Archive of Our Own

David didn’t get much news from the outside, but he tried not to look too eager as his father relayed the information: a rebellion in the southern provinces, a human religious radical who’d raised an army of human fanatics and was ploughing his way towards the capital, killing any who refused to join him.

“We’re massing an army of our own,” his father informed him, “But I’m concerned about potential casualties, especially if some of the radicals escape and try to raise further rebellion.”

Xavier had only wrested the country from its human oppressors a few decades ago. The idea of mutant-human equality was still relatively new.

Then David understood: “You want this finished quickly. You want me to fight – no, not just fight. You want me to destroy.”

“You’ll be provided with arms and armour, a tent for when you journey south and pages to attend you.”

David looked gestured to the bars which stood between him and his father, a gesture hampered by his restraints. They’d been loosened for this interview, but they still chafed. They always chafed. “And afterwards, you’ll return me to this cell. Not good enough. I want something in return. I want freedom.”

King Charles Xavier, who had one child and refused to name him heir, shook his head. “I’m sorry, David. I cannot risk that. But I can see what I can do about more comfortable lodgings, maybe some more books for you…”

David bared his teeth and leaned forward. “Not. Good. Enough. Oh, I’ll do it. But there’s more than one way to freedom. You’ll no doubt have me watched to prevent escape attempts on the way to the battle, but once I’m out on the field… I’ll fight the way you want me to. And when I die, know that it was by choice. Because I wanted to be free of this shit excuse of a life, and free of you.”

Ruth was going to die. Luca had planned it like this, and he had ensured her fate.

She was the only mutant in Luca’s ‘army’, if you could call it that. A rabble of bloodthirsty men whose hatred of mutants was evident in the way they spat at her. The only thing holding them back from killing her was the fact that Luca had promised them a worse death for her.

She would be killed by her own kind.

Luca knew how powerful Xavier’s army was. A few humans, but mostly mutants, and all of them well trained. It would be a slaughter.

But he had something which approached a plan: a lone mutant in his army, pushed out in front to draw the fire of Xavier’s soldiers. Ruth might be able to telepathically proclaim that she wasn’t on Luca’s side, but whether Xavier’s people would believe her… And in Luca’s camp she was surrounded by his fanatics. No chance to make a break for freedom, even as rumours began to be whispered around cooking fires. Rumours that Charles Xavier’s bastard son had joined the army. A monster in a man’s shape, destructive as a winter storm, devoid of any feelings of mercy or compassion…

It was the night before battle, and David was waiting to die. Or at least, he hoped so. The numbers of the humans on the other side might be enough to overwhelm him, especially with the one mutant who seemed to be on their side… well, being the sister of the rebel leader had to have its perks.

He wondered what kind of woman she must be, to fight her own kind at the side of that bastard.

Or girl. Like him, she was barely past seventeen.

Maybe she would be powerful enough to kill him.

David glanced at the armour sitting in the corner of his tent, inlaid with his father’s crest.

Once, he would have given anything to wear it into battle with his father’s blessing. But he had been younger then. He had not felt young for a long time.

Just because he’d been given the armour didn’t mean he had to wear it. Why not give the other side a fighting chance?

David strode to the opening of his tent and called over a page. They were meant to guard him, but also to attend to his needs.

“I want paint,” he said.

“What?” The look on the man’s face said everything he thought about David’s sanity. It was nothing David hadn’t heard before.

“Just fucking bring me some.”

Beyond the tents, David could see the glimmering fires of the opposing army. Somewhere out there was Ruth Aldine. He wondered if she was looking back.

Ruth stepped out on to the battlefield, and she was going to die.

She’d made armour for herself with telekinesis; her brother hadn’t provided her with anything, and she didn’t want to die. It was silver and sleek, with a helm that covered the top half of her face, hiding her birth defect.

Behind her was her brother’s army.

Desperate, Ruth sent out a telepathic projection to the Genoshans: she didn’t want to fight, her brother was forcing her, please, she didn’t want to fight.

They didn’t believe her.

Of course they didn’t believe her.

Ruth raised her psychic blade and waited for the Genoshan charge to meet her.

The battle was chaos. Ruth whirled and spun. She had no real training on how to fight, but her precognition and telepathy was enough to know when to dodge, when to strike. Her telekinesis kept weapons from reaching her. She was out of breath and scared out of her mind and she’d probably killed a few people along the way, but she was alive. For now.

Then there was a turn in the crowd. People running towards Ruth. No, not towards her. Around her. Running away.

A space opened up, and beyond the space, Ruth saw him. Eyes blazing red-white across the churn of mud, black hair whipping around his face in a tangle. He wore only loose trousers and boots spattered in mud and blood. Blue and green war paint looped across his chest and arms in sweeping organic strokes. Some of it had clumped in his hair. He did not fit in with Xavier’s pristine troops any more than Ruth fitted in with Luca’s extremists.

The sword he wielded was a two-hander but he held it in one, electricity crackling down its length from his hand, and Ruth was very, very glad that her own blade was made of force and thought. Going up against David Haller, a metal weapon would electrocute its owner. His other arm was wreathed in flame from shoulder to fingertips.

Dripping over the war paint was blood from his previous kills. It was impossible to discern expression in those blazing eyes, and his face was stone blankness. He looked like Ruth’s death, and he was probably the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

So that was Ruth Aldine, the only mutant in her brother’s army.

Her armour was beautiful, and David wondered at it, out of place among the others he was fighting. Below the helm he could just about make out the firm line of her mouth, the shape of her chin. Straight dark hair flowed from the back of her helm. Like him, and unlike anyone else, she was standing still, a space between them.

She looked so calm. Her calm seemed almost infectious, clearing his head from the earlier battle frenzy which had been all whirling steel and hurled flame and shattering blows.

On the field, all of David’s human opponents had died so easily.

If anyone on this battlefield was going to kill him, it was going to be her.

Aldine raised her blade towards him, and David mirrored her movement, the unspoken word: You.

They clashed like a tidal wave and a landslide.

This was the first time since the battle started that he’d had to make an effort. She was putting up a fight, and David actually had to try, among the clashing of their swords and the blows of telekinesis.

There was no time to think, only to act, to try and stay in control, to force her to react to him so that the fight might tip in his favour.

Wait, why did David want the fight to tip in his favour? Wasn’t this woman the perfect person to kill him? Wasn’t that what he wanted?

In the middle of the field, surrounded by mud and blood and desperation, David realised that he didn’t want to die.

He swung his blade in a wide arc, forcing Ruth to step back out of its range, then their blades clashed again, once, twice. The flame along his arm burned brighter, and David saw Ruth gasp against the heat. She was exhausted, he realised. David was too, he’d passed the point of exhaustion long ago, but he could keep his body moving as long as he needed to, force of will overcoming what should be physically possible. He’d pay for it later, but in the moment, in the now, he could keep going.

But Ruth couldn’t. Sooner or later, Ruth was going to die.

He felt her claw against his mind in desperation, and pushed back instinctively, probably harder than he needed to, because he did not want anybody in his mind. Nobody, not right now. Not with the way his alters roiled and seethed.

But her attack had left him with an afterprint of her feelings, and fuck, she didn’t want to be doing this, she didn’t want to be fighting and she didn’t want to die, and that message she’d sent everyone at the start of the battle which everyone had written off as bullshit had actually been true.

And she didn’t want to die any more than he did.

David shoved her away from him, buying himself space and time. Then he looked her dead in the face and threw his sword to one side.

Ruth froze, he could only presume in shock at the sheer fucking stupidity of his actions. It gave David the time he needed to charge towards her, wrap his arms around her torso, and carry her up into the sky.

They soared through the air, and still they fought. She clawed at him with her thoughts and her telekinesis and her scrabbling hands, and David held. He held her.

He held her as they both passed beyond exhaustion into bare, merciful oblivion, and fell from the sky.

Ruth woke upon wet grass that seemed strangely scratchy. Every part of her ached, yet there was no severe pain. She had, somehow, escaped serious injury.

And escaped death, too.

She was lying on her side, so she rolled onto her front and pushed herself, aching, into a stand.

She found herself in the middle of a patch of scorched grass, roughly circular. The burned black blades were wet with morning dew. She must have been unconscious the entire night.

Ruth looked around more, and did not recognise her surroundings. Green, hilly fields. A wood on the crest of a hill perhaps a ten or fifteen minute walk away. Or twenty minutes, with the way she was aching.

On one side the ground sloped down towards a river. Stumbling a little on feet of lead, Ruth headed in that direction. She was filthy, and while thirst hadn’t yet made itself known to her, a drink would probably be a good idea.

As she went, she stripped off her armour, letting the heavy metal plates fall to the ground without looking where they fell, leaving herself in only the under-layers of wool and cotton.

She was down to her boots, her trousers, and her gambeson when she saw him.

David Haller, standing up to his waist in the river.

He had washed off the blood, the paint, and the dirt, and his wounds seemed to already be healing – not that there had been many cuts in the first place. Still, he was half-purple with bruises.

He straightened, wringing the water from his long black hair, and looked up at her.

“Are you going to fight me again?” he asked, no hostility in his voice or in his gaze, “Or are we going to do something else?” He made no comment on her birth defect, though she had nothing covering the hollows where she had no eyes.

“No,” Ruth told him.

“Good.”

He waded to the riverbank and stepped onto the shore. Ruth flushed, but he didn’t seem in any way embarrassed as he looked down at his trousers, bloodied and battle-stained, discarded on the riverbank, and instead of putting them back on, shimmered his form a little until he was wearing a fresh, clean pair. He pulled on his boots.

He at least looked away when Ruth took her turn to bathe. The water was freezing cold, but it was all she had.

Later, they sat side by side on the ridge above the river and looked down at its slow-moving current.

“What will you do?” asked David.

“I don’t know, _{yes, thank you}.”

“Your brother’s probably dead; his army will be defeated by now. You might be able to plead for clemency from my father. He’s merciful, to anyone who isn’t me.”

“What about you?” Ruth turned to look at him.

David looked back at her. “There’s nothing for me in Genosha. I can’t stay. Maybe I’ll go over the mountains, start something new over there. My father will make at least a cursory effort to find me, once they realise my body’s not on that battlefield, but they won’t try too hard. He’ll be glad to see the back of me.”

Ruth looked out over the river for a moment, then back at David. His hair was drying in the cold morning air, and he was, in his own particular way, beautiful. And though she’d spent her whole life with people turning away from her mutation and her blindness, on that cold morning with air and life in her lungs, she found that she was beautiful too, beautiful in the way of a thing that fought and bled and breathed and lived.

“I could come with you,” she said, the words coming easier than she expected. “It might be easier, _{thank you}, with two. Less lonely.”

His eyes widened with surprise, but once he moved past that, he said, voice shaking only a little, “You could come with me. I wouldn’t say no to that.”

His hand was warm when he took it, and when she kissed him lightly his lips were colder and a little chapped. She didn’t mind. There was, it turned out, an infinite amount of time in the world, and no need to rush.

Gifts presented to Ruth Aldine and David Haller upon the official recognition of the Altar as a country by Genosha

Item: Sword used by David Haller in the battle against Luca Aldine. The sword is scorched black, partially melted, the blade heavily notched in battle. The leather grip has been almost completely burned away.

Item: Painting entitled, ‘Meeting by the River’. Painting depicts David Haller and Ruth Aldine after the battle against Ruth’s brother. The morning sunlight appears warm, and David and Ruth are garbed richly in brocaded coats. Ruth wears a satin blindfold. They stand facing one another, holding hands, on the bank of a stream. Polished armour is shown piled up to one side as a cursory reference to the battle that has just been fought. David and Ruth are both depicted as being in their early twenties, instead of in their teenage years when the battle was fought.

Painting placed in a side corridor of the Altar’s main meeting hall because, as David Haller said, “I don’t care who painted it, I’m not putting that thing in our fucking dining room.”

Item: Matching pair of ruby brooches. Given away to Karasu and Sojobo Tengu, because red wasn’t really Ruth’s colour, David cared little for jewellery, and it seemed a waste to throw away such fine work.