I've been really intrigued about Storm joining X-Force - what's caused her to and how she'll deal with it. So while I wait eagerly for the book to come out, I write my own version of her transition.
When I joined the X-Men, I was a different woman. I swore never to take a life. But that changed. I made an exception, and exceptions became justifications. Taking a life became less horrifying. I'm worried now. Because I wonder, the next time I cross that line... Will it be too much to bear?
I hear those words echo in my mind as I look at the man lying dead at my feet. His skin is charred, peeled away from the bone - the open flesh is mostly cauterized but it bleeds in some places. On to the floor, pooling towards my boots.
I hear those words which I said to Remy not so long ago. I hear them now and I try to process where I am on that line. If I've crossed it, if I've straddled it, if I've redrawn it somewhere else. It takes me a second to think about this, to try and frame who I am into who I want to be, or who I'd thought I was going to be. It takes me longer to have this after thought than it took for the lightning to charge down from the sky.
My hair is different, the clothes are different, my soul is different. So much of me has changed since the day I first stepped into a school so sombre and regal, beautiful in its age, beautiful for the life and joy that filled it. But since then, so much of the vitality that that it bore has gone. Jean long gone, Kurt only just, and Scott and so many others are barely recognizable. My heart has changed as well - it roamed free with the winds and spoke to the goddess before it found grounding in a land called Wakanda. But now it's been cut free, rid of obligations and a future. Our entire kind has changed too. Where there were precious few of us fighting to stay alive or at best, leave a precious legacy, now we burgeon in places godforsaken and we relish in our ascent once again. And so I let myself redraw the line - because the world has changed, so musn't I?
Betsy tells me to call it 'collateral damage'. But that is a term for the movies, for play acting. Not for reality. Not for the man lying at my feet. There are streaks of blood on my hands too, an indelible link to the thing I have done. I give up, and walk away. I brush my hand against the wall and leave the blood there instead of on me. I do not know how to face this, I do not know how to understand it anymore. I cannot fathom or reason the things I have done now - such a variety of exceptions and rationalizations have been made that they all are so worthlessly weak. Two things, and only two things, I know for sure. I will protect my family and friends. And I will die trying, if not in body then in soul.