xp_logs | Sound of Silence - Betrayal: Crystal, Blackagar, and Maximus

Blackagar finds Crystal. To say the meeting does not go well is an understatement.

Crystal strode through the hangar, a young woman on a mission. That the mission was not of her own choosing did not occur to her. That the mission involved the deaths of a dozen people did not bother her. This was for the good of Attilan, and the world. All that mattered right now was Attilan and helping it become the first of many mutant-only countries. Maximus was the rightful king of Attilan, and when he took the throne the humans would finally have the chance to see the glory of his mutant kingdom.

There were very few people currently at work in the hangar, and that unworthy handful left quickly with but a few spoken words. They knew who she was; who on Attilan did not? They did not matter, though; soon enough Maximus would take care of them, or perhaps he would permit her to aid him in ridding the island of all of the unnecessary humans.

The service door to the hangar swung open. This was a far cry from childhood games of hide and seek in the palace, but Blackagar didn't dismiss the possibility Crystal hadn't abandoned a talent for finding unlikely places. Why she would feel the need was another question, but far preferable to the alternative. For the time being all he bore in mind was assuaging Medusa's concerns. Until they were proven valid Blackagar had no wish to make a decision in haste -- particularly with the risk the impression of agitation from the crown prince might carry.

And so, as always, Blackagar remained calm.

Someone else was in the hangar. She had just sent everyone away, but someone else had entered the hangar. Even without her amplified powers, Crystal might have noticed the new arrival, but with her powers as heightened as they were, every movement anyone or anything in the hangar made sent a sonar-like message to her via the air. She didn't even have to see the crown prince to know who was there. Every person moved differently; even a shapeshifter might not have the exact movement of a specific person copied properly.

Without making even the slightest sound, Crystal slipped behind a pile of unpacked crates and hid there, peering out between a tiny space to observe Medusa's fiance appearing to search the hangar. What was he doing there? Medusa had offered to stay to take care of her supposedly ill sister, but what the hell was Blackagar doing off the plane? Maybe he was just running late and he was on his way to the plane now. If so, why was he looking around the hangar? Why wasn't he outside where the plane was?

He knows, Maximus thought from behind his cousin's eyes, and all the Inside Voices spiraled up united in a single hateful shriek. He could hear Blackagar's smug thoughts beaming out at him, the smug satisfaction of denying Maximus his rightful place again, despite all the planning and the secrecy. With a roar both mental and physical, his presence in Crystal's mind surged up into full control, and a howling blast of wind sent the stack of boxes tumbling toward the crown prince.

A desperate dive to the side took took him out of the path of a flying wooden crate that would have taken him across the shoulder. His first thought, strangely, was not for what his cousin was doing, but for her lack of control. With Crystal's relentless training he hadn't seen such unfocused use in years. Blackagar threw out his arm to absorb the impact and turned it into a roll. He sprung back to his feet and spread his hands, palms up and out to give opportunity for clear identification.

Cursing his brother's reflexes, Maximus narrowed Crystal's eyes. Her power was unfamiliar--if a good deal more viscerally satisfying than his own--and he didn't have time to refine his control over it very much. But thanks to Fabian, Crystal had reserves of power Blackagar could not even imagine, and that would have to be enough. He walked his cousin a step forward, directing a more focused and vastly more powerful gust at Blackagar himself, and his shriek in Crystal's voice of "I'll kill you! You'll never stand in my way again!" cut admirably well through the rushing wind.

The wind slammed him back against the corrugated metal of the hangar wall. He bounced off, barely managing to catch himself with knees and hands before cracking his face on the concrete. Fever, rage, madness -- there was little time to debate which was driving Crystal. Blackagar tensed the muscles in his throat to locate a specific frequency, discovered and trained at the expense of much barren terrain. The air around him hummed in resonance as Blackagar rose into the air. His expression of calm was belied by the tight urgency as his hands signed,

What's wrong?

"As if you don't know," Maximus spat. "You found out somehow, didn't you? That's why you're out here instead of on the plane where you belong. I can hear you, brother. I've always been able to hear you. But now I'll shut you up forever." He raised Crystal's clenched fists and tried to whip up a whirlwind around Blackagar's hovering form, with only limited results; his failure brought forth another shriek of rage.

The howl that emerged from the girl's throat wasn't half as chilling to Blackagar as that one, inexplicable word: "Brother."

He shook it off. There was no time for questions or uncertainty. That last wild blast was rattling the glass in the light fixtures, and the intensity of her attacks were increasing. As he watched a pane slid off to shatter itself on the ground scant yards away from her, and the girl was so consumed in whatever had seized her she didn't even seem to notice. She had to be gotten now, before she became truly ou tof control.

A different set of muscles tightened, and suddenly Blackagar had gone from levitation to a lightening-fast dive right for his cousin.

Voices gibbered in fear as Blackagar attacked, and pure instinct drove Maximus to send Crystal skyward. Gale-force winds peeled back the hangar roof, and out in the open sky Maximus balanced his cousin's body on the swirling air and smiled. There were possibilities here. More to work with. His brother would pay.

There was nothing to do but to follow, and so Blackagar did. He shot through the warped metal to find Crystal waiting for him, hovering black against the sun. Blackagar slit his eyes to the light and tried to appeal a second time, hands flashing Come back with me.

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Maximus hissed. "Come back with you, step back into your shadow, be the disregarded second son again. No. Never. Today will be remembered as the day the greatest king of Attilan came into his own." He sent Crystal's body higher and pushed--and clouds gathered around her, and a full-fledged tornado tore the air in a path toward the plane containing the king and queen, the Amaquelin parents, and the high government officials. "MAXIMUS REX!"

And as the wind ripped at his hair and clothing it sank into Blackagar, finally, the undeniable truth. Maximus, his brother. Maximus, always cordial and helpful in such duties of state as he was given. Maximus, who had always been pitied for having reached adulthood without showing any sign of manifesting . . .

In their cousin.

The wind roared, debris filling the air with a greyish tinge, and Blackagar realized what was going to happen. The plane. The people. Attilan's high-ranking officials . . . and their family.

Blackagar could not think of that day in their boyhood when he'd found Maximus dangling worms for a hatchling bird he'd smuggled into his room, or the way Crystal had laughed at her own scraped knee gathered in the course of learning to fly, or the smile Maximus wore when ruffling his cousin's hair in jest, or the times when as children together they'd ended yet another unendurably dull state dinner by escaping for rebellious games in the palace garden without even changing from their formalwear.

And he could not think of the look that he knew would be in Medusa's eyes when she found out what he had done.

He knew this could not be. He was the prince of Attilan, and there was no choice.

Blackagar whipped his head away from the shuddering plane back to his brother poured wild laughter rom Crystal's lips, and let his hands drop motionless to his side. His eyes closed, part in concentration, part in dread, Blackagar Boltagon spoke to another human being for the first time since manifestation.

He said:

"Sorry."

Maximus read Blackagar's intention before ever he opened his mouth, and it shocked him into sudden stillness within Crystal's mind, though the wind he'd made her call still howled around them. Blackagar wouldn't. He couldn't. Maximus had long known that his brother hated him, but never in his most terrible nightmares had he believed Blackagar capable of hurting little Crystal just to get to him. Of killing her, just to hurt him.

As Blackagar's lips parted, Maximus fled, withdrawing himself completely from Crystal's mind, cutting every tie between them. If the prince was really going to do this terrible thing, Maximus would rob every iota of triumph from the moment. And Crystal's death would head the list of acts for which he would one day make his brother pay.

The sudden departure of Maximus shocked Crystal into complete awareness. She remembered all of the events of the past few days: what Maximus had told her, what he had made her do, and what he had wanted to make her do. In that instant, too, Crystal was aware of why Maximus had fled from her mind. Instinct kicked in, her still-amplified powers shielded her and redirected the forceful blast of Blackagar's spoken voice away from her.

Both members of the royal family fell towards the ground; the power that had been meant to be directed only at Crystal was also directed upwards, at the very plane Maximus had sought to make her destroy. The fate of the plane was unknown to Crystal, and there was only one last thought present before her body hit the ground and she slipped into seeming nothingness.

Why?

* * * * * *

The storm that had suddenly sprung up over the island had sent the young man rushing towards home, wanting to get in under cover. This wasn't seasonable weather for Attilan at all, and he found it a little frightening. His parents would be worried about him, out in the middle of this, so he picked up the pace even further, almost running. Into the wind, thankfully, or he would have been struggling to walk, it was that strong.

Over the howl of the wind, he heard something else - a sustained mechanical scream, a strange noise if he'd ever heard one. He paused and looked up - and froze in horror as he saw the obviously out-of-control plane spinning towards the ground. Half of its wing was gone, and...

... it was heading right towards him. Run! part of his mind screamed, but his feet were frozen, his whole body was frozen in shock and horror as he saw death falling towards him.

Debris, part of the wing maybe, smashed into the house beside him, and he cried out, raising his hands.

And something entirely unexpected happened.