Snuggles The Symbiote

Skullface was writhing on the ground moaning in agony, physically unable to stand.

"Oh come on," I wined. "You were talking all of that good stuff and then you just... Fall over as soon as the MGH started to work." I shrugged. "I guess that's what happens when you're stupid enough to deliberately overdose on super illegal drugs."

I walked up to him and picked up the bag he'd drunk from. These all smelled familiar and, kind of scary, and...

I gave the bag a sniff, then tore it open and licked some of the residue.

"Uh, kid, you sure that's a good idea?" The Thing asked from behind me.

I held up a finger while Mister Snuggles compared what I'd just taken in to...

"This is mine," I said. "This MGH was made from my mutation factor."

"I thought the transfusion bag looked familiar..." I heard Spider-Man mutter.

"Which means," I began to the idiot leader of this HYDRA cell, "that you should probably go to the hospital. My mutant power sucks. Kicked in too early, the biological safety measures you're supposed to have broke. Right now you physically don't have the energy to stand even though your legs work perfectly fine. You're gonna feel vaguely sick and achy all the time, no drugs or medicine are gonna work to make you feel better, oh, and you have basically no immune system."

I looked at the filthy floor and the corpses.

"So... Yeah, good luck with that. You're about to get all of the infections. But before you go to the hospital... Or die from your own stupidity..."

I walked up and stepped on his arm hard enough to hurt. "Would you mind telling me where the hell you got a crateload of my mutation factor from?"

"He called himself... Nosferatu..." Great, there's a drug-dealing vampire out there somewhere peddling my hormones.

And then Skull Face started seizing.

I sighed, rolled my eyes, and turned him on his side. "Anybody have a spare wallet? If he bites his tongue off he won't be able to testify in his own defense at the trial." I blinked. "If he lives long enough to make it to trial."

I was sort of cat-herded away while some of the adults started looking in on Skull-Face. Dr. Richards and Valeria started fiddling around with Skull Face's computer.

Jo and Nikki were still hiding behind the Thing... I think they were scared of me... Hadn't that Super Skrull clone said something about how Skrulls saw Symbiotes? Oh well, that was something to deal with later. I was just kind of in a corner with Taylor and Mommy.

"Ashley?" Mommy started to ask, "Why are you blue?"

"I'm not blue, I'm periwinkle. It's prettier."

"Then why are your periwinkle?"

"So you know how Grandpa Patrick used to say that his Grandpa Slade had a tattoo behind his ear that matched my birthmark and when he got drunk he'd ramble incoherently about Egyptians?" I asked. "Turns out he didn't mean Romani, he meant actual Egyptians."

Mommy blinked. "And your mutant gene came from... Oh."

"Yeah. Turns out I'm descended from Anticnnt Egyptian Mutant Hitler." I blinked. "Tried to teach me sorcery. I uh, wasn't in a good place and kind of agreed for a bit... Apparently, he's trying to be a better person but he's not doing such a good job and... Can't even use the magic he was teaching, gotta be part of a Coven and need five mutants with specific powers standing in an X shape just to do one spell. But, on the other hand," I finished with a shrug, "I'm technically a member of Excalibur now."

"Also, I think that Blink is my third cousin twice removed, which means she's nothing to me, but it's interesting to know."

Mommy ruffled my hair and gave me a hug. I'd missed this.

And then I saw that Taylor was quiet and kind of standing awkwardly. "Mommy, this is Taylor. She's my foster sister. She's been taking care of me and we're superheroes together. Also, she's from another universe. It's weird, until I got there there was only one kind of superhero."

In the next second, Mommy was hugging a rather surprised-looking Taylor. Surprised or suffocating, I'm not sure how to tell the difference.

"Can't... Breathe." Suffocating. Definitely suffocating.

Mommy let Taylor go. "Sorry about that. I guess I don't know my own strength right now." Mommy poked a muscle on her arm that I'm pretty sure wasn't there before she died. "How did I come back?"

"The Punisher got into a fight with HYDRA in a graveyard and spilled Nazi Zombie juice on your grave," I explained. "Then he got his ass kicked by... Those guys" I pointed to the heap of Nazi super soldiers. They werren't moving.

"Are they gonna be okay?" I asked.

"They can't die," Captain America shouted back. "They'll be up and about in a couple of hours."

"And done!" Dr. Richards shouted. "All data on what they're doing here has been remotely back up on my private wireless server and the hard drive has been wiped clean. We can now go over the evidence at our leisure while preventing these abominations of science from falling into the wrong hands."

Taylor looked at me.

"Our Federal Government once turned a guy into a Godzilla trying to make more Captain Americas," I explained. "Nobody really trusts the Government with anything even remotely usable to make Super Soldiers."

"I was referring to Fisk's mayoral administration, but yes," Dr. Richards clarified.

Snuggles The Symbiote

Once everything was taken care of, we kind of split up. Most of Captain America's group, except for Doctor Strange, stayed behind to handle things with the authorities while the Fantastic Four gave us all a ride back to Yancy Street.

After another reminder that what we did was really reckless and we shouldn't do that again, I was mostly waiting while Dr. Richards and Dr. Strange did some more tests on Mommy.

Whatever scans they did didn't take that long, but comparing the results to the information they'd taken was taking longer.

So that left me time to talk with Mommy, who, after the tests were done, was given a spare Unstable Molecule uniform to wear until she could get clothes that weren't a half-decayed funeral dress.

"So, uh, about the ninja stuff."

"Ashley, I... No."

"How about the aunt I didn't know I had?"

"...So, how about I tell you what college was like?" Mommy asked. "I have a Master's in astrobiology you know. Ironically it was an article proposing a theory on the nature of symbiotes that paid for that experimental treatment when you were eight." She smiled very wide. "You know, the injection of modified Horton Cells? The one that didn't work?"

If that treatment had worked, I would have essentially turned into a bio-mechanical cyborg as the Horton Cells combined with and enhanced my body's natural tissues. By itself, that wouldn't have cured my condition, but Horton Cells are known to be able to activate and focus latent mutant and inhuman powers in humans that they combine with, which wasn't what Phineas Horton was trying to do when he created fully functional, non-toxic replicas of human cells out of self-replicating plastics and carbon polymers, but he also wasn't trying to make a godlike Pyrokinetic when he decided to play Modern Prometheus. Essentially, the plan was to try and trigger a controlled secondary mutation to see if that made my condition more stable. Also, I might have gotten fire powers. I was gonna call myself Sparkler.

But, apparently, my body recognized synthetic human cells trying to merge with my body's native tissues as a drug instead of an infectious agent so my powers tore the cells apart enough that even my pathetic immune system could clear them all out. I peed synthetic blood for a week.

"I don't think that's irony, I think that's just coincidence," I said in response to the article comment. "And, uh... No, I..." I was kind of stumbling. I didn't want this to be a confrontation. "I'd have been happy to just ignore it but one of my friends pointed out that it's kind of important that I be prepared for this stuff just in case it comes up."

"I also minored in western philosophy," Mommy deflected. "You know, I think you're old enough to actually read Thus Spake Zarathustra instead of just the watered-down summary."

I just stared at her.

"Fine, it's all related anyway." Mommy got comfortable next to me and pulled me into a hug.

"Yuki and I are fraternal twins," she began, "and I was ten minutes older, and, as the big sister, I always felt it was my job to protect her. And..."

"Did Yuki tell you about why our mother, your grandmother, trained us as shinobi?"

"Because we're descended from a branch of the Hand that split off when the main group turned evil?" I answered. That was basically what she'd said.

"Yeah, that's the gist of it... When it started out, it wasn't that bad. Yuki and I were maybe eight, the age a lot of kids start learning karate. My mother presented it to us and inheriting an ancient legacy, even tod us we could be heroes and... What kid doesn't grow up hearing stories about The Human Torch and Toro, the Submariner, Captain America and Bucky, Spitfire, Union Jack, the Destroyers..."

"There were two whole chapters about them in my social studies book," I confirmed. "And a third about Captain America specifically. Had to look up The Rumor on my own though, she was only mentioned in one sentence."

The Rumor was a Japanese-made super-soldier who defected from Japan and came to the United States because she didn't agree with her home country's imperialistic policies. She was friends with Captain America and worked with him and Bucky to route out spies and sympathizers trying to sabotage American security or steal secrets for the Axis Powers... And then Pearl Harbor happened and The Rumor was interned. The rumor, pun not intended, was that Captain America tried to help her escape but she refused and went to the camp without a fight. There's no record of what happened to her after that. It was a sad story.

"Yeah, so at first it was interesting and exciting... And it wasn't too intense. Mostly it was stuff like knowing how to fall properly, getting the right amount of exercise, and simple katas. A little karate, a little judo, a little aikido, but not really enough to actually be doing anything with it..." Mommy sighed. "But then, as we got older, the pace picked up. By middle school, Yuki and I were dueling with actual, bladed, lethal weapons three times a week and I realized that my mother was trying to indoctrinate us... And there was something funky in the 'herbal health' smoothies that she said would help us learn better."

"Brainwashing drugs?" I asked.

"No, alchemical drugs. Supposed to improve long-term memory and the ability to condition the body. I hadn't practice any of that stuff in years by the time... Story for later," she corrected. "They did what she said they were supposed to do, but we were still being drugged without our knowledge. You understand that that's wrong, right? Whenever we tried a new treatment with you we made sure, as best we could, that you understood what it was and how it worked."

I nodded.

"I'm not going to sugarcoat it, my mother was abusive, she was hurting me, and hurting Yuki. When I realized it... I tried to make it stop, I had to protect my little sister. I tried to rebel, but..." I hugged Mommy, she seemed hurt. "Mother always made it seem like Father knew what was going on, and 'my mother is indoctrinating my sister and I into a ninja cult, please call CPS' would probably have just gotten me laughed at if I'd told a teacher."

"Then, on a trip to the beach, father asked about the katana scar on my shoulder and everything changed overnight. But... But I could never convince Yuki that what our mother did was wrong, I think that part of her resented me for making mother go away. And, that was a pattern..." Mommy grimaced. "Six months after Mother was made to move out, I had to rescue Yuki from some 'friends' she'd met at a party who turned out to be Shuma-Gorath cultists planning to use her as a virgin sacrifice. In our senior year of high school, she wouldn't believe me that her new boyfriend was a human trafficker until I followed them to his warehouse and beat the crap out of him and even then she kept complaining that I didn't trust her until she saw the cages full of teenagers."

Mommy rolled her eyes. "I don't know why she didn't ask herself why a forty-year-old man wanted to date an eighteen-year-old or why he never wanted to take her out in public. The man got a life sentence but was killed in a prison riot a few years ago."

"Really?"

"Yeah," Mommy replied. "He wasn't even rioting, one of the other inmates just took issue with human trafficking. Now, where was I? Oh, right."

Mommy took a deep breath, coughed for a second, then took a more shallow breath. "After that, I thought I'd convinced her to be more careful, to not take people at face value, how to recognize toxicity, but... Your aunt and I started to drift apart after high school. I moved out when I started at Empire State University. She stayed home and went to community college. Your Grandfather would have paid for any university either of us wanted to go to, but Yuki didn't have the grades or motivation and dropped out of school a semester short of her associate's degree. We didn't really see much of each other except on Holidays until I married your father."

"When you were born... Yuki was so excited and wanted to be a perfect aunt. I don't know if... I'd hoped you wouldn't remember, but she was a very good aunt to you the first couple of years. She loved you... Until we found out you were a mutant." Mommy swallowed. "In the time since I'd moved out, Yuki had gotten in touch with some... Bad people, and... Because I wasn't there to snap her out of it... She'd never had any kind of prejudice when we were growing up and she kept quiet about it, I didn't know, I..."

"When I told her, what the doctor told your father and me, it was like flipping a switch. All of that love turned into cold-blooded hatred and... And it dawned on me," she said slowly, "I'd spent my whole life trying to protect my sister from being... corrupted or exploited by horrible, toxic, evil people... And I'd failed. And I couldn't save her. I couldn't save her, and protect you from her at the same time. I made my choice, and..."

Mommy was crying. I hugged her tight.

"Your father, your grandfather, Patrick, they thought that I was angry at Yuki. That I hated Yuki... The truth is, I hated myself for not... And now you know the story."

"I'm sorry it happened like that..."

Mommy held me tight.

After a minute it started getting awkward so I asked, "so if the pelvis punch thing isn't a ninja thing, then..."

Mommy pushed me off of her a little bit and sat up straight. She looked me in the eye, and with complete seriousness, said "Mommy fought in illegal underground cage fights on weekends for two years in college."

I blinked. "What?"

"So, it started when I decided that, after dating a woman named Monique for three months, that it was time to give her a key to my apartment. I called her up, told her I had something important to talk to her about in person and asked if she wanted to meet up at the coffee shop we'd had our first date at," okay, that sounded like a normal story so far. "When she met me there... She told me that she didn't care what I had to say, she was dumping me because she'd only been 'experimenting,' had decided that after three months she wasn't into girls after all, and had already been dating a man behind my back for two weeks, and then left me to pay for her coffee."

"Wow," I said, "nach í an bhitseach í?"

"Yes, yes she was," Mommy replied. "And I did not take it well. And then I remembered that one of the fraternities on campus was throwing a party and decided to drink the hurt away, because... Mother had Yuki and I build up a tolerance for a lot of drugs and poison. I could do it at a party and have someone else pay for it or I could buy the booze myself and not be able to afford groceries that week."

She raised a finger. "Never do that. It's a very unhealthy means of coping."

"...Mommy, the doctor gave me a shot of whiskey and the alcohol never made it to my blood. I physically can't drink the hurt away."

"Right, I knew that," Mommy deflected, "anyway, after drinking an entire Frat under the table... Things got really blurry and the next thing I knew I was on the other side of town, in an arena that was fenced off with chicken wire, barefoot, and wearing only a black latex bikini. I was bare-knuckle boxing with a... Let's say butch, woman in a similar state of dress. My childhood ninja training took over, probably becuase of those herbal drugs I mentioned, and even though I was still very, very drunk, I won easily. Made five grand that night becuase the guy organizing it was too scared of me to deduct all of the 'hidden costs and fees' and that was just kind of my thing for a while. Picked up some dirty fighting and street brawling skills."

I blinked again. "How the Hell did you get from a frat house to..."

"I honestly don't know," Mommy said with a straight face. "It's not the weirdest thing that a member of our family has done while blackout drunk. I have a second cousin in Tokyo who got drunk, climbed a mountain, and now she's dating a dragon."

"You're making that up!"

"Yes, yes I am," Mommy admitted. "So I did that for two years, made a decent amount of money, and earned a couple of... Favors from some less than savory people... Honestly, I came this close," she said holding her index finger and thumb a dime's depth apart, "to cashing them in to get some less than legal substances that might have made you better, but... Anyway, after a while, I met your father, we started dating, things got serious, and I realized that spending two years beating the crap out of people for money wasn't the best way to cope with a bad breakup. I don't regret doing it, but it wasn't good for me, so I retired... After an exhibition match against the three best fighters on the Kingpin's payroll at the same time."

"...Seriously?"

"Let's just say that Mayor Fisk would take a request from me very seriously and leave it at that" Mommy said with a sly smile. "Now, how did he end up Mayor again?"

"I have no idea," I shrugged. "Val says the rumor is that he used an Infinity Stone."

There was a knock at the door, Val opened it and stepped in. "Dad and Doctor Strange figured out exactly what that serum did if you still want to know."

So we went to the lab.