Genosha - Stemming the Tide: Attack Part 2
Jun. 2nd, 2012 05:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsAs the camp is ambushed, Marius and Wanda fight back. There are limits, however.
Screaming. Explosions. Shots being fired. The noise alone was guaranteed to generate chaos as the mutant camp of refugees was attacked. Wanda had been speaking to a group of the locals, trading wilderness survival tips and stories about living off the land, when everything had gone wrong. She grabbed the woman nearest to her and shoved her away, from the soldiers who were advancing and away from her. "Run!" Wanda wasn't sure what the woman, Ali, could do but she'd learned a long time ago that not everyone with powers could fight with them.
A small kid had been playing at her feet as the adults talked and Wanda scooped the little boy up, turning to shove him into a man's arms as he started to run in the direction she'd pointed Ali in. She gave a look when he paused, shouting, "I'll cover you, just go!"
With that, she turned and stalked forward, conjuring up her powers as she moved.
They had taken her friends and loved ones from her and she'd been forced to leave two of her own behind in a desperate bid to escape. But they would not take these people, these innocents, under her watch. Not now, not ever.
Marius had barely time to register something was happening before the gunfire had started, and he knew instinctively there would be no more rubber bullets. He briefly caught a glimpse of Megan's wings and thought he saw a flash of Catseye's lavender hair out of the corner of one eye, but the situation was rather too pressing to allow time for a headcount.
"Get clear!" he bellowed to the people nearest him, flattening himself close to the ground. His claws flexed against the dirt as his adrenaline began to rise.
"Which way?" called Tanya, who had taken shelter behind a hut. Her son was at her side, his eyes wide. "I can't tell what direction the shots are coming from!"
He let Wanda's powers buzz to life and quickly scanned the area, pausing only to target a tangle of red that turned out to be a cartridge in a magistrate's ammunition belt. "There!" he snapped, over the man's howls, pointing in a direction with less red than the others. The threads were pulsing wildly as the magistrates continued to close; he didn't know how long the direction he picked would be safe, but it was all he had for now. The woman nodded once and, Daniel held firmly by the arm, took to her heels.
Before he could decide where to start he caught a distortion in the threads from the corner of his eye. He whirled to find Wanda there, scarlet energy crackling around her fists. His teeth bared in a smile.
"Ms. Maximoff," said Marius with a lash of his tail. "Good of you to join us."
"I wouldn't have missed this party for the world," she reassured him, glad enough to see Marius. Wanda had been concerned that their group would be too scattered to make a viable push back but if she could find him, then they could find the others as they headed towards the soldiers. "We're standing between them and those that are trying to escape - we need to make sure that they do not get beyond us."
The amount of chaotic energy that Wanda could see was almost heady to her as she struggled to clear her mind and focus. Working side by side with someone who was, essentially, using her power on top of the level of activity in the camp meant that the lines were shifting and melding almost faster than she could keep up with them. But she had to keep up with them or she wasn't going to live through this.
"Agreed," Marius said. He lifted an arm and jerked hard on a string, and the strap of a magistrate's pack explosively separated and whipped into his face, fouling his aim. "And does any particular strategy come to mind?"
Ice. It was like watching ice crack under pressure. Every moment, breath, pull, step, caused a thousand different strands to branch off. Marius caused the magistrate's aim to be fouled due to the broken strap and Wanda didn't hesitate. A moment later and thanks to the sudden movement, the extra ammunition in the pack exploded and sent shrapnel through the original Magistrate's leg and into the hand of one running next to him.
"I think," she said slowly as she lowered her hands slightly, "I shall employee violence."
The explosion brought a cold grin to Marius' face. "By all means," he said, deciding that missing a reference was no reason not to attempt witty repartee, "let us ensure its position on payroll."
Barely bothering to formulate a plan, Marius grasped at three of the most obvious threads in rapid succession. The first collapsed a half-built hut, the second liquified a patch of ground into something with the consistency of mud, and the third caused several of the heated rocks surrounding a cookfire to explode like grenades.
A magistrate dodged out of the way of the exploding rocks only catch a rifle butt in the face as it went flying through the air as someone stumbled into the mud pit and got stuck. For everything Marius did, Wanda tweaked, either furthering along the action or, in some cases, sharking the new energy that his actions gave birth to and using it to heighten other reactions. It was a never ending cascade and she just had to stay one step ahead of it ...
The chaos energy she gathered roiled and bucked as she pulled it further and further in, holding it close to herself before finally letting it out in two hex blasts. She'd aimed at the ground and they burrowed through the earth, tearing it up and vaporizing the dirt as it went. The sheer amount of energy she'd pulled in had allowed the blasts to go further than normal and, essentially, she'd created two long open spaces of ground that made it hard for soldiers to come at them from the left and flank them.
As fast as Wanda spun the power, Marius found new threads to pull. The stock of a gun, the trunk of a tree, the kerosene in a camp stove -- anything he could find to spread the confusion. He was dimly aware of the blasts to either side of them, but all he saw was the spidering of threads it created. Together, the overlap of chaos wove itself into a kind of harmony.
Until he turned towards another burst of gunfire just in time to see a little girl go down.
It was Zoe.
The sudden shock of Marius letting go almost every single thread and line of energy was like a punch to the gut. Wanda actually took a step back as her world view shrank by half and her head throbbed in response. Concerned, she turned sharply with the terrifying idea that she'd be seeing his crumbled body at her feet and his blood seeping into ground. But what she saw was even that much worse.
She didn't know the child, hadn't even seen her, but all Wanda saw was a little body laying like someone had thrown down a doll after a hard day of play. And the soldiers were still moving in.
Marius froze, every muscle tightened to screaming tension. The gunfire was almost inaudible beyond the pounding of blood in his head. His fingers spasmed into claws.
Zoe passing stick insects to Molly and treated a ride on his back like a girl experiencing her first pony ride. Zoe showing them how to work the lamp in their hut, carefully avoiding the photograph of the family that was not in the camp.
Zoe, still on the ground.
Marius whirled towards the shooter. Years ago, Jennie had taught him to craft good and bad luck into discs of focused probability. The process was simple, and powerful, and as scarlet crackled around his hands he realized that this, too, was something that had a parallel in chaos. Equivalent, but not identical.
The power gathering now in his hands weren't luck discs, they were hex bolts.
If one knew what to look for, one could read the strings quite easily. Shades of red already dominated Wanda's vision and they ranged from the lightest of reds to the darkest but, as she watched Marius fling that hex bolt, the shades exploded around her, morphing and changing color. Dark, almost black. Death and not the kind that he only thought he meant. But worse, far, far worse.
Two steps. That was all it took to place herself between Marius and the guard and all it took to allow her to intercept the hex blast. In theory, this was her power Marius was throwing around and she was safe-guarded against her own abilities; only once had she ever been able to actively impact herself with her own power but never again. But this wasn't technically her power and the combination of two people manipulating the folds of reality overrode what should have been and replaced it with what it wanted it to be.
She took a step back and gasped as the world bled red around her, strings dissolved into a 'white' out as the power churned through her. There was pain, oh god, there was pain as the power zipped through her like electricity but Wanda was also riding a strange kind of high as the extra energy merged with her own. Feeling as if she were about to burst, Wanda weaved her own hex blasts and turned, opposite to the man Marius had been aiming at, and leveled the mixture of chaos energy at a soldier who'd been aiming a gun at their backs.
Pain mixed with pleasure as it ripped out of her body and struck the man fully in the face.
Whatever happened bypassed Marius' brain entirely. The world went red, then white, and then it seemed a few seconds later and the back of his head and neck were covered by something warm and sticky.
He looked around, dazed. Out of the corner of his eye he caught movement, and he turned and it was one of the refugees helping Zoe to her feet, and her arm was bloody and she was white-faced and shivering but she wasn't dead. Then he remembered Wanda had somehow gotten in front of him, and he looked to find her crumpled to the ground as if in pain.
"Wanda?" he asked. His voice had a muffled sound to his own ears like he'd been sitting too near a speaker. Another flicker of movement drew his attention, this one in front of him, and he saw the magistrate he'd been aiming for stumbling backwards, mouth agape. His eyes were wide and staring at something past the two mutants, and instinctively Marius turned to follow his gaze.
There, only scant yards away, lay a corpse. It still clutched its rifle, and aside from some stains its body looked almost untouched. All except one part.
Where there should have been a head, there was only a mass of red and the white gleam of spinal column.
And just as the significance of this began to sink in Marius became aware again of that sticky something in his hair, and the heavy chunks of what he'd thought were dirt--
Marius hit the ground retching.
It would have been so very easy to simply give over to the pain (no longer that combination of that pain/pleasure, now just pain) that had caused Wanda to crumple to the ground in the first place. Slipping into unconsciousness would give her an easy out - an out for the pain, for the whole Genosha clusterfuck, from the fact that Agatha was still missing. Easy and simple.
But Wanda had seemingly built her life around being stubborn and taking the harder path so instead of slipping away she forced her eyes open and took a deep breath. And then cursed, slamming her hand against the ground in a purely instinctual reaction to the burst of pain as her ribs moved. She'd broken and fractured enough ribs in her time to know that on the side where she'd taken Marius' hex bolt, something (many somethings) were very much broken.
The heaves were subsiding. He looked at Wanda through his sweat- and gore-lank hair. "What'd you . . . do?" Marius refused to look at the dead Genoshan, and now the relevance of her pained movements was beginning to process. "Are you . . . why'd you" a cough seized him, and he had to pause to spit bile, "why'd you get in the way?"
"Because," she said as she slowly pushed herself up, "you were pulling on so much energy -" Wanda stopped as her stomach threatened to rebel but forced herself through it. "On so much energy that had it gone much further, something very, very bad was going to happen thirty feet to our left." She couldn't point but knew he could see it. Thirty feet to their left were where the camp stored some of the heavily used kerosene tanks and, also, where some of the occupants of the camp had been fleeing only moments before. She didn't know for sure but she was pretty damned certain that had she'd allowed it to happen, those people wouldn't have survived it.
"And because," she continued, now up on her knees and regaining energy. She was pushing the pain into the back of her head and securing it away the best she could. It wasn't perfect but Wanda knew it would have to do. "Because you were making a choice you really did not want to make. So I made it for you."
The X-Man opened his mouth, but realized even as he did he had nothing to say. No angry retort, no sharp comeback. All he could think of was that man without a head . . . and what would have happened if that kind of energy had hit something explosive.
Marius closed his eyes and whispered, "Thank you."
Wanda looked at him and saw confirmation that what she'd done had been the right thing. And knew she'd do it the exact same way if she had to do it all over again. "You're welcome, Marius," she said as she finally tried to leverage herself to her feet. Their world had shrunk to only the two of them for a few moments but it was drawing to a close. More soldiers would come and they would have to fight; once she had her feet under her again, she'd be fine.
It was a mantra that only somewhat worked as pain exploded into being with every moment and breath. There was no choice but to get up.
It was the only choice Wanda would let herself have.
Marius helped her up, wincing at the obvious pain she was in. He'd thought Wanda was immune to her own powers, but he supposed what she'd been hit with weren't technically "hers". From the way she was moving it looked as if something in her ribcage was bruised or broken. His stomach twisted with guilt.
"We should--" he began, but that was as far as he got.
On the other side of the camp, the forest had begun to move.
Screaming. Explosions. Shots being fired. The noise alone was guaranteed to generate chaos as the mutant camp of refugees was attacked. Wanda had been speaking to a group of the locals, trading wilderness survival tips and stories about living off the land, when everything had gone wrong. She grabbed the woman nearest to her and shoved her away, from the soldiers who were advancing and away from her. "Run!" Wanda wasn't sure what the woman, Ali, could do but she'd learned a long time ago that not everyone with powers could fight with them.
A small kid had been playing at her feet as the adults talked and Wanda scooped the little boy up, turning to shove him into a man's arms as he started to run in the direction she'd pointed Ali in. She gave a look when he paused, shouting, "I'll cover you, just go!"
With that, she turned and stalked forward, conjuring up her powers as she moved.
They had taken her friends and loved ones from her and she'd been forced to leave two of her own behind in a desperate bid to escape. But they would not take these people, these innocents, under her watch. Not now, not ever.
Marius had barely time to register something was happening before the gunfire had started, and he knew instinctively there would be no more rubber bullets. He briefly caught a glimpse of Megan's wings and thought he saw a flash of Catseye's lavender hair out of the corner of one eye, but the situation was rather too pressing to allow time for a headcount.
"Get clear!" he bellowed to the people nearest him, flattening himself close to the ground. His claws flexed against the dirt as his adrenaline began to rise.
"Which way?" called Tanya, who had taken shelter behind a hut. Her son was at her side, his eyes wide. "I can't tell what direction the shots are coming from!"
He let Wanda's powers buzz to life and quickly scanned the area, pausing only to target a tangle of red that turned out to be a cartridge in a magistrate's ammunition belt. "There!" he snapped, over the man's howls, pointing in a direction with less red than the others. The threads were pulsing wildly as the magistrates continued to close; he didn't know how long the direction he picked would be safe, but it was all he had for now. The woman nodded once and, Daniel held firmly by the arm, took to her heels.
Before he could decide where to start he caught a distortion in the threads from the corner of his eye. He whirled to find Wanda there, scarlet energy crackling around her fists. His teeth bared in a smile.
"Ms. Maximoff," said Marius with a lash of his tail. "Good of you to join us."
"I wouldn't have missed this party for the world," she reassured him, glad enough to see Marius. Wanda had been concerned that their group would be too scattered to make a viable push back but if she could find him, then they could find the others as they headed towards the soldiers. "We're standing between them and those that are trying to escape - we need to make sure that they do not get beyond us."
The amount of chaotic energy that Wanda could see was almost heady to her as she struggled to clear her mind and focus. Working side by side with someone who was, essentially, using her power on top of the level of activity in the camp meant that the lines were shifting and melding almost faster than she could keep up with them. But she had to keep up with them or she wasn't going to live through this.
"Agreed," Marius said. He lifted an arm and jerked hard on a string, and the strap of a magistrate's pack explosively separated and whipped into his face, fouling his aim. "And does any particular strategy come to mind?"
Ice. It was like watching ice crack under pressure. Every moment, breath, pull, step, caused a thousand different strands to branch off. Marius caused the magistrate's aim to be fouled due to the broken strap and Wanda didn't hesitate. A moment later and thanks to the sudden movement, the extra ammunition in the pack exploded and sent shrapnel through the original Magistrate's leg and into the hand of one running next to him.
"I think," she said slowly as she lowered her hands slightly, "I shall employee violence."
The explosion brought a cold grin to Marius' face. "By all means," he said, deciding that missing a reference was no reason not to attempt witty repartee, "let us ensure its position on payroll."
Barely bothering to formulate a plan, Marius grasped at three of the most obvious threads in rapid succession. The first collapsed a half-built hut, the second liquified a patch of ground into something with the consistency of mud, and the third caused several of the heated rocks surrounding a cookfire to explode like grenades.
A magistrate dodged out of the way of the exploding rocks only catch a rifle butt in the face as it went flying through the air as someone stumbled into the mud pit and got stuck. For everything Marius did, Wanda tweaked, either furthering along the action or, in some cases, sharking the new energy that his actions gave birth to and using it to heighten other reactions. It was a never ending cascade and she just had to stay one step ahead of it ...
The chaos energy she gathered roiled and bucked as she pulled it further and further in, holding it close to herself before finally letting it out in two hex blasts. She'd aimed at the ground and they burrowed through the earth, tearing it up and vaporizing the dirt as it went. The sheer amount of energy she'd pulled in had allowed the blasts to go further than normal and, essentially, she'd created two long open spaces of ground that made it hard for soldiers to come at them from the left and flank them.
As fast as Wanda spun the power, Marius found new threads to pull. The stock of a gun, the trunk of a tree, the kerosene in a camp stove -- anything he could find to spread the confusion. He was dimly aware of the blasts to either side of them, but all he saw was the spidering of threads it created. Together, the overlap of chaos wove itself into a kind of harmony.
Until he turned towards another burst of gunfire just in time to see a little girl go down.
It was Zoe.
The sudden shock of Marius letting go almost every single thread and line of energy was like a punch to the gut. Wanda actually took a step back as her world view shrank by half and her head throbbed in response. Concerned, she turned sharply with the terrifying idea that she'd be seeing his crumbled body at her feet and his blood seeping into ground. But what she saw was even that much worse.
She didn't know the child, hadn't even seen her, but all Wanda saw was a little body laying like someone had thrown down a doll after a hard day of play. And the soldiers were still moving in.
Marius froze, every muscle tightened to screaming tension. The gunfire was almost inaudible beyond the pounding of blood in his head. His fingers spasmed into claws.
Zoe passing stick insects to Molly and treated a ride on his back like a girl experiencing her first pony ride. Zoe showing them how to work the lamp in their hut, carefully avoiding the photograph of the family that was not in the camp.
Zoe, still on the ground.
Marius whirled towards the shooter. Years ago, Jennie had taught him to craft good and bad luck into discs of focused probability. The process was simple, and powerful, and as scarlet crackled around his hands he realized that this, too, was something that had a parallel in chaos. Equivalent, but not identical.
The power gathering now in his hands weren't luck discs, they were hex bolts.
If one knew what to look for, one could read the strings quite easily. Shades of red already dominated Wanda's vision and they ranged from the lightest of reds to the darkest but, as she watched Marius fling that hex bolt, the shades exploded around her, morphing and changing color. Dark, almost black. Death and not the kind that he only thought he meant. But worse, far, far worse.
Two steps. That was all it took to place herself between Marius and the guard and all it took to allow her to intercept the hex blast. In theory, this was her power Marius was throwing around and she was safe-guarded against her own abilities; only once had she ever been able to actively impact herself with her own power but never again. But this wasn't technically her power and the combination of two people manipulating the folds of reality overrode what should have been and replaced it with what it wanted it to be.
She took a step back and gasped as the world bled red around her, strings dissolved into a 'white' out as the power churned through her. There was pain, oh god, there was pain as the power zipped through her like electricity but Wanda was also riding a strange kind of high as the extra energy merged with her own. Feeling as if she were about to burst, Wanda weaved her own hex blasts and turned, opposite to the man Marius had been aiming at, and leveled the mixture of chaos energy at a soldier who'd been aiming a gun at their backs.
Pain mixed with pleasure as it ripped out of her body and struck the man fully in the face.
Whatever happened bypassed Marius' brain entirely. The world went red, then white, and then it seemed a few seconds later and the back of his head and neck were covered by something warm and sticky.
He looked around, dazed. Out of the corner of his eye he caught movement, and he turned and it was one of the refugees helping Zoe to her feet, and her arm was bloody and she was white-faced and shivering but she wasn't dead. Then he remembered Wanda had somehow gotten in front of him, and he looked to find her crumpled to the ground as if in pain.
"Wanda?" he asked. His voice had a muffled sound to his own ears like he'd been sitting too near a speaker. Another flicker of movement drew his attention, this one in front of him, and he saw the magistrate he'd been aiming for stumbling backwards, mouth agape. His eyes were wide and staring at something past the two mutants, and instinctively Marius turned to follow his gaze.
There, only scant yards away, lay a corpse. It still clutched its rifle, and aside from some stains its body looked almost untouched. All except one part.
Where there should have been a head, there was only a mass of red and the white gleam of spinal column.
And just as the significance of this began to sink in Marius became aware again of that sticky something in his hair, and the heavy chunks of what he'd thought were dirt--
Marius hit the ground retching.
It would have been so very easy to simply give over to the pain (no longer that combination of that pain/pleasure, now just pain) that had caused Wanda to crumple to the ground in the first place. Slipping into unconsciousness would give her an easy out - an out for the pain, for the whole Genosha clusterfuck, from the fact that Agatha was still missing. Easy and simple.
But Wanda had seemingly built her life around being stubborn and taking the harder path so instead of slipping away she forced her eyes open and took a deep breath. And then cursed, slamming her hand against the ground in a purely instinctual reaction to the burst of pain as her ribs moved. She'd broken and fractured enough ribs in her time to know that on the side where she'd taken Marius' hex bolt, something (many somethings) were very much broken.
The heaves were subsiding. He looked at Wanda through his sweat- and gore-lank hair. "What'd you . . . do?" Marius refused to look at the dead Genoshan, and now the relevance of her pained movements was beginning to process. "Are you . . . why'd you" a cough seized him, and he had to pause to spit bile, "why'd you get in the way?"
"Because," she said as she slowly pushed herself up, "you were pulling on so much energy -" Wanda stopped as her stomach threatened to rebel but forced herself through it. "On so much energy that had it gone much further, something very, very bad was going to happen thirty feet to our left." She couldn't point but knew he could see it. Thirty feet to their left were where the camp stored some of the heavily used kerosene tanks and, also, where some of the occupants of the camp had been fleeing only moments before. She didn't know for sure but she was pretty damned certain that had she'd allowed it to happen, those people wouldn't have survived it.
"And because," she continued, now up on her knees and regaining energy. She was pushing the pain into the back of her head and securing it away the best she could. It wasn't perfect but Wanda knew it would have to do. "Because you were making a choice you really did not want to make. So I made it for you."
The X-Man opened his mouth, but realized even as he did he had nothing to say. No angry retort, no sharp comeback. All he could think of was that man without a head . . . and what would have happened if that kind of energy had hit something explosive.
Marius closed his eyes and whispered, "Thank you."
Wanda looked at him and saw confirmation that what she'd done had been the right thing. And knew she'd do it the exact same way if she had to do it all over again. "You're welcome, Marius," she said as she finally tried to leverage herself to her feet. Their world had shrunk to only the two of them for a few moments but it was drawing to a close. More soldiers would come and they would have to fight; once she had her feet under her again, she'd be fine.
It was a mantra that only somewhat worked as pain exploded into being with every moment and breath. There was no choice but to get up.
It was the only choice Wanda would let herself have.
Marius helped her up, wincing at the obvious pain she was in. He'd thought Wanda was immune to her own powers, but he supposed what she'd been hit with weren't technically "hers". From the way she was moving it looked as if something in her ribcage was bruised or broken. His stomach twisted with guilt.
"We should--" he began, but that was as far as he got.
On the other side of the camp, the forest had begun to move.
