I WILL MAKE YOU SEE GOD

By Bren Hunter

Previously In Captain Britain: Rachel Summers completed the first year of her university program, and decided to spend her summer vacation as a volunteer for several civilian search and rescue organisations, alongside Scott Wright.

Absently twirling a pair of chopsticks, Scott asked, “You’re in school too, aren’t you?”

“Business management,” Ray nodded agreeably. “As a student. I don’t know how you find the time for school, work and volunteering. When classes were in session, it took everything in me just to keep up. I don’t even know if I liked it! …Or if I learned anything. God.”

In the weeks since the end of semester, Rachel has gradually become increasingly agitated and confrontational.

Diving her hand into the back pocket of Jane’s stroller, paper crunched in Ananym’s palm. She withdrew the folded page, and smoothed it out.

“What are you doing going through Brian’s personal private property?” Rachel Summers shrilly tore the words from her throat.

Brian Braddock and Rachel Summers shared a flashforward prophecy of Brian presenting the costume and title of Captain Britain to an unknown individual.

“I never thought it would be you. It seemed impossible and yet you always knew it, even if you didn’t understand it.” The visage of Brian Braddock held the face of his Captain Britain helmet in the palm of his hand, and pressed it to Brian’s face, bringing darkness. “…You knew, didn’t you?”

Brian and Rachel subsequently disagreed over Brian’s apparently willingness to give up the mantle of Captain Britain.

Expelling his growing frustration, Brian asked, in sudden clarity, “Why do you want me to be Captain Britain?”

“It’s who you are. You’re at your best when you’re not fighting it,” Rachel said simply, and attempted to smile. “I’m trying to be your friend.”

“No. That’s not what I asked,” Brian tenaciously asserted. “Why do you want me to be Captain Britain? Why is it best for you? With Linda, if I give up the icon and the costume, I force her to question why she holds onto it so desperately. I can’t even fathom what it is that you get out of me being a super hero?”

“Nothing,” Rachel spat, her passion for the topic quickly deflating. “I don’t get anything. I don’t need anything.”

Rachel Summers was recruited, by former Excalibur member Cerise, to save Earth and many other worlds on behalf of the Shi’ar Empire, and was teleported aboard theStarjammer, a transport ship Captained by her grandfather, Christopher Summers.

Inhumanly dulcet tones came from the alien woman’s mouth the moment her form coalesced: “I am Cerise; genestock of Subruki, Zarstok, and Kulika. By Shi’ar Majestrix Lilandra Neramani, I have been charged with the critical chare of message-bearer. My message is that of a desperate plea. Countless inhabited planets between the nearest arm of the Shi’ar Galaxy and this precious orb are in direct threat of being slashed down to bloody flames and ashes. Only you can save us all.”

Four years before now…

The scorching sands and crashing waves of Bondi beach panned before Brian and Meggan’s eyes. The lovers were dressed for a nude beach, under the covers, even though they were hard pressed to remember a grayer day than the one pouring down outside their bedroom windows. As quickly as the comforting sight had been displayed in two-dimensions on the television screen set into the wall opposite their bed, it was diluted by bland actors strutting about. Brian’s attention quickly returned to his engineering journal, and Meggan’s attentions wrapped around Brian.

“Please, Brian, could Excalibur go for a training holiday in Sydney?” Meggan questioned sprightly, snuggling against his flank. Her big eyes pleaded with him, while her hands stroked Bri’s bare right arm.

Without affording a glance away from his magazine, Brian grunted, “I don’t see how that climate will make us more battle-ready for an attack in our own country.”

“Of course,” Meggan nodded pensively, and rested her chin on Brian’s shoulder. “Of course. It was dumb of me.”

“Hardly,” Brian insisted sharply. He flatted the magazine out on the bedside table, and mentally chastised himself for his pompous reply. Planting his attentions onto Meggan, Brian grinned uncontrollably, as he cooed, “Australia would make a charming vacation spot for the two of us. I will simply have to add it to the list of every other city you’ve seen on the television that we absolutely must visit.”

Meggan quickly squealed in delight, when she saw Brian retrieve said list from the bedside table’s drawer. While he looked for a pen, she wrapped her arms around Brian’s chest and lay a trail of kisses across his shoulder.

Seven months before now…

Newborn Jane Braddock, cradled in her father’s arm, spit up on his shoulder. Then she went back to sleep. Brian Braddock could only sigh lightly, and roll his shoulder to distract himself from the uncomfortable feeling of liquid dribbling down his back. With an unexpected curl to his lips, he placed his empty mug on the empty table in the kitchenette, and shuffled back into the bedroom. Amused and frustrated at the same time, he ran his free hand through his blond hair, completely forgetting how close he’d had it cropped, and then took a moment to regard his hand, silently blaming it for the frustrated habit that made more sense when his hair was longer. From the bedroom, he could not appreciate the fact that this rented cottage in Sydney, Australia was beachfront property, because he had left the windows shuttered.

When he returned to the kitchenette, carefully buttoning up a burgundy shirt with one hand as he held Jane close with his other, he found himself faced with a far more interesting sight. His mug had filled itself with tea, and had been joined by another.

“I can hold her, if you want to take a shower,” Elisabeth Braddock offered, skulking back into the kitchenette from the foyer. Her lengthy purple hair was streaked with blonde — a reminder of her childhood — and she was dressed in a light camisole atop dirty black jeans.

Instinctively holding Jane closer, Brian questioned Betsy, “How did you get in?”

“I miss my brother,” was all the answer Betsy felt was needed. She leaned against the edge of the dining table, resting her weight in the palms of her hands, which gripped the rim of the tabletop. In her Londoner-accent, she drawled on, “We were finally living in the same country, again. Now was not the time to continent jaunt. I want to know my niece. In fact, I refuse to miss all of her firsts.”

“We will come home,” Brian patronisingly promised, as he shuffled towards the refrigerator. He swung open the door, and stared at the florescent light in silence for some moments. “I just need to learn how… learn how to Be. Didn’t you tell me once, after you lost Thomas, that you didn’t know how to live anymore? Well, I don’t know how to be, right now.”

“Do you have to learn alone?” Elisabeth gently entreated.

Brian shut the fridge, without retrieving anything from it, and finally faced Elisabeth. “Braddocks grieve best solo,” he told her. His hard gaze quickly crumpled under the genuine affection between them, though. She smiled back at him, which only made him scoff, and take the first steps in pacing around the cottage. “You have only just arrived, and already you’re pitying me. I cannot endure that every hour of every day.”

Quick to the defensive when dealing with her brother, Elisabeth riposted, “What did I say that was–”

Counting explanations off on his one free hand, as he clutched Jane close again, Brian put forth, “I’m your twin; you’re telepathic; our Otherworld genes are dominant. Take your pick, but I can feel it. I refuse your pity.”

“Our home is a big manor, Brian. You can take an entire wing for Jane and yourself,” Betsy practically pleaded. “No one will disturb you unless you wish it.”

“Here, there. It won’t change anything,” Brian said resolutely.

“But it will!” Betsy insisted, and thrust herself up from the table. She began to follow Brian’s pacing, but kept her distance. “I know all about the emptiness you feel. Warren guided me away from that void, and then you got me out of it, after Warren…”

“You’re not qualified to be my guide,” Brian interjected flatly. “I think I might like to get through this without alienating my family and killing people.”

“You’re already halfway there,” Betsy shot back automatically. Gritting her teeth and breathing out a heavy breath, she regained enough composure to acknowledge, “You’re right. We both don’t want you to walk away from your life, the way I did. Excalibur needs your help. I’m not asking you to fight or to leave Jane by herself. In fact, I need your help because Martinique is arguing that Excalibur should stop fighting humans criminals altogether.” — Brian padded back into the bedroom, but left the door open as Elisabeth spoke — “She wants us to fight for mutant rights in developing nations, where human rights are iffy to begin with. It’s a noble cause, but I don’t know if it’s Excalibur’s cause. Rachel can’t decide either, and all of the other founders left before you did. Captain Britain would know what to do.”

Brian Braddock returned without Jane, to eulogize, “Captain Britain is dead.”

“Excalibur needs you to return from the dead, again,” Betsy stridently encouraged. “I need you to return. I can’t be certain, but I feel like the Crimson Dawn is sniffing the Manor.”

“Sniffing?” Brian derisively echoed. “Really?”

“A metaphor for a mystical activity that has no word. Go with it,” Betsy explained dismissively. “I don’t know who it is, or what it wants, but we have both made enemies. We cannot afford to ignore it.”

“You’re asking me to bring Jane into that danger?” Brian incredulously asked. “I don’t want her near Crimson Dragons or Undercloaks! I don’t want her near anything touched by the Ebon Vein.”

“Am I such a,” Psylocke cooly asked, “a thing that you don’t want Jane to be near?”

Brian eyed his sister skeptically, watching the flared red scar that marred her face, watching the hurt turning to anger in her eyes. And he frowned. “…Maybe you are.”

Now

Holding the purple, leathery material to her chest, Rachel Summers squished her arms through the sleeves of her new mid-thigh-length dress, each motion making a noisy slurping sound. Despite her previous familiarity with unstable molecules, Ray was vaguely unsettled when the the dress sealed itself around her. Her skin was blanched out with white makeup, and heavy blackish purple lined her lips and her eyes. Her shoulder-length red hair was loose and wavy, with small shiny black beads threaded throughout at random. Rachel attempted to stand perfectly still, down on one of the lower decks of the starship Starjammer, as a holographic imager recorded her exact appearance. Beginning to appear uncomfortable, she bit her lower lip.

“My flesh is crawling,” Ray admitted banally. When little response came from the group of alien Starjammers seated around a meeting table, Ray howled, “My flesh is crawling! I’m not talking about my own skin, here. This flesh that I’m wearing is crawling against my body.”

“Made of synthetic muscle tissue, it is,” the feline Mephistoid called Hepzibah exposited. In sympathy, she offered only a shrug and a swipe of her white furred tail.

Crossing her arms under her breasts, Rachel attested, “Red and gold spandex was good enough for the Dark Phoenix when she burned a world to a ground. Why isn’t it good enough for these Uncreated folk who you need me to scare some sense into?”

“They believe themselves supremely intelligent,” the long-limbed Shi’ar messenger, Cerise, replied. “The Uncreated believe themselves to have killed their God-slash-Creator-force.”

“They’ve proven themselves dangerous. They burned a score of worlds to the ground — for being mindless enough to believe in gods — and were looking at Earth as a tall pile of kindling, what with our polytheism back home,” explained the swashbuckling Christopher Summers, leader of the Starjammers.

“Oh,” Ray deferred to her sort-of-grandfather’s experience.

“In failing, their grand army self-slaughtered,” the cyborg Shi’ar, Raza, told of the part he had participated in. “We Starjammers hath contained the remaining Uncreated in their home star system by inflaming a holographic glamour of their god, and protecing it with sensor-beam-bouncing chaff. The Uncreated hath begun waging strikes against the god, damaging the hologenerators.”

“Additionally, they have devoured all diplomats whom the Shi’ar have sent to negotiate formal relations between our two peoples,” Cerise acerbically added.

“FriendRachel, we need you to destroy their god, and telepathically declare yourself the new Lord of the Created,” the massive amphibian Saurid, named Ch’od, asked of Ray.

“That,” Rachel let out a breath, rather than continuing. Her eyebrows raised up her furrowed brow, until she halfway smiled. “Now that, I can do.”

Satisfied with her agreement, Christopher Summers reclined in his chair, and Hepzibah joined him by sitting on his lap. Despite the distraction of his wife, he laid out the details for Rachel, “We will ensphere the Uncreated’s star system with the Shi’ar’s newest holographic technology. Each mechanism is made up of countless self-replicating nanites. The field of nanites will generate a convincing simulacrum of you as the Dark Phoenix — accompanied with wildly powerful false sensor readings — to watch over and contain them. If the Uncreated ever attack it and damage the mechanisms of the holoprojectors, the surrounding nanites can repair the damage.”

Rachel Summers listened to the details, but grew bored halfway through. Still, she made sure to regularly nod and mutter “right”. When Christopher completed detailing the plan, Ray wandered away from the congregation of Starjammers, to join Brian on the opposite end of the room. Bri was sitting on the floor, propped against a massive observation dome. His arms were clutching his knees to his chest, while his chin rested firmly against his knees.

“How long has it been since I last apologised?” Rachel queried, as she crouched down beside Brian. He shrugged the question away. Rachel checked her wrist for a watch, which wasn’t there, and declared, “Fourteen minutes. Far too long.”

“I have told you already. There is no need for apologies,” Brian assured her, exasperated. “I chose not to demand that they bring me home, what with the urgency. Burning worlds and all that.”

“But they only teleported you aboard because you were standing next to me. It’s my fault that you’re a galaxy away from your daughter,” Ray attempted to convince Brian of her guilt, but his eyes only said, ‘don’t remind me.’ Still, she went on, “My time gem seems to be ignoring me, and I should be able to form my own stargate… I just can’t divine how anymore. I already owe you so much, I should be able to–”

“Stop. It. This will be good” — Brian stumbled at that word, and cocked an uncertain eyebrow — “for me. You are always telling me that I need to get out, and let Jaye have time to herself.”

“I do always say that,” Rachel nodded sweetly, and raised her arms to wrap them around Brian’s shoulders.

“You can do one thing for me,” Brian offered quickly. “Don’t hug me.” He gestured towards the scaly purple flesh covering Rachel’s body.

“As you wish.”

“Really though, Ananym is Jane’s governess and Captain UK is a super hero. Neither of them will let anything happen to Jane. She’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.”

“Do you really think she should be playing with that?” Whitman Knapp hesitantly asked. He stretched his hand out to half of the distance between himself an baby Jane, to grab it away from her, if she tried to put it in her nose or mouth or ear or eye. Both of his own eyes, as well as Ananym’s, were locked on Jane Braddock, who was sitting upright on a picnic blanket, in the yard behind Braddock Manor. A meticulously-carved wooden wand was squeezed tightly in Jane’s chubby fist.

Ananym lazily looked to Whitman, looked to the clouds above, and looked back towards Whitman with a soft smile. “Jane reached for it, when she saw it in my room this morning. There was curiosity, like gleaming crystal, in her eyes. How can anyone say no to that tiny cute face?” Ananym playfully challenged her boyfriend.

“One simply says: no, you cannot touch that dangerous weapon,” Knapp reminded her at a hoarse whisper, feeling pinched with frustration that he needed to remind her at all.

“Any magick within it has long been drained,” Ananym promised him melodically, but cast a glance skyward. “Once I learned to focus my daemon energies, rather than be overwhelmed by them, I made sure to discharge all of my power from the wand. I only keep it to remind me how far I have come.” — Watching Jane accidentally twirl and drop the wand, only to pick it up again, Ana added — “And to make her giggle like that.”

After conceding with a nod, Whitman smiled a curious grin of his own, as he probed, “You keep looking at the sky…”

“I long to know that they are safe,” Ananym returned wistfully. “If Rachel and Brian do not come home… Brian’s parents have passed away, Meggan is incoporeal, and Brian has made it clear that he is no longer searching for his sister. The only Braddock who remains is his brother, but I do not believe a coma patient would make for the best father.”

“I dunno about that. My dad did some of his best parenting while he was asleep,” Whitman countered, tongue in cheek.

“And getting defeated by Amanda Sefton probably was the best thing my father ever did,” Ananym agreed.

“They will be back. I went on one of these impromptu interstellar incidents with Alpha Flight. They’re easy as pie.”

“Kara told me that you fought off crystalline aliens, took a detour through a demon dimension, and almost got killed by a giant brain tumour. Is that the pieishly easy journey you took off-world?”

“…Yes. …Easy as Rumble-bumble-berry pie.”

Rachel spent her second day aboard the Starjammer teaching the protein resequencers to produce raspberry tarts. Psylocke had told Ray, once, that their childhood governess, Emma, always served Brian raspberry tarts when she wanted him to do something he didn’t like. As Ray had discovered, it tended to work. Rachel spent the third day of high-speed travel by studying the Shi’ar archive files on the myths of the Phoenix and the recorded actions of Dark Phoenix. Rachel spent the fourth day listening to stories of how the Starjammers had shed away the piracy and politics of their lives, because it had been threatening their familial bond. Now they simply took jobs where they could get them, enjoying the journey without much care for the destination. Rachel spent much of the fifth day sparring with Brian — physically to keep fit, and verbally to keep the boredom at bay.

Early on the sixth day of travel, Rachel and Brian were called to the copper-paneled bridge of the Starjammer, which was abound with flatscreen and organic technology. Appearing within the forward holography tank, an unsymmetrical green monstrosity of a starship menaced through a star system not far from the Uncreated home world. It was a stout scout ship, filled with twenty-six of the Uncreated.

“Sensors assuage that yon vessel is solitary,” Raza noted.

“Shi’ar listening posts confirm: no brother or sister ships have left the Uncreated’s star system,” Cerise rattled off, from the CommSys station.

Drumming her claws along the edge of her console, Hepzibah trilled, “A more comely happenstance, we could not beg for. A chance, this is, to showcase Dark Phoenix.

“She’s right,” Christopher Summers nodded, greater realisation dawning upon him. “Rachel, you need to devour that sun.”

Ray gapingly scoffed out, “I believe I get to decide what I put in my mouth.”

“The Uncreated need to witness a show of strength. Killing our holographic representation of their god won’t be enough, since they’ve done the same,” Christopher began to persuade her. “Very few in this ‘verse have supped a sun, and let its carcass destroy the orbiting worlds. You can do it. Get in fast, get it done, and get out faster.”

“I may have agreed to melodrama as the Dark Phoneix, and let you appropriate my image for a guarding avatar, but I will not take innocent lives,” Rachel held firm.

“There is no way that a system this close to the Uncreated has anything resembling life in it,” Christopher promised her.

Conducting an investigation at the SciSys control panel, Ch’od said, “Confirmed. None of this system’s seven worlds are capable of supporting life.”

Cocking her head back, the perfect fan of feathery hair that surrounded her face holding in place, Cerise commanded, “We must commune with the Shi’ar to receive new directives.

“Are they really going to pout over losing a distant star surrounded by dead worlds?” Christopher aporetically asked.

“Her Majestrix Lilandra Neramani will question the wisdom of allowing the Phoenix Force to be fulminated with the immediate strength of an active star,” Cerise clamoured. Despite having once been a member of Excalibur, she had known Rachel only a short time. All Cerise truly knew of her was what she knew of the Phoenix Force.

Altogether ignoring Cerise and whatever she did or did not know, Christopher appealed to his almost-granddaughter, “Rachel, please put on your costume. I’m not asking you to absorb the energy of an entire star. I saw what kind of damage that did to Binary. I only need you to fuse the core of the star into iron and drain away a fraction of the stellar core’s energy. That will be enough to cause the outer layer of the star to implode, which will rapidly cascade the star towards becoming a neutron explosion. The shockwave of the supernova will send the Uncreated back to their home system at maximum shunt speed.”

“I want to help,” Rachel decided, but with extreme agitation, went on, “I just don’t know what most of that means.”

“Destroy the star,” Cerise simpled it up. “All you must do is will it. The Phoenix Force will do the rest.”

Sitting atop a leather chair, with her feet propped up on a low leather-clad table, which sat atop a leather throw rug, and was utterly surrounded by leather wallpaper, Cooter searched for the right words to say.

Years back, when Cooter first moved from New Jersey to London, she had lived in a messy flat with her cousin, Bash. Although they had ultimately resorted to the art of the Confidence Man, Cooter had been swayed to the UK by stories of the Vixen. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Vixen controlled crime in London. Using her charismatic leadership and extremely malleable men, she had built herself a modest empire of weapons smuggling, drug trade, prostitution, assassination and bootleg product sales (the latter of which was surprisingly lucrative, and absolutely risk-free, since the police were always so much more concerned with guns, drugs, whores and murders.) The pinnacle of Vixen’s career came when she broke into espionage, and took over England’s counterpart to SHIELD, an organization that was called STRIKE. Although STRIKE was dissolved out from under Vixen, and then the woman herself seemingly vanished during an encounter with the Braddock family some years later, Vixen’s STRIKE had performed horrors that the present day Black Air could only aspire to. To say that her boys loved her for it would be a significant understatement.

Of course, Cooter had only learned this through second- and third-hand means, because as many times as mutantly strong Bash had tried to prove his worth to the Vixen’s organisation, he had always been rejected, because he couldn’t ‘bring the pretty’. Cooter had been idly watching Kellin Sterre — his musculature, his facial features, his adroit body language, his sense of humour, his tactical mind, the shape of his lips — in the days since his desperate need for his former master had transformed Cooter into the geriatric dominatrix, Vixen herself. They had moved into Vixen’s abandoned mansion, and when Kellin invited two dozen men, who used to be Vixen’s enforcers and spies, Cooter had watched them too. At least, she watched them for as long as she could muster between naps. She could see why Bash had been rejected from this group, and decided not to tell him about her change of address. Having an army of lethal male models and dancers wasn’t half bad, and she didn’t want to risk losing it. At least not until it got boring, as it certainly would.

Cooter’s illusion of being the Vixen only grew stronger when the others first saw her; their desire for her leadership was of such magnitude that Cooter was even able to maintain the illusion when she lost consciousness. She didn’t speak to the boys much, but Kellin seemed pleased to step in and do the talking for her. Kellin assured them that Vixen was simply stuck in a nigh-mute depression, because of everything of hers that they had lost. This worried Cooter. Or it excited her, she wasn’t sure. In either case, it was an issue because Cooter didn’t know how to act depressed, since she was usually too apathetic to feel too bad about anything.

The situation became problematic when Kellin gathered together all of the men, and asked Cooter to inform them of her strategy. Together, they wanted to understand her overall vision for the organisation. Kellin had already determined the first goal: continue increasing their numbers before attempting any risky ventures, but this had been difficult, because all the other men who were already loyal to the Vixen had refused to leave their new employers. Since the real Vixen’s organisation had gone through so many styles over the years, the men in the room with Cooter couldn’t even guess as to what methods she would want them to use to attain the goal. Even Kellin looked to Cooter for guidance, just as expectantly as every other perfectly chiseled face in the room.

Although her dashing new living conditions were in danger if she was not convincing as the Vixen, Cooter cleared her throat, and capriciously decided to solve this problem as she would any other. As if it were an off-hand remark, she said, “If you can’t build a happy home, wreck one.”

The entire surface area of Rachel’s body — costumed in synthetic Uncreated flesh — appeared to burn with swirling cosmic flame, as she dropped out of the Starjammer’s auxiliary craft hatch. Once freed from the mechanical shell, the firebird personage of the Phoenix Force enflamed at full force, its wingspan spreading wider than the length of the Starjammer. Diving across the starscape, and swooping just beneath the Uncreated spacecraft, Phoenix telepathically projected, “I hunger!” in various language forms and brain wave patters. In her rocketing towards the pulsating star, Rachel artfully curved the form of the Phoenix to slap the Uncreated starship with its tail feathers, and continued forward, as if the Uncreated were beneath her notice. Phoenix had travelled hardly 1/8th of an A.U. away from the Uncreated ship, when she did halt her motion. She had noticed the Uncreated, and their thoughts were singular in fear.

A smile pushed itself across Rachel’s face.

She was warmed by strong memories of eliciting that kind of terror in others. Of late, she had thought herself incapable of being intimidating. As much as she knew she should hate it, she relished in the taste of fearful neural impulses; they literally aroused sweetness on her tastebuds. A kind change in fortune from the sym-pathetic pity that had become a permanent aftertaste in her throat.

Suddenly aware of her surroundings, Phoenix ducked, so to speak, as she sensed the Uncreated ship bearing down on her. Her startled movement didn’t lack grace or fluidity, but, with the Uncreated ship slowing its speed overhead, it dawned upon Rachel that her movement was the wrong one. She had shown a weakness — should have let the Uncreated crash their vessel into her telekinetic shell — and while she scrambled to think of a new way to strongly posture, she felt the unmistakable tickle of an intense sensor beam. Ray involuntarily laughed out loud at the sensation, but the sound of it in her head was hollow compared to the booming laughter she could telepathically hear within the Uncreated’s ship.

“It is not the Starchilde,” the lead Uncreated’s thoughts burrowed into Rachel’s brain. “It is a meat bag wallowing in the excrement of the Starchilde.”

“You’re going to talk to me like that? I don’t think so. You’re going to eat ‘excrement’. Ready?” Rachel challenged, and clapped her hands together. Simultaneously, her massive firebird exosleketon closed its wings together, denting the Uncreated vessel between two walls of cosmic fire. Ray pushed hard enough to damage the ship, but didn’t put on enough pressure to breach the hull. Without looking back at her makeshift redesign of the Uncreated’s starship, Rachel launched herself away at her top speed, until she was diving headfirst into the sun at the centre of this star system. Every part of her that was still human went instantly numb from sensory overload.

“Yon star’s energy readings are bating,” Raza gladly reported, from the OpsSys terminal towards the aft of the bridge.

At the fore end of the bridge, Christopher Summers began running calculations on the NavSys. Ever since he had given up the self-destructive Corsair nom de duerre, Chris had taken to piloting his own ship. Despite the business of his hands, his eyes never left the massive holography tank. “My granddaughter gets it done,” he proudly remarked.

“Calling you daddy, should I? Nearly as young as me, your granddaughter is,” Hepzibah mischievously taunted, from the DefenSys terminal, next to Raza.

“That’s only because you won’t stop celebrating your vektakth birthday, love,” Christopher smirkingly shot back.

“Yon star hath destabilized,” Raza reported.

A telepathic groan from Rachel swept across the Starjammer like a foamy wave. It hit Cerise particularly hard, apparently, as she tumbled backwards, and landed in the Captain’s chair.

“Sorry,” Chris and Hepzibah tentatively muttered in unison, suspecting that Ray had overheard them.

“Rachel…” Brian began to voice his concern.

“I can feel the star breathing on my neck,” Rachel projected into all of their minds. “Its heartbeat is pounding me. It sounds like music, like that song about frogs and princes. …Oh my. I know… I know… I know… I know… I can…” And Rachel’s scream reverbed in surround sound within all of their minds.

The holotank on the Starjammer bridge flared white, engulfing the command centre in blinding light. Only after shutting down the hologram, and reviewing the sensor composite logs, did Christopher see that Phoenix had blasted out of the star, and propelled herself out of the system. He could still hear the faint echo of Ray’s psychic scream in his head.

Behind Christopher, Raza grunted at the information spinning on his computer interface. “The star is’t…?”

“Stabilising,” Ch’od confirmed, from his own sensor readouts. “It will survive.”

Staying on mission, Christopher steely ordered, “Hepzibah, launch the starcracker torpedo.”

Cerise snapped her head towards Hepzibah, in response, and shrieked, “By Sterling Level authority of the Shi’ar Empire, belay that order.” Spinning to face Christopher, Cerise shrilled, “That starcracker is the property of the Shi’ar Imperial Guard. It is only to be mobilized upon the Uncreated’s star, in the event of mission failure.”

“Oh, stow it,” Chris waved off Cerise. He defiantly provoked, “You are prepared to give an order to murder an entire species?”

Cerise only pursed her lips.

“Raza, investigate the damage Rachel did to the Uncreated’s vessel,” Christopher calculatingly ordered. “Are their sensors offline? Will they be blind to our launching a massive torpedo into the sun?”

“Yea,” Raza responded, after consulting his console.

Swaggering to the Captain’s chair, Summers sat in it, cocksure. Again, he ordered, “Hepzibah, fire the starcracker.”

Hepzibah shrugged. “Already fired, when first, the order you gave.”

Brian missed the artificially forced supernova, as well as the shockwave that wiped out a star system and a crippled starship filled with the Uncreated. Once the Starjammer had shunted in the direction Phoenix had fled, Brian trudged down to the teleport chamber, to await Rachel. Ch’od joined Brian in the chamber, with a medical kit hanging over his shoulder. Brian offered to take it from him, and Ch’od admitted that the medical tech was mostly automatic. Brian was left alone to wait for Rachel.

When someone on the bridge teleported Rachel aboard the ‘jammer, she stood on wobbly legs atop the teleport platform. Brian charged up to stand by her side, and slung an arm around her waist. They took small silent steps towards the edge of the platform, but when Ray stepped down from it, her legs gave out, and she slumped against Brian. He gently lowered her to sit on the platform, and joined her, with his arm still around her waist.

Her eyes unblinkingly wide, Rachel coaxed words from her throat with great difficulty: “I severed the Uncreated from the well of life.”

Brian shook his head, as he sputtered a confused, “I don’t…” When he couldn’t finish the sentence, he shrugged, and rested his chin on Ray’s shoulder.

Rachel closed her eyes to envision it, and invoke the words, “I stole the Uncreated’s potential for procreation. I killed all of their future generations, but only for a minute.” –Brian let out a heavy breath, wanting for comforting words, but Rachel went on– “Still, for those sixty seconds until I could figure how to make reparations, I committed genocide. Hell, I can’t be sure if I fixed it for true. They should… god, I hope they can still have children. But even if they do, they won’t be the specific children who were supposed to be born. That destiny is nullified.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Brian whispered out, squeezing his arms around Rachel’s waist. “Future generations haven’t been born yet. They do not exist yet. It is impossible for you to have harmed them.”

“Is anything impossible? For me?” Rachel rhetorically asked, looking up at the ceiling plates as if they would respond in place of a god or sky bully. “Tapped into a star like that, I was instantly replenished with solar blood before I could even conceive of expelling energy… I can’t remember possessing so much power. Maybe, maybe when we faced Necrom. Even then, I’ve only touched that kind of power when I didn’t know that I should fear what it could do to me.”

“Maybe I’m going to make you Captain Britain,” Brian non sequitured to keep Ray from mentally spiraling downwards any further. “Merlyn could sew you dampening armour, to dull the cosmic edge of your power. All you would have to concern yourself, and your conscience, with is telepathy and telekinetic megastrength. I can truly see it happening. You stay strong to your own moral code, to begin with, and you have proven that you can make the heroic sacrifices that Roma will doubtlessly ask of you. Your complexion may not favour blue costuming, but I’m sure you could get away with an all red union jack.” He chuckled ever so briefly at his own bad joke.

“…I’m not British,” Rachel pointed out, with a snigger.

“No one’s perfect,” Brian pointed out, complete deadpan.

The slowly developing smile on Rachel’s face suddenly drained away. “I resent you.”

“I take it back. You are perfect,” Brian afforded.

“No, I mean, that’s why I want you to be Captain Britain,” Rachel diffidently tried to explain. “I resent the fact that you slipped and fell back into the skin of Brian Braddock. I’ve been fighting and juggling to be Rachel Summers, but I just can’t do it. I failed. If you burn every costume and uniform I’ve ever owned, my skin will still be made of spandex. And here I can’t even do the superhero thing right. You could teach physics, you could be the chief engineer for Braddock Solutions, you could fund a new Excalibur and you are a loving father to Jane. I can’t even go to college. I’m a business-school drop out.”

“When did you–?” Brian instinctively went on a dispassionate search for the facts, but stopped himself. Instead, he told her, “You can’t compare yourself to me. For almost twenty years, the only life I led was as Brian Braddock. Even after I became Captain Britain, I’ve spent years re-learning who Brian is, and those are years I wouldn’t have had if you had not fished me out of the timestream. I’ve had failed identities myself — non-combatant engineer of Excalibur, Bishop of the London Hellfire Club’s Inner Circle, and be thankful you missed the Brittanic phase… You’ve travelled the world — the worlds, plural — and jaunted through time, but you’ve still never really left the X-Mansion. It takes time to let go of that kind of thing, but do remember that school isn’t your only option outside of superherotics.”

“But I want it,” Ray entreated. “School is followed by work, and work is followed by a real life.”

“A ‘real’ life?” Brian questioned, in a you-know-better tone. “Every life is a real life.”

“This world’s Rachel Summers is the infant daughter of Cyclops and Phoenix. This world’s Phoenix is the ruler of Genosha. I’m redundant,” Rachel pityingly effused.

Meeting Rachel’s eyes as best he could, Brian disputed, “Isn’t it a decade too late for you to be having a teenaged existential crisis?”

Laughing at herself, somewhat bitterly, Rachel clarified, “This isn’t about finding my identity. This is my twenty-something existential crisis. It’s about finding my place in the world. And it’s not like I want to keep the life of a day job in the city, followed by a quiet evening in the suburbs. I know I’d tire of it. I know it. I just needed to find if I had the potential to live a normal life. And now I know. I don’t.”

“You don’t know anything,” Brian attempted to assure her in a comforting tone. “You haven’t failed; you said that you quit. That’s different.” –Still baffled by what she’d told him, Brian couldn’t hold back– “Christ, I’ve never known you to quit anything.”

Rachel nodded her assent, but began to recount what happened in a small, but increasingly tired, voice, “I never saw the point of a secret identity. Once I made friends at school, I told them who I was. It was the obvious thing to do. They talked about high school ski trips; I talked about the time I visited Pluto with the New Mutants. They candidly laughed at first, but, after a few weeks, they instructed me to stop lying. It’s not like I could prove anything; I never was a member of this world’s New Mutants. All I have are the most basic legal documents forged by Professor Xavier, and my mutant powers. So I showed them.” — Ray sourly pinched her lips at the remembrance — “I officially dropped out of university after my friends had my belongings searched for that drug, that, that Mutant Growth Hormone. They had an intervention for me, and everything.”

“Oh my Christ. Why didn’t you tell me before?” Brian asked, hugging her as if he were the Champion of Cuddling, who could defeat any foe through affection.

Shrugging and struggling to remember why she had kept it from him, Ray began to ramble once she remembered the start of it: “I wanted a plan first. I didn’t want to just cry to you about it. I wanted to figure out what I was going to do instead — figure out how to transfer my credits, so that your tuition payments won’t have been a complete waste. I wanted to know exactly what I was gonna tell you, but I couldn’t decide what I wanted. …I opted to tell you nothing.”

“You shouldn’t have worried about it,” Brian beseeched, tortured that he said or did something to make her think a matter of money would take precedence. “Haven’t you learned anything from living with me? Plans don’t help. What you need is a holiday. Step away from school, and the volunteer rescuing. You can stay at home with me and Jane, and once you start going mad from the boredom, latch onto whatever your first instinct is, and follow it. But you have to let your instincts come to you. Sometimes you can’t force a thing. If you push, it’ll only tumble down and break.”

Five weeks before now…

Elisabeth Braddock appeared acutely out of place. The British mutant was sitting with precise posture, in a booth at the back of a sports bar, in Albuquerque. Amid a mass of wifebeater tees, stained jeans and unwashed hair, Betsy was garbed in a laced purple bustier-inspired blazer, atop a conservative white blouse, and a black leather skirt. She suddenly seemed perfectly ordinary, when compared to the blond man in a business suit who joined her. He literally fell out of the sky, in the street outside the bar.

The picture of composure, Elisabeth left her gaze down on her pint, when she asked, “How did you find me?”

“You really need to ask me that?,” Brian retorted sadly, sliding onto the padded seat across from her.

Meeting his eyes with her own, Betsy impassively demanded, “What are you doing here?”

“I needed to get a feel on how you’re doing,” Brian freely admitted, sounding confused as to how she couldn’t already know. “Do you need anything?”

“What could I need from–?” Betsy started in a tone of near laughter, but stopped sharply, when she telepathically recognised genuine grief within Brian. Just a cursory push forward with her powers revealed that Brian’s grief was for what he believed to be Pete Wisdom’s recent public death, despite how bloody clear Brian had established that Pete would never be good enough for Elisabeth. Betts’ features softened for her brother, but she could not entirely forget her new responsibilities. “I’m in the middle of something right now.”

“Sitting alone in a bar?” Brian skeptically challenged, looking around the room for anyone who might be her type.

“I sensed you coming. I came here to wait for you,” Elisabeth rejoined in clipped tones. “Now I think it’s time for you to leave.”

Setting his hands on the table, and leaning towards his sister, Brian said softly, “I disagree.”

“Really? I’m not sure how much your opinion is worth these days,” Betsy glibly tossed off. “You told me that Braddocks grieve best solo. When did that change?”

“When you’re my sister,” Brian endearingly implored.

“Am I now? Did that start Right Now, because I didn’t feel like your sister when you moved back into the Manor,” Elisabeth reminded him archly.

“I only wanted Excalibur out of my home, away from Jane,” Brian reaffirmed apologetically. “What was left of the team didn’t have to disband. You and Pete certainly didn’t have to move away.”

“Yes. Yes we did,” Elisabeth corrected him slowly, each word hard. Her expression shifted widely, but she settled on contemplatively rueful. “I don’t think you get to decide when I become your sister again. I think I get to decide that, and I know I need more time to come to terms with…”

Elisabeth couldn’t lie to her brother, and put on her sunglasses, instead of mentioning Pete. With utmost resignation, Elisabeth said, “Goodbye Brian, I will see you again.” — She took his hand — “I do love you.” — She stood — “But stay away from me.”

Brian watched motionlessly as his sister strode out of the bar, and dropped into a lingering shadow.