xp_logs | Haller & Arthur | Chains of Intent

Arthur meets David after he has been "healed" by Radha, and the two decide a psychometric reading might help David. Instead, Arthur's powers give a glimpse into what might come.

Maybe clearing his schedule had been a mistake. Without anything else to do he was left alone with his thoughts. This was a situation that had never, ever turned out well for him.

But he also couldn't concentrate. Things weren't . . . settled. His brain felt like a clear lake suddenly churning with silt kicked up by an illicit diver. Memories that had been stored away in their own scrupulously organized filing cabinets had suddenly been dumped out and spilled across the floor. Unexpected things were triggering them: light bouncing off a closing car door, the buzz of a fluorescent light in the Medlab, smoke from a barbecue grill. He hadn't had such vivid nightmares in years.

Thus, art. Art had always helped David, and so he'd taken a palette of watercolors and his easel out to the lake and tried to relax. Or at least, he had until he'd wondered just how good his control was and learned that, yes, if he combined Cyndi's ability to manipulate free-moving particles with artistic experience and a sustained attention span it was entirely possible to mix and apply pigments without a brush.

Now Haller found himself staring at the canvas with only one thought: I shouldn't be able to do this.

"You shouldn't be able to do that," came an extremely chipper echo to Haller's own thoughts, as if the universe was agreeing with David's internal monologue. Then, in a complete pivot, "That's extremely neat!"

Turns out the universe was in the form of one familiar blonde man walking a familiar blonde dog. Felix's own chipperness made Arthur's seem a touch put on, however — quicky waggy tail and bright vacant expression quite a contrast to Arthur's brute force aura of goodwill and baggy eyes. Still, he smiled.

"Might be improved with some happy trees, and I do think you'd really be able to rock an afro."

Haller glanced over and arranged his face into a smile he wanted to feel more than he did. "Don't give my hair ideas," he said, before registering what he was seeing. He frowned at the older man. "Are you okay? You look tired."

There was a moment it was clear that Arthur was mentally dressing Haller up as Bob Ross. The man nodded at the image before filing it away for a giggle later. A small treat.

"Inez," he admitted.

"Inez?" That was right, she'd gotten sick . . . she was why Quentin had trusted Radha. Haller deposited the pigments back onto the palette as the frown deepened. "But she's doing okay now, isn't she?"

This earned the man an exasperated chuckle. "That's the thing, right? She's okay now, but woulda mighta shoulda. I should have been more of a shield."

This wasn't even a little like his powers worked. Except when they did. Probability was notoriously improbable.

Haller shook his head. "You don't know that, though -- or how things might lock together. I remember Wanda saying the threads of probability were all interconnected. Inez getting sick is the reason Quentin met Radha Dastoor. Maybe that's something that needed to happen."

He didn't want to tell Arthur he had serious doubts as to whether that was a good thing. If there was such a thing as fate, then it was true, maybe meeting Radha would form some connection that would pay off in a crucial moment. She could heal the sick and restore the broken, she could save lives. She already had. If there really was a mutant plague, maybe there would come a time when they'd call upon her to do so again.

Or maybe it was, as he was beginning to fear, simply to get her on their radar.

"There's a look people get as they explain my powers to me," Arthur sighed as he moved so that Felix could got closer for sniffs and licks. "The threads of fate. Ties that bind. Everything happens for a door and window. I appreciate whatever mental math is happening up there, don't get me wrong. Just everyone makes that same face. It doesn't make it easier."

The psi gave Arthur a crooked smile. "Sorry. Working on Muir there were a lot of versions of 'everything happens for a reason' flying around. It's part of my personality now." Felix ambled over to him, tail beating in happy recognition, and Haller knelt to greet him. It wasn't until he'd buried his hands into the dog's golden fur that Haller felt the dislocation of a memory he hadn't made himself rush to the surface.

"Little old man," he muttered, and leaned forward to touch his forehead to the top of Felix's head.

"Absolutely no worries." Arthur stretched languidly as he offered this, his gaze looking out and over the lake fondly. "Do you miss Muir at all?"

"Sometimes." Haller released Felix and pinched the bridge of his nose. His head felt too full, as if he was thinking the thoughts of too many people. "I, um. I was there a few days ago. For some scans. I went to see Radha. She did something to my head." The younger man stared at Felix as the dog circled back to his owner. He remembered the soft thunk of knives hitting wood.

"Did I ever thank you for playing with me?" Haller asked, distantly.

The other man practically leaned in with the intent to comfort, but blinked rather slowly as the words turned over. "It never came up, but I don't think that is Davey's way. I take his love language is action."

Arthur tilted his head as his gears of thought finally clicked into place. "Jim, do you need someone to listen? What happened with Radha?"

Haller blinked, then pinched the bridge of his nose to try and re-center himself. "A miscommunication. I went to talk to her about her ability to heal. I thought maybe it might help some of Moira's patients on Muir. But she assumed I was there for myself, so she did . . . something, not even Emma and the professor are sure what. It's like the system of dissociation and compartmentalization I set up just dissolved. There aren't any barriers between me and my powers anymore, but now I'm remembering things I did when I was the others. It's confusing. I miss--" he gave a short laugh, "okay, this is crazy -- I think I miss me."

"Oh. Oh, Jim. Or... what wouId you like me to call you?"

"I . . . don't know?" This time the laugh was forced. Haller shook his head. "I guess I'm David again. It's so weird in here right now. It's like my head's crowded, but I'm alone. Nobody's there and I--"

Abruptly, Haller shut his mouth; he was starting to feel lightheaded. The taller man dropped into a crouch and leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees as he closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. Breathe in, breathe out. Feel the earth beneath him, hear the trill of birdsong in the trees. Calm.

Felix, with a dog's purity of purpose and predictable response to a sudden change in posture, ambled over and started to lick him on the ear. Haller released a shaky breath and gave Arthur an apologetic smile.

"Sorry," he said, his voice steadying as he gave Felix a distracted pet. "My emotions are all over the place, too. I'm still getting used to it."

Arthur caught Haller in his arms as he fell, holding him steady in an effort to offer some modicum of superficial stability. Felix's encouraging thump thump thump of a tail beat hit against the blonde as he continued to offer nose pats.

"Dealing with emotions and finding one's self are two of the core problems of the human experience," he offered. "How can I help?"

"Sorry." The word came like a reflex, an artifact from the days David felt as if he always needed to apologize for his own existence. Using the weight of Arthur's hands on him to ground himself further, Haller took another breath. "Um. Thanks, but I don't know that anyone can. I think most of the anxiety is that I can't really -- 'see' what's happening in here, I guess. It's . . . scary."

The other man's expression twisted in thought as he pulled back a little, still remaining steady in his grip. Felix, ever helpful, gave Arthur a quick lick before returning to nosing his way into Haller's business. That... could work.

"I have a wild thought," Arthur mused as he adjusted his positioning to fully support Haller with only one hand. The other was needed to twist in the air to underscore his words. "We're done a mirror before for what I can see. What if I read you, and you saw yourself from the outside? You see me seeing you seeing you. I've been practicing."

That last mangle of words was underscored with a hopeful smile.

"But you . . ." It was a testament to how rattled he was that Haller didn't refuse out of hand. Arthur had a different way of seeing things -- he still wasn't sure what the other man got when he read people, exactly, but he knew it wasn't what a telepath could. It was something of memory, but mostly of emotion. And so much of what he was experiencing right now was emotion.

Yes, said part of him. Emotion that might become Arthur's if he let the man read him.

But another part, the part he had always left to Jack, the cold part interested in looking out only for David because he knew no one else would, said: What if this was the only way to know?

"If you're willing," Haller said, and the words were slow, as if he were trying to talk himself into this as much as Arthur, "maybe there's a way I can mitigate things on my end. Maybe it'll help if I tell you what you might experience." Gingerly, Haller lowered himself into a cross-legged position so the other man was no longer supporting his weight. He settled both his hands on his knees and began to order his thoughts.

"Emotionally . . . anxiety, obviously. Confusion. Some fear. More anger. Memories of my manifestation are close to the surface right now. It was violent. People . . . burned . . ." Haller broke off. He turned to meet the blonde's eyes, suddenly incredulous that he was even considering this. "Arthur, are you sure about this?"

"Absolutely," came immediately, twinged with a soft chuckle as Arthur moved himself into a lotus position to mirror David. He held a single finger in the air before turning and commanding Felix to also park it — the retriever obediently completed their circle, and was promptly rewarded with a bit of dried meat.

"Now, if I've learned anything over the past year," the blonde man continued as he removed his gloves, "it is that you have to sometimes abandon caution. If you want to dance with chance," and to underscore this Arthur shimmied his shoulders, "You have to take a risk to earn any real reward." He rolled the shimmy through his shoulders and down into his arms as Arthur extended one hand into a finger point. His other hand moved to join it in a palm up gesture.

"Take my hand, David."

The psi held Arthur's gaze, searching for any sign of smothered reservations or forced cheerfulness. What he found was only sincerity.

No risk, no reward.

Haller took his hand.

As their hands touched, the world fell away into darkness. The surrounding landscape split like pieces in a puzzle, dissolving as the light faded to leave only two figures suspended at the center of a lightless world.

Arthur opened his eyes cautiously. This was more promising than before, certainly. His surprise was echoed through his own mental words with a "huh" that rippled through the darkness. Each impression shown like oil in water, revealing the dark to be nothing but an illusion.

"Huh," he echoed again.

Eyes pressed shut so he could concentrate on the image in Arthur's mind, Haller frowned. It was calm. He hadn't been expecting that.

"This is . . . different," he said, thinking back to their previous experience. He tested the fringes of Arthur's perceptions like a man prodding a sore tooth. But . . . "There's no barrage of emotions. Are you controlling this?"

Arthur was, for his part, entirely distracted by exploring the new space. A thin, glassy plane seemed to form the boundary between where their feet met the undulating darknesses, but every step churned ripples of emotion and memory beneath the surface like a glass bottom boat.

"Who knows," the other man enthusiastically answered as he did a Tom Cruise slide across the ground, trailing multi-colored wakes of memory behind him like a psychic nyan-cat.

Not for the first time, Haller found himself wondering whether Arthur was a real person. Haller thought back over what he recalled from the first time this had happened.

"The last time you only saw a version of me, external . . . wait, that was only glancing contact. Maybe that was only a surface read?" He watched through Arthur's eyes as flecks of recollection billowed beneath his feet. Another memory triggered. "You . . . read me when I was Davey, too, didn't you? Was it like this?"

This got him a quizzical look.

"It was... Hm. Let's see how this works!" Arthur's upward inflection led to a series of images projected as holograms over the glass surface: fuzzy, imprecise recollections that took the grainy form of a small, eager child as its locus. Around the figures more sketchy recollections formed and faded. Haller throwing a knife. The sound of footsteps. Jessica Jones in a hospital bed. The figure of a woman and a city.

Most notably, the center figure twitched. White and red versions of Davey were layered over the central image, like slide projections doubled up. The white figure moved to scratch his nose while the red one decided to instead tilt his head in question. All while the small boy sat patiently.

"Your eye flashed," Haller echoed, remembering -- and found that it was true now, too, if he looked through his own eyes instead of Arthur's. The blond's left eye was flashing, like sunlight catching a windchime.

It was too much to ask the man how he was doing what he was doing, no matter how desperate the analytical portion of his mind was to latch on to an external mystery. So many aspects of mutant powers were intuitive. And this was Arthur, so either way the answer was probably "vibes."

"So, not the same," he said thoughtfully. "Those colors . . . you mentioned them before."

"My eye," Arthur mused to himself in lieu of answering questions directly. This wasn't that kind of day. In fact, this left eye began to flash and twinkle the more the man sat there considering. He held up a finger, "Just a minute."

In the next breath, the blonde man reached up and pinched that golden sheen in a plucking motion, condensing the usual star-like pattern into something tangible with a twist of the fingers. One minute: a power signature. The next? Arthur had condensed his power into a translucent pair of butterfly sunglasses made of golden-light.

"Now we're talking. Let's see what is happening."

Arthur had created some sort of -- was it a psionic construct, like Quentin's psionic shotgun, or a visualization tool, like what Hope used to navigate her powers? Or was this some secret third thing, unique to his specific powerset, or--

Haller remembered he really should be focusing.

"Okay," he said, "let's see what you can see."

"Already ahead of you!"

Arthur was making concerned circles around the image of Davey, inspecting him from all angles like an art dealer. It took a few passes before he stopped, golden glasses covering half his face, to hold his chin in his hands and sigh. He moved to adjust the glasses so that he would see through them and then not. Another sigh. "No, nothing new. What do you..."

He was left blinking at the psychic manifestation of David. "That's interesting."

"What do you see?"

"You're..."

He didn't have words. It was like before, with Davey, only... more. David's figure practically vibrated with potentiality. Was that the word for it? Red, white... they weren't colors as he had thought, but they were paths. An endless chain leading out into the darkness that was usually too infintical to matter. Yet for David, chance had just boiled down into a single moment that split into two selves. One decision. If all of the ripples and eddies had been the course of a river in this place, this was...

Arthur put a hand to his glasses and stared directly, unblinking, at David. "You're going to have to make a choice."

As the words left his lips, the golden aura that had made the glasses pulsed, tossing sparkles into the air like dancing disco lights. The more he focused, the more the images refined to reveal differences. One figure in familiar leathers stood bent over in racked grief, visibly distraught. The suggestions of other crumpled forms hung suspended around him in mid-air, but their paths were sketchy and less certain.

The other David, dressed casually, stared off into the middle distance blankly. No... Arthur gasped softly as he realized that the figure had only blank, white eyes, pulled open in strain. He glowed from within. Yet there wasn't any pain. Was it determination? No. Conviction.

"Soon. Either you act immediately and others suffer, or you wait and receive a better outcome to where only you pay the price."

The uniform. Haller knew from his association with Marie-Ange that precognitive visions often had a symbolic aspect, but Arthur's readings seemed more grounded. They were -- not the future, he thought, not quite, but future choices. This vision almost certainly hinged on deploying with the X-Men.

Bodies all around . . .

His powers, whispered his paranoia. While he remained integrated he had access to a level of power he shouldn't have. No one should have. The intrusive thoughts that kept telling him how malleable the world was, how easy it would be to just scoop it between his fingers and mold it like wet clay . . . that would be so easy to justify in the field. His own manifestation had killed half a dozen people. The damage he could do as he was now was almost beyond comprehension.

"Okay." The connection between the two men abruptly terminated as Haller let go of Arthur's hand. Haller sat back and pulled a hand over his face. "Okay. I need to think about this."

"No."

The voice that came from Arthur's mouth spoke together in a three part harmony of command. On either side of the man sat the two reflections, their gazes locked firmly on David. Arthur's eyes were, instead, full of stars.

"You," came from the X-Man at Arthur's left. Were those burn marks on his leathers? He looked stressed. Tired.

"Must," came from the other Haller on Arthur's right. This close, it could be seen that his inner glow came from a chain of light braided around his neck. His skin shined a light blue.

"Pro--" And the two spoke rapidly now, overlapping eachother. Left was interrupted as Right finished, "Vent. There's nothing," and now it was Left's turn to cut in, "To stop us." Right frowned. "Give it away."

They looked from David to eachother, and then...

"That was certainly a trip, wasn't it?" Arthur sat, Felix in his lap, staring politely as if nothing major had just happened. Just vibes, as it were. No more connection, no more stars. The man smiled.

Haller stared. There could be no more perfect encapsulation of Arthur than this: a man casually stroking a golden retriever as if he hadn't just said the spookiest shit imaginable.

"I think I had a faulty seatbelt," he replied. The psi pinched the bridge of his nose. Even now a part of him was cataloguing everything that happened and the implications of Arthur's power. It was probably a coping mechanism. He anchored his attention to the earth between them as his thoughts spun.

"Thanks," he said after a moment of silence punctuated only by the swish of Felix's tail. "I . . . don't know if that helped, exactly, but it did give me something to think about."

"Honestly? Same." Possibly not just vibes, considering the way Arthur couldn't maintain eye contact. Luckily he had an emergency Felix just for this kind of situation. On that thought, he moved to stand. "I'm going to need to take some time and let all of that process. Is it bad that I feel relieved? Like I finally know what's been itching at the back of my mind?"

He attempted a smile, but it was burdened.

"No, I think I understand. It's -- resolving the ambiguity, I think. Like waiting on a phone call from a doctor. As long as they don't call you won't know if they're about to tell you bad news, but at the same time the possibility of that is always hanging over your head. Once you have a definitive answer, though . . . then you at least know what you're dealing with. Good or bad."

Haller climbed to his feet after Arthur. Felix paced between one man and the other, pleased the walk seemed about to resume. The psi leaned forward to ruffle the long fur of the dog's ruff.

"Thanks," Haller repeated quietly. "That was . . . I know what you open yourself up to when you read things. I appreciate it. I mean it."

"That... I mean, I'm sorry." Arthur's smile tugged like it was being stretched taught by strings. Strings of anxiety. "I would usually say no worries, but I have a whole new list of worries I am sure are on the other side of the high of what just happened. So..."

He defaulted to finger guns, using the gesture to scoop up Felix's lead. The gesture also made an excellent diversion for Arthur to double check his pocket. Yes, good. Marie Ange's recording device was still there.

"Again, I'm sorry. I think. Right now the best I can do is only be in my own head for a bit before the implications kick in."

He began to retreat with finger guns still out and dancing.