'And all I ever learned from love
Was how to shoot someone who outdrew you.'
- 'Hallelujah' by Jeff Buckley
Heero's head snapped up as he heard Trowa's agonized cry, leaping from Logan's arms to skid into the hallway, narrowly avoiding colliding with Rogue. Duo came up the hallway, loading his gun with perfect, clean movements, glancing once, sadly, at Rogue, before he followed Heero up the stairs. They met Wufei at the top of the stairs, and Heero noticed the thin, bloodless line of his lips with apprehension.
This was bad, then. He took a breath and squared his shoulders, opening the door to their room.
Trowa lay in the fetal position in the corner, golden fur rippling up and down his body, thin form shaking with the ceaseless wailing that dripped, unheeded, from bleeding lips. Their room was in shambles; thick claw marks raked over every available surface, golden tufts of fur, crimson-stained, littering the floor. Duo's Lamb of God and Manson posters hung bravely onto the wall, ripped into pieces by the mateless lion.
Duo dropped to his knees beside Trowa, hauling the larger frame into his lap. Trowa didn't resist, and indeed seemed boneless with shock.
"Trowa? Tro?" Duo's voice was ragged with fright, worse with each word. "Trowa? Trowa, wake up!" Wufei sat beside him, fingers combing through the dark hair, as he said,
"I don't think he can hear you, Duo." Trowa shivered, the horrible keening going on and on and on-
It was suddenly cut off, and his blank eyes slid closed. Heero was across the room in a moment, twisted claws held to Jean's pulsing jugular.
"What did you do to him?" Jean stuttered, Scott's hands went to the visor- Wufei immediately had a gun trained on him- and Heero's claws pressed closer, staring into the green eyes dilated with terror. Skin cells split beneath the pressure, interrupting mitosis and replacing it with torn and dying cells, capillaries cracking open and the liquid life trickling from the wound.
"I just- I- I made him sleep!" Her voice cracked upward, and Heero was satisfied. He spun away and crouched at Trowa's side, cupping the thin face in his hands, thumb stroking over the sharp angles of cheekbones. He felt Logan's callused hand land on his shoulder, squeezing once. Heero leaned into the touch, wanting to escape the throbbing void in his chest where Quatre's presence had been.
"Logan. Where is Xavier?"
"He's talking to- holy shit!"
"Tell me." Duo was
breathing in sharp, hitching gasps, each breath seeming to be ripped
bodily from him. "Her name is X23," Logan said. "She's a
female clone of me, created to be a weapon. A few years younger then
you." Heero tensed. "She's escaped from a man named Trask.
Scott, tell them who Trask is. I have to go deal with X23." Heero
grasped Logan's hand momentarily, and then turned back to Trowa.
"Trask is the leader of the Friends of Humanity. He wants to
destroy all mutants, and he has the money and resources to do so. He
captures mutants and puts them in camps, or performs experiments on
them." Heero listened with half an ear.
Someone screamed outside, and Trowa's eyes snapped open. He breathed,
"Quatre." And then he was up and running, golden fur slashing across his skin as he flowed into the form of a lion, mane flowing behind him. The others followed, but Trowa left them behind, leaping out of the mansion and running, grace given form, across the snowy yard to the gates, where a small group had gathered.
Heero followed, legs pushing against the ground as he sucked in great gouts of air, trying to prevent Trowa from seeing this perversion, this colder-then-ice blade that hewed their hearts from them-
He stopped, sparing not a glance for Jamie, dry-heaving near him, and stared up at the gates, aching to reach for Trowa, who sat, still as death, at his knees, now human.
A blond head, sunlight hair encrusted with stiff brown, faced toward the darkening sky, the stump of the neck impaled upon the points of the gate. Aquamarine eyes gazed blankly down towards them, the gray fog of death having not encroached upon them yet. Blood, fresh and coppery-smelling, trickled down the cold iron, steaming softly in the freezing air.
Trowa's scream was so loud that it shattered the windows.
Duo howled with black rage, wings of shadow stretching out to encompass the Institute.
"What the FUCK is wrong with the world! It's not enough that we gave up our sanity and our innocence and every goddamn bit of life we had: now we have to lose Quatre!" He fell to his knees, and pounded his fists into the ground, uncaring of the loud splintering of bones and knuckles, the blood that ran from where the nails had pulled free.
"We didn't ask for this! We didn't ask for anything more then death!" He looked up, seeing Rogue staring at him with a kind of horrified pity in her eyes. "This isn't our fight!" he screamed brokenly at her. "You fucking hypocrites! You can't even fight your own goddamn battles!"
She came closer, and Duo scrambled away.
"Duo?"
"Don't- don't touch me," he said. "I just want to help," she said miserably, careful not to look at the macabre spectacle above them. Jean and Scott were shepherding the gathered people away, leaving Rogue, Logan, Wufei, Heero, and Duo to comfort Trowa.
"You didn't want to help me when I needed you most!" he spat, each word dripping with enough venom to kill. "I know!" she yelled back, trying to override the blind hatred in his voice. "I- I-" her breath hitched in her chest, "I know, God, I know! I'm sorry! I'm so, so sorry, but I can't do anything!"
"Goddamn you!" Rogue burst into tears at his hissed words and threw herself forward, wrapping her arms around his neck. Duo crushed her thin body to himself, murmuring into her smoke-scented hair. "I don't understand," he murmured, "We- we saved our colonies! We saved the world twice over, but it's not enough! Why- why isn't it enough?" he said, his voice exhausted and cracking with sorrow.
"I don't know. I don't know." They rocked together in the snow, and Duo cried bitter tears that froze as soon as they hit Rogue's poison skin. 'Just for a while,' Duo thought, rage lighting a roaring flame in his heart, 'Just for these small minutes, let me indulge in grief.'
Heero stared helplessly at Trowa, who sat, broken, at his feet, Quatre's head cradled in his arms as he murmured softly to it.
"Oh, love, we'll be fine. I've got you, and no one will ever hurt you again, because you're mine and I'm yours, and that's all I ever needed to know," he crooned. "My love, my Quatre." His voice cracked as he ran a pale hand over crusted skin, palming the eyelids shut, covering the gray gaze.
Heero knelt at Trowa's side and held his arms out, sliding out of his shirt.
"M-may I see him?" Trowa closed his eyes, passing the head over. Heero swallowed as he wrapped it in the cloth shirt, feeling a foreign scream welling in his throat, even as he fought it down.
Trowa, now splintered and shattered open, his traumatized spirit laid out for everyone to see, had no such compunctions.
He threw his head back and wailed, the sound tearing from his throat with a raw and liquid sound, the noise of blood and tears intermingled. The wail morphed into a raging roar, and from there into an unholy, wet crackling scream of grief, somewhere between the whimpers of an animal caught in a trap, the laughter of a madman, and the sobbing of a widow.
Heero held Quatre to him, eyes clenched shut as he fought against the tears. Wufei caressed the limp lock of blond hair, cold anger firming his brow and hardening his eyes. Duo sobbed ceaselessly onto Rogue's shoulder.
Trowa continued to scream.
"How are they?"
"See for yourself." Jubilee moved aside so that Bobby could look in through the window to the garage. "How's Jamie?" she asked, shooting out a few sparks idly. "Completely screwed up, the poor kid. He can't stop crying; Beast had to give him a sedative."
"I'm not surprised," she said grimly. "How long have they been like that?" Bobby said, his voice hushed. "Couple hours." She knew what she would see, were she to look in the window. They were all holding each other, the- ewww!- head nestled between them, their eyes as cold as winter and as sharp as steel.
"They're saying something, now!" Bobby bounced at her side, staring. Jubilee moved to stare avidly in through the frosted windowpane, gazing at the cold, sorrowful group, lying among the rusty bikes, Logan's motorcycle, and Scott's cherry-red convertible.
The shadow-controller- Duo?- moved sluggishly, and finally said,
"We can't die yet."
"No." Heero, now. "We will stay. We will fight, we will kill, and we will die. This is not our fight, but it was brought to us. We can't abandon it yet. When we've fought, when we've killed Quatre's killers, when we're done, when it's all over…"
"Then we can die," Trowa said, his voice shattered and hoarse from the screaming- they had only made him stop by giving him the head back-, his teeth bared, wolflike. Duo sighed.
"Look at us. We won a war, and now we're fighting another. We were the Lost Generation at home, the generation that had been butchered and damned, and now these fucking children are going to become their own Lost Generation."
Heero shrugged listlessly. "Then they will be tempered into adults, or fall. There is nothing we can do about that."
Jubilee, watching from the window, her breath steaming on the windowpane and snow falling around her, shivered.
Trowa stood before the pyre tree, gazing up at the cold sky, purple as a spreading bruise, with branches dark as veins slashing through it. There was a cold within him, a freezing void empty as space and colder then winter. His arms tightened around the precious burden in his arms, fingers stroking the golden hair. He had washed the blood from his lover's hair, wrapped the bleeding neck in gauze, and covered him in a silken cloth, in preparation.
Duo finished pouring gasoline on the wood, the clear fluid running off the wood and soaking into the snow. Normally, wood-burning fires weren't hot enough to cremate bodies; however, when you had a fire-controller on your side…
"It's ready," Duo said softly. Trowa drew back the cloth and stared at the pale, well-beloved face, the pink lips that had been so bitable- the eyes that had been warmth and light in a world of cold and shadow- the face that had been love. He lowered his head and touched lips to lips, his own bodily warmth sucked up by the cold of death. Fleetingly, he remembered a line from a play called Salome that he had seen performed in Vienna.
'Ah! I have kissed your mouth, Iokanaan, I have kissed your mouth. Your lips had a bitter taste. Was it the taste of blood?...Perhaps it was the taste of love. They say that love has a bitter taste… But what does it matter? What does it matter? I have kissed your mouth, Iokanaan, I have kissed your mouth.'
But he tasted neither blood nor love, only cold death. Softly, he drew away, and gazed with cold eyes on the pyre. Pulling the cloth back to hide Quatre, he laid him on the pyre and stepped away.
'There is nothing I can do.' Closing his eyes, he nodded to Wufei.
Flame as orange as a dragon's eye sprang from nothing, roaring and thundering as it sucked oxygen into itself, leaping into the sky. Red light flickered around them, reflecting off the snow and seeming to make the land look as though it was soaked in blood. Heero and Duo were standing close together, facing outward and guarding them. Wufei trembled with the effort of keeping the fire at such a high temperature, the flames changing hues to a white as pale as stars.
Trowa stared at the dark shape within the flames, watching the golden hair catch fire and curl tightly, limned in light for a moment, the skin char and blacken, sloughing off the high cheekbones he had loved to stroke, the perfect nose he had loved to bite playfully.
The warmth of the flames didn't touch him, a cold, desolate figure standing alone before the fire. Quatre's skull cracked, held- still as ice- and then crumbled in a cloud of dust. Wufei sighed hoarsely, lowering his hands as the fire subsided, becoming orange once more, and then disappeared.
A tearing sob caught in Trowa's throat as he fell to his knees, digging his fingers into the mud formed by the melted snow. He began to cry, helpless, useless to save his lover, helpless to bring the one he loved more then life itself back.
'There is nothing I can do.'
'Nothing…'
Heero twirled the knife in his fingers, the blade sending spangles of light across the room. Trowa perched on the corner of the couch, Quatre's gun and javelins slung across his back. He felt Logan's arm tighten around his shoulders, and he leaned into his side, staring unseeingly at the slender brunette girl in front of them. Wrapped in a tattered robe, with a cup of hot chocolate clenched in frozen hands, she spoke in a rusty tone, as though her voice was mostly unused.
"Trask has a nuclear warhead. He will attempt to detonate it soon; I am unaware of the precise time. I do know that he wishes to destroy all of Bayville; of course, the nuclear fallout will be significant, and it will destroy New York City as well as the surrounding area."
Heero almost smiled: it was almost as if they (Logan, him, and this X 23) were a family of sorts, united by a legacy of pain and metal. But no matter.
"Was it Trask who killed Quatre?" Duo was cold and focused, his face bloodless with rage and anticipation. Wufei and the odd white-haired boy were tightly entwined, hands clutching each other.
X 23 inclined her head regally.
"It fits his methods." Duo grinned wolfishly. "Excellent. Your goals and ours align, then." Xavier moved, his wheelchair whirring as he turned to face them.
"We have to have a plan. We'll divide into three groups: one to find the plane and take it down, one to find Trask and capture him, and one to free all the mutants kept there. Remember, we must not kill. To do so makes us little better then the ones we fight."
His eyes flickered significantly to the pilots. Heero felt a low snicker rumble through the chest behind him, and said dryly,
"Indeed. Let us leave them alive and humiliated, so that they may regroup and attempt to kill us again." The Professor stared at him. Rogue moved restlessly.
"I concur."
"Rogue! Do you want to become a killer?" That was Jean, sounding scandalized. "Of course not! How could you want to do something like that, especially when you've seen what… it…" she trailed off apologetically.
"What it did to us?" Duo said with a grim smile. "Yes." Duo smiled at her, and then turned his attention back to the Professor. "We are going to kill Trask, You cannot stop us, and any attempt to do so will lose you any chance at our help, which you need."
"Why?" Wufei let out a harsh bark of laughter, startling everyone.
"Are you a fool, or just naïve? We have experience in covert operations, experience in hacking and explosives, not to mention we are the only ones here ruthless enough to kill with surety. Without us, you will be butchered. I cannot say I am happy with the fact that there will be others along, but I suppose you deem it necessary."
"But-" Duo exploded,
"You're fighting a goddamn war! Did you possibly think there weren't going to be casualties! You fucking idiots! You fight or you die! There is no other choice." His voice softened, becoming laden with sorrow. "You are tempered into a weapon, or collapse under the pressure. God, did you think that we like killing? No, we hate it, we hated every goddamned hellish second of it, but we'd do it all over again, because It. Was. Necessary."
Xavier pressed his fingertips to his forehead. "Very well. You five have permission to kill." Duo's lips peeled back from his teeth in a feral snarl. "We don't need your fucking permission."
Logan stared at the small, desolate figure standing on the edge of the cliff, dark hair whipping about in the cold wind. There was a gleam of moonlight on metal, and he could see the grave, cold blue eyes in the twisted reflection off Heero's claws.
He came up behind Heero, and wrapped his arms around the slender shoulders. Heero retracted his claws and leaned into him, glancing upward. Logan gazed at him, saying nothing.
"Trowa will die tomorrow."
We might all die. That knowledge hung between them, unspoken, even as Logan tightened his grip, wanting to hold this diamond-brittle-and-hard young man to him forever, keeping him safe from the specter of battle and nuclear apocalypse before them. Logan looked out at the lights of Bayville, stretched out beneath them like grains of sand strewn across a black blanket.
"Logan?" He looked down, and froze at the quiet, heartbreaking half-smile Heero was giving him, his voice softer then normal, almost unable to force the words out. "Would you kiss me? I'd like to know what it's like, in case I-" Logan cut him off ruthlessly, stooping swiftly and sealing his lips over Heero's. Thick fingers tangled in Heero's hair, tilting his head back.
He tasted like smoke, leather, and blood. Like sin.
Logan liked it. He felt slender, callused fingers slide up his back, locking around his ribs, the inherent, wrong-wrong-wrong strength in them gentled, pulled back for him. He growled into the open mouth beneath him, tongue twisting to tangle with Heero's. Blue eyes drifted shut, and he wrapped his free arm around the slender hips, lifting and settling the long limbs around him as he backed up, letting Heero rest his weight on the Harley he had given Logan.
He ground his hips forward, meeting a matching hardness, and laughed hoarsely, separating their mouths. "Nice to know I've still got it, kid." Heero smirked with kiss-swollen lips and craned his head, staring at the rising sun. Logan dove forward again, hand insinuating itself under Heero's shirt, running across scars.
Heero shuddered and hissed into his mouth, arms locking even tighter.
"Hey, lovebirds!" Duo's brazen voice rang out from where he sat astride his own bike. "We've got to get suited up. You can finish that later! We'll be doing the same, huh?" He grinned at Remy, sitting behind him, who looked green.
"Sure. Sure, mon ami. Please don't go so fast, next time."
Logan felt his happiness melt away like snow before a flame.
There might not be a next time. For any of us.
