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Chapter Thirty-Two: Return of the Diadem
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It probably wouldn't have gone so far if it hadn't been for the grass. The plan had been simple: get a few small flames going in a room on the ground floor, not too distant from Nat's own bedroom, and just sit back and wait for the sparks to fly. So to speak. The perfect circumstantial evidence, he hoped.
Instead, Pietro soon learned that he was going to get a lot more than he had bargained for.
He paused in the rosebushes for a few seconds after the scent of flame was evident on the breeze, and flicked the match carelessly to the ground as he prepared to leave. It laid there, smoldering faintly for a moment or two as his mind vaguely registered the enormity of his mistake, a chill racing through his body. Unfortunately, the dry blades of grass, colored a dull green but tinged on the edges with gold, took the opportunity to erupt in a blaze so bright it made his stunned eyes begin to water due to his close proximity. The fire that was supposed to have been contained within a few meters of the window was suddenly much larger than that, and rapidly spreading both toward and away from the mansion.
Suppressing an undignified squawk, Pietro reeled back into the bushes, his back striking firmly against the brick wall behind him. He glanced from side to side, searching for something to do before this got out of hand. His legs were tense, his muscles urging him to run and not look back. There was the sudden, abstract feeling that someone suspected his presence as a mental tendril swept out over the flames, but he felt reasonably secure in the fact that he remained undiscovered. He had been careful to approach when Wolverine's motorcycle was nowhere to be found, hopefully ensuring that his plans could go unimpeded by the Canadian's dauntingly powerful nose, but a telepath is even harder to hide from than a wolf-man.
A breeze picked up, moving first one way and then another, gusting gently toward the house, and the flames danced and licked and tumbled, as if in a perverse sort of race. Fear gripped his chest, but the plan lingered most on his mind. At least, that's what he told himself was pushing him onward, pushing him to warn Nat and the others before this was beyond control. His backpack fell to the ground and scattered his supplies as he dropped to his knees to search for a small rock in the flowerbed. Chortling comically, almost hysterically, over his small success, he grasped a small, round orb of stone that seemed appropriate, and hurled it toward Nat's bedroom window. It bounced pitifully off of the trellis, making little sound against the dull roar of the fire, and he cursed loudly, falling down again to search for another.
This time, the stone, larger than the first, struck the windowsill with a loud thud, making what he hoped was enough noise to arouse any inhabitants. It was supposed to warn Nat, as he was hoping, but he could deal with someone else if that was how it ended up. He skittered back into the bushes, trying to scoop up all of his fallen materials so none would be left behind to incriminate him, desperately wishing that the batteries in the fire alarms had been replaced more recently. The tendril of mental energy was leaping and jumping out along the area, originating from the center of the flames inside the house, sluggish and disorganized. All the while, the fire was gaining the upper hand, and he knew his time was running low.
The tendril tripped over his mind just then, and ascertained the cause of the trouble. It knew, now, what was happening here, and who was to blame. Even Pietro could notice its uncharacteristic laboring, though, and the notion that Xavier could have been in that flaming room, and was now in danger, made his heart momentarily stop. The old bald telepath might be the self-righteous leader of his enemies, but he was also Magneto's oldest friend. And that most certainly did not put Pietro in a good spot.
The external flames were now around waist-height, and rapidly closing in on the house. The flames inside weren't yet as strong, creating mostly thick smoke and heat, but they would be twice as intense when the two segments joined and fueled each other. An alarm had begun to blare loudly and incessantly, shaking Pietro's concentration further, the urge to flee growing stronger. He rose to his feet and sought a thin place in the wall of fire, now just thirty centimeters or so from the window, and within millimeters of his own toes.
Just as he caught sight of a thin area which seemed possible to run through, he noticed with heart-wrenching clarity the small bottle of odorless, flammable liquid at his feet, just waiting to be lit by the raging inferno approaching the mansion with frightening speed. Shouting the foulest English and Polish words he knew and a few that he was making up, Pietro reached down and grasped the bottle in mid-step, trying to run and pick it up at the same time. A great deal more of the liquid sloshed around the rosebushes, and the flames exploded powerfully behind him. His lungs were seared with the atrocious injustice he was dealing them, and coughing wrenched his body.
But he was already well outside the grounds, sooty but mostly unhurt. His heart pounded, and his blistered hands bled.
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The sound of the alarm was harsh and piercing, emitting a mechanical scream as if the building itself was in terrible pain. Nat, disoriented with an unexpected fear, jumped up from the floor and glanced around, looking for a possible source of the horrendous sound. It almost made her forget the thud she had heard at the window, but her shaken mind clung to the idea that it might have had some correlation, and she stumbled over to the window with her feet in a knot.
As soon as her head was stuck into the nighttime air, the scent of flame was laid thick in her nostrils. She dismissed it as her own smoky skin for a moment, until a horrifying heat struck her face, and she glanced down to see the glaring brightness of the growing orange blaze.
Terror gripped her from brain to soles, and she began to tremble. The only grounding she had was a sudden, horrible thought: not only was the fire extremely nearby and rapidly spreading, it was also erupted from within the professor's study, where he was more than likely located. She heard Jean's frightened mental cry, reaching out to see that everyone was alright, but it was drowned out by Xavier's own telepathic message. The man was disoriented, crying out, unable to form a clear picture of what had happened.
The only thing that came through was that it hadn't been an accident, and he was in trouble.
Nat, with a jolt, realized that she was the nearest person to the office and the trapped professor, and the only person that could enter the fire without being badly harmed. Rogue and Evan were in the danger room, far from the study, and the rest were in their rooms or equally removed from the fray. Ororo and Logan weren't even in the mansion, and the thought terrified her as a child is frightened when he realizes that he is home alone, unsupervised and unprotected, and something dangerous was occurring. She heard distant footsteps thudding over the alarms, but knew they'd never get there in time.
There was only one possibility, one that she couldn't allow her panicking mind to avoid. Not now, not with her loyalty so tested and questioned already. She would have to be the one to help him. It could only be her.
She swallowed hard, trying to keep her body from trembling too hard. She gripped her hands into fists, and felt flames of her own creeping slowly up her spine, hotter than the ones below and, potentially, far more destructive. It was the feeling she had been pushing down for a few weeks now, as she had told Kurt. Her body was flame now, not just her hands, and it made her ache with something other than physical pain. It was the ache of realization.
As the flames below grew stronger, Nat let the flames engulf her body, forming a virtual shield about her flesh, and she dragged herself onto the windowsill. Her feet dangled just a meter or so from the colossal throng of heat and light, barefoot and seemingly insignificant. Her clothes had begun to burn, but she ignored them and concentrated on the display of the fire.
It was an incredible sight to behold, to see her thin white legs looking powerful in their blazing encasement, and somehow pathetic in comparison to the bizarre, spitting beauty of the fire. She allowed herself a moment to relish in the heat, a startling and familiar feeling of outlandish comfort overcoming her.
Nat slid forward so the flames were directly below her, crackling with their bright orange laughter like a language of their own, and the only brace remaining was her tailbone on the sill. She grabbed the curtain for leverage, but let go quickly with a muttered curse when the fabric naturally lit up in flame, and half-heartedly let herself fall downward into the leviathan flame-beast below.
With a painful crack, she came to an abrupt halt on her feet, but stumbled slightly from the momentum of the fall and nearly landed on her face. Her mind strangely clear, she glanced around for her next course of action, and caught sight of the open window not far away. She waded through the flame to reach it, as it licked at her legs, confused at the lack of damage. It seemed oddly pleasant, now that she was within it, and not nearly as forbidding as it had previously seemed. The only fear that lingered now was not the fire in the room or even the fire within her own flesh, but the location and condition of the professor. His mental calls had fallen silent for a minute or two now, and worry weighed heavily on her wits.
Had she been a normal human, her eyelashes would have burned away, and her eyeballs would have been dried and useless. Had she been a normal human, her lungs would have throbbed from lack of oxygen and her skin would have blistered away from her flesh. Then again, had she been a normal human, she would never have gotten that far.
But Nat Fairbanks was not a normal human, and for once in her life she was distinctly glad. She hoisted herself onto the windowsill of the professor's study and flopped into the room, sprawling gracelessly across the flaming seat of the bay window. The room was smoky and hot, filled with living flames, and she cast her eyes from one side to another in a desperate attempt to locate her telepathic teacher. The desk had been swallowed by fire, and the bookshelves had littered their charges to the floor in flaming, fluttering piles with flaming pigeon wings.
Without Xavier's gentle coaxing, she had no way to know where he was, but Nat could see in the flame and smoke better than most others could. Still, the darkness and heaviness of the room was oppressive, making it quite difficult to make her way through without stumbling.
Then, she caught sight of him. It was brief through the wall of fire, so brief in fact that she thought for a moment that she had imagined it. Then, she saw it again. Xavier had fallen from his wheelchair, or perhaps gotten out on his own to avoid the smoke, but he hadn't gotten far even with his powerful upper body strength. He was slumped across the floor, his arms stretched out in front of him with the hands like talons, his legs tangled and useless behind him. His smooth white brow was furrowed and beaded with sweat. Streaks of soot had dirtied his clothes and skin, and the edges of his clothing were singed. Not far away, his wheelchair had been consumed by the fire.
Nat's heart leapt into her throat, threatening to choke her of life and consciousness, but she scuttled to his side. She tried to concentrate on retracting her flames back into her body so she could lift the professor or try to drag him away from the mess, but her heart was pounding too hard and her mind was racing too fast. The flames continued to spurt in through the window and from her own skin, and there was no way to touch the professor without burning him. Her own clothing had burned away, but her body glowed a bright, pearly, unnatural white inside the flame, essentially covering her nakedness in a peculiar luminescence. Any embarrassment she might normally have felt was far in the recesses of her mind at the moment, virtually impossible to reach.
So, she concentrated. The only thing she could do was think, to imagine herself without the flame, standing cool and naked in the room. True, it wasn't something she normally imagined, but it was the only way she could think of to coax her body back into a more traditional state. Well, maybe not "traditional"…but not on fire, either.
It didn't seem to be working. She was still flaming and brimming with heat, unable to come too close to the professor's disturbingly lax form out of fear that she might accidentally burn him. Outside in the hallway, she could hear her teammates coming to the aid of the professor, and relief flooded through her as much as if water had begun to flow from the flames.
The door flung open with immense, bone-rattling force, clattering against the jamb. Scott and Jean stood in the doorway, dressed as civilians but looking as heroic and savior-like as ever, even without their uniforms. There feet were at battle-stance, and Nat felt herself flood with confusion. Jean's jaw was set, her pretty face screwed into a pretzel of concentration and concern. Beside her, Scott looked as calm and collected as usual, but his eyes, behind the ruby-quartz lenses, flashed with unease and barely contained fury. His mentor was trapped somewhere in this room, and he didn't know for sure who was to blame. As his gaze raked the room, he caught sight of Nat, blazing ferociously, standing a mere meter from the unconscious and battered-looking Xavier.
A coldness dredged itself up from the bottom of Nat's awareness when she saw the expression on Scott's face change from mostly concern to mostly fury. He glared at her for a moment, as if he were unsure of what he should do, then turned his attention to Xavier. He came forward quickly and both he and Nat gasped in surprise as a vivid orange ball of flame erupted at his feet, sending him spiraling backward for a moment. He whirled back, and she staggered slightly as a burst of energy from Scott's immensely powerful eye sockets landed not far away, jolting her off of her feet and making the floorboards groan in protest.
Nat tried to clear her thoughts, painfully aware that she had been the unintentional architect of that fireball, and Jean frowned at her, angry and confused. Scott, on the other hand, changed tactics, and charged forward again, this time for Xavier. Evan, who had just arrived to see what was happening, caught a glimpse of Xavier's limp body and Nat's ragingly burning one, and took off down the hall to phone an ambulance.
One of Scott's booted feet swung toward Nat's midsection and barely missed, and she stumbled to her knees as Scott arrived at the professor's side, coughing and choking on the thick fumes. He stomped out his burning pant leg and stooped, grasping the older man beneath the armpits and hauling him into the corridor where the smoke was thinner. Nat stared at Jean, who was watching her intently, and Nat mentally shivered when she felt the gentle touch of Jean's mind at the edges of her own. Jean frowned slightly and turned to Scott, who was kneeling on the floor with the professor's unconscious head across his knees, and Nat heard the traces of conversation over the roaring of the fire that continued to burn.
"—can't seem to get in—new barriers that weren't there before—something very different—"
She strained to hear, trying to stand back as she feared that she would either burn them or she might face another onslaught of Scott's potentially dangerous optic bursts if she came too close. Rogue was not far away, and almost rushed in after Nat before Jean tossed her arm across the younger girl's chest to halt her. Kitty had arrived and was kneeling beside Scott, who was desperately trying to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to their unconscious teacher, but apparently without much luck.
In the corridor, a familiar pair of wide yellow eyes made Nat's heart nearly fracture in her chest.
Kurt stood at the far end of the hallway, apparently unable to come any closer, lest he break apart like so many shards of shattered glass. Their expressions met, and she tried to compose herself, feeling the raging flames that encircled her body calm into more of a dim glow. He watched her closely, as she did him, with a small crease in his indigo brow and eyes narrowed in confusion. His lips moved, forming a word or words that she couldn't make out.
Rogue stepped up beside him, and Nat heard her say, "You're little girlfriend mighta just killed the prof, Elfy."
Kurt scowled, shoved Rogue slightly backward, but the glance he gave to Nat wasn't encouraging either as he stalked toward her, bypassing Jean with an acrobatic bend of his lean body. But as he approached, his face flashed with anger.
Something twisted inside of Nat, a strong, wrenching something that ached in her head and in her flesh. Could he possibly believe it? Did he believe what the situation seemed to so eagerly prove? The world seemed to rotate faster than before, a churning accumulation of perplexity and misunderstood verities massing in the air. The ground was ready to swallow her up and spit her bones back on the charred soil of the earth, silent and unable to defend herself.
She heard her own voice, strangled and terrified, scream out, "No!" Her hands curled into claws.
And she turned on her heels, vaulting through the window and hurtling toward the woodland that edged the property, where she could run without being seen.
Nat was on the run again.