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 3/10
It took a few months of more than one type of healing, but Stryfe did start going on missions with the X-Men. Not ones where media attention was probable -- that would have been foolish. It would have been equally foolish, though, never to take advantage of a high-octane psi with considerable combat experience, and a certain general nervousness didn't necessarily mean they didn't trust him to cover their backs if need be.
He kept "Stryfe" as his codename.
An assault by the Shadow King that didn't seem to have any precise analogue in the watching Cable's timeline gave the X-Men in this alternate one reason to take Stryfe along. The telepaths, bolstered by the minds of their teammates, succeeded after a lengthy, unglamorous, and exhausting struggle that came down to a battle of wills more than purely of power in forcing a retreat.
Cable skimmed the battle itself, mildly curious regarding the strategy applied but allowing the scryer to slip past it to the aftermath. If it wanted to show him reactions or something, which it frequently seemed inclined to, let it. He was becoming very interested in what went on in this Stryfe's head, and while telepathic battles could of course occur in infinite variety, the basic principles of fighting the Shadow King always seemed the same.
In the course of the fight, however, Stryfe had early on come near to succumbing; dark moods came naturally to him and he was more susceptible than he would have thought to the Shadow King's wiles despite all his skill at shielding. Jean's fiery-red telepathic call had cut the darkness and blazed across his mind with a plea and given him something to hold onto at the last second. Sheer inherent obstinacy had also been of help.
The battle had still left him exhausted physically, mentally, and psionically, the last two of which were not as much the same thing as most people thought, as well as deeply and secretly ashamed of how near he'd come to panicking at the first shadowy tendril that had eased through his shields and the hissed thoughts that had accompanied it.
He knew it had to do with Apocalypse's attempt to possess him; he'd never been able or even all that willing to remember the details, but had realized sickeningly as he recovered that that was what had nearly happened. He still wasn't sure why the attempt had failed and left him alive. But knowing why he'd been afraid didn't really make him feel any better about it.
Nor did being half-ignored afterwards. Jean had actually hugged him and Scott squeezed his shoulder, but very quickly, almost in passing, on their way to see to other people who were probably more congenial. And who hadn't, to his knowledge, nearly gotten subverted. Or possessed. McCoy had given him a once-over and ordered rest, which Stryfe thought an excessively obvious prescription. Not that he was going to admit he felt like collapsing.
Truth to tell, he wasn't exactly being ignored. Most of the X-Men were as exhausted as he, or nearly so, and many had somewhat more severe injuries than the bruises he'd sustained, though none were life-threatening. His parents had been in a hurry, naturally, to check on assorted teammates as well as innocent bystanders.
Equally naturally, his instinctive reinforcement of his psi-shields when Jean embraced him had led her to believe that he wanted a measure of privacy after the difficulties he'd encountered, perhaps to meditate. So when he had retreated to his own room afterwards, she had resisted the urge to check on him.
He didn't know she was fighting her own instincts in trying to be considerate, and accordingly he retired, lay down, and brooded. Certainly he had done everything (except lock the door or say it straight out) to imply that he wished to be left alone, but he still, illogically enough, resented the fact that no one came to look for him.
They never had. They'd sent him to the future, a miserable future perpetually oppressed and usually at war with itself well beyond the petty conflicts of the present, apparently with some woman they'd never seen before, and left him there to be raised by the monster who'd put him in danger in the first place.
The people who had adopted Cable didn't come to look for him, either. They'd turned up eventually, but as far as his recollection of that day went, it had been some sort of assassination attempt. They certainly hadn't taken him along when they left. It made him sick, thinking how proud he'd been to be Apocalypse's heir. At least those peasants he'd so looked down on had apparently cared.
Some sort of Askani, they'd been. He had gotten the vague impression somewhere along the line that the woman had possibly been the one who brought him back, though there was also a certain nagging familiarity to Jean that he couldn't quite sort out. Maybe a descendant.
He realized he was staring blankly at the ceiling and shut his eyes wearily. It didn't really make that much difference, and he wasn't likely to figure it out lying in a bedroom in the twentieth century. The point was, nobody was coming to look for him now, either. Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes; he tilted his head back on the pillow and succeeded in driving them away.
Stryfe groaned inwardly as he realized all his internal mental and emotional defenses were in a shambles, and the shields he'd so carefully reinforced were fading in and out ever so slightly. The realization that the Shadow King had gotten to him worse than he'd thought produced a shudder; an uncomfortable number of things he didn't like to think about were floating around far too freely.
Maybe it was just as well nobody was coming. He didn't want to see them anyway, he told himself. If they came it would only be to bring recriminations of how close he had come to being the Shadow King's next host because he couldn't control his fear.
A lecture on teamwork, maybe, and how it wasn't supposed to involve almost betraying the rest of the team out of panic, or distracting somebody else by having to use them as an anchor to avoid the aforesaid betrayal. A lecture on how they'd tried trusting him and he'd come a hairsbreadth from letting them down.
He really didn't want to hear that. Right. They could just stay wherever they all were, and leave him to try to put his shields back together and ignore the creeping terror that had stayed with him. With another muffled groan, he began the process. If he didn't attend to the psionic aftereffects of Farouk's last attack now, he wouldn't be able to use his telepathy without being practically blinded by pain for a week. So he'd better fix it.
Alone.
He propped himself up long enough to punch the pillow, hard enough the entire bedframe creaked. Then he flopped back down, deciding that blowing off steam wasn't really worth the effort, and tried not to writhe as he returned to quelling the nauseous roiling in his mind. And stomach, by this point, but that was probably merely a side effect of the mental disturbance.
Not as if he wanted an audience anyway. The fact that calming down and acquiring a better mood would do as much as if not more than telepathic repair to counteract damage caused by the Shadow King, due to that entity's preferred and rather nasty methods, was pushed fairly far down in his consciousness and kept being mistaken for an unpleasant memory and shoved back down whenever it tried to bob up.
His shields cooperated reasonably well, at least initially, but they weren't going to remain stable until he settled his own mind down internally. Agony nearly took his breath away as he tripped into a stray memory, of the time on the moon when he shouted at his parents, to look at him, at the ravages of scorn and lack of caring, and found them fallen unconscious moments before. Frustration.
He locked the memory down and tried reminding himself they probably didn't pass out on purpose; he should have put more air inside the shield if he wanted to talk to them longer. And they did take him home with them later. For what, he thought nastily to himself. And even if they do "care," do you really think they won't "scorn" you after this? But he'd tried, he had tried.... So?
Apparently he wasn't even worth mocking; he'd barely been spoken to afterwards. People had looked at him, and then looked away quickly with that uneasy expression he'd seen so often in the past few months even when they were being quite pleasant. He was very good at inspiring fear, usually, but when he didn't mean to it got very annoying, and right now the memory of every nervous glance cut like a whipstroke.
Stryfe gave the internal defenses and the shields they fed a savage jerk and twisted another segment into place. He certainly didn't want to sense what they thought of him, or risk projecting next time he happened to see Jean! Or worse yet, Betsy; Jean at least made some effort not to look amused, and didn't give that irritating toss of her head whenever he was driven to snarling that he wanted to be let alone.
Not that anybody was likely to bother coming. Maybe he'd finally driven them to giving up on him. He wouldn't be surprised. They never really liked him anyway.
As he hadn't been monitoring the hall, the knock at his door startled him.
"What?!" he called irritably, nudging his shields to make sure they wouldn't fall over or something and proceeding to scan. Illyana.
The door opened without further ado, and a small blonde head poked in. "There you are. When you weren't anywhere else, Dr. McCoy said he'd told you to rest, so I came to look here."
He propped himself on one elbow, then decided it was too much trouble and lay back again. "Did you want something?" he asked grouchily, in a tone intended to imply that he distinctly hoped she didn't.
"I wanted to see you," she said, as if it should have been the most obvious thing in the world. After a moment's consideration, Illyana padded across the floor, kicked off her shoes, and perched on the edge of the bed, _Winnie the Pooh_ clutched to her chest.
"Why?"
"Because." Feeling this needed more elaboration, she added, "I felt like it. And you'd just been in a fight, so I wanted to make sure you were okay, and you'd disappeared." She held up the book. "You could read to me. I like it, and you cuddle nice." After a moment's pause for contemplation of grammar, she tacked on, "Ly."
He inched slightly sideways, away from her. "I... It has been a very long day. I don't feel like reading to you," he told her bluntly. The "Just go away; I want to be left alone" got caught somewhere back of his throat and didn't make it out.
In its absence, Illyana took Stryfe's motion away from the side of the bed as an invitation, and climbed onto it, folding her feet up beside her. "Then I can read to you. I thought you might be tired, so I brought a book I know is all words I can pronounce."
Stryfe gave the child an incredulous look, which she met quite serenely. "If you insist."
She crossed her legs, somehow managing to sit bolt upright on the mattress, and opened the book. Then she leaned over and looked at him, and sighed. "You're in a bad mood, aren't you?" she diagnosed, a little reprovingly.
"No, not at all," he said with heavy sarcasm. "I'm perfectly happy. You might even say ecstatic." Something felt as if it tore inside him. "That's why I came up here by myself to get away from everybody who might want to tell me how badly I almost failed them during the battle!"
Illyana regarded him very gravely. "I asked Piotr, and he said, 'We won, Snowflake, and your comrade Stryfe did very well against him.' So, I don't think it sounds like you need to be worried." Her imitation of her brother's slightly stronger accent and manner of speaking, as she quoted him, was precise. "But you sound like you need a hug."
He was caught off guard and dumbfounded by this announcement, which meant he didn't have time to do anything before she slid down and put small arms around his neck.
Now what was he supposed to do? The obvious expected response was to return the embrace. Well, he'd held or carried Illyana often enough before, by this time, and it was hardly the first time she had hugged him. The practice had its moments. He'd been madly envious most of his life of people who found such things natural and common -- but he still didn't seek out occasions for it. Had never yet initiated it. Still, he liked Illyana, and a rebuff would hurt her, so he freed the arm she was half lying on, and wrapped it around the small body.
After all, he didn't really want her to leave; Illyana was a startlingly cheerful, carefree little girl even though she could also be remarkably serious at times, and perceptively intelligent beyond her years.
At least, Stryfe thought she was; he was not widely experienced in analyzing the normal development of children, but he was fairly certain it didn't include a memory which, when she chose to pay attention, rivaled the eidetic retention of some telepaths -- and with better comprehension. Her schooling was an informal affair, at the moment, and seemed likely to continue in that vein, since between her own reading and spontaneous or planned tutoring from assorted parties, she was well ahead of what might be expected in any school they could think of -- but haphazardly enough that placing her in an actual grade would have been essentially impossible.
Now, however, it wasn't the girl's academic intelligence that made Stryfe want her to stay; it was the bright innocence and sympathy and trust, and the secure happiness of her mind that seeped blithely across his shields even with the repairs he'd just made.
He didn't want to hurt her.
And he suddenly thought of what might have happened to that trusting, happy mind if the Shadow King had turned him against her, and his throat closed up in horror... and guilt. Stryfe realized then that it wasn't only the scolding he wanted to avoid; the shame wasn't only at his failure. These people had grown into his soul, even if he still made them uneasy and vice versa; he no longer wanted to harm them, even actively wanted not to.
But he very nearly had, through an old weakness. He swallowed sickly. He would deserve it if they did turn their backs on him now.
Still, what Illyana had reported of her brother did not sound like the words of one who blamed him for what he had almost done. Piotr was still suspicious about Stryfe, especially about his little sister's association with the man; it was surprising he had let Illyana come up here. Then again, she wasn't all that easy to keep track of sometimes, even for a telepath, and Piotr wasn't one.
But why would he have said Stryfe had done "very well" in the battle? Perhaps to protect Illyana from the knowledge? But that would be foolish: keeping the knowledge from her would only make the girl more likely to return to the side of a man who might betray her.
Of course. "Piotr isn't a telepath, Illyana. I doubt he knows what happened. You would have received a different answer, I imagine, had you asked Jean."
Illyana laughed. She laughed. "Silly. Piotr can tell who won or not. And Jean was right there, and she nodded. She told me you didn't want to be bothered right now, too, but I decided it would be okay to come because I wasn't going to bother you," she prattled, then added ingenuously, "I'm not bothering you, am I?"
It was Stryfe's turn to laugh, if gruffly. Maybe not always perceptive -- or maybe well able to ignore selectively. "No... no, you aren't bothering me." He found, a little to his surprise, that he was telling the truth, and decided not to mention that her arrival had annoyed, or "bothered" him at first. "I -- I am glad you came."
"Good," she said decisively, and wriggled free to sit up again and retrieve the book. His side felt slightly cold where she had moved away. "Now, since you are supposed to be resting, I will read to you, and then you can come down and eat dinner afterwards." She frowned slightly at him before adding, "Unless you're still too tired; then I'll bring you something."
Stryfe wondered for a few moments if he would do worse to go down and face everyone, or hide his shame up here and act as if he were too weak to have recovered yet. The latter would put off the consequences, perhaps, but it would be cowardly -- not to mention that it would make him look very bad, unable even to recuperate as quickly as others with worse injuries. It was kind of Jean, he supposed, that she apparently had not yet publicized his failings.
He stopped worrying about the matter for the moment as Illyana began reading, her voice and contentment both oddly soothing, and he allowed himself to think that perhaps things would be all right after all.
When another tap at the door revealed its source to be Jean, come looking for them both, all the guilt and dread came flooding back and knotted itself in his stomach as he hastily returned to the neglected business of repairing his shields -- finding them in surprisingly better shape for the time he'd ignored them -- and sat up.
Jean had been smiling when she entered, at the scene, but her brows drew together in confusion as her son tensed and sat up with an expression that suggested he'd prefer to face a firing squad. "Chris? What on Earth's the matter?" She hesitated, then added with an attempt at lightness, "I didn't come to check up on your shields; if you want a hand, though... or to help with mine...." She trailed off at the bleak look he gave her.
"I neither require help with my shields nor am likely to be much use to yours," he replied stiffly. What kind of joke was this? "As if you don't know what's the matter...." He gritted his teeth and forced himself to continue. "If you've come to tell me I'm... off the team, get on with it."
Jean emanated shocked bewilderment and looked completely flabbergasted. "What?" she finally managed faintly. "Why would you be off the team? I mean, given the option I don't think anybody would suggest sending you out on a mission until you've had a chance to rest -- you had a rough time, I know -- but that's pretty much standard."
Stryfe flinched. A rough time. That was, he supposed, one way of putting it, but that wasn't really the point. He gently suggested to Illyana that she run off and let them talk; he didn't think he wanted her to see this. She didn't move. He sighed, lifted her firmly off the bed, and glanced pointedly toward the door. She sat down just outside it. He gave up and lifted his eyes back to Jean's. "If you had known what could happen," he said quietly and as evenly as he could, "you would not have risked my presence."
His mother bent a green gaze on him and tilted her head. "If this is about the Shadow King's targeting you," she said carefully, "then... well, we would have been more careful about telling you what to expect, I guess, and I'd have tried to keep an eye on you a little better in case you needed support; we could hardly have left one of our best telepaths behind. Not against him. That kind of attack is... very unpleasant, I know, but it's a risk we all take going up against him. I am sorry about --"
She broke off and looked at him intently as it dawned on her that he wasn't simply upset over the trauma, or being accusatory because they had perhaps relied too much on his power and experience, and apparently underestimated the backup they needed to provide him. He was expecting accusations from her, not apologies, and she made a hasty mental shift to consider whether blaming oneself illogically might be genetic. "Excuse me, I seem to be missing something. Maybe I should go back to my first question: what, exactly, is the matter?"
Utterly confused by now, Stryfe stared at her. "I came very close to betraying you. All of you." He hesitated and then plowed onward. "I nearly handed him the victory because -- because I was afraid," he admitted harshly. "You knew that. I... gather from what you've said so far you aren't actually planning to send me away; could we perhaps have the inevitable lecture on teamwork sooner rather than later?"
"You didn't 'nearly hand' him anything," Jean said gently. "And you certainly did not betray us. What you came close to was having your defenses broken -- by a very powerful, very insidious enemy. But you fought back; when I called you, you answered; you didn't give in. And you made it back. To help your teammates, so I'm not quite sure why you're expecting one of Scott's legendary lectures on the subject."
Stryfe shook his head at her irritably as she came to sit beside his bed in a nearby chair, carefully not invading his personal space without an invitation (unlike Illyana, who had never realized she needed one). "Because. I didn't do my part; I put every last one of you at risk because I couldn't keep myself from panicking." And he loathed himself for it.
Jean frowned in concern, and made no secret of the fact that she was calling Scott to come up and relaying the conversation. "I can't say I'm not surprised to hear you say you panicked, to be honest. It's not like you. But as soon as you 'heard' me, you resisted him and you succeeded. If you hadn't... well, you'd hardly have been the first of us he ever got to do his bidding. But you did."
"If I hadn't... Jean, I would have been his new host." He couldn't quite help shuddering at the thought. "And... you would not have had a chance. Because you would have tried to talk, instead of seeing you had to kill me and doing it right away." He knew that, knew that even if he'd lost completely and been taken over, they would have tried to get him back, and it would have been their downfall. So why had he really thought they would simply throw him out? That wouldn't happen. It didn't fit. But the recriminations he could logically expect weren't materializing either.
"Maybe," she said noncommittally. "But might-have-beens don't really count in this game, do they? You didn't fail us, Chris. As soon as I gave you any kind of support -- if you can even call it that; I was --"
He interrupted. "You shouldn't have had to; I shouldn't have been so... weak... as to need your help and distract you so you couldn't put your full strength against him."
"Maybe you do need that lecture on teamwork," Scott said wryly from just outside the door. He stepped over Illyana, casting her a mildly perplexed look before crossing the room to lean on the foot of the bed. "The whole point of it is that the team works better as a team than as a collection of individuals fighting as if they're each alone. Synergy."
Stryfe wavered. Was Scott saying they didn't blame him for almost falling? Had Jean really been trying to say they shouldn't have let him get into that position? He still should have been able to handle it.
Jean leaned towards him. "It's unusual not to struggle, fighting the Shadow King. Everybody has a dark side. As I was trying to say when you cut me off, the call you used as a lifeline was me asking you for help; I was in trouble then too, and it scared me half to death realizing you were." She grinned slightly. "Turned out I didn't need to worry, it seems."
**********
Glittering milk swirled around the images and made them only that, images again, as Illyana unfolded herself from the floor and came back into the room to bounce on the bed. Nathan welcomed the receding. There was something unsettling about the entire idea of Stryfe feeling guilty. Not that the man shouldn't feel guilty, but Cable had always thought it was probably an alien concept to him.
Still a bit unnerved, Nathan let the tale of their timeline wander and alight where it would. The scenes seemed to swoop and spin, eventually reaching a sudden, sharp focus as a young girl's bedroom snapped to fill his vision and the girl herself sat up in bed with a cry.
A soft one, not so loud as it sounded in her own ears or mind as it echoed within shields that shouldn't have been there, as memories filled her head, falling into place, and she knew.
She was Magik again.
Illyana doubled over in her bed for a moment, then straightened, shut her eyes in an expression of mingled despair and determination, and stretched out her hand.
With a sword in it.
Silver crept up her arm as she watched, eyes wide, young face terribly pale. She scrambled out of bed and teleported.
Cable had no idea how long it really took her to return. He was carried along as if in a whirlwind as the skills, knowledge, traumas and friendships of all the time from when Illyana was snatched into Limbo until she threw herself back to heal the breach he himself had nearly been sacrificed to make permanent -- flooded back to her, warring with her brighter memories of the last four years, and lent her a grim purpose.
She found Belasco and took Limbo back, staying her hand once again and letting him go, face twisting as he begged her for mercy. She wished very distinctly that she had killed him before he had a chance to speak, and recoiled from herself at the thought.
She fought those of the other inhabitants of Limbo who challenged her rule, and defeated them all, and the blood they spilled slid off her armor as if it had never touched it.
And then she returned to her own room, and the clock flicked from the minute on which she'd left to the next.
As Cable glimpsed it and the young queen who never wanted to rule -- oath, she was younger than he'd been when he'd first killed Apocalypse; she couldn't deserve to have this laid on her, but deserving never made any difference, did it? -- glanced at the time and started to alight on her bed, he was thrown into another view, the transition jarring.
**********
Stryfe climbed the stairs, wondering idly why -- as many times as the house had been destroyed to one extent or another -- Xavier kept rebuilding it with so many stairs. Though the basements at least made sense; they tended to stay relatively intact. Not that he himself particularly minded, but surely it looked odd to anyone in the public who might notice, that a wheelchair-bound man insisted on living in a multiple-story house that kept being torn down?
Then again, noticing things about Xavier was probably not an activity greatly indulged in by much of the populace....
He headed towards Illyana's room, having volunteered to wake her. The early breakfast was one of her favorites, and if Bobby had gone he would probably have iced her sheets.
He tapped at her door and received no answer. He knocked louder. No response. Stryfe frowned. She must be fairly sound asleep? He pushed the door open.
And stopped and stared.
Illyana sat on her bed with her feet pulled up onto the edge of her mattress, all clad in silver-bright armor that glittered in the morning sun. One arm lay across her knees, her head resting on it and eyes fixed on the wall.
Her other hand clutched the hilt of a sword, and she was struggling desperately not to cry.
Stryfe took all this in, head spinning with the implications and the worry that perhaps he should have mentioned his concern that this could happen -- he'd thought of it -- but he hadn't thought of Illyana reacting quite this way, and now that omission seemed foolish. He took a step forward. "Illyana."
She jumped, and looked at him for the first time, then snatched up an empty vase from the table by her bed and hurled it at him. "Go away and leave me alone! I don't want -- I don't -- don't LOOK at me that way!" She turned her head sharply away and resumed her earlier posture, shaking slightly.
Stryfe wavered. What was he supposed to do? What could he do? He knew better than any other how armor could turn to a deathtrap.
Whenever he'd said, "Go away and leave me alone," he'd been miserable if people actually did.
He took the few steps to the bed, and set the vase he'd caught back in its place. When no further missiles seemed to be forthcoming, he sat down beside her. She didn't move.
Very hesitantly, fighting decades of habitual reserve (or, to be more honest, hostile standoffishness), Stryfe tried putting a hand on her back in what he hoped would be a comforting gesture.
Then she did move, suddenly, smooth metal sliding past his hand as she leaned toward him, and -- somehow it almost seemed natural -- he found his arm around her shoulder, holding the trembling girl close despite the cold stiffness of the armor.
"Illyana?"
"I remember," she whispered.
Stryfe had the feeling it was an inane question, but he asked it anyway. "Remember what?"
"Being Magik. I am Magik. I'm --" she broke off in a strangled sob and clung with her arms around his neck. He eyed the Soulsword a little uneasily, since she still had the hilt in her hand and this put the blade very close to his head, then recollected something about it being intangible to anyone not magical by nature or trained in magic, which to the best of his knowledge described him quite accurately.
He patted her shoulder, wondering if he should call someone who was good at being comforting. It really wasn't his specialty, and as far as he could tell she was just getting more upset, which didn't speak well for his powers of extemporaneous comfort.
Illyana gulped and got control of her voice again. "I woke up this morning and started remembering things from Limbo and being part of the New Mutants. And the bloodstones are back, and my Soulsword. Somebody else had it -- it told me where it had been, Kitty and then she gave it away and it got passed around, but it was drawn back to me as soon as I was a sorceress again."
"It's --" he began. It was what? All right? Hardly that, clearly. "Not the end of the world," he ended rather lamely. "I'm sure it's complicated, having two sets of memories for the same ages, but you'll manage, and...."
"I don't want to remember," she choked out. "Limbo was -- was horrible. Whether I'm in charge of it or not, maybe worse when I am, and I went and t-took it back from Belasco so he couldn't be still trying to let the Dark Ones through."
Stryfe wasn't completely following this, and his attempt to reach into her mind and find out what was going on bounced. He could probably break the shields, but that was a little violent given the circumstances, so he resigned himself to noncomprehension and stopped trying to propose solutions, instead just listening as she spilled tears and explanations that ranged from cryptic to incoherent.
Of course, he'd probably said things about his life that made just as little sense to her, or less, and she had never complained.
He finally patted her on the shoulder as she wound down and started to relax, and ventured to suggest breakfast. "It will have been ready by now; if you wait much longer it will get cold."
Illyana sniffled and leaned her head on his shoulder. "I guess I'll come. Give me a minute." She got up and started toward the door; Stryfe blinked, and when he looked back at her the sword and armor were gone. She turned and looked over her shoulder. "You go on; I need to wash my face." A very shaky breath. "And thank you."
**********
Unfortunately, over breakfast the memories proved not to be through with Illyana. She was calm enough by the time she came down that no one commented, or even noted the concerned look Stryfe gave her across the orange juice pitcher.
But midway through the meal, she dropped her fork and went pale again, her mind assaulting her with images of twisted landscapes, wild stepping discs, laughing demons, New York City gone mad, and....
... And --
-- And a child, no, other children too, murdered, and one who lived, but barely, who was about to be sacrificed --
-- Madelyne's and Scott's child, in the hands of the Goblin Queen --
-- Almost sacrificed --
-- Almost killed, by her servants, rebels it was true, but still hers, who still should have been under her control.
Stryfe and Storm both rose and started towards her as she buried her face in her hands, feeling them cold as ice against the near-feverish heat of her cheeks. "No. Oh, no... what I did to him..."
"Whom?" Ororo. Dear Ororo, who'd taught her, who had tried to teach her clean magic, whom she'd had to kill -- no, that was another Ororo, not this one.
Illyana shuddered, the visions merciless. It was hard to concentrate on the here and now; she knew only that she'd been responsible for horrors, and there was one survivor out there, to whom she bore a debt she could probably never wipe out....
Her voice was desperate. "Christopher. Madelyne's and Scott's baby. It was my fault, letting the demons out of control enough for them to go after Maddie. He's the only one of those kids who lived, I owe him, my blood, my death, my life, almost anything -- where IS he?" She had to find him.
"Uh... Illyana. I'm right here, but you don't --" Christopher? That was Chris... Christopher... not the right one; he didn't bear the invisible mark her instincts told her would have been left; she had to find the one who did.
"Not you!" she cried impatiently. "You weren't there, you've never been to Limbo --" She stumbled out of her chair, yanking out the Soulsword and letting the armor crawl over her all at once, oblivious to the shocked gazes of nearly every pair of eyes in the room and Stryfe's stricken expression, and betook herself to Limbo.
**********
Once there, she could find Christopher. Having been tied into a spell like that one, he should be practically a beacon for any competent sorcerer in Limbo. She knelt, a strange single-mindedness taking over and substituting for calm within the frantic urgency that possessed her, and scried. There.
Of course.
It was perfectly logical.
The baby hadn't been Stryfe-Christopher, so it had been Cable.
He showed up like a beacon, indeed, or maybe more like a supernova. She'd made the mistake of setting the spell to glow when it found him, and had to spend a few minutes blinking before she could see anything but purple, bruise-like spots in front of her eyes.
Illyana sat back on her heels and waited for her vision to clear. She had to go to him, tell him what she'd done, what she owed -- and offer him the chance to take what she owed him.
She drew a shuddering breath and grasped again at her control of Limbo. It was hard, not so much to make Limbo respond as to keep from responding too much to it, or keep it from responding too much to her. She wasn't completely sure which.
Really, she supposed, the issue was controlling herself. She clenched a metaphorical fist around the precarious balance, reminded herself of what she had to do -- as if she could forget -- bit her lip hard, and called another stepping disc.
**********
You weren't there; you've never been to Limbo.
Scott's and Madelyne's baby.
Not you! You weren't there.
Stryfe took a single, futile step toward where Illyana had stood, then stopped, mind reeling as her words echoed in his ears.
Scott's and Madelyne's baby.
Not you.
His world, the life -- the family he'd finally dared to believe he'd had, seemed to crash down around him. He wasn't Scott's and Madelyne's son, not really the child Scott and Jean had cared for and then given up.
He wasn't their child.
And that left only one possibility: Cable. Nathan. His nemesis, all this time. Nathan was the real one, the one they all wanted, and the one they'd meant to bring back and keep and love as their own.
Nathan was their own.
That left him -- to be the clone.
The half-life.
Sick horror washed over him at the thought. He wasn't anything to them, wasn't anything anyway....
And Illyana had vanished without a word of elaboration, to look for the real one.
Illyana. His train of thought returned to her with a jerk that jolted his body out of its frozen state.
She was distraught, almost hysterical, and going off to seek out Cable with no real preparation -- and with alarming words about owing him her death. He had to find her.
And besides, she had just torn his world out from under his feet; she owed him an explanation.
He mumbled something to the rest of the room and practically fled to Cerebro. Between real worry, even fear for Illyana, and the misery and anger toward her for what he saw as the loss of his identity, Stryfe -- not even Christopher anymore, he reflected bitterly -- was well-nigh frantic to find her by the time he settled the helmet and initialized the psi-computer.
Nothing registered at first on his search for Illyana's power signature. What it should be, anyway; he had to rake through old files to locate the record. Not that it took him long. Impatient, he pushed, sending enough energy through the circuits to fry the brain of almost any other telepath, boosting his detection range out past the orbit of the moon.
Still nothing.
And then a signal -- out in space, far enough he wouldn't have caught it with the normal settings. Moving. Part of an orbit, he calculated swiftly.
Not on the moon, either.
"Zero!" The android, who had joined him among the X-Men not long after they'd made landfall on Earth and never left, came to his side. "This signal." Stryfe's finger stabbed at the display. "Track the coordinates. Take me there now." He didn't even stop for his armor. That was probably a foolish omission, but it was too late now....
**********
Illyana, still in full armor with drawn sword, stepped through her disc onto Graymalkin. Cable swung around and promptly shot at her.
He was, of course, conditioned to expect Stryfe -- probably attacking -- when a glowing circle of light emitted a figure in shiny silver armor. It was ordinarily an accurate assumption.
He shot to kill.
Fortunately, since Stryfe was much taller than the eleven-year-old girl, the shot intended to blow Stryfe's head off missed Illyana by well over a foot.
To the astonishment of both Cable and Domino -- the latter dashed in as she heard the commotion, being naturally curious as to why Nathan was firing a large gun at the wall -- Illyana proceeded to drop to her knees, chiming softly on the floor, directly in front of Cable.
She extended the Soulsword, hilt first, and turned anguished deep-blue eyes up to him. The words came out in something of a rush, but still a little stilted. "When you were a baby, demons under my authority tricked your mother Madelyne and nearly brought her to sacrifice you, to make Earth forever open to Limbo. There were other children taken; you're the only one who lives and hence I owe you; it was my doing your blood was nearly taken, and it is your right to take mine. Vengeance is yours if you choose."
Understandably confused, Cable had lowered the gun. Illyana, terrified but determined, laid the blade of the Soulsword against her own neck and put the hilt into his left hand.
**********