Government Intervention

Disclaimer: Characters and Premise are borrowed from the Marvel, I'm not making any money.

Part 3/6

Tony watched Warren pace his cell. Warren was calmer, thanks to the sedatives, but the erratic twitches in his wings gave testament to his continued, underlying, agitation.

"Your parent thought you were killed," Tony told him quietly.

Warren paused but didn't reply.

"Biggest story of the year," Tony continued after a moment. "Hollywood even made a movie out of it. The family name, the mutant angle, the fact you disappeared off the face of the earth and no one ever dug up a single clue as to how or why despite the best detectives your parents could hire scowering the country. Can't remember if the movie went with the botched kidnapping theory or the hate crime one. Guess everyone missed the mark. What did happen Warren?"

Warren turned to face Tony through the force field spreading his wings a little. "This happened. They're better off thinking I'm dead."

"I don't know about that. Your dad keeps a picture of you in his office, I get the feeling he misses you pretty bad."

"What happened to Gambit.. Remy?" Warren asked abruptly, changing the subject. When Tony didn't immediately reply he drew his own conclusions. "I killed him didn't I?"

"Was that what you were trying to do?"

"I thought about it for years," Warren admitted.

"Seemed like a pretty convoluted way of going about it," Tony said noncommittally. "How do you feel about it now?"

"Sick," Warren said quietly. "I should have killed Sinister not Remy, he was just a little kid."

Tony smiled a little. "Remy's condition is improving," he told Warren. "His blood work's clean, the activity in his brain is starting to look human. When Thor brought him in the electrical and chemical activity were off the charts, it's still high, but at least we can monitor it now."

Warren looked relieved.

"He's still pretty out of it, no response to external stimulus, our working theory is shock," Tony continued. "Sodium Amytal works because it lowers your defenses, it's not a magic potion. You give it to someone, ask them leading questions and hope they'll confirm your guesses because they're too fucked up to think about keeping secrets. Telepaths, and whatever Lebeau is, have barriers in their minds that normal people don't, defenses to keep themselves apart from the rest of the world in spite of their powers. You took those away. At the very least you exposed him to an extreme sensory overload and he shut down mentally for the moment to protect himself."

"At worst?" Warren asked.

"He stays catatonic, his sense of self is so screwed up he can't figure out where to put his shields because he can't differentiate his mind from the people around him. Even if that doesn't happen, unless he has one hell of a strong sense of self his personality could have been rewritten."

"I didn't mean for this to happen," Warren said.

****** ****** ******

His mind felt like someone had taken sandpaper to it; raw, a tangled mass of exposed nerves. There were things constantly brushing against his awareness; they burned, they grated, they prodded, they froze, they hurt.

He wanted them to all go away. He pushed them away with the pain they gave him and they pulled back but not far enough, never far enough.

He remembered having a hiding place, a cool soothing cocoon that was not quite here. While he was there the others slid around him like ghosts, insubstantial and harmless. From his sanctuary he could reach out and touch or be touched as he chose, but he'd been drug out into the open and the frail surface of him had been worn away and is was JUST TOO MUCH.

He sobbed with relief when his scrabbling fingers finally found purchase and he pulled open the entrance to his place. He slid inside and pulled the flap closed behind him, pressing against it until the opening vanished. He wondered if he could seal it closed to keep all the hurtful things away from him.

Even though he knew he was safe now he wanted to be further away from the sources of his pain. He couldn't push them away anymore, not from within his hiding place, and they were coming closer to him now. It didn't hurt anymore, but he remembered the pain and it frightened him.

At first he ignored them, hoping if he didn't react they wouldn't think he was real and would go do something else. It didn't matter, there was something around him that fascinated them, they kept prodding at it, testing it.

****** ****** ******

Nick Fury glanced around the infirmary. "This place isn't secure," he pointed out. "Lebeau isn't projecting that shield of his anymore, move him up to the holding cells."

Doctor Brankin looked at him incredulously. "What if he starts again?"

"Then we move him back downstairs," Fury said.

"Not if Thor's out we won't," the doctor said bluntly. "He shouldn't even be in the same building as Dr. Banner. I think I'd go insane if I were trapped in the proximity of his psionic projections. Trust me General, even our containment cells wouldn't hold the Hulk under those conditions."

Fury glared at the comatose teen who was doing so much to disrupt his operation. They couldn't put him in a holding cell because of the Hulk, hadn't been able to transfer him elsewhere because until just an hour ago Thor was the only person who could treat him. They couldn't use drugs to negate his powers because their staff telepaths all felt that would delay his recovery and he was still their best lead on the X-Men.

Fury decided he was going to fire whoever it was that decided hand cuffing the kid to the bed frame was an adequate security measure. "Doctor, why isn't he under guard?" Fury asked in what he felt was a reasonable tone.

Dr. Brankin jumped, "Well... um... Sir, it seemed like a waste of man power, he's comatosed and now that he's in the infirmary it's not likely that we'd miss signs of his returning to consciousness."

"Such as movement?" Fury asked pointing to the ring of reddened skin around Remy's wrist. As they watched his hand jerked, tugging against the restraint.

"I'll get right on that," Brankin said swallowing softly.

****** ****** ******

His wrist ached Remy thought then paused for a moment to ponder the implications of that statement.

His wrist. His body; that was what the others kept fussing with. How could he have missed that?

He'd let it shut down when his empathy had been overwhelmed by the city. Now that he'd finally been able to close down that sense the rest were coming back on line.

He realized if he wanted them to leave him alone he should hide his body as well as his mind. He needed to leave.

Only his wrist was tied to something and he could sense them, right there, standing over him.

Cringing in anticipation of pain he tentatively reached out of his protective cocoon and encouraged their feelings of overwhelming urgency. It was strangely easy to do, with his skewed perceptions they were nothing more than blobs of emotion and potential energy. He thought about releasing that energy, dispersing the others into harmless nothingness, but the thought of unbinding the housing around those blobs of emotion made him shudder. Instead he pressed against the emotions themselves.

"I ain't 'portant," Remy said, his voice a cracked, uncertain whisper. "Jus' 'nore me. Got bettah t'ings to worry 'bout dan me. Bad t'ings happenin', I ain't wort' yo' 'tention..."

He felt the swirls of emotion shift and refocus, felt their confusion at what they were doing here and knew he'd succeeded. With a sigh of relief he withdrew back into his protective cocoon.

Once they left he dissolved the thing binding his wrist in place and rolled off the bed, falling to his knees. Concentrating Remy found his balance and staggered to his feet.

He blinked a few times and squinted to catch a blurry glance of the room rather than the potential energy it contained.

Remy stumbled toward an air vent and collapsed in front of it. At first he tried to pry it free with his fingernails, when that failed he ran the tips of his fingers over it, feeling out the bolt heads and blowing them up with his power. Then he crawled inside. He worked his way down and out, blindly feeling his way through the molasses of potential energy that he sensed around him.

****** ****** ******

"He is gone," Thor announced striding into Nick Fury's office.

Fury glanced up from his phone call, looking harried and annoyed. "Who's gone?"

"The boy, Remy Lebeau," Thor replied.

"Oh him," Fury said unconcerned. "Didn't I have him transferred to the X-Factor camp with the other mutants?"

"No," Thor said. "He is not here, he has not been moved. Dr. Brankin does not remember having him as a patient."

Fury thought about it for a moment. "He's not important. According to yourself and Stark his knowledge of the X-Men was limited and out of date. If we pull Jean-Luc Lebeau in now we can still use the kid as a bargaining chip. He isn't Professor Grey, I know he didn't just take Xavier's word for things."

"What about Remy?" Thor asked. "His condition was hardly stable."

"What about him?" Fury replied. "He's too screwed up to be much use to anyone, he's not worth the manpower it would take to look for him. He's not important."

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