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xp_logs2005-12-02 11:18 am
x-cable.livejournal.com) wrote in xp_logs2005-12-02 11:18 am
Skeleton Coast: Harmattan Winds
Friday. Nathan, Pete, Cain and Alison arrive at the Eris camp outside in the desert. The Eris personnel immediately decide that high-tailing it for the mountains is the best course of action. Still, there's a Domino who needs finding, and splitting up is the order of the day. Alison, though she doesn't find Domino, makes some headway of a very unexpected sort.
It was amazing how easy it was to make one's way inside an enemy camp when people were so busily intent on leaving. Having almost more silver than blonde in her hair (dammitall) seemed to be of some use as well, as one of the men bustling about hurriedly had actually paused to open a door for her, all the while never pausing to actually look at her face.
Dammit!
Keeping an iron grip on the cane and reminding herself that beating any of the people here about the shoulders would only lead to people assuming she was indeed an old lady, Alison continued towards the main building, ignoring the car that squealed it's way around her (with a shouted "Sorry ma'am!" in the process) in favor of keeping an even pace. She supposed she ought to be grateful, she reflected while climbing up the steps to the old bunker, that no one was shooting at her. Instead of feeling all crochety about people thinking she was old. Older. The wrinkles were all gone already and you'd think they'd know better, but no, all it took was a bit of silver in one's hair and a cane…
The door was flung open and Alison paused, nearly nose to nose with a young man who immediately bounded back. Any nose to nose possibilities faded as the man stretched up (taller by more than few inches) then fell into a defensive pose while cradling a portable carefully with one arm, apparently recognizing her well enough from the look in his eyes.
"About time," Alison grumbled to herself, stepping inside and closing the door so as to not distract any of the helpful people outside from their evacuation.
It just wouldn't do to be rude, after all.
"Hi!" She beamed at the man, a near white-haired, blue eyed and handsome enough creature, sharp features and easy motions keeping him well out of her reach. Well, her physical reach anyway. He blinked a bit as he noted the amused look in her eyes, the realization striking him as well in the following instants. "Yeah, the whole laser thing. That's for me, isn't it?" She pointed at the portable he'd been trying to hide behind his body and nodded wisely.
"You can't have it, ma'am," he said, apparently trying to figure out a way to somehow teleport himself out of the room while plotting out various ways to knock her out and run off. Or something of the sort, she assumed.
"Well, actually see… I was going to suggest you just hand it over and we skip the whole fight thing," she said charmingly. Or so she thought anyway.
"…er, why?" The whole lasers thing obviously hung in the air between them, though he still gave the cane Alison was leaning on a pointed look. And wisely forbore to point out the streak of silver in her hair in a similar fashion, thus ensuring his ability to propagate one day. Still, Alison decided not to re-iterate that point about the lasers. Yet. She didn't actually want to have to use lasers on the boy - man dammit! - and he probably knew it, at that.
"Well, see… I'm still hurting." She leaned on the cane a bit more and smiled pleasantly. "And I think I need that laptop." She didn't go into breadcrumbs and how Gideon was being vastly annoying about the whole thing, because that probably would have pleased him. "And since I'm hurting and needing that laptop, what do you think are the odds of me bothering to try and take it without hurting you in the process?" She sighed heavily, shrugging a bit. "Besides, he told you to make sure I'd get it anyway, right?" It wasn't even wild guessing at this point, they both knew. Kids today, Alison thought with mild annoyance - there was just no subtlety to them.
After a moment's reflection, the young man stretched out one arm - and deposited the laptop on a nearby table. "That's… pretty solid logic, ma'am." With a slight bow, earning himself a beam of approval from Alison for the courtesy, the young man then carefully walked around her and left the bunker.
Alison exited herself as well a few moments later, not bothering to close the door as she managed cane and laptop well enough - it wasn't the first time after all, she thought a bit sourly, that she had to sort out how to navigate about with one of the dammable things. But walking through the camp again was out of the question and heading behind the bunker seemed perfectly acceptable.
The gleam of light from the corner of her eye as she turned the corner was odd - unfocused and feathery somehow, but enough so that it caught her attention. Walking in the now quieter area towards a stone on the ground, Alison paused, then reached out with the cane to move some of the underbrush away. And stared, for a moment, at the glyph carved on the stone, staring up at her steadily. Picking up the stone - and the piece of paper that came along with it, Alison sighed and continued on her way.
She'd question how she'd found the thing later, she decided. Getting it and whatever message there was on the piece of paper to Nathan was of higher priority.
--
Domino, still in her cell when chaos breaks out, seizes the first opportunity to escape. Thankfully (given the content of Nathan's vision) she doesn't get very far. Although she's not quite as happy to see Pete as she should be. At least not right away.
Domino had no idea what was going on. There was shouting in the distance, and the ground rumbled ominously a few times. Not an earthquake, she had thought, lying there on the cot, her hands cuffed together and behind her back, and that damned blindfold covering her eyes again. Namibia wasn't prone to them.
Unless it was a man-made earthquake. Domino took a deep, shaky breath, and tried to force herself back to a state of calm. She could feel that tell-tale queasy sensation, telling her that variables were shifting, that the situation was more fluid than it had been a few minutes earlier. And she could almost feel an opportunity coming. Almost...
The door crashed open. "Come on," growled an unfamiliar voice, and there were rough hands hauling her up off the cot. "We're going for another ride..."
And there it was. Domino followed the internal push and twisted in the man's grasp, kicking at him, blind, and trusting it to connect. It did, and he went down with a gasp, dragging her down with him. She landed badly, her shoulder cracking ominously, but she was on top, and managed a half-roll, planting her elbow firmly into the man's throat. The noise he made then was suitably final, and she rolled back to her feet, staggering.
She'd never seen the room. Didn't know the layout, wasn't sure where the door was... Blindly, she lunged forward, and tripped over something, falling hard onto what felt like broken stone. Something sharp bit into her arm and she gasped as she felt fabric and flesh both tear. But then something else caught on whatever had just injured her, a metallic scrape...
... and the cuffs gave way. Domino reached up with her good arm and yanked the blindfold off, looking around wildly. Small room, a cell, really. Gideon had said something about this being a former POW camp. The man on the floor made a bubbling noise that might have been a moan, but Domino surged back to her feet in a rush of rage and kicked him in the head, before relieving him of his gun and bolting out the open door.
Pete had to supress a laugh as he turned the corner to see Domino dash out of the cell, and turn to head away from him. What had Nate said?
"Dom, wait!"
That voice.
That voice. Domino whirled, violet eyes very wide as they locked onto Pete's face. Pete here. Now. With Gideon. Feral rage blasted the shock away and she raised the gun to fire.
Pete flung himself backward round the corner as her shots hit the wall behind where he'd been moments before.
"Fuck! Look, I know this sounds really stupid given the--"
Pete was cut off by Dom's fist in his throat as he attempted to inch his way back round the corner, and he barely had time to duck the kick to the head that followed it.
"Hcgch!" He clutched at his throat with one hand, grabbing for her gun hand with the other, trying to get the words out...
Her gun had jammed. Her gun had jammed. Oh, well, Domino thought semi-hysterically, it made a perfectly acceptable blunt instrument, still. "Motherfucking... son of a... BITCH!" she hissed at him, punctuating each word with a blow. "He TOLD me, Pete! Your friend told me what you did..."
Pete backpedaled frantically, doing his best to block or roll with her blows, making slightly croaking noises as he tried to speak. "Not..." he managed as he grabbed her wrist and spun her against the wall.
"Like fuck you're not!" she hissed at him and tried to knee him in the groin. He managed to avoid it. Pity. Pinned again the wall was not where she wanted to be, trapped anywhere was bad, and she lost it all at once, two weeks of captivity and Pete, here, with Gideon, combining to push her over the edge. "Goddamn all of you fucking men, using me as BAIT... I'm fucking SICK OF IT!"
A look of nothing so much as exasperation passed across Pete's face. "Fucksake... balloon... feather..." He was cut off as Domino pivoted, and used her legs to shove him off her sending him staggering across the room.
"Excuse me." The voice did not drift to them - it took over the room, loud and clear even though there was no yelling, the voice training of a singer making her understood effortlessly over the fight. "Is this your slightly, okay no, very twisted idea of foreplay or something?"
Leaning on her cane and tapping her foot, Alison stared at the two calmly, hoping desperately that neither would answer yes but that at least the beating up of Pete (from what she could tell, Pete was definitely getting beaten up) would stop.
Domino, midway through a rush towards Pete, or more accurately, Pete's throat, which she was going to tear out with her bare hands since he was not only here with Gideon but apparently insane and talking absolute gibberish about feathers, froze, violet eyes gone wide as she saw the woman in the doorway.
"... Alison?"
"Heeey! Glad to see you're okay! We're the cavalry," Alison beamed at Domino, figuring that keeping the woman off balance long enough for Pete to catch his breath and speak the magic sentence could only help, really. "Well, you know, sans horses and all, but I think we're doing okay, over all." Alison paused for a millisecond, then continued. "You know, it's rude to spoil someone's fun when they're coming in to rescue you and stuff. Though I guess I can't blame you for skipping the sighing maiden bit and starting on things a bit early. I guess. Sorta."
Pete coughed hard then found his voice, "Balloon feather... boat... tomato"
And Domino reeled backwards, catching herself against the wall as the memory of that awful night in April came rushing back all at once. Confronting Pete in that bar, finding out that he was joining the Hellfire Club as their White King... him telling her goodbye...
Only it hadn't happened the way she remembered. Not at all.
---
Pete spotted Domino first, and moved away from Alison and Charles to intercept her before she could join the three of them at the table, and lead her over to a booth well out of earshot of the others.
"We need to talk. And it's really, really important that you keep your voice down. And no hitting."
"What the hell?" she hissed at him, struggling. He had a very firm grip on her, though, and while she could have broken it, it would have caused a scene. And something very odd was definitely going on here, so a scene would probably be bad. Her eyes flickered back to Alison and Charles, incredulously, as Pete pulled her down into the booth. "What the fuck is going on here?" she whispered.
"Same thing as always. Making sure that the kids don't die." He kept his hand on her wrist across the table, and held her eyes with his own. When he spoke, his voice was calm and steady, but she could hear the tension underneath it all.
"I need you to listen to what we're planning to do, and tell me honestly whether or not you think I should do it. Not whether you want me to or not, but whether you think I should. And I need you to do something else for me, but I'll have to explain the rest of it first. OK?"
"Talk," she snapped under her breath, fighting the urge to yank her hand out of his grip. Slightly mollified though she might be by the fact that there was obviously more going on here than she'd realized and Pete might not have actually lost his mind completely, she was still Not Happy. And this had better be good.
"I wasn't the one who killed de la Rocha, and right now, the only people in the world who know that are me, Alison, Charlie and you. That's how it's going to stay. Right now, as far as the world is concerned, I've turned my back on Xavier's, because hanging out there and being a decent human being got my Dad killed."
He paused.
"I've spent most of the last few weeks at one of Emma Frost's places, when I wasn't in Chicago. She and I talked about me taking the White King job a year or two back. Can you see where I'm going with this?"
Domino went ashen. "Pete, you..." Then she remembered the distinction he'd made, about telling him what she thought, not what she felt. "This was a set-up?" she asked, more uncertainly. It hadn't seemed like that. Or maybe that was just her pride talking, not wanting to admit that she'd been fooled... that she might not know him as well as she thought.
Pete shook his head, with a very slight smile.
"Do I look that clever? No, I went in there fully intending to slot that sack of shit. Beat the shit out of Al's team to do it. She tried to explain that she had some kind of plan, and I dropped her, too." He looked faintly disgusted with himself at the memory.
"Got to de la Rocha, smacked him about a bit, and then decided that the little sack of shit wasn't worth all the trouble. That Dad wouldn't have wanted me to do this for him, that I could find some other way of keeping Romany and Amanda safe. Then the Cunt pulled a gun on me, and Al killed him. She'd come round in time to hear me decide to behave like a grown-up."
A short pause.
"But we figured that if we made sure that everyone thought I'd done it, we might still make it work..."
Domino's eyes flickered back to the table. Neither Alison nor Charles was looking in their direction, and she turned back to Pete, violet eyes wide and somewhat stunned as she absorbed the fact that this had gone down a whole lot differently than what she'd been led to believe. "This is... oh fuck, Pete. That bitch Selene, or Shaw? Or both of them?" He had to have a target in mind, if he was willing to do this...
"Both of them, if I can pull it off. And all their fucking mates. We all know they'll move sooner or later no matter what, so we're going to try and nail the fucks to the wall before they do. And it'll take away what little excuse Shaw might have to move on the school right now, too."
Pete smiled ruefully.
"And it'll convinced everyone that I'm still a scary bastard, and that going near Amanda and Romany is a bad idea."
The he turned deadly serious again.
"But I'm worried here, Dom. I can see all these reasons I should do it, but I don't know if I'm thinking straight about this. What am I missing?"
She thought about it, trying to look at it strategically, like GW had always tried to teach her. "What you might have to do," she said very quietly. "To fit in." Just the idea of him sitting at the same table as Shaw was making her vaguely nauseous, but she stepped firmly on the reaction. "Having you there might take away Shaw's excuse to go after the school full-out, but you know damned well that he's not going to lay off completely. And if they think you've turned your back on Xavier's..." Her gaze went back to Charles and Alison.
"Yeah. I don't think it's a 'might', though. I think I'm going to have to fuck over a lot of people in one way or another. Good people. And everyone I like is going to end up hating me."
He took a deep breath, forced the nervousness back down.
"But then I think about a conversation I had with LeBeau six months back. About why I hung around Xavier's, and how people like him and me can try to live with the shit we did. I told him I kept doing it so that other people didn't have to."
Another breath.
"I hate the idea, Dom. It scares the shit out of me. But the job needs doing, and I can't ask anyone else to do it, even if we could set them up to be in the same place I'm in now."
"Shit," she muttered faintly, putting her other hand over his where he still had a firm grip on her wrist. But it made too much sense. Any way she looked at it. "I'm scared for you," she said, before she really thought the words through. "Even if you do this, and it works..."
"Yeah. I know. But I've done shitty things before, and I've coped. I've got a better chance than most people." He half smiled. "OK, so we've established that the idea scares us both. But I'm not really happy about men with guns, either, and I've never used them as a reason not do do something. So we're back to the big question: should I do it? Is it worth the risk?"
Domino gave a pained, hollow little laugh. "You're asking me if taking down Shaw would be worth it, Pete? Me? Not to mention what that bitch has done to Amanda..." She took a deep, shaky breath. "That's a yes, by the way. If you honestly think you can pull it off. Those kids at the school have their lives fucked up enough by what they are... they don't deserve to get caught in the middle of a war just because the fucking Inner Circle can't not play their games." Her eyes went back to Xavier. "He'll do something, I'm guessing? So that you can't be scanned..." Then it hit her, and she stiffened a little. "And to me and Blaire too, right? If it's just got to be the four of us, and the other telepaths back at the school can't know..." Her stomach sunk to somewhere in the vicinity of her shoes as that particular train of thought led to what part of her had been avoiding thinking of since Pete had started to lay out the plan.
"He won't do a damn thing unless you agree to it. But yeah, he is. It's a bit different for each of us. I've had some fairly specialised training in lying to telepaths, and Charlie thinks he can augment that. Al, he's just going to put a block in about this that other telepaths can't see round. Not so subtle, but she's not going to need it. So she and I can meet, and not have anyone pick what we're doing out of our heads. But in your case, the plan's a bit different..." Pete sighed.
"I need you to be my insurance policy, Dom. If it all goes wrong, and Charlie, Al and I wind up dead before this is done, I want to know that there's someone out there that can tell Romany and Amanda and everyone else what the score was. Charlie'll give you a fake memory of tonight that'll fuck off in two years, or when I speak a certain phrase to you. But until then, you're not going to remember what we've talked about tonight."
He sighed again.
"You'll remember me telling you I've quit, instead."
Domino stared at him for a long moment. "So I'll think it's real?" she asked a bit weakly. "That you've really gone off to be the White King?" There was a tiny part of her that couldn't help but glow warmly to know that he trusted her to be his insurance policy, but it was more than outweighed by the idea of spending months or years thinking that he... "Oh, fuck," she said rather uselessly, her eyes stinging. "Suppose there's no way around that. I couldn't... there's no way I could lie believably to Nate, if nothing else."
"Yeah." Pete looked a bit sick at the thought himself, then smiled weakly. "I figured I'd start with the person I could least stand to have hate me. That way the rest won't seem so bad."
"I could just... vanish for two years, or until it's done?" Domino said, and then bit her lip, knowing as soon as the words were out of her mouth that it wasn't going to work. If she vanished, immediately following something like this, Nate and GW would go to the ends of the earth to find her, and that would blow the whole thing just as completely.
"You imagine what Nate'd do if you just vanished? Especially if the last person anyone knew you were meeting was me? And I've just switched sides? It's going to be hard enough to get the job done without him deciding to smear my brains all over the shop, without him thinking I might've done something to you..."
"I know," Domino said faintly, her mind shying away from the thought. "I know, Pete, I just..." Didn't want him to do this. She opened her mouth to say that, but what came out was very different. "You promise I'll remember?" she asked, a catch in her voice despite her best efforts to keep it level. "In the two years. If this doesn't turn out right. I can't... I can't spend the rest of my life hating you, Pete, no matter what happens."
"You'll remember." he said, sounding absolutely certain. "Charlie knows what he's doing, and I already told him I wasn't doing this without you knowing the truth one way or the other. I couldn't handle it either."
Okay, how fair was this? He was being all forthright and open and shit, and she was about to get her memory altered so that she didn't remember any of it. Gotta love the irony. Domino managed a very weak smile. "Damn you and your always expecting me to do the adult thing," she said hoarsely, not meaning the curse. At all. "I mean, not that I didn't appreciate the hell out of it all these years while Nate and GW were still treating me like I was still sixteen years old, but now you've gone and turned it all around on me..." A forlorn note slipped into her voice, not at all the forced amusement she'd been striving for.
Pete managed a smile in response. "Yeah, well, if you'd just listened to them when they wanted you to go off to a good school and grow up to be boring..."
"But that would've been dull." Domino swallowed, telling herself to focus on the damned practicalities. "You have to be careful," she insisted, her hands tightening on his. "One of the men in my life having a martyr complex is enough. If you get yourself killed, I'll... well, I'll mope about it for the rest of my life, and you don't want that on your conscience, do you?"
"Not if I can help it. I'll be unbelieveably bloody careful, Dom. Besides, it'll be everyone at Xavier's looking for me, and I'll have Charlie and Al on my side." Then, suddenly, he grinned. "We'll get the bastards put away, and then I'm going to take a proper fucking holiday. Somewhere hot, where the drinks have umbrellas in. Want to come with me?"
"Are you kidding? I'm so there. I'll even bring that bikini that made your eyes pop out when we ran into each other in Rio that time." She made herself smile back at him. "You'll pull this off," she said more softly.
"Bloody right. I've got through stupider things with less incentive than than you in that bikini." He paused, and looked over at Charles and Alison for a second, visibly steeling himself.
"Look, we'd better get this started before I bottle it completely. But I figured I should say..." Pete trailed off for a second before continuing. "I love you. Just in case I don't get another chance. Thought I should say it once, at least."
He'd said it. He'd said it, and she wouldn't remember, maybe not for years... Before she could really process that, because once she did there wasn't any way she could avoid being a weepy mess, and that was not how she planned to leave things with him, Domino leaned across the table, giving him a quick, desperate kiss. "I love you, too," she whispered, then sank back down into the booth, tears spilling over as she looked in Charles' direction. "Now do this, please. Now."
---
...do this, please. Now.
Domino looked up, her head spinning and her eyes wide as she struggled to make it fit, that conversation with all the months after, with...
Then she saw the way Pete was looking at her, and all but flew across the room to him.
"Oh, God, I'm sorry," she choked out. "I'm so sorry..."
--
Outside, Cain and Nathan spot Gideon. Cain and Nathan chase Gideon. Gideon has a surprise for Nathan - or is the joke on him? Then, Gideon finds himself in the position of facing a furious, psimitar-bearing telekinetic out in the open where Nathan doesn't have to worry about collateral damage.
It was an organized sort of chaos. Obviously, the fact that the four of them had gone through Eris's on-site security personal like a strong wind through a field of late summer dandelions had been a persuasive enough argument for packing up and getting the hell out of Dodge, or rather Aus, as quickly as possible.
Nathan was, oddly enough, perfectly content to let most of them go. As he and Cain headed through the encampment that had grown up around the ruins of the old POW camp, following his apparently retreating uncle, he scanned each and every mind that he passed, just to make sure that they didn't know anything about Dom.
He might be planning to make his uncle very, very dead over the course of the next few minutes, but that didn't mean he'd lost sight of the primary goal.
And where the hell was Gideon going?
Cain kept glancing side to side, letting Nate pay attention straight ahead. Every few steps, he took a look back over his shoulder, checking behind them. Old patrolling instincts kicked in, and his hands felt somewhat empty without the familiar weight of a belt-fed machine gun in them. This was no Vietnam, he reminded himself as he did every time he put on the leathers. And this time, he was the machine gun.
"Looks like people are heading for the hills fast as they can," Cain mused, watching those security personnel that were still mobile scramble for vehicles, content to just point them at the horizon and go. "Gideon don't strike me as the type to run, though."
"He's not." Nathan stopped dead, wariness threading its way through his near-total focus. "And he's not synching to me, either." At least, the psi-trace he was getting from Gideon didn't have that mirror-like oddness about it. He looked back at Cain, his jaw clenching. "If he's drawing us out for some reason..."
Growling, Cain pushed his sunglasses up onto his forehead, peering about through squinting eyes. "Well, we're out. If he's gonna hit us with a booby trap or a rocket or something, now's a good time."
Nathan gazed at Cain for a moment longer, then looked back at the still calmly retreating Gideon. "To hell with this," he said under his breath, then strode forward again. "I'll be damned if I'm letting him stroll out of here, after this." The blade of his psimitar blazed, the air around shimmering as he threw up a TK shield between him and Cain and the not-really-all-that-distant form of his uncle.
Smiling finally, Cain dropped his sunglasses and shrugged his shoulders to let the thin windbreaker he'd been wearing fall to the ground. Spreading his arms wide, he smacked one fist into his other palm, the noise echoing like a gunshot across the now-abandoned compound.
"You grab him, I'll pound him?" he asked Nathan with a wry grin. "He's gotta sync up to you to stop you, and then I can make thin red paste out of him. Short and messy."
Nathan made a noise that might have been agreement, or a warning growl to the effect of 'no paste until I get some answers', but either way, he didn't elaborate. A Jeep squealed past them, heading for the mountains, and Nathan gritted his teeth and plowed onward doggedly, almost running.
He came to another dead stop as he realized that Gideon had stopped, beside some piece of equipment placed out here at the camp's perimeter. "Where is she?" Nathan hurled at him.
Stepping out from the Jeep with very calm and deliberate gestures after having stopped the engine, Gideon offered Nathan a thin smile -ignoring Cain entirely in the process - even as he rested one hand lightly on the small generator he was now standing next to. An eyebrow rose, a silent invitation to come closer perhaps, even as Gideon's hand hovered over what had to be the 'on' switch.
Nathan stared at the piece of equipment, then looked back at his uncle, frowning. "I'm sorry, am I supposed to be intimidated by... whatever that is?" Then it hit him, all at once, and he took a rapid step back. #Cain, if that's an EM generator...# Oh, fuck, and you walked right into it, you idiot!
Cain looked confused for a moment, glancing from Nathan to Gideon to the generator. "Uh, Nate?" he said questioningly. "Now would be a good time to hit him very hard before he starts explaining his master plan."
Nathan frantically channeled power through the psimitar, trying to focus on the generator even as his concentration did the equivalent of running away to hide under the bed. His reaction wasn't in time. Gideon pressed the switch.
And nothing happened. Nathan froze, raising an eyebrow. There was... something, he could feel it, but... definitely not a whole lot of psionic electrocution going on here.
Gideon's expression changed slowly, the subtle anticipation shifting to bemusement and then sudden, sharp comprehension. With a sardonic, self-deprecating smile, Gideon pressed and released the button once more, then simply reached out to turn off the generator, apparently giving up on whatever purpose it had been meant to serve. His gaze flattened, lips thinning in displeasure and despite the gravity of the situation, it wasn't hard to associate the man's current expression to that of one who might have happened to somehow swallow a bushel of lemons quite unknowingly so, until the taste finally hit full force.
"Well, damn," Nathan murmured, his voice low and tight as an equally powerful moment of realization hit him, leaving in its wake a strange, soaring, savage joy. "Did you make a trade for some bad information? Someone lie to you about your favorite nephew's vulnerabilities?"
Joy. Pure, feral joy. They were out in the open, no need to worry about collateral damage, no one for Gideon to hold hostage. And he had his psimitar, Nathan thought, his gloved hands tightening around it as it glowed incandescent with the power coursing through its circuitry and crystals.
Gideon's expression, if anything, turned more peevish at that and had the object of his discontent been nearby, likely the demonstration of that sentiment would have been thorough and to the point. Pointly so. With many pointy points. "Adaptability." With that single word Gideon started to walk forward, eyebrow twitching slightly once as he headed directly for Nathan and Cain.
Cain scowled, looking over and getting the quick nod from Nathan.
"Adapt this, asshole." Raising one fist, Cain stepped out from behind Nathan's shield and charged at Gideon, fully intent on pulping the bastard before he could get close enough to sync up with Nathan's power.
Pausing at the charge, Gideon cocked his head to the side and blinked at the sight, once. And then grinned, a sharp and fierce smile, as though everything in the universe which had previously gone wrong had suddenly re-adjusted itself.
He reached out with one hand, eschewing any flourishes to the gesture, and made a downward motion.
Mirrors. Gideon's mind was suddenly all mirrors again, and Nathan propelled himself upwards instinctively as he felt telekinesis shudder through the ground beneath him. Felt it start to collapse. #Cain! Move!#
"I AM!" Cain shouted back, just before he felt the ground give beneath his foot. "Oh, fuck..." he managed to blurt out before taking a deep breath as the ground - suddenly turned to unstable quicksand -opened up and swallowed him whole.
"Et tu, Mr Marko," Gideon said pleasantly as he watched a plop of air burst from the rather large patch of quicksand now containing a Cain in addition to the usual morass of mudlike material. He looked straight ahead then, meeting Nathan's gaze - and the smile widened, the look in Gideon's eyes having nothing to do with humor at all.
Hovering, Nathan stared at Gideon, peripherally aware of Cain in the quicksand, trying to find purchase to climb back out. "I think," he said, almost under his breath, not registering the sudden return of his Askani accent, "there needs to be an ending to this now."
He didn't give Gideon the chance for a rejoinder. No posturing. No verbal stilettos looking for the gaps in his emotional armor.
They were out in the open. No need to worry about collateral damage. His psimitar in his hand, and a sudden, absolute clarity filling his mind.
End it. It was the only voice in his mind. His.
The telekinetic explosion was colossal.
Directed forward, at Gideon, since the camp was behind him and although they had some distance, he didn't want to chance it. The air burned around him, and Nathan slipped into altered-vision, seeing the fabric of the world tear and shred under his telekinesis.
Gideon was hurled back through the air, Nathan's attack slicing through the lines of force. Nathan felt his uncle shield and recover, gathering psi-energy to lash out at him. But it was a fraction of what he could achieve, focusing his power through the psimitar.
#Dilettante,# he flung at Gideon with a cold viciousness, and summoned up another telekinetic shockwave, moving forward with it, carried along by its momentum. #Murderer.# Tyler's tiny body on the bed and Aliya's crumpled form on the floor, and how long had it been since rage had been ice like this, since he had found his center even in the midst of such terrible anger.
Nine years. Nine years, since he had walked into the Mistra home facility in New Mexico and let his anger destroy the place he had called home. But there were no walls to bring crashing down here. Just one man. Just the man who had sent him there, who had killed his family, who had come back to threaten everything he loved again...
He parried the telekinetic thrust that came at him easily. The lines of force were refined, practiced. But Gideon wasn't used to this level of telekinesis. Wasn't used tearing the world apart around him.
Wasn't a living weapon.
Let's see how you like what you made...
And there there was no reflection, no thought. Just power. Slicing through the lines of force again and again as Gideon tried to hold him back. Smashing through shields effortlessly as soon as Gideon put them up, not giving him a moment's breather.
Seeing the patterns again. Gideon's patterns, a shallow, fragile echo of his own. They disintegrated a little farther with each attack that connected. Strip him bare, Nathan thought distantly. Tear away every defense and scorch his mind to ash.
There was fire in his mind. His own fire, not Askani's. In his mind, and in the air surrounding him. Burning, the air was burning, and the ground beneath him was liquid glass as he drove Gideon back farther.
#I'm going to leave you in the desert.#
And finally, Gideon faltered. His shields softening, turning into flimsy things, his grip on the lines of force slipping. He was an old man, Nathan reminded himself, however he managed to look so much younger. An old man, playing with borrowed powers.
An old man, sprawled on the scorched earth, gasping for air.
"Too much for you?" Nathan's voice came out soft but wild, his eyes locked on Gideon as he lowered himself to the ground and crossed the few steps that separated them. He leveled the point of his psimitar at his uncle's throat. It was still glowing fiercely, the air around the blade still shivering. The blasted, cratered ground, shot through with glass, rumbled beneath his feet. Aftershocks?
Everything seemed surreal, disjointed. The air smelled like ozone, and Nathan's hands were shaking so hard that he had to clench them around the psimitar to hold it steady.
"Why?" The question was ragged. "Just tell me why. Make it... make sense."
It was, perhaps to Nathan's surprise, an utterly serene and lucid gaze which greeted his own as Gideon lifted his head, still breathing heavily, one hand pressed to his side. The smile had the clarity and surety of a child's, knowing he had done the right thing.
"For my brother, Nathan. It was all for my brother."
He didn't understand. He was never going to understand. Nathan's hands went white-knuckled on the psimitar. Did he want to understand? Deep down, did he really want to see through their eyes?
A step back, but the psimitar was still pointed downwards, at Gideon. He could feel the power still pooling there, could visualize any number of things he could do with it. What Mistra had taught him to do. Explode internal organs from the inside. Death, painful and irrevocable.
Tyler's tiny body, seemingly asleep. Nathan could hear his heart pounding, the ragged noise of his own breathing as he wrestled with the need to kill. If there had been anger in Gideon's expression, frustration, anything but that damned serenity...
In that tense silence, the only sound was a small pop of air, then a stabbing, burning sensation in Nathan's side.
Stepping out from behind a low wall, Saul looked down at the tranquilizer rifle with disdain. Such a crude tool, but effective when you could take advantage of a target's complete focus being directed elsewhere.
As Nathan slumped forward, resting on his psimitar, Saul set down the rifle and walked past his son to take Gideon by the arm. "I'm sorry, son," he said quietly over his shoulder. "It's not the endgame yet."
The dart wouldn't have gone through his leathers, but he wasn't wearing them. "Damn you... both of you..." His psimitar clattered on the ground, and Nathan had a moment to register that he was on his hands and knees before he was falling the rest of the way to the ground.
The impact was the last thing he felt. The last thing he heard was the sound of a helicopter.
It was amazing how easy it was to make one's way inside an enemy camp when people were so busily intent on leaving. Having almost more silver than blonde in her hair (dammitall) seemed to be of some use as well, as one of the men bustling about hurriedly had actually paused to open a door for her, all the while never pausing to actually look at her face.
Dammit!
Keeping an iron grip on the cane and reminding herself that beating any of the people here about the shoulders would only lead to people assuming she was indeed an old lady, Alison continued towards the main building, ignoring the car that squealed it's way around her (with a shouted "Sorry ma'am!" in the process) in favor of keeping an even pace. She supposed she ought to be grateful, she reflected while climbing up the steps to the old bunker, that no one was shooting at her. Instead of feeling all crochety about people thinking she was old. Older. The wrinkles were all gone already and you'd think they'd know better, but no, all it took was a bit of silver in one's hair and a cane…
The door was flung open and Alison paused, nearly nose to nose with a young man who immediately bounded back. Any nose to nose possibilities faded as the man stretched up (taller by more than few inches) then fell into a defensive pose while cradling a portable carefully with one arm, apparently recognizing her well enough from the look in his eyes.
"About time," Alison grumbled to herself, stepping inside and closing the door so as to not distract any of the helpful people outside from their evacuation.
It just wouldn't do to be rude, after all.
"Hi!" She beamed at the man, a near white-haired, blue eyed and handsome enough creature, sharp features and easy motions keeping him well out of her reach. Well, her physical reach anyway. He blinked a bit as he noted the amused look in her eyes, the realization striking him as well in the following instants. "Yeah, the whole laser thing. That's for me, isn't it?" She pointed at the portable he'd been trying to hide behind his body and nodded wisely.
"You can't have it, ma'am," he said, apparently trying to figure out a way to somehow teleport himself out of the room while plotting out various ways to knock her out and run off. Or something of the sort, she assumed.
"Well, actually see… I was going to suggest you just hand it over and we skip the whole fight thing," she said charmingly. Or so she thought anyway.
"…er, why?" The whole lasers thing obviously hung in the air between them, though he still gave the cane Alison was leaning on a pointed look. And wisely forbore to point out the streak of silver in her hair in a similar fashion, thus ensuring his ability to propagate one day. Still, Alison decided not to re-iterate that point about the lasers. Yet. She didn't actually want to have to use lasers on the boy - man dammit! - and he probably knew it, at that.
"Well, see… I'm still hurting." She leaned on the cane a bit more and smiled pleasantly. "And I think I need that laptop." She didn't go into breadcrumbs and how Gideon was being vastly annoying about the whole thing, because that probably would have pleased him. "And since I'm hurting and needing that laptop, what do you think are the odds of me bothering to try and take it without hurting you in the process?" She sighed heavily, shrugging a bit. "Besides, he told you to make sure I'd get it anyway, right?" It wasn't even wild guessing at this point, they both knew. Kids today, Alison thought with mild annoyance - there was just no subtlety to them.
After a moment's reflection, the young man stretched out one arm - and deposited the laptop on a nearby table. "That's… pretty solid logic, ma'am." With a slight bow, earning himself a beam of approval from Alison for the courtesy, the young man then carefully walked around her and left the bunker.
Alison exited herself as well a few moments later, not bothering to close the door as she managed cane and laptop well enough - it wasn't the first time after all, she thought a bit sourly, that she had to sort out how to navigate about with one of the dammable things. But walking through the camp again was out of the question and heading behind the bunker seemed perfectly acceptable.
The gleam of light from the corner of her eye as she turned the corner was odd - unfocused and feathery somehow, but enough so that it caught her attention. Walking in the now quieter area towards a stone on the ground, Alison paused, then reached out with the cane to move some of the underbrush away. And stared, for a moment, at the glyph carved on the stone, staring up at her steadily. Picking up the stone - and the piece of paper that came along with it, Alison sighed and continued on her way.
She'd question how she'd found the thing later, she decided. Getting it and whatever message there was on the piece of paper to Nathan was of higher priority.
--
Domino, still in her cell when chaos breaks out, seizes the first opportunity to escape. Thankfully (given the content of Nathan's vision) she doesn't get very far. Although she's not quite as happy to see Pete as she should be. At least not right away.
Domino had no idea what was going on. There was shouting in the distance, and the ground rumbled ominously a few times. Not an earthquake, she had thought, lying there on the cot, her hands cuffed together and behind her back, and that damned blindfold covering her eyes again. Namibia wasn't prone to them.
Unless it was a man-made earthquake. Domino took a deep, shaky breath, and tried to force herself back to a state of calm. She could feel that tell-tale queasy sensation, telling her that variables were shifting, that the situation was more fluid than it had been a few minutes earlier. And she could almost feel an opportunity coming. Almost...
The door crashed open. "Come on," growled an unfamiliar voice, and there were rough hands hauling her up off the cot. "We're going for another ride..."
And there it was. Domino followed the internal push and twisted in the man's grasp, kicking at him, blind, and trusting it to connect. It did, and he went down with a gasp, dragging her down with him. She landed badly, her shoulder cracking ominously, but she was on top, and managed a half-roll, planting her elbow firmly into the man's throat. The noise he made then was suitably final, and she rolled back to her feet, staggering.
She'd never seen the room. Didn't know the layout, wasn't sure where the door was... Blindly, she lunged forward, and tripped over something, falling hard onto what felt like broken stone. Something sharp bit into her arm and she gasped as she felt fabric and flesh both tear. But then something else caught on whatever had just injured her, a metallic scrape...
... and the cuffs gave way. Domino reached up with her good arm and yanked the blindfold off, looking around wildly. Small room, a cell, really. Gideon had said something about this being a former POW camp. The man on the floor made a bubbling noise that might have been a moan, but Domino surged back to her feet in a rush of rage and kicked him in the head, before relieving him of his gun and bolting out the open door.
Pete had to supress a laugh as he turned the corner to see Domino dash out of the cell, and turn to head away from him. What had Nate said?
"Dom, wait!"
That voice.
That voice. Domino whirled, violet eyes very wide as they locked onto Pete's face. Pete here. Now. With Gideon. Feral rage blasted the shock away and she raised the gun to fire.
Pete flung himself backward round the corner as her shots hit the wall behind where he'd been moments before.
"Fuck! Look, I know this sounds really stupid given the--"
Pete was cut off by Dom's fist in his throat as he attempted to inch his way back round the corner, and he barely had time to duck the kick to the head that followed it.
"Hcgch!" He clutched at his throat with one hand, grabbing for her gun hand with the other, trying to get the words out...
Her gun had jammed. Her gun had jammed. Oh, well, Domino thought semi-hysterically, it made a perfectly acceptable blunt instrument, still. "Motherfucking... son of a... BITCH!" she hissed at him, punctuating each word with a blow. "He TOLD me, Pete! Your friend told me what you did..."
Pete backpedaled frantically, doing his best to block or roll with her blows, making slightly croaking noises as he tried to speak. "Not..." he managed as he grabbed her wrist and spun her against the wall.
"Like fuck you're not!" she hissed at him and tried to knee him in the groin. He managed to avoid it. Pity. Pinned again the wall was not where she wanted to be, trapped anywhere was bad, and she lost it all at once, two weeks of captivity and Pete, here, with Gideon, combining to push her over the edge. "Goddamn all of you fucking men, using me as BAIT... I'm fucking SICK OF IT!"
A look of nothing so much as exasperation passed across Pete's face. "Fucksake... balloon... feather..." He was cut off as Domino pivoted, and used her legs to shove him off her sending him staggering across the room.
"Excuse me." The voice did not drift to them - it took over the room, loud and clear even though there was no yelling, the voice training of a singer making her understood effortlessly over the fight. "Is this your slightly, okay no, very twisted idea of foreplay or something?"
Leaning on her cane and tapping her foot, Alison stared at the two calmly, hoping desperately that neither would answer yes but that at least the beating up of Pete (from what she could tell, Pete was definitely getting beaten up) would stop.
Domino, midway through a rush towards Pete, or more accurately, Pete's throat, which she was going to tear out with her bare hands since he was not only here with Gideon but apparently insane and talking absolute gibberish about feathers, froze, violet eyes gone wide as she saw the woman in the doorway.
"... Alison?"
"Heeey! Glad to see you're okay! We're the cavalry," Alison beamed at Domino, figuring that keeping the woman off balance long enough for Pete to catch his breath and speak the magic sentence could only help, really. "Well, you know, sans horses and all, but I think we're doing okay, over all." Alison paused for a millisecond, then continued. "You know, it's rude to spoil someone's fun when they're coming in to rescue you and stuff. Though I guess I can't blame you for skipping the sighing maiden bit and starting on things a bit early. I guess. Sorta."
Pete coughed hard then found his voice, "Balloon feather... boat... tomato"
And Domino reeled backwards, catching herself against the wall as the memory of that awful night in April came rushing back all at once. Confronting Pete in that bar, finding out that he was joining the Hellfire Club as their White King... him telling her goodbye...
Only it hadn't happened the way she remembered. Not at all.
---
Pete spotted Domino first, and moved away from Alison and Charles to intercept her before she could join the three of them at the table, and lead her over to a booth well out of earshot of the others.
"We need to talk. And it's really, really important that you keep your voice down. And no hitting."
"What the hell?" she hissed at him, struggling. He had a very firm grip on her, though, and while she could have broken it, it would have caused a scene. And something very odd was definitely going on here, so a scene would probably be bad. Her eyes flickered back to Alison and Charles, incredulously, as Pete pulled her down into the booth. "What the fuck is going on here?" she whispered.
"Same thing as always. Making sure that the kids don't die." He kept his hand on her wrist across the table, and held her eyes with his own. When he spoke, his voice was calm and steady, but she could hear the tension underneath it all.
"I need you to listen to what we're planning to do, and tell me honestly whether or not you think I should do it. Not whether you want me to or not, but whether you think I should. And I need you to do something else for me, but I'll have to explain the rest of it first. OK?"
"Talk," she snapped under her breath, fighting the urge to yank her hand out of his grip. Slightly mollified though she might be by the fact that there was obviously more going on here than she'd realized and Pete might not have actually lost his mind completely, she was still Not Happy. And this had better be good.
"I wasn't the one who killed de la Rocha, and right now, the only people in the world who know that are me, Alison, Charlie and you. That's how it's going to stay. Right now, as far as the world is concerned, I've turned my back on Xavier's, because hanging out there and being a decent human being got my Dad killed."
He paused.
"I've spent most of the last few weeks at one of Emma Frost's places, when I wasn't in Chicago. She and I talked about me taking the White King job a year or two back. Can you see where I'm going with this?"
Domino went ashen. "Pete, you..." Then she remembered the distinction he'd made, about telling him what she thought, not what she felt. "This was a set-up?" she asked, more uncertainly. It hadn't seemed like that. Or maybe that was just her pride talking, not wanting to admit that she'd been fooled... that she might not know him as well as she thought.
Pete shook his head, with a very slight smile.
"Do I look that clever? No, I went in there fully intending to slot that sack of shit. Beat the shit out of Al's team to do it. She tried to explain that she had some kind of plan, and I dropped her, too." He looked faintly disgusted with himself at the memory.
"Got to de la Rocha, smacked him about a bit, and then decided that the little sack of shit wasn't worth all the trouble. That Dad wouldn't have wanted me to do this for him, that I could find some other way of keeping Romany and Amanda safe. Then the Cunt pulled a gun on me, and Al killed him. She'd come round in time to hear me decide to behave like a grown-up."
A short pause.
"But we figured that if we made sure that everyone thought I'd done it, we might still make it work..."
Domino's eyes flickered back to the table. Neither Alison nor Charles was looking in their direction, and she turned back to Pete, violet eyes wide and somewhat stunned as she absorbed the fact that this had gone down a whole lot differently than what she'd been led to believe. "This is... oh fuck, Pete. That bitch Selene, or Shaw? Or both of them?" He had to have a target in mind, if he was willing to do this...
"Both of them, if I can pull it off. And all their fucking mates. We all know they'll move sooner or later no matter what, so we're going to try and nail the fucks to the wall before they do. And it'll take away what little excuse Shaw might have to move on the school right now, too."
Pete smiled ruefully.
"And it'll convinced everyone that I'm still a scary bastard, and that going near Amanda and Romany is a bad idea."
The he turned deadly serious again.
"But I'm worried here, Dom. I can see all these reasons I should do it, but I don't know if I'm thinking straight about this. What am I missing?"
She thought about it, trying to look at it strategically, like GW had always tried to teach her. "What you might have to do," she said very quietly. "To fit in." Just the idea of him sitting at the same table as Shaw was making her vaguely nauseous, but she stepped firmly on the reaction. "Having you there might take away Shaw's excuse to go after the school full-out, but you know damned well that he's not going to lay off completely. And if they think you've turned your back on Xavier's..." Her gaze went back to Charles and Alison.
"Yeah. I don't think it's a 'might', though. I think I'm going to have to fuck over a lot of people in one way or another. Good people. And everyone I like is going to end up hating me."
He took a deep breath, forced the nervousness back down.
"But then I think about a conversation I had with LeBeau six months back. About why I hung around Xavier's, and how people like him and me can try to live with the shit we did. I told him I kept doing it so that other people didn't have to."
Another breath.
"I hate the idea, Dom. It scares the shit out of me. But the job needs doing, and I can't ask anyone else to do it, even if we could set them up to be in the same place I'm in now."
"Shit," she muttered faintly, putting her other hand over his where he still had a firm grip on her wrist. But it made too much sense. Any way she looked at it. "I'm scared for you," she said, before she really thought the words through. "Even if you do this, and it works..."
"Yeah. I know. But I've done shitty things before, and I've coped. I've got a better chance than most people." He half smiled. "OK, so we've established that the idea scares us both. But I'm not really happy about men with guns, either, and I've never used them as a reason not do do something. So we're back to the big question: should I do it? Is it worth the risk?"
Domino gave a pained, hollow little laugh. "You're asking me if taking down Shaw would be worth it, Pete? Me? Not to mention what that bitch has done to Amanda..." She took a deep, shaky breath. "That's a yes, by the way. If you honestly think you can pull it off. Those kids at the school have their lives fucked up enough by what they are... they don't deserve to get caught in the middle of a war just because the fucking Inner Circle can't not play their games." Her eyes went back to Xavier. "He'll do something, I'm guessing? So that you can't be scanned..." Then it hit her, and she stiffened a little. "And to me and Blaire too, right? If it's just got to be the four of us, and the other telepaths back at the school can't know..." Her stomach sunk to somewhere in the vicinity of her shoes as that particular train of thought led to what part of her had been avoiding thinking of since Pete had started to lay out the plan.
"He won't do a damn thing unless you agree to it. But yeah, he is. It's a bit different for each of us. I've had some fairly specialised training in lying to telepaths, and Charlie thinks he can augment that. Al, he's just going to put a block in about this that other telepaths can't see round. Not so subtle, but she's not going to need it. So she and I can meet, and not have anyone pick what we're doing out of our heads. But in your case, the plan's a bit different..." Pete sighed.
"I need you to be my insurance policy, Dom. If it all goes wrong, and Charlie, Al and I wind up dead before this is done, I want to know that there's someone out there that can tell Romany and Amanda and everyone else what the score was. Charlie'll give you a fake memory of tonight that'll fuck off in two years, or when I speak a certain phrase to you. But until then, you're not going to remember what we've talked about tonight."
He sighed again.
"You'll remember me telling you I've quit, instead."
Domino stared at him for a long moment. "So I'll think it's real?" she asked a bit weakly. "That you've really gone off to be the White King?" There was a tiny part of her that couldn't help but glow warmly to know that he trusted her to be his insurance policy, but it was more than outweighed by the idea of spending months or years thinking that he... "Oh, fuck," she said rather uselessly, her eyes stinging. "Suppose there's no way around that. I couldn't... there's no way I could lie believably to Nate, if nothing else."
"Yeah." Pete looked a bit sick at the thought himself, then smiled weakly. "I figured I'd start with the person I could least stand to have hate me. That way the rest won't seem so bad."
"I could just... vanish for two years, or until it's done?" Domino said, and then bit her lip, knowing as soon as the words were out of her mouth that it wasn't going to work. If she vanished, immediately following something like this, Nate and GW would go to the ends of the earth to find her, and that would blow the whole thing just as completely.
"You imagine what Nate'd do if you just vanished? Especially if the last person anyone knew you were meeting was me? And I've just switched sides? It's going to be hard enough to get the job done without him deciding to smear my brains all over the shop, without him thinking I might've done something to you..."
"I know," Domino said faintly, her mind shying away from the thought. "I know, Pete, I just..." Didn't want him to do this. She opened her mouth to say that, but what came out was very different. "You promise I'll remember?" she asked, a catch in her voice despite her best efforts to keep it level. "In the two years. If this doesn't turn out right. I can't... I can't spend the rest of my life hating you, Pete, no matter what happens."
"You'll remember." he said, sounding absolutely certain. "Charlie knows what he's doing, and I already told him I wasn't doing this without you knowing the truth one way or the other. I couldn't handle it either."
Okay, how fair was this? He was being all forthright and open and shit, and she was about to get her memory altered so that she didn't remember any of it. Gotta love the irony. Domino managed a very weak smile. "Damn you and your always expecting me to do the adult thing," she said hoarsely, not meaning the curse. At all. "I mean, not that I didn't appreciate the hell out of it all these years while Nate and GW were still treating me like I was still sixteen years old, but now you've gone and turned it all around on me..." A forlorn note slipped into her voice, not at all the forced amusement she'd been striving for.
Pete managed a smile in response. "Yeah, well, if you'd just listened to them when they wanted you to go off to a good school and grow up to be boring..."
"But that would've been dull." Domino swallowed, telling herself to focus on the damned practicalities. "You have to be careful," she insisted, her hands tightening on his. "One of the men in my life having a martyr complex is enough. If you get yourself killed, I'll... well, I'll mope about it for the rest of my life, and you don't want that on your conscience, do you?"
"Not if I can help it. I'll be unbelieveably bloody careful, Dom. Besides, it'll be everyone at Xavier's looking for me, and I'll have Charlie and Al on my side." Then, suddenly, he grinned. "We'll get the bastards put away, and then I'm going to take a proper fucking holiday. Somewhere hot, where the drinks have umbrellas in. Want to come with me?"
"Are you kidding? I'm so there. I'll even bring that bikini that made your eyes pop out when we ran into each other in Rio that time." She made herself smile back at him. "You'll pull this off," she said more softly.
"Bloody right. I've got through stupider things with less incentive than than you in that bikini." He paused, and looked over at Charles and Alison for a second, visibly steeling himself.
"Look, we'd better get this started before I bottle it completely. But I figured I should say..." Pete trailed off for a second before continuing. "I love you. Just in case I don't get another chance. Thought I should say it once, at least."
He'd said it. He'd said it, and she wouldn't remember, maybe not for years... Before she could really process that, because once she did there wasn't any way she could avoid being a weepy mess, and that was not how she planned to leave things with him, Domino leaned across the table, giving him a quick, desperate kiss. "I love you, too," she whispered, then sank back down into the booth, tears spilling over as she looked in Charles' direction. "Now do this, please. Now."
---
...do this, please. Now.
Domino looked up, her head spinning and her eyes wide as she struggled to make it fit, that conversation with all the months after, with...
Then she saw the way Pete was looking at her, and all but flew across the room to him.
"Oh, God, I'm sorry," she choked out. "I'm so sorry..."
--
Outside, Cain and Nathan spot Gideon. Cain and Nathan chase Gideon. Gideon has a surprise for Nathan - or is the joke on him? Then, Gideon finds himself in the position of facing a furious, psimitar-bearing telekinetic out in the open where Nathan doesn't have to worry about collateral damage.
It was an organized sort of chaos. Obviously, the fact that the four of them had gone through Eris's on-site security personal like a strong wind through a field of late summer dandelions had been a persuasive enough argument for packing up and getting the hell out of Dodge, or rather Aus, as quickly as possible.
Nathan was, oddly enough, perfectly content to let most of them go. As he and Cain headed through the encampment that had grown up around the ruins of the old POW camp, following his apparently retreating uncle, he scanned each and every mind that he passed, just to make sure that they didn't know anything about Dom.
He might be planning to make his uncle very, very dead over the course of the next few minutes, but that didn't mean he'd lost sight of the primary goal.
And where the hell was Gideon going?
Cain kept glancing side to side, letting Nate pay attention straight ahead. Every few steps, he took a look back over his shoulder, checking behind them. Old patrolling instincts kicked in, and his hands felt somewhat empty without the familiar weight of a belt-fed machine gun in them. This was no Vietnam, he reminded himself as he did every time he put on the leathers. And this time, he was the machine gun.
"Looks like people are heading for the hills fast as they can," Cain mused, watching those security personnel that were still mobile scramble for vehicles, content to just point them at the horizon and go. "Gideon don't strike me as the type to run, though."
"He's not." Nathan stopped dead, wariness threading its way through his near-total focus. "And he's not synching to me, either." At least, the psi-trace he was getting from Gideon didn't have that mirror-like oddness about it. He looked back at Cain, his jaw clenching. "If he's drawing us out for some reason..."
Growling, Cain pushed his sunglasses up onto his forehead, peering about through squinting eyes. "Well, we're out. If he's gonna hit us with a booby trap or a rocket or something, now's a good time."
Nathan gazed at Cain for a moment longer, then looked back at the still calmly retreating Gideon. "To hell with this," he said under his breath, then strode forward again. "I'll be damned if I'm letting him stroll out of here, after this." The blade of his psimitar blazed, the air around shimmering as he threw up a TK shield between him and Cain and the not-really-all-that-distant form of his uncle.
Smiling finally, Cain dropped his sunglasses and shrugged his shoulders to let the thin windbreaker he'd been wearing fall to the ground. Spreading his arms wide, he smacked one fist into his other palm, the noise echoing like a gunshot across the now-abandoned compound.
"You grab him, I'll pound him?" he asked Nathan with a wry grin. "He's gotta sync up to you to stop you, and then I can make thin red paste out of him. Short and messy."
Nathan made a noise that might have been agreement, or a warning growl to the effect of 'no paste until I get some answers', but either way, he didn't elaborate. A Jeep squealed past them, heading for the mountains, and Nathan gritted his teeth and plowed onward doggedly, almost running.
He came to another dead stop as he realized that Gideon had stopped, beside some piece of equipment placed out here at the camp's perimeter. "Where is she?" Nathan hurled at him.
Stepping out from the Jeep with very calm and deliberate gestures after having stopped the engine, Gideon offered Nathan a thin smile -ignoring Cain entirely in the process - even as he rested one hand lightly on the small generator he was now standing next to. An eyebrow rose, a silent invitation to come closer perhaps, even as Gideon's hand hovered over what had to be the 'on' switch.
Nathan stared at the piece of equipment, then looked back at his uncle, frowning. "I'm sorry, am I supposed to be intimidated by... whatever that is?" Then it hit him, all at once, and he took a rapid step back. #Cain, if that's an EM generator...# Oh, fuck, and you walked right into it, you idiot!
Cain looked confused for a moment, glancing from Nathan to Gideon to the generator. "Uh, Nate?" he said questioningly. "Now would be a good time to hit him very hard before he starts explaining his master plan."
Nathan frantically channeled power through the psimitar, trying to focus on the generator even as his concentration did the equivalent of running away to hide under the bed. His reaction wasn't in time. Gideon pressed the switch.
And nothing happened. Nathan froze, raising an eyebrow. There was... something, he could feel it, but... definitely not a whole lot of psionic electrocution going on here.
Gideon's expression changed slowly, the subtle anticipation shifting to bemusement and then sudden, sharp comprehension. With a sardonic, self-deprecating smile, Gideon pressed and released the button once more, then simply reached out to turn off the generator, apparently giving up on whatever purpose it had been meant to serve. His gaze flattened, lips thinning in displeasure and despite the gravity of the situation, it wasn't hard to associate the man's current expression to that of one who might have happened to somehow swallow a bushel of lemons quite unknowingly so, until the taste finally hit full force.
"Well, damn," Nathan murmured, his voice low and tight as an equally powerful moment of realization hit him, leaving in its wake a strange, soaring, savage joy. "Did you make a trade for some bad information? Someone lie to you about your favorite nephew's vulnerabilities?"
Joy. Pure, feral joy. They were out in the open, no need to worry about collateral damage, no one for Gideon to hold hostage. And he had his psimitar, Nathan thought, his gloved hands tightening around it as it glowed incandescent with the power coursing through its circuitry and crystals.
Gideon's expression, if anything, turned more peevish at that and had the object of his discontent been nearby, likely the demonstration of that sentiment would have been thorough and to the point. Pointly so. With many pointy points. "Adaptability." With that single word Gideon started to walk forward, eyebrow twitching slightly once as he headed directly for Nathan and Cain.
Cain scowled, looking over and getting the quick nod from Nathan.
"Adapt this, asshole." Raising one fist, Cain stepped out from behind Nathan's shield and charged at Gideon, fully intent on pulping the bastard before he could get close enough to sync up with Nathan's power.
Pausing at the charge, Gideon cocked his head to the side and blinked at the sight, once. And then grinned, a sharp and fierce smile, as though everything in the universe which had previously gone wrong had suddenly re-adjusted itself.
He reached out with one hand, eschewing any flourishes to the gesture, and made a downward motion.
Mirrors. Gideon's mind was suddenly all mirrors again, and Nathan propelled himself upwards instinctively as he felt telekinesis shudder through the ground beneath him. Felt it start to collapse. #Cain! Move!#
"I AM!" Cain shouted back, just before he felt the ground give beneath his foot. "Oh, fuck..." he managed to blurt out before taking a deep breath as the ground - suddenly turned to unstable quicksand -opened up and swallowed him whole.
"Et tu, Mr Marko," Gideon said pleasantly as he watched a plop of air burst from the rather large patch of quicksand now containing a Cain in addition to the usual morass of mudlike material. He looked straight ahead then, meeting Nathan's gaze - and the smile widened, the look in Gideon's eyes having nothing to do with humor at all.
Hovering, Nathan stared at Gideon, peripherally aware of Cain in the quicksand, trying to find purchase to climb back out. "I think," he said, almost under his breath, not registering the sudden return of his Askani accent, "there needs to be an ending to this now."
He didn't give Gideon the chance for a rejoinder. No posturing. No verbal stilettos looking for the gaps in his emotional armor.
They were out in the open. No need to worry about collateral damage. His psimitar in his hand, and a sudden, absolute clarity filling his mind.
End it. It was the only voice in his mind. His.
The telekinetic explosion was colossal.
Directed forward, at Gideon, since the camp was behind him and although they had some distance, he didn't want to chance it. The air burned around him, and Nathan slipped into altered-vision, seeing the fabric of the world tear and shred under his telekinesis.
Gideon was hurled back through the air, Nathan's attack slicing through the lines of force. Nathan felt his uncle shield and recover, gathering psi-energy to lash out at him. But it was a fraction of what he could achieve, focusing his power through the psimitar.
#Dilettante,# he flung at Gideon with a cold viciousness, and summoned up another telekinetic shockwave, moving forward with it, carried along by its momentum. #Murderer.# Tyler's tiny body on the bed and Aliya's crumpled form on the floor, and how long had it been since rage had been ice like this, since he had found his center even in the midst of such terrible anger.
Nine years. Nine years, since he had walked into the Mistra home facility in New Mexico and let his anger destroy the place he had called home. But there were no walls to bring crashing down here. Just one man. Just the man who had sent him there, who had killed his family, who had come back to threaten everything he loved again...
He parried the telekinetic thrust that came at him easily. The lines of force were refined, practiced. But Gideon wasn't used to this level of telekinesis. Wasn't used tearing the world apart around him.
Wasn't a living weapon.
Let's see how you like what you made...
And there there was no reflection, no thought. Just power. Slicing through the lines of force again and again as Gideon tried to hold him back. Smashing through shields effortlessly as soon as Gideon put them up, not giving him a moment's breather.
Seeing the patterns again. Gideon's patterns, a shallow, fragile echo of his own. They disintegrated a little farther with each attack that connected. Strip him bare, Nathan thought distantly. Tear away every defense and scorch his mind to ash.
There was fire in his mind. His own fire, not Askani's. In his mind, and in the air surrounding him. Burning, the air was burning, and the ground beneath him was liquid glass as he drove Gideon back farther.
#I'm going to leave you in the desert.#
And finally, Gideon faltered. His shields softening, turning into flimsy things, his grip on the lines of force slipping. He was an old man, Nathan reminded himself, however he managed to look so much younger. An old man, playing with borrowed powers.
An old man, sprawled on the scorched earth, gasping for air.
"Too much for you?" Nathan's voice came out soft but wild, his eyes locked on Gideon as he lowered himself to the ground and crossed the few steps that separated them. He leveled the point of his psimitar at his uncle's throat. It was still glowing fiercely, the air around the blade still shivering. The blasted, cratered ground, shot through with glass, rumbled beneath his feet. Aftershocks?
Everything seemed surreal, disjointed. The air smelled like ozone, and Nathan's hands were shaking so hard that he had to clench them around the psimitar to hold it steady.
"Why?" The question was ragged. "Just tell me why. Make it... make sense."
It was, perhaps to Nathan's surprise, an utterly serene and lucid gaze which greeted his own as Gideon lifted his head, still breathing heavily, one hand pressed to his side. The smile had the clarity and surety of a child's, knowing he had done the right thing.
"For my brother, Nathan. It was all for my brother."
He didn't understand. He was never going to understand. Nathan's hands went white-knuckled on the psimitar. Did he want to understand? Deep down, did he really want to see through their eyes?
A step back, but the psimitar was still pointed downwards, at Gideon. He could feel the power still pooling there, could visualize any number of things he could do with it. What Mistra had taught him to do. Explode internal organs from the inside. Death, painful and irrevocable.
Tyler's tiny body, seemingly asleep. Nathan could hear his heart pounding, the ragged noise of his own breathing as he wrestled with the need to kill. If there had been anger in Gideon's expression, frustration, anything but that damned serenity...
In that tense silence, the only sound was a small pop of air, then a stabbing, burning sensation in Nathan's side.
Stepping out from behind a low wall, Saul looked down at the tranquilizer rifle with disdain. Such a crude tool, but effective when you could take advantage of a target's complete focus being directed elsewhere.
As Nathan slumped forward, resting on his psimitar, Saul set down the rifle and walked past his son to take Gideon by the arm. "I'm sorry, son," he said quietly over his shoulder. "It's not the endgame yet."
The dart wouldn't have gone through his leathers, but he wasn't wearing them. "Damn you... both of you..." His psimitar clattered on the ground, and Nathan had a moment to register that he was on his hands and knees before he was falling the rest of the way to the ground.
The impact was the last thing he felt. The last thing he heard was the sound of a helicopter.