Shadow King: Orientation

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Waiting by a bedside. Waking up in a hospital bed. Panic. All these things seem familiar. Lorna fills Jack in on the situation.


Awareness began with a susurration of voices. Too many to make out any one voice, no way to tell which identities were attached. Just drifts of sound, piling against his consciousness like snow. The strongest pushed its way to the fore, the weaker and less-defined shoved aside like so much debris.

And finally he was out. His vision was blurred and the lights turned low, but he had other senses. Flat, hard mattress. Antiseptic smell. The Medlab. Jack made an attempt at sitting up, followed by an immediate return to the mattress.

"Well," he said, his head thumping back on the pillow, "it has been a good while since I wound up in restraints."

It had been a long wait but Lorna had a book and a coil of silvery fluid metal to keep her amused. When he spoke, she set the book aside and let the metal twined around her fingers slither away, curling into a bracelet that wound around and around up her arm. "Could be worse. I resisted the urge to cut your hair while I waited. Are you going to attack me if I release them?"

Jack craned his neck to look at the green-haired woman. "You drew babysitter again? Figures." He seemed to consider her question for a moment. "'Will' is open to debate, but I got no more urge to spontaneously attack you than the usual, if that's what you're asking."

"Volunteered, if you can believe that. I must be sick in the head." She reached out and unthreaded the first wrist restraint. Really they were more there for his safety than her own anyway. "How are you feeling? Sick at all? Dizzy?"

Knocked in the back of the head was how he felt, but the automatic retort stopped before it passed his lips. Things were coming back. Things he'd done. Things that had happened to him.

Things that were missing.

Lorna was still waiting, giving him a curious glance as she continued to unfasten each restraint, resisting the urge to rub away the red lines the straps had cut into his skin. "Jack? Are you going to answer me or just lie there and look perturbed? Because I can go with that but I need to get my patient face on in that case."

Jack sat up slowly on the bed, his eyes focused on some point past his own knees. His expression, never serene even at the best of times, gradually slid from frantic concentration to something that, on anyone else, might have been outright horror.

With wooden movements, David's strongest alter turned to Lorna and croaked, "Gone."

"Gone? What do you mean?" Almost of its own accord, Lorna's hand found Jack's, held on. Given her own history, it wasn't that easy to scare her but just the look on his face made her skin crawl uneasily.

Jack reacted to the sudden contact like a physical shock, ripping his hand away. The wild-eyed look he gave her indicated the reaction hadn't been entirely conscious, but even if Jack had been the apologetic sort this was the last thing on his mind.

"Where's Xavier?" he demanded, almost falling in his desperate scramble out of the bed. A hand shot out to brace against the wall as he staggered. "Get him the fuck in here! Now!"

"Jack!" Lorna grabbed him and rather unceremoniously repeated her action against Shiro on Jack, looping metal around his wrists and ankles to hold him in place. "Calm down, damn it. He can't come here. Every damn 'path in the place is screwed up so you need to sit the hell back down and answer my question!"

His reptile brain was engraved with the need to struggle against anything that tried to hold him, but her words penetrated even that. Jack grit his teeth and forced his heartrate down; though it went against every instinct, he realized he couldn't afford to be irrational right now.

"Screwed up how?" he grated, jerking spasmodically against the wrist restraints. "Headaches? A bloody nose? What?"

"Xavier hasn't woken up. Jean's regressed to childhood. Nathan's crazier than usual." She held firm, unwilling to let go until he was actually calm, not just pretending it. "You need to calm down and help us because you're probably the sanest one this time around. Now what are you talking about? What's gone?"

"David -- Jim -- the kid and the Arab, whatever's on the marriage license!" Jack slumped against the metal bonds, shirt damn and chest heaving from the effort. He glared up at Lorna, and she could see now that white rimmed his irises. "We can't find him."

Panic leaped into her throat, blocking her breath and voice for several seconds. Finally she shook herself, forcing something like reason past her initial emotional response. "What do you mean you can't find him? You are him or...some of him. He can't be gone permanently."

Jack's eyes focused again on some point through the physical world, his attention fixed someplace beyond it. His breathing was starting to steady, but the block of ice in the pit of his stomach wasn't going away. Wandering Salem Center, tearing doors from frames in the place that his mangled thoughts registered as one of David's zones -- he'd been out of his mind, but the need had been real. Then, and still.

"There's a wall between David and the world again, same as back in the day," he said at last, "except last time we were in there with him."

Lorna took a step closer but didn't touch him, just tried to catch his eyes. "Okay, good. See? Not gone, just disconnected. So what do we do? How do we get him back?"

Jack met her gaze briefly, then dropped it. "Can't help there. Only two ever succeeded are either unconscious or locked in there with him."

She pushed a hand into her green hair, gripping tightly. "I guess I should have expected that. But still, the point is that we'll figure it out. Somehow we'll figure it out. It's been done before, we can do it again. Right?"

Jack looked at her for a long moment, then looked away again. "Yeah, sure," he replied, though it was lacking in confidence. It was difficult to be an optimist when your entire function was addressing worst-case scenarios. He frowned as he processed the rest of her earlier assertion. "I'm sanest? Jesus christ."

Jack sagged, beaten. He regarded Lorna with an expression of resignation. "Right. All right, you can ease off now. I've had my little moment."

The metal flowed back to her with a crook of her finger, coiling close. "Yeah, well, what can I say. It's been an interesting day. Hungry?"

Rubbing his wrists, the alter gave her a weary look. "Will it matter?"