Chapter Fourteen
Ororo knew everything she saw and experienced while linked in with Charles and Cerebro only existed in Kurt's mind - even the image of Kurt himself. The man she held in her arms, the man who held her so securely in his, was a subconscious projection...the 'self' one knows in dreams... The real world Kurt Wagner lay unconscious in the medbay.
Yet, the experience of teleporting with him, jaunting through the screeching coldness of the midden mire... It was as real as anything she had ever felt. The warmth of his body, the strength in his arms and tail…the sickening vertigo of teleportation...these were not mere illusions.
She squeezed her eyes closed, burying her face in his fuzzy neck in a vain attempt to stave off the nausea. Kurt smelled just as she remembered, warm and musty with a sharp undercurrent of strong soap.
That made her smile. Kurt had always been so self-conscious about the smell his teleporting left behind, secretly terrified that the reek of brimstone lingered in his fur. And it did, but only very slightly. Ororo had never admitted it aloud, but she'd always rather liked the way he smelled.
She took in another discreet breath, her mind filling with warm memories…strolling through her garden in the moonlight as they talked over their latest assignments; sitting on his bed as he told her colorful tales of his years with the circus; the priceless look on his face when she sprayed him with the hose in an uncharacteristic fit of childish silliness; the security of his arms as he held her close in the elevator, soothing her claustrophobia with the kind words of friendship... She had missed that, missed him for so long until now, suddenly, Ororo felt a strange, irrational wish to melt into his arms and never let him go again...
Despite Kurt's obvious difficulty getting them through whatever metaphysical barrier stood in their way, the turbulent teleport took barely a handful of seconds to complete. All too soon, Ororo felt Kurt's embrace loosen, and she stepped away, quickly schooling her features into a mask of professionalism.
Kurt needed her to be strong. If she allowed her confusing emotions to distract her from her duty as a guide, it was frighteningly possible she would lose her friend all over again - this time for good. So, instead of praising him for the way he'd broken them away from that ensnaring realm of howling chaos, she took a moment to drink in their new surroundings.
They stood in the center aisle of a very small, very ancient stone church. A round, stained-glass window at the back cast colored shadows across the worn floor stones, and a very ornately carved wooden crucifix hung over the meticulously kept marble altar. A highly polished, upright piano stood in the space just below the altar, opposite a stone basin of holy water. The remaining windows were small and narrow, and the thick, wooden rafters that made up the ceiling sloped to a sharp peak. A glass display case filled with archaeological artifacts uncovered on church grounds lined the wall beside the only door that led outside, and the double rows of hard, wooden pews strewn with dog-eared hymnals made the small space seem full even though she and Kurt were the only ones there.
"Where are we?" Ororo asked, feeling uncomfortably out of place in the oddly occupied atmosphere of this empty church. Even her voice sounded muffled.
Kurt didn't answer.
Ororo turned to face him, only to gasp in alarm.
Kurt crouched on the last pew, his shoulders hunched and his head down. His colorful, threadbare clothes were torn and stained; his fur and hair matted with mud, grass...and what looked like blood.
Ororo rushed to his side.
"Bright Goddess!" she exclaimed. "Kurt, what is this? What happened? Are you all right?"
Kurt didn't look at her. He just kept staring at his bloodstained hands, his golden eyes wide with shock and pain. When he spoke, his voice was haunted, distant. The sound of it chilled Ororo straight through to her marrow.
"I—I had to stop him. I had to. I'd gotten the knife away from him…everything should have been OK. But he…he punched me, lunged for the knife… What else could I do? God help me, Father, what else could I have done!"
Ororo spun around, but no priest was there. Only her and him and whatever horrible memory was eating at his tortured soul. Slowly, Ororo crouched down beside him, gently taking one of his scratched, blood-matted hands in hers.
"Kurt," she said softly, "tell me why you brought me here. What did you want me to see?"
Kurt's breath hitched, his shoulders trembling as his golden eyes filled with tears.
"I used to feel so safe here," he whispered hoarsely, choking back his sobs. "The monks at Neuhertzel had always been so kind to me. After our circus was bought by that millionaire Texan, they gave me a place to stay. Sabu…" He swallowed hard and shook his head. "Sabu was d-dead, and Amanda couldn't leave with me, so the monks let me live in their monastery while I searched for my brother. And they were the only ones I could come to after…"
He turned his head to the wall, hunching himself into an even tighter ball.
"...after I found him."
He shivered, his eyes closing against the pain as he struggled to go on.
Ororo lowered her head in understanding, her thumb soothingly stroking the back of his fuzzy hand.
She knew this memory now...the tragic events that had first brought Kurt in contact with the X-Men. After the man who'd bought his circus threatened to put him in the freak show, the nineteen-year-old Kurt had left the only home, the only family he'd ever known and gone off in search of his older foster brother, Stefan Szardos, who had left the circus several years earlier. He'd found him some weeks later just a few short miles from the monastery at Neuhertzel, living in the small, isolated town of Winzeldorf.
At first, their reunion had been wonderful, but Kurt soon began to notice something…off…about his brother. Stefan seemed unnaturally obsessed with the mysterious string of child murders that had been taking place in the area, and would talk of little else. He seemed oddly frenzied, even manic, and would disappear for hours at a time...
Kurt had tried to rationalize his anxieties, unable to consider, let alone believe, that his big brother, the boy who'd taught him how to fish and how to fight, who'd looked out for him all through their childhood...that he could possibly...
But, as the days passed, Stefan's words and actions became more and more peculiar. He started ranting openly in front of him, claiming the victims weren't children at all, but demons in disguise. Frightened, Kurt began to track his brother's movements, just praying he could prove his suspicions were wrong...
One night, he followed Stefan to a cemetery. He climbed a tree and settled in for another night of watching his brother pace and rant...but this time, something was different. Someone was there. A small child, lost and dirty... Stefan pulled a long knife from his coat, but before he could strike, Kurt leaped to the child's defense, grappling with his raving brother for control of the weapon. The brothers punched and rolled, kicked and flailed, but Kurt finally managed to grab the knife with his tail and toss it out of his brother's reach. Stefan socked him across the jaw and dove for the knife. Kurt lunged after him, kicking his brother hard in the chest. The force of the blow hurled Stefan backwards like a rag doll, against a low gravestone, snapping his neck. He was dead by the time his brother reached him.
Kurt fell into an awful, disassociated shock, appalled and sickened by what he'd done. He'd fled the scene, but soon returned, resolved to take his brother's body home and explain what had happened to his mother and sister. He had found the knife in the grass and was leaning down to lift his brother in a fireman's carry, when a groundskeeper spotted him. Misunderstanding his posture and intentions, the old man called an alarm. Before he knew it, Kurt was under attack by an infuriated mob, all accusing him of being a child-murdering demon. If Professor Xavier hadn't turned up in time to stop them, Kurt would never have escaped alive. His mother and sister had later forgiven him for Stefan's death, and he'd sought absolution from his church, but Ororo knew Kurt had never managed to forgive himself.
"I always loved this place," Kurt whispered against his knees. "I never felt more protected than I did while I was here. This monastery was a place of peace, of study and contemplation devoted to charitable works and the simple love of God. And, once I left, it was only to find a world of violence and hatred…a world I've never been able to escape from since."
"Is that why you chose to come here, Kurt?" Ororo asked. "To escape?"
Kurt regarded her with dim, hollow eyes, then rose to his feet, pacing up the aisle until he stood before the altar, staring up at the large, ornate crucifix.
"I killed my brother, Ororo," he said bluntly. "I was a murderer in my own right before I'd even heard of Belasco. I've harmed so many people in my life... Since joining the X-Men, I led a life of violence and bloodshed. I called myself a righteous crusader, convinced myself I fought in the name of peace, for rights and justice, yet how often did I allow anger to influence my actions?"
He sniffed sharply and roughly rubbed his eyes, his features clenching in anguish.
"Xavier's words seem so hollow now," he whispered, "seeing them from this darker side of the looking glass. I never should have left Neuhertzel."
His shoulders hunched and he turned his face in shame from the crucifix on the wall.
Ororo started to move toward him, then froze in place, staring in horror as the red blood that dripped from Kurt's thick fingers began to pool up his arms and down his torso, altering his clothes and features as it spread.
"No..." she gasped. "No, Kurt...!"
But, he continued speaking, unmindful of the terrible transformation taking place.
"I know now that the old saying is true," he ground out, his voice low and harsh with bitterness. "It was my good intentions that set me on this path to Hell."
"Kurt, stop this!" Ororo cried out, rushing to take him by the shoulders. She gasped in alarm as she felt that, beneath his long, red cloak, his right arm was now missing.
The russet-skinned demon sneered at her expression.
"Stop what?" he snapped, gesturing fiercely with a five-fingered hand to his horns and spaded tail. "This is who I am, Ororo. This is what I always was. It doesn't matter whether I kill Belasco or Belasco kills me. In the end, we're both guilty of the same crime."
"You know it's not the same thing, Kurt," Ororo protested angrily. "And Stefan's death was an accident! He was the aggressor. You never meant for him to die!"
"Do you think that matters?" he snarled, his golden eyes narrowed into cold slits. "The fact is that he is dead, and at my hand. God's law commands that we shall not kill. It doesn't say 'you shall not kill unless it's in self defense or in defense of another'. Adding addendums to rules that don't suit you only provides justification for the very crimes you hoped to prevent!"
Ororo shook her head in frustration.
"The act itself does not constitute guilt unless done with a guilty intent," she said, echoing a quote projected by Charles's own frustration. "Actus reus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea. You said yourself, Kurt, it was not your intentions that led us here."
"Perhaps not," Kurt retorted. "But those actions, and their effects, remain my responsiblilty."
Ororo sighed, and ran a hand through her long, white hair. The Professor's presence itched at the back her mind, urging her to press harder, to cut through this protective rigmarole of constructed blocks and excuses to find a deeper blackness, the festering pain his unconscious was struggling so hard to conceal.
"We're wasting time with this argument," she said sharply, advancing on him with such purpose that he actually took a step back. "There's something else here. Something beyond your brother, and even Belasco. It's a gnawing guilt that you refuse to acknowledge, even though it is eating your soul alive."
Kurt stared at her in confusion, backing up even further.
"What is it Kurt?" Ororo pressed, getting right up in his face. "What is it that you did that's so terrible you can't bring yourself to remember it, even now?"
"I don't know what you're talking about!" Kurt snapped back, baring his teeth in a defensive snarl. "I already told you why I deserve this fate—"
"No, you haven't," Ororo countered. "You haven't given me a single good reason why a man as decent, as caring, as forgiving as you should be condemned to this half-life, controlled by some heartless demon who should have died centuries ago!"
"I murdered my brother!" Kurt screamed in raw anguish, the veins in his neck close to popping. "I used my power to teleport myself away from the Gray Gargolyle's grasp, when I should have tried to get my team out instead! I stood by while Belasco used my body to torture and maim X-Men from dozens of alternate realities. I watched him kill you again and again, Ororo, and rather than try to stop him, I slipped away into my subconscious, hiding like a craven coward from your screams and from the screams of everyone else I held dear. Logan, Scott, Jean, Hank, the Professor, Rachel…even Kätzchen! I was the instrument Belasco used to achieve your deaths, a willing slave to the Lord of Limbo! Your blood is on my hands!"
Ororo raised her chin, her blue eyes sharp as she replayed the start of Kurt's outburst in her mind. He had mentioned the Gray Gargoyle, his last mission before his capture...
Could that be it? Could there be a connection between that mission and the memory the Professor had sent her to find, the one the demons had repressed, shattering his psyche so the implanted Belasco personality would have a chance to take root?
The Professor was still urging her to press harder. They were getting close, but Kurt was still fighting to keep the painful memory buried. She would have to push him to his limit, squeeze him into such a tight corner that remembrance would be his only way out.
Reassuring herself that this harsh approach would ultimately help Kurt to heal, Ororo continued her attack with renewed passion.
"That's still not good enough!" she snapped, fixing Kurt with her most imperious glare. Her eyes whitened and her hair began to rise as she menaced him back against the worn basin of holy water. "None of that was your fault, Kurt, especially Belasco's crimes against the X-Men! They were all forced on you by Azazel! He implanted Belasco's personality and memories into your mind without your consent—"
"NO!" Kurt howled, his voice cracking as furious tears leaked from his burning eyes. "Ororo, you don't understand…!"
"What don't I understand, Kurt?" Ororo demanded, refusing to let up on him, even though the sight of him in tears threatened to tear her heart to shreds. "Tell me! Explain what happened to you after the Gray Gargoyle attacked."
Kurt shook his head, collapsing to the floor in soggy heap of misery and shame. Black tears as thick and slick as crude oil streamed down his russet cheeks, staining his cloak and collecting on the uneven stone floor in a viscous puddle.
Ororo's heart jumped with alarmed concern at the startling sight, but the Professor seemed glad. ...At last...he seemed to whisper, his ghostly voice bending around the corners of her mind. At last, the painful memory that had been locked away for so long was starting its rise to the surface.
Ororo lowered herself to the floor beside her friend, reaching out with a tentative hand to gently touch his arm. He flinched away, but she only moved closer, wrapping her slender arms around him until he finally gave in to her tender embrace, pressing his horned head against her shoulder.
"My sweet Kurt," she sighed, brushing her lips against his pointed ear as she ran her fingers through his short, red hair. "It's time for the truth to come out. No matter what it reveals, I will never think any less of you. You know you can trust me."
Kurt pressed his nose against her snowy hair, breathing in the clean scent of her herbal shampoo as he struggled to control his wracking sobs.
"With my life, Liebchen," he assured her, twining his tail loosely around her waist. "With my very soul."
A soft sound disturbed the silence of the medbay...followed by a familiar sulfur scent...
Hank looked up from his office computer, his furry brow wrinkling in confusion - an expression that quickly turned to alarm when he saw two red-skinned demons standing in front of his desk.
"Oh, my stars and garters!" he exclaimed, jumping to his feet and backing up against his over-stuffed bookcase, his fingers searching for the silent alarm...
"And greetings to you, my good doctor," the taller of the two said, and smiled, his black goatee providing a disturbing border for his sharp, white fangs. "I see from your expression that you've guessed who I am, but I believe you have yet to meet my son."
He gestured for the other demon to step forward. This one was clean-shaven, sporting meticulously styled red hair and a haughty expression that bordered on smarm.
"Henry McCoy," Azazel said with a theatrical flourish, "I'd like you to meet Mephistopheles."
"Mephisto," the red-haired demon offered politely, holding out a clawed hand for the doctor to take.
Hank stared at it for a long moment, then looked into the demon's hard, aristocratic features with wary curiosity.
"Surely you're not the same Mephistopheles—"
"From the famous history of the damnable life and deserved death of Doctor John Faustus?" Azazel broke in, and laughed. "Please, Doctor. Not all my children have proved to be disappointments."
Hank narrowed his eyes.
"If I remember my Goethe correctly," he said, "wasn't Faust redeemed in the end?"
Mephisto scowled darkly, and tucked his snubbed hand behind his back.
"That is a lie," he growled. "No matter what Goethe may have written in his vaunted play, that fool Faustus paid for my services with his soul, just as we'd agreed. I escorted him to our dimension personally, where the renowned scholar now serves as one of my father's slaves in retribution for his hubris."
"Ah," Hank said with a nervous smile. "Then, I take it you prefer Christopher Marlowe's version of the story."
Mephisto's cold, amber eyes flashed, and he leaped up like a panther to crouch menacingly on Hank's desk, scattering his papers in all directions.
"Are you mocking me, mutant?" he spat.
Hank gave a startled, involuntary cry, falling into a defensive crouch of his own.
Azazel held up his hands.
"Gentlemen, gentlemen, please!" he placated, though his eyes were dark with amusement. "We're wasting time."
Mephisto gracefully jumped down from the desk, his smug elegance barely masking the seething anger at his core.
Azazel turned to Hank.
"I know you are holding my son, Kurt Wagner, in the other room," he said.
"Kurt Wagner is my patient, yes. And he's currently in terrible shape, no thanks to you," Hank said, and glared, rising to his feet and crossing his long arms over his thick chest. "His genetic code is in a state of violent flux, and he's in constant pain."
"I know that too," Azazel said calmly. "In fact, that's why we've come."
"Why?" Hank snapped. "To gloat?"
Mephisto stepped forward, but Azazel placed a hand on his shoulder, holding him back.
"Not quite." The demon smiled. "To help you restore your friend to his proper form. When my son awakens, I want it to be to his own face, his own body, and his own powers."
"Pardon my frankness, but I've never known either of you to be the...philanthropic sort," Hank said, trying his best to ignore Mephisto's freezing glare. "What's in this for you? Why would you go to all this trouble for a son who has repeatedly rejected you, your 'realm', and everything that you stand for?"
Azazel's thin lips twitched slowly upwards in a small smile that showed no teeth. Hank shuddered despite himself.
"Mephisto," the black-haired demon ordered, striding past Hank through the open door to the medbay, "hand me my plasmotic alternator. We have a great deal of work to do, and not much time in which to do it. Doctor McCoy," he called over his shoulder, "you can either stand there or you may assist us. It's up to you."
"Of course I'm assisting," Hank declared, heading the demonic mutants off before they reached Kurt's bed. "But I'll be damned if I'm going to let you two anywhere near my patient before you first give me a full and detailed account of exactly what you intend to do to him."
Azazel and Mephistopheles exchanged a look.
"We will provide you with a brief overview of the procedure," Azazel allowed. "As we work. But I'd advise you to put more thought into how you phrase your thoughts from now on, Doctor." The demon smirked, his burning eyes cold. "The next time you threaten your own damnation, I just might take you up on it."
To Be Continued...
NOTES: I made up some of this backstory, but it's mainly based on the comics, and that includes Storm and Nightcrawler's affectionate relationship, which I adapted for this story. Belasco killed Sabu in "Excalibur #-1, Flashback: A True and Terrible Sacrifice." For more details on Neuhertzel, Winzeldorf, and Stefan's death, see "Giant Size X-Men #1: Second Genesis," "King-Size Annual X-Men #4: Nightcrawler's Inferno, Part the Second," (Ororo gives Kurt a birthday kiss in Part the First), the animated episode "X-Calibre" from "Wolverine and the X-Men," and the episode "Nightcrawler" from the "X-Men: The Legend of Wolverine" DVD.
Until next time! :)
