A/N: Sorry it takes me so long to update, I do mean to dedicate myself more but time and circumstance... Anyway back to the story. The mystery man I introduced to you in the last two parts is finally explained here. Full marks to irisheyesrsmiling for making the connection to Sinister, he is mentioned here as well, under an alias of course. And yes Marie's stalker is very much in love with her, obssessively so, which is always dangerous.

Part 4- 'Someone to watch over me…'

Blake Richards had been something of a child prodigy, with an IQ to put most adults to shame; he had spent most of his young school life skipping grades. Always being pushed to the next level, always challenged, always tested.

The only son and heir of multi-millionaire Maxwell Richards, Blake found there were few doors left unopened to a handsome young man set to inherit a monetary kingdom. And what privileges fortune could not afford him he earned, through his dedication to science.

His fascination with the mutant race had always been a factor in his young life, ever since the age of 10 from where his father had consented to him being an audience member in the public auditorium where the debate over mutants was raging. And he had of course read all the literature, the serious studies into how the mutant gene had evolved the severe papers on what such super advanced specimens of being would mean to the average, normal human population. He had absorbed all these as well as the trivial, the comic strips, the graphic novels, more often than not wildly distorted versions of the truth in animation, simply to know more.

And that obsession had naturally led to his keen interest in genetics, and more specifically its manipulation. The extraordinary development of the mutant race and its core grew into an addiction for him; the thirst for more knowledge, the dedication became an insatiable desire.

And that was when he was approached by a man whom he would soon find himself working closely with, Dr Nathan Milbury. Blake found the doctor to be something of a mystery, the way the older man had found him was incredible enough, the story he had to tell him was more so.

He was a professional looking man, with raven black hair, aged in his late forty's, he was remarkably pale, his skin seemed to glow with a luminosity that shifted every time it caught the waning moonlight. Milbury waiting outside the lecture hall in which Blake had been teaching, had stepped out of the shadows and made him an incredible offer.

The chance to study mutants personally, alongside Milbury himself, and to do so without restraint, without constriction and without question. Here was a chance for Blake to feed his addiction, to go on that quest for knowledge unabated.

All Milbury asked was that they study mutants of his choosing, that Blake would do as he was instructed without question and to be patient, to never question his methods, as well as his to impart his implicit trust.

For a fleeting moment Blake had doubted, the conditions required seemed to be asking to sell his soul to the devil, but the doubts were all fleeting and he was soon shaking Milbury's hand and nodding his agreement.

Only then did Milbury state his final condition, Blake Richards had to die. That is the persona; the scientific child prodigy the world had come to know had to be removed. The work they were to conduct was so sensitive, so secretive that Milbury could not afford to take on an understudy with hitherto such an infamous life.

And so Blake consented to even that, within a few days it was being announced worldwide that young Blake Richards had been killed in a freak yachting accident off the Ivory Coast.

Friends and family mourned and inevitably moved on, as did Blake.


He had been only 20 when Dr Nathan Milbury had offered him what had seemed the opportunity of a lifetime, although initially it had all seemed remarkably surreal. When Milbury had stated that the work was secretive, Blake discovered he had sorely underestimated just how secretive the Doctor's world was.

The lab in which he was assigned was concealed deep underground, one of many scattered across the world, expertly and clinically equipped, it was a vast labyrinth of networks, channels, lab rooms and research sections set out meticulously. And Blake discovered he was by no means alone, the place was as busy as any normal hospital, overrun by men and women in white coats, with the addition now and again of people in black suits.

It was to a panel of black suits that Dr Milbury had introduced Blake; they of course knew who he was and welcomed him accordingly. The area he stood in they stated was a highly classified underground facility, unknown to the outside world, a deep black ops of whose existence was officially and strenuously denied by any and every government.

The genetic experimentation of mutant genomes or GEM as it was 'unofficially' known was specifically created for the study and classification of the mutant gene. In pursuit of the ability to enhance it, manipulate it and ultimately control it.

That was the world Blake had allowed himself to be ingratiated in, and he was not sorry for it. He advanced and excelled, as he did at everything else, remarkably quickly and soon became known as the Dr Milbury's right hand man.

And the methods which Milbury had been so insistent Blake should not question, was something Milbury need not have worried about. Blake Richards although blessed with superior intellect was also it was soon discovered woefully lacking in human compassion, in his pursuit for perfection, which he thought through evolution mutants had finally reached, there were no methods Blake was willing to object to.

Yes, it was shock at first seeing various mutants in embryonic forms, fully grown and even as children being extensively studied, probed and yes sometimes even tortured in the name of science, but he saw it all as necessity, a means to an end. The perfect end.

So he allowed himself to become acclimatised to the screams of pain in the holding cells, the howls of despair in the experimenting labs, until eventually he could walk by and it was as if he wasn't hearing them at all.


It was during his second year as Milbury's understudy that Blake was offered his first and, for what soon through personal choice became his only field assignment. Marie.

He knew the subject was important when Milbury had called him into his private office, shut the door and produced a thick file. He gestured for Blake to take it away with him and read it, 'Come back when you've made your choice…'

Blake had looked back at him questioningly at the door, but Milbury had returned to studying a sample and gestured him away. Blake was back in a matter of hours, 'I'll do it…' was all he had to say, Milbury looked up at him with a knowing smile.

So it was that a relatively young Blake Richards began his observation of the young Marie D'Ancanto. She had been only 15 when he started sitting in his unmarked SUV to watch her. And at first he had convinced himself that the affection he slowly began to feel for the girl was of the brotherly sort, and at times he had tried to resist even that, wishing to ascertain his professionalism and prove that the way he watched Marie was with the indifference of a scientist watching his subject.

But he could not fault the feelings that gradually began to stir in him, every time he caught a glimpse of her in the window. He could not mistake the way his heart skipped a beat every time she walked passed his car on her way to school, unknowingly being within inches of his grasp. And he was outside her house, in different cars, but always there more than three times a week and more than was necessary.

At times he wondered if Milbury had somehow known of the effect the girl would have on him, and had sent him on this assignment deliberately as a test, but then he rationalised that he couldn't have possibly have foretold such a thing, and besides Milbury had offered him the choice. No doubt the older man would have been sickened as he had oft been towards himself, that he, Blake a man of 22, was in love with a girl of only 15.

But Milbury knew, of course he did, never mind what compassion Blake lacked, every beast is capable of affection and yes, even love. What Blake had misunderstood about the good Doctor was how quickly he was able to see how easily young hearts can be manipulated. Even hearts as guarded and as guided by science as Blake's.


It was after nearly a year of watching, of patiently waiting that her powers eventually began to manifest themselves. He had known something was happening when Marie's piercing scream cut through the cool Mississippi evening air. His grip had tightened on the steering wheel and he had gazed with increasing intensity at Marie's window from where the sound had emanated.

Within fifteen minutes he saw a steady stream of red and blue lights heading up the road and to the house as a number of police cars and ambulance converged on the place. People began stepping out of their houses to see what all the noise about, and when Blake saw a body strapped to a gurney and being stretched to the waiting ambulance, he knew. Marie had hurt someone.
He looked up instinctively at her bedroom window and the shadow that was cast there; he could feel her fear and guilt from where he sat.

It was early in the same hours that morning that Marie would quietly slip out of the door and head for the open highway. And it was the same morning Blake had decided to follow her, beyond the city limits, north and into the hubbub of New York. Ready to begin his vigil wherever she ended up, whichever place she chose to call home.

Even when that proved to be Xavier's Academy, of course there he could not spend as long sat outside in his car for fear of detection. So he cut back on the hours and sat in the lab and waited.

The idea of creating a cure had been the manifestation of both Blake's and Dr Milbury's brilliant minds. It was always going to be temporary, but the incentive would be there, to lure Marie out and to keep her within their grasp.

Having spent so long watching her, Blake felt he knew Marie as well as he knew himself, he had known she would take the cure, had known that she would feel outcast in the home she had made for herself with the rest of the mutants. And he had even known that she would come back, to this place.

Back to this part of the Deep South that had once been her home, the place with the white picket fence and the name D'Ancanto on the mailbox. So he had parked in that same place from where he had watched almost four years ago, and for him it was a little like coming home as well.

And just as he had known that Marie would come back he knew it was wrong. But he could not interfere, this was her time now, to find that family she so craved and to do whatever it took to hold onto them.

But the D'Ancanto were not the family Marie needed, and even as he watched her approach the house tentatively, he knew that Marie was not going to find what she wanted, certainly not here.