FIC: X-Men: All Wounds 1/2
Title: All Wounds
Fandom: X-Men movieverse
Author: Ghani Skywalker
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Characters/Pairings: Victor, Victor/OFC with appearances by Logan, Stryker, Professor X and Jean
Summary: Victor wanders without purpose after the events of Three Mile Island and meets the one person who has the ability to change his life. Bridges and explains the gaps between X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the three X-Men movies.
He keeps himself hard.
He keeps himself homeless and heartless and hard.
He sleeps under stairs
Along with the heirs of nothing,
And nothing means no one who cares.
- “Stay,” Belly
James remembered nothing. It was in the way he looked at Victor, his stare empty of recognition, of affection or anger. Not at all similar to the way Jimmy had for years willfully denied himself the remembrance of his childhood and, more importantly, what had caused them to flee together into the night. There was just nothing, a blank look of disinterest as Victor sat at the bar beside him. And then something sparked, but it was a pale apparition of remembrance, a mocking imitation recollection that both enraged and wounded Victor. Whatever Stryker had done, it had been drastic and effective.
“Do you know me?!” Jimmy demanded lunging toward Victor as he tried to skulk away down a snow covered back alleyway. He grabbed at the collar of Victor’s duster and, for a moment as Logan spun him and thrust him up against the tin wall of the prefab building, Victor felt the adrenaline boiling up inside of him, his blood pounding through his veins at the barest evocation of a brawl.
And that opened an aching hole inside of Victor’s chest, like a yawning lesion where he always suspected his heart should be. “No,” he replied through his teeth, his sharpened incisors giving Logan pause. Clutching Logan’s wrists in his tight grip, he let loose a feral growl as he pushed his brother’s grasp from his coat. “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
Lies were weapons of weakness, things that men like Stryker used; Victor usually preferred the more direct approach. But the glare he exchanged with Jimmy, the expectation that stood between them unanswered, the hope, broke Victor. Everything he’d done, it had all been for one reason: to bring his brother back to him. Giving Logan those memories back meant also admitting to every act he’d committed in his brother’s name. Was it Logan he’d wanted to spare, or himself?
Victor’s bloodlust worsened, unrestricted as it became; he was sinking into abandon, to a place even Jimmy could not find him, if he had had the wherewithal and motivation to look. But he hadn’t, and that caused Victor to sink more deeply into his sickened, deteriorating mind. Increasingly, he lived like an animal, always returning to the Alkali base as if it were instinct, second nature. He wondered if it was something Stryker had done, a form of encoding that drew him there time and again. Or if it was the knowledge of what occurred, what was done to Logan, what Victor had wanted done to him--all inside those secure walls.
A camping excursion to the Canadian region of Niagara, a group of students innocently stumbling into Victor’s hunting ground. He watched them from a towering pine, crouched like a predator waiting to strike. Three boys, a girl; it was to her Victor was drawn, old appetites reawakening in him. She’s smells young, positively mouth-watering. She’s blonde, fresh-faced, with a wide, full-lipped pink smile and eyes that changed color from pale green to blue in the sunlight. She’s charmingly careless in wandering away from her friends, from the shelter of their campsite.
Victor leapt from his roost, stalking her scent raucously through the wood. The girl was buttoning her jean shorts after a brief toilet break when he came in sight, bounding toward her on all fours. If she ran, he’d give chase; the possibility sent a thrill through him. She didn’t run, she didn’t so much as turn from him. Instead, calmly raising her arm, her palm extended toward him, she commanded him evenly, “Peace.”
He slue to a halt, blinking at her in confusion as a wave of serenity washed over him, clearing the debris of chaos in his bewildered mind and lingering in tranquil, swirling tide pools within him. He spoke then, for the first time in over three years, his voice gruff and unsure from disuse. “Who… are you?”
The girl grinned at him as if he hadn’t just tried to slaughter her and worse, approaching with a slight skip to her step. “Why, Grandma, what big teeth you have,” she snickered and then her face fell into a small frown. She reached out her hand to place it against the side of his head; instinctively, he pulled away, still half-frightened he’d murder this miraculous creature. “I’d tell you I don’t bite,” she told him wryly, “but I’m not sure you’d return the favor. So lost,” she said, her brow creasing, her hand remaining where she’d put it, hovering a few inches from his temple. That same quietude she’d given him before swept over him once more, and with it came composure, repose.
Father is sodden yet again, no astonishment or disbelief there. He’s muttering beneath his breath, pacing like a caged animal confined by the four wooden walls of their simple cabin. To tempt his anger now would be unwise; nevertheless, when he hears him invoke James’ name, his own rage flares. “You leave him be!” he shouts, Father snarling as he grabs Victor by the ear and begins to tow him toward the table where his tools rested.
“Your fault,“ Father grumbles fiercely, tugging recklessly at the boy. “Your fault she hates me. Little freak, little monster. She knows, she knows because of you, because she sees it in you.” Victor struggles but his strength, as considerable as it already is for his age, is no match for his father’s. Taking in hand a pair of steel tongs used for working wire and pulling nails, Father forces Victor’s mouth open. The boy shrieks in terror as the implement clamps down upon his left incisor first and continues screaming as Father yanks his arm back pitilessly.
“So much pain,” she gasped, falling backwards, winded for a moment. “So much… Too much.” Her attention is pulled away from him, and she thinks nothing of turning her back to him, as her companions call her name. She cupped her hands around her mouth as she shouted back, “Don’t worry about me!” At the same time, Victor felt a surge alike the one she had directed at him, but also dissimilar in its intention and headed toward the campsite.
“Birdy,” he repeated her name as he finally felt steady enough to stand, cracking his neck as he flexed, his body grown unaccustomed to these human stances, his mind unfamiliar with the lucid and rational thoughts that were streaming calmly through his returning consciousness. “Don’t you know that big, bad animals like me eat delicate little creatures like you?”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Well, I guess I’m taking my chances then,” she responded. She crossed her arms over her chest. “It won’t last, you know. It never does.” She clucked her tongue, shaking her head slightly as she looked away. “I’m only a low-level telepath, an empath. So, enjoy the dose while it lasts, ‘cause it’s gonna fade sooner or later….”
“No.” The word fled from his throat in a low growl as he lashed out at her, catching her about the neck with one strong hand, trying to keep the grip as gentle as possible though his nails had begun to dig into her soft skin; he brought her close to him. To her credit, she managed to suppress her scream, though her entire body shook. “You have to stay, I can’t lose this.” Composure returned as she sent him with another soothing sensation of ease, her eyes watched him anxiously.
“I can make it so you’re ninety-six percent sure that you had deviant sexual relations with the Canadian prime minister,” she warned, shrinking away from him despite her confident words as he lowered his head, his breath brushing her shoulder.
He grinned, displaying his sharpened teeth, as he chuckled, the sound rumbling deeply, dangerously, within his broad chest. “For a short time,” he pointed out.
“Well, yes,” she conceded, “that’s true. But if you can live with that, you’re a better man than me, boss.”
“Noted,” he replied, amused.
“Okay, so what are we talking about? Like a job?” she asked, uncertain. He nodded. “Well, I am a practical kind of girl--”
“I guessed as much.”
“--And I could use something to do that doesn’t involve me being bored to death at that damned school,” she considered and then smiled brightly. Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, what a yawn. Her parents had sent her there hoping they’d cure her; she’d gone along confident they’d help her to be more powerful. Neither had happened. “I guess you’ve got yourself a deal, boss.”
Victor did what Victor was best at: mercenary work, keeping an air of dispassion around him if he had to make the kill; at first it was a struggle, but with Birdy around, it became shockingly easier and easier until the kill no longer became his prized goal.
He learned rather quickly that Birdy’s main philosophy in life was, ‘Speak your mind, and carry a big damn stick just to back it up.’ And that her gifts weren’t as limited as she’d have some believe; over the years, she’d perfected getting exactly what she wanted with the minimal amount of effort. Victor observed, impressed, as she “convinced” a nasty little black market arms dealer to simply give her one of his M16.
“And you needed that why exactly?” Victor asked her with the hint of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
“You’ve got claws and teeth and that whole terrifying animal thing going for you. Me? I‘m just a helpless little telepath,” she replied, pushing her bottom lip out in a convincing pout.
“Birdy,” he chuckled, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned about you it’s this: you’re anything but helpless. You know how to use that?”
She regarded the weapon in her hand and shrugged. “Live and learn, boss; live and learn.”
Victor was never a team player, never a fan of the team dynamic; companionship was never high up on his list of priorities; people like him, they redefined the term ‘loner,’ for quite a number of reasons. There had always been Jimmy, but he had been family. Still, he came to enjoy having Birdy around. And not just because of her talent and how it influenced him, though that certainly wasn’t a disadvantage.
And her ability went farther than merely pacifying him: for the first time, he truly understood how disturbed and unstable his mind had been, how Stryker had used that, encouraged it, to get what he wanted. But Birdy’s gift alleviated his psychopathic urges, allowing him to see them objectively.
“Jimmy,” he whispered quietly into the darkness of his room, the shadows casting strange and unforgiving patterns between the elusively mocking fragments of light. “What have I done?”
He hadn’t realized that Birdy had been standing in the doorway until she spoke. “The memories I see every so often,” she began quietly, as if afraid to intrude on some sort of sacred mediation, “accidentally when I dose you--”
Victor pounces on James and the two fall tumbling head over feet down to the back of the creek, both covered in dirt and leaves, laughing carelessly. And then Master Howlett is standing above them at the top of the bank, scowling disapprovingly as he chastises James on his choice in recreation and companionship.
He casts a glance over his shoulder as he leads James back toward the house, and Victor cannot understand why all the contempt in the world is held within those commonly gentle eyes. Master John used to be so kind to him, so open-heartened and sympathetic. Father spits curses at him for it, calls him “Soft John”; he says that everyone would be better off if they only learned their place. And Father likes to remind Victor of his place as often as possible: the very bottom.
Victor has learned to be hated, he realizes as his hands curl into fists, his nails piercing his work-hardened flesh; the world is a horrible, harsh place and he hates it! James is his only friend, the only one who doesn’t look down upon him in derision. He’ll understand why soon.
“--I think sometimes that those government people you used to work for did that to you.” He’d told her everything; there was no use in trying to keep secrets from Birdy, especially the big ones. One of the only things of use she’d ever learned at Xavier’s School was how hated and feared their kind was and, while the professor always preached tolerance and solidarity in the face of such violent adversity, Birdy had become more interested in a more aggressively defense stance. Men who used mutants to harm or hunt other mutants, as clearly as she could see and even admire the practicality of it, were among the lowest creatures on the planet, in her opinion. It was like dog fighting, and Victor had been their prized pit bull, starved, worked into a frenzy and set loose.
“Those are my memories,” he snarled, instantly apologetic for his tone. But Birdy understood, recognized his need to hold onto what was left after his mind’s maladjustment settled.
“Probably,” she agreed softly, though personally she would not dismiss the possibility of false or implanted recollections. “They still could have used them as some sort of, I dunno, trigger or something?”
“You give me entirely too much credit,” he said with a contemptuous, self-deprecating scoff. “I’m a bad person, Birdy. I’ve done terrible things. There are no excuses; I’m sure as hell not looking for forgiveness.” He looked down at his hands, his nails growing, extending into lethal set of claws. “I liked the carnage; you could taste it on the air as you made the kill, the blood, all copper and warm. Soft flesh tearing, bone breaking like wood….”
“Your mind was unwell,” she mumbled inadequately. “They exploited a weakness, made you….”
“I did it because I could!” he roared his retort. “Because I had the power to; because there wasn’t anything I couldn’t have, couldn’t take. We,” he corrected himself. “There was nothing we couldn’t have done. Somehow… he walked away.”
He never spoke to her about his brother James, and she never asked; in this one matter she respected completely his privacy because she felt the pain it inflicted upon him. Her fingertips brushed lightly against his muscled shoulder, and then moved to his arm; she was standing beside him. “He didn’t walk away from you,” she told him gently.
“Just what I’d become. What I still am. What I‘ve always been.” And suddenly, he thought about--
The child hanged limply in his grasp; one would have mistaken it for a doll the way its small limbs swung loosely as if there had never been muscle, had never been life enough in those little arms to hug tightly to her a teddy bear or dolly. What had been a simple white dress was now indistinguishable from her blood, her torn and trailing entrails. Her head lolls back on its fragile little neck, the angle unnervingly unnatural.
Victor looks down into her dark eyes, now like glass, her small slack mouth, and he understands: He has just crossed the point of no return and there is no going back. Adrenaline pounds through him like a continuous thunder as he tosses the corpse aside, one of many, another indistinctive, forgotten face on a fleshy heap of broken bodies.
--And Birdy understood that he was sharing it with her, knew that she’d be prodding his mind with her telepathy and forced her to live it with him, as if he were trying to make her see the savage creature he thought of himself as. He considers that memory, that moment in his life, a great deal; with the aid of her ability, he‘d come to comprehend the significance of it. She would have been lying if she said it didn’t horrify or sicken her.
Glaring at her menacingly, his eyes boring into her, he growled in a rumbling undertone that sent shockwaves throughout her, “I could kill you right now. I‘ve killed others I‘ve called friends without a second thought.”
Her mind reached out to his with something unexpected and extraordinary, comparable to what he was used to but with a rawness and an unspoken invitation that she had never extended to him before. “I trust you.”
There were some things about Victor that had remained magnificently bestial; a lucid mind couldn’t alter his animal nature entirely. Birdy couldn’t help a mischievous smile from springing to her lips as she examined the almost sensuous contours of the bite mark on her shoulder in the bathroom mirror, the scratches along the sides of her body. She curled her fingers, mimicking the position of his hand as he grasped her, placing her fingernails against the shallow cuts and giggling.
Stryker was forgotten. Victor was sure there’d be hell to pay for the colonel, if only just for the very public failure of his mutant weapon program; it had almost cost the government their secrecy and Victor was certain that was a far more heinous crime than the methods that Stryker had employed or even the lives lost because of his zealotry. It wasn’t much of a concern; that was the past. Or so he had thought.
Anti-mutant sentiment on the rise; it was the perfect climate for a fanatic like Stryker to reappear, for those who had before shunned him, more out of fear of public approval ratings or denial rather than a true sense of morality, to turn to him. Again, his work was confidential; a free contractor now, he was liberated of militaristic procedure and taboo. And, once more in secret, his gaze was cast toward his favorite soldier, his one loose end.
‘Look at him,’ Stryker thought in with sneering satisfaction, ‘a house pet, neutered by that mind-controlling witch.’ Mutants could be useful tools, as his son Jason now was, but Victor was an animal at heart and Stryker was sure that no collar could contain or command that beast as Jason’s lobotomy had done.
And then there was the matter of the girl. Above all, Stryker loathed and feared telepaths; his own personal experiences had taught him just how dangerous and meddlesome they could be. But she hadn’t sensed him, or she gave no indication of it, and he knew he had to act before she could.
“Hell, mister,” the tough snorted as Stryker placed the money in his upturned palm, “like you even have to pay us to harass a freak.” He stuffed the jumbled of bills in the back pocket of his jeans nonetheless. The locals had had a close eye on both Birdy and Victor, for distinct reasons, since their arrival, and provoking them to action was shamefully easy, especially considering the persecution the two already encountered and endured. They hadn’t planned to stay long. All their plans were about to change.
Victor was staggered by the tremendous wave of terror and pain that assaulted him at once. Over the stale beer and sweat he smelled it immediately, her scent as he’d never experienced it before: terrified. And there was something else. Blood. The men were retreating rapidly out the back alley as Victor nearly tore through the wall to get at the corridor. There Birdy stood, clutching her stomach, a crimson fountain erupting from between her fingers and between her lips.
His roar shook the building to its foundation, his instinct and rage commanding him to follow the men, track them down and bathe in their entrails. Birdy let out a soft gasp and sagged to the floor. As much as it shred his insides to do so, he drove himself to forget the men and gathered her into his arms. The hospital would likely take one look at him and refuse to treat her. He felt helpless, hopeless, as wave after wave of her panic hit him. And then he remembered. They weren’t so far off, a good run, careful not to jostle Birdy too much, would take them about the same amount of time as the hospital would. Xavier’s School for the Gifted was only about an hour away. Birdy had been a student, they helped others of their kind. They’d help her.
TBC
Fandom: X-Men movieverse
Author: Ghani Skywalker
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Characters/Pairings: Victor, Victor/OFC with appearances by Logan, Stryker, Professor X and Jean
Summary: Victor wanders without purpose after the events of Three Mile Island and meets the one person who has the ability to change his life. Bridges and explains the gaps between X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the three X-Men movies.
He keeps himself hard.
He keeps himself homeless and heartless and hard.
He sleeps under stairs
Along with the heirs of nothing,
And nothing means no one who cares.
- “Stay,” Belly
James remembered nothing. It was in the way he looked at Victor, his stare empty of recognition, of affection or anger. Not at all similar to the way Jimmy had for years willfully denied himself the remembrance of his childhood and, more importantly, what had caused them to flee together into the night. There was just nothing, a blank look of disinterest as Victor sat at the bar beside him. And then something sparked, but it was a pale apparition of remembrance, a mocking imitation recollection that both enraged and wounded Victor. Whatever Stryker had done, it had been drastic and effective.
“Do you know me?!” Jimmy demanded lunging toward Victor as he tried to skulk away down a snow covered back alleyway. He grabbed at the collar of Victor’s duster and, for a moment as Logan spun him and thrust him up against the tin wall of the prefab building, Victor felt the adrenaline boiling up inside of him, his blood pounding through his veins at the barest evocation of a brawl.
And that opened an aching hole inside of Victor’s chest, like a yawning lesion where he always suspected his heart should be. “No,” he replied through his teeth, his sharpened incisors giving Logan pause. Clutching Logan’s wrists in his tight grip, he let loose a feral growl as he pushed his brother’s grasp from his coat. “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
Lies were weapons of weakness, things that men like Stryker used; Victor usually preferred the more direct approach. But the glare he exchanged with Jimmy, the expectation that stood between them unanswered, the hope, broke Victor. Everything he’d done, it had all been for one reason: to bring his brother back to him. Giving Logan those memories back meant also admitting to every act he’d committed in his brother’s name. Was it Logan he’d wanted to spare, or himself?
Victor’s bloodlust worsened, unrestricted as it became; he was sinking into abandon, to a place even Jimmy could not find him, if he had had the wherewithal and motivation to look. But he hadn’t, and that caused Victor to sink more deeply into his sickened, deteriorating mind. Increasingly, he lived like an animal, always returning to the Alkali base as if it were instinct, second nature. He wondered if it was something Stryker had done, a form of encoding that drew him there time and again. Or if it was the knowledge of what occurred, what was done to Logan, what Victor had wanted done to him--all inside those secure walls.
A camping excursion to the Canadian region of Niagara, a group of students innocently stumbling into Victor’s hunting ground. He watched them from a towering pine, crouched like a predator waiting to strike. Three boys, a girl; it was to her Victor was drawn, old appetites reawakening in him. She’s smells young, positively mouth-watering. She’s blonde, fresh-faced, with a wide, full-lipped pink smile and eyes that changed color from pale green to blue in the sunlight. She’s charmingly careless in wandering away from her friends, from the shelter of their campsite.
Victor leapt from his roost, stalking her scent raucously through the wood. The girl was buttoning her jean shorts after a brief toilet break when he came in sight, bounding toward her on all fours. If she ran, he’d give chase; the possibility sent a thrill through him. She didn’t run, she didn’t so much as turn from him. Instead, calmly raising her arm, her palm extended toward him, she commanded him evenly, “Peace.”
He slue to a halt, blinking at her in confusion as a wave of serenity washed over him, clearing the debris of chaos in his bewildered mind and lingering in tranquil, swirling tide pools within him. He spoke then, for the first time in over three years, his voice gruff and unsure from disuse. “Who… are you?”
The girl grinned at him as if he hadn’t just tried to slaughter her and worse, approaching with a slight skip to her step. “Why, Grandma, what big teeth you have,” she snickered and then her face fell into a small frown. She reached out her hand to place it against the side of his head; instinctively, he pulled away, still half-frightened he’d murder this miraculous creature. “I’d tell you I don’t bite,” she told him wryly, “but I’m not sure you’d return the favor. So lost,” she said, her brow creasing, her hand remaining where she’d put it, hovering a few inches from his temple. That same quietude she’d given him before swept over him once more, and with it came composure, repose.
Father is sodden yet again, no astonishment or disbelief there. He’s muttering beneath his breath, pacing like a caged animal confined by the four wooden walls of their simple cabin. To tempt his anger now would be unwise; nevertheless, when he hears him invoke James’ name, his own rage flares. “You leave him be!” he shouts, Father snarling as he grabs Victor by the ear and begins to tow him toward the table where his tools rested.
“Your fault,“ Father grumbles fiercely, tugging recklessly at the boy. “Your fault she hates me. Little freak, little monster. She knows, she knows because of you, because she sees it in you.” Victor struggles but his strength, as considerable as it already is for his age, is no match for his father’s. Taking in hand a pair of steel tongs used for working wire and pulling nails, Father forces Victor’s mouth open. The boy shrieks in terror as the implement clamps down upon his left incisor first and continues screaming as Father yanks his arm back pitilessly.
“So much pain,” she gasped, falling backwards, winded for a moment. “So much… Too much.” Her attention is pulled away from him, and she thinks nothing of turning her back to him, as her companions call her name. She cupped her hands around her mouth as she shouted back, “Don’t worry about me!” At the same time, Victor felt a surge alike the one she had directed at him, but also dissimilar in its intention and headed toward the campsite.
“Birdy,” he repeated her name as he finally felt steady enough to stand, cracking his neck as he flexed, his body grown unaccustomed to these human stances, his mind unfamiliar with the lucid and rational thoughts that were streaming calmly through his returning consciousness. “Don’t you know that big, bad animals like me eat delicate little creatures like you?”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Well, I guess I’m taking my chances then,” she responded. She crossed her arms over her chest. “It won’t last, you know. It never does.” She clucked her tongue, shaking her head slightly as she looked away. “I’m only a low-level telepath, an empath. So, enjoy the dose while it lasts, ‘cause it’s gonna fade sooner or later….”
“No.” The word fled from his throat in a low growl as he lashed out at her, catching her about the neck with one strong hand, trying to keep the grip as gentle as possible though his nails had begun to dig into her soft skin; he brought her close to him. To her credit, she managed to suppress her scream, though her entire body shook. “You have to stay, I can’t lose this.” Composure returned as she sent him with another soothing sensation of ease, her eyes watched him anxiously.
“I can make it so you’re ninety-six percent sure that you had deviant sexual relations with the Canadian prime minister,” she warned, shrinking away from him despite her confident words as he lowered his head, his breath brushing her shoulder.
He grinned, displaying his sharpened teeth, as he chuckled, the sound rumbling deeply, dangerously, within his broad chest. “For a short time,” he pointed out.
“Well, yes,” she conceded, “that’s true. But if you can live with that, you’re a better man than me, boss.”
“Noted,” he replied, amused.
“Okay, so what are we talking about? Like a job?” she asked, uncertain. He nodded. “Well, I am a practical kind of girl--”
“I guessed as much.”
“--And I could use something to do that doesn’t involve me being bored to death at that damned school,” she considered and then smiled brightly. Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, what a yawn. Her parents had sent her there hoping they’d cure her; she’d gone along confident they’d help her to be more powerful. Neither had happened. “I guess you’ve got yourself a deal, boss.”
Victor did what Victor was best at: mercenary work, keeping an air of dispassion around him if he had to make the kill; at first it was a struggle, but with Birdy around, it became shockingly easier and easier until the kill no longer became his prized goal.
He learned rather quickly that Birdy’s main philosophy in life was, ‘Speak your mind, and carry a big damn stick just to back it up.’ And that her gifts weren’t as limited as she’d have some believe; over the years, she’d perfected getting exactly what she wanted with the minimal amount of effort. Victor observed, impressed, as she “convinced” a nasty little black market arms dealer to simply give her one of his M16.
“And you needed that why exactly?” Victor asked her with the hint of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
“You’ve got claws and teeth and that whole terrifying animal thing going for you. Me? I‘m just a helpless little telepath,” she replied, pushing her bottom lip out in a convincing pout.
“Birdy,” he chuckled, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned about you it’s this: you’re anything but helpless. You know how to use that?”
She regarded the weapon in her hand and shrugged. “Live and learn, boss; live and learn.”
Victor was never a team player, never a fan of the team dynamic; companionship was never high up on his list of priorities; people like him, they redefined the term ‘loner,’ for quite a number of reasons. There had always been Jimmy, but he had been family. Still, he came to enjoy having Birdy around. And not just because of her talent and how it influenced him, though that certainly wasn’t a disadvantage.
And her ability went farther than merely pacifying him: for the first time, he truly understood how disturbed and unstable his mind had been, how Stryker had used that, encouraged it, to get what he wanted. But Birdy’s gift alleviated his psychopathic urges, allowing him to see them objectively.
“Jimmy,” he whispered quietly into the darkness of his room, the shadows casting strange and unforgiving patterns between the elusively mocking fragments of light. “What have I done?”
He hadn’t realized that Birdy had been standing in the doorway until she spoke. “The memories I see every so often,” she began quietly, as if afraid to intrude on some sort of sacred mediation, “accidentally when I dose you--”
Victor pounces on James and the two fall tumbling head over feet down to the back of the creek, both covered in dirt and leaves, laughing carelessly. And then Master Howlett is standing above them at the top of the bank, scowling disapprovingly as he chastises James on his choice in recreation and companionship.
He casts a glance over his shoulder as he leads James back toward the house, and Victor cannot understand why all the contempt in the world is held within those commonly gentle eyes. Master John used to be so kind to him, so open-heartened and sympathetic. Father spits curses at him for it, calls him “Soft John”; he says that everyone would be better off if they only learned their place. And Father likes to remind Victor of his place as often as possible: the very bottom.
Victor has learned to be hated, he realizes as his hands curl into fists, his nails piercing his work-hardened flesh; the world is a horrible, harsh place and he hates it! James is his only friend, the only one who doesn’t look down upon him in derision. He’ll understand why soon.
“--I think sometimes that those government people you used to work for did that to you.” He’d told her everything; there was no use in trying to keep secrets from Birdy, especially the big ones. One of the only things of use she’d ever learned at Xavier’s School was how hated and feared their kind was and, while the professor always preached tolerance and solidarity in the face of such violent adversity, Birdy had become more interested in a more aggressively defense stance. Men who used mutants to harm or hunt other mutants, as clearly as she could see and even admire the practicality of it, were among the lowest creatures on the planet, in her opinion. It was like dog fighting, and Victor had been their prized pit bull, starved, worked into a frenzy and set loose.
“Those are my memories,” he snarled, instantly apologetic for his tone. But Birdy understood, recognized his need to hold onto what was left after his mind’s maladjustment settled.
“Probably,” she agreed softly, though personally she would not dismiss the possibility of false or implanted recollections. “They still could have used them as some sort of, I dunno, trigger or something?”
“You give me entirely too much credit,” he said with a contemptuous, self-deprecating scoff. “I’m a bad person, Birdy. I’ve done terrible things. There are no excuses; I’m sure as hell not looking for forgiveness.” He looked down at his hands, his nails growing, extending into lethal set of claws. “I liked the carnage; you could taste it on the air as you made the kill, the blood, all copper and warm. Soft flesh tearing, bone breaking like wood….”
“Your mind was unwell,” she mumbled inadequately. “They exploited a weakness, made you….”
“I did it because I could!” he roared his retort. “Because I had the power to; because there wasn’t anything I couldn’t have, couldn’t take. We,” he corrected himself. “There was nothing we couldn’t have done. Somehow… he walked away.”
He never spoke to her about his brother James, and she never asked; in this one matter she respected completely his privacy because she felt the pain it inflicted upon him. Her fingertips brushed lightly against his muscled shoulder, and then moved to his arm; she was standing beside him. “He didn’t walk away from you,” she told him gently.
“Just what I’d become. What I still am. What I‘ve always been.” And suddenly, he thought about--
The child hanged limply in his grasp; one would have mistaken it for a doll the way its small limbs swung loosely as if there had never been muscle, had never been life enough in those little arms to hug tightly to her a teddy bear or dolly. What had been a simple white dress was now indistinguishable from her blood, her torn and trailing entrails. Her head lolls back on its fragile little neck, the angle unnervingly unnatural.
Victor looks down into her dark eyes, now like glass, her small slack mouth, and he understands: He has just crossed the point of no return and there is no going back. Adrenaline pounds through him like a continuous thunder as he tosses the corpse aside, one of many, another indistinctive, forgotten face on a fleshy heap of broken bodies.
--And Birdy understood that he was sharing it with her, knew that she’d be prodding his mind with her telepathy and forced her to live it with him, as if he were trying to make her see the savage creature he thought of himself as. He considers that memory, that moment in his life, a great deal; with the aid of her ability, he‘d come to comprehend the significance of it. She would have been lying if she said it didn’t horrify or sicken her.
Glaring at her menacingly, his eyes boring into her, he growled in a rumbling undertone that sent shockwaves throughout her, “I could kill you right now. I‘ve killed others I‘ve called friends without a second thought.”
Her mind reached out to his with something unexpected and extraordinary, comparable to what he was used to but with a rawness and an unspoken invitation that she had never extended to him before. “I trust you.”
There were some things about Victor that had remained magnificently bestial; a lucid mind couldn’t alter his animal nature entirely. Birdy couldn’t help a mischievous smile from springing to her lips as she examined the almost sensuous contours of the bite mark on her shoulder in the bathroom mirror, the scratches along the sides of her body. She curled her fingers, mimicking the position of his hand as he grasped her, placing her fingernails against the shallow cuts and giggling.
Stryker was forgotten. Victor was sure there’d be hell to pay for the colonel, if only just for the very public failure of his mutant weapon program; it had almost cost the government their secrecy and Victor was certain that was a far more heinous crime than the methods that Stryker had employed or even the lives lost because of his zealotry. It wasn’t much of a concern; that was the past. Or so he had thought.
Anti-mutant sentiment on the rise; it was the perfect climate for a fanatic like Stryker to reappear, for those who had before shunned him, more out of fear of public approval ratings or denial rather than a true sense of morality, to turn to him. Again, his work was confidential; a free contractor now, he was liberated of militaristic procedure and taboo. And, once more in secret, his gaze was cast toward his favorite soldier, his one loose end.
‘Look at him,’ Stryker thought in with sneering satisfaction, ‘a house pet, neutered by that mind-controlling witch.’ Mutants could be useful tools, as his son Jason now was, but Victor was an animal at heart and Stryker was sure that no collar could contain or command that beast as Jason’s lobotomy had done.
And then there was the matter of the girl. Above all, Stryker loathed and feared telepaths; his own personal experiences had taught him just how dangerous and meddlesome they could be. But she hadn’t sensed him, or she gave no indication of it, and he knew he had to act before she could.
“Hell, mister,” the tough snorted as Stryker placed the money in his upturned palm, “like you even have to pay us to harass a freak.” He stuffed the jumbled of bills in the back pocket of his jeans nonetheless. The locals had had a close eye on both Birdy and Victor, for distinct reasons, since their arrival, and provoking them to action was shamefully easy, especially considering the persecution the two already encountered and endured. They hadn’t planned to stay long. All their plans were about to change.
Victor was staggered by the tremendous wave of terror and pain that assaulted him at once. Over the stale beer and sweat he smelled it immediately, her scent as he’d never experienced it before: terrified. And there was something else. Blood. The men were retreating rapidly out the back alley as Victor nearly tore through the wall to get at the corridor. There Birdy stood, clutching her stomach, a crimson fountain erupting from between her fingers and between her lips.
His roar shook the building to its foundation, his instinct and rage commanding him to follow the men, track them down and bathe in their entrails. Birdy let out a soft gasp and sagged to the floor. As much as it shred his insides to do so, he drove himself to forget the men and gathered her into his arms. The hospital would likely take one look at him and refuse to treat her. He felt helpless, hopeless, as wave after wave of her panic hit him. And then he remembered. They weren’t so far off, a good run, careful not to jostle Birdy too much, would take them about the same amount of time as the hospital would. Xavier’s School for the Gifted was only about an hour away. Birdy had been a student, they helped others of their kind. They’d help her.
TBC