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Title: The New Mutants II, Volume XIV: Weapon X
Author: kanedax
Fandom: X-Men Movieverse, with hints of Spider-Man & Marvel universes
Spoilers: X3; The New Mutants I & II (see above); Spider-Man 1, 2, & the trailer for 3
Rating: PG-13 for language and suggested violence
Summary: Peter Parker gives Logan a history lesson on Weapon X
Notes: This isn't the longest chapter I've ever written. But it is definitely the most dense. Coming off New Mutants I, and coming into this series, this is the chapter I've been most anxious to get out there. The list at the end is real. You can find it on Wikipedia or IMDb. Hopefully your head doesn't explode. As usual, I don't own the X-Men, Spider-Man, Marvel Comics, 20th Century Fox, blah blah bliddy blah I'm so stuffy give me a scone.
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“No one really knows when Weapon X became Weapon X,” Peter Parker began, staring out the window as Logan drove he and his family out of South Kingstown, Rhode Island. “It could be argued that it was initially a British project.”
“How does that work?” Logan asked.
“It might have been a British project,” Parker continued. “Or it might have been a complete accident. A letter written by a soldier at the Battle of Cowpens in 1781 talks of a prisoner taken in by Revolutionary forces. This soldier said that when he came upon the Redcoat he was badly wounded, took a musket shot to the stomach. But by the time they brought him back to the line, it was as though the wound had never been there. He went on to say that his fellow soldiers thought he had just been seeing things, that the thrill of victory made him heady, and nothing more was said.”
“So we might have gotten him from the Brits?”
“The Brits, maybe,” said Parker. “Great Britain fought in the Revolutionary War against the US. Hell, so did Germany, Canada, some Native American tribes. Even Americans who were loyal to the Crown fought against the Revolutionists. There’s no documentation as to where this particular soldier originated, only that our government got a hold of him around that time.”
“If he’s even me,” Logan continued. “Might just be coincidence, might have even really been a guy who just had too much to drink, too much blood in his nostrils, and thought he saw something he didn’t.”
“Military records were flaky back then,” Parker said. “No one knows for sure what happened to this particular POW. There was no Geneva Convention back then, especially when it came to us. He could have been released, could have been executed, could have been taken in by the government.”
“So what next?”
“Not much for a while,” continued Peter. “War of 1812, Mexican-American War, nothing much is known. It’s possible that Weapon X had been brought into battle by our forces on a trial basis, as a trained soldier who never dies and only gets better with experience. But there aren’t any blinking neon sign references like Cowpens.
“Then the Civil War happens. An urban legend starts to spread about a Union soldier that doesn’t die. At the Battle of Chancellorsville, a soldier from the 75th Ohio Regiment sees a man get a bayonet to the heart, and thinks he sees the same man fighting three days later. A man in the 2nd Delaware sees a soldier he’s fighting with get shot in the face at Antietam, and swears to his fellow soldiers that the same man is in a division at the Battle of Bristoe Station.”
“Do we have any idea how I could do that?” Logan asked. “Make it through eighty years without anyone realizing that I haven’t aged a day?”
“Wouldn’t take much,” Parker said. “You’ve been able to do it for as long as your memory’s been with you, and you’re living in a world of camera phones, Internet, and breakthrough medicine. Back then all you would have to do is hop on a train and never be heard from again.”
“You’re right about the Civil War, at least,” Logan said. “I’ve seen a picture of me back then. I didn’t know if I was government or not.”
“If you were hopping from battle to battle,” said Peter, “odds are someone would have been pushing you around the board. Unless you were just doing it for fun, but… um…”
Logan looked at him, and Peter stammered.
“No, no,” he said. “You’re a… you’re a nice guy. No blood lust at all.”
“What happened next?”
“Whatever you against the Confederates, it made your bosses happy,” Parker said. “You started showing up more and more. You were a member of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Teddy wrote in his journal about a Rider who kept fighting through the malaria outbreak that took so many of his soldiers in Cuba. Never even had a sniffle. His only regret was that the man never came to any of the reunions.
“Two years later you ended up in China, part of the Eight Nation Alliance to quell the Boxer Rebellion. Five years after that you were seen in St. Petersburg during Bloody Sunday. Couldn’t say for sure why you were there, except that someone in the States must have seen the Russian Empire as a threat. Or wanted to see the Bolsheviks taken out as soon as possible, and brought you in as a catalyst. Either way, you were there.”
“So I stuck around for World War I…”
“World War I, World War II,” Parker said. “World War II is where it starts to get interesting. Weapon X starts to become less about one man and more about a project.”
“A project?”
“Another soldier comes onto the scene,” said Peter. “A man named Steve Rogers. He’s the government’s first attempt at recreating… well, recreating you. I can’t get into the technical aspects, but I think it involved them taking your blood and converting it into a kind of Super Soldier Serum.”
“Why me?” Logan asked. “I mean, I had been around for almost two hundred years. I couldn’t have been the only mutant they found.”
“Couldn’t say,” Peter shrugged. “For all intents and purposes, you’re America’s first mutant. I don’t think they started showing up in bulk until, you know, the past ten or fifteen years.”
“What about you?” Logan asked. “You’re a mutant, right?”
“Nah,” Peter said, shaking his head. “This is all wires and mirrors. And genetically-enhanced spiders.”
“What?”
“Long story, not worth getting into,” Peter answered. “Besides, I don’t want to bore MJ more than I already am, she’s heard it before. Hell, she was there when it happened.”
“Yet he still told it to me,” Mary Jane said from the back seat. “Repeatedly.”
“You guys holding up okay back there?” Logan asked, looking into the rearview mirror as the car traveled along streets that were becoming more and more rural and tree-lined.
“We’re doing fine,” Mary Jane replied, running her hand through her daughter May’s hair. “Don’t be surprised if we have to yell for a potty break eventually.”
“Not until I’m sure we’re clear of anyone following us,” Logan said. “In the meantime, just try not to mess up the seats.”
“Ew,” May said, her head on her mother’s shoulder. “That’s icky.”
“On the other hand,” Logan said. “If you gotta, go ahead. This was just Scott’s car, anyway.”
“I think we can survive for now,” Mary Jane replied. “Do you know where we’re going?”
“Pretty much,” Logan answered, looking around the road. “I might need someone to pull out a map occasionally, though.”
“Don’t you have GPS?” Parker said. “Or MapQuest directions?”
“That quest thing again,” Logan growled. “No one knows how to use a fucking compass anymore.”
“He said a bad word!” May yelled excitedly, bouncing up and down in her seat.
“And we know not to use that word, right, May?” Mary Jane asked.
“Right,” May nodded. “Or else we get a spanking.”
“Steve Rogers,” Logan said to Peter, forcing the conversation back on track.
“Steve Rogers, yeah,” said Parker. “Codename Captain America. He wasn’t all that they were hoping for, but he was close. He was a fast healer, but not as fast as you. He had a high endurance and enhanced strength, but not to your levels. But he still proved that you could be replicated. He made his debut during the end of the European campaign, and was sent to Korea, and Vietnam after that. As were you.”
“What happened to him?”
“Don’t know for sure,” Parker said. “You were both put in a combat platoon with William Stryker. Have you heard of him?”
“I’ve met the man,” Logan growled.
“He was assigned to not only command you and Rogers, but also to find worthy candidates to expand the Weapon X program. Documents I found listed a few men, all in the same group as the two of you. Franklin Castle. Luke Cage. Nicholas Fury. Wade Wilson. They were being trained alongside you and Steve Rogers, and were prepared to take the Serum before the project was suddenly dropped.”
“You have a good memory, to remember all of those names,” Logan interjected.
“I was a good study in high school,” replied Parker. “Anyway, there were rumors that the project failed because Rogers broke down. Whatever that means, I couldn’t say for sure. He could have just become over stimulated and died of a heart attack, a stroke, something like that. Might have been mental. Rogers could have snapped. None of the candidates for the Serum survived Saigon. No one knows whether their death was caused by the battle, by the government, or by Rogers himself.
“Well, no one except you and Stryker, that is.”
“I couldn’t tell you right now,” Logan said. “If I know it, it’s locked away pretty deep. And Stryker’s dead. But at least one of those candidates did survive. Nick Fury.”
“Really?” Parker said, sitting up.
“You didn’t know?” Logan continued. “He’s a member of S.H.I.E.L.D. I met him last year.”
“Wow,” Peter said, staring blankly through the windshield. “They were all listed as casualties in any records I’ve seen, classified or otherwise. You sure it’s the same guy?”
“Black guy, eye patch, shaved head. Smelled like he had a few too many cigars in him over the years.”
“Well, Fury was black, yeah,” Peter said. “He must have gotten the eye patch later. Do you have a notepad, or something? I want to write this down.”
“No one’s writing down anything,” Logan said sharply. “I’m recording, but Forge said it can be destroyed with one word if I need it to.”
“What word is that?” Peter asked.
Logan gave him a patronizing look. “If I told you what the word is, it would be destroyed.”
“Oh.”
“Moron,” Logan growled.
“Anyway,” Peter continued, overlooking Logan’s comment. “Whatever happened with Rogers, it was bad. Weapon X went into remission through the Eighties. It’s possible you were used in the Cold War spy game, but those documents are nearly impossible to get a hold of. In the mid-nineties X starts showing its head again, but in a different way. The US Military starts throwing weapons contracts out left and right to private corporations. Quest, Oscorp, Stark, Nanosoft, the list was fairly long. A lot of them were signed to public contracts, while others were rejected. Except some of the rejected really weren’t, but were signed to more secret contracts. Many of them I don’t even think the Defense Department knows anything about.”
“Let me take a guess,” Logan said as he flexed his hand. “One of the companies dealt in metals.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” said Peter. “It was a small group of chemists that were looking for funding for new projects, so they started up an unnamed company out of Cal. Whatever Stryker found from them, he liked it. How did you know?”
Logan smiled darkly, lifted his hand, and squeezed his fist together. The three claws strapped to his wrist flipped upward.
“They made me these.”
“Wow,” Peter said flatly. “They made you a strap-on claw thing. That doesn’t exactly seem like something Stryker would need to hide. Seems less covert super soldier, more… I don’t know… ninja?”
“It didn’t start on my wrist,” Logan said. “This was their final project on me. It’s called adamantium.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Parker continued. “I mean, it was a chemical compound that was discussed in a few of my textbooks in college. But I thought there wasn’t any way to shape it?”
“Stryker found a way,” Logan said. “I guess he found it from those Cal geeks. It’s the last thing I remember from my past, and it only comes in my nightmares. I remember them strapping me down. Injecting me with liquid adamantium. Surgically implanting these claws. Going insane from the pain and running out of the facility, naked and bleeding.”
“Oh my God,” Parker gasped. Mary Jane stared at them from the back seat, her hands clasping May’s ears. “They injected you with it?”
“Covered my bones with it,” Logan explained. “Guess they used me as their Guinea pig, since they knew I’d be able to survive the process.”
“But…” Peter breathed. “You’re indestructible. Why would they think you needed metal on your bones?”
“I’ve been asking myself that same question for years,” said Logan.
“So why is the claw outside of your body?”
“I’m not metal anymore,” said Logan. “Courtesy of Magneto.”
“That mutant terrorist?” Parker said. “That must have stung.”
“A bit, yeah. Anything else?”
“That’s the last I had been able to find about your involvement in Weapon X,” Peter said. “There’s more names, but that’s all been within the past fifteen years. If you say you remember back that far, then any part in the story is a part you already know.”
Logan sighed. Peter Parker had been able to explain a lot. He still didn’t know where he came from, or how he got to where he sat today, but he at least had an idea of some of the checkpoints of the journey.
“I think we’re clear,” he said to the Parkers. “I’m not seeing any cars behind us, not hearing any choppers above us.”
“My Spidey-Sense isn’t picking up anything, either,” Peter said.
“Your what?”
“My Spider-Sense,” Parker explained. “It’s kind of a sixth sense that goes off when there’s trouble.”
“Like how you knew the agents were coming before I could even hear them?”
“Like that, yeah.”
“Sounds useful,” Logan said as he pulled into a gas station. “Shitty name, though.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Parker said defensively as Logan parked in front of a pump.
“I knew a lot of people with psychic abilities before the Pulse,” Logan said. “And none of them had special names for it.”
“Yeah, well,” Peter pouted, “I guess I fought in a different time. Time was a guy could swing around in red and blue tights and fight a guy dressed as the Green Power Ranger and no one would bat an eye.”
“Anyone need to stretch or piss, this is the time to do it,” Logan said to MJ and May. “From this point on, we’re driving straight through. We might be out of immediate danger, but all the same, keep from direct eye contact with anyone. The longer someone can see the back of your head, the less likely they’ll be able to give a description when the Feds come through later asking questions.”
“Not like those X-Men,” Parker continued quietly, “and their ‘Ooh, we’re so dark and leathery’ selves. At least the Defenders have some color to them, but why doesn’t anyone wear a mask anymore? Isn’t a secret identity sacred?”
“Who are the Defenders?” Logan asked as he pushed the nozzle of the pump into the gas tank.
Parker snorted. “Are you still losing your memory, Logan? You’ve researched me and Weapon X, but you haven’t, I don’t know, cracked a newspaper in the past few months? Watched the news?”
“I like the quiet,” Logan said, leaning against the car. “And I’m not the reading type.”
“Well, they’ve been all over the news,” Parker said. “I’m guessing they’re the result of one of those weapons contracts I talked about, since Tony Stark’s involved. They’ve been out saving the world for the past month or so. Hell, they were just on the news last night, are you sure you didn’t hear?”
“Can’t say that I did,” Logan answered.
“There was an incident in New York,” explained Parker. “At a concert for one of those pop stars that May’s all into. They got into a big tussle with the X-Men, it was being talked about everywhere.”
“The X-Men?” Logan snapped, standing up.
“Yeah,” Peter said. “Man, I know I was in some big battles when I was fighting Doc Ock and Venom, but I didn’t do half of the collateral damage that those guys create.”
Logan growled under his breath, causing Peter to take a step back. He saw a pay phone at the service station, but forced himself from running to make a call. Even public phones could be traced, and he didn’t want anyone to know where they were going.
Besides, he thought, they’ve been able to handle themselves in the past. You’re five hours away from the Academy, even further from New York City. You can’t be of any help to them until you arrive, so just let it be until you get there.
Logan gritted his teeth, and forced the anxiety to the back of his mind. He looked back at Peter, who was watching him warily.
“You okay, man?” asked Peter.
“I’ll be fine,” Logan answered tensely.
“If you want to know what’s going on, I’m sure the radio still has updates…”
“I said I’ll be fine,” Logan snarled. He controlled his every instinct to jump in the car and drive as fast as he could towards the Academy. Then a thought from the previous conversation floated to the surface.
“You said you have Spider-Sense, or whatever,” Logan asked, forcing himself onto a different line of conversation to keep his mind off the X-Men. “Why weren’t you killed in the Pulse?”
“I don’t know,” Parker said slowly, his eyes still watching Logan with distrust. “I never thought of it as a psychic thing. It might be because I wasn’t born with my powers.”
“So how did you get your powers?” Logan asked. “And how did you get involved in this shit in the first place? Were you some kind of government experiment?”
“More of an accident,” said Parker. “I was bit by a genetically-enhanced super spider, and it gave me my powers.”
Logan grimaced in disbelief. “You’re serious…”
“One hundred percent.”
“Sounds like a lot of sci-fi bullshit to me.”
“I thought the same thing myself,” Parker said. “Got a little easier to swallow over the years after seeing men changed by radioactive sand and alien symbiotes. I was never able to find out for sure, though. Back then, super powers weren’t looked on quite as comfortably as they are today. And, believe me, I know that’s saying a lot.”
“It is,” Logan said, remembering people like Senator Kelly and William Stryker.
“I wore a mask,” Parker explained, “to protect my identity. More importantly, I wore it to protect the people I love. Only six people ever knew my secret. Three are dead, and the other three were riding in this car with me five minutes ago.”
“I’m touched,” Logan said flatly. “So I take it you found out more than someone wanted you to hear?”
“You’d be amazed at the sheer level of coincidence in my life, Logan,” Parker sighed as the pump clicked to a stop. “The first man I ever fought was a thief who I thought had killed my uncle. The second one was my best friend’s father. His name was Norman Osborn, president of Oscorp Industries. When he was at his best, he was like a father to me after Uncle Ben died. When he was at his worst…
“Oscorp was one of the companies on that list of Defense contracts, and in a last-ditch effort to save the company, Norman volunteered himself as a test subject for a strength-enhancing nerve gas. It didn’t work. His mind couldn’t take it, and he went completely Balzac. His personality split, and he became a… thing that the press called the Green Goblin. Kabuki mask, flying glider, exploding pumpkin bombs, the whole nine yards.”
“Some men love a show.”
“I took him down,” Parker said quietly. “His son, Harry, blamed Spider-Man for his death, not knowing that Norman was the Green Goblin. All he saw was me, carrying the unsuited body of his dad into his bedroom.”
“See, that’s why I don’t wear a mask,” Logan said. “Makes life a hell of a lot easier when you know who it is you’re fighting.”
“More stuff happened,” Peter said. “Eventually Harry got a hold of his dad’s gear. By that time I had told him who I was. There was a fight between me and some other baddies, and Harry got into the middle. Died for his effort. I gave up the Spider-Man gig a few years after that. My heart just wasn’t in it anymore. I was married to MJ, my aunt was sick, and mutants started making it tougher and tougher for a guy like me to make an honest crime fighting living.”
“But you didn’t leave completely,” Logan nodded.
“I worked for the Daily Bugle at the time,” Parker said. “And I felt like I had to keep an eye on the company my friend and his dad had given their lives to keep afloat. The board of directors sold Oscorp to Quest Aerospace, which eventually merged with Stark Industries. The whole time, I was poking my nose around, trying to make a name for myself at the paper. I got some scents about some dark dealings between Oscorp and the government. I wrote a few articles that dealt with insider trading, that sort of thing, nothing too nefarious.
“Then I got my first taste of Weapon X. I learned about the under-the-table contracts that the government had signed with a lot of these companies. Wrote an article about it, handed it to my editor, and was fired on the spot.”
“Well, Jameson was a jerk, anyway,” MJ said as she and May walked back from the bathrooms.
“He was a sensationalist,” Parker said. “Always loved to make someone look bad, as long as said someone wasn’t slipping him an envelope of non-consecutive bills.”
As Mary Jane and May climbed into the back seat, Parker continued. “So I was out of the Bugle, right when I had come across the makings of the story of a lifetime. I kept digging, thinking that I might be able to write for another paper, or maybe get a book independently published. That… didn’t last very long.”
“Someone caught on?”
“Big time,” Parker said as Logan pulled out of the station. “More and more of my sources started to clam up, and those who would talk only said that it was time for us to get out of the city. I trusted their word, and we left town and moved to Rhode Island. But, what can I say, my obsession wouldn’t shut itself up. I wrote a letter to the Providence paper asking someone to take over where I left off.”
“So you’re Ben Reilly, too?”
“It’s an assumed name, yeah,” said Peter. “Didn’t garner any attention beyond being labeled crackpot conspiracy theory. It did catch one eye, though, and that’s how things got to where they’re at now.”
“Who was that?”
“I had a visit about a year and a half ago from a woman with information. A lot of information. Papers that came directly from the offices of William Stryker. There was a lot there, but unfortunately it was stuff I didn’t know what to do with. It was a screen print that had a list of names, and another one that was some files were titled with what she said were Weapon X projects. She told me she had gotten a hold of them when she was trying to dig up dirt on something she called Cerebro, or something like that.”
Logan tightened his grip on the wheel to keep the car from swerving off the road. “Who gave you that stuff? Did she give a name?”
“She gave me an alias,” Parker said. “She called herself Raven Darkholme. No way that’s her real name, right?”
“We’ve met,” Logan growled.
“Jesus, you’re tied into everything, aren’t you?”
“Looking like it more and more,” Logan answered. “Do you still have the papers?”
“No,” said Peter. “The next day we had a knock on the door from two very nice men with sunglasses and black suits. They took us on a magical journey, at which time they took a lighter and torched the papers. They said never to mention Weapon X again, never dig again, or we were as good as disappeared. We came back a week later to discover our house completely bugged. And that’s how it’s been ever since, until you showed up.”
“Why didn’t they kill you?”
“Probably because they thought I was smarter than I was,” Peter said. “The logical thing for me to do would have been to send out a dozen copies to a dozen people, telling them to only open it if I turn up dead or missing. I didn’t get that far.”
“Do you have any copies?”
“Not copies,” Parker said slowly. “I do have a few scribbles, though.”
“You what?” Mary Jane yelled from the back.
“I tried to write down as much of it as I could remember a few days after it all happened,” Peter said as he took off his shoe. “It’s not complete, but it’s something.”
“You’ve been carrying around a list that could get our family killed?” MJ screamed, slapping Parker in the back of the head.”
“I didn’t think it would make much difference!” Peter said back. “It was more of an exercise for me, than anything.” He reached into his shoe and lifted the inside lining. He pulled out two small pieces of paper, which were obviously torn from a pocket spiral notepad.”
“I could remember about a dozen names,” he said, opening the papers, ink smeared and rough with years of foot sweat, “and only four or five of the projects.”
“Let me see,” Logan said, taking the papers. He smoothed one against the steering wheel and read it.
Cerebro, the note read. Omega Red. Alpha Flight. Franklin Richards. Project Wideawake.
He shook his head. With the exception of Cerebro, none of those codenames meant anything to him. He read the other page, and his eyes widened as he read.
A lot of the names he didn’t recognize. Roberto DaCosta. Elizabeth Braddock. Danielle Moonstar.
But there were others.
“Any of them look familiar?” Parker asked as Logan’s eyes narrowed.
“A few,” he said quietly.
Sean Cassidy. Theresa Cassidy. Remy LeBeau. Erik Lehnsherr. Alison Blaire. John Allerdyce.
“And you say this isn’t a full list?” he asked.
“No, only what I could remember a few days after I saw it,” Peter said. “My memory’s good, but it’s not that good.”
Logan’s mouth tightened, and he stared through the windshield. Unconsciously, his foot pressed down on the accelerator, forcing the car to reach its destination as soon as possible. Peter Parker had been given a list that may lead to even more clues about the nature of Weapon X, but the woman who had given it to him was now dead.
Just like every stop he had made along his journey, he had found answers, only to reveal more questions. Logan hoped to God that there was some closure on the other end of this list.
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