~Los Angeles, Ronald Reagan Medical Center~
Dressed in a straitjacket, David was wheeled into the psychological counseling room by a burly orderly. Due to his previous violent behavior, his movements had to be strictly controlled.
In fact, if not for S.H.I.E.L.D.'s intervention, he would have been sentenced to life imprisonment, or even the electric chair, for the murder he committed.
Sean gave the young man a once-over. This mutant with Omega-level potential was just a skinny pale-faced guy in his twenties, looking as if he hadn't seen sunlight in years.
The most striking feature was his eyes, which were seemingly hollow and muddled, yet swirling with complex emotions.
This time, the person waiting for David wasn't the expected Dr. Kissinger, but a bald old man in a wheelchair and a young man with a gentle smile.
Instinctively, David grew wary...
"Hello, David. I'm Charles." The professor greeted, his gaze complicated.
With just a slight activation of his telepathic abilities, he could sense a familiar aura from David, the chaotic, fragmented brainwaves and rapidly shifting mental patterns.
There was no doubt, David was a psychic. But upon closer inspection, the bald professor's eyes widened in disbelief. In his mental world, the David sitting before him wasn't just one person.
The counseling room was crowded.
Old men, children, men, women... each with different expressions, appearances, and behaviors. Some chattered incessantly, some muttered to themselves, others screamed at the top of their lungs. The cacophony of voices formed a tangled mess of thoughts, flooding David's mind.
"How do you manage this?" Charles asked, his eyes filled with pity.
He had experienced this torment himself and knew exactly how unbearable it was. When the he first awakened his powers, he couldn't control them. Every person's inner voice flooded into his mind unbidden, like a radio tuned to every frequency at once.
For a child, it was pure agony. Beyond the ceaseless noise, the worst part was seeing through the veneer of human hypocrisy... watching people's true, unfiltered selves laid bare.
Parents who pretended to love each other but secretly loathed one another. Teachers who preached lofty ideals while harboring vile, lecherous thoughts about their students.
In his eyes, the world became ugly and filthy.
It wasn't until he turned sixteen that Charles learned to control his abilities. He rarely probed others' minds, likely a result of his traumatic childhood. Seeing humanity's hypocrisy, greed, and ignorance so early had turned him into an idealist, making him retreat into a utopia of his own making.
But David's situation was far worse than anything Charles had endured.
"It's simple. I just think of them all as me." David said with a faint smile.
He knew exactly who the old man across from him was.
"This is Tommy, he likes playing alone with stuffed bears. This is Gianna, she has a drinking problem. Viven, a die-hard heavy metal fan and a total hippie. Cooper, a nihilist with suicidal tendencies…" David introduced each personality as if they were old friends, each with distinct traits and habits.
They operated independently, taking control of his body at random. He added, "I'm doing much better now. I take my meds on time, just like Dr. Kissinger says. The hallucinations and voices are fading."
Sean listened while flipping through David Haller's file. The pale, gaunt young man had displayed remarkable intelligence since childhood, excelling in both academics and sports.
Before high school, David had been the model child; obedient, well-behaved, top of his class. But then he grew increasingly withdrawn, stopped talking to his family, suffered insomnia and nightmares, and eventually developed violent tendencies.
At fourteen, David pushed Philip, a school bully, off the third floor of a building. Luckily, the grassy lawn below spared the boy's life, leaving him with only a broken leg.
After paying a hefty settlement, David's adoptive parents had no choice but to send him to a psychiatric facility. Medication seemed to help... for a while.
What they didn't know was that David had secretly developed a drinking problem. He started hanging with underground rock bands, morphing from a bright, promising student into a delinquent who frequented police stations more than classrooms.
After being expelled, he moved out, living with a pack of deadbeat friends, drowning himself in alcohol and drugs, drifting through life like a hollow shell.
On his twentieth birthday, high on marijuana, David tried to hang himself with an electrical cord. He barely survived, but was promptly committed to a psychiatric hospital for indefinite treatment...
Sean closed the file and spoke softly, "Why did you kill Lenny? From what I've heard, she was one of your few friends."
David's mental state was fascinating. It was chaotic, intricate, and dangerously unstable, like a ticking bomb. Even someone as powerful as Professor X couldn't easily navigate the labyrinth of David's mind.
A normal person's psyche was like a clear road, maybe with a few forks or bends, but ultimately straightforward. David's mind, however, was a shifting, convoluted maze, filled with bizarre thoughts and multiple personalities, making it nearly impossible to decipher.
This was why psychological treatment had done little for him.
"What are you talking about? I didn't kill Lenny! It wasn't me!" David's agitation spiked.
The water glass on the table trembled as an invisible pressure radiated from him, filling the room. The burly orderly clutched his throat, gasping as if the air had been sucked from his lungs.
"David, calm down." Professor X soothed the suddenly erratic young man, his eyes glowing with a gentle light.
The suffocating pressure vanished instantly.
"There's something wrong with his mind. Dissociative identity disorder isn't just from his mutant abilities." Sean said, motioning for the orderly to leave.
As the wielder of the Mind Stone, his psychic prowess surpassed even the professor's in some ways. He was starting to see the problem.
Charles's expression darkened as he watched David retreat into his own world, muttering, "I didn't do it," over and over.
"His mental state is highly abnormal. I need to delve deeper into David's subconscious to find answers." Charles said.
Sean affirmed. He was also curious about how a mutant with Omega-level potential had ended up like this.
The counseling room fell into silence. The three men sat motionless, like statues, their faces expressionless.
Only the imperceptible waves of psychic energy clashed violently beneath the surface, like a storm raging in the depths of the mind...