читать дальшеFill: Limited Release (40/?)
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2011-07-09 22:38 (UTC)
Now, across town, Charles can feel Erik and Raven's nervous worry, that underlying fearfulness that's always lived just beneath the surface, ever since he swam back into consciousness after the shooting. He's been tempted, more than once, to mute it, to simply slice it away, peel it back from their minds, but he promised Raven he wouldn't read hers and Charles loves Erik's too well to alter it in any way.
Most telepaths are limited to thoughts, some pull in sensation, others still — the more powerful ones — have both, and the ability to apply some measure of control to their subjects as well. Charles has never understood the demarcations of telepathy: he's always been able to know what people are thinking, how they are thinking it, and where, what they feel, what they see, the taste of wine on their tongue, the ever-expanding history of their lives — all in a casual glance. With effort, he can know everything, anyone in complete. Charles reads people like a particularly winding map, unfolded on the hood of a sun-hot car, fingers tracking across the highways and rivers, knowing all the while he could so easily rearrange the cartography, the landscape and sky and water. It's why he's so cautious, always, navigating an invisible minefield, over-careful not to push too hard, pull too much, not to tap someone's thinking one way or the next, to tick it three degrees toward his end goals. He'd done it as a child for years before he'd realized, before he'd felt the cognizant dissonance of someone doing what he wanted versus what they would, and he'd retreated back into the safe prison of his own head, terrified at what he could do.
And now, Charles thinks ruefully, I am terrified at what I may have already done.
"Come along, Hank," Charles tells him, wheeling around the boy on the floor on the study and toward the door, motioning for the papers. "Bring those — you'll need them."
Hank scrambles for the blueprints, the red marker. "What? Where are we going?"
"To the front door," Charles says. He can feel an SUV drawing up toward the house, Moira at the wheel and Erik furious in the passenger seat, Raven in the back. Alex is still back at the FBI headquarters, in the safe room, and Charles can hardly imagine that exposing poor Alex to additional stress while his brother is missing would be helpful, so perhaps it's for the best. "Our ride is almost here."
"Ri — are we going to Cerebro?" Hank asks, going immediately from nerves to rapture, and Charles reflects that Hank's lucky to have met Alex when he did. Boys who are rapturous over overfunded government science projects rarely do well in Central Park after dark.
"That would be my guess," Charles answers, and heads for the front door, which opens just as he reaches it to a well-loved if glowering face. "Ah, Erik. We're ready."
"You let them give you migraines for months," Erik retorts.
Resisting the urge to roll his eyes, Charles says, "Hank, please go ahead and get in the car," which Hank does, edging around Erik in the doorway and breaking into a run as soon as there's no chance of contact.
"I gave myself migraines for years expanding my skills," Charles points out. His telepathy hasn't come cheaply; he's pushed since he was a boy, has grown used to a constant ache in the base of his neck, at the root of his brain, in his right temple.
"You let them experiment on you," Erik growls.
"I helped them experiment, period," Charles replies, even, because right now Erik is projecting his childhood panic so loudly he adds, it's not the same as that, Erik, I wasn't a boy, and no one was forcing me, no one can ever force me to do anything.
They hurt you, Erik tells him, in a blurry hush of regret, anger in the last syllable, and Charles doesn't know how to make this better for him. Knowing exactly what everyone is thinking is surprisingly useless when it comes to resolving interpersonal disputes.
I'm sorry you found out this way, Charles says finally, for lack of anything better, and because he's an optimist to the last, adds, But at least you know now why I was late for our first date — and why I fell over the sidewalk and threw up on myself.
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Fill: Limited Release (41/?)
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2011-07-09 22:41 (UTC)
Charles snatches Erik's hand, lacing their fingers together. "Is it working?" he asks, feeling puckish.
"No," Erik lies, and tugs at Charles, their palms warm together, the beginnings of forgiveness in the interstitials. "Let go of me and get in the car."
Charles does, at which point he gets to make a series of very similar apologies to Raven, who at least is more intrigued by the potential mystery of it than being angry with Charles for a project he became involved in more than a decade ago.
"So the question remains, why would Shaw want Cerebro?" Raven asks, breaking the awkward silence that's been cultivating in the car, interrupted only by Hank's occasional, frantic bursts of scribbling, paper rattling in the furthest back seat.
I love you, you're a wonderful sister, Charles lets her known sincerely.
Shut up, you're still in big trouble, mister, Raven retorts. "I mean, if you want to know who the mutants are, or to recruit them, wouldn't it be easier to try and access the registry than to find a barely-known CIA project?"
"And one that requires a specialist to operate at that," Erik rejoins.
"Alex says that Emma Frost is a telepath," Moira reminds him, and Erik catches Charles's eyes in the rear view mirror to say:
"Lots of people are telepaths. The type of telepath it takes to operate that machine is another entirely."
Raven clears her throat before they can get into it again, probably because she has said before that watching Erik and Charles fight is more traumatic than watching their mother be married to Kurt Marko. "So what else, beyond finding mutants? What can Cerebro do?"
Charles frowns. "To date, we've only ever used it for identification," he admits. "Problematically, it's difficult to tell whether it's user error or design flaw when our findings don't match up with government data on the mutant population in any given place."
"What about projection instead of receiving?" Hank pipes up, and everybody in the car except for Moira turns around to stare at him all at once. He's goes totally white and says, "Uh."
"Projection," Erik murmurs.
"Oh, that would be…" Raven says, trailing off.
Charles thinks of all the things a telepath in Shaw's orbit could project, what feelings and thoughts an amplifier as powerful as Cerebro could push outward into the world. Or a step beyond, and even more frightening, if it wasn't just a suggestion but a directive, the mental draft, people falling into line out of their own control. Shaw has always wanted an excuse for war — Cerebro could give him soldiers.
"That would be disastrous," Charles says grimly, for all of them. "That would be a catastrophe."
***
The CIA radio telescope antenna array is situated juts out the side of a valley in Westchester, New York with a half-dozen monstrous-sized dishes perched peering up at the sky at various angles. There're a half-dozen shacks scattered around their bases and only one ugly concrete bunker hulked near a barbed-wire fence that runs the perimeter, signs marked MILITARY TRAINING EXERCISE AREA in fast-fading red letters.
Erik glances over at McTaggert. "Really?"
"I didn't design the compound, Erik," she says, a smile tugging at her mouth. Behind her, their escort is flashing a series of increasingly arcane credentials at the door to an unsmiling man fairly dripping with automatic weapons. "Take it up with the decorator."
"For what it's worth," comes Charles's voice, suddenly. "It used to just say, GET OUT."
Erik, because it's going to be another solid two hours before he stops being furious about this, decides to be his most petty and direct his comments to McCoy, who looks pale and awkward and on the verge of jazzing his pants, staring at the swoops of satellite curves in the near distance.
"Remind me why you're here again?"
Flinching, Hank says, "Um. The professor said — "
"Hank had some fascinating design ideas for the machine," Charles explains, turning to McTaggert and smiling wryly. "I thought it might be prudent to have him take a look at Cerebro."
Fill: Limited Release (42/?)
(Анонимно)
2011-07-09 22:42 (UTC)
McTaggert, to her credit and despite her obvious crush, doesn't capitulate even under Charles's bluest of sincere blue eyes. "You thought — Charles, he's like 15."
"I'm 19," McCoy clarifies.
Feeling a lunatic tug of empathy, Erik claps him on the shoulder. "That doesn't make it better, McCoy."
"See?" Charles says. "He's 19, and terribly clever. Besides he had some fantastically smart ideas about how to solve some of Cerebro's power flux issues that I'm sure Dr. Lang would be thrilled to hear."
Lang, when everybody is cleared to enter the facility and they are introduced, is too young to be balding as severely as he is, and underneath a coffee and mustard-stained he's wearing a tie covered in tiny Dalek's, on which Charles unironically compliments him until the man flushes bright pink with startled pleasure. Charles has a continuous, unrelenting charm offensive that he cranks onto high whenever he's feeling someone who's supposed to be besotted with him is angry with him instead — he's a slut for new experiences and a fucking vampire for affection.
"Professor, it's always a pleasure to see you," Lang says, finally, collecting himself while McTaggert flashes Erik a long-suffering look. He's seriously tempted to hold out a fist of solidarity to her. "And of course, if you believe Mr. McCoy has ideas that would improve the project, then by all means I would love to see them — "
McCoy, in a stunning display of how emotionally 15 he still is, squeaks.
" — but I'm sorry to say that the azimuth bearing on the Cerebro dish needs replacing and as you know that's a multi-day process that — "
Charles murmurs, Will I be being terribly presumptuous if I…? still looking for all intents and purposes as if he's listening to Lang's overly detailed explanation in the background. Erik knows that face. That's the same face Charles has on every time Erik tries to teach him non-profane Yiddish or argue for the virtues of vacationing in the great outdoors, to which Charles has always claimed to be allergic: it's thoughtful and understanding and 100 percent disengaged. There are no circumstances under which Charles will be able to reproduce a single scrap of what Lang's telling him so earnestly now.
When are you not terribly presumptuous, I wonder, Erik retorts, but he doesn't mean it cruelly. Charles has never been able to disguise this part of himself, and moreover has never thought it was anything to disguise, which Erik finds in turn wonderful and unbearable. Like most of Charles's worst flaws, they are evident, completely open, and not a source of worry to Charles, who thinks his worst flaw is his tendency to develop tunnel vision when faced with an interesting project.
But would you be able to? Charles asks, curious now, a bright spark in Erik's mind. It's 230 tons, you know.
"Never know unless I try," Erik says, knowing that his smile is showing all his teeth.
"It's indecent, the way you like a challenge," Charles says, rudely cutting into Lang's ongoing chatter, and in the abrupt silence that follows, McTaggert recovers first to say:
"I wouldn't worry about being insulted by it — they do this all the time."
Charles gives her a dirty look. "Dr. Lang, as to your azimuth bearing issue, may I offer a potential solution?"
TBC
Fill: Limited Release (43/?)
(Анонимно)
2011-07-16 21:27 (UTC)
The azimuth bearing has an inner and outer ring, with rollers and spacers that fit between about eight long, two inches thick. None of that really matters except to say that a broken azimuth bearing renders the dish inoperable, and requires about 15 people and a week to fix — or, alternately, one mutant capable of manipulating magnetic fields and 15 open-minded scientists who are having their panic held at bay by Charles, who is far more goal-oriented than he's ever been ethical about his telepathy.
Erik almost drops the satellite dish twice, lifting it away from the base with great, metallic protests of steel scraping steel, the Earth pushing back at him, fighting Erik, gravity trying to drag 230 tons back into the ground. But the hardest part, like the hardest part of moving a car or crumpling the infrastructure of a train or the first time he'd lifted up Charles's wheelchair — the first time he'd seen Charles look wondering, happy, since the shooting — is grabbing hold of the right magnetic fields in play. Afterward, sustaining the control is easy, which Charles knows, and is why he smilingly accuses Erik of almost dropping the satellite dish the second time just to torture the scientists.
As well as to see how terrifyingly controlled you have them, Erik retorts cheeky. Given that none of them lunged at the thing in a suicide run, I'd say you have their balls in your fist.
Given your jealous tendencies, they really would be making a suicide run if I had their balls in my fist, Charles tells him primly, but doesn't deny it.
Erik has seen Charles use his mutation in casual, flagrantly unethical ways for as long as he's known Charles, and in the beginning it had been infuriating, disquieting, and he'd wanted as little to do with Charles Xavier as possible. Erik had suffered at the hands of someone who had control over him before, and he'd never intended to associate with anyone who had power — real power — over him again.
Somewhere in the middle, the tenor of discussion had changed. If you think it's wrong for people with mutations to be segregated, to endure additional scrutiny, to have their powers curtailed, how is it that you hold me to a different standard? Charles had said. If all of your mutations, and what they can do, are part of you, and not a part you should be ashamed of, then why are telepaths different? Charles had asked, so reasonable it had made Erik's teeth hurt.
Charles has spent most of their acquaintance accusing Erik of seeing only black and white, that there is the right and wrong thing to do, leaving little room for compromise. Erik thinks that in most things, there is an obvious right and wrong choice — for Charles's mutation, there's no such thing.
To have such astonishing telepathic ability that you could control someone and never let them know it, to be able to tip everyone in a room's sentiments toward your own, to be able to freeze people still at great distances, take over their consciousness and use their bodies is terrible. It's power no one should have, and to allow a person with this ability to roam free is dangerous, it's bad, the stakes are too high and the temptation for misuse extreme. But Erik can too-clearly imagine a world without Charles in it, and he hates it, and anyway, Charles was born with it, just as he was born with brown hair and a vexingly red mouth and smiling blue eyes, annoying curiosity and a relentlessly good nature. It's a part of him, and Erik struggles with this, the demarcations of good and bad, when he uses his powers carelessly to move electrical equipment or stir his coffee and thinks, oh.
"Erik," Charles says, this time out loud, and Erik blinks, everything pulling into hyperclarity for a beat before he realizes that the satellite dish is hovering dangerously close to the rafters of the aircraft hanger.
Erik grins at the scientists, each pale-faced. "Sorry," he says, and settles it into the metal support structure with a whisper of sound.
"Next time, Erik, a little less showing off, please," Charles says, wry. "Their collective psychic distress was giving me a headache."
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Fill: Limited Release (44/?)
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2011-07-16 21:29 (UTC)
Lang, clearly made of sterner stuff than his colleagues — who are all in various states of heart failure, it looks like — just claps his hands together, apple-cheeked and obviously delighted as he says, "Fantastic! Really fantastic stuff, Agent Lehnsherr!" and starts hustling gap-jawed engineers.
All the metal in the room has aligned itself to the magnetic pole of Erik by the time they're done. The wrenches and stray nuts and bolts tilting and sliding until they're in longitudinal lines arcing outward from wherever he walks — shifting and shifting endlessly — and so it's easy, two hours later, when everything is in such perfect resonance with him already, to tilt his chin and lift Charles up to Cerebro, to follow on the stairs, when Charles arches one brow and asks, "Erik, if you wouldn't mind."
"So aside from giving you migraines and making you behave in undignified ways, what are you intending on doing with this monstrous creation today?" Erik asks, curling his hands into fists in his pockets, watching Hank and Dr. Lang confer in the background, closing up the metal plate hiding the tangled guts of the beast.
"Well, I'm thinking that today, I may use it to try and locate our poor indisposed friend, Scott Summers," Charles tells him, locking the wheels of his chair.
"As Scott will probably be with Shaw," Erik says, continuing the thought.
"Exactly," Charles replies, cheerful, and calls over his shoulder, "Hank? Dr. Lang? Any luck amplifying the power?"
Erik tenses. "Amplifying?"
"Yep," Hank says, voice flowing up over a number of worrying clatters and bangs. "We're closing it up now."
"Amplifying?" Erik asks again.
Charles smiles at him, pulling some sort of helmet on. "Don't worry, Erik, the chances I'll be electrocuted are extremely slim."
***
Alex has lost track of how long he's been lying on the floor of this stupid room, and how many times he's counted all the ceiling tiles, and how many awful fucking scenarios have run through his head involving Sebastian Shaw and Scott.
It's like that awful day, exactly seven after their parents had died, when all the numbness had snapped out of him all at once and it had felt like being plunged into ice water: shaking and staring at the ceiling of their family house freaking the fuck out. Alex had been thinking about dicking around for a year or two after having barely scraped out of high school. He had about $300 in his checking account, linked to his parents, a Visa that fed off of their line of credit, a driver's license, a 2004 Toyota Corolla and fuck-all idea of what to do with himself and his little brother.
So he'd tried, he'd tried so fucking hard. He'd taken three different jobs, the opening shift at a Starbucks, the mid-afternoon to dinner run at the Hardees across the street from there, and the shitty closing hours at the Whole Foods in the same strip mall, soullessly stuffing organic purple kale into reusable hemp bags. He'd visited Scott every single time he could in the group house they'd stuffed him into, promising that he was going to get custody, that he was working on it, and he spent any other free time begging their social worker — some butterface redhead named Susan who obviously came from old money and was working off her white girl guilt in the system, and oh, how it showed — to just give him Scott, to take him out of the group home. Scott was skinny and shy and quiet and there were a half-dozen assholes in that group home who liked to dunk his shoes in toilet water or shove him into walls, and every time Alex visited Scott managed bravery for about an hour before he started begging to go home with his brother. It hurt. It hurt worse than anything Alex had ever thought hurt before, and it ached in an unrelenting crush on his chest every time he got kicked out for the day and had to leave Scott behind. Alex didn't understand how Susan didn't understand that Scott wouldn't have cared about living off of leftover pastry from Starbucks and stolen burgers from Hardees and only seeing his brother an hour a day in a roach-infested studio because at least they would be together. Because Alex hadn't been that great an older brother but he was Scott's family, he loved the kid, he would salt and burn the Earth for the kid.
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Fill: Limited Release (45/?)
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2011-07-16 21:32 (UTC)
"I know you're trying, Alex," Susan had said to him, turning down his third appeal. "But the thing is, you're just a kid yourself. And you're working really hard now, I know, but it's only going to get harder from here, for you and Scott. We're just trying to find the safest, most stable place for him to be."
"Fuck you, lady," Alex had told her, gotten hellishly drunk and sat in the bathtub in the apartment they wouldn't let Scott live in with him and cried until dawn.
Then having legitimate jobs seemed kind of pointless, and he'd done other shit instead — nothing really bad, just the occasional stereo in the occasional poorly secured parking garage. If you parked your Bentley in the cheapest lot available, you were basically asking for it as far as Alex was concerned. And who cared, anyway? He'd spent a lot of time being pissed, this generally resulted in shit getting blown up. His parents used to give him crap about blasting stuff in the woods behind their house, but then they'd fucked off and died in a God damn plane crash and Scott was stuck in the foster system and Alex was too much of a useless waste to save him so whatever.
Maybe that would have been it, maybe he would have just kept visiting Scott in foster care and when those foster parents decided they liked Scott so much they would adopt him, except then Scott had turned 13 and that entire thing about you being more genetically similar to your siblings than your parents had kicked in with vengeance.
Scott had run away twice before he managed to make it stick, and by then it was too late, the foster family had figured out that Scott wasn't just burning stuff because they weren't loving him enough, but by opening his eyes — because he was a freak, just like Alex.
"I can't go back there," Scott had begged. "They're going to send me back. They're going to send me to mutant foster care and I can't go back there. I can't, Alex, don't make me, please."
Alex had thought, Jesus fucking Christ and thanks a fucking lot, Mom, Dad, and dragged his brother in for a hug, holding his hand over Scott's shut-tight eyes, over his cheeks, slicked with tears, and said, "Hey, chill out, kiddo. You're not going anywhere, okay? You and me, we're going to stick together from now on out."
After that, they'd had no choice but to run, and when Florick had found him and known things and said, "How about you run with my crowd for a while?" Alex has thought of the new sneakers Scott needed, that they were running out of milk and toilet paper and said, "Yeah, sure, why not."
And now all he can think is of Scott, who's all but self-imposed blind now, whose mutation goes off the rails when he panics, alone and shit-scared and fucked over all over again all because of —
"Hey," Raven says, suddenly in the room and suddenly standing directly overhead, her face dark in the shadows of her hair.
"Did you find him?" Alex asks, because of course they haven't.
Raven squats down to put a hand on Alex's shoulder, like she's not afraid of him, like he couldn't blow her up if he slipped up just the littlest bit.
"Yeah, Alex," she says, but she looks so sad and solemn that he doesn't jump up, just stays on the floor so that the fear doesn't kick his knees out from underneath him. He's too scared to ask, so he's glad when she smiles at him, tight, and murmurs, "He's fine — but we need to talk."
He ends up in the backseat of the SUV, stuck in between Angel and Armando with Raven breaking every known traffic law in the driver's seat.
The third time they skate across three lanes, the atonal shrieks of terrified drivers they've barely missed accompanying the move, Alex braces his foot against the back of the console and yelps, "Jesus fucking Christ! Who taught you how to drive?"
"Charles," Angel, Armando, and Raven say together.
TBC