Planetary

by Lise

I am not a god.

It's easy to forget, floating in the vastness of space.  But these dust clouds, cosmic trails, are everything that is bigger than a human being, bigger perhaps and more beautiful, than I am.  Even despite this, it's easy to forget.

I was like a god, once.  I ate a planet.

The sun's light filters through particles that swim in this black, black sea, and the starlight is so brilliant.  Beyond, the pink outline of some alien planet sits with dignity where Jupiter is supposed to live-- the same size, but color, storms, and moons are off.  The sun still burns as brightly.

I dare not move, and only years of practise as a statue, head facing the ground in the posture of meditation, has prevented me from changing orbit.  Not far off, the Earth-- what is left-- drifts lazily in an eliptrical voyage around the sun.  I drift with it.

But, I don't like that view very much; I prefer to look up at the starlight, through the remnants of a red, red planet and the dust it left behind.  The Earth, even on its best days, shines with a bite out of it.  Almost a third of its mass is-- missing.

Bitten, chewed, and swallowed.

I wonder, is this my revenge for the massacre of a whole heavenly body?  Does my world, now, need to do my penance?  Most of the Atlantic ocean is missing, some of Africa.  The globe is not circular, and it shifts in and out of vision, as if Kitty had the north and south poles grasped in both hands, phasing it in and out of existence.

I wonder if Kitty is still alive.

Eventually, there will be something more than a black, lonely void beneath my feet, grass, or dirt, or concrete, or lava.  Anything but space.  Eventually, this shift too, will pass, and whatever ate the world will spit it out again, and I will feel ground.  I see the far edge of this one, and it's moving like a high-pressure zone, little by little taking the universe in which the Earth never came together from component-atoms, and moving it away from the world I know.

The worlds, I know.

The starlight is so brilliant, out here.

~

You know how, there's a point in every kid's life that you realize your parents really don't know jack, and you're as grown up as they are, even if they're thirty years older and running around as some space pirate?

"Watch it, Alex--"

"I can see the tree root, Scott."

"I didn't mean the--"

"I see that, too, Scott. We were trained by the same people."

Of all the people I have to spend the end of the world with - Scott's a perfect choice, but if he says another word in the next ten minutes, I might just have to strangle him for it.  It's like being trapped in a bear cage, without the bear, but having your older brother point out all the places the bear could come from and eat you.

We pitch camp, and I start sneezing.  Something in the air on this world is highly allergenic.  It's driving me crazy.

The whole thing is driving me crazy. --the whole thing is crazy.  Nuts.  And I have that phantom tickle in the back of my skull, the guilt that just won't go away.

Sleeping bags rolled out, and it's just like Beavers camp.  Over the hill could be the lights of Anchorage, and mom would be waiting, expecting to hear all the details...

Up above, there are actual stars.

That's one thing that doesn't change, despite all the days and nights and worlds we land on.  The stars, if they're visible, make their way across the sky, and stay the same shape.  The constellation of Orion doesn't all of a sudden become the constellation Fat-Bear, or beer-mug.  Scott says it must mean that the phenomenon is localized; not affecting the entire universe, in layman's terms.

We're special, down here.

~

I know I'm not losing my mind.

~

Exactly twenty two days after the Blackbird disappeared into thin air, Moira, Pyro and I are hit by a wall of lava.

Being a semi-legitimate organization roughly attached to the Avengers has its benefits and privileges, one of them being the navy helicopter we're in when the spatial tear rips us out of the sky.  Pyro rolls to the right, Moira keeps her hands wrapped around the controls as I desperately and futilely attempt to land the copter.

We assess the damage, accept that the only thing we can do is sit on this outcrop of rapidly melting steel, and watch the volcanos in the distance.  "Quite a sight," Pyro says to me, "eh Beast?"

"It is a phenomena I have yet to explain," I tell him.  Moira is on the radio.  I doubt there are any people left within this world, if there were any to begin with. The lava is beginning to cool around us, and so it's likely we'll die from poison gas rather than molten rock.  Small comfort.  I say, "it appears as if this world has suffered some kind of cataclysmic destructive event, throwing it past the boiling point."

"No kidding."  Moira comes over to tell us there's no one on the radio.  We expect as much.  Twenty two days ago we were on the ground, and watched as the X-men's Blackbird was swallowed out of the very air itself.  It was a cloudless day, cloudless and calm.  "Think this is where the Bird went?"

"I can only hope," I murmur, "they found themselves somewhere more inviting."  We have been working - were working - for three weeks to try and figure out where the Blackbird disappeared to.  I have several PhDs, and I have advanced learning credits in numerous fields, one of them even theoretical physics.  I have seen those laws of the universe bent, even broken.  But I cannot accept that an entire plane full of people - of heroes - could vanish and leave no trace we can track.  Energy does not disintegrate, it does not disappear.

"So what now, Blue?" Moira asks.  She coughs; already the two of them, immune systems more vulnerable because of the Legacy still in their cells, are showing signs of trouble.  Volcanoes spew more ash and pollutants than they do lava; most people who die from volcanic eruptions do so just like house fire victims - they inhale the smoke and expire from lack of oxygen.

"I suggest," I say to them, "we hope for another anomaly to transport us out of here."  The sky above us is red, a deep glowing red, which means one thing: these volcanoes have been active constantly for a good long geological while.  The ash and carbon is so thick it blocks out the sun, and any sign of the sky.

~

I know that I'm not losing my mind because my name is Jean.  My name is Jean and my husband is Scott Summers, and we have a daughter.  My name is Jean and I have red hair, and I'm almost forty years old.  My name is Jean and also the Phoenix, I have traversed the galaxy, I have seen it for its splendor and its might.  My name is the Phoenix and something as small as this, one planet, will not cow me.  My name is Jean.

~

"Warren!" and then Betsy jumps out of the way as Warren, no longer remembering the life he had with the X-men, nor his relationship with Elizabeth Braddock, leaps into the dark sky.

Apocalypse can do that, you know - take away an identity, take away everything that is fundamentally *you*.  Of course, he can take away a hell of a lot more than that, and proved it by ripping holes in the space-time continuum, or the fabric of space-time, or whatever it is that theoretical physicists always go on about that no one understands.

But see, I'm not Warren anymore.  I remember Warren, but I'm not that person - I am Archangel, one of four Horsemen, missing the other three.  I must be a Horseman, that must have been my true identity, because this is most definitely the book of Revelations.

When I went to Sunday school, there was a girl who asked whether God was responsible for the whole world.  Of course, the teacher said.  Was He responsible for the whole solar system?  Of course, the teacher said.  And the entire universe?  Of course, God is creator of all and shepherd of all.

Then how, if the universe is however old and however large, could something as insignificant as one of us even make a ping on his radar?

My wings - real wings, feathered wings - flap.  This shift is a nice easy one, though the air doesn't smell quite right.  Betsy is long gone, standing on the earth, trapped and tied to the dirt.  I'm going to fly up and I'm going to find out if God really is up there.  If he's not, I'll touch the sun.  

And after that, I'll make sure I say a prayer, and go about my duty as a servant of the Apocalypse.  The moon is still in the sky, so that means that this little party to the Earth, brought about not by God, but by a mutant who aspires to walk a mile in his shoes.  If Apocalypse can rent this destruction, can usurp God's perrogative to destroy mankind, surely I can make it to the atmosphere, surely I can take a few steps.

~

Bobby doesn't even get a chance to duck.  It's just me and him, and then we're in the middle of nothing.  Do you know what nothing can do to a man? His eyeballs froze. It was all I could do to psychically knock him out before his lungs exploded.

~

I can't hear anything.

Of course, space has no sound. But to a telepath, silence is unforgiveable, silence is the final straw. There are no people in this shift, no people chattering in their heads, no fears, no emotions bleeding into the universe.

This will pass, but until it does, the only things I can hear are asteroids, comets, quaesars, nebulae. If I strain my ears with all my might, I can almost hear the hissing, the neverending hiss of the universe eating the planet below. It will pass - this isn't actual astronomical phenomena, which might require a wait of twenty thousand years. This is artificial, and *wrong*. It can't be too much longer now. I'll just wait.

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