SHADOWS AGAINST THE WALL

Ah, child. You do not know what it is to have tasted darkness, drank in it's heady scent, filled yourself with it's addiction. It is not a thing that may be gained simply by accident of birth, or simple violence, such things are simply the mark of disease, or primitive barbarity.
Darkness is a living, if soullessly empty, thing, one that defies simple words such as "evil". Are hurricanes evil? Or storm-blackened seas? Yet do they not claim endless lives, mostly innocent ones?
But darkness, ah, darkness. It is a melevolant voice, whispering obsenities to a child torn by fear and helplessness. It is a savage instant where a youth chooses to end a life to "prove" his worth. To what, might I ask?
Darkness.
It fills the most empty of voids so cunningly, so subtly, that it is rarely seen as one's true master until it is far too late.
Yet even in the darkest of moments, you reached out to me. Looked into my eyes and saw - what? Many times, I have come close to asking. But your smile tells me whatever you saw, it was not darkness.
Therein lies the question.
Did I walk away, or did you reach out and catch me?
Does it even matter?
Deep in the night, I stare out into the shadows, and refuse their offer. Power has lessened in it's dark need in me. Perhaps there are other, more vital things I need that for so long darkness blinded me to.
Simplier, less harsh desires Apocolypse would never consider.
Warmth. Light. A place to call home, not simply a base of operations. Simple respect, if tinged slightly with unease.
Yet Cayanne, for all her maddening, quixotic incomprehesiblity - and I am a man who craves comprehension - will charge into my arms when I walk in a door.
Her embrace is not simply for a duplicate - a back-up - of my brother, but for me, myself, the man she sees.
Oh, she will hug Nathan, and loves him without question, but then, is he not a simpler man to love?
Our first unity of purpouse came from an unlikely source - a teen-age girl who simply loves us as we are, seperate, struggling for identity despite those that seek to define us otherwise. Nathan stuggles against his hatred of the Askani manipulation and his need to love his - our - sister, as I struggle against a deep well of rage against those who created me simply to be a duplication of him.
Yet in that, we have found definition, all these long years. I hate him for being the "chosen" one, he hates me for all my attacks on him and his.
And in the end, a new definition dragged me into the light of the X-Men mansion that night.
We are united for the first time in our lives as - elder brothers - to a girl who loves us as we are.
Darkness is a devious thing. Yet it was vanquished by the simplest of things.
Is this faith?
I wonder.
Ah, well. There are things both good and - and. And better of being an elder brother.
This morning, Cayanne has challanged Nathan and I to a game of "hide and seek".
Little does she know, she has already found us both.