Who: Emma and Nate Summers, Laura Kinney and Jubilee, plus Cerebus NPCs Where: somewhere in Orange County What: lots of bad stuff When: 6/25 Warnings/Rating: R for violence, extreme character injury, and temporary character death Status complete
Nate struggled as the guards approached them, and he glared. He already sported a black eye as he stared at them, anger and a simmering frustration filling him. He was handcuffed and his legs were caught in ropes, ropes tied to the wall, but he was slowly working on that. Years as a warrior gave him far more skills than just mutant powers, and he watched and waited, making a show of resistance.
Watching the guards, he had a bad feeling about this.
These guards weren't as stupid as some others. They kept their distance except when they needed to resecure him or feed him. The food was drugged, just enough to slow his movements and keep his powers in check. So was the water.
Occasionally, that woman came in to check on him as well. She'd changed into a white labcoat, black slacks and a lowcut blouse. Her expression was always very very businesslike.
Laura growled at her. She knew it wouldn’t do any good. She’d already started refusing food and water, but they just drugged her manually at that point. Her hands were patched up enough that she wouldn’t die, so there was that, at least.
Emma was asleep, or at least she was laying relatively still with her eyes closed. She’d been as little trouble as possible since her arrival.
Nate was glad they were okay, and the appearance of the woman made him sneer. Disgust and disdain positively rolled off of him. His dream self had been a warrior and a diplomat for years, and he knew exactly how to fix someone with a look that communicated volumes.
He eyed the woman, his mind reaching deep down inside. There was power, and there was power, and sometimes, one had to spend extra to make a point.
“What’s on the docket today, doctor faithless?”
Jubilee was napping a lot too, when she wasn't clinging onto Laura. Whatever she'd been hit with hadn't reacted well with her body, and losing her fireworks again was depressing.
She stuck her tongue out.
The woman regarded him, then calmly marked something on a chart. "Ze same as alvays." She gestured to the soldiers. "Take Mrs. Summers. I vant to take a sample of her amniotic fluid. Then I vant the whore. Ve need to send a...message."
Emma made a face. She was tired of being poked and prodded already. Of course, she might find a way to escape, her bonds might be less restrictive, maybe she play on the sympathies of the doctor.
Laura continued to growl as the guards came near, and she lashed out at them, trying to kick them, bite them, anything to prevent being touched or hurt. She wasn’t about to cooperate with these assholes.
Nathan was tired of this bullshit and he had been working and waiting, ready for them to come back. When the guards got far enough along that they were facing his mother and not him, he gritted his teeth, then pressed just so with one thumb against the base of the other. With a shuddering shock, the thumb slid out of socket, and pain lashed through him, even as he yanked with that hand./ And with a scrape, and a sliding of more pain, his hand came out of the handcuffs.
One hand free wasn’t a lot, but when you had spent every moment of decades working on ways to maximize the resources of a body wracked by pain, it was enough. From his position at the wall, crouched and seemingly struggling, he launched himself out, letting his body extend to the length he could reached and into the air, the ropes catching his ankles as they were tied and snapping him out and around, and right against one guard. He yanked, and shoved, and the man was suddenly propelled toward the woman.
“How about you try something else, Lady Frankenstein?”
As he tumbled to the ground, and rolled, he grunted. That had cost him, but he wouldn’t give up.
The woman sidestepped the guard, drawing a gun and shooting Jubilee in the stomach. She spoke with the sort of tone of someone who really had no time for this fuckery. "If you want us to zave her, you'll zease resistink." She pointed the gun at Jubilee's head next.
Despite her calmness, there was sweat on the back of her neck, and just a little concern in her eyes. Either she wasn't in as much control as she'd like, or there was someone else pulling the strings.
Laura screamed, and Emma gasped. Neither of them had expected this. Laura went still staring at her wife. “Oh my God. You bitch. You- I’ll kill you. You’ll never see the sun again.” Laura wanted to go to Jubilee, to save her, somehow. “What do you want from us?”
Nate growled low, and rose to his feet. “You’ll kill us all in the end. It’s slow or fast, now. You can’t afford to let us go. Save her and you get Twenty four hours without resistance. Let her die and I swear to you that you will die screaming.” His voice was utterly and completely without inflection as he spoke. and he stared at the woman with no expression on his face. He would kill her with his hands, that he knew he would, Somehow, someday.
If Nate hadn't been so important to Cerberus, she would have put a bullet in his head. Her finger even squeezed on the trigger, but not enough to fire. "Take ze Chinese girl and prep her. Zummers still gets priorty, we need that fluid."
She smiled at Nate. "Your threats are adorable, but I've heard worse, and I've done worse. And when we have your gifts, it will all be worth it. The world will be a better place."
A guard stabbed him with a needle.
Emma took a deep breath as they injected Nate. She’d been wrong, but that wasn’t entirely surprising. She had greatly misjudged the danger involved in this.
Laura watched as her wife was carried away, and Emma led off in generally the same direction. She made a very careful note of each face. She was going to kill them all if she got her way, and anyone who tried to stop her could go to hell.
She was confused when a guard grabbed her hand and spread it out on the pole she’d been cuffed to. “What are you-” Her question was cut off by a shriek after the guard leaned on his knife and removed her middle finger at that second knuckle. It only seemed appropriate to send this finger to her father. “Do we have a plan to secure the other bitch?” They were still missing at least one target the guard knew about.
Nate swore and slid to the floor, feeling more sedative take effect, and his anger boiled up. But he had given his word, and with a swallow, he glared at them, at least until they removed Laura’s finger, then rage swam up and swallowed him. “What the hell?” Even in a rage, however, he knew what that meant.
He staggered to the wall, and tapped out three words in latin morse, before the darkness swam up and took him.
They’re After Logan.
And he hit the ground, groaning, as his body convulsed, and the stress of it filled him and something deep started to change...
"The Pryde girl? She escaped, but she didn't return home." The woman clucked her tongue, one eye on Nate as he shuddered. She made no motions towards him. Either he'd die, or it was a trap, and right now she didn't care.
"Frankly, I don't care what condition she's in. She's meddled zo much. Teach her a lesson on what happens when you can be touched. I can get ze data no matter what."
She nodded at Nate. "If he tries anything again, kill him. Do not hesitate, do not let him talk. Just kill him. Kill them both. They von’t hesitate to kill you."
Logan was the one they really wanted.
She headed in the direction the other test subjects had been taken in. As an afterthought, she added. "And bring me Shepard. I owe her for the Illusive Man."
Emma tensed a little. Who was the Illusive Man? She was led into a rather mundane looking examination room. “You know, you are going to die. Not because of my son, he thinks he’s bigger and stronger than he is. Logan is a force to be reckoned with. Do you really think something as inadequate as taking away his powers will tame him? You can’t hold his daughter against him forever, and you got the wrong daughter, anyway. He cares much more for Eli, from what I can tell.” She actually had no idea if that was true or not, but talking was the only weapon she had anymore.
***
Nate was dropping into darkness now, and somewhere deep, his cells were angry. And things began to change., His skin rippled, and his face and body shuddered, as he flopped to his back. his clothing starting to look, well, too small for him...
Energy boiled in him. His mutant powers might not work, but he still was one, and he was a Dreamer, and there was no anti-Dreamer drug, and so his body began to change...
Laura wasn’t entirely sure what she was looking at. It was pretty freaky. She wasn’t even actually sure that she was seeing it. She’d been there the longest, along with Jubilee, and she’d been trying so hard to avoid being drugged.
The guards all reacted in confusion, and one ran back to report to the doctor what had happened.
***
"Thank you for that information." After they'd lost that alien, they’d had to move up some plans. They'd have to investigate this girl too. She forced Emma to sit down while Jubilee was laid onto a table. "Hold her, I just want ze sample, not to harm ze child."
Well, that was a relief. She didn’t fight when they grabbed her arms. “You need something that can stop Logan in his tracks. No number of daughter, wives, or girlfriends is going to do that. He’s too used to losing them. What you need, doctor, is power. I’m willing to work with you, become one of you. With my powers Logan will walk in, tame as a kitten, and submit with joy to whatever you intend to do with him.” It was risky, but she would do anything to make sure she survived, that her children survived.
The guard came in, reporting the change in Nate’s appearance and size to the doctor. Emma didn’t have to pretend to be surprised by that. She hoped he was okay.
“Interesting. Kill him if he moves, otherwise observe and report back to me.” She turned back to Emma, and carefully inserted the syringe, while another doctor started working on Jubilee. “Perhaps. But it’s easier to just piss him off, and zen shoot him until he stops moving long enough to take care of.”
Nate was growing, his clothing splitting, and even unconscious, he screamed, his body filled with pain. The handcuffs cut into his wrist, as it grew, and his body seemed to surge large, his features almost flowing like wax. His body shook as it tried to burn through ten years of growth at once.
The guard watched cautiously, the safety coming off of his gun.
Emma winced. That hurt like a bitch. “The problem is the number of bullets that will take, and how many of your people you’ll lose in the attempt. You haven’t seen him in action the way I have. You might get lucky and subdue him before he kills most of your men, but it’s unlikely. It would take an extremely lucky shot to even hit anything vital. He’s not some soppy little girl like Laura, he’s a ruthless killer with unbreakable metal covering most of his vital organs.”
Nate’s body shifted slowly then, and filled out to the full, and the handcuffs broke, snapping as his body shifted to an older, more full perspective. His body, the metabolism burning faster and harder than normal, burnt through fat, and food, and nourishment all, and everything else in his system, and he grew thin, until suddenly, he was laying there, looking around 25 or 30, and even taller than before.
And then he woke up. His mind was fuzzy and he was filled with pain, and he groaned. He reached out, looking for those he knew. His mind felt logy, drugged, and slow, but he could feel those around him, close. And he felt the nervousness and the anger of the man near him. With a snarl, his mind snapped out and seized the man, and the guard smashed his gun against his own forehead, and snk like a rock to the ground, unconscious. Nate sat up, groaning.
“Son of a bitch, but that hurt!”
He looked over at Laura. “Are you okay?”
He staggered to his feet as he tried to move toward her, his telepathy cutting in and out and weakly at that.
Laura was pretty much just staring at that point, and extremely confused. She made a face at Nate, then passed out.
The scientist shrugged, before an alarm went off. She sighed, and fished something out of her lab coat. It looked like a smoke bomb.
Guards broke in, and opened fire on Nate!
Nate dove in front of Laura, just in case, staggering as the bullets hit him... and bounced off. He grunted. Damn things still hurt. And he charged, his staggering run not fast, but not slow either. And when he threw a punch, it was no sloppy thing. He tore into the men with anger filling him. He had said he would not resist, but that had been before they cut off Laura’s finger. He had issues with that.
Emma laughed a little. “You can’t even keep a little boy in line, how are you going to stop Wolverine?” The whole thing was ridiculous. “I’m disappointed in Kitty for not defeating you months ago, if this is your best plan.”
“She didn’t defeat me. She defeated another zell. Speaking of a little boy, it’s time for his nap” And Shepard had cut off their head. They were still licking their wounds from that. She stepped out of the exam room, and walked back towards where the other two were held. She pressed a button and threw the gas bomb into the room, pulling on a gas mask and kicking the door shut between her and the people inside.
The guards were down and he lunged for the door, but staggered as that grenade came in. He sent one more pulse out, omnidirectional, with all his power behind it, and swore as his powers faded. And then he was at the door, running his hands over it , then slamming one arm into it, his weight behind it, not breathing as long as he could. Damn it!
Emma knew that if she was going to escape it would be best to try to do so while the doctor was gone. She glanced over at Jubilee. She couldn’t risk it, if they killed the girl it would be a true tragedy. She waited, her expression hard and fierce. “You’ve lost control. What are you going to do when Logan does arrive, throw smoke bombs at him and hope for the best? You’re a fool.”
“Zere are always plans, you dumb bitch.” She peered into the other room, hoping that the two inside were knocked out. She wasn’t ready to bug out, not yet, not if she didn’t have to. But it was good to prepare.“Ryans, take the amniotic fluid and the DNA samples from all four of zem to our other lab. I’ll be joining you in a few hours. She is probably right.
Ryans nodded, and collected the samples, before heading down a long, dark hallway.
With one more kick, Nate stumbled out and darted out. He stumbled toward the other room, reached for the woman, and collapsed at her feet, unconscious.
“Take him and the whore to the sub-basement. Once the chinese girl is ztable, take her and Mrs. Summers to section b.” She turned her nose up at Nate. “Body of a man, mind of a child. He thinks in black and white, good and evil. Zere are many grey areas.”
Emma snorted. She hoped Nate was okay, but she couldn’t really help him at the moment. “I retract my offer. You’re not smart enough to help. It will be a pleasure to watch you fail, as you inevitably will.”
The woman looked at Emma, then lifted her gun and shot the blonde in the forehead. “Put her in the freezer.”
She waited for the guards to take Emma away, and then Nate. She walked over to Jubilee. “Behave, I don’t need you alive.” Then she walked out of the exam room. She had some science to do.