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Dante had teleported the moment Death said Emma was in trouble. He hadn't been fast enough. When he had been spending time with Death, Emma had been watching Hellions die right in front of her.
Her diamond transformation receded as she walked over to Sharon, returning the blonde underneath. Her coat was ruined. Dry blood stained her from the hairline to her jaw.
She fell on her knees and touched the side of Sharon's face gently, then let her hand fall.
He kneeled beside her and rubbed Sharon's head. The adorable girl who kept clinging to him every time he appeared—she had died. And around her, the rest of them. All five.
He looked at each face then Emma. She had the blank expression of someone whose soul had been taken apart and left in pieces.
"Selene."
She only whispered one word but intent was crystal clear. Trevor hadn't acted on his own. Selene had been responsible for pushing Trevor into killing her students.
He put a hand on Emma's shoulder. The Biokinesis read her body's condition immediately. Blood loss, substantial; concussion, moderate; small fractures in her right knee and left shoulder; wounds on her knees.
Every condition was dealt with immediately.
Emma… she was too lost in her mind to even notice the disappearance of her injuries.
"We'll deal with Selene together."
Selene would face the consequences of her actions. He would make sure she felt every bit of Emma and Hellions' pain ten times over.
"Emma."
She turned toward the sound of her name. Whatever she found in his face was enough for her to move into his chest, her arms going around him. She cried against his coat, despite being the one with most walls around herself to hide her vulnerabilities.
The loss was too heavy to contain on her own.
He rubbed her back and said nothing. It must hurt her deeply that her new power hadn't awakened in time to save them. It had come in response to losing them, as an answer to her uncontainable grief. It would leave her feeling even more guilty about everything.
Death appeared silently beside Sharon's body, kneeling in the grass. Her expression wasn't neutral like a goddess of death observing the ordinary passage of lives. It was melancholic and heavy.
"I'm sorry."
He shook his head. It wasn't her fault. She wasn't responsible to stop deaths when her sole purpose was to make death happen. Besides, he had the means to revert this sad ending.
Death showed a complicated gaze as though she realized his intention. "A few resurrections wouldn't break the greater balance."
Her approval made things easier because he wouldn't have listened to a denial. Sharon was too precious to die like this. All these kids were.
He allowed Emma to cry to her heart's content. She probably hadn't done it for years. After a few minutes, she fell asleep in his arms. He carried her carefully and let her rest against a broad trunk with her coat arranged around her to shield her from the cold.
'It's better she is unconscious.'
Emma would get her hopes up for nothing if he told his plan and failed.
He made his way back to Sharon.
"Moment of truth."
With a thought, he tapped into Death's Resonance Link.
Death arrived behind him and gently put her arms around his chest. "Is this your final decision?"
"Hmmm."
"Then let me remove the limitation on a full sync."
It took him a moment to realize what she meant. For Death's Link, he hadn't acquired her core abilities like cosmic awareness, the ability to guide souls, resurrection, and everything else that should come with near 25% completion (big boost from sleeping with her).
He only had a few abilities. Death aura. Massive boost in physical strength and speed. Even greater speed when close to death. Immortality. Beyond superhuman level senses, which he had to suppress to prevent his brain from being melted from sensory overload.
Death had put constraints around him from the very beginning to stop the burden.
"Your mind is barely ready after you've become used to Hyperion's force field calculations," Death whispered. "You'll need a lot of rest once you disengage the link. Probably days."
"Pretty small punishment for reviving someone."
"I'm unsealing it now."
Death dropped the constraints and synced his body, mind, soul, simultaneously. The information arrived like a body of water that had been waiting for the dam to open.
The universe became transparent to him.
He could see the structure of everything. The biological signatures of every living system within an ever-expanding radius registered in his mind. He saw souls divided by colors of how they would be treated in the afterlife. The architecture of the death cycle written into the fabric of every existing thing became visible to him.
He felt the weight of every heartbeat within kilometers. He felt the absence of heartbeats the same way.
Silvija sat at her desk in Manhattan, typing reports on her laptop. She had a murky gray soul.
Laura punched a sandbag in the gym at a sustained rhythm. Her soul was white.
Piotr cleaned his motorcycle in the garage while listening to heavy beats. He had a part gold, part gray soul.
Felicia and Gwen moved through the university campus, soft drink cans in hand. Felicia told a story while making dramatic hand movements. Gwen had a bright gold soul with hints of black as if the darkness had taken root in her heart. Felicia had a white one with specks of dark gray.
Then the black-haired mutant lying in the Hellmoon Club's private pool. It was a pool of blood. Her soul, likewise, was completely stained in blood.
He saw every living person within a growing radius.
This was a taste of cosmic awareness. And this much alone physically melted his brain. The power of Death had regenerated it in an instant.
It became a cycle of his mind burning and reforming.
He closed off the awareness function.
What he needed wasn't perception. What he needed was knowledge, the technical understanding of what Death did and how she did it.
The knowledge came right away.
The comprehension of death aura came first. The applications were endless. It interacted with soul-matter, capable of blasting souls into smithereens and handling them without damage.
Then souls. Everything from its structure to its relationship to the physical body. How they lingered after death. How Death harvested them and reincarnated them. And finally how to reverse every process.
"It's not that hard."
When he opened his eyes, he saw a near-translucent figure floating above Sharon's body. A girl with wild and dense lavender hair, almost like a mane. And she had a cat tail drifting behind her. Unlike Sharon, she was quiet and emotionless as her ego had been suppressed. The assigned servant of a god of death would arrive soon to guide her soul.
He wasn't going to let that happen, obviously.
First, he repaired her body back to its previous functioning condition—a piece of cake with the unimaginable powers of a cosmic entity. He reverted her back to her human form to make the follow-up processes easier. Before that, though, he materialized her Hellion bodysuit.
He reached for her soul and guided her back into the repaired body. A few seconds was all it took to anchor her soul and body to synchronize everything into a harmony.
Sharon's claws twitched. She pushed herself up and rubbed her eyes.
"Meawgh? Catseye is alive?" She touched her face and blinked. Her expression moved through several phases of confusion before she pinched her cheek as though verifying the validity of everything. "Not a dream! Dante is real?!"
He reached over and patted her head. "Why would you think I'm fake?"
"Because Catseye died…"
She burst into tears.
"The tin cans!" She pressed her face into his coat with both arms around him. "They were so mean! Catseye tried so hard and they just kept coming and there were so many."
"I know."
She let out a wail. "And Catseye tried to protect everyone but the tin cans cheated with their beams and it hurt a lot. T-then the mean man grabbed Catseye's neck and it went dark and Catseye didn't want it to go dark…"
He rubbed her back. "You were very brave."
This made it considerably worse.
"Catseye was not brave!" she snarled. "Catseye was terrified! Brave people aren't terrified!"
"They are. That's what makes them brave," he said in his softest voice. "You did well."
"...Really?"
"Really."
Her crying stopped there. She looked up and around her. The crying escalated back to full volume.
"Friends! They're all… Catseye's friends are…" The sentence couldn't find its ending. She pressed back into his coat. "The tin cans and that ugly man ruined everything."
"Sharon."
"Catseye doesn't like dying! It was very cold and very quiet and Catseye didn't like being alone and…" She sniffed. "What if Catseye's friends are cold and alone right now? What if they're scared of the dark like all stupid humans?"
"Sharon," he said in a firmer voice that would reach her. "Listen to me."
She stopped what was a way to cope with the sad situation. Her amber eyes, wet and wide, looked up at him. "Dante…"
"I can't bring them back like you," he said. "if you won't let go of me."
Her eyes got wider. "…What?"
"You heard me."
She pulled back an inch and stared at his face. "Dante can really do that?"
"Did you forget whose power you've been carrying?"
She looked at her hands. The faint trace of the death aura still lingered around her. Death had left a touch of aura on Sharon, which would only activate in the face of great danger. The minuscule amount wasn't enough to bail her out against many sentinels.
From Felicia to Sharon, his companion certainly had a fondness for girls with cat characteristics.
"Dante is good," she said, her voice carrying a conviction from deep within her. "Catseye won't be scared anymore."
"I know." He reached over and patted her head once. "Now let go of my coat."
She released his lapels with great care and smoothed the fabric she'd crumpled in her hands. She looked genuinely apologetic about the tear stains on the chest.
"Um, warm human. That was Emma."
"…"
Death materialized beside Sharon and patted her back. "Sharon, do you remember me?"
"Death!" She pivoted and wrapped both arms around Death's torso, pressing her face into her chest. She never shied away from showing affection. "Catseye missed you!"
"Companion, I'm very fond of this girl." Death smiled softly, brushing Sharon's messy hair. "I'd like to adopt Sharon as our daughter."
He had underestimated her fondness. Or maybe it was her way to give him a "family."
Sharon's head came up immediately, eyes as wide as saucers.
"Death as mommy?" She turned those eyes to him. "Dante as daddy?"
"Do you want that?"
"Catseye says yes!" An instant reply to Death's question. "Absolutely!"
He couldn't help but smile at her foolishness. "Let's get Emma's permission first."
Sharon's legal guardian and the person with most say in her life was Emma Frost. He would've taken all Hellions away from Emma if she had shown no heart. She revealed more than that.
Sharon's face fell. He fixed her mood with affectionate head pats. Hellions' bodies.
Afterward, he moved to the others.
Sharon stood by his side, surprisingly only a tad bit smaller than him. He didn't know how to feel about his potential adopted daughter only standing a few inches shorter than him.
"Daddy, please bring Catseye's friends back."
He wasn't ready to hear that word right now, much less from a young woman's mouth.
"It's Dante until Emma approves."
Sharon blinked and nodded.
When he moved to Tarot's body, Sharon watched him with her hands clasped and her tail waving anxiously behind her.
He took Tarot's soul and guided her to her body. Then Jetstream, Roulette, and lastly Manuel.
Sharon broke into cheers when everyone began to wake up. "Catseye loves Mom and Dad."
Death smiled. "Naturally."
"..."
***
Emma couldn't stay long in her dreams. The hurt had found her there, too. The grief took the form of a nightmare to haunt her.
She surfaced to the smell of blood all over her clothing. Dirt was smeared across her face. Her heels had broken, her coat destroyed.
Right now, she had no concerns about any of the things that usually would have made her scream.
The heavy weight on her chest was even stopping her from speaking properly.
The sound of metal screeching snapped her out of the daze, reminding her of what those metal machines had done.
She looked up and wiped the tears from her eyes. Her revenge against Selene wouldn't carry itself out.
She put a hand to the tree trunk and stood before walking towards the metal scraping sounds.
"This is just pure trash. What can he salvage from it?"
Her eyes widened at the familiar, uncaring voice of Jennifer Starvos. Roulette.
"Trash can still have value."
Marie-Ange Colbert. Tarot.
"Catseye thinks the same about Manuel!"
Emma's hand tightened on the tree. That was Sharon's voice.
"Don't you dare slander me!"
Manuel de la Rocha. Empath.
"Quiet, scum, or Catseye will call Daddy to spank you."
"Fear the big daddy."
Jetstream as well.
This was impossible. Despite knowing the truth, her steps hastened. She caught her heel on exposed roots and grabbed the trunk to stop herself from falling.
Taking a second to regroup and breathe, she peered from behind the tree and saw a graveyard of sentinels in the open area. Roaming through it was the group of five, bickering and bantering as usual. All five of them alive and well. It seemed as though Trevor's attack never happened, which her new ability and her current state instantly contradicted.
From the far end of the field, Dante was dragging two sentinels with one hand each, responsible for the scraping sound she had followed here.
He glanced in her direction and beckoned her with a big smile. "Come on."
Emma stepped into the open, immediately finding herself under the attention of her students.
Sharon bounced on her feet and waved her hands. "Here!"
Roulette and Empath shared a glance before approaching Emma together. Tarot and Jetstream followed. Sharon dashed over to Dante and pulled him towards Emma. He looked a bit upset to do the 'coming over' thing, which made her chuckle.
'Why is he this reliable.'
He had not made it in time. So what did he do to help? He literally brought her students back to life and acted as if it wasn't a big deal.
She wasn't sure she had ever trusted anyone on the same level as him, which was kind of alarming.
Emma took off her heels and threw them away as she walked. Sharon turned into her cat form and leaped. She caught the cat on instinct, held her against her chest, and stroked her fur. She purred like she had always done.
"Miss Emma." Roulette stopped in front of her, fidgeting like someone who had prepared words but wasn't sure if they were the right ones. "Miss… it wasn't your fault."
"It was ours," Empath said. "We should've stepped up when your enemies made plans around Telepathy. It's our job as your mutant team."
"Not as a mutant team even." Tarot briefly placed her hand on Roulette's shoulder. "We failed as human beings!"
"You're taking it too far now, girl," Jetstream said, laughing. "That's the gist of it, Miss. We'll train harder from now on. I really don't want to die again."
"Me neither." Roulette shivered, remembering her experience. "I still want to do a lot of things. Big things."
Emma held Sharon against her chest and looked at each of them. She saw them glancing at Dante and understood what was happening. He had put them to it, perhaps to uplift her.
And it worked.
That stuffiness in her chest was no longer there.
"Let's make sure it doesn't happen again."
"YES!!!"
Dante smiled and went back to piling sentinels' scraps in the same place.
"You all can celebrate later," he said after he finished. "Come here. I'll take us to Manhattan."
Emma realized he wasn't making an excuse. He must have used a lot of Death's powers to resurrect five people. It was quite a miracle he hadn't collapsed already.
She hushed her students and shepherded them all to gather around Dante. A dark shroud descended over the group and the road dissolved. They were in a parking lot.
Silver Sable International's underground parking area.
The name brought up a mix of feelings, which she pushed away without hesitation.
She stepped forward. "Go rest. I'll help Silvija move this."
The transformation took over and her entire body turned into organic diamond. In this form, she was more than capable of handling physical tasks.
Dante gave her a thumbs-up and vanished. That rush concerned her. She really hoped the price he paid for this wasn't too great.
Regardless, the debt Emma owed now far outweighed the two favors Dante had promised her. Far more than she could ever repay. Because not even the entire world's economy could've brought her students back to life.
A/N: I have a feeling people were going to do something if the cat wasn't fine 😰
***
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