[Fateverse Side Story: BB Bundle] Pressure
ah, evil!Steve teaming up with evil!Nate. there's no way evil!Steve will be able to put up with Nate's bossiness for long.
short!fic is short, and i have no idea where it's going after this, LAWL.
warnings: AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. evil!Steve and evil!Nate. some background rule 63/het. graphic threats of violence. language: pg-13 (for one use of f***).
pairing: Lester/Aki (Bullseye/Daken), implied Steve/Tony.
timeline: day after The Blossom to the Branch.
disclaimer: marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.
notes: 1) as a former teammate of Logan, Steve probably met Akiko more than once when she was staying with her father. 2) as i've said more than once before, few people can do Not Impressed as well as Wolverine; Akiko is one of those. 3) Nate is surprisingly good at coming up with elaborate plots to get people to do what he wants; it's just that his plots have a tendency to backfire slightly, especially when he underestimates people *coughlikedeadpoolcough*.
Pressure
Steve frowned when Tony told him how things had gone with Logan’s daughter.
She had thrown her weight around, and Tony had let her.
Steve slapped Tony silly for that.
“You know better than to let a wild animal smell fear,” he said.
As punishment for the slip, Steve ordered Tony locked out of the workshop for a week. Then he had Pepper arrange a new meeting with Mrs. Graves.
Now they’re sitting on the patio of a café, table between them and people all around. Aside from some curl to her hair (he’s not sure if it’s from an iron or from curlers, but the mental image of her in curlers is somehow reassuringly old-fashioned), she looks exactly the same as she did the last time he met her off the battlefield, some ten years back, and he’s slightly baffled that he never recognized Akiko as Lady Wolverine.
“It’s been a while, Akiko,” he says pleasantly.
“Fuck you,” she answers in the same tone.
He sips his iced tea, leans back in his chair, folds his hands together. “I’m sorry I was elsewhere when you visited Stark Industries. I thought I’d given Tony very clear instructions, but you seem to have been left with a wildly incorrect idea of how this arrangement is going to work.”
Akiko tilts her head and traces a lacquer nail along the side of her glass (açai pomegranate, like every other hip young health-faddist). “I think you know where you can shove your apology.”
Steve is struck suddenly with the familial resemblance. Akiko wields her father’s brand of unassailable universal disdain very well for someone with only sixty years of practice. “You should watch your tone,” he says evenly. “You somehow have the mistaken impression that you have some form of power in our arrangement.”
“I have all the p-” she starts to say, but he interrupts her swiftly.
“You have no power in our arrangement.”
Her pretty half-breed eyes widen with fury. If they weren’t in public, she would certainly have attacked by now.
“Only I and three others know exactly where your son is being held,” he goes on. “If you lose your temper and kill me, you drastically reduce your chances of finding him. Furthermore, I know that your children inherited your gift, so while I can only die once, Michael can be tortured to death every day for decades. He can be trained. He can be conditioned. He can be taught to hate you. He can be honed, admittedly over the course of several years, to fight you and perhaps kill you.” Steve takes a sip of tea while he lets this begin to sink in. “If you break our agreement, if you try to attack me or mine, if you try to track your son, if anything happens to me…the consequences will stretch for his entire lifetime.”
By now, Akiko’s face is blank and very pale. She looks like a doll. “I’m going to kill you,” she says, and her tone is almost gentle. “Not today. Not tomorrow. But someday. It will be excruciating and drawn-out, and while you are in the midst of it, I will destroy everything you love right before your eyes. You’ll beg for me to just end it, and do you know what I’ll do?”
He raises his eyebrows.
She leans forward. “I’ll pull your teeth out one by one and let you bleed while I butcher Stark’s lifeless body like a side of beef.”
“Oh, how imaginative.” He favors her with a slight grin. “You’ll be disappointed to hear that your father used to hand out that kind of threat like a cheap party favor.”
Her blank mask cracks into a minor sneer-so it’s true that she hates her father to that extent. “I take it back. I’ll leave you your teeth so you can chew when I feed Stark to you.” She smiles serenely and gets up from her seat. “I’m so glad we had this talk, Steven. My father was right when he called you ‘eminently reasonable.’”
Steve goes back to SI, takes over his favorite chair in Tony’s office, and waits.
Nathan appears in a flash of blue light.
“I have…things…to do…elsewhere,” Tony wisely decides.
When he’s gone, Nathan takes the chair behind his desk. “It’s true that the simplest and most efficient way to move something cumbersome and heavy is to apply a lever to a fulcrum,” murmurs Nathan. “But there’s a certain amount of danger involved if the fulcrum is not properly stabilized, or if the lever is brittle. Who knows where the object you’re trying to shift will end up, in that case? You made three mistakes.”
Steve bristles, because he feels it was all rather inspired. “Oh?”
“Taking the son was your first mistake. If you had studied the family longer, you would have taken the daughter. Itsuko is the darling, the apple of her father’s eye, the thing that changed their lives. It would have broken Bullseye, and he is the true weakness, just as Itsu was Logan’s breaking point.”
He knows that; it was in Tony’s preliminary report. Honestly, Steve had ignored Tony’s suggestion to take the daughter because he wanted the option to raise the child into a weapon. Perhaps it’s a sexist inclination, but Steve finds girls to be less reliable, less consistent. “I don’t think Logan would have supported it,” he says as an excuse. “Not with the very real threat of torture.”
“Correcting her misconceptions of the situation was your second mistake,” Nathan goes on, apparently ignoring Steve’s input. “As long as she believed she had power, she was complacent and therefore controllable. Now no matter what you choose to do, the part that will stick in her mind is that a white male authority figure told her she was powerless. Eventually, she’ll kill you, and if she must, she’ll kill Michael-and she won’t blame him for it, and she won’t blame herself for it, she’ll blame you, and she’ll take that out on everyone and everything you’ve ever valued.”
“And my third mistake?”
“Your third mistake was telling her how many people know her son’s location. As long as she didn’t know, she would’ve assumed you were the only one, except for possibly Logan, and you would’ve been safe. As things stand, you’re only safe until she finds out who else knows where the boy is.”
Steve forces himself to relax his fists. Nathan is necessary. The entire exercise was to convince Nathan of their capabilities so that he would join their efforts. “How should I handle this? Enlighten me.”
After a moment, Nathan slowly blinks, and the heaviness of his presence abruptly fills the room. No longer slightly pompous and arrogant…but truly powerful and dangerous. “Let her calm down again. Let her feel strong again. Let her blow off some steam. At the same time, don’t let her stew, and don’t give her time to brood or plot. Pretend to slacken the leash, but keep her under very close watch, and the moment she shows signs of straying, then apply pressure. Begin to have Carol case the house. A presence both threatening and docile…another female, pacing the edge of her territory but not invading…someone she knows she can’t harm through conventional means. You won’t have to threaten, because she’ll assume Carol is there to take Bullseye or Itsuko, and she’ll know that she can only protect either her husband or their daughter. Her options will be to let the most precious thing in her life be taken by her enemies or to watch his heart break into a thousand brittle pieces. Faced with that choice, she’ll do almost anything you ask.”
“I see,” says Steve. It’s the sort of sharp, backhanded tactic that Logan would have used. Lurking and intimidating and implying. The very idea is both intriguing and repugnant to Steve.
Then Nathan’s mismatched eyes harden like steel and glinting gold. “Any more gross foul-ups and you’re on your own. I will not hand the world to an incompetent. Bodyslide by one.”
A flash of light, and he’s gone again. Steve breathes out and scowls at the place where Nathan sat. Right now, he detests Nathan, but they need him, need the ability to shred things into their components with an absent thought. They need the way Nathan could, if he felt like it, transmute Akiko’s body into its constituent molecules. Nathan is one of the most powerful beings on the planet, the only force potentially able to stop the Sentry. They must stop Robert Reynolds if they want to change the way the world is.
.End.
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