by Timesprite
The minijet was set on autopilot, retracing the route he'd taken only a few days earlier. He half-dozed, keeping an eye on the displays while trying to relax . It'd been a long drive down to San Francisco, and he hadn't gotten much sleep between then and now. There was too much spinning through his head, questions that he knew wouldn't have easy answers. He couldn't ask Dom directly--it was quite obvious she wanted him to know nothing of what he'd learned from G.W. But he couldn't ignore it either, not when it had such obvious ties to the current situation. With a sigh, he shoved away the nagging sense of powerlessness and began going over preparations for his arrival at Muir.
----
"The best I can do us to treat it as post traumatic stress. I gave her something to help her sleep and a mild anti-depressant. But I dinna think that's all that's going on here."
"Psionic trauma." He and Moira were currently walking the halls of Muir, going over the details of what she'd found. It had been Dom's suggestion, upon his arrival, that he go talk to the doctor while she packed up her stuff. There'd been a distance in her eyes that'd left him with a vaguely apprehensive feeling.
"It's outside my ability to diagnose and treat," she replied, "but aye. From what she told me it seems a likely candidate. You already had yuir suspicions?"
"It's clear her memories have been tampered with, even she knows that. But she can't remember *how* it happened and the injury is--" he frowned, trying to find a way to describe it to a non-telepath. "Well, it looks old. Not something easily repaired. I'd feel more comfortable if she'd let Jean or Xavier take a look, but she doesn't trust them inside her head, and I can't really blame her for that. I don't know what to do, Moira." He sighed, looking out the window at the island's rugged coast.
"Do the best ye can for her," she replied. "What she's going to need now more than anything is yuir support."
He nodded. "At least this is a start."
----
"Ready to go?"
"Yeah." She stared down at her feet for a moment. "You talked to Moira?"
He nodded. "Are you doing okay? This is a lot to get a handle on."
"I can deal with it," Domino replied, still not meeting his eyes. "I've always known they did something to my head, I guess it's different, knowing for sure. I feel like--I have a right to be angry. But there's no one for me to blame, is there? I don't know who mind-wiped me, I don't know why. It's just something that happened." She sighed. "Let's go home."
----
"I've got a surprise for you," Cable said as he pulled into the driveway, unable to keep the smile off his face.
"Should I be frightened?" She asked, arching an eyebrow as she got out of the car.
"It's the good sort of surprise," he replied. "It's in the garage." He took her hand and tugged her gently in the direction of the building, rather like a small child eager to show off his latest find, she thought amusedly.
"Okay, Nate, what's up?" She asked when they'd reached the door.
"Close your eyes."
"Nate--"
"C'mon, Dom. Play along." He gave her his best puppy-dog look, and she sighed, but did as he asked. She heard the garage door rumble open, and Nathan lead her inside.
"Can I look now?" She had to admit, she was pretty curious at this point.
"Go ahead."
She opened her eyes slowly, and did nothing to suppress a grin at the sight of the motorcycle parked dead center on the concrete slab. "I'd almost forgotten about this," she said, circling the bike slowly. The whole vehicle practically glowed--he'd obviously taken great care in cleaning it up. Even her helmet, parked next to the front wheel, sparkled in the sunlight from the open door.
"Tuned it too," he replied, responding to her unspoken thought. "Runs like it just came from the factory." There was an undeniably pleased look on his face.
"What's in the box?" She asked, eyeing the brown package perched on the seat of the Harley. Nathan's grin widened.
"Open it and find out."
Keeping one eye on him, she lifted the cover of the box and set it down on the floor. Inside, folded neatly, was a black leather jacket and a pair of fingerless gloves. "Nate--" She lifted the jacket from the box and slid it on. Perfect fit, not that she'd had any doubt.
"Your old one was getting pretty worn out. I figured it was time for a replacement."
"You bastard." She beamed at him. "Thank you. Why?"
"Because you deserve it?" He pulled her into his arms. "That reason enough?" She was still smiling at him, her eyes sparkling merrily. It had been worth it, he decided, just for that smile.
"I think," she replied, going up on tiptoes to kiss him, "I can live with that."
"Good to know," he said. "Going to take it for a spin?"
"Hell yeah," she grinned. "I owe you one, Nate."
"I'm going to hold you to that."
"I'm counting on it."
----
He leaned casually in the front doorway when she pulled back into the drive and turned off the bike. She pulled the helmet off and shook out her hair. "Been too long since I've done that," she commented, striding over to where he stood. "So..." She ran a finger along the top of his shoulder and down his arm, smiling wickedly. "Want your thank you?" She didn't wait for a reply, throwing her arms around his neck for a kiss that left spots dancing in his vision. "Dom--"
"Shut up. My turn now." Without disrupting the contact of their bodies they backed into the house rather rapidly, and Cable was mildly surprised they'd managed to make it as far as the living room before he stumbled over a box. Telekinetic cushioning or no, they still made a rather loud 'thump' as they hit the floor. Not that Domino seemed to notice at all.
She was currently in the process of removing his tee shirt, and taking her time while she was at it, he noted somewhat distractedly. She was also still wearing the leather gloves, though the jacket has been shrugged off at some point on their way through the kitchen. He inhaled sharply as her fingers skimmed below the waistband of his jeans, and the grin on her face widened. He reached up and ran his hands back through her hair, pulling her down towards him for a kiss. Then she pulled away, sitting up while still straddling his waist and pulled off her shirt before allowing herself to be pulled back down again.
"If this is what a thank you is like," he murmured, toying with the strap of her bra. "remind me to give you presents more often."
"Mmm... no, you have to be especially nice to get this kind of thank you."
"I'll keep that in mind."
----
The link buzzed loudly in his skull, taut and almost painful, though Dom was out like a light and nothing short of a nuclear detonation was likely to wake her. He rubbed his face with his hands and sat up, battling with indecisiveness. He knew he shouldn't ignore the way their psilink was currently going haywire, but neither did he want to take action only to have her resent him for not asking permission later. That was the continual frustration of having a direct connection with someone who was as equally, if not *more* sensitive about privacy issues than he himself was. He could *feel* when things were wrong, but didn't dare act on them without her consent for fear of alienating her. No doubt skulking around the corners of her mind without permission was not going to be well received.
He got up and sat down on the floor a few feet from the bed, taking a few deep breaths with his eyes closed to ease into a meditative calm. She'd most likely hate him in the morning for this, but there was no way he'd sleep with her mind screaming at him the way it was currently. He slipped into a partial meditation--he was sorely out of practice and didn't entirely trust his TK to hold firm and not drop him on his head mid-way through. Besides, he was only going far enough to try and sooth whatever the disruption was, not planning a full-fledged sightseeing tour of his partner's psyche.
The landscape he opened his eyes to was at first almost alien in its desolation, though the time X-Force had been based at Camp Verde made it familiar; the scrubby deserts of the American Southwest. He turned in a full circle, taking in the barren land for miles around, slowly rising towards mountains to the west. The sun was setting, clouds lit in hues of pink and purple draped languidly over the distant range.
Something glinted in the distance, reflecting the rays of the slowly setting sun, looming blood red and swollen in the dusky sky.
He began walking towards it.
Mirrored shards were standing upright in the sand, reflecting the landscape in a jagged cacophony, like a deranged Zen garden.
"You shouldn't have come here." She appeared from nowhere, moving between the fractured mirrors, which reflected not her image as he saw it, but rather herself at various ages and points of her life, all of them battered and bruised. A hundred pairs of hollow amethyst eyes watched him.
"I want to help."
"There's no helping here," she said. "Look around. There's nothing for you here. Let me be."
"Don't ask me to do this, Dom. You asked for my help, I gave you my word." He put his hands on her shoulders. "Don't ask me to stand back and watch this tear you apart. What are you so afraid of?"
"I don't want to be the one who fucks this up this time, Nate. If we go down this time, it's really over, y'know? We gave it our best damned shot and we're still coming apart at the seams."
"I'm not letting you go," he said quietly. "Not now, not ever. I couldn't do that again. I know you're happy here, Dom. Buried under everything that's going on in your head now--but I can't fix that unless you let me in, and you won't do that! I'm not asking you for anything here. I just want to know what hurt you like this."
"What--" She laughed suddenly. "What hurt me like this? I hurt me like this, Nathan!" She ran a hand over the top of one of the mirrors and blood dripped down its face. "Every time I fought back. Every time I thought life owed me something. I should have just taken the blows but I couldn't do that." She clenched her hand in a fist, blood welling from between her fingers and running down her bare forearm. "I had to think that I was worth something. So to answer your question, Nathan, I'm the one to blame, because I was too stupid to just die." Around her, the mirrors shattered, glowing red with the last of the sun's light.
"We all--"
"Tyler!"
"--Fall--"
"I know people who can help you. I can help you."
"--Down!"
His eyes snapped open, his head spinning so badly he had to reach out a hand to support himself. His shirt was soaked with sweat, muscles cramped as he got unsteadily to his feet. This wasn't right. At some point he must have slipped from meditation to sleep, from Domino's mind to his own subconscious. First Aliya and now Tyler--but he'd made his peace with those particular ghosts. What's more, he didn't recognize the song. Which meant--he swallowed hard, pieces sliding into place as he watched Dom's sleeping form.
----
Sleep was thick and heavy, hard to swim through. Fragments of dreams and shattered memories clung to her with cruel fingers, unwilling to release her to wakefulness. Leaden lids opened sluggishly, surfacing from the mire, breathing heavy. Her heart thumped rapidly in her chest, as if she'd been fighting demons in her sleep.
Shadows shifted over the pale square of the ceiling as the world outside grew lighter. Domino stared at it almost without blinking. Her entire body felt heavy, pinned down by invisible restraints she couldn't bring herself to struggle against. The world seemed a great distance from here, where she lay still, as if she could sink into the bed itself and vanish entirely. Even Nathan, lying only inches away seemed unreachable, his breathing muffled and remote.
She let her head drop to the side, peering at his sleeping face through the veil of her hair. He looked unhappy, worried even in sleep, the corners of his mouth pulled downward, the lines of his face harsher than they had been in ages. 'This is your fault,' her mind whispered. She'd given him this weight that would not leave him. Something sharp seemed to dig into her ribs from the inside, expanding, tearing through her with a pain that came from everywhere at once. With a long sigh, she got up from the bed.
----
Domino closed her eyes and let the water pound down on her scalp, dripping down her face like tears, scalding her skin. She didn't really feel it, not through the layers of cotton her mind seemed wrapped in, still isolating and muffling everything around her. 'The dark is better,' a voice she hadn't paid heed to in years whispered. 'No pain. No one can touch you here.' It wasn't right, damnit! She knew better than to give in to that quiet little voice, a shadow of a person she'd once been, and had fought long and hard to be free of. 'Not hard enough,' she thought wryly, resting her forehead against the tile of the shower surround. She knew she'd screwed things up this time. Gone one step past her limits. She simply hadn't realized just how much her past still haunted her until she'd found herself staring it all down again. And she'd shut down, just as she had as a girl, letting it all spill away into some dark void without wondering when the dam would fail.
The bathroom door opened. She could feel Nathan's concern on the other end of the link, even before he pulled back the shower curtain. "Dom, are you okay? This water is scalding."
She turned her head to the side slightly, just enough so that she could see his face out of the corner of her eye. "I guess I didn't notice."
He sighed and turned off the tap, grabbing a towel off the bar and wrapping it around her shoulders and helping her out of the shower.
"I'm fine. Stop treating me like some sort of fucking invalid. I'm not sick or anything for Christ's sake."
"Have you looked in the mirror, Dom?" He swung out the door of the medicine cabinet so that the mirror reflected both their faces. "Does that look healthy to you?"
She turned her face away, staring instead at the wall. His heart felt heavy, as if it would drop straight to the pit of his stomach and stay there, like a stone. He picked her up carefully, cradling her against his chest as if she weighed nothing at all, feeling nothing more than as if he were holding a broken doll, her head lolling listlessly against his shoulder.
He placed her back in their bed with equal care, laying down next to her and pulling her close, holding on for all he was worth. He closed his eyes and swallowed hard, fighting past the tightness in his chest for breath. "Do you want to die?" His voice sounded strained to his own ears, distorted by the awful truth they implied. She shifted, eyes meeting his in the half-light of the early morning. "Do you, Dom?" His eyes stayed locked on hers as he fought for the control he needed. "Do you wish you were dead?" He couldn't stop the tears, not even if he'd wanted to, which he didn't really. He hurt too much to deny them. "Because you said something to me last night, or your mind did--it was a dream or a nightmare or--" He took a gasping breath. "You said you shouldn't have fought against any of this. You said you should have just let it kill you."
"I--oh God. No, Nathan." She reached out and wiped the dampness from his face. "Never. I just..." She curled up tightly against him, head tucked under his chin. She pressed her hand over his heart, feeling its steady beat against her palm--so strong.
Apocalypse had not been able to break that strength, but she almost had. She could see it in his eyes, feel it in the slight tremble that ran through him. Through skin and bones and blood and metal, in the arms that had tucked her in against his body, along all the planes where their skin touched. The weight was there again, suffocating, stifling, and bleak. "I'm just so tired. Tired of scrubbing away the blood and gore, stitching wounds and resetting bones. Tired of struggling, broken, back to my feet."
He kissed the crown of her head. "I know."
"I need time to sort this all out," she said. "It's a process, I know. There'll be good days, and bad ones. But after so much of the bad times, it's hard to believe anything can be good again. That anything can be right again. And there's a fear here that sits in the pit of my stomach. It's the fear of losing things that I never dreamed I'd have. I never had aspirations for myself, y'know? Nothing I ever wanted to strive for. Except to live through the next day. You know how it is, I suppose. The difference here is that while you managed to find an anchor amidst the chaos, I never did. So this is all new ground for me. And I don't want to let go, but I can almost feel myself being torn away.
"I don't know how to move past it," she continued. "It's a giant roadblock and I can't go around. And going through, dismantling it means facing it all again. Staring down all the fear, pain, and violation. I barely survived it the first time around. God, I don't think I could do that again."
"Would it help," he said, "If I admitted how afraid I am?" He looked intently into her eyes. "Afraid for you, for us. I never thought anything in my life could feel 'right' again, Dom. Everything had been wrong for so long. But you're right, this is right. And that makes me scared. I'm afraid when you're not fighting, Dom. When you're letting them beat you. You never stood by and let me do that to myself. Not until I'd hurt you so badly in the process... I never blamed you."
"I know, Nate." The silence stretched long between them, neither willing to whisper platitudes they both knew were empty. The contact of their bodies served as silent reassurance, giving way to slow, trepidation-filled caresses, careful love-making that was a marred shadow of a union, mind and soul, filled with doubts.
----
A momentary pang of fear constricted his heart as he registered her absence, but abated as quickly as it had come as he placed her presence in the house. He got up, stretching stiff muscles, and pulled on his clothes.
She was sitting at the kitchen table, legs stretched out across a second chair. She glanced over at him as she heard him come in. "Hey."
He pulled a chair out and sat down across from her. "You doing okay?"
"Yeah, I--" She ran a hand back through her hair. "Sorry about this morning. I had some pretty messed up dreams and I wasn't really... with it, I guess. I didn't mean to frighten you like that," she sighed. "I've been a little stressed about all of this, I guess, and I suppose I'm not shielding or whatever as well as I usually do. You don't need me throwing all this at you."
"I'm not entirely sure it was all on your end," he murmured. "We've both been dealing with a lot lately. It was a quirk, maybe. I remember Jean mentioning something--" He smiled wryly. "I should have paid more attention when she and Xavier were trying to pound lessons into my skull, I guess."
"It's never happened before."
"The link is stronger, and you're right, your shields are normally tighter. I could try to do something about it, lock things down tighter on my end..."
"No." She reached over and laid her hand on top of his own. "You're probably going to laugh now, but I missed it after I left. Guess I'd never realized how much I appreciated having you there, being able to feel you and know I wasn't alone. We're both so crappy at talking about how we feel. It's... reassuring."
"Not going to laugh. I never really knew how you felt, to be honest. At first, I thought you'd be angry at me."
"Angry?" She quirked an eyebrow. "Well, okay, I guess I can see that, but honestly, Nathan? I was flattered that you trusted me that much. You've always had your own privacy issues, and after Aliya... I know this isn't the same, but it's close. To know you cared that much meant the world to me. Besides," she grinned, "it certainly has its perks."
"I should have known you'd bring that up."
"Hey, I let you be a lecherous bastard on occasion, let me have my moment."
----
"I can't believe we're doing this."
"Moving was your idea, remember?"
"Oh, sure, throw that in my face," she retorted. "I swear, if the universe catches wind of this, it'll be forced to implode. Your family is cosmically forbidden to do anything normally."
"I think the universe owes me one," he replied, surveying the array of paint strips in the rack before them. "What do you think?"
"I'd say it owes you the damned Publisher's Clearinghouse sweepstakes at this point."
"I meant the paint, actually."
"Oh. Um..." She eyed the display for a moment and pulled a strip from one of the slots. "What about that?"
"You're not painting the bedroom purple."
"Oh, and what would you paint it? Battleship grey?"
"You don't paint whole rooms purple."
"You're expecting me to trust the design sense of a man who thinks concrete bunkers make for good living conditions?" She dropped the sample back in the rack. "Okay, so not purple."
"Blue?"
She rolled her eyes. "You are so damned predictable."
"I'm predictable?"
"Yes," she replied. "What about this? It's blue..."
"Slate?"
"Well, we certainly can't paint the room Navy, Nate. And I'll be Apocalypse's love slave before I allow pastels on my walls."
"*Thank* you for that image."
"Aw, did I traumatize you?" She smirked. "Good. Well?"
"It's okay..."
"Worth a shot? It's only paint, after all. And if we can't even decide on something as simple as wall color, we're never going to get the place fixed up."
"How did we end up like this?" He asked.
"Excessive head trauma?"
"Dom.."
"Kidding, Nate."
----
"Well," Domino commented, wiping at her forehead with the back of her hand. "Not bad, I'd say." She surveyed the room. "For one day, at least." They'd cleared and prepped the room, and gotten the walls scrubbed down and primed. "Take a break for dinner, you think? We could probably still get the first coat of paint on yet tonight."
"I'm done here," he replied, climbing down off the stepladder he was using to reach the ceiling. "This place would have to have 9' ceilings."
"Well, I'm lucky to have you around then, aren't I?" She started rinsing off her brush and roller. "I do believe we're getting the hang of this crap."
"Frightened yet?"
"Hell yeah," she grinned.