Disclaimer: Owner: Marvel. Money: none. Suing: useless.
Rating: This chapter gets a big fat M.
Notes: The Chapter That, Like, Basically Wrote Itself - although with some jarring POV switches.
There's another original character who's a plot device on legs. Will I ever learn?
And I know, Madelyne Pryor's awakening contradicts previously established canon. Then again, so does anything by Terry Kavanagh.

The Apologist
Interlude One -
Beginning

It started almost innocently, like an itch under the skin of your hands, and at first you hoped it was the nettles from the abandoned shipyard. Then it got worse, like shingles, like lying on a bed of embers, like a smoldering fire.
You knew it was all in the mind. It had been like this before, when you were too weak from hunger or fatigue or illness. And now it was the same, only you didn't know how to beat it. You could sleep the whole day out and still feel dog-tired. You could wolf anything and have this unnamed hunger gnawing at you.

It started with the itch and soon there was no way you could stop it. Even retreating to the barren concrete halls of the old steelworks did nothing for it. Fires set off everywhere; cranes collapsed boisterously in the heart of the night, the groan of steel buckling punctuated the undertone of roaring flames. You'd hide in the rusty innards of a truck-sized tilted crucible as the sirens screamed their way to the latest wreckage, lulling you to a restless, dreamless sleep.

After the second time your mattress caught fire, you started soaking your clothes before sleeping, out in the rough, on the concrete. The charge kept them warm through the skin; it seemed a good idea.
Then came December and the wind blew all night long from the ocean, carrying scent of salt and icy drizzle, and you woke up the morning after with a sore throat and a stubborn cough. Then came the fever and the weakness and the shivers and the heaves, and on top of all this, the itching didn't stop. As you withered out like an uprooted weed, the wildfire inside you wouldn't burn out.

You'd always been an optimist; you chanced that spring would be here before it got any worse, that you wouldn't need to go pleading a traiteur. Close, but no cigar, and now it's too late and you're too weak to do something. You're too weak to do anything, even to move out of this alley where you've fallen, crawl out from under this spring downpour. You're hot enough to melt steel and yet your body feels like ice. You're shaking so bad something has to break; every new breath is a surprise.
It's not been too bad, you tell yourself. You've seen the world. Mostly bad places, but at least lots of them. And it's easier than you had imagined and it won't be long now... you're hallucinating already. A shape that doesn't belong in this world is moving in front of your eyes, dancing in and out of sight.

At first, you thought it was real. Then you realized you'd seen the shape before you sensed the heat. Means it's cold. Cold as this evening, as only this city can get. No human body would ever be so cold.
You think it has come for your soul? You must be delirious.

The shape moves unevenly under the hammering shower, from dead dog to broken bottle to blown tire, not bothered about sheltering from the rain. You'd be scared, but you know better. It's not real, and even if it was, it has ceased to matter. The world turned meaningless the moment you fell, face forward, into the gutter.
He kneels beside you. The cape he wears spreads forward over your lying carcass as he leans over and the water stops drumming. Icy hands are all over you, feeling your chest and limbs beneath the soaked clothes with dismissive efficiency.

You've got no wallet. No money, no documents to fill one. You wait for the inevitable knife, squeeze the last card in your hidden hand - if you have to go, he'll come along for the ride.
A hand feels your burning forehead.

"Can you stand?"

Stand. As in, what human beings do - the healthy ones, at least. The word, the concern, strike someplace deep within you, carving a sharp splinter of regret. But you're already drifting on the far side of the pain, it's easier to escape than to come back. To this coldness. This loneliness. You'd want to explain, but it does not matter much. You just shake your head, close your eyes, severe the last link that kept you tied to - nothing anymore.

His hands abandon you. The rain starts to pound again as he straightens up. His tongue makes a small uninvolved noise as he wipes his hands on his clothes.

"Tsk."

It's a small dismissive noise that barely hits your ears, but it sounds like the crack of a whip flogging your back. Vermilion eyes flash open again in anger, in pride, your hands go blindly for the edge of the cape, grabbing, dragging. He does not react, just awaits, mildly surprised but not moved. Despise has succeeded where sympathy has failed. You stagger, rise to your knees, coughing, and painstakingly straighten up and find yourself staring defiantly at him.

The last thing you see are his eyes.
Piercing eyes. Piercing, blazing red eyes.

You finally come to your senses after days of sweat-coated hallucinating, of thirst and aching. He is not far away; he's never been. His hands, his eyes have been on you all this time, keeping a cold, silent watch.
You blink, stretch under the warm blankets to better relish the smooth sensation of clean cotton grazing your skin.
He stands up from his chair, feels your forehead. His palm is cool, ungiving, like his voice.

"How do you feel?"

How do you feel? It's a good question. Your vision is blurred and he's just a cold heap of colored spots, gray and blue and fiery red, fluctuating before your eyes. You try to focus, but a dull throbbing starts behind your eyeballs and when you frown your scalp seems to want to rip apart. You sigh. The gargling sound that underlined every breath his gone, and your throat is as dry as cotton wool, but does not explode with painful twitches each time you swallow.

"What" you say, and the sound of your voice surprises you. It's ten years older than you are, it's the noise of a rusty hinge giving way. The single word is uttered as an incomprehensible growl.

"I just offered what help I could" the hazy shape explains, returning to his stool. "Double pneumonia and a severe hypothermia - both of which fully receded, as you already noticed. Your voice box, on the other hand, will take some time to heal completely."

You're still too dizzy, going adrift inside your own body, but something strikes you - no, the absence of something strikes you.

The itching is gone.

"Plus, I was compelled to perform emergency neural surgery on you. You should be able to recognize subtle differences in the way your powers work. I am afraid you will notice an overall downgrading in their effectiveness."

"How..."

"There will be plenty of time to discuss this, later" he breaks off. "Rest."

He strides out of the room and as the door closes behind him you're already dozing off again.

Essex washes his hands in the basin. He never uses surgical gloves: bacteria, he has discovered, simply find him unpalatable.
You, on the other side, are not. Your hands and wrists are wrapped in bandages and smell of liniment and the aftertaste of the antibiotics is still lingering in your mouth. You wonder what's it like - gangrene. Losing your deft, slender hands.
Meanwhile, the woman you brought lies on the surgical table, neither alive nor dead.

Your fingertips are completely insensible, the skin blackened, almost necrotic. What little nervous tissue is left is screaming in protest, like red ants eating your flesh under the bandages. All this just for carrying her dead weight - and you had a protective suit, albeit no gloves. You wonder what she must feel, every day, all over. The bruises under her skin tell an unspeakable story.
He raises his eyes from the girl and frowns.

"Stop worrying over your precious hands. I told you you'll be fine."

Something's wrong with him. He was pleasantly surprised when you brought her here; now it looks like he's going to bite your head off, like that time you let the Labrador escape - but please let's not talk about it right now. He's tense and, for the first time ever, unconfident.

"I trust you with my hands" you bark for all answer, too tired and hurting to be polite. "What's the matter with her?"

Essex takes his time before answering. "Her mutation is... disorganized. I have never encountered anything like this before."

"What do you mean, "disorganized"?"

"The readings indicate that the mutation itself is responsible for her condition. The lack of control is predating her current state of shock."

"You mean her own powers put her out?" Sounds disturbingly familiar. "Can you, uh, fix dem?" Your eyes dart for an instant to Essex, but the man is too concentrated to notice the slight lapse into Yat.

"Shut that trap, Remy. You're such a nuisance! I don't have all the answers yet."

You shut that trap and lean over the girl, contemplating her from a few inches away. The cupola fogs under your breath; the heart throbs steadily, tireless, behind a curtain of shiny flesh.
There was a clock on the mantelpiece in the old French Quarter house, all exposed gear under a glass bell. Suddenly there's just so much your eyes can register. Is that the room spinning, or...

"If you're unable to master your own stomach, could you at least step away from the sterile hood?" Essex suggests harshly. The remark helps you regain control. You focus on him.

"Is she hurting?"

"Not from my doing. What do you think I am, a maniac?"

You raise your bandaged hands in a conciliatory gesture. The girl is lying naked on the steel surgical table, motionless, breathing normally, with no sign of distress. Yet her skin has been cut and folded back like a paper envelope, exposing the intricate patterns of the underlying tissues like an autoptic demonstration. There is no bleeding, no drying. Her exposed flesh shines like the Missouri River at sunset under the merciless light. You wonder how you must've looked a year ago, opened up like a frog on that same table, as Essex worked his black magic on you.

He throws the damp towel in a bin and goes to the sequence analyzer. He has done for years with machinery salvaged from the Celestial ship, adapting them to his needs and jury-rigging the spares, but now that human technology is finally starting to catch up, his laboratory has become a riot more than ever. Alien hardware coexists with three different operative systems, and this particular machine has a data collection system made up of an overclocked 486 with a color TV screen - your masterpiece of hardware bashing. The ports wouldn't get along at all, but you soldered them somehow. And it never had a system crash.
You were particularly proud of that.

He closes the lid and the machine starts whirring and humming. Now all you need is a way to spend the time. You would've left the lab long ago, but Essex has explicitly told you to stay, just in case. There's fresh coffee in the jug, smelling wonderful as always, but you're not in the mood. You wonder whether he makes especially it for you, and why - for sure he never took a sip. He doesn't drink, he doesn't eat, he barely breathes and not at all times.
Essex goes to his usual place in front of the main screens and drags a chair out for you, inviting you to sit down with a brief gesture.

"Her powers are not "freaking out", Remy. Actually, neither yours ever did. What you called "freakin' out" was a case of improper training, together with a unique situation of psychic and physical stress that had very few chances of occurring. There was little time left before you burnt yourself out, which caused me to resort to surgery. But I digress." Essex looks away from you as he speaks, as if he was... ashamed of his limitations.

"Remember what I told you about mosaicism? Some of her cells are mutant, some are not. Her neural wiring reflects this situation... distorted connections and misaligned synapses. As a result, she's physiologically unable to cope with her own power, let alone exert control on it." He gives a glance at the naked figure still lying on the table, oblivious to the world, to what has been accomplished on her. "In all these years I have never come across such a condition."

You start to understand. "You're saying there's nothing you can do?"

He nods gravely. " She's beyond my help. The only thing I can do is... take notes and study her case."

The machine stops droning and Essex stands up.

He had lost his faith long ago and sometimes he regretted it - it had left him without a God to curse. He stared at the results open-mouthed, aware that he looked like an idiot and not giving a damn.
A reporter sequence.

It was homage... or mockery. A sick joke at the expense of the nameless creature that LeBeau had stumbled upon in the sewage ducts under the city as he attended one of his own clandestine barters.

Every mutant factor started with the same string, then continued in a peculiar way. Celestials used notes as symbols for the DNA triplets, so that proteins were spelled out like music. The factor in the cells of this creature sang out of tune, and it was not until he tried the NCBI GeneBank database, and human notation, that he realized the heinous reason.

Every mutant factor started in the same way: Ala-Phe-Ile-Thr-Lys, or AFILTK. That was a conserved domain, acting as a mooring dock for the transcription enzymes. From there onwards, every sequence diverged, giving birth to the myriad of amazing variation that were the gift of mutantkind. In this case, it read: Ile-Met-Ala-Asp-Glu-Ile-Ther-Phe-Lys-Ala-Thr-Ser... ...IMADEITFLATS...

...IMADEITFLATSCANSBITEMEHASTALAVISTA...

The scalpels' tray flew into the wall, causing LeBeau to jump up like a scalded cat. Essex had created life himself - or had attempted to - and the mindless body in the stasis tank was there to prove it. But it had been a last resort attempt - and a futile one, too.
This woman, this quasi-mutant was a purposeless exercise in genetic engineering. Her X-factor wasn't even meant to function; it was a mere chance that it had managed to produce an erratic semblance of electrostatic power. Poor planning and hubris on behalf of the researcher had led her to this miserable condition.

His thin mouth curled downward at the corners in a disdainful grimace. Wasting time and resources for the lowly purpose of a bawdy joke... This haughtiness was totally extraneous to him - he was such above terrestrial technology that even parading his results would have been... demeaning. Mankind was not in his league, nor it would be for the next thousand years.

What with dumping the experiment, letting it rot in a gutter, like a spoiled child trashing his own playground with stapled lizards... Whatever the purpose, his rival's approach was too blunt to be ignored; he had to give this mean apprentice a signal, loud and clear, that Nathaniel Essex would not tolerate any amateurish interference within his field.

You've never seen him like this. His confidence is gone; his proud stance, vanished. When he tells you, it's not just to teach you. He has to share this with someone. With anyone.

"She's artificial."

Sounds like it's bad news. "What do you mean?"

"She's not even mutated. She's been constructed. Somebody cloned a normal embryo, and inserted an artificial mutant chromosome. But the extra chromosome was too unstable to be maintained during mitosis and this is the result."

His tone carries a ring of closure. Each word is like a bell tolling. You know where this is heading - you'd rather not to.

"I can't cure her, Remy. I wouldn't want to" he states. "Even if I restored her to a healthy mutant condition, it would be like giving my approval... an incentive for whoever is responsible to persist... to create more of this."

Your eyes narrow. "Not her fault" you observe. You'd like your tone to be sterner, though.

"No. It's not her fault. And yet she'll have to keep on suffering from the random activity of her mutant tissue until the day she dies." Essex replies. He says in a sigh, "What a waste."

You want to hear a hint of pity in those words. You stand by, silent, as he closes her chest, sutures the cuts almost mechanically, like it was a practice, without ever looking at her face once. When he's done, he drops the needle and tweezers on the heap due to the sterilizer, and walks away from the table.

You know what he wants. You always did, even when you least wanted to. To hear the words that people are afraid to say. Like your family and Belle and even the old Bodreaux man - all pleading with everything but words to do what's got to be done, then retreating in front of the enormity of their own desires once the feat had been accomplished.
The advantage, with Essex, is that he hears those words too, the unspoken ones. He doesn't lie to himself; he wouldn't balk at seeing his requests satisfied.

"I want you to bring her to the same place where you found her. Whoever did this, Remy... their act won't pass without consequences."

Before he walks out of the lab, he stops without turning. The sentence is finally spoken, in the form of a passing mention. He knows you'll understand.

"In case you are wondering, Remy, I cut off the anesthetic supply. She's expected to wake up any minute soon."

There's something about this man that you find reassuring. The decision has been taken, and there is no going back, no repentance.

It would be bliss. If only it wasn't about this.

You don't want to do this.

What you want doesn't matter a thing.

Your bandaged hands are aching, insensitive, but still strong.

You pray that she won't wake up, and she doesn't.

You think of the tunnels, the damp, cold, dirty tunnels.

You will need a coat.

The girl was drifting, cradled endlessly by the slow current of saline solution in her glass case. Remy was crouched aside, watching.
She was beautiful, beautiful in the way a statue, a painting, a dawn would be... and faulty. Essex had told him everything; how he why he couldn't resolve himself to put her out of her defective non-existence - to be reminded that he was not omniscient, not omnipotent.

Such a shame.

But it was good, nevertheless, to admire her elemental beauty, her hair dancing weightlessly in the fluid like bare flame, her serene, soothing expression. He had found himself coming here more and more often, often for hours on end, especially after a recurring dream of charred flesh and empty, lifeless eyes. Essex seldom, if ever, went to this room; it was in here that he was forced to face his limitations, to weigh his vaunted science and find it wanting. The thief just appreciated the quietness, maybe envied the dreamless oblivion of the woman, sleeping, blissfully unaware of the intricacies of the world in which she had been brought.

"Remy." Suddenly Essex was standing beside him, frowning.

"Uh?"

"I told you I don't want you to come here. Staring at a failure won't teach you anything. Now get out."

As Remy stood up to leave, a quicker movement caught the corner of his eye, and his mouth dropped open. The girl was having a fit in her capsule, her serene expression vanished. Her eyes opened wide and she stared at him, without seeing. She squeezed her eyes shut again as if to hold out a violent sight, took a breath underwater and screamed directly into his head...

"SCOTT!"

The glass capsule exploded like a grenade and Remy jumped under a rainfall of green gunk and glass shards, catching her limp body before she hit the ground.

"What have you done, LeBeau?" Essex yelled. He looked mad, bewildered.

"Ain't done a thing!"

"I can't believe it" Essex said, but he was talking to himself this time.

She opened her mouth as if to speak and choked; Essex pulled her out of his arms and held her head down as she coughed up more of that green sap. Remy observed the scene, wishing that he could do something, wishing that he knew...

"Power and fire and life incarnate... forever..."

"What she saying?" He leaned closer, cocking his ears.

"They're dying" she whispered. "Screaming. On and on and..."

The two men exchanged amazed looks. She slid out of Essex's hold and onto the floor, curling herself into a ball, face buried against her knees.

"I was just hungry. I didn't know... Scott... make it stop... please..."

Essex looked clueless: he stared at the woman with wide eyes, muttering something under his breath. He gestured for Remy to get a clean labcoat from the cabinet and wrapped it around her shoulders, lifting her gently.

"Can you stand?" he asked. Remy suddenly found it hard to swallow.

Her reply sent goosebumps down his spine. Barely a whisper, burdened with all the sorrow in the world.
"Why am I not dead?"

Next: Rogue goes mental. Warren gets some panel space