Time Warp: A Reluctant Pupil (Mike)

[Nora Marie "Nory" Gwinn]

[March 2009]

When Nora Marie met Mike Batista for the first time, she threw up on him. Intentionally. Out of spite.

This was not wholly unsurprising, since she was being treated for radiation poisoning at the time. Her recruitment had not gone well. She started throwing up on the 8 hour plane trip from Oregon, and by the time they reached Hammel she had to be carried through the front doors giggling, floppy and heavily sedated. The side-effect specialist said that a combination of extreme stress and inability to control her powers had amplified her symptoms. While not as dire as her illness would imply, the levels of radiation in her body were twice as high as they should have been. She needed training, and a lot of it, or she needed a suppressor to follow her around for the rest of her life.

When Mike entered the infirmary, he saw a small, extremely pathetic-looking eleven year-old girl lying in a large white bed. Scrawny and plain, with a blunt nose and eczema on her hands, she was curled up on her side and clutching a pillow to her chest. The side-effects of her powers had left her with several tufty patches on her scalp, and her eyes were red and puffy from crying. A neat and recently-changed wastebasket sat next to her bed.

She might have looked like a poster child for sick anime girls, but Nora Marie sat bolt upright when Mike entered the room. She wiped her eyes on her wrist and asked hopefully if he had come to take her home. When he said no, the girl started to cry. When Mike drew close to comfort her, she seized his shirt, leaned over the side of the bed, and vomited onto his knees.

That had been a month ago, and Nora Marie showed no signs of adjusting her position. Mike managed to teach her enough in the first week to get her out of the hospital ward, but after that their progress ground to a halt. Nora Marie was distraught, shell-shocked, and in denial about almost everything that had happened. She did not want to be here, she did not want to talk about her feelings with Dr. Neville, and most of all she did not want to learn about her supposed meta-human abilities that made her feel nauseous all the time. To say that she was uncooperative during training sessions was a laughable understatement, and Sean wasn't faring much better.

Today, as usual, she shuffled into the gym as late as she knew she could get away with without getting scolded. Nora Marie was nothing if not expressive, and for a trainer like Mike it took only a glance to tell what sort of day they were going to have. Dreary was the norm, where she came in resentful and upset and spent the session inventing injuries, purposefully misunderstanding directions, and shedding crocodile tears. There were occasional good days too, when she arrived with a hesitant smile on her face and a letter clutched in her hand, and Mike had a chance to get some half-hearted effort out of her if he didn't push her too hard. The worst were the rampages, when she would scream and bolt for the windows and work herself into a hysterical fit before she listened to a word her trainer said.

But today, the young girl just looked...tired. She dropped her things by the door and sat down on the nearest bench with a toneless, “Hi Mr. Batista.” Her eyes were dull and the skin on her hands inflamed from picking. She wondered distantly if she got another massage today, that was the only part of training she liked. Apparently her stomach hurt because her muscles were tense, or something. She didn't remember much of what Mr. Batista told her about it.

[Mike Batista]

Mike didn't know the vomiting had been on purpose till a bit later, but even if he'd know it wouldn't have mattered. Nora Marie was a child who was in pain, both physical and emotional, and had had one of the more terrible manifestations. While the old trainer had never had a foster child as ill as she was, he'd had ones just as difficult and more in their own ways, and had worked on gaining her trust and creating a rapport between them. Nora Marie needed training very badly, but her stress and anxiety over her manifestation and recruitment overshadowed almost everything. It was a cycle Mike had to break, but one that just fed on itself no matter what he did. The girl's lack of control over her powers made her sick, which damaged her self control and ability to think clearly, which worsened any attempts at control... and so on. Regardless of whether the symptoms were psychosomatic or not, the results were real and affected her.

Mike was not often called to be overly paternal in his role as trainer, though he was always there for a student however they might need him. His fosters were both much older than Miss Gwinn, but she was small and stubborn and had definite attitude, like a lot of his kids when they first came to him. She was manipulative too, and Mike was careful about getting into power struggles and winnowing out the real emotions from the fake ones.

Nory was many things, Mike saw, but subtle was not one of them. Probably never would be. That was alright though, it made his and Sean's jobs a bit easier. It's not like she could deny being upset when she was throwing a temper tantrum or crying till her shirt could be wrung out. That day, he was prepared for another of those dramatic sessions. For just Miss Gwinn, Mike had with him a box of Kleenex, extra-strength lotion, and his own Geiger counter. From the bedraggled look of her entrance, he thought he might need all three.

"Good morning Nory," he returned, smiling pleasantly. "Would you like something for your hands?"

There was no massage scheduled for that day, though if Mike had had his way she'd have one every session to loosen her up. Once she'd either taken or turned down the lotion, he said, "Come, let's take a walk. Just around the room."

The perimeter of the training room was cleared for just that purpose. It was a large room, but nowhere near the size of the eighth mile track outside.

[Nora Marie "Nory" Gwinn]

When comparing Nora Marie's behavior towards her primary supervisors, Sean and Mike, the results were largely unanimous: resistance by any means possible. For a perpetually nauseous, not especially intelligent eleven year-old girl, it was astonishing how resourceful she was. The Geiger-anklet she currently wore was the third she had gone through in less than a month, and they still didn't know how she had gotten a hold of bolt cutters.

But over time, subtle differences began to appear in the way she treated the two men (or the two primary agents of the institution that had ruined her life, as she seemed to think of them). They were odd moments when Nora Marie would shuffle and drop some small tidbit: her brother could build card houses, her mom wore glasses, Tony Katz back home had a crush on her. These facts were the only evidence that Mike's otherworldly patience over the past month hadn't gone in one ear and out the other, and for whatever reason, she never told anything like this to Dr. Neville.

She looked over at Mr. Batista now like he was a mountain of homework remaining at the end of a long day. "My hands?" Nory looked down at her palms. She'd had eczema since she was a little kid, and she always picked at the red, scaly patches when she was nervous. She had several blisters on the heels of both hands, and the skin on the backs of her fingers had started cracking around her nail beds. She kept forgetting to put her ointment on them. They hurt, but in a distant sort of way. "Sure," she said with a scuff of her feet against the gym floor. She took a squirt of lotion in each hand and sat rubbing the cream into her weathered skin until Mr. Batista gestured for their usual starting laps.

This was normally when the fake injuries started. It was hard to say if it was her wealth of genuine emotions or simply dramatic flair, but Nory could turn a bumped knee into a three-act play. Still rubbing the lotion in, she shuffled over and fell into step behind Mr. Batista. Whenever he tried to slow down to walk side-by-side, she slowed down as well to stay a step behind him, until they were proceeding at a snail's crawl around the room. She didn't say anything as they plodded, apparently still absorbed in rubbing the last of the lotion into her fingers.

[Mike Batista]

Between them, Mike would've pegged Sean as the more paternal despite not having ever been a father. The younger man was a natural, and the elder thought it was a blasted shame he hadn't gotten to have any children. But it was lucky that Nora Marie had Mike in the mix with the psychiatrist. The long line of fosters he'd had meant he knew all the tricks. And sometimes, not being a doctor or someone whose job it was to sort out kids like Nora Marie made a difference too. (That part, he knew, was both detrimental and ironic, but he also understood spite and pettiness and how even doing small things when your life was out of control made you feel powerful.)

Without a word, he'd replaced every lost... "lost"... bracelet, ambled alongside her, put up with her screaming and anger and crying and offered what comfort he could. He never tried to push, but sat near her silently, observing, letting her know someone was there, paying attention to her, and not judging.

Today Nory was the picture of Eeyore under a raincloud, but Mike knew that that didn't mean there would be absolutely no chance of emotional pyrotechnics. When she took some lotion (good girl!), the trainer took the opportunity to check her hands. No blood, that was good.

She followed, too, and that was excellent. Mike slowed a few times to see if he wasn't going too fast, but no, it was just a positioning thing. Even at a pace that would seem indulgent to rocks, she still followed. Good, good. Turning his head so Nory could hear him as he spoke and walked, he said, "I know you're tired, but what's something good that's happened today? For me it was frying my eggs this morning in leftover bacon grease."

[Nora Marie "Nory" Gwinn]

Part of Nory, the part that wanted to push her boundaries as far as they could go and then another shove for good measure, would have been very pleased to know that Mike counted accepting a handful of lotion and following him around the room as excellent behavior. It meant that her efforts to be as uncooperative as possible were succeeding. And for the part of her that didn't really enjoy making other peoples' lives difficult, at least such abysmally low standards meant that it would be easy to please if she had the mind to.

Today, Nory just wanted training to end as quickly as possible, and that didn't happen when the warm up exercises turned into a battle of wills. She threw in a few half-hearted scuffs of her feet just for the appearance of the thing, but otherwise trailed along behind Mr. Batista like a tired, disoriented duckling.

Her blank thoughts were interrupted by his question. "Something good?" What had she even done today? She cast her memory backwards, then decided to just make something up because her memory was a dangerous place right now. She didn't know how she was going to make it through her appointment with Dr. Neville tomorrow, he always knew...no, something good, something good. Mr. Batista had mentioned food. "Um...they had clementine cake in the cafeteria today," she said, or they had some time in the last week. As much as she hated the place, she had to admit that Hammel had a good cook.

[Mike Batista]

If her past behavior was taken into account, yes, accepting lotion for her eczema and staying upright were achievements. There was no crying or screaming or hysterics, no long abused sighs, no languid pained rolls of the eyes, no streams of complaints. No flopping about on the floor, no dejected beached whale impressions, no vomiting, rage, or energetic drama.

So yes, willingly treating her illness and actual locomotion? Practically a red letter day. And hey, she was even answering his questions with words that were relevant to what he'd asked.

Clementine cake had been a few days ago, but Mike wasn't going to dock her points for being off chronologically. Thinking looked a bit challenging, so he decided to ask her something he thought would be easy. "You're dragging today. Why so tired? Not feeling well?"

[Nora Marie "Nory" Gwinn]

A flash of sour depression crossed Nora Marie's face at Mr. Batista's question. She supposed that he meant 'feeling worse than normal,' because for the past month anything more stressful than an unexpected door slamming made her throw up. "I feel terrible," she mumbled at the ground. "I always feel terrible." If you squinted your eyes, you could almost imagine her posture as one fleeing the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression, trailing behind a dusty covered wagon on blistered feet. If given her choice she would have probably been dressed in a tattered jumper and fighting off dysentery. She sniffed. "But it wasn't any worse today, if that's what you mean."

Nory completed her lap around the room in what was possibly a record-breaking time of three and a half minutes. Not a single meltdown. "I didn't sleep very well though," she admitted as she waited for her trainer to get ready...whatever it was that they were going to do today. The girl's Geiger counter frequently woke her up in the middle of the night, so this was nothing surprising. Nory rubbed one foot against the ankle that held the locked, clunky counter. She'd get to have the thing off for a couple minutes at least while Mr. Batista looked at the counter records.

[Mike Batista]

Unswayed by her Oregon-Trail-like attitude, Mike just nodded. "That I did. Glad to hear it."

That they also completed the single lap in under a quarter hour was excellent.

He wasn't surprised that she hadn't slept well, though it concerned him. The counter wasn't overly loud, but he could understand how it could interrupt sleep. That all just meant she needed to relax more... which would mean she'd have to put effort into training and find an outlet for her anger, two things she was seemingly bent on refusing to do with truly stunning amounts of time and energy. Mike personally thought getting her to lotion up every morning, eating low acid meals that filled her up decently, and getting some exercise would help both those things, but he supposed in a pinch having her kick and scream on the floor for twenty minutes was as close as he was going to get for now.

"Alright, take five. I need to check your Geiger."

Once Nora Marie sat, Mike knelt at her side (much like a cow being milked, standing at the girl's side cut the chance of being accidentally or "accidentally" kicked way down) and gently pushed up her pants leg. Her numbers weren't horrible, but she was still pinging too often. Sitting beside her, he said, "Was something troubling you last night? I couldn't sleep either with what this thing is telling me."

[Nora Marie "Nory" Gwinn]

It was hard to tell if it was her lack of control over her emotions, her powers or both, but it was certainly true that Nora Marie's Geiger numbers were less than desirable. She had difficulty turning off her powers completely, and the radiation in her body was prone to fluctuations with her mood. This was rather like being at the whim of a particularly vengeful Greek god.

Her counter showed some spikes the previous day and, as she reported, several during the night that had been large enough to trigger her alarm. "Two of my roommates watched a scary movie last night," Nory grumbled. "It gave me nightmares."

Her lap completed and her Geiger checked, it was time to move on to the training part of training. Just getting her this far was often a job in and of itself, so they were still on only the most basic exercises. Since real samples were out of the question and even in her best moods Nory tended to revolt after more than twenty minutes of effort, they worked mostly with bananas and plastic buckets. The task was simple. Mike would place several bananas under one bucket, mix it around with two empty ones, and Nory would have to tell him which bucket was the right one. Purely guessing she had a 30% shot, and between that, peeking when Mike mixed up the buckets, and occasionally actually using her powers, she managed to get it right about half the time.

Mike set up the exercise as normal, and Nory remained sullenly unresistant on the bench. When prompted, she hauled herself up and slouched over to the buckets. She fussed for a moment, then picked the center bucket. This was incorrect.

Mike rearranged the buckets. Again she deliberated and picked wrong. And again, and again. She might have been doing it deliberately except she grew more frustrated with each failure. Out of seven tries, she found only one correctly.

At number eight, she snapped. "I give up!" she finally cried. A kick sent a bucket scuttling across the gym, punctuated with the sudden whistle of her counter and accelerating numbers on Mike's. "Shut up shut up!" she screamed at the thing, stomping her foot on the ground. "I don't care! I give up!" she shouted with tears standing in her eyes.

[Mike Batista]

((ooc: SO SORRY FOR LATENESS OMG. MIKE WOULDN'T TALK TO ME. I AM FULLY PREPARED TO BLAME THIS ON STEFAN AND LAMPPOSTS. AH.))

Being a trainer for so many years, Mike knew it was a combination of factors that had Ms. Gwinn perpetually miserable whether she wanted to be or not, and there was not a great deal he could do about any of them without her cooperation. Her barely-there grasp on her power affected her skin and made the counter ping, which affected her sleep, which affected her stress levels, which made her surly and uncooperative, which made her zombie-walk through her classes and pay little attention to her meals, which got her in trouble and detention and robbed her of energy, which further deteriorated her mood, and then affected her ability to control her powers. Vicious cycle didn't even begin to cover it. It was more like a thundering waterfall of horribleness.

He sympathized with her regarding the dorm situation, he really did. As a student, he'd been on both ends of the equation, the idiot who didn't understand volume control in his early years, the karmic sufferer who had to deal with other idiots like himself later on. He was on tricky grounds, but he was a respected staff member at the school and a registered, experienced foster parent on the other. "If you care to, I have a spare room you could use. House rules would apply, but it would be quieter."

It wasn't an offer he made lightly, or often. But Nora Marie was having especial difficulty, and without someone to snap her out of it she would only become worse and possibly start to endanger others.

He let her think about it, and got on with the training, since she was participating and all.

Unlike other training sessions (where there was participation, and there were not many), Nory was either not getting the correct readings from her power or was on a run of unprecedentedly bad luck. As ever, Mike didn't give any hint, and did his best, sliding a field under each bucket, to see that she couldn't cheat. Or that it was at least really hard.

Her outburst was... uncharacteristic. There was no prolonged wailing, nothing so loud and shrill that faces appeared at windows. For once, Nory seemed genuinely distraught. (Yes, she was genuinely distraught other times, but not about her power control. About and absolutely astonishing range of other things, but not her power control.)

Leaving the buckets, he walked over to her, slowly, calmly, and gently put an arm around her shoulder and gave her a one-armed hug. He didn't know what would set her off, and they weren't quite at the point in their relationship that Mike knew her well enough to know that a full hug would be well received. But nevertheless, he brought her to him and tried to comfort her with a bit of closeness.

"Nora Marie. It's alright. It's alright. It's okay. You're having an off day, that's all. We all have 'em. And you're being so cooperative, which is great." The hand at her back rubbed it in gentle circles. "Just relax. Relax. It's okay, Nory. You're trying, and you're doing so well. It's okay. It's okay."

[Nora Marie "Nory" Gwinn]

((don't worry about it for even a moment. ^^ stephan and lamp posts is worth some time between replies. ))

Nory regarded Mike and his offer with hesitant suspicion as she watched him set up the buckets and fruit. "That might be...okay..." she said slowly. She wondered what sort of house rules he meant. Probably stuff like running laps for her food or repainting his living room to earn bathroom breaks. But for a chance to get out of the dorms, she might be willing to do some chores.

Nora Marie had tried to cooperate because she was desperate, out of ideas and out of energy. Her life was in shambles, but maybe if she made an effort she could bring at least this small part of it under control. Her own instability betrayed her. She couldn't concentrate, and the more she tried to focus on the spikes of heat the more slippery they became. Through the lens of this small failure, the already crippling weight of everything else overwhelmed her.

"I can't do this, I hate this!" Nory screamed over the long, unbroken note of her counter. Tears were spilling onto her splotchy red cheeks. She flung her words at Mr. Batista as if they were her own containment field she could use to shove him back across the room. "I hate it here, I hate being stupid, I hate being sick, I hate--"

She choked on her tears. Emotion and nausea had rendered her temporarily mute, and for a moment it looked like she might throw up on Mike's knees again. Bubbling, gasping, leaking salt and snot, she looked up at her trainter as he put an arm around her shoulders. Her skin felt hot and papery. Desperate for comfort that she had never been willing to accept, his gentle hug and words pierced her misery like a knife. Her sobs, if possible, grew more violent.

She wheezed two, three times. The whining of her counter began to fade in and out as she tried to get herself under control. She swallowed hard, and a fresh wave of tears gushed over her cheeks. “D-dad called yesterday," she whispered. "He found--he said--Adam's not coming h-home..."

Then the girl wrapped both of her trembling arms around Mr. Batista's torso and pressed her face into his sweater.

[Mike Batista]

Nora Marie would not be the first child Mike had offered a home to and mentioned rules to believe they could be graded on a scale from Dickens to Dante. They were quite simple, and as a result very easy to break at first as he and his fosters felt each other out. Respect everything and everyone, including yourself. Be on time for meals. Call or tell him if you went anywhere. And the most pertinent one, that Mike left a half hour before school started and after it was finished, and if those who wanted a ride weren't there at that time, he left and they walked. Homework was checked over every night, and Mike expected participation in keeping up the house. His current fosters were a brother and sister who were not Gestalt but were close enough they could almost be mistaken as. They'd bonded as a team against abusive/absent parents and were nearly codependent, which was something Mike was working with them about. But they were good kids, nice, used to hard work, and not afraid to follow orders if they respected the one who gave them. If the trainer told them to leave Nory be, they would.

This time, it was different. Her crying. It wasn't crying to stall or crying just to make noise or crying because she had no other way to express herself. It was sadness crying. He sighed at her words, but kept his arms about her, holding gently. Nory's family was one he was both glad for and desired to temporarily cut off contact. Very little that came from them was good, and their daughter could not emotionally handle it. When she hugged him back, he kept murmuring to her, soft English and Spanish, reassuring. He lowered them to the grass and made the executive decision to seat her crosswise on his lap. Cradling her shaking, sobbing form, he brushed her hair from her face and let her weep into his sweater.

[Nora Marie "Nory" Gwinn]

Nora Marie cried for a long time. It came in waves, cresting in bursts of wheezing hysteria that burned themselves out into a halting whimper. When she could, she talked. Her speech was fragmented and largely incomprehensible, but Mike could pick out bits and pieces. She had been sure that her dad would be able to find Adam and bring him home, but he was at some sort of fancy school now and wouldn't talk to them. And now it was just her and dad, and a week ago she had begged him to put mom on the phone and he had started crying.

In ten minutes Mike's sweater was soggy with snot and tears, but as Nory gradually wore herself out her hold on him became less violent and she drifted to the crook of his shoulder. "I'm sorry I've been acting so bad," she snuffled after a while. Her eyes were puffy and lifeless. "I don't know why I did it."

[Mike Batista]

Sometimes it was hard not to feel like a dad to his trainees, especially when they needed things like this. A lot of the kids came to Hammel from strained home situations that meta powers and moves to Vermont did nothing to improve and a great deal to further ostracize. Mike didn't know if it was just that families nowadays were so much more stressed, or if staff like himself were just more equipped to recognize and help. So he rocked a little, twitched a hanky out of his pocket to catch the more serious drips from her nose, and listened to her sputtery words.

He smiled a little when she apologized, and hugged her gently. His voice was soft and low, soothing. "It's alright, Nory. You don't have to know why. Sometimes we don't. Maybe... aaaah, maybe your life was just running away too fast for you, and you did what you did for some, for any, control." He smoothed sweaty hair back from her forehead and face. "Or maybe you thought if you were bad enough we'd send you back home and things would go back to how they were." Mike shrugged, smiling down at her. "It doesn't matter. We all have tough periods. I'm just glad I was here to help you with yours."

Still cradling her, he continued, "Nory, why don't you come home with me after class? Stay at my house, in the spare bedroom. It'll be quiet, my other fosters will leave you be, and you'll have some privacy. Change of scenery. I can get it cleared before school's out... if you'd like to try it." He chuckled a little. "You don't have to."

[Nora Marie "Nory" Gwinn]

As Mike spoke, Nory closed her swollen eyes and rested her head against his shoulder. He said words and she felt hair parted on her face, more words and she was rocked gently back and forth. She couldn't stop thinking about the hospital. It was the backdrop of her mind now, with the random surges of engulfing horror when she would realize anew that her mom was really gone. And when she woke up from the nightmares, there was no open door and bed to climb into, no one lying awake for the same reason she was. Just the puke pail next to her bed and her Geiger counter whining on her ankle.

Nory's first and mightiest barrier of hostility had been breached, and the others were crumbling rapidly behind it. She had accepted Mike's affection at first simply because she needed something to cry on, but now she was hugging him as if reluctant to let him stand up. At his offer, she looked up and hesitated. A vestige of pride held her back—the school was her enemy, after all. But Mr. Batista's arms were too warm and his voice too kind and her heart too wounded to fight anymore. A real house, with a kitchen table and a recycling bin by the back door. “That would be nice,” she admitted in a mumble. “I would really like that a lot.”

As she agreed, she felt such a strong surge of relief that it brought tears to her eyes. She pressed her face into Mike's shoulder in a tight embrace and made a sound that might have been a small sob or a watery laugh. “Thank you.”