Title: A Villain State of Mind
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Angst, reference to past torture.
Timeframe: Set post-Avengers.

The X-Jet dropped him off in an abandoned lot in Selby-by-the-bay. It was clear that they weren't happy about him going off by himself, without even one of the X-men to serve as his backup; but Charles didn't want to expose any of his people to the discomfort (in some cases, a much stronger word would be needed than 'discomfort') they would feel at being in the bowels of a secret government testing facility. Even for some of his younger, less damaged students, there would be some inevitable friction when the mutant clashed with the human, and it was really better all around to just avoid that.

He wasn't worried about his own security at SHIELD's hands. If this had been a trap for him he would have sensed it coming, but this wasn't about him at all. Charles and Fury had put aside their differences and worked together in the past, and he felt confident they could do so again.

Besides, if anything did go wrong, Charles was perfectly capable of getting himself out. He loved his students dearly, and they him, but sometimes he suspected they viewed him as a harmless, paralyzed old man who needed to be taken care of. Not a fighter, not a soldier. They'd never had need to see him otherwise, and Charles dearly hoped that they never would. Their sometimes-overbearing worry was not offensive, really, and he did not spurn their true affection. But they could handle themselves without him for a day or two. If they could not, then Charles knew he had failed as a teacher.

He was met at the empty dockside by a young woman in nondescript navy and black, with an unmarked car and a poker face. Out of habit Charles brushed the surface of her thoughts, and found no animosity; either she didn't know what he was, or she was one of the all too rare humans who truly felt no antipathy towards mutants.

He could have pried further and found out which, but he didn't. Charles always minded his manners when he was among the humans, and it would rude to poke around in her thoughts for no purpose other than to satisfy his own curiosity. He ascertained that she intended him no harm, and that her loyalty was firmly with SHIELD, and that was really all he needed to know.

The agent took him on a circuitous route in a car with the windows tinted and shades drawn down; Charles allowed SHIELD their minor obfuscations. At last they came to an empty airfield with a chopper waiting on the tarmac, and his chauffeur/bodyguard helped to transfer him into the new mode of transit.

As they lifted into the air, the metal and plastic cage thrumming heavily in the wind around them, Charles let his mind wander a bit. After his tantalizingly uninformative conversation with Fury over the phone last night, Charles had taken the liberty of conducting some investigations of his own. He'd gone to Cerebro, turning the power of the great machine on the location he knew concealed the helicarrier; it had taken some searching, but he'd found it in the end.

And what he'd found...

In Cerebro's vision, that hundred-times expanded ghostly view of the world, normal humans appeared as gray. Some were more clear and solid in the vision, some less so, depending on their age and force of mental will, but they were meant to fade into the background if there was no trace in them of superhuman powers. Cerebro was built to isolate the exceptions from the rules, after all.

Mutants, Charles' own kind, appeared in Cerebro in color. Those who were neither mutants nor yet powerless humans - Stephen Strange, for example, with whom Charles had occasional dealings - all showed up in their own varying ways, dim or bright or sometimes with an oddly-tinted outline. If they showed up at all; many of them had ways to shield themselves from unwanted scrutiny.

Whatever Fury had in his cells right now, though, glowed in the mental landscape of Cerebro's vision. The outline was blurred, the details indistinguishable, only a splash of vivid color distorting the space around him. Not human, without question. Not a mutant, either, for mutants were still humans at their base, no matter what other blessings or curses Nature gave them. No, this was something other, and Charles was unable to fully make sense of what he saw, for it was out of the parameters built into Cerebro's senses.

And yet, Cerebro - and Charles, for their powers come from the same font - was able to see him. Not human, yet not completely alien either - cousin races, still. Kin. Charles, who had devoted his life to the study of the emerging X-gene and the advancement of Homo superior, couldn't help but wonder - if his own people were the next step in human development, was he looking at what waited several steps further down the road?

It was not an entirely comfortable thought.

Especially not if this distorted riot of color and thought and power was, as Fury claimed, a hostile.

The pitch of noise outside changed, and Charles glanced out the window as the chopper descended onto the landing pad of the helicarrier. The poker-faced agent helped Charles onto the flat paved surface and guided him through the bay doors, and Charles couldn't help but notice the recent, hastily added access ramps placed strategically throughout the corridors. Really, and to think this was a government installation. OSHA would have a fit.

He kept his mind open as they descended through the belly of the aircraft, brushing past the thoughts of the other SHIELD agents they passed. Not so much snooping as gathering surface impressions. For the most part the people here seemed unnerved by Charles' presence, but not half so unnerved as they were by the presence of the mysterious prisoner. Charles got fragmented glimpses of a thin looming figure in dark leather and armor, pale, with black hair and furious green eyes that radiated menace.

Also, it seemed that the young man operating the commissary was a mutant. Charles probed a bit deeper as they passed him by, since the welfare of mutants was always his concern - but the young fry cook (power to control milk, really? Proof that Charles hadn't seen everything yet after all) didn't seem to be in any distress, apart from the general tense wariness of a mutant going incognito among non-mutants. He was not part of Erik's faction, nor Charles'. He had chosen his post willingly, was not being blackmailed or coerced by any external factions - just a young man going about his job in a chaotic world.

Satisfied, Charles released his scrutiny and continued on.

He met with Fury in a briefing room on what snatches of thought assured him was the detention block. As usual, the man radiated military aggression even when standing still, feet set apart like a bulldog and shoulders thrown back with his hands clasped behind him. "Professor," he said curtly as Charles entered the room. His face was set and wary, carefully poker-faced, as though rigid discipline of his form and expression would be enough to keep his thoughts contained behind his skin.

Charles smiled and didn't bother to disabuse him of this notion, extending a hand in greeting. "Director," he said, matching Fury's tone. Fury took his hand and shook it carefully, precisely long enough not to imply any rudeness.

With the pleasantries over with, Charles sat back a bit and folded his hands in his lap. "Well, now that I'm here," he said. "Do you want to debrief me about this prisoner of yours, or shall I go see him directly?"

"Debriefing," Fury said with a grimace, and he waved Charles over to a conference table with a number of screens already set up there. "There was a lot I couldn't explain over the phone, and I think it's better if you know what you're getting into before we start messing around with him."

And he launched into a clipped, precise report of the events leading up to and surrounding the alien incursion of Manhattan, now nearly a month ago. Much of it Charles already knew, if from a rather different perspective, but not all of it; he studied the video clips and freeze-frame shots of the subject at hand with interest. Loki, the file named him before Fury did, Loki of Asgard.

Charles was never a Classics major - his focus had always been on political science when he wasn't studying biology and genetics - but he possessed enough background education to recognize those names. As well as the name of his apparent brother, Thor, who was listed in Fury's files not only as a friendly, but an active part of the Avengers initiative. Strange to think that men who'd lived and walked the earth over a thousand years ago could still appear on the surface of the planet as casually as popping down to the corner store - but then, Charles had made a living working with extraordinary things, and this wasn't all that much to adjust to.

It seemed that not all of these strange beings-from-another-time were hostile, then. Thank goodness for that. Although it did raise the question -

"So," Charles said casually as the flow of exposition dried up, "why did you say that your prisoner couldn't talk? He seems to be talking up quite a storm in these video clips." There was a whole theme to his speeches that struck bitterly familiar notes in Charles' mind; he'd heard similar lectures on the inferiority of the human race from Erik's mouth often enough.

Fury's lips compressed into a tight line, a flash of irritation passing over his eyes and then gone. "I'm surprised you even need to ask, Professor," he said brusquely. "Can't you just read the answer out of my head?"

"I could," Charles said mildly, "but that would be rude. And unnecessary, since the entire reason you called this debriefing was to explain the situation here." He sighed. "I'm not here to pry, Director. I have no interest right now in whatever secrets you do not wish to share with me. I came, by request, to work on a problem - which I can't do without all the pertinent information."

Fury rubbed a hand over his face, and it didn't take a telepath to read the wave of exhaustion that rolled off him as he did. "Sorry," he grunted, the apology sincere for all that it was grudging.

"We never intended to keep the prisoner onboard the Helicarrier this long. Actually, we never intended to retain him in captivity at all. His daddy wanted him back, and I was all too happy to pass him back into Asgard's hands and get him off ours. I surrendered the Tessaract to Thor to use to take them both back, since apparently their own local dimension-traveling machine is still broken after Loki went on a tear up there as well." He paused for breath.

"So what happened?" Charles prompted, when the pause went on too long. "Since Loki appears to still be here, and Thor does not." At least, Charles had seen no sign of him when he went searching with Cerebro; and if his signature was anything like so bright and confused as his brother's, there's no way Charles could have missed him.

Fury grimaced. "We don't know for sure," he said. "They left on schedule, vanishing right out of Central Park. Then an hour or so later, there's an almighty bang in the sky and down comes Loki, falling right out of the air - made a hell of a crater when he landed, too. At that point there wasn't much we could do except scrape him up off the ground and put him back in his cell.

"Thor never came back, but our local Einstein-Rosen expert managed to put a call through to Asgard - a micro-portal wide enough to bounce a signal, but apparently not a body - and get hold of him for long enough to talk. We've got the recording if you want to watch, but it's not very informative. He basically only tells us that something went wrong mid-transfer and he's not sure what, and asks us to keep his crazy brother quiet until he can get back here and pick him up. He said he'd be back within three days." Fury paused. "That was twenty days ago. We haven't been able to make contact again since."

"Ah." No wonder Fury looked harassed. Still - this was all very dramatic, but missing one crucial detail. "So why, to get back to my original question, can't Loki talk?" The only explanation he could think of was that the man - god, alien, whatever - was injured badly enough in the fall to put him into a coma, but that wouldn't explain why Fury had called him in. Even Charles couldn't have a conversation with a patient who was completely comatose.

Fury's jaw tightened, and he took a breath. Charles' attention sharpened on him, and he caught the thought 'He's not going to like this' flit past, before he said in a hard, clipped voice; "He can't talk because we haven't removed the gag."

"What?" Charles's voice crackled with disbelief, and he mentally reached out and snatched the image from Fury's mind: their dark-haired captive sitting in a cell, being led about on the helicarrier in heavy cuffs, with what looks like half of a metal mask enclosing the lower half of his face. He has to restrain himself before he digs any further; he had promised Fury he wasn't going to go poking around in his mind, after all. He tempered his initial disbelief and outrage, with some difficulty. "You must have, at least for short periods, in order to feed him. Surely he had plenty to say at that time."

Fury shook his head. "You misunderstand," he said. "We haven't removed it at all. We don't dare. Thor warned us against it in no uncertain terms - said that Loki can perform magic if he can 'pass breath over lips,' or something else poetic like that.

"He's a sorcerer, Professor - like that Strange character, or even worse since he's also a freaking norse god at the same time. He can teleport, or phase through solid matter - and since we don't have any kind of magic-blocking system in our cells yet, the only way to stop him from escaping is to keep him from casting any magic at all!"

"How have you been feeding him, then?" Charles asked, attempting to keep his demeanor civil. "Intravenous?"

Fury barked a short laugh. "Would be nice if we could. We haven't found a needle yet that doesn't bend instead of penetrating his skin, or else we could just keep him tranqed up and be done with it."

Charles drew in a careful breath, trying to keep hold of his composure. It would not do to let their tentative alliance become so fragmented so early on. He and the X-men had taken equally desperate measures, Charles knew, at times in the past; this Loki was an immediate and unquestionable threat, and it was only expected that he would prioritize the safety of his men - not to mention the public at large - over the welfare of his prisoner.

No matter how his less trusting instincts screamed at him about secret government facilities and the mutants who had been disappeared there, mistreated and experimented and eventually used up and discarded. It was so easy to justify, after all, when your prisoner wasn't human.

"Don't ask me how he's lasted this long, because if we knew that we'd be putting it in a bottle and selling it," Fury was still talking. "Asgardians are tough. We kept hoping his brother would come back and take him off our hands, or that we'd at least be able to get in touch with his people and ask for advice on some other way to keep him contained. The current measures are unacceptable, I'm sure you'll be the first to say, but right now we've got no other ideas."

Fury looked him square in the eye, apparently undaunted by whatever expression was on Charles' face right now. "That's where you come in," he said. "Right now, the only source of information we've got on how to keep sorcerers caged is the sorcerer himself. Even if we could uncork the genie without him getting out of the bottle, there's the obvious problem of trusting any intel given to us by the God of Lies."

"So you want me to interrogate him," Charles said flatly. "To find out what weaknesses you can use against him."

Fury made a frustrated gesture. "I want you to do this to help him," he said. "We're flying blind right now. He's gone twenty days without water - how much longer can he go before it kills him? How about food? What happened to knock him back to Earth when his brother took him up on the Tessaract Express? If we try to send him up ourselves, is the same thing going to happen again? And what in Hell has gotten Asgard so distracted that they haven't come back to pick up their stray sheep?"

"You think he would have any idea?" Charles asked. "He's been here the whole time; I doubt he's been receiving regular updates from them."

"I think we can't possibly know less than we do now," Fury replied. "Go pick his brain. See if you can come up with some better way to keep him from skipping his cell than wearing that smile piercing 24/7. We'll see where we can go from there."

Debriefing done, Charles went down to the next level of the detention block; it took half an hour to get him cycled through the half-dozen top-security containment measures built into this place. Charles wondered why they bothered at all, since Fury had apparently no faith in his own security to hold onto stray Asgard sorcerers. But then again, perhaps it was as much to stop others breaking in as their prisoner breaking out.

Fury had given him an earpiece to wear into the cell, which struck Charles as somewhat redundant since he hardly needed one to communicate with him long distance; on the other hand, transmissions over the communicator could be recorded for posterity. Charles intended to use his own judgment on that matter.

And then Charles set eyes on the god of mischief for the first time.

Red.

His first thought was that Loki was much smaller than he'd been expecting, which was ridiculous since the file quite clearly stated Loki's height as well over six feet. He looked smaller sitting down, perhaps, and there could be no question that superhuman constitution or not, the nearly three weeks of deprivation had taken their toll on him. His face was thin and gaunt, the skin drawn tightly over the bones of his collarbones and wrist, all that was visible under the nondescript cotton garments he'd been given to wear.

Red.

But perhaps the biggest difference of all was of attitude. In the pictures Charles had caught from the memories of his guards, Loki had loomed;he'd had a way of walking that stated the earth beneath his feet was unworthy of bearing his weight. He'd had a way of looking at you that sized you up and judged you less than a bug beside him, and a terrible, terrible smile that promised deeds great and fell. He'd looked larger than life, more than human - then.

Bright.

Not any more.

The prisoner was seated in a plain metal chair before a small table, both of which were bolted to the floor. His wrists were engulfed by shackles of an alloy unknown to Charles, although he thought it might have shared some properties with Logan's skeletal implants. A chain passed between both wrists, looping under the table to an eye-bolt on the floor, preventing him from raising his hands above the level of the table.

Sharp.

Not that he looked all that inclined to try. He sat hunched in place, neither moving nor looking around in response to the opening of the door. His hair was a rat's nest, and his face pale and gray-tinged; his eyes, which had glittered so sharply in the videos, were dull and glassy and stared straight ahead unblinking. He twitched occasionally, the only movement of his spare frame.

"How long has this been going on?" Charles wanted to know.

"He went nonresponsive day before yesterday," Fury answered. "One of the reasons we decided to call you in."

Heat.

"Is all these really necessary?" Charles muttered into the open channel. "He's completely out of it. You could probably do away with all this hardware and he wouldn't be in any shape to make a break for it."

"Nope," Fury replied in his ear, his voice flat and practical. "He could be faking it. No way for us to know. Not all of us have built-in lie detectors, Professor."

Charles quirked a bit of a smile at that, although truthfully he didn't feel much like smiling at the moment. There was something about the atmosphere of the cell that was oppressive, in a way that was hard for him to pin down - if Fury hadn't admitted candidly that he didn't have access to any kind of magical or psychic dampeners, Charles might have suspected the presence of one of those. Something coming from the prisoner himself, then? Fury had said he was a sorcerer - was he a bit of a psychic himself?

Red.

Even right here in the room with him, Charles couldn't get a read on his thoughts, and he ought to have been able to. He could sense the man's presence without a shade of doubt - bright, chaotic and somehow twice as real as the humans surrounding him - but that gave him no sense of what was going on in the man's head.

Charles put his elbows on the metal table and leaned into his hands, pressing his fingers against his temples in the habitual gesture that always helped him concentrate his mental facilities. There was something there, Charles could sense it - but it was faint and discordant, like a radio signal drifting just off the station. He tried to grasp those fleeting impressions, to bring himself in tune -

Red.

Glow.

Metal.

Bright.

Sharp.

Pain.

Red.

Heat.

PAIN -

"So what's the verdict, professor?" Fury's voice in his ear interrupted his concentration, and Charles grimaced as he opened his eyes. "What evil plots is he hatching?"

"I don't know," Charles snapped back at him, more than a little unnerved by his failure to get a clear reading. "Can you open a book written in a language you've never seen before and read from a random page?"

"Are you saying that you can't communicate with him?" Fury demanded, and a tone of real alarm was beginning to creep into his voice. Fear pain -

Charles knew that calling him in had been Fury's last resort, and if he couldn't make a difference, Fury had very few other options. He'd either be forced to do something that would put countless lives at risk, or else take an action that could permanently jeopardize their relations with a dimension-crossing, ultra-powerful race of beings. The situation teetered on the brink of two potential disasters, and the chained, silenced figure in front of Charles was the linchpin.

"Give me some space to work, Nicholas," Charles said. He didn't often use the man's given name, but he wanted Fury to understand how serious he was about this project; no longer detached, no longer interested only in the abstract. For all the bright metal security surrounding them - bright metal sharp metal pain - Charles knew he was sitting on an unexploded bomb, and defusing it was his responsibility. "I've only been trying for ten minutes."

Fury settled down in a subdued silence, no doubt crouching over his monitors like a hunting animal. Charles blew out his breath, swiping a hand over his scalp, and tried to focus again.

Charles didn't normally need to touch people to initiate a mental connection. Indeed, he didn't even necessarily need to be in the same room as them, although it was always useful to be able to get feedback from their reactions. Sometimes, though, it helped to focus through skin-on-skin contact, helped to anchor the link between one mind and another on the physical plane. Charles reached over the metal table and placed his hands on either side of the prisoner's head, settling his fingers lightly on the man's temples, and tried again.

- and the world around him dropped off to insignificance, as the cacophony of heat and darkness and blood and pain painpainPAIN overwhelmed everything.

~to be continued...