Subject: [OTL]: Legacy and Destiny - Kate Rasputin - Track One
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2001 18:42:56 +0200
From: KA Bruce <brucepat@iafrica.com>

Legacy and Destiny
Kate Rasputin
Track One

*

She walks through fields of gravestones on her way to meet her husband.
Although she keeps her head high in a deliberate attempt to avoid looking at
them, the white slabs, each marked with a name of a mutant who would not
submit to the Sentinel's program, accuse her for having survived. For having
joined the squadron of mutants in Kelly's employ, rather than dying in one
of the squadrons of eponymous Rogues.

At the time, capitulation had seemed the only way of saving the child which
she was carrying. The beautiful, dark-haired girl, who she had held in her
arms for the briefest and sweetest of seconds before the baby was taken away
to be terminated. Like the anomalous humans, mutants were forbidden to
breed - a step necessary for the preservation of the homo sapiens sapiens
genome - but she had wondered bitterly who could look on her infant daughter
and see nothing but a monster. Who could kill a tiny, laughing being as
casually as a cockroach. In that moment, lying in blood and amniotic fluid,
weeping and cursing, Kate Rasputin had become one of Magneto's rebels,
fighting the regime from within the confines of the South Bronx Mutant
Internment Center.

Unlike the Rogues, whose resistance was confined to the destruction of the
occasional Sentinel and government facility, Erik Lehnsherr had designed a
far grander scheme. As the Mutant Control Act of 1988 had grown out of the
assassination of Robert Kelly by the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, he had
reasoned that the simplest way to prevent the future from happening was to
save the Senator. The group had vetoed the idea at first, because it was a
high risk for potentially no reward, but the imminent launching of a nuclear
warhead had given them no choice.

So, in about fifteen minutes, Kate Rasputin will be travelling back about
thirty three years.

"Katya," her husband calls, and she feels the same twist in her stomach as
when she first saw him as a teenager. His hair is touched with silver now,
his forehead is lined, and his eyes have seen too much tragedy to look on
the world with the same idealism they once did. The wisdom and sorrow they
contain hurt her, because she remembers the innocence with which they used
to seek out beauty - beauty which his hands put on canvas for the world to
share. He stopped painting when their child was murdered, and the
uncompleted portrait of a pregnant her still stands in a corner of their
room under a sheet of cobwebs.

"Petya," she replies, relishing the traditional affectionate exchange.

"It is time," he says simply, "Remember that I love you, no matter in what
world we wake tomorrow?"

"I love you too, Piotr," she kisses him, tasting the salt of his tears and
wishing she had some of her own remaining, "But I've got to go. Rachel - and
the future - is waiting."

As she enters the room in which Phoenix is sitting on a thin pallet, she
takes a final look back at the graveyard and the rows of white slabs. At the
small, worn figure digging a fresh grave. At the pathetic, white bundle at
his side. At the Sentinels patrolling the perimeter. She lifts a hand
tentatively to wave, then lets it drop to her side. It is not much of a
world to which to say goodbye.