X-Men: The Last Stand (38 page)

“Well, guess what, Warren,” Psylocke told him, getting right up in his face. “It’s time to cure
you
!”

They shoved, harder than he expected……and his arms flailed reflexively, pinwheeling as he shot out and well away from the prison wall.

He cried,
“No!”
but that was an automatic denial. At the same time, he found himself cataloguing the sensations, body remembering his training and experience as a skydiver to shift from the shock of his violent launch into the limbs akimbo pose of flight.

If I only had a ’chute,
he thought. And then he recalled the classic joke about the man who leapt from the top of the Empire State Building. As he passed each floor, people heard him say, “So far, so good.”

So far, so good
.

He was falling faster. He wouldn’t clear the rocks, and he wondered how much it would hurt, how long he’d feel it before final oblivion.

And then, his son caught him.

There was a terrific shock of contact, then an even stronger jerk as the boy’s great wings beat at the air, both to arrest the older, larger man’s headlong fall and to gather sufficient lift to maneuver. Warren had stooped like a diving hawk, dropping with the speed of a race car to tackle his father and grapple him with arms and legs, making sure not to hurt him, wrapping himself around his father as he used to do as a little boy.

It was a tremendous effort and for the first frantic moments it didn’t look like he’d be successful. Angel cried out in very real pain, his voice breaking with the strain; there was fire across his shoulders, down his arms and spine, and he suddenly feared his wings could not withstand the strain of lifting someone twice his weight.

Adrenaline surged through his system as he refused to accept the possibility of defeat, his beating wings generating a pulse of ground effect sufficient to give him just enough lift to skim the crest of the rocks and transform his crazed descent into a semblance of level flight, barely a tall man’s height above the waves.

Worthington got his feet wet as they skimmed a couple of crests, but that was all as Warren kept beating his wings, startling the gulls and pelicans out for their own daily excursions.

Out of the corner of his eye, Worthington caught sight of his son’s face, in profile, taut with the effort of keeping them aloft—and yet, also transported with a fierce and primal joy the father would never himself feel. He looked to the birds that joined them, then back at his son who was as much a part of their world as of Worthington’s own, and he felt a tremendous sorrow. This was not something to be feared, or to be denied—the fact that his son had wings, that he was a mutant, that he could
fly
—but to be celebrated.

Perhaps others might feel differently. Perhaps there were powers that should be neutralized, as there were sure to be people who should not be allowed to keep them. That was a question for each individual and the society they were a part of. With mutants, as with all people, the judgment should be one of action and character, not genome. He didn’t regret his part in creating the cure, although he would always bear the burden of Kavita’s death, and of the harm that had come from his actions. What was wrong, however, were his reasons for it: the shame of having what he thought was a freak for a son, and the fear of what that represented for the future.

“Thank you,” he breathed.

It broke his heart, in the best of ways, to behold the smile his son gave him in answer.

“You’re my dad,” Warren told him, as though that represented the answer to everything.

“And you’re my
son,
” Worthington replied, as proudly as he was able.

Back on Alcatraz, the ground battle was winding down. Storm had rejoined the team. Beast was facing the last few of Magneto’s fighters still left standing. One had extensible limbs, grabbing for Hank with rubber-band arms. The burly X-Man bobbed and weaved, leapt and twisted, with seemingly aimless abandon, staying out of the other’s reach as he bounded from wall to pillar to post until he had the poor mutant all tangled up with himself.

Before the mutant could sort himself out, Hank concentrated on his companions, springing off fingertips to flatten one with a foot to the face, while using prehensile toes to grasp his mate and pitch him better than twenty feet into Rubber Band Guy. Another leap dropped him into the middle of the impromptu scrum, and a quick flurry of blows dealt with them once and for all.

He was sure somebody would have a minicam, if not among the mutants then certainly the soldiers, and that it was only a matter of time before images of the battle were all over the Internet. So much for his political career. He looked down at himself, clad in his old brown leather suit that was a size too small, and figured he’d come across as a laughingstock.

Or maybe not. The uniform may leave something to be desired as a fashion statement, but the moves were as good as ever. Seeing the X-Man battling side by side with the army, defending the people against a common foe, might do some good. The clothes might make the man, as the saying went, but the
deeds
defined him.

Speaking of deeds…

Logan, up by the bridge, where the roadway met the island, was duking it out with a multilimbed mutant whose body was covered in a protective carapace that gave him some of the aspects of a lobster. Nothing funny about what he could do, though, as the bodies of a clutch of troopers scattered about him testified. He had a weapon in every hand and the muscles to make a single blow lethal. Near misses shattered concrete and bent steel and the number of appendages took away the advantage of Logan’s speed. Logan could dodge one or two limbs, but not all of them. Fortunately, his unbreakable skeleton kept him from serious harm.
Un
fortunately, he was still vulnerable to strikes against the unprotected portions of his anatomy, and was taking some heavy hits to the belly.

That wasn’t the worst of it, though. Logan used his claws to lop off an arm. There was minimal blood and he fell back quickly as the mutant redoubled his efforts with the limbs that remained.

Even as Hank watched, the scientist in him utterly fascinated, a bud appeared at the base of the severed limb, regenerating at such accelerated speed that it was fully functional well before it regained its original size. Comparing all the arms, Hank noted that none of them were precisely the same, which told him this process had been ongoing throughout the fight.

Logan, however, was done playing. Hank feared he would simply kill the mutant. That would certainly fit Wolverine’s well-deserved reputation, but he discovered that the X-Man was not without his own brand of rough humor as Logan hauled off and kicked his adversary soundly between the legs.

The mutant went to his knees, gasping, face instantly pale purple with shock, all hands going reflexively to his crotch, none left to protect his jaw from the follow-up punch that Logan delivered to end their engagement.

“Well,” Hank muttered, to himself he thought, until a quick turn of Logan’s head his way reminded him of just how keen the other man’s ears really were, “that’s one way to do it.”

A few of Magneto’s fighters remained, but they collectively chose the so-called better part of valor and began a helter-skelter withdrawal back to the bridge. On Alcatraz itself, there was just some mopping up left to do.

Warren took his father home, to the big house on Russian Hill. He thought this would be a safe place, but the bridge was almost close enough to touch. He stayed low to the rooftops as he made his way across the city. There’d been time now for the army to respond to the day’s events and the air was becoming increasingly crowded with gunships, observation helos and remote, pilotless drones, both for battlefield surveillance and for attack. Some were armed with conventional ordnance but Warren suspected that more than a few would be carrying air-launched versions of the missiles the Alcatraz troops had used against Magneto’s forces. He didn’t want to be dropped by “friendly fire.”

His father looked at him after they had landed and moved a step or so back, intrigued despite himself by the new, confident way his son stood in front of him.

Warren grinned shyly, his expression darkening just a tad as he remembered the harness he used to wear to hide his wings and he vowed to himself,
Never again,
“I’ve learned to fold the wings pretty good.”

“I’m sorry for that, Warren, truly.”

“I know, Dad. I know you always meant well.”

“Son…thank you.”

Warren shifted on his feet. Worthingtons were never good with displays of emotion, especially between men. Ideally, that’s what spouses were for. But Worthington Jr. wasn’t done.

“Warren, I…” The words came slowly because they came hard, because they came from the father’s heart and from his soul. “I have never been more proud of you. I hope I can become half the man you’ve shown me you are today.”

“Dad,” Warren began, but instead of words he stepped forward and put both arms and wings around his father in the kind of embrace they hadn’t shared since he was a boy.

“I’ve got to go,” he said, when they stepped apart once more. “I’m one of the X-Men now. I’ve got to help.”

“Take care of yourself, boy.”

“See you soon!”

And with that, he was gone, rising majestically into the air with a casual sweep of the wings that reminded his father of sketches his son used to make when he was still a boy, long before he’d begun to change. He read comics in those days, and like many fans, created his own characters. His favorite, and here Worthington had to wonder if even then on some deep subconscious level Warren had known what was in store for him, was a winged avenger that he christened Archangel. The suit had been too garish for words, and the pose and body had been cribbed from da Vinci.

Watching his son now, Worthington Jr. saw that dream made real, in all its glory.

Jean’s mouth twisted as she caught that faint pulse of awe and wonder and pride from Worthington Jr., and the determination of young Warren to stand by his new friends. At that age, she’d been much the same, yearning to be a part of something greater than herself, to be of value, to be—a star.

The battle was rushing to its end, and Magneto’s side was losing. Quite badly.

Not a surprise to her, since she knew what they were up against. Magneto invariably underestimated the X-Men, unable to see how they compensated for the