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 "Quentin. Thanks for meeting me." Though the double-barreled shotgun Quentin held was only a psychic construct, as evidenced by the fact it was bright pink and glowed, Sydney's gun safety lessons were ingrained, so Quentin lowered it and set it aside before turning to face his visitor. "Jimothy. You seem . . . different. Did you do something with your hair?" "No. I went to see Radha a couple days ago." The older man paused, as if struggling to find the right word. Then, seeming to find nothing more accurate, he said, "She cured me." "Of your crippling need to sacrifice your own wellbeing for the sake of helping other people who barely appreciate it?" "No." Haller looked at the target so recently decimated by Quentin's shotgun and raised a hand. It happened slowly enough that the process was clear to the naked eye. The noise came first: a tortured snapping, like someone slowly bending a two by four. The wooden posts began to splinter as if unseen hands were rending the wood apart from every angle, shredding them into dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of pieces barely bigger than matchsticks. They hung in the air, a latticework of drifting wood, and the X-Man twisted his hand. The particles began to smolder, then swirl. A column of tiny flames swirled into the air like a swarm of fireflies. With a final snap of Haller's fingers the column exploded outward into a shining cloud. The tattered paper target fluttered to the grass, untouched. Ash raining around them, Haller turned back to Quentin. "My other problem." It was an impressive display, kind of showboaty considering Quentin's own telekinesis was limited to carrying groceries or packing a bowl, though he could appreciate the drama of it all, particularly the final snap. "Looks like she just replaced mental illness with compulsory destruction of property," he sighed as he dismissed his psychic shotgun in a puff of pink mist. He would have to take to the Danger Room now to practice, and he really did not care to have any X-Man watching over his shoulder. "Not her best work. But a cure's a cure, I guess." "I didn't ask for one. She didn't even warn me. She just did it." The words were uncharacteristically sharp. Even as he heard it he tried to rein himself in, but it was difficult. His emotions seemed to be closer to the surface, messier, especially the aspects that had previously been delegated to Cyndi and Jack. Haller took a deep breath and tried to choose his next words with care. "Look," he said, "Radha saw something she thought was ugly, and instead of asking she just changed it. She went into my mind and made me conform to her expectations of what a real person should look like. Like I was just a piece of broken furniture she found on the side of the road that she could refurbish and sell off again." The counselor shook his head. "I know you respect her, and that she seems to have done a lot of good for a lot of people, but if this is how she thinks -- what are the implications for the world she's trying to build?" Quentin crossed his arms and defiantly glared at Haller. (Just David now? He wondered. This meant Cyndi was gone. Pity.) "Seems to me she healed a lifetime of trauma and intense psychological impairment, which you've spent how many decades trying to treat? And no one else has ever even come close to it, while she did it in the blink of an eye. Painlessly. She found your problem and fixed you, and I bet she didn't even ask for a 'thank you' in return." "That's the thing. She didn't fix anything. She just got rid of how I dealt with it. DID is a survival mechanism, not a party trick. If Radha had bothered to ask, I'd have told her the others were created to hold experiences and memories so traumatic I almost lost my mind, and that all she did by removing my ability to dissociate was ungate them for me all at once. Now I remember everything. Feel everything. Unfiltered." Haller took a swift step forward that brought him immediately into Quentin's space, staring the younger man dead in the eyes. A small blotch of brown in his left eye was the only remaining trace of his natural heterochromia, but the ice in his tone could have been Jack's. "Tell me I'm lucky to remember the sound of fat popping while I burned six people alive," Haller whispered. "Tell me I should thank her for the memory of being trapped in every single one of their disintegrating minds as I tore the tendons from their bones. That I owe her for a memory I didn't even know I had: being trapped in the rubble under my guardian's corpse, smelling charred human meat while the flies crawled over us." He was breathing hard now, and he could feel the telekinesis shivering just beneath his skin -- close. Too close. This wasn't Quentin's fault. Haller turned away and pressed his hands to his face, steadying himself. He took another deep breath. "Sorry," he said, "but those decades of worthless treatment are the only reason I'm still standing here." |
