Alcatraz Island, San Francisco, Earth 10005
There was a thick fog roiling over Alcatraz by the time Warren managed to make it back to the island. A thick fog, broken only by the occasional burst of fire, like something large and heavy was being thrown and then hit, over and over again with gouts of flame.
Fog. Not exactly Warren's best friend, when he needed to come in and land. Karla was still here somewhere. His dad was safe, sure, but it wouldn't be worth it if he lost her to a bunch of insane mutants.
The fireballs stopped. A moment later, steam, fire clashing against ice.
"Karla!"
He couldn't see anything through this fog, damn it. He could hear yelling, footsteps as more troops armed with cure weapons honed in on one central location.
To hell with them. They weren't who he'd come back for.
"Karla!"
Karla
Karla was still hobbling over the uneven ground, cursing herself for not properly shielding beforehand and now dealing with the after-effects of having cure darts shot into one's hips and ass. Her whole side hurt, dammit, and in this fog it was impossible to tell where she was going--not that she really knew which way to head as it were.
This was perhaps the one time when air-walking wasn't a benefit. The ground was the only way to tell what direction she was going in. It was hard to stop in time when one was ungainly jogging and suddenly a wall rose up out of the fog.
Not that she'd done that, of course. Ow.
The maelstrom that was Jean's mind made it impossible for Karla to guide herself using the minds of others as a beacon. She hadn't known any of the X-Men long enough to be able to find their brains underneath the swelling, screaming presence that was the Phoenix.
There was only one person that she was close enough to to recognize his mind under any circumstance. And he'd pretty much vanished off her mental radar sometime after she'd told him about his father. She couldn't do a long-range sweep for him--not without bringing Jean's attention back to her.
She'd done that once by accident. Not again.
"Karla!"
Wait. What was that? She cocked her head to the side, listening. Had that been...?
Ooof. Right. Running was still a bad plan.
*Warren?* The thought was sent out on a very tight, very shielded thread. Maybe, since it was so small, Jean wouldn't notice it?
Warren
Warren jerked up the instant Karla's psychic thread hit him. Which was fortunate, because apparently he was about to fly headfirst into a watchtower. Which... would have been unpleasant. As it stood, his wing smacked against it pretty solidly, sending him cartwheeling and flailing into the ground in a tumble of limbs and flying feathers.
He could have probably managed that landing with a little more grace.
"Karla! Karla, where are you?"
He hauled himself to his feet all the same, hobbling for a few steps before finding his legs under him and running. The wing that he'd smacked a good one dragged behind him for only a few moments more, and then he was folding it at his back, too.
Things had gone quiet. After all of the chaos that had been roiling around here, unseen through the fog, he decided that he really, really didn't like the quiet all that much. At least the noise gave him something to work with.
Karla
"Warren?" Karla called out, trying to pinpoint his mind and voice in the roil of the fog and the turmoil that was--or had once been--Jean Grey. It might have been quiet to Warren, but for Karla it was a constant whirlwind of noise and pressure. In the center of it all, she could almost make out the sound of a woman screaming if she tried.
Karla wasn't trying. In fact, she'd be shielding for all the was worth if that hadn't meant she'd also be blocking out Warren.
"Warren?"
A big male blundered in the fog past her. Karla shied away, but he just kept moaning and stumbling forward. A ki-clack off to the side heralded the passing of another contingent of soldiers--or, at least someone carrying cure guns. A woman lying on the ground hissed at her as she walked by, her mouth open to reveal a forked tongue and tried to scrabble after her on hands covered in bloodied scales.
*Warren!* she sent, not wanting to yell any more. The noise only drew other people's attention. *I'm making a witchlight as a beacon. Find it and go head towards whatever side the building is on!* A Sapphire beacon in the dark would attract more people, true, but hopefully keeping it several yards away from her would keep them both from being noticed.
Warren
"Witchlight," Warren breathed, squinting into the fog, looking this way and then that, trying like hell to see- there. A blue light, barely a glow in the haze, but he was taking off after it at a run.
Somewhere across the island, he heard Logan's voice, loud and desperate, "No, don't shoot!"
The sound of more cure darts peppering the night air said more than enough about how that request was taken.
Risking another collision in the fog, Warren leapt into the air. He couldn't run to that witchlight quickly enough. Flying was faster. Always faster than being grounded had ever been.
Karla
Karla had always heard that if you were lost, the best thing to do was to stay still so someone could find you. She was pretty sure that whomever had come up with that rule of thumb hadn't been trapped on an island that was now going insane, but it was sound advice anyway. The last thing she wanted was to move and have Warren somehow miss her.
*Have you spotted it yet?* she sent, fretting. Jean was gearing up for something. Something huge. It felt like the moment before a tidal wave, when the water inches back only to surge forward again as an unstoppable force. *Please, Warren, hurry! I don't know what's about to happen, but I don't like it.*
Her Black Widow senses were screaming at her.
"Noooooo!"
The lights around the facility, only barely visible through the fog, went out. For a moment, the only light was the blue of her witchlight.
And then an explosion rocked the island.
Warren
"God damn it!" The island seemed to jerk out below him, the fog thinning slightly as a wind kicked up around him, suddenly thick with ash. He spat, the taste of it filling his mouth, and let his reply be a mental scream.
*Almost there! Karla, what's happening?!*
Screaming from below. More explosions. Debris flying everywhere. Warren focused on that witchlight even as more ash flew into his face, and dove for it.
Karla
Karla didn't want to answer his question. Didn't want to look to discover the answer to his question. But he'd asked and she couldn't have him flying blind.
So Karla closed her eyes and opened her mind to chaos.
Screaming. Panic. Terror. Fear death help! help! help! Paindeathfearrunning oh god oh jesus help me protect me watch over me mother mary full of grace no please stop please stop please nooooo jeeeeeeeean screaming screaming screaming the void the Nothing it's destroying everything there's nothing to stop her stampedingrunfeardeathatomsNOTHINGLEFT all is screaming never stop screaming screaming screaming forever...
With a wrench that was almost painful, Karla dragged her shields back into place and only then became aware that the screaming she'd distantly heard in her ears was her own.
Warren
For a moment, Warren had almost choked. No reply, nothing for him to focus on but that blue light.
In the next instant, a scream, and he banked sharply in his dive, wings flaring at the last second, feet pummelling the ground as more ash lifted up into the air around them. The fog was being pushed away just as quickly, but the ash and smoke weren't making seeing any easier.
He looked up to see a line of men just... disintegrate, right before his eyes, begging and pleading and blowing away into the same thick ash that he'd been choking on. And he froze for a heartbeat. Just one heartbeat, wide-eyed, wings splayed out behind him in that unconscious effort to make him look bigger and so much braver than he felt just then. And then he was running for the source of that scream, and not stopping until he was positive that the small blonde figure in his sight was the person that he'd doubled back for.
"Karla!"
He was wrapping himself around her, arms and wings, before he had even really registered that he was damn near on top of her.
Karla
His embrace stopped her screams, at least. "W-Warren," Karla choked out, her throat raw. She pressed her face into his chest and just shuddered for a few seconds, oblivious to the fact that her nose was bleeding I method RP, yeah or that she was getting that blood all over his shirt. "I don't--it's horrible--so much screaming, so much death and fear and pain." She shivered again, the insanity of the physical world around them taking second place to the sensations she'd just witnessed psychically.
She was like a little bird, trying to hide as much of herself as she could. "She's like the Nothing all over again, devouring everything in sight."
Warren
If Warren minded the blood in his shirt, he wasn't going to say anything. He had ashes in his eyes, in his mouth, that were a thousand times more nightmare fuel than a little blood had ever been.
In the back of his mind, Pop, Pop, Pop...
"She won't get us," he murmured, gathering her up into his arms, and then taking off at a run along with the very swiftly diminishing number of people, military, X-Men, and Brotherhood alike, that were trying desperately to get back to the bridge.
Far ahead of them, he thought he saw Jimmy, Kitty, and Bobby climbing over the debris. Behind them, the groan of metal, the sound of something huge being torn apart. A watchtower nearby was shredded, the people who had been trapped inside of it reduced to soot before they ever hit the ground.
Again, the ground lurched underneath them, another wave of power lifting damn near everything around them, and Warren couldn't help it, couldn't resist the instinct to fly, even as ashes and brick and god only knew what else pelted as his wings. He leapt, and flapped, and held Karla as close as he possibly could as he tried to get them both the hell out of there.
Karla
Karla clung to him tightly, coming back to herself a little more with each flap of his wings. First step: Find everything that is your Self. Know what is your Self and what is not. In that delineation, separate what is you from what is not. And block it.
Hilda's voice. The leader of her Black Widow coven, teaching the apprentices how to safely walk through the outer reaches of the Twisted Kingdom. As people shrieked and turned to dust, as burning cars became comets and whistled in the air, as the earth itself cried out as it was torn asunder, Karla separated herself from the fear and pain and all-consuming rage, putting up shield after shield with painstaking precision.
She opened her eyes just in time to see them flying over the coast of the island--and the giant wall of water that was shooting up to meet them.
Warren
Warren didn't think, didn't even let himself look. He'd take the wall of water over the possibility of being shredded down to his component atoms, would take the possibility of drowning with Karla in his arms over no hope of surviving at all.
There was another scream now, so loud in his ears that it startled him, and this time it was his own.
He pumped his wings, closed his eyes, and lurched midair as the wall of water caught his legs out from behind him, sending him and Karla cartwheeling through the air, barrelling down toward the water or the bridge or the sky or god only knew what, because it was too damn dark to tell, and all of the flapping in the world didn't seem capable of letting him sort out up from down.
He'd stop screaming in a moment in order to catch his breath. Maybe. But for now that seemed to be one of the few things that was working out for him, here.
Karla
They were tumbling, they were falling, they were plummeting through the sky like a falling star, trailing water instead of fire. Her jaw snapped shut, jarring her teeth and nearly catching her tongue and the inky black ocean yawned wider as she watched, as if it were preparing to catch them and drag them under.
*It can't end this way,* Karla thought, almost idly, unaware she was still broadcasting. *Not until I tell him...*
They flipped again, and now Karla was looking at the great orange monstrosity of a bridge, warped and broken from Magneto's powers. So huge, she wondered how he'd managed to do it. She couldn't lift anything that large or that heavy with Craft.
She broke off, trying to figure out why her brain kept focusing on that bridge. Surely she'd be better off trying to think of a way to shield them from the impact of hitting the water. Of course, she'd learned the hard way that her shields and Craft were still subject to the laws of physics, so even with a shield, hitting the water at that speed would shatter most...of...their...
Craft. Physics. Bridge!
Mere feet from the water now and still tumbling, Karla reached out for the bridge and tried to yank it towards herself, the way she had a billion times before with plates and cups and books and even people.
The bridge never moved. Not even an inch. Karla and Warren did, however. Their dive stalled and they began hurtling towards the bridge instead.
Warren
And now every last bit of Warren's avian instincts were screaming at him that things like this didn't happen. One did not just change course because the thing in one's arms got yanked that way. In fact, one didn't generally get into situations like this in the first place, because, presumably, one was smarter than to get sucked into this shit.
Warren's avian instincts could go get stuffed.
In any case, there was the bridge, coming up fast, and flapping one way or another wasn't going to do him any good at this point. And so he pulled his wings in tight, wrapping himself in a tight ball around Karla, and held his breath.
The impact did more than knock the breath out of him. There were a few notable snapping sounds, more than a couple of sudden, sharp, stabbing pains all through his body, and his scream was cut short as he forgot how the hell to breathe at all.
But on the plus side, they weren't drowning, too.
Karla
Karla could only lay there, panting. She heard the noise of Warren's body breaking against the surface of the bridge, heard the whisper of feathers dragging against metal and concrete, heard a low whimpering sound that might have been him but could just as easily have been her.
She wanted to go to him, to make sure he was all right.
The fingers on the hand closest to him twitched. She couldn't force herself to move any more than that. Her entire body was fire and pain. As a Healer, she knew that the damage was mostly limited to bruises and strains and an impressive amount of concrete-burn, which was...good. It was more the extreme pounding in her head keeping her prone. There was another trickle of moisture on her upper lip again.
Was it possible to strain your brain? If so, it was Karla's expert medical opinion that she had.
She was still twitching her hand towards Warren though. He was even more important than the pain.
Warren
There came a point where pain stopped being just something that you could feel, and it pushed beyond that, into something that you could see, white sparks filling the world around you, choking out everything else but the hurt and the too-loud noises of people screaming and the ocean roaring up in a way that the ocean was never meant to do, and Warren would have liked very much for all of that to just stop, please.
The white sparks were ashes. Everything in his head was made of ashes. And somewhere distant, noticed only because it was something recognizable through the soot and the fog in his head and the screaming, he could hear his father calling his name.
...
It occurred to him for a moment that he'd probably been better off with the crazy lady who was making people explode.
Warren Worthington Jr.
Something had made Warren Worthington Jr. look up in time. He'd like to think it was some kind of paternal instinct, but was realistic enough to assume it was likely his heightened wariness had caught a glimmer of something moving where nothing should be. So he'd looked over the edge just in time to see a meteor made of white feathers and blonde hair impact the bridge.
Terror made his mouth go dry. Had his protection failed, allowing him to get hit with a cure dart? If so, there was no hope that his son would have survived that landing. Had his cure signed his own son's death warrant? Love and guilt forced his legs to move, first walking then jogging then straight up running, past the hulks of cars and the terrified throngs of survivors, some of whom were circling around the newly cracked pavement and others who were already drawing away, afraid of what new horror it might portend.
"Warren!" he cried, shoving his way through. "Warren! Get out of the way, that's my son!"
Karla
Hearing Warren's name cried out that way cut through the pain-filled miasma of Karla's brain. She pushed herself up on shaking arms, and looked over to where her-not-boyfriend-but-still-beloved was crumpled on the pavement.
"Warren," she croaked. Something was in her mouth. She turned and spit out a mouthful of blood. Charming. "Warren."
Her legs still weren't obeying her, so she kind of half-crawled, half-dragged herself closer to him. She'd been thrown a few feet upon landing and each inch felt like forever. "Warren," she said again when she was close enough to touch him. "You came back for me."
Warren
And now everything hurt and was loud and all the loud things kept saying his name. Didn't they know he was trying to just die peacefully, here?
He cracked open one eye, looking tiredly at the one who had reached out to touch him, first. Karla. Karla was... more or less okay. Doing better than him, at the moment. His insides were working on putting themselves together again, slowly but surely, so that probably wouldn't be the case in a few hours.
"I... keep doing that," he murmured, ignoring the sharp tang of blood as it bubbled past his lips. Punctured lung in there somewhere. Cool. "Dunno why you keep sounding so surprised about it."
Karla
"Because anyone else would have given up on me by now," Karla whispered, reaching a trembling hand up to wipe the blood off his face.
Warren
A few more moments, and Warren's other eye decided that maybe it would be okay if he wanted to open it, too. Oh, hey. Karla in 3D.
Three or four of her, granted, but there she was, in living color and everything.
One of his arms still worked, more or less, and so he lifted his hand to reach for hers.
"Good thing I'm not anyone else, then."
Warren Worthington Jr.
Warren Jr pushed his way through the last of the onlookers just in time to see his son reach up and take Karla's hand. There was something so...intimate and personal in that one slight gesture, he felt as if he was almost intruding.
That thought was lost a second later as he took in their condition. Karla was scraped and bruised and bleeding. Warren, though...Warren was mangled. One wing was crumpled beneath him at an unnatural angle. His jeans had been shredded and so had the flesh beneath. Most of the damage was already healing, but the amount of injury still remaining spoke volumes. Warren Jr had made a study of his son's mutation--he could read more in a fading bruise than most people could in a medical chart.
"Son," he said, coming over to them both. He knelt down, seeking to lift Warren upright a little. "You're alive. Thank God, you're alive. I'm so sorry, my boy. So, so sorry."
Warren
Warren gave a sharp hiss between his teeth as he was moved, the sound ending in a snarl. Moving bad. Staying still wasn't so great either, but he was going to complain about these things as they came, damn it, and right now, it was going to be about moving.
"Dad?" His brow furrowed a little. "I'm supposed to be yelling at you some more. Maybe in a bit. Because I'm mad at you."
Just so he knew. Throwing that out there, Junior. Brace yourself for a good tongue-lashing.
"... I'm mad at him, right?"
Help him out with this one, Karla. The concussion was still healing, here.
Karla
The look she shot his father was answer enough, but Karla just stroked an errant lock of hair out of his face and shook her head. "You were," she told him. "Right now, you're focusing on getting better so we can all get out of here. Once we're somewhere safe and you can move again, you can be mad at anyone you like."
You know, like Warren Jr.
Or her.
Both of whom pretty well deserved it.
Warren Worthington
Jr.
Warren Jr bowed his head and nodded. "You have every right to call me an idiot," he said, willing his voice not to shake. "But not until you're on your feet again. I need a good yelling at and right now you can barely whisper."
Anything. He was willing to promise his son anything in exchange for making sure he was going to be all right.
Warren
"Oh. Later, then." If they were going to be all logical about stuff like that, Warren supposed he could do it their way. "It's too loud."
Like someone had turned off a faucet, the wall of water came crashing back down into the bay. And then, silence.
"... Thanks."
Karla
Karla closed her eyes in relief. The relentless howling in her mind had ceased as well. Ordinarily, she would have wondered what had cut it off so abruptly, but right now she couldn't bring herself to care.
It had stopped. That was all that mattered.
That and Warren.
She glared up at his father. "This place is crawling with mutants, ex-mutants, and soldiers." Presumably, two of those groups were still less than pleased with Warren Jr and the last was still a bit trigger-happy for her liking. "We need to move him. Figure something out."
[NFI, NFB, preplayed with and coded by glacial_witch, and pretty roughly based on the events of the last big battle in that really stupid movie that this kid comes from. Post contains Violent Themes and NPC death up the wazzoo. Dusty, dusty NPC death. There'll be just one more post after this, sometime later today. Almost done, I swear!]
Fog. Not exactly Warren's best friend, when he needed to come in and land. Karla was still here somewhere. His dad was safe, sure, but it wouldn't be worth it if he lost her to a bunch of insane mutants.
The fireballs stopped. A moment later, steam, fire clashing against ice.
"Karla!"
He couldn't see anything through this fog, damn it. He could hear yelling, footsteps as more troops armed with cure weapons honed in on one central location.
To hell with them. They weren't who he'd come back for.
"Karla!"
Karla
Karla was still hobbling over the uneven ground, cursing herself for not properly shielding beforehand and now dealing with the after-effects of having cure darts shot into one's hips and ass. Her whole side hurt, dammit, and in this fog it was impossible to tell where she was going--not that she really knew which way to head as it were.
This was perhaps the one time when air-walking wasn't a benefit. The ground was the only way to tell what direction she was going in. It was hard to stop in time when one was ungainly jogging and suddenly a wall rose up out of the fog.
Not that she'd done that, of course. Ow.
The maelstrom that was Jean's mind made it impossible for Karla to guide herself using the minds of others as a beacon. She hadn't known any of the X-Men long enough to be able to find their brains underneath the swelling, screaming presence that was the Phoenix.
There was only one person that she was close enough to to recognize his mind under any circumstance. And he'd pretty much vanished off her mental radar sometime after she'd told him about his father. She couldn't do a long-range sweep for him--not without bringing Jean's attention back to her.
She'd done that once by accident. Not again.
"Karla!"
Wait. What was that? She cocked her head to the side, listening. Had that been...?
Ooof. Right. Running was still a bad plan.
*Warren?* The thought was sent out on a very tight, very shielded thread. Maybe, since it was so small, Jean wouldn't notice it?
Warren
Warren jerked up the instant Karla's psychic thread hit him. Which was fortunate, because apparently he was about to fly headfirst into a watchtower. Which... would have been unpleasant. As it stood, his wing smacked against it pretty solidly, sending him cartwheeling and flailing into the ground in a tumble of limbs and flying feathers.
He could have probably managed that landing with a little more grace.
"Karla! Karla, where are you?"
He hauled himself to his feet all the same, hobbling for a few steps before finding his legs under him and running. The wing that he'd smacked a good one dragged behind him for only a few moments more, and then he was folding it at his back, too.
Things had gone quiet. After all of the chaos that had been roiling around here, unseen through the fog, he decided that he really, really didn't like the quiet all that much. At least the noise gave him something to work with.
Karla
"Warren?" Karla called out, trying to pinpoint his mind and voice in the roil of the fog and the turmoil that was--or had once been--Jean Grey. It might have been quiet to Warren, but for Karla it was a constant whirlwind of noise and pressure. In the center of it all, she could almost make out the sound of a woman screaming if she tried.
Karla wasn't trying. In fact, she'd be shielding for all the was worth if that hadn't meant she'd also be blocking out Warren.
"Warren?"
A big male blundered in the fog past her. Karla shied away, but he just kept moaning and stumbling forward. A ki-clack off to the side heralded the passing of another contingent of soldiers--or, at least someone carrying cure guns. A woman lying on the ground hissed at her as she walked by, her mouth open to reveal a forked tongue and tried to scrabble after her on hands covered in bloodied scales.
*Warren!* she sent, not wanting to yell any more. The noise only drew other people's attention. *I'm making a witchlight as a beacon. Find it and go head towards whatever side the building is on!* A Sapphire beacon in the dark would attract more people, true, but hopefully keeping it several yards away from her would keep them both from being noticed.
Warren
"Witchlight," Warren breathed, squinting into the fog, looking this way and then that, trying like hell to see- there. A blue light, barely a glow in the haze, but he was taking off after it at a run.
Somewhere across the island, he heard Logan's voice, loud and desperate, "No, don't shoot!"
The sound of more cure darts peppering the night air said more than enough about how that request was taken.
Risking another collision in the fog, Warren leapt into the air. He couldn't run to that witchlight quickly enough. Flying was faster. Always faster than being grounded had ever been.
Karla
Karla had always heard that if you were lost, the best thing to do was to stay still so someone could find you. She was pretty sure that whomever had come up with that rule of thumb hadn't been trapped on an island that was now going insane, but it was sound advice anyway. The last thing she wanted was to move and have Warren somehow miss her.
*Have you spotted it yet?* she sent, fretting. Jean was gearing up for something. Something huge. It felt like the moment before a tidal wave, when the water inches back only to surge forward again as an unstoppable force. *Please, Warren, hurry! I don't know what's about to happen, but I don't like it.*
Her Black Widow senses were screaming at her.
"Noooooo!"
The lights around the facility, only barely visible through the fog, went out. For a moment, the only light was the blue of her witchlight.
And then an explosion rocked the island.
Warren
"God damn it!" The island seemed to jerk out below him, the fog thinning slightly as a wind kicked up around him, suddenly thick with ash. He spat, the taste of it filling his mouth, and let his reply be a mental scream.
*Almost there! Karla, what's happening?!*
Screaming from below. More explosions. Debris flying everywhere. Warren focused on that witchlight even as more ash flew into his face, and dove for it.
Karla
Karla didn't want to answer his question. Didn't want to look to discover the answer to his question. But he'd asked and she couldn't have him flying blind.
So Karla closed her eyes and opened her mind to chaos.
Screaming. Panic. Terror. Fear death help! help! help! Paindeathfearrunning oh god oh jesus help me protect me watch over me mother mary full of grace no please stop please stop please nooooo jeeeeeeeean screaming screaming screaming the void the Nothing it's destroying everything there's nothing to stop her stampedingrunfeardeathatomsNOTHINGLEFT all is screaming never stop screaming screaming screaming forever...
With a wrench that was almost painful, Karla dragged her shields back into place and only then became aware that the screaming she'd distantly heard in her ears was her own.
Warren
For a moment, Warren had almost choked. No reply, nothing for him to focus on but that blue light.
In the next instant, a scream, and he banked sharply in his dive, wings flaring at the last second, feet pummelling the ground as more ash lifted up into the air around them. The fog was being pushed away just as quickly, but the ash and smoke weren't making seeing any easier.
He looked up to see a line of men just... disintegrate, right before his eyes, begging and pleading and blowing away into the same thick ash that he'd been choking on. And he froze for a heartbeat. Just one heartbeat, wide-eyed, wings splayed out behind him in that unconscious effort to make him look bigger and so much braver than he felt just then. And then he was running for the source of that scream, and not stopping until he was positive that the small blonde figure in his sight was the person that he'd doubled back for.
"Karla!"
He was wrapping himself around her, arms and wings, before he had even really registered that he was damn near on top of her.
Karla
His embrace stopped her screams, at least. "W-Warren," Karla choked out, her throat raw. She pressed her face into his chest and just shuddered for a few seconds, oblivious to the fact that her nose was bleeding I method RP, yeah or that she was getting that blood all over his shirt. "I don't--it's horrible--so much screaming, so much death and fear and pain." She shivered again, the insanity of the physical world around them taking second place to the sensations she'd just witnessed psychically.
She was like a little bird, trying to hide as much of herself as she could. "She's like the Nothing all over again, devouring everything in sight."
Warren
If Warren minded the blood in his shirt, he wasn't going to say anything. He had ashes in his eyes, in his mouth, that were a thousand times more nightmare fuel than a little blood had ever been.
In the back of his mind, Pop, Pop, Pop...
"She won't get us," he murmured, gathering her up into his arms, and then taking off at a run along with the very swiftly diminishing number of people, military, X-Men, and Brotherhood alike, that were trying desperately to get back to the bridge.
Far ahead of them, he thought he saw Jimmy, Kitty, and Bobby climbing over the debris. Behind them, the groan of metal, the sound of something huge being torn apart. A watchtower nearby was shredded, the people who had been trapped inside of it reduced to soot before they ever hit the ground.
Again, the ground lurched underneath them, another wave of power lifting damn near everything around them, and Warren couldn't help it, couldn't resist the instinct to fly, even as ashes and brick and god only knew what else pelted as his wings. He leapt, and flapped, and held Karla as close as he possibly could as he tried to get them both the hell out of there.
Karla
Karla clung to him tightly, coming back to herself a little more with each flap of his wings. First step: Find everything that is your Self. Know what is your Self and what is not. In that delineation, separate what is you from what is not. And block it.
Hilda's voice. The leader of her Black Widow coven, teaching the apprentices how to safely walk through the outer reaches of the Twisted Kingdom. As people shrieked and turned to dust, as burning cars became comets and whistled in the air, as the earth itself cried out as it was torn asunder, Karla separated herself from the fear and pain and all-consuming rage, putting up shield after shield with painstaking precision.
She opened her eyes just in time to see them flying over the coast of the island--and the giant wall of water that was shooting up to meet them.
Warren
Warren didn't think, didn't even let himself look. He'd take the wall of water over the possibility of being shredded down to his component atoms, would take the possibility of drowning with Karla in his arms over no hope of surviving at all.
There was another scream now, so loud in his ears that it startled him, and this time it was his own.
He pumped his wings, closed his eyes, and lurched midair as the wall of water caught his legs out from behind him, sending him and Karla cartwheeling through the air, barrelling down toward the water or the bridge or the sky or god only knew what, because it was too damn dark to tell, and all of the flapping in the world didn't seem capable of letting him sort out up from down.
He'd stop screaming in a moment in order to catch his breath. Maybe. But for now that seemed to be one of the few things that was working out for him, here.
Karla
They were tumbling, they were falling, they were plummeting through the sky like a falling star, trailing water instead of fire. Her jaw snapped shut, jarring her teeth and nearly catching her tongue and the inky black ocean yawned wider as she watched, as if it were preparing to catch them and drag them under.
*It can't end this way,* Karla thought, almost idly, unaware she was still broadcasting. *Not until I tell him...*
They flipped again, and now Karla was looking at the great orange monstrosity of a bridge, warped and broken from Magneto's powers. So huge, she wondered how he'd managed to do it. She couldn't lift anything that large or that heavy with Craft.
She broke off, trying to figure out why her brain kept focusing on that bridge. Surely she'd be better off trying to think of a way to shield them from the impact of hitting the water. Of course, she'd learned the hard way that her shields and Craft were still subject to the laws of physics, so even with a shield, hitting the water at that speed would shatter most...of...their...
Craft. Physics. Bridge!
Mere feet from the water now and still tumbling, Karla reached out for the bridge and tried to yank it towards herself, the way she had a billion times before with plates and cups and books and even people.
The bridge never moved. Not even an inch. Karla and Warren did, however. Their dive stalled and they began hurtling towards the bridge instead.
Warren
And now every last bit of Warren's avian instincts were screaming at him that things like this didn't happen. One did not just change course because the thing in one's arms got yanked that way. In fact, one didn't generally get into situations like this in the first place, because, presumably, one was smarter than to get sucked into this shit.
Warren's avian instincts could go get stuffed.
In any case, there was the bridge, coming up fast, and flapping one way or another wasn't going to do him any good at this point. And so he pulled his wings in tight, wrapping himself in a tight ball around Karla, and held his breath.
The impact did more than knock the breath out of him. There were a few notable snapping sounds, more than a couple of sudden, sharp, stabbing pains all through his body, and his scream was cut short as he forgot how the hell to breathe at all.
But on the plus side, they weren't drowning, too.
Karla
Karla could only lay there, panting. She heard the noise of Warren's body breaking against the surface of the bridge, heard the whisper of feathers dragging against metal and concrete, heard a low whimpering sound that might have been him but could just as easily have been her.
She wanted to go to him, to make sure he was all right.
The fingers on the hand closest to him twitched. She couldn't force herself to move any more than that. Her entire body was fire and pain. As a Healer, she knew that the damage was mostly limited to bruises and strains and an impressive amount of concrete-burn, which was...good. It was more the extreme pounding in her head keeping her prone. There was another trickle of moisture on her upper lip again.
Was it possible to strain your brain? If so, it was Karla's expert medical opinion that she had.
She was still twitching her hand towards Warren though. He was even more important than the pain.
Warren
There came a point where pain stopped being just something that you could feel, and it pushed beyond that, into something that you could see, white sparks filling the world around you, choking out everything else but the hurt and the too-loud noises of people screaming and the ocean roaring up in a way that the ocean was never meant to do, and Warren would have liked very much for all of that to just stop, please.
The white sparks were ashes. Everything in his head was made of ashes. And somewhere distant, noticed only because it was something recognizable through the soot and the fog in his head and the screaming, he could hear his father calling his name.
...
It occurred to him for a moment that he'd probably been better off with the crazy lady who was making people explode.
Warren Worthington Jr.
Something had made Warren Worthington Jr. look up in time. He'd like to think it was some kind of paternal instinct, but was realistic enough to assume it was likely his heightened wariness had caught a glimmer of something moving where nothing should be. So he'd looked over the edge just in time to see a meteor made of white feathers and blonde hair impact the bridge.
Terror made his mouth go dry. Had his protection failed, allowing him to get hit with a cure dart? If so, there was no hope that his son would have survived that landing. Had his cure signed his own son's death warrant? Love and guilt forced his legs to move, first walking then jogging then straight up running, past the hulks of cars and the terrified throngs of survivors, some of whom were circling around the newly cracked pavement and others who were already drawing away, afraid of what new horror it might portend.
"Warren!" he cried, shoving his way through. "Warren! Get out of the way, that's my son!"
Karla
Hearing Warren's name cried out that way cut through the pain-filled miasma of Karla's brain. She pushed herself up on shaking arms, and looked over to where her-not-boyfriend-but-still-beloved was crumpled on the pavement.
"Warren," she croaked. Something was in her mouth. She turned and spit out a mouthful of blood. Charming. "Warren."
Her legs still weren't obeying her, so she kind of half-crawled, half-dragged herself closer to him. She'd been thrown a few feet upon landing and each inch felt like forever. "Warren," she said again when she was close enough to touch him. "You came back for me."
Warren
And now everything hurt and was loud and all the loud things kept saying his name. Didn't they know he was trying to just die peacefully, here?
He cracked open one eye, looking tiredly at the one who had reached out to touch him, first. Karla. Karla was... more or less okay. Doing better than him, at the moment. His insides were working on putting themselves together again, slowly but surely, so that probably wouldn't be the case in a few hours.
"I... keep doing that," he murmured, ignoring the sharp tang of blood as it bubbled past his lips. Punctured lung in there somewhere. Cool. "Dunno why you keep sounding so surprised about it."
Karla
"Because anyone else would have given up on me by now," Karla whispered, reaching a trembling hand up to wipe the blood off his face.
Warren
A few more moments, and Warren's other eye decided that maybe it would be okay if he wanted to open it, too. Oh, hey. Karla in 3D.
Three or four of her, granted, but there she was, in living color and everything.
One of his arms still worked, more or less, and so he lifted his hand to reach for hers.
"Good thing I'm not anyone else, then."
Warren Worthington Jr.
Warren Jr pushed his way through the last of the onlookers just in time to see his son reach up and take Karla's hand. There was something so...intimate and personal in that one slight gesture, he felt as if he was almost intruding.
That thought was lost a second later as he took in their condition. Karla was scraped and bruised and bleeding. Warren, though...Warren was mangled. One wing was crumpled beneath him at an unnatural angle. His jeans had been shredded and so had the flesh beneath. Most of the damage was already healing, but the amount of injury still remaining spoke volumes. Warren Jr had made a study of his son's mutation--he could read more in a fading bruise than most people could in a medical chart.
"Son," he said, coming over to them both. He knelt down, seeking to lift Warren upright a little. "You're alive. Thank God, you're alive. I'm so sorry, my boy. So, so sorry."
Warren
Warren gave a sharp hiss between his teeth as he was moved, the sound ending in a snarl. Moving bad. Staying still wasn't so great either, but he was going to complain about these things as they came, damn it, and right now, it was going to be about moving.
"Dad?" His brow furrowed a little. "I'm supposed to be yelling at you some more. Maybe in a bit. Because I'm mad at you."
Just so he knew. Throwing that out there, Junior. Brace yourself for a good tongue-lashing.
"... I'm mad at him, right?"
Help him out with this one, Karla. The concussion was still healing, here.
Karla
The look she shot his father was answer enough, but Karla just stroked an errant lock of hair out of his face and shook her head. "You were," she told him. "Right now, you're focusing on getting better so we can all get out of here. Once we're somewhere safe and you can move again, you can be mad at anyone you like."
You know, like Warren Jr.
Or her.
Both of whom pretty well deserved it.
Warren Worthington
Jr.
Warren Jr bowed his head and nodded. "You have every right to call me an idiot," he said, willing his voice not to shake. "But not until you're on your feet again. I need a good yelling at and right now you can barely whisper."
Anything. He was willing to promise his son anything in exchange for making sure he was going to be all right.
Warren
"Oh. Later, then." If they were going to be all logical about stuff like that, Warren supposed he could do it their way. "It's too loud."
Like someone had turned off a faucet, the wall of water came crashing back down into the bay. And then, silence.
"... Thanks."
Karla
Karla closed her eyes in relief. The relentless howling in her mind had ceased as well. Ordinarily, she would have wondered what had cut it off so abruptly, but right now she couldn't bring herself to care.
It had stopped. That was all that mattered.
That and Warren.
She glared up at his father. "This place is crawling with mutants, ex-mutants, and soldiers." Presumably, two of those groups were still less than pleased with Warren Jr and the last was still a bit trigger-happy for her liking. "We need to move him. Figure something out."
[NFI, NFB, preplayed with and coded by glacial_witch, and pretty roughly based on the events of the last big battle in that really stupid movie that this kid comes from. Post contains Violent Themes and NPC death up the wazzoo. Dusty, dusty NPC death. There'll be just one more post after this, sometime later today. Almost done, I swear!]