Evadere, 'to go out' or 'to escape'

by Lise

I didn't want to die like this, it just happened.

Bollocks to the folk who say your life flashes right before your eyes. It doesn't. You get searing pain, and you get time to grimace, and that's it. No white light, no cleansing last breath. I'm inhaling noxious fumes and my skin looks like wads of balled-up sandpaper decided to rhumba along all my limbs.

Her face is the last thing I see, and it's a damned shame she had to watch me get eaten away by desert wind.

At least she won't have to look at my ugly mug as the last thing she sees.

I'd cry about it, want to desperately for about three seconds. Chest tight. Skin rubbed raw and worse, open bleeding wounds. I've got time to mouth my last words at her, before I know I'm gonna die.

Lips, nothing more than fatty tissue and cracked, form my phrase, and I close my eyes. I didn't want to die like this, but you don't get a choice, out in the shifts. It just happens.

~

Maybe it would have been easier to deal with if I had been able to laugh it off.

Now there's a thought. If I could have just giggled, and closed my eyes and given up, then maybe then, seeing Pete dying so close to me wouldn't have stung as much as it did-- I can still remember him, but maybe if I'd laughed then, cried then, it would be better now.

The way his flesh was ripped apart by the sandstorm, I can still hear the noise, feel the little particles going through my ghosted form... hear Jean from the other side of the zone yelling in our heads, "Let go! Let go, for god's sake, Wisdom, or she's gone too!"

And so he was wincing in pain, and I could feel my control slipping, the sand getting a little more substantial compared to my own body...

So he said it. "You'n me, Pryde."

And then he let go.

See, the way things were, when Jean said 'jump', we jumped. She had a good sense of things, what might happen, what could happen, what was going to happen most of the time. She pulled us along, out of the way of the worst of it.

Pete and I never would have lasted as long as we did without her.

...Pete and I. She kept us safe, drew us away from the worst of it. And nothing seemed very wrong.

I think, she read my mind while I was sleeping, pulled out my love and my affection and my hope and smothered it.

Jean laughed at me when I danced along shift lines and the borders of the universes, half in one and half in the other, ghosting myself out of a life. Pete looked on, Jean crowed, stepping lightly whether it was snow or charred flesh or ash or glass or grass.

But you get used to someone telling you, "Phase, Kitty, now." And you get used to that someone being Jean, but not quite as you knew her, a Jean that scorned hope and good feelings. A Jean that said there was nothing within her, and yet hopped out of the way of things that killed.

She had something with her that protected her. I know now that it was insanity.

She sang at night, when she thought we were asleep, Pete and I. Called us her children, exiles in a foreign land. I heard her hum about being a word in a foreign language.

The Jean I knew would never have quoted Margaret Atwood, but this isn't the Jean I knew.

So when Pete, looking at me and dying from the sandstorm and the way my powers were failing from being constantly used, obeyed her, I didn't question it. Her telling him to let go of me, revert to form to save my energy and kill himself in the process, he jumped without question. Jean is the smart one, the leader, the mother figure.

She always was the nurturing type. Even this one, she guided us with a smile and a hidden, secretive glance.

The secret was that, to control the shifts, to know them, she had to be crazy.

Even so, I didn't expect any Jean to be capable of murder.

You have to understand. Pete was eaten up by a sandstorm that she had to have conjured up. I want to hate her, but I can't. I can't even blame her, because she could read my thoughts in an instant-- did. Didn't even try to hide it. Anything I thought would have condemned me.

And I want to survive.

Lord help me. The devil is my shepherd. I never was good with Catholic prayers, but I remember Pete saying that one with a sarcastic grin on his sweet face, some time late at night.

Jean didn't want to hear prayers. She forbid it, in a quiet little whisper, and would talk about her mentor and her friends and her life instead, holding them as gods and monsters equally. Greater than us.

She never mentioned a Scott until we found him dead. After that, she cut off all her hair and burned it, and didn't move for three days.

Something around his body was keeping the shifts at bay, keeping everything serene around his gravesite. The air was still, and calm, and dead. It smells like burnt cinders, and ash, and the rotting of pine trees still. Jean wouldn't move, and-- I didn't have the willpower to leave her.

Maybe that's her doing, too. She had the power to make me stay with a thought. Pete is gone.

She was jealous of us, I think; friends-from-lovers and alive.

I don't even hate her a little. She's long gone from my mind and the world. Killed by a Cable a long time ago. I sat in the shadows, ghosted, and didn't breathe, while he stabbed her through the heart and she screamed about injustice and heartache and messiahs getting too big for their britches.

I remembered the hundreds of times she'd saved my life, in that moment, and wondered whether my karma would ever forgive me for letting hers go.

Later, when I finally moved away from the gravesite, I ended up wandering in circles throughout the lines, stepping between the borders and enjoying the fragmentation that seeped into my body from having one part of me in sunlight, one part in shadow. I kept finding that Scott, little toy soldiers all in a row, and Jean's decaying body right beside. I wanted to bury her, but I hardly had the strength to move her into the right shift so she could be with him-- could hardly touch her, let alone dig a hole.

The sad part is, I'm safe now, and I know what I was and what I'm not; I don't need to stay ghosted to survive in this place, under Franklin's shields. But part of me ended up lost out there, and always will be.

See, Pete died because Jean found the body of her husband. She lost her mind a long time before that, but that snapped it.

And when we found him, he was only two shifts away from the Oasis.

~end~

back to Lise's stories | Shadowlands archive | X-Men archive | comicfic.net