Pietro slept comfortably in the big chair, sprawled across it with his long legs dangling over the side. He never seemed to need much sleep and found that when he did, he couldn't stay asleep for long. It was far too boring, too slow.

However, Pietro had a very, very active mind. In times of stress or panic, his body tended to shut itself down whether he liked it or not in order of giving his mind a rest. That day he'd been so worried about Lance that he could focus on little else and found that the minute he sat down his eyes had closed.

Somewhere very distant, in the back of his mind, he heard the door gently open. Somebody was home. No, two people. Fred and Todd.

If Fred and Todd were home, then that meant-

Pietro's eyes flew open and he sprang to his feet, almost ashamed by his melodramatic reaction. Fred and Todd were in the doorway, Fred carrying the slumped body of a boy. All Pietro could see of the boy was a few strands of dark brown hair amongst Fred's bulky arms. Lance's hair.

"What happened?" he asked as Fred lay Lance down on Pietro's abandoned chair like an infant.

"Todd? Fred? What happened? What happened to Lance?"

The two boys did not seem to hear him. They were bent over Lance and whispering to each other.

"What's going on?" Pietro tapped Todd's shoulder persistently. With his super-speed, he had a tendency to be extremely impatient.

"Calm down, Speedy!" Todd shook Pietro's hand off. "Someone closed up the ground. He was kinda hysterical."

Pietro ran a hand through his sleep-ruffled hair. Lance's frequent visits to the abyss where Kitty fell had shown them how important it was to him. It seemed to help him somehow and now it was gone, Lance was beginning to break again.

Todd, who had been visibly shaken by the experience, muttered something about going to bed. Fred followed him up the stairs to his own bedroom and they both slept soundly for the rest of the night.

Positioning himself on the arm of the chair, Pietro waited for Lance to come round. What was only about two minutes felt like hours to him. What could he say to make it better this time? What could he do?

Lance opened his heavily-lidded eyes to a dimly lit room. He could see a blur of colours, ice-blue and silvery-white, and on blinking the colours morphed into a person.

"Piet?"

He looked tired, ill and unhappy. Dark shadows had formed beneath his lifeless eyes, dragging his whole face downwards.

A small, long-fingered hand brushed across his forehead.

"I'm going to call someone to take a look at you," Pietro's voice sounded muffled in his ears, like the boy was miles away rather than sitting in front of him.

"Try to rest."

The soft whisper dissolved into the air and Lance realised that the speed demon was gone.

He couldn't remember why he was there. What had happened this time- why did Pietro look so worried? Who was he calling? Lance examined himself. A doctor? But he wasn't ill, he felt fine.

Breath was drawn when he looked at his bloodied stubs of fingernails and the memories flooded back.

The field. The fight. His quake. Kitty falling. Kitty dead. Everybody screaming. Tears. Pietro. The chasm. Numbness. Visits. Ground filled. Screaming. Gone.

Gone.. How could anything ever be alright again? The pain of losing Her and knowing that it was his fault returned, more amplified than before. He felt it in every part of his body. It made his stomach twist and churn, his head pound and limbs shake with exhaustion.

Pietro had that the pain would go with time and he'd been stupid enough to believe him. What did Maximoff know? When was the last time he murdered the person he loved most in the world?

What if the dreadful ache never went away? Suppose he had to live his whole life tormented by guilt and pain, Her face forever in his mind?

It was punishment enough for killing.

He could hear Pietro speaking quietly on the phone in the kitchen. The white-haired mutant had been so patient with him, showing a gentle side that he would never have guessed Pietro had in a million years. Pietro had tried to help him, but he couldn't make the pain go away.

Nobody could.

If there was only a pill he could take to cure himself. A very, very strong painkiller that worked not only on the body, but the mind. Just one pill..

Lance's eyes strayed to the small table in front of him and a brown bottle immediately swam into focus.

He was very familiar with that bottle. Every time he had used his powers, the contents of the bottle had been his answer, his medicine. Those little white pills within never failed to make him feel better, so why shouldn't they now? Pietro, or Fred, or Todd had obviously left them on the table for that purpose. Why had he been so blind and not seen it before?

Once again, the pills were the answer. They could make the pain go so easily. He frowned as a dark thought entered the back of his mind. They could make the pain go permanently.

As the darkness in his mind took hold of him, he realised that the pills could not only get rid of the pain. They could get rid of him as well. How many would it take before everything went black and he left this miserable existence behind? Lance began to get excited by the morbid thought, thinking how in a short while everything could be over. He clutched up the bottle possessively, like a child with a treasured toy and crept quietly out of the room.

Nobody would find him where he was going. A weird thrill ran through his body and he laughed, realising that they might never find him!

'Where's Lance?' they'd simply wonder, searching for him day by day until they tired of Hide and Seek, unaware that the boy's body was very much there, rotting away to nothing in the basement.

Lance remembered the day he'd found it. The fuse had blown and Mystique had told them it was in the basement. Nobody fancied going down there, finding the rest of the house repulsive enough but it just wasn't an option to live in darkness for the rest of their lives. In the end, he, Pietro and Fred had drawn straws about who would go Down There to fix the fuse. Todd had been too scared to even gamble going down to the basement.

It was actually Pietro who drew the short straw, although his reluctance was plain for all to see. Not wanting to appear a coward, he had strutted out to the stairs with his chest puffed out, wielding his torch like a spear. He could not help but let his mask slip when his foot caught contact with the first step and turned to Lance with a pleading look. Lance understood, and not a word was said about the incident afterwards.

He changed the fuse as quickly as he could, ready to bolt up the stairs when a thin beam of light from the torch caught upon a crack on the wall. At first he thought it was pretty much unremarkable, but as he shone the torch more brightly into the crack he could see its depth. Naturally curious, Lance had put his hand into the crack and found that there was just enough space in there. Just enough space to curl up and hide from the world- or a secret hideout, as his inner-child liked to call it.

Just as he had that night, Lance climbed carefully into the hole in the wall. He unscrewed the pill bottle and left the cap lying on the floor outside the wall.

And then, he stared into the bottle at the perfect white pills illuminated by torch-light.

*

In contrast to Lance's peacefulness, Pietro was running the whole width of the house. He was going berserk.

He hadn't left him for long. Only long enough to make a phone call, really. So how was it that, when he returned, Lance was gone as was the bottle of pills on the table?

Lance's intentions were clear. Pietro had suspected that he, at some point, might try to do away with himself. He cursed himself for leaving the pills there like that, almost an invitation for the rock-tumbler to attempt suicide.

Why couldn't he find him? He knew that Lance was still in the house. With his enhanced senses, he would have heard him leave otherwise. But unless he had vanished into thin air, where was he?

Pietro knew, loath as he was to admit it, that there was one place he hadn't searched. It was the very place he'd been too afraid to go in the house, and still was. The only person that had ever been there was Lance.

And that made the basement a very good place to go if you didn't want anyone to find you, didn't it?

So, puffing himself up with false courage and knowing that he had to save his friend, Pietro made his way down the stingy stairs. He noticed that they creaked in a disheartening way, and twice he feared that he was going to fall through the floorboards.

"Scaredy-cat," he sang to himself, ashamed of the way his voice wavered and cracked.

The basement was certainly damp and dusty, but not as dark as he had expected. There was a light coming from somewhere, though he could not locate its source. He groped along the walls for a light switch, not at all enjoying the experience. Where was Lance? Was it too late? And where was the damn light switch when he needed it?

"Go away," came a muffled voice from somewhere in the room. Pietro jumped and shrieked at the sound that appeared to come out of nowhere.

"Shit," he whispered, trying to still his racing heart. "Lance, that you?"

"Lance?" He didn't care how stupid or scared he sounded anymore. He just wanted to find Lance, stop him and get out of the place.

It was then that he noticed the light was coming through the wall, through a crack. The white lid to the bottle lay discarded on the ground and Pietro realised in an instant where Lance was, unsure of how the bigger boy had managed to fit into such a tiny space.

"I said 'go away!'" Two eyes began to glow through the crack. They were the only features in his friend's face that Pietro could see.

Pietro kneeled down by the hole in the wall, staring into it.

"Lance?" he picked up the lid and rolled it in his fingers. "Have you taken any of those pills?"

The boy simply grunted in response.

"Lance, I need to know how many," Pietro pressed on. "You don't have to say.. Just stick out a hand or two.. Or your feet as well," he added, knowing that Lance could have consumed more than you were capable of counting on fingers and toes.

Slowly, a hand extended from the crack. He sucked in a breath and released it in relief when he saw that Lance was only holding up four fingers.

"Four. Well, can I have them back now?" he asked hopefully.

"No," Lance replied firmly. "No, you may not."

"Lance," Pietro glared, losing his temper as the torch was shone right into his face. "Give. Me. The. Pills."

"You're giving me a headache," Lance replied and Pietro saw his teeth gleaming in what could only be a bitterly unhappy grin. "I think I'll have to take some painkillers."

Pietro felt sick. He couldn't get to Lance. He could not stop this from happening. Lance could die right in from of him and there was nothing he could do!

"No!" the boy cried, his white hair glowing in the torch's beam. "No, Lance, don't, please, Lance-don't-please-don't-Lance-please-please-don't!"

Pietro panted after his outburst of speed and felt a new emotion rise up in him. Something ugly and huge, irrepressible.

"How can you be so fucking selfish?" he heard himself shouting through the wall. Every syllable became punctuated by rage and he could feel himself swelling with it, his voice rising to a scream.

"How can you even think about doing this? Don't you care about anything, don't you care about us? What do you think you're going to achieve by throwing your life away? Yeah, the pain will go and all that shit, Lance, but what the hell is gonna happen to us? You want us to have that kind of pain, do you? I thought you cared! You think that killing yourself is going to change anything? Kitty. Is. Dead, Lance, dead, and nothing is going to change that! Don't tell me you need to be with her, I don't take you for someone who believes that crap. You won't be with her, Lance, because there is nothing left for you when you're dead. You're just dead, that's it, dead and we'll all have to cope with it!"

Pietro's eye twitched and he drew breath, trying to calm himself down.

"If you leave us, Lance," he threatened, his voice breaking on the last syllable. First he screamed at him, now he was going to burst into tears in front of him. That wasn't what Lance needed.

"I'm sorry, Piet," Lance mumbled, his eyes stinging with hot tears as a result of Pietro's harsh words. "It's just too hard to live."

"You've got to try," replied Pietro, biting his lip hard. "You never walked away from a fight before!"

"Maybe I should've," Lance said hoarsely. "Then Kitty would still be-"

"Please, Lance, don't take those pills."

A cold, white hand grasped his and clenched it tightly. Lance could feel that it was clammy with the boy's fear.

"I can't live like this, Piet."

"We'll get you a counsellor. There's one at the hospital- I've seen her advertised. We'll get you some counselling and we'll all get through this. Alive."

Lance ran his other hand over his face. Why was Pietro begging, pleading with him to stop him from doing the one thing he really needed to do? He stroked the smaller hand gently and squeezed it.

"Counselling doesn't work. Nothing's going to work, Pietro, except this."

"So, you're really going to do it?" Pietro's voice sounded very small and his hand was trembling.

"Let me stay here. I want to be here with you when you do it." Lance felt him cling on to his hand more tightly. He could hear Pietro's small sobs and realised that he had never heard that sound before. It was good to know before he died that even a Maximoff cried.

Lance had previously emptied out the bottle on to the floor around him and took a handful of pills. He stared at them, knowing that they were his ticket out of this situation. The Way Out.

He held his hand up to his mouth. Now or never. It actually felt quite nice, having Pietro there holding his hand. These past few days, Pietro had been a rock to him. He frowned at himself for making a rock-pun, even in the face of death.

So.. He had the pills in his hand, just ready for consumption. He wanted to do this. He really did. He could do this, no problem.

Surely it wasn't right to have to psych yourself up for self-destruction?

With a sinking feeling, Lance realised that he couldn't do it. He was too afraid of death to look it in the face like that, however bad he felt about living. Pietro's rant had really stung him. He hadn't realised how much other people cared about him until then. The kind of people who stood by you even though you had killed someone. The kind of people who would get up at three in the morning to rescue you from a field in the middle of nowhere. The kind of people who would not let you be alone when you cried and the kind of people who would stay with you, even when you were going to kill yourself.

By then, Pietro was sure Lance had done it. It was so deathly quiet and his hand had grown limp. Now he was alone, Pietro howled his loss into the empty basement, salt tears running down his face. He couldn't believe he had lost him. There must have been something he could have done to save him. What was he going to tell the remaining Brothers?

Suddenly, he saw a dark shape emerge from the crack. Maddened by grief, he was sure that it was Lance's spirit escaping. A light shone from somewhere in the shape, a halo perhaps. Pietro stared at it wide-eyed through a curtain of tears.

The Something knelt down in front of Pietro and gathered him into its lap, stroking his hair. Calming noises came from its lips, one hand in his hair and the other gripping onto his. Pietro frowned against the Something's chest. Maybe he had been wrong- maybe something did happen when you died. Perhaps Lance had sent his spirit out to reassure him that everything was going to be alright.

Only spirits weren't supposed to be so solid, were they?

"Lance?" Pietro whispered, looking up at the face above him.

"I couldn't do it, Piet," came his reply.

If Pietro had needed any confirmation that this was indeed Lance Alvers in the flesh, he had it. He cried again, this time with relief as Lance held him and soothed him. He couldn't believe that somebody on the verge of suicide could turn round and be a source of comfort.

"Don't ever scare me like that again, Lance Alvers," Pietro told him in a mock stern voice sounding much like Magneto.

"I won't." Lance played with the boy's silky hair, letting each strand slip through his fingers.

"You'll stay?" Pietro asked, leaning so that he could look into Lance's eyes.

It took a few moments for Lance to reply, but when he did, he knew he meant it.

"Looks like you're stuck with me."

And under the glow of a dim beam of light, the boys spent the night in the basement being a source of comfort towards each other.

Because that, as Pietro once said, is what Brotherhood means.

-End-