Lance was sitting on the single bed in the cell - Logan lying on the floor, dead or asleep Lance couldn't tell - when the door suddenly slid open and the lights all flickered and suddenly died, plunging the room into sudden darkness. In the hall dim lights winked on casting an eerie glow around the room. "What's going on?" Lance asked, getting cautiously to his feet and peering out into the corridor. All the other cell doors were open, but there was no one in the corridor.
"I'm not sure," Logan's voice startled Lance, as he moved past Lance into the corridor. "Looks like emergency lighting's come on. Means central control must be down. Seems like something is running riot through Hydra's base."
"What could it be?" Lance wondered aloud, wishing that he had some kind of weapon to hand. Logan didn't answer, but instead strode past Lance and set off down the corridor. Shrugging, Lance followed him, hoping that he could find out exactly what had happened to Pietro.
Warren was trying to find his way out of the twisting maze of corridors and stairs, when the lights all went out and left him standing in the dark. Warren tensed, expecting trouble, but all that happened was emergency lights flickered to life, bathing the corridor in blood red light. He waited for several minutes before continuing down the corridor.
Several metres further on Warren suddenly found himself face-to-face with a middle-aged woman clad in a white lab coat, stained red in the emergency lights. The woman came to a sudden halt and stared at Warren, as if stunned to see a living person in the base. "Wait! I need to know how to get out of here!" Warren said, grabbing her wrist as she turned to run.
The woman struggled futilely, before turning to face Warren again. She looked torn between trying to run again and acquiescing to his demands. Eventually, she nodded jerkily. "Fine. Follow me," she jerked her wrist out of Warren's hand and set off down the corridor so quickly that Warren had to jog to keep up with her. She turned left and right down the corridors, and Warren hoped that she knew where she was going and wasn't leading him into a trap.
Eventually she came to a thick metal door that was open and the woman slowly stepped through the doorway. Warren followed her and found himself in a corridor full of corpses. They were primarily the bodies of Hydra soldiers, all of them killed in various gruesome manners. Warren gingerly stepped over and around the corpses, trying to keep from stepping in the blood that had pooled and congealed on the floor.
Warren surmised that could only have been the Pietro clone who had done this. Shaking his head, he followed the woman along a side corridor. How Viper could have created something that she had so little control over baffled Warren. Admittedly, Viper had seemed like an extremist and most certainly insane, but to create a living weapon that was so unstable seemed to be the work of a madwoman.
So wrapped up in his own thoughts was he, that Warren didn't realise that the woman had vanished until he realised he had reached a dead end. Warren looked around but all the walls were the same faceless steel - there was nowhere for the woman to have disappeared into. The sound of a gun being cocked caught his ear and he slowly turned around to see the woman standing behind him, pistol in her hand.
"You were the cause of all this death!" the woman hissed angrily. "You destroyed everything I worked for and believed in!" She raised her pistol and fired. The bullet hit Warren several inches below his collar bone and spun him around. He slumped against the wall, clutching at his bleeding wound. The woman bared her teeth in a vicious smile and was about to fire again, when a hand grabbed her neck from behind and wrenched her head sharply to one side. There was a wet snap and the woman gave a strangled cry before falling to the ground.
Warren looked up into Logan's eyes and Logan gave him a humourless smile. "Sorry to see you in such a state, Warren." Warren grinned back at him.
"I'm not that bad Logan, ah!" Warren shifted uncomfortably and Logan hurried to kneel by his side. "I don't need you to be a doctor, Logan." Warren tried to laugh, but all that came out was a small trickle of blood. His breath was becoming more laboured by the second. "How does it look?" Warren asked as Logan investigated his wound and shook his head. "That bad, huh?"
"I'm sorry Warren. I don't say this a lot, but I'm really sorry that I dragged you into this mess." Logan said softly, clasping Warren's hand.
"You dragged me into this? I seem to remember it was the other way round," Warren whispered. "I chose to come along on this mission. I needed to see what they'd turned Hydra into. We did a lot of shit in our day, didn't we Logan?" Warren smiled and Logan forced himself to do the same. "But these guys have really messed Hydra up. Finish off destroying it for me, please Logan."
"I will Warren, I promise." Logan stood up, working furiously at the corner of one eye with his hand.
"Logan, one more thing. I don't want you to leave me here to die slowly." Logan shook his head vehemently as Warren said this, but Warren persisted. "Please Logan. I want you to do it."
Logan nodded slowly, tears clearing a path through the grime and blood on his face. He pulled a long-bladed knife from his belt and with a swift movement thrust it into Warren's heart. Warren jerked suddenly, blood spilling from his mouth, before falling back against the wall, the light going out of his eyes. Logan slowly closed Warren's eyes, and wiped his face before tucking the knife back into his belt and straightening up.
Warren walked slowly back to where Lance was waiting at the entrance to the side corridor. Lance looked at him and opened his mouth to ask a question, but Logan forestalled him with a wave of his hand. "Warren Worthington III is dead."
"Worthington? Wasn't he a billionaire businessman?"
"He set up the original Hydra. We'd grown up knowing each other. We used to be as close as brothers." Logan's tone was steely and full of the promise of retribution.
"So, we're going to get out of here now, right?" Lance said hopefully, thinking that he knew all too well what the answer was going to be.
"I promised Warren that I would destroy this base. I can't leave until I've avenged my brother."
"I had a feeling you he was going to say that," Lance muttered under his breath, following Logan down the corridor. They had barely gone five metres when Logan stopped suddenly and Lance almost walked into his back. "What is it?" he whispered, but Logan didn't reply.
Standing opposite them, some ten metres away, was Pietro. Battered and covered in dried blood, with an almost skeletal grin, Lance was horrified by how different he looked since he had last seen him. But, he had been through a lot since then.
"You!" Logan's voice was sibilant hiss.
Pietro's smile curled into a sneer. "I've been waiting to meet you Wolverine. To match my strength against yours. Now seems like as good a place as any, don't you think?"
Logan didn't reply immediately but turned to Lance and said, in a low voice, "get out of here, now!"
"Don't kill him, Logan, I know you're upset about your friend, but killing him won't bring Warren back."
Logan nodded. "I won't kill him, don't worry about that. But you've got to get out of here. I can't fight if I have to worry about you." Lance nodded and ran down the corridor the other way, slipping and stumbling past the blood and corpses. Logan meanwhile turned back to Pietro, who was staring unblinkingly at him. "I'm going to make you pay for what happened to my friends."
"Do you know, I've always admired you Wolverine. Until now that is. I thought you were a killer, immune to pathetic emotion like friendship. But apparently I was wrong."
"I really couldn't give a shit what you think. You're not human, you're just a living weapon. And I'm going to utterly destroy you."
"You know, it's funny that you should call me a living weapon, because I have definitely heard that you were the original test dummy for human augmentation. Kind of like the kettle calling the pot black don't you think?"
Logan didn't answer, instead he launched himself at Pietro. Moving faster than the normal eye could see. But Pietro's eyes were no longer normal, and he could follow Warren's every movement. Both men moved faster than the eye could see, Warren tapping into reserves of strength he hadn't used for years, Pietro so augmented that he always used them. After several furious seconds of fighting the two men broke apart, both breathing heavily.
"I guess the stories are true," Pietro admitted. "Trouble is, I'm the new model and you're long out of date."
Author's Note: Thank you again for your continuing reviews Karakin and DaemonRogue 13, they are greatly appreciated! Yet more fighting coming up and trust me, the body count is going to get even higher.