Subject: [OTL]: (Timewind Arc, Rachel Summers-Richards) The Pain of Living Well (PG-15) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 20:22:51 -0700 (PDT) From: Phil Hartman will1@earthling.net Timewind Arc: The Pain of Living Well by Phil Hartman DISCLAIMER: Rachel and her generation (and those before) are Marvel's. Her kids and their generation are mine. No money is being made off of this. Please don't sue. NOTE: Arawn had his chance to speak out ... ... now it's time for the other side ;) WARNING: Some mature themes, language, imagery, and - as is usual for a Summers - angst. Also, alternate future, explained below ... -------------------------------------------------------- 9/8/2020: -------------------------------------------------------- I'm proud. And happy for him. Aidan succeeded. He healed Ninaeve, and chose light over darkness. I can feel the sheer joy over our psi-link, and the tentative ... Ahem. Well. There are some feelings a mother shouldn't intrude upon, so long as her son doesn't get out of hand. And being 13, Aidan is still just confused and hesitant enough not to do anything too foolish. I could say the same thing when I was 13. And 14, and so on, until 18. At least in this timeline. Being a telepathic chronovariant, I can pick up - sometimes - what happens to various alternate selves of me. Some of them didn't wait until they were 18 to become intimate. Some of them had no choice; others had all the choice they needed, and still plunged in too fast. In so many of those timelines, that led to heartache. I waited until I was 18, and it led to disaster for this Earth. Yes, I know what the history books say about the Lehnsherr War. Chuck Lehnsherr (I can't bring myself to call him that idiotic, cruel name he took up when he went insane) went insane, enslaved or rallied Genosha's 20 million mutants, and went on a six-month rampage of anti-human violence across the planet. And we, his former teammates in the second team of New Mutants, stopped him at the Battle of Hammer Bay on Dec. 31, 2006. We were heroes, never mind that it took 25 million people dying to end the damned war. Five million were various humans, and some mutants, outside of Genosha. Most of the non-Genoshan casualties were in Africa and Europe, and a relative handful in the U.S. when the Genoshan Army attacked on Christmas Day '06. The 20 million Genoshans were sucked dry of their life-force by Chuck as he prepared to blast Genosha to its bedrock with a raw burst of electromagnetic energy. I shielded the team with the Phoenix power, but we almost drowned when the island exploded from beneath us and we fell into the Indian Ocean. I know I didn't lead the Genoshan Army or vaporize Genosha. But I just can't help but think I could have prevented the War. Mrs. Rachel Lehnsherr. Would it've been so bad ? If I'd married Chuck after we graduated high school, would it've been so terrible ? I was 18 when I dumped Chuck. He'd changed somehow, from the aristocratic, slightly anti-human Prince Charming I'd grown up with, into a screaming, angry caricature of his former self. He accused Magnus of forcing him to follow "a darker path than even Magneto would ever consider." I would've been his Dark Queen, I guess. Instead, I was 18, and afraid, and heartbroken, and looking for someone to comfort me. And as always, there was my best friend in the entire universe, right there to support me. Frank Richards was an easy choice to go back to. We'd dated, been each other's first crush and first kiss as freshmen, and we were still friends after we amiably split up in our sophomore year. I didn't want to end up the prom queen to his champion swimmer/Most Likely To Succeed. Besides, he was the guy next door when I was 15 and had my own dreams. Breaking up was easy to do - we were mature enough to have a "no-fault" split. When I was 18 and lonely and heartbroken, though ... Frank came to me, held me while I sobbed, and let me vent. Then he broke down and told me how he'd wondered if he'd made a mistake when we were sophomores, if he should've stayed. We were two lonely people looking for satisfaction and something to hold on to. I wanted to hurt Chuck, and Frank wanted to - be there for me in all the ways he could. I remember waking up the next morning and realizing what we'd done. I'd used the one person who I could really talk to, my best friend, for a cheap fling and a cheap shot at Chuck. Then I felt it. The blessing and curse of every female pre-menopausal telepath is the ability to tell when you're pregnant without a test. That speck of "foreign" pre-mental life-force in the abdomen is impossible to miss. We were both adults, chronologically, but we hadn't grown up yet. We did THAT over the next 24 hours. That damned day - June 8, 2006 - is still a blur to me. Chuck bursting in, finding me in a fetal position next to Frank, screaming all sorts of incomprehensible curses - - well, Chuck flew off to become the "Angel of the Abyss," Frank felt horribly guilty and responsible, and I fell apart. It was easier, the first 12 hours, to let the testing and the recriminations and the aching guilt swallow me. The folks weren't happy, of course - they're not prudes, but they really wanted me to have been married before pregnancy. Frank didn't run. That was when I finally realized that he was the right one. That was what grew into what I feel for Frank today. The baby ... God. Arawn. I so screwed up. It really wasn't his fault. The Professor shouldn't've pressed the issue of doing a mindscan, even after the weird Cerebra scans of the zygote and Hank's genescan came back with some REALLY weird alleles in the mutant gene. The ... event ... was kind of like one of those awful scenes from "Buffy," where the vampire turns to dust. Xavier reached in telepathically, tapped zygote-Arawn with his mind, and became ash in front of me. I didn't feel the Professor die, precisely; I was wearing an inhibitor collar so my telepathy wouldn't mask the zygote's psi-signature during the scan. But I'll tell you this: I sure as hell heard SOMETHING in my mind when Charles Xavier met his maker. I'm not sure if it was a belch or not. Anyway, the Professor flaked apart, I really lost it, and my abdomen became a large watermelon in the space of about a minute. The next thing I remember was Hank screaming at Logan to "Cut for God's sake or the baby will eat HER !" That's not quite true; Arawn's psi-vampirism went latent as soon as he reached full-term. He gave quite a telepathic holler coming out, though. After they stitched me up and I got some MUCH-needed sleep, I held my firstborn child while the 11 o'clock news came on the medlab holo-screen. It's quite the emotional roller-coaster to dump the guy you fall for, sleep with your best friend and become pregnant, bear a psionic vampire to full term, and then see your ex-boyfriend toss his father's body off the top of a skyscraper on the late news 24 hours later. And what did I do ? I looked down into those innocent blue eyes and couldn't help but feel guilt and terror and irrational anger for an instant. At this helpless, innocent little person. Damn me. Oh, I grew up fast. Frank and I got married while Chuck took over Genosha, and we were on the front lines when the Lehnsherr War hit the fast track. We fought the Onyx Pillar in Wakanda, we saw the fate of the Fantastic Four in Doomstadt, we held the line at the front gate of the X-Mansion. We defeated the Genoshans and saw a country die and devour itself. We found time to cry and laugh and burp Arawn and cry some more, and bury the dead, and make some more babies. But I never quite did right by my first-born, now did I ? Otherwise, he wouldn't be running around in the Downside of Neohattan, wearing leather and mascara and doing his "psi-vamp vigilante" thing, and spouting some idiotic provision of the Mutagenetics Laws claiming 14-year-old mutants can become legal adults. I inflicted my guilt and fear and anger on Arawn's mind. He felt that, and never quite forgave me. I can't blame him. Sure, I helped rebuild the world. I'm "First Lady of Mutantkind" in the post-Lehnsherr-War world, Guenivere to Frank's Arthur. I'm a successful charity organizer and mother. I love my kids, all of them. Arawn, my dark prince, hungry and rightfully angry with me. Aidan, my second-born become the heir, hot-headed and caring, and in first love. Aislinn, my brilliant little timewalker, so compassionate and not seeing first love so close at hand. Bryce, my baby, starting first grade, so powerful and kind and silly. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to Arawn, I'm sorry to the world, I'm sorry to Chuck. I can't bring back the Lehnsherr War's victims. I can't be the Chaos-Bringer and scream out my pain that way. I can't even look Frank in the eye and tell him that our love is a poisoned thing and that I dream about what might have been with another. It hurts to live well. -------------------------------------------------------- finis ... ? --------------------------------------------------------