Many thanks to my small but select group of reviewers for your comments - you're all very kind :-) And Raquelle, thanks for pointing out the Anonymous thing - all these months and I never realised that tickbox was there! I'm open to all now... *grin*

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Five

"If you think I'm gonna get down and crawl
You don't know me, you don't know me at all..."


The sound of the door slamming behind one very pissed off Shalimar - right after she'd torn him off a strip for ratting Jesse out to Adam - echoed cannon-like round Brennan's room, and he stared blankly at it while he willed himself not to go after her, to argue his case until she accepted that he at least had good reasons for thinking the action necessary. But he knew that given the mood she was in right now it was likely to end in a stand up fight, and that wasn't going to help anyone.

It seemed like she was making a habit of noisy exits these days - she'd done exactly the same thing just a few days earlier after she'd burst in on him during his morning workout and, glaring him into putting the weights down, blurted out the news of Jesse's departure. But whatever reaction she'd been expecting it obviously hadn't been his shrug and casual, "So?"

His apparent failure to appreciate the seriousness of the situation, even once she'd clarified - in no uncertain terms - her concerns regarding Jesse's emotional and mental state, and why that made his immediate location and return to Sanctuary imperative, had only served to turn her initial open-mouthed shock to simmering rage. And taking the time to towel off and pull on a sweatshirt while he decided on the best way to explain his point of view to her hadn't improved things one bit.

He could still vividly recall her spluttering reaction to what he'd seen as the most fundamental of questions, given the circumstances. "How do you know he wants our help?"

"What?!!" she'd exploded, but he'd lifted a finger to silence her.

"No, listen a moment. You think he's in trouble, I know that. And OK, I'd agree he's got some pretty tough stuff he needs to deal with. But he's a big boy now, Shal, big enough to make his own decisions. And I gotta say, I'm glad he's finally done something about it instead of hanging around here like a wet week. Could be he just needs to be left alone for a while to do whatever he's doing, rather than having us on his back."

And that had seemed to slam her to a halt, as if the possibility that Jesse's departure might have been anything other than the result of total desperation on his part hadn't occurred to her. Not that she'd liked being forced to consider it, but it hadn't taken her long to reach her own conclusion - and no prizes for guessing which way she'd gone. "No," she'd said stubbornly. "We drove him away. And we need to find him so we can make it up to him."

His pointing out to her that the last time he'd looked it had seemed that Jesse had been firmly in that particular driving seat hadn't gone down too well either - but it had been more his continued insistence that if she didn't tell Adam what had happened in the warehouse he would that had turned her anger from red hot to ice cold. And he wasn't sure which version unnerved him most.

"None of your business," she'd warned, with more than the hint of a snarl. "I'll deal with it myself, in my own way, my own time. But *after* we've found Jesse!"

Any thoughts he might have had of getting to see the irrationality of her position were cut short by her frustrated assertion that if he wouldn't help her, she'd go and find someone who would. Which she'd done, leaving as explosively as she'd arrived, pulling the door shut behind her with sufficient force to practically shake the fixtures and fittings from the adjacent wall. And, he thought with grim humour as he eyed the floor-scattered magazines spilled from the bookcase by the force of this recent departure, she hadn't lost her touch any between then and now. Sighing, he turned and threw himself full length on the bed, rolling onto his back and folding his arms under his head as he continued to sift through recent events in his mind.

Was he wrong? He didn't think so, but equally he didn't like the way this thing was driving a wedge between him and Shalimar, leaving them heading inexorably for opposite ends of the spectrum with Jesse's phantom presence sitting slap-bang in the middle.

Maybe he needed to re-consider...

But memories of the terrible emotion-laden atmosphere that had permeated the place those first few days did nothing to encourage a change of perspective. And he knew inherently he wouldn't be reacting any differently if the situation repeated itself.

Not that he was as completely insensitive to Jesse's position as he knew Shalimar thought right now. He'd sympathised, really he had. To begin with, anyway. He could honestly say he wouldn't wish something like that on anyone, especially someone he still saw as essentially naïve and unworldly as Jesse, and he'd certainly been affected by it himself - hell, who wouldn't be? But it wasn't in his nature to hang on to the baggage of the past - not unless the past came back at a later date to bite him, as it had done on more than one occasion. Plenty of time to deal with it then, though, if it happened - what's done is done, no point crying over spilt milk, and all those other old adages...

But Jesse... well, that last job had proved that he not only couldn't let it go, but had allowed it to take him over to the point he'd endangered one of their own, and that was completely beyond Brennan's comprehension. And he'd wasted no time telling him so, once the data was safely delivered to Adam and the mission was officially over. Not that it seemed to have done much good.

Or maybe it had already been too late...

*

"What the hell do you think you were playing at out there?" Brennan's heated tones echo through Sanctuary's silent corridors as he chases after the resolutely unheeding Jesse, finally catching him as he disappears into his room and shuts the door behind him. It crashes open again violently, though, and he turns to face the other man, expression closed and impassive. "You left her out to dry, man!" Brennan almost yells, waving an angry hand back the way he'd come to indicate the subject of his outburst.

"Hardly," Jesse counters, standing his ground. "She's all grown up now, in case you hadn't noticed. She really doesn't need babysitting any more - she's more than capable of taking care of herself."

Brennan, though, is not about to be put off. "But there were too many of them, even for her. They'd got her backed into a corner - I know you saw that. She needed a way out and you just walked out on her."

The younger man shakes his head in what seems to be irritation, which only serves to enrage the other further. But he refuses to be cowed by it. "Now you see, that's where you're wrong. She got herself into that situation because she wanted to, because she can't resist the challenge - there can never be enough bad guys for her to take on. But she never stops to think it through, consider the implications before she just goes charging in. She needs to learn to take responsibility for her actions, to accept that there isn't always going to be someone to come to the rescue if she takes it too far." He folds his arms almost defiantly across his chest, watching the elemental with shadowed eyes.

For a long moment Brennan just stares at him in something approaching shock. "Will you listen to yourself?" he finally manages to get out, shaking his head. "What's gotten into you? I thought she was important to you, closer than your own family. We may not always agree on everything, Jess, but I never thought of you as someone who'd leave a friend hanging."

Jesse advances on him, the look on his face sufficient to make Brennan take a half step back, moving him into the doorway. "I know *exactly* what you think of me," he says, dangerously softly, the words just carrying between them. "How you really feel about me, deep down. And you know what? I don't care. I don't need to prove myself to you - to any of you - or keep trying to be what you think I should be instead of who I am. Especially now. And if you don't like it, you know what you can do."

The lack of obvious emotion in his voice belies the intensity of the gaze boring darkly from his gaunt features and Brennan finds himself unaccountably unable to come up with a suitable response, the small shiver running down his spine having nothing to do with the air temperature. "Yeah, well..." he starts, but the firmly closing door forces him to back out of the room to avoid having it slam in his face.

He glances furtively up and down the passageway to be sure no one has seen his ignominious exit. Then, cursing under his breath, he retreats to his own room to lick his wounds and brood over what course of action to take now...

*

As he thought back, he realised he'd chosen not to consider the full implications of what Jesse had said, focussing instead on the impact the molecular's uncustomary behaviour was having on those around him, those Brennan cared about. But if he was honest with himself he knew that he'd have to admit to being unsettled by the barbed reminder of how his younger counterpart had been changing, growing over the past few months.

Brennan knew he'd been changing too. But his attempts to develop and take on what he'd seen as the inevitable next step for him - a mantle of leadership within the Mutant X team, albeit still grudgingly recognising Adam's seniority - seemed to have produced as many downsides as they had positive results. It appeared he'd been blissfully ignorant of the true nature of the burdens inherent in the role, and that had left him feeling more and more off-balance as he sought to temper his urge to be totally in control of every facet of whatever job needed doing with enough trust in his friends' expertise to allow them all the freedom to do what they did best, without his constant intervention.

That this had proved hardest - though for completely different reasons - where Shalimar and Jesse were concerned hadn't escaped him either.

With the feral he had to accept it was simply his male need to protect the object of his - albeit not as yet openly proclaimed - affections. This wasn't made easier by the fact she patently neither wanted nor needed to be sheltered from potential harm, and he was rapidly coming to the realisation that if he wanted to stay in with a chance of turning their current close friendship into anything deeper he was going to have to back off, show her he respected her abilities and let her do her thing. However hard that was.

Jesse, though - that was a tougher one to unravel. To begin with, he'd seen his young team-mate as nothing more than an over-privileged kid come to play at superheroes, and though over time he'd come to care for him like a sometimes irritating but still mostly endearing little brother, to appreciate and rely on his undoubted technical skills as well as benefiting from his physical powers in tight situations, he'd still found the smart-alec comebacks and criticisms that greeted his efforts to give direction and provide focus wearing. Not to mention more than indicative that the molecular still had some growing up to do.

That hadn't seemed to be the case more recently, though. In almost synchronistic fashion, as Brennan's confidence in himself and his capacity to make the tough decisions had faltered so Jesse's had blossomed, to the extent that he seemed to have completely stopped second-guessing himself or waiting for others to tell him what he already really knew needed doing - a far cry from the man who'd whined to him back when Gabriel Ashlocke was holed up in Sanctuary that no one, especially Adam, took him seriously.

Brennan could recall several occasions in the recent past when Jesse's quick thinking on the fly had saved one or all of them, and that wasn't just confined to his technical know-how where the Helix was concerned. While no-one had been looking, the younger man had been quietly working away at refining his phasing abilities, practicing until he could control the extent of his own intangibility, and that of whatever person or object he chose to share it with, with a precision that had enabled him to save lives in what would have previously been impossible circumstances. Their recent encounter with an explosive-filled necklace and the senator's daughter was only one of several incidents where Brennan had good reason to be grateful for that skill.

So, Jesse had been growing more comfortable with who he was, while Brennan had conversely been struggling with who he wanted to be. And if he'd been pushed to say what the catalyst for change had been, at least in the other's case, he would have had to point to their time in Hillview Penitentiary.

Though he was still a little fuzzy on some of what had happened while he'd been under the influence of Rigas' drugs, he knew that the molecular had gone against Adam's express orders to stay clear of him and had instead manipulated himself into a position where he had a chance of saving his friend, regardless of the risks. A friend who'd been pretty damned disparaging in his openly expressed opinions about a guy from the suburbs' ability to do what was necessary to survive inside.

In the end, though, Jesse had not only survived but succeeded in bringing Brennan out with him too. Chalk up one to the underdog!

Something else had happened between them in there too, something that the elemental couldn't remember clearly enough to recount and that Jesse wouldn't elaborate on, beyond a couple of cryptic comments that had only served to make him feel uncomfortably like he was on the wrong side of a secret - one that had somehow left him on the back foot as far as their relationship was concerned. And he'd gotten the clear impression from those final words of their last encounter that it hadn't been forgotten. But out of it all, the younger man had emerged stronger for the experience, and had seemed able to continue building on that.

Up until a few days ago, anyway.

That was when everything had changed. Because all his hard won control over his powers, all his new-found confidence, hadn't helped him when it really mattered. Hadn't enabled him to prevent unlooked-for tragedy striking. Hadn't brought him any hope of finding peace in its wake...

And that had ultimately made everything that had gone before meaningless, taken him back to a place where that new Jesse was nothing more than wishful thinking.

Brennan wasn't sure whether to mourn that loss, as Shalimar was doing, or to just hope that what had finally emerged in its place was going to work out for the best in the long run - for all of them.


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TBC