2014.05.27 - Verzweifelte Maβnahmen

Part One
That face. That terrible, cursed face. So many feelings and emotions brought about by his hairline, the disarmingly innocuous eyes, even the small gap between his two front teeth. Fear. Loathing. Prison. And, oddly enough, a twisted sense of trust. For whom else does one come to trust when he finds himself living in hell, but the Devil himself?

Mengele had trained him well. 'Herr Doktor' he was to be called. He was never to be interrupted. He was never to be disrespected. In turn, Angel would be fed, given a warm place to sleep, and eventually, he would be free. If he behaved, he was given chocolate. Candy. A hi-fi and music to enjoy. Herr Doktor even remembered many of the little details Angel could remember of life before his abduction.

Before New Horizons.

Somewhere in the dark recesses of Angel McGuire's mind, however, he knew exactly what was going on. He had a firm suspicion how this would play out. Memory was hazy... it had been ever since they took him from his home. After all, military grade narcotics and temporal distortions have a tendency to put things out of sync. They abused him, poked and prodded at him until they discovered the true, terrifying breadth of his potential.

This would not end with his freedom, regardless of the Doktor's claims.

Before his abduction, Angel McGuire was quite the student. He held a particular excellence in history classes. With that in mind, it's nearly impossible to explain the shock of seeing, with his own two eyes, faces that he was only familiar with by the two-dimensional, black and white pictures in those history books. It's the kind of nightmare no one ever expects to live; the kind of nightmare no one prepares for. Worse yet, he'd been held directly responsible for the inexplicable disappearance of countless Nazi soldiers. Granted, they had come back through his time portal, but many of them returned as corpses.

His torment at the hands of Herr Doktor had been a great trial. Angel was now a scarred shell of his former self. Teeth had been extracted, fingers removed, countless drugs administered, all in an effort to understand genetics that were far beyond the limited scope of Mengele's mid-twentieth century technology.

On one fateful day, there came a rapping upon the door to Angel's cell. It held a pace and rhythm he was quite familiar with. Doctor Mengele entered, and explained to the young man how they needed to test his ability to impregnate another female. To accomplish this, they would wean him off the emotion-inhibiting narcotics used to keep his mutant ability in check. This process would take forty-eight hours. They moved him to a comfortable spot, posted a guard, and Herr Doktor explained that if he behaved this one last time, he would see his freedom.

Angel knew it was a lie. He knew what happened when Mengele was finished with his toys.

Which is precisely why he played along.

When the time came, they brought her to him. It was difficult to determine if she was young, like him, or many years older. She wore stained but clean rags, and her sunken face held the clear signs of starvation and the glisten of having been washed for the first time in months. The guards, however, decided to give them some privacy. Perhaps it was fate, perhaps the stroke of something divine, or perhaps the guard simply didn't enjoy the thought of what Doctor Mengele had demanded, but he posted himself outside the room, rather than inside, where he could see what happened next.

The door clicked. Angel looked at the girl, crestfallen, and whispered quietly to her.

"I'm sorry."

He mustered his strength and reached out with his powers, bending the very fabric of time to his will. In his raw, untrained youth, he didn't have much to go on, but there was one person he could think of, one person he could try to pull through time to come to his aide. That man was Isaac, the man from Ghana with whom he'd been imprisoned inside that horrible clinic.

March 10th, 2014

Xavier Institute, Westchester County

Isaac was growing restless. The X-Men had promised to help him return to his timeline if, in exchange, he helped them track down and put an end to the "mutant cure" that had come from his own blood and DNA. He was no fool; far more cunning and brilliant than this 'Shift' character who shared his origin but had traveled a different course in an alternative universe. Truth be told, Isaac wanted to be home. He wanted to be away from all of the mutants, from the politics, from everything. He wanted to go back to normalcy, to the peaceful and safe society from which he came. It had taken everything not to simply pummel these so-called X-Men with his inhibiting power, wiping out their abilities once and for all.

So far, the X-Men had struck out.

Isaac packed his bags and made for the road. It was a long walk to Salem Center, but he didn't care. He wanted to be far away from this place, far away from Braddock, from Xavier, and very far away from the other Odame. The who still held on to his given name like some fatherless brat.

"Kwabena," he muttered under his breath as the tall African trundled down the road with a setting sun behind him. "A name I haven?t gone by since pubahty. What a piece of..."

--RRRRRIP!!!--

Isaac spun about, winded and disoriented. There had been a flash of darkness before he found himself in an unfamiliar room, staring at an emaciated prisoner girl and a seventeen year old boy he recognized from the clinic.

Hissing, he backed up like a caged animal until he felt the wall against his back, and darted his eyes about to take stock of where he was. Only then did he notice the swastika upon the wall, and his eyes widened.

March 10th, 2014

Bastion, Genosha

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Some poorly misquoted words originating around the 4th century B.C., commonly mistaken as an Arab proverb thanks in no small part to the glorious American Press machine and the cold war.

Regardless, this was the very concept that drove Shift to ally with Magneto during the Apokolips crisis. It was strategically logical that he should return through Magneto's portal. It only seemed sensible that he make whatever efforts he could at repairing the damage done to an already shaky acquaintanceship. After all, there would undoubtedly come a time when he and the Imperator, much as they may have come to hate each other, would need to work alongside each other once more.

However, before he could catch his breath, Shift felt his world collapse. There was darkness, the feeling of being spun about much too quickly, the sudden urge to become ill. Blinking hard, he cleared his vision and tried to gain some idea of where he was. Teleportation, after all, was not unfamiliar to him.

He saw then the same thing that Isaac, his doppelganger in every sense of the word, was seeing. The two men, born of the same mother and bearing an almost identical genome, stared at each other while reading the confusion upon each other's faces.

"You," growled Shift.

"You," answered Isaac.

The young girl began to scream as the two men rushed each other, their faces drawn with violence.

Part Two
November 19th, 1944

Berlin, Germany

For Shift, it was the fury that often came in the aftermath of battle. The iconic markings upon the wall, the sight of Angel McGuire, and the sight of Isaac Odame were all he needed to know that something was terribly wrong and he needed to act. Unfortunately, Shift often defers to action before thinking things through. Sometimes it works out for him. Sometimes...

He wasn't surprised to find Isaac inhibiting his mutant powers. He knew, as his boots plowed across the room toward the inevitable clash, that this would be a down and dirty fight of man against man, rather than mutant against mutant. The two men leapt at each other in perfect synchronicity, and struck each other with almost equal force.

The ensuing brawl was vicious and brutal. Where Isaac was faster and more nimble, Kwabena was stronger and more deliberate. The X-Man brought far more combat experience to bear, but Isaac knew exactly where and when to strike, when to pull his punches, for he'd lived life as a 'mortal man' much longer than Shift had. The duel found a brief reprise when the men became separated by a now-shattered wooden table, each of them bleeding from relatively minor lacerations.

"I told you we'd help you!" snarled Shift. "Why did you betray us?"

"I didn't do a damn thing, Kwabena!" Isaac spat their mutual given name with venom. "It was his fault!"

Isaac swung about to point directly at Angel McGuire, but it was too much for the seventeen year old to bear. With a horrible cry of terror, he flung his hands toward Isaac and sent a shockwave of temporal power forward, capturing Isaac in its clutches and flinging him to God-knows-when.

Shift turned, chest heaving, to look at Angel. Isaac had been so hell bent on inhibiting his powers that he hadn't thought to work on Angel as well. And yet, as he felt his powers returning, he could hear the muted cries and footfalls of approaching soldiers.

"Get down," he urged, rushing toward Angel and the girl in an effort to gather them together and behind the table. He kicked the table over, then crouched down beside the girl. "Where did you send him?"

Angel shook his head, dumbfounded.

"Where?!"

"I-I don't know!"

The voices were upon them now, words shouted in German. They were out of time. Kwabena cursed. "Get down and don't move until I tell you!"

The door was kicked open, and the first Nazi soldier through had no idea what hit him. Black smoke, curling around his face and forcing its way into his lungs until he hit the ground, choking. Tendrils of black smoke flung themselves about here and there, capturing other soldiers and spooking the rest. The bullets that came next simply passed through the cloud harmlessly, until above the prone soldiers the X-Man reformed into his natural form. It only took a few moments to rip through the rest of the Nazi's, leaving their bloody corpses scattered about.

"Jesus Christ," he muttered under his breath. "I thought we left de Nazi's behind in Vegas."

Shift turned to check on Angel. He found his chest pierced by a small item, a dart designed to deliver some kind of poison. He looked down to find it embedded in his skin, which should have shifted to gas upon impact, but did not. Looking up, he saw Angel and the girl huddled together, and nearby, in the hands of a broken soldier, a blocky and clearly jury rigged weapon of some sort.

It didn't take long for Shift to make the connection. With a snarl, he ripped the dart from his chest and came upon the soldier, holding the dart in front of his eyes.

"What is it?" he growled.

"Schweinehund!"

Shift grasped the soldier by the neck, snarling, "WHAT IS IT?"

And yet, Kwabena truly didn't need an answer. He could already feel the power draining from him, as if his ability to shift into different matter states was like nothing more than the phantom limb suffered by an amputee. As life drained from the soldier's eyes, he began to feel the true weight of the situation pressing upon him.

The vials were here. The Germans had reverse engineered a cure. He couldn't be sure how long it might last, but it was only a matter of time before a hundred shock troopers descended upon him. Worse, the timeline had been changed. He couldn't be sure what the ramifications might be, given that quantum mechanics weren't exactly his specialty, but it certainly meant that things were suddenly much worse for him and the mutants he swore to protect.

"Doctor... Herr Doktor..."

Kwabena turned to Angel with an urgency in his voice he was unfamiliar with; urgency driven by mortality. "Doctah who?"

"M... Mengele."

At that precise moment, the reinforcements arrived. Shift relied on every trick he'd learned, from his time as a street thug to his experience as a fledgling mercenary and countless Danger Room sessions. Unfortunately, without access to his mutant powers, he saw Angel and the girl felled by enemy fire, and took a bullet to his left arm. For a moment, time slowed down. He stared from the entry wound in McGuire's cheek to the spray of blood coming from the opposing end of the young man's scalp, then back to the soldier reloading his rifle in the doorway.

Tunnel vision came next. Adrenaline. The animalistic need to survive and escape. By the time he escaped from the mansion, he'd left behind a trail of corpses and took on more wounds than he thought possible. He commandeered a truck, wrapped the worst of his injuries with fabric torn from dead soldiers' uniforms, and took off into the Berlin night looking for one last sign of hope. It was only a matter of time before someone was bound to notice the irony of a black man driving a car bearing the swastika, and only a matter of time before Kwabena would bleed out...

Part Three
November 19th, 1944 Berlin, Germany

Light came in the form of a familiar sign reading 'Western Union'. For the life of him, Shift couldn't recall if Western Union ran global operations by the WWII era, so he couldn't determine if it wasn't all some kind of nightmare. Regardless, his time was running short. Fresh blood continued to soak his makeshift bandages, and he could feel himself steadily growing weaker. However, the sight of it gave him an idea.

Parking the truck, he ran up to the storefront and tried the door. It was locked. A sign upon the door read, 'GESCHLOSSEN'. Shift knocked anyway. He rapped at the door once, then a second time, then a third and fourth. By the time a light came on inside, his face was leaning against the brick and he was nearly out of hope.

The door unlatched to reveal a young boy, no older than ten, peeking out with wide eyes. He stared Kwabena up and down, noting the color of his skin, the ethnic angles of his face, the wounds.

"Es tut mir leid, Sir, aber wir sind fur die Wirtschaft geschlossen!"

Kwabena's eyes rolled over toward the boy in the manner of a man slowly losing his life energy. The sight of him, however, brought a burst of hope. "Nein," he answered, trying to recall every bit of German he'd ever learned. "Bitte," he added while shouldering his way through the door. He locked it behind him, then turned to study the young man.

He had a boyish, innocent look, eyes wide with fear and wonder. Kwabena put on his most calming smile in spite of the urgency in his soul, and offered his right hand. "Ich bin Kwabena."

The boy gulped. He hesitantly reached out and took Shift's hand, answering, "Stefan."

Kwabena nodded and asked, "English? Any English?"

The boy smiled coyly and nodded. "Ein kleines bisschen." He paused. "Hello, Sir. You... help?" He pointed to himself, then to Kwabena. "I, you, help?"

Kwabena nodded rapidly. "Bitte. I am your friend. Freund, ja?"

The boy nodded.

With a gasp, Kwabena braced his left arm with his right hand and began rummaging through the place as quietly as he could. He found a map, a piece of paper, a timepiece and a pen, then got to work.

First, he spread the map out and inspected it. Berlin. He gestured for the boy to join him, then tapped the map and asked, "Where are we?" He pointed the boy, then to himself, then motioned about the room before tapping the map again. "Where?"

The boy nodded his understanding before pointing out their location on the map. Kwabena then carefully retraced his path from the mansion until he located its most likely location, then backtracked to check out the path based on memory. Feeling confident, he then went to work at calculating the mansion's coordinates, down to the fraction of a second. He left a series of mathematical calculations on the piece of paper to double check himself, then flipped the piece of paper over.

However, before he began to write, he looked back to the boy. "Newspapah?" he asked.

The boy shook his head, befuddled. So, Kwabena rolled up the map and patted it against his hand, then wove it through the air. "Extra! Extra!"

The boy laughed, snapped his fingers, and ran across the room to gather a newspaper. He brought it over and offered it to Kwabena, who took it and pointed at the date. "Today?" He asked. "Now? Here?"

"Heute," he answered.

"Heute," echoed Kwabena, then tapped the headline again. "Today."

"Ja," he said. "Heute. Today! November, neunzehnte."

Kwabena nodded his head, dated the letter, then suddenly stopped. There were only two people he could think of whom he trusted would be residing in very specific locations seventy years from now. Those two men were Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr.

Suddenly he found himself in a quandary. Of the two, he trusted Charles far more than the other. Charles was wise, but so was Magneto, both of course in very different ways. He thought about it long and hard, even though the life energy was draining from him further still. A sick sensation formed in the pit of his stomach.

He knew he was going to die.

A thought then manifested in the back of his mind. In the far distant future, he would have disappeared. He couldn't even know what might happen to him in this timeline, for the past had been changed. Would his future self become an X-Man? Would he have sided with Erik and joined the Brotherhood of Mutants? Would he even be alive, and would either of the men know of his existence?

In that moment, he decided that he needed someone zealous. He needed someone with savagery. He needed Erik Lehnsherr.

On the back side of the letter, he wrote a message for the boy in English:

'I come here from the future. The look of my uniform should be proof of you. I am a mutant, capable of transforming my body into different states of matter. You may not believe this now, but by the dawn of the 21st century, you will know that mutants are real. The future of mankind may be at stake. I need you to deliver this letter to Erik Lehnsherr, residing in the Spire, city of Bastion, island of Genosha,'

He stopped, considering the state of Genosha as of the day he left. There were many arguments in Quantum Mechanics, too many to recount, but his gut told him it would be prudent to date it some few weeks into the future. Just in case.

'on exactly May 27th, 2014.'

Kwabena slid the note toward Stefan and said, "Translate dis, from English to Deutsch." He reached out with his good hand and took the boy's in his own, looking into his eyes earnestly.

"Bitte."

The boy nodded his head in understanding, then looked on as Kwabena flipped the note over and began writing his letter to Erik.

Dear Erik,

I'm not sure if we have met in this timeline, but my name is Kwabena Odame. You may know me as 'Shift'. We might be friends, we might be enemies, we may even be strangers. Regardless, I need your help. The future of mutantkind is at stake. I've found Isaac, I've found Angel McGuire, and I've found the mutant cure. It has been sent back in time to November 19th, 1944.

(The exact location Shift calculated is written down, followed by a time he estimates would line up with his arrival through Angel's time portal).

We must save Angel, recover the cure, and find Isaac. Everything depends on this.

Best regards,

Kwab...

The pen slid a curved line across the note as Kwabena fell over, leaving his name unfinished and the letter stained with blood. As he collapsed to the floor, he thought of Erik. He thought of Charles. He thought of all the friends and enemies he'd made. And then, as life began to drain from him, he thought of Rachel. His dying hope was that someday, someone might help him to correct it all. To set things right, to set him back to his original timeline after fixing the mess he'd helped to make. To set her at ease that he wasn't gone forever.

Shift breathed his final breath, leaving him staring at the ceiling, lifeless.