Snuggles The Symbiote

You know, if we were gonna be coming back to my homeworld regularly we might have to find a way to set the gate-jump-thingy to take us somewhere other than Yancy Street. Having to sneak out of the Fantastic Four's house in the middle of the afternoon on a regular basis was gonna be a pain in the butt.

Luckily, we appear in the foyer and... When did they get a cat? Anyway, we appear in the foyer and at this time of day, everyone's busy so Taylor, Lisa, and I could just head out the front door.

All in civilian clothes, because apparently there was some stupid 21 and under only version of the Superhero Registration Act that got forced through by a 'moron of a senator who was obviously on Roxxon's payroll,' from what I'd been told. It didn't apply to me becuase of the Krakoan deal and it could be argued that it didn't apply to Taylor and Lisa since they were with me but it was being enforced by Cape-Killers who didn't need a warrant... So no costumes. I didn't feel like wasting time beating up violent power-tripping idiots enforcing an illegal law today.

Five minutes later, Lisa stopped walking. "Wait... Is the plan to walk from Manhattan to Queens?"

I blinked. "Yes."

"Excuse me for a second, I need to regret suggesting this."

"Well, I could fly us there but my powers are still sealed, so..."

"Okay," Lisa began, "next time we do this we're bringing Dean. He's strong enough to carry all three of us."

"Have you been spending time with Dean?" Taylor asked, sounding a bit surprised. "I haven't noticed you hanging out or—"

"The universe doesn't revolve around you and the kid," Lisa lampshaded, "He made an effort to be welcoming without an ulterior motive, backed off when I told him to, a bit later I heard him mumbling about his parents, I admitted to him that I also had emotionally abusive rich-asshole parents. We bonded, and ever since he's been making sure I take the time to take care of myself and I've been teaching him how to exploit vulnerabilities in people's mental state that he notices with his emotional powers."

Lisa paused for a moment. "Of course, he's mostly been using that to get Glory Girl to open up and deal with her grief over Panacea in a healthy manner instead of to throw his enemies off of balance, but it's not like I gave him conditions for what to use it for..."

And it just kind of went on like that on and off until we got to the cemetery.

The sun was still up, but it was definitely late afternoon. By the time we made our way to my parents' graves... Well, they were sectioned off with police tape and the HYDRA grunt corpses had been moved... But there were still blood-stains on the grass.

Daddy's grave was still just an unnamed wooden cross. Mommy's was...

I tried not to cry. The site of the earth shattered and torn open, loose dirt everywhere and a casket that had been punched and pulled apart from the inside was hard.

I closed my eyes and started sniffing. My super sense of smell still worked fine.

Rot. Like the freezer broke and all the meat spoiled. I tried not to think too hard about that, push past it, find more details...

A lot of people had been here in the last day. I recognized Spider-Man's scent, which I ignored, and a lot of different people and...

There were eight people who smelled like people mixed with the smell of rot But, trying to get around them, figuring out where they came from and where they went, there was too much crossover between them, I couldn't make it out and...

If only I had something that smelled like Mommy. If I could compare how she smelled before, I might be able to...

Someone was coming. Someone who'd been here earlier in the day... I'd smelled them before. When had I smelled them before?

Taylor spoke up. "Ashley, we should probably get—"

"The fuck are you doing here, freak!?" That's who I smelled. My racist bitch of an aunt.

I turned around and slowly opened my eyes. "Racist aunt," I greeted... I didn't know my Aunt's name.

"Mutants aren't a race," my aunt corrected in a totally Karen tone of voice, "they're an infestation."

"Wow," Lisa snarked, "I didn't know that Asian Nazis were a thing."

My aunt ignored Lisa, though she did grip a long bag she had hanging from her shoulder.

"Answer my question, Mutie. What are you doing here?"

My eye twitched. "What are you doing here?"

"Don't be childish," my aunt scoffed.

"I'm ten, what's your excuse?"

Her eyes narrowed and she unzipped her bag and slowly pulled out...

...A solid oak lacquered baseball bat with "A girl's best friend" written on the wrapping on the handle.

"That belonged to my Mommy." Mommy carried that with her almost every time she left the house. If I could get my hands on that, I could compare the scent and...

"And now it belongs to me," my aunt deadpanned. She took it up in a one-handed grip that wasn't exactly the way you were supposed to hold a baseball bat. "I've been wanting to beat your uppity mutant ass for a month." Then she kicked off her shoes.

I took my own stance, started bouncing back and forth to get my rhythm going. "Trust me, you wish I was just a mutant." I was a superhero and a capoeirista in training. She was a lady who didn't even know how to hold a baseball bat. There was no way this could possibly go wrong.

It was only after I jumped for her and tried to grab Mommy's bat that my spidey-sense went off. My aunt quickly moved so that I crashed belly first into the long side of the bat. With one fluid motion, she grabbed me by the throat with her free hand and with that grip and the bat flipped me over her shoulder and threw me behind her. I landed on my shoulders and rolled back before stopping flat on my back with my head pointing toward my aunt.

I pulled myself up, turned around, and glared incredulously at her. I could see Taylor about to jump in, but Lisa put a hand on her shoulder and whispered something I didn't catch.

My aunt met my glare with a smug sneer. "What, freak? Did Yuri not tell you that she and I were trained from the moment we could walk in the ancient and most deadly art of Ninjutsu?"

I thought back to what Mommy had said about her childhood. "You're from Queens!" I shouted. "Born and raised!"

"And Daredevil is from Manhattan."

I didn't want to admit that she had a point.

"But the people who took me were incompetent. If Mommy was a ninja then how—"

"Being a ninja doesn't make you bulletproof," my aunt scoffed. "It's not like we were taught how to use ki to make our flesh into a substance like unto cast-iron or any of the cool stuff. Mother didn't know how."

"You ran away from that bee."

"It came out of nowhere and you can't punch a deadly allergen."

"How?" No, seriously, how did... From what mommy said, Grandpa Tanshin was loaded. They lived in the rich part of Queens. People would have noticed something like that. Authorities would have been called.

"Big house, big basement. Mother told father it was the tradition in her family to train the daughters in the martial arts for purposes of self-defense, father converted the basement into a dojo no questions asked... at first." She sounded bitter for a moment. "Mother trained us both in martial arts, infiltration, assassination... Pretty much everything you'd expect of a ninja save for naginatajutsu. Father noticed the scars on a trip to the beach in our teenaged years, just as we started those particular lessons, and Yuri told him how intense the training was when he asked about them. The divorce was final within the year. Father got full custody." My aunt sighed. "In hindsight, Yuri being so willing to tell the court about the 'abuse' should have been a warning sign that she didn't care about family or tradition."

I blinked "Why? Just... Why?"

"Through mother, we are direct blood descendants of several of the original disciples of Kagenobu Yoshioka. The secret society that he founded may have fallen far from its original, noble goals, but our ancestors remembered and continued to train as Shinobi in the hopes of rejoining the Hand if it ever returned to the Light." She shrugged. "Mother never actually thought we'd end up using these skills, but turns out that Ninja training makes kicking mutant ass pretty easy."

"No," I said slowly. "Just no."

"What?"

"No. I can accept being a direct descendant of Apocalypse. I could have accepted being descended from the original members of the Hand." I explained. "I can't accept both. God damn, I'm not some Mary Sue in someone's fanfic." I suddenly felt the need to keep an eye out for Deadpool. I'm not sure why. "So no. I reject your story and substitute my preferred reality where you're just inexplicably talented at martial arts for no good reason.'

Okay, now if I wanted Mommy's bat I needed to beat a trained ninja who was twice my size with only half-trained capoeira skills and a bunch of martial arts memories that I didn't have the training to use right. And whatever minor powers I still had access to. Maybe I could penance stare her and punch her in the stomach while she was experiencing the pain of the one sin I could burn at a time?

Or maybe...

"Ashley, you're aware that our ability to manipulate the living abyss that forms our bio-lattice is not a power that can be sealed but an inherent aspect of symbiote biology, yes?"

I blinked. "Oh, wow, I'm an idiot. Thank's Mister Snuggles."

I reached out intending to generate an ocktacle from my wrist and just grab the bat from my aunt's hand, but instead a thin white tendril of symbiote mass sort of shot out of my wrist like high-pressure silly string and stick to the bat.

I blinked. "How long have we been able to shoot weblines?"

"We were born able to do that."

"She wasn't talking to you, Scream. Ashley, this one has been able to generate web fluid from its spare mass since we harvested the codex from the Poison."

"Why don't you tell me these things!?"

I tugged on the web line and yanked Mommy's bat out of my Aunt's hand. I whiffed on the catch though and ended up tying myself up in my own web line.

After Mister Snuggles ate the web line I was trapped in, I collected the bat and, trying to sound as serious as possible, said to my aunt. "I'm keeping it. It's mine now. It was my mommy's, now it's mine. It's leaving with me. This is non-negotiable."

My aunt pulled a knife from her pocket. "You little, jumped up, arrogant, mutie piece of shit. Should have just broken into Yuri's apartment and put you down myself. She'd have gotten over it."

It was at that moment that my aunt was wrapped in the stretchy glowing red, plastic-like Crimson Bands of Cyttorak.

"Okay, I was gonna let the kid fight her own battles and settle this personal family business," Lisa began as I noticed that she had her hands in the 'like Rocker Horns but with the thumb sticking out' pose used for both magic spells and web-shooting, "but she took way too damn long to remember that she didn't have to fight fair."

"I see you've been practicing your magic," I said to make small all. I said it loud enough to hear it over my aunt's struggling and cursing. I decided I was done engaging with her right now.

"What else was I gonna do?" Lisa shouted back. "Anyway, we should get out of here, that's only gonna hold for five minutes."

I held the bat up to my face and inhaled sharply through my nose. After filtering out my aunt's scent, and the scent of lacquered oak, and comparing it to the scents around the grave...

"I've got the scent." I knew which way Mommy had gone when she'd risen from her grave. "Come on, follow me." I deposited the bat in Mister Snuggles' extradimensional pocket and got going. Taylor ruffled my hair when I got next to her, and then, on a whim, turned around and shouted "bye Karen!" at my still bound aunt.

"My name is Yuki!"

"Don't care!"