Unexpected Companions
by Persephone
Chapter 6/10

The first thing he saw was a wedding. A joyous occasion, though it made him uneasy to realize that depending on when Nate Grey hit the timeline, if he did, Scott's first wife was probably actually alive again. But they couldn't have known that. Even Illyana seemed oblivious.

Cable and Stryfe -- or Nathan and Christopher -- both attended the wedding, assaulting one another during neither the ceremony nor the reception. This is not to say the situation lacked tension. It was strongly suspected that neither had wanted to risk the other being there and himself not.

Stryfe was either nosier or less abashed about being so than Cable had been in his own timeline. He was less than delighted about finding out that Jean and Scott had apparently been deserted by their own psyches at the start of their honeymoon. Cable privately and a bit reluctantly found this understandable, and watched as a sort of uneasy competition escalated matters until his alternate wound up hovering over the unconscious pair, across from Stryfe, as the two men exchanged suspicious and rather defiant looks.

Apparently this was too much for the newlyweds when they did wake, for instead of trying to conceal the knowledge that they'd been the ones to raise Nathan, they practically tackled the two "boys" with tearful explanations. Their sons, naturally, were first confused and then astonished.

"Nate --"

"Nathan. Not Nate."

"Nate," Jean persisted, "we were -- we were the Daysprings, Slym and Redd, I know you said you didn't remember, but we were."

"I know."

All three of the others stopped and stared at him. "You what?"

"I know." Nathan fidgeted slightly. "I didn't know this was when, but I figured it out a little while back.... It clicked, when Warren mentioned your nicknames."

Stryfe glared briefly.

Scott looked at them both for a moment, very seriously. "We didn't want to leave. Either one of you. If we could have stayed...."

Nathan looked down and muttered quietly, "I know. I -- I didn't really think you did."

"What," Stryfe asked, very, very carefully, "are you all talking about?"

"You don't remember?"

"Apparently not."

"We got pulled forward in time to raise Nathan --" Jean began.

"That part I got."

"If you keep interrupting how are we supposed to tell you?" Scott inquired, not unsympathetically.

"Show me?"

They did. Stryfe flinched, shown that he'd been left behind or taken by Apocalypse before they could get him free -- it was too confused to tell -- but at the last, finally, he believed that they'd had no way to look for him without a terribly high likelihood of getting themselves and Nathan all killed. He was almost glad, though, that Rachel had vanished entirely into the timestream a week ago so that he couldn't ask her about it. Which made no sense, as for her it hadn't yet happened, so she could hardly have told him anything.

The end, where the Dayspring Unit had interfered with Apocalypse's last attempt at taking a host, left him almost dumbfounded. "That was you," he said softly. "I can't believe --" He stopped, as if realizing something only just then, and stared at Nathan. "That was you?"

"Apparently," Nathan replied, a bit cautiously. "What was?"

"You blocked him out of my mind."

"I did?" Nathan thought about it for a moment, trying to make the memories settle into place. "I did. You really appreciated it, obviously."

"I didn't remember," Stryfe said, very quietly.

He knew better than to try to apologize.

**********

Nate Grey, being the flamboyant sort he was, came to the attention of the X-Men and various associates, not to mention enemies, fairly quickly. Cable and Stryfe both, in a futile attempt to avoid confusion, insisted on calling him "kid." This annoyed Nate severely and didn't really seem to clarify anything.

Holocaust was located shortly thereafter. Actually, Holocaust did an excellent meteorite imitation shortly thereafter, having failed to end up on Avalon for the exceedingly natural reason that Avalon, in that timeline, was still Greymalkin, and Cable was less inclined than the Acolytes to fish belligerent frozen psychopaths out of space.

This was probably wise of Cable, given that fishing Holocaust out of the vacuum and thawing him had an alarming tendency to result in Avalon falling apart and crashing out of space, not necessarily in that order.

Upon regaining consciousness, Holocaust embarked on a long tirade which boiled down to "I am the son and heir of Apocalypse and you will all die for your impertinence in restraining me," only much louder.

Stryfe muttered that the post wasn't all it was cracked up to be, knocked the man out mid-rant (much to the relief of everyone's ears, as they had neglected to soundproof the room in which they had confined him at Nate's insistence), and proceeded to mystify those who could still hear by remarking thoughtfully that he'd wondered what Holocaust was up to and this explained a great deal. Perhaps it did to him, but no one else was much enlightened.

Madelyne, needless to say, was even more of a surprise. Life was complicated. Then again, that was nothing out of the ordinary.

**********

"Nathan?" Illyana's voice and hand on his shoulder brought him alert in the morning, or what passed for morning.

"Something the matter?"

"No, we just have this probably nonsensical habit of going somewhere as long as we find ourselves in the middle of nowhere."

"Couldn't you just stay in Limbo? As far as I remember there's some kind of structure there."

Illyana winced. "We could, but it's not an option I really want to explore. You got your snake?"

Stryfe groaned elaborately from off to the side. "Just what I always want to hear first thing in the morning. An inquiry as to whether one member of the party has his snake with him."

Nathan produced his snake and examined its mouth. The teeth were healing nicely. "What I can't quite figure out, Stryfe, is why you find it so alarming. It's just a snake. A little one, too."

Stryfe sighed. "You'll excuse me if I have my doubts about anything that thinks you are edible."

"I'd think you'd be pleased with it."

"I've had traveling companions eaten before."

Probably here, too. Nathan cringed internally and thumbed his snake again.

Stryfe gave him an odd look, then shrugged and stared at the horizon, such as it was. "For the record," he commented, "I meant before I started time traveling."

He couldn't be trying to be comforting. Could he? How annoying should that be, anyway? Nathan shook his head and gave up on answering when he abruptly felt ice-cold all over and a shiftline rippled in the air not twenty feet away, billows of snow just visible on the other side. Then it rushed them.

He didn't have time to fight it, or propose running, or do anything other than call a telepathic heads-up as a shift he suddenly knew didn't have snow at all bore down on them. He only hoped he'd be able to carve a path elsewhere -- powdery dry ice was not his idea of a pleasant environment in which to spend his last moments of life.

What he'd done or how, Nathan was never quite sure. He'd held onto the other two, somehow, but he hadn't been touching them. Still, he must have held to them, because after the eternity he spent wrestling with a choking silver curtain in more dimensions than he could reasonably count, and thrusting away from the deadly "snow," and other equally fatal universes, he found himself standing with both of them in what looked for all the world like a restaurant.

He would probably not have consciously appreciated it if the jukebox had been playing something other than "Time Won't Let Me," but since it was, he thought he would have. At any rate he distinctly and actively did not appreciate its choice.

When it finished and changed to "Do You Believe in Magic," the three all exchanged unnerved looks and, since they seemed to be in the way of people who wanted to dance, found a free table, and told the waiter who appeared literally out of nowhere that they needed a few minutes. The irony did not escape them. (Not that they were in a position to talk about appearing from nowhere, either, though they suspected, or at least hoped, that the waiter was a teleporter and had done this on purpose rather than being thrown into the situation as they had been. In the latter case, however, it would have been significantly less probable that he should arrive fully equipped with menus and aplomb.)

Cable spent some time searching anxiously for any effects the shiftline might have had other than their own arrival, but no one appeared to be dead or dismembered, though if anyone had vanished he wouldn't have been able to tell anyway. The most he found was an arcing line of powder on the floor near their point of arrival, a line that was vanishing before his eyes even as cold white vapor rose from it. Only carbon dioxide.

Only. It would have seemed much less innocuous had it surrounded them.

Someone giggled and squealed. "Cooooool! It's like a fog machine!" Could anyone really be that giddy?

He brushed past the dancers again and returned to the table, unexpectedly relieved to see that both the people he'd left there were still sitting at it. He still had his doubts about Stryfe, of course, but there... there was something to be said for not traveling all alone.

Stryfe, come to think of that, might have said it. Nathan winced internally at echoing a sentiment of Stryfe's, but consoled himself with the thought that this one seemed to have changed a lot. He found his clone staring intently at something that appeared to be halfway across the room and was visible only because fewer people moved around between the tables than on the dance floor.

"What are you looking at?"

"That blade." Stryfe was frowning slightly. Cable turned, followed his gaze as best he could, and caught sight of a short sword leaning against the leg of a table. A short sword with a very... interesting hilt. Familiar.

"Didn't you try to steal it once? Not planning to try again, are you?" he asked, with only a touch of malice, and slid into his seat. There was probably reason to stare.

Stryfe didn't appear to be offended. "One like it. I suppose I did get one like it, at that. What did you do with the real one?"

"The real what?" Illyana asked, sounding rather as if the conversation had taken a sudden leap over her head, and she was annoyed at it.

"Sword." Cable waved vaguely and unobtrusively in its general direction. "Hid it for a while, then gave it back, with a warning not to display it any time soon. What did you want it for?"

"To kill Apocalypse."

Oh. Nathan blinked. Stryfe had been going to use that on Apocalypse? "A plain sword?" He couldn't help sounding a little skeptical.

"That wasn't all I planned to use. It was supposed," Stryfe replied a bit grouchily, "to be symbolic." He studied his hands for a moment, then looked up and made a very decent recovery when the waiter popped into existence beside them again to ask if they were ready to order. "Ah... milk, please."

"Milk?"

"Milk." Stryfe was very firm about this, as the waiter seemed, for some reason, not to believe him.

"It's..." The waiter fidgeted slightly and looked unhappy. "The latest milk's started to turn, I'm afraid. You won't want it."

"That's fine. If you prefer, you can boil it first, if it's smelled off for more than a day or so."

Nathan tried not to smile at the waiter's obvious discomfiture. He couldn't even remember when his digestive tract hadn't been inured to slightly sour milk -- though he had to assume he'd been at least a year or two old, since it wasn't considered nearly as important in this century. Lactose intolerance had apparently been mostly bred out of humanity somehow by his time, no matter where you went on the globe. Funny. Somehow he couldn't quite see that as having been Apocalypse's doing, at least not on purpose. Too... trivial. They wound up with cinnamon-sprinkled boiled custard and falafel as well. Illyana, presumably because she found it amusing when the two old soldiers she was with had opted for sour milk, asked for vodka. No one challenged her.

He remembered suddenly that there had been something more than a little odd about Illyana after she regained her knowledge of Limbo, as seen in the scryer. She'd looked older -- not just from the burden, either. She'd appeared to age a little more rapidly at first, though not too obviously, as she went back and forth between Earth and Limbo. When she had started to look -- after a few months -- old enough to belong in X-Force, the process had slowed again.. or perhaps stopped entirely, leaving her indefinitely in that charmed and sometimes aggravating gray area where she could seem a childlike teenager at one moment and a world-weary but still lovely queen the next.

Sometimes her sapphire eyes had still laughed.

All right, enough of that. He was getting as sentimental as... as.... He didn't want to finish that sentence. "Symbolic of what?" he inquired, poking at his meal with a fork. "That a weapon made in his honor... in his image... could kill him?"

"Something like that, I suppose." Stryfe looked up at him, then glanced back to his own plate. "I may have gotten the effect I was after, at least... well, in part."

"But you didn't HAVE it."

"I used the fake." There was a short silence. "Well, what else was I supposed to do? He didn't know the difference. Unless he checked with someone after he teleported off with it stuck through his chest, he didn't know...." Stryfe trailed off and sighed. "I suppose," he said softly, "I achieved a fairly appropriate symbolism I wasn't looking for at all."

Illyana reached over and squeezed his hand under the table, and there was a longer silence before Cable said quietly, "The original blade was broken when I found it."

Stryfe gave him a long, thoughtful, and slightly surprised look before he turned away.

After enough surreptitious study of the rest of the room to determine that they were, overall, unlikely to notice someone gazing raptly into a small wire contraption and less likely to take advantage of the situation if they did, and the observation that neither Illyana nor Stryfe seemed inclined to quibble with his staying largely out of their conversation, Nathan was seriously thinking about watching a little more of their timeline when he felt a twinge at the edge of his mind. He spent an uneasy moment trying to identify it. Succeeding didn't make him feel much better.

He stood up, a little abruptly, and signaled the waiter. They'd already agreed on doing a little moving of assorted objects for the proprietor in lieu of trading anything they were carrying -- well, that and some extremely bizarre goblet Illyana offered the waiter as a tip. It was a lurid magenta and filled itself, for no readily apparent reason, with powdered graphite if you let it. Illyana had pointed out that she was sure the waiter had to have more use for the stuff than she had for a mountain of it in limbo. They hadn't actually seen the proprietor but had been assured that, in accordance with logic, that individual would just as soon have the materials for a new wall moved into position (not built; apparently it had to be just so) as be presented with more materials that would probably be useless in a restaurant. Unless they were carrying a wooden spoon of high quality, or a kitchen knife they'd be willing to part with? No, hadn't thought so. They'd spent an interesting half hour speculating in low tones -- louder would have been impolite -- on just how the restaurant kept itself supplied with food.

Stryfe frowned up at him. Illyana's expression didn't change, but she asked softly, "Something the matter?"

"We have to go." He didn't bother trying to sound calm, but he did keep his voice down to a level nobody away from the table was likely to catch. "There are shifts on their way."

Stryfe glanced towards the approaching waiter and switched to telepathy. #And?#

#There are several, converging. It's not... natural.# As if anything of this was natural! #They're all aimed at me.#

Illyana was included; he could feel her at the edge of Stryfe's mind, and she raised an eyebrow at that statement. So did Stryfe. The two looked strange, in concert that way. #I think my presence attracts them, at least when I'm in one place so long. I shouldn't have spent this much time here --#

#Don't start THAT again.# His clone's thought was dry and a little irritated, and Nathan found himself slightly miffed. He broke away as soon as Stryfe turned towards the waiter; he didn't like being in mental contact with the man.

Apparently he had communicated some sense of the urgency, though, he thought with wry amusement. Silver discs swallowed the rocks and deposited them again in neat order so rapidly that neither he nor Stryfe had time to do a thing. Powers could of course activate quick as thought, for all three of them, but Illyana had darted ahead through openings in the crowd that wouldn't have admitted either of the two men without shoving.

They left without teleporting, however; Nathan was hoping to draw the shifts away, as they would probably just continue on course if he simply vanished. Not that they seemed to have done too much to the restaurant so far.... He stopped to look over his shoulder as they stepped outside, and froze. He must have made some noise in his throat, because he sensed Stryfe and Illyana both stop and turn less than two steps beyond him.

The sign over the door read neatly, with a half-sun between the words, "Nur Deli."

"No." He shook his head suddenly, a little violently, and glanced at Stryfe, who had spoken at the same time. Ordinarily he would have been irritated, but didn't think of it just then.

"Can't be."

"Right." Nathan looked at the sign again. "It can't."

"Not every occurrence of the name --"

"We were leaving." He turned resolutely back around and started walking, then stopped to glance over his shoulder again. It still said the same thing.

Stryfe nodded in slightly too enthusiastic agreement and turned away from the building as well. "Yes. We were."

They kept going and didn't look back again. Cable half expected Illyana to giggle, after a look he caught from her at the start, but she didn't. She did, every so often, smile mysteriously as they walked. Stryfe glared at her on these occasions. Nathan very carefully did not.

**********

It was always annoying, Cable reflected as he pitched into space, when a shiftline coincided with the edge of a cliff.

Not that he fell far. He started to catch himself almost immediately, though he was still moving slightly when he hit the translucent yellow floor. It was not the base of the cliff, although that also, come to think of it, had appeared both yellow and vaguely translucent in his brief unobstructed glimpse of it. He bent his knees automatically at the impact, though it still jarred his ankles, and straightened slowly before turning slightly to his left to eye Stryfe, who was presumably the source of the obstruction, which was now sedately continuing the descent. Stryfe shrugged. Illyana was peering interestedly over the edge.

It would, Nathan told himself firmly after they had landed gently and without mishap on ground of some cloudy gold-tinted crystal, be... immature... to complain about the elevator service, or even point out that he could have caught himself perfectly well.

The entire trek from -- he suppressed an urge to shudder -- Nur Deli had been remarkable primarily for its uneventfulness. He had announced that he was going to be going pretty much in circles for a while and judge, from what he could feel when, whether he'd gotten the shiftlines sufficiently distracted from the little cluster of lives he'd accidentally almost lured them to.

He'd been a little brusque about it, almost defiant. He could recognize this in retrospect and admit that it had been because he had expected them either to shrug and part ways, or to assume he was trying to tell them what to do, and argue or ask who he thought he was. Or perhaps question his sanity; he wasn't sure he'd blame them for that.

It would hardly be fair, given his own doubts on the matter....

It had taken him by complete surprise when Illyana had looked up into his eyes and nodded solemnly with the comment, "I thought you would. I can get you out if things get too wild," and Stryfe had smiled faintly -- smirked, maybe -- and said nothing... and both had gone along as if there had been no question.

It was possible that there hadn't, for them, he supposed. Neither one had mentioned any particular goal to their travels except to be moving, unless he counted the mention of playing fairy godmother to assorted of his own alternates.

Nathan turned back for a moment and stared up the way they'd come, and admitted silently to himself that he hadn't been looking forward to the separation and found the realization very disturbing. For one thing, in a general sense, he couldn't afford to get too attached to anyone under the circumstances. It would ordinarily be only natural, though, and he might have been able to deal better with the fact itself if not for the deeply ruffling addition that one of them was... well... Stryfe.

He distracted himself by studying the faceted, rippling shimmer of other realities that flickered back and forth along a boundary that moved faintly as if with wind. There wasn't any. It stretched high above the place where uneven stone and straggling plants -- mostly dead -- stopped peeking through; he couldn't see the top, and wondered suddenly whether there was a top. Could someone theoretically make it over a shiftline? (Could the cow jump over the moon? Wait, somewhere in the shifts was probably one who'd managed it. Really, really deep atmosphere or... something....) What would be on the other side then? Did the question even have meaning? He'd never really thought of the possibility before, but surely the shiftlines, the fractures in reality -- he did shudder this time -- didn't radiate out from Earth through the rest of the universe?

Please, no. Not that. As if one planet weren't bad enough, let him not have destroyed the rest of the universe as well.

He nearly jumped out of his skin at a light touch to his upper arm, and broke off the reflexive counterattack when his conscious mind caught up abruptly with events and determined that there was no attack to counter in the first place.

Brought back to himself with something of a jerk, Nathan realized he was standing perilously close to the shift boundary, almost in the area around it where -- depending on the properties of the particular shiftline -- it was easily possible for a sort of instability in the facets of the fracture to cut someone in two (or more), that he had been craning his neck back to search for a top that probably didn't exist and at any rate would have been obscured by the clouds, and that he had been completely ignoring Stryfe and Illyana. That was probably not smart. The latter was still moving when he dragged his gaze far enough down to see her; he guessed she had touched his arm and then dodged hastily out of reach. He was glad he hadn't hit her, anyway.

On top of and resulting from his excursion into the edges of oblivion, his muscles were all knotted with tension and he was trembling, partly from that and partly with cold -- and he had a cramp in his neck. Ow.

On the bright side, he thought morosely as he stepped back into a hypothetically safer area, the clouds were a normal color, or something like one. At least, he thought they were, though the sky was definitely... off. The clouds seemed to range from blinding snowy white in the brightest part of the sky to a stormy charcoal near (appropriately enough) the shiftline. Come to think of it, it only made sense for atmosphere exchange to take place, though he'd been lucky enough so far that really toxic vapors had usually seemed to be confined. Usually.

Lucky.

He stared into the glowing amethyst sky regardless of his protesting neck muscles, and tried to let the brightest sun he'd seen in days burn away the tears.

It wasn't working. He decided it wasn't going to work in time to do him any good about the time he telepathically overheard Illyana speculating with some concern on whether she was going to have to smack him this time, so he shook his head and blinked a lot and dashed the rest of the tears away from his eyes as best he could with the back of his hand. Squinting probably wasn't going to do him much good, given that Stryfe probably knew exactly how well his eyes adjusted to bright light, but he kept up the pretense for about half a minute anyway and settled in to wait for snide comments.

Stryfe didn't say anything. Cable wasn't entirely sure whether Illyana had kicked the man in the ankle or not. Nor did he ask.

**********