Bleeding: Returns

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August 28th, late evening, Paris, a hotel




Jennie had snapped. There was no other way to explain it. Her mind had refused to function after she'd inflicted the mother of all hangovers on it, and somewhere in the skull-crushing pain it had decided to just up and leave.

Because how else you explain the tiny girl in bondage gear sitting limply in a battered old wheelchair in Marius's room?

"I. Um." Jennie put a hand to her face. Manuel was on her left, just as poleaxed as she. "Marius? Darling? Where did she come from?"

"Found her," Marius replied, stripping off the industrial-strength gloves he's been given to handle her. Nonetheless, his jacket had seen better days. Loading and unloading the girl from the van had been a complicated procedure. He flipped the dreads out of his face. "Wasn't exactly in the best of circumstances, figured we could put her up for a bit. Could probably do with a bit of private care. See if I can't get the concierge to run down a company tomorrow. Mind the skin -- bit on the prickly side."

"You...you found her?" Jennie spoke slowly, as if to a very dull child. "You found a girl, randomly and decided to bring her here? Marius, this is a person, not a puppy." Jennie gestured to the figure in the wheelchair, which did not even stir at the sounds of their voices. "And why is she in bondage gear?"

Manuel looked at the girl, then at Jennie and Marius. "The girl, she has been traumatized." he said flatly. "Who did this to her?"

The other boy shook his head. "No way of tellin'. Whatever she's been through . . . not so much with the talkin' now." His voice tightened a little at that, but he shook it off. He glanced at Jennie. "And despite your apparently poor opinion of my moral fibre, I have nothing to do with the daring fashion-choice. One supposes there's durability to consider." His eyes flickered back to the girl swathed in leather and buckles. Hopefully.

Manuel walked over next to the girl in fetish gear, and his hand hovered just above her skin. "She is ... locked within herself." he said after a moment. "There's nothing I can do, not without risking severe mental and emotional damage."

Jennie crossed her arms, there was something slightly off about this whole situation. "So you go off on an errand and come back with a traumatized girl. Where'd you find her? Does she have a family? Please, for the love of god, tell me she has a name."

Although normally appreciative of Jennie's relentless pursuit of rational explanation and generally the sort to demand the same, Marius was getting an inkling how the less competent of Xavier's staff must feel. He began to strip off his jacket, feeling mildly uncomfortable. "Was in a bit of a rough neighborhood. Down by the old Moulin Rouge, if you could believe it. It's no longer quite as charming as one might hope. No family so far as I can tell. Got a name, maybe. Bloke called her Pénitence. Penance. Pick your language. Bloody odd, but who'm I to judge?"

"Penance?" Jennie looked from Marius back to the girl in the wheelchair. "The girl in the fetish gear is Penance?" Jennie couldn't tell really, because the girl's face was immobile, like a china doll, and she seemed to eat light, but she did not look much older than 12. Then something else clicked. "....Wait, did you get her from someone? The guy who called her Penance?"

Manuel was liking this whole arrangement less and less the more he heard of it. "Take it outside." he snapped at his non-comatose companions. The swirls of negativity and anguish were getting a _little_ thick in here, and he worried about the tiny little girl in too-big fetish gear. "I will take care of her while the two of you sort out what is to come next."

Marius nodded at the other man. "Do what you can, yeah? I'll see about hirin' on someone tomorrow. Therapist or . . . somethin'. We'll get it sorted." He tossed his jacket into the bed and turned to Jennie. "It seems we are unwanted. Your room, then?"

Manuel snorted at that. Well, it wouldn't be the first time he'd made his opinion of non-psionic therapists known. Instead, he turned his attentions to the comatose little girl. ~Hello, little one.~ he said in his perfect lisping Castillian Spanish. ~You've had a rough time of it, but if I can, I will aid you.~

Jennie set her jaw and jerked her head towards her room. The pair migrated in silence, before entering her room. Jennie shut the door behind her and put her hands on her hips. "Well? Whole story. Out with it."

Lying was harder to do when you actually respected the other party, Marius was finding. He might as well have it out. It wasn't as if she was going to drop the issue. Marius leaned against the wall, regarding her for a long moment.

"Look . . . right. I heard about a bloke . . . could hook you up with other mutants, right? So I went. Saw her there, decided to . . ." Marius snorted and shook his head, moving to brush back another fallen dreadlock. "Well. Set me back a bit, but she's done with that place."

He'd bought a human being. That was as wrong as it got. But what else could he have done? Killed the men? Attacked them and made it all the way back to the hotel with a girl who couldn't be touched? He didn't know the extent of her powers yet. Taking her Between might have killed her. As for the police . . . aside from the problems he'd already experienced with authority figures lately, if word of it ever got back home the inevitable would come that much sooner.

Leaving her there hadn't even been an option.

Jennie's mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. "This is a joke, right? Right?" She begged, the look in his eyes told her different. "Oh Christ, you're serious." She put her head in her hands and took several deep breaths. To say she was pissed off was an understatement. Livid would be a more accurate word.

"Marius, are you high? You bought her? You actually physically went to a place that...that sells mutants and bought her? What the fuck were you thinking?"

"I wasn't, all right?" Marius exclaimed, throwing his hands in the air. "I'm goin' on two bloody countries now with nothing that even approaches luck so I just thought I'd go look, an' then I actually saw her and -- I should've what, left her?" Marius let his arms drop and shoved his hair back again, viciously. "Doesn't matter. I did an' she's here. Done's done."

"What are we going to do with her? We can't take care of her, we're barely taking care of ourselves!" She wasn't even going to touch the 'thought I'd just go have a look' comment. Not now anyway. "It's because of 'luck,'" Jennie used her fingers as quotation marks, "that we haven't been arrested or chased out here, I'll have you know. And I have the sleepless nights to prove it." Jennie put her hands to her head again. "For fuck's sake, why didn't you contact the school?

Back in the front room, Manuel was getting irritated with all the arguing and ill-will from Jennie and Marius's little discussion fucking up the emotional atmosphere of the place. With a sigh of irritation, his eyes glowed red as he quashed as much of it as he could - Jennie was far too easy to get to, but Marius was, as usual, hellaciously tricky. His mutation tended to get a little pissed if Manny went poking his empathic brain into Marius's, so subtlety was called for.

The intervention worked -- somewhat. Even as Marius calmed his own power took a portion of the foreign power working on him and turned it around. The slightest projection, barely perceptible and unconsciously formed, bleeding off to the girl next to him as well as the source of the power a room away: This needs to be over.

"Jen, I'm at the end of it here. I can't go back. Or to Muir. One more place like that, it'll finish me. This thing is . . ." Marius stopped. "I've looked an' looked, an' so far this is the best I've got to go on. Not sayin' not to call ever, but if she can help . . . just let me try this, all right?"

Whatever Jennie was going to say next was washed out by a wave of confusion as her anger leaked out of her like air being let out of a balloon. She swayed and then sat down heavily on her bed, trying to put her disjointed thoughts back together.

"Fine, Marius. Fine. We won't argue about this any more. Just....promise me we'll get her help, okay? Soon. It's not her fault, any of this."

"I'm hardly one to deny help to damsels in distress, if you recall," Marius snorted, vaguely noting that was odd. Usually the other girl was good for at least a few more rounds. Still, he was too glad for the break to question it. Marius pushed away from the wall and sighed.

"No worries, Jen. She'll be right." Orange eyes burned brighter, just for a moment. "I promise."



September 1st, Paris, a room




He couldn't be bothered going through his pockets for the keycard right now. A step forward, an instant of darkness, and Marius was inside the suite. It was such a short jaunt it barely even scorched his clothing. Not even breaking his stride, the boy strode through the well-appointed foyer and into the adjoining bedroom.

"~Take your break,~" Marius told the startled woman seated next to the bed. The nurse nodded, slid the book she'd been reading into her purse, and left without a word. The room's other occupant was, as always, unresponsive -- a tiny shadow curled on shredded sheets. That was fine. He wasn't in the mood for conversation right now.

Marius collapsed into the chair the nurse had abandoned and leaned over his knees, dreadlocks dangling in his face. It had been inevitable. Indulgent as his parents were, he should have known a 7000 Euro cash withdrawal was going to be noticed; that was exorbitant even for his lifestyle. He'd suspected that was the cause of several unanswered phonecalls over the past few days. Even so, the fax had come as a shock.

An ultimatum, hand-written on Cartier's private stationary: be back in Brisbane within the next week, or be cut-off.

Two rings of teeth pressed against Marius' face as he tried to breathe. This was not a panic-attack happening. It was not.

The skin had come the second day. He had enough experience with Rahne and Masque's powers to know the basics of shapechanging. Physical memory was the key. The texture of his own skin beneath his hands, how the world around him had been before he felt like he'd been wrapped in leather -- all he had to do was make what he remembered a reality. Fit the skin to what was underneath.

But the lungs -- he couldn't do it. He didn't know how lungs worked. Anatomical knowledge alone was no good; Marius still didn't understand on any meaningful level how you were supposed to change what type of substance you needed to breathe, or if the power he'd taken was even capable of it. That was what he wanted. That was what he needed. If only he had more time to practice, or study . . .

"Your mother and I have been patient, but enough is enough."

"Come home, Sami."

There was one last thing he could try. In all his time working with borrowed mutations he'd only found one sure way to force a power to respond.

Well. What did he have to lose?

The quiet of the room pressed around him, broken by nothing but the rasp of his breath. He sat up, slowly, out of the awkward crouch his neck couldn't bend around, and crept his hands around his neck to fumble with a clip.

There. Not hard. Not at all. Closing his eyes, Marius raised his hands to the straps that ran behind his head, and paused.

Right then.

Marius tore off the respirator and threw it across the room.

His gag around the sharp line of pain the sudden removal of the secondary tube drew across his trachea became a gasp as his lungs suddenly found themselves trying to pull air too thin. Hands travelled to his throat of their own accord, tiny mouths gnashing in desperation as he fought every urge in his body that said go, go, go Between--

The red girl on the bed never even moved, her gaze fixed and blank. That blue stare filled his mind as the edges of his vision began to fall away.

Instinctive reactive adaptivity, Marius thought as he fell to his knees, gasping, suffocating.

So adapt.