[Dreams of the Waking Man: End of Dreaming VII] (We're Gonna) Scream Until We're Satisfied
i meant to post this days ago, but i got distracted. a certain adorable someone wanted to play co-op Portal2 instead of rotting his brain with Rayman like he's been doing for a week or so.
BOOM. second-to-last part. this is what happens when you let yourself get attached to things.
warnings: some Dark Avengers. Earth-339. sci-fi. post-apocalyptic (not to be confused with post-Apocalypse, because he doesn't show up for another few hundred years). flangsty flangst. multiple character deaths. language: pg-13 (for f***, g**damn, and f**got).
pairing: a little Daken/Lester.
timeline: 2065, shortly after Do or Die.
disclaimer: i doesn't owns the movies, comics, or characters. or the assorted objects of pop culture reference.
notes: 1) the title is a reference to the Pat Benatar song "Invincible." all the titles from the End of Dreaming sequence will be. 2) back in No Sacrifice, Dani expressed a singular lack of faith in Daken's ability to be self-sacrificing. somewhere along the line, Wade said "dude, i bet you a hundred bucks" and she was silly enough to take the bet. 3) Renquist is the name of the Valse Faction admiral. the Madeen is his nifty-pretty flagship. 4) Renquist is probably in his forties, which is actually pretty young for an admiral. 5) VF = Valse Faction. 6) ventral is belly-side, opposite of dorsal (top). 7) heron blue is a medium-pale, slightly desaturated blue. the Sears paint version of it comes out as 7AA0B7 in hex.
(We’re Gonna) Scream Until We’re Satisfied
Daken flinches as sparks shoot up from the console nearby. “Wilson!” he shouts. “Hurry up; the lifeboat’s about to leave!”
Through the smoke, he sees Wilson straighten up and get into his command chair. “Not going,” he says. “They want my ship? I’ll ram it down their fucking throats.”
Daken swears under his breath and picks his way over bodies and fallen metal panels and debris from the deck above. “Are you out of your fucking mind? What the hell good will that do us?”
“Feel free to run away, Junior,” Wilson grunts, punching up a heading. “I keep my promises.”
Daken pauses for a moment when he sees Laura.
Goddammit.
“You’re going to need someone managing the engines,” he grudgingly admits. “Give me two minutes to get that lifeboat out of here.”
“Hah. If Dani were alive, she’d owe me a hundred bucks. You’ve got eighty seconds.”
He turns and hurries back the way he came, sprinting down the crumpled corridor to the nearest escape hatch, where the last lifeboat is waiting.
The ship rocks as another volley of fire makes it through a hole in the shields.
“Aki?” Lester calls. “Where’s the Supreme Commander?”
“Get in the boat and go,” Daken says. “We’re crashing Providence into the Madeen.”
He can’t read the expression on Lester’s face, and the smell of burning electronics muddles the scents. Lester leans into the hatch, says something to the people on the lifeboat, leans back out, and shuts the escape hatch.
“You idiot!” Daken cries, rushing forward. “You’ve got less than thirty seconds to get on that fucking lifeboat!”
Lester catches him by the shoulders and kisses him hard. “You’re the idiot, you fucking stubborn fairy. If we only ever rely on each other, that means I gotta be there for you to rely on.”
“You stupid fucking…” Daken growls, but trails off. “If you die, I’ll never forgive you.”
“That’s my line, princess.”
Daken rolls his eyes. “Think you’re so fucking dashing, just because you’ve been a goddamn hero for forty-five years…”
“That’s right,” Lester says patiently. “I’ve been a goddamn hero for half my life. Haven’t you even looked at me lately, Aki? You look the same as ever. Me, I’ve gotten wrinkles, and I’m starting to go grey. Even with nanomachines and life extension treatments and mutant healing factors gluing me back together, I haven’t got much left in me. I’m not gonna die of old age, and I’m not gonna pass up the chance to take Renquist with me.”
Daken hates crying-hates feeling weak, looking weak-but he can’t stop himself. Lester is the only thing in his life he’s ever really wanted to keep. “Okay,” he says, and his throat feels thick. “Okay, let’s do it. Hell, we gave heroism a try, might as well go all the way.”
Lester grins. “I love you, you fucking faggot-ass little fairy bitch.”
Daken laughs, wipes his eyes. “I love you, you defective fucking idiot. Let’s go die in a blaze of glory like fucking Dayspring and his little Avenger friends.”
And he hurries back to the bridge, immediately takes the engineering station, offsetting various engines to give Wilson a straight line. “There,” he says. “You’ve got fifty-five percent thrust on a zero bearing.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Wilson says, pressing a button on the command console. “Can somebody get me a line to the Madeen?”
Lester pokes around in the remains of the comm station and pulls up the main projector.
A scene of the Madeen’s bridge shows, interspersed with bursts of static.
~“Ah, Supreme Commander Wilson,”~ says Renquist. ~“Ready to surrender your ship?”~
“Hi there, Admiral Dickface,” Wilson replies cheerily. “Actually, I was gonna give you the chance to surrender. You may have more guns, but Providence has more than twice the mass of the Madeen, and she can still push you around.”
The Valse Faction Admiral laughs. ~“You must be getting senile, Wilson. How old are you, anyway?”~
“Old enough to have been saving the world before you were a gleam in your daddy’s eye, and old enough to have been killing people before he was a gleam in your grandpa’s eye. For reals, kid, I’ll give you one last chance to apologize and run away before I kill you.”
~“We’ll see who kills whom,”~ Renquist grunts, and cuts off the channel.
“That may have been the lamest comeback ever,” Wilson says. “He’s gonna be pretty sheepish when he finds out I was serious.”
“The idea is for him to be pretty dead when he finds out,” Daken mutters, and reroutes some power to keep them on course at max speed. He sees Lester messing with the shields, probably adjusting to give them a decent buffer.
“Ain’t it great that VF ships put their bridges on top, where anybody could just crash a giant Helicarrier into ‘em and scrape ‘em off?” muses Wilson.
“They didn’t have the benefit of Stark’s paranoid planning.”
“Ventral shields almost gone,” Lester informs them.
The proximity alarm sounds, a shrill beeping over their heads.
~Collision imminent. Impact in fifteen seconds.~
“Gentlemen, it’s been an honor,” Wilson says, and for once there’s no hint of a joke in his voice.
“You’re an idiot,” Daken says.
Lester takes his hand with a grin. “Seeya on the other side, babe.”
“You’re both idiots,” Daken corrects.
The impact throws them forward. Things start to buckle and crumple-a raucous noise of squealing steel and screaming people and shattering glass. The lights spark and go out. Something explodes. There’s an ominous creak followed by weightlessness, and Daken realizes they’ve done it; the Madeen is falling like a rock, with Providence above her, ready to squash her flat when they meet the ground.
And then the world goes black.
When Daken comes back to consciousness, he discovers that part of Providence sheared off in the crash, and he’s breathing outside air. It smells awful, full of smoke and ash and poison, and he actually misses the canned, recycled smells of the Helicarriers.
His body currently consists of several bright spots of agony, bones knitting back together and organs stabilizing. In the orange, nuke-dimmed sunlight, he sees Wilson sit up and reattach an arm with a muttered stream of complaints (and something that sounds like ‘Deadpool wins, mother-fucker’). For a moment, Daken lets himself believe that they’ve done the impossible-they’ve pulled a kamikaze kill on the Madeen and lived.
Then his ears tell him that he only hears two heartbeats, two sets of labored breathing.
Slowly, he looks toward the hand still holding his own and sees blood. Some of it’s surely his own, but a lot of it must have come from the fragment of metal plating in Lester’s throat, or the mass of twisted metal crushing and obscuring Lester’s lower half. Heron blue eyes stare at him, unseeing.
Any moment now, it’ll hit him. Any moment now, his world will crash down around him, and he’ll hurt so much he can’t breathe, in a way he’ll never heal from.
Just like his stupid heroic father.
“Wilson,” he calls, and his voice sounds hoarse and weak.
Heavy footsteps move toward him. “Yeah, kid?” Wilson murmurs.
“Kill me,” he says. “Before my heart has time to break.”
He hears the slow hiss of steel unsheathing. “Don’t say I never did ya any favors,” Wilson says, raising his blade.
See you on the other side, darling.
.End.
merianmoriarty has my formal permission to pimp my fics on various comms (if/when i ever abandon deviantART, i'll go ahead and join the comms myself and take care of getting things posted in the right places). no one has permission to re-post this ANYWHERE, but feel free to share or link.
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