Damned Time And Dammed Time: Prologue

by Dyce

"You're starting to worry me now."

That was Destiny talking. Irene Adler, deceased. Fortunately, the man currently occupied with making shadow-pictures on the wall beside him was no longer in any mental state to differentiate between the living and the dead, and certainly wasn't going to let a piddly little thing like an altered life-state get in the way of a good conversation. "To be perfectly honest, Irene, I'm starting to worry myself." He wiggled the bunny's ears playfully. "Does this really look like a rabbit to you?"

"Sort of." Destiny gave him a distinctly - well, not a distinct, since being a ghost she was permanently out of focus, but a very worried look. "But this is odd, even for you."

"I know. But it's fun. I haven't," he observed mournfully, "had a lot of fun in my life, Irene. I never got to do all of those delightful little-boy things like tearing my trousers and wheedling an extra bowl of icecream."

"I know. But usually that sends you into mad-revenge mode, not shadow-puppet-making." Irene looked critically at the current picture. "Try tucking your middle finger under, the dog's nose is a little too pointed."

He did so. "It occurs to me, Destiny dear, that I'm a little madder than usual. Not so's anyone would notice, but I really do think I am. Do you think I am?"

"I think you're a great deal madder than usual, and that's saying a lot." She shook her head. "It must be the alterations to the timeline that's doing it."

"Yes, I thought so," he agreed. "I mean, the fact that I remember dying five separate times is hardly cause for alarm. Jean Grey, for example, will top that record at any time. But it does strike me as being just a little worrying that as far as I can remember, they were all the *same* time. Well, the same incident, anyway. Is that strange?"

"Stryfe, this is *you*. Strange would be if you *weren't* strange." Irene gazed assessingly at the self-styled Chaos-Lord. "But yes, I think that's a bit stranger than usual."

"Yes, I thought so too." Stryfe smiled a slightly deranged smile and made a shadow-picture of a cow. "It's very interesting, though, my death. You see, the first time I remember, I killed Cable while he was killing Apocolypse while he was killing me. Then the next time I killed Apocolypse first, but then he killed Cable and Cable killed me, so that didn't change anything. Of course, I wasn't aware at the time that I was trying to change anything, so perhaps that's why it didn't work." The cow metamorphosed into a squirrel. "Then the third time I had an incredible sense of déjà vu, so I tried to run away and let them kill each other."

"What happened that time?" Irene asked with a certain morbid fascination.

"Apocolypse mortally wounded Cable with his last breath, then fell on me. He was very big at the time. I left a very disgusting looking corpse that time."

"Ah."

"Then the fourth time I killed Cable after he killed Apocolypse but before he killed me, but then that horrible little Professor thing of his shot me so I died anyway." Stryfe put his feet up on the table and stared contemplatively at his big toe through a hole in his sock. "Then the fifth time I had really really *strong* déjà vu. I was very sneaky that time. I killed everyone ELSE in the vicinity first so that Apocolypse wouldn't have anyone's body to jump into."

"That was a good move. Did it work?" She knew already, of course, but it seemed polite to ask.

Stryfe gave her a dirty look. "If it HAD, I wouldn't be going around AGAIN, now would I? No, I miscalculated. His reach extended further than I thought. Delayed his ascension by nearly a year, but that didn't help much in the long run." He wiggled his toes and sighed. "You say this is the seventeenth time around?"

"Eighteenth. You don't remember permutations one through twelve, because then you still had at least a rather tenuous grip on the timestream not to mention your sanity." Time was Destiny's speciality. When she was alive she'd known it like a comfortable pair of old socks, and now that she was dead was getting rather put out by the way people kept shifting the metaphorical darns. "Every time around you and Cable make enough changes to alter the course of time, but not enough to get yourselves out of the loop. So you come back from the future again, make a brief impression on the world again, and kill each other and Apocolypse again, but not quite well enough that he fails to make the jump into a new body. So he takes over, you're cloned, and the whole thing starts all over again."

"And this is the eighteenth time I've been here? And I still haven't put any curtains on the windows?" Stryfe shook his head sadly. "I'm a terrible housekeeper, Irene."

"Up until now, I don't think you'd even noticed that you HAD windows."

Stryfe frowned, thinking back over the five previous lifetimes that he vaguely remembered. "You know, you may be right. Huh." He shrugged, and went back to his shadow-pictures. "You know there's one thing that bothers me about all this."

"Only one?" Irene gave him a dubious look.

"Well the constant looping has driven me quite mad, don't you agree?" He smiled brightly.

"No argument from me." The really terrifying thing, Irene thought, was that he KNEW he was mad. Not the ordinary psychopathic-chaos-mongering-self-obsessed-viciousness that he usually had, either, but an utterly deranged mad-hatter-pushing-the-dormouse-into-the-teapot-and-buttering-his-watch sort of insanity that didn't kill people just because it was fun, but because half the time it hadn't even noticed them and the other half thought they weren't really there.

He'd been like this for the last three permutations, of course, but now it was so bad that even HE'D noticed it.

"Well, it just strikes me as strange, you know?" Stryfe poked a finger through the hole in his sock, and waggled it a little. "I mean, here I am as crazy as a loon, and Cable hasn't even noticed yet."

"Cable never notices ANYTHING." Destiny pointed out with a certain amount of justification. "He's so obsessive that nothing can filter through."

"That's true." Stryfe nodded gravely. "That is very true. Irene, you're a very observant woman."

Irene sidled a little further away, just in case. She didn't THINK he could hurt dead people, but right now you just never knew. "Thanks."

"You're welcome, and don't you worry about a thing." He smiled a gentle, kindly, and utterly mad smile. "I have a Plan."

End Prologue

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