”I mean, how much of this hasn’t already been weird?” Lee asked with a smile. The strange familiarity that she seemed to feel really did just make everything weirder when she thought about it.

The smile faded slightly when Tarin brought Rupert up. ”Ah, yes…The first thing that you need to know is that he is a very contradictory hypocrite. I have heard him contradict himself in the same sentence.”

Lee let that sink in for a moment as she sipped her coffee. ”To start with, he was at one time the Supervisor for the mutant registration camp here in New York. The first night that I met him, apparently he had already met this world’s Tarin, and knew he was a mutant…he was merged with a different spirit, and tried to go out the window rather than deal with me. Rupert may have seen me pull him back into the apartment by the collar of his shirt.

“He’s not how I was caught,” Lee continued, shaking her head. ”Yet Rupert came up to the apartment after seeing that. To make sure he was alright. I was terrified, he’d introduced himself as a detective and the supervisor of the camps. But he also told us he was the ‘inside man’ for the breakout.

“Fast forward to that,” Lee paused here, taking another sip before leaning her head back against the couch, eyes closing. ”He had me dragged into his office.” Even though it had happened 15 years earlier, Lee still flinched slightly remembering the shock she’d gotten when the guard had grabbed her. ”I was the only one there that knew. He actually turned my collar off while I was in the office, and he let me eat his lunch because he’d had no appetite. Let me know that the breakout was happening at some point that day.”

She rolled her head on the back of the couch, turning to look at Tarin. As she continued to speak, her voice wasn’t upset or angry, it just sounded matter of fact. ”But, during that same short time in his office that day, he also pulled his gun on me and I was certain that he was going to shoot me.”

Lee spoke and Tarin simply sat and listened. Lee’s story was like a lot of other things she had explained over the last few days. Almost too wild to believe.

The more Tarin heard, the more Tarin frowned. Lee had mentioned that she’d been in the registration camps, but the tale she spun about the man who had simultaneously ran the camp and helped to orchestrate the breakout was almost too crazy to believe.

Lee had no reason to lie though, not to him.

This man, this Rupert, had drug her into his office, fed her, then held her at gunpoint.

He’d helped with the breakout. He’d come to help when Lee and the other Tarin had trouble…but it also sounded like he’d scared her and intimidated her too.

”I’m starting to see what you meant about the man being a walking contradiction.”

”Yeah…” Lee said, her eyes dropping to her mug in her hands. ”Rupert also found him…in a similar situation. Could have shot him. Instead, he got me to come ‘fix’ things. And left us to deal with it.

“Except, six months later, Rupert decided to come to our place to kill him.” Lee paused there, biting her bottom lip as memories came back. She’d walked into the apartment to the smell of burning food to find Rupert tied to a chair. With his gun on the table. To kill Tarin then long after the fact, instead when Rupert had found him covered in blood in the middle of a merge.

”Thankfully, he didn’t,” Lee continued, her voice lower. ”I may have broken a bottle of scotch over Rupert’s head at some point.

“But then, a month later, Rupert came again. Tied him to a tombstone in a cemetery…” Lee’s eyes closed as she bit her lip again.

The story hadn’t nearly been over, as it turned out.

Lee spoke of a situation like the one they were in right now, only instead of Lee finding the other Tarin it had been this Rupert man. A cop, the man who had supervised the registration camps.

Somehow, he’d decided that the other Tarin deserved to live too…that gave this Tarin something to think about. Later. He’d think about all of that later.

Except that there’d been conflict, and the other man had come back to settle the score sometime later. For what it was worth, Rupert had failed in his mission and Lee had brained him with a bottle of scotch.

This all sounded like fiction.

“But then, a month later, Rupert came again. Tied him to a tombstone in a cemetery…”

Of course he had. At the mention of the cemetery, this Tarin cringed. He had his own story that started in a very similar way.

”I…can imagine that was very overwhelming. I’m guessing that wasn’t something that your Tarin did very often?”

He thought for a moment, noticing that Lee was worrying her bottom lip again, this had to be serious.

”Please tell me this somehow ends with him in jail having just broken out long enough to get stuck on the other side.”

”Never,” Lee said with a shake of her head, her eyes still closed. ”Even the times we went to Texas, he’d never even go near the cemetery to see his father’s grave.

“And overwhelming is one way to describe it…” she said, but had to swallow the lump that was trying to form in her throat before she could continue. ”He said the spirits were coming and he could feel a merge about to happen. He tried to get away, to get out of there. Everything that he could, he tried. And, I guess he was successful because he avoided a merge. The problem was, he did that by…forcing himself out of his body. The best explanation we’ve come up with is to call is astral projection, but I didn’t know that at the time. He was essentially in a coma. For a month. He didn’t know how to get back into his body.”

Lee paused here, taking a sip of her coffee, which had grown cold by this point, before opening her eyes to look at Tarin. ”The spirit you met yesterday, she taught him to reach his mind, or energy, or something out, and that, with Slate’s healing ability, finally got him back in his body.”

“And no, Rupert never ended up in jail. Would you believe that six months after that, he baked us a pie and showed up to apologize?”

Never? The other Tarin had never gone to or near a graveyard? This Tarin simply had to gape a little in surprise when Lee explained that little tidbit.

He didn’t have time to do more than gape though, because then Lee was describing the aspect of the other Tarin’s power that the spirit had alluded to the previous day at the Empire State Building.

Astral. Projection. The other Tarin had been able to literally remove his consciousness from his body and had gotten stuck like that for a month. Until someone named Slate and the ESB spirit had helped him get back.

The story still made Lee emotional and Tarin almost felt bad for having asked her to tell it. The whole thing was just…unbelievable though. Even if it was all true.

”That's a lot for anyone to go through…”

As for the apology, ”Did nobody ever think of a restraining order?”

There was something else though, something that was nagging at the back of Tarin’s mind, ”Wait…was this before or after you saved the world?”

Lee looked over at Tarin as he started speaking, then burst out laughing when he asked about a restraining order. ”Honestly? No, not once,” Lee replied after a moment, the laughter still in her voice. ”That wouldn’t have done a damn thing to stop Rupert, former cop or not. Plus, trying to get one would have brought a lot more attention to things we didn’t want paid attention to, and at the time, we were already under scrutiny because I was still dealing with immigration stuff after we got married.

“Damn…” Lee said to herself, her head tilting as she thought. ”That really was a busy few months there…”

”Wait…was this before or after you saved the world?”

Looking back over at Tarin, Lee rolled her eyes at him. ”I told you, we didn’t save the world…Though, I guess it was only about a month after he woke up that we flew down to Columbia. Where I guess we did save a village. And helped, minorly, with making things better in the country. But that’s far from saving the world.”

Tarin supposed it made sense that restraining orders hadn’t come to mind. The man had been a cop after all, and Tarin knew that the justice system on this side was just as bad as it had been on the other side. Not much to have faith in.

Plus.

As Lee had pointed out, Rupert had found other-Tarin after his own run in with the spirit that Lee had saved him from a couple of days ago.

Oh. And Lee wasn’t American.

”That does make sense…” Tarin said contritely, but at least Lee had laughed a bit. The light-heartedness didn’t last though. Lee spoke again and Tarin couldn’t do anything but shake his head. All of that had happened in the span of a few months…and then they’d gone to Columbia. To save a town…and make the country better. Tarin had a sneaking suspicion that if Lee said they’d marginally improved things that meant that major systemic changes for the betterment of society had taken place after they left.

”I thought my life had been wild…” Tarin said, frowning his own little contemplative smile as he sipped his rapidly cooling coffee and studied Lee over the rim of the cup.

It wasn’t exactly difficult to reconcile the things Tarin knew about Lee from experience with the things that she was telling him. It just seemed outlandish that a single person had gone through so much and seemed so…well adjusted.

”I’ve been trying to figure out how you were able to handle all of this so in stride…” He said, gesturing between them.

He thought for a moment, ”Are you okay?” he asked, sitting his coffee mug down on the coffee table.

”I know that all of this has been hard for you, and I’ve been really self absorbed…Is there anything I can do to help you?”

”I’ve been trying to figure out how you were been able to handle all of this so in stride…”

Lee just shrugged her shoulder, just her left. All of these memories were causing her to go back to old habits. ”Survival technique?” She replied as she set her mug down, but even her own voice didn’t sound confident about that. ”Even before we had met, any time something bad happened, I’d deal with the situation, and only once it was over and I was alone and safe would I try to deal with everything else. And with merges, I have a lot of time to deal with that…”

Then he asked how she was doing. Really asked. Lee looked down at her hands, a crease forming between her eyebrows. And to be honest, she really wasn’t sure. After merges, other than her initial crying breakdown once he passed out, sometimes even before she’d start cleaning, she didn’t really worry about how she was feeling, how she was doing. Someone had to hold things together, direct everything back to some semblance of normal.

Except that Tarin appeared that he was holding himself together, not falling apart, most of the time.

”I’ll be alright,” Lee finally said, turning her head to look up at Tarin a moment later. That crease still between her brows.

Survival technique. Tarin knew a thing or two about those.

He tried to think for a moment what it must have been like for Lee all those times that this had happened. It didn’t seem like it had always been to the extent of what they’d been dealing with the last couple of days…but every time one of these ‘merges’ had happened, Lee had solved the problem and then spent days awake. Often alone. Trying to pull all the pieces back together.

It made a bitter taste rise up in the back of Tarin’s throat. He decided then, that it was time to stop feeling sorry for himself. Something terrible had happened, and it wasn’t going to go away. Things would happen, the trauma would re-emerge and he would have to deal with it. Lee had offered to help, and Tarin would let her, only because it seemed like she couldn’t live with herself otherwise. The rest of it…he had decided to move forward.

It was time to move forward.

And Lee would be fine. She wasn’t fine now. She would be.

”Well. This whole thing is going to be a two-way street.” he said firmly, but not unkindly.

”If you’re going to throw your whole life out of whack to help me, then you’ve got to at least tell me when you need something too. When I can help.”

He hesitated a minute, ”Because even if it’s not nearly to the extent to which you’ve experienced things, I know a thing or two about surviving…and that’s no way to live.” That was why he’d come here in the first place, and it was starting to get easier to remember.

Lee nodded hearing Tarin’s words. He’d said that he’d left home at 14, had hitchhiked to New York. Even without any more details than that, Lee knew he’d spent a time simply surviving. You didn’t leave home as a teen and go to a new city alone and manage to do more than simply survive for a while after that.

”I’ll try to,” she replied when he said she needed to tell him when she needed something.Though it was weird, she was the one who was supposed to be helping him through this. Because she’d gone through this before, while he hasn’t. She wasn’t supposed to be asking for help right now. Even if that was not a difficult thing for her to do in normal circumstances. Lee knew that she had trouble asking for help; she’d been chastised about that before.

So instead, Lee changed the subject. ”Want some more coffee?” she asked, leaning forward to grab her mug but not standing yet.

Yeah, that was going to be easier said than done. If one thing was becoming clear, Lee was used to being the one who shouldered the emotional burdens of the people around her. They’d joked earlier about Tarin’s lack of emotional intelligence, but when a person spent so much time trying to blend in they got pretty good at noticing other people.

Just how long had she been going on like this? Hanging on by a thread until the thread snapped and then starting the whole cycle over again. Who picked up the pieces for Lee when things finally fell apart? Tarin had a sneaking suspicion he knew, and it was not anywhere near a satisfactory answer.

The look Lee was getting was knowing. ”Good.” he said.

More coffee? When this coffee had been strong enough that he felt like he was vibrating where he sat despite the less than perfect night’s sleep he’d gotten the night before.

”I think I’m good.” he said. ”I know it’s still early, but I was thinking that a run might be nice…”

How was it possible that Lee knew exactly what the look meant that Tarin gave her as he said ‘good’? She knew exactly what it meant because she had seen that look countless times before.

But she had never seen the look on this face.

Again, how was it possible? But at least he wasn’t fighting her about it. Wait, they didn’t know each other well enough for him to be giving her that look based on her answer.

For the third time, how was that possible?

Hearing his answer about the coffee, Lee nodded, reaching over to grab his mug as well to at least take it to the kitchen. But hesitated in standing up when she heard Tarin’s question. A run? And this early in the morning of all times?

They really were very different people.

”That actually sounds like a great idea,” Lee replied, a lopsided smile having appeared on her face. ”I’ll get ready, I’ll be right back.”

Lee then stood, stopping in the kitchen to dump the mugs into the sink before making her way to her room. This time she turned the light on as she closed the door and dug out a pair of black leggings and red tank top to change into. It was only as she was getting ready to leave her room, when her shoulder brushed against the wall that she remembered about the cuts and bruises from the merge. Grabbing a lightweight hoodie, she tossed it on as she walked out of the bedroom, zipping it up as she walked. ”I’m all set,” she announced.

Lee seemed happy to go for a run, and Tarin was the one who had suggested the idea so while Lee retreated to her room to change he simply waited on the couch.

Tarin had the feeling that he’d done something wrong and as he played the last conversation over in his head he just couldn’t figure out what it was. Maybe it was simply the fact that he was there and it was uncomfortable. Sighing and leaning his head back against the back of the couch, Tarin reminded himself that Lee had assured him this was what she wanted to do. Bringing up the fact that she didn’t need to do it was going to be just as awkward as the situation itself if he kept bringing it up.

A jog would be good. There were no conversational requirements involved in jogging. They’d also get some space later when it was time for Lee to introduce her sister and son to the fact that she had a new roommate. Thinking about going to the shop wasn’t too terrible at this point, Tarin decided, maybe because he knew he wasn’t going to have to stay.

Soon enough Lee emerged from her room ready to run. ”We’ll have to stop by the shop real quick so I can throw on workout clothes.” . Tarin said, getting up from the couch and offering a shrug. ”I’m pretty sure your idea of a long run and mine are pretty different things…but I generally try to get in around 3 miles warm up included?”

Lee nodded before turning to throw on her running shoes. Though she had been wanting to go running quite a bit further north in the park, because Tarin had taken that bag of clothing back to the shop, it was true they would need to stop there.

Well, she had a decent idea of where the other women had been found, so she should still be able to keep them far enough away so that Tarin didn’t have any flashbacks while they were running.

But when he commented on the difference between their ideas of what a ‘long run’ was, she laughed. ”Yeah, just a little different,” she agreed, still laughing slightly as she stuck her phone and keys into the pocket of her hoodie. No earbuds, though. If she was actually going for a run with someone, she didn’t need to be listening to music. Especially right now. She would need to pay far too much attention to Tarin and any mood changes to be able to listen to music.

Waiting for Tarin to be ready as well, Lee led them out into the hallway, locking the door as they left. ”Three miles is more an afternoon stroll for me, to be honest,” she informed Tarin as she started leading the way out of the building. ”If I’m actually needing to burn off energy, I normally run a few laps.”