2012-10-28 Je Ne Sais Quoi

The First National Bank has seen enough chaos and tragedy to last a lifetime, by any building's estimation. Rebuilding has occurred rapidly - as is suited for such an important edifice - but an air of grim uncertainty hangs around it in the coming days. Tellers move furtively, jumping at shadows as their diminished customers rush in and out in fear of being caught fatally unaware. With the robbery having been prevented, the collective fear and doubt is - unfairly - aimed as much at the band of vigilantes who appeared upon the scene to prevent it.

It's a cold, paranoid atmosphere in which the people of Manhattan now dwell. Business needs to continue, but personal interests are... strained, at their very best. Few stop to think how those on the other side of this must feel - after all, what sort of person dares to empathise with their collective enemy? Psylocke understands all too well. Perhaps she's a part of the same issue, ultimately, her step leading her back to the scene of the crime not to seek reassurance that a balance has been restored, but in search of one of her 'kind'.

Not until some hours after her stealthy escape did the X-Woman pause to consider the full, dizzying detail of what had occurred. It was only once she'd eaten some small repast and lay back to find her equilibrium that she replayed events, blow by blow, piece by piece, and - as her thoughts turned to the confusion of that neophyte mutant who'd made such a bold sacrifice - she realized that she'd never felt the sharp telepathic feedback of Kwabena's death throes.

The poor hostage she'd been in direct contact with, had disengaged only in the final instant of oblivion - remaining long enough to assuage the victim's fears before fleeing the maelstrom of her last moment inside a mortal shell. It's always difficult, to keep track and remain collected through such an experience. But it's distinctive. Unmistakable. To a lesser extent she felt the deaths of the crooks too, bar their synthetic leader, leaving one glaring void. A question mark.

A dark-skinned face, engaged in hard panic, loomed into her thoughts and remains there now.

Rather than make the trip as Psylocke, Betsy has arrived upon the scene in civilian garb. Her sleek purple hair - so telltale - has been pulled back into a bun beneath a wide-brimmed hat, black and oh-so-fashionable. Playing accessory to an equally chic tube skirt and silk blazer, the 'disguise' is complete. Even those hostages who might return to the bank would fail to recognize the stern, scantily-clad kunoichi as she slips inside, her steps cool and collected to match the inwound focus of her thoughts. That image remains, of the man whose name she doesn't know; but she knows so many more useful things, the recollected residue of thought and emotion so much more unique and powerful than a mere moniker. All she has to do...

Is find the trail that remains. Telepathy is a fine art over through which Betsy herself pains in broad strokes, her actions the psychic equivalent of wild haymakers in a boxing ring. Undoubtedly effective when they can be made to connect - but unruly, unassured. By focusing upon nothing else she can tighten her technique, and she gets a tiny bit better every day, every week, every month. But the process is slow. Which is why she finds herself in the exact spot she saw her fellow mutant last. It takes some queuing to get there, though.

By the time she feels connected enough to the neural pathways, people are yelling out from behind, bidding the strange if beautiful woman to move her stylishly-clad butt so they can get some service already. Even the lingering tension cannot dispel their impatience, it seems.

Betsy barely hears them, one foot firmly outside of her physical form as she searches for traces like a detective team dusting for prints. Sweeping the floor for tiny specks of psychic DNA. There's some truth to the esoteric theory that everything in the world is connected - there may even be solid science behind it, waiting to be unearthed - and in the unearthly realm of the telepath it's certainly true. A person's journey through life leaves marks on the lives of others, upon their memories and thus upon their very character. There are, or at least have been, people within who glimpsed Kwabena Odame's disappearance...

It all conspires to create a living, breathing machine of interconnected souls. Matching her memories of him, his face and his feelings and his thoughts, against what amounts to a vast computer database of a hundred million remembered individuals, Betsy keeps pushing with all of her considerable willpower. Rolling through the thoughts of those around her, and those who have passed through in the past two days. Searching, searching.

It takes time, enough that she's finally forced to leave, doing so with quick, instinctive steps that see her retracting the vagaries of her passage through the bank that day. Until she ends up back in that small bathroom, closing the door behind her with the extension of a stylish pump heel, then hastening to a cubicle. Seating herself, she slips off her shoes and crosses her legs beneath her on the mercifully clean seat lid. A few long minutes later there's a jolt.

Not physically, not outwardly, but within. Her roving consciousness snags... something.

What she experiences is somewhere between the heightened sensory excitement of a fisherman finally feeling a bite, and the more simple joy of a child fitting a round peg into a round hole. Breath quickening, heart racing, she tries to sort the old from the new-- a bloodhound tracking a fleeting scent, but in reverse. Pulling the scent toward her.

What happens to Kwabena Odame's consciousness while his body undergoes a matter phase shift is a unique phenomenon unto itself, more unique in many ways than the mutation of his genetic code. Obviously, when only a portion of his body changes, he remains fully aware of himself and his existence within space and time, even though said portion of his body undergoes an odd change in the way it perceives any sense of touch or temperature.

However, when his head or entire body has changed into gas, usually represented by a man-shaped or otherwise cloud of black smoke, something entirely different takes place. In the past, while certainly he has maintained a general idea of the passage of time and his existence within the three dimensions that we call 'space', he has briefly lost his awareness of what is taking place within that time and space. It's not at all akin to blacking out, but more like being temporarily blinded. Knowing without seeing, feeling without touching, hearing without listening.

When Kwabena flung himself into the force field, right here in the First National Bank just days ago, he couldn't possibly have known what he was about to unlock in himself. No, he was not killed, nor was he trapped inside some power generator. His body, having instinctively turned itself into black smoke, had become so entangled in the energy field that when the field was overwhelmed and shut down, his molecular structure was quite literally obliterated. Molecules that were once tightly wound enough to be visible as that black smoke were split so far apart that they disappeared into the air, left to be cycled through the HVAC, breathed in and out by other creatures, and blown about by the passing of cops, investigators, news reporters and mechanics.

Until the day that the bank re-opened.

Those mutated molecules that once constituted the human shape known to some as Kwabena Odame are still very much alive, and the X-Genes inside each one of them have remained curiously bound to one another, creating a web of sorts, a consciousness spread out across the entire bank, from floor to floor, refusing to leave. Molecules breathed in by passersby refuse to be absorbed by lung and blood vessel, only to be expelled bank into the bank by exhalation. Molecules threatened to be blown out the door swim against the currents of the air in dire refusal, unable or unwilling to be sent too far away from the others they call family.

This consciousness, completely unaware of its own existence and no longer bearing anything remotely close to sentience, has existed only in animalistic survival, until Psylocke comes along. There were only two beings with whom Kwabena had become acquainted with during the heist, and even if Domino were to show, her lack of psychic abilities wouldn't have made her presence strong enough to draw attention to Kwabena's consciousness. Instead, like a billion flecks of metal attracted by the polarity of a magnet, the dissipated molecules of Kwabena's body begin to gather. It is, at first, invisible, but to the trained psychic mind, something is clearly happening. It's like a scream, a very soft and distant scream, but it seems to surround the place, as if the air itself within this bank were the source of it's desperate cry.

When searching for lingering sensory 'fragments' of Kwabena, Betsy would not have dared to imagine how very literally she might have taken such an idea. That the man himself was scattered into tiny, nearly indiscernable molecules doesn't begin to occur until she focuses herself yet more keenly - hauling back against that insistent tug upon her extra-sensory perceptions. There's a curious lack of weight to it that's hard to describe in mundane terms, as though what she has found is incomplete but willing to be completed-- a broken thing waiting to be reassembled. It's a moment after this realization that the totality of Kwabena's emotional response to the phenomenon hits her. A haymaker in turn, to her very consciousness.

Psylocke jolts back, the length of her spine slamming against unyielding porcelain near hard enough to crack it in twain. A fragment of cream-coloured dust drifts down the back of her blazer, creeping into the nape of her skirt and sending a very physical receptor through her central nervous system into the same brain attempting to focus upon a very trying task.

It all culminates in an assault she can hardly bear, and as she pushes her powers harder to keep up, violet butterfly wings spread to either side of her face. A pained grimace causes her teeth to clench, enamel creaking as she throws a hand to each temple. Massaging. Gripping. Clawing. She's distantly aware that she cannot lose control, that the presence flooding toward her in a billion fragmented pieces needs to use heras a conduit. That she needs to be strong enough for two; no, for a billion and one. Mentally, she becomes a pillar of strength, greater than she has ever been - using the gathered frustrations of the past few days, the pain and the doubt she has experienced about her very nature, to deny any possibility of failure. She has killed, she has caused others to be killed, and she has invaded the minds of men she had no business hurting. If she is to redeem herself, if she is to be the person she so dearly wants to be, to break away from the monster that first stalked in Kwannon's stolen body...

She must do this. It requires her to slip completely from her physical form, just for a moment, her posture slumping and head lolling in the instant it takes to transform her astral self into a veritable goddess. Pushing the boundaries of all that's reasonable and possible, to play god in reforming the pieces of a broken man, to create from literal dust...

When she comes to, the effort leaves her physically screaming, mouth parted in a pained rictus and the resultant noise ear-splitting. Perversely, twistedly, she ignores this reaction from her own body. Instead she focuses upon the empty space between the cubicle walls, above the tiled floor, none of which truly exists to her except as a physical boundary she cannot break from the astral realm. A limitation inside of which she must transcend all limits as she wills Kwabena Odame into being, bidding him to emerge from a scattered cocoon. How much this is down to her, and how much to him, she is incapable of knowing.

But as Betsy unleashes that primal scream without, within she is an unwaveringly calm pilot.

She is a leaf on the wind. Watch how she soars.

The screams of Kwabena's disassociated consciousness are joined by those of another, of a singularity as it were, and it is something upon which he instinctively focuses. No longer does he know without seeing, or feel without touching, or hear without listening. Instead, he knows without needing to see, he feels without needing to touch, and he hears without need of listening. He becomes distinctly aware of his unfortunate state, and with the familiarity of Psylocke's presence, however faint, he indeed finds something with which to focus upon, a thing to bend his will towards.

This becomes the true nature of Psylocke's extraordinary act, her potential moment of redemption, for not only is she saving a man's life, she is helping him to unlock his potential.

Kwabena's screams fade from existence, for he no longer feels himself wracked by desperate panic, the same type of panic that strikes a man when he is drowning and knows there is no escape. As they fade, his molecules rush through hallway, duct, and door, shifting against air currents and blowing past bankers and patrons by sheer willpower to find each other. Even while his screams fade from the ethereal psychic plane, the air inside the bathroom begins to darken ever so slightly, as if a poisoned mist was forming before Psylocke's very eyes. This transformation speeds up as those billions of particles become closer and closer, gathering into a dark cloud that has no choice but to form in the stall before her feet. The displacement of nitrogen and oxygen with some form of disassociated flesh, blood and bone causes the air to move, rushing out of the bathroom through a crack between the door and the floor fast enough to cause a whistling sound that is just overcome by Psylocke's screams.

The cloud takes the shape of a man, curled up in the fetal position, before forming at last into the shape of Kwabena Odame. He is naked, curled up against himself upon the cold floor, and trembling uncontrollably. His eyes, while open, seem to be staring listlessly past the woman's feet and at the gray wall behind the toilet, for the moment he reclaimed his solid form, his enlightened awareness was shocked by seeing again with actual eyes, feeling with actual skin, and hearing actual sound waves.

Clearly stuck in shock, his breaths come short and quick, bordering on hyperventilation.

But worse than that, the screams and commotion have drawn the attention of bank security. Already on pins and needles, two security guards rush toward the women's room, with one hand on their pistols and the other calling in their reports. As they draw near, they slow to a crawl, staring at the closed door with abject terror, for they do not know what lies behind wood and metal, and they have every reason to fear the worst.

Doing is much harder then having done, and there is a wash of almost crushing relief as Psylocke feels her implausible, incalculable efforts rewarded by an explosion of unleashed particles. In that moment, the bridge between the astral and the physical is absolutely corporeal to her perceptions, perhaps the very first time that she's felt the two merge so completely. There's a flash of giddy insight, where she sees as one and the same the three-dimensional lines of plain, mundane 'reality' alongside the endlessly more complex, labyrinthine corridors of the mind.

And then she's more awake than she's ever been, her astral self whiplashing against the physical as they bump and jolt apart. It stings like the gushing of ice water following a steaming hot sauna, widening her eyes so far they feel as though they'll escape their sockets. She becomes aware of her own scream just as it cuts off, and then aware of the eddying mist before those too-wide violet eyes. Face aching, she forces herself to relax with gasping breaths, seeing what unfolds in glaring high-definition as her heart threatens to explode from her breast - as her brain threatens to melt through sheer sensory overload.

Kwabena's heaving intakes are more troubling than her own, but no less in intensity. Moments after the alert security guards arrive, one is forced to draw the most direct and embarassing conclusion, the younger of the pair retreating a backstep and swallowing back nervous laughter as his superior delivers a brittle, utterly humourless scowl. Present on the day of the robbery, he's expecting the worst-- this place isn't safe any more. This job isn't secure.

"Alright. You've got to the count of three before I open fire, y'hear me, freaks?" Psylocke stares down at the man before her, aware too of the parallel convering lines of those other consciousnesses. But in her stark and glaring awareness of... everything, she can't linger on the more mundane latter concern any more than she could curse at the tangle of a hair or the chipping of a nail. They're just a small, microscopically insignificant thing against the import of what's occurred within the cramped stall. Unhesitantly, she reaches down and places cool fingertips against the back of the curled, terrified ball whose name she still does not know.

"One."

The guards may not know what lies behind wood and metal, but she does know what lies behind flesh.

"You're safe," she assures, clear British tone pitched low and understanding. Completely understanding, for as long as her ascended senses might last. "What you've been through is... improbable, impossible even. I know how it feels, and I can help you."

"Two!"

The very moment her fingers touch his clammy skin, Kwabena's eyelids batter themselves in a flurry of violent blinks. Listless pupils shrink and regain their awareness in the very same moment that a deep gasp is drawn in, filling his lungs with real air and helping to jolt him back to his senses. Not more than a beat later, his nerve endings respond instinctively to the touch, and where her fingers lay the skin melts away, turning into a little cloud of black gas. There it hovers for less than a second, before reforming just where it was, as if for a moment he felt that the touch of another was lethally dangerous.

As for Kwabena's mind, it is trapped between two places. Every inch of his memory and thought is flooded with what he'd just experienced; his first sense of true awareness while disassembled into another phase of existence. Now that actual light, sound, smell and touch fill his brain, he feels utterly conflicted, almost to the point of panic. However, there are reassuring words from a vaguely familiar voice that pierce through the cloud of distortion, speaking words that are impossibly amicable.

"Three!"

Kwabena's neck turns, and his eyes peer up toward Psylocke's, seeking contact to remind him once again that he has found his way home. The clothing she wears and the hat that helps to conceal her identity are meaningless to him, in spite of being noticed, for the voice has become familiar to him as the eyes that first glared at him across the shimmering blade of a deadly katana.

The recognition sets in, though there's an impossible lack of time to really appreciate it for what it is. Something in his gaze changes, from recognition to a question. Why would she come for him? Who is she? Does she know what horrible things he's done? The question in his eyes becomes strongly and unmistakeably, Why?

A prisoner between worlds. Between forms. When the Violet Butterfly speaks of understanding, she does not do so lightly; it's a condition she is intimately familiar with, flooded with pain both remembered and informed from the later consolidation of circumstance suppressed into the void lockbox at the heart of every human mind. It's possible to hide something so completely from oneself as to lose it in the entropic maelstrom of life. It's also possible to find it.

Betraying no audible astonishment at the mutation of dark skin, Betsy merely blinks her eyes - the surprise of an enlightened soul, stoic and mild. Her lips then turn up slightly, in a gentle smile of further understanding. Pieces of a puzzle falling into place - a puzzle not her own, but belonging to this fellow troubled creature. It should be jarring, to think like that, to call a man a beast - particularly in light of her recent strife. But in this state, still partway occupying that ineffable space-between-spaces, it's utterly natural.

And then she's brought from warm, distant ascension to cold, colliding reality. A finger tightens upon a trigger, and Betsy's violet gaze flashes upwards. A mind tightens upon a finger.

"'Safe' might have been an exaggeration," admits the telepath with humour so dissonant and queer from one previously speaking like some mother-angel. As the afterglow of her telepathic odyssey begins to dim, she nonetheless remains heightened in her powers - and it's with relatively laughable ease that she stays the hand of the security guard, his own, simple mind caught in an unending loop between warning and firing. Beside him, his colleague likely waits, the blush on his cheeks as frozen as the neural pathways compelling his prior inaction.

Turning her attention downward, once more, in the physical world, Psylocke moves to unseat herself, easing herself to a crouch beside the stricken man. Approaching his level from on high.

"Why?" She echoes his own, overpowering thought without herself thinking. A slow bat of her eyes concurs with the extension of her palm, easing as near his as she can - a universal gesture requesting both trust and pressing the need for movement. He needs to come with her, whether he trusts her or not, but she'll not expect him to act without thinking. She's already feeling a descending weariness as she spreads her ascended consciousness through three beings, and it's the last of this somehow-stolen power that she uses to project a portion of herself toward Kwabena's awareness. To explain who she is. Why she's here. It's up to him what he finds-- her control is still not so fine as to present a reasoned biography in seconds. Flashes, he'll see. Betsy Braddock, the tomboy turned model. Psylocke, the X-Man. Lady Mandarin, the stone cold killer lording over an entire underworld. It's all so vague, but flash after flash presents him a picture of the struggles she's faced - as he has, and will continue to - from eye sockets emptied of their loads, blood dripping over clutching hands. A mind distraught as it's pulled from one body and placed into another. The absolute, absolutely human pain of being segregrated from society as a mutant outcast. To be hated and despised simply for what one is.

It all comes in seconds, before insistently, she flexes her hand.

"We're the same, I promise you."

At this moment she knows less of him than he her. But she feels it. Felt it when their eyes first met.

Such a moment of inequality in understanding is short lived. Those flashes echo in Kwabena's mind, which lies somewhere between the lucidity of the real and the ethereal of the unreal. It triggers a similar flood of memories, almost violent in nature, starting at first with his first harrowing and miraculous experience with heroin. The spoon cooking the powder. The needle, gently piercing skin. Drawing some blood, then injecting the poison that thrust his mind into one of the most amazing, pain killing moments of his younger self. The harsh come down, wrapped up cold in wet blankets while his body uncontrollably shifts from solid to gas as the narcotic wrecked his mutation into listlessness. A younger Kwabena, wearing the bright colors of his Ghanaian heritage, being spoiled by the taunts of meaner children. Their fists beating red into his clothes until, at long last, his mutation first manifested, causing their fists to go straight through him and no longer causing harm. The terrible mockeries of fellow villagers; their angry voices as they threw rocks and pots at him, demanding he leave their village. Kwabena the freak.

Hiding in the streets of Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, waiting for the innocent hipster couple as he pulls his pistol. Beating them over the head and taking all of their possessions; his prize, to feed his drug addiction and put a little bit of food into his body.

Running from the Chicago police as they fired their weapons at him, the bullets whizzing through the air and passing through him harmlessly. Diving from the roof of a building in Los Angeles to escape the LAPD, falling twenty stories into what would have been a certain death, only to burst into a cloud of black smoke upon striking the pavement.

A pistol held by the hands of a raging drug lord, his nose white with the dust that fuels his rage, while Kwabena sits and waits for it to happen. The bullet discharged, his head bursting into smoke, the drug lord screaming in anguish and confusion.

It could once be said that Kwabena Odame never trusted anyone. However, things learned can be untaught, and with the shared flashes of memory, he goes against his every instinct and rises to his feet, caring not for his nakedness and feeling no shame in it. "We must go," he whispers through the thick Ghanaian accent. Turning, he looks at the security officers, glowering at them with a mixture of pity and blame, before slipping out of the stall while reaching for the woman's hand in a gesture that is both an extension of friendship and the desperate need to have something real to cling to in his early moments of true transformation.

'The same', she says, yet even in her brief touches upon the man's mind - as deep as she will allow herself without permission, or the foremost sharing of her own - Betsy has taken only measured vagaries of Kwabena Odame. Despite the trials of her existence, and the suffering she has endured, by immediate comparison they ought to be worlds apart. The wealthy, well-educated daughter of the British upper crust, and this shattered soul from the blackest depths of Ghana. That spoon - in her own hands - would be shining silver, her first world problems in youth a match for his own, harsher realities only in the pettiest of minds.

Yet unlike those of entitlement, she does not recoil at the flood of memories. Rather it deepens her conviction that here is a kindred spirit; their paths began at different places, and she has possessed benefits he could never imagine, but the irony of their condemnation as genetic filth to be resented and abhorred... is that they are both, inescapably human. Distinguished from the collective herd by their emotional responses to their respective tribulations, by their very personal evolution unwound over but part of a mortal lifetime.

No, they are the same. Neither is lesser or greater. United in gift and misfortune alike.

It's a decision she is comfortable reaching, making, though she exercises no more control over him than she would the dearest of her friends. He is allowed to reach that same conclusion by himself - if he chooses - the insistent extension of her palm a plea more than a command. When he rises to his full, bare height, her own shame indeed no greater than his, she feels a wave of relief and gratitude that transmits over the lingering tendril of that swift-broken neural link. Otherwise retreated from his mind, asking for no more than she already has, there remains a heightened sense of understanding that goes both ways.

There's a certain, odd sense in the sharing of mutual physical contact only after such a deep and intimate connection has been made. It finally brings Betsy out from the ocean of an expanded consciousness, and makes the following motions as businesslike and brisk by necessity as those she demonstrated two days earlier. Despite her attire, she remains Psylocke - those identities she shared awareness of, part and parcel of the same being after all - turning Kwabena toward the narrow window. A memory of the past, and a way into the future.

Once they're outside, her thrall over the security guards is released; they've got moments to distance themselves further from their would-be antagonists, but Betsy hesitates. Pulling toward a dumpster at the edge of a nearby alleyway, disregarding the gasps and cries of pedestrians glimpsing them from the street beyond as she retrieves - mercifully still there and intact - the duster abandoned during her original approach of the bank.

"We might as well share our clothes, too," she remarks with a smile, and the curve of a narrow brow.

When Kwabena takes through the window, he does it with such unique grace, unlike the way he'd entered. Fearlessly he vaults through, and his body turns into a cloud of black smoke as it passes that threshold. Down the cloud goes, almost gracefully, and reforms into the man once more with a soft and perfect landing. He seems quietly amazed for a moment, for his mutation had always come by sheer instinct, unable to be controlled. He is just now beginning to understand, like a child seeing color for the first time, that it can actually be controlled and manipulated.

However, such amazement is short lived, for as he materializes in the dirty alley way, the harsh reality of New York's backstreet grit has him also recognizing his nakedness. Embarrassment takes him quickly, and he spins about rapidly, as if looking for a place to hide. Instead, Psylocke retrieves her duster, and he reaches out to take it quickly. His dark face hides the blush well, and he quickly throws the duster over his shoulders and closes it up before making eye contact with the woman again. "Thanks," he mutters, and forces a somewhat awkward grin onto his face.

"You are Betsy?" he asks, while turning around to make for the street in his bare feet. "I am Kwabena, Kwabena Odame." He bursts out onto the street, similarly ignoring the surprised and shocked pedestrians. "I am also very good at hailing cabs!" he adds, while quite literally throwing himself in front of one. There is a screech of tires and the smell of burnt rubber as the taxi grinds to a halt.

"Hey, what the hell are you doin' here?" yells a man who clearly, based on his attitude and accent, grew up in the Bronx. He throws a fist out of the window, then extends his middle finger toward Kwabena. "You dumb son of a bitch! I oughta run you over!"

Kwabena turns to look at Psylocke, then nods his head toward the cab twice with a coy little smirk on his face.

Much like watching said child discover their innate talents, there's a transmitted joy in observing the unfolding talents of the dark-skinned mutant. It's often hard to remember, even sometimes impossible, that these arguable 'gifts' are the result of genetic progress. That the reviled, outcast minority are in the new wave of humanity's ever-marching evolution. Upon remembering, it can be even harder to bear in mind that they are still human.

Returning the man's grin with one of her own, easier and lighter by far, the mutant known as Psylocke inclines her head in a slow, affirming nod. "Betsy," she echoes, "Of all the names I've borne, it's the one closest to my heart." Closest to who she is. Even if the outer shell in no way matches the origin or tone of the woman it seemingly belongs to. That might seem odder, if they hadn't already shared what they have. As it is, it's just nice to exchange such pleasantries. A reminder of that self-same humanity so easily lost.

"Kwabena," repeats the violet-haired woman, reaching up idly to adjust her hat in the same instant that he's throwing himself away. "Kwa--" That second repetition is cut short, as she stops in mid-lunge, releasing a breath as the cab violently stalls. For a moment she flashes back to the last time they encountered one another, to that sacrifice. Memory is a powerful thing. Her relief as she approaches the cab, smiling, empowers her.

"He's hailing a cab," she smoothly informs the outraged driver, "This cab." Swinging open the rear door, she slips inside with all the grace and poise of a duchess, rendering his sputtering response void with a brow-curving glance into the rear view mirror. After waiting for Kwabena to join her, she motions for the man to begin driving before turning aside on her seat, hands resting in her lap as she tips her head back toward the abandoned fortress of the First National Bank now retreating into the past behind them.

"What happened back there," as she speaks, voice low - to the driver, beneath the roar of the cab's engine and the dull cacophony of the streets outside - a pained frown creases her olivine brow as she fixates on the Ghanian mutant alongside her. "They hate us for it. Blame us for what was lost. It's an attitude I should be growing used to, but I never do. If you remain on the streets, alone, you're in danger of more than just the new governmental regime."

She tears into that last with a strong undercurrent of vitriol lacing her tone, voice not raising because it doesn't have to - her feelings would be strong enough to penetrate a murmur. There's even a fleeting quickening of her step; the unintentioned haste of the empassioned.

"Kwabena," she says with sudden, almost jarring warmth. "It doesn't have to be that way. You don't have to be lonely, or outcast. There are... people I'd have you meet. People who've helped me to escape from the fear of what I am."

Shaking his head at the angry driver, Kwabena quickly turns and follows Psylocke into the back seat, where he's careful to make sure that her duster keeps himself covered, as modestly as is possible.

"You ever pull a stunt like that again and I will run you over," grumbles the cab driver as he pulls out into traffic. "Jesus Christ!" he curses. "Goddamn crazy New Yorkers. Where you people going?"

"Brooklyn," instructs Kwabena. "Take the Williamsburg bridge. Corner of 13th and Berry."

"Fair enough," answers the driver.

With that settled, Kwabena turns his attention upon the woman, his counterpart. As she begins to speak, he surely listens, but there is a part of him that is beginning to recollect his experience. It all happened so quickly, and he hasn't really had a moment to process it all. Her words are not lost on him, but he seems momentarily distracted. "Wait," he starts to interrupt, but stops and lets her finish. "Wait," he repeats, lifting his hands up in a pleading gesture. "Just... just hold on a moment." He turns away and rests his head back against the seat, closing his eyes and breathing a slow and deep breath. Then, his hands begin to tremble. He opens his eyes and looks at them, while a form of desperate fear begins to creep into his otherwise strong willed gaze. Then, he begins to form his shaking fingers into fists, and closes his eyes once more to bite down the tears that threaten to spring forward.

"Please, just give me one moment," he whispers, before just sitting there in silence as the car moves through the streets. Assuming that she obliges his wishes, he sits there in silence, letting the memories course through him as he wrestles them into existence within the passage of time and his harsh thrust back into, for lack of a better term, existence.

Finally, three blocks later, he opens his eyes again and turns to look at her. He seems calmer now, having regained some level of peace and understanding. "Betsy, I need to understand something. When... when I put myself into that force field, I... everything just seemed to stop. I don't even know what day it is, much less what happened!" Similarly, his voice remains utterly quiet, though the inflection and pacing clearly dictates the intensity of his feelings. "I need to know," he whispers, suddenly adopting a worried expression. "Is she safe? Did we... did we save them? Did we save her?"

He doesn't even know the outcome of the events that unfolded that day; it's likely understandable why knowing is much more of an immediate concern to him than everything Betsy has offered. There will come a time to address her offer, for sure, but for Kwabena, the time has not yet come.

Pain. One need not be a telepath to see it, the myriad fears and doubts that assail a man coming to terms with the greatness - or otherwise - of his being. In this instant, her powers actually do more harm than good; Betsy is several steps ahead of where she assumes this agonized soul to be, too adjusted to the dizzying slipstream of digesting a thousand thoughts and feelings simultaneously. It would be false to say she never struggles, at times it's overwhelming, but a decade of experience makes it hard to remain on a level with those entirely new to the concepts involved here. To the questions, with or without answers, that one naturally asks.

She's not in the least as cold as her businesslike turn of phrase makes her appear, however, and swallows back a tremulous quiver of her own as she watches Kwabena overcome. It's a subtle outward sign of the knot that twists in her gut, of the knife that follows a moment later when she turns away with a nod of deep understanding, granting the man what little privacy she can in the confines of the vehicle. Surrounded by the press of a city that might be arrayed against them, if they knew what they were. Her own mind is assailed by it, a distant hum she tries to block out... but on thinking of it, she begins to fail. Her breaths deepen.

When Kwabena turns his attention back to her, violet eyes shift slowly to meet his gaze. Her mouth is held in a soft line, the breath behind it held also as she waits for him to speak. She tries not to look as troubled as she feels, but fails; at least in part. Her pupils flicker, her expression darkens, and she hangs her head, watching him from a low angle. From within the smoke of her own assailing doubts. From within the very reason she came back.

"No," she responds finally, in a whisper of her own, so quiet that it may only be the familiar shaping of her mouth that drives it home. Or the anguish in her eyes. It's fleeting though, as she finds the strength she needs to sit aright, chest swelling as she draws and releases a cooling breath. "We didn't save her. We couldn't. But it..." A hand shifts from her lap, transferring to Kwabena's knee with a gentle, reassuring tension. "It wasn't your fault. You gave us the only chance we had, and she-- she was at peace." Psylocke saw to that herself, but she'll not claim credit for a small mercy. She doesn't deserve to. "What you did was selfless, and brave, and something a precious few would ever have dared to do. I know it's hard..."

She leans a few inches closer, still looking up at the Ghanian.

"But you should be proud."

She lets that hang there, aware of how hopeless her words must seem, then sits back. Her gaze shifts askance toward the window, the passing blur of people on the streets, the endless hubbub of a city that lives in part thanks to the efforts of people like Kwabena. For their suffering.

"I came back because I wouldn't lose you, too. This world needs people like you, my friend."

The plea that had escaped his lips is mirrored in Kwabena's eyes, but he can already discern her answer before she mouths the word, based on the turn of her head and the look in her eyes. He blinks twice and recoils somewhat, shoulders shifting back as if the answer slapped him, literally, in the face. He seems to share a similar reaction when she touches his knee, and nearly flinches, for he was not used to the touch of a friend. His leg nearly jerks instinctively, and he looks down, surprised to see her hand there. He looks back at her as she tries to explain, but he does something unexpected. He focuses, he listens, letting go of all the other distractions so that he might capture what ever it is she is trying to tell him.

But you should be proud.

The words echo in his head in unfamiliarity. He should be proud? Proud that he came close to relapsing on heroin only a few days prior? Proud that his crowning achievement up until the bank heist was that he'd tried to warn a relative stranger about a drug lord's price on her head, which was only there because of his meddling?

The denial has no strength, for she's right. He meets her eyes for a few moments, then hesitantly looks away as he tries once more, on trained instinct, to deny it. However, he can't; not anymore. Looking back up and into the woman's eyes, he knows that she's right.

When she looks away, he hesitantly looks back down at her hand before reaching to take it in his. In part, it's because he's uncomfortable with it there. Women tended not to get close to him, and those who did were the most despicable of sorts... junkies wanting to get a cheap blow off him, exchanging sex for drugs, or drunken women with whom he'd shamelessly taken advantage of. Having her hand there, on his knee, it simply felt wrong. However, having her hand in his, that was comforting; a type of comfort he needed.

As the skyline of Manhattan begins to disappear in favor of the tall tresses and cables of the Williamsburg bridge, Kwabena continues to look at Betsy while she watches the city pass. "Thank you," he whispers, with heartfelt gratitude. "I might have been lost forever." He, of course, is speaking literally; of being lost in disassociation, unable to find his way back to his natural state. The duality of his words, however, are not lost on him.

Betsy does not smile as her hand is taken, but she does turn toward Kwabena with a look of gentle pleasure and approval; but one a far, far cry from those of the poor souls recollected by the Ghanian. It's almost the look of a teacher or parent, quietly thrilled at the acquittal of a favoured charge, though entirely lacking the vestigial ego of superiority. His thanks are taken at equal face value, for what they are: he is not kneeling, but expressing himself with the grace and maturity that, in Betsy's experience, only the finest people can contain.

There's no need to front, to perform some mummery for one another. They can just be. Not squeezing, or shifting, simply allowing him to hold her in that comforting grasp, she allows silence to reign as they share a level, sympathetic gaze.

When at last she speaks, it's with forethought and care.

"The hardest thing in this world, is to live when you know what you are. Just a few minutes ago, you showed me parts of yourself - experiences - that would shatter lesser men. But that young boy... Kwabena, 'the freak'," emotion pours into the quoted phrase; an echo of his own pain, that she's so acutely felt, along with her utter disparagement that people could say such a thing. And, deeper still, her own agony that she cannot condemn them for it. Because she has a duty. Because they all have to be 'better' for the greater good. "He didn't have a single thing to be ashamed of. Had never been wrong, or cruel, or selfish, or evil. He was just a boy." She turns away again, without leaving him behind in her thoughts, back to the window. "We've all done things we regret, /bitterly/..." Her voice grows harsh there, forcing a pause as she draws a tight breath, head shaking to and fro, just once. "But it's in those regrets that we can find what we believed lost." Suddenly, she smiles, sniffing back a gentle laugh. "It wasn't easy for me to come back. It wasn't easy to find you, Kwabena." It's fitting to the duality that she can on no level consider this merely a physical search. This connection, this bond, was necessary. His depth of character, and his goodness of being, may also have been. "I can't promise it will ever be easier to find yourself. Heaven knows it's not for me. But..."

Once more meeting his gaze, she lifts her chin just faintly, outwardly echoing the stern power of the kunoichi he first encountered in the tension-charged corridor of the First National Bank. But tempered with the gift of hindsight, with the knowledge of who she is. Who they both are.

"You have the strength. Don't let it fade. And when you're ready, remember what I said."

There is, locked inside of the Ghanaian, an honorable man. It is that honorable man that has come to hate what Kwabena has become, what he has resorted to, in his pathetic attempts to live the life that he half fell, half walked into. It is the honorable man now, the one who begins to recollect the recent developments of his life. Of Erik Lensherr and his counterpart; of the one called Domino; of the woman calling herself Ororo Monroe. It is with a fine sense of irony that he considers the stark differences between the way Lensherr approached him and the way Betsy has done the same, both offering to help him. However, there was something finely different about the woman's approach when compared to Lensherr's. She lacks the charisma and superiority with which the older man carried himself, and it was that charisma and superiority that struck upon Kwabena's severe distrust of... well, pretty much anyone. It could very well be that very flaw that kept him from immediately taking up loyalty to a strange old man, who unbeknownst to Kwabena, could have led him down a path he'd never be able to turn back from.

What Psylocke possesses is much more earnest, a type of appeal that lies very much on his level. Worlds apart, with very different struggles and histories, but similar in many ways. He looks away as well, watching as the cab rolls into Brooklyn and comes closer to the small corner apartment that he rented with what little money he had left. It would only be another week before another payment was due, and he was fresh out of cash, his motorcycle likely stolen or towed, taken as evidence by the police. In that week, he would be forced to make a decision; a decision between going back to his old ways, a street thug robbing people to survive, or to find some way of living a proper life without any truly legitimate identification. As much as he may loath the idea of going with her, to meet her friends, he begins to realize that without them, he may no longer be able to avoid a self destructive path that would end in his undoing.

"I... don't think I have to wait any longer," he murmurs. "I don't want to be in danger any more. These people of yours." He looks back toward her, still holding her hand as it brings him comfort. "If they helped you, then maybe they can help me." His stark composure breaks into something humored, as if laughing at himself and the whole situation was something necessary to ease the tension. "I have to admit, I am running out of time."

Betsy Braddock would be the first to admit her flaws. What wisdom she has is earned through experience, rooted not in the wider ways of the world - in political and intellectual education - but by the twenty eighth year swinging free in the biased circumstance of her own path. A telepath's route through the world is a curious one to adequately judge, whether the ability to read and manipulate others is a blessing or curse upon the inherent righteousness of the gift's bearer, but she does act earnestly. Doing what she has come to believe is best...

Even if it's not what seems right to others.

There's a cruel irony in the result of her own recent meeting with Erik Lehnsherr, of the offered allegiance that has passed between them. Indeed, he would have been her second recourse if the offer of meeting the more known quantity, the genuinely benevolent X-Men, had been refused outright. It's hard not to be taken in by such charisma. Psylocke has not fallen entirely for these charms... but it's a flaw of her own that the white-haired man was able to so effectively manipulate her emotions regarding the proposed measures against mutants.

"Time is running out on us all, my friend," Betsy replies, in persisting ignorance of the gravity of that mistake. "Sometimes I believe that all we have left, is borrowed. That we buy our time here by the actions we choose to take..." Tailing off with a gentle frown, she reaches with her free hand into the inside pocket of her blazer. A downward glance takes in a wad of neatly folded bills; enough, she hopes, to buy doubtless expensive passage outside the city. She hesitates before acting further. "If you begin to regret this, Kwabena; if you need space, or time, I will not force you to walk further than you wish to. I want to help, not force, and I know how difficult it can be to seek acceptance..."

It's a long, hard road she's not certain she'll ever reach the end of. Easing a smile in spite of her concerns, she nods, as much to assuage her own concerns as acknowledge the Ghanian's convictions. "Get your things, and then I'll show you the way home."