A/N: This story presents our protagonist Cole following the non-canon Evil Ending of Infamous 2, in which he kills Nix and Zeke and becomes the Beast. Here, realizing the futility of his present actions and wrought with grief-hallucinations, Cole-the-Beast comes to a decision that will change everything. Using his newest power, he decides to go back in time, and stop Cole MacGrath from ever gaining possession of his powers.

This is my first Infamous story, so there might be some mistakes. Feel free to drop a message if you enjoyed reading!

Chapter 1.

Zeke isn't the only one that haunts your dreams but he's of the few that linger on when you're awake.

What've you turned into, man? he'd murmured angrily those first few months after his death, but these days he just stares at you, quiet and mournful. Accusing. He slouches in the corner of the room; sits nearby when you dangle your legs over a ruined building; does the whole lonesome gunman stare whenever you destroy another city. The silence is worse because it's ever-present: this is the gap that you created, with your own hands—the death you brought to him, to the many more after. Millions, after. How many people have been laid to rest with these hands?

"Cole." Kuo softly makes herself known. As if you hadn't already sensed her presence the two minutes she's been standing there, watching you watch the distant horizon, awash with the red of the sunset and the black of your radiation.

"That's not my name anymore," you tell her without glancing her way, voice like gravel. Zeke barks out a chortle some distance from you, mocking, but of course Kuo cannot hear or see him. Zeke is dead.

"Beast," she corrects herself, frowning through the shape mouth makes. "The humans have ordered an airstrike against us. It should reach us in a few minutes. There are a lot of them this time. I think they might be hiding something. Something big."

The humans, she calls them now. Dear, selfish Kuo…so quickly she adapts to new environments, you think. So quickly she's forgotten she was once human. No quicker than you, man.

"I know." Casual and unworried-like, you begin to play with a bolt of red lightning between your hands. "They will be here in ten minutes. The air strike is a distraction for the real prize: they're going to drop a nuke on our home base. They plan to wipe out as many conduits as they can."

"What!" Kuo sputters, and you feel the breeze drop a few degrees in chill. "You know this, and you're not doing anything? They'll kill us all if we don't stop it!"

"Not all of us," you roll your shoulders in a shrug. Zeke is unreadable some feet beside you, standing now, his sunglasses concealing once-fond eyes. His grubby hands are in his pockets, and some part of you registers the stale sent of pizza and decay. But you know well it's all in your head.

"Cole!" Kuo cries—you sense the hand coming and let it grasp your shoulder, cold as death and twice as deadly. You're swerved at such an angle that your eyes are now leveled with her angry face. "You plan on doing nothing? That nuke will destroy all the conduits you've saved!"

So what? Many of the conduits you've saved along the way have fallen against the humans. For every ten you save (and wipe hundreds upon thousands of people to awaken them), five die in the war as you traverse the entirety of the world. These days you understand why John pleaded an end to the madness on that red day in New Marais. Why he gave up, not a tenth of the journey in.

It is hard. And God, it is tiring. Despite being the most powerful conduit alive, with more power than you or Kessler or anyone had ever dreamed of developing, you constantly feel dry, sucked of life and of energy. Like the lethargic feel of a world without electricity, this mental or physical oppression clogs your breath and muffles your mind, leaving it vulnerable to Zeke and Nix and all those you have ended in this futile, fetid race. Only Trish has never shown herself. Even in death, you disgust her.

You are so very tired.

"Cole!" Kuo is shaking you now, a hitch in her voice. "Please. We'll all die!"

Is she crying? The salty tears crystallize into ice seconds after being shed, cracking and breaking off in little shards. The fear of death compels her, drives her to madness: to this very extent of madness. Undoubtedly, she would sacrifice the world if it meant that she would live.

"John was right, you know." You roughly push Kuo off and she falls to the ground with a gasp. "This burden is something only I could see through properly."

"…Cole?" Kuo whispers. Is there some form of understanding dawning in her eyes? Or just the pain of shedding tears her body no longer knows how to handle?

"I told you, that's not my name anymore." You smile, the scar down your face twisting into duplicate, fractal smirks. Your pale, drawn-out skin is almost translucent in the red haze that begins to encircle you, calling the Beast's powers and yours, now.

"What are you—?"

"Kessler developed a power from his despair; a power that trumped all the others he'd come to possess. One he decided would be the answer to all his present problems."

"Cole, don't tell me—" Kuo sputtered, immediately leaping to her feet. "You can't! After all you've done, you—"

"He molded me to be ruthless," you murmur, your voice metastasized into a growl so deep it shakes the very foundations of the building you stand on. "But he failed to account for the long-term consequences of such a transformation. I cannot let that happen to Cole. You see, Cole must never awaken."

"You're running away!" Kuo screamed, her fear of death, of being erased, forgotten, of being overwritten evident in the force and quake of her every breath. "You have to fix what you've broken, here, in the present! You can't just—"

"I am the Beast." Your voice is no longer recognizable. "And there can only be one."

"Cole!" Kuo's scream is drowned in the cacophonous shriek of both metal and human minds alike as you suck in the life force of everyone within a hundred meters of your position, powering up for the single greatest burst of energy you have ever and will ever expel—

There is a moment, a second really, in which time seems to stop, and you glance over to where Zeke had been standing, wanting, dreading, anticipating his expression—but Zeke is not there. Zeke has been dead for a long time.

And then you feel nothing more than pain, pain, PAIN.

John had apologized for attacking you in Empire City, so many years before. He'd also admitted that reconstructing himself atom by atom had been by far the most painful and maddening experience of his short life.

You understand now what he meant by that. But honestly? Time travelling feels even worse.

Time is a fickle thing—Kessler had never explained how exactly he'd managed to traverse its labyrinths, how he'd managed to land in the desired time frame and not, say, a hundred years off the mark. And, as your mangled mind attempts to piece itself back together as you literally FEEL the time stream racing by you, backwards, you wonder if maybe he really didn't know when he'd end up at all, and that's why it took him back so many years off Cole's awakening—and, vaguely, you wonder when you'll wake up yourself, when this pain will end…

If you had functioning ears and a present body, you would've heard an ear-splitting crackle of abrupt black lightning tear the sky, racing down from the heavens, exploding a crater on the ground—ONE, TWO, THREE strikes in quick succession, before just as abruptly disappearing, leaving only the smell of sulfur.

The time stream has spat you out. What's left of you, anyway.

The powers of the Beast aid you. John was good at putting himself back together: it stands to reason that you'd be good at it, too. Atom by atom, molecule by molecule, slowly, slowly…you come to a grinding, agonizing halt. Somehow, you are still alive. You're blind and deaf and cannot feel anything under your fingertips, but now you have all the time you need to piece it all together, to fix everything, spark some electricity through you deadened limbs… but for now, you want to sleep.

x-x-x

When you wake up, the sky is so bright a blue it's painful: so used to seeing grey and black and red, you only just now realize how much you missed this untainted view.

Everything hurts. Tentatively, you flex your fingers. Thankfully, they are all there. You wiggle toes. Yes, all there. Seems like John's experience was good practice for getting everything right the first time. You can feel a smile creeping up your face, and it brings painful tears to your eyes as a result of stretching the tender new skin you've drawn together. Gradually, external awareness comes to you in the form of a woman shrieking something about a naked man.

Naked man?

Ah, you realize, painfully drawing yourself up to a slouching sitting position and (gratefully) noticing all your other bits are still there. That seems to mean you.

"Lady," you try to ask her, but all that comes out is a wretched croak of a sound, nothing like a human language. You cough, barely able to breath, only realizing now that you hadn't been breathing: your lungs have only just been regenerated. Coughing and hacking and drawing in huge breaths, you try and recover enough to ask an important question.

A couple of curious bystanders have stopped to look at you now. A pained glance at your surroundings reveals you've regenerated yourself in a non-descript alley. What time is it? What year is it?

It's clearly before the arrival of the Beast in this timeline, given the undestroyed state of this place. There weren't many cities left, in your time. You'd leveled most of them to ground zero.

Another shaking, soul-wracking cough escapes you, as if your newly reconstructed lungs are those of an old man's. Tired is something that just barely covers what you feel. But the air around you is humming with the blessed presence of electricity and that helps you cope. In your time there hadn't been much electricity left, with no cities to generate it. But here there's enough around that you can just about taste it, deliciously acidic and achingly familiar.

The people around are still whispering and your hands unconsciously curl into fists. It's tempting to blast these annoying citizens with a bolt or three like you used to do before you started simply blink them out of existence with the powers of the Beast. If you'd regained enough power by now you would've killed them all by now for being so fucking noisy and unhelpful.

"Excuse me!" a terrifyingly familiar voice snaps your attention to the crowd—a girl trying to squeeze her way through, pushing angrily until she's bullied her way through, voice stern and commanding. "I'm a medical student, I can help this man! Make way!"

"Trish?" You try to say, but again, all that comes out is a dry, rasping croak—she's—she's—

Trish! A younger Trish. But her beautiful face is so familiar, so heartbreakingly familiar—she's got a hand on your shoulder, now, authoritatively, telling you something—

Trish is alive. You lose consciousness then, in her arms. There's a slack smile on your face and the darkness is blessedly sparse of nightmares.

x-x-x

Elsewhere, beyond your scope of consciousness, a hooded man twitches reflexively at the feel of a huge power surge in the distance. At his chest, blue spheres glow a tinge brighter in response to his surprise.

"Kessler?" a dark-skinned and gray-haired man asks, noticing the subtle change. "Are you all right?"

"Fine," the man rasps, voice like gravel. He pauses for another moment, before turning to his companion, hands clasped behind his back in an authoritative position. "How goes our newest test subject, Wolfe?"

"Dead, like the last five." The well-dressed scientist sighs. "I'll have you know cleaning the blood from the door hinges was extremely unpleasant."

"Work on that, then." Kessler growls. "I must go out. I felt a new conduit not far from here."

Wolfe raises his brows. "Why not send someone?"

"This one is strong," Kessler mutters, already on his way out. "This one I will attend personally."

Thanks for reading! Drop a review if you like, I'm always happy to hear feedback.