Work Text:
She must be around here somewhere. Mark clenches his fist. Unclenches. Blows through a glass door, through a body; uncaring. Well, he cares a little. He prefers to keep it quick. But that’s not—ugh, she has to be around here! She can't have gotten far from the house since they've arrived. It’s only a matter of time before Angstrom realizes he hasn’t gone to a city and he just—he just needs to know she’s okay. To keep her that way.
And—there. He stops midair; it’s like an invisible block has suddenly collided with his chest, pinning him in place. Through the window, third house on Wilson Street: she’s there.
He barely remembers to tear off his mask before he’s bursting through the door in a shower of wood splinters and glass. She’s real. She’s real. “Mom!”
“Mark?” Mom’s face goes worried, then relieved, then worried again. The hand that was on the knife block slips away. He could cry. He might cry. Is he crying? “Are you okay?”
“Mom, I missed you so much.” He flies into her with a little too much force—the breath humphs out of her and he can hear the shift of her bones against the countertop. He’s more careful with his embrace, loose as he can manage. Though it still must be tight. He—he’s found her.
Her hands are cold above the fabric of his suit, where she returns the hug if only instinctually. She has bad circulation in this world, too. “Mark, what’s going on?” He buries his face in her shoulder, fighting the wave of emotions that threatens to overwhelm him. He knew finding her would be intense, but not—
Oh.
The way he’s holding her, he can feel the exact moment every muscle in her body tenses. The way a cat decides to leave your lap or annoyance turns to anger. Tangible, irreversible. She’s realized. “You—” Her hands fall from around him. “Let go of me.”
Mark pulls back. No, no, no. “Mom …”
Her eyes flick to the side, and Mark realizes for the first time that they’re not alone. The news plays in the living room, a video of him taking down an apartment building plastered across the TV, and a man stands frozen in front of the screen. Mark thinks he might recognize him. One of Mom’s coworkers, maybe? Whatever. As long as he’s not a hero, Mark doesn’t really care.
“Why are you here?” Mom asks, somehow pressing herself even farther into the counter. Away from Mark, who must have stepped away for a second, distracted by the new guy. Distracted. He’s getting distracted, which is exactly what Dad told him he couldn’t do. He tries to focus on Mom, the way she’s staring right at him, rapt, as though he’s the only person in the whole world.
He thinks it’s sort of the way mothers in movies look at children before facing the enemy outside, instructing them to hide in the wardrobe and leaving with only a kiss on the forehead to be remembered by. The illusion breaks when her hand twitches, ever so slightly, to where she must be hyper aware of the knife block behind her.
He’s scaring her. “Mom, I’m not going to—” he laughs, the desperate sort of laugh that slips its way out when no other sort of laugh applies, “I’m not going to hurt you.”
She purses her lips. He takes her hand, and he can feel her pulse hammering through her skin, badumpbadumpbadump. She doesn’t believe him, but she’s doing a good job of not showing it.
“I’m not.” He says it too loud. Defensive. He knows immediately that he said it too loud, and she doesn’t flinch, but she probably wanted to. He doesn’t. He doesn’t want her to look scared of him.
“Please let me go,” she says. Determination is sparking in her eyes, the sort of determination that defies reality. It’s a determination Mark’s seen on her before in small ways, and then in a big way, and then never again. Shit, even the thought hurts. Still, he lets go of her hand. Steps back. The man from earlier has vanished, and Mark silently curses himself for letting a bargaining chip slip away. He doesn’t want to use anything against Mom, but he’ll do what he has to.
Mom takes a shuddering breath, and by the end of it she’s collected as ever. She has a knack for picking up the pieces of herself. Near the end, Mark saw much too much of that, and all he wants is make sure she never has to do that again. “You’re—you’re one of them,” she says, and it’s a question and a statement and an accusation all at once.
“Yes,” Mark says. There’s blood on her shirt now, from where his chest pressed into hers. Does it bother her? From what Angstrom said, it probably would bother the Invincible of this world. It doesn’t bother Mark.
“And … you’re here.” It’s the first time he looks at her, really looks at her and not just the idea of her, not just the smell of her shampoo. She looks tired. She looks put together. In this world she still gets her nails done, French tips. She still wears the necklace Dad got her, but the gold one.
“Silver’s more your color,” he blurts out. Cringes. What’s wrong with you?
“What?” Surprise cracks her determination, little pieces of it falling from her expression. This must be weird for her. Maybe even weirder than it is for him. After all, she’s the only Debbie to him, now, but he’s not her only Mark. Suddenly, he feels jealous of himself.
“Never mind, I—”
“Why are you here?” she repeats, cutting him off. It’s smart to cut to the meat of it like that. She always was smart. The dinner table, her hair tickling his cheek as she leaned over, showing him the mistakes in his algebra. Her smile when she came home after a multi-million sale. Whispers in his ear about how to sneak around Dad, when it came to that. Smarter than Mark, that’s for sure.
Her blood on the kitchen floor. Not smart enough.
Mark breathes in. Out. He thinks he might have left his lungs in his dimension. His chest feels tight. “I came to take you home.”
“Home?”
“My dimension. With Dad. He said we could keep you this time.” She looks away as if slapped. Shit, word choice. She feels like a person, always has. To Mark she is, although intellectually he knows that really, she isn’t. (She is to Mark, though. She is.)
“Oh, you’re crazy. I should have known you were crazy.” She shakes her head. Her earrings jangle.
It’s okay. He expected this. He wishes she could just understand, but he gets it. Any world where you’re a traitor to Viltrum, Dad said, your mom won’t be a pushover. “No, Mom, you don’t understand; it’ll be better there. Everyone misses you. You’ll be safe.”
“I am not your mother,” she says, sudden anger burning through her words. “And if you were anything close to a son of mine, you’d be fighting against the other Marks, not—not whatever this is.”
Oh … Oh, he almost feels bad. Not bad about what he’s done, of course, but bad that he can’t give her what she wants, bad that he can’t wipe that look off her face. Then he feels a little angry. She doesn’t get it. She should understand that this is just the way it has to be. “No, a real son would be protecting his mother.” Mark makes a show of looking around. “What if I had wanted to hurt you? Don’t you understand? He’s failing you, Mom!”
His voice breaks on the word failing. He doesn’t want to think about the way he failed.
Mom shakes her head. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”
Desperation takes the reins. This is just like before. “Please, you don’t understand! You have to! It’s—it was,” his breath hitches, not again, “it was my fault.”
He buries his head in his hands. Damn it. A little sob, and then another and the palms of his suit are growing damp.
Hands at his wrists. They coax his arms down. He should be stronger than this, but he isn’t. He sniffles. Mom searches his expression, squinting until her eyes go wide like she’s read something terrible there. “Oh, God.” She looks like she’s going to be sick. “You really love me, don’t you?”
“Of course.” He needs her to know that. She’s looking at him, stuck somewhere between pity and fear. “Of course I love you; you’re my mom, no matter the universe.”
She must be frozen in time, her own time. Mark wonders what happened on this world. No Omni-Man, Angstrom told them. Is he dead? Just gone? Distant memories sweep through Mark. The day Dad turned. The day Mark joined him. How similar is this universe? How much has this Debbie seen? “He did it, didn’t he?” she almost-whispers. “He killed me?”
Mark looks away. He can’t stand it. “… I should have stopped him.” Now it’s Mom’s turn to choke out a sob. He tries to reach a hand to her shoulder. She slaps it away. Something collapses violently on the newscast; the footage fizzles multicolor to grey. “He didn’t want to—he gave you a choice, see?”
That doesn’t help. Shit, it doesn’t help. Mom sobs again, turning away from him. If he can just make her understand that they all fucked up, that this is their chance to get it right. “Dad regretted it. He shouldn’t have given you the ultimatum. He knows that now! And, I should have fought harder.” He looks away. “And you …” It’s painful to even recall. To know what she didn’t choose, and what she did. Death over family. “Should have chosen us.”
He hears her knees give out before they really do and manages to catch her before she falls. He hugs her close to his chest. “Shh, it’s okay. I’m not going to let him hurt you this time.”
It must be comforting to be held. It always is. But still, she cries.
For a moment, she lies there against his chest. He can imagine he’s graduating high school, or moving out, or something sad but happy at the same time, and she’s crying the way normal mothers cry.
Then, a blur of blue hurdles through the shattered doorway. In the front yard beyond it, he spots the man from before, looking like a deer in headlights, cell phone in one hand. Bastard. Mark should have just killed him.
“Get the hell away from her!” Invincible shouts, coming to a stop inches away.
Mom starts to struggle against his chest, and he tries to balance keeping her still with not squeezing too hard. “Let me go!”
“Mom,” he says, pleading.
“She’s not your mom.” Invincible’s voice sounds deadly, poison-tipped, but he can’t throw a punch and both of them know it.
“She will be.” Mark considers his options. Let Mom go for now and fight, fly away with her … maybe he could threaten the guy outside if this world’s Invincible is really as much of a bleeding heart as Angstrom told them.
Before he can decide, a sound like tearing fabric rips behind him, and a familiar warm green hue tries to reach around and wrap the indigo of his suit. Before he can get a word to Angstrom —the fuck is this?— something slams into them, pushing them through the portal. All Mark can think is hold on, hold on, hold on.
He blinks, and the portal zips closed behind them. The finality would be relieving except that instead of the familiar gleaming skyscrapers of his homeworld, endless sand greets them in all directions.
“Shit,” he whispers. Angstrom! You’re dead! echoes through the dry air, his own voice, and Mark spots the congregation of Invincibles a second later. Fuck, Angstrom must have betrayed them. At least they’re all here. They have a better chance this way.
“What have you done?” Mom says, twisting in his grip. “Where are we?”
Mark hovers to the sand, setting her down. There’s nowhere for her to go, after all. “I don’t know,” he says quietly, and then the others spot him, he can tell; a ripple runs through their far-off circle. A couple shoot off in his direction. Mohawk, Maskless, the yellow one. More follow suit quick enough that he can’t place them. In a sudden spray of sand, they’re surrounding the two of them.
“No way!” Mohawk says. “You found her!”
“Mom …?” Maskless says, almost a breath.
“Pathetic,” another adds, the one that looks like Dad, but it doesn’t even seem like an insult. He says it in an even tone: a simple observation, the way one might point out a line of ants crossing the sidewalk.
He hadn’t considered the others’s reactions. He hadn’t planned on sticking around for them. “I’m taking her home,” he says.
“Nobody’s going home,” not-Dad says. He hovers inches off the ground, arms crossed. Mark imagines that usually his cape must rustle in the wind, but there’s nothing like that here. Just dry, dead air. Shit, are they really stuck? “We’re trapped.”
“And the only place she’s going is six feet under,” Mohawk adds, taking a menacing step forward. Oh. Oh. Oh, no.
“You can’t mean—she’s our mother!” Mark feels for the first time the threat of the Invincible’s surrounding him like a force pushing from all directions. Some leer, some frown, a few seem uninterested. Shit, and there’s so few of them in comparison with before. They must be the only ones left. They must be the strongest ones …
“Oh, look, this guy still needs mommy! You think that’s what Angstrom promised him?” Mohawk looks to the rest of the group for support. Anger begins to kindle in Mark’s chest. “That bitch never—”
“Hey!” Mom barks. Every head snaps to attention. Mark stares, horrified at what she might say. He can’t protect her from this many viltrumites at once. “I’m not some bag of meat, and I’m certainly not your mother. Not any of yours.”
Not-Dad is looking at her with interest, now. Most of them are. Mark tries to step protectively in front of her but then realizes there’s no such way to step in a circle, so he settles for facing Mohawk. Every muscle in his body is tensed, ready to snatch her and bolt at the first sign of violence. His Dad’s voice in his head: letting yourself get surrounded. You know better, Mark.
“Oh, feisty, huh?” Mohawk mocks. Mom steps forward. She should be scared, shouldn’t she? She must be. She must be terrified. “Y’know, my Debbie always just sat there and—”
Slap.
Mohawk touches his face. Mom wrings out her hand. Mark tries to close his jaw. “Fuck you,” she says.
“Oh, you’re so dead.” Mohawk shifts his weight back, almost imperceptibly. Mark readies himself to tackle Mom out of the way.
But before either of them can move, a hand wraps around Mohawk’s bicep. Maskless is staring at Mom, expression almost blank and yet intense. Not quite emotionless, but on the edge of it. “Don’t,” he warns.
“Oh, come on,” the yellow one says. “Let him kill the woman if he wants to. She’s going to die out here anyway.”
Not-Dad hovers forward. “Then let her die naturally. He found her.” He nods to Mom, and it’s tinged with a hint of investment that was completely absent before. Respect? Could that be it? “As pathetic as his attachment is … we shouldn’t be wasting our time fighting about it.”
Mom’s hands clench into fists. There’s nothing he can do. “Don’t you all feel powerful enough already?” she says. She spins around. “Was murdering thousands of innocent people not enough for you? God, did I really raise you that badly?”
Something rumbles through the circle. He can’t tell what it is. Anger? Regret? Something else, something more complicated? Maybe it’s different for all of them. But it’s probably not regret. After all, Mark doesn’t feel any, not over her speech. He was just doing what had to be done. They all were. One of them sneers, rolling back white-marked shoulders. “Will somebody just shut her up already? I would, but I don’t want more blood on my suit.”
Tension crackles between them all. He never expected his alternative selves to be so uncaring, not about this, not about family. He still has no idea how they’re going to get off this planet, but he can’t think under this pressure. He doesn’t need their help; he just needs to get her away from here. “Just—let us leave, okay? We won’t bother you.”
Mohawk finally lunges forward, but Maskless’s grip holds fast. He snarls, throwing up his free hand when he realizes he’s not getting out. “Fucking—fine! If you want to be a pathetic little bitch, be my guest. But there’s no way you’re getting out of here alive.”
Mom shakes her head. Mark thinks she might have run out of things to say. It must be hard for her, but secretly he’s glad. Sometimes, she needs to learn to move on.
He looks around. The others are starting to lose interest, more focused on Mohawk trying to wiggle out of Maskless’s grip, and what might become of that in the aftermath. All except for Maskless himself, staring Mark dead in the eye. “Go.”
Mark doesn’t need a better invitation than that. He scoops up Mom, who shrieks before throwing her arms around his neck, and shoots off as fast as he can go without worrying about ripping her skin off.
Below them, passing in a blur of brownish yellow: desert. Sand, metal, ruins, desert.
Fuck.
He sets them down and it’s only then that he realizes Mom is crying, again. Crying like she had when she found out about Viltrum, like she had the first time Dad really raised a hand against Mark, like she had in the early days of the revolution. Dad used to say crying was weak: the physical manifestation of a lack of control. But then he cried after he killed Mom, and he never told Mark off after that.
“It’ll be okay,” Mark says. “I don’t know how, but it will be.”
“Leave me alone,” Mom chokes out. It’s not a response. It’s nothing he can work off of. So, he ignores it.
“I can’t.” He thinks if he left, he would die. That would be it. She’s back and she’s here and he wouldn’t give that up for anything, he thinks.
But reality is also dawning on him. There’s no way out, unless Angstrom chooses to free them before Mom dies. There doesn’t seem to be anything edible or potable left on the planet, though maybe it’s just North America that’s been made desolate. That’s it. Maybe if they just keep searching—
A break in the sobs.
Swirling green, then pop! and there’s Invincible. Mom’s Invincible. The inverse of himself, right down to the uniform.
“Mark!” Mom shouts, standing and wiping her tears. The glow from the portal paints them all a sickly green, lighting Invincible from the back like some viridescent angel.
Mark hates him.
“You’re—how …?”
“I didn’t let Angstrom get away this time,” Invincible says. His goggles are shattered, and blood is splattered all across his suit. Mark doesn’t know how long has passed in his world, but he looks older. He looks changed. (Frankly, it’s embarrassing that it’s taken him this long to grow up. Mark learned the lesson of justifying the means by ninth grade.)
“Don’t you dare try anything,” Mark starts. Invincible puts a hand out, staying. It pisses him off.
“I won’t need to. You’ll let me take her home.”
“Mark, I’m right here,” she says. Invincible doesn’t even look at her, laser focused on Mark.
“You know it’s for the best. You can’t give her the life she deserves.”
“I …” Mark knows it’s not true. He could. He can. They can be happy together. A family again.
“Dad’s not going to change,” Invincible says, taking a step forward. “Go home.”
Another portal opens behind them. Is it—could it be his dimension? No. No, it couldn’t be, because then how stupid is this Mark? Does he really think such a short speech would sway him? He could grab Mom right now, jump through that portal, and fix everything. “Your mother is dead. You don’t deserve mine.”
He could do all of those things, but first, he’s going to kill this guy for good measure. Mark launches forward, only to blink as green flashes in his vision. The portal sews itself closed behind him before he’s even registered what happened.
Desert sand. Stone. Scrap metal.
He’s alone.
“No,” he says. “No, no, no!”
Mark falls to his knees. There’s nothing else to be done.
“… Mom …”