Log: Adrienne and Garrison

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After Morgan leaves, Adrienne finally works up the nerve to see Garrison, and manages to make him smile again, least for a brief moment.



This time. She was going to go in this time. No more turning back at the door. She wanted to see him. Couldn't be afraid. She had to see him. It was the only way to get the images of what had happened, what had been done to him, out of her mind. It had taken two days to realize that the very image that had been holding her back from seeing him- the brutality of the attack- could only be erased from her consciousness, and from her nightmares, by seeing him now. Seeing him alive. She was afraid, still, that if she looked at him now she would only be able to see the image of his arm being ripped from his body. But that fear was battling with the knowledge that moving forward was the only way to get free of what haunted her, and this time, after a dozen times of approaching the room and turning back, she was going to go in.

Once over the threshold of the doorway, Adrienne found she was unable to make small talk or tiptoe around what had happened, or even greet him. She wasn't even looking at him, speaking before she even knew it, unable to stop the words that had been bottled up for the past two days from pouring out of her mouth. "It looked like you were dead. The car," she clarified, "I read the car. I... I saw you, your arm..." she shuddered involuntarily. "It looked like you were dead." Her voice hitched, but she gave him a wan smirk. "Maybe, the next time you want to get that close to the dead," she continued when she'd swallowed the lump that was rising in her throat, "how about if you use this instead, okay?" With a goofy smile she pulled a large box with a picture of an ouija board on it, adorned with a bow, into the room and pushing it towards him, carried on with "use that to get close to the dead. Instead of getting your arm ripped off and bleeding... bleeding so much that you almost... You stupid, insuffrable, stupid..." Shit. Her throat was constricting, eyes stinging with tears. She wasn't supposed to be crying. She was supposed to be joking with him. This wasn't what was supposed to happen. Shit, shit, shit. She rubbed her face unceremoniously with her sleeve, turning up her nose and sniffling at him, facing him finally. "Stupid Boy Scout."

Kane put down the coffee he'd been sipping, and touched the ouija board on his desk. "You know that I was dead. Really, dead. If it wasn't for the technology involved, shit, there's no way any of us should be here." He didn't look any different then he had before. Sitting there in a t-shirt, both arms looked the same, slightly tanned, heavily muscled, and unmarked. He reached out to her, taking her by the upper arms before she could pull away. "I'm sorry."

The psychometrist was still too overwhelmed by her own thoughts to struggle in his arms, standing limply and silently for several moments. She wanted to put her arms around him to assure herself that he was really there, not a ghost like the one she'd seen so many times in her nightmares. But she couldn't seem to make herself move. "Why are you sorry?" she managed to ask, finally. "S'not like you planned all this, right? Or did you?" Recovering enough to narrow her eyes at him and give him a smirk, she muttered "because if you did, I think I might have to smack you."

"Generally I don't plan ambushing myself. It's considered self-indulgent." He locked his gaze with hers, not flinching. Garrison's eyes were different; pained, confused, but most of all, hollow of his normal humour and life. "We got into something, Adrienne. Something that I made a decision that it had to be finished. Maybe I could have gotten out, let everyone know, but-" His face went strained. "I decided what had to be done was too important. So I'm sorry."

The corner of her mouth tugged up in the makings of a smile at his mention of self-indulgence, but when he continued speaking it vanished. "Don't be sorry. It's not as if you owe me an apology." Her eyes were still shining, as if she was going to start crying any minute. She didn't like what she saw in his own eyes. "You did what you had to do. The right thing. That's who you are." She was going to tell him not to apologize again, but since that was who he was too, she didn't bother. Instead, she moved one arm at the elbow in a way so as not to break away from his hold on her and brushed her hand over one of his arms. The one she'd seen ripped off his torso, seen not once, but almost every night since he'd been gone. It felt like an arm should feel. Like nothing had happened to it. "I thought when I saw you it would look... different," she mused quietly.

"I did what I had to do. That doesn't mean I did the right thing." Kane said, shaking his head. "We were... rebuilt, I think is the best term. It feels the same, but it isn't. My neural emitters are gone and my skin-- it's not the same any more. Look, Adrienne, I can't stay here, not now. I'm going to head down to to my dad's boat. Try and get my head together, and figure out who I really am now."

Adrienne didn't understand what neural emitters were, but that became irrelevant when he mentioned not being able to stay. She nodded, feeling like she was being dismissed. "Oh, right. Now. Of course. Sorry, I-" She tried to twist out of his grasp, spirits sinking. "I... yeah. A boat sounds nice. I shouldn't have... I should have let you know I was coming. I'm sorry. I... don't let me keep you."

"Don't." Kane's grip tightened slightly. "I think my entire life is a lie, Adrienne. Everything that I thought I was, I don't know if that's true or not. Everything that I have is slipping away, and if you leave too, I--"

It probably wasn't appropriate, but Adrienne felt so glad that she wasn't being dismissed she let out a chuckle, attempts to struggle aborted. "I don't have to leave," she answered, then frowned in thought over what he was saying. She suffered a moment of panic, as she always did when people talked to her about their feelings. But she didn't pull away. "Listen," she murmured, taking a step closer to him. "I don't know what you went through after you were... taken away. But I do know what it's like to lose all the sense you had of who you were." She'd spent months, both before and after Steven's death, trying to forge an indentity for herself that was something more meaningful than what she'd been before. It wasn't the same, of course, but Adrienne wanted to try to understand, and show Garrison that he didn't have to be alone. She wasn't leaving. "You're going to figure this out. If- if I can help you, I will. For me," she continued, raising an eyebrow, "it helped to figure out the parts of myself that hadn't slipped away; the things that hadn't changed, and build from there. Do you still like baseball? Or was that a lie?" It wasn't meant to be accusatory, merely a question to try and help him figure something out. "Beer?"

"It's more about what I believe. They had the others under a kind of telepathic control. They had no choice to do anything other than what Pete said. For whatever reason, mine didn't take. I woke up, I guess, about a week and a half ago, and just played along. I heard what Pete was saying, that taking Apocalypse down mattered more than just individual lives." Kane looked lost as he spoke. "The last time, I arrested him, by the book. And now he was out and all those people who died in New York might have died for nothing and--"

He was rambling. With a deep breath, he tried to pull himself together. "I have spent my entire life trying to be different than my father, and it turns out that when the chance presents itself, I'm not any different. I went along with killing Apocalypse. I helped make it happen by my own choice."

So no joking about baseball and beer, then. That was okay. She'd heard something similar from him months ago, about his desire to be different from his father, and she hadn't the faintest idea how to be helpful then, nor had she gained any insightful knowledge about the right words to say now. She wanted to help him, but people bareing their souls to her, and her actually caring enough to want to be helpful, was still very foreign territory. "You're right," she replied honestly. No matter how much she wanted to help Garrison, Adrienne couldn't lie to him. "You helped kill him. Look, I know you wanted to believe that putting him behind bars was the right thing to do. For most criminals, it would have been. But this was Apocalypse. He wasn't most criminals. The right thing to do in this case was to kill him. You did the right thing. It was the only way to prevent more lives from being destroyed. So that more people wouldn't have died for nothing. That doesn't mean you're the same as your father, Garrison. It means you had a really shitty choice to make, to either compromise what you believed or save God knows how many people Apocalypse would have killed next time, and you made a choice. One choice." She wanted to make him understand that he was still the best man she'd ever known, but she didn't have the right words. All she could do was put her arms on his shoulders, a look of sympathy on her face. "One choice, one action does not make a man."

"I don't know if I believe that. I think what you choose to do when put to the test says more about who you are, than what you choose when it's not your own life on the line." Kane took a deep breath. "I don't know how to settle that in my head. Until I can, I'm not going to be able to pretend to be an X-Man, or a cop, or even myself. I have to know."

Adrienne shrugged, still holding him by the shoulders. "So you'll figure it out. You'll settle it. It just takes time. You don't have to have all the answers right now, you know. No one... nobody thinks any less of you for being affected by this and needing to figure yourself out." He was too hard on himself. It was one of the things she admired most about him; the fact that he was always wanting to be better, but Adrienne wished he could understand what a decent man he already was. "You have time to figure things out, and you have... friends who are willing to help you." They were friends, weren't they? "But it was just one test, Kane," she reminded him gently. "Who's to say you'll not make a different choice next time? No one can know the answer to what they're going to do in the future, not when they're put to such a horrible test as you were."

"Maybe one test is all that it takes." Kane shook his head. "I helped kill a man; consciously, intently, I helped plot, ambush and then kill a person in cold blood because it was safer for the rest of the world. I made that decision on my own, and sentenced Apocalypse to die. It doesn't matter whether or not that was true. I gave myself the right to decide that, something I swore I'd never do. So no, I don't know if the decision next time will matter." His voice dropped. "Or if it will even be all that hard to make."

He stopped, finally releasing his grip on her upper arms. "That's why I have to go, Adrienne. Until I know that... I can't know who I am, or where I belong. Does this even make sense? I think I'm babbling."

With a wry laugh, Adrienne gave his shoulders a shake. "You're not babbling. You're just trying to figure this out. Listen to yourself." Another shake. "You killed him because it was safer for the rest of the world." She sighed, resigning herself to tell him what she'd been afraid to say, without worrying about whether the words were right. "You, Garrison Kane, are the best man I've ever had the honour of knowing. You will go, and you will come to terms with killing a psycho to save the world, no matter how long that takes, because that is what you have to do to be who I know you are. Let me tell you this in case you get kidnapped again on your way to the boat and I never get to tell you. You are a good man. That's why this is tearing you up so much. Because you will always be the right-path-guy, the guy who doesn't think one man should give himself the right to decide to end someone's life. You think you don't know who you are, but only Garrison Kane could torture himself so much over saving the world. That's who you are." On impulse, she stood on her toes and kissed his cheek.

Kane touched his cheek, and gave her the first honest smile she'd seen thus far. "I don't know what's going to happen, Adrienne, but I appreciate the fact that you believe that I'm better than I might be. Thank you."

Adrienne waved off the comment and flashed him her own smile, the first genuinely happy one she'd had to give him since she'd come in. "Just trying to pay you back," she said quietly. It seemed irrelevant to mention what for. "Gimme your Air Supply cd before you go, though. I'm not letting you take it with you. Oh," she added with a playful smirk, hoping he responded better now than he had about the ouija board or the beer comment, "and if you want me to help you pick out some swim trunks to wear on the boat, I'd be really good at that, assuming you model them all first so I can make an informed decision as to which ones would be best."