dontcallmepatches:

technoorganicguardian:

 ”Where are you?” He practically barked it down the phone, surprising even himself. But orders always came easy to Nathan Summers. Orders, regiments and routines were how he’d lived his life. How he’d survived this long. Because that’s what he always does.

 He settled against the edge of the desk, silently chastising himself for trying to smooth his hair back with his now useless arm. He sighed softly into the phone.

 ”Sorry,” he said softly. “Are you still in town? I could use…”

 He trailed off, letting the word ‘help’ hang there before mentally swatting it away.

It was almost funny to her, the way Cable was practically stuck in his soldier-like habits by default. That’s one of the reasons she took a liking to him—-but that wasn’t the issue at hand. The guy obviously needed something from her, probably help or a little company, and she wasn’t one to deny him that. Especially him.

“No sweat. Yeah, I’m in town, got nothing to do since Scott decided to run business into the ground.”

She let a short silence fall, trying to think of the best option in response to his question for help, or at least for her company, then nodded to herself.

“Remember that old apartment of mine? Turns out it was still vacant by the time I got back here. Somethin’ to do with previous owners. Guess people don’t like mutant residents, hah. Come on over, drinks on the house.”

 ”Yeah,” he said shortly, “I’ll be right over.”

 He thumbed the disconnect button before he had a chance to hear her voice again. Before he had a chance to say something stupid. Sighing, he held the button in longer and the cell powered down. He left it face down on the desk and pushed himself up, crossing to the bathroom.

 He pulled the little cord by the doorway of the bathroom and the light flickered dimly and a ventilator fan somewhere in the ceiling turned on, filling the room with a low, droning hum. The bathroom cabinet was dismal: an old toothbrush with bristles that had clumped together with age, a rolled up tube of toothpase, a mostly empty bottle of mouthwash that has been discontinued years ago, a set of hair clippers and a razor with no shaving foam.

 Strands of pure white hair drifted slowly towards the bath mat below his feet as he ran the clippers over his overgrown hair. Once he was satisfied with his buzzcut, he ran his fingers through the short hair and nodded to himself. He eyed the beard and left it alone.

 He pulled a plain grey t-shirt on from the wardrobe and swapped the sweatpants for a pair of dark jeans. He left his left arm in the sling under the fabric of the t-shirt and pulled on the overcoat before heading back out into the world again.

 He hesitated before knocking on Neena’s door when he reached her apartment, standing back after and staring at his feet.

dontcallmepatches:

technoorganicguardian:

 If there’s one city in the world where a big guy looking like a strung out Santa Clause with one good arm and one good eye could blend in, it would be San Francisco. He draped a dark overcoat over his shoulders, covering the light grey vest top and sweat pants, as he made his way through the city to one of his safehouses.

 The city felt… empty. Even though he knew there were hundreds of thousands of people all around him at any given time, he couldn’t feel them. Like his mind was shut off. He couldn’t tune his telepathy to their wavelengths and hear the cacophony of thoughts. Everything felt silent.

 The guy at the front desk of the shitty apartment building at the other end of town didn’t even recognise Nate until he give him the password. He regarded him cautiously, but nodded and gave him the key anyway.

 The room hadn’t changed a bit since he’d last been there. He dropped the coat on the ragged couch and pulled the vest top over his head. He retied the sling holding his atrophied left arm in place. He picked up the dust covered cell phone from the desk and hit speed dial 1.

 Calling “DOM” appeared on screen.

The apartment Neena had been hauled up in ever since she’d manage to wriggle herself free from the fight between the X-Men and the Avengers was quiet as all hell. Her friends were either too busy with their own problems to hang out or…well, the other side of the problem wasn’t all that much fun to reminisce on. She was pretty damn sure she and Logan wouldn’t be seeing each other for a while, at least. Pitting old friends and teammates against each other was never a good idea.

After a long day of working out at the gym, yes, a regular human gym, where people gave her looks of defiance and disgust and she hit the punching bag and lifted weights to ignore insolent behavior, the thud of the couch as she slumped down on it and the sound of the tv as she turned it on were the only sounds to fill an otherwise dead silent apartment. That is, until her phone rang. Mixed in with the tv and the ringing of her phone was the banging of her knee against the table as she got up in such a hurry she completely neglected elegance. Domino was a very skilled and lucky mercenary, but household items, slayers of knees and shins, weren’t always her best friends.

What she’d expected to find on the screen of her phone—-well, she wasn’t exactly sure what she’d expected, but seeing the caller ID, with a cheeky little picture of Nate at the top of her screen, made a small surge of an emotion she chose to neglect run through her entire body, as though something had sparked her senses…and in a way, it had. Getting a call from Cable could mean good or bad news, but—-it was Cable. Still, she managed to sound casual as anything as she picked up the phone, as though it was some daily routine for them to contact each other, whereas in reality, she hadn’t seen him in a good, long while. Not awake, at least.

“Well, there’s a sound for sore ears. Heya, Nate. What’s the buzz?”

 ”Where are you?” He practically barked it down the phone, surprising even himself. But orders always came easy to Nathan Summers. Orders, regiments and routines were how he’d lived his life. How he’d survived this long. Because that’s what he always does.

 He settled against the edge of the desk, silently chastising himself for trying to smooth his hair back with his now useless arm. He sighed softly into the phone.

 ”Sorry,” he said softly. “Are you still in town? I could use…”

 He trailed off, letting the word ‘help’ hang there before mentally swatting it away.

dontcallmepatches:

Life isn’t black and white. People aren’t good or bad, evil doesn’t just pop up out of nowhere…a lot of the time? Society creates it. And once you’ve been branded evil, you can either choose to live up to your rep, try to fix it or disregard the matter altogether. When you’re a mercenary, you life your life in the grey zone. The big unknown, the shady morals and life on the edge, they’re all part of the job, and you know that from the get-go. You know mercenary has a shady ring to it, and you accept that. But being branded a terrorist, just ‘cause you’re a mutant? That’s something entirely different. And now it’s up to me to decide whether or not I want to live up to the reputation.

For Neena Thurman, life had always been black and white in terms of looks—-okay, with a little purple mixed in from time to time, but those were the nineties. We don’t talk about the nineties. In terms of jobs and occupation, however…well, she was born—-no, bred to be in the grey area. She was bred a weapon, bound to end up in shady business, but as she managed to work her way around the Perfect Weapon Project, at least she didn’t turn out on the whole supervillain side of the scale. Not right away. Not until society decided to put her there.

So, what was a merc to do? Ever since the outburst between the Avengers and the X-Men, mutant society had suffered. Whereas they’d made progress in contact between mutants and regular humans and mutant rights in general before, Scott Summers and his band of Phoenix-wielding maniacs, as society viewed them, had done a whole lot of damage. If they hadn’t been outcasts before, they surely were now. And it was because of that that Neena went back to her old life of training, of trying to get back into gear and desperately looking for a job that wasn’t directly involved with the mutant war-criminals she was now associated with.

For a mercenary, it’s all about reputation. It’s about the cred you get from your employers, and the reputation you build up through actions and display of skill. There was no lack of skill…but she was a mutant. And for human employers to hire a mutant mercenary in times like these? Not very likely. Unemployed, shunned, but at least still alive and kicking. And certainly not expecting to be called back on any team any time soon; if at all there were mutant teams out there, they were on the down-low since the final outburst of the Phoenix. They didn’t need her.

She’d become expendable. But she was fighting it, hard as she could.

 If there’s one city in the world where a big guy looking like a strung out Santa Clause with one good arm and one good eye could blend in, it would be San Francisco. He draped a dark overcoat over his shoulders, covering the light grey vest top and sweat pants, as he made his way through the city to one of his safehouses.

 The city felt… empty. Even though he knew there were hundreds of thousands of people all around him at any given time, he couldn’t feel them. Like his mind was shut off. He couldn’t tune his telepathy to their wavelengths and hear the cacophony of thoughts. Everything felt silent.

 The guy at the front desk of the shitty apartment building at the other end of town didn’t even recognise Nate until he give him the password. He regarded him cautiously, but nodded and gave him the key anyway.

 The room hadn’t changed a bit since he’d last been there. He dropped the coat on the ragged couch and pulled the vest top over his head. He retied the sling holding his atrophied left arm in place. He picked up the dust covered cell phone from the desk and hit speed dial 1.

 Calling “DOM” appeared on screen.

 The screams woke him. In his dreams he saw war. He always had, but this was different. He saw the war between his people, his family and the Avengers. A war put to death by his daughter. His daughter, surrounded by golden, cascading flames, ended the war with life.

 The screams woke him.

 He looked around with blinking eyes and fogged vision at the inside of the medical bay on the island of Utopia. He felt like he’d been hit by a truck. Twice. With a groan, he tried to push himself up into a seated position.

 But only his right arm responded. He looked down, expecting to see what he had seen his entire life: his left arm coated in technoorganic flesh. Instead, he saw a shriveled excuse of an arm. Withered and decrepit, it hung limp against the bed.

 He sighed and pulled it across his chest with his healthy arm and pushed himself up off the bed. He looked around. Empty. The entire room was deserted. He tried to reach out with his telepathy, but it barely responded. He crossed the room to the old, scratched mirror that was mounted on the wall above a sink.

 His hair was longer now, scraggly. He pushed it back out of his eyes with his good hand and saw it. His right eye. He had wondered why his vision hadn’t returned fully and saw now that his right eye was clouded and glassy. He ignored the white beard that had grown in his time sleeping.

 It was slowly coming back to him as he looked around the medbay for supplies. The last thing he remembered was Hope… and the Avengers. Succumbing to the TO. Dying, almost. And now he was here. What must be months later by the looks of him, and without any signs of the virus of him.

 He wrapped up his atrophied arm in a sling of gauze and wrapped a strip across his right eye in a makeshift eyepatch before looking around the room. He grabbed the clipboard at the end of his bed and flipped the paper onto the blank side. He scrawled a note in black ink across it.

Hope.

It’s not your job to watch out for me.

Don’t come looking.

Nathan

He sighed and left the note on the bed, tracing his fingers over the ink for more than a second. He dropped his head and pushed himself back off the bed and crossed to the door. He could get off the island without being seen easy enough. Now he needed to look into his old contacts.

 Nathan Summers needed to put a team together.

suckmyglocks:

technoorganicguardian:

suckmyglocks:

Neena had been pacing back and forth through her apartment, now and then sitting down, taking her guns apart and cleaning them before going right back to pacing. Something wasn’t right. Nate was supposed to be back by now, from whatever he’d been off doing, but he hadn’t even so much as given her a call, and when she tried contacting him, she got a big fat nothing.

Loud footsteps shook her from her worrying, and when she swung the door open, he practically fell into her arms. Metal. Cold metal on her skin. He’d almost fully turned metal, his skin, his voice, even his eyes. Her heart took a few enormous leaps before settling for pounding in her throat.

“Nate?! Oh god Nathan, talk to me. What the hell happened?!”

She’d known him for so long, she’d half gotten used to his techno-organic virus. But she’d be damned if she knew how to make sure it wouldn’t kill him…

 Nathan stumbled forward into the room, leaning against the wall to keep him from collapsing. He took shallow, ragged breaths that sounded like metal scraping against metal. Every couple of breaths he would break into a wheezing cough that would practically double him over.

 The thought that this might be it flitted across his mind before he realised that she was there with him. Neena. He looked at her through eyes glassed over with metal and grinned in relief.

 ”Neena…”

 He doubled over again, letting out a hacking cough. His legs shook and almost gave way under the sheer weight of him and he leaned more and more on the wall, sliding down ever so slightly.

 ”Got… kaff… got stupid, Neena… let it out… can’t… can’t stop…”

 He could feel the edges of his mind flickering, closing in. The corners of his vision blackened as he focused on her face. He reached out a hand, cupping her jaw gently.

Neena held him in her arms, her face as stoic as it would be when she was on the job, only her eyes betraying the emotions that raged inside her. Her fingers brushed his metallic cheek and she even managed to put up a smile for him as he cupped her jaw.

“Shuddup, Nate. You’re gonna be fine. You always are. …You have to be.”

She attempted to squeeze the upper arm on his formerly good side, but flinched away a little as she discovered it was as rigid as the other arm had always been. 

“Nathan…is there—-“

Her voice trailed off and she clenched her hands to fists, trying to think of a solution for an obviously urgent situation.

“What do I do?!”

 He tried to keep his eyes open and focused on her face, but the blackness at corner of his vision creeped in just that little bit further. He almost smiled, his metal lips curling at the corners as he felt her fingers brush against his cheek. She felt a mile away even though she was right there. She was with him. She could help him.

 ”Need to…”

 A raking cough tore through his throat and chest, interrupting him. It sounded like a car being crushed.

 ”Need to burn off the infection… kaff… give the virus… something to feed on.”

 He’d come close to succumbing to the virus before in the past, but he’d never come this close. Maybe this was it. His final curtain.

But he wasn’t going out without a fight.