Logs:Trust

Trust
Dramatis Personae Charles, Lucien, Rasheed
In Absentia Hive	2023-09-05 "How do you know when you have scrubbed enough?"
Location <NYC> Mount Sinai Hospital
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 consultation room is small and utilitarian, with a single computer work station, a wheeling stool, and two comfortable padded chairs along the opposite wall. Its walls are populated with colorful glossy diagrams of the nervous system and infographics about the various ways things can go wrong with them. Charles is here, in a light camel suit with a sapphire blue tie that intensifies the tint of his faded irises, blithely snubbing the chairs for his own, much more comfortable-looking powerchair. He perusing a poster about spinal cord injuries, his expression impassive and perhaps just a little judgmental. His hands are folded primly atop the Kinross tartan blanket covering his lap, whose folds partly obscure the lotus seed mala he's clutching. Charles is waiting, although not overly long, before the door opens. Rasheed hustles in -- considerably greyer than the last time Charles saw him, the bags under his eyes considerably more pronounced, a bit of fluster to him as he scoots behind the desk. Doesn't take the seat, just rubs with his first two fingers at his temple as he casts Charles a brief apologetic look. "-- forgive me, I've been having a little bit of difficulty with --" He shakes his head, leaning back against the wall as his hand drags down the side of his face; the well-practiced regulation of his mind shivers a note of deep frustration up through the calmer-quieter backdrop of prayers that murmur obscuring over the surface of his thoughts. "Nevermind, I'm, ah, I'm sorry to keep you waiting. I wanted to talk to you before I start prep. Now, I know his brain is --" Here he exhales short and sharp before continuing with some restraint: "Unusual, but the abruptness of some of the regeneration his scans are showing now -- after weeks with no change -- I really wanted to put off the surgery until we had some explanation but if your consultant can speak to that now, well." His lips press together, kind of grim. "Certainly it would be better not to have to wait." The warm, practiced smile that usually comes so easily to Charles is just a tick slow today, though perhaps Rasheed is not himself in the best place to notice the lapse. He slips the mala onto his wrist and tucks it beneath the french cuff neatly cinched with a circled X in yellow and black before turning to face his (sort-of) host more fully. "Please do take a moment if you need one, Doctor Toure." His concerned frown drops into place without delay, at least. It has gotten a lot of use lately. "I do believe I can make this fairly brief. The regeneration you have noted is in fact the work of a consultant with telepathic abilities, only it took him some time to find an approach that worked." He pauses here reluctantly, lips compressing. "Please do forgive the prevarication, but what I failed to mention in my email is that I am the consultant." Some of the tension eases from him with this admission. "I have been Hive's mentor since I first asked your help on his behalf fourteen years ago." The slow drag of Rasheed's hand proceeds onward, palm covering his mouth as his brows hike up. There's a sharp glitter -- surprise, cautious, a deep curiosity, all mingling together as his fingers curl into a loose fist, knuckles pressed flat to his lips. "You," he exhales, soft and wondering. "That --" But then he stops, a faint and uncertain frown on his face. He slumps down into his seat now, turning to his computer and clicking through his files to flip through several scans that come up on the screen. "-- only explains a little," he says with a faint uncertainty. "I'm sure you have insights into what is going on in his mind that could be," his jaw tightens for only a brief moment, eyes still trained on his screen with an intense scrutiny. "-- very valuable. But I've never seen a telepath who could effect some of these reversals -- ya Rab, if you know how to target structural nerve damage like -- this is --" Is what? His thumb is tapping quick and jittery against the side of his mouse, his eyes gone slightly wider. He's a little wry when he adds: "-- a shame you aren't the neurosurgeon, if I had more insight into how you managed this I'd say his prognosis just --" His cheeks puff out as he blows a sharper breath. Then, with a slight widening of his eyes and a greater caution: "... could I? Have -- that insight, is that a thing you -- I mean, how did you do this." "I did have some additional assistance," Charles admits lightly, "from another mutant, but I'll let them decide what to disclose to you. It's encouraging, but it would take months of intensive work like that -- at least -- to accomplish what you can in a day, even without...additional data." He taps own his right temple with index and middle fingers, his smile small and rueful. "But yes, I can guide you, much as I did my associate. I recognize it's no small matter to let someone else into your mind, especially someone you have known for so long with no notion they could do such a thing." He spreads his hands, a gesture of openness and supplication. "You likely have some notion why I have not been forthright about my genetic status, but I do take ethics seriously and have excellent control. I will do everything in my power to preserve your privacy in this." Rasheed pulls his eyes away from his screen, and there's a small hitch in the quiet litany of Arabic running through his mind that resumes smooth and calm when his head dips. "I --" He's glancing back to the many scans of Hive's brain and then returning his gaze to Charles. "Have some idea, yes." He draws in a long, slow breath, and after some deliberation logs out of the computer. "I have some experience working with other telepaths over the years. If you and -- your associate," he ventures cautiously, "can help me help my patient..." He is slow as he gets to his feet. "Well. I'd better get ready." It might have been hard to clock that Charles had been tense, but with Rasheed's agreement his shoulders ease just a fraction. "I'm not surprised -- you are quite skilled at screening your mind. But please be assured I am not prying." After this slightly hasty addition his expression softens. "You are a fine ally to my people, Doctor Toure. I ought to have found the confidence to tell you years ago." He doesn't look too consumed with regret at his lack of faith, though. "I hope that we can indeed be of some assistance, together." He tugs at his cuff and adds, quieter, "But an extra prayer or two can't go amiss." Something tightens around Rasheed's eyes, his shoulders tensing for a moment. The twitch of his mouth is small, a little tired. "It's been some while since any of my prayers have been answered, but oddly I've never given up trying. I hope yours find more receptive ears." He starts for the door, but pauses in the doorway to glance back over his shoulder. "-- And thank you," he adds, just before slipping away. "For your trust." <NYC> Mount Sinai Hospital - Preoperative Room Getting ready for surgery is a daunting experience for many patients, one that is probably not much helped by the figurative sterility of pre-op holding areas, even luxurious private ones like this. It's chilly in here, and a little cluttery with cabinets full of relevant supplies, wheeling trays and carts, a bed, and a cramped bathroom with an even more cramped shower. None of this troubles the patient who has just been prepped here, though perhaps it would if he were conscious. The staff has left Hive, head freshly shaven and smelling sharply of chlorhexidine, under a pre-warmed blanket on a gurney, ready for transport. The motorized door groans opens to admit Charles, not actively looking fretful even when his eyes land on Hive and his mind reflexively reaches for him. That telepathic reach transfers to the room's other occupant, not tentative exactly, but careful -- a polite flush of warmth fluttering at the edge of awareness. His gaze follows at a delay. "Good day, Mister Tessier," he ventures, producing a hammered steel thermos from one of his chair's startlingly capacious storage compartments. "I thought it likely you brought your own, but this is a serviceable Yunnan gold in case you've run low." Lucien is dressed today more for comfort than elegance, though his dark jeans and soft grey henley are both carefully tailored to his fit. He's been seated by Hive's bedside, though he isn't touching the other man, just repeatedly snapping and unsnapping the lid of a thermos of his own. He does not look up at Charles's arrival, but a careful sense of welcome -- and then gratitude -- shifts deliberate across his mind. "Many thanks. I have not been rationing mine well," he admits, a soft amusement in his voice that does not make it into his expression. He rises to accept the second thermos with a small tilt of his head. "Are you ready, then." Charles does not delve far into Lucien's mind, the warmth of his telepathic contact soothing where it displaces speech. His transmission of concepts and sensations this time is less linearlly and more spatially organized, a cloud of knowing that would probably glow if Charles let himself in more fully. Here a cluster of sense-memories about the tea in the thermos, orbited by more concrete information about its provenance and preparation. There a vivid memory of the last time he'd overlapped with Matt while visiting Hive, layered with both concern and query at his present absence. Here again, a dense nucleus of concrete information about the upcoming procedure, expected to go on for hours without any real way of knowing how many just yet, and the facilities that will be available for its duration. Another thought is still in the process of developing in soft layers around a new and amorphous fear. He does not show Lucien the relevant email exchange in full, but explodes excerpts of it into: a calendar event suddenly displaced to a future date before moving back, a scattering of brain imaging results both surprising and perplexing, a stranger more conceptual than physical, most prominent by their abstracted psionic presence, and the relief of their dismissal. All these smaller sensory clouds coalesce and resettle around his conversation with Rasheed Toure earlier, which throws both his fear and relief into better focus. To that fear of exposure -- obviated now by Rasheed's reception of it -- he appends a tentative offer: a cloak of invisibility green and velvety to drape around Lucien, tentative less for his unwillngness than his uncertainty of its practicality. Charles's thermos clatters to the ground, all the louder for the relative quiet of the room. For just a moment Lucien is very still -- not so much as a ripple across the frozen surface of his mind, not so much as a ripple across the frozen surface of his expression. It cracks only quietly: a soft shaky breath, a soft shaky ripple of fear soon clamped down hard into nothingness. "You --" he exhales, soft and horrified. "-- told Dr. Toure. Oh. Oh." It's hard to tell here whether Charles flinches at the physical noise or Lucien's abrupt inner silence. His first reaction past this start is subtle, sensible through the light touch of his mind as a shift of focus, a shoring up of shields around them both, and a rapid expansion not very much like Hive becoming more, but not wholly unlike it, either. In the wake of this his warmth intensifies, feeling out the edges of Lucien's reaction with puzzlement and concern. He does answer aloud, but "I could see no better option, and he is a trusted ally" is richly annotated with glimpses of Rasheed in conversations spanning three decades, in his assistance to Hive and so many other Prometheans, in the high regard he's accorded by the harrowingly small community of clinicians specializing in mutant medicine. << You need not follow suit, >> he adds gently, reiterating his offer of obfuscating Lucien's involvement, the impulse behind it more protective this time. << ({what is wrong?}) >> is somehow both in French and in no words at all, a slightly reluctant admission of his ignorance. Lucien swallows as Charles speaks, stooping slowly to pick the thermos up off the ground and grip it very tightly. His mindscape is still eerily flat; not its usual tranquil quiet but a sepulchral silence. His eyes shift somewhere beyond Charles, as if he could see the other man's mind expanding, as if he could see the people beyond the walls of this room being vetted for danger and cleared to go about their hospital routines. When he replies his voice is quiet, and very calm. "What he is, is the director of Prometheus. Perhaps even its founder." Charles does not freeze the same way Lucien does, but he freezes all the same, at this revelation. His eyes refocus again on something else, and the metaphorical temperature of his psionic presence oscillates wildly -- cold with dread and scalding with rage and everything in between. Shadows of those thoughts flicker across the link between their minds, struggling to recontextualize the memories of he'd conjured up to reassure Lucien. The wide psionic net he had just cast tightens in the direction of the operating room, its focus so intense Lucien can feel the target distantly, though he can only identify it by inference. Choppy half-formed ideas of what he could do to that mind flash through him, intermixed haphazardly with snippets of other thoughts from other minds that intrude despite his shields and threaten his already weakening grip on coherence. For a moment it's almost too much. For an instant it is too much. And then Charles lets go. Mostly. His contact with Lucien remains, his warmth steadying with a will, but the other minds fall away -- probably still legible telepathically but not near loud enough to bleed across the link anymore. He's still tracking Rasheed, as well, his attention now somewhat detached, the jumbled components of his wrath and anguish examined in brief then released to temporary irrelevance. He does not kill or lobotomize Rasheed, does not wipe his mind or seize control of it. Just keeps a quiet mental finger on him as he goes about scrubbing up for the operation, none the wiser to the horrifying fates that might have befallen him. << ({I am ready}) >> he manages. << ({We have to be.}) >> Lucien pulls in a slow breath, and his attention sharpens, a keen focus aligning his attention with Charles's as that psionic net coils tight around Rasheed. His eyes lower when Charles pulls back to leave Rasheed unharmed; his head bows just slightly in the only external concession to the quicksilver flare of fury that knifes through his mind. He pops the cap of Charles's thermos, snaps it hard back into place. "Mnh, yes." He's drifting towards the door, that fury tamped back down into stillness once more as he turns his thoughts towards the operating room. "I can see no better option." <NYC> Mount Sinai Hospital - OR Prep The surgical tech and surgical nurse are already inside getting the theatre fully set up. Rasheed is taking his time out here. Setting out his gown pack on a table. Carefully opening it. Putting his face mask on before he sets one of the faucets to running. There's a methodical deliberation here, almost ritualistic. Soap up the nail brush. Lather carefully. Lucien is probably not trying to be stealthy. Still, there's a very long-ingrained habit cultivated from many years of playing assistant to the rich and powerful and it's barely noticeable when he slips into the room. The rustle of his own sterile pack betrays him before he speaks; he's watching Rasheed careful and quiet as he gets his own things set up. He has a startling facility with the routine, smooth and practiced, for someone who has never worked in the medical field. "How do you know," he's musing quietly, "when you have scrubbed enough?" Rasheed looks up at the rustle, and he blinks a bit owlishly over at the other man. "Lucien, what are you --" begins before the rest of his morning catches up to him, eyes widening in understanding and surprise. "Wait, you are Dr. Xavier's -- you --" He's looking over to the window into the operating theatre, then looking back at Lucien. He shakes his head slowly, and returns to soaping up his hands and forearms, scrubbing careful under his nails. "-- starting to wonder who around me isn't a mutant, today." He's staring down at the soap on his hands as he rubs them thoroughly. "Guidelines used to be ten solid minutes but they realized that gave a lot of doctors skin problems with no noticeable reduction in bacterial load. Five minutes works just fine -- about twenty to thirty strokes on every surface." "Mmm. Today --" Lucien replies quietly, a brow hitching slightly upward, "-- I expect more than you would think, and considerably fewer than at your other job." He's still watching Rasheed work, once he has laid out his gown pack, not making any move towards the sink yet himself. "I have a small facility with brains and a lot of experience with Hive's, in particular. Dr. Xavier found it quite enlightening." He turns his hand up and then over, tipping his hand out towards Rasheed. "I do hope you will as well." Rasheed's laugh is short and huffed. "Fewer mutants than at Mendel is a pretty easy bar to cross." He continues his thorough soaping for a minute longer before rinsing his arms off and dabbing them dry with one sterile towel and then a second. "I imagine he did. From what I could see -- what you did was nothing short of miraculous. Brains are fiendishly complicated places and for you to just -- it's a shame," he's offering wryly as he carefully shakes out his gown and slips into the arms, "that you didn't go into medicine. -- Do you mind?" He's -- kind of gesturing with a small flap of one elbow at the loose straps of the disposable gown. Lucien's eyes just fix on Rasheed, silent, as he finishes his washing up. A muscle tightens, clenches brief and hard at the side of his jaw, but he steps forward -- also silent -- to help pull the back of the gown up over Rasheed's shoulders. His eyes fix hard on the back of the other man's neck as he fastens it at the back. "Oh, no," he demurs, as he steps back, arms folding tight across his chest, "I have seen plenty enough of your profession to know I could in no wise handle much of what you do." "Don't sell yourself short." Rasheed is carefully pulling his gloves on, now, securing the sleeves of the gown over top. "What you've already done without even studying is just --" His head is shaking as he heads to the operating theater doors. "Some time when this is over we'll have to sit down, you and I. I am dying to get a better look at what you do." It's only as Rasheed starts to leave that Lucien uncrosses his arms, making his way slowly over to the sink to begin the scrubbing process as well. Slow, too. Methodical. "Mmm," is quiet enough it's half lost beneath the running water. "For you, I'm sure I could make the time." <NYC> Mount Sinai Hospital There's a plethora of equipment in this suite ranging from the high tech (a wealth of highly specialized intraoperative imaging hardware) to the low (the wealth of various scissors and forceps and drills and saws for opening the site up.) There's a plethora of people, too, each in their identical blue gowns, caps, masks, and each with their own series of tasks that they move through like clockwork. In the midst of the bustle there's not much to outwardly distinguish Rasheed from the rest of the team, each running down their own meticulous mental checklist just as he is. There's a quiet caution in his mind as he settles his upcoming routine firmly into place, trains his thoughts quite deliberately to the task at hand and no further, and it's here they stay before he ventures a careful sense of readiness up to the forefront of his thoughts. Lucien has been ready, perhaps, for some time now -- at least in the physical, carefully gowned and carefully scrubbed. He's been for some time waiting, still, outside the surgical theatre. Perhaps this is simply to stay out of the anthill-busy paths of those with more complicated prep to complete, but perhaps the meticulous curation taking place somewhere deeper inside his mind takes its own careful concentration. Regardless, his mindscape is shifting, as he gets ready to enter, toward a rather grim sense of invitation that fixes determined on the task at hand -- and no farther. Is Charles, in fact, ready? He's settled himself in the postsurgical recovery room, closed his eyes, and slipped the mala off of his wrist into trembling hands. No hint of his disquiet makes it into the subtle warmth that wells up around Rasheed's and Lucien's minds or the carefully controlled light that shines through it into them, pale and stark but not unpleasant, like sunshine in winter. There's no scorching rage or soothing calm; Charles's presence just is. He insinuates himself with surpassing delicacy into the relevant regions of their minds, illuminating the formidable skills and knowledge he must bridge between them and already translating some measure of his own crystalline focus for their use. He says nothing to either, but where he sits alone his lips move silent over Sanskrit words worn as smooth the beads that pass between his fingers.