Snuggles The Symbiote
"Now, if we get stopped by da police, or worse, CRADLE," The Thing said while we were driving, "I was taking Jo and Nikki out on an evening drive and we offered you kids a ride home when we ran into ya. I only got in me to clobber one kinda wannabe fascists tonight. 'Sides, we're still workin' out how to go about that... M'just glad that the whole community more or less is on the same page this time."
Under any other circumstances, I'd be hanging off of the Thing's every word, but right now all I could do was try not to think too hard about what HYDRA was doing to my Mommy.
...And trying to discreetly memorize Nikki's scent. I knew it was weird that they had a cat.
The Fantasicar had an onboard computer with access to a self-updating database that Dr. Richards had made. Once I'd told The Thing what had happened he'd told it to cross-reference known and suspected members of HYDRA in and around New York City against a list of buildings purchased in the last year that could be used as a lab for a guy making Super Soldier Serums.
It was a very specific search, but the Thing got hits and now we were checking them out one by one to see if I could pick up Mommy's scent or the scent of the people who took her.
On the way to the closest hit, Nikki was chastising Jo for not paying attention in their earth history lessons (apprently the homeschooling program The Grimms were using was more in-depth than mine was, which says a lot) and explaining to him what Nazis were.
"...And for as much as it pains me to go against millennia of Skrull-imperialistic tradition," the young Skrull finished, "it's far to the Earthling's advantage that the Axis powers were defeated. Earthling history shows that imperialism and cultural unification just doesn't work for them and requires unacceptable amounts of bloodshed compared to the total number of earthlings to even hope of achieving."
...This was really my first time meeting the alien kids, I'd only seen them briefly before immediately being teleported to Shadow Base for my session with Doc Samson. It was obvious that being raised as soldiers for two separate intergalactic empires while being forced to live as gladiatorial slaves by a neutral third party had left them warped.
Nikki at least spoke like a normal earth kid. Jo, on the other hand...
"Hah! If you and I had been present for the second of Earth's great world wars, the conflict would have ended within a standard galactic week! The rivers of this Europe would have run red with the blood of the greatest soldiers of this axis." The Kree-boy's silence was like a beat panel in a comic book. "Humans bleed red, right?"
Jo was a little boisterous.
"Yes they do, and of course it would, you little blue freak," Nikki scoffed. "We are the Skrull Reqium of Shapeless Souls and the Kree Chronicle of Blood. Bred to be perfect soldiers with the memories and experiences of the survivors of every battle of the Kree-Skrull War up to the moments of our births bound to our very genes. Between us we have many millions of years of combined military experience, no Earthling soldier can compare."
I moved to the other side of the fantasticar and tried to ignore the urge to steal Jo and Nikki's blood so Mister Snuggles could archive those experienced memory-having genes.
"Do you often repeat facts that you're both more than aware of when talking to each other?" Lisa deadpanned.
"Our status as living archives of an entire era of intergalactic military history is something that should be taken pride in!" Jo countered in a way that was aggressively defensive.
I tuned the kids and Lisa out, scratched the itch on my arm, and my thoughts wandered. They wandered to Mommy. To finding her before HYDRA tears her reanimated body apart cell by cell to see what their formula did to her. To, to say goodbye before we have to...
"Mister Grimm, can I ask you a question?"
"Shoot, kid."
"You, you died once. Then you came back. Do you... Remember what it's like on the other side?"
The Thing was quiet for a moment. "I saw my brother again. Danny, Danny died I was just a kid. But I saw him again." He paused for a moment. "Dying ain't exactly a box of chocolates, and I'm glad to be back, glad to do the things I did because I came back, but getting to spend time with my big brother again... Almost made it worth it."
Even though the Fantasicar could fly, he still stopped at the red light. "Met the Big Man Upstairs, too. When Stretcho and the others came to get me. Took the form of that guy who used to draw the comics about us, Jack something. Said I still had work to do." The light changed and we got going again. "I wasn't exactly a very religious person, growing up in poverty, getting involved with a gang just to survive, my brother dying, my parents dying... Everything I got in life I got from hard work or the kindness of people down here on Earth. But after that... Something changed. Started thinking about it all differently. Started going to Temple again. Even got a Bar Mitza when my Rabbi pointed out that the accident that gave me this lovely mug was like being born again and it'd been thirteen years since then."
He sort of side-eyed me. "You worried about yer ma?"
I didn't answer.
"Kid, trust me, whatever happens... I don't know if that was really Big G God or some other all-powerful being with a host of angels and a paradise for the souls of good people. I just know that He's Good, and he takes care of people." He smiled. "No matter what happens here, even if... Even if she's not in good shape and we gotta make a hard choice? She's gonna be okay. Maybe not here, but..."
"I died once," I said. "But I don't remember what... I just feel like I was given a choice and I made the wrong one."
"Ya come back on your own or did someone bring you back?" The Thing asked.
"I don't know, maybe a little of both?" I explained how my body had been full of synthetic terrigen, enough to give me some really bad M-Pox despite my normal chemical resistance, and how Mister Snuggles terrigenized because of the Inhuman DNA he'd been spliced with after bonding with me and ended up perma-fused to my body.
"But I don't know if that by itself would have brought me back," I finished.
"I'm gonna tell ya, if you came back it's because you made the right choice. You're alive again for a reason, and you'll know it when ya see it."
"Thank you."
"Any time, kid."
After that, I just sat back. Taylor pulled me into a hug but didn't say anything.
Eventually, we made it to a large warehouse. The Thing parked the Fantasticar and we all got out. I sniffed the air.
Mommy. The people who took her. Some of the other people who'd been at her grave in the past day, and something else, something vaguely familiar. Something vaguely familiar that...
"Ashley, are you okay?" Taylor asked me. "You're shaking."
"I'm fine, I'm just... This is the place. And I smell something else here. I've smelled it before but I don't remember when. Blood and salt, but not, not like when I smelled Shadow Stalker—"
"Wait, what?"
"More like... Like something chemical, with faint trances of blood and salt in it?" I continued as if I hadn't been interrupted. "I don't know, it's just..."
"Ya know, you don't have to do this?" The Thing questioned. "Don't have ta go in there and see something you maybe don't want to see."
"No. I need to do this. It's my mom."
"Okay, so here's what we're gonna—"
"Wait," Taylor interrupted, "before going in..."
She dropped some spiders from her sleeves and let them skitter across the ground to the building, going under doors and up the walls into vents.
"It's all one big room inside, but there's a catwalk above it and a roof entrance that they don't have guarded off," Taylor explained. "There are about seven very muscular men and women in white tank tops, black pants, combat boots, and matching chest tattoos, six men in what I'm assuming are standard HYDRA Uniforms, green and light green with big Hs, and a guy who s dressed up in some ridiculous period place cosplay with an impractical cape and a Face tattoo. There are about a dozen surgical slabs with six corpses with messily severed heads sewed back on... To what I assume to be the best of their ability. The six uniformed guys all have big, Tinker-Tech-looking guns."
I totally didn't make a squeaking sound.
"That... That is a useful power," The Thing complimented. "Can you tell if that bit of wall right there is loadbearing?" He said, pointing to the wall right in front of us.
"The building won't collapse if you choose to use that as a door," Taylor said, seeming to guess at what The Thing was talking about. "But before we start? Ashley, there's no sign of your mom but there's a big tube of frosted glass hooked up to some computers and a vaguely humanoid shape in it, so..."
"Okay, what's gonna happen is I want you kids up on the roof." Commander Benjamin Grimm had been in the army and the air force at different times in his life, then he joined NASA. He wasn't the leader of the Fantastic Four, but he had a lot of leadership experience and you could tell. "I'm gonna crash in through the wall and get their eyes on me. After a minute, I want you to come in through the rough entrance and try to get in and out with Ms. O'Leary... You related to the lady whose cow burned down Chicago?"
"Not in any meaningful way" I replied. "At most, her husband and I are both descended from the Irish King from fifteen hundred years ago. Though, uh... The story about the cow isn't true. A lot of harm came from those rumors, so, uh..."
"Sorry. Anyway, you kids try to get in and out. There shouldn't be too much trouble, but if something goes wrong get back to the Fantasticar, hit the big red button on the console that says 'emergency beacon,' and take the flare gun under the driver's seat and shoot it straight up. If the HYDRAs come out after yah, the green button next to the red one will turn on the autopilot and take ya right back to Number 4 Yancy Street, do that instead of the beacon and flare, the rest of the family will know what to do."
Nikki, being a Skrull, got to the roof by turning into an eagle and flying up. Jo, on the other hand, backed way up, ran at the building, and jumped, grabbing the ledge and pulling himself up.
Taylor and I spider climbed up, Taylor carrying Lisa piggy-back.
Once we were all up top and over by the door of the roof entrance, there was a loud crash and we could hear The Thing shouting "Good evening ya Nazi Scumbags! Guess what time it is!?"
I couldn't quite make out what the response was beyond a huge commotion, but shortly afterward The Thing shouted again. "Sorry, the answer I was looking for was 'Clobberin' Time!'"
Then we started hearing the pew-pew of energy weapons and the impact of flesh on rock or vice versa interrupted intermittently by panicked cursing and a man shouting obscenities in a fake German accent.
Maybe not a full minute later, Taylor forced the locked door open and we started trying to creep down its stairs down to the catwalk over the warehouse proper.
...My first thought, upon seeing the inside of the warehouse, the parts that weren't being overturned by a super-fight, the surgical equipment, the poorly stitched together corpses, and the... Transfusion bags full of a liquid that looked really familiar that was starting to get strewn about and... Honestly, it was a good thing we didn't ask Grace to come. This would either trigger her or make her relapse.
I wasn't sure this was gonna work. Right now, The Thing was doing a decent enough job fighting off the HYDRA super-soldiers, but those laser guns looked like they hurt pretty bad. He'd only gotten hit by one or two, when...
When the catwalk loudly squeaked underneath us.
We all froze, but some of the HYDRAs heard us, the fighting stopped for a moment, and they looked up at us.
In particular, the man with the face tattoo and the fake accent, who sighed and said "Okay, I can deal with the surprise attack by five-hundred-pounds of pissed-off Jew. I cannot deal with that and sneaky children skulking around. Erlking, could you deal with the young ones?"
He sat down at his computer, the one the frosted glass tube was hooked up to, typed something in it, and...
And big mechanical arms folded out from under the six occupied surgical tables, each with a freaking huge syringe full of something green which all got jabbed right through the sternums of the six stitched together dead guys and...
Okay, what did it say about me that this didn't scare me that much?
On the other hand, the giant blonde muscle man in the tank top who just made it from the ground to the catwalk right in front of us from a standing start was much more concerning.
"I'm so sorry, children," the man said in a much more convincing German accent than his boss, "but there shall be no immortality or apotheosis for you on this day."
I rolled my eyes and began to back up to head back to the car... But apparently, the Thing's Kids forgot the plan. Jo shouted "For Hala!" and tried to tackle the man, Erlking. Nikki furthermore shouted "For Skrullos!" before turning into a tiger and joining her brother in trying to wrestle the muscle-bound Nazi to the ground.
I blinked, shrugged, and said "To hell with it: For Earth!" and jumped up to try and kick the man's exposed face.
For the second time today, my Spider-Sense only went off after I wasn't able to do anything about it. You ever been smacked with a tiger? It's not nice.
I fell all the way to the hard cement floor of the warehouse and Nikki, still, a tiger landed right on top of me.
"...Soon may the Wellerman come..." I singsong mumbled while Mister Snuggles fixed my concussion. "Nikki? Nikki are you okay? Are you okay Nikki? Because you're heavy."
Nikki turned back into a Skrull and sort of crawled off me, and I pushed myself up just in time to hear a raspy voice declare. "Ail Aidrah!"
Another raspy "Hey Hyra!"
"Heil Heildwah!"
I looked up to see the six corpses sitting up off the surgical slabs.
"Hah hahrah!"
"Fail Fydra!"
"Fuck the police!" Apparently, the one zombie that didn't have a speech impediment got a wire crossed instead.
And then I noticed that my hand was periwinkle. I must have lost focus on staying normal-looking when I hit the ground.
The next two things I heard were "Fool! I am immortal. Your spiders, they do nothing!" From up on the catwalk, and "Hey, it's Apocalypse Girl" from someone down here.
God damn it, I should have kept my temper better. Now I'm a fricking meme.
"Ressurection corps two-point-oh," the cosplayer who could never get a real job because face-tattoo, "grab the mutant child and strap her to one of the tables."
The fact that zombies were now converging was enough to motivate me to recover from my landing pretty quickly. That and my Spidey-sense was going crazy.
I couldn't see Nikki or the Thing's fight or what was going on on the catwalk. I was kind of surrounded by reanimated corpses.
They grabbed for me, and with my powers sealed I couldn't stop one from grabbing my arm and another picking me up by the ribs.
I responded by kicking and punching and scratching and biting and cursing. Proper cursing, like Grandpa had taught me. "Mallacht Dé ort! Galar an bháis ort! Tuirse ort! Go dtachtar le d'anáil thú! Buineach dhearg go dtigidh ort! Mullach do chinn fút! Ualach sé chapall de chré na h-úire ort! Go n-ullamhuighe an diabhal teinne dhuit!"
That could maybe be more grammatically accurate but I was too ticked off to string the curses together properly.
Despite my best efforts, however, the six zombies were able to manhandle me and strap me to a metal table... One of the ones that had had a dead guy on it not two minutes ago. That was kind of annoying.
And tattoo-face, with a super-fight going on around him, just casually strolled up to me while holding what looked like a fishing tackle box. On the way, he grabbed a metal table on wheels and rolled it over with him.
"A feisty young child, aren't you?" He asked in a way that implied that he didn't want an answer.
"Níl tada níos measa na bód ina seasamh," I deadpanned back.
"I'm going to assume that's meant to be an insult," the man said cheerfully. He sat the box down on the table he'd pulled with him and started pulling out probes and pliers and shears and scalpels and... Needles. "Now, Apocalypse is immortal. Alive for five thousand years, able to withstand attacks that would atomize a normal man. No matter how hard he's put down he always comes back, like a rabid cockroach from Hell he is. If I cut you apart and study the pieces," He said with a laugh, "will I find that you are the same? What improvements can I make to the Lazarus Formula from studying your mutant physiology, child?"
I didn't answer, I was too busy starring at the huge frick-all-sized needle he was brandishing.
"No, that's alright, don't answer me," He said as he slowly moved the needle closer to me, almost like he was doing it on purpose. "It'll be more fun to find out for myself. And feel free to scream as loud as you want. I find it soothing."
With how the slab I was strapped to was inclined, I could see Taylor land on her feet after jumping from the catwalk. She tried to run for the man but was tackled by one of the zombies.
"And first, we take the blood sample..." The guy was going so slow, he had to be doing it on purpose.
I don't know why, but when I felt the needle touch my skin, I screamed the first thing that came to mind. "Mommy, help!"
The man laughed. "Mommy cannot help you right now, child. Now don't squirm I—"
The man was interrupted by the sound of shattering glass. specifically the big tube of frosted glass being shattered from the inside.
Mommy... Didn't look like a zombie.
As Mommy charged the man with a roar like a lion, the man jumped back and dropped the needle. Then he was grabbed by the back of the neck and pulled up.
"Get away from her, you bitch."
AN: For the record, Ashley's string of Irish curses is roughly "May God curse you, may you catch the disease of death. May you grow tired. May you choke on your breath. May you have red diarrhea. May you fall on your head. Six horseloads of graveyard clay for you. May the devil prepare a fire for you." Essentially, she's saying "Get sick, shit blood, die, and burn in hell."
Her response to tattoo face is "there's nothing worse than a standing prick" which is essentially an elaborate and particularly insulting way of calling him a dick.