xp_logs | A Touch of Brimstone Log 10

More fall as Jean sounds the retreat.

Trigger warning: Graphic violence and death.

It had seemed like everything was going almost perfectly to plan. The flanking tactic had worked, the Brotherhood were being taken down, one by one, and contained by the X-Men. But then things had changed dramatically. Portals had opened and out of them came the Dark Riders and then everything had gone horribly, suddenly, unthinkably wrong. Cyclops was down, Angel was seriously injured, and Catseye...

Yvette couldn't weep - her powers would not let her - but as Catseye went down she screamed, a long wailing keen, something tearing loose inside her. Her skin reflected her grief and fury, becoming a mass of spikes and hard armor plating so quickly that her leathers were shredded away and her bodysuit, made of Forge's self-repairing cloth, was hard put to knit itself together, holes and tatters going unmended. She launched herself bodily at the closest enemy, Kamal, tearing at his rocky skin with the foot-long daggers that had been her hands and fingers.

Kyle had been wrestling - literally - with Toad as he heard Yvette's scream, and stopped, stunned as he put together the meaning of what he had heard and seen - and smelled. His friends, his teacher - his people, dead because of self-righteous assholes. He let the Toad hit him twice before he pulled his attention back to the fight, and lashed out with a rage-driven elbow to the man's gut before headbutting Toad in the face. Toad reeled back, and lashed out at Kyle with his whip-like tongue, only to find that his opponent was all too happy to take more blows if it means he could lash out harder by using Toad's own momentum to flip him.

Death was an unmistakable feeling to a telepath. The mind was constantly active, flowing with thoughts and images. It was a bright flame of a candle, a blooming flower bursting with life. Death snuffed the candle out. It was deafening silence. Jean could feel it when it happened, that moment of confusion and pain, and then, and then...nothing. No life. Just darkness.

She was almost grateful that she didn't have the time to react...to Catseye, to Angel, to Scott: the dead, the possibly dying, and the distraction. She had to get the rest of them through this. She knew if she didn't the thought of it would swallow her whole.

Funny how the tide could turn in an instant from a swell to a tsunami.

Staring down the small cadre of Brotherhood and Dark Riders, Jean stood perfectly still for a moment. A rumbling was heard, and suddenly a few of the rocks from down at the bottom of the cliff came flying over the edge toward them with enough force them to crack upon impact.

~Wildchild. Squirrel Girl. I need you to help Logan. We have to rendezvous with the others.~

The Brotherhood and Apocalypse's forces were between them and the Blackbird. This left them with very few options.

Dori nodded at the silent order and turned around, heading in the direction. She wouldn't let the fact that this seemed to be going sideways break her optimism, they would kick butt! They always kicked butt! After all, they were the good guys, the good guys always won.

"Here I go," she squeaked.

There was a thump and a small cry as Kamal swung a massive rocky fist at Yvette and connected despite her greater speed and agility. She flew through the air and landed in a small crumpled heap by the cliff edge, too close for comfort.

It was almost humorous to watch a group of Brotherhood members scrambling to get out of the way of a volley of rocks. One of the Brotherhood members, Katu, who was able to absorb electromagnetic energy lobbed an electric blast at Jean but she brought up one of the larger boulders to deflect it and it wound up shooting in to the air instead, striking Foxbat, who had been swooping in to try to dive bomb Dori.

The yell from Yvette, followed by the crash, broke Jean's concentration, however, and it allowed a few of the Brotherhood to rally. They decided to attack all at once. Katu fired off another electromagnetic blast, which Jean brought up a telekinetic shield to counter, while Kamal decided to set his sights back on Jean and charged at her, bringing up a set of rock fists to pound against the shields like a battering ram at a set of gates. Another Brotherhood member, Senyaka also took turns with a crackling energy whip, repeatedly striking against the shield.

"Knock knock," Senyaka said with exuberant glee. "Open sesame."

Jean grit her teeth, trying not to look toward Dori, Kyle, and Logan so she wouldn't set the Brotherhood's attention back to them.

~Get out! GET OUT!~

Kyle's attention snapped from the near-unconscious Toad to the telepathic map that Jean had driven into his head. He dropped to all fours, barely noticing Dori at a full out run next to him as they dodged around retreating teammates.

Kyle had no idea whose face he broke with his elbows and fists and claws, it didn't matter, except that they fled, leaving a broken, bleeding Logan on the ground. A Logan that Kyle had never seen, smelling of blood and sweat and such powerful rage that the smell of it had Kyle snarling himself and tossing his head, as he bent to pull his teammate up and failed, and had him snapping out orders at his white-knuckled fear-eyed girlfriend.

It took the pair of them too long to get Logan half off the ground, Dori's strong legs providing all the leverage to get the older man off the ground and supported. They staggered with every few steps under his weight - the adamantium bones that kept Logan virtually unbreakable making him too heavy to just carry.

With Kamal and Senyaka drawing Jean's attention, Katu decided to try again, pulling in the full electromagnetic energy of the weather for a fully-charged blast. Raising his hands, he aimed at the same point of Jean's shield that Kamal and Senyaka were focusing on, to compound the pressure. His expression was grim, that of someone doing an unpleasant job for the sake of a higher purpose. "~Farewell, X-Man,~" he murmured in Russian as he prepared to wipe out Jean's shield...

A weight landed on his back, something small but surprisingly dense, and long claws drove into his body armour. Katu twisted his head, only to find a pair of inhuman glowing blue eyes blazing back at him from the depths of fierce jagged spikes and crags that covered the creature's face. Yvette snarled and swept one long-taloned hand down - in one swift movement she had severed the man's neck, blood fountaining from the stump as his head toppled off and into the mud. Yvette herself leapt from his back as the dead man's body dropped to its knees, landing in a crouch as she looked for further prey.

The sudden move startled everyone who had witnessed it, including the Brotherhood. For a moment things stopped, like someone had pressed pause. X-Men didn't kill. The Brotherhood knew this. They didn't expect it. Jean didn't either, so when she saw it she knew that Yvette's mind had been lost, driven mad with grief to the point where the primitive, the feral nature that she had witnessed when the girl had faced the Fury was the only thing left.

Oh Yvette...

Her attention returned sharply back to Kamal and Senyaka, who were suddenly very, very angry. Kamal started for Yvette, but was ripped backward telekinetically by Jean, whom began tossing him back and forth against the ground like a ragdoll in an attempt to knock him out.

"You'll pay for that X-Man!" Senyaka snarled with clenched fists as a twin pair of energy tendrils slid from his wrists. He lashed one at her, aiming for her ankle.

The energy lash coiled around Yvette's ankle and she growled and slashed at it with razor-sharp finger-blades. A blast of energy feedback caused her to stumble back, shielding her sensitive eyes with one hand, as the second whip coiled around her entire body. Sensing pain, Jean dropped Kamal and was about to head for Yvette when Paralyzer, in a temporary moment of consciousness, fired off a burst of energy that Jean was able to block with a telekinetic shield. An tiny echo of the energy managed to bleed through however, due to her being tired from the fight and caused her to hit the ground, momentarily stunned and helpless.

Senyaka drew in his target with his energy coils like a snake wrapped around a mouse. The air was electrified, and the smell of ozone was mixed in with the salty, brackish sea air. He studied Yvette a moment, only a moment, and it almost looked like he changed his mind before he laughed and jolt of energy poured through the tendrils, then another, and another, the electricity arching wildly off the coils, lighting up the night.

Typically, Yvette's skin protected her from all extremes - heat, cold, pain... But this was something beyond the typical, and the sudden jolt of energy electrified every muscle, burned every nerve with searing pain. She stiffened, unable to move, unable to even scream as smoke began to seep from her ears, her nose, her mouth... Senyaka's powers were cooking her from the inside out, and the last thing Jean saw was the blue light in Yvette's eyes flickering out before her eyes themselves boiled in their sockets and became another exit point for the smoke.

Senyaka pulled his whip away with a satisfied smirk, and Yvette's body fell mercifully forward, an empty shell.

She had always been small. When Jean first met Yvette the girl barely spoke. She was nothing but a shadow, her spirit broken and beaten by the ravages of war. But at Xavier's she had come into her own.

"NO!" Jean shrieked, willing herself to move even though her body wanted to just be dead weight. She couldn't take her eyes off the girl's still form, even as Kamal, thinking he had an advantage, tried once more to attack.

More smoke filled the air, this time from Jean herself as her eyes snapped toward him and she launched him backward with the wave of her hand, sending him sailing through the air and causing him to crash down with enough force to throw up dirt. She locked eyes with Senyaka, who, at first gave her a wolfish grin, but that grin quickly died as some primal sense of preservation kicked in and he started to back up.

But she didn't give him the chance to run, and her eyes almost started to glow as the man suddenly hit his knees, clutching his temples as he began to scream, overwhelmed with feeling the pain Yvette felt before he finally collapsed next to her body. He was still breathing, however. But barely. Death was too good for him.

Staring at Yvette for another moment, Jean turned away and pulled out her communicator.

"Penance..." Her voice cracked. "Is dead. I repeat. P...Penance is dead."

Two. Two of her former students, her children, dead. One dying. She didn't want to think about it anymore but she couldn't stop. It threatened to consume her.

What were they going to do now?

No... Dori couldn't believe what she heard. It couldn't be right. This wasn't supposed to happen. Dori before the school would have shut everything away and tried to forget about it. She was a master of denial when she wanted to be. Dori wasn't that person anymore though, not only had she grown from that but they had a job to do. She would get it done. She could deal with the idea of having lost a friend afterward. Right now... she'd get this done. She would.

"We can do this, I know we can," she said - trying to convince herself as much as anything.

"No we can't." Kyle barked out. "Blink! We need to get the fuck out of here! We aren't gonna get Wolverine clear. We need support." He kept dragging Logan, kept his eyes up, didn't look at Dori, or the space where Yvette had fallen. There couldn't be anything but grunting steps out, because if he stopped to think about the smell of blood and smoke and death or the little grey Kevlar piglet on his friend's bed, or a lonely apple sapling, he'd finish what Jean had started.

There was too much triage, too much evac. There was no choice either, she couldn't choose one over the other, not like this. "Incoming mutant cheesecake!" she called, half the message coming across over the comms and the other half as she ported in almost as if she were flying she was porting so fast to get who she could. She didn't want to think about the dead. They were piling up too quickly. She was going to do her job, but when the job ended? There would be Words About This and a nice, happy breakdown. Preferably with someone's head on a platter.

It had started to rain, the water washing away some of the blood on the ground. It was the UK, after all. Rain was pretty much the typical forecast. Jean scanned the battlefield, her breath misting so much from the influx of cold air against her warm body that it almost looked like she was smoking. Her face was a mask, stone cold, almost frightening.

"Blink, get the three of them to the Blackbird. There's no one aboard. If anyone comes your way, teleport them as far away from here as you can," she said. Turning her head, her attention turned upward. There was someone she needed to speak to.

"I'm headed to the roof. Be careful."

The girl's eyes turning to smoke replayed over and over in her mind. She pushed away the thought, her fingers twitching. The rain seemed to sizzle as it struck her.

This wasn't good. Not at all. Pursing her lips, Clarice didn't argue. There was something about Jean that was terrifying. This was going to be bad and they had no way to stop her from whatever she was thinking without stopping her in a rather permanent way. There had already been too much death. "'First do no harm,'" she quoted, reminding Jean of her doctor's oath and that X-Men didn't kill. Then she opened a portal to get everyone to safety.

Jean glanced down at Clarice. "This isn't the medlab. It's war," she said. War had casualties. He would regret what he had done. She had ways of making someone wish they were dead. She took off toward the roof, trailing smoke and steam in her wake.