The Marius Laverne Apology Tour Part 4: Garrison

[xp_emplate]

The apology tour concludes with Garrison. It's awkward, as such things tend to be, but it turns out they have some common ground.



He wasn't entirely sure he felt like making this delivery. For one thing, it had been Garrison who assaulted him, not vice versa. For another, the comment in the Medlab had stung; the fact it had been deserved only made it worse. Under the circumstances Marius was trying to find it in his heart to be generous. This had been easier when the aforementioned heart wasn't located beneath several layers of ritually-inflicted scar tissue.

"So, welcome back to the X-Men. Some people didn't survive the experience."

Marius told himself, hurt feelings about a particularly pointed remark from an ostensible friend and former teammate were of course valid, Marius told himself, but when all was said and done only one side of the equation had been acting as the living avatar of an ancient entity bent on the annihilation of a city. He really needed to be less sensitive about these things.

Marius knocked on the door.

"It's open." To be fair, the door was rarely entirely closed as the wolf liked to wander. But he was at Auntie Amanda's and MA's because of how disconcerted he'd been when Garrison had returned from the medlab to his rooms. Kane was propped up with a couple of pillows on his couch, watching hockey highlights. The Canadian still looked terrible, mottled bruising everywhere, dozens of tiny cuts and burns either plastered over or scabbing up on any exposed skin that he could see, Still, the sidetable only held a bottle of tylenol, a water bottle, and several empty Moosehead cans, so he wasn't in immediate medical peril.

Marius stepped into the suite only for his thick brows to immediately furrow at his erstwhile teammate's collection of relatively minor yet extravagantly varied injuries.

"To be clear," he said after a beat, "I never actually laid a hand on you, correct? That was not a fantasy created to absolve myself of yet another assault?"

"Depends how you want to look at it. I did traverse the sphere you created around you to instantly kill everything it touched and, well, all this happened."  

"And such is why I thought your efforts warranted something a bit stronger than wine," the Australian said a little hurriedly, turning the box in his gloved hands in lieu of anything so direct as actual eye contact. "Couldn't recall if you were a scotch man, but it seemed appropriate. Or at the very least a respectable option for regifting." Marius stared at the box for a long moment, then quietly placed it on the side table.

"Just . . . no good way to say 'cheers for preventing a genocide,' you know?"

"To be fair, I figured it was at least a fifty-fifty shot it just killed me outright, so I'm going to count it as a win." Kane said. "Sit down, for pete's sake. I'm not going to try and throttle you with my bare hands, Marius."

Marius snorted, but dropped bonelessly onto the opposite chair regardless. "In my defence, I did try to kill a fair few of you lot. That sort of thing can make people a bit funny. Myself being no exception."

"Well, we stopped you from winning the title of the single greatest mass murder in history. Huzzah. Open the scotch and we'll toast it." Kane said wryly.

"How dare you. Gabriel reminded me that the bar is, in fact, the destruction of an entire reality, and I intend to cling to this very low bar by the serrated teeth of both hands." Marius obligingly opened the box and brought forth the sacrificial bottle of Macallan's. He cracked the seal without ceremony and poured a few fingers into a glass that had previously contained a much less expensive offering.

"I'll toast in spirit," the Australian said, replacing the bottle. "I'd like to become fully reacquainted with my own faculties before I get back to compromising them again."

"Fair enough." Kane wasn't much of a scotch drinker, but he surmised the bottle was mainly there to bolster Marius' mood as opposed to altering his. He took a sip. "So, what's next? Akkaba will have you on their radar. I'm assuming it would be best to stay at the mansion for a bit."

The younger man went still.

"I . . . hadn't actually thought of that. I was so preoccupied with whether I still need to . . ." The thought of Akkaba attempting to reassert its claim on him made his stomach twist. Marius gave his head a brisk shake and tried to focus. "But it'd make sense, I suppose. They did spend significant resources getting me into fighting shape."

"Or maybe because you didn't serve your purpose, they don't care any more. Still, likely best to hang out here until MA and her people can get some better answers for you." Kane took another sip and shrugged. "If I went through all that just for you to get shanked on a street corner hit somewhere, I'm going to be pissed."

"Speaking of 'all that,'" Marius said, grasping at the opportunity to change the topic, "what exactly did you do at the end there? Not the inhibitor. The bit before, where reality went . . sort of orange and wobbly?"  

"That's.... complicated." Kane said, pausing and putting down his glass. "Thanks to some mission related encounters, I've got this kind of chaos aura, according to the magic types. It does unexpected things in the event that I'm potentially killed. I- well, I didn't see any other option but trust it would keep me alive long enough to reach you."

Marius cocked his head, raptor-like. "So you're unkillable?" he asked, his amber eyes scanning the other man. "Then why do you -- and pardon the indelicacy of the observation -- look like you've been dragged behind a truck and then slow-roasted for an hour? I know I've been out of circulation for a minute, but I am intimately familiar with healing factors, and I can't help but notice yours doesn't seem to have engaged."

"I'm not sure. I've been trying not to test that but the short answer is that I think there's only a few ways I'm allowed to die right now." He shrugged. "Side effect is that my powers started to weaken and a few weeks ago, disappeared entirely. So I'm solely weird aura guy, which has a lot less useful applications than you'd think. I'm off the active roster for now."

The younger man's forehead twitched as he scanned Garrison again. "You read the same as you always have," he said. "Saw something similar with Forge when I first came here. He'd just been hit with that neutralizer of his, his powers were blocked. Got shaken loose by something in my feeding mechanism, oddly enough, but even should you yearn for the touch of another man in general and myself in particular I can't say that's an experiment I'd care to run while you're injured. I already put Arthur in a hole he's still climbing out of." With a sigh, Marius settled back in the chair, subconsciously stroking the gloved palm of one hand with the opposite thumb. "Funny. That's why I never went active again after that incident with Jefferies and that Fury, you know? My health. That's when the mouths reopened, and of course the subsequent weeks of uncontrollable tumour growth were somewhat less than enjoyable. I worried that if I kept pushing I'd lose what gains I'd made." He snorted. "Turned out it would've happened regardless. Ah, well. It bought me a few years, at least."

"Yeah, mine is... the result of a lot of things, going back over a decade. It's more magic and lifeforce and getting snacked on by a Hellord at the wrong time. Fortunately, I've got all the magic nerds on it so... only a matter of time before I'm back, eh?"

"I admit it's never occurred to me to think of magic as a form of occupational exposure. Only here, eh?" Marius recalled the books he'd seen spread across every square inch of Amanda's suite.  It didn't take any particular expertise in the realm of the occult to figure out Garrison must be the friend she was doing research for. 

'Cursed,' she'd called it. He didn't understand precisely what that might mean in this context, but there was a very specific field in which Marius had had a lifetime of experience, and Garrison's deflection had thrown up a red flag. "Look, apologies if this is an overstep from someone who just attempted a bit of light genocide, but are you all right? Aside from the obvious."

"I'll be fine. Like I said, I got the best and brightest working on it. They always find a way, eh?" He picked up and finished the glass with a single pull.  

Marius watched Garrison, a man who was very definitely fine, consume nearly three fingers of whiskey in a single go.

"Mate," he said slowly, "I've got a mutation that's been trying to kill me for half my life. My last job before Horseman of the Apocalypse was Executive Director of a medical charity. How bad is it, really?"

"It's nowhere near the things that I survived that caused me to get to this point." Kane said. "Seriously. You've been here long enough to know the insane shit we deal with. I've been cursed, murdered by gods, survived demonic scourgings and celestial assaults. I've survived things that should have killed me a dozen times or more. The fact that has effects... that need extra help... it shouldn't be surprising."

"Yeah, I know all about surviving things." Marius leaned an elbow on the armrest and regarded Garrison.  "My career with the team was neither as long nor as storied as your own, certainly, but I logged enough field experience to know an active crisis hits different than passive. Chronic stress, they call it. The toll of carrying a thing you can never throw off, day after day." His amber eyes flicked again over Garrison's injuries. "Death by a thousand cuts."

"I have it on medical authority that I got a thousand cuts stopping you. And a thousand burns and a thousand bruises. But I'm still alive." He said, shaking off the dirge in the back of his head. "And I'm still standing. I don't intend anything else."

"Glad to hear it. A bloke might wonder, hearing someone currently without even the benefit of a healing factor had himself dropped into a sphere of instant death. Although," Marius conceded, "even as I say that I am, again, reminded of the requirements of the job."

"I think you need some sleep. Like me. Both of us are dealing with outside factors controlling us." Kane said, patting the side of his couch, "But you're welcome here. However long you need it."

Whilst working at the Foundation Marius had interacted with too many patients facing a terminal diagnosis to like how Garrison spoke only of the very edges of whatever he was dealing with. He'd been one of those himself, in fact, and so he recognized the strategy: downplay, deflect, redirect. He still had the playbook somewhere. No matter how many times Jennie had tried to tear it away from him.

But by the same token Marius knew that sometimes the merciful thing was to drop the issue. It was an exhausting thing to carry. Hadn't that been the reason he hadn't told Kyle about his relapse?

On the other hand, the eventual result didn't exactly recommend this as a strategy. Perhaps he should circle back to this later.
Understanding a dismissal when he heard it, Marius rose from the chair.

"So many have told me, and for that you have my thanks" Marius said. He gave Garrison a nod. "For that, and the rest of it. Stopping me. Saving me. All of it."

"You should know by now. This is what we do."

Comments

[xp_longshot]

The interplay in this log is great — from Kane’s deflection and focus on moving forward (most of his replies are focused on now or the future), but Marius getting to utilize his (other) relevant experience in seeing the signs of trauma and stress in terminal conditions.

This is a lot more casual than some of the other logs, and the time they’ve spent together previously really shines.

"I have it on medical authority that I got a thousand cuts stopping you. And a thousand burns and a thousand bruises. But I'm still alive." He said, shaking off the dirge in the back of his head. "And I'm still standing. I don't intend anything else.”

The figurative nature of ‘chronic stress’ matched with “Death by a thousand cuts” was very clever here. Kane has both right now!