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xp_logs2009-06-26 10:23 pm
x-cynosure.livejournal.com) wrote in xp_logs2009-06-26 10:23 pm
Mnemovore: Charles, Nathan, Jean and Jean-Paul
Xavier, Jean, and Nathan begin the task of piecing Jean-Paul's mind back together.
The bastard had stimulated Jean-Paul's pain centers and snapped the switch off short. The torment combined with Jean-Paul's fractured mind had reduced the speedster to a dangerous binary, an unthinking fight-or-flight response. Turning off the pain had been relatively easy and managed on the flight back from Romania, but it hadn't fixed anything. Removing the aggression hadn't brought back anything of Jean-Paul.
The trio of telepaths watched as the bandaged speedster beyond the medlab's clear-fronted quarantine room backed away from them, eyes narrowed warily. Left to his own devices, Jean-Paul's reactions were minimal; he rarely moved from his rigid seat on his bed. If anyone came within his line of sight, however, he became agitated, pacing the confines of his small, white world and retreating if approached, but without any sound. No comprehension. No recognition.
"So what do we do?" Nathan's voice was hoarse and tired, but outwardly he was completely composed. Whatever emotional reactions were there were buried deep.
"Rather more than I was hoping," Charles said quietly, "at least, for right now. I had wanted to give him some time to rest before any sort of deeper mental intervention-" It went without saying that Jean-Paul's mindscape was the equivalent of a mass of open wounds, and more manipulation, however beneficial, would certainly not encourage
them to close. "-but the damage is simply too severe. Leaving him like this for any length of time would only make things worse."
"He doesn't look like he's capable of resting," Nathan said, almost inaudibly.
"Not after the hyper stimulation of his pain centers," Jean agreed, leaning against a wall, looking tired. "Even with his pain sensors switched off again, he's still reacting as though he's in pain from time to time. Ghost pains coursing through him."
"That can be eased," Charles said, studying Jean-Paul, looking grieved and somehow determined at the same time. "The alterations to his memories - that may take some doing, to undo. We can remove what's been grafted, but not without taking a great deal of time, and possibly causing more trauma."
Nathan gave a soundless, humorless laugh. "Just what he needs." But Charles was giving him that assessing look, and he swallowed, turning to face the older man more directly. "What?"
"You might be able to help prevent that."
"There's a reason none of the rest of you generally ask me to try and use my telepathy therapeutically," Nathan pointed out, not quite harshly. "I suck at it."
"I would say instead that your skills lie in other areas," Charles said, "and also, that you've had little opportunity to practice. But I'm not suggesting you actually assist in...repairs. But if you were to find Jean-Paul on his mindscape, while Jean and I work..." He looked at Jean. "I think between the two of us, we should be able to
make this a somewhat less protracted process."
Jean glanced away from the man inside, pacing back and forth, and caught Charles' gaze. They'd known each other long enough that much of the time they didn't even need telepathy, and certainly Nate didn't catch a hint of anything before Jean nodded and looked over at him. "You have the greatest familiarity with Jean-Paul's mind. He's closest
to you. You have the greatest chance of finding him without scaring him."
There was a sort of symmetry to it, he thought - very privately. Jean-Paul had gone through hell because of him. Now he needed to go into hell and find him. "Just call me Orpheus," he muttered. "I can...I can find a good memory to hold him to. If they left him any." Too much to hope that there was an echo of the island somewhere in his friend's shattered mind. "Might do, for a temporary mindscape..."
"Any rest you can give him at all will help," Jean said quietly, turning her gaze back to Jean-Paul.
Rest. Distraction from more people slicing away at his mind, even if it was done with the best of intentions this time. The only difference between the surgeon and the torturer was the desired end result. "I'll do it." His voice was calmer than it had been. The least he could do was play the anesthesiologist.
Charles nodded slowly as Nathan turned away to get chairs for himself and Jean. His eyes fell on Jean, studying her gently, as if assessing her own level of weariness. #I should take the lead to begin, I think. Once we've established the best protocol for dealing with the grafted memories, we can work separately and accomplish what needs to be done more quickly.#
Jean straightened up, nodding. #Of course.# Her mind slipped into link with his the way a hand might into a familiar glove - once upon a time there was no other mind she knew as well as his, and it was comforting to her that that familiarity would always be there.
========
Nathan went in first, with Charles' mind a subtle anchor to his own.
Nathan was intimately familiar with Jean-Paul's shields. Even braced, it was still a jolt to enter his mind and "see" nothing but the raw pits left where they'd been dug out from their moorings. It could heal, though. If they gave him the help he needed, the time to recover, it could heal. They'd started on Jean-Paul's defenses from scratch and they could do it again. He slipped past that first layer of damage and probed deeper, moving with as much care as he could and still feeling hopelessly clumsy.
Ice crunched under his feet as Jean-Paul's mindscape slowly coalesced around him. Snow. The memory of cold. Mountains fading into view in the distance. So very Jean-Paul that, for a second, some hare-brained hope lead him to think that it wasn't as bad as it looked from the outside, even knowing better.
The first step he took caused the entire scene to shake, nearly to cave in underfoot. A whif of putrescence rose up from the ground, and a dark ooze began to bubble up out of thousands of thin, nearly invisible cuts running across mindscape. Nothing quite fit together, Nathan realized, looking closer. From where he stood to the horizon, it had all been taken apart and put back together wrong...but never cemented into place for some reason.
Self-hatred well-repressed, Nathan moved forward, slowly but surely. Persevering, even when the distances didn't seem to change. He would find Jean-Paul. If the mindscape was here at all, it meant that he was here. Conscious or not.
It seemed like an impossibly long trek across the bleeding, fragile interior of Jean-Paul's mind, with nothing to see except featureless snowfield and mountains that never got any closer. Nathan literally stumbled across the house, barking his shins on the steps of a two-story modern cabin that had appeared where there had been blank white before. Not a memory itself, he decided, as he mounted the porch, but a place to house them. A hideaway. Security. He saw at once that it hadn't been enough. The assault here had been more forceful, brute and inexact. The front door was kicked in, the windows smashed. The only echo of the precision found in the assault on the rest of the mindscape was the black and white dog, neatly quartered and hanging from the porch rafters like aging meat.
It was no consolation, Nathan thought somewhat faintly, that the telepath who'd done this had been the first to die, ground zero of the psychotic break he'd created. It should have been, but it wasn't. He didn't think there was any consolation at all in this situation.
"Jean-Paul?" he called, his 'voice' on the mindscape hoarse and hesitant. "It's Nathan. Are you here?"
No answer.
Inside the cabin was cavernous and scoured down to bare, splintered wood on the walls and floors. Every surface was plastered with memory, floor to ceiling, branching off into other rooms. Like everything else here, they'd been cut to peices and rearranged to fulfill the purpose of another.
Nate knew some of these. He'd been there or touched Jean-Paul's mind or Jean-Paul had told him...
...about his mother abandoning him and Jeanne-Marie to die in the wreck...
...pummeling Phoebe/Esme/Sophie/Celeste Stepford until there wasn't a bone left to break and their flesh held the indentions of his fists as it if were clay...
...getting that bitch MacTaggart and her brat out of the way...
Nathan stepped back out of the cabin, and knew that the nausea he felt, here on the mindscape, was just an echo. "Not real," he muttered. "But they'll wash it away. I promise." It might have been futile to make such a promise, here and now, but he had to believe that Jean-Paul could hear him.
He turned away from the cabin, set his jaw, and kept moving. Searching, with as delicate a touch as he could, for some clearer sign of where Jean-Paul's consciousness could be, in all this.
Three steps beyond the cabin, the world gave way beneath Nathan's feet, dumping him down into freefall through rotting permafrost...
...and into a booth at a small, well-lit restaurant crowded with mannequin-faced servers and customers, all rooted in place and moving like animatrons in need of maintenance. The ghost of gibberish conversations whispered through the room with the clink of silverware and plates. A laugh that was quite clearly Jean-Paul's rose over the fake-life sounds, coming from beyond the doors to the kitchen.
Drawing what little calm he could muster around him like armor, Nathan moved towards the sound of his friend's voice. "Jean-Paul," he called out softly, pushing open the kitchen doors. "It's Nathan..."
The kitchen was nearly deserted save for three figures: a dark-haired woman who shared Jean-Paul's features, an elderly gentleman leaning on a cane, and Jean-Paul himself, stirring a boiling pot that threw off no scent. The speedster hardly looked himself; his physique was middling at best, his features softened by years of easy living, with the beginnings of a belly beneath his apron.
At Nathan's hail, he left the stove at once, heading toward him with a stride that had a bit too much tension in it to be casual.
"I am sorry, monsieur, but customers are not allowed back here." Easy-going on the surface, with fear welling up beneath. This was the last place he'd had to hide.
Nathan stayed where he was, not moving forward - or back. This was Jean-Paul's consciousness, however hard he was attempting to hide behind a facade that made more and more sense as he thought about it. "Jean-Paul," he said, his voice still soft. "You're at the mansion. You're safe, and we're trying to help you. I'm here to stay with you while the others try to undo what was done."
"Nathan...?" Quiet, uncertain, fearing deception, but Jean-Paul was simply too exhausted to keep up his defenses and concentrate on the man before him. Whether it was trust or simply giving in to the inevitable, the scene around them faded to black. The Jean-Paul that looked to Nathan now was bloodied and haggard, but familiar. "I don't...how can you be here?" More sharply, "Who is out there?"
"That kid, the teleporter - she dumped me in the middle of the Ukraine." Nathan's shoulders slumped, an outward reflection of the near-overwhelming relief that swept over him. "Charles found me first. I didn't know what had happened. But we're both back, and it's just Charles and Jean... I came in here to find you." His voice was the tiniest bit unsteady as he went on. "I can't fix what he did. But I can keep you company while they do."
Jean-Paul shook his head. "No. They can't...they can't..." He swallowed hard, taking a step back. "If I go out there, I will die, Nathan. Don't let them. Just...stay with me. Please."
"I'm not going anywhere." This time he did move forward, if only by a step. He forced his voice to calm as he went on. "And I'm not going to let you die. Believe me. I don't care what I have to do."
"The rest of me is already dead. I saw it...I felt him...cutting out pieces..." Jean-Paul shook his head, eyes going briefly pained and unfocused. "Was that me? Why do I know your name and not these others?" Nathan could feel him trying to reach beyond this safe retreat, reaching for mutilated memories, then retreating. Pacing in a futile attempt to ward off a rising panic.
"Listen to me." Nathan moved closer to him in the darkness, hands out, palms up. "This part of you wouldn't be here if he'd taken away your self. He's grafted on... wrong things," he said, stumbling over the words. "Things meant to drive you in ways you can still feel are wrong. Think about that, Jean-Paul. Think about what it means. If he'd killed the rest of you, you wouldn't know the difference."
Jean-Paul blurred slightly and seemed to skip the distance between them, coming back into focus at Nathan's shoulder. This deep into Jean-Paul's self, with no shields, it was impossible to not read him. The speedster's faint trust was a sharp contrast to the fear he was struggling to keep at bay. "This is going to hurt again, isn't it?"
Nathan straightened, squaring his shoulders. "No," he said steadily, meeting the other man's eyes without hesitation. "It's not. Not for now." Slowly but steadily - and he was surprising the hell out of himself, given the mess that psi-bolt had made of his own shields - Nathan created what Jean and Charles would have seen as a diamond shell, around this last refuge. It pushed everything to a remove for Jean-Paul, and he knew it couldn't last, but he'd damned sure do his best to make sure it would last for however this took. #Ready,# Nathan sent back to Charles, and broke the link. Closing the door after him.
The bastard had stimulated Jean-Paul's pain centers and snapped the switch off short. The torment combined with Jean-Paul's fractured mind had reduced the speedster to a dangerous binary, an unthinking fight-or-flight response. Turning off the pain had been relatively easy and managed on the flight back from Romania, but it hadn't fixed anything. Removing the aggression hadn't brought back anything of Jean-Paul.
The trio of telepaths watched as the bandaged speedster beyond the medlab's clear-fronted quarantine room backed away from them, eyes narrowed warily. Left to his own devices, Jean-Paul's reactions were minimal; he rarely moved from his rigid seat on his bed. If anyone came within his line of sight, however, he became agitated, pacing the confines of his small, white world and retreating if approached, but without any sound. No comprehension. No recognition.
"So what do we do?" Nathan's voice was hoarse and tired, but outwardly he was completely composed. Whatever emotional reactions were there were buried deep.
"Rather more than I was hoping," Charles said quietly, "at least, for right now. I had wanted to give him some time to rest before any sort of deeper mental intervention-" It went without saying that Jean-Paul's mindscape was the equivalent of a mass of open wounds, and more manipulation, however beneficial, would certainly not encourage
them to close. "-but the damage is simply too severe. Leaving him like this for any length of time would only make things worse."
"He doesn't look like he's capable of resting," Nathan said, almost inaudibly.
"Not after the hyper stimulation of his pain centers," Jean agreed, leaning against a wall, looking tired. "Even with his pain sensors switched off again, he's still reacting as though he's in pain from time to time. Ghost pains coursing through him."
"That can be eased," Charles said, studying Jean-Paul, looking grieved and somehow determined at the same time. "The alterations to his memories - that may take some doing, to undo. We can remove what's been grafted, but not without taking a great deal of time, and possibly causing more trauma."
Nathan gave a soundless, humorless laugh. "Just what he needs." But Charles was giving him that assessing look, and he swallowed, turning to face the older man more directly. "What?"
"You might be able to help prevent that."
"There's a reason none of the rest of you generally ask me to try and use my telepathy therapeutically," Nathan pointed out, not quite harshly. "I suck at it."
"I would say instead that your skills lie in other areas," Charles said, "and also, that you've had little opportunity to practice. But I'm not suggesting you actually assist in...repairs. But if you were to find Jean-Paul on his mindscape, while Jean and I work..." He looked at Jean. "I think between the two of us, we should be able to
make this a somewhat less protracted process."
Jean glanced away from the man inside, pacing back and forth, and caught Charles' gaze. They'd known each other long enough that much of the time they didn't even need telepathy, and certainly Nate didn't catch a hint of anything before Jean nodded and looked over at him. "You have the greatest familiarity with Jean-Paul's mind. He's closest
to you. You have the greatest chance of finding him without scaring him."
There was a sort of symmetry to it, he thought - very privately. Jean-Paul had gone through hell because of him. Now he needed to go into hell and find him. "Just call me Orpheus," he muttered. "I can...I can find a good memory to hold him to. If they left him any." Too much to hope that there was an echo of the island somewhere in his friend's shattered mind. "Might do, for a temporary mindscape..."
"Any rest you can give him at all will help," Jean said quietly, turning her gaze back to Jean-Paul.
Rest. Distraction from more people slicing away at his mind, even if it was done with the best of intentions this time. The only difference between the surgeon and the torturer was the desired end result. "I'll do it." His voice was calmer than it had been. The least he could do was play the anesthesiologist.
Charles nodded slowly as Nathan turned away to get chairs for himself and Jean. His eyes fell on Jean, studying her gently, as if assessing her own level of weariness. #I should take the lead to begin, I think. Once we've established the best protocol for dealing with the grafted memories, we can work separately and accomplish what needs to be done more quickly.#
Jean straightened up, nodding. #Of course.# Her mind slipped into link with his the way a hand might into a familiar glove - once upon a time there was no other mind she knew as well as his, and it was comforting to her that that familiarity would always be there.
Nathan went in first, with Charles' mind a subtle anchor to his own.
Nathan was intimately familiar with Jean-Paul's shields. Even braced, it was still a jolt to enter his mind and "see" nothing but the raw pits left where they'd been dug out from their moorings. It could heal, though. If they gave him the help he needed, the time to recover, it could heal. They'd started on Jean-Paul's defenses from scratch and they could do it again. He slipped past that first layer of damage and probed deeper, moving with as much care as he could and still feeling hopelessly clumsy.
Ice crunched under his feet as Jean-Paul's mindscape slowly coalesced around him. Snow. The memory of cold. Mountains fading into view in the distance. So very Jean-Paul that, for a second, some hare-brained hope lead him to think that it wasn't as bad as it looked from the outside, even knowing better.
The first step he took caused the entire scene to shake, nearly to cave in underfoot. A whif of putrescence rose up from the ground, and a dark ooze began to bubble up out of thousands of thin, nearly invisible cuts running across mindscape. Nothing quite fit together, Nathan realized, looking closer. From where he stood to the horizon, it had all been taken apart and put back together wrong...but never cemented into place for some reason.
Self-hatred well-repressed, Nathan moved forward, slowly but surely. Persevering, even when the distances didn't seem to change. He would find Jean-Paul. If the mindscape was here at all, it meant that he was here. Conscious or not.
It seemed like an impossibly long trek across the bleeding, fragile interior of Jean-Paul's mind, with nothing to see except featureless snowfield and mountains that never got any closer. Nathan literally stumbled across the house, barking his shins on the steps of a two-story modern cabin that had appeared where there had been blank white before. Not a memory itself, he decided, as he mounted the porch, but a place to house them. A hideaway. Security. He saw at once that it hadn't been enough. The assault here had been more forceful, brute and inexact. The front door was kicked in, the windows smashed. The only echo of the precision found in the assault on the rest of the mindscape was the black and white dog, neatly quartered and hanging from the porch rafters like aging meat.
It was no consolation, Nathan thought somewhat faintly, that the telepath who'd done this had been the first to die, ground zero of the psychotic break he'd created. It should have been, but it wasn't. He didn't think there was any consolation at all in this situation.
"Jean-Paul?" he called, his 'voice' on the mindscape hoarse and hesitant. "It's Nathan. Are you here?"
No answer.
Inside the cabin was cavernous and scoured down to bare, splintered wood on the walls and floors. Every surface was plastered with memory, floor to ceiling, branching off into other rooms. Like everything else here, they'd been cut to peices and rearranged to fulfill the purpose of another.
Nate knew some of these. He'd been there or touched Jean-Paul's mind or Jean-Paul had told him...
...about his mother abandoning him and Jeanne-Marie to die in the wreck...
...pummeling Phoebe/Esme/Sophie/Celeste Stepford until there wasn't a bone left to break and their flesh held the indentions of his fists as it if were clay...
...getting that bitch MacTaggart and her brat out of the way...
Nathan stepped back out of the cabin, and knew that the nausea he felt, here on the mindscape, was just an echo. "Not real," he muttered. "But they'll wash it away. I promise." It might have been futile to make such a promise, here and now, but he had to believe that Jean-Paul could hear him.
He turned away from the cabin, set his jaw, and kept moving. Searching, with as delicate a touch as he could, for some clearer sign of where Jean-Paul's consciousness could be, in all this.
Three steps beyond the cabin, the world gave way beneath Nathan's feet, dumping him down into freefall through rotting permafrost...
...and into a booth at a small, well-lit restaurant crowded with mannequin-faced servers and customers, all rooted in place and moving like animatrons in need of maintenance. The ghost of gibberish conversations whispered through the room with the clink of silverware and plates. A laugh that was quite clearly Jean-Paul's rose over the fake-life sounds, coming from beyond the doors to the kitchen.
Drawing what little calm he could muster around him like armor, Nathan moved towards the sound of his friend's voice. "Jean-Paul," he called out softly, pushing open the kitchen doors. "It's Nathan..."
The kitchen was nearly deserted save for three figures: a dark-haired woman who shared Jean-Paul's features, an elderly gentleman leaning on a cane, and Jean-Paul himself, stirring a boiling pot that threw off no scent. The speedster hardly looked himself; his physique was middling at best, his features softened by years of easy living, with the beginnings of a belly beneath his apron.
At Nathan's hail, he left the stove at once, heading toward him with a stride that had a bit too much tension in it to be casual.
"I am sorry, monsieur, but customers are not allowed back here." Easy-going on the surface, with fear welling up beneath. This was the last place he'd had to hide.
Nathan stayed where he was, not moving forward - or back. This was Jean-Paul's consciousness, however hard he was attempting to hide behind a facade that made more and more sense as he thought about it. "Jean-Paul," he said, his voice still soft. "You're at the mansion. You're safe, and we're trying to help you. I'm here to stay with you while the others try to undo what was done."
"Nathan...?" Quiet, uncertain, fearing deception, but Jean-Paul was simply too exhausted to keep up his defenses and concentrate on the man before him. Whether it was trust or simply giving in to the inevitable, the scene around them faded to black. The Jean-Paul that looked to Nathan now was bloodied and haggard, but familiar. "I don't...how can you be here?" More sharply, "Who is out there?"
"That kid, the teleporter - she dumped me in the middle of the Ukraine." Nathan's shoulders slumped, an outward reflection of the near-overwhelming relief that swept over him. "Charles found me first. I didn't know what had happened. But we're both back, and it's just Charles and Jean... I came in here to find you." His voice was the tiniest bit unsteady as he went on. "I can't fix what he did. But I can keep you company while they do."
Jean-Paul shook his head. "No. They can't...they can't..." He swallowed hard, taking a step back. "If I go out there, I will die, Nathan. Don't let them. Just...stay with me. Please."
"I'm not going anywhere." This time he did move forward, if only by a step. He forced his voice to calm as he went on. "And I'm not going to let you die. Believe me. I don't care what I have to do."
"The rest of me is already dead. I saw it...I felt him...cutting out pieces..." Jean-Paul shook his head, eyes going briefly pained and unfocused. "Was that me? Why do I know your name and not these others?" Nathan could feel him trying to reach beyond this safe retreat, reaching for mutilated memories, then retreating. Pacing in a futile attempt to ward off a rising panic.
"Listen to me." Nathan moved closer to him in the darkness, hands out, palms up. "This part of you wouldn't be here if he'd taken away your self. He's grafted on... wrong things," he said, stumbling over the words. "Things meant to drive you in ways you can still feel are wrong. Think about that, Jean-Paul. Think about what it means. If he'd killed the rest of you, you wouldn't know the difference."
Jean-Paul blurred slightly and seemed to skip the distance between them, coming back into focus at Nathan's shoulder. This deep into Jean-Paul's self, with no shields, it was impossible to not read him. The speedster's faint trust was a sharp contrast to the fear he was struggling to keep at bay. "This is going to hurt again, isn't it?"
Nathan straightened, squaring his shoulders. "No," he said steadily, meeting the other man's eyes without hesitation. "It's not. Not for now." Slowly but steadily - and he was surprising the hell out of himself, given the mess that psi-bolt had made of his own shields - Nathan created what Jean and Charles would have seen as a diamond shell, around this last refuge. It pushed everything to a remove for Jean-Paul, and he knew it couldn't last, but he'd damned sure do his best to make sure it would last for however this took. #Ready,# Nathan sent back to Charles, and broke the link. Closing the door after him.