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No one should be alone when they are dying, especially not a Jew.
Kitty fell behind her team leaving the battlefield, ignoring the worried look at least one other teammate shot her and ignoring the prickle of awareness at how solemn and strange this all was.
Magneto was lying on the ground in the midst of the rubble, dying. Erik Lehnsherr was dying.
Kitty knelt beside him, listening to the strange sound of blood coming up his throat. She wrapped the fingers of one hand around his while he stared at her and wrapped the other hand around her Star of David.
"Sh'ma Yis'ra'eil," she whispered, the beginning of the Shema.
Erik's voice choked out through the blood with her. "Adonai Eloheinu..."
The ancient, holy words wove them together on that ruined field, in his dying rasp and her soft voice, very much alive.
The Vidui. The final prayer of confession.
She felt the sting of tears and an ache in her chest despite all the grief and war between them and their choices, the difference between protecting humanity and protecting mutants only. He was a Jew and he was dying. No one should be alone when he was dying. No one.
"You," he brought out slowly, painfully, before his body was racked with a wet cough.
Kitty did not try to hush him. This was his right, whatever he was pushing himself to say.
"You are the future."
She stared at him, fought down the rising tide of her worry and grief. "I don't--"
"Mutant. Jew. Never be ashamed."
"Never," she whispered back.
Charles Xavier was gone. Now, Erik Lehnsherr would be gone. The world was frightening already with the thought of neither man alive within it. But Kitty was mutant and Jew and unashamed. She would not be afraid to meet this new world spreading out before her.
She held Erik's hand as death rattle set in and waited with him in one final mitzvah.