some Billy and Tommy! super-powerful super-mutants. who look like string-beans and bicker like little kids. appearances can be very deceiving.
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. some flangsting. language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus s***).
pairing: Logan/Wade (with hints of Nate/Wade, hints of past Billy/Teddy, and reference to Tommy/Kate).
timeline: other than "right after On Attack," doesn't matter.
disclaimer: i doesn't owns the movies or the characters. or the assorted objects of pop culture reference.
notes: 1) the title is a reference both to the act of outlining a geometric shape and the act of removing the power-suppression devices called Limiters. 2) i'm thinking that even at 26, the twins would not look very imposing, especially to Logan, who could probably nom them for breakfast and lunch. 3) ahhh, magic. now you know that it screws up the Space-Time Continuum. isn't that comforting? 4) in metaphor, a chimera is something made out of a bunch of incongruous, mis-matched components. 5) there is, in fact, a TV trope about resurrection attempts leading to amnesiac versions of people. 6) there's another TV trope about continuity glitches being the fault of a wizard changing things between scenes/shots.
visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.
Delimit
Logan was Not Impressed.
Few people could be as completely Not Impressed as Logan; his talent came partly from abundance of experience and partly from lack of tact. He knew this very well, had long ago come to terms with it, and in fact frequently made use of it.
The two young men Hope had called 'the big guns' were lean and rather lethargic things, smelling like soap and metal, like they'd been locked up somewhere. They looked like they'd fall over in a stiff breeze.
"Well, they're too skinny for human shields. We gonna use 'em for javelins?"
The dark-haired twin jerked a thumb at his brother. "You can use him for a javelin, I wouldn't mind. Thow him head-first, since it's not like there's anything in his skull he'd miss."
The pale-haired twin scoffed. "Please, I could run faster than he could throw me."
"Self-propelled javelins, then," Logan amended.
Hope huffed and put her hands on her hips. "Mister Logan, you of all people should know that looks can be deceiving. Tom and Will are extremely powerful mutants—so powerful that we have them wear special devices to suppress their abilities, keeping their damage to the timestream at a minimum."
'Extremely powerful mutant' never boded well, in Logan's experience. Magneto had been an extremely powerful mutant. Jean had been an extremely powerful mutant.
"There you go with the misleading generalizations again," said Wade. "Super-powerful mutants don't damage the timestream just by existing. It's what they tend to do with those powers that screws things up."
A flicker of blue light sparked up when the techs finished removing the twins' collars.
"Well, since I 'screw things up' by wanting stuff…" the dark-haired one said with a shrug.
The other twin vanished in a blur and a gust of disturbed air, reappearing a second later and jogging on the spot like a little kid at the fair. "Ohmigod, it's been so long since I had that thing off, I've been slow for ages! Who's my favorite Auditor? Hope's my favorite Auditor! We should get attacked by evil Avengers every day!"
"Oh, god, it starts," groaned the other one. "Are you sure we can't leave Tom here? Do we have a treadmill we can use to power the compound, or a giant hamster ball or something?"
Logan shrugged. "Okay, so if we gag him, we've got a fast runner. That could be helpful."
"Idon'tjustrunfast," blurted the speedster. "Iblowshitup!"
"Oh," Logan said, which seemed to cover it. "Okay, then. And you?"
"My name is Will, not 'you.'"
"Kid, your name is Toothpick as far as I care. What can you do?"
"Anything," said Wade.
Logan frowned and looked at his companion.
Wade shrugged. "Pretty much. If he wants it enough, it happens. Magic. Big-time magic. If he really wanted to, he could blow up the world. Or, y'know, just rearrange it. Weird thing about him and his mom—they don't make new branches when they change stuff, they actually alter the timestream. So, y'know, keep that in mind when we get back, and try not to give Wanda any reason to try to remake the universe, lest five hot chicks in leather show up to destroy it. In the meantime, you might wanna stop making fun of the kid."
"I'm twenty-six, and I'm right here," muttered the subject of their conversation. "My name is not 'you,' my name is not 'kid,' my name is Will. Now, can we please all proceed like grown-ups? What's our attack strategy?"
Wade pointed. "You get to hide in the back and keep Evil-Nate's powers from turning us all into our component elements."
Will sagged. "Great. Collar off for the first time in two years, and I'm reduced to playing shield generator. That's not demeaning at all."
"You got a way to kill him without just unmaking him?" Wade countered.
"…no…"
"Then shut up and be a good shield generator. I don't feel like seeing if I can survive that nasty case of dissolution that took out the last Auditor. Tommy—where the hell did he go?"
The white-haired twin appeared in a blur, hands full with a burger and a huge soda. "Yeah,sorry,gothungry. So what are we doing?"
"You're going to blow up Evil-Spidey. If anybody can catch that leapy-crawly bastard, it's you."
"Damn right," Tom said with a smug grin.
"Jamie, you get to fight yourself, because I'll be busy kicking ass against Evil-Cap and Evil-Nate."
Logan frowned. "How come you get two and I only get one?"
"'Cause I'm better'n you. Now, if anybody gets a good chance at it, try to steal their Node—but don't end up dead in the process, please, or Hope will never let me borrow her toys again."
"Hey, waitasecond," Hope said with a scowl. "Where the hell do I fit into this attack plan? I know we talked about the power-borrowing thing, but I have other powers of my own. Does everybody get to do something except me? Because that's not only unfair, it's ageist and sexist. I really am qualified to be the Auditor, you know."
"No good," Wade replied, shaking his head. "You're not set up to fight in a group in tight quarters—your fighting style causes too much collateral damage. Just you versus them, you'd be fine. You and one person versus them, okay. You and the five of us? We'd end up flung into walls."
The redhead subsided to a pout. "Well…what if I borrowed—"
"Like you said, we covered that. Who would you borrow from? Jamie heals good, but that's a little less than helpful without the fun claws. Nate 'n the twins are too powerful, and we'd end up surrounded by uncontrollable magic, splosions, or a vortex of matter disassembly. And me…let's just not even go there."
"Why?"
"Because I'm a hideous fricking chimera. I have no clue what would happen if you tried to borrow from me. Maybe you'd get one power. Maybe you'd get all of them. You don't want the semi-controllable eye-lasers, and the teleportation is hard to get used to."
She pouted. "Aw, but the teleporting looked so cool. Fine. I know a way to program the Nodes to perform a slide as soon as one of you has Archimedes, and I'm pretty sure that Tony has some helpful scan-blocking tech."
Summers and the squirrel-tailed girl came back into the room with a steaming mug that smelled pleasantly of cream and spices, and Wade practically pounced on it before he and Hope went over their loose approximation of a 'plan' with the big man.
"The place where they keep you guys," Logan said, looking back at the twins. "It's basically a prison, right?"
"No," said Will.
"Yes," said Tom, at the same time.
They glared at each other.
"We're kept there on a strictly voluntary basis," Will went on.
His brother snorted. "Yeah, but when they say 'okay, we can erase your entire existence or you can come live in a metal box for the rest of your life,' only a certain kind of whacko would not volunteer."
Logan had to concede the point, despite knowing he was one of that 'certain kind of whacko.' "So what'd you do to end up here?"
"Accidentally blew up a Keeper about eight years ago," Tom said nonchalantly, slurping at his soda. "Well, I meant to blow him up, but I didn't know he was a Keeper at the time. His own fault, really, because I'm not sure what kind of reaction he expected me to have when I showed up and saw my brother being held at gunpoint."
"What'd you do to end up at gunpoint with a Keeper?" Logan asked Will.
Will shrugged. "I remade my boyfriend," he said, completely straightfaced and matter-of-fact.
Logan blinked. "Remade? As in…?"
Will shrugged again, but he smelled distinctly of fear. "As in he died and I made a new one of him. I didn't mean to make a separate one, I actually meant for the original to be okay, but wording in magic gets tricky. And I can tell you, it's pretty depressing to have a carbon-copy of your boyfriend who doesn't remember you. It's like some bad TV trope."
Uneasily, Logan cast a glance at Wade, who was making distinctly annoyed faces at Summers.
"Anyway…he was supposed to die, and when I tried to undo that, it screwed up the shape of the timestream. An important neighboring branch almost collapsed." Will shifted his weight with a soft squeak of rubber soles on metal flooring. "So a Keeper dropped in, gave me the low-down. When Tom blew him up, I put him back, and he decided I wasn't such a bad guy. So. Here we are, instead of being erased."
"Would you have kept him, if ya could?" Logan found himself asking. He didn't know why he wanted to know; it wasn't like Will and Wade were anything alike.
The scent of fear had faded, and the kid's heartbeat was slow and steady. "Of course I would've. I'll always love him, even if he couldn't remember me. But when they fixed what I did, the timestream sprang back into place, and fifty-thousand people who would have died didn't. And I know that he wouldn't have been able to stand it if those people had died because of him."
A gagging sound drew Logan's gaze back to Tom, who was miming choking on his burger. "Oh, god, the saccharine…I think my teeth all fell out from spontaneous cavities."
"Shove it, Tom," Will muttered.
"Hey, I'd like to point out that my girlfriend is still completely, legitimately alive, and I'll never get to see her again because you had to try your little Snow White stunt. Congratulations, the princess woke up, wasn't who you were looking for, and was 'summarily disposed of.' Meanwhile, my sweet Katie is probably fighting off perverts as we speak."
"The only pervert she ever had to fight off was you, and you never took the hint."
"Screw you and your dippy little fairytale!"
"Screw you and your juvenile envy!"
They both huffed and turned to sulk back-to-back.
Logan blinked at them in mild disbelief. "What are you, twelve?" he grunted.
"Jamie, are you making people sulk again?" Wade asked, startling him.
"Hey, they did it on their own," he said, gesturing to the twins. "Some old argument about girlfriends and boyfriends past, and ill-advised resurrection attempts leading to permanent exile."
"Ah. That'd do it. Let's set aside the sibling bickering for now, guys. As soon as Stark and the mad scientist figure out exactly where our special friends have gone, we're heading out."
"Goodie," said Will. "And then I can get back to my day job of helping Dr. Strange insert random continuity glitches into Star Trek episodes."
Wade paused. "…seriously?"
"No, not seriously," Will said with a scowl. "God."
"Just checking. 'Cause, I mean, somebody's gotta be doing it."
.End.