X-Gene
She was sleeping peacefully… finally. It had taken the greater part of four hours to make her understand that she was no longer caged. But Logan couldn't help but feel, as he watched her from the doorway, that he had only sentenced her to a different form of captivity. She had refused to acknowledge the bed; instead she used the blankets to make a strange sort of nest, which conformed to her strange form. Logan watched her until she had fallen asleep, curled impossibly small, and impossibly flexible. Her dinner was untouched, but he left the food in the center of the room. Slowly, quietly, he closed the door, wincing as the lock fell into place with a dull click. She was locked in, for the safety of the kids.
With a sigh, he turned to the Professor, and scrubbed a hand along his thick, dark hair. "So, what do you think those tests'll tell you?"
"Hopefully her age, a DNA print, a place to start looking for her family, her past," Xavier answered as Logan took control of his wheelchair. It was Xavier's turn to sigh. "I have been unable to reach anything resembling a human thought pattern in her mind… everything is fragmented and jumbled." He felt Logan nod slightly. "Do you think there is anything vestigial left to contact?"
"If you're askin', do I think she's in there?" Logan chuckled softly. "She's definitely in there. It'll just… be a while to dig her out."
"Hank should have her tests done by morning," Xavier announced after a moment of silence conference. "If she's undergone the kind of trauma that her scarring suggests…"
"Scarring?" The interruption had been expected. He hadn't been around when Ororo and Jean had cleaned the unconscious Carnal up.
Xavier calmly continued around Logan's outburst. "…then the mental damage she's suffered may far outweigh anything we can counteract." He sighed, and reached back to pat Logan's hand, as if the action were meant to comfort him. "From what we've uncovered so far, we can assume that her mutation had manifested very early in her life, perhaps before she even reached puberty."
Logan was growling softly, but remained silent until he had wheeled the Professor into his study. "You'll notify me when she's awake?"
Xavier turned the chair himself, slowly pivoting on one wheel. "Of course," Xavier responded, nodding slightly. "You will be the first to know."
"And the test results?"
"Hank will share them with all three of us, as soon as he has them ready." Logan grunted in response, and turned to leave. "Oh, and Logan?" The feral paused, turning slightly to glance at the Professor over his shoulder. "If she proves a threat to my students, we will have to pursue alternative avenues."
Logan didn't answer, letting the sound of the door closing speak for him. It bugged him; no, it didn't just bug him, it irritated him. To see everyone around him react to the girl as if she were nothing more than an animal! Logan let himself stew, wallowing in the gripping anger as he descended through the levels towards the training room. The weights and the dummies filled his mind through the wee hours of the night, as he alternated between power lifting, and knocking the stuffing out of the practice dummies. His gi was soaked with sweat as he pushed himself into the numbness of motion, concentrating on the pull of each muscle, and twinge of each tendon as he twisted through kata and sword forms.
The sun had barely begun to rise as the intercom buzzed in the room. Snatching a towel from the weight bench, Logan jogged over to it. Answering the buzz with a grunt, he heard Xavier's calm, even voice, and a dreadful caterwauling behind it.
"She's awake," was all that came out of the Professor's mouth before Logan was running through the halls. As he came through to the upper levels, he could hear the heartbreaking howling coming from Carnal's prison. Apparently, so did the rest of the students, as they were all clustered as close as they dared to get. Logan pushed his way through them, having to squeeze past five, or six, little Jamie's. Logan glanced in the window and grinned.
"At least she ate," he chuckled noting the empty place. But Carnal was sitting in the center of the floor, her head was thrown back and the heart-rending sound was issuing from her throat. He gave a curt nod to Jean and Ororo, before he opened the door and slipped inside.
Carnal's howling instantly stopped. She was on her feet in a blur, her hair floating around her head and shoulders like a downy, coal-colored cloud. Free of the grime and the dirt, she was beautiful, feral and dangerous. It was enough to make Logan's heart skip as her wild, golden eyes locked onto his. He suddenly realized that he was feeling the exact way most women felt when he fixed them with his own predatory gaze. Feeling sheepish, he held his hands out, palm up, and remained locked in a stare-down with her.
She was trying to establish her place in a pack, he realized, watching her body language as she hunched her shoulders, trying to make herself look bigger. Her every muscle quivered with tension, her fingers were short again, her hands taking on the more paw-like appearance. She constantly shifted, her body twisting and adapting, as she stood rooted to her spot. Logan refused to back down.
He took one step forward; she didn't move. After a few more moments, he took another, then another. He was standing right before her, staring down into her eyes with an intensity that would have cowed any normal person. She wasn't normal; she snorted, and balled her fists up, but Logan knew she wouldn't break the eye-contact by swinging at him. This was a dominance contest, and she had already lost by showing her aggression.
He let his upper lip curl slightly, narrowing his eyes as if challenging her to attack. That was all that he needed; her fists relaxed, her eyes dropped. She backed away one step, letting her chin touch her chest and her eyes nearly close. Logan couldn't help but smile, even submissive, she still harbored the desire to put him under. He reached out, and touched her chin, intending to lift her head. Carnal jerked away so quickly, she became a blur. Striking at his hand, her slap stung as if she had struck him across the face. Her teeth bared; she snarled, and continued to edge back away from him.
Logan? The Professor's quiet mental voice cut through his thoughts. The feral man shook his head, and waved towards the door dismissively. He had completely forgotten about the audience. The damned girl deserved more privacy than this. If he was going to dig her out of herself, he couldn't afford to have so much pressure.
Logan, the tests are finished. Hank needs to see us in the labs.
Logan shook his head again, but he sighed and decided to defer. "Hold that thought, darlin'." She stared at him blankly. He turned to leave, but heard Carnal's soft whine before he reached the door. Placing his fingers to his lips, he prayed she understood the signal. He could have sworn she whined again as the door clicked locked behind him.
"I'll make this quick," Hank was hanging from the ceiling when they arrived in the cramped lab. With a flip and a flourish, he landed beside Ororo and offered her a fanged smile. Blue and furry though he was, the brilliant mind beneath the brutish exterior did possess some small amount of charm. "This girl you've found, Logan, is an amazing work of artistry! A true analogous metamorph!"
He gestured to the screens around him, as numbers and letters flashed quicker than the eye could follow. "Blood Type O Negative… possessing an enormity of platelets and white blood cells. I'd hazard to say she's rival Logan in her hardiness." Again, the flashing smile came as Logan grunted. Quick for Hank wasn't quick enough for Logan. "Roughly, I'd put her age around 25, perhaps even upwards of 30, but as we all know, DNA age-testing is far from accurate."
Ororo glanced at Logan, a man who knew so little about his past he couldn't even tell how old he was. Logan's gaze was intent, never leaving Hank. She pondered why this girl meant so much, so quickly to their aloof physical trainer.
"Along with an incredibly active X-Gene, she has extremely high levels of endorphins and testosterone in her system. I'm going to hazard a hypothesis, that those enzymes aid in the control and use of her oddly manifesting shifting abilities." Hank kept going, and Logan began to stop listening, letting his thoughts drift back to the frightened girl locked two floors up.
"What about the scars?" Logan asked suddenly, remembering Xavier's off-handed comment last night.
"Oh," Hank broke off from his rambling train of speech to ponder that. "Oh, yes! From the scars along her back and torso, it appears that she's been… shall we say… experimented upon?" Hank couldn't find a euphemism for what he suspected. And he shifted uncomfortably as Logan's eyes bore down upon him. "She may have been vivisected… I'd have to run more tests on her to find out exactly what'd been done."
Logan shook his head. "She's not gonna have to go through any more tests." He growled softly, gripping the handles of the Professor's wheelchair until his knuckles turned white. "She needs help… not to be poked at anymore."
He forced himself to release the handles of the wheelchair, and he turned, preparing to exit the lab and return to Carnal's prison. But Hank's soft voice stopped him.
"There's one last thing… about her DNA structure…" He paused until he had Logan's attention too. At one screen, he hit a few keys upon a keyboard, calling up a digital display. "She has a third strand… it's an unfamiliar compound to me, something I have to conduct more tests on to find out what it is… but the strand is entwined with her primary helix. It's a half-strand, more like a length of RNA than anything else. But it's definitely not natural."
"And?" Logan asked, trying to keep his voice calm.
"And it's the only thing holding her cells together… I tried to extract the information, and the cells instantly underwent lyses. She's storing information; a living… breathing… walking… library." Hank scowled then, his lower canines protruding with a gleam. "Every attempt I made to study her DNA resulted in instant cell destruction."
Logan continued to scowl. Xavier shook his head slightly, and hazarded a speculation. "So whoever experimented upon her encoded something upon her DNA that should the information be retrieved… her body would, essentially, self-destruct?"
"Precisely."
Logan didn't want to hear anymore. The door shutting behind him gave full breath of his opinion. Xavier sighed, rubbing his temples lightly. "Hank, what am I do to do if she's a threat to my children?"
He was standing at the window when Xavier found him again. He didn't look happy, watching Carnal cooped up in that tiny room. She was stalking her lunch at that particular moment, circling warily around the perimeter of the room. The plate that Logan left her was once again full of meat, mostly the steaks Logan had been planning on saving for the Start-of-Summer barbeque. He was silent as Charles wheeled into position beside him; silent as Xavier's gaze was drawn again and again to the stalking predator.
"She's not evil, Chuck," Logan began softly as the feral pounced upon the plate of meat. Her fingers sported cat-like claws that extended and dug into the tender meat. Under their gaze, her jaw shifted and twisted, canines lengthened. She shook the meat, ravenously gulping down bites.
"I never said she was," Xavier countered. "We are old friends, Logan, yet I still cannot figure out why you are so obsessed by this girl."
They both watched in fascinated silence for a short time; Carnal gorged herself, cleaning the plate of all traces of flavor before she retired to her pile of blankets.
"I was like her once," Logan said quietly, allowing him a slight laugh as she carefully washed her face with her hands. "Feral, uncontrollable… but I was taken in, helped."
Xavier was silent. Logan rarely ever talked of the days he remembered, what little of the man's past was still held in the mostly blank memories. They both fell silent again as they watched her fix her blankets, pulling them and pushing them until they were piled in just the right manner. She curled up, incredibly flexible, and covered her eyes with her hands. She would sleep while she digested. Logan sighed, and finally turned toward Xavier.
"Chuck? What good am I if I can't help her?" Logan asked, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans. "I've been where she is; I know how it feels."
Xavier shook his head, but refused to meet Logan's gaze. "Tell me, Wolverine." Logan stiffened slightly. "Do you think she is a threat to the students?"
That wasn't the question Logan wanted to hear. He sighed and hung his head. "Right now… in her current state… yes." He couldn't lie, not to a telepath of the caliber of Xavier. "But, in time, once she recognizes that the students are part of her pack too…"
"Pack?"
Logan nodded. "She's wolf-like. When I went in earlier, she tried to stare me down. It's a pack dominance thing. This time, she let me enter without a problem. To her, I'm the pack alpha, and she's the omega wolf."
"I see," the Professor resorted to his let me think phrase. Logan rested a hand against the door while he waited for Xavier to finish thinking. "How do you propose to get her to recognize the students as pack-mates?"
It was Logan's turn to think. He rested his forehead against his hand. "Time… attention…" He picked his head up, his pale eyes intent on the sleeping form. "She needs to understand and trust me, Chuck."
Xavier couldn't help but pick up the surface thoughts of his long time friend. Reaching up, he patted the man's arm, as if to reassure him that all would be well in the end. "I can give you two weeks, and use of the boat house. It is off-limits to the students; you should have your privacy there."
Logan grinned, but didn't respond. He nodded almost to himself as he peered through the window again at the sleeping feral. With only two weeks, he had his work cut out for him.