fifteen !
-

An hour passes and Rosa does not touch down.

She glides above Cairo, hiding in the cloud cover, catching up-drafts and sailing with little to no effort through the skies. For a moment, the impending war seems as if it were only a nightmare. She'll collapse into one of the clouds and awake in her own bed once again, wrapped in a blanket and ready to begin a day of teaching youthful mutants.

If she could go back to those routine days, she'd do it in a heartbeat.

Never again would she complain about the early mornings, the constant teens running around the place acting as if they were years older and ready for love, or the authority of Charles above the rest.

Those days had been draining, yes, but they were nothing compared to the black hole of this delusional war she'd walked right in to.

How could she have let herself become consumed enough to agree to bringing an apocalypse upon those who only wanted to live?

Troubles far beneath her, it's almost serene until Warren enters her air space, flying alongside her, though at a distance.

Does he fear the bite of the Harbinger too?

She glances across to him and he seems to take this as an invitation for he banks closer to her. Those wings of metal glint beneath the sun. A reminder of their imposed purpose.

" Are you ever going to come down?" He asks her as if she can fly forever. She might have been enhanced, but she is no machine.

"Yes," She replies, beating her wings once and then extending to continue on the wind. One of few constants in her life. "Did he send you up here to force me to come down?"

"No." His feathers clack together as he too is forced to concede a beat of his wings to the tides of the sky. "I came up here to check if you were okay."

"Well, the answer is no, but I guess I have no choice but to fight one more time." They turn on the wind in perfect synchronisation.

As if they're part of their own flock. Gliding through the skies with little to consider other than food and kin.  Again, a simpler life that has passed them by in the blink of an eye. They are not people who can plan their lives. They are those who will go to war and wonder who they're going to see die.

One last fight, but at what cost?

Warren's body shifts to vertical as he slows and hovers in place with constant beats of his metallic wings. She stops too. Though she wishes she'd kept on flying for the expression on his face is even more torn up than it had been on the ground.

"You have a choice," He says, finally speaking his mind beyond his support for Apocalypse's cause. "You've always had a choice. I didn't ask you to follow me into this."

Rosa flies a little closer, as if she fears the wind will carry her words away, and replies, with a sad curve of a smile on her mouth, "My choice is you."

He opens his mouth to protest, but she doesn't let him.

"My choice is you and everyone who I care about. My choice is to fight for that instead of stand by and let more people die." Her eyes are wild with a fierce breed of determination that is unavoidably stark in those brilliantly molten irises of hers. Eyes that could set the world on fire if she so desires.

And yet she chooses him.

Chooses love over the easier choices of hate and blood and war and battle.

She knows it then as the wind rattles around them and the clouds slip between their toes. Knows that feeling in her heart and in her gut is love, but the words cling to the dry walls of her throat and refuse to show their face.

Even in the tide of war, she is afraid of such vulnerability.

Even with the threat of losing him before he can know, she does not tell him.

"Trust me, I remember every second of pain and torture I endured in the cage, but I survived. I survived and, though many others didn't, I don't think billions deserve to die. Their death won't make my pain go away and it won't erase yours either, Warren."

Her fingers reach out to him and, though he doesn't move towards her, he lets her take his hand and bind her fingers through his.

"I'll feel a hell of a lot better knowing that no one else will ever have to go through what we went through," He counters, his fingers clasping around her tight as he remembers those days of fighting, that day where he'd hit the electricity and lost too much.

"It's not too late to change your mind," She reminds him, hand squeezing tight on his. "Don't let this be your legacy."

"I've made my choice," Is all he says, though he doesn't even think to pry his hand from her vice grip. Scared to let her go in fear she will never come close again.

He swallows down the terrifying thought that maybe this is their last chance.

The wind howls in mockery as it thunders through his feathers. Gliding between shards of metal. Gracing the mutant weapon with its cooling presence beneath the beating sun.

Her other hand reaches out desperately to him as she pulls close. Fingertips brushing his jawline and burning eyes staring right into him as she resorts to beg, "Please, Warren." She fills her lungs with a shaky breath. "Choose anything but this. Anything."

"This is the right choice," He replies through grinding teeth. Every little piece of his willpower bends and shifts beneath her pleas, but it holds even as she withdraws from him, leaving cold where she had brought warmth. "Rosa, this is for the greater good. Can't you see that?"

She shakes her head in disbelief at the boy before her.

"No," She says, swallowing down a lump in her throat.

Giving up with going in circles, both in conversation and in flight, they descend in silence and rejoin the group in time to witness the speech of Apocalypse through Charles, who, despite it all, still resists in his message to the citizens of the world.

Yet again he confirms her conclusions. Encourages her in her solitary rebellion against the false-god. He is nothing more than a mutant who has abused his power and those around him.

He is a plague.

Rosa sees him for what he is. Though his minions are blind, she is not. But she will hold her tongue until the time for betrayal is right. Then, and only then, will this festering power inside of her be released and she will eradicate the plague where he stands.

And leave behind ash as his only legacy.

-

1182 words
10.4.19

there's not much of this book left now