Snuggles The Symbiote
The Slaughterhouse Nine were, apparently, based in an abandoned storage facility in a particularly shitty part of town. Hopping the fence wasn't too hard, but once inside...
Every so often throughout the facility, there'd be an apparatus crudely assembled from a window fan, a vaporizer, and oversized compression tanks. The whole thing filled the facility with this thick green, sweet-smelling fog. It was being produced by the Nine, which was frightening enough. If it wasn't a Bonesaw plague, then what the fuck was it? Beyond that, it made it a little hard to see.
"Huh. Terrigen," Spider-Man said suddenly. "Weird, unless you've got Inhumans here but don't know about it, the only way to get Terrigen would be to extract it from the cells of cloned Inhumans and reverse engineer it. I'd be impressed if I wasn't pretty sure that a dozen or so people got murdered to do this."
"Isn't that the stuff that kills mutants!?" I shouted, concerned.
"In an impure form or in large concentrations, yes," Spider-Man admitted, "but Ms. Marvel didn't secondary Terrigenize the second we got here and she got a whiff of the mist. She didn't even recognize the smell. This is probably a watered-down knock off... If there are any Mutants in town who aren't protected, they're probably a little itchy right now but there's a couple of cures for M-Pox by now that should work fine. I'm guessing that Little Miss Mengele tested her knock-off on someone, it happened to be a mutant clone with an especially powerful allergic response, and she doesn't realize that her terrigen knock off is mostly harmless."
A streek of green light blasted apart one of the machines. "Mostly harmless or not, do you really think that just letting a band of murderers release a mutagenic gas into the city is a good idea?" Tattletale asked. I was a fucking mess, it'd only been a few minutes ago but I'd already forgotten that she'd been tagging along.
"Point," Spider-Man admitted.
"And we were given medicine for Ash..." I trailed off.
"Saw the leak, Ms. Hebert," Tattletale deadpanned. "You can just say her name." She blasted apart another machine. "Also, by any chance is that medicine a viscous red serum given to you by a bitch in a tux and a feather mask?"
I decided not to let her know that she was calling herself a bitch. "Well, she gave it to someone else to give to me but more or less."
"Just so you know, the key ingredient is the blood of some edgelord named Apocalypse. It'll work as cure-all just fine, but... Heads up, you're gonna be feeding the kid human blood."
"...Yeah," Spider-Man said awkwardly. "I was there when he attacked Washington DC. Looked into the aftermath. If it's the real thing it's legit, but uh... Ashley might have to cope with some side effects." He didn't clarify what those were.
"Discussion is fascinating, but Ashley's safety and wellbeing is this one's sole priority. Deal with Terrigen and side-effects of blood later. We save Ashley now." With that, Mister Snuggles started rushing down an alley of storage units and I ran after him.
About, maybe halfway through the facility, he slid to a stop in a manner that was almost cartoonish with his flailing noodle limbs. He reached under the garage-like door and ripped it clean from the wall with the agonizing screech of tearing metal.
Immediately, the zombie Hatchetface jumped out and tackled him. He seemed to have it in hand, so I slipped around them and went in.
Bonesaw had nailed the various parts of a particularly pale man with a batlike face to a wall. Ashley's lecture on the people who got cloned said he was most likely a clone of someone named Morbius the Living Vampire. Said he was a good man who was in a very bad position. If any of that applied to his clone, then he didn't deserve this.
Then I looked around, trying to find Ashley and noticed Bonesaw sitting on folding chair, reading an issue of the Love Bug comic book adaption and seemingly ignoring everything going on around her.
"Here for the kid?" She asked casually. Or not.
"Yeah. And you're not gonna stop me."
She waved a hand dismissively without looking up from her comic. "She's on the table behind the curtain in the corner. If she's still alive, you can take her. She's boring. She bores me. I can't even stay mad she's so boring. I filled her up with poison and was waiting for her to die, but it's taking forever. Just take her. I won't stop you. I won't help you if someone else tries to stop you, but I won't stop you."
I eyed her suspiciously, but my spider-sense wasn't going off.
Without taking my eye off of the murderous child, I edged around the toom to the corner and pulled back the curtain. Only then did I look away from Bonesaw and—
"SWEET JESUS FUCK!"
"Don't cuss. It's rude, crude, and shows a bad attitude." I ignored the demented little psycho.
Ashley was breathing. That was a good sign. But there were tubes and wires and junk jammed awkwardly into every part of her body from the neck to ankles. From head to toe were some very, very painful looking rashes, her eyes swollen shut, and that breathing was in the form of pained wheezes. Her veins were green, bloated and pressing up against her skin, probably from whatever it was that... What the hell kind of poison was this? She was supposed to be immune to this kind of crap. I almost didn't notice the fresh surgical wounds up and down her torso that had been crudely stapled shut.
"Ashley? Sweety? Can you hear me?" I asked.
Her head turned to me. "Ay-er?"
"Yeah," I said while pulling tubes out of her arms and legs and ignoring the knots my stomach was twisting itself into. "I'm here. I'm gonna get you out of here. I've got some medicine for you. Do you think you can swallow?"
"Ug." I didn't know what that meant.
"So Tattletale is standing watch, the symbiote is smashing Frankenstein's monster's ugly cousin into pudding and the killer kid's just kind of... Oh." Spider-Man was coming up behind me. "That's M-Pox. That's terminal M-Pox. I'm pretty sure that's the worst case of M-Pox on record."
I took out the medicine, the blood serum, pulled the cork, and started slowly pouring it into Ashley's mouth a little at a time so she didn't choke. She seemed to be able to swallow a little bit at a time without much problem but with her mouth open, I could see that her throat was swollen.
It took a full minute to finish administering the medicine, but the horrible, horrible rashes were starting to recede. She started coughing. "Medicine tasted like blood."
"Yeah. Okay, I just need to get you out of here," I said while plucking out the last of the tubes and wires. "Then we can work on..." I didn't even know what I was talking about anymore. I just wanted to get my foster sister somewhere safe.
"Can't leave..."
"Ashley," I said as I put my arms around her and made to pick her up, "I know you feel bad for her but you can't talk her down or save her."
"No," she said hastily while I picked her up, "I mean—Urk!"
She suddenly went limp in my arms, her eyes glassing over. She wasn't breathing anymore.
"Oh," Bonesaw said overly sweetly. "Did I forget to tell you about the springloaded blades I stuffed in her and set to go off and shred her heart, lungs, stomach, liver, pancreas, spleen, intestines, bladder, and three different parts of her spinal cord if someone picked her up off the table? Stupid, silly, forgetful me." And then she started giggling. Not maliciously, or mockingly, but in genuine mirth. Like she was a normal little girl gossiping about which boys had cooties.
Within seconds, Mister Snuggles slithered up around me and forcibly took Ashley's body out of my arms. I didn't fight him. I watched as he deformed and wrapped himself around the cooling body of his host... My little sister... And then everything else around me faded away.
The next thing I knew, I was outside. Slamming Bonesaw's head into a shattered piece of concrete. Again and again and again and again and again. The little piece of shit was still giggling. "Oh my gosh." Slam! "I wish I could have seen the look on your face." Slam! "When I tricked you into killing your own foster sister!"
I heard a clinking sound which, combined with my Spider-Sense, brought me fully back to reality. I had just enough time to notice something small, and orange, like a miniature metal jack-o-lantern in the corner of my eye before I had to jump to avoid the massive explosion.
From my new perch atop one of the non-exploded storage units, I could see that the rest of the Nine, or what was left of it, had come back from wherever they'd been. I recognized Jack Slash with his resemblance to Johnny Depp and his midriff exposing shirt and the sharp knife in his hand. He had an arm around Tattletale and was pointing the tip of the blade at her temple. Even from this distance, I could make out that she had some nasty cuts.
Next to him was a muscular man with dark hair, his eyes yellow and his face fainted grey. He was tossing up another one of those... Pumpkin bomb things and then catching it again. Opposite of the grey-faced man was a savage-looking woman with two rows of cigarette burns down. Burnscar. A pyrokinetic who could teleport through flames.
Up above them, dressed all up in a costume of stained glass, was Shatterbird. She could control sound and glass. Or anything that was too much like glass. The shards of glass that still littered the streets hours latter were a testament to her power.
And then I realized that I was still holding Bonesaw. Who was still laughing at her demented "joke."
Just as I prepared to throw her headfirst at Jack in the hopes that he'd let Tattletale go to catch his medic, something big and green aught my eye. I turned, ever so slightly, to see that Spider-Man had set a giant chrysalis on top of a storage unit out of the Nine's line of sight and they seemingly hadn't noticed him. Where the fuck had that come from? Spider-Man looked at me and put a finger to his mouth would be under his mask, telling me to be quiet, while he carefully stepped over, across the roofs of the unit, to get directly behind the Nine.
Whatever he'd been planning, however, did not come to fruition, becuase just as he got into position, the chrysalis split open with a wet crack. Inside was a child, sitting in the fetal position, who slowly stood up.
Ashley's skin had changed color to a pale, greyish, purplish-blue color. The Blood Red Birthmark on her back, the oval, with a horizontal line through it, and the four wedges around them that formed a larger oval had grown from hiding between her shoulders to cover her entire upper back. Then her gold-and blue symbiote oozed out of her pores and formed a writing mass around her and obscuring everything but her head.
"En Sabah Nur..." She said.
"En Whatta-who-now?" Bonesaw asked. God, I wanted to just choke the life out of her.
"It means 'The First One' in an ancient language spoken on the outskirts of Egypt thousands of years ago. It's the name of the oldest confirmed mutant, and was given to him becuase he was believed to be the first of a new breed of humanity." Ashley explained. She'd explained it before, in a lecture, but now it sounded... sinister.
"For over five millennia, En Sabah Nur has terrorized the world under the name 'Apocalypse.' This symbol on our back?" She said as her symbiote began forming the basic shape of a costume around her, her birthmark emblazoned upon her back. "It means that we are Nur's descendant." What now? Why hadn't she said anything about it before?
I could just barely hear Tattletale muttering "fuck" under her breath repeatedly.
'We are unique. Reborn. Reforged. Mutant, symbiote, inhuman, Kree, gamma rays and cosmic power, mystical and scientific enhancements, even a dragon all combined into one by a symbiote and a mutant undergoing Terrigensis. Something that has never happened before. Can we even be called human anymore, biologically speaking? Or are we something else? Something new? The point is... We are the first of our kind now. We are En Sabah Nur now. And we shall be..."
Her costume stopped forming now. Before, it was a skin-tight costume that, comparing, somewhat resembled Spider-Man's or at least took design cues from it. Now it more resembled a power armor. Gold through most of it but blue at the joints. Bulky torso, gauntlets, and greaves/boots but still lean, like the old costume in-between. And cables from her back hung loose but connected to the gauntlets. She turned around to look down on the Nine. On the front of her armor was the same Spider-Emblem as before, but now there was a giant gold "A" in the middle of the oval that formed the main body of the stylized spider. But that only caught my eye for a second. Her face was more of a draw. Her lips were now a dark metallic blue and her eyes... The eyes that had been a bright, optimistic green were now a soul-piercing, malevolent red.
She smiled, almost sadistically as a mask somewhat like Agent-Venom's but in her own colors wrapped around her head. Then she finished her speech and my heart sank.
"A Superior Apocalypse!"