Vitiation - Aftermath II

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Drastic steps are taken, and, finally, something goes right.




Charles Xavier opened his eyes, and was surprised to find himself in a jungle. Yet nothing like the rain forests of Venezuela or the mountains of Borneo where he had traveled before, the odd juxtaposition of random flora and the too-vivid colors gave the lie to the visions before him. This was no real jungle, but something put together by the mind of someone who only had the faintest idea of what one should be like, assembled from old Tarzan movies and Rudyard Kipling books.

Rising to his feet out of the lotus position, Charles walked through the jungle, smiling to himself at the inconsistencies. The sound of insects, but no gnats buzzing at his collar. Lush green vegetation, but dry garden loam under his feet. As mindscapes went, this was one of the more completely constructed ones he had encountered.

The jungle gave way to a small clearing, and Xavier stepped through, one hand going to the brim of the safari hat he found himself wearing. In the center of the meadow, surrounded by tall grass, stood an antique-style cage, complete with thick iron bars. Inside, the lone occupant was recognizable by his psychic presence, if not his appearance.

"Marius Laverne, I presume?"

A taloned hand shot through the bars to rake the air inches from the telepath's face. Charles didn't even blink. A nest of fangs churned as the outstretched hand groped blindly, and then, thwarted, darted back. A clot of shadow hurled itself back, the only things discernible in the darkness the motion of four limbs reduced to mostly bone and ligament. The figure settled to hunch in the back of the cage, slitted pupils shining green in an instant of refracted light.

"Sorry," Marius snarled, words slurred around his distorted muzzle, "not quite myself."

"That is precisely the case, Marius," Charles said, fixing the young man in place with his gaze - quite literally in this place - while testing the bars of the cage with his hand. As chaotic as the visualization of someone's mental processes could be, the human mind followed its own rules of sense and order. Marius saw himself as an uncontrolled animal, ergo here he was a beast. And a beast might belong in the wild, as shown by the cardboard jungle, but Marius saw himself as caged. Something dangerous, something to be contained.

"Tell me the last thing you remember, Marius," Charles said softly, "the last thing you can recall consciously doing."

"Which bit? Lookin' at the fourteen year old girl I bought and giving serious consideration to the thought of attacking her? Chasin' Jennie through the woods an' then holding her down so I could feed on her? Tryin' my best to take my flatmate apart an' failing utterly? I remember. I was there for it all. All until Mr. Marko put me out of it. Again. An' it's a brilliant testimony to my academic career here that I've run through staffers to subdue me so fast I'm into repeats."

The boy began to pace, head down, four limbs moving beneath him with predatory smoothness. Back and forth, back and forth. "But it's only fair, eh? 'Didn't know what I was doing, not in my right mind' excuse doesn't so much fly after the willful purchase of a human being. Can't say as to your unique school policy, but think I've played out the free passes."

"There is no excuse so solid as the truth," Charles said calmly, circling the cage to look at the bars. No door, no gate. How does one enter a cage with no door? he asked himself.

When the cage is built around you.

"Marius," Charles continued, projecting feelings of calm rationality, "I have reason to believe your mind has been somehow influenced by an outside source. But I will need to scan your memories to be certain, with your permission." Walking directly to the cage, he extended his hand inside in a symbolic gesture of faith and trust. "Simply take my hand, Marius."

The boy growled and threw himself around to pace to the other side of the cage, not even breaking stride. Each punch of muscle beneath grey skin was taut with barely-restrained fury, and all the while orange eyes remained trained on the intruder.

"You want not to be stickin' that in here."

"You want not to be here right now."

Charles stood unmoved as all around them the mindscape shivered with images a young mind already in turmoil couldn't hope to keep from him. Memories crawled through the shadows, warping the twist of vine and leaf: the kitchen, the woods, the tree. Hands moving of their own accord. Jennie's skin in the dusk, white and clammy under his. And the screams inside his own head, hidden from any who might have sensed them by his mutation, as he fought to regain control of the body that had once done anything he asked of it.

Tried, and failed. Again, and again, and again.

Marius reached the other side of the cage and whirled again.

Charles winced at the echoing screams of pain and rage, but kept his hand extended. "Marius," he repeated, "I will help you, but you have to allow it. This is not who you are, this creature of anger without control. Let me show you, take my hand and trust me."

There it was, right there in between two bars. The lock without a key. Somehow, Marius' mind could acknowledge the possibility of a way out. He simply had to find the key and use it.

Again, the offered hand was passed by and angrily ignored. "Sorry. Gave up on the shakin' a long time ago. An' what do you know, then? Bit hard to make the case when I've been at the random attacks from day one. It is rather a natural progression. My power, after all. Evolution in all its glorious disaster. You must admit I am rather impressively suited to the role of monster on those rare occasions my body's not just decided to do something brilliant like evolve itself beyond the ability to process breathable atmosphere. Really, it's only a formality."

The statement was harshly made, but beneath it trickled the despairing thought that, in this place and to this observer, might as well have been words:

When I do nothing, I lose. When I try, it goes even worse. How do you fight when everything you do and everything you are is telling you what to be? I give up. I give . . .

"Was it a monster that helped those people victimized by Masque?" Charles asked quietly. "Not only your friends, but dozens upon dozens of innocents. You used your power to heal, Marius. Those are not the actions of a monster."

"Yes," Marius said bitterly, "that one will do my parents tremendous good at the next family dinner. Because when your charming son has spent the last year in turns on the edge of death, eating people an' too sodding stupid to know just maybe he's doin' the unforgivable to multiple parties details like that come as a great comfort. Can't say for sure, but I rather suspect after Monet I rank as something of a disappointment. Or rather, a reprisal of a theme without the genetic consolation."

Charles began to speak, but Marius' words struck a chord in him.

Reprisal of a theme.

"Faster degradation of different cerebral functions, of course..." he mused, then turned his gaze upon Marius. A gesture of his hand, and a woman stood beside Charles, slightly translucent. Xavier indicated the psychic projection of the young woman with the curled waves of brown hair. "Have you ever seen this woman, Marius? In Europe, perhaps?"

Baleful orange eyes slid from cursory inspect of the projection back to Charles. "Can't say as she rings a bell. I have a go at her when Not In My Right Mind, too?"

"No, of course you wouldn't have," Xavier mused, the image fuzzing into static before vanishing. "There's no way she would have... Marius, have you come into contact with anything at all related to Doctor McCoy in the past week or so?"

At the mention, an image formed in the air between Charles and Marius. A wood carving, a twisted ladder - A DNA helix - spiraling around a wooden heart. He looked over at Marius, who was still stalking around the cage, but his hands were brushing against his legs as if to swipe away dust or...

Moira! Find this carving and test it for biological agents, specifically those similar to the virus that attacked Henry.

Charles? Ye don't think... I'm on my way.

Xavier returned his attention to Marius, smiling slightly. "I believe we have an answer, lad. This wasn't your doing."

Marius' disdainful head-cock was jerky, almost reptilian. "Right. No offense, professeur, but talk of the immutable reality that accompanies certain genetic predispositions is not so much what you'd call an acceptable condolence to me at this point."

"Marius, listen to me," Xavier steeled himself, then stepped through the bars into the cage, kneeling next to Marius. "Your loss of control was due to a biological virus, the effect of another mutant's powers." A quick mental touch from Moira confirmed it for Charles. "It was none of your doing, and what is more important, this is something we can cure. We are going to help you, Marius. You need not worry."

That, finally, halted the pacing. Marius slowed to a stop, almost stumbling, uncomprehending eyes locking on Charles. "It was . . . what? You -- what?"

The disastrous developments of his mutation, the events in Europe . . . his own foolish, self-serving choices. At the time he'd never given it a thought, but after all that had happened Marius had steadily grown to feel everything in his life was one of only two things: that which no one could control, and that for which he had only himself to blame. But what Charles was telling him now was something he'd barely even been able to remember having been a possibility.

It . . . it isn't me . . ?

"It wasn't you," Charles repeated. He held his hand out to Marius, standing up as the door to the cage slowly began to swing open. "This isn't you. Not really. We can help you, Marius. I know that it has seemed like a dark road you've been made to walk, and it must seem that no one has been able to help you - but this I promise you, we will make this right."

Marius crouched at the back of the cage, frozen against the bars as he stared at the open door and the man beyond. One thing. The only thing he'd ever wanted since coming to be at this place, though then he'd never lowered himself to fit thought to words. Wanted ever since he'd lay dying in hospital what now seemed like lifetimes ago -- and what circumstance seemed to decree could never be done despite the best efforts of those around him.

Please, somebody help me.

One uncertain step, then another, and slowly the figure within the cage began to flow upwards like a chart of evolution. Quadrupedal to bipedal, grey-skin to olive. The figure that emerged from the cage was tall and straight, and his hair curled across brown eyes.

Marius stopped face-to-face with Charles, and for the first time realized that even standing upright and in this place the professor was shorter than he.

"Merci," Marius said, the word thick. He swallowed to give himself time, but the attempt at decorum finally faltered. One shaking hand raised to press a smooth, unbroken palm to his face to the first tears he'd let fall in years.

"Merci beaucoup," he whispered.

"You are always welcome, Marius," Charles said, placing a hand on the young man's shoulder and turning to the now open door of the cage that was beginning to fade away as they spoke. "It's time to walk from this place. You do not need to be here now."

Marius took a deep breath and composed himself, slowly lowering his hand. He straightened as the landscape around him dissolved from jungle to a lakeshore in summer, warm and humming with the whirr of locusts.

"No," the boy said softly, "suppose I really don't."