Haller & Arthur | Therapy

[x-longshot.livejournal.com]

Haller helps Arthur explore the gaps in his memory.

They stood on a precipice looking out a beautiful scene pulled right out of a postcard: the grandiose mountain peaks before them were laid out between frozen fields of green. From the height and sheer spread, Arthur's would best guess would be that they were in the Andes. Or the Perenees. The grass was wrong, though, and the flowers that dotted the snow made no sense in the current season.

Longshot sighed and turned back to the other, darker, man with him and their equipment. He took a deep breath of the crisp, chill, air, but paused at its apex with a dumbfounded expression. "So. If this is my mind, why do we need to breathe?"

"We don't. We're not. The brain doesn't like abstracts, so it populates your mindscape with a combination of autonomic habits and memory, sort of like a dream. Physical people tend to notice it more." Jim was inspecting the landscape with a detached appreciation; unlike the former reality-show star he didn't often find himself in picturesque surroundings unless large portions of it were about to be destroyed. Then again, from what he'd heard of Arthur's career maybe he was assuming too much there.

Arthur held up his hands in protest. "Whoa now, mindscapes? And aren't all people physical?" He shook his head, sluffing that off as soon as he had asked the question. "I'm beginning to assume that psychic things require a lot of handwaving."

The telepath acknowledged the assessment with the appropriate gesture. "Pretty much. Basically, your mind automatically translates what we do into an activity it's familiar with. I've had people get through this sort of thing by putting together a puzzle, rebuilding a wall, matching shoes . . . anything. Your subconscious decides how it wants to play things."

"So then we climb. Simple and enjoyable enough." The television star gave Haller a once over. "You may be dressed appropriately, but have you ever climbed before? Do I need to go through a safety course?"

Jim smiled. "Normally, but not here. Telepaths don't have to worry--"

"--about logistics."

The last words came from a ways up the face of the cliff where Jim was now standing on the sheerest point. Standing, not perched. His feet were firmly situated on the horizontal plane.

"My job isn't climbing, though," he continued, abruptly back at Arthur's side as if breaking the laws of physics wasn't worth more than a moment of his time. "This mountain is riddled with false memories. You'll find them as you go, and when you do you'll end up kicking off a lot of debris. I'll deal with it. Think of yourself as the pathfinder and me as the support crew that secures the way for the less experienced climbers."

Arthur gave a lop-sided smile and squinted up at the telepath as he went about readying the equipment. It didn't take long, but there was comfort in ritual. "I will readily admit that was awesome, but it is also completely against the challenge of ascending a cliff face. I am going to dock you three gold stars for show-offedness."

By this time, he had secured a preliminary hold and had begun the first bouldering portion. "The real joy from climbing comes from ---" He cut off, hand slipping from a false hold and echoes of a high female voice filled the range, bouncing from the walls.

"I am going to take away all of the bad."

"Who is my good star? You are."

"Let me fix you, Arthur."

The telepath couldn't suppress a wince, and not only because the blond man was now dangling from a single hand. Jean had said Arthur's mind was like swiss cheese, but he hadn't expected to find the presence of the mnemokinetic this early, nor this intense. He wondered how long Mojo had been reformatting his brain.

Perhaps that was the place to start.

Despite the fact the telepath remained some yards below, Arthur heard his question as clearly as if they stood side by side.

"Do you remember the first time you heard that voice?"

Arthur blinked rapidly. "She was there when I signed with Majordomo six or seven years ago?" He steadied himself with another hold quickly, swinging to reposition himself. "Minnie always smelled like cough drops."

Six or seven years? Jim revised his opinion of Arthur. After half a decade of mind-wipes it was a miracle the man could count to ten.

The false handhold, now avoided, broke away from the rockface and bounced to a rest at Jim's feet. Calmly, the telepath stooped to take the stone in his hand.

"You have to wonder why she'd have left that impression of herself," he remarked as he closed his fist around the constructed memory. It crumbled like dry dirt. "Though I guess in her position there were benefits to being overlooked. What is the real joy of climbing?"

"There's a crystal clear sense of freedom when it is just you and the rock. No distractions. Life or death. You and the void." Arthur's words were almost wistful.

"I can see that." Literally as well as figuratively. The other man was responding, but his answer seemed almost to be coming from somewhere else. Jim got the sense it went beyond the preoccupation that came with raising oneself up inches at a time. Even splitting his attention between the cliff and Jim the impression Arthur projected was beyond simple focus. To Jim, the faint strain of the muscles and scrape of the fingers seemed almost to be a type of meditation.

"How did you start?" he asked, casting a feeler towards Arthur's older memories. "Did someone teach you?"

"My father and I would go --" There was another short gasp from Arthur, and the entire scene shifted.

They were in an abandoned town. Or, well, that's what it seemed like on the surface: streetlights overturned, shop windows broken, abandoned vehicles, and only the noise of unattended electronics punctuating the eerie still. It took a minute to register the the fact that the cars had comatose drivers or the the cafe down the corner had patrons slumped over halfway into their own meals.

A shot broke the still, and a beleaguered Arthur rolled out of a side-alleyway. He was dressed head to toe in leather and had a bandoleer strapped around one shoulder. From this he produced a glinting knife that he chugged at a shadowy, amorphous figure that followed him in pursuit.

"Where are we?"

The telepath stood beside the crouched man. He was too clean, too unconcerned for the scene; his attention was on Arthur rather than the knife's trajectory. Arthur's indistinct pursuer showed no sign of registering the newcomer.

"I... don't..."

A red optic blast interrupted the blond's statement, and he rolled away from Jim. Another series of knives were launched, but Arthur wasn't really trying to hit the oncoming threat.

The familiar blast provoked a frown from Jim. Their surroundings had the solidarity of a memory based in truth, but there was a strange quality to the star's attacker, as if it had been filmed by a camera slightly out of focus.

"Why would Scott have attacked you?" he asked, turning back to Arthur's dirt and sweat-streaked face.

Arthur's gaze was glazed and moved back and forth Haller and the pseudo-Scott. "It was an episode, but there was a twist not in the brief. Competitors."

"Were there?" Jim returned the gaze with his odd-colored eyes. "You're still on the mountainside, Arthur. What does your grip feel like?"

"It... my grip." Then they were back on the mountainside as suddenly as they had left it. Arthur's eyes were still wide, but his tone was suddenly very different. "Man, that was a rush!"

Jim blinked. In his time at the mansion he'd seen a range of reactions from those forced to confront psychic tampering. The adrenal equivalent of "Wheee!" was a new one.

"That's one way of putting it," he said aloud. "Now that we're out of it — did anything about the memory strike you as off?"

The climber was still breathing heavily. "I... that felt like it happened not long ago, but my brain is telling me that it was in August." He frowned. "It is only October, right?"

Jim shook his head. "It's early December."

"No, that cannot be right."

The counselor thought for a moment. "The psychic interference probably scrambled your sense of time," he ventured. "Normally people don't notice, but this has been going on for a while and I'm guessing Minnie was self-taught. It could be that every time she went into your mind to change or add something it's like pulling up an old document. Even if all you do is move a comma, the change still registers and the file's kicked back up to the system's Recent Documents. The experience is fresh in your mind even if the event itself isn't, if that makes sense."

Haller got a long blink in response to this.

"So. December. Got it." Arthur's tone fell a bit flat and defeated as he continued his ascent. "So you are saying that I had an amateur poking around in my head, or that at the least she was sloppy."

"Maybe. It might also have been intentional -- keeping you from realizing what was going on around you and what kind of operation you were involved with." Jim wondered, too, if it had also been an attempt to influence his personality. Restricted memories would have prevented a degree of emotional development. Jim had heard somewhere that sitcom characters were essentially static so casual viewers could drop in and out of the series without feeling alienated by any history they'd missed, and part of Arthur's appeal had been his optimism through hardship. Why risk having your star burn out or change into a different product when you had the power to keep them static and safe?

"That's not necessarily a bad thing," the telepath added, aware of the other man's shift in tone. "Amateurs leave more traces. It's easier to find the changes. And to fix them."

Arthur took a deep breath in resolve. "You know what? Minnie was always good to me," and the voice from before echoed faintly across the crevasse in unison. "However," and he closed his eyes as if fighting an urge, "You cannot treat people like toys. There's a line."

Jim's voice hardened in agreement. "Yes, there is. And she's a long way over it." He gazed meaningfully up the height of the mountain. "Of course, you're not an action figure. Even if she figured out a way to pose you there's nothing to keep you in that position."

"There was market testing for a me action figure. It was released as a special collector's item."

Jim smiled despite himself. "Did it have kung-fu grip?"

Arthur stared back confusedly. "Why else would you have an action figure? Of course."

"Good point."

"So," Arthur reached into a bag strapped to his belt and used some chalk for grip, "Onto the next horrible and emotionally scarring memory? Maybe... ooh, maybe they tried to drown me."

"I don't know, they did throw a dragon at you," Jim mused, mildly worried that was not a joke. "Drowning seems a little anticlimatic. Maybe something with lava?"

"There's one way to find out, isn't there?" He began to climb again. They had made good progress, but the face was deceptive. It twisted and turned upward in only the way an illusion of the mind could elongate objects in and out of focus.

"What's your deal, then? You just go around helping mutants with messed up minds?"

"Well, in some respects it does take one to know one. As deals here go it's pretty boring. The professor did this sort of thing for me and I got interested in the field. Now I do the same for other people. Pretty simple." Jim watched the blond carefully probe a crevice for integrity before setting his foot into it. "What about you? Why'd you sign on to television?"

"That," and suddenly with a sharp intake of air Arthur was in the air, lunging into a steep dyno leap, "Is easy." He landed precariously gripped on a set of handholds that were previously out of reach. "I wanted more editorial control and television paid more than movies. Plus it let me show the world the wilderness."

The last should have sounded like a PR pitch, but for some reason Arthur made it sound genuine. Moreover, there was no indication from the surrounding mindscape that it was anything but. The forthrightness was paradoxically disorienting. Jim was so used to dealing with people on their guard talking to Arthur was like gearing up to batter down a door only to have the occupant open it right before your shoulder hit the frame.

"Do you regret it?" Jim asked, though he suspected he already knew the answer. "With everything that's happened, I mean."

"Course not. Think of all the good I've done teaching kids and the sheer crazy-ass things I've got to do. What's a little brainwashing and loss of personal freedom to a good adrenaline rush?"

Though this was more or less the answer he'd expected, Jim found himself having a hard time not picking the scab Arthur seemed not to notice. "I'm glad you've got things in perspective, but . . . does it really not bother you?"

Arthur stopped and looked Haller dead in the eyes. "I'm not smart. I accepted that long ago. I use a smile and positive thinking to get by, and it works for me. But even I'm smart enough that know it should bother me! Yet I cannot change what happened."

The thing about visiting another person's mindscape was that it created a certain intrinsic immediacy. The apparent distance didn't matter; Arthur's look was just as direct and affecting as if they'd been standing side by side. For just a moment the telepath saw the other side of that forthrightness. The same unguardedness allowed a glimpse of something else beneath the beaming celebrity: not contrary to it, but rather something from which it had grown. A grasp of one's own limitations was important, but something about the way Arthur had described his own struck Jim as all the sadder for the matter-of-fact way he'd said it.

"No, you can't," Jim acknowledged. "But there's a difference between accepting and . . . well, 'accepting'. Smiling is fine, it's good not to dwell, but some things deserve a little anger. You don't owe it to anyone to be positive all the time."

The other man's expression didn't waver for once, but the entirety of the scene seemed to dim. The rocks were suddenly less saturated and sharper. The cliff was steeper. The clouds looked ready to burst. The gray was grayer; the bad was suddenly worse.

Arthur did not react to, or perhaps notice, the shifting landscape.

"Perhaps I owe it to myself. What if there's a deep, dark well that no luck is going to pull me out of?"

The telepath noted the change, but didn't comment on it. "I don't know about that," he said instead. "But I do know you owe it to yourself to feel what you're going to feel, not just plaster it over with a smile."

"You make my smiles sound so superficial," Arthur pouted, "But choosing to focus on the positive isn't necessarily choosing to not feel the bad. ... Right?"

"No, it doesn't," agreed the other man. "But it's possible to swing too far in one direction, you know? It's not about what reaction is good or which one is bad. It's about balance."

The other man sighed, going for an easy grip. He was only partially through a rebuttal before the world fell away and they were in a rather nice, rather modern sitting room. A window showcased the type of relentless sunshine and bamboo indicative of southern California. Two women, both blonde, fluttered around the chair Arthur was seated on.

Arthur wasn't quite ready to drop the earlier conversation, however. "I don't quite get how dwelling on the horrible things that may have happened to me will bring any type of balance into my life. Sure, dig up some memories. Put together missing pieces. I can see that."

"Like I said, the intent is not to dwell, but to look at the situation closely enough to process it and the implications. All I meant is that some of the pieces are likely to be unpleasant."Jim turned, taking in the room. "Where are we?"

​"Oh, this is my home. Was my home. One of those."

One of the blondes, very stiff and intent, placed hands on either side of the television star's head and frowned sadly, tsking under her breath. She whispered into Arthur's ear softly. The other woman prowled the edges of this interaction like a cat, her eyes shifting to exits and windows predatorily.

Jim stood apart from the scene as he watched as the women moved independently of their conversation. One was Minnie; though he'd never seen the woman he guessed the other might be Spiral.

"Do you remember why they're here?"

Arthur tossed his hands into the air. They passed right through Minnie, who would lean over every few seconds to coo into Arthur's ear. "The whole point is that I do no -- wait, she's telling me to stop shaking so hard."

As Arthur looked down, his own force of will revealed itself to be plastered over his remembered self like an overlay. The memory, indistinct and lacking detail, was vibrating in anxiety; ghost-like.

"You're under stress," Jim observed, not meaning the Arthur in the present. "Is it because you know what's going to happen? Or is it something else?"

"I..." He frowned very hard, considering. "No, this was after a tsunami. Apparently they did try to drown me, but it didn't take."

Jim mirrored his frown. "A tsunami? Do you mean the one that hit Avalon?"

"Ava-what?" But his chance at exclamation was lost in the sound of squealing tires and twisting metal as a cloud of debris filled the air. Spiral was gone in an instant, but Minnie just sighed and moved around to face Arthur more directly.

The sad, concerned expression on her face was illuminated by a pale yellow light coming from Arthur's left eye. Her voice was high-pitched and laced with compassion. "Darling, I want you to take deep breaths. You are safe with me. I will not let anything happen to you as long as be a good boy. Who's my good boy? That's right."

As the woman extended her hand to touch Arthur's temple another reached out. Before she could make contact Jim's hand closed around the memory of Minnie's wrist, and the scene froze.

"What did she take?" the telepath asked, his low, quiet voice a contrast to Minnie's. The woman still leaned over Arthur, as motionless as a statue. "Before she touched you, what was in your mind?"

The blond man was shivering visibly now, and his voice was ragged as the memories started to bleed past his control. "The images aren't clear, but I don't want to delve deeper. They're... too jumbled. It couldn't have been healthy."

"It's okay," Jim began, "don't force it--"

The frozen scene was broken by the sound of screaming rubber and the crash of metal. Puzzled, Jim looked towards the large window to see smoke billowing from somewhere just out of sight. Nothing else about the scene had changed, yet he'd just heard the same accident that had occurred a few moments earlier.

The telepath looked back at Arthur: his eye was rimmed with the same gold light that had flared when Minnie got close. The significance dawned on him.

Jim released Minnie's wrist. The apparition disappeared, leaving Arthur and the counselor alone in the room.

"You're right, it probably wasn't healthy," the telepath agreed. "But I think your subconscious knew Minnie's 'help' wasn't, either. One thing at a time, though." He extended a hand, palm turned towards Arthur, and closed his eyes. The scenario had queued the other man's mind to where the missing memory should have been. Minnie's technique seemed to have depended on impairing the brain's ability to access certain memories; true deletion was far more difficult than burying, manipulation, or severing the connections. If you knew where to begin it was easy enough to trace the pieces -- and to return them to their original place.

"Okay," said the counselor after a moment, allowing his hand to drop. "Try remembering now."

Arthur took a deep breath. As he remembered, the blankness of the scene was painted in; like a time-lapsed water color. "I was in a well. Or... a house. The episode was pitched on how to survive a tsunami, and then segment was intended to be about how to get out of a flooding basement. The tide hit too hard, though, and I was caught without an exit. I had no air. And the water.... in the water there were bodies. There weren't supposed to be bodies."

He looked down and away, eyes squinted tight against things he couldn't unsee, as ghostly water pooled in the psychic landscape.

"I see. She was excising trauma . . . anything that would have impaired your ability to work." He found himself thinking of Molly and her parents. Perhaps she'd cared, too, Jim thought; maybe she'd genuinely believed she was helping. He remembered the look of concern on the woman's face, and seeing Arthur's reaction to the memory now it was hard to fault her the impulse. Still, Arthur had been right. There were limits -- and he couldn't believe Mojo had employed anyone out of the goodness of his heart.

Jim shook his head. "I'm sorry. We revived the incident in its original context -- I mean, the memory being buried means you never had time to heal, and because we just uncovered it again it feels like it just happened. Burying it again won't help, though. The mind tracks these things. Yours seems to be on the high end of resilient, but it's like any organ. When it's injured it can only power through for so long before you start experiencing problems, and it seems this has been building for a while now."

In contrast to Haller's cool analysis, Arthur was breathing heavily and trying not to shake too much. "That was, what, April? And I could have more of that lurking around in my head?"

"That's what it looks like," the telepath admitted. "Though it's not all going to be that bad. There's other stuff, too -- insertions, like what we saw earlier. The good news is that while they're taking up space I don't think they really took. Getting rid of them won't be as difficult as bringing other things back."

"But can what happens in here make bad things happen out there?" Arthur waved randomly. "Me having panic attacks is bad."

"I'm starting to see that," Jim remarked, recalling the memory of the accident. "But there are things we can do to try and work around that. Besides, if we do nothing we run the risk things pile up in your subconscious and the bad stuff happens anyway."

He slumped, his energy draining out of him like a squeezed sponge into the remnants of the previous memory below. "Well, I just cannot win can I? Behind Door A is years of abuse. Door B holds less fetal position, but more karmic backslash for bystanders. But what does Door C hold? Could it be a new car?"

"Speaking from experience? Closure. Same first letter, but without the property tax." Jim sighed and dropped into a chair next to Arthur, putting himself on the same level. He leaned back, letting his arms hang on the armrests. "I've been a contestant on this gameshow, too. It wasn't exactly the same, I didn't have anyone else screwing with my mind -- but there were things I didn't want to remember, things I couldn't blame on circumstances or anyone but myself, and when you're a telepath that kind of thinking can create an entirely new category of dysfunction. I set it up so that I had the luxury of not knowing what I'd done or being responsible for my actions, and so the people around me paid instead. So I do understand where you're coming from." The telepath rolled his head to the side so he could regard Arthur out of the corner of his eye. "It does suck. But I look at it this way: if you're trapped outside in a snowstorm, do you try to find shelter or do you just lay on the ground and let yourself freeze? Proactive or passive. I know which one I prefer."

"See, now you've got to go and be all practical while putting that initial long explanation into something I can understand." Arthur gazed at the white expanse that served as a sky here impassively. "I really do appreciate that you're trying to do, but survival as victory is only what I film for television. I long for a quick and easy montage."

"I know the feeling. My life would be easier on at least six different levels if that was an option. If you can figure out a way to pull it off, be sure to let me know." Jim gave him an apologetic shrug. "Though if you want, I can fix it so 'Eye of the Tiger' is on permanent loop in your head."

That quip made the blond man double take, but resulted in a smile that reached Arthur's toes. He beamed at the telepath. "You wouldn't dare."

Jim arched an eyebrow, keeping his face bland. "That would be pretty cruel, so probably not. You know, unless you personally wrong me somehow."

"Well, where do brain-worms -- Ear worms? But in the brain? -- rate on a sliding scale between slapping and memory-wiping?"

"Closer to the memory-wipe, but harder to prove than the slap. After all, who's to say it didn't get stuck there on its own?" Jim allowed himself to smile. "Don't worry. People already have enough in their heads already without tossing in extras. I'll do what I can to re-sync your internal clock so it doesn't feel like whatever we find just happened and keep the memories from getting too intrusive when you're awake, but other than that I'll be pretty hands-off."

"If I understood that correctly," and Arthur was back to seriousness again, "You're saying that I will be less likely to go freak out, but I'm going to have trouble sleeping and should invest in Ambien."

Jim nodded. "I can help prevent waking flashbacks, but we'll be stirring up a lot -- not just memories, but anything that might have been put in there that doesn't belong. The subconscious may end kick them up when you dream. It's like your body working out a splinter. You might have nightmares and you might not. You might remember them and you might not. It just depends on the individual."

"Lots of Ambien. Gotcha." Arthur looked around the white-washed void sadly, as if just noticing where they were. "So, what next?"

"We leave the time-out room and keep climbing." Jim rose from his chair and offered Arthur his hand. "One rock at a time, right?"

This got a beaming smile that shifted the white plain back to its original mountain vista. Haller and Arthur were now poised on a high outcropping. The sun shone bright, the clouds were extra fluffy, and Arthur was smiling right down to his toes. He winked at the therapist. "Now, where's the fun in that?"