Gestalt
"I can't feel him!"
Jean's sobbing hysterically and pounding at the metal door leading to Cerebro-Two. Bright tongues of flame are unfolding all around her, and wherever they touch things start to move in little jitterbug hitches and hops. The children take anxious steps back, away from Jean, away from the fiery tendrils of telekinesis that snake around their ankles; Doctor Grey lifts syringes, not people.
Kurt frowns. Jean was kind to him once in a church, and flew through the corridors of his mind with gentle wings, and so he reaches out a hand to try and still her. "Liebchen, please, you must stop before you hurt yours--"
Jean screams, an unintelligible cry, a raptor's shriek as it takes flight. Kurt flinches at the sound. A wing of telekinesis unfurls from the corona around her, knocking Kurt and several of the students to the floor. Jean sobs again; the walls of the tunnel shudder in time with her gasps.
Scott shakes Jean once, violently. "Jean, pull yourself together--"
She turns, fixes him with a vacant and utterly predatory gaze, and he pauses in midsentence, vocal chords failing to respond; whether that's rooted in fear or telepathic hijacking is immaterial, because Scott's still stuck there trying to form words in his mouth, words that fail to command, words that falter at the sight of his wife lit up like a dying supernova.
Jean curls her fingers and brings them down in a swipe at the door, and this time it's more than the walls that scream in sympathy; all of them wince as the psychic residue of Jean's assault spills out and over, onto them, sending Ororo to retching in a corner and Scott to his knees.
She's slashing at the door hysterically now, leaving furrows wherever she gestures, Kali dancing and consuming the world in flame. His students are moaning piteously, painfully, and Scott thinks that the day he fails to differentiate between where Jean Grey's husband ends and Fearless Leader begins will be one of the happiest days of his life.
Scott says a silent prayer to a God he's sure couldn't care less before opening his visor full bore.
The impact shreds Jean's shields and slams her against a wall. Unconsciousness is mercifully swift.
Her heaves spent, Ororo crawls over to Jean and draws her near against her. Ororo's cradling Jean in her arms, smoothing away the hair that still smolders like spent coals, and she looks up at Scott expectantly, deferently.
All around them, Alkali Lake makes itself known in the little geysers of water erupting through fissures in the metalwork.
Ororo's eyes dart once at the door, at the talonmarks running down it. Near them, crumpled around Kurt, Jubilee whimpers.
Ororo's unasked question still hangs in the air.
Scott wipes a wet lick of hair up, away from his face. "All right. We move out now."
He bends down and takes Jean in his arms, and as he turns and runs, Jean's head lolling against the side of his face, what may have been a streak of lake water makes its way down his face.
***
"Checkmate."
Erik peered down the bridge of his nose at the chessboard; with his eyebrows arched and lips twisted in an expression of disbelief, his face put the image in Charles' mind of an affronted waterfowl contemplating some surprisingly lively dinner. "Already? How did this happen? Didn't I just block your check two moves ago?"
The gloaming was beginning to settle in, dying the study and its two occupants a rich purple hue. Outside, the sounds of summer setting in on the mansion made themselves known in the crack of a baseball bat, the cries proclaiming the forbidden nature of powers in games of sport, the laughs and catcalls and general atmosphere of contentment that defined the Xavier-Lensherr Institute For Higher Learning.
Charles indulged in a chuckle. "You lost the game as soon as you traded your knight for my bishop. Your defenses would have held up here, here, and here," and Charles' fingers flew over the chessboard, pointing out the breaches in his opponent's perimeter, the little zig-zag line of the chesspieces' field maneuverings, "but you needed the knight to keep it all together." He sat back in his chair, fingers laced up on his lap. "Silly of you to be so daring as to assume an offensive like that without rear support."
Erik smiled ruefully as he knocked his king over. "Point conceded. I had hoped that you wouldn't be quite so--aggressive this game, but it looks like I misjudged this once."
"Yes, of course, 'this once' he says," Charles murmurred sotto voce. He let out an exaggerated snort as indication of his opinion on the subject.
Erik grandly ignored the commentary. "Incidentally, if you hadn't kept up defending with that stubborn queen of yours, my gambit would have succeeded and the game would have been mine five moves ago." He gestured at the board, and the pieces leapt to life under his command, slain pawns and battle-weary queens alike. "Another game before dinner?"
Charles opened his mouth to agree, but before he could voice his assent, a fit of pain wracked his body. Every nerve ending on his body flared to life violently. Charles imagined that he could feel his spine warping, his legs turn to crippled and impotent twigs.
Erik blinked. "Charles, what's the matter with you? You look positively dread--"
Static drowned out Erik's next words. Instead of Erik's lilting accent, a sound like talons scrabbling over rock slipped out of his mouth.
"Charles?" Now Erik's brows were drawn together in a neat, single line across his forehead. He reached out an arm to Charles, fingers mere inches away from the back of Charles' hand. "Are you all right, Charles?"
"No," Charles whispered, "no, no, no..." He reached a hand out to steady himself against Erik's outstretched arm, but the arm turned translucent as soon as Charles' fingers alighted upon it. Erik flickered for a moment, then faded away altogether. Charles turned on his heel, eyes darting madly as the world around him began to bleed away.
The empty room rippled.
The walls of Cerebro-Two were buckling under the weight of thousands of tons of water. Already, the lower half of the chamber had filled with water, like a fishbowl being prepared for occupation.
Jason was situated on the other end of the walkway leading out of the chamber. Charles' wheelchair was useless, since the path between him and the boy was littered with pieces of metal and chunks of debris; instead, he hauled himself out of it and dragged himself across till he was within arm's reach of the boy.
He touched Jason's mind briefly, instinctively, and recoiled in surprise. Jean's psychic signature was on him, the incandescent reds and golds that had always been the residue of his most cherished pupil swirling around Jason's psyche; but these vestiges of her presence were uncharacteristically angry ghosts, violent streaks of flame that burned the edges of Jason's mind.
Before Charles' horrified witness, the flames wore down Jason's battered defenses and moved towards the core of the boy's mind. Even if the boy had not been a mentally emaciated shadow already, Charles doubted he could have survived what Jean had wrought. As it was, it was all he could do to snip Jason's pain receptors off before they could relay their codas of agony to the boy's brain.
Jason began to whimper as his mental faculties began failing in earnest. His arms spasmed like beached fish, pale white flashes wriggling pathetically. "Shh, shh," Charles soothed. He put a hand on either side of Jason's face, moved it till both eerie eyes fixed upon his own. "Jason," he said slowly, echoing his words with gentle touches of telepathy, "rest, Jason."
Eyelids moved slow and lazy like butterfly wings over Jason's mismatched eyes. "I'm sorry, Professor. After the firebird fixed me, I saw--I saw what I did and I didn't mean for that to happen, honest, I just wanted to make everything all right again..."
And then, grown far too heavy for wakefulness, the eyelids fluttered shut.
In his dying moment, Jason pushed his last few memories at Charles. Through the boy's addled eyes, he could see Erik strut magnificently down the walkway, Erik take long consideration of him sitting helpless and drugged and an instrument of genocide besides, Erik raise his hands and shift the walls of the Cerebro-Two chamber in a magnetic ballet, Erik calling for Mystique, Erik setting the boy to ravage his mind and condemn his soul, Erik turning heel and leaving Erik leaving Erik leaving leaving him to die--
Charles clutched Jason's body to himself, weeping as another mark was added to the tally.
Gently, slowly, mindful of the dead, he set Jason's body down on the ground. Steeling himself, Charles crawled back to the Cerebro helmet.
***
His body had already begun to give way. A metal i-beam had fallen askew, and its end pierced the side of his body like a lance. He was curled fetal on the floor, wheelchair destroyed behind him by a fallen piece of piping. His blue suit bled purple through the fine fabric.
Charles pushed.
The astral plane was ablaze with pain, the suffering he'd just inflicted upon the world lingering on in streaks of agonized reds and blacks. Wherever he looked he found pain, confusion, minds filling the void with a mental static unlike any he'd ever experienced before.
Charles ignored them. He offered what little solace he could as he passed, euthanized however many he stumbled across who would die later in agony rather than sooner in peace. Charles thought that perhaps he should have taken notice of the faceless lives he ended as he passed through the astral plane, but he realized now that he didn't have the liberty of taking the time to count that high.
Still all along the way, he pushed.
The filament of the astral plane thickened in parts, reacting to Charles' invasion savagely. The collective memory of what he'd just done festered like a gangrenous wound upon the world. It lingered, this rape, and the plane did not forget its rapist so easily. Charles grimaced and found that he still could marshal a shred of pity for himself, for indeed, the place that had been more a home to him than the physical carapace that had housed his mind was rejecting him.
Another branch tossed onto the pyre.
And suddenly, brilliant like the pole star, lit up in a majestic and serene purple on the astral plane, Charles found him. The smooth metal of him, the looming wall that interposed itself between them, the psychic manifestation of the rift between two weary, broken men.
Stryker had done a good job rebuilding Cerebro; the machine was identical in every way to his own. If Charles judged correctly, he would be able to achieve his goal without difficulty.
In the past, Charles had never tested the limits of Erik's protection against his telepathy. True, he had theorized on his own about what sort of effort it would take for him to render Erik's helmet impotent, but had always held out hope for some sort of reconciliation between them, and understood that an invasion of that magnitude would be an unforgiveable breach in their relationship. He had never been willing to risk shattering the illusion of privacy that Erik's helmet offered, if only for the morality in his spirit and the memories in his heart.
Now, with blood flowing freely from his wounded side, with Jason's wasted corpse behind him and metal crashing down all around, Charles found that he no longer had the moral compunctions he once possessed, and faded memories of New England winters no longer held the cachet they once did.
With Cerebro-Two augmenting his powers, Charles shattered the safety afforded Erik by his helmet.
Erik reacted with violent surprise, a wave of nausea rising up to meet Charles' intrusion into his mind; in the past, their flirtations with this sort of mental union were conducted with delicacy on Charles' part and grudging amusement on his own, but never this level of rapacity, never this sense of hungry consumption. It was with a perverse sense of glee that Charles noted he could still elicit such passion in Erik, even if it was preparatory to a violation of an unprecedented degree.
Charles pushed further, pushed harder. Dimly, he was aware of the pain seeping in at the edges of his mind. In his hyperaware state of consciousness, every movement left painful, phosphorescent afterimages in its wake. He cauterized the nerve endings that fanned out like a fine filigree throughout his dying body. When that proved to only be a partial anasthetic, he compartmentalized his rapidly fraying psyche into several neat little boxes, separating himself from the pain that pushing his telepathy so caused.
They intersected. The lines of him converged upon Erik, boring holes in the sheer smooth metal of his mind, and when the holes winked into existence, offering tantalizing glimpses of the swirl of Erik's fortified psyche, Charles shoved himself through.
Charles? Erik had a brief moment in which his mind was still his own, a single instant of shock and revulsion, a terrified thought that stank of urine and vomit and bile, and then he had no more.
***
High up in the air, miles away from Alkali, Erik stiffened noticeably. Small lightnings sparked from his eyes, and he removed his helmet to scrub them away with the back of his hand. Mystique, whom Erik knew would be discreet in the face of such an expression of weakness, dutifully looked away, but not before he caught the nictitating shutterbug motion of her eyes focusing on him.
The boy, however, had yet to learn that ignoring Erik's smaller falterings was in his best interests. He looked at Erik expectantly, deferently. "You all right?" He flicked the lid of his Zippo open, calling up lines of fire and wreathing them around his fingers.
Erik shook his head. "Yes, yes. I'm fine. Don't concern yourself with me." He gestured, and with a twist of metal the boy's lighter jumped into his hands. "And Pyro? Do not use your powers without my approval again."
The boy sulked magnificently, in the way only the young might sulk, but did not move an eye towards Erik again.
Erik leaned back in his seat, suppressing the urge to place a pair of fingers at his left temple. Somewhere, a pain was building, a dull throb that clouded his senses and unsettled his stomach.
And somewhere, a voice in his head whispered, "Checkmate, old friend."
"I can't feel him!"
Jean's sobbing hysterically and pounding at the metal door leading to Cerebro-Two. Bright tongues of flame are unfolding all around her, and wherever they touch things start to move in little jitterbug hitches and hops. The children take anxious steps back, away from Jean, away from the fiery tendrils of telekinesis that snake around their ankles; Doctor Grey lifts syringes, not people.
Kurt frowns. Jean was kind to him once in a church, and flew through the corridors of his mind with gentle wings, and so he reaches out a hand to try and still her. "Liebchen, please, you must stop before you hurt yours--"
Jean screams, an unintelligible cry, a raptor's shriek as it takes flight. Kurt flinches at the sound. A wing of telekinesis unfurls from the corona around her, knocking Kurt and several of the students to the floor. Jean sobs again; the walls of the tunnel shudder in time with her gasps.
Scott shakes Jean once, violently. "Jean, pull yourself together--"
She turns, fixes him with a vacant and utterly predatory gaze, and he pauses in midsentence, vocal chords failing to respond; whether that's rooted in fear or telepathic hijacking is immaterial, because Scott's still stuck there trying to form words in his mouth, words that fail to command, words that falter at the sight of his wife lit up like a dying supernova.
Jean curls her fingers and brings them down in a swipe at the door, and this time it's more than the walls that scream in sympathy; all of them wince as the psychic residue of Jean's assault spills out and over, onto them, sending Ororo to retching in a corner and Scott to his knees.
She's slashing at the door hysterically now, leaving furrows wherever she gestures, Kali dancing and consuming the world in flame. His students are moaning piteously, painfully, and Scott thinks that the day he fails to differentiate between where Jean Grey's husband ends and Fearless Leader begins will be one of the happiest days of his life.
Scott says a silent prayer to a God he's sure couldn't care less before opening his visor full bore.
The impact shreds Jean's shields and slams her against a wall. Unconsciousness is mercifully swift.
Her heaves spent, Ororo crawls over to Jean and draws her near against her. Ororo's cradling Jean in her arms, smoothing away the hair that still smolders like spent coals, and she looks up at Scott expectantly, deferently.
All around them, Alkali Lake makes itself known in the little geysers of water erupting through fissures in the metalwork.
Ororo's eyes dart once at the door, at the talonmarks running down it. Near them, crumpled around Kurt, Jubilee whimpers.
Ororo's unasked question still hangs in the air.
Scott wipes a wet lick of hair up, away from his face. "All right. We move out now."
He bends down and takes Jean in his arms, and as he turns and runs, Jean's head lolling against the side of his face, what may have been a streak of lake water makes its way down his face.
***
"Checkmate."
Erik peered down the bridge of his nose at the chessboard; with his eyebrows arched and lips twisted in an expression of disbelief, his face put the image in Charles' mind of an affronted waterfowl contemplating some surprisingly lively dinner. "Already? How did this happen? Didn't I just block your check two moves ago?"
The gloaming was beginning to settle in, dying the study and its two occupants a rich purple hue. Outside, the sounds of summer setting in on the mansion made themselves known in the crack of a baseball bat, the cries proclaiming the forbidden nature of powers in games of sport, the laughs and catcalls and general atmosphere of contentment that defined the Xavier-Lensherr Institute For Higher Learning.
Charles indulged in a chuckle. "You lost the game as soon as you traded your knight for my bishop. Your defenses would have held up here, here, and here," and Charles' fingers flew over the chessboard, pointing out the breaches in his opponent's perimeter, the little zig-zag line of the chesspieces' field maneuverings, "but you needed the knight to keep it all together." He sat back in his chair, fingers laced up on his lap. "Silly of you to be so daring as to assume an offensive like that without rear support."
Erik smiled ruefully as he knocked his king over. "Point conceded. I had hoped that you wouldn't be quite so--aggressive this game, but it looks like I misjudged this once."
"Yes, of course, 'this once' he says," Charles murmurred sotto voce. He let out an exaggerated snort as indication of his opinion on the subject.
Erik grandly ignored the commentary. "Incidentally, if you hadn't kept up defending with that stubborn queen of yours, my gambit would have succeeded and the game would have been mine five moves ago." He gestured at the board, and the pieces leapt to life under his command, slain pawns and battle-weary queens alike. "Another game before dinner?"
Charles opened his mouth to agree, but before he could voice his assent, a fit of pain wracked his body. Every nerve ending on his body flared to life violently. Charles imagined that he could feel his spine warping, his legs turn to crippled and impotent twigs.
Erik blinked. "Charles, what's the matter with you? You look positively dread--"
Static drowned out Erik's next words. Instead of Erik's lilting accent, a sound like talons scrabbling over rock slipped out of his mouth.
"Charles?" Now Erik's brows were drawn together in a neat, single line across his forehead. He reached out an arm to Charles, fingers mere inches away from the back of Charles' hand. "Are you all right, Charles?"
"No," Charles whispered, "no, no, no..." He reached a hand out to steady himself against Erik's outstretched arm, but the arm turned translucent as soon as Charles' fingers alighted upon it. Erik flickered for a moment, then faded away altogether. Charles turned on his heel, eyes darting madly as the world around him began to bleed away.
The empty room rippled.
The walls of Cerebro-Two were buckling under the weight of thousands of tons of water. Already, the lower half of the chamber had filled with water, like a fishbowl being prepared for occupation.
Jason was situated on the other end of the walkway leading out of the chamber. Charles' wheelchair was useless, since the path between him and the boy was littered with pieces of metal and chunks of debris; instead, he hauled himself out of it and dragged himself across till he was within arm's reach of the boy.
He touched Jason's mind briefly, instinctively, and recoiled in surprise. Jean's psychic signature was on him, the incandescent reds and golds that had always been the residue of his most cherished pupil swirling around Jason's psyche; but these vestiges of her presence were uncharacteristically angry ghosts, violent streaks of flame that burned the edges of Jason's mind.
Before Charles' horrified witness, the flames wore down Jason's battered defenses and moved towards the core of the boy's mind. Even if the boy had not been a mentally emaciated shadow already, Charles doubted he could have survived what Jean had wrought. As it was, it was all he could do to snip Jason's pain receptors off before they could relay their codas of agony to the boy's brain.
Jason began to whimper as his mental faculties began failing in earnest. His arms spasmed like beached fish, pale white flashes wriggling pathetically. "Shh, shh," Charles soothed. He put a hand on either side of Jason's face, moved it till both eerie eyes fixed upon his own. "Jason," he said slowly, echoing his words with gentle touches of telepathy, "rest, Jason."
Eyelids moved slow and lazy like butterfly wings over Jason's mismatched eyes. "I'm sorry, Professor. After the firebird fixed me, I saw--I saw what I did and I didn't mean for that to happen, honest, I just wanted to make everything all right again..."
And then, grown far too heavy for wakefulness, the eyelids fluttered shut.
In his dying moment, Jason pushed his last few memories at Charles. Through the boy's addled eyes, he could see Erik strut magnificently down the walkway, Erik take long consideration of him sitting helpless and drugged and an instrument of genocide besides, Erik raise his hands and shift the walls of the Cerebro-Two chamber in a magnetic ballet, Erik calling for Mystique, Erik setting the boy to ravage his mind and condemn his soul, Erik turning heel and leaving Erik leaving Erik leaving leaving him to die--
Charles clutched Jason's body to himself, weeping as another mark was added to the tally.
Gently, slowly, mindful of the dead, he set Jason's body down on the ground. Steeling himself, Charles crawled back to the Cerebro helmet.
***
His body had already begun to give way. A metal i-beam had fallen askew, and its end pierced the side of his body like a lance. He was curled fetal on the floor, wheelchair destroyed behind him by a fallen piece of piping. His blue suit bled purple through the fine fabric.
Charles pushed.
The astral plane was ablaze with pain, the suffering he'd just inflicted upon the world lingering on in streaks of agonized reds and blacks. Wherever he looked he found pain, confusion, minds filling the void with a mental static unlike any he'd ever experienced before.
Charles ignored them. He offered what little solace he could as he passed, euthanized however many he stumbled across who would die later in agony rather than sooner in peace. Charles thought that perhaps he should have taken notice of the faceless lives he ended as he passed through the astral plane, but he realized now that he didn't have the liberty of taking the time to count that high.
Still all along the way, he pushed.
The filament of the astral plane thickened in parts, reacting to Charles' invasion savagely. The collective memory of what he'd just done festered like a gangrenous wound upon the world. It lingered, this rape, and the plane did not forget its rapist so easily. Charles grimaced and found that he still could marshal a shred of pity for himself, for indeed, the place that had been more a home to him than the physical carapace that had housed his mind was rejecting him.
Another branch tossed onto the pyre.
And suddenly, brilliant like the pole star, lit up in a majestic and serene purple on the astral plane, Charles found him. The smooth metal of him, the looming wall that interposed itself between them, the psychic manifestation of the rift between two weary, broken men.
Stryker had done a good job rebuilding Cerebro; the machine was identical in every way to his own. If Charles judged correctly, he would be able to achieve his goal without difficulty.
In the past, Charles had never tested the limits of Erik's protection against his telepathy. True, he had theorized on his own about what sort of effort it would take for him to render Erik's helmet impotent, but had always held out hope for some sort of reconciliation between them, and understood that an invasion of that magnitude would be an unforgiveable breach in their relationship. He had never been willing to risk shattering the illusion of privacy that Erik's helmet offered, if only for the morality in his spirit and the memories in his heart.
Now, with blood flowing freely from his wounded side, with Jason's wasted corpse behind him and metal crashing down all around, Charles found that he no longer had the moral compunctions he once possessed, and faded memories of New England winters no longer held the cachet they once did.
With Cerebro-Two augmenting his powers, Charles shattered the safety afforded Erik by his helmet.
Erik reacted with violent surprise, a wave of nausea rising up to meet Charles' intrusion into his mind; in the past, their flirtations with this sort of mental union were conducted with delicacy on Charles' part and grudging amusement on his own, but never this level of rapacity, never this sense of hungry consumption. It was with a perverse sense of glee that Charles noted he could still elicit such passion in Erik, even if it was preparatory to a violation of an unprecedented degree.
Charles pushed further, pushed harder. Dimly, he was aware of the pain seeping in at the edges of his mind. In his hyperaware state of consciousness, every movement left painful, phosphorescent afterimages in its wake. He cauterized the nerve endings that fanned out like a fine filigree throughout his dying body. When that proved to only be a partial anasthetic, he compartmentalized his rapidly fraying psyche into several neat little boxes, separating himself from the pain that pushing his telepathy so caused.
They intersected. The lines of him converged upon Erik, boring holes in the sheer smooth metal of his mind, and when the holes winked into existence, offering tantalizing glimpses of the swirl of Erik's fortified psyche, Charles shoved himself through.
Charles? Erik had a brief moment in which his mind was still his own, a single instant of shock and revulsion, a terrified thought that stank of urine and vomit and bile, and then he had no more.
***
High up in the air, miles away from Alkali, Erik stiffened noticeably. Small lightnings sparked from his eyes, and he removed his helmet to scrub them away with the back of his hand. Mystique, whom Erik knew would be discreet in the face of such an expression of weakness, dutifully looked away, but not before he caught the nictitating shutterbug motion of her eyes focusing on him.
The boy, however, had yet to learn that ignoring Erik's smaller falterings was in his best interests. He looked at Erik expectantly, deferently. "You all right?" He flicked the lid of his Zippo open, calling up lines of fire and wreathing them around his fingers.
Erik shook his head. "Yes, yes. I'm fine. Don't concern yourself with me." He gestured, and with a twist of metal the boy's lighter jumped into his hands. "And Pyro? Do not use your powers without my approval again."
The boy sulked magnificently, in the way only the young might sulk, but did not move an eye towards Erik again.
Erik leaned back in his seat, suppressing the urge to place a pair of fingers at his left temple. Somewhere, a pain was building, a dull throb that clouded his senses and unsettled his stomach.
And somewhere, a voice in his head whispered, "Checkmate, old friend."