Disclaimer: *groan* Not ANOTHER one! These things are like fleas! Next time any of you people see a disclaimer, kill it before it breeds. Anyway, everyone in here belongs to Marvel. Not mine, not selling this story, not making any money. DO NOT SUE! Any and all constructive criticism should be mailed to TRZR40F@Prodigy.com. All flamers should stick their heads into the deep end of a swimming pool and inhale deeply.

Author's note: Unless you've read Excalibur #94, this story probably won't make much sense. Go out right now and buy it. NOW, I said! It'll probably be in the back-issue bins. 
	And if I make a mistake in the DOFP or any of it's assorted history, live with it. I can't keep these things straight anymore.


			Loves Of Futures Not To Be
				by Suzene Campos	


	Pete Wisdom took a deep breath, smelling only the bleeding insides of his nasal passages, rubbed raw by the tubes in his nose that carried air down into his ruined lungs, and the stale, recycled atmosphere of the Black Air isolation ward.
	'Nice name.' he thought, not feeling up to pausing his wheezing breathing. 'Means they've tossed me into this rotting hole to listen to me own lungs give out bit by bit.'
	Excalibur was gone. All of them excepting Wisdom, Douglock, and that turncoat bitch Karma. She'd given them away to Black Air, that's what she'd done. And laughed like a hyena being given a blow-job while Black Air had stormed what was left of Braddock Manor and taken Wisdom from what was left of Excalibur's HQ. Doug might have given away Excalibur's position, but he'd hadn't a choice in the matter. Being dissected and strung out as a communications network tended to limit what you could and couldn't refuse to do. He hadn't been a traitor, he'd been a victim. And soon he'd be all that was left of Excalibur.
	Killing him right off would have been far too kind for Pete Wisdom's former employers. After their pet telepaths had finished ripping through his mind, they'd set him up in his own, private, white-walled room. 
	That had been over a year ago. Aside from the daily medical visits, there was nothing to do except lie on his back on the hospital bed, listen to emphysema turn his lungs into a miniature bag-pipe solo ('Oh, Mactaggert would have loved that one, she would have... yes, she would have...'), and think back on a world gone wrong. 
	It'd all started to go wrong after that fight with the demon under London. They'd won... oh, of course they'd won, didn't the good guys always? Ha... but the demon's link with the free-world, Margali Szardos, had managed to strike back, just as her source of power was cut away. 
	A quick flare of magical energy down through Douglock's body was all that it'd taken. The energy had easily cut through Excalibur's own magic user, Amanda Sefton, Margali's daughter, even as she'd sealed the demon away forever. It had been as good a way as any to die. No pain, not even enough time for a scream. The burst of violent energy had even packed enough punch to topple the ancient tunnels beneath the Hellfire Club. Kitty'd gotten them all out... almost all. Douglock had been left behind and no amount of searching on Shadowcat's part had been able to find him or even Sefton's body.
	After that utter defeat, things had sloughed off to where they were now. Kurt Wagner, the team's leader, had tried to put his own heartache at the loss of his lover to the side, and had attempted to lead the team through the Black Air takeover. He'd not done a horribly good job of it. He'd just vanished from Braddock Manor after a particularly crushing defeat. Brian Braddock, the infamous Captain Britain, had flat out refused to lead the team again. Pete had been brought to that rank, if only for his former experience as a spy. On the first mission that he led out, he'd caught a bullet in the lower spine. He'd known before he hit the ground that he'd never walk again.  	
	Not long after, Pete's own young lover, Kitty Pryde had abruptly announced to those that were left that she and Peter Rasputin, her former boyfriend, were returning to the United States to be married. Any hopes that Pete had possessed at that point had crumbled into dust. 
	"What's wrong?" he'd sneered at the woman he loved with all his soul. "Ain't so attractive now that I'm a cripple?" She'd turned away without an answer.
	Pryde and Rasputin had left the following morning. Kitty never said good-bye to Pete and Pete had never told her those three little words that might have joined them forever: I love you.
	Did any of it matter now? Wisdom supposed not... but his mind wouldn't shut down. He had to think. He could do nothing else.
	Eventually, Excalibur's field-active roster (Meggan, Captain Britain, Wolfsbane, Psylocke, formerly of the X-Men and Brian's sister, and Tangerine) had learned where Douglock had been all along: in the clutches of Black Air. And like the heroes they were, they'd rushed to the aid of their friend. Black Air had been waiting. The lot of them had been slaughtered like so many bleedin' sheep. 
	'So here I am.' His thoughts cut off as he hacked painfully. 'Gonna be joining my mates in a bit...' More hard coughing. This time, it brought up a mouthful of bloody phlegm. Like all the others, Pete just swallowed it and tried not to think of the high-levels of CO2 poisoning his blood. 'Shoulda taken meself out months ago. But never could. Either I've fought too long to stay alive t'just toss me life away or I'm just as chicken shit as dad always thought I was...'
	His thoughts fragmented into incoherence as a flash of multi-hued light broke into the stark cell.
	"P... te? Pete W... dom? ...t you?"
	Even as electronically filtered, broken, and static-filled as the voice was, Pete knew it.
	"Kitty?" he gasped. He was suddenly short of breath, even for a emphesemic.
	The light faded and before Pete stood a robot that seemed to mostly consist of... nothing. From the shoulders down, the entire body, save the fingertips, seemed to be nothing more than a vaguely human-shaped shadow. The fingertips were of a smooth metal, as were the shoulders and domed head. The features on the face were only hinted at... all except the eyes. They were somehow as expressive as Kitty's always had been. 
	Pete remembered now. Years ago, before the takeover, Kitty had shown him some file photos of some blasted little robot called Widget. It had wound up like this in the end, and just before being lost in a time-stream, it had been inhabited by the persona of one of Kitty's alternate-future selves. 
	Pete had paid little enough attention at the time. All of that "futures that might be" sludge gave him a headache. But the full impact of this hit him like a hammer. That alternate-future Kate had been HIS Kitty all along. He couldn't speak. There was nothing to say and too much to say all at once.
	"Pete? I know you can hear me, you horrible English wanker."
	"Ain't no *wheeze!* call for that sort of language, ye American harlot. What d'yer want?" Now that the first shock was over, Pete's hurt and bitterness welled into his voice like pus from an infection. The emotions should have been dulled with time, but they were as fresh as if he'd just heard the announcement of Kitty's impending wedding once again.
	Widget/Kate took a few steps towards Pete's withered form.
	"I knew I'd make it, if I tried. If it was important enough." she said, a note of tenderness somehow coming into the synthesized voice.
	"*cough* So now I'm important to you, am I? *hack-cough* Pity ye never let me know that before ye ran off with Comrade Terminator. Why're you here?"
	Widget/Kate hesitated. "I never told you why I left you, Pete."
	"Yes, you did. *cough-cough* Some things a man just don't forget, you computerized tart. You *WHEEZE!* left me for that tin-headed Russian what beat the living shit outta me."
	Emotion was definitely in the machine's voice now. "That's right, I did! And do you know why, you stupid bastard? Because I loved you! Because once you were all but helpless, Peter said that if I didn't become 'His Katya' again, he'd finished what he'd started back on Muir! I couldn't have protected you Pete, and you know it!"
	"Christ..."
	"So I went back to America with him! I went back to the X-Men and became his wife and his... his CHATTEL as far as he was concerned, because I LOVED YOU! And now... now you're dying..."
	"Tell me somthin' I don't know."
	"And I had to let you know, OK?"
	Pete struggled to sit up, striving to get up and take a better look at what housed Kitty's consciousness. He failed and fell back to his pillows. "That you loved me?" 
	Widget/Kate couldn't nod, having no neck. She bent at the waist.
	"Yeah."
	"Aw, bloody hell..." As Pete broke into another coughing fit, he could feel tears stinging his eyes. And not from the pain in his lungs. "Pryde... I..." Pain ripped through Pete's lungs again and thick blood sprayed against the back of his throat. His love crouched by his bed, but could do nothing. "Loved you too, Pryde... for what it's worth." Wisdom managed to rasp out. "Do me a last favor, will ya?"
	She slid her fingertips, cold, but somehow not unpleasantly so, across his forehead. "Anything." 
	"Put this damn pillow over me face. I don't wanna go out chokin' to death on meself, or to die with those bloody Tories starin' at me. I'm happy, Kitty. Let me go out before it fades."
	In the time-stream, Widget/Kate Pryde had seen almost every possible situation and scenario. A human brain would have been driven mad by it. She'd run across a few others in there that were beyond mad. But she was something more than human, thanks to her merging with Widget. She could process and understand the events that she saw and not be driven over the brink. And it was so beautiful... so very beautiful and so very... simple, in a way. But none of it could prepare her for what Pete was asking. She also couldn't refuse him.
	She eased the thick pillow out from under Pete's head. Before she pressed it over his face, she brushed her almost non-existent lips across his thin, dry ones in the closest thing to a kiss she could manage. Then she pressed the pillow down over his wrinkled face. 
	Dying was one of the quietest things Pete Wisdom ever did. He didn't struggle or flail about. It took the loud, steady tone of the heart-monitor beside Wisdom's bed to let her know he had passed on. 
	Widget/Kate wanted to cry her grief out on someone's shoulder. But all of her friends were dead and gone and her body did not allow for tears. She put the pillow underneath Pete's head and straightened his body as best she could. 
	The entrance to the time-stream tore the still air of the room once more. Widget/Kate turned back towards it. She didn't understand why, after attempts without count to return to other points in time, other events she'd have given anything to change, she'd only been able to make it through to this one. Maybe it really had been because it was so important. Who knew?
	Widget/Katherine Pryde stepped back through into the only thing that was left for her anywhere, and let the tides of time wash her away.

The End