Madelyne hasn't enjoyed her dreams in years. Not because she hated the activity of it -- she used to dream about flying planes overhead, about a future with Scott, about normal worries any woman would have with life. No, dreams used to be enjoyable and even fun to decipher. It was more that her dreams usually always ended up at the same place after awhile: stolen memories of Jean's, ebbing into her life, and the realization of who and what she really was. She couldn't escape: Annie Richardson dying her her arms, the grief and trauma, and Sinister laughing that no, that wasn't really her friend. Her rage, her anger, and the blinding despair afterwards. Then the dreams would loop back into her old life, and again and again and again. Being dead, and then just a construct had at least freed her from it for a little while. Just sheer, bright existence however strange.

Being alive, being in a body however, made her brain tumble all over itself to impart dreams on her again, mixing them with memory. More than once, she found herself in Molly's memories overlapping with hers: a birth in a home instead of a hospital, the sense of rage and betrayal over being abandoned, the yearning for things that could be better.

This time, though, Maddie finds that as she falls asleep, huddled close to the other captured, she dreams of Genosha again. It's almost worse to conjure up, that period where she had been erased, brought back again, and still distraught and unknowing of what, exactly she had agreed to be.

Not that it mattered. In dreams, there were only emotions, and in this one it was just one thing: fright. Fear racing through her mind as she's strapped down. Only the faces of the examination team this time are lackey's: sneering, amused as she twists, trying to get out of their grip and force her into the suit beneath the gleaming, awful machine.

The suit feels too tight along her skin, probes digging into her skin, and her mind twists and turns in terror. The lackeys grin, and say, It's done with all mutes. So they can be instantly recognized as such. She protests: what about her, what about children?

They don't answer her. Some paradise this place was. Her heart pounds. This isn't the street, where they'd surrounded her, yanked her into a car. She's not able to kick them, or push with her mind, and there's no prick against her neck. Try as she might, the dream won't bend to her desires. No snap of magic, no feeling of the Phoenix animating her body or her brain, nothing.

She's forced to stare up as the machines whirr to life. The lackeys are gone, leaving just it and her, struggling harder and harder against the restraints. There is only powerless terror in her throat, and an anger that can do nothing for her here. She strains and strains as the machine hums, sounding almost like Sinister himself.

A scream tries to escape her throat, pushing with everything she had, and her body lights up with the shock.

As it turns out, the shock is real. She wakes choking on a scream, body seizing up from it. Reality isn't much better than dreams: the collar still hums against her neck, only barely catching herself from touching it again, her head pounding. Sweat drips down her forehead, and Maddie pushes her hair back, trying to shift against Rahne, not wanting to wake her up.

A new day, and one that she dreaded more than the last.