Fortress X to Utopia, Wednesday, Fandom Time
//Well, fuck me. This is a bit of a dog's dinner, isn't it?//
They'd been waiting at the gates, so to speak. Waiting for over an hour, now. It was dawn. The preaks -- precursors, humans -- always, always attacked at dawn. They'd attacked at dawn every day since Fortress X was new, and, as always, the mutants who could fight gathered at the force wall, waiting to fend off the attack.
//Could've had an extra bloody hour in bed.//
This morning, there was no attack. There were just a dozen tired mutants, standing around and feeling more and more like idiots for doing so.
"I don't get it," Allison was saying, somewhere behind Jonothon. "They always attack at dawn."
"Maybe we won. X, did we win?"
There was no answer from the fortress' security computer at all.
"Already tried that, Noriko," Allison noted. "Phone's off the hook."
"Stand firm, people," Cannonball was saying, eyes on the force wall, hands at his side, balled into tight fists. "The push is going to come. And we're going to be here to meet it."
"Actually…" Basilisk's own gaze didn't waver from the wall, either. "I've got a better idea."
"Basilisk, you will hold your damn position. Or I will bounce you back to the fortress and into the brig before your heels touch the ground."
Scott didn't seem too concerned about Guthrie's order.
"Three years, they stick with the same tactics. And then today they don't even bother to show."
"Get back in line, soldier."
"That's a little crazy, isn't it? A little hard to explain. Lot of things that are hard to explain. Like how come the soldiers we fight sometimes have the same names and numbers, the same dog tags." Scott held up a pair of tags at arm's length for everyone to see. "As if someone's making this stuff up on the win, and getting sloppy with the details."
"This is not the time," Cannonball growled. "We're about to go into battle."
"Except we can't throw a battle if nobody comes. Listen to me, Guthrie. All of you. Just listen. Box, what was it you said to me about the stars?"
"Huh?" Everyone turned their attention to the man in the metal suit, who popped his faceplate, looking around a little perplexed before he started talking. "Well, they… they don't read right. No red or blue shift. Which would mean the universe stopped expanding. And they're too close. As though the light's just coming off the force walls themselves."
"Detail, again," Scott noted.
"What are you even saying, Summers? That this is a stage set? That God's getting lazy?" Guthrie's tone was starting to lose its calm. "Not one thing you've said makes any kind of sense."
"Exactly. That's my point. None of this makes sense, and until it does, I'm not fighting any more." Scott turned and started walking back toward the fortress. "My new job is looking for answers, and I'm starting at the top. Anyone else who's interested can come with me."
"You will hold position," Cannonball stressed. "Everyone will hold position until the General tells us otherwise."
There was a moment of awkward silence while a handful of mutants looked at Scott's back, retreating toward the building, looking for answers to questions they hadn't even thought to ask.
And then they all stood and headed inside after him, leaving Sam Guthrie standing on the field alone, waiting for the attacker that wasn't coming.
----
"I know you all, but you don't know me." Everyone was gathered inside, listening to a man they had never seen before talk to them as though they were family. "The time and the place in which you knew me have been stolen from you. It was -- literally -- in another world. But that world is the real one, where you were born and made. This world is a fantasy. A skein of nonsense. Its architect was a diseased mind. A fragment of a mind, rather, sick and mad and at war with itself. I did my best to stop it, but I failed, and I fell. That was all I knew, until Magneto woke me. I can't explain all this to you in words. I don't have the time. But I can show you. I can make you experience it, exactly as it happened. It is the moment when this world was born, and when your lives spun out of their orbits. Share it. And understand."
The images that washed through the minds of the mutants gathered were altogether unfamiliar, but they felt right. A place called Utopia, seven days ago. Two men standing over the body of a young man in a coma, the body of one of their own Force Warriors, Legion, laying in a coma. One of those men was the one who was sharing these images with them now. The other was a man in a clean white suit.
They were arguing.
"We've gone beyond mere discussion, Nemesis. I told you what your methods were doing to my son."
"I'm curing him of his identity disorder. Deleting his alternate personalities do that his mind can repair itself."
They argued back and forth for a while, about progress, about damage made. Nemesis insisted that he was making progress, and this Professor was arguing that they couldn't predict just what reaction they were dragging out of Legion with what they were doing.
They wandered into Legion's mind, then. The Professor, Nemesis, and every mutant sharing the vision with them. Inside the head of who they recognized as one of their heroes, there were cells, prison cell among prison cell, each containing what looked like their own kind. A mutant a cell. Chamber shuddered -- he'd seen enough prison cells holding mutants in his lifetime to be uncomfortable with what he was watching. He'd seen enough to want out.
He didn't speak up to stop this. Nobody did.
The mutants inside the cells were almost all rotten corpses.
Nemesis screamed for the Professor to leave. The Professor refused, swearing to find out what happened to the parts of his son's mind that were in those cages.
"I ate them." A shaky rumble, barely a voice at all, echoing through their minds, a voice inside a broken man's head, manifesting now as a giant mass of flesh and rage. "You should have left him alone! All you had to do was leave him alone!"
It picked up the professor and threw him around like a ragdoll. A new persona, a psychic antibody that existed to chase out the people who had invaded Legion's mind.
And at the creature's core, a face. The face of the women that the mutants of Fortress X knew as Moira, Legion's mother.
The Professor knew her face, too. And he paused, just long enough for the creature to grab him again.
"Not Moira," it chided, in her all-too-familiar voice, "but her face bought me a moment's advantage. I like it. I think I'll keep it for a while. You come here! You cage us! Hurt the Legion, who is our home! But I can heal him. That's what I was built for. All the little pieces of his mind, and your mind, and the other minds here. I can weave a world out of them. Better than the one they've got."
"Dear God! It -- Nemesis! -- Warn Scott! Its power is--"
"I can make a home for him."
And then the sun went out.
"And us the rest of you for furniture!"
And then the world went out.
----
"Seven days?" Scott was the first to speak up as the vision ended, looking incredulously at the man who called himself the Professor. "That's all it's been? All of this was just--?"
"No!" Legion's cry of protest made half the people there jump. "A fake world, inside of a -- a bubble? He's lying! He's lying to trick us!"
"I concur," X spoke up, finally. The first time anyone had heard the Fortress' security system speak up all day. "Analysis of Charles Xavier's heart rate and skin moisture confirms that he's lying. Everything he says is lies."
"Whether you speak through the woman I loved, or the computer voice called X, you're still the same entity," the Professor said, bowing his head. "Neither a human nor a mutant, but a monster that incubated in my son's mind."
"Who's the monster here, you stinking, bald speck?" Moira stepped out from the shadows, a small box tucked away under her arm. "This is their shelter -- their last refuge -- and you want to take it away from them!"
"This is no shelter. This is a dollhouse you built for my son to play in."
Legion was ignoring the Professor entirely now, in favor of throwing his arms around his mother.
"Moira! Thank God! The things he put in my head--"
"Lies, David. Hideous, filthy lies. He has mind-powers. It's dangerous even to listen to him."
"Look at this place, David," the Professor broke in. "Were you happy here? She meant you to be. You're respected, even loved. The hero you always wanted to be. But it's only a dream… and it's falling apart at the seams."
"It's no dream," the woman -- Moira? -- protested.
"No? Then why do the human battalions disappear when your attention is elsewhere? As soon as anyone takes a close look at your Fortress X, the cracks start to show."
"The threat is real," Moira snarled, holding the box she had been carrying up over her head. The window behind her exploded inward. "And it's always there. If you relax for even a moment, it will swallow you. This-- this is what you get for listening to him!"
Megan, flying up near the window, made the mistake of looking outside.
"Oh, sweet God! Guys, we've got incoming! We've got all kinds of incoming! The walls are coming down!"
Outside the fortress, more weaponized aircraft than anyone could count were coming in fast, destruction their only goal. Inside, 'Moira' was yelling madness, how this was their own fault, how they brought the walls down themselves. They did this.
"Force Warriors," Cannonball was yelling, making his way out of the building, "we're gonna need a miracle. What can you give me?"
"They've got tanks," Psylocke replied, "and air support, and a million troops already coming through. I think it's far too late for miracles, Sam."
"Then you're on the front lines, with everybody else. Go to standing orders, people. Protect the fortress at any cost. Do whatever you've got to do to keep it intact. And we'll see who's still standing when the all-clear sounds!"
----
If inside was madness, outside was like stepping into the mouth of hell itself.
"This is insane," Iceman was yelling as they emerged into the fray. "How do we fight against these odds?"
"Couple of hundred thousand to one?" Basilisk was reaching for his faceplate as he spoke. "Look on the bright side, Drake… It's going to be really hard to miss."
Somewhere in the distance, Namor grabbed a gunship and threw it at another. The resulting explosion was somewhat satisfying, even drowned out in the chaos as it was.
A preak in a giant mechanized suit of armor was stomping on Frenzy. She dealt with it by picking it up and throwing it away.
"Gotta love that woman," Chamber heard Basilisk say.
//From a safe distance, mate.//
Jonothon punctuated that sentence by lighting a human's face on fire.
"This is Frenzy we're talking about. There is no safe distance."
----
Still inside, Moira opened up a box, looking into it at the universe she'd tucked away.
She started a fire.
And she threw the entire reality into it.
But a ghost of a woman caught it just in time
A terrorist fashioned into a general offered her some cover as she tried to escape.
And Legion came around the corner into a room that had been all but demolished, and asked her to tell her what there was in this reality that was left to save.
----
The humans had blown the fortress down.
"Can't believe they'd make such an obvious mistake," Hellion yelled from above.
"What?" Jubilee sounded more than a little confused, where she was fighting on the ground. "What do you mean?"
"We got nowhere to retreat to now. Makes things a lot simpler."
----
"I told you! I told you not to listen," Moira was screaming, in the wreckage of the room. "He's poisoned your mind against me! He's filled your head with lies!"
"He showed me, Moira. I can't pretend I didn't see. And I hate that this is all my fault."
"Fault? What fault? Whose fault? They were ripping pieces out of your mind! They were killing you by inches!"
"That still doesn't make this -- any of it -- bearable. Moira, you took away the whole world and left us… this. A few square miles of rubble. A tower, and a war that never ends. Did you really think that would be enough?"
"I'll do better." Moira threw her arms around Legion, sobbing into his shoulder. "I'll do better! Making worlds is the only power I've got, and I'd never used it before. Of course I made mistakes. But next time will be perfect!"
"It's okay," Legion murmured. "It's okay."
"I… I'll make things right. I promise."
"We both will. It's down to both of us."
And, as Legion absorbed the fragment of himself that was Moira back into his body, a box containing an entire universe fell to the floor.
----
The attackers faded.
"Who cares about you," Legion had muttered. "You're nothing but a pack of cards."
And he descended down on the handful of surviving mutants with an apology on his lips.
"I'll get you home presently. As soon as I can figure out how this works."
"Do you know what you're doing, David?"
"I've absorbed Moira back into my mind. In theory, I can do anything she could have done."
"No offense, ami, but you're holding the whole of creation in your hands. So 'in theory' doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence."
Legion took Gambit's words in stride.
"We could stay here. That's the only alternative. But I don't think this reality is even stable anymore. It wasn't very well made to begin with. So I have to do this. And the way it works… there isn't any way to take a practice run."
And with that and a flash of white light, the world they were standing on crumbled into dust.
And a moment later, the X-Men were standing, confused, on a familiar island as bits and pieces started creeping back into their minds.
"It's… it's called Utopia," Reaper-- no, Rogue, said.
"And we lived here," Jubilee murmured. "I know we did. I just… don't know when exactly. Or how."
"Your real memories will start to return soon. And I'll do my best to root out the false ones."
"No offense, Professor… Xavier?" Warren spread his wings, looking with concern at the man standing in the midst of them. "But there are hundreds of us! Whole centuries of memories. How could you, or anyone do that?"
*He can't. Not by himself.*
*But he won't be by himself.*
*Fortunately--*
*He'll have us.*
"This is Emma Frost," the Professor said as a woman in white and three girls in uniforms marked with an X stepped out of a nearby building. "And her former students, Phoebe, Celeste, and Irma. In the other world, they were imprisoned and drugged, like me, because their psi-powers would have seen through Moira's disguises in an instant. Now they'll be your midwives as you're reborn into your real lives."
//But...// Jonothon looked down at himself, at the fire spilling from his face and chest, as the world started slowly coming back into focus around him, memories of a second life creeping in around the edges. //This isn't right. Gordon Bennett! Something's bloody iffy here!//
"We're the pieces that don't fit into the configuration, Jonothon," Rachel said, stepping up to him. "There'll be others."
There were reunions all around him. Repairs. Revisions. People making the choice to keep the memories of what they had gone through. People who couldn't get rid of them quickly enough.
Jonothon was ushered down to the infirmary, put through test after test. First, to ascertain that it was really him. Then, to figure out just how deeply the damage ran. His powers had returned. His body was destroyed.
Outside of the room, he could hear Dr. Rao and Scott arguing about him while they stared at his x-rays, showing a body every bit as ruined as it had been before Akkaba had stolen away. More tests. More observation. People worried about how he felt. People worried about how he was coping with how he felt. People offering to take the other world from his head.
He told them to go away. Spoke to Jubilee and Jubilee alone, asking her to bring him his coat.
He needed to get the hell away from here.
A few hours later, Lee managed to make her way to the infirmary with his coat in her hand. He thanked her with little more than a nod, pulled his phone from his pocket, and took just one photo. A picture of a set of x-rays, faintly illuminated by orange flame.
And he sent that picture to a friend, with no comment at all besides a location and a single word.
The island off San Francisco. Help.
[OOC: And that's that for the catchup bits ganked from the books. They're… still pretty disjointed, but what're you gonna do? These chunks were taken from X-Men Legacy #247, New Mutants #24, and references to X-Men Legacy #248. Still NFI, still NFB, and I'll be tacking up an OOC post later as a wrap for this sucker.]
They'd been waiting at the gates, so to speak. Waiting for over an hour, now. It was dawn. The preaks -- precursors, humans -- always, always attacked at dawn. They'd attacked at dawn every day since Fortress X was new, and, as always, the mutants who could fight gathered at the force wall, waiting to fend off the attack.
//Could've had an extra bloody hour in bed.//
This morning, there was no attack. There were just a dozen tired mutants, standing around and feeling more and more like idiots for doing so.
"I don't get it," Allison was saying, somewhere behind Jonothon. "They always attack at dawn."
"Maybe we won. X, did we win?"
There was no answer from the fortress' security computer at all.
"Already tried that, Noriko," Allison noted. "Phone's off the hook."
"Stand firm, people," Cannonball was saying, eyes on the force wall, hands at his side, balled into tight fists. "The push is going to come. And we're going to be here to meet it."
"Actually…" Basilisk's own gaze didn't waver from the wall, either. "I've got a better idea."
"Basilisk, you will hold your damn position. Or I will bounce you back to the fortress and into the brig before your heels touch the ground."
Scott didn't seem too concerned about Guthrie's order.
"Three years, they stick with the same tactics. And then today they don't even bother to show."
"Get back in line, soldier."
"That's a little crazy, isn't it? A little hard to explain. Lot of things that are hard to explain. Like how come the soldiers we fight sometimes have the same names and numbers, the same dog tags." Scott held up a pair of tags at arm's length for everyone to see. "As if someone's making this stuff up on the win, and getting sloppy with the details."
"This is not the time," Cannonball growled. "We're about to go into battle."
"Except we can't throw a battle if nobody comes. Listen to me, Guthrie. All of you. Just listen. Box, what was it you said to me about the stars?"
"Huh?" Everyone turned their attention to the man in the metal suit, who popped his faceplate, looking around a little perplexed before he started talking. "Well, they… they don't read right. No red or blue shift. Which would mean the universe stopped expanding. And they're too close. As though the light's just coming off the force walls themselves."
"Detail, again," Scott noted.
"What are you even saying, Summers? That this is a stage set? That God's getting lazy?" Guthrie's tone was starting to lose its calm. "Not one thing you've said makes any kind of sense."
"Exactly. That's my point. None of this makes sense, and until it does, I'm not fighting any more." Scott turned and started walking back toward the fortress. "My new job is looking for answers, and I'm starting at the top. Anyone else who's interested can come with me."
"You will hold position," Cannonball stressed. "Everyone will hold position until the General tells us otherwise."
There was a moment of awkward silence while a handful of mutants looked at Scott's back, retreating toward the building, looking for answers to questions they hadn't even thought to ask.
And then they all stood and headed inside after him, leaving Sam Guthrie standing on the field alone, waiting for the attacker that wasn't coming.
----
"I know you all, but you don't know me." Everyone was gathered inside, listening to a man they had never seen before talk to them as though they were family. "The time and the place in which you knew me have been stolen from you. It was -- literally -- in another world. But that world is the real one, where you were born and made. This world is a fantasy. A skein of nonsense. Its architect was a diseased mind. A fragment of a mind, rather, sick and mad and at war with itself. I did my best to stop it, but I failed, and I fell. That was all I knew, until Magneto woke me. I can't explain all this to you in words. I don't have the time. But I can show you. I can make you experience it, exactly as it happened. It is the moment when this world was born, and when your lives spun out of their orbits. Share it. And understand."
The images that washed through the minds of the mutants gathered were altogether unfamiliar, but they felt right. A place called Utopia, seven days ago. Two men standing over the body of a young man in a coma, the body of one of their own Force Warriors, Legion, laying in a coma. One of those men was the one who was sharing these images with them now. The other was a man in a clean white suit.
They were arguing.
"We've gone beyond mere discussion, Nemesis. I told you what your methods were doing to my son."
"I'm curing him of his identity disorder. Deleting his alternate personalities do that his mind can repair itself."
They argued back and forth for a while, about progress, about damage made. Nemesis insisted that he was making progress, and this Professor was arguing that they couldn't predict just what reaction they were dragging out of Legion with what they were doing.
They wandered into Legion's mind, then. The Professor, Nemesis, and every mutant sharing the vision with them. Inside the head of who they recognized as one of their heroes, there were cells, prison cell among prison cell, each containing what looked like their own kind. A mutant a cell. Chamber shuddered -- he'd seen enough prison cells holding mutants in his lifetime to be uncomfortable with what he was watching. He'd seen enough to want out.
He didn't speak up to stop this. Nobody did.
The mutants inside the cells were almost all rotten corpses.
Nemesis screamed for the Professor to leave. The Professor refused, swearing to find out what happened to the parts of his son's mind that were in those cages.
"I ate them." A shaky rumble, barely a voice at all, echoing through their minds, a voice inside a broken man's head, manifesting now as a giant mass of flesh and rage. "You should have left him alone! All you had to do was leave him alone!"
It picked up the professor and threw him around like a ragdoll. A new persona, a psychic antibody that existed to chase out the people who had invaded Legion's mind.
And at the creature's core, a face. The face of the women that the mutants of Fortress X knew as Moira, Legion's mother.
The Professor knew her face, too. And he paused, just long enough for the creature to grab him again.
"Not Moira," it chided, in her all-too-familiar voice, "but her face bought me a moment's advantage. I like it. I think I'll keep it for a while. You come here! You cage us! Hurt the Legion, who is our home! But I can heal him. That's what I was built for. All the little pieces of his mind, and your mind, and the other minds here. I can weave a world out of them. Better than the one they've got."
"Dear God! It -- Nemesis! -- Warn Scott! Its power is--"
"I can make a home for him."
And then the sun went out.
"And us the rest of you for furniture!"
And then the world went out.
----
"Seven days?" Scott was the first to speak up as the vision ended, looking incredulously at the man who called himself the Professor. "That's all it's been? All of this was just--?"
"No!" Legion's cry of protest made half the people there jump. "A fake world, inside of a -- a bubble? He's lying! He's lying to trick us!"
"I concur," X spoke up, finally. The first time anyone had heard the Fortress' security system speak up all day. "Analysis of Charles Xavier's heart rate and skin moisture confirms that he's lying. Everything he says is lies."
"Whether you speak through the woman I loved, or the computer voice called X, you're still the same entity," the Professor said, bowing his head. "Neither a human nor a mutant, but a monster that incubated in my son's mind."
"Who's the monster here, you stinking, bald speck?" Moira stepped out from the shadows, a small box tucked away under her arm. "This is their shelter -- their last refuge -- and you want to take it away from them!"
"This is no shelter. This is a dollhouse you built for my son to play in."
Legion was ignoring the Professor entirely now, in favor of throwing his arms around his mother.
"Moira! Thank God! The things he put in my head--"
"Lies, David. Hideous, filthy lies. He has mind-powers. It's dangerous even to listen to him."
"Look at this place, David," the Professor broke in. "Were you happy here? She meant you to be. You're respected, even loved. The hero you always wanted to be. But it's only a dream… and it's falling apart at the seams."
"It's no dream," the woman -- Moira? -- protested.
"No? Then why do the human battalions disappear when your attention is elsewhere? As soon as anyone takes a close look at your Fortress X, the cracks start to show."
"The threat is real," Moira snarled, holding the box she had been carrying up over her head. The window behind her exploded inward. "And it's always there. If you relax for even a moment, it will swallow you. This-- this is what you get for listening to him!"
Megan, flying up near the window, made the mistake of looking outside.
"Oh, sweet God! Guys, we've got incoming! We've got all kinds of incoming! The walls are coming down!"
Outside the fortress, more weaponized aircraft than anyone could count were coming in fast, destruction their only goal. Inside, 'Moira' was yelling madness, how this was their own fault, how they brought the walls down themselves. They did this.
"Force Warriors," Cannonball was yelling, making his way out of the building, "we're gonna need a miracle. What can you give me?"
"They've got tanks," Psylocke replied, "and air support, and a million troops already coming through. I think it's far too late for miracles, Sam."
"Then you're on the front lines, with everybody else. Go to standing orders, people. Protect the fortress at any cost. Do whatever you've got to do to keep it intact. And we'll see who's still standing when the all-clear sounds!"
----
If inside was madness, outside was like stepping into the mouth of hell itself.
"This is insane," Iceman was yelling as they emerged into the fray. "How do we fight against these odds?"
"Couple of hundred thousand to one?" Basilisk was reaching for his faceplate as he spoke. "Look on the bright side, Drake… It's going to be really hard to miss."
Somewhere in the distance, Namor grabbed a gunship and threw it at another. The resulting explosion was somewhat satisfying, even drowned out in the chaos as it was.
A preak in a giant mechanized suit of armor was stomping on Frenzy. She dealt with it by picking it up and throwing it away.
"Gotta love that woman," Chamber heard Basilisk say.
//From a safe distance, mate.//
Jonothon punctuated that sentence by lighting a human's face on fire.
"This is Frenzy we're talking about. There is no safe distance."
----
Still inside, Moira opened up a box, looking into it at the universe she'd tucked away.
She started a fire.
And she threw the entire reality into it.
But a ghost of a woman caught it just in time
A terrorist fashioned into a general offered her some cover as she tried to escape.
And Legion came around the corner into a room that had been all but demolished, and asked her to tell her what there was in this reality that was left to save.
----
The humans had blown the fortress down.
"Can't believe they'd make such an obvious mistake," Hellion yelled from above.
"What?" Jubilee sounded more than a little confused, where she was fighting on the ground. "What do you mean?"
"We got nowhere to retreat to now. Makes things a lot simpler."
----
"I told you! I told you not to listen," Moira was screaming, in the wreckage of the room. "He's poisoned your mind against me! He's filled your head with lies!"
"He showed me, Moira. I can't pretend I didn't see. And I hate that this is all my fault."
"Fault? What fault? Whose fault? They were ripping pieces out of your mind! They were killing you by inches!"
"That still doesn't make this -- any of it -- bearable. Moira, you took away the whole world and left us… this. A few square miles of rubble. A tower, and a war that never ends. Did you really think that would be enough?"
"I'll do better." Moira threw her arms around Legion, sobbing into his shoulder. "I'll do better! Making worlds is the only power I've got, and I'd never used it before. Of course I made mistakes. But next time will be perfect!"
"It's okay," Legion murmured. "It's okay."
"I… I'll make things right. I promise."
"We both will. It's down to both of us."
And, as Legion absorbed the fragment of himself that was Moira back into his body, a box containing an entire universe fell to the floor.
----
The attackers faded.
"Who cares about you," Legion had muttered. "You're nothing but a pack of cards."
And he descended down on the handful of surviving mutants with an apology on his lips.
"I'll get you home presently. As soon as I can figure out how this works."
"Do you know what you're doing, David?"
"I've absorbed Moira back into my mind. In theory, I can do anything she could have done."
"No offense, ami, but you're holding the whole of creation in your hands. So 'in theory' doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence."
Legion took Gambit's words in stride.
"We could stay here. That's the only alternative. But I don't think this reality is even stable anymore. It wasn't very well made to begin with. So I have to do this. And the way it works… there isn't any way to take a practice run."
And with that and a flash of white light, the world they were standing on crumbled into dust.
And a moment later, the X-Men were standing, confused, on a familiar island as bits and pieces started creeping back into their minds.
"It's… it's called Utopia," Reaper-- no, Rogue, said.
"And we lived here," Jubilee murmured. "I know we did. I just… don't know when exactly. Or how."
"Your real memories will start to return soon. And I'll do my best to root out the false ones."
"No offense, Professor… Xavier?" Warren spread his wings, looking with concern at the man standing in the midst of them. "But there are hundreds of us! Whole centuries of memories. How could you, or anyone do that?"
*He can't. Not by himself.*
*But he won't be by himself.*
*Fortunately--*
*He'll have us.*
"This is Emma Frost," the Professor said as a woman in white and three girls in uniforms marked with an X stepped out of a nearby building. "And her former students, Phoebe, Celeste, and Irma. In the other world, they were imprisoned and drugged, like me, because their psi-powers would have seen through Moira's disguises in an instant. Now they'll be your midwives as you're reborn into your real lives."
//But...// Jonothon looked down at himself, at the fire spilling from his face and chest, as the world started slowly coming back into focus around him, memories of a second life creeping in around the edges. //This isn't right. Gordon Bennett! Something's bloody iffy here!//
"We're the pieces that don't fit into the configuration, Jonothon," Rachel said, stepping up to him. "There'll be others."
There were reunions all around him. Repairs. Revisions. People making the choice to keep the memories of what they had gone through. People who couldn't get rid of them quickly enough.
Jonothon was ushered down to the infirmary, put through test after test. First, to ascertain that it was really him. Then, to figure out just how deeply the damage ran. His powers had returned. His body was destroyed.
Outside of the room, he could hear Dr. Rao and Scott arguing about him while they stared at his x-rays, showing a body every bit as ruined as it had been before Akkaba had stolen away. More tests. More observation. People worried about how he felt. People worried about how he was coping with how he felt. People offering to take the other world from his head.
He told them to go away. Spoke to Jubilee and Jubilee alone, asking her to bring him his coat.
He needed to get the hell away from here.
A few hours later, Lee managed to make her way to the infirmary with his coat in her hand. He thanked her with little more than a nod, pulled his phone from his pocket, and took just one photo. A picture of a set of x-rays, faintly illuminated by orange flame.
And he sent that picture to a friend, with no comment at all besides a location and a single word.
The island off San Francisco. Help.
[OOC: And that's that for the catchup bits ganked from the books. They're… still pretty disjointed, but what're you gonna do? These chunks were taken from X-Men Legacy #247, New Mutants #24, and references to X-Men Legacy #248. Still NFI, still NFB, and I'll be tacking up an OOC post later as a wrap for this sucker.]