xp_logs | House of Wind: What Remains (Reply)

Nathan has a last moment with Askani. Saul has a last moment with Gideon. Their last moments are of a very different sort, and the X-Men aren't bringing everyone home today.

~*~

What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
- Pound, 'Pisan Cantos'

It should have been the White Room, part of him thought. There was the same total sensory deprivation, but wherever he was now, it was dark. Not white, but black - a thick, impenetrable blackness that somehow managed to be utterly empty at the same time.

He had no idea how he had gotten here. Where here was. What had happened. Was he dead? Dreaming?

It didn't matter, he thought desolately. He was alone.

No. You're not.

Nathan clung to the voice - and then to the sudden return of sensation. It was still dark, but there was solid ground beneath his feet, or the approximation, and he could hear himself breathing. Could feel again.

And there was a shimmer of light in the distance, a shimmer that grew into a beacon, into the glowing form of someone he had loved and lost. Nathan stared as Askani crossed the space between him, smiling, reaching out to take his hands in hers.

Solid. Her hands were solid, and warm. "Askani," he said softly, wonderingly.

"Hello, little brother." Her voice was gentle, warm and resonant. "I've missed you."

"I..." His voice failed as he stared down into those luminous green eyes. "I'm dreaming."

"In a way." Her smile was gentle, almost teasing. "Really, you're unconscious under a very large pile of rubble, but I suppose in most ways this is still a dream."

"A good one." Before she could say anything else, Nathan stepped forward and hugged her - hesitantly at first, then with more conviction. "You... wait, I'm what?"

She didn't let him draw back for a moment. "Time enough for that later," she said more seriously, once she finally did. "When you wake up." She reached up, her fingertips brushing his jaw lightly. "There's so much I wish I could tell you," Askani said, a very human wobble in her voice, "but we don't have time."

No. Not again, he wasn't going to lose her again. "But-"

"Shhh." Askani placed a finger against his lips, a slight smile playing on her lips. Tears in her eyes. Were those tears in her eyes? "Listen to me." Nathan nodded almost numbly, and she took a deep breath before she continued. "All dark towers fall," she said, very slowly and precisely.

And it all came back, all at once. Nathan swayed backwards, but she kept him from stumbling, effortlessly. "It's over," she said simply. "A very long and complicated story is over. The circle has been closed."

It had been her, all along. Her whose reappearance he hadn't quite seen. "Is he-"

"Dead? Almost." Askani rested a hand against his cheek for a moment, as if in reassurance. "No questions," she murmured. "Just listen." They were tears. "What happened, with you and I... what you saw as cause and effect was never what I saw. What we've been, Nathan, is not linear. And what your mother and I were was not linear either."

Nathan stared at her blankly, not understanding, except on a visceral level that didn't count because it didn't answer his questions, damn it... "My mother," he repeated.

"What you need to know, Nathan, is that she loved you and believed in you. What she did, what I helped her do - it was because we had faith. The night you were born, I saw you through her eyes, and I knew that you were hers. That you would always be hers, no matter what your father or your uncle did. There was," Askani said, very softly, "too much strength in you. Too much light. Who do you think gave you your name?"

This was very, very confusing. Nathan opened his mouth and then closed it again, words failing him utterly. Askani gave a strangely shaky sigh and went on, speaking more quickly now, as if she was indeed running out of time.

"You won't see the future any longer," she said, and it sounded like a promise. "You've seen all you were meant to see, with a gift you were never meant to have. It's hurt you, hurt you more than we ever dreamed it would, but in the end you trusted it and yourself and..." She looked down for a moment, and when she looked back up, those green eyes were filled with a fierce, quiet joy. "He was stone," she whispered. "The black pyramid. Remember?"

He had seen a black pyramid in Gideon's precognitive aura, the first time they had met back in that office in Philadelphia the previous summer. The memory came back to him all at once.

"All dark towers fall," Askani repeated. "The future isn't written in stone, and even if it was, stone can be broken."

So confusing. Nathan swallowed and raised his hands to his temple, as if to still the bewildered thoughts chasing themselves in his brain. "If he's gone, then... what's left?"

"The future you make. Only that." She gazed at him, her eyes impossibly piercing. "He was stone. You were the wind."

"The wind?"

"The wind. He could touch you, but never hold you." She laid a hand flat on his chest, over his heart. "He locked himself into his course. You were free. No matter what he tried to do, you made only the choices that were yours."

It made a strange, detached sort of sense, as if the pieces were fitting together but only in his subconscious, where he could feel the big picture but couldn't see it. "So," he said hoarsely, covering her hand with his. "The wind, huh? Where did I blow myself away to this time?"

"Nowhere in particular," Askani said, almost playfully, but her eyes were full of love. "And you can't stay."

"I can't?"

"No, and neither can I. I think..." She paused, a smile of wonderment flickering across her features. "I think I need to go and be born someplace new."

"You need..." His brain just refused to process that. Not right now. Later. Much later. "I... this is it, then?" he asked, stumbling over the words. "You're... I won't see you again."

Askani shook her head slowly. "No," she said simply. "You won't. I'll miss you, but it's time to say goodbye for the last time, little brother. All stories end."

His own eyes were full of tears, finally. "But new ones start?" he said, clinging to what she'd said as fiercely as he'd pushed it away a moment before.

"Always." Askani leaned up and kissed him gently on the cheek. "Wake up, little brother," she urged him softly. "It's time to go home."

This was not at all how he had expected this to end. Then again, Gideon Faraday thought very dimly, choking on blood, he was not the precognitive, and one thing he had learned a very long time ago was that borrowed powers didn't always mean borrowed understanding.

He simply hadn't expected that truth to come back to haunt him in such a fashion. Gideon coughed and shifted weakly on the ground where the explosion had thrown him. Just clear of the house, he thought; he remembered going through the glass. There seemed to be a haze in the air. Or perhaps that was simply his vision.

Saul felt the ground crunch under his feet, the force of the explosion having reduced most of the nearby rock and concrete to rubble and dust. He looked on the house, mostly collapsed in on itself. Closing his eyes, he let out a long breath of sorrow. He'd spent forty years watching his son, most of it from afar. If anyone knew Nathan's strengths, it was him. But this... no one could have survived this.

Forty years, and all was lost.

A movement in the wreckage caught his attention, and for the first time in almost thirty years, Saul cried out with hope. Heedless of the steam rising from the superheated ground around him, he ran forward to where he saw a form writhing amidst the debris.

Hope turned to ashes in his mouth when he looked down to see his brother. "Gideon," he said, his tone thick with condemnation and barely-restrained wrath.

Saul! Hope flared amid the pained daze, and Gideon reached out with his powers, synching to his brother's mutation instinctively. Saul's mutation was, after all, the first he had ever studied in detail. It would let him shift the burden of keeping himself alive from his body's more damaged systems...

"Brother," he managed, his voice barely audible as he reached out physically this time. Saul would help him. This wouldn't end here after all.

But his brother was simply standing there, staring at him. And the look on his face replaced hope with confusion.

"... Saul?"

Without a word, Saul knelt down beside Gideon, surveying his burns and wounds. He needed Saul's power, his ability to control every miniscule aspect of his body. Saul knew this, they had done it before numerous times. All it would take is a touch from his hand, and Gideon would be able to save himself.

Concentrating slightly, Saul closed his eyes and placed the palm of his hand on Gideon's shoulder, feeling the seared flesh crack under his grip. "Take it, Gideon," he whispered, "as in all things, we are in this together now."

He'd misunderstood. That had been shock on his brother's face, not anger, and that was understandable, wasn't it? Gideon concentrated, cracked lips cracking further as he smiled faintly, realizing that Saul was making it even easier for him. Not just the pattern of his power, but the pattern of it in action, the way energy ebbed and flowed to produce the proper end result, the one that would save him.

So easy to duplicate.

The pain started in Saul's chest, as he knew it would. Over the years, he'd experimented with his power, testing its limits. How quickly he could heal from an injury, the resistance of his cells to poison and radiation. And how to turn on any little genetic trigger inside his DNA.

Including a normally dormant yet incredibly malignant form of cancer.

Through the haze that began to cloud his eyes, he saw Gideon gasp and attempt to struggle. Saul bore down with all his weight, both hands pressing into his brother's chest as he felt damaged ribs crack. "Where is our strength now, Gideon?" he asked, voice rasping as his own throat began to burn. "What price, this end? Too many years, we have refused to pay the price for our actions. Today, my brother, today we will count the cost."

A flicker of disbelief, clouding what little coherent thought Gideon could manage at the moment. He couldn't breathe, couldn't cry out a protest, tell Saul that he didn't understand, that there had been reasons for all of it, even this...

And he couldn't shut off his power. It was the one drawback of synching with physical contact - only breaking the contact ended the synchronization, and he had thrown himself too freely into duplicating not just Saul's mutation but what he was doing with it. Killing us both. His vision started to go dark from lack of air.

But he could still see his brother's gray eyes - level, boring into his and burning with emotions Gideon couldn't even begin to guess at. So like his son's, only a few short minutes ago, and yet so different...

There were many things he should have known. Many things he should have done differently.

But there was no more time.

It seemed to take eons for Gideon's eyes to finally go clear, staring up into the sky. With muscles protesting and feeling pain he'd banished decades ago, Saul stood up over the body of his brother. One twitch of his power, one small act of will and the spread of the cancer through his body would reverse itself.

Instead, Saul walked into the ruins of the house, feeling himself grow weaker with every step. There wasn't a wall that stood untouched, the ceiling collapsed in through most of the wreckage. Moving with the gait finally due one of his age, Saul righted a chair - a simple wooden chair that had somehow escaped the conflagration. As he sat, a glint of glass caught his eye, and he leaned down to dig a picture out of the ash and rubble.

Even through the cracked glass, Saul recognized it and smiled. A black and white photograph, one Gideon had taken almost forty years ago. Saul was there, smiling, the beginnings of a beard showing on his cheeks. Beside him stood Esther, frozen in the middle of a laugh. If he closed his eyes, Saul thought, he could hear it right now.

Between them in their arms, they held their infant son. Nathan Christopher Morrow. Eyes closed, the baby looked peaceful. He had been their hope, Saul remembered, their glory for the future. He clenched the photograph in shaking hands, giving himself at least this one last memory of how things had been.

Leaning back, Saul Morrow let his eyes close, feeling the breath rattle out of his lungs as his heart stopped. He knew that his cells would hold onto life as long as his body would permit it. And so, cell by cell, he willingly let go.

As if from a long distance, he could hear Esther's voice singing, one of those old folk songs she loved. Without breath, Saul's lips moved, silently following along.

The minstrel boy... to the war has gone... in the ranks of death you'll find him...

Opening his eyes for only a second, Saul imagined he could see her there, a hand out to him. And then - nothing.

Angelo would really rather be where he could see the team coming out, when they did, than sitting at the back of the plane where he couldn't see anything. Especially after that boom. So he headed up to the front, where Paige was already waiting.

She'd curled herself up in one of the passenger chairs, drumming her short nails against the metallic walls in an anxious rhythm. It wasn't so much that she was worried – Paige trusted her team to come back safely – as she just hated the long pause, the waiting, with nothing to do but try and predict all the different outcomes.

Angelo's boots against the grating announced his arrival, and she half turned in her seat to give him a quiet, even perhaps sheepish smile, before folding her nails into her palms to still them.

He trusted them all to come out safely, certainly. But they hadn't been held captive by Gideon for a week, and that was the part that terrified him. He attempted a return smile before dropping into one of the empty seats. "Any sign?"

"Not a peep nor a wink," Paige replied, allowing herself a small sigh. In the back of her mind, the checklist of things to be done repeated endlessly, even though she knew all she had left was waiting; it was a gentle harmony to the hum of the jet. "I wish they'd hurry... Shoot him in the head, grab Nathan, go. Or is that not very X-Man centric of me?"

That got a crooked grin. "I think the idea is to try not to kill him. Much as I'm sure they want to."

"Blahblahblah, rotting in jail, nobleblahblah. He gets close enough with no one looking and I'll punch his nose inside out. And I don't even like Nathan," Paige replied, waving her hand around like a sock puppet. Realising her company, she flicked her eyes over at him, letting him know she was joking, mostly, and continued to peer out the window.

Angelo was staring out of the other window, but caught the glance and nodded an acknowledgment. "Wish they'd let me get some time alone with him. Let's see him use my powers when he's never had to before."

Laughing under her breath, Paige didn't let herself think about how odd this was, her and Angelo having something that possibly counted as an actual conversation. A slightly twisted one, but it was more than the awkward brushes in the halls. "If nothing else, maybe they'll let us submit torture techniques we'd like to see applied."

He gave that a moment's thought. "...not likely. But nice idea."

"Come on, Ange. Give optimism a try. Your heart will thank you," she returned, giving him a quick, playful wink. "I hear water torture is fun."

That got a stronger attempt at a smile. "Lasts a good long time, too." He was ignoring the strangeness of this conversation... because hey, it was conversation. Better than sitting in the back of the plane with his thoughts.

"I'd also heard that bit. Or we could make him watch Richard Simmons videos on loop. Or would that be too cruel?"

"Nothin's too cruel for him", was the almost-serious answer.

"Richard Simmons water torture with only brussel sprouts to eat it is, then," Paige decided with a single nod. "I'll let the higher ups know."

"For the rest of his natural life", Angelo decided, returning the nod. "Only fair."

"Possibly a bit of his unnatural one t- oh! Look, I see them!" Paige exclaimed, nearly tumbling out of her seat. Leaning over the controls on one hand, she used the other to shield her eyes, squinting. "I think... well, no one's face is covered? I'm taking that as my good sign."

Angelo shot out of his seat, staring out of the window. "I... yeah. I need to be out there." He started back towards the door, tripping over a thing or two in his haste.

Looking over her shoulder, Paige smiled oddly at his retreating back a moment, before going to find her kit.

He should have risen majestically from the rubble, maybe. In his exoskeleton. A phoenix from the ashes of the old, from the remnants of his father and his uncle's twisted dreams. Something like that would have been fitting.

Instead, Nathan Dayspring crawled out of the rubble. Small, fitful flickers of telekinesis, all he could manage, knocked the debris away from him as he pulled himself back out into the light - and promptly started to cough, choking on the dust that made the air glow an eerie white. The coughing sent jolts of fiery pain through his chest, and a choked moan slipped out, turning into a gasp as the debris collapsed beneath him, spilling him down several feet into some sort of depression. A crater? Had he left a crater again?

Cain heard the calls over his communicator. Juggernaut, stand down.

Like hell he was standing down. Leaving Callery behind to tend to her wounded comrade, Cain bolted towards the explosion, punching trees and kicking boulders to dust rather than avoid them. This was Youra, all over again. He wasn't going to see Nate taken out on a stretcher just because he'd been too slow.

The area around the house looked like ground zero of a bomb blast. No sign of life could be seen - the only motion seemed to be ash floating to the ground and the sliding of burnt wood and debris under Cain's feet. Gritting his teeth, he glanced around before bellowing "NATE!", hoping to hear a response from anyone. If it was Cable, that meant he was okay. If it was anyone else, well, Cain was itching to hit someone.

Someone was bellowing his name. There were a limited number of people who would be bellowing his name, at least at the volume to overcome the ringing in his ears from the explosion. Nathan managed to raise his head and look around, his eyes watering from the dust. He hadn't done this, he thought dimly. His powers were... strained, in a funny and very painful way, but that was from Gideon's synching attempts. Not from blowing yet another hole in the world.

Gideon had done that. Or rather, Askani had done that, with Gideon's powers, which were really his powers, and... Nathan sagged back to the ground, his mind spinning along with the world around him, and he was so done for the day, he really was...

That familiar bellow came again, and Nathan blinked, struggling back from the edge of well-deserved unconsciously. #Cain?# he sent back telepathically, faintly. Not wanting to yell and trigger more coughing.

Cain had never been so glad to feel the familiar itch of psychic contact. "Nate!" he hollered, carefully picking his way through the debris. "Don't try and move, buddy, I'm comin' through." He keyed the priority channel on his communicator cutting through the other chatter, "Juggernaut to everyone, I found him, he's alive. Probably gonna need medical attention."

Standing at the edge of a small depression, Cain looked down to where Nate lay, covered in dust and remnants of plaster and other unidentifiable bits of wreckage. "I'll be damned," he breathed, "son of a bitch, you're alive. End of the fucking world, huh? C'mon, say something."

"... I didn't do it." It was the first thing that came out, and for a sudden, absurd moment, Nathan wanted to do nothing more than laugh. He mastered the impulse, knowing that it would have hurt almost as much as coughing, and pushed himself up on his elbows. Small steps. "Think I'm... pretty much okay," he managed.

"Right, it was like that when I got here, officer," Cain mocked, dropping to a knee and sliding down into the crater next to his teammate. "Y'ain't bleeding, don't got nothin' broken - where's that bastard uncle of yours? Tell me he's still wiggling around under a rock somewhere."

"Ribs are pretty banged up, but that was back in Rio..." He wasn't going to try and sit up just yet. In a minute. Oh, he hurt. "Gideon's..." Nathan trailed off, staring into the dust.

Dead, or just about. Somewhere close. Flickers of brain activity fading and dying, and...

"Saul," Nathan said in a soft, uncertain voice, a voice that was almost childlike. "Where's... where's my father?"

"Was on the plane last I saw," Cain drawled, lifting his head to peer out of the crater, seeing the other X-Men working their way through the devastation. "Over here!" he bellowed, "Husk, getcher scrawny metal butt over here and give Cable the once-over!"

Hoisting himself out of the hole, Cain looked down at Nathan. "Don't go movin' anywhere, I'm gonna take a look around for anyone else that's trying to walk away from this."

"... they're dead." The words slipped out, the realization oddly distant, and Nathan wondered if he was in shock or something. The feeling was familiar. "They're both dead."

Cain paused, looking down into the hole at Nathan. "No shit, huh? Tell you what, you sit there and wait for Husk to check you out. Me, I'm gonna make sure I see the bodies before I believe it." He took a step, then paused. "You got your wallet with you, by the way?"

Nathan blinked at him, the non sequitur taking him entirely off-guard. "No," he finally said, "I think the wallet's in another crater."

"Too bad," Cain said, "because you owe me ten bucks from the last round at Harry's, and I figured I oughta collect before we get you home and Moira kills you."

The dust was settling as Nathan staggered away from the house, followed very closely by Paige, who was apparently determined that he was not going to fall on his face while he was under her care. He had to admire her conviction. He wasn't so sure.

But he'd been very sure about walking out of here under his own power. Point of pride. He'd gotten himself into this mess, and even if he wasn't getting himself back out of it he was at least going to be on his feet at the end. And that didn't make sense. Not much did at the moment, though. Or maybe it made too much sense, and...

The air was less dusty, and the sun was brighter, and the way it glinted off Alison's hair was really... very bright, Nathan thought, stopping dead and barely aware of Paige moving off to help someone else.

"Hey," he said hoarsely, swaying a little on his feet as he stared at Alison.

"Hey," was the reply, similar in kind though varying in a multitude of ways in both intonation and meaning. Alison moved to help prop him up, just a bit, before starting again towards the Blackbird, far more slowly this time. "C'mon. Let's get you somewhere where you can sit down..."

"Sitting down would be nice." He sounded a little hysterical, he thought. "My father's dead," he said, and stopped, blinking. "But you heard that already," he said, "because Cain... saw them, and I heard Paige's part of that conversation. And I didn't kill Gideon," he said suddenly. "Askani did."

Though the name brought a twisting sensation in the pit of Alison's stomach, she didn't say anything - merely nodded and accepted what Nathan was saying as fact, no more and no less. She kept her attention mostly focused on keeping him up if not steady as they headed for the inside of the Blackbird, intent on getting him there and down, as soon as possible.

"She saw him. He wanted to see her future, wanted it so badly, and he saw it the way I saw it. So she saw him. And you remember how she hated him. Except..." Nathan trailed off, his expression blank again. "Except I think she wasn't hating him so much as saving me. And herself. I... I can't quite sort it all out just yet."

"You don't have to sort it out yet," she murmured softly, pausing for a moment to brace him a bit more firmly before going on, picking a careful path to the ramp of the Blackbird. Once there, it'd be only a few moments longer before he could rest. "We're almost there, Nathan."

The moment her foot hit the ramp, the slight dull sound of metal underfoot accompanying the gesture, Nathan suddenly pitched forward, pure dead weight which carried Alison down with him, though she managed to hang on enough so that he didn't fall too hard on the ramp.

He'd fallen. Maybe he shouldn't have tried to walk into the plane? Nathan thought somewhat dimly. Embarassing. Walking and falling on your face. Or maybe the ground had moved. He wasn't sure. He just hurt so much... the ground wasn't so bad. The black vortex in his mind, though, that was a little odd. It could go away.

He sensed, rather than saw someone bending over him, and heard someone else calling out a familiar name. "C-Can't leave," he wheezed, waves of pain punctuating each word. But he was starting to remember what was going on here. "Can't... leave. Gideon said..." And now Gideon was dead. Well, that was awkward.

Alison shook her head and took a deep breath, then looking up to call for help. It proved to be unnecessary to even do so though, and she waved at the man on top of the ramp tiredly.

Jim jogged down the ramp and to a halt, more winded than he should have been, but well enough to unwind his shields for a scan. As he stopped to get his breath back he brushed Nathan's mind with his own, as much to reassure as to assess the damage.

#Don't really believe in doing things halfway, do you?# he sent as he moved to Nathan's side.

#Not my fault,# Nathan sent back weakly and managed to turn over onto his side. It took far too much effort, and he told himself that it wasn't really a rib poking through his lung, it just felt like it. #You came to help find me...?#

Jim smiled as he knelt down to lay a hand over the other man's forehead. #I thought you might need a telepath. We're a bit far out, even for Charles.# His power was still a little shaky, but the physical contact helped focus the connection. His brow creased; the artificial structures stood out sharp and clear to his mind's eye. "Psychic behavioral inhibitors," he said aloud, as much for the benefit of the others as for Nathan's own. There was one suspicion proven right. "Let me guess: Gideon's insurance?"

Nathan closed his eyes. #Can't leave until he says. And well...# Jim's mental touch was hesitant, careful, and that more than anything else kept him from jumping out of his skin. After this, he thought that it would be very good not to let anyone else in his mind for a while.

Jim withdrew his hand. "He wasn't fooling around. They're worked in pretty deep -- but I think I can dismantle them. He wasn't exactly subtle." He gave the other man an apologetic smile. "It's going to take some time, though, and it's . . . I'm afraid it's not going to be pleasant. It might be better if I put you out for a while."

He was not going to hyperventilate. Hyperventilating with broken ribs would be a bad, bad idea. Besides, this was Jim. He trusted Jim. And he was tired already. He wanted to sleep, let the world turn however it wanted...

He wanted to go home.

"Okay," he murmured aloud, weakly, and rather painstakingly took down what was left of his shields.

Jim sensed the defenses lower, and what doing so cost the other man. He squeezed Nathan's shoulder. #It's all right,# he murmured as he gently began to push him towards unconsciousness. #It's over. You're safe. We'll take care of the rest.#