Snuggles The Symbiote
"Ulohb Grace Gdylv!"
Whenever she tried to think about who she was, she got a flash of a woman shouting that gibberish. She was forced to assume that her name was Grace.
It was dark and cold and every part of her body hurt. Also, she was covered in scales and had a tail. When the heck had that happened?
She remembered... Grace shuddered at the sudden intrusion of half-formed memories. the Slaughterhouse nine had... they'd killed her family and... A needle?
"Kid, focus. You've gotta get somewhere warm before you freeze to death." That was the little yellow box. The little yellow box was her friend. The little yellow box was always looking out for her and Grace had the sinking suspicion that if she'd listened to the little yellow box earlier she wouldn't be in this situation.
With the little yellow box's help, Grace was able to find a grate that let out hot air and a refrigerator box that would be comfortably warm if left near the grate. It was in a back alley where people couldn't see.
Crawl in the box, curl up nice and tight, stay warm. Grace tried to sleep, and ignore the constant bone-deep ache while the little yellow box explained that they'd need to find permanent shelter and food in the morning.
"Look, there are people whose job it is to help people in situations like this," the box said, but Grace... She didn't know why, but she didn't think she could trust... Anyone. Anyone except the little yellow box.
She tried to sleep, but every time she drifted off... Jumbled violence would fill her head. jumbled violence and pain. So instead, she merely rested.
Her big, floppy, bat-ear twitched. Someone was out there. She could hear faint footsteps. She pulled back and curled tighter, hoping that whoever it was wouldn't be able to see or sense her.
"Hello?" gently called out a little girl's voice. She sounded younger than Grace... Thought she was. "I know you're there," the voice continued.
Grace shivered. Whoever it was knew she was here, and, and...
"Kid," the little yellow box said, "I don't think that she's here to hurt you."
"I'm not gonna hurt you," the girl called out. "And I'm not gonna let anyone else hurt you, either. I'm here to help. I'd say scout's honor but I was never a scout. Probably would have gotten kicked out. Or hate-crimed." Grace wasn't sure if that was a joke or not.
"Just go out and see her. I think you can trust her." The little yellow box seemed so sincere, so Grace slowly, very slowly, crawled out of her box.
The girl who was looking for her was wearing a shiny golden suit. She'd had her back to where Grace was at first but slowly turned to face her. Her hair was black and her skin was sort of a blue-grey. her eyes were red. Grace shrunk back but the girl raised her hands. "Hey, I'm not here to hurt you. I'm here to help."
"Who are you?" Grace asked without getting up.
"...I'm Ashley," the girl said. "...What's your name?"
"...Grace? I think."
Ashley mumbled "oh boy," then stood up straight. "Okay, Grace. I'm gonna send off a text message and then I'm gonna bring you somewhere warm and safe. Is that okay?"
"It is," the little yellow box said. "You can trust."
Grace simply nodded, not knowing what to say.
Ashley pulled out her phone and sent a few texts. Then a few minutes later she asked, "so it'll be fastest if I carry you. Would you rather I fly you there or run you there with superspeed? Becuase I am a lot faster than I used to be."
Grace thought about it. More people could see if they flew, so she answered: "Run."
Ashley crouched down. "Get up on my back and hold on tight." Grace thought this was weird, becuase she was pretty sure she was bigger than Ashley, but Ashley seemed confident enough so Grace did it. "So, I can make tentacles and stuff," Ashley continued, "and I'm gonna use them to make sure you don't fall off while we're running so don't freak out. It should feel like a hug."
A slimy, sleek, metally feeling stuff wrapped around her and melted into a solid covering. It was kind of like a hug, but it mostly felt like a wet blanket.
"It's not too tight, is it?" Ashley asked.
"No."
"Okay." and then like a sprinter Ashley took off. Or maybe like a bullet. All Grace knew is that one second they were in an alley and the next Ashley was running and jumping across roofs and the wind was pushing against her ears.
After that, things kind of went fast. Ashley got Grace into a big government looking building where some people who acted scared of her gave her some warm, clean clothes to replace her tattered and bloody dress. Then Ashley escorted her to a safe-looking room with a strong, secure looking door and a small bed inside.
"Okay," Ashley said, "tomorrow we're gonna have some talks about what to do with you. I'll come and see you first thing in the morning but for now, it's time to say goodbye."
"No!" Grace screamed suddenly. Without even thinking, she wrapped her arms tightly around the smaller girl.
"Grace... You're crushing me."
"Sorry, sorry," Grace shouted, suddenly horrified at the thought of hurting someone. "It's just... I don't know why but when you said to say goodbye suddenly everything inside me got icy cold and..." Grace started hyperventilating.
"It's okay, it's okay," Ashley said while suddenly looking guilty. "How about I stay with you until you fall asleep? Would that make you feel better?"
"...Yeah."
So, they sat on the bed together for a bit. Ashley hugged Grace. Ashley was good at hugs.
Snuggles The Symbiote
The first thing she noticed when she woke up was that she was snuggled up to something warm. This wasn't unusual, she'd often have one of her zombies hold her while she slept or go to Mister Jack when she was having a bad dream. But she'd never made a zombie that felt so sleek. Bonesaw blinked her eyes open and found herself in a secure prison cell, sharing a cot with that crazy girl who kept calling her Riley and trying to save her. Apparently, she'd fallen asleep in her hero costume.
She sat up and looked at her hand. Claws and scaled. Slowly, everything that had happened ever since she injected that experimental mutagen into herself. In hindsight, maybe giving herself a retroactive healing factor before checking how it worked with cybernetics had been a bad idea, but that naive child had just made her so angry, and...
The child was fast asleep. And no one was around. If she wanted to, she could just dig her claws into the little idiot's brain and be done with it... except as soon as she got a claw maybe a millimeter away from the kid's grey face, she suddenly felt sick to her stomach.
She stumbled out of the bed, walked halfway across the cell, fell to her knees, a puked her guts up. When she was done, she dry heaved for a bit, then collapsed to the side and hugged her knees in the fetal position. Wave's of guilt rolled over herself as she suddenly thought about everyone she ever hurt... Even people she'd forgotten about.
What was wrong with her? She'd never felt bad about any of this before... Except for the first couple when she was six, but those didn't count, and... She heaved again.
"Maybe your healing factor is undoing six years of brainwashing and psychological trauma so you actually can feel bad now?"
"Shut up, you stupid box," she mumbled. "Psychology doesn't work like that."
"You okay?" Asked the idiot-child on the bed. She rolled over, not feeling strong enough to get up. The stupid kid was sitting up, wide awake on the bed. "Are you still Grace, or...?"
"It's Bone—" She shivered as if she'd stepped in something disgusting. "Riley," she admitted in defeat. "I'm Riley, are you happy now?"
"A little," the girl, Ashley, admitted with an honest chirp. "But are you okay?"
"I'm full of crushing guilt, I'm having intrusive thoughts about all the people I've ever hurt, and I feel violently sick every time I think about anything fun," Riley snarked. "Do I sound okay?"
Ashley got up, helped Riley up, and hugged her. "No, but you're gonna be. I promise."
"Why do you care?" Riley asked bitterly.
"I know that part of you wants to be good. I also know that you didn't get a fair chance—I looked it up, kill orders are done behind closed doors with no effort made to contact the people on trial. That's a violation of the fifth and sixth Amendments. And you were given a kill order just for joining the Nine, which is a violation of the first Amendment. Since it authorizes literally any means of killing you, it violates the eighth Amendment. And you were six when you got the kill order," Ashley finished, "which means that a judge looked at you after you were kidnapped by the people who murdered your parents and sentenced you to death for the crime of being kidnapped. No effort was made to rescue you. It's not your fault you were brainwashed. You were just trying not to die."
"So?" Jack might have... He'd been right about how awful people were inside and how little anyone cared about law or society when it wasn't doing what they wanted.
"So when trying to guilt-trip Alexandria about how she wanted to leave me to die didn't work, I spelled out all the ways that kill orders were illegal and how in your specific case getting one led directly to all the thousands of deaths from the people Jack made you kill or worse and threatened to take it to the media using you as an example of why the whole thing was immoral, unethical, and counterproductive." Ashley sounded dead serious. "Then I pointed out how there were enough anti-death penalty types and anti-kill order specifically types... And enough people who are super peed off about a judge who broke the law and sent a woman to the Birdcage on a charge that should have gotten her a slap on the wrist, I'm still waiting to hear back on a warrant so I can go to Boston and arrest his butt, that your story getting out might uh... Lead to court cases and lawsuits that would tear down the whole political system that supports kill orders and The Birdcage."
"So," Ashley finished suddenly all cheerful, "Alexandria agreed to put you in my custody until further notice and give me and you a fair shot to explain why you deserve a fair chance."
Riley blinked. "You blackmailed Alexandria to get me off the hook for thousands of homicides?"
"No," Ashley denied. "Blackmail is wrong. I threatened to tear down a corrupt but useful government system unless Alexandria did the right thing." Ashley paused for a minute. "I also threatened that if she tried to fight me on it I'd make it a literal fight and drag it out in public so she'd forever be known as either the bully who beat the crap out of a little girl or the scrub who got beat by a little girl. Apprently she considers her reputation more important than doing the right thing. Taylor said she was this world's Captain America but Captain America would have whooped her butt on principal."
"You talk a lot," Riley said after a moment.
"People say that," Ashley admitted. "Now, we're going to get some breakfast and then we're gonna talk to Alexandria. I recommend the chicken and waffles but the bacon is good too. People keep saying that if I keep eating like this I'm gonna have a heart attack by thirty but I'm pretty sure I'll be dead by sixteen anyway so..."
Snuggles The Symbiote
"Miss O'Leary," Alexandria began as Ashley led Riley into a conference room. "Please explain why these people are here." Ashley's last name was O'Leary?
The other people in the room were a girl in a black costume with a big white spider and sculped on anime hair. She had a bunch of belts and was leaning against a wall. Then there was the woman in a black and yellow costume with a horned or eared helmet. Riley could make out that she had long black hair. And a red and black-clad Ninja was sitting on the floor polishing a katana.
"He's the most handsome man in the universe," the little yellow box said.
"I asked them here because my argument is dependant on some facts that I can't prove so they're here to back me up," Ashley admitted. "First, to prove that even if it wasn't hilariously illegal, the kill order should be removed as an option completely." Ashley pointed to Riley, "the serum that made Riley look like this gave her the powers of Komodo, Stegron, Morbius, two different Goblins, and Deadpool." She pointed to the ninja. "That means that you physically can't kill her."
"Yep!" The ninja confirmed. He sounded like that cancer guy that Bloodbath had killed before she got a chance to finish play—her stomach churned. Torturing. Before she got to finish torturing. And experimenting on. And stuff. "I've survived being liquified. I've survived being reduced to my component molecules. I once regenerated from cells leftover in a pile of vomit. You've basically gotta make it so that every trace of me stops being biology and starts being physics to put me down for good." Deadpool sliced his own arm off at the elbow, bled all over the floor, and then stuck the arm back on. He flexed the fingers, showing it had instantly reattached. "And I'm great at parties. And if she's got Goblin, Lizard, and Living Vampire healing factors on top of that then she'll be healing faster and better than I do so even shredding her to atoms might not work."
"That still leaves the Birdcage as an option though," Alexandria said professionally. "I don't mean to seem cruel, trust me, my heart bleeds for an innocent trapped in a horrible situation, but after this much time, after everything, she's done... A child who killed thousands of people can't be rehabilitated. There's a point where she has to be treated like an adult, and she's passed it." She shook her head sympathetically "No reasonable person would just let her go after that. It's not a fair decision, but if she relapses..."
Ashley pointed to the short woman in the black and yellow, who sat up straight. "My name is Laura Kinney," she said, "I am the daughter of James Howlett and Sarah Kinney. I was born in captivity and from my earliest memories, I was raised to be a murderer and a weapon." she was so clinical bout it. "My first mission was to murder a presidential candidate, which I did. And his wife and children. And everyone else in the room." Even Riley was a little sick at how casual she was being. "The facility that raised me turned me out as an assassin for hire. My official body count is well into the thousands but unofficially... I can't even remember." She looked at Riley. "I managed to escape the control of my abusers when I was about Riley's age, by presenting myself as the sole survivor of the town I had been made to massacre down to the man."
"The only reason I'm here is that Captain America gave me a chance when he found out that I was being abused and controlled," Miss Kinney finished. "I'm still atoning for the harm I've caused, and I still have lingering...issues from what I did, but I'm living proof that someone like Riley isn't beyond rehabilitation. She's better placed than I was. She's only got six years of conditioning to overcome instead of from birth and with the programs that Ashley mentioned when she asked for my help, Riley won't have to go to such desperate measures as I did before my father and his family found me."
Riley leaned over and whispered. "Desperate measures?"
"I don't know everything about everyone," Ashley whispered back. Then she paused. "Mister Snuggles, I didn't need to know that."
"And just to drive the point home," Ashley finished. "Magic is real. Demons are real. A lot of people around here don't believe me when I say that, but it's true."
Mania stood straight, flexed her shoulders, and was engulfed in flames. When the fire cleared away, she had a fanged face where her mask had been, a pair of curly goat horns. Her feet were now cloven hooves. She was holding a mace and scary armor had been merged into her costume. A flaming pentagram burned into her chest and the lenses of her eyes glowed a fiery orange. "Yeah. I'm basically first in line to become Queen of Hell. Kind of an existential trip."
Ashley tapped her chest. When Riley looked at her, Ashley just gave a small smile and said "Heartburn." No wonder. Riley'd been kind of frightened by the way Ashley'd eaten and she'd judged an eating contest between Crawler and Siberian.
"I've got demon magic in me," Ashley explained. "I can put it in my eyes and then I can see people's sins." Fire burned in Ashley's eyes as they began to glow. "When I look at Riley, I see chains binding her to Jack, but when I look at... Oh, wow."
Ashley was looking right at Alexandria. "You've committed more sins than Riley has. And you're actually stained by them. Nobody forced you to do it, nobody manipulated you or..." Ashley was shaking.
Alexandria scoffed. "I think that's quite enough."
"How many people did you hurt?" Ashley asked, her fists slowly clenching and unclenching. "How many people are dead because of you? Or worse?"
Something flaming ignited on Ashley's chest and she lept for Alexandria. Alexandria, being Alexandria, caught Ashley by the shoulders. "You know, I could easily have you jailed for an unprovoked assault. As it is, I think you should count yourself lucky if I decide to just pretend that this meeting never happened."
Ashley responded by using a long reptilian tongue to rip Alexdria's helmet off. By this time the other heroes in the room were trying to pull Ashley back, but not before she did something that made Alexandria's eyes widen in terror.
"Your soul is stained, Alexandria! Now feel the pain and suffering you've inflicted!"
Alexandria let go of Ashley and fell over, allowing Ashley to be pulled back. The scary demon lady's hand caught fire and she pressed into Ashley's torso and suddenly all the flaming stuff on Ashley went out and she went limp.
"Okay," the woman said as she reverted to human form. "I've forced it back to dormancy, but where the hell did you get a Hell-Mark?"
"Uh dunno," Ashley mumbled in a daze. This prompted Miss Kinney to cuss as though she knew something but didn't want to share.
"Well, the good news is that you might get to be royalty if something happens to me," the demon lady deadpanned.
"Fine, just, just fine," Alexandria said as she got up and put her helmet back on. "Do whatever you want, I'll make it happen." Alexandria actually sounded scared. "But someday, someday soon, you're going to learn that you can't just unilaterally decide what right and wrong are and brute force the world into going your way."
"Is cuma sa toll feisithe liomsa," was Ashley's response.
Snuggles The Symbiote
How it'd worked out was that Riley Davis was declared legally dead, something helped by the pile of gore and cybernetics she'd left behind. Ashley was officially credited with the kill, but insisted that it had been a result of Bonesaw's own actions rather than Ashley's actions and so donated the Kill Order bounty to a charity that helped survivors of Slaughterhouse Nine attacks. (Riley had suggested that part.)
Meanwhile, a new Ward, not technically a Case 53 but treated the same due to similar circumstances, answering to the name "Gremlin" and given the legal identity of "Grace O'Reilly" (Which Riley... Grace felt was too on the nose, but whatever,) had joined the East-North-East program alongside new member Ms. Mystic(apprently, Tattletale was very happy with the probationary contract she'd worked out with Mr. Lafayette.) Since "Grace O'Reilly" hadn't actually committed any crimes, she wasn't technically a probationary Ward, but her contract had been immediately been bought out by Ashley(who could apprently do that)which meant that if she misbehaved it reflected poorly on Ashley and... After everything Ashley'd done, all the things that Riley... Grace didn't deserve, the idea of getting her in trouble kind of sickened Grace.
"Seriously, there's no way you're gonna be happy here," said Bonesaw's reflection in the mirror as Grace washed her face. Yeah, that had been a thing. A reflection of who she used to be talking to her, taking the place of her reflection, trying to convince her to go back to what she was before. Grace chalked it up to having injected the DNA of three lunatics into herself.
"Don't listen to her," the little yellow box said, "you're doing good and I believe in you, so please, believe in me who believes in you."
Bonesaw's reflection facepalmed and muttered about "darn weebs."
Grace ignored them and left back to the Wards' living room to sit with Ashley. Grace was semi-coldblooded now... Which made no biological sense, but neither did her new biology. Regardless, it meant that she occasionally needed to warm up her blood and Ashley had offered to let her leech her body heat as needed.
Also, it meant hugging and Ashley was a good hugger.
The other Wards gave her a lot of space and she couldn't blame them. Gremlin and Ms. Mystic would be formally presented after they, Ashley, Ashley's sister, Gallant, and Vista for a trip back to Ashley's homeworld to run some tests and introduce them to people who could help them with their new powers. Rose Red and some kid named Bruiser were also going back, but they were staying for good.
Apparently, the fat lady who ran the city when Alexandria wasn't here was mad about losing their new healer after only a week but her hands were tied.
Grace hoped that someone who knew demon stuff could help with that Hell-Mark thing because for the first time in forever, she was worried about someone else's wellbeing.