59: Rebirth

SUE

She'd been standing in a S.H.I.E.L.D. laboratory, about to shut down Wanda's madness with the Cosmic Cube.

And...

And it had been a dream. She was back in the Baxter Lab, in her seat at the desk that she and Reed shared. The part about Ant Girl being there had been weird. And the part about her being the only living member of the Fantastic Four. Now that she thought about it, it must have been a nightmare. Too long staring through the portal at the Negative Zone, that's what it was.

"Hey, honey. Hope I didn't wake you up..."

It was Reed. His dexterous, enlengthened fingers already wrapping around her slender shoulders and massaging feeling back into them.

She smiled and turned to him. "No, no...I was just nodding off."

She wrapped one of her hands around his and he closed the gap between them sensing her need for affection.

"Sue...you're shaking. That must have been a doozy!" He said as she leaned back into his ever-protective embrace.

"It...It was pretty bad...you were gone, Franklin was too...everyone was gone. I-I was so lonely..."

"Franklin?"

Sue turned to stare at him. She wasn't sure what she was expecting but the look of total bewilderment on his face wasn't it.

"You mean your father?"

"No...Reed...your son! Our son!"

Reed just stared at her.

Sue looked around the room, suddenly very uncertain about where she was and what was going on. "No, no, no...I-I couldn't have dreamed that! I...I remember him, I remember him inside me."

"Slow down, Sue...whatever is going on, I promise we'll figure it out, okay?" He reached out for her.

She shifted further away, her hands tingling, ready to place a barrier between herself and him. "No! Reed this is wrong...you should remember your son!"

Reed's confusion and anguish was as heart-breaking as ever and it lowered her guard long enough for her to be taken unawares. Before she knew what was happening, a thick, stony hand was wrapping around her neck from behind, lifting her up and instantly cutting off all air to her lungs.

She made a rather undignified sound, her legs kicking as she clawed uselessly at Ben's hand. She tried to make a forcefield shove him away from her. She tried to turn invisible.

But it didn't work. It was like her powers just weren't there.

She gave Reed a shocked, pleading look. He just smiled.

"Oh, come now, Sue...you knew you what you were doing. All that time parading around in that tight suit..." As he spoke, his hands grew. With just too rubbery, but solid fingers, he snapped her legs open. "It was only a matter of time before we all decided to give you what you deserved."

"Yeah...us guys can only take so much." Ben growled, his free hand shoving down his shorts so that his cock, as scaly and thick as the rest of him hung free. "'Sides...Alicia's too classy for me to ask to use her ass..." As he spoke, he pressed his over-sized organ between her thighs and her asshole puckered at the implication.

She tried to squirm, to twist her head so that she might stare into those deep black, soulful eyes she knew so well. But Reed was intent on commanding her attention. Turning his other fingers into tendrils, he slid them down the front of her uniform, coiling his cold knuckles around her breasts and encircling each tit with sharp fingernails.

She squirmed and struggled again to formulate speech. But as she did, Reed's tongue was stretching, sliding between her teeth and lapping at either side of her strangled throat, leathery and tough. And his fingers were down below, prodding her open for both Ben and Johnny.

Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she caught a flash of fire fill the air above. Briefly, a spark of hope filled her heart. Then she felt the leggings of her leotard disintegrate, exposing everything below the waste. She couldn't see him, but she could feel the heat of her brother's burning member as it neared her now exposed entrance.

"It's okay, sis..." She heard him say, as his hands somehow clasped her thighs without burning the skin. "It'll hurt at first...but you'll learn to like it!"

She tried one last time to escape. To turn invisible. To do anything to get away from them all. Then she tried to scream but found she couldn't.

WANDA

She floated, inches above the ground, staring down at Sue as she knelt on the floor, her eyes covered in a red haze, as her hips bucked, and her leggings dampened.

"I never liked you." Wanda told her, as the Baxter Building's latest intern ran screaming for help down the nearest tunnel.

"I always thought you were...pretentious." Wanda said, before pressing one crackling digit to Sue's forehead and drawing all the cosmic energy out of her body. Sue, who was busy dreaming about getting **** three-ways to Sunday, didn't seem to notice in the slightest. Wanda had considered having Sue imagining getting it from Mole-Man and that fraudster of a magician Doom, but this was _much _tastier. Besides, she wanted Sue to her last moments before being reconstituted and assimilated as part of the new whole. It added that extra sting to the illusion.

"Don't worry, I'll do better with your powers than you ever did." Wanda said, pressing a kiss to Sue's cheek.

With that, she turned to the Cosmic Cube. Like her, it floated, above it all. It would be soooo easy to reach out and touch it.

But it wasn't the time yet. She'd need the powers of the greatest witches and sorceresses in the universe to absorb the Cosmic Cube.

And purely by coincidence, all of them were currently on their way here...

PEGGY

It was the Blitz. All around her, London was falling beneath a torrential hail of explosives.

And there was a little boy at her feet, his leg trapped beneath a pile of rubble, his eyes staring up at her in unceasing horror. Even if he survived this, even if she saved him, he would remain shell-shocked for the remainder of his days, his soul shattered by the savagery of the Hun.

Peggy stared at him for a moment. He had short, almost blonde hair. His eyes were blue. He was the spitting image of Steve. The perfect child.

She turned away. None of this was real. Her mind belonged to Him, and she would not allow it to be seized so easily by some bitch in red spandex.

The pounding sound of the bombs continued. As did the cries of the boy, blubbering and begging for her to save him.

She closed her eyes. She took a deep breath. She counted to three. Then she opened her eyes again.

She was back in the real world, in a secret access tunnel that supposedly led right to the only thing that could keep the Scarlet Witch restrained. All the decorated, ultra-stoic super spies who had escorted her and Him this far, were clutching their heads, rolling on the floor, clawing at their eyes and desperately trying vomit up something which did not exist.

Yes, there was no training adequate for being in the thick of it. No benevolence proportional to the evil that men and women could command against each other. She gazed past them all though, searching for the one who belonged, the one who was real in her mind, realer than S.H.I.E.L.D. was now, realer than Steve had ever been.

She found him a few steps behind everyone else, curled in a ball, staring at something that wasn't real and...crying. She'd never seen him cry before. Or...if she had, she'd blocked it out. Her memory was fuzzy...that's why it was so important to have him around.

With both arms she scooped him up and held his chubby form to her toned one.

"It's alright." She told him, as she ran a hand through his hair. "I'm here. Whatever you're seeing, whatever you're hearing...it's not real."

He trembled against her, his fingers digging into her shoulders and finding the curls of her rich, dark hair. He let out a sound and she realized he'd just hiccupped. She felt no resentment toward his despair though, nor did her respect for him waver for an instant. He had done what she thought impossible, what she had believed beyond the reach of any man.

He had made her happy again.

She clutched him tighter. If she was going to march into hell, she would march not for a nation, not for a government, but for a person that she cared for, and for all the people that she knew cared about him too. And all the people that she knew would come to care for him.

She didn't have any magic. Any reality bending powers, or even any hyper-powered technology at her disposal.

But she would fight till the last.

She hugged him tighter to her. She would make him proud.

"Don't worry, sir...we're almost there..."

DIANA

She fell to the ground with a cry.

Her ears rang with laughter, not from one particular direction but from all of them at once, bouncing around inside her head and harmonizing in a cacophony of hunger and madness.

Her knees trembled and her eyes blurred as she felt the magic drawn from her helmet, her sword, her shield...she was taking everything. Everything that made Diana strong. Everything that made Diana herself.

She groped out, trying to find her the hilt of her fallen gladius and drive it through the witch's abdomen. But the metal disintegrated at her touch, reforming into another bit of armor for her opponent. Her whole life, Diana had believed in the power of magic, the power of the spiritual realms over the physical.

She felt now, how easily manipulated all she'd relied on was. Just as the shell of a six-ton tank had peeled away beneath Amazonian bronze, so too did her mind and the minds of all her comrades beneath the searing touch of the cackling bitch. In all her days, facing gods, fighting Circe, she'd never fully grasped how tenuous her own grasp on metaphysics was, how slight her people's claim to power truly was.

How easily it was taken away.

"You heroes are all the same..." The witch said, as she dragged the magic kicking and screaming out of Jonni and Lady Shazam and absorbed it through her fingertips. She was by now human only in the silhouette. Her skin had been replaced by something between glass and diamond, such that her hellfire veins were entirely visible as she single-handedly dispatched with all of Justice League and Young Justice in one fell swoop.

"All one has to do is cause a little chaos...disrupt the status quo a little...and you come running in to save the day." The witch levitated closer, grinning down at Diana with teeth that refused to stay vertical. "Not this time though...you see, if you'd all just quarantined S.H.I.E.L.D.'s little experiment, I never would have had sufficient power to absorb The Cube."

Her mouth quirked. "Even after obliterating all the thugs and vandals this place calls inmates. Although taking all of Creel's powers does seem to have accelerated my abilities to duplicate and replicate that of others..."

Her eyes lowered back to Diana, two gleaming black holes which dared her sanity to fall screaming into them. "Still, even with my new telepathic powers...I would have been trapped by the Cube if you'd just left me alone. I'd be able to manipulate reality inside the barrier, but I'd be unable to overcome my true warden. But..." She tapped one burning fingernail against a fang. "You couldn't leave behind your little friend, could you?"

One of her hands flexed and M'gann appeared in a puff of smoke beside her. Not M'gann as Diana knew her, not as her friends knew her, but the slavering, hairless beast beneath, with its jutting jaw and fiendish red eyes.

"Your friend is dead." The witch snarled. "She was dead the moment I instructed those S.H.I.E.L.D. idiots into imprisoning her in the house across the street from me."

There was a scream, as Kendra came hurtling out of the seething red mist with her mace raised above her head. Then M'gann stretched one hand out, wrapping her fingers around Kendra's face and cracking her against the ground. Once, twice, thrice. Finally, after the fourth time, Kendra's fingers stopped twitching with movement and the thing that had once been M'gann roared in sadistic glee.

"I have to thank you, especially though, Diana..." The witch said, as Diana's bracelets dissipated from around her wrists and reappeared on her own arms. "After all, if you hadn't been so arrogant to kill the gods of this world, if you hadn't been so paranoid to bring their relics with you everywhere you went..." She leaned down, her eyes boring into whatever remained of Diana's soul. "If you hadn't been so stupid to keep the Justice League going after Superman's ****...I would never have been able to gain enough power to remake this universe."

Diana lashed out, one fist swinging at the witch's jaw. Wanda caught her hand without flinching, and just continued to stare down at her with the same all-consuming serenity as she twisted Diana's hand until red hot pain shot up her arm.

Diana heard herself cry out. It had been so long since she'd been in a battle where she'd actually felt pain. It snuck up on her, tearing through her, reminding her instantaneously of her own mortality. Under normal circumstances the removal of her bracelets would have launched her into a primordial rage, from which no creature in this reality or any other would be safe.

But these weren't normal circumstances. The limitless potential which had once been contained with Diana's mortal shell, had been entirely subsumed by the witch. Everything that made her more than mortal had been stripped away, leaving just another human **** not to die.

"It's okay..." Wanda said, in the loving tones of a mother as she twisted Diana's arm painfully. "Go ahead, little one. Cry. You'll feel better once you let it alllll out..."

Diana screamed and swung her other hand, trying to grab Wanda's hand and wrench free from her grip. That hand was suspended in the air by glowing red energy. Diana stared at it and then at Wanda, who's haunting smile had only widened.

"When I first sensed you were coming, I considered turning you into clay..." Wanda said, as Diana's body slowly lifted off the ground. "Y'know, leaving you to bubble all over the ground..."

Wanda's mouth opened impossibly wide. "I like this better though. I'm going to leave you here to think about what you've done...you've got about ten minutes to regret everything. Then you'll be part of me, like everyone else, and you won't even be able to hear your own screams over their suffering."

Then Wanda evaporated, her essence disappearing into the storm of red mist, taking M'gann and any hope of saving the world away with her.

Diana lay on the ground, naked and powerless as her wrists both throbbed. Too scared to inspect at her team-mates, by the possibility of what state she might discover them in, she curled in on herself.

I'm sorry, Clark. She thought. I'm sorry, Bruce. I'm sorry, Wally. I'm sorry, J'onn. I'm sorry, Steve. I tried. I tried as hard as I could...

In that moment, she wished that she was clay once more. She wished that she could melt into the ground. The weight of the world was too heavy for even Atlas to bear. But the burden of failure was somehow heavier.

She couldn't protect her teammates. She couldn't save her homeland or bring peace to the world. She had dishonored the title of Wonder Woman. She was worthless, hopeless, hapless.

Ares had been right after all. War wasn't Tartarus. It was the sole relief from the facade of peace. At least in the rush of bloodshed there was release. Release from the perversion which writhed inside her. Release from the grief which had come to define her.

Soon though, it would all be over. Soon though, she'd finally be free of herself.

ZATANNA

She tried to focus on the ritual, to follow along Inza and Clea's chanting with her own special speech. But whatever exorcism they'd done to release her from Wanda's hold had been...insufficient. She could still hear the woman's laughter in her head. She could still feel the heat of her breath on the back of her neck.

Suddenly, she wasn't floating in the Astral Plane alongside two other hypercompetent magic users. Suddenly, she was back on stage.

Her audience leered up at her with termite-infested teeth and pale, unblinking eyes.

They were ventriloquist puppets, all of them. Thousands of puppets, all waiting on the edge of their seat. She saw friends, loved ones, lovers, all remade in paint and papier-mache. They stared at her, their mouths moving invisibly in chattering, corny voices, a buzzing hornet's nest of garish grins and falsetto laughter.

"Stop it!" She shouted, turning away and covering her ears with both hands. "Stop it! I know it's not real Wanda...so you may as well stop it!"

"Oh, it's real, alright..."

She turned again to see the bloated corpse of her father, suspended in a glass chamber, filled with water, and chained to it's floor, forever drowning in the one trap from which he could never escape. His milky white eyes glared down at her.

"You must be a terrible magician if you can't tell the difference between real magic and an illusion anymore." Her father's corpse sneered, his moldering voice echoing through the auditorium over the dummy's celebrations. Slowly, he raised a water-logged finger and shook it dismissively. "I warned you not to let the power get your head, Zatanna."

Chains were suddenly wrapping around her, dragging her backwards along the stage as the curtains parted to either side of her.

"Em esealer! Sniach raeppasid!" She cried out, as the dummies laughed harder. But the words failed to take, she wasn't in the world where she could use magic to protect herself. She was locked within her own mind.

"Foolish girl, trying to use Logomancy on your own father, eh?" The corpse asked, as the chains dragged her toward a familiar steel five-gallon milk can. It had been barely big enough to fit her body inside when she was a child but somehow, though, the chains grasping her now slithered into its gaping maw, coiling endlessly in its base. "I can see you need a t. I suppose a time out. Perhaps a few centuries in the milk can?"

"On! Og em tel! Pots!" The chains didn't listen and as her feet were pulled into the can, she felt them coil as well inside its dank and curdled depths. "Please, no! Father! HELP ME!"

"Oh, and one more thing...something to think about while you're down there." He called as she grasped the edge of the can with one hand as her legs kicked over the bottomless abyss contained within. "Epiw dinm."

Suddenly, she felt it. All her memories flooding out of her mind, disappearing into the vastness below. Her fingers slipped from the lip of the can.

And she plummeted into the dark to the sound of thousands of tiny hands clapping.

KAREN

She laid on the cold floor and stared at nothing, clutching the seal fur parka to her form. Her legs, curled tightly to her, trembled around her recently abused hole.

She let out a jerky cry as she felt warm hands wrap around her shoulders. Then Kara was plunging her fingers into her tits, squeezing them mightily and sighing into her ear.

"It's okay...we were broken before..." She whispered, cuddling her cheek against Karen's own. "But he's going to put us back together better than before."

The world turned lazily here, at its summit. Karen let out a sob and felt Kara's hug tighten around her.

"Don't worry...it'll be okay..."

BOBBI

She was in a dirty apartment down the street from the club, getting fucked from behind by the cowgirl, while her roommate shoved her face into her cooch. Occasionally, the cowgirl would slap her reddened flanks and Bobbi could only moaned and gyrated and thrust herself backwards for more.

The sex she'd had with Lincoln Slade had been the best of her whole life. Before tonight.

"I'm an dumb-dumb...a stupid, naive, big-titted, blonde, bleach-brained moron..." She repeated to herself, as she ate out some girl that she didn't even now the name of.

WANDA

She stared into The Cube, feeling its power radiating over her. It had been used to destroy Galactus, once and for all. It was the single most powerful object in this universe. Soon, it and her would be indistinguishable and all the horror she'd ever known would be seared away by the light of unbridled possibility.

As she was savoring this thought, an adamantium shield slammed into the side of her head.

Wanda was more surprised than hurt and when Captain Britain hurled herself right at her a moment later, amidst a hail of bullets. She flung the woman backwards, crashing her into the lines of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents attempting to fire at her. Then Jean Gray was appearing out of the darkness, along with her daughter and half a dozen others. They were nothing compared to her, not even Hope. She wiped the floor with each of them, continuing to fling Britain around like a rag-doll, enraged at being distracted at her moment of triumph.

Finally, she turned back toward The Cube...and found it was already too late.

She stared in horror, as some wide-eyed, shlubby thirty-year-old neckbeard fondled The Cube with his greasy hands. She screamed like a banshee and lurched forward to take it from him.

Then everything disappeared in a wave of cold blue light.

GERRY

He'd touched the Cube.

He was the Cube.

He flexed his fingertips, testing the boundaries of his newfound power. And everything shifted around him. Suddenly every molecule was a grain of sand, waiting for him to mold and re-arrange.

He looked around. The Scarlet Witch was frozen in place, still reaching out towards him. Her eyes burned like blackholes, but she was as helpless as everything else in this moment. Gerry turned and stared at where Peggy hung in mid-air, three blood-coated bullets protruding from her stomach, just as trapped in time as everything else.

He stared at his hand, and the infinite power swirling in it. This...this was what he'd wanted...wasn't it?

Someone laughed and Gerry jumped, twisting in surprise. Sitting, cross-legged, levitating in mid-air and remaining completely unaffected from the power which held everyone else still as statues, was a little, balding man in a suit, with a tiny purple bowler hat on his head.

"Don't go growing a conscience on me now, 'Mister Patriarch'..." He giggled, lifting one tiny hand to his smile. "I knew when I gave you that App that you'd put it to good use..." He pulled his hand away and his eyes gleamed with a kind of adolescent evil that was usually restricted to schoolyard bullies, not reality-manipulating masterminds.

"You...you created the App?" Somehow Gerry knew it was true just from the way the man had said it. No one else in the universe save the two of them were aware that the app even existed. But of course, somehow had to make it, and it suddenly made a sick kind of sense that some alien creature had done so, just as a cheap giggle.

The little man laughed harder this time. "Oh, don't go judging me for creating it or for tuning in every now and then to watch the show. You're the one who did it all, who wanted it to work."

Gerry stared at the cosmic **** slowly rotating in one hand. With the other he felt inside his pocket and clenched his phone.

"Things have been sooooo boring since Super-Lame died..." The little man sighed. "Having one of you three-dimensional simpletons actually trying to be better than his base instincts...oh, we had such good fun." His smile faded. "But then he died...and everything changed. Some dumb brute who couldn't put two pieces of Lego together if his life depended on it killed Superman. Can you believe it? I can't...ever since then, ever since then, there's no heroes anymore. Everyone's tragically flawed, or psychologically damaged...we used to have fun, don't you know? This used to be fun! Saving runaway trains and catching bank robbers...now it's all divorced couples and serial killer worship and pin-up girls in frilly-silly outfits pretending like they have serious problems. I mean, hellooo?" He pointed at the insensate super-heroines all over the floor. "That woman right there is dressed like a hooker in a magician outfit! She does her magic by speaking backwards! Is there anything REASONABLE about that? Anything logical or mature or dark and gritty about that? NO! Do you think anything in this clown of a universe deserves to be taken seriously? It's a soap opera...and not a very entertaining one at that!!" The man's cartoonish features were beginning to grow red with range. "This whole universe has been turned into an adolescent fantasy to appeal to depressed, porn-addicted adults too defeated by life to relinquish themselves to its absurdity!"

Gerry remained silent, watching steam pour from the little man's ears.

When the little man realized that Gerry wasn't understanding 90% of what he was saying he sighed. "That's why I gave you the App, I thought it might be amusing to have a change of pace...but it's just more of the same. You're going to defeat the bad guy now and everything will continue to be the way it is. Dark. Gritty. Self-aware. Self-loathing. B-O-R-I-N-G."

Gerry stared at the power of the Cube, though he knew it was everywhere and inside of him at the same time. "What would you have me do...I mean...you gave me the App? If you had the power to change things, why didn't you?"

The little man sighed and put his chin on his hands. "It's no fun if *I* have to tell you what to do...I want you all to surprise me. Is that too much to ask?"

Gerry considered this for a moment. He considered returning to reality as a god, making all these women bow before him. It wouldn't be the App this time either! It would be his own, personal cunning which had granted him this power.

But...it was like the little man was saying. When you could do anything, everything was too easy. There was nothing to...to strive for. No reason to improve yourself. No luster in the accomplishment. He could have sex with a million beautiful women...it wouldn't change him. It wouldn't fix what was wrong with him.

He thought about Peggy, who had just sacrificed herself for him. He thought about Kara and Karen. The last of their race, crushed by the weight of responsibility. He thought about Bobbi, betrayed, ****, used by the fucking government. He glanced down at the prone form of Wonder Woman. She'd gone insane, with the weight of maintaining world peace set upon her shoulders. He looked at all the mutant ladies who'd try to deus ex machina this whole situation. Beautiful, talented women who's genes could be improving all of mankind. And instead they were constantly isolating themselves, constantly fighting each other and destroying countless lives in the process.

He stared back into the angry black holes in the Scarlet Witch's skull. Being powerful hadn't helped her. It had destroyed her.

Gerry didn't quite understand what the little man meant, that things used to be different. But he did understand that things shouldn't be this way.

"Could I...fix it...I mean, fix it all?" He asked, glancing back at the little man. "This power...it's like a god isn't it? I could re-arrange everything, set things right...make things better, couldn't I?"

The little man lifted an eyebrow. Then he smiled. "Well, there's only one way to find out..."

With that he was gone.

Gerry thought about the App in his pocket. How easy things had become once he'd gotten one of them on his side. How hard things would be without it. But...he didn't want to just conquer for the sake of it. Not anymore. Not after having gained some kinship with those he'd subjugated. The desire to be important, to prove his masculinity...it was ravenous. It bit him in the dick and sucked out all the joy of sex like a fucking leech. Even the joys of sadism would eventually dull and fade he knew.

He wanted...no, he needed to do something to be worthy of respect, not to trick everyone into thinking they respected him.

He held out his hand and thought about the time he'd first met Kara. He thought about how simple things had seemed back then and how strange and awful they were now. Then he closed his eyes...

...and wished.

I figured I might as well wrap this story up, given that I already put a bunch of work into the final chapter before bouncing. Anyone who wants to continue from here has my blessing to undo my past mistakes with new chapters, but I really hate most of the stuff I wrote for this story from a narrative perspective. If I could do it again, I'd do it completely differently. But since I don't have the time for that, better to wrap it up and hopefully start fresh with a new story sometime later.

Thanks again for all the support everyone.