Chapter 46 – The Mourner's Kaddish

Katherine Obromowitz Journal

October 16, 2021

3:42am

Longshot and Gambit do recon up ahead.

Peter…they all have civilian lives, but those lives disappear as I just start naming them quietly to myself: Dazzler, Cypher, Brian, Meggan, Kurt, Banshee, Thunderbird II, Sunfire, Rogue, Guido…there must be fifty or more of us.

Xavier and Summers would have been proud.

Alex, his brother, is there with Polaris.

This place smells like a sewer.

Smells like disease, pornography, and Auschwitz.

It feels like man's laws have been broken.

G-d's contract with man has been discarded here.

We have been to quite a few Dante's Inferno-like places in our time - but none that we use to call home.

I feel we are missing someone.

Who are we missing?

I am so tired, but my adrenaline kicks in.

Alex whispers to me that Rahne passed away in a L.A. hotel a few years ago, apparently OD'ed. That sucks. Maybe that's who I think we are missing.

Longshot reports back, "she is in here, but you should know..."

Why is Longshot reporting to me?

Both him and Gambit stand in front of me.

Everyone is looking to me.

Weird.

O considered me her closest friend.

They know and - somehow without discussing it - this has become my mission.

She could still be alive. We do not know what happened to her.

I do a head count, even without Rahne, we seem to be missing someone… …someone, with a bigger stage presence.

I hear someone breathing heavily. It sounds like someone is making love in the distance. We get closer to the sounds.

Gambit, "we should really not go in there. We need a plan."

But we are all pushing, we all feel invincible, and before you know it….

We all go silent…

- oh – dear - G-d.

…like a church.

Fifty friends who have not seen each other in decades stop.

I turn and we all stop.

I do not really see what is in front of me.

I maybe see a shape of a person on the floor before Peter, I guess, instinctively stands in front of me.

Protecting me.

From what?

I need my glasses. Some of us start throwing up.

I look up and see - Logan.

And I am so relieved.

Whoa - That's who I forgot.

Logan. How could I – forget.

Well now we have our team now we will find O and …-

Logan is on the floor.

Why is he on the floor?

Now that I think about it, how did he beat us all to the location?

How did he know where she was?

He found her. That's her!

Then white heat panic hits me.

Something is not right with this picture.

My head struggles to comprehend the image in front of me.

I do know how my body can put together pieces before my brain, but my body is breaking down.

I feel sweat, paralysis, light headed.

The blood drains out of my head.

Then I realize.

Logan is making those sounds.

He is making love to this body in his arms.

The body does not move, the body is part skeleton, part skin, part body organs… …stroomed on the floor. A lot of blood over everything.

Logan is making love to a corpse.

My brain refuses to connect the corpse to O.

Logan is on top of some corpse.

The corpses skull falls off and that does not stop him.

Her.

It's her. Oh dear G-d.

He looks up at what has to be quite a site from his end and he says to us - he says to all of us:

"Give me a second fellas I will done with her in a second then she's all yours if you want a taste, but there's not going to be too much left."

Magma throws up - as does Cable if you can believe that.

I tear up - partly from the fumes from everyone's vomit and partly from the site of O. The sacrilege and total brutality of Logan is beyond my comprehension.

How did he get to this?

How did we get to this point?

I have not seen him in decades he did not come to my wedding and the first thing out of his mouth is that -

Where is he?

Where is "our" Logan?

Fuck that, where is - my - Logan…

This was supposed to be a rescue mission.

From a rescue mission we all in unison make the realization that we are here to pronounce justice on a peer.

We are judges and observers to record this moment in time.

To say it existed, to say we were there when the world would not believe us, like Holocaust survivors.

Then - afterwards we might have to weigh in and see how much was our responsibility. But that is for another time.

For now we are here.

Here.

Now.

And after we record the moment, we know what we must do next.

Serve out justice to our friend.

And it breaks our hearts.

We are all psychically linked thanks to Rachel, but we do not even have to say a word psychically.

We all know the plan.

We all practiced the play.

Peter does not even armor up because it is over for Logan.

The match is at checkmate and Logan does not know it.

You see, the Professor had us plan for each one of our demises, should it come to that, but we never anticipated we would use any of them.

But we ran the play so often back in the day, that we could run it in our sleep. It is like breathing.

Logan does not have a clue.

I approach. I am the first to leave the safety of our formation. The chess board: me, my slippers, and my robe from Kohl's.

I try not to look at the objects in front of me. I try to block it all out if that is possible, like trying to impress a boy on a date by sitting through a horror movie. That's a really bad example, but…

"She—she-sh-sh—she had voices inside of her and she wanted them to stop," he says.

I am not really listening to him. I am, but I am not. I am just trying to start the play, but I just picture him sticking O in the lumbar vertebrae with one of his claws, permanently paralyzing her from the waist down. Immobilizing her, but so he can still have, have, have his - do his thing.

This red stain on the floor is O. O and her - child.

I do not know what to do.

Xavier prepared our bodies, but my mind is not ready for this.

Then somewhere deep in my body, in my soul, a part of my soul reaches up and takes control of me and starts saying the Mourner's Kaddish:

"Yitgadal v'yitkadash sh'mei raba.

B'alma di v'ra chirutei,

v'yamlich malchutei,

b'chayeichon uv'yomeichon

uv'chayei d'chol beit Yisrael,

baagala uviz'man kariv…"

He starts laughing.

Everyone begins saying their own cultural mourner's prayer.

It's over.

He goes on a rant about how five adamantium iron men could not kill him.

And you "out-of-shape…"

We are.

Hell I am still in my Land's End pajamas.

With eyes closed:

Oseh shalom bimromav,

Hu yaaseh shalom aleinu,

v'al kol Yisrael. V'imru: Amen.

I finish. I open my eyes and the world slips into slow motion.

Logan attempts to touch me, but his hand moves right through me.

Alison, who is first at bat, distracts. Temporarily blinded he fails to see Anna Marie take off her glove and place it upon his cheek, giving him a "ya' know I loved you a long time ago" kinda look.

She cannot resist and the hand gesture turns into a kiss. Her eye flare up, unaware of the evil she was welcoming. It takes a couple of team members to grab at her clothes, and block her away for safety.

Mr. Logan is weaker but far from over. My turn.

The seas part and I walk out a second time. Little Jewish woman - me. He is small; I am a little taller than him.

We, my team - together, can do what no one else on the planet can. G-d has given us permission to kill our brother, our friend, our own.

Looking at him, his time was long overdue. We are the orphans. We are the misfits. Our invitations got lost to Avengers dance. The irony of this whole farce we call life is that we just wanted to be human and those who are the most different tried the hardest to fit in.

All I have to do is touch him and he becomes a ghost like me. And together we fall into a nearby boulder. He falls into his coffin as smooth as butter. I look over his face. I want to go up for air, but I'll be damned if I am going to miss a second.

It's bad enough that I am doing this.

I do not want him to die alone.

At first, he just smiles at me. Then the oxygen begins to leave him. He begins fighting. But Peter and Banshee each grab a leg. Kurt and Sunfire grab an arm. It is only fair; they were there at the beginning with him. They are the closest things to pallbearers that he will have.

His face changes color. I come up for air, and then look him in the eyes.

I slowly see my old friend come back into his eyes. His life. His humanity.

He smiles and sue me I feel compelled to smile back.

He knows what has to happen.

And then he does the darndest thing - he winks at me.

He wants me to let him go.

I hold on selfishly for one more second, before I let go and instantly he becomes part of the rock. His atoms and the rocks atoms have become one.

Four of his limbs fall lifeless around the boulder.

Peter smashed the boulder into dust.

I fuse the rest of his extremities into nearby rocks and each one is smashed into dust. We each probably inhaled a little bit of him.

Nothing remains of him.

His atoms no longer remain assigned to him.

I reassigned them.