Disclaimer in first part.
A Walk Through Niflheim: Part Two
The shield wall wasn't there. Nathan's mind went blank with shock, but he was already turning, his hands reaching out, fumbling to find the wall. This wasn't possible. The shift couldn't have moved already. He'd just stepped out farther than he'd intended, that was all.
The attempt to reassure himself fell a little flat, because he couldn't even sense the energy of the wall. He should have been able to feel it, if it was anywhere in the vicinity. "Not good," Nathan muttered bleakly, and swayed as the wind howled around him. The snow was a world removed from being soft and fluffy; it was sharp chips of ice, being driven violently by the gale-force winds. He raised a hand to his face, half-expecting it to come away bloody.
Not that he would have been able to tell, if it had. The visibility was near zero. Gritting his teeth, Nathan stumbled through the snow, heading determinedly in the direction he'd come. The shift must have moved, after all, but if it had gone far, he would have sensed the displacement. He hadn't been that distracted, to have missed major movement.
He reached out with his mind as he went, searching doggedly for the distinctive feel of the Oasis, the bubble its shields made in the shifts. Stupid, this was so flonqing stupid, he told himself furiously as he headed doggedly onwards. There was no one here. He wasn't sensing any sort of awareness in this shift, let alone a telepath in distress.
Nothing like jumping to conclusions and getting yourself lost. The thought made him edgy. Lost--was he lost? Maybe, but that didn't mean he had to stay lost. Navigation in the shifts was always a tricky thing, but he'd been able to find his way back to the Oasis from weeks away before. He could do it again, if he had to.
He'd gone barely fifteen minutes when he tripped over something buried in the snow and went to his knees. Nathan floundered helplessly for a moment but eventually managed to pull himself back to his feet. "Fuck!" he snarled weakly at the sky he couldn't see.
The cold was already starting to get to him. He was in shirt-sleeves. It hadn't even occurred to him to grab his jacket when he'd left the house. Of course, he hadn't been planning a trip, at the time, had he?
Intentions aside, he knew he was in trouble. The cold was spreading outwards from the techno-organic side of his body, chilly fingers reaching into uninfected flesh and bone and bringing it down to the same temperature as the metal.
He'd always been prone to hypothermia.
The Oasis wasn't in front of him, he realized after a few more minutes of slow progress. At least, not in sensing range, and since that was the case, it could be behind him, for all he knew. When shifts moved like this, there was no telling what direction they might take.
Stopping, Nathan looked around him despairingly. There was nothing out here. Nothing. Just snow.
No. No, snow was something, he told himself almost feverishly, kneeling down and digging through it, trying to find the ground. The shift wasn't empty. It had a ground, and a sky, and weather. That was a start.
A ground, a sky. Borders, if he could just manage to reach them. Nathan kept digging in the snow, trying to get to the ground. You could sometimes feel the way the shifts moved, like shadowy tectonic plates grinding together deep inside the earth. If he could just--
He pushed away the last layer of snow and reached the ground. Only it wasn't ground after all. It was ice, thick and hard, a rippled white-blue.
Ice. He stiffened, wondering frantically how far it went, whether it was stable. If he broke through, fell into the water, he was done for. He sucked in a deep, shaky breath and tried to telekinetically feel along the surface of the ice, underneath the snow, looking for the spot where it became solid ground again.
And the ice beneath him began to glow. Nathan froze, his heart thudding sickly in his chest. It might be a very good to levitate himself off the ice a bit, the small part of his mind that was still working clearly pointed out. Or at least run. Running might be good.
But the ice wasn't cracking, and something about the glow was--Nathan found himself leaning closer to the ice, almost involuntarily, to 'listen'. He wasn't sensing anything dangerous, but this felt almost like--
The glow rose through the ice around him. Not cracking it, but passing right through with no visible effect, emerging as ribbons of silvery light.
Nathan flinched. They looked like--shift-threads, almost. Which was not a thought guaranteed to make him feel particularly safe in their immediate vicinity. They felt different, though, and they didn't seem to be making any aggressive moves towards him, as shifts so often did when you were one of the Twelve. They merely hung there in the air around him, shimmering. And they seemed to be keeping the snow off him, unbelievably enough.
Nathan reached out, brushing a hand against the closest. Definitely energy of some sort, he thought as a tingling sensation, not entirely unpleasant, shot up his arm. Shift-like, but there was no sense of fracture, no twisting of reality.
He wondered if they would move if he got up. Slowly, he started to rise, willing them to get out of the way. They shimmered and rippled and started to part, and Nathan was already beginning to breath a sigh of relief when one unwound from the others and rippled into his path before he could react.
It passed through his skin, into his chest, just as easily as it had passed through the ice.
Nathan gasped and fell back to his knees, clawing desperately at the shift-thread with his mind. It wouldn't let him catch it, though, no matter how hard he tried. It whipped back and forth, always just out of his reach. Burning, as it moved. His heart racing in his chest, Nathan struggled to catch his breath, willing his lungs to work, but he was choking--
--choking on blood, lying there on the floor of the warehouse. The smell of death was all around him, but his mind refused to process the silence. One last gasp of defiance, of denial. But he knew the truth. He couldn't pretend. If he turned his head, he could see the kids, lying there broken, motionless. Dom, pinned to the wall by a harpoon, the shaft broken off a foot from the blade. It had been in their way. Like her uniform.
The blood was livid red against her pale skin, and her eyes were open, staring right at him. He wanted to get up, to close them. Maybe even to pull the shreds of her uniform around her, give her a little dignity in death, but if he moved, he'd die. His own blood was already pooling beneath him, burning hot in the chill of the air, in the cold, cold place the warehouse, Sinister's retrofitted death trap, had become.
He couldn't move. He had to stay on his back, even if he was choking, because Creed had ripped him open, gutted him like a fish. His last flicker of telekinesis was going to try and slow the bleeding, but shock was taking over, and his concentration was fading along with everything else. Tears trickled soundlessly down his face, mingling with the blood. Their death-screams were still ripping at his mind, echoing back and forth, barely dwindling even as the world itself blurred and flickered.
His eyes roved from Dom to Sam, and he wondered faintly where Sam's head was, what the Marauders had done with it. Whether they'd taken it back to Sinister as a trophy.
Nathan turned his head away, and stared up at the ceiling for a long time. Darkness tinged with angry red started to creep in at the edges of his vision more insistently as the minutes dragged by. The telekinetic pressure bandage faded finally, and all that he was left with was his hand, his arm flung over the wound, holding in his own internal organs.
Only instinct, though. He wanted to surrender to the darkness, to let go. There was no reason to hold on. He'd come back to life for them. For her. Now they were gone, all gone, and nothing mattered anymore. Not the mission. Not revenge. He was so tired. He just wanted to close his eyes and sleep, sleep forever.
Voices roused him, after he'd been drifting away for a while. There were minds that he knew, filling the emptiness, and even though he had no strength left to reach out to them, he sensed their shock, their horror. Their overwhelming anger and grief that flooded his unshielded mind and wrung a soft, liquid-sounding moan from him, the sort of moan a drowning man might make.
"--can you hear me? Cable?" He forced his eyes open, staring up at a blur that started to resolve into a familiar face. White hair, piercing blue eyes. Magneto stared down at him for a moment and then looked up, at someone else. "Are any of the others alive?" Nathan heard him ask. A soft, British-accented voice murmured something, and Magneto's mouth twisted bitterly. "Get in touch with the other team and get Henry in here, then," he said roughly. He looked back down at Nathan, and Nathan flinched at the anger in his eyes. Magneto noticed, and the rage faded immediately. "I'm sorry," he said very softly. "I'm so sorry, Nathan. We got here as soon as we could."
"Fucking Sinister!" another familiar voice growled from somewhere off to the side. "Look at this place. They never had a chance."
"Enough, Logan," Magneto said, his eyes lingering on Nathan's face. There was something almost fearfully insistent in his gaze, something that commanded Nathan to stay awake and expected to be obeyed. "Save the tactical analysis for later."
"Riptide's over here. Dead. All the rest of the corpses are ours."
Corpses. They weren't corpses, weren't things--the blurring of his vision got worse, and he knew why but couldn't stop the tears, or the broken sob that escaped from him and silenced all the other voices. Someone else was kneeling by him suddenly, her face half hidden by a fall of purple hair as she leaned over him, laying gentle hands on his temples.
He tried to shut her out of his mind. Didn't want her to feel what he'd felt, watching the kids die. To hear what he'd heard, the sounds Dom had made as she died--
"He's fighting me," Betsy Braddock murmured, sounding anguished. "He won't let me in."
Magneto reached out and took her by the wrists, moving her hands away. "Then stop," he said roughly. "Forcing your way into his mind isn't the answer."
"I have to! Erik, he's death-willing himself. Hank won't be able to save him unless I get into his mind and keep him from--"
"He will not die." Magneto let her go and turned back to Nathan, staring down at him with blue eyes gone hard as ice. But there was compassion there at the same time, mingled with the determination and just as strong. And his shields were so far gone that he couldn't resist it. It stole into his mind, wound itself around his fading consciousness and kept him trapped there, in his body. "Do you hear me, Nathan? I will not allow it."
He was falling, but he couldn't let go. Magneto's eyes were holding him there, even as he tumbled so far into the darkness that they dwindled into stars, shining in the night sky--
--stars in the night sky, and the snow-covered ice beneath him. Still gasping for air, Nathan stared up at the break in the storm, a rift in the clouds big enough to reveal two bright stars and nothing more. The shift-ribbons were gone, except for the one he could still feel inside him, and Nathan shuddered, trying feebly to grasp it with his mind.
Just a dream, he thought dazedly, trying to calm his breathing. The shock of contact with the shift-thread had knocked him out, and he'd dreamed. One hand clasped against the place on his chest where the shift-thread had penetrated, he laid back against the snow, his eyes blurring helplessly with tears.
But why that? Why that dream, again? Because of the Erik he'd killed? Domino had been more right than she knew, accusing him of overreacting when he had to kill Magneto. He knew that the ones he'd met were different, weren't the Erik he knew. Most of the ones he'd encountered in the shifts had come from worlds where they were the X-Men's enemy, Xavier's nemesis instead of his partner. A set of circumstances that he could barely imagine. The whole idea seemed so--warped.
But he knew that wasn't it. That his problem wasn't just not being able to wrap his mind around the difference.
The shift-thread inside him undulated lazily. Nathan fought back nausea and the urge to curl into a fetal ball and just blank out. He didn't know what to do. He didn't seem to have any control over this thing, not like he usually did with full-sized shifts, and even if he had, the idea of ripping it out of himself was not appealing. Exit wounds could be messy, messy things. He laughed, a harsh, unsteady sound, and pulled himself up to a sitting position.
The break in the clouds had vanished, and the storm was worsening again. He had to find shelter of some sort. Stumbling through this until he found the borders of this shift wasn't going to work, not if he wanted to be alive to cross them.
The storm closed its wings around him.
He kept walking.
***
There was light shining through the storm now, and Nathan staggered towards it determinedly. Light could mean--a building, or people. Or maybe at the very least, the borders of the shift, despite the fact that he wasn't sensing any such thing. But it meant something. Light always meant something.
He'd passed beyond feeling numb from the cold. Sheer willpower alone was keeping him on his feet, though all he wanted to do was to fall back onto the snow and sleep. But if he stopped, he died. He knew that. So he kept going.
Too much to get back to, at the Oasis. Dom, and Franklin, and Kitty--life, and hope--
Nathan took another step forward, and stumbled, feeling a brief, molecular-level pain that was like a shadow of what it felt like to cross a particularly unstable shift wall. But the snow was on the other side, too, and there was no sense of dislocation. He hadn't crossed a shift-line--
But something had changed. The snow wasn't snow, because it was frozen in place, glowing brightly. Snow didn't do that. Nathan stopped, swaying on his feet, his nerves jangling with fear as he stretched his mind out tentatively. They felt just like the shift-threads. The same energy pattern, just smaller. Snowflake-sized.
And there was no way through. There were so many of them, countless shift-snowflakes, every one different. Swallowing, Nathan wrenched his thoughts back onto the correct track, wrestling the hysteria down. He concentrated, reaching out to try and move the shift-snowflakes out of his path. Just because the shift-threads hadn't responded didn't mean that these smallers pieces wouldn't--
The shift-thread inside him stirred, like a snake uncoiling to strike, and Nathan moaned, slipping to his knees before he could stop himself, and falling right through dozens of the shift-snowflakes. He gasped, his breathing turning ragged as he saw them moving under his skin, flowing up his arms towards the centre of his body. "No," he choked out. "No!" But there were too many, and he could feel them, carried in his blood just like the virus, but warm where it was cold.
He doubled over, a scream fighting to break free. The shift-thread was rippling inside him, pulling the others to it. Growing brighter, more intense. Burning. Nathan looked down and could see it glowing through cloth and flesh and bone and techno-organic fiber. Pulsing, in time with the beat of his heart.
It grew brighter and brighter, and the rest of the shift-snowflakes whirled around him in a cyclone, fading slowly, until he was kneeling on the snow in a pocket of silence amid the storm. Trembling, Nathan clasped his hands over his chest, and nearly moaned again at how the glow shone through them anyway. The pain was ebbing, but he still felt sick, unsteady.
He looked up, and nearly jumped out of his skin as he saw the tree. "Fuck," he muttered weakly. That hadn't been here before, he was sure of it. Was he moving through a series of conjoined winter shifts or something? That didn't explain the thing in his chest, but the other changes, maybe--
The tree was drawing him to it. It was dark and twisted, like something out of a nightmare, holding its own shadows around it like a cloak. Nathan took a deep breath and got back to his feet, starting forward unsteadily. There was something--in the branches, but he couldn't quite see from here.
Another step, and the something started to resolve into a shape. Nathan's mind screamed at him to stop, to back away, but the dazed fascination was stronger, and he moved closer. Closer, until--
It was a body. A man, hanging spread-eagled in the tree. Nathan stopped, a strangled gasp catching in his throat as he took in the scene.
This wasn't real, he thought, his gaze moving from the corpse's pierced hands and feet to its bloodied side, to the frozen, frost-rimmed face--
A face missing an eye.
Nathan laughed. And laughed, hysteria bubbling up out of him like a roaring river. This wasn't real. This was a hallucination, start to finish. All because of what he'd seen with Erik and Charles in the wasteland. He'd snapped, he'd really and truly snapped, at last--
The shift-thread burst into flame, and he screamed, falling back to the snow.
Only he wasn't falling, he was being lifted, pinned by strong hands against the tree as someone drove spikes of metal through his hands and feet. And he was biting back the screams, knowing that he'd chosen this, that he had to do this, that the sacrifice was necessary, and didn't he know all about necessity? Even when a man with Creed's face stepped forward and ripped open his side, even when Domino smiled and took his eye, he stayed silent. And the ravens waited in the branches above, ready to tell him everything he needed to know, once the sacrifice was finished--
Lost in something not quite a hallucination and not quite a memory, Nathan never saw the three slender gray figures step through the storm, into the gap. Never felt himself lifted, and carried beyond the tree, into the mouth of the cave.
He was hanging from the tree, bleeding, as thought and memory whispered harshly in his ear.
to be continued...