Playing With Fire (EDITING)

Surprise Visitor

I woke to a massive headache sometime after midnight. When I pushed myself to a sitting position and looked around, I was startled. This wasn't my room and I hadn't been here before. I sat up further and caught a glimpse of a familiar silhoutte on the floor beside the bed and another propped in a chair by the nearest window. The shape on the floor shifted and groaned, sitting up and running a hand through his hair. "Doug?" I whispered.

His head snapped around to face me and he knelt beside the mattress with his arms resting beside my outstretched legs. A blanket had been pulled over me and I twisted my fingers into the edge. "How you feeling?" he asked.

I sighed. "Like crap."

He chuckled a little and I saw a corner of his mouth twitch into a half-smirk. "You had two back to back vertigo attacks and then passed out. Crap is probably the best you could be feeling."

He ran a hand through his hair again and let it fall, partially obscuring his face in the shadows of the dark room. The night was hazy and the faint light from the windows wasn't enough to illuminate further than six feet from the wall. The air the windows allowed into the room was warm but dry with a lazy breeze that ruffled the loose ends of my hair before dying away.

Tentatively, I reached out with my mind and slipped around Doug's barriers and into his thoughts. Despite his subconscious understanding of pretty much everything, I was still able to find places tainted in confusion or frustration. One of which was me.

I probed further and examined the memories he had stored of me and found several to be prominent among them. When Kitty introduced us, him and Kurt getting pranked, our fight in the mud, the night sneaking out, him witnessing my first vertigo attack in the kitchen- he had been right, I did look possessed, our afternoon on the roof, the week of captivity, the time on the Helicarrier, and the battle on the cliff.

I felt a change in his mind and pulled away. I understood the change when I saw his forehead resting on his arms and his shoulders rising with gentle snores. After the stress of the days leading up to the battle, the battle itself, and the exhausting party, he must have been fighting to stay awake every second he had.

As I watched, his breathing caught and his hands balled into fists. Nightmare, I thought, letting myself into his mind again. I found the part of the brain that dealt with dreams and watched as his nightmare played out. I realized very quickly that there was nothing I could do to stop the nightmare, and to be honest, I was frozen in place.

Across the screen of his mind played out the horrifying scenes of the testing we had to undergo during the week of captivity. He was lying on the table, strapped in while drugs were pumped through his system. His mouth was bleeding and a long cut above his jaw dripped onto his neck. As I watched, the scene changed and Doug was convulsing on the table, straining against his bonds. Brute and South scrambled around, shouting at each other and blaming the other for causing an overdose. The scene changed again and I thought I was going to be sick. Our captors were animals, nothing more.

I wanted to end the agony but I knew I couldn't stop the nightmare. Maybe I could relieve it somehow though. When a thought struck me, I began searching for the happiest memory I could find. If I could do what Prof had done to me- drag a memory out and make him relive it- maybe the good memory would overshadow the bad. I found the memory of the party tonight and dragged it to the forefront of his mind in front of the nightmare. The changes were slight, but at least Doug wasn't under complete torture any longer.

I returned to myself and sank into the pillows as my headache throbbed against my skull. When I slid down, Doug shifted and lifted his head. "Sorry," he mumbled. "Didn' mean t' fall 'sleep." His words were slurred but understandable.