POV: Richard salmons
Richard Salmons lay on the cold concrete, the numbness in his limbs spreading like a slow frost, sealing him further into stillness. The attacker's footsteps echoed somewhere not far away. He felt no urge to cry out. He felt only the faint recognition that this was the logical end of a line he had drawn long ago.
He had always understood the world in simple binaries. Hunter and hunted. Killers and victims. Those who shaped the world and those bent beneath its shaping. It was, he often thought, the only true law beneath all the ornament and noise of civilization. People pretended there were systems, ethics, structures of fairness. But in the end, everything came down to who stood over whom. He had chosen long ago which side he wanted to occupy.
Richard Salmons had known, even as a boy, that greatness was a thing granted only to those who seized it. Nothing would ever be given freely. Happiness itself seemed to him something allocated early in life, and rationed sparingly, as though a clerk behind some cosmic desk decided the matter and sent everyone on their way.
Whatever had been allotted to him must have been meager, because Richard never felt it. What he felt instead was hunger, an ambition sharp enough to open doors or slit throats. The difference, he believed, was merely situational.
That hunger led him to the Hellfire Club, a place for people who spoke softly but carried the economies of nations in their pockets. The wealthiest, most powerful, most untouchable individuals alive. For Richard, they represented the height he could achieve.
They were proof that destiny could be sculpted by human hands. If he could stand among them without bowing his head, he would be more real than the world that shaped him. That was his life's philosophy: if he became undeniable, then so would his existence.
He remembered the first time he walked through the Hellfire vestibule, past guards who did not check his identification because someone had already whispered the correct permissions into the correct ears.
He felt then as if the marrow in his bones vibrated with possibility. Every step taken toward power, after all, was permanent. Every step was forever. You couldn't undo ambition. It clung to you, even in sleep.
And so when his superiors assigned him a task, he accepted without hesitation. Find and befriend a mutant girl named Tommy. Gain her trust. Learn the whereabouts of her people, the Morlocks. Why the Hellfire Club wanted such information was not his concern. He'd learned long ago that some things weren't problems, only aggravations. And if nothing could be done about a thing, it barely even qualified as that.
He found the girl easily enough: strange, slight, with streaks of hair in luminous colors, as if she had been painted rather than born. She moved with the grace of someone who had never been allowed to imagine safety. Richard observed her for a week before approaching. He watched her barter for scrap food, watched her retreat into shadows as though the light itself were hostile. Most men would have pitied her. He saw only a map.
Every human carried their secrets in patterns of behavior, and he believed that misfortune was a signature. Those who endured suffering were set apart; easier to read, easier to tilt in the direction you needed.
He befriended her slowly. He gave her food the first day, nothing more. A conversation on the second. A story on the third. He made himself small, unthreatening, a man who seemed to have seen just enough hardship to understand hers. Eventually she laughed in his presence, and he felt the satisfaction of gears turning exactly as he had engineered them. Every step toward her was a step toward the elevation he sought within the Club. Prominence was given to useful men rather than clever ones.
Some nights Tommy asked him questions he had no interest in answering. Why are you alone? What do you want from life? Do you believe in anything? and he answered with whatever fragments of honesty served the moment. Probably, he admitted, he no longer believed in many things he once held as truth. But that didn't mean he believed in nothing. He believed in progress. He believed in agency. He believed that a person could fix what they could fix and let the rest dissolve into the night.
Still, he occasionally felt the faintest sting of conscience, as if recognizing that the girl trusted him with a purity he did not possess. That she found comfort in him. That she might even consider him a friend. But he had long ago learned that regret was a luxury afforded only to those who could afford to be wrong. He needed results. He needed the Club to know his name as a man who delivered rather than an entry on a payroll.
Now, as paralysis crept further up his spine, tightening its grip around his ribcage, he replayed each moment with a clarity that surprised him. The last instance of any thing, he reflected, took the whole class with it. The final breath of a life contained the meaning of all breaths before it. He wondered whether his drive, his relentless desire to rise, had been strength or merely blindness.
"R-richard?" said Tommy, her voice tight with horror and panic. "Is he dead? He is dead!"
"Not yet," Richard managed to say, each word a struggle. "Help me, they are coming… Please give me my gun."
His plea barely reached her. She stood frozen, eyes wide, breath shallow. This is no use, he thought. The girl had the survival instinct of a blueberry. He saw her edging away from him, inch by inch, and understood at once that she meant to run.
"Please, Tommy, please," he said, his voice thin and failing. "Together… we have a chance. Together… we can still beat the odds. If you run on your own, we are both done."
"Richard," Tommy whispered, trembling. "I... I can't. I must run. I must hide. I am s-sorry."
She shouted the last words as she broke into a sprint, fleeing as far and as fast as she could. "For the love of the almighty, girl, do not do that," he called after her, but Tommy was already gone.
The approaching footsteps were growing louder. Cornered, he forced himself to search for any possible escape. The energy spear had struck him deep, its charge gnawing at his nervous system and paralyzing him.
Move. If you don't move, you die.
He mocked himself in silence. Come on then make an effort, clown. The gun's right there. Only a small stretch. Only everything you've got.
He remembered reading that in moments of extreme stress, adrenaline could drive people to near superhuman feats, brief flashes of clarity and strength. He prayed that the idea was true.
By some miracle he managed to drag himself an inch closer to the gun. He stretched out his hand, slow and shaking, reaching with everything he had. His fingers grasped at empty air, coming up a few inches short.
The approaching footsteps paused. He could hear breathing. The hunter had arrived. Perhaps, he had always underestimated the cost of ambition. Happiness, after all, had never been the metric he used to measure his life. He had gotten what he needed instead of what he wanted, and he'd always considered that a kind of good luck.
Richard Salmons closed his eyes. He'd spent so long reaching upward that he had forgotten the ground entirely. Now the ground held him, claimed him, and refused to release him. And he understood, with a calm that surprised him, that there was no time at all.
He moved his hand again, dragging it through the dirt, and almost reached the gun. His fingers trembled inches from the grip when a boot came down hard across his knuckles, pinning his hand to the floor.
"Well now," a calm voice said above him, smooth as a man commenting on the weather. "Look at you crawling like the insect you are. Reaching for that little gun as if it would change a thing. I swear, watching you try is almost entertaining." The pressure on his hand increased until he felt something grind. "But you will not be needing toys anymore. Not where you are headed."
The man crouched, caught Richard by the shoulder, and flipped him onto his back with clinical ease. The world spun and then settled, and Richard found himself staring up at five figures arranged like judges at an execution.
The one standing over him was tall, built like a statue carved from iron, with Native American features and a heavy mustache, his body encased in metal gear. Beside him stood a blond woman wrapped in a white and green costume that moved like smoke. A short, stocky man with reddish brown hair rested an energy spear against his shoulder, his skin-tight suit stretched tight under a sash. A brown haired man in casual clothing watched with bored detachment. Last was a dark haired woman in a blue and white skin-tight suit, her gaze cold and unreadable.
"Who are you people?" Richard asked.
"Look at that," the tall man said in a mocking tone. "A dead man is talking."
"A mistake," Richard whispered. "If you kill me… the Hellfire Club will pay back in kind. You… will be hunted."
"They are welcome to try," the tall man replied, his voice flat and empty. "They will get the same as you."
"Oh enough with the dramatics," the blond woman said, irritation cutting through her voice. "Sabertooth should be tracking that girl down by now. The real party will begin then."
The tall man said nothing more. He simply raised his gun and pointed it at Richard.
Then he fired.
Richard Salmon did not move.
…
POV: Adonai
"You can't spell advertisements without semen between the tits," Adonai said thoughtfully.
"What is wrong with you?" Bobby asked. His disbelief was sincere and profound.
They were all crammed into his dorm room, despite the very obvious fact that normal, functional adults should've been asleep hours ago. They were dressed in attire more fit for a nightclub or party. Clearly they have decided to not settle in for a quiet evening of minding their damn business.
Adonai didn't mind the girls being there; they were a feast upon his eyes. The guys, however, were absolutely not welcome. He had a strict policy against dudes in his room after midnight, especially when said dudes were actively ruining his chances of a joyful descent into sexual degeneracy.
If it were not for Scott looking stiff and serious, Kurt regarding him with amusement, Piotr standing stoically like a judgmental monolith, and Bobby refusing to keep his mouth shut for even a fraction of a second, Adonai was certain he could have talked the girls into a glorious reverse gangbang by now.
But fate was cruel. The boys had clearly mastered the forbidden and accursed art of cockblockery, dark magic passed down by bitter men across generations. And tonight, their powers were simply too damn strong.
"Well, you asked what I was thinking about," Adonai said, completely unbothered.
"Well forgive me," Bobby replied with annoyance. "Apparently it is too much to expect you to not be a weirdo for a second."
"Rogue," Adonai called, feigning outrage. "The man of ice is bullying me."
Rogue sat on his bed, feet dangling, entirely unmoved by his suffering. "Alas, thy suffering tickleth me not," she replied in a snobby drawl. "For I am not the keeper of fools nor the royal therapist. Present thy woes to the court jester for he careth more than I. Begone, thou emotionally inconvenient turnip."
"Why is she speaking like that?" Adonai asked flatly, to no one in particular.
"I blame you for all of it," Jean said dryly.
Outrageous. He would never speak like that, so it certainly was not his influence that had infected Rogue with such theatrical nonsense. Though he did not deny that some part of his personality had imprinted on her. Her boldness these days was unmistakable. He suspected that his own risk taking and pleasure seeking habits had bled into her when she absorbed part of his mind.
Not that he was complaining. Rogue had become a constant companion in his bed. She was insatiable, hornier than a bunny on ecstasy. She came to him multiple times a day. With both their enhanced stamina they would go at each other for hours. Sometimes she kidnapped him between classes for a quick session in whatever room she could drag him into.
"No way," Adonai said firmly. "You will never catch me speaking like that. I am not a fucking nerd."
"Whatever you say," Alison added with a snicker.
"Why are you all here in my room anyway?" Adonai asked, ignoring Alison and heading to his wardrobe.
"We want to come with you," Angel said.
"Whatever do you mean by that?" Adonai asked, amused. "Who said I was going anywhere?"
"An educated guess," Angel replied.
"Are you perhaps implying that I, Adonai Ezra, would sneak out of the school past curfew in some adventurous quest or another?"
"No, I am not implying that," Angel said, voice dry as paper. "I know for sure that you do that."
"A baseless slander," Adonai said, scandalized. "A calculated attempt to damage my stellar reputation at this prestigious school. Very crafty of you. Alas, you have no proof."
"You literally admitted it to us yourself," Kitty giggled.
"Et toi, Kitty?" Adonai said dramatically. "You obviously wish to see my downfall, probably because I am an academic weapon, which all of you envy. But justice will prevail. Your accusation will not hold up in court."
"Academic what?" muttered Jean.
"You are so exhausting," Kitty sighed.
"Why do you want to come with me though?" Adonai asked as he pulled clothes from the wardrobe.
"Remember when we talked about celebrating Rogue's rebirth?" Jean asked calmly.
"Of course," he said defensively. In truth he did not remember that at all.
"So," Jean continued, "we thought that since the whole thing would not have been possible without you, we would try things your way."
"Which is?"
"A copious amount of alcohol and partying," Jean said without hesitation.
"And don't forget the sex," Alison added. "Lots of sex with people whose names you probably do not even remember. I do not get it, to be honest. There is no intimacy in doing it with people you do not know."
Adonai wondered how she knew that. Perhaps Kurt had shared too many details of their night out.
"They would only sleep with him if they did not know him truly," Angel quipped. "If they knew how many girls he has slept with, I doubt they would even consider it."
Adonai knew that was nonsense. If a woman gained a reputation for promiscuity, men would shun her without hesitation. But a man with the same reputation was something else entirely. A man who had been with many lovers was praised, admired, even respected. Women were drawn to him too, because of it. Desire bred desirability. They wanted a partner others wanted, someone others would try and fail to keep.
There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.
"I am not ashamed of who I am," Adonai said, perfectly calm. "A man is supposed to have experience."
"From all indications," Jean said sarcastically, "you have acquired enough for ten men."
Adonai chuckled. "What can I say? I like to impress."
"I fear for your soul, my friend," Kurt said softly, though he smiled.
"Spare me your sermon," Adonai snorted. "I do not want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."
"You have friends?" Scott asked.
"So you do know you are doing something immoral after all," Kitty said, amused.
"Nope," Adonai replied as he pulled on a red leather jacket. "I have never considered the morality of my actions. I want to truly live my life, not waste it philosophizing. Now, let us stop with this dreadful topic and return to the important matters. Which car are we gonna steal?"
…
In the end they decided to take the van, the only vehicle capable of carrying all of them without someone being forced to sit on someone else's lap. There was a long and agonizing debate about who would drive. Adonai championed himself as the obvious choice, which immediately guaranteed that everyone else refused to let him anywhere near the steering wheel. In the end Scott drove. Scott, who probably obeyed traffic laws even when fleeing supervillains.
Even so, the ride was not as dull as Adonai feared. They talked, argued, laughed, played music too loud for the hour, and Kitty somehow managed to become anxious about every possible scenario in existence.
"So are you sure they will not ask for ID?" Kitty asked again for what felt like the thousandth time.
They had just reached the district near the club he and Kurt had visited earlier.
"Jesus Christ, Kitty," Angel said. "You need to chill out."
"Don't worry, Kitty," Adonai said, perfectly unbothered. "The only thing they will ask for here is Mr. Green." He delivered the last two words in an exaggeratedly mystical tone.
"Mr. Green?" Kurt asked.
"He means money," Jean clarified.
"Speaking of money," Adonai continued. "We have no money. I am, tragically, financially destitute."
It had been a while since he began living in the X-Mansion, and no one there had ever accused him of being responsible with his finances. Somehow no one looked even mildly surprised.
"How did you plan on getting in if we had not tagged along?" Bobby asked, genuinely curious.
"I have my ways," Adonai replied, shrouded in mystery that was almost certainly nonsense.
Jean sighed, reached into her pocket, and pulled out a stack of cash. She handed it to him like she was giving pocket money to a delinquent younger brother. "Will this be enough?"
"More than enough," he said, pocketing it immediately and striding toward the club.
The others followed him nervously, all of them radiating the unmistakable aura of teenagers who had no business entering a place like this. Fortunately, the people who ran establishments in this district did not trouble themselves with legality. Adonai had first learned about this area thanks to his uncle, the man who had more or less taken him in after his parents died. A committed hedonist and one of the few adults Adonai respected. His uncle had offered him the one piece of advice he had truly taken to heart: be yourself; everyone else is already taken. At least in that, the man had been right.
"Marcus, my man…" Adonai said cheerfully to the security guard at the club entrance. The guard nodded in easy recognition. They exchanged a few quiet words, and then Marcus stepped aside and let them through.
…
POV: Tommy
Tommy moved through the dark like something half-made, half-lost, a sliver of a girl sliding between the world's seams. Her breath came thin and frightened. The echoes of the tunnels carried her memories back to her like voices teasing a child. She did not want them, but they came all the same.
She had been born small, strange, and pliant as paper. A girl who could thin herself to a whisper and return to flesh again. The world had looked at that and chosen to fear her. It always chose fear. In those early years she had learned what selection meant, how ruthless the world becomes when dream and reality stand side by side. People dreamed of compassion, but reality chose rejection.
She searched for someone who would not flinch at the sight of her, and in the lowest places she found them. The Morlocks lived where no one else wished to, the forgotten and unchosen beneath the streets of cities that glittered above them. Among them she learned names like Callisto and Marrow and Tar Baby and Beautiful Dreamer. They welcomed her, in their way. They understood what it meant to be pushed out of the world and told never to return.
She had believed that was enough.
But the Alley was only a hiding place. She wished for more than just hiding. Something in her always looked upward, like those gutter people who still gazed at stars they could not reach. She wanted to try the world again. She wanted to believe that her path could change, that not every line had already been drawn. So she left the safety she had barely earned and walked with a few companions into the world above.
She had not known they were waiting. They called themselves the marauders.
They came with the cold certainty of men who had killed before and expected to kill again. Men like that do not shout or threaten. They work as if they are performing a simple task. Cleaning a tool. Turning a key.
Richard Salmons found her then. Or perhaps he found opportunity in her, though she had not known the difference. He had been strange in his own right, sharp in manner, eyes full of thoughts he never shared. He had saved her, or seemed to, guiding her far west to Los Angeles. She did not know she had been carrying her hunters with her like a curse, that they had marked her and would not forget.
And when they came again, it happened the way the world often does. At their own pace, with no concern for hers.
Richard fell first. She saw the bright spear of energy cut through him. Saw his body jerk and fold. Saw his eyes widen with something like surprise. She crawled toward him, trembling, the shock of it hitting her like a wave. She had thought him clever, capable, someone who knew how to live above ground without being devoured by it.
"Help me," he whispered. "Tommy… help me. Together we can do it. If you run… we are both done."
She remembered that moment with a clarity that stung. The way his hand shook. The way his breath rattled. The pleading in his voice, thin as thread. And she knew what the right thing was. She knew it in her bones, just as she had always known every right thing in her life.
And just as always, she was too cowardly to do it.
Fear came first, flooding her like ice water. Then the old lessons followed. When you are strange, you run. When you are hunted, you hide. When the world closes its hand around you, you slip through its fingers. Her body folded in on itself, thinning, the instinctive contortion that had always been her salvation.
"I am sorry," she said. But she was already leaving.
The sound of his voice disappeared behind her, swallowed by pursuit and gunfire and the certainty of approaching death. She fled. She fled because she always had. Because she knew how. Because she did not know how not to.
On the freight train eastward she lay flat as thought. No thicker than a sheet of paper between the metal ribs of the car. It hurt to hold herself there, but pain was nothing new. Pain was a thing she carried lightly now, like a perfume. In the dark, swaying cold of the railcar, guilt settled into her like sediment. She tried to put her life in order, tried to see which choices had mattered and which had not. But every moment was a turning, every moment a choosing, and all choices led here. Running. Always running.
When she reached Manhattan she felt a faint spark of hope, foolish as it was. The Alley was close. Safety lay underground, among those who would understand. She stepped from the train with that dream still clinging to her, a fragile flower blooming in harsh weather.
I thought I'd never see these old tunnels again. They never looked so beautiful.
She had changed trains many times. There was no way those monsters followed her.
She never saw Scalphunter until he stepped from the shadow.
His face held nothing. Neither hatred nor pleasure. Men like him did not need such things. He was the sort who understood fear perfectly, the sort who used it without tasting it, the sort who killed as if he were carrying out an instruction.
Her first thought was that she had led them straight to her home. To the people who had given her shelter, who had accepted her when the world above had only ever recoiled. The monsters were hunting mutants, and she had walked them right to the heart of the Alley. Her chest tightened with the weight of it.
The faces of her friends, her family among the Morlocks, flashed in her mind; Callisto, the others who had trusted her, who had believed in her. She had doomed them. She had betrayed them. Every instinct she had ever clung to for survival, every act of cowardice, had carved a path straight to this catastrophe.
The fear in her throat turned to ice, and tears blurred her vision, though they offered no release, only the sharp sting of guilt. The tunnels she had always called home, the sanctuary of outcasts, now seemed like a tomb whose gates she herself had opened.
Tommy froze. Just a girl again. Just a frightened, lonely child who had spent her whole life learning to hide and never learning to stand.
Some part of her wondered how the never to be differed from what never was. Another part knew the answer did not matter anymore.
She thought of Richard as the world narrowed.
She hoped he had forgiven her.
She hoped someone would.
She hoped.
And then the light went out.
AN: I decided to use the Mutant Massacre as the first arc. let's see how it goes. On another note, I tried looking for X-Men fanfics in my meager free time and was sorely disappointed. I could barely find anything that wasn't just smut. Also, Tommy and Richard only appear in the Mutant Massacre arc for a couple of panels, so while they are canon characters, I had to fill in a fair bit of their characterization myself.