ETHAN.
A hot and hurried flow of unconscious (French) curse words came spilling out of his lips as those machines came to life and red light flooded the space they had just entered. Christian almost didn't react in time but the sound of metal joints humming and whirring (it was like insects only a thousand times worse, a sound he suspected he would hear in his nightmares for a very long time to come) and then a hand catching in the back of his jacket snapped him out of his shocked state just in time to avoid a catastrophic blast that would have taken his legs not only right out from under him but clean off.
His heart was going a mile a minute as his back collided with something that didn't quite feel like a wall but was fairly solid nevertheless and a glance over one shoulder showed him a very familiar face extremely close to his own: Ethan.
Ethan had pulled him clear.
"Merci." The look the older (quite a bit older now, in fact) Dumaine tossed him told him that now was most definitely not the time to get caught up on such things and he uttered an acknowledgement before he disengaged from where Ethan had yanked him back in order to get a better look at what was happening. Powers were firing and flaring and blasting in rapid succession and Christian watched for a few moments as the chaos unfolded before he took a deep breath and gathered himself. The air around him dropped in temperature immediately, a direct and clashing contrast to that around Ethan close by, there was a space between them where both pockets of extremes met, a harsh and yet complimentary contradiction. The breath misted from his parted lips and he cast his pale eyes sidelong to Ethan's profile. For a split second he hesitated, thinking about everything this man had told him about all that had happened to them, what had been done to them and how it had changed everything for both of them. How it had all come to an end. Christian knew that for the man close by his side he was the brother he had lost (and horrifically at that) and yet at the same time he was someone else entirely. Practically a stranger. And yet--
When he spoke it was in French that he did so, and surprisingly steadily at that. "They can withstand us as individuals, separately, they can compensate for one or the other." An extreme heat or extreme cold. There was the faintest glimpse of a smile, a fleeting one, that crossed his lips before he sobered completely again and said by way of conclusion, "But both of us at the same time?" If nothing else it had to be worth a shot. Perhaps they had tried it in the past and maybe it had worked, maybe it hadn't, but unless this man who was and wasn't his brother said otherwise he wanted to see for himself exactly what would happen, just what they were capable of when they worked in unison like this.