Sonatorrek: Hyndluljóð - Reborn Part One

[x-dominion.livejournal.com]

WARNING: MATURE SUBJECT MATTER

Kane's shattered mind is slowly pieced back together by the telepaths over the last week.



Non-telepaths can never truly understand what it is like to step into someone else's mind. In truth, telepaths themselves don't truly understand what pure immersion would be like, unless they wish to lose themselves into another. Each mind has an architecture to it, and each telepath had a set of personal interfaces which they used to interact with them. Minds like the Professors were the equivalent of sprawling metropolises, with intricately built mental constructs, memory stores, and his own impressive psionic abilities running like the operating system of a supercomputer. Children were equally daunting, with their partially formed minds laid out like open fields one moment, and wrapped in storm-like cascades of input and information the next moment, building them into the people they are to be.

Some telepaths liked to impose their own constructs on others, like the icons of operating systems, running the programs and code they were familiar with to get what they wanted. Others preferred to work with the mindscape of another, taking clues from the internal structure about what kind of mind they were interfacing. Be it simple or complex, telepaths were still human, and unlike the rumours from non-Psions, delving into another mind wasn't as simple as pulling on a pair of pants. Each person was like the world's largest library being opened up, and systems were needed to navigate it rather than sort through the equivalent of billions of books and files at chance looking for your information.

In the case of Garrison Kane's mind, it was a deep blue infinite haze, against a dull plane. It was a nu-mind; a blank slate covered from end to end with shattered fragments; hints of where the structure of a mind once existed, but had toppled as it was pulled apart at random, to the point that it was impossible for every an echo of it to pull itself together on its own. The only hope was to try and replicate the structure that had been there before, and if successful, the rest of the pieces would pull into place once it passed a certain mental density. But if done wrong, the person who woke up might wear Kane's face, but be an entirely different man.

It had been the first time since Jean had entered the astral plane since Genosha. She didn't know what would happen. The uncertainty of her slipping--of losing control--lingered within her, but all knew it was a situation where certain risks needed to be taken. There was no one else with quite as many qualifications as she had, in both knowledge of the person and the craft, to do the job properly. Because of this Jean Grey knew she could not fail. There was too much riding on it.

A brilliant orange light cut through the haze as Jean floated in midair, the Phoenix wrapped around her in a cloak of fire. As she gracefully floated to the ground the dull plane turned to ceramic tile under her feet. The tile spread outward in all directions until it stopped at baseboards, then shot upward to form white walls where deep blue had been and circled around to make a ceiling, florescent lights, doors, hallways, and gurneys. A hospital. A foundation. She worked best here. At some point in their lives everyone had been in a hospital, to visit a loved one or to be there themselves. It was a place of healing, everyone knew. She was a healer of bodies and minds. Perhaps his mind would recognize that in some way.

Jean's outfit shifted, from her X-Man uniform to a pair of green scrubs, her hair in pony tail, yellow tennis shoes, white lab coat. She grabbed a clipboard and pushed her way past a door into a ER. People mulled about, scrambling, rushed, busy. Patients lay on gurneys between white curtains. Some cried, some sat patiently, some played on their cell phones. Family members paced nearby, trying to flag down anyone who would listen. Nurses and doctors drifted between each curtain, attending to the injured.

As she had discussed with the others, with a thought the 'interface' popped into view. It was a shared mental 'echo' of Garrison Kane, quickly put together by their memories. He would serve a little like a combination of a confirmation and a dowsing rod; there to help them determine if their efforts were being successful.

He looked around for a moment, and then seemed to focus, falling into step behind Jean. "Hey Doc."

It was a good sign but Jean knew he was still a vestige, the barest semblance. Easy to fade away with the slightest wrong move. It was best to be delicate.

"Hey," she said with a smile as she pulled the pen she had tucked from behind her ear. "I was just about to make my rounds. Would you like to join me? I don't think they'll mind."

"It's not Harry's, but sure." He said, following her down to her rounds.

***

Emma Frost's telepathic avatar materialised in that deep blue haze dressed, as was usual for her when entering an unfamiliar mindscape, in her White Queen's robes. She looked around the landscape and, putting her hands on her hips, tapped her foot impatiently on the ground.

"Well," she said. "This is unimpressive." Structure, Emma tended to find, was helpful in the kind of work she was seeking to do with Kane. A narrative to fit the pieces into. With a series of entirely unnecessary but personally satisfying gestures, Emma drew a picture in Kane's mind. When she had finished, a classic picture box stage, with red curtains stood in the centre of the blue haze, and Emma's robes had transmuted into a magician's outfit that bordered, unsurprisingly, on the edge of being a burlesque outfit.

"An audience is required, I think," said Emma and reached out carefully into the blue haze that rolled endlessly out before her, feeling in the fragments for pieces that she could pull together. Slowly and carefully, she pulled what she could into shape, placing what she had made eventually into a chair that materialised in front of the stage. It wasn't Garrison Kane, just a man shape made of the blue haze, but Emma had pulled enough out of the haze that it could, at least, respond to questions in some form or way.

"Welcome," she said at last to the nu-man in front of her. "To the Emma Frost magic show. Here," she said and pulled off her white top hat, tapping it with a cane that she had pulled from somewhere in her nearly non-existent costume. "I think I might be able to pull a rabbit out of my hat. If you help. Tell me, Garrison Kane, what do you think you are?"

The form infront of her blinked a few times, but didn't respond. There wasn't enough there yet, just an echo of her own limited encounters with the man, shared memories from her sister's mind, and the barest shreds in the mindscape around them. True to its nature, the figure kept shifting, from different times in the memories, switching between his X-Men leathers and the iconic red serge; bearded and not, in a baseball cap and a pair of shorts to nothing at all. Obviously one of Adrienne's.


Still, it watched her attentively, and there was at least a flicker there to work with.

***

And for Jim, it was not going well.

Over the years, he'd thought he'd encountered every type of wound. Psionic and traumatic. Organic and chemical. Conditioning and reprogramming. Damaged and defensive. In every case, there was some underlying construct to repair, uncover, or purge.

Until now.

The telepath had arrived to find himself standing in the midst of what remained of Garrison Kane: an asteroid field of emotions, experiences and beliefs. And that was all.

There was no discernible sense to the rubble's drift or location. Every so often he caught a distortion in the haze: remains of the original structure, like the impression of a pencil mark in paper after the line had been erased. At first he'd tried to focus on these distortions in the hopes they would give him some sense of Garrison's original system, but found the traces disappeared when he did so. An experimental push of debris into one of the flickers, with the vague hope that perhaps some of the jumbled fragments would find their original position and cling, proved equally fruitless. He had then spent quite a lot of time making no progress whatsoever experimenting to see if the debris could perhaps be reassembled like a puzzle, and now he was out of ideas.

The rarity of his frustration only increased it. The astral plane wasn't supposed to be daunting for him, and this irritation was threatening to bring his less mature personalities closer to the surface. And, more embarrassingly, Jim couldn't pretend part of the issue wasn't the growing suspicion that maybe he wasn't as smart as he'd always thought.

However, letting Cyndi emerge to throw a sulk was, though indulgent, not going to make this session any more productive. Jim pinched the bridge of his nose and glanced at the closest thing he had to a guide.

In truth, the interface that they'd discussed was more of a best guess than anything. Jean said it would work like a dowsing rod, letting them know when they were getting things right, but it was still a long shot. The echo, as it were, was little more than a sketchy concept as opposed to anything real about Kane. But still, with the thought, the Canadian seemed to come to life, coming to stand shoulder to shoulder with Haller and watch the chaos.

"I don't suppose you have any idea what your brain should look like," Jim commented, not really expecting a response. There was something eerie about the interface. While nothing appeared explicitly wrong, it seemed . . . not dead, but lifeless. Like a CGI figure rendered too closely to a living being, the interface was visually accurate, but not "right". He couldn't quite place what made him draw the comparison. Perhaps it was only that he knew it was no more Garrison than an image in a photograph.

"Not sure, eh. Sorry." It was almost Canadian Bacon in the stereotype, but it at least responded, indicating things were working.

Jim himself didn't move, but a ghostly image of Cyndi leaned away from the main body -- and, consequently, from the image of Garrison. Its functionality did not make it less unsettling.

"Okay," Jim said, failing to acknowledge the alter's discomfort. "Okay. Let me think about this."

The telepath dropped into a cross-legged seat, a lit cigarette appearing in one hand. Even if Charles could have involved himself in this, Jim didn't want to ask for help. He should be able to handle this. He just needed to let go of his frustration and think.

A large part of his vocational training had been the necessary separation of his own opinions and preconceptions from those of his patients. He'd always felt the policy was equally applicable to astral repair. Don't project onto the patient. Work only with what you find before you.

But what if there was nothing?

Jim exhaled and watched the smoke swirl around the fragments they encountered. It drifted past the interface, still standing beside him, and the final stanza of a poem taught to him by the professor floated through his mind.

Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

The telepath paused in thought, cigarette halfway back to his lips. The edge of an idea began to form; slowly he lowered his hand, half afraid it would be lost with a sudden movement.

Jim looked up again, this time studying Garrison's profile. "What do I know about you?" he murmured.

"Eh?" The echo answered back helpfully. It was not the most auspicious of beginnings. Still, the pieces of the man were all around them. It was a question of finding the pieces to unlock the person behind the trite image. A starting point was what they needed. A point of reference that they shared.

And there it was. A terrifying ride through Central Park, responding to a possible danger to Angelica Jones. The Canadian had commandeered a horse from the NYPD (an action which Haller had not realized was even possible) and had cut through the park at a gallop. He was a good rider, pushing the horse to the limit and getting to Angel in a fraction of the time that any other method would have taken to make sure she was safe.

It was a minor fragment, barely larger than a pebble, but resonance with Jim's corresponding memory drew it to him like a meteorite to a planet. With care, the telepath took it into his hand like a wilting flower.

"Yes," Jim said, regarding the fragment between his thumb and forefinger. "You know how to ride . . . because you're RCMP."

Mountie. It was a term that, for Americans, usually brought to mind an image of a mounted officer in stereotypical dress reds. It was easy to lose the substance of what the job actually entailed.

Garrison was a policeman.

Fragment cupped in one hand, Jim unfolded his legs and rose.

***


"Tempt me, why don't you?" she mused as she paused in front of one of the curtains, then pulled it back to reveal an older gentleman holding a towel, saturated with blood, over his arm. The man's features looked similar to Garrison's but not quite the same.

"Hmm."

The echo almost looked bored, taking a seat on the unused gurney behind her.

"I promise we can go to Harry's after this is all over. I'm sure we both will need a drink," Jean said. She nodded toward the towel the older man had pressed to his arm.

"May I?" The man lifted the towel, revealing a deep gash. Jean pulled a tray over filled with sutures, a needle, gauze, and other items and set to work.

"Do you know who this is?" Jean said after a moment, glancing over to the echo as she set about cleaning the wound.

"That's my grandfather. Jonathan Borden." The echo blinked a couple of times. "He took me to my first Jays game. Exhibition Stadium. It was so cold, I spilled my hot chocolate in the third inning, and it was a frozen puddle by the sixth."

"Sounds like you two were pretty close..." Jean said with a smile, tossing bloody pieces of gauze into a nearby trash bin. "Was the stadium pretty close to where you lived?"

She knew some of the answers from what he'd told her, some from what she'd seen floating around in his head. It was getting him to remember that was the trick.

"We lived on Parkside. It's wasn't as expensive then." The echo's eyes went distant, looking for a word. "Poppy said that it was important to go to a game live, because you got to understand what the players felt. He would buy me a hotdog and peanuts."

Jean dabbed the wound with antiseptic, then gently spread a topical analgesic over the cut to numb the pain as she reached for a needle and suture.

"Did your father ever go with the two of you?"

There was another pause, as the memories were nudged into place as she worked on the wound. The echo spoke slowly; haltingly. "No. Dad was gone by then. Pete took me once, but he didn't know the game."

Prepping the area, Jean pushed the needle into the skin and began to sew, carefully threading the edges of the wound together.

"What was your dad doing at the time that kept him from going with you?"

"He was... working. All over the world. We'd get postcards." The echo stopped for a moment. "He'd see us a couple of times a year when he was in town. Poppy used to come to our sports games and school shows."

Jean paused, slowly looking down. "I'm sorry. Must've been hard," she said softly, gently continuing to stitch the wound.

"Who's Pete?"

"He works for my dad." The response came faster, more certain as she closed the wound.

Nodding a little, Jean concentrated on tying off the end. She smiled.

"What's Pete's last name? What does he do?"

"Pete Wisdom. Of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Services." There wasn't even a pause. "Although, if you ask me, his real career is smoking cigarettes."

The touch of humor, welcome and encouraging, made Jean laugh as she snipped the thread with her scissors.

"I'm sure Phillip Morris deeply values his input," she said with a smirk, then gently squeezed the older man's shoulder.

"I think we're done with this one. Shall we go to our next patient?" she said, finding the mention of Pete a good segue for the next leg of the journey while he was still fresh on the mind.

***

“Let me see,” mused Emma, sticking a hand into her hat and pulling out a Mountie’s hat. “Not a rabbit,” she said, and reaching in again, pulled out, in succession, an FBI badge, a miniature set of black leathers and finally a baseball bat. “Not a rabbit among them, Rocky,” she said and then slowly began to juggle the four items. “Which one are you, Mr Kane? An officer of the RCMP? An FBI agent? An X-Man? Or just an ordinary man? Perhaps we should try the outfits on for size.” With a nod of her head, the items she was juggling disappeared and reappeared on the form in front of her, the baseball bat, laying across its lap. “Are they all part of you, Mr Kane? Or all parts of you? Integrated,” Emma clapped her hands and a smiling, confident illusion of Garrison appeared in the air in front of her, “or conflicted?” Another clap of her hands and the figure in front of her fractured into four parts that flew away from each other and vanished.

It followed the forms as they dissipated and reformed. For a moment, he was back in the red serge and raised a pledging hand.

"Maintiens le droit." He said confidently. But the serge disappeared, replaced by a black suit and a badge. "Fidelity. Bravery. Integrity." These words were less confident, and he snuck a quick glance at the badge before he changed again, X-Men leathers. The echo of Kane fingered his epaulets, tiny maple leafs instead of the X worn by the others. "Like a cuckoo." He muttered, looking uncomfortable. Finally, just the street clothes, turning around the old bat in his hands.

"I never asked for this." He said, so quietly it was almost hard to hear. "I just wanted to do the right thing. Be the person that stood for something." The voice that was there wasn't the echo she'd created for that moment, but pieces of him aligning; admitting. The bat slipped from his fingers. "And I tossed it all away. For what?"

“Well, isn’t that the question?” replied Emma. “Or one of them at least.” She raised an eyebrow at the shade in front of her, then dipped her hand into the hat again, pulling out a series of scarves that piled at her feet, a never-end flow of silk through her mental fingers. “How long is a piece of string, Mr Kane? How does one define the right thing? Is there one right thing? One thing to stand for? Is the right thing an absolute? Can two wrongs make a right? If you can save many by sacrificing the few, how do you weigh up the innocence of the few? Or the values of the many?” Emma smiled suddenly. “As the very embodiment of moral ambiguity, I’d be most interested in your answer.”

***

Everyone brought something to a mindscape. The instinct to establish basic rules of movement and gravity was strong, and as such these rules tended to assert themselves. It was what allowed him to feel he stood on solid ground in a featureless expanse, and why the smoke of his cigarette billowed and curled in a world with no air. But visitors brought with them more than a sense of physical laws.

They brought their stories.

The mindscape began to roil with the telepath's stream-of-consciousness. With Genesis Jim split the void into earth and heaven, and with this delineation the rubble began to fall. By itself this configuration did not suit his purpose, so he singled out Noah's flood to drown the newly-born shingle beach in water before he allowed it to recede into a river. Flat terrain bulged and fell into natural contours while clouds formed only to part and reveal a new sun, which an instant later gave birth to a night sky with its setting. What had been only a void heartbeats before was now a moonlit riverbank.

The telepath had deliberately declined to create the setting all of a piece. The process itself was a thought exercise, a sort of dual meditation and testing ground to prepare his mind for the next step. None of this was from the story he had in mind. Like all creation myths, it was only a means of defining boundaries . . . and setting the stage.

Jim opened his hand again. The fragment had been shielded from the changes wrought on the rest of the mindscape. Though severed from whatever context had informed the act or the accompanying emotions, it still hummed with traces: adrenaline, concern, and a keen focus on what had to be done.

Once more the telepath sank to his knees beside the interface, but this time there was purpose to his movements. A small plane of level rock had appeared beneath him, leaving him clear of Garrison's shattered psyche. At his gesture a sputtering torch appeared to light the work area.

"When I was a kid," he said to the interface, "my uncle used to tell me this story about a rabbi in Prague who prayed for a way to protect his people from violence and blood libel. In a dream, God told him to go down to the river at night with two assistants. They were to make a golem."

With his empty hand the telepath stroked a few broad marks in the slab. The stone gave way beneath his fingers as if made of chalk. The topmost and bottom most markers were roughly six feet apart.

"Golems are the closest man can get to the act of God's creation of mankind," he continued, sitting back to consider his work. "There's a lot of versions as to what happened to the one from Prague. It got too dangerous, or it fell in love, or it was just no longer needed. But it was always created for the same reason."

He placed the fragment on the stone like a seed, and over it layered the association that had sparked inspiration.

"To serve and protect."

He didn't bother waiting for a response. Instead Jim simply put his hand to the closest chunk of identity, its texture softened by the flood into a malleable clay.

The echo settled in beside him, watching the movements of his hands. It was odd to have not-Kane there, the image totally correct but the mind behind nothing but a programmed routine, like a wax dummy with a few pre-recorded responses in the persons voice.
Jim began to move swiftly, counting on the focus provided by the fragment to bring the associated pieces to hand. Experience informed identity, and each decision in Garrison's life had been shaped by what had come before. The man could not have come into the X-Men as he had without the training received from the Gamma and Beta Flight programs. Likewise, he would not have been made FBI liaison without his position within the RCMP -- a position which would itself not have been fully utilized had the Alpha Flight program not been terminated.

Entries on a resume, perhaps, but these concretes provided a framework from which Jim could work. He arranged certain key experiences within the demarcations he'd created so that the clumps of clay formed the constellation of a man. There was nothing linear about identity, and so he made no attempt at chronological arrangement. Each piece formed a node. Each node ached for context.

Jim took a piece of clay in his hand and considered it in the torchlight. He closed his eyes and washed power over the surface, rendering it receptive to connection.

"You made a good time through the training programs," he remarked to the silent interface. The telepath pressed the clay to the appropriate node, kneading gently. "Was your mother worried? About you going for Beta Flight?"

The echo paused for a long moment, but as Jim's hand sculpted the newest piece, it was as if a realization had struck it.

"No." It started slowly. "She was worried about my powers. That I might hurt someone if I didn't get the proper training." It stopped. "She said I had an obligation to do something with them. It wasn't good enough to focus on just what I wanted when I could do what others couldn't. I think I hated her that day. Until she got sick."

Pieces around them trembled with ghostly emotion. Jim's attention sharpened to them like a spider tracing tremors in its web.

"I'm sorry," he said as he continued to smooth the clay, and meant it though he knew he spoke only to a construct. A moment later another set of hands passed him the next piece, firelight glinting off its mismatched bracelets.

"And your father?" The new addition was joined to the previous mass. The node was beginning to resemble a knee. Jim closed his hands on the forming limb, a physician testing sensitivity around a bone he knew to be fractured. "You being a mutant, and then your mother's cancer. Where was he for this?"

"Away. Always away." The form watched his hands carefully. "Used to get postcards. But never there for anything. Got used to it." The voice got a little less shaky with each movement, as the hands swept over the clay.

Jim accepted another handful of impressions from a second pair of hands, these large and masculine. Christian Kane was a presence that loomed large in his absence: negative space in the skein of familial connection that pulled tight between Garrison, his mother and sister.

"But his reputation preceded you," he commented as he formed the clump of impressions into the meat of a thigh.

"Always special." He looked close at the clay. "I heard there was almost a diplomatic incident when the UK learned that the son of Christian Kane was a mutant and in a government program. I was in college at seventeen so they could get me to the academy faster. Didn't know anyone, on an accelerated program that barely gave me a day off the first two years... I took my oath before most of my friends moved out of home for the first time."

"You must've had a lot of expectations to deal with, being his son. Most from people you'd never even met." The telepath smiled crookedly. "I was lucky to be spared that, I suppose."

***

They walked through the door, and into a completely different room; built out of logs and stone, stout and squat. The fireplace was crude but effectively, throwing out enough heat to counter the thin fingers of wind which snuck through the cracks in the doors and walls. On a roughhewn table lay a man with an obviously broken leg. He was sweating profusely, twisting against the pain of it.

Jean's outfit changed the moment she set foot across the threshold, from a pair of scrubs to a green gown with petticoat, gold necklace, and black jacket, her hair neatly arranged in curls. She carried a worn but well-made and sturdy leather doctor's bag, and exchanged her coat for a white apron to drape over her dress. She approached the table and set her bag down, opening it up, taking out supplies.

"It's okay...we'll get you set...." she said, lightly running her fingers along the leg to assess the damage. "It's bad but he won't lose the leg."

She glanced over at Garrison.

"Does he look familiar?"

The echo looked at the man, but shook his head mutely.

Jean nodded. It was a bit too soon. "That's okay," she said. There was a pile of kindling near the fire. Jean grabbed two sticks, making sure one was the length of his leg and the other was long enough to travel up his side. Then, using some old rags, she wrapped the rags around the sticks for cushioning.

"I'm going to lift you up a little, just for a moment, so I can put some rope underneath," she added. Picking up some sections of rope, she gently lifted the man's leg and slipped them underneath it. Next came most of his body, telekinetically, so she could put a couple of ropes underneath his torso.

"Did you know Pete when you were younger?" she said.

"Sure. He used to visit when he could, back when he still worked for Dad. I guess he was his guilty conscience." He leaned on the table, watching her hands move between the telekinetically woven ropes. "I've seen that before. Somewhere..." He trailed off and shook his head.

"What do you mean? The telekinesis?" Jean said. If he brought something up she wanted to nurture it, not push it away. Grabbing another stick, this one significantly smaller, and other materials, she began to fashion a traction splint, placing the smaller stick at the bottom of the foot, then wrapped the rope around ankle.

She drew in a breath once the ropes were secured. "This is going to hurt."

"Always does." The echo muttered, nudged by a shard of memory, before the reset the leg. The figure of Judd cried out in pain and the echo's looked up sharply. "That was the first thing he said to me. This is going to hurt. He was wrong though. It already hurt. I had the program. I had school. and at the end, I had a badge. But no one was there. Mom was already sick, and Vikks was just a kid. And then this assigned me to the west coast."

Jean set more bones, wrapping the ropes around the leg and his waist, securing them. "What made it hurt? Being a mutant?" she said.

"Being alone. Being so 'special' that I either got avoided or treated at arm’s length by the regular officers, too young for my rank to get any respect, and living in a tiny apartment away from any friends or family. Joining Alpha Flight was almost a relief, since it meant coming home to Toronto." He reached over to help knot the ropes. "And that's where Judd took over my training. Little bastard beat me senseless for a solid month just to make sure I got the message."

Taking a step to the side to let the semi-corporeal part of Garrison work, Jean studied him for a few moments, watching him sharply yank the ropes at every rough memory like a punctuation mark.

"I'm sorry" she said. They were experiences if, given the chance, most probably wouldn't want to forget, but what shaped the person into who they were, for better or worse. Remove any one part and it could change that person entirely. The butterfly effect.

Her eyes flickered back toward the man on the table.

"Do you recognize him now?"

Kane looked down, but just shook his head. Obviously the connections were still coming together.

***

"There has to be right. At some level, you have to be able to draw an absolute between actions." He said quickly, but also automatically, as if working from a well memorized script. The bits of Kane were out there, resonating, and the core beliefs moreso than others.
“Really?” Emma’s eyebrow quirked up in amused disbelief. “What a fascinating point of view. I don’t think you’d do terribly well in my Club. However,” the endless silk moving between her fingers cut off suddenly. Dipping her hands back into the hat, Emma pulled out an image: the mutate Yvette heading for Kane’s nearly blank face, claws spread, vanishing just before it hit him, “I suspect there are occasions where you are correct. Some things,” and for the slightest moment, the vision of a blue-faced blond-haired boy hanging from a rope flickered between them and was gone, “can never be forgiven.” Emma made a small moue at the vision, but it had only escaped because she had been distracted; her consciousness still roved out through the mindscape around them, pulling together the small sections of it that had resonated at Kane’s last words. Carefully she gathered them together and added them to the shape in front of her, smiling as small sections of it became noticeably more defined. “Tell me, Mr Kane,” said Emma, and tapped her cane on the hat again, frowning as she pulled out a bouquet of flowers. With a deft flick of her wrist, Emma turned them over and aim the sword she now held in her hand at the throat of the man in front of her. “What of people who use children as weapons? Good or evil? Right or wrong?”

"A weapon is a tool with one sole purpose, to be discarded when it is no longer useful. Turning a child into that is evil." He said, but it sounded textbook; something from his education as opposed to his experience.

“And yet you give young students lessons in the Danger Room,” Emma responded dryly, tracing the sword up his neck and lightly tracking it over his cheekbone. “To defend themselves against a world that hates and fears them, says Xavier. And yet, a weapon they become. A sword in a scabbard is still a sword, Mr Kane.” Emma threw the sword into the air and clapped, watching as the dove the sword turned into flapped away across the landscape. “How do you choose to define your own behaviour, Mr Kane? Is the training that you do evil? Or does it have some grander purpose? Where have you drawn your own line?”

The figure stopped, watching the dove as it flew away. There was a rustle in the background; a sound like fine crystal being jostled together lightly. "No." It started hesitant, and then changed into something more.

"Training them to defend themselves, and to defend others isn't making them a weapon. Any more than the RCMP Academy made me a weapon. I can fight, I can defend, but I can also choose."

For the first time, there was a glimmer of more than Emma's own projection in the figure as it looked her in the air. "I'm not making them into the sword. I'm giving the sword to them to choose how they will carry it."

“Oh, very good, Mr Kane,” murmured Emma as she tracked the resonances throughout the blank mindscape in front of her. Here, then here, and she touched on the tenuous link and used her own will to reinforce it, the first delicate steps in turning the dissipated nodes of aspects of Kane’s personality into a network. A re-integrated moral and ethical framework, or as much of it as was left, should help in pulling together some of the other aspects of his mind, those being worked on by Jean and Haller.

***

He scooped up another piece. This, too, had some parallel in his own memories. For Jim the focus had been on Baron Zemo and his cohorts, but for Garrison it carried a more personal snarl of emotions. Even with years and miles of distance between them, it seemed as if there was no place so far away that his father's shadow could not fall over him.

"But they only knew him as an agent, or by reputation," Jim continued. "You knew him as a father. Did you want that? Was he someone you wanted to live up to?"

It watched the clay work into the form, becoming one piece from two. "No. The opposite." It said finally. "As much as possible."

"You did follow him, sort of," Jim pointed out as he sculpted a calf. "Working for the government, I mean. But your own way." He accepted another lump and began to work towards an ankle. "And you have friends in that world. Like Pete. Pete's . . . got a lot in common with your father. Vocationally, anyway."

"I know I became my father." The sudden jump in intensity and anger was an encouraging sign, that some of the scattered pieces were starting to make their own connections. "I just never wanted to be."

The telepath withdrew his hand. At the flare from the interface the ankle joint had hardened beneath his fingers of its own accord.

"Working in the same world does not make you the same man," he said. The words were uttered in unison, calmly from Jim, sharply from Jack.

"How are you him?" the telepath pressed, voice once again singular as he took up another piece. "Forget the job. In what fundamental way are you like a man who abandoned his responsibilities and cut ties when they became inconvenient to him?"

"I swore an oath to uphold the law, and yet, I'm happy to ignore it when I have to." The echo flickered, and X-Men leathers materialized for a second before winking out. "For my dad, family was always going to be second to what he saw as his duty to Queen and country. For me, all of those oaths are second to what I feel I have to do. There's not a lot of distance between the two."

"That depends on what it is you feel you have to do." Jim began work on the other leg. This piece carried echoes of anger, and helplessness, and a biting ambivalence.

"The law would say you should avoid overt terrorist action against agents of a sovereign nation, too." The telepath's grip tightened fractionally on the clay, but he smoothed away the impressions as quickly as he'd caused them. "The law would have said to let the politicians spend weeks in negotiation with the Genoshan government while our friends and students were being tortured and used."

"The law is also what says that the Genoshans had no right to kidnap us in the first place." He stared at the clay form emerging, the words flowing freer. "If we always have the right to do what we have to, where does it end? What happens on the day we do go over the line and don't realize we've done it?"

Kane's shade picked up a shard of clay from the ground, turning it over. "Does the Brotherhood tell themselves anything different? They believe they do what they have to for the greater good of mutants, even if it means killing and destruction. We draw the line where we choose, and justify it by saying we understand where that line should be. My father could shoot an innocent man in cold blood because he rationalized it against the security of a whole country. When it comes down to the mutant community as a whole, what are we willing to do?"

"If we're no different, then why'd you join the X-Men?" The counter came from Cyndi as Jim concentrated on a thigh. As the interface's speech gained surety the creation process began to feel less and less like a sculpt. His hands seemed to be moving around some Platonic ideal: not creating a shape, but finding something that was already there.

Beside the growing figure, Jim stretched out his hand for the shard the interface was contemplating. "And come to that," he said, "why do you stay?"

"I came because I was ordered to." The clay under Jim's hand trembled for a moment. "I was Canada's way to learn from the team and apply it to Alpha Flight. I was always supposed to be Alpha Flight."

The interface reached for his lapels, at the maple leafs that decorated his uniform. "And then they were killed. I helped kill Apocalypse. Genosha. Going home would be-" He paused. "I'm a disgrace to the badge and a hypocrite."

The telepath waited for the trembling to pass before he spoke again.

"You're holding yourself to an ideal," Jim said quietly. "An ideal is something you can strive to uphold, to pattern your behavior to, but it's unattainable by its very nature. The law is the same way. Genosha and Apocalypse violated it first, forcing us to act in ways we wouldn't have if there'd been any other choice. Some things just aren't black and white." Exhaling slowly, Jim placed another piece of clay across a node of the golem's chest as he continued. "Likewise, there were things at work in Aitkins beyond your control. Things commitment and determination couldn't have prevented, and can't undo. And with Alpha Flight . . . they died because of choices and decisions that had nothing to do with you. And no matter how much you might devote yourself to getting justice for them, no matter how much your sense of right tells you the world shouldn't allow something like that to stand, the people on the other end of it may never be found." He shook his head. "You're not a hypocrite, and you're not a disgrace. You're tearing yourself up for not being good enough when it's the world that's let you down."

"That isn't good enough. It's an excuse." He sighed. "If we fall down; if I fall down, what's left? At the end of the day someone needs to be responsible. You have to draw the line that says this is where we stand!" The mental image shifted as Kane explained, cycling through his uniforms, from agent to Mountie to X-Man.