Weapon Cute
Here he was. In the wilderness, stabbing soldiers wearing alien-dragon-goo monsters in the chest. If it wasn't so cold, he'd think he was back in 'Nam.
Well, that, and the fact that he had backup this time. Before it was just him and a Life-Model Decoy of Nick Fury. This time...
A sym-soldier to Logan's left suddenly had a bunch of white goo on his face and screamed as the symbiote began to sizzle and boil. As the pain distracted him, he was knocked down by shield bounce off of him.
It'd started about a week ago. He, Captain America, and Agent Anti-Venom had all been working the same case from different angles. Anti-Venom had heard rumors of people disappearing in incidents involving Symbiotes when all the usual suspects were accounted for and feared a repeat of that Invasion from back when Parker had a dozen clones running around. Rogers had been contacted by someone in the army who tipped him off that some money and some data about the various attempts to make more Captain Americas had been funneled into a joint project between the United States and Canada but the files had all been blacked out.
And Logan? Someone, or rather, several very strong and very heavily armed someone had kidnapped a couple of mutant children. A sixteen-year-old boy who could breathe chlorine gas. An eight-year-old-boy who could sweat nitroglycerine, and a ten-year-old girl with a whole host of hormonal problems from a bad mutation.
The three men had each investigated on their own, each followed leads into a seemingly abandoned section of the Canadian wilderness, and crossed paths there. They compared notes, and a pattern emerged.
The whistleblower who tipped off Rogers had informed him of who exactly had been in the files that had been sent along with the disappeared funding. Isaiah Bradly and his Grandson. The effect of Nuke's adrenaline pills on both himself and on others who took them. The Medical treatments that gave Cage his powers, and someone named Todd Ziller and every last bit of data on the Mercury Team and Weapon Plus 2.0. Also, some stuff that Osborn had been up to when he was basically running the US.
The missing persons who tipped off Thompson, five, included a mutant growth hormone addict, an Inhuman hybrid whose saliva could induce adrenaline rushes in people, two unrelated mutates with napalm spit, and a seemingly normal human with a ridiculous level of drug and alcohol tolerance.
Eight people, all between the ages of eight and twenty-one, all with some chemical-related trait.
All of that, based on Canada? Weapon Plus was up to something with symbiotes. If it hadn't been obvious at first, the Symbiote-Soldiers with fatigues that said "Weapon V" that they'd practically been tripping over since they got here made it pretty damn clear.
Which brought them back to the present. Two-Weapon V soldiers had been patrolling the forest, but they hadn't been ready for three superhuman veterans.
Wolverine retracted his claws and let the soldier he'd stabbed through the chest fall, dead. Normally he'd have been inclined to show mercy around Rogers and one of Web-Head's friends, but these punks had been working for people who kidnapped children, and... The agony that Weapon Plus experiments left people in was enough that his healing factor blanked out everything during and before his own treatment and it took him years to get it back. He wouldn't wish that on his worst enemy, let alone a bunch of kids.
The one that Rogers and Thompson had taken care of, on the other hand, was very much still alive, if currently unable to use his legs. He'd seen what Venom and Carnage were capable of, that broken spine would fix itself in no time. Face still exposed from Thomson's slime melting away the symbiote, the man pulled himself with his hands to his dead comrade. Logan stepped between his shoulder blades.
"Bub, you've about three seconds to tell us where you're keeping the kids. Otherwise, you're gonna find out why it is I say that what I do isn't very nice."
"You're too late," the man said. "They've already been given over to a cause greater than themselves." Logan put his full weight on the foot he had on the man's back. His bones and muscles were superhumanly dense and his entire skeleton was coated with an almost indestructible iron allow, so his full weight was usually enough to crush a man to death if he did it right.
The Weapon V soldier, however, seemed to be made of sterner stuff. He didn't even grunt. What a trooper.
"I mean, what are a few lives compared to protecting the world from aliens, mutants, communists, and god knows whatever freaks you bastards have just been letting run around unchecked," the soldier said. He seemed to have no idea just how angry he was making Logan just by running his mouth.
"Look," he said while taking the time to, slowly, one at a time, pop his claws again with a nice, satisfying 'snikt,' "let me tell you that Weapon Plus are full of so much shit that there isn't even a joke for it. They're not gonna protect anyone, they just want to use an army of super slaves to take over the world and kill anyone different from them."
"You're a damned liar!" The man screamed. "You're just jealous becuase you, and Rogers, and Thompson and everyone else are just failed projects! We're all here! Weapon V, Weapon I, VI, VII... Even got some assets retrieved from those turncoats in the X program! We're so damn close... I won't let you ruin it!"
"Son," Rogers spoke up. "You're not really in any position to stop us. If you just tell us where your base is and where we can find the prisoners, I'll ask that you be shown mercy when we drop you and your friends off with the authorities."
The fanatic just started laughing. "Cap? We're sanctioned by Uncle Sam and the Canadian Government. There's no mercy to show, becuase everything we've done has been greenlit... Face it, you Mutie-Loving traitor, you're the ones breaking the law here... And there's one thing I can do to stop you."
Thompson suddenly stepped up next to Logan, a firearm that he'd pulled from... Somewhere trained on the fanatic's head. "I think that's quite enough about tha—"
And then the Weapon V lunatic screamed "We're in CANADA you dumb fucks!" and tore a piece of his dead friend off with his teeth.
Logan's blood ran cold. "Thompson, shoot! Shoot now!" and jumped off of the madman.
Thompson obliged and emptied the Magazine into the Weapon V soldier's head and chest, but not fast enough to stop him from swallowing. The man began convulsing on the ground and his wounds healed before their eyes as he began to grow... Hairier.
Thompson reloaded and kept shooting, but it was a lost cause.
"We need to get the hell out of here," Logan said. "I was prepared for venom's uglier cousins. I was prepared for soldiers. I was prepared for knock-off mes. I was not prepared for—"
"WEN! DI! GO!" The now giant monster said as it pushed itself up, transformation complete.
"...A symbiote-powered Wendigo."
The creature was black with red tiger stripes, with claws like sickles and a mouth of curved fangs like a god-damned T-rex. Spikes jutted awkwardly from it's back. It glared at Logan, opened its mouth...
But before it could roar it was assaulted from all sides by a deafening barrage of automatic gunfire, bullets piercing it and then exploding into white-hot fire. The Wendigo screamed in pain but after a full minute of sustained assault in shrank and was replaced by a very badly burned and mutilated corpse.
A couple dozen more symbiote soldiers came out of the trees, shimmering as they dropped their camouflage... Damn it, the whole section of the forest had been so saturated with the scent of the aliens that he couldn't get one's scent when they were right on top of him! Three more, far bigger ones came out next, carrying oversized flame throwers and...
Logan sniffed. Now that he knew they were there, it was easy enough to make out the distinct scent underneath the smell of alien parasite. Bit of him. Bit of Sabretooth, Domino, Deathstrike, a couple of others... and Banner. He'd met Weapon H once. the process of making him must have been what crazy had meant when he said they'd gotten some assets from Weapon X and then they'd mixed it with symbiote soldiers.
"This day just keeps getting better and better," he deadpanned.
"And that, ladies and gentleman," one symbiote soldier, his symbiote looking more like heavy-duty armor than the armored fatigues of the others spoke, ignoring Logan's outburst, "is why you never want to be too devoted to the cause. Morgan worked himself into such a fury that he forgot the rest of us were here and almost ruined everything."
The two sym-hulkverines turned their flame-throwers—actually shooting some kind of white-hot plasma—and completely destroyed the corpse. Which was smart. Just becuase a wendigo is dead, that doesn't mean they're not still cursed.
"I'm sure you can relate," the apparent leader of the squadron said while looking to Captain America. "Veteran of The Second World War, with all that propaganda depicting the Germans and the Japanese as subhuman and their doing the same to us and ours, not to mention the kind of fucked-up shit the Nazis got up to, you have to have run into at least one person who was in it more for the killing of Nazis than the liberating of Europe."
"Where are the kids?" was Roger's only response.
"Ah ah ah," the commander said as all the weapons were turned onto the three heroes. He himself produced some kind of pistol from inside his symbiote and aimed it at Agent Anti-Venom. "You're hardly in the position to be making demands or asking questions. Now, I hate to do this to a national treasure and his friends, but you're the ones who took the bait."
"Bait?" Thomspon asked?
"Oh, yes. Doctor... You know, I don't think I ever learned his name. He just tells everyone to call him Doctor... Anyway, the head of the facility wants the original Weapons I and X test subjects and to get a good look at the unique properties of the anti-venom symbiote. I'm not 100% sure what for, but it's got something to do with completing Weapon XVII. So, we leaked just enough information about what we were doing in just the right places to make the three of you come running. Had Deadpool in here a week ago, but he escaped. I don't know where he got the inflatable raft from. I don't want to know. Anyway, I'm going to have to ask you all to disarm. Cap, gently roll the shield over to Agent Ramirez here to my right."
Not seeing an easy means of escape, Rogers obliged, allowing the shield to roll like a loose wheel to the indicated soldier.
"Agent Dresden, take Thompson's rifle and any other guns on his person, be careful not to touch his symbiote, and Thompson, in case it isn't obvious, we know about the extradimensional pocket trick so no funny business."
Again, with the symbiote-soldiers outnumbering and outflanking them meant that Thompson didn't have much choice but to comply, surrendering his automatic rifle, two automatic pistols, three fragmentary grenades, and several clips and magazines for each firearm.
Then the commander pulled the trigger on his pistol, shooting some kind of dart into Thompson. Thompson's symbiote briefly flashed black, then received back into his body. He stumbled for a bit from the sudden shift, but his prosthetic legs held. "Supervenom," the Sym-Soldier-Commander explained unprompted. "Norman Osborn invented it when the original Anti-Venom was harassing his fake-spiderman. Heal's symbiotes from damage cuased by Anti-Venom and temporarily neutralizes the Anti-Venom symbiote. for the next couple of hours, Thompson, you're no different from any other veteran who lost his legs in whatever armed conflict it was. Too damn many to remember."
A few minutes later, the three of them were being marched through the forest at the barrel of multiple guns. Logan kept his eyes and ears open for any faltering, any sign of weakness that could be used to escape but apparently, they'd sent the two least competent rookies to be the bait for the last leg of their trap. Everyone here seemed to be an experienced professional soldier and they were clearly up to the task of handling this.
"I don't get it," Rogers said to the commander "You seem like an affable fellow, why do... This? Work for a secret conspiracy dedicated to genocide?"
"I had a wife and a daughter," the Sym Soldier commander said. "While I was stationed overseas, one of our neighbors... A mutant whose power was that his eyes were solid purple... That's it, just a cosmetic change, shot up the whole damn neighborhood while ranting about the superiority of mutants over humans. He was taken down by a police sniper after taking three people hostage in his house following the initial attack. They searched his house and found a whole room full of pictures of Apocolypse and all the other Mutant Supremacist types and articles and papers that mentioned Apocalypse and a manifesto that mentioned Apocalypse fifty god-damn times. My wife ran off after that. Filed for divorce. She blamed me for not being there to keep her safe. I got back from my tour just in time to claim my daughter's body at the morgue. The cause of death was blood loss from multiple non-fatal gunshots. M.E. said it had to have been on purpose, to make her suffer longer. She was three."
The man pointed the barrel of a rifle he'd pulled from his symbiote at the start of the march at Logan. "Howlett here. Or Logan. Wolverine... Whatever he's calling himself? He's cool. It'll be a shame to lose someone like him. In different circumstances, I'd probably have bought him a beer. But people like Apocalypse? Magneto? The people who buy fully into the Homo Superior bullshit and use it to call for the extinction of baseline humans? Them? Their followers? Their ideology, their memes? They're an existential threat to humanity and civilization as we know it that needs to be stopped. Weapon Plus stands the best chance of doing that."
"And the countless innocent people who'll suffer and die if Weapon Plus wins?" Rogers countered.
"You're a hundred years old, Rogers," the Commander replied. "You can't possibly be that naive. Innocent people die as casualties of any war. Besides, they say that in a couple hundred years the mutant gene will have activated in all human bloodlines so unless you kill all humans it's not possible to genocide mutants. At absolute most, this is just purging a corrupted generation and starting fresh."
"Yeah," Logan deadpanned, "I bet that's what the guards at Auschwitz thought about the jews." He was jabbed in the back by the barrel of someone's rifle and the rest of the march was done in silence.
The Weapon Plus base was situated in a large clearing, built up against a hill. If Logan suspected that a mine or some such had been there once and the tunnels had been repurposed to give them multiple underground rooms. He didn't particularly like the smell of the place, as he found his attention drawn to the chimney on its eastern wall and the recent smell of blood and burned flesh coming from the incinerator at the chimney's bottom. He'd been joking damn it.
Most of the symbiote-soldiers split off after they got to the base, but the Commander and two others, including the guy who'd taken Cap's shield, stayed behind to keep the three of them marching once they entered the building. Th smell of blood was stronger here. Eight people, the eight kids they'd been here to rescue, had all bled a lot in the last few days.
"How are you any better than purple-eyes?" He said. "You're helping the psycho that runs this place torture and kill kids. Don't you think their parents might feel the same way about you and yours that you feel about purple-eyes and Apocalypse?"
"You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs," the man said coldly.
And then he heard it. It was damn near earsplitting, a child. A little girl. Screaming in agony. From how Thompson and Rogers flinched, it was loud enough that you didn't need super senses to hear it. At least one of the kids was still alive. They could still save her, and that meant that they suddenly had a time limit for escaping and tearing down the facility.
Logan spun around, popped his claws, and stabbed the soldier behind him square in the chest in one fluid motion. In the next second, he grabbed the soldier's rifle and fired it one-handed into the commander, emptying the magazine. Rogers took the distraction to turn, gab his shield from the soldier that took it, and pull it back to himself, and then the three of them were rushing down to hall heading towards the sound of the screaming.
"Thomspon," Logan began, "you're unarmed and depowered. Split off, find some bolt hole, and wait till either this is over or your powers come back. We'll find you."
"To hell with that!" Thompson replied. "I was a career soldier before I was Venom. I saved a whole planet without a symbiote once. I can still throw a punch, I can still fight. I'll just grab a gun off the first sym-soldiers we find if I have to."
"Happy to serve with you, soldier," Rogers replied, and that was that.
Three minutes later, the kid was still screaming and they hadn't run into any more soldiers. The scream was getting louder, but... "Anyone else feel like this is another trap?" Thompson said.
"I looked three sets of parents in the eyes and promised I'd do my best to get their kids back," Logan admitted. "If there's even a chance I can rescue even one of them I've got to take it."
They came to a set of reinforced doors just as the screaming started to die down. A keypad told said it was electronically locked, but a lot of these places had really poorly designed electronic locks. Logan buried his claws into the keypad and the door opened. The same mistake everyone makes.
The room smelled of ozone, and the screaming wasn't fake. There was an actual little girl being lifted out of a vat of some kind of chemical by a mechanical arm and some kind of harness. Her back was to them, her skin grey except around her major blood vessels which glowed green and the bright red mark between her shoulders. That explains it, Logan thought bitterly. An Apocalypse fanatic killed that guy's kid, so he helped torture a kid in Apocalypse's family. didn't matter where she came from, the point is these bastards were hurting a little girl.
From what could be seen of the child as she was, short metal spikes were jutting from her shoulders and upper arms and syringes embedded in her arms and legs with hookups for various IV tubes. For a kid who'd been screaming a few seconds ago, she seemed remarkably calm now. He couldn't be sure it wasn't part of the harness, but he couldn't be sure she wasn't wearing the same kind of helmet he had on when Weapon X bonded the Adamantium to his skeleton.
A man in a lab coat observed the whole process with cold eyes and as the girl was sat down and the harness pulled away from her, he pulled a handgun from within his coat and fired on the girl. A bullet hole exploded in the wall above and behind the doctor, which made him smile. "Project Power enhancements successful. Suit up, Weapon XVII, it's time for your medicine." A Weapon V symbiote formed around the child from neck to feet, becoming identical to the standard armored fatigues of the symbiote soldiers save for her head and the syringes sticking out. A literal child soldier
He didn't know what the kid's medicine was, and he didn't want to know. Claws out, Logan ran into the room intending to just kill the doctor and get it over with and then got the crap shot out of him by half a dozen Weapon V soldiers who faded in from camouflage at the corners of the room. More soldiers came up from behind, forcing Thompson and Rogers into the room and the Commander from before materialized and tore the Shield out of Roger's hands. "You people are a bunch of god damn idiots."
As Logan regenerated, he noted that the kid was standing next to the doctor with her mouth open and her tongue stuck out. The man pulled a red pill—that bastard was giving one of Nuke's red pills to a kid? He pulled a red pill from a bottle, settled it on the girl's tongue, and watched as she immediately swallowed it. The kid convulsed on her feet for a few moments but then stopped, her symbiote seeming to become flushed for a moment. Logan wasn't able to get much of a good look after that, becuase his still injured body was being picked up and manhandled onto some platform he hadn't seen before. He could See Rogers being manipulated onto the same on the opposite side of the room by the super-strong symbiote soldiers, but Thompson was merely being held in place.
Without a word, the doctor marched up to Thompson, pulled a needle out of his jacket, and jammed it into Thomspons's neck. A few seconds later, he stepped away with a vial full of Thompson's blood.
"Okay," Thompson said. "You went to a great deal of effort to get us here. Why?"
"You, Thompson? It's mostly just to test a theory." The man produced a handheld device from inside his coat... How many pockets did he have in there? And placed the vial in it, next to an empty vial already plugged in. He pressed a button, the vial of blooded emptied into the device, the whole thing vibrated for a second, and then the second vial filled with some black and white slime suspended in a blue liquid like a lava lamp.
"You see, while... Examining, the bodies of the United State's Anti-Symbiote Task Force's Mercury Team, I took note of the traces of symbiote mass that Venom's offspring left behind in their hosts' cells and I got curious... Could I integrate those pieces into other symbiotes, to pass on their unique abillities? Testing confirmed 'yes.' So now, what I want to see," he said as he loaded the new vial into a new needle and walked up to the kid, still sanding silently and patiently, "is if the same can be done with Anti-Venom?"
"Wait," Rogers said as the doctor lined up the syringe with one of the open ones already jabbed into the girl. "Antivenom destroys symbiotes. This could all backfire horribly and cost you all the work you've put into her."
"We have put a lot of work in her... Viral gene therapy to correct a glaring flaw in her mutation, the most successful recreation of the Super Soldier Serum augmented with mutant growth hormone, surgical augmentations, cybernetics, nanomachines, further gene therapy, Gamma Ray exposure... Literally just made her bulletproof... and the constant adrenaline treatments to make sure her symbiote grows at the optimal rate" He pulled the syringe back. "On the other hand... We've archived her DNA both digitally and as blood samples and her physiological data since we got her here and have taken multiple samples of her symbiote as we've experimented with it. Worst case scenario, we can clone another one." with that, he jammed in the syringe and pressed the plunger.
The child began screaming again and fell to the floor. It looked like she was having a seizure. Logan struggled against the soldiers holding him and from the corner of his eye he could see Rogers and Thompson doing the same. Eventually, however, the child stopped and climbed back to her feet, standing at attention.
"The one thing I'm having trouble with?" The doctor said. "Pain. It's easy enough to turn it off. Much harder to turn it off without affecting the other sensations. Pain is a distraction, but it also tells you when you're hurt and it seems I can't get rid of one without getting rid of at least the other. Anyway, onto the test."
The man approached the far wall and opened up a panel, from which he pulled a canister full of black goo. "Weapon XVII, hold out your hands and think about killing a symbiote."
The child held her hands out and the man dumped the canister out over them, letting the symbiote bubble and dissolve when it made contact with her own.
"Good, good, very good!" The doctor said. "And that brings us to why Weapon I and Weapon X are here." the doctor snapped and the soldiers holding Logan and Rogers let go and jumped to the side just as two glass tubes fell from the ceiling and trapped them.
Then there came a high pitched, earsplitting whine. And it started getting warmer, and...
The next thing Logan knew, he was on his knees covering his ears and sweating through his costume. The whining stopped and while breathing heavily Logan looked up and say multiple IV tubes from the ceiling were pumping red and black goo into the kid.
"You see while studying the remnants of the symbiotes in a host's body, I made a remarkable discovery: Those remnants record physiological information and the skills, memories, and emotions of those hosts, in addition to a fraction of the symbiote's original powers. And wouldn't you know it, right here there's an immortal Canadian Samurai and an Ageless Centigenarian who between them have literal centuries of experience in Martial Arts, firearm use, melee weapon use, military tactics, espionage, survivalism, and assassination and have both had symbiotes. Between what we took from you, what I harvested from the mercury team, and what we got from that irritating mercenary, the child is now one of the greatest soldiers and martial artists in the world. In other words," he finished, "by taking your symbiote remnants and giving them to Weapon XVII, I've completed the child's transformation into the ultimate killing machine. My only regret is that I couldn't figure out how to lure Manwolf or The Thing out here to give her Astronaut training."
"Now all that's left is to field test her. Weapon XVII, do you want to demonstrate your great power?"
"Great... Power...?" The little girl said. Something about it struck Logan as odd. A particularly painful sounding 'snikt' heralded the deployment of the child's own claws. Two in each hand, like Laura's... From what he'd heard of the research that cloned Laura, two claws in each hand and one in the foot was how his exact power manifested in a female body... Personally, he hoped he never found out first hand if that was true or not, but here's more evidence for it.
The doctor gave a hand sign, and one of the soldiers holding Thompson poked him with a needle and then let go of him. Within moments the Anti-Venom symbiote completely regenerated.
"Weapon XVII, kill Agent Anti-Venom."
The child ran for to steps and then jumped for Thompson, and it was all he could do to avoid getting impaled. A dozen tentacles tipped with axeheads erupted from the kid's back and swung around, each trying to chop Thompson to bits, while Logan popped his claws and dug at the glass keeping him contained. Turning people into killing machines, making a little girl kill, and this whole situation had Logan thinking of his daughter and her childhood and his blood burned.
Or maybe that was his bones. even since he'd come back to life, he'd had these... complications with his rage. His bones, especially his claws burning red hot whenever he was mad enough. glowing hot metal under his flesh hurt like absolute hell, but right now the heat was helping cut through the glass imprisoning him. He'd get out, kill that scientist and as many of his soldiers as he could, get Rogers out, and then they'd figure out how to help the kid. Maybe Jean could undo whatever conditioning is making her listen to the bastard.
He was almost loose when a loud clanging drew his attention. Thompson had gotten his hand's on Cap's shield and used it to block a blow from the kid
And now the kid had stopped trying to kill Thompson. She was just staring at the shield.
"Weapon XVII," the doctor began. "I gave you an order. Kill him."
"Bu-but... Shield. Cap... Captain America's shield. Captain America... He's the good guy."
"That's not Captain America, he... Just take the shield!"
"But... I'm not... worthy."
"It's not Mjolnir little girl," Rogers shouted from his tube. "Anyone who believes in truth and justice can use it. Do you believe in truth, and justice, and doing what's right?"
"...Ye-yeah! "
"Weapon XVII..." the Doctor said with clear frustration. "You are the inauguration of a new division and the greatest creation of the Weapon Plus program. You have a responsibility and that means following orders."
"Responsibility..." The girl said while starring at the shield. Thomspon had just given it to her... They were breaking through the programming and...
Wait a second. Logan's bones cooled as his rational mind took over again. He'd spoken to the parents of the three mutant kids who went missing. The girl's parents had admitted that their daughter practically worshiped the Web-Head... and he was always going on about how...
"Hey, kid?" He called out. "You're name's Ashley, right? Not Weapon XVII. Ashley."
"Y-ya-yeah! My name's Ashley."
"This jerk here... He said you've got a great power and responsibilities... I can't help but think that that makes you sound like a friend of mine... Oh, what was his name again?"
"Spider-Man! I'm... I'm like Spider-Man..."
"Yeah," Logan continued. "He wouldn't kill someone though. He wouldn't listen to some jerk doctor telling him to hurt people, either. Right?"
"I don't think he would," Rogers added.
"Absolutely not!" Thompson concluded.
"So, Ashley," Logan continued, careful to call her by name, "that leaves the question of what you want to do?"
The girl started screaming and bashing her head against the Shield. After three good hits, the helmet on her head split clean in half and fell off.
"Ow... Where am I?" She asked. Her posture had instantly changed and she instantly sounded scared. "I... I remember someone taking a drill to my head and then. Wait... Am I holding..?"
"We'll explain later, just stay behind me and follow my lead," Thompson said. He had powers like Web-Head, and that meant webs. Webs made of living slime that killed symbiotes, which he fired out to each Weapon V soldier in the room in a bloom that would have made the web-slinger proud.
"Well shit," the doctor said. "Well, this has clearly been a colossal waste of everyone's time so I'll just be going now and..."
And then something crashed through the ceiling. Something very big, very muscular, and as Logan cold see as the dust cleared, something very green.
"Just so everyone knows, I activated an emergency tracker in my armor the second we got captured," Rogers said. "It was Tony's idea. He felt the Avengers should all have a panic button just in case. I'd have said something earlier, but I didn't want to tip off the Weapon Plus Operatives that backup was coming."
—
She-Hulk, Thor, and Blade made quick of the rest of the Weapon V operatives and apparently, Black Panther was already trying to see about getting them tried in an international court for crimes against humanity. That left Logan and Rogers time to search the facility, but unfortunately, it seemed like Ashley was the only one of the kids to survive the last few weeks. After some... difficult phonecalls, he found himself in Avengers Mountain waiting for a member of the support staff that T'challa set up to get there with Ashley's parents so the situation could be properly explained to them.
More specifically, he was in a dead Celestial's lymph node that had been turned into a multipurpose room, watching as Jen Walters tried to instruct a little girl in how to turn off hulk-powers.
"The important thing is to stay calm. Trying to force yourself from hulk form back into human form has never worked ever," Walters explained. "Now, take a deep breath and try to shift back."
The little girl breathed in, breathed out, and red eyes turned green, grey skin got some color, and the shoulder and upper arm spikes retracted into the girl's flesh. "Ow." she'd just experienced a major shift in muscle structure and had sharp metal spikes retract into her body and all she had to say was 'ow.' The kid was a trooper. She'd already shifted the symbiote into a t-shirt and poodle shirt over tights.
God, he needed a drink.
"So... I'm thinking," the little girl began, "since my powers came from Weapon Plus... I mean, Weapon XVII is a stupid name... Maybe my super name could be Weapon Cute?"
"You might want to workshop that," Logan deadpanned. "And you don't need a super name. It's not like you're gonna be fighting crime. You're too young."
The little Asian girl turned around and glared at him. "I'm twice as old as Energizer was when the Power Pack got started."
"And when's the last time you heard of the Power Pack getting up to anything?" Logan countered.
"Uh... The Runaways had two girls about my age."
"Three of the Runaways died, one disappeared into space, and the rest either got jobs or went into foster care," Logan countered again. Hopefully, that meant he'd never run into Molley Hayes again. Every time, without fail, whenever they met she'd sucker punch him square in the chest. The full strength of the Hulk focused into a little girl's fist, it always hurt like hell. "Besides, they weren't really heroes as much as, well, runaways who just happened to have powers."
"Nah uh, they got back together a few months ago. Beat up an evil old lady with a bunch of psychic cats, made national news. Then they disappeared again and I lost interest."
"Doesn't matter, you're still too young," Logan insisted.
"Most of your side-kicks weren't much older than me when you picked them up," Ashley protested.
"You're not my sidekick," Logan pointed out. "I won't be there to make sure you don't get in over your head, and most of the time the girls I mentored stayed at the School. There isn't even a school right now. You' don't have anyone to protect you."
"I have Wolverine, Hulk, Luke Cage, Captain America, and Venom powers now and I'm suddenly more or less a blackbelt in literally every martial art," she pointed out. "I didn't even know that savate existed before now. I don't think I'm physically capable of dying or being permanently hurt anymore."
"Kid," Logan said while looking her in the eye. "There are things that are so much worse than death or physical pain. Things you got a taste of this past week, but are far, far worse than that. Being immortal just means that there's no escape from that. You want to be a hero? Wait till you're old enough to smoke and drink. Once it's legal for you to be self-destructive, then you can make that choice."
"Uh... My doctor gave me a shot of whiskey once while we were testing my chemical immunity, so..."
"That doesn't count."
"This is why your daughter was a better Wolverine than you," the girl said defiantly while Walters laughed. "She doesn't make excuses not to let Honey Badger fight crime."
Logan sighed. "Look, talk about it with your parents. If they say it's okay... And if I ever run into you in costume, you better have a signed and notarized permission slip on you. With both parents' signatures. And don't try to forge it. I was a school headmaster, I can smell a fake." That would take care of things for maybe a few years and—
"There's no such thing as a parental permission slip for Superheroics," Ashley called his bluff. "I've checked." Damn it.
"Still, at least clear it with your parents first." He'd talk to Spider-Man, have him go to talk to her and try to talk her out of it. She respected him, she might listen to him.
"Okay," she agreed. Then she yawned and stretched her hands up above her head. She flexed a little bit and a web line shot out of her sleave and hit the ceiling. Without a word, the girl walked over to a wall, spider-climbed up it, skittered into the middle of the room, and sat on the ceiling. "This completely makes up for being kidnapped, losing a few weeks of memories, and all the pain I probably suffered but can't remember."
She sounded completely genuine as she said it. Logan was now 100% sure she'd listen if Spider-Man told her to wait until she grew up to be a superhero.
The girl's parents were led into the room by... Jameson's kid. Manwolf. Huh, he'd been mentioned by name earlier. Weird.
—
The girl's parents had taken the whole thing... surprisingly well. Apparently, they'd been researching some extreme measures for curring the debilitating sickness that came with her powers. Their little girl wasn't traumatized, she didn't even remember most of what happened, and she'd come back from the ordeal far stronger and healthier than she'd been in a long time. The people who'd hurt her weren't in any position to hurt her or anyone else ever again... If she was okay, they were okay. They didn't even care when she hulked out and showed off her symbiote, as long as she was happy and healthy.
Logan was a rather cynical man, but he had to admit that seeing that kind of unconditional love was refreshing. Especially among the human parents of a mutant child.
They'd asked him to pass along their condolences to the families of the kids who didn't make it, but that could wait until he was in the mood for more difficult phone calls. He kind of regretted informing them of that bit. The kid started crying when she realized that people had died.
He stumbled into his apartment, intending to drink himself to sleep and wake up in a day or two, but he realized that someone else was there. He sniffed the air, cursed, and flipped the light switch, revealing Wade Wilson standing in the middle of his living room. Wilson was dressed only in a kilt that had clearly been made from an inflatable raft.
"Wolverine. We need to get to Canada ASAP. Weapon Plus is torturing kids and they pulled symbiote goo out of me to make a superweapon."
Logan face-palmed and explained that it had already been taken care of.
AN: Well, Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Fuck if this isn't longer than I planned.