Work Text:
Storm's Temptation
by Lucinda
She could feel the clouds overhead, thick with rain and itching with lightning. There was a fitful breeze, enough to keep the clouds twisting and moving, not powerful enough to move them away or shred them into harmless wisps.
Most people would be powerless to do more than watch the clouds, wondering if the roiling mass would break into a storm, or continue to seethe above them. Many would hide in their houses, rateful to the panes of glass and the solid rooftops above them, while others, far less fortunate, would seek whatever shelter they could without the luxury of their own home. Some would watch with fascination, entranced by the power of the heavens.
She had never cowered from the sky, never feared the weather. Not even the fiercest sandstorms had frightened her. Not even long ago, when she was a small child.
Ororo ached to touch the clouds, to call out to their power with her own, to summon the lightning, to spin the clouds thicker and call down the rain to drench the land, to fill the air with water. To feel the mist that would rise up after such a storm, to feel and watch the tendrils of fog wrap around the buildings and trees, to feel the giddy rush of the winds as it tossed trees and made the power lines dance.
She could do it. The power of the wind, the clouds, the lightning... it was her birthright to touch that power, to feel it as easily as she could feel the power of her hands.
She was the storm.
Her hands gripped the balcony railing, and she could feel her hair fluttering in the breeze. Part of her ached to call the winds, to let them carry her up and away, to lose herself in the clouds and the lightning, to let the dancing winds fill her mind and soul.
To forget Ororo Munroe.
The iron railing bit into her hand, the pain reminding her that she wasn't the storm, was still a woman. Still close enough to human. To remind her of the children at the school, needing someone to watch over them, someone to offer comfort when their nightmares woke them, when their memories would not let them sleep.
"Perhaps one day, there will be nothing to keep me here. No reason to deny the call of the winds," she looked up, feeling the clouds shift with her mood, her melancholy thickening them, the rain almost heavy enough to fall.
Her footsteps made no sound as she returned to the hallway. She could still feel the clouds above, feel the rain that began to fall.
When she felt the lightning dancing above the school, Ororo realized that Logan wasn't the only one here who had reason to worry about losing their self to their mutation. While he feared becoming no more than a feral beast, she could feel the siren call of the winds, beckoning her to abandon this life, abandon her concern with the small, fragile mortals that cowered from the winds. Part of her knew that she could do it, become one with the winds and storms. Become part of the weather.
Become eternal.
But if she did that, she didn't know if she could still remain Ororo. Still remain the woman who had laughed at her mother’s old stories, had watched her father take pictures. Still remember the streets where she had run, slipping money from the pockets and wallets of inobservant travelers. Still be the woman who ha guarded and protected a small tribe. Still be the woman who comforted young mutants, who opposed Magneto, who fought for a day when it no longer mattered how ones genes twisted.
Sometimes, she wondered if it would be worth it, to give up being Ororo.
If there had been someone else who could watch the children, she might have found out. But there was nobody else who would care for them as she did. “I am still needed here.”
Not yet.
Ororo returned to her room, looking out the skylight where the rain beat upon the glass, the lightning lending the room moments of wavering light even as she could feel each twisting arc within her soul.
She remained the woman, and not the storm. Once more, the temptation had not taken her from this place.
There would be another storm, with the siren song of the wind, the lightning speaking to her soul. The clouds offering her the soothing caress that no lover could equal. The winds whispering of speed and mountains and vast expanses.
Temptation.
Perhaps the next time, she wouldn't be able to resist.
end Storm's Temptation.