Tainted By the Cure
By: Eraina
Rated: T
Genre: Angst/Drama
Disclaimer: If you think I own the X-Men, you must think you're a mutant, too. In addition, this story has spoilers for X3. You have been warned.
Author's Note: This story assumes that the cure is permanent, which, though an unlikely choice for the director to make in the event of a fourth X-Men movie, is entirely scientifically possible. If you would like an explanation, based on real science, of how the cure could be permanent, leave a note and an e-mail address in a review. P.S.—If there are enough reviews, I may transform this story from a one-shot to a real story, so review! And finally—remember that I am a great fan of Magneto. I hope this story has portrayed the feelings of his last moments at Alcatraz as I wished it to.
Alcatraz was embroiled in pandemonium.
The mutants of Magneto's newly expanded Brotherhood both fled and cried in terror. The Alcatraz facility shook on its base, shuddering and moaning as it bore witness to the carnage that lay before its gates. A flat plain of packed dirt, riddled with fallen light poles and guard towers, and thickly layered with thin vials of the very serum generated in the facility itself—the mutant "cure" that had been the cause of such controversy and carnage—marked the field of battle between human and mutant, the facility itself acting as the base of the humans' operations, the mutant side's the Golden Gate Bridge, ripped off its base as easily as a child might tear a piece of paper, its jagged edges forming the side of a small hill, atop which three figures stood. The three figures, bodies illuminated in the soft white headlights of the cars behind them, stared imperiously down at the chaos below them.
Flanked by Pyro and the Phoenix, Magneto regarded the field before him with pleasure. The war was going well. Since the battle had begun, the ground before him had been transformed from an expanse of quiet earth to a small piece of Hell made real. The flaming, twisted wreckage of cars lay scattered over the ground, creating artificial cover, and the scent of burning oil reached his nostrils. He breathed deeply, allowing it to fill his lungs with the thick heat. Yes; despite this minor setback, the low stench still assured him that the main objectives of the Brotherhood were to be fulfilled—they would destroy the facility, retrieve the child, and end his life, in due course, this night. If only the pious X-Men had not arrived to slow the process. He could have done without the losses which their coordinated slaughter had wreaked upon his small army; although their presence had been an obstacle which he had indeed expected, he would have preferred faster progress, without the wasteful expenditure of mutant resources. Nevertheless, the Brotherhood would prevail.
Magneto glanced confidently over at the Phoenix, who stood calmly above the chaos, her dark eyes coolly observing the burning battlefield. Whatever resistance the X-Men might muster in the final clash, Magneto was more than certain that his newest, most volatile acquisition would be able to dispatch them in short order. Admiringly, though without desire or lust, his eyes traced the curves of her young smooth frame, enshrouded in a dress of deep blood-red. She was a flower in the palm of his gently cupped hand, beautifully capricious, yet a flower with a grimly fierce mouth and rows of sharp teeth. He would keep hold of her base until the time was right to release her.
Magneto turned his eyes from his queen to gaze down at the tableau. The pawns were all but destroyed, and the board was pitted and pockmarked, covered with deep dents and burning wreckage, but beyond the fiery veil that separated the Brotherhood from the facility, the rooks, knights, and bishops of the opposition were still moving. He could see their queen, a feeble answer to his own, her eyes aflame with a cold white luminescence, pressed to the side of a burning car beside a cluster of her subjects, whose bodies moved wraithlike in the flickering light. They were hunched with fatigue, their hands gripping the smooth sides of the metal barriers which littered the chessboard, their faces strained with exhaustion. They were all nearly spent. It would not be too much longer before one of them made a fatal mistake; he need not trouble himself with their elimination.
Magneto turned his mind to the inner metal structure of the building itself, and felt the familiar slip as the heavy steel beams and metal wiring within moved, molding itself to the shape of his mind. The comfortable stream of certainty within his mind strengthened. He need wait no longer; the building was his to squeeze open like a ripe peach. The members of the Brotherhood who were still inside need not be spared; Magneto was prepared to make sacrifices in this game. Without moving from his self-created throne, the king would kill the castle and kill the cure.
He smiled as he prepared to bring it down.
Motioning to Pyro, he felt the power gather at the back of his mind, a comforting, familiar presence. Simultaneously, he concentrated on the structural weaknesses of the building, places where the metal was thin, or weakened, or worn. A car sent careening into these places, charged with a tank full of gasoline transformed into a blazing fireball, courtesy of Pyro, would send the flimsy metal buckling and cause the stone around it to crumble into powdery, blackened ash. Then the Phoenix would rise.
Chuckling slightly at the metaphor, Magneto lifted his hands, and with them, the entire body of one of the cars situated directly behind him. He had always enjoyed coupling his manipulative mental endeavors with similar gestures, not only to give his mind something more concrete to follow, but also, and most pleasurably, to inspire fear. The seat of his power was not in his hands, but when he raised them now, or drew them apart, the humans before him inevitably shrank and cringed. It had become a kind of habit, and though Magneto was not ordinarily a man to allow himself to be ruled by any habit, this particular habit was one which he thoroughly enjoyed.
With little effort, he drew the car directly over his head. Pyro was ready. Seconds after the car was propelled airborne it was engulfed in a stream of fire which ignited the engine and gas tank, transforming into a flaming metallic meteor that arced towards Worthington Labs.
Suddenly, it stopped—engulfed not in fire, but in a powdery blue haze that crackled in a different way, froze the car in midair, and spoke of cold.
The twisted hunk of metal crashed to the ground. Magneto's concentration briefly slipped, and he drew himself up from the visions and touches of sleek metal to see the bishop. The boy who called himself Iceman was moving, rapidly and rashly, across the game board, and his eyes were fixed on the trio who stood imperiously at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Magneto's smile widened. It was time to bring his bishop into play.
Turning to Pyro, he muttered a supportive, affirmative, "Go on." The Class 4 manipulator of fire did not need the encouragement of his master. Magneto sensed his vengeful excitement as clearly as the metal that lay scattered on the field before him. Pyro leapt down throught eh wreckage of the bridge, disappearing to the fog that rose suddenly out of the San Francisco Bay. The sudden arrival of the fog could mean only one thing.
Magneto chuckled again. Storm's coming.
He turned his attention from the pair and the flickering orange flashes which were coming to him now through the mist, redirecting his focus to the ground before him. If these traitorous mutants were still alive, there had to be more. With a slow sense of anticipation, he searched the course of twisted metal below for a familiar scent: the cold tang of the adamantium skeleton of the one who called himself Wolverine.
The sharp scent was easy to locate; it was unique to any other metal that now lay before him. He sniffed the air. Unless he was much mistaken—and he never was mistaken—Wolverine was on the move. And with a partner. Metal as well.
Interesting…Colossus.
Though he could see virtually nothing through the thick fog, he might as well have been inside both of their minds. He could sense Colossus, a pillar of human-shaped metal, standing upright with his feet firmly planted in the ground, gripping a thinner, lither frame of metal, human-shaped as well. With three claws on each hand.
Thinking himself hidden by the fog, Colossus gripped Wolverine's body, turned twice to gain momentum, and threw him like a discus—directly at Magneto.
The leader of the Brotherhood could not at first discern the shape coming through the fog, claws extended, but he felt enough. His hands were raised and slowing the mutant before he had even appeared out of the fog. Wolverine skidded painfully on the ground in front of him, landing with his chest down, flecks of dirt and gravel stinging his eyes, teeth bared in a snarl. His claws fell inches from Magneto's leather boots.
Magneto carelessly flipped the mutant onto his back, and smiled at him indulgently as a parent would a child.
"You never learn, do you?"
For a moment the self-healing mutant looked at him with eyes burning hatred: The hatred that a slave has for his master, for anyone capable of confining and subduing his vital independence. Then, with a slowness that made Magneto wonder briefly whether the change was actually taking place, the mask of hatred morphed impossibly into one of deliberate triumph.
"Actually, I do."
Then a shadow came out of the night.
He had just time enough to see it looming behind him at the corner of his eye, a broad, dark black spot against the cinder-brightened haze of the night made foggy by Storm. In the few milliseconds before his mind had time to comprehend what it might be, it filled his vision like a vast black hole, drowning him, sucking him in. His throat seized reflexively, yet his limbs and body were too slow to make the necessary adjustments with the few fractions of a second he had; he could not react to it. He felt the jolt of the huge dark creature roughly clutching his shoulder, the flash of anger, bright as a stroke of lightning, illuminating for a brief instant the craggy blue visage of his attacker, and then, suddenly and too cruelly, the bite of four tiny needles into the flesh above his lung.
At first there was nothing—a silence that roared through his brain, a moment of incomprehension, seeming to stretch thinly across the vast spaces of eternity to touch the limits of his past and future. Pain shot through his system, not a sharp pain now, but the slow, aching pain of an old wound as his body adjusted, and he looked dumbly down at the needles, attached to thin, smooth green vials, that protruded from his chest. The being behind him, almost not a being, but a beast, slowly released its grip, and cast a coldly translucent plastic case to the ground.
Time slowed to a sluggish trickle, and he felt the poison of the cure working its way through his blood. The power he felt in his arms abruptly, violently, darkened, and went out, like a lightbulb fiercely short-circuiting in a last burst of heat, only to dull to cold, dead glass. A tightness seized his chest as the icy cure seeped slowly through him, his own heart beating the poison treacherously through his fingertips, through his legs, through his brain.
Slowly, the familiar warmth of the metal began to die in his mind.
Its visceral iron scent left his quivering nostrils, replaced with the chill dead smoke of the burning engines and flesh. The presence of the Wolverine's adamantium skeleton, so powerfully obvious to his mind, a flash as easily read as the light of the orange flames before him, died like a doused fire. Desperately, he clutched at its fading tendrils, but they curled up as smoke flickering in the air, and dissipated, melting into the uniform blankness of his transformed mind. He stared horrifiedly at the feral mutant with the shock of a person seeing someone for the first time, unaware that his legs were buckling as his self-control let go. A single thought branded his mind like a searing knife of fire.
No!
It could not be. It could not be!
"I'm—" The word was half a refusal, and half a sob, laced with fear, and panic, and pain. He could not force the remainder of the sentence, that single word, that terrible word, out of his mouth. He looked into Wolverine's thick brown eyes, and there was grim satisfaction there that made him afraid. The feral mutant finished for him.
"One of them. Yeah."
A dry sob welled in the throat of the being who had once called himself Magneto, and he slid at last loosely to the ground, his nerves twitching in his hands, not mattering any more, all gone. Tears flickered, tiny pricks of pain, at the edges of his eyes, but nothing, nothing, compared to the great swell of pain that rose up in his heart—his traitorous, cruel heart—now. The cure ran through him, dull and cold. Dimly, he felt the hard dirt beneath his head, and the soft fabric of the cape that flowed so elegantly, so foolishly, around him. His bleared eyes looked up through the flickering firelight and fog and discerned, vaguely, the faint outline of his queen.
She was looking at him, staring as one stares at a beaten and whimpering dog, with the same strange mixture of curiosity and disgust with which he had looked before at the naked body of the woman who had once been Mystique. There was no sympathy in her eyes. A moment ago he would not have cared for sympathy, would have scorned it with all the forces of his soul, but now her pitiless eyes caught him and pained him, like thin burrs clutching his skin. He looked at her, and saw hatred.
With his last pleading breath, he called to her, his queen, his hope, his savior.
"This…is what they want for all of us."
And then the horror of who he was, or was no longer, cast a black shadow over him, and he fell weakly against the hard ground and cast the cruel needles aside, uselessly, shaking, and lay prone on the dirt, a feeble, helpless old man.
One of them……………….human. The word beat mockingly at his mind, reminding him of the enemy whose weapons had made him irrevocably theirs, taken away who he was. Self-loathing rose like bile in his throat.
Human!
Homo sapiens!
The frantic panic gave way to incapacitating despair, and at last he could control no longer. Numbed by pain, he let the tears trickle down his aged face.
What have I done…