Cable

Cable was not someone you could reasonably call a coward, there was very little he was truly afraid of. But this conversation was one of those things. He'd planned to never have it, in truth, but Natalya's talk yesterday had convinced him that would be cruel. Whatever sort of illusions these people truly were, they did not think of themselves as such and perhaps he owed it to them to treat them better than that. In memory of who they represented if nothing else.

So he had, reluctantly maybe, gone to see his wife and his son. They had, he was pleased to note, survived Stryfe's attack unharmed and he had silenced Aliya's questions, and anger, at his absence, by dropping his shields and joining his mind with hers. Not completely, of course, not enough to reveal all the details of his mind or his life but he let her see his real, aged, body and the Island where he lived, enough for her to know he didn't think this was real. He watched her face as he did so, watched the emotions flicker along a face he'd been so familiar with and yet had almost forgotten and then he heard her whisper in his head, speaking to him in his first tongue the way they always did so as to not disturb the baby sleeping nearby.

"You are not my Nathan?"

"No, I'm not."

"And I am not your wife? Not a real person?"

"No, I don't think you are."

He could feel the grief in her mind at that, and the determination overriding it and he could have taken her in his arms, he wanted to but he wasn't her husband, not really. Time and anger and grief had left him as someone else and that distance sat between them as clear as anything else.

"And tomorrow, you might wake up on that Island and it'll be like me, and my baby here, never existed?"

He sent a mental confirmation to that and waited for the reply.

"Well," she sent and he could feel as well as see the brave face she was putting on, "that at least is no different from normal. The bright lady said we should give thanks for today and plead for tomorrow. I can hope you are wrong, Nathan."

"You can," he replied and he felt a smile rise unbidden to his lips. "You always had faith in that, at least."

And then he finally did what he had been dying to do since he walked into this room, he took his wife into his arms and kissed her, fully and deeply on the lips.

"I have missed you," he whispered into her skin, the foreign words he had not spoken in years coming back to him naturally, "more than you will ever know."

He could read the questions she wanted to ask in her eyes as well as her mind, how could she not want to ask them, but she knew he would not answer and so she didn't.

"Oh, my husband," she told him back, as she accepted his embrace. "What has happened to you?"

"Life," he told her, and it sounded more apologetic then he'd intended. "I am not the man I was"

"No," she agreed. "Life is hard. Even in the sacred timeline, there are losses. But you still live and you are here now, not then. What is, is."

The sacred timeline, oh he remembered that. Aliya had believed in it entirely, believed in a way he never had. This was the sacred timeline, the best of all possible worlds, so it must be preserved and any sacrifices were in service of a greater destiny. She could see her own death in Cable's future and accept it but the idea that their cause had failed altogether was alien to her, unthinkable. And he saw that belief in her face, and for a moment, a brief moment he didn't let out of his own mental shields, he utterly despised his sister.

Instead he forced himself to be cheerful, forced such thoughts away. This was his wife, or something very much like her that he held his hands and he had wanted a day like this for oh such a long time, for all it will hurt when this day was over.

"I have missed your mind," he told her, as he reached for it with his and he felt himself rewarded with a blush, because for the Askani that was like telling someone you'd missed their breasts or their backside. "I have missed your thoughts, missed the dark hues of your fantasies, missed your tactics in battle. Missed the brilliance of your war plans, and the way your mind's thought reaches for food when you are aroused."

And she reached for him, the flattery stirring their passion, until they heard a cry from the baby and he, reluctantly pulled himself away from her to go tend her. He was so beautiful, his little boy, he'd almost forgotten how beautiful he'd been and he remarked as much.

"In which case, you can change him," was Aliya's, verbal, reply from towards the door. "While I attend our guest. Please, do come in."

There were few places Cable had ever known as well as he knew Tabula Rasa, few places he'd spent so much time and few places he'd been where his mind was less busy planning out the next steps. But it wasn't his home, it was a prison, something powerful but hostile.

Providence hadn't been his home either, not the way it had been for some of his followers. He'd seen it as a tool, as a weapon, far more then he'd ever seen it as a home. The X-mansion had been much the same and even the station of Greymalkin had never meant as much to him as the AI who inhabited it's walls.

No, the place he still thought of as home, for all he tried to forget it, was the safehouses of Clan Chosen during the Askani revolution. Back when he'd had a wife and a child and hope and mercy and all the other luxuries that young men allow themselves when they think they're still immortal. And that was a time and place he tried his best not to dwell on. Even his dreams, these days, were more often in English and Russian and based on the 21st century. And those that weren't, he never spoke of.

But if he had learned anything about living on Tabula Rasa, and he liked to think that he had learned a lot, it was that the past would never stay buried there where it belonged when it could be used to whip and prod it's victims instead.

So when he awoke to find himself a younger man again, surrounded by the tents and platforms of a rebel camp, he was angry but he was not surprised. He did not know the details of this particular trick, not yet anyway, but the intent was as familiar to him as his own skin. He could feel the whispers of minds around him, and he felt a dull terror at the familiar shape of them. This was a personal hell for him, filled with the ghosts of those he'd failed.

Still, he was not one to sit and take his punishment. Whatever game this was, there was no reason he had to play it. If he was lucky, all he had to do was walk away, out of the camp altogether, and spend what time he had before being returned to Tabula Rasa, out in the wilderness. Alone.

The camp itself was shielded and camouflaged, of course, but it was designed to be difficult to enter not exit and the guards stepped aside as he passed. All so simple then, except he could feel the whisper of another mind approaching and this one wasn't a ghost but another responsibility to chain him down.

Cable closed his eyes for a second, let a single sigh come out, and then stepped forward to greet them, expression blank and masked.

There was something deeply depressing about Rapture. Not just in the sense of it being a city filled with corpses and lunatics, Cable was used to both, but because it represented the death of a dream. A stupid, short sighted dream, but a dream nonetheless and that still meant something to Cable. He'd long lived a life where dreams were more precious than lives.

Still that didn't stop him from spending a lot of time down there, with the ITF and with Rachel, experimenting with Plasmids and hunting for technology and searching, in vain, for someone sane enough to talk to.

The Medical Pavilion had been the area he and Natalya had discovered on their first trip down here and where he'd found the telekinetic plasmid that allowed him to mimic his powers so it was where he and Rachel visited most often.

He shot his sister a quick silent look to make sure she was keeping up and then strode off up some stairs, into the heart of the area, looking for movement.

"One of the habits we mods are always trying to reaffirm to all of you is communication, and chances are you already e-mail or IM with other muns to discuss your characters' relationships. What this meme is all about is expanding on that, to better create a personal history that you can then use to better build personal development. To paraphrase Lindsay, "it's not intended to be a way of avoiding/handwaving actual threads but rather a way of kickstarting them and getting a better idea of where our characters stand with each other. It's a small island, and it's likely that a lot of our pups have interacted, maybe in little ways."

This for people who play characters who know Cable to ask for or give details of interaction/shared experiences that haven't been played out.

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