xp_logs | Garrison and Haller: Wolves on a porch

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Haller and Garrison have a chance encounter at Harry's. What could have been a perfectly civil session of catching up becomes needlessly confrontational.

Averted workplace shooting. Tropical storm clusters. Beach contamination from something called the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, which, as far as he could tell, was further proof the ocean held nothing good for anyone. Jim stubbed out the remainder of his spent cigarette in the ashtray as he skimmed down his news feed. Smoking gave him a reasonable excuse to isolate himself on the porch at Harry's while still allowing him to honestly claim he had left the mansion that day. Now that Moira had successfully recruited Sooraya to her cause being antisocial was much more difficult. Much as he loved Sooraya and appreciated what she was trying to do, it hadn't been a particularly good day.

He was making a mental note to follow up on a story about improved treatment outcomes from supplementing naloxone revival with buprenorphine when he sensed something behind him.

Turning, he found himself staring at the triangular face of a large white canid, who cocked his head at Haller once he made eye contact. There was a long moment of a stand off before another figure came up behind the creature. "He doesn't like cigarette smoke. And has decided all of this patio is his. You can ignore him though. He needs to learn some boundaries."

At some point Jim had heard Garrison had acquired a wolf somewhere. However, nothing had prepared him for the size of the thing. It wasn't actually the size of a pony, that was only the shock of his first impression, but he instinctively felt that any animal that size should only be viewed through a set of binoculars.

"I was just finishing," said the telepath. The wolf loped closer, as if to confirm this assertion. Its chin was even with the surface of the tabletop. Jim tried not to breathe too obviously.

"Relax Haller, he doesn't actually get to decide." Kane said, touching the wolf on the back and giving a short whistle, pointing to the fence. The wolf made a grumbling sound in the back of his throat before stepping around to the other side of the patio fence made of wood slats like a stair railing and settled down next to the table. "He also knows he's not allowed on the patio, just inside, but, again... he likes to see what he can get away with."

"I feel like I could have lived without that last part." The fact the wolf had conceded to settling down behind a fence helped somewhat, but as someone who was vaguely uncertain about animals in general it was still unnerving to be in the presence of something so clearly undomesticated. Jim's forehead creased as he studied the pale shape through the slats in the wood. "Where did it come from?" he asked.

"Good question. The answer is, well, a hell of a lot more complicated than it should be. By the way, how are you?" Haller had moved back to Muir not long after the Dark Phoenix incident, and Kane had given the man his space, especially once it was clear that the Betsy Braddock they knew didn't make it into the new reality. He understood a bit about grief. Meanwhile, Briar dropped off a pint with a sour look at him.

"Eating regularly," Jim replied automatically, despite the fact the only thing on the table in front of him was half an ice-tea. He'd been spending too much time around Sooraya. He winced. "Sorry, usually when people ask me that it's followed by 'you look terrible.' I'm fine, just settling back in."

"Nah, you're allowed to look how you want. Shit is tough out there." He said. He reached into his pocket and slid a ziplock over the table to him. "He's waiting for you to give him a treat or two right now. He will keep staring until you do. Just, you know, FYI."

Jim glanced at where the wolf lay. The animal was gazing at him with unblinking eyes. I lost a fight with a chicken, do I really want to take any chances with an apex predator? With the awkwardness typical of non-dog people, he prized a treat from the bag and tossed it over the fence in the wolf's general vicinity.

"What do you mean by 'complicated'?" he asked, trying to look at Garrison while keeping the wolf in his field of vision. "It's not a hellhound, is it?"

"You know, all the time I spent in a hell dimension, never saw one of those. No, he's an Arctic wolf mix. Also, don't toss it." The wolf had scraped the treat out of the dirt with a head shake. "Present it to him. He's not going to hurt you."

Jim gave him a look, trying to decide whether Garrison was being serious, but the Canadian seemed sincere. And more haggard than the last time he'd seen him, come to that, but that was true of most everyone he'd seen since returning. Jim guessed it really had been a hard few years for them all. He took another treat from the bag and got out of his chair. Gingerly, his hand flat with fingers well clear of incidental gnawing, he presented the treat to the wolf. The massive creature gave the biscuit one light sniff before taking it from his hand with surprising delicacy.

"Hell dimension," Jim repeated, slowly backing away from the creature as it crunched into its prize. "I keep hearing about that. Maybe I'm imagining things, but it seems like there's been more of that sort of thing since the world changed over."

"Long story? Short story? It's all available in the archives." Kane said, taking a long pull from his pint. "We got thralled by a Hell-Lord, and as a result, I went undercover with the Brotherhood, helped kick the shit out of the X-Men, but in return, used Magneto to destroy an anti-mutant robot program and then break a Hell-lord. Except he flayed me alive at the end, so now I have this kind of chaos aura thing... and then the wolf showed up while I was drowning due to having Marie-Ange's powers. I mean, we've been dealing with a lot of shit." He said wryly.

"I meant that there seems to be more mystical activity now then there had been before," Jim said, equally wry, "but I think you just proved my point." He slid back into the seat across from the other man. It wasn't his business, but Garrison had opened the door. He decided he might as well. "Can I ask you something?"

"Unless it's a proposition, sure. Otherwise, I need at least a couple more drinks. I mean, I need to be wooed."

Jim gave him a humorless smile. "No, not that. Don't take it personally, I've just realized dating doesn't work out for me." He drew his drink back to him and swirled the melting ice. "Actually, it's about when you joined the Brotherhood. Gabriel said everyone thought you died, but it turned out you'd just gone deep-cover. Amanda knew, but no one else. Why didn't you tell them?"

"The Brotherhood have a network far more extensive than we realized. And Brand, and thus SHIELD, were compromised. So, I ran everything through an expert through a network that no one who didn't know about the Phoenix could ever understand. It was the safest way to run the operation without risking anyone else." Kane said. "It wasn't the cleanest option, but at the end of the day, we managed to not only put a few Brotherhood into the Vault but also gain a hell of a lot more information about him and his network."

"I understand why you'd want to keep Brand and SHIELD out of it. The more people involved, the greater the odds something can go wrong. But I don't understand why you locked out your own teammates." The telepath thought of the bitterness in Gabriel's voice and shook his head. "I wasn't there, I get it. But I don't understand why you let them live with thinking they'd lost you, and I don't understand why you didn't tell them what you were planning to do. Did you really not trust them?"

"It wasn't about trust. It was about operational security. The Brotherhood, at no point, trusted me. And they had connections in ways I didn't know whether or not could have unintentionally blown my cover. And, to be honest, we still aren't sure of all of their connections in the Underground." Kane said. "Also, remember, I had to convince a Hell-lord that I was fully in his thrall. It was... complex."

"But Amanda knew, didn't she? If you'd asked her to, she could have made sure the only people who knew were the people you wanted to know. People you trusted." Jim took a deep breath, frustrated and unsure why. He hadn't been there, and he knew full well both Garrison and Amanda's experience with undercover operations dwarfed his own. Maybe it was because the other man's response to an event that had clearly had a significant effect on his teammates seemed so casual. Jim ran a hand down his face and tried to work out his own reactions. "I guess what I'm struggling with is this. Everything you say, on its face, makes sense -- except for the part where you shut out even people you've worked with for almost twenty years. You let people who'd already lost a whole world think they lost you, too. And as much as you say the secrecy was for 'operational security,' to me it sounds like you decided it didn't matter if you threw your own life away on a gamble, and rather than give anyone a chance to help you or challenge you on it you just shut them out entirely. You didn't just decide what was right for you, you decided what was right for everyone else, too."

Kane took a long pull from his glass. "It's taken me months to run through in my head what I could have and possibly should have done differently. But one minute, we're fighting for our lives against some creature none of us have ever seen before. The next, I'm in its hell dimension with Brand, who is fully and completely loyal to it from a simple swipe of his claws and thinks I am too. But then the whole picture starts to drop. He wants me in the Brotherhood to ramp up attacks. That in turn justifies a secret program of mutant hunting robots to the forefront and lets him sell his demonic weapons to make them even more powerful. Oh, and I don't have a clue what this thing is and how it can be beat. Or if it can at all. One slip, one mistake, they all go underground and the mansion has no way to face those threats until it is already potentially too late to handle." Kane had been clear in his post detailing what happened, and didn't spare himself any blows. "This wasn't some martyr play, David. At the time, it seemed the safest way to get the information we needed to build a plan for stopping all three threats. And that all hinged on the people closest to me reacting honestly to the idea I died anywhere the Brotherhood's eyes might be."

The telepath gave a derisive snort. "You know, I envy big picture people like you," he said, and while it had all the hallmarks of sarcasm the sentiment was genuine. Jim stared into his drink, watching the ice cubes diminish. He was aware that the wolf was still watching them. Not posturing, not growling. Just watching. He shook his head. "The professor's like that, too. As long as you know it's for the greater good, that's enough, conscience clear. I'm a small-picture guy, but even I understand that the world doesn't change without people willing to make those decisions. I get it. But I've spent my entire career cleaning up after those people, or gods, or demons -- it doesn't make a difference. The rest of us break for great movers. I don't see the backroom treaties or the wars that never happened. I only see people that have to be put back together because someone else decided the world should change."

"To be honest, that's a load of crap. Do you think I would have put any of them through that if I thought I had a choice? Put Adrienne through that?" Kane said, his voice sharpening a bit. He'd accepted that some people disagreed with his decision and thought he had made the wrong choices. That he could handle. "Do you want to look at my opinions? Here's your idea. I let Amanda tell the people I trust that I'm alive. And it soothes the pain of loss they'd already been dealing with. But now, there's nothing they can do to help and they get the added bonus of knowing if they fuck up and somehow make the Brotherhood think they know I'm alive, they're the ones condemning me to a very slow, painful and utterly certain death. There is no world that I'd put them through that agony. Jesus, Adrienne thought I was dead and your idea of righteousness is to replace that with worrying she might be the one responsible for getting me killed?"

Kane drained his pint. "Sometimes there's only bad options available in order to protect the people you care about. I've faced the consequences of those decisions every day, even when it cost me trust, friends and-" He paused for a second, clamping down on his anger. After all, Haller wasn't there and didn't; couldn't know. "But they're safe from those monsters for at least a while longer." He motioned to Briar the international hand sign of his tab and clicked his tongue at the wolf, who stood up.

"I know, you're right. I apologize. I'm dealing with some things, and I'm taking them out on you. Sorry." And he was. Jim didn't disagree with Garrison's reasoning as set out, not really, and he'd known it even as he'd pushed him. He wasn't even really angry at Garrison -- he had just been a convenient target. Get ahold of yourself.

"I think that's what's getting to me," Jim said, his eyes tracking the wolf. "The fact that sometimes there are no good options. Sometimes there's not even a win. There's just . . . a less bad way to lose." A less painful way for parents to watch their child die. The animal was looking at him with its inscrutable canine gaze. Jim looked away.

"I'm tired of a world where all you can do is tread water," he finished.

"Yeah, but that's not where we live. Take it from me, drowning is deeply unpleasant." Kane said, taking a deep breath and letting it go as the wolf padded up to him and with the instinct of animal's anywhere, nudged Haller with his nose. "But the thing about treading water... as long as you keep your head above water, you still have a chance to make some headway. Take care."