Smith. Excellent, far less awkward than if she hadn’t changed her name back after she and the other Tarin had split up.

Tarin smiled, maybe the first real smile since they’d reconnected in the park the other night, “Nice to meet you, Lee Smith.”

Unfortunately, the attention was now back on him and Tarin shrugged his shoulders a bit, “I’ve done a little bit of everything except actual organized sports. I had a pretty strict training regimen when I was younger and it was mostly focused around the kinds of things that connected body and mind. Lots of core work, lots of breathing and meditation...yoga. The kind of stuff I needed to get by and blend in so SUPER didn’t pick up on what I could do and snatch me.” They were veering into dangerous territory now and Tarin shrugged a bit.

“Now, I mostly just run and try to lift a bit each day. I do light circuit work when I can.” It was kind of weird chatting about it like this.

“Where do you run?” He asked, again veering a bit close to dangerous territory but not wanting to destroy the easy mood that had cropped up between them.

When she properly introduced herself, Tarin smiled, and for the first time it looked to be a real, genuine smile. The fact that he could do that so soon after a merge was both surprising and very good to see, and she returned the smile in kind. “It’s good to meet you properly, Tarin Brooks.”

Then she listened to what he was saying about his workout regime and she just nodded as he explained. Other than the running, it was so much different than anything she had ever done to ‘properly’ work out.

But then he mentioned why he did all that, what the reason was, and she turned a confused look toward him. “That kind of thing, working out, actually helped with your powers?”

She supposed that the meditation and breathwork made sense, but she had never even thought about the possibility that physical working out could help with a power as…mentally based as Tarin’s.

“Where do you run?”

Lee casually took a deep breath. This was not a question that she wanted to go into, not so soon. Why couldn’t he have asked her about what she did to work out other than run? Explaining why she did what she did in the gym would be so much safer to talk about right now. “Mostly the park,” she finally replied. “It’s really the only place large enough when I need to run that doesn’t make me feel like I’m going in circles.” That was a good enough answer. He didn’t need to know about when she needed to run like that normally.

Lee was curious about the way he worked out and Tarin shrugged his shoulders, “I mean, yeah.” he said slowly and thoughtfully, “It’s all kind of connected isn’t it?”

It was hard to explain, but he’d try, “Sure, most of what I do is up here.” he said, tapping the side of his head, “but it’s a lot of work. I don’t think I need to explain to you that it’s a full time job to get any kind of peace and quiet.” He’d done a terrible job explaining, he looked around at pretty much nothing for a moment, trying to figure out something that could make it a little bit more clear. “It’s kind of like when you yell. Sometimes you just raise your voice to do it. It gets the point across, but it’s different when you scream from here.” he said, hand tapping his chest just over his diaphragm. “Strong core, strong body, strong mind and all that…You asked me once how I could stand to hang out on Hart Island? Practice.”

Lee didn’t seem to be familiar with the connection and it made him curious about something, “Didn’t your Tarin do that sort of thing?”

She ran in the park. Tarin nodded his head, the smile from earlier sliding from his features as he nodded.

That was where he usually ran too. The park was huge, maybe he could still run there even after…everything. “Me too.” he said.

As she listened, Lee realized that everything he was saying really did make sense. Obviously not the kind of immediate, he’s having trouble with this kind of power so work out kind of sense, but it did when looking at the whole picture.

“No, he didn’t,” Lee said quietly, almost a little sadly. “If either of us had thought about doing that, maybe it would have kept us from having so many problems. The only thing that either of us did, well, other than my running, was to take some self-defense/fighting lessons after we got back from Columbia…”

He went running in the park too. Of course he did. With the shop so close to Central Park, why would he go anywhere else to take a run? “If you wanted to, I could show you some different paths some time. There’s some between The Lake and the reservoir that are nice.”

Huh. The Tarin from this side of the rift hadn’t trained physically beyond some self defense classes after one of the world-saving trips that he and Lee had apparently taken. Tarin from the other side of the rift didn’t really know how to feel about that.

The more time passed, the more stark the differences between him and the man from this side seemed to be. It was surreal in a way that Tarin hadn’t really experienced since his early days on this side when every store was a novelty and the way certain foods were made was a shock and a surprise.

“I didn’t figure it out on my own.” Tarin said finally with another little shrug, he did that a lot around Lee. “I was dangerous to the people around me for more reasons than what my powers could directly do. If I wanted to stay, I had to prove that I could keep everyone safe.” He’d seen what happened to people who couldn’t, and not just at the hands of SUPER.

As for the running, Tarin nodded at Lee’s idea, “That might be nice. A chance of scenery.” Away from the place where he knew he…no…the spirit…had killed someone. There was no guarantee about the rest of the park though, had he taken the others there too? Lee said that all of them had been found, so she would know. This wasn’t the place to ask though. The little green space they’d found wasn’t exactly secluded.

“So what from here?” he said, the temptation to once again tell Lee she didn’t have to be here rising as it had so many times before. She knew, and was still here. “As nice as this little space is, I doubt you want to just stand here all day.”

He hadn’t figured it out on his own. Lee nodded. That made sense, then as to why the Tarin she’d known hadn’t done the same thing. “Ah, I guess that makes sense,” she ended up replying. “He was pretty much on his own the whole time between leaving Texas and meeting me. Neither of us had really met many mutants until then, actually, and he certainly hadn’t had any relationships, of any kind.” Yeah…this was starting to get into awkward territory.

A change of scenery in the park might be nice? “Well, depending on how far you normally run for, there are a lot of options in the park. Though the paths on the far side of the park…I know some people consider a distance shorter than just [/i]getting[/i] to the far side of the park to be more than enough for a run…

“Yeah…I’m not a huge fan of standing around outside,”[/font] Lee told him. “But I’ll leave it up to you if you still want to go to the Empire State Building, if you want to meet the woman up there. Like I said, she’s normally the only one up there, and she was the only one I’ve ever been ‘introduced’ to, so she must be pretty…easy to deal with.”

On his own from the time he left Texas?

Certainly hadn’t had any relationships?

Tarin didn’t ask, he had the sneaking suspicion that Lee wouldn’t answer if he did.

Lee put the ball back in his court as far as their next move and he tried to decide if he really wanted to take the trip to the Empire State Building

Lee pointed out that the ghost woman was usually alone up there and Tarin mused for a moment over why that would be. Curiosity peaked he nodded and started walking again in the direction of the iconic building. “I’m curious. I’ve rarely met spirits that people want to talk to more than once. Let’s check it out.” He said.

As they walked, Tarin mused over his own arrival to New York and the events that had followed.

“I hitchhiked my way to New York.” He said, “I’m not proud of it, but I stole all the cash I could find in our house and I just started thumbing it.” He paused for a moment “it’s a miracle I made it there alive. A couple of times I wasn’t sure I would.”

Why was he telling Lee all of this? Tarin supposed it was because she’d been so open with him…that or it was because right now it was easier to talk about the past than the present.

“But I did make it. It’s a long story how, but I managed to fall in with a group of mutants when I got here. An Underground Railroad of sorts that kept mutants safe. There were really strict rules though, rules that you just couldn’t break. You also couldn’t just leave.”

One of the rules had explicitly outlawed relationships. It would have upset the natural order of things, promoted infighting, and they couldn’t have kids around. Tarin didn’t share that piece with Lee, it felt too personal and too raw.

It was one of the things that had brought it all crashing down in the end.

“Eventually things went bad there and I was on my own. Luckily I’d learned enough by that point that I could hold my own. SUPER was starting to become a problem around the time the rift opened.”

Tarin started walking, and so Lee followed, easily catching up to walk beside him as he said he was curious about the spirit at the top of the Empire State Building.

Then he was telling her how he had left home, how he’s stolen all the money in the house and hitchhiked to New York City. At age 14, if Lee was remembering correctly. “That would have been hard,” Lee said, her voice quiet as she thought back to how things had been for her when she’d left home. And she’d been two years older at the time, and hadn’t traveled nearly as far. “I’m glad you were able to find people who were able to help you. Though I’m suspicious of groups that have such strict rules. I guess it does make sense, considering…”

But he went on to say that SUPER had just started to become a problem, and Lee frowned in confusion. “They were that new of an organization? How were they such a large, wide scale problem if they were that new?” it didn’t really make sense to Lee. Though, the camps had become a large, wide scale problem rather quickly, too.

Tarin had shared so much of his past, how he’d come to New York just now, and Lee couldn’t help but marvel at how different it had been than on this side of the rift.

“My parents thought it was a medical condition at first,” Lee said after a few moments. “Everyone in the family was so tired, so much of the time. It took a year of doctors visits before we realized that it wasn’t a medical condition, it was me. My brother and I used to go see horrible sci-fi movies all the time. It got to the point where even though we went to matinees, he needed to take a nap afterwards because he was so tired.

“It didn’t take too much longer for my parents to pull me out of school, ‘home schooling because of my medical condition’ so no one would find out I was a mutant. They avoided being around me at home as much as they could, and when my younger siblings wanted to be around me, my parents found ‘reasons’ for them to not be. I ended up basically stuck in my room all the time, the worst possible thing they could have done to me in terms of my powers.."

She frowned at the thought that Kevin was in that house right now. Despite her lingering feelings about how she had been treated, they had been trying over the last decade, and Kevin did love them.

“That only lasted a couple months. Just before I turned 16, I packed a bag and left. I should have done what you did, though, and taken more money with me.”

Tarin just nodded when Lee said that she was glad he’d found people to take care of him.

That was one way of thinking about it.

As for SUPER, “As an organization SUPER had been around for a long time, even if we didn’t know what to call them. They’d only become a problem for me recently. They sent someone out to the island to try and recruit me.” Tarin’s mouth twisted in distaste as he said the words. “I managed to send him packing, but I’d never heard of them taking no for an answer.”

Lee’s story was nothing short of heart breaking and Tarin found himself utterly disgusted with her parents. As far as he was concerned when you had a child you decided from the moment they were born that you would love them for exactly who and what they were. That was the job. Nothing more, nothing less.

Isolating your child…bringing them intentional harm…it was no wonder that Lee had left home. Tarin once again looked over and down at the vibrant, smart, genuinely kind woman walking next to him and thought about her locked in a room. From what she’d said, she’d have had little to no energy…it was just gross.

He couldn’t considerate with that much. His Mom had loved him, she just hadn’t know what to do with him and all the psychiatrists in the world hadn’t been able to figure it out either. All it had taken was one three day hold in a psychiatric facility and Tarin had known he had to leave.

“I didn’t have much money either. Just a couple hundred bucks. I ran out about halfway there.”

Ahh…That made more sense that he’d only just started having issues with them recently when the rift opened. “They normally didn’t take no for an answer, yet they did with you?” Lee asked as she looked over at Tarin. “And they actually came out to that island to find you? How did they even know you were there?” That part was hard for Lee to figure out. It wasn’t like he would have been getting mail delivered out there, after all.

But he’d said something about them using psychics, right? Maybe that was how they knew where he was? Possible, but also a terrifying thought.

“Wait, how did you send him packing? What did you do?” She knew now that he’d done everything he could, basically his entire life, to hide his powers and the fact that he was a mutant, and while she knew he was much stronger than the Tarin she knew, physically assaulting an agent, even one in a secretive group like SUPER seemed to have been, couldn’t have been a good idea.

“And that’s still a lot more than I had. I didn’t even have $100 when I left my parents’. But at least it got me to Toronto and kept me fed for a little while.”

“They sent a single agent out to do the recruiting. He was young, and I’d gather pretty inexperienced. I spooked him some, politely declined the job offer, and he left.

I knew they’d be back though, especially because I’d shown a little bit of what I could do.”

That was all ancient history now though, he’d made it through the rift and had been on the right side when it closed.

They were approaching the Empire State Building now and and Tarin nodded at just how little Lee had left home with, “That must have been really hard with you being so young.”

A single agent. A single inexperienced agent was sent to ‘recruit’ Tarin. If SUPER was as bad as Tarin was saying, and Lee had no reason to not believe him, they must not have known what it was that he could do. Either that, or they had thought he would readily agree.

Either way, it now made perfect sense why he had come through the rift; it seemed that another encounter with SUPER would not have ended so successfully for Tarin.

“Well, yeah, of course it was hard,” Lee said, giving a slight shrug as she looked over at Tarin. “And even on the streets, people didn’t want me around once they found out what I did to them. But at least I was able to get energy, and I started to learn what I was capable of. I mean, it took years for me to really figure that all out, how much more I’d have even imagined being capable of, but I started to learn.

“And weren’t you even younger when you left? I have no idea how I would have managed being on my own like that at 14.”

And just like that, they were there.

It was a Sunday in early spring, and it was a nice day, so it was predictably packed as Tarin and Lee walked into the lobby.

Lee still seemed surprised that he’d managed in New York at fourteen. “I got picked up really quickly, but I was very very lucky.” And very very easily manipulated. SUPER had excelled at scooping homeless mutants up off the street, especially if they lost control of their powers in public. A kid would make one mistake, and they’d just be gone.

Tarin looked around at all the people in line and in the lobby taking pictures of the building. It was famous on his side as an example of the art deco style just like it was over here. There were slight differences in the style, but Tarin didn’t know enough to put his finger on exactly what they were. It was like looking through dirty glass distorting a view you’d seen your whole life.

“My “friends” helped me get in touch with the right person, otherwise I wouldn’t have lasted a week.” He said, hoping the slight emphasis on the word, ‘friends’ would get the point across that it had been the spirits that had helped him.

“It makes it all the more impressive that you were able to do anything on your own.”

This line of conversation was going to be difficult in such a crowded space. There may not have been robots or secret government agencies waiting to snatch them up…but anti-mutant sentiment was alive and well. If you could blend in…it was just better.

“So…what do you do now? I feel like you mentioned working in a bar? Is that a full time gig?”

There. Back to safe topics.

Lee was a little surprised at just how busy it was when they'd walked into the Empire State Building, but then she remembered that it was the weekend. Right…

His ‘friends’ had helped him to get in touch with the right people, the people who had helped him survive in New York City as a teenage mutant. And, in his mind, that made what she'd done that much more impressive.

Lee just nodded in acknowledgement that she'd heard what he said. She had simply been trying to survive, and a lot of the time in those early years, she had only barely managed that much. It wasn't impressive, just simply survival. But the middle of the line in the Empire State Building to get to the elevator was not the place to argue that.

Even though she wanted to.

Thankfully for the location, Tarin changed subjects, asking what it was she did, asking about her working at the bar. “Not any more. I cut my hours back to help Kevin through everything after…” her voice trailed off, but she assumed that Tarin would know she meant when the rift closed, when his father had disappeared.

‘Now, I pretty much just handle the paperwork, orders, scheduling, payroll, stuff like that,”[/fon]t she continued with a shrug, glancing over at Tarin as she spoke. “But I had been full-time managing the bar before that. Still would be if Matt had his way.”

The line moved in increments about the size of an elevator full of people. He knew it wasn’t true, but in situations like this Tarin always felt like people were looking at him, that they could somehow know how other he really was.

Maybe this hadn’t been a great idea. Lee was talking again though, and he latched onto her words for distraction.

“Not any more. I cut my hours back to help Kevin through everything after…”

Yikes, it seemed like there was no such thing as a safe topic. At least not for him and Lee. It was still hard for her to talk about some things, even after all this time. Tarin made a mental note to tread a bit more carefully around those topics. It wasn’t fair for him to dig up painful memories simply to assuage his curiosity about matters that didn’t really involve him.

Unsurprisingly it sounded like Lee had done a number of jobs at the bar where she worked and Tarin couldn’t help to smile a bit and shake his head. “I can imagine he would. I get the feeling that you’re every bit as determined as a manager as you are at everything else…”

Studying Lee a for a moment, he shook his head again, “For some reason the world hopping and world saving didn’t surprise me, but I wouldn’t have pegged you for a bar type.”

The line shuffled forward, ever closer to the elevators that the attendants seemed to be packing as full as humanly possible.