by Timesprite
She would have laughed if she knew how often he watched her sleep, he thought wryly. He couldn't help it; truthfully, there was something captivating about catching her when she wasn't in constant motion. Memories drifted past in a long chain-- times he'd watched her with amusement or trepidation, out of fear, just to satisfy himself that she was still there, breathing, that they were both still alive. Watched her with a pang of guilt and regret as he slipped out the door long before the sun rose.
He watched her now with a strange sense of peace, smiled to himself at the sight of her curled under the comforter, buried in the pillows. Their bed, their house, their life together. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It would be okay. It had to be, it was all he had left.
He stripped off his shirt and winced, catching sight of the bruise that had spread across his right shoulder in the bathroom mirror. With a sigh, he started up the shower, and an ugly sense of dread slinked beneath the morning's calm.
Dom was awake when he walked back into the bedroom, rubbing her eyes blearily. "Nate, what happened to your shoulder?"
"Must have done something to it yesterday," he shrugged, not meeting her eyes. "It looks worse than it feels."
"Should be more careful," she replied, climbing out of bed and walking past him to the bathroom. "Neither of us is as young as we used to be."
----
"So what's on the agenda today?"
Cable looked over the edge of the newspaper at her. "Your toast is burning," he pointed out, taking a sip of his coffee.
"Goddamnit," she reached over and popped the lever up on the toaster, swearing in disgust as she dropped the charcoaled bread into the garbage. "I swear that thing is broken."
"Worked fine for me."
"Well, fine. So it doesn't heat consistently," she snapped, pouring herself a cup of coffee and sitting down across from him. "So what do we need to do today?"
"I was going to run to the hardware store to get supplies and fix that corner of the garage roof. So unless you want to help with shingling..."
"I think I'll pass," she replied dryly. "I'd fry in two seconds flat. I guess I can finish taking care of those boxes in the den. Are you sure your shoulder is up to that?"
"I told you it was fine," he grated. "Do you have to keep nagging me?"
"Well, excuse me for caring," she retorted. "I'll just leave you and your foul mood to go about your business then." She grabbed up her mug and left the kitchen.
----
At noon he headed back into the house to take a break, despite the fairly mild temperatures, working up on the garage was hot work. It'd also given him a lot of time to think.
He'd regretted his hostility that morning the instant she'd left the room, realizing it wasn't her fault, exactly, that he was upset. But there wasn't any good way to explain what had happened. Part of her had wanted him gone badly enough to shoot him, there was no mistaking that. The fact that he was sure it wasn't out of malice--she was obviously just frightened of something, wasn't likely to make the news any easier to swallow. Pausing to grab a beer from the fridge, he headed down the hall to find her.
She was perched on the arm of the sofa, in the midst of unpacking several boxes, it appeared, flipping through a book. She set it down on the end table when he walked in.
"Hey," she said quietly. "Done already?"
"Almost. Taking a break." She nodded and started putting books onto the bookshelf. He could feel the tension in the air that had been there since the morning, muffling everything, making the atmosphere heavy and hard to work through. "Dom, we need to talk."
"So talk," she said, eyes flashing with an emotion he couldn't place as she glanced at him, still shelving books.
"I lied--last night, when I said I didn't remember what woke me. I lied." She turned to face him, balancing on the arm of the sofa again, arms crossed, but said nothing. "When I called you at Muir? I lied then, too. This... thing that's happening, with the link, between us, has been happening for awhile. I didn't recognize it until the other night... I tried exploring the link but I'm not sure what's going on."
"And you didn't think it was important enough to tell me?" She'd meant the words to be harsh, but her voice came out weary instead, even to her own ears.
"I thought I could deal with it. I thought it wasn't a big deal and you..." Something in his posture and expression shifted and she could see all the pent up worry in him hovering just below the surface. "I'll admit it. I was trying to protect you, Dom. I..."
She sighed and nodded slowly. "I get the feeling this isn't what you really needed to talk about."
"There is no good way for me to say this. Sometimes, when they're strong enough, events that are... telepathic in origin can have actual physical manifestations--"
"Nathan..." She stood and took a few steps forward.
"I didn't injure my shoulder yesterday, Dom. It happened last night--"
"Nate--"
"It happened when you shot me."
She hit the floor hard, as if the blow had been a physical one, looking up at him with an expression so pained it hurt him to look at her. "Oh, God. Nathan... God."
He kneeled down next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. "It was mostly my fault, Dom. Even my subconscious doesn't know when to stop prying."
She sighed softly and closed her eyes. "I thought I could take it... the job with Wisdom. I thought... It was a challenge, to myself. To prove I was still good after all these years. To prove that Madripoor didn't matter, that I wasn't--" She took a deep breath. "That I wasn't still that scared kid, that nameless little girl who fought because she had to, who got good at it because she didn't want to die. It was a way of proving they didn't own me still, Nate. That I was a real person. But then I was there, and I realized I'd simply never dealt with that part of my life.
"There were far too many of us, Nathan. There in the dark, victims of things our parents had done, or of simple circumstance. Brainwashed children who knew no love... maybe I was luckier than the rest," she grimaced. "I didn't know any better. For me, there'd literally been nothing else. Home? Family? I couldn't remember those things. I had only the vaguest of recollections. My 'life' began in those damned pits. It could have easily ended there, I'd never have known."
Her arms were wrapped tightly around drawn up knees, her chin resting atop them. Hair fell across her face as she stared at him with eyes that were not her own. They belonged to the girl inside her that'd been lost forever to violence and betrayal. "Sometimes I wake up in the dark and think I'm still there," she said softly. "But you're here, and that's okay."
He reached out and stroked the hair back from her eyes gently. He could feel her shaking, almost imperceptibly beneath his touch. "It's okay, Dom. I know what it's like to be afraid." He wanted to gather her up and hold her, be the protection she hadn't had then, but all the wishing wouldn't fix the wounds she carried. They'd spent so many years holding each other together and he knew what she needed was space. She didn't want him to see her cry.
----
He finished the work on the roof and cleaned up before heading back inside. The bedroom door was shut, so he went into the den and finished unpacking the last of the boxes. When there was nothing left to do--nothing to unpack, nothing to be put away or straighten up, he sank onto the couch in the den and watched as the sky faded from blue to pink to indigo, and the stars appeared one by one. Then he got up and walked into the bedroom.
Domino was curled up on the bed, back towards him. He sat down next to her, indecisive. "You hungry?" He asked finally. "I can go get something for you."
"Not really," came her muffled reply.
"Okay," he sighed. "I'll be around if you need anything, alright?" She nodded and he got up, closing the door quietly behind him.
----
Dark halls, dirty halls. Lights flickered dimly overhead, garbage littered the concrete floor. Doors punctuated the dull grey walls at even intervals, some of the small windows dark, some lit. Voices echoed, yelling, sobbing, whispering. He didn't look around, he didn't need to. Somehow, he knew where he was going, which door was the right one.
His hand stopped on the knob, and he stared down at it for a long moment, unsure if he wanted to see what was on the other side. Turn, click, the door swung inward.
"Who's there!?" A child's voice, scared, shaking, and yet so full of hate. He willed himself to look up, to open his eyes. He willed himself to look at her.
Short-cropped hair fell in the eyes of his partner, all of fourteen, perhaps, backed up against the concrete wall. The gun she trained on him, arms outstretched, shook visibly, barrel veering off target and back again wildly. "Get the fuck away from me! I mean it!"
He couldn't move. He stood there, eyes riveted to the sight of her, bare feet, bare legs, bruised skin, and half crazed-eyes fixed steadily on him, the wavering, merciless gun in her white-knuckled hands as she tried desperately to melt into the wall. He wanted to run, wanted to close his eyes, dash out that door and be sick, fall to his knees and let himself shake, let go of the tremor that he was holding in by force of will.
He willed himself to move, forcing his feet to go forward until he could rip the gun from her shaking hands and gather her up, ignoring her screams, folding her tight against his chest until the fight went out of her and he carried her back out that door, down the cold, empty halls and into the light.
----
"Nathan?"
He sat up, closing the book that'd come rest on his chest when he nodded off. Domino was standing in the hall doorway, hand resting against the frame, bleach-white against the dark wood.
"You coming to bed?"
"You were asleep. Didn't want to disturb you. Thought I'd just read here for awhile."
"Oh, by all means, disturb me."
"Another nightmare?"
"The stuff Moira gave me knocks me out, but I always feel like shit in the morning."
"Didn't answer my question."
She sighed and leaned against the doorway, crossing her arms. "Not sure. It was jumbled, chaotic. I woke up and you weren't there."
"I know," he sighed, "Would you like me to clarify it for you?"
"What, the--it happened again?"
"Yeah, it happened again." The images tumbled down the psilink with crystal clarity. "Do you maybe want to talk about that, or should I stay in the dark about this a little longer? Because I don't think I can deal with being a passive spectator to this anymore," he grated.
He watched as her expression darkened, mouth twisting down in a frown. She took several paces into the room, stopping a few feet in front of where he sat, arms crossed. "And what is it I'm supposed to say to you, exactly?" She snapped. "What is it that you need to hear? That at twelve, I had already killed and the blood on my hands then might as well have been my own? That at thirteen, I lived in fear of the dark, because that's when they always came? That other men turned their heads and let them rape me, so long as they didn't hurt me too badly? That I cursed my luck every time it saved my life, because instead of dying, instead of escaping, I was cursed to live?"
Her eyes were flat and emotionless. "That the scar on my shoulder that you just can't get over is from where I was branded like a fucking piece of livestock? And that afterwards, the sight of it made me so ill--that I did that to myself rather than stare at those numbers they'd burned into me. Is that the sort of confession you wanted?"
"Yes," he said quietly after a moment of silence. "That's exactly what I wanted from you, Dom. Because it means you have to admit it to yourself. We both know it never gets any better if you sit around denying it ever happened at all." He stood and walked over to her. "We both know we can't play these mind games with ourselves--or each other anymore. Deal with the past instead of running away from it."
"It was a secret shame, I think," she said, anger beginning to fade, replaced instead by exhaustion. "God forbid I own up to the fact that I'd been bought and sold and treated like meat. God forbid I admit I let them use me like a two-bit whore because I knew somehow, someday, I'd be stronger than them." She stared down at her feet. "What the men Wisdom and I--" She swallowed hard. "The brand was almost secondary," she said finally. "Just a physical manifestation of what was already in my head. Part of me forgot all the years in-between, Nathan. Do you know how that is? The situations overlapped and I got caught in the old mindset. Go numb. Fight when you have to. Never, ever think about it. Just react. I stopped living all over again. Ever since then, it's been cloudy. I can't find the clarity I had before."
She took a deep, shuttering breath and reached up to touch the hand he'd placed on her shoulder. "There's a mystery here," she said, tapping the side of her head with a finger. "One I can't figure out. But it's tied together somehow. The psionic damage I don't remember getting--I lied when I told you I couldn't recall a thing from that dream. Partially, anyway. There's a different dream, I had it when I was undercover. I remember a room, a dark haired woman, and a hell of a lot of pain."
"We'll work through this, Dom," he said, squeezing her hand. "We knew going into this things weren't going to be simple. They never are. But we'll make it. We'll get this stuff with the link cleared up and get you through everything you're trying to deal with.
"Yes. I'm sure you've started to sort this out, right? That these aren't just my nightmares? This is our fear, Nathan. Both of us together. My shattered memories and your desperate need to know."
"I'm sorry."
"You don't believe in sorry," she said sadly. "You can pretend to want to know; you can say you want to share even this horror with me, but it's not true. Not any more so than saying you'd want me to watch as Aliya died." Her smile was a faded one. "There are parts of me you'll never touch, Nathan. These parts that are dead or dying. It's time to let them go."
"Dom, don't say that."
"Don't you see?" She sighed, pulling away from him. "We can't drown in each other like this. We can't be all we might wish. There are parts of you and parts of me that litter this damned graveyard, and it's time we respected those graves instead of exhuming the remains." She sank heavily to the floor, as if her bones had collapsed.
"It's the quiet spaces that kill me," she said softly. "The empty moments when I'm caught unaware." The room felt wrapped in a soft blanket of sadness, an ache that filled the air itself.
The strength in his own limbs left him, and his knees hit the floor at the same instant she fell towards him, falling into him, it seemed, so that he could feel her break. Not as she had at Christmas, in a jagged tapestry of pain, but subtly, a cry muffled by the fabric of his shirt as she cried, unashamed and without pride, stripped naked by the years that would not let go. She was shaking and he was shaking, the thousand deaths that made their lives rose and fell, more quiet now, in an ocean that was them, and them alone.
----
Domino was asleep--buried in the pillows and bedding, looking vulnerable in a way that made something in him ache--though entirely with pain. She'd been that way for hours now, long after he'd woken and grown restless. She deserved the peace, he decided, and turned back to the window. Outside, sunlight was making a valiant effort to break through clouds that had rolled in during the night, turning the morning to a grey twilight.
Something had broken here, he could feel it like a weight that had slinked away sullenly, leaving bruises in its wake. There was a shift he could sense but couldn't quite grasp, a change... but not a solution. He took a deep breath and held it for a long moment, releasing it slowly. They'd been running. He realized that now with an understanding so keen it seemed impossible he could have missed it before. They'd made a mistake, tried to remove themselves from everything; isolated themselves in a stubborn, misguided attempt at normalcy that had been doomed to fail from the start. It wasn't as simple as walking away, leaving behind X-Force and a lifestyle that was all either of them had ever known. It wasn't a cancer that could be cut away and discarded. It was a warning.
They'd made it over the hill, so to speak, they'd survived this trial--though only time would tell how well the wounds would heal. There were darker mountains lurking somewhere ahead, veiled but still menacing. This wasn't over, and something inside him worried that it was only the beginning.
End