Tangible Light
by Alicia McKenzie
DISCLAIMER: Marvel's, not mine. No money, don't sue.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is a sequel to my Disability Challenge story, Clarity, but it can stand on its own, too. Basically, all you have to know is that Cable had his big, final showdown with Apocalypse and won--but lost his sight.
He was dreaming about climbing a mountain. No ropes, no safety harness, just him and the rock and a sense of blissful freedom he couldn't quite remember ever feeling before. There was no rush, no pressure. Just him and the mountain.
He glanced down, smiling in delight. The ground was so far beneath him that he could barely see it when he looked down. He'd come so far. He was almost there, almost at the summit. He looked up, just to get a good look at his goal, to remind himself how close he was.
But something drew his attention onwards, past where the rock ended, into the depths of the sky. The deep blue, cloudless, endless sky--he was lost in it. Drawn up into it, floating, free of his body, drifting upwards into eternity--
Stone crumbled beneath his hands. Suddenly he was back in his body, a fragile, helpless flesh- and-blood being, hanging there on the side of the mountain, the cold, grey, implacable rock laughing at him. He struggled for a moment longer, reaching desperately for the next handhold. So close--almost there--
He lost his grip, and fell. Down through the vast, empty air, hurtling towards the deceptive green velvet of the unforgiving ground so far below--
Nathan Summers awoke with a half-choked sob, shuddering violently. His eyes flew open and he stared out into the darkness. The darkness that was all he saw now, day and night. Part of him cried out in longing, remembering the brilliant colors in his dream, clutching at them desperately. But they flickered and faded away like the ghosts they were for him now. Gone past his ability to recall, except in memory.
"Dom?" He didn't like the quaver in his voice. Sounded far too pathetic. He swallowed, struggling to regain his composure, but by then she was already stirring, the soft rustle of the sheets in counterpoint to the sleepy concern emanating from her end of the link.
Sounds. He concentrated on the different sounds almost frantically: the rustle of the sheets, the soft creak of the bedframe as she sat up, the change in her breathing. The unmistakable click of the bedside light being turned on.
"Nathan?" she asked softly.
Light. He couldn't see it--the darkness was as impenetrable as ever--but he could feel it, feel the faint warmth it gave off.
A gentle hand reached out, stroked sweat- soaked hair back from his forehead. He jumped at her touch, and a wordless apology immediately flowed up the link. "What's the matter?" she asked aloud, her voice soothing, one hand framing the side of his face tenderly.
He tried to picture her as she must look right now, hair rumpled, eyes a little bleary but alert. His imagination formed the image with loving, meticulous detail. "Just--a dream," he said hoarsely, feeling a little sheepish. "I shouldn't--I didn't mean to wake you up."
"It's okay," she murmured softly. "You're sure you're all right?" A note of concern entered her voice. "You're still shaking--"
"I'm fine, Dom. Really." Waking her up over a stupid flonqing dream. How infantile.
She was silent. He could feel her thinking, studying his face measuringly, weighing options. Then, another click; the light being turned back off. She laid down beside him, and he shivered as she nestled closer.
She was so warm, and he felt so cold--
"What were you dreaming about?" her voice said in his ear. Soft, still soothing, yet encouraging at the same time.
"Falling," he said in a very small voice. "I was climbing a mountain, and I--I looked UP and lost my grip." He chuckled, weakly. "Weird, huh? I didn't have trouble when I looked down. Just up."
"I wonder what that symbolizes," she whispered, a ripple of humor underlying the words. He felt her shift position, and twitched involuntarily as she laid one hand on his chest, just over his heart. He felt a strange lump form in his throat at the thought that she was trying to reassure herself that he was really here. "Nate," she said, a little more loudly, and a great deal more sternly. "Calm down. Your heart's going like a racehorse."
Her head was leaning against his shoulder, and he could smell the faint, flowery fragrance of her hair. Lavendar--and jasmine? He should ask her, sometime. Tentatively, using just a little of his TK field, he brought his free arm around--*don't poke her in the eye or anything, you idiot,* he told himself firmly--and managed not to miss and do something embarassing. He stroked her hair hesitantly. Her hair was like silk. Soft, but a different kind of soft than her skin. He was definitely going to have to work on his metaphors.
She chuckled softly. "That tickled."
"What?"
"The TK field. You were echo-locating me." Her sensed a strange sort of--bubbly delight from her, for lack of a better word. "Don't deny it--I felt it."
"Well--" He floundered for a moment. "I didn't want to--um, break your nose or anything. I mean--okay, what are you laughing about?"
"You," she snickered, shifting again. He felt the ends of her hair drift across his chest, knew from that and the change in the direction of her voice that she was leaning over him. "Me. The two of us."
A bemused smile broke over his features before he could help it. "We have sort of been tiptoeing around--things, haven't we?"
"That's one way to put it." She gave a slightly rueful sigh. "I think I'm nervous. It hasn't been that long since I couldn't touch you anywhere without hurting you."
Nathan winced at the thought. He knew, intellectually, that it had only been a few weeks, but it had felt like an eternity that he'd laid there in medlab, his whole body afire with agony that even the Shi'ar's best pain-blocking drugs hadn't been able to handle. Nerve damage of a particularly unique sort, thanks to being at ground zero where that mysterious energy wave had erupted at the moment of Apocalypse's death.
He remembered Dom being there at his bedside-- the whole time, it had seemed like. Her quiet, soothing voice, talking to him until she was hoarse, until she'd lost her voice entirely. Even then, she'd still been there, radiating support, reassurance. His beacon. He recalled, just as clearly, how much he'd wanted to touch her, even though his exhausted, pain-racked body had flinched at the thought of even the briefest physical contact.
"I guess--" He realized, much to his embarassment, that he was flushing. "I think I'm afraid of being--well, clumsy." He felt a flare of startled surprise across the link, and continued swiftly, before she could say anything--or laugh. Oath, he didn't think his pride could take THAT. "I mean, look at me. Even with my TK field, I still stumble over furniture or run into walls--or people. Drake left the freezer door open in the kitchen tonight after dinner and I nearly knocked myself out--"
"Nate." A gentle hand covered his mouth. "I'm not suggesting you do the jig on the stairs or anything, babe." There was that faint ripple of amusement, again, but he knew that it wasn't directed at him. "But I think we can handle this, don't you? I mean, we've made love in some of the strangest places and weirdest circumstances anyone could imagine--" Her hand moved away from his mouth, caressing the side of his face gently.
"I think the basement of the Pentagon was one of the most interesting spots," he said with a tiny smile.
"Oh, I don't know. I kind of got a kick out of Red Square in broad daylight--" She gave a soft, wicked laugh. "Remember the audience?"
He felt himself flush, again. To be perfectly honest, he hadn't NOTICED the audience. She had this weird effect on him, sometimes. The world just sort of--went away, to the point where no, he HADN'T notice half a dozen Red Army officers standing there and peering into the bushes, grinning.
"Nick Fury's office--" he persisted valiantly.
"Oh, shit, don't remind me," she almost giggled. Dom didn't have one of those schoolgirl giggles, he noted. It was this warm, wry, throaty giggle that somehow managed to be utterly sensual at the same time--when she wanted it to be. "I thought G.W. was going to have a coronary--"
"And when you think of what we were SUPPOSED to be doing there that day--"
"How did we ever live through half of these stupid stunts we pulled, huh?" she asked, snickering.
"Luck?" he suggested whimsically.
"Or pure bloody-minded stubborness," she snorted. "SOME of us are just too ornery to die--" Her voice trembled slightly, and Nathan reached up unerringly and took her hand in his. "Damn it," she breathed, her voice ragged. "I thought I was past this."
"It's all right."
"No, it's not." Her laugh sounded half-pained, half-ironic, and there was such a tangle of emotions on the link that he couldn't even begin to sort them out. Images, flashing up the link like a tape on fast-forward. All him. Him on the Blackbird over the Atlantic, him in the desert-- him bandaged and unmoving in medlab, him walking slowly, hesitantly across a room toward her, his eyes wide and full of frustration, seemingly fixed on some point above her head.
"Dom. It's all right," he repeated quietly, persistently.
"No, it's not all right, Nate, damn it. I've been treating you like glass, you've been--shit, you've been acting SHY whenever the subject comes up, it's so fucking unnatural I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone--"
He stopped the tumble of words with the most direct method that came to mind. Without worrying about the TK field, he reached up and pulled her down to him, kissing her. And maybe he shouldn't have worried so much, because it felt as right as it always did--
She pulled away, her breathing already rapid. "Nate--" Her voice was husky, yet faintly hesitant. "I don't want to push you--"
#Have I ever told you that you talk too much?# Recklessly, forgetting tentativeness and anxiety, he threw the link open as wide as it could go. Wistful yearning, swelling need, feverish desire flooded from both ends like rivers bursting free of their damns, meeting in the middle, mingling until what he felt and what she felt were what THEY felt, a turbulent, intoxicating, exhilarating mix of emotions.
#Dom--#
*--Nate!*
The darkness didn't matter. He didn't need to be able to see her, he knew her body as well as his own--how had he managed to forget that? He traced the elegant curve of her neck, the line of her back. She shivered as his hands settled on her hips for a moment, then drifted downwards.
"Tease," she murmured unsteadily.
"Just exercising my other senses," he said, fingering the fabric of what she was wearing, experimentally. "One of my shirts?" he asked, feeling his faint smile growing into the sort of grin that usually got him swatted if he smiled at her this way in public.
He heard her chuckle, and then she offered him an image along the now-nearly-quiescent link, like a gift. Her reflection, in a full-length mirror, wearing nothing but the shirt in question.
"That is a downright lecherous grin, you know that, Summers?" she asked humorously.
"I can't help myself."
"Good excuse," she scoffed. "No self-control, none at all--" Her laughter rang out delightedly in the darkness as he turned over and pinned her to the bed, giving her his best forbidding scowl.
"What was that about my self-control?"
"Nothing, nothing--HAH! Tickle me and DIE, old man--"
He could almost see her, in his mind, lying there beneath him, violent eyes sparkling, inviting. Almost--but not quite. He shifted over slightly to lie beside her, reached unsteadily and took her face between his hands. Something of what he was feeling must have shown on his face despite his attempt to prevent it from creeping across the link, because she sighed, wistfully.
Her voice, when she spoke, was as gentle as it had been when she'd sat at his bedside. "What are you thinking?" she asked.
"I--" His voice roughened, almost broke. There weren't any words to tell her how beautiful she still was, even in the dark that had descended on him. No words strong enough, true enough, to tell her how she was the only light he needed.
Graceful fingers drifted across his cheek, lingering on the dampness then. "Never mind," she said softly, and kissed him.
The link resonated gently and then burst into incandescence.
fin