Disclaimer: I do not own any characters, stories, or plot devices that are the recognized property of Marvel Comics. I am not, nor will I ever seek monetary compensation for this work.
Author's Note: I am setting this story in the Marvel universe, but in a time frame existing mostly in my own head, so worry not about characters appearing who may or may not be dead or no longer affiliated with the X-Men or other such groups. Please don't send me a pointless message abouts such errors or omissions. You know as well as I do that comic book storylines are about the most convoluted things in the world anyway.
-We Were Children-
Chapter One: Plastic and Names
"Hello."
Xavier was, for a moment, startled to hear the soft purr of a voice that pierced the silence. The facility's neural inhibitors, as laughable as they were in the presence of a mind such as Charles Xavier's, still tended to give him a slight twinge of a migraine behind his eyes if he made a consistent effort to fight them, so he often resigned all but the most basic of his mental powers to alleviate the strain. Thus, he had known that the being imprisoned in the cell before him was indeed there, and very much aware of the Professor as the guard has led him down the narrow corridor to the cell. Yet, he had made no further effort as of yet to delve into his thoughts. So, for the briefest of moments, he had believed that the stifling box of a room before him was unoccupied; it's white interior revealing no person within. It took only a moment for Xavier to identify the source of his error, and he adjusted his perception to allocate it.
"Good morning," Xavier replied.
There was a dull thud as the man in the cell (no, not a man, not older than twenty) allowed the weights he had been holding to drop to the floor. Xavier was familiar with the fitness equipment he used. They were deadweights designed for dangerous inmates, little more than elaborate water balloons. While they could allow for heavy lifting, their material was unstable enough that any attempt to swing them with great velocity, as a blunt weapon, for instance, would cause them to break apart instantly. It seemed odd to Xavier that this particular inmate would be so concerned with physical fitness, given the gravity of the charges being held against him, but prisoners were still allowed to engage in physical exercise. That, at least for now, still applied to inmates of a meta-human nature.
Still, the remarkably advanced but essentially crude equipment appeared to be effective. The young man's upper body glistened with sweat and his lean arms still pulsed from the strain. He had, apparently, been doing standing bicep curls. He shrugged back into the upper half of his white, prison-issue coveralls and smoothed the front, which had wrinkled slightly from being bunched at his waist.
"I apologize," the young man said, "They didn't inform me I would be receiving visitors today." There was no hint of irritation in his face, with the exception of a barely-audible clicking of his back molars as his finished his sentence.
Xavier smiled pleasantly. He had yet to try and probe the young man's mind, and did not honestly intend to do so. He was a fine judge of character in his own right, a rival to many of the nation's top psychiatrists, and often saw that his best work in perceiving someone's true nature would come without use of his mental abilities. Though, even he would admit, they did help. If he wanted to, he could simply reach into this boy's mind and pluck from it whatever information it was that was wanted. But why deny a prisoner, no matter what nature his crimes, the pleasure of a visit from one who was not his jailer? There was no need to shatter the possibility of a genuine rapport of information by wrenching his head open.
"You needn't be embarrassed," Xavier offered, "I was under the assumption that you had knowledge of my being here today."
The young man eyed Xavier quizzically. "Embarrassed? Did I give that impression?"
Xavier shook his head slightly, still smiling. He made a small gesture with his hand as if to clear the air, "Forgive me, we haven't been introduced. I am Professor Charles Xavier. I've been asked here today for an impromptu interview of sorts."
"Is that right?" The young man asked, not bothering to return the introduction. Or perhaps evading it.
"Yes."
"Interview… Or interrogate? I don't ask out of inconsideration, but merely clarification. You wouldn't be the first to say the former only to carry out the latter. I will warn you, the ones who came before you were very good. Very thorough. They left not a mark."
With swiftness that shocked Xavier, for he was never surprised by the movements of others, the young man had stepped towards the impregnable wall of clear plastic that separated them and was, in an instant, once again naked from the waist up.
"Almost, anyway," the young man gestured to his now-exposed ribs, where the slightest hint of bruising was just nearly faded.
From this close point of view, Xavier allowed himself a moment to truly marvel at the figure in front of him. The young man's skin, with the exception of the minute bruising, was completely and utterly an opaque and unreflective chalk white. It was this that allowed him, by being perfectly still as he had been when Xavier arrived, to blend into the room, which was a plastic alloy of nearly the same shade as his pigmentation. Xavier noted that his earlier assumption that the boy's head was shaved bald was incorrect. His hair was, in fact, long and elegantly combed back from his hairline. It was simply that his hair color was identical to that of his skin. It was his swift movement that caused the thinnest of locks to fall over his face before the young man smoothed them back over his scalp.
The only points of color on his entire figure were his fingernails, which were an unusual but unquestionably natural shade of dark purple, his mouth, slightly agape and almost blood red against the opaque white of his lips, and lastly, his eyes. They were a remarkable color configuration that was almost poetic; the black of his pupils, a radiant gold in his irises, returning to black in his corneas.
Xavier narrowed his gaze. The young man was not lying about the origin of his bruising. That much was easy to discern.
"Do you mean to tell me that you have been physically abused while in custody at this facility?" Xavier asked.
The young man refastened the velcro of his coveralls and was fully dressed again. He ignored Xavier's question, instead opting to seat himself on the bare, plastic floor in front of the clear, plastic barrier, opposite of the Professor. He gazed steadily with his golden eyes with an eager, almost predatory patience.
Xavier took this as a sign that the time for questions about the injury was over, and he did not press the point.
"Do you know why you are being held here?" Xavier asked.
"I know why you think I'm being held here," came the boy's quick reply.
"Why?"
"I await judgment for what the civilized world believes to be crimes of a brutal and unusual nature. I possess abilities beyond normal human beings, so I am kept here, in a facility designed to house such creatures. Given the nature of the social and political climate these days, I have no reason to doubt I will either die in this facility or be put to death by order of court. In a way, I supposed I ought to be glad for the media coverage my arrest warranted. Had it been the silent endeavor they had hoped, I have no doubt I would have been tried and executed before anyone ever noticed I had gone missing. Nevertheless, I'm prepared for a swift trial, public or not. Then it will be off to death by whatever means they can imagine."
"You believe this to be incorrect or… unjust?"
The young man looked up towards the ceiling in thought.
"No. I simply object, being non-human, to being judged by human laws and standards. I have done nothing that was not in my nature, or within my moral ideologies."
Xavier's brow furrowed slightly at the answer.
"Mutants are not 'non-human.' We are merely a variation or an expansion upon-"
"No," the young man sprang to his feet, a new fire in his gemstone eyes, "No, that is stupid and wrong. That is irresponsible and foolish."
The young man pressed his face and palms against the thick plastic. Xavier knew that if he persisted in doing so, a silent alarm would sound that would bring guards running to investigate.
"Look at me, Professor Xavier." The ghostly young man made a referential gesture towards his too-white face. "Is this human? The people who will walk the streets tonight, the people who pay tax dollars to restrain me so, certainly wouldn't think that. By the nature of what you call my crimes, they would say that I am a monster. And I am. I am not Homo sapien. All that I ask is that I be judged as such, and not held to the standards that I so clearly do not meet."
For the first time, Xavier caught a glimpse of the young man's right palm. At the base of his thumb, faded with age, was a tattooed Nazi swastika, executed with what looked like machine precision. Beneath it was an inscrutable set of numbers.
The young man followed Xavier's eyes to the mark. He regarded it and smiled in the way that a parent would smile at an infant's finger painting.
"It has not earned me any sympathy here," he said, looking into his palm now. "The man who left the bruise on my ribs, he had grandparents in the Holocaust. The tattoo made him... Lose himself, shall we say, when coupled with his already-existing hatred of what I am, and what he thinks I have done."
Xavier took a long moment to once again drink in this boy's complexity. He still had not made any intrusive attempts on the young man's psyche, but the waves of thought that emanated from him, Xavier could read those as easily as the average person reads a book. There was frustration, pain, anger, and all forms of emotion that were almost always associated with inmates of any sort. But deeper, as though playing a harmony to the negativity, were washes of deep and unselfish sorrow, empathy, and heartache.
"I wouldn't have taken you for a Nazi sympathizer," Xavier said, perhaps a bit more curtly than he had intended.
The young man looked again at Xavier with a quizzical expression.
"Of course I'm not," he said, with astounding finality. Xavier knew, without even having to probed the boy's mind slightly, that it was the truth.
Xavier furrowed his brow and steepled his fingers under his chin.
"Would you like to explain the tattoo, then? I can assure you that, on my word, your explanation would be accepted."
For the first time the young man gave Xavier a grin that seemed a genuine expression of amusement.
"I think, Professor," he said, still smiling, "that the phrase they use for that is 'Polishing brass on the Titanic.' Whether the world believes me to be a Nazi is irrelevant to the fact that I will be surely put to death."
Xavier considered this a moment and nodded. He was still not confident that this was going well or not. The way the boy darted about subject of conversation, the way he had avoided telling Xavier anything of use, while still remaining polite, talkative, and yes, charming, was not a talent natural to most. This boy had been trained, conditioned, for this. Xavier was beginning to understand why his presence had been detected. An interrogator could keep this young man talking for hours and not realize that he was not saying anything terribly useful.
Xavier sighed. He leaned towards the clear plastic and looked at the young man steadily. There were questioned that needed to be answered. But he could not bring himself to ask any of them until he had presented what he believed to be the most important of them all.
Xavier stared once again into those coal drop eyes.
"What is your name?"
--To be continued in Chapter 2