To Kill, or Not to Kill

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Feuerstein
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To Kill, or Not to Kill

Post by Feuerstein »

Yeah, so here's my very first story here on Nightscrawlers... in fact, except for two short drabbles, this is the first time I really tried to write Kurt. This was intended to be an entry for the July challenge, but I missed the deadline by three hours... part of that was me procrastinating, and the other part was my dad stealing my computer and hiding it from me... In any case, here's the results of my efforts, even though it's too late for the contest.

You should know this is the fourth entry for that contest I wrote, and the only one I finished. I loved the other three ideas, but they were too long and I kept feeling like I was deviating from the theme, so at the literal last minute I tried to throw this together, but didn't quite make it.
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It was one of those moments when time seems to slow. Your insides turn cold and weigh you down, and you hover for a moment, blots of light and darkness bursting before your eyes. Then you are falling at exponential speed, hurtling into the depths of an unknown, silent void that opens like a gaping mouth to envelop you whole.

All this in a mere sliver of a moment.

There was I, spread-eagle on the cold ceramic tiles of Hank’s English classroom, where only minutes before I had been subbing for him. The students had been rapt as I detailed Shakespeare’s Hamlet as only I can, complete with daredevil acrobats across the room during my recount of the Prince’s fatal fencing match. It was a wonder to watch the glowing smiles cross their faces, hear their sudden intakes of breath when Hamlet tormented Ophelia, and witness the utter silence that fell when Gertrude partook of the poisoned goblet. For a time, I felt as if I were back in the circus, the eager faces of the crowd cheering me on, admiring me – proud that one with abilities such as mine was a member of their world.

And then it was over – the roof parted, leaving a wide window to the late afternoon sky, and the desks had fallen, the children were buried, the dust was rising in swirls from the floor. In shock, I found myself beneath the desk, pinned to the floor by the shards of what had been my desk. One serrated plank of wood had split through my leg, rendering it useless. As the dust cleared, I heard the distinct click of guns nearby, and those trigger-happy terrorists burst in through the door.

“No one move or you’ll be shot! We who desire purity of species have declared this area a restricted zone! Your fellows are detained below. For your own sakes, I suggest you follow our orders to the letter.”

I gasped for breath as the band of heavily armed men trouped into the room and pointed the barrels of their guns at my defenseless students. They – the children – cowered in terror, and as the youngest uttered the smallest of squeaks, the terrorists’ apparent leader pulled the trigger. His shot went straight through the wall, not intended to maim, only to frighten. Didn’t he know, couldn’t he see they were already terrified?

In spite of my wound, I wanted to risk teleporting. To save the children. But another terrorist turned his gun on me and looked down his nose at me with eyes full of mind-numbing hatred.

“Don’t move, mutie,” he snarled. “Don’t do whatever it is you can do, or we’ll pump your mutie kids full of lead.”

I calculated my chances of taking him off guard. There were fifteen men at least, all armed with handguns and larger weapons, and most of them had my students penned in a large circle. I searched for a way to save them. Meanwhile, in an almost subconscious effort, I prayed for help to reach us before it was too late.

One of the men lifted a cell phone from his pocket. “Number One. Yeah, we’ve got ‘em – meek as kittens. What’s your status?” Muted static reached my ears, and nothing more. “Good work. Keep at it. We’ll have this place exterminated in an hour.”

I wondered at these chilling words, and suddenly, from below, I heard leaden thumping down the stairs, and then the familiar rage-filled roar of my friend, Logan. Gun shots, a woman’s shriek a man’s howl of pain. The floor shook with the ferocity of the battle. Scott’s trademark red beam shot up through the classroom and the roof, knocking one of the terrorists to his knees.

My knees were trembling. Blood seeped from the jagged gash in my leg that was sure to become infected if it weren’t attended to immediately. Yet my thoughts were only for the children. They had been herded like sheep, pressed together, clutching at each other with tears streaking their faces. I heard Emilio, whose lack of eyes made it impossible for him to cry, making strange, bleating noises from the center of the group.

“What’s going on down there?” demanded the irate terrorist leader, his bloodshot eyes wincing with a nervous twitch as part of the wall caved in. “Dammit, the place is a mess! He said he could handle them. God, shut up!”

And he lifted his gun and pulled the trigger, and blood spurted fountain-like from directly between the spots where Emilio’s eyes had been before his mutant powers appeared and forced them out of his head. His pink, blubber-like body seemed to melt into jelly, and the other students’ screams were like a thousand scraping violins in my head.

“Stop! Stop!” I couldn’t restrain myself from crying out. That young one’s blood was running between the tiles –

One of the men knelt, took a fistful of my hair and dragged my head up. Fury competed with horror at the sight of the malevolent smirk above his prominent square chin.

“You want us to stop? Stop – killing these kids? These insults to humanity? These blemishes on the face of the Earth? Well, look at it this way, mutie. When you’re sick, antibodies have to fight the disease out of the system. Cleanse it. Purify it. And we humans are the antibodies of the world, fighting out your wretched, malformed DNA. And here’s our helpful drug right here.”

He waved his handgun before my eyes. I wondered if I could reach his hand to sink my fangs into his skin. But the others still had their guns trained on the children.

Nightcrawler!

I almost visibly winced, but caught myself in time. Emma!

Nightcrawler, Xavier is on his own, and we’re being attacked. You have to save him before they find him. We’re in over our heads; jaunt him out of here, now!

The battle below was still at full throttle, and judging from the note of urgency in Emma’s telepathic message, it wasn’t going in our favor. But to teleport was to condemn the rest of the students who, but for Emilio, the terrorists seemed to not want to harm. Indeed, I could tell a few were uncomfortable pointing their weapons at the children; their hands shook and cold sweat beaded the exposed skin unprotected by their helmets.

Could I prey on their sympathy?

Did I have time?

Gingerly, I moved my arms inward and pushed myself off the ground, keeping my eyes on the nearest of the rear guards. One noticed my movements and whipped his gun in my direction. But I was careful not to seem threatening, and moved very slowly upright through the rubble of the teacher’s desk.

“Please, don’t hurt them. They’re children. They’ve never hurt any of you. It’s me you want.”

The leader broke into grating laughter, loud, raucous, full of spite. He clunked towards me, carrying a much larger M16, his finger laid on the trigger in warning. Beneath his moustache, his mouth tipped.

“You want to offer yourself in their place.”

“Yes.” I just wanted them to pay attention to me – and only me – just keep them away from the kids until I could think of a plan.

“Ah. And why? What makes them more innocent than you?”

“They’ve never hurt anyone,” I repeated sternly.

“And you have,” he grinned.

“One.”

“Who?”

“My brother.”

He laughed again, the mouth of his gun coming to rest on my chest as he backed me against the wall. His eyes roved the room. “This is an English classroom,” he remarked, studying the words I’d scrawled on the blackboard. His stare returned to me and his smile grew more menacing, with a touch of barely hidden madness. “‘This be Damascus, be thou cursed Cain, to slay thy brother Abel, if thou wilt.’”*

Shakespeare.

“You are Cain.”

“No,” I demurred, “you are, for by my hands my brother died, but without any stain of malice. It is you with your weapon turned on your brother, your fellow inhabitant of this Earth, who stands in Cain’s shadow.”

Ach, but my words fly up, my thoughts remain below*, on the battle overwhelming my dearest friends, my only family, and yet my tongue carried me into the devil’s hands.

The terrorist leader pushed the machine gun against my chest until there was a crack, and I gasped as for a moment my vision failed me. My eyes cleared, and the gun jerked to my chin, tilting my head back, and the leader’s grin never faltered as he pressed his fist against my sternum, drew back and punched the air out of me. I fell against the blackboard, and suddenly there was a boom as if from a bomb, and the board fell off the wall and cracked in two.

Kurt! Emma’s mental voice sounded almost desperate beneath the commanding tone. There wasn’t much time, if there was any. If there ever had been time.

The terrorist was speaking again – rather, growling. “Never call us brothers!” he exclaimed, the twitch in his eyes growing more pronounced as blood filled his cheeks. “I know what you are – scum of the earth, lower than dirt!”

“‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’,”* I returned, scanning the room as I spoke. All the terrorists were sufficiently distracted, their eyes now fixed on me and not the children. I risked communicating with Emma:

Emma, please send Kitty – she needs to come up through the floor and take the children out – I cannot leave here until she takes the children – they are at the far West corner –

But she broke in and shattered my ambitions. Katherine is out of commission, Nightcrawler! Scott is half-blind, Ororo took a bullet to the chest, our foyer’s been shelled, and I am so deeply buried that I can no longer even see the battle! You need to find Xavier, Kurt – he must be your priority – there’s no one to protect him!

How could they overcome us so easily, Emma?

It could be our diminished numbers, it could be the weapons they’ve procured specially to deal with mutants – questions for another time, Kurt, get Xavier, NOW!

But the children…!


The leader was enraged, his face purpling, yet his lips were still curled in that wild, madman’s grin.

“Proud of being dirt, are you.” He spoke in such a low tone; I had to strain to hear him. “Well, then, let me help you into your grave.” But instead of aiming the M16 at me, he jerked his head at his comrades. “Kill them.”

I froze, just for a moment, and then I found myself leaping over the ruined desk and teleporting to the children, just in time to take bullets for a few of them. But the terrorists were ruthless, their strength boosted by their hate. I shouted at the kids to scatter, to do whatever they could to escape, but we were sorely outnumbered. And blood rained down.

I dove under the range of the guns, then kicked up swiftly and took down a pair of guards. Narrowly missing getting shot again, I tried to backflip across the room, but my injured leg gave out beneath me and I collapsed. A terrorist slammed the butt of his rifle into my head. I tripped him with my tail and twisted his arm behind his back, but when I looked up the room was spinning and my head was pounding and I could barely think. And then Emma was in my throbbing head, screaming my name – Xavier, NOW! – and the floor was rumbling with the heat of that other battle. And I knew I couldn’t stay here anymore.

The children were now out of my sight, hidden behind a wall of armed terrorists. To teleport among them would be certain death. Their mewling cries drifted into the air like a cloud of fog. Meanwhile, two other terrorists were darting towards me, shooting, almost hitting.

I made a split second decision, and teleported out of their midst.

In a puff of rosy smoke, I materialized in the Professor’s room and found him level with the business end of another terrorist’s rifle. My eyes stinging, I teleported directly behind him, grabbed his shoulders, and ‘ported us out of the crumbling remains of the Institute. His head was bloody and he wasn’t conscious, but I put my finger to his neck and found a pulse.

The others were struggling to get out, so I lugged Xavier into a van and drove around to the front yard. The others met me there – all the survivors – and they clambered in the van or flew alongside, and we made a break for it.

I drove for barely five minutes before Ororo’s hands were on my arms, steadying them, as I realized my whole body was shaking. At her compassionate gaze, I let her take the wheel, and stumbled into the crowded trailer with my injured and beaten friends – what remained of them.

I didn’t cry. Logan said later he was surprised, he’d expected me to be hysterical. That was an exaggeration, but I was surprised at myself. Surely all those children I’d left to die were worth my tears.

We arrived at that old lab of Moira’s. Decrepit and hazardous though it was, we staked out inside the wide, open foyer, and tended to our injuries as best we could in our weakened condition. That we had lost weighed heavily on us, and the chill night wind did nothing for our downtrodden spirits.

Professor Xavier was fine, nursing a gash to his forehead and a minor concussion. After my wounds were cared for, I bent over Kitty, trying to ignore the sharp pain in my leg as I dressed her head wound. Her eyes flickered to my face, and I recognized a deep suffering akin to my own in their dark depths. Her lips parted, and she asked me what I had done.

I took a deep, shuddering breath. My voice trembled as I answered, “I killed those children.”

“You killed them?”

“Yes.”

“Why, how?”

“Why? Because we were fighting terrorists!” I flung my hands to my hair and clawed at my scalp as frustration and grief overcame me. “Because I thought I could distract them, provide an avenue for the students to escape – and instead they took out their rage on innocent children!

“And I left them! Left them to die, left them to rot and return to the dust of the Earth. Just like that, in the blink of an eye and a burst of smoke, they were on their own. I let that happen – I killed them…”

Her eyes were wet as she listened, and then she broke in with a choked sob. “I killed Peter. He’s dead. I could have phased him out of harm’s way, but to reach him would have meant leaving the others I was already protecting. If I’d left them, they would have died. So I stayed, and now Peter – Peter –”

She started crying, raw, throat-burning sobs that tore at my soul as deeply as the news that my friend was dead. In horror I let her wrap her arms around me, and I stroked her hair and her back as she cried into the crook of my neck, and I rocked her body until she found blissful, empty oblivion. Then, misty-eyed, I covered her with a blanket and crept outdoors.

The moon was nearly full, stark white against the navy blue sky. It seemed like an eye, fixed unblinking on my unworthy self, wrapped in darkness. I felt naked underneath its condemning stare, my wounds and scars shining like traitorous lights from my flesh. I felt the hands of each of those children scrape at my arms, trail down my back, then turn into vapor and disappear.

I was glad Kitty hadn’t told me, “Those kids were doomed; you did what you had to do,” or “Xavier’s safe because of you.” Because there was an “if” dangling in the air – a foul, treacherous “if” that taunted me, tormented me with thoughts. If I had stayed in the classroom a moment longer, could the terrorists have been delayed long enough for me to save at least a few of the children? If I’d acted earlier, risking the terrorists’ threat to kill the children if I moved, would I have had a better chance of saving everyone?

Once again, I’d survived. Once again, I was left alive. And thanks to that horrible, pointless battle in which nothing was gained and nothing was won, we were now back where we’d always been – hated, feared, and now minus eleven young, bright students who were as much a member of this family as those of us who had been around for years –

It was as if I’d just awoken from a long sleep, as if feeling had just returned to my soul which had been numb for so long. The tears built in my eyes until overflowing, a horrible, wonderful, rejuvenating cry that brought the first step to healing. After a while I wasn’t sure who I was crying for, the poor children, my tarnished soul, the blackened hearts of the terrorists. I just cried until there were no tears left in me, my voice gave out, and the dew-soaked grass seemed a most inviting place to rest.


“O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!”*

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*Henry VI
*Hamlet
*Genesis 3:19
*Hamlet

Be honest with your comments. I know the storyline is a little strange... in the comics I expect 'Crawler would have found a way to save the kids. Or at least, if he couldn't, the circumstances would be more dire. I might go back and tweak a few things in the plot (the original idea was that, after the terrorists arrived, Sentinels would attack also, and Kurt would have to decide whether to save the kids or the terrorists - but that struck me as a no-brainer, so out the window went that idea). In the meantime, what do you think?

edit: Check it out, I'm a Butt Monkey now!!!

[Edited on 8-1-07 by Feuerstein]
Steyn: Oh sweety, no, the elvis boys are across the street at the wolverine forum
Tessa: LMAO
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Rowena
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To Kill, or Not to Kill

Post by Rowena »

AMAZING!!! Rather graphic, but very well done!!!!!!!!!!!!
This Kurt reminded me a little more of movie-Kurt than comic-Kurt, but telling it from his POV really made the horror come through all the more. FANTASTIC job! Deadline, shmeadline, you wrote an entry--the only entry--and therefore you win, hands down. :D Feuerstein, you rock!!! :D
"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea's asleep and the rivers dream, people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice and somewhere else the tea is getting cold. Come on, Ace, we've got work to do."
~The Doctor, Survival

"There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes."
~The Doctor, Robot

"If this isn't civilization, why am I standing in a bomb crater?"
~Hawkeye Pierce, M.A.S.H.

Rowena Zahnrei's Stories: http://www.fanfiction.net/u/526713/Rowena_Zahnrei
Feuerstein
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To Kill, or Not to Kill

Post by Feuerstein »

^^ Thanks, Rowena! I'm glad you like it... I love everything of yours I read, so it means a lot to me that you like this.

He did come off sounding like angsty movie Kurt, didn't he. :moviecrawler
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To Kill, or Not to Kill

Post by Trigger »

That was sooo sad!! :puppy I loved it! I don't even know what to say!! I'm gonna go cry now...
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To Kill, or Not to Kill

Post by love_of_bob »

*cries*

I thought it was beautiful.
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To Kill, or Not to Kill

Post by the_lone_bamf »

(I seem to be making a habit out of leaving comments on ancient story posts- hope nobody minds...)

I enjoyed this- thanks!
My only comment on possible story weirdness is that... chances are the Professor would have preffered to have died rather than sacrifice the children... regardless of what the others wanted.

Still- this was a great read. Good work!
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