Snuggles the Symbiote

After she'd gotten all of the tears out of her system, Ashley had gone into the girls' locker room here in Wards HQ to wash up. I wasn't sure where the other Wards were, except for the ones in the infirmary.

So with nothing else to do I reclined on the couch in the common room and revisited a book I'd read with my mother almost six years ago. She'd taught a class on it, one I'd sat in on at the time. From my more mature current perspective and greater understanding of the world, I kind of wondered why my mom let me read this when I was ten.

The masks on buzzer went on. My mask was kind of a pain to put on quickly, so I pushed my hair over in front of my face.

Of course, it turned out that it was just some of the other Wards coming in, so I needn't have bothered even with that.

Vista, still red, still smaller than she was this morning, and with her costume clinging to her from the dried sweat was the first one I could see. "Anyone in the girls' showers?" she asked.

"Cuddlebug's in there," I replied.

"Well, she can deal," she squeaked bitterly and sulked down the hall.

As she did that, Aegis helped a boy with his leg in a cast make his way to a chair.

"Need anything?" Our leader asked as he set who I presumed was Gallant down.

"No. I'll be fine," the young man said.

"Okay, well, I'll be in my room finishing some paperwork," Aegis finished and left, leaving me with Gallant.

I sat up and looked over to him. "How are you doing?"

"Well, the painkillers that Dr. Landis gave me kicked in about five minutes ago, so right now I'm feeling great," he joked. "Mostly I'm just waiting for them to call my parents and confirm a cover story so they can smuggle me back home," he said more seriously. "Kind of a public figure, so if my leg's broken at the same time as Gallant's it's a bit suspicious."

I got a better look at his face. He was wearing a domino mask to conceal his identity, as he was out of costume, but something about his jawline and complexion was vaguely familiar.

And then I remembered that he called Panacea his 'girlfriend's sister.' "Dean Stansfield?"

"Yeah," he said. "Surprised?"'

"Not really," I said. "I never really put much thought into who anyone was under their masks."

"Fair enough," he replied.

A thought occurred to me. "So, awkward question: The evil Panacea was trying to kill you specifically. Um… Why?"

"Well," He began slowly, "without giving away some things I'm not entitled to share, Amelia… She had issues. I can't turn my powers off, I can't not notice it. I genuinely think on some level that she resented me for taking her sister away… Take that and remove all morals, and..." He sighed. "I wanted to… Well, she's not hurting anymore."

Ashley had told me about the run-in with Brandish. "How is Glory Girl doing?"

"I haven't spoken to her since… Haven't seen her at school much, either." He looked away. "Honestly, I'm a little worried."

I grunted. "I'm sorry. I don't know what to say, I'm really not good at..."

"Prolonged social interaction?" He answered. I nodded. "Yeah. Even when you know what to say it can be hard. My parents want me to get involved with the family business and run in their social circles… Look, it's hard to hold a conversation with someone when you're at a charity event and you don't even need emotion-sensing powers to know that he doesn't give a damn about the cause."

"Working class," I quipped. "I'm sure that's frustrating, but I can't relate. The closest thing is well, teachers at Winslow don't care about their students' well being."

"Yeah, I heard about that," he said. "Back in January, there was talk about doing a crisis point for some girl that got shoved in a locker full of something they needed to call a hazmat team to clean up and left there for an hour or so. Ultimately they didn't because the girl was in the psych ward for a week and after that, they assumed she didn't… Uh, Weaver? Are you okay?"

Crisis points were cases where Heroes—usually PRT affiliated but sometimes from allied groups—visited a kid or teen who had a really bad day in the hospital, partly as a "brighten the day to help them get better" thing and partly to see if they'd gotten powers. Gallant had probably noticed that my mood had been soured by the reminder of the really bad day I had back in January. "Whoever decided that she didn't trigger is an idiot."

"Oh," he said. "Sorry."

"So, you know mine," I said." How about yours?"

He grimaced. "I'll be honest, I got off lucky compared to most. I drank something I probably shouldn't have, had a bad reaction, and when I got over it I could sense emotions."

I hummed. I had no idea what else to say, but then Ashley came down the hall. She was in full Cuddlebug costume, but her hair was loose and visibly still damp. "Hey," she said, and then sat on the couch next to me. I sat up more to make room.

"Hey," I said back. "Feel better?"

"A little," she replied. "Gallant, are you okay?"

"Yeah," he said. "It was a nice clean break. They set it without a problem. Just gotta hang out till I can go home and rest for a bit. And it's Dean when I'm out of costume."

"Okay, Dean. I'm Ashley." She made her mask move back and… God, that's still creepy.

"So, what were you talking about?" She asked.

"Comparing origin stories," I said offhand.

"Oh, well, I'm a mutant so I don't really have an origin story," Ashley said. "It's genetic. My family had some screening done when my powers first came in." She waved her hand. "I get it from my dad, he had it latently. He got it from Grandpa Patrick and Grandpa Patrick thinks he got it from my Great Grandma because my Great Great Grandpa Slade had a mark exactly like this weird birthmark I've got.."

"Did great-grandpa Slade have powers like yours?" I asked.

"I don't know," Ashley said with a shrug. "He was long dead by the time I was born. All I know is that he was the bastard son of an Englishman and that he'd start ranting about Egyptians when he got drunk." She paused for a minute. "I think he meant Gypsies. That was back when they still thought that Romani people came from Egypt." She paused again. "Actually, now that I think about it, if he could get drunk he probably didn't have my powers."

"Your chemical resistance works on alcohol?" Dean asked uncertainly. Honestly, I wasn't sure I wanted to know why either.

"My chemical resistance works on everything," Ashley answered. "We did a lot of testing to see what medication would and wouldn't work on me. Doctor Tam even gave me a shot of whiskey once just to see if it would do anything. It tasted nasty and it never made it to my blood."

"So…" I began, "does anything work?"

"Strong opium drugs take the edge off of little pains, but they can't give a little kid morphine for the headache that comes with a sinus infection even if it's the only thing that works," she explained. "Enough horse tranquilizer to kill three men makes me a little drowsy, and vaccines work fine but we never found any, you know, get-better-faster medicine that worked. The only useful thing we ever learned from the testing was that I was 'technically producing large amounts of normal hormones and then the molecules in them were rearranging themselves into stronger hormones."

"How is that useful?" Dean asked.

"Because if it's molecule manipulation," Ashley said, "there's a chance that I could get a Secondary Mutation that lets me control it and then I could make myself not weak and sick all the time." She sighed. "My doctor thought I might secondary mutate on my own since my mutation came in way early for no apparent reason, but just in case he said he was gonna write to Doctor McCoy but that was around the time he was working with the Inhumans to try and cure M-Pox and then… Then the Sapien League burned down the clinic and we had to start looking for another doctor. Then I got kidnapped and spent a year being harvested to make Mutant Growth Hormone."

"I'm gonna take a wild guess," I deadpanned, "the Sapien League are domestic terrorists?"

"Anti-Mutant hate group," Ashley confirmed. "The clinic openly catered to mutant patients, so..." she sighed again.

"And Mister Snuggles' origin story is that his people invaded Earth, his parent got captured by the same people who kidnapped me, they were experimented on, he was born in captivity, also experimented on, then when the clones got loose he escaped, found me, we bonded, and he decided to help me."

Vista came out into the common room. She'd replaced her costume with some sweats that didn't fit right. The top was a little loose and the pull-string on the pants was pulled out as far as it went, tied in a knot, and then twisted around her waist as a belt.

"Hey, Missy?" Ashley asked. "How are you doing?"

"Everything is slightly too big and I hate the sound of my own voice," she replied. "Also, I'm a fucking tomato."

She plopped down on the floor between the couch and Dean's chair. "So what are we talking about?"

"Sharing origin stories," Ashley said.

"My parents are raging, bitter, assholic psychos who absolutely loathe each other and the judge who handled the divorce case was fucking retarded," Missy said in one breath. "Done."

"Oh...Okay," Ashley said.

"I'm gonna get home after they figure this out and the house will have been remodeled five times," Missy continued despite having claimed to have been done. "I'll be lucky if I'm in the same bedroom. That's the upside, I guess, that I don't have to deal with that shit for a while."

"...Would you like a hug?" Ashley asked while leaning forward.

"No, I'd like emancipation, a restraining order keeping both my parents a state away from myself and each other, to look my age, and to not be a fucking tomato!" Missy had started calmly but finished with an outburst that made Ashley recoil.

"You're not normally this open about your home life," Dean observed. Is that what Ms. Mystic meant when she said that Vista would be a living metaphor for her own issues? Kind of a shitty metaphor, she just comes out and says it.

"Why wouldn't I be!" Missy snapped as she jumped to her feet. "It's just another example of everything-nobody respects me, nobody cares about what I want or need. Not my parents, not the courts, not the PRT, and especially not Ms. Piggy! Even this," she gestured down to herself. "Nobody asked how I was feeling when I got to the infirmary, they just locked me in the emergency hazard room. I start to feel better and they let me out… But do I get a 'feeling okay?' or 'hey, take the rest of the day off and get some rest?' No! I've gotta go to power testing in less than an hour to see how the blasts I pulled out against the crystal creeps… They don't respect me, they don't respect any of us! We're just means to an end. Powers on legs."

"I respect you," Ashley said quietly. "Are you sure you wouldn't like a hug?"

"...Fine," Missy said after a moment.

Ashley sprung up and hugged Missy in one fluid motion. Missy slowly calmed down over the course of a minute. "Okay," she said, "you can let go now."

"No," Ashley said sternly, "you're warm."

This triggered Missy to start laughing uncontrollably.

I smiled. The incident with the Poisons had been rough, and they were still a threat to deal with, but for a few minutes, we were just hanging out and relaxing. Maybe bonding?

Everything had calmed down, Missy had joined Ashley when she returned to the couch, and then she spoke up. "So, Ashley, I've gotta ask… What's with the tattoo?"

"...I uh, I don't have a tattoo." Ashley denied. She sounded confused.

"That red pattern on your back? Between your shoulders?"

"Oh, that's a birthmark," Ashley said in understanding.

"...But it's red," Missy said slowly with her head cocked.

"Yeah," Ashely said. "Birthmarks can be red."

"But it's a symmetrical pattern," Missy countered. "Like, I only saw it for a second but I saw triangles around an oval or something."

"Well, it's a birthmark," Ashley said with certainty. "It's been there as long as I can remember" She laughed. "Seriously, who would get a tattoo for a little kid?"

"That's why I asked about it!"

This prompted Ashley to start giggling.

"So, it's gonna be a couple of hours before I can go see my Dad in the safe house," I started. "If you'd like, Vista, Cuddlebug and I could hang out while you're power testing… If uh, Dean doesn't mind being alone for a bit."

"I'll probably be here all night," Dean said. "I'll be fine for a little bit."

"Yeah," Vista said. "That'd be nice."