xp_logs | Last Limbo log.

x-snowflake.livejournal.com posting in

Previous parts: Start here. Around ten to seven, Thursday, February 26.

[And Illyana comes home after beating Belasco at his own game -- much to her own, and Piotr's, surprise.]

Homecoming

It took her a few minutes to regain her balance, and she spent them sagging against the wall, steadying her breathing from erratic gasps to slow, laboured breaths -- and she tried to think of these as her first free breaths in eight and a half years. It was hard, though, to connect the tepid air in her throat with the supposedly-uplifting sense of liberty she'd read about at stolen intervals in Belasco's library; she supposed that would come with time. She pushed her hair off her shoulders and out of her face, scraping at it where the blood had cooled and dried, and tried to breathe shallowly, so as not to aggravate the sharp pain emerging on her left side.

Over. It was over and she could go home. The very thought was surreal, the sense of vertigo almost overbearing. In nearly nine years she'd entertained the thought of going home at every turn of every day, whispered it in prayers and screamed it in defiance and dreamt of it at night -- and now she was here, and it was nothing like she'd thought. She'd never imagined herself slumped against the courtyard wall, Belasco gone, bleeding onto the marble floors, breathing painfully against cracked ribs, letting her sword dissolve into uselessness beside her.

Now it had happened and she didn't even know what she felt. As with all things, it was time to stop thinking about it and just go.

She 'ported when she could stand upright again. She'd known where for years, ever since this moment -- if not its mechanics -- had become a solid reality. Could there really have been anywhere else? She could even remember the panelled walls, the clean carpet underneath her feet that one last time -- when she wanted to remember -- and his face beyond it, frozen in time, perpetually in shock.

What she saw was not what she expected. She'd often allowed herself a moment of idle time to imagine what might have happened in the time since she'd left Xavier's mansion -- since she'd been taken from it, Storm would have said, and she brushed that thought firmly from her mind. She'd imagined all of them dead, or wounded, or the mansion destroyed, made herself plan for the contingency that they wouldn't want her, would know what she'd become; hundreds of different scenarios, remembered faces and voices blurring into a million different ways to come home, for better or for worse.

But they were all there, like they'd been that time, and she had never --

It was like they hadn't -- he was too -- she wasn't -- should have --

They were still the same, and she was --

"Piotr?" she said after a moment, when the silence had stretched to a
breaking point so high that her hoarse voice cracked slightly. She wished they'd stop staring, had never felt so many eyes on her; had she thought she could do this? "Piotr Nikolievitch?"

"Y-Yana?" Piotr barely managed to gasp. He had thought she was gone. His snowflake was taken from him. He had seen it with his own eyes! He looked her up and down, up and down. Could this be his little sister? She was older, harsher, darker. Tears started to well in his eyes, "Illyana, you've come back to me!"

She didn't move, took a breath and put a hand over her hurt side to buy herself time. The sense that this was *wrong* overrode everything else -- it was all she could do to keep from stepping back, 'porting herself to *safety*, somewhere where it was definitively 2012. Even if she'd counted wrong, if the years had been a few more or a few less, she knew he should be older. "What's going on?" she asked in Russian, still stalling, flicking a glance to the others and, oh, Elder Gods and little ancestors, it was as though somebody had lifted them right out of her memory. "Is it -- you?" And involtuntarily she took a step forward, as though another few inches would lift the haze and things would be the way they were supposed to be.

He slowly approached her, oblivious to her wounds, and offered her a hand. He didn't care about her wavering stance, her confused looks, he had his sister back! Replying in Russian, "Yes! Yes, it is me! Piotr! Oh my little Yana, what's happened to you?" The questions couldn't come out fast enough, "Where did you go? Why...Why are you so old?"

Her nerves were shot to hell, and she backed away from the barrage of
questions physically, ignoring Piotr's proffered hand in favour of answering his questions. "Limbo," she said finally. "I've been in -- you didn't know?" Was that even possible? "It's been -- I mean, it's been eight years, Piotr. More than eight years. Why aren't you -- why don't you -- " Completely nonplussed, she cut herself off, feeling the room spin underneath her.

Piotr reached out and caught her limp body. She recomposed herself and gently pushed Piotr away, letting him know that she can stand herself. Piotr gazed at her face, recognizing every little feature of the young sister he just saw only five minutes ago. Five minutes! The realization struck Piotr like a bulldozer. "Illyana, you've only been gone for five minutes from us," he continued in Russian, "...not eight years..."

She stared at him. Five minutes. Five minutes. Unwittingly, she was drawn back across the years, back to Cat and Storm, to the hidden garden, to the ceremonies and the bloodlust and her recent victory -- her new throne. Eight and a half years of fighting nearly everything that moved, running from place to place, hiding where she could. Months where she hadn't known where her next meal was coming from, times when she didn't know whether she would live to see the sunrise, injuries and sicknesses and everything else. The realisation hit her sharply in the pit of her stomach.

Five goddamned minutes. Like it was nothing. "It was eight years -- eight and a half -- in Limbo," she said finally, taking a deep, somewhat shaky breath. She closed her eyes briefly, regained her composure, checked her tongue and her thoughts so that she could get through this. "Probably -- the dimensional -- it must work on a different -- " She shook her head firmly, pushing the theory to the side. Time for that later. "I missed you," she said instead, reaching up tentatively to touch Piotr's face, half-disbelieving.

"And I've missed you, dear sister." Piotr was overjoyed to have her back. He reached out and embraced her. It didn't matter if she was gone for five minutes or eight years, she was back and he wasn't going to let go.