InsaneJournal

Who: Winn and Xanatos
What: Winn becomes a Cyborg, attacks Xanatos Enterprises and doesn't remember any of it
When: During the Darkseid plot
Where: Xanatos Enterprises
Rating/Warning: Pretty low. Some violence
Status: Complete


Winn knew his orders. He had to take out the red, flying, gargoyle. How the hell he was supposed to do that he didn’t know. It definitely started with finding the damn thing. Luckily it was difficult to miss with how it was flying all over the place. Now it was just a matter of getting it out of the sky.

Winn had access to the rooftop at Xanatos Enterprises. That seemed like the best way to go about it. It was the tallest building around after all. Once he was up there he started a fire, in an attempt to get the gargoyle’s attention.

Xanatos was sure it had been more than 24-hours since the parademons had first shown up, though he couldn't be absolutely certain. It was hard to judge the time, even with a small, digital clock working away in the corner of his vision.

What had started as an excellent opportunity to test out the new suit and gargoyle robots he'd received from the dreams a couple weeks ago had quickly turned into something more. Xanatos didn't like to see these things in his city. He didn't like seeing them eviscerate the people who lived in his county. He wouldn't, couldn't live in somewhere where they had free reign to do what they wanted, and so he wouldn't give it to them.

His first encounter, he had learned just how powerful they were. They had ripped apart one of his Steel Clan robots in seconds, and after that, Xanatos learned to pick them off when they were relatively alone, himself and the three remaining robots, until they'd left them for dead.

He'd have thought that he was meeting with relative success, if they hadn't infested the county like rats. There were other people fighting, but he wasn't sure if he liked their chances.

He was in frequent contact with Owen, back in New York, sending him footage and trying to see if they could pinpoint the monsters' weaknesses, see if they could develop some sort of weapon that would put them down from the data he gathered in his frequent encounters with them. He hadn't been able to reach Nathaniel in some time, and part of him worried. Caroline, at least, seemed fine. At some point, he'd flown home and had caught a couple hours of sleep and had done some quick repairs on his suit and the rest of the Steel Clan.

He was exhausted, and had the odd, delusional thought that he should outfit his suit with an espresso machine when his suit gave the alarm - Xanatos Enterprises had taken damage. He frowned, and changed course, and when he spotted the fire, he flew level to it, extended his arm, and tried to use the concussion beam built into it to help smother the flames.

It worked! The red gargoyle was putting out the flames and had lowered enough for Winn to get to it. He didn’t have any weapons with him, Winn didn’t own any at all. But he was stronger now. Winn pulled back his hand, clenching it in a fist. He wound it up and punched the flying gargoyle, right into the flames.

The attack was unexpected, and his suit only warned him of it when it was already too late to protect himself from it. He was glad that the suit itself was fireproof - it was warm, almost uncomfortably so, but it wasn’t hot and it wasn’t burning, and the air filtration system built into the helmet was working as expected.

He got his feet under him, and stepped out from the fire, the flames licking at his suit, reflecting off the steel plating.

“That was a mistake,” he said to whoever had attacked him, looking around. He was glad his face couldn’t be seen through his helmet, because his eyes widened when they fell upon Winn. Winn with a great deal more mechanical parts than Xanatos recalled seeing the last time he’d seen him.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I’m here for you,” Winn replied, the voice in his head taking over. He had to take this thing out. He pulled back his fist again ready to punch the red gargoyle again. Clearly the fire did nothing to him but there had to be another way.

The punch was sloppy and easy enough to catch in the taloned hand of his gargoyle suit, but it had more force than Xanatos had been expecting. If he hadn’t been wearing the suit, no doubt he would have just broken his hand - as it was, it was easy enough to stop without much trouble.

“What has gotten into you?” Xanatos snapped. “Stop this at once.”

Winn definitely wasn’t much of a fighter. Even with his increased strength and speed. Being a cyborg didn’t seem to increase his skill at all. He ignored the gargoyles words and went in for another punch. At some point he had to break through.

Xanatos frowned, catching Winn’s other fist in his hand, and with both fists firmly in his grip, he brought up his knee to knee Winn in the stomach. The clang of metal against metal reverberated, and Xanatos instead shifted to a throw.

It wasn’t something he wanted to do - who knew how much damage it would cause to the electronics in his building - but at the same time, it wasn’t as though he had another choice - the fire, if left to burn, would cause far more damage. And so he pulled the EMP bomb from his suit, affixed it to Winn’s chest, and engaged his thrusters, hoping to be able to fly out of the range of the EMP bomb before it went off.

He didn’t know if it would work own the cyborg parts of Winn, but it seemed more likely than anything else.

The EMP did indeed work on Winn and his cyborg parts. Before he knew what was happening he was knocked out, falling onto the roof almost directing into the fire.

Xanatos observed from some distance up, and once the cyborg with Winn’s face stopped moving, Xanatos flew back down, trying not to think of how damaged his equipment inside might be.

He put out the fire before he returned to Winn, frowning a little as he checked him over. He wondered what had happened with him, but there was time to worry about that later. Instead, he scooped him up over his shoulder, and flew to Gen-U-Tech labs.

Gen-U-Tech labs had no official ties to Xanatos or his businesses, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t own it and oversaw all the experimentation that went on there. In fact, many of the breakthroughs were then given to Xanatos Enterprises’ medical technologies program - it was much quicker to come up with breakthroughs when one didn’t have to worry about pesky things like ethics.

He locked the cyborg into one of the cells, hoping it would hold, though he was relatively confident with that - after all, he had a Paradoom in one of those cells, and as far as he knew, it hadn’t broken out yet. Then, stripping out of his exo-suit and changing into a proper suit, he went to check on the progress with the Paradoom.

Winn woke up having no memory of the past few days. Or however long it had been. The last thing he remembered was walking to a coffee shop, spotting some creature and doing his best to fight it. Now here he was in this.. Padded room? What the hell. Had the thing captured him? What did they want with him?!

Winn banged on what he assumed was the door. “Hey!” he called out. “What do you want from me?!” There was no response. He continued at that for about an hour. But there seemed to be no one around. And then came the panic attack, followed by Winn sitting in the corner rocking back and forth trying to calm himself down.

Xanatos woke up feeling, more or less refreshed. It seemed as though he had slept longer than he had intended, given the dark sky he could see through the window, but that could only be expected after only getting a couple hours of sleep during the last 48-hours, and the amount he had exerted himself. It seemed that Sevarius had, indeed, made sure that no one had disturbed him during his rest.

He got up with a groan, stiff and sore - no doubt when he checked under his clothes when he got home, he would find a number of black bruises. He called his helicopter driver to come meet him, and then began to make his way out of the building, something nagging at his mind as he did so. It was only once he laid his hand on the door handle leading to the outdoors that he remembered, and he reprimanded himself under his breath. If there hadn’t been so much that had happened over the last couple of days, there was no way he would have forgotten, but he quickly turned around and made his way back to the cell where Winn was being kept.

He managed to keep the relief off his face when he realized that Winn had returned to normal as Xanatos had suspected he might. “Good evening, Winn,” he said. “How are you feeling?” Hopefully, he’d be feeling a little less homicidal.

Winn was still in the corner when Mr. Xanatos came in. He didn’t even realize someone had entered until he spoke. Winn looked up, blinking, terror all over his face.

“Mr. Xa-Xanatos?” he finally got out his voice small, eyes wide. “Yo-you put me in here?” He was slowly piecing it together. Though he had no idea why Mr. Xanatos would lock him up. Even if he had fucked up on a code or something, which Winn never would, this was a bit extreme.

“A man in a flying suit brought you in,” Xanatos said, adjusting the cuffs on his suit jacket. He peered at Winn through the glass, frowning a little. “Do you remember nothing?” he asked after a moment, because, from the look on his face, Winn seemed to somehow think that Xanatos was the bad guy here.

“A what?” Winn asked, trying to process it all. “Why?” Where the hell had the man come from? And why had he brought Winn here. Wherever the hell this place was. It was clearly somewhere Mr. Xanatos had access too. “What is this place?” he asked, his head swimming. He barely even heard his boss’s question. “Re-remember what?” he asked unable to keep the worry out of his tone.

“Because you tried to kill him, from what I understand,” Xanatos said airly. “More importantly,” he added, punching in the code to the cell. The guerrilla glass barrier slid seamlessly into the ceiling. “You set Xanatos Enterprises on fire.” Seeing Winn’s expression of confused shock, Xanatos smiled. “Oh, don’t worry about it. I’ve reason to suspect that the damage has been undone by now.”

He was aware that wouldn’t do anything to lessen Winn’s confusion, but where was the fun in that?

“Wh-what are you talking about?” Winn stammered once he was finally released from the cell. “I-I’m not a killer.” That was his father. Winn would never hurt anyone. He would never set a fire or a bomb. He was nothing like his father.

“You weren’t exactly yourself,” Xanatos said, already turning to lead Winn toward the exit, assuming that Winn would fall into step behind him. “When I saw you, you were half machine. It was… unnerving, to say the least. I suppose we may have some security footage of it, if you’d like to see, though all other evidence of this incident has disappeared so I’d hardly be surprised if the footage somehow deleted itself too.”

He was annoyed about that. The samples he had taken from the Paradoom would have been very valuable, and he was a little bitter over their loss.

It still made no sense to him. How had he even become part machine? There was no way he wouldn’t follow Mr. Xanatos. He still had so many questions. But there was one more important than the rest. “Did I hurt anyone?” Winn asked unable to keep the fear out of his voice.

Xanatos shrugged. “How should I know?” he asked dismissively, and then frowned, looking over at Winn. It was obvious that Winn was clearly distressed by the prospect, so Xanatos relented a little. “As far as I’m aware, you didn’t,” he said. “One of the reasons we thought it would be best to lock you up was to insure that you didn’t. And to see if there was some way we could revert you back to normal.” Winn had one of the Oracles, and it might very well have been possible to check on that sort of thing, but he somehow doubted that the cyborg Winn had carried his cellphone around with him for any amount of time.

Well that was somewhat of a relief. Though he still couldn’t keep that nagging fear at bay. If he had tried to set Xanatos Enterprises on fire who knows what else he could have done before Mr. Xanatos locked him up. “I guess I should thank you for that,” Winn began. “So - uh - thank you.”