Continued directly from Part 1/2...

-----



Parts of the next few weeks, I have no memory of, just as there are

parts of my time on the street that are simply erased.  But in this

case, it was the uncertainty of blindness and a powerful grief that

rendered me insensible.  Who had mourned for the dead Mariana, I

wondered?  Had anyone missed her?  Was she buried in a pauper’s

grave?  Even the knowledge that I’d killed the man who’d killed her

didn’t help.  The death of Jack couldn’t resurrect my friend; it only

made me a murderer on top of being a whore.  Some days, I simply

didn’t get out of bed, having no energy to face the chore of making

my way around blind, and I ate little.  It was easier to sleep, or at

least to vegetate.  I listened to the noise of reconstruction

downstairs, the buzz of saws, the pound of hammers, repairing the

damage I’d caused.



To this day, I don’t know how Xavier kept me from being arrested, how

the bodies were explained, or what became of the four goons who’d

survived.  I’ve never asked, either; I don’t want to know.  It was

nebulous, and I was content with that.  True to the promise Jean had

given me, Xavier protected me, probably through highly illegal means.

  But the law isn’t always about justice; it’s about the law.  I

suspect that a few cops had their heads messed with, a few were lied

to outright, and a few knew the truth but kept their own counsel,

glad to be rid of the burden of Jack O' Diamonds.  That his death

would almost surely instigate internecine gang warfare among his

lieutenants . . . well, that was the way of the streets.  But the new

alpha wolf would be weaker, with less influence and fewer contacts,

and the police were happy with that.  Sometimes, one must settle for

the best one can hope for.



That was the lesson I was learning.  The best I could hope for.



Xavier had hoped that my manifestation would be a cause for

celebration.  I learned many years later that he’d had a private

dream all his life of making the manifestation experience of at least

one child a time of joy and fulfillment, not fear and uncertainty and

self-loathing.  He’d planned to throw me a *party*.  But no one had

anticipated the fatal devastation of my power’s genesis.  I suppose,

in a perverse way, I was lucky.  Given my dicey mood at the time, I

could just as easily have blown my top at Jean, or Warren, or Hank,

or even the professor, and my power might have manifested against one

of *them*.  That, I couldn't have borne.



I was the first energy converter Xavier had ever seen.  Erik

Lehnsherr manipulated magnetic energy, but didn’t convert it.  Hank

and Warren had physical mutations, and Jean’s was like Xavier’s --

psionic.  But my body was one giant solar battery.  Apparently, I

have a tertiary system right alongside my circulatory and limbic

systems that absorbs solar radiation through my skin, then conducts

it to part of my brain that converts it into concussive force that's

emitted back out through my optic pathways.  Why the eyes, I have no

idea, though I suppose if mine worked right, it'd target and fire

instantaneously, with no need for eye-to-hand coordination.



But of course, it doesn't work right.



None of us knew that then, and almost the first words Xavier said to

me on the morning after I'd blown up his mansion den were words of

reassurance, not rebuke.  "Most young mutants have to learn to

control their powers, Scott.  Warren couldn't immediately fly, Hank

couldn't immediately climb walls, Jean couldn't immediately control

either her telepathic shields or her telekinesis.  But they learned.

In my experience, just as babies are born with an instinct to pull

up, to crawl, and then to walk, so each mutant is born instinctually

knowing the proper way to manage his or her powers.  You'll have to

trust yourself."



But two weeks later, the news was different.  It took that long, and

that many failed attempts by me to command the beams, to reach the

conclusion that there was something seriously wrong.  My old medical

file, sent by Children's Hospital in Omaha -- where I'd spent five

months in a coma after the accident that had orphaned me -- only

confirmed what they'd begun to suspect.



It was a Thursday afternoon in mid-April, and I could hear the sound

of rain striking my window.  April showers bring May flowers, but I

was beginning to fear I'd never see them.  Xavier came motoring into

my room where I lay alone on my bed as I often did, listening to

music.  Music had replaced books.  Though Jean and Warren read to me

sometimes, Jean was still in class and Warren had other things to do

than entertain me.  I had my CD collection.  I'd come up with a

marking system on the jewel case spines that let me sort them

according to type, and with Warren's help, we'd alphabetized those.

I had a good memory for what I had, but it still often took three

tries before finding the one I was after.  Strangely, I resisted

audio books, as if borrowing them from the library would be an

admission that this state wasn't temporary.



Now, I could hear the whine of the professor's chair even over the

earphones.  I'd become extremely sensitive to sound and the

disturbances of air in a room.  It was hard to surprise me, blinded

or not, and I removed the earphones, sitting up and turning my face

in his general direction.  The professor rarely came to my room, so I

figured he had important news, but he began with small talk.  "What

are you listening to?"



"Bimbetta -- 'The War of Love.'"  Despite the group name and album

title, the music had been composed by Frescobaldi, Purcell and

Monteverdi.  Hank's fault.  I'd never like his opera, and composers

such as Wagner and Tchaikovsky drove me insane with their bombastic

style, but I'd discovered that I enjoyed early modern and baroque

very much -- the clarity of it.  It pierced my soul in a way that

later classical music didn't.



"Have you ever considered joining a chamber ensemble, Scott?"



"*Me*?"  The idea struck me as absurd. "What for?"



"Every now and then, I've had the pleasure of hearing you sing to

yourself in the kitchen.  You have a fine ear and nice tenor."



That embarrassed me.  I hadn't been aware that anyone had been

listening.  "I can't read music," I blurted.   "Not that it matters

now."



Normally when I made remarks like that, Xavier would admonish me

with, "It's just a matter of time until you learn to master it."

That afternoon, he didn't.  Instead, he moved his chair closer and I

felt his hand rest on my knee.  In another place and time, I might

have construed it as a come-on.  "Henry is finally finished with his

comparisons of your old medical charts to what data we can glean

now."



Xavier's tone told me that whatever they'd found wasn't good news.

"Apparently, your effect on medical equipment isn't new."  All those

fancy machines in the medbay didn't like my body much.  X-Rays came

back entirely white; MRIs and CAT scans were nearly indecipherable.

"But the effect seems to have been intermittent when you were

younger, so they did have several brain scans.  You suffered severe

injuries in the fall from the plane:  multiple pelvic fractures, two

broken legs and one broken arm, plus internal injuries -- it's a

miracle your back wasn't broken.  You also had fractures to both

shoulder blades and the rear of your skull."



All the damage he listed was old news.  Involuntarily, I touched a

spot behind my ear where one of the scars lay from the holes they'd

been forced to drill to relieve the pressure on my bruised and

swelling brain.  I'd always worn my hair longer to cover them.



"It seems the severe concussion that partly accounts for your lengthy

period of convalescence did damage to the occipital lobes of your

cerebrum.  One of the doctors even wrote in your chart at the time

that if you did regain consciousness, it was possible you'd suffer

from vision problems or reading-related dyslexia of one stripe or

another."



That, I'd never been told.  "My sight's always been fine.  Better

than fine.  Except for the sun headaches -- but that's new.  And I've

never had trouble reading."  That was an understatement.



"Yet the damage is clear, according to Henry."  Xavier hesitated,

then said, "He thinks the damaged part of your brain isn't the part

that controls sight or reading comprehension, but the part that would

have controlled your mutant power."



He stopped, but it took a moment for the import of his words to

register.  "You mean I *can't* control it?"



"We’re beginning to fear that's the case.  As you know, scans of your

cranial area are only nominally useful, but the MRI, at least, gives

enough data that Henry can pinpoint the damaged section when he

compares it to MRIs made at Children's Hospital nine years ago.  It

does show up a different color, which seems to reflect less

activity."



"It's dead, you mean."



"Not dead, merely damaged.  Obviously, part of the area still

functions, or your mutation would never have manifested at all."



I pulled in my legs against my body and wrapped my arms around them,

chin on knees.  I didn't say anything for a while and Xavier didn't

press me.  "So what does that mean?" I asked finally.  "I'm going to

be blind forever?"  Or effectively blind, as my sight destroyed

whatever I looked at.  For the past two weeks, uncertainty had driven

me into increasing depression, but now I had the very truth I'd

feared the most.  "I *hate* it," I said now, ready to scream with

rage, though I refused to lose control like that.  "I *hate* being

helpless like this!"



"I know."  Xavier's voice was soft and I could hear him shift in his

chair; that gave me pause.  If anyone at the mansion understood what

it was like to be told "never again," it was the professor.



"How do you stand it?"



He seemed to follow what I was asking, but then, of course he would.

"Time," he replied, his voice gentle.  "You adjust, relearn . . .

But Scott, it is still very early.  We have only just isolated the

problem, and there may yet be a way around this.  Please do not give

up hope."



Unsure of what to think, I pressed one hand over the blindfold

secured across my eyes, there to help hold them shut as much as to

remind me not to open them.  Fear suddenly filled me.  "What'll

happen if there's no way around it?  Can you sew my eyes closed?  Or

just take them out?"  Could they even do that without my blasting

through the medlab roof?



"Absolutely not!" Xavier's tone was shocked and -- I could tell --

deeply upset.  "I would never permit you to be mutilated, Scott.  We

can't know what the future will bring.  I don't want you even to

think about damaging your eyes permanently.  Promise me that you'll

attempt nothing drastic."



The emphatic nature of Xavier's concern took me by surprise, but I

said, "Okay," intentionally vague about what I was agreeing to.



He left me then, and I lay down, sleeping through until early

afternoon the next day.  Once, Warren came by to sit with me a while,

though he said nothing.  I was too depressed even to cry, but his

presence was the bulwark that I'd come to associate with him.



Deprived of sight, I'd developed new ways to see my friends.  Warren

had become the wall that enclosed and protected me, just as he did

sometimes with his wings.  He was scrupulously careful when I went

walking with him, warning me of everything in subtle ways that spared

my dignity; accidents rarely happened with Warren, and the few times

he failed to warn me fast enough, or I failed to listen, one of those

great wings would snap out to brace me or keep me from jeopardy.

That, I thought, was Warren's nature.  Maybe he'd taken the whole

'guardian angel' thing to heart, but it was just the foundation of

his personality.  He was a protector, a defender of those weaker than

him.  He embodied the absolute best of the old aristocratic ideal of

social obligation.  With power and resources came responsibility.



Hank was my educator, now no less than before.  If the professor

taught my classes, Hank taught me that the heart of learning is a

spirit of adventure.  For him, there truly were no stupid questions

except the one that went unasked, and if he sometimes seemed

childlike, it was because he'd never fallen into the sin of a

cultivated apathy.  From Hank I learned to enjoy life, whether

sighted or blind.



One day while running errands for the professor (an attempt both to

get me out of the mansion and to force me to function blind in

public), Hank pulled off the highway unexpectedly, parked the car,

and led me across a field.  I wasn't at all sure where we were beyond

someplace with a lot of squealing kids.  Then he halted, took away my

cane, and placed my hands on a set of what turned out to be monkey

bars.  "Climb, Scott."



"I can't fucking *see*!" I snapped back.



"You don't need to see, you only need to feel.  I won't let you

fall."  And he didn't.  By the end of the afternoon, I'd been on

every toy the yard had to offer and had even caught myself laughing a

time or three.  What the children thought of two grown (or nearly

grown) men playing on monkey bars and slides, I have no idea, but no

one said anything to us.



Thus, when a few days later Hank arrived at my room with a handbook

for Braille, braille flashcards, a braille keyboard and voice

recognition software for my (unused for four weeks) computer, I

didn't snap his head off.  "You love to read, Scott.  There is

absolutely no reason to deprive yourself of that joy."  Other things

Hank brought included a currency scanner, a talking calculator, and a

hinged-face pocket watch for telling time by touch.  So I sat down

that evening and began to memorize letters.  When I got my sight back

a month later, I kept it up anyway.  Today, I read American Literary

Braille fluently, and still use a braille keyboard.  It's not an

affectation.  I'm at the mercy of my glasses or visor; without them,

I am blind.  And I refuse to be helpless.  Besides, by the end of the

day, their weight can give me a headache.  It's a relief to take them

off and read a book by touch.



Touch.  What the blind can't do without, and what I had the most

difficulty accepting.  If Warren was my bulwark, and Hank my teacher,

then Jean became my open door.  It had been Jean who'd come after me

that first night in the rain, who'd dragged me bodily back to land,

and who, even before that, had taught me to accept a touch or embrace

without flinching.  She still touched me afterward, despite what

she'd learned of my past, as if she knew how much I needed the

reassurance of human contact.  There was an added benefit -- when she

was touching me, I could see.  It proved, however, to be a

double-edged sword.  When I saw, I saw through her eyes, not my own,

and the result was a tendency to misjudge distance.  I ran into

things.  With more time, I might have learned to adjust, but Jean

could only visit on weekends and about a month into my blindness, I

realized that it was neither fair to be her visual parasite, nor

useful.  It only fostered dependence, which I despised.  So I told

her that I'd accept the gift of sight only occasionally.  She didn't

press the matter, but when she was around me, she was always touching

me.



And thus I didn't associate Jean with sight, but with the warmth of

skin and an enthusiastic grip.  She grounded me, dragged me back to

the shore of social companionship.  I wasn't an island in a blind

lake.  Strangers who saw us probably assumed we were lovers, but it

was never that kind of touch, not then, though I have no doubt that

my complete ease with the feel of her body bled later into the

sexual, not merely the sensual.  At that point, she was simply my

door.  I passed through her back into the human race.











For convenience, I say I was blind for two months.  In fact, I was

blind for seventy-one days.  I lost my sight about midnight on March

29th and regained it fully on June 8th.  But the process started

weeks before that, and like most important discoveries, it happened

quite by accident.



'Try it again, Scott.'  'Concentrate, Scott.'  'Isolate the feel of

the beams themselves.'  'Experiment with contracting and releasing

the muscles of your eyes.'   Probably all good advice, if things had

worked right, which we eventually discovered they didn’t.  In those

first weeks, I tore up a lot of lawn, a few trees, and probably

confused a number of locals with the ‘laser show’ in the sky up at

Xavier’s estate.  The difficulty with learning to control my powers

(even if they *had* worked right), lay in their sheer

destructiveness.  I could dig a twenty-foot trench in seconds, and

seconds isn’t long if it’s all new and you’re trying to get a sense

of how it feels.  Aiming at the sky gave me more time, but I couldn't

really determine relative force because the beams weren’t striking

anything (we hoped).  The end result was that I usually stormed off

inside half an hour, upset and frustrated past bearing.  I was a

walking weapon, my body good for nothing except destruction.  It was

hardly the mutant gift I’d have chosen.  Warren got to fly.  I got to

punch holes in things.



About four weeks after my beams first manifested, Hank and the

professor took me out to a corner of the estate that sported a

shallow cliff of exposed granite, hoping that by trying my beams

against such hard rock, I'd have more time to feel them.  The

professor still thought my lack of control might be 'mutant dyslexia'

rather than an entirely dysfunctional 'on-off' switch.  (It isn't.)

And Hank was trying to discover if the density of an object had any

containment effect.  (It doesn't.)  They'd had no idea just *how*

much force the beams wielded, but when I drilled a hole twenty-five

feet deep in the side of that cliff in ten seconds, they realized my

'optic blast' was a whole order of magnitude stronger than they'd

thought.  They also made a startling discovery.



The igneous granite had been riddled with veins of brown tourmaline

and one massive deposit of SiO 2 -- silicon dioxide, or quartz.  In

this case, rose quartz, common to New York and Connecticut.  The hole

I'd made was clean-drilled, slicing through both granite and

tourmaline, but leaving half-exposed that clump of raw, glittering,

tectosilicate pink.



Rose quartz is my friend, so I've read a lot about it.  The name

comes from the Saxon word 'querklufterz,' and the mineral has

traditionally symbolized love and beauty.  Romans believed it to be a

fertility aid, it's the gemstone of the zodiac sign Libra, and South

Dakota's official stone.  Yet in terms of geology, it's . . . quirky.

  First, unlike all other forms of quartz, it rarely occurs in

hexagonal prisms, only massive chunks.  There's no scientific reason

for this.  Second, no one is entirely certain what gives it the

distinct color.  Mineral impurities, yes, but *what* impurities?

Iron and titanium used to be thought the culprits, but more recent

X-ray defraction tests suggest it's a previously unknown fibrous

mineral related to dumortierite.



Whatever it is, it likes me, or my beams like it.  A few more tests

were conducted before they said anything, but on the five-week

anniversary of my manifestation, Hank called me outside, sat me in a

chair and told me to open my eyes.  Still docile in my depression and

used by now to being a guinea pig, I complied.



In front of me, I saw a wall of pink as the beams lanced out.  They

struck the wall -- and *disappeared*.



It startled me so much, I jumped to my feet, knocking the chair over

backwards and blasting part of the lawn before I snapped my eyes

shut.  "What the hell just happened?  What *is* that stuff?"



"Rose quartz," Hank said, sounding very pleased with himself as he

righted the chair and guided me back down into it.



"Is it still in front of me?"



"Yes."



I opened my eyes again to the same astonishing result.  The beams

disappeared into the crystal -- mostly.  A bit leaked around the

edges, and I asked, "Are you sure this is safe?"



"As long as you don't shift your head much, we should be fine.  Move

in closer.  I want to see the approximate width of the beams at close

proximity."  He didn't explain why and I was still too amazed to ask,

just pressed my nose to the quartz.  It was the gemmy kind, milky and

opaque, like looking into a pink cloud.  I could pick out the threads

of it, capillaries under fair stone skin, and caught Hank in my

peripheral vision moving about beside me, taking careful measurements

with calipers.  Everything was tinted red, but what I noticed most

was the sensation of the beams releasing.  Before, the longest I'd

held my eyes open had been 20-30 seconds, but now, almost a full

minute had passed and the sensation had gone from a sudden thrust to

a steady pressure, not at all painful.  Vaguely erotic, in fact.  It

had given me a partial hard-on and realizing what was happening, I

shut my eyes.



"What's wrong?" Hank asked.  "I wasn't quite finished."



"Sorry."  I swallowed and concentrated, trying to make the erection

go away, but of course, and perversely, concentrating only made it

worse.  One's mutant gift wasn't supposed to be a turn-on, was it?

But the unexpected power of it, pouring out of me, felt bright like

ejaculation.



I opened my eyes again and concentrated on feeling the beams.  I

could master this.  My body didn't rule me, dammit.  After a few

moments, the sensation faded into physical background noise.  Hank

finished his calibrations and the blindfold went on again.



Thus began steady days of experimentation.  Having something positive

to concentrate on, I could drag myself out of bed in the morning.

(Well, late morning.)  I didn't want to think about my present

blindness, my unsavory past, or dead people -- Mariana, Jack . . . my

family.  I only wanted to think about rocks.  Hard, crystalline,

impassive rocks.



Henry hallowed out a practice mask for me from the rose quartz I'd

accidentally excavated from the hillside.  The whole block had been

ten inches by twelve, exceptionally large.  He created a shallow bowl

that curved over my face from chin to forehead and around to my ears.

  I had to hold it there, and it was heavy, but it gave me something

to work against that didn't explode.  I found that if I couldn't shut

off the beams, I *could* control the power of their impact by pushing

or relaxing, and I could vary their size by widening or narrowing my

eyes.  As we moved the mask closer to and away from my face, we could

measure the beams' dispersion and project the width of the ray.

Using the left-over quartz, Henry also began testing how thin the

sample could be before it cracked under impact, and determined the

effects of varying the aperture in the quartz.  If the slit were long

and narrow enough, the beams were pushed together until they made a

single blast.  I wasn't sure what the point of all that was, but Hank

was about six steps ahead of me.



Experimentation proved that any type of rose quartz was resistant,

but the thickness required to block the beams before the sample

shattered depended on its impurity level -- suggesting it was the

mysterious 'something' in rose silicon dioxide that absorbed my

power.



In short, the darker the gemstone, the thinner it could be.



That presented a problem.  Unlike other varieties of quartz,

high-grade transparent rose crystal is damn rare, and most comes from

Brazil.  It's pale, too, with fewer impurities, and thus, less

resistance.  No piece of natural transparent stone is strong enough

to withstand my beams, yet still be thin enough that I could see

through it.  Hank's solution?  A synthetic.  Synthetics, like

cultured pearls, are real, just artificially created.  The quartz

used for my visors and glasses is lab grown, stabilized, and then

enhanced by irradiation -- creating perfect, flawless crystals with a

high level of mineral impurity, making it deep pink.  Hank calls it

'ruby quartz.'



I remained intensely interested in the entire process, as it gave me

something intellectual to latch onto, a raft in an emotional sea.

I'd been drifting.  Even so, science isn't a steady march forward.

For every breakthrough that Hank made, he ran into another problem,

yet he was determined to find a way for me to see again and spent

hours in his lab, even though he was also juggling residency

rotations.  "Why are you doing this?" I asked him once.  "I got you

shot, almost killed."



"Don't be ridiculous.  The bullet merely grazed my shoulder.  And

*you* did nothing."  I could hear his motion cease.  He'd been

polishing yet another stone.  "Listen to me -- you must cease to

blame yourself for the actions of a hardened criminal, Scott.  Yes,

perhaps you erred in returning to visit your old roommate."  By now,

they all knew how Jack had gotten my cell number.  "But it was an

error, and a *compassionate* error, at that.  Would that all of us

made mistakes of that kind.  Let blame fall on the right shoulders --

and they aren't yours."



I heard him out, but maintained my doubts.  Instead, I said, "That

still doesn't explain why you're helping me.  Every spare hour you

don't spent at the hospital, you're down here playing mad alchemist."



I could hear the smile in his voice.  "I delight in a challenge, and

this is a massive challenge."  Then he grew serious.  "But more than

that, you belong to this little mutant family, Scott.  Your burden is

my burden, and in this case, it's a burden I can do something about.

So I am."



I pondered that, remembering what Jean had said to me on the night

she'd come after me -- that she admired how I noticed and did things

for people.  I'd replied that it was all I had to offer.  And it was

-- but I'd been looking at it wrong, as a payment, not a gift.  We

each had something to give.  Mine was noticing things.  That

encompassed who I *was*, though I'd never thought of myself in those

terms.  Always before I'd been an orphan, a runaway, a street-kid, a

hustler . . . a problem.  But I was also a shepherd of sorts, an

organizer, and -- if Xavier could be believed -- a budding tactician.

  I saw patterns in things, how they held together, and what was

required to make them work.  Hank's gift was ingenuity, Warren's was

compassion, Jean's was enthusiasm, Xavier's was vision, but I was the

glue that held them all together.



I liked that thought a lot better than being a whore.



Three days later, Hank caught me in the kitchen on a Sunday morning.

It was brunch; Warren, Jean and I were quarreling over whether

pancake syrup should be hot or cold (surely a topic of epic

importance), when Hank burst through the door, shouting, "*Eureka!*"



"Whathefuck . . .?"  I heard a loud clatter as something fell.

"Don't scare the shit out of me like that!" Warren snapped,

presumably at Hank.



"What is it?" I asked, frustrated yet again at my blindness.



"War dropped his plate of pancakes," Jean explained



"Forget the pancakes!"  I heard Hank bound over to undo my blindfold

and put something else on my face instead.  It was heavy and cold,

like metal, and it fit snug over my ears and across the bridge of my

nose.  "Wholah!  Open your eyes, Scott!"



"Are you fucking crazy?  Not in the house!"  I'd been through a

couple of Hank's experiments before, enough to be cautious.



"Okay, so let's go outside."



"Shouldn't the professor be here?" Jean asked.



"I don't know --" I began even as Hank said, "Yes, yes!"



So Xavier was summoned from where he'd been taking quiet time in his

office, and we all exited the kitchen's servant door, Jean guiding me

by the elbow.  I tried not to think while we trooped out onto the

lawn beyond the herb garden.  This would probably be another failure;

no reason to get my hopes up.  When we stopped, Hank said, "Open your

eyes, Scott!"  And cautiously, I cracked them a little inside the new

contraption on my face.  Nothing happened.  No exploding quartz, no

deadly optic blasts.



It was marvelous.



Everything was red and distorted and dark, even outside at near noon,

and the visor itself lay heavy and uncomfortable on my face.  But it

was marvelous.  After months of blindness, the power of vision felled

me.



Dropping to my knees, I whispered, "I can see."



--------------



Notes:  Thanks to Cyclops&Phoenix, especially Lelia and Naomi, for a

long-ago discussion of Scott's injuries and the discovery of his

glasses.  Heatherly read a draft and offered insight.  Bimbetta is

http://www.bimbetta.com/ -- "a blend of cabaret, Commedia Dell'Arte,

and MTV Unplugged."



Feedback is always welcome.





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