Check out [email protected]/Saintbarbido for more fics.
Chapter 10: Mathew's Past.
(General P.O.V)
Mathew stood at the base of the Throne.
It wasn't built. It had grown—from strings, from cause and consequence. Thousands of glowing narrative threads converged into its seat, each one a timeline, a universe, a fate. It pulsed. Waiting.
He took one step forward.
"Stop." Strange's voice cut across the silence.
Mathew glanced over his shoulder.
"You sit there," Strange said, "and you're no longer just you. That Throne connects you to every possible variation of existence. Every possible life. It'll burn through your thoughts, Mathew. It'll shatter your mind—or worse."
Mathew looked back to the Throne. "That's the point."
"If Jules is out there… if she ever existed… I'll find her."
Behind him, Loki chuckled, still slumped near the base of a broken spire.
"That's the spirit, Mathew," he said, his voice still shaking from weakness. "Go on. Sit down. Let it show you everything."
Strange stepped forward quickly. "No. He doesn't understand."
Loki tilted his head toward him. "Oh? So now you're ready to tell him the truth, Stephen?"
The Cloak of Levitation whipped forward and wrapped tightly around Loki's mouth, muffling whatever came next.
Mathew turned fully toward Strange.
"No," he said. "You don't understand."
He lifted his hand. Green strings danced between his fingers.
"I'm not just back to full strength. I'm synced with this reality now. The strings, the laws, the patterns—I can read them. I am them."
The Throne pulsed again. Closer. Clearer. A thousand lives whispered across his skin.
Strange shook his head. "That's not understanding. That's desperation."
"I call it clarity."
Strange's hands moved fast, shaping spells. "There's another way. Interrogate Loki. Extract the truth from his mind."
Loki made a strangled laugh under the cloak.
Mathew scowled. "You expect me to trust anything I'd find in his mind?"
"I expect you to stop thinking like a man chasing a ghost," Strange snapped. "Because if you sit on that Throne, you'll stop being a man altogether."
Silence.
Then green energy pulsed around Mathew's eyes.
"So stop me."
Strange didn't hesitate. A blast of Eldritch force tore from his palm.
Mathew raised one finger.
The blast unraveled mid-air—reduced to harmless photons.
He walked forward. Strange tried again. Symbols, mandalas, living constructs of protective enchantment.
Mathew waved his hand.
The spells collapsed. Magic didn't bend for him. It froze. To him, magic was a statistical anomaly—a distorted branch in the logic chain of reality. And now he controlled the logic.
Strange stepped back. One final spell on his tongue.
Mathew vanished—and reappeared behind him. A single tap on Strange's spine dropped him to his knees, frozen in a stasis loop of repeating probability.
"I'm sorry," Mathew said. "But this is mine."
He turned back to the Throne.
It waited for him.
He sat.
The moment he touched it—everything changed.
No sound.
No movement.
Then—
BOOM.
His mind tore open.
Awareness exploded across billions of threads, timelines, parallel universes.
Mathew Malloy no longer existed in one universe.
He existed in all of them.
It should've been enough.
Merged with the Throne, Mathew's awareness expanded like wildfire—unstoppable, all-consuming. Billions of timelines unfolded before him in microscopic precision. He saw alternate histories, variant Earths, universes where he'd died, worlds where he never existed, realms made of thought, dimensions sculpted from music, voids that housed only regret.
He saw himself as a child. As an old man. As a villain. As a ghost.
But he never saw her.
Not once.
No Jules.
No alternates. No variants. Not even a stray echo of her face in someone else's dream.
She wasn't hidden.
She simply wasn't there.
Anywhere.
Mathew's hands trembled on the arms of the Throne. His breath caught in his throat. The impossible weight of omnipotence pressed inward—not as power, but as emptiness.
She only existed in his memory.
And memory… could be wrong.
He stood slowly, every step away from the Throne cutting him off from the multiversal stream. It didn't matter. There was no point in staying.
He descended.
And when his feet hit the floor, the storm inside him rose.
His eyes locked on Loki, still bound and bloodied near the base of the steps.
Mathew moved in a blur, grabbed him by the front of his torn robes, and hoisted him into the air.
"Where is she?!" he roared, tearing Strange's cloak off Loki's mouth.
Loki coughed, smirking weakly. "Ah… thank you. That thing was really—"
WHAM!
Mathew slammed him into the floor, the ground cracking beneath the impact.
He didn't stop.
He drove his fist into Loki's gut with crushing force. Loki's body folded over his arm, gasping, eyes wide with genuine pain.
Mathew swung, hurling him across the chamber.
Loki bounced hard off the steps of the Throne, rolled once, and came to a crawling stop. He coughed blood into his palm, blinking rapidly.
"Mathew—wait—"
Mathew grabbed him again, this time by the throat, lifting him clean off the floor.
His voice came quieter now. Tighter. Controlled.
"Where. Is. Jules."
Loki's eyes twitched. He could feel it now—the air pressing around him, compressing space at the molecular level. Green strings formed behind Mathew, pulsing with a darker glow.
"I swear… I don't know," Loki rasped. "If you couldn't find her on the Throne, then she might not exist. She could be a—"
"Don't you dare finish that sentence."
Loki swallowed hard. The threads coiling behind Mathew hummed like blades.
So he changed tack.
"Then let me ask you something, Mathew," he said. "Who brought you back? Who placed you in this timeline after Xavier erased you? That's not in the throne's record either, is it?"
Mathew's eyes narrowed. His grip tightened.
He'd seen everything.
Except that and one other thing.
No memory of resurrection. No cosmic agency claiming responsibility. Just a return—unexplained. Unregistered.
Like Jules.
"Why would someone sitting on God's Throne care about meaningless scraps?" Loki whispered.
Mathew's aura deepened. The green in his eyes flared into black.
"You still haven't learned your lesson."
Reality tightened around Loki. The space behind him curled inward, flattening into an impossible angle. His lungs compressed. He gasped for air.
"Hasty—wait! Wait!"
"TALK!!" Mathew's roar shook the walls.
Loki froze, fully aware that another second of silence might cost him every remaining bone in his body.
He cleared his throat, trembling.
"All right," he said. "I'll tell you everything I know."
(Mathew's P.O.V)
I stood there, frozen.
The words Loki had just said bounced around in my skull, like echoes I couldn't trap or silence. My body was still—too still. Even the green threads swirling around me dimmed, as if they didn't know how to process what I'd just heard.
I wasn't Mathew Malloy.
Not really.
According to Loki, I was something else. Something that shouldn't exist.
He said it started with a soul—a rainbow-colored soul—that entered the multiverse from outside it. From a place beyond timelines. Beyond structure. A place even the throne couldn't trace.
Beyonder. The world felt...almost soothing.
He'd seen it.
He tried to stop it.
And failed.
Even with the Throne, with the full spectrum of narrative command at his fingertips, he couldn't change its path. The soul moved with intention, like it knew exactly where it needed to go.
And it went into Mathew.
Not the me that's standing here now—the real one. The one who'd died, killed by the Illuminati after he lost control.
And then this soul, this outsider—me—descended into that ruined corpse.
Merged with it.
Rewrote reality itself just to cover the seams.
The memory loss? The changes in space and time? The way the whole world felt off?
That wasn't a fluke.
That was me.
And suddenly… everything made a sick kind of sense.
I staggered away from Loki, my legs almost giving out under me. My breathing was sharp. Shallow.
He collapsed too, rubbing his bruised neck where my hand had held him.
I wanted to call him a liar. To laugh it off. But the moment I thought about it, puzzle pieces started falling into place without my permission.
The deja vu.
The instinctive understanding of people I'd never met—Xavier, Jean, even Loki himself. I hadn't remembered them. But I'd known them. Before.
From where?
And Jules…
Why was she only in my memory?
Why could no one else remember her—not even her family?
I turned my back to Loki and muttered aloud, mostly to myself. "I knew something was wrong. From the park bench. From the moment I opened my eyes. The world was… smooth. Too clean. Too scripted."
Loki, still gasping, pointed weakly. "That's why your power's different. Why it doesn't follow the same rules. You're not bound to your timeline… because you were never from it."
I turned back to him, teeth clenched.
"Then who am I?" I asked. "If the memories I have belong to Mathew, but the soul doesn't?"
He shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. I couldn't see anything. That soul—it nullified every probe. It was invisible to the Celestials. To Eternity. To Mephisto. Only I could glimpse it, because of my... connection to timelines."
My heart pounded louder than it had in hours. Maybe days.
If he was telling the truth—if I wasn't just some reborn mutant but a walking hybrid of a dead man and a soul from beyond existence—then I wasn't just broken.
I was unstable.
And maybe insane.
I looked up at the Throne again, eyes locking onto one golden string that pulsed differently from the others. The string.
The special one.
My timeline.
The only one I couldn't see while I was seated. My present.
Of course I couldn't see it. No narrator can look into the page they're standing on.
I stared.
That string held the key to everything. I could feel it.
But not yet.
Not until I confirmed Jules. Her reality. Her truth. If I had to tear through hell or heaven, I would. Because until I found her, I couldn't decide what to do with… me.
But first—I had a loose end to tie.
I turned toward Loki again, walking slowly. Calmly. My fingers extended, green energy spiraling into the shape of a blade.
"W-wait," he said quickly. "Let's talk. It was all a misunderstanding. We—we were friends, remember?"
"No," I said.
"You need me!"
"I needed a lot of things," I replied.
I stopped over him, the dagger pulsing between my fingers.
"But most of all… I needed a real black card."
His face twisted. "You son of a—"
I drove the blade straight through his chest.
He shuddered once.
Then dropped.
But as his body fell limp, something unexpected happened. A shimmer.
From the corpse, a faint, younger version of Loki's soul rose—no crown, no cloak, no arrogance. Just a boy, smiling faintly.
"Thank you," he said. "You freed me."
Then he was gone.
And I was alone again.
I turned my eyes back to the Throne.
And knew—without question—that the next chapter was mine to write.
-0-
-Volume 1: Absolute Mutant End-
-Volume 2: Beyond Absolute Mutant, will return-