Most nights, Nate was fine with the other voice that resided inside of his head, taking up rent free space in his psyche in exchange for what he could only assume was the armament of abilities he could bring to life by mere thought and the occasional root beer. Most nights, he could sleep without being bothered by a flood of memories that would readily make it restless, if not entirely impossible, to get some shut eye. Most nights, Nate was Nate, an old man in youth’s clothing who had submerged himself into a world of superpowered shifters instead of criminals, and Nathan Summers was Nathan Summers, a mutant teenager with a voracious appetite - both to feed himself and make sure he fit the mold of such far reaching family legacy as that held by the Summers.

But this hadn’t been most nights and once in a while, memories fell through the magical sieve that had been put on his mind to make the worst out of an already trying night under the buzz of new electronics in his arm. Like tiny grenades ready to go off as soon as they had been shot out of the new set of compartments built into the techno-organic housing that held everything from bodysliding technology to single-dose vaccine generators for cases of M-Pox, Nate had been sure he could hear them whirling, twisting about in the silence around him as if waiting for the activation command to blow his apartment off the map.

It could have been growing pains, Nate and Nathan not without them in their converged existence, but where youthful energy might have tried to make it a point to argue until he turned blue in the face, experience told Nate it was something deeper than that: Fear.

There had been nothing comfortable about his pillow dissolving underneath his head into nothing but mud, the weight of blankets becoming heavier with the unwelcome pinning from his towering opposition who had already turned over a number of points for Arakko - not that the odds were in their favor, they never had been and he doubted they ever would be against their rival swordbearers when their numbers towered over anything Krakoa had been able to throw at the competition - and the hand against the back of his head was the met resistance as he tried to push himself up.

He wasn’t quick enough.

He wasn’t skilled enough.

He wasn't focused enough.

He wasn’t enough.

It was a thought that echoed from Nathan with a loud snap of something that sounded like a two-by-four, but Nate knew instinctively what it was as soon as his nerves picked up on his grip, now loosened from around the hilt of his sword as his skeletal structure fractured and fragmented in an arm that was, without a doubt, flesh and bone. He didn’t yell. He didn’t scream. He didn’t acknowledge the hurt. He simply waited for the inevitable that tore at not flesh, but something much deeper than that: His pride.

“Point: Arakko.”

Somewhere in the expanse of time and space, Nate was sure this had been a fight to the death, that Bei had struck him down with Seducer and he wouldn’t have been returning to Krakoa and not correctly if they resurrected him; but thankfully or not, this hadn’t been the same.

“Dad…”

Silence. It was expected when Scott wasn’t telekinetic, probably didn’t have a telekinetic bone in his body unless he was riding high on Phoenix power or by way of a mental link which was more someone else reading what he was thinking to them, but as the events unfolded, he hadn’t felt the same temporal tickle that he did plenty of times before. Perhaps it was because the shifts had left him woefully unfamiliar with just who might have been on the other side, little to no grounding in the waking unshifted world to make such a strong connection as he had with Madelyne, but it seemed a fool’s errand to try and chase down the meaning of it now when his nerves bristled with the young mutant’s spiritual defeat.

“... Mom… Can you hear me?

“Please tell me you can hear me.

There. There had been someone though Nate couldn’t say who had been the one on the other end - not when there had been such leaning towards the mother who had given birth to him, the mother who had tried to raise him no matter all that stood in her way, the mother who had been through fallen trees, plane accidents, and bullets to the head to protect him despite the intention to reach out to the one who had visited him in the future from a past he never knew, had tried to raise him under such physical and spatial distance given the short time Slym and Redd had, and, now, stood on the other side of the gate to Krakoa while Nathan’s own foolishness, his own headstrong demeanor and stubborn bravado, sent him into a void she could only hope he’d return from. As much as they were the same, they weren’t, and it seems instinctive to reach out to one even though the apology that hit psychic airwaves spoke of nothing to do with San Francisco.

“I’m so sorry. I screwed up. We’re… we’re gonna lose. It won’t even be close… It’s not a fair fight. It’s like the witch wants to run the score up against us for some reason.”

Breathe - breathe into the pain, not against it, and settle: It was a nice thought, one which Nathan seemed to take to heart as he listened to his mother on the other end of their mental connection, staticed and jumpy between the pain and the distance and the universal gaps that had separated the battlegrounds of Otherworld from Krakoa.

“And I’m… I’m not… I wasn’t ready, Dad.”

“I shoulda been the other guy for this. Things would be different.”

The other guy, not the hero.

The other guy, not the old man.

The other guy, not the one that they could rely on.

How many times had he failed now? How many times had he been the one down on the ground in defeat, face down in the mud until someone had been able to rouse him or consciousness had taken hold again? The restlessness came again as Nathan’s consciousness sank into Nate’s, the bleed through clear in recollections of battles past where someone else might have been more readily suited for the job, but Nathan had run in, hard and fast and with an armament that he couldn’t quite control, only to be laid flat on the ground, nursing injuries that held the same mental impact as the sound of broken bones that echoed in his head over and over again.

But at least he wasn’t dead, something he didn’t know who to thank for - be it Doug for stepping in the way, for stopping his giant wife, or Saturnyne for imparting a worse pain than he imagined death would be. At least death would have been shorter than defeat.

“Could you tell Esme and the girls that I --”

But then there had been another sound - snap! - that broke through the telepathic links he might have unintentionally woven, through the memories that had been dreams in disguise of a young man who had a hard time setting his pride aside, and echoed through the empty apartment that he woke up in, eyes snapping open to stare up at the ceiling through the flush of white energy emitting from his left eye; but there was nothing, no reason to panic, no invading forces, nothing than the sound of a ceiling fan and that awful whirling.

“Oh, kid.”