Logs:Allies

Allies
CN: genocide, oblique Holocaust reference, reference to transactional sex by a minor
Dramatis Personae Charles, Lucien	2023-09-05 "How do you know all this?" (considerably later the same night as hive's surgery.)
Location <NYC> Mount Sinai Hospital - ICU
It's quiet once again in here. To most outward senses, there hasn't been much change in Hive's status. He's certainly not conscious, certainly looks in no way improved where he's been resettled among so many tubes and wires in his bed, and in some garish ways looks even more alarming than before -- his old and faded scars joined now by a new wound, thick raw and swollen under the arc of staples that curve from his forehead over the top of his shaved head and down by his ear. What improvement there is is quiet but easily felt to some, though -- at the moment, Hive is dreaming, incoherent but active in colorful contrast to the previous month of mostly-stillness. There's not much story to it, barely even much imagery; just a pleasant sense of quiet comfort that ripples like warm sunlight filtering through leaves that sway gentle in the breeze. Lucien has not been here the whole time, certainly, zipping out immediately after the surgery; but this late hour finds him at Hive's bedside once again. Recently showered, freshly changed into slightly and evenly faded slimline blue jeans and an aging pale green long-sleeved tee. There's a thermos on the nightstand, a Kindle in his lap; he's not paying either any mind. He almost looks like he is sleeping, too, head propped in a forward droop against his curled fist, elbow resting on the arm of the chair, eyes closed. His other hand rests on the edge of Hive's bed, fingers resting light up against the edge of Hive's hand in a gesture that looks half accidental, but the steady careful weaving of so many tangled fibres through Hive's mind tells a different story. Lucien's own mind is considerably less tidied than usual, radiating exhaustion and ache that he only attempts to gather back in in a desultory kind of way. Several lines from the titular song in the Cap musical are looping incessantly in his head, niggling with a sharp itch of irritation at some flub earlier in the evening. The warmth that precedes Charles this time is wan and weary, and the man when he enters looks not much better. Perhaps he also had to rush off somewhere between the surgery and now, for he has also changed, as well. He's dressed now as casually as he ever gets in public: a lightweight suit of fine blue-gray tweed with an unstructured(!) jacket, an ivory dress shirt that only a trained sartorial eye would identify as (finely) (softly) knitted, a rich purple tie that, to similarly trained eyes, looks meticulously hand-dyed, and brown loafers. The habitual fussy precision of his presentation now feels almost jarring against the outfit's significant concessions to comfort and, even more strikingly, his obvious exhaustion. He has a different hammered steel thermos -- this one heat-tempered to bluish-black -- and the same old Kinross tartan blanket in his lap. "{Good evening, Mister Tessier.}" Though Lucien did not catch him by surprise this time, there is still something slightly wondering in his expression when his eyes alight on the younger man. He rolls up beside the bed, and though he does not turn his chair to face Lucien, the warm psionic presence presses lightly at his mind. Also sensible to Lucien, if indirectly, he's easing into Hive's mind, his light dispersing soft and careful through the damaged but very much living forest. He swallows hard and blinks his eyes clear. "{Thank you.}" His lips compress, and his next breath is a little shaky. "{I know not whether it's possible to adequately compensate you for what you did today, but I daresay he might have some ideas, when he wakes.}" Charles might, perhaps, have caught Lucien by surprise this time. He starts upright at the greeting, and as his hand pulls away from Hive's the other man's mind frays rapidly from its quiet-comforting dreaming. A deep throb of pain is creeping in, a harsh rasping itch that chafes soothing imagery rapidly down into equally vague nightmare only partially diffused by the new-blooming warmth. Lucien presses his palm hard to an eye, a small degree of his pounding headache receding in exchange for a heavier weight of exhaustion pulling sluggish at his mind. His head inclines as he sinks forward once again. His hand drops back to its previous rest, a deft and quiet touch calming Hive's physical pains to leave space for Charles's warm light to take over the rest of the way in driving back the unquiet dreams. He's turning some part of attention to cleaning up his own mind, then, slower than the nimble work he'd been doing earlier today in Hive's brain. Carefully gather these misfiring nerves, those stray feelings, stitch them down tight and quiet. Probably the headache and various sensory aggravations are not receding much further, for him, but they do stop blaring loud against Charles's senses. "Doctor Xavier," he murmurs only now in quiet greeting, eyes flitting down over the other man's attire. "{Adequately. How would we even measure? These days Hive can himself certainly well afford my regular consulting fees, but --}" His lips compress briefly, a shiver of deep discomfort rippling murkily within him. Charles flinches at the abrupt shift in Hive's mindscape. "{Forgive me, I'd not meant to startle you.}" Once Lucien has hold of Hive's much-abused nervous system again, he finds the light has not withdrawn, and given space once more it starts coalescing into more concrete forms his power cannot parse but which feel like memories. "{Frankly, I haven't a particularly solid grasp on measuring that for anyone's labor.}" The touch of his psionic presence against Lucien's mind shivers in time with that ripple of discomfort, and answers it with an offer of focus and calm. "{I imagine this is rather more involved than your...regular consulting, but you gave up more than your time and energy today.}" The warmth blooms, spreading out its cloud of sense and concept, crowded now with questions he's keeping just out of focus, anxious to ask but reluctant to place yet more strain on the younger man. "{I admit I had rather hoped you might be sleeping, by now.}" Lucien has been carefully scrutinizing the shifts in Hive's brainscape, watching it react as Charles works. His head tips to rest against the steeple of his fingers, and though his eyes have closed his mind is still keenly alert -- still moreso when that warmth brushes further against him. "{I know what I gave up.}" The gentle neutrality of his voice belies the sick wrench that twists within him. Even so it is not exactly apology that has crept into his tone when he continues more heavily: "{I regret that you did not. I had not thought...}" He trails off with a small shake of his head. An image stitches itself together: the surgery just as it had gone, but Charles somewhere out of sight, a fog veiling him in stylized depiction of a psionic cloak of obfuscation. "{I doubt if sleep will come to me at all tonight, and not wholly for -- what I gave up.}" To this somewhat resigned prediction Charles adds an image of himself in the recovery room earlier, several shimmery-translucent spheres emanating from his own head to surrounding him in precise concentric layers reminiscent of Jax's shields. An abstracted sense of his own growing exhaustion throughout the hour of surgery corresponds to the attrition of the outermost shield under the cacophonic assault of ambient psychic noise. It weakens and eventually shatters in a faint pulse of light, exposing the next layer to the same eventual fate. "{But I am well used to that. As for the other matter...}" His head dips, his laugh breathy and humorless. "{Ironically, I disclosed in hopes of obscuring your involvement.}" He mirrors Lucien's illustration this time, a bright foggy veil cloaking Lucien inside the operating theater, the staff moving around him unawares. A little grudgingly, he appends his uncertainty whether he could have managed that and the fiendishly complex work. "{I thought it less risky for me, before I knew, but now I expect he'll be more wary of me for all the reasons I thought he would be accepting. Either way, the horrors he has wrought cannot be borne.}" He scrupulously does not illustrate this last comment. What he conjures instead is a vivid recollection of Lucien at Hive's bedside -- not now but a week ago -- his words quiet and serious: "{The world is, I think, not very safe, for most of us. Perhaps sometimes in order to be that safety -- we must learn to be a little bit dangerous.}" "{Would you like to sleep?}" comes idle and almost reflexive in the casual sense of offer that accompanies it. It's woven through with countless snips of memories, vague and ever-shifting in their details but crystalline clear in context -- years of deeply ingrained habit, deeply guarded with who he tells about his mutation at all but for those sparse few, equally unguarded with his assistance. "{I've little idea what to expect of the man. How many times has Hive been under his knife? All these years he could have --}" Lucien opens his eyes, studying Hive's sleeping face. He shakes his head hard, and his jaw tightens. "{-- regardless, they will have to be borne some time longer. The man is regrettably...}" Though here his head is tilting slightly, eyes lifting to fix on Charles thoughtfully and finishes instead, "... a problem you could perhaps help with." Charles smiles, weary but warm, at the memories Lucien calls up for him. "{I as well, in my own manner. Granted, most are reluctant to accept my assistance unless in dire need. Often even then.}" His gratitude for Lucien's offer is limned with curiosity (riffling through publications he's read on the matter, images of relevant brain structures, diagrams of neurotransmitters), and his desire to accept it cluttered with practical concerns (IEP reports to review for students in need of his tutoring, another paper Moira wants him to proofread, emails to draft over some inane GENUS board drama, how his already aggrieved back will rue sleeping in his chair --) All of this vanishes in a flash of abject terror at being helpless here, in Rasheed's domain, unable to defend himself or Hive or Lucien. He deftly obscures the fear with a soothing glow of apology, behind which he quietly examines the reaction before releasing it. In Lucien's perception again, he turns << "{All these years he could have --}" >> over, weighs the fact Hive had been conscious for his previous procedures, then compares the frenetic intensity with which Rasheed has thrown himself into mutant medicine this past decade, his assistance with Prometheus rescuees particularly. "{Guilt, perhaps,}" he murmurs, letting his own guilt and regret and rage (if only he'd been more involved, or less scrupulous, might he have seen through Rasheed?) fall away. He collects himself with remarkable alacrity and glances at Lucien, brief. << ({what problem?}) >> Half-formed glimpses of help he might offer orbit the question, from erasing Lucien's disclosure to killing Rasheed outright, alongside wisps of shame and doubt and caution. He annotates << ({how do you know?}) >> with his intuitive sense that Lucien would not make such an accusation unless he were utterly certain. A tightness threads itself through Lucien's jaw, and the breaths he takes are slow and deliberate. The memory that surfaces in answer here is colored with fury and with pain, sewn from threads pulled from a decade of Rasheed's stalwart presence in his family's lives. Close at a time when they let so few close; the help he provided through Matt's lengthy succession of failed cancer treatments -- the sickened discoloration those memories grow in hindsight even as a missing piece of an old puzzle -- how did Prometheus learn about Matt in the first place, how did they know to swoop in at that moment, how did they pluck him from death's door -- clicks into place. These threads blend smoothly together to stitch a video clip, taken at a slightly awkward angle; Rasheed in a laboratory, clearly unknowing that he is on camera as he tells the listener, "I had known him since -- Well. Long before he was Dr. Allred. Came to us so unstable it was a miracle he got here in one piece. Lot of days spent worried he'd end up half in a wall before he learned to control it. I'm just sorry we couldn't --"; another clip likely taken imminently after, judging by the background, by the camera position, "We've been working on unraveling this since -- well. Before Prometheus was Prometheus, really.". And then another memory, contextually connected to this although Lucien's crisply polished recall has been deliberately obscured in the retelling; no image, no distinctive voice, even, just the spoken words embroidering themselves across his mind: "For instance, the fact they cracked that code already. I know who the head of Prometheus was." And another, stark in how it's been plucked out of context as well from the rest of his intricately interconnected weavings: an unassuming electronic device, simple buttons, simple display; the way it lit up when Lucien turned it on himself. "A rapid mutant detector. It does work." "Regrettably," Lucien says, soft and calm, "if the good Doctor comes to harm, that thing hits the market. If his Prometheus connections hit the news, so too does it." Even without deliberate telepathic annotation, by now Lucien can probably identify the rapid fluctuation of the warmth in his mind as Charles processing. The thoughts are largely opaque to him, but the emotions they conjure up are not: anger, horror, and grief revolving around and melding into and strengthening each other. His earlier perplexity at Matt's absence aligns all at once with the image of Rasheed's personal betrayal of the Tessiers. When (the memory of) (the recording of) Rasheed mentions Dawson, Lucien feels Charles's reaction not just at the edge of his own mind but from somewhere deep in Hive's, his steady work there seizing momentarily in anguish and fury. Charles draws a sharp breath as another layer of his psychic shielding gives way, rent asunder from within. His formless warmth blazes into light that at once freezes and scalds until he pulls hastily back. Carefully modulated once more, his presence manifests as a not quite painfully bright mist all around Lucien, his communication grown choppy with the effort of maintaining equilibrium. A flustered apology. A quashed reflex to feel out whether he's hurt the younger man, diverted into a wordless query of the same. An image of the innocuous-looking device, somehow also a key that opens a door from which pours a cavalcade of nightmares, not all his own. His students abducted, his X-Men killed, his community destroyed, he himself waiting in an unbearably silent cell to be pulled apart in the name of the science he helped birth. Flickering behind all this, the fire and ash and steel of different a genocide he's seen through Erik's eyes. << (you were right)(we've failed our people)(again) >> It takes him several attempts to deploy his practiced nonattachment this time, but he has not dismissed the nightmares, which Lucien can sense still lurking in the periphery of his thoughts. "How," he asks aloud, slightly unsure of his voice which indeed comes out shaky, "do you know all this?" The picture of Lucien he sketches now is a reflection of the man he sees slumped at Hive's bedside, but bound up in glimmering threads that emerge from seemingly nowhere, he himself the weaver, and the loom, and the tapestry in which he is a garden spider -- also innocuous-looking -- perched at the center of a scintillating web. << {I can be more than a little dangerous.} >> He does not conceal his caution or hesitance or fear at the hazy hypothetical dangers he's still revising around the hateful necessity of keeping Rasheed alive, but his conviction is firm. "{I will be, for my people's sake, but I cannot do this blind.}" Lucien's eyes tic minutely back to Hive's face, an easily overlookable hitch of motion that belies the anguish and pain that ripples through him with the fluctuations of Charles's mind. His breath has caught, and he tends Hive first, a deliberate and fussy grooming of nerves that buffers the sensations that ripple through them both, imposes a deliberate wash of soothing cool in its wake. By the time this has finished, by the time he has exhaled, Charles has pulled back, and some automatic part of Lucien's mind simply dismisses the query without thought. It's not an acceptance of the apology, not an assurance it wasn't so painful, but some ingrained subconscious disregard for whether or not he has been hurt that relegates both the pain and Charles's inquiry about it into Just So Much Background Noise. "Have you talked much to DJ? I realize his company can be -- painful, for many, but he's quite a wonderful man in his own right. He does not always like to speak in depth of his own home world but he has done me the kindness of indulging my curiosity on one or two occasions. Sera was young enough her," his pause here is only barely a hitch, too, "-- family worked to keep some of the finer political details from her in those early days but I gather the development of such technology was what tipped the balance, for them, between civil war and simple open genocide." One hand turns up, turns out, and then returns to serving as a prop for the side of his head, fingers rubbing slow at one temple. "-- for the Prometheans here in our world, of course, the distinction has long been a rather --" His gaze flits to Charles, and then down to Hive's bed. "-- academic one." His eyes slip half closed as he only now sets to a careful tending of the disorder Charles's psionic outburst left within his own mind. The small smile that plays briefly on his lips suggests some appreciation of the mental image Charles offers of him, his quiet hum pleased and lightly amused. "How long have you known me, Doctor Xavier?" sounds in his light tone like a rhetorical question, but feels considerably more weighted than that in his mind. It answers itself, also; a memory well over a decade old but as crisply recalled as if it were this morning: one of the luxe salons at the old Hellfire Clubhouse, set up for a private dinner meeting; the slightly-flustered then-concierge apologizing to Charles upon arriving in the room and seeing the rearranged table settings, planters pushed wide to the corners, crystalware and decanters fronted closer to the tables' edges than elegance should dictate, foisting the blame for these changes off on a new and still-learning porter (whose uncannily quiet mind is as unobtrusive as the teenager himself is, ducking away down a hall to avoid reprisal and, as such, missing any response Charles might have given that day.) "What did you know of me, until recently?" "Not much, before that last raid." Charles frowns, and it's hard to tell what he's frowning at, exactly, but Lucien can discern a twinge of pain quite apart from what he's felt before, when he looks at Hive again. "There is so much I ought to have done before, more than I ever thought, and that was rather a lot." The memories that coalesce from his light are bound up as gilded scrolls to illuminate (endless papers and books and articles he's penned as if he could prove mutantkind deserving of existence), musical instruments to sooth (armies of lobbyists and experts he sends to push sensibly drafted legislation that never make it out of committee), chests of gold and jewels and more (grants and scholarships and campaign donations and trusts and endowments that all help, but are never enough) to lay in vain before the giant who continues to devour their children. "But then, I thought I could fight this war with words and coin and goodwill." He touches the memory of their meeting with infinite delicacy, his light rippling from the point of contact into an ornate mirror that plays the incident in similarly sharp detail from the moment Lucien exited. Though the Charles in the mirror does not look so very different from the one sitting beside Lucien now, he feels infinitely younger as he rolls a slow circuit of the room in startled appreciation having space to turn around and being able to reach items on the table, rare luxuries away from home. He returns to offer the concierge a dazzling smile and commend him on training his staff so well. Of course the Club's standards are quite high and that is as it should be, but pray don't be too hard on the young man, he's done splendidly with what he had to hand. "As far as your work at the Club, I didn't know much beyond your name and that you were Quebecois, but I thought you clever, observant, and punctilious...when I thought of you at all," Charles admits. It's less a specific memory he brings up now and more a cumulative sense of how Lucien's quiet mind and quiet manner made him unusually pleasant for a crippled telepath to be around, but also easy to overlook -- along with all the ways he went above and beyond his job description. "After your siblings entered my orbit, I found you were a devoted brother and a brilliant actor, as well." Here a snippet of Lucien in the titular role of the Pippin revival, expounding melodically on how to be extraordinary. "I knew it was your skill that saved Ryan's career when he came out, but suspect now I underestimated that, as well. I suppose," he adds, a little sheepishly, "I also thought you a steadfast ally to mutantkind." "Mmm." Lucien is annotating Charles's impression of his time at the club with his own mental images -- a jewel-bright greenbottle fly tucked up onto a high wall; a succession of senators and CEOs, presidents and princes, passing through the Club's elegant lounges with little notice paid to the staff keeping their drinks flowing. "Being easy to overlook may be the quickest route to quite a good number of secrets." He's flicking a quick glance to Charles, and the fly dissolves into only so much smoke that wisps near-invisibly into the heads of two of the Club's conversants as Lucien amends, lightly amused: "Second quickest. I kept that position a good while longer than I needed, and not one of our clientele ever asked why I chose to get up the morning after the Tonys and make sure their milk has been hand-milked from the correct goat but -- I suppose that would have required knowing my name, first." He sits up, now, reaching for his thermos -- Charles' thermos, really, though the tea in it has been refreshed since this morning -- to take a long swallow. "You are not wrong, though. This battle would not have been won without words, and coin, and goodwill." Here there are different memories threading through; long conversations with Ryan and without him, about what having such a prominent celebrity mouthpiece might mean; long successions of suggestions dropped light or bribed heavy in the right ears, over dinner or between bedsheets; hours pored over the precise wording for a press release or a tweet, all these strands twining back to the very first moment he learned what had truly happened to his brother and decided, simple and clear, to end them. "-- but it would nor have been won without blood, either." In his image here, Jackson is astride a dragon, fire-breathing and gleaming iridescent against the sky as an ominous dark-shrouded castle goes up in flames; but in his image, too, there is blood thick and fresh beneath his armor when he dismounts, and a battlefield littered with fallen teammates all around. "Unfortunately --" And now there's a snake, slipping into a burrow beneath the burning castle and writhing its quiet way away, "-- until we can disarm this bomb of his, he is like to simply continue on his charade as a --" Lucien's mouth twists downward. "Steadfast ally to mutantkind." Charles watches the literal (figurative) fly on the wall, conceding to Lucien's logic with a touch of self-deprecating amusement at the reason he doesn't make a habit of discussing sensitive matters at the Hellfire Club. His reflection of Lucien's imaginary clubhouse is an ornate set on an even more sumptuous stage. Behind the flimsy walls -- for all its opulence it is not a particularly well-designed set -- actors dressed as chessmen bicker and scheme in vaudevillesque caricature. "Though of course, they were never much interested in a decrepit academic with nothing up his sleeves but science and philanthropy." Perhaps unconsciously, he brushes his fingertips over the lotus seed mala beneath the cuff of his actual sleeve. Onstage now is an all-too-real memory of taking lunch in the Rook's Salon with Rasheed, around whom a faintly luminous mist swirls but never enters. The scene transitions, this time a chance encounter at some conference, then another, and another, skipping rapidly down through the years for a hint of something, anything that might have -- or should have -- aroused his suspicion. "{Certainly he would have been cautious around me, knowing my connections if not the content of my chromosomes, but the same would have applied to you.}" He only remembers now that he also has tea, himself, and opens his thermos to take a sip, savouring the sharpness of the bold Keemun. "I suppose the dramatically appropriate thing for me to say is 'I'd hate to be your enemy', but that's nothing new." Charles is chatting onstage with Rasheed again, but this time his light flows into the other man, who rises flustered and walks right into a very visible, very fake spider's web strung across the fourth wall of the salon. "I doubt you've much interest in credit, and considering my own failures with respect to Prometheus it seems disengenuous for me to praise your work, but it is a remarkable accomplishment nevertheless." His light dims almost imperceptibly -- far more comfortable to behold now, still-volatile emotions muted and distant -- with the addition of the new psionic shield he's been patiently assembling. The Charles onstage watches Rasheed struggle for a moment more, then pivots smartly (no furniture in his way) and exits through the back of the set. "It will probably not be quite so simple." He quirks a humorless smile. "Likely would not have been even if I didn't out myself, and he has a lot more power over me now." "I had quite a lot of help in getting there." In Lucien's mind, Charles's mental stage is plucked up, and as a spider descends to cocoon Rasheed up tight the viewpoint shifts away from what's going on stage entirely -- panning over the orchestra pit setting the ominous music (numerous sympathetic media contacts helping to frame the story), the brilliant technical crew (years of gathered intel, ranging from what the raid team's skilled hackers picked up to military contacts carefully cultivated to the extreme risk taken on by those going undercover into Prometheus itself), to the black-clad stagehands who keep the entire operation running smoothly (in Lucien's picture, it is these people who bear, subtle now, a chess motif, embroidered black-on-black on their pockets but evident in this mental space where eyesight would fail to pick it up.) "-- and the last Court did have a fairly short-sighted view on useful contacts but I have found few people quite as helpful along this road than --" The twitch of Lucien's lips is very small, the revisiting of some of his previous brief flashes of memory wholly devoid of shame; so many Decrepit Old Men whose beds he has graced, from the one so-many-years ago who helped land him the job at the Club in the first place to the Oscorp researcher who confirmed for him Prometheus's pressure in the matter of the Guardians that ultimately killed Dawson to the med school director who helped pull strings to ensure his Prometheus spy would be placed in the program he requested. "Though as you say," he concedes, folding both hands around his thermos and resting it on his knee, "it will be far from simple. The man has had many very skilled telepaths in his employ for some years now, and I would be shocked if he had not taken some pains to secure the information in his head -- not to mention to monitor his thoughts for tampering. And he will --" His hand turns upward, out towards Charles. "-- be chary of you in particular, no doubt. Still. With the harm he has wrought it is only a matter of time before someone sees fit to harm him and when that day comes, I would rather --" He does not finish this thought, very deliberately shadowing over the domino tumble of horrors that want to surface here. Charles raises his brows and neatly summarizes the sudden burst of thought Lucien cannot parse as a light bulb switching on. "My favorite theory was they'd all assassinated each other in some Machiavellian comedy of errors." He's impressed and not sure he wants to know what happened to the old Inner Circle. But then, he'd been ready to murder a man less than a day before, and not in any immediate defense of self or other. Here a brief flash, perhaps not altogether deliberate, of holding down another mind with his own, holding his screams and curses and pleas, holding through searing agony until the darkness of decohering thoughts drags him down with his victim. It's definitely conscious, this time, when he drags his thumb over the lotus seeds circling his wrist. "Not that you were offering, but you needn't bed me for my cooperation." He was about to add something clever when some thought beyond Lucien's perception brings him up short, but he quickly stifles whatever reaction it was about to inspire. "I am emotionally compromised to be sure, but I should like to think I'd make the same decision if I weren't, however perilous it may be, and not just for myself." He doesn't actually name the decision, but he does shape his light into a golden pungi that plays soft and persuasive, coaxing a wary venomous snake from its burrow to coil in protectively on itself. "It will be delicate work. I'll need pretext to spend more time with him than Hive's recovery will likely furnish." Briefly he laments that he will not have Hive's assistance, then pushes that aside in favor of, "...or at least near him." The allegorical flute dissolves and reforms as Charles (dressed like a silver screen ninja) and a comically large cardboard box that drops down to wholly obscure him (matte black wheelchair and all) while the snake slithers by unawares. "This is not my wheelhouse, I'm afraid. But..." He wreathes the image of Lucien -- where he sits now, and at his loom, and in his web -- with swirling light that, when it fades, leaves him bedecked in doctoral robes with brilliant octarine trim and stripes. No tam, though; he doesn't think Lucien would suffer such indignity. "...I can learn."