Post by Pyro on Aug 10, 2006 10:51:40 GMT -5
Sitting on her bed, Angie gazed in the direction of John's cell. His throat must be sore from all the yelling and screaming, because it had been going on for hours and hours, without a break. She still didn't know exactly what had gone on to land him there, a little fuzzy on the details, but she'd padded out during the night to find out that Python had locked him in, taking away anything that even made a spark. Unable to sleep with the noise and memories of Baltimore still fresh in her mind, Angie had spent most of the night staring into space in that direction, worrying about him. She could still remember the feeling that she had about his mind when their skin touched - something not right, and then there were those headaches that kept coming back. Without any warning, the sound that had been keeping her awake suddenly stopped. Pulling on her mittens, Angie opened her door and looked down the hallway, seeing nobody. Walking the distance to Pyro's cell quickly, she was a little dismayed to meet Python at the door.
"I want to see him." The tall man just looked at her. "Please, Python, maybe I can help somehow." She doubted it, but there was a possibility. Reaching out with a pink and white wool-clad hand, Angie pushed aside the bolt and turned the lock.
"It's not safe." Finally the other mutant spoke, and he pushed the bolt back closed. Reaching out again, she pushed it aside once more. She would do it all day if she had to, though there was no doubt that the older mutant could pick her up and take her away if he wanted to. "So lock me in, too. You'll hear me scream if anything goes wrong." She had no doubt that he'd stand outside the whole time, because he obviously didn't trust John - or her. "Please, Python."
He'd obviously acquiesced, because Pyro was no longer alone in his cell. Angie turned to look back at the door as she heard the bolt slide shut, suddenly thinking that she might have just done something very stupid. Trying to smooth away her worried frown, Nightingale looked back at the reason she was there.
"Pyro." She spoke softly, and you could hear her concern in her voice.
He was pressed into the very corner of the room, his knees drawn into his chest, trembling visibly as a result of the outpouring of fury and emotion that had ripped from him since he'd regained consciousness. Finally he'd stopped, his voice gone, no fight left in him and he'd simply ceased to make any noise at all.
God, but he looked awful. He had torn his fingernails from where he'd been attempting to tear the door open and dried, caked blood was on his face where he'd clawed at it in his insane rage. He'd pulled out several chunks of his own hair which lay at the floor by her feet.
Python had said he'd gone crazy, but the words didn't start to cover it.
He sat there and stared at her, no hint of recognition on his face at all.
"Oh, god." As he turned his face up to her, Angie saw what he'd done to himself. Tearing off her mittens and dropping them, she rushed over to him, cradling his face in her hands. His body had been damaged, yes, but the pain that she felt from him was coming from nothing physical. It made her want to weep, to feel such hurts, such damage, and not be able to do anything about it. More, though, it made her want to weep because she was only feeling an echo of what he felt, observing it from the outside. Things were not right, not by a long shot. No wonder he'd clawed at his own face.
"John." She took her hands off his face uncertainly, and they hovered a few inches from his skin, shaking slightly. "What...? Are...?" She didn't have the words to express what she was feeling.
He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out. He'd screamed himself completely hoarse. Instead a thin trickle of spittle dribbled down his chin. He pulled himself away from her as though afraid of her touching him, literally scampering away to the other side of the metal cell. Python had obviously cleaned up any soiling John had done, because despite the blood, he was clean enough.
He continued to stare at her through eyes that were obviously struggling to place her in his thoughts. It was a terrible state of mind for a twenty year old boy to be in.
She did start to weep at that, or almost - managing to hold herself in check, though tears welled in her eyes and threatened to spill out. Sitting down on the cold metal floor right where she was, Angie groped about behind her for her mittens, though she didn't take her eyes off him. Finding them, she put them in her lap, in the hollow inside her crossed legs, rather than putting them back on. She'd taken her hands away too soon, not wanting to feel it all, but it meant that she hadn't fixed him enough, only starting the job. He looked... so confused, as though he didn't recognise her, and she closed her eyes for a moment, one tear finally sliding down her left cheek and into the corner of her mouth. Darting her tongue out to wet her lips, she tasted the salt.
Reaching a hand out toward him, she didn't move from where she was seated. "Please, Pyro, let me help you. I can help your throat, and your hands." His fingers looked terrible, and she suspected that he'd broken all of his fingernails on the walls, but not before doing the damage to his face and scalp. Her hand shook as she held it out, hoping that he'd come to her, that he'd let her fix him. She knew, though, that she could never fix him completely, could only do half the job. Actually, not even that - though she'd helped him a few times since their first meeting, if he was ever half as bad physically as he was mentally, it would probably push her abilities. Oh, god. She'd never put much in the idea of God, but she had no other words that could express her feelings quite so well.
There was a long period of silence during which she swore his haunted green eyes didn't blink once. Then, so quietly she could barely hear it, he spoke.
"Pyro," he said. "I'm Pyro."
He shuffled slightly towards her. "St. John Allerdyce. Twenty years old. Born in Sydney, Australia. You...you...you..." He broke off talking and coughed instead, his throat red raw. Then the cough became a maniacal giggle and finally a sob.
St. John? He'd told her that his other name was John, but that he was Pyro. It was true, he was Pyro more than John, though she didn't know if that was a good thing. She wondered if his mind had always been the way it was now, and the thought made her want to lose control and cry without holding back, and she could only imagine the feeling of holding such emotional pain for so long.
"I'm Nightingale. Angela Leanne Price. Seventeen years old. Born in Sydney, Australia." He was closer to her than before, but still not close enough. Her hand stopped shaking so much, but she didn't move it, holding it outstretched toward him still. She hoped that the information might jog his memory, that the connections that they shared - their birthplace, their mutations, the Brotherhood, and now this room - might help to guide him out of the fog that his mind seemed trapped in. If there was a way out.
"Is this Australia?"
God, he sounded like a little kid, lost, and scared. "Angela. I know an Angela...I can't remember." Tear streaked green eyes met hers again. "Why can't I remember?"
He would have clawed at his face again except his nails were now torn and ragged and simply dragged across the surface ineffectually. Instead he started rapping smartly on the side of his head with his knuckles, hard enough that she could hear.
"It's all in my head, all in my head, all of it...everything...make it stop, I don't want it there any more..."
He reverted to simply mumbling like this for a few moments, then made a sudden move towards her, catching her wrists in his hands. The glint in his eyes turned totally insane.
"Are you like her?" he said, in his croak. "Rogue? You want to suck everything out of me, is that it? Is that why you're here?"
"No, Pyro, it isn't Australia." She sounded sad as she said it - her mother worked emergency, Angie had seen confused old people come in with horrible injuries because they didn't know what was going on. Some of them got worse in the hospital, even more confused because their routines were changed.
She wanted to give him an answer, tell him why he couldn't remember, but she didn't have one. Didn't know what to say.'You're sick,' couldn't even begin to describe it, or explain it. 'We'll make you better,' was a promise she didn't know could be kept. Empathy made her ache as he asked her to make it stop, but she couldn't speak, didn't know what to say or how to say it. As he caught her wrists in her hands, she felt her energy flow into him, felt the injuries begin to heal. But she also felt his mind again, and she knew that it would not be healed so easily.
"Oh, Pyro, no. Can't you feel it? I'm here to give it back." Tears spilled over and flowed down her cheeks and along her chin, Angie soundlessly weeping at the look in his eyes and the feeling of his mind. It was broken, broken like a precious vase that someone knocked over, and she didn't know how to start putting the pieces back together again. She didn't even know if all the pieces were there.
He seemed to remember something and gently, ever so gently, pushed her away from him. The brief moment of contact had given him some of his voice back.
"You can't fix me," he said, and it was so sad. "Nobody can fix me any more. The Professor fixed me once. But he's broken. And so I'm broken. Don't...hurt yourself trying to fix me."
He picked up her mittens and rather like a small child, somberly handed them to her. "Put them on," he suggested.
Then he crawled over to her and lay on his side, his head in her lap, a beaten puppy craving affection.
She didn't know who the Professor was, but he finally seemed to be remembering something, and he was making sense. She would hurt herself eventually, trying to heal him and failing, and she wished that there was someone who could do the job. Accepting her mittens and slipping them back on, Angie rested one hand on John's side as he lay in her lap, her fingertips poking out of the mittens but only touching his shirt. The other hand rested on her knee, after brushing his hair out of his face.
"I wish I could fix you, Pyro." The words were soft, but she had no doubt that he'd heard them. I'm sorry. All she could do was sit there with him, holding him in a way that she'd never held anyone, never expected to. People assumed that a lack of physical contact meant that there would be no emotional connection, and even Read, her best friend in the world, had never thought to seek her out for comfort beyond a few mostly-ineffective words. "Someone will fix you - the Professor can't have been the only one of his kind." She'd thought that she was unique, energy transferrence through skin contact, but there was this Rogue girl that John had mentioned. Even if she was the opposite, it meant that Angie wasn't the only one. Someone else out there had to be able to help him, but who that could be was beyond Angie, since she couldn't even really say what was wrong with him in the first place.
After a time, exhausted by his outbursts and by his condition, the young man fell asleep just like that, laying in her lap, his breathing even and regular. His sleep was not peaceful though, and he twitched and moaned the entire time. His fists clenched and unclenched and he kicked with his feet like a dreaming animal.
When that moment had happened, when the final cord binding him to reality had snapped, all the suppressed memories, all the things he had received from Jean Grey's unconscious as she'd slept back at the mansion, had roared back up to haunt him again.
He managed to fall asleep in her lap, though she didn't know how he could be comfortable on the cold metal floor. Exhaustion had a tendency to win out, though - she'd managed to sleep in a truck, and a plane, and all through a journey to an island that she'd never heard of before and an unfamiliar bed. His sleep didn't seem to be the kind that was restful, though, and she stroked his forehead with her mittened hand as he moaned. She cast her mind back to their conversations, to the easy way it had been to speak to him on the phone, and she remembered something that he'd said. When she told him to sleep well, he'd said that he always did, and she wondered now if he was a smooth liar or if this was a new development. With her left hand still on his head, Angie bent back and lay down on the floor herself, her right arm bending up and under her head. She shifted a little as she moved, but he didn't wake, and she closed her eyes to try to relax. She wasn't going anywhere until he woke up, and she didn't even know if she'd be able to once he did, unsure of whether Python was still waiting outside the cell.
Python was indeed still outside the cell. When he no longer heard voices, however, he opened the door and peered inside.
"Is he finally sleeping?"
Angie had had little to do with the thin mutant since arrival, but in those four words, she sensed just how much Python cared for the boy. It was a surprising sentiment in him.
Jerking in startlement at the words, Angie realised that Python had opened the door while she was lost in thought, and she looked up at him with a rising blush. While there was obviously nothing going on, with her mutation and Pyro's current... condition, Nightingale still couldn't help but feel that she'd been caught in a somewhat compromising position.
"Yeah, but not very well." She spoke quietly, not wanting to wake up Pyro, although somewhere better than the floor would have been a more welcome choice of where to fall asleep with her pinned beneath him. She was lying in such a way that Python appeared upside down when she looked up at him, and vice versa, but the troubled frown marring her forehead didn't change meaning with orientation. "He needs help. Help that I can't give him." She unconcisously stroked his hair again with the two fingers poking out of her mitten.
"He lost it. Big time. For real, this time. He's been angry before, but he's out of control now. That blonde bird who was here - Frost was her name? She does head stuff. Though being Mystique's friend, I wouldn't blame her for not coming anywhere near him now. If he doesn't get a grip on himself, we're going to have to figure out what to do with him. He can't be allowed to stay here, he's a liability."
Python sighed heavily.
John mumbled something in his sleep and batted ineffectually at whatever monsters were chasing him.
"He's not like the rest of us." The words sounded weak to her, but Angie didn't really know what to say. Python obviously had some idea of what was going on, but the full extent of it...? She couldn't even say for sure what the full extent was, but she could feel that there was a lot wrong with him. It was still a weak argument - they couldn't keep him locked up until he got better, because she wasn't sure if that would ever happen. Python was right - they would have to figure out what to do with him, but she didn't even want to consider it - she knew what the likely answer was. "He needs someone to help him, but..." Well, the Brotherhood didn't exactly have a reputation for being pure of intention, and Angie didn't even know if Emma was really one of them. It seemed like Emma Frost did what she did for her own reasons, and that didn't bode well for any of them. "I don't know how he's lived with it for so long." The words were barely a whisper, and accompanied by a fresh welling up of tears. Anything more than a few minutes was too long.
"Kid's lived with it because he's like the rest of us here. He's a survivor. From what I gather, ol' Professor Xavier did something to help him get through sleepless nights and looks like he did a good job of squashing down the bad karma in our Pyro's head."
He reached down and wiped another line of drool from the boy's chin. It was an almost affectionate, paternal gesture. "You stupid bastard, Pyro," he said, quietly. "You idiot."
Python stood up straight again. "The Brotherhood will end with him, you know. There's nobody really who could lead us now."
Nodding mutely, Angie knew that Python was right. There was no-one else, but did he deserve to be sacrificed to their cause? She couldn't help but feel that if he could live a normal life, one where he wasn't expected to do the things he'd done, one where he could actually talk about what was happening instead of having to have it bottled up, things wouldn't be so bad. They'd all benefit from a world that let them be what they were without pressure or expectations, and she wondered if they'd ever achieve it.
"So the Brotherhood will make sure that he doesn't become... too great a liability." If there was no other option, someone would have to get Emma Frost involved. Angie prayed to any receptive higher powers out there that it not be her.
"There's two options," said Python, and his tone was cold and clinical. "If we can't get him sorted, I mean. One is hand him over the authorities. They can help him. The second is simpler, faster, and would put him out of his misery. A bullet to the brain. Quick, clean, simple."
Blinking for a few seconds more than necessary, Angie bit her lip. "Yeah, the authorities. I'm sure they'll be a real help." The second option actually sounded better to her. "You know all they'll do is put him in a prison and let him get... worse." She'd almost said 'crazier and crazier.' She just imagined Pyro's lawyer calling an insanity plea for his defence. If he even got a lawyer - it seemed more likely to her that they'd send him (and anyone who handed him over that happened to be a mutant) straight to terrorist prison, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Even if they did let him have a trial, what lawyer would defend him and tarnish their reputation by being a publicly known mutant lover, who supported the Brotherhood? No, the second option was definitely the kinder if they were to hand him over to anyone.
"So what do we do, call Emma Frost and hope that she's willing to help? See if we can find another handy telepath who will come for a quick outcall to the middle of nowhere to fix the leader of the Brotherhood?" They weren't likely to have many friends after Baltimore. "I'm sorry, Python, I'm just... worried." Lying there on the cold metal floor of a cell, with a troubled young man sleeping in her lap who could kill her if he got near a spark, Angie wanted to cry. She simply didn't have the life experiences to be able to deal with it all.
"We wait."
Python shrugged his shoulders. "Let him get the worst of it out of his system. He's nearly exhausted any rage he had left in him. Once that's out the way, we can get a better feel for what grip he's got on his own mind - if he has any."
He levelled his gaze at the boy sleeping in Angie's arms.
"I had a son," he said, quietly. "He'd be about John's age now." It was the first time she had ever heard Python refer to Pyro by his given name - and also went some small way towards explaining why the man seemed so protective of him. "If I have to take - let's call it Option B - I will. And he won't suffer. At all."
Nodding, and beginning to realise that Python's 'option B' was another way of being protective, Angie sighed. She didn't want to pry into Python's business, so she didn't remark on his son. She did, however, remark on the other part of what the tall mutant had said.
"He didn't recognise me at first. And he's been... hurting himself." You could still see the dried blood on his fingers, even though the skin was new and healthy again. She could feel the warmth radiating from John, a sharp contrast to the coolness from the floor, and her fingers brushed a stray hair off his face in a protective gesture of her own. "He knows that everything isn't all right. But I don't know if any of us can really understand how much everything is... not right." She had caught a glimpse of it when he'd grasped her wrists and asked if she was here to steal his life force, feeling the wrongness in his mind and his emotions that she couldn't do anything to fix. The words sounded weak and ineffectual to her own ears, but she didn't have the vocabulary to describe what she'd felt. She knew physical problems, she'd practically grown up in hospitals. Her mother had never dealt with the mental side of things, though, and all Angie had ever known about the mentally ill patients that she'd seen was that they weren't quite like the rest of them, and that neither she nor any of her mother's medicines could truly fix them.
"I can't just give up on him. Not yet." Python sounded fiercely determined. "He's tried his hardest, God knows he's tried. But he's not cut out for strategy and planning and worrying about everyone the way he does. Maybe it's our fault for being prepared to follow the leadership of a kid."
He clamped his mouth shut and shook his head. "I'll go get some bandages," he said. "Maybe if I wrap them round his hands it'll stop him damaging himself any more."
Without another word, he left the cell.
"I want to see him." The tall man just looked at her. "Please, Python, maybe I can help somehow." She doubted it, but there was a possibility. Reaching out with a pink and white wool-clad hand, Angie pushed aside the bolt and turned the lock.
"It's not safe." Finally the other mutant spoke, and he pushed the bolt back closed. Reaching out again, she pushed it aside once more. She would do it all day if she had to, though there was no doubt that the older mutant could pick her up and take her away if he wanted to. "So lock me in, too. You'll hear me scream if anything goes wrong." She had no doubt that he'd stand outside the whole time, because he obviously didn't trust John - or her. "Please, Python."
He'd obviously acquiesced, because Pyro was no longer alone in his cell. Angie turned to look back at the door as she heard the bolt slide shut, suddenly thinking that she might have just done something very stupid. Trying to smooth away her worried frown, Nightingale looked back at the reason she was there.
"Pyro." She spoke softly, and you could hear her concern in her voice.
He was pressed into the very corner of the room, his knees drawn into his chest, trembling visibly as a result of the outpouring of fury and emotion that had ripped from him since he'd regained consciousness. Finally he'd stopped, his voice gone, no fight left in him and he'd simply ceased to make any noise at all.
God, but he looked awful. He had torn his fingernails from where he'd been attempting to tear the door open and dried, caked blood was on his face where he'd clawed at it in his insane rage. He'd pulled out several chunks of his own hair which lay at the floor by her feet.
Python had said he'd gone crazy, but the words didn't start to cover it.
He sat there and stared at her, no hint of recognition on his face at all.
"Oh, god." As he turned his face up to her, Angie saw what he'd done to himself. Tearing off her mittens and dropping them, she rushed over to him, cradling his face in her hands. His body had been damaged, yes, but the pain that she felt from him was coming from nothing physical. It made her want to weep, to feel such hurts, such damage, and not be able to do anything about it. More, though, it made her want to weep because she was only feeling an echo of what he felt, observing it from the outside. Things were not right, not by a long shot. No wonder he'd clawed at his own face.
"John." She took her hands off his face uncertainly, and they hovered a few inches from his skin, shaking slightly. "What...? Are...?" She didn't have the words to express what she was feeling.
He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out. He'd screamed himself completely hoarse. Instead a thin trickle of spittle dribbled down his chin. He pulled himself away from her as though afraid of her touching him, literally scampering away to the other side of the metal cell. Python had obviously cleaned up any soiling John had done, because despite the blood, he was clean enough.
He continued to stare at her through eyes that were obviously struggling to place her in his thoughts. It was a terrible state of mind for a twenty year old boy to be in.
She did start to weep at that, or almost - managing to hold herself in check, though tears welled in her eyes and threatened to spill out. Sitting down on the cold metal floor right where she was, Angie groped about behind her for her mittens, though she didn't take her eyes off him. Finding them, she put them in her lap, in the hollow inside her crossed legs, rather than putting them back on. She'd taken her hands away too soon, not wanting to feel it all, but it meant that she hadn't fixed him enough, only starting the job. He looked... so confused, as though he didn't recognise her, and she closed her eyes for a moment, one tear finally sliding down her left cheek and into the corner of her mouth. Darting her tongue out to wet her lips, she tasted the salt.
Reaching a hand out toward him, she didn't move from where she was seated. "Please, Pyro, let me help you. I can help your throat, and your hands." His fingers looked terrible, and she suspected that he'd broken all of his fingernails on the walls, but not before doing the damage to his face and scalp. Her hand shook as she held it out, hoping that he'd come to her, that he'd let her fix him. She knew, though, that she could never fix him completely, could only do half the job. Actually, not even that - though she'd helped him a few times since their first meeting, if he was ever half as bad physically as he was mentally, it would probably push her abilities. Oh, god. She'd never put much in the idea of God, but she had no other words that could express her feelings quite so well.
There was a long period of silence during which she swore his haunted green eyes didn't blink once. Then, so quietly she could barely hear it, he spoke.
"Pyro," he said. "I'm Pyro."
He shuffled slightly towards her. "St. John Allerdyce. Twenty years old. Born in Sydney, Australia. You...you...you..." He broke off talking and coughed instead, his throat red raw. Then the cough became a maniacal giggle and finally a sob.
St. John? He'd told her that his other name was John, but that he was Pyro. It was true, he was Pyro more than John, though she didn't know if that was a good thing. She wondered if his mind had always been the way it was now, and the thought made her want to lose control and cry without holding back, and she could only imagine the feeling of holding such emotional pain for so long.
"I'm Nightingale. Angela Leanne Price. Seventeen years old. Born in Sydney, Australia." He was closer to her than before, but still not close enough. Her hand stopped shaking so much, but she didn't move it, holding it outstretched toward him still. She hoped that the information might jog his memory, that the connections that they shared - their birthplace, their mutations, the Brotherhood, and now this room - might help to guide him out of the fog that his mind seemed trapped in. If there was a way out.
"Is this Australia?"
God, he sounded like a little kid, lost, and scared. "Angela. I know an Angela...I can't remember." Tear streaked green eyes met hers again. "Why can't I remember?"
He would have clawed at his face again except his nails were now torn and ragged and simply dragged across the surface ineffectually. Instead he started rapping smartly on the side of his head with his knuckles, hard enough that she could hear.
"It's all in my head, all in my head, all of it...everything...make it stop, I don't want it there any more..."
He reverted to simply mumbling like this for a few moments, then made a sudden move towards her, catching her wrists in his hands. The glint in his eyes turned totally insane.
"Are you like her?" he said, in his croak. "Rogue? You want to suck everything out of me, is that it? Is that why you're here?"
"No, Pyro, it isn't Australia." She sounded sad as she said it - her mother worked emergency, Angie had seen confused old people come in with horrible injuries because they didn't know what was going on. Some of them got worse in the hospital, even more confused because their routines were changed.
She wanted to give him an answer, tell him why he couldn't remember, but she didn't have one. Didn't know what to say.'You're sick,' couldn't even begin to describe it, or explain it. 'We'll make you better,' was a promise she didn't know could be kept. Empathy made her ache as he asked her to make it stop, but she couldn't speak, didn't know what to say or how to say it. As he caught her wrists in her hands, she felt her energy flow into him, felt the injuries begin to heal. But she also felt his mind again, and she knew that it would not be healed so easily.
"Oh, Pyro, no. Can't you feel it? I'm here to give it back." Tears spilled over and flowed down her cheeks and along her chin, Angie soundlessly weeping at the look in his eyes and the feeling of his mind. It was broken, broken like a precious vase that someone knocked over, and she didn't know how to start putting the pieces back together again. She didn't even know if all the pieces were there.
He seemed to remember something and gently, ever so gently, pushed her away from him. The brief moment of contact had given him some of his voice back.
"You can't fix me," he said, and it was so sad. "Nobody can fix me any more. The Professor fixed me once. But he's broken. And so I'm broken. Don't...hurt yourself trying to fix me."
He picked up her mittens and rather like a small child, somberly handed them to her. "Put them on," he suggested.
Then he crawled over to her and lay on his side, his head in her lap, a beaten puppy craving affection.
She didn't know who the Professor was, but he finally seemed to be remembering something, and he was making sense. She would hurt herself eventually, trying to heal him and failing, and she wished that there was someone who could do the job. Accepting her mittens and slipping them back on, Angie rested one hand on John's side as he lay in her lap, her fingertips poking out of the mittens but only touching his shirt. The other hand rested on her knee, after brushing his hair out of his face.
"I wish I could fix you, Pyro." The words were soft, but she had no doubt that he'd heard them. I'm sorry. All she could do was sit there with him, holding him in a way that she'd never held anyone, never expected to. People assumed that a lack of physical contact meant that there would be no emotional connection, and even Read, her best friend in the world, had never thought to seek her out for comfort beyond a few mostly-ineffective words. "Someone will fix you - the Professor can't have been the only one of his kind." She'd thought that she was unique, energy transferrence through skin contact, but there was this Rogue girl that John had mentioned. Even if she was the opposite, it meant that Angie wasn't the only one. Someone else out there had to be able to help him, but who that could be was beyond Angie, since she couldn't even really say what was wrong with him in the first place.
After a time, exhausted by his outbursts and by his condition, the young man fell asleep just like that, laying in her lap, his breathing even and regular. His sleep was not peaceful though, and he twitched and moaned the entire time. His fists clenched and unclenched and he kicked with his feet like a dreaming animal.
When that moment had happened, when the final cord binding him to reality had snapped, all the suppressed memories, all the things he had received from Jean Grey's unconscious as she'd slept back at the mansion, had roared back up to haunt him again.
He managed to fall asleep in her lap, though she didn't know how he could be comfortable on the cold metal floor. Exhaustion had a tendency to win out, though - she'd managed to sleep in a truck, and a plane, and all through a journey to an island that she'd never heard of before and an unfamiliar bed. His sleep didn't seem to be the kind that was restful, though, and she stroked his forehead with her mittened hand as he moaned. She cast her mind back to their conversations, to the easy way it had been to speak to him on the phone, and she remembered something that he'd said. When she told him to sleep well, he'd said that he always did, and she wondered now if he was a smooth liar or if this was a new development. With her left hand still on his head, Angie bent back and lay down on the floor herself, her right arm bending up and under her head. She shifted a little as she moved, but he didn't wake, and she closed her eyes to try to relax. She wasn't going anywhere until he woke up, and she didn't even know if she'd be able to once he did, unsure of whether Python was still waiting outside the cell.
Python was indeed still outside the cell. When he no longer heard voices, however, he opened the door and peered inside.
"Is he finally sleeping?"
Angie had had little to do with the thin mutant since arrival, but in those four words, she sensed just how much Python cared for the boy. It was a surprising sentiment in him.
Jerking in startlement at the words, Angie realised that Python had opened the door while she was lost in thought, and she looked up at him with a rising blush. While there was obviously nothing going on, with her mutation and Pyro's current... condition, Nightingale still couldn't help but feel that she'd been caught in a somewhat compromising position.
"Yeah, but not very well." She spoke quietly, not wanting to wake up Pyro, although somewhere better than the floor would have been a more welcome choice of where to fall asleep with her pinned beneath him. She was lying in such a way that Python appeared upside down when she looked up at him, and vice versa, but the troubled frown marring her forehead didn't change meaning with orientation. "He needs help. Help that I can't give him." She unconcisously stroked his hair again with the two fingers poking out of her mitten.
"He lost it. Big time. For real, this time. He's been angry before, but he's out of control now. That blonde bird who was here - Frost was her name? She does head stuff. Though being Mystique's friend, I wouldn't blame her for not coming anywhere near him now. If he doesn't get a grip on himself, we're going to have to figure out what to do with him. He can't be allowed to stay here, he's a liability."
Python sighed heavily.
John mumbled something in his sleep and batted ineffectually at whatever monsters were chasing him.
"He's not like the rest of us." The words sounded weak to her, but Angie didn't really know what to say. Python obviously had some idea of what was going on, but the full extent of it...? She couldn't even say for sure what the full extent was, but she could feel that there was a lot wrong with him. It was still a weak argument - they couldn't keep him locked up until he got better, because she wasn't sure if that would ever happen. Python was right - they would have to figure out what to do with him, but she didn't even want to consider it - she knew what the likely answer was. "He needs someone to help him, but..." Well, the Brotherhood didn't exactly have a reputation for being pure of intention, and Angie didn't even know if Emma was really one of them. It seemed like Emma Frost did what she did for her own reasons, and that didn't bode well for any of them. "I don't know how he's lived with it for so long." The words were barely a whisper, and accompanied by a fresh welling up of tears. Anything more than a few minutes was too long.
"Kid's lived with it because he's like the rest of us here. He's a survivor. From what I gather, ol' Professor Xavier did something to help him get through sleepless nights and looks like he did a good job of squashing down the bad karma in our Pyro's head."
He reached down and wiped another line of drool from the boy's chin. It was an almost affectionate, paternal gesture. "You stupid bastard, Pyro," he said, quietly. "You idiot."
Python stood up straight again. "The Brotherhood will end with him, you know. There's nobody really who could lead us now."
Nodding mutely, Angie knew that Python was right. There was no-one else, but did he deserve to be sacrificed to their cause? She couldn't help but feel that if he could live a normal life, one where he wasn't expected to do the things he'd done, one where he could actually talk about what was happening instead of having to have it bottled up, things wouldn't be so bad. They'd all benefit from a world that let them be what they were without pressure or expectations, and she wondered if they'd ever achieve it.
"So the Brotherhood will make sure that he doesn't become... too great a liability." If there was no other option, someone would have to get Emma Frost involved. Angie prayed to any receptive higher powers out there that it not be her.
"There's two options," said Python, and his tone was cold and clinical. "If we can't get him sorted, I mean. One is hand him over the authorities. They can help him. The second is simpler, faster, and would put him out of his misery. A bullet to the brain. Quick, clean, simple."
Blinking for a few seconds more than necessary, Angie bit her lip. "Yeah, the authorities. I'm sure they'll be a real help." The second option actually sounded better to her. "You know all they'll do is put him in a prison and let him get... worse." She'd almost said 'crazier and crazier.' She just imagined Pyro's lawyer calling an insanity plea for his defence. If he even got a lawyer - it seemed more likely to her that they'd send him (and anyone who handed him over that happened to be a mutant) straight to terrorist prison, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Even if they did let him have a trial, what lawyer would defend him and tarnish their reputation by being a publicly known mutant lover, who supported the Brotherhood? No, the second option was definitely the kinder if they were to hand him over to anyone.
"So what do we do, call Emma Frost and hope that she's willing to help? See if we can find another handy telepath who will come for a quick outcall to the middle of nowhere to fix the leader of the Brotherhood?" They weren't likely to have many friends after Baltimore. "I'm sorry, Python, I'm just... worried." Lying there on the cold metal floor of a cell, with a troubled young man sleeping in her lap who could kill her if he got near a spark, Angie wanted to cry. She simply didn't have the life experiences to be able to deal with it all.
"We wait."
Python shrugged his shoulders. "Let him get the worst of it out of his system. He's nearly exhausted any rage he had left in him. Once that's out the way, we can get a better feel for what grip he's got on his own mind - if he has any."
He levelled his gaze at the boy sleeping in Angie's arms.
"I had a son," he said, quietly. "He'd be about John's age now." It was the first time she had ever heard Python refer to Pyro by his given name - and also went some small way towards explaining why the man seemed so protective of him. "If I have to take - let's call it Option B - I will. And he won't suffer. At all."
Nodding, and beginning to realise that Python's 'option B' was another way of being protective, Angie sighed. She didn't want to pry into Python's business, so she didn't remark on his son. She did, however, remark on the other part of what the tall mutant had said.
"He didn't recognise me at first. And he's been... hurting himself." You could still see the dried blood on his fingers, even though the skin was new and healthy again. She could feel the warmth radiating from John, a sharp contrast to the coolness from the floor, and her fingers brushed a stray hair off his face in a protective gesture of her own. "He knows that everything isn't all right. But I don't know if any of us can really understand how much everything is... not right." She had caught a glimpse of it when he'd grasped her wrists and asked if she was here to steal his life force, feeling the wrongness in his mind and his emotions that she couldn't do anything to fix. The words sounded weak and ineffectual to her own ears, but she didn't have the vocabulary to describe what she'd felt. She knew physical problems, she'd practically grown up in hospitals. Her mother had never dealt with the mental side of things, though, and all Angie had ever known about the mentally ill patients that she'd seen was that they weren't quite like the rest of them, and that neither she nor any of her mother's medicines could truly fix them.
"I can't just give up on him. Not yet." Python sounded fiercely determined. "He's tried his hardest, God knows he's tried. But he's not cut out for strategy and planning and worrying about everyone the way he does. Maybe it's our fault for being prepared to follow the leadership of a kid."
He clamped his mouth shut and shook his head. "I'll go get some bandages," he said. "Maybe if I wrap them round his hands it'll stop him damaging himself any more."
Without another word, he left the cell.
