Haller and Gabriel
Jun. 4th, 2023 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsDavid and Gabriel feel each other out, then Gabriel catches Haller up on the chaos that happened during his absence.
Gabriel wasn't sure that the smoker's porch had ever been a particular hub of activity during his time at the mansion, but it was hardly a hotspot now. The popularity of vapes and the general changing attitudes seemed to thin the ranks of the mansion's smokers. And some of those who remained were people he was keen to avoid.
But on this day, the weather being what it was, Gabriel decided to take his chances and was relieved to find himself alone, with the sun shining on his biceps as he held a cigarette between two fingers and a beer bottle in his other hand.
The universe had kindly allowed Gabriel five disarmingly quiet minutes of solitude when the porch door swung open behind him. Jim wandered onto the deck, an unlit cigarette between his lips and his attention on a Nintendo Switch. Consequently, the taller man was somewhat startled to discover that he was not alone.
"Oh, hey Gabriel. I didn't realize anyone was out here." Jim glanced around; Gabriel was alone. He removed the cigarette from his lips and raised it as explanation. "You mind?" he asked, and from his tone it was clearly a sincere question.
"Nah," Gabriel replied, offering a short but equally sincere answer. He flicked ash into a bucket. "Plenty of space. Help yourself." Haller didn't bother him, because the two barely knew each other. There was a kind of comfort in that, actually. His eyes went to the Switch. "Whatcha playin'?"
Jim nodded and tucked the Switch under his arm while he fished out his lighter. "Animal Crossing. You play?"
Gabriel shook his head as he sipped from his beer. "Just Mario Kart. I'm not much for video games, I guess." He placed the bottle down and picked a little at the label. "But I think those kinds of, like, 'build a farm, catch a fish' games feel too slow for me. Never sure what the point is."
"In my case it was mostly about being peer pressured by bored tweens who spend a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms." Jim slipped the lighter back into his pocket. He leaned back against the wall and began to thumb at the console. "But I think that, for a lot of people, the point is that there is no point. You get a steady daily routine that gives you goals you can hit without ever having to engage your brain while simultaneously stimulating the part of it that likes the feeling of accomplishment. Obviously you can use it as a creativity tool if that's what you want, but sometimes it's nice to have something you can pick up and mess around with for a couple minutes. Bite-sized stress relief." He paused to take a drag before resuming. "Besides, the game guilt-trips the hell out of you if you stop playing for a while."
Gabriel snorted. "Of course it does. I think all technology eventually turns into reminders that you've been neglecting it." The beer in his hand was replaced by his phone in a split-second. He unlocked it, then flipped the screen into Haller to show him the sea of red dots on various apps that he'd been ignoring. "Though I guess I don't feel guilty about these. Clearly."
He set the phone next to him, its screen facing down so it was more easily ignored. "I can see how that can be... meditative, I guess," he added. "Escapist, but like, because of how ordinary it is."
The lack of transition made Jim wonder if he'd missed another slice of time before he remembered Gabriel's power. He nodded, impressed by and mildly jealous of Gabriel's self-control. "Basically. Something about watching the world end made me start thinking mundanity can be underrated."
"Underrated, yes. And rare around here." Gabriel took a drag off his cigarette, considering that. "Were things that much more stable over in Scotland? Haven't been but, you know." He shrugged. "An overlapping cast of characters, right?"
"Scotland is chaotic in a predictable way. Big on medical emergencies, not so much on dimensional incursions." Jim flicked ash into the bucket. "If you don't count Illyana, I didn't see a single demon while I was there."
Gabriel did his best not to bristle and to keep his expression placid as he again lifted his beer. "Well, there's a blessing," he said before taking a swig. "No collision between universes, no impromptu trips to Limbo?" He left his own demon encounter out of the mix; he wasn't sure what Haller knew, but he wasn't going to be the one to bring it up. "No wonder you missed this place."
The telepath half-shrugged. "I guess now that I'm eligible for a midlife crisis my heart yearns for adventure. Plus I never made it to Limbo. The closest I got was a pocket dimension where a demon told me what a disappointment I was to everyone I loved before turning into Gambit and tearing me in half. That was a fun one." Had the other man's tone gotten sharper? He didn't have a good baseline on Gabriel. He backed off a little. "But seriously, I needed a change of pace, and this was the only place I could think to go. I guess after so long the weirdness becomes almost comforting."
"Almost being the key word there." The younger man wasn't sure what to say about the demon, but a part of him wondered if it was the same one that had tapped into his deep-seated adolescent trauma that he now knew he'd buried under irony and hedonism. "Things were particularly spicy around here," he said after a second. "This past winter or the one before it? Can't remember which. Time's sort of... wobbly for me sometimes. I didn't think we could top the 'universe almost ends in a borderline apocalypse' thing, but we came close."
"Do you mean the incident where the borderline apocalypse issue was being repaired? D- the Professor was trying to explain it, but I think I was finishing my Masters and I haven't had the strength to look at the mission files." Damn, he was tired. Fortunately Jim doubted Gabriel knew or cared enough to worry about a slip of his tongue. He resituated himself against the wall and frowned at his cigarette. "I'm almost afraid to ask, but was that a demon dimension, an alternate universe, or some kind of mindscape thing?"
"Well, the best I understand it — which, you know..." Gabriel rocked his hand back and forth. "There was some kind of, uh... I dunno, psychic vampire or something? She was taking advantage of the cracks in our reality, and then when we went to investigate, she trapped us in a new reality." He knew he sounded both dumb and insane. "I guess I don't know if it was an alternate universe or not? But we were in some kind of mess, and somehow Jean or Emma or maybe both of them fixed the universe and now it no longer breaks apart if you mention anything that happened before all that. I think."
He knew he would have a second cigarette. "But, no, actually, that was pretty mundane if you can believe it."
Jim raised an eyebrow. "Fixing the universe was the mundane part?"
"I mean, a lot of us had been walking on eggshells for... however many years. In a way it was kind of a relief." Gabriel's cigarette was tapped; he snuffed it out and tossed it in the bucket. "But no, there was, like this weird period after Garrison died-but-didn't die, when the Brotherhood really kicked the X-Men's ass, and then Topaz disappeared in a way that was pretty bad but I still don't entirely understand, and then Laurie... well, to be honest, I'm not sure what happened there either, but it was all very dramatic."
"Wait, what about Garrison? I missed that one." Jim pretended he hadn't heard the comment about Laurie. He'd heard about Laurie. He did not want to discuss Laurie. He gestured vaguely with the Switch. "Are we talking 'died and left a body,' or 'washed out to sea and presumed dead'?"
"Oh..." Gabriel would not have opened this can of worms if he'd suspected Haller hadn't heard about this. "Sorry, I assumed that made it to Muir." He sighed, again lifting the beer bottle. It felt light enough, and so he drained it. "Hold on." In a few seconds, he'd gone inside, grabbed a second beer, cracked it open and sat back down.
"Short version? Demon lord, hell dimension, Garrison got left behind." He'd inadvertently started clenching the neck of the bottle a bit tight. "We thought he'd died. And that was horrible, as I'm sure you can imagine. Especially given what we all went through." He assumed Haller would understand the subset of people he was referring to, so he didn't linger on it. "Except he wasn't dead, which most of us didn't know for another five or six months." He stared at the beer in his hands. "Except for Amanda."
Jim had known this wasn't going to be a good story the moment Gabriel had opened a second beer, but this made him frown. "Was there a reason she didn't say anything?" he asked. He'd known Amanda for a long time; he could think of a number of reasons she might have concealed something like this for one of her teammates, but Garrison was an X-Man.
"Oh, you'd have to ask her for the full details." Gabriel could not help sounding a little bitter. He was finding it hard to fully forgive Amanda, even as he'd told her he understood what she did. "But, okay, buckle up, Haller." He took another sip of his beer as he tried to figure out how he could best explain this. "Garrison somehow escaped, I couldn't tell you, and went undercover with the Brotherhood. And I guess he and Amanda were working together, both to... I dunno, take down this crazy anti-mutant government weapons thing. And maybe also to try and fight Magneto, and to figure out how to deal with the demon fucker. Maybe more? I don't really know everything those two had their hands in."
There was something upsetting that Jim could track this string of phrases with relative understanding. Relative. "So . . . he escaped from hell and immediately went into a two-man deep cover operation to take down what sounds like a pretty significant threat," he said. "With no help." Then, "Okay."
"Yeah." Gabriel wasn't sure exactly what to say. He put the beer down and, his hands a bit shaky, tapped another cigarette out of his pack. "Well." He lit it, took a nice drag and then closed his eyes as he exhaled. "A bunch of X-people got hurt fighting the Brotherhood while he was undercover with them. And then, you know, we all thought he was dead, and..." And then they'd had to go fight that fucking monster again. "To their credit, they seemed to understand why everyone was so... you know." He offered a small shrug. "Pissed."
"Uh, yeah," Jim replied in a tone that was so bland it almost crossed the other side and became withering. Amanda and Garrison both had a lot of experience in undercover operations, so he assumed there was something that he was missing, but on its face it seemed . . . what would you call this? Oh, right: kind of fucked up.
Aloud he said, "That's kind of fucked up."
“Yeah.” Gabriel nodded. It was validating to hear someone else say it — not that Haller’s perspective was objective, strictly speaking, but he’d missed the emotional turmoil around that. “I mean,” he added after a few seconds, “the relief is that nobody actually died. Dunno if we really stopped to appreciate that.”
"Well, yeah, that goes without saying. But I'm sure it would've been a little easier to process without a couple of months thinking he'd betrayed you first." Jim shook his head, half in disbelief. He trusted there was further context here, but still. "Did it at least work?" he asked.
Gabriel looked at the cigarette in his hand and, suddenly finding it distasteful, stubbed it out. "As far as I know."
"I guess that's something. On some level, anyway." The telepath regarded the Switch, letting his eyes settle on the colorful, rounded images on the screen without really seeing them. "I'm sorry you guys had to go through that, though. Feels like we've lost enough people for real, you know?
"I do." Gabriel, too, was staring somewhat blankly at the bottle in his hands. He hadn't even told the whole story, and he hadn't done that good of a job of it. "God, you know, thank you for seeing how fucked up all that was?" He looked up at Haller suddenly. "I feel like — well, not that people got over it, but you know. I guess a fucked up thing happens, but then another fucked up thing happens, so people move to the next fucked up thing?"
Jim snorted a cloud of smoke. "Yeah, funny thing about that: your brain doesn't actually reset just because you hit it with another trauma, you're just throwing another one onto the top of the pile. It's like paperwork. So much stuff hits your desk so fast you can't finish one thing before another one shows up." He turned to meet Gabriel's gaze, smiling without humor. "I get that life doesn't slow down, but people aren't great at doing that for themselves, either."
"Yeah." Gabriel took another drink. He wondered briefly if there was some kind of personal advice underneath those words, but he knew Haller didn't know enough to know just which buttons he was inadvertently pressing. "We're always lurching from crisis to crisis, it seems."
"That's the other side of it, though, right? If you never stop you never have to process anything." Jim took a long drag, and slowly exhaled. "And everything is fine forever and ever."
Gabriel wasn't sure that the smoker's porch had ever been a particular hub of activity during his time at the mansion, but it was hardly a hotspot now. The popularity of vapes and the general changing attitudes seemed to thin the ranks of the mansion's smokers. And some of those who remained were people he was keen to avoid.
But on this day, the weather being what it was, Gabriel decided to take his chances and was relieved to find himself alone, with the sun shining on his biceps as he held a cigarette between two fingers and a beer bottle in his other hand.
The universe had kindly allowed Gabriel five disarmingly quiet minutes of solitude when the porch door swung open behind him. Jim wandered onto the deck, an unlit cigarette between his lips and his attention on a Nintendo Switch. Consequently, the taller man was somewhat startled to discover that he was not alone.
"Oh, hey Gabriel. I didn't realize anyone was out here." Jim glanced around; Gabriel was alone. He removed the cigarette from his lips and raised it as explanation. "You mind?" he asked, and from his tone it was clearly a sincere question.
"Nah," Gabriel replied, offering a short but equally sincere answer. He flicked ash into a bucket. "Plenty of space. Help yourself." Haller didn't bother him, because the two barely knew each other. There was a kind of comfort in that, actually. His eyes went to the Switch. "Whatcha playin'?"
Jim nodded and tucked the Switch under his arm while he fished out his lighter. "Animal Crossing. You play?"
Gabriel shook his head as he sipped from his beer. "Just Mario Kart. I'm not much for video games, I guess." He placed the bottle down and picked a little at the label. "But I think those kinds of, like, 'build a farm, catch a fish' games feel too slow for me. Never sure what the point is."
"In my case it was mostly about being peer pressured by bored tweens who spend a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms." Jim slipped the lighter back into his pocket. He leaned back against the wall and began to thumb at the console. "But I think that, for a lot of people, the point is that there is no point. You get a steady daily routine that gives you goals you can hit without ever having to engage your brain while simultaneously stimulating the part of it that likes the feeling of accomplishment. Obviously you can use it as a creativity tool if that's what you want, but sometimes it's nice to have something you can pick up and mess around with for a couple minutes. Bite-sized stress relief." He paused to take a drag before resuming. "Besides, the game guilt-trips the hell out of you if you stop playing for a while."
Gabriel snorted. "Of course it does. I think all technology eventually turns into reminders that you've been neglecting it." The beer in his hand was replaced by his phone in a split-second. He unlocked it, then flipped the screen into Haller to show him the sea of red dots on various apps that he'd been ignoring. "Though I guess I don't feel guilty about these. Clearly."
He set the phone next to him, its screen facing down so it was more easily ignored. "I can see how that can be... meditative, I guess," he added. "Escapist, but like, because of how ordinary it is."
The lack of transition made Jim wonder if he'd missed another slice of time before he remembered Gabriel's power. He nodded, impressed by and mildly jealous of Gabriel's self-control. "Basically. Something about watching the world end made me start thinking mundanity can be underrated."
"Underrated, yes. And rare around here." Gabriel took a drag off his cigarette, considering that. "Were things that much more stable over in Scotland? Haven't been but, you know." He shrugged. "An overlapping cast of characters, right?"
"Scotland is chaotic in a predictable way. Big on medical emergencies, not so much on dimensional incursions." Jim flicked ash into the bucket. "If you don't count Illyana, I didn't see a single demon while I was there."
Gabriel did his best not to bristle and to keep his expression placid as he again lifted his beer. "Well, there's a blessing," he said before taking a swig. "No collision between universes, no impromptu trips to Limbo?" He left his own demon encounter out of the mix; he wasn't sure what Haller knew, but he wasn't going to be the one to bring it up. "No wonder you missed this place."
The telepath half-shrugged. "I guess now that I'm eligible for a midlife crisis my heart yearns for adventure. Plus I never made it to Limbo. The closest I got was a pocket dimension where a demon told me what a disappointment I was to everyone I loved before turning into Gambit and tearing me in half. That was a fun one." Had the other man's tone gotten sharper? He didn't have a good baseline on Gabriel. He backed off a little. "But seriously, I needed a change of pace, and this was the only place I could think to go. I guess after so long the weirdness becomes almost comforting."
"Almost being the key word there." The younger man wasn't sure what to say about the demon, but a part of him wondered if it was the same one that had tapped into his deep-seated adolescent trauma that he now knew he'd buried under irony and hedonism. "Things were particularly spicy around here," he said after a second. "This past winter or the one before it? Can't remember which. Time's sort of... wobbly for me sometimes. I didn't think we could top the 'universe almost ends in a borderline apocalypse' thing, but we came close."
"Do you mean the incident where the borderline apocalypse issue was being repaired? D- the Professor was trying to explain it, but I think I was finishing my Masters and I haven't had the strength to look at the mission files." Damn, he was tired. Fortunately Jim doubted Gabriel knew or cared enough to worry about a slip of his tongue. He resituated himself against the wall and frowned at his cigarette. "I'm almost afraid to ask, but was that a demon dimension, an alternate universe, or some kind of mindscape thing?"
"Well, the best I understand it — which, you know..." Gabriel rocked his hand back and forth. "There was some kind of, uh... I dunno, psychic vampire or something? She was taking advantage of the cracks in our reality, and then when we went to investigate, she trapped us in a new reality." He knew he sounded both dumb and insane. "I guess I don't know if it was an alternate universe or not? But we were in some kind of mess, and somehow Jean or Emma or maybe both of them fixed the universe and now it no longer breaks apart if you mention anything that happened before all that. I think."
He knew he would have a second cigarette. "But, no, actually, that was pretty mundane if you can believe it."
Jim raised an eyebrow. "Fixing the universe was the mundane part?"
"I mean, a lot of us had been walking on eggshells for... however many years. In a way it was kind of a relief." Gabriel's cigarette was tapped; he snuffed it out and tossed it in the bucket. "But no, there was, like this weird period after Garrison died-but-didn't die, when the Brotherhood really kicked the X-Men's ass, and then Topaz disappeared in a way that was pretty bad but I still don't entirely understand, and then Laurie... well, to be honest, I'm not sure what happened there either, but it was all very dramatic."
"Wait, what about Garrison? I missed that one." Jim pretended he hadn't heard the comment about Laurie. He'd heard about Laurie. He did not want to discuss Laurie. He gestured vaguely with the Switch. "Are we talking 'died and left a body,' or 'washed out to sea and presumed dead'?"
"Oh..." Gabriel would not have opened this can of worms if he'd suspected Haller hadn't heard about this. "Sorry, I assumed that made it to Muir." He sighed, again lifting the beer bottle. It felt light enough, and so he drained it. "Hold on." In a few seconds, he'd gone inside, grabbed a second beer, cracked it open and sat back down.
"Short version? Demon lord, hell dimension, Garrison got left behind." He'd inadvertently started clenching the neck of the bottle a bit tight. "We thought he'd died. And that was horrible, as I'm sure you can imagine. Especially given what we all went through." He assumed Haller would understand the subset of people he was referring to, so he didn't linger on it. "Except he wasn't dead, which most of us didn't know for another five or six months." He stared at the beer in his hands. "Except for Amanda."
Jim had known this wasn't going to be a good story the moment Gabriel had opened a second beer, but this made him frown. "Was there a reason she didn't say anything?" he asked. He'd known Amanda for a long time; he could think of a number of reasons she might have concealed something like this for one of her teammates, but Garrison was an X-Man.
"Oh, you'd have to ask her for the full details." Gabriel could not help sounding a little bitter. He was finding it hard to fully forgive Amanda, even as he'd told her he understood what she did. "But, okay, buckle up, Haller." He took another sip of his beer as he tried to figure out how he could best explain this. "Garrison somehow escaped, I couldn't tell you, and went undercover with the Brotherhood. And I guess he and Amanda were working together, both to... I dunno, take down this crazy anti-mutant government weapons thing. And maybe also to try and fight Magneto, and to figure out how to deal with the demon fucker. Maybe more? I don't really know everything those two had their hands in."
There was something upsetting that Jim could track this string of phrases with relative understanding. Relative. "So . . . he escaped from hell and immediately went into a two-man deep cover operation to take down what sounds like a pretty significant threat," he said. "With no help." Then, "Okay."
"Yeah." Gabriel wasn't sure exactly what to say. He put the beer down and, his hands a bit shaky, tapped another cigarette out of his pack. "Well." He lit it, took a nice drag and then closed his eyes as he exhaled. "A bunch of X-people got hurt fighting the Brotherhood while he was undercover with them. And then, you know, we all thought he was dead, and..." And then they'd had to go fight that fucking monster again. "To their credit, they seemed to understand why everyone was so... you know." He offered a small shrug. "Pissed."
"Uh, yeah," Jim replied in a tone that was so bland it almost crossed the other side and became withering. Amanda and Garrison both had a lot of experience in undercover operations, so he assumed there was something that he was missing, but on its face it seemed . . . what would you call this? Oh, right: kind of fucked up.
Aloud he said, "That's kind of fucked up."
“Yeah.” Gabriel nodded. It was validating to hear someone else say it — not that Haller’s perspective was objective, strictly speaking, but he’d missed the emotional turmoil around that. “I mean,” he added after a few seconds, “the relief is that nobody actually died. Dunno if we really stopped to appreciate that.”
"Well, yeah, that goes without saying. But I'm sure it would've been a little easier to process without a couple of months thinking he'd betrayed you first." Jim shook his head, half in disbelief. He trusted there was further context here, but still. "Did it at least work?" he asked.
Gabriel looked at the cigarette in his hand and, suddenly finding it distasteful, stubbed it out. "As far as I know."
"I guess that's something. On some level, anyway." The telepath regarded the Switch, letting his eyes settle on the colorful, rounded images on the screen without really seeing them. "I'm sorry you guys had to go through that, though. Feels like we've lost enough people for real, you know?
"I do." Gabriel, too, was staring somewhat blankly at the bottle in his hands. He hadn't even told the whole story, and he hadn't done that good of a job of it. "God, you know, thank you for seeing how fucked up all that was?" He looked up at Haller suddenly. "I feel like — well, not that people got over it, but you know. I guess a fucked up thing happens, but then another fucked up thing happens, so people move to the next fucked up thing?"
Jim snorted a cloud of smoke. "Yeah, funny thing about that: your brain doesn't actually reset just because you hit it with another trauma, you're just throwing another one onto the top of the pile. It's like paperwork. So much stuff hits your desk so fast you can't finish one thing before another one shows up." He turned to meet Gabriel's gaze, smiling without humor. "I get that life doesn't slow down, but people aren't great at doing that for themselves, either."
"Yeah." Gabriel took another drink. He wondered briefly if there was some kind of personal advice underneath those words, but he knew Haller didn't know enough to know just which buttons he was inadvertently pressing. "We're always lurching from crisis to crisis, it seems."
"That's the other side of it, though, right? If you never stop you never have to process anything." Jim took a long drag, and slowly exhaled. "And everything is fine forever and ever."
