The phone continued to ring for what must have felt like an eternity before her hand actually made contact with its slim surface. It was plastic; something she could have easily crushed with less time than it took to truly think to take the action. Then in a motion she wasn't quite aware she even knew, she flipped the phone open, listening to the voice on the other end.

Mr. Essex, someone on the other end said. I know this is probably not the best time to be contacting you about this, but all the necessary changes have been made at the cemetery. They have your wife ready to go back in her crypt, but I wanted to make sure that you'd had a chance to inspect the modifications. First thing in the morning will be fine for you to come back. Just as soon as you've had a chance to look things over, we'll be more than happy to put her back.

Lenneth refrained from making any noise at all and eventually the line went dead. His wife, a cemetery, a crypt. What had occurred and why did she have such a strong urge to view this body? It was there walking along her bones, trying to convince her that it would be no hardship for her to go to this cemetery. No, there was a flaw. She didn't know where the cemetery in question was. Then came a string of thoughts all of which centered around the phrase 'Burnt Heart'. What did a burnt heart have to do with any of this? She set the phone down on the table carefully. What was all of this? First she's fascinated by a hairbrush, then a clock, and now instead of following through with the orders she had been given, she wanted to make a side trip to a cemetery? Had she gone mad? Was this what it was like to be mad; to completely lose one's self to whatever strange forces seemed to coalesce around the mind?

Fingers combed through long white tresses. Part of her desperately wanted to seek her God and his guidance. He would understand where she did not. Yet she did not. Turning, she went back to the out of place clock and moved it to where it should have been in the first place. Then she went back to the second floor, climbed out the window, and onto the rooftop. Forget the mind, let the body lead, the body seemed to know the way. Directly to Burnt Heart Cemetery, the private Cemetery of the Ascher family.

Nathaniel's private lab was equipped with a phone and an answering machine. He generally didn't bother himself with something as pedestrian as answering the phone when he was in the middle of something he deemed vastly more important. In his world, everything was vastly more important than some little thing like a telephone. So the message waited for hours as he worked at the task he had set before himself. The task of resurrection.

He had long since stored the exact DNA combinations of his children in his brain, all five of them. It wasn't terribly hard. Lenneth had always made him promise that he would not do this. That he would never resurrect their children; she couldn't bear to look at clones knowing that she had failed to protect her own offspring originally. Now he was breaking that promise. It was for her own good. If nothing else would break the spell that Apocalypse had woven around her, it would be the voices of her children calling out their dissent. Each of them had learned to distrust, and it could even be called hate, Apocalypse for his role in their parents' lives.

Did he feel any kind of upset for the fact that he was breaking a promise to the woman he had at one point promised to love, honor, and cherish? No. He was doing this for her own good. She would see that once things were done, when the smoke finally cleared and she was herself again. Back at his side where she belonged.

Each of the florid green tubes he had set up to incubate the clones of his children was occupied before he finally sat down at would could have been called a desk and bothered with the phone message he had heard the machine pick up hours earlier.

It was an exact replica of the phone message that Lenneth had picked up when she chose to answer his cell phone. Sitting there at his desk, he had half a mind to simply pick up his phone, call the caretaker back, and say that he had no interest in seeing the modifications to the crypt. One hand rested on the phone receiver for a moment as he debated that decision. No, he picked up his hand again, resting it on top of a pile of notes he had taken on the early stages of incubation, he would go see the 'improvements' they had made to his wife's crypt, though that was not his wife who laid within it. He would once more remind himself that the body that had been desecrated by those who saw her as the bane of all existence was not the body of his wife. His wife, his Lenneth, still strode among the living, touched by a creature that he had devoted his existence to finding a way to destroy.

Locking his lab was simply a matter of leaving, the fail-safes automatically cued to fall into place with his absence. The children would grow undisturbed in his absence. Up the stairs and back into the hospital proper, he made sure to wave at the night security man, his persona as Dr. Essex firmly in place, one of the few nods he bothered with toward the human population and their comfort. It was easy enough to get a taxicab outside of his building.

"Burnt Heart Cemetery," he told the man without hesitation. The caretaker had said the next morning would be soon enough. There was nothing stopping him from taking his own tour that night and simply avoiding the inane chattering the next day. After all, by then, his clones would hopefully be nearly finished. Their oldest child would be awakening and asking for her mother. What would he tell her? He would tell her that her mother was no longer with him. Then he would wait, let them all gather together before he told them the story. Once they were all together, they would no doubt be a formidable enough force to stop the woman who had given birth to them in her tracks. Nathaniel Essex allowed himself to smile as he sat in the backseat of the taxi moving through the London traffic. Apocalypse was certainly the stronger, but he did not know the human heart like Sinister did after all the time that had elapsed. More, he didn't know Lenneth as Nathan did. How could he possibly.

--

The heavy trees of the cemetery seemed to whisper of old days to her as she walked along the graveled paths, eyes taking in every detail, more and more convinced that this place was somewhere that she had been before.

She knew if she crawled up into the lower branches of that oak, she would found a space where she had hidden trinkets during her childhood. Shaking her head, she tried to banish those thoughts. The certainty that she had no childhood forcing those false memories away.

The crypt beckoned her at the end of a path, drawing her toward her as if it held its arms open to her. The caretaker had reinforced the door, but that meant nothing to a woman who could eat metal with her touch. There was nothing but darkness inside the walls, darkness that gave Lenneth no pause and the body that was laid out waiting to be returned to its resting place.

"The late great Lady Lenneth Elizabeth Ascher-Essex," of course, she knew her name. Protocol 22 was famous around the world. The greatest killer of humans ever invented. Surpassing even the Black Death in its ferocity. "How much homage they show you now after your death?"

"How does it feel to look into a sad reproduction of your own face," Nathaniel stood in the doorway, the bare light of world outside the crypt streaming past him, throwing his shadow at her across the floor.

Finally, she did look, truly look, at the woman laid out on the slab before her. Those eyes, softly shut, the lips, all of her face. Every bit of her, who she was, looked so much like the face she had seen in the mirror for so many supposedly remembered years. Poisyn turned to Nathan, her pupils dominating her eyes.

He was standing at the counter, a plate had just landed on the floor at his feet. His hands were shaking.

"Nathan, what's wrong," was that her voice asking him that.

"Nathan, who am I?"