Renere, 'to unspin, to undo, unravel what had been spun'

by Lise

VI.
~

Now

*

They never told me how they found me.

I wish they had.

Franklin won't talk about it. I asked him, one time right after they'd installed me in a room, and after I'd woken up from a nightmare. I remember swimming through sharks-- the second time-- and I remember Pete. I remember Logan's skeleton, shining from a pool of acid so yellow in the sunlight I had to shade my eyes.

I remember being in pain.

It's my turn to do the beds. That means I have to go around and check on the wounded. I have scars to prove that at one time, I too was one of their number. I remember that, too, if vaguely; a place I don't want to go back to. I don't remember how I got those scars. I think that's what the nightmare was about.

He asked me what was wrong, and I told him, "Same as always, Franklin."

He wasn't laughing. And so, I asked him how I'd managed to find my way to the Oasis. He wouldn't tell me. I know after Jean I was awake for almost a week straight, staying intangible to avoid the worst of what the shifts could throw at me. I fell into Franklin's arms, caught my first glimpse of the ramshackle house that would become my home-- and then I must have fallen asleep.

Our reality had such a close proximity to this place-- it deteriorated swiftly, putting me close enough to get to safety. I was lucky.

Franklin doesn't even know how I was wounded. Nate looked in my head one time, because I asked, and then he wouldn't tell me. I think someone tried to rip off a limb... Maybe it was gangrene, maybe a fight. Maybe it was giant whirring disks floating in the sky. I guess, I'll never know. I'm not going back there.

I know that's it for me; that the Oasis is place I'll die. I've even accepted it. But goddamned if I don't wish, sometimes when the crying and the bland food get too much, it wasn't so.

~*~

Then

*

It took me a while to go through the diaries that I had, but I finally had a fairly good picture of what Irene saw. It was the end of the world, indeed, but I saw a way to fix it. The diseases that she wrote of, the fires from heaven, the sick Earth itself... it seemed to be preventable. The picture was incomplete, but I'd done my best to fill in the gaps.

Unfortunately, I was completely wrong.

In number eleven, when I started seeing definite signs of another great battle, and another rising of the dark one, the evil, the beast-- Irene had a hundred names for him, but he all wore the same face-- I knew I had to do something, and fast. I just didn't know what.

Like always, what Irene saw, came true. She foretold of a cat with eyes to see the future, but what she really meant was me, reading her.

'sickearthsickearthsickearthsick--' This goes on for five pages, in loud, angry letters. No child should have to see the things Irene did. Not even the happiest of visions could possibly have made up for that.

Nothing can make up for anything.

Xavier, Cyclops, Phoenix, Storm, Iceman, Sunfire, Polaris, Cable, Bishop, Mikhail Rasputin, the Monolith, and Magneto. Cyclops was gone, taken from us and stripped of everything that made him leader, husband-- Scott Summers. They wanted to believe he was coming back.

It seems that, quietly, he'd found Sunfire, and maybe Mikhail, too-- everything is so confused, now. But the Twelve of them, they never made it out of there alive.

Twelve hours to a day, twelve victims on the block. We are all but puppets on strings. --Irene's words, not mine. Book eleven, page 153.

See? I can quote it word for word.

Not that it changed what happened in Egypt. It's not like it would change anything; Scott was dead and gone, they were working towards protecting humanity like always. I was supposed to be studying economics, and majoring in the end of the world. And when Xavier got a hint, telepathically, that suggested that perhaps, just maybe, Scott Summers was alive, no one read the fine print. I had the visions written down, book eleven, and I didn't read it either.

To be honest, I don't think anyone wanted to. This was the salvation we were hoping for.

So when I got called by the Professor, from my life in 'college', to come and help find Scott, I couldn't say no. April-- Easter weekend, actually, not that I realized it then. I brought the books with me, hidden in my case and on disk, and I got ready to save the world.

I actually believed that I could do it, too. Destiny would show me the way.

~

And so it went; so we were in the desert when he first found us.

'Sands of death,' Destiny said. It's always about the desert. Some days, I expect scarabs to be scuttling around, acting as if they own the place. --in some small measure, I think they do.

Not that it would have made any difference whether we were in the desert or the mountains, but it seems fitting that the harbringer of death ended half of the X-men in the desert. In a way, he'd already ended the lives of the X-men; without our leader, we were mutants now, and just fighting for our lives.

We were getting good at that part.

In order to truly understand the scope of our inadaquecies in taking on his armies-- Warren, the bright, shining star of the Worthington line, one in a line of horsemen spanning back farther than I want to even think about... he went down in less than five seconds, shot through the heart with an alien ray gun -- something you might have seen in Star Trek, set to kill instead of stun.

Death kills Death, blue angels, and the raven hovering over all.

If I were Irene, I would have said that.

Mystique wasn't actually there, of course-- it would have been too dangerous for her to risk her precious life with. She had found something more interesting to occupy her time; Raven Darkholme had ceased to exist, and she was in full underground survival mode. No gun, scanner, or telepath would have been able to find her. Whether she was dead, or gone, no one would know.

We went to Egypt, again, to try and find the bringer of death-- again. He killed Warren, Tabitha, and Kurt almost before we got out of the plane-- shot, all of them, by the snipers on top of the pyramids. Once we caught our feet and faced up to a thousand modified Skrull soldiers, all in full battle armor and sporting some nifty new ingrown weaponry, Logan and I looked at each other, then at Betsy.

Psylocke was grinning.

She was the next to go down, though she didn't die. She took out the biggest Skrull troop ship in a heroic move; trumped up dynamite, and hope that her telekinetic shielding would hold.

It did, but barely, and she ended up laying in the back of the bigger Blackbird, waiting for us to be heros and fly out of the desert, triumphant... when they bombed it.

Strangely enough, the rest of us held our ground long enough for Cable to get into the inner chamber of the Beast. --it's bad luck to even think his name, anymore, and so I try and keep it down to Irene's epithets. The Beast, the Dark One, Amun-Ra. Lord of the dead-- lord over a world of dead.

Cable found him, whoever you wish to call him, and couldn't keep the horror from his mental voice as he shouted to us all the name of the Beast.

<<It's Scott!>>

Jean jumped up, snarling almost as much as Wolverine, and grabbed the closest soldier to her. <<Where is he!>> she demanded-- but didn't get to ask anything more, because a stun bolt dropped her, and several green-clad agents of chaos dragged her body through a secret entrance in the pyramid.

En-Sabah Nur knew exactly what he wanted. And our fallen leader was getting it for him.

Logan turned into Wolverine at that point, feral, lost all control. Around me, the rest of the X-men were slowly being eaten up by soldiers -- alien and human both, they wouldn't stop coming, melting out of the woodwork and sandstone. The new Horsemen, four strong, ended up with Jean, Xavier, Bishop, and Magneto before we realized what they were doing.

Remy called to me, over a sea of dead bodies, "Can y'tell Wolverine? I'm goin' t'the Bird. We ain' gonna win here, Kate. Have t'make sure that Stormy and Polaris don't get dragged into that place."

I looked up, and saw Storm, eyes wild with fire and clutching the sky itself in her palms... completely unaware of Pestilance coming up behind her. Too late, I yelled, "ORORO!"

And I let my guard down.

~

Waking up on the plane, a worried Logan peering into my face, I was groggy. We were moving, that was apparent enough, and in the secondary bird; the one the remnants of X-force and Lorna Dane had borrowed as transport. Rogue sat in the pilot's seat, Neal Sharra beside her, and both of them had tears on their cheeks. I sat up, too quickly, and immediately blacked out.

"Whoa, darlin'. Take care."

Wolverine was alright, then. Sitting up more carefully this time, I looked around. Five seats occupied, and no other room. "Did-- where is everyone?"

Neal turned around, looked at Wolverine, and faced front grimly. "They--we're it, darlin'. The Cajun's in the back, trying to contact some people he knows. GenX is underground, and we're gonna find'em." He glanced back, towards Gambit, and added, "We think a few other mighta gotten out before they swarmed the jet. Not sure."

I tried to stand, needing to verify that there were really only five of us. "Five? But-- Storm... Bobby-- Jean?"

Rogue said flatly, "Sugah, they went into that temple and never came out."

A horrified look flittered on my face, and settled down to rest like a carrion bird. "We-- this is it."

Logan looked determined. "We're gonna get them back, Kitty."

A verse floated into my mind, and I shook my head slowly. 'Five ashes, five graves, and the lords of the dance-- quickly now, run run, mice playing, the cat, the shepherd of them all...' Page one hundred and ninety four, book eleven. Just about as close to the end as you can get, without falling over the edge.

I said quietly, "No, Logan, we're not."

~

Once things had-- cracked, I thanked god for our jet. The Blackbird saved our lives.

Those of us that were still alive.

As a temporary measure.

After-- after Egypt, once we'd found our feet, Rogue flew us the hell out of there. We landed in New York, to think. To recover.

I think, not in small measure, to pray.

And so, in a deserted Denny's somewhere in upstate New York, three o'clock in the morning and quiet outside, it happened.

I've phased through things my entire life, and it didn't affect me, feeling that nausea and flash of light. I wish I'd counted seconds until the next flash-- that data might be crucial now. As I remember it, it must have been ten seconds. But who would know?

The second time it was harsher than before, and Neal looked a little green when I opened my eyes. The fact that there were two flashes, so close together, has to mean that our reality was close-- it spiralled down quickly, quicker than most of the others. It should matter, but I don't think it does.

I know I didn't do more than blink. Neal, poor man, he was just about sick.

I couldn't explain it-- how the people and faces beside me managed to phase, but I looked, and then they were frozen, and the street light outside went out.

Blackness outside.

Logan recovered, moved first. He just said, "Something's up and you know it, Kit." Neal was still pale. Rogue had flown to the deserted Academy to check on things-- no word from Emma, no word from the students, not even a garbled message from Jubilee. Emma had to have them underground somewhere. Remy was waiting for us back at the jet.

Something was up, indeed.

I knew that Irene's diaries had to be the key, but if I'd read them right, this was just the beginning. Flashes of light. The vague sense of something behind you; paranoia, running high and wild, coming in rivers and waves and trickles in the general population until it broke, crested, splashed down on the cement and ran red.

Again. Irene's words, not mine.

The next day, there was a riot.

Two days later, there was another flash, and it lasted longer that time... long enough for Logan to reemerge from the stasis bleeding, and long enough for me to see a new volcano on the horizon.

I remembered again, those graves lined up so carefully, headstones drawn with a ruler-- volume seven, page twenty two, one of the first things I saw. A vision of the future, she wrote. Irene's hands were so unstable. Fear. Uncertainty. Plain madness. I don't know

I did know what these new flashes were called-- Irene had given me the name. The only mention of them in the whole set, though the missing two... they have to have the key. Volume eleven, page 200 -- last page -- third line down.

Shifts.

And I knew there would be more of them.

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