haller's office. The sharp feeling of anxiety lodged in her chest just wouldn't go away, even when it normally did when she left her room. She was about to turn back to Haller when she saw the name "Yvette Petrovic." on one of the files.

Penance.

"Um. Mr. Haller? How's the uh, the girl? The one that...that came back with us?"

Ah, Jim thought, studying her carefully closed expression for a moment. I was wondering when we were going to get to that. "Yvette's actually doing pretty well. A little disoriented, but adjusting. Forge and Clarice have found a solution to the clothing problem -- and we're working on finding her family, too."

"Good, that's... I'm glad. I knew she had family. I mean, she had to come from somewhere, right?" Jennie tugged at the bracelets on wrist. "I'm babbling I know, but-" she sighed and looked away. "It was wrong. What we did. So incredibly and incomprehensively wrong. Does she, I mean, she doesn't remember us, does she? She was completely catatonic for all of it."

"She doesn't remember much of the last few months. The situation she came from wasn't really a reality anyone would have wanted to live in." Jim's left hand returned to his right, tracing the old scars etched by a fire still hidden from him even now. "It wasn't right, what happened, but when you're desperate and in the moment you do . . . stupid things. Sometimes stupider than others. But wallowing in guilt and self-recrimination won't make things better for either of you. That only comes by doing."

"No. That is the path of woe and bad poetry. Too many people have wallowed and examined their belly buttons so much they managed to shove their heads up their asses." Jennie said, a faint trace of a smile on her lips. Inwardly, she was relieved that Pe-Yvette didn't remember. Anything. The state that she had arrived in...Jennie felt the girl was much better off with not remembering. "What's going to happen to her? She's going to stay here, isn't she?"

"For a little while, at least," Jim conceded. "We can't make any solid decisions about that until we get in touch with her family, but with her power being what it is it's a possibility. If that happens, though -- do you think you would be all right with that arrangement? I mean, obviously we wouldn't turn her away based on that, but there are things we could do that might make the situation a little easier on you."

"No," Jennie said vehemently. "No, this is where she should be. Don't turn her away on my account. We're just going to have to live with it. With what happened. Avoiding something won't make it go away."

"No, it won't," the telepath agreed with a fleeting but genuine smile. Her decisiveness was a relief on more levels than he could count. Not only seeing the problem, but acting to change it -- Jim knew the first was relatively easy. The second . . . was not.

But Jennie wanted to change. That was half the fight in itself.

"Okay," Jim said, rising to his feet, "there's obviously a lot to be covered here, but I think this is a good start. We can get something regular set -- um, once I find my schedule," he amended with a resigned look at what was still technically his desk. He glanced back at Jennie, quirking an eyebrow. "Sound like a plan?"

Jennie gave a half-shrug. "Sure. Have nothing but time now. Well, except for my sessions with Samson. I haven't been feeling up to going to class." She rubbed her fingers together sighed. "Have to start though. Not much make-up work you can do in Dance," she gave Haller a tiny smile. "Thanks for seeing me."

"Any time. Or a set time to be determined upon me finding my dayplanner. I'm glad to hear about the class. Getting back to your life is the best thing you can do for yourself."

Jim smiled slightly as the girl showed herself out, and turned back to his paperwork. Yes. We speak as one who knows.