Who: Tate and Hank Pym Where: Pym's laboratory When: Sometime after Hannah Montgomery is murdered What: Just some friendly chit chat! Warnings: A little violence, disturbing imagery. Bad guy stuff.
In the beginning, Loren hadn't wanted to believe it. He'd refused to believe it, even when Tate gave up and reduced screams of rage to conspiratory silence. The police didn't seem to think there was much to go on, all things considered. Girl runs away from her religious parents and becomes a stripper in Vegas, then stops coming around to some middle-aged guy's apartment? It was a story that was too common to even raise a fucking brow around here.
That night, he took to the streets like a scavenger. He swept through the spiderweb alleyways and stopped every passerby. Those that wouldn't stop got a twist of knuckles in a shirt collar and when they took notice of the cruelty boiling low in blue eyes, they stopped. The problem was that Loren didn't have a picture of Hannah, just a description. Small girl, brown hair, gray dress proved to be just about everyone, and Loren spent the rest of the night chasing down nothing leads. He didn't even show up for his 4 AM shift at Caesar's, slipped his mind. Over the next couple of days, anything but finding Hannah slipped his mind. That's when Tate started speaking again. No screaming, no crying. Just the logical, clipped tone of a resolution. We find him.
The plan was simple, although a bit formless. All it required of Loren was waiting. Just wander the floors of the Passages hotel. Ignore the duties of life, like food and rest, and simply patrol in wait.
Adam tried to keep Pym away from the door for as long as he could. Normally, he could go about a week before the headaches and self loathing brought him to a breaking point that landed him back in Passages. This week was different. He was tired from the burn victims, the trouble through sweeping over Vegas. Pym could easily pull Adam to his will like a child carrying a teddy bear. Adam relented early, promising a day’s worth of time in the robotics lab if Pym let him get back to his patients until the clinic quieted down.
The Marvel door was a busy one, so he only passed through at night when he suspected not a lot of people were going through. He was a man of little conflict in his blood, but Pym would take advantage of anything he could. Dressed in a black hoodie and jeans, Adam slipped up the stairs and towards his door as he fumbled for the card key with a yellow beehive printed on it. The hotel seemed considerably empty, so he slid the card, waited for the futuristic door to open and then walked inside.
Pym appeared in his laboratory wearing a white coat, dress shirt and slacks. He was a little taller than Adam with lighter blonde hair and more muscle under his clothing. There was something clinical about him, like all of the bobbing personality of Adam’s gait was replaced with cool efficiency. He was the kind of man that wasn’t much of a man anymore. Someone who managed to take all of his emotions and turn them to bleak hopelessness. The only thing he felt was a need for revenge that fueled his research to take the Avengers down. Taking a seat at a work table, Pym immediately started up his computer and began sifting through robotic parts, unaware of anything that might follow him.
Even if all of that mercenary training was tucked away in an amnesia drawer, some things were just hardwired. Call it conditioning. Loren had a knack for following people, and the skill was honed in his current jobland. He was wonderfully average in the way serial bombers could be. He was just missing the mirrored aviators, really, with those soundless steps and nonchalant hands wedged deep down into the pockets of asphalt slacks. Loren blended when blending shouldn't have been possible. See no evil, hear no evil, right? He was already sweeping close from behind when the other man passed through the Marvel threshold, and the toe of his loafer kept the door from falling shut completely. Sensing obstruction, the electronic door hissed wide once more, and Tate strolled inside a moment later.
The differences were significant, but this scientist hadn't been paying enough attention to notice. That's alright, Tate was rather fond of the element of surprise. He was wearing his lucky Converse all-stars, some Cobain era jeans, and his favorite Freddy Krueger sweater. It was a winning ensemble, by all counts. It would certainly put somebody at ease, more so than the black rubber suit would. Tate was angel blond curls and a dimpled grin, but that hardly mattered because the man at his desk didn't turn around. There was the sudden squeak of a sneaker from behind, and that might have done the trick for raising red flags, but it was too late. Tate had some questions, but they say that actions speak louder than words... which is why he reached forward and shoved the man's face for a hard thwack into that glowing computer screen. You can't make an omelette without breaking some noses.
Violence in Marvel was a little more glorious than it was out there in Vegas. It didn’t kick swiftly and end before anyone knew it was over. It moved in frames. In perfect, slow successions that let each inch of pain show like slides across a white screen. Pym didn’t see any of it, only felt the cracking glass of his monitor and the small hand against the back of his head. His head jerked back from the impact, body crumpled in his chair as his eyes fluttered open expecting to see Steve, Tony or any of the other Avengers.
With blood smeared across the side of his face, Pym smirked. The angelic blonde looked a lot like him when he was younger. If he had been belly deep in drugs and antidepressants, he would have thought this was some violent vision trying to wake him up. But, he knew better. He opened his mouth slowly, his voice cracked and full with recovering pain. “What can I do for you, Mister-” Pym raised his eyebrows, waiting for the boy to fill in the blanks.
"Langdon." Tate took a slow step back with a cheshire sphinx smile. It didn't quite reach his eyes, but that wasn't surprising. Few things could travel to the bottom of such tar pits and survive a second breath. "See? You've got manners, man. I like that." Tate's grin bloomed into something a little more real, it might have even been honest. "I like that a lot." It certainly wasn't something you saw every day, particularly if you were living in a house full of your victims. Some people just couldn't take hold of the idea of forgiveness, it was unfortunate.
"I'm looking for somebody. Why don't you tell me about your man on the other side?" He took a clue from his old shrink. All vacant stare and leading questions. “Certainly.” Pym wiped the blood from his face, staining his white sleeve with a streak of red before folding his hands in his lap. “Though, I would like to know why. Just out of curiosity. I am a scientist, as you can tell, and being curious is part of my line of work.” Pym didn’t try to fight back, didn’t even move from the chair. He would fight for his life if it seemed necessary, but he hadn’t done anything wrong and Adam wasn’t capable of personally hurting a fly. Encouraging others? Maybe so.
“My man on the other side is a doctor. At a free clinic. He’s practically a saint.” Pym’s mouth moved with a happy, mischievous smile. “For now, anyway. Why? Is your man on the other side looking for a prostate exam? Some birth control for his lady?” He sounded like a man on the radio back in the 1960’s. He had knowledge of modern times, but it was almost as if he never aged along with it.
"Oh no," Tate was forced into a surprised burst of chuckles. They were sporadic, like the flames from a roman candle. "Nothing like that." Prostate exams, how funny. Pale fingers, they bordered on ash gray really, found his striped chest as if to steady himself and Tate shook his head. Pale curls bounced gleefully into his eyes as he straightened, all youth and mirth. "No, no.. we're going to feed somebody their heart." There was a little nod at the end to cement that statement in place, but Tate's brow creased a moment later with concern. "Or would he die too quickly.. we should feed him his liver instead, maybe?" This was the scientist after all, he must have had the answers. There was no mention of the initial violence or the cracked computer screen. It seemed to have already been forgotten in favor of this conversation.
“Start with the toes.” Pym liked this kid. A little insane, sure, but he didn’t let anyone push him around. Either because he spent so much time being pushed, or because he just found it a lot more fun making other people fall. The tall scientist finally stood, hands behind his back as he weighed the options. “This person you want to hurt, is it an eye for an eye?” Pym’s long, worn fingers grazed a tray of broken robots and data boards as he passed by it. They were his tools, his only work. “What I mean is, did he hurt someone, too?”
There was a tough swallow here, it betrayed some emotion that didn't quite fit the rest of Tate. It was like a broken cog come loose, rattling defective inside of the tin man's physique. "He killed the girl I love," he admitted. There didn't seem to be any reason to deny it, although Tate was still considering whether or not this doctor on the other side could have been the one to blame. Doctors were supposed to help people, he knew, but he wasn't sure that such things meant very much.
“Consider yourself fortunate.” Pym’s eyes unfocused for a moment as they gazed down at the metal and circuit boards. “You have someone else to blame.” There was an anger in the boy that rang familiar. It was the sort that wanted desperately to be justified, even though that could never be so. Like a warrior fighting a dragon he had unleashed on a village only weeks before. He was caught in that nice, squishy place between being a monster and feeling love despite it. “My doctor would help you find this man, but this seems like a personal vendetta, yes? My suggestion is to break the man before drawing blood.”
Tate liked this guy, he didn't get bent out of shape about the little things. A little blood, a little broken glass. All of the computer parts made Tate assume that the guy was pretty smart, too. He could respect that. "Your doctor a good man?" Tate asked this with the deep-seeded knowledge that men were either good or bad, there wasn't much room for grey in the arena of morality. Not when it came to the way other people looked at you, anyway. He would believe the scientist if he said yes. It was the naivete of youth, perhaps, but he'd never much understood lying. Tate might have evaded the truth once or twice, but that was all to spare Violet.. and when it came down to it, he'd never denied what he'd done to her family. There wasn't much point in thinking about that now, though, and Tate sniffed with a glance toward the door.
“Yes. Woefully so.” Pym looked up at Tate, hands going to his pockets as he gave an even look to the boy. “If you don’t mind keeping that information to yourself, of course. Secrets are an important part of survival.” He didn’t remember giving Adam’s name, but a saintly doctor at a free clinic was easy enough for anyone who knew him or the name Waterhouse to figure out. Who knew what kind of brutes lived inside the head of the Avengers.
"No problem, man." Tate's index finger drew a little cross over the left side of his chest in demonstration. "Hope to die." This scientist was nice, and that made Tate liken the doctor to the same. He wouldn't expose the secrets of this stranger, good people didn't deserve to be double-crossed or hurt. That didn't mean that Tate never did those kinds of things to good people, there certainly were circumstances where it couldn't be helped. "I'll keep it between us. Thanks for your time." See? Manners. Tate's smile was small, and he saluted the scientist with a duo of fingers before backing up toward the door that he'd previously stormed through like a Bates Motel war banner.
Pym arched an eyebrow comically and saluted the boy with one hand as he left for his crusade. It was funny how civil fellow psychopaths could be towards each other. Pym felt a similar sort of decency towards Loki that someone like Tony Stark would never experience first hand. Maybe it was because they understood each other in a world that didn’t seem to try and understand very much at all. Once Tate left, Pym sat back down at the his desk and stared at the now broken computer. Replacing it seemed to be a bigger nuisance than the cuts across his face.