Where Anger Bleeds

by Alicia McKenzie

The morning had a peculiarly hushed quality to it. The air was cool, but not overly so. The sky was cloudless, but its clear blue was almost subdued. It was as if the world was waiting with bated breath, to see what happened next.

Charles Xavier grimaced at his own conceit as his hoverchair skimmed over the grass. An inappropriate metaphor, all things considered. He would not permit this to turn into a confrontation. His disapproval, however justified, didn't matter. He was here to help.

If he was allowed.

He caught sight of the tall figure standing in front of the tombstone, and sighed. #You spend far too much time out here, Nathan.# It was becoming a pattern, a daily, brooding ritual that everyone in the mansion was beginning to remark on. #It's not healthy.#

#I don't recall asking you, Charles.#

Charles halted his hoverchair a few feet away from Nathan. Permitting him the necessary degree of personal space, even while making sure he wouldn't be able to ignore his presence. "I realize that," he said gently. "I thought I'd say it anyways."

"Good for you. Get to the point."

The words were delivered in a hard, wintry tone barren of all emotion. Charles let the chair drift forward slightly, until he could see Cable's face. That iron control was back, the same perfectly composed mask he'd worn at Domino's funeral, and for most of the last two weeks. The truth was in his eyes, though--those burning, yet alarmingly vacant eyes. It was as if every part of him that mattered was somewhere else, leaving behind only an unfocused yet vicious anger at the world that had hurt him so badly.

"The point," Charles said quietly. "Yes." He folded his hands, laid them in front of him on the top of the hoverchair. He was surprised by their slight trembling. It wasn't as if he was anxious--not precisely. Disquieted would be a better word, perhaps. "I'm--aware of what happened between you and Magnus last night, Nathan."

Cable's head jerked around. "And?" he asked in that same neutral voice. His eyes were more alert now, though. "Let me guess--you're out here to give me a lecture on telepathic ethics, right? How wrong it was for me to invade your friend's mind." Cable's mouth curled in an ugly snarl. "Save it for someone who cares."

'Your friend'. There was something definitely accusatory about the way Cable had said that, Xavier reflected wearily. And was that really so out of line? If he had done more in the last confrontation with Magneto--if he had even simply stepped aside and allowed Logan to attack him, perhaps the situation that led to Domino's death would have been averted.

But there was no changing any of it. "I wouldn't presume to give you a lecture, Nathan," Charles said as gently as he could.

"Too bad," Cable muttered, his head turning away again. He knelt down in front of the tombstone, his posture somehow formal in a way Charles couldn't quite pin down. "If you have nothing to say, then leave me alone."

"I didn't say that." Charles hesitated for a moment, unsure of how to proceed. "The--ethical questions aside, Nathan, what you've done is not--healthy."

"Now there's a nice, non-threatening way to put it--" Cable bit off whatever else he'd been about to say and nearly doubled over, a stifled moan breaking free from somewhere deep in his chest.

Charles hurriedly reinforced his shields, but even so, the white-hot pain Cable projected nearly swamped his senses. He clutched the sides of his chair in a white-knuckled grip and struggled to reach out to the battered, wounded mind of the man huddled on the ground in front of the tombstone.

It was like placing one's hand on a red-hot burner. Charles gritted his teeth, tasting blood in his mouth as he was pulled down into a nightmarish, vertigo-inducing spinning darkness shot through by angry red flashes of light and haunted by vague, fluttering ghostly shapes. #Nathan--# he managed, trying to find a stable point, whatever shard of sanity Cable was clinging to in the midst of all this horror. #Nathan, let me help--#

#--get OUT!#

Nathan hurled him out of his mind with such force that his body jerked in instinctive response. Xavier straightened in his chair, breathing heavily, appalled by the look of seething hatred on Cable's face as the other man straightened, wiping sweat from his brow.

"I don't want your help." The snarl of pain nevertheless held a tone of honest warning. "I don't want it, Charles, I didn't ask for it, and if you're smart, you won't try and force it on me!"

"There is no need to be throwing around threats, Nathan," Charles said as coolly as he could. Inwardly, he was shocked, and found himself forced to use every bit of his prodigious self-control to hide it.

The way Nathan had thrown him out of his mind--Charles no longer wondered how he had managed to pierce Magnus's not-inconsiderable defenses and establish the psi-link. It had not simply been a freak occurrence, as he'd thought. Instinctive, yes, but there was a new and incredible strength there, in Nathan's mind--a raw, angry, largely untrained strength, but none the less formidable for all of that.

I always knew he had such potential-- The tragedy was that it had taken this sort of trauma for him to realize it--and that it had manifested in such a destructive way. Charles took a mental 'step' back, regarding Cable on a psionic level, and was further shocked by the fierce, blazing presence he was on the astral plane. Whatever the trigger itself had been--the shock of the link breaking, or grief alone--it had pushed him across a threshold, united his body and mind in pure pain and unbridled rage. He was capable of nearly anything, at the moment. Charles only prayed he didn't realize it yet.

"You can't continue like this," Charles said levelly, forcing himself to put that aside--for now. If Nathan forced him to it, he would have to take steps, but so long as this business with Magnus was resolved satisfactorily, there was no need for such--measures yet. "You haven't permitted Jean or myself inside your mind for days," he continued, trying the indirect approach. "We made a start on repairing the psionic trauma, Nathan, but only a start. If you don't let us continue, your condition will deteriorate. The sort of damage caused by a broken psi-link won't simply go away on its own--"

"And how the flonq would you know?"

"Excuse me?" Charles asked, taken aback by the sudden contempt in the question.

Cable's eye flashed. "You heard me perfectly, Xavier--" He bit his lip, the color draining from his face, but less of his pain reached Charles this time. He was controlling himself more tightly, struggling not to project. Closing himself off in instinctive self-defense. "What would you know about any of this? How I feel, what--what it's like to lose part of yourself--"

"We are both telepaths, Nathan," Charles said softly. "I can feel your pain as if it were my own--"

"Oh, bullshit! All those women in your life, Charles, all those old loves--they're all still part of your life, in some way or another, aren't they? You may have let them go, but you've never LOST any of them, not like--not like this--" Another surge of pain, more intense.

Charles shielded himself, and thought of Lilandra. A quieter, slower sort of loss for him, lacking the wrenching, agonizing bereavement Nathan was suffering through now. There was no comparison. Nathan was right. He had no such experience in his life, nothing to serve as common ground.

But that didn't mean he was going to leave this alone.

"You seem to be doing an admirable job of punishing yourself for Domino's death," Charles said in a neutral voice. "What made you decide to extend your efforts to Magneto?" He chose his words carefully, determined not to sound judgemental.

Cable gave him an almost feral smile. "Oh, I don't know, Charles. Whim, maybe. Or maybe it was that little matter of him being the one who KILLED HER?"

"Nathan--" Charles swallowed. "This link--you need to be thinking about yourself, Nathan, what's best for you. Constantly reliving what happened, psi-bonded to the man who caused you this pain--"

"You really haven't clued in yet, have you, Chuck? I WANT him to feel what I'm feeling, I want him to suffer!" Cable pulled himself to his feet, that hatred back in his implacable glare. "I would think you'd be happy."

Charles raised an eyebrow. "Pardon me for being obtuse, but I see very little in this situation that would justify such a reaction on my part."

"Shall I spell it out for you?" Cable asked contemptuously. "You and Jean and the rest don't have to keep taking turns watching me like a hawk anymore, I'm not going to do myself in as soon as your backs are turned." Charles risked a light scan, curious to see if he was telling the truth, and was rocked by the telepathic equivalent of a slap as soon as he touched Cable's mind. He stiffened, giving Cable a wary look. That savage smile flickered and died. "If I'm busy making Magneto's life a living hell, I have to be alive to do it, don't I?"

"Is that all you're living for?" Charles whispered, horrified. Had he left this conversation too long--? The eyes boring into his were far from sane, and he'd seen enough in that brief contact earlier to know that Nathan's mind was in utter chaos. "Vengeance?"

"I wish." Cable glanced around at the quiet morning, shaking his head slowly. Charles sensed a strange, half-suppressed yearning from him, wistful and yet somehow grim at the same time. "I have a job to do," he continued in a softer voice. "I won't walk away from that, because it is all I have to live for, now." He looked back at Charles, and for a moment, just a moment, there was regret on his face. "When it's done--well."

"When it's done?" Charles asked hoarsely, a strange pain settling itself in his chest. He was suddenly, acutely aware of how little time he'd taken to get to know this man, in all the time Cable had been a part of his 'family'--extended or otherwise. How little he really knew about this 'grandson' of his, his namesake who had upheld his dream, through joy and loss, good times and bad, in a future Charles himself could barely envision. "What then, Nathan?"

"I don't know yet," Cable said with a faint smile. "I don't even know if I'm going to survive it. But what I do know, Charles--what I'm absolutely sure of--is that, one way or another, I'm going to go out with a bang. And if I have my choice, if--fate's kind enough to give me that chance, I'm going to take your 'friend' with me."

"So it is vengeance you want, in the end," Charles said.

Cable shook his head. That faint smile grew shaky, and his voice sounded a little wild. "What I want, Charles? What I WANT is to hold her in my arms again, to tell her everything I always wanted to tell her, everything I put off until 'later', or a 'better time'--" He bit his lip, turning ashen again, and Charles winced at the wave of pain. "But what I want," Cable continued hoarsely, as soon as he was able, "I can never have."

"Part of grieving," Charles said, keeping his calm tone with great difficulty, "is picking up the pieces and moving on."

"Leave it alone, Charles. You're not going to make me change my mind." Cable turned to go, but hesitated. "I don't blame you," he said in a different voice. Charles started, and Cable gave him that faint, humorless smile again. "I heard what you were thinking earlier, and I just wanted to tell you that. I don't blame anyone but myself--and him." His gaze hardened. "Which doesn't mean that I won't go right through you if you get in my way when the time comes."

"I understand," Charles said calmly. Provoking him any further would be useless, at this point. He needed to talk to Jean and Scott, decide what to do.

The smile flickered, became more sardonic. "But you don't accept, is that it? Tough luck, Charles, but you'll get used to it. Having no choice helps."

"We'll see, Nathan." He meant it to be placating, but it came out almost challenging, and he winced at the tone.

Nathan seemed amused. "And the game goes on," he murmured, turning away again. "This should be interesting."

#If this is what I have to do to keep you alive, Nathan, I won't hesitate,# Charles projected after him.

#Give it your best shot, Charles,# Nathan sent back without turning around, or even stopping. #But don't get your hopes up.#

#What about what the Askani taught you? Aren't you turning your back on that?# Charles shot back. Cable hesitated, and Charles plunged on relentlessly. #Aren't you supposed to be the embodiment of hope, Nathan?#

The answer, when it came, was curiously mild. #Once upon a time, Charles. But right now? I'm what hope becomes when it dies.#

And Nathan walked away, without a backward glance. Leaving Charles to stare after him in stricken silence, chilled to the bone even as the sunlight grew and warmed the air.

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