21

 
At first, it was like a hot spot in the corner of his vision.  An orange-red point that was more mutant
than not, and yet also something else entirely; never quite settling on what - or where - it should be.

Xavier already felt a dull pain somewhere in the back of his mind, having to reach out this far, but it
was ignorable … for now.  He didn’t know how long that would continue to be true.

The energy of the skull - or the rite cast on the skull, or however that worked - must have been acting
like the “flare” it was supposed to, as he got a sense of some other movement in the corner of his vision, though none like that of the telltale mutant signature.  But it was still so far away, hovering on the fringes
of this reality …

He reached out mentally as far as possible, and suddenly found himself in what he knew to be Jean’s “safe place”; the telepathic “retreat” from other people’s thoughts that he had helped her create. Although it was her own personal place, it was one of the first things he taught telepaths, because other people’s thoughts could be overwhelming, especially when the telepath was still young and learning to control their powers.

What no one knew about Jean - not even Scott - was that when he first met her, she'd been incorrectly diagnosed with an early form of schizophrenia called dementia praecox, and thus had been so heavily medicated she barely knew what month it was. But she still heard the other voices when people got too close, in spite of a very heavy cocktail of anti-psychotics. She was so tormented by her gift that it took her years to come out of her protective shell, and even then, she always seemed to be straddling the worlds, as if afraid that if she left her defenses for good, the “madness” would come back - although, technically, it had never existed in the first place.  Jean had always been special to him, because he felt her pain so acutely, and because she'd had so much potential; she was like a daughter to him really.

He remembered her safe area from before, and couldn’t believe it was the same place he was in now.  The plants had mutated, becoming these huge, monstrous things of complex knots and man-sized thorns, and if the mansion of her mind was still here, it had been obscured by a wall of consumptive vines.  The sky was on fire, burning, and he could see the grounds had been transformed into a lake of fire, with an oversized border of sawtoothed mountains on the horizon.  Was that supposed to be Alkali Lake?

Xavier had some idea of a twinge in his stomach, back in his distant corporeal body; this was madness. Everything in this landscape had been transformed by something dark and twisted, something that had been allowed to go unchecked.  It made him wonder if there was anything left of the Jean he'd known.

He felt an ice pick of sudden pain stab into his mind, tearing something, making him wince and want to withdraw, but he didn’t - he couldn’t, not until he could talk to Jean (or whoever).  Then, when his eyes
could focus, he saw someone standing twelve feet from him, blocking his view of the lake.

“Professor?” Jean said, surprised.

Jean looked just as she had when she'd supposedly died, but with a few small changes.  Her hair was longer and more brightly red now, as if soaked with blood, and her eyes were controlled flames, barely confined within their sockets; she glowed with something akin to fire.  The power she gave off made his brain ache and his eyes burn.  He had to squint to look at her, but the pain in his head started to increase exponentially, and he knew he was rapidly running out of usable time.  She was magnificent; she was utterly terrifying.

“Why are you here?  I thought-” she stepped toward him, and it felt like something burst inside his head, making him grab it and start choking as he tried to swallow a scream.

He held up a hand and backed away, barely aware of his mental legs, or anything else.  All he knew was pain. “D-don’t come any closer,” he said, feeling a warm dampness on his face.  Blood?  Probably; it was too thick to be sweat. “I h-have … I have to t-tell you…”

He felt something like little explosions in his head - pop, pop, pop - and he wondered if those were his neurons giving way, rupturing under the strain.  He dropped to his knees in the astral plane, the pain like shivers traveling down his spine, and he tried hard to focus through the bright red agony to what he knew he had to say.  “I - “ But Xavier had to stop, because he already knew he had failed.

He couldn’t even remember why he was here.

****

It seemed beautifully, perfectly pointless.

Scott shot his visor at those he could, but the fight was taken out of him with extraordinary rapidity.  It didn’t matter that he knew this wasn’t Jean, or that there couldn't be this many Jeans (she didn’t have two dozen twin sisters) - he couldn’t bear seeing himself hurt her again.  It was a war between his logic (They aren’t Jean!  They're dead things that look like her!) and his gut (You just shot Jean!  Again!), and his logic was losing very badly.  It didn’t have much of a chance, not when he felt sick every time he hit one of the imposters.

But that was the point. The reason they looked like the people that haunted them was to kick their legs out from under them, to make them lose the will to fight before it even started.  It was great strategy, and Scott hated to admit it, but it worked.  Still, would he really rather die than hurt the pseudo-Jean anymore?

They swarmed him, and something snapped his knees out from under him, so he went falling on his back. As they jumped on him - and they were smart, for ghouls - they kept trying to pin his arms down so he couldn’t reach his visor. He kicked some off, but something wrapped around his leg like a boa constrictor - the Chameleon ones could change shape too?

There were maybe half a dozen of them on him now, trying to pin him down, and they all but had him dead to rights; he wasn’t even sure he wanted to fight them anymore.  Bob had probably set them all up to die here anyway.

But then one of the Logan ghouls stabbed him in the shoulder.

All three metal blades punched through his upper arm, and he screamed in pain, instinctively trying to pull his arms free but unable. So he jerked his head hard to the side, feeling the glass-hard ground beneath him, and felt the edge of his visor bite into his skull.  Terrific. “Watch out!” he shouted, only for his teammate’s sakes, as he jerked his head to the side and knocked his own visor off.  Only when he was certain he’d
be looking at bad guys did he dare open his eyes.

It was richly satisfying to see the Logan ghoul that stabbed him launched skyward, and everybody else around or near him tossed away like so many pieces of garbage. (He tried hard not to notice how many Jeans he may have hit.) He cleared them all off of him with a mere glance, the red energy splashing back at him on contact but curiously harmless (the Professor was still looking into why that was, beyond the odd fact that no one’s mutation seemed to specifically hurt themselves), and as soon as he had cleared them all off of him and away from his general vicinity, he closed his eyes, and blindly grabbed his visor as he sat up.

He could feel blood running down his injured arm, the muscles trembling as if in spasm, and the three wounds - and he could feel each of them individually - pulsed with his heartbeat.  Was it the fact that they were “fake” Logan claws (and demonic) that made them hurt so much, or did it really hurt that much to
get stabbed by Logan?  If the latter, it was no wonder he could clear a room so fast.  Scott wondered why had he actually entertained the idea of giving up?  That was so unlike him.  Maybe it was this place; maybe the Underworld, in spite of its bright prairie façade, oozed a special kind of defeat that wormed beneath your skin without your being consciously aware of it.  A siren song of depression.

He was getting up when an amorphic figure knocked him down - a shapeless Chameleon - and before he could fire at it and send it flying, something wrapped around its still liquid neck and tossed it aside. Helga then appeared, dripping green blood from what looked like a slash mark across her upper right arm, and minor cuts across her face. (Those Logans were deadly when in close range.) “What the hell did you shoot her with?” He asked, as it had been bothering him, in those few moments when he could think.

“Bob’s blood,” she said, looking around the chaotic plaza for someone.  Xia was having no problems
at all with any of them - with her good old natural force field - and Tom was left to just punch and kick
them, but he seemed to be extremely well trained in hand to hand combat (then again, he was a former Organization operative, wasn’t he?  A glorified hit man). “In theory, it should put any bad being on the ropes.”

Scott sensed a terrible loophole as he climbed to his feet, trying not to show her how he was favoring his bloody right arm. “She’s bad, right?”

“Well, you’d think, wouldn’t you?  Underworld and all.”

That wasn’t really an answer, and they both knew it.  However this worked, it was possible that blood bullet (Ew!) was no more harmful than a regular bullet. “Do you see her?”

“I ain’t all over the bitch, am I?”

He took that as a no. “Could she be dead?”

“If she was dead her minions would fall; she controls them.  Do they look like they’re crumbling to dust
to you?”

“So if that doesn’t kill her, what will?”

That turned out to be a rhetorical question, as sky woman suddenly appeared, being helped up by a minion who looked like an iguana turned into a biped with a natty suit and a boxer’s thick build. What the hell was that supposed to be?

Ereshkigal was bleeding night sky from the wound in her summer sky chest, and didn’t look that good. But she was clearly still alive, as the sudden resurgence of ghouls proved. “Clear me a path,” Helga said, taking off running, a knife suddenly materializing at the tip of her tail.

“Hey....damn it,” he grumbled, but did as she asked, mowing down minions in between Helga and Ereshkigal.  It looked like she had a straight shot as she lunged for her … but of course, when had anything ever been that simple?

Injured or not, she was a god, and when she saw Helga, the suns of her eyes flared brightly. “Miserable concubine,” Ereshkigal snarled, and made a simple “lifting up” gesture with one hand.  It sent Helga flying not just high over her head, but back first through the castle wall, high above them all, and with such force that she disappeared inside the castle itself.

And the tower itself started to topple over.

Scott had to make a split-second decision: shoot at Ereshkigal, or shoot at the castle.  But the tower, impossibly big and wide, was falling fast, and looked to be heading right down to crush them all.  There really wasn’t a choice, and besides, did he really think he could hurt her if the blood bullet barely had
any effect on her?

He used wide beams to break up the tower, but the material was odd, and broke up in unpredictable ways. Sometimes his energy vaporized it; sometimes it broke up into still sizable and dangerous chunks; sometimes it did nothing more than punch a hole through it.  Too much of it was coming down way too fast; obviously Ereshkigal was simply trying to crush them all.

As he tried to bust up a last piece the size of a Pontiac, heading straight for him, someone tackled him and they both hit the ground as the piece slammed down on the plaza.  Scott had closed his eyes, sure he was going to be crushed …but he could still hear his heart thudding frantically in his ears, and he didn’t feel any great weight; in fact, he had felt no impact at all.  With great reluctance - like acknowledging reality would destroy the fantasy - he opened his eyes.

The huge slab of debris was hovering over him by maybe six inches, and he wondered if he had lost his mind until he realized he felt an arm around his waist, and there was a faint shimmer in the air where the dust and the sunlight could be seen.

Xia.  She had grabbed him and extended her force field around him.

“Don’t use your powers,” she said, kicking and punching away the debris. “It’ll just bounce back inside the field.”

“What aren’t you immune to?” He wondered.  They could see through the window in side of the façade that Ereshkigal and her helper had taken to the air with her aide and flown over the wall, soaring like an eagle, away from them.  Her minions were still about, even though many were crushed in the tower’s fall. But why would she care?  They were already dead anyway, weren’t they?

“I really don’t know,” she admitted, and he helped her cast the rest of the debris off of them.  There were more ruins around him than he remembered - she really had saved his hash. Tom had ducked into the area beside a still-standing part of the castle base, and that had protected him from any debris; in fact, it looked like it was the only rubble free place around.  Scott briefly wondered if part of his power was the ability to sense or otherwise predict “fall” patterns - where things would end up once the rug had been ripped out from beneath them.  Either that, or he was just damned lucky.  Certainly Xia must have known he would be okay.  He then added, almost as an afterthought, “Thanks.”

She just nodded, as if it was no big deal at all. “Do you think she’s dead?”

It took Scott a moment to realize she was referring not to Erishkigal, but Helga.  “I don’t know.” He said, climbing to his feet. Y ou’d think being thrown through an entire building would kill anything; but she was under the aegis of Moros (whoever - or whatever - he really was) and a demon on top of that.  The one useful thing he’d really learned about demons was that, in general, they were made of much hardier stuff than Humans.

Some of the minions started to climb out of the rubble, some actually missing limbs but completely unaware of it, and Scott shot a random few as Tom continued to beat, throw, and otherwise pulverize them.  If they ever got back to their reality, he thought Tom and Xia would make some good additions to the team, in spite of their Organization past.  They certainly kept their cool when everything went bad.

Xia gestured towards the break in the wall, and said, “Should we go after Eresh - Irish - whoever?”

He sighed. “Why?  Can we hurt her?” He looked down at the pulsing red ground, watching the different shades of red swirl and meld, and suddenly he had an epiphany. What had Xia called this when they first came in?  A heart. And somehow Tom’s fantastic earthquake hadn’t touched it because … because maybe it really wasn’t part of the ground?  It was submerged, but it was ... part of something else?  Part
of her?

He couldn’t believe how he was thinking.  It was insanity, and he was basing his suppositions on nothing. The mere fact that this was unlike anything he’d ever seen before, and that she did seem to be a god of some sort didn’t mean it was some outgrowth of her.  And yet he was seized with the sudden, undeniable feeling that they had to break this; that if they could harm it, she wouldn’t be much of a problem anymore.

After shooting one more minion, he took a pot shot at a distant part of the plaza, just to confirm his beams weren’t reflected off of it like they were the outer walls.  It didn’t do any appreciable damage, but no, it didn’t rebound either.  “Xia, help me” he said, turning his aim towards the ground, a meter away from where he was standing.  He started to shoot a steady, concentrated beam down into the glass like floor
of the plaza. “We have to break this open.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. We just have to.”

Luckily, she didn’t give him shit, like he figured Logan would.  She just dropped to her knees and started hammering her fist into the ground, and her results were more immediate than his - shards flew everywhere as she began to make a very neat, fist sized hole in the crystal.

“I can help,” Tom said, continuing to cover their backs against the dwindling minions.

“Maybe when we get enough damage in this,” she told him, moving over to start pounding the crystal a bit farther down.  Scott fired a concentrated beam of energy into the hole she’d just left behind, and it seemed he was getting more accomplished that way.  All he needed was a foothold, a crack in the armor, and he could flood this thing with everything he had.

They must have been on the right track, because he heard the minions coming back to life, and Tom was a little more busy in his perpheral vision.  He only paused to shoot the ones that got too close; otherwise he concentrated on the task at hand.  Now he was sure they were on to something.

Xia kept moving around, punching holes everywhere, making the surface resemble Swiss cheese, and he understood what she was doing; she was weakening the structure - making it easier for Tom to attempt to “break” it.  How long had they been working together?  They made a very good team.

“What do you think it is?” Tom asked, throwing a Collin into a Logan and knocking them both down. 
He seemed to work extra hard at keeping the Logans out of slicing range, which Scott could totally understand.

“Maybe her power source,” he replied, not wanting to voice the first response that popped into his head: “Maybe her heart.” It might have been the same thing anyway.

This confirmed it - he was now officially insane.

Tom paused to catch his breath, sweat plastering his hair to his face, the few minions left struggling to get to their feet. “So, we pull the cord, we get out of here?”

“In theory.” Scott hated to commit further, because he really didn’t know what would happen if they succeeded.  Quite possibly nothing, and then what would they do?

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw quick, slithery movement, like a snake on the ground, and since it was moving away from him he really didn’t think much more about it … but where had a snake come from?

As the danger of that familiar form and movement registered in his mind, the “snake” the Chameleon ghoul had become lunged up and shot straight through Tom’s chest like a spear.

Tom was so shocked he gasped, eyes as wide as saucers, and for a moment it was like time had stopped  as blood poured down the new hole in his chest like red rain.  Finally, the moment was shattered when Xia uttered an anguished, “Tom!”

Scott felt a deep and terrible twinge in his gut as Tom gave Xia the most heartbreaking, apologetic look he had ever seen, as if he had just failed her horribly somehow.  He held out a hand to her as he collapsed to his knees, his blood already pooling on the crystal ground.

She raced to him and took him in her arms as he fully collapsed, putting a shimmering hand over the gaping wound on his chest, staunching the blood.  It just exited through the wound in his back, the pool of crimson surrounding him, growing ever wider.

“Hon, it’s okay,” he told her, laying down on the ground, tears falling from the corner of his eye. Scott saw the Chameleon thing forming itself into a more humanoid pillar, and he shot it.  Because he had his beam tightly focused to a “drilling” mode, it seemed to make the amorphic Chameleon thing explode into a billion droplets of something like water, and he was secretly glad.  Tom grabbed Xia’s hand, removing it from the entry wound, and said, “I’m going out with a bang.”

Scott saw his eyes fog over snow white, and he barely had time to hastily throw himself down on the ground before the world started to - literally - tear itself apart.

Right away, it was worse than before, and he guessed Tom was pouring it on as hard and fast as he could, racing death as he bled out all over the ground that seemed to be quaking in abject anger.  Tom arched his back and screamed, partly in pain and partly in rage, and the quake abruptly reached a crescendo that not only matched his roar, but swallowed it whole.

What was left standing of the castle started not so much to crumble but violently fling itself apart, and Scott was forced to hit the bucking ground and cover his head as the rocky debris pelted down on him.  He was sure some of it had cut him, if not outright broken his bones, but he couldn’t tell for sure because his inner ear was convinced he was not on solid ground but rather a raging sea, and he was about to be sick.

The shaking reached an intensity that was truly frightening; it not only knocked his heart out of rhythm (it was now thub-dubbing along like a rabbit shot full of caffeine, unable to hit a normal rate and making him feel out of breath as well as nauseous), but the remaining outer walls seemed to vaporize, collapsing into instant enveloping clouds of stale, chalky dust.

Scott curled up into a fetal ball, but threw up anyways, the pressure building up inside his head so great he was pretty sure his brain was going to explode before his heart did.  But just as he was certain he couldn’t take it anymore, he finally heard something over the seemingly enraged roar of the shifting of the earth: a crack he felt as much as heard, the sound of a massive calving, an iceberg big enough to sink three Titanics breaking away from a humongous ice shelf with enough violence to sink the floe.

And then the quaking stopped.  No, it died off to small shudders, and then came to a slow, incremental stop, yet Scott could still hear the roaring of his ears, still feel his muscles quaking in sync with the tortured ground. When his heart started moving back toward a normal rhythm, he leaned over and attempted to spit the sour taste of bile out of his mouth, and saw, in his peripheral vision, something like red vapor bleeding up towards the sky, out of the now fractured crystal ground.

He had done it.  Tom’s last dying act was to break the world.  He knew a man who didn’t trust Logan couldn’t be all bad.

He sat up, and shot a few blasts towards fragments of the ground, busting it up more, releasing more of
the red stuff.  He had no idea what it was, but it wasn’t giving off heat, and he couldn’t smell smoke; it
was just … what?  Red fog?  Something like that.  Certainly not blood like he'd expected.

He heard shifting in the castle debris, and tensed, ready to fire on whatever minion had managed to survive that but, to his shock, he saw a flash of green as it crawled from the rubble. “You trying to wake me up, San Andreas Fault?  I’m fucking up already, so knock it off with the pony ride.” Helga groused, pausing to sit and catch her breath.  She had green blood streaming from her nose, and she was holding her right arm at an odd angle, suggesting it was broken.

“You’re alive,” Scott said, more shocked than he would have thought.  She'd survived not only the throw and the fall, but that quake. That was an awful lot, even for a demon; especially for her.

“Like that Moros motherfucker would let me die,” she said, with surprising bitterness. “If he can’t, no one else can.  I can just get completely fucking pulverized, but he ain’t letting me go that easy.”  She wiped blood away from her head with her forearm, and said, “My my, Boy Scout - I’d never have bet on you as the last man standing. I’m impressed.”

He was in no mood for her. “I’m not the -” His glance over at Xia and Tom turned into a stare.  Xia was draped over Tom’s body, as if trying to protect him from the falling debris, and her posture was one of complete dejection and surrender.  That was her husband; to Scott, he was just a random mutant, one of Logan’s “org buddies”, but he'd been her husband; her spouse had just died in front of them all.

Scott’s stomach twisted into a tight knot of empathy - oh, how he knew that hideous feeling, to lose a loved one and be helpless to stop it - and very carefully he stood.  Once he was sure he wasn’t going to lose his balance - or his lunch again - he started across the shattered plaza, where spiderweb-thin cracks in the crystal gave it almost a mosaic pattern now, the red paleing to a pinkish hue as the scarlet fog fled into the sky.  He had covered half the distance when he noticed there was a piece of the rubble on her back, a small triangle like a shark’s fin, that she hadn’t bothered to knock off her field. Except that something else wasn't adding up, and it took him a moment to realize what it was: no shimmer.  Her field was down.  And she wasn’t moving.  Or breathing.

“Xia!” He shouted, but he knew, before he even got there, what had happened.  She had dropped her field, or never raised it at all. Her husband was dead, and she'd decided to go with him. Scott understood this instinctively, because he knew if he could have died in Jean’s place (if she had indeed died) or died with her, he would have.  Logically, it was pointless and stupid, but that was one of those “in retrospect” things; in the heat of the moment, all you could think of was your future without them, and you decided death was better than pain or loneliness.

When he reached her, he saw the triangular debris was sticking out of her back, but as he reached for her throat to see if he could find a pulse, he realized that blood was dripping down from her scalp onto a scree of chalk white façade - her skull had been caved in by something large and heavy, possibly the bloody chunk of stone just a foot or so away.  Scott didn’t even realize he was weeping until he saw the spots his tears made on the dusty ground at his feet.

Even though she was dead, he felt like asking her why, and yet he knew the answer to that too. In the end, he and Xia had much more in common than he had ever thought.

Tom was dead too, which was no surprise, and probably a blessing since he didn‘t live to find out his wife had died along with him. It didn’t look as if any of the rubble had hit him, but the amount of dust coating his copiously spilled blood made it almost muddy, and he had hemorrhaged from his eyes - he'd pushed his powers until every blood vessel in each eye had burst, streaming down his face like cheap mascara in the rain. He'd easily hastened his own death by pushing himself so hard.  “But you did it,” Scott told the dead man, wiping tears from his face and trying to get a hold of himself.  He had to confirm Ereshkigal was finished, and then, who the fuck knew; maybe they could get out of this bright and shiny hell.

Helga limped up next to him, and said, “You gonna be okay?” She had wrapped her own tail around her right leg, and he figured she was trying to keep it working, more or less.  Probably it was broken too.

“Yeah,” he lied, and then became aware of a high keening noise. At first he thought it was from the red fog escaping from the ground - like a kettle whistle or something - but it was a bit farther away than that, and he became aware that it was spiraling ever higher, full of something a simple steam mechanism could never claim to produce. It was full of bitterness and pain, rage and hate, and seemed to make the very air quiver, a beaten animal now in fear of - and fighting for - its very life.

It was Ereshkigal, and they had now officially pissed her off.  Oh joy.