Logs:Information Gap

Information Gap
Dramatis Personae Charles, Hive, Matt
In Absentia Cerebro, DJ, Dawson, Polaris, Rasheed	2024-11-08 << I'm sure I've a few more idiot solutions to put up for peer review. >>
Location <NYC> Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center - Upper East Side
This is one of the oldest and most renowned cancer treatment centers in the world. The facilities are state-of-the-art, the staff are knowledgeable, the treatments are innovative. But at the end of the day it is still a hospital. Full of cancer. It is not a pleasant or cheerful or comfortable place to be. The entire place smells unpleasantly chemical, not solely from the medications but their (extensive) (extreme) (necessary) sterilization practices. This room, at least, does not smell like active chemotherapy, but it's dim and dismal and chilly all the same. It has not been leavened, as many other occupied rooms, with cards or stuffies or balloons, but to experienced eyes the non-hospital-issued slippers and extra blankets and such tell a story all their own. Matt looks a mess. His face is pale, his hair tousled, his blue dress shirt and black slacks rumpled. He's staring out of the window toward but not at the East River, crunching his perfunctory way through a paper cup of Froot Loops. The entirety of the Lost! soundtrack, which he knows backward and forward, has been playing in vivid, determined detail in his mind to fill the pall of eerie stillness there punctuated by violent jags of fury and grief. << ...but I am no stranger -- no stranger than you, >> the Faun assures the girl he's getting ready to steal away. << What harm is it to see a new and brighter view? >> As the sun clears the distant skyline to shine piercing orange-red across Queens and Roosevelt Island, he turns away blinking at the afterimage. He sets the rest of his cereal, half-eaten, down on the wide swiveling tray that serves Hive for a bedside table, and leans back against the side of his bed, leaning on the heels of his hands. The sun is still seared into his retinas when he closes his eyes. "Tabarnak," he mutters in favor of voicing any of the barely coherent questions crowding his head as the song winds down. Hive looks oddly kempt given his current condition and the Terrible News he's recently received. He's awake, washed, shaven, propped up against several pillows. He's been ignoring his own breakfast, fixated instead on refining the holographic blueprints in front of him -- elaborate plans for an elaborate arcology that is almost certainly not actually going to be built anywhere. Several other projects, actually ones he's getting paid for, have been minimized to tiny glowing models and pushed to the side. Presumably he is thinking quite intently about the work in front of him, but it's hard to tell through the heavy stab of pain dominating most of his mental landscape right now. Past this, other things -- worries, stresses, the gnawing hunger that tries pushing his mind to expand its reach -- seem foggy and far away. A faint warmth that has nothing to do with the hospital's cool, sterile climate control envelops the two men before either can sense its source properly with their own powers. Visiting hours have not yet begun, but the staff either made an exception for Charles, or he made one for himself, because he is hastening -- his sleek silver chair is faster than most would expect of such a minimalist powerchair -- down the hallway to Hive's room. He's dressed much as he might for any school day, in a charcoal three-piece suit with a blue and gold striped tie, the Xavier's School crest pin on his lapel. The psionic aura that rolls in with him isn't just an illusion of subjective temperature anymore, but a soothing suggestion of white noise just beneath the threshold of hearing, a whiff of santal soft and familiar, and an indefinable sense of safety and comfort. He looks from Hive to Matt and back again, lips compressing lightly, but whatever he first thought to say he holds back and replaces with a dignified, neutral "Gentlemen." For all the restraint of this greeting, there's little hesitation when his shields shift and realign and open to Hive. His urgent but wordless reach for information before he's quite reached Hive's bedside carries with it what little he already knows about the situation -- only what Cerebro was able to glean from the news, really. Matt tenses at the warmth of the familiar psionic bow wave and straightens to meet it. By the time Charles physically enters, he's already cycled rapid-fire through relief, annoyance, rage, wariness, disdain, and lapsed back into more or less the same lethargic detachment as before. "Professor." The greeting he returns with a minute incline of his head is a little less neutral. << (why wasn't he here sooner?) (why isn't anyone else here?) (why isn't DJ?) >> "Do you know who might have been behind this?" The hunger in Hive's thoughts stirs, stronger at the feel of another mind's warmth against his. He's stretching out shaky roots towards Charles and yanking them back quick, shoulders pulling in tight and uncomfortable. "Don't know shit," comes out gruff, with his mouth although his mind is twitchily-itchily restraining from amending this with more information. "He was here just. Fucking. Hours ago. Then fifteen minutes later the entire damn hospital's panicking and --" There's grief, there, muted and uncomfortable, too, guilty that his own stress and anxiety and growing certainty of impending death are eclipsing what he should be feeling for this man who he knew so long, had helped him through so much. His eyes narrow, cut to Matt irritably. "Didn't fucking ask DJ." Charles frowns at Hive's telepathic self-censorship, and starts to inquire silently before thinking better of it. "Is there damage to the same region he operated on last year? Such that you ought not -- or cannot..." He's suddenly at a loss trying to communicate this concept purely via language, and sounds very uncertain when he settles for "...interface? Psionically." He may not be speaking in Hive's mind, but he is carefully folding the younger telepath into his own, imitating the pseudo-hiving that Hive practiced much during his recovery from Lassiter. The forest clearing in the labyrinth of his memories where Hive fits is warm, but the stained-glass sky overhead is dark and ominous. "No one's come after you directly," he says, though he doesn't seem much relieved by this. "I was in Rasheed's mind during your last operation and I forget nothing. I could -- guide another surgeon." Matt holds up his hands, wearily and conciliatory. "I just really thought he would come anyway, so long as you didn't ask him not to. But I thought that about a lot of people." He tips his hand at Charles. "Like you, now that you have -- most of your staff back." This began as censure but quickly strays into concern. << (I could have helped) (can still help) (thank gods they didn't ask) >> "We used to keep a rotating watch when any of us -- the raid team -- was in the hospital. Prometheus is gone, but the shitfucks who are in the wind now..." He runs a hand through his hair, which actually straightens it out a little. "I don't know. A lot of people stand to get rich by getting Rasheed out of the way. Maybe it didn't have anything to do with Hive at all, but the timing..." Images of the alarmingly large glioblastoma dominate his thoughts for a moment before receding beneath the opening bars of "Green and Growing Things". "If they wanted him dead too, they don't need to come after him directly. It wasn't just that Rasheed knew his brain." His voice falters but doesn't break. << "You're only as lost as you feel you are..." >> "He was godsdamned brilliant and you can't make another surgeon brilliant like him." "You fucking kidding me, old man?" Hive's cranky-sharp tone is a stark contrast from the relief with which his mind leans into Charles's warmth, nestles there like a comforting blanket. "You gonna, what? Recreate it from memory stroke by fucking stroke? Whole different goddamn surgery for a whole different goddamn problem, {academics}," he's telling this to Matt, now, "{are goddamn idiots.}" Beneath the sharp edges, where his thoughts bleed into Charles's there's a fondness that does not really help his current very mortal fear: goddamn idiot, yes, but it's kind of reassuring that his friends are groping desperately at goddamn-idiot solutions to save his life. Friend, anyway, singular, which pulls his attention back to -- "... didn't ask," sort of mumbled again as some odd new realization is slowly creeping up on him. He picks up his phone again, swipes back through several different message threads only to end with a rough gasp of laughter. << (oh shit) >> << gonna be so fucking mad >> "-- I didn't tell him." Didn't tell them, his mind is clarifying, didn't tell anyone, days of panic and crippling headache and confused memory issues kind of bleeding into each other until he felt certain he must have mentioned by now. Whoops. "I didn't know until I saw the news." Charles sounds more worried than defensive, studying the scans from Matt's memory as if he knows what to do with them. He does not, but the sheer size of the tumor sends an icy dread through him. His light coils protectively around Hive, insulating him from the chill which, in this his distraction, bursts out into his psionic periphery briefly unchecked. "Câlice." However shocking coming from him, this profanity cannot quite contain the magnitude of his dismay, and he appends a wordless annotation that feels like a long string of sacres. His warmth resumes with a quiet apology to Matt and a barely conscious adjustment of his psychic shields to encompass him too, linking all three of them. This elicits another mental shiver, though this time he contains it before exposing anyone else. It's only by dint of his vast experience that he does not flinch outwardly or shrink inwardly from the jagged edges of Matt's mind. He does frown when he darts a glance at Matt, uncomprehending and uneasy and unthinkably lost for just an instant down a strange corridor in his mind. Hive, at least, can sense him making a note in the new flagstones to investigate the mystery, irritated and bewildered that he'd forgotten it to begin with, somehow. He gathers the younger men close. << We should set up a rotating watch regardless of the assassin's motives. >> There is a tightly guarded terror behind this, darkening the sky above his mindscape like a gathering storm that somehow doesn't seem very connected to Hive's predicament at all. << I'm sure I've a few more idiot solutions to put up for peer review. >> Matt doesn't exactly flinch, but draws closer to Hive when Charles folds him in, nevermind that the folding itself draws them psionically closer. His power had immediately curled around Charles -- a panicked reflex he'd never displayed before -- and started to bear down before dissipating like smoke when he relaxes. The sharp things that rise from the surface of his mind do not subside completely, but he's rearranging his thoughts around them now. << {I'll thank you to give me a little warning next time.} >> Beneath the prickly wording there's surprisingly little rancor in request, given his wonted disdain toward Charles. Maybe he's too grateful for the proximity to his friend to mind so very much, but even so there's the faintest whisper of fear in the midst of his relief when he leans into Hive. << Does this -- >> He somewhat clumsily indicates the unfamiliar (to him) mindscape. << -- make it easier for you to not -- >> The verb is constructed of Hive's frequent and frequently quashed reflex to spread his roots into other minds. These memories come through the sense granted by his power, perhaps difficult for Charles to immediately decipher, but a familiar enough view to Hive. The anxiety driving that question clutters the surface of his mind in fragments of their conversation with Rasheed a few short hours ago and in the crushing weight of their millions of selves a few long weeks ago. << (if telepathy did this to him, could telepathy undo it somehow?) >> "Hah." This is the only response the question of if this helps quiet Hive's mental hunger. It's still there, a constant restless craving that shifts and presses at and into the warmth around him. He's starting to text, several different group chats with the same perfunctory identical Yo btw tumor's back it's not looking good, and looks up from this to frown. He's going over, mentally, the many complexities of trying to operate on his brain, going over the median survival rate of untreated GBM, going over the chaotic stress of his friends' lives, and coming to the strong conclusion: "-- fuck's the point of a goddamn vigil. If sometime does want to come kill me it's gonna be a hell of a lot quicker and less painful." He's shifting kind of uncomfortably, a mental flick shivering as if he could swat away Matt's suggestion. "Telepathy isn't..." He's reaching for words, not finding them, just a vague irritable sense that telepathies aren't created equal, that the messed up things he does to brains -- does to his own brain -- aren't easily replicable. He squeezes at his phone, sets it aside after he's done dropping his bombs, not bothering to read the replies that buzz back. Charles draws a sharp breath and does not immediately let it back out. He does not immediately reply, either. He bows his head and clasps his hands together tight. His labyrinthine mindscape shifts and folds somewhere in the darkening distance. Where he's sheltering his guests it's still warm and bright, but Hive can tell even without prying that he's searching his own memories, looking for patterns and connections. << I have seen too many wonders to say it's impossible, but I can't conceive of how. The strain of his power may have triggered it, but this is a disease of cells that transmit no thought. >> He creates an elegant anatomical illustration of a brain (<< artist's rendition >>), then strips it down to the myriad neuroelectric impulses, and zooms in on a void amidst all those twinkling stars. << It is not part of his mind and so is beyond even our indirect reach. >> But the pain that it causes, that he can ease if Hive lets him intercept his perception of it. << If there is anything within my power to help... >> He does not finish the thought, his attention consumed for a moment holding back the howling storm behind it. "You do not need to decide that right now." His voice trembles, but his hand is steady when he pulls it free of his own grasp to take Hive's. Matt reluctantly retracts the wondering that he knew deep down was probably absurd. He does not even roll his eyes when Charles lapses into teacher mode. It's comforting, in some obscure way that rankles the ego he's trying to set aside in favor of Hive's comfort. He produces his own phone as Hive delivers his somewhat uninformative bad news, and picks out a few contacts to send more practical information. "I was so sure Polaris, at least, knew. How did we manage to talk past each other for so long?" He drapes himself along the side of the bed, drowning the terrible flotsam and jetsam in his thoughts and filling the numb spaces with music again. "There are other paths to 'quick and less painful'." This comes sort of casual and speculative, dusting off the many, many hours of contemplation he's dedicated to the topic while in palliative care himself. "I won't let the doctors harass you about treatment you don't want, in any event." A mess of fragmented thoughts collide in Hive's mind -- sharp annoyance at Charles' attempts at speculation << fuck if only I had an actual goddamn neurologist to figure this out with >> butting up against an equally sharp guilt << not being fair of course they're going to worry -- >> and then ricocheting right back into irritation << -- of course there fucking are I'm just -- >> "-- tired," he manages aloud, his hand twitching but not getting quite so far as to pull away from Charles's, and though he's grateful for the worry and grateful for the protectiveness, right now he's just trying very hard not to keep snapping at these men who have done nothing to earn his ire except care. He starts to reach for his phone, but it's not actually DJ he wants to text, here, and in the sudden sick imagining of going through all this, again, but without Dawson by his side he's almost wishing for an assassin. He swallows, and nods. "Thanks," is what gets out, and then nothing more.