It's All In Your Head: Part Thirteen
by sevenall
The image of the meadow rippled and was gone. So was Victoria. Elizabeth found herself soaring in empty space, lit only by distant stars. She recalled a childhood memory; Brian telling her how stars really were glittering pin-heads pinned onto a cloth of black velvet, wrapped around the earth at night. That was how it felt.
<Victoria?>
No answer. The woman might be too far gone.
<Kwannon?>
The voice of Kwannon was as cold as before.
<I've told you that I am not Kwannon. If you meet my demands, I might one day become Kwannon>.
<Whatever you say. Do you prefer to be called Revanche? Where is Victoria? Can you
find her?>
<Perhaps I can>. Kwannon conveniently skipped the name issue. <Though I'm afraid it will cost you. In fact, every action of mine does cost you. I need space to work, and space, my dear, is short in your head>.
There was no shortage of space in Victoria's head, though. The distances between stars were vast, incomprehensible. As Elizabeth was watching one star after another flared up and went out. Each star had a physical counterpart, Elizabeth knew. Each time a star died, another part of Victoria's mind sank into oblivion.
But once she thought about it, the idea wasn't bad. It was Victoria's singing that had attracted Elizabeth's attention from the start. Perhaps music was the right way to bring her back? Elizabeth took a deep breath.
The song she chose was the one that first came to mind as appropriate.
The melody came back to her as she sang. She had learnt it at school, a long time ago. She and a couple of her friends had walked arm in arm on the road, singing in chorus. She could remember the warmth of the sun on her face, the stickiness of the wool stockings, and the birds singing their own tune in the hedges, tsi-tsi-ty, tsi-tsi-ty.
<Dona nobis pacem. Dona nobis pacem>.
Grant us peace. Wasn't that appropriate for Victoria and herself?
Another voice joined in. Elizabeth thought it was an echo at first, until she realised that was Kwannon. An assassin and cold-blooded killer singing an old Latin hymn. Well, perhaps Kwannon needed peace, too.
<Dona nobis pacem pacem. Dona nobis pacem>.
And now the voice that Elizabeth had been waiting for joined in, weak at first, as if it had come from a great distance, but soon it grew in magnitude and beauty. It sang of joy entwined with sorrow, ecstacy mixed with pain and a terrible ancient sadness.
<Dona nobis pacem. Dona nobis pacem>.
And there were memories, unusually jumbled, in disarray, but through it all, there were images of Lisa: in the hospice, in another hospital, in school. Elizabeth and Victoria saw Lisa take her first step and received her lovingly into their arms as she faltered. They rejoiced over her first tooth, and watched fondly as her tiny baby fists waved in the air. Their hands remembered the small weight of her, their shoulders remembered the terry towels that the baby rested her head against when they carried her.
Victoria's golden voice filled the empty space, though all but a few of the stars had gone out, though darkness were overtaking her. Elizabeth and Kwannon sang along with her, as the last star flared up and went out, as the last note faded into silence. And then Elizabeth stood alone in the darkness.
Before Elizabeth could argue, she was pulled through the dark, through the mist that soaked and chilled her. A very ragged and unprofessional transition. Kwannon might be formidable at finding soda bottles and producing snappy answers, but she had a lot to learn about telepathy, Elizabeth thought sourly. Worse yet, when she came to, she felt blood running from her nose, which was a textbook example of sloppy technique.
<Kwannon!> she yelled.
But Kwannon had disappeared, probably into some obscure corner of her mind. Instead, there was bright light on her face and the man called Danny, dabbing away at the blood stream with a tissue.
"She's coming out of it now", he reported to someone she couldn't see.
A com unit perhaps? Her instinct proved correct when the answer came back, riddled with static.
"Good. Then step away from her. She's dangerous, do I have to tell you? Nearly sent those psionic readers off the scale."
Danny did as he was told. More than so, he even took the precaution to step outside and lock the door. Elizabeth could hear the clanking as heavy bolts were drawn.
Ten minutes later, Elizabeth's nosebleed had stopped and she felt sufficiently anchored to the here and now to venture an evaluation of her situation. The room was a holding cell. The texture of the walls told her that they were impenetrable, except perhaps to adamantium. It didn't matter very much, since no one on her side had any adamantium anymore. Psionic dampeners surrounded the whole area and there was a faint whirring that she recognized as an electromagnetic forcefield being mounted. The set-up made Elizabeth uncomfortable. It was overkill to keep an almost-but-not-quite Alpha telepath with average ninja skills in a facility like this.
She turned her attention to her own state. The left side of her face felt numb. Had the little journey into Victoria's mind caused a stroke? There were always a risk of that. Elizabeth pinched her cheek. There was pain, but not as much as there should have been. Damn. But effects of minor strokes were reversible. Kwannon had warned her, fair and square. Elizabeth had no one but herself to blame if her smile became a little crooked.
She thought about the address in Madripoor. Wishful thinking, but then a girl could wish. The X-Men hadn't come running to her rescue, as she had hoped. A small seed of almost forgotten resentment was growing stronger inside her. Maybe they hadn't discovered the mutant connection to the hospice fire. Maybe they were in space, cut off from communication and recent news. Or maybe they didn't think she was worth the trouble, in spite of the countless times she had volunteered to bail someone out. "I'll go too, Professor, the X-Men are like family to me". Some family. But then those closest to her, Ororo, Logan, Rogue and Warren, yes, Warren, damnit, weren't at the Mansion to cast their vote.
There was no use thinking about it. The X-Men would come, or they would not. In the meantime, it might pay off to prepare herself for interrogation and possibly torture. Elizabeth hoped that she was still cunning enough to lie her way through perhaps four or five interrogation sessions. She would talk at last, there being drugs that would crack her wide open, but if she could stall for twenty-four hours, the X-Men would have had a chance to change their running codes and ciphers. It occurred to Elizabeth with unpleasant clarity that she was one of the X-Men that were able to fly the Blackbird, had an insight in their personal dynamics and were involved in Hank's research. To someone who knew what questions to ask, she wasn't a bad catch, not at all.
She thought about torture. She had a high pain threshold, having been trained that way by the Hand, but, although she had known the raw pain from a serious injury, she had never been systematically tortured. Well, there was a first time for everything. They had apparently missed Hank's implant, or left it alone for now. If they had left it, they could use it as a leverage and take it away at any time. Had they missed it, the implant might overdose her under torture. Should she tell them about it? No. They were, by God, going to fight for every little piece of information they got from her.
What to do now? They might have decided to let her sweat, let fear work on her nerves for a while. It meant a respite, some time in which she could rest and work on getting that facial half back to working order. She decided to sleep, closed her eyes and deliberately slowed her breathing. She'd show those bastards that a Braddock didn't have any nerves to work on.
She woke a few hours later as the bolts clanked again. The door opened a slit and Elizabeth had to rub her eyes, to make certain that she wasn't dreaming. A handsome face under a wild spray of auburn hair showed between the door and the door frame. Remy? Remy! His eyes fell on her, first without recognizing her, then with dawning fear. Elizabeth had known she was a great deal changed, but this was ridiculous.
"What took you so long?" she snarled, not in the mood to be charitable.
Then she saw, as in slow motion, how Remy's face withdrew and the door begun to close.
"You with the Friends now, Remy?" she yelled at him. "Well, damn you too!"
She got to her feet, wobbly as she was, and banged a couple of times on the door. Her knuckles split open and started to bleed. The door stayed closed.