Sonatorrek: Hyndluljóð - Reborn Part Two

[x-dominion.livejournal.com]

WARNING: MATURE SUBJECT MATTER

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



As they walked through the door, they found themselves in an old-fashioned brick hallway, with linoleum floors and heavy metal gurneys. The posters on the wall and the public telephone were obviously from the 1950s, and they passed a picture of Prime Minister St. Laurent on their way to an examining room. On the table lay Marie, pale behind her hospital gown save for her feet, on which the two smallest toes had turned black: severe frostbite. Kane's echo took a seat by her head, looking at her curiously.

Jean's outfit had morphed into a blue nurses’ uniform and white apron with a red cross emblazoned in the middle and a white hat that had a black band across the top. She crossed over to a cabinet and pulled out a few glass vials, a needle, cutting tools, and heaping amounts of gauze, putting it on a metal cart. Outside, the wind howled, and the trees beat against the windows, making the dead branches screech across the glass.

"So what happened with Alpha Flight? What did you do there?" she said as she pushed the cart over, one of the wheels squeaking as it went along.

"Training mostly, I think. There was-" Kane paused and smiled. "There was a girl. And... Logan. I didn't know them when they just showed up one day. He was using a No Smoking plaque as an ash tray. Walt told me that they worked for Xavier’s in the states, and that they knew Jean-Paul and Jean-Marie."

He looked up and recognition sparked as he took Marie's hand where she lay. "She thought that 'poutine' was the French word for sex. OK, I told her that it was the French word for sex. She was so offended when Minister MacDonald suggested that she needed to try the poutine to feel at home in Canada."

Jean laughed, then nodded. "So you and the girl became friends? Or did she get angry?" she said as she brushed antiseptic along the area, and a stool slid up behind her so she could take a seat.

"What was her name?" she said, more insistently.

"Marie." He replied, in a far away voice. "When I first met her, she still preferred Rogue, but eventually, it was Marie."

"And what happened with Marie?" Jean said, a reminder of the first two questions she hadn't answered. The sound of his voice sounded like more than just a mind coming to grips. It was almost...sad, reflective. "She had to go away. Just like Alpha Flight." There was a long pause. "My mom."

Jean tilted her head, not understanding at first until she figured out what he was saying. And then regretted what she had to ask next, even if it were necessary.

"How did your mom go away?"

Physical and mental therapy were often very similar in that it was never easy, often painful. Anything worth doing took effort. She'd tried building up to it, sewing together the pieces, but healing was not just strictly a magical mechanical force. The mind was often an important part: willpower, drive, stretching beyond the means, trying harder, strength through pain, resistance. It played a role just as important.

"Cancer. Nothing I could do." Kane laced his fingers with Marie's, giving her a reassuring smile as Jean began to cut. "It snowed early that year. It had already started to coat the trees in High Park. Marie gave me a hug. Logan found me on a bench by the pond and brought a bottle of rye. We finished it while he taught me how to howl."

On a nearby table a record player started playing. "So you took it hard," Jean said. She tried to make it quick, to mask the sound of cutting through tendons and bone with the music and her words. She knew it was hard for people to hear. Gently, she kept telekinetic pressure on Marie's legs and feet to keep her from squirming, even as blood pooled in a bowl she'd placed underneath.

"It's what I do." And for a brief second, it was Garrison's voice. "And not long after, I was at the mansion in my red serge, reporting to the Professor ass the newest X-Man."

He stroked Marie's hair back from her face, his expression kindly as she trembled from the surgery.

Time passed differently in the astral plane, Minutes could feel like hours, and so they did, cutting and stitching, removing dead tissue, sewing up what remained, cleaning up in her wake.

The howling wind and cold soon gave way to still and calm air, and the ground turned from a clean, checkered floor to sandy dirt and rockets dotted with trees and mountains in the distance.

***

“So choice is important to you. Tell me,” Emma dipped back into the hat and pulled out two kittens, one black, one white. She shook her head slightly, “Still not a rabbit,” she muttered, “tell me, do you believe people are born evil? Or do they choose to be evil? Or choose to be good, for that matter?”

"There's a point that good people can't cross." Again, the more automatic reaction. He looked uncomfortable in answering, as if something was bothering him.

Emma frowned, feeling resonances that whispered and tinkled in the shattered mindscape that lay before her. Leaning down, she released the kittens she held, letting them bound out across the mindscape, sniffing out the places that were resonating, touching on the memories that were filtering back from wherever they had been driven.

“Oh,” said Emma softly, as she dissected the memories. Charles had informed her about what had happened in Aitken, but nothing could ever capture the Stygian depths that Amora had driven her captives to as well as the memories of a man who had been at the centre of a maelstrom. “Oh, Mr Kane. No wonder you were broken. Moral absolutes don’t do well when you’re up against the gods.”

***

As the interface's aspect shifted to that of agent a piece of clay near Jim's knee boiled. The telepath took it in hand and was met with a bitter wash of emotions. He saw Abigail Brand abandoning the case with the same perfunctory finality with which she paid the check, shrugging off his desperate appeal to her humanity. Like a coal in his stomach, he felt the humiliation as he made one last appeal, this time to the emotional connection they shared . . . and found there was none.

"You did take responsibility. Aitkins wasn't your case anymore, but you stayed." There was something here. He could feel the focus of Garrison's echo. Methodically, Jim flattened the substance in the flickering torchlight and began to apply it to the center mass. "Didn't you keep pushing? Didn't you pursue every lead, every possibility?"

"I should have taken more into account. I was so sure that it was one person behind it all, and never thought about expanding the search. I just didn't consider it." The interface looked down. "Obsessing on it pushed me into stupid decisions to try and outlast him, and I failed."

"You're one man. You used the information you had available, and you reached out to every agency you could." Jim's hands moved faster, placing here the frustration of an unsuccessful overture to the Chicago field office, there the discomfort of a call to Snow Valley after Brand left, taking with it the brunt of his legal pull.

And then, unexpectedly, he found an unrelated memory in his hand. Over a year old, the singularly out of place fragment was set at Harry's.

". . . Everything we've been through, and you never even thought to tell me? You just ran at the first threat and did what they wanted? Bull."

"Right. I forgot. You have your own opinions on how everything in the world works and nothing ever runs contrary to your beliefs. I suppose there's not even any point trying to spare your feelings by telling you that the Hellfire Club has connections and power beyond anything you or the FBI could muster, because you believe you can beat them, so nothing I can say will convince you otherwise, right? Fine, then I'll be honest. I didn't come to you because you couldn't help. I knew the minute you got a whiff of what was going on you'd barge in trying to play the hero, and you and your imaginary white horse would fuck it up."

Jim frowned. The hurt and anger were authentic, which was expected given the circumstances by which Adrienne had left them, but something didn't seem right. He risked a look at the interface.

The memory hit the interface and it shook its head, as if he was attempting to dislodge it. "I- she was right. I would have failed her too. Just like Aitkins."

The frown deepened. No matter how heated the exchange may have gotten, that didn't seem like something Adrienne would have leveled against him. But the pain of the memory dug at him like a stone in a shoe that throbbed with every step.

A stone . . .

Instead of placing the fragment on the golem, the telepath held it up to get a better look at it under the light of the torches. Its wet glisten was identical to any other piece, but he had a hunch. Simultaneously exerting gentle pressure with his fingertips, Jim worked his power into the clay. It softened, deforming -- and then stopped. Something sharp was embedded in the fragment. It did not soften under Jim's power like the rest of the substance.

The clay yielded under the telepath's fingers as he dug deeper, searching for the source of resistance. His fingers closed on it, and what he withdrew was black and pock-marked like a piece of volcanic rock.

Charles and Wanda had explained that chaos magic had been responsible for the destruction of Garrison's psyche. Jim had no meaningful understanding of what that meant, but in the language of this scenario he could guess at the result.

The shard crumbled between his fingers as easily as charred wood. Now confident the fragment was pure, Jim applied it to the golem and looked back at the interface. "Was that really what she thought?" he asked, watching the reaction carefully. "That was really why she didn't want you involved?"

"She-" Kane stopped, and sat down heavily. She had told him he'd fail, didn't she? That there wasn't anything he could do but make things work. But, was it? The memories shifted, and seemed shaky.

". . . I suppose there's not even any point in telling you that the Hellfire Club has connections and power beyond anything you or the FBI could muster, because you believe you can beat them, so nothing I can say will convince you otherwise, right?"

The scene replayed once more, but where before there had been scorn now Adrienne continued in a voice low and inexorable with resignation.

"If you want to believe I ran at the first threat, believe it. I can only say I was terrified so many times, so I might as well just say it all once and let you believe what you want. The FBI can't touch them. I tried. I thought of the FBI, I thought of the Trenchcoats... No one can touch them. I tried to find some way, something to take to the FBI to take them down so I could come back to you. But they're too powerful. They've used their connections to destroy my business in a matter of minutes... something I worked my entire life to build. It's all gone and there's nothing anyone can do about it, because they're too powerful. I've never been so terrified of anyone before- even my husband- as I am of Jason Wyngarde hurting you. He arranged the fire that nearly killed you, and he could have arranged a hundred more. And yet if you believe he couldn't touch you in his wildest dreams, I don't know how to convince you otherwise.

"But you thought I left because there was something wrong with you? I suppose it never even occurred to you that I left because I wanted to protect you..."

"What did she say, Garrison?" repeated Jim, softly.

"She wanted to protect me. Face things herself because she was scared that she'd lose me otherwise."

"Yes. But you didn't know that when she left." Eliminating the false memory had done nothing to touch the hurt of her sudden abandonment. Knowing her reasons now changed none of the days spent wondering what had gone wrong, what he could have done that she'd gone to such lengths to cut him out of her life. How little their relationship must have meant that he didn't even warrant the courtesy of an explanation.

***

In the bowls of the line of mountains a small cluster of green tents and a couple of makeshift buildings sat clustered together. Military jeeps mulled about and men and women in army fatigues and plain white with red crosses hustled from here to there carrying stretchers with wounded men. Jean, her own army fatigues covered with a white surgical gown, opened the door into one of the buildings, the most sterile place in camp. A plank of wood was nailed above the door, the words 'pre-op' burned into the wood.

"Let's see who's in here, shall we?"

"It's like MASH in here." The echo was growing more of a voice, offering opinions. It was an encouraging sign.

Jean glanced over, then grinned a bit. "I was hoping you'd say that."

Pushing back a curtain, they found an older looking gentleman with white hair pulled back in a ponytail and a face full of grey stubble clutching a blood-stained rag to his arm. He stared up at the two of them without a word as Jean pulled up a chair, carrying another form of a doctors bag. She opened up the bag.

"Busy day, hmm?"

"So it seems." Kane sat down next to her. "What happened to Dad?"

Another metal cart rolled over and Jean took out her tools. "Shoulder wound. Bullet. Machine gun caliber. I need to dig the fragments out and then patch him up," she said, a faint smile to herself.

"So you recognize him?"

"Only me and every secret agency on the planet knows Christian Kane." Garrison sighed. "I never thought getting back to my dad would go through the X-Men, eh?"

Jean tilted her head. "I don't follow."

"I had been- um, should you just leave him to bleed like that?" Kane said when she paused. As she got back to work, he went on. "Dad showed back up needing the X-Men's help. I could have killed him for trying to shove his way back into my life. But then, I-" He stopped. "I- something important happened. And I can't-"

"Take your time," Jean said gently, using her finger to determine where the bullet was before she grabbed a pair of forceps for digging out the bullet.

"Was it a bad thing or a good thing?"

"It was... important, I think."

"I know, you mentioned that..." Jean said, digging the forceps into the wound. She kept a steady hand on the elder Kane's other shoulder.

"Try to remember. Why was it important? What happened that made it important? Did it have to do with your dad? Or with the X-Men?"

"I- killed someone." His face looked pained as he tried to remember. "I don't- I... I made the decision to?"

Jean winced, and closed her eyes a moment before opening them as she kept digging. "Who--" It was necessary, it was important, but it didn't mean she liked it.

"Who did you kill?" she said faintly.

"I don't know. It's not- it's not there."

"You do know, Garrison. It's hard," Jean said. She could feel the bullet, and dug in deeper to get a good grip. "But you have to try. Who was it?"

"I said it's not-" He started, but as her hand pulled back with the bullet in the forceps, he stopped. "Apocalypse. I played dumb in order to help kill Apocalypse."

The bullet dropped with a 'clink' into a metal tray and Jean got out a needle and thread after swabbing the area again with gauze and antibiotics. The bullet had been intact, luckily, and hadn't fragmented. She hated those. In this case it was a representation of the damage to the mindscape but the analogy was the same. The more fragmented it was, the harder it was to dig out the damaged pieces.

"And then you and your father got closer?"

"He made it make sense. That it wasn't just revenge or anger but what needed to be done. But if that's the case..."

"Then what?" Jean said as she pierced the skin with the needle and drew the thread across to the other side to stitch the two jagged halves together.

"Am I the man I claim to be? If it's all about necessity, where does principle come in?"

Silence fell for a few moments as Jean pulled the needle through the skin again, drawing another line of thread from edge to edge.

"I think it’s something many of us ask ourselves as X-Men every time we go out in the field when faced against the evil we see. How easy it would be in that moment but....what means for us, and to us, afterward, to decide not to," she said. The action of it was quick, simple, final. But the repercussions of what it meant to that person meant much more.

She lowered her eyes. "I know....it’s been a struggle for me in the past. Moments where I came to the brink and looked over the edge and wanted to jump. But I didn't. I know why I didn't...the question is...what's your reason?"

***

“So,” she said more loudly, to the man in front of her, and clapping her hands, the kittens reappeared in her grasp. “Bridges that can’t be crossed. I can create moral dilemmas left and right to show the shades of grey, but I don’t even need to.” She looked down at the kittens in her hands and then put her hands back into the hat, drawing them out with only one grey kitten in her hands. “You assume morals are inviolate, unchangeable. Do you assume the same of minds? Of memories? What if someone changes your mind for you? You know that I have the power to do that, to make you do what I want. How much personal responsibility do you bear if I choose to make you do something - unforgiveable?”

Bits and pieces of the mindscape resonated with the offer, and she could see the echo gain something more solid in its bearing. The image of Kane rubbed his eyes, mulling over the idea. The resonance started to grow, feedback in bell like waves growing around them both. "Why would you? You could only make me not me." It stopped, and a connection linked up with the clear ring of fine crystal as it met her stare. "You can take it away, can't you? You can fix what I did?" The personal pronoun wasn't missed.
“Memories are not absolute, Mr Kane,” replied Emma. “Even without telepaths involved, memories are... malleable things. They change, they fall away, some are created from whole cloth and yet are utterly false.” She held up one warning finger. “But yes, if I change your memories, to some extent I change you.” Emma sighed, looking down at the kitten she held in her other hand. “I believe in the Law Of Consequences, Mr Kane. I rarely consent to change someone’s memories, because how do you learn from your past if you don’t even remember it? Even if,” she shuddered slightly, “I have been recently reminded how painful memories can be. However, is there anything that can be learned from events that were forced upon you? Actions undertaken beyond your control?”

“Compromise is possible, Mr Kane. Amendment.” Emma lifted the kitten in front of her face and it morphed in her hands, first into a tiger cub, then a lion cub, then a Siamese cat that Emma cradled in her arms, stroking it mockingly in classic super villain style. “How much do you need to thrash yourself with your own guilt? Do your morals demand that you keep all of those memories and wallow in the pain they cause you? Are they... essential to you? Do you need to know the depths to which you can descend to be true to yourself?” She smiled suddenly. “You may have noticed, I don’t tend to ask easy questions.”

***

Cyndi handed Jim another piece, and he discovered the association had led back to Brand. Rather than a specific memory, the fragment bore a melange of impressions: flashes of bare skin and green hair, the sense memory of drying sweat and pleasantly burning muscles.

The aggregation was devoid of eroticism. Instead there was shame, and something which at the time had almost been like denial: a guilty awareness that this was no one he even wanted to be with, yet never rejecting her advances.

Jim bowed his head and began to stroke the clay into position near a shoulder. "It's hard to recover from something like that," he said as he worked. "The curse . . . didn't help, I know. Would you have turned down Brand if you'd known it wouldn't intervene? Right then -- would that have changed anything?"

"I don't know. It was- a way of getting distance. When it happened, everything seemed to disappear for a while." He said, looking embarrassed. "Like it was a period where there wasn't the doubt or the isolation."

"No, I understand. Don't fault yourself for wanting something to hold onto." As the telepath smoothed the last of the rough edges, the earlier memory hummed: “Oh, sweetheart. You’re really serious about this, aren’t you? Too bad you’re wasting your time on someone who doesn’t give a shit.”

Jim grimaced. "I'm just sorry-"

"-that she was a poisonous bitch," finished Jack as he passed the telepath another piece.

"I should have known, which is why I never should have let myself get drawn into it. It was selfish."

That word, selfish, shivered through the clay Jack set in his hands. Now he was parked in a nearly empty covered garage, Jubilee in the passenger seat and 'China Girl' on the radio. He twisted in the driver's seat so he could slide his hand around the back of her head, pulling her into a kiss.

"Relax, Jubilee. I have some experience with this."

The counselor did not place the piece. Once again, something about this memory wasn't right.

"Brand used you, too," he continued. "She took what she wanted and left, and when Alex Knorr was killed you were the only one left to deal with it." Jim raised his mismatched eyes to the interface as he began to push his fingers into the clay, watching the construct for clues as he focused its attention on the incident. "She left you feeling more alone than you already did."

"It was my fault. I pushed that, just so I could make it easier." The interface was more agitated, more Kane. "It's not an excuse!"

At 'I pushed that', Jim's fingers found the foreign body. Damage, just like the memory of Adrienne. He prized it out and crushed it in his fist, letting the motes flake into nothingness. In his free hand the memory began to shift and reform.

"Did you push it?" Jim asked. "Or was it just that you couldn't bring yourself to say no?"

"So like, I am totally the last person to talk when it's all about 'you must get sleep' but Gar, you gotta get some sleep, that shit'll make you crazy after too long. And not the fun crazy with like painting on walls or like, eating chocolate cake and going into a precognitive bender."

"Relax Jubilee. I have some experience in this."

"Don't know, dude. Maybe you just need some extracurricular activities to knock you out, yeah? Get you remembering what a bed is for and all."

"Yeah, right. That's going to happen."

"Gar, if I've got to make some sort of crack about coming to clean your pool, I'm going to be totally disappointed in you."

"I-"

His protestations ended then, cut off by the lithe young woman twisting into his lap and silencing him with a kiss.

"That's not the point! Someone needs to be accountable." Kane said, the interface starting to merge finally. "It was my choice!"

As the interface's temper rose, Jim's hands began to dart to the piles around him. Not just his: now he seemed to be working with four additional arms, one pair slim and female, the other large and masculine. Each pair seized on a separate memory, feverishly grasping at the fragments that now radiated self-loathing like a furnace.

I see it. I see it. The chaos struck along pre-existing fault-lines. There was a common thread here. Throwing Paige down onto the motel couch -- grabbing Amanda's wrists as she worked his neck and drawing her roughly into his lap -- crushing Wanda against an alley wall with all the strength in his body. These encounters had happened, but not as Garrison remembered them. Amanda had said the effects of Garrison's curse had interacted with the Blot to amplify emotional attraction, and as he began to tear free the chaotic influence and join the true memories to the golem he could see that in no encounter had Garrison been the aggressor. He hadn't initiated them. He simply hadn't refused. The chaos must have fed on his turmoil, twisting his memories into a reality that suited his guilt.

"Accountable for what? For being in pain?" The words came out sharper than Jim had intended, and realized that tears were on his face. Garrison had always seemed so well-balanced, so successful -- professionally and socially adept in a way that Jim had always been ashamed he envied. Now, faced with the wave of helplessness, failure and loneliness seething beneath the surface, a tangle so close to what he had struggled with and continued to struggle, he was angry. Angry that Garrison was in this hell, and, more than that, angry that someone like him could work so hard, sacrifice so much, and think that hell was what he deserved.

But before the interface even had a chance to respond, Jim found he may have answered his own question. As he finished adding the now un-tainted memory of Garrison's encounter with Marie-Ange, another piece, drawn by the association, came into his hand and hit him with the power of a sledgehammer.

The torture of a young girl repeated over and over in a multifaceted fly's eye of monitors, recorded cries emanating from every speaker. The sole glimmer of true, uncomplicated human connection he'd found from no one else, screaming for help that would never come.

She was sixteen. It cascaded through his skull. She was sixteen. And he’d been right there. Right fucking there and he hadn’t protected her. Worse, he thought back to what Bill had told him. If he was right, the innocent girl was taken around the same time he’d been ignoring a relationship just so he could get balls deep in Marie-Ange and pretend everything was alright for a moment.

"Don't. Don't I-" The interface was lost, clutching at itself. "I- Don't do this to me!"

Jim squeezed his eyes shut. I'm so sorry. Because I have to.

***

The interface was silent as she finished with the elder Kane, and then followed her through the tent flap and through the doors of the medlab at the mansion. At her gesture, he stopped beside the bed, looking down at himself lying in the bed. She picked up the clipboard from the front and gave the interface a look.

"It's because I can. I have the ability to change things, to stop things like Aitkins from happening. It doesn't matter whether it’s in the leathers or behind the badge."

The harsh florescent lights of the mansion medlab made a spotlight over the other Garrison's prone form. The man's body was a patchwork of mottled purple, black, blue, and red. His hands and arms were covered in zig-zags of stitches, where the skin had to be sewn back together after the bones had punctured through after being crushed. What was left underneath the skin resembled a bag of rocks where the bones lay shattered and splintered.

The air around Jean seemed to bend and shimmer slightly, like heat rising off a sidewalk as she stood over Garrison. Reaching out, she gently lifted one of his arms at just below the wrist.

"But?" she said. She could sense it in the air: hesitation and doubt beneath the surface.

"Because I can, I have to own those decisions. And finding out what I'm capable of, am I the person that should be making those decisions?"

Jean's eyes turned distant in concentration as she glanced down down at Garrison's hand. A muffled, sickening crack echoed through the air as the larger bones on his left hand started to be pushed back in place. The smaller, more delicate bones would be last. In the real world if he hadn't had a healing factor he would have undoubtedly been unable to use his hands again for the rest of his life, possibly amputation...even death.

"What kind of person should?" she said.

"That's the question, isn't it?" This time, it wasn't the interface, but the ruined body of Garrison Kane that responded to her. The interface had disappeared, leaving only the Canadian in the room, badly injured on the bed.

The new location of the sound made Jean glance down, studying him with the look of a friend more than the precision focus of a doctor. The interfaces were still Garrison, but only parts of him and she had had a singular mission. The more aware he was, the harder it was. It had been essentially a mental scavenger hunt before, picking up the pieces, working their way to this point. But the inevitable reality was dealing with what the pieces lead up to: realization. The summation of self and dealing with the aftermath.

She smiled sadly. "Seems so," she said, a lingering touch on his arm, a squeeze to prepare him for the next round.

"But it’s all we can do."

Another crack sounded, wet, like the sound of a broken twig underneath wet leaves and dirt. More silence followed for a while, until,

"You hide it well."

He hissed from the pain. "Maybe sometimes you have to trust yourself. But that takes time to accept."

"Maybe?" Jean echoed. As his body flinched and wriggled it suddenly went still, held steadfast by Jean's telekinesis. She kept her hand around his arm, more for reassurance than method, never pulling away.

"It doesn't sound like you have that trust in yourself yet." The questions he asked were not ones of someone who was confident in themselves.

"Why?"

"Because I was the one there, and I failed. Maybe it's not my fault, and maybe I'm only accountable for part of it. But I was there, I made the wrong decisions, and people died."

Jean studied him. "The ones who want to make people suffer....They find a way. And we stop them the best we can. Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes people do die. It makes you feel powerless. There is no perfection. If there was....no one would ever die and everyone would be happy. But its not. And it sucks. It's not fair. But it’s all we have. We have to make the most of it. If you dwell in this...in the bad...in what ifs....in every mistake...If you let them haunt you...it'll consume you. Don't ignore all the good you've done and the people who are still alive because of you."

"Like I said, Doc, it takes time to accept that. At least I'm not blind to it anymore."

The world seemed to be sharper, shaped by not only her own hand but also his. Every bone was set into place was like an infusion of life. Jean worked quickly and carefully, the pieces now mostly on the right "path." The only thing left to do was for him to heal it himself. She and the others had only set things into place. The figurative bruises and stitches were still there, but the "bones," the "foundation" was strong again.

Jean stepped back. "I think we're done here," she said. She smiled.
The world dropped out and faded away as Jean disconnected from Garrison's mind. The chill in the air from the air conditioner, the smell of alcohol and clean floors, the rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor, the bright lights overhead, all returned the moment Jean opened her eyes and lifted her head.

***

"I-" It would be so easy. To take away the memories and move on. But it was like a lodestone; his morality was how he gauged himself. It was as much of him as anything.

"I can't. I- if I'm capable of this, what hope is there? Where is the line drawn between the moral and what is expedient?”

“That question is for each person to answer in the silence of their own heart,” said Emma. “Most never need to. Most are never tested to the extremes.” Emma turned the kitten over in her hand and its form shifted again, turning into a miniature Garrison Kane. From its limbs strings grew upwards to meet the frame held in Emma’s other hand. Moving her fingers rapidly, she made the puppet dance. “You were a plaything of gods, Mr Kane. You danced under their spell. You asked why people would change your mind for you, when it would make you not you.” Emma closed her upper hand and the puppet slumped bonelessly downwards. “The gods would unmake you for their own fun; to see what they could do to a good man. Because they could. Because you were there.” Emma sighed and looked down at the puppet in her hand. “You passed a test. You survived gods and monsters and magic. Good people fought to ensure that would happen. Will you throw that away by assigning all of the guilt to your own head? Because I am not sure that you can survive that.”

"I never liked you. I thought that Adrienne would be a better person without you." Kane took a deep breath. "Because you don't care, except you do."

Emma laughed. “Then you have excellent taste, Mr Kane. I am not a likeable person. And Adrienne would undoubtedly have been much richer without me.” Emma shrugged. “Or dead. Or in an asylum. Frost family dynamics are complex. As for caring; your opinion on how much I care for my sister, or whether I do it what you consider some appropriate fashion, is irrelevant. Adrienne’s view on that is all that matters. And we... understand each other.”

"So what happens? I can tell things are a wreck." Although the mindscape was far more structured than he could see, as an infinite number of connections rebuilt themselves. "Letting go of guilt isn't easy, unless you've got a telepathic shortcut in mind."

Emma tilted her head in thought. “I don’t want to take away all of it, Mr Kane. Your life – would have a hole in it, if I took away all of the memories.” She looked down at her hands and let the puppet disappear, recalling the anguish that was leaking out of Marie-Ange, Amanda and Jubilee and how disturbing it would be to them to have Kane remember nothing of the events in Aitken. “But I can take away the worst of it. The things that might kill you if you dwell on them too long.” She shrugged. “But it would be my choice. You would have to trust my judgement. You would have to accept now that the person I take out of the end of this surgery may not be the same person that went into it.” She looked around the bleak plain that still presented itself to her view, although she could feel the shifting connections that were building beneath its surface. “Although I am not sure how much of a person could be considered to have gone into it.” She looked at the man in the chair in front of her, no longer a blank slate. “I am very good at what I do, Mr Kane. Perhaps, as Logan is wont to boast, the very best.” She offered him that, at least.

"I can't forget it. It might not be my fault, but I do need to be accountable for what happened. I need to have the memories for the next time." He took a deep breath. "But if you can blunt it, give me the time to process it bit by bit as I can handle it, I'll do it."

He was struggling to find words, and the fear that was there was real. Garrison didn't want to remember any of it, but he couldn't just get rid of it and still be him. If she could make the process bearable, give him time to get his feet under him, he could hand the responsibilities he owed to the dead. "I don't know you really, Emma, but people I trust with my life trust you. So, where do I sign?"

“I can do what you ask,” said Emma. “Blunt the worst of it.” She smiled wryly. “Provide a sense of perspective. And at the end,” she grinned and reached her hand into the top hat on the table beside her. “Why look,” she said as she raised her hand, full of softly wriggling, nose-wiggling life, “I can pull a rabbit out of my hat.”

***

"You said someone has to be accountable." The telepath's hands smoothed the piece into the construct's cheek, his tone gentle. "But how far can your accountability extend? To a girl who had her own ideas about how she should live, who made her own choices? To her father, who allowed her to be her own person?" His voice didn't even waver as he pressed in the next. "To the man all three of you thought you could trust, who killed her?"

There was a long silence, the interface's eyes screwed tightly shut and hands clutched at its head. Slowly, it began to unclench and finally the eyes opened. "It's not right. Not even Arnie was to blame. And if that's the case, what is the point of it all?" The voice was different, surer. "Maybe I'm not personally accountable. But I was there. I could have done more if I had made the right decisions, but I didn't. I have to take the blame for that, at least."

Garrison walked over, looking at Haller's handwork. "That's why we're here, isn't it? Because we can make a difference when we get it right. We can stop things like this from getting worse and because of that, we have a responsibility to act."

"We do." Two shots into the face of an old man with blood on his skin and thirty years on the job behind him. A bullet between the eyes of a woman being used now just as she'd been used up long ago. Two experiences tied together, but no satisfaction, no bloodlust: just gaping emptiness.

"You acted as you acted," Jim continued, massaging the clay. It took shape faster now, as if drawing itself into contours it now remembered. "That's not an indictment, and it's not absolution. It's just what happened. You can't undo it. You can only understand it." He realized he was talking to the thing as if it were Garrison -- so far into the process, it was almost impossible to remember it wasn't. Perhaps the distinction no longer mattered.

"You killed Arnold Snorinsen," said the telepath. "Lushton came at you, but he was unarmed. The husk of a decent man who'd taken an oath to protect the people in that town, just like you." He raised his two-colored eyes to the interface that stood over the golem. "What was it you saw in him, that you couldn't bear to let him live?"

"He was already dead." Kane said grimly. "It didn't matter whether or not I stopped it at that point. Snorinsen's first conscious act would have been to eat his gun."

"How do you know?" Jim didn't break eye-contact, hands now moving seemingly of their own accord. "Because that would have been yours?"

"Yeah. Not even a moment of hesitation." He said.

Jim nodded. There was certainty here, despite Garrison's misgivings about the use of lethal force and personal circumnavigation of the law. Already stripped of what he thought he knew of himself, sick with horror and the suffocating weight of his own failures, in that moment Garrison had seen in the man something he recognized. Recognized, and understood.

"No one is so good that they don’t have a monster lurking inside, Kane," Arnie had said in that voice of the already dead and damned. He had been speaking for both of them.

One last piece now; somehow Jim knew that what fragments remained would follow it of their own accord.

The clay-like substance gleamed in the firelight, and Jim saw Garrison's last minutes of consciousness. Speeding down the road as his heart pounded and the seat grew tacky with blood. Amora smiling that too-dazzling smile, so like the one Brand had worn, gleefully exposing just how insignificant he really was. And finally standing before a god with no weapon but his badge, and all it represented. A talisman of law, of Right, and the only anchor he had left.

Following the prevailing emotions, Jim placed the piece directly over original fragment, the guiding star which seemed to him the core of Garrison's character: focus, and determination.

"You did them justice, in the end," he said. "All of them. You ended it right."
"Not much of a victory. Too many innocent lives. Too many mistakes coming from assumptions." He sighed and closed his eyes. "Therein lies the lesson, eh?"

"So take the lesson. But don't forget that you held onto yourself when it really mattered. Ask Arnie how small that victory was." Jim rose, and slowly the night began to fill with sound. It was the sussuration of hundreds of smaller fragments in motion, rolling towards the golem like marbles down a slope.

The telepath stepped back towards the river, and now faced not a life-sized figure but a man the size of a mountain range. Boulders rolled up its slope to become the bugle of veins while great sheets of rock slid into place to complete musculature. Miles above them, eyes the size of glacial pools lay closed and motionless beneath the starry sky.

The telepath moved forward to rest a hand on the figure's hand, the whorls of its fingerprints thick as his arm. "Even a rabbi can't make a real man," Jim said, "and I can't tell you who you really are."

Dwarfed by the construct, four faces turned to regard the interface: the two men, the girl, and the faint shadow of the child. They smiled at him, quiet and sad.

"That's up to you, Garrison."

***

Kane sat up sharply, breathing heavily as if at the end of a long race. The room was dark, he could hear the telltale beeping of medical equipment, and the last memory was of the hammer swinging for his head, ready to end it all. He swallowed heavily and tried to slow the disorientation, the rapid beating of his heart, and the panting breaths. He was alive. He didn't know how, but he'd survived. He finally registered the presence of another person in the room, trying to adjust his eyes to the darkness.

The mind felt different when it was awake. The unconscious mind had what felt like a film or haze over it, thick and heavy. But when it was awake that haze suddenly cleared, like clouds moving away from the sun. It was immediately noticeable. Not that Jean really needed to feel it, she could see it. And after all that time, after all that had happened....seeing Garrison open his eyes was a welcome sight.

"Welcome back.