Snuggles The Symbiote

As it turned out, my parents had been buried in a cemetery in Queens. The same one my Grandpa had been buried in... I'm not sure why.

I mean, Grandpa Patrick had bought the funeral plot he was put in before my family moved to Manhattan. I mean... I'd been prepared to die ever since I was seven and the topic of death had come up a lot when Granpa Patrick had been watching me... He always talked to me honestly about those things, Mommy and Daddy got uncomfortable and kept changing the subject.

He'd told me once that his own father's unexpected death had been a huge inconvenience. He said his father was a cúl tóna and probably wanted it that way, but he figured that if he died suddenly that the inconvenience of making funeral arrangements and making sure final debts were paid would be a stress that Daddy didn't need and did his best to make sure things were taken care of ahead of time just in case.

But my parents? They'd been living in Manhattan for longer than I've been alive. It didn't make sense to bury them in Queens unless it'd been a screw-up in like... Like, the city took care of things like that if there hadn't been someone to do the arrangements, right?

It doesn't matter much, I guess, but it was weird.

Apparently I'd been out for a while. It was like, late night-early morning when Doctor Strange stopped me, but now it was the afternoon. It wasn't cloudy or rainy or gloomy or anything like that when Taylor and I got there. It was actually a nice day, not cemetery weather at all. My powers hadn't been completely sealed, so I was able to switch to my natural skin and eye colors instead of the kid-Apocalypse look and shift up some appropriate cemetery clothes(basically just my normal outfit in solid black.)

"Do you know what you want to say when we find them?" Taylor asked me.

I shrugged. "I don't know... It's not like they'll hear me or anything." Honestly, it was more that I needed to see the graves... I think. "I don't know... I uh... Expected I'd die before they did, so..." I was immortal now. Even without the thing that Doctor Strange didn't say because it didn't happen, I had Apocalypse's physiology and a bazillion healing factors. I'd spent my whole life preparing to die young but now it looked like I was gonna outlive pretty much everyone I knew. That was something I'd have to deal with eventually but I really didn't want to think about that right now. Or at all.

My parents were supposed to be buried off in a newer part of the cemetery. A lot of empty plots without headstones yet, so I figured that checking the names of paired up headstones would be the best bet to find them, but that still took a while.

"Taylor? Do, do you still trust me enough that we could split up and look?" I... I screwed up bad and I really didn't know where I sat with... anybody.

A spider crawled out of her sleeve and skittered up my arm and rested on my shoulder. Then she let go of my hand. "Don't go too far."

She didn't trust me, then, if she was keeping an eye on me... I guess that was fair.

It after another few minutes, I was pretty sure I'd seen every paired-up set of headstones and... In the corner of my eye, I saw a wooden cross-post like you'd use as a temporary headstone right next to an actual headstone with a woman tending to it... could that be it? I wasn't sure why it would be, but...

Getting closer, the woman looked... vaguely familiar. Like, she kind of looked like... The tombstone said "Yuri Fujimoto." I was about to turn back as a false alarm when the woman tending to the grave, leaving flowers and the like, turned around.

Looking at her straight on... She kind of looked like Mommy, but not exactly... And then she looked at me and her eyes narrowed into a glare. "You."

I blinked. "I'm sorry, I don't know who..."

"Of course you don't," the woman said with bile and venom dripping from her tongue. "Yuri would rather harbor gene-trash than have anything to do with her own sister."

Wait... When they first found me, Val had said that they'd looked into me and found out that I had an aunt who... Well, damnú.

"I'm just here to—"

"The second the doctor said you'd gotten the freak gene from your freak dad, I told Yuri that she should have just held a pillow over your face till you stopped struggling," she said evenly. "Her life would have been so much easier and no court in the country would convict for putting down a sick mutie."

I wasn't going to respond to that. "I'm just here to—"

"Assuming you actually were sick," she said while looking me up and down skeptically. "I thought that you genetic jokes couldn't get the same diseases as real humans. You were faking the whole thing, for attention, weren't you? I mean, you're clearly fine now?"

I narrowed my eyes. Now I was starting to get upset. "Miss. I'm just here to—"

She interrupted me again. I didn't remember Mommy being rude like so, so it's not genetic... "I don't see my sister for four years becuase of you and then—"

"Excuse me," Taylor said as she came up behind me. "What seems to be the problem here?"

"Buzz off!" My no-good-racist-aunt said. "This is between me and my no-good-mutie niece." And now I needed to take a shower.

"Why?"

"Scream, this is a situation where it is best that we keep quiet and let the humans be humans."

"Don't talk down to us, we're older than you."

"And yet we're the one with a stable permanent host."

Yeah, having an extra symbiote was gonna go great. Taylor set a hand on my shoulder.

"I'm sorry, it's just that I brought my foster sister here so she could visit her parents' graves and we're having trouble finding them... Yuri Fujimoto? She wouldn't have been married to a Sean Wei O'Leary, would she?"

This prompted my aunt to start screaming and cursing fast enough that I couldn't keep track of most of what she was saying. The words 'Mutie' and 'Mutie Lover' and 'Fuck' came up a lot and she finished by saying "bastard tainted the bloodline and I'm not putting his name on my sister's grave. Fuckhead's lucky I didn't leave his corpse in the street for the stray dogs to eat."

I took a deep breath. I was already upset but now I was starting to get angry and I had at least two different Hulk's worth of codices in me so... Wait, no, that was probably sealed away but still, getting angry wasn't gonna help.

"If those are her parent's graves," Taylor said calmly, "then she has a right be here."

"Mutants don't have rights," my aunt countered. Deep breathes, stay calm. "Besides, it's her fault that Yuri is dead."

...Well, I wasn't mad anymore. It started raining.

"Oh, and here come the crocodile tears," she said... what tears? I wasn't crying. It was raining. "Stop it, we both know that mutants don't have feelings." She kneeled down and started screaming in my face. "Yuri was murdered by people who were after you! It's your fault she's dead! And you didn't even have the decency to get killed by whoever took you! My sister would still be alive if she'd just smothered you when I told her to!"

"Regardless of your personal beliefs," Taylor began evenly but with something dangerous under her voice, "she does have a right to be here and..."

I didn't catch what Taylor had to say. I was shaking and... I ran. I didn't even think about which direction, I just ran and ran because I needed to be not there anymore and...

After I don't even know how long my spidey-sense went off just seconds before I tripped, tumbled over, and landed on my side with my back against a headstone.

I wasn't hurt, but I didn't get up, I just curled up and sat there with my eyes closed. I wasn't crying.

A little later I heard footsteps approaching before stopping in front of me. I cracked my eyes open to see red soft-soled shoes. I looked up. No. No. I did not deserve to have a conversation with Spider-Man. Not after what I did.

Which didn't stop him from crouching down to talk to me.

"So when I'm having a slow day, sometimes I like to come to the cemetery, pay a visit to some dearly departed loved ones, think about what I've learned from them or what things would be like if they were still here. I'm having a slow day, pop in, and I find that a kid I who know has been having a rough couple of days, curled up and crying and I think to myself 'this is more important.' " He moved around so he was sitting next to me. "Wanna talk bout it?"

"...No." I wanted to tell him that I wasn't worth his time and that he should just go do what he was here to do, but I didn't know how to say that and...

"Okay then," he said. Then he just sat there. "Read any good books lately?"

"No."

"What about movies?"

"...The Earth Bet version of The Princess Bride has Fezzik played by Robin Williams on stilts."

Spider-Man was silent for a few minutes. "...I can't decide if that's stupid or brilliant."

I shrugged. "Was alright. Also, Miracle Max is called Magic Mike in that version."

"...Speaking of changing the subject—"

"Why?"

"Speaking of changing the subject," Spider-Man insisted, "You feeling any better?"

I looked down. "Not really."

"You sure you don't want to talk about it?"

I was about to say yes, I was sure that I didn't want to talk when I suddenly exploded in tears and explained everything. From getting kidnapped to the bank and Panacea to my aunt just now and everything in between.

"I just feel so worthless. I want to help people but people keep dying because of me and getting hurt because of me and the bad guys keep winning and... People tell me that most of it isn't my fault but..."

"But even though you know that up here," Spider-Man said while pointing to his head, "nothing anyone says or does can make you believe it down here," he finished by tapping his chest over his heart. "They tell you that there were other people involved. That you're not responsible for the other person's actions. That it's just a symptom of a bigger problem."

"That you never should have been in that situation in the first place," I added.

"But at the end of the day, you know that if you'd made just one different choice, that they'd still be alive. You stay up at night pondering over what-ifs... Even when there's no conceivable thing you could have done you still wonder if you could have done something. Yeah, I know exactly what that's like."

That made something in my mind click. His codices had been part of the package that Doctor Strange gave me. a couple of his memories snapped me out of, but most of them had been lost in the flood but now... don't think about it don't think about it don't—oh, I thought about it. I didn't want to know why Spider-Man is and... aww, he copied Iron Man with the 'pretend to be my own bodyguard' thing. Spider-Man shouldn't have needed to copy Iron Man, he was objectively better than Iron Man in every way.

"You okay? You look like you swallowed a bug just now."

"I'm not any worse than I was, it's just... how do you deal with it all?" I... even with... "Like, I decided that I needed to be good enough that it didn't happen anymore and then... What the Hell is wrong with me, I agreed to take lessons with Apocalypse! When does that ever end well? I wasn't thinking, like... And I ate a guy!"

"Ashley, I probably shouldn't say this, but... Look, killing is wrong and a hero shouldn't do it, but in the case of Cletus Kassady, it's probably for the best. Even when he was turned good by a magic spell he was still a murderous sociopath. It wasn't right for you to... Eat his soul to improve the demonic part of your power, but you shouldn't feel... Too bad about it..." Spider-Man sighed. "Especially since I doubt it'll stick. He's like Jason Vorhees or Freddy Kruger, no matter how decisively he's beaten or how 'permanently' he's dead, he's always back to kill more people next summer. "

"I don't remember what happened while I was dead, but... I feel like I was given a choice, and if I chose right I could be a great hero, but I came back and chose wrong..."

"Ashley, back during the first Superhuman Civil War, over the Superhuman Registration Act—"

"The blatantly illegal law that violated the constitutional ban on slavery?" I asked.

"...Huh. Why didn't anyone think to bring that up at the time? Anyway," he continued, "after I switched from the Pro-Reg side to the Anti-Reg side, I had a little conversation with Captain America. He told me some things, about right and wrong, and gave this whole big speech about how people need to stand up for what they think is right and not cave in to pressure to do the wrong thing." He cleared his throat and started talking like he was reciting a quote: " 'When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world —' and you know what the last bit is?"

I shook my head, "no."

" 'No, you move.' "

I didn't get it at first, but then I realized what I'd said to Miss Militia when I insisted on arresting Jack.

"That Jack guy? You decided that just killing him without trial would be wrong and that for justice to prevail he needed to be tried and sentenced so his victims could have closure. Personally, I agree with that, and you stood up for that despite pressure to cave, just like Cap would." He patted me on the head. "I think you've got what it takes to be a great hero. Your heart's in the right place, you just... You're ten, and you've been through things that would break full-grown adults."

"I can't tell you how to cope with it," he finished, "because everyone reacts to these things differently. You can't cope with it the Spider-Man way, you've gotta cope with it your way. You understand?"

I nodded. "I guess."

"But, if I was to give some advice... And I'm going to sound like a huge hypocrite for saying this, but I think that, maybe, you should take a break."

"What?"

"It sounds like you've been thrown headfirst into one emergency after another without any chance to rest and compose yourself," he said, "some times with the bad guys coming after you specifically. even this, which was supposed to be a little breather to make sure that you and your friends were okay and then Arcade. So, I'll tell you what I told Daredevil a little while back: Take a break. Take the time to sort out your issues, get your head on straight, because you can't help other people's problems if you haven't dealt with your own."

"But, if I'm not there to...?"

"Do you trust your friends?" Spider-Man asked.

"Yeah, but..."

"Then you should be able to take a week or two off to de-stress or whatever you need to do to get back into top form."

"Okay, I guess..." I wasn't sure, but...

"So, back then when you were giving your little speech, you mentioned that I was the greatest Hero in this world," he said with kind of a jokey, fake-flattered tone. "But there are a lot of great heroes here. What makes me so good?"

"When I was three or four I fell out of the window. I would have gone kersplat on the street if you hadn't been swinging by at the right time. You saved my life and I've wanted to be like you ever since and that sounds incredibly dorky and I'm sorry and... You probably don't remember that, I bet that stuff like that is just a normal Tuesday for you."

I couldn't see his face behind his mask, but I got the feeling that he was starring at me intently. "Actually, I do think I remember a little girl with bright green eyes asking to do it again and trying to touch my mask when I carried her back up to her mom about six or seven years ago."

He remembered! I couldn't help but smile, then I kind of lost control of my disguise, shifted back into the Apocalypse girl look, blushed, and took a few seconds to try and get my normal girl look back.

"Uh..."

"So, your foster sister's been standing behind us for the last twenty minutes," Spider-Man finished. "I think that maybe I should give you back to her now, unless you're still..."

"I'm feeling a bit better now, so... Thank you."

I got up and turned around and, yeah, Taylor was standing there. I walked over to her. "Uh... I'm in trouble for running off, aren't I?"

"Not this time, no," Taylor said while taking my hand. "Now come on, your bitch-aunt's gone so..."

"What happened?"

"It was the strangest thing, just after you ran off a bee came out of nowhere and landed right on her nose. Didn't sting her or anything, but she ran off screaming bloody murder all the same..."