Haller and Adrienne - In Adrienne's Mind

[x-adrienne.livejournal.com]

Haller enters Adrienne's mind, which is experiencing some garbage collection issues. When her mind tries to attack him, Jean comes to the rescue. After Jean stabilizes Adrienne, Haller cleans up the mindscape by getting rid of twenty-five years of inane Readings and shows her how to put her special Readings, and her memories, in their proper place.

He knew there was something wrong the moment he entered Adrienne's mind.

At first glance his surroundings were idiosyncratic, but not unusually so: a city, at least on the surface. Roller coasters wove between the towering skyscrapers and shining glass, and above him a working ferris wheel emerged from the roof of an office building. A stock exchange ticker alternated between DOW updates and cardboard targets, which indistinct figures in expensive suits shot at from behind a counter. Jim even caught a glimpse of a teacup ride sporting limos and corporate cars instead of seats. It all blended together with the seamless logic of a dream to create the themepark version of corporate America.

But almost as soon as he took in his surroundings he began to notice aberrations: the glass of a modern storefront marred by an inexplicable patch of brick; one of the skyscrapers peaked in the spire of an old Gothic church; cobbles replaced asphalt without any transition; an elaborate fountain that looked as if it'd be more at home in Venice or Milan jutting from the side of a building; even a ledge that sloped in distinctly Asian eaves. Touches of Old World architecture and foreign elements that disrupted the sleek urban city.

It didn't feel right. He couldn't put his finger on it, but these disparities didn't "feel" like they belonged to Adrienne. It was as if he'd walked through his childhood home and found a room from an entirely different house. There was no sense of familiarity, no emotional or intellectual connection.

Cautiously, the telepath knelt beside a patch of cobbles and brushed it with his fingertips.

Images came to him. A blur of smelting and casting. Installation on the street. Hands replacing bulbs, hands working to update and repair wiring. The weight of perching birds and many impacts of inattentive passer-bys. Sunrises and sunsets, day after day, all the while illuminating the same unchanging cobbles.

Jack's ghostly hand wrenched Jim away from the cobbles. The information was dense, so dense, like a blackjack to the back of the neck. If not for the natural division of his mind he might have been lost in it.

All right, that was enough. It was time to do what he'd come here for. The telepath rose and called out in a voice he knew would carry:

"Adrienne? Are you here?"

"Haller?!" Adrienne's voice sounded relieved, though a little hysterical. "Is that you?! I dunno what you're doing here, but can you help?!" She couldn't see him, but she hoped he wasn't too far away. And that he could get to her.

She was caught in a chaotic block of the cityscape. There was garbage everywhere; piles of old cups, bits of furniture, watches, computers, phones, papers, envelopes, writing utensils, clothes. There were clothes all over, mountains and rivers of clothes she was struggling to wade through. And in amongst all the garbage, the buildings around her, Frankenstein-created patchworks of odd colours and materials, were shifting before her eyes, pieces replacing others, rising up or crumbling down as she stared at them. The random patches of cobblestones, asphalt, and sidewalk composing the ground before her- what little she could see of it, anyway- were rippling like waves, completely unstable. And all around the detritus of objects, the patchwork buildings, and the shaky ground, were people. The ghostly images faded in and out of her view as the landscape changed- people walking over the cobblestones disappeared as the cobblestones themselves did, replaced with people hurrying over concrete sidewalks, only to be replaced again by cars zooming over asphalt. Over and over, always different people and objects.

"Haller, I'm stuck!" she added to her plea of help, for every time she tried to step forward the things around her would shift again, and something told her she would shift right along with the landscape if she ventured out into it.

"On my way!" Jim felt a wash of relief; she was responsive, and that would make this vastly easier. He set out for her at a jog, alters trailing behind him in perfect step. He noticed that as he ventured further into her mind the streets became more crowded. The indistinct pedestrians became less corporate-polished and more varied. A man in Victorian garb walked beside a girl from the era of Mod while a flapper conversed with a hippie. Hoop skirts coexisted with miniskirts, pinstripes with brocade. If this was the theme park version of the business world, Fashion was holding a parade.

But the aberrations were increasing too. Unwilling to risk the delay of another vision, Jim created a simple grated walkway beneath his feet. It stretched just far enough ahead of him to catch his stride, and disappeared again the moment he'd passed.

A garbage dump, he realized as he came to a halt over the source of Adrienne's voice. That was exactly what it looked like, and Adrienne was trapped in the center.

"I'm up here! Try this!" he called down from the fragment of walkway. In an eyeblink the walkway became the platform of a fire escape, complete with ladder. The telepath slid it down, putting the bottom rungs within Adrienne's reach. He was still trying to figure out a strategy for dealing with the bizarre junk images and the things that seemed to trigger them, but if she could extricate herself . . .

When Adrienne tried to reach up and grab the fire escape, a soccer ball came out of nowhere and hit her in the head, knocking her off balance and to the ground. "What the fuck?! she exclaimed, as one of the piles of clothing she'd hit on her way down collapsed on top of her, burying her underneath. Where the fuck had a soccer ball come from?! She hated soccer. Ever since she'd tried to bet on that match in college by trying to Read the ball and had ended up being out nearly a grand.

When the stars in her vision cleared, Adrienne started tossing clothes out of her way to dig herself out of the pile. "Let me try that again," she muttered when she could see Haller once more. But no matter how many pieces of clothing she cast aside, she didn't seem to be able to free herself from the pile she'd fallen into. Pieces from different countries, different eras just seemed to keep pushing up around her like flowers popping out of the ground. They seemed to grab at her legs, at her arms as she tried to reach the fire escape. Another soccer ball whizzed at her head- or maybe it was the same one coming back for a second round- but she dodged it this time. "Haller, I can't get free! These clothes- it's like they're grabbing me!"

Jim's mouth thinned. This went beyond simple obstruction. Surface objects were actually following Adrienne as she struggled, as if something were pulling them into her orbit. Normally such things would mean some kind of symbolic association, the manifestation of fears or memories preying on her mind. These objects were not representative of anything but themselves. Unlike the encroachments on Adrienne's mindscape they seemed "familiar," but passingly so. There was no sense of the emotional weight that would indicate something dear, like a family heirloom or lucky pair of shoes. They were simply everyday things.

Nasty suspicion beginning to form, Jim straightened.

"I'm going to try to free you," he said. He didn't want to rip her away; if this was what he was beginning to think it was that could cause serious damage. But if he could push it back, give her a little space . . .

All went well as he slid his mind between Adrienne and the mess. It was only when he tried to push it away that all hell broke loose.

Adrienne had no idea why all hell broke loose, but it was pretty damn frightening. When Haller tried to push away the junk that was closing in around her, the patchwork buildings all came down around her at once; the ground started to explode, and random objects whirled around at increasing speeds. Cutlery, cookware, everything that had been littering the cityscape before seemed to start flying everywhere now. Except now it wasn't just flying at her, it was flying at Haller, too. Adrienne was grazed by a brick and was knocked off-balance, quickly swallowed up by the clothing pile and unable to extricate herself, which sent her into a panic as even more chaos erupted in the cityscape.

The chaos caught Jim completely off-guard. He'd expected push-back, but not like this. This was severe, as if trying to free her had somehow disrupted the structure of her mind. He'd triggered some kind of immune-response, with himself as the foreign body.

Objects struck him, too many to register, and each impact brought with it a random burst of remembered Readings. He faltered, and the platform disappeared beneath his feet.

---

Jean stared at the ticking clock. The marked rhythm felt slower than usual. She resisted the urge to pace, feeling the pressure building on the other side of the carefully created mental walls Jean had around her own mind. Something was wrong.

It was the soft flutter of Adrienne's eyes that gave the signal, like a siren before a tornado. On the other side of her wall came cacophony, a violent rumbling that Jean braced herself for just as the flutter in Adrienne's eyes cascaded outward, like a shockwave. Adrienne's body became rigid and began to tremble, her arms and legs jerking back and forth.

The siderails on the bed slid up and locked into place and Jean took off into a sprint, grabbing a syringe and a bottle of Diezapam from a nearby drawer. She jammed the needle into the bottle, drawing 0.2 mg of the drug. They had already started an IV on Adrienne earlier, giving her fluids to keep her hydrated. After evacuating the air from the syringe Jean inserted it into the IV line.

"Come on...." she murmured as she turned Adrienne on her side, to make sure in case Adrienne happened to vomit she wouldn't accidentally swallow on any and choke.

Dashing over to another drawer, Jean pulled out a lung bag and waited, checking her vitals and respiration to check for complications.

---

The flying objects stopped whipping about and floated to the ground, slowly. The clothes that had seemed a few moments ago to be attempting to strangle her released their hold and were still. Although she was still nervous, Adrienne couldn't hear any further signs of chaos, so she dug herself out of the clothing pile and poked her head out.

The landscape looked much more stable now. Although the buildings and the ground were still patchy, mismatched, containing materials and designs from different eras and different parts of the world, they had stopped their mad fluctuations. There was still debris everywhere, but it was no longer moving about. "Haller?" Adrienne asked, taking a few tentative steps forward, expecting the ground to begin changing again. It didn't, though, and she was able to make her way, tentatively, over to where Haller had fallen off his constructed platform. "Are you okay? Where are we? And what happened?"

There was no immediate response. For a moment Jim remained in the heap in a fetal position, still assailed. The world had stopped twisting around him, and the distant, analytical part of his mind registered a change. The atmosphere of anxiety had lessened, and he could sense a sort of relaxation -- not quite a lack of tension, but something like a muscle beginning to unclench.

The momentary respite was enough. He raked the pile with one hand, and the cold resolve of Jack shoved the debris clear. The pressure of the Readings ceased, and a ripple of power around him ensured he wouldn't come into contact with anything more. Jim took a deep breath and turned to Adrienne.

"Sorry about that," he said, voice laced with the deeper undertones of the alter. "I'm okay. Your mind just takes some getting used to."

Things like the atmosphere of anxiety and the pressure of the Readings were completely lost on Adrienne, but even she could recognize that there were a great many strange things going on right now. Firstly, "we're in my mind?" Secondly, "what the hell is wrong with it? It looks like a fucking junkyard of useless crap. I don't think it's supposed to look like this. Well, except for maybe the theme park bits," she amended, looking around. Her gaze eventually fell back on Haller, though, which brought her back to the list of things that were wrong with what was going on here. "Whoa. That's a lot of... what are those?" She squinted at the alter-egos, their forms faint as they stood behind Haller. His voice had sounded strange to her.

Jim waved a dismissive hand, a motion made eerie by the impression that three other figures were doing the same. "Manifestation of my DID. It's normal. This kind of thing isn't, though. All this stuff -- I see things when I touch them, a massive amount of information all at once. That doesn't normally happen unless I'm touching a major memory node." He looked at the patchwork buildings and lingering shades. "I think they're artifacts from objects you Read. And they're encroaching on the rest of your mind."

The motion that was echoed by the other figures had Adrienne raising an eyebrow, but when he said it was normal she let it go. It probably wouldn't help their situation if she was fixated on things like Haller's DID, as interesting as she might find the topic.

Frowning, Adrienne looked around the trashed cityscape again. "That... okay. Okay, yeah. That makes sense." Well, as much sense as any of this made. "Yeah, you know what?" She stared at a door on the side of a building nearby. It looked like the door to the cell where she'd been held in Genosha. "Now that you mention it, I think I do recognize some of this stuff," she admitted, sounding surprised. "Not... a lot of it, though. There's waaaay too much here for me to recognize everything. And... when you say 'encroaching'... do you mean they're not supposed to do that? That they shouldn't be here? But if that's the case, where did they come from?"

"I'm not sure. Memories are usually stored using a certain internal logic, but it's particular to the person. And what you remember from the Readings isn't . . . 'personal', if that makes sense." He pointed to a nearby utensil. "For instance, you touched or used that fork. Whatever you did with it is a part of your memory. But you're also carrying the entire history of that fork, including the parts that had nothing to do with you. All that information has to be stored somewhere, and that applies to everything you've ever Read."

Adrienne had always known that when she Read anything its whole history was stuck in her memory forever, but she'd never actually thought about what that might do to her memory, to her mind, until Haller began to explain it, and until she could actually look around her and see a manifestation of it right in front of her. "So... we should probably find out where the information is supposed to be stored, then? If this isn't where it's supposed to be?" It did seem like it wasn't supposed to be here, the more she thought about it. Nothing felt right here. This was supposed to be her mind, and when she looked at the theme park games, bits and pieces of it she felt like it was comfortable to her, but most of it- all this garbage- didn't feel like it belonged to her.

Annoyed, she shoved a pile of it out of her path. "If the storage is supposed to be particular to me, I should know where it is, right?" she asked Haller, and started shoving more debris away as she began to clear herself a path. She didn't know where to, exactly, but if this was her mind she should follow her instincts, right?

"Yes, but hold on." Jim crouched by the nearest pile to inspect it critically. "The first time I tried to move things your mind was on high alert. It attacked me. But unless I'm mistaken we got some outside help a minute ago -- probably some kind of sedative. That means we have some room to work." He rose, and a simple canvas messenger bag appeared in his hand. He offered it to Adrienne.

"Here, take this."

"Ooo, Gucci. Vintage." Adrienne cooed as she accepted the messenger bag. She stroked it and frowned at Haller. "Hey... this was mine. It was the first one I ever owned." Pushing some more things out of their path, she continued to step forward tentatively. "Thank Christ for outside help," she muttered, glad her mind wasn't attacking them anymore. "I'll have to buy Jean something pretty. So what's the bag for?"

"It's a template for your mind. You tailored it automatically, that's why it looks like something of yours." The telepath halted and gestured to the piles around them. "A lot of this is junk, but some things are tied to you. There's a couple of reasons this could be. Some could be personal memories that got swept out with the clutter, or Readings that heavily informed your actions or decisions. Some might just be some of those encroaching junk Readings that have gotten tangled up in your brain structure. Either way, they need to be secure until we get to the bottom of this." Jim took a step back and nodded to her. "Now, I need your help. Hold the bag and concentrate on something you're proud of. Something you did yourself, unrelated to your powers. Doesn't matter what as long as the memory is personal and strong. What's yours will come to you."

Adrienne digested what Haller was saying as if she heard things like this every day- because of course she was sort of getting to that point after four years at the mansion, which she was sure she'd never get used to- and nodded in response. It took some serious thinking, though, since so much of what she'd done in her life had been accomplished through use of her powers, or wasn't really something she was proud of anymore. Eventually she settled on her MBA, since during her college years she'd been resentful of her powers and hadn't used them to cheat her way through classes the way she had in secondary school. She also included her first company, 64 Square, which she'd created herself out of jealousy for Emma being given Frost Enterprises. Sure, she'd used her powers to expand it, but its initial inception was purely her own.

She stared at the bag in her hand, but nothing was 'coming to her', as Haller had explained it would. Still, she started to think on her enduring friendships, her rekindled relationship with her sister and Garrison, and some of the moments as a businesswoman and a teacher that had made her proud and weren't related to using her powers, and with about half of her thoughts she felt the bag growing heavier in her hand. She kept most of these to herself, but one she shared with Haller, grinning, was "learning to ride a motorcycle a couple years ago," since that had a lot of great memories and feelings tied to it, including her pride at overcoming her initial fear to do it.

The bag was definitely heavier now that she'd thought a while, which made her relieved. She really did have memories to keep in all this mess. "I can't think of anything else, and a lot of what I'm thinking of isn't having an impact on the bag," she told Haller, sounding apologetic.

The telepath closed his eyes and probed outwards. Although there was no visible dent in the trash he could sense it now lacked the emotional resonance of personal memories. He grinned. "Don't worry about it. Most of the important stuff is elsewhere, like it should be. We just needed to be sure nothing gets touched that shouldn't be. Now, let's see if we can't make this easier . . ."

Broad gestures could be a shock to the system, and it was for that reason he tended not to use them. But Adrienne's mind was relaxed right now, and there might never be a better opportunity. Two-colored eyes focused on the street before them, Jim touched a hand to his forehead, then swept it outward.

Pure white energy exploded outward. It roared through the streets like a tidal wave, curling around buildings and corners. In its path the trash dissolved like salt in the rain. It was sudden, silent, and left the fundamental structures of Adrienne's mind untouched.

Jim gave a satisfied grunt and dropped his hand. "All right. That should help."

"Heeey, awesome," Adrienne praised as the cityscape around her was restored. With the garbage gone, it suddenly felt much more familiar when she looked around. The buildings were sleek and modern again. The carnival rides started to work again; Adrienne could hear the music. She moved forward through the street, following her instincts towards where her Readings might be held.

After a couple blocks, she noticed a structure in the distance that didn't fit with the rest of the Wall Street-esque mindscape. "Hey... I think I recognize that house in the distance there," she told Haller, pointing. As she moved towards it, however, she spotted some more things that didn't belong, like the fountain on the side of the building Haller had seen before. The curtain from La Scala covered a bank of windows at a cafe. Movies she'd used her powers to gain knowledge of without sitting through them in real time were projected on sides of buildings. More clutter, larger pieces of clutter, began to encroach on the cityscape again as they got closer to the house. Hotel rooms she'd Read, conference rooms, dressing rooms at fashion shows were situated at odd angles in and around buildings and the theme park rides, but they seemed more organically implanted than the patchwork buildings on the outskirts of the cityscape, as if they'd been growing where they were for some time rather than having been quickly slapped into place.

Jim noted the artifacts in silence. He'd been able to eliminate the loose Readings, but they'd all been minor enough that the pressure of the buildup had been able to shove them to the outskirts. The closer they drew to the center the more significant and larger the Readings became. They had penetrated Adrienne's mindscape to a corresponding degree.

"Is it yours?" he asked, turning his attention back to their destination. "That house."

Adrienne shook her head. "No. It's a ski chalet where my family used to vacation each year when I was a child. But I liked it better than any properties we actually owned," she shrugged, smiling at a memory that came to her about the chalet. "I used to have trouble falling asleep the first couple nights of our vacations every year. Trouble sleeping strange beds," she explained, and snorted, partly because she realized it might seem an ironic comment to some people, but partly because it was something she'd never really gotten over. "I was always afraid to go to sleep in strange rooms. So I'd crawl into bed with Emma, and she made me feel safe. We stopped going there when Emma was taken away." She frowned as they crossed a street, yet another block closer to the chalet. A catwalk jutted out inexplicably from a cab stand at the intersection they crossed

Her smile brought an answering one from Jim. "The center is usually somewhere significant for us," he said. He could see it more clearly now; a structure of stone walls and wooden timbers surrounded by deep snow that had the brightness of the freshly fallen. Against its corporate surroundings the chalet stood out as warm and organic. The scene was actually quite picturesque.

Until they actually reached it.

It wasn't actually deep snow that surrounded the chalet when they arrived at the structure, Adrienne realized- mountains of clutter like the things that had invaded the cityscape rose up around the chalet, but the snow had fallen over the piles of stuff, making it look from a distance like the mounds of garbage were pure snowbanks. Some of the colours of the objects were distorted, bleached from the sun, and some were warped by moisture where the snow had been accumulating. This stuff had been gathering here for a long time, Adrienne guessed, recognizing random things such as Scott Baio pencil cases and sneakers she'd worn to gym classes shortly after her manifestation. Piles of cassette tapes and Betamax, toys and dolls such as a Strawberry Shortcake and a Cabbage Patch doll she'd been given by a distant relative as a child and had vehemently declared at eleven, after her manifestation, when she had no control over her powers, that she was far too old for now.

And the junk wasn't just threatening to swallow the chalet from the lawn outside. The chalet itself looked like it was about to burst with all the junk inside. It was piled up against the two-storey windows, and the wooden timbers themselves looked to be bulging under the strain of what was contained inside. "This is probably not good, huh?" Adrienne muttered to Haller. She held out the bag she was still carrying and did the focusing thing again, feeling the bag growing heavier as she thought of memories she was proud of, so that Haller could do whatever he'd done before to clean up.

Jim frowned down at a couch. It was actually two couches: one a shade of orange that indicated someone had still been shopping with the taste of the 70s, and another that was sleek, quality leather. They had fused into a T-shape, and the upholstery did not make a good combination. Loose debris disintegrated beneath another rush of power, though those embedded in the landscape remained unaffected. He wandered up to an old-style wooden school desk that was lodged half-inside one of the stone walls.

"Your mind is so full of Readings they are running into one another," he remarked, giving the chair a steady, gentle tug. "And the ones embedded into your mindscape would explain why your powers are throwing up images at random. It's no wonder you've been seeing things." A gentle wash of energy softened the stone to the consistency of soft clay. The desk came free. Setting it carefully to one side, Jim turned back to Adrienne. "The good news is they're not hard to get out. Give me some time and I might be able to come up with a faster way to do it. We can think about that later, though. Let's keep going."

Haller's comment about it being no wonder she'd been seeing things and about there being good news made a knot in Adrienne's stomach loosen, comforted by the fact that there was a way to fix all of this and stop the relentless paranoia she'd been feeling lately.

Now that the loose debris had been taken care of again, Adrienne moved forward into the house, the path mostly cleared. It was faux stone inside, with rich hardwood floors, area rugs, a big open fireplace, exposed beams, and inviting couches. It didn't look quite so much like a Hoarders paradise anymore, but there were still random bits of junk, mostly reminding her of the 80s. Pre-drawn posters that had to be coloured in- one of a unicorn, one of an underwater scene, one of a landscape and one of a castle- were on one of the walls, but they all bled together in a big glob. The same thing was happening with the New Kids On The Block posters that covered another wall. Adrienne scoffed at the posters as she side-stepped a stack of Trapper Keepers that were situated in a log basket next to the fireplace, melded with fire logs. "Weird," she muttered, frowning. An Alf backpack the vaguely remembered as having been her younger sister's had fused with one of the area rugs. "This 'running into one another' stuff is making me feel like my mind is subconsciously one of those serial killers that sews peoples' skin together," she mused, stepping towards a door at the back of the main room that was giving off a particularly inviting vibe. She opened it cautiously, making sure she was standing back from it in case something jumped out.

Rather than something jumping out, though, Adrienne was met with a cascade of shoes pouring out of the open door into the main room of the chalet. Well, mostly shoes, but also some junk. And the shoes were only shoes for a moment when they fell out of the room. When they stopped rolling or sliding, they became other objects. But when Adrienne stepped around the back of the door and looked inside the enormous walk-in shoe closet, she could see it packed with shoes that were still shoes. She reached in and picked up a shoe, and had a flash of memory that involved Reading the room D'Spayre had once held Tandy in. "What's that about?" she asked when she relayed what had happened to Haller.

Jim, who had been momentarily distracted trying to remember the last time he'd seen a pog, put a knuckle to his lips. "See what happens when you put the bag in there," he suggested. "Hold it through the doorway and then check what's inside."

Adrienne did as Haller bade her and put the bag in the room, holding it open. She watched, wide-eyed, as the various objects that had been gathered along their route changed into shoes before her eyes. "Cool," she murmured, staring at the assortment of Jimmy Choos, Louboutins, and Blahniks now occupying space in the bag. "But why is there still non-shoe crap in there?" she asked, squinting into the room, where hypercolour shirts and snap bracelets stuck out like sore thumbs among the mountains of shoes in the room. "I mean, if the most important stuff in here gets turned into shoes, why is this stuff not shoes?" She picked up a snap bracelet, but rather than giving her a memory she felt a connection to, it was just a snap bracelet. "Can we clean this up, too? Like you did the city?"

Since the shoes and the 80s junk seemed safe enough to touch, Adrienne started shoving it to her left and right to try and cut a path deeper into the room. But there were only shoes as far as the eye could see. There must have been thousands of them...

Jim shook his head. "We're too far in. The stuff that's here is either meant to be here or tangled up in the things that are. I'm not going to risk deleting something important. We'll have to do it another way."

The telepath concentrated. There had been a fireplace downstairs, the centerpiece of the living room. He turned his head slightly and an industrial chute similar to those used during professional remodeling and demolition appeared outside the closet. Another slight movement created a soft whoomf from downstairs, and an answering glow from the chute. The fireplace was lit.

"This is the seat of your memory," he said, moving to join her. It didn't seem right to call it a "closet" -- the room was huge, with more rooms beyond. He'd seen apartments smaller than he suspected this place to be. He picked a shirt out of the mess, shaking free a pair of sandals and an unmatched stiletto. "Everyone manifests their memories as a system particular to them. To you, every important Reading -- every personal memory -- has been translated into one of these shoes. The problem is that the junk memories have been going into the same place. That's why it's overflowing, and that's why we found personal memories pushed out into the rest of your mind."

With one final look at the old shirt, Jim turned and tossed it through the closet threshold and into the chute.

"So we'll just throw out the junk."

It still seemed odd to Adrienne, when Haller mentioned 'deleting something important', to think that they were in her own mind, that the deletion of something important might mean her vocabulary or... toilet training or something. Scary. Best not to think about that part. "The seat of my memory is a shoe closet. I love it," she smiled, beginning to pick shoes up randomly. Some were the latest fall lines- these held memories relating to Tandy, Sue, and Layla, among other people who'd come into her life more recently. When she touched older, discontinued styles, she found older memories. Ugly shoes, like some horrible Oxfords and some wingtips, held bits of information she'd learned from when she'd been married. The styles she liked best, unsurprisingly, held the good memories. Some memories of friends had characteristic styles: memories of Amanda were Doc Martens, Garrison memories were Converse, Vanessa was combat boots. Wanda was pumps. Jean was slingbacks. Emma, unsurprisingly, was a mixture of stiletto heels and leather boots. Marie-Ange was peep-toes. Wade was flip-flops. Doug was Crocs. Kyle was Tevas. There was a pair of Haller's steel toe shoes, too, due to his help with her addiction issues and the Tandy stuff.

As she went around familiarizing herself with the types of shoes, Adrienne also started pulling the non-shoes out, sometimes extricating them from having fused with a shoe, the way she'd seen Haller free the desk. She began tossing the inconsequential non-shoes down the chute and into the fire.

Deep into what she was still laughingly calling a closet, after what felt like hours, Adrienne came across some dirty, scuffed children's sneakers and a pair of plastic heels, the kind kids had to play dress-up when they pretended to be princesses or whatever it was they did. "Hey," she called out to Haller, since they were working in different areas of the closet, "my first Readings."

"Yeah?" Jim turned away from prizing a utensil from a leather boot to look.

"Must be like finding a yearbook from elementary school," he remarked, wandering over. The shoes were almost startlingly small, and it was hard to imagine Adrienne wearing anything so obviously mass-produced. "What was the first thing you ever Read?"

Adrienne had to touch the plastic heel to remember it; it had been so long. "It was a necklace of my mother's. She was passed out on pills and never took Cordelia to her tennis lesson like she was supposed to, so I swiped the necklace. I made her think Cordelia was pissed at her and took it out of spite. I didn't know what was going on when I was suddenly getting these flashes of... well, let's just say my father's assaults didn't begin with his children," she shrugged. She couldn't remember if Haller knew about her father's abuse, but figured if he was going to help her clean this place up he'd probably come across evidence of it sooner or later. As much as Adrienne sometimes wanted to forget the bulk of her childhood, she knew she couldn't delete the memories that had made her who she was today.

"I'm sorry." There were some things about the human mind -- and human behavior -- that no one really wanted to know. Especially not a child, and especially not about their parents. The telepath shook his head. "That must have been scary. Not just what you saw, but not knowing what it was. How old were you when you manifested?"

Adrienne nodded in thanks for his sympathy. "It was twenty-five years ago, so I would have been eleven." She gazed around the room, the sheer size of it finally striking her as she realized how long the Readings and memories had been gathering in here. "I used to Read everything back in those days," she mused. "I didn't realize the gloves helped until a few years later. So it was a... difficult time."

"I imagine it must have been if you couldn't control. . ." Something about Adrienne's focus on the memory of her manifestation was resonating with particular items in the room. One of them was nearby. He broke off the thought and dug through one of the piles until he extracted a worn tennis shoe, the sort a child might wear for gym class.

"Something . . ." Jim murmured brow furrowing. He looked up at the psychometrist. "You've never been able to control it? It's always on?"

Sensing that Haller was on to something, but not knowing quite what it was, Adrienne raised an eyebrow. "Yeah. Always. And it's worse when I'm under stress. I've been doing meditation to try and keep calm, with hopes that I can control it, but so far, the only thing that works is covering up, first with gloves and then with the hand-coating solution. But even that isn't working very well anymore," she informed him.

"I'm doing something similar to protect my astral body from the full brunt of the Readings," Jim commented, once again lowering his eyes to the shoe he held. "It's just my power instead of a solution. But now that I'm getting used to your mind I can make it selectively porous . . ."

Jim concentrated on the sneaker. The incidental Readings had been alienating; he was used to connecting with living minds, not objects. This, too, was a Reading, but it was personal to Adrienne. Nothing special, just a down comforter that had been on her bed, but the Reading entwined with her own emotional state as she curled beneath it: confusion, helplessness, and the absolute lack of control that came with so many manifestations. Those feelings were as much a part of the duvet as the fabric it had been made from, frozen like a fly in amber.

"You never lose a Reading," he said slowly. "They're not at the top of your mind, but they're always there."

Adrienne nodded slowly. She'd always suspected that, had even said it aloud before. But she'd never had confirmation until now. "That's why I can never forget anything I Read. Like Garrison's damned arm being ripped off. I always see it with the same intensity as I did the first time. It never fades, the way the memories I have of what I've seen with my own eyes do."

Jim nodded, partly to buy himself a few moments to decide whether he should voice his suspicions or not. Finally he lowered the shoe and exhaled slowly.

"The way we manifest can influence how our powers express themselves," he said. "When D-- when I first manifested it was so traumatic it was almost a decade before I could use my own powers. That first experience plus the dissociative disorder schismed my abilities." He lifted a hand to his lips and a lit cigarette appeared; he took a drag and continued. "Most people eventually get over their initial lack of control. The more you work with your powers the less stressful the experience is. You train yourself, and in doing so the old emotional associations fall away. But you never forget a Reading, and because those emotional associations are a part of those early Readings they've never left you."

He hesitated one more time and finally took the plunge. "I think the reason you can't control your powers is because your own Readings tell you you can't."

Melodramatically, Adrienne let her jaw drop. "That's such a dirty gyp! My powers are sabotaging me? My powers suck sometimes. How come Emma gets the diamond form and the mindreading and I get stupid sabotaging... this?" She gestured to the shoe room. "Well, okay, a room full of shoes would be pretty damn awesome under most circumstances, but still!" She poked at a couple of the shoes. "So, we already know anything that isn't a shoe is crap, right? And the crap is invading the shoes, the stuff I'm obviously supposed to keep. But why is the keeper stuff so messy in here? I mean, has it always been like this? And if not, why is it doing this to me now? This crazy bullshit? Just... sheer volume? Accumulation of Readings after all this time? And more importantly," she added, frowning, "can we make it stop?"

Jim absently flicked ash from his cigarette. "I'd guess it's accumulation. Your memory is obviously different than most people's -- retaining the Readings and being able to store it all alongside your own experiences is pretty exceptional. But the mind has finite resources, or at least most do. It probably started out orderly, but as time went on the system got overwhelmed." He prodded one of the piles with a foot. "Clearing it out isn't a problem. Not especially fast, but not a problem. It's preventing a repeat incident twenty years down the line that's the issue." The pile got another few moments of scrutiny before he lifted his eyes again.


"I might be able to help," he ventured, "but the emphasis is on 'might'."

Adrienne flinched when he mentioned a repeat incident, but she forced herself to trust Haller. "Hey, might's better than nothing. What do you need me to do?" she asked as she separated some sort of musical instrument she vaguely remembered having a two-week interest in as a pre-teen from a pump that held the memory of her first fashion show and tossed the instrument down the chute. She studied the shoe, then held it up to her own foot as if contemplating trying it on.

"These are personal memories. It wouldn't be a good idea to get rid of them. But I can alter them." Jim held out a hand to forestall understandable alarm. "Nothing would get removed or changed. I'm talking about separating the emotional components from the Readings so those feelings aren't so hardwired into your system. They'd still exist, but outside of the Reading itself. If we remove those from your earliest Readings there's a chance you'll be able to learn to control your powers." The telepath looked again at the shoe in his hand. "Remember that this is a theory, and your mind is unique. I can't guarantee that it's going to fix anything. It may be a long time before you see any change, if ever. I also understand that memories are private. I don't touch them lightly. So . . . tell me what you want to do. If you want to try it, we'll try it. If not, we'll leave it alone. It's up to you."

"Let's do it," Adrienne answered without hesitation. "Like I said, even if something isn't a guarantee at least it's more than I have now. I mean, I can't... I can't just do nothing. I can't keep being how I've been for the past few weeks. Months, even. This junk has been messing with me for months now," she finally realized, thinking back to all the times she'd relayed wrong Readings, before they had started to encroach on what she saw and heard in real life. "So, if you're willing to try, I'll take whatever you're willing to give me," she nodded, grateful. She stared at the shoe in her hand, then the one in Haller's. She'd figured out how to extricate junk from real memories, but she wasn't sure how to even begin to extricate her emotional components from the Readings themselves.

Jim nodded. It had to be nerve-wracking to put your memories in someone else's hands, but if the choice were between rolling the dice or risking a future breakdown he'd have made the same decision. He set the sneaker down for a moment moved over to her and took the heel of the tiny shoe.

"These you can't do by yourself," he said. He kept her fingers closed around the shoe's toe with his free hand. "The memories are too old, they're a part of you. But if you hold this . . ."

The telepath pulled back on the heel with a gentle, constant pressure. The plastic began to stretch.

And suddenly the tension ceased and they each rocked back, both holding half of the same pair: Adrienne the right shoe, and Jim the left.

Jim looked at the heel and nodded to himself. "What do you see now?" he asked her.

Adrienne frowned at the heel, half in awe that Haller had made two shoes out of one, and half because she couldn't really see anything. "Were you an elf in another life or something?" she joked of the shoemaking ability. "I don't really see anything," she relayed. "I... I feel what I've always felt when I've thought about it, but yeah, I can't see the complete history of the necklace anymore. Does that mean it worked?" she asked him excitedly. "Do you have the history part? Can we chuck that out?"

"Yeah, I have the Reading, but I don't think throwing it out is a good idea." Jim held up the matching shoe pensively. "Some of these Readings built your worldview. This one isn't just significant because it was your first Reading. It also informed your understanding of your family. How much of who you are now came from what you learned?"

Confusion showed on Adrienne's face. "Okay, yeah. True. A lot of the history is important. But... why separate the emotions from the history if we can't get rid of either?"

"So you can start over." Jim took the other shoe from her and considered them. "If you can't control your powers because your earliest Readings tell you you can't, we just severe the connection. Take away the 'fact' you can't control it, the knowledge that stays fresh in your mind no matter how much time passes, and maybe you can move on." He pressed the heels together and a box appeared around them. He passed it back to Adrienne and gave her a crooked smile. "Maybe this time you can learn to control it."

"Ohhh. Riiiight." Damn, this stuff was complicated! Adrienne was really glad Haller seemed to know what he was doing, because she was ridiculously out of her depth here. She put the box of shoes on a nearby shelf, making some room by shoving some other shoes aside. "I know it's not certain, but that would be pretty fantastic. How'd you come to understand stuff like this?" she inquired, holding a Sketcher that looked like something she used to wear to gym class out and ripping it apart in both her hands like they'd done with the plastic dress-up shoes. When she thought of a box like the one Haller had created, to her delight one appeared around the Sketchers. She pulled a couple junk Readings off the shelf and sent them down the chute to make room for the box. There was a lot to clean up, but things didn't seem so bleak now that she knew what to do.

Jim gave a half-shrug, picking up the sneaker from earlier and separating it as well. "Sometimes experience, sometimes just a feeling. I have powers problems, too. Maybe it makes it easier for me to see in others once I'm in their minds." He put the newly created box on the shelf next to Adrienne's and gave her another crooked grin. "But remember, today we're here to clean up. Separate as you find, but concentrate on the cleaning. This isn't a one-and-done venture. Today we just need to get enough done that you're not hallucinating any more orgies."

Adrienne nodded at his reminder and then mirrored his grin. "Yeah, I hope the girls forgive me for that one. Unless it was precognitive, in which case, just... eew."