Part 18
Jab, jab, jab, left cross, right uppercut, left, jab, jab, jab, left hook, jab, left, right, left, jab, jab... without conscious thought, Jesse allowed the newly familiar combinations to stream from his brain to his hands, savouring each jarring thud of impact as it sent a reciprocal jolt back up his arm and gave a wake-up call to muscles still weak from disuse.
He knew he wouldn't be able to keep this pace up for long, could already feel the tightening in his chest and the trembling in limbs still more accustomed to the horizontal than this kind of treatment that would force him to stop far sooner than he'd like. But he kept pushing himself, seeking the catharsis of physical exertion to cleanse him of his insecurities and give him release from the anger and frustration that had been so omnipresent in his life the past few weeks.
If he'd been asked, he wasn't sure he could have said why he'd forsaken his usual training regime for this particular form of punishment. He'd always preferred the dojo simulations, which at least gave the pretence of a tangible foe to fight, to the solitary grunt and grind of a gym workout. Besides, this had always been Brennan's preserve, the font of his muscle-pumping machismo, and that was an area Jesse had no desire to compete in.
But after all the falsehoods he'd been forced to live through so recently, the thought of facing more phantom enemies – albeit 'waking world' ones that looked and felt real – was too much for him to deal with. Instead he'd turned to the honest, solid, unthinking presence of punch bag and weights to help him fight his way back to a level of fitness that would hopefully allow him to do more than just sit around all day brooding.
He'd missed most of the aftermath of their escape from DeSalles' clutches, sleeping his way through the following days, his rare forays from his bed leaving him so tired, breathless and aching it was all he could do to get back there again. But he'd gradually put the pieces together and the bigger picture had provided more food for thought than he really felt able to digest, even now.
Because even now the images and sensations of his final nightmares remained, every time he closed his eyes, the heat and dust and despair and pain lurking in the shadows waiting to ambush him, and he couldn't believe that it would ever really go away.
Adam had assured him it would fade in time as he got stronger again, in the same way he'd assured him that it was really only a temporary and involuntary aberration on Joshua's part that had led to his mental assault, the reflexive pursuit of self-preservation in the face of the overwhelming nature of his newly emergent powers. Powers too strong for him to cope with alone, too far-reaching to keep contained without risking his sanity.
But Adam hadn't been there with him in the dreamworld that he'd been compelled to endure, hadn't had to suffer his own execution over and over again in ways that still haunted him, hadn't seen and felt his blood gushing from his body, his nose and mouth filling with dirt or water, his lungs starved of oxygen until they imploded... Worse even than that, the systematic deconstruction of his self-esteem, depriving him of the few remaining shreds of dignity and hope he'd been clinging to, so that when Emma had finally come in after him he already believed implicitly that he was a worthless failure who deserved nothing more than he was getting.
And that was proving far harder to get past than anything else.
He'd learned that the State police reports on the outcome of their raid showed that they'd arrived too late to prevent someone detonating charges to level what appeared to be some sort of control centre and living accommodations a mile or so from the site of the fire, destroying everything including all the computer systems and records. With no clear idea of what had been going on there, they'd had nothing with which to charge the fleeing men they'd managed to pick up. Those who deigned to say anything had just directed them towards Warren DeSalles – and as he was the only apparent fatality, with no evidence to say who killed him, their investigations had come to a halt.
A footnote to the CSI report made mention of discovering a large quantity of some sort of highly corrosive acid stored in an outhouse that had been virtually demolished in the same explosions that took out the command centre. They weren't able to say for sure what it might have been used for, but as they'd found no evidence of the bodies that had to be there somewhere given what the Mutant X team had witnessed, Adam was convinced that was how they had to have been disposed of.
So regretfully, despite the lack of incontrovertible proof, he'd had to assume all those who had been taken – which would include Gayle – were dead. Connie had refused to believe it at first, though she had to have known it was on the cards from the start, adamant that her friend had to be out there hiding somewhere. But over the days, as her confidence in herself and her newly found abilities grew, and she realised that she wasn't going to be thrown out to fend for herself, she'd come to accept it as the truth. Accepted it and grieved, but ultimately put it behind her and moved on, just like everyone else.
Everyone but him.
They all expected him to just forgive and forget, good old Jesse who never held a grudge, always gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. And they couldn't really understand how he could still be harbouring such antipathy towards someone as openly penitent, and as emotionally and physically fragile, as Joshua seemed.
Even Emma, probably the only one of them he might have expected to understand where he was coming from, had, after some initial wariness, been drawn into Adam's guilt-driven crusade to help Joshua learn to explore and regulate his new world, and had become a quietly enthusiastic advocate of the boy's willingness to learn and make amends.
What made it harder still was the fact that Adam had made it clear that Jesse owed Joshua his life, that the telepath had not only intervened to help him survive the ordeal in the river, but had been the supporting impetus that allowed him to push through the last few feet of the fire, clearing the path for Brennan to bring Shalimar safely out – which meant he owed her life as well. And though he also knew that the acts hadn't been totally altruistic, his sense of honour had niggled at him to recognise the contribution.
Even so, it had been over a week before he'd worked through his hostility and sense of violation enough to agree to a face-to-face meeting. It had been brief and awkward, Jesse accepting the stammered apology before hiding behind the excuse of fatigue to enable himself to escape to lick his imagined wounds alone. And chance encounters since, as the boy skimmed his wheelchair deftly through the corridors of Sanctuary, had been mercifully few – at least from Jesse's perspective, though he thought he'd glimpsed the light of hope die in the disturbingly bright eyes as he'd ducked away to avoid direct contact.
There'd been plenty of time, once his need for sleep lessened but while he still felt too wretchedly weak and shaky to do anything more than lie in bed, to allow his mind to roam back over the years to his first encounters with Joshua, and to examine the reasons why Connie's mention of his name had filled him with such dread.
He'd never really talked to anyone about how the whole experience in the safe house had affected him, not in detail. Never revealed how close he'd come to losing himself through his inability to find a big enough space to breathe and reform on the way in, and how hard it had been to get the resultant panic under control once he'd reached the place the others were sheltering in. How he'd thrown himself completely into the task of keeping them all – but most especially the injured child – safe just to stop himself falling apart, stop himself thinking about how little air there was, how little room, how little hope... The disconcerting feeling of hearing the small familiar voice calling out to him for help, even though its owner was unconscious, desperately scared he was hallucinating but nonetheless using its plaintive cry as the focus to bring himself through the whole terrifying experience.
Afterwards he hadn't wanted to explore any of it too deeply, unable to bear the sight of the child lying broken and silent in the big bed despite his efforts, preferring to lock the whole thing away rather than fall prey to the new insecurities it had released in him.
But now it seemed the kind of help Joshua had been asking for wasn't what he'd held himself together long enough to give him. At least, that's what he understood from Adam's oblique explanation for the reasons behind the boy's apparent determination to make him suffer. And if that was the case, didn't he only have himself to blame for what had happened?
Which just made him up the tempo, punish himself some more.
His body finally called a halt on him, a wall of breathlessness forcing him to stop before the spots dancing before his eyes became a fully-fledged blackout and his lungs gave in to the urge to cough themselves inside out. Panting heavily, he wobbled over on unsteady legs to sink gratefully onto the bench running along the wall, stripping off the gloves as he did so.
Sweat dripped down over his face, into his eyes, bringing accompanying memories to nudge at the edge of his thoughts again until he wiped them both firmly away with his towel. With a sigh he let his head droop forward, listening with grim satisfaction to the quivering complaint of his over-worked muscles, letting it take over his mind and blank out everything else.
He became suddenly aware that someone was watching him and kicked himself for not noticing sooner. Not that he should be surprised, he thought – there always seemed to be one or other of them lurking around, checking up on him, making sure he wasn't going to do anything stupid. But he didn't allow himself to look their way immediately, finding some bizarre amusement in trying to guess who it would be this time.
Not Adam – he'd expect him to be running the unnecessary checks on the Helix's flight systems, one of what felt like an endless stream of pointless tasks the older man had found for him once he'd expressed his need to get back to work, all designed to keep him occupied without undue exertion. That was, if he'd even thought about him at all given his immersion in his current project.
Maybe Brennan, come to claim his playground back? No, probably not – not after the way he'd snarled at the elemental the last time he'd turned up with his unasked for advice and patronizing comments on the format of his self-imposed therapy.
Emma, then – the one person he'd been able to relax with a little, knowing that she at least appreciated why he was finding it so hard to get past what had happened, even if she didn't agree with how he was going about it. Perhaps... but after a few abortive attempts to get him to actually talk it through, she'd given up and left him to his own devices.
Or Connie? The kid had certainly kept popping up a lot to begin with, but even she had tired of his short temper and the even shorter periods of attentiveness his body and mind allowed him, something that had so annoyed him in the early days of his recovery.
And Joshua certainly wouldn't dare venture in here...
Which left Shalimar. Shal, who he'd come so close to losing. Who'd been there at his bedside when he'd first woken, there with a care and concern that had come close to smothering him, which he'd rejected almost out of hand because he didn't believe he deserved it. Not then. And by the time he'd allowed himself to accept that he had perhaps been worthy in some small part of her faith and gratitude, she'd retreated to a wary distance from which she watched him with hurt disquiet.
There'd been so many times when he'd longed to go to her, tell her he was sorry, how important she was to him, why he'd done what he had - all the things he'd been unable to say while the unresolved dreams were so fresh in his mind. Longed to have her hug him as she'd done so often when he was younger, reassure him everything was going to be alright. But each time he'd plucked up the courage and gone looking for her, she'd been with Brennan or Adam, or his nerve had failed him at the last moment. And each time the barriers he'd been erecting around his soul had grown a little thicker.
Guessing game over, he raised his eyes towards the gym door and met the expected cautious brown gaze.
"Hey," she said softly, hesitantly, hovering in the shadows until she was sure he wouldn't send her away. At his tentative smile, though, she moved forward, coming to perch on the edge of the bench a few feet away from him. "Thought this might be where you were hiding – you seem to be spending a lot of time in here these days." She grinned fondly as she continued, "Brennan's starting to get grouchy, you know, thinks you're teaching his toys new tricks."
"Yeah, well," he said, without being able to stop himself, "last time I looked, none of this stuff had his name on." He buried his face in the towel again as a way of avoiding the expected look of wounded censure, not surprised by the silence that followed before she tried again.
"I hope you're not overdoing it, though. Adam said it could be weeks..."
"I know what Adam said," he interrupted, flashing her a warning glance. "I think I know how I'm feeling better than he does, though." Damn, there he went again, trapped in the vicious circle created by the feelings of estrangement that made him challenge everyone's motives for talking to him, driving them further away and thus isolating him more. He knew he needed to stop it, to break the cycle, but he was so afraid it had already gone too far that he couldn't see where to even begin. And if Shalimar left him here alone now, he didn't think he'd ever be able to find his way back.
Arms folded defensively across her chest, Shalimar sat back and watched him hunch in on himself, the haunted expression in his shadowed storm-gray eyes speaking volumes about the turmoil she knew was going on inside him, for all that he was bottling it away even more than usual.
Stripped of the baggy shirts he'd been hiding in the past few weeks she could see how thin he'd got, his normally leanly muscled frame suffering despite the time he'd been putting in here in the gym, and his face was gaunter than she could ever remember seeing. She felt the sudden urge to reach out and smooth away the tension knotting his stubbled cheek, and the curls of sweat-damp hair clinging to his forehead and the back of his neck cried out to her to be brushed free, but she didn't think this was the moment for her usual affectionate tactility. Instead she waited, hoping the silence would provoke some opening she could use to reach him.
During the three or so weeks since the 'incident', as she'd come to think of it, there'd been a lot happening around here – so much that she realised she'd let this go on longer than it should. Everyone had seemed to have issues to work through, though, all of them treading eggshells around each other in case they inadvertently made things worse.
Emma had been unusually abrasive and remote at first, disappearing for long periods in search of peace enough to meditate and regain her balance. She'd been reluctant to talk too much about what she'd shared with Jesse, but even the bald facts she'd given to Adam, and which Shalimar had then extracted from him, were enough to give her the shudders even now.
In her own case, the need to exorcise the spectre of her almost total breakdown in the face of her arch-nemesis had made her question herself and the flaws inherent in her genetic makeup, seeking reassurance that they didn't devalue who she was. It had taken time and a lot of patience from those she'd used as sounding boards to talk through her doubts and fears, but she was far more comfortable with herself now than she had been for a long while.
She wished she could say the same for Brennan. He'd seemed to have made himself personally responsible for her well-being, and to begin with she'd leant on him, used his almost constant presence as a buffer for her battered confidence. But as she'd grown stronger, more self-assured, she'd found his continuous attentiveness constricting, irritating even, an intrusion on her re-defining territorial boundaries, and he'd taken ill-disguised offence when she'd told him to back off. He would come round, she knew, but in the meantime it was making things a little awkward.
Not that there weren't distractions enough for all of them, if they wanted, mostly centring on the two teenagers still in their midst.
With Emma's help latterly, Adam had spent most of his time working with Joshua, starting the process of teaching him how to deal with the manifestations of his mutancy in a less traumatic way. There was still a long way to go, but even she'd been able to see that he'd started to open up in response to their encouragement.
This had been helped in no small part by Connie. The girl had, after some early suspicion and attempts at one-upmanship based on her few extra days' tenure there, become fascinated by the outwardly emotion- and humourless Joshua, making it her mission to crack his façade and make him smile. Shalimar couldn't help but see parallels between herself and Jesse, particularly as what had happened seemed to have pushed him back into his shell once again. And it pained her to see him so alone, so afraid of being hurt again.
It was really because of Jesse that Adam had taken the decision, earlier than he might have preferred, to arrange for both Connie and Joshua to go and live with a New Mutant couple, people he knew and trusted, who would continue their training while helping them live as normal lives as possible. He'd had very little problem persuading the Arkansas authorities and the Hartsons that it was in the boy's best interests, an indication of their relief to have the problem moved off their plate. Shalimar just wished that Jesse's problems could be so easily resolved.
The silence stretched on, but finally she heard him sigh. "What do you want, Shal?"
Though the words could have been construed as confrontational, there was enough resignation in his tone that she could choose to accept them as an invitation. So she said carefully, "Connie and Joshua are leaving soon – thought you might want to come and say goodbye."
There, it was done, and she stared anxiously at him, seeing the mixed emotions flooding his features. When there was no immediate response, though, she felt compelled to go on. "Listen, I know what he did to you was inexcusable. I know what it's like to have someone in your head, to have dreams so real they invade your entire being, take over your life. Believe me, I know how violated it makes you feel. But they were only dreams, Jesse, not reality. None of them actually came true, not in the end, no matter how close we came. And I for one am eternally grateful that we're both here now to see that. Grateful to you..." She paused, then finished, "... and to Joshua."
She saw him stiffen at that, eyes shooting her way wildly before returning to their fierce contemplation of the floor. One last shot, she thought, unwilling to surrender him without trying everything she could. "Please come back to us, Jess," she whispered, stretching out a hand to gently touch the tense chilled flesh of his arm. "I miss you..."
Caught in a maelstrom of conflicting emotions Jesse heard her words, felt the bitterness, the outrage, the surge of betrayal at her admission of traitorous gratitude battle with the warmth striving to flood his soul at the knowledge she wasn't going to abandon him, that she could forgive his rejection, that it wasn't too late. And when he went in search of his demons, for the first time he saw the happy, fun-loving, energetic child the boy had been looking back at him from the fading face of the monster he'd been living with.
Shalimar heard him take a short breath, then he murmured huskily, "Well, I guess it's not really goodbye – not when we're going to be seeing them again."
It wasn't much. But she had to believe it was a place to start his journey home.
END
Jab, jab, jab, left cross, right uppercut, left, jab, jab, jab, left hook, jab, left, right, left, jab, jab... without conscious thought, Jesse allowed the newly familiar combinations to stream from his brain to his hands, savouring each jarring thud of impact as it sent a reciprocal jolt back up his arm and gave a wake-up call to muscles still weak from disuse.
He knew he wouldn't be able to keep this pace up for long, could already feel the tightening in his chest and the trembling in limbs still more accustomed to the horizontal than this kind of treatment that would force him to stop far sooner than he'd like. But he kept pushing himself, seeking the catharsis of physical exertion to cleanse him of his insecurities and give him release from the anger and frustration that had been so omnipresent in his life the past few weeks.
If he'd been asked, he wasn't sure he could have said why he'd forsaken his usual training regime for this particular form of punishment. He'd always preferred the dojo simulations, which at least gave the pretence of a tangible foe to fight, to the solitary grunt and grind of a gym workout. Besides, this had always been Brennan's preserve, the font of his muscle-pumping machismo, and that was an area Jesse had no desire to compete in.
But after all the falsehoods he'd been forced to live through so recently, the thought of facing more phantom enemies – albeit 'waking world' ones that looked and felt real – was too much for him to deal with. Instead he'd turned to the honest, solid, unthinking presence of punch bag and weights to help him fight his way back to a level of fitness that would hopefully allow him to do more than just sit around all day brooding.
He'd missed most of the aftermath of their escape from DeSalles' clutches, sleeping his way through the following days, his rare forays from his bed leaving him so tired, breathless and aching it was all he could do to get back there again. But he'd gradually put the pieces together and the bigger picture had provided more food for thought than he really felt able to digest, even now.
Because even now the images and sensations of his final nightmares remained, every time he closed his eyes, the heat and dust and despair and pain lurking in the shadows waiting to ambush him, and he couldn't believe that it would ever really go away.
Adam had assured him it would fade in time as he got stronger again, in the same way he'd assured him that it was really only a temporary and involuntary aberration on Joshua's part that had led to his mental assault, the reflexive pursuit of self-preservation in the face of the overwhelming nature of his newly emergent powers. Powers too strong for him to cope with alone, too far-reaching to keep contained without risking his sanity.
But Adam hadn't been there with him in the dreamworld that he'd been compelled to endure, hadn't had to suffer his own execution over and over again in ways that still haunted him, hadn't seen and felt his blood gushing from his body, his nose and mouth filling with dirt or water, his lungs starved of oxygen until they imploded... Worse even than that, the systematic deconstruction of his self-esteem, depriving him of the few remaining shreds of dignity and hope he'd been clinging to, so that when Emma had finally come in after him he already believed implicitly that he was a worthless failure who deserved nothing more than he was getting.
And that was proving far harder to get past than anything else.
He'd learned that the State police reports on the outcome of their raid showed that they'd arrived too late to prevent someone detonating charges to level what appeared to be some sort of control centre and living accommodations a mile or so from the site of the fire, destroying everything including all the computer systems and records. With no clear idea of what had been going on there, they'd had nothing with which to charge the fleeing men they'd managed to pick up. Those who deigned to say anything had just directed them towards Warren DeSalles – and as he was the only apparent fatality, with no evidence to say who killed him, their investigations had come to a halt.
A footnote to the CSI report made mention of discovering a large quantity of some sort of highly corrosive acid stored in an outhouse that had been virtually demolished in the same explosions that took out the command centre. They weren't able to say for sure what it might have been used for, but as they'd found no evidence of the bodies that had to be there somewhere given what the Mutant X team had witnessed, Adam was convinced that was how they had to have been disposed of.
So regretfully, despite the lack of incontrovertible proof, he'd had to assume all those who had been taken – which would include Gayle – were dead. Connie had refused to believe it at first, though she had to have known it was on the cards from the start, adamant that her friend had to be out there hiding somewhere. But over the days, as her confidence in herself and her newly found abilities grew, and she realised that she wasn't going to be thrown out to fend for herself, she'd come to accept it as the truth. Accepted it and grieved, but ultimately put it behind her and moved on, just like everyone else.
Everyone but him.
They all expected him to just forgive and forget, good old Jesse who never held a grudge, always gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. And they couldn't really understand how he could still be harbouring such antipathy towards someone as openly penitent, and as emotionally and physically fragile, as Joshua seemed.
Even Emma, probably the only one of them he might have expected to understand where he was coming from, had, after some initial wariness, been drawn into Adam's guilt-driven crusade to help Joshua learn to explore and regulate his new world, and had become a quietly enthusiastic advocate of the boy's willingness to learn and make amends.
What made it harder still was the fact that Adam had made it clear that Jesse owed Joshua his life, that the telepath had not only intervened to help him survive the ordeal in the river, but had been the supporting impetus that allowed him to push through the last few feet of the fire, clearing the path for Brennan to bring Shalimar safely out – which meant he owed her life as well. And though he also knew that the acts hadn't been totally altruistic, his sense of honour had niggled at him to recognise the contribution.
Even so, it had been over a week before he'd worked through his hostility and sense of violation enough to agree to a face-to-face meeting. It had been brief and awkward, Jesse accepting the stammered apology before hiding behind the excuse of fatigue to enable himself to escape to lick his imagined wounds alone. And chance encounters since, as the boy skimmed his wheelchair deftly through the corridors of Sanctuary, had been mercifully few – at least from Jesse's perspective, though he thought he'd glimpsed the light of hope die in the disturbingly bright eyes as he'd ducked away to avoid direct contact.
There'd been plenty of time, once his need for sleep lessened but while he still felt too wretchedly weak and shaky to do anything more than lie in bed, to allow his mind to roam back over the years to his first encounters with Joshua, and to examine the reasons why Connie's mention of his name had filled him with such dread.
He'd never really talked to anyone about how the whole experience in the safe house had affected him, not in detail. Never revealed how close he'd come to losing himself through his inability to find a big enough space to breathe and reform on the way in, and how hard it had been to get the resultant panic under control once he'd reached the place the others were sheltering in. How he'd thrown himself completely into the task of keeping them all – but most especially the injured child – safe just to stop himself falling apart, stop himself thinking about how little air there was, how little room, how little hope... The disconcerting feeling of hearing the small familiar voice calling out to him for help, even though its owner was unconscious, desperately scared he was hallucinating but nonetheless using its plaintive cry as the focus to bring himself through the whole terrifying experience.
Afterwards he hadn't wanted to explore any of it too deeply, unable to bear the sight of the child lying broken and silent in the big bed despite his efforts, preferring to lock the whole thing away rather than fall prey to the new insecurities it had released in him.
But now it seemed the kind of help Joshua had been asking for wasn't what he'd held himself together long enough to give him. At least, that's what he understood from Adam's oblique explanation for the reasons behind the boy's apparent determination to make him suffer. And if that was the case, didn't he only have himself to blame for what had happened?
Which just made him up the tempo, punish himself some more.
His body finally called a halt on him, a wall of breathlessness forcing him to stop before the spots dancing before his eyes became a fully-fledged blackout and his lungs gave in to the urge to cough themselves inside out. Panting heavily, he wobbled over on unsteady legs to sink gratefully onto the bench running along the wall, stripping off the gloves as he did so.
Sweat dripped down over his face, into his eyes, bringing accompanying memories to nudge at the edge of his thoughts again until he wiped them both firmly away with his towel. With a sigh he let his head droop forward, listening with grim satisfaction to the quivering complaint of his over-worked muscles, letting it take over his mind and blank out everything else.
He became suddenly aware that someone was watching him and kicked himself for not noticing sooner. Not that he should be surprised, he thought – there always seemed to be one or other of them lurking around, checking up on him, making sure he wasn't going to do anything stupid. But he didn't allow himself to look their way immediately, finding some bizarre amusement in trying to guess who it would be this time.
Not Adam – he'd expect him to be running the unnecessary checks on the Helix's flight systems, one of what felt like an endless stream of pointless tasks the older man had found for him once he'd expressed his need to get back to work, all designed to keep him occupied without undue exertion. That was, if he'd even thought about him at all given his immersion in his current project.
Maybe Brennan, come to claim his playground back? No, probably not – not after the way he'd snarled at the elemental the last time he'd turned up with his unasked for advice and patronizing comments on the format of his self-imposed therapy.
Emma, then – the one person he'd been able to relax with a little, knowing that she at least appreciated why he was finding it so hard to get past what had happened, even if she didn't agree with how he was going about it. Perhaps... but after a few abortive attempts to get him to actually talk it through, she'd given up and left him to his own devices.
Or Connie? The kid had certainly kept popping up a lot to begin with, but even she had tired of his short temper and the even shorter periods of attentiveness his body and mind allowed him, something that had so annoyed him in the early days of his recovery.
And Joshua certainly wouldn't dare venture in here...
Which left Shalimar. Shal, who he'd come so close to losing. Who'd been there at his bedside when he'd first woken, there with a care and concern that had come close to smothering him, which he'd rejected almost out of hand because he didn't believe he deserved it. Not then. And by the time he'd allowed himself to accept that he had perhaps been worthy in some small part of her faith and gratitude, she'd retreated to a wary distance from which she watched him with hurt disquiet.
There'd been so many times when he'd longed to go to her, tell her he was sorry, how important she was to him, why he'd done what he had - all the things he'd been unable to say while the unresolved dreams were so fresh in his mind. Longed to have her hug him as she'd done so often when he was younger, reassure him everything was going to be alright. But each time he'd plucked up the courage and gone looking for her, she'd been with Brennan or Adam, or his nerve had failed him at the last moment. And each time the barriers he'd been erecting around his soul had grown a little thicker.
Guessing game over, he raised his eyes towards the gym door and met the expected cautious brown gaze.
"Hey," she said softly, hesitantly, hovering in the shadows until she was sure he wouldn't send her away. At his tentative smile, though, she moved forward, coming to perch on the edge of the bench a few feet away from him. "Thought this might be where you were hiding – you seem to be spending a lot of time in here these days." She grinned fondly as she continued, "Brennan's starting to get grouchy, you know, thinks you're teaching his toys new tricks."
"Yeah, well," he said, without being able to stop himself, "last time I looked, none of this stuff had his name on." He buried his face in the towel again as a way of avoiding the expected look of wounded censure, not surprised by the silence that followed before she tried again.
"I hope you're not overdoing it, though. Adam said it could be weeks..."
"I know what Adam said," he interrupted, flashing her a warning glance. "I think I know how I'm feeling better than he does, though." Damn, there he went again, trapped in the vicious circle created by the feelings of estrangement that made him challenge everyone's motives for talking to him, driving them further away and thus isolating him more. He knew he needed to stop it, to break the cycle, but he was so afraid it had already gone too far that he couldn't see where to even begin. And if Shalimar left him here alone now, he didn't think he'd ever be able to find his way back.
Arms folded defensively across her chest, Shalimar sat back and watched him hunch in on himself, the haunted expression in his shadowed storm-gray eyes speaking volumes about the turmoil she knew was going on inside him, for all that he was bottling it away even more than usual.
Stripped of the baggy shirts he'd been hiding in the past few weeks she could see how thin he'd got, his normally leanly muscled frame suffering despite the time he'd been putting in here in the gym, and his face was gaunter than she could ever remember seeing. She felt the sudden urge to reach out and smooth away the tension knotting his stubbled cheek, and the curls of sweat-damp hair clinging to his forehead and the back of his neck cried out to her to be brushed free, but she didn't think this was the moment for her usual affectionate tactility. Instead she waited, hoping the silence would provoke some opening she could use to reach him.
During the three or so weeks since the 'incident', as she'd come to think of it, there'd been a lot happening around here – so much that she realised she'd let this go on longer than it should. Everyone had seemed to have issues to work through, though, all of them treading eggshells around each other in case they inadvertently made things worse.
Emma had been unusually abrasive and remote at first, disappearing for long periods in search of peace enough to meditate and regain her balance. She'd been reluctant to talk too much about what she'd shared with Jesse, but even the bald facts she'd given to Adam, and which Shalimar had then extracted from him, were enough to give her the shudders even now.
In her own case, the need to exorcise the spectre of her almost total breakdown in the face of her arch-nemesis had made her question herself and the flaws inherent in her genetic makeup, seeking reassurance that they didn't devalue who she was. It had taken time and a lot of patience from those she'd used as sounding boards to talk through her doubts and fears, but she was far more comfortable with herself now than she had been for a long while.
She wished she could say the same for Brennan. He'd seemed to have made himself personally responsible for her well-being, and to begin with she'd leant on him, used his almost constant presence as a buffer for her battered confidence. But as she'd grown stronger, more self-assured, she'd found his continuous attentiveness constricting, irritating even, an intrusion on her re-defining territorial boundaries, and he'd taken ill-disguised offence when she'd told him to back off. He would come round, she knew, but in the meantime it was making things a little awkward.
Not that there weren't distractions enough for all of them, if they wanted, mostly centring on the two teenagers still in their midst.
With Emma's help latterly, Adam had spent most of his time working with Joshua, starting the process of teaching him how to deal with the manifestations of his mutancy in a less traumatic way. There was still a long way to go, but even she'd been able to see that he'd started to open up in response to their encouragement.
This had been helped in no small part by Connie. The girl had, after some early suspicion and attempts at one-upmanship based on her few extra days' tenure there, become fascinated by the outwardly emotion- and humourless Joshua, making it her mission to crack his façade and make him smile. Shalimar couldn't help but see parallels between herself and Jesse, particularly as what had happened seemed to have pushed him back into his shell once again. And it pained her to see him so alone, so afraid of being hurt again.
It was really because of Jesse that Adam had taken the decision, earlier than he might have preferred, to arrange for both Connie and Joshua to go and live with a New Mutant couple, people he knew and trusted, who would continue their training while helping them live as normal lives as possible. He'd had very little problem persuading the Arkansas authorities and the Hartsons that it was in the boy's best interests, an indication of their relief to have the problem moved off their plate. Shalimar just wished that Jesse's problems could be so easily resolved.
The silence stretched on, but finally she heard him sigh. "What do you want, Shal?"
Though the words could have been construed as confrontational, there was enough resignation in his tone that she could choose to accept them as an invitation. So she said carefully, "Connie and Joshua are leaving soon – thought you might want to come and say goodbye."
There, it was done, and she stared anxiously at him, seeing the mixed emotions flooding his features. When there was no immediate response, though, she felt compelled to go on. "Listen, I know what he did to you was inexcusable. I know what it's like to have someone in your head, to have dreams so real they invade your entire being, take over your life. Believe me, I know how violated it makes you feel. But they were only dreams, Jesse, not reality. None of them actually came true, not in the end, no matter how close we came. And I for one am eternally grateful that we're both here now to see that. Grateful to you..." She paused, then finished, "... and to Joshua."
She saw him stiffen at that, eyes shooting her way wildly before returning to their fierce contemplation of the floor. One last shot, she thought, unwilling to surrender him without trying everything she could. "Please come back to us, Jess," she whispered, stretching out a hand to gently touch the tense chilled flesh of his arm. "I miss you..."
Caught in a maelstrom of conflicting emotions Jesse heard her words, felt the bitterness, the outrage, the surge of betrayal at her admission of traitorous gratitude battle with the warmth striving to flood his soul at the knowledge she wasn't going to abandon him, that she could forgive his rejection, that it wasn't too late. And when he went in search of his demons, for the first time he saw the happy, fun-loving, energetic child the boy had been looking back at him from the fading face of the monster he'd been living with.
Shalimar heard him take a short breath, then he murmured huskily, "Well, I guess it's not really goodbye – not when we're going to be seeing them again."
It wasn't much. But she had to believe it was a place to start his journey home.
END