Part 14

Remy/Emily squinted in the screaming light that advertised the growing new day, the large picture window at the opposite end of the office framing a disadvantage for their ultra-sensitive eyes. They tried to process the terrified looking man sitting behind the large desk with the resources of both of their experiences and their combined knowledge.

But all they came up with was a reaffirmation that this was not what they had expected to find.

They still stood poised for action, weight even on their wide stance, staff in one hand, a splay of cards charged in the other. There was a camera in the corner of the room, but nothing that they could see worth stealing. No papers spread out over the laminated desktop, no file cabinets, no extra chairs for meetings, and a computer that was sitting on a small table in the corner of the room looking untouched.

If nothing else, it was obvious that this wasn't a room used in the normal office capacity.

"Finally! Thank you!" the worn, fearful expression of the man perked up as he registered Remy/Emily. "Please… help me?" The voice went from excited to desperate.

They weren't sure what to make of it. Where was the Shadow King? Was this just a trick?

Maybe their plan to surprise their enemy had failed.

The man stared at them, dark, Italian-looking eyes begging them for help. They noticed his hands were tied to the large, black, plush chair he was sitting in. Cautiously, they moved forward a few steps.

And that's when they noticed the bomb strapped with duct tape across his lap. Another step. The timer came into view, a little digital readout amidst a mass of wires. A little digital readout that boldly flashed its unhappy news.

Five minutes until they all blew up.

This day just keeps getting better and better, they thought. With a renewed urgency they considered their options. The bomb would no-doubt be set to detonate if the man were untied and moved…

"PLEASE! Aren't you going to do anything?" It looked as if the man, probably only in his late 20s, was about to cry. He was dressed in a precisely cut suit, definitely an expensive knit. He'd probably never faced his mortality as severely as in this moment.

"Who are you? Who did this?" they asked. It was strange that he didn't seem afraid of them, even considering his situation. They did have red—green on black eyes and were holding a hand of glowing cards that they had been about to throw at him a minute ago. How did he know they wouldn't kill him before that bomb did?

"Remy, please. I'm gonna die here! He's a madman!"

Every muscle tensed. "How do you know our—my name?" They remembered the use of the singular this time, as unnatural as it felt.

"Because I'm your boss. New Son." The bomb beeped a warning as another minute disappeared. New Son looked down at it with eyes that somehow widened even more, and then back up with increased panic. "Please, the Shadow King did this. He was just here. Help me! I don't wanna die!"

New Son. This was New Son? The man behind the name. He had been much more intimidating when he'd been faceless. New Son had been a powerful crime boss. This was a deer trapped in headlights…

Something wasn't right. They couldn't figure it out. Shadow King should have been here… unless he changed locations after they had shut their mind to the astral plane. They wouldn't have felt him move then. Or maybe…

Maybe this was the Shadow King and they were the ones about to be taken by surprise rather than the other way around.

"Where is the Shadow King now?" they asked, still not making a move to help the man.

"I don't know. Please! Aren't you going to help me?"

Beep. Three minutes until they all blew up.

What to do? They swallowed with stiff muscles. If we trust him and we're wrong?

And if we don't? We go boom too…

Too many variables… too many unknowns. There was only one way to know if this was New Son, and that involved its own risk. If they checked him on the psionic plane and it was really the Shadow King… At this proximity they might not be able to fight off his influence…

The man—whoever he was—was screaming in hysterics now. Amidst the list of expletives, they were able to pick out the gist of his cry: "Are you insane? There's a bomb strapped to my lap! Help me!" If it hadn't been so horribly, undeniably true, it might have been funny.

Nobody was laughing. Deep breath, and they took a step forward, knowing there was nothing else they could do. They couldn't let this man die, couldn't free him just in case he was... They had to be sure before they did anything.

We are stronger together. We can do this.

And in that moment they believed it. All differences behind, they were truly one. One being with one goal—to find Shadow King and destroy him. It was time to do the finding part. Green-on-black eyes locked into the man's terrified brown ones and hooked onto them, holding the stare as they dropped the walls around their astral being and set themselves free on the psychic plane.

The anger and hate rolled in unhindered, all the feelings of sinking and blackness I am alone in the world that plagued the deepest corners of the psyche on the darkest night I have no hope, I have no future. They fell to their knees immediately, only minimally aware of the action, perceived only as the slightest jarring of the brown eyes they were still staring at. Eyes that were no longer terrified, eyes that were suddenly shackles and chains about them as their intensity seemed to bore a hole right through where their heart should be. I am worthless. I am unloved. They felt it all, every negative feeling they had ever had in their lives brought back and magnified like never before and like could never be again… because it all added up to a weight so heavy I am crushed. I am sinking. that it was impossible to breath.

Suffocating. The man in the chair had gotten up, and had his hands around their neck, fingers of rusted metal gripping and twisting. The bomb beeped in the distance, abandoned on the chair.

His hands burned and froze, all at once. They could feel the solid touch of hate and fear and depression. Why has the world done this to me? I want it all to end. All they wanted was for it to be over, for it to be gone, for the blackness to stop growing in them and for the screaming that was piercing their ears to end. It was getting more straggled now, more raspy, and the hands were closing around their neck until eventually they couldn't hear the screaming anymore. It occurred to them that it was their own.

Breathe. Must breathe.

Heavy lids, blinked once, twice. Another beep. They were coming every 30 seconds now. Those eyes were all they could see, ripping them apart, burning them up and choking them with the smoke. Eyes closed, one last dim though…

One and a half minutes until we all go boom.

There was a feeling of thankfulness. Soon it would all be over. After that the darkness came.

Where are we? There is a palpable black night with the crackling of lighting running throughout and failing to distill the darkness. Yet they know their surroundings.

We are in our mind. The place that Emily used to stay in. It was the last place left for them to retreat to, the last place that remained walled off.

They look down at their blue- and green-laced form. It looks so dim, flickering like a dying light. It's almost over.

The blackness is everywhere, closing in on them so that they huddle claustrophobic in the shrinking space. It's killing us.

We can't die.

Why?

We have a mission.

Can't, it's too hard. He's too strong.

Must destroy the Shadow King.

The thoughts are collective, unattached to any clear personality within them, and as they see the light of their being distilled into the encroaching darkness, they let the last waves of their essence roll over them – the memories, the thoughts, the desires – the last and most important things to impress upon their mind at the last and most important moment.

He reaches out to touch her, knowing that this moment might be their last. Rogue looks back with those green eyes of captured emerald, wetted just enough that they gleam with the reflected light of his own red-on-black eyes. The Crystal Wave is coming, and with it, the erasure of their existence. It is here and now that his desire is greatest, here and now that he knows that there is one thing that will make him complete before he dies. His arms tighten around her as her hands press into his back, and with one last look into those green eyes of captured emerald, their lips meet with a kiss that marks the culmination of their lives.

She looks up into her father's face as he stares resolutely ahead. She feels his big hand tighten around her miniature one and likes the strength she feels there, drawing on it to keep her from crying as she looks around and sees the homeless on the street – the children, the mothers, the fathers. She knows in that moment how lucky she is to have a family, a home to live in, food to eat. She sees a little boy, not much older than herself, with red spiderweb lines all over his skin. She will see him again one day, but she doesn't know this now. He is alone, sitting on the ground and digging through a small pile of trash. She looks up at her father again, finds him looking at her. "How?" she asks, "How do they survive?" He looks forward again and doesn't answer for a while. Finally he says: "Hope. They live on hope."

Antarctica. He hates Antarctica. The way time melts away the feeling of the snow so that you are left with nothing but the numbness of death. He doesn't know how long he's been wandering though white blindness, doesn't know why he keeps doing it anymore. The rejections of the ones he loves ring through his ears and yet still he staggers on, crawling when he can't walk. Why does he do it? Stubbornness? He refuses to die. He remembers where he came from, that his simple insistence for survival is the only reason he is here to wander through this eternal winter. It is a habit now, an instinct. Humanity stripped away by cold and crystallized tears so that this is all he has left: I will not die.

He has always looked so big to her. They call him Spider and he is a rock of a man, solid, with a will that can bend steel. She's seen it happen. He looks down at her now and holds out his hand to shake hers. The skin is laced with thin red lines, a spider webbed pattern that covers his body from head to toe. She's seen that too. She grasps the hand and then he pulls her close, whispers in her ear: "Goodbye Em." And then they are a few feet apart again, professional and polished. "Are you ready?" he asks. "Yes," she says. "You cannot fail. The War must be stopped." She nods: "I know." She turns and steps into the portal that will lead her to the past…

That has led her to here and now.

We cannot fail. We cannot die.

It is the final truth left to them, with everything else ripped away in the Shadow King's maelstrom. Their last icon of identity. It is their solid ground and they stand on it, letting it expand out from them and hold away the feelings of doubt.

They can feel him, feel the Shadow King just beyond the blackness, a darker spot in it all, so dark he is brilliant and they can feel his transformation to the astral plane is almost complete, can feel that in a moment's breath he will exist only there with no need for a physical host. They feel that that moment must not come.

Running across the foundation they have built, they look toward that brilliant darkness, leap toward it and latch on with Emily's power to lace into another's psionic being. The blackness is solid and it seems to roar, a monster, the culmination of a million nightmares and they are there digging themselves into it, deeper and deeper and winding through it until they are a part of it.

We cannot fail.

They remember that they are on the astral plane, and that there is a physical plane outside of them. They remember that in this physical plane there is a bomb and that this bomb is going to blow up very soon. Winding into the core of the Shadow King they find the last ties to a feeble and dying mind, one that had once belonged to New Son. They reach into this mind, strengthening it and still holding onto the Shadow King, holding the two together so that he cannot escape the pull of death when the bomb explodes and New Son dies.

There is another monstrous roar. But they refuse to let go, holding him to that mind, to the physical plane, as they use Remy's empathic power to infuse feelings of love, hope and determination – the essence of what they are, the remaining core of their being when all else is stripped away – into the blackness.

But it is not enough. The Shadow King is pushing back, reaching for the dark patches of their pasts and smothering them with them, yelling to them that they are alone and the world has abandoned them.

It isn't true.

No more lies. We have each other.

We need more help.

Then let's get it.

Jean Grey-Summers was tired of screaming. She was marginally aware of the fact that her voice was getting raspy and her throat was throbbing, but the part that bothered her the most was the noise. So much noise. Everywhere. Inside her head, outside of her head. And no way to stop it. It even echoed off the walls of the abandoned subway tunnel she stood in.

Wolverine was down, stabbed through the heart, and as the blade sunk into his chest she screamed again. She could feel all the pain of it as if it were her, the consequence of being connected directly to his mind.

She could feel all of them, every single X-Man there, as she held their minds in hers and shielded them from the Shadow King's influence. Wolverine was back up again, healing factor working over-time, but as he was pulling himself to his feet an angry mob was surrounding Cyclops and swinging at him with pieces of wood and brick from the damaged buildings around them.

"Scott"

"Don't worry about me Jean, I'll be fine." One of the men, one wielding a board with a nail in it, managed to get a shot it, sinking the weapon into Cyclops' arm.

Jean screamed again.

She couldn't take much more of it, all the pain they were feeling. Storm had been taken out of the fight already, her injuries from their last incident with Sinister coming back on her and making her too easy of a target. Marrow was also down, with Bobby trying desperately to protect her from further damage as he suffered attack from more of Shadow King's minions.

And Rogue? She was gone. She'd foolishly touched a mutant girl that had attacked her, one under Shadow King's control and it was just too much for Jean to fight off. Shadow King had a direct path into Rogue's mind and Jean had no choice left but to let her go. And so she was gone. Stupid girl. At least it was one less person to scream for.

And then there was Gambit. She had no idea what had happened to him.

Jean was worn out. The Shadow King was leaking in. All the power of the Phoenix within her and slowly this madman was still winning. And she didn't know how to stop it. Nobody had been able to find his host body yet, and unless they did that there was no way to beat him. He was too strong to fight on the astral plane.

"No he's not."

She jumped at the sudden entrance of a new voice in her mind. "Who is that?"

"Remy."

She felt out the voice, formed the features of it in her mind, like a mental face. It was a face she didn't recognize. "You're not Remy." She knew Remy's psychic imprint, she'd been in his mind before.

"I've changed. There's no time to explain. We need your help."

The voice echoed in her mind, twisting through like a duet. It was a strange sense, like seeing double of two slightly different images. "Who are you?"

"No time. We are friends and you must trust us. We need you to beat the Shadow King."

"How?" The thought was jarred by another scream. Bobby had just been knocked unconscious.

"Combine your strength with ours, and the strength of all the X-Men you're in contact with. Help us to hold the Shadow King in his host body and attached to the host psyche."

"Why? What will that do?"

"No time. Trust us. We have to do this now."

Jean could feel the astral form of the hand offered her. She screamed one last time as Scott got hit again and took that hand. There were no more options left to her. This was her last hope.

They are a powerhouse of energy. Three psionic forms wound together and dragging the remnant of the X-Men in tow, a shining light of energy. They follow the ropes the Shadow King has tried to tie to their minds, the chains intended to pull them down under his influence. They follow them until they come to the black hole at their end, the concentrated mass that is the monster himself. They slam into him with all the force they can and force him back into the fragile mind of New Son, strengthening the connections between him and that host mind.

They hold him their, pinned under their force of will. And they wait.

There is fear in the Shadow King, fear in the remnants of New Son's mind, because they remember that bomb in the room. They know that it is about to go off. They know that they cannot escape.

With the last of their strength they reach out into the physical plane, directing Remy's control of kinetic energy outward, pushing the energy away from them, manipulating it so that there is a bubble around their physical form that the explosion cannot reach.

And as they retreat from the Shadow King's being back into their own a split-second before, they somehow hear an echo chasing them through New Son's ears. The final "Beep!" of the bomb's countdown, and then everything goes boom.

end Part 14