Disclaimer: Marvel owns them, I don't.
Notes: This is set before and after the 'Underground' arc in Weapon X (#7-13). You don't really have to have read that to read this... it wasn't very good, and doesn't actually weigh much on the story. This is a companion piece to Tectonics, which can be found here: http://www.1407greymalkinlane.com/timesprite/tectonics.htm
Tidal
by Timesprite
The waiting never gets easier.
She's been waiting for a half hour now, ever since the display lit up announcing the arrival of his plane. Part of her wonders why he ran so far north. Did it seem, somehow, like going home? His family has ties to that snow-bound state, if not happy memories. But Nathan has never tolerated cold well, and in the end, she wonders if that, more than anything, is why he went.
And then she senses him coming. Not in the way she used to--their old bond is long destroyed--but in the reaction of the crowd around him, like ripples in a pond spreading outward until they crash into her. She closes the over-read book in her lap, and raises her face to meet his approach.
Gaunt is the word that immediately springs to mind. His tall frame seems like the skeleton of a hastily strung marionette, marching forward through the effort of unseen strings, the bag in his hand an afterthought. She banishes a multitude of metaphors of puppets and fate that careen suddenly through her mind and concentrates on pulling herself together, becoming the professional, the only part of her that still seems firmly in her control.
"I didn't pull you away from anything, did I?" There had been no word of him, not for months. Once, that would not have been surprising, but she knows now that Apocalypse is dead, and cannot imagine what could have so thoroughly replaced the dead external's hold on him. That she cannot guess makes her wonder just how well she ever truly knew him.
"Nothing important." His voice is like gravel, lacking its usual lyric undercurrent, but less groggy than it had been over the phone. He reaches out a hand, benign enough, and she lets him help her to her feet. He pulls away quickly, as if such a simple gesture is now too much for him. She tries not to dwell on it as she gathers up her things.
Later on, she sips coffee and talks while he listens. The speech is a matter of memory for her. She has gone over the facts a thousand times, sees them in her sleep. There is a job to do, and work is the only thing that has held her together for months now. Without it, the weight of the life she no longer commands would rush in upon her, and she would be caught, helpless, in its undertow. It's ironic--he is, undoubtedly, the one person in the world who could truly understand the place she has found herself in--the one person she will not open herself to. The last few years of her life have been so completely out of her control it seems almost illusory, but she knows from her scars that she has not imagined dying, and from the empty ache in her chest that being exposed as nothing more than an unwanted experiment was no delusion. The abuse and betrayal are all very real things, and she is tired of being used.
Nathan is distant, and she finds him difficult to read. He looks tired and old and about ready to surrender to whatever comes next to claim him. He seems both vulnerable and insecure, and neither sits well with her. The part of her that still remembers how to feel wants to protect him. That job has not been hers for years, but even distance, she is discovering, cannot completely subvert that instinct. Still, too much of her is numb now to ever will her into action.
----
He has made no arrangements for the night, and so she invites him back to her apartment despite the protests being made by the more logical parts of her brain. She has self-control, though the alcohol they share between them does its best to blur it. She will not let things get out of hand. He's been looking into his glass as if it might hold the secrets of the universe, though she's not entirely sure he's not just doing it to avoid looking at her. She slouches in her chair and swirls her drink in its glass.
"You look like shit, you know. S'pose heading a cult takes a lot out of a man, hm?" She's angry with him suddenly, and she's not sure why. She called him. She asked him to come here. He hadn't come looking for her, and there was no reason to believe he ever would. Perhaps it's simply the fact that he had the gall to show up looking as damaged as she currently feels. It's petty of her, but she can't help it. Somehow, it doesn't seem fair.
"Don't like your haircut," he replies, looking up at her finally.
She fights down a very juvenile urge to toss her drink in his face. As far as she's concerned, he's got no room to comment. Especially not given his own appearance. There's nothing wrong with the haircut. It's a ritual of sorts, anyhow. Every time she starts over, the hair gets cut. Gryzanova's impromptu brain surgery had only reinforced the pattern, and she's found herself growing more and more accustomed to the abbreviated style. She runs a hand through it. "Well, it's not for you to like, is it? The buzz cut looks stupid on you, by the way." Only she can't hold onto the anger. Not really. Poking holes in his armor has become unexpectedly easy, and there's no satisfaction to be had in that.
"Thanks."
He's watching her now, and she almost wishes she could read his thoughts. He's not reading hers, of that she's almost certain, though she's shielding to the best of her ability anyway. He's lacking a certain confidence that his telepathy has always given him. Sitting on the opposite end of her kitchen table, Nathan Summers looks as lost in the world as she is.
"You were working for Xavier."
She waves a hand in his direction. It figures he'd have checked up on her. She looks at him with half-closed eyes, blurring reality for the time being. "For awhile. He was using me." Not that she'd minded so much. Not in the beginning, anyway. The silence had started to get to her after Gloria's death, but if it came down to a choice between silence and the babbling, scrambled alien memories that started up every time she closed her eyes, she'd take silence. It had been okay, until it became clear she wasn't gaining anything from the association.
"And you didn't use him back?"
"Of course I did." She'd bled his databanks dry. Decades of carefully gathered information the old man had never had the balls to act upon had been at her fingertips. Information she could use for missions like the one they were, theoretically, mapping out now. She knows he would have done the same--he's not accusing her. She reaches into the pocket of her coat and pulls out her cigarettes, remembering too late that he hates it, and not really caring, in the end. His frown raises her ire again. "Hey, my apartment. My rules, alright?"
"Always looking for new ways to die, aren't you?" It's a statement, not a question, and he's looking at her as if he can see clean through to her soul.
"Oh, fuck off. I didn't call you so you could read me the riot act." She knows she's using her anger like a shield, trying to keep him from seeing past her surface. All she can see in him is weariness, and she wonders why the hell he bothered coming. His mood is inexplicable, so unlike him. There was a time when she thought she knew him well. She's seen him at his worst, if not his best, and she knows all the different ways he tries to keep control. She's seen him when that control is failing, and this is like nothing she's ever encountered from him.
"I know." His surface is calm, but deep down there's turbulence brewing. The beginnings of a tidal wave she hopes she can escape in time. She watches him refill his glass. "How have you been?"
It's a simple question, and one she can't answer truthfully. She holds back a sigh, and lies to his face. "Fine, Nate." She's not. She hasn't been fine or good or well in years, and he knows it. Neither has he, from what she's heard, but then, she tries not to think about all she's heard.
"You don't look fine."
Of course she doesn't, and she wants to tell him that dying and discovering one's very existence is invalid will do that to a person, but it won't have the desired effect. Not with him. He might offer his sympathy, but that's the last thing she wants. She doesn't want someone to understand. She wants it all to go the hell away, but that path ends, inevitably, in a bullet. "Neither do you." At least she doesn't look as if someone dug her up that morning. Wherever he's been, it hasn't been good for him.
He nods a little. "Spending six months looking for life's answers at the bottom of a bottle will do that to a man."
His honesty slaps her in the face and she pulls away, stung. This is exactly what she didn't want. It's exactly what she hoped to avoid. And it's not that her last few months have been much better, it's that this is Nathan, and she always believed him above such things. Drinking to forget has always been her form of self-flagellation. Working too hard was his, and she wonders when they switched rolls. Both are ways of drowning, she supposes. He's found refuge in a drunken haze while she's choked on her anger.
"I'm not doing this." She has heard things about him, things that have left her with an icy dread in the pit of her stomach. She doesn't want any more confirmation. His storm-blue eyes are broken and she would do anything to stop them from piercing through her heart. She's not as numb as she wants to be. She grinds her cigarette out in the ashtray and stands. "The couch folds out."
The bedroom door closes behind her, and she sighs. She knew, coming into this, that it would be difficult. As much as she might pretend otherwise, there is something left unfinished between them, and they have too much history simply to ignore. She still cares for him more than is wise, though the part of her that loved him has long since gone into hiding, suffocated under the weight of all those messy emotions. He's broken. He has been since the day they met, and she realized it shortly after. It didn't scare her off, though. She couldn't know the depths of the damage--he kept so much to himself in the early years--but it didn't really matter. She became very skilled in keeping him together when his own abilities failed him. It made her feel important. It made her feel needed. When the world was coming down around his ears, she was the one Nathan always called. She's never blamed him for that. She simply wishes she'd spent more time thinking about herself.
He's always cared. He probably even loved her, in a way. But on the most basic level, he simply needed her more than he could ever help her in return. It's possible, she realizes, that he simply never knew how. She can't say he didn't try his best.
She misses him sometimes, on the nights when a multitude of private demons swirl like a whirlpool through her head, driving sleep away. On nights like those, she sometimes yearns for the mere presence of him. It seems like years since letting herself be touched has felt safe.
----
The sun rises after a night devoid of sleep, and she drags herself from between rumpled sheets, dressing carelessly before heading into the kitchen. She makes coffee on automatic pilot, watching him sleep from the safety of her kitchen. This isn't how she wants it to be. She hates the gulf she can feel between them, but she hasn't got the energy to mend it, and it would involve leaving herself far more exposed than she's comfortable with.
She's afraid of him as much as she's afraid for him. She's read reports--little more than rumors in the end--and has been able to fill in some of the details. He's a man on a collision course, but with what, she doesn't know. Instinct is screaming at her to get the hell out of his way while there's still time.
She must be insane or suicidal, because she walks into what amounts to her living room instead. "There's coffee."
Her posture must be giving her away. He pushes himself upright stiffly--she gets the feeling he hasn't slept either--and fixes her with an unreadable look. "Do you want me to go?"
It's an out. One she really should take. But the weight of the mission she hopes to accomplish presses down on her, and she can't deny she needs him. She never would have called, otherwise. And there's no reason to fear him. He's never given her any reason to believe him capable of causing her harm. If anything, she's the one who's proven herself to be the bigger danger. The memories of trying to kill him still burn. "No, I--" She pauses, drops a little of her guard. She owes him something of an apology, she figures, for the way their last few meetings have gone. "No hard feelings, right?"
"We... didn't part on the best terms." Hesitant. He's not sure if he should bring up the topic, and she can't pretend to be surprised.
"I had to go," she replies, and looks away. The world had hurt her so badly, and she'd lashed out like a wounded animal, heedless of the hand that would have offered her aid. She'd turned her back on him, closed him out, and she's regretted the pain she must have caused him. "And I shouldn't have yelled at you." She simply didn't--and still doesn't--know an other way to be. There are things she will never be able to tell him, and the hollow place in her chest expands, ever so slightly. Things could have been different, but they aren't. She doesn't know how to live with that. "I tried to kill you."
He shakes his head. "It wasn't you."
" No," It wasn't. It was a monster with oily thoughts, oozing through her consciousness, teasing every little secret from the darkest places in her soul. It had taken her apart bit by bit, violating her on a level she hadn't thought possible. "But it knew me. The things it said..." The things it said still haunt her at night.
"Weren't the truth."
She knows he wants to believe that. Has to. He doesn't want to believe that she ever felt abandoned. That she felt unappreciated and he was the reason she eventually fled. She sighs. "No, they were. That's just it. That thing told the truth." It told the truths she couldn't, and she can't help that now.
----
She gives him her crusade, in the end. She was never cut out for this type of work, and in the light of his experience, she is little more than a shadow. It's a relief to be rid of the weight, even if she is uncertain of his ability to carry the load. She has her hands full now just keeping herself together. Each new situation slams into her like a hammer blow, and she can't fine the guts to explain why the sort of crude experimentation they're faced with now is hitting her so hard. But the nightmares of a cold steel table she never quite recalls in her waking hours get worse as time goes on, and she clamps down harder on her emotions. Better to feel nothing at all.
If Nathan even remembers her request for information regarding 'Project Armageddon,' he hasn't mentioned it, and it's just as well. She's not willing, or able, to start comparing emotional scars with him. He'll win, and she'll be left feeling like a fool. Though she might have him beat on the resurrection angle.
It's a strange thought, one that pushes her near the edge of hysterical laughter as she ignores the bleeding hole in her shoulder, focusing someplace beyond Nathan and his careful ministrations. His hands are gentle, if impersonal. He's trying not to hurt her, all the while his eyes are searching hers for something he will not find.
She cannot say it. Her voice has been locked up tight in her chest, a prisoner in her own body. She cannot tell him how, in an instant, she'd felt the bullet slip through her like water. Felt it enter and exit, and been, in that moment, somewhere else. A Paris street and another bullet--unseen and invisible--cutting through her just as cleanly. She cannot explain the sensation of her legs, paralyzed and useless, folding beneath her an instant before she died. She can't explain any of that, and so she says nothing at all, her mind trapped in the metal and concrete confines of a French morgue.
----
It doesn't end like a good op ought to. It feels, instead, like a collapsing house of cards, and she takes her time packing, hoping the others will dissipate while she dawdles. She's tired, and all she wants anymore is to find someplace safe and dark to crawl into. Someplace where she will either learn to cope, or succumb.
"Dom..."
She should have figured he'd be waiting for her. She's done too much avoidance, and he hasn't changed so much that he's going to let it slide. The problem is, this mission has served as one big demonstration of all the reasons she should worry for him, and the knowledge feels like a responsibility.
She shakes her head. She can't do this. She wants to help him, but she can't. To hold him together, she'll have to let go of herself, and there's no one here to save her in return. Not now. And as much as the look in his eyes and the sound of his voice cuts through her like a knife, she can't let go of the only thing she has left. Not even for him.
He says her name again, because he can't let her go. Maybe he believes he can correct for a past mistake--he's let her go when he thinks he shouldn't have, so he won't do it again. He takes her bag from her, and she doesn't resist. She's tired. She's so fucking tired, and she just can't play this game. "I won't do this."
"Why the hell not?"
His voice reverberates through the empty space and she flinches uncontrollably. "There's no point, Nathan. There's just no point."
"You don't have anywhere to go," he says, "and neither do I."
"And that means what, exactly? It means nothing, Nathan. It's been a long time. Let it go."
She needs to get away. Her first instinct has always been to run, and it is screaming at her now. She can't stand here and look at him, because the temptation is just so strong. She can't help the fact that she misses him and wants to be there for him, no matter what disaster is looming on the horizon. A part of her is praying he won't ask.
"I can't. I need you."
"You always have." It's almost a release. The cat is out of the bag. The game is over, and she can come clean, just as he has. "I needed you, Nate, and you didn't have time. I'm tired of staying because you ask me to." There's no reason to hold on any longer. And she's tired of feeling guilty. "This isn't going to work."
And he knows it.
Even as his hand closes around her wrist, he knows it. There's something in his eyes then, something akin to revelation as he looks at her and she stares back, tired and resigned. This won't be goodbye, but she can't be his bandage anymore. She has too many wounds of her own that need mending now. He releases her, backs away, looking at her as if he has done her harm. Nearly two decades of reality washes across his face, and all she can do is sigh. He knows, and it's out of her hands. "Come and find me when you figure out what you want."
-end-
Notes: This is set before and after the 'Underground' arc in Weapon X (#7-13). You don't really have to have read that to read this... it wasn't very good, and doesn't actually weigh much on the story. This is a companion piece to Tectonics, which can be found here: http://www.1407greymalkinlane.com/timesprite/tectonics.htm
Tidal
by Timesprite
The waiting never gets easier.
She's been waiting for a half hour now, ever since the display lit up announcing the arrival of his plane. Part of her wonders why he ran so far north. Did it seem, somehow, like going home? His family has ties to that snow-bound state, if not happy memories. But Nathan has never tolerated cold well, and in the end, she wonders if that, more than anything, is why he went.
And then she senses him coming. Not in the way she used to--their old bond is long destroyed--but in the reaction of the crowd around him, like ripples in a pond spreading outward until they crash into her. She closes the over-read book in her lap, and raises her face to meet his approach.
Gaunt is the word that immediately springs to mind. His tall frame seems like the skeleton of a hastily strung marionette, marching forward through the effort of unseen strings, the bag in his hand an afterthought. She banishes a multitude of metaphors of puppets and fate that careen suddenly through her mind and concentrates on pulling herself together, becoming the professional, the only part of her that still seems firmly in her control.
"I didn't pull you away from anything, did I?" There had been no word of him, not for months. Once, that would not have been surprising, but she knows now that Apocalypse is dead, and cannot imagine what could have so thoroughly replaced the dead external's hold on him. That she cannot guess makes her wonder just how well she ever truly knew him.
"Nothing important." His voice is like gravel, lacking its usual lyric undercurrent, but less groggy than it had been over the phone. He reaches out a hand, benign enough, and she lets him help her to her feet. He pulls away quickly, as if such a simple gesture is now too much for him. She tries not to dwell on it as she gathers up her things.
Later on, she sips coffee and talks while he listens. The speech is a matter of memory for her. She has gone over the facts a thousand times, sees them in her sleep. There is a job to do, and work is the only thing that has held her together for months now. Without it, the weight of the life she no longer commands would rush in upon her, and she would be caught, helpless, in its undertow. It's ironic--he is, undoubtedly, the one person in the world who could truly understand the place she has found herself in--the one person she will not open herself to. The last few years of her life have been so completely out of her control it seems almost illusory, but she knows from her scars that she has not imagined dying, and from the empty ache in her chest that being exposed as nothing more than an unwanted experiment was no delusion. The abuse and betrayal are all very real things, and she is tired of being used.
Nathan is distant, and she finds him difficult to read. He looks tired and old and about ready to surrender to whatever comes next to claim him. He seems both vulnerable and insecure, and neither sits well with her. The part of her that still remembers how to feel wants to protect him. That job has not been hers for years, but even distance, she is discovering, cannot completely subvert that instinct. Still, too much of her is numb now to ever will her into action.
----
He has made no arrangements for the night, and so she invites him back to her apartment despite the protests being made by the more logical parts of her brain. She has self-control, though the alcohol they share between them does its best to blur it. She will not let things get out of hand. He's been looking into his glass as if it might hold the secrets of the universe, though she's not entirely sure he's not just doing it to avoid looking at her. She slouches in her chair and swirls her drink in its glass.
"You look like shit, you know. S'pose heading a cult takes a lot out of a man, hm?" She's angry with him suddenly, and she's not sure why. She called him. She asked him to come here. He hadn't come looking for her, and there was no reason to believe he ever would. Perhaps it's simply the fact that he had the gall to show up looking as damaged as she currently feels. It's petty of her, but she can't help it. Somehow, it doesn't seem fair.
"Don't like your haircut," he replies, looking up at her finally.
She fights down a very juvenile urge to toss her drink in his face. As far as she's concerned, he's got no room to comment. Especially not given his own appearance. There's nothing wrong with the haircut. It's a ritual of sorts, anyhow. Every time she starts over, the hair gets cut. Gryzanova's impromptu brain surgery had only reinforced the pattern, and she's found herself growing more and more accustomed to the abbreviated style. She runs a hand through it. "Well, it's not for you to like, is it? The buzz cut looks stupid on you, by the way." Only she can't hold onto the anger. Not really. Poking holes in his armor has become unexpectedly easy, and there's no satisfaction to be had in that.
"Thanks."
He's watching her now, and she almost wishes she could read his thoughts. He's not reading hers, of that she's almost certain, though she's shielding to the best of her ability anyway. He's lacking a certain confidence that his telepathy has always given him. Sitting on the opposite end of her kitchen table, Nathan Summers looks as lost in the world as she is.
"You were working for Xavier."
She waves a hand in his direction. It figures he'd have checked up on her. She looks at him with half-closed eyes, blurring reality for the time being. "For awhile. He was using me." Not that she'd minded so much. Not in the beginning, anyway. The silence had started to get to her after Gloria's death, but if it came down to a choice between silence and the babbling, scrambled alien memories that started up every time she closed her eyes, she'd take silence. It had been okay, until it became clear she wasn't gaining anything from the association.
"And you didn't use him back?"
"Of course I did." She'd bled his databanks dry. Decades of carefully gathered information the old man had never had the balls to act upon had been at her fingertips. Information she could use for missions like the one they were, theoretically, mapping out now. She knows he would have done the same--he's not accusing her. She reaches into the pocket of her coat and pulls out her cigarettes, remembering too late that he hates it, and not really caring, in the end. His frown raises her ire again. "Hey, my apartment. My rules, alright?"
"Always looking for new ways to die, aren't you?" It's a statement, not a question, and he's looking at her as if he can see clean through to her soul.
"Oh, fuck off. I didn't call you so you could read me the riot act." She knows she's using her anger like a shield, trying to keep him from seeing past her surface. All she can see in him is weariness, and she wonders why the hell he bothered coming. His mood is inexplicable, so unlike him. There was a time when she thought she knew him well. She's seen him at his worst, if not his best, and she knows all the different ways he tries to keep control. She's seen him when that control is failing, and this is like nothing she's ever encountered from him.
"I know." His surface is calm, but deep down there's turbulence brewing. The beginnings of a tidal wave she hopes she can escape in time. She watches him refill his glass. "How have you been?"
It's a simple question, and one she can't answer truthfully. She holds back a sigh, and lies to his face. "Fine, Nate." She's not. She hasn't been fine or good or well in years, and he knows it. Neither has he, from what she's heard, but then, she tries not to think about all she's heard.
"You don't look fine."
Of course she doesn't, and she wants to tell him that dying and discovering one's very existence is invalid will do that to a person, but it won't have the desired effect. Not with him. He might offer his sympathy, but that's the last thing she wants. She doesn't want someone to understand. She wants it all to go the hell away, but that path ends, inevitably, in a bullet. "Neither do you." At least she doesn't look as if someone dug her up that morning. Wherever he's been, it hasn't been good for him.
He nods a little. "Spending six months looking for life's answers at the bottom of a bottle will do that to a man."
His honesty slaps her in the face and she pulls away, stung. This is exactly what she didn't want. It's exactly what she hoped to avoid. And it's not that her last few months have been much better, it's that this is Nathan, and she always believed him above such things. Drinking to forget has always been her form of self-flagellation. Working too hard was his, and she wonders when they switched rolls. Both are ways of drowning, she supposes. He's found refuge in a drunken haze while she's choked on her anger.
"I'm not doing this." She has heard things about him, things that have left her with an icy dread in the pit of her stomach. She doesn't want any more confirmation. His storm-blue eyes are broken and she would do anything to stop them from piercing through her heart. She's not as numb as she wants to be. She grinds her cigarette out in the ashtray and stands. "The couch folds out."
The bedroom door closes behind her, and she sighs. She knew, coming into this, that it would be difficult. As much as she might pretend otherwise, there is something left unfinished between them, and they have too much history simply to ignore. She still cares for him more than is wise, though the part of her that loved him has long since gone into hiding, suffocated under the weight of all those messy emotions. He's broken. He has been since the day they met, and she realized it shortly after. It didn't scare her off, though. She couldn't know the depths of the damage--he kept so much to himself in the early years--but it didn't really matter. She became very skilled in keeping him together when his own abilities failed him. It made her feel important. It made her feel needed. When the world was coming down around his ears, she was the one Nathan always called. She's never blamed him for that. She simply wishes she'd spent more time thinking about herself.
He's always cared. He probably even loved her, in a way. But on the most basic level, he simply needed her more than he could ever help her in return. It's possible, she realizes, that he simply never knew how. She can't say he didn't try his best.
She misses him sometimes, on the nights when a multitude of private demons swirl like a whirlpool through her head, driving sleep away. On nights like those, she sometimes yearns for the mere presence of him. It seems like years since letting herself be touched has felt safe.
----
The sun rises after a night devoid of sleep, and she drags herself from between rumpled sheets, dressing carelessly before heading into the kitchen. She makes coffee on automatic pilot, watching him sleep from the safety of her kitchen. This isn't how she wants it to be. She hates the gulf she can feel between them, but she hasn't got the energy to mend it, and it would involve leaving herself far more exposed than she's comfortable with.
She's afraid of him as much as she's afraid for him. She's read reports--little more than rumors in the end--and has been able to fill in some of the details. He's a man on a collision course, but with what, she doesn't know. Instinct is screaming at her to get the hell out of his way while there's still time.
She must be insane or suicidal, because she walks into what amounts to her living room instead. "There's coffee."
Her posture must be giving her away. He pushes himself upright stiffly--she gets the feeling he hasn't slept either--and fixes her with an unreadable look. "Do you want me to go?"
It's an out. One she really should take. But the weight of the mission she hopes to accomplish presses down on her, and she can't deny she needs him. She never would have called, otherwise. And there's no reason to fear him. He's never given her any reason to believe him capable of causing her harm. If anything, she's the one who's proven herself to be the bigger danger. The memories of trying to kill him still burn. "No, I--" She pauses, drops a little of her guard. She owes him something of an apology, she figures, for the way their last few meetings have gone. "No hard feelings, right?"
"We... didn't part on the best terms." Hesitant. He's not sure if he should bring up the topic, and she can't pretend to be surprised.
"I had to go," she replies, and looks away. The world had hurt her so badly, and she'd lashed out like a wounded animal, heedless of the hand that would have offered her aid. She'd turned her back on him, closed him out, and she's regretted the pain she must have caused him. "And I shouldn't have yelled at you." She simply didn't--and still doesn't--know an other way to be. There are things she will never be able to tell him, and the hollow place in her chest expands, ever so slightly. Things could have been different, but they aren't. She doesn't know how to live with that. "I tried to kill you."
He shakes his head. "It wasn't you."
" No," It wasn't. It was a monster with oily thoughts, oozing through her consciousness, teasing every little secret from the darkest places in her soul. It had taken her apart bit by bit, violating her on a level she hadn't thought possible. "But it knew me. The things it said..." The things it said still haunt her at night.
"Weren't the truth."
She knows he wants to believe that. Has to. He doesn't want to believe that she ever felt abandoned. That she felt unappreciated and he was the reason she eventually fled. She sighs. "No, they were. That's just it. That thing told the truth." It told the truths she couldn't, and she can't help that now.
----
She gives him her crusade, in the end. She was never cut out for this type of work, and in the light of his experience, she is little more than a shadow. It's a relief to be rid of the weight, even if she is uncertain of his ability to carry the load. She has her hands full now just keeping herself together. Each new situation slams into her like a hammer blow, and she can't fine the guts to explain why the sort of crude experimentation they're faced with now is hitting her so hard. But the nightmares of a cold steel table she never quite recalls in her waking hours get worse as time goes on, and she clamps down harder on her emotions. Better to feel nothing at all.
If Nathan even remembers her request for information regarding 'Project Armageddon,' he hasn't mentioned it, and it's just as well. She's not willing, or able, to start comparing emotional scars with him. He'll win, and she'll be left feeling like a fool. Though she might have him beat on the resurrection angle.
It's a strange thought, one that pushes her near the edge of hysterical laughter as she ignores the bleeding hole in her shoulder, focusing someplace beyond Nathan and his careful ministrations. His hands are gentle, if impersonal. He's trying not to hurt her, all the while his eyes are searching hers for something he will not find.
She cannot say it. Her voice has been locked up tight in her chest, a prisoner in her own body. She cannot tell him how, in an instant, she'd felt the bullet slip through her like water. Felt it enter and exit, and been, in that moment, somewhere else. A Paris street and another bullet--unseen and invisible--cutting through her just as cleanly. She cannot explain the sensation of her legs, paralyzed and useless, folding beneath her an instant before she died. She can't explain any of that, and so she says nothing at all, her mind trapped in the metal and concrete confines of a French morgue.
----
It doesn't end like a good op ought to. It feels, instead, like a collapsing house of cards, and she takes her time packing, hoping the others will dissipate while she dawdles. She's tired, and all she wants anymore is to find someplace safe and dark to crawl into. Someplace where she will either learn to cope, or succumb.
"Dom..."
She should have figured he'd be waiting for her. She's done too much avoidance, and he hasn't changed so much that he's going to let it slide. The problem is, this mission has served as one big demonstration of all the reasons she should worry for him, and the knowledge feels like a responsibility.
She shakes her head. She can't do this. She wants to help him, but she can't. To hold him together, she'll have to let go of herself, and there's no one here to save her in return. Not now. And as much as the look in his eyes and the sound of his voice cuts through her like a knife, she can't let go of the only thing she has left. Not even for him.
He says her name again, because he can't let her go. Maybe he believes he can correct for a past mistake--he's let her go when he thinks he shouldn't have, so he won't do it again. He takes her bag from her, and she doesn't resist. She's tired. She's so fucking tired, and she just can't play this game. "I won't do this."
"Why the hell not?"
His voice reverberates through the empty space and she flinches uncontrollably. "There's no point, Nathan. There's just no point."
"You don't have anywhere to go," he says, "and neither do I."
"And that means what, exactly? It means nothing, Nathan. It's been a long time. Let it go."
She needs to get away. Her first instinct has always been to run, and it is screaming at her now. She can't stand here and look at him, because the temptation is just so strong. She can't help the fact that she misses him and wants to be there for him, no matter what disaster is looming on the horizon. A part of her is praying he won't ask.
"I can't. I need you."
"You always have." It's almost a release. The cat is out of the bag. The game is over, and she can come clean, just as he has. "I needed you, Nate, and you didn't have time. I'm tired of staying because you ask me to." There's no reason to hold on any longer. And she's tired of feeling guilty. "This isn't going to work."
And he knows it.
Even as his hand closes around her wrist, he knows it. There's something in his eyes then, something akin to revelation as he looks at her and she stares back, tired and resigned. This won't be goodbye, but she can't be his bandage anymore. She has too many wounds of her own that need mending now. He releases her, backs away, looking at her as if he has done her harm. Nearly two decades of reality washes across his face, and all she can do is sigh. He knows, and it's out of her hands. "Come and find me when you figure out what you want."
-end-