A Walk Through Niflheim: Part One

by Alicia McKenzie

Dirt was dirt. Except when it was dead and gray like ashes. Ashes instead of dirt. The ashes of the earth. Laughter broke the silence, laughter that sounded like something breaking into a thousand pieces, and he clawed at the dirt frantically, trying to forget that he was the one laughing.

Dig. He had to dig. Dig a hole through to China. Find a rabbit hole to fall through. He wondered if there were any rabbits anymore, and if there were, if he'd recognize them. Little shift-rabbits. Maybe they would have colorless fur, and blood-red eyes, and fangs--

Hands fell on his shoulders and he gave a hoarse cry, trying to pull away, to go back to digging. He didn't want to be touched. But the hands slid downwards, strong slender arms wrapping themselves around him and hugging him tightly. Warm breath on the back of his neck, a soft voice 'shhing' him gently until he stopped struggling and knelt there, passive and rigid in the circle of her embrace.

"What are you doing?" Domino asked gently.

He knew that voice. That was the voice she used when he was scaring her badly enough that she didn't want to yell at him.

"Nathan, talk to me."

"I'm digging," he croaked, and made the mistake of looking upwards.

Charles Xavier stared down at him from where he was hanging on the telephone pole. Or maybe it wasn't a telephone pole. It was wood, tall and weathered, and Nathan couldn't pay too much attention to it because Charles had trapped him with his eyes. Dead eyes, dead and glassy and staring. He was like a scarecrow, Nathan thought wildly, a scarecrow with ragged clothes and no flesh on his bones. A dead bald crucified scarecrow--

Why are you staring at me?

"You're the one staring at me," Nathan almost whimpered.

The corpse raised a bloodied eyebrow. Take me down, it said with a rictus of a grin.

"I will, I promise--"

Don't leave me hanging here in the sun.

"There is no sun!" Nathan almost screamed. The sky was as gray as the dirt. The ash. Everything was ash.

The corpse sighed mournfully. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, all dreams die--

"Shut UP!"

Domino murmured something he couldn't make out and hugged him more tightly. "You're digging a grave for him?" she asked quietly.

Nathan laughed again, wildly, and the thick ashy air splintered at the sound. It was easier to breathe, suddenly. "We can't just leave him there," he rasped.

"Okay. Let me help."

***

She had liked the savannah. It was warm and alive, and frighteningly unique for that reason. 'Normal' shifts were more rare these days, she thought. That wasn't to say they hadn't come across a number of very strange, if pleasant locales on their expeditions out of the Oasis, but sometimes she just wanted a world she could recognize, one that felt familiar. The sun in its proper place, a wind that smelled right, and colors that didn't make her nauseous with the wrongness of them.

But all good things inevitably came to an end. So she'd taken Nate's hand and walked through the border to the next shift, thinking about the song she'd heard the children singing the night before they'd left Oasis the last time.

'Is it safe to cross the line?
If you die will you be mine?
What's on the other side, can you tell?
Is it Eden or is it hell?'

And they'd stepped through, out of the savannah, into hell. A hell. Domino had seen lots of different kinds of hells, in the shifts, but this was a form it often took, a gray and blasted wasteland, barren of life. She'd sucked in a breath and nearly choked on the thick, bitter-tasting air.

She'd been coughing still when she heard Nate curse, his voice strangely stricken. Looking up through watering eyes, instinctively falling into a defensive position, she'd seen a rag-clad figure kneeling in front of what looked like a telephone pole, or the mast of a ship, and another rag-clad figure hanging there, a hanging man--

"It's all right," the kneeling man babbled between sobs, in a voice thick with an accent that Domino couldn't identify for a moment. "It will be all right now, Charles--"

Charles? Not--

Nate was breathing raggedly beside her, projecting something between fear and shock, emotions that grated at her mind like the dimly remembered sound of nails on a chalkboard. Ghostly afterimages she couldn't put together into any coherent whole fluttered at the edges of her vision and Domino shook her head to clear it, not understanding what was going on, why he was doing this--

Get out of my mind, Nathan!

"Now that you're dead, it will be all right--someone has to die, to fix things--"

"Magneto," Nate said, in a voice that hardly seemed like his own. "Erik. Erik, stop--"

The man turned his head towards them, and Domino stiffened as she saw the unearthly glow building around him. "Nate," she snarled softly, but Nate was frozen, and there wasn't much that she could do against Magneto. A gun, a gun, my kingdom for a gun--a PLASTIC gun--

Magneto flicked a hand at her, almost dismissively, and Domino staggered backwards, gasping for air. Her heart lurched in her chest, and her knees buckled. The blasted ground came up to meet her, seemingly in slow motion--

And she felt the edge of the telekinetic blast as Nate snapped out of it and went on the offensive. She tried to scramble back to her feet, to get out of the figurative line of fire, but her legs wouldn't hold her. She had to settle for crawling. By the time she'd gotten a few precious feet between her and them, they'd stopped using their powers and started fighting with the shifts.

It always happened this way, when the Twelve fought. No matter their powers - and most of them were hellishly powerful, you couldn't deny that - it always turned into this, this wrestling with reality--

Shiftlines tore open all around them, even erupting up out of the ground, and Domino scrunched down into a ball, trying to shield her head and stay as small as she could, trusting to her luck and Nate to protect her from the worst of it. The wasteland was ripping itself apart, she thought faintly as the ground heaved beneath her. Oh, well. She hadn't liked this shift in the first place--

There was a scream, abruptly cut off. Then silence, and the world seemed to settle, the air losing its sharpness, the sensation of twisting fading. Domino raised her head tentatively, and exhaled on a sigh as she saw Nate standing there, staring into a rippling shift wall.

"You okay?" she called, still on her hands and knees.

Nate didn't look at her. He stretched out a hand towards the shift wall, and it writhed like a living thing. She half-expected it to scream, but it didn't. It retreated soundlessly across the broken ground, like a wave retreating from the beach.

There was no sign of Magneto.

"Are you okay?" Nate asked in a soft, strained voice.

Domino took a deep breath, and managed to haul herself to her feet. The sensation of weakness was fading rapidly. Magneto had gotten in a good one, but nothing incapacitating, from the feel of it. "Fine," she said slowly. "You?"

He gave a harsh, unsteady laugh. "I'll--live."

She went to his side, moving slowly. There was something in his posture she didn't like. He looked like he was about to break and run, and she'd chased him through enough shiftlines before that she really didn't want to repeat the ordeal. "You didn't have any choice," she said softly, reaching down the link. It was cold, like something had coated it in ice. She could feel pain at the other end, like a fire raging in the distance, but he wasn't letting her through, wasn't allowing her close enough to even begin to try and soothe it. "He attacked first."

"I always kill him, though. Always," Nate said in a cracked voice, and raised his eyes slowly to the hanging corpse. The crucified corpse, Domino thought sickly, looking up at it too. It was amazing that it was still there, with what had just happened in its immediate vicinity. But then, the horrors always endured.

She coughed to clear her throat, and looked back at Nate. "It is Xavier, isn't it?" she asked hoarsely.

Nate kept staring at him. At it. All the color was gone from his face, and beads of sweat were standing out on his forehead. He was trembling, very slightly, and Domino reached out, laying a hand on his shoulder.

He spat something in Askani that sounded as despairing as it did foul, and dropped to his knees without another word, digging at the hard ground with his bare hands.

Domino reflected that it was turning into one of those days.

***

Franklin was busy trying to deepen one of the wells when the sound of shouting broke his concentration. He looked up irritably, reflecting that he'd been trying to get time enough to do this for the last several days, and someone or something kept interrupting him.

But as he reached mentally for the source of the shouting, he sensed alarm, sharp and urgent, shot through with fear. Franklin grimaced and broke into a fast jog, heading unerringly for the center of the disturbance.

Just behind the bar, there was a group coming through the shield wall. Well, coming through was a tame way to put it. Patrick, Jake, and Domino were actually trying to drag a struggling Nate through into the Oasis. Nate was shouting in Askani - what, Franklin didn't know, but he sounded utterly hysterical - and lashing out wildly with his telekinesis. One of the recycling bins set against the wall of the bar went flying, scattering its contents everywhere.

He had to do something before someone got hurt. Why it hadn't happened already, Franklin didn't know. Unless Dom's luck was protecting all three of them, somehow, and there was no telling how long that might last. Nate shoved Patrick away and started to turn, apparently determined to get back through the shield wall even though Jake and Dom were still hanging onto him. Franklin grimaced.

#Nate. Enough,# he sent, and clamped down on Nathan's mind a little harder than he'd intended. Nathan just--folded, sliding limply to the ground. It all happened so quickly that Dom and Jake didn't have the chance to react, and the three of them wound up in a tangled heap.

Domino extricated herself, cursing like a particularly foul-mouthed sailor, and gave Patrick a livid look. "Nice way to hold onto him, tough guy!" she snarled, and Patrick raised a defensive hand, prudently backing away a step.

Franklin trotted over just as Jake managed to get out from under Nathan and sit up. "Ow," the burly hunter said and then sighed, rubbing at his arm. "He weighs a ton."

"No shit," Domino growled, and looked up at Franklin, her eyes flashing dangerously. "You couldn't have given us a little warning?"

"Sorry," Franklin murmured, and knelt down beside her. "What was he doing?" he asked, laying a hand on Nathan's forehead and concentrating, "Damn," he muttered, "this is an awful lot of residue. You were only out a few days."

Domino gave a laugh that sounded almost as wild as Nathan's raving had a minute ago. "He thinks we buried Xavier alive."

Franklin felt his stomach twist. "I won't ask," he muttered faintly. Not yet, at least. He always got around to getting the complete account, but maybe he'd wait a while for this one. He closed his eyes and concentrated on wiping the temporal residue from Nathan's system.

It took nearly five minutes. Maybe it was a good thing he'd knocked Nate out cold, after all.

***

His head hurt. Then again, he was used to waking up with headaches, although usually it was because of a hangover. This felt different. This felt like one of those out-in-the-shifts-too-long headaches, the sort of headache he got after Franklin scraped his synapses clean.

"Welcome back, asshole."

Domino was lying beside him. Nathan clawed irritably at the blanket covering him, wanting it off. It was too hot, and the air was crackling with--something, energy. Shifts hammering at the shield wall again, probably.

The realization that they were back didn't come as much of a surprise. The last--little while? several days? was very hazy. Not that he wasn't used to that. But if they were back, and Dom was all right - and she did feel all right, if exasperated, judging by the link - that was good.

"You owe Jake an apology," she pronounced, pushing herself up on an elbow and staring down at him, her hair falling loosely around her face.

"Why?" he muttered, shifting. He felt stiff, like he'd been in the same position for a while. For a moment, he toyed with the idea of asking Dom how long he'd been asleep, but discarded the idea almost immediately. It didn't matter. He probably didn't want to know, anyway. "Tell me I didn't do anything I'm going to have to make serious amends for."

"I suppose not. You fell on him, that's all."

Well, that wasn't so bad. "That's all?" he muttered, closing his eyes with an involuntary sigh. Why had he woken up, anyway? He was so tired. "So long as I didn't kill anyone."

As if summoned by his words, a face flashed through his mind. A memory. A familiar face. Thin and angular, dirty white hair framing it, blazing blue eyes--

Nathan shuddered, his eyes snapping open. Bile rose at the back of his throat and he pushed himself up to a sitting position, ignoring Dom's grimace. "Shit," he rasped, running a shaking hand through his hair. "Shit," he repeated, softly but still emphatically.

Erik. He'd killed Erik, again. Nausea churned in the pit of his stomach, and he crossed his arms across his chest, trying not to double over. I am not going to be sick. I am NOT going to be sick. The mantra didn't help much. The memories were coming back, reassembling themselves.

It had happened again. He took a deep, shuddering breath. Why should he be surprised? It always happened that way. He'd never found even a semi-sane Erik, and they were always so dangerous, so willing to kill--

The memory of Charles hanging there dead hit him like a punch to the gut and he did double over this time. "Did--did we bury him?" he choked out, hugging himself tightly. He couldn't remember that part yet. Not clearly. He remembered seeing Charles like that, and wanting very badly to turn around and run--

Domino moved across the bed, and he jumped as she rubbed his back gently. "Yeah, we did," she said softly. "You wouldn't leave until we did." She hesitated for a moment, but then continued in the same calm, reasonable voice. "We started back, but you got it into your head somehow that we'd--buried Xavier alive." She gave a faint, humorless chuckle. "It turned into a hell of a trip, let's just put it that way. If we hadn't run into Patrick and Jake out on a hunt, I'm not sure I would have been able to get you back here."

Nathan didn't remember that, but it provoked enough of an uneasy feeling that he knew it had to be true. Shuddering, he sank his face into his hands. "Oath," he muttered shakily. "I want to get drunk."

Domino sighed. "Your answer to everything," she murmured, scooting backwards on the bed and leaning against the headboard. Nathan glared at her a bit blearily and her mouth quirked in something that very decidedly wasn't a smile. "Come on, old man. Indulge my curiosity."

"Dom--"

"You overreact every time you have to kill a Magneto. Why?"

"That's none of your business," he growled uneasily. Domino didn't pry for information like that very often, but when she did, she tended to be persistent. She wasn't getting this, though. There was too much else wound up in it, too many memories that he'd been very careful never to share with her. "I don't like having to kill any of them."

She made a soft, derisive noise. "No shit. But that's not it, Nate. You know what I mean."

He did. But he'd be damned if he was going to dwell on it. Straightening, Nathan stared bleakly at the wall, then jumped as Domino moved soundlessly across the bed and laid her hands on his shoulders.

"Okay, screw this. I don't feel like getting drunk," she said almost conversationally. "Or watching you brood." He shifted irritably, and her grip tightened. "I get tired of it sometimes. You know, you didn't say a word to me for four days while we made our way back here?"

Nathan swivelled around, meeting her eyes. "Is that what you want?" he asked roughly. "To talk?"

"I want--" She hesitated, then smiled. It was a wry, almost mischievous smile, and Nathan sighed as she grabbed the collar of his shirt, the fabric twisting in her grasp. "A nice lengthy conversation," she said, leaning closer. "About all the things you do and don't do. Everything about you that pisses me off."

"Really."

"Yeah. One of these days. But not tonight."

***

Eventually, she kicked him out of bed. Nathan supposed that had been inevitable. They'd both been too tired to go for a new record, but unlike her, he hadn't been able to sleep. He'd tossed and turned until she'd pushed him onto the floor and told him to go walk it off.

Walk it off. There wasn't anywhere to walk, unless you went in circles, around and around the inside of the shield wall. And that was too much like pacing. He'd tried it before, and it didn't work. Plus people looked at you strangely.

So he'd gone to the garden instead, to try and write a journal entry. It was quiet at this time of the 'night' - as far as he could tell, he was the only one in here - and that was what he needed, he supposed. Quiet time. Alone with his thoughts.

Nathan gave a hollow laugh. It had been harder than he'd expected, to put it all down in black and white. Writing it down--changed it. Made it real, in a way that the feverishly vivid memories weren't.

But it was done. He'd reread it sometime, just to remind himself that it hadn't been a nice, harmless nightmare. Swallowing hard, Nathan carefully put the lid back on his pen and clipped it onto the water-stained front cover of the notebook.

Erik's mind had been completely open, with no trace of the formidable natural defenses Nathan was used to finding in him. This one had been too far gone, he supposed. Madness made you vulnerable. Strong and vulnerable at the same time.

Nathan gritted his teeth and laid the notebook down on the grass beside him before he dropped it. He clenched his hands into fists at his sides, trying to ignore how they were shaking. He shouldn't be dwelling on this, but he'd seen too much in this Erik's mind.

He'd seen why Erik had done it. It hadn't been simple murder, of course. It had been a sacrifice.

Now that you're dead, it will be all right--someone has to die, to fix things--

Nathan swallowed again and clutched at the grass beneath him, trying very hard not to pull it up by its roots. But he felt like he had to reassure himself that he was still on the ground. He felt--so strange, almost dizzy, and he didn't think it was just the headache.

It all made too much sense, that was the problem. Erik had killed Charles, crucified him in the middle of the wasteland, and he'd done it--out of love, because someone had to die. Someone had to see--

You had to make a sacrifice, to see clearly. Nathan ran a shaking hand across the techno-organic side of his face, trying vainly to recall whatever was currently thrashing around in his long-term memory, trying to get his attention. Something about eyes. About sacrifice, about giving something up, enduring pain that let you achieve a new level of understanding--

But it didn't do you any good if you were dead, did it? He laughed harshly and jerked his hand away from his face. Understanding these things bothered him. Too often there was truth in madness. He knew there were things he'd forgotten, things he'd learned when he'd spent too much time out in the shifts.

But it all got so vague, once Franklin cleaned the residue from his system. So vague, so fragmentary, and whenever he tried to put the pieces together, they called him paranoid--

"Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday," Nathan muttered doggedly. Something--"Wednesday," he said, softly, but determinedly. "Wednesday ." Something Dom had told him. Something about--

Something tugged at his mind, and Nathan shuddered as his vision blurred. For a split-second, the garden changed, all the green bleeding into white. Snow, Nate thought, and nearly jumped out of his skin as the garden went back to normal.

Lovely. Hallucinations were generally a sign that Franklin had missed something. After all, it had never snowed in the Oasis, and it wasn't liable to start. Franklin kept the weather stable for a good reason; they needed all the food they could grow. But Nathan felt a strange ache in his chest as he got up.

He'd missed snow. It had been rare, in his time, but he'd seen enough of it in the twentieth century to know that he--liked it. Maybe not the cold, per se, but there was something about the textured silence of falling snow, something almost soothing. And the world was a weirdly beautiful place when it was shrouded in crystal and white--

The flash hit him again, and he staggered, nearly going to his knees. "What the fuck?" he muttered, straightening as the air shimmered around him. Falling snow. This wasn't possible. He reached out a shaking hand to touch it, but it froze, then faded, and the atmosphere returned to normal.

Okay. Definitely time to go find Franklin. Either he'd missed a lot of residue this time around, or he was losing his grip on the weather. Trying to decide which would be worse, Nathan rubbed at his eyes and started to turn--

--and stopped as he looked across the garden at the shield wall. It was rippling, like a gauzy silver curtain in a gentle breeze. Wide-eyed, Nathan took a deep, unsteady breath and stared at it fixedly. Nothing to worry about. The shield wall did do things like this sometimes. It wasn't a real wall, after all--

--but it was calling to him. Or something was. Something out there, beyond the shields.

It wanted him to come to it, whatever it was, he thought with a flash of sudden clarity. That was the tug he'd felt. A summons of some sort.

"This is insane," he muttered faintly, moving across the garden towards the shield wall. He'd just gotten back in, from a bad trip. He needed a break before he went running back out into the chaos. He needed--

--he needed to see what the hell this was before it threw any more hallucinations at him. For all he knew it was a telepathic refugee of some variety, sensing the Oasis but afraid to come in.

The prospect cheered him up considerably. It made sense. They'd had people linger outside the shield wall lots of times, and if there was a telepath caught in a hostile winter shift out there, they might very well be projecting their distress.

All right. He'd just step out, see who it was, and drag them back in before they froze. Simple. Not the most diplomatic way to approach things, but he wasn't in the mood to be overly patient with a case of nerves tonight, especially when whoever it was was intruding on his mind, making him see things that weren't there. He did quite enough of that on his own--

Nathan stepped through, and into a howling blizzard. Instinctively, he reached out behind him, to keep in contact with the shield wall, so that he'd have a little warning if this shift started to move.

And the wall wasn't there.

to be continued...

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