Cry In The Wilderness
by Alicia McKenzie
DISCLAIMER: Characters belong to Marvel. No money, don't sue.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: #9 in the Nocturnes series, which can be found at the Dayspring Archive, as well as Alternate Timelines and a few other places. It will make NO sense at all unless you've read the previous 8. :) Many thanks to the #plotting crew, especially Duey and Lynxie for all the much-needed support. :)
The shadows drifted across him lazily, undulating. Almost like a caress, Cable thought as he laid on the carpets, amid the tangled blankets. He stared up at the ceiling of the tent, trying to think, but his eyelids were heavy, so heavy he could barely keep them open. . .
A slender white hand settled over his heart. "Go back to sleep," the voice that was music to his ears, balm to his heart, said softly. He turned his head slowly, fighting lassitude, and smiled sleepily at her.
She tossed untidy black hair back over her shoulder in a single motion, and smiled back at him, those brilliant violet eyes capturing his soul in a heartbeat. "What are you looking at?" she asked, the smile becoming teasing. "What do you see?"
"I see. . ." Everything. He tried to raise a hand to touch her, to trace the way the smile changed the shape of that beloved face. To touch her. Just to touch her. But he couldn't. So tired. . .
She laid back down beside him. He could feel her body along his, feel each breath she took, hear each beat of her heart. . .
Tears spilled helplessly from his eyes, and she brushed them away, so very gently.
***
"Why are we walking?"
"You'd prefer what?" his companion asked, undisguised hatred in her voice. "To fly in there like you owned the place, lord of all you survey?" Her eyes bored into him, arctic emerald, hellfire seething in their depths. Her hair was the color of blood in the light of the desert sunrise. Somehow, she was changed here, although she wore the shape of her real body. Everything about her was sharp, knife-edged.
A knife was too mild a metaphor, he decided. He had seen many things in this woman, over the years, but never this precise mixture of rage and anguish.
Charles had been almost painfully objective about all of this, once he'd arrived at the mansion. Scott had been piteously grateful, relief overcoming everything else, old grudges and new alike.
But Jean. . .he had seen hate like that before, felt it himself. Hate beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond perspective. The hate of a parent for someone who had hurt their child. A hate that wouldn't die.
And yet she had insisted upon being the one to come with him. Charles had wanted to accompany them, but Magnus had refused. Never Charles, not anywhere near his mind ever again. Emma had offered, in turn, and Jean had refused, her words so cold and irrevocable that even the White Queen had been taken aback.
*I don't trust you,* Jean had said to him in the long descent to this place. *We need you, but I don't trust you. And I will not let you hurt him again, intentionally or otherwise.*
So here they were, together. Wandering through a mindscape that seemed more vivid than reality, a world in which they were both invaders, searching for someone who didn't want to be found.
So futile. But he had agreed, and not simply because of the psi-link Cable had formed with him weeks ago in the moment of Domino's death. Self- preservation wasn't his only reason for being here.
One way or another, this would be finished.
Magnus looked away, staring down at the tracks they were following. "They should have been erased by the wind," he murmured without thinking. "Why are they still here?"
Jean Grey stopped, staring at him. "What wind?" she asked in a very different voice. "The air's so still it feels dead."
She was right, Magnus realized, focusing on the here and now. There was no wind. But there had been. He didn't know how he knew, but he did.
"Magnus!"
His head whipped around at her cry, but she was pointing ahead of them, fear on her face.
Sandstorm. Bearing down on them, directly at them.
He turned back to her. "Can you shield us?" he asked harshly.
The ice broke in her eyes, and he nearly flinched at what was beneath. "No! I told you, you bastard, this is his mind, his rules. . .we have NO control here!"
The wall of the storm reached them, swallowing them up, and Magnus was driven to his knees by the wind.
The wind that screamed in a voice he knew all too well.
#GET OUT!!!# Cable roared.
***
"Are you hungry?" Domino asked mischievously as they walked, hand-in-hand, towards the center of the bazaar. There were few people abroad, this early in the morning. Those that were, were few and far between, and seemed to avoid them, consciously or otherwise.
"So quiet," he murmured. He was holding her hand. Part of his mind couldn't think of anything but that, her hand warm in his, her pulse steady and reassuring. As if she was all of reality to him, here and now.
She stopped, smiling at him fondly. "I asked you if you were hungry. Focus, Nathan."
"Hungry," he said a little uncertainly. He wasn't hungry. Wasn't. . .anything, except with her. It was strange. He could barely remember the intensity of the night before. . .the sandstorm, the chase in the twilight.
What had come after.
It was all. . .paling. Like the morning light. Everything seemed softer, gentler somehow. Warmth, peace, that was waiting there to envelop him, waiting only for him to give in and let go.
Domino let go and then reached up and took his face between her hands, her expression serious. He shivered at her touch. "You're here," she said quietly, firmly. "I'm here. What need is there for anything else?"
She was right. "I'm so used. . ." He trailed off, losing himself in her eyes again. "So used to the pain," he managed, and the emptiness opened up inside him again, vast and dark and hollow, so hollow it ached. . .
"Nathan."
#Cable. . .#
That voice. That. . .
He cried out, his hands coming up involuntarily to cover his ears, to shut out that soft, distant, desperate call.
#Cable. . .Cable, let us pass. . .we mean you no harm. . .#
And the delicate spell, the gentle haze, shattered.
"NO!" he screamed.
And the buildings around them, the occasional bystander, dissolved into dust, as if his cry was a wave that swept outwards, destroying everything it touched. He felt to his knees, shaking, tears pouring down his face.
It had found him. The thing that had chased him across the desert, the thing that had left him no choice but to come here, nowhere else to go, had found him. It was coming, it was going to take her away from him again. . .
He reached out for her blindly, feverishly, and sobbed as he felt her in his arms. Alive, she was alive, warm and alive and here with him, and he wasn't letting her go, wasn't going on without her. Not again, not ever. . .
"You don't have to," she murmured against his chest. "You don't have to leave." He shook, and she wrapped her arms around him, held him tightly. "You can stay. You can do MORE than stay."
"More. . ." he murmured brokenly, not understanding.
She looked up at him, her eyes glowing, clear as amethyst even through his tears. "You make reality, here," she whispered. "Anything you want. Everything you want. Life. . .and death. . ."
Life and death. He closed his eyes, still not understanding what she was trying to tell him. Clarity wouldn't come, wouldn't. . .
Life and death.
He opened his eyes. The sky was clear harsh blue, the sunlight dazzling gold, the sand beneath their feet white as bone. They knelt there, in the middle of the street, and the crowds parted around them.
The sun was right overhead.
He smiled at her. Faintly, dazedly. Nothing of humor in the smile, or the feeling. "High noon," he murmured, and her smile reached into him and warmed the knot of ice in his chest. "I have a strange sense of humor."
"Appropriate, though," Domino said, her eyes sparkling. He rose, pulling her up with him.
It was so simple, here. Nowhere as complex as it had been in the place he'd left. Nothing surviving of his shadows, nothing left to divide his heart.
He was here, and she was here. That was all that mattered.
And he wasn't going anywhere.
***
She walked easily, unhindered by the wind, and all he could do was stagger along in her wake as the sandstorm tried to flay him alive.
"Faster, Magnus!" Jean shouted back at him, almost imperiously.
He would have opened his mouth to curse her, but that would only have given the storm a further opportunity. It wanted his death with a rage so intense he could almost taste it. So cut and dried, so simple. The response to his call along the psi-link, prompted by Jean, had been pure pain and hatred. No guilt. . .no bitter resolve to endure, to live on even when what made life worth living was gone. . .
None of the conflict he had felt from Cable that night he had confronted him on a different version of this very mindscape seemed to be present here. But then, they were so much deeper than he had gone that night. So much deeper. . .as far from reality as he had ever been.
*There is a level beneath unconsciousness, below even the subconscious,* Charles had said. *That's where he is.*
Why a desert? Magnus thought wildly, trying to distract himself from the assault of the storm. *The connection to Apocalypse?* But this was not about Apocalypse, this was about Cable fleeing into a refuge of last resort, running away from his responsibilities. . .
The storm laughed. And laughed and laughed, wild, anguished laughter that tore at his heart no matter how hard he tried to shut his ears.
***
So very focused. He hadn't felt this way in. . .so long, he couldn't even remember when. It wasn't calm, he knew that. The peace that had called to him in the early morning light was still there, waiting. But he couldn't let himself feel it, not yet. Not when this wasn't finished yet.
There were no guards at the gates of the city, today. It struck him as a little odd that there were no walls, either, but part of him understood why. Part of him was beginning to understand all of this. . .
"Can I just say I'm very glad you finally woke up, lout?" Domino asked wryly, her hand tightening on his as they stood at the spot where the city met the desert.
A threshold, he knew instinctively. A border. He had drawn boundaries for himself, here. He was forcing them to reflect truths that no longer existed, rules that no longer held power over him.
He. . .could stop. He knew that. He could let go. But not yet.
"You always called me thick-skulled," he murmured. "Takes me a while to absorb something new."
"True. But do you have any idea what it was like?" Her grip tightened on his hand even more, and he glanced down at her sharply, hearing the sudden tremble in her voice. Her eyes were brimming over with tears. "I could feel you, but you were in too much pain to feel me. Part of me wanted you here, so badly. . .but I couldn't ask you. It had to be your choice."
"I didn't think I had one," he breathed, tears of his own threatening to escape. "You were gone, Dom, and you were all the freedom I ever had."
A moan burst from her, and she was in his arms, holding him so tightly that hurt, hurt through every bit of his entirely flesh-and-blood body. "Is it selfish of me?" she whispered in anguish. "Of us?"
"I don't know," he whispered into her hair. "I don't know. . ."
"It has to be," she wept, shaking. "Look where we are, damn it, we're in the one place in the world that frightens you. . .you think I haven't seen this in your nightmares?"
Cable looked up. The city was gone. All that was left was the desert, stretching out around them as far as the eye could see.
A different desert. Not their sanctuary anymore, and Cable began to tremble. He'd walked this desert before, a thousand times in his nightmares.
It was HIS place. Apocalypse. He was between them, darkness tainting joy. Just like he had always been, and the weight of it crashed down on him, too heavy to bear.
Pulling him back. The shadows marching right back in, surrounding him, choking him. . .peace nothing but a distant shimmer across a gulf too vast for him to cross.
"I don't want this. . ." he rasped. "I don't. . ."
"Then let it go!" She pulled back, staring up at him, hair wild and tears pouring down her cheeks. "Come with me," she begged. "Don't leave me, it wasn't supposed to be this way. . ."
Real shadows on the sand, now. He looked up, saw two figures standing on the crest of the dune above them, backlit by the blazing sun.
"Nathan," one of them said in a soft voice, full of grief.
He didn't listen to her. Didn't see anything but the one standing beside her.
No armor. No helmet. But he was the same, the same. . .
*. . .love you, always. . .* Domino's voice whispered to him on a battlefield in Genosha.
And he was there, again. Watching her hand fall limply to her side, the light fade from her eyes. . .
"Cable," Magneto said, his voice tense with something. . .Cable wasn't sure what.
"You," Cable breathed raggedly. "You. . ."
Life and death.
The words hung there.
So simple. So very simple.
"We've come to take you back," Magneto said brusquely, glancing at Domino and then looking away.
Dismissing her.
"You shouldn't have come," Cable said, his voice ghastly-sounding even to him. "I told him. Charles. I told him. . ." Magneto was silent. "That I'd take you with me, when I went. . .I told him. . ."
Something changed in Magneto's eyes. "Then do so," he said, his voice hoarse, so very weary, suddenly. And it was pain in his eyes, Cable realized with growing shock, building anger. Pain. For him? Sympathy. . .from HIM? "I gave you the option once, Dayspring, if you remember. End this, if you want. Set us both free."
Tears. Why was he crying? So many tears, all the tears he'd fought so hard not to shed. . .
"STAB YOUR EYES!" he snarled, giving himself over to the anger.
And the desert burned.
to be concluded. . .
continued in Cast Your Soul To The Sea