Sahara Desert.
Following the advice of Juri, and with no better leads or possible help, the crew went back to Egypt in hopes of getting Peter back to stable condition. Currently the gaping wound that was his eye was covered tightly and the bleeding was slowing down. Still, as much as everyone knew that Peter was resilient and lucky when it came to not dying, everyone was on edge. More specifically Wrench and Rogue.
"How much fucking farther?!" Wrench yelled.
"We have to go to the pyramids Wrench. Like I said when we were back on the plane." Juri responded, visibly annoyed. Juri, Wrench, Rogue, Widowmaker, and Mystique were able to secure a car to transport Peter to his parents as fast as possible, while Cammy, Chun-Li, and Guile went back to Interpol HQ to get updates on anything involving S.I.N or Shadaloo.
"Sorry if I'm making you agitated. It's not like my best friend is in the back seat fucking bleeding to death."
"And I told you where we needed to go! So stop fucking yelling at me." The tension between Juri and Wrench was getting to volatile levels, and neither Widowmaker or Rogue wanted to intervene. Mystique on the other hand, wanted to make sure this didn't turn into another distraction.
"Would the both of you just shut up and drive!" Wrench and Juri both stared each other down for a minute before he turned his attention back to the road, and she followed suit. Mystique leaned back into her seat, where she could feel the eyes of her daughter staring her down. Rogue and Mystique's multi-year reunion after the Stryker fiasco didn't start off on the right foot when she came out of the cockpit and was greeted with her daughter yelling at why she was there. The hate began to calm down when Wrench told Rogue that she was there to help save her.
After 30 minutes of awkward silence and not so hidden animosity, They arrived at the Giza Pyramids. Juri was the first out the car as everyone followed behind her. She was walking to area between all the pyramids, where it was preety abandoned. That was, until a security guard for the pyramids came by to stop them.
"Excuse me, I need to see all your tickets."
"Fuck off." Juri responsed. She proceeded to walk past him, when he grabbed her arm.
"I said I-" The man was cut off when he saw the lifelessness behind Juri's eyes, followed by a smile. She used her free arm and the one being grabbed to flip the guard on his back, then raised leg and brought her foot down on the guard's stomach, hard. He immediately wheezed and reacted in pain as he grabbed his stomach and rolled on the ground.
"And I said, fuck. Off." Juri continued to walk as everyone followed, albeit worried if she had just caved the guard's stomach in. They followed Juri towards the wall of one of the pyramids and stopped behind her.
"Uhh, they got some secret place under the tombs of pharaohs?"
"No Wrench. I'm bringing you to their ice cream shop." Juri replied. Wrench muttered some obscenities under his breath, but Juri chose to ignore them for the sake of not wanting to explain two bodies to Peter's parents. She walked up to one of the blocks of the pyramids and rested her hand on it. Everyone looked in confusion for a few until a follow up scanner presented itself for Juri's eye. She scanned that too and then the wall opened up to show a elevator. Juri turned back to see everyone is awe or in confusion as she nudged her head toward the elevator, prompting everyone to go into it.
Ex-Shadaloo Secret Base.
The elevator ride down was awkward, to say the least. Tensions were high and with Peter fading in and out of consciousness, everyone hoped Juri's claim of Peter's parents being alive wasn't complete bullshit. The elevator stopped, and opened to a clean and brightly lit hallway. The group went down the hallway, following Juri as their pseudo leader. The group walked fir what felt like 20 minutes until they came by another door. Juri used a hand scanner that was there, but it rejected her handprint.
"God damn it! Why did they reset the security now?" Juri asked outloud. Wrench was about to get a word out, but when he saw the look that Rogue gave him, he decided it was best to leave it alone. Juri tried the scanner multiple times before banging on the door loudly.
"Richard! Mary! Open the damn door!"
Peter heard the names Juri yelled out and raised his head slightly. "Dad? Mom?" Wrench and Rogue turned their attention towards him.
"Relax buddy. We're going to take care of you." Wrench stated. There was no response from the other side. Juri, now getting more and more impatient, kept banging at the door in an attempt to get some type of attention from the scientists.
"Mary, Richard, OPEN THE DAMN DOOR!"
"Stop yelling Juri." A voice came over on the door's intercom. Juri backed up to face it. "Now can you just leave please?"
"I need your help."
"Why should we help you with anything? You're the reason we're stuck down here in the first place with limited resources at our disposal."
"Because its not me you need to help Richard. Its...your son." The intercom went silent, as if the voice on the other side was in disbelief. Juri waited for a second, still impatient and was about to bang on the door again when it started to open up slowly. The group was greeted by two people in lab coats, one man and one woman, both of whom who looked like they haven't slept in days.
"Get out of the way." Richard said, pushing Juri to the side. Normally, Juri would've had some not so nice words to getting treated like that, but seeing him disheveled and in disbelief of seeing his own son near death, it didn't sit right with her.
"Mary, prep an emergency room stat. We need to stop the bleeding and get him stabilized." Mary nodded, still in shock of her son's current state. Richard noticed she was still frozen in place and not moving, so he followed up with a bit more venom in his voice. "NOW!"
Mary snapped out of it a quickly ran back from where they came, clearing a table and setting up some supplies for an impromptu surgery.
"All of you, follow me." Richard said to the group. They followed him, dragging Peter along to the room. Wrench and Rogue laid him down onto the table, while everyone else stepped over on the sidelines.
"What the hell happened to him Juri?!" Richard asked. Juri didn't answer, as she was still processing the reaction of Peter's parents, and his weak voice when he heard her say their names. It took Wrench shaking her shoulders to get her to snap out of whatever trance she was in.
"Juri!" Wrench yelled. She blinked rapidly and turned her attention to Richard.
"Bison. It was Bison."
"God damnit!"
"Honey, not now. We need to stop the bleeding now, otherwise he's dead." Mary intervened. Richard tried to calm himself down and went over in his head what to do.
"Ok ok...Wrench was it?" Wrench nodded. Richard pointed to a nearby machine that wasn't turned on. "I need you to turn that machine on and point it towards our direction. Rogue, grab this towel and apply pressure to his eye."
Rogue and Wrench both followed their respective orders, and followed what Richard asked them. Wrench turned on the machine and pointed it at Peter, to which the machine brought up a 3D overlay around Peter, showing everything from his skeletal to his nervous system.
"WARNING: EXCESSIVE BLOOD LOSS DETECTED. PROBABILITY OF SURVIVAL: 22.9%" The machine shouted. Everyone in the room looked horrified, but was determined to keep him alive.
"We have to move fast." Richard turned to Mary. "Program the machine to run a blood type test."
Mary began typing into a nearby computer and within a few seconds, the machine started scanning Peter and started to go on again.
"BLOOD TYPE FOUND. PETER PARKER IS AB POSITIVE."
"The universal receiver." Richard mumbled to himself. He ran into another room and carted in another device. It had two syringes on opposite sides, and what seemed to be a motor function in the middle.
"What the hell is that?" Widowmaker asked.
"The quickest way for us all to transfer blood to Peter." Richard rolled up his sleeve, and then rolled up Peter's, and stuck the needles into his arm and Peter's. He turned the machine on, and within a matter of seconds, blood was moving to Peter's body.
"There's 6 of us in the room, and we each can only spend a minute on this machine before it takes too much blood from us to where we can't operate or help Peter."
"Meaning?" Wrench now asked.
"The goal is to get the survival probability at least above 45%. Only then can we safely operate." Richard explained. By the time he was done explaining, the minute was up."
"Ok, who's next?"
Eerie place.
Coldness was all that Peter felt. He was familiar with the feeling before.
He was dying. No denying that. Except the last time this feeling came about, he had met Madame Web, during the fight on asteroid M when he was still in high school. He didn't know if this time would be a Madame Web meeting, or if this was really his time.
Either way, he opened his eyes and saw that he was on the ground. He pushed himself up to see that he was back in his old room in the mansion.
"My room? It looks untouched. Before I started really decorating it." Peter thought to himself. He walked towards his room's door when he heard the voice of screaming, specifically of Rogue's.
He swung open the door and moved into the hallway, where he saw Rogue and Kitty arguing in the hallway.
"Ah had the sign up. The door was locked." Rogue said, angrily.
"Yeah, well, who's reading at this time?" Kitty's response from Rogue was a slammed door. "Yeah, I'll just, like, wait till you're done." Kitty began to walk towards Peter.
"Nice going Kitty. Intruding on-" Peter stopped when Kitty walked right past him, not even acknowledging his presence.
"-people's...bathroom...time."
"I remember this scene from back in my teen years, but there's no explanation on how I went from the Himalayas back to being 16." Peter decided to search around the mansion, in hopes of finding some type of answer. He walked down the hallway, remembering memories of his time with the X-Men, as well as before he moved to Bayville.
"Come on, Parker! Ve got two tickets to see Mad Max, and I'm not missing ze sliver screen carnage of it." It was Kurt's voice, and the mention of carnage slowly turned the mansion from its normal state, into the dilapidated and ruined state when Venom and Carnage came to Bayville.
"Spider-Man and Peter Parker are one and the same. And everywhere they go, they hurt the ones they care the most about." Hearing Cletus' voice again shook Peter's resolve, as he stopped thinking about him and Carnage altogether when the church burned down.
Peter came up to a door. It was Aunt May's room in the mansion. He hesitated to open it, as he knew she was long gone, and didn't know how he'd react if he heard her voice or saw her. Despite that, his body went on autopilot and began to open it. He expected a bedroom, but instead was met with a very linear industrial looking hallway. He stepped foot into it and immediately the voices changed.
"Last resort Wrench." It was Peter's voice. Before he could even think about the memory, another voice followed.
"You ruin all the fun." Wrench. Memories of Germany came back, as well as the rescue mission for Widowmaker. Peter kept walking down the hallway when he heard Wrench's voice again, but this time had no memory to pin it too.
"You remember the time we stopped in DC, and we accidentally ended up stumbling upon the Payday gang? You wanted to just move on, let them get themselves arrested, but me being stubborn thought they could help us find the X-Men you kept talking about."
"Wrench? Where are you?" Peter asked. He got no reply, but Wrench kept talking.
"Then we helped them with that bank job. I nearly got shot in the face with a shotgun from this bomb armored motherfucker, and there you come, fire extinguisher in hand, shooting it at the cop, trying to get him off of me without hurting him." There was a long pause before Wrench started to talk again.
"I've seen you face impossible odds before, and I'll be damned if you let some cape wearing motherfucker win. You can pull through this Peter." Peter stopped walking.
"Bison." It started coming back to Peter, he fought Bison, won, stopped Juri from killing him, and then Bison caught him again when they got outside.
"I don't even know if you can hear me, but Richard says it might put us at ease." Now Widowmaker was talking.
"Where to start with you Peter Parker? The fact that you're insane? You tell terrible jokes? You're some type of Guardian Angel to everyone here? Pour l'amour de la merde, I'm rambling."
"Its ok Amélie, just...tell him how much he means to you, like Wrench did." Another voice was consoling Widowmaker, but Peter didn't know who it was, as he had no recollection of the voice.
Widowmaker took a deep breath and continued. "I don't believe in superstition, but I can only think it was fate that you met me when you did. You could've easily taken me to the cops, or handed me over to Overwatch, yet you didn't. You helped me break Talon's control, and helped burn them to the ground. I know now how much you really mean to people, especially to Wrench and Rogue, and if you're hearing this, you will pull through."
Widowmaker's voice started to fade into silence. Peter didn't know what was going on, but knew that whatever he was experiencing right now wasn't reality. A breeze overtook the hallway, and was pushing Peter slightly forwards. He turned around to face the winds, and was met with the sight of rundown house of the Brotherhood of Mutants.
"I don't know why I'm even attempting to talk to you. We haven't been on any friendly terms."
"Mystique..."
"Rogue!" Peter shouted instinctively. With no sight of her, and his own voice getting ignored, he paid attention to the voice again.
"Right. Well, everyone here has positive things to say about you, so I assume it's only fair I add to it as well. Admittedly, I treated you and everyone of the X-Men harshly, you more than everyone since you were close to my children." Mystique said, referring to Kurt and Rogue.
"You promised me that you'd look out for the both of them, and for the most part, you kept that promise. You also trusted, or was desperate enough, to come to me for help when Stryker first came for all of us. And you also made sure Summers didn't leave me behind during the raid, despite all I've done before that point. You need to survive, for all of us now."
As with Wrench and Widowmaker, Mystique's voice faded out, and the setting around Peter reverted back to his old room in the mansion. Instead of standing, he now found himself laying down on his bed. A wave of fatigue hit him, and he found himself struggling to stay awake. After a few seconds, he closed his eyes, and everything went dark again.
The Lab.
"We're almost there, just a little bit more blood." Richard said. He turned over to the machine, which Mystique was just taking herself off. Mary went on next and as she did that, Richard noticed Juri walking out the lab. He appointed Wrench to look after the machine as he followed her outside. He turned the doorway and saw her sitting on the floor, leaned back against the wall with her arms on her knees.
"Spare me the talk Richard, we both know I'm not going to listen." Juri stated.
Richard didn't care, and was more angry than he was calm.
"I want to know how the hell you found my son, and what happened to him."
"Oh yeah? Why should I?"
"Don't fuck with me Juri! This is my SON we're talking about. And I've known you long enough to know how you treat people gets them in situations like this."
"Hmm...guess I shouldn't have pegged you as the annoying scientist type." Juri replied. She focused her attention away from Richard towards the floor, obviously looking distracted.
"He was part of the fighting tournament S.I.N was hosting. He figured he could find out what they were planning, then that southern girl got kidnapped by Bison. We tracked him down to the Himalayas, and Peter decided to prevent me from ending Bison's life then and there, and as payback-"
"Be very careful with the next words that leave your mouth Juri." Richard snapped coldly, catching Juri off guard.
"You threatening me, Richard?" Juri got up from the floor. "Maybe you forgot who you're talking to, but-"
"I'm fully aware of what you're capable of Juri. But the truth of the matter is that you don't care about anyone. It doesn't matter who it could be, if they even cared about you."
Richard could tell he was getting under Juri's skin, as she wasn't cursing at him or making veiled death threats to him, just standing in silence with a pained look on her face.
"I don't know if my son asked for your help, or you coerced him into working with you, but what I do know is you're the reason he's in there bleeding out. Because of your personal vendetta."
"That's not-"
"Save it Juri. You want to get yourself killed? Do it by yourself." Richard walked back into the room, closing the door behind him. Juri stood in place, shocked and confused at the conversation that just happened. Was she really to blame for what happened to Peter?
"No. No way. How dare he blame me for this, the smug bastard? He didn't even know his son was alive before now. And Peter...he knew the risks." Juri thought. The scene at the base played back in her head, how Peter stopped her from killing Bison, and immediately how Bison gouged his eye out for that prevention. She walked by a window to the room, and saw Rogue was now the one transferring blood to Peter.
She took in how everyone around Peter was concerned, afraid, hoping he wasn't dead.
"Why should I care? He...he knew..." Juri stopped herself as Richard's words came back to haunt her.
"You want to get yourself killed? Do it by yourself." The combination of reliving the scene of Bison damaging Peter's eye, Peter's lifeless body in the room, and Richard's words proved strong enough to be the second breaking point in Juri's life.
She suddenly found herself with tears forming in her eyes. She tried to hold them back but it was no use. At the same time, Juri's knees buckled, and she fell down onto the floor. She moved herself to be back into the same position she was before Richard had left the room, leaned against the wall, arms on her knees, except now she had her head there too.
Juri continued to cry into her arms, not able to process the thought of her crying or being sad. As she continued to cry, she started to repeat a single phrase that coincided with the events that brought her to tears in the first place.
"I'm sorry Peter."