Disclaimer: Marvel's properties are Marvel's, used without explicit permission. The Shadowlands concept in this context was set up by Alicia, and is used with explicit permission. Enjoy.

Unexpected Companions
by Persephone
Chapter 1/10

Cable was fighting. He wasn't sure WHAT he was fighting, but rather suspected that it thought he was lunch. It was, in that case, mistaken. He hoped.

He whacked another smoky-looking tentacle with the handle of his psimitar, no time to reverse and use the blade. The handle hit something and bounced.

Carnivorous smoke-and-rubber octopuses were not his favorite variety of fauna. And having a shift sweep across and bring him face to -- billow with its charcoal-black murkiness was not his favorite way to meet one.

Actually, that was a pretty lousy way to meet ANYTHING. Worse if the anything happened to be hostile, which this obviously was.

Shove away the arm that looped out of the smoke at him. Channel through the psimitar. Squint into a half-formless black cloud and release. Close his mouth on the cry of frustration as the hole torn in the mass wisped closed.

He'd slept the night before. If it had really been night. There had been all the signs of night -- darkness, cooler air, visible stars, a moon -- if a rather sullen, reddish-looking moon, still a moon.

Ignoring the fact that he was pretty sure that really large, crimson star that glowered down between sickly-looking shadow-clouds in the sky that wasn't quite black, like a deathly-ill cyclops -- no, bad simile, BAD simile, don't think about that -- had been the sun.... If he could just ignore that, it had been night. Right.

Keep blocking the nearly amorphous thing away, with shields, with blows, whatever, and wonder why he bothered, why he didn't just let it eat him and be done with it... at least that way he'd do somebody, or something, some good.

Or, of course, he could give the thing energy enough to survive another while and hunt down some actual innocent. Besides, when he got right down to it, that survival instinct usually reared its stubborn head and got him fighting back anyway.

Even after a night like last night, when after the initial hours of blind, exhausted slumber he'd been prisoned in guilt-racked nightmares until he woke up to Apocalypse's choking taint, as the boundary swept through and left him practically in the arms of a predatory, tentacled fog-bank.

Ropy black mist had made a snatch for him, and he'd fought back, even out of the despair he'd been reliving in his dreams. He'd fought for his life.

And he'd thought it was his duty, his Mission, that had kept him going for so long. But he'd failed in it, and still insisted on living, despite the guilt he bore, despite the chronic disaster through which he and everyone else had to move, these days.

Slash at a protruding tentacle and wonder if he'd even hit anything but fog.

This was a very foggy shift altogether, it looked like. Very gray. Gray. Grey... STOP THAT. Very... foggy. What he could see of his surroundings was all haze, all beige and brown ground at his feet, all gray haze in the air, silver down to charcoal.

The worst of fighting this thing was that it had no clearly defined boundary; what looked like a wisp of darker fog could dart beside him and apparently solidify into a revoltingly rubbery and horribly, horribly strong tendril to grab and tangle his arm. He couldn't even get a proper grip on it telekinetically; the tentacles would bounce off his shields, but disintegrated into the fog when he tried to hold onto them.

He panted for breath, and couldn't shake the horror of wondering whether his next deep breath would suck in a strand of mist to solidify into a tentacle wiggling inside his lungs.

Thrust. Shield. Duck.

Might help if he weren't so exhausted. Seemed as if the dreams had destroyed any good the deeper sleep might have done him. He felt bone-weary.

The last pleasant shift had been the one two back. Nathan still missed it. Real, healthy, green plants, clear air, and a familiar sky, even if a few of the constellations had been a little weird. Then that strange world where sunset and night had no seeming relation, and now this.

He felt bleak. He felt as if the fog had seeped into his brain and some sinister miasma was wrapping his thoughts and dulling his ability to think, to strategize. He felt miserably exhausted. He felt there was nothing left, no good he could do anyone, no way to make up for causing this, and no one to keep living to see. He'd lost track of Dom -- any Dom -- what seemed like ages ago. He felt....

He felt like giving up.

But he kept fighting anyway.

He always did. Maybe that was it. Maybe it wasn't really any desire to stay alive.

Maybe it was just habit.

Habit didn't explain the hot jolt of fear when he was taken off guard, let himself get dragged a little nearer the murky black center of the creature -- and saw a wickedly hooked beak open and reach toward him.

Adrenaline surged through him anew as he brought his psimitar up and threw himself frantically backwards, forcing a shield out against the tentacles blocking his way. Abused muscles threatened to give out.

He saw two huge eyes as the light from his own left eye reflected moistly off their surfaces, glinting deep in the center of the black smoke. Eyes that could have been human, maybe were -- could they be? An earlier victim perhaps? They looked... almost pleading.

He faltered in shock, hesitated, and recovered too slowly as the thing's arms lashed around him, bonelessly, trying to pull him closer to the beak, the maw. Cable struggled valiantly, shoving away, winning a little more breathing space, such a little more, but knowing with a sinking despair that he was too tired to pull entirely free. Was the creature's grasp weakening? Yes.

Not enough.

He saw an opening and took it, aiming a blow to the center of the mass. The laws of physics chose that moment to indulge in a slight frolic, and the blade of the psimitar jerked sideways as gravity pirouetted. It then tried to curl backwards, crawl up the handle, and bite his hand.

No it didn't. It only looked that way. Optical illusion. Not terribly unusual. But the stroke that might have freed him still went awry.

A flash of silver in the mist registered in his peripheral vision. Light? Or was he just starting to hallucinate? His telekinetic shield was still holding -- at least enough that he couldn't be seeing things due to the constriction cutting off airflow.

"...Yes, we have to."

What?

The voice was feminine, weary, and unfamiliar, and its tone bespoke strained patience. The one that responded, though, sent a chill through him.

"I know, I know." A hint of annoyance. But that didn't matter.

That was Stryfe.

Cable fought a little harder, struggling to force his body to respond, trying to force the tentacles away. Bright Lady -- he was NOT going to have Stryfe watch him be mangled and eaten by a smoky land-walking octopus!

A telekinetic shield, glimmering gold, formed just outside Nathan's own and extended to wrap the entire creature, then peeled from around him and became a bubble that began steadily shrinking. The interior, beneath the transparent yellow, filled completely to black as the contents were compressed further.

The shield looked a little... shaky, Nathan noted with some reasonably objective part of his brain, in between looking wildly around to locate the newcomer. He returned his gaze sharply to the golden gleam as a popping sound heralded a fire that flickered sullenly inside the bubble, accompanied by writhings and more noises like snapping bubble wrap or crackling bacon, for about thirty seconds.

The gold winked out, telekinetic field dissipating, and the stench of scorched rubber filled the air. The creature lay limp, dark smoke hanging heavily over it but sluggishly clearing.

Beak. Large eyes. Tentacles -- eight of them -- sprawled gracelessly on the hard-packed ground.

Who'd have guessed, Cable thought absurdly. It WAS an octopus.

And why hadn't he thought of that? Maybe the fog had gotten to his brain.

"Nathan?" Stryfe again. Oath, where was the man? Cable scanned the mist for another flash of silver, scanned telepathically and felt the light probe slapped away. There.

The glint of silver came from the right direction, but the armored figure who stepped out of the mist was too short and much too female to be Stryfe. It was... a girl. Cable nearly smacked himself as his brain stalled for a moment over that brilliant observation. Long blond hair, sword --

Illyana Rasputin. Magik.

Not a child, certainly. Not even a teenager -- well, maybe. Looking at her face, at her eyes, Nathan was certain she was older than 16, and less than 40, but he would have hesitated to try to pin it down any more firmly.

"Hello... Nathan." She sounded strangely resigned. He yanked his attention away from her as the source of the earlier voice approached close enough to be visible behind her.

Stryfe, oddly enough, wasn't wearing armor. Not the trademark silver spiky stuff that would almost have qualified as camouflage in this place, anyway.

Cable brought the psimitar up, in arms aching almost too much to hold it steady. Then he hesitated. Yes, this was Stryfe. On the other hand, he didn't have the energy to fight if he didn't have to -- and with Magik alive and walking around, there were obviously significant timeline differences involved.

And Stryfe had killed the rubber octopus thing, which -- no matter how hard the portion of his brain devoted to suspicion hammered at it -- Nathan couldn't seem to construe as a hostile act. Not towards him, anyway. The octopus probably would have had a different opinion, but he couldn't bring himself to care.

Which reminded him, why hadn't he thought of that trick?

Either his telepathic shields weren't up to par, or he'd muttered the question aloud. He got an answer.

"I don't know." Stryfe hesitated, and spread his hands. "Possibly the same reason I didn't, when one got... up close and personal," he suggested dryly.

Cable knit his brows as his clone moved closer to Illyana, who glanced up over her shoulder but didn't step away or object. "How'd you get rid of that one?"

"I didn't." The other man looked down at Magik with a slightly embarrassed smile. "Illyana teleported me away from it. We've avoided them since. Mostly."

It made Nathan feel marginally better that Stryfe had also had to be rescued from the creature, or a similar one. Marginally less humiliated, anyway. Of course, that begged the question of WHY Illyana would be rescuing Stryfe, not to mention why Stryfe would be rescuing him.

He remembered the first voice -- Magik's, of course, he realized now -- saying "we have to." Her idea? That still didn't explain why she'd think they "had to," or why Stryfe would bother listening to her in the first place.

Nathan was really beginning to think that meeting people he almost knew, from timelines almost like his own, was much stranger on some levels than any of the wilder variations in climate, physics, or history.

He tried another scan, two very light psionic probes, really. The one aimed at Illyana simply plinked off shields that somehow gave the impression of being made of the same stuff as her armor. Not that that made any sense. The other made Stryfe's eyes widen slightly and was swatted away with rather more force than seemed necessary.

"Quit that, will you?" Stryfe said irritably. He gave Nathan a wary look. "I... both our shields are shot. Let it be." Cable frowned. His own shields were a bit strained, though he wouldn't have gone so far as to say shot, and he assumed Stryfe knew the condition of his.

And this was no place not to be able to shield. Nowhere was anymore, really.

Stryfe had lived with Apocalypse. Nathan wondered if he could sense the foulness in the shifts as well, or if the sensitivity had more to do with having been part of the Twelve. Then again, would it even bother Stryfe? Sure, it felt like pure evil, but that wouldn't necessarily grate on him the same way. Not on the Chaos-Bringer. Still, Stryfe hadn't liked Apocalypse too much either.

Illyana sighed. "Are you two going to stand and stare at each other until Doomsday? I think you both know what the other looks like by now."

Cable started. "Doomsday," he muttered. "I think we already had that." Stryfe laughed shortly. Cable shot him a brief glare. It hadn't been a joke.

"Guys. Camp, maybe? There's wood nearby. Or something similar, at any rate. We could build a fire, easily enough, and I can... arrange for... food." He raised an eyebrow at her tone. A little impatient, shading into something half smug and half rueful at the end.

The tangle of wood -- dead thornbushes, it looked like -- was very near; a few steps in the right direction and Illyana caught her foot and nearly fell into it before Stryfe steadied her. It didn't take long to lay a fire. Cable rummaged in his pack, wondering if the food he himself carried would still be edible, or even recognizable -- on one memorable occasion, a bag of walnuts had turned into topaz during a shift. Which had been very pretty, but he'd gone hungry the next few days.

It seemed to be fine, though there was always the off chance of something turning spontaneously into poison, even without a shift. He found a box of dry matches, too, but dropped it back upon seeing a small flare of light, then a larger one, as the arranged wood burst fiercely into flame under a glare from Stryfe.

Illyana glanced his direction as he stood up with food in hand. Cheese and zucchini, for some reason. He collected some interesting combinations. And extremely salted meat from some creature whose taxonomy he hadn't inquired too closely about beyond ascertaining it to be edible.

"Nathan, I said I could arrange for a meal. You... can consider yourself our guest, after a fashion."

He looked up. "I know, Illyana. But... I have this, so it only seems right to offer." It was standard courtesy, really; if you made camp with somebody, you shared food if you had any. Something he'd grown up with, which didn't mean a thing to the world he was in now, but also a tacit agreement that seemed to develop among decent folk in highly uncertain conditions.... "Besides, we might as well eat it now. There's no telling what it might turn into otherwise."

"True." She nodded, face serious and somehow drawn. "I'll supplement, though. I don't think I'd trust the water here."

Nathan sat down beside the fire. It felt good; the haze was damp, chill now that he wasn't fighting, and very slightly stinging if he thought about it too long or breathed too deeply. He caught Stryfe giving him an oddly grateful glance and returned an inquiring one.

#Illyana 'arranging for' food means conjuring it. Not that I'm complaining, of course, but food from Limbo is... more than a bit strange sometimes, even compared to what can be found in some of the shifts. You'll see.# The transmission was careful, and extremely guarded, but what else would he have expected? They might not be treating each other as enemies, and they might be from different timelines, but he was still himself and this was still Stryfe.

#I'm sure I will,# he replied, still a little bemused. He did. Illyana gestured, and a stepping disk deposited a damask tablecloth, three place-settings, and a few serving dishes -- made of what looked like gunmetal --whose contents issued an inviting steam into the surrounding haze and looked, at first glance, perfectly normal.

Realizing one of the steaming dishes contained ice cream banished the "normal" impression.

None of the three seemed inclined to bother making small talk, so the first portion of the meal was eaten in weary silence. Cable sipped piping-hot wintergreen-flavored tea from a tiny bone china cup that must have served him a quart of the stuff before it emptied, and tried to convince himself that the thin material was in fact bone china. And that the trickle of red from a minuscule chip on the rim was from having cut his own lip on the jagged edge.

Curiosity finally nagged him into speaking. "Why did you help me? And thank you, by the way."

He was expecting a response from Stryfe, who after all -- galling as it was -- had been the one who actually pried his opponent away. He got a murmured, "You're welcome," from that direction, but Illyana was the one who answered the question. So to speak.

She looked up, her face somehow drawn. "I owe you," she said simply.

"You don't owe me anything. You can't. We're not even from the same timeline."

"It's close enough." She gave him a strange smile. "I can tell."

He wasn't sure he wanted to know. The conversation flagged uneasily over a course of what seemed to be cucumbers stuffed with rose hips until Nathan finally decided the dish might make a good change of topic. "Just out of curiosity, what is this?"

Illyana poked at hers. "Cucumbers. Stuffed with rose hips, I think." She pulled the Soulsword closer to her from where she had laid it on the ground, and scooted sideways to lean against Stryfe. Her plate followed her.

"Ouch," Stryfe protested. Magik's armor lacked the spikes his had sported, but still had some rather vicious protrusions. Cable tried not to snort.

"Sorry." She sheathed the sword and armor gave way disorientingly to something resembling a dark blue silk sweatsuit.

Nathan studied his own plate again. "That's what I thought. Why?"

"Pearls are hard to chew, I guess."

"Pearls?"

"It's from a fairy tale. Cucumbers stuffed with pearls. I think it was a symbol of foolishness."

"Oh." Was this supposed to tell him, or them, something, or just be disconcerting?

They all fell silent again. The zucchini turned out to go remarkably well with the cucumbers and "pearls." Fascinatingly enough, so did the oysters Stryfe discovered in the jade container the centerpiece had just turned into. Illyana scowled reprovingly at the transformation. The oysters ignored her and did a Carroll-esque softshoe without any feet before settling down and behaving like food.

The meal was delicious at first, and showed none of the disquieting propensity some viands had lately, for turning halfway through the meal into something else entirely. There was a faint, peculiarly repulsive aftertaste to it, however, one that was certainly not unbearable but suggested a plausible explanation for Stryfe's apparent weariness of conjured meals.

Cable nearly jumped as Stryfe stirred from several minutes spent gazing unfocusedly at the corpse of the land-octopus and spoke to him. "I don't suppose," he said tiredly, "that you have any idea what caused," he paused to gesture at the landscape, "all this? The shifts, that is -- I'm assuming some variety of temporospatial catastrophe, but we haven't run into anyone who seemed to know what happened."

Nathan's throat constricted and went dry as he stared across at the other man and a wave of agony soaked him. Ozymandias had understated the case. His actions hadn't just doomed one world, but all of them.... He'd known that. But he hadn't had anyone ask him about it about point blank before. He didn't -- couldn't -- answer right away.

"Well, you -- our Cable, that is -- did say something about Apocalypse, before we lost track of him completely. He wasn't terribly coherent about it, claimed he knew but wasn't sure what he knew." Stryfe shook his head. "I suppose it's rather nonsensical to keep asking, but when the world falls apart on an otherwise perfectly uneventful day, one tends to wonder why. If you don't know, never mind."

"Oh, I know why." His voice cracked harshly and he could have choked on the lump in his suddenly raw throat. Nathan gulped back more of the wintergreen tea, blood and all, and wished it were something alcoholic. "It was my fault," he said miserably. "We fought Apocalypse. We lost. I lost. I couldn't kill him." He shut his eyes and cursed the tremor in his voice. "Twice. Twice! The first time he -- tried to possess Nate Grey, as his first host, and Scott j-jumped in the way and... when we fought him again... oath, I think it nearly drove Jean around the curve -- bend, I mean bend -- to strike even one blow. And this," he gestured grandly, throat and chest aching, "this was the result. Some savior I turned out to be."

Why was he telling them all this? Why that last, in particular? Was he trying to beat Stryfe to all the possible taunts about the whole wreck? The laugh Cable barked out then was more than half a sob. "Guess Ozymandias was right. Only he didn't go far enough. I thought I could get around his prophecy and ended up dragging everything else down at the same time, doing even worse -- guess I went around the wrong side." He was shaking now.

There was a long silence. Those seemed to be a prime feature of the conversation lately.

Nathan felt a hand on his shoulder and opened his eyes again, wondering dully when he'd closed them. Illyana's dark blue eyes hovered in a worried face in front of his. "Calm down." He obeyed, somehow, not sure why or how. She withdrew, went to lean on his clone again. "These things happen."

These things happen?! He told her he'd essentially destroyed her world, thrown it into a muddled mess with an infinity of other worlds, and she said "these things happen"?

"It was the second battle that did it. Ripped apart reality, somehow... I don't know exactly what happened, how it worked, but Apocalypse tried to -- reshape the world -- and," he swallowed hard, painfully, "when I tried to stop him I think it only made things worse. I only made things worse. The chronovariant component -- everything just started... sliding together."

He reinforced his shields with everything he had as another shift-line swept over them. Stryfe hunched. Illyana arched her neck slightly and glared at the tablecloth as if daring anything on it to change. It very meekly didn't. The fog thickened and took on a faintly blue tinge with yellowish streaks, and the air grew dimmer and a bit colder, but the shift was overall less than dramatic.

"And to think I was the one they called Chaos-Bringer."

Cable would have lunged at Stryfe, at the soft comment and half smile, if he hadn't been sunk so deep in guilt that it mired his limbs. Illyana leaned away slightly and administered a light kick to the calf. "Stryfe."

The man sighed and moved his leg out of range. "All right, yes, that was out of line." He shrugged. "Quit worrying, Nathan."

"Quit worrying?!"

"You're projecting."

Illyana shook her head and intervened. "It's already happened; we just have to live with it. Things could be worse."

His voice broke again. "How?"

"You don't want to know. But there are dimensions -- unaffected by the collapse, some of them -- that are worse. I've looked." She bit her lip. "And even here... think about it. People could just turn on each other. Some of them do. But at least the worlds I've been through... with everything going mad all around them, people still pull together more often than not. More often than they try to tear each other apart."

"I... hadn't noticed."

"Did you look?" she asked gently. "I suppose I could just be experiencing some sort of statistical fluke, but it's something."

Nathan couldn't answer. He tried. His voice had choked off in his throat even before he realized that he really could simply think of nothing to say, even if he had found himself able to speak. He closed his mouth and tried to swallow past the swollen ache beneath his jaw. All the bruises from his earlier combat, and all those accumulated over the weeks -- or months, or years, from the feel -- seemed to ache at him, individually and with malice, and each cut stung with sweat.

He couldn't help thinking he deserved it.

She was trying to make him feel better. Illyana was. Some Illyana whose timeline had clearly not involved her miserable illness and death. Whose timeline had, "on an otherwise perfectly uneventful day," been thrown into this seething cross-temporal wreck because of his failure.

It's already happened; we just have to live with it.

What is, is.

He could have done without drawing that parallel. He couldn't tell whether her version was of particular help to Illyana in coping, though she'd said it as if it were something she genuinely took for granted, but for him?

Somehow, when he had really, truly, and thoroughly screwed up -- and this, to employ the next several years' quota of understatement for at least half a dozen recently and forcibly merged timelines, qualified as outdoing himself in that department -- when he had quite distinctly made a mess of things, reminding himself that "What is, is" rarely seemed to do much good, and he often began to wish that "sorry" had a meaning worth the name.

Nathan withdrew into a soggy blanket of fog and wretchedness, trying to ignore the uneasy glances both the others cast in his direction across the tablecloth. He still couldn't help noticing that Illyana appeared slightly pained, and Stryfe -- after a glance down at her face -- directed towards him a look that was rather less worried and more exasperated than the earlier ones.

"A statistical fluke?" Stryfe asked the girl quietly.

"It's always a possibility."

"Or you could be drawn to certain types of timeline, I suppose."

"You've been there too; you don't have to act like it's just me. It wouldn't be the timeline, necessarily, either -- most of the people probably aren't in their own anymore."

Cable couldn't help flinching at that one. He felt Stryfe glance his direction, and it penetrated his awareness that his clone's next comment was specifically intended to prevent Illyana from noticing the flinch.

"I suppose not. Maybe you're a good influence."

"HAH!"

"You're the one who insists on playing fairy godmother to every version of my 'brother' you can locate, in the absence of ours."

Illyana laughed softly and murmured something Nathan couldn't quite catch. Fairy godmother? What a bizarre thought -- made even more bizarre by Stryfe's involvement.

Nathan finally roused himself to speak into the following silence. "Why are you two traveling together?" He directed a slightly harder gaze at Stryfe than this version had lately done much to warrant. "If you meant what I think you meant about her 'playing fairy godmother,' you can't be too fond of the activity, and to be blunt, I'd imagine in most timelines I'd probably attack you on sight."

Stryfe smiled ever so faintly. "Who says you don't? For that matter, who says most ever see me at all?"

Now THAT gave him chills.

"Why do you travel together?" he repeated, more insistently. There had to be some reason. Different timeline, he reminded himself. The relationships he was used to didn't have to apply. All right, so it was fairly obvious that they didn't -- and if they did, he would at present be being digested in leisurely fashion by a half-substantial octopus, so he should probably avoid complaining.

"It's better than traveling alone." Ouch. He wasn't even sure if Stryfe had meant that to hurt the way it did, but loneliness practically swamped him as the fog seemed to thicken.

He snorted. "You have to be getting something out of it." An unpleasant possibility skittered into his head, as he watched how close they were sitting, and he knew he had to be looking suspicious. "Don't know if I like the idea of you going around with a teenage girl --"

Stryfe looked absolutely furious. "You honestly think I --" he began, starting to push himself to his feet.

Illyana tugged him back down and he subsided, but the outrage he was projecting didn't. It didn't feel fake, either. She, though, sounded more amused than anything else. "He hasn't done anything objectionable, I assure you. And we do not need a chaperon. Although," she added meditatively, "I'm not exactly a teenager anymore, at least from my perspective, and I have considered seducing him every now and then."

Cable sputtered helplessly, mouth dropping open. Surely she had to be joking. He hoped. Didn't she?

Stryfe didn't look much less shocked than Cable felt. Aghast might have been an apt description. Taking Illyana by the arms, he removed her from his shoulder and turned her to face him. "Please tell me you aren't serious. Illyana, you're a child."

She shrugged away, eyes laughing, shadows almost gone. "How do you know how old I am?" she asked, almost playfully. "You know I've spent more time in Limbo than I've spent away from Earth, but not how much. With the spells I know, I could be older than you by now." She looked mischievous. "Not that I'm telling."

"Illyana...."

"All right, no, I wasn't serious." Stryfe looked absurdly relieved and let her settle against him again. "Though I have to say, that reaction was just short of insulting." She turned to Cable, who realized he was still gaping and shut his mouth firmly. "He's known me since I was about nine; I appreciate the concern -- sort of -- but there's really nothing to worry about." The blue of her eyes seemed to darken. "It's not as if I've really been a child since... ah, never mind. That's not the point."

"What was the point?" Nathan asked, voice rather shakier than he would have liked.

"Why Illyana and I were traveling together, I believe," Stryfe replied. Agitation from Illyana's rather bizarre sense of humor over, he didn't sound as if the distraction had done much to placate him after Cable's question -- his voice carried a hint of a snarl. "And what I was 'getting out of it.'"

Cable bristled at the tone, but found he couldn't quite ignore the nagging feeling that his suspicion had turned out to be unjustified. There was that nagging guilt-whisper, too, saying that he'd destroyed their world. "All right. It's all perfectly innocent, then." He couldn't really help the trace of sarcasm. "That still doesn't explain it."

"I told you --"

"That it's better than traveling alone," he snapped back. "I heard you. That doesn't explain how you keep TRACK of each other." And oh, how he wished he could have done that with... people... and especially with Dom.

Stryfe's teeth glittered faintly in a wry smile. "Mostly, she keeps track of me. She's very good at this, really; I have some advantage in most types of battle and I can sense shifts fairly well, but she can actually bypass them."

"What do you mean, bypass?"

"Through Limbo. If we're separated, I might be able to force a path through the shifts -- but I doubt it; I can tell to some extent what's going on, but I'm not sure about control. For some reason Sanctity didn't bother putting much emphasis on chronovariance." He smiled mirthlessly. "I only found out I was supposed to have it during some discussion of using yours to fix Legion's time-distortion."

"Oh, really. Should I even ask what you've used it for since?"

"Apparently safer pursuits than --" Cable realized what Stryfe had to be about to say and almost flinched ahead of time.

"What. He. Was. Saying," Magik's icy voice interrupted before hostility could escalate further, "was that I navigate well." Nathan found himself surprisingly glad for the reprieve; he hadn't even really intended to start a fight -- it was just such a habitual expectation, that any conversation between himself and Stryfe would involve baiting at the bare minimum. He and Stryfe glanced uneasily at each other and silently both settled back.

"Navigate. Bypass. You can get around the shifts through Limbo?"

"There's only one Limbo for all the different timelines. No, no, don't look like that; it's always been that way. When timelines split in Limbo, you don't necessarily see your alternates again -- but then again, you might. Time and space aren't nearly as distinct there; stepping discs make gateways through both, and if you walk far enough you just might stroll through your past, or a completely different version of it."

"That has to make things interesting." It defied everything he'd ever been taught about the timestream. Of course, so did the world or worlds he'd been walking through for the past... the past... oath, it felt like forever.

No. No, they didn't. He'd been taught that going from one timeline to another was difficult, which it no longer was, but he'd also been taught that it was dangerous -- both to the traveler and to the timestream itself -- and THAT was holding up all too well. If this didn't qualify as damage to the timestream, he didn't know what did.

"I suppose interesting is one word for it -- but it's natural there, you see. So are changes in landscape with little warning; so are changes around you in reality itself -- especially when I'm there and reigning, because at the peak of my power I could defeat Franklin Richards, Kevin MacTaggart, and Jamie Braddock in Limbo all at once. And Mikhail, if I had to." She spoke matter-of-factly, with no pride at all.

Cable grew suddenly quite certain that she was not, in truth, proud of her power there. It simply... was, and sometimes, from her voice, it was to be regretted. "Impressive."

"If you say so." Confirmation, from the dull indifference of her tone and the way she leaned into Stryfe's shoulder. "Useful, at any rate. Aside from the convenience of being able to conjure supplies and command them, to some degree, to behave themselves," she continued, with a growing hint of amusement, "I do have the advantage of being accustomed to a far more mutable version of time and space."

"I knew your stepping discs went through time as easily as space, and something about their being a natural phenomenon there." He found himself becoming curious. Maybe that was what she'd meant to evoke? "And I've... seen how it's possible to visit different times, there, without apparent transitions. But this...." Some part of him cringed from asking, but he went on anyway. "You don't have... shards of different timelines sliding into each other like this, do you?"

"Not exactly, but -- this isn't so different from Limbo, in some ways. All timelines are one, there, and you can walk or teleport between them without much difficulty. On the other hand, here you generally notice."

"Hard not to, when a shift-line opens under you," Nathan said bitterly. He'd seen that happen too many times, to too many people he would have warned if he'd only learned to recognize the signs a few seconds faster, if only his throat hadn't locked in fear and horror on the words, if only they'd listened.

Illyana's eyes softened, he thought, though he could only meet them for a moment. "I think nearly everyone," everyone left alive, Nathan fancied he could hear her not saying, "is learning to tell when one is about to open. Stepping discs can be almost as much of a danger, too, though a little training -- or as in my case a natural control -- usually is a sufficient counter."

"If you say so." He stared blindly into the fire. "I keep expecting to turn a corner, and run into myself, only it never happens. But I can... feel... the others of me. Somewhere. It's because it's our fault, you see. All the Twelve. All with our complicity in this."

He could almost hear Illyana deciding not to respond to the more guilt-stricken portion of his musings. "There's a bit of an energy or probability barrier against running into your own alternates or past selves, I believe -- simple enough to see them, but somehow there seems to be a skewing against interaction. Not that it's impossible, of course. That's in Limbo. It may work similarly here."

"Maybe so."

Nathan heard her quiet sigh and the faint sound of fabric against fabric as she changed positions. "Still. As I said, the shifting has a lot in common with Limbo, so my experience there gives me something of an advantage. There's not the same taint, though -- and," she added with a hint of laughter in her voice, "a lack of the same potential for accidental time travel."

He couldn't help snorting. "Oh, there's a taint. Every shift feels like it's got Apocalypse's slimy hands all over it -- at least to me. As for not time traveling by accident? Don't count on it."

"Why not?" Stryfe echoed Magik at that, an instant behind, his voice sharper and more anxious than her still-cool one.

Cable looked up, a wry smile twisting his lips. "Think about it," he said, eyes darting from one to the other. "It's cross-time travel that's always been supposed to be hardest, take the most energy, carry the most risks. That's what happens every time one of the shifts opens or even moves -- things or people going to different timelines. Pieces of time itself going to different timelines, maybe."

Illyana, accustomed to the seemingly (formerly?) unique rules of Limbo, still watched him with a careful, attentive expression, trying to understand what he was getting at. Stryfe's eyes, though, held a dawning comprehension. Cable shook his head at them both. "Compared to that, going back and forth in chronology is child's play. If that much ordering hasn't broken down yet, it's only a matter of time until it does."

"Isn't everything?" Stryfe murmured.

Cable glowered at him for a moment before turning a less hostile scowl on Illyana. "That explains why he'd want to be around you, I guess. 'Navigation,' as you put it, and the conjuring. But what good does he do you?"

The sorceress pushed a lock of shining hair behind her left ear and smiled, dazzlingly and with the air of one who was very mildly offended and whose next words could turn a world inside out. "He keeps me sane."

Cable looked at Illyana. Then he looked at Stryfe. Stryfe looked back and shrugged. "To be perfectly honest, I think I find that very nearly as frightening as you probably do." Cable noticed Stryfe didn't deny the truth of it, though.

This comment effectively killed the conversation.

It remained clinically dead for several minutes before Nathan, growing almost desperate for something else to think about -- something besides the idea of Stryfe keeping ANYONE sane, and besides his own guilt, and besides what further progress of the disaster might assail the ravaged timestream -- resuscitated it by asking as delicately as he could how the two had come to be on such good terms.

"... In my timeline, I didn't get the idea you -- er, my versions of you -- would have been terribly fond of each other. Not even sure they ever met." It felt very strange to be claiming a version of Stryfe.

Illyana chuckled and seemed to relax. "Well, we made friends after he came back from the moon and I got pulled out of Russia when my parents died. And he didn't give up on me when I turned semi-demonic again at eleven. More details... well, some of it's... kind of sensitive, and I don't know about Stryfe but I'm tired. So... let me try this, it should work...."

Cable blinked as Illyana reached through a small stepping disk and pulled out an oddly twisted piece of thick golden wire. His eye tried to trace it before deciding, a bit queasily, that it appeared to have sprung full-grown from a rather sinister Escher painting. She flicked at it and a liquid shimmer formed to cover the largest loop.

Stryfe looked slightly tense. Illyana murmured something at the contraption and held it out to Cable. He took it, a little doubtfully.

"It's something of a scrying device. I keyed it to start from the nexus point that split our timelines -- for some reason I can trace this if you're involved -- and you can use it to look at what happened."

"How does it work?"

"Magic."

"I should have known."

"Yeah." She gave him a half-smile. "As long as you're touching the framework it will respond to your commands. That's the idea. But because we're the only ones here from that timeline you won't be able to get much of anything from when we weren't there -- maybe a few snatches with your alternate around, though. And it tends toward stuff that could be considered timeline-crucial, or just was important to one of us."

Illyana shrugged. "So it's not that different from having us tell you, except with more detail and less subjectivity and nobody freezing up over awkward subjects." She yawned until her jaw popped. "None of that either."

"Well... thank you." I think, he added silently. "I'll... take first watch?"

"Nothing to watch. I set wards. So if you want to look at the scryer you have time."

Cable glanced doubtfully at the small device. Would it cooperate? And why wasn't Stryfe talking? Oath, maybe he was exhausted too. Bright Lady knew Nathan himself was, but there was no way he was getting to sleep anytime soon anyway. And for all he had to hate Stryfe over, he wouldn't have blamed either of these two if they'd hated him for his part in dragging their timeline into this depressing muddle.

There were plenty of perfectly legitimate things to blame Stryfe for, after all. No need to get unreasonable.

Illyana sat up again from where she'd just curled onto the ground, next to Stryfe and wrapped in a blanket colored some bizarre shade of smoky purple that seemed inclined to melt into the haze surrounding them in this shift.

"I almost forgot. Don't touch the surface itself. Just the frame." She curled up again and seemed to be asleep before he could ask her what happened if he did touch the surface.

Cable stared at it for a moment and tried willing it to work.

~Jean stretched out a hand to Stryfe on the moon, promising help, promising family to a terrifying, terrified supervillain -- and in one timeline, beaten, desperate, he conquered his distrust, staggered back from the brink of suicide and epidemic distribution, and reached to take the offered hand.~

He jumped slightly at the voice, unable even to tell for sure whether it had been sound or thought, and glanced over at Stryfe and Illyana.

Stryfe hadn't moved. Illyana had sat up and looked faintly amused. She'd heard it, then? Nathan raised an inquiring eyebrow. "What was THAT all about?"

Illyana shrugged. "It's a modified version of a fairly old spell. Comes with a pretentious omniscient narrator. You can tell it to shut up if you want."

She went back to sleep. Cable sat cross-legged -- on the ground, not upside-down in the air, not here -- and looked into the contraption again. Visuals might be nice, here...

The liquid-like shimmering surface flickered once, then seemed to dilate to fill his entire field of vision. And he watched.

**********