General rode Ghost's power, drifting through the air like smoke, summoning phantoms, raining down blow after blow under the sky.
Defense was no longer possible. Apocalypse's colossal thirty-meter form shrank, bit by bit, down to the size of an ordinary man.
Near powerless now, he found himself sealed in by Azazel's spatial blockade, with no room to escape.
Punch after punch came down. Blood burst from his mouth. At last, a giant hand closed around him and held him fast.
Cornered, Apocalypse reacted, throwing up a protective shield.
The pressure on it was enormous, the general's body strained to bursting, smeared red with its own blood.
And still, on the very edge of death, his life force held.
"I was going to take a break. Looks like I have to do everything myself."
A theatrical voice rang out. Every eye turned skyward to a figure in a silver mask, an immortal aura rolling off him.
"Dad!" Kyle, Chris, and Clark called out as one, knowing Ernst at once despite the mask.
Ernst gave his three children a nod, then gestured to the general. It understood and tossed the spent Apocalypse to him.
In full view of everyone, Ernst decomposed Apocalypse with no apparent effort.
The sight left them stunned, the moment too unreal to take in. The once-unstoppable Apocalypse, the immortal one, simply came apart. Was it the sheer strength of the man, or some ability built to undo him specifically?
What the mutants couldn't know was that Ernst's ease came from how badly Apocalypse was already broken, all his resistance gone.
Whole and at full strength, even Ernst would have needed real effort to put him down.
Once the body was unmade, only a faint soul remained, invisible to everyone else. Ernst produced a cube and drew Apocalypse's soul inside it.
Enhanced from the start by a Celestial's blood, evolved along a path no one else had walked, Apocalypse carried research value too valuable to discard.
He looked wholly absorbed in the work. In truth, he was watching Professor X and the others from the corner of his eye, and their astonishment delighted him.
The act had landed.
The joy didn't last.
Just as he savored it, an irritating voice cut in from behind.
"Ernst Shaw. You're here. This is your doing again, isn't it? What in the world happened?"
Ernst seethed. He'd just gotten the performance exactly right.
'Who dares to interrupt me now?'
He turned. A figure was streaking toward him, beautiful, breastplate gleaming, round shield slung across her back, golden rope coiled at her waist.
Diana. Wonder Woman.
He was masked. He could not work out how she'd known it was him so fast.
With the whole world under threat, no surprise the government had called her in. But running into her again dragged up the shame of their last meeting.
'My luck,' Ernst sighed inwardly, 'to cross paths with this woman again.'
He readied himself to slip away by Apparition, and then a thought stopped him.
'Wonder Woman couldn't have flown here on her own. No plane. No transport of her own.'
He studied her, and his eyes settled on her boots. Magic was bleeding off them, the source of her flight.
He remembered now, Wonder Woman had a pair of Boots of Hermes, a swift passage to anywhere she liked.
A gift from Zeus to his daughter, perhaps.
The name struck Magneto, Professor X, and the rest like a stone. They had faced Ernst during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
They knew exactly what he could do. And the realization that the silver-masked man was Ernst lit a new question: what, then, tied Ernst to Chris, and to Moira?
A faint expression crept into Professor X's expression. He'd never had anything romantic with Moira, but she was the first woman to leave a true mark on him.
Ernst, for his part, hadn't the faintest idea and was busy being annoyed at Wonder Woman.
"Diana, what exactly am I doing? Spare me the deductions. And why do you keep staring at me? Go back to Paradise Island and be a good girl. Do you know how rarely I take the mask off to make an impression? If I botch it, won't it look like I took advantage of you in the first place? So have a little mercy."
"Shut up!" Wonder Woman blazed, eyes alight.
"If you dare bring up what happened, I'll, "
Those without the backstory eyed Ernst with open contempt, wondering what he could possibly have done to earn such hatred.
Some abandonment in the chaos, maybe. Utterly unmanly.
Ernst sneered. "Your call. But wake up, I learned my lesson from the beating last time."
The onlookers, the three brothers included, all winced in unison.
'You did what? Careful, a woman that beautiful can still do serious damage.'
"That was then. This time I won't lose," Wonder Woman declared, and swung her sword at him.
Ernst slipped back, clearing the blade.
"Too many people here, this is no place to fight," he called.
"If you want your revenge, come with me."
Undeterred, she gave chase.
Professor X, Magneto, and the others let out a collective breath and watched the two of them go.
Pulled back from the edge of death, the mutants broke into cheers.
Moira couldn't hold herself in; she turned and threw her arms around Professor X, and the contact sent something surging through him.
Having looked death in the face, Professor X decided to give the past back.
He reached out and restored the memories he'd erased, and their shared history came flooding home to her.
"I'm sorry. I should never have erased our memories. I'm giving them back to you now."
The feeling was too much to hold. Moira's tears spilled over. Only now did she understand the depth of what they'd shared, the real weight of her connection to Professor X.
It explained the pull she'd felt toward him from the very first.
"Mom, why are you crying? Who hurt you? I'll make them pay," Chris cut in, arriving just then to find his mother distraught.
"Get away! Don't come near me!" Moira shouted at him, almost in fear, shoving him back. Joy, worry, anger, reluctance, and a thin thread of hatred all crossed her eyes at once.
With her memories whole again, she remembered exactly who Chris's father was.
Chris read the room. He went still for a moment, then wore a wry smile.
"All right, Mom. Your memory's back, then. I've no right to weigh in on you and Father. I can't say who was right or wrong. Since you don't want to see me, I won't put myself in front of you again. Take care of yourself. I'll leave this with you. I hope it helps."
Ernst had always been honest with Chris about his history with Moira, so Chris understood the war in his mother's heart.
The two of them were enemies, yes, but motherhood was its own tangle, all the more so when the child was her own.
Chris took a document bag from his arms and set it on the ground.
Inside were the shares of the company he'd founded, something of real value to leave her.
Chris and Kyle gathered themselves and waved toward the air. A half-meter toy plane shimmered into being and settled lightly onto the sand.
Its glass canopy lifted on its own. Chris, Clark, and Kyle climbed in, their bodies shrinking as they did, and the aircraft began to fade.
The day had broken everyone's understanding more times than they could count, but the sight still stunned them.
They glanced at Moira and held their questions.
Chris's words had carried a deeper meaning, and out of regard for Professor X, they chose not to dig.
The crisis was resolved, cleanly. Magneto and Professor X were on the point of leaving when Azazel approached them, unexpectedly.
"Erik. Charles. I think there are matters the three of us should talk through."
"We've never seen eye to eye, and I doubt that changes now," Darwin said.
He held a low opinion of Azazel. The X-Men had bled badly under Shaw, and Azazel had done his share of it.
The contempt didn't move him.
"The mutant population is growing. New factions keep surfacing. For all our differences, we're among the strongest hands at keeping mutants in check. Our philosophies clash, fine, but I'm proposing we find ways to limit the conflicts and cut down the infighting."
"I'm in," Magneto said, first to speak. It was good for mutants, and there was no reason to object.
Professor X considered it a moment, then nodded too. He had no appetite for a mutant war either.
Relieved, Azazel pressed on.
"Then let's gather at the X Academy and talk through where mutants go from here. Since the Academy was bombed, you can work with Erik and Jean to rebuild it."
He snapped his fingers, opening a blue portal. Through the wormhole, the wreckage of the X Academy was visible on the far side.
Magneto sent the rest of the mutants off by plane, keeping only Sabretooth and the mutant who could raise an energy barrier to come through with them.
Beast carried Professor X on his back, and the others, Cyclops, Nathan, Mystique, Moira, and the rest, passed through one by one before the wormhole closed.
On the other side they found Magneto, who'd gone first, standing dumbstruck.
His gaze was locked on an eight-year-old girl in front of him, and he could not find a single word.
"Daddy!"
The girl cried out, bolted forward, and flung herself into his arms.
It was Magneto's daughter. His dead daughter.
As for how she came to be standing there, that was Ernst's arrangement, of course.
Thanks to the Cradle of Rebirth, every mutant had a shot at a second life.
Ernst had done no end of concrete work for mutant kind, and here, as a gesture of hard-won goodwill, he'd brought Magneto's reunion with his daughter forward.
It helped that she was young; the revival of a child took far less time.
Had it been Cyclops' brother, the wait would have lasted at least a month before the body fully matured.
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