Unsacred Responsibility Chapter 5 - Vengeance Has Consumed You

For ages, I ran purely on Sanity Plus Plus Plus. 

When I woke up, I would expect to see the face of the Ancient One, over me, as I had, for unknown eons, expected to have a pillow pressed over my face in silence, and expect only darkness to come, before a repeat occurrence followed. For a long time, every morning, I readied myself for a fight, and every morning, when the fight did not come, I would ready myself for the bitter gnawing of abject solitude.

The first few weeks I wandered the Void, searching for any traces of Cassandra Nova, I anticipated finding her to be an easy task, and that the true challenge would lie in slaying her. Stupid as I was, mad as I was, the gravitas of the task had not dawned on me then. 

Find and kill one woman across endless space at the End of Time. 

Verily, I say, the madness of the task had not dawned on me then.

Yet, madness was my refuge. I was not daunted. Madness, and hate, and that desire for vengeance, spurred me on. Bit by bit, I sought to practice the magic I had been given. How, had been the question. I had neither books nor tomes, neither a tutor nor a mentor. Even had I both, I did not have Stephen Strange’s photographic memory, a memory that allowed him to pursue a Master's and a PhD simultaneously, and become a Master of the Mystic Arts in mere weeks, an effort that would have taken others years to accomplish. 

I had only myself, my memories, and the vast stretches of space at the End of Time. It took several weeks, running from Flerken, evading raiders, sprinting from the Alioth’s attacks, mad, near powerless, from threat after threat, losing fight after fight, losing, and laughing, staring into death and laughing, embracing futility and laughing, until the answer of how to use magic came to me. One night, as I stared into the sky, surrounded by the bodies of a squadron of dead Nazis, a defeated Hydra cell, the answer came to me. 

Faint, vague recollections of a campaign came to me, a campaign where I had sat as a Dungeon Master, and faceless figures of people who could have been friends, or could have been lovers, sat as well, each playing a character.

A Rogue Assassin named Widow.

A Berserker Barbarian named Smash.

An Armorer Artificer named Stark.

A Hunter Ranger named Hawk.

A Tempest Cleric named Odinson.

A Battle Master Fighter named Steve.

The memory lingered, the memory of the only lingered, because of that connection. A campaign where I, and others, played pretend, where the threats I set against them were those of a cunning Illusion Wizard and Wild Magic Sorcerer, named Lucky. Yes, Lucky, the Big Bad Evil Guy, the BBEG, was the enemy that this ragtag group of adventurers had come together to stop. This party, called Justice, had come together to defeat the evil Lucky and save the world.

It was a short campaign. I did not remember how it ended, or if it even did, just as there were many things I did not remember, and just as there were few things I remembered. What I did remember, were the character sheets and what I did remember, was the system of magic that the board game used.

Verbal Components. Somatic Components. Material Components. 

I told myself, “Surely, this won’t work.”

Then, I told myself, “My name isn’t Shirley. HAHAHAHAHA!”

Mad as I was, there was no reason not to attempt it.

“Salicylic acid, toluene, methanol, carbon tetrachloride, potassium carbonate, and ethyl acetate…”

Peter Parker’s iconic web-fluid could be made using items that could be found in any science classroom, any science lab. The first step was to make a device that could track the necessary items and chemicals or their closest alternatives. The second step was to begin searching for them and collecting them.

It took me only three years.

After three years, I had what I needed.

From there, I had the ‘Material’ component.

The next step was the ‘Somatic’ component.

The iconic finger movement, the index and middle fingers pressing down against the base of the thumb, the pinky, thumb, and index finger extended, and pointing at a target.

The final step was the ‘Verbal’ component.

Short and simple: “Web.”

Drawing in dimensional energy, possessing all three components—

Three years after I was sent to the Void at the End of Time, I had discovered my method of using Magic.

The Web spell became my primary mode of offense and defense as I traveled. I could create endless quantities of it, endless amounts of it. I could slow down enemies, suffocate them, trap them, and bind them. I grew mad with glee. I webbed up everything, everyone, fired off webs to my heart's content, went back to the raiders I fled from, the Flerken I ran from, and webbed them into submission. I watched life slowly leave their eyes as they begged me for air, and beat my meat to the gasps of their suffocation.

From there, the next step became to learn other ‘spells.’ If I had suitable Material Components, I could recreate any ‘spell.’

For a while, I had been content. For a while, I felt unrivaled. Unstoppable. The Web spell had a near-unbeatable Difficulty Class. It would take a creature that broke the upper limits of baseline human strength and approached the upper ceiling of superhuman strength to destroy it, and I did not believe I would encounter such a creature in my travels. 

Until I did.

Foaming at the mouth, frenzied and rabid and beastly, I encountered a savage Variant of the Hulk. There was none of the kindly, mild-mannered doctor to be seen, no trace of humanity, nothing within those eyes but a desire for bloodlust, nothing but a screaming, yearning urge to rip my body in half and squeeze it back together, then sink its teeth into flesh and chew on my innards.

With infinite webbing, I pinned him down, first by the legs, then the hands, then the face, then the nose, then the mouth. I wrapped him in a cocoon like a hapless fly entering a spider’s web. I thought it a done deal.

I was wrong.

This Variant was not a caricature of the Hulk, but a version that did as advertised on the tin. A version that got stronger as it got angrier. It tore through the cocoon, bigger, faster, madder, and future attempts to trap it resulted in failure.

It could not be stopped, could not be reasoned with, could not be contained.

I was too slow, too weak, too fragile and flimsy in front of it, and as it crushed my lower legs and body with a careless swipe, my victory had been attained at the last minute, through bloodshot eyes, and crippled form, by figuring out how to cast Banishment. Using the shattered glass of a car mirror of the car I’d been buried between, I sent the Hulk Variant to the Mirror Dimension.

The Mirror Dimension inverted the real one and was everywhere, everywhen. Those of us connected to Dormammu were stronger in the Mirror Dimension. The reason I never sought to go in there for safety was that it was impossible to leave without a Sling Ring. Thus, it was the perfect place to banish threats, because once sent there, there was no return. 

The Rabid Hulk would remain in the Mirror Dimension until the Alioth eventually consumed that portion of spacetime, that inverted section of the Mirror Dimension.

The experience taught me a valuable lesson. The Ancient One, Doctor Strange, Wong, the Sorcerers of Kamar-Taj were powerful, yes, but their instincts and reflexes and physical capabilities were still those of a baseline human. Stephen Strange could be bested by Black Widow with a sniper rifle, as could the vast majority of Sorcerers, all of whom could be defeated by a firearm, much less a gamma-irradiated freak of nature. 

I was no different.

My body, the result of that encounter, had left me paralyzed from the waist down, bleeding out, and suffering from intense radiation poisoning.

Healing Spells were not a thing I knew how to perform. Healing Magic, the very reason Stephen Strange had gone in search of miracles, was a thing I needed. There were ways to channel magic into my broken body, constantly, permanently, to walk, but learning such a thing under such dire straits was all but impossible.

I closed my eyes, laughed a final time, and prepared for either awakening once again in that crib, or perhaps, awakening hours earlier, or perhaps, final death.

Yet, I awoke, oddly, in a place I did not foresee. A place filled with the countless dead of every Black Panther. A place where, without words, I was summarily ejected.

When I awoke next, I was once again in the Void at the End of Time, in a cave, covered with sand, and beside me was a dying man, smiling, a mortar and pestle with a crushed flower filled with the extracts of a juice I knew to be the Heart-Shaped Herb. A man wearing a battered black vibranium suit.

My injuries, the ones that prevented me from walking, were mostly healed.

“Why?”

I asked.

“I saw your fight with the Hulk, but there, I could not offer aid. This way, I could. After all, you appeared as though you were in great need of the help, Peter.”

“...You know me?”

He had chuckled. “There are surprisingly few men who opt to fight with the webs of a spider. You are far older, but there is no mistaking Spider-Man.”

I’m not him. Yet, I was him. He’s not me. Yet, he was me. 

My face was, after all, Peter Parker’s. My voice. My hair. My blood. My bones. My very DNA. My Web spell was, at first glance, just me shooting from a web-shooter. He was not wrong; he could not be blamed for mistaking me for a Peter Parker Variant. An ally.

"I could be an enemy," I said. "I could wish you harm."

"Do you?"

"I could."

"But you do not."

I did not understand it. I could not fathom it. He had smiled at me.

“If it is so that my final breath is used to save another, be it friend or foe, if it is used to shed a little light upon this place of darkness...” he rasped. “I will have made my Ancestors proud.”

With those words, T’Challa died. 

A T’Challa Variant, dying from an illness. A T’Challa Variant, who had had the Heart-Shaped Herb in his possession, a thing that he would have, should have used for himself. Wasting it on me, a person he did not know, because he assumed I was like him, a Spider-Man Variant, a good person, a hero.

I laughed.

I had laughed, and cursed, screamed, and mocked. I stood there, for days, perhaps weeks, ranting and insulting a smiling corpse as it stank, as maggots feasted on the eyes, as the face rotted away, and it became less of a man. In my madness, and in my fury, and in my rage, and disbelief, I stood, and watched, until he rotted, completely, down until he was purely bone.

Many times, I came to terms with different reasons as to why he acted as he did. Perhaps the Heart-Shaped Herb, the Herb which gave one the superhuman senses and abilities of the Black Panther, was of no use to him; perhaps it could not heal him, which was why he did not mind parting ways with it to give it to me. Yes, in the end, he was being selfish. Selfish. He all but admitted it himself. 

There was nothing heroic about it. He was merely acting as he would, as he did, when following a script. The script of T’Challa the Kind. A script determined for him by others.

Yet, in this place, here, at the End of Time, no one controlled the actions of others. Everything was permitted, and nothing was disallowed. The T’Challa Variant’s Actions, selfish as they were, were his. Not determined by a cosmic script, not written in stone by gods, not foretold by prophecies—

They were his.

It… irked me.

Irritated me.

I could not understand why.

It didn’t matter, I told myself.

It did not change things, I had said.

I left.

I left the cave, the space, the rotted body of T’Challa, and continued my wandering, my ambling, my search. Now, gifted with the enhanced senses and superhuman capabilities of the Black Panther.

Power I had not asked for. Power bestowed upon me by the whims of another.

It irked me.

I knew then that whatever time-looping ability I had before I was sent to the End of Time was gone, and I knew then that I would most certainly have died, perhaps a true, permanent death, had T’Challa not intervened.

It. Irked. Me.

I went on a rampage against any hapless raiders I could find. I no longer fled from encounters, but met them head-on. I was a budding Warlock who had taken a multiclass into Fighter and was by all means on even footing with Super-Soldiers. My stamina was beyond human. My rate of recovery was beyond human. My strength, speed, reflexes, and reaction time were beyond human. Combining such with my magic, with my Web, and my newfound prowess, barring Hulk-level threats, there was little to fear.

I grew drunk on that power.

Intoxicated.

Time passed. My magic grew. My combat senses were honed. I learnt more spells. I collected more Material Components. I killed hundreds. Then, I killed thousands.

Yet I found no traces of Cassandra Nova.

Decades had passed, but I found no traces of Cassandra Nova.

My hatred of that T’Challa Variant had grown.

I wandered aimlessly.

I did not know how long.

I could not remember.

I wandered, and wandered, and wandered, walking and walking for days, and weeks, fleeing from the Alioth on the few occasions it descended to feast, and walking some more.

Until a day came.

I found refugees.

I found a shelter.

There, at the End of Time, was a shack, an old man holding a rifle, protecting several children. The children, I only faintly recalled. Creations of the High Evolutionary, genetically engineered, all of whom would be saved at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy 3. The old man lifted his barrel and pointed it at me, with shaky hands, asking if I was friend or foe.

I laughed.

“Old Timer, the Alioth cometh. Sooner or later, it will devour you and everyone here. Do you not know that?”

“I know,” he replied.

“And yet, you wish to spend your twilight years, protecting children in a land where they have no future?”

“They have a future,” the Old Man disagreed. 

“What future?” I asked, perplexed. “There is no time here. There is nothing here. This place, this wretched place, is all they will know, all they will ever see. A life, lived in terror of raiders and monsters and aliens, of death coming from whence they know not. How do you expect them to live?”

“As long as they have a why to live, they can endure any how.”

“What is that… why?”

There, I saw the children holding each other's hands. Tightly. Cuddled amongst themselves.

“They live for each other.”

The Old Man told me.

“It does not matter if there are monsters or death. Death always comes. If they can spend time together, and they can learn together, and if they can know love together, and know loss together, then their lives are no less worth living than any other.”

I could not believe it.

“You cannot be serious.”

“Even here,” he replied, “There is a life to be had.”

I laughed.

I laughed so much my lungs burned, and I laughed so hard all the children huddled behind him in terror. I laughed until I could not breathe, and laughed again, until I nearly soiled myself. The sheer ludicrousness of such a sight, the hilarity of it, tickled my brain in ways I myself could not explain.

I felt an inexplicable sense of revulsion. The old man reminded me of that T’Challa Variant in a way that irked me. Why was he attempting to create a facsimile of normality in this hellish landscape? Hoping the children would grow, and marry, and have children of their own? Here? At the End of Time? Was I to believe, even in a place beyond places, a when beyond whens, that there would still be families, there would still be breakfasts and lunches and dinners, still be babies suckling on to their mother’s tits, young boys playing catch, and lovers squeezing hands, gazing longingly into each other’s eyes?

“I think I’ll send you off, old man,” I said, tilting my head. “You and the children. It would be an act of mercy. What do you think? Will you accept it?”

The old man stood his ground, shaking his head.

“Do not be in a haste to refuse. You’re on your last legs. I doubt these children will survive without you. These lands know no laws. Even if you avoid the gaze of the Alioth, those young girls and boys behind you will either become meals to the raiders or toys to soothe depraved appetites.”

I extended my hands.

“I am a kind man, am I not? Who would chance upon an old man and defenceless children, and offer to send them peacefully to their deaths instead of feeding their delusions? In this place, there are no men like me, no men kind enough to grant that mercy.”

“No.”

“No?”

“In this place,” the Old Man rasped. “There are always men like you.”

Something clicked.

I remembered him.

The Old Man.

In 2012, in the Avengers, in Stuttgart, Germany, as Loki gathered people, as he spoke of how the lot of humanity’s fate was subjugation, as he commanded them all to kneel, as he said this was the fate of humans to obey and cower, there was an old man. One old man, who stood up to the god-tyrant. One who had risen and refused to kneel.

“Not to men like you,” he had said.

Loki had laughed, “There are no men like me.”

He had answered: 

“There are always men like you.”

The old man had no powers. No abilities. No suits of iron, nor godlike control over thunder. He was no super-spy, nor was he an augmented scientist with an unstoppable alter-ego. He was just a man. An ordinary man, likely a veteran, a man who had seen war, and seen death, and seen the costs of kneeling to tyrants. A man who stood up to a god, even knowing the risk. A man who had stood before me, holding a rifle, refusing to yield, even in the fell clutches of helpless circumstance.

A helpless old man I could have killed with the ease of taking a piss.

My madness, mad as I was, had been reigned in, but for a moment, by the sight of a powerless old man, pointing a rifle, and defending frightened children, in the Void at the End of Time. Whereas I, in the body of Peter Parker, empowered with the abilities of the Black Panther, stood against them, offering them mercy.

It made me feel something.

Something I did not like.

I wanted to raze the Multiverse. I did. I wanted it all to burn. It meant I would kill thousands, millions, trillions.

I would face such a situation again and again and again. I would face innocents who had done me no harm, and I would tell them I was giving them mercy by extinguishing their lives, because in the grand scale and scheme, they had no free will, and countless horrors were ever about the corner.

Their lives were determined at best, or hopeless at worst, so it did not matter.

It should not matter.

But I did not like this feeling.

I did not… like… this... feeling.

Wrong.

This feeling... Feeling like I was...

Wrong.

Like I was... going against... something.

I was mad, but even a mad man could feel joy, and feel disgust, and feel contempt, and feel lust. Even a madman could distinguish between the things which brought him pleasure and the things which made him sick.

I hated this multiverse. I hated it. I loathed it. I would see it burn. All of it.

I could not give up this goal.

But it felt... wrong.

My desire to burn the Sacred Timeline, to raze this world to the ground... felt...

Wrong.

But I could not give it up.

I could not.

I could not give up this goal.

It was all I had.

I left the old man, the children, alone, without a word, with only a gnawing in my stomach. Using a broken piece of Wakandan Cloaking Technology as a Material Component, I walked around the borders and cast Private Sanctum.

The area, like Wakanda, would be hidden from view. Unseen, undetected, and unsensed. 

I left and continued my travels, my search for Cassandra Nova.

After some time, I went back to the cave.

The cave where that T’Challa Variant had rotted.

His skeleton was no longer there. There was nothing to be seen.

A decade later, I returned to where I met the Old Man.

Nothing existed in that area, but a vast empty region of devoured spacetime. Pitch darkness. The Alioth had, as I foretold, consumed everything. The man’s words, his hopes, gone. The children, too, were gone.

I ventured into the nothingness with a handful of pocket sand and molded the earth until I recreated a piece of land. On that land, I molded a tombstone, and on it, I engraved words. I recalled the number of children, and one by one, for each of them, I made tombstones, and then I made one for that T’Challa Variant. 

I stood there in silence. Days… or weeks. I did not know.

Eventually, I left. I left, and I continued my search.

Searching and searching.

Searching and searching and searching.

As I continued my travels, alone, as I wandered alone, as more decades passed, and I grew no closer to my goal, as the madness deep within me grew and grew, and as it sought to swallow me—

As the days came, when I felt there was nothing of value worth salvaging in this wretched multiverse, this hellish existence, I remembered…

Even in the Void at the End of Time, where lives were meaningless, death was certain, and variants were abundant, even in this abhorrent Multiverse, where Anchor Beings existed and trillions would be condemned to death by no fault of their own…

Even in this cruel, indifferent, deterministic multiverse…

There were those like T’Challa the Kind.

There were those like the Old Man Who Would Not Kneel.

=====)+(=====

I slowly opened my eyes. I lay on the bed in the Captain’s Room, Peter Quill’s chambers on the Milano. A familiar woman was straddling me, smiling.

“Wakey, wakey, Eggs and Bakery!”

My lips twitched.

“It’s bakey, Mantis. Eggs and bakey.”

“IT IS?!”

I chuckled.

"It is."