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

by Lise

I.
~

Now

*

It's morning; I look out the window and see a measure of sunlight. Look to my right, and the door's still closed... the kidlets have decided to give nice Aunt Kitty a break this morning and let her get her clothes on before pouncing. I get dressed, and just like every other morning that can be called a morning here, I take a thick black felt marker and make a tick on the wall above my bed.

One for each day the sun rises and sets; I have the better part of the surface covered. It's a crude calendar, but somewhere, eventually, the fact that I have a wall-full of days is going to matter. How long we spent with sanity, while the rest of the world ran without it, will matter. Some day. When someone knows what to do with that information.

I tell myself it's a Saturday morning, and lace up my boots. Saturdays used to be my favorite day of the week.

When we had weeks.

Stumble down the hall to our paltry, tiny kitchen, and almost kill myself twice on little matchbox cars. Mikhail is getting carried away again. I'll have to talk to him at breakfast.

It's my turn to cook for the house, and I should make enough to take next door, where the few remnants of a tribe with blue skin bear witness to Mystique's continued family line. At least, that's what I imagine. I want to think we've got something of Mystique around here, since I haven't seen any Raven Darkholmes in.... as many days in a half-square foot of wall.

Quite a while.

~*~

Then

*

"Kitty, the transport's leaving."

"I'm coming, Rogue! Just-- give me a minute."

The Blackbird was prepped and ready; we were ten seconds away from the first real work the X-men had gotten in years. Building a space station-- we should have all been excited.

Damn you, Irene Adler.

I was staring at a schematic blueprint of the space station we were supposed to be building, but twisted and distorted, like looking at it through a glass of water; none of the parts seemed to fit. This drawing, done by a thirteen-year old Irene, had to be at least thirty years old. Fifty, if I pushed it... no one ever knew how old Destiny really was.

And it showed a little stick figure, falling down to earth like a shooting star.

"Kitty!" Rogue appeared at my door, and I jumped up almost a foot, half-phasing my foot through the chair leg. "Come on, sugah!"

I stared down again at the book, and took a gulp-- then shut it away in the part of my desk that locked. There was no way to know who, if anyone, Irene saw dying... whether it was metaphorical, whether it had already happened-- whether it was anything, there was no way to tell. And yet.

"Rogue," I said hesitently, "Would you do something for me?"

She nodded. "Course, Kitty."

I handed her an envelope, sealed with a Shi'ar glue that never faded or decayed. The paper, too, was reinforced with linen-- even though there was nothing but a single piece of paper and a disk inside, it weighed a lot more than a normal letter. Precautions. I said quietly, "Listen. If anything should happen--"

She interrupted, and said, "Nothing's gonna happen. Don't even think like that."

"But if it does. Here." She tucked it into her pocket, and lead me out to the plane. I'm sure she thought I'd chosen her because she was team leader, because she was virtually invulnerable. And they were both good reasons. But it was because of her adopted mother, more than anything. If anything happened to me, I wanted to make sure that the journal didn't end up collecting dust in my drawer forever.

Maybe that would have been the best place for it.

~

Space.

It was supposed to be my chance to show that, no, I wasn't just a measley child and one that couldn't take care of herself. I had knowledge, I had competence, and I was a valuable member of a scientific team, not only a valuable member of a team of superheroes. We did have real substance, and we had real worth, outside of fighting and the lives we'd been embroiled with for so long.

I suppose I didn't really expect the sabotage, even though I should have. Nothing goes the way its planned; I didn't expect to be hurtling towards Earth at immense speeds, enough that I blacked out and enough that I-- don't quite remember what happened. A week or two must have passed. Things happened. I got better.

I had an unnerving experience in the nunnery I was recuperating in-- the whole thing seems like a dream now. Maybe it never happened... but I have to accept that some things are true, evidence or no. I had to then, and I have to, now.

Somewhere in Southern France, there is a town called Saint Jean Pied de Port. And somewhere living in that town, there is a young deaf girl, blond, with brown eyes and a peculiar quirk. She likes to draw pictures in the dust with matchsticks, then light the matches and burn them out. At one point, she drew the route that the pilgrims would take through the town on the route of Compostelle.

I used to know the story of Compostelle, but-- I don't remember. I do remember her drawing in the dust while I waited for my broken leg to heal well enough to travel. Much later on, I would recognise the patterns as the scorch marks on the fields around the farmhouse of World's End, as seen from up in the sky, the first time Nate took me up to view the Oasis from the air.

She smiled at me, and I remembered being a child as being so long ago.

I couldn't believe it was so long since I'd been a child. I can't believe it still.

I couldn't go back home, and I couldn't stay in hiding. So, I went to Japan. Hoping to find Logan.

For some reason, it all started with that little girl, and her drawing a six pointed star in the dirt, smiling up at me with older eyes and dimples. I flashed back to a dream I'd had right before things on the station went to shit, about a creek and a star and my family, the team--

Again, I don't remember. It was so long ago. Maybe the creek was after the world ended, and I just want to think I was dreaming about my place at the mansion, to make sense of why I went back.

I had to push my way back home, that's what it came down to. The leg healed, I got scared enough, and-- I came back.

You ask me now, I have no idea whether I'm grateful to that child, or not. I may hate her for reminding me that I had family, and that I missed them-- because it made me come back here. It's really all irrelevant in the long run. She can't be alive anyway. So many people have died that it makes no sense that she could have made it.

~

"Kitty, it's good to have you back again!"

I walked through the hallways of a new, improved mansion... noting all the changes that had come to pass. Remy's eyes followed me, and on the one hand it was strange, thinking he had been our leader, the one we looked to for guidance. But on the other hand, Remy LeBeau, whatever else he is, knows how to survive.

Coming back to hear that Earth was an intergalactic prison... even spending a week with a broken leg in France, even having a gap in my memory, even going to Japan because I was scared.

Things change, I reminded myself. Bury the dead. Grieve. But-- things change, Kitty. That's what I told myself.

I don't know what compelled me to continue research on the journal in the first place. Perhaps it was simple curiousity -- I never died from it, but I've got more than my healthy share-- perhaps it was the way Irene never told a lie. Not about the future.

The night I saw my first reference to Legacy, it was a Tuesday evening, and everyone was working on a way to defeat the Neo. I was up in my room, and I'm sure, I'd only been home a week, if that. The dusky horizon meant that I'd been studying all day, making notes in my laptop, and drinking coffee from a pot that had been stewing for hours.

There was starting to be a sort of pattern, in a strange roundabout way, to the predictions that Irene wrote down. Pages and pages of scrawlings detailed specific days and times; poetry; Latin sonnets, lines and lines from the Iliad about wolves and lambs and the slaughter in Homeric Greek... and I was starting to see a pattern. Every ten pages or so, she would try and summarize the things that had haunted her-- often sketching the most potent images. Garbled phrases, in tongues I didn't even recognise, lined the margins.

On page 53, beside "...trôôn rhêxe phalanga, phoôs d' hetaroisin ethêken," --which is something about giving light to comrades, being the first, or being the primary-- she has a very carefully done sketch of none other than Mystique, holding a vial of something bubbling and green.

The caption, decorated with swirls and little dancing eyes, read, 'and she walks, alone, with a legacy resented-- see-- a double dance disease death death... maladie du mort... chuma, smerte... Nasledstvo procliato--'

And on the other page, in bright red crayon, the numbers '16,62'. It took me another three days, but eventually I remembered Moira's phone number... the last four digits being 1692.

~

Why Irene's prediction worried me now, when so many of them had already come and gone, and when so many garbled things meant nothing... In all truth, I wanted to see what Moira was up to anyway, and it had been far too long since I'd visited... it was a nice idea, catch up with old friends, see Britain again.

I didn't think about Pete. Some things are too hard to dwell on.

I didn't expect to find Raven Darkholme holding Moira hostage, and snapping an inhibitor collar me up in short order. While she wrapped electrical tape around my ankles, effectively binding me to a hard, wooden, chair, I eyed the facility she had me in. Moira's equipment seemed to be in tact; in fact, Mystique appeared to be using it.

I asked where Moira was, and Mystique gestured to the inner lab impatiently. She was watching the clock, and I wondered what, exactly, she was on a schedule for.

But Mystique was never one to keep secret her plans when she wanted them known. She volunteered the information about Legacy, and the mutated strain that affected only humans. It was an atrocity. It made sense in a frightening way, but it couldn't be the only choice.

I tried to reason with her, "Mystique, please-- you can't do this." A fairly standard thing for one in a hostage situation to say. I tried to plead with her. "Please, Mystique. I helped you once."

She rounded on me. "And you think that one little night's aid is enough reason for me to just sit back and do nothing?"

The X-men would come; I said that I would contact them in a day or two. It was now day three. Looking at perhaps the only person who had ever known Destiny, I couldn't help but shiver. The first diary sat, locked safe away in my room again, and I wondered-- did I do right to let the X-men, the Professor, see it in the first place?

No way to tell, but no way to reverse the past, either. Last time, we lost so much. If I'd been able to properly read the thing before the first gathering of the Twelve, perhaps the second wouldn't have ever happened. I had revealed the future to Rogue, and the Professor, and the results of those events were devestating. I thought at the time this might be my chance to redeem that.

And I was facing Raven Darkholme, the only one who might have any knowledge of Destiny. Even then, at the outset, the feeling that I'd need this knowledge was strong.

I answered her, "But killing all those people won't stop what Irene saw."

It was a gamble; I knew that Raven Darkholme always had a plan, and that she was dangerous. But from that one night with her, I'd also gotten the feeling that, whatever else she was, crazy wasn't it. Paranoid, lost, egocentric-- yes. But clinically insane is a label I would never pin on Mystique. Any Mystique.

She spat at me, "And what do you know of what Irenie saw?" I flinched, and she continued, "Did you hold her when she cried? Did you have to wake up in the middle of the night for three years, reach over, and remember all over again that she was dead?" Quieter, she added, "Did you have to bear the brunt when what she saw was her own death?"

I held my hands up, part denial, part aquiescence. "I didn't know her like that, Mystique... but I have read some of her journal. And this-- this isn't the way to stop whatever you're fighting."

Her face drained of a lot of it's color, turning her cheeks a paler blue. "You have one of her journals? You-- found--"

The gun snapped to my temple before I could blink again. "Mystique, I-- it was at your house." I sighed, and figured I was signing my own death warrant... but if this would get me more information, I was willing to risk it. "One of the picture frames told me to reach inside it, and I did, and I found it. Volume seven." I tried to play Irene against her, said, "She must have wanted me to find it."

She smiled suddenly, calculating. "Pryde. You've changed."

As Raven put her glock away in its holster, I sagged against the chair in relief. It was even more of a surprise when she snapped the tape that bound my hands and feet, took off my collar-- releasing me. I rubbed my wrists, and said, "So have you, Mystique."

Moira, locked away and guarded by the Toad, was watching us through the glass. I paced, trying to gage her reactions to me. I'd been freed for a reason, and it appeared it wasn't to fight. Not likely I would fight her, not now. I decided to be blunt; a gamble worked before. "Why."

She leaned against a wall, watching me as carefully as I was watching her. "Why release Legacy into the human population? Because we are two different species, Kitty-cat."

I asked again, "But why? Why now?"

There is a calm about Mystique-- some versions of Mystique-- that lends her an air of confidence, of trust. I've met one or two. But the Raven I knew was anything but; she was desperate, hanging onto threads. Dangerous.

She took a breath, paused, and I actually thought she might give me a straight answer. But all she said was, "Because now is time."

I said flatly, "A lot of people are going to die from this, Mystique."

She looked almost wistful for a moment. "A lot of people are already dead, Pryde."

Truer words I never heard. "Why."

"Why indeed." Mystique looked a little uncomfortable. She shuffled around a little bit, and I hesitated, then reached my hand out, hoping she'd shake it. She stared at me, then said, "Because, Kitty-cat, I don't have the power to do anything else. You've read her words. They've-- always frightened me. I don't like to feel helpless."

Mystique stared at the ground with a look I would come to know well, and said softly, "And, because I'm not a visionary to see the things Irene did."

Fear started worming its way through me. "What did she see?"

She turned away, face towards the wall, a blank mask. "The end of the world, Pryde." She chuckled, low, and added, "Call me Raven, darling. No need to be polite."

And then the cavalry came.

Capturing Mystique was relatively easy, considering. Keeping her was the hard part. Within a week, she had escaped, and we -- I -- didn't find her again until the ball was already well and truely rolling. I look back and what-if the situations, sometimes, but there's not much point.

She said that she was afraid of the end of the world; I should have believed her. Instead, I managed to let Logan convince me otherwise.

~

All his reasons were sound; everything he said made sense. Raven's changed, she could be setting me up, it might be a huge, long-standing ploy to maneuver the X-men into the positions she wanted. Hell, she could be working for whoever we were going to be up against next, using paranoia to set us on edge.

He saw the evidence of Irene's power, and yet he was able to brush it off with, "And even if it's not a fake. There's no way to be sure that Irene Adler had any idea what the hell was going on, darlin', some or all of the time. And even if she did, the future ain't changeable."

Logan managed to convince me of that, and still, for the next weeks I worked on reading volume seven of her diary, the one that she had obviously meant for me to find. Logan didn't want me to worry, but I couldn't help myself.

He also told me, "Now, Raven and I go way back, Kitty, and I can tell you something. The woman hasn't been the same in a long time. You shouldn't take anything she says too seriously."

But I did.

I told him that I would leave it alone, but it wouldn't go away. After talking to Mystique even once, seeing more evidence of Irene's gift, I was more and more convinced that something was going to happen, and that Mystique wasn't behind it. We had to be ready, and the only way I could see to try and get an edge was to figure out what was on the mind of Destiny when she first turned thirteen.

Thirteen. Funny, that. There were the Twelve, plus Apocalypse; there are thirteen of Irene's diaries. Thirteen is the number for change. Thirteen is the number for chance.

The next night, after I had to explain to the Professor why I went to England-- catch up with old friends-- and explain away Mystique's involvement... I was drinking cold coffee and pouring over page fifty eight-- 'and the sun shall be more brilliant because of the one starred man'-- Rogue happened to find me. She said, "Sugah, Ah-- care for Mystique, still, but I gotta ask why you're so intent on this. There's every chance that-- well, it could be anything. We've got no way of knowing."

I wanted to tell her the truth, but I remembered well what Irene told me about friends and family, and power, the danger. --and, really, I couldn't say, myself.

Then, the best answer would have been I hate mysteries, and I love solving puzzles. Both are true, but that wasn't the real reason. The voices that Destiny heard buzzing, the timelines she lived in, had to tie up in a package some how. The basic laws of physics demand that somewhere, these had to make sense. I wasn't going to accept otherwise.

The prophesy of the Twelve came true. Some of the rest might be necessary information. Some of the rest might count. That's what I should have said.

But really, the truth was her vision had gotten under my skin, like that elusive itch you want to scratch, were you just able to reach it.

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