A belated Happy Halloween to everyone.

This uh... I'd feel remiss in not saying that some people might find parts of this 100% Non-Canon oneshot a bit disturbing. There's nothing too graphic, but this is a Horror snip.

That out of the way

Bad End

The city was drenched in blood.

Wherever it wasn't, it was on fire.

At least, that's how it was the last time I saw it.

It'd been such a beautiful day outside. Birds were singing. Flowers were blooming. On days like today, kids like me should have been playing outside.

And then every piece of glass in the city shattered all at once.

So soon after the poisons, we weren't prepared. They broke into the base. Klara died crying and begging for someone named Molly.

Everything happened so quick. We had to flee, the... Nightmares of stitched flesh and crude steel. There so many of them. Some of them even had symbiote powers and I could have sworn that one of them was what would happen if you sewed Cyclops and Deadpool together and then gave them sword arms.

We all got separated in the chaos and had to make our way to a rendezvous point on our own and... Oh God, there were so many. So many people dying and I couldn't save anyone... I found Donar dead. By Thor's golden locks not even the worst racist son of a... Bhitseach deserves that. I tried to grab Mjolnir from the... puddle it was in, to try to save as many people as I could with its power, but I still wasn't Worthy.

I had to leave it when I saw Fucking Carnage himself leading some of the mechano-super-zombies in a mob down the street I was on to slaughter any stragglers... I was never going to forget the woman who called out to me when he impaled her through the stomach on the blunt end of a sledgehammer but I couldn't... I couldn't save her. I couldn't save anyone.

I ran. There was a rendezvous point for this exact situation, we had to meet there and regroup, but I couldn't help notice that "Carnage Rules" was scrawled in blood on every streetcorner that wasn't on fire and... So many people were dead already and it hadn't even been an hour. What happened!?

I stepped over what I'm pretty sure was the body of Norman Osborn in an iron patriot suit... that got blown up.

The only other person to make it to the rendezvous point, an office building set aside for meeting with all the capes of a city in case of like, giant monster attacks or something, was Taylor.

But she wasn't Taylor anymore.

Someone had sewn two muscular pairs of arms, one black and one white, above and below her natural arms. They didn't line up just right and there was fresh scaring on her head that...

She leaned and spider-crawled to me and opened her mouth to vomit out darkness and spikey, meaty spiders the size of footballs. Everything went black and something bit me and then I was here.

Helpless again.

My blood being slowly sucked out of me again.

But it was different this time. Before I was helpless becuase I was too weak and sick to move.

Now I was helpless becuase I was infected by some poison or venom. Something strong enough to get past my resistance.

Something that paralyzed me but left me feeling everything. Even things like my heartbeat that I couldn't feel before.

It kept Mister Snuggles from moving, either. I couldn't even hear him.

But like I said. I could feel.

I could feel the razor edge of the knife and the blond girl's hands digging through my intestines as she poked and prodded to see how Mister Snuggles bonded to my organs.

She was saying something, but I couldn't hear her over the agony that I don't even have the words to explain.

I had a mouth, but I couldn't scream.

After I don't even know how long, she left. She just left me cut open and laying on a table, starring helplessly at the fluorescent light above me.

What felt like an hour of agony later, I smelled something. Something other than the metallic scent of my own blood. Something like, like rotten eggs and a charcoal fire.

And then I felt something climb up onto the table with me. Something slowly slither up my body, through my wounds... It probably would have hurt more if it'd happened a day ago, but a day ago I didn't know what pain was.

And then it was up above my head, looking down at me, a white scaled snake with eyes that glowed like coals. It was surprisingly clean. It flicked out its forked tongue to lick a dry tear from my cheek, and then it's mouth moved like it was a human mouth, a disturbing movement for a snake.

"Please allow me to introduce myself," it said in a deep voice. Like Thor, but without any warmth, "I'm a man of wealth and taste." I think he was trying to be funny but in a mean way. "I can't help but think that you're in quite a pickle, little girl... But I can help you out of it, for a price that is..."

I did my best to glare at him.

"Don't look at me like that," he said. "I don't want your soul... Even after all of this, your soul is far too good and pure, a little mote made of love and sugar. It'd burn the Hell out of me if I tried to claim it. Pun not intended. Normally I'd offer you... Vengence, for what's been done to you. To your friends. To your family, but you've already had a taste of Vengence and, while you find it a useful tool, you're much more interested in Justice of all kinds. You want to be a Symbol of Peace and Justice. A hero who eradicates evil, who fixes or destroys what doesn't work. You want power and the responsibility that comes with it. Tell you what? Some people owe me a few favors and a certain someone is looking for a partner or two... I can give you enough power to live up to the Ultimate responsibility."

I kept glaring.

"Seriously, people look at fiends such as myself and judge us so unfairly," the snake said with a roll of his eyes. "Not everything we do is evil... Even the man you idolize has dealt with my counterpart in your native reality on one occasion." That was a lie. It had to be a lie. "Now, you aren't upset? You don't feel cheated by the injustice of this all? The future mystic said it was a stable time-loop. That you'd grow up, be happy, be an Avenger. This wasn't supposed to happen. Someone cheated, young child of Akkaba, to make sure this came to pass when it shouldn't have" Akkaba? What did that mean? I tried to ignore him. You're not supposed to listen when the Devil cuts a bargain, but...

"The world is going to end, child. As soon as two years, as late as fifteen. Captain Universe failed and I... take offense at my favorite playthings being destroyed by some worm forsaken by both Hell and God. I can give you the power to stop it. To avenge this travesty. Heal your body. Cure your sickness. Give you the powers you were meant to have and those of your Mutant ancestors, mend your partner and grant him the full brunt of the powers he's absorbed, and give you an even greater power that has nothing at all to do with my infernal own. I've cleared it with my counterpart in your reality so as to have no conflicts, cashed in my favors, Her Majesty is willing... The only thing I ask of you is that you kill Scion for me. Trust me, he deserves it."

What?

"If you're willing, all you need to do is say my name. I hope you've guessed it."

I tried to speak. I needed to say something. I worked up all my strength and forced it into my lungs, and managed to wheeze three syllables.

"Me... Phis... to."

The snake smiled and melted away and then above me there was a red-skinned man with a colossal, spikey widow's peak. "She's willing, my lady. I leave the rest to you, per our arrangement," and vanished in a puff of smoke.

And then I burst into flame. Again, I learned a new definition of pain. But then it faded, and I could hear Mister Snuggles again.

"Ashley, what have you done?"

*All Hell Breaks Lose*

The city was doomed. He didn't know how they'd done it, but the Slaughterhouse Nine had stepped up their game significantly. Soon, the rest of the Protectorate would be here, from all over the country. And some independents too. And PRT Quarentiene squads. they'd either slaughter the Nine or trap them in the city for the foreseeable future.

He'd failed, Armsmaster thought as he slashed one of Bonesaw's zombies apart with the nanothorns he'd been preparing for use on the Endbrigners. He was the leader of the Protectorate in this city. He was supposed to protect it.

Now the only honorable thing to do was to buy time for the reinforcements to get there or die trying and...

He hadn't been expecting the pile of charred Bonesaw creations.

Or the... dismembered remains of all identified members of the Nine, save the Siberian, in the middle of the street.

The flaming van was expected, he'd passed several.

But the oddest thing of all was Cuddlebug, alive and well, surrounded by all the Carnage.

"Cuddlebug?" he called out. He'd honestly written her off, after finding the evidence that she'd been dragged off from the rendezvous point. He was hesitant to accept that it wasn't a trap. Those corpses could be doctored, but he had to hope that there was one other survivor.

She didn't answer.

"Ashley?"

The girl's costume, he symbiote, began to swirl from specific patterns to gold marbled through with dark blue.

"Ashley's dead," she said in Cuddlebug's voice. "After all of this? We can't be Ashley. We can't be Mister Snuggles. We can't be Cuddlebug. Innocent. Cutesy. It doesn't fit us anymore."

His lie detector registered everything as Ashley completely believing everything she said. It was heartbreaking.

"But you are, or were, the person I'm asking about, yes?"

"Yes."

It registered as the truth. That was a relief.

"Then what do you want to be called now?" They could work out more important details, like getting her some therapy for the PTSD she was guaranteed to have after this nightmare, once he got her the hell out of here but before he could do that he needed to be able to communicate with her.

The dark blue swirls in her costume suddenly turned blood red. She began to levitate off the ground, far higher than she was normally limited to, and Armsmaster grew concerned again.

"We are fire!" she shouted.

The swirls of blood-red overwhelmed the gold, inverting her palet so that she was cloaked in metallic red with accents of gold marbled through.

"And life incarnate!"

The costume settled. A golden bird emblem on her chest and golden eyes were the only things that werren't solid red. Her wings, far larger and stronger than before erupted from her back, and her eye lenses formed into jagged crescents as her mouth tore open to show her fangs and long, forked tongue.

"Now and forever," she concluded as she burst into flames which formed around her as a giant bird of prey, "We! Are!Phoenix!"

Ashley had told them about the Phoenix Force. And now it dawned upon Colin in horror that the Slaughterhouse Nine might be gone, but now an emotional and traumatized child may have become something far worse.

AN: Again, a Belated Happy Halloween to anyone who made it through the whole thing.