xp_logs | (no subject)

x-sanfuaiyaa.livejournal.com posting in

Series of logs set on Friday around 3 PM:

Shiro is distraught. Convinced that life would be better if he weren’t a mutant, he decides to give it all up. No growth without pain. Moron.

It was quiet in the room Shiro and Alex shared, much more so than usual. Normally there’d be the sounds of its inhabitants talking to or teasing each other, or from video game sound effects, or even the clicking noise of computer typing.

But there was nothing. Shiro sat cross-legged on his bed, staring off into space. He’d barely left that position for the past couple of days. Leyu had tried her best to get her brother to get up and do something, anything, but he’d stubbornly refused, so she’d finally given up and went to play with her new friends.

The events of the past few days weighed heavily on Shiro’s mind, and no amount of trying to make sense of it or even ignoring it brought him any solace. He was alone. Sure, he lived with his best friend and now his little sister was at the school too, but no amount of sympathy from them helped.

What got him stuck here in the first place? Why was he stuck in America, abandoned by those who’d promised to take care of him?

Shiro looked down at his hands as the answer came to him: Sunfire.

The culpability could be placed squarely on his mutation. Because he was a mutant, Uncle Tomo tried to fashion him into a weapon to wreak “justice” against the Americans. When Shiro’s father Saburo discovered this, Tomo shot and murdered him. In an act of vengeance, Shiro retaliated and obliterated Tomo. Left without legal guardians, he and Leyu had been sent to the collective care of Saburo’s cousins, Keniuchio Harada and Mariko Yashida. They took a special interest in him because of his power, training him and developing him. Then they sent him to America because he still had a lot more growth potential than they could handle. At Xavier’s, Shiro had developed a new personality and a new identity. He fell out of Harada’s mold.

None of this would have happened if he weren’t a mutant. No dead father, no exploitation, no America. He could just be Yoshida Shiro, son of diplomat Yoshida Saburo, not Sunfire the mutant.

For a moment, he wanted to punish those responsible for his mutation. He would not have received his faulty genome if his mother’s family hadn’t been contaminated by radiation at Hiroshima nearly sixty years ago, he reasoned. Oh how he’d like to destroy the Capitol and the White House in retribution. (Although granted, many Americans might approve.)

No, revenge wasn’t the answer. What Shiro needed was to just not be a mutant anymore. He couldn’t go back in time and repair the past, but he could at least prevent future tragedy. If he were a normal human, then he could take care of Leyu in peace without having to worry about any of the baggage that comes with being a mutant. He’d have to leave Xavier’s, but it was a sacrifice that by this point he was willing to make.

Shiro got up and made his way downstairs. Can’t be a mutant anymore. I can’t live like this. Get rid of it. Get it out of me! There was only one way to do this, and while there was the possibility of failure, success would be well worth the risk.

Desperation led him to fly east as fast as he could, intent on reaching the Atlantic coast. He needed a place out of the way, where he wouldn’t be disturbed and no one would get hurt.

He reached his destination in what felt like hours, but may have been just a few minutes. Spotting a small island a few miles off the coast, approached it and centered himself a mile up. He felt his body drinking from the Sun, and let himself take in as much as he could. The more power he had, the easier it’d be.

Filled to the brim with solar energy, he closed his eyes and concentrated. Wrapping his power around him, he felt a twinge of doubt. Never again would be experience the joy of free flight, of enhanced speed and agility, of oneness with the center of the solar system.

But then again, never would he have the power of a thermonuclear bomb coursing through his veins, waiting to be exploited by whoever wanted that power for themselves.

That was reason enough. Spreading his arms out in an almost Christ-like manner, Shiro let it all out, every last Joule of energy and photon of light. The omnidirectional wave of plasma radiating from his body superheated every single molecule in its path, stripping them of their electrons and making them move around with such force and speed that molecules of hydrogen gas in the air fused into helium.

Pain wracked Shiro’s body, but he persisted. Everything needed to get out. Burning himself out of his power was the only way to become human. He couldn’t stop just because he felt like his body was being ripped apart.

He didn’t know how long it took, but as his body shut down from the over-expenditure of energy and darkness took over, a small smile grew on his lips.

Sayonara, Sunfire.

Set just as Shiro leaves, Manuel’s empathic gifts come in real handy.

Manuel knocked on the door to Nathan's suite. "Come on, estupido, open the damned door." he said to himself as he waited. "Open up!" he said impatiently through the door. "It's important!"

Sitting at the desk in the bedroom, staring a bit blankly at the computer screen as he tried to put his thoughts in order, Nathan was jarred out of his reverie by the knocking, and Manuel's hissing. Pushing himself up out of his chair, he headed out of the bedroom, frowning.

"What?" he demanded crossly, as he threw open the door.

"You might want to round up the fetish brigade. Based on what I just felt, I believe Shiro is going to go immolate himself very soon now. Luckily for us all, he'll be doing it very high in the sky, so we have time to prepare for fallout or whatever." he said. "I just thought you might want to know."

Nathan's eyes widened, and he instinctively lowered his shields, reaching out to try and find Shiro's mind. He glanced off the boy's thoughts, growing rapidly more distant, but it was enough to tell him that Manuel was right.

He spared one moment to swear aloud and then pushed past Manuel without another word as he took off at a dead run down the hall. #CHARLES! SCOTT!#

Manuel watched Nathan go, and then considerately closed and locked his suite door behind him. "You're welcome!" he called out after the rapidly-retreating mercenary.

Nathan quickly grabs Scott and Paul to out and retrieve Shiro. They reach him just as he explodes, and with quick thinking manage to get him to safety.

"How far out are we?" Scott asked in a low, tense voice, his gaze flickering down to the instrument panel to check the jet's speed and altitude. "Cable?" he snapped when he didn't get a reply.

Nathan, in the copilot's seat, jerked a little, Scott's question jarring his concentration as he tried to listen to Charles, who compensated smoothly, keeping their minds linked. "We're catching up," he muttered, a bit dazedly; he wasn't used to double-talking. "Shiro's still almost ten minutes ahead of us still. Keeping the same heading, though."

Paul tried to sit still. He smoothed his gloves and adjusted the collar of his uniform. The Blackbird was going faster than he could fly but he still hated sitting still. Damnit. He should have said something to Shiro when he'd seen the post. Merde. He tried to keep his anxiety stifled.

"And when we do catch up?" He leaned forward in his seat, looking to Scott for answers.

Scott's eyes flickered to their airspeed again. "Five, six minutes, given how we're narrowing the gap." And they would be there in time, before Shiro did anything irrevocable. There wasn't any other alternative Scott was willing to contemplate.

A soft groan burst from Nathan as he got, through the link with Charles, a glimpse of Shiro's mental state. "Fuck, kid, don't do this..." he said, the pained mutter slipping out.

"What's he doing?" Paul ground his teeth in frustration. Unlike some mutants, he couldn't make them go faster just by thinking about it.

"Giving up." It was too familiar a taste, that cold, bleak edge to what he could see of Shiro's thoughts, familiar enough to shake his hard-won self-control. "Wants it to stop..."

"Nathan, focus," Scott said sharply. "We may need you."

"I know him and this is nothing but a tantrum gone too damn far," Paul snapped. "Pain or no..." But he knew he was just angry out of fear and Shiro didn't bend because he was a Yoshida. With that taken away from him, what was left? Couldn't this thing go faster? He despised helplessness and waiting, it was intolerable.

"We'll get there before it goes anywhere," Scott said, checking their airspeed again. He was already pushing the jet as hard as he dared. They'd taken off without doing a proper pre-flight, too, but there hadn't been a choice about that.

Blind and slow. They were blind and slow in this thing. Paul didn't like the sense of being closed in when he should be moving and he told himself yet again that the air in here was fine, he could breathe fine. "Yes, we will," Paul said, jaw clenched.

The minutes crept by, and Nathan, casting his mind out desperately, started to sense Shiro himself, not just through Charles. "Higher," he said tightly, closing his eyes and trying to focus on the kid's mental signature. "We have to go higher."

Scott's eyes widened as he pulled the jet into a climb and saw something glowing above them and still quite a distance ahead. "Is that him? What is he--"

Nathan's eyes snapped open. "BANK!" he shouted, an instant before a second, smaller sun blazed into existence over the Atlantic Ocean.

Paul was grateful for being strapped into his seat - for all of a split second. A wall of sound and energy that crashed over them and wrenched at the Blackbird and in that moment he was glad of being held in. The next, he was clawing at the belt buckle. That had to have been Shiro, his mutation going haywire under the strain of his speed. "Nathan..." Paul reached for the back of Nathan's seat, pulling himself out of his own.

Half-blinded by the flash, Scott cursed as he fought the controls, listening to the shriek of the jet's engines. They were going to stall, he thought as the turbulence battered the Blackbird. If he couldn't level them out...

Nathan didn't hear Scott curse, or Paul call his name. He closed his eyes - couldn't see anything anyway, thanks to the flash - and threw nearly everything he had into steadying the jet telekinetically, fighting the disruption in the air currents. What he had left, he flung outwards at the falling boy. Not trying to catch him - he was too far up for that, falling too fast, and Nathan couldn't compensate for that much momentum at this distance without breaking every bone in Shiro's body - but only to slow him.

#Falling - Paul, he's falling, you have to get to him... Scott, the hatch--#

Gritting his teeth, Scott spared a hand to reach out and hit the control for the hatch. "Go!" he snapped and turned his attention back to keeping the plane aloft.

This, he could do. Paul was gone out the hatch in a heartbeat, reveling in being free as he got his bearings. He could see, his eyes were used to the light and it hadn't affected him at all, the speck in the distance. Shiro was falling fast, far faster than freefall. It wasn't often that Paul used everything he had, but he did now. He was there in seconds, twisting in the air and matching Shiro's downward speed. He could feel the radiation starting to touch his skin already.

Slower, Nathan thought. Had to slow him down, make it easier—safer for Paul to catch him. Diverting some of his attention from the jet, he tried to visualize a parachute, something, anything that would shave more off the speed of Shiro's fall...

Taking a risk, trusting that Nathan had a firm hold on the jet, Scott flickered the engines, and breathed out in relief as the sound as they came back on was something closer to their usual roar, rather than the anguished shriek. "Nathan, you can let go," he said tightly, and pushed the jet into a dive, following Paul.

Sunburn. That's what it felt like. And the inside of his nose and mouth and throat felt seared. Paul reached out for Shiro, pushing the awareness of the boy's blackened skin out of his mind for the moment. He got his hands on Shiro and pulled him in, arms around his chest. He began to change their trajectory into a slow arc.

"Paul's got him." Nathan opened his eyes finally, blinking away the afterimage.

He fumbled with his belt, pushing himself up out of his seat despite the steepness of the dive. "I'll check the medkit."

"Is he alive?" Scott asked, his voice tight, business-like as he concentrated on matching Paul's trajectory.

"I think so..."

Paul's radio was useless with the radiation and he wasn't sure Nathan could hear him, if he were even listening. #Nathan?# He kept slowing them so that Scott could catch up but wanting to move into cleaner air. He held Shiro to him with one arm and pulled his glove off his other hand with his teeth. He felt for a heartbeat with his bare hand.

#...Paul?# It was hard to project his thoughts that far. The backlash-headache was already starting, and his vision was blurring, his hands shaking as he started to check the medical supplies. #Get back in here... the radiation...#

#I don't want to contaminate you and Scott.# There it was. A pulse. Thin and thready but there. #I'm getting the medical supplies out... we'll stay in the cockpit...#

Scott swore as he failed to get through to Paul on the coms again. Had to be the radiation. "Nathan, can you contact him?" he called back over his shoulder.

#We're coming. Tell Scott to open up.# Paul could hear the Blackbird closing in on them.

"They're coming in," Nathan said, leaving the medical supplies where they were and stumbling back to the cockpit, almost falling into the copilot's seat. "Hit the hatch again."

Scott shot him a worried look and then opened the hatch. "Blackbird to base," he said. "Do you read?" Nothing, still. The radiation had to be interfering with the coms.

Paul leaned on the button to close the hatch as he came in. He felt fine right now, the heat had passed, and he laid Shiro out on one of the benches along the wall that doubled as beds for the injured. "He's got a pulse," he said, his voice a little rough. "Anybody think to bring a Geiger counter?" He started to strap Shiro in.

"Should be one in the gear stored under the right-side benches," Scott called back, banking the plane to come back around in the direction of the mansion. The jet was definitely not as responsive as it should be; there had clearly been some damage in the explosion.

"You people think of everything. Nate okay?" Shiro was breathing and his pulse was still fairly steady. First thing to do was get both of them out of their contaminated clothing. Paul started taking care of that. There were changes of clothing back here as well. Had to be water somewhere, he was thirsty all of a sudden.

"I'm fine, Paul," Nathan said hoarsely, keeping his eyes closed. His head hurt marginally less that way. #We've got him,# he thought disjointedly at the presence he knew was Charles. #Going to be a radiation problem...# Too much, and he cut off the projection, clutching at his skull with a wince as the pain blossomed behind his eyes. "They--know we're coming," he wheezed at Scott. "Just get us back there."

The remains of Shiro's clothing shredded away easily under Paul's hands and he was as careful as possible not to send fibres floating into the air. The rags and his own uniform went into a biohazard bag, one of a few folded up in the drawer with the radiation counter. The clothes were bad. Shiro, shockingly, didn't show much difference from the Blackbird itself. Paul didn't want to know what his readings were, he'd leave that to the doctors. He wrapped Shiro in a blanket and pulled on pants and shirt from another storage drawer. "This isn't covered under disciplinary procedures, is it?" he asked, trying to keep his mood light.

Scott grimaced. He could hear the tension under the surface of Paul's words, and he really didn't want to think about how much radiation the other man would have picked up out there. "Just do what you can, Paul," he said tightly, glancing sideways at Nathan, who was slumped in his seat, his eyelids fluttering. "I'm going to get us back to the mansion as fast as I can."

The trip back to the mansion isn’t quite a smooth ride. Damaged by Shiro’s blast, the Blackbird has problems obeying Cyclops’ orders, and requires some help from Jetstream in order to land.

Definitely thruster damage, Scott thought, gritting his teeth as he tried to ease the jet towards the hangar. Bad noise, he thought bleakly, listening to the shriek. But he was not going to crash the Blackbird. Not at all, and certainly not a hundred feet from home.

Haroun, standing in the hangar but well-away from the Blackbird's landing pad, watched the descent with open worry on his face. They had mangled his jet! The thrusters were badly out of tune and the right one looked just about ready to melt. From his vantage point underneath the 'Bird, he couldn't tell what else they had managed to break, but it didn't sound good, and judging by how it was handling, thruster damage was the least of their problems.

Not. Crashing. The Blackbird. "Everyone well clear in the hangar?" Scott grated over the coms, hoping that they were reading him.

"Jetstream here. Hangar is clear, medical is standing by. Bring her down easy, you've got major thruster damage. Right one's running way hot, you've got maybe forty-five seconds until burnthrough." Haroun said into his throat-mike.

"Shit," Scott muttered, glancing sideways at Nathan. "Any chance of a hand here?" A little telekinetic assist might help.

"You have got," Nathan muttered, not opening his eyes, "to be kidding."

"No-go on the external assist." said Jetstream. "No assets on the ground. You're on your own, Cyclops. Bring 'er in nice and easy, that's it. Back down on the starboard thruster, it'll last longer."

Wonderful. Scott did as Haroun suggested, listening as the pitch of the thruster's shrieking got a little less ear-shattering. "Everyone hold on," he said, and hit the landing gear.

Nothing. No familiar sound of the gear lowering. Scott's eyes widened behind his visor. "Jetstream, what's the status of our gear?" he snapped over the coms.

"Gears are up! Repeat, gears are up! I'll see if I can extract manually! Can you hover?" said Jetstream, then he kicked his power into gear in a flash of light and the stink of chemical ignition. "Fucking piece of SHIT!" he growled, forgetting for an instant that his throat-mike was still hot.

"I'll do my best," Scott said tensely, ignoring the profanity, and looked sideways at Nathan again. "Cable, you might have to hold us steady." The sound from the thrusters was getting worse.

Haroun grabbed the housing for the nose landing gear, and wrenched it open to allow the gear to descend. "Nose gear is down! Warping all along the plates down here. I'll have to spring them all manually. Thirty seconds!" he said as he flew to the second gear cover to repeat the process - the one on the port-side wing, away from the malfing thruster.

Thirty seconds. Scott's eyes flickered over the instrumental panel, checking the readings, as he tried to hold the jet steady. "Hold it together," he muttered. "That's my girl..." But he swore as his eyes lit on one particular gauge. "Temp in the right thruster's gone critical!" he snapped. "Haroun, back off--"

And it blew, mushrooming outwards in flames that expanded rapidly until the overrides killed the fuel run to the engine. Scott cursed again as the plane started to tilt. Started to fall...

Haroun had just got the second gear free when the thruster went. Not wasting time with words, he flew to the damaged side to use his body and his power to try to level out the plane's descent, pushing himself as hard as he dared. He only had to keep it level for a twenty-foot drop. Just twenty feet...

Falling... they were falling? Nathan's eyes snapped open and he reached out, despite the screaming pain in his head, to try and catch that side of the plane. There was already someone there - Haroun? - exerting enough of a counterforce to start bringing it level. Standing in for the thruster, Nathan realized in an instant, and added what he could, trying to tilt the plane back in the other direction.

Scott, feeling the plane level out, concentrated on one thing: the ground. He had to get them down right now.

Haroun felt almost deliriously hot as he pushed hard against the fuselage of the jet. His body couldn't take much more of this abuse - he was never intended to act like a missing thruster for a multi-thousand-pound aircraft. Finally, the nose and right wing gears touched the ground, and Haroun let his power wink out, to collapse onto the hangar floor. The nice, cool hangar floor.

Major huge wow thanks to Ande, Alicia, and Redhawk!