a sequel to One Spark, investigating the death of Professor Summers and the birth of Eight-ball. this is the stuff Anthony talked about in Gestalt (a Fateverse Side Story).

warnings: AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. unrequited slash leanings. angsty angst. sort-of-kind-of character death (but technically not). language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus s***, f***, and g**damn).

pairing: one-sided Nate/Wade, plus Nate/Wade bromance.

timeline: probably about two years after One Spark; Native Year AD 2555, Network Operations 734 (AD 3272). [yes, you read those right; timelines are especially squirrelly when time travelers are involved]

disclaimer: marvel owns all the characters.

notes: 1) the title is a reference to the Katy Perry song "Firework." 2) Wade's natural lungs have lasted longer than expected, because he's stubborn that way. 3) Wade told Traveler!Wade that he wrote his doctoral thesis on the effect of quantum entanglement on the probability of a branch being absorbed, which is apparently related to probability loci (you'd have to ask MerianMoriarty). 4) this may be only the third or fourth time i've ever used future tense. certainly the first time i've posted something that used it.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

Firework

Wade has often felt trapped by his body. Sometimes, especially more recently, he's wished the stupid thing would just quit on him already, instead of dragging things out.

It's a coward's thought, and he hates having it, but he hurts. Every day, almost constantly. His hands. His head. His useless, disobedient legs. His dying lungs.

Each breath claws at him, like hungry fingers dragging him into darkness.

He has only three escapes from the pain.

The first is the opiate painkiller they put him on twenty years ago. It numbs him, makes him drift. It makes him drowsy and forgetful, and he hates that—the forgetfulness. He hates feeling like he's wasting the time he's got. He should be helping the people he cares about get over him, helping them get used to the idea that he's going to die, and he thinks it's got to be harder on them if they see him losing himself. So he doesn't take the drugs unless the pain is just too much to bear that day.

The second is the fascinating world of hyperbolic chronometry, the quantum coral reef slowly making alien shapes out of the fabric of space-time. He can lose himself in mental exploration of the timestream for hours; blessed hours in which he barely notices the pain. Before, when his body still worked, when he was healthy and active and deadly, he hadn't cared about physics. He'd had some inkling that he was smart—but what did that matter, next to the ability to kill a guy with a pair of chopsticks? He'd been too busy having fun to think of things like the fabric of space-time, and things like gravity tunnels and tesseracts. Now he wonders if he was born hardwired for theoretical physics.

The third is being near Nate, his oldest and closest friend, but that brings a different pain that has been steadily growing. For a long time, Wade has suspected Nate might be far too attached to him. It doesn't bother him in an 'ew, I'm a homophobe and that's gross' kind of way. But it does bother him in a 'you're the biggest celebrity on the planet but you picked a dying cripple, what the fuck' kind of way. More than that, it bothers him in a 'you're killing yourself and I wish to God you'd stop' kind of way.

"Penny for yer thoughts, hun," Inez says as she steers his hoverchair toward Nate's lab.

He takes a slow breath. "Stuff," he tells her. "And things."

She laughs.

Nate's staring at a projection of somebody's brain. He looks like he's hit another dead end. But how can that be? Didn't he say they'd already done five round-trip brainslides on each test subject? Sure, not everybody handles them well, and the tests with permanent brainsliding are showing some side-effects…

"Hey," Wade says.

Nate glances at him guiltily and shuts off the projection. "Wade. Good morning."

Wade feels a tickle of worry in his gut. What has Nate got to feel guilty about? "Afternoon. Hungry?"

"Not really." Nate looks at his watch. "I suppose I should eat something, though."

Inez seems to sense the strangeness in the air. She comes around to kiss Wade's cheek. "I should be gettin'. Y'all have fun at lunch." And she makes herself scarce.

"What's wrong?" Wade asks, now that she's gone.

"Nothing's wrong," Nate says, but it's a lie. It's too rote, too automatic.

"Expect me…to believe that? How long…we known each other?"

A wry little grin twists Nate's mouth. "Sixty years now, isn't it?"

"Sixty-one."

"We were very young."

"You were," he corrects.

"I was," Nate agrees.

"God's sake, Nate…" he grumbles. "Just. Tell me."

"Let's get lunch. How about salad? Salad sounds good, don't you think?"

Neither of them moves. As usual, Nate won't look at him.

"Gonna die," Wade says firmly. "Been dying. For fifty years now. Not. A big deal."

"Yes, it is," Nate contradicts.

"Everybody dies."

Nate flinches.

Wade watches him for a long time in silence.

"It's a big deal to me, Wade. And maybe I'm not curing it the way I'd always hoped to, but this is something."

"So tell me," Wade presses. Even with crappy lungs, he can damn well be as stubborn as Nate.

Slowly, Nate pulls the projection back up and points. "This is the area of the brain that stores long-term memory. This part over here stores language. They're some of the first parts of the brain to start forming permanent structure, and they're some of the most frequently accessed. In this brain, they've started to degenerate."

"Due to…?"

Nate frowns. "Due to…some kind of side-effect to the way we reprint consciousness on a returning brainslide. It's got to be a—a write-error of some kind, from trying to write onto an occupied mind with an almost-identical consciousness."

"That a problem?" Wade asks. "We planning to…put me back?"

"Aside from the currently approved research subjects, the Network won't let us use the equipment we need for a permanent brainslide unless we prove we can undo it," Nate sighs. "Steve says the Concordat is being very insistent. But this scan indicates that undergoing more than a dozen permanent brainslides will cause cascading neural damage to the receiving brain."

Wade feels a sudden pang that has nothing to do with his malfunctioning lungs. "Yours," he realizes. "Goddammit, Nate."

Anger and frustration pass over Nate's face briefly, but then he settles on his usual sad smile. "Please. Let's not argue about it today. Let's go have lunch."

"Not today?" he echoes, too upset to let it go. "When? After you…kill yourself? What good…will that do?"

"All the good in the world!" Nate shouts. "I told you, I don't care, as long as it helps. If doing this, taking the notes, and frying my brain buys you even a year, it's worth it."

"Fucking selfish!" Wade shouts back. "Think I want…an extra…year…of this shit? Wake up hurting…spend the day…barely breathing…watch my stupid…best friend run…headlong into walls…go to bed hurting… That sound like…something I wanna…keep doing for…an extra year?" He manages to keep from coughing, but it's a near thing.

Nate doesn't say anything for a long time. He just stands there, frowning fiercely at the projection like he's on the verge of tears. "Aren't your painkillers working anymore?" he says at last, hoarsely.

"Can't think. When I take 'em. Close to…breakthrough. On locus theory."

"You'll deal with the pain for the sake of chronogeometry, but you won't let me do this to myself to save you. How very like you, Wade. You'd really rather just die and get it over with?"

He watches Nate wearily. "Sometimes," he admits.

A tear falls down Nate's face. It trembles for a moment at his chin before dropping through the projection. "Fine," he whispers.

For a moment, Wade breathes easier. He thinks Nate's finally found some measure of peace—enough, anyway, to stop killing himself over it.

"If you ask for euthanasia, I'll give it my official sanction as chief medical officer," Nate goes on. "But I'm not going to stop the brainslide research. And I'm not going to stop using myself as the primary test subject."

"Bastard," Wade spits, because he thinks his heart is breaking.

But four years later, when Nate's mind is too far gone to oversee the research, Wade will sign the release form for Rachel and the others to keep using Nate as their primary test subject. And a year after that, when Nate's brain fails to reboot after the twenty-second brainslide, Wade will sign the release form to have him interred in the specimen preservation wing.

When the Sysadmin finally pushes through the decision to allow erase-first one-way permanent brainslides three years too late to save Nate's mind, Wade will throw an almighty tantrum in his new body, breaking everything he can get his hands on. Nate's note board, still covered with a glowing mixture of cancer research and neurochemistry, will shatter into a million satisfying little safety cubes.

Wade doesn't know it, but decades of exposure to light and emotion instilled a resonant signature in the board, and those million little cubes will be gathered up and melted down and given to a computer called the Quartermaster, destined to be turned into a three-inch sphere that will feel the echoes without understanding why.

.End.