Chapter Text
Every time she puts her foot down, it hurts, and she thinks, I can’t take another step.
And then she does it again.
There’s nothing left to do but walk, because she can walk. Because she’s alive, and Ellie and Anaaya are alive, leaving thick trails of grief and shock in their wake.
Because somewhere behind them—
No.
Lia looks forward instead, at the streets of a town with a forgettable name. They’re covered in the usual: the annoyances and small joys of daily life, masking fear. Always fear. Ubiquitous, and often ignored.
The few people out give them a quick once-over, checking for horns or tails or unusual skin, but mostly, their eyes are on the sky.
Most people are looking up, these days.
Charles, if you’re listening, she thinks reflexively, but she doesn’t have a way to finish the sentence. It’s been weeks since he answered, anyway.
“Any sign?” Anaaya asks. It’s the first thing she’s said since they left the woods.
“I’m looking.” If she relaxes her eyes a bit, she can see the fliers and graffiti covering the walls: missing persons posters, old petitions, and advertisements for a lifestyle long since abandoned. Nothing that will help them, so she looks at the feelings, down one street and then the next, and—
“Maybe she left.”
Lia doesn’t tell Ellie to shut up, even though she wants to. Talking is hard. A few hours ago, Shawn might have—
“Found her.” A long line across the broken window of a Domino’s, bent at one end to indicate direction.
The line isn’t as miserable as what the other two have been leaving behind. Worried, but there’s no grief. Not yet.
There’s another mark on the post office at the end of the block, and one on a fence at the end of the next. They’re leading out of town, and Lia hopes it’s not much farther to walk, because her feet really fucking hurt.
She readjusts her backpack, tugging one of the straps free from where it had gotten caught on her holster.
Right.
Okay.
By the sixth block, they catch a tangle of footprints that she recognizes. One arrogant and angry, one excited and afraid, one wounded and frightened. A side injury: he’d given that away when he’d leaned up against a tree to rest.
They’ve been following those trails for two days.
(“Do I look like a goddamn mutant to you?” Ashe had said. “Mutants are the reason my family’s dead. If I knew how, I’d go out in the woods and hunt them down myself.”)
The footsteps end about a mile from the edge of town, at a house that stands alone in a field. An old jackleg fence still surrounds most of it, but there’s a ten-foot gap with burned edges on the south side. Normal fire, or Sentinel blast? The house doesn’t look damaged, but if there was only one mutant trying to jump the fence...
Whatever happened, it was far enough in the past for the grass to grow back. But Lia checks the sky anyway.
Flat and blue, as far as the eye can see.
“Do you need to clear the house?” Anaaya asks, and Lia shakes her head.
“There’s no one else in there.” All but one of the trails lead outward, and those ones aren’t coming back.
So she climbs the steps, pushes open the peeling door, and goes inside.
It’s clearly been occupied for a while. The front door opens into a living room covered in worry, relaxation, anger, and discarded Ramen wrappers. A stack of Rubbermaid bins is braced precariously against one wall— please be supplies— and there’s even the sound of running water in the kitchen, because Ashe is standing by the grimy sink, filling a yellow Minion water bottle.
For a second, it’s all Lia can do not to collapse onto her. Three days is a long time.
But Ashe is staring at them, her smile fading, relief changing to a sharp fear.
“Where—”
There’s a chair. A kitchen table and a chair. Someone put them here. Someone had family dinners here. So many that emotion is baked into the cracks in the wood. Then there were Purifiers, and now there’s them, and Lia sits down.
“He didn’t…” Ellie doesn’t finish the sentence, instead dropping her bag on the table. She focuses very hard on unzipping it, on pulling out three of their four collars. Lia takes hers, running her finger along the metal. Leaving her grief on it for later.
Erik could shred these into nothing, if he were here. “Key?”
“Yeah.” Ellie fumbles with the remote. There’s a beep, and the light on the collar turns red. Another beep, and it’s off. “Wait, hang on.” Double-beep and it clicks open. “There we go.”
Lia puts the collar around her own neck, and the room turns sharp and hard and crystal clear. And like every time, she thinks, what if it doesn’t come off?
Ashe is still looking at her. She makes the same expression whenever Lia puts the collar on, and Lia still doesn’t know what it is. But Ashe catches her hand when she reaches back, and her fingers are still warm, and she’s still here, alive.
“We tracked them into the woods,” she says, because someone is going to have to explain. “They found the campsite where you told them it would be, and we attacked when they weren’t looking—” and it should have worked. Nobody should have been killed, not even the Purifiers.
“It was my fault.”
Ellie grabs Anaaya’s shoulder. “It was not your fault.”
“I was supposed to knock them out, and—”
“And one of them dodged, and so Shawn set him on fire,” Lia says. Blasted him with fire, really. It had been the man with the injured side, and he’d reacted how they should have expected him to react, shooting into the threat. The bullet passed through the fire, and Shawn never saw it coming. “And the Purifier got a lucky shot.”
Ashe’s fingers are digging hard into Lia’s palm. “Did the fire kill him?”
No. He’d been alive. Scorched, but breathing. Until Ellie threw him into the trees, glowing brighter blue than Lia had ever seen her. And one of his buddies had gotten up— the one whose anger had been fueled by excitement, the one who enjoyed the hunt, and Lia had seen it, and Lia had fired. Because her powers could lead her on a chase, but they can’t end it.
There are human ways to do that.
“None of them are coming back,” Lia says. “We can stay here for a few days.”
“Stay h—” Anaaya looks around. “This was their house?”
“It’s well-supplied. I doubled back after they left. If it all went well, I thought we could raid the place before they returned, and if they were the ones who made it back…” Ashe looks from Anaaya to Lia’s gun, and lets the rest of them decide how she was going to end the sentence. “Did you… did you at least get the…?”
“Yep.” Ellie holds up a round, flat battery. “Whole pack of ‘em. They’ll keep the collars charged for a few months, at least.”
“And if we keep dying at this rate, they’ll last even longer.”
It’s not that Anaaya’s wrong. It’s just thinking about it makes Lia want to cry, and if she starts she might never stop, because yesterday Shawn was here and now he’s not and she’s got his favorite issue of Green Lantern tucked into the pocket of her backpack where she keeps Hanna’s family photos and a deck of cards Mystique had given her.
“Don’t talk like that,” Ellie snaps, and Lia can’t tell exactly how close to a breakdown she is, but it’s probably close. It might be a good thing they’re all powered down right now, because Ellie’s breakdowns often involve things going flying. “We aren’t going to die.”
“I’m just—”
“Charles has a plan,” Ashe says, though she sounds very far away. “Charles has a plan.”
And now would be a great time for you to tell us what it is.
He could be dead too, but Lia doesn’t believe it. He’s survived the impossible over and over again. Charles isn’t dead, and Charles has a plan, because otherwise…
“Bit late, for a plan.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Ellie sticks her hand out, palm down. “Oaths. C’mon.”
One by one, they put their hands on top of hers. Anaaya first, then the other two, and Lia takes the chance to press her thumb against Ashe’s.
“I will live to spit on the president’s grave,” they all chant, slightly out of time with one another.
(“If we can’t live for hope,” Nate had said, a few months before, “we can live out of spite. I’m not dying until he does.”)
(Nate had been unable to keep that promise.)
“Right.” Ashe clears her throat. “There’s some ramen packets and a bag of rice in the second bin over there. I ate earlier, so I’ll go keep watch.” She squeezes past them out of the kitchen with short, quick steps. The sole of her sneaker flaps where it’s broken free of the heel.
Should Lia go after her? What she really wants to do is open all the bins and look at the food, or possibly, go find a side room and cry for about a week, but that’s more or less what Ashe is doing and Ashe never actually wants to be alone. She spent a day rubbing elbows with shitheads and then two days by herself wondering if the others were going to make it back—now this. At least Lia’s had the walk to process.
“Go ahead,” Ellie says quietly. “We’ll take stock.”
“Thanks.”
Lia ducks out of the kitchen and through the living room. It looks grimier without tracks covering it up: the carpet is molding, the couch’s pattern is hideous, and she’d almost rather see Ashe’s worry covering the last feelings the Purifiers had left behind. Putting on a collar always makes her feel like she’s stumbling through the dark.
Ashe is lying flat on her back in the yard, flannel balled up under her head. Lia approaches slowly, making sure her footsteps are loud enough to be heard. She still has her backpack on— gets anxious if she’s more than three feet from it at any given time— so she takes it off now, using it as a pillow.
Ashe isn’t crying. But her breathing is very careful.
“Even when you guys weren’t here,” she says, “I couldn’t sleep without watching for Sentinels.”
“You slept out here?”
“Mm.”
The ground isn’t exactly uncomfortable, but the grass is going to make her itch eventually. It seems like allergies shouldn’t still exist, at the end of the world. “If you want, I can keep watch tonight,” Lia offers, really hoping Ashe doesn’t take her up on it. “If you want to sleep inside.” The entire point of the collar is that most Sentinels won’t register them as a threat. But they also reveal them as mutants to every human they pass, and if they happened upon one of the Sentinel Guard groups, looking for collars as a sign of camp escapees—
Well.
They haven’t yet.
But Anaaya’s right. It’s only a matter of time.
“It’s alright.” Ashe’s voice is hoarse. “I keep… I didn’t even know Shawn that well, really. But he knew Brook, and I keep thinking…”
Yeah. Lia reaches out to where Ashe’s hand is flat on the ground. An offer. “I know.”
She didn’t expect she’d miss mourning as much as she does. There are things one does for the dead, and they don’t involve abandoning the body in the woods, in case their use of powers had caught any Sentinel radar. At least when Nate’s injuries finally did him in, they’d been somewhere relatively safe. They hadn’t had any supplies for a proper Hindu funeral, but there had been a few dandelions, and a chipped novelty mug for Anaaya to break. Then Shawn had incinerated the body, and they’d all run gagging from the smell.
Funerals with relatives and sitting shiva for her grandma feel like something that happened to another person.
Ashe finally takes Lia’s hand, squeezing it hard.
She’s never asked if Ashe regretted leaving Salem Center with her. There wasn’t time to regret it, not with scorched earth behind them and no chance to turn back. But she must have wondered, since then, what her life would be like if she’d never befriended Lia in the eighth grade. If George and Brook would still be alive.
(There’s a chance Connie is still out there. Maybe Lia’s mom, as well— her dad was doomed from the start, carrying the X-gene, but the last time Lia had seen her mother she was running for the reservoir, and Lia has never worked up the courage to ask Charles if she made it. Because if she did, Lia will want to find her and that will put her in danger, and if not— if not, what good would that knowledge do her? Better to have the hope. One more reason to turn her collar on, when the Sentinels pass overhead—)
(Pass over—)
“Do you know what day it is?”
“Late March? Maybe April.” Ashe rolls onto her side, propping herself up on an elbow. Her ponytail is full of grass. “Should I?”
“I think it’s almost Passover. Or maybe it just ended.” She hadn’t thought about it until now, and definitely hasn’t been timing the length of the days, but surely they’re past the equinox. When was the last full moon? Wasn’t there one when they were hiding out in that storm shelter? It probably doesn’t matter. It’s not like she can celebrate— although mumbling half-remembered prayers while Sentinels drift overhead is rather in the spirit of the thing. Last year, they’d had the family Seder at Bill and Ruth’s, and she’d brought Ashe, and Kelsey had put the Haggadah underneath a magazine and then forgotten so they’d had to spend half an hour tearing the house apart trying to find it.
She’d emailed Charles and Erik a meme with a picture of the Pillsbury Dough Boy captioned he has risen! next to a Pillsbury Dough-Boy-shaped piece of matzah captioned he has not.
Erik had replied: “I hope your family is well.”
Charles had replied: “LOLOLOLOL.”
“Guess it’s Easter then, too,” Ashe says. “There’s a computer in there, if we want to find out the exact date. Might even have internet.”
“Best leave it off, just in case.” Ashe turns nineteen in late April. If they’re still alive, Lia will have to think of something to do. “Next year…”
“We’ll have a table, and food, and all the wine. So much wine.”
“Or we might be dead.”
Ashe squeezes her hand tighter. “Don’t say that. Next year in Jerusalem, right?”
It’s a good thing they ran in the same direction, Lia thinks, because she’s pretty sure that alone, they’d both be dead by now. “Right.”
Above them, white clouds drift by.
Fifty years earlier, a gun hits the White House lawn.
Ashe wakes the next morning to a damp feeling on her ear. It takes a second to process where she is— at her parents’ house, with unpacked bags at the foot of the bed— and another second to recognize that the damp feeling is somebody’s tongue.
“Eew!” she hisses, lashing outward with her elbow. Snickering, Lia rolls away, using a pillow to defend herself. “What was that?”
“I can’t get up without climbing over you, and it’s ten o’clock! It’s time to wake up!”
“Some of us are jet-lagged.”
“Well that’s what you get—” Lia dodges a wiggling fingertip aimed for her chin, and the motion nearly takes out Ashe’s Yuanyuan Tan poster— “for going to another time zone just to learn how to snoop.”
“One day you’re going to declare a major, and then it’s all over for you.”
Ashe is about to bring her elbows back into play when there’s a sharp knock at the door, and Lia squeaks, diving under the covers.
“Yeah?”
Her mother leans into the room, and Ashe sits up slightly, pulling her duvet with her to try and make the Lia-shaped lump less obvious.
“I thought I heard voices.”
“I was sending talking emojis,” Ashe says quickly.
“Right. Well, your dad is making waffles, if you want to get up.”
Whole family in the kitchen. Not ideal for sneaking one’s girlfriend out after an unsanctioned sleepover. “Okay. I’ll make it downstairs eventually.” She yawns, for effect. “Brain’s still off-kilter, you know.”
“Alright.” Her mom smiles, moves like she’s going to leave, and Ashe is just about to relax when she stops. “He’s doubled the recipe, so there are enough waffles for Liliana if she’d like to come downstairs as well.”
Busted.
“Thanks, Connie,” Lia says, her voice muffled by blanket.
“You’re very welcome, dear.”
And then she finally does go away, leaving the bedroom door wide open. Ashe flops back down onto her pillow. “Well.”
Lia emerges. The static from the blanket is making her hair stick out in all directions, and Ashe pats it back down. Then she untangles the bit that’s gotten tangled in the chain of Hanna’s locket, because they haven’t been in the same room since January and Ashe will take any excuse to touch her.
“At least she’s amused, not mad,” Lia says, squinting at the hallway. “Think she’ll tell my parents?”
“Er, did you think they weren’t going to notice that you weren’t home?”
“I told them I was going to go visit the school today. If they noticed I was gone early, I’d have said I went for breakfast. Erik would probably have covered for me,” she adds, at Ashe’s dubious expression.
“Is he in town?” As far as Ashe can tell, the leadership at Xavier’s changes on a semi-regular basis: Professor Xavier comes in and out of retirement every few years, splitting his time between Westchester and Genosha. Scuttlebutt says that his movements are based on how well he and a Mr. Lehnsherr are getting on at any particular moment, but that doesn’t explain the amount of time Erik spends in Westchester. Come to think of it, maybe it’s not that Erik comes to Westchester with Charles, it’s that Charles goes to Genosha with Erik.
Their marriage is weird.
“Yeah, that’s part of why I gotta visit now— who knows if he’ll still be in town during summer break. You want to come with?”
Ashe visited the school fairly frequently, once Lia started going there part time— especially Junior year, when Lia had decided that she wanted to board like most of the other mutants in town. That lasted about a month before she remembered how much she liked having her own room, and parents, and walls that weren’t a mural of teenage emotions. Nobody there was ever rude to Ashe’s face: Professor Xavier was almost disturbingly welcoming, and even Erik, notorious separatist, was nice enough.
But she’d still been very, very human. “Would that be weird? Don’t you want to see people?”
“We’re only home for eight days, and I want to see you too.” Lia pokes her in the side. “Come onnnn. Rogue will be there.”
Rude. “I’m breaking up with you,” Ashe says, pretending to go back to sleep.
“Pshaw. How else would you get into the mansion to observe Rogue’s lovely visage?”
“Raven would let me in. She likes me.”
“She moved to Genosha with Irene. She’s like, mayor there now, or something.”
“Jean, then.”
There's a pause as Lia considers this. “She’s a telepath, though. Think of the mockery. Face it, babe, you’re stuck with me. Now geddup, or I’ll lick your ear again. Your mom promised me waffles.”
Those do sound nice. However. “Those waffles will come with parental mockery and judgmental eyebrows, you realize.”
"Somehow,” Lia says, “we've survived worse.”