New Mutants Unlimited 30

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New Mutants Unlimited #30
Post by Alexander "Cadmus" Baptiste on Dec 27, 2006, 7:14am

New Mutants Unlimited #30
… and To All a Good Night.

Cover Description: Nadia is hiding behind a snowman with a snowball in her hand. Greg is on the other side of it, off in the distance a bit, throwing snowballs towards her. The image is drawn in a style reminiscent of Calvin and Hobbes.

Writer's Note: The opening scene of the story takes place roughly twenty minutes after Greg and Nadia left the mansion in Merry X-Mas.

***

Three masses of snow float gently through the air. All of them are of similar sizes at the moment but are clearly of differing densities - each mass has more snow in it than the last. The moment was somewhat picturesque, which was a shame since nobody was taking a picture of it. They looked like small, low flying clouds. Or they did in the moment prior to this one. In a quick burst of activity - one that was almost violent looking and utterly smashed the "picturesque" illusion of moments past - each snow mass crushed down into a ball. One was fairly large, one was fairly small and the last bowl of porridge was just right. Hold on. Wrong story. The three balls of snow organized themselves from smallest to largest in the typical snowman shape before setting itself down on the snow-covered ground. It joined its brethren - over a dozen other snowmen scattered on the grounds between the Ex-Mansion and forest behind it.

"Your powers seem to be coming along nicely."

Greg shook his head. "Power was never the problem. Well, well before Exodus power was never the problem. It was always precision. It's why I came here in the first place. It helped start me on the path to control - and I've come even further since I left. But that's enough of that. Mutations and power levels is what we deal with during the rest of the year. Keep catching me up. I'm still not over Lex knocking up Jubilee. I mean, not that teen pregnancy is naturally hilarious or anything like that. But something about the hothead and the girl Wreck and Current convinced me to drop a roof on back in the day conceiving a child thanks to telepathic tampering just seems to have all the ingredients for comedy in it."

Nadia placed the head on her first snowman, compared to Greg's dozen plus. She was doing it the old fashioned - powerless - way. Nadia had paused ever so slightly when Greg mentioned Current but decided against saying anything about him. "Well after the whole debacle with Apocalypse it gets fuzzy for a little while, but we eventually went to Hell, or a, and met the Devil, or a devil. Mephisto was his name. Somebody had cut deal with him to get us out. Not sure which of them it was. Not that I'm not glad to be home," Nadia realized that it was the first time she referred to the mansion as home… "but I can't say that I'm not a little disappointed to know that despite going to hell to rescue one New Mutant, one or more others got themselves condemned." Her tone had been solemn while she was talking but she soon started to chuckle. The chuckle grew in loudness until it graduated into a laugh and got only more intense from there. Nadia was near doubled over.

Greg had first thought he would wait until it passed to inquire what it was all about but he decided that he couldn't wait so long. "Just what, exactly, is so funny?"

Slowly she managed to calm it down enough to talk. "It's just… the Brotherhood, the Friends of Humanity backed by alien tech, Apocalypse and then the devil himself. The FOH aside, I'm fairly certain that you never had to face any of those threats. And even the Friends of Humanity you always met in social settings when our parents had members over, like at a dinner or something. You've never had to see them while they were armed and dangerous. So what I want to ask you Greg… was it still safer for me to stay here than to go with you?"

In a pattern very similar to the one just exhibited by his younger sister, Greg let loose a subdued chuckle that finished off as raucous laughter. Letting himself fall backwards, he landed next to one of his many featureless snowmen and leaned up against it as he sat. The laugh died down far quicker than Nadia's did, however, and after he resumed breathing he began in his normal tone of voice, "Well… safe is a relative term. I mean, you aren't dead are you? You've barely a scratch on you. And to be fair to me… there was no way I could have guessed that you would end up against guys like Apocalypse and Mephisto. That sounds more up the regular X-Men's alley. I would have assumed that they would have taken care of anything big instead of the newbie team." He pauses for a moment. "Aside from that… it was still better for you to stay here than to come with me. There were other places I could have taken you… but nowhere that you wouldn't have felt alone. You can probably chalk it up to guilt over ditching you right after you emerged from your coma, but I felt that I had to leave you where I knew there were - generally - nice people. Okay people. Not insane people. Whatever. Point is, you couldn't have come with me and this was the best option available at the time."

Nadia had taken notice that the conversation had finally made its way back to the reason they left the others to come outside in the first place. "So are we going to talk about it now?" she said with most of the humor gone from her face as she made her way over to the snowman adjacent to the one Greg was in front of to sit down herself.

Greg twiddled his thumbs and stared at them intently. "I was really hoping that we could just avoid that subject all together. It's Christmas… I'm leaving again tonight… that's one conversation that would undoubtedly drag down the whole occasion."

"Oh please." Nadia said with even less of the residual humor left. "Don't give me that crap. When else are we going to talk about it? You just said that you're leaving again tonight. And this isn't the type of thing that can go unmentioned."

Greg sighed. "You know, I came here because I had the feeling that you would be missing the family about as much as I was. What, with our parents being dead and the extended family being just as anti-mutant as our parents were. I really never bargained for having to talk about this." Greg finally took his eyes off of his still twiddling thumbs to look at Nadia. "How did you even find out about it. I've been keeping an eye on the team but I'm pretty sure that you haven't been able to do the same to me. Seriously, what gives?"

"I glazed over most of the details with the whole Mephisto debacle. At one point, he sequestered each of us in a separate pocket dimension. The worst he could have really done to any of us was kill us in which case our souls would be freed, so he decided to tempt each of us with what he figured that we would want the most in exchange for our freedom… until we die. In my case… he showed me you. Running around with a bunch of seedy looking mutants that I didn't recognize at the time but looked up later. He showed me some of the things that you were doing with them and tried to convince me to sell my soul so I could come back and save you from yourself. I declined, which is just as well since we got out anyway."

"Ah." Greg stopped playing with his thumbs and placed his hands behind his head as he flattened out his position into something half way in between sitting and laying down. "That Mephisto. What a troublemaker. I sincerely hope that he got a great big lump of coal in his stocking. What exactly did you see?"

"Oh, a few things. The first few scenes were just you hanging out with a bunch of shady looking mutants that were obviously up to no good - to set the mood or something - but afterwards I got a few flashes from what I can only assume were a couple different missions. I saw you killing, Greg."

Things got really quiet for a few minutes as the two siblings leaned upon snowmen and looked off towards cloudy sky.

"I that why I couldn't come Greg? Is it? So you could go become God knows what and work for the kind of person that ought to make you cringe? So you could be the type of person that ought to make you cringe?"

Looking away from the sky and back towards his sister, Greg quickly shot out "No. This wasn't the plan… not when I left at least. I meant what I said… I had to go do things that I didn't want you around for. When I was recovering from Exodus' attack… there was a voice speaking in my head. Talking about my past. Our past. I forgot all about it when I woke up but some of it came rushing back to the surface when we talking later on. Not just the voice either. There were images that time. Hidden laboratories. Memories of pain. The stench of death. Places that I had to go see for myself. Places that I could never bring you. For all you've been through here, you've never been knee deep in dead bodies before. You stopped talking for a month when you walked into your room and found your cat dead. It may have been years ago, but you never got any better with facing death. I couldn't put you through that."

Nadia said nothing as she reflected on her fight with Carnage, which she had decided not to tell her brother about. Greg continued.

"I never planned to end up with these guys when I left you here. It… just happened. An opportunity presented itself. I took it."

The humor was all gone from Nadia's face now. "An opportunity? 'These guys?' I looked 'those guys' up in the X-Men's database. They're the Marauders. As in the guys who carried out the freaking Mutant Massacre! They slaughtered most of the Morlocks! Damn it, Greg. Roxy was down there when they attacked! She could have been killed! You're running around with the same people who killed most of the people Roxy knew growing up, could have killed Roxy herself and have committed God knows how many other atrocities since then. I mean… damn it Greg, how can you be doing this?"

Greg sprung to his feet in a burst of movement that heavily contrasted the almost motionless scene that existed before as they sat amongst a sea of snowmen. "What the hell do you want me to say Nadia? What? Seriously. There's absolutely no response that I could possibly give you that would satisfy you. Nothing I could tell you that could justify my actions in your mind. What do you want from me?"

"A response damn it!" She answered as she, too, got to get feet and stood opposite her brother. "Just give me a reason! Make sense of this for me!"

"I can't make sense of this for you!" exploded Greg. He paused for a brief moment and then continued in a more subdued voice. "I can't. We grew up together but we're different people. We have different mindsets. I could tell you exactly why I'm doing what I'm doing but it will never make sense for you. And in a way that's a good thing. It means you're a good person. I'm not."

Getting tired of the circles they were arguing in Nadia finally came out and said what she was thinking, "Just tell me that this isn't about revenge. Just tell me that this is in no way linked to Magneto or Exodus or anyone else."

Greg looked her in the eyes, but said nothing.

"Oh, God…" Nadia mumbled out as she buried her face in her hands. She spoke softly but every word had power behind it. "Okay. So Magneto was responsible for your powers emerging when they did, which caused you to kill our parents. So Exodus beat the living shit out of you. And so we both had nanomachines put in our bodies by yet another figure who I think you know about but haven't told me about. That's all true. But damn Greg, does vengeance have have to be the only way you can deal with this? Because I'll tell you right now that it isn't. Haven't you ever wondered about how I've not once expressed any hate towards Magneto or how I've never - not even for a moment - so much as glared at you for losing control and killing our parents? Thoughts of revenge aren't the only way of dealing with that - I'm living proof of that."

"Which just goes to show," Greg replied, "that I'm right about one of us being a good person, and the other one not being one. For the record, it's not just about what these people have done to us. It was a good long while, I'll admit. But I've been cooling my heels a lot and that gives me time to think. For people like Magneto and Exodus and -" he stopped short of mentioning McCoy, "… people like them, we're just two people in a much longer line of victims. I mean, just look at the hell that Magneto's electromagnetic pulse let loose. Also, don't talk to me about how Magneto is a space faring vegetable and Exodus is in custody. It sounds like something you would throw in my face, and you wouldn't be the first one. But the fact is that for monsters like them, no punishment truly sticks except for the capital variety. They'll be back."

Nadia looked intently at her brother and said slowly, "Battle not with monsters lest you become one."

"Lest I become one? Oh it's far too late for that, kid. You saw it yourself." He broke eye contact to look off into the sky once more with a look on his face that was stuck halfway in between wistful and solemn. "I've started my journey down something of a shady path. Paved, partially at least, with bodies. The time when Nietzsche quotes could have convinced me to get off of it has long passed.

"The time will never be long passed Greg. That's the beauty of redemption. You get a new chance to start it every day. Every minute. Every second. You could do it now. Put it all behind you and start to atone."

"You know, that's one of the things that I've always loved about you. Always searching… for the best. In our bigot, mutant hating parents… and in me. I don't think you're going to have much luck finding it here. I cut a deal. Service… for power. The power to crush, quite literally, my current enemies… and so much more." The look on his face abandoned the attempt at a balancing act and settled on being wistful as Greg reflected on private thoughts of what he had started to plan for after vengeance was achieved…

"Yes… a deal. Mephisto showed me that as well. The most intriguing part of that was when you mentioned that there were certain memories that I don't need to have back." Nadia spoke in a fairly deadpan tone, "What memories, Greg? What have you decided that I don't need to know?"

His eyes remained trained on the sky but the wistful look had disappeared from his visage. He looked back on the six years he had spent in McCoy's laboratories. Six years. For no more than shits and giggles, McCoy had also kidnapped Nadia when she was only a few days old. She spent the first five years of her life as McCoy's guinea pig. The only reason she is as well adjusted as she is, is because of Mister Sinister's mental blocks. They all had them… Nadia, Greg and their parents. It was only recently that Sinister removed Greg's and remembering what his childhood was like he couldn't burden Nadia with that knowledge. It was one of the stipulations of his deal that in addition to not going near Nadia, he would never return her real memories. But he now had to face the staunch reality that Nadia was a stubborn person. He didn't have to tell her jack squat. He could keep his mouth shut if he wanted to. But he knew that the X-Mansion was full of telepaths… the Professor, Jean, Psylocke, Gerald… If he kept his mouth shut… there was no doubt that she would go to one of them to try to get her memories back. And he couldn't let her do that. He looked at her.

"I'm going to make a long story - a six year long story - very short. We were both kidnapped when we were young. Me when I was three, you a year later when you were just born. We had the pleasure of growing up in multiple dark laboratories, being poked, prodded and essentially tortured. It was hell. It was a thousand hells. And it didn't stop until my current 'employer' found us. He gave our parents and us fake memories to fill in the early years of our lives. He's the reason why you don't recall being a guinea pig for the first five years of your life. I skimped on the details - I know. But I did that on purpose. The fact is, there was nothing malicious behind those memories that I don't want you to have back… it's just that the whole experience was a hell that I don't have words to describe. I remember every excruciating detail of it. I wouldn't wish that on my enemies, which really says something considering the things that I plan to do to my enemies. I would never wish that knowledge on you. So there. You know. Now promise me, right now, that you'll never go to anyone to try to get those memories back. Please."

Nadia looked at her brother's face. He looked sincere… he sounded like he was telling the truth. The whole thing sounded surreal and unlikely. She wasn't certain that it was all true… but after hearing what the truth could possibly be her fixation on finding out what had been hidden from her sort of ebbed away. "Fine. I promise."

There was a very long silence after that. The two of them walked around in slow, small circles, looking at everything in the area but each other; Greg put together another snowman. After a while Nadia thought that she heard something. "I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that."

"I said that maybe you should just kill me."

"… what?"

"This whole thing… me signing on with Mister Sinister, joining the Marauders, being obsessed with vengeance… it all goes way deeper than I've made it out to. It goes all the way down… to the very soul. It's like I keep saying: I'm not a good person. There were things that I should have felt but never did. There are things that I should feel but still don't. My feelings about you are pretty much my only bright light. The rest is darkness. And it's growing. I don't really see an end to it. What's more… I don't really think that I want it to end. I think I need to keep growing so that I can do what needs to be done. It takes a monster to fight a monster… and I've got a ways to go before I've reached the place I need to be at to war with the long list of monsters I've set my sights on." He looked her dead in the eye. "It's not going to stop. You're disgusted by what I've done… if you don't ever want to see what I'm going to do, maybe you should kill me right now. The way I see things, that's the closest you're ever going to get to 'saving' me."

Nadia shook her head. "No. Never. That's insane. I'm not going to kill you Gregory. Not today. Not ever. You've done horrible things. And though I hate saying it, you've become a horrible person. But I believe in redemption - regardless of what came before. Has it every occurred to you that your self awareness of all of your dark tendencies and your dark path - and the fact that you don't exactly seem pleased with it - indicates that there's more of a light in there than you think? Have you ever thought that maybe the reason you have these evil personality traits is because you keep convincing yourself that you have them? Have you ever thought… that maybe it's not hopeless? We're linked, Greg. When Exodus attacked you, the link woke me up. When I went rogue, you used it to find me. And right now I can feel more of a light than you're letting on, regardless of what you say. It's not hopeless. I will never be hopeless. It doesn't matter how far you travel down a path Greg. You can always just turn around and head back. I'm not killing you Greg."

Greg stared at his sister, balancing the conflicting feelings of pride and disappointment. "Then I think we've reached an impasse." Greg reached into his jacket and pulled out a large envelope. "This is your present. Our parents left us everything. Everything. They had insured their lives against 'Death By Post-Humans' but my complicity in it gave the company reason to with hold payment - and I'm not really about to contest it. Regardless of that, our parents did okay for themselves. And it was willed to us. Only, I have very little need for money where I am. So I'm giving it all to you. I already had the accounts arranged. The information you need to get at your money is in here. Don't spend it all in one place."

Nadia looked at the envelope she held in her hands and her eyes began to water as thoughts drifted back to her parents. "As if the money can make up them, and you, being gone." She said something else but it got lost in a wave of gibberish as she began crying for second time that day. Greg didn't pause or hesitate for a moment - he simply did a big brother should: he held her.

They stood like that for a few minutes that felt like a few hours and then finally broke the embrace. A shimmering light - one of Sinister's tesseracts - appeared ten feet away as Greg reached in his jacket and clicked a button on an unseen device. He slowly walked towards it. "I get the feeling that one day, no matter how you feel now, you're going to wish you killed me when I gave you the chance."

Choking back the last of her tears, Nadia responds, "And I know that no matter how you feel now, I'm going to get you to step off that dark path of yours one day. I know it."

"Merry Christmas, Nadia."

"Merry Christmas, Greg."

And with that, Greg disappeared through the light, leaving Nadia alone in a sea of snowmen as the sun set off in the distance. After a moment of reflection, Nadia turned towards the ruined mansion and mumbled under her breath,

"I know it."


Re: New Mutants Unlimited #30
Post by Alexander "Cadmus" Baptiste on Dec 27, 2006, 7:20am

My last couple fics were action heavy… this one is dialogue heavy. In fact it's nearly all dialogue. Part of me wanted to have the argument boil to the point where they got into a fight but in the end I decided not to lean on fight scenes like a crutch and try to do an actionless character piece. I like to think that it's better this way, but what do I know.

Edit: Also, WHOO 30 issues!


Re: New Mutants Unlimited #30
Post by Roxanne "Madrock" Madison on Dec 27, 2006, 9:57am

Great read. Good thing it came during the holidays; typically, I don't have as much time to sit back and read these as I'd like. It's nice.

And yeah, nothing wrong with being dialogue-heavy; it's great character development and it's great setup for the inevitable clash with Mr. Sinister.


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