His had been a calculated existence, dictated by numbers in a hierarchy of usefulness in the eyes of an alien being thought to be intelligent beyond all measure, fraternizing with those of similar echelons behind closed doors in the background of life-changing political affairs and events, while the children he had adopted with considerable sums of money from all corners of the world had been paraded about as the heroes of The City. They were the ones who would stop its inevitable end - the ones who would stop the apocalypse, any apocalypse, as they turned up and however they turned up - and as such bore the weight of an entire world unfairly on their shoulders before there had been time to learn how to tie their own shoes never mind process the pressure found in such an honor, and in such an injustice.

A young man left to rot on the moon, warped and manipulated in an attempt to save his life into half-man, half-ape, with the worst parts of the latter to deal with; a young woman with a husband who had kept her failing marriage together through such wanton use of her powers only to have such haunted secrets rise to the surface, losing her all that had been built; another with a hero complex who found himself constantly toeing the line of trouble in such foolhardy attempts to prove to his father that he wasn’t a failure, that he was just as good as the rest; a boy lost through time from hubris; a fourth without enough mental fortitude to cope with all the torments that had come of the dead he had been trained to summon thanks to the abilities granted, turning to drugs and alcohol as a means to block them out; and a sister long forgotten, ostracized, and left alone in the dark with no one to turn to until the last days of Sir Reginald Hargreeves had come to be - these had been his siblings. These were his siblings, and with the exception of one --

-- they had forgotten him.

Much like his statue had been, Ben had been destroyed, buried and left to rot in the ground with the worms, and ignored when there had been such opportunity for someone - anyone - to reach out. Even the circumstances of his untimely demise, his shuffle from the mortal coil, had disappeared with time, perhaps not forgotten because how did anyone forget something so cruel by his own sister’s admissions and the aftermath that had befallen the family, but silenced, unspoken, ignored amiss their own struggles and problems to the tune of “moving on” from something irreversible.

He had been a memory, not yet dead in those ways where names were long forgotten, gone in the physical sense, but he had existed at one point in something other than the shadows or the manipulations of his brother’s abilities to bring him back to the land of the living instead of ushering him into the bright life of the afterlife; and, through such curious means as the shifts allowed, he existed now, but not as he should have - not as his own person in the emptiness that settled into his soul and the coldness that seeped into his bones that seemed to draw him like a moth to a flame to the twinkling sounds of magic in the air. It punctuated the thoughts in his head, underlined the words and their meanings, grabbed them and enlarged them for a purpose he readily understood.

He had existed once -- and so had she only to be forgotten and left to rot, a shell brought to life by the spark of another who had usurped the life she had known, one that she would never get back; and as the tendrils of thought continued to twist and turn and warp, grabbing onto mental threads left open even with the magical fortifications in place, Henry could feel him stir; could feel the presence of another that hadn’t belonged to the Goblyn Queen, but something far more malicious than a woman crying for help through the means she knew how. It had been the being he was holding back, the one he had ensured was trapped - at least a part of his being - through wards of the Darkforce, the one which pushed so consistently to be let out --

-- the one who had finally found the means to, spurred through mental manipulations not born of magic, but of telepathy that he had little recourse against despite what magically barriers he had put up to protect himself. She knew well enough not to use magic. Magic was something he knew, had studies some aspects of, and could manipulate in ways that were only improving with each piece of text he read, but telepathy - that had been galvanizing, stirring He Who Slept from the depths of eldritch binds with a miniscule taste of the power that could be found on the other side once he had broken through. It freed him in the cracks left of growing emotional distress, pushing past compartmentalizations made between human minds who had long stopped struggling against each other, and all but ripping physically out of his body in a swirl of darkness that only seemed to deepen in contrast against the pallor of his skin.

It was welcoming, the hallowed screams of the banshees that resided in this dark place that felt like a twisted home, and the cold that sunk into his very core served, easily, as a reminder of where he had been once upon a time - six feet down in the ground, stomach agape from that which had escaped, dressed in a uniform torn, tarnished, nothing but rags by the time he had returned to the paranormal visions of his siblings. He embraced it - that loneliness that seemed long felt not only by himself, but the woman who had been left behind, forgotten, and ignored. Darkened eyes looked across his little slice of Hell he hadn’t so much fallen in as transported to, echoing the dark frigidity felt under his skin and a place no one should have dared to tread; but it was his, and he knew how he could wield that dark abyss against their enemies.

Twisting his own fingers about, the ground, had there been any distinction of such a thing in the Darkforce, took on fluidity; took on shape and movement like tar that clung to his body like an unholy armor, dark and sinister in shape to shield its bound host underneath; forged of the living abyss that bent to his will to give him new form - one more readily appropriate for such dark alliances.

Because she wasn’t alone now - not against this mutant nation of Krakoa that had sought to keep her down despite the life she justly deserved the opportunity to live; that had cast her out, away from her son, away from her family, while others had been allowed amnesty from their crimes; that ignored the pleas of those who cared about someone who only wanted a chance at something that was hers. They had been the ones to stand between it, to be that blockade so many others had been allowed passage through, and they would be the ones to pay.