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.
"I can't believe we just have to sit here doing nothing," Bobby sulked, tossing a little ball of ice from one hand to the other. Next to him, Kitty stared dreamily at Johnny Storm, not seeming to mind getting sent down the hall in the slightest.
"What would you do if you were in there, Frosty?" Ben rumbled, smirking. The giant orange chunks that made up his face rendered every expression comical, the huge stonelike brows shifting and dancing with a light agility you wouldn't expect from a man who appeared to be built of tiny orange rocks. "Make it cold?"
Ali snickered as Bobby glared, throwing the ice ball across the room. It hit Ben's chest and shattered into tiny shards, and Ben shrugged impassively.
"We could do, I don't know, something," Bobby answered, slumping back into his chair.
"Robert, you lack the skills to be helpful here," Kurt said, leaning on the doorframe. He was staring down the hallway toward the lab, trying to hear, and his tail flicked nervously behind him, whipping back and forth with a mind of its own. He turned to Bobby, his bright yellow eyes sparkling. "No offense."
"So does Peter," Bobby grumbled.
"Jesus Christ, Bobby," Warren blurted, rolling his eyes. They were all tense, all worried, and Bobby was just making it worse. Ali, sitting on top of the desk next to War's chair, rubbed his shoulder. "You know why Peter's there. If standing down the hall in the other room is so damn important to you, walk your ass down there."
"Scott said we couldn't," Bobby muttered, looking at the floor. This sucked. Johnny Storm, Mr. All-American blue eyes and blonde hair and perfect teeth, was hitting on his girlfriend, Scott had ordered them all to go sit in the conference room like they were little kids, and Seth Rand, pain in the ass rookie, had once again managed to make everything all about him. Well, him and Jean, but still, this sucked.
"Um, we don't all know why Peter's there," Ben said, looking around.
"Peter's there because Seth's in trouble," Ali explained. Ben still looked confused.
"So's the redhead," Ben said, shrugging.
"Ben, duh," Johnny said, shaking his head. "The goggles guy is with the redhead, and the big giant Russian guy is with the other, you know, guy. Right, Kitty?"
"Yeah," Kitty answered dreamily, all but batting her eyes at him.
"Cool," Johnny said, grinning.
"Whatever," Bobby grumbled. "And you're wrong. The big Russian guy isn't with the other guy."
Ali laughed, shaking her head.
"Try telling the big Russian guy that."
Down the hall, Peter Rasputin, the big Russian guy, clenched and unclenched his fists, light flashing off of his steel knuckles. Tension rolled off of him in waves that were almost palpable as he stood behind the lab bench, staring at the darkened robotic forms of Seth and Jean. He wanted to hit something, wanted to peel whatever this creature was off of them. The only way he knew how to solve his problems was to get mad at them, and right now his anger was useless. He had to put his faith in the device that Reed was building, and hope that whatever it told them would be enough to save Jean and Seth.
"Anything?" Scott asked, leaning over Reed's shoulder with his arms crossed over his chest. His voice was neutral and impassive, emotionless, the way a good leader's should be, but inside he was a mess. He loved Jean more than he'd ever loved anyone, and he cared about Seth, and right now there wasn't anything he could do to help either one of them.
"I'm still calibrating," Reed answered distractedly. The device he had cobbled together out of available lab equipment took up most of the bench in front of him, and he, Sue, and Scott peered at the monitor screen where dim green outlines, vaguely human shaped, glowed motionlessly. "The field that she's throwing off, Marvel Girl, I don't think it's just keeping us out. I think she's also keeping it in."
"What about the two of them?" Scott asked. "Can you tell what's happening to them?"
"Nothing, actually," Reed answered, tapping quickly at the keyboard. They all jumped as Peter's fist slammed into the wall, denting it.
"Nothing?" Peter demanded, yelling. He spun toward them as Reed shrank back, his body sliding away to the wall but his head and hands staying in place in front of the computer. It was disconcerting watching his elastic anatomy distort itself, but Peter ignored it as he fought the urge to sweep the entire useless machine off of the table top. "You spent an hour constructing this machine, and it tells you nothing?"
"Peter!" Scott yelled, stepping between him and the table. There was a soft puff of smoke as Kurt teleported into the doorway, convinced by the shouting that there must be trouble, and Sue raised her hands, ready to take action.
"You misunderstand," Reed said casually, turning to make notes on the dry erase board across the room, stretching his arm several feet to pick up the marker. "It's telling me that nothing is happening to them. The creature is wrapped around them, but it's not doing anything to them."
"All their vital signs are normal," Sue agreed, leaning over. "Except for their brains."
Peter and Scott paused, both turning toward Sue.
"What's wrong with their brains?" Scott asked quietly.
"Nothing bad," Sue answered quickly, pushing a lock of blonde hair away from her face. "Just extremely high neurotransmitter levels for both of them. I've never really studied telepathy before, so I don't know if this is normal or not, but if I had to guess, I'd say they're both engaged in some pretty heavy mental activity. Given the circumstances, I'd have to guess that they're communicating with each other, and with it."
It would have been more accurate to say that they were trying to communicate with it. Seth and Jean were both sure that they had made some sort of connection, that they were influencing the creature in some way. Not only had it taken them through its memories, showing them where it had come from and what it had done, how it had been created, but now, on the astral plane, it was presenting itself to them in a humanoid form. Sure, it had some of the proportions wrong. If it had been physical, the creature would have been about eight feet tall. One of its arms was clearly longer than the other, even if they did both end in five fingered hands, and one of the feet appeared human down to the toes while the other was just a block at the end of the leg. It was still all black, with those glowing lines of yellow shot through it, but the face that grinned at them from beneath a wild spray of spikes intended to be hair was expressive and clearly alive.
"Not Self," it said again, staring at the two of them. One eye was at least three times the size of the other, but they were both round. When it spoke, the bright yellow teeth didn't move, but the sound was a blend of thousands of voices, high and low, electronic and animalistic, like a chorus speaking in unison. "What is `kills'?"
"To kill is to make something not alive," Jean answered, throwing Seth a glance. He shrugged, no more sure than she of how to answer the question.
"What is `alive'?" the creature asked, turning its flat round face from Jean to Seth and back again. The head swiveled on its too thin neck like an oscillating fan turning.
"You," Seth answered, pointing at it. "You. Self. The Self is alive."
"The Self is The Self is the Self," the creature stated enigmatically. Around them, the featureless white gave way to a tangle of images: the sphere streaking through space, that weird launch tower, strange creatures of black and yellow running across a strange black and yellow plain, whole planets of black and yellow, orbited by black and yellow moons and peppered with black and yellow towers ejecting black and yellow spheres into space. The creature opened its arms, gesturing at all of this. "The Self."
"Not Self," Seth said, pointing at himself and Jean. He pointed back at the creature. "Self."
"The Self," the creature answered. "The Self. Alive."
"Yes!" Seth answered excitedly, nodding and grinning. "The Self is alive. Not Self."
"Not alive!" the creature answered, and Seth frowned.
"It learned that word from us," Jean said softly, and when Seth turned he saw that her eyes were blazing, with actual sparks shooting quickly out of them. She seemed detached suddenly, and Seth realized she was burrowing into its mind. Jean's power was flaring up, and she was making full contact. "Self. It had no word, no concept of self, when it came here. It learned that from us. It has no concept of other, of outside. It only knows itself, like a toddler or a baby. It is its own universe, and nothing else is real. Kind of like a sociopath."
"But it's learning," Seth said, squeezing her hand. "It's learning from us."
"It won't matter," Jean said, her power dimming down again. "It won't matter what it learns from us because it still has to eat to survive, and it eats life energy."
"But it doesn't know we're alive," Seth said. "It doesn't understand."
"It understands that we're food," Jean said, staring at it as it watched them speak.
"Not Self not alive," the creature said. The chorus of voices sounded uncertain. "Self Alive. Not Self not alive?"
"Not Self alive," Seth said, trying to convince it. He was caught in its mind, caught in the feelings flowing through it, the sense of wonder and confusion and comprehension, and he realized that words weren't the only thing it was learning. "Jean, it's learning emotions from us, from me! Through the link, it's learning to feel. It didn't feel anything before, and it does now."
"No, when it sensed life on Earth, it got excited," Jean argued. "We both caught that from the memory, when it was hovering and scanning."
"But that wasn't the way it really happened," Seth said, knowing he was right. "Remember when we didn't understand the temperatures and then we did? It picked up from us while we were picking up from it. When it sensed life, it had a reaction, but it absorbed from us that the reaction should be excitement, and it felt it!"
"And now it feels confusion," Jean agreed, catching the emotion flowing through the link. "We've challenged it, shifted its whole worldview, and it feels confusion and uncertainty."
"But we've made contact," Seth said. "We can convince it to leave. We can convince it that we are alive, like it, and that it shouldn't hurt us."
"Seth," Jean began, shaking her head, her hair fluttering out as she scanned the creature again. "I don't think we can."
"Something's happening," Sue said suddenly, looking away from the screen and at the still forms in front of them. "We're getting strange readings."
"What kind?" Scott asked, reaching for the intercom panel by the door. "Guys, we may need you."
"Energy readings from the creature," Reed answered. "It's showing a pattern that mirrors a human electroencephalogram."
"Huh?" Warren asked from the hallway. The others crowded in around him, and he shivered as Kitty phased through his wing to get a better view.
"Brainwave, sorry," Reed answered, taking more notes. "The creature is thinking."
"It wasn't before?" Scott asked.
"Not in a recognizable pattern," Reed answered. "But now it's thinking in a human pattern. It's thinking like a person."
Behind Seth, the world burst into life in the kind of montage that one usually saw on commercials for nature television. Birds flew across the sky, majestic eagles streaking past fluffy white clouds, and then fish swam in glittering schools through the sea. A green stem burst through the soil, unfurling and growing until a flower exploded in vivid color. Children ran through green fields, accompanied by dogs and cats and a woman Jean recognized as the nanny from one of those shows on television. Bison thundered across the plains, an elephant lifted its trunk and trumpeted, and a giant panda pushed a bamboo shoot into the mouth of a baby at its side.
"Alive," Seth said, waving a hand. He hoped and prayed that his feelings were carrying a lot better than his words. "Life! Living! The Self is alive, and the Not Self is alive."
"You are Not Self!" the creature burst excitedly, pointing at Seth and Jean, and Seth grinned, nodding.
"It's never met anything that could communicate with it," Jean said, reading deep again. The creature's mind was hard to hold onto, hard to sift through. She'd thought it would be like a computer, a system of files and directories that she could key open and page through, because of the creature's robotic nature, but instead it was like a magic 8 ball, a dark area where words and ideas and images bubbled to the surface and then were gone again. "No telepaths, ever."
"How do you know?" Seth asked, watching as the creature stared at the images pouring out of his mind. Seth figured they were springing from his subconscious somehow, but since they seemed to be having an effect he made no effort to stop it.
"It remembers everything," Jean answered, her voice seeming to trail off a little. "It has one mind, the entire species, a hive mind, and it remembers everything, back to when it first arose as a species. Look."
Jean gestured, and behind the creature Seth saw a rolling pattern of planets devoured, one after another, stretching further and further back. The pattern was exactly the same every time, the tower and the sphere and the creature overtaking everything, planet after planet falling like dominoes. The creature didn't seem to notice this display, but Seth felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach as he saw the creature's relentless advance across the galaxy. It encountered intelligent species, strange lizardlike creatures living in cities with electricity and vehicles, but never once paused. Everything fell before it.
"That was before," Seth said, sensing from Jean where this was going. "It didn't understand before. Can be guilty of murder if you don't know something's alive?"
"It doesn't matter!" Jean said. "You're not seeing the big picture, Seth. You're all caught up in what it's feeling, because you're feeling it, too. It has to kill to survive, and it will kill everything on Earth."
"Jean," Seth began. There had to be a way to stop it. If they could convince it that they were equals, they could convince it not to eat the planet.
"Jean!" the creature said, turning its head toward her. Seth's mouth dropped open. "Jean is alive."
"Yes!" Seth burst, nodding.
"Self is alive," the creature said, and then pointed at each of them. "Not Self is Jean. Jean is alive."
"Well, he almost has it," Seth said, shrugging. "We're just not all Jean."
"What is `kills'?" the creature asked again.
"To make not alive," Seth answered, repeating Jean's earlier response. Behind him, a flower withered and fell, and Seth pushed feelings of loss and grief toward the creature. "To cause something to die."
"What is," the creature began, blinking, "die?"
"To cease to be," Seth answered. This was the heart of the matter, the thrust of the problem. All around them the memories of the creature devouring worlds appeared, and Seth tried to explain. "What you do, this, the consumption, it kills. All of these creatures die. They cease to be. They become zero."
"They become Self," the creature said, apparently arguing. Around them, the creatures on all the other planets turned black with bright yellow lines as the creature rolled over them, but the feeling from the creature was joy. It seemed to be getting warmer, growing more satisfied as each creature fell before it.
"It feeds on life," Jean said simply. "It converts other life forms into itself, and it uses the bioelectric energy to power the conversion of the inorganic matter. That's how it takes over the planets and spreads. There's no other way for it to survive."
"Not Self becomes Self," the creature agreed, holding out its arms toward them.
"We have to kill it," Jean said, squeezing Seth's hand.
"We can't!" Seth said, turning toward her. "Jean, it's, I don't know, it's like a person! It's a living thing! It has thoughts and feelings and we can't just kill it. There has to be another way."
"How, Seth?" Jean asked. "You've seen its mind and its memories. It seeks out living things and consumes them. It's not a person. It's a smart virus. Would you get a flu shot?"
"That's not the same thing," Seth argued.
"It is the same!" Jean said. A humming arose around them, and Seth noticed dark threads starting to creep across the white background of the astral plane.
"What is that?" he asked, looking around.
"It's starting to attack us," Jean said, squeezing his hand as a protective cocoon of flame blossomed around them. "It's going to eat us, and then the rest of the planet."
"It's trying to assimilate them!" Reed blurted, jumping up from his seat. "If you're going to save them, you have to get it off of them right now!"
Scott keyed his visor, a bright lance of scarlet light bursting forth and splashing against Jean's shield like water sprayed against a wall.
"All of you," Scott said. "All of you, now, where I'm hitting it!"
Behind him, Ali started to shoot, a thin, pinprick laser, all of her power over light condensed down into a narrow concentrated sliver. Johnny burst into flame, his body turning bright red as he gestured a beam of orange fire toward Jean and Seth. Sue clenched her teeth, focusing a shield into an invisible battering ram that she smashed forward like a hammer, trying to break through. There was a brief flash, and all of them were knocked backwards, crashing to the floor and into the walls as Jean's telekinesis shoved them all away.
"Again!" Scott yelled, jumping to his feet. "Hit it again!"
"We have to kill it, now!" Jean yelled. She reached toward it, power flaring up around her free hand, and Seth grabbed it.
"No!" he said, shaking his head. "There has to be another way!"
"There is no other way!" Jean yelled, her green eyes flaring.
"I won't kill!" Seth yelled back, his voice high and tight with frustration.
He looked down, his shoulders slumping. "I'm not a killer."
"If we don't kill it, it will kill us," Jean said. Seth could see that she was frustrated and no happier than he with this course of events, but she was trying to make him see her point. "Seth, sometimes we have to make tough choices. You and I, right now, have to save the world, and the only way we can do it is to stop this thing here and now, where it's weak and underpowered."
"What about my power?" Seth asked. "What if we changed its memories?"
"Seth," Jean said, shaking her head. Around them, tendrils continued to flow from the creature, but they stopped harmlessly before touching either of them.
"The Professor says I can do it," Seth said. "We could go back to the memory where it's floating over Earth, the part where it was scanning, and make it think it saw desert. We could make it think there was no life here, and you can throw it back into space! It would be like it was never here."
"And then what?" Jean asked. "If we send it away, it'll land somewhere else and the same thing'll happen, except this time it'll be our fault. The next world that dies, and every world after that, will die because we sent this thing to kill them. Can you live with that? This is one life, Seth, balanced against billions."
"Jesus," Seth said, shaking his head. It wasn't fair. Jean could sense the creature's thoughts, but she couldn't feel what Seth did. It was a person. It had a mind, and it wasn't evil. That was the hard part. It saw nothing wrong with what it was doing, and knew no other way. It was wrong to kill something just for doing what it had to do to stay alive. "We could convince it not to eat living things."
"Then it would starve to death," Jean said, shaking her head. "That would be cruel."
Seth fumbled for another plan, reached for another idea, but he had nothing else.
"There's no other way," Jean said, and Seth felt waves of regret streaming off of her. "I'm sorry, Seth."
Seth swallowed, nodding, unable to look at her.
"Can you make it quick?" he asked quietly.
"I think so," Jean answered, turning toward the creature. She lifted her hand again, her hair blowing back and her aura blazing, and the creature froze. Jean closed her fingers, making a fist, and the creature began to fold in on itself, opening its mouth and emitting a siren wail. Jean winced, trying to go faster, but it was struggling against her. "It's fighting me."
"It's afraid," Seth said. He let go of Jean's hand, stepping toward the creature with his palms out. "We made it understand death, and now it's afraid of dying."
"Seth, don't!" Jean yelled.
"I can take it away," Seth said, taking the creature's head in his hands, opening his mind. He felt it screaming, and flooded it with reassurance and calm. Tears streaked down his cheeks as he swallowed the blind terror into himself, smothering it. "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. Go to sleep, Self. Just go to sleep."
Around them came the soft sounds of a woman singing a lullaby, her voice soft and whispery, filling the white void with the soft tinkle of music box chimes behind it. Blurry, indistinct shapes drifted past them, and Seth recognized the voice and the music box, which had been inside a teddy bear in his crib. It was his mother, singing him to sleep, the memory blazing up from inside his mind. The feeling of safety and comfort, of love and belonging, combined with drowsy sleep, washed through Seth into the creature. In Seth's mind a bright white sky narrowed and contracted until it was a planet, then a moon, then a star, the tiniest twinkling light in a field of the darkest black, and then that light went out.
"Something's happening," Reed said, holding up a hand. "Everybody stop."
It didn't make much difference, since nothing they had done had dented Jean's shield, anyway, but at least now he could see clearly without the backwash of everyone's power glowing and flashing and flaring in front of him. The air in the room seemed to relax as Jean's shield winked out, and as Jean and Seth let go of each other's hand the black coating on them turned gray, falling to the floor in a cloud of dust.
"Jean!" Scott yelled, grabbing her in a hug that crushed her face to his chest. Seth blinked, trying to clear his eyes.
"Dude, they're naked!" Johnny said, staring at both of them. Sue punched him in the arm, and then both of them were pushed, along with everyone else, into the hallway as Jean held her arms out.
"Jean?" Scott asked, sliding along backwards toward the door.
"Seth and I need a minute," Jean said, shutting the door with her mind as soon as everyone was through it. She turned to Seth, who was wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand. "I'm sorry."
"I know," he answered. "I am, too. I didn't mean to argue, I just, I thought there had to be a way where everyone won. It wasn't fair that we had to make that kind of choice. It wasn't right. We're not God. We shouldn't get to decide who lives and who dies."
"I know," Jean answered, wrapping her arms around him. She rested her head on his shoulder for a second, her hands on his back, and Seth felt that she was as shaken and upset and sorry as he was. "But we're human, and we do the best we can."
Seth nodded, still thinking about that light winking out, and then Jean was reaching into a cabinet for a pair of lab coats so that the two of them didn't have to face everyone in their birthday suits. The creature hadn't eaten them, but it had consumed their uniforms. On the floor, the dust continued to break down, getting smaller and finer until it was gone.
"Are you ok?' Jean asked, buttoning up her coat. The coats hung down to their knees, covering all the important parts.
"Not really," Seth answered. "We can let everyone else back in, though."
"Can I say something else, before we do?" Jean asked, her brows knitting together seriously. Seth nodded. "In the astral plane, you said you're not a killer, and you meant it. You didn't want to kill that creature even though billions of lives were at stake."
"Yeah?" Seth asked. He knew what he said. Was she going to point out that they'd killed anyway? Was that supposed to make him feel better?
"The way you feel right now," Jean began, staring straight into his eyes, "is the way you'll feel if you kill the Brotherhood. I know that you think you can do it anyway, but if you kill them, you're going to kill something inside yourself, and I don't want that to happen to you. You're not a killer, Seth."
Seth swallowed hard, looking at the floor.
"I know," he said finally.
Jean telekinetically unlocked the door, and everyone carefully stepped inside. Scott rushed right to Jean, hugging her again and asking her if she was ok without saying a word to Seth. The Fantastic Four hung back a little, not really knowing either of them but glad they were ok. The others kind of swarmed around them both, patting their shoulders and asking if they were ok, and Seth was dimly aware of it, nodding and hugging back, when suddenly he looked up and found Peter right in front of him. Instantly it was like everyone else faded out, and all he could see were Peter's dark blue eyes.
"Seth," Peter began, and Seth decided that this whole thing needed to stop. Every time he and Peter started talking to each other, they ended up in a fight, and judging by the look on Peter's face right now, they didn't need to talk.
Seth grabbed the back of Peter's head, pulling him down, and kissed him, fastening his lips over Peter's and hoping this wasn't a mistake.
Peter wrapped his arms around Seth, enveloping Seth's smaller frame in his bulky form, and kissed him back.
"Dudes, get a room," Johnny said from the wall, giggling. "And get that guy some pants."
To be continued.