Chapter Text
A man sat on a ragged couch in a rundown house in the middle of an isolated mountainside. Reddish-brown hair framed a thin, bony face, and his eyes were covered by glasses with red lenses. He was only in shorts that hung off of his bony frame, and numerous scars covered his torso.
Some were gunshot wounds, little dips in his flesh, telling the stories the American government wouldn’t tell of firing on their own citizens. Some were from knives and other blades. Some were from metallic claws that had sliced into his skin with all of the deadly precision of a surgeon’s scalpel, or friendly ice that had gotten too heated, or fire that had consumed him with a lover’s touch. Some were from medical procedures- like the appendectomy he’d had when he was thirteen.
But not all of his scars were physical. Hence why Scott Summers, formerly the leader of the activist vigilante group the X-Men, was sitting alone in a house in the midst of bumfuck nowhere with none of his loved ones anywhere nearby. Hence the loaded gun in front of him.
Despite the world calling him a monster, despite his family siding with the world that had hunted them all and imprisoned them all like animals and calling Scott a terrorist, it had been ridiculously easy to buy a gun. Weapons were everywhere, and so were people willing to sell them to any person who offered money.
A lifetime ago, a person ago, Scott would’ve been horrified by the thought of doing business with a criminal. But Scott wasn’t that man anymore. He wasn’t Cyclops, rule follower and leader with a stick up his ass and pressure so heavy on his shoulders he felt suffocated. He wasn’t fighting crime anymore, no longer trying to fight an entirely hostile world.
He was just Scott Summers, the man the world hated. The man who had been framed and abandoned by everyone he had once held dear. He didn’t give a flying fuck if the world burned. He kind of hoped it did. It had used him, abused him, and then abandoned him. It had taken everything from him and had destroyed the lives of so many mutants.
Fuck Earth. Fuck humanity. Magneto- Erik- was right.
Scott sighed and glanced down at the gun on the table, his pale face reflected by the pale moonlight glimmering on the metal of the barrel.
What was the point in ever trying? What was the point in fighting for a world that hates us? We’re not people to them. We’re faceless robots to them, monsters out of a fairy tale. Those in power will never see us differently. It was a losing game from the start.
And yet Scott had tried. For so long, he’d worn a mask, covering his shattering convictions as he bled and cried and sacrificed for a world that wanted to tie him down to a table and torture him. But that mask had shattered, and his friends had left him to the wolves- hell, had become the wolves themselves- rather than take a look and admit that the world was too broken to fix.
If the world can’t change, if it won’t let me be who I am without every moment being a battle, then it’s time to leave the world.
He couldn’t exactly go to space anymore. Scott had no access to any of the X-Men’s resources, and going anywhere near the others would result in him getting caught. He wasn’t a master of stealth. Thus, the presence of the gun on the table in front of him.
It was interesting. He’d been playing Russian roulette for years now, between the space creatures and cosmic entities and the fucking government and the Brotherhood of Evil, tempting fate. He’d been resigned to die since he was a teen, since the X-Men had begun. He’d been wanting to die for almost as long but only kept himself from giving up because dammit Jean and the team needed him and now, they made it clear they didn’t and also did not want him.
And yet even having the gun in front of him, even having the plan in his mind, was surprisingly heavy. Scott was surprised to find that his eyes were wet.
Why am I crying? This is better than being arrested by the people I loved. It is better than being marched into some underground military base and used as an experiment for a new generation of Sentinels or whatever the fuck those bigoted assholes are doing now. This will bring me peace. This will free me from a world where everyone hates me for things I didn’t even do. I want to do this…so why am I so upset?
So why were his hands shaking? Why couldn’t he just reach over and pick up the damn gun? Faces flashed through his mind- Remy, the Professor, Jean, Emma, Nathan, Rachel, Hank, Bobby, Ororo, Logan- twisted in grief and darkened by the emotional veils of mourning. Scott’s heart ached in his chest, hating seeing his family in pain, even if they weren’t family anymore and it wasn’t even real.
Despite everything, he didn’t want to hurt them. He didn’t want to make them suffer; despite everything they had done to him. Finding his body- even if they did hate him these days- would destroy them. Scott knew far too well what losing someone who was family was like, and no amount of estrangement would ever lessen the pain.
Finding a loved one’s- or a former loved one’s- body is bad enough when the causes are natural. But homicides, suicides, are messy and bloody and add a whole new level of trauma to the situation.
Scott sighed and slumped back against the couch, his eyes staring at the mold-encrusted ceiling above him.
God, why do I still love them? Why do I still care for them? I should hate them. I should want them to hurt. I should want them to feel even a particle of the hell I’ve gone through. I should be happy that my suicide would hurt them.
But Scott Summers had never been a particularly vengeful person. He’d been willing to kill, of course; the way it goes in the streets, especially if you’re a hero and doubly so if you’re a mutant, it’s kill or be killed. It wasn’t his preferred method of resolving situations, but he had done it. He didn’t have a no-kill-code. He had blood on his hands.
However, he wasn’t sadistic about it. He didn’t enjoy it or get off on it like Logan seemed to do. There was nothing alluring or heady about the smell and taste of blood for him. He was merciful with it as much as he could be: it was usually quick and relatively painless unless something went wrong.
I’m not the monster they think I am.
Scott Summers was a rule-follower, and he followed his rules, his morals. Right now, his morals said that he couldn’t- couldn’t do what the world wanted because of the pain it would inflict. He couldn’t put a gun in his mouth and blow his goddamn brains out because it would hurt the people who had once loved him- the people he still, deep down, cared for, no matter how much they had hurt him as of late.
Because despite everything, despite the scars that littered his body and his mind, despite the diagnoses and the labels that haunted him almost as stubbornly as his demons, Scott still had a heart. It was shattered, so he was unwilling to break anyone else’s heart. No matter if it would make things so much easier for him. No matter if it would end the pain he’d been carrying alone for so long now, only for it to get much worse in the last few months.
He’d rather drown in a tidal wave of his own blood and tears than save himself at the cost of other people.
So where does that leave me? Scott wondered, his face pale in the wan moonlight shimmering through holes in the ceiling and the broken windows. Where do I go from here? Do I go and find a place where they’ll never find my body, so I can be free, but they’ll never have to deal with the pain of losing me?
Something moved behind him and Scott stiffened, his heart pounding in his chest. He was alone…or he was supposed to be. He reached for the gun, grateful the safety was already off, and moved to stand. But then something smooth and wet wrapped around his waist, pulling him into the shadows.
“What the hell?” Scott squirmed in his bonds, and they tightened to the point his ribs were creaking in his chest, as if warning him to behave.
Scott ignored the warning and knocked his head back, hoping that this damn thing had a head he could headbutt. Nothing. He only just almost gave himself whiplash. He tried kicking with his feet, but then more of the smooth, wet tentacles appeared, wrapping around his legs like shackles.
What in the fresh fuck is going on? Those tentacles feel like that eel Remy caught once and tried to keep as a pet before it escaped. It’s like a giant, tentacled eel is trying to kidnap me.
In the chaos, his gun slipped out of his hand and vanished into the darkness, landing on the ground somewhere with a metallic thump. Scott grimaced. With the darkness preventing him from seeing where this eel-octopus-monster was, his concussive eyebeams were useless. He’d probably bring the house down on top of them before the light of his beams allowed him to actually see where the damn thing was. Shit.
But he didn’t have time to think up a plan, because then the monster tightened its grip around Scott’s waist, and his eyes rolled into the back of his head as his ribs groaned in complaint, turning everything dark.