AU oneshot. This was an AU that hit me while I was writing Thrill of the Chase. Despite the hugeness of this idea I have no plans for expanding this. It tastes too much like Sue already.
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Alarms blared as the emergency systems labored, trying to contain the horror within. The figure within the blast, at ground zero, stumbled as he ran out of the destruction.
The pain was blinding as slowly his body began to dissolve under the oppressive heat and corrosion of the experiment gone wrong. There was no time, no chance of recovery. He fell to the lab floor, flesh splattering wetly as his blood oozed and boiled.
Had to get... to the...
Got them!
He slipped the large metal gauntlets over his crumbling hands. They covered the hideous fact that he could see the bones of his hands. Hopefully they still had enough movement...
The gauntlet's claws unsheathed. He stabbed them into his chest and pulled.
Within his ghost half packed its bags, collected a complete set of memories, and let go. The gauntlets tore him out of his crumbling body, still somehow alive despite all that had happened to it. Wet labored breathing filled the room, somehow louder than the alarm klaxons still blaring. White-filmed eyes stared up at him, one ruined hand blindly reaching up. Blistered, bleeding lips mouthed something, a ragged whisper.
"I'm... scared..."
He knelt down, putting one black gloved hand on the human's head. Hair pulled away as the skin sloughed off. "Don't be afraid," he said. "I'm here."
The metal gauntlet came off. One ruined hand came up to touch his face, trailing blood and gore down his cheek. He kissed that hand, tasting blood, acid, ectoplasm. Fire and death. "I'm here," he repeated.
Broken lips smiled before that hand fell limp, the eyes going dim.
Plasmius wiped the blood off of his face. He couldn't linger, no matter how unsettling it was to watch his human half die. The fire was spreading into the chemical supplies. The suppression systems weren't stopping it. He had no chance of saving the lab. Or his human half.
He took one last look at everything. The lab, the equipment and inventions, that was nothing. But the body had been his prison, his home, his chariot for over twenty years. He held the man's memories, his personality, his self in the back of his mind, as cherished as his own. Everything the human accomplished had been due to the ghost's presence. Everything the ghost learned had been due to the human's influence. It had been a trade, not equitable but still a trade. That trade was not yet over.
No, not yet.
Plasmius entered the portal, headed to the separate cloning facility.
There was a tank there. A mindless clone, a blank brain ready for imprinting with a personality, a set of memories. A stable clone.
If only they'd had time to discover why the only stable half-ghost clones were all teenaged girls.
No time to wonder now. Only time to do the imprinting.
Plasmius flew into the tank to begin the process.
In the fluid darkness a pair of blue eyes opened.