somewhere over the rainbows

by Lise

I think there's a somewhere wit' colors in it still.... Th'rainbows, they all glittered. Made of crystal, made of nothing... They call it schizophrenia when you can't filter out sensory input properly. What if sensory input wasn't being created properly? Is it still a mental disorder?

Does it really matter? Scott would be surprised to hear me say mental disorder. He thought I had one. Before he was dead.

I wish I could see. If I could see, I could know that th'world had gone t'hell, and it wasn't just my imagination. The last vision I remember is hot desert sands, and I'll be damned if that's going to be my last visual memory. Hot desert sands are too much like Egypt. It seems like forever since we... well, we lost, didn' we? We lost. Apocalypse and Scott and swirling and goin' around and around and around, and of course we couldn't do anything...

Th'sun was so red one day, maybe it was last week, maybe it was a hundred years in the future. It looked like the whole sky was bleeding.

Red. Red used t'be the color of her hair, before... and before things got ugly. Why is the street grey, Daddy? Why am I not allowed to play anymore? Why is Uncle Logan dead, and Tante Ororo a vampire? Why d'you have a gun now, but never shoot it?

Why does the sky look like something swallowed it?

Ah, pauvre Jean, je te connaissais bien.

If I concentrate really hard-- and I mean really hard-- I can even hear the blues guitar in the background, the wail that says to us, Nothin' is alright, nothin' will ever be alright. It's jus' like th'blues down south. I knew Nawlins would come back to haunt me, but I never knew it would be in stereo. I listened hard enough, and a soundtrack came out of this mess. I'm hearin' music, but there's no one there... must be love...

Saints. Can you hear it?

I think I'm babbling out loud, but can you really blame me? One time, Betts grabbed up a skull from a dead dog -- bones clean and dry from th'sandstorm -- and recited half of Hamlet to us, just to get the little one to sleep. Is it better to suffer th'slings and arrows of greater fortune... no, that's not right. Jean would get it right. Even though she's gone, if I think about her like this, maybe she'll stay. Maybe I'll meet another one, an' we'll be as happy as my Jean and me.

I don' actually move positions. I haven' in almost two hours. I don' want to stumble over any more dead people, and that's what would happen now that I don't have any eyes. In Nawlins, if the bodies weren't buried in crypts, they'd all float away, like props for the world that lost their grip line. All the world's a stage, and the bodies merely actors that didn't know their lines, or maybe didn' know when to duck. Not that y'can duck a shift, but you can try. Betsy kept saying over an' over that she heard people in her head, and we'd go towards them. We'd try an' find them, run through the next incarnation of hell or high water to try and find the ghosts that were whispering in her mind. Th'world kept screaming.

My legs are cramped, but where can I go in a world of pitch black? No more colors for this Cajun thief...

Orange, I remember orange. A grove of orange trees sprouted up in the middle of the city one time, just as we were about to go to sleep. And they were perfect trees, perfect oranges, and it was sunny for the first time in over eight shifts. The little one was excited; she said it made her eyes hurt, but she was excited. I gave her my own sunglasses, and it was about a day b'fore they melted right off her head, drippin' candle wax all down her clothes. Poor babe. We ate oranges with Ororo, and she sucked more of the blood I needed to live. I don' know who or what left Stormy to die on th'beach, but I made her sit up, crawl away from the acid lapping gently up to the shore, and onto th'logs.

The beach was deserted, and it had been raining. Reality had righted itself enough to be comfortin' -- it never did anythin' but rain in Seattle. The gloom felt right, an' we sat on the beach, looking at all the beached whales, blubber spilling out onto the harsh discolored sand, and Ororo tried to use her powers but they just made her ill, so horribly ill...

She tugged on my duster, the world lurched upside-down, and then we ended up hip deep in swamp that reminded me of home so much I threw up. How swamp lands infested the suburbs of Seattle I'll never know. Not only that, but half the trees were upside-down, and the other half weren't the right shade of green. There wasn't anyone left alive in the bog, and th'blood seeped into the tree-trunks. There must have been thousands of people under that mess to make all those poor plants weep. Ororo cried. The upsidedown trees let us pick their bananas.

Daddy, why did you shoot that man with yellow fur?

Yellow fur... what was that again?... Oh yes. Yesterday, if y'can call it that, there was a red mingling with yellow tinge to a Sabretooth I found. The automatic rifle I managed to filch off one of Kai's cronies came in handy. All red blood, coagulating into his brown and yellow fur. I think he spat on me and laughed, rude as always. But I got revenge on the demons. Oh, happy day. There's a yellow, sickly tinge to th'sky today. Betts had said so before she went to sleep. I wonder if it's bees. There's something we haven' seen yet -- killer bees. I don' think I've seen them, even if I can' see much of anything since I don't really have eye sockets anymore...

Why is your face bleeding, Daddy? Why don't you have any eyes? Why is it so cold? Where did Mummy go?...

I wish I could've pulled her out of the way of that shift. Her innocent, young eyes. She wasn' even eight years old, but I'm sure she knew what was goin' on. Even when she asked me all of those stupid questions -- I could see that she knew the answers. She asked t'distract me from the truth that I didn' know the answers either. Pauvre petite.

After the swamp, things cheered up a little bit. It was just the three of us, an' then a somewhen that appeared normal entered into it, and out popped Betsy. We were walking in and out of the hundred dollar a night hotels in the downtown core, tryin' t'find a place that still had clean towels, and there she was. We had a picnic, and then there were four. It was such a small time to be happy, but we were.

And then things fell apart. It was so nice, and then so nasty, but it started with th'grass.

Green grass underfoot -- what had happened? She was leadin' me by the hand, a lil' girl in hell, I could feel her hand, so I know she was there... and then... but the grass was so green underfoot, I'm sure it would have been if I could see it... she said it was dark grey, but I know it would have been green. Y'know, she was wearin' a green dress too? A little angel in a green dress. My baby. My daughter. My...

I think it was the next shift my eyes fell out of my head. Thank th'Saints for Betts. From the first time I felt my eyeballs deform an' burst, she only disappeared once, for about an hour. And that time, the little one had my hand... and she jus' wanted t'sit down for a minute, jus' a little minute... but then the air pressure changed, and her hand went cold in my grasp, an' I held her body against me. The grass so green, and her so cold. She was so thin, so very... and I was alone, and if Betts hadn't come back I think I would have gone crazy.

Thank th'Saints for Betts. She came back jus' in time.

Hmm. Betsy didn't wake up this morning. I don' know what I'm going to do now. 'Roro dissipated a while back, right in front of us, and then there were three. I don't think she could have handled it much longer anyway... but what a way to go. One minute she was standing, horrified expression on her face, the next, somethin' in the air took her apart, molecule by molecule. What a nasty shift that was. The wall between us, so thick... moving... pulsing... an' she was gone, jus'...

I'm so glad th'rest of us were on the other side.

But Betts didn't wake up this time 'round, and now all of my family's gone. Doesn' matter they weren't my versions. I know what happened to my versions. Most of'em died in Egypt, before all of this even started. I buried them myself, when I still had a shovel. My... my Jean. She almost held out in th'big battle, in the battle that mattered, but 'pocalypse had skin that was far too tinged, far too strong for her, an' then her gut was gone.

Blue was Jean's favorite color. I think she told me that right before her intestines found their way into my lap. An' then the sky was so blue, blue as midnight, as coal, as... as... Warren's skin, and somethin' punched right through Jean's gut. I managed to pull our girl, three years old, out of the way.

What a world for her to grow up in. How does the world end, amour? Ashes, ashes, we all fall down...

Terms like up and down don' actually apply amore. Nothin' really applies, since nothin' stays th'same. Something clear could go as purple as your veins in a second, or blood that didn' have any oxygen left. Pretty an'purple, only deeper, just like indigo flowers.

Indigo as Psylocke's hair, even. I miss Jean so much, but I was sleepin' wit' Betsy -- had been for the last dozen shifts or so. It started because she wanted t'comfort me. Wanted comfort herself. We'd lost everyone else. Her Warren threw himself into a shift zone, flew at it with a mighty roar on his lips, ragin' against the things he couldn' change. She'd watched his body be torn apart... out of the skin... out of, just like.... But why think about it?

She was sharin' her vision wit' me. She let me see what the world was for a little while, let me feast my eyes on my child. Of course, Betts took off th'one time I needed her, and so I couldn' see her die. Poor little girl. Pauvre petite. You deserved so much better than this, so much better than this world. At least y'died peacefully. Not like the other corpses we've found.

It's jus' me now, isn' it? Me agains' the worlds.

Betts must be dead, or gone, or left, or... either way, it doesn't matter. I used to believe in reincarnation, you know? I don't anymore. I don' want to think that once I'm dead, I'll have to come back here. I don't care what hell is like, it has to mean more than this, serve more purpose than Remy LeBeau, wandering 'round, sightless, gutless, and hopeless.

What a pretty picture all these colors paint -- all th'crayons in my little girl's crayon box. She liked to color, before there was nothin' but black.

Violet eyes, that's th'only thing I'm going t'remember about 'Lisabeth. That and th'way she used to mutter every ten minutes, "You know the only reason I'm letting you see is because I don't want to suffer alone, right?" But she had pretty eyes, and a pretty smile, and could fight, and could screw, and could...

Daddy, what happened to Mummy?

It's rainin' now. I can feel th'water drippin' onto my skin, and it burns a little bit. Probably more acid rain, but I don' really care. It's Seattle, and it's raining. There's comfort in that. I know, if I only squint hard enough, there's a rainbow comin' up over th'horizon of Seattle, city of coffee and torment, over a multi-colored ocean. Damn Betsy anyway -- I know there's a rainbow out there. I want t'see it too. Betsy, come back, come back from the 'byss that you're hidin' in, show y'self, please, I need your eyes....

Guess I'll just sit here, and picture it instead. Th'colors will be so brilliant, and shining, and the rainbow will be a perfect arc, and she'll look up at me, eyes jus' trusting and crystal clear, and ask me, "Are we going to be okay, Daddy?"

And I'll lie an' say, "Course, chere."

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