xp_logs | Log: [Haller, Rachel] Late to the Party

Somewhere not too far away . . .

It had been a long time since either had felt the breeze, but there it was. Sounds, too, were hitting their ears: the chirp of a bird, the distant hum of traffic. Haller plucked an experimental handful of dead grass, every motion slow and heavy, like emerging from the pool after a long swim.

The dead grass drifted to the ground. Satisfied with this evidence of their current reality, the older man turned his attention back to his companion.

"We seem to be back."

"Xorn is a fucker," was Rachel's succinct reply from where she lay next to him on the ground, eyes closed against the harsh sunlight and a distinctly annoyed scowl twisting her lips. "A fucking motherfucker does not have the courtesy of dishing out complete information before going and offing himself to save fucking worlds."

To be fair, though, by the time Xorn had chanced upon them drifting along the Spiral, the omega-level mutant had already spent his powers melding the worlds together and sending their friends to the physical plane. They were lucky the omega-level mutant even had enough energy (or desire) to give them what little he had been able to.

Her brain was struggling to catch up to reality, already missing the serene emptiness of the astral plane. But given the length of time they had hung out there, Haller had started looking just slightly blurry around the edges. Which had meant that her weaksauce companion had been in danger of dissipating into the immenseness of the astral plane. While Rachel herself had been perfectly willing to join Xorn in his own suicide mission, letting her brother cease to be was not quite on the cards.

For a long while, the pair of them lay there and just existed. Fingers curled in the grass as they counted even breaths and inhaled the vague scent of air, tasting the slight breeze that ruffled hair. Spring was coming, Rachel could tell.

She was so done with this reality-hopping shit.

"Are we even in America?"

"Shouldn't I be the one asking you that?" There was a pause; the next words were spoken into the sky with a vague sense of resignation, as if spoken by someone who, though under no real obligation to do so, had looked at their alarm clock and realized it was really time to get out of bed. "We should get up, I suppose."

She hummed noncommittally in reply and lifted a limp wrist in a vague-ish kind of wave before dropping it. With some effort she heaved herself up into a sitting position, only to bury her head against her knees with a soft groan. Something felt wrong. The world felt wrong. And she said as much, voice muffled against the dark material of her jeans (oh my god at least they were clothed).

Haller tried to rise and had similar trouble. His body was weak; too much time without one, he supposed, and David had never had much in the way of physical reserves to begin with. This needed to be rectified.

"We'd better get something to eat. Here." He extended his hand to the redhead, then paused. "You look different. Your hair's grown."

"Huh." She lifted her head and peered up at the fringe of fire-red that burned brightly in the sunlight. An unfamiliar weight on her shoulders gave her pause and she shifted it around until she pulled a long lock of hair (that ran to her butt!) into her lap as her knees parted for her to shift into an Indian sit. "Weird." She curled the fiery strand around her finger and turned to Haller, looking him in the face for the first time. "You look the same."

"I didn't spend half my life on the astral plane. I think at a certain point you have to accept this as your 'thing'." He waved the fingers of his outstretched hand encouragingly. "Up, Rapunzel. You took us out so I wouldn't dissipate. I will repay you by ensuring you don't starve."

"It's a fucked up 'thing' to have," she said plaintively, finally grabbing his wrist in a firm grip and hauling herself to her feet. Vertigo swamped her for a moment and she gripped his hand almost painfully tight -- glad that he let her -- and carefully shook her head when it passed. "I'm kind of feeling like... Japanese food is apropros right about now," she added after a moment, twisting around to gather the heavy weight hanging from her scalp and pulled it over one shoulder. "Although I'm sure you'd prefer a greasy burger."

She glared at it for one long moment, fingers subconsciously slipping down to finger at the side seam of her jeans and making a frustrated noise when it came up with nothing. "I don't suppose you have a knife with you?"

It was entirely possible that she missed his answer as she paused and cocked her head to the side, verdant eyes bearing into his for a long moment as she tilted her head at him with a heavy frown. "You seem off too. Maybe I didn't manage to bring all of you back."

The older man paused, his own head tilting in an unconscious mirror of Rachel's. His eyes went distant as he took an internal inventory.

"I am not a telepath," he said, apparently as a non sequitur. Still thoughtful, he turned pale eyes to the nearest tree.

Half the trunk split away, torn by an invisible hand. Haller nodded. "But I can do this." He closed his hand into a fist; the wood burst into sputtering, smokey flame. "And this. Interesting." Point made, he let the tree fall; without telekinesis to sustain it the fire died.

Rachel blinked, having frozen still while he wielded his telekinesis with a kind of controlled carelessness that had her brain stuttering to a stop and her hand moving instinctively to throw up a shield with a needless gesture.

"Okay," she said finally, when it looked like he was done with his impromptu show and tell. Her shield collapsed into itself. "That was instructive. You don't feel like you're not you. You're just..." Missing something. Like any lights on in both of his very blue eyes. What did the missing brown one mean? "Not coming anywhere near my hair with your TK."

The astral plane must have fucked her friend up in some way. The redhead sighed, and frowned when there was an echo in her brain - like a tolling bell echoing across a vast valley. For a moment it was as though she were not in her own body. It belonged to someone else.
Haller's eyebrow arched in a familiar fashion, and all of a sudden the hair tossed over Rachel's shoulder began to move of its own accord. The unruly mass abruptly gathered into three equally sized strands and braided itself with both speed and surprising gentleness.

She startled badly when her hair began to move, and she pinned with a deadly glare, reminding him that she was still a warrior at heart and capable of (trying to) take him down if she had to. But then Rachel relaxed and watched her hair dance, one hand reaching out to grasp at his arm, fingers curling comfortably around it just above his elbow as she shuffled closer. It wasn't the same closeness they had shared as incorporeal beings, but the comfort was still there. They had both needed it and she wasn't about to let go of him just because they were now capable of bleeding again.

"My TK is no threat to your hair," Haller assured her as the resulting braid secured itself with a tidy knot. "My control is better than Jack's. And yes, I'm still me. I'm just . . . not quite Jim." He studied the look on her face. "Are you all right?"

"Brain feels... full. Shifting." She closed her eyes and gathered a thin strand of TP, prodding and coaxing it towards him. "David."

Haller accepted the overture, but just below the surface thoughts Rachel encountered a strange blankness. It was like a void that swallowed emotional resonance; she could sense felt faint fondness and concern, but no trace of anything deeper.

As if to compensate for this deficit, Rachel found herself wrapped in a hug. "Not too deep," Haller said, not unkindly. "I don't know what's past that boundary. Be careful you don't fall in."

She pressed her cheek against his chest, arms slipping around his waist as she unabashedly curled into him. "Kay." The telepathic thread skimmed the edge of the void, tugged lightly at the 'corners'. It hovered for a moment in the empty space as she debated diving further, but the cool presence of his mind and the freezing depths of the void stayed her hand. Carefully, the thread slipped away with a friendly telepathic pat on his brain even as she reluctantly disengaged physically as well.

"Not broken, at least. Just..." she wrinkled her nose as she felt around for a word. (Hiding) "Hiding. Parts of your mind. Y'know. The rest of it." Another vague gesture and she gave up with a disgusted sound. "I'm going to call you David." Because she'd always preferred that to Legion.

"You can call me whatever you want. I don't have a name. Not like the others did." The telekinetic's bland expression didn't change, but he responded to her wrinkled nose with an exaggerated scuff of her hair -- just like the old him would have done. "It doesn't matter. I'll take care of things. It's what Jim would have wanted. Are you steady enough to walk?"

She shrugged, not at all disconcerted by what he was saying. "Dunno. Even if I can't, I can fly." She took one shaky step -- You'd think that after having done this twice (thrice) over she'd have gotten this down pat. "Why? Are you going to carry me?"

"Yes, actually." Haller jerked his head, and Rachel was lifted off her feet. "Power has to come from somewhere," he explained as he maneuvered himself into an appropriate piggy-back-acceptance position and lowered her again. "I seem to have a little more than you, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the fact you bodily extracted us from the astral plane. I can tap some power if I need it. Even so, I wouldn't trust either of us to fly more than six feet right now. Besides, that might attract attention." He gave the girl a slight bounce to reposition her. "And don't bother acting outraged. Jim used to carry you like this when you were a kid, and you loved it."

Rachel looped an arm around his neck, the softness against his back reminding him: "I'm not a kid anymore, David." She did lean back a little so that she could smack him on the back of his head, clearly unafraid of repercussions, and then resettled herself with a disgruntled noise. "And you need to stop doing that and remember that you're not the only one with destructive powers." Or hair triggers. She flipped her braid over his shoulders and eyed it with distaste. "Besides, you do realise this is your fault, right? I had to haul your bony ass out of there."

Haller accepted the hit without complaint even though the force knocked his head forward. "I'm being pragmatic. What makes more sense: that we both exhaust ourselves, or that one of us works while the other recovers? And you need to remember, we don't know where we are -- or what kind of world this is."

"You're being emotionally absent is what you are," she said bluntly. Because that was what the void his head had meant and it was what she had seen in his blank blue eyes. Rachel would know what that type of coping mechanism entailed, after all, nevermind that she wasn't as literally fractured as he was. (And she did enjoy getting piggy-backed.)

But the redhead didn't push her point, merely tickled him under the chin with her braid and hummed. "Well, he warned us about using powers openly, albeit in not so many words. He said something ominous about change and keeping our mouths shut about shit --" Though that wasn't so much Xorn telling them things than it had been things hurriedly shoved into their brains. "Oh, and my parents aren't my parents. At least I think that's what he said in his usual irritatingly convoluting Shakespeare-in-the-park way. Before he, y'know..." Died?

"Your parents will always have been your parents. We may meet some people who happen to look and maybe act like them, but that's all. Since I'm being emotionally absent you know I'm not just saying that to spare your feelings." Haller blew a strand of red hair away from his nose. "This world is like David's brain. There are parts that don't go together, but they've been fused regardless. There will be inconsistencies."

"You're not sparing my feelings because it still means that I've lost my parents for like the second time now," she said, adopting his bland tone. "How do we fit into it then? Do we have a past here or are we just going to turn up at Westchester and be like: 'Ta-DA! Xorn's a martyred fucker!'?"

"That sounds reasonable to me. Anyone else who remembers will sympathize. Assuming Westchester still exists, that is. We'll need to do some research." He walked in silence for a few paces. "I wonder if David's father is alive."

"God, I hope so. You kind of don't need any more fucking over. Plus it'd be that much harder to convince people we're not completely insane."

They fell silent for a few more paces, not even worried that there wasn't a vehicle in sight, when a thought occurred to her. "If my parents aren't my parents here, does that mean I don't exist in this world? Or did I pop into existence like a bloody magical fairy?"

Had she mentioned how sick she is of all the fucking world hopping shit and the existentialism crises that came with it? Because she was so done. Fucking done.

"Wait, wait, wait." She sat up on his back, forcing him stop and straighten to compensate for the sudden change in weight distribution. "What's my name?!"

"Rachel Kinross," Haller replied matter-of-factly, waiting patiently like an obedient beast of burden.

She smacked him in the face with her braid this time, scowling down at the crown of his head. "How can I be a Kinross here if my mother is not my mother?" Yeah, she didn't even exist to the Moira of this world, if Moira herself existed, that is. It was easier to think of her mother as a woman buried in the waters near Muir Island rather than a complete and utter stranger. The latter actually physically hurt.

Haller craned his neck to look at her as best he could. "People may know me as Jim, Jack, Cyndi, Davey or Legion," he said gently, "but I'm always David Haller. Maybe you'll need a new name, but it won't make you any less Rachel Kinross than you were as Revenant. You've already survived the destruction of two realities. No matter what this world thinks, you exist. Never doubt that." He gave her a calm blink, his level tone never changing. "But if you need a new name, maybe you should be Rachel Xorn. He did bring you into this world once, after all."

She sputtered, and avoided his gaze by settling back against his back and digging her chin into his shoulder. "Don't you dare suggest that again," she said, but her voice lacked any real heat as she silently nudged him into resuming his trek along the road (fuck knows if they were even walking in the right direction). "I may enjoy calling him a motherfucker but it is not meant to be a interpreted literally. How does Rachel Haller sound to you?"

Haller gave her braid a telekinetic tug that was almost playful. "It might confuse David's mother, if she's alive, but it's also more common than Kinross, Dayspring or MacTaggart. I'm afraid you've missed your bat mitzvah, though."

"I got adopted after," she replied airily. Hmm. "Didn't you miss your bar mitzvah?"

"David was catatonic. He's still very Jewish." Haller bent over so she didn't have to duck as far to avoid an overhanging branch. "We'll think of something. I know I can't give you the same support Jim could have, but David loved your parents, and he loved you. I'll do what I can. You won't be alone."

There was a long moment of silence as she took her time to mull over and process his words, broken only by the sound of an engine in the distance. Then the psion wrapped her arms tighter around his neck and planted a kiss on his face right by his ear. "I love you too, woodblock. We can be nameless together."

The arms supporting her knees squeezed briefly. "If that's what we need to do. But first I think we're going to have to steal a car."