Yvette, Marius - Bedside Talks

[x-penance.livejournal.com]

Backdated to August 21: Post-Fury, Marius checks in on Fred and is caught out by Yvette, resulting in Serious Talks.



Lionel's power was still running strong. Stronger than it should have been at this point, but Marius tried not to think about that. Instead he contented himself with the fact that if he was going to be miserable it would be whilst also being objectively useful.

Everything seemed good as far as his diagnostic could tell. A relief. Marius withdrew his hand from the patient and sighed.

"Fred, mate," he muttered to his unconscious teammate, "I want no secrets between us. I have a confession to make. I got to second base with your girlfriend . . . 's leg."

"I was wondering about the... how do you call it? Love bite?" The voice came from the doorway, where Yvette had returned after going to the bathroom - the thing about drinking her weight in water to rehydrate damaged tissues was she had to go every five minutes, it seemed. She took in Marius' altered appearance, the grey skin, the unnatural bulges, the way he flinched at her arrival... "But perhaps this is not so much the time for teasing. Are you all right?"

Marius almost jumped out of his skin. She was so quiet. He'd heard a shower going, seen the room empty, and thought she'd finally taken a break from her vigil. It must have been one of the omnipresent medstaff. Many of them had taken up semi-permanent residence ever since the team had returned.
"Ah, you know," he said, attempting to sell levity so badly even he wouldn't have purchased it, "it looks a bit shocking, but I'm in good shape. No injuries to be found." He swiftly changed topics. "And yourself? You look a bit . . ."

There wasn't any good way to describe it. "Soft," perhaps -- after so many years accustomed to her hardened skin her face seemed unusually expressive. It might have been exaggerated by her skin. Though still red, it was lighter. Without the dark colour drinking in the light it was easier to discern details.

"I am fine, thanks to you and Doctor Jean." She came in and took a seat on the end of the bed, laying one hand gently on Fred's leg as if to reassure herself he was still there. "And the same for Fred, here. Without you two, he would have died."

"Good. That's . . . good." Marius noted the movement. It reminded him of her cries as Fred screamed and thrashed in Jefferies' lab.

"I was checking on him, just to make sure he's healing all right," continued Marius in what he hoped was a reassuring tone. "Everything seems to be holdin', though Jean thinks he may need a bit of rehab for the muscles and that. She being the doctor, I'll take her word for it." He glanced at her again, the lightness of her skin, the pliability of her normally spiked hair. Unconsciously, the X-Man folded his arms so the deformation of his right side was less obvious -- and so the mouths on his hands were firmly against his sleeves. "You sure you're all right? Thing is, it's been a few days. You should be . . ." the words "back to normal" hung in the silence.

"Oh." She looked down at her hands, perfectly normal except for the colour of the skin. "I suppose I overdid things? Fighting that... monster." And here she shivered despite herself, mind's eye full of horrifying images, the beating she and the rest of the team had taken. "Powers overload, yes? I am sure it will come back, in time." Her face, when she looked up at Marius, held a certain degree of trepidation. "And after what I did, how I was... it is better, perhaps, if my powers do not work so much for a while. I was... frightening."

Marius gave her a baffled look. It wasn't that he didn't share certain associations with the battleform that was the physical artifact of her time as a mutate. On the contrary, Marius had a very specific memory of being maimed by it. However, under the circumstances he wasn't certain he understood her concern.
"Er, what? Yvette, when something's trying to pull you apart you don't worry about frightening. As you were facing a literal killing machine I feel your actions were entirely appropriate. Besides, I had a punctured lung. Without you and Clarice I'd not have gotten Jefferies' power at all." He dropped his eyes to where his hands flexed nervously against the sleeves of his sweatshirt. "Anyway, this right now, the weakness and that . . . I think it was me." He forced his fingers still. "I fed on you."

Yvette had been about to explain the flashes of memory to her time as a mutate in Genosha, the gaps in her memory during the fight as she had switched off her mind altogether, in order to do what had to be done. But his revelation forestalled that. "The mark on my leg... it looked familiar. From back when I was first here," she admitted. "But I thought you could not feed like that any more? That the..." She indicated his hands, balled up in his sweatshirt. "I thought they were gone?"

"They were." Marius had meant to keep the statement matter-of-fact, but the actual utterance failed miserably. He cleared his throat and continued, a little more evenly, "Seems like Jefferies' power worked on himself, too. It put me back together, which was fine, but I used a fair bit of energy working on everyone else. Suppose my body remembered how it used to handle that. But I--" he hesitated, hands clenching against his sleeves, "I wouldn't have done it except we couldn't get you cool. You were too armoured. The bath wasn't working quick enough."

"Oh, Marius, I'm so sorry." She reached out and gently touched his arm, just once, and then pulled back. "But you have nothing to worry about with me. You did what you had to do to save my life. If you hadn't..." She looked down at Fred's face, hidden by the layer of bandages. "You saved my life also and for that I will always be grateful to you."

He managed not to flinch as she reached out to touch him before she mercifully withdrew. He knew he should accept her thanks. Jean had told him the same, and logically he acknowledged it had been the only choice. It probably had saved her.
For anyone else he might have been able to live with it, but this was Yvette. Though she'd long since forgiven him Marius could never forget that she had only come to the mansion because he had purchased her like a pet -- a tool to be used in the mad, desperate attempt to delay his own death.

Whether she remembered it or not, whether she blamed him or not, feeding on her again still felt like betrayal.

"Well, the same goes for you," Marius said, obliquely shifting topics as he followed her gaze to Fred. "The both of you, come to that. Despite the . . . measures needed."

"I am frightened for him," Yvette said softly as she tried to make out some recognisable feature beneath the linen covering his face. "When he was fighting the Fury, at the end..." Her voice shook and she couldn't finish. "What if he does not come back? From that place in his mind, I mean?"

Marius thought back to the incoherent howl of profanity, the rending flesh and hail of blows, the impossibly wide mouth darting towards the Fury to do . . . something he was glad he'd been too far away to see.

"He's tough," Marius replied. "I believe that rather goes without saying.but if he is indeed lost, well, the professor knows how to bring people back. To this I can speak from experience."

"I know." Yvette sighed. "There are gaps in my memory of fighting the Fury. Something else, something I cannot remember properly, came up and helped me fight. And I know it is from Genosha. But Fred... that anger, what he did... it is part of him too. Not something that was grafted on by the Genegineer."

Marius glanced at the blank, bandaged face beside them. Yes. He could see why that would disturb her. "I suppose. But Fred's one of us. He choose to join the X-Men, right? I think it has to matter why it came out, and what he used it for when it did." He looked back at her. Whilst aware it was unfair to prioritize, he didn't know Fred well. He did know Yvette. "Have you told the professor?" he asked. "About yourself, that is."

"Not yet. I have been busy down here," Yvette admitted. Marius' words did cheer her up somewhat - the reason was important and Fred was a good person. She wouldn't love him if he wasn't, would she? "I will, when Fred wakes up. Gaps in the memory... it is not so new for me. And I am not entirely sure I want to know everything." The state of her uniform when she'd come back to herself had been proof she'd done something terrible herself.

"Kyle, Jen and I, we went through something similar." Marius didn't like to recall his time at the hands of Ahab, but it felt important to remind Yvette such experiences weren't unique. "Learn as much as it takes to not be afraid of yourself. For myself, I preferred to know. Some things I found out I didn't like, but if I hadn't . . . there'd always have been that question." His gaze dropped again to the backs of his hands. "An imagination under stress is not kind."

"I remember. I was only new to the school when that happened." Yvette sighed. "And I will talk to the Professor. Maybe also the people who were there in Genosha when I was the mutate. I do not know if it will help, knowing how I was and what I did, but like you are saying, it is better than what my imagination is telling me." She wrinkled her nose slightly.

Whilst relieved by her willingness, Marius belatedly realised he may have done her more harm than good. After all, it hadn't been the memories of the torture or what he'd been made to do that left the deepest scars: it had been the sense of absolute helplessness. He'd been able to reclaim a sense of control by taking the first step to become an X-Man. Yvette was already there. What would she do?

This, Marius reflected over the sick feeling in his gut, was why he shouldn't be allowed to give advice. He rubbed his eyes.

"Do you ever feel," he said, "that something is deeply wrong with a world in which it is not at all unusual to discuss the consequences of brainwashing whilst attending the bedside of a teammate?"

She laughed at that, somewhat wryly. "Every day," she replied. "Welcome to life at Xavier's, where nothing is impossible. Or even improbable."

Marius looked from the girl he'd seen burst from the thorax of a biological weapon to the young man who'd ripped it apart with his bare hands.

"No offence to the professor, but perhaps it's time to rebrand."