Explosions and I don't play well together. Doesn't that sound ridiculous? Does anyone play well with explosions? I make the point simply because explosions are one of those things which can knock me on my ass, or in the case of the second time I can remember seeing that face, knock me straight into another life threatening jam.
It was here in San Francisco funnily enough, but before Scott raised his rock. We'd lured one of Thursk's Sentinel robots away from the city; doing our darnedest as X-Men heroes to keep innocent civilians from being killed in the collateral damage of its assault on us. I was on the thing's head, doing my usual slash and stab job, trying to get at the electronics when the damned thing took to the air, heading out over open water. The exhaust from its boosters made it hard to see for those who were on the ground, and it was quickly out of Kurt's teleportation range, and Scott's beams, with me still clinging to its head. Rogue and Storm were pursuing it, I assumed, but I wasn't about to bail before finishing the job. I'm stubborn like that, you might have noticed. So I kept tearing at the thing and holding on against its attempts to shake me loose.
I suppose I could have paid a moment's heed to the fact that the damn things had a habit of blowing up. And true to its established pattern, so did this one, helped along by my interference. The fall to the water also would have been totally survivable for me, except for the concussion wave from the explosion, and the way it knocked my brain one way in my skull, and the impact on the water knocked it back the other. Passed out for a minute, and two hundred pounds of adamantium began a rather quick descent into the black. I awoke when I tried to take my first breath of air and found a mouthful of salt water instead. I started kicking for the surface, but with nothing left in my lungs I knew it was going to be a nasty swim and that it was gonna hurt.
And then there was that golden kind of light again. I don't recall that it immediately put me in the mind of the tundra episode, but it definitely flashed back when the face materialized in front of me again, accompanied by more of a human form. I felt arms wrap under mine more than saw them, and felt a little more buoyant, which was a great help. But my chest was starting to ache with the lack of oxygen, and the muscles in my legs were burning.
I looked into those almost too big eyes again, and found them looking back at me, with a distinct air of concern, different than the serenity I had remembered from my first glimpse of them. She cocked her head, and then, quite unexpectedly on my part, pressed her mouth to mine, parted my lips with the force of her own and exhaled deeply into my lungs.
The air rushing in was, well, like oxygen to a drowning man; fine, sometimes the obvious works just as well as a fancy description. The energy it gave me let me kick a few meters closer to the surface. She did it again, and I didn't even wonder where she was getting the breaths from to give to me; being as she was underwater too. Some more kicks, and I could see real rays of the daylight piercing the black, and it became easier to make out her form too. If I had wondered before it was now quite obvious she was female. I could see the soft fall of shoulders from her neck, and the taper to her waist and the gentle flair of her hips beneath. We were only feet from the surface when she gave me the last breath, lingering just a moment longer than the other times I noticed, grinding against me with her mouth, just delicately. Then I broke the surface, only to be scooped up by a gust of wind, which sent a shiver through my body, owing in part to the damp uniform I wore. Storm had plucked me from the water, and I could only look back down to see nothing where the golden glow had been only seconds before except the floating debris of the Sentinel and the slick its fluids raised. That time the vision stayed with me for a number of days; before I finally had to replace it with the necessity of being an X-Man full time again. Work always does get in the way of my fun it seems.