Shade & Gambit, Pre-Backlash It was time to go home. Shade had been hearing the whispers of it for days. Where was home exactly though? No, not home to Texas where her family had already received the body of her brother and now waited with bated breath to see if she would be shipped back to them in a box as well with a form letter saying that the government was sorry that their son had been the victim of the riots caused by the release and subsequent black out of New York City by one Erik Lensherr otherwise known as the terrorist Magneto. No, she was not supposed to go home to her family. They probably wouldn't even recognize her anymore, this girl who had withdrawn into herself so deeply that only a pair of green eyes glowered out at the world. One could say that the loss of her twin, her double, her reason for breathing had shaken her sanity to crumbling and all that existed now was the leftovers. That would be a very easy explanation. Then there were the powers that had been given more free reign over the last few months than they had been during the earlier portion of her life. Powers that had been released so completely that she barely even noticed the voices as something separate anymore, they simply were and she reacted to them as if they were there. Sometimes she followed their suggestions. Other times, she simply listened to them and ignored what was said. This was not one of those times when she paid them no heed.
For several days, they had been telling her to go home. Urging her to leave Fixx and the others who were mere sounds, voices that held no true significance, to go back to where she had come from. It was unusual for Fixx to let her wander around alone, probably because Shade didn't so much control her powers as her powers reacted to things as they felt necessary, a very bad thing as the anti-mutant sentiment grew stronger. Yet on the morning that Shade chose to leave, Fixx was nowhere around and she was more than happy to simply walk away without saying good-bye.
Blind people shouldn't wander around alone. However, Shade was never truly alone. She was just not accompanied by anyone that could be seen conventionally. Invisible but not silent partners that told her where to go, what to touch, when to get off the train, what street she was on. So many things that others took for granted. She had been able to find her way around before, but they made things go so much faster. Brunette hair falling down her shoulders and a heavy winter coat pulled around her body, she didn't quite remember where it had come from only that it was a black trench coat that Fixx had thrown over her shoulders at one point, Shade made it back to the apartment she had shared with her brother, now dead more than two months. Her violin case was in one hand, her cane in the other. Did she still have her key?
Did it matter? Not really. If she really wanted in, she could get in. Yet she heard something beyond the door, it might have been the television. So in a rather uncharacteristic motion, she knocked.