Xaviers!

Will Stanton was on the parallel bars in the gym area of the rec center.

Now, most people, when they're doing a gymnastics exercise, are fairly straight-forward; they jump from one bar to the next, and it's very athletic and exciting.

Not Will--he was intentionally continuing to hold on to the bar, stretching and warping as he twisted himself around and around, like some kind of weird cat's cradle.

((open))

"I don't believe that's what they mean when they say you should stretch before working out." Miriam jokes dryly from near the door, very much hiding her anxieties about talking to Will for the first time since that whole mess behind an almost mean sounding facade.

"'They' have muscles they need to worry about, Miriam," Will countered, continuing to stretch.

"And bones for that matter. What are you doing, Will?"

"Letting it all hang out. It's good, every now and again, to stop being confined."

Miriam let's out a short, sharp laugh. "Yeah, I guess everybody needs that sometimes."

"Pretty much.

Did you need something?"

"No. I guess not..." she says, turning to leave but then hesitating for a moment and looking back over at Will. "How have you been?"

"Lost in time and space. Yourself?"

"About the same, just... less literally. I didn't mean to hurt your precious Sam, you know."

"I don't know that, thanks. YOU'RE the telepath, remember?"

"I tried to help. Both of you." she says, not really sure why she's still here, trying to justify herself. She should probably just leave.

"And you really did a bang-up job."

"Yeah, I really screwed up. I liked you better when you were less of an ass."

"My apologies; I should be thanking you, right?"

"Nooo. I love taking shit for trying to do the right thing. It's fantastic! Maybe I should try cramming my powers in a box, that way all the good mutants with the PR friendly powers don't have to be scared of the bloody telepath!"

"Funny, I don't see the other telepaths on campus erasing someone's mind. Maybe I've been distracted."

"I didn't erase anything! I put a bloody cast on her because she was about to tear her mind to ribbons. Sorry you two didn't appreciate the color."

"You went a little deeper than a coat of paint, Miriam."

"And you determined that how exactly? By tieing yourself in knots to jump to conclusions?"

"Not sure how well I would jump if I was tied in knots.

The ravens told me all I needed to know, Miriam."

"Yeah, a panicked fragment of her flailing psyche. Excellent source. Maybe next time you'd like to slam me for something a belligerent hobo screamed at you on the streets."

"See, you don't even know what you're dealing with. I'm no telepath, but believe me when I say I know Sam's mind better than you."

"And here we are. You just know all of us already, don't you? I bloody knew this was going to happen!"

"I don't know all of you, but I know Sam. I thought I didn't know you, but then, well, actions speak louder than words, don't they?"

Miriam scoffs. "I'm not going to be the punching bag for your unresolved trauma, no matter how hard you try to project this onto me. You've got issues and you're dragging Sam into them as well."

"Why don't you tell me what my issues are, Miriam?"

Throughout all of this, Will had hardly turned to look at her, instead continuing his exercise routine.

"Your issue is that on some level you've already made up your mind about people. Sam might be okay with that but I'm not."

Will chuckled, ruefully. "And how SHOULD I be viewing you, then, Miriam? I saw what you did. I know who you hang out with. Your actions, your friends, they don't define you?"

"You were perfectly fine with those people up until then and you're casting all those things against the backdrop of that other person. How's that fair, huh? How's it fair to be told that everyone else is just fine the way they are but you, you are worse, scarier, your power is bad. Don't use it. Doesn't matter if you try to do good, everyone will only see the worst of it!" she presses out, shaking with frustration as she stalks towards Will.

"If you hadn't done this, maybe they could have helped her! If you hadn't been so selfish she might be alive! Do you know how many lives you ruined? Half of them are still catatonic! What did you do!? Your mother is here to wash her hands off you!" she hammers thoughts and memories into Will's head as she shouts them out. Emergency personnel, people at Muir, her mother. None of them saying anything, but it's ringing in her ears none the less. "Now I lost two welfare checks!" she finally ends on, her voice hoarse tears of rage and sorrow running down her cheeks.

"And all this time, knowing that I could make it alright if I just wanted it hard enough. But no, I was going to be good. For her. But I have had it! That pathetic excuse for a woman in your mind is not going to define who I am to you!" she snaps at him as she reaches into his mind, tendrils of shadow searching, grasping for the memories of her counterpart in his thoughts.

Miriam Bell wrote:"You were perfectly fine with those people up until then and you're casting all those things against the backdrop of that other person. How's that fair, huh? How's it fair to be told that everyone else is just fine the way they are but you, you are worse, scarier, your power is bad. Don't use it. Doesn't matter if you try to do good, everyone will only see the worst of it!" she presses out, shaking with frustration as she stalks towards Will.

"If you hadn't done this, maybe they could have helped her! If you hadn't been so selfish she might be alive! Do you know how many lives you ruined? Half of them are still catatonic! What did you do!? Your mother is here to wash her hands off you!" she hammers thoughts and memories into Will's head as she shouts them out. Emergency personnel, people at Muir, her mother. None of them saying anything, but it's ringing in her ears none the less. "Now I lost two welfare checks!" she finally ends on, her voice hoarse tears of rage and sorrow running down her cheeks.

"And all this time, knowing that I could make it alright if I just wanted it hard enough. But no, I was going to be good. For her. But I have had it! That pathetic excuse for a woman in your mind is not going to define who I am to you!" she snaps at him as she reaches into his mind, tendrils of shadow searching, grasping for the memories of her counterpart in his thoughts.

Will probably had a poinient and detailed counter-argument to that, filled with precise and sharp wording and elegant imagery, but Miriam ignored it as she shoved past the pathetic boundaries of his mind, cutting and slashing her way through waves of memories and associations as she grasped and pulled her way back, back through the months at Xaviers and the years in Antarctica and the countless time of space and void, back to a much younger, much more fragile and much more vulnerable Will Stanton.

But he wasn't there, at least, not obviously. Miriam saw...well, I suppose it could be best described as herself. Older, yes, and wearing much nicer clothes, but there was no doubting the resemblance, as much as she would want to.

She sat in the back of a fancy car, all fine leather and wooden paneling, enjoying a drink from the included drinks tray, smoking a cigarette from a fancy holder. Up front, a short-red haired boy carefully and expertly weaved his way through traffic, which seemed to part and merge away from the Rolls, despite the standard London rush-hour traffic.

She patted her purse contently, a small lump of clay resting there.

Miriam is too angry to really appreciate the weight of the situation, her avatar coalescing in the memory. Nothing about this seems bad to her but she can taste the emotional charge it has in Will's memory and it's less than pleasant. As things play out around her she reaches out for her the woman's face, fingers sinking into the memory as she swipes her hand through. Facial recognition is a complicated mental process but it's always easier to break something. The older woman's facial features begin to slide and blur like a kaleidoscope. "That's not me! It's not! Me!" her mental voice echoes through the scene as she breaks the woman's face.

The face was...shall we say, resilient? It should be child's play to erase and alter a memory for someone as weak as Will, but this particular one was sticky, reforming around Miriam's hands as they cut through.

Was...was the woman looking at her? Couldn't be.

"Just... go away already! Stop messing everything up!" she goes on, putting her other hand on the woman's head in an attempt to redouble her efforts.

"Nice to have a visitor stop by from time to time, darling."

The voice was crisp and clear, even if the woman's mouth never moved.

"And you're one of Will's. He's... so messed up about this he's projecting you somehow!" she decides, trying to calm herself as Will of all people somehow resists her.