From Genosha to the Jean Grey School, Evening. And then another, more different evening.
There was fire in his footsteps as Evan made his way down the hallways and corridors of the facility that the Brotherhood had been keeping him in. Somewhere in this building, Wolverine was drowning. Somewhere.
He had no idea where to begin, but his first stop seemed to pick itself out for him.
You can only see so much ugliness before you have to FACE it.
It wasn't Headmaster Logan that Evan found first. It was the man without skin, the one that had thrown Uncle Cluster's body at Evan. He'd been making his way down the hall when he realized what he was about to run into, and had turned on his heel to take off in the opposite direction without hesitation.
"Evan, come now-- Be a sport! It was all in good fun!"
Evan followed. A flash of power crackled off of him, and the hallway around them exploded. The Skinlessman went flying, barely ducking out of the hallway into a nearby room to avoid the blast. When Evan rounded the corner, he could make out the shape of his uncle's body, tacked to the wall like a grotesque marionnette.
You CAN'T let them roll over you. That's what Wolverine could see. Why he KILLED these types of people.
"Wait!" The Skinlessman made a reach for a glass jar across the room. A glass jar containing a human heart. "There is still a bit of bartering to be done!"
You must see a thing for what it is. And when you see evil--
Evan's hands started to glow, a fierce red to match his eyes. To match his blood smeared across the floors, to match the nightmares that they'd trapped him inside.
--You END it before it SPREADS.
"You have nothing I want."
The Skinlessman held up the jar.
"This you want. You do." He gestured to the body on the wall. The shell that they made of him, his chest gaping open, that face that Evan barely knew tilted down toward the floor. Dead. "It's his bloody heart. You can fix him. Let me go and you can have Uncle Cluster back."
Right there. His heart was right there...
"See there? The boy's interested. Wise enough to see a fair proposition. Chance to set it all right. All you have to do is reach out..."
Evan's fingers brushed against the glass of the container.
"And feel it slip between your fingers."
And the container shattered in the Skinlessman's grasp, shards of glass slicing the heart to ribbons.
"Blimey-- Now that was offhanded of me. But that was it, the last joke, I promise--"
He turned, making to run away while Evan was left standing, reeling over the loss of that one last chance.
He didn't make it far.
"Bummer." Wade. Stepping in front of the Skinlessman and plunging his sword deep in the monster's throat. "Your last joke, and I just murdered the punch line. That's for Fantomex. Probably goes without saying."
Evan wasn't paying attention. Evan was on his knees on the floor in front of his Uncle's body. His mind was his own. His powers were his own. And none of that seemed to matter. His hands were red with blood. Cluster's blood. Probably not his own. The glass wouldn't have been able to cut him now, anyway.
"How?!" The question tore from his throat the second he sensed Wade stepping up beside him. "How can people be this horrible?"
"Whoa," Wade chided, trying to be soothing. "Just take it easy. Calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean-- Say it with me--"
There was no calm blue ocean to be had.
"HOW CAN PEOPLE BE THIS DECAYED!?"
The surge of power that followed, ripping free from Evan's body like a tidal wave, left the building they were standing in crumbling around them.
They had split up, Wade and Evan. They needed to find Logan. They needed to take out the rest of the Brotherhood. They needed to find a way out of here and they needed to go. Which meant that Evan was walking the hallways alone, the floorboards burning under his feet.
"I have the power. Power to protect my friends at school. Power to protect myself."
"Evan!" A woman's voice, not far off. The face and the voice were familiar. Standing in front of him was Betsy Braddock. She had been one of the first people Evan had seen, since stepping out of his virtual beginnings and into the real world. "Thank god! It's all coming down! We have to get out of here before--"
The back of his hand connected with the side of her face hard enough to send her sprawling, shifting back to her proper shape. The blue woman with the blood red hair, staring up at him with desperate eyes.
"Evan, please... Wasn't my idea-- None of it. Too much risk, it was his idea--"
"You're a bad person," Evan said, looking down at Mystique calmly. "You did this. You set this up. Set up my Uncle Cluster."
The world was so clear. Everything was red, but the red was from him, crackling from his skin in ripples of power.
The blue-skinned man that appeared with a bamf in a cloud of sulfur smoke, called her 'mother,' and then took her away...
Evan couldn't do anything about that.
By time time Evan found Logan at last, the man was curled up on the ground, cradling Daken's body to his chest. Not far off, a puddle of bloody water.
Logan had drowned him.
"I-I'm sorry... I didn't protect you better," a father's apology to the son that he'd killed. "It... It's m-my fault..."
Logan fell silent as Evan stepped up to him, turning to look up at the boy with a face still half-shredded by Daken's claws.
Evan reached out to rest a hand on his shoulder.
"This was the only way it could have ended. You didn't have a choice."
"Sure he did." Creed's voice, an amused growl from the burning wreckage. "And he chose to kill his own son, Evan. You remember that." His hands met again and again in a slow, condescending clap. "I know Logan will. All the cuts I've given you over the years-- here's the deepest. Hell, this right here, this is why I set it all in motion. Had to put in some hours with you boy. Desperate for some fatherly adoration, kid was a snap to manipulate. Now, you might live a long life, Runt, but you ain't never gonna sleep a full night without this gurglin' up. You ain't never gonna forget. Not this. I wish you many years relivin' your son's face while you drowned him--"
Evan had heard enough.
Evan had heard more than enough. And there wasn't anything more satisfying than the way it felt to punch Creed in the face.
"You monster!"
And punch him again.
"You deserve to DIE!"
And again.
And again.
And again.
"Go on..." Creed was choking on his own blood from the flat of his back, and still talking. "Do it, kid... Let 'em watch."
It was Logan's hand on Evan's shoulder that made him stop. Made him turn his face away from Creed for just a moment, to look up at the only father figure he had left in the world and stare at him with glowing red eyes full of confusion and hurt and barely contained anger.
"Look around you, son. This is revenge. This is what it gets."
Bodies everywhere. Pain. Too much pain for words, there in the ruins of Genosha.
Creed was running away, laughing, as Logan slumped forward, leaning heavily in Evan's arms.
"It's all a mess," he murmured. "Ain't a thing... ain't a damned thing solved... You see that, Evan? For the love of God... Tell me you can see that?"
Rescue had come. The last standing members of X-Force were waiting for him in the doorway of the ship they had arrived in. Wade stood back quietly as Evan carried Logan on board. Betsy placed a hand on his cheek and looked at him with a sort of soft, damaged pride in her eyes.
She was feeling his loss. She had loved his Uncle Cluster, too. He had died for her, after all.
Evan laid Logan down on one of the medical beds, between his Uncle's body and some near-hollow shell, inside of which the Shadow King's mind was locked, screaming forever into an empty void. Betsy had seen to that.
And, as the ship took off, the world burned behind them.
It had been a few days since Evan had been returned to the Jean Grey School. Spring break was still in full swing for the Fandomites, and, in spite of Quire's constant bullying, Evan didn't want to go back to the island, yet. He didn't want to be alone.
People were quiet when he walked by them in the hallways. They always had been before, but he had a look in his eyes now that said that now wasn't the time to corner him. Now wasn't the time to press him for details about what had gone on after Sabretooth and the Blob had stolen him away.
He'd handed the Apocalypse armor over to Betsy. She had told him that she knew of a place where it could be kept safe. A place where he wouldn't have to see it again. Evan had agreed. There were too many painful memories associated with that armor. Too many nightmares, sitting right across a room smeared with blood and decorated with the shadows of loved ones that had never been what he had always believed they were.
Tonight, he was reading in his room, content to keep away from people for a while longer. Not wanting to be alone didn't mean he didn't need his space, after all.
"What're ya readin'?"
"Gha--!"
Of course, it wasn't like being on an upper floor was going to keep everyone out. Especially when Evan left the window open.
"You think sneaking up on an Apocalypse is a good idea, Wade?"
Wade ignored him for a moment in favor of grabbing the book from his hands and idly flipping through it.
"'Mindful Meditation.' Logan give you this?"
"He says it helped him," Evan explained, sitting up awkwardly as Wade took a seat on the edge of his bed.
"Hmm. Hey, do me a favor?"
"Sure."
"Never refer to yourself as 'An Apocalypse.'" Wade pointed at Evan to punctuate his words as he spoke. "For one, even if you were, it's third person, and sounds super-arrogant. No one likes that. And most important-- You're not him. After all we went through together, I know."
"Wade, I am Apocalypse," Evan protested softly. "I have that same capacity for evil inside me. I almost killed Mystique... If Nightcrawler hadn't shown up--"
"We all have the capacity to be crappy people with bad tempers, Evan. Difference is you didn't quit fighting. You never stopped trying to be the man your Uncle Cluster taught you to be."
There was that pang again, clutching at Evan's heart. Eyes that had been red for days looked up at Wade now, very nearly verging on their usual shade of ice blue again.
"Even though it was all a lie. My entire life..."
"None of us remember our childhood. Not much anyway." Wade's hands rested on Evan's shoulders, and they were a thousand times more comforting than Daken's had ever been, cold and condescending and desperate to prove that Logan's favorite pet clone wasn't as great as Logan had hoped. Wade's hands were warm. "What we learn is built into our fiber. Virtual reality or reality reality-- Fantomex raised you right."
Evan almost choked, a sob building in his chest that he didn't dare let go of. If he started crying now, he'd probably never stop.
"I'll never have a son," Wade continued, "but if I did, and he came out half as awesome as you... What I'm trying to say..." Words. Heartfelt words. Not easy things to come by, even when they mattered most. "I'll always be there when you need me."
Evan wasn't sure who started the hug, whether Wade had wrapped his arms around him, or Evan himself had leaned forward into it, but there it was, much-needed, and Evan was murmuring into Wade's shoulder, his eyes tight shut.
"You already were, Wade. At my lowest point you were the hero who showed up to save me."
Wade pulled back at that. It was impressive, just how much confusion and surprise could show through that mask of his.
"...That... That's the first time anyone's ever called me that..." He stood, stepping away from the bed and edging toward the window. "I- I should get going before I spoil the mood with a fart joke."
Evan watched him ease out the window for a moment, and then finally spoke up again.
"Hey, Wade-- You still have my book."
"Yeah, I know. But meditation is for hippies. Or psychopaths trying to be hippies. It ain't for you." He slipped out the window and jumped down to the ground. "I left you something you'll get more use out of."
And then he was gone, leaving Evan standing in the window, wondering just what, exactly, he was going to do with a stack of Playguy magazines.
… Probably not meditation.
[And that's all she wrote. NFB and NFI and OOC is awesome. Adapted from the pages of Uncanny X-Force issues 34 and 35, and rife with death and violence, but somehow weirdly less depressing as an endgame than all the other posts before it. I'm so glad to have this done.]
He had no idea where to begin, but his first stop seemed to pick itself out for him.
You can only see so much ugliness before you have to FACE it.
It wasn't Headmaster Logan that Evan found first. It was the man without skin, the one that had thrown Uncle Cluster's body at Evan. He'd been making his way down the hall when he realized what he was about to run into, and had turned on his heel to take off in the opposite direction without hesitation.
"Evan, come now-- Be a sport! It was all in good fun!"
Evan followed. A flash of power crackled off of him, and the hallway around them exploded. The Skinlessman went flying, barely ducking out of the hallway into a nearby room to avoid the blast. When Evan rounded the corner, he could make out the shape of his uncle's body, tacked to the wall like a grotesque marionnette.
You CAN'T let them roll over you. That's what Wolverine could see. Why he KILLED these types of people.
"Wait!" The Skinlessman made a reach for a glass jar across the room. A glass jar containing a human heart. "There is still a bit of bartering to be done!"
You must see a thing for what it is. And when you see evil--
Evan's hands started to glow, a fierce red to match his eyes. To match his blood smeared across the floors, to match the nightmares that they'd trapped him inside.
--You END it before it SPREADS.
"You have nothing I want."
The Skinlessman held up the jar.
"This you want. You do." He gestured to the body on the wall. The shell that they made of him, his chest gaping open, that face that Evan barely knew tilted down toward the floor. Dead. "It's his bloody heart. You can fix him. Let me go and you can have Uncle Cluster back."
Right there. His heart was right there...
"See there? The boy's interested. Wise enough to see a fair proposition. Chance to set it all right. All you have to do is reach out..."
Evan's fingers brushed against the glass of the container.
"And feel it slip between your fingers."
And the container shattered in the Skinlessman's grasp, shards of glass slicing the heart to ribbons.
"Blimey-- Now that was offhanded of me. But that was it, the last joke, I promise--"
He turned, making to run away while Evan was left standing, reeling over the loss of that one last chance.
He didn't make it far.
"Bummer." Wade. Stepping in front of the Skinlessman and plunging his sword deep in the monster's throat. "Your last joke, and I just murdered the punch line. That's for Fantomex. Probably goes without saying."
Evan wasn't paying attention. Evan was on his knees on the floor in front of his Uncle's body. His mind was his own. His powers were his own. And none of that seemed to matter. His hands were red with blood. Cluster's blood. Probably not his own. The glass wouldn't have been able to cut him now, anyway.
"How?!" The question tore from his throat the second he sensed Wade stepping up beside him. "How can people be this horrible?"
"Whoa," Wade chided, trying to be soothing. "Just take it easy. Calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean-- Say it with me--"
There was no calm blue ocean to be had.
"HOW CAN PEOPLE BE THIS DECAYED!?"
The surge of power that followed, ripping free from Evan's body like a tidal wave, left the building they were standing in crumbling around them.
They had split up, Wade and Evan. They needed to find Logan. They needed to take out the rest of the Brotherhood. They needed to find a way out of here and they needed to go. Which meant that Evan was walking the hallways alone, the floorboards burning under his feet.
"I have the power. Power to protect my friends at school. Power to protect myself."
"Evan!" A woman's voice, not far off. The face and the voice were familiar. Standing in front of him was Betsy Braddock. She had been one of the first people Evan had seen, since stepping out of his virtual beginnings and into the real world. "Thank god! It's all coming down! We have to get out of here before--"
The back of his hand connected with the side of her face hard enough to send her sprawling, shifting back to her proper shape. The blue woman with the blood red hair, staring up at him with desperate eyes.
"Evan, please... Wasn't my idea-- None of it. Too much risk, it was his idea--"
"You're a bad person," Evan said, looking down at Mystique calmly. "You did this. You set this up. Set up my Uncle Cluster."
The world was so clear. Everything was red, but the red was from him, crackling from his skin in ripples of power.
The blue-skinned man that appeared with a bamf in a cloud of sulfur smoke, called her 'mother,' and then took her away...
Evan couldn't do anything about that.
By time time Evan found Logan at last, the man was curled up on the ground, cradling Daken's body to his chest. Not far off, a puddle of bloody water.
Logan had drowned him.
"I-I'm sorry... I didn't protect you better," a father's apology to the son that he'd killed. "It... It's m-my fault..."
Logan fell silent as Evan stepped up to him, turning to look up at the boy with a face still half-shredded by Daken's claws.
Evan reached out to rest a hand on his shoulder.
"This was the only way it could have ended. You didn't have a choice."
"Sure he did." Creed's voice, an amused growl from the burning wreckage. "And he chose to kill his own son, Evan. You remember that." His hands met again and again in a slow, condescending clap. "I know Logan will. All the cuts I've given you over the years-- here's the deepest. Hell, this right here, this is why I set it all in motion. Had to put in some hours with you boy. Desperate for some fatherly adoration, kid was a snap to manipulate. Now, you might live a long life, Runt, but you ain't never gonna sleep a full night without this gurglin' up. You ain't never gonna forget. Not this. I wish you many years relivin' your son's face while you drowned him--"
Evan had heard enough.
Evan had heard more than enough. And there wasn't anything more satisfying than the way it felt to punch Creed in the face.
"You monster!"
And punch him again.
"You deserve to DIE!"
And again.
And again.
And again.
"Go on..." Creed was choking on his own blood from the flat of his back, and still talking. "Do it, kid... Let 'em watch."
It was Logan's hand on Evan's shoulder that made him stop. Made him turn his face away from Creed for just a moment, to look up at the only father figure he had left in the world and stare at him with glowing red eyes full of confusion and hurt and barely contained anger.
"Look around you, son. This is revenge. This is what it gets."
Bodies everywhere. Pain. Too much pain for words, there in the ruins of Genosha.
Creed was running away, laughing, as Logan slumped forward, leaning heavily in Evan's arms.
"It's all a mess," he murmured. "Ain't a thing... ain't a damned thing solved... You see that, Evan? For the love of God... Tell me you can see that?"
Rescue had come. The last standing members of X-Force were waiting for him in the doorway of the ship they had arrived in. Wade stood back quietly as Evan carried Logan on board. Betsy placed a hand on his cheek and looked at him with a sort of soft, damaged pride in her eyes.
She was feeling his loss. She had loved his Uncle Cluster, too. He had died for her, after all.
Evan laid Logan down on one of the medical beds, between his Uncle's body and some near-hollow shell, inside of which the Shadow King's mind was locked, screaming forever into an empty void. Betsy had seen to that.
And, as the ship took off, the world burned behind them.
It had been a few days since Evan had been returned to the Jean Grey School. Spring break was still in full swing for the Fandomites, and, in spite of Quire's constant bullying, Evan didn't want to go back to the island, yet. He didn't want to be alone.
People were quiet when he walked by them in the hallways. They always had been before, but he had a look in his eyes now that said that now wasn't the time to corner him. Now wasn't the time to press him for details about what had gone on after Sabretooth and the Blob had stolen him away.
He'd handed the Apocalypse armor over to Betsy. She had told him that she knew of a place where it could be kept safe. A place where he wouldn't have to see it again. Evan had agreed. There were too many painful memories associated with that armor. Too many nightmares, sitting right across a room smeared with blood and decorated with the shadows of loved ones that had never been what he had always believed they were.
Tonight, he was reading in his room, content to keep away from people for a while longer. Not wanting to be alone didn't mean he didn't need his space, after all.
"What're ya readin'?"
"Gha--!"
Of course, it wasn't like being on an upper floor was going to keep everyone out. Especially when Evan left the window open.
"You think sneaking up on an Apocalypse is a good idea, Wade?"
Wade ignored him for a moment in favor of grabbing the book from his hands and idly flipping through it.
"'Mindful Meditation.' Logan give you this?"
"He says it helped him," Evan explained, sitting up awkwardly as Wade took a seat on the edge of his bed.
"Hmm. Hey, do me a favor?"
"Sure."
"Never refer to yourself as 'An Apocalypse.'" Wade pointed at Evan to punctuate his words as he spoke. "For one, even if you were, it's third person, and sounds super-arrogant. No one likes that. And most important-- You're not him. After all we went through together, I know."
"Wade, I am Apocalypse," Evan protested softly. "I have that same capacity for evil inside me. I almost killed Mystique... If Nightcrawler hadn't shown up--"
"We all have the capacity to be crappy people with bad tempers, Evan. Difference is you didn't quit fighting. You never stopped trying to be the man your Uncle Cluster taught you to be."
There was that pang again, clutching at Evan's heart. Eyes that had been red for days looked up at Wade now, very nearly verging on their usual shade of ice blue again.
"Even though it was all a lie. My entire life..."
"None of us remember our childhood. Not much anyway." Wade's hands rested on Evan's shoulders, and they were a thousand times more comforting than Daken's had ever been, cold and condescending and desperate to prove that Logan's favorite pet clone wasn't as great as Logan had hoped. Wade's hands were warm. "What we learn is built into our fiber. Virtual reality or reality reality-- Fantomex raised you right."
Evan almost choked, a sob building in his chest that he didn't dare let go of. If he started crying now, he'd probably never stop.
"I'll never have a son," Wade continued, "but if I did, and he came out half as awesome as you... What I'm trying to say..." Words. Heartfelt words. Not easy things to come by, even when they mattered most. "I'll always be there when you need me."
Evan wasn't sure who started the hug, whether Wade had wrapped his arms around him, or Evan himself had leaned forward into it, but there it was, much-needed, and Evan was murmuring into Wade's shoulder, his eyes tight shut.
"You already were, Wade. At my lowest point you were the hero who showed up to save me."
Wade pulled back at that. It was impressive, just how much confusion and surprise could show through that mask of his.
"...That... That's the first time anyone's ever called me that..." He stood, stepping away from the bed and edging toward the window. "I- I should get going before I spoil the mood with a fart joke."
Evan watched him ease out the window for a moment, and then finally spoke up again.
"Hey, Wade-- You still have my book."
"Yeah, I know. But meditation is for hippies. Or psychopaths trying to be hippies. It ain't for you." He slipped out the window and jumped down to the ground. "I left you something you'll get more use out of."
And then he was gone, leaving Evan standing in the window, wondering just what, exactly, he was going to do with a stack of Playguy magazines.
… Probably not meditation.
[And that's all she wrote. NFB and NFI and OOC is awesome. Adapted from the pages of Uncanny X-Force issues 34 and 35, and rife with death and violence, but somehow weirdly less depressing as an endgame than all the other posts before it. I'm so glad to have this done.]