[Blood & Tears: Phase 35] Leaving Now
getting the skinny on Eight-Ball so they can get the hell outta Dodge.
warnings: Movieverse (as-yet unnumbered Earth version; NOT Earth-616/Main Comicverse) with bits of the Wolverine Gameverse and B&T ficverse mushed onto it. incredible amounts of AU and technobabble. angsty bits and mention of AU character death. language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus f***, s*** and g**damn).
pairing: Logan/Wade (with hints of Nate/Wade).
timeline: other than "right after Detonate," doesn't matter.
disclaimer: i doesn't owns the movies or the characters. or the assorted objects of pop culture reference.
notes: 1) AR091-Eta is the most sane, sensible Nate in the multiverse. that's really the only way to describe him. 2) don't worry, Logan, the funky physics confuses me, too. 3) Wade's yellow boxes are talking about old school American Gladiators, and the version of Siren who was a hot (and hearing impaired) blonde. 4) aside from the DBA, only a Wade would know how to unlock a Node that doesn't strictly belong to him. more on that later.
visit The Fateverse Glossary for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.
Leaving Now
Hope made them promise to stay another five minutes.
She said they needed a breather, and she had to call the Core to give a status update anyway.
Wade fidgets and tries not to count the seconds while she’s standing there talking to someone who looks a lot like Emma (might actually be Emma…an Emma, at least). There’s maybe twenty feet between them, but it feels like an ocean, and he hates goodbyes. He’d rather just skip out while Hope’s distracted, rather not have to look her in the eyes and be hugged like he’s the greatest guy in the universe.
But getting hugs from cute little girls is great.
Not when you have to make yourself turn around and leave right after.
“Are you all right?” Nate asks him.
He flinches. “Am I all right? You’re the widower, pal.”
“You have that look you get when you’re upset.”
He doesn’t like having someone know when he’s upset. It’s bad enough having Jamie smell it. “We just saved another world. Why the hell would I be upset?” he counters.
“He betrayed you.”
The words turn into a little ball of ice in the pit of his stomach. He doesn’t have to ask who Nate’s talking about.
You. You betrayed me.
“Us,” Wade mutters to his yellow boxes. To Nate, he says simply, “Sort of.”
Nate doesn’t look like he plans on moving any time soon. “Would you like to talk about it? Or yell at me?”
Yelling might be nice.
He arches an eyebrow. “What good would that do? The one who did it’s already in the fridge.”
“You could use me as a proxy, just to get your yelling in. My husband usually did. I’m pretty good at not taking it personally.”
I’ll just bet.
His head hurts, and his throat aches with memories he’s pretty sure he doesn’t deserve to be stuck with.
“Wade?”
“It’s better he’s dead,” Wade suddenly says. “Your husband, I mean. You have a habit of doing stupid shit for him. Fucking stupid, crazy shit, like promising to make the world exactly the way he wants it.”
“He was worth it,” Nate tells him calmly.
He wasn’t. We aren’t.
Wade flinches again. “He didn’t, actually, y’know. Betray me. That world really, really sucked, and I really, really wanted to die. He just kind of decided that I wasn’t allowed to, and it pissed me off, and then I found a way to make them do it. Take that as a goddamn lesson, will you? If a regenerator looks at you, completely sane, and says, ‘I’m tired, I’m ready, I wanna die,’ don’t fucking flip your shit. Because if you really care, you’ll say ‘okay.’ Living as one of us is fucking exhausting, in a way most people can never understand.”
Nate’s hand touches his shoulder briefly, gently. “Then I’m glad you’ve got Logan.”
Jamie gives a territorial growl, so Wade takes his hand and squeezes it as hard as he can, until he feels the painful press of metal on metal. He uses that touch to say what he doesn’t want to say in front of an audience.
Don’t go. Ever. If you do, I’ll kill you.
“You’re a good man, Wade,” Nate says. “Better than you think. I hope you succeed in this, and not just because of the ‘saving the multiverse’ aspect. The thing about being a hero that most books tend to ignore…is that the happiest moment for the hero is coming home at the end.”
“Well, yeah,” scoffs Wade. “The only reason I agreed to go on this crazy adventure was ‘cause Effcee promised to take me to meet Bea Arthur when we’re done.”
Nate laughs, but it sounds strained.
Guiltily, self-consciously, Wade remembers that the way he thinks, the way he talks, are enough like the last Auditor that nobody noticed the difference. “I’m sorry we didn’t get here sooner,” he feels the need to say.
But Nate shakes his head. “You said you came from the Database. Their timescale is too different from ours, too stable. It could’ve been a matter of seconds or a matter of minutes. When you came here, you arrived at the point-oh…but within a millisecond, the timestream moved on.” He looks at the watch on his wrist. “From the Network Core’s perspective, four and a half minutes passed between Natalie’s call to us and Hope’s update to Emma. On the Database, it’s been eighty seconds.”
Wade makes a face. “Fucking relativistic chronography… You know that shit still confuses me?”
“Wait,” grunts Jamie, waving a hand. “If time’s moving at a different speed there, how can we have a conversation with someone over that fancy-ass telephone you got?”
“It creates a gravimetric distortion band,” Nate replies, “temporarily connecting our branches of the timestream so that the timescales align. Gravitic-power-source curved-space technology, the same as we use to travel the timestream without worrying about chronometric signature calculation.”
Wade glances up with a grin. He can practically see the gears grinding behind Jamie’s confused grimace. He decides to rescue his poor, tech-unsavvy boyfriend. “Makes a time-bubble, honey.”
“Right,” Jamie says slowly. “One o’ these days, when I’m bored as hell, I’ll sit down and read about all this shit, because it sounds pretty cool. Straight outta H.G. Wells.”
Wade winces. “My God, you’re old,” he mutters.
“Asimov?”
“No, you’re still old.”
“Buck Rogers?” Jamie tries.
Got you there.
He sighs unhappily. “My God, we’re both old.”
“And just think,” Nate puts in, with that smug tone he gets sometimes. “I was born almost fifty years after you were.”
Wade exacts vengeance by kicking Nate in the left knee.
“Ow. I think you dented something…”
“Daddy, are you being mean to Wade?” Hope asks sternly. If it weren’t for the silly pout and the fact that Wade remembers carrying her on his shoulder as a little girl, she’d be really intimidating. Something about being six feet tall and having the upper body musculature to use a rocket-launcher for a baseball bat.
She looks like an American Gladiator. Remember Siren? Man, she was hot.
Okay, not making mental connections between hot badass chicks and the precious little red-haired princess…
“I was only teasing,” Nate says innocently.
“Well, stop it. I told the Analyst that the situation was contained, and I went over the info from the CDB-it looks like Node 250 is heavily sentient, to the point that it may be able to apply creative reasoning to the Smart Node Laws.”
“Crap,” Wade sighs.
“It’s crucial that the Node remain where it is, something to do with a time loop and relocating another Hope. The static feedback it’s been giving is a little off, but it doesn’t look like a big deal. It’s found its Keeper, but he hasn’t done anything to activate it-you may get stuck with that job.”
Oh, sure, just remember how to turn on one Node. Like we don’t know how to activate about a hundred of the things. It’s okay, we can probably just guess. That’ll work out great.
“Shush,” Wade grumbles. “How do we turn it on?”
She looks at him and blinks. “The DBA said it worked the same way as Forecaster, so I kind of assumed that meant a lot of Nodes work the same. Uh…you do know how to turn Forecaster on, don’t you? You didn’t just…like…happen to find him while he was activated?”
As a matter of fact…
“Actually, I completely remember how to wake Effcee back up,” he tells his skeptical little yellow boxes. “Okay. Anything else? It doesn’t have any death-rays or thought-altering abilities or anything sinister like that?”
Hope shakes her head. “From the report, it looks like it’s just a really smart, really sentient Node that may or may not have intuition. Other than that, it’s got the standard capabilities. Average-precision sliding, typical chronographic calculation, resonance transmission…” She shrugs.
He thinks on that for a bit. “Spiffy,” he says, and stands. “C’mon, Jamie, let’s get this show on the road. The Hunter ain’t gonna drop dead on his own.”
The room’s lighting is still dimmed for the benefit of the holographic projector in the table, so Wade has some trouble finding the activation angle.
Should start carrying a flashlight for these things…
When the grid appears on Effcee’s surface, he has to pause and remember the commands. Nodes can do a lot of things, even without being ‘awake,’ so it’s probably for the best that he only learned three or four of the command sequences. Light source. Timescale signal. Pre-programmed slide.
Aha.
Boot-up sequence.
It’s been a long time since he’s had to boot a Node, so he’s kind of surprised he remembers which buttons are which. He knows he’s gotten it right when the grid splinters into flickering symbols, and he remembers which one he needs to look for to start the code.
He remembers because it means Hope.
Slowly, he rotates the crystal sphere until he sees the symbol. Line up the thumb, grasp the Node to turn it right-side-up, press in.
And then all he has to do is pretend he has a knife in his hand.
“Holy monkey shit,” Hope says.
The Node beeps and blinks unexpectedly, long before he thought it would.
~Oh, sure, wake me up now that all the fun’s over. Am I just a chauffeur to you, Wade?~
“More like a cab driver,” Wade tells the thing. “A chauffeur would know when to shut up. Grab us the coordinates and ship us out.”
~…wait. That’s not right. What the heck?~
Wade frowns. “What?”
~Well, the DBA gave me coordinates that are…they’re way below Point of Operation.~
“She’s not sending you to the Node?” Hope asks, confused.
~She is. She must be. I specifically asked for 250’s coordinates.~
Nate drums his fingers against the table. “The laws are clear. Unless the Netcon and the Sysadmin ordered her to do it, the only way for her to be able to give a Node’s coordinates below the point-oh is if the Node’s actually there, and the only way for that to happen is for the Node to undergo a timeslide while dormant. So something else with sliding tech put that Node where it is.”
Hope shakes her head. “That doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t the Administrator flag it?”
Because the Node is where it’s supposed to be.
Wade snorts. “It’s all part of the plan,” he says. “It needs to do some pretty finicky work inside a loop, and the only way to make sure the loop stays stable is with solid-phase interaction, right? Easiest way to get that is to be physically present instead of just resonantly present.”
“Ya lost me again,” Jamie sighs. “Can we just go?”
“You got it.” He wants to use the opportunity to skip the whole ‘goodbye’ thing, but Forecaster is apparently conspiring with Hope.
She hugs him tightly. “I’m gonna miss you so much.”
“Yeah,” he says, awkwardly patting her on the head. “You be good for your dad. And don’t go getting yourself killed.”
“I know you hate saying goodbye. And I do, too. So I won’t say it.”
“What’ll you say instead?”
She steps back; her eyes are wet, but she blinks the tears away and grins. “May the Force be with you?”
He smiles. “Nerd.”
“I learned from the best.”
As soon as Jamie’s hand slips into his, the world vanishes.
.End.
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