xp_logs | Alexander's Wall: The Long Flight Home

It takes just as long for the Blackbird to get back from Derbent as it did for it to get there. That much time to think, in a situation like this, is both good and bad.

It was bugging the hell out of him that he couldn't pace properly. He liked pacing. It appealed to the same part of him that liked turning on his exoskeleton and divebombing the lake when he was particularly frustrated. But it just wasn't working properly today. He started off all right, but he'd either meander off to one side or totter, and turning around at either end of the cargo hold was more challenging than it should have been. The deck under his feet didn't want to stay put. Nathan wished he could pretend it was turbulence.

"~Motherflonqing son of a bitch,~" he muttered under his breath in Askani as he continued his drunken - punch-drunken? - pacing. "~Stab his eyes and roast them over an open fire with salt...~"

The temptation to stick one foot out and trip Nathan was almost too much for Cain to resist. Instead, he settled for wadding up a stray roll of bandages and throwing it lightly at the back of the telekinetic's head.

Nathan a) didn't catch or otherwise intercept the roll of bandages, and b) nearly jumped out of his skin. "Go away," he muttered, swaying slightly. "And stop throwing things at me. Enough throwing of things today. Except for the non-ferrous...something I didn't find and throw at Magneto's head. I need to work on that. Scott needs to write a scenario where we have to find fifteen non-ferrous things that can be used to squash the man with the funny hat..."

"Oh, quit your bitching," Cain drawled, stretching out across two empty cargo pallets. "Look at the bright side. Magneto's got Saidawhatsis now, yeah?"

Nathan gave him one of those looks that somehow managed to be blank and yet utterly appalled at the same time. "And this is a good thing why?"

"Well," Cain explained. "He's like the Russian you, right? Think of how much money Magneto's going to have to spend on neurologists and concussion bills now. Not to mention he's got to partner up with Captain Coatrack, and they're liable to fight all day over who wants to kick your ass more."

Nathan's mouth opened and closed silently, before a rather cracked-sounding laugh escaped him. "Right. Fun," he wheezed, wincing as he folded both arms across his midsection as if to brace himself. "He must have stock in thorazine. Magneto, I mean. Great new recruiting strategy, going for the crazy people... although I suppose we can't really talk." He grimaced, letting one arm fall back to his side and rubbing at his shoulder. "I realize the big flaming X-chicken is a tempting target but I think I'd like to skip it the next time someone decides dismembering it's a good idea. That hurt."

"That's because you fighting him is stupid," Cain said flatly, holding up a hand to forestall Nathan's inevitable protest. "You were a soldier, stop me if this makes sense. You don't fight artillery with artillery, all you're gonna do is blow the shit out of the entire countryside. You send an engineer around to disable the fuckers. Same principle. You two are like... like two goddamn boulders just bouncing off each other." He snorted and shook his head. "All that new age mumbo jumbo you keep talking about patterns and force and energy and whatever. Nate, he does the same damn thing and you wonder why he keeps kicking your ass? Shit, you needed Dave to bail you out here, and he ain't even got his head screwed on straight half the time! This guy knows all your tricks because they're his tricks. Crazy knows crazy, I suppose."

"So what was I supposed to do? Wait ten hours for the 'Bird to arrive?" Nathan growled at him shakily, frustrated - but not denying that he had a point. Nor was he about to voice the excuse for a plan hat had been behind the whole thing. He somehow doubted 'I wanted him to beat on me instead of the city' was going to go over very well. "We stopped him from moving any farther into the city. Jim could have stepped in earlier, maybe, but it's not like either of us was expecting all his personalities to suddenly play nice."

Cain shrugged. "I didn't say you did the wrong thing. Just that it ain't going to work all the time. You got lucky. But hey, sometimes lucky works."

"Dumb luck," Nathan muttered, rubbing at the rising lump at the base of his skull and fighting back another wave of nausea. "I swear I'm swearing off traveling for a while, this is ridiculous. I'm cursed."

"Also possible," Cain said with a smile. "Jake got turned into a frog, Jean got possessed by herself, I've been to Hell twice - I wouldn't rule it out." He leaned back against one of the bulkheads and picked up the copy of The Weekly World News he'd been reading on the flight. "You ever piss off a voodoo queen? Says here they do curses and shit all the time."

Nathan stared at Cain and his tabloid. "You read. I'll be - over here. Sitting down." With his head between his knees. Right, that felt better. Pacing was overrated.

***************

"This was," Pietro declared sourly from his seat in the back of the Blackbird, "quite possibly the single most useless transatlantic flight I've ever taken. Though I suppose at least we weren't there long enough to develop jet lag."

"An upside," Jean agreed with a sigh. Certainly Pietro had cause and more than for his bad mood, but he was hardly the only one thoroughly frustrated by the way things had turned out, and Jean really wasn't in the mood for his particular brand of stress relief.

"Should we feel flattered, do you suppose, that my father's started mirroring our recruitment strategy? Well," Pietro corrected himself, "I suppose it's too early to declare a trend, per se, but if he decides to collect a half-dozen or so overly-frivolous teenagers next we may have to consider the point."

"Overly-frivolous, huh? Surely you're being too harsh. Some of them are merely sufficiently-frivolous." Fighting snark with snark was probably not the best option available, but it was all Jean really had the energy for.

"Are you accusing me of having a low tolerance for frivolity, doctor? Ask anyone who knows me, I'm sure they'll say I'm only a moment away from a red rubber nose at all times." Pietro glared out the window. "He won this one. His favorite kind of victory, too, where nobody else knew they were playing until too late."

That earned another sigh. "He did," she admitted, leaning back onto the headrest of her seat and closing her eyes. "Damn it," Jean whispered. There was zero upside to this that she could see.

"Saidullayev's never demonstrated any telepathic ability that we know of, has he?" Pietro asked suddenly, eyes narrowing. "He's a powerful telekinetic, I'll grant, but he's not one of you spoiled broad-spectrum brats, is he?"

"Hmmm?" Jean asked, opening her eyes. "Oh, no. No telepathy as far as we know, although his mental discipline and natural shields mean it's hard to attack him that way. I almost wonder if not being broad spectrum doesn't make him a more powerful telekinetic, though. Almost certainly more powerful than I am, at any rate."

"Not what I meant, though certainly something to consider." Pietro settled back slightly. "Functional telepaths have always been high on Father's shopping list, even discounting the Cerebro possibilities. If Saidullayev's not one, that's . . . something, at least. Not that telekinesis isn't bad enough on its own. There's nothing quite so humiliating as being completely useless because I'm three inches off the ground."

"Ah, I see," Jean said. "No, he hasn't picked up a telepath, at least not in this run."

"Could be worse, then." Pietro rubbed his chin speculatively. "I think I'm going to bend Dayspring's ear about tactics when we get back. If it's feasible for me to traverse Saidullayev's effective range faster than his reaction time, I might be able to get the jump on him without leveling half a city in the process. Which would, I think, be an improvement over past dealings."

"We hardly leveled half the city. Maybe a tenth. Maybe." Not that that was such a great defense, but it was the best Jean could do. "And yes, talking to Nate would probably be a good idea. I foresee many, many danger room scenarios with Nate or I playing Saidullayev. Joy."

"I'm just saying, it's probably in the best interest of our public image not to leave places looking like they've been bombed, if we can help it." Pietro shrugged. "If it's any consolation, my scenario is more-or-less just wind sprints. Once we have a decent estimate of how much distance I'll have to cover in how little time, all I need is a rangefinder and a stopwatch and you can go play psychotic Chechen for somebody else."

"It would definitely be a good starting place," Jean agreed. "Certainly more productive than me sitting here and fretting." Straightening up, she glanced over and nodded at Pietro.

The corner of Pietro's mouth twitched. "Hmph. I thought I was being unproductive, with the moping. I'm going to have to re-evaluate my whole posture now, and that's just inconvenient."

"Don't you hate accidentally being productive and helpful..." There was a hint of wry smile at the corner of Jean's mouth.

"Accidents are Wanda's thing," Pietro replied in tones of great dignity. "I try not to do anything accidental because she'll feel bad when I show her up."

"I'm sure she appreciates your great consideration."

"Are you really?" Pietro smiled. "That makes one of us, then."

***************

"Thank you," Jim said, accepting Gabrielle's offered icepack and settling back deeper into the chair of the Blackbird. His cheek and lip twitched at the sudden cold. Sore, but Jean had assured him it was unlikely anything was broken -- or wouldn't be unless Lorna decided to carry out her threatened punishment for making her break tonight's date, anyway. Jim pressed the pack to his face and added apologetically, "It's my first head injury."

"According to the rumors, I doubt it will be your last," she responded, briefly glancing at Nathan before turning back to Haller. "How are you feeling?"

What was it about parents that made it hard to say what you really felt? Jim had noticed the phenomena among some of his younger patients -- how no matter how at ease the child had been during their sessions, the appearance of their parents would regress them to the automatic answers. "How are you?" "Fine." "Do you want to get lunch?" "Okay." "How did it go?" "Good."

Pattern, ritual -- giving nothing, sharing less. Maybe there was some comfort in it, or maybe it was just easier. Jim had never really understood it. Yet even now, to this woman he'd known was his mother less than a year, Jim could feel his own "okay" forming.

But where do you ever get with that?

Jim exhaled slowly. "Weird." He shifted the icepack so he could meet Gaby's eyes with his blue. "That was the first time I've seen him since the first time we met. Magneto, I mean."

Gabrielle looked back at her son, forcing herself to hold eye contact. "He wasn't always like that," she said after a brief silence. "Magneto. Erik. I suppose that is not comfort, but . . . he was once a decent human being. Once upon a time."

Jim just lay there for a moment, letting the cold seep into the throb of his head. He was glad Pietro was on the other side of the plane. "I know I should connect him to San Diego," he said eventually. "After all those people, and what happened to me there. But the first time I met him, before I came back to the school -- I don't know. He said he found me because he'd read about what I did with that lost Alzheimer's patient and wanted to talk to me. Just talk. Maybe he was thinking about recruiting, I don't know. But he was . . ."

What was he trying to say? He didn't know. Blaming the concussion was a reasonable excuse. Jim readjusted the icepack with a wince. "I don't know how to describe it. Like seeing your teacher outside of school, maybe. It's weirder in retrospect. It's like I was meeting him while he was taking time off from being the master of magnetism and just being a person. I wondered if it was real. If maybe I met the man you and the professor used to know. When he swung the pipe, that's what I wondered." His mouth opened once, hesitating over the words, then drove on. "Now I guess I'm just wondering what it's like for you, knowing what he really was like, and what he is now."

"Seeing him again was possibly one of the most frightening experiences of my life," she replied with no hesitation. And it was true, which made it all the more terrifying, given what Gabrielle had lived through. "I don't know how much your fa . . . Charles has told you, but we three were once a triumvirate to be envied. That he has descended into this madman is . . ." She faltered but did not try to pick it up again. There were no words to accurately describe what seeing Magneto made her feel.

He had never heard her voice taper off like that before, and it was jarring. Gabrielle had never given the impression of being anything but thoroughly in control. Seeing her like this shook him almost as much as her tone told him the experience had shaken her.

And he had to wonder: was it like this for the professor, too? Had Charles made peace with this, or did seeing his old friend like this make him feel like it made Gabrielle? What went through his mind every time every time a friend or teammate or student suffered due to his actions, every time he saw the carnage of Magneto's crusade for a better world . . . every time.

"He's hurt a lot of people," Jim said, "but he left us alive, and . . . and he said he was sorry. So maybe he's not all gone, yet. In spite of everything."

Tentatively, Jim reached out to settle his hand across Gabrielle's. The nostalgia that washed through him was strangely inverted. Back in the early days on Muir, Gabrielle had done this same thing for him.

"Now you sound just like Charles." Gabrielle smiled softly, and laid her other hand on top of her son's. "Even today he searches for the friend he once had, and believes that he still lives there somewhere."

There should have been a word for the moment you realize your parents are also people.

Jim smiled, a little self-consciously. "The good thing about striving for the impossible is that you've always got something to do with your time. Today Jack . . . helped. And Cyndi. Both of them. This is the first time we've intentionally worked together like that. I never thought that'd happen, either."

In some ways, that came as a shock. With what she knew about David's condition, getting his alters to cooperate was like trying to bathe a cat. But first and foremost she was a psychologist, so she knew that this was inevitable. And a good sign, a far cry from where he'd been when he was younger. "Talk about hope," she said.

Jim smiled crookedly. "Yeah. We live and learn. So maybe even madmen aren't a lost cause." Although he hoped the one Magneto had just kidnapped was excluded from that category. Which was Cyndi being petty, since he wouldn't wish what he'd found in what remained of Saidullayev's mind on anyone, but given the throb in his head Jim was going to excuse her this one.

But vague desires of vengeance aside, the interior of his head was much more settled than it had been during the interrogation. Quiet, almost. It felt . . . good, like a rock laying across his chest since the beginning of the trip had suddenly been removed. Jim shifted his head against the back of the seat to look at Gabrielle. "Tired . . . think I need to pass out for a while. Do you mind?"

"By all means." She patted his knee affectionately - familialy - and stood up to leave him be. "~I'm proud of you~," she whispered in Hebrew as she walked away, just loudly enough that had he been nodding off, he might have thought that it was a dream.

Already settling in, her son raised his head in surprise -- not by use of the language he'd heard only rarely since his childhood, but by what he thought they'd said. He blinked once as the meaning settled into his mind, then settled back into his seat.

"Thanks, Ima."