Hey Everyone, guess what! I actually, factually, finally finished this chapter! That's right, this here bit I'm about to post marks the very end of the final chapter of this freshly revised story! All that's left now is the Epilogue!
Thanks so much for reading, and for your marvelous comments and reviews! I hope you like this last bit! :)
BAMF!
Chapter Eighteen, Part IV and Finale
Kurt reappeared in the clearing beside the vibrantly purple wooden trailer his foster mother, Margali Szardos, had always used as her office/workshop - just in time to see a teenage girl in a sparkly pink leotard come running out of the main tent.
"...Amanda?"
The girl stopped short and stared at him, her mouth falling open as her blue eyes grew unnaturally wide.
"No way," she said, her head shaking slightly as she looked him up and down, then up and down again. "There is no way I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing. Kurt…Kurt, that can't be you! Is it...?"
Kurt winced, realizing his mistake. He had seen the boy in the forest, so he'd pictured his old circus the way it had been when he was fourteen. Back when Margali was still a fortune-teller, her passion for sorcery little more than a hobby. For his forming idea to work, Kurt needed a skilled sorceress powerful enough to perform a spell of summoning. That meant he would have to age this circus at least five years - but how?
Amanda was circling him now, her expression appraising. She reached a hand out to his fuzzy cheek, but stopped before she actually touched him.
"Wow," she said, her eyes shining with wonder. "Who knew my scrawny foster brother would grow up to be so hot? How did this happen, Kurt? Were you poking around in Mom's spell books or something? Can you show me? 'Cause there's this big concert in town next week, and I—"
Kurt sighed, gritting his teeth. He really didn't have time for this. Holding out his hand, he concentrated as hard as he could on consciously picturing his foster sister as she had been at twenty-one.
For a seemingly endless moment, nothing happened. Then, slowly, Amanda began to change. Right before his astonished eyes, his foster sister grew from a pretty teenager to a stunning young adult. The length of her ponytail shortened from her lower back to just below her shoulders, and her sparkly pink leotard morphed into the familiar red and black costume with the pointed shoulders the two of them had worn for their joint act.
Lowering his arm, Kurt took a moment to catch his breath, delighted with his success.
Amanda looked around in confusion, clearly disorientated.
"Don't worry, Amanda," he said, focusing his concentration with all his might. "I'll have the rest of the circus caught up with you in a moment..."
Maybe it was his success with Amanda, or maybe he was just getting better at controlling his subconscious mind, but bringing his circus five years into the future was actually easier than he had expected. Kurt quickly scanned the colorful new tents and shiny trailers that now filled the large clearing for his foster mother's familiar purple trailer, spotting it near the outskirts of the camp.
Leaving the befuddled Amanda to sort herself out, Kurt teleported directly to the trailer's open door, praying that his activities had not yet tipped Belasco off to his plan.
"Mom!" he called into the dimly lit space. "Mama, I need your help."
Margali looked up from her book, her sharp violet eyes glittering under the maroon kerchief that covered her frizzy, graying hair.
"What kind of help are we talking about, my son?" she asked, slowly placing a bookmark on the page she'd been reading and closing the thick, leather-bound tome. "If this is about tonight's show—"
"No, no, it has nothing to do with the show," Kurt said quickly, leaning forward with his palms pressed against her multi-stained, round table as he caught her concerned eyes with his desperate ones. "Mama, I need you to help me trap a demon."
"Make that circle a little larger, Kurt," Margali instructed, her eye critical as she watched her foster son drag the thick piece of red chalk around the cluttered trailer's freshly cleared floor. "This pentagram has to be large enough to hold a full grown demon, remember. We don't want him escaping because his tail was stuck outside the circle, now do we?"
"There," Kurt said, joining the two ends of the circle with a flourish of his wrist. "How's that?"
Margali tilted her head, considering.
"Looks about right," she said after a long moment. "Now, I need you to place these candles where each point of the star meets the circle."
She pointed to five thick blood-red candles standing in a huddled row at the far end of one of her bookshelves.
"Got it," Kurt said, hurrying to do as he was told.
His plan depended on catching Belasco by surprise, and he could feel his time growing short. If the demon found him before he was ready, all his efforts here could be for nothing...
"Good," Margali said once the candles were in place. "Very good. Now, help me place this cauldron in the center of the pentagram and we'll be ready to begin."
The large, black cauldron was far heavier than Kurt had expected, but somehow he and Margali managed to lug it into place without smudging a single line of the chalk pentagram he'd drawn. Standing back from the prepared space, he watched anxiously as Margali read through the spell of summoning once more, then raised her arms with a sudden shout.
A gust of cold wind blew through the ancient trailer, rattling the objects on their shelves. As it passed, the five red candles burst into flames as red as rubies, and the empty cauldron began to hiss and steam.
Closing her violet eyes, Margali started to chant, softly at first, then with growing intensity and volume, rocking her slender body back and forth as she held her arms out toward the flickering candlelight.
Kurt stared at his entranced foster mother, his anxiety increasing, until—
"Don't look at me!" she scolded, her eyes still closed. "Watch the cauldron! This spell cannot succeed without belief. You must believe your demon will appear there, or he will not."
Kurt nodded, fixing his gaze on the smoking cauldron as Margali resumed her chant.
"He's close. He's very close."
Ginniyeh tilted her bald head, her scarred, sightless eyes turned in the direction of her father's voice.
"Is it time for me to enter, father?" she hissed in her serpentine voice, an anticipatory smile spreading slowly over her pale features.
"Soon, my daughter," Azazel assured her, sharing a look with Mephisto across Kurt's prone body. A delicate sensor was positioned just over the unconscious mutant's forehead, the shadow it cast making his short, velvety fur seem almost black. "Very soon. I will give you the signal when the time is right."
"The final sensor is in place," Mephisto announced, his golden eyes fixed on the readouts flashing across the monitor of Dr. McCoy's laboratory computer. "Storage disk formatted and ready to receive data."
"Very good." Azazel smiled, his sharp fangs glinting in the florescent light of the medbay. "You have done well, my son. Doctor!"
Hank turned, apologizing to Scott as he reluctantly excused himself from his examination of Jean, who had only just started to regain consciousness after her own ordeal with Belasco.
Crossing the room with great, loping strides, he said, "Yes? What's happened?"
"Nothing yet," the demon replied curtly, "but the next few minutes will be critical. I need you to keep a sharp eye on the monitors. If there is even the smallest change in my son's condition, I want to know immediately. Understand?"
McCoy ground his teeth, but swallowed his retort when his eyes fell on Kurt. The change in him was truly remarkable. Whatever else he had done, there was no denying that, in this case at least, Azazel had been true to his word. Kurt looked just as Hank remembered him. A bit thinner, perhaps, his cheeks slightly more hollowed, but that was only to be expected. Even his arm had been restored, the bone and flesh having regenerated only a matter of hours after Mephisto and Azazel had administered their formula.
Hank knew that formula had been inspired in part by his own experiments with genetic manipulation, but he had still been stunned to see the effects of the demons' elixir in practice. The science they'd used was so far in advance of anything he knew, it might as well have been magic - an observation the brilliant doctor would be loathe to admit aloud.
Still, the results of the demons' efforts were undeniable. If they truly could repair his friend's mind as skillfully as they had restored his body, Hank was ready to lend whatever help they needed - no matter how obnoxious or irritating he might find them.
"I'm on it," he said, keeping his tone professional as he took up his post before the wall of beeping machines they had hooked up to monitor Kurt.
As Azazel turned back to his own work, supervising the others, Hank brought a casual hand to the comm device at his belt. If everything worked out as planned, Kurt would be regaining consciousness relatively soon. And when he did, Hank wanted to be sure Ororo would be there to finally welcome him home...
Whatever was in the cauldron hissed and boiled like lava, its thick, red-tinted steam filling the small trailer with a sharp, rusty smell. Margali's chanting continued to swell, Kurt's heart racing with nervous anticipation as he struggled to squint through the rising fog...
A flash of thin, blue lightening shot up from the bubbling kettle and, for an instant, the steam glowed purple. As Kurt watched, the blood-red vapor thickened like smoke, pouring down the cauldron's sides to roll along the floor. Slowly, the rolling, reddish steam picked up speed, rising, swirling, condensing into a dense, crackling cloud that hovered, spinning, just over the cauldron.
Margali's chants rose to a wild crescendo as the revolving pillar of steam began to distort and bend. Kurt saw a shadow growing at its heart, darkening, deepening... Something was inside, struggling, fighting to get out.
An unearthly chorus of shrieks and yowls roared up from the twisting cloud, joining with Margali's shouts. The chalk pentagram began to glow with a strange, pale light, and Kurt's breath caught in his throat.
Belasco...
Fear gripped him...an awful, unearthly terror...and he staggered back, his long tail lashing as clutched his throbbing head in his hands.
The demon was there, behind his eyes, his cruel talons digging painfully into Kurt's mind. Kurt cried out against the pain, the fear, but Belasco's wrath was too strong...too strong to fight...
Voices seemed to surround him, hemming him in with cold whispers he couldn't ignore, couldn't block out. They flooded his mind with images of failure and fraud, teasing out his doubts, his guilt...
And, they were right... He was no leader, no swashbuckling hero...only a coward, feigning confidence by hiding behind childhood fantasies, then BAMFing away when things got tough... His fate was just... The X-Men were better off without him...
Kurt shrank back against the wall, his shoulders stooping as he sank down...down...
"Get back here, Kurt!"
"...Mama...?"
Kurt could barely hear Margali through the taunting whispers spinning through his screaming head, sapping away his spirit... But, he tried to listen, tried to follow her voice...
"You are allowing this demon to manipulate your fears," Margali snapped. "Now is the time to think with your head, not your heart!"
"But…but I can't hold him, Mama," Kurt gasped, his head pounding with the pressure of myriad conflicting thoughts and emotions, those freezing claws, threatening to pull him back down...down to a fractured madness he could not fight...
"He's stronger than I am…he has always been stronger…"
"Open your eyes!" Margali demanded, pointing a long, blood-red nail at the solidifying figure floating above the cauldron. "See the truth! Only your belief keeps your demon trapped within the pentagram. Your doubt will set him free!"
Kurt lifted his head, the reddish steam stinging his eyes and blurring his vision as he forced himself to take a shuffling step forward...then another...
Belasco snarled at him from within the smoky cloud, his thin lips moving in a silent chant as he desperately projected thoughts of hate and horror Kurt's way.
And, in that moment, Kurt knew his foster mother was right. Belasco was trapped, helpless to escape the circle of chalk. His plan had worked!
A surge of triumph filled him, his eyes brightening and his posture straightening as he turned his smile toward Margali.
But, his foster mother was no longer there. In her place, his subconscious had summoned the image of the only person he truly wanted to share this moment with. Her smooth, elegant features glowed with pride as she stepped toward him, sliding a loving hand up his back to rest supportively on his shoulder.
"Now, Kurt," Ororo told him, turning a rather predatory glare toward the struggling Belasco. "Do it now!"
"It will be my pleasure, meine Dame," Kurt assured her, his face taking on a look of intense concentration as he stretched out his arms.
The mere feel of Ororo's presence at his side banished any lingering wisps of doubt, the whispers taunting that he wasn't good enough, wasn't strong enough... Fueled by her friendship, by the confidence she inspired, Kurt transformed the dusky smoke that still swirled above the cauldron into a thick, metal cage without a door, cutting off Belasco's influence once and for all.
The demon's sputtering curses were silenced as the cage crashed to the floor, the reverberation extending out beyond the cramped, purple trailer to be reflected in the subtly altered rhythms of the monitoring devices that surrounded Kurt's bed…
From her place by his bedside, Ororo's head shot up, her expression pinched with worry as she squeezed Kurt's fuzzy hand tighter against her chest.
"There's been a change in—" Dr. McCoy started, but Azazel's triumphant shout interrupted his report.
"Ha ha!" the demon crowed, his golden eyes glowing so fiercely, it gave the doctor chills. "He's done it! Ginniyeh, quickly!"
With sure, practiced movements, Mephisto guided his blind sister's hand until her bony fingers brushed Kurt's temple. The bald telepath tightened her lips, her concentration complete as she reached down into Kurt's mind…
Kurt jumped back, pulling Ororo with him as an enormous, grasping hand materialized out of thin air just below the ceiling. It snatched Belasco's cage and began to rise.
"What is that?" Ororo exclaimed. "Kurt, are you—?"
"No, it's not me," Kurt said, and ran out of the trailer, following the diminishing image.
"Wait!" he shouted. "Please - What's going on? Where are you taking him?"
The hand paused. Then, much to Kurt's alarm, a disembodied head faded into view. It was the head of a woman possessed of a stern, old-fashioned beauty. Soft, dark curls framed her pale, slender features, and her large eyes were of the deepest blue.
"My name is Ginniyeh," the head intoned, the resonance of her low voice causing his brain to rattle uncomfortably in his skull. "I have been sent by our father to extract the Belasco program from your mind. The retrieved data will be placed on a storage disk until such time as our father again requires its services."
"Services?" Kurt repeated with a frown. "Wait, do you mean—"
"No questions!" The floating head glared angrily, her eyes hard and cold. "Be satisfied knowing you have achieved the impossible. No one before has ever recovered from one of my mental wipes. And none will again, that I swear."
As she spoke, her features began to fade, slowly dissolving before Kurt's thoroughly unsettled gaze until only her steely eyes remained.
"You are to sleep now, Kurt Wagner," Ginniyeh ordered, her deep, serpentine voice seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere, enveloping his thoughts with her will. "When you wake, your mind will be healed. But I warn you now, brother, if our paths should ever cross again no one will be able to shield you from my vengeance. Not even Azazel."
The cruel eyes vanished, along with Belasco's cage, leaving Kurt with a sensation of indescribable lightness tingling right in the center of his brain. His world gave a sickening lurch, the fairground around him spinning woozily before everything snapped to black…
The response from the school was overwhelming.
Nightcrawler had been presumed dead so long, even the older students knew of him only as a name on a campus building, from mission case studies and stories the teachers told, from the memorial holograph hanging in the mansion's Hall of Heroes. The rumor of his return spread around the school like an urban legend; everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of the man who had endured a total mind-wipe and, not only survived, but managed to crawl his way back to sanity...and his friends...
For the first week after Kurt regained consciousness, Hank and Jean had to post extra security in the medbay just to keep the nosier students from disturbing his rest. They moved him to a small, private room and, before long, the walls and tables were papered with cards and letters from former teammates who had retired from the X-Men and scattered around the globe. Streams of visitors brought cheerfully colored flowers and sparkly balloons...including Anna and Paul, who were thrilled to discover the unconscious demon they'd landed on had turned out to be the Kurt Wagner, the fallen hero for whom their dormitory wing had been named.
While he was still too weak to leave his medicot, Ororo stuck by his side day and night, only leaving to teach the odd class or to sneak a few treats from the kitchen to share after dinner. At first, Kurt was disoriented, confused. Everything that had happened in his mind with Belasco and Jean, Charles and Ororo, was like a dream he could only half-remember, or even believe. The Professor assured them both that such memory loss was natural and even expected. After all, Kurt hadn't been conscious when the battle took place, as he and Ororo had been.
What Kurt did recall was how brave Ororo had been to approach him in that schizoid state up on the roof of the cathedral, and how she had been there to support him at the end, holding his newly reformed hand through the worst of his ordeal. Her face had been the first thing he'd seen upon regaining consciousness. In the haze of bright florescent light, she had seemed an angel to his exhausted eyes, her snowy hair shining like a halo around her face and shoulders, her smile alight with relief, and joy.
The sight had touched his heart, the depth of emotion in her smile leaving him lost for words...
When Hank finally declared Kurt well enough to leave the medbay and move into quarters of his own, Ororo was there to help him take his first steps on his newly restored feet.
And, some months later, when Professor Xavier called an assembly of the entire school to officially welcome Nightcrawler back to the team, Storm was at his side, her eyes glowing with pride as she watched the packed auditorium rise for a standing ovation.
Now, they stood together in the darkened greenhouse, the light of the half-moon filtering through the leaves of the fig tree they had planted together so many, many years before. Keeping his golden eyes fixed on hers, Kurt slowly sank to one knee, somehow finding the courage to ask her the question that had been burning in his heart since before he'd ever heard the name Belasco.
Ororo stared for a long moment. The moonlight limning her lovely face brought tears to his eyes as he watched her nod, somberly pressing her warm forehead to his as she whispered her acceptance over and over again...
Pulling back gently, Kurt rose to his feet and held out the ring he'd been concealing in the spade of his tail, slipping it gently on her finger. Catching her tearing eyes with his, he touched the shining silver of her hair with tender fingers, and her brilliant smile banished any lingering doubts from his heart.
There was no need for words as the soft breeze from the open doors rustled the leaves above their heads, drawing them closer until their lips finally met.
This kiss was the delicate droplet that heralded the rising flood; the rich scent of rain before the storm. It was an instant of perfect joy, clear and sharp and warm. Their tears mingled as they fell, their breaths laced with laughter as the full realization of their victory at last hit home.
Spurred by Ororo's dedication and love, Kurt Wagner had finally found his redemption. His Beatrice had guided him home.
The End
Stay tuned for Azzy's Epilogue - coming soon! :)
