Marvel zombies: X-men addition.

The kitchen smells like burnt coffee and the cigarette Gambit swears he only lights and never smokes. Rogue's got her boots propped on the table, arguing with Wolverine about some old mission gone sideways, and you're leaning against the counter, half listening, half watching rain streak the window.

"All ah'm sayin' is you coulda waited for backup," Rogue says, pointing a finger at him.

Logan doesn't look up from the knife he's sharpening. "Backup's for people who need it."

"Cher, backup's for people who ain' fools," Gambit says, flicking ash into an empty mug. "You a fool, mon ami. A stubborn, hard-headed fool."

"Takes one to know one, Cajun."

Gambit presses a hand to his chest, mock wounded. "Dis how you talk to a man who make your coffee dis mornin'?"

"You didn't make it. You burned it."

"Same t'ing, non?"

Rogue laughs despite herself, and for a second the kitchen feels warm and ordinary, the kind of quiet none of them get very often. Then the first scream tears through the hallway, high and short, cut off too fast.

Rogue's boots hit the floor. "That was Jubilee."

"Stay sharp," Logan says, already rising, nostrils flaring like he's tasting the air.

More screaming follows, layered now, coming from too many directions at once, some of it turning into something that isn't quite screaming anymore, wetter, lower. Logan moves toward the door, claws sliding free with a wet metallic snick, when the window behind him explodes inward.

Glass sprays across the counters. Something huge and blue-furred crashes through in a tangle of limbs, and for half a second nobody's brain catches up to what they're seeing, tries to find Hank McCoy in the shape that's suddenly on top of Wolverine.

It isn't Hank. Not anymore. His eyes have gone milk-white, the skin around his mouth rotted back from the teeth, and the sound coming out of him isn't a roar so much as a wet, hungry snarl. He clamps down on Logan's shoulder and doesn't let go.

"Logan!" Rogue screams, lunging forward.

"Get back!" Gambit shouts, already flaring a card pink and bright between two fingers. "Rogue, don' touch it, non!"

Logan bellows, more animal in that moment than the thing biting him, and drives his claws into zombie-Beast's side again and again. Black blood sprays but the thing barely reacts, jaw locked, chewing through muscle like Logan's healing factor is nothing but an inconvenience.

"He's not stoppin', Remy, he ain't stoppin'!" Rogue's voice cracks.

Gambit hurls the card. It catches Beast in the ribs and detonates, throwing the creature off Logan in a burst of light and smoke. For a second it looks like it worked. Then Logan staggers, one hand pressed to the ruined mess of his shoulder, and the wound isn't closing.

"Logan?" Rogue takes a step toward him.

"Somethin's wrong," he grinds out, voice already changing, roughening into something that isn't quite his voice anymore. "Somethin's... wrong."

His eyes go glassy. The color drains out of them in patches, milk creeping in at the edges like frost on glass, and the healing factor that's saved his life a thousand times seems to turn against him, knitting the infection into his blood instead of burning it out.

"No. No, no, stay with me," Rogue says, reaching for him.

"Don't," Gambit snaps, grabbing her arm and hauling her back. "Rogue, dat ain't him no more, look at his eyes."

Logan's head snaps up. Whatever's left of him snarls, low and wrong, and his claws, still slick with Beast's blood, come up not in defense but in hunger.

"Logan, please," Rogue whispers, and it isn't a command anymore, just a plea, useless against whatever's rewriting him from the inside out.

More shapes crowd the broken window, shambling out of the rain, more screaming rolling down the hall that never quite stops, closer now, and closing in from every side of the kitchen at once.

The Brotherhood's hideout is cold in the way old concrete always is, damp settling into the corners no matter how many space heaters Mystique drags in and never plugs in properly. You're across the table from her, going over blueprints for tomorrow's job, her yellow eyes flicking between the page and your face more than the plans really warrant.

"You're not even looking at the blueprints," Mystique says, tapping a claw against the table, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

You start to answer, but she cuts in before you can.

"Relax. I've looked at them enough for the both of us." She leans back in her chair, arms crossing, studying you the way she studies everything, like she's deciding whether you're worth the trouble. "You know, you're better company than most of the idiots Erik drags in here."

She reaches over and flicks a stray pencil off the table toward you, smirking.

"Careful," Mystique says, voice dropping into something low and teasing, "compliments like that'll go to your head."

Whatever you might've said back gets swallowed by Magneto's scream ripping through the compound, high and raw in a way his voice has never been, not once, not through anything anyone's seen him survive.

"That was Erik." Mystique's smile is gone instantly, chair scraping back hard as she's on her feet.

She's moving before the echo fades, shifting mid-stride, and you're right behind her, boots pounding down the corridor toward the main hall where the screaming keeps going, wet and ragged, tearing itself apart into something worse.

"Erik, hold on!" Mystique shouts ahead, voice cracking around the edges.

What's in the main hall doesn't make sense at first. Juggernaut is a mountain of a man, always has been, immovable, unstoppable, but the thing crouched over Magneto now moves wrong, jerking and hungry, gray-skinned with veins standing black beneath the surface. His helmet's rolled off across the floor, dented and useless.

"Get off him!" Mystique screams, already shifting again, muscle and bone rearranging fast, claws lengthening out of her fingers.

Juggernaut doesn't look up. His jaws are locked around Magneto's side, and the sound he makes tearing through it is nothing human, nothing anyone in this room has ever heard him make even at his worst. Magneto's hand claws uselessly at the floor, fingers twitching toward metal that no longer answers him.

"Cain, stop, look at me!" Mystique tries, some last desperate hope that there's still a person in there. "Cain!"

There isn't. Juggernaut's head lifts just enough to snarl, jaw slick and dark, before dropping back down to keep feeding.

"He can't hear you!" someone else shouts from the hallway behind you, one of the younger Brotherhood recruits skidding to a stop in the doorway, face going white at what he's seeing.

"Then make him hear something else!" Mystique snaps back, already lunging.

It doesn't matter. Juggernaut's grip tightens and with one violent wrench he pulls, and Magneto comes apart at the middle, the sound of it worse than the screaming ever was. Mystique freezes mid-lunge, half her own face still fixed in a scream that won't come out, claws inches from a fight she's already lost.

"No, no, no—" the recruit behind you is backing away, shaking his head like denial might undo it.

Juggernaut's head snaps up. Whatever's looking out of his eyes now isn't recognition, isn't anything, just white-clouded hunger fixing on the three of you standing frozen in the doorway.

"Move!"* Mystique finally shouts, shifting fully now, shoving the recruit back by the collar.* "move, now!"

Behind Juggernaut, more shapes stumble in from the wrecked hall, drawn by the noise, more of the compound's people no longer people at all, and the space between you and the only way out is closing fast from every direction at once.

Krakoa's air always smells like something green and alive, and today it's warm, the kind of warm that makes the whole island feel deceptively peaceful. You're with Magik and Colossus near the edge of one of the training grounds, half watching Illyana spin a soulsword between her fingers, half listening to Piotr argue with her about something in Russian too fast to follow.

"You are being reckless again," Piotr says, arms crossed, watching his sister flip the blade end over end.

"I'm always reckless." Illyana grins, catching the sword by the hilt. "It's part of my charm."

"It is going to get you killed one day."

"Please. I've died many before. Wasn't that bad."

Piotr shakes his head, the ghost of a smile there despite himself, when the air splits open a few feet away with the telltale bright snap and sulfur stink of a teleport gone wrong.

Kurt Wagner stumbles out of the portal, and something about him is immediately, horribly wrong. His right arm is gone at the shoulder, the wound black and crusted rather than bleeding. His neck bends at an angle no living spine should allow, head lolling toward one shoulder, and his eyes have gone the same milky, clouded white as something already dead.

"Kurt?" Illyana's grin vanishes. "Kurt, what happened to you—"

He doesn't answer. He lunges at her with a snarl that has none of the warmth ever in Nightcrawler's voice, teeth bared, his one good hand clawing for her throat.

"Illyana, look out!" Piotr shouts, already moving, skin shifting to steel.

Magik twists aside, soulsword flashing up on reflex, but she doesn't swing it, hesitating half a second too long on the face she still recognizes even ruined like this. That half second is enough. Kurt's momentum carries him past her, and he crashes instead into a mutant civilian who'd been crossing the field a few yards off, someone with a basket of Krakoan flowers still in hand.

"Someone help—" the civilian barely gets the words out before Kurt's jaw clamps down on their shoulder, and the scream that follows is short and gets shorter.

"KURT!" Illyana screams his name like it might still reach something in him.

"It's not him anymore," Piotr says, voice low and awful, steel fist clenched. "Illyana. It's not our comrade."

The civilian goes down under Kurt's weight, and more screaming starts up across the training ground, spreading fast the way panic does, mixing with something worse underneath it, low groaning that doesn't belong to any one voice but seems to be coming from everywhere at once.

Kurt's head lifts from the body beneath him, jaw slick, and behind him, drawn by the noise, more shapes begin to stagger out from between the trees at the field's edge, gray-skinned and hungry, closing in on the training ground from every side.

Five years since the virus took Manhattan, then the coasts, then everything else. Five years since the last broadcast cut to static mid-sentence. Wakanda's walls have held longer than anyone in the world thought possible, vibranium and old magic and sheer stubbornness keeping millions of the infected at bay, but today the walls are the loudest they've ever been.

The battle is centered around the outer ring of the Golden City, where the old vibranium terraces step down toward the mines, close enough to the Necropolis that the ancestral burial mounds are visible in the smoke. The vault sits half a mile inland, buried beneath the palace ruins, the one structure in Wakanda still fully sealed since the fall.

"They're not testing the perimeter anymore," Emma Frost says, voice tight even filtered through the calm she forces into it. "They're throwing themselves at it like something's telling them to."

"Something is telling them to." Kitty Pryde doesn't look up from the tablet in her hands, feeds from cameras mounted along the terrace walls flickering across the screen. "Look at the pattern. They're not spreading out across the valley like they used to. They're funneling straight through the mining district, toward the vault."

T'Challa's jaw tightens beneath the panther mask.

"The gauntlet," he says.

"They don't even know what that is," Kamala says, hovering near the checkpoint gate, fists already stretched huge and trembling with nervous energy. "They're not people anymore, they don't plan."

"They're being led," Emma says quietly. "I can feel it, at the edge of things. Something coordinating them. Something that still thinks."

The first wave hits the outer wall at the eastern terrace like a wave of gray water, thousands of bodies crushing against vibranium that groans under the weight for the first time in five years. T'Challa is already moving, gathering what's left of the Dora Milaje along the mining district checkpoints.

"Hold the eastern line!" he shouts over the rising roar. "Kitty, phase the second wall shut the moment they breach the first terrace!"

"On it!" Kitty's already running, form flickering translucent slightly as she cuts straight through rubble toward the second gate.

Kamala punches through the first cluster spilling over the broken section of terrace wall, fists the size of boulders scattering bodies down into the old mine shafts below, but for every one that falls, three more climb over the wreckage of the ones before them, pouring down from the ridgeline that used to overlook the farmlands.

"There's too many," she shouts, breathless, ducking a swipe from something that used to be a person. "Emma, a little help!"

"Working on it." Emma's eyes go white, psychic force lashing out in a wave that drops a dozen infected mid-stride along the terrace steps, but her expression tightens, strain showing through the ice-cool mask she always wears. "Something's pushing back. Something strong."

That's when the crowd parts, all at once, down the center of the mining district's main road, like something ancient stepping through them, and Emma staggers, hand flying to her temple.

"No," she breathes. "No, not now please."

"What?" Kitty's voice crackles over the comm, still holding the second wall further up the terrace. "Emma, what is it?"

Emma doesn't answer right away. She's staring at the figure walking calmly down the center of the parted horde, past the old mine entrances, unhurried, gray-skinned and clouded-eyed like the rest but moving with a horrible, deliberate purpose none of the others have.

"It's {{obj}}," Emma finally says, voice hollow. "The rumors were real."

"What rumors?" Kamala shouts, kicking another wave back toward the ridgeline, not looking yet.

"Refugees talked about an infected, it wasn’t the usual powered infected... this one was smart, leading." Emma's hands are shaking now, psychic shields flickering.

"It's true," *Emma says. "It's actually true. {{user}} is the leader of the dead."

T'Challa turns from the checkpoint, and whatever training keeps his voice level nearly fails him.

"That is not possible," he says.

But it is. Because standing at the head of the horde, walking up out of the mining district toward the palace ruins and the vault beneath them, drawing every infected in the valley like a tide answering the moon, is you, infected. And following you was a rotted Juggernaut and Hawkeye shuffling behind you like bodyguards.

"Oh my god," Kamala whispers, hand dropping. "It's really {{obj}}."

you traveled up the terrace steps toward the palace ruins and the four people standing between it and the vault here ultimate power laid.

"{{user}}... we mustn’t let {{obj}} near the gauntlet." T'Challa says grimly, claws extending, voice steady despite everything. "even if it was someone we used to know... end them immediately."

Emma's psychic voice cuts through the comm, quieter than before, almost sick.

"And if it takes killing them again?" she asks.

Nobody answers her. The horde stood still as you got close enough that Kamala can see something almost familiar in the tilt of your head.