The XXX-Gene Ch. 58 (Marvel)

A/N: To topple a king.

-x-X-x-

Deep down, Thaddeus knew already what he had to do. He just wasn’t sure if he had the strength to-

Thaddeus.

Time almost seems to freeze as Emma’s voice echoes through his mind telepathy. Almost seems to, because in reality what actually happens is that their thoughts speed up. Time is moving normally outside of their shared mental connection, but for each fraction of a second, they have an eternity together.

I’ve locked down the ballroom and the surrounding area. After our weekend spent improving my powers, even Tessa doesn’t stand a chance against me. Nobody is going to interfere. Nobody is capable of moving a muscle right now.

Thaddeus would have blinked at that if he could have. Wasn’t Emma only a telepath? She didn’t have telekinetic abilities last he checked.

I’m not holding them in place physically. I’m holding them in place mentally. At our level of psychic power, blocking the connection from the mind to the body so they can’t send signals to move their appendages is child’s play. Making sure they all keep breathing is a little more taxing though, so let’s wrap this up quickly.

… Fair enough. Still, Thaddeus can’t help but spare a moment to send a feeling of apology in Emma’s direction. This had all gone to shit, and admittedly it was at least partially his choice. If he hadn’t brought Natasha as his date, if he hadn’t been unable to set aside his pride and let Shaw take her… none of this would have happened.

What’s done is done. All we can do now is move forward.

Still, that went both ways didn’t it? There was no putting the genie back in the bottle now. Forget Shaw… Selene was almost certain to learn more about him than they’d wanted her to know at this point. The Black Queen was their true enemy, and Thaddeus had just blown their entire subterfuge wide open regarding her.

Not necessarily.

What? What did Emma mean by that?

There’s still potential to salvage this situation, Thaddeus. Selene isn’t here right now, we are. And we are in control. The narrative is ours to shape. However, before all of that… we have to decide what to do with Shaw.

Right. Shaw was still under him and Cessily. Still trying to fight back, though at a snail’s pace right now due to the sped up perception of time. If not for Rogue’s mutation, Shaw probably could have used the energy he’d collected from Pierce’s blows to fully blast Thaddeus and Cessily off of him. The Black King could have gotten the upper hand. However, between Thaddeus draining some energy off of Shaw earlier and now every second he remains in contact at this point… it’s a foregone conclusion that Shaw will lose. The end of the road.

The question remained though, what to actually do with the Black King. Beating him was one thing. Killing him was another. But if they didn’t kill him…

I could alter his memories as I intend to do with the surviving guests of the Gala, Thaddeus. I could change his mind so that he thinks he simply decided not to be so aggressive in his poaching of Natasha, make him think he intended to contact her outside of the party at a later date completely of his own volition.

Oh. Thaddeus hadn’t thought of that idea. That was clever, and obviously if she could do that to Shaw and the party goers, she could do it to Tessa as well. It would clean up this situation nicely. Except… something in Thaddeus rebelled at the thought. It just felt…

Your instincts are correct, Thaddeus. There is always a risk of Shaw uncovering what we’ve done to him. Of him realizing that his actions are not his own and his memories have been tampered with. There’s a greater chance because of Tessa… a telepath is far more likely to uncover tampering done to her mind and we cannot remove her from the board entirely without leaving Shaw incredibly suspicious.

Damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Once more, Thaddeus’ thoughts begin to bend towards the clear solution… the final solution. Regicide.

… There is a quote from an exchange between two learned men of the nineteenth century that feels applicable here, Thaddeus. Never strike at a king unless you are sure you shall kill him. Or, to put it more succinctly… no half-measures.

Right. No half-measures. Shaw died. Right now. Funnily enough, once the decision has properly crystallized in Thaddeus’ mind, he stops feeling anxiety about it. He stops second guessing himself. Sebastian Shaw was already dead. He just didn’t know it yet. All that was left… was to finalize the details of his execution.

We can explain this away to Selene, given the right context. You need to kill Shaw properly though… fill his throat and asphyxiate him. Choke him out even as you drain him. Have him die from lack of air.

It takes Thaddeus only a second to make the logic leap. They were going to pin the kill on Cessily. In a way, she WAS Shaw’s direct counter, though Thaddeus had his doubts on whether she could have done the Black King in without his help. Still, Shaw worked on kinetic energy, taking blows and using that power to deliver back even stronger hits. Cessily though, did not have to fight with brute force. She could at any time she wanted shove herself down someone’s throat or into their orifices and spread through their body, killing them that way.

That said, pinning this on Cessily was… dangerous.

Do not fret, Thaddeus. If we spin it properly, we will have turned Selene’s ire towards Charles Xavier, not Cessily herself. I will tell her that Xavier managed to insert one of his students into your life without my knowledge, relying on Cessily’s immunity to telepathy to sell the lie. I will explain that I had no idea Cessily was lurking under your suit… until everything kicked off.

… Yeah, that might work. Rather, it had to work. Though no matter what, Thaddeus suspected Selene would be far more focused on him than she had been previously after this. Still, pointing the Black Queen at Xavier would take some of the heat off, hopefully for long enough to regroup and come up with a proper plan for dealing with her.

For now, it was like Emma had already said. The only way through… was forward.

Thaddeus pulls back from Emma’s mind as she does the same. Time appears to rapidly speed back up even as his mental perception slows back down. As soon as he’s back in the present, Thaddeus surges forward into Shaw’s wide open mouth. The Black King was ever so kind enough to give him such an opening because he was too busy roaring and screaming his head off in anger to do anything else.

Good too, because otherwise Thaddeus would have had to go up the man’s nostrils… and that would have been disgusting.

Thaddeus senses Cessily’s shock as he forces part of his liquid diamond body down Shaw’s throat and into his lungs. But the shock doesn’t last long before the living being made of pure mercury joins him. Cessily might be made up of a non-toxic form of mercury, but in this case… that doesn’t matter.

Shaw’s struggles become more panicked by the second, the man thrashing even more violently than he did before as they pin him to the ground. However, Thaddeus has drained so much off of Shaw that it’s not even funny. In fact… yes, much to Thaddeus’ surprise, he can FEEL Shaw’s weakened struggling feeding energy to him in a way completely different from Rogue’s mutation.

He hadn’t known that was possible. He was pretty sure Rogue didn’t know either. It seemed though… that if Rogue drained a mutant or possibly any metahuman long enough, she would take their mutation or powers for herself. Just like Thaddeus was doing now.

Shaw’s mutation was Thaddeus’ now, and that sealed the Black King’s fate all the more thoroughly. No amount of struggling, even if Shaw still had the power he had at the start of this, would help… Thaddeus was feeding on Shaw’s last remaining remnants of energy two different ways at this point.

Finally, it’s over. The Black King twitches in his death throes and then falls still. His lungs do not draw breath, his heart does not beat blood. Thaddeus knows this because he’s inside of those lungs. He’s surrounding that heart. Slowly, he begins the process of pulling himself back. Cessily does the same, even as she whispers to him in his nonexistent ear.

“Did we really just do what I think we did?”

They had, yes. Thaddeus signals Cessily that they’ll talk later. He can feel her settle down at that. Frankly, he wonders if he ever should have brought her along in the first place now that things had turned out like this. But… he was glad for her presence all the same.

Slowly taking back his standard form, Thaddeus towers over the women around him for a moment before forcibly shrinking himself back down to a more manageable six feet and a few inches. His tailored white suit is of course completely shredded by his transformation into liquid diamond, but Cessily takes its place, even transforming into an exact replica of the original set of garments and covering him from head to toe.

It’s a sign of just how insane the situation is that she doesn’t so much as fondle his balls right now, even as Thaddeus grimaces down at Shaw’s corpse. Movement from the side has him tilting his head as a cautious Natasha steps up though.

“… What’s the plan?”

The Black Widow sounds shaken. Thaddeus has no idea whether that’s because she actually IS shaken, or if she’s just affecting a certain tone of voice right now. She’s not pretending to be Natalie Rushman anymore he notes, but that doesn’t mean she’s still not putting on an act.

Still, it’s obvious why she’s dropped the façade when Thaddeus looks around the ballroom. Everyone except for them and Emma is unmoving. Not frozen in place, he notices, but literally just sitting or standing still, some of them swaying side to side with their minds trapped in their own bodies.

When Emma doesn’t speak up, Thaddeus realizes she wants him to say it. Whether that’s because she wants him to have all the credit, or because she’s too strained with what she’s currently doing… it doesn’t matter.

“The plan… the plan is simple. Shaw went too far and I didn’t back down. Something had to give. It would have been me; I would have just been a smear on the ground… if Cessily hadn’t jumped down Shaw’s throat and asphyxiated him to save me.”

There’s a brief pause at that as Thaddeus waits not just for Natasha’s answer, but also Cessily’s. This was the first that the mercury-based mutant was hearing of this after all. If she objected too strongly, they would have to figure something else out. But after a moment passes, Cessily’s voice purrs in his ear.

"Giving me all the credit? This is because of the Black Queen, isn’t it? I don’t mind. I would have done anything to save you from Shaw anyways if I had to."

Thaddeus lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding in. Frankly, part of him felt like he didn’t deserve Cessily’s ‘ride or die’ attitude. But on the other hand… he had done a lot for her. He appreciated a girl who was happy to return the favor, even if it wasn’t expected.

Natasha, meanwhile, finally nods.

“I can spin that, yeah. SHIELD is going to throw a fit, but this will help sell my cover better. They can’t deny that I’ve managed to worm my way into your heart if you’ve killed the head of the Hellfire Club for me.”

That was true. Well, mostly true. There was one minor detail about what Natasha just said that was incorrect. Emma is the one who corrects her though. Her voice sounds strained, but she’s able to keep her tone clear and consistent all the same.

“Sebastian Shaw was not the head of the Hellfire Club. He was one of its two kings, and he nominally held control, but he was not the head of the snake. There is another… the Lord Imperial.”

Pursing her lips together into a thin line when Emma proves not to be much more forthcoming then that, Natasha simply nods.

“I’ll be sure to include that in my report.”

“Do so.”

Emma’s clipped tone makes it clear she’s splitting her focus right now. As does the slow movement taking over the room as people come out of their frozen states and stare in differing degrees of horror at Shaw’s body. Thaddeus can only assume that Emma has done her due diligence already in altering their memories of what occurred. Fortunately, their duplicity was close enough to the real deal to be easily accepted, Thaddeus figured. That was why Emma had had him kill Shaw the way he did in the first place.

Suddenly stepping forward, Emma lifts her hands wide.

“It would seem tonight is a night for change. A night for… shake-ups. Some of you might be tempted to flee at what you have seen tonight. But this is the Hellfire Club and we are, all of us, made of sterner stuff. This is the Hellfire Club… and here, you keep what you kill.”

Turning, Emma regards Thaddeus and for a split second he fears she might actually intend to name him the Black King right then and there. From the slight quirk of the side of her mouth, she’s amused by his second of panic.

“Strength begets strength. Power and conviction is to be rewarded. Thaddeus Cummings… I name thee my White Knight. Do you accept this position and all the responsibilities that come with it?”

Nobody says a word. Nobody would dare after what just happened. Thaddeus lets a moment pass before nodding his head stoically and speaking in a gruff tone.

“I do.”

Emma smiles wickedly as she turns back to the crowd.

“So be it. Before all of you, recognize my Knight’s ascension. May he continue to serve the Hellfire Club loyally and with as much conviction as he showed tonight.”

There’s a pause and then Emma turns back and gestures almost dismissively at Shaw.

“Have your pet clean up this mess, my pet.”

Thaddeus’ eyes widen slightly… but before he can even consider whether he wants to ask Cessily to do that, she’s already moving. Everyone sees for a moment as the ‘killer’ of the Black King flows halfway off of his body, covers Shaw’s corpse, and a moment later pulls back to reveal nothing left behind. Not even bones.

“Tasty.”

He tries not to shudder too hard, even as Emma, now the highest ranking member of the Hellfire Club in the ballroom, finally calls for an end to the festivities. The party is finished just like that, and their group departs through one of the side doors into a more private setting. Finally, Thaddeus asks the most burning question on his mind as they settle into the smaller room.

“… Why is she still with us exactly, Emma?”

Tessa hasn’t said a word in all this time, and Thaddeus figures that’s because Emma has been controlling her carefully. However, when everyone else in the party had come out of their minor bit of memory modification, Tessa seemingly had as well. And yet, she’d remained quiet and withdrawn, not doing a single thing or taking a single action against them. Thaddeus knew that meant Emma hadn’t really let her go like she had all of the others.

The White Queen hums as she looks over at Tessa curiously.

“That’s the interesting thing. Before I could modify her memories, she asked me not to, telepathically. Told me she had something to say. She was frantic enough, positively shouting in the depths of her mind… so I deemed it worth us hearing her out. Well, Tessa? Your loyalty to Shaw was unquestionable, so I’m curious what you’re going to tell us now that could possibly stop me from doing what needs to be done.”

There’s a pause as the slightest change comes over Shaw’s secretary and right-hand woman. Tessa had seemed free before, but now Thaddeus can tell she’s ACTUALLY free of Emma’s influence, able to move and speak of her own volition. The raven-haired telepath swallows thickly for a moment, her eyes flicking between all of them before she finally speaks.

“My true loyalty was never to Sebastian Shaw. I was a long-term undercover plant sent to spy on the Black King and the Hellfire Club… by Charles Xavier.”

Oh. Well now.

-x-X-x-

A/N: Let me know if I missed any italicization anywhere. This chapter was a heavy one for that lol.