Re: log: marvel, mutant manor - jack/rachel
At first, Jack thought he was merely trapped in reverie, thinking of Max. He had thought about her since seeing her, more than once. He worried about her while feeling grateful, mulled over her changed appearance and her new inability to touch. He wanted to see her again, to try to push past whatever was keeping him to short, clipped sentences and speak.
But this vision wasn't the usual. He knew the images that poured from his own mind intimately. After Helen's death, when his head injury had still been fresh, he had seen her all the time. And in the facility she had been there again, sparking fear and revulsion as well as comfort. Something he had thought he was past. She had only appeared the once, though, and gone again. After that, he had been on his own.
He didn't know the dark woman layered over Max like like a film negative, palimpsest on the air. The memory's rise was so sudden that it disoriented him. This wasn't normal. It wasn't his, didn't belong. He knew it wasn't real because there was no Max smell, no hint of the other woman on the wind, and the sound wasn't right. It still bounced with the acoustics of the little room it had been spoken in. These facts hit his brain as innate facts of what he saw and heard, too fast to really be separated out, and rolled into instinct. It was a vision, but not his own.
When the woman with black hair appeared inside/outside Max, his first reaction was confusion, then fear as he struggled to find the source of this stranger inside his memories, and then anger.
Someone was in his head. He knew it the way he could taste another person's fear on his tongue, now. All his abilities had developed in the realm of the physical, but he still had a good grasp on where he ended and someone else began. He turned around, ready for a fight, but there was no one there. "Who?" he snarled, peering behind him into the forest, but his thoughts ran on after words hit a wall and stopped. Are you here? Where are you?