Unexpected Companions: Part One

by Persephone

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 statement, 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.

**********

They took him home, of course.

Cable went back to Earth with them, seemingly in shock, and promptly disappeared again two minutes and forty seconds after landing. So did Domino. The natural supposition (which was in fact accurate) was that they had disappeared together. Members of X-Force who were fairly well disposed toward both parties regarded this as somewhat encouraging, if irritating, and due to a lack of further data no one could really contradict them.

X-Force, not surprisingly, was moved en masse into Xavier's mansion. Some of them made a fuss. Sam wound up as a sort of liaison, once a reconciliation was induced regarding the surrounding issues. Sam's having been drawn off to the X-Men, the X-Men's having imprisoned X-Force, the X-Men's having now taken in the man who'd done what they'd been pursuing Cable for at the time... that sort of thing.

As a matter of fact, the X-Men were still, or again, pursuing Cable. After a fashion. More accurately, they were trying to find him, and encountering a distinct lack of success. Cerebro could not locate him. The combined efforts of all the telepaths they could bring to bear could not locate him.

"Stryfe, are you sure you can't --"

"Think about what you are asking for a few minutes. If Nathan and I could find one another telepathically as a general rule, at least one of us would have been dead for several years by now."

**********

The watching Nathan, of course, knew exactly where his alternate had gone. Greymalkin. He had essentially fled there when it really registered that Stryfe was being taken in as Scott's and Jean's son, and a sort of ward of the X-Men. Of course, he also thought he himself was the clone, still, and Stryfe the original.

Nathan could only imagine how those would have felt, in combination -- there was, of course, no way he would have come to any conclusion other than that he would be unwelcome, to say the least, even though as an observer with a little distance he could see that no one had tried to exclude him.

He was only surprised that his alternate had had the presence of mind and the confidence to ask Domino to accompany him -- and somewhat that she'd been willing to do so. It wasn't, though, as if they'd really abandoned X-Force; the kids could do just fine without them, and had all the X-Men as mentors if they wanted them.

Now, there was a daunting thought....

So the timeline had been different because the Stryfe dozing on the other side of the fire had had sense enough, or nerve enough, or something, to take Jean at her word. Cable still had doubts about how much sense Jean had been exhibiting when she made the offer, but given this Stryfe's behavior to date, apparently there hadn't been too much of a backlash.

After a few more moments of reflection and some calming breaths, he looked back into the scryer. Fascinating, the way it showed him the timeline and yet almost told it as a story, half-buried beneath conscious perception.

The next scene he chose to watch was actually a little earlier, coming before they'd really had a chance to start seeking their Cable. It also showed a little more of the bent Illyana had mentioned, toward focusing on her and Stryfe. A blink, an intention, and he was drawn almost into the scene of their first meeting....

**********

Having just gotten back, the X-Men apparently considered introductions to be in order. "...And this is Illyana, my little sister," Piotr was saying. Stryfe forbore to point out in exasperation that he already knew perfectly well who she was, and in fact knew perfectly well who all of them were, and had studied them in considerable detail. This was probably wise.

There was also to be considered the fact that while he could identify each member of the X-Men, not to mention assorted associates and satellites thereof, on sight, his predictions regarding their behavior -- at least Scott's and Jean's -- had failed, and failed in spectacular fashion. This rendered him more cautious than usual. Wary.

Secretly, he was both cynical about the likelihood they were sincere, and dubious about their sanity if they in fact were. Of course, he hoped the latter, and that they wouldn't come to their senses any time soon. Stryfe would, he decided, rather to his own alarm, genuinely prefer to die than find Jean's offer false, or revoked.

He was... fearful?

Stryfe slammed that thought instantly and furiously into the back of his mind and tried to ignore it, concentrating instead on the present as Colossus picked up the small blonde girl -- about nine years old, it appeared, though chronologically she should be a year or so older. She'd lost the time she spent with the New Mutants as well as that in Limbo, during the still-bewildering chain of events two years ago.

Illyana was comfortable, cheerful, and quite without fear, perched on her brother's hip and encircled by his arm. She regarded Stryfe with wide, dark blue eyes and only looked a little bit shy. "My precious Snowflake -- Illyana, meet Str-- er, Christopher." Piotr looked toward Scott for confirmation.

"Snowflake?" Stryfe muttered. "You are aware most of the snowflakes I've encountered in my life have been corrosive?"

Colossus drew his brows together, eyes darkening a little at the less than civil response. Illyana, either too innocent to consider that she might have just been insulted or simply too inclined toward friendliness to assume it, twisted slightly in his arms and smiled, appeared to consider, and then held out the pine branch she'd been carrying.

Stryfe looked at it in some confusion. She shook it a little and held it out farther. He took the branch, rather uncertainly, but felt completely ridiculous carrying it around and handed it back at the first opportunity. Illyana, by that time on her own feet again and running around, nonplussed him completely by shortly leaving it on the ground on her way to some other game.

**********

Cable stopped to consider. There was something odd about the cast of that first meeting, as shown in the scryer; it hadn't really meant a lot to either one of them at the time, though in retrospect it had taken on a little more significance, almost more intellectual than otherwise. Still, he wasn't sure whether or not the device would have shown it to him had he not specifically thought to seek Illyana's and Stryfe's first meeting.

He relaxed his mind a little, choosing by some instinct or feeling he couldn't quite identify a specific kind of relaxation that seemed to cause the bizarre device to skim through events in a way that gave him a general sense of things, but gave it a certain freedom in what it showed.

There was something obscurely satisfying about learning that Stryfe was not so very readily accepted -- oh, everyone tried, to be sure, but for obvious reasons tended to be uneasy around him. And of course Stryfe could tell. He would have had to be not only mindblind but fantastically oblivious to avoid noticing.

Xavier was exceedingly polite and outwardly unflappable, and never in word or gesture made reference in Stryfe's presence to the bandage around his head. The two tended to prefer not being in one another's company, however, perhaps due in part to the instinctive tensing that occurred in everyone else present whenever they were. Every other mind in the room was always on the topic, it seemed.

Conversation with Warren was especially interesting. A few days after everyone returned from the moon, things seemed to be settling down when Warren happened to give an account of his last encounter with Apocalypse. Stryfe's roar of "You just LEFT him there ALIVE?" rattled the windows, and he was all for going back in the remote hope of finding and finishing off the Egyptian External.

Cable, frankly, could sympathize. All hearers, however, seemed more of the opinion that Stryfe was simply overreacting. Stryfe went back anyway, surreptitiously, in the course of a series of excursions that Cable realized with a kind of morbid thrill were primarily aimed at retrieving or deactivating all specimens of Legacy. It would appear that the plague had been released, in his own timeline, sometime very close to Stryfe's death.

Well, that only made sense, if Stryfe had thought of it as a "legacy." But hadn't Xavier named it? Maybe Xavier had known more than he was telling. He usually did.

The relatively bland documentary unreeling itself sedately against mind-blanketing liquid silver-white suddenly grew more vivid, resolving with a feeling of sliding into place from summaries and generalities and samples -- all pervaded by mixed apprehension, resentment, and cautious hope from Stryfe, and by blithe joy from Illyana -- into a specific setting and event, at first glance far too serenely domestic for any real drama.

Nathan was almost made dizzy for a moment as he noticed the plurality of viewpoints, both physical and mental -- views from opposite directions that somehow left the laws of perspective perfectly intact, thoughts and emotions from separate people alternating or jostling together.

He was only disoriented, but wondered briefly how long it took non-telepaths to adjust to the divergences -- before surrendering to the fascination the scene almost seemed to hold for the device itself.

**********

Stryfe was sitting in a comfortable, deep armchair with a book to which he was paying limited attention. Scott and Jean were sharing the sofa and, judging from the quantity of newsprint, three or four different newspapers. Piotr was painting the scene. Stryfe appeared to be trying to ignore him.

Illyana was perched behind her big brother, leaning on his back to watch him paint and sniffling intermittently with a winter cold. It was getting boring, though, and she wanted a lap. And Piotr was busy, and Scott's and Jean's both had papers in them.

She headed over to the armchair, picking up a slightly battered copy of _The Velveteen Rabbit_ on her way, and climbed into the large silver-haired man's lap. He wasn't doing anything, just staring into the fire more than he looked at his own book...

The person who owned the lap jumped and looked down in shock. "Read to me?" Illyana asked with her best irresistibly cold-roughened voice and pleading eyes.

"Read?" Stryfe asked blankly, still lost in a strange land.

Illyana held up the book. "I'm bored and I feel yucky..."

Stryfe took the book, as he was obviously supposed to do, and tried to restrain the half-afraid nervousness at having his personal space invaded without so much as a "please." "Read... this aloud?"

At least she had gotten the word right; for a minute she'd almost wondered. Illyana squirmed slightly, sniffed again, and nestled against him. "Please?"

Stryfe fought back the instincts. She was a small, sick child. He did not need to check her for weapons.

She rubbed the back of her hand under her nose. He wasn't answering. "Everybody else is busy," she said carefully. "Please read to me?" Illyana squirmed again and scooted a bit sideways. His lap was awfully hard, like he was tense. Her lip trembled slightly. "If... you don't want me here, I'll go..."

If he didn't comply, they'd think he wasn't trying. How hard could it be? Well, mortifying, but he didn't see much of a choice. If you didn't treat sick children nicely, you were a Bad Person. "Fine. But bear in mind, as English is neither your first language or mine, I'm not sure how much you will be able to understand."

Illyana nodded, a little reassured. She didn't mention that she knew the story by heart already. He might refuse then. She nestled down.

Piotr, who had looked over first in guilt and then in some alarm at Illyana's previous two comments, relaxed slightly.

Just as he got the book open to the first page, Illyana picked up her head again from where she'd rested it on his rib cage. Her nose was running slightly. "Are you sure you don't mind?" she asked anxiously, and rather stuffily. "You're..." she hesitated briefly, "tense."

Jean looked over and gave a very tiny, approving smile. Not that Stryfe was looking her way. She telekinetically lofted the Kleenex box over to the table beside the armchair. It looked like it might be needed.

Stryfe looked down at the small blonde child and wondered how in the world such a creature had survived Limbo, based on what he'd been able to find out about the place. He looked at her face, looked at the box of tissues that had just floated over to him, and tried not to grimace in disgust. Fortunately, telekinesis did mean he didn't actually have to HOLD the tissue to wipe her nose.... The point became moot, as she took the tissue and did it herself anyway.

She was still looking at him expectantly with gigantic, slightly worried dark-blue eyes. Oath, she expected him to answer her... and she'd just announced to the entire ROOM that he wasn't relaxed.

"Just a little uncomfortable." That was definitely the truth. He lifted her a smidge telekinetically and made a small show of rearranging himself. What do I do if she falls off? "There, much better." Forcing himself to relax, he looked at the book. Illyana settled herself between his arms so he could still turn the pages, and looked expectant.

Horribly aware that Jean was watching his every move, he tentatively opened the book. There seemed to be... an awful lot of pictures.

Illyana settled down anew and leaned her head on Stryfe's chest, sighing happily at the sight of the first familiar picture. It felt so much better, having somebody nice and warm to sit on when you were sick.

He hadn't started yet. Perhaps she should make polite conversation; he hadn't read to her before, after all. "Do you like rabbits?" she asked, craning her head back so she could see his face. Or at least his chin.

Stryfe thought quickly. He did remember tasting rabbit once... but that wasn't what she was asking. "I... am not sure. I haven't met one."

"I have." Her neck was starting to hurt a little bit, so she looked back at the book. "Some of them are to eat, and some of them are for pets. The pet ones are cuddly and they like carrots. Toy ones aren't really either one, but they're still cuddly. But I'd rather have my Bamf."

Stryfe took a deep breath and recited to himself, "This is a small child. She is not a threat. And I am supposed to be 'nice' to her," silently like a mantra, and finally located the story's first words. And blinked at them.

"There was once a vel- velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid. He was fat and... bunchy, as a rabbit should be; his coat was spotted brown and white, he had real thread whiskers, and his ears were lined with pink sateen." Stryfe winced slightly and eyed the picture. It looked far too Christmassy for his comfort.

Illyana always liked commenting in between lines, and only hushed if it really bothered people. "He was cute. But not cuddled yet." She patted one of the large arms she was sitting between. "That comes later."

"I'm sure it does."

On the couch, Scott looked up curiously. Then he grinned and looked back down, pretending not to notice. Fighting back a blush (chaos bringers don't blush, even if he wasn't being one actively anymore), Stryfe continued. "On Christmas morning, when he sat wedged in the top of the Boy's stocking, with a sprig of holly between his paws, the effect was charming." The room's other occupants were certainly liking it. Illyana didn't seem to notice.

"Holly's a funny plant. It's very prickly. But people like decorating with it anyway."

Illyana decided that Stryfe was pausing longer than made much sense. Maybe he would rather just talk. She didn't mind, as long as she could sit and snuggle up on his lap. Or maybe she ought to quit interrupting the story? She looked up at him again, coughing a little bit. "I'll stop talking in between if you don't like me to," she chirped meekly.

Jean, smiling fondly into her newspaper, tried to squelch a hint of disappointment. The "in between" conversations sounded as if they might be VERY interesting to listen in on. Granted her son looked utterly mortified... but then, he was so cute that way...

Which was a rather unmotherly sentiment, perhaps, but... no it wasn't, she decided firmly, recalling the amusement with which her own mother had periodically told embarrassing stories.

Stryfe closed his eyes for a second and thought of past battles he really wasn't supposed to be proud of anymore. I can win against a book. "I will keep reading; say what you like. It's your story."

Illyana, ill as she felt, beamed up at him, a sudden wash of happiness going through her that he'd read to her and let her talk too. "Thank you!"

There was probably no psi on earth who could have completely blocked out perception of quite such a spontaneous emotional rush, despite the deceptive simplicity of its cause. At any rate, if there was one, it wasn't Stryfe. Not when his primary focus the past few minutes had been keeping his own emotions in. He blinked down at the small golden head.

Holding onto the contented feeling and taking a deep breath, Stryfe set out to do war for his small patron. He struggled through the opening paragraphs, then rallied magnificently at the prejudice of the more modern toys. If he ignored the childish language, it was a rather nice metaphor.

"They weren't very nice," Illyana inserted, naively but accurately enough. "I don't much like them. But maybe they didn't know any better."

Jean noticed the abrupt improvement as Stryfe progressed more comfortably when he reached one of the more negative portions of the book, and raised an eyebrow. Well, perhaps it was only to be expected.

"Maybe they were jealous, and tried to make themselves feel more important by focusing on what they thought made them special," Stryfe said with a restrained hint of irony and a baleful glance in Jean's direction.

Illyana looked up at him with a rather more considering statement than he would have expected from such a tiny face. "Do people do that a lot?"

"More often than they think they do."

She looked down at the book again. "I guess the other toys didn't think that was what they were doing either. They really thought they were better, didn't they?" She sighed. "So they were mean. That's very sad."

The other adults in the room exchanged looks.

Stryfe noted the looks and bit back a comment on how it was sometimes quite fun, simply clearing his throat and moving onto comparative Realness.

Illyana snuggled down. This had always been one of her favorite parts.

"...'The Boy's Uncle made me Real,' he said. 'That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always.'"

"Are people ever not Real?"

The question was completely innocent, but managed to send the entire room into silence and immobility but for the crackle of the fireplace.

"No," Stryfe said flatly. "People are always real. Everyone. Always."

"That's what I thought," Illyana replied, relaxing a bit more again. "And I guess if they weren't I'd just have to go love them so they got that way."

Jean pressed a hand hard to her mouth behind the newspaper, trying to quell both the urge to laugh that bubbled up behind her lips and the tears that sprang to her eyes.

It was very hard to strike Stryfe quite speechless, but the unfamiliar feeling racing though him stole all the words away. For a moment he just stared down at the strange little girl who wasn't at all as he'd thought she was. "That... that would probably work quite fast on people."

"You wouldn't even need to use the magic from the fairy," Illyana agreed. "They're already people."

"Fairy?" Stryfe asked weakly.

"Keep reading."

**********

He did, but Cable shook his head and quit watching before the book was over. Seeing Stryfe read sentimental children's literature aloud with a small child on his lap beat out a lot of the weirder universes he'd run across lately, for sheer incongruity. Had his clone really thought he'd get kicked out for not reading to Illyana?

Apparently the practice kept up, though. Mindful of the fact that the people whose past he was watching were only a few feet away, Cable tried not to snicker aloud at either the renditions of assorted Dr. Seuss books, or at Stryfe's consternation when the nickname "Snowflake" first slipped off his tongue.

_Pride and Prejudice_ and _Jane Eyre_ surprised him slightly, though he wondered if the title of the first hadn't gotten Stryfe curious. Nathan admitted grudgingly to himself that he shared a certain level of admiration with the rest of those who observed the reading aloud of _The Silmarillion_, _The Hobbit_, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy -- along with _War and Peace_ (in Russian), _Alice in Wonderland_, and _Les Miserables_ all in the course of one snowbound week.

It was impressive as a feat of sheer vocal endurance, even if Illyana did join in for some of the "voices." She could in fact read English quite well; she just liked being read to out loud. As well as reading out loud -- she really made an excellent Galadriel.

Cable did stop and listen at full length to a lively discussion of correct pronunciation and accent based on Tolkien's own explanations, and to every song Illyana lilted through in the elf-tongue. She sang very prettily.

He couldn't help noticing that the little girl shared none of the uneasy suspicion or discomfort about Stryfe's presence, accepting it as a matter of course and -- after a little initial diffidence about asking him to do things -- treating him with the same sweetly confiding trust and naturalness she gave Piotr and her other favorite adults.

Despite clear evidence from his own immediate past that no such thing had happened, the only reason Nathan could watch this without waiting for and dreading the moment Stryfe turned on her in some horrifying fashion was the device's insistence on showing him the timeline as much from Stryfe's perspective as Illyana's.

The former Chaos-Bringer had no intention of harming her. The irony of the Legacy release in Nathan's own timeline was wrenching, but this Stryfe actually seemed to be getting fond of the child, even protective. She even knew he had been a villain, and as long as he wasn't being one anymore it made no difference to her. He wasn't the only one, after all.

Nathan suspected Illyana might not really have a clear sense of scale, but she genuinely wasn't concerned. And Stryfe, much to his surprise, instead of taking advantage of the lack of concern for dastardly purposes -- seemed almost unconsciously grateful for it.

Even if he wasn't always particularly gracious.

**********

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 statement 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 statement 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 statement 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 statement, 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.

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