-We Were Children-
Chapter Two: Barriers
The tall, thin, unnaturally white young man stared at Xavier. All traces of smiles and amusement had vanished, replaced with and unshakable expression of void. Xavier knew that asking such a direct question would undoubtedly trigger an extreme response from him. He was prepared to deal with it.
"What is your name?" He asked again.
And again, he was answered only with a deep, abyssal stare and a long, pregnant silence.
Furrowing his brow ever so slightly, Xavier began to let his telepathy bloom from his mind like a long-neglected garden suddenly blessed with the freedom to grow and spread uninhibited. The relief at relaxing his mental constraint overshadowed the discomfort generated by the facility's inhibitors utterly.
With a long-practiced delicacy, like that of a neurosurgeon or a master conductor, Xavier reached with his mind and gently prodded at the young man's psyche. It was the gentlest of touches, one he used to familiarize himself with another's mind in order to comfort and coax it into compliance.
"Please, don't do that."
Xavier retracted his mental probe in shock. No one but a fellow telepath should have been able to detect his abilities, and Xavier was quite sure that this young mutant possessed no mental powers other than the obvious intellect he had already displayed.
Xavier stared into the young man's eyes. His white visage had knotted slightly in irritation, and he returned Xavier's stare with a shadow of anger.
"Don't do that," he repeated.
"I apologize," Xavier offered, actually feeling somewhat embarrassed by the accusing look the boy now presented him with. "I was merely trying to--"
"You are not allowed," the young man said, gesturing with two fingers to his temple, "...In here."
There was something curious about the way it was said. Xavier sensed that it was a recitation, rather than a personal request. The rigidity of his posture, the way his eyes no longer darted curiously about Xavier's face, his body, his wheelchair, it seemed as though he was reacting to social conditioning against telepaths. Though, conditioning of this level of sophistication was something that Xavier was not sure even he would be able to teach without inserting a mental block into someone's mind, and he had not sensed one in this young man's.
"Who told you that I was not allowed?" Xavier asked. It seemed a silly question. A question manufactured for a child, but Xavier found it difficult to put the question any other way. It was a stab in the dark, to say the least.
The silence between them seemed to span minutes as Xavier watched the young man's eyes flicker with alarming frequency. To Xavier, those moving eyes were like watching the clockwork of an exposed pocket watch. He could almost see the thoughts, the possible reactions, the confusion at being asked so blunt a question, flying through the boy's mind. He has clearly never been asked the most basic and obvious of questions, or it had been so long since someone had asked him that he was unaccustomed to forming a suitable response.
The moment passed, and the young man shook his head ever so slightly, clearing his thoughts.
"I'm sorry, Professor Xavier," he said, "I was taught, a long time ago, to reject any attempts at interrogation or extraction of information upon my person. Forgive my behavior just now. Let us discuss something else."
But Xavier would not be deterred.
"We're you 'taught,' or 'conditioned?' " Xavier asked. After a pause, he added, with a smile, "I ask not out of inconsideration, but clarification."
The young man looked stunned, then returned Xavier's smile.
"You genuinely want to know, don't you?" he asked.
Xavier nodded deeply, "Yes. I do."
The young man leaned forward to look down the long, white hallway down which Xavier had come. He stared for a long moment.
"They don't care," he stated, mildly. "They want their confessions and their trial and my corpse. They want to know how I did it and why I did it and when I did it... but they don't care, really. They want it for their records, for their headlines, so that they can make and example of me. And it's dreadfully hard to make an example out of the thing without a name."
"But that's not why you give them no answers," Xavier said, "You don't answer them, or me, because you can't."
The young man continued to stare down the hall. "Quite right, Professor."
Xavier waited for the young man to turn his attention back to him.
"But you must call me something," the young man mused. "We can't very well conduct and interview without you having a named for me."
"Well, then," Xavier smiled and clasped his hands together, "What name would you like?"
The young man laughed, turning from Xavier and pacing slowly along the dull, white walls of his cell. Once again, Xavier's eyes were fooled into believing that his too-white body had disappeared into the blankness.
"I've gotten a few nicknames since I've been incarcerated," he mused, his posture almost actorly now, "But none I would ask you to address me by."
The young man spun on the heel of his prison-issue slipper and regarded Xavier once more with his brilliant golden eyes.
"Call me Wolfsangel."
--
"Wolfsangel?"
Dr. Callum McElroy tossed the rather thin manilla file onto his desk, as though it had personally offended him. Professor Xavier had not liked McElroy since the moment they had been introduced. He was the chief of staff of the psychiatric ward of the facility, though how he had gotten the job, Xavier was not sure. He radiated pomp and egotism to the point that it almost became another presence in the room, constantly accompanying him. He was the type of man who viewed psychoanalysis as the means to his own career benefits. Being in charge of dangerous and mentally unstable meta-humans and mutants was a badge he wore, not a calling he aspired to.
Xavier could see that he groomed himself with aspirations of politics always scampering the the back of his mind. He was a man who always tried to look good for others, and never for himself. A quality that Xavier found almost vulgar in many people who employed it. He was a handsome man, square of jaw and well-aged, but his teeth were painfully white and straight and absolutely veneers, and the difference of hair color around his temples and the top of his head certainly suggested that he covered the grey hairs on the sides with men's hair color. Xavier thought that his was too bad; he probably would look more scholarly with the grey.
Xavier sighed.
"Wolfsangel. Pronounced 'angle' not 'angel.' It's of Germanic origin."
Dr. McElroy's eyes narrowed. He was not used to being corrected in such a forthwith manner, nor did he take to it very well.
"Yes, yes," he said, gesticulating casually as though he had known already, "I remember now. The Wolfsangel was the lightning bolt symbol used by certain officers of the Nazi regime, correct? So he does have Nazi sympathies."
Xavier frowned.
"No Doctor, I don't think that is the reason he wishes to be called by that moniker. He doesn't strike me as the radical type, nor does he seem to be racist by any stretch. You'll remember that the Nazis were among the first to do serious experimentation on what few mutants there were at that time. You'd be hard pressed to find any mutant anywhere who has admiration for Adolf Hitler and his associates."
"Then what is he trying to tell us, Professor?" McElroy asked, using Xavier's doctoral title as though it were some thinly-veiled insult. Xavier was glad, at least, that McElroy and he shared a common dislike for each other. There were few things more irritating than an unfortunate fool who faked kinship like a cheap suit.
"The Wolfsangel," Xavier said, "Also known as the Wolf's Hook, or the Doppelhaken, was, in fact, used hundreds of years before the Nazi Party even existed. It was a Germanic symbol employed on many coats of arms, and is speculated to have descended from runic alphabets dating back thousands of years. It means, in the most literal sense, a hook used to capture wolves."
"Which has relevance to your session with him how, exactly?" McElroy asked, letting his impatience show through quite clearly. Despite himself, Xavier found himself missing his conversation with the young man, though it had only concluded a mere half hour ago. He had then spent several minutes typing and printing his observations before presenting them to Dr. McElroy. They had been, as he knew they would be, unimpressive on paper.
Xavier breathed another deep sigh, knowing that whatever he said was not going to satisfy this man. He had been brought in assuming that he, being a telepath, would simply wrench the answers they were after from the boy... Wolfsangel's... head. He had not done so, and now had little to show for it. But what could they honestly expect from a period of contact no more than twenty or so minutes?
"He has many sophisticated mental blocks implanted in his mind," Xavier began, "Mechanisms designed to keep telepaths from gleaning information from him, and also to keep him from offering the information willingly. They're some of the best I've ever encountered. One of the many reasons your others... 'experts' could not coax information from him."
Xavier allowed a long pause between them, meeting eyes with McElroy, before he continued.
"I believe there is something much deeper going on with this boy. Someone, somehow, conditioned his mind to an almost machine-like efficiency. A person with that sort of conditioning does not commit crimes arbitrarily, especially not crimes of such a brutal nature. He told me as much as his own mind would allow. He told me to call him 'Wolfsangel.' I believe he is trying to show or tell me something of great importance, without actually saying it directly."
McElroy rolled his eyes, exasperated. "Come now, Professor. You know as well as I do that these... types of people," McElroy clumsily dodged using the word 'mutants,' "Will say or do just about anything if they think it will get them declared unfit to undergo a trial. They are granted their abilities by some random fluke, and are happy to exploit them by whatever means they can conjure, so long as they are never held to answer for them. You must see that it's obvious that he is toying with you. This individual, this 'Wolfsangel,' is dangling random tidbits over your head, knowing you cannot easily enter his mind to verify them."
He retrieved the folder that he had tossed onto his desk earlier and began leafing through the pages.
"Make no mistake, Professor, this is a killer of the most brutal sort that you are dealing with."
"I have read the file," Xavier pointed out calmly.
McElroy stood from his desk, still holding the file, and began to circle around towards Xavier. "Oh, but perhaps you need a refresher: Eight individuals, five men, two women, and one child, with no discernible connection between them, all kidnapped, brutally tortured anywhere from two to twenty hours, then killed with a single blow to the head with a blunt object bearing strong resemblance to a human fist. Each individuals skull was opened post-mortem, their brain removed and..."
He trailed off, looking at Xavier now instead of the file, with a look of disgust and horror that was about ten percent genuine.
"As near as the investigators can discern, their brains were removed and ingested." McElroy finished, once again tossing the folder to the desk.
McElroy leaned forward, taking advantage of the height he had over Xavier, as Xavier was forever sitting down, in a way that Xavier found most distasteful. Almost bully-like. Still, Xavier refused to lean back in his wheel chair as the other man bent over him. He simply continued to give him his attention, nothing more.
"Let me make it perfectly clear, Professor," McElroy's mint-soaked breath washed over Xavier's face like a paint fume, "You were brought here because your abilities offer you an advantage in these sorts of situations that others do not possess. This person will be psychologically evaluated, and the information that the authorities seek that he will not divulge will be extracted by any means I deem necessary. And if you won't do it, I will find another who will."
McElroy seemed to remember himself slightly, and he adjusted his menacing posture so that he no longer loomed over Xavier, who remained unmiffed by the attempt at intimidation.
"I would like you to return," McElroy said, almost begrudgingly, as he returned to his seat and opened a leather appointment book, "Within two or three days time for another evaluation of the boy. I would request that you be more rigorous in your treatment of him. There is basic information that we simply cannot find anywhere else. His full name, his birthday, where he is from, if there are any other victims that have been undiscovered, those sorts of things."
He looked up at Xavier, "He is a blank slate, Professor Xavier, and the American public, not to mention the American media, will not stand for the trial of a mass murderer who has no name."
"Yes, I understand," Xavier said, steepling his fingers thoughtfully. In fact, he did not understand at all. In fact, he found himself actively disgusted with this man's conduct as a Doctor of Psychiatric Medicine.
"Yes, well," McElroy closed the appointment book and looked at Xavier, "I will have my secretary contact you and set up the details of your next visit. You do know the way out? I have several important calls I have to make."
"Indeed," Xavier replied, unlocking his wheelchair and turning out of the office. Just before he reached the door, he turned back to McElroy, who was already doing his best to ignore Xavier's departure as he went over several documents on his desk, though Xavier could plainly see that he was not actually reading them.
"Doctor McElroy, I do wish you had read my findings more closely," Xavier said, casually, as he opened the door.
McElroy's head snapped up, "What are you implying, Professor? I read every word."
"This boy has no fear of being put on trial, or of being found guilty," Xavier said, ignoring the question, staring deep into the other man's face. "What frightens me about him is the fact that he seems so desperately eager for both. No matter what you think of me, Doctor, or my methods, be careful. I have no doubt that he will speed his execution if it means he can take you with him."
--To be continued in Chapter 3