Trojan Horse, part seven - Measure of a Man - (Nathan and Pete, Thursday afternoon)

[x-cable.livejournal.com]

At the art exhibit, Cable arrives to carry out his rather last-minute orders. Pete tries to stop him. The two of them are saved by a last-minute intervention.

(OOC: There's a Charles/Amanda scene that goes along with this, to be backdated. The rest of the logs for today will go up after I return from proctoring an exam tonight. Eww.)



It had taken him some considerable amount of time to find the right position. Finally, he had settled on the roof of a building overlooking the plaza where the art exhibit was taking place. A perfect sniper's perch, Cable told himself, wrestling with the tactical imperatives in the back of his mind as they complained about his choice of tactics.

A rifle shot would do the job just fine, he told himself, sitting up. He didn't need his telekinesis. Bullets could tear through a telepathic brain as easily as a normal one. Didn't need the telekinesis. Didn't have to use it.

Assembling his rifle, Cable peered through the scope, sighting on a familiar bald head. Easy target, he told himself. Right there in his wheelchair, beside the man at the microphones. There was a significant crowd, but he was high enough that his shot wouldn't be impeded.

One shot.

Easy.

Easy. His hands were trembling on the rifle, and he gritted his teeth. There was no option here. And the hesitation hurt, made the voices in the back of his mind scream warningly at him.

But he could see familiar faces in the crowd, too. The kids. If he... could he...

Do it.

Swallowing, his finger moved on the trigger...

...and Charles moved towards the microphones, turning his head. The shot missed him by inches and ricocheted off the pavement. The crowd started to stampede in all directions, screaming, and Cable cursed, throwing his rifle aside as habit and instinct took over.

Long-range wouldn't work. Had to get up close. Without hesitation, he flung himself off the side of the building, falling fifteen floors as he visualized a telekinetic line and harness. He landed hard, rolling and coming back to his feet, and took off running. His window was closing. He had to do this now, or report back that the mission was a failure, and the consequences of that had been made perfectly clear to him.

It struck him, absurdly, that he was moving upstream. A sizeable portion of the crowd was headed in this other direction, running, screaming, trying to get out of the open. But not all of them were fleeing. Some of them were taking cover - familiar faces, Cable recognized in a flash, but forced himself not to pay attention, only hoping that none of the kids would get in the way - and there was Charles, up there ahead of him, who wasn't moving at all.

He reached into his jacket for his pistol. A gun would work, he told the tactical part of his brain as it protested. A bullet to the head would be just as effective as any kind of telekinetic attack. Less chance of giving him an opening if he kept his own mind where it belonged...

Pete had dropped his fag at the sound of the rifleshot, and started sprinting toward the crowd, scanning for faces as he did.

"You daft bastard, Wisdom. Run toward the place everyone's desperate to g-." He stopped mid-mutter as he caught sight of Nate heading toward Charles.

"Fuck." He changed course, using the crowd to block him from Nate's sight as much as possible, moving to intercept Nate as he closed on the telepath.

Charles was watching him approach, his expression absolutely calm. Cable felt a push against his shields and stopped in his steady progress through the panicking crowd, half a dozen possibilities racing through his mind in an instant. The conclusion came quickly. Charles wouldn't push too hard. Not and risk hitting a trigger, in the middle of all these people.

He raised the gun.

"Sod playing nice." Pete muttered to himself, as he broke clear of the crowd a short distance from Cable, and threw a fist of hot knives at the gun and Nate's hand, as he sprinted to cover the remaining distance.

"Never bloody wanted to do this for real..."

Cable caught the flash out of the corner of his eye and dodged. Not fast enough to avoid the hotknives completely, and he gritted his teeth flinging away the smouldering half-a-gun left to him, ignoring the pain where the edge of one hotknife had clipped his hand, searing through the glove.

"Stay the fuck out of this," he snarled at Pete and lashed out with his telekinesis, sending a row of newspaper boxes flying at him.

Pete dived and rolled under the flying metal, hoping to god that there weren't any students behind him, and coming to his feet in a low crouch in front of Nate.

"Yeah, that's fucking likely, soldier boy." He feinted a shot to the kidneys, then went to sweep Nate's legs out from under him.

"Did they have to hold you down to force feed you the Kool Aid this time, Nate?"

Too fast. Even with the talking. Cable was hitting the ground before he could react, but he rolled and came back to his feet, extending his momentum telekinetically and winding up several steps away.

And Charles wasn't there. Where had he gone? Tactical imperatives screamed in outrage at the back of his mind, but even so, acknowledged that he couldn't take his attention off Pete. Couldn't risk it. Had to kill... no. No!

"Glad you're finding this funny," he gritted shakily and lashed out again with his telekinesis, this time tearing up the concrete under Pete's feet.

Pete threw himself backwards as the ground exploded up around him, slamming his back into the ground harder than he'd intended. He cast a few hotknives in Nate's direction just force the other man to duck, and buy him a second to roll to his feet.

"Yeah, trying to stop my brainwashed mates from killing their friends is my idea of a good day out."

He circled, closing the gap between them, looking for an opening.

"Orders," Cable said harshly, matching his movements, keeping that bit of distance between them. If they closed, if he had to use his TK at close range... the kids, he could sense the kids watching... keep him talking? Try and distract him? "You're not part of them. Don't..."

"Well, that makes it all fucking OK. It's all orders. I thought you'd grown a spine of your own. Or were you just borrowing MacTaggart's all this time?" Pete leapt forward, aiming a solid kick to Cable's ribs.

Slow. Entirely too slow, trying to wrestle with his tactical imperatives like this... The kick landed and he staggered backwards, but lashed out at Pete, a half-hearted swipe of telekinesis that nevertheless carried quite a bit of force to it. "You think you can talk me out of this?" he said, wheezing a little as he backed away from Pete as the other man stumbled. A laugh, brief and desperate and utterly without humor slipped out before he could stop it. "Fuck, I wish you could..."

Another poke at his shields, and that flash of resistance, of pain at what he was doing, was gone in an instant. Charles was still here. His target was still here, and Pete was distracting him. Cable's expression went flat, extraneous emotions sucked away in an instant, and he threw himself forward and at Pete, sheathing his fists in telekinetic force as he launched a flurry of blows.

Whatever smart answer Pete'd been planning died on his lips as he staggered back under Nate's assault, rolling with it as best he could, hoping like fuck that the pain was just bruises, and not his ribs going. Apparently, they were through playing. For a fleeting second, Pete remembered the conversation he and Nate'd had months ago when Nate'd had his conditioning triggered the first time. 'If I got lucky, or you got careless' he'd said.

Time to find out if he'd been right, he thought, before trying his own variant on Cable's trick, extending the reach and force of his answering swipe by projecting hotknives a few inches from each of his fingers.

They seared through the armor on his arm and Cable gritted his teeth, visualizing a few telekinetic additions to the armor so that the next swipe was blocked. His tactical imperatives were still screaming at him, still offering half a dozen different ways to put Pete down for good, and Cable caught himself visualizing ruptured internal organs, massive bleeding... NO!

"STOP it!" he snarled and flung Pete away telekinetically. His mind snatched at the cars parked along the street, pulling them across the plaza. Some of those who'd taken cover were suddenly exposed, in the open, and Cable barely registered them running for their lives. "Dodge this, you stupid son of a bitch," he hissed and flung an SUV in Pete's general direction. Throwing it and letting it go as he did, instead of smashing at Pete with it. Dodge, damn it... part of him thought desperately.

Pete felt the breath leave his lungs as he hit the ground again, and he forced himself to roll sideways, narrowly avoiding being hit by the wreck. He hauled himself to his feet, and did his level best to take Nate's legs out below the knee with another spread of knives, wishing, not for the first time, for a mutant power that would let him get a level of injury somewhere between "minor wounding" and "dead" a bit more easily.

Cable saw them coming and threw up a partial shield at knee-level, deflecting them. He hadn't counted on the richochet. One or two of them somehow found their way right to the gas tank of one of the cars he'd dragged across the plaza, floating in the air barely ten feet away from him, and it exploded.

The force of the explosion threw him to the ground, heat and shrapnel tearing through the last-ditch, paper-thin shield he'd managed to throw up.

"Lucky..." Pete muttered, throwing his arm in front of his face against the wash of heat as he tried to close again while Nate was off balance. A pain in his side as he moved told him that the rib was definitely broken. Shit.

Range made it too easy for them to both to do killing damage. Another spread of knives to pin Nate down, and Pete launched himself across the last of then gap between them, bringing them both crashing to the ground. Maybe he he could keep the pressure up, he thought, doing his best to hammer at Nate as they rolled, maybe he'd get out of this alive.

Yeah, right.

Too close, too close again. Even as he was trying to push Pete away, block the blows the other man was landing, he could see it in his mind again. The easiest way to stop this, the quickest and most permanent...

He finally managed to push Pete away, gain a little distance. Just a step or two. Not nearly enough, and as Pete hauled himself back to his feet, still in that wary crouch, Cable could have throttled him. For being so damned persistent, for...

Trying to stop me.

"I asked you a question once," Cable said raggedly.

"Yeah." Pete spat, and was startled to see blood in it. "Been thinking about that a lot this week. Kept imagining how Moira and Dom and Amanda and the rest would take it. I've gone fucking soft. What's your excuse?" Another feint, and this time the shot to the kidneys was real.

The blow landed, and Cable stumbled, but blocked the next and managed to stay on his feet. "Can think... a little," he said raggedly. The tactical imperatives were screaming at the back of his mind, starting to cause him serious pain as he fought them with everything he had. "Don't want to do this, Pete--" Pete lashed out at him again and he blocked it, moving automatically. Desperation blazed into anger as he lunged at Pete. "Fuck you for going soft," he hissed, mingling physical attacks with telekinetic ones, just as focused, as if he had an extra set of fists. "Answer the question, Wisdom!" Get lucky already...

Pete stopped as much of the assault as he could, but it wasn't close too enough, and he staggered back, fighting to stay concious. So much for hoping there was someone out there with a better plan than him, he thought.

"Yeah." he stumbled, struggling even to hold himself upright. "Yeah, OK." He hated this bit.

The air between them filled with hotknives. Pete didn't bother to spit them from his hands, didn't bother to aim for injuries, he just reached inside and shoved the energy out into a thousand tiny spears of white heat, aimed straight at Nate.

And Cable felt himself throwing up a shield, even though the part of him that was still thinking, that wanted this to end right here, was fighting with everything it had to leave himself open. To let it be over.

It nearly was anyway. There were too many of the hotknives, and he'd never been that good at deflecting energy. His shield started to fracture and Cable stumbled backwards, fighting himself as he instinctively tried to reinforce it. Losing. It firmed up again, deflecting the rest of the hotknives, but even as it did, he went to his knees, his mind screaming with pain from the impact and the psionic feedback as the tactical imperatives interacted with his obedience compulsions, trying to bring him to heel. He wasn't supposed to try to give an opponent an opening. Wasn't supposed to want someone to kill him... but he did...

"Not good enough," he gritted out, his vision blurring as he hauled himself back to his feet. "Not nearly good enough, Pete..."

And then something hit him from behind. Something that slammed him into unconsciousness with the force of a speeding truck. He didn't even feel the impact with the ground.

"Thank fuck." Pete didn't bother with asking how or why - he couldn't seem to focus on any details right now. He stood upright long enough to watch Nate fall, then gave up himself, and sank to the ground, head in his hands.