After the Merge
Author: Jenskott Summary: What if when Cyclops merged with Apocalypse, he kept accidentally any of the power?
Notes: Thank you very much for your reviews. Please, write me more! The first chapter was a kind of prelude of the future. The real action begins in this part. This is my version of the Battle of Akkaba. Enjoy.
Rating: PG-13 for some language and violence.
Feedback: To I need opinions, please. They will be read, reckoned with and worshipped.
Part Two. Battle of Wills-
The atmosphere boiled with fire. Blue and white blazes sparkled, leapt and swirled in a vortex. A powerful gale of wind mixed with crackling lightnings welled up wildly from it. And the hurricane carried the rumbling roar of a thunder-like laughter.
Bright light blinded him, aloud noise scratched his ears and violent whirlwind dragged him backwards. He was injured and exhausted and drained, and barely was able of standing up and walking two steps. And still he stepped forward, driven by an unyielding determination, ignoring it everything except his goal. The knowledge of what was about of happening and the only way of stopping it had dawned on him. And with that realization he made a choice. And he never backed down when he was set on something.
"You've always held us in contempt, Apocalypse! We were your puppets, whose purpose was to serve your grand design. You cut yourself off from your own humanity so long ago... you forgot how truly powerful it makes us. You look pretty impressive trying to imprint yourself on the soul of a boy. Let's see how well you fare- against a man!"
And with that wild cry of defiance he threw himself between the villain and the boy was his son in another time and reality, bursting the bubble-like shield Apocalypse had been protecting with, and shoving out of the way to Nate Grey.
And then he felt something bursting in his mind. Exploding a breach on his mental shields and pouring into him as a river of slippery molasses trickling in his skull.
He had cried his love to Jean telepathically. He had yelled his contempt to Apocalypse. He had screamed mockingly in challenge. Now he howled in pain. An intense, piercing, excruciating agony, as thousand acid-tipped claws stabbing his brain and carving long bloody furrows.
And then he listened to the grieving, disbelieving, desperate Jean's cry. Which degenerated in a shriek.
Jean had got laboriously on his knees to watch to Scott striding with utter and stubborn determination towards Apocalypse. For a moment she hesitated, wondering what he would do when Nate and she had been useless and he had run out of power. Her emerald eyes widened impossibly with shock when she realized what he was about of doing.
And then he leapt into the energy maelstrom, shouting her a last 'I love you'. Nate was roughly pushed out of the way, falling on the floor. And the shriveled, decayed corpse was the true Apocalypse's shape disintegrated as a wilted flower, as unholy light erupted out of him and rushed at Scott. She heard his scream of appalling hurt, and watched his body blurring, shifting, warping, becoming bigger and bulkier...
She contemplated the entire display paralyzed in horror, seeing the man she worshipped more than the very life dying. Scott was dying, that monster was taking him away her, and she was helpless, impotent, useless to impede it...
No, that was untrue. She was able of doing something. But she was too much of a coward to act. It'd mean release forces was better letting asleep, face parts of herself she preferred ignore, set off a chain of events she couldn't bear relive. But the alternative was losing her husband.
With agony and chagrin, she reached within herself, seeking a place of her mind, in her innermost core, hidden so deeply almost nobody had seen it. She broke the bar kept the double titanium doors locked, and found an unfathomable and black pit, an abyss of lightless shadows. Her voice called the power. Darkness was drowned with sheer golden light, and cosmic flares filled the cliff, welling out of it.
Jean drunk the power tide whole, and with a steeled and hardened glare, unfolded her flaming wings and soared down her psilink with Scott, a path twisted downwards as a spiral staircase. The other extreme of the bond usually glowed with warm crimson light, but now it was tainted with darkness.
She stormed in the place violently, gliding amidst the tendrils of oozing slime and reeking blackness were invading it all. Her coming stirred them, and they swirled around her, ready to entrap her and engulf her. Jean simply burst in blistering flames, incinerating the thick negative energy dared to come near, and she plunged headlong in the wall of blackness rose in front of her. Powerless to stop her, the shadows screeched and burnt to ashes with a mere brush of her wings.
Swiftly she pierced the coal-black barrier, and her keen eyesight spotted them when she reached the lightside. Scott was one tiny and diminutive figure, crushed under the unbearable weight of an ocean of energy washed over him in a ceaseless tidal wave, threatening overwhelm him and squash him as an insect. He moaned in pain, feeling his bones splintered and his mind flayed, but even then he crawled along the 'floor', wrestling defiantly with him by his body's control.
And she saw him in the other side. Huge as a mountain and just so monolithic, with a booming laughter echoed throughout the mindscape, hurling wave after wave of power at Scott to force him to surrender, to relinquish the control, taunting him with his weakness and with the assurance of ceasing his torment. Her husband wasn't listening to that malignant voice, but his willpower faltered.
Indescribable, anguished wrath and fierce overprotective love possessed her, and the firebird released a deafening raptor-like shriek before diving on Apocalypse, ramming on his underbelly. The brutal hit caught it off-guard, and he toppled backwards. Jean started to ravage his body with her beak and claws, slashing with berserker frenzy and dousing him in charring flames. The intensity of the assault overwhelmed to Apocalypse, but he reacted instinctively with the hurt of his hide torn and sliced in ribbons, blasting to Jean with a wide beam catapulted her backwards.
After several aerial spins Phoenix controlled the searing pain of the blast and halted her momentum, gliding hastily towards Scott. The sight of him sprawled on the immaterial floor bled her heart and boiled her blood, but she wouldn't act rashly against the external bastard. She landed by his side and hoisted him in a sitting position, holding him with her arms. After gazing longingly at his face, she hurled a grim and murdering glare at En Sabah Nur, who was striding pompously at them. The ground quaked and wavered with each thunderous footstep.
"Impertinent worms!" He roared "To me your lives are only pebbles dragged by the sea waves! Reeds caught in a typhoon! Grass blades hurled in a pyre! My hand will crush your bodies and strip your souls before slaying you! I'll conquer this universe stomping on your cold, lifeless cadavers!"
"Funny" Jean sneered acidly, as her mind repaired the wounds of her astral self and an orange armor flashed on her body. "You're still blackened and scarred and bleeding from my former attack and you're menacing us!" A nimbus of flames shimmered around her and Scott, condensing in a shield of feather-like sparks. Her body crackled with the energy she was mustering. "Come on, motherless fuck! If you're so powerful and superior, attack instead of boasting! Come on! Dare to it!"
"Whimpering mortals! Gladly I shall oblige your urges of dying. Long and painful- Yeargh!"
Jean Grey-Summers blinked stunned. A fast meteor of amber fire had erupted out of the tar-like mire she had crossed, and as a lightning bolt, it had struck to Apocalypse, hurling him as far as the rim of the 'skyline'.
The solid energy bolt expanded, and a human figure solidified into it. And as Jean cradled soothingly her feeble husband, she gaped in awe. She knew her son was an impressive image in the astral plane, but the man standing in front of her, shielding them with his frame, was awesome. His astral self glowed with the brightest light, exuding charring golden blazes. His mere presence was unleashing an awful storm into the Scott's mind, and she felt him groaning in aching agony. Concern marred her features.
On the border of the vault, Apocalypse began to grow out of proportion and limit, until becoming a towering giant. His looming self, tall as a mount, leered down at them with a mixture of fury and spite.
"Once and again I've proved myself stronger than you, Dayspring! And newly do you try opposing to my plans with your puny power? I hesitate among praising your persistence or regretting your craziness." He stretched out his trunk-like arms, and they transformed into twin cannons. "Poor stubborn fool. You wished triumphing over me even forfeiting your life, but you only accomplished your father waged your battle in your name, losing the life on it! You are a failure of man, Cable."
He fired a volley of crackling fireballs, which landed where Cable stood. Rubble and dust flew everywhere as the projectiles scorched the surface and opened crater-like scars on it. But neither of the plasma bullets damaged to Nathan or pierced his psychic battle aura.
Among the smoke billowing from his cannons, Apocalypse observed him, stunned. He had been sure of that attack would wound him at least. But he remained unscathed. He didn't wobble even.
Jean, who staring at him from behind -very thankful of no seeing what look her son's eyes displayed-, wasn't surprised at all. She understood what energies were fueling him. Seething hatred by Apocalypse. Anguished love by his father. Two feelings, both very powerful but fully opposite, throbbing in him and tearing him apart, but at once giving him an endless supply of strength. Nathan was right now beyond pain or suffering. He was basking in a tormenting rage only the Nur's death would quench.
"Leave. My. Parents. Alone!" He roared, and a hurricane of psionic wind arose around him. Swinging high his psimitar, he charged towards Apocalypse with another hatred-boosted bellow.
Then...
A pillar of fire exploded where Apocalypse stood.
A blade drew a jagged line, slicing with strength of swordsman and precision of surgeon.
An intense, glorious light flooded the mindscape, as a bloodcurdling scream pierced the 'air'.
On the physical plane, neither of the X-Men understood what was exactly happening. First they'd seen with horror to their fearless leader disrupting the energy flux between Apocalypse and X-Man. A horror had grown when they watched to their sworn enemy taking residence in the Scott's body, and transforming until becoming a seven-foot tall monster, bald, with blue lips, hairless skin of grey hue, and a single big eye on the face.
The monster stood up, looming them with his fists closed and a sick smile splitting his twisted visage, when he howled in pain and stumbled dizzily, grabbing his head. One second later, Nathan had risen with a snarl, but instead of attacking he kept frozen on his spot, with one faraway glance on his eyes. The Nur's shape, form and aspect started to waver, as if he was melting, and a sphere of orange and golden light exploded of sudden where he stood.
The surface of the silent fireball rippled, and it spat two shapes landed on opposite sides of the chamber. Jean shook her head groggily, as if she was half-asleep in a daze, and crawled anxiously at one of them.
The floating and still sphere trembled again, and a stream of bright sparks flowed out of it, flooding the place. A wave of warmth and healing swept over The Twelve, and they felt marveled how their powers, energies and strengths were being restored. It was a tingling, fuzzy feeling.
The second figure, a dwarfed and bald man, with his tanned skin wrinkled and slackened, was slithering weakly among the debris carpeting the floor. However his limbs were too thin and its muscles were too fragile to hold his frame.
"T-this can't be possible" he stuttered faintly. His voice sounded haggard and rusty, and he misspelled the words due to the lacking of many teeth. The X-Men were amazed. That ancient, decadent and pathetic figure was their ultimate nemesis, the mad mutant warlord who had tried owning the power of a God and ruling the world? "My power is... lost..."
A shadow covered him suddenly, and one hard boot stepped on his back. He howled. The weight had nearly split his backbone.
"I'd dreamt sometimes with seeing this picture. Not often, mind you, because I'm not of the optimistic sort." Cable seethed, gripping his weapon and lifting it up. "You've always lived according to your own damned creed. Die now according to it, flonqing son of bitch!"
The spear of wicked-looking edge slashed a downward arc, and the Apocalypse's head was detached off his body. Green fumes floated out of the wound, coalescing in a humanoid figure. Nathan leapt backwards swiftly, and with one fluid motion, he lunged on the ghost, thrusting his blade deeply in his chest and burying it into it.
The Apocalypse's death cry echoed throughout the entire expanse of the Egyptian desert, like the yell of a devil falling. And as the Nur's astral self vanished in smoke, Nathan glared balefully at the hideous, loathsome corpse. Starlight glow flared on his eye, and the atoms were spliced and disintegrated.
"This is the man I am, Nur. The same kind my father is." He wheezed out, ignoring the petrified stares of horror and sickened revulsion the X-Men got. His eyes rolled up, and he dropped heavily on the floor. Fainted and motionless as a puppet with its strings cut.
Silence lasted several long and tense minutes.
"Damn it!" The Jean's yell shattered abruptly the moment. "What are you doing? We must carry them to the Blackbird! My husband and my son need medical care urgently!"
Her harsh words jolted in action to everyone. The X-Men scrambled to their feet and rushed to help her or to move to Cable, who was passed out on the dust.
Neither of them happened thinking they had achieved the final victory over the ultimate evil.
To be continued...