Title: Red Sky At Night (part 1 of three or four)
Fandom: Captain Britain and MI-13
Rating: R or thereabouts
Disclaimers and Notes: (1) Marvel's, not mine -- all characters, and especially the lines quoted from CB&MI13 #9. And oh thank you Marvel for Paul Cornell. (2) I am making relatively little attempt to catch up on current canon; Captain Britain and MI-13 for the win, and I picked up the "Unstoppable" arc of Joss Whedon's Astonishing, but otherwise, continuity errors are likely to be rife. (3) Thanks to Gina Donahue for a very quick beta; anything that still doesn't make sense is totally my fault, not hers.

Summary: Pete Wisdom's always been given to bad dreams; tonight's no exception, and an unwelcome visit from an old acquaintance doesn't look to make things much better.

Silence.

No air. No rest. No sound. Only the long gliding arc of a weapon eternally past its target, slingshot around the brief burning heat of the sun and off into the emptiness forever between the stars. Only the deadly thinning that had already begun, as her body -- phased so hard its metabolism had virtually stopped, so that she needed no air, no food, nothing -- began to dissociate molecule from molecule, dissipating into the mass of alien metal around her.

She prayed that when she drifted apart far enough, she'd lose awareness entirely. Since if she didn't, it was all too possible that she'd live out there for a very damned long time.

Maybe forever.

Pete Wisdom gasped for air, fought for contact, and came up from the dream just enough to realize that he was dreaming. That one. Again. He couldn't be surprised; the Skrulls and John and the damned door had given him other things to have nightmares about, but recent events had her right back in his head.

Never mind. Bad dreams he was used to. He tried to force himself awake.

It didn't work.

How long till the universe ends?

The black hole death took too long for Kitty to keep the zeroes straight. The death of iron only had fifteen hundred zeroes involved, but that one might not kill her, even after the stars fused everything they had into one uniform kind of metal and went dark. Thirty or forty zeroes if the fundamental building blocks of matter were unstable. And if the world were kind, and the universe kept building pressure and expanding faster and faster -- first the galaxies would fly apart. Then worlds tear free of their suns. Then both suns and worlds were torn apart.

A mere fifty billion years, but she'd see all but the last few minutes of them.

Trapped in the silence. Helpless. Alone.

She tried to draw a breath, but the shift of her ribcage against her prison's metal sent a tearing agony through bone and blood and nerve. That was fine. Pain she could deal with. Pain she could cling to, focus on. Think about her other self, who existed in pain and madness and chaos, coopted her enemy, built herself a new body out of scrap and nothing to come back --

Opening her eyes hurt worse than trying for air had.

Her other self. Her older self. Kate Rasputin --

Pete drove his nails into his palm. It didn't help.

She'd needed power. But she'd been able to open gates, world to world. Kitty didn't need to open a gate. She just needed to walk through a different wall than usual.

The effort of concentration was a fire in her brain, screaming against the resistance of the alien metal. She'd managed to shut herself down; forcing her metabolism awake again to support her last all-out try at rescuing herself -- well, if it didn't work to get her out, at least it would burn through the time she could keep herself together. Maybe she'd still go out like a light.

There still wasn't any air, and now she needed it. Red bursts in the blindness of her vision. Sparkles bright as stars: neurons firing at random, struggling, dying.

Her fingertips numb even against the nothing resistance pain that caged her.

Phase. Hard. Walk on the air that isn't there. Let the colors and lights come, like sleep, like dreaming. Just keep trying.

Right angles to anywhere.

The world twisted around her in a flare of fire, and she slid through it and went away.

"I thought you'd understand," a voice said in Pete's memory, quiet and tired and broken and old. "A lifetime of service, and we got so little. And then when the only person that makes it better dies --"

Pete covered his eyes and wept. Even as he lifted his hands, he knew the gesture was wrong.

It was as if he were expected to weep, expected to sympathize, expected to be broken beyond repair by those words. As if something had pulled a cover away and shown Pete a secret that would destroy him. But Kitty's death wasn't a secret; what it meant to him wasn't a secret; he ignored it, but that didn't mean he didn't know. And any sympathy he had for the temptation meant nothing at all beside the rage and loathing he felt for the owner of that voice falling to it.

If something had really known what it was doing trying to break him, it'd've hit him where he was weak: that Sid's fall was at the hands of a creature Pete had himself set free.

Something was trying.

Pete chose to let it think it was winning.

She lay on a rock, burning-hot and jagged-hard. The air scorched her lungs every time she inhaled. She didn't care: it was air, and rock was rock, and pain was pain, and every one of them in this moment she loved.

The tendril that lashed itself around her ankle and started dragging her across the stone's sharp edges? That one she didn't love so much.

Reflexively, she phased again -- or tried to. Pain stabbed across her head, a straight line of pulsing ice from temple to temple, and she arched her back and screamed. That rattled her skull against the rock; not a help there, and whatever had grabbed her was still in very solid contact. She scrabbled blindly on the ground for something to hit at it with, then thrashed a little more purposefully, kicking out. Smashing her foot against the ground, over and over. An outcropping of rock bruised her to the bone, but hurt the thing holding her enough her next kick yanked her free; she scrabbled to her feet and leapt back even before she looked --

Petals of blood and meat reared up like a closing flower from the ground. Jagged ivory shards smashed against one another. The spray of splinters and bile and pus hit Kitty like a rain of fire. Reflex kicked in for the second time in seconds; this time the ice stabbed down her spine, too, and she doubled over retching. Nothing in her stomach to bring up. No time to indulge herself, either; the instant she could straighten enough to see her footing, she started moving. A lurching stagger, but it was motion. More steps would bring her to a walk, then to a run, as the seizure passed.

She'd seen where she was, past the thing that'd tried to eat her. Rock that shifted under her boots, dull rust-brown treachery of knife-edges and sliding gravel. Sky that burned crimson with the flames that swept randomly over the rock, charring anything they passed to still-twitching coal. Things moving along the cliffs and plains. Things towering above, inhuman silhouettes watching with immeasurable detachment.

This wasn't where she was supposed to be. If the shift had succeeded, she should have been lost crosstime; she could've found her way to Otherworld eventually, and to rescue. The place between places was maddening, impossible, lawless, but she'd seen it before and was sure she could survive it. This place wasn't that one. This wasn't even Belasco's Limbo, where a strong enough will could rewrite the rules for a while, if it could hold against the world's innate corruption. This place had laws of its own, and all of them were about pain.

Hell wasn't supposed to be this close to Earth.

Unless, Pete amended silently, some idiot opened the great gate and let all the monsters out. And the monsters started opening gates of their own, to pull it closer. Unless Kitty's being trapped in Hell were both true -- and his fault.

Horror spread across his face, eyes first and hardest, expression after. Self-revulsion. Despair. He wove them over the surface of his thoughts, as well, and hoped whatever was trying to claw at him didn't look past the first confirmation of its victory.

The mistakes it was still making were enough to make him sure it wouldn't.

The sky showed one flaw in the burning glare. A single twisting rope of blackness. She made for that hint of shadow as her only hope of escape.

She ran across the barren rock till the soles of her boots wore out, and tiny maggots the color of human flesh scurried behind her to lap at the blood of her footprints. One of them, once, seemed to half recognize her. She didn't stop to find out.

She scaled a cliff whose denizens slithered out of cracks to try to gut her with their claws. They shredded the yellow and black of her costume and the pale and red of her flesh, only to be driven back into their hiding by a molten rainfall. She guessed at the laws of the place, and forced herself to keep climbing. The injuries healed themselves and went away. The pain didn't.

She closed her eyes and made her blind way across a road used by grey, smoky figures; she'd lain in watch for an hour beforehand, and seen what happened to creatures that touched them, and what happened to creatures that looked at them, and chose to risk the touch instead.

And when she came close enough to that shadow in the sky --

Lines of ebon-black untwisted and webbed her in. Where they touched her, there was nothing; no rock, no fire, nothing all over again, without even the stars to keep her company. She fell screaming into what had been solid ground, and now was nothing but darkness and fear, nothing but --

Yes. Everything made sense now.

Wisdom dragged the back of his hand across his face to hide the fact that it wasn't shaking, and snapped, "Get the fuck out of my head, you pretentious cunt."

The figure was there beside him, where it had to have been all along. Under its shock of gray hair, Nightmare grinned smugly at him, chalky and emaciated with wells of eternal pettiness for eyes. "Peter. After we've known each other for so long. And after you've done so much for all of darkness, and for me in particular."

The urge for fire was close to the surface, but Wisdom pushed it back; just a physical attack wouldn't affect Nightmare on the demon's home ground... and the thing never seemed to leave its home ground. It took more and more of an effort to keep up the mask, to make it aware only of enough anger to be convincing. There was real fear to feed it, at least. Not the kind Nightmare was expecting, but real. "I didn't need to do a bloody thing to you, last time," he scoffed. "The others you kidnapped shook off your little horrorshows all on their own."

A long-fingered, green-gloved hand made a careless gesture in the air. "The score's at one and one," Nightmare said, dismissive. "Though I seem to remember one of your friends not being so successful --"

Thin and small, all wild stripes and a tumble of hair and eyes too big to be real. Kitty Pryde cowered in her room, hands over her ears and knees to her chest, and knew terror-deep that this was all there was.

A tall Russian artist telling her, straightforward and quiet, that he'd met someone else while he'd been gone.

An Englishman flinging an unanswerable question at her with the same perfect aim he had with his knives, and walking away in the silence after.

A flutter of wings, and her looking over her shoulder, and the little alien dragon slipping from following to hovering to slinking away.

She'd poisoned them all, and this, the screaming and the hiding from it and the slow breaking apart, was all there ever would be.

Pete had braced for that one, but one detail in it he hadn't expected -- and that made it strike closer to true than he'd hoped. (The dragon? What in hell had happened with the dragon?) He flinched, that was all.

It was enough. Nightmare's eyes glowed with anticipation, mottled red and blue like bruises on a baby. "That's all in the past now, isn't it," the demon purred. "No, Peter Paul Wisdom. This isn't a contest." An instant's pause, indulgence in the creature's taste for the theatrical. "You did ask for a second boon."

The image of Pete throwing a punch dead-center into Nightmare's face was, for just a moment, so strong in Wisdom's mind that he wasn't altogether sure it was his own thought and not another vision.

"You wanted," Nightmare continued, "to ask the demon-hosts you let out of the Great Dark to bring the people you'd lost back from the dead. Well." He placed a hand against his green-clad chest, oozing false modesty. "I don't have that kind of power. You can't have your little lost Kitty back in the waking world. But I give you this, Peter Paul Wisdom, Breaker of Oaths, Opener of the Door. You can see her any time you want."

She spun and ducked in the same motion, dropping halfway out of existence, letting one attacker's strike take out a second, her elbow coming solid in the instant before it impacted a third man's gut; she was a whirlwind angel of fury, and she still took time to laugh at him watching her --

She turned to look at him over her shoulder, and the monitor glow made her hair into a halo and her mouth the echo of a smile just to find him looking back at her --

She arched her back in a perfect curve, arms crossed over her chest and fingers digging into her own shoulders, curls cascading down her back, mouth open in an involuntary and glorious cry; and as ecstasy released her she wilted slowly and let herself go, eyes opening in half-lidded half-lazy searching, and her hands came down to support her again on the shoulders of --

-- a tall Russian artist.

Piotr Nikolaievitch Rasputin.

"All you have to do," Nightmare gloated, secure in its victory, "is come to my realm to do it."

Sign up for an eternity of torture by installments, or claim to walk away from the needle, knowing he'd be back? Either way, Nightmare would win; Pete knew that clearly enough. Quitting smoking was one thing. Quitting her was another, even years after they'd gone down in flames. No. Neither option was acceptable. Besides. Step by step, detail by detail, there was something wrong with the picture Nightmare was trying to paint.

The dragon was a sign she was the real thing, all right, that there'd been time in her life he hadn't seen. The costume wasn't one she'd imagine herself wearing; she might dream herself in one, but not black and yellow, not the colors she thought of as marking her being a kid. The run through Hell hadn't been the half-random evasions of someone just trying to escape. She'd had a purpose to it, taken obstacles head-on, just to walk into Nightmare's trap.

Her eyes were still open. She was looking --

Not at Rasputin. She was looking around them, at the air.

It wasn't more than a hunch, a gut feeling. He moved on it anyway. Because there wasn't much more than seconds left before Nightmare realized that it'd misstepped trying to break him -- again.

She shifted lazily, one hand lifting to brush hair out of her eyes --

He didn't take a step so much as he willed himself to move. Locked his eyes on hers, trusted that connection. Reached out.

The skin of her wrist felt cool and smooth in his hand, the bones of it terrifyingly fragile.

The dream around them vanished at the contact, for which Pete was profoundly grateful; he'd half expected to need rescue from an angry steel giant, and the feel of his ribcage crumpling like paper wasn't one he wanted a replay of right now. For an instant, it was just them. Pete in suit and tie and sunglasses, watching her over the rim of them. Kitty in the tatters of that same black and yellow, her bared midriff a child's scribble of fresh scars.

"Sorry," she gasped, and her eyes found focus on him. She blinked, startled, but didn't take time to indulge it. "Sorry. It was the best chance I could think of --"

"Shut it." Pete cut her off fast, before she could summon anything dangerous, like sympathy. The void around them was already starting to ripple -- reform. Coalesce. "Right. Found you. What's the rest of your plan? How do we get out of here?"

At the first of his questions, she found a little alertness somewhere; but she only shook her head, bringing her free hand up to her hair again and yanking her fingers through the curls in frustration. "You have to wake up," Kitty said. "I'll try to hitch a ride."

"Tried. Can't. The little shit's got us trapped in here ---"

This time, it was himself Pete cut off, as Kitty pulled her hand loose of a tangle and he saw what she held in it. Enough to make the maze growing around them hesitate in taking its shape: something solid, real, like she was and like his own dream-self wasn't. A jagged, hateful splinter of ivory bone, carried along with her out of Hell.

"Sure you can," she said, and stabbed it into his shoulder.

It hurt like where it came from -- of course. But the pain was real, and his startled howl was real.

The bed under him was real; the tangled sheets around him were real; the weight of the girl on top of him was real, the startling lightness of her wrist was real. The bone needle trying to chew its way under his skin was real, and so was the hand pulling it out and away.

Also real was the weight stirring next to him. The other girl. The one not wearing even the rags Kitty was. "Mmh?" she asked muzzily, and tried to cuddle up against his side -- and then her nose wrinkled at the stink of sweat and sulphur and worse that had come out of the dream with Kitty, and she started coming awake fast.

They had time to trade one glance, nothing more than that. Even in the darkness, Pete could see Kitty's eyes widen, and the way she pressed the back of her hand against her mouth as if to stifle laughter. Then her weight was off him and she retreated noiselessly toward the door, half-vanishing in the shadows.

He took her absence for granted and turned toward the woman still left in his bed, trying desperately to dig up her name. Apparently he'd just taken a couple too many blows to the brain in quick succession; it wasn't coming to mind. "Sorry -- sorry," he said anyhow, running a hand over her hair. "Just a bad dream, love, go back to sleep --" He hoped she would. And ignore things like the blood and the smell. It didn't strike him as likely, but there was always the --

-- sulphur. The rest, the worse, had retreated along with Kitty. But the sulphur was still there. The demon-stink.

"It never bloody stops, does it," he breathed.

There was no surprise in him whatsoever when the ceiling came down.