xp_logs | This Savage Land - Part Three: Vigil

Before dawn, Marius has his turn on watch. Yvette keeps him company, and with necessity being the mother of invention, an unusual interaction between their powers is discovered.

He had always been aware that there were aspects about his being which courted hazard, but Marius had never imagined being both a technical adult and a well-documented morning person would result in the extreme unlikeliness that was pre-dawn sentry duty in a conservatory full of prehistory wildlife. Living at Xavier's as long as he had he was aware it could hardly have been considered unfeasible in the context. Even still, however, there was an element of unexpectedness here.

Still, the responsibility came with some advantages, at this moment embodied primarily in the fact he currently had a measure of privacy with the nearest water source. The boy dipped his hands into water, briefly pondering the possibility of equally primordial bacteria. Then he shrugged and splashed it over his face.

Only the chance glance at the canopy alerted him to the fact he was not alone. It was lost in shadow and obscured by broad, thick leaves, but the particular perception being triggered was slightly more acute than normal sight. Wiping the water from his blurred eyes, Marius sat back on his heels.

"Mornin', Yvette."

There was a small surprised noise, and then the leaves parted as Yvette climbed along the branch and dropped to the ground in a low crouch. She was quite noticeably spikier than usual, her face the same doll-like mask as when she had arrived at the school. "Good morning, Marius," she said solemnly. "You are being very clever, to be seeing me." She glanced around cautiously. "It is not being safe to be alone, I am thinking?"

Marius grinned. "Indeed, it runs contrary to those guidelines so highly suggested to ensure our continuing survival. A moment of foolish delirium on my part. Cleverly we are now together, an' so none need ever know it was otherwise." To say the girl looked a bit on edge was an understatement, but to be safe Marius decided to substitute the possibility for tactless comment with a simple gesture of invitation to join him by the stream.

"So," the boy continued in a conversational way, "would you say you were adequately prepared for your first official field trip by the dire warnings of our classmates, or do you think we should advocate the creation of a primer? I was told to expect demons. 'Potentiality of dinosaurs' was conspicuously absent from the list."

Yvette moved over to join him, still glancing around occasionally. So many things to jump out at you... Still, translating Marius-ese into something she could understand was distracting her attention away from outright paranoia. "I am not understanding how this can be," she said, curling her toe-talons into the soft earth as if to anchor herself as she folded into a crouch beside him. "The dinosaurs, they are being dead for many years, yes? They are just bones. They should not be walking about to be eating people." She gave a small shrug. "I am being, how you say? Spoiled? The first field trip is being the climbing with Mr. Dayspring, and there is being no curse."

"Ah, but that was an extracurricular activity. The curse only attaches to those trips sponsored by the school. I admit to some envy. Sudden dinosaurs make for somewhat a more engaging anecdote than a riot spent in the safety of a hotel room well within the comforts of a staffer's carelessly neglected minibar." Marius glanced sideways at the tiny girl, taking in the sharp shadow of her profile, hardened by stress. "But then, I speak as one already well-jaded by life at the school, which is a condition which it seems carries quite the distressing loss of perspective."

"I was thinking the stories are being... how you say? Pretend, for the scaring the new people? Hazing, Kyle is being calling it." Yvette wrapped her arms around her legs, resting her chin on her knees. The gesture shredded the material of the leotard she was wearing, Forge's cloth reknitting itself as Marius watched. "I am being wishing this is being so."

"Urban myths, you mean? Yes. I confess I too have noticed that many myths about Xavier's are not, in fact, very mythological." Her body language was closed, coiled, so he opened his own. He leaned back on his hands, legs stretched in front of him. His movements were slow to prevent startlement -- a precaution he had learned had merit during the days his mutation had been somewhat less than comfortable for those around him. Still, he was careful to maintain a respectable distance. There were many reasons for this, but foremost on his mind was that in the state Yvette was in now a casual graze against the arm would remove skin.

"Nonetheless," Marius went on his hand seeking out some of the pebbles on the shore, "I'd say you're makin' it out rather better than most. The bit with the firewood, for example. Ms. D'Ancato's method, while unquestionably effective, has a tendency towards shrapnel."

Her eyes glowed slightly, and there was the slightest hint of a twitch in the corner of her mouth. "It is good, to be being useful," she hazarded. "You have been making the watch, yes? That is to be very brave, watching for the danger."

Handful of pebbles collected, Marius began flipping them into the stream. "Ah, I'm good for the filling of positions requirin' a warm body. Dead useful against other mutants, prehistoric beasts with no powers to flip a bit less so."

Yvette tilted her head at him. "What is to be 'flipping' the powers, please?"

"Ah, I absorb an' turn powers back. Angel an' Jen can do a decent lend, for example." A pebble plopped into the stream. "At one point healin' factors an' that were an option, but not so much since the fix. Means of extraction's been a bit removed since." Marius turned to smile at the girl briefly, waggling the fingers surrounding one scarred palm. "Though all things considered I believe it's a pain I shall bear."

Yvette frowned - or would have, if she could. "What is being the difference to Angel or Jennie's powers and the healing powers? You are needing to be having something special to be flipping the powers like Kyle's?"

"They're the internal sort," Marius explained. "I can mimic what's introduced to my system direct. Projective powers, energy projection an' that, that's still right enough. But healing factors, shapeshifting, teleportation -- they don't so much affect others, so the necessary means of introduction was a bit different." He paused, then raised his hands, one open and one still half-full of pebbles, and tapped the mass of white scarring where the parasitic mouths had once been at Yvette. "These here. Or what was, that is."

"Oh." The word had a flat, disappointed sound to it. "I was being thinking that you could be using my powers. To be making you safe here."

Marius had mostly come to terms with some of his more ambivalent thoughts about the young girl, not to mention was now well-used to the concept of voluntary powers-sharing as a consequence of some of Xavier's more specialized courses. Still, though he knew the offer was given in the same spirit, for some reason he found himself unable to quite reconcile Yvette's suggestion on the same terms as Angel's in Kansas City. The fact that Angel had not once been purchased by him for use as a foodsource featuring rather prominently.

"That is . . . rather a humblin' offer, Yvette," Marius said, and with complete honesty, "an' greatly appreciated for its sentiment, but I'm afraid I haven't the means. Indelicate as the biteybits were, they did effect convenient intranvenous delivery of the otherwise unextractable." He paused, then realized the blankness on the nearly expressionless face that was now in part due to the girl's comprehension being brought against a language barrier steep even between Marius and other native English speakers. He added, "Ah, they were good at gettin' what was inside someone else into me."

"You are being needing the something from inside?" Yvette repeated, glad for the clarification. She raised one hand, looking at the long, razor-sharp claws, thoughtfully. "The... blood?"

"Ah, it wasn't the . . ." Marius trailed off as Yvette's words overtook the automatic denial. During the spate of vampirism jokes Marius had always believed the distinction between blood and bone marrow was an important part of address. The convoluted internal logic of a flawed mutation that had determined the favored sort of delivery aside, however, his power had always come down to one thing: mimicry. What he experienced, he copied. Things turned on him. Things affecting the world around him. And things that had been introduced to his system.

Marius stared at her long hand, the red of her skin so deep from the stress it almost seemed to absorb light, and then found his eyes inexorably drawn to where his own hovered.

Is there a reason I couldn't?

"If I am to be making the blood, you could be using my power that way, yes?" Yvette continued, not oblivious to Marius' conflict, but cutting to what was, to her, the point. "Then you are being safe." She looked up at his face, meeting his eyes with her own unnaturally glowing ones. "I am wanting to be helping, to be making sure no-one else is being hurt, like Mr. Forge."

Forge. His instinct was to reject the offer, but the name gave him pause. The chaperones had done their best to address the panic without furthering it, but there was no denying the tension in the camp after last night's attack.

Or, as he'd been helping to pick up the campsite in the glow of Angel's fire, the blood staining the dirt.

The boy shook his head and gestured towards her still-raised hand. "Your power -- she's useful, but she tends towards keepin' the inside in an' on the outside out. Also, I am not quite comfortable with the idea of applying a pointy stick to girls." He paused, then added, "Except possibly Jen."

She snorted a hint of a laugh, and then turned her attention back to the problem at hand. "Tommy is being teaching me that sometimes you can be making the cuts on something being hard, with something being the same hard. Like with the diamonds, yes? My... hands," she almost said 'claws', but shied away from the word. "...are being very sharp. If I am trying to be making the cut, will you be taking my power, Marius?"

He almost rejected it on principle. It felt too much like the previous year, where he'd had to go begging people for a meal; an experience which had been tolerated by some, but pleasant for no one, least of all Marius -- not just because of the process itself, but for the implications it carried. Dependence from him -- and pity from the donor.

The words were forming on his lips when his eyes rose back to Yvette's face. Her blue eyes were blank and unreadable as always, but there was no question he was the focus of her attention. The gaze was luminous, steady. Marius realized: She means this for serious.

He didn't respond, but she saw something in his expression that made her mind up. Her power was to hurt, to harm... perhaps this was the opportunity to actually help with it. Wordlessly, she pushed up her sleeve and raked a talon across the skin of her forearm, not leaving him time to react and refuse, or herself time to flinch. There was a screeching noise, as of nails on a blackboard, and she gritted her teeth and pushed down harder. The tips of her talons were the sharpest part of her, and Forge had said she could cut through almost anything with enough effort. Time to put it to the test.

A sudden pinprick of pain heralded success, and she almost jerked away before cutting sideways across her arm. She didn't know how much blood would work, but she didn't want to have to try this again. Blood welled up sluggishly, fighting past her skin's instinctive reaction to harden even more, and she pushed her arm over to Marius without ceremony. "To be fast, please," she told him, a certain firmness in her tone few had heard before. "Before the blood is being stopping."

Marius stared as blood welled and began to dribble, almost unable to believe the damage she had just done to herself. All without a sound.

The wound was moving. Her powers were struggling to draw the skin tighter to close it; the edges rippled as he watched, puckering into ridges. Sharp ones. In a moment they would be pressed shut completely, held until the injury could heal of its own accord. He knew that aspect, because months ago he had used it himself.

The decision was made in an instant. Closing his hand in a fist, Marius turned his hand up, pressed the back of his forearm to the blood streaking Yvette's, and dragged.

If she'd been able to grimace, she would have as his arm opened up at the touch of her skin, his blood mixing with hers. There was a brief glimmer of memory - a hotel room, Marius, grey skin shredded at the touch of hers - and she accepted it without qualm. You did what you needed to in order to survive, and this time, she was giving him her power, he wasn't taking it. There was a world of difference.

"Is it to be working?" she asked quietly, as he pulled his arm away from hers.

It was like sliding his arm across a razor blade. But Marius had been through the scouring hell of Between, felt his own lungs fail not once, but twice, and experienced steel needles inserted into his longbones. On top of Brisbane's rugby club it barely rated a one in his life's scale of pain.

Marius lifted his lacerated forearm, feeling heat spread through it like the injection of an intravenous dye. Different than what he had felt when he'd extracted it before, but a familiar power. For months the most familiar. Breathing deep, Marius closed his eyes and let his mind blank and the power roll through him, rippling his own skin. It shifted subtly, almost imperceptibly. Settling, smoothing.

Yellow eyes opened, and Marius set his hand down on the dirt. The hand that dragged across the shore wasn't taloned. As experience had shown him, hers was a power molded to emotional state, and Marius' was not hers. Yvette's touch was like ripping blades. Marius' was smooth, slick. Untouchable.

Marius raised one hand and flexed his fingers to watch dust slide from skin darkened so grey it was almost black.

"Seems to have done the trick," he replied.

She couldn't smile. But there was the slightest of twitches across her mask-like face, and her eyes flared brightly. "This is being good," she said, lifting a finger to poke at the back of his hand, ever so slightly. The sharp talon skidded off without a mark. "One day, I am to be learning this, yes?"

Marius grinned. "Indeed, my young padawan. Or, minus the cultural reference it occurs to me you may not in fact get, a simple 'yes.' It's a matter of practice. Although there are certain techniques I believe I shall fail to pass on as those sorts attempted only by a blood idiot."

But despite the parallels, at this moment his mind didn't go back to the worst of it -- to those excruciating moments wheezing on the floor of the hotel room, feet away from her, willing himself to live and no longer caring if he didn't. Instead Marius found himself remembering that time when her borrowed power had given him protection the hired nurse and her clumsy gloves hadn't been able to achieve, and so he had helped. Helped move her, helped feed her. Quiet moments apart from the others when he had been able to forget, briefly, that it wasn't really Yvette that needed his help, but him that needed hers.

Spontaneously, Marius reached out to the small girl and ruffled his fingers through the slicing barbs of her hair.

The pair were unaware that they had had an audience for quite some time. Jennie stood just beyond the tree line, two salvaged tin cooking pots tucked under one arm and held against her chest, the other hand gripping a tree branch so tightly her fingers were beginning to cramp. Jennie had been unable to sleep during the night, trying to force her powers to give her a readout of where Forge was, and only getting a confused mess of nothing. When it was noticed she was awake, she'd been sent to be useful and gather water.

As she watched the quiet scene between the two unfold, Jennie remembered a night in a Paris hotel waiting for Manuel to return, when Marius had appeared, smooth-skinned and without the need of his respirator, hands a mass of shallow cuts. The knowledge of of where he'd acquired the power to change himself had been present, but all Jennie could feel at the time was immense, tremendous relief. And it was not until later, in a hospital bed with a splitting headache, would she feel the sick, sharp realization that those feelings had not been her own.

For a brief instant, Jennie considered slipping away and going to fetch water from further upstream, but it was quickly banished. Her philosophy was one of meeting anything headlong. She however, didn't give either Yvette or Marius the benefit of a greeting or a warning before she slipped down towards the stream to gather water.

At the movement, Yvette startled a little, drawing closer to Marius where ordinarily she would have shied away. He was safe now. "Hello, Jennie," she said, a little bemused by the silence. "Are you being needing the help?"

"One of you can carry this one," Jennie said, setting one filling pot of water on the rocks next to her, "I would try to prove how tough and strong I am by hauling both back myself, but only a stupid person would do something like that." Blue eyes flicked towards them briefly, expression unreadable, before she turned and lowered the other pot into the stream.

The discovery should have evoked panic and a frantic explanation, like a child caught standing in the middle of the broke shards of a dropped plate; the look on Jennie's face gave the reaction enough support. Seven months ago that would have been what he would have done. But right now, sitting untouchable in the middle of a prehistoric landscape with fresh blood drying on his arm, Marius realized it felt . . . all right.

Marius rosed to his feet in one slow, smooth motion. "I'll take the one," he said, indicating one of the pots. "We may be a bit synced right now, but there's a bit less of a gouge-risk from me." He moved to where Jennie knelt, giving Yvette's stiff hair one last tousle as he passed.

Jennie had to physically force herself to relax. She'd seen the events leading up to it, knew that the entire exchange was voluntary, but it had triggered something. It was through a silent mutual agreement that they never discussed or refrred to the events of the summer, and being faced with a reminder, no matter how inadvertant, was seriously weirding her out.

"You are the worst sentry ever," Jennie said causally as she finished filling up the other pot and moved to stand, cradling it gently so as not to slop water all over herself. "Marie very nearly had kittens when she woke up and saw that our party contained two less than when she went to bed."

"My apologies. But you should know by now I am quite the loose cannon. I would say a lone wolf, but that's not been applicable for months. Besides," a gesture at Yvette, "we are well within the confines of the buddy-system."

Despite his tone, the look Marius gave her was anything but flippant. He met Jennie's eyes over the pot of water, the yellow livid against the dark grey of his face. "No worries, Jen," he said quietly.

Yvette looked from one to the other, glowing eyes taking in the tension under the casual words. She couldn't reach out to Jennie without hurting her, so she placed herself squarely between the two of them, one hand in Marius' free one, and the other reaching out and brushing the very edge of Jennie's pot with a faintly metallic sound. "We are to be going back now, I am thinking. All together, yes?"

Marius blinked as the knife-fingered hand closed harmlessly around his. Red skin on grey.

Looking up, the Australian's head tilted at Jennie, the question in his eyes clear. "I suggest we heed the tiny one. Perhaps as a group we shall avoid the wrath of the RA for darin' to wander, although I advise a splitting of ways immediately afterwards. Though unfounded, I suspect retaliation from a particular substitute with whom I cannot help but notice she sits suspiciously close."

Jennie raised her own eyes from the tiny girl's to again meet Marius's. She gave him the briefest incline of her head, so subtle as to be missed by the other party. A part of her wanted to remark just how beyond messed up the entire situation was, but that was something for another day. Instead she raised an eyebrow and smirked at them.

"Watch yourself Marius, otherwise you will find yourself with your very own jailbait brigade." She sighed and lowered her pot of water. "Come on then, we'll make something up to tell her on the way back."