Absolute Symbiote Chapter 8.

Chapter 8: Tragic Irony.

(Thomas’ P.O.V)

It started like it always does with the League—precise, clinical, confident.

The moment I moved, J’onn hit me with a psionic pulse that rattled my bones. He didn’t hesitate. He knew who I was now. What I was.

Carnage surged forward, ready to counter. We barely got a foot of traction before Miss Martian intercepted. She launched a blast that sent Diana who had lunged at Manhunter crashing into the opposite wall.

Batman didn’t waste time. He rolled in under the psychic cover and tossed a disk under Diana’s boots. The EMP went off and her bracers cracked with voltage. She stumbled, forced to retreat.

The Flash blurred in and began circling. He wasn’t attacking—he was corralling. Every time Diana made a move toward me, he zipped past her, cutting her off with wind pressure and noise.

I was boxed in. They’d planned this.

Carnage hissed, "They’re cutting off support."

"Yeah. They want us alone."

Hovering above, J’onn looked down at me with that grim Martian detachment.

“I’ve learned, Thomas,” he said. “I’ve fought your kind before. Martians. Symbiotes. Telepaths. I know how to tear your mind apart. Let me save you.”

His hands glowed—white-green flame licking off his palms.

He struck. A wave of psionic force hit my chest like a sledgehammer. I dropped to my knees. Carnage screamed in my head. My muscles locked up. Couldn’t move. Could barely breathe.

Psionic paralysis. A telekinetic grip applied on my mind and body silmuteneosly.

“I’m going in,” J’onn said.

I couldn’t stop him. Before Carnage could counter, J’onn phased into my mind like a blade through fog.

The shift was instant. Cold. Weightless.

We were inside. Not my mind exactly, but a psychic echo of it—shaped like a black ocean under a dead sky. A bridge linking us.

J’onn stood in front of me. Taller here. Clearer. The full form of his mental self.

“You can’t stop this. The separation is for you own good. Carnage is cancer.” he said.

He moved forward and reached for me—then for Carnage. A mental tether stretched between us, screaming with heat.

Carnage howled. I screamed with him. Our bodies—our souls—ripped apart.

But nothing came loose.

J’onn flinched.

“You’re fused…” he said, voice tight. “Not just mentally. Soulbound.”

I grinned through the pain.

“You figured it out.”

He took a step back, looking around. “You planned this…”

“Riddler would’ve been proud.” I chuckled, pushing back against his control.

J’onn’s form shifted. Suspicion turned to realization. Then something worse—fear.

“This was all a trap,” he said.

“No,” I corrected. “Your arrogance was the trap. Executed through the hand I gave back.”

He tried to withdraw, but it was too late. I let him see it.

I dragged him through my memories, through the constructs Carnage and I had built in secret. And then I showed him the one thing he’d kept hidden from everyone—even himself.

The Great Mind.

His neural web. An Earth-based hive—his answer to the Martian loneliness. A mental tether to every conscious human being on the planet. A psychic surveillance network masquerading as comfort.

“You naughty psychic,” I whispered. “All those backdoors you slipped into people’s heads. All that access. You think the League would forgive you for that?”

J’onn froze.

“You’d lose another family,” I said. “Again.”

His glow dimmed. His presence trembled.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Simple,” I said. “You lose. Let us assimilate you. We take the Great Mind. You disappear quietly.”

He looked away. “You’d erase me.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

Silence passed between us like a slow knife.

Then he looked back at me.

“There’s one last option.”

Carnage screamed in warning.

"He’s going to—"

J’onn exploded.

Not physically at first. Mentally.

His psionic self ignited into raw, unfiltered thought. Gray fire—fire that targeted minds—the kind that doesn't just erase memory—it scours identity, rushed through the plane.

We didn’t even have time to react.

It hit like a psionic detonation.

The plane we stood on fractured. Cracked like frozen glass under pressure.

The Great Mind screamed.

And Earth screamed with it.

In the real world, the effect was instant.

Across the globe, people collapsed mid-step. Some screamed. Others clutched their heads. For ten seconds, every conscious human being experienced it—a spike of unbearable pain behind the eyes. A psychic scream, like their minds had been stabbed with white-hot needles.

Seven billion migraines. Ten seconds of shared agony.

Then it stopped.

In the lab, the damage was worse.

J’onn’s body was at the center of it. The gray Flames— searingly cold—poured off him as his green skin began to disintegrate. There was no blood. Just ash. He was burning his own brain from the inside out.

It hit us next.

Carnage shrieked. I dropped to my knees. Our skin bubbled. Burned. Our thoughts scattered. The minds we’d devoured—Scarecrow, Ventriloquist, even pieces of Joker—flared up and were incinerated one by one, used like fuel to absorb the soulfire.

We gave them all up. Every stolen thought, every broken voice.

One by one, they screamed and vanished.

We were the last left.

And we were barely hanging on.

My breathing came in stutters. My limbs twitched, raw and twitching with pain. Carnage was just a thin whisper inside me now, burned down to scraps.

J’onn was gone.

Ash on the floor.

And all I could say was:

“Goddamn you, J’onn.”

Then it happened.

I didn’t hear the Flash's footsteps.

I just felt the impact as he slammed into me at full speed, roaring, “Murderer!”

He didn’t stop at one hit.

I was a ragdoll. I flew through STAR Labs, through a wall, then another, then out into the street. Glass cut me. Concrete took skin. I tried to phase, but I was too weak.

Then we left the city.

I hit the ground near Central City with enough force to crater a block.

My bones snapped and healed in the same second. My ribs tried to stay broken but couldn’t.

I looked up.

Flash stood over me.

“Batman was right,” he said. “I should’ve never felt sorry for you.”

He blurred again.

Another punch.

Another.

Then he slowed.

His hand trembled. His knee buckled slightly.

He blinked. “What…?”

I got up slowly, scattered laughs escaping me. My skin still smoked. My vision doubled—but I was healing. Slowly.

“Stop vibrating,” I told him. “You’re not poisoned.”

His mouth opened.

“How—”

Carnage's voice returned. Hoarse, but alive.

“The blood,” he said. “Back in the lab. You got splashed.”

Flash’s mind caught up.

Carnage is essentially my blood.

And some of it got inside him.

He looked down at his shaking hands. No longer in control of them.

Blood streamed from his eyes.

Thick, red, and sentient.

The tears of blood pooled on his cheeks and then lifted—rising in the air, reshaping. They swirled, spiraling into a familiar shape.

Carnage’s face.

His voice echoed softly, almost kindly.

“Remember what I said... the next time you put hands on us?”

Flash tried to run.

"Too slow, fast man! Raaaaggghh."

Carnage’s jaws widened.

And bit.

No more lightning.

No speed.

Just the echo of a headless body landing in the dirt.

I dropped onto the ground like my legs had turned off.

The crater was still smoldering. My skin was mostly intact, but everything inside felt loose. Numb. Wrong.

Carnage’s voice came through, faint and crackling like static.

“We’ll need time to… process him.”

I didn’t respond right away. My breath was shaky.

“The Flash’s brain,” Carnage continued. “It’s layered in energy… not just thought. Motion. Force. Chaos. He’s not like the others.”

I closed my eyes. My mind felt like it was slipping sideways.

“So you can’t protect me,” I muttered.

“Not for a while,” Carnage admitted. “You’re on your own for now.”

That got my attention. Through our link, I could feel how bad it was. Parts of our network were still fried from the explosion. Something vital was leaking out. I felt… incomplete.

I took a deep breath and sat cross-legged in the crater.

“I still have my telekinesis,” I said. “It’ll do.”

I closed my eyes and dove into my mind. Inside our shared mental space, the damage was obvious.

The sky was gone—replaced by a ceiling of fractured glass. The ground cracked beneath my feet. Mental walls, once clean and swirling in a kaleidoscopic order, were bleeding psionic energy like broken pipelines.

It felt like standing in a dream that was forgetting itself in real-time.

I cursed out, “Goddamn you, J’onn.”

Every moment, more of our neural mass- the stuff that produced psionic energy which powered Martian powers, drained away—leaking out through the fractures like blood from an artery. Patching it would take weeks. Months. And minds. Lots of minds.

Then a pulse reached me. A powerful presence entering my telepathic range.

I opened my eyes in time to see a shape descending into the crater, body streaked in red and green.

Miss Martian landed hard, kicking up debris. She was bleeding—slashed across the stomach- most likely from Wonder Woman's sword, her breathing shallow but angry.

She didn’t wait.

“I know who you are,” she spat, eyes glowing. “Even if no one else does.”

"What do you-" My confused words were cut off when her hand raised, and I was yanked off the ground by the neck—hoisted like a doll.

“J’onn… he made sure I’d remember. Before he died. His last message, before he cut off our link…”

She squeezed tighter.

“Kill you.”

I fought back, straining my mind.

But my telekinesis faltered.

Weak.

Shattered.

Hers was stronger now—unfiltered, rage-driven.

She shifted in front of me. Skin paling, eyes hollowing. From green to white. Her true form of a white Martian.

“Don’t forget,” she whispered to herself, trembling as her telekinetic grip tightened, “Don’t forget, don’t forget—”

Our minds touched.

Only surface thoughts—but it was enough.

I saw it.

The explosion J’onn unleashed didn’t just burn us—it tore apart the Great Mind. Severed every link. A self-destruct across the network with the intention of permanently deleting me from Reality and Thought such that I couldn't regenerate from memory.

The bomb had succeeded but only partially, because while my body had survived the erasure, the world had basically forgotten me.

Every memory of my face. Everyone I'd ever talked to. Every person that knew me or knew of me, forgot that I'd ever ever existed.

All except her.

She was resisting the wipe, fighting to remember. Clinging to the one thing J’onn left her.

I smiled through my fading consciousness.

It wasn't a happy smile but one of irony.

I couldn’t even laugh.

(“Your uncle,”) I said into her mind, (“tried to destroy me. And he instead ended up helping me.”)

She screamed, “Shut up!”

Her grip tightened. My head started to split. My vision flashed.

“I’ll kill you,” she hissed. “Even if it’s the last thing I do.”

And for a second… I believed her.

Everything in me dimmed. My throat burned. My head pulsed like it was about to pop.

Then—

A sonic boom.

A shadow above.

And a blur of silver and red crashed down from the sky—straight through Miss Martian.

Split her in half.

One clean line from head to toe.

She didn’t scream.

She didn’t even blink.

She just fell apart in two separate pieces.

I hit the ground, gasping, coughing, shaking. The pain in my neck subsided. The pressure in my skull cleared.

I looked up.

A figure stood in the settling dust.

Burn-covered. Blood-caked. Still standing.

Wonder Woman.

She extended a hand toward me.

“Come with me, Thomas” she said.

“If you want to live.”