Aftermath

by Alicia McKenzie

He hadn't been sleeping well since he'd come back from the dead.

Smiling wryly, Scott Summers took a bottle of juice out of the refrigerator and closed the door, plunging the kitchen back into blackness. His eyes adjusted quickly. Too quickly, really. He should be bothered by evidence of yet another physical change in himself, but at the moment, he was too tired to care.

Damn it, but he really wished he could sleep through the night. This was getting to be ridiculous. Hank would probably give him something if he asked, but Scott was loath to resort to drugs. Nightmares or no nightmares, being alive and in possession of all his faculties - and alone in his mind - was too much of a miracle for him to want to--diminish the experience in any way. Stubborn of him, maybe, but he couldn't help the way he felt.

Anyway, the problem tonight hadn't been the nightmares. Just insomnia. Plain old boring insomnia--

A creak, absurdly loud in the silence, broke his train of thought. Scott hesitated for a moment, then headed unerringly across the dark kitchen and into the boathouse's living room. "Jean?" he asked, reaching out along the link and getting nothing but an impression of peaceful, dreamless unconsciousness.

Not Jean. The dark shape on the couch was far too big to be Jean. "Nathan?" Scott asked with a faint frown. Nathan had been sleeping here, in the guest room, since they'd gotten back. As if he wanted to be close to them, although no one would ever have guessed that from how anti-social he'd been.

"Couldn't sleep."

Scott considered it for a moment, and decided that no, it hadn't been a question. "Me either," he said, sitting down at the opposite end of the couch and debating whether or not to turn on the lamp. If they stayed in the dark, they could both hold onto their illusions--

What a strange thought.

"Are you all right?" The question was stiff, and as soon as the words were out of his mouth, Nathan shifted almost uneasily, as if he were sorry he'd asked. "I mean--I was just wondering why you couldn't sleep."

Scott shrugged, then wondered how good Nathan's night vision was. "Just suffering from a bout of insomnia," he said aloud, just in case. The words came out curiously flat, and Nathan shifted again. Fidgeting, Scott thought, and almost smiled. "How about you?"

"Same."

Silence ensued. It was an awkward, tenuous thing, alive with all the things that had been unsaid between them for so long. Scott leaned back into the couch, grimacing as he took another sip of his juice and wishing he could be--bolder, here. But rebuilding his life was such a delicate process, and his relationship with Nathan had never been as strong as he would have liked it to be.

The silence dragged on, and Scott's jaw clenched, a flicker of anger surfacing amid the unease he felt. Why should he have to be the one who made the first move? Why was it always him? For weeks now, he'd been doing his best to deal with how uncomfortable the others felt around him. *Nothing like being possessed for a year and coming back from the 'dead' to find out you're still expected to be the level-headed one--*

"You don't have to," Nathan said hoarsely. "Not with me."

Far too close to what he'd wanted to hear, Scott thought suspiciously. "Nice to know," he replied, still nettled and not bothering to hide it. "So say something." Nathan made a sudden, somehow uncontrolled movement, and Scott scowled at the shadowy shape of his son. "Come on," he said, more sharply. "Even if it's 'fuck off and let me brood'. Something, Nate."

"What do you want me to say?"

The strange, completely un-Nathan-like passivity of the question only made Scott angrier. He leaned over and switched on the lamp. "How about something beside 'good morning', 'good night', or 'please pass the salt'? You haven't spoken five words in a row to me since we came home from Akkaba."

The addition of light to this little scene was illuminating in more ways than one. Scott saw the rigidness of Nathan's posture and his son's reddened eyes, and realized what he'd walked in on. His anger twisted in on itself, warping into self-disgust.

"I'm sorry," Scott said with a heavy sigh, and leaned back against the cushions again, swishing the juice in the bottle and staring down at it bleakly. "And you'd better not start with the 'sorry has no meaning' crap, or I'll take you over my knee."

Nathan just sat there. Taking it all in, absorbing it like a great big telepathic sponge. Jean had been doing the same thing, Scott supposed. She'd let him talk and curse and rage and cry whenever he'd felt like it. She'd taken whatever he needed to dish out, and just listened--and comforted him, when he needed it.

Whatever this was with Nathan wasn't working the same way. It felt--wrong. Dangerous to be angry with him, as if the anger would break something that couldn't be repaired if Scott wasn't careful.

"Talk to me," he said, and this time some of the pain crept through, despite his best efforts to keep it locked away. This wasn't fair, damn it! How was he supposed to put his life back together if his son wouldn't talk to him?

"What do you want to know?" Nathan muttered.

"I want to know what YOU'RE thinking, damn it." Jean had talked to him, when he'd asked. She'd told him about the last year, how she'd felt through all of this. He'd NEEDED to know. He'd never have that time back, but he had to understand what had happened since he'd been gone. "Just--talk to me."

"Okay," Nathan said quietly, and Scott took a deep breath, relief replacing the heaviness in his chest. They were going to talk. They were going to talk, and--"You know that Jean could help you sleep if you told her you were having problems."

Scott froze, but Nathan went on, his voice still calm, strangely lifeless. "That way you wouldn't have to take anything. She could just implant a telepathic suggestion telling you to sleep for eight hours. Even the nightmares--she could probably do something about them if she tried--"

"Stop it," Scott rasped, setting his juice bottle down on the end table with rather more force than was absolutely necessary. Nathan shut his mouth and stared across at the opposite wall. His face, in profile, seemed carved out of stone, absolutely immobile. "What is this, Nathan?" He didn't try and keep any of the pain out of his voice this time. He let it flood the words, raw and angry and impossible to ignore. "Why are you DOING this?"

"I'm trying--to be here for you," Nathan replied, and if Scott hadn't been listening very closely, he might have missed the tiny, momentary unsteadiness in his son's voice. "The fact that I'm not doing a good job of it just illustrates why we shouldn't be having this conversation."

"And why is that?"

"Because I can't help you--"

"What makes you think I want you to help me?" Scott snapped. He felt--overheated, as if the anger he was still vainly trying to pen up inside him was coalescing into some vast magma-like sea, impossible to keep contained. "Or am I wearing a sign these days that says 'Hello, my life is a giant therapy session, analyse away'?"

Nathan leaned forward, bracing his elbows against his knees for a moment and rubbing his face with his hands. "It bothers you that much?" he said, his voice rough with something Scott couldn't interpret.

Scott opened his mouth to make the obvious reply, but then stopped, confusion disrupting the anger for a moment. It did bother him - at the moment, it bothered him a great deal - but that wasn't always the case. Part of him had and still wanted to--wrap himself in the support of his family and friends, to stop fighting and let them shield him from the nightmares and the memories, from all the things that could have happened--

But this was different. "From you, right now? Yes," Scott said, more calmly than he'd originally intended. The words still came out harsh enough to make Nathan flinch. "It bothers me."

"Then what do you need?" Nathan asked, straightening but still not looking at him.

Scott's jaw clenched. "I need my son to stop acting like a well-trained automaton and talk to me. I need-" His voice broke, but he forced himself to go on. "I need to know that you're all right, Nate."

"I won't--piss you off by assuming you meant physically," Nathan said with a momentary flicker of a smile. There wasn't a lot of humor to it, but it was something, Scott supposed.

"Well, that too, actually," Scott muttered, flinching himself at the memory of that last fight in Akkaba, of hurting Nathan to make him angry, to make him fight. Watching his son claw his way back to his feet, coughing blood, but still coming for him, that fanatical determination blazing in his eyes.

A choked noise from beside him tore Scott from his own thoughts. He looked up to see Nathan staring at him, his face suddenly even more haggard and tears glimmering in his eyes. "It WAS you. You were trying to get me to kill you--" Nathan swallowed visibly, shaking hands clenching into fists on his lap. "I wanted to think it was Apocalypse," he said wildly. "I didn't want to know that that it was you--"

Scott straightened and met his eyes as levelly as he could. "I thought you knew," he said, his voice unsteady. The honesty hurt as the realization of what it would have done to Nathan began to sank in. "I--didn't see any other way out, at the time." Nathan kept stared at him with that horrible, haunted look in his eyes, and something in Scott's chest twisted. "Nate, I--"

"Don't," Nathan suddenly said, almost violently. He had moved back as far as he could go on the couch, as if afraid Scott might reach out, breach the safe distance between them. "Don't try and explain. I'm so sick of logic, and no-win situations, and n-necessary evils--"

"Nathan," Scott said desperately, wishing that thread of a link he'd once noticed between them would wake up and give him something, anything to go on here. There were times he really wished he could trade mutant powers with Jean, just for a little while. "Nathan, I'm sorry. I was trying to think strategically." And he'd known that Jean couldn't do it, that she could never kill him. All he'd had to rely on had been Nathan. Nathan and his hate--

And it was Nathan who crossed the space between them suddenly, in what could only be called a lunge, Nathan whose metal hand clenched into a fist around a handful of Scott's t-shirt, as if he would have preferred it to be Scott's throat.

"Stab your eyes!" It came out half hiss, half broken moan, and that tightness in Scott's chest only grew worse. "How dare you--how DARE you! What right did you have to do that to me--" Nathan froze and then started to tremble, his expression going from anger to shock, then to horror and self-loathing that nearly broke Scott's heart to see.

Nathan let go of him and moved away, making a strange, hoarse noise, a travesty of a laugh. "Me," he murmured unevenly, sliding off the couch. "Will you listen to me? As if it were about me--"

His knees buckled and he slid to the ground, shaking violently. "I'm--I shouldn't have said any of this, I didn't mean to." His voice was almost frantic. Scott, as he got up off the couch and went over to crouch down beside him, found that his hands were shaking, too. "Please don't--I'm so s-sorry, Scott, I should never have said it--"

"No," Scott said, as firmly as he could. His voice didn't want to stay steady, but he summoned up every bit of self-control he possessed and put steel in his next words. "You're angry with me. I don't want you to apologize for saying so." Cold steel. Iron. Hard and implacable enough to tell Nathan that he meant every word. "Because then I couldn't tell you how angry I am with you."

Nathan looked up wildly, and Scott nodded jerkily. "I'm--so fucking furious with you that I can hardly put it into words," Scott said, feeling the anger erupt inside him and letting it, seeing Nathan shudder as the backwash of his emotions hit him. "Do you think I don't know what happened after you thought I was dead? Between Jean and the others, I know a lot, Nathan. I know EXACTLY what you did. I know about the self-destructive behavior, how you joined the X-Men for the wrong reasons--how you didn't trust your teammates. I know about everything that happened because you were too angry and too hurt to stay focused on what you were doing. I know--I SAW you wearing my visor like some kind of noose around your neck!" Scott leaned back, letting the anger flow out of him and at Nathan without even trying to hold it back. It was unfair, a cruel thing to do to an overstressed telepath, but it had to come out--"You used my memory to hurt yourself, and I will NEVER forgive you for that, Nathan Christopher!"

The color was gone from Nathan's face. He stared at Scott, his mouth working silently for a moment, as if he wanted to speak but couldn't summon the words. All Scott's anger drained away as he met those wide, empty eyes, and he reached out instinctively. Nathan flinched away from him and fell, crumpling to the ground.

"Don't--touch me!" he gasped out as Scott laid a hand on his shoulder. Ignoring the tears beginning to trickle out from behind his glasses, Scott shook his head slowly and gathered as much of his son's shuddering form in his arms as he could, holding him tightly. "Don't--" It was almost a moan.

"Do you think," Scott said in a hoarse whisper, squeezing his eyes tightly shut to try and hold back the tears, "that I ever wanted to leave you?"

Suddenly Nathan was clinging to him and crying freely, great racking sobs that were too loud, too anguished in the silence. Something cracked, like ice in warm sunlight, and Scott flinched, but didn't resist as emotions that weren't his own seared into his mind. Pain and guilt and--fear?

"It wasn't your fault," Scott murmured brokenly, and felt Nathan's violent rejection of that wording, and the memory-flash of Anais mocking him with those very words. Scott tried again, desperately. "I don't blame you," he said almost feverishly. "How could I ever blame you? How could I--never, Nate, never--" Nathan moaned, and Scott forced himself to keep talking. "I tried to get you to kill me because I thought it was the only way--"

And he almost had. He'd goaded his son into a killing rage, knowing exactly what he was doing, knowing Nathan wouldn't stop until Apocalypse was dead--

But then Nathan had stopped. In mid-battle, when he could have lashed out and killed Apocalypse right there, with a single blow, he'd stopped and reached out instead, calling to Scott. Hope in his eyes, instead of hatred. And Scott had felt--

Pride. He'd felt pride, despite how desperate he'd been to have someone end the nightmare, to kill Apocalypse.

Such--fierce pride.

"I was so--proud of you," Scott whispered raggedly, tears pouring down his face now. All those times he'd feared that Nathan's hatred for Apocalypse was the most important thing in his life, all that kept him going--he'd been wrong, so wrong, and his son had proved it to him beyond a shadow of a doubt. "So proud, Nathan--"

Nathan slumped against him, the sobs easing slowly. The storm along that suddenly re-established link was ebbing, passing, but he was still crying, clinging to Scott as if afraid he'd vanish if he let go.

Scott sensed that fear in the emotions that were now merely fluttering against his mind, like a trapped, agitated bird. He reached to soothe it as much as he could. "I'm not going anywhere," he murmured softly, realizing something. Trying to get himself back to the 'status quo' wouldn't cut it. There were things in his life that had gone wrong long before that day in Akkaba. So much to put back together--

"I'm not going anywhere," he repeated. Time he gave up living the Dream and started dealing with reality. If this nightmare had taught him anything, it had taught him what was important. Life was so much more than fighting for a cause, than devoting yourself to a set of ideals, however worthy they might be.

Scott flinched at the surge of mixed emotions - guilt, and anger for feeling guilty - that the thought provoked. Maybe if he told himself often enough that the 'good fight' wasn't everything, he might start to believe it.

Maybe if he said it to Nathan often enough, his son would believe it, too.

alicia's stories | [ARCHIVE] | comicfic.net