xp_logs | Fiddler's Green: What We Carry

While Jean covers the evacuation of the creche, three Mistra operatives meet for the last time.

The sunlight hurt his eyes. It was too bright out here, light flaring off the water and not a cloud in the sky. At least it wasn't as warm as it could have been. He already had enough factors working against him today. Swallowing, Nathan tugged off his sling, dropping it on the ground as he circled around through the woods. He couldn't see the helicopter just yet, but he could sense Lense standing near it, watching his men deploy. Something occurred to him and Nathan paused and concentrated for a moment, telekinetic shielding forming around his chest to protect his injured ribs.

Then he started moving once. Fifty metres away, once the helicopter was empty and Lense was just starting to move to follow his men, Nathan aimed a telekinetic shockwave directly at the ground beneath his former comrade's feet.

The ground erupted like a geyser, chunks of dirt and rock raining down as the rearmost group of hired mercenaries landed awkwardly, some rolling with the sudden blast, others curling around dislocated knees, shattered collarbones, or worse. Lense, however, seemed to hang in midair, a cloud of debris orbiting him like a million tiny moons.

"Cable!", the gravity manipulator bellowed, followed by a hearty laugh. "You crafty old bastard! Never thought you'd try anything so textbook! Five seconds on the ground and -wham! Where were we, Bahrain?" Lense gestured, and a handful of rocks began peppering the scrub brush at the woodline, like a minigun chewing through the scenery. "Do you remember, Dayspring? We hit that chopper, Tim dropkicked it with that big glowing armor of his. And Jackie... she lit the whole thing up like a candle. Trying to revisit your glory days, Dayspring?"

Another gravity pulse sent a wave of rocks and dirt scything through the brush, a stray fragment clipping one of Lense's men, but the former Mistra soldier was too far gone to care. Gliding inches above the ground, pupils fully dilated, Lense cocked his head and inhaled, moving one hand back and forth like a dowsing rod. "I'll find you, Cable! You can feel it, can't you? This is where it ends, old man!"

#Jean, incoming!# Nathan projected as he saw more of the mercenaries continuing towards the building. He didn't move from behind the rock outcropping for a moment longer as he tracked Carly's progress. Getting into position, but John was definitely not sufficiently distracted. Well. Can fix that, right? He had to fight the urge to laugh. God, this was insane. Absolutely insane, and he was in no condition for it...

And yet. Nathan gritted his teeth and grabbed the helicopter telekinetically, swinging it like a baseball bat, directly at Lense. It appealed to his sense of symmetry.

Lense didn't even turn around, he just raised one arm at the elbow and clenched a fist. The metal of the helicopter buckled in on itself, crumpling into a twelve-ton sphere of steel and glass. Thrusting his arm down to the ground, Lense smiled through the blurring air as everything in a ten-meter radius around him - from the blades of grass to his struggling men - was suddenly slammed to the ground as its weight increased twentyfold.

"Clever, old man," Lense taunted, circling backwards and keeping an eye to the woodline. With one free hand, he unfastened the flak jacket he wore, dropping it to the ground. Rolling his shoulders with the released weight, he mimed holding a rifle to his cheek, closing one eye as he panned the wilderness before him. Large ferns and huge redwoods provided enough shade and concealment to hide an entire battalion. But Cable wouldn't bring his friends - he wouldn't endanger his precious new family for his own personal vendetta.

"Bang," Lense intoned playfully, a blur of light the only outward sign of his power as a redwood shattered into splinters under its own weight, filling the air with bark and sawdust. "Come on out, Dayspring! Remember everything they taught us? All the drills and lessons about pack behavior? You were always the alpha, weren't you? But when the alpha wolf gets old, what happens?"

Another implosion of wood and earth rocked the woodline. "The younger wolf comes up and tears his fucking throat out!" Lense shouted, eyes wide and wild as he threw his arms open wide. "Come on out, old wolf! It's your time!"

Nathan, still under cover, rolled his eyes. Then rolled the dice. "Would you shut up?" He almost managed the roar. Almost. A push of telekinesis and he was in the air, moving into Lense's line of sight. "Fuck, John, would you listen to yourself?" he called, more hoarsely than derisively. Sometimes talking wasn't so bad. If nothing else, it would get the other man to focus on him and give Carly an opening. If they could end this with no one dead... I'm so tired of bodies...

Carly narrowed her eyes as Nathan appeared over the treetops, steeling herself as she wrapped her fingers around the jagged shard of wooden shrapnel lodged in the meat of her thigh and yanked it free. The pain was irrelevant, the blood was nothing. She had her target, her opening, and, she suspected, only one shot against Lense. She'd carried herself as close as she could, shielded by rapidly disintegrating cover, but it wouldn't be enough to catch her gravity manipulator's mind with the full weight of a telepathic hammer blow.

There was no other way. One shot.

She waited until Dayspring drew Lense's gaze and stepped out of cover, launching herself the few yards she needed to bring the target into her mental crosshairs.

---

It was bare minutes after Nathan's telepathic warning that the first of the gunmen who'd come with Lense appeared, and almost instantly got into a firefight with some of the SHIELD officers outside the house. Moira was already halfway to the Blackbird with the SHIELD medic and two of the babies, but there were enough of Lense's people to cut off access to the road leading back up to where the Blackbird and the SHIELD helicopter were. Things had gotten considerably more complicated.

"No," Jean muttered from where she stood in the room with the remaining children, though there was no one to hear. Her eyes were closed, her attention spread out telepathically, and she was clearly pissed off. "No more games, no more threats, no more." And the first of Lense's men who caught sight of Moira, her red hair standing out in the bright sunlight, didn't even have time to aim as his rifle was ripped out of his hands telepathically before being clubbed upside the head.

His comrades were clearly taken aback by seeing the man knocked out by his own weapon, but they must have been a better class of hired thugs, because their focus was quite good. Some focused on sealing off the perimeter and pinning down the SHIELD officers, while others moved ahead into the building. Tellingly, however, none moved to follow Moira and the medic.

Jean smiled faintly to herself, an idea occurring to her which suited her rather vicious mood and, rather than simply knocking out the agents coming closer to where she and the babies were, she took a page from some of her students' books. As soon as any of them stepped into the building she began overwriting their perceptions, building mazes around them out of their deepest fears and darkest secrets. #You do not want to be here.#

It provoked an interesting range of reactions. One clearly realized what was happening and, clawing at his own head, ran right back out the door. One stumbled around until he found a wall, and wound up huddled on the ground, knees to his chest. Two forged doggedly onwards.

Outside, one of the SHIELD officer went down with a bullet to his shoulder, and another member of his team took one to the leg as he tried to drag him back to cover. Fairly certain the maze construct she'd created would hold and that even the two who were still moving about the house would not find the nursery Jean turned her attention to the outside. The problem with a single telekinetic wall was that it would pin the SHIELD agents just as thoroughly as their attackers, and ricochets would be a problem on both sides. Small telekinetic cages, on the other hand, minimized the risk to the SHIELD staff and if, in order to conserve on energy, she made the cages a little smaller than they really properly ought to be, well, that was just too damn bad.

The better class of hired thugs to judge by their persistence, as well. When the first couple of riocochets off the rapidly shrinking telekinetic domes that enclosed them made it clear that firing indiscriminately was not the way to get out, they started to try and smash their way through using their weapons as blunt instruments. Not that it got them much further. The SHIELD officers broke from cover and advanced on their opponents, even as the telekinetic cages forced Lense's men to kneel down, bending nearly double to keep from whacking their heads on the 'roofs'.

A flicker of activity well away from the heart of the fighting caught her attention. The lone man was quite busily setting up an explosive charge to knock out the house's power.

Jean was out of patience by a long shot, and 'delicate' solutions really weren't appealing to her. Which was probably why the man found himself, and his explosives, hurled backwards as though swatted by a giant hand. Sometimes brute force was the only answer, and sometimes it was just the one which seemed like the most fun.

---

Sensing the mass moving behind him, Lense whirled, expecting one of Cable's telepathic tricks the moment he felt another presence brush his mind. Years of conditioning by Mistra had honed his reflexes to lightning-quick levels, and he pushed his power outwards through the cloud of debris orbiting him. A fist-sized mass of debris suddenly accelerated to terminal velocity in a fraction of a second, expanding like a shotgun's blast with lethal force.

There was no thunderclap, no gunshot. Just a blur of motion, and then Lense standing stock still, watching the dark red bloodstain spread across Carly's chest.

"...Alvarez?" Lense breathed, a sudden look of horror crossing his features as the telepath dropped to her knees. "Alvarez... Carly? No, no, no no no, this isn't right. This isn't right, you're dead, you can't be here..."

Oh God, no- The push of telekinesis that took him across the distance between him and Carly was completely instinctive, and fast enough that he was there to catch her before she could hit the ground. "No," he muttered distractedly, trying frantically to stop the bleeding with his powers. But it wasn't just a single wound, wasn't something he could just put pressure on... "Goddamn you, John! She wasn't going to hurt you, she was just protecting those kids!"

With her life leaking out of her, Carly tried to focus her mind...they were both distracted, there was a chance. The mental touch that grazed her target's shields was so weak as to be almost gentle. No. Still too far away, and her range was fading fast. She lifted her gaze to Lense, but trying to draw in breath to speak only resulted in a slight bubbling of the blood oozing from her lips and chest. She could barely see him anyway, not worth trying to keep her eyes open.

Carly slumped against Nathan's hold.

#We are the last ones, Dayspring. Promise me that.#

The patterns of Carly's thoughts unraveled, disintegrating. Fireflies falling into the dark, and for a moment Nathan fell with them, felt the void reach up to take him, too...

He let the pain drag him back, remind him that he was alive. "I promise," he whispered, and lowered her to the ground. It had all happened so fast that Lense was still frozen in that moment of horrified shock. For an instant Nathan contemplated saying something, drawing this out to find an opening. Delaying the inevitable.

Instead, he closed his eyes and let the telekinetic groundburst roll outwards from where he knelt and Carly lay, rolling right over Lense.

Caught off-guard, Lense was thrown head over heels through the air, smacking into the bole of a large sequoia and tumbling to the ground. He lay still for a second, then pushed himself up off the ground, punching at the ground with his fists.

"No, no, no!", he bellowed, each word punctuated by a strike of his fist and a pulse of his power that began to warp the ground around him, collapsing small sinkholes and erupting geysers of floating earth. "Another one dead, Cable! Another one of us bleeding out in your arms because of your stupid crusade! I swear to God, Dayspring, it ends here! It ends now!"

Launching himself into the air, Lense slipped the bonds of gravity easily, planting one foot against the massive redwood and pushing off, caroming off another as he gained speed and altitude, then shifted his power and plummeted like a comet towards the blasted clearing where Nathan stood.

The impact was like a meteor strike, blasting a crater of charred earth, streaks of sand and loam burned into glass at the point where Lense landed feet braced and arms outstretched towards Nathan. "Everything you've done to us, Dayspring. You forced us down this road, you brought us here! It's all your fault!"

The force of the impact had thrown Nathan across the clearing and into another rock outcropping - bad shoulder first, unfortunately. He crumpled back to the ground, vision gone white with pain, and breathing increasingly difficult. Get the kids out, Jean, he thought faintly, barely projecting, not even sure she could hear him.

Something that didn't have enough strength behind it to be a laugh escaped him. "No... no, John," he managed, wheezing. "You don't get to pass the buck. Not anymore. Choice. You make choices, I make choices, all of us made choices..." The faces of the infants in the creche floated in his mind's eye. "But you're here... to choose for them. Exactly what you accuse me of doing. No. No more."

"You don't get it, Cable..." Lense rasped. "It wasn't me that destroyed our family. I didn't go renegade and lead my brothers and sisters to die!" He began raising boulders from the ground, punching at them and sending them to shatter above Nathan on the cliff face, shouting a name to accompany each one. "Morgan! Foley! Pulaski! Jackie! Dyson! Bourne! Nolan! Alvarez!"

Floating above the ground, he began to advance on Nathan, the whirling cloud of debris forming distinct orbits around him, whistling at buzzsaw speed. "You used to be such the philosopher," he taunted. "Well, I learned something too. A weird thing about gravity. It connects everything. Everything, Dayspring. One atom moves, every other atom in the universe is affected, connected by gravity. You don't think I knew, I knew when each of us was killed? They were all I ever had, Nathan!"

Another crack of power and part of the cliff face broke away to slam down at Nathan, only barely shunted aside by a telekinetic push, but still Lense continued his destructive advance. "And you, you goddamned hypocrite! With your message about moving on! Do you know what Taygetos is, Nathan? My new family, my new pack. You stole mine, I found another, and I won't let you take them too! You hear me, old man? I won't LET you!"

This time the ripple of Lense's power was visible, the light stretching around him, refracting in glassine streams as the ground began to separate, ripping house-sized chunks from the landscape and sending both men into the air.

Something Askani had done, Nathan thought faintly, close to blacking out. Years and years ago, facing Lense. He'd been pinned down, and she'd... yes.

To those who glanced back from the creche, mercenary and SHIELD officer alike, it looked like a mid-air explosion, a nova in miniature. Afterwards, Nathan wouldn't be sure why it had happened, whether it was some sort of interaction with Lense's powers or something else entirely. But it was like the sun coming up over the water in one blinding instant, finally coalescing into the firebird.

Which didn't precisely slip the bonds of gravity - there was entirely too much effort involved for that - but still, Nathan dove at a blinded Lense faster than he'd moved in the exoskeleton since San Diego. Great glowing claws catching the gravity manipulator, and as the dive continued, slammed him hard into the ground.

"You... know what you... are?" Nathan ground out, pushing until he felt the other man's bones crack beneath the exoskeleton. It didn't give him any particular pleasure, or satisfaction (although he owed John a few fractures, he thought) but if it would just keep him down. If it could only do that. "You're weak. Weak... abused little boy. Too afraid... too beaten down to reach out for help, so you b-become them, instead.... and I'm done, I'm done trying..." His vision was blurring. It wasn't just the fatigue.

Chunks of earth were falling like meteorites around the two men, breaking against Nathan's telekinetic exoskeleton like rain on an umbrella. Under one glowing claw, Lense spat blood up at his former packmate. "You were supposed to protect us!" he accused, "but you chose to save yourself, you selfish son of a bitch!"

Concentrating through the pain, Lense reached out and shifted the pull of gravity against the ground beneath him, molecules of dirt and rock suddenly repelling each other as he slid down through it like quicksand, then 'fell' laterally out of Nathan's grasp to pop out of the ground a few meters away.

No longer cocky and composed, Lense was obviously wounded and broken. Blood flecked his lips with each labored breath, and his left forearm was twisted at an angle that biology and anatomy never intended. Cradling his broken arm, Lense focused, and then turned his bloodshot gaze to Nathan. "Maybe I'm just a wounded animal," he said in a disconcertingly soft tone, "but I'm not going to be put down by you. You're right. I was weak. Always the weak one, the guy who had to be protected by his squad, always! You think I don't know how many nights you took the beatings I deserved? How many times MacInnis dragged you to that damn white room in my place? Everyone knew! You had your god-damned messiah complex, even then."

Lense raised his good arm, crooking his fingers as the air seemed to twist and distort above his palm. "You know the funny thing about messiahs, Nathan?" he asked. "They always have to die."

Talking. Still talking. Why? Because he's not ready. Not sure. Talking was a sign of conflict - as if that hadn't been completely fucking obvious just from what John was saying, Nathan thought, the exoskeleton lurching back upright, tearing itself free of the quicksand.

"This isn't about you," he said raggedly. There was something very wrong with his breathing, something worse than the cracked ribs he'd already had. "This isn't about me. This is about... babies, John. Can't talk... can't walk, and they've already done things to them. Already hurt them. But they don't have to be us!" It was almost a plea. "Do you love what you are that much? That you'll force it on them?"

This time there was no conflict in John Lense's eyes or voice, when he rasped out a harsh "Yes."

Without a gesture or motion, Lense's power shot out, increasing the gravity around Nathan geometrically. Doubling the telekinetic's weight, quadrupling it, increasing to levels that should have crushed Cable like a tin can under a bulldozer.

The firebird seemed to shrink, but... it was holding? It was holding!

Lense cried out, snapping his arm forward, blood starting to pour from his nose as he pushed his power as hard as he could. All around him, rocks and debris rose and fell as the very fundamental force of the local gravity well began to ripple and shake like a flag in the wind. He could feel something pop behind his eyes, but it wasn't important. The only thing he had to see was Nathan Dayspring brought down. He had to fall. He had to.

Unaware that he had dropped to a knee, Lense coughed, feeling something break loose in his chest. "Yes, it's worth it," he gargled, "every last one of them. Teach them to be killers, Nathan. S'all there is in this world. Killers and the killed. Quick and the... the dead... dead... fall, dammit. Why... why won't you fall down?"

This wasn't going to last. Every instant that he stayed upright was agony. There were stars flaring in his vision, and he could feel the fabric of his exoskeleton fraying, slowly but steadily. Moving forward was worse, but he did it anyway, pushed the exoskeleton through the distortion. Landed just in front of Lense - of John.

"You don't... want to believe that." He focused on each word, on forming each and every word as clearly as he could. "Can... sense that." He had to stop, to choke back the blood at the back of his throat. Something was very wrong. He could sense Moira's alarm growing on the link, focused solely on him now.

"You don't want this... you've just... convinced yourself there's nothing else..." The alleyway, behind the bar, back in March. He'd turned that encounter over and over in his head in the months since, and realized something. "I lied," he said, voice barely loud than a whisper at this point. It was all he could manage. "I'd... let you walk away again, John. I'd keep doing this... dance. As long as it took. Even if you kept... coming back at me, over and over... I'd live with it. For the chance that you might w-wake up, and see... it doesn't have to be this way. That you might take someone's hand... even if it's not mine."

The continuous gravitic onslaught let up for a moment, then lifted as Lense stumbled forward, hand clenching for any kind of support. "Wake up... to be... to be just done with this..."

He lurched forwards, stumbling through the fading exoskeleton to slump against Nathan's shoulder in an awkward soldier's embrace. "I just needed... needed to believe," he gasped, leaving bloody handprints against Nathan's shirt. "Believe in... in something... to believe in..."

The pleading voice vanished in a choke of blood as Lense fell to a knee, and then looked up at Nathan. "~I tan i epi tas~" he hissed. Nathan recognized the Greek saying that had been drilled into them since the first days of Mistra.

With your shield or on it.

The unexpected blow caught him full in the chest, Lense's fist rising like a prizefighter's, an uppercut with thousands of pounds of force behind it, the relative mass of a locomotive smashing into his body in one instant.

The only thing that saved Nathan from dying on the spot was that as the exoskeleton had faded and Lense had stopped twisting gravity around him, he'd reestablished the shielding around his already-injured ribs, almost unconsciously. But it was armor, at best, with nothing like the exoskeleton's near-impenetrability or ability to absorb extraordinary levels of force.

It blunted the blow. A little. Not nearly enough. It threw Nathan like a rag doll through the air to crash into the shallow water by the shore, and the pain of impact was nothing, almost unnoticeable when set beside the waves and waves of icy white fire that tore through his chest.

Somewhere, Moira was screaming.

Lense rose and gestured, and the water rushed forward in a sudden tidal surge. Another twist of his arm brought daggers of pain, but the waves froze in place and began to flow upwards, a reverse waterfall with millions of gallons of seawater and sand tumbling chaotically, dragging Nathan along with them.

"This is what I was made for," Lense hissed, unable to discern Nathan among the thrashing waves suspended in midair. "I hope you... hope you... hope you hear me, you son of a bitch. This... last time we fight. Now you die."

There was a flare of light visible suddenly, amid the rough water. Nathan was barely conscious, aware of little more than pain and fear and Moira's despair on the link. Instinct was still operating, however.

It was a trick he'd rarely used, that he'd hated from the moment he'd been forced to learn it. Even when he'd been a trained and leashed killer, he'd never wanted to be an assassin. And using his telekinesis from a distance to cause a stroke, or a heart attack, had been such a horribly easy trick to learn. Just... a delicate twist. Pressure, in the right places.

There was nothing delicate about what he did to John in that moment. He was too far gone for that, too close to the edge of consciousness. He lashed out, half-deliriously imagining the claws of the exoskeleton reaching into the other man's body, tearing.

Lense didn't even have the breath to scream as he felt bones snap and muscles tearing. Folding into a fetal position, he dropped to the ground, trying to draw his power back into himself. The air around him seemed to glow as water, sand, and rocks came crashing back down. A sphere of solidifying light formed around Lense as he twitched in the churned-up sand, then finally took in a breath and screamed.

The explosion was silent, not even ruffling the air. One moment, a sphere of light. And the next, a ruined body that was barely recognizable, almost as if dragged from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the moon and slammed back to Earth, discarded.

Miraculously, from the broken mass of tissue and blood, something that could still barely be described as a thought managed to reach Nathan.

#Dayspring? Nathan? ...Nathan? I... I can't see. I can't see anything.#

Floating limply in the water, bobbing gently on the wave pattern that seemed to be trying to reestablish itself, Nathan heard him, but couldn't move. Darkness was pressing in on him, and he wasn't even trying to breathe now. It hurt so much, and he was so tired...

Yet he did reach out in another way, pulling those disintegrating patterns of thought to him instinctively, stubbornly. Not trying to hold them together, because he knew, he knew what he'd done.

Just holding them.

#Nathan.#

Lense's dying thoughts had an uncanny clarity to them, an odd sort of balance as if death was finally the only thing to give the man peace.

#This is what I wanted, Nathan. Only thing I ever wanted. Die fighting.#

And before he could think or say anything, before he could do more than tighten his grip on those fading patterns in reflexive, anguished defiance, the rate of disintegration sped up, and everything that had been John Lense was fading sparkles of light, trickling through his fingers and falling into the dark.

Leaving him alone. He floated in the dark, even the pain gone distant. Someone was calling his name from very far away, and he tried to listen for a moment. Too far, though. Entirely too far.

He could follow, he thought faintly. It would take... nothing. No effort at all just to let go and fall. He'd been fighting for so long. Surely there had to be something on the other side of all this strife, all this pain. Somewhere better than this world that kept demanding pain and blood and sacrifice and loss, over and over again. Where all the people he'd lost were waiting, at peace. Wasn't that supposed to be the way? Weren't you supposed to believe that?

He didn't know what he believed anymore. But he missed them. So much. Faces flickered through the dark, echoes of voices, and for a moment, for a single blissful moment, he could hear them calling him. Could see blue skies and green rolling hills, and everyone he'd lost together there, safe and happy. Waiting. Smiling. As he watched, a young man with Aliya's dark blond hair and his own gray eyes even waved.

And then, like a shock of cold water to the face, he felt it. The unmistakable sensation of a small hand, nestling into his and squeezing tightly.

Don't go. I love you, Daddy.

They were still smiling, standing on those green hills under the sun. Still waiting, but not beckoning him onwards. Waiting for him to choose.

When Jean's arms closed around him, dragging him out of the water and into the air, her voice murmuring urgently in his ear to hold on, Nate, I've got you, he had already made his decision.

No-brainer. It was worth it. He could still feel Rachel's hand in his, could hear Moira telling him that she loved him, over and over again like a desperate mantra. As if he didn't know.

They were still here. Holding him here, in the light. And he was content to be held.