Rachel & Haller | Mixed feelings and a welcome home

[x-eidolon.livejournal.com]

A reluctant Rachel tells Haller how she survived, and the two share a hug and some tense words. Mindless destruction always makes things better, though.



Time passed slowly outside Charles' study. Jim maintained his position a short way down the hall, eyes fixed on the window. Worry and curiosity had a minor altercation in the pit of his stomach, but this he could wait for.

The study door opened. Jim turned his gaze from the window and gave the person who emerged a relieved smile.

"You've got your father's talent for giving people heart attacks."

Quirking both her lips and a brow at him, Rachel looked down at the floor and shrugged, shutting the door behind her with a soft click.

“You can’t really complain ‘bout that, given how many talents you inherited from your father,” she joked, half-heartedly. “He told you I was here?”

"Yeah, when you showed up. He suggested I give you some space. At least until you got some sleep." Jim pushed away from the wall and paused, unsure whether or not a physical gesture would be welcome.

"What happened?" he asked instead. "When you got us out, I felt--" he struggled to find words for a sensation that had no real equivalent. "I thought I felt your power . . . run dry." Unspoken was the implication: I thought I felt you die.

She inhaled deeply and exhaled, trying to tamp down the riot of emotions still burgeoning in her chest. Then, with a backward glance at Charles’ door, she started forward and grabbed Jim’s elbow to steer him towards a door that led to the grounds outside. There was something to be said about knowing a third person could hear your conversation, after all, nevermind that he was a powerful telepath and already knew everything there was to know about it anyway.

“I’m glad you got out safe and whole,” she said quietly. “Physically so, at least.”

Jim gave her a look of concern. Her touch on his arm transmitted a fraction of the emotional charge behind it. It was -- jumbled. He couldn't blame her for that. "We all are," he replied. "Don't worry about it. We're all experienced. Molly was the only non-combatant, and Emma and the professor will make sure she's okay. And she's a tough kid -- in every sense of the phrase."

They came to a stop a respectable distance from the main building. To the casual observer they were just two people taking advantage of the shade of a tree. Jim spared a cursory glance to ascertain no one was near, then fixed his mismatched eyes on Rachel's green.

"And you?" he asked quietly. "Are you okay?"

But she forwent answering his question in favour of peering up into his eyes, although it would be Jim’s best guess as to whether the avoidance was deliberate or not. “Dude, your eyes are weird.”

"Dude, that's the second question you've dodged," the counselor pointed out dryly. "Rachel, please. What happened after we left? How did you get back?" A paranoid suspicion twisted in his gut. "It . . . wasn't Kwannon, was it?"

“But your eyes are weird. I thought they were blue,” she trailed off, frowning, mind trying to grasp at images from a lifetime ago when his mismatched eyes weren’t such a novelty to her.

Shaking her head to dislodge the stray thought, Rachel sighed again, carding fingers through hair that was overdue for a trim. “It wasn’t Kwannon… whoever the fuck that is. I guess the best way to put it is that Xorn… well, he kind of saved me, I guess.”

"Xorn." Jim ran a hand through his own hair in a subconscious mimicry of Rachel's gesture. In all the confusion he'd nearly forgotten the man had helped Rachel bring them to her . . . what she'd thought was her world. "That's . . . unexpected. I've only met him once, but he was -- above. Not indifferent, just beyond us. He doesn't have much to do with everyday concerns. I didn't think he gave much thought to individuals." He gave Rachel a crooked smile. "I'm glad he made the exception."

“He’s a piece of work, that one,” she snorted, although what could be described as a somewhat fond smile toyed at the corner of her lips. “Don’t ever get into an existentialism debate with him -- he’d just irritated the crap out of you.”

Scuffing the sole of her combat boots against the dirt, she gazed at Jim thoughtfully, trying to piece together a coherent enough explanation that would satisfy him.

“I did die, actually. Gave everything I had to make sure the six of you made it back unscathed.” Glancing away, the redhead studied the mansion doors because the thought of her sacrifice made it a little harder for her to breathe. “It’s a price paid willingly, of course. But apparently what that meant was that I reverted back to that psionic being I had become after I got fucked over in Genosha. Make sense?”

"Somewhat." Jim crossed his arms, brow furrowed. "Consciousness can transcend injury or death, especially for psis." As Kwannon had proven and Essex had counted upon, but he declined to think about that for now. He glanced back at her. "Xorn restored your physical body?"

“Kind of, but not really. I think Prof—Essex did that, or Kwannon, whichever, was responsible for that. Xorn probably just shoved my consciousness back into the meatbag. I think. M’not too sure, and I wasn’t all that preoccupied with askin’, really.”

Rachel shrugged. “He gave me a choice, though. Whether I wanted to come back here or just float around in the astral plane. Gorgeous place.”

"Yeah. It is." The older man studied her. The lack of eye-contact, the closed, self-contained body language -- he didn't have to know Rachel to know this was not someone celebrating life.

"But you chose to come back," he said, quietly.

“Yeah,” she agreed, but didn’t put voice to most of her thoughts. She had felt that she owed it to people to come back. Her parents. The six of them. Whoever else had been hurt by her ‘death’. With that in mind, floating through the astral plane would’ve been too much of a cop out, maybe. But then again, she could not deny that she was just so damnably tired. “Think I made the right choice?”

"You think?" Jim shook his head. "Rachel, in no universe could you being alive be considered 'wrong'. It was wrong that you were thrown into that world. It was wrong that you were forced to make the choices you did. Those circumstances were not in your control." He smiled, that same crooked, sad smile. "But coming back -- that was your choice. I think there are plenty of people who'll agree that you being here, now, is the only 'right' thing to come out of this."

The smile she returned him was just as sad, and she had to tip her head backwards to peer at the sky through the leaves to deter tears from forming. “Sure doesn’t feel that way right now.”

Gently, Jim put his hands on the girl's shoulders. It was a gesture that had nothing to do with the borrowed memories from her world. Instead, it fell now to his true memories. Memories of the child she had been, the child he'd known from almost the moment he'd come to Xavier's. Age, battlescars, combat boots -- all that was immaterial.

"Hey, look at me," he said. "I know you gave everything you had to save us. I could feel it in your mind as you pushed. You had no end-game for yourself. Because after all that happened, all you learned, you didn't think you deserved one." His fingers tightened on her shoulders, almost imperceptibly. "You're not a sacrificial lamb, Ray. There are no scales to balance for taking us there or for believing a lie we believed, too. Whatever you feel right now, I'm happy that you came back to us. Picking yourself up again and carrying on -- sometimes, that's a bigger sacrifice than death." Jim smiled again, sad and fond. "So thank you, for not giving up."

“But I—I…,” Rachel only managed a second of getting lost into those warm eyes before she had to look away again, misery etched on her face. Almost imperceptibly, her bottom lip trembled before she swallowed heavily and bit it into submission. “Shut up, David. I’m not that noble.”

"I'm not saying you meant to be anything. I'm not even saying you know why you made the decision you did. We don't analyze everything we say and do when we do it. All I'm trying to tell you is that you're here, and I'm glad. That's all."

He looked at her pale, averted face; the too-bright eyes, the twitch in her jaw. Lost and hurting, but stubborn to the end. Just like her mother. Jim shook his head.

"Come here, kiddo."

Without giving the girl time to pull away, Jim slipped his arms off her shoulders and pulled her into a hug.

She stood there stiffly for a moment, quite unsure of how she was supposed to react. This was not her David. Hell, her David did not exist. But the very real warmth of him surrounding her and holding her tight made her close her eyes and relax into his arms. Without even realising it, her hands had come up to rest against his back – not clinging, but just laying there and letting him hug her tight.

There were no sounds of sobbing or wretched crying, but if David felt the dampness on his shirt, he wisely said nothing.

“I just,” she took a moment to breathe a shaky breath. “Fuck if I know what I’m going to do now.”

Jim rubbed her back with one hand. "Well, you could start by calling your parents. And I don't mean that in a nagging Jewish-parent sort of way. Your dad . . . he's been through a lot, too. Talk to him. He knows what it's like to be used, more than I think you'd believe."

Rachel giggled, almost hysterically, and tried to push him away. “Not ready for that yet, dude. And I mean, there has to be some reason why Xorn sent me back here instead of to Muir…” Trailing off, she shook her head and smacked the back of Jim’s head – though the effect was lost when she sniffled loudly. “Shut up. I’m not going there.”

Jim casually let his neck bend under the mild violence. It a surprisingly small evolution of the telekinetic tantrums and/or keep-away that had often punctuated his earlier attempts to babysit.

"What, is there something wrong with the phone?" he chided. He allowed her to pull away, but only after giving her a final squeeze. "But I understand. It's . . . a lot to adjust to. They'll give you space if you need it, and we won't push. Still, you should say something to them -- even if it's just in a letter or email. Just so they know you're okay."

“Your Dad’s already had a conversation with them,” she said, as though it justified her silence, wiping off the tears and snot on the sleeve of her shirt, ready and willing to deny tears had ever happened in the first place. Charles, too, had tried to get her to contact her parents. She breathed in deeply – meditation exercises she never quite stopped doing – and turned away from Jim to face the road winding away from the mansion.

“Bit strange, no? My actions led to the death of my parents. I dealt with their deaths. But now I’m told they never died… That it was all a lie,” Rachel shook her head and twisted fingers into her hair. “And they’ve already dealt with my death. And now their little girl is alive but not six? She’s 18 and has learned to get by without them. Don’t know. Sounds like a perfect recipe for disaster to me.”

"I don't have to be a parent to know they'll take eighteen and alive over six and dead." Jim gave Rachel a sidelong look. "My life here was -- different. For a long time I thought my parents had died, too. I learned to live with it. When I found out my real parents had been in my life for years but never told me, I didn't exactly take it well. I was angry for all the time I lost, and all the damage it did . . . anyway." He shook his head. "It wasn't easy to get over. Sometimes I still have problems with it. But at the end of the day, I'm glad they're there." His eyes tracked hers, watching. "I'm glad I'm not alone anymore."

“It’s not even about the loneliness right now, D. And I’m not going to not talk to them forever. I know I can’t run forever. But right now? I just want to crawl into a hole somewhere, have a huge tantrum and sort through my thoughts first. I swear, just give me a day…” Or five. She crossed her arms across her chest, shoulders hunched inwards as if to hug away her own pain. It wasn’t going away. Unsurprisingly. Turning her head back towards him, she gave him as measuring a look as she could muster. “Is that why your brain’s in such a mess?”

"There's a lot of things that contributed to that, but yeah, in part." Jim met her gaze evenly, making it clear he found nothing particularly opaque about her strategy. "I crawled into that hole, too. I thought if I just buried everything it would just go away on its own. It's been twenty years and a couple thousand dollars in hospital bills and property damage, you tell me how well that worked." He put one foot out to nudge a combat boot with one of his own steel-toed. "So yeah . . . take time, Ray, but not too much."

For some reason, that just irritated her so, so much.

“I promise to be out of your hair within the following week, don’t you worry.” Her posture straightened imperceptibly, and her expression grew bland, mental walls slamming into place as she closed herself off from him. Her accent, too, had taken on the crisp tones of a London accent. She knew David meant well – knew that he was concerned and loved her as much as she did him. But like a stubborn teenager in the face of a parental lecture, Rachel just wasn’t ready to listen. Didn’t want to be ready to listen. “And I promise not to inflict damage on the property. Heaven knows that I couldn’t possibly afford to compensate anyone.” Because, really, she owned absolutely nothing in this bloody perfect world of theirs.

There was her mother again, Jim noted. He supposed he'd been lucky to get this far.

"Sorry, did I say you shouldn't break things?" he said aloud, tacitly conceding her desire for space. "I broke things because I'm emotionally repressed and my control is shitty. You, on the other hand, are more than welcome to blow the shit out of things in our designated You Can Blow This Shit Up Zone. It's a quarry. A very large, very isolated quarry." He shrugged. "We've got some glass bottles you can hurl, but I recommend boulders. The noise isn't as satisfying but if you're going for stress relief you might as well go big."

“There may not be a quarry left when I’m done with it,” she warned, blinking at him. It wasn’t even a boastful statement, but one made so factually – well, she clearly believed it. Almost as if she had done it before. But the fact that she had even said it suggested that she would be more than happy to ‘blow shit up’.

"Don't worry, there are a couple people around who are good with earth-moving." Or repair any tectonic rifts she might cause. Still, it was nice to know she could be tempted by the promise of consequence-free destruction. Fifty percent of him could get on board with that sentiment.

Jim jutted a thumb over his shoulder. "Want me to show you where it is?" he offered. "You know, in case you feel like throwing that tantrum."

“Al’right,” she said, gesturing for him to lead the way with a marginally less guarded expression. “But I swear, David. Make me cry and try to get in my head with your psycho-nonsense babble and heartbreaking personal anecdotes again and I will blow you up.”

"Don't worry, I made my quota for the day." As he walked past her the man gave her shoulder a brief squeeze. The contact was punctuated by an equally brief, equally warm brush to her mind. It was mostly sensation, ghosted with the faintest message. It said, welcome back.

"Now come on," said Jim, "let's find you something to demolish."