Obligatory warnings and disclaimers:
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If reading this is in any way illegal where you are or at your age, or you don't want to read about male/male relationships, go away. You shouldn't be here.
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The X-Men and any related characters are property of Marvel Comics, trademarked and registered and copyrighted and all that. I'm using them without permission.
For those who read the comics and worry about such things, this story takes place in the (much simpler and easier to follow) Ultimate X-Men universe, and starts right around issue 54. The current chapter takes place during and after issue 58.
Comments can be sent to "dustyh75@hotmail.com"
Thanks.
"Where are we?" Seth asked, staring down at his and Jean's linked hands. Even though he could see that his fingers were touching her bare hand, he felt nothing from her.
"Mental plane," she answered. It took Seth a minute to realize that her lips hadn't moved when she answered, and then a second later he realized his hadn't either when he asked his question. Jean turned to him, her red hair rippling behind her head much longer than it was in real life, and smiled. When she spoke again, her mouth moved. "Sorry. Would you be more comfortable if it looked like we were talking?"
"Whatever's easier for you," Seth answered, shrugging. He looked around, trying to get his bearings. He and Jean were hovering, their hands linked, in a featureless white sky, no clouds or sun or moon or stars, just an endless white void. Below them, spread out like a prairie plain, was a flat black landscape, scored and marked here and there with glowing yellow lines.
The two of them were surrounded by an aura of fire, and Seth raised his free hand in front of his face, waving his fingers experimentally and realizing he felt no heat. The flames must be Jean's power, protecting them like she said she would. "How much of this is real?"
"All of it," Jean answered enigmatically. "You've been in the mindscape before."
"True," Seth said, shrugging again. He and Jean had actually first met here, before meeting in real life, but it had looked different then, like they were at the school but no one was around. He blinked, trying to clear his head a little. "Sorry, I just needed a second to get my bearings."
"It's ok," Jean said, smiling. "For non-telepaths it can be a little bit disorienting. Do you remember now?"
Seth thought for a second. He and Jean had been standing in the lab while Kurt, Ali, and War watched from the lab table across from them, Kurt perched on the edge of the table, crouching like a gargoyle, and Ali and Warren sharing the same chair, Ali sitting on his lap. In front of Seth and Jean, the black and yellow sphere waited, and Seth swallowed nervously as he took Jean's hand. She squeezed his fingers reassuringly, and he felt a low hum from her, a sense of warmth as both their powers flared up at once. He wasn't reading Jean, exactly, but was instead reading the force moving through her, and it rushed over him like a warm breeze running up and down his body. He looked at Jean and nodded, and when she nodded back he reached out carefully and touched his fingertips to the sphere, closing his eyes.
"Yeah, it just took me a second," Seth answered, nodding. He glanced down at the black and yellow planet below them. "Did you make that?"
"No," Jean answered, and he could hear the satisfaction in her voice. When he looked at her, she was smiling widely. "That's how it sees itself. It's making that projection, which means I was right. It's alive, Seth. Whatever that is, it's alive."
"Wow," Seth sighed, catching her enthusiasm. He knew, in reality, that he was touching the thing, but here he was catching no impression from it, just a low hum, like the vibration you got in your ribs when someone set the bass on the stereo too loud. "Do you feel that?"
"Yeah," Jean answered. "I'm not reading any thoughts, though. Is that all you're getting?"
"For now," Seth answered, nodding. "What do we do now? How do we get it to talk to us?"
"I'm not sure if it even knows we're here," Jean answered, glancing down. The landscape remained flat and featureless, with no rhyme or reason to the yellow patterns. Sometimes they looked like circuitry, sometimes like mathematical lines and tangents, and sometimes just like random doodling on a blackboard. "I think the only way we can make contact is to move in closer. You ready?"
Seth nodded.
"Sure," he answered, and Jean's power flared up around them as they began to sink slowly toward the flat surface.
"What happened?" Scott demanded, yelling at Kurt as they ran through the house. Their guests, uninvited, followed, but no one thought to stop them. As they ran into the basement hallway they saw Ali and Warren trying to stop Peter, who had gotten there first, from rushing in.
"MOVE," Peter thundered at them, raising his hands.
"Wait!" Ali yelped, her hands on his chest. She glanced at Scott as the rest of the team and the Fantastic Four came spilling into the hallway. "Little help here?"
"Peter!" Scott yelled. "Stand down!"
Peter spun toward Scott, his lips pulled back and gleaming steel teeth bared. Behind Scott, everyone jerked to a halt, and Johnny exhaled a soft, "Holy shit!" Peter seemed to swell, bearing down on Scott, looming over him in the suddenly small hallway, but Scott stood his ground.
"We don't know what's going on," Scott began, and Peter grabbed his arm, steel fingers closing roughly on the muscle, and jerked him into the doorway.
"Look!" Peter commanded, and Scott did.
Jean and Seth stood in the center of the lab, in front of the bench, holding hands and glancing down at the table, but neither seemed aware that anyone else was there. Seth's free hand was reaching out toward the bench, fingers splayed, but there was nothing in front of him. Scott realized with horror that the reason there was nothing in front of them was that it was all over him, covering Seth and Jean from head to toe like someone had dipped them in tar. Every inch of both of them was completely covered, every strand of Jean's hair and every thread of Seth's uniform, their skin and their eyes and their clothes. Glowing yellow lines crisscrossed their surfaces in random patterns, and Scott saw their chests rise and fall as they breathed. It looked for all the world like someone had colored them in with a black crayon, background filling them like someone pointed and clicked their outlines on Photoshop. They were completely alien, but still Jean and Seth.
"How did this happen?" Scott asked, turning to War and Ali. Reed's head suddenly appeared over his shoulder, gaping into the lab, and Scott realized that Reed had stretched his neck several feet down the hallway from where his body stood patiently.
"Oh, wow," Reed breathed, his eyes wide behind his thin round glasses.
"They linked up with each other," Warren said, glancing at Seth and Jean's hands. "Jean said she was going to shield them, and Seth was going to touch it to see if they could read it."
"Read it?" Susan asked.
"His power," Kurt explained. "Seth can touch people and make them see things, or feel things, and he can read feelings and memories from them. Jean suspected that the creature was alive, and thought that Seth and she together would be able to contact it."
"I was afraid of that," Reed said.
"Of what?" Scott asked, turning toward him.
"Of being right," Reed answered, shaking his head on the end of his curving snake of a neck.
"What else happened?" Sue asked, glancing back at Warren.
"Seth touched it, and for a second nothing happened, but then it just kind of shifted," Warren explained, gesturing with his hands. "It stopped being round, and it just kind of, I don't know, it flowed up Seth's arm, like it was made of water or something."
"And you did not stop it?" Peter thundered, Ali jumping between them.
"We tried!" Ali barked, rainbow colored sparks dancing on her fingertips. Soft, tiny fireworks popped and glistened around her, a little constellation of her light powers firing up. Peter pushed past all of them and into the room, reaching for Seth as Scott and Reed both yelled for him to wait.
"You did not try hard enough!" he snapped, reaching for Seth's arm. There was a bright orange flash, and Peter crashed backward into the wall, shoved by a wall of what they all recognized as Jean's power.
"That's what stopped us," Kurt explained. "Whatever is going on, Jean is still shielding them."
"What's that supposed ta mean?" Ben grumbled from the far end of the hallway.
"I hope it means they're still alive," Reed answered clinically, not noticing everyone's heads snapping toward him. "And not just that it's absorbed them and their powers."
Seth closed his eyes, concentrating, really pushing his powers, but he still wasn't getting anything.
"I'm still just getting that vibration," he said in frustration. "I don't think this-"
"Seth, look!" Jean whispered, squeezing his hand, and he opened his eyes to see that instead of landing on the black surface, the black surface was gone. There was still a plane there, a separation from the sky, but it was transparent now, like a lake, and he gasped as they passed through it.
"Wow," Seth breathed, amazed.
Everything around them was suddenly gone, vanishing as they passed through the ground, and they were in space. All around them were stars and nebulas and galaxies, chunks of rock and tiny pieces of dust. Seth realized he could even sense gasses streaming past them, stray atoms, and he understood that he wasn't feeling any of it with his own senses. He was feeling what the creature felt, the vast emptiness around them peppered with barely perceptible traces of matter and energy, and when he glanced at Jean she nodded, letting him understand that she felt it, too. Neither of them wanted to speak yet, both of them just taking in the breathtaking feeling of rushing through space, traveling through the universe under their own power, looking for something, seeking something. They were aware of the cold, not feeling it in their fingers or on their skin, but just registering in a clinical way that the temperature was a certain amount. Seth and Jean both concentrated, trying to get that amount to translate into something they knew, some kind of degrees, but they weren't there yet.
"It's an alien," Seth whispered finally, taking in the stars, wondering where the two of them were traveling. "That's why we couldn't tell if it was alive or not."
"It's not like us," Jean agreed, nodding. "I knew there were aliens. The Professor says that the Ultimates have fought aliens before, but I didn't think, I mean, it didn't occur to me, that, wow. We're making contact with an alien. You and me, Seth, we're making first contact."
"But with what?" Seth asked, and Jean shrugged. "Are these its thoughts?"
"I think they're memories," Jean answered. "I think it's showing us its memories to help us understand."
They stopped, aware of a new feeling. Off to the side, below them somewhere, was warmth, and as soon as they realized it they began hurtling toward it. Seth realized they were falling toward a star, a small bright star that didn't look all that different from the ones around it, but it felt different, felt right somehow. They felt warmth, and light, and something else, some kind of energy. Seth heard a new buzzing, a different hum and chatter, and realized it was radio waves. He couldn't pick anything out, but as larger and larger chunks of rock rushed past them he became aware of different signals, more and more of them, radio and television, images and sound that were just snatches and snippets with no meaning behind them. There was a sudden massive pull, a gravity field that clawed at them for a second in a blur of swirling gasses and a giant red storm, and Seth realized they had just rushed past Jupiter.
The alien, and the two of them in its memory, was hurtling toward Earth.
"I realize you don't know us, so I want to explain that I have a doctorate in biology," Sue explained to the assembled group in the lab across the hall. "While it's not in-"
"You have a doctorate?" Ali asked. "You're like twelve."
"I'm almost twenty," Sue said coldly, her eyes narrowing. "I'm sure the briefest of searches on the internet could acquaint you with my credentials if you could tear yourself away from your tattoo artist for a minute."
"Hey!" Warren blurted, sitting up straighter.
"Are you, like, all doctors?" Kitty asked Johnny, practically batting her eyes. Next to her, Bobby bristled.
"Nah, I'm just pretty," Johnny answered, smirking at her beneath his perfectly messed blond hair.
"Pretty full of himself," Ben grumbled. None of them could tell if he was grumbling on purpose or if it was just the way he talked with the whole being made of stone thing.
"Enough!" Scott barked, and they all snapped to attention. He yelled toward the hallway. "Peter?"
"No change," Peter answered, watching Seth and Jean from the doorway of the other lab.
"Susan, Dr. Storm?" Scott asked, but she shook her head, holding up a hand. "OK, Susan, please continue."
"What I was trying to say is that I'm a biologist, and while I'm not an exobiologist, I might have an idea of what we're dealing with," she continued, turning toward Reed. "We were on our way to New Jersey to intercept the creature, but we were, um, held up, and you guys got there first."
"Held up, Dr. Barbie?" Ali asked, and Scott glared at her again.
"Weren't allowed to leave the Baxter," Johnny said, staring at Kitty.
"We were still getting clearance to study the creature," Reed said smoothly, holding up his hands. "Anyway, before you guys got there, and before it even landed, we were tracking it."
"Landed?" Kurt asked, raising an eyebrow.
"From space," Reed answered bluntly. "We believe the creature is extraterrestrial."
"I think it's scanning, reading or something," Seth whispered to Jean.
They were hovering somewhere between the Earth and the Moon. Neither of them had dwelled on being able to breathe and speak, although it seemed weird and illogical since they were well above the atmosphere. There were twinkles below them as satellites circled the planet like a cloud of metal gnats, and below that they could see the edges of continents, the blue of the ocean, all the things you saw in a picture of Earth from space but it was different because it was real, right in front of them. Seth felt full of wonder, awestruck at the view and the planet and the life below them, and realized that the feeling wasn't just his.
"Jean, it feels," he said, turning to her. "Are you catching that? It feels us, below, the planet, it feels, I don't know."
"Excited," Jean said, and Seth nodded. "I feel it, too. It was studying, but when it sensed life, it felt excited."
"Are you getting any thoughts?" Seth asked, knowing he was probably the one getting the feelings. Jean shook her head.
"There's something, like whispers, at the back of my mind," she said finally, biting her lip in concentration. "I can't make it out yet, but I'm getting something. It's getting louder."
The view changed, centering in, and then they were falling. It started out slow, a kind of drift downward, but began to pick up speed as they got closer. Seth tightened his grip on Jean's hand, feeling a surge of adrenaline, as he realized they were rushing through the atmosphere. The blackness of space gave way to a reddening, the blur of heat and friction that they couldn't feel but that the creature, like it had with the cold, registered the temperature as a clinical three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Seth gave Jean's hand a squeeze as he realized that they were getting more, had connected enough to translate its measurement system into one they recognized, and she nodded again. Around them the sky began to level out, shifting from reds and oranges to familiar light blue, and they caught a glimpse of the city below them, Manhattan and the boroughs and then they were streaking toward New Jersey when Jean's power flared up and everything stopped.
"Jean?" Seth asked, looking around as they hung in midair. Below them, they were close enough to see the ground, to pick out cars and trees and the water, but nothing moved.
"I paused us," Jean said, the orange fire wings around them larger and brighter now. "We already know what happens here. We're not going to get anything if we go this way, because it will eventually lead us back to ourselves in the lab. I don't think we're going to make contact this way."
"You're probably right," Seth agreed. "So what do we do?"
"We need to see where it came from, how it got to us," Jean said, and as soon as she said it they were unfrozen. As if they were in a movie and someone had hit the rewind button, they began to streak upward, back into space.
"We were studying the energy signature while you guys were fighting," Reed continued. "As soon as you arrived on the scene and began interacting, the energy signal and the creature itself changed."
"Seth mentioned that," Warren said, perking up. "When we were taking notes he said that it didn't have a head or hands or anything until you guys showed up."
"We noticed that, too," Scott said. "I assumed it was copying us in some way."
"But it didn't copy anything else it encountered, and that's the key," Sue said, nodding.
"The key?" Kurt asked. "To what?"
"Understanding what this is and why it's dangerous," Sue answered.
"The creature engulfed a number of objects before you arrived without emulating any of them," Reed continued, oblivious to Warren's squint of confusion. Behind Warren, Ben was making the same face. "It didn't alter its appearance or behavior until it encountered organics."
"Huh?" Ben asked finally.
"Life," Sue said. "It didn't copy anything until it encountered something alive, which was your team."
"Enough!" Peter yelled from the hallway. "We have had enough talking and lecturing and arguing. How do we free them from this creature?"
Sue and Reed looked at each other for a second before answering. They may have meant for it to be subtle, but everyone in the room caught it.
"What?" Kitty asked.
"What the hell was that?" Ali demanded.
"It may not be possible to free them," Reed answered finally. "It might be too late to save either of them."
"Where are we?" Seth asked, looking around. Stars streaked by on all sides of them, and had been for what seemed like forever.
"I have no idea," Jean answered, shaking her head. "I never realized before, but the stars look different when you're not on Earth. I don't recognize anything."
"Some astronauts we turned out to be," Seth said, laughing. "I don't feel anything anymore. No satisfaction, no excitement, nothing. Are you still getting voices?"
"Yeah, but no words yet," Jean answered. She looked thoughtful for a second, her brows knitting together. "Is it possible it couldn't feel anything when it was at this place? That it couldn't feel until it got closer to Earth?"
"I guess anything is possible," Seth answered. "We're slowing down."
They looked down as a planet yawned below them, streaming up into focus, and for a second Seth thought they were back at the beginning again. They were sinking through the plain white atmosphere of a featureless world, a long expanse of blackness marked by glowing yellow. As they got closer to the ground they picked out coastlines and mountains and valleys, but everything was the same black and yellow. Black waves crashed against black beaches, and on the black ground spiky black objects that could have been trees reached for the sky. They were rushing down toward a tower, and they saw a sphere floating between them, the plain black and yellow streaked sphere that Jean had brought back to the mansion. As they watched it raced toward the tip of the tower, and the tip opened like an iris, pulling the sphere inside.
"It launched," Jean said. "The thing that landed on Earth launched from here, like a probe."
"Or an explorer," Seth agreed, nodding. "But this planet, the whole planet, it's like this? Everywhere?"
"I'm not sure," Jean answered. "We're still rewinding. It's going faster now."
The tower sank to the ground around them, all the spikes and spires melting back into the main body as it sank into the ground. Above them, clouds whipped by faster and faster, the orange sun rising and falling until the sky was flashing like an old movie, and they saw the blackness on the ground begin to roll itself up, to flow backward like a slow tide going out. Seth gasped as the soil was revealed, a dark purplish soil with metallic glints in it, and then some sort of moss or grass or algae bloomed across it, some sort of covering that was, without doubt, alive. As the black and yellow coating continued to recede, shapes pushed out of the ground, rising, sinuous moving shapes that Seth guessed were the equivalent of trees. Above them, something vaguely insectlike flitted through the air, and then there were clouds of them, swarms darting back and forth.
Seth felt growing horror wash through him as he realized what they were seeing.
"Jean," he began, needing to say it out loud.
"I know," she whispered, squeezing his hand. "This is happening in reverse.
These things aren't growing."
"They died," Seth whispered. "This creature rolled over everything, and everything died."
"We believe the creature works by assimilating," Sue explained. "Like a virus. It absorbs things into itself and makes them like it is. It converts matter, whatever kind it absorbs, into itself."
"How do we stop it?" Scott asked, standing.
"We may not be able to stop it," Reed answered, shaking his head. "We may only be able to contain it."
"What about Jean and Seth?" Kitty asked, finally ignoring Johnny. "How do we get them out?"
"We might not be able to," Reed said again. "It's hard to tell from here, because Jean's forcefield is keeping us from studying it, but it's very likely that your friends aren't just coated in the creature. It's, um."
Sue's face was hollow as she surveyed the group, taking Reed's arm when his voice trailed off uncertainly.
"Seth and Jean may already be part of it," she finished. "It might already be too late."
On the planet things were moving very fast now. Seth and Jean flew above the surface, following the edge of the black wave as it shrank and absorbed back into itself, getting smaller and smaller with every second. Behind them, in its wake, the land came back to life, weird, dazzling forms of life that neither had ever seen before and, sadly, that they did not have time to study. The wave shrank and contracted in on itself until it was just another small, black and yellow sphere, sitting in a crater, and then, as they watched, the sphere leapt skyward, arcing up into space.
"It came from space to this planet," Seth said numbly. "And it ate everything, the whole planet."
"And then it made another one of itself, and launched it toward Earth," Jean said. Around them, the planet began to fade away, everything turning white and washing out, and in a moment they were floating in nothingness. "We have to find a way to stop it, before it kills everyone."
A voice spoke behind them, a soft, low, vibrating voice that somehow sounded like many voices at once all speaking in unison.
"Not Self," it began, and they both turned, still holding hands. "What is `kills'?"
To be continued.