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xp_logs2005-10-17 06:14 am
x-forge.livejournal.com) wrote in xp_logs2005-10-17 06:14 am
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Monday morning, Marius meets Forge
Early Monday morning, one of the medlab's current inhabitants decides to be social and go meet one of his neighbors. They get along rather cordially, for two guys who are dang near terminally exhausted at six in the morning.
Forge lay back on the bed, idly raising his left leg up and down. Numb. It felt numb. And it wasn't supposed to be that way. Wires had been cut, and an important part had been shattered. Damned if he could figure out what it was, though. Brushing his foot against the sheets, he felt... nothing. Just a dead chunk of metal, responding to nerve impulses, giving nothing back.
Looking at the clock, the second hand seemed to creep by, each tick sounding like a hammer in his ears. It wasn't that the room was quiet, he could still hear the sounds from the medlab, the water rushing through pipes in the walls, the air conditioning whining. But it was like his mind was somehow more silent. He wasn't THINKING as much, and that was wrong.
Curiously glancing at the swivel arm that held the tray where his breakfast had sat only an hour before, it took Forge a good ten minutes to realize it. He wasn't trying to figure out how to motorize it to respond to patient movement. He wasn't mentally disassembling the mechanisms and reconfiguring them for efficiency. The machine was just a machine.
The fact that he was now "just human" was beginning to sink in.
Outside the semi-private room Marius lingered at the edge of the observation window, looking in. He'd been told not to bother the other patient, but he couldn't resist. Not after hearing about what had put him here.
Rescued from Magneto. Unreal.
It was only Marius' second day out of isolation. After a day and a half of observation and various tests, Moira had cleared him to leave his room -- if not the medlab -- Saturday night. The feeling that this was too good to be true was confirmed the following evening, when Marius had found himself bustled back into his room and told to remain there until further notice. Since Marius had never been inclined to treat orders as anything more than suggestions at the best of times, this had been obeyed just long enough to ensure people had stopped forgotten about him. Then he'd gone out to investigate.
He'd found the staff focusing its efforts on two newcommers, both unconscious. The air in the medlab had been relatively subdued, since neither patient seemed to be in imminent danger, so Marius had tried to keep to the background to avoid detection. He'd been caught by Moira eventually, of course, but by that time he'd seen and heard enough.
As far as Marius was concerned, "star-struck" happened to other people -- he'd been to too many of the right kinds of parties to hold celebrity, or infamy, in any kind of awe. But this was different. This was like moving into a new neighborhood and discovering the guy in the house across from you had just been returned home after being held hostage by Pablo Escobar.
Marius still wasn't sure what had happened, exactly -- the staff had been too busy to elaborate, and what he'd heard he hadn't completely understood. It was quieter now, though, and Marius' internal clock was still set to the wrong hemisphere. The night had been very long, very boring, and Forge's room was so very, very close.
And the boy was awake.
Marius decided the staff's request to leave him alone had expired. He raised one hand and rapped on the window.
Grateful for the distraction, Forge glanced up. Confused at the unfamiliar face, he swung his legs off the bed, thankful that the doctors had at least allowed him his own baggy basketball shorts and a t-shirt.
Using the bed as support, Forge leaned out, hopping on his right leg as much as possible. Cracking the door, he leaned on the doorframe, breathing heavily from the effort. "Hey," he gasped out, catching his breath. "You the new doctor?"
"Nah, just another bloke who's had a bad week," Marius said with a grin, pleased the other boy seemed willing. "Marius Laverne. New student, if they ever let me out of here." The boy's breathing was heavier than it should have been; he hadn't heard of any serious injuries, but Forge was obviously in rough shape. Marius nodded towards the window. "Mind some company? I'm bored as sod-all."
Forge nodded, turning up the lights and reaching to hook a chair with his prosthetic foot. Without any feeling, it took him three tries, but he dragged over the stool for Marius, sitting back down on the edge of the bed. "New, huh? I figure they've already given you the 'welcome to the madhouse' speech. Only that's usually Lorna's line, and she's ... well, you probably heard how they brought her and I in the other day. Last I heard, she's still powerless, too. She's an energy projector, though. Should recover quickly." He looked down at his hands, the metal of his left forearm tarnished and gouged from where the Neutralizer had exploded on it.
"I didn't get that exact speech, but I did wake up in restraints. Suppose that counts." Powerless. Marius wracked his brain for what he could remember of the medstaff's overheard conversations. There had been something about powers in there, but it hadn't registered with him at the time -- details had been lost in the flood of too much talk about too many things he didn't understand yet.
He turned his gaze to Forge's battered hand and leg, and recalled hearing Forge had made them himself. That's right . . . his power was making things. That's why he'd been taken.
"I've only been here a week, so I'm not quite up with current events," Marius said, raising his eyes back to Forge's. "This power thing, with you and Lorna. You did that?"
Forge nodded, looking downcast. No one had ordered him NOT to talk about what happened, and as far as he was concerned, it was his business anyway. "Magneto," he began, as if one word could explain everything. "He wanted a tool, a weapon he could use to threaten other mutants to keep them out of his way, or punish them, or corral them by fear. Take away what makes them more than human. And I built it for him."
Running his fingers through his hair, Forge stared at the blank wall, practically emotionless. "He'd taken Lorna, you see. Slapped some mind control collar on her - damned if I can figure out how it worked now - fooled her into believing he was her father. Both magnetic manipulators, you see. But her power was what was fueling this thing, so I hit her with the device. Shut the collar right down." He chuckled lightly. "Of course, I didn't figure in the magnetic interference pattern. Caught myself in the backlash. Lorna's genetic structure will recover, they say. Me? No one's sure."
Marius blinked. "Mind control and genetic terrorism. And here my biggest worry coming was finding out why I was starving to death after thirteen different dietary regiments. You lot . . . well, there's a bit of difference." He shook his head, and the ghost of a smile returned. "But for all that, it worked out, right? You're both back, alive, and no more, uh . . ." and he was forced to grin at the sheer unlikeliness of using the phrase in any serious context, "mind control. And I don't know from powers, but you still come off mutant to me, if that helps."
"Wonderful," Forge said flatly. "Theoretically there's hope. I'd be able to figure out more, of course, if I could actually look at the Neutralizer and understand it - but of course, the feedback blew it up. And I've got no CLUE how I did it." He sighed loudly, falling back onto the bed, cocking his head to look at Marius.
"So, that's your thing? Detecting mutants or something? Can't figure out why that'd need a weird diet. Usually that's for the feral folks or the shapeshifters."
Marius gave a fluid shrug. "Your guess is as good as mine. The doctors thought I was ill for months. Dietary deficiency or somethin'. Right up to the point the blisters on my palms burst and they found these, anyway." By way of explanation Marius peeled off one of his gloves and held up his hand, palm-out.
"Turns out that dietary thing was actually a mutant thing," he continued, wiggling his fingers to make the little mouth flex. "That was enough messing about for dad. He sent me straight here. Never mind we didn't know what the chompy-bits were for, that was for Xavier's to figure." He grinned and turned the display into a gesture of scrutinizing his nails. "Good thing I attacked Mr. Dayspring my first day here, eh?"
Reaching for his glasses, Forge looked down at Marius' palm, squinted, then looked up at the younger boy. "Dude? That's gross."
"Isn't it?" Marius regarded his hand for a moment, then shrugged. "Then again, can't complain -- it stopped me starving. There's some bits we haven't worked out still, like me being able to distinguish from mutants and the part where I supposedly threw Moira into a wall with my brain, but for the moment I'm fine with the bit where I'm not dying."
Forge shook his head, sliding his glasses off in the same motion. "You... well, they're letting you walk around, so I suppose you're not all killer dangerous. Shit, I wonder how many people are trying to figure out if I belong in that category." He rested his elbows on his knees, looking past Marius to the door.
"A lot of the people here, I didn't see eye to eye with. Politically, I mean. I'd put bets on it half the folks here are either convinced I went willingly over to Magneto, or that I'll be harboring some weird case of Stockholm Syndrome." He looked around the small room. "Wonder how long they'll let me hide out here. I don't have to take visitors if I don't want, I think."
Marius snorted. "Speaking as one still not allowed to leave the medical wing after almost a week, I don't see why you'd want to stay here any longer than you have done. The sooner you're out, the sooner you can do something. About . . . whatever." He waved a hand in an irritated fashion. "If there's one thing I know from wasting in a bed for two and a half months, it's that the worst bit is waiting. Get on and be done with it. Besides, even I've been round long enough to know being thought mad or a traitor doesn't make you anything special. Just straighten it out right off, and she'll be right."
"You don't know," Forge said sadly. "There's people out there I can't... I'm not ready. I don't even have anything to offer here anymore. School for Gifted Youngsters. Heh. Killed that 'gifted' part good and dead, no matter what you smell. I can't feel it up here," he tapped the side of his head. "It's like my brain's got this void where something belongs and it's... it doesn't hurt, it doesn't feel anything. It's like thinking NUMB."
Numb. "That . . . that's something I can understand." Marius felt an unfamiliar tremor deep in his chest, like a sudden chill. He grimaced and quashed the feeling he refused to call fear, irritated at the pointless reaction to something that no longer mattered, at himself for feeling it. It would pass. He was still recovering, that was all. He shook his head to clear it of the idiocy and continued. "All the time I spent in hospital . . . I knew what was happening, but something in my head wasn't . . . right. Everything was off. Skewed." He paused, searched for some way to explain. "When it got to the point the docs were givin' up and Mum had me see a counselor about the fact I was dying, I didn't give a toss. It didn't matter anymore, because by then nothin' did. Lookin' back, that's what . . ." he stomped on the sudden ressurgence of that pointless emotion again, shook his head. "That's the bit I don't want to go back to. Ever." But then he smiled. "This place, though -- they're what set me right again. Shouldn't be too long before they come up with something for you.
"And besides," he added, the smile sliding into a grin, "If they'll take on a mutant whose contribution to the species is chewin' on the main of it they're hardly a lot to show you the door over burnout of what you had. On the balance, mate, your paranoia don't fly."
"There's more," Forge whispered. "More they don't... well, it doesn't matter. I have to consider the possibility that I'm NOT going to get better. That the one advantage I have just got flushed. But..." He looked out the door again, as if trying to look through the walls to where Lorna was. "They got her back. I helped do that much. Fair trade."
That strange feeling again -- the feeling that he was standing outside, looking through a window into another world. A dangerous, alien world that had existed alongside his own his entire life, acknowledged but separate. He'd known it was there -- he'd read about it in the papers, heard about it on the news, seen it talked about in books and movies a hundred times -- but all that was something you heard about. It never happened to anyone you knew. It never happened to you.
Now he was sitting here talking to a boy who had only yesterday been the hostage of a notorious terrorist, who had been made to work for him against his will, and who even now was mortally afraid, because saving his friend's life might have ruined his.
Forge couldn't have been any older than him, but Marius realized with an unpleasant jolt that this boy was in that other world. Had been living there all along.
This pain, the pain Marius was looking at right now, was because he had saved a life.
The world these people lived in wasn't the world Marius knew. And now he was here, tossed by a fluke of biology into a place he didn't know where good intentions held incomprehensible consequences and he didn't understand.
Marius stared at Forge. He'd never offered comfort. He didn't even know how to begin. But, for the first time, he realized he wanted to try.
"Look, mate," Marius said at last, "I can't guess on the rest of this lot, and I don't think you should try. They'll think what they want, and there's nothing you can do about that. But you know what you did, and why you did it." Marius shook his head in wonder. "You made a choice, and it worked. You -- you saved a life. All the rest of it, what they think of you . . . it doesn't matter. You did what you had to do. And even if no one understands, or you lose your place . . ." he groped again, suddenly painfully aware of how little words could do, "you'll never wake up knowin' you didn't do everything you could have done. However you end up, it won't be because you did wrong. And that's . . . that's something."
"I did the right thing," Forge agreed. After a few seconds, he slumped back onto the bed. "I think I'm tired. This whole needing to sleep thing. Eight hours EVERY night? How do normal people stand it?" He nodded to Marius lazily. "It was nice to meet you, Marius Laverne. Welcome to Xaviers. This doesn't happen EVERY day, I promise."
"No," Marius agreed, managing a wry smile, "just every other." Suddenly he wasn't feeling so talkative anymore, either. He rose, returning the nod. "No worries, mate. Sometimes the body just needs rest. She'll be right, you'll see."
Forge lay back on the bed, idly raising his left leg up and down. Numb. It felt numb. And it wasn't supposed to be that way. Wires had been cut, and an important part had been shattered. Damned if he could figure out what it was, though. Brushing his foot against the sheets, he felt... nothing. Just a dead chunk of metal, responding to nerve impulses, giving nothing back.
Looking at the clock, the second hand seemed to creep by, each tick sounding like a hammer in his ears. It wasn't that the room was quiet, he could still hear the sounds from the medlab, the water rushing through pipes in the walls, the air conditioning whining. But it was like his mind was somehow more silent. He wasn't THINKING as much, and that was wrong.
Curiously glancing at the swivel arm that held the tray where his breakfast had sat only an hour before, it took Forge a good ten minutes to realize it. He wasn't trying to figure out how to motorize it to respond to patient movement. He wasn't mentally disassembling the mechanisms and reconfiguring them for efficiency. The machine was just a machine.
The fact that he was now "just human" was beginning to sink in.
Outside the semi-private room Marius lingered at the edge of the observation window, looking in. He'd been told not to bother the other patient, but he couldn't resist. Not after hearing about what had put him here.
Rescued from Magneto. Unreal.
It was only Marius' second day out of isolation. After a day and a half of observation and various tests, Moira had cleared him to leave his room -- if not the medlab -- Saturday night. The feeling that this was too good to be true was confirmed the following evening, when Marius had found himself bustled back into his room and told to remain there until further notice. Since Marius had never been inclined to treat orders as anything more than suggestions at the best of times, this had been obeyed just long enough to ensure people had stopped forgotten about him. Then he'd gone out to investigate.
He'd found the staff focusing its efforts on two newcommers, both unconscious. The air in the medlab had been relatively subdued, since neither patient seemed to be in imminent danger, so Marius had tried to keep to the background to avoid detection. He'd been caught by Moira eventually, of course, but by that time he'd seen and heard enough.
As far as Marius was concerned, "star-struck" happened to other people -- he'd been to too many of the right kinds of parties to hold celebrity, or infamy, in any kind of awe. But this was different. This was like moving into a new neighborhood and discovering the guy in the house across from you had just been returned home after being held hostage by Pablo Escobar.
Marius still wasn't sure what had happened, exactly -- the staff had been too busy to elaborate, and what he'd heard he hadn't completely understood. It was quieter now, though, and Marius' internal clock was still set to the wrong hemisphere. The night had been very long, very boring, and Forge's room was so very, very close.
And the boy was awake.
Marius decided the staff's request to leave him alone had expired. He raised one hand and rapped on the window.
Grateful for the distraction, Forge glanced up. Confused at the unfamiliar face, he swung his legs off the bed, thankful that the doctors had at least allowed him his own baggy basketball shorts and a t-shirt.
Using the bed as support, Forge leaned out, hopping on his right leg as much as possible. Cracking the door, he leaned on the doorframe, breathing heavily from the effort. "Hey," he gasped out, catching his breath. "You the new doctor?"
"Nah, just another bloke who's had a bad week," Marius said with a grin, pleased the other boy seemed willing. "Marius Laverne. New student, if they ever let me out of here." The boy's breathing was heavier than it should have been; he hadn't heard of any serious injuries, but Forge was obviously in rough shape. Marius nodded towards the window. "Mind some company? I'm bored as sod-all."
Forge nodded, turning up the lights and reaching to hook a chair with his prosthetic foot. Without any feeling, it took him three tries, but he dragged over the stool for Marius, sitting back down on the edge of the bed. "New, huh? I figure they've already given you the 'welcome to the madhouse' speech. Only that's usually Lorna's line, and she's ... well, you probably heard how they brought her and I in the other day. Last I heard, she's still powerless, too. She's an energy projector, though. Should recover quickly." He looked down at his hands, the metal of his left forearm tarnished and gouged from where the Neutralizer had exploded on it.
"I didn't get that exact speech, but I did wake up in restraints. Suppose that counts." Powerless. Marius wracked his brain for what he could remember of the medstaff's overheard conversations. There had been something about powers in there, but it hadn't registered with him at the time -- details had been lost in the flood of too much talk about too many things he didn't understand yet.
He turned his gaze to Forge's battered hand and leg, and recalled hearing Forge had made them himself. That's right . . . his power was making things. That's why he'd been taken.
"I've only been here a week, so I'm not quite up with current events," Marius said, raising his eyes back to Forge's. "This power thing, with you and Lorna. You did that?"
Forge nodded, looking downcast. No one had ordered him NOT to talk about what happened, and as far as he was concerned, it was his business anyway. "Magneto," he began, as if one word could explain everything. "He wanted a tool, a weapon he could use to threaten other mutants to keep them out of his way, or punish them, or corral them by fear. Take away what makes them more than human. And I built it for him."
Running his fingers through his hair, Forge stared at the blank wall, practically emotionless. "He'd taken Lorna, you see. Slapped some mind control collar on her - damned if I can figure out how it worked now - fooled her into believing he was her father. Both magnetic manipulators, you see. But her power was what was fueling this thing, so I hit her with the device. Shut the collar right down." He chuckled lightly. "Of course, I didn't figure in the magnetic interference pattern. Caught myself in the backlash. Lorna's genetic structure will recover, they say. Me? No one's sure."
Marius blinked. "Mind control and genetic terrorism. And here my biggest worry coming was finding out why I was starving to death after thirteen different dietary regiments. You lot . . . well, there's a bit of difference." He shook his head, and the ghost of a smile returned. "But for all that, it worked out, right? You're both back, alive, and no more, uh . . ." and he was forced to grin at the sheer unlikeliness of using the phrase in any serious context, "mind control. And I don't know from powers, but you still come off mutant to me, if that helps."
"Wonderful," Forge said flatly. "Theoretically there's hope. I'd be able to figure out more, of course, if I could actually look at the Neutralizer and understand it - but of course, the feedback blew it up. And I've got no CLUE how I did it." He sighed loudly, falling back onto the bed, cocking his head to look at Marius.
"So, that's your thing? Detecting mutants or something? Can't figure out why that'd need a weird diet. Usually that's for the feral folks or the shapeshifters."
Marius gave a fluid shrug. "Your guess is as good as mine. The doctors thought I was ill for months. Dietary deficiency or somethin'. Right up to the point the blisters on my palms burst and they found these, anyway." By way of explanation Marius peeled off one of his gloves and held up his hand, palm-out.
"Turns out that dietary thing was actually a mutant thing," he continued, wiggling his fingers to make the little mouth flex. "That was enough messing about for dad. He sent me straight here. Never mind we didn't know what the chompy-bits were for, that was for Xavier's to figure." He grinned and turned the display into a gesture of scrutinizing his nails. "Good thing I attacked Mr. Dayspring my first day here, eh?"
Reaching for his glasses, Forge looked down at Marius' palm, squinted, then looked up at the younger boy. "Dude? That's gross."
"Isn't it?" Marius regarded his hand for a moment, then shrugged. "Then again, can't complain -- it stopped me starving. There's some bits we haven't worked out still, like me being able to distinguish from mutants and the part where I supposedly threw Moira into a wall with my brain, but for the moment I'm fine with the bit where I'm not dying."
Forge shook his head, sliding his glasses off in the same motion. "You... well, they're letting you walk around, so I suppose you're not all killer dangerous. Shit, I wonder how many people are trying to figure out if I belong in that category." He rested his elbows on his knees, looking past Marius to the door.
"A lot of the people here, I didn't see eye to eye with. Politically, I mean. I'd put bets on it half the folks here are either convinced I went willingly over to Magneto, or that I'll be harboring some weird case of Stockholm Syndrome." He looked around the small room. "Wonder how long they'll let me hide out here. I don't have to take visitors if I don't want, I think."
Marius snorted. "Speaking as one still not allowed to leave the medical wing after almost a week, I don't see why you'd want to stay here any longer than you have done. The sooner you're out, the sooner you can do something. About . . . whatever." He waved a hand in an irritated fashion. "If there's one thing I know from wasting in a bed for two and a half months, it's that the worst bit is waiting. Get on and be done with it. Besides, even I've been round long enough to know being thought mad or a traitor doesn't make you anything special. Just straighten it out right off, and she'll be right."
"You don't know," Forge said sadly. "There's people out there I can't... I'm not ready. I don't even have anything to offer here anymore. School for Gifted Youngsters. Heh. Killed that 'gifted' part good and dead, no matter what you smell. I can't feel it up here," he tapped the side of his head. "It's like my brain's got this void where something belongs and it's... it doesn't hurt, it doesn't feel anything. It's like thinking NUMB."
Numb. "That . . . that's something I can understand." Marius felt an unfamiliar tremor deep in his chest, like a sudden chill. He grimaced and quashed the feeling he refused to call fear, irritated at the pointless reaction to something that no longer mattered, at himself for feeling it. It would pass. He was still recovering, that was all. He shook his head to clear it of the idiocy and continued. "All the time I spent in hospital . . . I knew what was happening, but something in my head wasn't . . . right. Everything was off. Skewed." He paused, searched for some way to explain. "When it got to the point the docs were givin' up and Mum had me see a counselor about the fact I was dying, I didn't give a toss. It didn't matter anymore, because by then nothin' did. Lookin' back, that's what . . ." he stomped on the sudden ressurgence of that pointless emotion again, shook his head. "That's the bit I don't want to go back to. Ever." But then he smiled. "This place, though -- they're what set me right again. Shouldn't be too long before they come up with something for you.
"And besides," he added, the smile sliding into a grin, "If they'll take on a mutant whose contribution to the species is chewin' on the main of it they're hardly a lot to show you the door over burnout of what you had. On the balance, mate, your paranoia don't fly."
"There's more," Forge whispered. "More they don't... well, it doesn't matter. I have to consider the possibility that I'm NOT going to get better. That the one advantage I have just got flushed. But..." He looked out the door again, as if trying to look through the walls to where Lorna was. "They got her back. I helped do that much. Fair trade."
That strange feeling again -- the feeling that he was standing outside, looking through a window into another world. A dangerous, alien world that had existed alongside his own his entire life, acknowledged but separate. He'd known it was there -- he'd read about it in the papers, heard about it on the news, seen it talked about in books and movies a hundred times -- but all that was something you heard about. It never happened to anyone you knew. It never happened to you.
Now he was sitting here talking to a boy who had only yesterday been the hostage of a notorious terrorist, who had been made to work for him against his will, and who even now was mortally afraid, because saving his friend's life might have ruined his.
Forge couldn't have been any older than him, but Marius realized with an unpleasant jolt that this boy was in that other world. Had been living there all along.
This pain, the pain Marius was looking at right now, was because he had saved a life.
The world these people lived in wasn't the world Marius knew. And now he was here, tossed by a fluke of biology into a place he didn't know where good intentions held incomprehensible consequences and he didn't understand.
Marius stared at Forge. He'd never offered comfort. He didn't even know how to begin. But, for the first time, he realized he wanted to try.
"Look, mate," Marius said at last, "I can't guess on the rest of this lot, and I don't think you should try. They'll think what they want, and there's nothing you can do about that. But you know what you did, and why you did it." Marius shook his head in wonder. "You made a choice, and it worked. You -- you saved a life. All the rest of it, what they think of you . . . it doesn't matter. You did what you had to do. And even if no one understands, or you lose your place . . ." he groped again, suddenly painfully aware of how little words could do, "you'll never wake up knowin' you didn't do everything you could have done. However you end up, it won't be because you did wrong. And that's . . . that's something."
"I did the right thing," Forge agreed. After a few seconds, he slumped back onto the bed. "I think I'm tired. This whole needing to sleep thing. Eight hours EVERY night? How do normal people stand it?" He nodded to Marius lazily. "It was nice to meet you, Marius Laverne. Welcome to Xaviers. This doesn't happen EVERY day, I promise."
"No," Marius agreed, managing a wry smile, "just every other." Suddenly he wasn't feeling so talkative anymore, either. He rose, returning the nod. "No worries, mate. Sometimes the body just needs rest. She'll be right, you'll see."
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