A/N: This one's short because I wanted to get it typed out and go to bed. I'll be bouncing back and forth between this and my Ult. X-men fanfic (see profile) for a while.
Disclaimer: I own only the OCs for this story. Nothing else.
X
He was a homeless man, wandering the streets. He'd forgotten his name years ago. Now he was simply Parasite. A mutant.
Parasite was something out of the ordinary, even for mutants. He didn't have any physical signs of the X-gene – no fangs, no fur, no extraordinary size. Nor were flashy powers present. His mutation reorganized his brain into a set of fibrous tendrils. These were capable of budding off, sprouting cilia, and migrating to other humans. They would settle down and meld with the host's brain, forming thousands of new nerve endings that merged with the host's original ones. Connected to the nerves, the tendrils could experience everything the host did. New tendrils would form, grow slightly out of the skull, looking like gray hairs, and begin relaying information back to Parasite.
The host took no harm, and Parasite got to share experiences from all walks of life. Businessmen, tattooists, mobsters, construction workers, teachers, whores, scientists, doctors, etc… Occasionally, he would send feedback to his colony tendrils, nudging a potentially endangered host to act in its own self-interest.
A twenty-something woman pushed her abusive boyfriend off a ninth-floor balcony. A rookie cop saw an armed drug dealer twitch, and shot him. An accountant discovered evidence of insider trading that would have collapsed the company he worked for, and promptly turned the data over to the Feds.
Parasite walked the streets of Bayville for years, constantly twitching as the experiences flooded in. The Cerebro system didn't pick him up. No one noticed him, no one paid attention.
Until Duncan Matthews and a couple other jocks, blind-drunk and full of testosterone, went looking for someone to beat on.
They went too far, and beat Parasite to death in the park, with rocks and branches and bare hands. He didn't fight back. He was too old and too weak.
That should have been the end of it, with Parasite lying sprawled in his own blood and broken bones as the jocks realized what they'd done and ran like hell.
But it wasn't the end. Some primitive lifeforms are able to survive without outside nutrients for months or years. Parasite's mutation turned out to have a similar aspect. As his body died, the tendrils that made up his brain slid out of his skull and burrowed into the dirt in a survival reflex. They coiled up in a ball a foot below the surface, still self-aware, waiting for some unlucky person to leave bare skin exposed to the ground long enough. Long enough for them to tunnel upward, painlessly burrow into a new host, and take him or her over.
Parasite had been motivated. He was no longer content to sit back from the world. Now he wanted a new body. A new body to beat the jocks to death, like they'd done to him.
His opportunity turned up months later, when the X-men had a summer picnic in the park.
