Part 12
He was aware, that he was sure of. Awake or asleep, that was impossible to determine, but he could wonder about the question, thus he knew he existed.
It wasn't dark it was more than that, he'd always been able to see in the dark. The faint glow of a digital watch made an adequate lantern for his demon's eyes. There had never been a time when those eyes hadn't been able to make out something of his surrounding. He remembered an all-nighter in second grade, one of the rare times Josette had let him go to a friend's house, Armand had been gone on a long business trip and for once Remy hadn't been carrying bruises she was ashamed to have his friends' parents see. They'd told ghost stories, tried to frighten one another with tales of Baron Samde and the Tithe Collector, of vampires and zombies and everything that goes bump in the night. Remy had laughed at their stories, he had no fear of monsters that disappeared when the lights were turned on, truth be told, he could see better in the gloom. Much better than Armand, the dark was a friend, a place to hide, nothing to fear. This was not dark, this was nothingness, deep, endless fields of nothing that made his eyes ache with the futile strain of trying to pierce its heart and see.
There was no sound except the pounding of blood against his eardrums, and he was thankful for that lonely sound, at least he knew he still had a heart and that it beat. Outside of that was silence. Essex's base had been silent, the air handling equipment had only run intermittently and his rooms had been so isolated. Remy now knew Essex had done that on purpose, had kept him away from anyone who might have given him a clue as to Essex's true, malevolent purpose. Grey Crow, no Scalphunter, had been the only Marauder Essex had deemed discrete enough to associate with Remy. He'd been cold, he didn't love what he did, he wasn't a psychopath, just a professional killer, like Wolverine, like Belle now. Remy laughed and sound was swallowed up by the silence around him before it reached his ears, he seemed to have an attraction to killers, put him in a room with a dozen people and he'd make friends with the assassin. Scalphunter had liked him, Remy had felt honest emotions in their friendship; it hadn't stopped the man from hunting him down like an animal when Sinister had ordered it.
He felt nothing. Nothing supported him. Nothing touched him. There was no hot or cold. There was no up or down. He was floating in something that eluded his senses. If it weren't for the pulsing of his blood he would have wondered if he were alive. He didn't feel alive, he couldn't feel were his body ended and the stuff surrounding him began. Nothing had always been what he expected when he died, he hadn't expected to be aware of it though, or aware of nothing, after he died. Of course he wasn't actually dead, or he didn't think so anyway.
If he were dead, he'd like to see Scott. He hadn't made many friends; Scott was the only one who'd died before him. Or at least that was what he thought; Pierre had been hurt pretty bad. If things had gotten worse all the friends he'd brought here might be dead. Belle and the baby might have died months ago at the hands of the people he'd come to save her from. Still since there appeared to be something after death, if he was dead, then seeing Scott didn't seem like too much to ask.
Remy counted the beats of his heart. He tried to remember how many times a minute that was supposed to happen. He wondered if that still applied if he were dead and only imagining that his heart was beating.
He started seeing colors, meaningless, purposeless splotches, his eyes wanting so bad to see that his brain manufactured visions. He wished they were more interesting. They didn't do much to occupy his thoughts.
He started hearing murmurs in the darkness. Whispers not quite heard. Telling him… he didn't know what. Imagined or real he didn't want to hear them anymore clearly.
He wondered what it was that he liked so much about killers. A soldier turned mercenary, an assassin who found a cause, a girl carrying on a family tradition of paid murder, nearly half of the people who meant something important to him. Remy wondered if it was hard for them to do what they did. He'd killed, when Hammerhead had been trying to beat his skull in, threatening Mia, he'd forced his hand into the other man's mouth, had sensed the metal plates in his head and metal took a charge so easily. Kneeling over the smoking ruin of the man he'd killed he hadn't felt regret. He wondered how different it was for them, killing without warning, knowing the other person would never know until it was too late, or would never stand a chance. Killing because you were paid to, because you were told to, because it got you something, someone, you wanted, was it truly so different from what he'd done?
The meaningless splotches of color slowly became a sparkling tapestry of potential energy. Remy felt relief to see it, to see anything again. The potential around him was densely packed, much more dense than he remembered air being.
The whispers became as clear as the beats of his heart marked the passing of time. They told him they were his god, his everything, they had taken him from the world and could keep him here or return him as they chose, there was no life except through them. He would obey them, kill for them, live for them, die for them, he was nothing except as he was of use to them.
Remy growled at the whispers that no one owned him, that he had no god.
The whispers pressed back, "Deny us and this will be your forever." Then Remy saw them, hungry, hating, grasping, fearing minds. Emotions churning and roiling, and so human. So they hadn't killed him after all. These people that had injured Pierre, taken Belle and his child, forced him to help Singer torture a man, force him to kill an innocent by stander, these people held him still, tried to claim his very soul with their lying whispers, locked him in this emptiness-filled place.
Remy felt a dark rage building in him. Nothing went right anymore, Belle, Scott, Wolverine, the world turning ever more violently against mutants. All the emotions he'd been forcing down came bubbling up: grief, rage, betrayal, fear, anger, pain, loss, revulsion, hatred, confusion, all flooding back, all just as intense as when he'd pushed them aside to be dealt with later. Now was later and this reckoning wouldn't be denied any longer.
He felt/saw/sensed their ugly emotions flickering around him as well as the frames of potential energy that contained those emotions, their bodies, and he reached out with his powers. He felt an instinctual buzzing in the back of his brain warning him against what he was about to do but he ignored it, he wanted them to suffer, to hurt, to die. They were the reason he hurt so badly. He took hold of the potential energy that flowed through their bodies. Arrogant creatures, believing they controlled him, believing they could steal the world from him, fools the lot of them. He took control of that energy and released it. Their bodies, their flesh came apart in wet, ripping explosions as he charged the living tissue and turned it into a weapon against them.
The emotional cores that had been caged by flesh were set loose. Screaming, horror, dying, confused, hurt, masses of blackest emotion set free, boiling across the psychic landscape like seething cauldron of acid/poison, laying waste to everything in it's path.
Remy screamed as the blood-dark emotions swept over him. Screamed until his throat bled. Passed out screaming still. Woke to the choking, suffocation of bad air. Trashed in the nothing/dense void until a tube wrapped around his arm. Pulled himself along it, he found a wall, something solid something real, the feel of it: hard, smooth, cold against his fingertips the first sensation he'd felt in a time that was timeless. Still no air. No breath. He s sent his powers flowing into the wall.
The shock wave from the resultant explosion drove him back into unconsciousness, but even as his awareness faded Remy felt a current taking hold of his body.
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