Xaviers!

It's a very fortunate thing that the mental suggestions vampires could use were not overly literal. Will didn't necessarily need muscles to move.

Still, he froze in his tracks, halfway through a stride across the room.

Miriam finishes getting up and steps out of the bathtub/blanket cocoon.

"Really? Really!? You were going to kill me? For what? Having been lied to? For trying to keep my distance? Or just because it didn't stick when the last person tried it?" she snaps at him, only after a while realizing that even if he wanted to he couldn't answer. And she wants to hear what he has to say, not just rip it out of his head. "You may talk.Go on. This better be damn good."

"And just what would you consider a damn good reason? I know what you've already done, and I know what you're capable of doing with a shove in the wrong direction. The icy-cold grip of an undead abomination can't be good for the psyche."

"So you figured you would pre-emptively kill me? For something a different me has done? Yeah, that seems fair. Very heroic and self-righteous."

"Like this you has your hands clean. Or do you not remember everyone you've brought dancing, or to your girlfriends place? The road from here to there is paved with 'oh, it won't happen to me's."

"I tried! I tried to make things right once I realized what was happening! It's not my fault they treat me better than the so called 'good guys'. I saved Wanda while your friends burned down the house. And then I left so I wouldn't hurt her any more than I already have. But if you're going to treat me like this no matter what I do then maybe I should just be the villain you want me to be. It's not them who are driving me down that road!" she shouts at Will and somewhere along the lines tears have started to run down her face. "Go ahead and punish me for everything I've lost. I'm sure you've never made any mistakes in your life. After all, you act in the name of a Goddess, don't you, and I'm just an abomination." she goes on more quietly and Will can feel her mental grip on him slip.

"Once you realized what was happening? Sticking your head into danger once or twice is one thing, but you have the absolute knack to make the worst decision at all possible times. What you need is a big sign telling you to do the exact opposite of whatever it you want to do at all times," he said, willing himself to take a half-step forwards.

"I tried to protect Wanda the best way I could. It failed because ir hurt her too much. So I took her pain away this time. So she wouldn't come looking for me again. So she'd be better off. So everyone would be better off without me. But I suppose that's not permanent enough for you, is it?"

"Nothing is a permanent solution. Nothing ever stops and nothing ever ends. It all loops back and intertwines and happens over and over and over again. It's all patterns and tropes and on and on and on, forever and ever.

How long did you think you could hide here? A week? A month? A year?"

He took another half-step forward.

At the back of Will's mind, Miriam was picking up a familiar feeling. My my my, what troubles we find ourselves in....

"I didn't know I had to hide. I just needed a place to stay while I figure out where to go from here. But your... bias is so strong, it's trying to bloody talk to me." she says and suddenly steps forward to close the gap, her hand reaching for Will's face and pushing him against the bathroom door with a sudden explosion of movement.

"Why don't you try a different perspective for once." From her mind she conjures up the silvery mask of all of Wanda's memories with Miriam and presses them onto Will's thoughts. On most people they wouldn't fit, not without a lot more work and even then they'd leave some edges. But Will is particularly flexible and all the experiences and feelings from Wanda's perspective sink into him. Not necessarily her personality or self-image which leaves some seams and incongruities but Will suddenly finds himself remembering a actions and feelings of a relationship that wasn't there before.

Will staggered back as Miriam shoved him against the wall, her fingers briefly digging into the clay as she pressed the memories onto him.

"M...Miriam..." he stammered, shaking his head as he tried to unfog it. "I...what are y...what are we..."

She pulls her hand down and leaves a couple of streaks in the clay that used to be a face, her fingers coming to a rest against Will's chest.

"I... don't know." To be perfectly honest, she's not really sure what precisely this is going to do to Will. Or accomplish, really. "But I've lost everything that ever mattered to me. You've wrapped yourself up and pretended to be someone else for Sam's sake. A Sam anyway. You could do the same for me."

Absentmindedly, Will put his arms around Miriam as his face wrinkled -- from concentration, not from clay shenanigans for once in his life. "I'm...no, Mel, I'm not pretending, I just...just am..."

He bit his lip

"I gave up trying to understand people when I was at the Institute. I just...do what I feel is best. And what needs to be done."

"Do you still think what needs to be done is driving a stake through my heart?" she asks, taking a shaky breath as she tries to ignore being called by the wrong name.

"You...you have to be stopped. Before you can hurt anyone else. Vampires are...unnatural..."

"I didn't ask for this. And I don't want to hurt anybody. You know this..."

"We've seen the one in charge, remember? The darkness inside of you. The strong one, who handles the ugliness and pain. You put her in charge.

You told me once that I was right not to trust you. How can I trust you now, with what you've become?"

"That doesn't mean she still is. I was doing better before... this. I could make you trust me, you know I could. But I won't. Not... beyond sharing this with you."

"What would you have me do, Mel? Leave you here to...to pray on someone else when you make your next error in judgment? The next time you try to protect someone, only to find the darkness within? If I leave now, everything you do from here on out is on my head and on my hands.

Vampires don't quit, Miriam. Trust me. The hunger, the emptiness -- it gnaws at them, twists them, demands to be filled."

"I've had a darkness gnawing at my mind most of my life. Shouldn't I at least get a chance to try?"

"You DO try. And, dang it, you have the incredible knack to make the wrong decision at every possible turn, Mels. Someone has to keep you from doing what your instincts tell you is right."

"Are you volunteering...?"

"...What do you think I could even DO?"

"Keep me... grounded. Away from the darkness. It won't gnaw at me if I can feed..."

"And you would LISTEN to me? You would do what I told you, WHEN I told you to do it?"

"I might. If I knew it was because you cared and not just because you're afraid of who I am or what I might become."

On some level she knows that she'd had someone like that in Wanda, accidental mental manipulation or not, but the realization of what she'd accidentally done to her had made it obvious that she would just end up hurting her. But Will... Will might get hurt but she'd seen the things he could recover from. Will would bend but he wouldn't break.

"I cared. And it burnt me," Will said, remembering what had happened to Wanda. "You left me to...I mean, you left HER to...I mean, that is," he said, blinking and trying to shake his head. "That is to say...you left and they...because you thought you knew best..."

He was clearly having a little trouble reconciling the memories and feelings from Miriam's Wanda mask with his experience of those same events -- streams crossing, as it were.

"Was I wrong? You came here because of the people I might hurt and that's why I left."

"Your heart is in the right place; your brain is filled with issues. And then there's the hunger that has to gnaw at you. That's probably gnawing at you RIGHT NOW. That's not going to get satisfied by a burger and a coke."

"Mental trauma isn't the only thing you bounce back from..."

"I'm not here to enable you, Miriam. I'm here to stop you. Whatever it takes," he said, as his neck began to emit eau de garlique.

"And murder is preferable to helping me? You would do it for Sam." she says. It's not really a question, it's hard to miss this fact even with a cursory glance at Will's thoughts. "But she happens to look like somebody you cared about, while I... don't." she says, trying to keep herself from recoiling. "Stop that..." she adds, her voice cracking a little from the almost abrasive feeling of smelling the garlic emanating from Will.

"It's always about Sam with you, isn't it? A universal constant.

Looks aren't everything, Miriam. Even here, people are mostly the same, on the inside. I know this better than most -- it's not what you look like on the outside that counts. It's not that you look the same, because you don't. Not on the micro level. It's the stuff everyone has deep inside, that colors their actions and their behaviors, that I respond to."

He did, at least, stop with the garlic smell, though his neck was still off-colored and pale, like a freshly picked clove.

"Bullshit. What do you know about what people are like on the inside. I can tell what goes through someone's head when they see me. And what's going through your head even now is leaving me little choice. I'm not dieing again." she says, her hand reaching for Will's head as her thoughts slide into his mind.

"Gnnh," was Will's intelligent rebuttal, as he felt Miriam's hand on his face and her mind sinking deep into his own.

One of the many benefits of being a vampire was the ability to fly -- so, rather than falling into clay and sinking or something, Miriam would find herself high above. The factory, the city and the forest all lay below her, full with the tiny mini-minds she came to expect from Will. Standing out specifically, of course, were the Triad -- the Champion, The Advisor and the General. There was also a strange, ominous presence somewhere deep in the woods -- and the frustratingly familiar presence of her universal double's mental duplicate, lurking on the edges of everything.

Key to the realm. No defenses to speak of. What was a vampire going to do?

For a moment she looks around, trying to figure out the best place to start, but as she's hovering above it all she realizes she doesn't have to. From up here she can observe everything and doesn't have to lower herself to the same level as all those little pieces. She spreads her arms and from the edges of the 'world' two enormous shadowy hands reach across the landscape, casting long shadows underneath. The enormous hands mimic the movement of Miriam's avatar as she brings them together, shadowy fingers finding the patch of clay in the forest and like giant columns the fingers slam into the ground, sinking into it as the landscape buckles around them.

In the real world Miriam has brought her other hand to rest on Will's head as well and her fingers are digging into his skull. Slowly she pulls her hands apart just as she does inside Will's mind where the forest splits apart as the two arms reaching across the land to tear it in two. Trees sway and topple as the ground breaks open, the gorge racing across the land. The city and factory tremble as the divide opens up right in the middle, creating a cross-section through both the city and the factory with parts of them on each side. The divide splitting the city in two does seem to have bit of a mind of it's own, zig-zagging a little here and there seemingly at random, but from Miriam's vantage point it's making sure the Triad of Wills remains on one side while denizens sporting the silvery glint of the memory mask remain on the other.

Miriam's fingers sunk into Will's clay, distorting his features and causing him to fade to grey as her hand sunk inside. Pulling her hands apart required great effort at first, but it slowly became easier and easier, as she pulled and tore, the two halves losing definition as she began to split the clay in twain.

As the two halves separated, the mindscape began to flash and fade, with first one side, then the other, fading out from Miriam's perspective as she found herself trying to balance being in both minds at one time.

For a moment Miriam's disoriented, taking a step back from the two halves of clay that are emitting two very similar, but quickly distinguishing thoughts. Like watching a magic eye picture coming out of focus and turning into noise. But that means it worked...

-----------

A little later. The sun has set by now and Miriam has gotten dressed and taken care of some chores. Which is to say that only one of the Will-halves is still in the hotel room, currently lieing in the tub while she waits for it to recover a bit. The other half, well, it'd have some time to unrattle itself.

The clay in the tub blurbled and bubbled for a couple hours, but gradually began to reform over time-- first into a a round disc, which then inflated and elongated into more of an oblong capsule, which gradually gained protrusions which gradually became identifiable as arms, legs and a head as it tried to reform itself into it's previous form.

It was a good thing Miriam had remembered to put the stopper in the drain, or else the clay probably would have oozed right on out of the apartment. As it stood, the clay in the tub was about 3/4rs of the size of the piece she had started with -- impressive, considering she had torn them apart fairly evenly. Durable and resilient were the watchwords, right?


Miram's patience, more than anything else, would determine how fully 'normal' Will would look when she returned, though presumably she'd want to return before it could really get back on it's feet under it's own power.

Conveniently, she can tell fairly easily how awake Will is from pretty much anywhere so when he starts standing up she makes her way over to the bathroom to check on him. She's not entirely sure what he's going to remember. Or rather, how murdery he's going to be. But better to be safe than sorry. The three-quarter clay thing looks a little odd, but even infinite potential needs to have some kind of baseline, right?

"Can you talk?" she asks the little golem.