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Published:2020-06-02Updated:2024-05-24Words:179,353Chapters:34/?Comments:200Kudos:486Bookmarks:175Hits:27,349

Compulsion

Lead_Zeppelin

Chapter 3: Incubation 1.3

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Incubation 1.3

The fire abated. Sight and sound came back, just a little. He could see the reason the fire had stopped.

The reprieve was torturous in itself. He tried to pull himself together, but there was too much damage, too much emptiness, like he had split himself apart to hold himself up. He could feel in minute, agonizing detail every bit of damage to his body—the tiny hissing bubbles of fluid that were boiling out of the split in his denuded scalp, the chunk of his right arm that was flaking away, the landscape of ruin that was his back, and the few restraining tendrils that were holding closed the charred remains of his stomach.

He couldn't move like he wanted to, he couldn't even think properly. He consumed the most-destroyed parts of himself, but that only helped a little. Delaying the inevitable, only gaining back part of what was lost. There was a word for it. Thermo... something. Entropy? Words didn't matter. He couldn't even remember his own name, and he didn't care.

The burning man had gotten smaller, his movements growing slow and confused. His fire was guttering out. The building still burned all around them, but the focused flames they had been engulfed in had lost cohesion.

The pain and hunger blended together into one agonizing drive that consumed him, rekindling his urge to move and fight. Even through the pall of smoke filling the building, he could smell the thing he needed. It was so close—the impossibly captivating smell that was forcing him not to succumb to the pain, the one that was promising salvation. He rose to his feet on legs that were crumbling into ash, preparing to tear into the burning man, who was also struggling to push himself upright.

A dim awareness flashed across his fragmented mind that the smell was coming from the burning man.

He tackled the burning man, brutalizing him with his fists even as his hands cracked and crumbled away with every blow, oozing a red and black tar. The burning man fought back, clumsily, his shredded limbs knitting together at a much slower pace. The claws of the burning man gouged into his ribs, his face, his eye.

He didn't care. He was furious. Ravenous.

The burning man collapsed under a frenzy of blows, falling to the ground, the flame finally flickering out. But that didn't stop the beating, didn't even slow it down. Blood began to splatter over his fists, and—

Taste

Sensation, relief, and life flooded back into him, racing up from the blood on his arms like a jolt of electricity. Pleasure as intense as the pain, and just as overwhelming. The metallic flavor of the blood was amazing but it wasn't enough, just a drop of water on a parched tongue, a gulp of air in drowning lungs.

His arms unraveled from sheer desperation, coming apart like frayed threads. Each individual part of him abandoned its connection to the others, lunging forwards like dozens of snakes all striking at once, collapsing onto the burning man in a frenzy. His mind came fully apart, and there was no more him, only them.

They moved with pure instinct and desperation, cutting and burrowing into flesh, bristling and branching and subsuming, competing with each other for each precious scrap of life. They were fighting each other for more of the sheer, glorious relief, but with each passing second, they calmed as they felt the pain easing away. Each did what came naturally to them, following the instinct to recreate the shape of what they had consumed.

Then, contact—a shattered perspective, a kaleidoscopic mix of fragmentary thoughts and senses, all happening at once. The perspectives blended together, synchronized at the points of contact with each other, and the mental separations erased, their minds fusing to become his mind once again.

No sooner had mental unity returned than there came an explosion of memories, the sheer magnitude of them obliterating all perception of time, place, and sensation. It was an instantaneous outpouring of an entire lifetime, not coming in chronological order but as the single, titanic architecture of connections and experiences that constituted a mind. The memories were unfathomably more vast and complex than any consciousness could comprehend at once, leaving him utterly scattered and disoriented, trying to find his way back to when and where he was. More importantly, who he was.

As simple as knowing the question, he knew the answer, in its totality. He knew hardship, victory, and defeat. He knew how to command power and fear and reputation. Always surviving day by day, always building up to something greater, even when there were setbacks. Implacable perseverance.

He was Lung. He was Kenta. He was the burning man.

There was a discordant note, momentary confusion. He had never referred to himself as the burning man. That had been the name given to Lung by the other, but never spoken aloud. Lung could remember the fight he'd just had from two different perspectives, one from himself and one from the other, whose recollection was hazy, indistinct, and even more feral than Lung's own. It was nothing more than an animal in the end.

The last thing Lung remembered was the pain of being torn to shreds by those dozens of horrible, lashing, eel-like things. And it made no sense. It didn't belong. His body was wrong. He could feel his mask like it was an extension of his face, and his insides were condensing and splitting apart into tentacles, growing hungrier already, and his power—

His power was gone.

Lung had never been able to control the changes, not fully. However, he'd always been able to feel the fire he could call at will, and all the fires around him, ever since Daiichi and his gang had been decimated by the woman in the suit who had crushed his face into the drugs. He'd carried the weight of that moment for the rest of his life, turned it into his strength.

And now it was gone.

No. He was still Lung, Kenta, the dragon, the burning man. He had sworn he would never lose, not in the end. He had fallen before, but he had always come back again, stronger than before.

A loud snap startled Lung from his confused thoughts. The roof sagged and crumbled, sending a rain of dust and ceiling plaster down on Lung's head, making the smoke-filled ruin even harder to see through. A part of the roof collapsed in the center of what had once been an apartment, and Lung reflexively backed away from the falling, flaming timbers.

He had to get out before the building collapsed or the fire consumed him. He was no longer immune to the flames.

The way out was blocked, but strength came easily to him in this new form. He simply battered through the wall into the neighboring apartment. This one had been repurposed into a storehouse for Lung's local drug distributors, with folding card tables set up, holding ordered piles of drugs and loose cash. The fire hadn't reached here yet, but smoke was already pouring into the room from the hole Lung had made. His incompetent underlings had all been drawn away in his aborted attempt to muster forces to reinforce Oni Lee and kill the Undersiders, or they were lying defeated outside, so no one was around to save the product from the fire.

Inconvenient, but Lung didn't care to do it himself. He'd take his recompense from the ones who had failed him.

Lung went to the drawer in the corner of the room and opened it. All his locations had stores of clothes, simply because any fight of consequence always left himself naked, as he was now. He'd long since stopped caring, but clothes made escaping the Protectorate's notice easier, and with normal clothes and a hood or sunglasses, he was able to blend in surprisingly well when it suited him, despite his size and unnatural eye color.

As he got out a pair of jeans, though, and noticed they were far too small, Lung realized for the first time that he wasn't shrinking as he should. In fact, he hadn't shrunk at all, even though the fight was over. He still stood seven feet tall and had his claws, plus a few patches of scales along his spine, chest, shins, and forearms. The scales weren't moving or receding at all.

He was stuck like this. The same form he had possessed when he—

Died.

No. He hadn't died. He'd been absorbed. Assimilated. Consumed. But he'd still come out on top in the end.

But he was not alone. He was also the other. Alex Mercer. Or he had been him. He was both at the same time. How could that be? The scope of Lung's lifetime was incomparably greater than the man who was a stranger even to himself, but despite the fact that those memories of being Alex were like a bare instant in comparison, they were still there. Impossible to deny. Growing clearer.

Lung tossed aside the jeans. He had to think. There must be a way to bring his power back.

The memory of his trigger event loomed in his mind, a well-worn groove in his thoughts. Normally Lung held it at bay with promises of vengeance, but for the sake of getting his powers, he was willing to do anything. Even if that meant forcing himself to relive it.

Lung closed his eyes, and remembered the weight of the woman bodyguard pressing down on his head, holding him against the powder, suffocating him. He remembered the rush of the drug, exploding in his mind, carrying him away without limits. Overdosing. The contradictory euphoric might and total powerlessness. His heart frantically, painfully beating away as though it would burst out of his ribcage or tear itself apart. The spreading numbness in his left side. The icy, seizing terror as he realized he was dying of a heart attack.

Lung's hands shook, even from the recollection of it. He clenched his fists, his long metallic claws lying flush against his wrists.

This wasn't working. His trigger—reliving it wasn't granting his power back.

Lung knew, or at least suspected the reason. His body wasn't supposed to be this mass of tentacles inside. He wasn't supposed to have this presence in his head, telling him where all the parts of himself were at all times, channeling strange, intrusive information and urges into his mind. Lung somehow remembered what his body should be, down to the very last minute detail, even though his current body didn't have enough material left over after it had finished absorbing him to restore his insides. They had been left half-finished, patched up by a lattice of writhing flesh swimming in the fluids his body had wrung out of itself as it had coalesced.

Lung could never have understood his own body in such detail before, but now he could remember Alex Mercer just as well. His self was overlaid with a another image, a mental concept that carried not only image but also its own sort of flavor, something completely different. Alex and Lung. Two bodies, so familiar. They were both equally vivid in his mind's eye, but only one of them was wrong.

Feeling a deep despair come over him, Lung's façade of invulnerability slipped for just a moment. He knew it was hopeless. Everyone would eventually know Lung's power had changed. That he'd lost.

Lung couldn't accept that. So he didn't. Another part of him did.

Alex Mercer.

Lung could feel the presence weighing on his mind, growing in strength as Lung's resolve weakened. He could remember being Alex, however briefly, and each time he thought of the other, the stronger the presence grew. It was a mind that was ordered, sharp, and analytical in a way that was impossible to ignore. Part of Lung yearned to abandon his turbulent emotions and feel that cold clarity again, but he hadn't noticed it taking hold until it was too late to stop.

Lung could feel his own sense of self falling away, the mental territory being reclaimed by the other personality. It felt like dying again. Sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

It didn't matter anymore. He was more than just Lung. Lung had lost, and he had won. He took the correct form and pushed it outwards, and just like that, his body reformed just as it had been, even down to the facsimile of clothes. He hadn't even really intended for that to happen, but it was how he had remembered himself, so it did.

Alex stared down at himself. Leather jacket, hoodie, dress shirt, jeans. It was all false, just a feeling, a memory, expressed as a physical shape. His body and mind were no less arbitrary, artificial constructions than his clothes, he realized, and the thought briefly disturbed him on an existential level.

Alex slid his hand down his sleeve as if to make sure it was real, for a given value of real. The leather and fabric felt real enough. For just a moment, Alex missed the achingly familiar dragon tattoos etched into his skin. Alex had only thought he was Lung in his confusion, but the truth was that Lung was gone, and his ambitions and revenge would forever go unfulfilled. It felt incomplete, and the last fragment of him that he thought of as 'Lung' felt a profound pang of loss before Alex subsumed it entirely.

As that echo of grief evaporated, Alex was again struck by the sheer impossibility of what had just occurred. This was beyond mere insanity or drug-induced hallucination. What he experienced was paradoxically too much for him to truly believe he was insane. Drugs or madness couldn't invent an entire lifetime's worth of memories out of nowhere. Absolutely nothing was commensurate with that sensation. Alex clearly wasn't human, so what was he? As soon as it occurred to Alex to consider the question, Lung's memories supplied an answer, as if it were a piece of trivia he'd momentarily forgotten. Alex was a parahuman, just like the bug cape had said earlier.

That explanation seemed like it should have made perfect sense, but in another dissonant contradiction, what he now thought of as the 'original' Alex felt like he had never heard of parahumans before tonight. Lung's memories provided more than enough familiarity and details to compensate, though. Lung was obviously one of them, and had known all about them. That seemed unbelievable to Alex, it struck him as fundamentally wrong, yet Lung's memories and the evidence before him were incontrovertible.

Parahumans had been around for decades. The first one, Scion, had appeared in 1982, manifesting not unlike a physical God come to Earth—a silent and mysterious golden man hovering above the ocean, naked as the day he was born. No one had known what he was at first, until other powers began manifesting in ordinary humans during the greatest crisis of their life, the trigger event that turned a human into a parahuman. Their powers were bizarre, and people speculated they were extraterrestrial or even supernatural in origin, but either way, they were undeniably real. Parahumans had become common knowledge to the public from the first contact with Scion, and no one doubted their existence after the tumultuous first few years when they started to emerge from secrecy in increasing numbers.

To put it in terms Alex was more familiar with, he was a superpowered mass of shapeshifting tendrils. The thought would have seemed a lot more strange to the Alex of fifteen minutes ago, but Lung's memories implied that Alex's circumstances weren't actually something particularly unusual in the parahuman world. Case 53s were rare even among the ranks of parahumans, which themselves only numbered roughly one in every ten thousand humans, but the condition was hardly unheard of.

Everything had been neatly explained, an answer had been found, but after everything he'd just gone through, the revelation only left Alex feeling numb. Compared to the experience of getting an entire separate person's memories branded into his mind, this revelation was nothing. He could have dwelled on what had happened to him for years, but there was still one question left unresolved.

Now what?

Alex needed time to think, but he had already been absorbed in himself for too long. How long had he been in here? Two minutes? Five? It was long enough to fill the room with more smoke, and for the fires to begin to encroach on the hole he'd made. So much had happened to him all at once it was almost impossible to tell time.

Regardless, this fight had probably attracted more attention than a fireworks display. Even in a slum like this, where the police response time was probably somewhere between 'eventually' and 'never,' there was no way something like this would be ignored. Alex had no reason to stick around. While he was thinking of potential incoming dangers, Lung's memories informed him that a parahuman organization called the Protectorate was probably sending superheroes this way.

Time to go.

Alex paused for just a moment to shovel two handfuls of loose cash from one of the tables into his jacket pocket. Then he was out the back door and into the back alleys of Brockton Bay again, this time with all of Lung's knowledge of his territory branded into his head. Alex knew exactly where to go to avoid the main streets and escape the sounds of incoming sirens, and he broke into a sprint.

In an instant, he was already traveling faster than most cars did in the city. With a shift that felt almost as autonomous as breathing, his feet and lower shins broke out into tendrils that pierced into the pavement as though it were soft loam, giving him the extra grip he needed to practically fling himself forward. As he came up against the limit of air resistance and pressed himself to go even faster, his body reacted again to give him what he needed. The outer edges of his arms and legs rippled and broke apart into a blur of incredibly fast-moving tendrils that took in air, compressed it in the space of an instant, and shot it out along with a trail of fine red mist like hundreds of tiny jet engines, giving him a massive boost in thrust.

Alex's strides stretched out over twenty, thirty feet as he ran, and the cold night air whipped over his whole body, howling in his ears along with the rushing noise his arms and legs made as they created their own slipstream. The sheer power and freedom felt incredible.

Once he felt he was far enough away, Alex slowed down and started winding through the abandoned dockyards, almost shaking with energy.

The speed of his movement was liberating, and he yearned to start sprinting again, but held himself back to a fast walk for subtlety's sake. At least the slow pace would allow him to think about his powers and consider his next steps.

Looking at his fight objectively, Alex hadn't been as strong as Lung had been at his peak. It stung his pride to admit, but that much was undeniable, having full experience with both sides. However, even the fact that his power was comparable to Lung's at all was noteworthy. Though Lung has deliberately hidden the true extent of his powers, he was still considered by most to be the single strongest parahuman in Brockton Bay, and that was really saying something in a city that was disproportionately infested with capes.

Complicating the comparison, though, was the fact that Alex now felt much stronger and more whole than he did when he woke up, no doubt a consequence of consuming Lung. How much further could he go, and how much more powerful could he get? Would it be enough to survive another encounter like this?

A memory surfaced of Lung reasoning that the only reason the superheroes hadn't already put him six feet under or in the Birdcage, the jail for parahumans, was because Lung was simply too powerful to bother with, and he had mostly targeted criminals. Also, he had proven useful against the Endbri—

Alex stumbled mid-step and very nearly tripped. He froze in place as his new memories filled him in on the world's collective nightmare.

Holy mother of fuck!

Alex felt a cold chill running down his spine. He remembered Lung's cataclysmic duel with that thing in November of 1999. It was amazing that Alex could have overlooked the memory even for a minute, but it wasn't like he had the mental capacity to unpack all of Lung's mind at once. Now, though, it was hard not to think about the battle. He could almost feel the phantom sensation of the Endbringer's giant claws effortlessly carving through his scales and flesh, hear the deafening roar of the entire island of Kyushu crumbling into the raging sea, and picture the explosive clash of flame and water as they fought. Worst of all, Alex remembered Lung's empty sense of futility, which had ultimately halted his power's escalation. It felt like part of him was still there, almost like how PTSD flashbacks were described, but one step removed.

Alex shook his head to clear his mind. That vivid recollection had felt strange.

Apparently there was now some degree of separation between the memories of Lung and Alex. That was a relief, considering just how emotionally fucked up Lung had been. If Alex's hypothesis was correct, he had inhabited Lung's brain while he was inside his body, and that was why he'd temporarily thought he was Lung. The fact that Alex's consciousness was now safely ensconced in his original brain was probably what allowed him to remain removed from Lung's personality and emotions, even though the semantic and episodic memories of Lung had been copied over and added to his own.

At least it seemed safe to view those memories now. Alex didn't feel like anyone but himself, even if most of his memories didn't belong to him. Lung's memories only seemed to occur to Alex following his natural train of thought. They were reactive, not proactive, with no anticipation of what information Alex might need. That had the potential to be dangerously inconvenient, considering he'd initially missed the existence of Endbringers while thinking about parahumans, when by all rights, they should have been the very first things he thought of. On the other hand, that reactionary memory was also probably the only reason that Alex wasn't a comatose vegetable or a delusional Lung clone right now.

Alex didn't feel quite so powerful anymore, not after learning about those things. Whatever he was now, he didn't measure up to the real powers in the world. He was one shark in a vast, dangerous ocean, but he was a shark nonetheless. The only certainty in life was that anything, at any moment, might rise up out of the depths and eat him, so he just had to make sure he ate them first. It was an appealing prospect.

Damn it, this hunger is so distracting, Alex thought to himself.

With nothing better to do, Alex started looking for something to eat.

Notes:

For those of you who might still be confused as to what happened with Lung's personality nearly taking over, essentially the virus was so damaged and reduced that it could no longer maintain the simulation of Alex Mercer's mind and personality, and as a result Alex nearly turned himself into another James Heller on accident, only this time with Lung. Once his body had regenerated enough, though, Lung's original central nervous system and memories were no longer the only game in town, and as a result the original personality resurfaced from within the Blacklight network's parallel subconscious.

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Chapter 509 - 3