Logs:Interfacing

Interfacing
Dramatis Personae Charles, Lucien
In Absentia	2023-08-28 "Surely, you're not here to serenade him, at this time of night?"
Location <NYC> Mount Sinai Hospital - Upper East Side
On the cutting edge of many medical technologies, Mount Sinai Hospital is often ranked as one of the nation's best hospitals. The medical school attached is one of the best in the world, meaning that even your med students know what they are doing. Chin up, then -- when you come in here badly mutilated after the latest terrible catastrophe in Times Square, you're in good hands. The neurology ward is quiet in the small hours, but a hospital is still a hospital with its host of muted background noises layered over that of the city outside. The lights in Hive's room are turned down low, little though he's likely to notice or care where he lies still and silent amidst the equipment that confirm he is alive and work to keep him that way. His current visitor, however, is very much awake. Charles is in a sleek silver powerchair, wearing a navy blue suit and white dress shirt with a gold damask tie in an impeccable full Windsor knot, though the overall presentation is perhaps a little disrupted by the soft, ancient blanket covering his lap in fiery Kinross tartan. "We think of ourselves as individuals," he's reading softly aloud by the bedside lamp from a tablet poised in one hand, "but all that we have accomplished, and all that we will accomplish, is the result of groups of humans cooperating. Those groups are organisms in their own rights. We are their components." Certainly visiting hours are long since over but that seems to be prime time for Hive to get company. Lucien is probably not the company either Hive nor Charles might have been expecting, at this hour or any other, really. Certainly not solo, but Matt is nowhere to be seen. Charles gets less forewarning of the interruption than he is likely accustomed to. The flat tranquility of Lucien's mind does not much betray him until he has opened the door, appearing in the entryway in charcoal three-piece suit with blue pinstripes in a sleek modern cut that minimizes his impressive musculature, a single buttonhole on each cuff also picked out in blue, a blue and black floral brocade tie, a very pale gray dress shirt cinched with simple yet strikingly iridescent labradorite cufflinks, and black monk shoes with a subtle embossed floral scrollwork. He hesitates in the doorway, one hand on the handle and the faintest ripple of something at once apologetic and uneasy crossing is mind and then subsiding back into glassiness. He does enter all the same, head inclining to Charles as he closes the door behind himself. "No change, I take it." He does not bother to look toward Hive with this question. Charles starts at the opening of the door, and when he looks up to see Lucien standing in it he seems entirely at a loss for a moment. It's a very brief moment. "Mister Tessier," he says, "forgive me, I was not expecting --" He doesn't say "you", but it was probably a near thing. "-- anyone. But there's been no change, for better or for worse." He does look toward Hive, briefly, then back at Lucien. "Did Matthieu send you?" "I apologize. I know it is not much of an hour for visitors. Much though I imagine his friends keep odd hours." Lucien drifts further in, stopping a polite distance away at the foot of Hive's bed. "He did." He hesitates a brief moment on the verge of leaving it there, but then adds: "He rather hoped I might help." "That they do," Charles agrees with a faint and faintly self-deprecating smile. "For what it's worth, I do not mind the company, and certainly you aren't disturbing him." He lays his tablet down on the bedside table. "It's very kind of you to oblige, especially considering your schedule these days -- and I'm sure I don't know the half of it." His hesitation is very brief. "Now, you do wear quite an impressive range of hats, but I admit I'm not sure which your brother has persuaded you to don for Hive." "Hive and Matthieu are quite close. For him I could make the time." Lucien pulls a chair up to Hive's bedside, sitting down opposite Charles. "Mmm? You do not suppose he needs a social media consultant, currently? He's always been so very invested in his image." Is he amused? It's hard to tell, his expression a quiet calm that betrays very little and his mind still less. Perhaps there's a flutter of warmth in his quiet voice here. Perhaps not. Charles nods abstractly. "It has not wholly escaped me how often you've made time for the Prometheans down through the years." There's something tired and sorrowful in the brief flit of his eyes to Hive, but he shortly blinks it away. "I suppose not, though his business might be another question. Surely, you're not here to serenade him, at this time of night?" He, at least seems (lightly) (cautiously) amused. "More's the pity. It would be more entertaining by far than that book." Lucien lifts his eyes to Charles, lingering there a few long beats before he looks down at Hive. "With as much as they've been up against, someone had to." He rests his hand down against Hive's, the barest hesitation there before he does. "What were you reading, it sounded quite on the nose. Would you," he is asking this very solemnly, "like a song. I know several." "You are quite right." Charles bows his head, just a fraction. When he looks back up he reaches for the tablet again. "Nexus, a novel by one..." He taps the screen. "...Ramez Naam, wherein some maverick engineers seek to jailbreak nanotech that links minds together. That bit there was the King of Thailand admonishing them to be more Buddhist about it." His eyes track to Lucien's hand when he touches Hive's, thoughtful. "You do sing splendidly. Alas, I doubt if even the most enchanting music can dispel the curse that's been laid upon him." His brows lift very slightly, the sharpening of his interest almost palpable. "But, really -- what are you doing?" "Goodness. You are quite serious? Hive ought to sue." Lucien exhales a soft huff, quiet and definitively amused, this time. "Perhaps we have yet to find the right tune." He's settled comfortably into his chair, leaning slightly back but keeping his hand curled gentle around Hive's. "I do not know, yet." It doesn't seem like he is doing much, sitting there; the careful quiet of his mind hasn't shifted, his placid expression unruffled. The surface of Hive's mind, though, is slowly rippling. It isn't much, at least not as compared to his usual verdant mindscape. Not any particularly coherent thoughts or feelings. Where once-dynamic roots have been hanging eerily quiescent for the past month, though, there's a noticeable psionic rustle, briefly shivering and straining in Charles's direction and then going silent again. "Quite. But I thought he might find it entertaining," Charles allows, "even if only in an exasperated sort of way." He looks very much like he's about to ask for further clarification, but then sits bolt upright with a flinch when Hive stirs. Lucien can feel his answering psionic reach, the indecipherable thoughts he projects, the desperate warmth he's pouring into Hive. He does not fully subside back into his chair when Hive's mind returns to quiescence. His eyes are brighter in the lamplight when he turns to Lucien, the slow realization in his suddenly unguarded expression easily legible (probably). "Young man, that was more than anyone's gotten out of him since the raid." He looks back down at where Lucien's hand touches Hive's. << (how?) >> This is annotated with his uncertain half-reflexive answer to himself: the crystal-clear memory of a teenaged Desi sitting in his office, her smile serene but her hands clasped together tight under elegant satin gloves. There's a noticeable dilation in Lucien's pupils as Charles's warmth floods into Hive's, a faint quickening of his breath. "... trying a different tune," he murmurs in quiet response, his attention slipping into a more focused concentration. There's another psionic shudder, this one less focused -- a slow vague stretch that reaches but not towards anyone, and then once more goes quiet. Lucien's mind comes more vividly alive, at the psionic question, than Charles has likely ever seen it; a sudden rippling prickle like a million tiny caterpillar-spines that shivers across his nerves -- then subsides into uneasy tension, and then with a soft flutter of apology returns once more to its mountain-lake serenity. "I am -- not sure how. I have," and there's something just the faintest bit tighter in his tone, his thumb brushing slow against Hive's knuckles, "never had this studied. I am good with brains, I think. Not quite in the ways you are." Charles doesn't exactly flinch at the prickling of Lucien's mind, but there is a brief tightening around the corners of his eyes. "Evidently not, which is most fortunate." Though here he frowns. "At least for our current purposes. Does this...hurt you?" He taps his own temple with index and middle fingers in lieu of clarifying telepathically. "I've rather a lot of experience deciphering the ways people are good with brains, though I expect you're much further along deciphering your own than most of my students." The flick of his eyes to Hive is brief, pained. "I can well understand why you might not want anyone else to study it." "It --" Lucien hesitates. His lips press together, a small frown creasing at his brows. "It does not hurt," he answers finally, but seems considerably more uncertain of this answer than his typical quiet assurance. The frown remains in place through a long silent stretch; just at the edge of Charles's awareness there is another faint shiver from Hive, less defined than before. "As far as I can tell, you --" It's a plural you, a generic you; there's a very careful ripple across the quiet of Lucien's mind that lets just this concept clearly surface, a you that encompasses Hive and Charles and all their psionic kin. "-- work in higher-level programming and I write machine code. Brains are tricky," he's adding this apologetically, "it is likely not a perfect analogy." "Indeed not." Charles looks down at the ~~intelligent notepad~~ tablet in his lap, his chuckle rueful though not altogether humorless. "But it is a familiar one, and frequently useful. I think I take your meaning, and have often wished I had that kind of access..." His mouth presses into a grim line. "Especially these past few weeks. If only I could reach him, I have vast experience with such damage -- to him in particular, I'm sad to say." He studies Lucien thoughtfully. "It seems you can reach him, and have fine control over your ah...shielding -- I'm unsure your preferred terminology." Here he looks a little sheepish. "All these years, I'd chalked that up to neurodivergence, of the baseline sort. But perhaps we can guide each other, fill in some of our respective gaps in knowledge and perception." "I spent quite some time mitigating the longer-term damage, after Hive's -- last surgery. Likely why my brother thought I might be of some use again." Lucien's mouth twitches up very slightly at its corners. "And it is not not the autism. It does rather heavily inform the way it feels comfortable to structure my mind. I simply have a degree more control over that process than most." His brows furrow, and he glances up with some degree of puzzlement to Charles. "Shielding? I --" The hesitation is slight, here, and barely noticeable except for the faint ripple across the surface of Hive's psionic landscape that accompanies it. "-- am afraid I know very little of that. I have," he is saying this slow and careful, "some small difficulties, interfacing with psionic abilities." Charles blinks, though he gets over his surprise much faster this time. "Here I'd thought he just had remarkable neuroplasticity, but I am glad you were able to help him and hope you might manage it again." His eyes stray to Hive's head, newly shorn again, the worst of his scars hidden by the fussily arranged pillow. "If you are not shielding, perhaps it's the structure of your mind which makes you so quiet -- psionically." He taps his own head again. "I've met very few people -- regardless of neurotype, powers, or training -- who give off as little psychic noise as you do just as a matter of course." He finally leans back in his chair again, steepling his fingers. "What manner of difficulties?" His tone is gentle and almost neutral enough to disguise his curiosity. Almost. "I don't assume they must be technical difficulties, but do flatter myself to say I've some skill in that area. Emotional difficulties are thornier, and I cannot fault anyone feeling uncomfortable with telepathic contact." He turns his palms up. "All I can offer there is my word that I'll not go anywhere or change anything without your leave." "Oh, he does. I think he needs to, to do what he does without harming himself --" Lucien's eyes tic towards Hive's face. "-- more." He sits back, hand shifting away from Hive's to drop into his lap. "I do not like mess," is his mild explanation. "When people come into my house they take off their shoes, I see no reason to go tromping around in anyone's mind in my boots." He folds his hands together, and then quickly unfolds them -- laces his fingers the opposite direction. Gives up on this and sets his palms flat against his lap. "What is the difference?" he finally ventures cautiously. "Between technical and emotional, in the landscape of the mind." He is looking steadily at Charles's upturned hands, and not his face. "If I gave you leave --" But he falters, and clasps his hands together again. His gaze has drifted away, settling somewhere around Hive's pillow. "{We all change each other simply by existing in relationship. By communicating, by touching. If I tell you not to think of a pink elephant and you put a suggestion of a pink elephant in my brain, where is the difference. How can you give your word you will change nothing? We have been changing each other since I walked in the door.}" Charles arches his brows very slightly at the "boots" analogy but holds his peace, radiating engaged neutrality as he listens. After, he considers for several long seconds -- long enough that he glances more than once at Lucien, perhaps expecting some sign of impatience. "I suppose that depends what part of the landscape you're talking about. I don't think they must be mutually exclusive, and sometimes they are inextricable. But in this case by 'technical' I mean a barrier I might be able to circumvent by being good with brains. Might." He tips a hand helplessly at Hive. "His neuroogical damage is a technical difficulty I cannot circumvent." His eyes linger on Hive this time as he ruminates. "I ought perhaps to have said 'deliberately change', but what you're asking goes well beyond the scope of that clarification." He looks back to Lucien and adds, "{That is not a criticism. The topic is rather near to my heart, it just isn't what most people are concerned with.}" His accent in French is polished and flawlessly Parisian, which inadvertently makes his Québécois word choices sound quaint. "{Usually, what people say they fear most is that we'll discover or change things about them in ways they do not understand or approve. Trying to get at what that really means often comes off as equivocation.}" He clasps his hands together. "{Few think of verbal speech as inherently invasive, but many think of mental speech that way, even when restricted to verbal thoughts. For what it's worth, I am extremely skilled at restricting my thoughts.}" Lucien’s eyes slip half-closed, a faint smile toying at his lips. “{Few enough people would guess it, but I despise speech.}” After a small pause for thought: “{And delight in it. A wonderfully colorful playground but a terribly clumsy tool for actual understanding.}” The restless shift of his hands has calmed; the pad of one thumb traces slow and light against the opposite thumbnail. “{I think there is very little more invasive than the way we can choose the right words, or wrong ones, and reprogram each other’s thoughts. Reprogram society, if we put them in the right ears.}” He turns his hands upward, something quietly self-effacing in his tone. “Making a career of understanding people’s feelings and then delivering words just so to manipulate them, but I have gotten no more comfortable with anyone understanding mine. An actor’s hypocrisy, I suppose.” He’s studying Hive’s face, now, a long time, and only then looking back to Charles. “{Would it help, to see what I am doing?}” Charles nods slowly, meditative, his smile perhaps an unconscious mirror of Lucien's. Perhaps not. "{My father was autistic -- science was his language and playground. I manifested the day he died, and trying to make sense of that alone landed me for a time in the belief my gift was somehow a reaction to or recompense for the ways I could never connect with him.}" He tips his head back slightly, thoughtful. "{Who knows, maybe it is. But I've spent nearly half my life now making myself small, safe --}" He glances at Hive's head again, a bitter creeping into his serene voice. "{-- minimally invasive. And our people have suffered for the very caution I'd meant for their protection.}" He stirs, blinking away musings and tears alike. "I don't know that it's hypocrisy to fear being understood when you have been too often misunderstood, or understood and thought less for it." The twist of his smile this time is sardonic. "Ah, but I ought not to assume such things. Forgive an old man squinting at shadows on the wall." A quiet sigh eases from him as he looks again to Hive, suddenly looking more his age than Lucien has probably ever seen him. "I don't know. It's certainly possible, and I want to think it likely but, I truly don't know." "Mmm." Lucien is studying Charles's face with a quiet thoughtfulness that continues into his soft question: "{Does it, generally? Help you connect?}" His eyes lower again but slowly, gaze brushing light down the path those unshed tears might have fallen. His hands fold lightly against the flat of his stomach, and he pulls in a slow breath. "{The world is, I think, not very safe, for most of us. Perhaps sometimes in order to be that safety --}" He's glancing, quick, to Hive, and then back down. "{We must learn to be a little bit dangerous.}" When he sits forward again it is slow, and he doesn't look at Charles. He rests his hand on the mattress beside Hive's, not quite touching, just yet. He swallows once, hard, and across the polished surface of his mind there is a shift; it's no less glassy than before but there is a definite sense of invitation, however tentative. "I suppose we shall find out together, then." Charles actually laughs, and it seems to surprise him a little. "Not often, no! {Sometimes it feels almost incidental, when it does. Just another facet to a joining of minds that might have aligned with or without telepathy. Sometimes it happens in spite of the telepathy, too, or the fear it inspires.}" He looks up at -- or past -- the ceiling. "But, my stars, when it does -- it's extraordinary." He picks up the cue this time and does not look at Lucien, without as much apparent effort as most allistics must expend. When he opens his mind it's not, at first, particularly dramatic: a subtle enveloping warmth from a source just out of sight; a soundless, wordless whisper of comfort and reassurance; a careful shift of attention. << (I am here,) >> though more concrete, still comes in concepts rather than words, steady and quiet and centered. There's a small twitch at the corner of Lucien's mouth, though he doesn't look back to Charles. "It is a bit extraordinary, isn't it? How very many means we have available to us, to keep each other at a distance -- or find such intimate connections." At the quiet mental warmth, Lucien's mind once more unspools into vivid life -- though this time, thankfully, it comes with no pain. There's something a little bit Magic Eye to the chaotic scene that spreads out in front of Charles's awareness -- a million colorful threads that seem hopelessly tangled -- seem intricately woven -- seem seamlessly interlaced into an endless and endlessly changing tapestry -- at one and the same time the finished picture and its messily jumbled component parts and the tireless work of creation. There are a thousand tiny needles, here as before, but though they quiver stressed and defensive at the intrusion they do not halt in their work, do not turn their sharp-edged prickles to jab at the newcomer. The threads they pull are each of them immediate, clear, to Charles's understanding, flooding his mind with meaning that he does not need to search for. Here are one doctor, and another, and another, with increasingly grim prognoses; here are countless sleepless nights spent by a hospital bed scrambling to juggle homework and medical bureacracy; here are days spent steeling himself inexpertly against borrowed pain and violent nausea so that he could learn to quiet those torments; here is a phone call, late night, the news at once long-expected and impossibly world-ending; here is appointment after appointment after appointment with doctors at the Mendel Clinic, at this hospital, at hospitals farflung across the country and none of them saying anything more promising about what help they can give a tiny mutant child; here is a coffin, far too small. Each of these just is, full and complete in their own delicate threads -- and each of these weaves together into the background fabric of the hospital itself, barely in focus in the picture but lending it its own keen context all the same. Here are nights spent up sick with worry, preparing food and praying that the raid team delivers home his brother safe; here is an endless mountain of paperwork and red tape and logistical hurdles for an endless stream of labrats that could be cut through in one fell swoop with a billionaire's checkbook; here is a (carefully) (lovingly) (irritably) cultivated corner of Gibraltar campion in a corner of the nursery that feeds the Hellfire Club's garden, and another now in L'Entente's; here is Desi (tired, stressed, jerking away from the accidental brush of his fingers as he passes a mug and splashing hot tea down over them both) and here is Desi (tired, stressed, tucked casually on the couch beside him as she studies for finals and not so much as flinching at the passing contact when she reaches out to rearrange the large blanket he has been hogging); here is Dawson, mind frayed farther and farther it seems each time Lucien sees him and each passing raid fragmenting him deeper; here is Jackson, long sword gleaming as he faces down a giant, thousands around him and far too painfully alone; here are school hallways filled with children, bickering with each other or annoyed about homework or excited for the weekend or forlorn over love and safe to be all these normal teenage things. Each of these just is, full and complete in their own delicate threads -- and each of these weaves together into Charles where he sits across from Lucien, at once radiating power and looking far too aged. Here is the Mendel Clinic, and the remodeled Hellfire Club buildings, and a new housing complex in Flushing, and a new school in Bushwick, and L'Entente itself, and many more, all bearing the hallmarks of the thoughtful artistry that breathed life into them; here is sour-scowl face and ungainly slouched shoulders and the exhausting sledgehammer bludgeon of cranky-sharp acerbity that refuses (boorishly) (enviably) to bend itself into a sociably palatable shape; here is the poisoned-poisonous mass that he can feel only by the shape of the functions it impairs, long hours of check ins to tidy up that damage; here is a chessboard whose black side is entirely populated by far too many rooks; here is that mass again, growing -- growing -- growing with each passing raid; here is Matthieu, home and safe and it's at once a struggle to care about the cost and a struggle to ignore it; here is Dawson (and here is Dawson, and here is Dawson, and here is Dawson), earnest and quiet and thoughtful and impossibly somehow at once here in the the bright warm harmony-colors of him and in the unravelling hole the absence of those threads left behind. Each of these just is, full and complete in their own delicate threads -- and each weaves together into Hive where he lies too-thin and too-scarred in the bed in front of him. Even in the tangled mess that lies all around nothing is disconnected. A thread here quivers with fear, with discomfort, tense-wary at the mind that touches his, and that needle shifts and plucks the fear from the pile, weaves it neatly through the image of Charles where it does not vanish but becomes immediately less prominent. Several threads here carry a two-shows-today ache, carry a bone-weariness after several days not-sleeping, carry a throb of headache settling in for the long haul behind his eyes, carry an old hunger that burns through his veins every time the pain flares, and these threads weave themselves deftly into the background imagery, further cementing the tired weight of the hospital around him. A thread here continually tries to unfray itself with each gurgle or beep of the medical equipment, jabbing magnified and irritating against his ears; another is trying the same at the unpleasant-rough feel of the over-bleached hospital sheets against his skin, and managing these seems at once rote and Sisyphean, tucking one back into place instinctively only for another to garishly warp where it should weft. Lucien himself is perhaps conspicuously not in this picture. When his hand settles against Hive's the entire image shifts. It stays exactly the same, too, but a million new threads join it, weaving in their own new image while somehow not displacing the old. Hive remains, in the same intricate colors he'd been stitched, and an entirely new image of him develops entwined, this one rendered too choppy where many of its threads are out of place or severed. "I do not know," he murmurs, quiet, and as he speaks, as he mulls this question over, the tapestry fair scintillates with activity, perhaps somewhat arcane in the specifics of its meaning as somewhere below the level of conscious thought the myriad different fibres that go into thinking, go into speaking, into living, shiver into more brilliant notice within the idea-threads they have come together to compose, "what might help -- or hinder -- your understanding, here. There is --" A subtly different scintillation shimmers across many of the filaments that make up Hive, illuminating their lengths and sputtering out where the threads fray and break. "-- a lot." Charles does not move at all for a moment -- actually stops breathing, if only briefly. Then he blinks, his eyes refocusing as the sense of his attention turns deliberately away from Lucien's mindscape, though the ambient warmth of his presence remains. "Mister Tessier," he says quietly, looking back up at Lucien before catching himself and averting his eyes probably more than necessary, settling on where his hand touches Hive's. "I have touched thousands of minds and overheard millions more in the last sixty years. Yours is one of the most singularly beautiful I have yet encountered." He draws a deep breath and lets it out. "It is also one of the easiest to parse. Would I be correct to surmise that the very elegance of its organization is the source of your ah...difficulties with psionic interfacing?" Lucien's eyes go very slightly wider, and in the periphery of Charles' averted attention there is another rapid shift as several memories weave themselves more prominently into his picture, held up each in turn alongside this compliment. As this comparison melds into the background a faint blush rises to his cheeks. "As I mentioned, I dislike mess." Still more memories are rising and sorting themselves in turn with this statement, these attended with a brief sensory prickle that chafes at Lucien's mind like the coarse cloth against his hand; it comes with a brief flutter of something like agitation and something like shame, there swiftly and just as swiftly gone. "But, yes. Keeping my mind in some semblance of order has meant I am not much bother to those --" He tips his hand out towards Charles indicatively, "-- who might be disturbed by the excess noise. But, also, it means if I invite you in --" Here he exhales, quiet and a little amused. "... well. I have not ever actually invited anyone in, until now. The few passing intrusions I have had have not gone pleasantly for either of us. Even setting aside my own comfort, I expect if what you need is to see how I mend a brain, you have absolutely no desire to be shown --" His jaw tightens briefly. "All the callouses earned in learning to sew in the first place. Unfortunately I have never quite figured out a more elegant way to handle --" The tightness in his expression eases into a brief and amused warmth. "-- the interfacing." Charles steeples his fingers, brows furrowing with thought that Lucien can sense as subtle, methodical fluctuations in his psionic aura. "I had rather --" He stops, then resumes without words, his meaning delivered in a fluid mix of abstract concepts (obviously more intuitive to him than speaking) and sensory information (less intuitive yet uncommonly clear and sharp). He would really prefer to avoid picking up all the myriad threads so intricately woven through the parts of Lucien's(Hive's) tapestry with which they need to work. This desire is twined with memories of Lucien's thought processes quailing with discomfort at the reluctantly invited guest (no boots, though, just Charles in awe of the majestic tapestry). Of Hive's disordered broken threads and his ache to gather them up and mend them (helplessness at the sense he has no notion how to even begin doing so). Of the sheer amount of information he took in without even trying (reflected back to Lucien in crystalline detail, grateful and humbled by his trust), far more than he can imagine needing for their current purposes. The idea of this problem brings its own passel of concerns, but also bright -- almost childlike -- curiosity and an attending eagerness to find solutions. Turns over a related problem through the vivid memory of a much younger Charles painstakingly restructuring his own mind to manage the staggering amounts of psionic information that inundated him through still-rudimentary shields. Of how the meticulously organized mental library that helped him survive graduate school very nearly doomed him the first time he squared off with another telepath. Of the rapacious glee with which the Nazi scientist had torn into his mind (delirious with agony and terror) before Erik (passionate, beloved, obsessed Erik) drew him away to safety. Of the dizzyingly complex labyrinth of his mind now -- still very much, in its own way, his library -- easily navigable to himself and anyone he permits, utterly bewildering to anyone else. Then, a bit more abstractly again, he conveys the methods of mental self-defense he'd developed alongside a new community of telepaths and empaths at Utopia (inseparable from his enduring grief at its loss). The much more polished versions of those techniques he now teaches all his staff and students, the occasional need to adapt them to minds with unusual processes and needs. The simultaneously daunting and fascinating prospect of adapting them to Lucien's brilliant, intricate, unique mind, set aside for now in favor of a crude scattershot defense-by-proxy -- temporary and imperfect and labor-intensive but more than feasible in short stretches. With a quick review and reorganization of these ideas, appending a concrete sensory detail here and there that he left out, he raises his eyebrows (physically and, in some indefinable way, mentally) and signals his interest in Lucien's opinions. At Charles's pause, at his silent transition of communication, Lucien's eyes go just slightly wider. The expression is barely noticeable externally but across the arcane architecture of his mind the sense of relief is almost palpable, as numerous background processes that had been previously unintelligible to Charles except as a constant fluctuating of intent activity suddenly ease out of their churn, the constant frenetic scintillation of those fibres shifting into a quieter steadier glow along several others. He's watching the older man's shift of thought with an expression that looks almost disinterested in his placid non-response. Internally, though, each passing expression is picked up, touched on with thought, with curiosity, and then after a careful and deliberate decision neatly stitched each into its own place in the ongoing tapestry of Lucien's mind. He takes the most care with the thoughts of Erik and Utopia, turning them over with a quiet shimmer that mingles wonder and amusement and a strong sense of several other understandings suddenly falling into place. And then that, too, is woven, the single thread tucked into a picture that is Charles and a picture that is Erik and a picture that is X-Men and a picture that is Brotherhood and a picture that is mutantkind, all in their separate places yet all somehow connected via this strand. He doesn't offer an opinion -- not exactly. What he offers is a quiet rearrangement; in many places his tapestry is unspooling, flowing into its thousands of component thought-threads and the threads themselves unravelling further into a million unspun fibres that glimmer with the raw stuff of being. And then they're twining back -- these impulses twisted deft into sensefeel, these into heartfeel, these into things that are both and neither. The threads begin their weaving dance again -- slower than before, hesitant, here and there pulling up this or that idea from Charles and holding them in careful examination as he works. What gets woven now is tapestry both like and unlike before, a perplexing layer of imagery. Looked at one way, here is Charles at the bedside; looked at another way, he is Hive; looked at another, he's no physical representation at all but a feeling of intense concentration; looked at another, he's the sensory feeling of mind against mind; looked at another, he's slipping altogether out of focus -- and on, and on, with a strong feeling that if he could just find the correct angle the picture would lay itself out in the same recursively woven detail as before and just as strong a feeling that the right angle lies at some intersection of these threads that is just out of reach. Lucien is rubbing slow at the bridge of his nose with forefinger and thumb, and then sits forward again. There's an additional strain here, faint and manageable, while several threads carefully re-weave themselves into clarity: a question, offered through memory not so many minutes before of Charles asking if this was the source of his problem. There's a second question that susurrates on a layer beneath this and it's just out of clear sight while simultaneously remaining apparent that staying just out of clear sight is the point: a hopeful See this? and a warier (not this)? The warmth in Lucien's mind fluctuate not-quite in time with the reworking of the tapestry -- Charles quietly broadcasting his attention and interest. The sense that one corner of a puzzle about their history has tumbled into place draws a poignant flutter of something akin to solace. With the layering-transforming-reweaving of the tapestry, his fascination blossoms into delight (and more fascination). He echoes back his own inferred rendition of what Lucien's power might be doing beyond the reach of Charle's -- not intended as a literal depiction, just positing his thoughts on the potential for stunning efficiency and grave danger of manipulating a mindscape at the neurological level. When Lucien's first draft is complete, Charles shifts his focus sensibly, marveling at the seeming-but-maybe-not paradox of the refracted tapestry. His confirmation that it's achieved the intended effect simply mirrors Lucien's question back to show him what Charles doesn't see now, attended by his amazement and some highlighted points for potential improvement. Through all this his aura intensifies slightly, a sensation he identifies now -- in context Lucien already has from Charles's memories -- as the controlled undoing of one layer of psionic shielding. Another reflection of the pair of test questions shows the obfuscation still holds. His praise is not a word or even a concept, just a soft starburst of knowing this was a remarkable accomplishment. There's a flush of wry amusement at these first posited thoughts, and Lucien answers in a quiet flow of memories stitched one into the other. Though individually they are far from funny (an arm broken for a solid week before noticing after a quite-early teenage foray into simply muting the infinite piled up sensory aggravations of life; bruises upon bruises from a long stretch of uncontrolled seizures and a much-younger Matt looking pale from terror and not sickness after only-barely salvaging the wreckage Lucien made of his autonomic system; the panic-then-curiosity-then-panic of crosswiring several senses at once) they tie together into a picture self-aware and more vigilant for it. This brief woven story is echoed quieter with learning: the throb of headache, the ache in his bones, buffered from their raw signals but not shut off; the very carefully curated grooming of threads here and there that tic processes like respiration just that much more efficient without drastically altering their function; the deliberate tweaks of synaesthesia that span the practical (the color-sound shimmers that help steer swifter learning of his numbers) to the fantastical (the taste-sound shimmers that turn the routine act of downing yet another terrible protein shake into a symphony that dances through his senses.) For all this, though, there's a careful reserve underneath, highlit with far more recent seizures, far more recent sudden panic as some faculty that should work with ease fails him; a keen awareness of how much his learning is ongoing even at this age, of how close he so often comes to laying wrong the tiniest thread that stops some vital function. Perhaps this awareness is not so very encouraging, when he reaches again for Hive's hand -- but then again, perhaps it is, an intense and considered care in the rearrangement of his own mind even before he's laid his hand on the other man's. An even greater one in the testing coruscation he sends flickering down one thread and another and another where his power starts to knit itself into the ruin of Hive's nervous system. And then, finally, an offer -- almost shy, here, the suggestion that it is his turn to teach, appearing first as a loom on which his fluctuating storyscape tapestry is weaving itself -- then the loom brushed aside to leave instead a spinning wheel set up beside a messy pile of roving -- no, on closer inspection, these frayed and broken fibres, each holding some ghost of what should be Hive, are straw. Maybe Charles shouldn't be amused at Lucien's chain of power mishaps past -- he ostensibly understands the peril better than most after teaching young mutants for over thirty years. Or maybe he's amused precisely because he's been teaching young mutants for over thirty years. The humor in the rippling of his warmth is tinged with horror and sympathy and an obscure sorrow he does not name or illuminate -- but does not hide, either. Maybe that knowledge shouldn't be encouraging, either, but if Charles is fazed it does not bleed through whatever barriers still insulate his mind. His focus is intense as he observes the intricate neural adjustments Lucien undertakes to weave Hive into his tapestry. Here and there he reflects back this stitch or that in query against a steady backdrop of wonder. That wonder grows brighter -- again, almost childlike -- at the allegorical spinning wheel and the prospect of learning its operation. Beyond Lucien's direct perception but plainly recognizable to him now, Charles adjusts his shields again, and the warmth is light. It's a tight, controlled ray that bespeaks a source infinitely more intense, probing with both curiosity and care at the interfacing Lucien has woven for him. Then he diffuses through the portions of the tapestry framed in focus for him. The threads of the spinning wheel refract its new halo of light into sussurated chants in Pali and Sanskirt, stones from labyrinthine paths that once (should) (could, again) wound through a forest now laid to waste, memories of the ruined banyan tree(s) in tenderly cultivated cuttings, and a fierce, fierce love that is nevertheless gentle when it sets the wheel experimentally in motion.