A Villain State of Mind

Chapter 2

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 be 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.