Nathan and Marius, Monday afternoon

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Nathan passes along a little information that's made its way to the X-Men via SHIELD, concerning the Taygetos operatives captured in Wakanda. He has some questions for Marius about What He Did.


It had taken some doing to detach Rachel this morning - finally, he'd managed to get her to focus on Dom instead, which served a couple of purposes. Ordinarily he would have just picked her up and brought her along, but Nathan suspected this conversation with Marius would be best held without attached toddler. "I need to talk to you," he said, spotting Marius just coming out of his suite.

Marius blinked, startled. Drawing upon years of experience, his brain processed this particular phrase and automatically responded with tried-and-true. His head went down and hands went up in Concillatory Posture.

"I apologise an' it won't happen again."

"Oh, for the love of God, boy. In," Nathan said in exasperation, gesturing at the still-open suite door. "This is not the sort of discussion we want to be having out in the hall. And what's with the guilty conscience?"

"Nothing, really, I've just found it to be the appropriate response nine times in ten." Marius allowed himself to be hustled back into his single, giving Nathan an odd look. He was suddenly aware he hadn't seen the man since they'd returned from Wakanda, and his bodylanguage didn't bode well. The boy cocked his head as Nathan shut the door behind them. "Er, hello, by the way. I can't help but be a bit concerned wonderin' what manner of discussion need take place without witnesses."

"You're deeply paranoid." Nathan sat down in the nearest chair, without waiting to be invited. "I want to know what you did with the telepathy I loaned you," he said without further ado. "In Wakanda, I mean. When Jean and I left."

There was another blink. This was not one of the subjects Marius' life had prepared him to anticipate after a conversation-starter like "we need to talk."

"Little enough," the Australian said cautiously. He moved to the couch and sat down himself. "I don't so much like to use it. Not one of the most controllable, you know? Er, why?"

"You didn't happen to reach into the mind of one of your opponents," Nathan pressed, "and, oh, yank on anything?" There was no anger in his voice or his expression, just a certain intensity.

"N--" Belated recall terminated the automatic denial. Marius' brow creased.

"Before we got back with the group," the boy ventured slowly, "last bloke we fought, I did do . . . somethin'. He was comin' up on Domino, but I didn't want to . . ." Marius hesitated for a fraction of a second, then sped on, "Let us just say intervention was required. So I gave myself a bit of luck an' it just -- came to me."

Nathan twitched, looking very slightly ill for a moment before he wrestled his expression back under control. "Well. According to the call Scott got today from SHIELD, you actually managed to break said bloke's conditioning. Which you shouldn't have actually been able to do with just a telepathic push. So I'm guessing the probability powers probably factored in..."

Marius' mouth suffered a momentary stall. Broken conditioning? He hadn't known what he'd done at the time -- only that the young plasma-thrower had suddenly stopped. Not fallen-down unconscious, simply -- stopped. Like a toy whose batteries had suddenly run out. But by that time there'd barely been time to think, let alone examine the result, and the migraine afterwards had driven away conscious thought for the next two days.

"There was red," he heard himself say, struggling to vocalize something that had no physical parallel. His idiosyncratic diction gained a touch of unusual clarity. "Inside his head, somehow. I needed a way to get him down, and then I saw it. I reached in and found the edges and . . . made it void." Marius shook his head uselessly at the inadequacy of words. "I can't explain it. I only knew I'd found something that wasn't meant to be there, and knowing that -- I fit the world so it wasn't."

"So in other words, not something anyone's likely to be able to replicate," Nathan muttered, not knowing if he was relieved or disappointed. "You didn't hurt the kid, by the way," he went on, "or at least, not any more than was inevitable, given what you managed to do. I should have told you that at the start."

"That's . . . good." Marius was still having trouble really grasping what he was supposed to have done. That had been it? One swift snap?

"I don't understand," he blurted suddenly, head snapping up to look at Nathan. "It can break like that? All in one go?"

"It can. It doesn't usually. I knew someone who spent ten years figuring out how to make it break like that," Nathan said, definitely looking a little pale. "I'm relieved you didn't actually hurt yourself, doing that... the psychic feedback could have been nasty. I suppose the probability powers skewed things in your favor in that sense, as well."

"What? Oh. Luck, yeah." Marius settled back in the couch, forehead still creased. He tried to force a little levity back into his voice. "No worries, I've proven to be the resilient sort. Personally, I count the bloke in question somewhat more fortunate. Given a choice, I would gladly have eschewed the torturous unravelling for a quick-break."

Nathan looked like he'd swallowed something unpleasant. "It... has its pros and cons," he said. "The torturous unraveling spares you certain things. But, well. It's torturous." He ran his hands through his hair, fingers lacing together at the back of his neck for a moment. "I'll ask Charles, and Moira... but I doubt what you did could be safely replicated."

"Like so many of my better moments, it seems. That I do regret." Marius was aware they seemed caught in some kind of vaguely-defined masochistic loop: he driven to speak without really addressing, and Nathan unable to stop. Perhaps, Marius thought, this manner of brittle discomfort was not unknown between survivors of similar experiences.

Not that Marius' self-pity was such that he imagined a week of mental and physical reprogramming at Rory Campbell's hands was comparable to the nearly half-lifetime Nathan had endured, but still, knowing he wasn't the only one responding to the concept of Taygetos with an uncomfortable feeling of deja vu brought some reassurance. Though the mission had been a technical success his subconscious was still kicking up the occasional dream about Wakanda. The burning bodyguard was one feature. The blank-faced Taygetos assassins comprised most of the rest.

"Well. One step at a time. You've established that it can be broken; that's a start." Nathan, as soon as the words were out of his mouth, had one of those odd moments where his thoughts took a right turn away from something so fast that it was jarring. He blinked at the wall for a moment, then shook his head, shaking off the unformed thought without the slightest hint of guilt.

Not right now. Whatever it was.

"Right. Better than nothing -- and a fair sight better from the bloke's point of view, I suppose." Marius looked away from the older man with a casualness that did not come off as particularly authentic. "That kid, though -- you said he's okay. They say any more? How he's doing an' that, I mean. Mentally."

"They didn't give Scott many details. Just said he's unresponsive." Nathan's expression was guarded, and he chose his next words with care. "I doubt it's anything you did. If what we think we know about Taygetos is accurate, they've been raised for this since infancy. Conditioned from the get-go."

The boy tried to imagine living like that. He was relieved when he failed.

"Well," Marius said slowly. "Practical, I suppose. Fewer mistakes. Providing one has no further use for one's soul, that is." His yellow eyes returned to Nathan's, now cold with a sudden hardness. "On behalf of those of us who've made the effort to retain one, do me the favour, please, of being the sort of 'mistake' that comes back to visit such people with ever-increasin' complications."

Nathan gave him an odd, rattled smile as he rose. "My reason for being, isn't it?" he asked. "I should go. I'm almost positive I sense Rachel's babysitter calling silently for help already."

"Indeed, you do have an undeniable responsibility to protect innocents from your ravenin' offspring." As the man turned to leave Marius paused, then added, "Cheers. For tellin' me, that is."

It would be, perhaps, that he would be seeing those blank faces in his dreams for a while after. Still, Marius thought as the older man let himself out, it was equally possible that one of those faces might one day be a little less blank, and that was better than nothing. The boy sighed, leaned back, and put his feet on the end-table.

Certainly better than dwelling on the alternative.