Cain and Haller, Tuesday evening

[x-juggernaut.livejournal.com]

Cain spends some quality time with his niece. Ah, family.



She should have known sooner or later this encounter was going to happen. Even extraordinary measures to change a routine wouldn't have ensured avoidance, which worked well since Jim felt no need to make any concessions for this situation other than the necessary wardrobe change. Lowering her cigarette to tap the ash into the tray balanced on the railing of the porch, Jim fixed her odd-colored eyes on Cain.

"Whatever you're thinking, just say it."

"Me?" Cain leaned on the railing, trying to keep a straight face. "Just thinking, is all. Was weird enough finding out I got a nephew suddenly out of nowhere, and only in this place would things get weirder when suddenly I get a niece. I gotta tell you, sometimes I'm half-convinced I'm still in a coma somewhere and this whole insane thing is just my brain finally dribbling out my ears."

"There's precedent. I mean, did you shake hands with any street-performers?" Jim raised the cigarette and took a drag, the gesture not any noticeably more feminine than it had ever been for him. "Technically as transitions go you're getting off pretty light since you've got a lot of previous experience throwing around the 20% of me that thinks it's a niece anyway."

"Which is weird enough as it is," Cain replied, shaking his head. "I mean, I can imagine how freaked other people might be. I know what it's like wakin' up in a body that don't seem rightly yours. You, though - part of your brain thinks you're a girl anyway. Cyndi, whatsername. The little brat with the fire. She's probably havin' a ball, ain't she?"

"Maybe if I'd turned into her instead of, um, me as a girl. Now she just complains about what doesn't match. But yeah. The 'waking up different' camp is more applicable. When the professor brought me out I woke up and found out I'd hit puberty, which isn't exactly up there with finding out you can get hit by a train and keep going but is still something that's a little hard to get over when you come into it after the fact." Jim held the cigarette in her mouth as she re-rolled a fallen sleeve back over her forearm. "It was worse for Jemail. David was just older. Jem's body was gone."

"Still strikes me as odd, how some folks are takin' this so lightly," Cain mused with a shrug. "Then again, the other week I was punching dinosaurs off the Queensboro Bridge. I've been dropped out of a high speed jet plane twice, held open the gates of hell, seen one of my friends blow up about sixteen acres of Brazilian real estate with his brain, and watched you split yourself into five people and go traipsing all over the city. Weird seems to be stock in trade here."

"I guess personal experience is a big factor. I mean, Marie spent days walking around thinking she was Logan, so for her it's not a big departure. I don't know. With some people I can't tell who's actually okay with it and who's just in massive denial. There's a pretty good percentage of people who deal with things by aggressively not dealing with them, if that makes sense." She didn't add that there were some, like Scott, who she hadn't even since getting back to the school. And then there was Logan, who Jim really had no idea how to begin to address no matter how many years of first-hand identity she had.

The woman raised one hand. It was too thin and had less hair than normal, but the smudge of pencil lead on the outside of it was normal enough. She thought back to bits and pieces she'd picked up about Cain's background over the years. "I think I don't even have perspective here," Jim said. "I think I'm so far away from the land of normal it doesn't even make the map. I don't know if it's the telepathy or the crazy. The body's meat. It's a glove I wear. Putting on a new one doesn't change us." She dropped her hand and looked up at Cain's massive frame, one eyebrow cocked in honest curiosity. "When yours did -- with the power you got, I mean -- what was it like?"

Cain shrugged one massive shoulder. "Not really sure," he said slowly. "I remember waking up and just... walking. Felt like, well, you know when you've just woken up and you ain't really all there yet? I knew something was different and it took me a while to figure out what. Of course," he remarked with a smile, "it was about the time the train hit me that I twigged to somethin' being a bit off. Wasn't easy, I mean, I was even bigger then than I am now. Couldn't get in a car that wasn't meant for haulin' cargo. Couldn't fit through most doors, even. Figured I could either keep walkin' around the wilderness like Bigfoot for the rest of my days, or do what I needed to do and come on home."

Jim took her cigarette out of her mouth and rolled it slowly between her thumb and forefinger, watching the embers burn. "Does it feel like you've changed because of it? I mean, aside from having to learn to duck and turn sideways a lot. Did it change who you see yourself as?"

The question stopped Cain for a moment. "Don't rightly know," he said after a while. "I am who I am, right now. I mean, I can spend all week wondering about what might have been, what oughta be, all that. Fact is - I'm the world's only senior citizen that can throw a tank across the Grand Canyon. And that's enough for me."

Jim slid the cigarette back into her mouth with a faint smile. "Well, maybe aside from Magneto and a couple more hiding, but you are probably the only one who can do it without funky genetics. And sometimes I wonder about that, too. How much that influences identity. I think if you and the professor were actually related by blood my sanity really would have been ended. I mean, powers aside the professor's all about the mental and the inner and you're--" The cigarette wobbled in her mouth as Jim struck one fist into the palm of the other.

"Use what you got," Cain said dismissively. Smirking, he looked his nephew, - niece, at the moment, he reminded himself - up and down. "So, you got roped into chaperoning the prom. That oughta be a hoot. Although if you drag Chuck up for one of those daddy/daughter dances, I'm gonna have to kill the both of you just out of principle."

Jim allowed the cigarette to hang precariously close to vertical in favor of staring at Cain. "Okay," she said, carefully removing the cigarette from her lips, "there was so much wrong with that I'm actually not sure where to start." Especially since Cyndi had automatically begun running scenarios about the mechanics of that with someone who was paralyzed from the waist down. I hate you, brain.

Cain smiled widely, then reached out to ruffle Haller's still-unruly mop of hair. "Suck it up, Dave. If this ain't traumatizin' enough, I gotta make up for the difference. It's the sworn duty of your favorite uncle, hey?"

Jim blinked, startled. Only three people ruffled her hair on a regular basis, all of them women, and she'd doubted it was because her head was normally at an elevation where the act was impossible without a ladder. The telepath recovered quickly. "You're weirdly okay with this family thing. I mean, I found out about it and had a graphic nervous breakdown. You, um. .. went fishing."

Cain shrugged again, the gesture become habitually familiar. "You ain't your old man. You were an okay kid before you knew Chuck was your dad, don't see why that changes anything. Ain't right to bring what problems I got with him on to you."

Jim remembered drinking with Cain at Harry's the night they'd encountered Charles. Before she'd found out Charles was her father, even before the relapse in San Diego. It had been the first time she'd ever seen Charles raise his hand in a toast -- and the first time she'd realized the strain between the two step-brothers, when Cain set down his glass and simply walked away. Even then she'd wished there was something he could do to repair it, but she knew that finding out she was Charles' son didn't give her any more right to try and rebuild that bridge now than she'd had then.

But family was still family.

Jim gave Cain a crooked smile and ground her cigarette into the ashtray, exhaling the last breath of smoke in a long stream. "Considering the beating I take with you okay with me I don't think I'd survive the alternative."

"Geez, you fling a kid into the Pacific Ocean one time and listen to her whine forever..."