The Warrior with No Name
By The Odd Little Turtle Named Froggie
(Marvel characters not mine… have a few I added myself...
The timeline in the last few chapters has been going back and forth as the perspectives changed –Is it just me or is Chronological Order is ebil? With an unladylike snort, 'To Hell with it,' I say. More experimentation with the view points ahead.
Extra flavoring: I seem to be going through a Spiderman kick. I'm not really a fan of Spidey, but he was a logical addition. Inspired to add him after reading Author376's Stolen Child, which is great with a capital G- R- E- A- T.
As always, input welcomed.)
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Journal Entry: April 5th
I have found new meaning to the phrase, "Up in smoke." I was under the impression that it was merely a title to a funny movie. There's nothing funny here.
Illyana and I will go back in a few days to see if anything is salvageable. At least it was my home and not my gallery. Homes are replaceable after a fashion. I don't think I would be able to recoup the loss of the gallery. Or my sister.
Katya is religious. Perhaps she will pray to her god for me. Anything will help at this point.
I wonder if she would like to see the gallery.
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The heat was intense. Orange, red and yellow flames licked at the floors and up the walls. Black clouds billowed forth and up the through the stairwell, choking the life from the old building. Ricky Gonzalez made sure it would burn for a while. He, Carlito and Victor had doused the stairs, the banisters, some of the walls all the way up to the fourth floor while Juan and Manuel had drenched the Old Broad's apartment and the foyer. Manuel had told them to be careful up the stairs. There were still a few lights on past the first and second floors. He was the boss, so Ricky listened to him. He knew Manuel's creed. "No witnesses, no jail time."
Although Manuel had told him not to, Ricky disabled one of the fire escapes. There was no way he was going to jail for this. If everyone died, then nobody would be able to pin it on him. And no one would be the wiser if he grabbed a few things on his way out.
What he hadn't counted on was how fast things would burn. They hadn't stuck around in the last three. Ricky wanted a memento for this one. This one was special.
He also wasn't counting on the flashover.
The superheated gases that had accumulated on the ceiling of the Old Broad's living room and mixed with the accelerant disbursed everywhere, caught fire while he was nosing around effectively trapping him. The only way out was the window and down the sabotaged fire escape.
Should'a lissened'ta Manuel, he thought as the he tried desperately to get the window open. Breaking it, the wind howled in, feeding the now ravenous fire. A deafening explosion, as flammable gases met the greedy, hungry flames, choked him burning his lungs, his face, and his torso. Everything went red and then he nothing more as the powerful blast knocked him back into the wall.
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Smoke.
White Wolf. No.
No!
Sheer black fright swept through Illyana when the building trembled, blood pounding in her ears. Moments later, the fire alarm sounded in the hallway outside the apartment, the shrill cry of it resounding in her veins.
"Piotr!" The ninja-trained Goth gripped her brother, too petrified to move.
Fire.
Anything but that.
Memories of Russia came back unbidden. The men in black robes who shot Mama and Papa while eleven-year-old Illyana watched from the crack in the cupboard. The smell of gasoline being dumped over their bodies.
Illyana's breathing hitched, her fingers biting into her brother's flesh as she clung to him for support.
No.
More memories. More horror. The red and orange flames licking at her, the black smoke choking her. The miraculous manifestation of her mutant power. Then the bitter cold of the snow and the biting pain from a broken arm when her disk dumped her out six feet above a snow-covered tree stump outside the burning dacha. Her breathing increased, coming in heaving gasps, her vision becoming spotted.
No!
Piotr held his sister as she clutched him, trembling, gasping for air like a fish. Illyana had problems with the open flame of his gas stove. He couldn't imagine how she would handle this. What had his Little Snowflake been through that she would throw out all of Wolverine's training?
He cast his worried gaze about the room, his chest tightening. His blue eyes took in the smoke creeping its way from the entrance of his apartment, clinging to the high ceiling. The door appeared to breathe, piping in more tendrils gray. He was about to lose everything.
No.
Not everything.
The training that had been ingrained into him by Gospodin Xavier, the times he'd used the training to rescue his comrades, the memories came back to him. He had killed someone to save his comrades, to save the world, to save his sister.
He took a soul cleansing breath. The man known as Colossus was dead no more.
Piotr kneeled down in front of his fifteen-year-old sister, taking her rigid hands into his much larger ones. "Breathe, Illyana," he said gently, urgently. She blinked, the cloudiness in her eyes receding, and she tried to regain her composure. "Good. Breathe." The larger Russian breathed with her, hoping it was working.
"Mikhail," she panted and he nodded.
"Get to the fire escape. I'll get Mikhail." He pushed her in the direction knowing that her fear was something she would have to overcome herself.
She was back in his arms a second later, black fingernails digging into his shoulders. "Don't leave me!"
"Get the window open for me," he tried again softly, his brain trying to come up with something that would keep her from panicking. He knew how much she wanted to be an X-man, how much she wanted to save people the way she could not save their parents. Hoping that now was a good time to play the hero card he combed a large hand through her oddly streaked tresses. "Mikhail must be rescued. Help me rescue Mikhail."
She nodded, appearing somewhat calmer than before.
Her shrill scream pierced his soul when an explosion rocked the building, and for the first time in years, Piotr used his powers. It was like flexing a muscle long forgotten, felt an ache he never realized he'd missed. His skin and body mass shifted. His sense of touch, taste and smell were all but gone. It unnerved him when his vision dimmed. It had been far too long since he'd changed to remember the feeling of sensory deprivation. The increase in mass shredded his shirt, his pants as he changed from six foot six and two hundred fifty pounds to seven foot two and five hundred pounds. He ripped the fragments off, foregoing all but his underwear. It was not the first time he was glad he didn't wear tighty-whities, as Illyana called them. The cotton would have ripped, had that been the case. The stretchiness of the Speedeez fabric aided in preserving some modicum of modesty.
If 'modicum of modesty' means: 'a seven-foot-two, heavily-muscled, anatomically-correct, steel-covered man with only a scrap of overstretched black elastic covering his groin and butt.'
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Muted senses be damned, Spiderman knew smoke when he smelled it. He itched all over as his spider sense kicked in. Eyes darting to and fro, he shot webbing at a greater speed, using all of his enhanced strength to get to where he needed to be. A twenty had convinced a homeless man to direct Spiderman to Pelham Parkway South, and just ahead of the super human sat the building he knew was the home of Kitty's friend.
The last thing he'd expected was to have to rescue people from a fire. Flames engulfed the building quickly. Yellow-gold and orange flames rolled up the sides. He didn't hear any alarms, and there were no people on the street. Without hesitating, Spidey rushed to the top of the building, the only part that wasn't on fire. He threw open the roof's door and stormed in, hitting the fire alarm on the way down and kicking open another door. He found the occupants sleeping and yelled for them to get up. Not waiting for them, he opened their window and told them to take the fire escape.
An explosion rocked the building and, for all his super senses, Spiderman found himself kissing the floor. The two tenants had grabbed their daughter and were headed out the window. Spiderman wrapped them in webbing and yanked them out as he fled to street level. They shrieked in terror.
He was about to shoot another piece of webbing when a glowing disk appeared in front of him. His heart did a flip when three people immerged. Was he going to have to take on bad guys too? Only having a moment to study them, he realized they weren't a threat. A teen-aged girl with streaked hair and black running make-up, a distressed-looking woman in sweats, and a toddler were left in its wake when the disk disappeared.
"Magic, momma," the toddler said, "magic."
"Yes," the woman agreed, put her hand on the teenager's shoulder, tears in her eyes, "that was magic. We never would have gotten out of there alive."
The girl only nodded, looked shaken. "You should get yourselves a safe distance away," she told the woman in a thick accent. Bosnian? Russian? Kazakh? Spiderman wondered. "I do not have a phone to call 911."
"You're going back in there?"
The teen-ager looked up at the building a moment, and seeming to come to a decision. "Da. My brother. He—"
Spiderman didn't hesitate any further and flew into action. He arched his back, toes pointed and landed lightly on the roof. Pushing himself to stand, he thought, "Ooo, shiny."
The shiny turned out to be a man. A big man who was charging full speed at him after having leapt over ten feet from the building next door. The behemoth's chest and powerfully moving legs glinted in the moonlight as all that covered him were a pair of black Speedeez underwear. And then he recognized the behemoth.
"Thought you were dead." Spiderman looked up at the towering X-man formerly known as Colossus—or was it the man named Colossus formerly known as an X-man? he wondered trying to remember the man's real name.
"Pretend I am," Colossus told him, his steely, heavily accented voice biting into the other super human's skull. "Kitty asked you to come." It wasn't a question as he ripped open the door behind the super human and ducked into the building.
What are the odds? Spidey wondered as he charged in behind the glinting metal body. Still, he hadn't seen Colossus in a good ten years, couldn't even remember his real name for that matter. Wasn't during that weird fight with Deadpool that Wolverine had told him Colossus was dead? Maybe to Wolverine thought he was.
"Thieves in the area," Spiderman told the Russian mutant.
"Probably same thieves." He didn't even bother with correct English. He had much more pressing issues to worry about anything but rescue. The much larger man ducked through flames and pried open doors, working fast to get the occupants to safety. Spiderman activated the breathing vent under his mask by pressing a button on his left web shooter and followed Colossus into the stairwell.
A sharp, terrified scream pierced the night, and Spiderman went to work. He'd get answers from the X-man later. Oh, yeah, definitely.
By the time the fire department had the fire controlled enough, Spidey was exhausted, the hair under his mask dripping with perspiration, his costume singed in many places. He was sure he stank, but the breathing vent filtered everything out. His enhanced muscles were reaching their limit, and he still had to get home.
It had taken hours to get the blaze under control. Not everyone in the building had been lucky that night. Death always weighed heavily with him, especially when he felt he could do something about it. Heaving a sigh, he walked over to Colossus and the teen-ager with streaked hair.
Illyana watched Spiderman in awe. He'd really come to their rescue, just like in some of Piotr's stories to her as a child.
"Snowflake," Piotr said in Russian as Spiderman approached, "Mikhail is on the roof in her cage. Our emergency bag is there too." He pointed to the building adjacent theirs. Illyana nodded and called a disk to take her away.
"Where's she going?" Spiderman asked.
The man known as Colossus regarded the shorter man somberly, his organic steel-covered face revealing nothing. "You ask a dead man questions?" he finally inquired in English.
Peter Parker only tilted his head to the side. "Yes?"
A smile, or what looked like one, chipped at Colossus's mouth. He said nothing.
Illyana returned shortly thereafter with a caged yowling cat and small duffle bag. Once a super hero, always a super hero, Spiderman thought, knowing instinctively that the duffle bag had at least one change of clothes, toiletries and some form of identification.
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(and away we go…
Input welcomed! Yeah, I know I've got some 'splainin' to do. A few more chapters like this and then the 'real' KIOTR starts.)