"We need Sentinel tech."

Molly, startled out of a reverie featuring killer unicorns, jerks awake; Kitten, asleep on her lap, stirs but doesn't open her eyes.

"I feel like we're gonna have to talk about 'phrases it's okay to wake people up with', Ange," she tells their resident tech expert, stifling a yawn with difficulty. (Techspert? She has got to get more sleep.) "'Cause that sentence is gonna feature pretty heavily in my nightmares, I swear."

Angeliqua rolls her eyes, permanently oil-stained hands clutching two mugs of coffee (one black, one milky and so sweet Molly can smell the sugar from several feet away). "Yeah, but we do." Beat. "Need Sentinel tech, I mean, not ... the other stuff."

They're all tired, Molly thinks, carefully lifting the dozing little girl as she stands and even more carefully lowers her back onto the sofa to finish her nap. Everyone is tired, all the time - except maybe Kitt - and there's no payoff, no target, and no end in sight.

"All right," she says, and - gently but firmly - shepherds the older woman out of the room and away from the sleeping six-year-old. It took her hours to convince Kitt that this was bedtime, and she's in no hurry to repeat the experience. "We need Sentinel tech." She closes the door behind them, leaving them in the half-light of the corridor between living quarters and Angie's domain, and takes the milky coffee from Angie with a murmur of thanks. "Why do we need Sentinel tech?"

Angie gives her the look of a woman who'd geared herself up for an argument and would really rather they were having it, if only so as not to waste the preparation time, but starts ticking reasons off on her fingers anyway.

"One - the Sentinel tracker you wanted. I can't replicate their signal, so I'm going to need to get a copy from the source. Several copies, if possible, because - two - my spare parts stores are basically Mother Hubbarded right now. Three - you know you wanted us to do something about reducing our psychic footprint aboveground? Well, I had a couple ideas in that direction, but all the quickest ones involve using Sentinels' in-built power dampeners. And it'll be trial and error, if it even works at all, so I'll need a lot of them. Five - your shield mechanism's playing up again, and you need an extra spare in any case. Short of dismembering Wolverine - wherever he is - again - they're the only obvious source of Adamantium round here."

She puts down the mug of coffee she's holding to gesture a 'six' with her second hand, reminding Molly that in hindsight, seeing her approach with caffeine to share had been a very bad omen indeed. "And, finally - the air con's on the blink again, and you know how Bianca gets when she can't sleep. We don't specifically need Sentinel guts to fix that with, I admit, but if you're bringing me some anyway, it'll make my life easier to use them. Might even hold for longer, you never know."

"Right." Molly rubs at her face. "So what you're saying is, not only do we need Sentinel tech, what we need is lots of Sentinel tech?"

"Yep." One of Angie's dreadlocks has managed to fall over her face despite the goggles pushing her hair back; rather than try to fix just one lock, she takes the goggles off and slides them on again, leaving her hair neatly falling down her back. "You'd be a while trying to find and beat up enough single 'bots to get me everything I need, I think. Especially since you, uh..."

"Tend to smash up all the useful bits?" Molly supplies, half-rueful and half-proud.

"Uh-huh. Your collateral damage record is an inspiration to us all, if that helps."

"Not especially, if I'm being honest, but thanks." She gives Angie a wry grin - the two of them understand each other pretty well, these days - but she can already feel the headache starting to build up behind her eyes. "All right, I'll figure something out. There a deadline on all this?"

"Not as such, but in the next week or so'd be good. We don't want another of Bianca's freak-outs if the air-con fails and she overheats while she's sleeping. Again."

Molly winces at the memory, particularly of trying to put out fires caused by a frantic pyrokinetic while trying to soothe a psychic's PTSD-induced nightmare. "You're damn right we don't. Leave it with me." A thought strikes a match. "Oh, Ange?"

"Yeah?"

"Can you get me a blueprint or a map or something for that lock-up Chase found on the scanners the other day? The one by the Sign? Something that'll at least show us more of what the inside of the place looks like."

Angie looks startled; Molly grabs the second cup from its resting place before her outflung hand can knock it over. "You're not serious?"

Molly gives her a look. "Not yet I'm not, but depending on what you find I might be. Unless you've got any better ideas?"

Angie takes her cup back and takes a long, long sip - which Molly takes to mean that she hasn't.

When Karolina comes back from the stars, she comes back in tears. She'd been to Majesdane, she'd been to the Skrulls, she'd been to the Shi'ar and to everywhere in between, and in all those places and planets she found -- nothing. Or maybe you'd say she'd found too much: no help, nowhere, too many interstellar wars for anyone to be spared to attend to trouble in a postage-stamp planet in a galaxy at the back end of the universe.

"All right," Molly says, into Karolina's hair. "Then I guess it's all on us."

They've never really gone all-out on Magneto before this: too many responsibilities (they're going to have to find a way to keep Kitt out of it; they've buried enough children already), too many worries, too much trauma to think straight. Too afraid, when you get right down to it - but right here, right now, they've had enough. They've taken too much to let this continue.

Molly thinks maybe she's supposed to be more scared.

But, then again, she was never very good with 'supposed'.

It’s all a bit of a mess, really, Molly Hayes considers. Well, rather more than a bit, but thinking like that’ll just have her curled up in a ball wailing like a kid, and she’s not a kid any more. She hasn’t been a kid in a very, very long time.

When the door home had reappeared in Milliways after well over a year, they’d none of them thought twice before charging back through it, back to the fight they’d left behind. After all, they had a job to do, didn’t they? They had responsibilities. They were supposed to be heroes, or something, or at least, as Gert sniffed dryly, they were supposed to not fail on purpose. She missed Gert the most, really, which was strange, considering she’d been dead the longest. But Gert had always known what to do, or at least she seemed to, and now that she was grown Molly appreciated the way the other girl had tried to mother the group baby, as unsuited to mothering as Gert really was, without smothering her. So when Molly ran with the X-Men, as she did, for a while, she’d taken the codename Arsenal, in tribute to the runaways’ Arsenic. The name had stuck, after a while, even if Chase still wouldn’t call her it. His voice always seemed to catch on the name, and he'd just call her Bruiser instead. Molly didn't mind.

They never knew why the door hadn’t reappeared. Molly didn’t cry about it, though; it would show up some day, right? It had to. She just had to keep looking.

At least, she didn’t cry where anyone could see her. And after a while she stopped crying at all, for anything. It never helped, and she was supposed to be the adult, these days. The leader, for what it was worth.

Nobody ever did find out how Magneto got his powers back. Back many times over, it seemed, the way he’d levelled the X-Mansion; this time, the old guy was taking no chances. Molly had only escaped because she’d been shopping in the city with a few of her team mates; they’d seen the carnage on twenty TV screens at once in a store. Nobody said anything, just watched in appalled silence, but when they saw Cyclops and Emma Frost on screen, twisted together like lovers in the same bodybag, they looked at each other. And they ran.

None of them looked back.

She thinks that was the last time she’d cried, hot and fierce tears like molten iron two nights later, when they’d made it to L.A. and the old Runaway hideouts. She doesn’t know if the last two survivors, Conor and Freakout, who’d never said if she had another name, had cried at all. She thinks Conor maybe did. Freakout never seemed to react to anything much at all, really; the voices in her head were more than enough emotion for the telepath.

When, the next day, New York City proper had been levelled, Molly had watched the Avengers fight Magneto on another shop TV screen. The grainy picture had been a blessing, really, had allowed her to force herself to believe that she hadn’t really seen them die, every last one of them.

Hadn’t watched Nico and Victor go out in a blaze of suicidally heroic glory, hadn’t seen Xavin crushed by the skyscraper he was supporting, hadn’t seen Karolina’s rainbow lights wink out all at once as she fell from the sky screaming Xavin’s name, and Nico’s, one after the other, until the words were a blur.

So when Chase turned up a week later with Old Lace and the Leapfrog, bruised and burned and sleepless, the brother she hadn’t seen since he’d run off on his own, appalled by their growing up and splitting up and leaving him alone, she didn’t cry. She just held him so tight she thought she’d never let go again. It was the last time she let herself feel like a child.

When Chase told her, in a cracked hoarse voice that if she didn’t know better she’d swear was a split-second away from tears, that he’d brought Karolina, she’d somehow expected a corpse, had wondered why he’d brought Karolina’s body back to them and not Xavin and Victor and Nico’s, Nico, Nico, so when the alien waved a hand in mute, shattered greeting none of them said anything for a long time. Chase had never said how he’d got her out of the carnage alive, but it had never mattered much. Only that he’d done it.

So, they had a team. Not much of one, maybe, but it was a team.

None of them were in any sort of fit state to be a leader, it was true- Chase was no leader, nor were Molly’s two mutants, Wildcard and Freakout, and Karolina was far too traumatised, for a very long time, to take care of anyone more than herself. Angelina, the genius human they’d rescued later from one of Magneto’s tech labs and who’d christened herself Anarchy, was far too obsessed with her beloved machines to think of anything beyond motherboards and electricity, so the job had fallen like a lead balloon to the group baby, who’d taken leadership lessons from Cyclops himself and who’d led an X-Squad.

For all of a month, before they’d been wiped out, but she’d done it. Sort of.

So Molly did it.

And when they’d found the petrified, speechless eight-year-old human girl in the wreckage of an L.A. mansion, none of them had thought it was a good idea to keep her, but equally none of them wanted to leave her to the mercy of Magneto’s army, either. So they picked her up, and ran like hell. The kid wouldn’t speak, and they couldn’t exactly stick around to go hunting for her personal effects, so Chase christened her Kitten, just as he’d christened Molly herself Bruiser nearly ten years before. Anarchy had earlier put together a new version of his old Fistigons, so when it turned out the kid was a baseline human, no powers at all, he gave Kitten Old Lace as protector.

Molly, who had somehow wound up as de facto mother to the girl, wondered, when she could bear to, how the hell Gert had done it. She never had an answer, really.

So, a team. A squad, sort of. Mascot and all. A team with an enemy.

The name they left on the bombs (and Molly never thought she’d wind up a terrorist; never thought she’d keep so close to her parents) was ‘Y Generation’.

None of them really knew why, just that having a name had seemed Important, somehow.

None of them really knew much, any more.