Notes: There's an epilogue coming, but it has its own huge notes, so I'll blather a bit here. When I first started writing this fic, I was like, "No Evo fan is going to want to read this - it's got only two minor Evo characters, and a bunch of 616-canon characters who've never appeared in the Evolution universe at all. And no 'fun' stuff! ...Why am I writing this again?" But obviously, people did read it, and liked it (I hope!), and I'm very grateful for that.
So thank you to all of my reviewers: Rurouni Tyriel, Neva, jacob, Illmantrim, Lyranfan, the mildly anonymous "me", and anyone else whose name I've forgotten here. There's no joy like getting a review, and y'all have each made my day more than once. If I wasn't so awkward with feedbacking my feedbackers, I would've told you this sooner.
For those wanting more, well, this fic is Part One of a projected (may I emphasize projected) trilogy, and Parts Two and Three are supposed to have a lot more of the X-Men. And even some fun. :)
Rachel's "darkness/light" line in this chapter is actually a slightly paraphrased quote from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., may he rest in peace. "The Chaos-Bringer" is a bonafide 616 nickname for the Phoenix. And a raptor is a bird of prey. Just in case, y'know, someone thought I was talking theropod dinosaurs.
Now alone on the catwalk, with only the crackle of flames and the scent of heavy smoke for company, Rachel pressed the palms of her hands to X23's temples, making a physical connection to bolster the psychic one. What she was about to do was in theory far more complicated and strenuous than merely overloading a couple of soldiers, or demolishing a few Sentinels - although probably not so in reality, given the way her power level was surging ever higher.
"X23? X23, listen," she said out loud and in her mind. "This is important. Don't fight me."
That was like asking the sun not to rise, but she had to make the attempt. X23 struggled against the telepathic link with her own psychic defenses. It was surprising to see the strength of the fortifications that the other girl, a non-telepath, could bring to bear against an attacker: walls, mazes, mines, and a few deviously hidden traps that could take out all but the most skilled mind-readers.
Rachel overpowered her with a single thought.
Listen, she said into the other girl's mind. Listen to me...
X23 wailed out a refusal in the language of a small, lost child - scared and angry but mostly scared. Rachel soothed the girl's mind-self with a wave of positive emotion. Listen, listen to me - this is the story you have to know. This is your story too...
It started with a mother who vanished almost as soon as she appeared - and a father who stayed around for a while longer, sunk in grief and grim determination, sustained by the ever-receding hope for victory. And then he too failed to come home one day and everyone had cried, and she'd been taken in by her aunts and uncles - her parents' friends - and spent her days absorbed in the task of learning how not to become the Chaos-Bringer.
Then there was the day the soldiers stormed the house, the mansion, the school. Stormed it and taken no prisoners but herself. She was too valuable to kill. She was going to become their ultimate weapon.
After that point the memories became dark and jumbled, fragments of a time she wanted desperately to forget. They swirled past in a mad, headlong rush, end-over-end, almost going too fast to be perceived. Torture. Brainwashing. The proprietory tattoos branded on her face. The long, black days of crouching inside herself, zealously guarding the spark of awareness against prying eyes until the right moment. And then the exhiliration of breakout - freedom at last!
She soared up all over again, remembering, and felt X23 add a joyous howl in agreement.
But then immediately came recapture, and this time they had no use for her, their broken weapon. They threw her away, into the refuse of the internment camps where the last sorry remnant of her family clung to life with an iron grasp. She found them again, or rather they found her: Kate and Piotr and Ororo, and even their old enemy-friend Erik. And there in the camp, beneath the ponderous weight of her neural inhibitor collar, under the watchful eyes of the Sentinels, she met Franklin.
Rachel tried to show X23 how important he was, but the other girl did not understand; she was too dazzled by the bright strangeness of love to understand that it was the only force in the universe that could bind the Grey women.
Birds mated for life. Even firebirds.
Time passed - years - too short, but happy in their own way. All the while there was planning, secrets, conspiracies hatched in the recesses of their camp shacks. Aid from the distant Canadian Resistance came in the form of bits of electronics for Franklin, her genius, who would get them out of there on cleverness alone. And then the word came down that it was time. Time for action. Time for the X-Men to rise from their own ashes.
Breakout again, fleeing through the streets, running and fighting their way to the bitter end.
The end... when the Wolverine and the last of the true X-Men were cut down by the Sentinels, and it was just Franklin and herself, and after years of neglect, he had forgotten how to use the reality-bending powers of his birthright. So had she, for a different reason - the distaste of being a weapon, the refusal to be one again. Finally he'd found what was left of his powers, right before the Nimrod unit came crashing in, and pushed her into becoming, and she had landed hours and miles from where she should have because neither of them had been any good at aiming. And that took them up to the ephemeral point called Now.
Rachel brought both herself and X23 back into the real world, and broke the mental connection; the physical one had already been severed. She was still standing, but X23 had collapsed to the floor of the catwalk and curled into a fetal position, no doubt trying to protect herself from the inundation of her mind.
"Sorry for that - speed over style. It's called a memory dump," Rachel explained, helping X23 stand. "Not the most elegant term, but descriptive. I telepathically downloaded my memories into your brain. They'll all fade eventually."
X23 shook her head, plainly dazed. The younger mutant wasn't much for words anyway, Rachel knew, having seen the inside of her memories during their connection. What a life - if it could be called that. And how closely it mirrored her own.
"We're sisters, X23," Rachel said. She touched the dark slashes on her face, the marks of a Hound - a hunter-killer mutant who chased down other mutants on human orders. The ultimate weapon in the war on mutants; the ultimate irony, too. She'd hidden the marks from the second she'd made her first breakout - a low-level psionic mask, nothing fancy, something an Omega-class telepath like herself could do even with a collar on. It was all part of an effort to forget, but it had failed; she could remember the day she'd been marked, how the pain had only grown and the salt of her tears had made it worse. "We were both slaves - both weapons. And we both fought our way to freedom."
"Weapons," X23 said. It seemed to be the only word that she could wrap her mind around. Her fingers were twitching reflexively, trying to contract the muscles that controlled her claws, but Rachel doubted she knew it.
Claws, tattoos - brands. None so indelible as the scars on their souls.
Rachel nodded solemnly. "Sisters. You know it's true. So please trust me when I tell you that there's nothing else you can do tonight."
X23's face twisted into a snarl. "I can finish my mission."
Kate had suggested it. Ororo and Erik had approved it. Franklin had plotted it. They had all died so that Rachel could accomplish it, even big Piotr, the strongest person she'd ever known. She saw him for a moment, the way she'd seen him last: standing over her, tears coursing down his steel face for the loss of his beloved Kate, shouting incoherently at the Sentinels and shielding Rachel and Franklin with his body, with his last fragile spark of life.
Her power hiccuped, tried to surge over her barriers. She forced it down and shook her head. "It's my mission."
The younger girl's already-strained grip on civility snapped altogether. Rachel sensed the rage coming a split second before it manifested and flung another telekinetic field around X23 like a net.
"It's MY mission!" she exploded, all fury and sharp teeth, fighting against the TK field so vigorously that veins stood out on her forehead. "It's mine! I found the reports in HYDRA base! I broke into SHIELD to confirm! I came here -"
"And you would already be dead," Rachel said calmly, "if it wasn't for my presence."
X23 paused in her struggle, seemingly struck by that. Rachel thought that perhaps the other girl understood - that she saw in Rachel's memories that it was the truth - and the thought translated into a momentary weakening of the TK field.
But it was all a ploy. Playing dead was the easiest ambush of all, and X23 broke the weakened field with a concentrated burst of physical effort.
The backlash hit Rachel and disoriented her enough to make the next few seconds a loss. X23 was smart and obviously well-trained against psychics. She didn't wait to confront Rachel, but instead got her feet under her and practically flew down the catwalk.
"Wait!" Rachel cried out, scrambling after her. Then she stopped. She was in no shape to catch a trained assassin, pyschic powers or not. Instead of chasing X23, Rachel closed her eyes and let her mind run for her - across the catwalk, down the hallway and the cramped stairwell... there was X23, burning with fury... and there, also were the faint afterimages of Bolivar Trask's thoughts drifting through the empty passages. His psychic aura had clung to the area, and Rachel could follow it as easily as X23 was following his scent trail. Of course, that called for a sensitivity that bordered on the godlike.
Too close, she thought nervously, I'm way too close. It was getting down to the wire and she still hadn't accomplished what she came for.
Her thought-search, running on without her conscious direction, found Trask deep inside the complex. He was standing on a movable platform, in a big box of a room that also contained a Sentinel shrouded in scaffolding and wires. Even without his thoughts to identify it, she recognized the robot from her history lessons. Bigger than a normal Sentinel, marked with different colors, it was unmistakable.
"Master Mold," she said, eyes flying open. Trask was going to activate it -
In the space between breaths she vanished from the catwalk and materialized in front of the man and his machine.
"Stop this right now!" she ordered.
Trask jerked back and nearly lost his footing on the platform. She was an impressive figure, she knew; bold tattoos on her face, wreathed in psychic energy that looked uncannily like fire, levitating without effort. On the other side of the room she saw real fire, and smoke, beginning to crawl across the floor. Time was running out in more ways than one.
"Not a chance, mutant," he spat, and reached for the control console just beyond his arm's length.
"I can make you stop," she said, lowering herself onto the platform and forcing Trask to back up to avoid contact with her. "I can make your brain disconnect from your body. I can make you forget your entire life. I could do anything I wanted and you wouldn't be able to lift a finger in your own defense."
Trask snorted but took another step back, resting his hands on the control console behind him. "Typical. You genetrash are all the same, Jean Grey - you and your threats of violence against defenseless humans -"
"If you'd let me finish," Rachel interrupted, scowling at him. She had a terrible temper - just like her mother - and Trask was pushing his luck. "First of all, I'm not Jean. If you had half a brain you would see that. And I could do all of those things, but I won't. Because we 'genetrash' are not all the same. Some of us are -"
Trask cut her off with a venomous, "Poison in the system."
Rachel's frayed temper came dangerously close to cracking, which would spell disaster since her powers were also cresting out of her control. She fought it all down with a concentration that made her almost physically ill, but couldn't prevent herself from retorting: "The system is nature and nature erases its mistakes!"
"Sometimes," Trask said, suddenly gone cold and imperious, "nature needs help."
And with that, he reached back with one hand and defiantly pressed the button that finished Master Mold's initiation sequence. Rachel turned and saw the robot's eyes beginning to light up. She saw more than that - she saw her family destroyed, her home destroyed, her mind and body shackled, her entire dismal world, her every fear, rising into existence in the twin glow of yellow sensors. As soon as Master Mold powered up, it would go online and that would be it.
The end.
Her heart stopped; it froze. She froze. In that last vital moment, she failed. She could not use an iota of her infinite power.
A small, black shape suddenly flashed across the robot's face, breaking Rachel from her near-trance. She recognized X23 as the younger girl landed heavily on her feet on the platform and straightened, tossing her hair over one shoulder.
X23 gave Trask a smile that was half fang and half maliciousness personified. "Boom."
Behind her, the tiny explosive disc stuck to Master Mold's face exploded. It was a huge sound for such a little object and bounced around the room several times, making the walls and the platform shake. Rachel projected a TK shield automatically - she could make bubbles in her sleep - and protected all of them, even Trask, from the debris. The robot collapsed into an unidentifiable heap in a series of smaller failures, and was swallowed up in its own flame.
A few chunks of metal and circuitboards bounced across the floor of the platform despite Rachel's bubble, trailing acrid smoke. One rolled to a stop a few inches from Bolivar Trask's feet.
"Animal!" he roared, as wounded and furious as if they had killed his flesh-and-blood son - who by now, Rachel knew, was well on his way to safety. "That's my life's work you just destroyed!"
X23's slitted grin grew wider by another few teeth. Rachel stared and breathed with a relief so vast it fairly washed her away.
On this night, as everyone in Rachel's "family" knew, X23 had tried to break into the Sentinel factory, and had been killed in the process. A single mutant couldn't hope to accomplish something like that, not without a significant distraction, not without a tremendous amount of luck. And no one had been unluckier in their short, brutal life than X23.
That wasn't where the bad news ended, though. In ten years, driven by the heartless logic and intelligence of their Master Mold, the Sentinels would take over America. Then North America. And then they would set their sights on the world and start an unwinnable nuclear war in the process - but not before they systematically captured, enslaved, and killed every mutant they came across. Millions would die. Billions.
But because Rachel had been there, because X23 had lived, none of it would ever happen.
"I think it was for the best," Rachel said.
Trask's attention jerked to Rachel, and as soon as his eyes were off of X23, she made her move.
It was a fast charge, hand claws out and gleaming even in the poor light. There was no doubt in anyone's mind, least of all X23's, that she meant to kill the creator of the Sentinels, the greatest human danger to all mutantkind, the same type of person who would raise a mutant child up to be an ultimate weapon and then order it executed when it failed to obey.
"Stop!" Rachel cried. She put a quick hand to her temple and sent a concentrated burst of telepathy - a psibolt - at X23. It hit the younger mutant without visible damage, but her knees buckled and she collapsed at Trask's feet, boneless and spineless. Her claws retracted with a soft snickt, scoring the metal floor of the platform with four thin grooves.
Her earlier speech and her action against X23 notwithstanding, Rachel had no intention of letting Trask escape now. She pinned him with a telekinetic field and knelt beside X23, helping her to sit up. She'd overdone the psibolt a touch without meaning to; it was getting harder to keep track of where her power levels were, which put urgency into her voice: "X23, you have to leave. You have to go to the X-Men."
Despite a look of intense concentration, X23's eyes were swimming in and out of focus, and Rachel knew it was an effort for her to even stay conscious. Still, X23 was Wolverine's daughter, and she demanded clearly enough, "The X-Men?"
"Go," Rachel said. "Have the old man take you to the nearest town and then go. Don't stop, don't look back. You know how important my parents are to the future - you're the only person who knows. You're the only one who can keep watch over them."
"I'm not leaving," X23 snarled, but her eyes had gone unfocused again and she was swaying where she sat. Rachel concentrated, found Albert Jethro and his dog and his truck a dozen miles away, and with a sharp stab of guilt, took away X23's right to choose.
It was too important. Someone had to be there with the X-Men. Someone had to be on that team who knew what could happen, would happen, might happen next. It couldn't be her; if she stayed, she would be placing the entire space-time continuum in jeopardy.
So it would have to be X23.
"I'm sorry," she told her new friend, her new sister, "but you are."
X23 jerked her head up, but Rachel was already teleporting the younger mutant away in a surge of flame-colored psionic energy. X23 had no choice, really, no matter whether or not Rachel teleported her, no matter whether or not Rachel buried telepathic orders inside the girl's brain.
Obedience had been engraved into the very core of X23's being from her first days. She might chafe at orders, she might delibrately act against them, but in the end she would always follow them. And never know why.
The lingering effects of the memory dump and the psibolt would slow X23 down a bit, as would the post-hypnotic suggestion she'd tacked on at the end, but the younger mutant would get to New York within the next few days. There was no longer any reason to worry about that.
Satisfied, if not proud, Rachel turned her attention to Bolivar Trask, who stepped backwards hastily. "Don't worry, Dr. Trask, X-Men don't kill."
"You're not one of the X-Men," Trask said, wary. He'd been listening to her after all.
"That's true," she agreed, although not without a touch of irony. She was, after all, the last X-Man, even if her camp uniform proclaimed her to be only a lowly Mutant. "But like the man said, darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that."
He took another step back anyway, visibly panicked. The tattoos on her face, she knew, were scaring him more than anything else. She found it amusing. "What are -?"
"I'm going to bring you light. I'm going to bring you truth," she said, reaching out and pressing two fingertips briefly to his forehead. "The truth will set you free."
Trask's body twitched and shivered as though she'd passed an electric current through it, and then his eyes widened. Within their depths flickered the spark of revelation.
"Free," he echoed - dazed, but not dumb. Troubled, but not uncomprehending. That pleased her more than anything else she'd done in the last few hours.
She dropped her hand to his shoulder, patted it as though he were a small child. "We have to fight to keep our freedom, Dr. Trask."
He nodded, still reeling from the power of the truth. She saw it from his perspective and was momentarily shaken by the amount of change: he was reevaluating his entire life, seeing things from the vantage point she had given him. Change. His ideas were undergoing a radical mutation of their own.
Bolivar Trask looked at her - and she looked through his eyes and saw not the tattooed freak of a few moments before, but a sober young woman with a halo of fire. And then the fire flared out and rushed over him, in a red-gold tapestry that swallowed all his vision.
There were flames everywhere, she saw, now that she was no longer occupied with Bolivar. The entire room was being devoured and the smoke was becoming so thick that it was interfering with her vision. She 'ported back to the catwalk instinctively, getting out of the box with its slowly burning corpse of a dead dream and a dead future. She leaned over the railing and looked out at the main shaft.
Fire and smoke were billowing freely, fueled by the grease and oil of the Sentinel assembly lines. She closed her eyes and felt out the along the structure of the building, felt the stress lines and warps and fractures; the damage that she and X23 had caused was not catastrophic, but if she had her way, the building would not maintain integrity for much longer regardless.
"It's the end of the world, Franklin," she said to the destruction. "Just me and the fire. I guess it's time for a rebirth."
Franklin, her Franklin, the young man she loved from the deepest parts of her soul, was gone - lost with a future that couldn't exist after this night. But she felt the whisper brush of his thoughts, and the warm touch of his hand, and she knew that he was still with her. Somehow.
Rachel took a breath and gagged on oily smoke. It was time for her to stop fighting the inevitable. It was time for her to let go and be carried along by the surging tide of her destiny.
It was time for a rebirth.
"I am fire made flesh," she proclaimed, voice rising in volume and confidence as she went. "I am life incarnate -!"
She flung her arms wide, rising upwards on her thoughts, and felt the psychic fire flare out all around her. The destruction had sped up, feeding on itself; debris from the falling ceiling hit her fledging fire-raptor but disintegrated against the telekinetic shield that it provided.
She could not be stopped now. Her ascent had begun in full force and in another few heartbeats, there would be no boundaries against her. The knowledge came with fear, but she pushed it away. A dark side couldn't scare her, not when she had succeeded. Not when she was rising. Not when every cell in her body was swelling with the crescendo of her song.
With a triumphant unfurling of her psychic wings, she burst through the roof and into the remains of the night. The raptor blossomed out, expanding to fill the available space-time, glowing white-hot around the comparatively small shape of her body. Where her wings brushed the rocks, the desert sand turned to glass - and yet the handful of people unlucky enough to still be trapped within the factory were unharmed by those very flames as she teleported them to safety. It was all according to her whim, her desire, her thought. The tiniest of atoms were falling under her sway.
She gathered up a goddess' spear of fiery thought and sent it plunging down, the way Ororo had once - was still - would yet - dropped lightning from the heavens.
Beneath her, the Sentinel factory exploded, and the canyon was filled with a thunderous, earth-shaking fireball that burned the sky and swallowed her raptor altogether. She touched the minds of those still watching, felt the razor pain of loss within more than one. Inside the flames of the fireball, inside her own flames, she continued the unstoppable flight of her ascent.
She soared up and up and up on an endless spiral of exhiliration as her powers unfolded to their absolute maximum limits - except they had no limits. She felt herself reaching the point of infinity, felt herself touching the entire universe all at once, all at once, and for less than a millionth of a second while she existed at her zenith, she was fire and life incarnate. Now and forever -
I am Phoenix!, she sang out to the universe. Her raptor threw back its head and keened a fierce hawk's call.
Three thousand miles away, in Bayville, New York, Jean Grey grabbed at her temples and cried out.
And Rachel Summers vanished.