[Fateverse Side Story: DR Bundle] Priscilla
First impressions, and all that jazz.
Warnings: AU - Fateverse. Sci-fi. Movie geekery. Military geekery. Brief mercenary violence. Language: PG-13 (primetime TV plus s***, f***, and g**damn).
Pairing: Light background Nessa/Wade.
Timeline: Probably sometime in the 2490s.
Disclaimer: Recognizable characters and terms belong to respective owners. I just made the AU.
Notes: See postscript; linked footnotes may open in a new tab.
Visit The Fateverse Glossary for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.
Priscilla
Years and years ago, Wade met Nate for the first time twice. That is, Wade met Nate for the first time when Nate was forty-mumble, and then (some four and a half hours later) Nate met Wade for the first time when Nate was twenty-three. Ah, the many delights of time travel.
It happened in the desert near Tikrit[ 1].
They were camped in a gully just off an oasis, roofed by a beige ghillie[ 2] net while they waited for a particular convoy to pass on the road half a mile away. In daylight, when the trucks came driving along, they would blow the cable charge[ 3] in front, put a hole in the engine block of the tailing vehicle, use the delay to verify their target, apply rule two[ 4], run like hell.
Wham, bam, thank you for the clean million, ma’am.
When you’re waiting for the next assignment, extra commission work is a beautiful thing.
The girls were asleep, and Omaha (Masters, had to call him Masters now because Nessa and ‘Lektra and their asshole boss didn’t get the damn joke) was perched up in a palm tree like a frigging monkey, watching the south approach.
Wade was belly-down in a dune, watching the north.
In a brief sparkle of blue-white light, a man appeared. Before the light faded, Wade caught a glimpse of a handsome, deeply lined face crowned with white hair. Old-ish, somewhere between forty and sixty, but pulled off nicely (like Patrick Stewart or Sean Connery…or, hmmm, maybe George Clooney), and Wade found himself wishing he’d look that good when he got old.
“Please don’t shoot, Wade,” the stranger said.
As it happened, Wade had been way past scripted reactions on his Weird-Shit-O-Meter[ 5], and had just gaped like a dumbass. Probably for the best, if whoever-the-hell was on a first name basis with him.
“My name is Nathan Summers, and I’m from the future.”
Something like hysterical laughter bubbled up in Wade’s throat, but he swallowed it down (just in case this was a hallucination and the sound might cause Masters to punch his lights out for scaring the crap out of him). “Y’know, the other one’s got bells on it[ 6],” he said. “I’m thinking of adding little blinking LED lights, the cool ones that change colors so you can keep them up all through-”
“Wade, calm down,” the stranger interrupted gently, hands up in a placating gesture.
Wade abruptly realized that the stranger was frigging huge. “Wow, you must be, like, seven and a half feet tall, Priscilla.” Because really, when a huge handsome guy from the future appears in the middle of the desert with all the subtlety of a pink bus, what else can you call him?
“Pay attention, please. In the second truck, sitting next to your target, is the high-value prisoner you were told to leave alive if at all possible.”
“Okay,” Wade said, because of course the guy would know the details of their covert operation, being from the future.
“That high-value prisoner is a younger version of me. You need to change the plan to include retrieving him.”
“Because otherwise you die and the machines win the war?” Wade guessed.
“No, this has nothing to do with Skynet or Terminators. Without you, the timesliding projects stall and get shelved. You’re the impetus behind the evolution of linear displacement into lateral displacement, an intuitive prodigy of chronogeometry who-”
Wade had tuned out, and Summers seemed to notice.
“Nevermind that. Just save Nathan. He’ll offer you a job. Take it.”
“If you’re really from the future-”
“Sixty-nine, dude.”
Holy shit.
And then Nathan-from-the-future pressed a button on his watch, glowed for a moment, and vanished.
Later, in the rosy pink-violet of dawn, they breakfasted on MREs[ 7]. El P-Temple augmented this by rigging up her smokeless burner and frying a pair of snakes she’d caught the day before[ 8]. They all grudgingly admitted that they’d rather eat snake than MREs (except Nessa, who said she’d rather starve than ever eat snake).
They geared up, checked and double-checked their weapons. Neena, ‘Lektra, and Temple crossed the road and wriggled into the sand to hide; Neena had the multi-purpose ammo[ 9], so she would disable the vehicles. Masters peeled off the contact seals for his ignition controller and hooked up to the cable he’d laid the day before. Wade and Nessa got settled on the ridge just above their base camp; Wade would take the killshot.
“Alpha, Charlie, and Foxtrot in position,” Wade said over their comms.
~Bravo, Delta, and Echo[ 10] in position,~ Neena replied. ~Radio silence until target confirmation.~
Nothing to do but wait.
It was full daylight, bright and hot and unforgiving, by the time the convoy showed up.
“Dust cloud on my two-thirty[ 11],” Nessa said softly. “No wind, low humidity. I make your range at exactly six hundred thirty-six yards to target.”
“Masters, ready up,” Wade quietly relayed.
Fifty feet distant, Masters gave a thumbs-up.
Four dun-colored Hummers appeared in the heat-haze over the road, cruising along in spacious single file.
Nessa checked through her spotting lens again. “Confirmed target, second vehicle. You’re good to go. Fire when ready.”
Ambushes, when properly laid and executed, are very quick.
A staccato of muffled booms flinging sand upward, a screech of tires on sandy asphalt, three quick explosions (minor compared to Masters and his det cord, of course, but sharper because they were aboveground), several rattling bursts of unsuppressed fire[ 12] from Temple and ‘Lektra.
The enemy rushed to take cover on what they believed to be their sheltered side.
Wade waited.
A man slid out of the backseat of the target vehicle, dragged a cuffed and hooded man with him.
“Confirmed high-value friendly,” Nessa said, into her throat-mic this time. “Black hood, next to target, behind second vehicle. Exercise fire discipline[ 13] in the area. Prepare to fall back[ 14] to Bravo and Charlie nav points[ 15] upon target kill confirmation.”
For a moment-just a moment-Wade stared at Nessa while something like disapproval crept its way through him. She didn’t give a rat’s ass about the prisoner, was totally ready to just leave the guy in enemy hands in the middle of the desert. Maybe it was all that time in SF[ 16], but it went against his nature to just leave somebody like that. Dead or alive, you never leave a man behind.
Fuck it.
He took his shot (and several more to thin the ranks), jumped up, and ran for the convoy.
“Wade, what the fuck?!” Nessa yelped.
He ignored her, choosing instead to take out any enemies that were completely concealed from Neena and the girls. All enemy forces were flatline[ 17] by the time he skidded to a halt at the second truck and cut through the zip-tie holding the prisoner’s wrists.
“Thank you,” was the first thing out of the guy’s mouth as he yanked off the hood.
Wade gaped. “What are you, like, twelve?”
“Twenty-three,” the kid corrected with a scowl. “As I was saying, thank you for the timely rescue.”
“Which wasn’t in the job description!” Nessa said irately as she slid down the dune to them. “We were just supposed to off Al-Assar and go, let the Goddamn Army clean up the rest.”
“I’m glad you didn’t-they would almost certainly have killed me in retaliation. I’m Nathan, by the way. Summers.”
“I don’t care. Out here, bullets is bucks, and I just spent a lot for no extra gain.”
Wade glared up at Nessa. Because yeah, okay, she was right, but Nate was just a kid (twenty-three, for Chrissakes, he’d just gotten started with life). Sometimes his girlfriend was a complete bitch.
Nate snorted. “Maybe you’ll care that I’m head of Research and Development for AskaniCorp, the United Federation’s top defense contractor. I find myself in need of a new security team.”
“Since the last one ended up splattered all over the inside of a black SUV?” Masters guessed as he came to join them. “The pictures in the briefing weren’t pretty.”
“How do you feel about time travel?” Wade asked Nate.
“Well, it’s an absolutely fascinating subject and we’re currently on the verge of a real breakthrough. Still, it’s best to go carefully, especially when we’re uncertain about the physiological side-effects, and chrononeurology is still in its infancy as a hybrid science. Linear displacement would of course have to be carefully monitored in order to prevent accidental paradoxes, but some time loops may be unavoidable and could, in fact, occur naturally on a semi-regular basis-but the real trick will be lateral displacement to neighboring universes, a sensible step after interstellar and intergalactic trade, and-”
“I’m in,” said Wade.
“In what?” called Temple as she and ‘Lektra and Neena finally crossed back over the road.
“Leaving Charon[ 18] for AskaniCorp.”
“How’s the pay?” she asked at the same time that Neena asked, “We still get to blow shit up?”
“Competitive and probably,” Nate replied.
“Shiny,” said Temple. “I’m in.”
“Me too,” said Neena.
“I’m not,” Nessa grunted. “I’ve been working for Alex for ages now, and I like it. I don’t want or need a new boss-especially some big corporation.”
“I owe Alex,” agreed ‘Lektra. “I’m out.”
“Out,” said Masters. “I like my contract, don’t feel like renegotiating.”
Neena looked from face to face. “We’ll leave you guys with all the long-term supplies and take all the blame for exceeding the mission parameters.”
“Good luck with the rest of the tour[ 19],” Temple added, shaking hands with Masters. “Don’t get dead, okay? You still owe me thirty bucks and a drink, Omaha.”
And it was that simple. Three of them stayed in the sand, three of them flew Nate home. Hayden bitched them out, screwed them out of their severance-the guys at AskaniCorp were nice enough to pick up the tab. When the others got back stateside, Nessa and Wade went out to lunch somewhere expensive that Wade hated but Nessa loved. The bigwigs decided Nate needed a live-in bodyguard. Wade moved in and saw The Board for the first time.
It was half-covered in formulas, equations, molecules, and scribbled notes. Something about it irritated Wade.
“What’s that?”
“It’s sort of a hobby,” Nate told him. “Cancer research. Chemistry. Genetics. I haven’t had anything to add to it for years, though-nobody’s been making any headway, and I’ve been busy.”
“Cancer is your hobby?”
“Trying to find a cure,” Nate corrected. “My mother died of lung cancer, and she never smoked a day in her life.”
Wade considered that. “Waitress,” he guessed. “Paying to send you to school?”
Nate made an affirmative noise. “It’s ridiculous, you know. Magnet schools charge outrageous tuition and they still couldn’t keep up with me. Med school was far more engaging.”
“So you’re twenty-three and you’ve been through med-school?”
“I got a Masters in genetics first. But then I went to med-school. I never finished my residency, though-AskaniCorp recruited me right in the middle, and the work was just so fascinating that I couldn’t say no. After that, I got my Masters in biochemistry. Molecular geometry started giving me some interesting ideas, so I started another one in molecular engineering, and I think that will lead right into quantum physics, but it’s possible that I’d be better served cobbling something together on empirical work as we continue the chronological displacement experiments, and-”
By that point, Wade tuned out and went back to stacking his movie collection alongside whatever boring-ass holocubes Nate had accumulated (probably all educational, him being such a damn super-nerd).
Nate kept talking as they went back downstairs to fetch the next box (because Wade had a system and always unpacked his holos before he moved anything else into a new apartment). He kept talking as he carried the two modest suitcases that held Wade’s entire wardrobe (work clothes, five pairs of jeans, a pair of sweats, socks, boxers, and about two-dozen tee-shirts with slogans of varying decorum). He kept talking as Wade unpacked an entire set of matched luggage filled with weapons and started stashing guns around the apartment (between the couch cushions, safety on, taped under the end table, safety off, kitchen drawer, freezer, between Nate’s bed and the wall, taped under the lid of the flush tank on the toilet, the shelf in the hall closet, taped under the dining table…).
Then Wade figured out what was bothering him about The Board.
“That should be a five,” Wade said, pointing.
Nate stopped talking.
Wade tapped the erroneous subscript. “Ethynylphenyl only has six hydrogen in it when it’s all by itself.[ 20]”
Nate stared at the number and turned an interesting shade of pink. Then he wiped the number off with the edge of his sleeve and wrote in a five. “Ah. Yes. Thank you,” he said, and coughed. “I must have been tired when I wrote that. So, chemistry. That doesn’t strike me as something that a mercenary would find interesting.”
“The fine art of blowing shit up? Lots of mercs love chemistry, whether they know it or not. Let me into a cleaning closet, a kitchen, or a high school chem lab, and I could probably find enough stuff to level a building.”
“That’s…both disturbing and impressive.”
Wade shrugged. “I was salutatorian[ 21] with a four-point-oh in a town of less than ten thousand people. Boredom was a way of life, and Neena mostly filled our boredom with learning how to be a badass secret agent. Kind of…Bourne meets Burn Notice, plus some Call of Duty.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Nate said, puzzled.
“You were really sheltered.”
Nate puffed up. “I was being constantly educated.”
“It means I can drive or pilot any vehicle smaller than a destroyer, I’ve never met a gun I couldn’t shoot, and I can melt my way into a safe with an empty soda can, five rusty nails, and a flare[ 22].”
“Good?” hazarded Nate.
“Since I’m keeping you alive, yeah.”
“Why exactly did you ask me about time travel when we first met?”
Wade kicked his suitcases into a corner and shrugged. “Because a future version of you had just traveled back in time to tell me to save your ass and take your job offer. Coulda been a hallucination, but my gut feeling was to do what future-you said. But this roommate-slash-live-in-bodyguard thing has a catch-you require some serious pop-culture exposure. We’re having weekly movie night.”
.End.
Notes:
1 Tikrit is an Iraqi city on the Tigris, some hundred or so miles north-by-northwest of Baghdad.
2 Netting or fabric with things like rags, weeds, or foliage attached to break up a silhouette for the purpose of camouflage, because straight lines draw the eye. A sniper in a good ghillie suit can be invisible to anything short of a thermal scan.
3 See also: “detonating cord” (det cord); explosives in the shape of a cable or rope.
4 Zombieland Rule 2: The Double-Tap.
5 I blame Men in Black for the “Weird-Shit-O-Meter.”
6 “The other one’s got bells on” is an expression related to “pull the other one,” which is itself related to the expression “you’re pulling my leg,” which means “you’re kidding me.”
7 “Meals ready to eat,” non-perishable military rations.
8 Every snake I’ve ever eaten was delicious. The texture and taste are a lot like chicken.
9 Ammunition that has an armor piercing core and includes an incendiary stage and an explosive stage; it’s designed to penetrate light armor and damage the personnel inside.
10 Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot are the first six letters of the NATO phonetic alphabet.
11 Clock-face direction that corresponds to right and slightly ahead.
12 Gunfire with no silencing or flash-hiding components.
13 The process of either refraining from firing or carefully confirming targets before firing.
14 “Withdraw,” “move to (a location farther from the engagement).”
15 “Navigational point,” a pre-determined map coordinate, given a nickname for both convenience and secrecy.
16 “Special Forces.”
17 “KIA,” “dead.”
18 The ferryman who takes the dead down (or across, depending on who you ask) the River Styx; the namesake of Hayden’s private military group.
19 “Deployment period.”
20 Ethylphenyl is an organic chemistry component, part of the molecular composition of certain cancer drugs. In isolation, ethylphenyl would have six hydrogen and eight carbon atoms in it, but it’s still considered ethylphenyl if some of the hydrogen atoms are replaced with other components (like an amine). That is the extent of what I remember from the organic chem chapters of my chemistry courses.
21 Salutatorian is the second-highest rank in a graduating class (under valedictorian).
22 One of the simplest thermite compounds is rust and aluminum (plus a heat source sufficient to ignite it).
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