she'll burn our horizons, make no mistakes, [ au & rw ]
When she left the note for Nico it was only meant to be for little while, they had both been sticking together since both of his brothers were now gone and so too was King, they’d fallen asleep whilst holed up in one of the rooms but as she had done so more frequently Angel had woken up again not long after the fact feeling hot and uncomfortable. It was a feeling she was familiar with, one that she had experienced countless times as a teenager, the creep and crackle of radiation on her skin, simmering up her spine in that way that made her feel as though her bones themselves were on fire. It was for Nico's own good that she crept out really, she had been controlling her mutation for years, making sure that while she couldn't stop the constant absorption she could manage the output, keep it at safe levels for everyone around her. Lately she hadn't felt totally in control of it and she doubted his brothers would forgive her if she ended up burning Nico, accidentally or not. So she wriggled off the bed and scribbled a note in clean printed handwriting just in case he woke up while she was gone.

Gone for a walk, back soon. a xx

A walk wasn't entirely accurate, she didn't intended to traipse around the grounds burning a hole in the grass as she went so instead she made her way up to the roof, rubbing her face tiredly. There was no way she was the only one having trouble sleeping, she was worried about what was going on, trying to reason with herself that people disappearing one by one was nothing like anything that had happened before and that wherever everyone was they were alive and together. Without any real information she didn’t see the harm in some wishful thinking. When she pushed out onto the roof she was biting her bottom lip in thought, a shudder chasing up her spine as the cool air hit her skin, the contrast vicious as her core temperature -- already higher than average -- had climbed a few degrees in recent days. Not good. There was a fwoom of superheated plasma engulfing her body as she jogged to the edge of the roof and took off into the air.

Burning across the sky felt good. She blasted up through the atmosphere towards the sun, rocketing into the stratosphere and feeling a warm tingle creep across her pale skin the closer she got the space, the stronger the energy up there. It was such a huge release, she felt so much better. It was only meant to be a sojourn to release all that build up that she could feel tickling under her skin more and more each day but at the edge of the Earth is was hard to keep track of time and suddenly she felt like she had let it get away from her, she really ought to get back. Only something felt wrong all of a sudden. Quickly the relief that she usually felt after a quick burst of flight disintegrated and she felt hot and prickly all over again. Stalling midflight she tried to take deep breaths and remember her power training but something was wrong, control was sliding out of her grasp fast than she could claw it back. Around her the air started to pulse a brilliant red, spreading further no matter what she tried to do to pull it back, to suck it in again. Red changed to orange, orange to yellow and yellow to a searing white that hurt her eyes. It was the one thing she had never wanted to do, the one thing she had been warned about over and over when she had been trying to get her mutation under control as a teenager; detonating at full capacity. And now she couldn't stop it, she could feel it in every cell of her body, painfully aware of every inch of her blistering skin, the heat rivalling that of the sun. When the detonation came it seared through her, a thousand needle pricks in her flesh and Angel cried out in shock.

Opening her eyes, she found the sky on fire.

Everything burned. Hundreds of miles overhead Angelica could still hear the screaming beneath her and horror clutched at her insides. What had she done? Heart thudding rapidly against the inside of her chest, she hurtled down through the flaming sky, back towards Xavier's, knowing as she drew closer what she'd done, what she'd find. Beneath her the ground was black and charred, the closer she got to what was left of the Earth the harder it became to breathe, the more tightly fear gripped her heart.

Xavier's was all but gone; half the building had caved in on itself, the trees around it were bent towards the ground, still flaming but nothing more than charcoal. Angel turned around on the spot, pressing her palms to her face, tears puddling in her eyes as she took in the decimated landscape. Then the groans caught her attention. From inside the broken shell of the school she could hear agonised moans. Gasping in hot, dry air she started to move towards the unstable walls, scrabbling through what was left of them to get into the ground floor of the school that had been her home since she'd been thirteen. Something moved in the corridor, she could see through where the walls should have been, a group of people shuffled towards her, out of the shadows and into the scorching orange light spilling into the ruins from behind her where the outer wall as once stood but now lay in a slope of disintegrated rubble beneath her feet. It took her a moment of watching to realise she knew those people, it was hard to tell under the burnt flesh and the distorted limbs, they limped towards her groaning and Angel started to back up. Even under the blackened skin and protruding bone she recognised them. Her friends. No. This wasn't happening. It had only been a walk, just a walk to clear her head and now she was staring into the faces of people who she had disfigured and destroyed and oh god she'd just stumbled over a corpse lying face down in the dirt, half skeletal where it had been exposed to the worst of the radiation. A St. Christopher’s medal winked at her cruelly through a thin layer of ash.

"Oh-- oh god Rahne..." Angelica tried to move away, shaking her head back and forth but the sky was falling, the ground was crawling up to meet her, everything was going dark.

It was still dark when she woke up with a strangled start but she wasn't on the gritty, debris riddled floor she was certain she had collapsed into; she was on a bed, one that felt very familiar. Panting rapidly, panic setting her nerves and senses on edge she tried to get up but found her body didn't want to respond right away. There was a needle in her arm. Angel grabbed at the tube in the gloom, her fingers felt stiff and sluggish but she wanted the needle out of her, she didn’t want it whatever it was and she immediately started to tug it out, breaths tripping over one another in her blind confusion.

[ rahne! ]