warnings: crossover with the Fateverse, sci-fi, creepy shrinks, reference to emotional abuse/toxic relationships, reference to self-harm. language: pg-13.
pairing: Blood & Tears is a Wade/Logan arc, and this fic references that.
disclaimer: recognizeable characters belong to Marvel.
timeline: follows Firsthand Research.
notes: 1) The Future™: according to RoosterTeeth, things are very shiny here. Seems legit. 2) Doc Samson, Marvel's superhero psychiatrist to the stars, is head of the Network's Proctor branch. 3) If you've never seen the show 'Daria,' the eponymous protagonist is a low-drive introverted high school girl who spends most of her time philosophizing to herself and her punky best friend and doesn't outwardly display much energy or emotion. 4) Guinan from Star Trek: TNG was a bartender from a race of listeners (El'Aurians). If somebody had an issue and needed non-judgmental advice, they went to Guinan. 5) Lol, Pirates of the Caribbean reference. 6) Freudian psychiatry, while an Important Thing from History, is widely considered useless and nonsensical by modern psych professionals. 7) Don't think about elephants… ;) 8) Gagh is a species of worm served live as a popular Klingon dish. As far as the shows demonstrate, Klingons have four favorite food/drink items: chocolate, worms, bloodwine, and coffee. 9) A Ktarian Puff is a Star Trek chocolate treat.
The Impossible Chair
Wade can't really figure out how the chairs are real.
They're, like…unreasonably comfortable. Then again, this is The Future™, so they probably had an entire think tank devoted to making the most comfortable chairs in the multiverse: chairs so perfect they faded from awareness.
Wade has to keep checking that he's not floating.
Nope, still on the chair.
"How are you, Wade?" Samson asks him.
He blinks. "I don't understand the question."
Samson tilts his head a little. "How are your neighbors?"
"Yeah, still not understanding."
"Well, are you getting on with them? Are they…loud, friendly, quiet, creepy?"
"Um. Kind of normal-ish? I guess? Jessica's kind of a misanthrope, so I take it as a good sign that she only sneered a little when she said, 'welcome to the neighborhood.' Chocolate Captain America is smokin' hot, but he's got this wife who's built like a really hot half-orc, or Jason Momoa. I think she could snap me in half in a way that only sounds sexy. Fortunately, she has the temperament of Daria. Do you get that reference? Did you have MTV here?"
"We didn't, but I understand your meaning. Do you like your quarters? You can modify anything you like—as long as the result isn't hazardous, of course."
"Uh, yeah…" Wade shifts and checks for the chair again. "Look, I'm just as sane as I never was, pal. The experiments aren't really having any kind of effect on my stress levels or my emotions or whatever. I mean, not more than usual."
"But you miss James."
Asshole.
"Yeah, thanks for that, Doc," Wade snorts. "I never would've known I missed my goddamn boyfriend if you hadn't dragged your head-shrinking meat-hooks right through that one. Good thing you're not supposed to be making me feel better."
Samson makes a note. "Feel better," he says. "Implying that you're not exactly content with the current situation."
"I don't know what you want me to say."
"Good. I find that leads to more honesty. Say whatever's on your mind; that's what I'm for, really. Think of me as…a professional explainer who is also a professional listener."
"Pfft. Okay, Guinan. What the hell is with these chairs?"
"They're the product of twenty years of ergonomic and fatigue studies across all Network Employees, plus six thousand cumulative hours of materials research. We have made the perfect chair—it's just as comfortable for over seventy percent of our non-human employees, too."
"So you sell it to bankroll shit?"
"Oh, no. Any Network technology that we allow to leave the District is considered a non-tradable item. It can be given away, but never bought or sold, even in part. The penalty for monetary redistribution of non-tradable goods is generally single-instance retuning, occasionally escalating to erasure. The Chair is donated to hospitals and cat cafés on a regular basis."
"Cat cafés."
"Well, it wouldn't do to be trapped under a sleeping cat on an uncomfortable chair. We did offer the Chair to various restaurants, but it turns out that most restaurants want you to eat, pay, and leave as quickly as possible."
"How does that work here in Star Trek land?"
Samson blinks politely.
Guy must've learned that from somebody Japanese…
Wade makes a prompting motion with one hand. "You don't have money here on the Island. So people don't pay for things."
"So they stay wherever they wish to be for as long as their duties and desires permit it," Samson says with a shrug. "We devote quite a lot of resources to making sure all work is as comfortable and healthful as possible for Network Employees, Wade. Those whose work requires a great deal of standing, for example, get the shoe equivalent of the Chair, and are required to perform certain simple exercises on duty to prevent bad circulation. Analysts are given a very carefully balanced set of lighting conditions and a recommended number of eyeblinks per duty shift, and are required to use enlarged fonts on all readers to reduce eyestrain."
"And listeners like you?"
Samson gives a brief smile. "There are no other Proctors quite like me, Wade. Generally, mental health Proctors are given leeway to practice in whatever way we find most productive. Our choices are judged based on whether we evaluate our patients on the appropriate schedule, whether our patients' personality profiles remain stable, and whether we can produce desired changes in our patients' personality profiles.
"Maybe we don't want a particular Employee's depression to improve—" he goes on, waving a hand. "Perhaps she works best when she's two steps above a maudlin breakdown. Or maybe we want another Employee's energy levels reduced for the stability of his working environment—we would have to carefully induce either tranquility or malaise, and only a Proctor's training can tell him how and how much. It's interesting that you compare us to Roddenberry's pseudo-utopian future, where replicators have eliminated the need for hard currency and the drive of life has been diverted from the acquisition of wealth to pursuits of knowledge and happiness. To be perfectly frank, the Network is an absolute totalitarian dictatorship that happens to operate on a socialist system of carefully evaluated equity—which is not the same as equality. The System Administrator has the final say on everything, and we have no system in place to depose or replace him. We trust that he is utterly incorruptible, and that all his decisions lead to the optimum stability of all universes. The reason we have no money is that everything we need is provided for us in a rigidly pre-determined fashion and many things we want are provided on a regulated basis."
Wade's immediate instinct is rebellion.
Okay, so defiance is Wade's instinctive response to most things.
But it's just words. A totalitarian dictatorship sounds pretty fucked up, and it would be if the guy in charge were a human being. And if people weren't free to quit their jobs here whenever they want.
"You guys can quit, though, right? You can just say you're tired of it and go back out into the world?"
"Yes and no. Employees who have undergone Life Extension treatments are obligated to pay back at least sixty percent of their most recent treatment before they can terminate employment, which is why they are rigorously evaluated before undergoing a treatment. Other than that, provided they relinquish all restricted items, they are free to quit at any point, and Network service generally screens very positively on outside employment applications. We have a current turnover rate of approximately three percent. Stress, mental breakdowns, loneliness, and nostalgia are cited as the most common reasons for departure. That stress, however, is nearly always the result of a lack of forthrightness with the Employee's mental health Proctor. So, if there's anything you want to get off your chest, any questions you want answered…"
"Why are you telling me all this?" Wade asks, suspicious.
"To see how you react to the knowledge," Samson admits with a half-shrug. "That, too, is a Proctor's job. We study, we predict. Every word I say is chosen to produce a specific reaction from you. The information I divulge, the phrases I use to do so, the order in which I do it—all of that is designed to create a predictable sequence of thoughts and emotions. I have studied personality profiles nearly all of my adult life, and Wades are a particular passion. You happen to be a member of a fairly standard template: extremely reasonable, family-oriented, altruistic, pragmatic when necessary, quick to violence once enemies are known. Very similar to the Sysadmin, in fact."
Wade fidgets.
That's very creepy. I feel sullied and unusual.
Samson points with his pen. "And there's what Wades like to call the 'I've been touched by Uncle Bob in the no-no place' reaction. But I promise you will only exhaust yourself if you try to analyze your every reaction to see what benefit I gain from it. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
"Freud was a fucking nutcase."
Samson smiles indulgently.
"And you knew I was going to say that. So what was the point of this whole conversation?"
"To be absolutely certain of your personality, to judge your current mental stability, and to give you something to think about besides your dysfunctional, obsessive, borderline-abusive relationship."
"What do I do these days that's abusive?" Wade squawks.
"Who said you're the abuser?"
"I'm—that's not—"
"You haven't self-harmed in all the time you've been away from him. And no: binge-eating doesn't count in your case, considering your body's optimum calorie intake."
"H-he doesn't—"
"You're breathing designer air right now, and your food synthesizer was programmed only with items you would either recognize or enjoy, but not necessarily both. Even your neighbors were carefully chosen. I'll see you at the lab tomorrow."
And Samson just gets up and leaves.
Wade feels twisted-up and wrung-out.
Was that the point of the rapidfire 'mwahaha' shit at the end?
He turns off his projector (and why the hell did he bother, when the damn shrink apparently knows all the ugliest parts of him anyway?) and goes to sit on the couch (not the same kind of comfortable as the chairs…maybe so people won't spend unhealthy amounts of time watching TV?).
"I could self-harm if I wanted!" he tells the blank screen.
But the urge isn't there.
He spent years playing around, seeing how fast he healed from what, seeing how much things hurt, seeing whether he'd hurt worse before, whether he'd be okay with hurting that way again, whether he should avoid that kind of injury at all costs.
Ripping out fingernails, there's one he can't stand. He'd rather lose the whole finger. Weird, since he sometimes chews his fingertips literally to the bone.
Walking on broken glass or hot coals, not as awful as it sounds. Just messy.
Tooth-pulling used to be annoying because of all the blood and the little spurts of light-headedness, but his body kind of got accustomed to it and he learned to just spit the blood at people.
He flexes his right arm, extending the blade.
Getting that put in hurt. It really fucking hurt. He'd rather fall off a fucking building than do that shit again (besides, he's got that hovering thing going on now, so falling off buildings isn't really a big deal).
He should cut himself. He should slice a big ol' gash in his arm, leave a nice stain, just to show the shrink who's boss.
He sets the blade against his skin.
Do it. Go on. Just a slice. No biggie. It's sharp as fuck, so it hardly even stings.
He presses down, determined—
He flops over onto his side with a huff.
"Goddammit," he mutters, sheathing the armblade again.
And what the fuck does it mean, that he really, truly doesn't feel like hurting himself, and hasn't since he got here?
Is it something in the air?
'Designer air,' right? Gotta be it.
It's not like Jamie makes him want to hurt himself.
Right?
No. No, that's stupid. It's stupid! Jamie takes care of him, Jamie puts up with him. Jamie came looking for him, and watches him sleep, and makes sad faces when he hurts himself.
Oh, shit.
Mind. Blown.
"I hurt myself to hurt him," Wade realizes.
They're regenerators; they get used to physical pain. It hurts, yeah, but it doesn't bother them. So he could beat the shit out of Jamie all day and he'd just get that raised eyebrow and an exasperated 'are you done?'
But even a drop of blood, and it's all soft hands and tearful kisses and 'why would you do that?'
It's the only way he can punish Jamie without leaving.
And he wouldn't even have thought about this shit if fucking Samson hadn't fucking mentioned it and told him not to think about it, so here he is, doing exactly what that green-haired fucker programmed him to do, thinking about elephants (metaphorically).
He runs to the food synth and orders every chocolate item on the menu.
Even the gagh.
And then he knocks on his neighbors' doors and invites Grump-ass and Mrs. Cap to help him eat all that chocolate.
"So," he says to them, seated around his dining room table with a banquet of semi-identifiable chocolate. "I'm in a creepy mutually-abusive relationship where I self-harm to punish my boyfriend for my abandonment issues."
Mrs. Rogers stares, a spoonful of Ktarian Puff poised inches from her mouth.
Jess looks at him with something between confusion and disgust.
He braces for judgment.
"Is that…chocolate covered worms?" she asks.
He stops eating and looks at his spoon, which is wiggling. "Gagh," he corrects. "Highly nutritious."
Her lip curls.
He hesitates.
"'S it any good?"
"I may throw up on you," Mrs. Rogers warns them.
.End.