"Hank, take a look at this will you?"
Hank vaulted into the sick bay, swinging off the doorframe to land with a thud next to Maddy by the workbench. It pleased her when he loosened up like this – unselfconsciously displaying his mutant agility. It let her know he felt comfortable with her. What didn't please her was the familiar look on his furry face – one of concern and disapproval.
"You should be in bed. You're still weak from the procedure last week." She blew frustrated air out of her nose.
"Hank. I am FINE. You saw yourself, the kidney's back, and working fine. I've spent more than enough time in bed as it is." Hank looked mutinous, but acquiesced.
"Fine, fine. What did you want me to look at?" She indicated the pig's heart on the table before her. It was hooked up to a bypass machine, pumping the blood through it in an eternal loop, oxygenating and de-oxygenating – to all intents and purposes, the heart was alive. At least, alive enough for Maddy's purposes, which all revolved around unlocking the secret of her blood.
Hank grimaced. "Lovely. What am I looking at?" She smiled at his squeamishness. It had been her idea to try pig's hearts, hypothesizing that just because her blood required a living host, it didn't necessarily have to be human. Hank had seemed almost offended on her behalf at the suggestion.
"This is that test environment. The blood is human, sickle-cell. Look what happens when I add my own blood to it." She calmly stuck a syringe full of blood into the heart and depressed the plunger, then stood back so Hank could observe the effects on the blood pumped out of the heart through a microscope. They had both already watched the process a dozen times, watched as the blood cells began to collide, fuse, tremble, break apart and reconvene again, as slowly her blood won the war, and the curved diseased cells began to plump and straighten out. The process began instantly, but usually took several hours to complete. Hank peered politely, then stood back.
"So what?" She grinned.
"Check this out." With a flourish, she pulled a cover off the end of the bench, revealing two more hearts similarly hooked up to bypass machines.
"This one is just like the control heart there – a pig's heart, filled with sickle-cell blood. The other is my own heart, filled with my blood." She remembered how horrified he had been when she had asked him to remove her heart for test purposes, keeping her on bypass until a new one grew back. He had almost balked, until she made it a condition of performing another donation to a sick kid.
"Now watch this." She drew a syringeful of diseased blood from the pig's heart, and injected it neatly into the heart with her blood in it. Hank peered into the microscope. Madeline's blood engulfed the diseased cells, and the disease was disappearing almost quicker than he could watch. He blinked.
"That's weird." She grinned.
"You ain't seen nothing yet. Watch this." She pulled a syringe full of the cured blood out of 'her' heart, and injected it into the 'patient' heart. Hank looked into the microscope… and saw a perfectly healthy blood flow, with perfect, round red blood cells.
"What the hell… how did that happen so quickly?" he asked.
"I know, right? I couldn't believe it myself the first time I saw it. Something happens to the patient's blood when it is in mine – it seems to somehow fuse with or camouflage the mutation, so when it is returned to the host, it heals without provoking an immune response. The time it takes my mutation to heal the host decreases exponentially."
Maddy could hear the excitement in her own voice, tried to calm down. She had been working on this in between procedures for the last six weeks, hadn't wanted to tell Hank until she was sure of what she was seeing. Now she allowed herself a moment of pride as she watched his quick brain draw the dots between what she was showing him and what they both wanted most – a cure for Charles. But then he frowned.
"Maddy, you know there's no way to be sure the same thing would happen with Charles. For one thing, a blood disorder is very different from a severed spinal cord."
"I know that Hank, but the procedure with Charles proved that in theory at least, my mutation can cure his-" Hank cut her off gently.
"Moreover, we can't extrapolate from this to guess at what his immune response might be. It looks like camouflaging your blood through a transfusion of the patient's blood to you in the first instance negates the patient's immune response. But that response in humans has never been strong enough to counteract the beneficial effects of your blood in any case; it just delays matters. Charles's body rejected your blood so powerfully he went into shock. Mutant-to-mutant transfer seems to be violently incompatible. This might not work at all. Just putting Charles's blood into you in the first place might send YOU into shock!"
She was downcast. She had been so carried away with the success of her experiment, these counter-arguments hadn't occurred to her.
"Isn't it at least worth a shot?" she asked, in a small voice. He put a comforting hand on her back.
"Of course it would be, scientifically. But if we've learnt one thing from the original procedure, it's that there's a lot more to this than science. Charles hasn't been the same since the procedure failed. Before you came, he had more or less come to terms with his disability. Now, he's having to go through that whole process again, and he's finding it so much harder. We can't offer him more hope unless we're as sure as we can be that we'll deliver."
Maddy knew he was right; but it was hard to hide her disappointment. Every time she saw Charles these days, the guilt was almost more than she could bear.
The worst of it was how he had to get involved with the successful transplants she and Hank had been performing on human children. Hank would discreetly identify deserving candidates through his old contacts from medical school; the procedures would go ahead, so far without a single hitch. However, then there were the grateful parents to be dealt with, the ones who thought they had witnessed a miracle, who might tell people out there in the world about the dark-haired woman who had cured their dying child. If word got out – if Fiskel found out where she was…
And so they needed Charles, to throw some psychic interference up, to quell the questioning, to take away the memories of the procedures, of the mansion, leaving only relief that their sick child was now well. Although he claimed to be happy to do it, she couldn't help but feel that it was a particularly cruel torture to make him participate in a process he couldn't benefit from himself.
But he will one day. Maddy was determined, if it was the last thing she ever did, that one day she would find a way to give her gift to Charles without killing him. She stiffened her spine, looked up at Hank.
"You're right, of course you are. We can't just go in all guns blazing until we know exactly what we're dealing with here. But can we at least trial it with the humans? Like you said, none of their immune systems have reacted badly to my blood, but it does slow the healing up a bit. Can we try this process next time, see if it decreases recovery times?"
Hank nodded eagerly. "Of course we can. I'm not saying we'll never be able to use this discovery to help Charles. But let's learn more about how it works first."
1 month later
Erik was on his way to the sick bay, a journey he felt he was making all too often nowadays. Madeline was about to go under the knife again, and it had become his habit to go visit before and after.
At first this had been necessary to help her prepare herself – her fear of surgery had still on occasion threatened to overmaster her desire to help, and she had been quite naked in her need for him to be there as the anaesthetic stole her sight, to be there still when she woke again.
He had been reluctant at first – he disapproved completely and openly of this project, cutting up his friend for these humans; humans who couldn't even be trusted to know of the great gift she'd given them, in case they then betrayed her to Fiskel.
But Erik couldn't abide hypocrisy, least of all in himself. If he had been there for her when she was nerving herself up to help Charles, he couldn't very well refuse her now. She was getting into the swing of it at last, with barely a tremor of the terror she'd felt when first consigning herself to Hank's care. In truth, Erik had to admit, she had nothing to fear – Hank monitored her every breath and pulse beat with such assiduity that even Erik's misgivings about her safety were reluctantly resigned. His disapproval now was philosophical rather than practical.
As usual, she was delighted to see him. He liked the way she never assumed anything – although he had reported to her bedside like clockwork for fully five procedures, she always behaved as if his coming was a very pleasant surprise.
"Erik! How are you? I haven't seen you in ages!" He smiled tightly.
"Well, you spend so much time locked away up here. Where's Igor?" She shot him a reproving smile.
"You really shouldn't call him that, you know. At very least, he deserves the full credit of Dr. Frankenstein." Erik smiled, shook his head. As far as he was concerned, there was only one candidate for that role - Shaw. He preferred to characterize Hank as the mad doctor's shambling, inept, apocryphal assistant.
Their relationship, such as it was, had deteriorated so much since their confrontation in the lab that Erik took a perverse pleasure in baiting the younger man, but he hadn't yet drawn Maddy's attention to the continued blazing of the torch Hank carried for her. Although he would have enjoyed Hank's discomfiture, he didn't want to make Maddy's life any more difficult than it was.
"Hank's just sorting out Wilson and his mom. They'll be in soon, and then we can get going." Erik rolled his eyes at the affection in her tone as she mentioned this month's recipient. Erik had gathered that he was a nine-year-old with chronic liver failure. Now Maddy proceeded to fill him in now on far more details than he had ever cared to know – the boy's siblings, his likes and dislikes, even his hopes for being selected for Little League baseball once he was better.
"Why do you waste time getting to know these kids, Madeline? It's not like you'll see them again, not like they will remember you." She smiled.
"But I'll remember them. Sally. Abel. Faizal. Anna. Marshall." For each name, she tapped a scar proudly through her gown. "I'll remember all of their names, their faces. And one day maybe I'll see them on the news, winning a Nobel prize or the Olympic Games or topping the charts. And I'll know that only happened because of me." Erik sneered.
"Or maybe you'll see them on the news blowing up a bus or robbing a bank." She rolled her eyes.
"Don't spoil this for me Erik. I'm doing what I need to to get through – everything that's happened. So is Hank. If you think you've found a better way of dealing with it, just let me know." He winced. She had her point. She always did.
"Fine, fine. I just wanted to check you were OK, that's all." She smiled, her irritation with his cynical approach forgotten.
"That's sweet of you. Don't worry about me. Hank's all over it. I think he's even starting to get bored - everything goes like clockwork, every time. I'll see you after?" He nodded, gave her shoulder a squeeze.
"Always. Be well, Maddy."
And with that, he was gone. It was hours later when Charles came and found him in the Library, a grave look on his face.
"Something terrible has happened, Erik." Erik went cold. Charles was not the sort of person to say such things lightly. Visions of catastrophe passed before his eyes: soldiers advancing on the mansion. Mutant children dragged from their beds screaming. His world, their world, the life they had built together, in flames.
"What is it, Charles?" Tears started in the telepath's blue eyes.
"The procedure. Madeline's procedure – it went wrong." Erik came to his feet.
"Is she- is she-"
Charles shook his head. "Not our Maddy. The boy." Erik sank down into the chair again, put a hand over his eyes.
Just the boy. Only the human. Not her. Charles gave him a wounded look.
"He was only a child, Erik. Don't you have any pity for him, for his family?" Erik looked at him, lost for words. It wasn't that he didn't feel sorry for the boy; but that paled into nothing beside the awesome relief it wasn't her. He looked at Charles, wordlessly pleading with him to understand. Eventually Charles nodded, dashed the tears out of his eyes.
Hank says it happened before they had even really started the process. They had transferred the boy's blood into Madeline's circulatory system, kept him going with a transfusion until they could transfer it back from her to him. But then he had an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic. Hank said they couldn't have predicted it – just one of those things." Charles's voice broke, and Erik wondered at his lover's incredible heart, that he could find so much love inside him to weep for a human boy he had barely known.
"I've had to wipe his parents' memories of this, of course. It felt wrong, but how else could I protect the school? Unauthorised surgery ending in death? No matter that it would have happened anywhere - it would have been the end of us. They're going back to Arizona on the train, in the belief that their son's body has been in the morgue there for some days. Hank and I will have to escort it there in the jet, and see to it that by the time they get there, the relevant authorities think the same thing."
Erik passed a hand in front of his eyes. Charles already had so much on his plate. Couldn't he have been spared this miserable task? Lying went against his nature, and lying about something so tragic as this was going to leave a scar upon his soul. But what else could be done?
Erik knew there was nothing he could say, so he simply went to Charles, knelt beside his chair, pressed his forehead into the side of Charles's face. The stayed that way for a moment, sharing pain, and forlorn comfort. With a sigh, Charles finally patted him on the shoulder in an attempt at briskness. Erik stood up.
"Madeline?"
"She's asleep. Someone should be with her when she wakes, someone she trusts. I'm sure she's going to take it very hard. She really loves those children, every one. I tried to find Raven, but she's off on one of her mystery jaunts again – I never know where she is nowadays." Erik heard the frustration in his lover's voice. Raven had become increasingly elusive since Charles's procedure; Erik had half a feeling he knew why, but he had chosen not to pursue the suspicion. Whatever he knew, Charles would glean from his mind soon enough, and Erik didn't like to think how the telepath would react if Erik was right about Mystique and Azazel. He shook the thought away, took Charles's hand.
"I'll go to her. Do you have to go now?" Charles nodded. Erik thumbed his lower lip gently. "Come home soon, Schatz. Stay safe." Charles turned over Erik's hand, kissed his palm.
"I will, my love. And you stay strong, for her."
Maddy was in the stands at Phoenix Municipal Stadium, watching the Firebirds step out to bat. The whole crowd was on its feet, but Maddy could see everything because she was sitting on her father's shoulders, taller even than the pitcher who Maddy longed to be with every fiber of her being. As the first ball hit the bat, the crack made her jump almost out of her skin-
With a gasp, Maddy sat up in bed. She was alone in the sick bay, and that by itself was enough to alarm her. Even if Erik hadn't remembered to be here, Hank wouldn't ever have left her if he had any choice. And where was Wilson?
She felt strange. Not bad, exactly – in fact, she'd never felt so wide awake, and stronger than she ever had before. But her skin throbbed and itched with nervous energy, and her head felt too – full, full of information, full of the sights and sounds and scents pouring in on her, full of the dream of that day at the baseball field –
That had never happened. She had never been to a baseball game, had never even been to Arizona. The dream had had the quality of memory; but not her memory. It was too imprecise for her photographic mind. And where had been the scents? All of her memories were linked to scents, as was only natural given her mutated sense of smell.
She took a deep breath, and her whole body went rigid. An involuntary moan escaped her lips.
What was that smell?
After almost twenty years with her nose, Maddy thought that she had smelled everything that could be classified as food. Most of it only on the breath or clothes of her captors, of course – until recently, until she had escaped to the luxury of Charles's home, her food had been undistinguished hospital slop. Since she had been free, she had experimented broadly – Charles especially took a great delight in introducing her to some arcane or mundane foodstuff for the first time. She had found she had a taste for fresh white bread, for tea, red wine, peaches, asparagus, and (predictably) chocolate. She had found she loved food, now that she had the chance, the choice.
But she had never smelled anything so appealing as the scent that dominated her senses right now, something savoury, salty, something, something-
Before she'd even decided to move, she found herself standing in front of a steel-fronted cabinet, her chest rising and falling rapidly. Wires were trailing from her arms, and monitoring machines had been pulled over by her passage, lay bleeping plaintively upon the floor. She glanced in brief dismay at the destruction she had wrought, but couldn't keep her attention for long on anything but the scent filling her nostrils, coming from within the cabinet. What was it?
She opened the cabinet, and found herself bathed in the cool blue glow of a refrigerator. The smell was so intense now she could taste it, something rich and unctuous, something, something-
Blood. The fridge was full of blood bags. Her pupils contracted, and she suddenly felt the tips of her teeth on her tongue. Without intending to, she reached out, took a plastic pouch of red liquid in each hand. Now she recognized it, of course she did, but blood had never smelt like this before. She raised both hands up to her face-
"Maddy?"
She was so startled by the voice she jumped, stumbled across the room – or should have stumbled. Instead she found her back against the wall before she could blink, her every muscle tensed for fight or flight. An involuntary snarl leapt to her lips; the blood bags were still clutched jealously in her hands. One of them had split in the strength of her grip; the cold, viscous liquid ran over her hands, pooled on the floor. Erik was standing in the door of the sick bay, staring at her in consternation.
"How did you do that? I barely saw you move. One minute you were over there, and then-"
But although she was watching his lips move, she found she couldn't make sense of his words. The smell was all around her now, taking her over, calling out to her from the pool on the floor, the stains on her own hands, even singing out hotly from under her skin –
Under my skin. Blood under my skin. Not my blood.
She dropped the other bag, breathed heavily through her mouth, tried to ignore the urgent, wordless imperative that took her over every time she caught the scent. She looked at Erik helplessly. He blanched.
"Mein Gott," he breathed. "What the hell happened to your eyes?" She blinked, reached for a scalpel lying on the table next to her. Erik took a defensive backward step. Was he afraid – of her? The very thought made her even more scared herself. What was happening?
With a shaking hand, she raised the scalpel to eye height, looked at herself in the reflective blade. Instead of the familiar forest green, her wary eyes were a deep reddish-brown. The scalpel clattered sharply on the floor as she spun round on him, so fast she almost knocked herself over.
"Erik?" she gasped. "What's happening to me?"