CHOSEN

 
Author: Notmanos
E-mail: notmanos at yahoo dot com
Rating: R
Disclaimer:  The characters of Angel are owned by 20th Century Fox and Mutant Enemy; the character of Wolverine is also owned by 20th Century Fox and Marvel Comics.  No copyright infringement is intended. I'm not making any money off of this, but if you'd like to be
a patron of the arts, I won't object. ;-)  Oh, and Bob and his bunch are all mine - keep your hands off! 
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7

 

“Brendan?” John repeated, as if he didn’t remember. “D’ya mean that kid at school? The one who turned green and had a perfect memory?”

Rogue nodded, looking displeased. “Yeah, him. Don’t play dumb.”

John scoffed. “I ain’t playin’ dumb, sister, you‘re just not making sense.”

“Don’t call me sister,” she snapped.

Matt watched all of this with a jaundiced eye. Rogue had brought him up to speed on her history with Pyro, and what a traitor he had been. He’d heard all about Magneto and his “brotherhood” before, as he belonged to a mutant group online and kept track of all the big stories. He never imagined he’d be on the inside of it.

Okay, not exactly on the inside, but closer than he ever imagined. In its way, it was kind of weird, mainly because he felt he didn’t quite belong here. He wasn’t a superhero or a super villain, he was just a literature major who tended bar for a living until several months ago, when a guy who could only have been Wolverine (although he didn’t quite believe it at first) sauntered into his bar. He played it cool, as he was sure this was the last guy in the world who’d appreciate someone going all “fan boy” on him, but he was kind of excited by the possibility of meeting other X-Men. Of course all he met was Sid, whom he didn’t recognize as an X-Man (Saracen just wasn’t as high profile as, say, Storm), and Marc, who wasn’t an X-Man and wouldn’t be until they started paying annual salaries. But Marc was handsome and fun and slightly dangerous, and that was endlessly appealing, especially to him. How could you not love Marc?

(Apparently some people had answers to that, but he didn’t get those people at all.)

He had no idea that Rogue had taken the cure until Marc told him. Why the hell did she do that? Okay, some mutations weren’t especially helpful - even Marc had to be really careful about touching things without his gloves on, as he could accidentally poison someone - but still, would you want to give up the one thing that made you special? Admittedly his powers were basically useless, but he’d learn they had their uses, and he never even considered giving them up. Why would he? Useless or not, they were his. How could you just give them up?

“Did I say sister?” John replied snarkily. “I meant traitor.”

He knew John had taken one look at him and dismissed him. He was curious about what his powers might be, but didn’t much care, assuming it wouldn’t matter. But Matt knew that the word had come down from Logan, and was echoed by Marc: Pyro was expendable. So while he waited for John and Rogue to stop bickering like little kids fighting over the front seat, he was using Pyro as a guinea pig. Marc had asked him the other night if he could control the water in other people’s bodies, since people were made of over ninety percent water. It was a good question, and Matt didn’t know, but this seemed like a good time to find out. While the two argued, he’d been concentrating on the fluid within Pyro’s hands. He had no idea if it was working or not, until Pyro unconsciously wiped his sweaty palms - super sweaty palms - on his pants leg.

It was working. Cool. He wondered if he could put out a fire with the liquid from Pyro’s own body.

Wouldn’t Pyro just hate that?

 

****

 

Logan reached out with Bob’s power, which was always a bit harder than he anticipated, if only because the power wanted to lash out on its own. “Get out of here,” he demanded, his voice a low growl. “Brendan’s here. Get him out!”

It was as if they’d forgotten he was the target. Suddenly they remembered, and Marc grabbed the kid - still Brachened out - and pulled him behind him, while aiming one of his bigger, nastier Glocks. “Enchanted bullets work on this guy?”

“I don’t know,” Helga answered honestly. “It depends on the type. Some can shrug them off like mosquito bites.”

“Get out!” Logan roared, in a voice that was deep and gravelly and made his head suddenly ache and throb like an infected wound. Was that a god voice, a “push“? He wasn’t sure; all he knew was his head hurt and Rags teleported all of them out of there, save for him. He was glad; he wasn’t looking forward to this.

“You’re not Bob,” a voice said behind him. It was like screeches through metal, or claws scraping down aluminum siding. Whatever it was, it was painful to hear.

He turned to face the thing. It was vaguely humanoid but sickly pale, the eyes like bloody gouges, and it was cloaked in darkness that seemed to shift around it like a living shadow. He emanated ill will like a palpable breeze, a taste of rot and decay. “I’m close enough.”

The god grinned. He had jagged grey teeth, like shards of granite, but everything else about his mouth was black. “No, you’re not. What a stupid thing to do: send cattle to do a god’s job.”

As Logan glared at him, wondering if he should pop his claws now or wait to surprise him with them, when a snippet of a song ran through his head, Bob’s way of communicating: “Don’t it all end up in some revelation, with four guys on horses and violent red visions, famine and death and pestilence and war -

Holy shit, was that literal? Was he saying this guy was one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse? Was he a death god? Did that explain all the decay? “What do you want with Brendan?” He asked, hoping to narrow down options by his answer.

But the god didn’t answer. He just glowered at him with his blood filled eyes, and told him in his painful voice, “I don’t explain myself to your kind.”

Then he was there. It was a blink, the air shimmering, but Bob’s energy felt the twist of reality, the warp of reality around him as he manipulated it, and Logan was able to move before he materialized in front of him. But he must have felt his shift as well, as Logan hadn’t moved far enough back, and he was able to reach out and grab his arm.

It was like being grabbed by a heated skeleton. All he felt were bones, supernaturally hot, radiating heat like a fever, and then the burning began. But it wasn’t the burning of heat but of acid, and he watched in horror as the black fungus started eating away his flesh and spreading up his arm. But the Bob energy was already responding to it, and even as the pain was sinking into his brain, he felt the stronger, stranger heat of the energy filling the void now forming in his flesh.

He moved in, popping his claws and slashing through the god’s midsection … and meeting absolutely nothing. There was no resistance at all; it was like he missed by a mile. The force of his own slash spun him around, and he stumbled back as the god looked at him in what must have been shock. “What has Bob done to you?”

Logan looked down at his arm, and could actually see part of his own adamantium coated ulna through the eaten away patches on his arm. But this stuff, whatever it was, wasn’t eating away at the metal, which was a kind of relief. Adamantium and asphalt seemed to be immune to this stuff, whatever it was. And it was then it occurred to him what this guy was. “You’re a disease,” he said, feeling feverish and delirious with both Bob’s energy and his own healing factor reacting frantically to this strange attack. He then ran towards him and at the last second jumped up, slamming both feet in his big pale face.

This struck something that felt like bone, and the god made a shocked noise as he wheeled back, not hurt more than stunned that Logan had actually landed a blow. Logan hit the street and rolled, meaning to land on his feet but unable to manage it in his current state. So this god was made up of nothing but tainted energy in his midsection - there was nothing to hit in the trunk of his body, but he still had physical limbs and a head. He had no idea how that worked, but these were gods; they had their own laws of physics.

“I am the disease,” the god stated haughtily. “And why aren’t you dead yet, meat? What monstrous thing did Bob do to you?”

The black fungus - the disease - had stopped midway up his arm. It had eaten away flesh and some muscle and tendons, but some of it was starting to grow back in defiance of the disease. Logan got to his feet, half aware that he might be unconscious if it wasn’t for Bob’s energy. “It wasn’t what he did to me, it’s what Mother Nature did to me.” He made to move towards him, but the god moved first, which was what Logan had been counting on.

He grabbed him by the neck, spreading the black fungus there, and Logan yelled in pain as he still managed to lash out and cut the fucker’s arm off. It splattered to the pavement, almost instantly turning into liquid black fungus, and instead of blood, more of that liquid blackness poured out of the stump. With his one remaining arm, he slammed him in the chest, causing more fungus to spread across his torso, dissolving his shirt and the first layer of skin on contact, but as he fell to the street once more he spun around and slashed at the god’s nearest leg, taking it off below the knee.

The god overbalanced, stumbled, and fell, as Logan rolled away, hearing, smelling, and feeling his skin dissolve in thick patches, but the fungus was spreading even less over the initial impact points. The pain remained hideous until it totally overloaded his nerves, and then he felt nothing. He already knew from his treatment in Weapon X that at some point, when the pain became too great, his mind just shut it off. He wished it was hair-trigger, but sadly he could weather unfathomable agony before it hit the breakdown point. But finally it had, and he felt nothing but numb even as he saw the skin and muscle sizzle away enough on his chest that he could see a silver slice of ribcage.

“You should be dead!” The god roared, as if personally offended that he wasn’t. “Why aren’t you dead?!”

Logan shoved himself up to his knees, and watched as blood and liquid black fungus trickled out of his mouth and splattered on the pavement. It must have gotten into his system through the holes it created in his flesh. It tasted like dirt mixed with honey. “You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve heard that question,” he admitted, still feeling feverish and disconnected from himself. Bob’s energy was the only thing tethering him to his mind and body right now. Without it, he’d be out cold or maybe even as dead as he wanted him.

(Reshef. His name was Reshef. He didn’t know how or why, that’s just what came to him.)

“Bob isn’t strong enough to defeat me, and neither are you, meat.”

“The Gorgons are,” he countered, sure that was true. He started crawling towards him, as he wasn’t sure he could stand, but that was okay, as Reshef couldn’t either. “So why don’t I just fuck you up ‘til they get here?”

“You‘ll do no such thing.”

“Stop me.”

Reshef glared at him with bloody hot eyes as Logan crawled ever closer to him, and Logan felt the energy build up before Reshef disappeared, taking the cowardly way out.

Actually, he was kind of relieved about that. He fell over on his side and just laid on the pavement for a while, trying to figure out which black puddle of goo was Reshef’s arm and which was his leg. He breathed in sickly sweet air, and wondered when his muscles were going to grow back. At least the fungus had stopped eating away his skin. He watched his blood puddle on the pavement, mingle with the liquid black, and knew there should have been more. Was Bob’s energy keeping him from bleeding out? It must have. He could still see the bone in his arm.

He had no idea how long he’d been laying there, as time was a slippery thing, but he felt a different kind of energy surge, and Rags suddenly popped back into existence, with Giles, Helga, and Marcus in tow. Giles was holding some object that looked like a crystal on a chain, Helga had the sword that Rags’ blessed (had he blessed another one, or had Angel given it to her?), and Marc still had the gun with the enchanted bullets aimed out at the ready. Rags had his shirt off, not to show off his impressively doughy physique, but to show off all the scrawls of Gorgon protection sigils.

“Holy shit!” Marc exclaimed, seeing him first. He started coming toward him, and Logan mustered the strength to shout, “Stop! This black shit is consumptive! If you touch it it’ll jump to you.” He didn’t know how he knew that, but he did.

“Is he gone?” Helga asked, as they were all looking around, but mainly coming back to stare at his gaping wounds and patches of black fungus.

“Yeah, he ran off after I dismembered him. But he’ll be back, prob’ly whole. He’s mostly energy anyway.”

“Do you know who he was?” Giles asked, wincing in sympathetic pain and not quite able to look at him directly. Logan could see the hole in his arm and his chest, but he couldn’t see the one in his throat. He wondered how bad that one was. “Can you describe him?”

“He’s Reshef.”

Now Giles looked at him sharply, recognition in his eyes. And it was not a good thing. “Reshef? Are you sure?”

“Who is he?” Marc asked.

“Pestilence,” Helga said, and looked to Giles for confirmation. “That’s what that word means, right?”

Giles nodded, mute horror in his eyes. Fuck yeah, this was really incredibly bad if you could freak out a Watcher.

“Mate, I ‘af no fuckin’ clue ‘ow yer still alive,” Rags said, walking towards him. “You must ‘af the constitution of a cockroach. No offense.”

“Stay back!”

“I don’ hafta,” he claimed. “The Gorgons are protectin’ me. I’m still their Chosen, and I ‘af the poison cancellation sign, see?” He pointed at a black mark that looked like a tangle of snakes, just to the left of his belly button.

Would that be enough? Too late now, as Rags was already close enough to reach down and grab his arm. Rags helped pull him up to his feet, and even though some of the black fungus touched him, it didn’t spread to Rags. So here was some empirical evidence that Pestilence - horseman of the apocalypse or not - was not strong enough to beat the Gorgons. But then again, there were three of them; he was outnumbered. Now if he got the horseman band back together, he might have a decent shot.

Rags put his arm around his shoulders and helped hold him up, although if he didn’t have Rags to lean on, Logan knew he’d have been flat on his face on the asphalt. Marc peered at him while carefully keeping his distance, and said, “We need to get him to the demon hospital.”

“No,” Logan insisted. “I can’t be taken anywhere where there’s biological material this stuff can spread to. It’ll eat its way through people, buildings, anything. All I can figure is it has no taste for pavement, adamantium, and Gorgon power.”

“Fuck, then we’ll hose you off,” Marc replied.

“The water’ll be toxic.”

“We can’t stay here,” Helga pointed out. “So where do we take ya?”

Giles’s brow furrowed in thought, and he asked, “Do you think concrete will be immune? I mean, if pavement is …”

Logan wanted to shrug, but he was so feverish and tired he could only shake his head once. “Maybe. Don’t know.”

“We might have to risk it.”

Helga turned towards him. “Where do you want to take him?”

Logan closed his eyes to rest them, but before he did, he saw Giles pointing down at the street. What? What was that supposed to mean? Was he suggesting they take him to hell?

Well shit, why not? He knew it so well, it was like a second home.


 
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