Light Ahead

AN: just a little John/Lorna one-shot. I've imagined a million different ways they end up joining forces with Marcos to run refugees to Mexico, this is just one of them...

"Lorna, look. Lights."

Lorna shifted from her half-asleep position against the passenger seat window. She turned her head, blinking out into the midnight shadow, ignoring the pain in her neck from the weird angle. The gloom was illuminated by their run down car's bleary headlights. In the drivers seat John sat stone faced, the only hint of worry was the way his jaw seemed to tighten with every mile that spun under the tires. They topped the rise of one last foothill of what felt like hundreds, the old junker car groaning at the effort, and began their final descent into the valley.

It was the edge of one world and another; in the distance the city lights of El Paso began to dance in the darkness.

"You're still sure about this?" John glanced at her, his ex-marine, grown-out, messy buzz cut making his face seem harder than it normally was. Or maybe it was his eyes, the edgy, uncertain stare that he leveled her with for a split second before turning back to the road where the highway lines were nothing but blurs, leading them to their destination.

Or doom. Lorna pushed the heavy thought from her mind. Now was no time for second thoughts. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, grounded herself, reminding the voices in her head to stay centered in the moment she existed in.

"You were standing there and heard every word Sonia said, just like me," she reminded him, green eyes opening to level him with a calm stare, "if we don't get Ella out of the states, not only is she as good as dead, but we will be too when Sentinel Services sends out their full forces to find her."

"It's just…"

"Just what?"

John frowned in the dark.

"You know I don't like fighting enemies I can't see. It's not what I would have done before."

That word, before. Lorna could feel the involuntary swell of sympathy in her chest for the man sitting next to her. A marine unfairly discharged for dishonorable conduct, an apache Indian disowned by his family, a mutant fighting for a cause that so little supported or believed in. Before was a hopeless word of simpler times they would never get back. There was only the now, and hopefully, the after.

"This is how we fight back," Lorna reached across the center console, grabbing John's arm with gentle fingers, fingers that were usually used to create damage and chaos, not sooth, "Sure, the frontline is different, and we don't wear uniforms, but every life we save makes a difference. One by one, every mutant we keep out of Sentinel Services hands, every link we break in their chains, is one step closing to making this world better for all of us. You have to believe in that. I know you do."

"I believe in you," John grinned, a flash of boyish kindness amidst the grave persona of the soldier he portrayed, before his brow furrowed again, "I just want us all to make it home, and this… well, it's not our usual area of expertise."

Home was thousands of miles away in Atlanta, back at headquarters were the other refugees and militia would wait for their safe return. The mutant underground was all John and Lorna had, the only family they had, and now they were risking all of it to save the life of one of their own. They had to try, because if they didn't, the rest of the lives that depended on the mutant underground would also be at stake.

"I believe in you too, and we will make it home." It wasn't a question, but a statement of fact. John might have had foresight, but she was speaking their future into existence. Lorna would allow nothing else.

"Ella could have made it a little easier," John muttered, "roasting an entire fleet of patrol cars and sentinel agents wasn't the best idea, not that I blame her."

No mutant would blame her, not when Sentinel Services murdered her husband and teenage daughter in front of her, in cold blood. Their senseless deaths were not the first, and they wouldn't be the last, but Ella's violent retaliation and her well known reputation for harboring mutant refugees had earned her a death sentence of her own. Human blood on mutant hands was the highest crime; she'd melted their cars to liquid ore and their men to ash in the blink of an eye. Mexico would be the only safe place for her now, where she could disappear, and become a ghost.

"And this Eclipse guy?" John glanced at her again, pulling her from her thoughts, "I know you trust Ella, but he's a stranger Lorna, and I don't like it."

"Trust is all we have, John," Lorna looked back out her window, the inside of the car suddenly felt very small, "We have to try."

John was ever the solider, looking out for everyone but himself. He was fiercely protective of his friends, and even more so of Lorna. She was the only sister he'd every really had, and though his generosity knew no bounds in the mutant underground, the loses they had suffered in the past made him wary of outsiders and the unknown.

The truth was Lorna didn't know if Marcos Diaz could be trusted or not. He was an old friend of Ella's family, but with hands deep in in the cartel drug trade along the border. Lorna couldn't imagine how a man who's life revolved around blood money and murder could have any sort of interest in helping a wanted mutant fugitive when the price on her head would be more than he'd make in a lifetime. That is, until Ella had explained, he was one of them. One of us.

Her brief conversation with this man, on the shoddy static-filled satellite phone back at HQ, was as clear in her mind as if it had just happened. John pulled the car off onto the shoulder, into what little cover the rugged Texas terrain had to offer, for one last stop before they made the rest of their way to the city where he would be waiting for them. She pushed open the passenger side door and it squealed in protest, and she made her way to the trunk that John was already opening.

Lorna replayed Marcos's voice in her head, the question she had asked, and his answer.

"Why are you doing this?"

John reached down into the trunk, and gently lifted a sleeping child, a four-year old boy, from the arms of his mother and onto his shoulder. Ella climbed out behind him, exhausted and shaken. Lorna helped the woman to her feet, handed her the bottle of water she'd been holding. The El Paso skyline glittered in the distance.

"He's just a little boy, and they need help, why wouldn't I?"

Somehow Lorna knew that because of Marcos, this suicide mission wouldn't be in vain. Just as she could feel the threads of the magnetic field against her fingertips, she felt in her heart that they had made the right choice. She knew. They couldn't save Ella's husband or daughter, but they could give her and her son a second chance, because of him. People like Marcos were a reminder that there was still good in this world. They were embers of a fire that couldn't be put out, a bright light in a dark place.

Little did she know…