Under a blackened sky
far beyond the glaring streetlights
sleeping on empty dreams
the vultures lie in wait.
You lay down beside me then
You were with me every waking hour
so close I could feel your breath.
When all we wanted was the dream...
to have and to hold that precious little thing...

- Wait
Sarah Mclachlan

---

The teeth of rocks shredded the skin from her bare feet as she ran, each step leaving behind a heartbeat's worth of blood on the water-swollen ground. A thousand tiny needle points of rain drove into her face, scraping against her eyes. Instinct guided her steps, not sight. The sky writhed in agony as jagged spears of lightening ripped wounds in its side. As the hammering thunder rang out the beat of nails in heavens flesh.

The sky is crucified and the blood falls onto our faces. She would have screamed the words if only she had breath in her lungs. Only her mind shrieked the cry to the smothered stars. Her body shook under the heavy weight of the life within her, but she only drove herself faster. Faster.

Behind her, the earth trembled under the tready of heavy boots and pure evil. Any moment now, her body would give out and then it would be all over. They would crush her bones into the dust, steal the life from her womb....

She pushed herself forward. The blood decorated the stone. She forced herself to breath. The pain! She grit her teeth and urged her legs into another step. Think of the hope.Think of tomorrow. Don't think of the fear on your tongue.

The Evil behind spoke to her. Called to her.

Surrender now and we might let him live.

Then his voice, torn and raw but so defiant...

Don't you dare stop! You run! You survive!

Survive, oh yes, she must survive. She must live to tell the rest of the world about the needles and the straps and the things they did to innocent girls under fluorescent lights. They would not believe her but she could show them, of course. She bore the marks on her arms and....deeper...inside her. No, she was not innocent anymore. She was with child....

Gunshots, now, piercing the darkness with the sound of cracking bone, and hadn't they said they wanted her alive? Maybe they changed their mind. Or maybe they were just trying to frighten her. Either way, if she kept running, she might just be granted the mercy of a quick death.

Her legs trembled from the pain. The end was near.

forsakenforsakenforsaken....save us....

In one second between the lightening and the thunder, the struggle was lost. The prayer tore from her mind to erupt in one shriek as an invisible battering ram caught her from behind, twisting her body into a convulsion and slamming her to the ground. Underneath the storm, she could hear him screaming profanity into the face of the night. After that he just screamed. For a moment that was all she heard.

Then the pain started in her lower back, just left of her spine, a white-hot ball of fire that boiled all blood in her veins. It tore through flesh and bone and hope until all that remained was the hell of it. She gagged on the defeat in her throat.

One....step....

Someone else was screaming and it was a child's voice. A child that would never be...

The steel cords of her nerves frayed and snapped as she clawed the ground with one hand, seeking to drag herself forward. Survive. Survive. Protect the child. Skin and fingernails peeled away; fresh blood seeped into cracks in the stone. But she moved an inch. Then another. Screaming, shoving, until she was on her knees. Force yourself to breathe. All feeling was drowned by the defiance pulsing inside her. His defiance. Her fingers stretched upward to pull herself up the the stars, by him.

For one wild, beautiful moment, she stood; and the sky held its breath in awe. Then the demons descended.

Three hours before, they had lain in silence on a rented bed, arms tangled in arms and dreams caught up in dreams. The only light flickered from one naked lightbulb, a dirty yellow glow that bounced off the metal fan blades to pass shadows across their skin like memories. Which neither of them wanted, at that moment.

He had held her so close they shared heartbeats, the muscles in his arm slightly tensed as his hand rested on the swell of new life insider her. The tips of his fingers were warm and so very alive. You are beautiful, he had whispered in her ear not so long ago. You are beautiful and I would die for you.

She remembered his words because just under his skin the death metal waited, a reminder that his fingers were steel even though they were satin with her. His fingers were spread like he expected to pop his claws, and fast. This was in case the door should open and the shadow men appear. They had run until they had hit the dead center of nowhere, but that was rarely far enough. You didn't just walk away from hell without some sort of demon following you. There was no place safe for them, not anymore. Three days after regaining their freedom, they had learned that the school had been shut down. They were on their own. So they had followed instinct and hit the streets, leaving everything behind but each other. This had bought them time, but they both knew how quickly that could be spent.

Especially when you wanted to hold onto it.

This hotel, with its ugly light and thin mattress and cockroaches in the showers, was supposed to something like safe. Anonymity is a mutant's best friend, the Professor used to say. Right then she hadn't care about any of that. She was just so tired of running. It had only been a week, maybe a little more, but at times it seemed ages longer. Like the times when he held her head while she threw up into a dumpster in an alley, or when she had to sit and breath in the stale smoke of a filthy bar while he fought until he bled just to scrape up enough money for dinner. Then would come the midnights when she lay flat on her back on a thin mattress, staring up at the ceiling and tried to believe his assurance that they would be okay.

Why are our mutations dead, then?

I don't think they're dead. Just stunned. They'll come back in time. As soon as all the suppression drugs leave our system.

Do you think the drugs will hurt the baby?

For a minute, she thought he would lie, just to make her happy. But he hadn't. I don't know.

Her hand tightened on her belly then, and he'd kissed her because she had started to cry. She distinctly remembered the roughness of the split skin on his lips, because it was something she had never felt before, on him. It was a cut, a wound, a tangible evidence of physical pain. He was just like everyone else now. He fought anyway, to make sure she didn't have to sleep on the street.

But it hurt her even more to watch.

She was supposedly normal too. Only when she looked at the needle scars on her skin, she felt even more like a freak. Except when he kissed her. Then it felt something like beautiful.

The night air had been thick with a brewing storm, blanketing the room with the oppressive heat of summer. She remembered it had rained on the second night after they escaped the labs, a soft warm drizzle that made them both laugh and smile and celebrate their freedom.

But, on that particular midnight, the smiles and the laughter were already so far behind her, pushed from her mind by five hundred miles of terror and don't-look-over-your-shoulder. The enemy was close. Deadly close. The chill of fear had frosted her bones despite the heat.

"Do you believe in miracles?" She had whispered, hearing her own voice shiver as a rose before a storm.

"Sometimes."

"Do you believe we will live?"

A moment of quiet thought. "Maybe. Maybe not. At least we have a moment...."

Forty seconds of silence.

"I want more than a moment."

Then he had turned her face to his and kissed her full on the mouth. She had tasted love on his lips, but somewhere in there she could have sworn it was also goodbye.

The men surrounded her to crush her body back to the earth. They could break her flesh but not her spirit. Her soul raced madly through space and time, a runaway comet searching for some stray spark of him. He was in the air. His anger birthed the storm and his love slid down her cheeks with the rain to hide her tears. (She had whispered one night that she never wanted them to see her cry.) Rebellion electrified her until she no longer cared about the pain. The Evil was so close...

"Thought you could escape?"

A blow to the mangled side. A sudden spasm of pure nightmare. Strange hands ran over her womb in a perversion of his caress.

"You've got something that belongs to us. Are you ready to become a mother?"

She began to shake as they dragged her off the road, into the cover of the trees. No, they could not do this. She began to struggle. Biting, kicking, screaming curses and prayers to make them understand. They could not do this. Please.

No one listened.

Once they were inside the iron curtain of the forest, the darkness thickened but she could still see him by the glow of the no-identity sedans. Tiny droplets of blood and rain formed patterns on his skin, strangely delicate as the film of a spiderweb. Once his eyes met hers, the broken pieces of his voice melded together with new desperation. Take me! You can do anything you want to me, but don't touch her baby... Someone had to hear him. Someone had to stop this. She wanted to touch him, to comfort him, to hold him. Dying messiahs were always beautiful. But he'd never tried to save the world. Just her.

And oh, he tried, seventy times up Golgotha and back he tried, even with a crown of thorns around his wrists and ankles. The sadists had tied him with barbed wire. Maybe they were afraid ordinary ropes wouldn't have held him back. Even now, they feared him. Cowards, she denounced them in her mind. I would suck the life out of you for making him bleed.

Inside, she was afraid of the wire, but they used handcuffs on her instead, circlets of metal that chafed her wrists as they bound her into helplessness. For a moment she fought back, but then the but of a gun drove into her side and her self-control shattered like a china doll. She could not keep back the scream. Logan jerked forward, spittle and vengeance flying from his lips, but the wire held and instead it was his flesh that tore. He managed to get his claws into one of them. Brave, stupid, beautiful man. They punished him for it, but just for that long, they weren't touching her.

He looked at her while they beat him, and his eyes said that's what he had intended all along.

You are beautiful. He said without words. You are beautiful and I will die for you.

She stared back at him. But I want you to live.

Soon enough, they turned back to her. The thunder could not mask the ripping of cloth as they tore her dress open over her belly. Rain was so cold on the skin....

By now it was pointless to struggle, but she did so anyway because any good mother would. One of them had to hold her shoulders down, and it took two to pin her legs. The lightning slid across the edges of the scalpel as the blade neared her flesh.

It was at that moment that her heart exploded into a sheer horror and agony that burned like fire and brimstone. Not this. Anything but this.

In the background, she heard him sobbing.

Her mind burned.

NO!myGODforsakenmeforsakenmeNO!no!NOTMYBABY!notmy angel!CAN'TyouSTOPTHEMwon't someone...st...op...th...em...

Pain took her long before darkness did.

Thirteen minutes before, they had been running, hands tangled through hands and fear bleeding into fear. There was blood on his hands and three of the shadows were dead. But there would be more. There was always more. She hadn't been able to realize why he stayed by her side, when they both knew he stood a decent chance of escaping if he was on his own.

"Leave me." She had whispered, dodging a tree and stealing a breath. "I can't run for much longer."

He had wrapped his arm around her waist and dragged her forward. She jerked her body away.

"You have a chance to live if you go now. Don't you hear me? I'm not fast enough. Not like this."

Silence. "You're right." He had burned a kiss onto her lips. "Don't stop for anything."

Then he had turned to fight the mighty men.

She had seen him fall, but had not stopped to mourn.

She dared heaven to turn away as the scalpel finished its first incision. Dared the angels to close their eyes. Don't you have a place for miracle babies? Don't you have a place to take mine?

Her own blood dripped from the edge of the blade back to her own skin as the monsters prepared to cut again. The child within her screamed but heaven remained silent. She turned her face form the sky. The angels were dead. The demons had destroyed them and now they were killing her.

Her body trembled with the force of sobs she had been too proud to release.

But then came the miracle.

The darkness was ripped down the middle by another stab of lightning, the brightness so intense it was as if she had stepped into the heart of a star. She saw him, in that instant, and noticed that the cuts on his wrist and ankles were no longer bleeding. That the bruises on his face were beginning to disappear.

His words flashed through her mind. It will come back in time.

Thirteen seconds later, he was on his feet and two of them were dead. The others swarmed from her to him, a black mass of hate and evil that momentarily swallowed him up. She could no longer see him. The earth ground to a stop. Time stretched from firecracker seconds to the long, slow, burn of eternity.

She saw three more fall, but oh, he was bleeding now. Gunshot wound to the stomach. How did he even stay on his feet?

One of the monsters loomed over her again, its face twisted in anger. A kick to her side sent a whirlwind of pain across her senses, whipping them into chaos. She barely heard the click of the automatic, the soft scrape of death on metal...

Thunder roared in her ears and it sounded like finality.

Three spikes of metal sheared through the man's chest before he pulled the trigger. His body crumpled to the wet earth, and for a moment she saw the face of the man she loved above her, the rain dripping from his eyes to mingle with streams of blood from fresh cuts in his forehead. (Of course, it was the rain and never tears. He did not cry.)

He was alive, he was standing, but she looked at his stomach, and there was so much blood...

After the next lightning bolt faded, he fell. First to his knees, and then to his side, arms clutching his wound as if he could keep the life from pouring out through his skin. She watched the rain fall as slender fingers of water attempted to brush the blood from his skin. Oh, she was so tired. So weak. No one should die like this. No one should die alone. So she began to move, her hand stretched in agonizing inches toward his before she realized that perhaps her power had returned as well. She would only finish the job of killing him.

So she watched.

Despair threatened her until she saw the blood flow lessen, saw his skin knit together and heal. It was not until then that she realized the loss of her own blood, pouring from the wound in her side. It was not until then that she surrendered to the darkness, to the pain. She was not sad. She was not afraid. The child was safe from the needles and therefore evil had not won.

His hand caught hers in the last second before darkness took her, a firm insistent grasp that dared her to try and pull away. His life-- so shortly returned unto him-- began to flow into her. No, she did not want this. She did not want to live if he must pour himself into her and then die.

"No..." she whispered, barely able to give the sound life. "You are too weak..."

"The baby." He said, and that was all he needed to make her surrender.

"Do you believe in miracles?" she whispered, as his energy began to wrap around her bones, squeezing away the pain.

It may have been the wind but she swore she heard him whisper that he did. And in the silence of between the lightning and the thunder, he kissed her hand. That was his last conscious act before the blackness of the sky pulled him down into oblivion. She saw the smile on his face. She felt the child within her smile much in the same way.

And so, they slept. The man. The woman. The child.

Peace was the sound of their breath moving in rhythm to each others, as if all three were extensions of the same soul.

Not long after, dawn broke, and the sunlight sent golden fire through the raindrops dropping from two almost-joined hands.

Who are they? The sunbeams whispered to the trees.

The trees bent their heads together for a moment of thought. The moonlight says she is a lost angel and he her protector. We think they are both fallen stars.

No, The violets shook their heads. They are something even better.

The leaves quivered. Are they lovers??

The violets nodded, but it may only have been the breeze.