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Disclaimer: The characters in this story belong to Marvel, and I am making no profit by using them. After various debates on racmx and OTL, I have decided not to write Piotr's accent, but to let the reader imagine it.
Many thanks to Dannell for kick-starting and beta-reading.
Continuity: This takes place immediately after the notorious Excalibur 92, wherein Colossus attempted to kill Pete Wisdom.
Loyalty
The sleet shimmered on the steel face of the man crouched on the craggy rocks. It could not harm him, but the downpour enveloped him in blindness and invisibility. He had held his hands out before him, until the silly parallel with Lady Macbeth struck him. Then he had folded his hands away. Besides, they looked like massive slabs of metal stuck out on their own like that, huge crude hammers.Not like his hands, not his hands at all. He was strength, not violence; he was endurance, not relentlessness. But everything had been turned upside-down since his Snowflake had been dropped in the dirt. Enemies had become friends, so why not friends enemies?
The steel cave of his mouth opened to emit a gasp of pain, but the gale that carried the pitiless crystals of ice dashed his sound back down his metal throat. Silent and deaf. His face twitched. It was an illusion of isolation, because Meggan was up there, somewhere, swimming in the bitter storm. He had seen her, briefly, her features
as sharp, careless and brittle as the ice. She was not someone he knew well; she was not at the heart of his glamorous, scattered family. His friend would have to be careful coming here. If Meggan really was an empath, maybe she would sense good intentions and ignore the security breach. She did not seem the type to be overly concerned with ideologies and taking sides.
It was a surprise, this intense longing that kept him standing, and a greater surprise that it could be fulfilled. His loves had wavered between flirtation and obsession - the longest lasting had been the liaison between a dreamed self and a masked other - but this time it had not been he that confessed all of his being to the other. What a remarkable thing, that it was not tears, not art, not even going out to save the world, but the supporting of another's soul that lifted the weights he had thought welded to his own soul. He looked to the low, blank, endless sky, his frozen face twisting in a
tearless grimace, as the new burdens he had claimed began to drag him down to the hard earth again. Stupidity, violence, jealousy, fear. All he had wanted was to make time vanish, to leap back to when everything was straightforward, to when he was cherished and needed, loyal and trusting. His big hands curled at the curdled memory of Katya wriggling into that man's embrace, their wet mouths mashing together, her soft eyes closing in trust and pleasure. He forced his fists open again, flared his fingers like a fan, to make them harmless. They looked like knives, his steel fingers, sparkling with rain.
"Piotr." The level voice came from behind him.
With a relieved relaxation into ice-cut, stinging, feeling flesh, he threw his arms round his startled friend, sobs wrenching his throat and tears freezing on his face.
"You did come, you did not leave me."
"We vowed, my friend."
Piotr held close, Exodus put up a light telekinetic shield around them both, protecting them from the cutting storm. A calm centre in the careless elements, he held their little world in place. Nothing would touch them, here, and no-one but each other.
*Avalon, six weeks earlier*
Piotr stood squarely in the centre of his small room, and peeled off his sweat-soaked robe. He hadn't really expected that he could save the life of the boy nicknamed Neophyte, but now even his steelform and a welding torch couldn't have kept the smile from his face. He couldn't remember the last time he had done something so honestly good: it was slowly becoming apparent to him that his time with the X-Men, however much he loved his tangled family, was a long series of mistakes, necessary but terrible actions, well-intentioned blunders and a few moments of relaxation and friendship so heavenly that they washed him through the bad times in a wave of numbness and nostalgia. Here, though, surrounded by old enemies and violence, he had found reason to plant his feet and resist that agreeable wave of passivity. He could
stand against the insistent shoving of the prevailing tide and speak against its wrongness. Until he had seen Exodus open his glowing fist and give the condemned boy back his life, Piotr hadn't realised that his personal decision to leave his family was a public decision to join a new community. He hadn't chosen the empty solitude that he had wanted, but a place where he couldn't retreat into the comfort of protective, unchallenging friends.
Piotr still wasn't painting, but he no longer had those endless hours to spend staring at the white page until its single colour began to undulate before his eyes, and the pencil or brush fell from his numb hand. A stack of blank computer paper was stashed under his bed, along with a box of pencils, but his lack of desire to create beauty, to make the budding images in his head bloom on the page, no longer hurt him. It had been a shameful hurt, slithering through the bloody holes left by the deaths of his parents, brother and sister, nipping at the corpse of Peter Nicholas and his short, undone existence. Now Piotr was waiting, when he even thought about it, waiting for this detente between he and his art to end. He had learned to want less, but to look for more. It was not contentment, but it was a beginning, and he had been wandering around in the staggering throes of endings for far too long.
His door beeped, a la "Star Trek". It had been Milan, a die-hard Trekkie, who had supervised the refitting of the station after its resurrection, and many of the Acolytes were getting a little sick of the samples of Majel Barret's calm voice on their computer system. Piotr had experienced Kitty's obsession with the show for long enough to be comforted, rather than irritated, by the familiar noise.
"Come in."
Exodus stepped inside, flicking his white cloak close to get it through the door quickly enough. His dark, tattooed face was composed, but his brief glance at Piotr's robe, in a damp lump on the floor, was hostile.
"Exodus. I did not expect to see you here."
"Where did you expect me to be?"
Piotr smiled slightly, warily.
"In the throne room. In conversation."
"You know as well as I do that he's not there, Colossus."
Piotr stared at the dark-skinned Acolyte in silent surprise. After a moment, he realised his mouth was hanging open, and he snapped it shut.
"But you always claimed - you would spend hours in there! I thought you believed he spoke to you, that he heard you speak!"
Exodus straightened his spine, tossed back his black hair and glared into Piotr's face, ready to defend himself, but Piotr was not prepared to return to the adversarial stance that he had had to maintain all this long day. He held his face frozen, locked into a
blankness that was not mirrored on the inside. It worked: Exodus lowered his shoulders and began instead to nervously toy with the beads at the end of one of his long braids. He still looked directly up into Piotr's eyes, but the threat was gone.
"Keep your voice down. What am I supposed to tell them? They know he's not...conscious, but they suppose that the damage Xavier did prevents him from using his powers, or has put a block between his mind and his body."
"They are not entirely wrong."
"No. I am the only true telepath on this station, and it is plausible that I am the only one who can reach him through the damage."
"Plausible. But they know differently, in their hearts."
"No. In their hearts, they want Lord Magnus to be speaking to me. They only wish he would speak to them, also."
Piotr's smile was wan. He had been surprised, in the few days between his arrival and the attack, at how genuine the Acolytes' hope and trust in Magnus had been. He, and the other X-Men, had assumed that as followers of a known and active terrorist, the
Acolytes would all be minor mutant criminals with violent agendas of their own, bound together under their strong leader only by their greed for power. Instead, he had found a diverse group of mostly young men and women, driven by the need to escape,
transcend, their limited lives and petty futures. A few, like the Kleinstock brothers, were thugs and yes-men, but most were delighted and energised by their sudden ability to help others on a large scale, to make a difference, to take part in what Magnus had led them to believe would be a major turning point in history. Few,
if any, had left friends behind: their lives had been transformed by their acceptance into the squabbling but still close community of Avalon. The fact that it was, in fact, a cultish mutant strike force, didn't get in the way of their dedication to their new family. It was a familiar feeling to Piotr. And with the head of the family gone, the eldest son was doing his best to hold things together.
"Why do you not lead in your own name? They would listen to you. And, if they did not, you could make them."
Exodus's gaze hardened again.
"Do you wish me to do this, Colossus? It would be very simple."
"Piotr. And no, I would not wish you to force obedience. We are here of our own will, to follow Magnus's dream. Not yours." Piotr sat down on his low bed, trying to gently defuse the angry uncertainty of the other man's face. Exodus seemed to vacillate from prepared-to-attack to prepared-to-listen, and Piotr could not squander this opportunity by refusing to yield ground. He had seen Ororo use this tactic a hundred times, giving an angry Logan enough space to realise that he was not facing a threat, but a friend. It was not unlike painting, composing a scene to affect the intellect and emotions, but here he himself was a component of the picture.
"I do not think that you would do so. I merely thought that since you choose such a harsh way to lead us, and judge us, you might wish to take it to its logical conclusion."
"No. As I said, I am not the leader. All I want is to keep our Lord's dream alive. I thought, if I made the hard decisions, if I chose the harsher way, they would obey me. They would respect me as they respect him."
"Love him."
"Yes. Yes, we all..." Exodus's broad, strong face was more animated than Piotr had ever seen it, but he could not tell whichemotion was causing the sudden outpouring of expression and words. Exodus paced the two steps from the doorway to the far wall. The door swished open at his movement, and he telekinetically thumped the electronic lock to hold it closed. "Hewill return, Piotr, and we will be his followers. It is my task to keep everyone together, to keep hope alive. If they see how far he is fallen, they will never believe. They are all so crude and curious, they all want to be in my place, they all want to crowd around him and look at him and make him theirs. He deserves more than that! He deserves his dignity! Until he wakes up I must protect him. And if you told them what you knew, if we told the truth, everything he has done would be destroyed. And he cannot stop that himself." He blinked away tears of - anger? sorrow? - and stopped his pacing to stand directly in front of Piotr, hands at his
sides, almost as if he were asking for his approval.
Piotr hesitated. It would be easy to retreat into steely silence, to end this conversation and see no more of Exodus's embarrassing fervour. They were opponents, in thought and in deed, and bothold and fresh blood covered the middle ground. But Piotr could
remember Kitty half-dead at Magneto's hands, and he could remember her befriending Magnus, sitting in the Professor's library, arguing and smiling. He remembered him holding her small hand as they walked into the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, united in the shadow of something more terrible than their little
differences could begin to define.
Piotr reached out, and pulled Exodus down to sit beside him. "You protect him well. Better than even I could." Exodus didn't try to get up, but bowed his head, tired.
It had been Exodus that had placed his hands on the bloody, dying body in Piotr's arms, and held the slippery flesh and flailing bones together in those three slick stab wounds, telekinetically aligning blood vessels, muscle and bone until it would all heal perfectly. Then he had gently floated their Lord away and Piotr had not again seen the man he was supposed to be following. Unlike the other Acolytes, he had no desire to pry. He knew what he would see, and he knew who had allowed Professor Xavier to do Magnus such harm.
"I looked in his mind, I searched for days, but only the most basic reflexes are left. Breathing, swallowing, pissing. I have to do everything. I don't want to touch him, now. One day I will be cleaning him up and he will look at me. Every time, I fear he will open his eyes and see what I am doing for him. Or he will never look at me, Piotr, and I will have to do this forever. We will all be stuck here forever, doing nothing, worshipping a dead man and a dead dream-" Exodus broke off, and stared at the steel floor.
"The dream is not dead, Exodus." Piotr really did not know what to say at this sudden outpouring of anger and disappointment. He had been too caught in his own guilt at precipitating the ghastly confrontation to think about what Exodus actually did to keep their comatose leader alive. "I am sorry, I did not..."
Exodus waved off his hesitant apology, and continued to sit, shoulders slumped, beside him. The white-cloaked Acolyte was turning his hands over and over, as if preparing for the endless array of tasks awaiting those hands soon as he left Piotr's room.
Exodus had not come here to look for praise, or to ask Piotr to take over the tending to Magnus's insensate body. Piotr frowned. He had told the bloodied little team of X-Men that he was staying to care for Magnus as he could not for his dead sister, and they had been too shaken and hurt from the vicious battle to argue with him. Then, without protest, he had let Exodus take over his responsibility. He could not reverse course again, on a whim and a shamefully recalled intention; he could not strip away all Exodus's heartfelt effort and relentless work on their collective behalf. Instead, he put his arm around the other man's back, and, with his huge arm in place, pulled the smaller man close to him, so that his head lay on Piotr's broad, warm chest. Piotr saw the lethal gleam of telekinesis for a moment, but it faded as Exodus relaxed.
"I will not betray you, Exodus. I will not leave you."
"Nor I you." The telepath's voice was shaky, with tears or relief, and he did not pull away from this, their sole comfort.
The two men sat very still, very close in their determined, quiet embrace. Outside the triple-glass window, the cold, blue earth drifted by.
*Muir Island*
"Stop it, Piotr!"
"I could have killed him, I could not stop! She was at least my friend, my good friend, and now she despises me. It is all destroyed. I cannot return. Kurt is wrong. There is no place for me. I hurt him and I could not stop. I would not stop were he here now. It is all destroyed. Nothing can be good now." Piotr's voice was flat and stunned, bludgeoning himself with the repetitive drone of wrongs, unheeding of his friend's attempts to comfort him.
Exodus held the shivering, weeping man, as he himself had been held.
"Piotr, you are not a monster."
"I came to be with my friends and I destroyed everything. Nothing can be-"
Exodus kissed him, full on the mouth, and Piotr stopped talking in sheer surprise.
"My friend, there is always something good. There is always a way back up. Go back inside to your friends. You are a good man, and you will make up for your mistake. Everyone knows this but you."
"You-"
"I will not be far away. Go inside, Piotr, it is cold out here."
Piotr touched his wondering fingers to Exodus's lips, and then to his own. Exodus smiled, and pushed him gently away, back towards the warm yellow lights of the research centre. Piotr smiled back, briefly, then squared his shoulders and walked away from the cliff, back to the noise and confusion of his family. Exodus watched his friend enter the building, then flew up into the cloudy night sky, his white cloak a stable speck of brightness in the arching gloom.
Many thanks to Dannell for kick-starting and beta-reading.
Continuity: This takes place immediately after the notorious Excalibur 92, wherein Colossus attempted to kill Pete Wisdom.
Loyalty
The sleet shimmered on the steel face of the man crouched on the craggy rocks. It could not harm him, but the downpour enveloped him in blindness and invisibility. He had held his hands out before him, until the silly parallel with Lady Macbeth struck him. Then he had folded his hands away. Besides, they looked like massive slabs of metal stuck out on their own like that, huge crude hammers.Not like his hands, not his hands at all. He was strength, not violence; he was endurance, not relentlessness. But everything had been turned upside-down since his Snowflake had been dropped in the dirt. Enemies had become friends, so why not friends enemies?
The steel cave of his mouth opened to emit a gasp of pain, but the gale that carried the pitiless crystals of ice dashed his sound back down his metal throat. Silent and deaf. His face twitched. It was an illusion of isolation, because Meggan was up there, somewhere, swimming in the bitter storm. He had seen her, briefly, her features
as sharp, careless and brittle as the ice. She was not someone he knew well; she was not at the heart of his glamorous, scattered family. His friend would have to be careful coming here. If Meggan really was an empath, maybe she would sense good intentions and ignore the security breach. She did not seem the type to be overly concerned with ideologies and taking sides.
It was a surprise, this intense longing that kept him standing, and a greater surprise that it could be fulfilled. His loves had wavered between flirtation and obsession - the longest lasting had been the liaison between a dreamed self and a masked other - but this time it had not been he that confessed all of his being to the other. What a remarkable thing, that it was not tears, not art, not even going out to save the world, but the supporting of another's soul that lifted the weights he had thought welded to his own soul. He looked to the low, blank, endless sky, his frozen face twisting in a
tearless grimace, as the new burdens he had claimed began to drag him down to the hard earth again. Stupidity, violence, jealousy, fear. All he had wanted was to make time vanish, to leap back to when everything was straightforward, to when he was cherished and needed, loyal and trusting. His big hands curled at the curdled memory of Katya wriggling into that man's embrace, their wet mouths mashing together, her soft eyes closing in trust and pleasure. He forced his fists open again, flared his fingers like a fan, to make them harmless. They looked like knives, his steel fingers, sparkling with rain.
"Piotr." The level voice came from behind him.
With a relieved relaxation into ice-cut, stinging, feeling flesh, he threw his arms round his startled friend, sobs wrenching his throat and tears freezing on his face.
"You did come, you did not leave me."
"We vowed, my friend."
Piotr held close, Exodus put up a light telekinetic shield around them both, protecting them from the cutting storm. A calm centre in the careless elements, he held their little world in place. Nothing would touch them, here, and no-one but each other.
*Avalon, six weeks earlier*
Piotr stood squarely in the centre of his small room, and peeled off his sweat-soaked robe. He hadn't really expected that he could save the life of the boy nicknamed Neophyte, but now even his steelform and a welding torch couldn't have kept the smile from his face. He couldn't remember the last time he had done something so honestly good: it was slowly becoming apparent to him that his time with the X-Men, however much he loved his tangled family, was a long series of mistakes, necessary but terrible actions, well-intentioned blunders and a few moments of relaxation and friendship so heavenly that they washed him through the bad times in a wave of numbness and nostalgia. Here, though, surrounded by old enemies and violence, he had found reason to plant his feet and resist that agreeable wave of passivity. He could
stand against the insistent shoving of the prevailing tide and speak against its wrongness. Until he had seen Exodus open his glowing fist and give the condemned boy back his life, Piotr hadn't realised that his personal decision to leave his family was a public decision to join a new community. He hadn't chosen the empty solitude that he had wanted, but a place where he couldn't retreat into the comfort of protective, unchallenging friends.
Piotr still wasn't painting, but he no longer had those endless hours to spend staring at the white page until its single colour began to undulate before his eyes, and the pencil or brush fell from his numb hand. A stack of blank computer paper was stashed under his bed, along with a box of pencils, but his lack of desire to create beauty, to make the budding images in his head bloom on the page, no longer hurt him. It had been a shameful hurt, slithering through the bloody holes left by the deaths of his parents, brother and sister, nipping at the corpse of Peter Nicholas and his short, undone existence. Now Piotr was waiting, when he even thought about it, waiting for this detente between he and his art to end. He had learned to want less, but to look for more. It was not contentment, but it was a beginning, and he had been wandering around in the staggering throes of endings for far too long.
His door beeped, a la "Star Trek". It had been Milan, a die-hard Trekkie, who had supervised the refitting of the station after its resurrection, and many of the Acolytes were getting a little sick of the samples of Majel Barret's calm voice on their computer system. Piotr had experienced Kitty's obsession with the show for long enough to be comforted, rather than irritated, by the familiar noise.
"Come in."
Exodus stepped inside, flicking his white cloak close to get it through the door quickly enough. His dark, tattooed face was composed, but his brief glance at Piotr's robe, in a damp lump on the floor, was hostile.
"Exodus. I did not expect to see you here."
"Where did you expect me to be?"
Piotr smiled slightly, warily.
"In the throne room. In conversation."
"You know as well as I do that he's not there, Colossus."
Piotr stared at the dark-skinned Acolyte in silent surprise. After a moment, he realised his mouth was hanging open, and he snapped it shut.
"But you always claimed - you would spend hours in there! I thought you believed he spoke to you, that he heard you speak!"
Exodus straightened his spine, tossed back his black hair and glared into Piotr's face, ready to defend himself, but Piotr was not prepared to return to the adversarial stance that he had had to maintain all this long day. He held his face frozen, locked into a
blankness that was not mirrored on the inside. It worked: Exodus lowered his shoulders and began instead to nervously toy with the beads at the end of one of his long braids. He still looked directly up into Piotr's eyes, but the threat was gone.
"Keep your voice down. What am I supposed to tell them? They know he's not...conscious, but they suppose that the damage Xavier did prevents him from using his powers, or has put a block between his mind and his body."
"They are not entirely wrong."
"No. I am the only true telepath on this station, and it is plausible that I am the only one who can reach him through the damage."
"Plausible. But they know differently, in their hearts."
"No. In their hearts, they want Lord Magnus to be speaking to me. They only wish he would speak to them, also."
Piotr's smile was wan. He had been surprised, in the few days between his arrival and the attack, at how genuine the Acolytes' hope and trust in Magnus had been. He, and the other X-Men, had assumed that as followers of a known and active terrorist, the
Acolytes would all be minor mutant criminals with violent agendas of their own, bound together under their strong leader only by their greed for power. Instead, he had found a diverse group of mostly young men and women, driven by the need to escape,
transcend, their limited lives and petty futures. A few, like the Kleinstock brothers, were thugs and yes-men, but most were delighted and energised by their sudden ability to help others on a large scale, to make a difference, to take part in what Magnus had led them to believe would be a major turning point in history. Few,
if any, had left friends behind: their lives had been transformed by their acceptance into the squabbling but still close community of Avalon. The fact that it was, in fact, a cultish mutant strike force, didn't get in the way of their dedication to their new family. It was a familiar feeling to Piotr. And with the head of the family gone, the eldest son was doing his best to hold things together.
"Why do you not lead in your own name? They would listen to you. And, if they did not, you could make them."
Exodus's gaze hardened again.
"Do you wish me to do this, Colossus? It would be very simple."
"Piotr. And no, I would not wish you to force obedience. We are here of our own will, to follow Magnus's dream. Not yours." Piotr sat down on his low bed, trying to gently defuse the angry uncertainty of the other man's face. Exodus seemed to vacillate from prepared-to-attack to prepared-to-listen, and Piotr could not squander this opportunity by refusing to yield ground. He had seen Ororo use this tactic a hundred times, giving an angry Logan enough space to realise that he was not facing a threat, but a friend. It was not unlike painting, composing a scene to affect the intellect and emotions, but here he himself was a component of the picture.
"I do not think that you would do so. I merely thought that since you choose such a harsh way to lead us, and judge us, you might wish to take it to its logical conclusion."
"No. As I said, I am not the leader. All I want is to keep our Lord's dream alive. I thought, if I made the hard decisions, if I chose the harsher way, they would obey me. They would respect me as they respect him."
"Love him."
"Yes. Yes, we all..." Exodus's broad, strong face was more animated than Piotr had ever seen it, but he could not tell whichemotion was causing the sudden outpouring of expression and words. Exodus paced the two steps from the doorway to the far wall. The door swished open at his movement, and he telekinetically thumped the electronic lock to hold it closed. "Hewill return, Piotr, and we will be his followers. It is my task to keep everyone together, to keep hope alive. If they see how far he is fallen, they will never believe. They are all so crude and curious, they all want to be in my place, they all want to crowd around him and look at him and make him theirs. He deserves more than that! He deserves his dignity! Until he wakes up I must protect him. And if you told them what you knew, if we told the truth, everything he has done would be destroyed. And he cannot stop that himself." He blinked away tears of - anger? sorrow? - and stopped his pacing to stand directly in front of Piotr, hands at his
sides, almost as if he were asking for his approval.
Piotr hesitated. It would be easy to retreat into steely silence, to end this conversation and see no more of Exodus's embarrassing fervour. They were opponents, in thought and in deed, and bothold and fresh blood covered the middle ground. But Piotr could
remember Kitty half-dead at Magneto's hands, and he could remember her befriending Magnus, sitting in the Professor's library, arguing and smiling. He remembered him holding her small hand as they walked into the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, united in the shadow of something more terrible than their little
differences could begin to define.
Piotr reached out, and pulled Exodus down to sit beside him. "You protect him well. Better than even I could." Exodus didn't try to get up, but bowed his head, tired.
It had been Exodus that had placed his hands on the bloody, dying body in Piotr's arms, and held the slippery flesh and flailing bones together in those three slick stab wounds, telekinetically aligning blood vessels, muscle and bone until it would all heal perfectly. Then he had gently floated their Lord away and Piotr had not again seen the man he was supposed to be following. Unlike the other Acolytes, he had no desire to pry. He knew what he would see, and he knew who had allowed Professor Xavier to do Magnus such harm.
"I looked in his mind, I searched for days, but only the most basic reflexes are left. Breathing, swallowing, pissing. I have to do everything. I don't want to touch him, now. One day I will be cleaning him up and he will look at me. Every time, I fear he will open his eyes and see what I am doing for him. Or he will never look at me, Piotr, and I will have to do this forever. We will all be stuck here forever, doing nothing, worshipping a dead man and a dead dream-" Exodus broke off, and stared at the steel floor.
"The dream is not dead, Exodus." Piotr really did not know what to say at this sudden outpouring of anger and disappointment. He had been too caught in his own guilt at precipitating the ghastly confrontation to think about what Exodus actually did to keep their comatose leader alive. "I am sorry, I did not..."
Exodus waved off his hesitant apology, and continued to sit, shoulders slumped, beside him. The white-cloaked Acolyte was turning his hands over and over, as if preparing for the endless array of tasks awaiting those hands soon as he left Piotr's room.
Exodus had not come here to look for praise, or to ask Piotr to take over the tending to Magnus's insensate body. Piotr frowned. He had told the bloodied little team of X-Men that he was staying to care for Magnus as he could not for his dead sister, and they had been too shaken and hurt from the vicious battle to argue with him. Then, without protest, he had let Exodus take over his responsibility. He could not reverse course again, on a whim and a shamefully recalled intention; he could not strip away all Exodus's heartfelt effort and relentless work on their collective behalf. Instead, he put his arm around the other man's back, and, with his huge arm in place, pulled the smaller man close to him, so that his head lay on Piotr's broad, warm chest. Piotr saw the lethal gleam of telekinesis for a moment, but it faded as Exodus relaxed.
"I will not betray you, Exodus. I will not leave you."
"Nor I you." The telepath's voice was shaky, with tears or relief, and he did not pull away from this, their sole comfort.
The two men sat very still, very close in their determined, quiet embrace. Outside the triple-glass window, the cold, blue earth drifted by.
*Muir Island*
"Stop it, Piotr!"
"I could have killed him, I could not stop! She was at least my friend, my good friend, and now she despises me. It is all destroyed. I cannot return. Kurt is wrong. There is no place for me. I hurt him and I could not stop. I would not stop were he here now. It is all destroyed. Nothing can be good now." Piotr's voice was flat and stunned, bludgeoning himself with the repetitive drone of wrongs, unheeding of his friend's attempts to comfort him.
Exodus held the shivering, weeping man, as he himself had been held.
"Piotr, you are not a monster."
"I came to be with my friends and I destroyed everything. Nothing can be-"
Exodus kissed him, full on the mouth, and Piotr stopped talking in sheer surprise.
"My friend, there is always something good. There is always a way back up. Go back inside to your friends. You are a good man, and you will make up for your mistake. Everyone knows this but you."
"You-"
"I will not be far away. Go inside, Piotr, it is cold out here."
Piotr touched his wondering fingers to Exodus's lips, and then to his own. Exodus smiled, and pushed him gently away, back towards the warm yellow lights of the research centre. Piotr smiled back, briefly, then squared his shoulders and walked away from the cliff, back to the noise and confusion of his family. Exodus watched his friend enter the building, then flew up into the cloudy night sky, his white cloak a stable speck of brightness in the arching gloom.
