Brotherhood 1
Disclaimer: All characters belong to the creators, writers and illustrators of the X-men comics and the director and producer of the films. This is a work of fanfiction, I make no money from it, and no copyright infringement is intended. Any characters you don't recognise are open source, use them if you want.
Mortimer Toynbee is Toad, Victor Creed is Sabretooth.
Beginnings
When he was seven, Mortimer Toynbee gave up on adults. The main thing was that they lied. Not just about the little things (this won't hurt, everything's alright don't worry, you'll really enjoy it, etc) everyone lied about the little things, but they even lied about big things. They told you to never lie, and always share, and not be afraid to stand up to people and then they just left you out in the world where you discovered that all of it, all of it was lies. That telling the truth got you in trouble, sharing got you exploited and standing up to people?
That had to be one of the worst lies ever.
They told you that hospitals made you better, and policemen looked after you and teachers were there to help you. Sometimes Mortimer figured that the best way to work out what the world was like was to take anything any adult told you and turn it upside-down. That way at least it wouldn't hurt too much when you did hit the world, or rather, when you entered the world and it hit you.
And he never understood why they did it. What benefit did it possible give them, would it give anyone to tell a kid that bad things only happened to bad people and then send them out into a world where this was blatantly not the case? What did teachers gain from telling you to stand up for what you believed in? Did they get some sort of sick pleasure out of the knowledge that someday some guy would smash you into a wall for disagreeing with him?
He didn't get it at all. Which was why, he supposed, that he spent so many of his years at the orphanage in London sneaking into the computer room. Computers made sense, they had rules, they did things so much more simply than people. They gave you crap, true enough, but only if you gave it to them first and, best of all, they didn't change. They didn't tell you to 'be your own person' and then get all stroppy when you decided to eat with your hands, or to 'always tell the truth' and then slap you for admitting about the broken window. They had hard cold rules, and he was fine with that. Rules he could understand, it was the lies that he found baffling.
By the time he was fifteen, Mortimer Toynbee had given up on people.
Rumour is not solid, a heavy clunky thing that passes from one person to another. Nor is it liquid, flowing around in mixed gatherings, swirling into whirlpools as its distortions show. Instead it is air, flying, floating, changing (but always with a core of truth).
And sometimes it doesn't even need people to spread. The Weapon X disaster was meant to stay a secret, and everyone involved in the procedure who was still alive would swear blind they hadn't told. But it's hard to keep a secret when a fully grown naked man spills out into the snow, screaming and crying, drenched in blood, howling into the night, the taut red lines on his skin still healing.
The rumour spread like air, insidiously slipping through the strongest meshes. It floated over the hills and through the bars until it reached Victor Creed, who was sitting in a small damp cell and wondering: if he was X5, who the hell were the other four?
The rumour contained the word 'Wolverine' and Creed pricked up his ears at that. That was a name he knew. Somehow everyone knew about the Wolverine. X2. The ultimate weapon….
(Although sometimes Creed wondered why, if Wolverine were the ultimate weapon, he'd been X2 rather than X1. He guessed that Stryker always wanted to leave room for perfection).
Wolverine had escaped. Wolverine had run out, and no one knew where he was.
Creed thought for a moment, trying to remember why he knew Wolverine so well. They'd taken out most of his memories for the procedure, that had been part of the deal (they got extra abilities, the government got some nice new weapons, and they lost enough memories to make sure they had no background) but he'd asked to be allowed to remember some of his time in the army. He'd enjoyed the army, and he had a sneaky feeling that Wolverine had been there too, involved in some capacity.
He still felt slightly queasy after his own operation. It hadn't done much, admittedly, just lengthened his claws and bulked up his muscle mass, but it had still been bad enough. He knew he'd get better though, given time, and then, maybe then, he might think about getting out.
"Hell." He grumbled under his breath. "If he can get out, what's stopping me?"
A/N: And here we go again. :) All backstory is made up by me, and is based on the events of the X-men movies. I've also tried to keep it vaguely consistent with my first X-men story, 'Playing with Fire' although both of them are separate, stand-alone stories.
Oh lor' : the Return of the Crappy Chapter Titles.