Wolverine rubbed the sleep from his eyes, but didn't expect anyone else up at this hour. It surprised him when he saw a dim glow spilling beneath Charles' door and heard two voices—one the Professor's, one Hank McCoy's—shuffle in low tones through the door's eaves.
The voices stopped short. Then, after a pause, one voice spoke a little louder: "Wolverine. Could you come join us, please?"
A small growl rose in Logan's throat.
"I know, I apologize, Logan. I shouldn't have pried. But I didn't have time for niceties."
Logan narrowed his eyes and pushed back the door with a firm fist. "What is it, Chuck? I ain't in the mood for games."
"This is no game."
Charles and Hank looked at him with thinly veiled excitement in their eyes. Both of them were wearing their strongest spectacles while they hovered beneath a small desk lamp. A long list of technical words and brain diagrams burned into an adjacent wood-paneled wall from an overhead projector, and books and papers scattered the office floor as if a small tornado upended the room. Colored flimsies and clear transparencies lay wherever the papers weren't. Logan couldn't remember seeing Charles' office in such a bad state without some enemy doing it on purpose..
"What's the matter? Doin' some redecoratin'?"
"More or less. Please, find a place to sit."
"If you can," Hank amended, chuckling. He swept a mound of dot matrix printouts onto the floor with a blue paw, revealing a chair.
As Wolverine sat, both Hank and Charles went back to whatever it was they were staring at under the desk lamp. To Logan, it looked like part of a plastic brain.
"Why's it so damn dark in here?"
"Hm?" Charles said absently. He stabbed the brain with his pen, and Beast nodded. A slow, steady grin spread across the furry mutant's features. "Sorry, Logan. It became too much of a bother to turn the lights on and off while we studied the overheads. It became easier just to leave the lights off. "It's incredible, Hank. And entirely possible."
"What is?" Logan yawned and rubbed his eyes. He'd been up for practically three days straight, and no healing factor could make up for a lack of sleep. "Lissen, if you two're gonna go on about some tech shit, leave me out of it. I need at least a few hours of shut-eye if—"
"Oh, you'll want to hear this."
The way Hank said those words and the way Charles smiled—like a father about to have his first kid—suddenly brought him to full alertness. "This about Nada?"
Charles nodded slowly. "We may have found an answer. She may have a fighting chance."
Wolverine let out a long sigh. "She'll be able to go home, without any trouble?"
The scientists exchanged glances and their faces fell a little. "Possibly," Hank finally said. "How this will ultimately affect her could take months of study."
"I thought you said she didn't have months. That she has days."
"Not even that long," Hank said with a sigh. "Hours, if we really want to get down to it."
"So what the hell are you so—"
"Wait," Charles said, holding up a hand. "We cannot predict how it will affect her outcome, but we can control the damage she will do on this side of our universe. Hopefully we will be able to control it long enough for her 'jump,' and perhaps the change will be permanent."
Wolverine fought to control his animal side. His anger was just below the surface due to sleep deprivation, and he didn't want to go off half-cocked unless he had to. But they all heard the frustration and anger in his voice.
"Pardon me if I ain't jumpin' for joy, Chuck, but it sounds like all you're tryin' ta do is save your ass, and hang Nada's out to dry."
Again Charles and Hank exchanged glances, and it was all Logan could do to stop himself from kicking the desk over.
"Friend," Hank said softly. "It would take months—perhaps even years—to truly understand the effects of our tamperings on Nada's timeline—"
"I told you," Wolverine interrupted darkly, "this is her timeline. We screw with her, we screw with us."
"Be that as it may, we can't predict with any accuracy what will ultimately happen."
"However," Charles interrupted, coming from the other side of the desk. He placed his hand on Wolverine's shoulder and smiled as warmly as he could, but Wolverine wasn't about to buy the nice guy act. "We have a pretty good idea of how we might."
"Go on."
"It's really quite incredible," Hank began excitedly.
"Naturally, Nada's entire body chemistry runs somewhat higher than our own, due to her Omega status. But one part of her is completely off the charts—and it's absolutely in conflict with the rest of her body. I ran the tests several times to be sure that this situation wasn't part of her natural mutations. I've concluded that it's definitely not in sync with her natural brain chemistry."
Wolverine's eyes narrowed. "What're you sayin'? Plain English, Hank."
The blue mutant smirked. "I'll try... Nada's final growth spurt happened around the same time her mutation came upon the scene. Coupled with the mutant healing factor she received from your genes, her pituitary gland became—well, in plain English, hyper-inflamed. It began a...'poisoning' of sorts of all her metabolic functions. Normally, the natural growth process would have a measured surge of hormonal activity before finally leveling off. But apparently in Nada, her healing factor sees the excesses as an 'infection.' It wants to heal the fluctuation, but her body is fighting her healing factor's process—rejecting it, even. It's that fight—between hormonal imbalance and healing factor— that causes her powers to go out of control."
"Huh. Bigger pain in the ass than usual."
"Quite," Hank said. "But at least we know the cause. Now we're working on the cure."
"Then you can give 'er some pills or somethin' to level her off?"
"I wish," Hank muttered. "But from what little I know of her system, her body would reject my meddling outright and bigger fluctuations would result. Pills will only exasperate the problem."
Wolverine's look darkened. "If you fed her enough of 'em it could override her healing factor for a while."
"I thought about that," Hank said quietly. "But I don't know what an overdose would do to her. That, and I don't know how much of the drug would constitute an outright success. I wouldn't have any room for error. I doubt I'd kill her, but her powers could possibly kill us."
"Then what're you planning? Surgery?"
Hank glanced at Charles.
"Surgery, yes, but not in the way you're thinking," Charles said. "Neither of us are brain specialists. We don't have enough time to find the correct surgeon, and Nada doesn't have the time to wait. As Hank said, we have mere hours. Not even days. And even if we found a surgeon today, this sort of procedure has never been successful. No one would know how to perform it."
"Then what?"
"Hank and I believe that—with Jean's help—we can work together to 'shut down' part of her mind." At Wolverine's look of cold fury, Charles shook his head. "No. It's not what you're thinking. We're only trying to bring a sort of balance to Nada's body chemistry. It's not a lobotomy—it's a new form of surgery."
"Mental surgery. Sorta what you did to Magneto, Chuck? You gonna shut Nada off like that? Cute. Real cute."
"You misunderstand me, Logan." Charles rubbed his eyes. "Please don't compare what I had to do with Magnus with what Henry and I are planning. We believe that the three of us together can mentally alter the route of her neurotransmitters, in effect constricting the output of her pituitary gland. With Hank's medical knowledge, Jean's telekinesis, and my mental augmentation we could create a mental 'blockage' that would, in effect, redirect the neuro-chemicals causing the damage."
Wolverine shook his head. "That sounds too damn dangerous. You're gonna mess with her head physically. You three make a mistake, any mistake, and you could kill her."
Hank swallowed. "True. There's always a risk in any kind of surgery. This included. Perhaps even more so."
"Yeah, I'll bet." Logan rose and flexed his hands to calm the creeping fury inside him. "Jeannie said it, all right: a 'damned lab experiment.' You don't really care what happens to her, do ya? She's just meat to mess around with. Some new fuckin' toy."
"Now, Logan, please. You aren't being fair. We haven't tested our theories, but—"
"Goddamn it, Hank, she ain't gonna be yer guinea pig!" Wolverine's claws slid from his hands. "You fuckin' find another way that won't screw her up, or turn her into a vegetable."
Growling, he headed for the door. On the way out he stabbed through a stack of books and flung them across the room. The momentum of it knocked over the overhead projector and plunged the side of the room into an unsettling darkness. "Wolverine." Charles' voice was sharp; insistent. Logan wanted to go on, but the voice held him. "There is one thing I haven't told you--one thing you must know before you make your decision. Nada's body cannot indefinitely handle this internal war, and unless we take measures to correct it, her system will shut down and she will die. Either way, her life is over."
Logan stood with his back to them in front of the door. His body trembled from barely contained back rage. "She ain't yer lab rat," he murmured. Then he left the room.
~~~ Next Part => ~~~
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