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He’d been to several different edges of Heaven. It was widely known that the deeper you went into God’s country, the more beautiful is became. But not very many souls ventured to the outer edges, where the ether clouds floated and covered the rest of the afterlife. And not very many knew that moving to certain edges meant crossing into the part of Heaven reserved for another universe entirely. One could only do it at the edges, though. Never fully inside.
The robed figure padded along the edge, following a small path that lead to another universe’s Heaven. He’d seen his friends deal with some nightmares down on Earth, but there had been one that had suffered so much. One that sacrificed himself so that his friends may continue to live.
Technically there were two that had sacrificed themselves, but he was hardly worried about the second. That one was a child, and the way he saw it, the child had a pure heart and had earned his place in his own Heavenly choir. That, and children suicides/self-sacrifices hardly ever got punished for their decisions; they immediately went to Heaven.
But the figure had been curious. What was the fate of the first? Was he doomed to Hell, in the Wrath Circle? The man had been rather vengeful, and had allowed wrath to consume him in his later years. He’d murdered many in his day, and the most recent of which had been extremely violent, regardless of the victims’ innocence. He had planned suicide-by-Wolverine before the climax of the terrible event, which would have landed him in the Suicide Woods, not in Heaven. However, his final self-sacrifice made it rather tricky to determine a fate for, and the figure couldn’t help but be curious.
The robed figure immediately noticed someone else was standing at the edge. He calmly walked to them, noting it was a woman.
The woman turned slightly. She gave no view of her face. “Another one to try and convince me of Heaven’s beauty?”
He shook his head, keeping his hood low. “I’m from a different territory’s edge,” he said, his voice tinged with a soft German accent. “And I know how it feels to get preached to about Heaven’s inner beauty. I was curious about the fate of someone from your universe.”
She stiffened. “Your voice…”
He immediately assessed the situation. It wasn’t impossible that he and she would meet, and it was certainly going to be awkward. He pushed back his hood, revealing his indigo skin and dark blue locks. His golden eyes were cast down, and he could feel his pointed ears trying to lower in slight shame.
“I’m not him,” he said bluntly. “Not technically.”
The woman pushed her own hood back. Her light brown hair cascaded down her back as it was released from the hood. Her eyes—a deep chocolate color—were brimming with tears. “I know you,” she said softly. “Your world’s Wolverine mourned for you. Mistook my husband for you.”
He nodded. “My name is Kurt Wagner.”
“Linda,” she replied. “Linda Darkholme.”
It was odd to hear that surname attached to someone other than Mystique. Kurt smiled and offered his hand, which she shook.
Linda turned away after a moment, looking down at the ether below. “You’re here for my Kurt, yes?”
“That’s right.” He shifted on his feet. “I wanted to know…wanted to see…”
Linda pointed down. “He’s in Purgatory.”
Kurt flinched. Purgatory had various levels, each more stagnant than the last. One level was a vast ocean of souls lost at sea. Another was just a pure white void where souls wandered invisibly. Yet another—the closest to Heaven—was a large ice cap with a never-ending blizzard. There were infinite levels for infinite souls, and it was shared by all souls of the multiverse, not split up into universe sections like the rest of the afterlife.
Also, unlike Hell, where punishment was more physical torture with a side of emotional stress, Purgatory was designed for souls to punish themselves inside their own minds. The unending cycle of nothingness and stillness in each level made one think. And thinking led to terrible thoughts and actions. A soul would be laid bare there, and would suffer their own self-inflicted tortures until they finally reached a peace. Some never got out. Others ascended to Heaven, finally able to rest after their own punishment had stripped away their sins.
“Which one?” Kurt asked hesitantly.
“The cells.”
So, one of the lower levels. The lower one went, the darker it got, and the harder it was to get out in peace. The cells were designed like solitary confinement. Many souls there lost their sanity. They lost their human minds. Most souls in the cells just kept devolving until there was nothing left but an enraged animal.
“Have you tried reaching him?” he asked.
Linda nodded. “The moment he arrived down there I tried to console him. I tried to reach him—tell him we’d be together soon. But he couldn’t hear me. In just this short amount of time he’s already lost so much of who he was…” Her eyes threatened to overflow with tears unshed. “Every time I look down there he descends further…”
Kurt reached out to her and hugged her. As she sobbed into his shoulder, he rubbed circles on her lower back. His tail instinctively wrapped around her waist.
“Let me try,” he said automatically. “We are two side of the same coin. Perhaps he can hear me.”
Linda sniffled. “I wouldn’t ask that of you,” she whimpered.
“You don’t need to. I watched him, too. He’s been lost for a long time.” Kurt blinked away tears of his own. “I will do what I can to help him find peace.”
Linda gave him a sad smile. “I know you must not think so now, but…you both are more alike than you realize…”
“Oh?”
“It took so long for me to break his hard, outer shell, to see the man inside for what he was. And that man was just like you; kind, caring, and loyal to his loved ones. He just didn’t show it as well as you.”
Kurt smiled in return. “We were raised differently.”
She reached up then, and hesitantly brushed her fingers down his left cheek, just under his eye. “Please help him.”
He took that hand and kissed it lightly, bowing over as he did so. “I promise I will do what I can.”
One didn’t need to ‘fall’ from Heaven to visit the various planes of the afterlife, or even to visit the dreams of the living. All a soul needs is concentration. Thankfully, sitting alone at the edge of the ether clouds, Kurt Wagner had that in abundance.
Well, he would if his bamfs would stop crawling around him, chittering away.
He sighed heavily. The small creatures—his brothers, if one looked into their history far enough—were creatures from the deepest pits of Hell, where even the damned were not welcome. They were slowly gaining in numbers as more and more were turned from his father Azazel’s side to Kurt’s.
But that was another story, the end of which had yet to be written.
Anyway, the leaders of the bamfs almost always clung to him, giving him updates on the living world, his father’s rising crew numbers, or tattling on one of the troublemakers in their brood.
“Please, bamfs,” he sighed desperately. “Not today. I need to concentrate. I must extend my consciousness to Purgatory.”
The bamfs reacted terribly. Their tails lashed, their teeth bared, their claws dug into the loose Heavenly soil. They screeched some nasty curses at him.
“I don’t mean the sea of Purgatory,” Kurt clarified. “We aren’t ready to face him there, I know.”
The bamfs settled, but still waited for him to finish.
“I need to go to the cells.”
The bamfs encircled him, narrowing their eyes in curiosity. One squeaked in question.
“I made a promise,” Kurt said softly. “I must see if…”
He didn’t know how to say it. The bamfs didn’t really understand the whole multiverse thing. One soul was one soul to them. It didn’t matter if it was the same soul as the one before it, just from a different universe. They were more simple-minded when it came to things like that.
“I must see someone,” Kurt finally finished. “It’s important. I’ll never be able to go on if I don’t try this.”
His smaller brethren backed away at that. All but one gave him the distance he needed to concentrate again.
This one waited patiently at the edge of Kurt’s lap. Kurt sighed in defeat. “Do you know your way around the cells?”
The bamf nodded.
Of course it knew how to navigate Purgatory. Why not?
“Then, when my astral-self arrives, please show me to the spirit of Kurt Darkholme.”
It took a few minutes to find the bamf in those dank halls. It was a maze of barred windows, endless walkways of doorless rooms, and dreary paths of hard, wet rock. It sat patiently in the middle of a hall, waiting for Kurt to find it. Once Kurt was in sight, it turned and began searching the cells.
The cells were directly below the sea of Purgatory, so it constantly leaked, and smelled of bitter salty air. Kurt was reminded of Edmond Dantés, one of his favorite characters in literature, who had been imprisoned for fourteen years inside a dark and dank cell, inside a prison that sat on a rock in the middle of the ocean.
He had seen that his Darkholme counterpart had grown with similar tastes in movies and literature. It made sense that his Purgatory would be in something akin to the Château d'If.
Kurt could hear the tortured screams of those imprisoned in the cells. No one was with them; all of the torture was in their minds. Kurt could only imagine what they were doing to themselves.
His bamf crawled the walls, peeking into cell windows far ahead of him. Sometimes it grimaced. Sometimes it chittered with dark glee. Mostly, its face was blank.
Kurt flinched as he passed a cell that sounded like it held a rabid dog. Something bashed its head against the wall, and Kurt had to hold himself steady. He feared he might collapse if he saw the state of that soul, no longer human and on its way to nothingness.
Finally, the bamf stopped. It had peered into a cell and froze, no doubt immediately seeing the resemblance between the prisoner and Kurt. Then, it squeaked at Kurt impatiently, lashing its tail.
Kurt gazed into the cell hesitantly. He didn’t know what to expect. Would Darkholme be on the more animalistic side, unrecognizable even to Azazel? Would he still remember his life?
The cell was dark, with only a window on the opposite side of the room providing light. The window was large—large enough for even Beast to squeeze through the bars. The light from outside was dreary and grey, which didn’t help Kurt’s vision much.
There was exactly one piece of ‘furniture’ in the cell: a large, stone slab that sort of resembled a bed. Crouched on that slab, facing the wall with Kurt’s window, was a dark figure. The gargoyle that sat on the slab was skinny and frail-looking, but his eyes were blood red with anger. His spaded tail twitched next to him, in an almost eerie rhythm. His hair was a greased mess, slicked back against his skull in some sort of attempt to keep it out of his eyes.
Kurt steeled himself and willed his astral form to shift through the wall. He stepped inside the cell, hoping to God Darkholme would not be violent.
Darkholme didn’t react to Kurt’s presence. That didn’t bode well. His eyes were cast down in an eternal glare. He muttered unintelligible phrases at the wet floor.
Kurt edged closer, taking in more details of Darkholme’s condition. His fur was matted in many places, crusted with the salt from the sea’s leakage into the cell. He was balding in some places. His form wasn’t as skeletal as Kurt had initially thought, though it was still frail-looking with his deteriorating muscles and obvious ribcage. What had been an X-Force uniform was now in shambles, with only a loincloth for minor decency and the remains of the uniform’s neck and shoulder combination that draped over his torso like a miniature poncho. A single shackle, clamped tightly around one of his wrists, was all that chained him to the slab and to the Purgatory level.
Kurt cleared his throat. His tail twitched nervously.
Darkholme looked up, taken completely by surprise. Kurt was surprised, as well. He hadn’t expected his broken counterpart to actually acknowledge him!
Darkholme’s eyes soon narrowed. “Another vision,” he snarled. “Can’t leave me alone, can you, mind!?”
“I am as real as you,” Kurt assured him. “And just as dead.”
“Lies,” Darkholme spat.
“You and I…” Kurt began.
Darkholme reached out with his chained arm, his hand resembling a bird’s talons. “We are not the same! I would never look like that!”
He spat the last word with such a venomous tone that Kurt actually was taken aback. Were his heavenly robes that blinding in this darkness? He looked down and blinked.
He was not dressed in Heaven’s mandatory garb, but actually in a priest’s robes, collar and all. It shocked him to know that this was what Darkholme saw first before anything else. He was no priest, though he’d spent so long thinking he was (another story that had no place here).
But perhaps, he realized, this was what Darkholme needed: A Father.
Oh, this Purgatory was truly perfect for Kurt in any form. It was truer to the Château d'If than Kurt had initially realized. The parallels were so close it hurt his heart.
God was watching. He was judging Kurt in both forms, waiting to see what happened.
Kurt stepped up to the gargoyle-like creature that was Kurt Darkholme. “My child,” he said softly. He hoped this was the correct place to begin: “You are correct. We are not the same. But we are two sides of the same coin.”
“Get away from me!” Darkholme swiped at Kurt, catching the rosary that hung from Kurt’s neck in his disgusting talons.
He paused. The cross seemed to glow as it dangled from his fingers. The beads were still wrapped around Kurt’s neck, so he had to bend a little.
For a moment, Darkholme’s eyes seemed to flicker. The red gave way to flecks of gold.
“You’ve let wrath rule you for so long.” Kurt spoke softly, so he wouldn’t startle Darkholme. This was his ‘priest voice’, as Logan had called it. “You had let go before you died. What changed?”
Darkholme didn’t meet his eyes. He glared at the wall next to them. “Why should you care?”
“Because I always cared.”
Darkholme tossed the rosary out of his hand, shoving Kurt back. “Go away.”
“No.” Kurt stepped forward again. “I won’t let you slip. You are committing the soul’s equivalent of suicide here in this dungeon!”
“Because I deserve it!” Darkholme snarled. “I deserve every bit of punishment the afterlife gives me! I did horrible things up there! Terrible things I now realize have probably revolted the ones I loved!” His eyes flashed a dangerous red.
“So you’d rather sit here and become the demon those ignorant people called you? Keep this up and that’s where you’re headed.”
“So be it.”
With that sentence, it was like Kurt could see Darkholme slipping further away. His rage twisted his face into a more permanent snarl, and his eyes—if it was even possible—sunk into a deeper shade of red. The scar over his left eye pulsed an angry red.
“What about Linda?”
Kurt had asked this so quietly that he feared Darkholme hadn’t heard. But he had.
The twisted soul paused and glared at Kurt. “What about her?”
“Would you condemn her to wait an eternity at the edge of Heaven? To wait eternally for her husband to join her?”
Darkholme snarled viciously. It was more animalistic than before. “You don’t know anything!”
“Would you force her to watch her love become a true demon? Would you make her look upon that demon who would not remember her?”
“Shut up!”
“I met her up there,” Kurt said, his voice even. “She’s heartbroken. Even she can see you do not deserve this fate. No one is forcing you into this cruel fate but you.”
Darkholme grabbed the rosary again, dragging Kurt down to his level. “Get. Out.”
Kurt straightened up, clutching the rags on Darkholme’s neck. “No.”
A smirk played on Darkholme’s lips. “You know…Father,” he muttered this word, his voice dripping with venom. “There’s only you and me. We’re the only ones in this cell. If I killed you here…that’s it. Game over for you.”
“What would you gain from that?” Kurt was genuinely curious here. This idea of Darkholme’s came out of nowhere. He was growing unstable, and it meant Kurt was running out of time.
“Well, for one, I wouldn’t have you bothering me.”
Kurt stayed silent.
“And without you,” Darkholme continued. “It’ll be easier to forget…”
Kurt sighed. “Forgetting doesn’t help.”
“What would you know?” Darkholme growled. “Father Goody-two-shoes that everyone loves! What could you have possibly done that would make you understand…?”
“I killed my own brother.”
Darkholme paused. He blinked, his eyes lightening again. “What?”
Kurt tried to keep his voice level as he repeated, “I killed my own brother. Before I became an X-Man, I made a promise to that brother that I would stop him if he fell to the darkness in his heart. I hadn’t meant to kill him, but…”
He looked Darkholme square in the eye. “Even as an X-Man I had done things I regretted. Things I wished I could forget. But when I died, I let it all go. What happened happened. I cannot change any of it now, just as you cannot change what you did. Forgetting won’t change it. But you can still forgive yourself.”
“How could I?” Darkholme let go of the rosary and curled in on himself. The anger radiating from him had turned to depression. His eyes continued to drain in color, revealing a softer pinkish red. “Forgiveness was never in my nature. Not like it was in yours. You weren’t raised like I was. Vengeance was all I’d known.”
Kurt moved to sit next to Darkholme. “Linda told me you weren’t at all like that when you were with her.”
The twisted soul shifted, his tail twitching. “I…”
“I told you that we are two sides of the same coin,” Kurt continued. “We were raised differently. We followed different paths. Yet…we are largely the same. We’re both swashbucklers in our own right. We’re devilishly charming—” This earned a slight smirk from Darkholme. “—and we both care about the ones we love. Whether that be Linda on your end, or…” He paused, thinking of his friends and love interests. “The point is…neither of us is the devil those fools above thought us to be. Why condemn yourself to that fate when you know—deep down—it was never true?”
Darkholme didn’t answer this time.
So, Kurt kept going, “Forgetting won’t solve anything. It will just make it worse for everyone. Why should you suffer this fate when you’ve done so much good for the world? So what if you aren’t a saint? You were still a hero. You’re still Nightcrawler, just like me. Just like Kurt Waggoner.”
Darkholme blinked at the child’s name. It was as if he remembered the boy’s own sacrifice just then. He grimaced.
Kurt placed a hand on the spirit’s skeletal shoulder. “Please, mein fruend. Don’t give up all hope of paradise. Not when Linda still holds out hope for you.”
“How do I know this isn’t just another vision?” Darkholme said softly. “That this whole conversation meant nothing?”
“Even if I weren’t real,” Kurt assured him, “our conversation meant more than nothing. And I hope you won’t forget it.”
Darkholme pulled his knees up to his chest, his tail encircling his ankles anxiously. He placed his forehead on his arms, which were crossed over his knees. “I’ll…try not to.”
Kurt rose to leave, but hesitated. Then, he placed the rosary on the slab next to Darkholme’s chains. “You’re a good man,” he whispered. “You’ve just lost your way. But I know you’ll find it again.”
He took small strides towards the small window, where the bamf was still eavesdropping. He took one last look at the pitiful form on the slab. “Show Linda you can find yourself again,” he muttered softly.
And Kurt left. Whatever happened after that, it was not Kurt’s place to know. There was only so much he could do to guide a soul in Purgatory. They had to leave on their own in the end. Whether they were themselves or not when they did so…well, that was up to them.
Later…
It was almost time. Kurt had gotten reports that the Earth-bound bamfs were nearing their mission’s completion. Just in time, too, for Azazel’s forces were almost ready to strike again.
Kurt walked along the edge of Heaven again, remembering how he’d traveled this way so long ago. If he looked down hard enough, he could possibly see a few levels of Purgatory.
Kurt figured now would be a good time to check up on Linda. He’d warn her to stay away from the edge closest to his universe’s Heaven, as she might risk Azazel catching sight of her.
He also wanted to know if Kurt Darkholme had improved in Purgatory. He shuddered to think of what had happened if Kurt’s conversation with him had failed.
As he crossed into the next Heaven, he noticed two figures standing side by side, staring out into the ether. Kurt paused.
One figure was Linda. Her hood was down, and she was smiling brightly at the second figure. She gazed at the second figure lovingly, as if she couldn’t believe they were really there.
She pushed the figure’s hood back and ran her hands through his hair—his dark blue hair.
Kurt Darkholme lowered his head and kissed his wife. His indigo fur, no longer patchy or balding, flushed purple at the contact. His spaded tail wagged under his new robes. A small rosary was hanging off of his tail, almost as if it had grown there naturally. The cross dangled and caught the sunlight as the tail wagged.
Kurt Wagner smiled at the scene. Darkholme had found peace at last. He was finally happy again, after all that suffering in life and in Purgatory.
Kurt watched as the Darkholme couple walked deeper into Heaven. They hadn’t seen him, and he didn’t call out to them.
He turned and walked back towards his own Heaven. He felt he didn’t need to warn the Darkholmes of Azazel’s impending invasion. If Azazel won in the days to come, by the time he reached this Heaven’s edge, if ever, they would be too far into Heaven for him to reach.