xp_logs | Xorn: Reintroductions

Following a phonecall (and backtimed slightly due to literal acts of God) Jim proceeds to Snow Valley as requested. And his bad weekend gets worse.

It was weird being in the Snow Valley offices, invited or not. This wasn't a place he'd ever foreseen himself interacting with even before his explosive separation with Betsy, and truth be told he wasn't even entirely sure what they did. Research seemed to get mentioned a lot, and there was information-gathering, of course . . . except there were some mixed signals going on. He wasn't sure whether this was the all-night vigil with his ex or what, but all he was pulling up right now was the vague impression of Nazis and tentacles. Wow, someone should have pondered the second thoughts before they decided to make the noble speech to their predecessor. Oh well.

Jim sighed and took a step around the door, rapping on the frame politely to announce himself to the dark-haired receptionist currently occupied with something on the computer. "Um, excuse me," he said, "I'm David Haller, I have an appo . . ."

And that turned out to be it. Even as it happened Jim was vaguely impressed with himself, because not only did he get most of the sentence out before the receptionist's face pegged, but in that moment of recognition every part of his brain unified in the single thought:

Oh my dear god PLEASE BE KIDDING.

It was a rather strong indication of his willpower that Mark didn't burst out laughing or sobbing. Or both. "So the cocktease has a name," he said instead, eyeing Haller flatly. "This has gotta be one of Wanda's cruel jokes. Damn probability manipulators."

Oh god please kill me kill you Cyndi kill you kill you dead. How was I supposed to know? That entire club was nothing but mood-lighting dammit! No! I spent the night with my traumatized ex-girlfriend and got a phonecall asking for help from a complete stranger this morning and I cannot deal with this! We are not dealing with this right now LALALALALALALALA.

"The appointment was just made today." That's right. When in doubt, go with the facts. And the absolute denial of the situation. "The timing was a little nonspecific. Are they ready for me?"

Mark just stared at Haller. "I fucking hate this job," he said finally, shaking his head. He pressed a button on his phone and waited for the response. "Doctor Essex? Your visitor is here." He hung up the phone and looked up at Haller, still wearing a blank expression. "Down the hall, first door on your right." He had to tell Amanda about this, he decided. At least someone ought to be amused.

Jim froze, gaze traveling back from the carefully-studied piece of wall over Mark's shoulder to fix on the younger man's blank face in shock, and wondered how one simple name could cut the bottom out of his world.

Who?

Haller has his arranged meeting with Essex, and questions are asked. The answers aren't satisfactory.

“Young Mister Haller. Please have a seat.” Essex said, extending a hand to the chair in his ‘temporary’ office. Ever since Haller had first met the Doctor at age thirteen, he’d been ‘young Mister Haller’ to him. They’d arranged space for him to work, with great reluctance. Wisdom had been clear that only the fact of Xorn kept him from dealing with Essex himself. “I trust the journey wasn’t inconvenient?”

Jim looked at the doctor in silence for a moment, then moved to take a seat in the offered chair. The soft leather creaked under his weight. "No," the telepath replied. "I'm not too far away."

Traumatized though the power had been, over the years Jim had at least progressed to the point of acquired sensitivity. Moira he could sense. Charles, too, though never with the acuity of a normal telepath. But with Essex, as always, there was only the faint sensation of . . . lack. A sinkhole on the astral plane. Jim had lived so long unable to feel the ghost of any but the most familiar thoughts the absence was barely noticeable. Just at this moment, however, the young man had never wanted to know what anyone was thinking more.

"Yes, I had heard you were at Charles' these days. An interesting choice." Essex leaned back in his chair. "And how do you find that?"

"A good experience. I spent a while wandering around trying to do selfless good. The professor offered me a place when it became obvious that if that's what I was going to do with my life we would do better if we had a permanent bed." Jim felt his mind begin to turn at the unbidden memory of white teeth bared in a shark-sharp smile. He took a deep breath and let the grey break around him, then recede. Calm.

"I heard some of the circumstances around you leaving," Jim said, opening his mismatched eyes. "And frankly I don't think I even want to know what you've been doing for the last few years."

"You will find both situations to be quite a bit less villainous than you might believe." Essex said, still radiating his normal cool control. "Primarily research, very esoteric. Moira would understand it, maybe nine or ten others on the planet. I normally avoid such focused practices, but in some cases there is little option."

Essex set aside his files, lying his pen down on top. "I hear that Moira has had another child. A daughter?"

"Yes. She's a psi. Like her father." Esoteric. He was that; the man would definitely have been interested in Rachel's pre-natal manifestation. With the toddler's open-reputation on Muir it certainly wasn't information the man would have any difficulty unearthing on his own if he meant to look -- if, in fact, he was actually ignorant of it to begin with -- but after what Betsy's screaming mind had leaked to him last night Jim would rather have peeled off his own skin with a rusting coathanger than give the man's interest any reason to become piqued about the only child Moira had left.

"We should get started," Jim said. "I was told I'm needed to make contact with a mutant. And that it was in my area of telepathy. Tell me what this is about, please."

"That's not entirely accurate. We do need to make contact with a mutant, but even your vaunted telepathic abilities will not suffice. No, it curiously is your rather unique psychological condition that makes you ideal." Essex passed over a stack of notes and some computer models. "The idea is to use your various personalities as a sort of transmitter, blanketing multiple signals and then filtering back to a single point of original; Ms Braddock. She will then pass them through a psychic link with Mr Ramsey, who's unique powers should provide Ms Mantaga-Barret with an actual cohesive 'voice' as it were of Xorn."

"Yeah," Jim replied with a thin smile, "it turns out I'm made for contact with multiple minds and unconventional consciousness." Which you have to be, after you've had to perfect your vaunted telepathic abilities on your own. The telepath's hands worked slowly on his knees in thought. "You say we need a filter to translate contact into a comprehensible level. Three. Me, Betsy, Doug. An identity disorder is one thing, but even at my worst I never needed anything near that number of special considerations. No mind I've ever worked with, either. How 'different' is this consciousness?"

"It makes Charles look like a lungfish on the evolutionary scale." Essex said matter of factly. "Xorn is what I would call a perfect Teilhard Omega point; a psionic singularity that is existing almost entirely on the noosphere. His world is the minds of every conscious thing on this planet. Even with all of this, it will be difficult to know if we can even hold his attention long enough to filter his input enough to bring him to safety."

"You and Charles are the only two people on earth I've ever physically witnessed able to use the word 'noosphere' in a conversation." Jim rubbed the back of his head, assimilating this new information. No part of him had ever been anything more than an average student, at least not in terms of conventional academics, but the theory of a Teilhard Omega Point was one potentially applicable to psionics. Some things warranted the extra effort. Massive evolutionary leap of consciousness, perfect unity with all life . . .

"So I'm going to act as a filter for a mind that has achieved the theoretical convergence between an individual mind with awareness of every living being in existence on a fundamental level," the telepath said slowly, "and we get to try and bring him down to a state of consciousness comprehensible to a normal human mind just so we can make him aware of the situation." He brought his mismatched eyes up to meet the doctor's. "I just agreed to go to China to have my own head blown up, didn't I."

"I doubt that even the worst backlash would do much more than liquify your brain by rupturing every blood vessel inside it." Essex said dryly, and from anyone else, you might be tempted to think he'd just made a joke. "If we can buffer the input, there is a good chance that Xorn will be able to reconstitute an element of stable consciousness for himself. Maybe not for very long, but certainly for sufficient time to see his release from the complex."

"I'm a little more concerned that the last time my brain was put under massive stress the resulting breakdown was pretty spectacular. Although I guess we're one up this time. Powers-wise, I don't have any more inhibitors to tear at. Psychologically, there's not exactly much integrity left to shred. Glad to see something productive can come of my insanity." Jim pinched the bridge of his nose. "Okay. Dr. Essex, this isn't on-task, but I'm trying to process and express my emotions in a healthy manner. Can I just ask you something?"

"Of course, Mister Haller." Essex replied, dividing his attention between the man and the paperwork in front of him. Haller had seen this many times, Essex' uncanny ability to focus entirely on multiple elements simultaneously. Only the very foolish assumed that the doctor wasn't absorbing everything they had to say. "Even in such a unique situation as this, my door has always been open to you.

"I know what you did to Miss Braddock in Baltimore. To her body. You brought her out in that room to see, and then you sent her back. You knew it wasn't her in control anymore. She trusted you. She needed your help. And you cut her. And you raped her." Jim's hands twisted together on his knees as his mind shivered with the familiar sensation of distance, removal. The kind that came right before Jack came out and he found their hands twisting around someone's throat.

The exhale of breath from his lungs was slow as withdrawing tide. Taking all things with it. Emptying him.

"I don't understand," Jim said quietly, his voice steady now. "How could you do that?"

And in his mind: What happened to you?

Essex stared at a middle distance for a long while before he spoke. "I'm afraid the answer to that is neither simple, nor convenient, David. You are right, in the most basic sense. The acts that I committed at that time are grotesque in any circumstance. It would be far more understandable to say that I simply wanted something that I could not have, or that something twisted in myself needed to cause her pain. That at least has the advantage of being easily understood."

Essex closed the file in front of him, and set it off to the side. "The fact is somewhat different. Unlike some others, I had no time to adapt to the idea of Kwannon and Betsy fighting for control in her mind. Kwannon herself was simple enough to read; a basic psychology, not unsuited to her background and former profession. Miss Braddock, on the other hand, is not so easily analysed. A mixture of strength and weakness in often contradictory ways." He sighed, placing his hands flat on the table. "I don't have all the answers, David, and I didn't then. Kwannon had Betsy trapped, and I believe that she was simply waiting for the right excuse to remove her forever. I couldn't let that happen, and the only way I could see to ensure that was by making Kwannon fear the consequences of destroying Betsy more than she desired the rewards."

"She was drowning under Kwannon. I know that, too. I understand some of your reasoning. As much as I ever could." Jim stared at Essex's flattened hands on the tabletop and slowly raised his eyes. "But I'm sorry. You might be able to guess why I have a visceral reaction to being violated by someone you trust when you've lost the ability to even defend yourself from yourself."

"True. I don't ask for forgiveness of my actions, David. They were as appalling to me in ways you cannot imagine." Essex spread his fingers, the burns up his hands and disappearing under the edge of the cuff the slick pale pink of scarred flesh. "After the death of my wife and son, I have eschewed all true emotional connections, with remarkable success. Miss Braddock was one of those that I couldn't maintain that distance as strongly. When Charles banned me from the school, I violated every ounce of professional ethics by convincing children to bring her out so I could save her life. Students who trusted me, and I manipulated to keep her alive. Kwannon could have killed Betsy, or both of them, if she didn't have some restraints."

He stopped, and carefully laced his fingers together. "So to save her life for the second time, I violated every personal code that I possessed in order to do so. I betrayed the memory of my wife after twenty-two years. And for that, there is no mercy or forgiveness for me. But whether Miss Braddock hates me or not is irrelevant, because she is still alive to do so." There was just the slimmest crack in Essex' serene composure, a slight tightening around the eyes that betrayed his emotions. "I despise those actions, David, and will do so until the day that I die. But I will not regret them."

"So you chose life," Jim said quietly. "Above all else. Oh yeah, we know that story. A life is saved. And too fucking bad if they choke on what you left them with."

Jim stared fixedly at the other man for a long moment as the silence dragged. Then, quite calmly, he picked up the lamp on the desk between them and hurled it at the other man's head.

Wire and glass exploded against the wall four feet behind the doctor's left ear. Shrapnel pattered against the high back of the man's leather chair.

And in Essex's cold grey eyes there was no reaction but calm, polite interest. None at all.

Jim had never wanted to kill anyone so much in his life. Any one of him.

But that was a privelege that belonged to Betsy.

God fucking dammit.

"Congratulations," Jim said. "You saved her. But fucking the unwilling for the greater good is still rape." With unhurried movements, the telepath smoothed his rumpled clothes. As with Essex, the long sleeves could only partially conceal the scars running up the back of his hand and arm. He visited us in the burn ward. The doctor's eyes on him were cool and unblinking. Jim met them steadily, his face equally blank. "I need to go back to the school and make arrangements to take a few days. Ones that allow the professor to maintain at least the illusion of plausible deniability. There was an incident with one of the staff last month. And the month before. I don't think the school is going to accept the 'I'm fine, really' phonecall anymore."

"I doubt your involvement should take up too much of your time, Mister Haller. Mister Wisdom is normally quite efficient in his operational plans." Essex picked up the file again, checking over his notes. "Please close the door on your way out.

Jim nodded, and showed himself out without another word.