"Caducity" (Scott, Charles, X2)

Title: Caducity
Author: vagabondsal
Rating: PG-13ish for pretty heavy subject matter.
Characters: Scott, Jean, Charles, Erik.
Summary: "How do you tell a man who's lived inside his skull for the past seventy years that his mind is rotting away? How do you tell a man that, given time and space enough, his world will sputter out and fade completely?"

"[It was] one of those evenings of autumn when the chilling damps of the air, and the caducity of nature, deepen the gloom of a melancholy mind."

W. Roberts, Looker-on No. 49 (1794), II.231

***

We had to sedate the Professor again last week.

Marie had volunteered to take him his breakfast; with the remarkable resistance to telepathy she absorbed from Carol Danvers, we all thought that she might be able to be near him, at least for a little while. Most of the students can't even stay in the little telepathy-proofed waiting area adjacent to the Danger Room for very long--Jamie got sick the last time he tried, and Rahne starts heaving uncontrollably whenever she's near the lower levels of the mansion.

Not Marie, though; the weaker projections glance off her shields, and the worst ones she bears with an equanimity that's admirable in a non-telepath. Nowadays, she often sits shift in the control booth with me, playing cards and keeping me abreast of student gossip while I monitor the machines monitoring the Professor.

We thought she'd be okay. I thought she'd be okay.

She stumbled out of his room weeping, clutching at fistfuls of Bobby's shirt as he caught her in the circle of his arms. He looked at me with eyes that couldn't decide whether they were angry with me or sympathetic with the clench of my jaw, and took her into the elevator.

That was when I had to tranq the Professor, to keep him from battering at the defenses around the Danger Room till the effort broke either him or the walls fencing him in.

That was almost a week ago, today; as of this morning, Marie still hasn't stopped talking in Greek.

We're trying to figure out who the Professor thought she was. From what Jean's been able to piece together, when Marie walked into the room Charles was thinking about a childhood vacation on an island in the Mediterranean, and a seashell vendor named Magdalena.

***

We have a few helmets that we've cobbled together, headgear to protect us against the Professor's roving telepathic reach. In his dementia, the Professor sometimes mistakes people for figures from his past and--and he rewrites them, so that, for a while at least, they are who he remembers them to be. I still remember the first time it happened to me; the Professor started calling me "David," and before I could gently remind him that I was Scott, not this David he seemed to mistake me for, I was screaming hysterically and accusing him of abandoning me.

The only person who can be around him unprotected for any protracted period of time is Jean. She just might be a more powerful psi than him, now; ever since her resurrection, the maelstrom of psionic energy that swirls around the Professor slides off her shields like the ocean crashing against a breakwater.

It takes a different kind of toll on her, though, to be around him. The doctor in her weeps at her impotence, the telepath in her shivers in sympathy, and Jean's always been stubborn when she's told that there's something she isn't capable of doing.

She tried repairing his mind, once, during a feverish moment of weakness. This was before Hank wrote up the rota and drafted all the other senior staffers into taking shifts monitoring the Professor; before then, I'd brushed off all requests by anybody other than Jean and Ororo for a turn at watching over him.

I had been sitting shift for nearly 72 hours, barely conscious and even then upright only through the forceful application of stubborn pride to my fatigued body, and I would have missed Jean slipping into the Danger Room altogether had it not been for the polyphonic beeping of the computer alert.

I only say this now because it's the only excuse I have for why I didn't notice Jean, and stop her in time.

She knew that his condition was physical, not psychic. The synapses between his brain are degrading, and even if we suspect that the Professor's mutation held the onset of the deterioration at bay, no amount of telepathic nudging now can restore what's been lost. She knew all this--hell, she discovered most of this--and she still tried to glue his mind back together through sheer force of will.

Direct telepathic connection with a high-order psi suffering from a degenerative brain disease is a terrible thing for a person to attempt. Through our link, I felt a little of what rocked Jean, my body shaking in sympathetic agony with hers. I was with her as the Professor's mind wrapped itself around hers like a constrictor, squeezing the life out of her astral form, popping capillaries in her head and causing the veins to stand out flush against my skin as the blood rushed to all the extremities of my body.

I was unconscious for the better part of a day.

Jean was knocked into a coma for a little under a week.

After that, I called Hank back to the mansion. He tended to Jean, saw to it that she was going to be all right, chewed me out something fierce for not sharing monitorship with anybody else on the faculty.

The after-effects of that failed attempt at stitching the Professor back together still linger on. For the most part her mannerisms are all hers, but every now and then, she'll speak--the bending of a vowel around her tongue, the softening of a hard consonant, the patois of her speech changing and taking on subtle colors--and I'll hear New England gentility in her voice.

I wonder sometimes how much else of the Professor still lives on inside of Jean's mind; can that fragmentary Charles think on its own, feel, walk and dance and make love to the echoes of memory dwelling within?

***

I don't know how much more we can take.

Logan made a crack the other day about the Danger Room really deserving its nickname with the Professor living inside of it, and it was only thanks to his preternatural luck that it was Bobby who hit him and not Peter; the older boy had armored up in the split second it took for the rest of us to register what Logan had said, and his fist was cocked and deadly-primed before I could phrase a rebuke.

I don't think Logan really understands why we all walk around as though our clothes were made of sackcloth and streaked with ash. He hasn't been here for very long, even if you discount his on-again-off-again leaves of absence from the mansion, and for him, the Professor is just a man who tried to help him, once. I'm sure he understands intellectually, but the viscera, the wrench in his soul, just isn't there.

More to the point, though, I don't think he really understands how it feels when the Professor looks at us and calls us by names that aren't our own, recasts us in tragedies that only he can watch unfolding; Logan is merely a convenience for him, a signifier, a comfortable space in which the fullness of him rests. Whether we call him Logan or James or Wolverine is immaterial, to him.

Names may have lost all their currency with him, but not with us.

***

How do you tell a man who's lived inside his skull for the past seventy years that his mind is rotting away? How do you tell a man that, given time and space enough, his world will sputter out and fade completely?

***

I think that, on some level, Charles must have always known. After Hank moved back into the mansion, he unsealed all of Charles' medical records for us. The symptoms were there, he said, if you knew to look; Hank said that a man of Charles' faculties would have been aware of the possibility. He should have made provisions. He must have made provisions.

Generally, now, the Professor speaks in one of three or four languages. English, most frequently, but German and Hebrew nearly as often; French and Mandarin a little less. He's free-wheeling through time, living it backwards and forwards and sometimes a step to the side.

Jean and I have arranged a rough chronology of the Professor's life, and instructed all the senior staff in the broad strokes of its construction: undergraduate at Columbia, resident at Johns Hopkins, the years spent gallivanting across the globe like some pulp comic hero. We found wine bottles from Egypt and arrowheads from Papua New Guinea, ticket stubs for the Trans-Siberian Express and a card stamped by pilgrims' stations along the Finis Terrae to Santiago de Compostela.

His life moved like a sine curve, wending its way across the globe.

***

Hank had called us together, in the Professor's study, to tell us what the Professor's diagnosis was. We gathered--Stevie Hunter, myself, Ororo and Kurt and Logan, Sharon and Tom Corsi, the mansion's two human intendants--and waited for him to speak. Through the study's bay windows, we could see the sun fade far off the horizon, and the fading lambent light lent the room a delicate and fragile quality.

He cleared his throat (so tiny an act for so huge a man, an attempt to draw attention away from himself through the intermediary of his massive hand), and turned to address us all.

"The Professor is currently in the extreme stages of an advanced case of senium præcox, more commonly known as Alzheimer's disease."

Ororo broke, a little, and wept in small, shuddering gasps. Kurt moved an arm to cover her shoulder.

Hank averted his eyes from her as he continued. "The changes in Alzheimer's disease are somewhat similar to those which occur with the onset of senility, but advanced at a fantastically rapid rate." He paused, and his voice took on a far-away, thin quality, as if he was reading off some cue card held up only to his mind's eye. "The condition is characterized by a diffuse loss of cells in all layers of the cortex, the onset of secondary gliosis, the build-up of argentophile plaques, and neurofibrillar degeneration." Hank continued like that for several moments, and with each polysyllabic symptom he uttered his eyes lost a little of their luster, a little of their gleam.

Jean cut in, placing a hand on Hank's shoulder. He blinked down at her, as if he hadn't realized that anybody else was in the room until Jean reminded him of her presence with her touch. "We think that the Professor's mutation may have interfered with the rate of deterioration," she said--I recognized that voice, the careful veneer of calm, the neutral bedside manner of tight-lipped and professional Dr. Jean Grey, "perhaps holding it in abeyance up till now. Mutant physiologies have till very recently not been researched, leaving us groping in the dark for the most part; compounding the problem, our genetic structures are all configured so distinctly that it's as if every single mutant is his own case study, his own exception to the accepted body of medical knowledge."

She paused, and glanced briefly at her notes. Through our link, I could feel faint stirrings of excitement at the prospect of delving into the Professor's condition, the cool and efficient machinery of her mind already separating Charles Xavier the patient from Charles Xavier her mentor and confidante.

Sometimes, I hated Dr. Jean Grey.

I can't blame her; it's how she copes. She tells herself that the Professor is just another patient, just another case study waiting to be plumbed for medical significance. It makes it easier on her, and if it sets the hackles of my neck to rise with jealousy that she can so easily parse herself between her selves, well, I'm just glad that it's her that has the easier go of things.

I remember everything they said that night. I remember the treatments that Hank talked about, and the promising new cocktails that Jean mentioned. A colleague from Snow Valley, the headmistress of our satellite school, would be called in for consultation; Emma Frost has had experience with mental trauma, though nothing this severe, and Hank and Jean suspected that the exercises she undertook when she was recovering from a deep and ponderous coma might help the Professor retain what acumen he yet possessed.

I have to remember these things. It's all I can do for him, now.

***

We've advanced the simulation tech in the Danger Room; Bobby calls it the holodeck, and even I have to admit that it's a fairly accurate nickname, now.

Hank and I spent weeks upgrading the room, working frantically to install psi-shields that would be strong enough to bear the weight of the Professor's constant psionic assaults. If it weren't for those notes we found--

But enough. We're through with the notes.

The holography technology is nothing short of uncanny; we can simulate any environment, any sensation, any time and any place. Long-blade fans approximate thin desert winds, computer-regulated air conditioning can call forth crisp winter colds on a moment's notice. We can bring the Professor to the streets of San Francisco, a country fair in the middle of America, any site that's been programmed into the Danger Room computer's vast database. The Florida Everglades, white sand beaches rimming the Pacific Ocean, London and Paris and Rome--we try to give the Professor a trip once a week, to stimulate his mind and get him to concentrate on his surroundings.

He particularly likes it when we take him to Haifa.

***

"You have to do it," Jean said to me in the kitchen one morning, about a month ago. She rubbed my shoulders as I poured a measure of green tea into a fine china service. "The Professor is getting worse by the day. You have to contact him."

She didn't need to elaborate. I nodded, and exited the room with one hand cupped over the brim of the teacup.

That evening, a man in a wide-brimmed hat and long raincoat arrived at the back door of the mansion. He arrived by no visible means of transportation, and the air crackled faintly with electricity in his passing.

Magneto said nothing to me as I took his coat and hat from him. I confess, I'd never seen him in civilian attire; even the few times that I glimpsed him while escorting the Professor to his cell in Langley, the man was in prisonclothes, not charcoal-grey khakis and a knit cable sweater. Without his helmet and his trappings of uniform, he looked old, so very, very old, and more tired by far than I should ever hope to be.

I conducted him through the back ways of the mansion, the unseen paths and hidden corridors that only the seniormost faculty knew about; it wouldn't have done well with the students if they saw the man who many blamed for the Professor's condition walking unmolested through our home.

Eventually, we came to the antechamber adjacent to the Danger Room. Magneto shifted his weight from one foot to the other and cracked his knuckles; somehow, the little gesture was more telling than the fact that the man had flown to the mansion straightaway upon being informed of the Professor's condition.

I hesitated. "Do you--" I waved at the row of helmets occupying the long bench next to the door. "These--they protect you from what he imagines you to be." I knew he couldn't see my eyes, but they slid over and poignantly lingered upon him. "They were designed on certain notes we found in the Professor's effects." Your notes, I wanted to say, your effects interspersed with his in a room he kept secret even from Jean, even from me, your neat and fucking angular handwriting laid astride the loops and whorls of his pen, but I caught myself. This was neither the place nor the time for what I wanted to ask.

He shook his head. "I would not keep Charles at arm's length." His eyes assumed a steely quality, and crinkled a little at the edges. "He will remember me," he said, firmly.

I nodded, though I had my reservations, and keyed in a few commands. The main door spiralled open like a camera's aperture, and irised shut just as quickly after Magneto walked through the portal.

I shut off the audio and closed the bay windows that overlooked the room; the remote Cerebro units we've installed in the Danger Room would alert me if the Professor tried to reach out with his telepathy and latch on to Magneto, but miraculously, the alert system's red light didn't flicker once throughout the man's visit.

I don't know what passed between them during their confessional, only that the room shook, several times, and the acidic stench of ozone burning permeated even the control booth where I waited; I would have leaped into the room at each of the tremors that rocked it, but each time, Jean assured me through our link that the Professor remained unharmed.

I'm not sure how she knew; she's not supposed to be able to feel the Professor through all the shielding we have up around the Danger Room. There's so much about telepathy that we just don't know, Jean's powers are growing geometrically by the day and--

One day at a time.

The two of them stayed in that room for a night and a day and another night, and I didn't leave my post in the control booth the entire time. Eventually, the Danger Room doors opened again (and maybe I really shouldn't wonder how Magneto was able to compel the Danger Room's doors to open on their own accord), and Magneto walked out of the room with his held held high, back forced straight like a poker. He didn't say anything while we walked through the mansion, but when we'd come to the back entryway he laid a hand on my forearm.

"Thank you," he said gravely, after a long moment of eyeing me critically.

I nodded, and turned around and went back into the mansion without waiting for him to depart.

Jean told the students that I was away, conferring with a colleague about a new treatment that might slow the Professor's deterioration. In a sense, I suppose that she was right. The visit from Magneto did more to restore the Professor's spirits and faculties than Emma's mental aerobics routine or the last dozen of Hank's polysyllabic pills. For a couple days after that, he was animated, and actually able to converse with visitors.

He remembered our names.

But in the end, even the arrival of the Professor's--the Professor's--I'm still not sure what Magneto was to the Professor, but I have my sneaking suspicions--even that brief and poignant visit wasn't able to halt the degradation completely. He stumbled, and the little lustre he'd accumulated inevitably began to fade away.

Better to hold the shifting seas back with your hands, than try to keep a man lodged in one moment in time, forever.

***

Yesterday was a good day. He turned his head to look at me when I entered his room.

"Morning, Professor," I said, keeping my voice as light as possible. "You ready to eat?"

He's lost the fine control necessary to project onto us, which was a relief, of sorts. No longer are we players in the Professor's Grecian tragedy; a man around the Professor is still the same man he was walking into the room. Now, though, Jean says that his mind has grown so addled that he picks up stray thoughts and emotions and mistakes them for his own.

We still wear the helmets, no longer for ourselves but for him: to afford the Professor what modicum of dignity we can.

I set the breakfast service down on the nightstand by his bed, and knelt down till my visor was level with his eyes.

"Come on, sir, let's get breakfast out of the way. Then I can take us for a drive in the countryside. Would you like that, a drive in the countryside?"

His milky eyes rolled freely in their sockets, never alighting upon my face for more than a second or two at a time. "David, mein schöner Junge! Wo ist Ihre Mutter?"

So it was to be German today, then, and I was David all over again. "Ich weiß nicht wo sie ist," I said, haltingly; Kurt gives me lessons when he can, but I can't wrap my head around too much of the language. On days like this, the breaks in our communication are as much because of me as because of him.

In a way, it makes the German days just that much easier.

I caught one of the Professor's flailing hands in my own and placed a spoon in it, gently. "Bitte, geehrter Herr, müssen Sie essen." He may or may not have understood, but he gripped the spoon with strong fingers and dipped it in the bowl of oatmeal at my coaxing. "Gut, gut."

I asked Kurt to translate a snatch of German for me, once, about two weeks ago: mein Sohn, mein Sohn, können Sie mir verzeihen?

My son, my son, can you forgive me?

I used to think that the highest nobility was the act of service, of doing good, in the name of a good man. To fight in his name, to dream his dream, to live a life he helped build; this, surely, was the best of all possible worlds.

It's taking the slow and languid death of the most brilliant teacher I've ever had; the inevitable fading away of the best man I've ever met; the dissolution, like a sand castle swept away by a great and heavy tide, of the only father I've ever known, for me to learn otherwise.