All Men Are Liars

by Diamonde

Stryfe looked uncertainly at the unusally cloudy shift that rippled in front of him then over his shoulder. Caught between a rock and a hard place or, as the phrase would have been in Canaanite, between the battle and the fire.  The battle was behind him, but the fire was in front.  Should he risk getting burnt or fight?

It was a hard decision.  Stryfe didn't like shifts. Admittedly, his distaste was fairly mild compared to the horror and mind-numbing terror of some of the others he'd met, but he had advantages they didn't. In fact, he was suprised to find himself feeling father sorry for them.  They thought of nothing other than surviving, making it to the next day, and with a bit of luck maybe eating.

Then again, feeling sorry for them didn't mean he was at all inclined to help them, or even go near them.

Stryfe might not be as disturbed by a reality that moved and tore as they were, Chaos Bringer that he was, and his powers might better equip him to survive, but that didn't mean it was easy.  His resources were limited to what he carried, the most valuable of that being the remains of his armour.  The helmet had been lost long ago as he tumbled down a vertical landscape and through three shifts in succession with a shift-maddened Bishop trying to bite his throat out. The arms and legs had been stripped off so that he could use the metal for other things.  Now only the boots, armguards and the main body remained, still glittering silver in the moonlight.  Well, those and the five foot long sword he'd used some of that cannibalised metal to make.

Before the shifts, he wouldn't have needed it.  Now, when using his powers could attract people or that thing which he could feel reaching for him in his dreams that only just missed him, it helped to have something else to defend himself with.  Something to use when he drained his powers to the limits and still needed to fight or cut his way through alien underbrush.  Or if he felt himself start to go mad like the others.  Stryfe was, he admitted, a little unbalanced, but he knew that he'd kill himself before he lived like that.

No, he had no urge to help anyone.  What little he possessed would remain his own, and he could offer nobody any protection even if he'd been idiot enough to try.  They were better off without him, in fact, what with his tendency to attract the homicidal. Again Stryfe looked over his shoulder, cautiously extending his telepathy.  This Cable was nastiest he'd come across yet and, much as it pained him to admit it, he was scared.  It was hard to fight a madman, especially one who didn't even notice if you hurt him...

But if he wanted to get away, he had to go through that damned shift!  Stryfe hesitated, and was lost.  A shadow slipped up from his left and swung.

Once again the armour absorbed the brunt of the blow from a techno-organic fist, but the impact was more than enough to knock the wind out of him and send him flying.  Dazed, Stryfe barely managed to soften his landing and roll through it, scattering dust and gravel.  _Stupid!_  He rolled a little further than he needed to, giving himself enough room to get back to his feet before Cable came at him again.

Cable swung with the psimitar.  Stryfe ducked just in time and took another few steps back, getting out of reach before retaliating with a telekinetic blow at the other's hands and arms.  Cable stumbled back a little, but didn't let go of the weapon.

Stryfe had been running for hours, his powers were not at their peak.  Maybe this one wasn't as crazy as he seemed...  "I'm not the Stryfe you knew," he tried in fluent Askani.  That had been a most fortunate tidbit he'd found when he picked over the mind of one of the weaker Cables, one who'd all but walked up and asked to be killed.  He probably would have if he'd still be able to speak, but Stryfe was more than happy to be a form of euthanasia for Nathan Dayspring.  It never stopped being entertaining.  But the language, that inclined other, stronger ones to trust him, or at least be uncertain for a moment.

"So?"  Cable smiled pleasantly.  "You still don't deserve to live."

Well, there went that idea.  Stryfe dodged sideways to avoid the casual bolt from the psimitar that turned several of the rocks where he'd been into hot gravel. Between the armour and his own shields he would have survived it, but it would have hurt.  Stryfe growled internally.  Cable was _playing_ with him.

Anger increased the strength of psi attacks, so Stryfe cultivated it as much as he could.  Anger was better than fear.  Lashing out again, this time a telepathic blow at that madness and guilt, Stryfe tried to dodge past into the shift.  The rocky lanscape they were in had no distractions, potential allies or places to hide.

Cable shook the attack of easily and growled as he lifted a hand towards the shift.  The shift started retreating.

Stryfe blinked, affronted.  How could a mad version of his generally inept 'brother' be doing what Stryfe had failed to accomplish in what probably really was years, and so easily?  Sometimes it had felt nearly possible, but he could never quite get a grip on them. _Maybe because I'm not Nathan.  Of course, why should that surprise me?_

With insanity came power in psis.  His opponent was far more powerful than the rather depressive but generally sane man Stryfe had fought before the shifts came, he could no longer be sure of having the upper hand.  _Unless I can turn his madness to my advantage..._  Stryfe hated doing it, but it had worked before.  He'd amplified the guilt and horror until the Cable in question became incapable of fighting him or committed suicide.  He didn't like doing it, though.  Wading into that black insanity, immersing himself in it until he could grab and twist... it made him feel dirty, and often the backlash made him physically ill.

He reached out to try it anyway, then pulled away from the brief contact as if burned.  Insane, yes... but with a smooth veneer of purpose and calm unlike anything Stryfe had seen before.  This one wasn't like the others.  Stryfe shivered and dodged another blast from the psimitar.  "Why are you going to all this effort to kill me?  You've chased me for days.  With the world as it is, what's the point?"

"Because you are all that's wrong with me.  You're self-righteous and cruel and think only of your own ends.  You all do.  That's why you all have to die, so that your evil can be purged from this world."

Stryfe blinked.  "No, I'm all that's wrong with _me_. We're different people, remember?"

Cable suddenly struck at his legs, sending Stryfe sprawling on the ground again.  "Oh no.  We are each what we most hate in ourselves made flesh, everything we feared to become."

"So one of us has to be the good one, right?"  Stryfe snorted at the look of agreement in the mad grey eyes. "And you think that it's YOU?  Sorry, brother, but I'm not the one chasing people around with a big stick telling them that they don't deserve to live!"  Stryfe rolled to one side as the psimitar carved through the ground where his head had been.  "You're not even the best one at it I've seen.  The one who tried to shoot me from a window, now THAT nearly worked.  If I had not looked up at the right moment he would have had a bullet through my brain before I even realised he was there."

"Then he was a coward."

"He was smart."  Stryfe made it to his feet and regretted it.  The ground was apparently moving, but he suspected that it only seemed that way to him.  So running for the shift again was out, he'd fall over if he tried.  No, apparently it was up to cunning.  Or rather a more subtle, vicious version of a child's trick...

Instead of dodging back again Styfe stepped forward and grabbed the psimitar shaft, his hands and Cable's alternating on a weapon that had been designed to perfectly enhance their power.  As a physical tactic it was insane - Stryfe had just put them body to body and even when he wasn't exhausted and bruised Stryfe was no match for Cable as far as physical strength was concerned.  But he wasn't planning a physical attack, as soon as his hands touched the weapon he began to use it as the psi-channel it was.

A channel that led from Cable out.

The blade flared brilliant gold and spat sparks before arcing to the nearest, most perfect conductor. Stryfe, whose left hand was only inches from the blade.  Pure psi-energy flooded from Cable to Stryfe - not, as popular misconceptions might have it, at the speed of thought, but at the speed of light.  Thought, relying on neurotransmitters to cross synaptic gaps, was far slower.  Thus the sheer force of that energy hit Stryfe like an angry meteroite before Cable had time to notice it was gone.

Power roared into Stryfe's body, sharp fire that could burn him out as easily as it could replenish his spent reserves.  Stryfe would have kissed it if he could. Beautiful like a dragon on a rampage (which, thanks to the shifts, he had actually seen) and about as dangerous, power had always been Stryfe's true love.

Of course, Cable's brain was moving as fast as Stryfe's was.  As soon as he felt the energy loss he grabbed for the channels, unable to close them off but more than capable of pulling right back.  So they both pulled, playing tug of war with a dragon.  The psimitar had not been designed to go in reverse, but Cable was much more practiced at its use than Stryfe was.

He was sweating, Stryfe knew, as he pulled as hard as he could.  Cable countered, one huge effort to reverse the flow... and Stryfe let the channels go.  Under his hands the psimitar flashed hot and the metal actually audibly screamed as Cable pulled far too much energy back through it.  A second, and it was gone again. All the power he'd stolen and almost all that Stryfe had left of his own, all of it hit Cable far faster than he could think to shield against it.

Like countless Nate Greys before him but much, much faster, the power burned Cable out from the inside. For a moment he glowed like a sun, then the dragon broke free of that fragile human shell with a roar and a firestorm that obliterated the tiny flame that was Nathan Dayspring as if it had never been.

It seemed noticably later when Stryfe regained consciousness, exhausted and battered and nauseous from the power drain.  And in pain.  Groaning out loud now that there was nobody to hear it, he tried to move.  Bruised muscles screamed in protest, which Stryfe had been expecting, but the sudden pain from his hands caught him by surprise.  Moaning and swearing he managed to open his eyes and look down.

Locked in a spasm by an unconscious and futile effort to hold the power by gripping the psimitar, his fingers were still clutched around it.  Left hand near the blade, right lower.  The exact mirror image to the way Cable held it, of course, as they'd been standing face to face... and entirely appropriate as, unlike Cable, Stryfe was left-handed.  He smiled humourlessly at the irony of that.  True, Cable was probably only right-handed because the TO had reduced the fine motor skills of his left, but it had still been twistedly amusing when he'd found out what being left-handed had once been thought to indicate.

Then again, it was fairly accurate.

"'All that's wrong with me' indeed..."  Stryfe peeled his hands off the metal, wincing as he discovered the angry pink burns on both palms.  "No, Nathan, I'm entirely my own evil, thank you very much.  You poor, mad idiot."  The psimitar clattered as he dropped it onto the rocks and dragged himself to his knees.  Then he stopped, and looked back at it.  What was he thinking?  It was a weapon, a perfect weapon, designed for the energy signature he shared with so many others, his height and his reach.

_But it's an Askani weapon,_ some small voice said in disgust.  "As if that matters anymore."  Gingerly, but more because of the burns than distaste, he reached out and picked it up again, setting it more neatly beside him as he did what he could for the burns and any places he seemed to be actively bleeding.

Some self-doctoring and rest later, Stryfe looked back at the shift.  He had very little water left, and even though dawn would seem to be an hour or more off it was already going from merely hot to broiling.  Better to take a chance.

Jamming the blunt end into the ground he used it as a staff and pulled himself up, then staggered towards the shift-line.

Cool, damp air hit him and Stryfe looked around.  The cloudiness that had kept him from seeing through the shift was caused by steam as hot dry met cool wet - he was in the middle of a tropical rainforest.  A reasonably healthy-looking one.  That probably meant biting bugs, and Stryfe only hated his family more than things that bit him and tried to suck his blood out.  An encounter with a vampiric Nate Grey several probably-months ago had briefly united his two greatest hates, resulting in a rather embarassing screech and, thankfully, a small pile of ash.

However, rainforest also meant probably food and water that should, judging by the identifiable and robust nature of the plants, be drinkable.  You could never really be certain, but it was worth a try.

* * *

Having found food, abundant clean water and sleep, Stryfe was rather liking the new landscape. Especially the rocky pool that was large enough to float in.  Enjoying his second bath in twelve hours, Stryfe stared up at the canopy and truly relaxed for the first time in days.

He'd seen mad Cables before, too many of them, but none like that.  None that had actually thought Stryfe was a part of him.  That was just... well, twisted. Stryfe ducked his head under the water as if to wash away the thought.  Admittedly it wasn't as perverse as some relationships between the two of them he'd seen...  _Especially since I've never been attracted to another man in my life, let alone that one.  Not to mention the incest angle..._  The other irritating thing about the shifts, Stryfe decided, was the way they encouraged your mind to wander.

Then again, it was the perfect time for it.  Lying naked on his back in cool, fresh water, not hungry or thirsty or tired... still burnt and bruised, but it was hardly the first time and he'd grown very tolerant of his own pain over the years.  So he let his thoughts drift, thinking through the battle carefully, noting mistakes and things that worked, then putting it aside and pondering what it was that really did make them such different people...

Suddenly he snapped back to himself.  Something was watching him.

Stryfe was not that attatched to physical modesty - he didn't walk around naked on a regular basis, it was hardly practical after all, but had no real difficulty with nudity either.  So it couldn't be the paranoia some people experienced when bathing in the open, even if he couldn't find a mind.  He'd been a soldier more than long enough to know that someone was watching him, whether he could find them or not.

Calmly, without hurrying too overtly, he swam to the edge of the pool and climbed out, pushing the water off his body with just a little telekinetic force. The feeling of being watched suddenly sharpened, became active.  Stryfe dressed quickly and grabbed the rest of his belongings.  If he wasn't being hunted yet, he soon would be.  Unless he could get out of range.

In the past, Stryfe probably would have been too angry at the idea that something might dare to hunt the Chaos Bringer to try and escape.  But after a while in the shifts retreat becomes everyone's first option. There was little territory left worth fighting over, especially if you weren't certain that you'd win. Against an opponent he couldn't find telepathically or identify as animal, mineral, vegetable or none of the above and as damaged as he was, Stryfe didn't intend to fight for his pool.  There would be more, provided he didn't cross a shift line.

Unfortunately, the feeling of being hunted din't fade as he walked.  Instead it increased.  Something crunched to his left and he spun, the psimitar feeling very nice in his hands.  There was nothing to see but some waving branches to indicate that there had been something.  It did tell him that whatever was out there was physically present, quite mobile and over three feet tall, though.  Not exactly comforting, but it was an improvement.

Another hour, more sounds.  The followers seemed to be getting bolder, and closer. It was starting to get dark, and Stryfe still couldn't find the mind of anything more intelligent than a snake and a small mammal or two.  What was keeping pace with him, however, seemed to be deliberately trying to intimidate him.  So he waited for the next telltale sound and when it came lashed out with a telekinetic 'net'.  Branches ripped off trees, the undergrowth was flattened, and something large and alive was caught... for a moment.  Stryfe took in a large, rather reptilian head with iris-less eyes set on the front of its skull, a tall, bipedal body and a lot of teeth before the thing spun amongst the leaves and absorbed the net with an angry hiss.

Stryfe didn't wait to find out how the absorbing worked.  He dropped the point of the psimitar and sent a burst of force at the creature before it could move again.  His target made a pained screech and fell, thrashing.  Injured, but certainly not dead.

He took one step towards it and stopped as seven more stepped out of the trees and began slowly advancing on him.  The structure of the head was potentially dinosaurian but, Stryfe decided as he ran for the only gap in the circle, the plants were wrong for that and the forelimbs were very large for a bipedal dinosaur.

Another appeared ahead of him and tried to grab him, which gave Stryfe a very good opportunity to see the human-like range of movement and reasonable coordination of those arms before he blasted the creature from point blank range and ran literally over the top of it.

They did, however, seem to be slower runners than he was.

He could try to fly, of course.  But if they could suck the enrgy of that as well as they had the net... well, it wouldn't be his first choice of ways to test their range.  Especially since his power reserves were still dangerously low from his last fight.  Stryfe decided to keep that as a last resort and kept running for the hill in front of him.  For some reason it was grassy with only one large tree on the top, which would give him something solid to put his back against if necessary and he'd see anything trying to creep up on him.  Which he needed, because between the weight he was carrying and his less than optimal physical condition he was already getting winded.

He'd thought he was doing very well unil he broke out of the ground cover at the base of the hill and spotted two of the things coming towards him from ahead and to his left.  If he'd been a bit slower, they would have caught him quite tightly.  _Wonderful, they can communicate with each other..._  But the thought was ignored completely as instinct took over and Stryfe sprinted up the side of the hill much faster than he would have ever thought he could.

He could hear them behind him, many feet thudding on the grass as they loped after him.  But they were predators designed to catch prey on the ground. Stryfe, for all his mutancy and comparitive baldness, was descended from tree-dwelling apes and was feeling more aboreal by the moment as he realised the tree at the summit had branches that he could, with a little boost, probably get hold of.

He didn't slow down.  That would have cost him important momentum.  Instead he just leaped straight up, giving himself a quick extra push with the telekinesis.  As he'd feared something reached out and sucked away the end of the push, but they weren't quite quick enough.  He didn't get as high as he planned, the branch hit him in the stomach instead of letting him get his feet on it, but Stryfe wrapped himself around it and clambered upwards.

One branch, he decided, really wasn't enough.  So he tied the psimitar to his pack and jumped for the next branch.  A shorter man - or one with less upper body strength - might not have made it, but Stryfe was hardly in the mood to even consider failure.  Another minute later and twenty feet higher Stryfe sat down on a branch and leaned against the trunk, gasping to get his breath back and glaring balefully across at the tree's other occupant.

Cable glared back.  "I was here first, go find your own flonqing tree."  Then he paused and frowned. "Stryfe?"

"Right."  Stryfe gulped air and wrapped an arm firmly around the branch as he looked down.  There were at least thirty of the creatures around the base of the tree looking up now.

"I don't want to know what you're doing with a psimitar then, do I."

"No."

"But I could proably guess, right?"

Stryfe smiled tightly.  "Probably."  Still looking down he untied the psimitar again and held it tightly. "It's mine now, anyway."

"Yeah, well you led them all to _my_ tree."

"I don't care if it's Apocalypse's tree, I'm not going back down there."

Cable was also looking down.  "Can't say I blame you."

There was a moment of silence as they watched the milling, scaled bodies, then Stryfe looked thoughtfully across the six feet seperating them. "You know, Nathan... you're a large, healthy man with what feels like a nice amount of power, if I pushed you out of the tree they might fill up on you and I could get away."

Cable smiled companionably.  "If it would have worked I would have pushed you out already."

"Thought so."  Stryfe aimed a narrow blast from the psimitar down to smack the nose of one that looked like it was thinking about attempting the climb.  "You know what they are, then?"

"No, but they've eaten three people already and show no signs of slowing down."

There was a pause as they both wondered whether four might be enough.  Then they were distracted by the fact that apparently telepath-eating lizards could climb trees.  That settled their differences firmly and without requiring any further verbal bravado.

The tree suffered in the messy battle that followed. A bolt from a psimitar intended to hurl a very large reptile off one of its branches more often than not took the branch with it.  Deep scratches appeared in the bark as more of the creatures climbed to replace their dead, injured or simply evicted fellows.

Lost branches meant lost maneouverability, at least for Cable and Stryfe, which eventually forced them back onto the ground.  So they fought the last wave with their backs to the trunk on opposite sides of the tree and Stryfe couldn't see what Cable was doing, just had to trust that it was enough.

His own power levels had been barely sufficient when the fight had started and had quickly dropped to the point where it hurt.  Soon he had to stop using bolts from the psimitar and settle for just holding the energy in the blade to make it burn and keep it from getting stuck as he used it like an ordinary weapon. If he'd been at his normal levels, if they hadn't been able to drain any energy not channelled through the psimitar, it would have been easy.

It wasn't easy.  It took him long moments to realise that there were no more psi-sucking dinosaurs trying to bite his head off, just a pile of corpses.  Stryfe rested against the tree for a few precious seconds, the only sounds he could hear his own ragged breathing and the ringing in his ears that told its own story of strain.

Stryfe paused.  All he could hear was himself. Pushing off the tree trunk reluctantly, he took the few steps around to the other side.  "Cable?"

Cable was still alive, he straightened quickly as soon as Stryfe said his name and raised the psimitar again.

Without thinking about it, Stryfe raised his own weapon into a ready position.  After fending off lizards that seemed intent on eating his powers and his brain, in that order, he wasn't ready to let Cable kill him.  Just let the man try...  So he waited, but Cable didn't try.  They just stood, both poised at the ready to attack or defend, but neither of them did...

Blinking sweat out of his eyes, Cable spoke in a dry-throated cough.  "If you're going to attack me it might as well be now, I don't have enough power left to push you over."

"Don't worry," Stryfe replied with a shake of his head that made the ground lurch under him.  "I think I have just enough energy left to fall over by myself." Which he would, any minute.  To save himself that embarrassment he sat down instead, clumsily but at least deliberately.

Cable followed Stryfe's example, dropping to the ground with a groan.  "Funny, isn't it?  Both here... and we couldn't kill each other if we tried."

Stryfe managed a look of intense dislike.  "If I rolled over and swung my arm out I think I could break your nose."

"I could give you a nasty jab with this nice psimitar, but I don't think I could make it fatal so it isn't really worth the effort."  He lay on the grass in silence for several minutes as they both thought about that and got their breath back.  Eventually he spoke again as Stryfe fumbled for his water bottle.  "Where did you get the psimitar, Stryfe?"

"I got it from a Cable I killed.... probably about two days ago."  Stryfe watched Cable challengingly as he drank.  He'd killed a lot of people before and after the shifts with little reason, but that particular death he felt perfectly justified in causing.

"Any particular reason why or just because he was me?"

"Don't get egotistical, I killed him because he was trying to kill me first.  Although I would have anyway, he deserved it."

"Of course I did.  I always do, because I made your life so flonqing _hard_, right?"  Cable rolled his eyes.

Stryfe wished there was an adult equivalent of sticking your tongue out at someone.  "First, he was trying to kill me.  I'm not the only person in the world who thinks that someone should die for that. Secondly, he was trying to kill me because he thought that _I_ was what was wrong with _him_."  He snorted, still angry at that. "Idiot, he was so mad he didn't even think that I was a different _person_. He thought that I was his evil side, physical embodiment of _his_ shortcomings, and if he killed me - all of me - then the shifts would stop."  Stryfe paused and took a deep breath to make sure his words were perfectly clear. "If you show any sign of being that insane I will kill you too.  If I have to chew through your neck with my teeth."

"I'm not.  At least, I don't think so.  I know you're a different person, at least, and am very happy about it."

"But are you so self-centered that you think that the shifts are here to punish you?"  He smiled grimly at the sudden silence.  "That is what is constantly, consistently annoying about the Cables of this fractured little world.  You all seem to think that anything and everything that happens is all about _you_. Never mind that you aren't the only person here, or that there are worlds affected by the shifts where you were never even BORN."

"I caused them," Cable said quietly.

"What, all by yourself?"  Stryfe laughed nastily. "Then you've been hiding power from me, big brother. No, wait, you _can't_ hide power from me, can you? Because I've got it too."

There was a long pause, long enough to let some of the anger drain away.  Cable laughed.  "You're a petty, vicious, arrogant little child, aren't you?  You missed your calling, Stryfe, you should have been a Spice Girl."

Stryfe spluttered with outrage.  "That from a little Sylvester Stalone wannabe?!"

"Oh, for THAT you have to die."  Cable reached out, but three inches of defiant space stayed between his fingertips and Stryfe's neck.  Cable gave up. "Later." He paused.  "Did we just demonstrate a knowledge of popular culture?"

Stryfe nodded.  "Bad popular culture at that."

"Think they'll throw us out of the time-travelling enigma union?"

"I won't tell if you don't."  Maintaining anger, Stryfe discovered, took energy.  "I think I'm glad most of you have no grip on it, that definitely makes the top five worst things a Cable has ever called me."

"Ditto."

"For a start, I can sing better."

Cable grinned.  "Prove it.  Let's hear a rousing chorus of 'two become one'."

"Not even if I knew what song you were talking about, which, let me make absolutely clear, I don't."

"Wish I didn't."

"I suppose that there has to be one of you around who knows who's seen Reservoir Dogs, just to provide contrast," Stryfe shrugged.

"Seen what?"  Cable looked blank, an expression Stryfe uncharitably decided he was well-suited for.

"Never mind."

Cable shrugged and looked at the nearest body thoughtfully.  "Speaking of dogs... think these things are edible?"

The thought was slightly repulsive, yet enchanting. Stryfe thought about his very small supply of food, weighed it against the thought of fresh meat and the knowledge that he _needed_ the food to replenish his drained reserves, and looked around for wood that was dry enough to burn.

"Won't know unless we try, will we?  They don't seem to have anything venomous although I doubt they'll taste good."

"Carnivores rarely do."  Cable rolled sideways, then gave in and climbed up to his knees with a groan. "I'll cut a piece off, you're cooking it."

"You and whose army?" Stryfe muttered.  Sitting up to see better, he didn't see much wood.  What he did see was a lot of bodies, few of them particularly intact, and a growing population of flies.  "If your messiahness wouldn't mind a suggestion, though, I'd recommend finding somewhere else to eat.  In a forest that can support carnivores this big there's bound to be scavengers bigger than either of us want to face at the moment which may or may not care whether we're dead yet."

Cable looked up from the rather rough butchering job he was doing.  "Good point.  Think you can walk?"

"If you can, I can."  Stryfe rooled to his hands and knees, breathed deeply until the ground stopped moving then made it up to his knees.  Then he concentrated on breathing for a little while longer and wondered how on earth he was going to make it to his feet.  He opened his eyes with a start as hands touched his shoulders.

Cable roughly unbuckled the armour and dropped it onto the grass.  "Idiot.  You'll never get up with that on, you're in an even worse state than me."  He looked down at Stryfe thoughtfully.  "The other me put up a good fight?"

Stryfe nodded resentfully.  His pride was screaming at him to get up, to never show any sign of weakness in front of this of all people.  But it wasn't offering any practical suggestions on how exactly he could do that.  A bloodstained hand appeared in front of Stryfe's face.  With a sigh he took it and let Cable pull him to his feet.

Cable didn't let go until Stryfe had stopped swaying, then picked the armour back up again.  "But you're carrying this yourself."

"If I'm wearing it I can carry it.  It just... makes it a bit harder to get up."

"I noticed," Cable said drily, easily lifting the armour back into place by relying on his left arm but letting Stryfe refasten it himself.

It was heavy.  Almost too heavy.  Stryfe had been wearing armour for most of his life - that was the primary cause of what was, for a man of his age, quite astonishing muscle tone in his chest and shoulders. But he was tired, bone-tired, and he didn't recover from that as fast as he used to.

By the time Stryfe had got the armour refastened and settled properly Cable had finished cutting off a large haunch of telepath-eater and roughly tied it to his own small pack.  Then he looked at Stryfe, swore and threw the captured psimitar at him.  "Carry that, it's about all you can manage."  With some more expletive-laced grumbling he added Stryfe's equally small bundle of belongings to his own, pausing briefly to admire the sword.  "Nice work."

"Thank you," Stryfe said with bad grace.  The idea of owing Cable - any Cable - anything ate at him, but the sad fact that even the psimitar was heavy in his hands precluded any objection.

"You made it?"

"Yes.  Better to make a weapon than curse the enemy."

Cable grunted a little as he lifted the weight and began to walk down the hill.  "In a world like this you'd think there wouldn't be so many enemies, wouldn't you?"

"No.  There's more of them, everywhere, and you can't know who they are or why they hate you."  He looked sideways at Cable.  "There's a lot of you, for example.  And you _would_ have thrown me out of the tree if you'd thought it would help."

"Flonqing right I would have.  So would you."

"True."  Stryfe looked at them both using the psimitars as staffs to stop them falling over as they stumbled through the undergrowth and smiled self-mockingly.  "Because we're stubborn old men who don't know when to let go."

"Maybe we just don't _want_ to let go."

"No.  Because that would really be letting the shifts win, wouldn't it?  If they can take that, they can take anything.  We define ourselves by each other."

"Speak for yourself."

Stryfe snorted.  "Liar.  Most of the foundation of your self-image is based on not being me.  I've seen many, many versions of us.  And that's the only thing that never really seems to change.  We can never get away from each other, even if the only place the other one exists is inside our own heads."

"I can't even get away from you out here."  Cable sighed.  "I've seen a few versions of us, too.  But most of me were crazy, and most of you weren't much better.  Then again, you never were."  He looked across suspiciously.  "I hate to say it, but you seem almost stable in comparison."

"Compared to this world I'm practically Buddha." Stryfe shrugged.  "I am better suited for it than most.  I'm unlikely to see anyone I particularly care about warped or killed in the shifts, I'm used to being self-sufficient and I'm used to drastic changes in the status quo."

"That's right, you're the chaos-bringer.  This would really be your sort of place."

Stryfe frowned.  "This isn't anybody's idea of a perfect world.  I'm an anarchist, not a masochist."

"Sadist?" Cable suggested innocently.

"Only on special occasions."

"Now better not count as one, because if you try anything I _will_ punch you in the head.  With the left hand."

Stryfe didn't dignify that with an answer, instead he pointed.  "If we go this way we should end up near the creek I was camping by before."

Cable turned to follow the path the finger indicated and they continued in silence for nearly fifteen more minutes before Stryfe's knees gave out.

"Bright lady, why me?"  Cable ungently hooked one of his almost-clone's arms over his shoulders and heaved Stryfe back to his feet.  "I can hear the water, you couldn't have lasted another two minutes?"

"Let me go," Stryfe said without conviction.

"And have you fall over and die and attract all sorts of disgusting things to where I'm about to set up camp?  Don't be stupider than you have to be, it makes me look bad.  Same DNA and all."

So Stryfe let Cable tow him until they reached the bank of the creek, at which point Cable passed Stryfe's weight back to the whim of gravity.  Newton's laws were a more like occasional guidelines in many of the shifts, but in this case acted quite predictably. Luckily for Stryfe, the ground he hit was unusually sandy and merely knocked the breath out of him.

"You've got five minutes to get up again," Cable said sweetly.

As soon as he could get enough air into his lungs Stryfe suggested something about Cable's ancestry that quite neatly insulted him as well, but he was too tired to care.

"And somewhere that's probably even true.  That's the lovely thing about the shifts, infitite possibility in practice."  Cable sat down on the bank, collecting what wood had been washed up or dropped from the tree behind him that he could reach without getting up again.  Fortunately, that was a fair amount.  The creek turned at that point, washing up the sand and a small amount of wood.  Some of it was damp, but would dry out if they could get a fire started.

"Mmm."  Stryfe forced himself to sit up and talk so that he couldn't fall asleep.  Then he jumped and slapped at his arm.  "But for some reason no matter where I go something wants to suck my blood out!" Stryfe tucked himself up so that he exposed as little skin as possible, looking around suspiciously.  "If it's not mosquitoes it's vampires..."

"Vampires?"

"Nate Grey, if you'll believe it."

"Nate Grey as a vampire?  That is..." Cable trailed off, making a disgusted face.

"It was so horrible I don't think I have words.  Not only was he trying to suck my blood out, he was _touching_ me."  Stryfe shuddered.

Cable shrugged.  "Nothing ever wants to bite me, I don't think my blood tastes very nice.  Which is good, because it tends to infect them with the TO."

"Mosquitoes can catch it?"  Stryfe looked dubious.

"Yes.  Try to fly away and hit the ground with little pinging sounds."

"I don't believe you."

"I believed you about the vampiric Nate Grey and didn't even suggest that you screamed like a girl."

"I did not scream like a girl!"

"Ah, so you're admitting that you did scream?"

Stryfe blinked.  Verbally outmaneuvered by Cable?  How embarrassing.  "No!"

"Funny, because that sounded a bit too defensive."

"I was surprised.  I might have sworn briefly, in a manly way."

Cable grinned.  "Sorry, my money's still on 'screamed like a girl'."

"I have seen much stranger, scarier things than that since the shifts started, and before for that matter. I did NOT scream."

"Or squeaked, possibly.  Like what?"

"What do you mean?"

"What stranger things have you seen?  I think my best, of us at any rate, was when I fell through a shift - literally, it came out fifty feet above the ground - into the middle of a battle.  Your army, the Clan Chosen.  I was trying to get back behind my lines when I noticed something very... disturbing."

"What?"

"I didn't seem to be me at all.  And you weren't you. We looked kind of like us, and acted like us, but normally..." Cable waved a stick casually in the air, "... normally we're _men_.  Not so... buxom."

Stryfe blinked for a moment, then laughed.  He'd thought he'd been in the shifts too long to be surprised, but Cable had managed it.  "_Women_?"

"To the toes of our cute little feet."

"Little?"

"Well, judging by the people around me I'd say we were approaching six feet, but smaller than the two of us here."

"And cuter, apparently."

"Well, in my biased opinion I thought _I_ was adorable."  Cable began putting together the beginnings of a fire.  "So beat that."

"The strangest us I've ever come across?"  Stryfe dug out the flint he'd found several shifts earlier.  When you could never tell what the atmosphere might be, it was the only safe fire-starter to carry.  "I think I can.  There was one pair, a little younger than I'd guess either of us are, who were actually the original pair.  Apparently they'd been fighting each other when the first shift opened in their world and they stayed together.  They actually helped me, I'd been injured when I met them.  They were unnerved and didn't trust me, but they may well have saved my life."  He shrugged.  "They were also lovers."

Cable quite satisfyingly dropped a large piece of wood on his leg and was stunned speechless for a moment. "That is even weirder than the shift where everyone had two heads."  He paused again.  "And _intensely_ revolting, all offence intended."

"I quite understand."  Stryfe smirked.

"I think the female you was sleeping with Haight," Cable attempted half-heartedly.

"I doubt she liked him," Stryfe replied with a telltale twitch and a look of disgust.  "I still win."

"You do.  It's... wrong.  So wrong in so many ways." The Askani'son rubbed his arm absently, as if suddenly feeling dirty.  Which he was, but Stryfe didn't think it was the blood and sweat that he was trying to rid himself of.  "I just can't... imagine it.  Not that I WANT to.  But I'm me, I should be able to at least figure out my own perversity."  He frowned.  "And I can't."

"Yes you can, you just don't want to."  Stryfe fed the fledgeling fire carefully.  "Just a combination of narcissism, the way the world is and the fact that we've hated each other for years.  Hate is a passion, like love and lust and anger.  And it's only a step from one to the other."

"It's a BIG step, Stryfe."

"For you, probably a bigger one.  But still only one." He shook his head.  "We hate each other.  We have since we were too small to even know why we should but we did anyway.  For years and years, more than either of us admits, we kept it up.  If we didn't have a really big rousing screaming fight once every few years we got twitchy.  That was just how things were in my world and judging by the way you glare at me it was in yours too."

Cable was actually giving Stryfe a supicious look, not a glare, but he meant it sincerely.  "I wouldn't have described it exactly that way, but it's close.  Which doesn't mean that you're getting any further away from a punch in the head."  He paused.  "But as long as you stay over there I won't," he said magnanimously as he shuffled away slightly.

"Don't be pathetic.  I understand, that doesn't mean I'm any less revolted at the thought.  Besides, you're not mine."

"I think my Stryfe was saner," Cable said acidly.

The barb bounced off as easily as many others had over the years.  There were a few things that would get Stryfe very angry very quickly, but a half-hearted prod at his mental stability wasn't one of them.  He knew he'd been quite crazy at times and knew just as well that he was presently as sane as could be expected.  "That's okay.  My Cable was taller."

"The sad fact is that sometimes that happens."  Cable relaxed again with a rueful smile.  "You'd think that would be a constant, but apparently it isn't.  Some of us are absolutely enormous."

Stryfe laughed.  "True."

Cable crawled away a few feet to grab a larger piece of wood and put it next to the fire to dry.  "Which doesn't make you any less crazy."

"Possibly.  But not because of that.  Face it, brother mine, we share one giant ego.  Everything about your family, my government, our armies, it was really just about you and me.  And the fact that we didn't like each other, of course.  But it was a connection."  He sighed.  "And I understand why those two... were what they were, because I miss that.  If they weren't from the same world I doubt the idea ever would have occured to them.  But the other me... well, that was _his_ Cable.  That was the only human connection they had left, twisted though it was.  I miss my Cable.  I don't think I'd be attracted to him at all even if I found him, but I miss him.  He was mine."

"What would you have done if you'd ever managed to kill him?"

"Before the shifts, probably be very pleased with myself.  Then feel at a loose end, but I'd be pleased with myself."  Stryfe shrugged, deliberately casual. "He was mine, I could kill him if I wanted to."

Cable looked across the fire.  The light of the flames in the growing dark under the trees was throwing every angle of Stryfe's face into sharp relief.  And it was so strange seeing his own face without it being reversed as it was in a mirror, still strange after all these years.  They were probably both still alike - dirty, underweight and eyes full of mistrustful age. So alike, but yet... not.  "You know, every time I go without seeing you for a while I start to wonder how much of it is just me.  What I think of you just because I hate you.  And then, as inevitably happens even when one of us is supposed to be dead, we run into each other again.  And every time you manage to give me the creeps in a new and more twisted way."

Stryfe looked back with equal gravity.  "Thank you. Go fuck yourself."

"Better me than you."

"You're really too defensive on that subject. Insecure in your heterosexuality?  Or just something I should know about before I turn my back on you?  So to speak."

"It's just that the you-involvement is so far out of my realm of understanding that my perfectly secure heterosexuality is having trouble comprehending it. Stop being disgusting."

"You started it."

"I did not," Cable lied.  He glared, and Stryfe glared back.  They eyeballed each other for several long minutes, daring each other to start something.

Then the fire had to be fed, and a stick to put the reptile-leg on needed to be found and another unspoken truce started because even that much effort was too much.

Stryfe curled up next to the fire, still carefully minimizing the skin available to biting insects. "There is some evidence for a genetic basis to homosexuality, you realise.  Which, of course, neatly implicates us both."  He thought for a moment.  "And Nate Grey doesn't help our case, either."

"He's not... us."

"No," Stryfe agreed, ignoring all evidence to the contrary.  He was good at that.  "Far too short."

"Exactly."

Another long pause.  "Stryfe, did... in your world, did you ever end up trying to drain Nate's powers in Latveria?"

"No.  Why would I do a stupid thing like that?" Stryfe frowned.

"I was asking because I wondered that myself, actually."

"Well, hypothetically.... I'd say that I probably cut a deal and was wreaking some destruction in return for a way back from the underworld.  Then when little Nate showed up and made a nuisance of himself with his ego the size of Asia and body the size of a six year-old girl I took exception to his bizarre belief that he was the most powerful telepath on the planet and set about correcting his perceptions.  In a loving, brotherly, power-draining way.  Besides, I actually knew how to use it.  It would have worked too, if Madelyne hadn't been there... I underestimated her. Or possibly I didn't, I simply ignored that she was trying to decieve me because I liked her."  He smiled nastily.  "Or that's what I would guess."

"Hypothetically," Cable said with all due sarcasm.

"I do know me well."

Cable shook his head.  "Liar."

Stryfe laughed, self-mocking but also genuinely amused.  "At last, one of them figures it out."

"I know that you lie, Stryfe.  That's hardly new."

"Yes, you accept that I lie as you accept that I will do all other immoral and unethical acts.  But you don't really understand how _easy_..."  Stryfe looked up at the few stars winking through the leaves.  "I lie so much I sometimes forget what the truth is.  I lie inside other people's minds, inside my own, and with you I lie to your face.  And no matter what I tell you that I think or have done or will do, you believe me.  Because you really don't believe that there is any twisted, horrible thing that I won't do. So I never even have to do any of it, I can just tell you that I did or will and it hurts you just the same as if it were true...  Lies are amazing things."  He waited a moment, but Cable didn't say anything and he was feeling reflective.  Probably due to exhaustion, he decided, ignoring just how long he'd been alone. "I sometimes wonder how that adds up... if everyone believes that I did something terrible and I told you that I did deliberately to make you suffer as much as possible... is that as bad as if I actually did it, or is it just a malicious lie?"

Cable took a deep breath and growled.  "If you're talking about what I think you're talking about, so help me I am going to kill you."

Stryfe carefully didn't respond to the threat, as things stood it was quite possible to carry out.  "If I said yes, how would you know I was telling the truth?  And if I said no, how would you know I wasn't just trying to make you feel better?"

"Feel better?  Feel BETTER?  How the flonq could it make me feel better you self-righteous son of a BITCH."  Grains of sand imbedded themselves under Cable's fingernails as his hands clenched and dug into the ground under him.

Stryfe sat up, smiling as if there was no sight more pleasant than Cable in doubt-driven venemous rage. Perhaps for him there wasn't.  He spoke softly and warmly and every word had an edge so fine it didn't hurt until the blood came.  "Because then you can blame me for everything."

And, projected from Stryfe's mind, Cable saw himself. Standing over an exhausted and unwilling foe, deliberately dominating and humiliating.  _You are all that is wrong with me..._  He shook his head, either to deny the words or dispell the image, he didn't know which.  "That's not... how it is."

Tiny reflected flames danced in Stryfe's eyes, the only part of his face not cool and still.  "Swear on your mother's grave?"

Cable flinched back at the memory those words evoked. That moment where Stryfe came forward, screaming in his mind without making a sound, to take the world away from him.  That one most intimate of moments when their minds actually touched without their normal shielding and he could taste the bitternes of Stryfe's hate and anger and pain.  He could have lived with the physical resemblance, but the way he could see echoes of Stryfe in the dark corners of his own mind... that was worse.

Stryfe's hatred of him for being loved and wanted and free and his returned hatred, hating Stryfe for being more powerful and priviledged and careless.  And after that he also hated Stryfe for reminding him of pieces of himself that he would rather not have.  "Not that way, no.  Are you saying that you don't hate me for what you don't like about yourself?"

Stryfe looked down at the fire, almost visibly releasing the tension in body and mind that he'd been deliberately building.  "It's different.  I hate you for being what I can't be, you hate me for being what you could be."

"I hate you for what you've done."

"And so much more because I did it all with your face. Go on.  Tell me that fact that we share every gene and therefore so many potentials for behaviours and psychoses doesn't faze you at all.  That you openly share as one of life's funny coincidences that we both hate swimming in cold water and crunchy peanut butter but have an irrationally strong attraction to dark-haired women."

"I'd be lying if I said it didn't bother me."

Stryfe nodded.  "I know.  It's the way the bits get stuck in your teeth."

Cable laughed, partly from tension and perhaps because deadpan humour also seemed to have a genetic basis. "I hate all swimming.  I sink."

Stryfe grinned and dropped back onto the sand.  "I like chili."

"That's because you're an insane freak, Stryfe."

"It's very tasty."

"It is not."

"Is so."

"Is not."

"Is so."

"Is not."

They both paused.  Stryfe coughed.  "That never happened."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Cable agreed.

There was a long, embarrassed silence that stretched and became a simply exhausted silence.  They cooked, ate, drank and watched the fire.

"I want to go to sleep," Stryfe said finally, "but I have this irrational feeling that I don't want to go to sleep with you sitting there awake.  So at least pretend to be asleep."

Cable jumped.  "What?  Oh, right.  Sleep sounds good." He dropped down onto one side, as close to the fire as was safe and watched Stryfe in bemusement.  The clone carefully removed the armour, pulled a familiar piece of red cloth out of his pack and patted himself a groove in the sand, then wrapped the cape very firmly around himself and curled up like a puppy. "Sure you don't want to turn around three times?"

"Shut up."  Stryfe determinedly shut his eyes and Cable followed his example, intending to just rest for a moment.  As soon as his eyelids met blackness snapped shut around him and he dropped instantly into unconsciousness.

Cable lost his grip on sleep very unwillingly, annoyed at whoever was shaking him.  Then he woke a little more and realised that the shaking was his own shivering - he was dangerously cold.  The temperature had dropped far lower than he had expected and the metal of his right side was like a cold burn inside, carrying the precious heat of his body out to be wasted.

"Shit..."  Cable sat up, trying to move and warm himself up.  But he was tired and stiff and sore and the fire was out.  Numb hands slipped and he dropped down to his elbows.  "This is not good."  He was so cold that throwing up was a very real possibility. And there was nothing he could do, his reserves were spent and so were Stryfe's, even if the man would have been at all inclined to help.

A thought made its way into Cable's befuddled brain. He blinked into the darkness, looking across the little beach to the dark blob a few feet away. Stryfe...

Stryfe moaned as Cable shook him vigorously.  "Go away," he muttered.

"No.  Wake up."

"I don't want to."

Cable pressed his human hand against the side of Stryfe's neck and grinned at the resulting wakeful cursing.  "I picked you up and all but carried you here.  Without me, you might well not have lived.  Now I'm on the edge of hypothermia, so you're going to share that nice cape with me and let me steal your bodyheat because if you don't I'm going to have to kill you."

"Could've just asked," Stryfe mumbled, unwrapping himself with bad grace.  "But you keep your hands to yourself.  They're freezing."

"So's the rest of me."  All Cable's previous inhibitions regarding Stryfe and body contact disappeared without a trace and he dove underneath the cape before all the warm air could escape, cuddling enthusiastically against Stryfe's chest.  The warmth burned, but Cable didn't care.  Better a warm burn than the cold one.

Stryfe yelped and flinched away.  "Did you dip yourself in ICE?!"

"It's the TO.  Metal conducts heat, and it goes all the way into my chest."

"What a stupid idea," Stryfe grumbled without opening his eyes.

"I agree," Cable snapped.  "I just don't have a lot of choice."

Stryfe sighed and shuffled back in, dropping one very hot and very heavy arm across his new sleeping companion.  "Shut up, I'm asleep."

"Yeah, just don't sneak away while I'm sleeping."

"I won't.  You just get me breakfast in the morning." Stryfe promptly went straight back to sleep.

Cable lay awake for a while longer as the shivering slowly stopped and he started to regain feeling in his fingers.  Experimentally he snuggled even closer, wrapping arms and legs around the hot body so similar to his own and warming his feet against Stryfe's leg. Stryfe just twitched a little and mumbled something, then lay still again.

_I guess it could be easy to get used to this,_ Cable reflected unwillingly.  Physical contact, as essential as food for human sanity, could be a hard thing to come by in the shifts.  It had been days since Cable had been touched by anyone, probably months since anything even resembling physical affection.  And there he was, intimately entangled with an alternate version of one of his worst enemies.

Oh yes, how they could become lovers was suddenly much easier to understand.  Because he didn't want to let go.  Even if it had been warm and he'd had a pile of blankets of his own he wouldn't have wanted to.  Just the feeling of a human body, living and breathing and relaxed, felt so much better than the heat.  The gender and identity didn't matter, he just needed it. Someone other than himself, confirmation that he existed in a way.  He was still alive, still human, because there was another human who unconsciously reciprocated the snuggle until they were as close as they could be without sex and whose slow, warm breath brushed his shoulder.

Confused and guiltily happy, Cable slept.  And, after an hour or two, dreamed.

Strange, he could see himself.  He was younger than he thought he was.  Cable watched in sleep-slowed bemusement as the younger him reached down to touch what looked like another younger him lightly on the shoulder.  The second jumped a little and started to turn, the knife he'd been repairing suddenly held more seriously.  But the first him didn't try to defend himself, just said something Cable couldn't hear.  The second relaxed, looking up with only half-sincere annoyance.  'Don't do that,' Cable read from his lips.

The first grinned, unrepentant, and crouched down next to second.  'You're too jumpy about being touched, you know' Cable thought he might have said.

'You would be too if you were me,' the second said, not returning the smile.

'Glad I'm not then,' the first said, lips clearly visible as he turned to look directly at Cable.  'I see he's awake,' he said, sliding his arms around the waist of the other and looking at Cable defiantly.

'Awake and thinking quite loudly that we're both perverts,' the second said with a wry smile.

'Can't argue with that, we are.'

Cable shook his head, wishing he could hear, but the scene in front of his eyes didn't move at all.

'Lucky us,' the other said, hand moving to touch one of the arms around him in an unconsciously possessive gesture.

'Yes.  But he should be sleeping.'

'Easily fixed.'

And the lights went out.

The sun was high behind the canopy when Cable woke up again, although he couldn't tell whether it was late morning or early afternoon.  And Stryfe was gone, body and cape and psimitar.  Nathan was quite alone on the sand, feeling oddly abandoned.

"Bastard," he muttered, sitting up.  "Wonder how many women you said that to.  Suuuure you won't sneak off..."  Rubbing his eyes, he looked around.  And spotted the message of meticulously laid-out charcoal from the fire, dark against pale sand that had been brushed flat.  Two words.

'I lied'.

And despite himself, Cable laughed.  _You really are a lying sack of shit, aren't you?_ he thought at the dozy presence in his mind.

The mental ghost of Stryfe that had leaped into his brain once again at his second moment of death and refused to leave sent a ripple of amusement across the place where the two of them joined.  *A lying sack of shit that's the only thing keeping you sane, Oh Great Twelve-Gatherer.  Which, I notice, you didn't mention to him.*

Cable stretched.  "Yeah, well, he didn't ask."

END

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