it's a morbid, yet true: dying isn't so bad when you've done it before, when you've accepted that it is inevitable in your own need to assert yourself. madelyne has tasted the tang of blood in her mouth before, has felt her body become utterly useless to her before. she greets it like an old friend, mind and body fading from krakoa. when your body and mind were often divided between different forces, your soul had to take a path. this time, she does not go where she should go, to the illuminated corridor in the ever burning heart of the phoenix. it's where she is from, it's technically her home, the very thing that gave her life.

she doesn't want it anymore, turning instead to the sickly green glow of the goblin force. she had turned her back on it before, on the island, and now madelyne and molly, two in one, go down to the goblin force, open their arms to it as it takes them in -- the magic is a comfort in a way the phoenix is not, it's malevolence at least out in the open rather than concealed in a fiery will. it's soothing to be baptized in it, to let herself be carried by it. there's no tangled web of hosts waiting here, no grandeur of previous lives and future lives all wrapped in one.

it's simply magic, twisted and hateful, but it's face bear, it's intentions easy to read for them.

she wants it.

they are reincarnated in its arms of magic instead of the phoenix's psychic ones. it feels better to reborn like this, in it's magic that doesn't have to hook it's fingers into her the same was as the phoenix. to be reminded now of jean, of the phoenix. experiments to fashion her in her damn likeness, to make sure that she was a piece of her.

there was a point where she wanted that, begged for it.

now as she feels the magic stitch her another a new body, she wasn't sure she wanted to be attached to it anymore. it feels as if the moment her psyche would brush up against the phoenix, it would swallow her up, throw her at jean's feet again. that she would have be cast back in her shadow and madelyne, molly both were done.

things weren't ever going to be the same. she had made bitterly sure of that with every move she had done. every cradle destroyed, every mutant she had killed, everyone, it had all been bitterly deliberate.

about the only thing she hadn't done was hurt nathan. she could have done so, physically, mentally. except she'd kept her promise to herself, still had remembered that out of anyone, he didn't deserve it. and in the end, what he said to her still mattered.

she wasn't in cerebro. and that meant that unlike everyone else in krakoa there was no way for sinister to replicate her over and over. there was no way that she would ever find his tainted hands on her body, no way for him to control her body to give him exactly what he wanted ever again. no more memories of being cloned endlessly to contain the phoenix, no more awful memories of sinister staring her in the face, no more terror that one day she would wake up back in his labs again.

she won, in her own way.

the magic stitches her back together, one inch at a time, and she wonders if she will cry. she wonders if she will regret this, as each piece of her comes back together, if nathan will hate her despite what he'd said to her as she died.