Safety pins, sticky tape and hope

[Cable & Deadpool] Good Intentions (1/?)

2009-12-02T14:14:52Z

Remember that other-C&DP-story I kept talking about writing during those last couple of bits of Dogs of War and kept asking questions for? Well, this would be it.

Title: Good Intentions
Summary: Deadpool thought killing that 'Nathan' guy was going to be a fairly routine job. He couldn't have been more wrong.
Chapter: 1/?
Characters/Pairing: Cable/Deadpool, X-Force
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 6020
Warnings: Bordering on dubcon territory

Intro notes (because this is sadly not one of those stories that can get away without a lot of intro notes): AU fic, splitting from canon around New Mutants #98, a.k.a. Deadpool's very first appearance in Marvel canon, also being the first time he and Cable met. I am not sure whether, in good conscience, I can recommend people actually read that chapter if they haven't already, since we're talking Liefeld art in all its glory, and that is not the kind of imagery I'd want anyone to have in mind when reading this. All you really need to know is that Cable's still in his early days leading the New Mutants/X-Force team, and Deadpool's working for a guy who wants him dead, but when he breaks into the mansion he gets only as far as threatening Cable and having a brief fight with the kids before being shot by 'Domino' and tied up. Beyond that, I am going to be playing rather loosely with a lot of elements of the timeline – partially because it’s an AU, but also because the canonical timeline already contradicts itself in ways I cannot otherwise resolve.

So, yeah – C&DP fic set before C&DP started (and doubtless well before anyone at Marvel had ever considered giving either character a solo series, let alone an oddball team-up). If that wasn't bad enough, I may as well admit the idea is, at heart, really just a gratuitous PWP which probably wouldn’t have beyond idle speculation if it hadn’t then grown a surprisingly convoluted plot and backstory and continued to bug me until I got it down on paper. On the upside, if this does up and abandon me before I finish it, at least the first scene will stand well enough alone.

Well sheez, it's not like we're lovers or nothin'! The guy just cuts the pay-checks and I cut the throats.

actual quote

Most of Cable's remaining doubts evaporated around the time when the mercenary calling himself 'Deadpool' got through sharing his enthusiastic idea about being sent to a nice prison in the Bahamas. Loudmouthed indeed – whatever else could be said for Deadpool (which even on short association was more than enough), he didn't lack for guts. Still, there was no harm in being thorough. A few external insights into just what manner of intruder they'd caught didn't make the question of what they were going to do with him any less pressing, and any extra minutes he could buy while he made up his mind were to be made the most of.

“I think we should find out exactly who we're dealing with,” he said aloud, unfolding his arms and moving towards their prisoner. Deadpool eyed every step with the jittery attention of a caged beast.

“Oooh, you want to see me without my mask on? I'm warning ya, you won't like me without my mask on. I don't think I'm the kind of girl who goes that far on a first date, Nathan-baby.”

Cable had his hand on the mask before the final word was out of his mouth, and pulled it off in one quick tug.

There were shocked gasps and murmurs from behind him. Cable pursed his lips.

Well, this was... expected, technically. Hardly less confronting for it. To his own mind at least, more warranting the judgement of 'poor sod' than 'monstrous, inhuman freak', though he'd be naïve to imagine everyone else would see it that way.

“Warned ya,” Deadpool snarled, vicious despite the way he bowed his head under the glare of all those eyes, trying to hide his face in shadows that weren't there to hide it.

It may have been the single thing that went furthest to helping Cable make up his mind.

“Leave us. I'll deal with him,” he told the others.

“Cable, he's...” Sam started to say. Either adjectives failed him, or good sense warned him before he got any further.

“I had noticed,” said Cable. “Meanwhile, in the twenty odd seconds the rest of you lasted against him, I hope you all noticed how much more training you still have to do. Now would seem a good time to start.”

The room cleared quickly after that.

Deadpool looked around warily, like he half-expected a hooded man with a box of medieval torture instruments to walk out of a bookshelf, but finding that it apparently was just him and Cable, he turned his attention back to his captor, full force.

“Alright, Nate, since it's just you and me, let's clear a few things up – what do you bet is the one thing a guy with my looks hates more than being reminded he's a freak?”

“What?” said Cable, playing along.

“Try pity,” Deadpool spat. “So if clearing out the brats wasn't your way of saving their innocent eyes the shame of me getting 'forcefully interrogated' the way real mercs handle it, I am going to be seriously pissed off.”

“Who says I pity you?” said Cable. “Or that I imagine 'forceful interrogation' is going to work on a man who keeps talking with a supposedly broken jaw?”

“Oh, suuuuure, I bet you sent the kids away because you're so taken by my good looks and charm that you wanna have your way with me right here, right now, huh, big boy?”

'Loudmouthed' did not do him justice.

Well, why do things halfway?

Cable took another step to put himself inside Deadpool's personal space, and crouched – slowly – down until he was just about on the other man's eye level.

“And what if I do?” he said, taking hold of his chin. Then he kissed Deadpool on the lips, brief but purposeful.

When he leaned back, Deadpool had taken on a haunted look. “Uh, sorry, think I was hallucinating for a sec there, what'd I miss?”

Cable smirked. He didn't let go of Deadpool's jaw. “Hallucinating or fantasising?”

“Who can tell? They're both so... that was real?”

In lieu of answering, Cable pressed another kiss to the side of his jaw, the texture of the skin there unusual, but not unpleasant. If the bone really had been broken earlier, it showed no sign.

“Aha, right, very funny,” Deadpool grumbled. “No really. Hilarious. I'm just splitting at the seams. My inside seams where no-one can see them. Joke's over.”

“Who says I'm joking?” said Cable, keeping his movements slow. The pulse in Deadpool's neck was racing now.

“Uh, I think there's been some kinda mix-up,” Deadpool tried, voice suddenly faster than even its usual rattle. “I was 'sposed to be appearing in a comic today – y'know – manly, G-rated, painfully heteronormative? Not a porno. Definitely not this porno. Wrong room. All my agent's fault. I'll just see myself out...”

“Nice try.”

“Are you sure you wouldn't rather beat me to a pulp?”

“Would you enjoy that?”

“No, but it sounds a lot better when you get back and your boss wants to know how it went!” Deadpool insisted frantically. “You remember that thing where I tried to kill you about fifteen minutes ago?”

Easy does it, Cable decided – he didn't want to make Deadpool panic. Giving the jaw one last nibble, he moved back. Instead, he brought both hands to trace the muscle of Deadpool's chest – less threatening, but thoroughly unambiguous as a statement of intent. “Clearly. I also remember how you got in undetected, and took three of my men down before they could stop you.”

“And that turns you on? Don't you heroic types have rules about molesting your prisoners?”

“That only applies when the prisoners don't want to be molested.”

“Did you stop and think maybe I don't? I'm already crazy! Nofair, messing with my head!”

“I'm quite sincere about this.” Although the fabric hid the worst from view, he could feel the same textured skin from Deadpool's face extended over the rest of his body, the rapid rise and fall of Deadpool's chest under his fingers. “And you've been thinking about it,” he added, “ever since you first laid eyes on me.”

“Bet you use that line on all your prisoners,” Deadpool muttered, indignant.

Cable let himself smile. “You thought I hadn't noticed?”

“There was nothing to...!”

A finger over Deadpool's lips was surprisingly effective in shutting him off. “You weren't in much of a rush to finish me off,” Cable reminded him. “You made quite the point of letting me know it wasn't personal.”

“Can't blame a guy for being disappointed you put up such a lousy fight – Tolliver had me thinking you were going to be an actual challenge. Just 'cause I'm a morally challenged psychopath doesn't meant I don't have professional standards to think of!”

Cable let his hands travel around to Deadpool's back, leaning in until his lips didn't quite brush the lobe of his ear. “Then it wasn't because you were thinking,” Cable let his voice drop to just about a whisper, “'a shame to have to waste such a nice piece of arse'?”

“N-no!”

“You're not,” his hands trailed lower, the inviting curve of Deadpool's own (also very nice) arse so very close now, “as subtle as you think.”

“I'm carrying enough weapons to be the next three Arnie movies by myself! Where does 'subtle' enter into it?” Deadpool twisted under his hands. “The boss never mentioned this in the mission statement!”

And that was Cable's cue to back off before Deadpool really started to panic. Bringing his hands back to safer territory, he sat back on his heels. “Let's talk about your boss,” he said. “How much is he paying you?”

Deadpool calmed down a bit – interrogation seemed to be an area he felt more comfortable with. “Is this one of those 'how much is my life worth' kind of questions? Sorry to bust your ego Nate, but it's more of a fixed salary kind of job.”

“Maybe I want to make you a better offer.”

“You want to hire me in exchange for sex?”

“A number, Deadpool.”

“Hah, then for your information, Tolliver's paying me two thousand buckos a week. Best paying gig I've had since-”

“You're lying.”

“Am not.”

“I have a better idea of what a mercenary of your calibre is worth to Tolliver than you give me credit for.”

“What are you, his Dad?”

“I'm the man who's about to offer you fifteen hundred a week to work for me.”

Deadpool froze. “Fifteen hundred? For serious?” The words escaped with a bit too much enthusiasm. Most of it faded again when he saw Cable smirking. “...you bastard.”

“Plus expenses,” Cable continued rotating his hands gently against Deadpool's sides. “Plus room and board. And... there are certain other perks I can offer you.”

Deadpool's eyes widened even further. “You are trying to hire me for sex!”

“I'm trying to hire you for money. You can consider this,” Cable spread a hand meaningfully over his chest, “incentive – to make you think twice when a real offer of two thousand comes your way.”

Deadpool squirmed a bit. “Uh, sure. It's been real, Nathan, but unfortunately for you, I really don't swing this way...”

Cable raised an eyebrow at him. Then he looked pointedly downwards. Deadpool followed his gaze to where part of his spandex costume was stretching further than it had been designed to.

“Whaaaat, that? That don't mean nothing! Deadpool Junior and me have some great times, but Nate, you're in for a world of heartbreak if you think it means anything just because he waves hello. Unless you think I also swing for public transport or a good taco or the Golden Girls or...”

“Older women turn you on too?”

“Oh, fuck you.”

“We'll get there,” said Cable, enjoying the way Deadpool's breath hitched when his hands dipped lower again.

“I'm still catching up on how we got here! Did someone forgot to send the artist one of the pages in today's script? Why is no-one noticing but me?”

“How much clearer do I need to make my intentions here?”

“Pretty clear how much of them are about putting one over the guy who just tried to kill you,” Deadpool snapped.

“Less than you might think.”

Deadpool made a noise of exasperation. “Okay, so maybe Big Deadpool and Little Deadpool don't always agree on the fine print, but let me tell you, if I was untied right now, this would be going very different.”

Cable raised an eyebrow and, unseen by Deadpool, fished a small knife out of a pocket.

The look on Deadpool's face when he realised the rope holding his hands had been cut was priceless.

“Your choice,” Cable told him.

Deadpool spent five seconds staring at his hands in furious indecision. Then he threw both arms around Cable's body and fixed his mouth viciously on Cable's neck.

“Didn't your... mother ever tell you...” he managed, between sucking kisses into Cable's skin, “it's rude to call a guy's bluff twice in one argument?”

Cable did not let the sweet sense of victory – or the decidedly interesting things Deadpool was doing to his neck – put him off his stride. “My mother was a clone created by a mad scientist, some number of centuries before the era in which I actually grew up.” He shrugged at the stunned look Deadpool gave him. “I never really knew her.”

“...you aren't gonna let me win anything, are ya?”

“You aren't making that very hard.”

“Making plenty of things hard around here on your own,” Deadpool grumbled, trying to climb into Cable's lap. Cable shifted to oblige him, and Deadpool scrambled in close, legs arriving either side of his waist so that two of those 'hard things' pressed up against each other, grinding them together in angry thrusts.

Cable let him, the last remaining doubts over an admittedly unorthodox plan falling swiftly to rest. Even with the contact dulled by several layers of fabric, Deadpool knew what he was doing.

“Just want you to know I do know what you're thinking, smartarse” Deadpool muttered, keeping control of his voice with increasing effort. “Guy like me, face like reconstituted roadkill. Even hookers probably charge double just to take his pants off. He's gotta be just about begging for it. And,” he added, panting as Cable's lips traced the underside of his chin, “let's face it – you're basically right.”

“Hm.” The patterns of heat Deadpool's hands were mapping across his back were far more interesting than anything he had to say.

“Just so you know,” Deadpool went on, “I could kill you, like, four different ways right now.”

“Only four?”

“Like four. Gimme a sec, I'll think of another one.”

I'm sure you could, Cable mused. The wiry strength evident in every muscle of Deadpool's body – in every move he made – was well worth admiring. “But you aren't going to?”

“Well. Not the kinda guy to look a gift fuck in the groin. I can kill you later.”

“Or you could take me up on my offer.”

“Could. Maybe. Maybe you could do a few more things to see if you can convince me.” If there had been any possible doubt about what kind of things he had in mind, a downward wiggle of his hips settled the matter.

Cable smirked into his next kiss. “Now you're getting the idea. What do you say we move this somewhere more comfortable than the library floor?”

“There's a table?” said Deadpool hopefully.

“I have a room down the corridor.”

Deadpool leaned back to look at him. “Sure you wanna trust me to get that far without changing my mind about whether this was a really dumb idea after all?” The angry edge to Deadpool's voice showed no sign of fading.

He had a point – even a short walk down a corridor was enough to rid the situation of a good deal of its spur-of-the-moment plausible deniability, from his perspective. Cable shifted backwards and palmed Deadpool through his pants. “I'll take my chances.”

“...that is so cheating,” Deadpool panted.

“Trust me,” Cable told him. “I'll make it worth your while.”

“Worst euphemism for 'bend you over the nearest surface and hope the kids won't walk in' I ever heard,” Deadpool grumbled, failing not to sound just a little bit hopeful about the prospect.

“I thought you wanted be the one bending me over?” said Cable, innocently.

Deadpool make what could only be fairly described as 'a noise'.

“I... what? You mean... but that was just... you were serious?”

“I could be. If you want me to be.”

Deadpool appeared to experience some momentary trouble remembering how to close his jaw.

“...where did you say your room was?” he managed.

Cable grinned and got to his feet, pulling Deadpool with him.

***

'Just down the corridor' had been a slight exaggeration, especially counting a stop at a bathroom cupboard to find a container of hand lotion, but Deadpool (somewhat uncharacteristically) didn't comment. Possibly he was still having trouble with his jaw. Or was having too much trouble getting his eyes off Cable's behind to notice how far they'd gone.

Cable let him close the door behind them, and stripped out of his shirt without turning around.

“You have a lot of guts turning your back on a guy who tried to kill you once already today,” Deadpool observed. He sounded a little bit distracted, and a little bit in awe.

“I could say the same about a man who broke into a building full of powerful mutants.”

Deadpool shrugged. “I grow back. Pretty sure you don't.”

Cable filed that under 'things to talk about later', and dropped his hands to his pants.

Under Deadpool's scrutiny, he may have spent a little more time and effort on the task of removing them than he needed to.

“Getting undressed?” he prompted. “Or did you want me to do that for you?”

“Do you want me undressed?” said Deadpool, pointing to his face. “It doesn't get better further down.”

“What you're wearing looks like a one-piece job, is this going to get any further otherwise?” said Cable, meeting his eye. “Show me.”

Muttering obscenities at his costume, Deadpool pulled off his gloves, then grabbed the top of his costume and yanked it down to his hips. He glared up at Cable, daring him to comment.

“Well?” he snapped.

It was a moment too late that Cable realised that forcing Deadpool to put himself on display like this may have been his first real mistake. The shame Deadpool felt about his appearance ran deep – far too deep to be the sort of wound he could risk opening lightly. And he could only imagine how any hollow sentiments suggesting it didn't look as bad as any fool could have seen it did would be received. Probably the only option he had left was not to notice it at all.

Cable stepped forward, making no attempt to school his expression beyond open-minded curiosity, and trailed a hand slowly down Deadpool's chest, exploring the texture he'd felt through his clothing. “Well now we're getting somewhere?” he offered, mildly.

The tension in Deadpool's shoulders relaxed only very slightly. “Y'know, this makes a lot more sense if you've got some kind of fetish for freaks.”

Cable raised an eyebrow. “A few minutes ago I was taking advantage of your desperation. Now I'm after you for fetish fuel?”

“No-one said it can't be both!”

Cable rolled his eyes, then cupped Deadpool's chin with a hand.

“I'm not going to tell you it's your most attractive feature, but if you hadn't noticed, half my torso is made of metal. You'd be amazed how many people don't find that a turn-on either.”

“...huhh.” The way Deadpool eyed his left arm, almost like he hadn't even noticed it until now, suggested he wasn't going to be one of them.

“Besides,” Cable added, smirking as his wandering hands pulled Deadpool closer, “I'm counting on you to more than make up for it in other departments.”

“Oh sure, just heap the pressure on a guy,” Deadpool muttered, but now the indignation from a minute ago had all but been replaced with breathless wonder.

“You're doing fine so far,” Cable told him, “Now, do I get a first name, or am I going to be calling you 'Deadpool' while you take me?”

There was a sharp intake of breath in response, quieter than last time but still much louder than breathing generally required. “Wade. Name's Wade.” Cable had the passing impression he was lucky Deadpool had remembered this. “You really were serious about the part where I get to fuck you...”

In answer, Cable sat back on the bed, spreading himself backwards, thoroughly aware of Deadpool's – Wade's – eyes on him the whole time. He reached for the hand lotion.

“You'll have to give me a minute,” he explained, starting to prepare himself with two fingers. “Despite all your insinuations, I haven't done this in a while.”

Cable must have blinked then, because he completely missed Wade getting rid of his pants. The next thing that mattered was Wade climbing on to the bed, motions awkward as though he was being drawn by unseen forces – or perhaps more aptly, as though he was half-afraid Cable might stop fucking himself with his fingers if he startled him. He seemed locked in indecision over what he wanted to touch first, or whether he was allowed to touch at all.

Cable could only imagine how he must look right now, the expression on Wade's face almost as good as a mirror.

“Or did you want to take care of this part?” he asked innocently, holding out the lube.

Wade snatched it from him, and quickly had it spread over both shaking hands, and some of the bed sheets. He used one hand to take hold of his cock with a groan, smearing it liberally with fluid. Cable was only too happy to let Wade take over opening him up with the other – he was at a much better angle for the job, taking to what Cable hadn't counted on him seeing as more than an unfortunate necessity with real enthusiasm. Interesting.

But not worth dragging out.

“Ready when you are,” he told Wade (it was a much more fitting name for the scarred and insecure but reassuringly human creature who'd emerged from Deadpool's costume), who responded by drawing out his fingers, rendered silent for the first time in the whole process. His hands settled on Cable's thighs as he lined himself up, massaging the muscle nervously.

They both hissed at the first contact, the head of Wade's cock pressing that first inch inside, the full girth significantly larger than the fingers had been (and he hadn't been exaggerating – it had been a while, long enough to make him take a moment to remember how to make this work). Wade's hiss turned into a whine as he slowly slid further in. A minute later he still hadn't moved further, and Cable was struck by the realisation that he was the one adjusting to the sensation fastest out of the two of them.

“Been a while for you too?” he asked, amused.

“S-shut up!” Wade snapped, thrusting the rest of the way in one quick movement, then pausing to groan. “If we're counting,” he added, voice strained, “since the last time a hot mutant hero wannabe with a fantastic arse tied me up and seduced me into fucking him through his own bed, then yes, it has been a while!”

He punctuated middle of the statement with an angry, sudden thrust, which nevertheless hit just the right spot inside Cable with unerring accuracy, and ensured it took several seconds after for Cable to assemble the whole sentence accurately. It hadn't been his intention to make Wade angry with him this far into things (indignant, put-upon anger of the protest-too-much variety or otherwise) – he wouldn't have thought that a good idea when they'd advanced far beyond teasing – but if that was any indication, apparently there were unexpected advantages to come with it.

Cable shifted a little on the bed, finding a position to give Wade the best access as he began to thrust raggedly.

“Any minute now,” Wade muttered, disbelieving, words emerging even more unevenly than his movements, “I'm gonna wake up and find out this is all a crazy wet dream and the boss is gonna want to know what all those stains on the mug-shot of you are meant to be...”

“A photo of me?” That made sense; Deadpool had had no trouble identifying him.

“Didn't... didn't do you justice... Did I say that out loud?”

“Didn't hear a thing,” Cable growled, rapidly losing all interest in teasing him. “More.”

It was the first suggestion that night Wade took to without the slightest hint of contrariness.

“Damn, this – place,” he stammered out a minute later, “full of all those kids – you even bother to think what you're gonna tell them 'bout what you did with the big scary merc you caught sneaking down the chimney...?”

“I'll tell them I packaged you up and sent you home. By mail.” Cable didn't even know where this was coming from anymore – just the weird superstition that if he didn't keep Wade talking he'd stop moving too.

Wade snickered. “Oh you bastard. Gonna get your fifteen hundred a week out of me without letting me leave your room, that the plan?”

It didn't sound like a bad plan, which said a lot – maybe a bit too much – about the state of Cable's mind at that point. Much more of this and he'd be making Wade sound coherent.

Wade was giving the distinct impression he could do this all night. Or come to pieces five seconds from now, and Cable didn't know which of those prospects he liked more.

“Did I mention,” Wade began again, “really not how I was expecting to spend the evening.”

“Glad you didn't get to kill me?” Getting a hand on his own cock – trying to jerk it in time with Wade's erratic rhythm – was almost too much on its own.

“Might be... might be seeing an upside or two. Oh, fuck...” From the sudden burst of uneven speed Wade put on, the way his eyes were fixed on Cable's hand, the sight of what Cable was doing to himself was doing nearly as much again for Wade as well.

Cable caught the side of his face in a hand and nudged Wade to look up at his face. “Believe it,” he pronounced. “This is real.”

The pronouncement alone wasn't what sent Wade over the edge, but it did mark his last attempt to say anything coherent of more than one syllable for the rest of the way. There were snatches of swearwords, variants on Cable's name, breaking off into deep-throated moans. All his attention was going into pounding himself into Cable as hard as he could.

For himself, Cable no longer found any inclination to do more than lean back and let Wade have him, the promise of release to come coiling tight inside him.

It had to be something of a miracle he outlasted Wade at all in the end – and then only by less than a minute. The sight of Wade – this fascinatingly twisted man – coming so completely apart while still buried deep inside him was breathtaking all on its own.

They both spent a while catching their breath afterwards before anyone moved.

Wade pulled himself out at last in one short tug that made them both wince, sat there panting some more for about five seconds, and then fell face-first down on to Cable's chest. The weight of his body was heavy but warm and comfortable; finding the willpower to mop the worst of the semen off his chest (excluding what Wade was lying in) and find something to cover them both with so they didn't wake up freezing later was more effort than it should have been.

“So we'll discuss the details of your contract with me later then?” Cable whispered to him.

Wade made an unclear noise that was probably some kind of threat, and appeared to go to sleep.

Cable got only halfway through trying to decide when he'd last had sex that good before following. (Certainly not as simple an answer as 'when he'd last been with another man', and certainly, the danger of the whole proposition had been some of the appeal...)

If he developed unrealistic expectations of Wade in the near future, it wouldn't be without basis.

***

Cable managed to disentangle himself from his still-sleeping bedmate without incident when he woke the next morning, fished up the previous day's pants from beside the bed and made his way to the kitchen. Deserted at this hour, for several minutes there was no sound but the kettle boiling stubbornly. Cable let his mind wander, content to allow himself a slow morning for once.

The noise didn't quite mask the sound of quiet footsteps making their way up behind him, and did nothing to soften the sound of a gun being cocked at his head.

There was another click a second later, but it was just the kettle – finally freed the effects of proverbial scrutiny – choosing that moment to announce it was done.

Cable straightened, but didn't try to turn around yet. “Morning, Wade. Coffee?”

“Yeah, no.” Wade did not sound pleased. “How 'bout instead we have a little talk about what the fuck that was supposed to be last night?”

Cable turned around, slowly, using the excuse of acting casual to avoid making any sudden movements. “You didn't seem to mind at the time.”

“At the time the blood wasn't exactly rushing to my brain, if you get what I'm saying here.” Wade was fully dressed in his costume – even the mask, which he must have had to go back to the library to retrieve. Given that he'd also found where his weapons had been stored, that probably hadn't required much of a detour.

“I thought I made myself clear? I want you,” Cable leaned back against the counter, “to work for me. And I'm willing to make it worth your while.”

“Yeah, got that,” Deadpool sneered. “What I don't get is how you get from that to where you're making it with a total stranger who just tried to shoot you in the head.”

Cable smirked, and gave Deadpool a heated look. “It worked out. Didn't it?”

“You didn't know it would,” Deadpool snapped, “and I got these issues with the idea of working with a guy who is, as far as I can tell, crazier than me! Who the fuck tries something like that?”

It was a little too late to realise the mistake it had been to leave Wade to wake up alone. Best to make the most of the situation – let him get his doubts in the open, and deal with them before they had any more time to fester. The irony was that Wade's concerns weren't ridiculous, or even unfounded – Cable had simply not counted on him to protest quite this much.

“Would you believe I got a fortune cookie telling me to look forward to a visit from a troubled stranger who was not what he seemed?” he suggested.

“Hey, I once got one that said I'd 'find spiritual peace after finding my centre where I'd never expected'. Don't see me running off to the Himalayas and opening up my knees to see if that's where my little black heart was hiding itself, do you? Try again.”

Apparently Cable was going to have to resort to the truth. Or at least, a version of events containing enough truth to sound convincing. “I consider myself a good judge of people.”

“Meaning?”

“I'm a mind reader.”

“Nice try, but I got a doctor's note saying I don't have to do that class.”

“Oh?”

“This bit up here,” Wade tapped his head with his free hand, “regenerates all the time along with the rest of me. S'what gives me my superhuman attention span, in case you were wondering. Psycho types can't get in.”

Now that was interesting. “I was wondering – I've rarely encountered a mind as hard to get a grip on as yours. Your thoughts keep... shifting. Fragments and images under a thick haze.”

Wade's gun dropped a fraction under a startled look, he seemed to be trying to decide whether Cable was bullshitting him.

“Emotional reactions, though – those I can skim off the surface. Even from you. I was very sure about what went through your mind when you first saw me,” Cable reminded him. “And being seen without your mask on bothers you a lot more than you wanted to admit, doesn't it?”

The gun clicked back into its previous position. “Y'know, reminding me how ripe I was for you to take advantage of ain't helping your case much.”

“Wade,” said Cable looking calmly at the gun, “for all the show you're putting on, I'm fairly confident you're not the kind of man who'd kill someone he's just slept with.”

“...okay, maybe, you have a point,” Wade allowed grudgingly, tightening his fingers around the gun, “but I might also be the kinda guy who gets an itchy trigger finger when he's angry and who thinks there's no reason you couldn't finish this chat with a couple of bullets in your legs.”

The edge of the bench under Cable's arms seemed suddenly sharper. “I'll keep that in mind,” he said, grimacing just a little. “But what I said about your emotional state from yesterday I only meant as an example. I didn't ask you to work for me because you were easy, Wade. I did it because my instinct tells me you'd be worth the investment.”

“Uh-huh,” Wade did not sound any more convinced, “so for everyone who's just tuned in, are these your hippie new-age psychic instincts, or is this coming from somewhere below the belt? 'Cause either way, they're setting ya up for a world of disappointment.”

“You think you're not worth it?”

“...have I told you how much I fucking hate you yet today?”

Cable decided to ignore that. “Tell me, why are you working for Tolliver?”

Wade shrugged. “Good pay, good hours, lots of mindless violence, which I happen to be pretty good at – and it's not like I need a job that comes with a dental plan.”

“Then it's never occurred to you that you could be a lot more than a well-paid thug?”

“Oh, I could be your well-paid thug?”

“In a word, yes. In more words, if you think an arms dealer like Tolliver is one and the same as a man trying to give a new generation of mutants the skills the world is going to need in times ahead, you're going to find the work I have in mind for you something of a surprise.”

“All sounds like the same package to me.”

“Then you'll be in for an even bigger surprise. You have a gift, Wade. What you paid for it,” here Cable's eyes dropped back to Wade's skin, the way he twitched under the gaze suggesting Cable's guess was on point, “doesn't change that. What makes you so sure the state of your skin and your talent for murder define all you can do with it?”

“The backup career in classical ballet came apart when they told me no-one was making tutus to fit hips like mine,” Wade spat. “You had that one at 'talent'. Not interested in your twelve-step-program to not being a chump.”

“There's no program. There's just me.” Cable took a step forward, his chest pressing right against the barrel of the gun. “Since you're determined to make this difficult, I'm going to be straight with you on this. You want to know why I'm taking chances with a man of questionable morals working on an enemy's pay check, and I'm answering: because I want to see what you do with the opportunity to take a better class of work. I can't force you to rehabilitate, and I don't have time for charity cases. I'm under no illusions about how far a man like you should be trusted, which is why I'm going out of my way to give you extra incentive not to double-cross me. What I'm going to give you in exchange is a chance to surprise me.”

“And if I don't?” Wade sounded unmoved. “Living down to expectations is kinda my speciality.”

“Then you're still making more money than what your present boss is paying you,” Cable pointed out, evenly, “and I'm sure I can still find ways to make use of you.”

“Y'know, one thing you haven't covered yet,” Wade said, pointedly, “is what happens if I take all your fifteen-hundred-a-week-plus-perks-and-say, go fuck yourself.”

“You walk out of here, and we never mention this again.”

For several seconds, nothing happened, save for the face under the Deadpool mask crunching even deeper into angry indecision. The gun didn't budge.

“If you need some time to think about it...” Cable offered. It was hard to tell whether Wade's silence was a good sign or a bad one. “I'm not forcing you to give me a definite answer here and now.”

“Uh-huh. Time. Sure.” The gun flicked back into a holster at Wade's side, and Cable started breathing a little more deeply again. “Sounds like a great offer, seriously. Tell you what, Nathan – don't call me, I'll call you.”

The kitchen door rattled for several seconds behind him. The footsteps in the corridor faded in the direction of the nearest exit.

Cable stared into the bottom of a still-empty coffee mug, and went to check whether the water had gone cold yet.

Well, that could have gone better. Could have gone worse – he hadn't actually been shot, in any vital or non-vital places. He had to consider the possibility he'd come on a little too strong.

He could credit himself with giving Wade plenty of food for thought, at least. And, he remembered with a satisfied smirk, quite a night as well.

[Cable & Deadpool] &^@* this $#!%

2009-11-26T12:12:03Z

For a bit of light relief between big projects, I thought I'd have a crack at one of the unfulfilled prompts off the kink meme - specifically one asking for Deadpool using his fourth-wall-breaking powers to 'fix' what the comics have done with him and Cable since their joint series ended.

This would have been lighter relief if it hadn't required me to actually read a couple of recent Cable chapters for material. While I must admit this did give me a certain amount of fun making stupid macros and horrifying friends*, I really miss the days when Cable's series was intentionally hilarious, rather than just unintentionally so.

*"Oh hey, now Cable's being eaten by a giant space whale! Now Bishop's being tentacle raped by aliens! Did I mention the same aliens can track Hope across a galaxy but don't know she exists when she's a couple of dozen metres away? IN SOVIET MARVEL, SHARK JUMPS YOU!"

Title: &^@* this $#!%
Summary: Deadpool takes it on himself to 'fix' the current Marvel status quo. With extreme prejudice.
Characters/Pairing: Cable/Deadpool, Hope
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2120

Cable ground his teeth as the Brood army closed in from both sides. Things were going from bad to worse. Hope was missing. The appearance of the Brood may have distracted Bishop just long enough, but now he was trapped on this ship with both the aliens and a would-be suicide-bomber, and if either of them found Hope before he did...

Cable hadn't gotten to the end of that thought before there was an ear-splitting noise, like a projectile punching through thick glass, and something that came out of nowhere hit him and bowled him over. His first thought was that a new wave of Brood must have breached the ship's hull right on top of him, but the thing that had hit him – that was now keeping him from getting up by sitting on him – had distinctly humanly fleshy legs, a red and black costume, and – this part took even longer to make sense of – was waving a comic book in his face.

His name was on the cover. There was a picture of him underneath it, or possibly an over-inflated blow-up doll based loosely on his likeness, it was hard to be sure when the image was being shaken around so furiously.

“Aliens?!” said a voice. “I've been real patient with your whole midlife crisis – most people run off with a girl half their age in a sports car instead of buying a time machine and adopting your own freaking mother, but you never were 'most people' – and this is me being very patient. But now you're fighting aliens and I don't even get an invite? Not even a postcard? Not even a, 'Hi Wade, having the fight of my life, wish you were here'? How could you forget how many years I've been trying to get 'Aliens vs. Deadpool' off the ground? That's not just cold, that's where I am drawing the line.”

“Deadpool?!” Cable couldn't believe his eyes. Hadn't he seen Deadpool die? He couldn't remember anyone checking to make sure – come to that, he couldn't remember giving the mercenary a second thought afterwards, but it was only Deadpool.

“And now he makes out like he can't even remember my first name in the morning!” Deadpool threw his arms up, then slammed them down to the floor, either side of the body he was sitting on, leaning right into in Cable's face. “This is what they cancelled our series for? Well you know what I say to that? Fuck. That. Shit. Ha! Did you see that? Did you see any little squiggly symbols? See any little stars or hash signs? No! You know what that means, Nate? We're flying free of censorship now! And so's you know for next time, when someone comes crashing clean through the fourth wall breaking every real or imaginary physical law there is to save your arse, it's traditional to say 'thanks'. So I didn't bring Sigourney Weaver herself, but I am totally the next best thing. Sometimes my supporting cast even makes it out alive!”

Cable let all the insane babble wash over him. Something tingled low in his stomach – frustration, he told himself firmly, urgency at worst – as he groped for an explanation. Had Deadpool's 'death' been just a sadistic trick to put him off his guard? They should have known to make sure.

“What... how?” he murmured – but he knew the answer – Deadpool was obviously working for the Brood – or worse, working for Bishop.

He flinched at the sight of Deadpool's fist coming towards his head, but the blow he'd expected merely turned into him being tapped lightly on the side of his skull.

“Hello? Anyone home? Are we all listening up the back? They're not watching, you can knock off that tough-guy act aaaaaany time now. You're not seriously still holding that thing with your evil twin against me, are you? Isn't it time we admitted we both know I only did it to make you jealous so we can move past it already?”

Cable tried to shove him off, but the mercenary was making himself inexplicably hard to shift. “Deadpool, I don't know how you got here or what you're playing at, but I do not have time for it -”

“Oh come on, there's no way this is in continuity. We've got all the time in the world!”

“-and I am not going to let you get in my way.”

Deadpool whistled. “Man oh man, that new writer really tattooed his name on your unmentionables, huh, Nate? But the thing you gotta remember about writers is they come and they go, and the guys upstairs don't give a hoot as long and you and me are still making them a big bucket of money each month, and if we have to be edgy and controversial and prepared to throw the status quo into the blender every other week to keep people's attention, well, two can play at that, so why shouldn't I take a few risks? And speaking of risks, here's what I really wanna know: you tell me why...”

Whatever Deadpool had meant to say next was lost as the nearest Brood took the opportunity to grab him from behind.

“Hey!” Deadpool complained, “I was just getting to the good bit! Don't you xenos have any sense of dramatic timing?”

“You are not human,” hissed the Brood. “We sense your power.”

“Watch where you're sensing with that! I am so human!” Deadpool struggled, he seemed to be trying to reach something tucked into his belt. “Okay okay, a bit not human, but I had legitimate professional and medical reasons, and anyway, like you can talk!”

“You will give birth to future generations of the Brood.”

“Uh-huh. Right. Maybe you could work on that pick-up line a little, and I could let you down gently because I am never going to be that desperate. I do not do mpreg on a first date!”

There was the sound of a gunshot, and the Brood screamed and recoiled, letting Deadpool free.

“Nate!” Deadpool cried happily, getting to his feet. “I knew you still cared!”

Cable stared down at the smoking end of his gun in confusion. Everything had happened so fast – he'd seen Deadpool needing help and had reacted without thinking. And he didn't even understand why.

The remaining Brood suffered no such uncertainty. “Your weapons are useless against us!”

Deadpool turned away from Cable again with a certain reluctance. “Okay, one, didn't a little girl with a sharpened toothpick take out one of you a couple of pages back? And two, you think I'd come all this way if I wasn't kitted out for the kicking of alien booty?” He fished through a couple of pouches until he found one containing a neatly folded sheet of paper. “Uh, don't answer that one like you know me, just assume the answer should be 'no', and that next time I do this I'm going to remember to bring a superweapon I can yank out dramatically. Um. Maybe you could all just turn around until I'm done unfolding this so we can save the surprise? I'm going for a big double-page spread here, the set-up's kinda important...”

“We outnumber you a thousand to one. You have nothing that can threaten us.”

“Hey, that'll do. Ahem!” Deadpool brandished the newly unfolded document proudly at the alien. “How about a copyright infringement notice from 20th Century Fox? Read it and weep! 'Inspired by' the Alien franchise, my butt!”

The sound of every Brood in the room screaming at the top of its insectoid lungs and dissolving into a pile of ash echoed in Cable's ears for several minutes. Deadpool looked pleased with himself. Cable stared in disbelief.

“What did you do?” he asked, dreading the answer.

“Never let anyone tell you the right document landing on the right desk at the right moment can't work wonders, Nate my old buddy!” Deadpool declared. “100% counterfeit, but by the time they figure that out you can bet the 'no writing any more Brood until we clear this up DO NOT EVEN THINK IT THIS MEANS YOU' memo will already be out there and too late to call back! It'll buy us at least an issue, maybe more!

“So Nate, as I was saying, before I got interrupted by bugboy there,” Deadpool continued, pulling up his mask and advancing on Cable with the inevitability of a tidal wave, “You tell me why a third-stringer like bleeping Shatterstar is the only nineties-Liefeld-creation getting any hot guy-on-guy action lately.”

And with that, Deadpool threw both arms around Cable's neck and kissed him on the lips.

The next few minutes were... blurry. Tongue was definitely involved. Almost definitely two tongues. Hands wandered into places they had not been invited but found themselves immediately welcome. The tingling returned, now a few crucial inches further down.

Cable pulled back at last to find himself looking into the face of the best friend he'd ever had – a friend who should have been more – who, incredibly, still wanted to be more despite half a dozen things Cable couldn't believe he'd said or done.

“Wade?” Cable tried, two sets of dizzyingly contradictory memories warring in his head. “What was I...”

Deadpool patted him reassuringly – on the arse, as it happened, but it was still generally reassuring. “It's cool, I mostly forgive you. Not many of us can fight editorial mandate – even I had to recruit fanfic writers off an anonymeme to get this far. Officially my new favourite word. A-non-knee-meeeeeme. Mememe. Hee.”

“Fight... what?”

Deadpool waved a hand. “Selective memories. Insufficient fact checking. Underspecified retcons. Creative reinterpretation. Or uncreative if you want my opinion. The whole works.” He looked up into Cable's face and seemed to take pity on him. “Tell you what, don't think about it too hard. Let's call it all repressed trauma after what happened with Providence, handwave the details and get moving before I forget how I did that awesome fourth wall thing that got me here.”

Cable stared at him blankly.

“Would it make you feel better if I called it a... uh, time-travelling remote-controlled bodyslide thing?” Wade suggested.

“You have a way out of here?”

“You have anything to stick around for? C'mon!”

Wade stepped back, pulling Cable along with him by the wrist, and for a couple of blissful seconds Cable actually followed him before one small, important bit of the new reality came crashing down on him.

“Wade, wait,” Cable twisted his arm to grip Wade's and tugged back. “Hope.”

“Oh. Right.” Wade came guiltily to a stop. “Hope. No leaving without the rugrat. Any idea where you left her?” When Cable couldn't immediately give him an answer, he pulled out the comic from before and turned a few pages. “We're pretty far off script now, but according to this she should be right around...”

“Nathan? What happened?” said a voice – a small voice, belonging to a small head that was peering around a doorway. A wiry knot of tension that had been nesting under Cable's chest eased swiftly away.

“...here?” Wade finished. “Hey there, kid! Wait, do I have to pretend like I don't know you for continuity reasons? I can never keep track.”

Hope looked from Cable to Deadpool and back again. “Isn't he...?”

“It's alright, Hope,” Cable told her, “he's here to help.” It almost came out, here to stay. Either would have fitted.

“Was he the one who made all those monsters disappear?” Hope guessed, catching on quickly.

“You betcha! Be good, and maybe I'll teach you how someday!”

“Wade,” Cable warned.

“What, I get to spoil her at least a little bit, don't I? I've got all those birthdays to make up for!”

“We'll discuss it later,” Cable said firmly.

“Later,” Wade agreed, and crouched down so he could talk to Hope face to face. “So kid, you ready to go home?”

“Home?” Hope asked, puzzled.

“You'll know it when you see it, promise,” said Wade, patting her on the head. He turned back to Cable. “How 'bout you? Splattered the aliens, rescued the little girl, kissed the hot guy, did I miss anything?”

You really did know it when you saw it, Cable thought. And you often didn't realise you'd how much you'd been missing it until it was staring you in the face.

“You and I,” he warned, “are still going to have a long conversation about exactly it was you thought you were doing here-”

“As long as it involves the word thank you somewhere. Do you know how screwed Hope's gonna be if she has to learn her manners from me?”

“-after we get back.” Cable finished. “I'm ready. Take us home.”

[Cable & Deadpool] Let Slip the Dogs of War - Side Story/Missing Scene

2009-11-16T15:15:15Z

As promised! If you've read the rest of the fic, you probably already know why I couldn't include this scene as a proper chapter (loud enthusiasm from certain readers notwithstanding). If you haven't, this is really not where you'd want to start...

A shame the 'penetraitor' gag was already done in the comic, it would have fit in nicely here.

Title: Let Slip the Dogs of War
Characters/Pairing: Cable/Deadpool
Summary: The missing scene between War and Deadpool, from between chapters 5 and 6.
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 6860
Warnings: Some violence, explicit sex featuring seriously confused consent issues.
Previous Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Epilogue 1, Epilogue 2

As War's fortress loomed closer, any passing nerves Wade might have been experiencing were more than overruled with the happy certainty that this was going to be the easiest mission ever. Throw himself (heh) at an undefeatable. foe, screw up, get caught, get 'punished' for running away – mission accomplished! Why couldn't every job he'd ever taken be so easy he could hardly think of a single thing that could go wrong?

...Well, except the possibility he'd slip up and spill the whole plan to War. Right, note to self: no slipping up and spilling the whole plan. Giving himself away by being a little too eager about the whole sex thing was probably out too, so lots of token struggling, maybe a bit of girly screaming – the whole pre-ravished-for-your-convenience Mills 'n Boon-heroine dinner and show. Or would that be going too far? Nah, War liked a bit of struggling and screaming. Shame he hadn't brought a skirt to wear, there was nothing like the right costume to get you in the mood.

Then there was the possibility that War would take punishing Wade as a cue to go on another of his I'll-show-you-how-much-you-want-this flings with extended orgasm denial. Or one of his look-what-I-can-do-without-even-touching-you (suuuure, like telekinesis didn't count) flings – and either of those could easily go on well after the few hours he had before his healing factor cleaned the virus out of his system were up. Hm. Would it make a difference if he gave in and begged right away, or would that just encourage him?

Right: struggling, followed by screaming, followed by begging. May have been some bodice-ripping in there somewhere. Crap, this was getting complicated, should he be writing this down?

One way or another, at least he could count on War jumping his sexy little arse the moment he showed up. If there was one upside to being a sexy victim of evil – apart from the being kept alive while the rest of the world burned and the great sex – it was great for your self-image. Something about going as bad as War gave the guy a total inability to keep it in his pants.

Unless one of those few desperate bands of rebels just happened to choose right now to attack the fortress and cause royal mayhem until War threw them all out...

So, only about half a dozen ways this could go horribly wrong. That he'd thought of off the top of his head. Nothing to worry about at all.

The fortress loomed closer, in that blackened, spiky, fortress-y way it had.

What the hell, you only ruined the mood to these things by over-planning. All he had to do was sneak in, do a passable impression of a real assassin, stuff up, and get caught by War. He could improvise from there.

Moving right along to deal with that first order of business: the front door was closer, and not even all that heavily guarded from what he could see, but this was more of a back door sort of job. (Badum-ching!) Back door it was.

Skittering from one rubble pile to the next for cover, Wade made his way around the fortress, humming a few bars of the X-Files theme on the way. Not for any particular reason, just because he felt like humming the X-Files theme.

He was most of the way around before it occurred to him to wonder whether War would even have a back door. Would he need one? Did doom fortresses made from bits of old space stations get produce deliveries? He was pretty sure they didn't have backyards. On the other hand, if you had a lot of evil scientists playing with chemicals in the basement and rebels breaking in every other week, you could never have too many emergency exits. Or were occupational health and safety regulations just not evil enough?

Wade blamed the public education system. They never taught you any of the stuff you really needed to know out in the real world.

If there was one thing he did know from every spy movie ever made, it was that places like this always had conveniently man-sized ventilation systems. With exits that looked like big rusty pipes like... like that one over there! Perfect! Unless it was a laundry chute, or a sewerage pipe, or one of those mechanical exhaust pipes that sprayed out a batch of superheated toxic gas every half hour, but Wade found it was always less stressful to focus on all the fun hijinks he could have finding out.

The entrance to the pipe was a good three metres off the ground, but that wasn't a problem for the Goddamn Deadpool. A couple of paces of run-up, and Wade had launched himself straight up into the opening.

It took a second longer for it to dawn on Wade that he didn't seem to have made it to the ventilation duct. In fact, he didn't seem to be moving at all. To all intents and purposes, what appeared to be happening was that he was floating in mid air.

Even with Wade's somewhat tenuous grasp of physics, this didn't seem right. Golly gosh, now who did he know who could pull a trick like this?

Huh. Getting caught was even easier than he'd expected.

After letting him struggle for a few seconds more, invisible forces whipped him around and flung him against the side of the building, then held him there, spread-eagled. The momentary impression of a few fluffy yellow birds circling his head failed to give him any serious trouble identifying the person floating up in front of him.

“Waaaaar! Whoa, what are the odds? I was totally just thinking about you!” Wade struggled a bit, mostly just by habit. “You really did have security footage of the ventilation ducts? I thought I was making that up!”

War looked furious – though that was pretty much his default state, unless you counted 'smug and oversexed' – and 'furious' on War tended to mean hovering debris and enough gratuitous lightning effects to keep the whole SFX department pulling an all-nighter. That could only mean he was still more mad at Wade for escaping than he was feeling smug about recapturing him so easily.

Wow, he was so getting the lecture about staying out past curfew.

“You have more balls than I gave you credit for, coming back here like this, Wade,” War thundered, looming over him in a way Wade had to admit he maybe found just a little bit sexy, though mostly it just promised a world of pain before they got to any of the good bits.

“Two of 'em, one on each side. If you keep forgetting it would explain a lot about our relationship.” Wade struggled some more and panted a bit. “Think you might have your teke grip on a setting too high right now, it's a little on the side of tight--”

The grip tightened, with a focus on his throat that left him spluttering and gasping to breathe.

“Aha, okay. Of course you meant to do that all along,” he corrected himself quickly, when he could talk again. “Sorry. Carry on then.”

“All those months trying to escape, and when you finally do, this is what you do with your freedom?” War growled. “What are you doing here? And before you answer, think carefully, because it would be a great mistake to imagine – even for a moment – that I'd believe you foolish enough to break in here unless you wanted to be caught.”

…oh fuck. This had not been on his list of things that could go horribly wrong.

“Um. No?” he squeaked.

“You're going to have to do a lot better than that, Wade.”

“No I didn't think you were stupid enough to think I was stupid enough to do something this stupid...?” Wade babbled, despite a strong hunch that a mere full sentence answer didn't have much hope of satisfying War now. “This is so not fair, the Avengers totally bought it!”

“I would think I know you a little better than the Avengers do.”

“Ooh, we're talking the biblical kind of 'know'?”

The telekinetic grip tightened hard enough to bruise bone.

Through the pain, Wade heard War say, “It would not be wise to try my patience.” Well duh – no shit Sherlock. Would it have killed him to bring that up a second earlier?

“Y'know, I was really thinking you were gonna be happier to see me,” Wade complained. Ungrateful bastard. See if he made it this easy to catch him again next time he got away.

...and wow, if that wasn't a self-defeating thought. C'mon, Wade, focus! There had to be a way he could spin this.

“If there is one truth that has become very clear to me since Apocalypse freed my mind,” said War, “it is that no-one in this world does anything of consequence without benefit to themselves. How does your capture benefit you, Wade? Is this some foolish attempt to distract me? Did you imagine you could lead me into a trap?”

“You mean the one you just walked into?” The sight of War's eyes widening ranked up there with the best comedic victories of Wade's career. “Hah! I had you going there a minute! Admit it!”

“WADE!”

All these attempts to buy time to think up a new story by making War mad at him would be working a lot better if he didn't keep completely losing his train of thought under all the excruciating pain.

“...really thinking you'd have figured it out by now,” Wade heard himself mutter, as his breath came back to him.

War hesitated. “Enlighten me then. What should I have 'figured out'?”

Good question. Wish he knew the answer.

“Well, think about it,” he threw out, madly hoping to figure out where he was going with this before he got there. “Why would I want you catching me?”

“Other than as part of a trap or a distraction?”

“If you expect me to be that obvious. The thing is, Nate, you're thinking about it all wrong. Didn't you even stop to think, what if he's not thinking of it like it's about getting captured, huh? What if it's about coming back?”

Right. Of course it was! He was a genius!

The rage on War's face softened into amused fascination. Possibly the kind of what-would-be-the-best-way-to-squash-this-amusing-bug kind of fascination, or does-he-really-think-he-can-get-away-with-this kind of fascination, but it had to be a step in the right direction.

“Kerrr-ist on a South Pacific satellite, Nate,” Wade went on, rapidly gaining momentum, “you spend months drilling it into me that I'll get a pat on the head for obedience, then you wonder what I'm up to when it works? Man, that's just cold.”

“You mean to tell me you came back voluntarily?” Even if War didn't believe him, at least Wade would have the satisfaction of knowing he'd given him a good laugh, “Even for you Wade, this is unexpectedly creative. I suppose next you're going to convince me the Avengers tore you out of my dungeon and spirited you away against your will?”

“Bastards did cut off my hands and feet.”

“I know. I have them in jars.”

“Aw, you kept them? For you that's practically sweet.”

“I am getting very tired of your refusal to get to the point, Wade.”

“The point,” said Wade, ramping up the indignation a couple of points, “is of course I had to make them take me with them! Shit, Nate, you did see the tape, right?”

“Every last second,” War assured him. “I can repeat everything you said to them, I warn you strongly against trying to deny a single word of it.”

“Great, that's going to save me so much exposition! But like I was saying, of course I went along! How else was I gonna get the chance to stab them in the back and lead you right to them, huh?”

“You'd betray the Avengers,” War sounded utterly fascinated now – skeptical, sure, but flattered all the same, “to me?”

Wade tried to throw his hands up in the air, found them still telekinetically bound, and succeeded only in twitching instead. “Um, duh? You are the first person ever to question whether I could double-cross a bunch of guys – whose team I hardly joined for like five minutes – just 'cause I feel like it. Sheesh, what do you think I am, a guy with integrity?”

“There was another version of me with them,” War growled. “I saw the way he looked at you.”

Ow, if that didn't go right to the bone. Cable had looked at him like what? Had he been too busy trying to figure out why War was downstairs in his pyjamas to notice? “What, like I needed a hug – an absolutely-not-skeevy-non-threatening-hands-in-safe-places-hug – and a year in therapy to 'work through my trauma'? Nate, I never remembered the old you treating me like a box full of china, but the guy thinks if he breathes on me I'll fall over – wouldn't even hold my stump while my hand grew back. Call me nuts, but that's just not something I see working in a long term relationship.”

Wade ploughed on while he still had the opportunity. “Look, Nate, you just told me how not-totally-stupid I am. Those Avengers guys brought all this fancy tech stuff that's supposed to block your TK, but you and I know people here have tried that only, what, a dozen times already? We both know you're gonna wipe the floor with them – just as soon as you find them, and if you could do that without me you would've done it already. All I'm doing is speeding things up.”

“Out of the goodness of your heart, I suppose?” War's skepticism wasn't going down without a fight.

“Well, maybe I'm skimming a little off the top. I did make myself clear back there, didn't I? 'Cause this is all about me not having to go back to the cave when this is over. We can negotiate on cable channels and that civilian slaughter thing you're so big on getting me into. I'll even take being tied up sometimes if it gives me a bargaining point, I am just so over that fucking cave you would not even believe – that was like the one thing I didn't lie to the Avengers about. I mean, do you even want me down there? There must be like a million stairs between you and nookie. This way everyone wins!”

“Except your Avengers, obviously.”

“They're not my Avengers!” Wade protested. “Have they ever been chained up in a cave for months? I don't owe them squat!”

There was a pause while War processed the story, and Wade built himself up for his next burst. “And exactly how long do you expect them to take to notice you're gone?” War asked.

“They know I'm gone.” Best to keep the story as close to the truth as he could make it, gave him better odds of keeping it all straight. “I talked them into letting me do recon to find a good way in. They know I'm the only one you can't scan with your mind, so they bought the whole plan.”

War was looking at him with a kind of contained wonder now. Wade pressed impatiently on.

“It's like I keep saying, Nate, who do I have to kill before you let me out of there? A couple o' dozen crazed resistance cell members – who were totally not even any fun to kill, just so you know – weren't enough for you. And I couldn't do anyone else because you haven't let me off the leash since! Fuck, Nate, you think I'm a tough guy to break? I can't even find my conscience most mornings. You've had me in that cave forever – I'm probably ready to sell my soul for a TV and a back rub.”

And if that didn't do it then Wade was in big trouble, because he was rapidly running out of material. Not to mention more than a little freaked out about where he was even getting most of this stuff from.

Come to think of it, was War hovering closer than he was a minute ago?

Oh.

There was a fine line, sometimes, between being punched in the face and being kissed by War in a possessive mood – you had about as much say in both, and similar danger of being left with the kind of bruises you'd have trouble explaining to your co-workers tomorrow, but after the initial shock had worn off, Wade generally had to admit the kissing had a certain something going for it... if you liked having a guy pretty much trying to tattoo his initials on to your tonsils. Which was something Wade tended to change his mind on a lot, depending on his mood. Today, it felt a heck of a lot like raw, undiluted victory.

War drew back, one hand stroking over the underside of Wade's jaw, holding his face up to meet War's eyes. “I'd say,” he breathed, eyes shining with lust, “I can get you a better deal for your soul than that.”

Ha! And to think his high school drama teacher had only given him a C for improv! Take that, Mr Makes-No-Effort-Can't-Get-Into-Character-See-Me-After-Class!

“Oh thank fuck,” he panted, with depressingly real sincerity. “You were making me seriously worry you weren't even going to...”

War kissed him again, which was a very good thing because it saved him from having to come up with an end of that sentence that wasn't 'buy this crap'.

This time it stayed relatively pleasant for all of about twenty seconds before War started pressing a little too close and Wade broke off with a yelp.

“Uh. War. Armour. Not as comfy on the outside.”

War floated back about a quarter of an inch, not at all apologetic. “How long before the Avengers will be expecting you back?”

“Didn't really give me a deadline. Few hours?”

From War's expression this was definitely the right answer. “Then we have time to celebrate properly,” he said, voice promising all manner of X-rated things.

“Ooh, we're gonna have a party?”

“Yes, Wade,” War smirked. “I think we will.”

Wade felt himself being pulled upwards, War hovering mere inches away, one hand still resting on his throat, the other clutching possessively at his side. Looking around he spotted an opening in the roof that looked to be their destination. Oh, that figured – flier, right. He should have realised the back door would be in the roof.

“You have no idea, Wade, how long I've waited for this day,” said War, as they floated down into the building below.

“Oh, it's always all about you, isn't it?” Wade grumbled. “What about me? I was the one waiting in a fucking cave the whole time!”

“You'll get over it.” Hallways flickered past them, largely metallic and featureless. “For the goal of remaking you in my image, no exertion would have been in vain. The day will come when you thank me for my magnanimity in showing you the light.”

There were depths even ooh-take-me-now-your-evilness!Wade was not going to sink to. “Uhh, y'know what, in the interests in getting me laid sometime this week, let's just agree to disagree on that one for now, huh?”

“A day will come,” War repeated, as they floated into an elaborately furnished bedroom (Wade tried not to look too closely at most of the décor in case it took the edge off the mood. The four-poster double-bed with black sheets was as much as he needed to see). “We have all the time in the world.”

The most unnerving thing about War was always that under everything else, there was still this undercurrent in his voice and face that did such a good job of passing for genuine warmth and affection that Wade didn't know what else to call it. What with all the panic over inventing a new cover story on the fly, followed by the incredible glow of achievement that he'd gotten this thing off the ground (not to mention the distracting things War managed to do to Wade's nether regions no matter how hard he fought it), it wasn't until War was right up to the point of undressing him that it dawned on Wade: he was about to have what passed as consensual sex with War.

Except for that little detail where one of them was secretly only consenting so he could get close enough to infect the other with a tactical STD. Wade wasn't quite sure what that did to the 'consent' status, but he was pretty sure it wasn't good. He had a horrible sinking feeling that if anyone was the rape-ee in this scenario, it wasn't him...

Heck, it wasn't more than what War deserved, considering everything he'd done to his prisoner over the last six months – let alone everyone and everything else in the world. So why was there still that one little corner of his mind that wouldn't shut up about what a lousy bastard he was being? It would make it a lot easier if stupid War would just stop looking so damn happy about his latest conquest...

Stripping Wade took no more than a few seconds of telekinetic effort. “Truly Wade, you cannot even imagine how much pleasure it gives me,” War declared, “to think that when I crush the last of the resistance of this pitiful world beneath my heel, it will be with you at my side.”

...or if he just kept talking like that, actually. Something about the 'crushing the world beneath his heel' part was a real fuzzy-mood killer.

There was no time wasted waiting for War to get his armour out of the way either – a couple of loud, metallic clicks to mark something obscure and telekinetic going on, and every piece pretty much fell off into a pile. There was probably a big red button hidden on it somewhere, Wade imagined. Labelled 'emergency exit'.

Wade snickered to himself as a telekinetic nudge pressed him back against the sheets – unusually gently by War's usual standards. War followed him down, eyes raking hungrily up and down Wade's body as he loomed closer.

At least he wasn't in any danger of giving himself away by not getting hard on cue, Wade thought, feeling light-headed as War's mouth staked its claim deep into the skin below his jaw and damn, how did he always manage to forget just how good War was at pushing his buttons when he was in the mood? Definitely didn't need to worry about his reaction being convincing as he began to shiver and pant, War moving to extend his claim down every inch of his body (and it should not be possible for anyone to spend that long on one spot and still be such a total fucking tease about it), mouth tracing a trail of fire over his chest. 'Every inch of his body' wasn't even an exaggeration with War – what he couldn't get to with his mouth and two hands was free game to be lovingly stroked by least a dozen invisible extras – he would've had a hard time picking where the real hands even were.

Okay, that was maybe a bit of a lie – the sensation of real, metal fingers stroking up and down his cock was pretty difficult to mistake, hard as he might try not to notice it (a panic attack would be really not productive right about now). The T.O. arm had been so much more of a turn-on back before he'd experienced first-hand what it was like to have bones crushed between its fingers. Wade might've been confident today's session wasn't going to go that way, but there were parts of his nervous system down in his lower spine somewhere that were a lot closer to those abused nerves, and they weren't buying it.

It figured that even after he'd finally turned in his damn consent form, War would still find a way to make this all about making him feel helpless. Which he really wouldn't have minded nearly so much if it had been just a feeling and not so much of a fact.

Considering that in the past War had displayed no qualms about disabling him telekinetically and using him as what amounted to little more than a flesh and blood sex toy when the mood took him, it took a couple of minutes for it even to dawn on Wade that for probably the first time ever thus far into things, his own hands were actually free. He lifted and flexed them both in amazement, rather like a man who'd just woken up with three more fingers than he knew what to do with.

War smirked, sensing his confusion. “Never let it be said my promise of rewards for good behaviour was in vain.”

Near-meaningless as two free hands against an overpowered telekinetic might be, this was War showing he trusted Wade. Why hello again, unwanted sense of residual guilt. Didn't we change the locks after the last time you came past?

“You want me to tango too?” Wade blurted. Oh, now that was great, when half his mental faculties were still convinced that breathing without War's explicit permission was something he'd regret, and the other half was telling him he so didn't want to be here at all. “Wow. Uh. Just. Been so long, I'm trying to remember the steps...”

It was a really, really good thing that willing!Wade had good reason to be just about as uncomfortable figuring out what to do with this as the real one was.

War rubbed his shoulder gently, which actually did manage to be reassuring, wonder of wonders. “I am willing to be patient on that front. For today, I have a more... defined role in mind for you.”

“...not the kind that involves playing dress-up?”

War's smile widened. “This is an important occasion, Wade. I feel the need to do something special to mark it.”

Wade was still trying to guess what on earth that might mean as War rolled them over, switching their positions. If he wanted Wade to top, it usually meant being sat down on War's cock and telekinetically restricted from moving in any but a very limited set of directions (generally 'up' and 'down') while War watched him like a predator and waited to see how long it took Deadpool to give in. Being aroused to just about to the point of pain and denied release could inspire a guy to agree do a lot of things he'd deny wanting both before and after the event, and that would make him feel even more used than usual in the morning. It took a special kind of creativity to fuck with a guy's head like War could. If that was what he wanted now Deadpool was willing, there was some sense to it – or just poetic irony, he didn't really know which – but he could work with it. Probably.

“What kind of special?” he asked, to see if his suspicions would be confirmed.

“In all the time we've been together,” War pronounced, settling Wade between his legs, “I've not yet experienced the satisfaction of having you inside me.”

Wade's mind dissolved into frantic punctuation. War, the original Mister-Sex-Is-About-Showing-You-Who-You-Belong-To, wanted him to what?

“You... you want me to...?!” Typical – after all this time, here was Nate still finding new ways to blow his mind. Damn you, War, he'd been using those brain cells! Well, some of them. He'd definitely be wanting the rest of them later.

“Yes, Wade.” The metal hand traced the line of his hip, making him twitch in ways that weren't entirely about arousal. “Why so surprised?”

“But you never... you always...”

“Of course. This particular pleasure,” (aaaaand back to his erection goes the scary hand again, and if he had to ask War to repeat the rest of this twice more before he got it he was going to have no-one to blame by himself), “is one I've saved until the day your stubborn reluctance would finally be overcome. Until I felt you able to satisfy me.”

How the fuck, thought Wade, did War get away with saying these things without it sounding like week old cheese fermenting under a stack of 80's porn and bad harlequin romance novels? It must have been the evil thing. You'd get all the practice you needed on lines like, 'I shall grind your worthless body into the earth' – and even if you didn't get the elocution down pat first time, you wouldn't have to worry about anyone living to tell about.

More importantly, this was putting Wade in a really awkward position. And not just in the physical sense.

War raised an eyebrow, sensing his uncertainty. “More reluctance, Wade? I would have thought after all your protests, this would be exactly the change in routine you craved.”

“I might just have been exaggerating how I didn't like the routine a little bit much back there,” Wade squeaked. “You're... you and I'm me and...”

“...and you know a little too well the standards I hold you to,” War concluded. “Do not fear. I have no intent to let you disappoint me. I want to feel you – feel how much you've learned to want this.”

Wade swallowed. Someone up there was probably getting a real kick out of just how, even with the imagination of a paranoid schizophrenic on acid, he'd so miserably failed to come up with any of the things that were actually going to go wrong with his foolproof plan. He chalked this down under 'complaints to be levelled with extreme prejudice' next time he stopped by the lofty offices of the editorial department, and tried to get his mind back on the problem at hand.

What was it his drama teacher had been trying to tell him, in all those lessons where he'd spent most of his attention surreptitiously oogling the cleavage of the girl in the next seat rather than on the teacher? Something about finding the little part of you that did want what your character wanted? He was going to have to find it fast, or War was going to find it for him. Or find out it wasn't there, which was... which was really not something he could afford.

It would be hard to picture War going out of his way to make himself look any more... inviting. So what was really the harder job here, making himself believe part of him wanted this, or seriously convincing himself none of him did? (Because ever since he'd convinced War he wanted this, there'd been that tiny little voice in the back of his head saying, well, look at the bright side, say the virus doesn't work now, we won't be going back to the cave. It was a voice that scared the rest of him almost more than War did.)

Okay, definitely over-thinking this. He couldn't seriously pretend it was that hard to find the part of him that wanted this: that would be that bit down there – the bit War was telekinetically smearing with lube (nnngh, btw) while simultaneously opening himself up for Wade with more of the same. Wade was only human. It was not his fault if every part of him below the belt found this incredibly hot.

War watched Wade watching him, a lazy smile spreading over his face. The metal hand trailed its way up his side, around to the back of his neck and pulled him over War's body, and in for another of those bruising kisses.

“Now,” War breathed against his lips, and Wade took a deep breath, stopped thinking altogether, and thrust himself into War, all in one fast movement.

Just like ripping off a bandaid, right? A really fucking tight, hot bandaid that took approximately half a second to register as just maybe the best fucking bandaid ever.

...wow, sex really took the edge of his ability to come up with metaphors that made any fucking sense whatsoever.

“Mm.” War watched him with heavy-lidded eyes, utterly at ease. Good to know one of them was still in a state to play designated driver here. “That's it, Wade,” he instructed, “Now move.”

Wade didn't need to be told twice.

Once he'd gotten that far, it really wasn't that hard. It wasn't like there was any rocket science involved in the mechanics – he had done this before. Not with a hot telekinetic cyborg supervillain, maybe, but that didn't really affect the principle of the thing. It didn't take long to find a rhythm War seemed pleased with, if his increasingly ragged noises of encouragement were anything to go by. It was a little bit mindblowing just how much control War was letting him have in this arrangement – at the least he'd been expecting a lot more 'nudges' to get him up to the pace War wanted.

He was completely not expecting the sudden, none-too-gentle push on his own prostate at all.

Wade did not moan. The noise he made was more reminiscent of someone trying to eject their own vocal cords backwards. He thrust so hard into War it wouldn't have been a surprise if he'd reached his vocal cords, while his spine tried to arch in about three different directions at once. He may, very seriously, have just pulled out at least six vertebrae. He didn't care.

Holy shit. He was fucking an evil madman who was also psychically fucking him. If he didn't live through this (which might be a very real danger) he could at least count on dying happier than his few remaining non-blown brain cells knew what to do with.

War laughed, warm and throaty. “Still so surprised. Don't imagine I don't want to see you enjoy this. Perhaps you still don't realise how pleased you've made me, but I mean to show you,” he said, massaging that spot inside Wade more gently, “I mean to go on showing you for a very. Long. Time.”

It was a very good thing War's other habits included keeping draconian control over the state of his balls or this would have been over really fast. Wade made a token attempt at making a list of things he was supposed to hate about War, but after five tries losing track of item one, put the whole thing off till later.

This was once again officially the best plan ever. Except for all the million ways it wasn't, and that was something he was going to spent the next blissful however long this took not caring about. When every part of his head that had given up evolving less than a million years ago still thought War was the hottest piece of arse left in this reality, it was even surprisingly easy.

...Well. Equal hottest. Almost equal hottest. Attainability in his favour, fondness for mind games kind of standard, addiction to torture against him. Wasn't it amazing the things you lost all will to keep yourself from thinking about when you were balls-deep in their identical clone?

And every time he remembered the things he'd said to War outside about Cable, he spent at least a minute worrying about whether he was really sure there was no way Cable been listening to him say it, and how he'd go about explaining that he'd hardly meant a word. He'd had enough trouble just making Cable believe Wade wasn't holding any of this as his fault (like there was anyone who didn't have an evil double out there somewhere) – though Wade would happily take apologies in the form of sexual favours if Cable was intent on making it up to him.

In a world blessed or cursed with two Nathan Summers simultaneously, how much did it bite that it was this one he had to have fantastic sex with to save the world? Especially when it was probably the last chance he was ever going to get to have any kind of sex with either of them, if all went well.

Couldn't be a good idea to let himself get his hopes up about getting to go home with alternate-Cable when this was over either. Odds were he had his own Deadpool waiting for him (though if Wade ever got to meet alternate-Wade, he had a good mind to give himself a good kick in the nuts for letting his Cable go traipsing around other worlds without coming along to keep an eye on him). Damn alternate-Wade had better be appreciating alternate-Cable. The idiot probably didn't even know just how lucky he was.

Wonder if the alternate-Wade could be talked into sharing... Would he be willing to share in the same position?

Wrong question. Right now, he'd have happily leapt at the chance for a two-weeks-a-season time-share arrangement. He wasn't in any kind of position to be picky.

It was also a really good thing there were so many Nates in his life right now, or he was about to get into serious danger of calling out the wrong name...

By the time War finally let him come – or lost the will to stop him in the throws of his own orgasm, who could tell which – it would have taken several minutes for Wade to remember that he hadn't come here just for this. War slumped backwards, humming with contentment, while Wade just flopped where he was, utterly raw inside and out, too out of it to have noticed even if he'd fallen face first on to the floor. Consciousness felt like some kind of glorious punishment.

When War pulled him up the bed on top of him for one more kiss, he wasn't even very surprised to find himself kissing back. He slumped down on War's chest again afterwards, unmoving as he got his breath back, and waited, with no small trepidation, for the self-loathing to set in.

His healing factor stubbornly informed him it had never been hired for situations like this, and it was filing an official complaint.

Somewhere in all that emotional debris he actually managed to fall asleep.

***

Deadpool woke to the feeling of War stirring under him.

“Five more minutes, Mum,” he grumbled. “Dunwanna go to school today.”

“Hm?” War sounded amused.

“'Kay, fine, I don't have to go to school. 'Cuz of how I graduated like a million years ago and moved on to a ripping career as a successful well-compensated establishment provocateur,” Wade grumbled. “Yes, I really did graduate, Mr Smug Silence! Not just 'cuz it was the fastest way for them to get rid of me either. Jus' lemme sleep and I'll tell you all about it later.”

“I do know how fast you recover, Wade,” said War, “You said the Avengers were expecting you back within a few hours?”

Uh-oh.

“Give or take? Why? They're not going anywhere.” How long was it supposed to take the virus to kick in? How long had it been, anyway? Asking War if he was feeling funny at all probably wasn't the most subtle thing he could do right now.

“If we keep them waiting so long they have reason to fear you've been captured and interrogated, they well may,” War pointed out.

“Sure, but they're not seriously gonna expect me to get back on time either,” Wade protested desperately.

“Perhaps not. But think what a surprise it will be when you come back early.”

Uh-oh the second. “Now?”

“Is that reluctance in your voice, Wade?”

“You don't want to maybe have a bit more sex first?” Wade said hopefully.

War chuckled, deep in his throat. “After. Trust me, Wade, we'll have all the time in the world.”

In War-speak, that probably translated to 'fuck like bunnies right there before we've even washed the blood off'. Even by Deadpool's standards that was a whole world of ew.

Wade wracked his brains for any idea to buy even a little more time.

“Is there something else?” asked War, impatiently, as Wade hit on a minor brainwave.

“Well, kinda. Taking out the Avengers is a pretty special occasion, you wouldn't wanna send me in underdressed, would you? And I don't just mean a new costume: I'm talking guns. Swords. Stuff that goes bang when you pull out the pin and lob it at some guy's head. Ooh, how about one of those nice plasma rifle-things you used to lug around? Those were hot. I mean, do you know how long it's been since I've had my hands on good weaponry? Euphemisms aside.”

From the look on War's face this was very much the right answer. Any version of Nate was guaranteed to have an armoury in his castle somewhere. A really huge one where Wade could waste lots of time picking out weapons he liked. A happily post-coital War might even let him get away with it for a decent long while.

“That,” he said, getting to his feet and pulling Wade after him with a glint in his eye, “we can definitely arrange.”

[Guilty Gear fic] The Third Degree of Denial

2009-11-05T14:05:46Z

Request fic for yhibiki, who spotted the most references in The Gratuitous Vampire AU and wanted Pants on a Stick-verse fic, with Sol flirting with Ky while Ky tries to help someone. Somehow, this is what resulted. I feel vaguely like I've just written a Discworld crossover by accident.

Title: The Third Degree of Denial
Summary: Ky's trying to be helpful. Sol isn't. From an outsider's point of view, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.
Characters/Pairing: Sol/Ky, Sin
Word Count: 2030
Rating: PG

Mayor Kobolt had been having a bad day, worsening steadily since early morning, and only now culminating with what was just about the final straw: the king wanted to talk to him. He couldn't begin to imagine why. Surely talking to lowly commoners like mayors of outlying Illyurian towns wasn't kingly behaviour. He'd have thought any proper king would have had people to do ordinary things like talking for him.

He'd have thought that coming all the way out here in person to deal with a minor monster-infestation problem wouldn't have been kingly behaviour either. He couldn't very well have said anything like that though, oh no – he'd had to make a big song and dance about his undying gratitude on behalf of all the townsfolk that the king's men had arrived just in time to... clean up the last of the mess, as it turned out. And pry him with all kinds of awkward questions.

Truth be told they were mostly very innocent, simple questions – or they would have been if they hadn't been coming directly from the king himself.

“Above all, it's imperative we talk to anyone who can help us uncover where these creatures came from,” the king was saying, as the mayor jittered nervously and tried not to do anything that might seem unpatriotic. “I understand they were first sighted emerging from the wilderness from the south?”

“They just appeared! Out of nowhere!” The mayor spluttered. There was a danger he was making himself look very foolish and reactionary in front of the king – but even that paled against the very real danger the king would find out he'd been having tea when the monsters showed up. He'd stopped as soon as he heard the ruckus outside, of course, but it couldn't reflect well on him that his town had come under attack while he was nibbling on a biscuit with a nice cup of milk-and-two-sugars. The monsters might have come from the south – they might very well might have come from the moon, for all he knew. Right at the moment, he would have been lucky to be able to correctly distinguish up from down.

At least the king had moved on from asking about casualties. He was quite positive the last thing wounded people needed was a king coming around to check up on them. What if they weren't getting better fast enough? Did it count as treason to be ill in front of the king?

The king looked sympathetic, which the mayor could only assume must mean he was doing something horribly wrong.

“I want you to assure your people their safety is our first concern,” he said. “We will be stationing a temporary garrison here until we can be sure there won't be more of those creatures.”

The mayor fell back on making a lot of noise about gratitude and unworthiness. He supposed he could deal with a few soldiers around the place (nosing into things and reporting the slightest sign of unpatriotism straight to the king, no doubt) if he had to, though it was all so breathtakingly unnecessary. Those creatures couldn't have been all that dangerous – they'd gored a few people here and there, maybe, but he'd seen a little boy kill one by hitting it on the head with a flag, for crying out loud! There'd been that one big one, of course, but the unpleasant-looking man in the red jacket who'd shown up in the middle of things had taken it out in one hit, so clearly it couldn't have been all that dangerous either.

The unpleasant-looking man in the red jacket would have been the worst thing that had happened to him today if it hadn't been for the king showing up. Both he and the boy were still hanging around, and showing a truly despicable lack of respect for His Highness and the retinue of knights who'd accompanied him. (“Mum! Mum, didyouseedidyouseedidyousee?” the boy had yelled excitedly. “I killed a Gear! All on my own! Wham, right between the eyes!” The man had just rolled his eyes and tugged him back. “Can it kid, your Mum's working.” The mayor hadn't figured out exactly who the boy had been talking to – one of those shapely archer women in the king's retinue, presumably. The king had smiled at him though, which seemed to make the boy happy. He could understand that, it wasn't every day a real king smiled at you.)

The man in the red jacket had the boy on a leash now, which worried the mayor a bit, but no-one else had commented, so supposed it was probably better not to be the one to draw attention to it. What worried him more was that he'd been positive he'd recognised the man's face from the first moment he saw him, and had been waiting desperately for anyone else around him to draw the same conclusion he had. No-one had. And he knew no-one had, because no-one had so much as tried to arrest him yet.

Could the king really be unaware of who was standing almost behind him? No-one in the king's retinue had spoken up, were they all covering for whichever of the archers the boy had been speaking to? What if a man like that was so far below the king's standing that he hadn't even deigned to look him directly in the face? What if the mayor really was the only person here who could raise the alarm?

He was already in deep water over the tea, he couldn't risk not speaking up about this! It was probably his patriotic duty.

He swallowed nervously. Took a deep breath. Swallowed again. It didn't seem to help.

“Sire, forgive my unworthy presumption,” he began, feeling horribly like the poor sod tasked with telling the emperor he wasn't wearing any clothes, “but isn't that...”

“I'm sorry?” the king seemed confused, possibly by how the mayor's eyes kept skittering over to the criminal and away. He couldn't say he cared at all for the way the man in the red jacket was watching the king. He didn't look the least bit concerned for his safety or liberty – quite the opposite, he looked entirely relaxed and distinctly pleased with himself.

The mayor leaned in as close as he dared and pitched his voice low. “Isn't that the notorious outlaw Sol Badguy, wanted in every country across Europe?”

It took only a moment for the mayor to realise his voice hadn't been pitched nearly low enough, because the way the outlaw was now smirking could only mean he'd heard every word.

“Wanted nowhere more than here,” he grinned, crossing one leg over the other and lounging back against the wall behind him. The boy on the leash made a gagging noise.

The king straightened, looking suddenly displeased. He didn't look over his shoulder.

“Mayor Kobolt, perhaps there's been some sort of misunderstanding,” he said stiffly. “The man behind me is the heroic citizen responsible for arriving in the nick of time to defend the people of your town – at considerable risk to his own life and safety. This can't have escaped your attention.”

“Well, yes,” the mayor admitted, “but he's also...”

“I am sure,” the king went on, “an upstanding citizen such as yourself would have no cause to be so familiar with the faces of foreign criminals as to be able to be absolutely certain about the matter.”

The mayor started in alarm, petrified by the idea of what the king seemed to be suggesting. “N-no! Of course I wouldn't...!”

“I can only assume this is some minor case of mistaken identity,” concluded the king. “Clearly a dangerous criminal and the man to whom a large proportion of your townsfolk now owe their lives could not be one and the same.”

Warring survival instincts granted the mayor the uncharacteristic ability to think very quickly. There had been a nuance to the king's tone that implied his 'suggestions' were the kind of suggestion only a king got away with making.

“Of course, sire!” he squeaked. “Mistaken identity! That's bound to be all it was!”

And with that, the outlaw went right back to ignoring him. Why, if he didn't know better, the mayor would say he was looking at a man who was basking in the knowledge of a job well done and looking forward to receiving a quite substantial reward.

Oh. Oh dear. He could see what was going on here. No wonder the king was so upset he'd drawn attention to just who that man really was.

That was it, there was a law that said a criminal couldn't be apprehended in the act of performing a civic service, wasn't there? One of those nasty relics from the Holy War that had yet to be written out of the books the way it so obviously ought to be. Killing monsters was almost definitely a civic service. There was probably an automatic bounty on the head of every one killed – even some sort of official commendation supposed to be awarded. So now the king and his men had travelled all this way, only to find the monsters they were supposed to deal with had already been slaughtered by a criminal who, legally, they couldn't even touch.

No wonder the king had been so irritated when he'd made the mistake of bringing the matter up. The poor man was probably going to have to spend the rest of the time it took to get rid of Badguy pretending he didn't know exactly what was going on.

The wave of sympathy he'd been feeling lasted exactly as long as it took the king to start talking again, then evaporated once more quite quickly.

“My men and I,” the king was saying now, “shall have to intrude on the hospitality of your town for the night. It is far too late for us to make it back before dark.”

“Mm, hear that, little mayor?” said the outlaw. “You've got a king to house for the night. Better make sure you get him the nicest room you've got. With the biggest bed too.”

The king coloured slightly. Most of his knights appeared to be taking great pains not to pay any attention. A little of the mayor's sympathy returned.

“And will we be expected to find accommodation for this... hero too?” he asked, stiffly, because he wasn't fool enough to assume anything else.

“Nah,” grinned the outlaw. “I can make my own arrangements.”

He probably meant the town brothel, the mayor thought, with no small disgust. Or that he was planned to run off in the night before his welcome wore out. It was embarrassing just how easy it was to understand what a man like him must be thinking.

Strangely, something about his prior comment about finding a room fit for a king actually served to make Mayor Kobolt less panicky about the task of finding suitable accommodation – their best hotel would surely do perfectly well. Sheer spite probably played a certain role in that, not that he ever did admit quite how big a role it was.

Either way, the king seemed to be in a very good mood the following morning before he left, even despite the discovery that the outlaw was still hanging around, so the accommodations must have been entirely satisfactory.

It all seemed like truly despicable behaviour, even for an outlaw. What was the world coming to when a dangerous criminal didn't have to do any more than dispose of a few dangerous monsters and save a few lives whenever the authorities showed up on his tail to be be practically handed an instant pardon? How was anyone supposed to run a kingdom with men like Sol Badguy showing up on your doorstep whenever you tried to get anything done?

Perhaps he was feeling more including to be charitable now that the king was leaving and the tea incident still hadn't come up, but it was surely a credit to the king that he was able to deal with it all in such good humour. It must be a hard job, being king.

[Cable & Deadpool] Let Slip the Dogs of War - Epilogue 2

2009-11-02T14:29:51Z

I would usually include a summary in the header, but given the content of the last part, I felt that pointing at the rating should pretty much suffice. (Why yes I have just posted an epilogue longer than any single chapter of the actual fic. Whaaaat? >.>)

Title: Let Slip the Dogs of War
Characters/Pairing: Cable/Deadpool
Rating: NC-17
Chapter: Epilogue 2
Word Count: 4030
Previous Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Epilogue 1

Wade was lounging by the doorway when Cable got back to his room, with too-obvious nonchalance that as good as said, 'What, me, run all the way here? 'Course not! I was just... nearby! And not because I've been loitering around this hallway all day, nosiree.' The way he was watching Cable approach, with edge-of-his-seat fascination that suggested he was trying to decide the best moment to pounce, didn't do much for his efforts to look relaxed either. While Cable wouldn't have been wholly averse to being pounced on under the circumstances, he found himself stopping just a little beyond arm's reach.

“Did you want to get something to eat first?” he offered, likely to be the one concession to tradition
either of them made all night.

“Uh, no,” said Wade. “Sex now, food later. How about more sex after that?”

After so many months of never finding the right moment to raise the subject with the old Wade, the directness was actually quite refreshing. “I can't say I'd planned that far.”

“I'm easy,” said Wade, following him into the room. The cleaners had done a thorough job restoring his room to its natural state – with the exception of the Deadpool-print sheets, which had merely been straightened and tucked in neatly, but if Wade noticed he gave no sign of being offended. “We can do sex, sex, then food, or how about...” He paused, realising Cable had stopped just inside the doorway. “Nate?”

Cable turned and pulled the door shut behind them. Finally alone and free of all other commitments, he treated himself to the luxury of giving Wade the kind of slow once-over that would have been borderline inappropriate with anyone else watching. The tight fabric of his costume hid most of the scars, but only accentuated the lean muscle of the body underneath. A good look on him – and a shame he still believed that the condition of his skin marred a physique like that beyond redemption. Nevertheless, the sooner they could get the costume out of the way, the better.

“Huh,” said Wade, sounding a little breathless, not the least oblivious to what Cable was thinking.

Cable let his smile widen, and stepped a little further into Wade's personal space. “How about we start at the top of that list. See how we go from there.”

“I like your plan,” Wade agreed, as Cable brought both hands to his neck, resting them just at the base of his mask.

“May I?” Cable asked, something he expected to be saying a lot tonight – after what Wade had been through, he couldn't be too careful.

“Uhh,” No matter how many times Wade had let Cable see his face before – sparring, hanging out or just to make a point, suddenly now he got nervous – like he'd just realised that cue to pounce had gone sailing past and he'd missed it, “so, uh, I was thinking maybe we could leave the mask on, or, halfway on? People tell me it's a good look on me...”

“Please, Wade,” Cable gathered the edge of the fabric in his fingers, not raising it without permission, but this was the one item he was going to push on. “I want to be able to look you in the eye while we do this.”

Wade fidgeted a bit. “Well, you put it that way...”

The mask came away without further resistance, revealing the face beneath centimetre by centimetre as Cable peeled it back. Scarred, yes, but not ugly by any standard Cable had any inclination to contemplate.

Kissing Wade was much better without it in the way.

Wade kissed back with more enthusiasm than anyone else in Cable's experience – with the matter of his face resolved, shyness was no longer a word with any place in Wade's dictionary. In a trice, Cable had both of Wade's arms wrapped tightly around his neck, then one of Wade's legs hooked around his waist to go with them, pressing the full length of that warm, hard body up against his own. Another second to sort out his balance, and Wade had his second leg hooked up beside the first. The weight wasn't more than Cable could support, hands going automatically to help hold him up, but he needn't have worried – the wiry tension he could feel in Wade's thighs proved him quite capable of holding himself up without assistance. He certainly had no objection to having Cable's hands suddenly all over his arse, though. The position meant Wade was now looking down slightly into the kiss (which seemed an insufficient term for what might have been better described as his eager experiments to see how far he could get his tongue down Cable's throat) – quite the novel experience for someone of Cable's height. Whether the way he kept grinding against Cable was the side-effect of or the ulterior-motive behind his apparent determination to try out every possible angle he could get at Cable's mouth with his own, Cable really did not mind. Getting his hands on Wade was living up to all expectations.

“So,” said Wade, coyly, when he finally came up for air, “is this 'wanna look you in the eye thing' gonna extend all the way to the part when you're fucking me through the mattress?”

Wade had dived for his ear before he gave Cable a chance to reply, so he missed seeing him frown. “I was going to ask if you wanted to top.”

“Ooooh,” Wade breathed, exploring what little stubble he could find on Cable's chin with his lips, “Put me down for one of those for next time. Got my heart set on being screwed into the South Pacific today.”

The trouble with that much body contact was that it didn't give you any leeway to tense up even slightly without the other partner noticing. Wade leaned back, and made use of his looking-you-in-the-eye privileges.

“Okay, what?” he said, not too harshly. “No way are you going to tell me you don't want to screw me through the mattress. I have a freaking proctologist's certificate that says otherwise. I know you're not War, but you can't be that different. Especially in those departments.”

A very deliberate downward squirm to emphasise that last sentence made it momentarily harder than usual for Cable to think how to phrase a reply.

“The differences are... something I feel I ought to emphasise,” he managed.

Wade sighed and settled his weight a little lower.

“New rule,” he pronounced, stabbing Cable in the chest with a finger. “If you do anything I don't like, I promise to let you know using a special secret code where I say something like, 'don't' or 'stop' or maybe even 'hey!'; and if I do that, you'll, oh, stop whatever it was you were doing. In return, you can promise not to treat me like I'm so damaged I have to be handled like a crazy old bag lady on acid with one foot hovering over the 'world goes boom' button. Deal?”

“Deal,” agreed Cable quickly. He swiftly revised several assumptions he'd been labouring under about how this was going to go, swung them around, took two steps across the room and tumbled Wade down on to the bed.

“Whoo!” said Wade happily, as Cable's lips settled hungrily on his throat. “Now you're getting the idea. Ohhhh yeah...” he added, as Cable began tracing lines of scar tissue, pleased to find no lack of sensitive spots between them, “that – you can just keep doing that and that'll be totally okay – ”

“I might have other ideas,” Cable warned, getting his fingers under the top of Wade's costume below the neck.

“Other ideas are good too!” Wade assured him, as Cable dragged the top half of his costume down to his hips. His left glove came off with it. Cable caught his other wrist in one hand and, to Wade's unambiguous approval, made a show of pulling the glove off with his teeth.

Cinemax hand, an old memory supplied. Coincidentally, that had also been the first time he'd seen Wade naked, though he'd had to be careful not to stare at the time. Wouldn't have been fair, considering he'd had no illusions about the odds Wade would be keeping his restored appearance – not to mention other distractions. His feelings on kissing Cable had evolved quite a bit since then too.

He was no stranger to what Wade looked like shirtless in his usual state either, but having permission to touch was a wholly different privilege.

It was hard to believe he'd ever feared there was any danger that War had beaten the fight out of him. 'Passive' was the last description Wade would ever deserve – especially in bed, as Cable was rapidly discovering. Wade was apparently clinically incapable of staying still for more than two seconds together. Anything Cable did that he enjoyed prompted a burst of happy squirming; anything he did that didn't quite hit the mark was corrected by a squirming in a more directed fashion. It probably would have gotten tiresome if every movement hadn't been a ringing tribute to how thoroughly Wade was enjoying himself, or if the squirming itself didn't have its own way of being rather pleasant, more often than not.

Wade seemed far more interested in getting his hands under Cable's shirt than he was in getting said shirt out of the way properly, but when Cable finally took over and shucked it over his head himself, Wade responded with only more enthusiasm – which meant fixing himself on Cable's metal side like it was the holy grail of intimate contact.

“I'm a lot more sensitive on the other side,” Cable reminded him.

“But you still do feel stuff with your T.O.?” Wade asked, looking up at him.

“Pressure, pain, heat and cold – most sensations still come through,” Cable explained, rather wishing they'd had this conversation earlier, “but everything is muted by an order of magnitude or more.”

“Hm...” said Wade, in a somewhat ominous tone, sliding his fingers thoughtfully down the bulges of artificial muscle that made up Cable's left arm. “So what happens if I do this?” he asked innocently, and bit down hard on Cable's metal nipple.

What happened involved a lot of T.O. sensory circuits urgently finding need to report a signal significantly outside of any range they were accustomed to reporting. There may have been stars in his T.O. eye for a moment. Cable gasped, quite involuntarily, but Wade got the message loud and clear.

“Heh,” he grinned. “Now, the lines between the plates, those are weak points, right? So if I – ”

The end of Wade's sentence was lost under the noise Cable made.

“I am so telling Weasel about this next time he calls me a meathead for sucking with machines,” Wade declared, gleefully and terrifically smug.

“Don't you dare,” snapped Cable. At least, someone said it. It didn't sound entirely like him.

“I'm not gonna tell him where the weak points are,” Wade insisted. “That's privileged information – Deadpool's eyes only. You don't just give away blackmail material like that.”

With all Wade's squirming, Cable had missed the moment when his belt had been undone, so he had very little warning before there was a hand was in his pants – heralding the end of the fascination with his T.O. for this session, though making it momentarily difficult to come up with a suitable comeback now that now that he was experiencing all the considerable and developed talent of Wade's Cinemax hand firsthand.

“Y'know...” Wade said playfully, “I think you might be bigger than War.”

“That doesn't seem very likely.”

“Well, all that high tech armour, letting the T.O. go kinda feral down in some of the lower regions, that might not be healthy for a guy...”

“We're going to have to make a rule about mentioning evil doubles of me in bed.”

“What about non-evil versions of you?” Wade suggested innocently.

“Not him either.”

“What makes you think you know which one I meant? I was talking to Forge about that time other-me went reality-hopping and...”

“No mentioning any other version of me in bed. Or any of your other ex's. Or mine.”

“Not even 'Nessa?”

“Especially not Vanessa.”

“I bet Domino never figured out that thing with your metal bits,” said Wade, back to smug again.

Cable did the only thing any sane man could have done in that situation: he leaned down, kissed Wade into silence, and ground his body down against the erection that stood out plainly through the spandex of Wade's pants (nearly trapping Wade's hand between them in the process) until both of them had forgotten what started it.

The first thing Wade said when they finally broke apart was, “You and me, we are wearing way too many pants. Uh... too much pants? How do you even...”

Cable stopped him with another quick kiss. “Not important. Let's get them out of the way.”

The downside of his impulsive tumble onto the bed was that Cable still had his boots on, and there was no way of getting his pants anywhere approaching 'off' without dealing with them first – and as long as he stayed crouched over Wade like this there was no way of doing that either. Reluctantly, he swung himself off the bed, while Wade shimmied out of the rest of his own uniform with considerably more ease.

Wade lying naked on red and black sheets was an interesting effect – Deadpool turned inside-out, if there was a way of expressing that idea so that it sounded as erotic as Cable was finding it. Even with the scars, much better than last time – now the only factor to dissuade him from staring was the need to be back on that bed and too close to see the full picture.

Before discarding the full costume, Wade paused to rifle through his pouches until he found a tube of something which he brandished triumphantly.

“Ha, see? I found a use for those pouches!”

Lubricant, of course. Cable tried not to look too hard at the part of the label which declared which flavour it was. Knowing Wade, he was probably lucky if it wasn't rated for use on machine parts.

Cable took it out of his hands as he knelt back down between eagerly spread legs. “Do you need me to use this on you, or just...”

“Nuh-uh. Apply to Tab A and insert, and it'll be good with me. Moderate force can be applied if you need it. I'm sturdy.”

Cable quirked an eyebrow and couldn't help smirking a little, though he followed Wade's instructions, such as they were. “Romantic, aren't you?”

“Used up my romance on the confetti. Do me!”

Despite Wade's best efforts to ruin what little mood they had going, there was probably nothing that could have spoiled those first couple of thrusts to bury himself full-length into Wade's body – the heat, the friction – the anticipation alone had been getting thick enough to cut with a knife. The sounds Wade greeted him with seemed to agree with his experience.

“Alright?” he asked, just to be on the safe side.

“No,” said Wade, wrapping his legs around Cable's waist in a way that implied the opposite, “cuz I still seem to be on the wrong side of this mattress. A lot more moving and then I'll be 'alright'. If you wanna go for 'terrific' then... aha.... ohyeah...”

Cable kept the next few thrusts as slow as he could make them, ostensibly to make the most of every nuance of the sensation, though with maybe just a little interest in seeing how much he could make Wade beg. (Borderline manipulative, perhaps, but after Wade's speech about rules, nothing that gave his conscience any trouble.)

Begging wasn't precisely what he got, though the enthusiastic noises Wade was making were, for a while, just as good. Nor did that long have anything to do with the crux of the matter.

“Hey Nate...” Wade said after a bit, “not that this isn't great but I think ya missed the signs – we moved out of the 20 zone kind of a way back there...”

Cable focused on keeping the rhythm slow and steady, wondered how far gone it meant he was if he was finding even Wade's voice a turn-on. “I don't want to rush this.”

“Me neither, but we can not-rush it a bit faster, if you get what I'm saying here, which is – which is – that I was pretty serious about the screw-me-down-to-the-South-Pacific part. Remember that whole 'not treating me like glass' convo we had at the start?” Wade’s legs twitched around Cable’s waist. Despite his protests, he seemed reluctant to make any move take over what he’d decided was going to be Cable’s job. Small mercies, under the circumstances.

“I got the message,” Cable assured him dryly. Or possibly hoarsely – it was a fine line.

“Really, 'cause, from where I stand – lie – lying is good – it's feeling like maybe a bit of Chinese Whispers happened on the way. Doesn't this thing have a higher gear?”

“Wade...” Mother Askani, how much longer was it going to take before he stopped being struck anew that he'd finally, truly gotten this far with Wade every time he buried himself inside that body?

Wade squirmed in counterpoint, trying and failing to force him to speed up.

“Damnit, what's the opposite of a safeword? Go! Green! Simon says: Harder! What do you, need this in writing? Do I have to get this thing signed by a lawyer? The entire cast of Boston Legal? Did I ever tell you about the time War told me today's safeword was 'harder-faster-ohgod-more'? 'Cause I been saving that up ever since.”

“Wade!”

“...not bad, but let's try that again with less anger and more, 'oh I am overcome by the power of your sexiness'.”

“Wade,” Cable repeated, through gritted teeth, punctuating every point of emphasis with another thrust, “I am trying. Very hard. To make this last.”

Wade stopped squirming and stared, eyes widening as understanding dawned. “...oh. You. Really?”

“Really.”

“That's. Okay. Not what I was going for but that's not a bad consolation prize. Uh, so,” Wade looked a little dazed, like he still couldn't quite get his head around it, “is it me? Or has it just, y'know, been a while?”

“It's you,” Cable assured him. “It's all you.”

The noise Wade made in response started out as a 'huh' but dragged out into a groan, the legs around Cable's waist tightening.

There was no keeping the floodgates back any longer.

“You have no idea,” Cable told him, hissing the words haltingly through gritted teeth. “How long I've wanted you. So sure I'd wasted my last chance with you. So long – hunting any loophole that could mean you survived. Even if you'd hated me, better than losing it all... Never even got to apologise. Never told you...”

The pace was picking up, seemingly free of any conscious intention on Cable's part. Wade took it without a word, suddenly horribly, breathtakingly focused on the man above him like he'd just realised what all those religious nuts had been on about. Attention from Wade was a full body activity; part of Cable wondered if anyone had ever had his full attention like this before.

“Finding you – finding War had you... Spent the whole time there – trying not to think about it. About having to leave you behind at the end.” Cable leaned forward, as far as he could. “Didn't work. Almost kissed you after you shot him.”

Cable's hand was on Wade's cock now, pumping it in rhythm, though he couldn't have picked when exactly he'd reached for it. He had Wade all but writhing in ecstasy, silent intentness starting to erode under the shear physicality of it all.

“That damn UN meeting. Longest one ever. Hardly remember a thing they said – couldn't stop thinking about this.”

A long moan from Wade slowed him down only for a second.

“About having you at last...”

“Fuck, Nate, you can still 'have' me a whole lot harder if you wanna.”

Cable did want – gave up on words and put everything he had left into showing Wade in a way he couldn't possibly misunderstand (that anyone less than three walls away from them probably couldn't have misunderstood). Wade never stopped moving, towards Cable one moment and having to be chased up the bed the next, in a manner that defied any rhythm Cable tried to set. So much for not lasting, everything Wade did conspired to keep him right on the edge that was starting to feel like it might go on forever, like they'd both forgotten what happened next. Wade might have been built just for this – just for him.

That was the last remotely coherent thought that went through Cable's mind until he discovered that 'what happened next' involved something very like the ground dropping out from under him.

Coming down afterwards was a slow process, the lasting burn of exertion making him feel old and young again at once, but it was hard to care much in the wake of what might have just been the best orgasm of his life. A vivid streak of white fluid on Wade's chest was the first sign he had that he'd come so hard he'd almost missed Wade following.

Wade made a noise that would be unreproducible even via copious keyboard mashing, so at least Cable wasn't the only one present in that state. Muscles moving mostly on automatic, he pulled himself out of Wade's body and lowered himself down to the bed, not quite on top of the other occupant.

“I...” said Wade, sounding breathless and a little freaked out, “take back every nice thing I ever said about sex with War. Holy fuck, Nate, that was... you were... you really... Can I talk about War now? 'Cause after this I don't think I'm going to be mentioning him ever again.”

Cable groaned into the pillow.

“I made you babble!” Wade exclaimed, like he'd just discovered there was an eleven on the scale of all things hot.

By all that was holy, he had. Wade was sexually transmissible – to Cable, if no-one else, who was only now coming to realise just exactly how unhealthy all those months of making a dozen different excuses to convince himself he could live without jumping Wade's bones this very second had been for him. He must have been bottled up to bursting point. Probably very nearly still was.

The upside – and a very satisfying upside it was – was that it was bound to be nothing that a lot more sex with Wade wouldn't fix. And if not, he could take his time disproving it.

“I just made Priscilla-the-Mutant-Messiah-of-Providence babble!” Wade was saying. “I gotta get that on a t-shirt or...”

Cable snagged Wade with one arm and kissed him back into silence again. Wade showed no indication he minded.

“So,” Wade proclaimed after he'd reclaimed his tongue once more, still looking so pleased with himself he practically glowed. “What's up next? Food or more sex?”

“Food,” Cable said firmly. “I... don't think I'll be up to a repeat performance for a bit.”

Wade snickered at him. “I'm thinking something we can get delivered?”

“Knock yourself out,” Cable muttered. Wade gave him one last quick snog, slithered out of bed and fished through Cable's pants until he found the mobile phone he still sometimes carried, mostly out of habit or for use in event of headaches. He was probably ordering pizza – in the nude, but as long as most businesses on Providence didn't rely on videophone, no-one would have to know.

One of them would need pants on (at least) by the time the food showed up, but Cable had a feeling it wasn't going to be him.

On which matter, he should probably be worried about how long it would take Irene to find out that the 'urgent' business he'd cancelled everything for involved a half-naked Deadpool ordering pizza from his room.

Later, maybe. Right now, it was hard to worry about anything beyond how long it would take Wade to come back to bed.

Bonus Side Story!

Before the "& Deadpool" days

2009-10-21T14:36:15Z

So I've spent a few days digging through old comics featuring Cable's pre-C&DP appearances. Yeah – this even despite everyone being so helpful as to answer with a big 'nah, don't bother' to my question about how much I should worry about getting early canon right. Don't think I'm not pleased with that response though – when it comes to the really early stuff, I can rarely work up the interest to do more than skim-read, so it's nice to know no-one expects anything more. Even despite how I'm usually a big fan of kid-superhero groups, it's almost embarrassing just how difficult it's been to work up any real interest in the New Mutants/X-Force team – even the ones I kind of want to like based on more interesting things that have been done with them since. Then there's Cable, who, well. It does make a change to see an adult who doesn't believe the kids have to be coddled and protected 24/7, but Cable in his earliest appearances is such a humourless bastard most of the time it's hard to find more than the barest framework of the character I liked so much in Cable & Deadpool.

The good news is they do start building on that framework earlier than I'd counted on (I'd have given up far sooner if they hadn't). I know I'm biased by how much I want to find things to like, but once you get to the issues where the clusterfuck that is his family history get dealt with, there's a lot of material I genuinely enjoyed. Among the really important things I hadn't picked up from bios and web-discussion are that Cable arrived back in time with no idea he was from that era – let alone that Cyclops was his father. He had no idea that Stryfe was his clone (ah, the advantages of face-concealing helmets), or that he even had a clone. When a guy is as high-and-mighty as Cable, goshdarn but it's fun seeing him thrown off his stride as hard as he was when all those revelations came out, and it finally made it possible to empathise with the guy. And at least when we do have to put up with his uncompromising-bastard moments, there's generally at least one character around going 'damn, I hate what an uncompromising bastard Cable is', which makes you feel a lot better about it.

One of the few things that did impress me about the early comics was how many background details about him they were setting up years before they got to explain them in full – his history with Six Pack being the main one. With that in mind, I'm not sure whether to be impressed or unimpressed by how much the same issues make me wonder how many years it took before even the writers decided on most of the features that have defined him since: that he's from the future (probably very early on?), that he's telekinetic (I have no idea), that he's Scott's son (probably long before it was revealed officially, but I'd be very surprised if it was part of his initial concept), that Stryfe is his clone and Tolliver his son (probably the former well before the latter), that his mission centres around stopping Apocalypse (this I'm pretty sure they had no idea about for years), or that his mechanical arm is the result of a Techno Organic infection rather than just a regular bionic and responsible for keeping his powers in check (if this wasn't a big retcon, I'd be very surprised). Would love to hear if anyone knows any of these, or feels like asking the creators about it they happen to run into them at a con sometime, anyway.

If you need any further proof of just how little they bothered to set in stone at the start, you need look no further than how the extent of the TO infection varies from artist to artist – it could be anything from just his arm, to his arm and varying amounts of his torso, to pretty much the entire left side of his body. Yes – including his face, though on this account at least they're more consistent with the explanation that most of the time he has it covered with synthetic skin. This actually makes a lot of sense when you remember he's supposed to have a bionic eye, so at least some of the TO infection must have spread that far. Actually, while we're on the subject, apparently the fact that it glows has nothing to do with it being bionic, but is rather some kind of weird genetic nod to his father's mutant ability (and which does make sense considering that Stryfe and Nate Grey have the same eye despite having no TO infection – are you taking notes yet?). Why he doesn't bother putting synth skin over his arm is a whole other question – maybe it just doesn't last as long once he starts punching through doors and whatnot.

Anyway, for anyone else interested in seeing a bit more of Cable's pre-C&DP days, I can recommend at least the following as being worth tracking down.

Blood and Metal: Cable's first two issue mini-series, dealing with his falling out with Six Pack and discovery of who's face is under Stryfe's mask.

X-Cutioner's Song: Here's where most of the big revelations about Scott/Cable/Stryfe finally come to light. Massive fifteen issue crossover event spanning four different X-titles, every active X-character of the time, plus Stryfe and lackeys plus Apocalypse and lackeys plus Mr Sinister in the background somewhere and it's all huge and chaotic and I may have kind of enjoyed it to bits. *cough*

X-Force 26: I just had to list this one, because it's the issue where Cable reunites with the team after the events of X-Cutioner's Song, and you aren't going to believe this but it's cute! There are hugs! Cable coming clean about his past! Cable apologising for every time he went overboard! And then having kind of a bad run in with Magneto, but the mood mostly survives.

Cable 5-8: Listed mostly for completeness, as this wraps up the remaining mysteries around Cable and Stryfe, and also Tolliver who (just in case we hadn't fucked with Cable's head enough lately) has just turned out to be his brainwashed son. Personally, I found it a bit hard to get into the whole drama over who was the original and who was the clone (I mean, seriously, who cares? You're genetically identical and everything else is nurture!) and the execution is pretty seriously lacking in the subtlety department, but at least it ties off most of the loose ends.

Fun fact: Most of the above was actually written by Fabian Nicieza. Of course, he was also responsible for most of those X-Force issues I never got into, but he's been making Cable likeable for a lot longer than I'd realised.

I've poked through some of the later big events featuring Cable, but didn't really get as much out of them. The Onslaught arc seemed to suffer from too many different things happening in too many different titles (most of which I wasn't that interested in and many of which contributed practically nothing to the overall story). The Twelve – supposedly the big showdown against Apocalypse – had a little less of this, but instead lost me by never bothering to justify in any coherent manner what made the 'twelve' so important, beyond self-fulfilling prophesy ('the bad guy is after them because the prophesy says they're important, and the prophesy says they're important because the bad guy will be after them') or 'collect one of each element and two of the important ones' pokemon-completionism. Also, the abject failure of any of the good guys to prevent the bad guys from abducting even one of their targets while playing straight into their hands got old fast. I think I can safely say that the single most important thing to happen anywhere in the whole Twelve saga was an extended (and very nicely drawn) scene of Nate Grey and Johnny Storm naked in the shower in one of the early tie-in issues (#59 if you're curious).

Didn't bother with the 'Ages of Apocalypse' arc which followed it either – couldn't work up the enthusiasm – though I did enjoy the 'Search for Cyclops' miniseries that concluded it, and that featured Cable finally getting a reasonably lasting victory over Apocalypse. Well written, nicely paced and good art, though if there's a reason why Jean suddenly seems to have lost her telekinesis for the whole story arc, they didn't bother to explain it.

On reflection, I think there's a lot to be said for why X-Cutioner's Song worked so much better for me than almost any similar event since: it took over exactly four team-oriented titles in a regular sequence to tell one, coherent story, introduced every important character early on and kept them relevant (so you didn't feel like you were reading about a million characters you hated for one page of the one you were interested in), and didn't confuse things with excess tie-in issues from titles that weren't essential to the main plot. When a character's been co-opted for a big event, there's a nasty tendency for their own titles to find themselves reduced to producing a whole issue which ties into the event (for marketing/continuity reasons) but in which absolutely nothing happens. You get a whole issue of introspection, of random dream sequences, of the character attempting something which fails miserably and leaves them back at square one at the end – issues which equate to the kind of scenes that any decent movie director leaves on the cutting room floor (occasionally these are still excellent stories, but that's far more the exception than the rule). Alternately, the issue is important, and everyone following the story finds themselves inexplicably having to pick up Hulk #451 to find out what was supposed to have happened X-Men #34 and #35. If Marvel insists on crossover spectaculars, surely there's got to be a better way of handling these things. Issue 40 of Cable & Deadpool is a pretty classic example of 'absolutely nothing happens' – but 41-42 are absolutely vital in giving covering the consequences of the event (ie, goodbye Cable and Providence ;_; ) for the C&DP title, though you could probably skip them completely if you were only in it for the X-Men plot. It's a good example of one time the tie-in wasn't so important that anyone reading the big event has to pick up every tie-in issue to follow what's going on, but not so meaningless that there was no need to include it. The Civil War tie-ins were also unusually good - though it's unfortunately true that most of the tie-in issues were infinitely superior to the main event itself.

When you have an event as big scale as Secret Invasion or Civil War, I'm sure it is easier to find ways to give characters their own little side plots, that fit into the landscape of the event without being either crucial or meaningless – but I still made it only a couple of issues into Secret Invasion before the feeling that I needed to be reading a dozen other titles to make head or tail of what was going on made me give up. The latest big event, Dark Reign - centred around the idea that everyone wants to kill Norman Osborne - is stuck more in the meaningless category, since when everyone wants to kill the same guy, 99% are only going to get to fail at it repeatedly. It's a problem – the sales figures for big events speak for themselves, but I can only imagine how many fans drop a title because they can no longer figure out how many other books they're supposed to be reading to make head or tail of what's going on these days.

...okay, got a little carried away on that tangent there. Where was I? Right – early Cable issues.

I guess the bottom line is that there’s a surprising amount of fairly decent stuff, packed in between a not-at-all-surprising even greater quantity of ‘meh’. With no consistent ongoing story to ground things (no Providence yet, and Apocalypse can’t be expected to stop by every week) there’s not a lot to keep me reading, but Cable mellows out early enough to become a decently likeable character in his own right. It’s hard to picture 90’s Cable watching an old friend get himself ripped in half while doing him a favour without so much as a word of concern or gratitude, anyway. But that’s a whole other rant. >.>

[Guilty Gear fic] Five More Years - Chapter 1

2009-10-15T15:41:59Z

Ah, where to start on this one? It ties in with a lot of embarrassingly detailed theories I've been toying with for ages about exactly how the Sol/Ky ship could have been quietly ticking away in the background of the series all along. It's based in part on an attempt to give the first GG game some actual plot, and just as much on one of the most gratuitous premises I could have come up with. It's the angstiest Sol/Ky fic I've written since Game Over. There are a couple more parts mostly written following this one, though it's been stalled for a while now. We'll see if getting part one posted gives me the impetus needed to get going on it again.

Title: Five More Years
Summary: Guilty Gear: The Missing Link didn't tell us much about Sol and Ky's reunion. This wasn't because there was nothing much to tell.
Characters/Pairing: Sol/Ky, others from the first GG game.
Chapter: 1/?
Rating: R
Word Count: 2990

The first time Sol saw Ky in five years was in the hallway of a shabby hotel, nowhere in particular save for being the designated accommodation for a so-called 'tournament' that had (on light of current evidence) attracted a greater variety of competitors than Sol had counted on. Apart from bad carpet and variously tarnished light fittings, the corridor had twelve doors, counting rooms on both sides, most of them probably already occupied, so Sol almost didn't look up at the sound of one opening. That was all the fanfare he got before a piece of his history stepped out, right on to the bad carpet not half a dozen yards in front of him.

Later on, when he needed an excuse, Sol would blame most of what happened next squarely on the fact that after five years, Ky had still had the nerve to look exactly the damn same.

He could almost have believed a ghost of the war years had stepped out of his past and come back to haunt him, except that Ky had lived through the war (miracle of miracles, certainly not for lack of trying to get himself killed) and wasn't likely to have bowed out for anything since. Sol was meant to be the one who was immortal, but Ky had apparently cleared the years between seventeen and twenty-two without aging a day (even if that was as much testament to how easily the real seventeen-year-old Ky could have passed for twenty-two). War had made Ky old beyond his years long before Sol met him, and by luck or design his body had matched it. He must have hit a growth spurt somewhere in his early teens and shot up like a bullet – it had never been for nothing that he'd been so good at making every other man in his army forget they were being lead by a teenaged boy. Even Sol had let himself forget that more often than he could justify. To look at Ky today it was hard to imagine him ever aging – unless he ran himself into the ground he was probably destined to be one of those rare, frustrating individuals who went on looking twenty-five until the day they hit fifty. Even the uniform was the same – nevermind that the Holy Order disbanded five years ago and its men scattered to the winds, old regimentals now only to be dusted off once annually for 'end of the war day' ceremonial parades. Nevermind that not even Sol had been entirely able to avoid the fuss the news outlets had made when the first chance to produce pictures of Commander Kiske in the IPF colours had presented itself. But there was no new IPF uniform in evidence here, not so much as a new haircut to mark the fact half a decade had gone by in the time since they saw each other last.

He might just have stepped through a doorway and found himself transported back to the very day he'd left the Order, every argument they'd never finished just waiting to picked up right where they'd left off. There, without a single word yet spoken, Sol could have written the whole script of everything either of them were going to say given half a chance, and it made him sick just to think about it. It was the last thing he had the stomach to deal with, and that might have been reason enough for what he did then.

In the several seconds it took Sol to cross the space between them he watched the whole series of emotions skitter across Ky's face – recognition, disbelief, rage, dissolving straight down into shock before he stopped gaping long enough to form a single word as Sol kept coming closer, until even the boy couldn't have mistaken his motives. It may well have been shock that kept him from doing anything but staring, riveted to the spot, when Sol stopped in front of him, grabbed him by the front of that stupid, damnable uniform and kissed him with everything in him that had missed having the freedom to do this in the last five years.

Sol may have spent his share of time mocking Ky for his naivety, but the boy wasn't slow; this had been sudden and crazy enough that Sol couldn't blame him if he took a minute to catch up – or if he decided a suitable response would involve punching Sol in the face. He felt Ky tense up under his lips and gasp, but then the next thing he felt was both Ky's hands tangling in his hair to hold him down, kissing back with every bit as much desperate need as Sol could have expected. Probably knowing as well as Sol did this was a moment he couldn't afford not to make the most of when it might so easily never happen again.

It wasn't like it used to be, back in the days when they'd been known to go straight from a match to struggling on the floor to trying to crawl inside each others' clothes without anything more than the technicalities of the exercise changing between them. A lot of arguments of theirs would probably never have gotten any kind of resolution if they hadn't gotten into the habit of doing this, back in that time when it had been a little too easy to justify taking a teenaged boy with a typical teenaged crush to bed and fucking him until he got over the infatuation. Less easy when the infatuation showed no sign of wearing off, even if Sol hadn't seen any need to complain about it at the time. Ky had grown up in a war-torn world, lost all his illusions well before he was old enough to join the fight; he had no excuse for mistaking a few encounters (or a few more than a few) for the sake of comfort or release for love. It certainly never stopped them arguing, didn't even slow them down. If the reality had had anything to do with a boy whose life was taken up with more responsibilities than an old man should have shouldered in a lifetime – a boy wanting even one thing he didn't have to answer for, didn't have to worry about breaking, then Sol had successfully avoided the thought until long after he'd already left. If it had struck him before that, it might still not have meant anything more than a reason to leave sooner.

Without so much as breaking contact between them Sol was walking Ky backwards through the door he'd just come out of – mercifully left open a crack – barely tearing himself away long enough to navigate them in the direction of the small hotel room bed. The Order uniform had approximately a hundred different complicated buckles and fastenings – a part of this process Sol had decidedly not missed, but one he'd gotten down to a fine art long ago, back when this was a regular occurrence. Ky's fingers fumbled over the buckle on his jacket, learning Sol's new outfit by touch and halting guesswork (this would shortly be the first time in years Sol had cause to regret adding so many belts to his pants). But it wasn't long before he was pushing the jacket back over Sol's shoulders and dropping his hands more efficiently to the belt Sol had sudden cause to be glad he hadn't changed since his Order days.

No matter how many years he might have spent lying to himself about whether he'd missed this it was ridiculous how easy it was to fall back into it like nothing had ever changed.

Whatever quota of desk-work was involved in Ky's new job, he hadn't let it do his physique one iota of damage; he was as familiar under his clothes as he'd been in them, body kept stubbornly at the peak of physical fitness down to the last muscle and sinew, not one new scar added to those Sol remembered (a little more faded now by time, but little enough to make no difference). Sol knew this body, still remembered what made it arch under his hands, how to make Ky moan and clutch at him with shaking fingers until he was inches away from climax – knew how to keep him there on the edge until they were both spent. How to prompt Ky to take his turn to go down on him without a word needing to be exchanged, and find out by doing so that Ky remembered all this just as well as he, could approach this with a passion and single-mindedness that none of the thousands of people who saw only his public face would have believed he could have in him. (That it was there at all was very probably Sol's fault anyway.)

It was probably stupid to stay afterwards long enough for them both to fall asleep, crowded into a bed hardly selected with more than one occupant in mind. But – or so he told himself – it would have taken a far bigger coward than him to leave.

Didn't matter how much he was going to regret this in the morning. Avoiding Ky never had done more than delay the inevitable. Five years had to be long enough.

***

There was no pleasant period of sleepy forgetfulness when Ky woke up the next morning – not even the nostalgia was nearly enough to let him believe for so much as a moment that they were back during the war again – when times could hardly have been described as 'better' but waking up next to Sol like this had been a relatively common occurrence, and frequently the most peace they'd be given by either the world or one another for the rest of the day. Of all the times he'd ever pictured meeting Sol again over the last five years – an event he'd known was inevitable from the day Sol left – this scenario had never crossed his mind. It was unlikely Sol could have caught him so utterly off-guard otherwise.

Beside him, Sol was stirring and sitting up, something Ky might have slept right through in the old days. It had been fairly typical once upon a time for him to be awake before Ky was but not bother rising until much later. Funny how the little things could bring the nostalgia on so much more than the big ones; so many memories he'd long since shelved away, never even recognising how many pages there were in that volume until it opened again. The memory closed down sharply as Sol got out of bed, back turned to Ky, and began the long search for wherever his pants had ended up.

The brush-off would have been more insulting if Ky had been expecting anything else. Finding Sol still here in the morning had been far more than he'd counted on already.

“What on Earth was that supposed to be?” he asked Sol's back. It felt uncomfortably like a question read from a script, but some mornings there was just no getting around it.

“Didn't hear you complaining,” said Sol, gruff in a way Ky would have called defensive on anyone else, a hit on a nerve Ky hadn't expected to be there. Could he really have been worried he was being accused of forcing what had happened on Ky?

It had been sudden. It had all been very sudden.

“All this time after you left us,” enough time and practice that Ky wasn't even thinking 'left me' anymore, small victories where he could get them, “you avoid every attempt I make to track you down, and now this?”

“It was that or fight. Which one do you call more civilised?”

“That's your only reason?” Ky wanted to laugh at him – laugh at both of them, coming to this. There'd been a time when he could have laughed at Sol and it would have been no more than childish mirth, but it would be a very different laugh today.

Shaking his head, he said, “You're only delaying the inevitable. We both came here for the same tournament. Sooner or later, we'll meet each other in the ring in combat, if not before.”

“Maybe,” Sol grunted, head disappearing under his singlet for a moment in the process of dressing. “Think you'll last that long?”

While it was a bit late to realise Sol had actually had rather more justification for dressing so quickly than avoidance alone, Ky would have given a lot to have been clothed and on his feet at that moment. “This is no game to me Sol, I came here for a reason. I will tell you now I have not the slightest intention of losing a match before I have the opportunity to face you as an opponent. And I have not the slightest intention of letting you defeat me either.”

Sol snorted and turned to face him properly for the first time since the conversation started, the look on his face straight from another page in Ky's nostalgia-volume, covered with scrawl about arguments on the edge of bloodied battlefields and too many days when dragging Sol to a deserted training hall only left him limping away humiliated. “You're going to beat me, boy? Five years isn't long enough for you to have forgotten that much.”

“On the contrary, Sol,” not even the uncomfortable suspicion he was indulging in little more than bluster could have stopped Ky now, “Five years is more than long enough for everything you thought you knew about me to have changed. I am hardly the same man who you remember. I have spared no effort to improve my skills in that time.”

Sol gave him a humourless grin that, more than anything else, proved that the full irony of them having this discussion while one of them was naked in a strange bed hadn't escaped him. “How's that working out now there's no war for you to lead?”

Ky glared at him with as much authority as he was in a position to muster. “The Holy Order and the Gears may be no more, but that has scarcely brought an end to the conflicts facing this world. I'm a member of the International Police Force now, and I see battle enough in the line of my work even in these peaceful days.”

In the search for his second shoe, Sol recovered Ky's pants out from the floor on his side of the bed, and tossed them at their owner. Ky snatched them from the air just short of his face, quietly grateful that Sol had enough pity not to make him spend what little dignity he had searching for his own clothes in the midst of this, despite a certain kneejerk embarrassment at losing sight of Sol even for a moment under the cover of a lot of white fabric.

The moment proved long enough for the last trace of humour to have leached from Sol's face.

“You come here just to fight me, Ky?”

“Of course not,” Ky bristled, caught by a sudden and painfully familiar paranoia dating from his teenage years that surely Sol would be able to hear how fast his heart was beating. “I didn't have the slightest idea you'd be here last night, did I?” If that was neglecting to mention the little voice in his head that always wondered whether his next mission was the one where he'd cross paths with Sol again, it was scarcely relevant. Pulling on his pants at last, he continued, “There's more at foot here than the revival of old rivalries.”

“When you're still wearing the uniform of an army that disbanded five years ago?”

Ky looked up sharply, feeling he'd lost track Sol's meaning completely. “Do you imagine this to be foolish sentimentality? Of course I wear this uniform today.” Or half of it, as the case might have been, but at least he was on his feet now without the self-consciousness of parading around naked. “This whole tournament was convened under the premise of selecting members for a new Holy Order – they seek to undermine the very pride and good name of the Order for purposes I cannot begin to imagine!”

“That what they told you?” Sol grumbled, reviving yet another old talent by dismissing all of Ky's concerns with hardly even a hand-wave. “Ch, figures.”

Ky narrowed his eyes. “I take it you were lured here under a different premise? But of course they did, it's hard to picture you of all people being first in line to join a second Order.”

“Musta been. Whatever you want to hear,” Sol muttered.

“Why are you here, Sol? What did you hear that make you come here?”

Sol made no reply.

“I have spoken with some of the other prospective competitors,” Ky offered. “Most seem to be under the impression the winner will have their greatest wish granted.”

“Who knows?” Sol snorted, which was good enough to be taken as a 'no'. “Something you got to wish for, boy?”

“Wishes...” Ky mused, shaking his head for what was very much not the first time since waking up today, “they always seemed like the most ridiculous nonsense. If something is worth having, a goal worth achieving, then it is to be achieved by one's own hard work, not by relying on miracles.”

The sound of Sol's footsteps crossing the short space to the doorway was the only warning he had to look up before Sol was at the door. “Save the preaching for the rest of these losers. Maybe you can go home early.”

“Do you realise that's the closest you've come to agreeing with me all morning?”

“Like old times,” Sol spat, and let the door slam closed behind him.

The impulse to run after him faded well before Ky had the rest of his uniform in order.

[Cable & Deadpool] Let Slip the Dogs of War - Epilogue 1

2009-10-07T14:52:46Z

Minus a crucial paragraph or two that mentioned the broader context, this was originally posted as a standalone piece for an unrelated prompt on the kink meme. (If anyone actually guessed Dogs of War was the larger story it was destined to be part of, I will be very impressed.)

Title: Let Slip the Dogs of War
Summary: Wade gets around to dealing with a little unfinished business. And he never does these things by halves.
Characters/Pairing: Cable/Deadpool
Chapter: Epilogue 1
Word Count: 1100
Rating: PG
Previous Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

Something colourful and papery went crunch under Cable's boot in the doorway to his quarters, but before he'd had the chance to investigate further, the sight of the room within had distracted him. For a split-second he was almost convinced he must have walked into the wrong room by mistake.

“Hel-lo sailor!”

Cable took a long, bemused look around what had been until this morning among the more spartanly furnished rooms on all of Providence, now redecorated to a point that defied conventional adjectives. The presence of Wade draped... expressively across his bed was probably the least incongruous feature.

“Wade?”

“Nuh-uh, today you can call me Wabio, mutant X-Man with the power of luuuurve!”

Cable decided now was not the time to remind Wade about his continued lack of X-Men membership.

In the two weeks that had elapsed since their return from Apocalypse's universe, Wade had spent most of his time sobbing happy tears at his reunion with his television (and renewed 24 hour access to every television program he'd ever proclaimed to hate), and getting in touch with the few friends who'd cared enough about him to come to his funeral (usually by leaping out at them wearing a white sheet and shouting 'Boo!') No further mention had been made of his stated intentions of taking 'a shot' at Cable by either party. Until now.

Clearly he should have taken Wade's silence on the subject as a warning.

“Are those Halloween candles?” he asked.

“Yeah, I was gonna get the regular kind with scented herby stuff and what, but these ones are way cooler.”

“I didn't think I'd ever live to see you buying Mickey Mouse merchandise.”

“Oh, that one – pretty lame now, but you just wait until his head's half-melted – he turns into this awesome zombie-alien-tentacle-Disney thing. That's what I call a Halloween candle.”

Cable gave the bed a long stare. “Are those really Deadpool-print silk sheets?”

“I know red's traditional but if we're already doing my favourite colour scheme I thought, why not go all out?”

“I'm just a little confused about all the confetti.”

“I was gonna get rose petals but this is more colourful. And crunchy! And if anyone tells you anything about some kind of explosion down in the florist district I wasn't even in the area, I swear!”

“The bow must have been tricky to tie from your angle.”

“Not when you can dislocate both wrists!”

“Though I notice you're at least still fully clothed.”

“Unwrapping your present's half the fun, right Nate?”

There was a short, awkward silence.

“I'm not being too subtle, am I?” asked Wade, body language, even through the mask, just the slightest bit nervous. “I know you come from that wacky future where stripping down in front of each other don't mean jack, so I wanted to be really sure we wouldn't be getting any messages mixed up...”

“No, Wade,” said Cable, smiling. “This is definitely the most effort anyone's ever made to seduce me. I'm oddly flattered.”

“Okay, but your tone is telling me – and I know I'm gonna wreck my whole reputation by not having a witty double-entendre to go with this – there's a 'but' coming.”

“But I have a teleconference with the UN scheduled in fifteen minutes.”

“Oh.” Sprawled on the bed with posture most people would have to break something to achieve, everything about Wade still found a way to droop. “You couldn't reschedule it for later or something?”

“With fifteen minutes' warning, not really.”

“You could tell them some horrible threat to mankind came up and you had to run off to help your fellow X-Men?”

“I don't particularly like the odds that none of them will check the veracity of a story about a threat to mankind.”

“Well. Fifteen minutes, we could still–”

“I'm going to need most of those minutes to prepare.”

“Oh.” Wade drooped even further. “Guess not then. But if it's just a teleconference, you could do that multitasking thing with the Infonet where–”

“I'm not quite up to that level of distributed concentration. You're thinking of Tony Stark again.”

“Better believe I wouldn't be thinking of Tony Stark if we were getting naked about now.”

“I'm sorry, Wade. You didn't pick the best time to spring this on me.”

Defeated, Wade gave up on draping altogether and curled up disappointed little ball on the bed. “Okay, but Nate, if the UN-thing is just your way of letting me down gently...”

“I'm free afterwards.”

“...then you... huh?”

“You'll have to give me a few hours,” Cable admitted, “international politics has a way of dragging out longer than scheduled – but after that, I've got a window free for the rest of the evening. I'm all yours.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Really really? Really seriously really?”

“I'm serious.”

Wade leapt off the bed with a whoop of joy, and for a couple of seconds Cable was treated to the odd experience of being kissed through Wade's Deadpool mask.

As Wade went cavorting around the room, happily singing something about having a 'personal GI Jesus', Cable reflected that it was going to be a very long teleconference.

“Wade?”

“...find out if you're a screamer, reach out and touch... yes?”

“I've now got nine minutes left. I'll come and find you when I'm done, alright?”

“Sure thing, Nate-baby! Oh my god, you're the best, Nate, wahoooooooo!”

The last vowel sound trailed away into the distance as Wade leapt out of the window, and danced happily away over the rooftop. Cable shook his head with a wry smile, looked around his quarters one more time, and opened a comm link.

“Irene? I'm going to need you to convey my apologies to the Argentinean trade delegation – the Avengers too. Something urgent has come up, I'm going to have to reschedule the rest of my meetings today.”

“X-Men urgent?” asked Irene, sounding, to her credit, not particularly surprised by the request.

“Not exactly. Also, I'm going to need you to have a cleaner sent up to my quarters while I'm at the teleconference.”

“A cleaner? Is this related to your 'urgent' thing? Oh god, don't tell me – Wade's involved, isn't he? Wait, I don't want to know.”

“Probably not,” replied Cable, and closed the link.

Epilogue 2

[Cable & Deadpool] Let Slip the Dogs of War - Part 8

2009-10-05T15:37:03Z

Since I've consitently forgotten to mention it so far, belated thanks are owed to velithya for finding time to get whole monster betaed for me (in between making last minute arrangements for spending a couple of weeks out of the country, even). <3

Title: Let Slip the Dogs of War
Summary: War wasn't telling the whole truth about what happened to the Deadpool of his universe.
Characters/Pairing: Cable/Deadpool, guest staring the New Avengers
Chapter: 8 / 8
Word Count: 2420
Rating: R
Warnings: Not explicit, but contains references to torture, non-con and assorted other Evil Overlord AU-related staples. Also: Contains Deadpool.
Previous Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

Understanding of what had just happened made its way gradually through Cable's body from the top down. After a few seconds it reached as far as his legs, and he had to sit down heavily before they gave out under him. Deadpool reloaded his gun and studied War carefully for any signs that outside forces like character popularity or publishing pressures might lead to a case of not-being-totally-dead.

“You okay, Nate?” he asked, gun still trained on War's body. Behind his usual flippancy was just a trace of real concern.

“You had me worried for while there,” Cable admitted.

Deadpool shrugged sheepishly. “Sorry 'bout that. Change of plan.” Cable shook his head half unbelieving, and laughed silently into his metal hand.

“Do you think we should we be burning the body?” suggested Deadpool, turning back to War. “Cutting his head off? Cutting all his bits off and burning them in different places? Maybe do some genetic checks to make really sure it's him and not some robot-clone-twin-thing? They could still invoke supernatural forces to bring him back whatever we do, but at least we can say we tried. It's the Summers-Grey family we're talking about here – you can't be too careful.” Wade appeared to think for a minute. “Or we could go the whole hog and lug him to the nearest nuclear testing site, but the writers would probably just take that as a cha-”

Deadpool cut off because Luke Cage's fist had just connected with his head. Spider-Man was only a second behind him, and quickly had Deadpool wrapped in enough web that he was almost spherical before he'd hit the ground.

Cable was back on his feet in an instant. “WAIT!” he hollered, stopping both of them in their tracks as sure as one of War's psychic commands.

“The hell?” Luke complained, freezing with a fist raised in mid air.

“War is dead!” Cable informed them, pointing at the body both Avengers had missed in their hurry to reach Deadpool. “Furthermore, dead at Deadpool's hands. He never betrayed us – I'm guessing,” he went on, turning to Deadpool, “what we just witnessed was no more than a performance to buy time while the virus took effect?”

“Aw, Nate, I knew you'd understand!” Deadpool practically wept. “Oh man, didn't you guys see me cap War? I have my most awesomely badass moment ever, and no-one saw?”

“We saw,” said Captain America, making his way to join them. With one arm he was supporting Tony Stark, who was leaning heavily on him, dressed only in his metallic under-suit and looking a little pale, but otherwise not too much the worse for wear.

“Cable's right,” he continued. “Cage, Spider-Man, stand down.”

Both the aforementioned swiftly came up with personalised varieties on the theme of relaxing while somehow coming to attention at the same time.

“And then perhaps Deadpool would like to explain to us all why he felt the need to deviate so far from the plan,” Cap finished.

“Hey, I had to!” Deadpool protested. “War called my bluff, like, the moment I showed up! I had to improvise!”

“Called your bluff?” Luke echoed.

“The part where I was going to pretend like I thought I could sneak in and kill him without being caught? Maybe you guys thought I was dumb enough to try it – ”

“It was your idea,” said Cable.

“Okay, maybe I thought I was dumb enough to try it. But War caught me the second I got there, and the first thing out of his mouth was, 'I hope you don't expect me to believe you're dumb enough to sneak in and try to kill me,' so I was like, 'No?' and then I had to think real fast 'cause...”

“I think we get the idea,” said Tony.

“It got me laid, didn't it?” said Deadpool, raising the general level of awkwardness in the area back up by several notches. “I told him I was selling you all out and he bought it.”

“Most of us bought it too,” said Cap, dryly.

“I couldn't have him reading the old plan out of your heads, could I? I had to keep you all so mad at me for turning traitor that no-one was going to think too clearly about what I was supposed to be doing with War.”

There was a short pause while the others digested all this.

“That made sense!” exclaimed Spider-Man, sounding faintly traumatised. “Should I be scared by how Deadpool's making sense? Wait, you mean you were telling the truth about triple crossing War?”

“Kinda?” said Deadpool. “I probably would've said it anyway, but it was mostly the truth.”

“Well done,” Cap pronounced, and if there was any strain to his sincerity you would have needed superpowers to identify it. “You've gone... far above and beyond the call of duty for us today.”

“Aw shucks, Cap,” piped Deadpool. “Sure I was mostly just doing it for revenge, and you did pull me out of his dungeon and all – well, most of me, but who's counting? Just hook me up with the Olsen Twins sometime and we'll call it even.”

“Wilson...”

“Oh, fine. But I have to get an honorary Avengers' Membership Badge out of this, right?”

There was yet another of those slightly-too-long pauses.

“I don't think we've got any,” Tony said diplomatically.

“Geez you guys drive a hard bargain – fine, I'll settle for Web-Boy over there untying me – got this thing about being tied down lately, you may be surprised to hear – plus full boasting rights. For the rest of ever.”

As Spider-Man hurried over to comply, the general mutterings among the Avengers came to the effect that while they themselves were never going to be admitting exactly how they defeated War aloud to any other party for the rest of their lives, no-one among them was going to begrudge him that.

***

The rest of the process of retrieving the components Cable needed was pleasantly uneventful. The fight with War collectively left them with nothing worse than a few burns and bruises and one sprained ankle (Tony's, and by far the most painful part was Deadpool's insistence on making constant damsel-in-distress jokes about it until the Avengers' remaining good will towards him ran very thin). They broke camp – a job mostly consisting of figuring out which of the equipment they'd brought was still salvageable – and walked the distance to War's fortress on foot. Constructed from blackened parts of what had once been Providence and before that Greymalkin, the interior remained familiar enough to give Cable little trouble finding them what they needed. The few living servants War kept about the place made no attempt to impede them.

***

By the time Tony Stark was down to the second last item on his list of crucial diagnostic checks to be run on the salvaged components before they left, Cable could feel the clock counting down. The best and worst thing about teleporting home was that it could be done on a dime – not more than seconds of prep time required, but he hadn't yet figured out how he was going to say goodbye. He was still pondering when Deadpool sidled up and took the matter off his hands.

“So,” Wade began, awkwardly, “this is it?”

“We've achieved everything we came here to do,” Cable replied, a trifle apologetic. “We can't justify staying much longer. This is it.”

Wade nodded and fidgeted a little. “So, the Wade from your world – how's he doing these days?”

It was a question Cable had been expecting ever since they arrived, so answering it was easier than it should have been. “The Wade in my world... died. A few months ago.”

It didn't get him quite the response he was expecting. Wade spent several seconds watching him like he was waiting for the punchline.

“But he came back to life, right?” Wade prompted. “Who hasn't done that, like, half a dozen times? We X-Men don't take death lying down!”

“No, Wade. You – he – didn't.”

“But that doesn't mean he won't – are you really sure? Was it one of those things where they (dumdumdum) never found the body? Maybe he's just got amnesia and he's lost up in the wastes of the Swiss Alps thinking he's a lumberjack or...”

“It wasn't like that, no.”

“Oh. Well. Did you find all the bits? Even the little ones? You're sure one of them isn't, y'know, growing back...”

“Wade, no,” Cable was realising it had been far too early to declare that this was going to be easy – or even achievable without dredging up far more of those memories than he had any desire to relive, “the reason you died – your healing factor wasn't working.”

“...but you do mean that in a 'but it could kick back in at the last second' kind of way?” Wade suggested hopefully.

The look on Cable's face shut him down.

“Oh. So, if the healing factor was on the fritz, then, uh, the cancer, it wasn't...”

“No, you made it very clear that no matter what happened, you weren't going to go that way. I tried to find a way to help you but we... weren't on the best terms, after the Civil War.”

Wade's expression was one of mixed disappointment and curiosity. “So how did I go?

“There was an explosion – on Providence.”

“Not the one where the US...”

“No, this was well before that. You were there. I think you were trying to make a point.” Cable paused. “Either that, or you got yourself caught in the blast by accident. I never found out which. The comm link cut out a few minutes too soon for me to hear the end of what you were trying to say.”

“Ouch. You mean I blew myself up again? That is just so me it's not even funny.... maybe a bit funny.”

“You did save Providence,” Cable offered. “The blast would have been much worse without the difference you made. We just never knew for sure whether that was deliberate or not either.”

“At least,” said Wade hopefully, “I probably went out a hero?”

“In every way that mattered.”

“And, are you really, really sure I'm not coming back?”

Cable hesitated. “There was something you said just before the comm link cut out – something about someone you were expecting to see again if the worst happened; you didn't mention a name. I don't know if that means more to you than it did to me.” He'd agonised over it afterwards longer than he had any rational excuse for, going over lists of every deceased acquaintance of Wade's he could uncover (including certain recently deceased elderly celebrities), but had never convinced himself that anyone among those names fit the bill.

Wade showed no sign of having any better luck. “That's weird, I can't think of anyone who that would be... wouldn't be him, couldn't be him...”

“You referred to them as a 'she', if that helps.”

Wade suddenly lit up. “Wait, she as in her? It would have to be if he's seriously down for the count at last, but damn. That's not so bad. That puts a whole different spin on things if the other me's with her.”

Wade trailed off, and Cable was just about to ask him to explain, when Wade asked, “So, you and the other me, you were never...?”

“We were never intimate.” We never got that far.

“Shame. Not that I'm not a little jealous of where he is, but that's a real waste... So basically,” Wade straightened, all that fidgeting and nervousness dissolving at once, “I've got to have a shot with you, right?”

During the several seconds Cable spent staring at him while his brain kept refusing to admit it had really heard what it had just heard, Wade took the opportunity to add, “He sure can't complain I'm muscling in on his territory, not where he is. Lucky bastard.”

“Wade, you...”

“And you're not going to tell me I can't come!” Wade snapped, stabbing a finger at Cable, “Piece of Providence gets blown up, you go find a new one no-one's using. Deadpool gets blown up, you go find a new one no-one's using! I could be your whole mission objective! And don't you even try convincing me you're from the one universe out there where you're too straight for that, because not even my life sucks that hard –”

“Wade,” Cable cut him off, and managed to get in a deep breath he badly needed. “After everything I put you through in this world, are you sure you want that?”

Wade gave a hunched sort of shrug. “I gave War a pretty bad rep, but it wasn't all bad. Always made time to torment me, never made me share him with other prisoners, and the sex was pretty good. Ah, who am I kidding, the sex was great. It's just that once in a while,” he went on, with some rather more emphatic hand gestures, “a guy wants to be able to say 'not tonight dear, I'm not in the mood' or 'I have a headache – y'know, from where the back of my skull just grew back' or 'hey, you know what, how 'bout we don't see if I bend that way?' Also call me unreasonable, but imprisonment and torture – that's a deal breaker for me.”

He gave Cable a nervous look. “I did mention the sex was good?”

“You did.” Cable was fighting off a lot of distracting mental imagery.

“Anyway,” said Wade, more confidently, stabbing that finger at Cable some more. “You need someone around to keep an eye on you and make sure you don't go the way War did, and I am the reigning expert on that stuff.”

Cable stared at him, six feet of scarred muscle in only slightly torn red and black spandex, suddenly made tangible and – obtainable, in a way he hadn't let himself see Deadpool since he arrived here, and realised just how ridiculous every objection he'd been about to make really would have been.

“You make a compelling argument,” he admitted, through the edge of a smile.

“And I didn't even have to shoot anyone! Aren't you proud of me?”

“Any objections?” Cable said, louder, addressing the rest of the room, who had all spent the last several minutes finding things on far walls to study intently, and thinking to themselves about distracting, unrelated topics so loudly you could almost hear them doing it.

And for once, the silence was nothing but welcome.

So, now I've gotten this far, this would be where I mention that although the main story's done, the 'X/8' chapter numbering thus far has probably been a bit misleading - because there are two epilogues still to go before I'm done with this 'verse. ;) Been seriously toying with the idea of writing up the missing scene between Deadpool and War between parts 5 and 6 as a side story too.

And if anyone with a bit of a longer association with Marvel canon than me would like to share their thoughts on a few canon related ponderings I've run into in the process of working on another fic, that would be totally awesome too.

ETA: Epilogue 1

Thinking too hard about fanfic again

2009-10-04T15:13:37Z

The ramblings below are going to be mostly about Cable and Deadpool/Marvel Comics, but if anyone who's completely unfamiliar with that fandom wants to throw in their two cents on broader canonical-accuracy-in-fanfic issues, please do join in. I'm in a discussion-y sort of mood.

With Let Slip the Dogs of War mostly done now (main story finished, epilogue two off to the beta reader) it's time to get working on the next idea that's sunk its little plot-snake fangs into me for this fandom. The only trouble with this particular idea is that it requires a lot of early scenes set in the early New Mutants/X-Force era – and that's a bit awkward, because outside of the Deadpool-related issues, I've read next to nothing from that part of the series, and only have a very vague understanding about who was around and what was going on. Since the whole idea depends on sending the timeline veering into AU territory I have leeway to fudge the details, but I'm not going to get very far without mentioning anything about the non-Cable-or-Deadpool characters and conflicts from around then. More importantly, I run the risk of putting off people who do know that part of the series well by getting things wrong.

Sure, most of the people likely to read it will probably be in the same boat as me – in it for C&DP, and interested in their earliest appearances mostly for backstory reasons, but I've been thrown out of fic myself before because a minor character I'd gotten myself attached to was acting wildly OOC. * I should be making at least a token effort not to make the same mistake.

So, yeah – in short, I'm stuck in that old fanfic question: just how well should you know canon before you can get away with writing about it?

When writing for a series like Marvel Comics, my general rule of thumb for this (ie, you should probably try to go through all the main source canon available for the series before you write much fic for it) just doesn't work. The total quantity of published work for the Marvelverse is insane – just keeping up with everything that happens in it on a monthly basis would be a job and a half. Many individual titles have issues going back to the '60s, if not much further (and even if they don't, there's probably at least one supporting cast member with important connections to a title that does). Most of them also include long periods where the quality of the writing rollercoasters around wildly, or which have since been retconned into oblivion. Even most of the professional writers Marvel employs probably haven't read half the canon out there (and a few make you wonder if they ever bothered to read material from a year ago...) Even for a really dedicated writer working in a universe that enormous, sooner or later the problem isn't going to be whether you know canon well enough, it's whether the plot elements you're referencing are so random and obscure that half your readers won't be familiar with them. Factor in that canon itself is so wildly and gleefully inconsistent, and not only is it virtually impossible to get yourself up to date with everything in canon, there's really not much point.

The part that matters to this fic, the New Mutants/X-Force era, is a much more limited subset, of course, but outside of the Deadpool-related issues (few and far apart), I don't have access to many of those comics – nor, to be honest, much interest in going out of my way to track them down. The writing's not terrible – I wouldn't be writing in that era at all if there was nothing that caught my interest – but we're talking a lot of Liefeld art, and there's a limit to how much I want to put my eyeballs through. This is canon so early that even the writers are still figuring out who the characters are, everything we're told about them can and probably will be contradicted later.

As for what I have gathered about that part of the series... well. Cable's playing mentor to a bunch of mutant kids called the New Mutants/X-Force. Active bad guys include Stryfe, who will at some point turn out to be Cable's evil clone from the future, and Tolliver, who Deadpool's working for, and who will at some point turn out to be Cable's evil son from the future. Cable gets back together with Domino, who later turns out to have really been Deadpool's shape-shifter ex-girlfriend Copycat posing as her while the real Domino was held captive by the bad guys. Other characters include Siryn, who I know mostly from when she not-quite-dated Deadpool, Cannonball, who may or may not be immortal, Riktor and Shatterstar, who finally came out of the closet lately (much to fandom's glee and Liefeld's horror), and a few extras like Kane, who by odd coincidence was both on Cable's old Six Pack team and in the Weapon X program at the same time Deadpool was. In short, it's pretty much one big soap opera about people with superpowers. **

And even with that much, we've got bizarre retcons and contradictions cropping up: because unless there's some major mitigating factor I'm missing, Tolliver sent both Deadpool and Copycat in to infiltrate the New Mutants/kill Cable at the same time, so that Copycat shows up, posing as Domino, just in time to shoot Deadpool in the back. Unless Tolliver is crazier than the Joker, this makes no sense whatsoever. Unlike the writers at the time, I'm not going to have the luxury of glossing over that particular plothole without dealing with it – so me and canon are already looking at each other sideways at this point.

Also keep in mind that if current canon ever does reference any of these events again, odds are half the awkward details will be delivered with enough spin to make them fit the current status quo, if not retconned right out of existence.

Even with that in mind, I do still feel like I should probably make an effort to show some respect for that era of the series if I'm writing fic based on it. On the other hand, if most of the people who are reading have even less interest in that part of canon than me, is it really worth the bother? And on a third hand, since the whole point of the story involves turning the timeline on its head, should I worry about any of this at all?

So here's where I throw this out there for discussion – are there a lot of people in C&DP fandom who have a lot invested in Cable's earlier misadventures? Are there any particular issues or summaries I should be looking at in particular? Or is that all going to pale into insignificance as long as I can guarantee that the fic's going to involve C&DP getting it on at some point?

* I've been thrown out of professionally published comics for the same reason. Alas, such is the nature of the medium, le sigh.
** Totally different from Marvel today, of course. *cough*

[Cable & Deadpool] Let Slip the Dogs of War - Part 7

2009-10-01T12:13:54Z

Title: Let Slip the Dogs of War
Summary: War wasn't telling the whole truth about what happened to the Deadpool of his universe.
Characters/Pairing: Cable/Deadpool, guest staring the New Avengers
Chapter: 7 / 8
Word Count: 2280
Rating: R
Warnings: Not explicit, but contains references to torture, non-con and assorted other Evil Overlord AU-related staples. Also: Contains Deadpool.
Previous Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

The first to react was Luke Cage. “You sick motherfucker!” he yelled at the top of his lungs and launched himself at Deadpool before War had even reached full view. Inches away, he froze in mid-air and was thrown flying as if he weighed no more than a baseball. War lowered his hand.

“Hey!” Deadpool protested. “I could have taken him!”

“You can play with him later,” said War, as all of Tony's proximity alarms began wailing at once. “I want to savour this moment. The rage, the betrayal – in all of their minds – such a pity you cannot enjoy it likewise.” War laughed aloud. “You truly gave none of them the slightest notion of what they had in store, did you?”

“Wade,” yelled Cable, horror in his every feature, “what have you done?”

“Preeeeetty much just what it looks like, Nate,” Deadpool called back. “'S called 'being a backstabbing bastard', but we experts like to call it 'siding with the winning team'.”

“Like looking back in time,” mused War, meeting Cable's eye, though the comment was directed more at Deadpool. “To think I was ever so foolish as to believe you could be tamed with no more than sentimentality and good will.”

“So Nate, you are gonna, like, run and fight and stuff instead of just flopping around like a beached fish, right?” said Deadpool, waving his gun. “'Cause thanks to you guys I finally got the leverage I needed to get War here to let me out, but I haven't had a whole lot of exercise lately and I'm feeling the need to do something kinda special to celebrate.”

The change in Cable's face was short and terrible, shock giving way to rage line by line, teeth clenching in time with his fists. Cable's gun was in his hands and levelled at Deadpool almost too fast to see – but barely a split-second faster, a glob of webbing hit Deadpool right in the mouth. Spider-Man wasn't far behind it.

“Grmmmmph!” exclaimed Deadpool, flailing backwards. Two bullets passed harmlessly through the space Spider-Man had occupied slightly too many seconds before and landed in the rubble beyond. War rolled his eyes.

“Hey Deadpool, I'm sure you hear this a lot,” said Spider-Man, following the first stream of webbing with a second, “but no-one has ever wanted you to shut up as much as I do right now.”

“Mmph!” Flailing turned into a tumble turned into a crazily gymnastic back-flip and ended with a catlike three-point landing. Somewhere in the process, whether more by method or madness, he moved far enough that Spider-Man's shot went over his shoulder without connecting. With some effort, Deadpool wrenched the webbing off his face, taking a lot of his mask with it.

“What the hell, Spidey?” he complained. “Me and Cable were having a moment there, do you mind?”

“Are you kidding, that was me doing him a favour!” said Spider-Man. “Friends don't let friends fight drunk. Or when it's so personal they can hardly see straight.”

“Aw, Cable's your friend now?”

Spider-Man looked back guiltily. “Considering I just left him to deal with War on his own, I don't know if he's going to see it that way...” The sentence ended a wall away from where it began; the first wall ended up far richer in lead for the meagre crime of offering Spider-Man a few seconds of support.

“Okay, new rule,” said Deadpool crossly, leaning down on both his triggers at once. “Spider-sense is out of bounds or I'm telling War you're not playing fair.”

“How do you even say 'playing fair' without exploding from hypocrisy? Serious question!”

“Don't suppose I could convince you I'm planning on triple-crossing War any second now?”

Deadpool dodged the stream of webbing before it reached him, but not all his equipment was as lucky.

“Yeah,” said Deadpool, trying and failing to extract his second-favourite gun from where it was now webbed to the side of a building. “I wouldn'a believed me either.”

***

After the third beam from Cable's gun dissipated harmlessly against War's telekinetic shield, he gave up wasting battery power. Weighing his other options just didn't turn up anything better.

War watched with dry amusement. “This is what you're reduced to. How the mighty have fallen – I might be disappointed – had I not so long fantasised that some day I might show my prior self the depths of his foolishness. For that, you'll suffice.”

Captain America's shield actually made it within a foot of War's body before it halted in mid-air, but that was probably just War showing off.

“Captain, good of you to join us,” said War, looking over his shoulder so that one glowing eye stared Cap right in the face, “and I must say, looking much better than when than when last we met. The sight of your mangled body at Apocalypse's feet is one I have long savoured, but to claim the privilege of finishing you myself will easily surpass it.”

“We came here to correct our failings in this world,” Cap yelled, “not repeat them!”

“Don't I warrant so much as the infamous Avengers' battle cry?” War laughed. “Or does that become somewhat trite when you're the last to arrive – when you find yourself reduced to ambushing your opponents? Come now – tell me how much I'm going to regret this. Offer me the chance to surrender. Or at the very least...” The shield rotated vertically in the air, blocking both of Iron Man's repulsor beams before they could get any closer, “...verbalise that instruction to 'fire now' you're thinking at your comrade so very hard.”

The voice distortion of Iron Man's helmet did little to muffle the sound of him screaming as every piece of armour was torn from his body, the human within tossed ragdoll-like to the ground. War turned his attention briefly to the building beyond, and the alarms coming from within shut off abruptly to the sound of metal and wire twisting in on itself. Cap and Cable could only watch in horror.

“Not so threatening without it, are we, Stark?” War crowed. “I've heard tell you built your first suit from no more than spare parts in a desert cave. Shall we see what you can do here, left to your own devices for a month? For two?”

The shield twirled again and flew – right back at its owner. Cable moved to intercept, and succeeded only in taking the blunt of the blow to his metal arm, the clang of organic metal on vibranium alloy piercing enough to echo for miles. Cap leapt after the shield as it ricocheted away and caught it before it could land, only to feel it wrenched upwards in his grasp by an irresistible force. His grip held, but he was left dangling uselessly in mid-air, War's hold on the shield too strong.

“Truly, words cannot express my gratitude to you all,” said War, “Just as this world was becoming tiresome – its last echo of resistance crumbling beneath my heel – here you are. What better means could Wade have found to prove his loyalty than by handing me the Avengers? And to show my appreciation, I am going to make this last. I shall take the greatest of pleasure in hunting you down, one by one.”

“War – Nathan!” yelled Cap, and War twitched at the sound of his human name. “We know this is Apocalypse talking. Not you!”

“Well, at least you joined in for the chorus,” mused War, dryly. “But the tune grows old. The debt I owe to Apocalypse is more than I can repay, but to reduce me to no more than his mouthpiece? You have no idea how far you fall from the truth.”

With a frantic wrench from Cap the shield came free, both weapon and owner suddenly suspended by nothing more than air. Cap landed on his feet with little more than a grunt, and with a roar of battle he charged War, shield in hand.

“Captain,” said War, holding him off at arm's length with little effort, “I had hoped your men might offer me at least a diverting challenge, but the belief you can distract a psion with a frontal charge is...” War broke off, hesitating as something registered in the psychic equivalent of peripheral vision.

Thrusting Cap away from him, War moved almost too late to avoid a glowing blade that had pierced straight through his shield. The weapon caught him on his right shoulder, the armour offering little resistance against it, but it barely more than grazed the skin beneath before War had caught the shaft with his other hand. Cable glared at him from across the blade, gripping the weapon double-handed, every muscle straining to move against War's influence.

War dropped his gaze to examine what he'd caught, eyebrows raising just a little as he identified it. “A new psimitar? Now that is inspired. I'd go so far as to extend the compliment, had you not just used a weapon made to amplify latent psionic ability...” War's voice rose to a roar even as his grip on the psimitar tightened, “against a psion a million times your power!”

The entire length of the psimitar glowed, and Cable had just time to give a yell of pain before War wrenched it from his grasp altogether. He took a moment to appreciate the make of the weapon, then cast it aside. The psimitar came to rest several feet above the ground, well out of anyone's reach, and hung there.

War's grin was vicious as he approached where Cable lay, defiant but half-stunned and left trying to pick himself up on his forearms, hands raw and steaming. A half-gesture from War – not quite mimicry of grabbing an opponent by front of his shirt – took over the job for him, dragging Cable upwards. War rose with him, high enough to give himself height advantage even as Cable's feet dangled above the ground.

“Already done? What a shame,” said War. “Shall I finish you myself? Or shall I call Wade over to do the honours?”

Cable twitched at the name, and his teeth ground. War smirked, pleased by the response.

“I haven't forgotten meeting your Wade, you know. A shame our acquaintance was cut so short. How do you suppose he will celebrate when you do not return?”

Suspended by the front of his shirt and head thrown back, Cable could do nothing but laugh silently through clenched teeth, beyond caring what War might read from his mind – half-mad gallows-humour of the condemned.

“Really?” said War. “How tragic. Do you still believe it was the humanity – the weakness – within him that called to you? Even now?”

And there Cable's head snapped back upright, human eye blazing almost as bright as the other.

“You have the – the nerve to speak of weakness when you gave in to the tyrant I dedicated my life to defeating?” Cable seethed. “Was it so easy to forget – how many years have we fought? How much have we sacrificed? All for what, to become the very thing we hated most? You accuse me of weakness?”

But War's grin only widened. “In the single day you've been here, hasn't it occurred to you to wonder where my lord and master” War spat the words, “has been? Apocalypse is no more.”

War paused to dedicate his full attention to the reaction his pronouncement created; and Cable's eyes widened as the meaning of his words sank in.

“As I told your Captain,” War went on, “I owe Apocalypse a great debt – the freedom, the release, you cannot even imagine – and what better way to thank him than to demonstrate how far I have surpassed him? I succeeded where you failed, because you were not prepared to sacrifice enough.”

Cable stared at War in disbelief. “Millions of lives,” he breathed, “all to become the very thing you struggled against?”

“Millions were only the beginning. In thanks for this power I would gladly sacrifice far more – starting,” War gloated, raising a hand, “with my own.”

Following War's statement several things happened in quick succession. Cable realised, to his confusion, that his feet were touching the ground again, and War was sinking, making the same realisation as Cable a few seconds later.

The next thing was the sound of a high-pitched beeping noise, as a small device which had gone on happily flashing its lights even after being thrown from Cable's lap finally found something to report. The noise served as little more than a wildly inappropriate backing track to the sight of something the armour covering War's left arm could no longer contain beginning to writhe like a mass of snakes as the effects of the Façade Virus – at long last – took hold.

War's telepathy lasted just long enough to give him an explanation that was no comfort whatsoever.

“YOU!” he roared, the fingers of his metal hand closing around Cable's neck before the latter regained enough equilibrium to defend himself; but his movements were halting, the grip not nearly so strong as it would have been had motor control not been so rapidly escaping him.

Cable reacted on automatic, both hands closing on War's arm despite the pain of the burns, too shocked to decide which out of the hand or the horribly familiar tendrils of unconstrained T.O. mesh was the greater threat.

“Hey Nate,” said someone neither had noticed approaching them. Both 'Nates' looked up in unison.

Deadpool had a gun in his hand, and the sweet glow of victory in his eyes.

“Wishing we'd talked about safewords now?” he crowed, and emptied the entire clip of bullets into War's head.

Part 8

[Cable & Deadpool] Let Slip the Dogs of War - Part 6

2009-09-28T13:40:20Z

Finally up to the new parts!

Title: Let Slip the Dogs of War
Summary: War wasn't telling the whole truth about what happened to the Deadpool of his universe.
Characters/Pairing: Cable/Deadpool, guest staring the New Avengers
Chapter: 6 / 8
Word Count: 1600
Rating: R
Warnings: Not explicit, but contains references to torture, non-con and assorted other Evil Overlord AU-related staples. Also: Contains Deadpool.
Previous Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

The mood after Deadpool left was sombre. The idea of this mission being a chance to do some 'real Avenging' after months of mind-numbing politics and internal conflicts seemed more ironic by the minute. Teleporting themselves to a parallel universe to steal an irreplaceable piece of technology had been hard enough to get past their consciences as appropriate behaviour for the world's most prominent superhero team. Relying on what amounted to germ-warfare had been no better. Being forced to depend on the help of someone like Deadpool was just as questionable, and now that it had come to sending one of their number to (literally) get in bed with the enemy, the whole experience had come to bear more resemblance to an uncomfortable metaphor for everything they'd been trying to avoid back home than the welcome reprieve it was meant to be.

When Luke Cage got sick of this and decided he wanted a word with Cable, the latter was sitting alone on the camp perimeter. The spot he'd picked sat a pointed thirty degrees diverged from the place where Deadpool had given them all a jaunty wave and taken off towards War's fortress, but there was no hiding where his thoughts lay. Every now and then his eyes drifted to a device in his lap that was programmed to set off an alarm as soon as the virus spread far enough through War's system for it to detect the signature of destabilising T.O. mesh. So far it had made not so much as a warning beep, but this soon no-one would have expected anything else.

Luke took a seat next to him and made himself comfortable. Cable made no comment either for or against this unexpected company.

“Couldn't help but notice you didn't seem all that surprised by what your evil twin had been doing with 'Pool,” said Luke.

Cable gave him a sideways look. “Is this leading into a question about my sexual preferences?”

“Like whether they're wide enough to include mouthy, ugly and batshit insane?”

“They stop a long way short of imprisonment, rape and torture, if that's what you're worried about.”

“What I'm worried about is whether there's something going on that might've made you bit too quick to trust him to carry off that crazy plan. Rest of us never woulda considered it if you hadn't been for it.”

“Cage,” said Cable, evenly, “I just sent a close, personal friend – who has already suffered months of abuse at the hands of an alternate version of myself – off to suffer yet more abuse, under the questionable justification of 'the greater good'. Believe me when I say that any deeper feelings I might ever have experienced for any version of Deadpool did not make that any easier.”

Cage scratched his neck, not fully convinced but forced to accept that as a perspective he'd missed on the subject.

“If you're accusing me of bias on this matter,” Cable went on, somewhat less comfortably, “then you should be more concerned that I haven't become so determined to see War defeated as to be willing to contemplate any means, no matter the morality of it.”

Cage appeared to consider this. “Seeing yourself warped that far,” he offered, “would be hard not to take that personally.”

Cable's mouth flattened in a manner that bore little semblance to a smile. “Before we left, Captain America asked me point-blank how much of my motivation for this expedition came from my own sense of responsibility for the crimes committed by my alternate self. I admitted to him that played a very real part. Knowing that there's a version of myself like War only a thin wall away from our reality has been preying on my mind for some time.”

Cage shrugged. “Hate to say it, but shit like this happens to the best of us in this business.”

“And what is that but a sign that we don't take enough responsibility for it? The last year has shown us all too well how easily the public opinion can be shifted against people like you and me. But that's beside the point. I've tried to be realistic about my bias with regards to this mission, but I assured Captain America I hadn't let it overrule my better judgement on the risks we'd be taking. His response was to tell me – after a certain amount of argument on tangential topics – he hoped that was true. There's a part of me that's still hoping the same. We've crossed a number of lines just by coming here, and I don't know whether what we've just done crosses one too many.”

“Summers, every one of us has been wondering which side of the line we're on every day since this whole damn registration mess raised its ugly head. If we imagined this job was gonna be any simpler that's just to show how screwed up our lives have been lately. In the meantime, the rest of us have still gotta worry whether Deadpool's gonna pull this off or screw up and give the whole game away.”

Cable gave a wry smile. “I'd be foolish to imagine there isn't a very real danger he's going to screw it up. But his odds of success are still much better than any other means to infect a powerful telepath with a slow-acting virus without his knowledge, let alone our odds of defeating him without the virus. It may not say much that I trust Deadpool more than the rest of you, but he's the best hope we've got. And Spider-Man,” he added, “just because I'm no longer telepathic doesn't mean I haven't noticed you eavesdropping back there.”

“I wasn't eavesdropping!” Spider-Man protested. “I was waiting for a good time to join the conversation!”

“You both realise the ideal time to raise all these objections would have been before Wade left, don't you?” said Cable, sounding tired.

“It slipped my mind!” Spider-Man insisted. “I was too busy trying not to picture anything involving him and War to remember it! But right before that meeting, Deadpool was saying all this stuff that sounded like really bad news!”

“That sounds like Wade,” Cable observed.

“No, really bad news!” Spider-Man reiterated. “War wasn't keeping him down in the dungeon full time, he'd been taking him out to kill people!”

“He what?” said Cable, head snapping up sharply.

“Son of a bitch,” Cage exclaimed. No-one thought to ask who exactly he was referring to.

“I'm not talking about just making him watch either, Deadpool was joining in. He was telling me all about it!”

“Peter,” said Cable, dangerously, “if there are any details you're glossing over...”

“Deadpool thought it was part of some kind of Stockholm-brainwashing thing,” Peter explained. “Y'know, bad treatment to wear him down, then rewards promised for good behaviour, where good behaviour meant slaughtering innocent people on command. He didn't sound thrilled about doing it, but he reckoned as long as War would've killed them whether he helped or not, it didn't matter. Deadpool may be morally challenged on a good day, but how do we know the reprogramming didn't work?”

Cable's mouth had become thin, hard line. He didn't immediately respond.

Cage raised his eyebrows. “You still happy with your stance on how far to we should be trusting the guy?”

“I... don't know,” Cable admitted. “His hatred for War – that much I don't doubt, but if War has that much influence over him... I worry we don't know even the beginning of what War's put him through, or how much damage it's done.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “I wish I'd come sooner.”

“Aw, that's real sweet, Nate,” said a gravely voice. “But last I checked, the exchange rate on wishes was still pretty fucking miserable. Check back next month.”

Everyone turned. Deadpool was crouching on a tall heap of rubble, just beyond the nominal camp perimeter.

“Wade?” said Cable, startled. “You're back? Did you...” A glance at the device in his lap showed that it continued flashing the lights that showed it was functioning, but it remained stubbornly silent.

The second warning sign was the state of Wade's costume. Gone were the tell-tale gaps left where the fabric had failed to regenerate along with his hands and feet; the suit he now wore was clean and new. While Deadpool had left armed with only a single, modestly-sized gun loaned from Cable, he'd come back armed to the teeth, two guns on his belt and his customary twin katanas strapped to his back. In a world like this one, the possible sources where Deadpool could have acquired armaments like that was heavily limited, and the only probable option was one Cable did not want to consider.

“Yeah, 'bout that,” said Deadpool, unholstering a gun and levelling it casually at the Avengers, “Sorry guys. Change of plan.”

Before anyone could make up their minds how to respond, the armoured monstrosity of War was levitating up behind Deadpool in all his glory, grinning a grin that glowed with bloodlust and power.

“Hard to believe, coming from him, isn't it?” he said to the Avengers, an eerie trace of fondness in a voice that promised murder with every other syllable, “For once in his life, Wade has managed to be guilty of understatement.”

Part 7

Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days - Living down to every expectation

2009-09-24T14:52:38Z

Despite a lot of objections from me about how we're only going to encourage Squeenix if we keep giving them money for this crap, pinneagig ordered in the Japanese version of Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days a little while ago to see how it held up against our first impressions. Neither of us were very surprised when the game proved to be every bit as bad as we'd feared. If anything, it found a number of ways to be worse – the finished product is frankly so bad it doesn't deserve a full review. Xion* is every bit as Sue-ish as we could tell she was going to be, swiftly takes over very nearly the entire plot of the game, and yet never once gives us any useful new insight or development of any character we actually care about. There's very little point going through all the specifics; though pinneagig's own review includes a full Sue-tally summary of all Xion's worst achievements, which really needs to be seen to be believed.

* In my sole attempt to maintain something remotely approaching journalistic neutrality, I am going to be good and try very hard not to call her Xarmy for the rest of this post.

One thing we did have wrong from the trailer was the impression that Xion was someone supposed to be Kairi's 'other' Nobody, but the reality is even less sensical: she's a 'clone' of Sora/Roxas, created by the Organisation by out of something-about-Sora's-lost-memories-mumble-something because they apparently needed an extra keyblade user taking out Heartless. Later, it turns out they didn't need her that much after all, and with Sora on his way back that's about it for her. At the end of the game, she transforms into a seriously creepy Heartless-monster which for some reason wears Sora's clothes, fights Roxas and finally dies tragically in his arms. The end implications that Roxas left not so much to find Sora as because of Xion – and worse, that Riku's confusion on meeting Roxas was because Roxas reminded him of Xion rather than Sora – are nothing short of insulting to anyone who played KHII. Her entire contribution is to give chronically angsty characters yet another thing angst about, and repeat Roxas' story almost verbatim, give or take a sex change. You could remove her from the series altogether and lose nothing of consequence at all.

Even the non-Xion related aspects of the game are painfully lacking in redeeming moments. As I said in my trailer impressions, at first glance I had reasonable hopes for a game like Days – done properly it could be a chance to flesh out Org 13 a bit, let us in on how they spend their downtime and maybe develop the story of how Roxas came to leave them and go hunting for Sora in a bit more detail. Well, it turns out that all the Organisation did in their downtime was kill lots of Heartless, so as to collect all those hearts they're so keen on. Virtually all the gameplay in Days consists of Roxas being sent on missions to one world after another and instructed to kill a bunch of Heartless before he's allowed to come home, after which he, and Axel and/or Xion all have ice cream together on the clocktower in Twilight Town. That's pretty much the whole game. Proper cutscenes with the rest of the Organisation happen sporadically, including the occasional important event like the Chain of Memories plotline (interspersed with lots of Xion-related angst) but do little to interrupt the tedium. Even the ice cream scenes we loved so much in KH2 quickly get old to the point of being physically painful. The battle system is nothing to write home about either. Abilities are equipped in a grid that fits together like a badly-designed tetris puzzle, and can't be re-equipped mid-level if you've done a bad job, adding an extra level of frustration to a lot of endlessly boring combat sections.

The whole game is painfully analogous to Crisis Core – unnecessary, poorly thought out, and overly dependent on Sue/Stu characters or villains to fill a minor plot-hole in a previous game with more backstory than the narrative had the space to accommodate. Only worse, because for all its faults, CC at least had a likeable main character and enjoyable combat. Days can't even boast that much.

(As a quick side-note before anyone launches into Nomura-bashing for giving us such a lemon of a game, I just want to point out that as variable in quality as some of his work is, the man has lately been dividing his attention between about six games at once and the main culprit for the plot is instead apparently the author of the KH novelisations (which I've otherwise heard decent things about – go fig). I'm not saying Nomura's blameless, but, well, for all I know he drew a few pics, signed off and fell asleep on a pile of Versus XIII storyboards. It takes a team effort to deliver a game this bad.)

The game's just not worth analysing any further, but it's gotten me into the mood for overanalysis, so instead I'm going to head off on a bit of a tangent about Sues in the KH-verse, because that way I get to talk about some of the characters I don't hate. You see, one thing that did strike us during the very first rounds of Xion-bitching is that complaining about her Sue-ish tendencies was maybe a bit disingenuous considering that I've been affectionately referring to Sora as the Intergalactic Mary Sue From Hell for ages. I mean, think about it – the guy spends most of his time flying from one barely-reinvented Disney world to the next, making friends and helping save the day. That's pretty much textbook Sue activity, and yet I like Sora. A lot. So what makes the difference?

It's a lot of factors, but the main one (for us at least) is that Sora manages to be endearing despite his Sue-ish tendencies, rather than being defined by them alone. It's not hard to see what Squeenix and Disney were trying to do with the KH series – Sora is very much born from the childhood fantasy we all had at some point of getting to travel to the worlds of all those Disney movies (or whatever else our favourite story might have been as a kid) and make friends with our favourite characters. But for me personally, and an impressively large number of other KH fans who've variously outgrown Disney or otherwise become disillusioned the company over the years, this is not a selling point. In fact, quite a bit of disgust at the idea of playing 'a Disney game' kept us from getting into the series at all for years. Sora does also get to cosy up to a lot of Final Fantasy characters, which is a whole lot more up our fanservice alley, but what played the biggest part in getting us to finally give the game a chance was the realisation that the KH series had some likeable new characters, and a really good story. Not to mention gorgeous graphics and enjoyable gameplay, but characters and plot will always be my one big weakness.

This is not so much true of KH1, which is best described as a bit of brainless fun, but by Chain of Memories the story was genuinely involving me, and KHII blew me away – the leap in storytelling between the two main games is so big it verges on emotional discontinuity. And while I didn't have much opinion on Sora in KH1, by KHII I loved him to bits. He's in many ways the stereotype of the dumb, well-intentioned hero – chosen by destiny for the usually arbitrary 'strength of the heart'-type characteristics. But his stupidity rarely hits the point of being offensive – by KHII, he's being allowed to give good advice and make good calls (see, for example, his efforts to get Hercules out of his emo-phase, or his justified reluctance not to trust the parrot). Sora's been dealt a rough hand – torn from his home, separated from his friends, dumped with the weight of the universe on his shoulders – and just when he thought it was over and he could go home, sent straight back into the fray for another round. And yet he never complains about the unfairness of his lot, and rarely takes more than a few glum moments here or there to angst about it. No matter how many worlds he visits or how many friends he makes, he never loses his sense of wonder, never makes you doubt he genuinely cares about each of them, but never long loses sight of his own goal of finding those two really important friends he grew up with again. Sora, in short, is a good person, but without becoming so perfect he becomes unbelievable. A few Sue-ish traits can't even make a dent in that.

Xion, alas, is not nearly so inoffensive.

Whereas Sora may have been born from childish fantasies of meeting fictional characters and having fun, Xion is the kind of Sue people start writing when the crushing angst of puberty is upon them. She exists not to meet wonderful people, help them out and have fun, but to be told by all the good guys what a wonderful special little snowflake she is, and victimised by everyone else to make the us feel sorry for her. The story is no longer about how wonderful all the worlds she's experiences are, it's about how wonderful she is. This is narcissism of a far less innocent kind. To add insult to injury, unlike Sora, innocently Sue-ing himself into a bunch of old AU Disney movies, Xion is Sue-ing herself into a series I genuinely enjoy – and that usually has far better writing than that.

There are two more characters from the KH series who sometimes get accused of Sue-ism: Roxas and Namine, and the accusations aren't entirely unfounded. Both are, pretty much by definition, pale shadows of established characters (Sora and Kairi respectively), introduced to the series well after most of the main cast with a heavy side order of angst about how neither were 'meant' to exist at all. For which matter, the entire plotline revolving around the Nobodies of CoM and KHII was not so much as foreshadowed in the first game, and when I initially heard about this (surprisingly humanoid and frequently prettyboy) new group of enemies I was initially a little skeptical that, with so much left unresolved from KHI, the producers might be adding one plot element too many. On this point I can only say I was proven happily wrong. Roxas and Namine manage to just squeeze in under the same category.

Out of the two of them, accusations of Sue-ishness probably suit Namine best, who not only has to be rescued princess-style from the badguys and is heavily implied to have at least a bit of a thing for Sora, she quite literally rewrites Sora's history to accommodate herself as a long-forgotten childhood friend. What redeems her is that Namine is that she's really no more than an innocent pawn, being used by the real badguys to manipulate Sora, and the inherrent falseness of everything she's doing to him is pretty much the entire point of it. She's ultimately not so much a real Sue as a cautionary tale to show what's wrong with Sues, and, like Sora, she's endearing enough that I love her anyway. (And I have to say, when you see that page from the otherwise crack-tastic CoM manga of all four of them on the beach together – Sora, Riku, Kairi and Namine – you know it's a lie but it's still so cute that goddamn, you want it to be true.)

When it comes to Roxas, who takes over from Sora as main character in the early part of the game, it's worthwhile keeping in mind that not everyone playing KHII will have played KHI, so there's real practical value to starting the player off with a character who's as unfamiliar with The Story So Far as many of the players will be. Roxas also ties into events from the previous games (Sora's transformation into a Heartless and memory loss) enough to have some point in proceedings. More importantly, he never comes close to taking over the plot – after the introductory sequence, he's seen again only barely long enough to give his story some needed resolution.

The real shame of Days might be that after such a long history of giving us characters with a few Sue-ish traits but enough redeeming features to make them likeable, they've gone and gotten it so very wrong in the latest instalment. There is nothing to Xion the series hasn't done before. She's a Nobody (Roxas, Namine) Organisation member (Roxas, etc), created by a slightly more unusual method than normal (Namine) by some kind of cloning process (the Riku Replica), connected to Sora (Roxas) and Kairi (Namine), connected to Sora's memory loss (Roxas, Kairi, Namine) and ulimately screwed into non-existence by a combination of Organisation disinterest and Sora's return (Roxas). In short, she's a female Roxas, with a couple of other overused character traits thrown in for flavour. Oh yeah, and a whole lot more angst.

'Cause lord knows what Org 13 always needed was more angst amiright?

In better news, now that Days is out we're finally getting some new news on Birth by Sleep, which continues to look much more promising. But they had so better have a better explanation for Ven's connection to Roxas than what they served us with Xion, that's all I'm saying. >(

[Cable & Deadpool] Let Slip the Dogs of War - Part 3-5

2009-09-23T10:20:04Z

Second and last part of the catch-up posts for this story.

Title: Let Slip the Dogs of War
Summary: War wasn't telling the whole truth about what happened to the Deadpool of his universe.
Characters/Pairing: Cable/Deadpool, guest staring the New Avengers
Chapter: 3-5 / 8
Word Count: 4880
Rating: R
Warnings: Not explicit, but contains references to torture, non-con and assorted other Evil Overlord AU-related staples. Also: Contains Deadpool.
Previous Parts: Part 1, Part 2

III.

They made camp in a half-ruined building in the city outside. There were plenty to choose from.

It might have been for the best that he'd had no warning they were going to find Deadpool alive, Cable reflected. There was nothing he could have done to prepare himself that would have helped. Confronting as it was to be faced with the reality of exactly what kind of monster you had it in you to become should all your worst impulses ever be brought to the fore – to see so much destruction wrecked against the world with the aid of your own hand – even that paled against such bleak evidence of all that malice turned against a close friend; that had a personal touch that went right to the bone.

It took ten minutes of babbling (inane even by his usual standards) for Wade's hands and feet to regenerate completely, but barely were his toenails done before he was off, frolicking – there was no other word for it – over the rubble piles like a drunken acrobat, celebrating his new freedom at the top of his lungs, until the others yelled at him to shut up before he attracted them attention of a kind they couldn't afford. It would have been a touching sight if not for the ever-present reminder of just exactly what he'd been through to inspire so much joy at simple freedom, or at whose hands. Cable had done his best to keep his distance through the regeneration process; he didn't like to think what kind of associations the sight of his face might trigger for Deadpool – especially after being injured so badly. Wade showed no outward signs of trauma, but that didn't mean there weren't any buried deeper down.

What could you say to someone who'd spent so long imprisoned and tortured by a man who shared your face? Futile as it was to assume responsibility for the actions of his alternate self, Apocalypse's influence could only excuse so much.

Almost as bad had been finding confirmation that the Façade Virus incident had taken placed in this world – and it was hard to imagine that the same genetic transfer could have happened any other way. It was a discovery that put a date on War's fall from grace that was almost too recent for comfort. Perhaps no more than a few months had passed since this timeline diverged from their own, and yet so much damage had been done.

It probably was fortunate he'd been too surprised for the full implications of what they'd found in War's prison to strike him right away. Anything he'd prepared to say could only have been woefully insufficient.

“So since when are you an Avenger, anyway?”

Cable startled out of his thoughts to find Wade crouched on a rock beside him. But for the way his hands and feet poked awkwardly from holes in his costume, he looked as relaxed and comfortable as Cable had ever seen him.

“Aren't you on at least two different X-teams already, depending what title's running this month?” Wade went on. “And running like two countries at once? I thought Wolverine had exclusive dibbs on that power.”

“I'm not an Avenger officially,” Cable explained. “Circumstances have simply pushed us together over the last few months.”

“So what brings you all to Apoco-land? 'Sides saving my ass, of course, which was totally awesome of you and all, but if you came all the way out here to recruit another mutant-messiah-type to help you keep up with all that work then hooboy did you guys pick the wrong one.”

“It's a bit more complicated than that,” said Cable, with nothing but honesty.

“I got nowhere to be, do you?” said Deadpool, settling himself cross-legged on his rock. “Exposit me a tale, storyteller-Nate!”

Cable glanced at where Captain America and Tony Stark had been deep in debate, the latter's helmet removed.

“You may as well bring him up to speed,” said Stark, with only a slight trace of the exasperation all the Avengers experienced whenever they were unavoidably reminded of Wade's existence. “We can quiz him for whatever intel he can give us about War when you're done.”

Cable nodded and turned back to where Wade was watching him expectantly. “Two days ago,” he began, “the Providence of our world was hit by a devastating act of sabotage. To keep the technical details to a minimum, a crucial component in the power converter for my teleport matrix was damaged beyond repair. The system is running on backup power for now, but once that runs out, the unit will become useless. The technology to repair it simply doesn't exist in our time.”

“So you came to steal a new one from Evil-You!” Wade guessed. “But isn't that, like, against the Prime Directive or something?”

“It wasn't a decision we took lightly,” Cable assured him, and even that came close to being a criminal oversimplification of the full argument it had taken to convince the Avengers to agree to this. “Forge had this reality... bookmarked, so to speak, from a previous misadventure. If our mission required us to deprive an alternate world of an irreplaceable piece of technology, we felt it would only be excusable if we could be sure to do that world a favour in the process.”

“I still say I could have reverse-engineered something that would have done the job,” said Stark.

“Time we don't have, Stark,” Cable replied. It was an old argument.

“So is this before or after you all lay the epic smackdown on whoever sprung the leak in the bottom of Providence?” asked Wade. “'Cause that had to be one of the big names, right? Like Doctor Doom or...”

“The US government,” said Cable dryly.

“Not that we'll ever be able to prove it,” said Cap, without any more enthusiasm.

“Whoa, way to go Nate!” Wade crowed. “I mean, they always hated your guts for being so totally un-American with that big hippie island paradise you run, but you must've really pissed in their Cheerios this time.”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Cable. “What you need to understand for context is that six months ago, the US government passed a law requiring all metahumans to register themselves or be hunted down as felons.”

“Ah, the good ol' U.S. of A: truth, justice and anything that panders to the voters-slash-comic-buying-fanbase. I love a good crossover event, don't you?”

Cable had to squash down an uncomfortable impulse to tell Deadpool that he'd certainly been loving it at the time. Explaining anything to Wade always became a constant battle against getting sidetracked.

“As you could imagine,” he went on instead, “I was among a large majority of the superhero population who opposed the act – a majority that only increased as the overwhelming corruption behind how the act was being enforced became apparent.” Cable very carefully did not glance over his shoulder, but you could practically hear Tony Stark's jaw clenching.

“Did the temperature in here just drop about fifteen degrees?” asked Spider-Man.

“It's amazing how much less traumatic it sounds in summary,” commented Stark.

“Wow,” said Wade. “You guys have all the fun.”

“Oh yeah, good times,” said Spider-Man. “My favourite bit was when two of the politicians who drafted the act turned out to be Skrulls. What about you guys?”

“How 'bout the part where they still wouldn't overturn it after that went down?” said Luke Cage.

“This isn't the time to bring up the full debate again,” said Cap sternly.

“A long story,” Cable repeated, rubbing his head. “But for my part, when it became clear there was little hope the matter would be resolved quickly – and that the government wasn't going to stop hunting down unregistered heroes while the debate dragged on – I had Providence offer asylum to any American metahuman who preferred not to register. A number have been using my Bodyslide technology to keep up their crime-fighting work in public view without getting caught – and with considerably more effectiveness than most of the government sponsored teams, given the amount of red tape they're fostered with nowadays. Not least since it became apparent that the authorities had been instructing them to prioritise capturing unregistered metahumans over apprehending real criminals. The act has been losing support fast since that became public knowledge, but it isn't going down without a fight.

“In other words, the ability of unregistered superheros to teleport in and out of the country at will has become a lynchpin in our bargaining position. If we can't get the teleportation matrix running again soon, and the US learns the sabotage was successful, then even at best they'll have the ammunition to justify extending the debate yet again.”

No-one had wanted to think too hard about the worst case scenario.

“So basically,” said Wade, “you could've said you guys 'ported in to lay the smackdown on Evil-Alternate-Cable to piss off the government, right? I played a video game like that once, but I got kinda fed up around when I had to go down the cave to collect a billion bottle caps from flying frog monsters to trade in with the ugly dwarf who had the key to the tower to save the princess from the...”

“You get the idea,” Cable cut in quickly.

“But this does still all come back to the bit with you guys handing War his armour-plated-butt on a decorative platter, right? Because I am down with that like you do not even know.”

“That is the plan, yes. To be honest,” Cable admitted, “after all these months of arguing with politicians, we were all about ready to jump at the chance of doing anything resembling a little old-fashioned superheroing.” The other Avengers all took on faintly sheepish looks that did nothing to subtract credibility from that notion.

“Great, sign me up! What do I do to help?”

“You can tell us everything you know about War,” said Captain America.

“Starting with anything with tactical significance,” Cable added quickly.

“Aww, are you sure? You're going to miss some awesome goss from when the paparazzi caught him sneaking into the X-Mansion to make Emma Frost an 'offer she couldn't refuse' –”

“Tactical significance please, Wade."

“Spoilsport.”

IV.

The sight of the ruined city was really starting to get to Peter. There were just enough recognisable parts left for it to be no good trying to pretend it was anywhere other than New York – a city he'd spent the best (and plenty of the worst) years of his life working overtime to keep intact. One measly universe away from home and all of that was for nothing. Even the rats and the tabloid reporters must have abandoned this place by now.

According to Cable, there was an evil version of him out there somewhere. Out of a group of four evil horse(less)men with cool names like 'War' and 'Death', he would be the one to draw 'Pestilence' – but at least he wasn't the loser stuck with 'Famine'. Unlike Cable though, Peter would have been perfectly happy to get this job over with without having to meet his evil counterpart. Great Power might come with Great Responsibility, but Avengers' membership came with the welcome luxury of leaving the big decisions to other people once in a while.

That was probably for the best, because a team with Cap and Tony and Cable was a team which already had about three times more leadership than was healthy. Sometimes up to four times more when Luke Cage got into it.

Why had this sounded like such a good idea? Had they really thought they'd just stop by, get a little real Avenging done as a change from all that politics, and be back in time for dinner? People could be committed for less than that.

Something twinged at Peter's spider-sense, making him jump in a seriously undignified manner, but it turned out just to be Deadpool come to get some fresh air or whatever.

“Oh, it's you,” said Peter. “They done grilling you in there?”

“Told me to go play while they talked grown-up stuff,” shrugged Deadpool, rolling a shoulder with the exaggerated enthusiasm of someone who wouldn't be taking basic mobility for granted for a while. “Hey Spidey, race you across the city! Last one to the other side has to picture Famine naked for ten minutes.”

“Yeah sure,” said Peter, “or how 'bout we do something that won't advertise where we are to everyone this side of the Atlantic?”

“Hey, I don't get out much lately, why waste the good weather?” said Deadpool, sprawling happily down backwards on the ground, arms and legs spread. “I mean, look at that view! Clear skies, fresh air, neo-Egyptian pillars on every street corner and all the rubble you can eat!”

“You can almost smell the asbestos,” Peter grumbled, though he had to admit that after being chained up in a cave for god knows how long, he'd probably be ready to welcome a sight like this too. “Has it changed a lot since last time you were outside?”

“Nah,” said Deadpool. “It's only been a couple of weeks, the Fab Four keep their city-renovation schedule way tighter than that.”

“Wait, two weeks?” Peter blurted, almost laughing. “That's all? We were thinking you'd been down there for, oh, months or something!” It shouldn't have been funny. Even an hour chained up like that with no idea when (or if) you'd get out would be a miserable experience (unless you were, well, into that sort of thing, which was one of those mental places Peter was going to avoid going at all costs). Two weeks would be levels of suck that even Peter's life only descended to on rare occasions, but the dungeon had looked like it'd been there pretty much forever.

“Don't ask me, I can't tell what day it is down there,” Deadpool grumbled. “Two weeks is just mostly how long I figure it was since he let me out last.”

“He let you out? That's awfully... nice for an evil overlord.”

Deadpool shrugged. “It beat spending another night in the cave, but it's not like he took me anywhere nice. Apocalypse had just set him up on a murdering spree down in some resistance camp they dug up and he didn't have a date.”

It was so not a good sign when a mere statement set off Peter's spider-sense. “He took you out to kill people? Okay, that pretty much cancels the 'nice' part.”

“Reprogramming me into an insane killing machine is all part of his evil plan to... turn me evil, or whatever,” Deadpool explained, waving a hand around in a dismissive sort of way. “It's this whole 'BWAHAHAHAHA WE ARE NOT SO DIFFERENT YOU SHALL BOW TO MY POWER' sorta thing for him. The keeping me locked up part is just until I crack. Now and then he takes me out to see if it's worked yet. He offered me the chance to stay out of the cave permanently if I did my best Conan impression with enough of those Resistance bozos.”

Peter had to bite down on a couple of scathing remarks about the distance between Deadpool and evil even on a good day – they were only remotely funny even when they weren't right. “You're not telling me you actually...”

“Hey, don't you go all moral on me. He was going to kill them anyway!”

“You think that makes it okay?”

“Do I look like a guy who turns to the 'ethical dilemmas' page in the Saturday morning puzzles? You try being locked down in a cave with only me for company for a few months and see how you like it.”

“But he still locked you up again afterwards.” Peter was clinging to this detail with all the web he was worth.

“Yeah, I dunno.” Deadpool sounded honestly confused. “Maybe I didn't look enthusiastic enough for him? Or I didn't make the high scores for dramatic disembowelling and eyeball-popping. Or maybe he was worried I was going to beat his high scores. Bastard never said, just locked me back up and told me he expected me to do a better job next time.”

Peter made an attempt at feeling reassured. It didn't work. Shit, what was he supposed to do with this? It wasn't exactly news that Deadpool would kill if the price was high enough, and he had been locked up... but if he'd been going along with War's instructions to the point of helping hunt people down that couldn’t be a good sign. Or was this just standard Deadpool-crazy? How were you even supposed to tell the difference without a degree in abnormal psychology, and maybe a PhD or two to go with it?

So much for this being less complicated than home-world politics. It was quite a relief to get interrupted by the other Avengers before the conversation could go any further into TMI territory.

“Deadpool?” The voice was Tony's, Luke standing behind him. That meant Cap and Cable had been left alone inside, probably either locked in the staring match to end all staring matches or arguing obscure points of philosophy. They really knew how to make a guy glad he'd generally left 'great responsibility' defined at well below federal level or international level.

“Speaking.” Wade craned his head backwards in an uncomfortable looking way, the sole obvious benefit being to allow him to see who was behind him without technically getting up.

“We need you back inside. You too, Peter – we're ready to start talking tactical options.”

“We still going with the virus-thingy?” Peter asked, getting up and dusting himself off.

Tony nodded. “From what Deadpool's told us,” this was delivered with only the barest hint of sarcasm, “it's still our best option.”

“Virus-thingy?” said Wade. “You're going to fight Evil-Nate with techno-herpes?”

“...I'll let Nathan explain,” said Tony, turning quickly back the other way. Whether this was to avoid Deadpool or hurry back before Cap and Cable demolished the place was pretty much a moot point.

V.

“Actually,” explained Cable, “it's a modified strain of the Façade Virus.”

Most of the interior wall area of the building was now all wound over with a mess of wiring, which had emerged butterfly-style from Tony Stark's briefcase. Connected at points were the various components of a camouflage and alarm system – makeshift work, but functional. The Avengers, mostly seated on the more comfortable pieces of available debris, listened with a kind of trainwreck fascination to the spectacle of Cable trying to get the plan through Deadpool's skull.

Deadpool scratched his head. “The one that gave everyone really bad sunburn and turned us into goo? I thought you destroyed it.”

“Deactivated, not destroyed,” Cable clarified. “This particular strain is based on the one the One World Church used to block my telekinesis.”

“Oh, now that's devious. You kept it all this time?”

“I had a suspicion it would come in useful someday,” said Cable, looking more than a little smug. “So I kept a vial, hidden in a hollowed-out book entitled 'Economics of the Textile Industry of the 16th and 17th Centuries'. I was relatively confident no-one I didn't want getting their hands on it would look there.”

Deadpool made a face like a monkey trying to comprehend advanced mathematics. “Someone probably asked this question before I got to class this morning, but why go to all this germ warfare hoo-hah when you could just waste him the old fashioned way? Evil-Nate's still getting his solo career off the ground, while we've got Good-Nate and the Nate-ettes.”

There was a brief pause as everyone in the room tried to parse Advanced Deadpool into English.

“Okay, okay, Good-Nate and the Avengers, you don't all have to glare at me at once.”

“The difference,” said Cable, catching up first, “is that he is in possession of all his telekinetic and telepathic abilities at the height of their power. I'm... not. Anymore. Even my technological replacements won't work here – too far from home.”

Deadpool drooped a little. “Well that sucks. So, we give Bad-Nate a case of the melting-STD, the playing field see-saws back the other way, Cable and the Avengers (and I would so buy that record, by the way) go straight to the top of the charts. That about the size of it?”

“Apart from a couple of minor complications,” Tony Stark put in, with only mild sarcasm.

“Oh good, for a second there I was worried you guys were trying to sell me the idea this was going to be easy.”

“The issue,” added Cap, “is how we get the virus to War without him knowing.”

“What, no flash photography? Did I miss the signs?”

“The light-based vector for delivering the virus was meant to be one of our options,” explained Cable, ruefully. “Unfortunately, the one carrying the device we needed to deliver it that way was Spider-Woman. Providence doesn't have the power to spare to send her or it to join us.”

“Oh, buuurn.”

“That leaves us with the option of transmitting the virus by direct means, and in that form it takes longer to spread through the body. That's a problem, because we've confirmed that War has been exposed to it before. There's a real possibility he'll be able to use his telekinesis to block its effects before the virus has a chance to block his telekinesis.”

“So after you guys already spent an hour testing my knowledge of War's favourite bands and boxers vs. briefs preferences, now my million dollar bonus question is how do we get our Trojan under his firewall without him knowing? Ooh, that's a good one. Am I out of lifelines?”

“We're open to anything you can suggest,” said Cable.

Wade appeared to think for a moment.

“Seriously, was I on the right track calling it an STD? 'Cause if so, I've got an idea.”

At least three palms in the room connected sharply with their owners' foreheads.

“Wilson,” said Stark, through gritted teeth, “even if we could find someone willing to volunteer for something as ridiculous as what you seem to be suggesting –”

“Whaaaat, Tony Stark dancing around talking 'bout the birds and the bees? I never!”

“ – and even if there was any plausibility to the idea that War would fall for such a ruse – ”

“Even megalomanic mutants got urges just like the rest of us.”

“ – even if that was possible,” Tony continued, with the strained patience that bespoke just how barely he could believe he was arguing this seriously, “then I remind you that War is telepathic, and would read the plan right out of the mind of whoever we sent!”

“BZZZZZT, wrong! The million dollar bonus round goes to me, 'cause lucky for us, I'm telepath-proof!”

There was a short, awkward silence.

“You?” said Tony.

“Who else? No offence, Mr-three-times-voted-most-eligible-superhero, but you're just not his type.”

“And you are?” barked Luke Cage, taking a crucial minute too long to catch up.

Deadpool explained.

The awkward silence returned.

“Whaaaat, you guys didn't know?” said Deadpool, just a little insulted. “Is it because I wasn't wearing my Princess Leia Slave Bikini on when you guys came in? Because I offered to wear one – I seriously did – but he wouldn't let me. Why did you think he was keeping me down there, the scintillating conversation?”

“I don't know about the rest of us, but I was trying really hard not to think about it,” said Spider-Man, voice hitting an octave higher than usual.

“Oh sure, just contribute to the culture of silence surrounding victims of unrelenting kinky sex at the hands of bondage-obsessed over-villains, why don't you?” Deadpool grumbled. “Hope you realise people like you are exactly why survivors have such a tough time coming forward. 'Cept around here, where it's because everyone's dead, but out in all those other universes...”

“Wade,” said Cable, voice slightly hoarse. “You can't think this is going to work.”

“What's not to work? I sneak in, pretend I'm trying to kill him – which is going to be really convincing because of how I'm going to be seriously trying (and if it works, great! We can all go home early!) – he catches me in the act, shows me what a baaaaaad boy I've been, leave him to simmer for a couple of hours then you lot run in and clean up.”

“You realise,” said Cable, “that even if you do this, he'll have access to your healing factor. That's the same thing I used to defeat the Façade Virus last time.”

“It's not going to make me melt this time, right? So he'll be minus his mind-whammies, minus use of all his arms and legs, and plus a skin condition from a sci-fi B-movie, whereas I'll be good, dependable ol' Deadpool, taking ass and kicking names!”

“And if he chains you down before the virus takes effect, what then?”

“We aren't seriously considering this?” asked Captain America in disbelief.

“Well, Cap,” said Deadpool, “last I checked, the bonus question wasn't multiple choice. What was Plan B? Anyone?”

The loudest answer was Luke Cage swearing quietly to himself. A lot.

“I can't believe I'm this close to encouraging this,” said Tony Stark, “but the theory of what he's suggesting is uncomfortably sound. I had Maya do a full analysis on a sample of the Façade Virus before we left – check for any uncomfortable surprises it might have in store for us. The trade-off this strain gives us for the longer incubation time is that when the symptoms do hit, they'll hit hard and fast. He should be near-paralysed within minutes. It's also,” he added, with even more reluctance, “highly sexually transmissible.”

“See?” said Wade. “The rest of you aren't going to argue with science, are you?”

“When we asked for suggestions,” said Cable, rubbing his forehead, “we were hoping for something more along the lines of slipping it into his food.”

“Tough,” snapped Wade. “Y'see, Nate, I don't get to see a lot of his eating habits. Couldn't even tell you where the back door to his massive Gothic doom castle is. Pretty much all I got to bring to the party is where he likes oiling up his T.O.-joystick – and boxers or briefs, c'mon, didn't you guys even wonder about that one? I took six months of being his chew-toy, give or take, so what's another day? And between you and me, if I get to turn this on him so his fucked up ideas about consent get to be part of what takes him down, the beauty of it all is gonna be just about worth it. Still waiting for Option B, guys.”

“There has to be a better way,” said Cap desperately.

Wade spread his hands. “You could still charge him head first like the protein-powered hunks of manhood you all are. I'm not the one who's gonna have to mop up the mess when he's done with you. If I head for the hills now I might even get whole days before he catches me again.”

Cable looked him right in the eye, almost pleading. “You know none of us would ask this something like this of you.”

“I know, Nate. Damn, I know you're getting your second-hand-guilt on over me offering to go play prison bitch to Evil-You. But I'm volunteering, and so help me, you guys had better make it worth my while – if he chains me up before he keels over, I am going to be counting down the minutes until you all come busting through the windows. Counting the seconds.”

The staring match finally ended when Cable looked down.

“Trust me,” he uttered, “We'll be ready.”

Deadpool looked around the room.

“How's that Plan B coming along? Is it gonna involve cutting my favourite limbs off again? There's always the off-chance the title'll get the chop before we have to do anything if we drag it out another issue. Or who knows? The writer could die. How's eternal limbo sounding as Plan B? Coz even I'm not flexible enough to keep shimmying under that bar forever.”

Answers remained unforthcoming.

Part 6

Ghost Stories betaing - unscheduled redux

2009-09-18T15:50:33Z

I can only suppose that by this point, it would probably surprise anyone who's still reading for the purpose that I haven't completely forgotten about The Telling of One Billion Ghost Stories - a.k.a. the novel-length xxxHolic/Tsubasa post-apocalyptic AU fic that I posted in draft form back in 07/08, and have been promising to revise and repost ever since. *hangs head in shame*

Actually, most of my own edits have been finished since earlier this year. Unfortunately, since then distractions have been myriad, and now it seems that neither of the friends who originally volunteered to beta for me have been having much luck finding the time to go through this 90,000 word monster of a fic. :/ So more than a year since I posted the final chapter, I'm finally back to hunting for anyone who may be willing to beta for me. Soon for preference, though I'm painfully aware I don't have much freedom to be picky in that regard.

<.< Any volunteers?

[Cable & Deadpool] Let Slip the Dogs of War - Part 1-2

2009-09-16T12:11:26Z

Written for a prompt on the Cable&Deadpool kink meme, asking for a continuation of this ficlet by sarkywoman - which was in turn inspired by the canonical alternate universe where Apocalypse won (and one of his horsemen turned out to be someone unexpectedly familiar) from C&D 15-16.

Fun as the annonymeme has been, the story has since grown past the point where I have the patience to keep posting it in 4300 character chunks, so the plan now is to repost a betaed version and continue on from there. This is the first of a couple of catch-up posts before I get to the new stuff.

Title: Let Slip the Dogs of War
Summary: War wasn't telling the whole truth about what happened to the Deadpool of his universe.
Characters/Pairing: Cable/Deadpool, guest staring the New Avengers
Chapter: 1-2 / 8
Word Count: 3760
Rating: R
Warnings: Not explicit, but contains references to torture, non-con and assorted other Evil Overlord AU-related staples. Also: Contains Deadpool.

I.

If Deadpool squinted up at just the right spot on the rocky cave roof, there was a little niche of shadows that looked like a fluffy bunny. Well, like a bunny that was maybe missing a leg or two. And an ear. And half its face, and had something like a tentacle protruding from somewhere unmentionable. Probably more like a bunny after meeting Elmer Fudd with a double-barrelled shotgun in the middle of rabbit season, to be honest.

Goddamn, wasn't there always supposed to be a bunny up in the clouds when someone did this outdoors? Who did this cave think it was anyway? He was the goddamn Deadpool, he'd seen fluffy bunnies in broad daylight when there wasn't a cloud, fairy floss machine or Loony Toons fourth-wall-breakout for miles, what was the ceiling's excuse?

Deadpool was, put simply, bored out of his brain, and this was coming from a brain that tended to turn him away at the door for B.O. and dirty feet even on casual dress nights.

The one mercy of being chained up down in a cave with décor fresh out of Modern S+M Monthly (Extra Affordable Monochrome Edition) was that at least his captor's sadism hadn't extended to gagging him, because as fond as Deadpool was of his little yellow boxes, some days they just weren't the same. He'd spent the last week working his way through his entire repertoire of show tunes and 90's pop hits (his complete collection 80's pop hits and favourite TV jingles having run out the week before). Say what you like about the cave, it had great acoustics – on a good day he could do whole duets with his own echo. Only trouble was that the snobby reverberation never would agree to sing the backup parts, and whenever Deadpool got to the bits that inevitably went “Nananana something potato meow meow nanana something,” there was always something creeping into its tone that seemed to be mocking him.

Stupid echo. See if it ever competed with his boxes for favourite backup device.

Worse yet, the damn cave kept dripping on him. Not often, and not with any kind of regularity detectable with a wandering mind and not a clock in sight, but it seemed like every time he was right up to the upper-key-bonus-chorus of his latest performance, some horrible stalagmite (tite? Bite? Fite? He didn't know and wouldn't even care if there was anything else around to distract him, which there wasn't) up there in the bunnyless shadows of the roof would critique his performance by loosing a drop of water right into his face. Oh he'd tried warning it, he'd made it perfectly clear to that no-good cave-ornament that if it did that one more time – one more time – he'd be up there in a flash and see if he didn't turn the last thousand years of calciferous limestone formation into extra-whitening toothpaste, but just when he thought he'd got that ceiling good and intimidated, what happened? Drip, right in the nose. The whole being chained down thing must have been really taking the edge of his threats.

What really worried him – apart from the ongoing torture of being constantly dripped on when the guy upstairs only let him up for bathroom breaks on alternating Tuesdays – was the burning question of just how long he had left before all that dripping mineral water built up and turned him into an attractive cave formation of his own. A hundred years, maybe? A thousand? Why, in geo-marvel time, that was practically the blink of an eye! On the other hand, getting turned into a human stalagmite had to be good for at least one new superpower, right? It was going to be that or sit around and wait for a radioactive cave newt to wander by.
It was a thought he made the most of, because the only other way to pass the time down here was counting the skulls, and once you knew the cave you were sitting in contained three-hundred-and-forty-oh-fuck-it-close-enough skulls, that got pretty old too. There was the whole Swiss assortment of other bones down there too, but Deadpool could never think of the names of any of the interesting bendy ones. How did that song go again, the rib bone's connected to the... next rib bone? The fibula, maybe? Something ending in 'ibula'... hibula? Ribula? And where was the T-bone supposed to fit in? Being able to classify every bone in the body by the sound it made when you broke it was a nice party trick, but it didn't help him recognise them on the outside, and singing, “The crunch-ohfuckfuckfuck-bone's connected to the snikt-crackle-my-arm-my-arm-bone” just wasn't ever the same.

...hold on a second, he was missing the obvious solution! He had a skeleton, and lately it was all connected up right and everything! He should just get all his bones tattooed with their names, and whenever he forgot again he could just open himself up and check his tags! Genius!

Oh wait, that was him forgetting about that little being-tied-down problem again. He couldn't open anything up right now. Rats. It'd been such a good plan too.

Man, it was a real good thing he was already out of his skull, or being stuck down here could drive a guy insane.

You really knew you had problems when your evil-megalomaniac-captor stopping by to molest you for a bit was the unequivocal highlight of your week. If the whole chained-up-in-a-cave part wasn't already enough of a clue.

...speak of the devil. He'd know the sound of those steel toed-soled-and-heeled boots anywhere. 'Course, Evil-Nate was the only one who ever came down here, so if he'd heard someone tap-dancing their way down with a full backing accompaniment of Happy Feet, it'd still be a pretty good guess it was him, just on way too much caffeine and sugar. That or revolutionaries with seriously weird taste in victory music. Or a hallucination, but even those mostly left him alone these days – bunny-shaped or otherwise.

Heh, tap-dancing Evil-Nate. That was a good one, he should really remember it.

“Heyyyy, War old buddy! How's conquering? Big Boss still got you and the rest of the Infamous Four still working all those crazy hours? I'm telling you Nate, you should get the union on him – even henchmen get an hour off a day to spend with their families and prisoners.”

The footsteps stopped, just beyond the halo of light created by the forest of drippy candles, leaving War still largely shrouded by shadows. (Poser.) “How touching. I might almost think you'd missed me.”

“Oh, nah, I've been great, seriously! Never better! Me and your ceiling, we could just staaaare into each other's stalagmites forever. Just today I found another place up there you could fit a widescreen TV!”

“Hm. Now there's a thought.”

“Oh don't be like... what, really?”

“What you may have forgotten is that there isn't a single television network still functioning on the entire continent.”

“...oh you evil bastard.”

“You flatter me.” More footsteps, and if Deadpool was getting maybe just a little breathy about Evil-Nate moving into arm's reach, it was just frustration. Wait, anger. Rage! That was the one. And totally not in a sexy way either.

“I am so not kidding.” A hand landed on Deadpool's ankle and started dragging its way upwards, but if War thought that was all it would take to make it up to him he had another thing coming. “The drippy cave and all the skulls and spikes and the whole Marquis de Fucking Miserable theme you've got going down here – baby, that's Discount Dungeon evil, but tormenting a guy in the throws of Golden Girls withdrawal, that's just... ohgodplease, you don't have to get me a widescreen, you can put a skull motif on it and everything, it won't even clash with the décor! I know you have all the Terminator movies on DVD, I'll even take the security feed from the back alley behind the air-conditioning ducts! I'll take reruns of Pushing Daisies!”

“You,” said War with considerable pleasure, “are losing it.”

“Am not. Know exactly where it is. Only put it down just a second ago. Left it in my other pants.” There was a drawn out ripping sound. “Ooookaaay, in my only pants. Wait, wasn't I wearing my other pants already? Hey, if you want this sexy body in skirts you'd better let me up to shave my legs first, there's like, a Geneva convention about it and everything.”

“You're trying to divert me. It isn't going to work.”

“Shit, hey! Cold fingers, cold fingers!” Squirming like a startled weasel wasn't going to help Deadpool very much, but he couldn't do much to help it either. “Didn't anyone ever tell you that TO mesh is mean at cold temperatures? Where've you been, conquering Iceland?”

“Norway, if you must know.”

“Huh. Did you get me anything nice?”

War's grin expanded slowly into something containing enough teeth to be near-Liefeldian. “The rebel leader's head on a platter?”

“Awww, you – nnngh – shouldn't have. Anyone I know?”

“Doubtful.”

“Okay, but sweet as that was of you, seriously – you shouldn't have, I'm up to my skull in skulls down here. Perhaps a nice ribula or two next time, and if you could maybe just get it labelled for me... oh...” The sentence broke off into something less coherent and rather more drawn out.

“Look, honey, hate to bring this up,” keeping his voice at the same octave was getting further beyond Deadpool by the minute, “but I think our relationship's kinda – nnnn – stuck in a rut.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, 'oh'. It's all BDSM-this, casual-non-con-that, page-53-of-the-karma-sutra-for-kinky-fifth-dimensional-Stockholm-victims-the-other. There's just no surprise anymore, it's all spice and no vanilla and that's... that's, uh, really bad for your digestion... ohnnnrgh... are you even listening?”

“You're saying you think it's time we tried something... different?”

Later, Deadpool would realise he should have been paying a lot more attention to War's tone at this point.

“Yes! Yes that's it exactly, there's this wild thing I read about once called 'missionary position' where...”

“Hm. Perhaps you have a point.” With that, War leaned back, and then stepped away from Deadpool altogether.

“Wait, what? What are you doing!?”

“Trying something different,” said War, pointedly re-fastening a few crucial pieces of armour.

Deadpool stared in not-at-all-mute disbelief. “Oh come on, orgasm denial is so not even original anymore! You can't leave me like this!”

“What you haven't yet grasped is that I can do exactly. What I please.”

“Like my oversexed evil overlord could go a day without putting a hand on me? You'll come crawling back! This punishes you as much as me... huh, okay, in point of fact you do have two hands and neither of them tied to anything... hey... Hey! Don't you walk away from me! You don't have any idea what kind of rude gestures I might be pulling behind your back! Joke's over, not funny anymore!”

The sound of footsteps retreating up the stairs was the only sound in the cave for a good fifteen seconds.

“Okay fine, I give in! What do I have to do, beg? Who do you want me to kill before you let me up from here! Orphans? Puppies? Martha Stewart? I'll do Martha Stewart's orphaned puppy if that's what it takes, and by god I'll probably even enjoy it! I'll wear the outfit with the spikes you like and everything! War? I know you're listening right where I can't see you just to psych me out”

The only noise was that of a very large, heavy door closing in its usually ponderous manner.

“WAR!”

II.

Imagine, if you will, a cave – or better yet, a dungeon, built complete with all standard dungeonly fittings, though the excavation costs were saved by using the cave that was conveniently there to begin with. It's the same one from the previous scene, so you're probably imagining it already. It is not completely dark, but all but two of the candles have burned down, leaving the halo of light around the cave's one permanent occupant constricted down to focus unhelpfully on his lower legs. (This is enough to reveal said legs are wearing pants at the moment, which may come as a relief to some readers.)

Now imagine the sound made by a small group of people being teleported in all at once. (Contrary to popular belief, 'BAMF' is not the most appropriate onomatopoeia, but it will probably suffice.)

The next sound is inevitably going to be that of several people trying to establish where on earth they are, only very quietly in case it's somewhere unfriendly, while their eyes gradually adjust to the gloom.

When Deadpool wakes up from a light snooze to discover that all the above has not been a particularly vivid dream it won't make any particular noise, but it's about to happen nonetheless.

***

It was several seconds of frantic, barely-whispered argument later that a voice from somewhere in the gloom said, “Nate? 'Zat you?” Despite being rough with sleep, there was an undeniable gravely-Demi-Moore quality to it.

All talking ceased abruptly. After a minute, a different voice (slightly hoarse with surprise, but nonetheless recognisable) ventured, “...Wade?”

“Uh, last I checked. Didn't hear you come in, did you float all the way down the steps just to surprise me or something? Coz I can still act surprised if it means a lot to you.” There was a clanking sound, made by chains shifting as their captive craned to get a better look at something. “Is it just me or is there something different about you today? Wait, don't tell me: all your good armour's in the wash and you were stuck with that old spandex thing at the back of the closet. Yeah, that happens to me all the time too. Well, used to happen.”

No-one replied immediately, though there were a few exasperated mutters, the sound of someone's palm connecting sharply with their face, and heavy footsteps as the owner of the second voice – who did indeed fit the description of Nathan Dayspring Askani'son Et Cetera Summers to a T – walked forward several steps into the light.

“I think you have me confused with someone else,” he said, with a trace of embarrassment.

“Oh sure, with the other Priscilla? Waitasec, do we have guests? You never let me have guests. Are those the Avengers? Didn't you fricassee the Avengers? ...Oh my god, don't tell me: you're alternate universe-Nate with a rescue party from another world come to save me! Oh thankyouthankyouthankyou I take back every bad thing I ever said about epic crossover events! By the love of sweet Bea Arthur, someone up there is returning my calls! Whohooo!”

The silence this time was of a more embarrassed nature.

“Should I be disturbed how close to right he got that?” said the voice belonging to Luke Cage.

“If I've been following this correctly, then I'm a lot more disturbed that we appear to have landed right in a prison cell belonging to the very tyrant we came to ambush!” The distortion of Iron Man's helmet did little to take the edge off his tone.

“Was the signal intercepted?” said Captain America. “If he found out we were coming, could he have diverted our landing point?”

“While we're on the bad news kick,” said Spider-Man, “wasn't our team, like, twice as spidey when we left home?”

Everyone looked around at once, with a net effect that would have been comical in better light.

“Jessica? If you can hear me, say something!”

“Not like her to wander off in the dark.”

“'Bodyslide by six',” Cable muttered. “I never thought to allow for this.”

“Cable, if you have an explanation we should be hearing...” Cap prompted.

“I'm afraid this is probably my fault,” said Cable, apologetically. “In our world, Deadpool and I went through a... a kind of accidental genetic exchange which had the side effect of confusing the signatures my teleportation matrix used to identify us.”

“... nudge-nudge, wink-wink, if-you-know-what-I-mean.”

“The same must have transpired in this universe. I had Forge fine-tune the process to exclude the alternate version of myself when he sent us here, but... I was under the impression we wouldn't be finding Deadpool alive.”

“Hah, oh if I had a buck for every time I've heard that one... would've hired a stunt double to do all my being tied up for me for one...”

A faint smile crossed Cable's face, but he turned away before most of the others saw it.

“So instead of transporting the six of us to a safe landing point...” said Cap, catching on.

“...it picked up me, Deadpool and the four people closest to me when I gave the command,” Cable finished.

“Which still doesn't explain why it brought us to him, instead of bringing him with us,” Iron Man pointed out.

“Ooh, me, me, I know this one!”

“Wade?”

“Yeah, my fault, got my teleportation-proof vest on. You may fire at will!”

Everyone stared at him.

“Okay, fine, my teleportation proof hand-cuffs. Happy?”

“You mean your restraints,” said Cable.

“Evil-you really didn't want anyone 'porting me out of here,” Deadpool explained. “Had one of his little overlord moments and gave me the whole infomercial on them when he locked me up down here. They're also tamper-proof and water-proof and radioactive-cave-newt-proof and even dislocating-your-thumbs-to-escape proof. He let me find that one out the hard way though, bastard. Stiffed me my free set of steak knives too.”

“Meaning that when the teleport couldn't take Deadpool with us, it compromised by bringing us – minus Spider-Woman – to him,” said Iron Man, resting his head on a hand. “Cable, when this is over you and I are going to have a long talk about the proper programming of failsafes.”

“Hey, since we're already talking about these stylish cuffs of mine,” Deadpool piped up, “it is seriously bad for your hero cred that you've all been down here ten minutes and no-one's let me out of them yet.”

This silence was the uncomfortable kind where even the non-telepathic could hear everyone thinking.

“Before anyone voices anything they'll want to distance themselves from later,” said Cable, “I'll remind you we can't Bodyslide out of here without him.”

“We're aware,” said Cap. “Tony?”

“On it,” said Iron Man, stepping forward.

“So,” said Spider-Man while everyone watched him work, “is anyone else seriously weirded out that Evil Cable has a whole cave down here just to keep Deadpool locked up in?”

“No gags about not being evil enough to lock someone else up with him for company?” said Luke.

“You have no idea how hard I'm restraining myself.”

“Deadpool, is there anyone else down here?” said Captain America, tactfully ignoring the rest of the conversation going on behind him.

“Just me and the stalagmites. Hey Metal Man? If your plan for getting those off me involves staring at them and wishing really hard, I tried that one already this morning. Clapping your hands or clicking your heels are still open for you to try if you want though.”

Iron Man started crossly out of a haze of concentration. “I'm... oh, nevermind.”

“Can you get him free?” asked Cap.

“Yes. But I'm going to have to do it without tripping at least three different alarms in the mechanism.”

“How long?”

“You know the saying about getting your food cheap, fast or good?”

Cap frowned. “How long do we have?”

“Depends how long War is likely to take to notice us down here,” said Cable, looking at Deadpool.

“Search me, not like he bothers to call before dropping in. Plus I'm pretty sure he's got a 24 hour live Deadpool feed going down here.”

“Then we may not have very long,” Cable concluded, grimly. “What are our options?”

“The clean way would be to hack the system and disable the alarms from the top,” said Iron Man, “but the technology here is years ahead of what I've seen before,” (the helmet may have directed a slight glare at Cable here). “I could force the locks one at a time, but the alarm will trip long before I'm done. Physical contact on the mechanism from anyone other than Deadpool will do the same. The last alarm is connected to pressure sensors on the inside of the cuffs, so short of leaving his hands and feet behind completely there's no way to avoid… ah. I actually didn't mean to suggest that.”

It was a moment later that Spider-Man said, “That's it, we are officially way over our uncomfortable silence quota for the year.”

“Wade,” said Cable slowly, “is your healing factor still working?”

“Oh, sure. It's been working out like you've never seen it work before – regular schedule, three times a week.”

“Am I going crazy,” asked Spider-Man, voice just a little higher and faster than normal, “or did we seriously suggest what I think we just suggested?”

“It's up to you Wade,” said Cable, looking grim. “The slow method puts us at risk, but it's still an option.”

“Lemme see. Excruciating pain now plus FREEDOM FOR ALL, or I stay here and delay the excruciating pain until Evil-Nate next comes home in a bad mood.” Deadpool craned his head forward to look straight down at his toes. “Sorry extremities, it's been real, but at this point in my career you are just holding me back.”

“Fast and cheap it is,” Iron Man muttered. “The pencil laser will cauterise the wound as I cut, but there isn't anything I can offer for the pain. Are you ready?”

“No, but you probably better start before I am and the panic attack sets in. If I start screaming like a little girl for you to stop, don't worry too much. I'm pretty used to that getting ignored lately. I'd ask if one of you guys would hold my hand while he does this, but that's gonna be a bit of a joke in a minute so... ayup, that would be panic setting in right there, oohboy...”

The high-pitched whine of the laser starting up drowned out the sound of most of the cave's occupants taking deep breaths all at once.

A large drop of water fell on Deadpool's face, but for once he didn't even notice it.

***

An alarm did go off eventually when the temperature inside the cuffs started dropping sharply towards the ambient, but by the time War came roaring down the stairs with fury befitting his name, they were all long gone.

Part 3

The Gratuitous Vampire AU - Part 5

2009-09-10T13:14:27Z

Finally done! (Sorry for the wait - my beta reader's had to deal with a seriously uncooperative couple of weeks) Total word count now comes to 16,000 words, which I am embarrassed to admit makes this truly gratuitous AU the single longest fic I've yet finished in this fandom (even Chain of Command barely made 12,000). ~~clearly this only means I need to get going with the next long to epic length fic on my WIP list ASAP~~

Also, now it's done – I've no idea whether people actually have been spotting most of the random (and often somewhat oblique) references to assorted other bits of vampire pop fiction scattered through the earlier chapters, but I'll, oh, offer a drabble request or something to anyone who can list the most of them. ^_~

Title: Sign of the Cross (a.k.a. the Completely Gratuitous Guilty Gear Vampire AU)
Summary: Gears or vampires, it's all just another day's work for the Holy Order. But they never do quite manage to screen some of their more unusual recruits as carefully as they ought to either.
Characters/Pairing: Sol/Ky
Chapter: 5 of 5
Rating: NC-17 overall, PG for this part
Word Count: 2260
Previous Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Ky wakes mid-morning to find himself in his own bed, alone. It takes him a beat to figure out why that's wrong – to convince himself the events of the previous night had been real – and two more for it to dawn on him that perhaps this was no more than what he should have expected all along. Out of everything he might have imagined Sol had implied the night before, he'd made no promises, and in the sobering light of day everything that took place can't help but look very different.

It soon proves that Sol is not in his quarters, or the mess hall, and not his favourite corner of the courtyard either. No-one Ky asks can recall seeing Sol anywhere in the headquarters since daybreak, nor have the gate-wardens seen him leave. He may as well have disappeared, and Ky would have to be a fool not to wonder whether that hadn’t been exactly what he’d intended. Sol’s secret is out, and if he has any doubt that Ky will keep it, by the time Ky woke this morning, Sol would have had long enough to be miles away.

Sol had to know what Ky would assume if he woke and found him gone. He had to know what Ky would do. If he had any sense he'd be raising the alarm already – everyone in the Order could be woken and warned about the monster that had been hiding itself in their midst by the lunch bell.

Instead, he finds himself returning to his room before he’s treated the option to more than a passing thought.

If he had any sense, he would never have frozen at the sight of his own sword sticking out of Sol’s side last night.

When Ky had first rushed out after waking he'd done little more than throw on his clothes at speed. Now, peeling back his collar in front of his bedroom mirror gives him his first look at the mark he’d had to resist the urge to finger all morning. The bite-mark stands out stark red against his skin, but Ky has to conclude that inasmuch as he has any experience with the subject, it looks no worse than an ordinary love bite or suction mark. The puncture wounds he knows should be there are gone completely. The spot is still sensitive when he explores it with his fingers, but compared to what he felt last night when Sol had…

What he’d felt last night in the heat of the moment – it doesn’t mean anything he could count on.

Sol has until sundown, he decides, forcing himself to make eye contact with his reflection. He’ll decide what action ought to be taken then, and not a moment sooner.

Sol can’t expect Ky to wait for answers any longer than that.

***

Sol shows up at the gate an hour later, and immediately causes such a ruckus that Ky hears it all the way from the courtyard and takes off at a run, relief expanding into writhing knots in his chest that make it hard to breath. He catches Sol staggering through the archway, two worried looking wardens at his heels. Sol has his right hand clutched over his left side, blood oozing through his fingers and staining the white of his uniform to match its trim. Fear of a very different flavour rises in Ky's throat and has to be forced down with effort; Sol is a vampire – Ky lets himself frame the thought for the first time since last night – and he's still on his feet, this couldn't possibly be enough to do him in.

Sol catches sight of Ky and hunches away again, more irritated than ashamed to have been caught like this. At the sight of their captain the wardens hesitate.

“What is going on here?” Ky demands.

“Sir, he's refusing to go to the medics!” a warden supplies.

“It's a fucking scratch,” Sol snaps. The man flinches back a pace, but for a moment Ky could have sworn he caught something in Sol's eye that begs him to understand.

“I'll be the judge of that,” he says. “Have someone send a first aid kit to my quarters.” The last he directs to the warden, who looks surprised but relieved to have a matter like an injured Sol taken off his hands. Ky turns his attention back to Sol. “And while I'm deciding, you can explain to me exactly what you were doing to get yourself a 'scratch' like that at this time of day.”

Ky turns on his heel and stalks back toward his room, not looking back even when he hears the uneven sound of Sol's footsteps following behind him. By the time he arrives the hammering of his heart against his chest has almost calmed to normal. Even he's not entirely sure how much of that performance was an act, or for who's benefit.

The first-aid kit arrives moments after they do (angry captains are nearly as effective as wounded men at inspiring quick action). Sol takes a seat on Ky's bed and removes his shirt without a word. Underneath are three puncture wounds a few inches apart, slowly oozing blood down his side. Ky could not have begun to guess how deep they might be; if Sol had been anyone else he would have sent him straight to the duty medic. As it is, Ky merely wipes him down with a damp cloth and covers the wound with a layer of gauze and bandages, hands moving on automatic through the too-familiar task. Everything he wants to say is going to wait until Sol's no longer bleeding.

“You smell so damn good right now,” Sol breathes, as Ky is fastening the end of the bandage in place. Ky manages not to drop the clasp, and makes himself finish before replying.

“Do you mean me or my blood?” He tries to make the question sound more objective than he feels.

“Either,” says Sol, as if the difference isn't important.

Not sure what to make of that, Ky presses a hand lightly over the bandages covering Sol's side. “Last night,” he ventures, “you healed much faster than this.”

“Last night I'd just fed.”

“Do you need to... feed again?” Ky asks.

“Nah,” says Sol, leaning back. “I'm good for a while. Give me a few hours and I'll be good as new.”

Ky looks up into Sol's face. “Sol, what on earth did this to you?”

Sol hesitates only for a moment. “Met him last night. Remember?”

For a moment Ky wonders whether Sol is talking about himself, then his memory turns up the face of the other vampire, one glimpse of whom had sent Sol into such a rage he'd forgotten Ky was watching at all. “Him... he came back?”

“Went after him,” Sol admits. “Bastard stabbed me and ran off.”

“Who was he? You seemed to know each other.” Despite everything that came later, he'd left the sort of impression on Ky that he wouldn't soon forget.

“Calls himself 'Testament'.” Sol spits out the name. “I've been hunting him over a century.”

“You found him this morning? In the daylight?”

“Doesn't slow his kind down much,” says Sol, voice lowering to a growl. “He's one of hers.”

Ky stares. “'Hers', you don't mean...”

“What else would I mean?”

Ky takes a deep breath. “You're talking about the stories about the Vampire Queen? The first of the vampires, who commands the will of every one made after her... those stories are true?” It's not the most far-fetched tale of the creation of the vampire race he knows, but on reflection, hardly more impossible than everything else he's seen in the last twenty-four hours.

Sol snorts. “They left out a lot, but she's real.”

“Sol...” Ky has so many questions he hardly knows where to begin.

Something in Sol's face closes down, but he leans forward until he's almost whispering in Ky's ear. “I'm the only one she didn't make. And I've been hunting her since before your Holy Order existed.”

Ky shivers. He should be asking more questions, he should want to know every detail Sol can give him, but all of this – Sol being a vampire, vampires who walk out of stories no-one had ever known the truth of and into broad daylight, not to mention Sol himself – is already as much as he can take in at once. Whatever might be said for Sol, the fact remains that Ky doesn't want to believe him capable of betraying them any more today than he did last night. The sordid details of Sol's past aren't nearly as important as knowing he's here to stay. Those can wait until they're both ready for them.

Ky shakes his head; this is going to take some getting used to. “So all those times you went hunting alone, without permission...”

“A guy's gotta feed.” Sol shrugs.

Ky looks up at him in horror. Of all the difficult questions he's been pushing to the back of his mind, this is one that's far too important to ignore, and he can't think of any possible answer that he's going to like.

“I don't eat humans,” says Sol, looking him right in the eye. Ky shakes his head in disbelief.

“Sol, I've seen what happens to vampires who are forced to live on animal blood, and we'd know if you'd been–”

“Who said anything about animals?” Sol snorts. “I live just fine on other vampires.”

“Oh.” Relief mixes with embarrassment that he hadn't thought of that himself. No wonder Sol's always been so vague about the results of solo hunting excursions. “I didn't realise that was possible.”

“Just as good as human blood. Better – don't need it as often.”

Relief, Ky reflects, is an unbelievably draining emotion. He's had more bursts of it than could be at all healthy in the last few hours.

“Any more dark secrets I should be asking you about?” he asks, tiredly.

Sol's face darkens.

“I see.” Ky has to admit he hadn't expected much less. He holds up a hand before Sol can try to elaborate. “I don't really want to know. Not today, at least. Just – promise me one thing,” one of Sol's hands is resting in his lap, and Ky places one his own on top of it, “you aren't leaving?”

Sol's eyebrows rise. “Leaving? The hell did you get that from?”

“Sol, since yesterday I've had to revise everything I thought I knew about you.”

“Hardly. Before tonight you had no idea there was anything to know.”

“I had no idea how little I knew,” Ky corrects him. “At the least, I thought I understood what you were doing in the Order. Now – it would seem foolish to assume anything.”

“Ch,” Sol grunts, but rather than answer a hand lands on Ky's neck, and Sol pulls him into a kiss, more gentle than deep this time. After a moment he leans back again.

“Got a reason or two worth staying,” he tells Ky. “That good enough?”

Ky nods mutely. Sol grins at him, and Ky's stomach twists – he'd realised last night Sol's smirk was never going to look the same to him again. He hadn't been wrong.

“Good.” That settled, Sol lets go of Ky and starts taking off his shoes. “Overdue for a good day's sleep. Testament can wait.” Depositing his belt on Ky's bedside table, Sol climbs into the bed. Ky watches with faint bemusement; vampiric sleeping habits do shed a lot of light (so to speak) on some of Sol's lazier tendencies when expected to do anything in his off-duty daylight hours.

“You do have your own quarters,” he says fondly.

Sol cracks open an eye. “And how much sleep did you get last night?”

Probably not more than two or three hours – he's been running mostly on nerves all morning. Sol does have a point.

Sol shifts over to make room for him, then rolls straight back into Ky's space as soon as he settles down. It's... nice, actually. Easier to relax in Sol's presence than it ever was when Ky still thought he was human.

“Wake me before you leave this time?” he murmurs, already sleepy.

“Not getting me out of here before sundown with a crowbar,” Sol grumbles back.

Ky's pretty sure he can deal with that.

The rest is going to take some more getting used to. He'd be naive to assume his job hasn't just been made a lot more complicated, but he never chose this path in life expecting it to be easy. Life with Sol is never going to deserve that descriptor either, but at least that much came as no surprise.

It's fair to say the full absurdity of the situation hasn't sunk in yet, but if he ever meets Testament again he might almost be inclined to thank him for showing up at so inconvenient a moment. Probably best not to mention that to Sol, Ky thinks, more soberly. He hasn't given the impression he'd see it as a laughing matter.

After a second, he corrects the 'if' to 'when'. He can only imagine how long Sol's been hunting this Testament and his ilk, but he has no intention of letting him continue it alone.

But that's an argument they can save until after they've both had some rest. Right now, curled up snug and warm and just awake enough to enjoy every subtle reminder that Sol is sleeping only inches away, having a vampire in the Order seems a very welcome idea indeed.

[TWEWY Fic] The Opposite of Death (Part 3)

2009-09-09T14:23:07Z

Probably to be the last in the series, following the previous vaguely-Shiki/Eri fic in which Shiki hardly appears, now here's a vaguely-Neku/Joshua fic in which Joshua doesn't appear at all.

Title: The Opposite of Death (and the Recognised Stages of Coming To Terms with your Gain)
Part: 3. Disorganisation
Summary: Neku can't imagine why Eri ever wanted to talk to him to begin with.
Characters/Pairing: Neku, Hanekoma, implied Neku/Joshua
Rating: G
Word Count: 2490
Warnings: Post game, spoilers for everything.
Previous: 1. Shock and Numbness 2. Yearning and Searching

So it should probably have been a given that readjusting to being alive again would take a bit of doing, with or without all that crazy selective memory stuff everyone who ever knew Neku had so conveniently done when he got back. It takes a bit longer for Neku to get around to admitting that winning the game, even winning it three weeks running, isn’t the same as being able to stop playing it somewhere in the back of his mind. It sure as hell isn’t anything like being able to forget about it. It’s there in all sorts of things – the recurring dream about waking up in the Scramble Crossing, the nagging need to look over his shoulder for Taboo Noise, the part of him that's always secretly disappointed that a pin is just a pin now and not a tool that will let him summon fire or fling a motorbike across the street. It’s a novelty just to be able to walk around Shibuya without having to worry every couple of blocks that he’s about to run head first into a Reaper wall; the places he passes aren’t just Udagawa or Centre Street or Hachiko anymore, they’re the place Shiki barely bailed him out of a surprise Noise attack or the place there’d been flowers for Beat and Rhyme’s memorial or the place he first saw Minamimoto’s junk piles. It’s hard to go anywhere without wondering if right at that moment the Game is on again and there might be invisible players right in front of him, struggling to master Psyches or make head or tail of what Shibuya’s fashion trends have to do with their survival. Neku came out of the game changed and mostly glad of it, but Shibuya has changed too – a whole other world opened under his feet only to be closed again just as suddenly, and if he’s ever going to be able to put it out of his mind again he’s not there yet.

It was a full week before he worked up the guts to set foot in any of the shops with the innocuous Reaper decal stamped by their door, and even then he spent the whole time it took to eat his taco watching customers come and go, just in case he caught sight of one disappearing the moment they stepped out of the door. It takes two more weeks on top of that before he ‘gets around’ to venturing into Cat Street for the first time, home of the infamous Mr H, a.k.a. Sanae Hanekoma, mild mannered café owner; a.k.a. Cat, secretive artist and designer; a.k.a…. well, they never did quite clear that part up, did they? The Wildcat has no more customers than he ever remembers it having, the owner cracking a broad grin as he walks in (“Phones! Long time no see!” “…yeah, sorry, I did this crazy thing where I went and got a life.” He hadn’t intended that to make Mr H. laugh so hard). To kill time, Neku forks over the price of a cup of coffee and fields a few innocuous questions about the health of himself and a couple of friends: he's doing fine, Shiki’s doing just great, and by the way, Beat is fine too, before you ask…

“Oh, Beat?” says Hanekoma. “He was in here a good two weeks ago. Stopped past to say the menu was over his budget and he still doesn’t get quite how you all made it back at all, but he wanted to thank me for everything I did for Rhyme in that first week and apologise for taking off like that. He’s a good kid.”

Trust Beat, thinks Neku. Just when he thought he had the guy figured out to the third decimal place, he goes and makes himself the one first in line to break the Cat Street embargo – which Neku had not, okay, actually bothered to tell him about in so many words, so if the others hadn’t taken it as the given he’d assumed it was, he had no-one else to blame. Beat hadn’t had nearly as good a seat as Neku to… well, whatever the hell it was that had gone down when they’d confronted the ‘Composer’ at last, so he hasn’t even got any real reason to suspect Mr H. of anything sleazy, and suspicions aside, they all owe Mr H. their lives at least once over. But that doesn’t negate what Neku really came here to talk about either.

Five minutes here and already it’s not going to plan – not that he’d ever bothered to plan this out. There’d been some kind of expectation in his head that it would all have to be either easier or harder – either Mr H would spill the whole story the moment he walked in or he’d get to Cat Street to find the Wildcat was gone and the street address was now filled by a pet shop filled of tropical fish, and run by a foreigner who spoke only enough Japanese to insist she’d been working there for years. What he’s been forgetting somehow is that he's dealing with a guy who’ll happily tell you his shoe size and star sign before getting within light years of mentioning that the reason he was qualified to hand out helpful little pearls of advice about the Reaper’s Game had something to do with how he was one of the same shadowy figures up there in charge of administrating it. Truth be told, Neku isn’t sure he wants to know what Mr H’s deal is. He has enough to get his head around already, including the part he came here to ask about, and if he doesn’t ask now he’s going to lose his nerve and then he’ll probably never get to at all.

“So all that stuff about Joshua, that was what, some kind of cover story?” He tries to make it sound more nonchalant than bitter. He probably isn’t succeeding so well.

Mr H’s eyebrows winch themselves up a notch. “Cover story? Phones, if you’re going to change gears that fast, you’re going to have to give the rest of us a bit more chance to catch up.”

“Don’t play dumb, Mr H,” and this is one he’s had stuck in his gut so long now it feels like he’s pulling it out with a claw hammer, “I’m talking about how you let me think the only reason he knew so much about the Game was because he was some psychic kid who hung out at your shop!”

“Sure he was,” says Hanekoma, so easily it makes Neku's teeth hurt. “You don’t learn all the ins and outs of the Reaper’s Game from the back of a cereal packet. You think I’d lie to you about something like that, Phones?”

“Mr H, he was the Composer all along!” Saying it out loud doesn’t make thunder rumble, doesn’t make Shibuya crumble to the ground, and that seems wrong.

“Oh, since you met him, sure. But he wasn’t born Composer. I told you we went way back.”

Neku has to take a minute to process that into his post-Game world-view, to decide that Hanekoma isn’t just stringing him along here this time, then another minute to feel dumb he hadn’t guessed it for himself. But damn it, the sane response to finding out you’ve been lied to isn’t to underestimate where the lies started. There’s still the matter of Mr H. letting him assume Joshua was just a regular player, but there was no way to bring that up that didn’t sound like whining even in his own head.

“How long back?” he asks stupidly.

“Waaaaay back,” Hanekoma grins, as much answer as Neku was going to get.

“He spent the week making me think his whole goal was to become Composer.”

“Just his way of nudging you in the right direction. There’d be the nostalgia factor for him too – even our Composer’s not immune to that.” He fixes Neku with a look over the top of his spectacles. “Listen up, Phones – I’ll share something with you you wouldn’t hear from anyone else. I’ve seen my share of Composers come and go. Josh may not have been born Composer, but he was born to be one. I’m not just talking about his ‘special’ powers among the living. Succession’s a cutthroat business anywhere about Harrier in the Reaper Brass, but Josh got his sights set on it, coasted through his week and was through the door before anyone knew what was happening. I won’t tell you he never broke a sweat doing it, but he went head to head with one of the toughest Games played anywhere in the world and made it look easy. And between you and me, he’s been bored out of his skull ever since.”

“He seems like the kind of guy who makes his own fun.”

“Sure, but having a city under your thumb isn’t all you might think it is. There’s rules even a Composer doesn’t get to break. Running a city might keep a body occupied, but the thrill was in the chase for him, and he hasn’t had that since. ‘May you get everything you ever asked for’ is a curse in some parts of the world.”

Put like that it’s a little too easy to picture. No wonder razing the place to the ground entered the agenda. “Leaving Shibuya in the hands of a spoiled brat.”

“Absolute power corrupts a lot of folks much worse,” Hanekoma shrugs. “It’s pretty lonely at the top. Like I said the first time, he’s not a bad kid, he’s just not so good at reaching out to people. Can you blame him, with where he’s coming from? You of all people should know how hard it is to make friends when you won’t admit you need ‘em. Takes a big person to make the first move for someone like that.”

Neku’s had so much food for thought out of this conversation already that he’s going to be chewing over it in his head for weeks, so it takes him a moment to get to noticing just exactly what Mr H. actually said. “Oh no. No no no. Please tell me you’re not saying what I think you are.”

“Did I say anything?” Hanekoma remains the very picture of unconvincing innocence.

“I tried being his friend! It fell apart around about when he got around to admitting he’d he killed me, wiped my mind and spent the whole time I knew him screwing me over!”

“How’s all that working out for you?” says Hanekoma, like the worst Joshua’s done is enter Neku in a cake raffle without his knowledge.

Neku slams both hands down on the counter, hears his stool screech across the floor behind him and wobble precariously back and forth several times. “You talked me into trusting him once already! It ended with him waving everything in my face and shooting me again!” The part where he woke up alive again afterwards is a bit of a sticking point in that complaint, but it hardly invalidates it. “Mr H, he’s done nothing but play me from the day we met! You can’t make me believe he meant for it to work out this way. He wanted to burn Shibuya to the ground!”

“Bit much for you to complain he took you out first then.”

“He treats life and death like it’s some sort of game!”

“And yet here you are – and all your new friends – alive and better than ever! Sure he doesn’t deserve maybe a little credit for engineering that?”

Neku sits back down again with a thud, finds a crack in the countertop and develops the crazy idea that it's laughing at him. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I am.” He looks up reluctantly, only to discover to his horror that, for what is barely the second time today, Hanekoma actually looks serious.

“Neku, as I recall it, that last game wasn’t quite so one sided. I recall there being a gun in your hands too. Even some kind of instruction to fire on the count of ten? A chance to take all you anger out at him in one shot?”

“So? He knew I wouldn’t.”

“Did he?”

“He was sure feeling pretty safe about it.”

“So what do you think would have happened if you’d fired it?”

I’d be Composer? The thought had hardly even struck him at the time. “Not a lot. I saw what happened when Pi-face tried to shoot him.”

“Was that really why you didn’t shoot?”

Why? What did he mean, was that why? It was so obvious in Neku’s head there was no way to put it into words. There had been one rage-filled moment when he could almost believe he was going to do it – he’d been laughed at, put through hell, threatened with losing everything he’d never known he had, and he’d wanted nothing more than to splatter Joshua’s brains all over the wall. It hadn’t lasted through the count to ten. You just couldn’t go from thinking you owe someone your life to being prepared to kill them with not even five minutes to think about it. What kind of person could do something like that?

Because even if he was 99% sure he couldn’t have touched Joshua with a bazooka – even if he was convinced he was really going to die and a bullet would be the best parting gift he had to give – he’d still have had to die knowing he’d pulled the trigger.

“So what, I’m pathetic because I wasn’t prepared to kill someone I hate?” Neku mutters. The crack in the counter top still looks like it’s laughing at him.

“Nah,” says Hanekoma, master of all the universe's open secrets. “But you just might be alive because of it.”

Neku has finally, officially, had enough of this for today. Enough of this for a lifetime. Two lifetimes. He knows he’s going to be turning this over in his head all day, if not all week and beyond – knows with a kind of sad inevitability that the longer he goes at it, the more he’s going to be finding stuff in what Mr H just told him that he can't ignore, no matter how much he doesn’t like it. But he figures he’s got at least a few good hours of perfectly good denial left before he gets to the worst of it, so he might as well make a head start.

“Well, if he ever wants to apologise for screwing me over, he knows where to find me.”

He’s most of the way to the door when he hears Hanekoma say, “I’ll pass that on, shall I?”

“Yeah,” says Neku, hardly hearing himself over what sounds like all of Shibuya buzzing in his ears, “you do that.”

2009 Wai-con Ball

2009-09-06T14:34:05Z

The events page for the Wai-con ball is finally up, so this seems like a good time to ask, who's going this year? Is anyone planning on organising a table? (And if not, should I be seeing if I can get one organised? The webpage is a little vague on whether tables need to be booked in advance, but assuming we do, we've got 8-10 seats to fill.)

[TWEWY Fic] The Opposite of Death (Part 2)

2009-09-04T14:24:38Z

Title: The Opposite of Death (and the Recognised Stages of Coming To Terms with your Gain)
Part: 2. Yearning and Searching
Summary: Neku can't imagine why Eri ever wanted to talk to him to begin with.
Characters/Pairing: Neku, implied Shiki/Eri
Rating: G
Word Count: 3260
Warnings: Post game, spoilers for everything.
Previous: Part 1

As of 1PM on the third Saturday since he woke up back in the real world, Neku has known Eri for slightly over an hour, and so far his defining impression of her is that she makes him uncomfortable. It probably wouldn’t be hitting him so hard if he wasn’t, for the moment and extending until the others get back with lunch, stuck on a bench with her by Hachiko with no-one else but a few complete strangers and a pigeon for company, but it’s only making it worse that he knows his initial assessment of her hasn’t been fair. She’s a nice sort, even at her most self-conscious (see: today), and she’s one of Shiki’s closest friends, and Shiki is his friend, so that's a lot of incentive for the two of them to be doing the mutual-friend-thing and trying their best to get on. So he assumes, at least. Neku’s still so new to the idea of having friends of any kind that he’s still making up a lot of the rules as he goes along. During the one week he spent in the UG with Shiki she’d gone through a lot of angst over a small misunderstanding with Eri, so he supposes he’s also got the option of doing the friend-who’s-overprotective-and-indignant-on-your-behalf thing instead, but it would take a much bigger arse than him to seriously try to turn all that into Eri’s fault. None of that’s any more than a side-note to the real problem.

The real problem is that about 67% of his brain still thinks her face is Shiki’s, but Eri has her own voice and a subtle set of her own mannerisms, and every now and then she does some small thing that’s so distinctly not Shiki that it throws him in a way that’s going to take a lot more than one hour of acquaintance to get used to. The problem is that even if he wants to respect whatever made her ask to have a word with him privately, meeting her under the circumstances was weird enough even when Shiki was still around as a buffer zone, and he’d be blind not to see that she’s feeling that too. The problem is that ‘so I’m this guy who made friends with your best friend while she was dead for three weeks that got almost-completely wiped from your memory’ doesn’t carry a conversation very far. On which subject, Shiki might have said she told Eri ‘everything’ about the experience, but Neku is willing to bet that excluded a lot of details that are too personal to share with anyone – or worse, things Shiki’s going to want to come clean about eventually, but which Eri is going to take hearing a whole lot better from Shiki herself than to having blurted out to her by a near-stranger without enough tact for his own good. Shiki has failed to supply him with any kind of list of exactly which details fall into which category, and that leaves Neku tiptoeing through the eggshells of safe conversational subjects. The time he tried to strangle Shiki, for example, is hopefully in the first category for good. What Shiki spent the Game looking like could be either of the two.

He’s already started to wish Shiki had lied from the outset and told Eri he was just some old friend who’d moved back to the area, or some guy she met on holiday somewhere, and saved them all this messy stuff dancing around the truth. He can’t imagine why Eri ever wanted to talk to him to begin with.

“…and even if we wanted to tell anyone else it’s not like we have a shred of proof,” he’s saying, largely to have anything to say. “But it's not like any of us would want to make a big deal out of it. Getting back and finding out none of our families had noticed we were gone, that was as weird as anything the Game threw at us – and trust me when I tell you it threw some unbelievably weird shit around. But now it’s over, I’m glad we can just put it behind us. The last thing we would have wanted was to get back to life and have to go around explaining the Reapers’ Game to everyone. It’s the kind of thing most people would be happier not having to hear about.” He makes it all the way to the end of that sentence before he realises that ‘people’ arguably counts Eri and he’s basically just told her she shouldn’t want to know all this stuff she’s come here to find out and oh great, like this hadn’t been awkward enough already. There just isn’t any way to back-pedal through all that again without sounding too lame for words.

“You’re not wrong,” says Eri, apparently missing his last faux pas. She has her hands clasped in her lap, and since telling him she wanted to talk she’s made eye contact mostly in small, furtive glances. “Shiki talked about it for hours that night and I still don’t think I’ve got my head around half of it. It would be easier if I thought she was crazy, but – she’s Shiki, you know?” She hesitates, and when she starts again it comes out in a rush, with the sound of something that’s been mentally rehearsed too many times. “She tried to play the danger down, but I’m lucky any of you made it back, aren't I? And to talk to her I’ve got you to thank that she made it through at all.”

Shiki would make it sound like that. “She probably didn’t tell you how I wouldn’t have made it through the first day without her. I was halfway through that week before I had any clue what I was doing. It took someone beating me over the head pretty hard with everything I was doing wrong to get me that far.” She’d obviously left out the bit where it was all Neku’s fault she hadn’t made it home by the first weekend too, but that was first-category stuff if anything was and his own private guilt trip.

The admission gets him a small smile. “She did say something about you being a bit of a jerk to her for the first couple of days.”

There’s no point even pretending to take offence at that one. “She wasn’t exaggerating that part.” It would have been nice to blame it on the amnesia, except that suggesting he’d have been any better company otherwise was basically one big fat lie.

“So...” There's not even a sideways glance this time, she's just not looking at him at all. “What changed?”

Neku tries very hard not to read too much into body language that hasn’t even been in the language he’s been expecting from Eri’s body from the moment they met.

“Well, that’s pretty much what the whole Game’s about.” Other than royally screwing everyone over, that is. “If you can’t learn to trust your partner, you might as well give up on the first day.”

There’s an awkward silence; quite an achievement in the middle of such an awkward conversation.

“Look,” says Eri at last, “I know I’ll probably never be able to begin to understand what you guys went through that week, but I want you to know – if there’s anything between you and Shiki…”

Out of all the awkward questions that might have turned up in this train-wreck of a conversation, this is one Neku has been at least halfway expecting, but it’s still well up there with the ones he’s been least looking forward to answering. Incredibly, this ripper of an experience still only ranks as the third most awkward thing he’s had to deal with since making it back to the land of the living. The trophy for second place goes to the conversation he had with his Mum the night he got back, but first place is reserved for a conversation he had with Shiki a little after they’d started getting over the overwhelming euphoria of just knowing they’d both made it back for real. That had been when Shiki, with a lot of ‘um’s and ‘ah’s and constant verbal backtracking, came out and told him she had to get it out in the open – that she knew what it meant that she’d been the price for his second week (and she didn’t hold it against him at all!) and she liked him a lot and she was really quite flattered, but, well, she’d only known him for a few weeks and only a few days of that actually counted (and quite frankly he’d changed so much in that time that she could hardly believe he was the same person), and she just wasn’t sure how she felt about him just yet, or how much she felt about him, or, um, whatever. You know?

That had left Neku with no option but to explain in similar mode that the thing about the price he’d paid for his second week was… well, he’d spent his first week with his memory in so many pieces he was lucky he’d remembered his own name. He hadn’t even known what he had apart from his self-identity that he cared about enough to be his price – whereas she’d been right there. Put up with enough bitching from him to qualify for sainthood and generally been the whole reason he’d had any chance of making it back to normal human behaviour, let alone back to life – not to mention being basically the first real friend he’d ever had. So the fact she’d become what he valued most by the end of that week had been a foregone conclusion, and not something to read anything more into. It was such an obvious relief to Shiki that they hadn’t morphed into more-than-friends in the two weeks she’d been out of action that he couldn’t regret the conversation too much, though the reality was that he wasn’t sure even now how much he’d meant it – didn't know whether if they'd both gotten to go home at the end of the first week the way they’d expected they wouldn't eventually have had a conversation that started like this but reached a very different conclusion about where they stood with each other. Now that the issue had been forced though, it feels pretty final, and for all he knows, it’s for the best. He doesn’t need his first real friendship getting any more complicated.

“There’s nothing really,” he tells Eri, who doesn’t immediately seem to believe him, and he can't really blame her either. “Stuff got pretty intense, I'm not going to sugar-coat any of that, and I owe Shiki a lot, but with her and me… it’s not like that, you know?”

“And if I asked Shiki would she tell me the same thing?”

If there’s one upside to having talked it all out with Shiki, it’s being able to answer that one without exaggerating anything. “I partnered Beat in my third week, and just about everything I just told you about Shiki goes for that week too. No offence to him, but he’s not really my type either.”

It gets him the smile he’d been going for.

“I’m sorry, really, I’m being such a busybody today. I didn’t mean to imply… I know it’s none of my business...”

“It’s cool,” says Neku, and surprisingly, it is. For all of the fifteen seconds before Eri’s smile fades back into her face.

“Look,” she says, “I… I’m just going to have to ask you to listen while I babble here for a bit, okay, because I need to get the rest of this out in one go. When I met Shiki… well, you have to understand, I’ve wanted to be a fashion designer for as long as I can remember – designing clothes is my dream, but hand me a needle and it’s like I’ve got two left thumbs. Then I meet her – this amazing girl who can take one look at my silly little scribbles, vanish into her sewing room for a day and she’s turned out this incredible outfit that looks so much better than I ever imagined my scrappy little designs could. It was like we were born to work together.

“But all along… I knew she was jealous of me, for being the trendy, popular one. The first day we spoke it was like she couldn’t believe someone like me wanted to talk to her at all. She’s my best friend in the whole world and she knows me better than anyone, but she’s never had many other people she was close to. She’s got… got this image of herself as someone who’s shy and bookish and not pretty enough to be popular and if I was the friend I should really be I’m sure I should have done more to help her get past that, but… but the truth is there’s this horrible part of me that liked it. I didn’t want to have to share her. She has so much talent and there was this stupid fear in my head that if she ever made other friends, she’d be the one realising I wasn’t anything special and I’d lose her and…” Eri takes a desperate gulp for air and charges on, even faster, if that was possible. “Well, it came to the point where this one day she was feeling down about how she couldn’t come up with her own designs and I think I kind of freaked. We work so well together, but if she could do designs herself, what would she need me for? That was when I blurted out that stupid, stupid thing about how she just wasn’t cut out to be a designer, and it came out so wrong that I didn’t even realise until it was too late that she’d taken it in a way I never meant and I’d really hurt her.

“Then the very next day I’m waking up from this horrible nightmare that what I said broke her heart and she ran off and got herself killed – and it all turned out to be true! – and suddenly I’m hearing she’s been through this incredible, world-changing, life-or-death experience with these people who she never knew existed a month ago, and especially this one guy who she says she’d never have made it back without – and then I talk to him and he’s saying all the exact same things about her! – and it’s like, how can I ever compare to all that? It’s only by some weird fluke that I ever knew about any of this – I’m not even supposed to remember! She went through this incredible experience that I can’t begin to get my head around, and I wasn’t there for her, didn’t even get to see her off or pray for her or any of the things you're supposed to do because I didn’t have the faintest idea it was happening until too late. And now there’s this part of me – oh god, I can’t believe I’m saying this – that’s so incredibly jealous of you all. You and she and the others could have died, and there’s part of me that’s feeling mad and left out because I didn’t get to go too.” She stops, just long enough to hiccough in a really pained sounding way – but she’s not in tears or even really close to it, and somehow that just makes it scarier. “And you think your story’s crazy.”

Neku is left trying very hard not to gape. He’d thought he understood that Shiki and Eri’s relationship was a whole lot more complicated than Shiki had admitted when she’d first mentioned Eri’s name. Apparently, the truth is he’d had no fucking idea. And it’s only then he notices just how much she’s cringing away from him – even now she’s done with all that – because, oh hell, she really thinks she deserves contempt for all this? But there’s also a big feeling is relief, because at least now he knows what all that tension through the rest of this was coming from.

Well, so much for most of his resolve about the ‘safe’ areas for this conversation.

He takes a deep breath, sure he’s going to need it. “This may sound pretty lame,” he admits, flying on instinct because even he’s not sure he knows where he’s going with this yet – but the instinct is that this is all fixable, he just needs the words to make Eri see that. “But… you were there for her. Way more than you think.”

“…Neku?”

“Hear me out here, okay? Shiki had this photo of you on her phone. I spent the first three days wondering why she kept looking at it so much until she explained about it and who you were.”

Eri is giving him a guarded look, very deliberately withholding judgement until she knows where he’s going with this.

“That thing from the day when we saw you talking to, whatshername, Mina – Shiki told you about this already, right? – that was the moment she decided she had to make it back no matter what. You need something like that to keep you focused long enough to make it through. I don’t mean it like it was a good thing you guys had that argument just so she could get that boost when she needed it, but, well, fact is – if you hadn’t meant something to her, it never could have hurt her so much.”

From the way Eri’s eyes are widening, Shiki did tell her, it just took Neku spelling it out for her to make that last connection. Now he’s just casting around for some way to wrap all this up, and what he lands on is, “Just… trust her a bit more in future, alright? She adores you. She’s not out to replace you, she doesn’t have that in her.”

“You really mean all that, don’t you?” says Eri, looking just a little awed.

Neku shrugs. “Sure. The Game really forces you to think about what really matters to you. But with Shiki, I think she pretty much knew from the beginning.”

“If I hug you,” says Eri nervously, “you won’t take it the wrong way, right?”

Wonderful way to end an already sky-high awkward conversation, but, “Nah, you’re safe.”

Eri’s hug is short, to the point, and practically resonating with all the fear and gratitude she has no better way to express.

“Thank you, so much, for making sure she got back to me,” she chokes out. “I… think I can deal with her having a friend or two like you.”

“Any time.”

Just to prove that there’s someone up there with a half-arsed sense of timing, it’s right about then that Shiki, Rhyme and Beat show up again, loaded down with burgers and salads.

If Eri has any doubts left, the way Shiki relaxes the moment she realises he and Eri are getting on just fine should be telling her everything she needs to know.

Part 3

[TWEWY Fic] The Opposite of Death (Part 1)

2009-09-02T14:17:50Z

Title: The Opposite of Death (and the Recognised Stages of Coming To Terms with your Gain)
Part: 1. Shock and Numbness
Summary: So you die, and then you get over it and get on with your life. Neku and friends get their first chance to trade notes on some of the stranger side-effects to come with being alive again.
Characters: Neku, Shiki, Beat, Rhyme
Rating: G
Word Count: 2710
Warnings: Post game, spoilers for everything.
Notes: Written as the first part of a series of loosely-connected fic, set shortly post-game. Thanks go to thano for betaing (and many apologies and much embarrassment that I then went and took this long to find time to make the final edits and get this posted *hangs head in shame*) Some vague shippiness for later parts, but so far thoroughly gen.

It’s been said, under the astute wisdom of certain circles of pop-psychology, that wanting something is better than having it, and Neku has to admit there might even be some truth to that considering that it took a week of being dead to teach him to appreciate a whole lot of what was out there to make being alive so thoroughly worthwhile. On the other hand, he spent three weeks wanting little more than to make it out of the Game in one piece, and now he’s done it he’s pretty confident that nothing – not all the emo-urges that school, family and the modern rat-race in all its horror combined could ever hope to inspire – are ever going to make him regret pulling it off.

That said, being alive again might have been taking a little more adjusting than he’d prepared for.

The embarrassing part is that there’s nothing in it he shouldn’t have expected from the start. If he’d spared even a moment to think about it he would have seen something like this coming: he’d have remembered that in all the years of his life he’s never once seen anyone make the international news after coming back from the dead, and there are only so many ways to reconcile that with the nature of the Reaper’s Game that wouldn’t have made him give up on the spot. If anyone had actually come out and asked Neku how he thought it all worked, he’d have had to admit he’d pretty much been taking it for granted that what happened in the UG stayed in the UG and it’d all take care of itself. At the least that was still a much more comforting explanation than what was frankly the more plausible possibility - that the promise of being returned to life had never been any more than a carrot on a string the Reapers were dangling in front of his eyes to keep him dancing to their tune. But un-life in the UG had had a way of keeping them too busy to worry about the big picture, and no matter what the objective was, the reality was that on a shear moment-to-moment basis they’d never been playing to win nearly so much as they’d been playing not to lose. The risk of being erased was not only a constant and incredibly motivational threat, it was a fate so horrible it was didn’t bear thinking about – and if they weren’t going to waste time thinking about that then they certainly weren’t going to have the time to waste worrying about anything less immediate.

The long and short is that even if the question had occurred to him, the healthiest thing he could have done would have been to push it to the back of his mind and forget about it, because sometimes denial is the only thing that keeps you going. So when it finally became an issue he had no defenses, and the Reapers’ parting shot against his sanity got him with both barrels.

***

“…then outta nowhere we get this lecture on road safety. But it was like our folks didn’t know why they was giving it – like someone gave 'em a script an' they were just reading it all out at us.”

Beat looks every bit as worked up as he sounds; like he wants to crawl into a little ball and flail off a thousand kilojoules of excess energy at the same time, and the combination is not doing good things for him. “You think being dead was freaky, it had nothin' on this.”

“It was like our parents knew there was some reason they should be worried about us, but they couldn’t remember what it was,” Rhyme puts in. “They’re never that happy to see us when we get home on a normal day. They wanted to be angry at Beat for being careless – at both of us – but they were too relieved to see us. It must've been horrible for them.”

“Forget them – Dad looked like he was about to hug me! I woulda died again right there!” says Beat. “Whole time we was in the game the only thing in my head is gettin' through it. Then suddenly Rhyme and me are standing on our doorstep and it hits me that our folks are gonna think we've been dead for three weeks. What the hell are we gonna say? And then the door opens and everything's going nuts and Rhyme has to elbow me out of blurting out the whole story three times before I catch that as far as they know we ain’t been gone for the weekend. Never felt so boneheaded my whole life.”

Neku leans back against the bench as Shiki makes appropriately sympathetic noises. He heard most of this on the phone a week ago, not so coherent without Rhyme’s inputs, but there's something weirdly comforting about having Beat – born one of those rare individuals with no brain/mouth filter – having the big, loud freak out that everyone else is feeling but doesn't want to have in public.

“It was the same with my parents,” says Neku – and it was, except that his mother really had hugged him for what had to be the first time since he was old enough to be trusted on his own feet – so completely out of the blue he hadn't known what to do with it. It wasn't like he'd expected to do his usual thing of walking in at any hour without either of them so much as glancing up from their latest row, but he'd walked home in such a daze – not seriously believing he’d even get home without hitting a Reaper wall somewhere – that by the time he had shown up and been proven alive and well and visible even to parents who usually didn’t notice him coming home unless he walked right under their noses, he hadn’t yet given a moment's thought to what he was going to say. Beat and Rhyme had it dead right: you could feel they knew there was some reason they ought to be glad he was home; the poor suckers just didn’t have the faintest idea what.

He was finally packed off to his room, headphones unneeded for the first time since he couldn't remember when, because downstairs was blessedly quiet but for the kind of sounds you expect as a reminder that any family lived here. Neku knew he’d heard somewhere that surviving trauma was supposed to bring people closer together, but did that even apply when they didn't have the first clue what kind of trauma it was supposed to have been?

When, around midnight, the phone rang and he answered it to hear Beat’s voice bitching about how many Sakuraba’s there were in the phonebook and just what the hell happened back there, man? It was the first thing that felt real all evening. By the time they hung up again it was so late it was early – so late that Neku’s next impulse to see how ‘Masaki’ ranked against Shibuya’s most common names had to be squashed down as a bad idea. He’d flopped down on his bed, not even out of the same clothes he’d been wearing since he couldn’t remember when, convinced he wasn’t going to sleep a wink, and that was the last thing he remembered before he was waking up to find the sunrise glaring through his window, having crashed so hard and fast it felt like nightfall back in the Reaper’s Game all over again.

Neku cut school the next day in favour of camping out under Hachiko from practically the first light, jumping just about every time he saw anyone carrying anything black, whether it was plush toy-shaped or otherwise.

It was late by the time Shiki finally showed (whadya know, skipping school is a lot harder when there are people around who’ll actually notice you're not there) but he didn’t regret a minute of the wait. He’d never hugged someone for that long either. (Actually, that was probably almost as awkward for her as it'd been with his Mum, but at least he'd be able to explain himself better at the end of it.)

Beat and Rhyme hadn’t been able to come out and meet them properly until the end of the week because their parents had picked up this sudden unbelievable paranoia about letting them go out on their own, especially if there were any roads they might have to cross on the way, and it took them a few days to calm down.

Now, finally, here they all were, alive and well and apparently just expected to go on with their lives, everything resumed as normal, the management apologises for the delay.

And it certainly isn’t news that the powers running the Game can rearrange a memory or two, Neku’s got ample first hand experience of that one. Allegedly all of Shibuya is under their control, whatever that’s actually supposed to mean. When all’s said and done it’s not hugely crazier than the idea of a bunch of invisible dead kids running around Shibuya and shopping for their lives, but the kind of power it must take to rewrite three whole weeks and wipe everything clean from so many memories is nothing that can be brushed off so easily – and it wasn’t just memories, there must’ve been funerals, gravestones – the whole shebang. Just trying to get his head around it gives Neku a headache.

Every time he makes the mistake of thinking the Game had run out of surprises it proves him wrong.

“My parents too,” Shiki puts in, bringing Neku back to the conversation. For someone who’d had to explain to two of the three persons present why she didn’t look anything like how they remembered her from when they’d first met, she was holding together her composure as successfully as anyone could have expected from her. Rhyme and Beat took it pretty well – and considering that Rhyme had spent four days treating her brother like a stranger, the level of cruel and unusual punishment in Game entry fees was nothing new to them. Explaining that Shiki’s UG appearance was based on a friend of hers who was a very real person they might run into on the street any time was less comfortable when there were still so many raw personal issues tangled up with it, but there at least Rhyme seemed to have picked up enough of a hint to be sympathetic without prying, whereas Beat passed the whole thing off with “Man, that Game – ain't one part of it that's ever gonna make sense to anyone who’s not as crazy as those Reapers themselves.”

“Although…” Shiki adds with more trepidation, “um, you remember Eri? That friend I told you about?”

“Oh yeah, you've…” ‘made up’ is the word Neku wants but really not the one he wants to use in company, “talked things out with her, right?” Shiki saw how devastated Eri had been by her death. Coming back to life only to see Eri forget everything might well have been weirder than what happened with her parents.

“Sort of, it's a bit…” Shiki’s hands are gripping her skirt hard enough to leave extra creases. “Well, actually, she showed up at our doorstep at five AM the morning after I got back, completely freaking out. She said she’d had this horrible dream I’d died and it was so real she had to come right over to make sure it wasn't true and…” A shiver runs through Shiki, almost too fast to see. “She tried to play it down after she saw I was okay, but… you guys should’ve seen the look on her face when I answered the door.”

The silence that follows that admission is simultaneously broken by Neku saying “Wow,” just as Beat exclaims “Man!” shortly followed by Rhyme chiming in with the more important question, "Did she really dream everything that happened?”

“Right down to the details,” Shiki breathes. “Everything that happened in the accident was there. You know how normally when people describe dreams they’re full of, oh, dreamstuff? Things that don't make any sense? There was nothing like that in this one. More like someone had taken a whole memory away from her and made her think it was a dream.”

“That makes sense,” says Neku, a little bitter and really not in the mood to hide it, “being as how that was exactly what happened.”

“Do you think maybe that’s what happened to the rest of our families too? They were made to think they’d dreamt all those memories?” wonders Rhyme. “It would explain why they all acted that way when we got back.”

“I for one am not gonna be asking,” moans Beat.

“So what did you say to Eri?” Neku asks before they can get any more sidetracked.

“I sort of… told her everything,” Shiki admits.

“Did she believe you?”

“I think so. She kept saying it was crazy, but when everything in the dream matched what I was telling her so well – and there were even a few things, like how the accident happened and the stuff she told Mina afterwards, that she hadn’t even dared tell me about until I brought them up first. I mean, it felt so real to her she had to come over and make sure it wasn't true, so when she heard it was…” She looks up shyly, one of those expressions Neku remembers so well from her UG-self that he’d know her even without that plush-pig thing she’s all but hugging to death. “Um, you guys don't mind, do you?”

Neku scratches his head. “I don’t think so. You would’ve had to lie to your best friend’s face about the biggest thing that ever happened to you… that's not something any of us would ask you to do.”

“Like Phones said,” says Beat.

“How much did you tell her?” asks Rhyme.

“Pretty much everything. All the parts I could explain. About the Reapers’ Game and all of you. And we had a long talk about some stuff between us from before. We both cried a lot. She wants to meet all of you sometime, if that’s okay. I think it’ll make it easier for her to believe everything.”

"Um, sure,” says Neku. “I don't see why not.” He's got no idea what he's actually supposed to say to Eri when he meets her for real, but it's pretty obvious how much it's going to mean to Shiki that he at least makes the effort.

“So, for everyone else – our families and our other friends – we’re just going to keep it a secret?” asks Rhyme.

“I guess,” says Neku.

“Who'd believe us?” says Beat. “They’d lock us up for being nuts.”

Shiki does the nervous look again, at each of them in turn (Neku last and longest), and finally voices the question they've all been dancing around all day. “So... what do we do now?”

There isn’t actually any good reason Neku should have to think about how to answer that one. But there is a bad reason, being that that even though at the time the Reaper’s Game might have been all about winning, or not losing, or things similarly mercenary and simple, Neku came back to the real world changed – in more ways than he’s probably even ready to admit to himself yet – and he’s glad of it. But the thing he can't – probably ever – say to the others is, “I'm glad it happened. And I'm glad all of you were the ones to go through it with me”, because that’s too close to, “I'm glad you all died and got put through three weeks of hell to earn a second chance,” and making it sound the way he really means it would require him to venture into territory more sappy and touchy-feely than even the new post-Game Neku is ever likely to be capable of without a personality transplant and maybe a sex change too.

So instead he shrugs like it’s not that big a deal and says, “We've got a second chance. We make the most of it.”

And that’s really all that needs to be said.

The way he saw it, dying was just a career change. Been there, done that, worn the shroud… And then you got over it and got on with your life. Of course, he knew that many people didn’t, for some reason, but he thought of them as not prepared to make the effort.

The Fifth Elephant

Part 2

The Gratuitous Vampire AU - Part 4

2009-08-19T13:37:54Z

Title: Sign of the Cross (a.k.a. the Completely Gratuitous Guilty Gear Vampire AU)
Summary: Gears or vampires, it's all just another day's work for the Holy Order. But they never do quite manage to screen some of their more unusual recruits as carefully as they ought to either.
Characters/Pairing: Sol/Ky
Chapter: 4 of 5
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 4690
Previous Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

The walk back to headquarters passes in a blur. Ky hardly registers whatever excuse he makes to the gate wardens for Sol's tattered state – the truth, probably: Sol got into a fight with a powerful vampire, but his uniform suffered for it far worse than he himself did. The guards are scarcely going to try any harder to stop two such important persons when they're in no mood to be stopped. Sol all but barges straight past them, Ky trailing explanations in his wake.

It's on his shoulders that they lost that vampire before Sol had the chance to finish the job, but Sol hasn't mentioned it all the way back. Responsibility for that has been prickling like a burr stuck in the back of his mind ever since, but it's only now that he gets to framing the thought that Sol has given up the hunt for this – for him. As well as Ky knows Sol and as often as he might berate him for laziness, it sends a shiver up Ky's spine to think that there's anything that Sol would prioritise higher. The vampire's long gone by now, of course, with little hope of tracking him down again tonight if he doesn't want to be found, but even that's more of an excuse than a reason. There are vampires every night of their lives, but even Ky has come to accept that punishing himself for every vampire that escapes them is useless at best. There are vampires every night of their lives, but this is something new.

Sol stops just beyond the arch of the entryway, and Ky's just distracted enough that he almost walks into him before noticing. A hand raised to stop himself lands on Sol's side, miraculously finding a solid patch of fabric that hasn't been near-shredded, and even so it's embarrassing how much something as simple as proximity to Sol is affecting him now. Affecting Sol too, from the way he turns under the touch until they're facing. The hungry gleam in his eye Ky remembers from earlier has returned, if it ever left, promising things Ky hadn't imagined he had it in himself to want this badly.

“Your room or mine?” Sol murmurs in his ear.

The answer isn't really in any doubt – Ky's is by far the more comfortable, thanks to the privileges of rank. “It had better be mine, hadn't it?”

Sol gives a warm chuckle. “Meet you there.” And with hardly more than that, he's gone, leaving Ky in the hallway, feeling so addled he takes two steps in the wrong direction before remembering where his room is.

After everything that's happened this night, the familiarity of his quarters seems out of place, and the door closes heavily behind him. He's torn between wishing he'd asked Sol what he'd gone to do and feeling sure that would only have betrayed his ignorance. Automatically, he strips out of his coat and boots and wonders stupidly what he's meant to do next. Should he be getting undressed? Or is that something he should leave for Sol to take care of? He's not nearly so clueless about sex as Sol seems to think, given some of the jokes he's made in Ky's presence in the past, but ever since he started making his way up through the Order's ranks in his late teens, there's always been so many more important things to do than pursue romantic possibilities. There's never been the opportunity to put what he knows into practice.

There's never been anyone like Sol before either.

Some of those jokes of Sol's are starting to sound a bit different in retrospect. Particularly a couple of instances when he'd brushed aside the thought Sol might have been flirting with him.

Ky's in no state to be judging time objectively, but it's probably about ten minutes before there are footsteps in the hallway outside – and that's all the warning Ky gets before Sol's pushing the door open without so much as knocking. Whatever he went away to do included removing the remains of his shirt and wiping away the worst of the bloody mess that had been drying on his side, which Ky is quietly grateful for. He's carrying something, a small jar Ky doesn't immediately recognise, but that's a detail he hardly notices in passing. Sol's hair had come loose from its usual binds sometime earlier in the evening, and the picture he paints is feral and beautiful in a way Ky has never let himself appreciate like this before.

Sol prowls up to him and brings a hand to the side of his face. He rubs his thumb over Ky's chin, his expression suddenly serious. “No second thoughts?”

Ky looks down as far as Sol's hand will let him, leaving him studying Sol's collarbone. “I should have, shouldn't I? There's so much I don't understand about you. So many things I should be asking – what you are, how any of what you've told me is possible.” How much of his willingness to trust Sol after all of this has been motivated by lust. He raises a hand to run slowly up Sol's free arm, balancing the contact between them; the reassurance of smooth, warm muscle under his fingers is something he would probably need now even without the urge to get his hands on Sol again that's been burning him for what feels like half the night.

“But?” Sol prompts. It must have been obvious where Ky was going with this.

“But that can wait,” Ky says.

In the alleyway, when Ky had choked out the word, “Please,” it had been too dark to see quite how Sol's face had lit up around the grin (which to be honest had been doing strange things to Ky's stomach since the day they met) – if 'lit up' was a term that applied to the kind of far-spectrum radiance that had far more to do with heat than illumination. Any remaining doubts in Ky's mind burn and shrivel away under the glare; there's already been too much anticipation, and for once in his life, Ky pushes away every impulse to over-think things. Before Sol's even moved he's leaning forward, and Sol's mouth opens underneath his own.

It's different this time, without the blood-fuelled urgency that had overtaken him up against the wall outside and left him aching to crawl inside Sol's skin by any means available. All the sensations are muted now, parts of the experience that had all run together the first time laid out for him in resolution he'd hardly known existed before, so that every nuance becomes something new and surprising – it seems almost criminal he'd had no chance to appreciate it all the first time around. Sol tastes like the memory of everything they've done this night – sweat and blood and semen, fire and anger and despair; far from being unpleasant, there's no part of it that doesn't taste like the promise of more. The bite mark on his neck still throbs dully whenever he remembers it, the sense-memory of the experience still new enough to taste, but the need this time feels as though it's coming from somewhere deeper, less overwhelming but perhaps more genuine for it. The hunger in the way Sol's kissing him is unmistakable, but the way he's exploring Ky's mouth is almost leisurely, even if it's still leaving Ky feeling that little bit off balance, always one step behind catching up.

He's barely starting to feel like he's settled into the kiss before Sol's mouth is moving lower, lips exploring the soft skin under his chin and trailing deliberately down his neck with, hard, sucking kisses like Sol's laying claim to him, inch by inch. The moment Ky realises just where Sol's going the bite mark throbs anew, anticipation winding like a spring with the closer Sol gets. When Sol's tongue runs over the spot at last the sensation goes straight to his groin and Ky gasps aloud. Even expecting it, it's so much better than he'd been prepared for.

Sol doesn't linger there long, but he doesn't need to; it's more than enough to bring everything that started all this flooding deliciously back, heat spreading just far enough to leave him wanting more. When Sol's mouth leaves a moan of protest escapes before he even realises he's making it, and there's an answering noise from Sol that comes closer to a growl.

“Don't tempt me,” he says mildly. Sol has one hand in his hair, the other wrapped around the back of his neck, and the fingers on both tighten, though not painfully; for all his protests he's still practically nuzzling against that spot, and it's making Ky dizzy. “Can still taste it on your skin.”

Ky blinks over his shoulder. Of all the things he thought he'd known about sex, this particular complication had never entered into things. “...no, that wouldn't be wise, would it?”

Sol snorts against his neck. With Ky's experience, it's a little too easy to start calculating exactly how much blood a human can safely lose, and how often, and he doesn't feel – or sound – as convincing as he probably should.

“Maybe some other time?” Ky offers, a compromise of sorts.

Sol mutters something Ky doesn't quite catch about failing resolutions, but it doesn't sound a bit like disagreement. With what feels like real reluctance, he pulls his face away, moves to the other side of Ky's neck and sucks a kiss into the skin there instead, sudden and hard enough to bruise, and that's really not half bad either.

The thought they've got all night to explore this makes something tingle deep in his stomach, but by the time Sol starts on the buttons of his shirt, there are just one or two little details he's starting to feel the slightest bit impatient with.

“Haven't we,” Ky's voice comes out so husky the first two words are barely decipherable, “done enough standing up for one night?” Not least because he isn't sure he trusts his knees to hold him up through much more of this.

Sol finishes a long, and completely un-protested, lap of his tongue along Ky's newly accessible collarbone before replying. “Getting ahead of me?”

“I've been...” the scrape of teeth on the same place almost make him lose the rest of the sentence, “ahead of you since the alley outside.”

Sol chuckles and looks up to meet his eye. “True, that.” A nudge is all it takes to start Ky walking backwards towards the bed, Sol following him. Any flash of self-consciousness he feels about spreading himself back against the covers lasts only as long as it takes for Sol to join him, crawling over to cage Ky's body between his limbs. Ky's hands come to rest of their own accord on Sol's lower stomach, but it's impossible to keep them still for long. It's a source of constant amazement that a vampire could have skin this warm, this inviting.

“Looking forward to settling the score?” Sol asks, not doing anything to Ky yet beyond grinning at him (which is really enough), and leaning in low, voice descending another octave below even his usual husky growl. “Getting in under my guard and laying it into me where I'll feel it.” The last line is whispered right against his neck, “Can't be many people ever inspired Ky Kiske to aim below the belt.”

Trust Sol to take a metaphor of this as a fight all the way past its logical conclusion, to make words sound dirtier than anything they've actually done.

“You make it sound like you ought to be the one in my debt,” says Ky. It could only be arrogance to imagine he knows how to make Sol feel half as good as Sol had made him, but that certainly isn't going to discourage him from trying.

“Took you apart once tonight already. One opening and I'll be doing it all over again,” says Sol, with what sounds like considerable pride, pulling Ky's shirt free of his pants and running his hands over Ky's stomach.

“Am I supposed to have it in me to object?” he replies, feeling dizzy again. They've really got to get rid of the rest of these clothes – there's something even dirtier about how much they've done already with him still dressed.

Sol goes back to the buttons on his shirt, working his way up from the bottom this time. “If I'd known you were going to be this enthusiastic, don't know I could've kept my hands off you this long.”

“You've thought about this before?” It's really no surprise – he's suspected at least as much ever since his revelation about the flirting, but he hadn't expected Sol to admit it so easily.

Sol shrugs. “Maybe a little.”

It's such a blatant understatement Ky can't help letting out a breathless laugh, and Sol's grin widens, sharing the joke.

“Should I be congratulating you for waiting this long?” Ky suggests, bringing a hand to the side of Sol's face. “I feel rather more inclined towards the opposite.”

Sol's expression darkens, almost imperceptibly. “Promised myself I wouldn't move on you as long as you didn't know I wasn't human.”

Ky blinks at him. “You were planning to tell me some day then?”

“Who knows,” Sol mutters, focusing on the last couple of buttons, but the inflection sounds far more like 'no' than 'yes'. Something warm and comfortable that had been in the process of opening up in Ky's chest halts abruptly, but before he has any time to dwell on the feeling it dawns on him Sol's not just avoiding eye contact for the sake of it, he's staring at Ky's newly bared chest. A gold cross in solid, ornamental design stares back at him.

The spreading warmth constricts back down again all at once as Ky realises this isn't going anywhere further until he takes it off.

There are vampires powerful enough that they can look on the sign of the cross with the same illusion of ease they treat full summer sunlight, but that doesn't mean either ever lose the capacity to weaken them, even to the extent of causing pain. He can't ask Sol to endure something like that just for the sake of the principle, but not even the bite mark on his neck had served as so sharp a reminder of just what kind of creature he's invited into his bed.

But before Ky's gotten as far as formulating all that into a real response, Sol looks up again at last, catches his eye and quirks an eyebrow at whatever it is he's reading in Ky's face. Keeping eye contact until the very last moment so that he knows Ky's watching everything, Sol leans slowly down and presses a kiss to the lower bar of the crucifix, the edges of his lips brushing the skin of Ky's chest either side. Something burns deep in his eyes when he looks up again, but there's not the faintest trace of discomfort.

Ky is, once more, finding it incredibly difficult to breathe.

“My god,” he whispers, the heat in his chest before replaced by yet another of those sensations he doesn't have a name for, spreading out from where Sol's lips just touched him and not stopping. “What on earth are you?”

“Thought we were saving that for later?” says Sol, without malice. Ky shakes himself.

“That was mostly hypothetical,” he says quietly, and Sol seems to take pity on him a little.

“Shh, there'll be better times for it. Trust me.”

A light tug prompts Ky to lean up so Sol can push his shirt back over his shoulders. “Would I have let you do all this if I didn't?” he replies, keeping his voice light, even teasing.

Sol's eyes rake over Ky's newly bared chest, down and up again, hands following but coming to rest just above Ky's hips. “Think you know where this is going then?”

Ky hasn't known where anything was going from one moment to the next since Sol ran off on patrol earlier that night. “I have a feeling I ought to make you tell me,” he says aloud.

Sol gives him a hungry grin, and leans down low, “I want to fuck you,” he breathes in his ear.

Ky is left dealing with a vague feeling that the first proper thought to pass through his head after hearing a particularly graphic sex act proposed as a profanity probably should have been further from, 'oh please'.

“I could be talked into that,” he admits, voice suddenly hoarse, the end of the last word lost in a gasp as Sol's hands dip the final inches remaining to his pants, setting on the button and zip with practised efficiency, a process which involves just enough incidental pressure to tease. Trust Sol to take this approach to 'talking him into it' – words never have been Sol's first resort when it came to settling a matter like this.

Sol makes short order of Ky's pants before reaching down for something on the floor, which confuses Ky for the moment it takes for him to think to wonder what happened to the jar Sol had been holding when he'd come in. Retrieved from the floor, the container proves to be filled with a viscous fluid, into which Sol unceremoniously plunges the fingers of one hand. They come away slick with an oily substance, and when Sol strokes them slowly over Ky's cock, the result – glorious, frictionless pressure – is so very nice any passing indignation Ky might have wasted on the thought of just what Sol's getting on his privates is well and truly overruled.

The stroking only goes a couple of times up and down the his length – reassurance, maybe, certainly enough to quell any doubts that Sol knows exactly what he's doing – before the fingers are trailing lower, over his balls and further still into sensitive parts of Ky's anatomy that he's never been this aware of before. Sol may be taking his time, but he's not patient by nature and he doesn't linger any more than what Ky has the passing impression of being rote requirements for breaking in any nervous virgin. He doesn't bother asking permission again for anything Ky's already more than implied permission for either, but he does look up at that point, catching Ky's eye. Whether he's making sure he can tell if he's doing anything to make Ky uncomfortable, or if he just wants to see every last thing that crosses his face while he does this or some combination of the two Ky will never know, but the result is that when Sol's finger presses inside him everything else in the world is lost behind the look in Sol's eyes, pupils dilated until the red of his irises is little more than a sliver around the edge.

The sensation of Sol's finger pressing into him is more strange than uncomfortable – if it's any rival to the kind of strains he's used to from years hunting monsters through the cold and wet at all hours of the night, it's only because the stretch is somewhere so much more intimate than anything he's experienced before. Ky's breath is coming in short pants now; when he breaks eye contact at last (Sol's face strange and serious) it's to lean back, arching up into the contact in a way that seems to make it easier. By the time he looks up again there's a second finger moving in beside the first, stretching against muscles that really aren't used to this sort of intrusion, and yet Ky's almost too distracted by the sight of what Sol's doing with his other hand to notice, palming himself roughly through his pants while he watches. Ky's mouth goes dry; for all that they've done so far, up to now Sol's been just a little too good at keeping his own arousal under wraps for comfort – this is the first hint he's had yet of so much that seemed to be missing from the incident in the alley outside. At the same time the sight comes with the faintest niggling of betrayal – it should surely be against whatever rules apply here for either of them to be doing that to themselves, especially when Sol would only have to scoot up the bed into reach and Ky would be more than happy to take over for him. He never does get any further with that thought though, because the next second whatever patience Sol has had with the pace thus far has eroded to where he's now thrusting both fingers sharply inside, as far as they'll go, and as far as they'll go involves hitting something deep inside Ky that shorts out every thought he'd been having and a good deal more he'd hardly even begun to form. Ky gives a low moan, and he's shifting bodily back against Sol's fingers as soon as they move away. Sol's response is to pause, judging (undoubtedly smirking even if Ky can't see), then thrust his fingers back once more, making Ky gasp out his name.

The fingers still. “Ready for more?” Sol asks him, not waiting for Ky's answer before pulling his hand back and reaching for his pants, but Ky makes a vague noise that he hopes sounds like assent – full words are giving him more trouble than usual right now. Sol's already undoing his pants, completely mindless of the dark, sticky fingerprints he's leaving on them with both hands, finally drawing out his cock. He takes a moment to coat himself with more of the oil, and Ky knows he's staring, but he can't help it. Sol's decently larger than him – he'd have been a fool not to expect that – but it's still just a bit amazing to think he's the one responsible for making Sol that hard. For all Sol's faults, sexual deviancy has never been among them – as long as Ky's known him he's always been too stubborn and solitary to seek even the most casual kinds of intimacy with anyone, male or female, soldier or otherwise. To be the one exception is perhaps the greatest compliment Sol could have paid him.

Now they've come this far Sol wastes little time lining himself up. Ky lets his head tilt back against the pillows, eyes drifting closed, half-certain that if he watches Sol pushing into him this could all be over embarrassingly fast. The sensation alone is more than enough, the stretch of Sol sliding in much greater than before, slow enough that Sol has to be deliberately holding himself back. Ky reminds himself to relax, tries to slow his breathing down, but it's an effort, and the restraint Sol's holding himself to isn't actually helping much with that. By the time he's all the way inside Ky's desperate for Sol to move; he feels like he'll split in two if either of them so much as breathes too deeply, but there isn't a single sensation involved in all this he'd trade for all the world.

“Alright?” Sol asks, an impatient hitch in his voice that wasn't there before. “Can't tell much if you won't look at me.”

“Sorry,” Ky breathes, opening his eyes, “I'm fine. You can... any time you like.”

Once again holding eye contact, Sol draws himself out slowly, slick against enough oil to remove all but the last hint of friction, and thrusts himself back in again all at once, hitting that spot inside Ky again hard enough to make him arch his head back and whisper, “Oh yes.”

Sol does it again, and all the strangeness of all of this put together – the intrusion, the way Ky's legs have had to spread to give Sol access, the very idea that he's gone from nothing to this so fast, let alone with Sol – is nothing compared to how good this feels.

It doesn't take long for Sol to pick up the pace. Whatever restraint he's held thus far is soon confirmed to have been for Ky's benefit alone, and within the space of half a dozen thrusts he's pounding into Ky's body hard enough to almost fold him in half. Muscles Ky never knew he had are going to be aching from this tomorrow morning, but he isn't going to care. It's this he's been waiting for all night – all that energy he knew Sol had in reserve loosed at last; this is Sol hiding nothing, holding nothing back. Sensation builds long past where he can tell where one thrust ends and the next begins, - he's digging both hands into the bedclothes just to have anything solid to hold on to that won't mean doing himself damage with his own nails. It's a good thing he's come once already, he doesn't know how he could have lasted this long otherwise – the only thing holding him down is that he doesn't want it to end.

He's just about concluded that it couldn't possibly get any better when Sol leans that little bit further forward, thrusting all the way in, his mouth finding the bite-mark on Ky's neck one last time. Sol sucks down hard, and Ky comes so long and sudden the whole world whites out; he barely has the sense left to hear Sol growling out his name as he shudders deep inside him. Not even in a whole night of new and overwhelming experiences has there been anything to compare to this.

When Ky remembers how to move again (only a little startled at the discovery that the rest of the world is still there) he finds Sol licking semen off his stomach, not the least self-conscious when he glances up to see Ky's back with him again. The next stroke of his tongue is drawn out as long and slow as Sol can make it. It would probably be unbelievably arousing if Ky had anything left in him in any state to tell. The whole world seems to be happening on the far side of a thick, warm fog at the moment. He brings a hand to rest on the side of Sol's head as Sol finishes what he's doing and crawls back up towards him. Sol looks as pleased with himself as ever, but there's something new to it now – something more relaxed and open than Ky's not sure whether he's imagining or not.

“My god,” he murmurs, which doesn't do the experience any kind of justice, but is as much eloquence as he's capable of.

Sol grins. “Talking to me?”

Ky swats him playfully on the side of the head, which somehow turns into him pulling that head down again for another kiss, lips colliding with less than perfect grace; Ky is well beyond having the energy left to do this properly.

“Better get you in bed before you pass out on me,” says Sol after a bit. The statement puzzles Ky until he remembers that although they're nominally 'in bed', the covers are all underneath him at the moment. It's fortunate that Sol seems to know what to do about it, because he's not wrong that Ky's about two breaths from sleep.

Sol's curled up beside him before it even occurs to Ky that there was any possibility that he might not be staying there the night. He can't quite think what the alternative would have been though; there are a lot of cold corridors between here and Sol's quarters. It's natural Sol would be staying, isn't it?

He's asleep before he can carry the thought any further.

Smash '09

2009-08-17T15:48:29Z

After last year's somewhat lackluster Manifest experience we decided to give Smash a try this time around, which turned out to be as good a call as we could have asked for. Smash is a lot smaller than Manifest – probably not even as big as Waicon – but it may well have been the best organised anime convention we've ever been too. Queues were short and moved quickly, the staff were helpful and friendly and never seemed run off their feet, there were two excellent food stalls right outside, and there was even a live video feed of the cosplay comp for entrants to watch backstage while waiting for their turns. Things ran a bit late on the second day and they could have used more seating for the cosplay competition (a lot of people were left sitting on the floor, standing at the back or watching from the balcony), and the host for the event was, not to put too fine a point on it, not John, but none of that took too much away from the experience. The people were more friendly and enthusiastic than at any other con I can ever think of, and they stopped us to ask for photographs/complimented our costumes/oohed and ahhed over Lisa's art/recognised us from the Internet a lot over the two days, which all terribly good for one's ego. Lisa only managed to book a table for the Sunday, which turned out to be the quieter of the two days, but a respectable profit was still made and for once we had a day free to actually see what was going on around the con. All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable con experience.

The other big highlight of attending a con over East was the chance to catch up with some of our friends who've been part of the giant Eastern States Exodus that's overtaken Perth in the last few years – plus a couple of Eastern States natives who I'd met briefly at previous Wai-cons but hadn't had much chance to talk to until now. If any of you should be reading this, hi again to Sam, chisathechi, cielrose, k_chan009, Will, Kenny, Catty, Tsubaki and anyone else I've missed - really hope you can all make it over for Wai-con next year!

This was our first time flying Virgin Blue, which worked out reasonably cheaper than Qantas even after you factor in extra charges for food and/or seat-back video. The plane even got us there half an hour earlier than expected, which was great apart from the part where that meant I missed out on the climatic final battle of Wolverine (an otherwise perfect in-flight viewing option since I'd already seen it 1) enjoyed it enough to see again, 2) remembered it well enough to understand through dodgy aeroplane audio and 3) hadn't been so blown away by it that it deserved much better than an in-flight viewing), so that was a bit of a bugger. At least the star of the movie had had most of its main scenes by then.

The hotel we were staying at this year was not so much bad as sort of odd. The rooms were pretty nice, if a bit short on powerpoints in useful locations (read: there was one, and it was stuck behind the table). However, contrary to what was written on the signs, the staff member working at the front office disappeared on Friday evening and didn't reappear until Sunday, despite the fact that both Sam and chisathechi were due in on Saturday morning. Room keys for them eventually turned up by means of being left sitting on the counter, practically in view from the street. This all basically worked out in the end, but I'm not sure whether I'd stay there a second time.

Anyhow, on to the con: Saturday was the day we had no stall to worry about, and we spent it in our now ridiculously well-traveled The World Ends With You costumes. These were mostly unchanged from Japan, except that Lisa now had her Sho wings with her (probably the sole reason for half the photos we got stopped for), and I'd finally gotten hold of an orange phone (more accurately, a cheap black one and a can of metallic orange spray-paint). Plans also included a skit which was our first foray into having to pre-record our voices, but all went well up on stage on the day.

(Photos shamelessly cribbed from the Smash forums and friends, we didn't get get to take many of our own.)

chisathechi has a bunch of other pics of us we took outside afterwards posted as well up here, and Lisa's got a handful up here, mostly taken while we were waiting for our Takoyaki.

Links for the day would not be finished without a mention of k_chan009 and cielrose (and the rest of the team!)'s Utena skit - which should be particularly recommended to anyone who 1) liked Utena, 2) liked Moulin Rouge or 3) didn't like High School Musical.

And I had to link to this vid of Will showing off some of the 'special features' of Sol's Overture outfit. It was a real crying shame we didn't manage to synchronise our Guilty Gear cosplays on the same day.

While I'm singing the praises of Smash – and Sydney fandom in general – I was also impressed by the standard of costumes up on stage that day, and particularly the standards of of the other skits. I have to give special mention to one cosplayer who was not only the best Sailor Moon I've ever seen, he was in fact the best male Sailor Moon cosplayer I've seen - and I can't think of anyone up on stage in the 'but why did you bother?' category (being typically the kind who goes up to proudly tell us all how they'd pulled their entire costume out of their wardrobe on a whim this morning). The skits were all well performed and/or genuinely funny too, including multiple dance numbers, the obligatory RickRoll and pretty much everything you can get away with saying about the plot of Ai no Kusabi on stage without being thrown out of the venue, amongst other things. ;)

So you can imagine our surprise when we found out we'd been awarded runner up in the skit category. Actually, we'd been so sure we had no chance that we were outside taking photos during the awards ceremony. ^^; k_chan009 had to phone us up to let us know we'd won.

Then on Saturday night the guy with the costume with the massively awesome wings we'd been admiring at Manifest the previous year cooked really delicious crapes for everyone. :3

Sunday we had to be at the con by nine to pick up our traders passes, but despite what was in retrospect a less than brilliant plan to walk the distance to the con in my high-heeled boots, we made it easily. Cosplay that day was Ky for me and a new Robin costume for Lisa.

Someone actually got a shot of both of us that day! =D

I'm going to take a paragraph to blab on about the costume for a bit here, because not since that first Yuffie have I ever gone through making a costume with this many different bits to it. There's the pants, the undershirt (which had to be made in a way that seriously restricts your shoulder movement), the coat (made in two pieces – the skirt and top coat are completely separate), the tabard (do *not* get me started on sewing pleather edging around all those corners), the boots, the belt plate, the gloves (which were bought and modded rather than having to be made from scratch, thank god), the wrist guards, the cross-pendant and the wig – and I haven't even start work on the Fuuraiken yet. There were six gold buttons to be made and eleven different belts - depending how you count the ones around the waist, but we'll go with eleven - each of which had to be measured carefully before the hole was punched, had to have a buckle sewn on, an end finished off neatly, and at least one belt-loop made – and anything without belts on it had edging with too many corners or some other decoration that would have to be custom made. I owe huge amounts of gratitude to twinkl33 and velithya – both of whom have made Holy Order costumes in the past and were willing to let me quiz them on how everything had been made and borrow bits to base my patterns off. Also to pinneagig for doing the metal weathering on the belt plate and generally putting up with the house being kind of a massive cosplay zone for the two months (though as a cosplayer herself she's very sympathetic about that).

Despite all the time and effort it took, everything went pretty smoothly. Excluding a few moments of frustration over the umpteenth belt to be finished, it was even kind of fun, probably mostly a sign that I've been in the right mood to have a big project to focus on lately. It absolutely paid off on the day too – the finished product got me enthusiastic compliments from at least three seriously awesome cosplayers whom I'd hardly known (if at all) before that weekend. The standard in the cosplay comp was as good as the first day too – there were a number of really good solo entrants to compete with, so I was hugely flattered that the judges awarded me runner up best cosplay. At least I'd stuck around for the awards ceremony this time.

I feel like I should have more to say about Sunday, but it's a bit of a blur - running a stall and competing in the cosplay comp doesn't leave your day with a lot of change left over. Between running the stall and everything else I didn't actually get many photos taken that day, but it's early days for that costume - we'll get a proper photoshoot done back in Perth some time.

That was about it for the con, but our flight back wasn't until late Monday afternoon, giving us most of the day to do a bit of general touristy stuff. We spent it wandering around the Sydney CBD, starting out at the Sydney Kinokuniya and meandering down through China Town and whatever we found in between. The two main highlights were both places stumbled onto completely by accident – starting with a little store called 'Shibuya' just on the edge of China Town which appropriately sold Goth-Loli and assorted other Japanese fashion. It was closed the first time we went past, with a sign on the door saying it opened at 12, but when we went back there just after midday it was still closed, with not so much as a light on inside to suggest it was opening. Hoping that it someone was just running a little late today, we went off to find some lunch instead.

The place we got lunch is tricky to describe. It's a particular variety of restaurant (Lisa calls them 'Family Restaurants', which just doesn't sound all that specific out of context) that was as enthusiastically franchised in Japan as fast food chicken is everywhere else in the world, but the food is not only way better, the menu ranges from from the usual Japanese fare to steak or spaghetti or whatever else they've picked to appropriate from far corners of the world – almost reminds me of a slightly down-market version of Sizzler with a much more varied menu. It's the kind of food you try once or twice and then spend the rest of the trip bemoaning the mystery of why the rest of the civilised world hasn't caught on to doing the same thing, so finding one in Sydney completely by accident may have prompted quite a lot of happy squee from the too of us. May it spawn and spread across the Nullabor post-haste!

And after that we went back to the Shibuya shop again, to find it open at last, and as a result my Joshua-related goth-loli outfit needs are now taken care of. :3 As Lisa said, it's like we went to Sydney, and came back via Japan.

The flight back was pleasantly uneventful. So that was our trip.

Still a heck of a lot of things I've been meaning to get written up and/or posted sitting on the queue, but now there's no huge, urgent cosplay projects looming over me, that should be a little easier to get around to.

Back from Smash!

2009-08-12T11:24:20Z

Full con report is taking some time to assemble, so in the meantime, the uber-summarised version:

Joshua and Sho cosplay: Runner-up Best Skit on Saturday! \o/

Ky cosplay: Runner-up Best Cosplay on Sunday! \o/ \o/

Smash: Very possibly the best run anime convention we've ever been to.

Sydney fandom: Incredibly friendly and completely deserving of such a good con.

Catching up with friends/getting to know some new ones: Only sorry I won't get to see you all again sooner. <3

Sydney shopping: Left us a bit poorer but very much the happier for it. :3

Off to Smash!

2009-08-06T14:30:06Z

...see you all there/on Tuesday when I get back. [delete the inappropriate] ;)