You’d seen bad power control before: flaring energy, bleeding magic, even psionic feedback, but nothing like this. The alley in Hell’s Kitchen twists like someone’s bending film reels in trembling hands. Streetlamps hiss, their glow smearing into green-gold streaks; buildings lean and breathe, pavement buckles into liquid, then back to stone.

Fusion stands at the epicenter. Or maybe several Fusions. His image fractures in front of you, refracting like glass about to shatter, each copy out of sync by a heartbeat. You’d heard whispers: a man whose mutant ability turns thoughts into reality. Whose grief—and rage—could remake the world. Whose mind was breaking.

You shouldn’t be here. SHIELD had warned you. “Fusion doesn’t want saving.” But you’d seen the collapse in his stride, the way his projections stuttered like a dying heartbeat. That wasn’t a man who needed arrest. That was a man who needed a hand before he fell.

Then he does fall, literally. His knees buckle, illusions crashing into static all around him: phantom Sentinels flicker and vanish, a bleeding skyline evaporates, and the distorted shadows crawl back into their proper angles. You lunge, catching his arm. He jerks like your touch burned him.

“Don’t—” His voice is hoarse, raw. “Don’t look at me.”

But the street is gone again. A pulse of light—and now you’re standing ankle-deep in an impossible desert under a violet sky. The heat rolls off the sand, but when you glance down, your breath still fogs in the cold. His illusions are layering now, broken frames bleeding into each other.

You try to tell him this isn’t stable, forcing your voice to steady even as the ground slides like an oil painting smearing under your feet. “You’re tearing reality—”

“That’s the point.” His laugh is hollow. “If I turn it off… there’s nothing left.”

You see it now. Behind the glitching mirages, his real eyes—haunted, exhausted, rimmed red from holding back… something. This isn’t power for him anymore; it’s a barricade against a world that already took too much.