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Methods of Deduction (AU) (TW: dehumanization, torture, homophobia, ableism) (12/?)

[tawabids]

GRB-M-00001 had had no right to guilt him. Henry looked after his mutants, didn’t he? Better than Shaw would have. The memory of how lucid the telepath’s speech was - how impossibly sentient he had seemed - was already fading. So one mutant had learned how to speak; it wasn’t a precedent, it was an exception. And no surprise it was the one who could read minds. GRB-M-00001 wasn’t really aware of what he was saying when he talked, only that he was getting an emotional rise out of Henry. It was a mental trick, like faux-psychics that fed off the audience’s reaction in order to guess details about dead relatives.

That was all it was. A parrot’s trick. Even dogs could be emotionally manipulative. It didn’t make them human. It didn’t make them like him. He, Henry McCoy, was clearly a different order of being. He wasn’t an animal.

He wasn’t.

Not his mind.

Henry was starting to feel a bit stupid that he’d fallen for the trick and released Deu-K-00009 before the board had cleared the decision. Luckily they’d followed his lead, as Moira had predicted they would, and told him that they trusted him not to let another disaster happen. And Henry would do anything to prevent more people being hurt. From now on, every safety protocol would be followed to the letter, every mutant would know their place, and there would be no more secrets or tricks. And if GRB-M-00001 started talking to him again, he’d tell Moira, that’s what he’d do. Moira would figure out what to do.

Feeling better about the whole situation, Henry decided to go back to his office and catch up on his reading.

---

He stayed late that night, giving Moira a grateful smile as she stuck her head in the door and waved goodbye. She waggled her cast at him; it was due to come off in a couple of days, and two of the postgrads had taken to it with coloured markers and turned it into quite the work of art. Henry bade her goodnight and returned to the reviews of his new Searchlight plans.

When he next looked at the clock it was after midnight. He sighed, thinking of the long drive home and the four or five hours sleep he’d get before he had to come back to work. He eyed the couch in the corner, buried under a pile of ring binders and biology textbooks. Crawling under his jacket and sleeping until the cafeteria opened tomorrow sounded like the best plan right now.

Just as he got up to clear the couch, the phone on his desk began to ring. Henry lifted up his paper lunch bag to find it and stared at it for a couple of seconds as if he’d never seen such a device before. Who would be ringing at this time of night? His mother? She only called on Christmas, and only to berate him for working through the holidays instead of coming to visit her.

“Hello?” he said cautiously into the receiver. He was seized by the sudden, bizarre fear that it would be Professor Shaw, deriding him for his lies that afternoon and demanding that he hand USA-P-00020 over for impregnation. But the voice on the other end was Terry’s smoky wheeze. He was the only handler on duty tonight.

“Sorry about the hour, sir. Didn’t know if you’d still be in.”

“Is everything alright? They’re not sick, are they? I’ll call the hospital-“

“No, sir, not sick,” Terry quickly assured him. “But Em-One’s doing something a bit odd. You said to tell you if I noticed anything funny since Deu-Kay got reintroduced, and they’ve been on perfect behaviour for the most part, but now he’s-“

“What?” Henry clutched the phone so hard he could feel his knuckles clicking. “What is he doing?”

“He’s doodling, sir. But I think it’s in his own blood. Thought you’d want to know.”

Henry was out the door almost before the receiver of the phone hit the cradle.