xp_logs | Arthur & Haller

Arthur consults Haller on his new powers development.

"So."

It was a pleasant so, as these things go. The kind of opening gambit for conversation about small talk had passed and it was time to get down to the meaty topic at hand. A transition. Not precisely exclamatory, but Arthur's expression was poised in such a neutral manner where there could have been absolutely everything happening behind his eyes, or, more likely, absolutely nothing.

He turned his head a little, taking in the scenery, before continuing, "This seems familiar."

The counselor stared at the other man blankly. Jim had been going over some notes when there'd been a knock at his office door, and it had opened to yield Arthur. An Arthur that was clearly expecting something. He tilted his head. "I'd say that's good, considering the last time you were here was for memory work. Though maybe a sign that I should redecorate once in a while." The telepath studied the other man's unusually bland expression. "Something I can help you with?"

Arthur nodded over to the corner. "The boxes are new!" This was offered like it was a deliberate choice and not the mere byproduct of a room left empty. His gaze turned reflective, though, as he considered Haller's words. "There may just be something you can help me with. Or... maybe there isn't? Hm."

This was followed by a little more stare broken almost immediately by a defeated shrug. "I was never good at tests. Puzzles, definitely. I'm excellent at challenges. Just tests, you know?"

"Me neither, honestly," the counselor replied, completely lost. Arthur wasn't usually cryptic in the same way a wading pool wasn't usually a drowning hazard. A terrible suspicion began to form.

Oh god, Jim thought, heat prickling his scalp as his memory inevitably turned to blocks of missing time, did we set something up? Is he here because I said I'd help him with something? And then: FFFFFFFF-

Instead of screaming, Jim feigned a start and fished his phone out of his pocket. "Excuse me, this might be important," he said with an apologetic smile, swiftly navigating to his email. To his vast relief he found what he'd hoped: an email exchange between himself and Arthur. He quickly skimmed the thread. There was not just a time and place, but a proposed strategy. It was new to him, but his own ideas. Easy to backfill the logic. He allowed himself to breathe again.

"Okay, sorry about that," Jim said, turning back to the awkward stuntman with a more genuine smile. He slid his phone back into his pocket and gestured for Arthur to come in. "Let's sit at the coffee table. Did you bring any objects?"

The other man's gaze went helpfully to a bag sitting near his feet. This camera pan helped to emphasize that Arthur was, notably for the topic at hand, wearing gloves. His eyes, however, lingered on the bag. "I get the idea, I think, of these, but shouldn't I already know what's happened to this stuff?"

Jim nodded, noting the gloves: the standard mansion accessory for those with touch-activated powers. "Right. As long as you have some idea of what you're going to get you can focus on how it's happening and what you're experiencing. Basically, we're eliminating a variable. We can always work our way up from there."

"Sure, sure." There was a lingering note of doubt in Arthur's tone, but that sharpened into hope when he realized, "Wait. Is this what everyone else does with their powers? Start with what you know?" Almost literally in this case, but that epiphany hitting the surface brought some noticeable energy into Arthur's contenance, like one could see the engine of his brain kicking into gear. "Huh."

"It helps. It's li-" Suddenly Jim recalled the nature of Arthur's probability powers and realized he was going to have to think carefully about any metaphors he used. He was having this conversation with a man for whom everything famously "just worked out".

"It's like learning to climb a mountain," he tried, reaching for an example Arthur could relate to while acutely aware of his own lack of outdoorsman experience. "You don't start with Everest. You start on smaller slopes so you can get used to the equipment and develop the necessary muscles. Once you've built a good foundation you can move on to more demanding slopes with more extreme changes in air pressure."

"Oh nice," and Jim got a literal finger gun with this, "We really are revisiting old times here. I see what you did there." Arthur leaned over to pick up the rucksack, setting it gingerly on his lap. He rolled his shoulders back into a stretch, as if preparing for some entirely more physical endeavour.

"What first?"

"We see what we're working with. Go ahead and empty the bag on the table. We'll try to keep the items separate so you don't risk getting too many impressions at once."

There was the jingle jangle of a bunch of knickknacks and items. Clearly memories, mostly venturing toward mementos toward past cases. Surprisingly little that stood out in the way of lost childhood memorabilia or trophies. No medals, no accomplishments. Arthur shifted them apart slowly, considering, lost in his own sense of wonder.

What was left wasn't exactly organized, but it was closer than it had been. "What now?"

"We see what triggers, and what happens when you do. Would it be all right if I linked with you?" Jim touched his own temple. "Surface thoughts only. It's not critical, but it might help me to see what kind of input you're getting."

"Go ahead," he offered freely, "You've been there before. I have," and there was a shrug with this, "Touched these things befor-- huh. Wait."

A brief spark of epiphany, fleeting and star-bright, based behind Arthur's eyes as his own words sunk in. "What if I pick something randomly? I know the story of these things. That way I can't just imagine something."

"Whatever you want to do. I should be able to tell the difference between a reading and imagination." Jim carefully settled himself behind Arthur's senses as he spoke. He wasn't certain, of course, but he'd had experience with Adrienne's readings to supply a baseline.

A nod sealed the plan as Arthur's expression hardened. He closed his eyes, scrunched his nose, and stuck a hand right into the pile.

Darkness. The feeling of intense relief in the midst of a churning vortex of lights and power. A girl back in their care. A held hand.

Jim blinked, startled, and turned his gaze to the object Arthur had set his hand on. It was . . . a stone. Just a stone, smooth on one side but rough on the other, as if it had broken from a structure.

"I felt that," said the telepath, puzzled. "I don't mean the memory itself, but the emotion." He glanced back at Arthur. "Could you try another?"

This got a nod, and another dive in.

Hesitancy, but a feeling of mischief. Held hands, the coy smile of Marie-Ange, only not. Shannon. Anxiety. An office complex: sterile and taupe, with coverings on the windows at the top of a midrise. Impending chaos. Marie Ange turns, sheepish, and states: ""One last time, and then I promise I'll quit! For the baby!" Only that was code. He had to follow.

But, then:

Different held hands. More masculine, rougher. Staring into Angelo's eyes. Sarcasm. Fondness.

Then, abruptly, nothing.

The telepath sat back, processing. Arthur had been touching a crumpled packet of cigarettes, almost entirely empty. Most of the objects he'd brought were like this, Jim realized: little odds and ends that might have been mistaken for trash, like a stone, or coin, or receipt. Small mementos with no obvious significance.

They clearly had some significance for Arthur, though. Jim remembered the state the man's mind had been in when he'd first encountered it. Memories deleted, shuffled, stitched back together so often all sense of time and continuity had broken down. Maybe, he thought, having physical touchstones to the past might help someone who had been through something like that. Something he could hold, and feel, and know: This really happened.

Jim reached over and plucked the stapler off the corner of his desk. He'd gotten it when he'd re-outfitted his office. He set it on the table in front of Arthur, careful to move back so he wasn't in touching range.

"I just put something on the table, near your left knee," he said. "Can you read it?"

The look that crossed Arthur's face — fondness brushed with years of learned affection — was completely out of place as he aimed that fondness right in Haller's direction. "For you, any—," was drawn out with hints of Jean Paul's accent. The man stopped himself short, however, and screwed his eyes shut tighter as he shook off the imprint.

His hand hesitantly searched the table for the item. There was a brief stutter in Arthur's searching as he found the stapler, but his fingers soon settled on the cold metal.

"No," he sighed with his own accent, "Nothing."

"Interesting." Jim thought he was starting to detect a pattern, but he needed a control. He glanced around the office, but he'd never been the type to add too many personal touches to his work space. It made him feel too exposed.

There was only one thing he could think of that might serve. After a moment of hesitation, Jim extracted the silver cigarette case from his pocket and placed it before Arthur.

"I'm going to ask you to touch one more thing. It's where I put the last one."

From the opposite side of the table, there was a quiet, determined sigh. Then, like before, blind grappling.

Then.

A familiar office surrounded Arthur, one that felt both private and safe. The walls were different. Less boxes. There was also a tangible speechlessness that made Arthur gasp — the gratitude that there was someone who still saw him, the person he had been, and not just the man he'd tried so hard to disappear into. His hands trembled as he removed the sleek silver object from its box. Not his hands, but...

A voice. Familiar.

"Happy birthday, son."

Then, again.

The face that had looked back at him in the mirror for so long. The figure, him, caught the case in bloodied hands, acutely aware of a flash of green hair, the weight of purple eyes. Two women who had grown so large in his world fear of their rejection tore his chest like a razor.

"Stop milking it, Jem. Remember your birthday? The professor did. The only one who's not willing to accept you is you. You just won't give anyone the chance."

Arthur, blinking rapidly, massaged the bridge of his nose in a reflex not his own as he tried to process.

Yet, once again.

A beautiful mind, shattered. Its shards laid like stain glass across the astral plane — a mural depicting the core of this person's being, the seat of their memories and awareness. Perhaps even the soul. Here, at last, I pray I find my... David Haller, he was my child. Why did he have to suffer? Why did he deserv... The stain glass twisted, pulling both mind and illusion into new, contorted shapes.

Arthur blinked. He opened his eyes suddenly, locking immediately onto Haller.

"Enough damage has been done, Jemail. Let's not add to it." It wasn't his voice.

The memory was like a shot of ice through his veins. He'd been prepared for Arthur to see information from his own past -- after what he'd seen from the other objects that had been a calculated risk. He had not been prepared to see the memories of the man who'd given to it, and absolutely not to hear the distinctive cadence of Charles Xavier's voice coming out of Arthur's mouth.

"A . . . Arthur?"

"Yes?" The upward lilt of Arthur's reply underscored that perhaps he wasn't sure. The man's gaze softened, however, as he came back to himself. A gaze that settled on the lighter, still in hand, like it was poison.

"I... no," Before he knew it, Arthur was reaching across the table to return the silvery lighter. This was too much. This belonged to Jemail. This...

Arthur's hand lightly brushed Haller's exposed skin and a sharp clang sounded as he dropped the lighter in shock. Before him sat not the man Arthur had been with minutes before — dark hair, clean cut, friendly if not controlled — but an absolute horror of a man. Two men. Two men stitched poorly together at the seams.

There was a scratching noise as Arthur backed away in his chair.

Jim terminated the link, but it was too late -- he knew exactly what Arthur had seen, and worse, felt.

"S-sorry" i'm sorry i'm sorry please don't look at me like that "That was -- there's been a lot of damage over the years. I know it's shocking. I usually keep it masked. I'm sorry." Jim drew the lighter from the table, fingers curled to disguise how hard he was shaking. He forced his voice to remain level; Arthur was alarmed enough without Jim adding to it. He felt small and ugly under the other man's gaze. "I'm sorry," he repeated, at a loss.

Arthur's features blurred with shock, guilt, and, above all, concern — more himself than he'd felt since this entire exercise had begun. "Hall--- Jim, I cannot imagine what that must feel like. I apologize for intruding. I..."

He sighed, rolling his shoulders uncomfortably. "I don't know what exactly happened, but I went too far." The lamp behind him flickered sadly as if in agreement, the man's melancholy twisting the world around him.

Jim cut him off with a short shake of the head. "No, it's not your fault. I was pushing you with a new power. Sometimes you get a little more than you meant to. Trust me, I get it. Don't worry about it." His hands were still shaking, but Arthur was no longer actively backing away from him, and that helped. It's okay. You're okay. Just keep going. He cleared his throat, forcing his attention back to the reason they were doing this. This was Arthur's time. Professionalism, at least, was solid ground.

"Anyway," Jim continued, unobtrusively slipping the cigarette case back into the safety of his pocket, "your psychometry . . . it's fascinating. I'm not sure I'd call what you do reading an object's past so much as using the object as a window to read the psi-prints they've come into contact with. Not just a hard memory, but the person's state of mind in that moment. Furthermore, you seem to get multiple impressions from an object at once. It's almost like a chain. One experience evokes associations with another." The telepath lifted the stapler from the table, turning it over in his hands for Arthur. "But it doesn't seem to engage unless the object was present for something emotionally significant. For example, I've only had this for a few weeks, and it hasn't been around for anything more exciting than a cup of coffee. I think that's why you drew a blank when you touched it."

"I see."

What Arthur saw was the change in topic, which was a welcome relief. Something to swing fully into and file these last moments away for when Haller might actually want to talk about it. Or, never. Either was thumbs up for now.

"So what I have is just super invasive? To use it I'd have to ignore pretty much anyone's privacy?" He actually frowned as the wheels of cognition slowly clicked into place on what implications such an ability might have. "That is what it feels like. I... am not myself."

"It has things in common with empathy and telepathy," Jim agreed. He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. "The good news is those powers are mostly controllable, and yours probably will be, too. We want to get you to the point where you don't have to use them if you don't want to. But I understand. Telepathy's also . . . yeah. Invasive is a good word for it." He looked down at the stapler in his hands, still feeling a pang of dysmorphia at the shape of them. He shook his head and returned his attention to Arthur.

"I think about it like this. Maybe I can't always help knowing things people don't want me to know, but I can still respect them. I try not to judge what they've been through or how they felt when they went through it. And I promised myself that anything I learn that way, with or without someone's consent, will never be used to harm. Only help." The telepath gestured to his own face with a lopsided smile. "A lot of what happened to me is because when I manifested I was my own first victim. It was so traumatic David never really reclaimed that power on his own. He only got it back because I was made. When that happened I decided that if this was going to be my power, I was going to use it for something good. We'd pay it back. That's how I square it with myself."

"So," Arthur clarified, "What I'm hearing is practice and time. But I think I understand the last part with what else I do... if only a little. There's balance to things." This was clearly over-simplifying the grand web of chaos and order. He rolled with it anyway. "Helping is the goal. Something more than just standing around and thinking positive thoughts. I want to be out there." The man waved vaguely at nothing, indicating everything.

"What was the last part, though? When I touched you?"

Balance. Why was he not surprised a probability manipulator like Arthur would see it that way -- or why Arthur would seem to immediately hone in on helping as a goal, come to that. Still, he had asked a good question. Jim frowned.

"I'm not sure," he confessed. "I was -- emotional, so maybe that was part of it. Plus a lot of psis find physical contact helps with connection." But a normal psi-link didn't seem quite right. Arthur wasn't connecting mind-to-mind, but to specific impressions. And he didn't just read the memories he found. The man experienced the events almost as if he were living them in real time. The actual person didn't seem necessary. Jim touched a knuckle to his lips in thought, his odd-colored eyes flicking back to the blond. "Aside from what you saw when you touched me, did you feel anything? Get some kind of read on my thoughts or memories? Don't worry about my privacy, it's just us here."

Haller got a look. It wasn't judgmental or anything holding sharp edges, but a thing of permission and question. Was he sure he wanted to know? Arthur bit his lip and considered, carefully. "I got a sense of shock. The idea that you... several of you, maybe, were unsure on how or if to move forward."

Arthur untensed, finally, slumping his shoulders back into his seat. "Plus that moment of horrific vibes. There was that too."

"The vibes might have been because some of those memories weren't from a particularly good time in my life. I'm usually a little more -- together -- but certain stressors can aggravate the scars." Like this conversation, but they needed to work through it. It was a puzzle. Jim liked this sort of puzzle. He just wished the edge pieces didn't include some of the most traumatic moments of his life.

"So maybe you pick up surface thoughts from people, or at least emotional states," the younger man continued slowly. "But it's not quite . . . wait. Do you think it could have something to do with potentiality?"

"There's a potential that potentiality is potentially potential." The blonde steepled his fingers in consideration. "Potentiality."

Jim tilted his head and gave Arthur the sort of look people often did when trying to figure out if the man was secretly having them on. "So... Yes?"

"I don't follow."

Jim looked into those sincere blue eyes and decided to never, ever play poker with Arthur. He'd been in the man's brain before and he still couldn't figure out just how much was going on in there.

"That potentiality is what you key in on, I mean," he explained. "Instants that could break one way or another, or already have. Secondary mutations don't always have a natural-seeming connection to the primary mutation, but you're a probability manipulator. It seems to fit better than straight psychometry, which is essentially data, or telepathy, which is primarily thought and emotion."

"Huh," Arthur conceded, "That feels right? I've always felt pulled in one direction or another by the universe. It is a lot like breathing, though — easy and natural, but harder when you think about it. I often have to remember to step back and remember not everyone has that." The man folded his hands awkwardly on the table, careful to not touch anything. "How can we be sure that's what is happening?"

"We can't," Jim admitted. "Or not yet, anyway. You'll need more experience to get a better idea of what you're working with and even then it might be tricky -- probability powers are notoriously difficult to pin down. Maybe a consult with Wanda . . ."

"She's in Europe." At least, Arthur was pretty sure that she was still in Europe. "She was my first person to ask about this. Instead I got some free advice from Marie-Ange, plus a game show recommendation."

"Is she? Maybe when she gets back, then." Jim could think of worse people to speak to than Marie-Ange; her precognition was its own sort of extrasensory viewing. However, her readings were abstract in a way Arthur's were not. Wanda's didn't have clear overlap, but maybe if he made a telepathic bridge so she could see what Arthur experienced . . . he made a note to explore that strategy more later.

"Okay, in the meantime . . . I would select a specific object here, one with memories you can handle looking at over and over again. Personal will be easier. Spend time getting used to the sensation of being pulled back, and then slowly start to focus on something physical in the present to block it. Something like controlled breathing, or curling your toes against your shoes, or even focusing on the texture of the object you're holding instead of the memory -- whatever feels the most natural. I'd try to avoid touching anyone until you can reliably shut down a reading." Jim touched his own temple. "Right now your power is like a door that's been blown open in a storm. First, you learn how to close it. Then you figure out how to latch it so it stays closed. Eventually you'll get to the point where it opens only when you want it to."

"Hm. A door." Arthur left that thought hang out there as he looked back to the bag of items that was still laid out on the floor next to him. "This all does feel a lot more doable when you lay out a plan like that. Better than 'touch lots of stuff,' at least. Wanda will be able to see if what I'm doing touches chaos, though, and that does sound plenty useful." Because it did. Arthur smiled at the plan, feeling far more confident than he had coming in.

Jim nodded. "Your power's unique, so there will probably be some trial and error involved, but I feel pretty confident that you'll be able to get to a point where it's controllable. You might just have to get used to being a little more intentional than you are with the straight probability aspect." He leaned back in the chair, feeling like a teacher wrapping up a lesson. "That's about all I can think of for the time being. Any questions?"

"Are you okay?"

The telepath blinked, momentarily at a loss. That was a question hardly anyone bothered to ask him.

Habit took over. Jim gave Arthur an apologetic smile. "Yeah, I am, thanks. I was a little thrown there, but I'll be fine. We also got some useful data out of it. If something like that can happen I'm glad we found out in a controlled environment."

"I--" The other man stopped there, paralyzed by thought, as what could have been a hundred starts and stops crossed his face. He instead chose to pull himself carefully out of his chair, slowly and methodically putting his gloves back on. The next time Arthur met Haller's eyes, however, his expression was soft and controlled. Kind.

"I'll call you tomorrow," he offered. "Just in case."

It was a kind offer. The telepath smiled again. "Sure," he said. "I appreciate it."

He waited for Arthur to collect his belongings and leave. Then, once the other man was down the hall and safely out of earshot, Jim locked his office door, put his face in his hands, and sobbed.