16 May 2004

X-Man/Willow crossover
Nate Grey/Sorsha
NC-17 (eeeee, het)

Snow is only half the problem.

Title stolen from the Goo Goo Dolls.
Written for Trollprincess' The Pairings List That Ate Fandom challenge





It's not that he's unused to falling.  Nate's earliest clear memories are of the world tearing itself apart and throwing him out into a new one.  There was just the briefest glimpse of Scott-and-Jean (the other Scott-and-Jean), and then he fell.

This time the world he falls into is brighter.  No industrial edge to the air he breathes, no haze over the stars.  Where Nate was born (born?  made?), the stars were more a theory than a visible phenomenon.  There were stars in Shakespeare, but none in Massachusetts. 

This isn't Massachusetts.  If there's an ocean, it's far away, and there are mountains in between: big, raw mountains with glaciers hanging down.  Not Switzerland or Chile or Colorado.  Nate falls down into snow, rolls and then lies flat while the world melts and re-crystallizes around him.  He's wet and cold; he aches.  Nobody's ever been able to convince him that skiing is fun.  Snow is what hits you when you fall between worlds.  It's what you lie in, feeling sick and scared and wishing for some warm, dark place loaded with freely available sugar and porn.

There was this squat he stayed in, under New York, which was pretty much like that.  Two months living in the old subway tunnels, wrapped in blankets and flipping through discarded issues of Hustler and Blue Boy, pushing away the rats telekinetically and mentally nudging the other squatters to ignore him.  Really, if large, demanding people hadn't come looking for him, he'd probably still be there.

In more industrial worlds, it's easy to tell when people are coming.  Vibrations hit, then the smoke.  Jackboots and internal combustion engines.

He's never learned to listen for horses.  There's a rhythm to their movements, and metal rings out now and then, but horses in the snow can come up more quietly than Nate expected.  He's still lying on his back when iron-shod hooves land next to his skull.

"Get up."

"Give me a minute.  I'm waiting for the world to stop spinning."

"Get up now.  Boy."  Cold metal hits his chin.

Snow-brilliance hits when he opens his eyes.  Black, shaggy animals mill around, periodically blocking out the sun.  One very sharp, serrated sword nudges at his chin.

"Don't do that."  He doesn't like falling.  There will be no poking of Nate until he can find his feet again.  He pushes at the sword, just a brush of telekinesis.

The sword hits the snow a long way off.  Maybe half a mile.

His feet are approximately where he left them.  Once his head realigns with the rest of him, he'll be able to stand up.  Maybe even be back on his feet before the running horses come back.

Except, when he stands up, she's still there.  Bright-sharp girl, still on horseback and holding another, shorter sword.  Knife.  She's wrapped in fur and leather from heel to skull, but the flashes of her face echo all over Nate's brain.

"Um.  Hey."

"You're a sorcerer."  It's not a question.

"Not exactly.  I'm.  Never mind, it's complicated.  Sure, 'sorcerer' covers all the important parts."  She has, he notices, brown eyes.  Sharp nose and cheekbones.  Her knife's only an arm-twist from his throat.

"You know this country belongs to my mother."

"Actually, I didn't know that."

"Are you going to challenge her?"

"I wasn't planning on it."

He can feel her thinking.  Her thoughts have the shape of armies and battle plans.  Somewhere southwest of here, there are soldiers quartered.  Tents and horses, dogs and flags and camp followers.  "Where are you going?"

"Away.  In a couple of days."  When he can figure out where he is, in the world spiral, and step out of it.

He can feel the air shift when the horses come thundering back.  He's surrounded by them, men in black armour and strung-out animals.  One of them hands the girl's sword back to her.

Nate spreads his hands.  Thinks at her, *softNate notdangerous*

"Alright."  She kicks a foot out of her left stirrup.  "Get on."

The horse shies away from him as soon as he touches the stirrup.  He can see the white edges of its eyes while it dances back.

(*even mother doesn't frighten horses*)  Her mother.  Old woman, sharp and metal-edged.  Swirling black.

He reaches again.  The horse rears back and screams.

Nate says, "I'll walk."


Even later, crouched in the dark of a tent, he can hear the horses squealing and rattling their chains.  Men keep running between them, trying to calm them down.  Nate knows it's his fault.  He's spilling over.  Horses aren't psychic, exactly, but they're herd-minded, and they can feel him.

Meditate, then.  Forget the cold, the ache in his shoulders, the psychic smell of dead things hanging over this army

. . . still . . .

When he surfaces, it's nearly grey morning, and the same woman is crouched in the corner of the tent, looking at him.  She has very red hair.

Someday he'll find a quiet universe with a nice therapist who'll tell him why every world he enters gives him a red-haired woman who bears at least a passing resemblance to Maddie/Jean.  He thinks maybe Freud would have a good time with it, if he weren't dead.

She says, "Your lips are blue."

"Wha?"

"You let yourself get chilled.  We'll be hours warming you up."

He doesn't feel cold, but he does feel numb.  He staggers when she pulls him up, leans on her through the snowed-in camp.  Horses rattle their chains, but only softly, sleeping.

There's fire, and furs.  The tents smell like warm, recently-dead things.  He lies where she puts him, under skin-layers, soaking up the warmth of fire-heated iron bricks.  Drifting. 

His first memory of another earth is of snow and Madelyne Pryor.  The girl who haunts him was so cold.  They were in the Swiss mountains, then, huddled in a too-cold cabin.  He remembers her fingers on his bare shoulders.  He slept beside her for years after that, sometimes naked, usually with layers of clothes and covers between them.  Even after he knew she was almost-not-quite-Jean-his-mother, he couldn't leave her.  (Oedipus had it easy.  Oedipus only had one mother, and she was willing to end it.)

That particular Madelyne is dead.  There've been other Maddies, other Jeans.  The same woman, over and over again, with blue eyes and red hair.  They always need him so much . . .

. . . Sorsha's watching him sleep.

During the time it takes him to wake up, Nate remembers that Sorsha (girl red hair horse and sword) has brown eyes.


And later, he's still buried in furs, but sitting upright and contemplating Sorsha sitting in her own furs, poring over spread vellum maps and growling faintly.

There are glaciers and cliffs on both sides of the road, and a snowed-in pass ahead of her.  He understands she's supposed to be a hundred miles farther south right now.  This isn't the main army, but it's the army's brain.  Without Sorsha, nothing else happens.  Thousands of men are on the other side of the mountains, waiting for her.  Somewhere south of that, there are a handful of towns and a country waiting to fall.  There are maybe fifty thousand refugees running away desperately, more slowly than a mounted army travels.

Too many of his red-haired women are butchers.  Every single one of them echoes Jean or Maddie.  All of the dead scream at the back of his skull.  Fifty thousand more people, all dead, would drive him mad.

Sorsha says, "You're a sorcerer.  Can't you do something about this snow?"

Nate thinks about explaining his necessary gap between can't and won't.  He thinks about what she might do if he makes her really angry. "I don't think so.  No."

She snarls at him and goes back to her charts.

He needs them to stay here.  Just for a little while, long enough for the others to get clear of the army's path.

It isn't really all that hard.  Time is a liquid thing; he can feel it pouring around him these days.  He can't actually stop it, but he can slide time past the people in this camp without their noticing.

Except, when he tries it, Sorsha looks up, absently, and says, "Don't."  There's a haze around her, less than a telepath but more than a flatscan.  If what he reads off the soldiers is right, then Sorsha's mother is easily the most powerful person on this version of earth.  Old, powerful witch in the north. 

None of this will work if Sorsha can tell what he's doing.  He isn't strong enough to shadow everyone in the camp and fight her too.

So time flows normally, and Nate curls down in his furs and watches her.  Thinks about it.  How much she looks like Maddie, the way his body and mind always wrap around these red-haired girls.  Little sexual-psychic gaps in the universe that he always falls into.

He wonders if she can feel him.  If she's the same woman, another version of the same woman, she could fall into him just as easily  . . .

He says, "Sorsha . . ."

"What?"  Irritably.

"Hey."

Sigh.  "What?"

"C'mere."

"I'm working.  I have to find a way around this, and you're no help at all."

"Please.  Come here."

She's angry, but she comes.  Sheds the heaviest layers of furs and pads over to him, sits on the edge of his palette and cocks her head.  He decides it's as good an angle as any to kiss her from.

Careful and sweet as he knows how to be.  She doesn't immediately hit him.  This close, he can read her surface thoughts without trying.  (*anger frustration bodysex yes lonely edge yesplease*)  Slides his fingers up through her hair and pulls her closer to him.  Thinks back, *warm Nate friendly likes you pleaseyes*

She growls at him again.  "Don't do that."

"Please.  It's cold."

Easy as that.  He pulls her furs over while they're still kissing and nests them.  She flinches when his fingertips dig under her jacket to find skin.  (*coldhands*)

*sorry*

She has a redhead's skin.  Icy-pale and freckled down her torso, showing all her veins.  Once he warms his hands, she stops flinching from him and slides her fingers inside his leathers.  Her fingers are rougher than his: she works for a living, he doesn't. 

This is alien every time he does it.  Girl-smell is interesting/not interesting, less engaging than the mental contact.  Kissing down her body and re-covering her as he goes, before she freezes.  It's so cold.  He pulls blankets over her lap as he eases her leggings off, dives underneath.

Noses at her thigh.

*like that?*

"Yesss."

He spreads his mind, and time outside accelerates.  They slow down.  It's a perceptual question, not an important one.  Sorsha doesn't notice.

She spreads her legs for him.  Rough fingers in his hair.

Red hair between her legs, too.  Sharp smell, very wet.  He touches first, one fingertip tracing down through her pubic hair and between her labia.  He feels the relative cold of his skin echo through her.  These little shocks.  Bigger ones when he pushes his tongue-tip against her.

He starts low, where her body opens.  Flicks his tongue across the tiny lips there and feels her shudder.  Rubs harder there, laughs into her flesh when she twists against him.

Up, nosing, looking for her clit.  He feels her shift again when he bumps it.  Good.  He rubs his tongue up both sides, sucks at it a little, slides back down.

The fingers in his hair pull, hard.  Up.

Night hangs outdoors.  The morning and the evening of the first day.

His tongue isn't long enough to actually fuck her with it, but she loves it when he tries.  Strokes as deep as he can, then twists and sucks and feels her gush against him.  She's tight, deep inside.  Growling at him.

A telekinetic nipple-tweak makes her shout.  A hard pinch to each of them makes her howl.  Hips in his hands, pushing up at him, growling.  When he locks his mouth around her clit and rubs hard at it with his tongue, she jerks hard enough to rattle his teeth.  She loves this.  It's written all over the inside of his brain.

*there.  come for me, lovely girl*

She does, hitting him like a wave of psychic colour he has to screw his eyes shut against.  He gives a little mental kick at the highest point.  It knocks her head back.  Red hair against brown and ivory fur and leather.

He crawls up her while she's panting. Pulls her in against his chest and kisses her, deep and open like he could pull her inside him.  Runs hands over her, under her jacket, and whispers all her pleasure back to her.  Doesn't let her come down.  Bright light outside flares and fades while Sorsha digs into Nate's shoulder and gasps.  It's dim by the time she settles enough to smile and lean in, lick herself off his face.

"Maybe you aren't entirely useless, sorcerer."

"Thanks."

Her fingers press against his cock.  Only half-hard.  This is work, holding her attention and sliding time around them.  "Shall I?"

"Um."

"Come on."  She grins at him.  Every auburn woman he's ever loved is right there in her.  Twilight settles outside: evening of the second day.

He stills for a second, listens.  Refugee columns are settling for the night on the edge of a forest.  It's a long way off.  Over river and past far mountain, on the edge of the horizon.

"Yeah.  Do it."

She holds him down.  Straddles him and grins, reaches.  She's older than he is.  Sharper and stronger and she runs with the army.  Her hands on his cock are smarter than his have ever been.  He gets flashes of her with random soldiers, pressed up against walls in the dark, flashing at the edges of his eyes.  Once or twice she twists toward the same flashes, and Nate realizes he's projecting.  Clamps down.

Sorsha snorts.  Not-quite/almost laughing.  "Sorcerer."

"Yep.  Oh god, do that again."

"Your control . . ."

". . . is pathetic, I know."

Nobody cares.  She's seen worse things than flashes of her own sexual history, and she's good.  More fearless than any of the other almost-the-same women he remembers.

Her fist tightens, time wrenches out of Nate's grasp, and now it's definitely night, and he's coming.

He sucks himself off her fingers after, while she pets his hair and laughs at him.

Into her hair, in the dark, Nate whispers, "I'll see if I can move that snow for you."

She says, "Good."


The horses forgive him, eventually.  After two miles walking, Sorsha's mount sidles up to him, and she offers him a stirrup.  All morning he rides behind her, arms around her waist, looking at the snow-bound world.

More than snow in the pass, there's fallen rock.  He can lift it, but it's hard.  Heavy.  He wakes up later, head on Sorsha's shoulder, with a headache and a bloody nose.  Fragments of his blood have frozen into the filigree of her armour.

She smells like him, like Maddie.  Like Sorsha, horses and leather and iron.  The army's moving, miles from collateral human damage.  He clings to her.



jane
x-men