LOG: [Charles, Marius] Hamartia

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He was tied to the bed.

Again.

Marius lay back and breathed deep, his head heavy with pain. Low lights, white tiles over his head -- the Medlab. Of course. The restraints should have tipped him off. The smell of disinfectant made him almost as nauseous as the pain. I go mental on someone again? came the bleary thought. The recent past was a confused blur. It felt like he'd been kicked in the head. Well, that would hardly be new. One cuffed hand groped against the sheets for the call-button that would be somewhere by his side. Page Moira or Amelia, prove he wasn't psychotically hungry, get released, go sleep it off in his own bed. With ice. Lots of ice.

"I'm glad to see you awake, Marius," Charles Xavier's voice, calm as usual, interrupted the young man's search. "I apologize for the restraints, but you've had an eventful time of it, and Amelia and I thought it might be best to avoid any accidents should you wake up disoriented. How do you feel?"

"Professeur . . ?" Marius tried to focus on the shape positioned a discreet distance from the bed. The genetic signature was familiar, at least. He'd gotten familiar enough with it in his Psionics lessons after that incident in Nathan's office. All that time working together on Masque's victims hadn't hurt, either. He certainly wasn't a stranger. But Charles didn't normally come down after an episode.

Then somewhere in the throbbing mass that was his head murky images began to stir. "Jen an' . . . Manny," he said. Despite his disorientation Marius' heartrate began to pick up. He tried to quash it, cleared his throat and tried again. "They here? Where are they?"

"Jennie is under observation here in the infirmary; she is physically unharmed, but has been under a very great deal of strain over the past few weeks, which is now taking its toll. Amelia tells me, happily, that we should expect her to be up and around after she's rested." Charles paused for a moment, then continued more gently. "I'm afraid Manuel remains in Monaco, at a hospital there. He will continue to receive the best possible care, but . . . his injuries were extensive."

His . . ?

And then it came back to him. Out for the night in Monte Carlo, and Ms. Munroe in the club, and the empty hotel room, and -- two bodies in the street, not moving--

For an instant Marius' skin crawled, literally, as instinct tried to invoke the power he'd absorbed from Penance. His body shivered, but no change happened; he didn't have enough of the power left in his system for any kind of change. The barest twitch was the most it could manage.

Charles wheeled closer, the concern deepening in his face. "I'm afraid the rest of this will be very hard to hear, but I judged it to be essential you understand what happened as soon as possible." He folded his hands in his lap. "I don't know if you quite realized that we were careful to keep the residents with psionic mutations off your donor list as much as possible, during your first stay here. They can be particularly difficult and dangerous gifts to bear, and more so the stronger they are. Manuel . . . is very strong. And he never quite achieved the level of control I'd hoped he would. When you fed on him. . ." Charles sighed softly. "I'm afraid none of the three of you have been entirely in your right minds for some weeks now. I've seen loops like this before: you with no control, Jennie with no training to resist, Manuel . . . more open to certain kinds of manipulation than he believes. But it's over now, and the consequences could have been far worse."

"Wait -- wait, what? We . . . what?" The man's words might as well have been in Mandarin as far as Marius was concerned. His first thought was No, that can't be right. He'd known he was picking up empathy from Manuel, obviously, but you couldn't project without knowing it, could you? All right, so Manuel had been obliging, but Manuel had agreed to help him from an ocean away, well before any time Marius would have had access to his powers. They'd arranged it before Marius had ever left the school, because it would have been suicide to go out into the world alone and without a donor. And Jennie had still been Jennie, she hadn't acted any different. He's got it wrong, Marius thought, hands beginning to move again in mindless strain against his restraints. There's no way--

Ms. Munroe's words filtered back to him: She lied to the school and she lied to her father.

The odd moods. Arguments won too easily. Overstaying her summer vacation for -- what?

"It takes people that way, sometimes." Charles smiled faintly, reaching out with a quiet curiosity as he felt Jennie wake. "With newly-emergent psis, it seems either they manifest very loudly. . . or so quietly that the first challenge of training them is simply to make them recognize why they tend to get their own way, why everyone around them seems so transparent." And there it was, just as he'd thought it might be. "You think--or you feel--and those around you respond. They feel, and you respond. Your power does only what you tell it to do--but the human mind is a complicated thing, and often the subconscious speaks more loudly than our conscious selves can credit." Carefully, oh so carefully, Charles disentangled the remains of the link from Jennie's mind, a process not unlike carding wool. He held the curling strands for a moment, then cast them away, watching them drift, unanchored, until they faded back into nothingness. "Tell me, do you feel any different now?"

"I . . ." The foreign presence in his mind evoked a vague shudder, but the professor had worked with him for months before he'd left and knew how to mitigate the instinctive response. The result that came of the contact was much more subtle. As Charles stepped back his influence Marius realized he felt lighter, and . . . cold, as if he'd taken off a heavy jacket he'd been wearing for hours. The disorientation was nowhere near as alarming as the horror that gathered in his chest, pressing the breath from his lungs like a slow piling of stones.

It was still happening.

"You won't be doing that again, at least not while you remain here," Charles said firmly. "Perhaps if you'd fed on Manuel over a longer period . . . but the empathy you borrowed from him is already fading, and we can work together to make sure you create no more unwitting links before it goes." He frowned slightly. "You've made some very bad choices, Marius. Not all of them were of your own volition, and you can't be held wholly responsible for what has happened--but you need to understand why it happened, so that you can prevent yourself from making these kinds of mistakes from now on. Am I making myself clear?"

"The -- the link," Marius said hoarsely. "Block it. God, block it." The feel of its sudden absence said more to him than Charles' words ever could have. He felt like his thoughts were moving through water. The same words kept echoing back to him. I was controlling them. All that time. I was controlling them and now Manny's in hospital. And now another image was coming back to him, red and silent, more evidence of his steadily-mounting crimes.

"The . . ." the words crawled out almost of Marius' mouth almost of their own accord, "an' Penny?"

Charles' expression grew more severe. "She's resting comfortably, and I have high hopes for her prognosis. All the damage she suffered, aside from some minor marrow depletion, appears to have taken place long before she came into your . . . care. To your credit--and this is all the credit I am willing to extend you on this subject--that care appears to have been well-considered." He paused for a moment. "To avoid as many potentially unpleasant surprises as possible, I think I should warn you that I am attempting to bring her out of her catatonic state, and there is every possibility that she will be staying here for some time."

Right. Of course. The school. The school had her now, and they would help her. And that was a good thing. Jennie had said that's what they should have done with her in the first place, and he'd known she was right. He just hadn't wanted to give up the . . . opportunity.

Yet even as he saw the sense of it, and the stupid, self-serving decision he'd made, Marius couldn't suppress a surge of bitterness. They'll help her, right. Like they helped me?

Charles nodded, his expression revealing nothing of what he might have sensed or guessed of Marius's thoughts, and a note of finality entered his voice. "I'll leave you in Amelia's capable hands for now, but we'll speak again. Try to rest."

Marius said nothing as the professor quietly showed himself out of the room. Belatedly, the boy realized there was nothing keeping him from escaping the restraints.

But what would be the point?

Nauseous with pain more than just the sharp ache of his skull, Marius lay back in the darkness and waited for sleep.

None came.