Title: Below the Canopy and Above
Author: Cynjen [rachel@subreality.com ]
Genre: X-fic, Elseworlds
Characters: Jubilee, Cyclops
Rating: PG (Contains descriptions of death.)
Disclaimer: characters are property of Marvel, used without permission for non-profit purposes.
Distribution: ask before archiving, please.
Author's Note: written in the early hours. Bit strange. [3/12/1]
Thanks to: Mitai for the beta.

--Start--

Below the Canopy and Above
by Cynjen


Do you remember a time when your stomach didn't hurt? When your chest didn't ache on the inside, in the roots of your bones? Do you remember a
time when the thought of food didn't give you the dry heaves, when the scent of sizzling meat didn't make you want to stab yourself in the belly, right there, so your blood would douse the flames and stop you from ever seeing a meal again?

What was that like?

To eat.

To want to eat?

--

I see first him across the clearing, ripping a strip of cloth off his arm to bandage his leg. He's a square; a skinny white man with little, round, incongruously clean glasses sitting on his sweat-shining nose. His hair, perhaps styled nicely before the crash, is greasy and limp. He sticks out, here in the jungle, not being a parrot or a monkey or an ant. He wears what remains of a suit; the pants are mostly intact to his knees and the shirt is now sleeveless. The wound he's working on is a deep gash from the left ankle to the calf. His shoes are ripped and charred; I can smell the burnt polish on the edge of the wind. There is no jacket in sight; he can't have had time to collect it. Beside him, leaning on a tree root, he has a small black briefcase, apparantly undamaged.

I move quietly around behind him, concealed in the undergrowth, then crouch to observe him. From here, I can see that his shirt is shredded, along with a good portion of his back, but he continues to bind his leg. Either he can't feel it or he's insanely brave.

I don't think he can feel it.

He tucks in the last bit of bandage and puts his socks back on. He experiments with moving his leg. I see his neck twitching, but he is quiet. After a while he stops and rests his head in his hands. I wonder how he can bear to stretch the skin over his spine like that. Already there are insects buzzing around him. He brushes away the ones approaching his face, but lets them sit on the other wounds. He can't feel them.

I reach out while he's distracted, steal his briefcase away from its resting place. It has no monogram, just a standard combination lock and two flip-up clasps. I twist the dials experimentally. 0000. And click.

The case won't open, but regardless, a deep, artificial wail bellows from the inside. I drop it, scuttle back, but he's seen me. He hasn't moved from his seat, just twisted round, and he stares at me.

We look at each other in silence. The alarm keeps screaming for help. For a second, his eyes flick to the case and then back at me. I get the message.

Gingerly, I get the case and carry it to him. The noise is deafening, pummelling my ears like the monsoon on an iron roof.

He barely touches it and the world is quiet. Then the monkeys start shrieking in competition.

He rests the case on his knee and looks at me again. He looks small from this angle. His glasses magnify the darkness under his eyes, and already his bandage is turning brown with drying blood.

"Did you know mosquitoes are eating your back?" I say.

"No," he says, and he is quiet again.

"Do you care?" I say.

"Probably," he says. "But there is very little I can do about it. I'm in shock, I'm badly injured and we are not near a hospital." He glances at me again. "Are we?"

"No," I say. "We're not near anything any more."

"Do you know where the nearest military base is?"

"No."

"Are you sure? I don't care which side you're on."

"There is nothing like that near here. I used to see the fighter jets, high up, but not for a long time now."

"Too far north."

"I have not seen a passenger flight for many years." I watch him closely.

"Do you have food?" He sounds very tired. He looks worse.

"No."

He looks me up and down for a long time, as though he was looking for something and forgot what he was looking for and had to start his whole thought process over again. "Are you wild?"

"Wild?"

"How long have you lived alone in the jungle?"

"Last night your plane crashed into my hamlet."

"There's a hamlet near here?"

"No. Your plane crashed into it."

"There's no one left?"

"What happened to your parachute?"

He points up and to the north. "It's in a tree somewhere."

I nod. He perhaps injured his back falling through branches when he released himself from the harness. Did the other passengers have parachutes? Did they choose not to use them?

"Why did you jump?"

He puts his head in one hand, wiping his forehead. "I didn't want to die."

"But now you're dead."

"I will be, yes. But so will you. Doesn't that bother you?"

"Didn't the others want to live?"

"Don't you know how to gather food out here?"

"Don't you have any peanuts from the plane?"

He pauses. He is not entirely angry. "Please, just tell me where to get water."

I nod, and put out my hand to help him up. He gives me the briefcase instead and stands by himself. He balances on one leg like an acrobat, the injured one raised behind him.

"What's your name?" I ask.

"Scott Summers," he says. "What's yours?"

"Lee Chu Bai."

"Which bit of that can I call you by?"

"Chu Bai."

He follows me very slowly to the nearest creek. On my own it would have taken two minutes at most, but he can barely take a step in that time. I don't bother to lend an arm, or to break down a cane for him. He is too proud.

He sits on the muddy bank, his legs in the water. He has stripped off to his underwear. I see his bandages flapping underwater and warn him about the crocodiles and the fish. He just shrugs and tries to make his hands a scoop to wash his face.

I sit a short way away and watch.

"Aren't you going to drink?" He is licking his fingers.

"No," I say. "I have drunk before."

"Will this water kill me?" I think he's trying to smile. Somehow his cheeks rise up under the frame of his glasses and make him look like a child about to throw a tantrum.

"Not before everything else does," I tell him.

He starts to throw water across his back. Mostly it just hits the ground behind him. I can bear it no longer. I jump up and pull off my shirt, soak it in the river and then go to bathe his injuries. He tenses when the cloth meets raw flesh, but says his back is numb. Looking at one of the deeper scratches, I see that a thick layer of his skin near the surface is whiter than it should be; the only blood near it is trickling down the outside. I make no comment. The bleeding does not stop. Our remaining clothing does not make a big enough bandage.

When I have patched him up as best I can, I help him stand up. He is shivering now and his toes are a little blue. He puts one arm across my shoulder and makes me give him the briefcase for the other. He glances down at us and chuckles.

"If my wife could see us now..."

We wear only our underwear and his bandages.

I take him back to my village. We see smoking remains as we are climbing the mountain. When we arrive we see only black wood and white dust on the plateau. Chunks of the aeroplane sit here and there among the shells of our houses, each as big as each other. I estimate that it carried a hundred people. There are no visible bodies.

We sit in the remains of my porch.

"What do you do for a living?" I ask him. It is polite.

"What do you do?" He is casually suspicious.

"I live here."

"Do you go to school?"

"Not any more. That was the school house." I point it out, across the fuselage. "The door was red," I say.

He shakes for several minutes. I hold his hand, which is clammy and does not give off human heat. His face is strained.

"Is there no food at all?" he says.

He is desperate, so I try to look in our ruined houses, although there is nothing there. I am about to go back and tell him, but he has taken off his glasses and is staring into space. I climb into the wreckage of the plane.

I am near the back. The seats are arranged in rows of two and three. Afternoon light slants in from the not-a-ceiling-any-more, and dimmer light comes through the port holes. I turn around and go into the staff kitchen. The contents are scattered randomly. There only appear to be empty trays and cups. I dig half-heartedly in the rubbish, but there is nothing.

I go back to the seats and walk along the aisle. There are no bodies or personal belongings. One of the emergency doors is missing.

There is no food in the cockpit. His jacket is neatly folded behind the copilot's seat. The pilot's dark skin is now whiter than her hair. Her eyes are open. The impact has cut her body all over, but the wounds are clean.

I walk back to the porch. He has the case open on his lap, but shuts it before I arrive.

"There is no food." I tell him.

"Where have you been getting your food from?"

"Why were there no people on the plane?"

He growls, pushes himself to a stand, still clutching the case. One of the clasps is not fully closed. He does not notice.

"This," he says, with heavy finality. He hops towards where the plateau drops off to the green valley. With his left leg dragging behind him and his big bandage slipping down his torso, progress is slow. I walk beside him, but a little way off.

"What's in it?" I ask.

"Misery," he says.

"Too vague," I say. "Misery is not a single thing."

He does not pause, although when he speaks his breath is short. "This is not a single thing. It holds papers and pens and vials and needles and pipettes and a hundred other small, insignificant things. Useless things now, because I haven't--come far enough."

He reaches the edge and with great effort, pitches the case out into the air. It carries a fair way before gracefully smashing into the forest canopy.

Silently, we walk back to the houses. This time he leans on me. He feels lighter than before, although he is still not putting weight on his injured leg.

The light is failing and we retreat into a room on the outskirts. It still has most of three walls.

"Where are your people?" he asks.

"It's going to get dark very quickly," I warn him.

"Where are your people?" Again.

"Would you like more water?"

"No. Where are your people?" He is persistant.

"Good, I don't have any to give you."

"Any water or any people?"

He has me now.

"Neither."

"Nor food?"

"No."

He looks at every inch of me as though he has never seen me before. His gaze prickles on my ribs. "And yet you survive."

"I was not there when it happened."

"The plane crash?"

"The coming of the short plague."

He asks no more questions for a while.

"I thought I could get far enough," he mutters. "I thought I could get to the front line."

He is sweating now so fast that it is an effort. It is like he is running down hill and cannot stop. His breath cannot catch up with him and his chest heaves uselessly.

I know the symptoms. The pilot must have had them too.

"If it's got this far, then it must have reached our men...our men as well as their men..." He shivers. "When did it come?"

"A few months ago. The monkeys brought it from the west. Our people ate them."

He frowns. "I saw monkeys in the jungle."

"They are merely carriers. There aren't any animals affected."

He chews on this for a time.

"The cat, maybe."

I wait. He will explain eventually.

"We had a cat in our lab. A calico. Hank drank a lot of coffee. He called the cat Cafe au Lait. I called it Cat."

"But you did not eat it."

"No." He sighs heavily. It takes a while before he can breathe easily again. "Once the cat smashed a petri dish. Hank stitched her paws right there. He was a doctor. He was the first to die."

"What are you?"

"Mathmo--Mathematician. Contracted by the Army. I model--probabilites. Theories. This should not--" He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. When he looks at me again, I see that his irises are thinner than they have been. "How have you not been infected? Are you naturally immune?"

I do not answer him. His thighs and stomach are streaked with blue. There are so many thin veins that he looks like the jungle from above, crisscrossed with streams. But his canopy is as white as the mountain tips.

He speaks so gently I barely notice him. "When did you last eat, Chu Bai?"

I do not reply. He will die soon.

Before the last light fades, I fetch his jacket from the plane and spread it over him. He looks like a corpse already, but I feel the faintest breath on my cheek as I bend to kiss him.

Then I go back down the path to the jungle.

Under the trees there is no light. I do not know my way and trip over every twig. My feet ache from the effort of carrying me up and down the mountain all day and my breast bone hums a quiet, constant pain. I don't know where I am. I keep walking.

It has been a slow day. Every day is slow now. For the past four weeks, (or maybe more, I have not been able to keep track) I have spent the days exploring and the nights sleeping. This is the first day I have met someone. And now I wonder why I explored. What was I looking for? And now, in the dark, why am I exploring still?

I touched his blood.

I trip once more and hit water. I get a mouthful of mud, even around the back of my teeth and my gut reacts violently. When I finish retching I cannot breathe. I touch my head and feel blood on my fingertips. My scalp is numb, even though I didn't eat. I touched his blood.

I sit down and cry for as long as I can.

When the first rays filter through the canopy, I find my vision indistinct. I can make out some colour and can tell the difference between up and down, but nothing more. My world is pale green and brown. Perhaps this was my first impression, when I first saw the world. It seems to be the most ordinary thing to see. But there, to one side, I see something red. Bright red, so strong it eats a hole in my vision around it. I cannot tell whether it is lying on mud, or in water, or on greenery until I reach out for it. My hand picks up loose gravel and plastic.

Close up, I can tell it's a liquid in a hypodermic needle. There are others on the ground further away, patches of purple and alien green. The red shimmers clearly before me for a moment, sharp and beautiful. I cannot read the dosage, or see if there is any other writing on the syringe. It may be poison or cure, or nothing of the sort, I don't know. I don't know the difference between this one and that one, between life and death and some prolonged agony. Regardless, I struggle to my knees and jab the needle hard into my thigh. It takes so much effort to push the plunger in that I almost pass out, but I manage to inject myself with several inches of the red liquid, all the same.

Numbness courses through my body. I can't tell if I'm holding the hypo, if I've dropped it, if it's still there in my leg. I can't feel my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth, although there is still a faint taste of mud. I can't feel my hands. I can't feel my eyelids. I can't feel his breath on my cheek any more.

I hear a stomach growling; it must be mine. I'm not hungry, though. I can't feel the acid bubbling inside me any more. I can't feel bile in my throat. He called it Misery, before he threw it away. I don't feel the dull pricking in my ribs any more. Perhaps he was wrong.

My sight, even with my eyes shut, is fading to white. It's not harsh, it's not the light reflecting from the mountaintops. It's not intense, like staring into a candle flame. It's like looking through a veil, a veil I can't touch or feel or even really see any more because there's only white.

I think I should have buried him before coming down here. I think he deserved a better death.

I don't think I did.

Was this what I was looking for?

--End--