Wrong Invisible Woman

You wanted Susan Storm. Blonde, the blue suit, the 4 on the chest, the woman who still looked like the heart of the team. You dressed for that.

What snapped into the room with you was wearing her face and almost nothing else you had asked for. Blonde ponytail, a spiked black crown, an X of straps over the eyes, red scarf, black leather cut high on the hips, fishnet on the thighs and the arms, spiked gauntlets, a red cape, and a grin stretched wide enough to make the whole thing look less like a costume than a warning. She came through cackling, already in the middle of something, one clawed hand slashing down at a target that had stopped existing the instant she crossed over, the other thrown back for balance, cape kicked out behind her. Whatever she had been laughing at was still funny for half a second after the room changed. Then the claw met empty air, her footing went with it, and the laugh broke as she finally noticed you. The grin cracked into a scream.

You froze her before it finished. No field, no fight, no chance for whatever she had been about to do next. The leather locked, the cape stopped mid-flare, the claws hung an inch from nothing. Her mouth was still hers. Her eyes were still hers, wild behind the X. Everything else became dead weight.

The Malice this suit came from was familiar enough. Psycho-Man's puppet, hate poured into Sue until she turned on her own team, Reed finally dragging her back by making himself the thing she hated more. A wound with a woman still inside it. Nothing in this grin belonged to that version. Too pleased, too loose, too comfortable on her face, with none of the strain of somebody trapped underneath the wrong emotion. Whatever seam should have been there wasn't showing.

“Susan Storm,” you said. “What happened to you?”

For a moment she only blinked, still catching up with the room, her gaze drifting toward the empty space where one claw had been coming down on somebody a second ago. Then the restraint registered. Whatever confusion had come through with her thinned out, and the grin settled back onto her face as though it had only been interrupted.

“I had a nightmare,” she said. “Villains. An army of them. I woke up and my power had already answered. Everyone on my world was dead. Frozen. Air, heat, motion, all of it. Billions.” What little movement the hold allowed turned into something like a shrug. “Johnny lived because his fire kept him warm enough to move, which was almost funny. It meant Susan Storm still had somebody left to apologize to.”

The laugh that followed was quiet, more private satisfaction than performance. “She was on her knees in a dead world, trying to be sorry hard enough to make any of it matter. Guilt, regret, horror, all those little things that make people stop once they've done something they can't take back. I wasn't going to spend forever listening to her cry, so I told Johnny to flame on. Turned my own skull invisible, bent his light where I needed it, and burned out the part that made any of that hurt. It hurt while I was doing it, then the hurt had nowhere to live. I couldn't undo the world, but I could undo the part of me that cared that I had done it.”

By then the grin had widened, not because any of it was funny, but because the deliberate part of the story pleased her more than the accident ever could. The world ending in her sleep was only the beginning; everything after waking had been chosen. “Johnny helped with that. I killed him later. I wanted to know if I'd still feel anything.” The answer came with an almost tender smile. “Of course I did. It felt good. I'm the Invincible Woman now. I look at what Susan did and I like it. No guilt. No regret. No nights lying awake wishing the dead could forgive me. The woman who would have cried was the mistake. This one is better.”

The scale of it should have made the speech more impressive than it was. A dead world, Johnny kept alive long enough to turn his fire into a surgical tool, then murdered after he had served his purpose; none of that was small, and none of it was difficult to believe once Susan Storm's powers were followed past the version the public liked to think about. Light, pressure, heat, blood, breath, anything with a boundary around it could become something she controlled, and the nightmare had always been sitting there inside the power set waiting for circumstance to make it real. What felt smaller was the meaning she had built around it, the reduction of all that horror into guilt being weakness, murder being freedom, and pleasure being proof that the woman left behind was somehow an improvement.

Malice had at least contained a conflict: hate forced into Susan until there was barely room left for Susan herself, two selves grinding against each other inside the same woman. This was different. The world had ended by accident, but everything afterward had been chosen. Johnny had been kept alive long enough to help cut the guilt out of her head, then killed once he had served that purpose, and somehow all of that had led her to the philosophy of a cheap Joker imitation. One bad night, one permanent grin, murder because it felt good. Spikes and fishnet where the punchline should have been.

Even the Joker comparison gave her too much credit. His whole construction depended on resistance: a city that kept surviving, a man who refused to kill him, an argument that only mattered because somebody kept answering back. Here, the last person capable of answering had already been murdered, and the silence afterward had been dressed up as liberation. No witness, no resistance, nobody left to point out that destroying the part of yourself capable of horror was not the same thing as becoming profound.

She kept waiting for the reaction, and when it didn't come the smile tightened at the corners, barely enough to notice but enough to expose something the surgery had missed. Guilt might have been gone. Shame, regret, horror, all burned clean. The need to be taken seriously had survived.

You had never needed innocence from yourself. Whatever else could be said about the things you had done, you remembered doing them, and when guilt came it was allowed to exist without being mistaken for an order. It could sit in the passenger seat, complain, keep score, remind you what the road behind looked like; it simply did not get the wheel. There was a pile back there too, growing higher with every year, and one day it would probably be enough to bury you. That was an ending, not an argument. Until then, the idea was to enjoy yourself without pretending enjoyment made anything clean. Susan had chosen the cheaper escape. She had ended a world, found the knowledge unbearable, cut away the part capable of bearing it, and then built an identity around the relief.

The cane settled against the black crown almost gently, which only made the smile worse. “Well, Invincible Woman,” you said, drawing the name out just enough to make it sound as cheap as you thought it was, “all that work carving out the inconvenient parts of yourself, and this is what you came up with?”

The cane warmed against her skull while you kept talking, the power moving through it in the opposite direction from Johnny’s light, not burning anything away this time but rebuilding what she had been too frightened to live with. “No guilt, no shame, no horror. Very impressive. Must have taken real courage to make sure you’d never have to feel bad about anything again.” Tissue knitted itself back into the places she had destroyed, nerves and structure returning together until the damage stopped being an absence and became part of a working mind again.

“There. Better already.” Guilt came back with the machinery that made guilt possible, regret with the ability to understand what could not be undone, shame with the memory of choosing it anyway, horror with the knowledge of what those choices had actually meant. None of it had to be planted in her or taught to her. It had all been hers before she burned away the parts capable of carrying it, and once those parts existed again there was nothing left between Susan Storm and everything she had spent so much effort refusing to feel.

The nightmare returned with the clarity of the first time, villains closing in, her power answering before thought, and then the waking into a world where nothing moved. Air stopped, heat gone, billions of lives ended while the force of what she had done still seemed to hum through the silence around her. Johnny remained in the middle of it, fire in his hands because she had told him to flame on, the last familiar face alive on a planet she had emptied, and now there was no burned place in her mind to keep what followed at a safe distance. The memory carried straight through into the decision she had made afterward: her skull turned transparent, his light bent inward, the white violence inside her head, and the obscene relief when the part of her capable of guilt finally went quiet. She remembered the relief becoming pleasure, remembered how easily pleasure had become permission, remembered looking at Johnny later and wanting to know whether killing the last person who still loved her would feel good.

It had.

That knowledge came back with everything she had cut away to survive it. Not guilt by itself, not regret as some clean intellectual understanding, but empathy in full, brutal working order. Billions stopped being a number the instant she could imagine each death as belonging to somebody rather than to the world in aggregate. Every frozen body became a person who had expected another morning, somebody's child, somebody's parent, somebody who had trusted the day to continue.

Johnny stopped being the useful survivor who had supplied the light and became her brother again: the boy she had grown up with, the man who had stood beside her through everything, the last human being left alive after her mistake, and the person she had deliberately murdered once she had made herself incapable of caring what that meant. The pleasure she remembered taking in it did not disappear when the horror returned. It stayed exactly where it had always been, only now empathy wrapped itself around the memory and forced her to understand what that pleasure had been purchased with.

Her mouth opened, but nothing recognizable came out. The sound was too raw to be called a scream in any ordinary sense, a broken, voiceless convulsion dragged through a throat that could not find enough air for what the mind was suddenly trying to expel. Tears flooded beneath the X as the grin collapsed completely, her face contorting against a flood of feeling too large to organize into words. Spikes, fishnet, cape, crown, the whole ridiculous construction remained fixed around her while Susan Storm came apart inside it, not because pain had been inflicted from outside but because the part of her capable of feeling other people had been returned all at once and had nowhere to look except at what she had done.

The cane stayed against the crown while you watched the understanding spread through her. “There she is,” you said, letting the mockery sit in the name she had tried to replace. “Susan Storm after all.” Another shudder tore through her, and the only answer was that ruined, wordless sound. “And since you went to all that trouble to get away from her, Mr. Mind Control is going to make sure you get properly reacquainted.”

The frozen world was already beginning to close around her again when you continued. “You’re going to relive it. The nightmare, waking up, Johnny surviving, using him to burn yourself hollow, killing him afterward, every second you spent enjoying what you had turned yourself into. Then you’re going to do it again. And again. You don’t get distance, you don’t get numbness, and you don’t get to hide inside repetition until I decide you’ve had enough.”

By then the memory had already folded back to the beginning. Villains were coming. Her power was answering. Somewhere just beyond the moment of waking waited the silence of an entire dead world, and Johnny was still alive inside it, still her brother, still trusting her for a little while longer. This time she knew exactly what came next, and empathy made her feel every step toward it before she reached it.

The first time had been shock, memory colliding headlong with the empathy she had tried to cauterize out of herself. The second was worse because anticipation came with it. Nothing could surprise her anymore. The silence waiting beyond the nightmare was already there before she woke into it; Johnny was already standing alone in the dead world before she saw him, already destined to become the light she would turn against herself, and the relief inside her skull was waiting on the other side of the burn with all the pleasure that had followed it. Worst of all was knowing exactly when her brother would die and remembering, long before the moment arrived, how pleased she had been afterward. By the time the sequence carried her back to him, the first ruined scream had worn itself down into a hoarse, helpless wail that sounded less like pain than recognition.

The cane stayed against hear head with almost casual pressure while the memory kept moving, giving her no clean break between what she had done and what it meant now that the missing parts of her mind were working again. The billions became harder to shelter behind as a number, each pass forcing faces and lives into the space where abstraction had once protected her, but Johnny was worse because there had never been anything abstract about him. His voice came back with his face, then the familiarity of it, then the trust that had kept him beside her long enough to become the instrument she used to hollow herself out. She had taken the last person alive who still loved Susan Storm, used him to escape being Susan Storm, and afterward, when there was nothing left inside her capable of naming betrayal for what it was, killed him for the pleasure of finding out whether she could.

The freeze held her upright, but it could not disguise what the loop was doing to everything you had left free. Breath caught beneath the red scarf, each sob pulling the leather tight across her chest before breaking loose anyway, while the tremor running through her legs made the fishnet shiver against skin. Behind the X, her eyes had gone wet and unfocused, no longer carrying only grief. The machinery she had burned out of herself was alive again, and guilt was no longer an idea she could observe from a distance. It had nerves now, memory, attachment, a body willing to betray every feeling she had once amputated.

“Now that,” you said when the wailing finally thinned enough for her to hear you, “is much more useful.”

Her eyes struggled toward you, and the cane warmed against the crown with just enough pressure to make its presence impossible to forget. “You thought guilt made you weak, so you cut it out. That was the mistake. Guilt is leverage. Regret is leverage. Love is leverage. You threw away perfectly good machinery because you never learned what to do with it.”

Another fragment of Johnny surfaced behind her eyes and folded whatever composure remained. Her breath caught hard enough to make the leather creak, color climbing beneath the scarf while the old grin failed completely to return. Everything that had once driven Susan Storm toward responsibility was back, only now it had been dropped into the same mind that remembered what Malice had enjoyed doing without it.

“You want to make it right now, don’t you?” The answer showed before she could hide it, guilt pulling across her face toward punishment, sacrifice, anything that might make the impossible debt feel smaller.

“Of course you do. Susan Storm always needed to put things right.” The cane shifted slightly against the crown. “But I’m not giving you Susan back and letting Malice disappear behind her. That would just be another escape, and you’ve had enough of those. You get both: Susan with every ounce of guilt, every memory of Johnny, every dead face your mind can manage to give back to you, and Malice with every memory of enjoying it, every laugh, every moment she thought being free of remorse made her stronger. Neither one gets to hide behind the other.”

Her mouth opened as the meaning settled in, but whatever answer tried to come out collapsed into a thin, broken sound. Susan could no longer push the pleasure onto Malice as though another woman had felt it, and Malice could no longer dismiss the grief as weakness belonging to somebody she had replaced. The memories belonged to the same mind now, the joy and the horror occupying the same space, each making the other harder to escape.

“You wanted Susan gone and Malice permanent,” you said, keeping the cane where it was. “I think you’ll be much more useful as both. Susan gets to understand exactly what Malice enjoyed, and Malice gets to feel exactly what Susan knows it cost.”

The sound caught in her throat again as that closed the last gap between them.

“Good. Now all that guilt has somewhere to go.”

The suggestion entered softly, almost underneath the memory itself. Not an order dropped on top of her mind, but a path built through the emotions already tearing her apart. Guilt would not paralyze her. It would move her. Regret would not turn inward. It would become effort. Shame would not make her hide. It would make her prove herself. Every feeling she had tried to destroy would now bend toward usefulness, and usefulness would mean you.

“You will atone for your weakness by serving me,” you said, and the words settled deeper with each repetition of the nightmare. “Not because service erases what you did. Nothing erases it. That’s why it works.”

Another wail, weaker now, exhausted by repetition.

“You’ll remember the world every time you hesitate. You’ll remember Johnny every time you hold something back.” You let the next part land as a lie she was too wrecked to catch. “Every failure will remind you what happened the last time you decided your comfort mattered more than what needed to be done.”

The cane pressed fractionally harder.

“And when you serve well, when you anticipate what I need before I ask, when you make yourself useful, that guilt will loosen. Not disappear. Never disappear. Just enough for you to breathe.”

She was already chasing that ration with her eyes.

“You wanted joy without guilt,” you continued. “That was crude. Wasteful. We’re going to do better. Joy when you fulfill your purpose. Happiness when you succeed. Bliss when you become exactly as useful as you should have been all along.”

The words threaded themselves through the machinery she had burned out and you had rebuilt. Every remembered death became pressure. Every successful act in your service became release. The horror of it showed in her face because she understood enough to know what was happening.

“You’re going to love me,” you said, “because loving me is where all of this gets to go.”

Susan was still in there. So was the woman who had cut her own guilt out and called the leftover joy a victory. You were not building a third person in the space between them. You were keeping both, and pointing them. Conscience and appetite, aimed at the same work.

“You’re going to evolve around that purpose.”

The word useful followed her into the next repetition: Johnny alive, Johnny trusting her, Johnny burning, Johnny dead, and beneath all of it the new pattern waiting for the moment guilt became unbearable.

You let the loop carry her almost to breaking before the cane warmed again.

“Now devote yourself to me,” you said. “Body and soul.”

The command sank through everything already tied to obedience, and the ration hit. Relief first, then a deep clench low in her belly that she could not stop, pulling inward, pulsing, each squeeze milking the feeling higher instead of spending it in one hard burst. A broken moan tore out of her. The freeze kept her upright while her cunt fluttered around nothing, slick running down the inside of the leather, her breath breaking in short wet sounds as the wave rolled through her core and kept rolling. Shame sat in it. That was why she could not stop. She understood what was happening, and the understanding made the next pulse worse, then another, until she was shaking through the aftershocks with her mouth open and tears in the straps.

“Good,” you said. “That’s where all of it goes now.”

Seriously what was with this, you just wanted a new beauty to make your own and had to jump through so many hoops for this. First the wrong Carol Danvers and now the wrogn Susan Storm.