Jay, Forge and Jean

[x-icarus.livejournal.com]

Forge gets permission to see Jay, but its not what he expects and Jean has to step in.

"I need to see him. Please."

It had been the "please" that was the hardest for Forge. Especially when all he wanted to do was to charge in and demand to see his friends, or to shut down security temporarily and slip in past Jean and Amelia, but this was his friend, back from the dead for all intents and purposes. It wasn't as if the concept was foreign to Forge - but something in him knew that this was going to be hard enough without futile arguments involving the medical staff.

Dead. He repeated the thought to himself sombrely. It wasn't a new thought, after all. He, Crystal and Medusa had been thought dead briefly when Attilan had vanished. Mark had been seemingly killed by whatever had happened in that church, Jennie had dropped off a bridge into the Harlem River -- but they'd found bodies, or enough of them. Blood. Adrienne's psychometric imagery of the horrors Sabretooth had visited upon them. As much as it pained him to admit it, Forge had given up hope of his friends returning alive.

"He isn't the same."

That's what they'd told him. Forge wasn't sure Jay could regrow his wings - Paige had given him a rundown once of biology mumbo jumbo concerning Jay's physiology, but as usual, Forge had understood maybe a third of it. But wings or not, he was alive.

Alive and secured behind a guarded door in the medlab. Curiouser and curiouser, Forge thought as he opened the door and stepped inside.

The lights had been turned down, at his request, Jay stood in the corner, staring at the wall. His back faced Forge, his wings were gone and the black hoodie covered his head, shadowing his face. He turned only briefly, a glance over his shoulder and yellow piercing eyes gazed out at his friend. He had no welcoming smile, no words, just a blank gaze that turned to hurt and slowly he turned back around, facing away from him. Blue finger tips emerged from his side, clutching at his arm. He wanted to hide from Forge, hide his wings, but against his will, they unsheathed, one after another and circled around Jay, a visual shield of protection.

"Jay, I--" Forge stopped as he saw the blue skin and the metal. "...my god," he breathed. "What did they do to you? This is... I mean, it's..."

Cautiously, he reached out for his friend, despite the entire room of space between them. "Jay, you're alive. You're here. It's me, man. Say something."

"Don't--" he warned. His tone was different, changed. A gritty hoarse comparison to what it was before. The left wing shifted, more feathers slipped out, one over another and glistened, reflecting what little light was in the room. Unresponsive as he was, his wings responded for him. For the closer Forge got, the more feathers came out in a warning.

Forge stopped dead in his tracks, eyes fixed on the shining metal wings, their razor-sharp pinions bristling. He unfocused his eyes, and then immediately shook his head as if he'd just looked into the sun.

Whatever the wings were that had replaced his friend's natural ones, they weren't cybernetics as he understood them - they were barely even recognizable as mechanical, so impossibly intricate and complex as if they were...

"Alive," Forge repeated, this time in an awed tone. Unheeding of the danger, he stepped forward again, hands down in a nonthreatening posture. "Oh Jay, this is magnificent, this is light-years past anything I've ever designed, and I'm one of the greatest minds on the planet, not to damn myself with faint praise. I mean, the reflexive-responsive nature, it's beyond anything I've ever seen. I can't even fathom it."

"Magnificent? Magnificent?" Jay said, his tone deepening, darkening by the mar of its alteration. "You want 'em? Take 'em." Jay actually turned down and his wings shifted behind him, just like he had been born with them. They moved like his own, like his old wings. God, how he hated them. But Forge. "You could fix this," he said, his eyes filling with hope. "You could change all this, reverse it." He turned now, facing his friend, the dark underlying tones gone from his voice.

Haltingly, Forge shook his head. "I can't," he said sadly. "We're not talking about an aftermarket carburetor on a truck here, whatever was done to you - it's something I can barely even perceive, let alone comprehend. This is impossible tech, and I'm not using the term loosely. It's as far beyond my limits as I am beyond normal humans - Jay, you've been through a lot. Believe me, I know. This is going to take time, but you'll get through it."

At this point, Jay wasn't listening. He was only listening to himself. Forge could do this. He was only being modest. He could fix Jay, he could fix him and set things right. "But you could do it, you ain't like them. You could fix me. You could, Ah know you can. It's all mechanical, engineering. All you gotta do is pull 'em out, work you're stuff, the rest will grow back." It was so simple, why didn't he see it when Forge came? Why didn't he think of this when he arrived? His wings folded in, less threatening than they were before. "No no, ya ain't listening, this is real easy. You're just being funny about this, but you could do it. Go get your stuff right now." He gestured to the door.

Hanging his head, Forge sighed. "That's not how it works, Jay. If there's a way to reverse this, then I'll help you find it. But what you're asking, I simply cannot do. Not that I'd ever say this in public, but I have limits. I'm not even sure where I could start, what the state of your healing factor is, why you're... well, rather blue, and that's just for starters."

The young inventor thought for a long moment, choosing his next words carefully. "And even if I could just fix it, I'm not sure that I should."

The metal wings tilted back, angling as Jay drew up, the last of Forge's words hit him like a punch in the gut. What little hope that was there melted away, replaced by a bitter resentment, realizing his friend would hold back on him. "You don't wanna help me." It wasn't a question. It was a statement, dangerously quiet.

"Help you?" Forge replied incredulously, "Jay, I don't know how you could see potentially crippling yourself as help. Let Jean and Amelia run their tests, figure out what's changed and... and then just see where things go from there."

He walked forward, holding a hand out towards Jay in a pleading gesture. "Come on. You're alive after everything you've gone through, and you're back with us. Concentrate on that, okay?"

It's all he could think about. He was alive and felt he shouldn't be. Didn't want to be for all the changes that had taken place. The faint whispers in his head was background noise, had been the whole time they were talking, but his feathers rippled with thirst, hungered for organic to taste steel and make it bleed agony out into a cry. Not his cry. Forges.

"Don't--" He struggled to say, fists raised to his temples and Jay abruptly turned his back on Forge. The wings bristled, menacing in their posture and seemed to beg Forge to test his theory that they were very much alive.

"Jay, stop." Jean had given the boys as much space as she could safely do, but that didn't mean she wasn't monitoring the situation and, while it was possible that Forge would be able to help, calm Jay, bring him somewhat back to himself, it wasn't a chance she could take. Not when she was sensing what she was. She stood in the doorway, focused on Jay as she built a quick telekinetic wall between him and Forge, just in case - he'd not fought her care as much as she'd feared, but there was a lot they didn't know yet about... everything that had happened to him. "I'm sorry, Forge, but Jay needs space."

"I'll be back," Forge said out loud, more for Jay's benefit than Jean's. "You know where I am if you need me."

He walked briskly out of the medlab, and to his credit, made it an entire seven steps before dropping down into a chair and cradling his head in his hands, just shaking.