(A/N): Yeah... sorry... it's... probably just going to get worse, sorry *snuggles you*
Chapter 35: Clone!
In the Capitol
When the cannon went off for Clara Creed, Victor simply disappeared — out of sight, away from everyone. And for the first time in a long time, the entire gathered group of victors was silent as they watched him leave.
Logan had gone very quiet and still. Although Clara hadn't been his responsibility, she'd made a point to spend her free time with him over her brother, and he had honestly come to enjoy being around her. He hadn't thought he'd want a thing to do with her to start with, but she was such a polar opposite to Victor in so many ways …
But as awful as that was, watching poor little Kamala fall to pieces while Scott barely held himself in check was so disheartening that he didn't have any way to even begin to express it. Scott was done. It would be all about protecting Kamala from then on, which was fine. Logan could understand that. He just didn't know what would happen if Kamala died before Scott did.
"You alright?" Jess asked as she sat down next to him. She paused, then clarified, "Relatively speaking."
"I wish you'd quit asking me that," Logan replied.
"Sorry. Reflex," she said with a frown. She took a deep breath, still watching him. "Never thought I'd have been rooting for a Creed."
"She was good," Logan said. "All the way around."
"Creed's pissed," she remarked.
"Course he is," Logan scoffed. "He's got a right to be."
"I'm just saying — stay out of his path," she said, giving him a look. "You two have been on the same page the last few days, and it's freaking me out, to be honest."
"More or less than Bobbi with Viper?"
"I'm just saying. It's a little creepy. On both accounts, if you're keeping score, sure."
"I don't know what to tell you," Logan said flatly before he sighed and looked around the room. "I'm headed out. Have fun with the crowd. Maybe you can go to the next to tea party with Ophelia."
Jess pulled a horrible face. "No thank you."
He smirked as he reached behind the bar and pulled out two full bottles of whiskey. "Come on, Jess. I think you two'd get along fine." He started toward the exit and shook his head at her on his way out.
No one tried to stop him — not when they saw he was packing booze with him anyhow, and when he got up to the Seven suite, he was not surprised in the least to find the place completely trashed already, with Victor clearly looking for a fight. He didn't say a word as he approached, and when he got close enough, he silently offered Victor a bottle by holding it over his shoulder nearly in his face. Creed paused, seemed to consider it and then took the bottle without comment.
Logan watched him for a while before he opened his own bottle and dropped to the floor across from him, and the two of them simply drank in silence.
July 16th: Day Ten of the Games
District Seven Suite
When Logan woke up the next morning, he had honestly expected to wake up the way he did. He was sore as hell, and his jaw was aching. A quick peek in the mirror let him know that the night had not passed without Creed taking out some of his frustrations on him. Jubilee would be mad about that. Purple, he was told, was not his color. And there were plenty of purple marks across his body.
She wasn't the only one with something to say about how he'd spent the night, either. He dragged himself to his feet and stretched out, wincing at the new aches and sore spots before he found a message waiting for him on his tablet. He almost lazily checked it while the coffee was brewing, sighing to himself because of course she'd have been aware of what was going on.
Your decision-making skills are just getting worse. What were you thinking? WERE you thinking?
Logan shook his head and let out a sigh as he tried to figure out a witty way to explain it, but he simply wasn't with it enough to try and lie. Did I do something wrong that I should know about? He texted back.
The response was almost immediate: Drinking with Creed. WHY.
For an instant, he thought about sending back something snarky, but again, he took half a moment and went with the second impulse. His sister just died. She was a good person.
But at that, Skye took a much longer time to reply, and when she did, it was just one word: Fine.
Logan glared at that; he'd had about enough of all these girls second guessing his every move and he honestly didn't see what was wrong with joining the guy in mourning his sister. Good morning to you too.
Good morning, sunshine. Try not to do anything else stupid today. I'm not there to bail you out.
But it's so hard not to when everything I do is considered stupid by one person or another.
At least wait until I'm there so I can practice lying to Fury. I need some hilarious excuses to model.
He was irate over the mention of the Head Gamemaker and Director of SHIELD. Still. Fury's warning was a little off-putting when applied to Parker's aunt and Kurt's siblings. Fury can bite me.
You know, it's not good for your long-term health if you let Creed drink with you and ALSO let Fury take a bite out of you. There will be nothing left, and then who'll teach me how to cheat at poker?
He had to smirk at that, but he knew no answer would let her think that he was considering it. May's a good cheater.
There was a long pause before Skye's response. Yeah, but she's not as funny.
Or as stupid. But don't worry. There can't be long left to go now.
Not with just six left. Scott's doing well. There was a pause. Sorry. About Clara. I liked her too.
He swallowed and let his head drop, waiting for a moment to try to find a way to switch the subject, since he didn't want to talk about Scott or Clara. Just do me a favor and warn me if you're going to be Ronan's date to the victory party. It'd be hard to keep a straight face between watching you AND Quill panic.
You have a twisted sense of humor, you know that?
He actually chuckled at that. I hate this. No inflection. And I thought you liked my humor.
I do, I'm just making sure you know it's twisted, she replied, with a quick followup: Sorry about the format. I couldn't swing video with how outdated your tablet is.
It's fine. You really don't want to see me right now anyhow. As soon as he hit the send button, he ran a hand through his hair. Yeah. It was gonna be a countdown to Jubilee screeching.
I've seen you shirtless before. I promise not to faint.
He blinked for a moment, and responded quickly. I'm uglier than I was yesterday. But after he sent it, he frowned and glanced down at his bare chest, wondering if she was poking in through the camera system. What makes you think I'm shirtless?
You always are. And try not to make it any worse. By making bad decisions. (Imagine me making a very smug face at you. Does that help?)
Logan paused for a moment, smirking to himself, but decided that the opportunity just couldn't be passed up. Smug. Is that the one where you're blushing?
No, was the very quick, one-word response, followed up by: I thought you could read people.
I can. But I'm sticking with that one if I'm imagining you making faces at me.
There was another little pause before Skye's response. Gotta go. Boss came in. Time for work - talk to you later.
He laughed to himself at that and made a point to stretch out a lot better, hands over his head and ignoring the bruises and injuries.
He glanced down at the tablet one more time, shaking his head as he poured his coffee. "Don't need to see it to know that was a cop out," he said into his coffee cup before he settled in to watch the morning news, now confident that he was right about her lack of interest.
In the Arena
It had taken them a while, because Miles wasn't sure about his internal compass, but he and America eventually made their way all the way back to where the Tesseract was. Or, really, what was left of it after the bloodbath and after the Careers had picked through everything that they wanted from it.
"Gotta be something useful you can use in this instead of those stupid venom things," America muttered under her breath as she started to pick her way through the supplies.
Miles shielded his eyes from the mid-morning sun as he looked around the area. "You know, we're probably not the only ones with this idea. Food. Water. Weapons."
"Yeah, I know, I know. You want to trap them like a…. What's that spider called?"
"Trapdoor spider," Miles told her. "Read about it—"
"—at school, I know." She shook her head as she sorted through the scraps left at the big blue box and let out a little 'aha' when she found a pack that had some protein bars in it. "Not much, but…" She tossed a couple of them Miles' way, and both of them ate ravenously. Sure, Billy's system had ensured that they had water, but food was harder to come by, and they were both starving.
"More of that would be nice," Miles told her, still munching on half of his bar as he picked through the bags and other weapons. He spotted one that was rather well-hidden, wedged between a couple rocks, and he frowned at it.
"My whole entire body is screaming 'trap' right now," he told no one in particular as he edged toward the bag, gently prodding it with the tip of his toe. He winced, but when nothing happened, he reached down and yanked the bag free, grinning to himself when he heard the sloshing sound that meant there was water inside.
"Hey, America!" he called out, turning her way — only to come face to face with someone who was definitely, definitely not America.
It was totally unnerving, like looking in a mirror, only a mirror that had a sword and made a mechanical sort of clicking and whirring noise as the thing that looked just like Miles moved its gears to twist into an approximation of a grin.
Miles stared at it, frozen in place, barely an inch away from the mechanical doppelganger, and then he simply turned around and booked it.
"CLONE!" he shouted at the top of his lungs, headed for America. "Cl-o-o-o-o-one!"
America looked up in time to see Miles running at full speed toward her — and she glanced over her other shoulder to see that there was more than one Miles in the desert at the Tesseract. She swore under her breath, her hands up in fists in front of her — though at least it was obvious which one was Miles. The one screaming about clones.
There were about three of them in all besides the original, each with mechanical smiles and long swords that America saw now would make it difficult to get close enough to pound their circuitry. And Miles' venom would do absolutely nothing against robots, despite his claims that they were clones.
"Find something to fight with!" she called out to Miles, searching the remains of the Tesseract for anything she could use. All she had to do was get one of the swords from the 'clones,' and she'd be fine, but until then, she needed something with length.
As for Miles, he was running through the area at top speed, now less panicked and more focused with every breath as he desperately looked for something he could use. It was just luck that had him ducking down after a pair of sai.
He could actually feel the momentum of the sword swing as it passed over his head, and he gulped convulsively as he popped back up to his feet.
The clone Miles grinned at him with a mouth that was all teeth — no distinctions between the teeth, white and grinning. "That's just… wrong. Wrong and creepy," Miles informed the clone, who had absolutely none of his sense of humor, clearly, because the clone didn't say anything as it lunged for him, sword in hand.
Miles barely managed to bring the sai up in time, but it took both of them to parry the sword strike. "Oh. Okay. I see. No sense of humor. What — you traded it out for super strength?" He ducked another swing. "I'd get your money back, dude. This look is not working for you."
Meanwhile, America had her hands full with the other two clones of MIles. She hadn't found anything quite as useful as Miles had — not within reach, anyway. There was a scythe; there was always a scythe in case a tribute from Nine wanted to play up to the stereotype. But it was beyond the two weirdly grinning clones with swords.
And there was a staff, but the way those swords were gleaming, she wasn't entirely sure it would hold up. Still, it was better than nothing, and she dived forward, grabbing the long staff with one hand to swing it almost blindly, and to her shock, she collided with the side of one of the clones. The impact shook her arms, but it also knocked the clone entirely off course and nearly into its partner before it course corrected.
America bared her teeth. "Alright then," she said, rushing forward with the staff extended. It wasn't hand-to-hand, but it gave her reach, and it was at least something that she could use with her strength.
She batted the second clone across the side of its head, hard enough that it buzzed and whirred in confusion for a moment before it lunged toward her again. But this time, when she brought her staff up, she was frustrated when the other clone lunged as well, slicing the staff neatly into a few pieces when she tried to use it to block the sword.
"Well, that's just great," she muttered, dropping the now useless pieces.
The two Miles clones rushed for her, and she managed to twist away from one, but the second tore a long cut across her shoulders. It was glancing, but it still stung, and she could feel the warm blood trickling down her back and mixing with the sweat and she glanced around for the nearest usable weapon — and her sights settled on the scythe just beyond her reach.
She sprinted for it and dove, rolling with the weapon as soon as she had it in her hands — and a sword came crashing down inches from her, right where her head had been a moment ago.
It wasn't her preferred weapon, but at least this thing had reach, and she swung out with it with her teeth bared, meaning to just take the thing's head off.
She was short, though. She'd never swung a scythe before.
"Oh, come on," she muttered under her breath as she was forced to jump backward just to avoid getting a sword in her side. She readjusted her grip on the scythe, gritted her teeth, and dove back into the fight.
Meanwhile, Miles was trying to hold his own against the single clone that had targeted him.
"I knew I should have spent more time doing pushups," he muttered to himself, his arms shaking with exertion from trying to parry the strikes by the Miles clone. The mechanical Miles had way more power to his strikes than the actual Miles did, and he also wasn't tired from ten days in a death arena with very little food and water.
"All things considered, I would like to point out that I'm doing very well right now!" Miles half-shouted. He wasn't sure who to, but he … that was how he reacted to stress, apparently. He had to talk about it.
The clone made a sweeping motion, and Miles raised both sai to defend himself against the blow, but at the last second, the clone feinted, instead kicking out to sweep Miles' feet out from underneath him so that he landed flat on his back with an 'oof.'
"AUGH!" Miles shouted, rolling to the side as the clone seemed determined to press his sword as deeply into the sand as possible — with Miles with it, if it could.
He scrambled to get back to his feet, but as soon as he was halfway there, he felt something tear at his side, and it took him a moment to realize it was the very tip of an incredibly sharp sword.
"Oh… crap," he muttered, eyes wide as he glanced down at the steadily-growing red stain there. The clone tried to take advantage of his distraction with a swing that would have taken Miles head off if the young man hadn't instinctively ducked, but already, his vision was swimming.
He stumbled to his knees and heard the clatter as he dropped his sais, but as the Miles clone pulled back for the final blow, something weird happened. Its head … fizzled and slid sideways off of its neck, and the whole thing collapsed in a heap.
"Oh. Hey. America Chavez," Miles said, and he wasn't entirely sure why, but he broke into a little giggle. "You killed me. I mean... the other me. Good job."
America was fairly bloody herself, the scythe held in one hand as she glanced around one more time — just to be sure they'd gotten all the clones, and dropped to one knee, rather clumsily, beside him. She was favoring one side, and Miles could see that it was splattered with blood just under her arm.
"Oh, hey. We match," he said, trying and failing to gesture at his own side, since his arms didn't really want to listen to him when he told them to move.
"Not quite," America said with a little frown as she saw the way Miles' eyes kept drooping shut, and when she reached out to see the wound in his side and how bad it was, he laid his head on her shoulder, unable to support himself on his own anymore.
"I'm tired," he muttered into her shoulder.
She stiffened as he continued to lean harder on her — moreso when she saw the pool of blood staining the sand around them and knew there was no way he'd come back from it. She couldn't stop it in time, though that didn't stop her in the least from trying as she pressed her hand to his side.
But he leaned more and more heavily into her until she was the only thing keeping him up — and when he slipped sideways, it was only two seconds before the boom of the cannon told her that he was gone.
She stared at him, in the sudden silence, and simply swore under her breath. "Told you not to die on me, you idiot," she told him — or at least, she started to. She didn't quite make it through the sentence before it caught in her throat, and then she simply had to bury her face in her knees, drawn up to her chest, trying unsuccessfully to pretend that the heavy, ugly breaths she took didn't mean she was crying.
Whatever venom had been in Miles' 'venom blast,' it wasn't kind to Bucky in the slightest.
It seemed to be breaking down his body from the inside, particular in his left arm, where he had been tagged by the venom-laced throwing star. He had long ago lost any sense of feeling from his elbow down, and he didn't really like looking at it, because it had turned a sort of blackish-gray color that honestly had him worried. The venom was necrotic, and where Miles had hit him, it looked like his arm was pulling away from the rest of his body, slowly but surely.
It was wearing, too. He could tell he was severely dehydrated from how much effort it took to part his lips to take a drink from the last few gulps of his water bottle — they were parched and dry, and all the fluid in his body was simply coming out of his left side. And he knew it.
His injury was going to kill him, but for some reason, he kept stumbling forward. He was too tired to know exactly why or where he was going, but he went — right up until he saw the bluish hue of the Tesseract and realized that he must have come full circle.
There might be water there at the very least, so he slid down to where the supplies were, not really paying attention to anything but searching through what the Careers had left behind — until he heard the shout behind him.
He didn't really have time to process it as the bushy-headed girl from Twelve simply tackled him, and her first punch already had his head ringing, since he was pretty well out of it going in.
"How are you still alive?" she asked, clearly not actually expecting an answer as she set to pounding on him to make sure the situation was remedied as quickly as possible.
With the venom running through his veins and the dehydration that had set in, it really didn't take too many hits before Bucky had been knocked unconscious, though America kept right on pounding him and kicking him with as much fury as she had when she started. His head, sides, chest — they were all a mess by the time she stepped back to let the transport come for him, and his arm could hardly be considered to be attached either.
She stepped back to let the transport come for Bucky, realizing in the back of her mind that she hadn't even heard the cannon, not with her blood roaring in her ears the way it had been. "Gotta tone it back," she muttered to herself, wiping her hands off on the rocks, though that wasn't effective at all at getting the blood off of her hands. She needed a shower in the worst kind of way, but there were still three other kids out there, and she had to keep going.
Bucky hadn't even done her any real damage, not with how much Miles had hurt him, and America sighed to herself as she looked around for something she could wipe down her arms and hands with. It felt too much like murder… and besides, she'd want to scrub off the blood so whatever had infected his arm didn't get her, too — and then she'd need to catch up with the others.
By her count, she was still fairly sure there was at least one other kid from up on the roof in the Capitol. Maybe, just maybe, somebody decent could still win this thing if she got her butt in gear and got moving to make sure it happened.
Tahiti Wing
On seeing his best friend's deteriorating condition, all Steve could do while he watched the screen was just hope against all sane thought that Bucky would pull through it somehow. He knew it was a totally irrational hope, against all odds, because he'd watched America's alliance and knew that Miles had dosed his throwing stars, but that was just … how could one little cut have Bucky's whole arm looking like it was ready to just fall off?
"He's not even trying," Steve muttered to himself as he watched Bucky, though Ororo was close enough to hear it too. "And even if he was — how's he going to fight with one arm?"
Ororo tried to give him some kind of encouragement, even if she knew it looked back. "Same way I fought with one eye, or Clint with one ear, or Wade with … his … issues," she said diplomatically.
Steve nodded to himself with a little self conscious 'yeah', but he didn't know that it was really the same. The three of them had learned long before going into the Games how to handle it, and Bucky … well. If someone didn't kill him first, then Miles Morales would have a post-mortem death on his hands, and Steve knew it.
When Bucky came up to the Tesseract though, Steve just shook his head. America was still in good shape — and clearly ticked off about losing the kids in her group. There was no other way the fight was going to go.
But to see Bucky totally resigned to it when he saw her, to watch him not even so much as raise his good arm to block before America got to work … that was just …
Steve didn't stick around to watch America finish the job before he left the room to find some private place to hide and make sense of everything.
24. Monet St. Croix, District Eleven Female, Killed by Arkady Gregorovitch
23. Jessica Jones, District Five Female - Killed by Zebediah Kilgrave
22. Skurge, District Four Male - Killed by Clara Creed
21. Brian Braddock, District Two Male - Killed by Giuletta Nefaria
20. Giuletta Nefaria, District Three Female - Killed by Elizabeth Braddock
19. Alex Summers, District Nine Male - Killed by Brock Rumlow
18. Brock Rumlow, District Six Male - Killed by James Barnes
17. Arkady Gregorovitch, District Ten Male - Killed by Remy LeBeau
16. Amora, District Four Female - Killed by Clara Creed
15. Gwen Stacy, District Eight Female - Killed by a long fall
14. Zebediah Kilgrave, District One Male - Killed by Yuriko Oyama
13. Remy LeBeau, District Eight Male - Killed by Gamemakers' mutts
12. Trevor Slattery, District Three Male - Killed by America Chavez
11. Billy Kaplan, District Twelve Male - Killed by Gamemaker poison
10. Elizabeth Braddock, District Two Female - Killed by Yuriko Oyama
9. Jean Gray, District One Female - Killed by Scott Summers
8. Kitty Pryde, District Eight Female - Killed by James Barnes
7. Clara Creed, District Seven Female - Killed by Yuriko Oyama
6. Miles Morales, District Eleven Male - Killed by Gamemakers' mutts
5. James Barnes, District Five Male - Killed by America Chavez
