Gabriel and Haller (backdated a few days)

[xp_velocidad]

Haller and Gabriel chat on the smoker's porch, where they both end up revealing something about themselves, kinda maybe.


It wasn't far enough along into the summer for the nights to become truly sultry, but summer was on its way. The clearest evidence of this was the array of june bugs currently pinging off the porch light. To bask in its illumination was to be pelted by handfuls of insectile raisinettes.

And then there were the lantern flies.

Jim did everything in his power to avoid learning about nature, but there was no way to ignore the white-spotted nymphs crawling across the deck. It was unreal. For a moment he wondered why smoke wasn't repelling the insects until he had a horrifying thought: that it was.

Shuddering, the telepath lit another cigarette.

"Can I bum one of those?" Gabriel appeared from the back door, no better than one of the light-loving bugs. "I'm fresh out and you'd be saving me from a drive to the gas station." He stepped toward Haller, an eyebrow raised as he surveyed the porch to figure out what had apparently made the other man seem so spooked.

"What? Oh, uh, sure." Distractedly, Jim fumbled the pack from his pocket and offered it to the younger man. "Just Marlboros, sorry. I'm basic." He moved to crush a lanternfly nymph that was venturing too close beneath his heel. The impact was disgustingly palpable.

"Thanks." Gabriel tapped out a cigarette as he watched Haller murder a pest. "I'm not sure what a non-basic cigarette is," he added, like he didn't usually smoke American Spirits. "Here." He passed the box back and took a light out of his pocket. "Strangely satisfying, right?"

"Crushing things? I try not to think about it. I know too much about paraphilias." Jim finally tore his attention away from the wooden slats and focused on Gabriel. His forehead creased as he tucked the cigarettes back into his pocket. "I feel like I haven't seen you around for a while. Or . . . wait, I was on Muir. I haven't seen a few people for a while."

"Yeah, I actually didn't realize you were back," Gabriel admitted after he'd taken a drag. Not that he would have sought Haller out. An insect flying past him drew his attention, and his eyes instinctively followed it to the porchlight. He wrinkled his nose a bit. "I've been around," he added, turning back to Haller. Then, he considered. "Well, kinda." Another beat. "I mean, no more or less around than usual?"

Jim paused. He never had announced he was back, had he. He really needed to remember details like that.

"Were you around for the kidnapping?" Jim asked instead. "I was hoping I'd get at least a full year before seeing another one of those, but . . . no." The drag he took was deep with remembered stress. "Thank god I'm not a student counselor anymore."

"Oh, uh..." Gabriel stared blankly down the end of his cigarette as he tried to place the kidnapping on his mental calendar, an all too frequent task given the particular manner in which he experienced the world. "I wasn't involved," he said after a second. "I don't know if I was here or, you know, elsewhere." He shrugged. "Crazy as hell, though," he added. "And like... how often has this happened?"

"I legitimately have no idea. That's not hyperbole. I guess it's just a hazard of having a large population of people with weird pasts and attractive powers, but back when we were a school there was nothing more soul-destroying than trying to find a way to talk to the kids afterwards. What can you say? 'Sorry, this shit happens and will keep happening'?" A small shower of ash fell from the cigarette, narrowly missing a junebug that had fallen wrong and now spun haplessly on its back. Jim sighed. "And now we're probably going to need to make some kind of policy about accepting anything that sounds even remotely like winning some kind of contest."

"If a guy shows up with a big check, don't buzz him into the gate?" Gabriel stubbed the cigarette out and placed it on an ashtray. "Hold on a sec." He vanished for two seconds, then returned with two beers in the crook of his arm and a bag of Fritos that had been opened but folded closed.

"Sorry," he said, "but this felt like one of those conversations." He placed the beers — opened but with their caps on — on the table. He genuinely couldn't remember whether the older man drank, so he somewhat tentatively pushed one slightly in Haller's direction, while also keeping close enough that he could pretend both beers were for him, a possibility that everyone at the mansion would have found all too feasible.

"I don't really understand," he said after flipping the cap off, "how there were ever actual students here."

"I guess there still are, technically. For their powers at least. Something something takes a village." Jim wasn't much of a drinker, but Gabriel was right: this did feel like one of those conversations. He grabbed a bottle and started to open it before his eyes settled on the chips.

"Doesn't that belong to someone?" Jim asked, as if the bag didn't have "BARTON" written in sharpie across a piece of masking tape.

Gabriel at least had the dignity not to pretend he hadn't seen the makeshift label. He took a swig of his beer, then gave Haller a shrug. "I think on balance," he said, sounding more matter-of-fact than bitter, "the universe will back up my claim to a few of his chips." He opened them and popped a few Fritos in his mouth. Then he turned the bag around, as if hiding the tape would absolve Haller of any guilt.

"So," he said after he'd swallowed. "Was it your job to make sure the kids didn't flee every time something insane happened?"

"It became something like that." A small, round body buzzed into the side of his face. The telepath batted it away instinctively. "My specialty is powers-related trauma. That part I've always been okay with. But inevitably there was a creep in scope. And eventually it was helping them deal with the trauma they were dealing with at the hands of other people's powers, too."

Jim stared at the bottle in his hand, as if the mouth were a cavern to the past.

"I've rebuilt minds and deprogrammed teenagers abducted and conditioned to hunt their own kind," he said distantly. "Now that I'm back here, I'll do it again. It's okay. It's my job. But they can't be 'my' kids anymore. It's too hard to think of them that way when all I can do is stitch them back together after things I can't protect them from."

Gabriel, his hands finally free again, re-lit his cigarette, buying himself as he weighed Haller's words. He couldn't help but think that his powers-related issues seemed so small, and then he hated how self-centered that reaction was. "I think everyone takes some responsibility for that these days," he said. "I mean, seems like," he added quickly. "I don't have much to do with the kids so, you know. More power to you."

The moment passed, and the telepath snorted at himself. "Sorry. Had a brief haunted phase there. But yeah. At the very least we have more outside resources we can direct them to when they need help now. And we have more here than we've had in a while, too. It helps to have peers you can talk to about your latest abduction." Jim took a drink and turned his attention back to Gabriel. "You skipped all that and went right to Snow Valley though, right? That's like jumping immediately into the deep end."

"I guess?" Gabriel scratched at the label of his beer. "But that was after the world broke apart and got put back together though," he added. "Maybe that qualifies an abduction. Forcibly dragged to a new reality?" A bug landed on his arm, and he flicked it away. "But I guess I missed the formative stage where you get used to mid-level weird shit happening to you all the time."

"It depends on timing. I think I only got two months here before I was asked to help punch the elder god that crawled into Wanda's head-" and here Jim flinched hard enough to spill beer, because a junebug chose just that moment to fly into his. Sourly, the telepath wiped the back of his arm across his mouth and set down the bottle.

"Excuse me a minute." The tall man fell silent, concentrating.

Then the porch erupted in dozens upon dozens of tiny bursts of flame as every insect present spontaneously ignited.

"Okay," said Jim, stooping to pick up the bottle as the flames winked out as quickly as they'd come, "I feel better now."

"The—" Gabriel sputtered. He had practically jumped out of his seat, dropping his cigarette in the process. "You — "

Belatedly, Jim realized he should probably have issued some warning before setting that many fires, even if they were only pea-sized, He gave the younger man an apologetic grimace. "Oh, um, sorry. Pyrokinesis. I'm not usually in the right mindset for it, but sometimes I have . . . moments."

"Yeah, apparently." Gabriel thought maybe he was seeing dark spots from the sudden flames, but he suspected he was more likely just dazed. "Jesus." He reached for his beer, shaking his head at Haller in disbelief. "Neat party trick, I guess."

"Less useful than stealing snacks," countered the telepath, gesturing with his beer. "But, well . . . sometimes you just want to burn shit down."

"Only sometimes? Impressive restraint." Gabriel raised his eyebrows and took a swig from the bottle.

Jim shrugged. "I'm old and tired these days. Plus you get a little less impulsive after the first few skin grafts."

Gabriel studied Haller's face, searching for scarring the best he could given the lighting. He'd never really thought about it, but guessed the man was in his 40s. With enough time studying his own face, he'd always been great at guessing ages. His particular party trick.

"I think 'stealing' is a bit harsh," he added after a second, shamelessly reaching for a few Fritos. "I mean, really, in the grand scheme of the morality that governs this place and all of its inhabitants, a few chips between friends..." He paused. Were he and Clint friends? "Well, between whatevers."

"We do end up sharing most things here. I guess better chips than trauma." Jim alternated the beer with his still-smouldering cigarette. "Although I guess even that's good, in a way. If we have to go through weird crap at least there are plenty of people here who understand."

"Yeah. Gabriel nodded. "For most things, anyway." He stared at the bottle, continuing to scratch at the label. "I started seeing Charles after the world ended. Not right away, but, you know. Eventually. You were gone, I think?" He looked at Haller for confirmation, not that it mattered.

"Anyway, Laurie made me, which seems like a crazy sentence now." He chuckled a bit. "People here love to urge you to open up, even if they won't always do it themselves."

"You're not really a resident until at least one person has confronted you about your deteriorating mental health or deep-seated avoidance issues. I didn't even have a middle-man during that period -- Charles got on me personally." Jim quirked an eyebrow at the younger man. "You doing better now?"

Gabriel snorted at the question. "Sure," he said. "The world is healed and so, magically, am I."

"Healed is a strong word, but sometimes you can stop the bleeding." And here Jim snorted to himself and raised his beer. "Or at least find people willing to tie a tourniquet around you and drag you in for treatment, but I think I'm starting to overplay the metaphor."

"Don't tourniquets make you lose limbs? Think that might be apt in Laurie's case." The joke had felt sharper in the speedster's head before he said it. "I'm doing better," he said, and he meant it, because overall it was true. "But you know how life is. You solve one set of things only to deal with another. And you just hope you get better at dealing with it."

"Or at least build up the requisite scar tissue that it stops hitting as hard, yeah. It's not as if any of this shit is going to stop happening any time soon." The telepath paused, regarding the beer in his hand thoughtfully. "Unless we left, I guess, but that seems like a smart decision, and I think that's against mansion policy."

Gabriel smiled. "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave?"

The man's return smile was wry. "Or you do and come back, but like I said, no one ever accused me of being smart." Jim raised his bottle in a mock-toast. "Oh well. Here's to having a brand."