Chapter Text
Daken climbed the steps out of the subway wearing a knit cap and light jacket he’d donned in the lavatory to foil any overzealous HAMMER weasel that could potentially be trying to track his movement by traffic-cam. He pulled the cap off once he was under the awning of the Club Noir, pushing it into his jacket pocket with one hand as he ran the fingers of the other through his hair. Taking out his wallet, he presented the bouncer with an ID naming him ‘Luciano Sugiyama’ and the cover in paper cash. He strolled into the club, still sparsely populated with the night as young as it was, and checked his jacket.
An hour and a half later, after he’d bought drinks for three fellow clubbers and accepted drinks from five, the club was creeping towards capacity as the clock crept towards midnight. It wasn’t that his quarry made a scene when he appeared, he was probably about as low-profile as a popular celebrity strolling into a club could be, but Daken marked his arrival because he’d been keeping one eye on the door all night. He kept drinking and dancing just as he had been, while keeping track of his position as Johnny Storm did the exact same, both of them homogenized into the press of bouncing bodies and the darting flicker of lasers ricocheting off disco balls.
After an hour, Daken made his approach, weaving and bobbing slowly through and with the crowd. Coming up alongside, Daken slipped a device into the right-front pocket of Johnny’s jeans, and a moment later, Johnny’s hand found his, pressing an identical one into his palm. Untraceable, undetectable, back in the tower, the cutting edge spy-tech would hack its way into every wifi and bluetooth network it could find and start filling itself with as much classified HAMMER data as it could hold. If Reed Richards weren’t a white-hat, he would probably have conquered the Earth and subdued all resistance by this point.
As he kept on drifting past without eye-contact or verbal exchange, Daken considered the feeling of the object Johnny had put in his hand; the spy-tech was wrapped in a post-it. He peeled the devise out of the paper and slipped it into his pocket as he headed toward the lavatories. Once he was in the steady light of the men’s room, the booming house music reduced to a rumbling thunder, he straightened out the post-it and read the hand-written note scrawled in pen across its face. A Manhattan phone number and below it: if you get in trouble or need anything call us
Daken pulled out his phone and started adding the number to his contacts; he paused to consider a name, before writing in ‘Blonde Club Noir Margarita’ and saving. Then he tore the post-it into small pieces, dropping half of them into the men’s room garbage and put the other half in his pocket to dispose of at the subway station.
000
Hey sexy, what are you doing this weekend?
Reed gave the computer monitor displaying the incoming text message a puzzled stare, then frowned, worried. The line was one he’d cannibalized from a prepaid phone, purchased with paper cash, then cloned and set up to bounce all calls and text messages off six towers before entering or after leaving the Baxter Building’s encrypted security network. It was a number they’d only given to one person. “HERBIE,” Reed called aloud, “Call the Fantastic Four to this lab.”
“Calling,” HERBIE replied.
Reed went back to the code he’d been writing before the message had pulled his attention away. Susan was the first to arrive, wearing a curious but unworried expression. Reed reflected that he hadn’t told HERBIE to stress any urgency, so she probably thought he just wanted to show off what he was working on. “Something new?” she asked.
“It’s not that. Or, well, this isn’t ready yet,” Reed replied, shaking his head and pushed away from his workstation. He heard the door open again and glanced over to see Johnny and Ben walking in together. “Daken sent a message, but I think he may have just selected the wrong contact on his phone,” Reed said, pressing a few keys to bring up the text message on the large monitor.
Ben groaned and rolled his eyes. “Oy, this guy.”
Johnny laughed and shook his head, then said, “It’s not the wrong contact. We only planned four drops ahead, remember? He doesn’t know which club to find me at this week.”
“He must be worried that Osborn can intercept his text messages,” Susan murmured, nodding.
“Ah.” Reed nodded slowly. “It would make sense, as paranoid and controlling as Norman Osborn is, he very well might try to spy on his own employees personal messages... Given the technology at his disposal, it would be simple to track digital transmissions going in and out of the tower. Or he may have just directly ordered the carrier to turn records over as a matter of national security.”
“So Ozzy’s is reading all his employee’s texts?” Ben asked with a grimace.
“More likely a minimum wage employee is reading all of them and reporting anything potentially suspicious,” Susan said, crossing her arms and looking equally disgusted.
“I didn’t even think about that before. It’s a good thing Daken is familiar with espionage, apparently this isn’t a field I intuit well,” Reed said, shaking his head, then turned back to his keyboard. “All right Johnny, which club should I tell him?”
“Reed. Dude. No. You can’t just randomly shoot a club name right back at that. Do you want to raise every red flag?” Johnny protested. “You’ve gotta flirt, man!”
Reed’s fingers hovered over the keys as he derailed at the complication. “Ah...”
“Gimme,” Johnny ordered, striding over and pushing at Reed’s chair with his foot, rolling him to the side as Johnny took control of the keyboard and tapped out a quick message.
The only thing fun happening in town is you
“So you’re goin’ for bein’ a bimbo who likes t’say things that don’t mean anything?” Ben snorted, squinting up at the large monitor as Johnny’s text appeared below Daken’s.
“It’s flirting, Ben. Nothing has meaning,” Johnny shot back as he stood up and waited, watching the screen. After a minute, a reply came in.
Does that mean you want to see me?
Johnny stooped and typed quickly back.
Maybe
How much do you want to see me?
“Why are you being difficult?” Reed asked with a frown. “He’s risking his life, Johnny.”
“He’s not being difficult, he’s being coy,” Susan corrected, casting Reed a smirk and a shake of her head, then her eyes flicked back up to the screen as another reply came in.
How much OF me do you want to see?
“I’m out!” Ben announced, turning sharply and heading back to the door, as Johnny started laughing.
Johnny’s fingers were already tapping across the keys before his laugh had died, and he hit the enter key with a decisive jab.
That’s open to discussion
Better bring it all babe
“If Johnny had been out today, I... might have compromised Daken’s cover,” Reed murmured, frowning at the thought and at the thoroughly mystifying exchange up on the screen. “This doesn’t even look like a conversation to me.”
“Because it’s not a ‘conversation’, it’s flirting,” Johnny said. “And I feel good about being smarter than you at one thing.” He glanced back at the screen as a new message came in and grinned.
You’re going to have to buy me a drink first if you want it all.
“Aaaaaand there. That’s perfect,” he said, typing back.
Sidecars at the wild pussy Friday?
“Is the... ‘Wild Pussy’ a club?” Reed asked uncertainly.
“Club Jaguar,” Johnny said with a shrug.
“Really, Johnny?” Susan growled, shooting him a narrow-eyed scowl.
“A HAMMER desk-monkey with no night life won’t be able to Google this up, but I think Daken can figure it out,” Johnny explained, folding his arms and affecting a relaxed posture as he watched the big screen and waited.
“And there’s no other, uh, cat-themed clubs he could mix it up with?” Reed asked.
“We agreed to eight hundred plus capacity clubs only. So, no,” Johnny said as another message came in.
Sounds good. What are you going to wear?
Johnny snorted and typed back.
You’ll have to show up and see for yourself
“Wait, isn’t he asking how to spot you?” Reed protested.
“He hasn’t had any trouble finding me yet,” Johnny said dismissively. “He’s just padding the end out with a couple more flirts so it’s not like ‘Understood! Moose and Squirrel will be destroyed! Signing off now!’”
“Are you sure?”
“If that was important, he’ll find a way to ask again,” Johnny said, shrugging it off.
The next message that came in seemed to prove Johnny right. Looking forward to it. See you Friday.
“I am officially a super spy,” Johnny announced with a grin.
“Johnny, please take this seriously,” Susan admonished, brow creasing anxiously at his lackadaisy.
“I am. It can be serious and fun,” Johnny quipped. “I catch on fire and fly around. I am the living embodiment of things being simultaneously dangerous and fun.”
“Just be careful.”
“I know! I will!”
“I’m going to put together an encrypted phone to forward these to,” Reed decided. “Johnny’s obviously better equipped than me to respond to coded communiques like this.”
“I’ve been an expert at coded communiques for years,” Johnny said with blatant smugness.
000
After giving it the usual buffer time, Daken slowly wended his way toward where Johnny was dancing and made the weekly drop. Johnny’s hand found his, but this time it was empty; instead of passing off a new data stick to fill, Johnny lightly tapped their palms together and turned his head to make fleeting eye contact, before he started drifting away through the crowd. That was new. Daken held position for a minute while he took in the direction Johnny was meandering. Headed for the lavatories. Daken stayed where he was for another five minutes, dancing with the mob, before he moved to follow.
As he neared the men’s room, Daken pulled out his phone and powered it down. When he stepped through the door, he found Johnny leaning against the wall next to the hand dryers. He opened his mouth, drawing a breath. Daken reached out quickly, pressing a finger against Johnny’s lips, stopping him. He pulled his hand away and put it to his own lip for a moment before glancing down at his phone to peel the back panel off and pull the battery. “Okay,” he murmured, pocketing the disassembled phone and looking back up at Johnny. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Johnny shook his head. “It just felt weird that we’ve never talked.”
Daken raised an eyebrow at him. “Socializing is generally frowned upon in high-risk espionage,” he said softly.
“So you’re saying I’m not the awesomest super-spy then?” Johnny asked, matching his volume at least.
“Don’t quit your day-job, honey,” Daken replied, and started to take a step backward, then wavered; if there was a camera in the hallway, he should stay in the lavatory a reasonable length of time to suggest he’d used it. Johnny reached out and caught his arm.
“It’s a bathroom, it’s not like they can put cameras in here,” he whispered.
“Oh that’s cute. You’re suggesting that every business owner behaves in a legal and morally upstanding way?” Daken retorted, rolling his eyes.
“There’s such a thing as too paranoid.”
“Not in my line of work,” Daken scoffed. “And perhaps you’re forgetting that anybody could walk in here at any time?”
Johnny bit his lip and tilted his head slightly as if considering, then his hand tightened around Daken’s arm as he started walking, pulling him toward the back of the room. “C’mon.”
“What are you doing?” Daken hissed.
“Maybe you’re not the only one who feels paranoid,” Johnny whispered back, dragging him into the last toilet stall. “Maybe I want to know who the hell I’m working with.”
“Worried I’m your skrull stalker?” Daken snapped quietly, pushing the stall door shut and locking them into the cramped, but mercifully well-cleaned space.
Johnny went still for a moment, his eyes widening slightly, before he recovered. He held up his arm and tapped the smart watch on his wrist. “I know you aren’t a skrull,” he said.
Daken eyed the watch appraisingly, he wouldn’t have realized it wasn’t just any ordinary Starkwatch or Baintronics Chronix. The next-gen skrull detectors could fit in a chassis that small? Richards did fast work. “So you do have a touch of healthy paranoia then,” Daken murmured.
“Hard not to at this point,” Johnny agreed.
“Not much more than a touch though.” Daken smirked, casting his eyes askance. “Trapping yourself in a tiny box with a perpetually-armed professional assassin.”
“A perpetually-armed professional assassin who obviously wants or needs something from us,” Johnny retorted. “You’re putting yourself at a lot of risk to build up favor-currency.”
Daken hummed softly. “Maybe you’re not just a pretty face.”
“Number one, I’m a gorgeous face, thank you,” Johnny retorted, he was smirking but his scent betrayed frustration. “Number two, I’m not dumb like people think.” His eyes flickered away from Daken’s. “Whenever I do something smart, people assume Reed told me to do it... Whenever I make something smart, people think he made it.”
“I didn’t even know you made things at all,” Daken noted, studying him.
Johnny pursed his lips, looking back into Daken’s eyes silently for a moment, his scent a bit more sour. “... I’m the one who started with the flying cars thing,” he said. “Yeah, Reed invented the anti-grav tech I built them around, but he developed it for getting a rocket out of Earth’s gravity well without a gajillion gallons of burning fuel, and then was like ‘that’s done, moving on.’” Johnny sighed, rolling his eyes. “I’m the fanatic gear-head who said ‘I want to make cars fly’ and started working out how to smoosh the anti-grav into smaller, less-rockety things. SHIELD uses-- used four of Reed’s patents and two of mine in their skysters.”
“... Huh.” He wasn’t lying. Daken studied him with more consideration than he had before. A response was just starting to form on his lips when he heard the door to the room open. He and Johnny both went still and silent, listening to the footsteps across the floor, a zipper, and piss hitting the back of a urinal. After a flush and a reprize of the zipper’s refrain, the footsteps went back across the floor, and the door opened and shut again.
Johnny’s lips twisted. “I did not hear a sink,” he noted quietly.
“Indeed not,” Daken agreed. “I wonder if he would have been shamed into hygiene if he knew he wasn’t alone in here. There may be cons as well as pros to these stalls going all the way to the floor.”
“These are a weird choice, right?” Johnny said, glancing down at the lower regions of the stall door.
“They wanted to make the place look classy like the bathrooms in the expensive restaurants,” Daken replied with a shrug.
“I mean, it’s one thing in expensive restaurants, but putting these kind of full-coverage stalls into a club? They’re encouraging misbehavior.” Johnny smirked.
“Oh I’m sure. The only question is whether it’s intentional,” Daken agreed.
“Or was it just some really old prude who was like ‘these will look fancy with no foreseeable kinky consequences,’” Johnny snickered.
“America’s favorite boy-nextdoor speaks like he knows a thing or two about public lavatory kinks,” Daken lilted in amusement.
“You think I’ve never hooked up in a bathroom stall before? What am I, a virgin?” Johnny shot back.
“Not according to every second tabloid,” Daken chuckled. “The boy-nextdoor has gotten a bit of a reputation in recent years...”
The grin on Johnny’s face faltered for a split second. “Yeah, that’s true. And fine,” he said with a shrug. “Once that narrative’s started, just makes it everything easy, right? It’s easy, I’m easy, easy people want me.”
“I detect some wistfulness,” Daken murmured, tilting his head. “You don’t like the reputation?”
“Neutral on the reputation. The reality’s a little heavier. This isn’t how I saw my life going. Or my love life anyway,” Johnny said, voice dropping a bit quieter, and he held up the wrist with the skrull detector watch on it again. “After the third or forth time my very serious she’s-the-one turned out to be a skrull assassin sent to infiltrate and kill me and my family, the same skrull assassin, I... realized I just couldn’t have relationships.” He took a deep breath and shook his head. “But, I mean, hey, maybe it’ll be different now that I have this? Or... do you think I’m stuck, after I gave up and let myself fall into that reputation for fucking around?”
Daken’s gaze fell and drifted to the side, an uncomfortable buzz invading him. “I doubt it. Male privilege should insulate you from any negative repercussions,” he said. “How many trashy romance novels and rom-coms are built around a trope of the spunky ingenue reforming the playboy?”
“Basically the whole genre, right?” Johnny murmured.
Daken was quiet for a few beats, then words were pouring quietly out of his mouth before they’d registered in his own mind. “If he ever suspected I’d gotten even a little bit emotionally attached to someone, I’d receive orders to kill them,” he whispered. “And I did... I knew they’d suffer if he did it ‘for’ me. He showed me what would happen. The first and only time I refused.” A shocked silence followed the confession, going on for a full minute, maybe more. Daken kept his eyes averted.
“... Fuck,” Johnny breathed. Then there was more silence.
Daken closed his eyes and bit his lip, nausea and anger settling into his stomach, knowing he’d just thrown away the six week’s worth of work put into courting the Fantastic Four.
“That’s why you’re doing this isn’t it?” Johnny whispered. “That’s why you signed on with Osborn in the first place, and why you came to us when you realized that wouldn’t be a long-term solution... You need protection from that fucking monster, and you’re digging for it anywhere you think you can trick somebody into backing you.”
Daken lifted his face and stared at him. “Oh. I didn’t see this coming... You’re the smart one,” he said. “... Your brother in law’s supposed to be the foremost genius on the planet, but you’re the brains of the Fantastic Four.”
Johnny stared back into his eyes for a moment, then reached out, hooking an arm around Daken’s shoulders, pulled him in, and caught him by the lips. Daken’s mind jounced spasmodically back and forth through a handful of thoughts as he kissed back on autopilot. He’d been letting himself get too distracted and had stopped paying attention to the fluctuations in Johnny’s scent over the sting of chemical cleansers that every surface had been recently washed down with. And he hadn’t been putting an effort into managing and mitigating his own emissions.
When Johnny backed the kiss off he didn’t go far, leaning his forehead against Daken’s, a slight tremor in his breath. “... That’s not really the most true thing anyone’s ever said about me, but it’s still sweet,” he whispered.
“Huh...” Daken breathed. “The tabloids may have missed a detail.”
Too close to focus and on the periphery of his field of vision, he noted Johnny bite his lip for a moment. “Every guy I’ve ever momentarily dated dumped me because he was scared of the tabloids,” he said softly.
“What about star-fuckers?”
“Never really wanted to date star-fuckers, not, like, as an ongoing thing... For strings-free onesies to blow off steam, feels more okay to just take whoever runs up and grabs me, I guess,” Johnny replied quietly, shrugging. “Hit-and-quit star-fuckers are... fine. They want fifteen minutes, a selfie, and a fuck they can brag at their friends about? No harm no foul... Right?”
Daken hummed soft agreement, nodding. “Makes sense to me... I always opt for letting flies come to me. If they came to shop then...” he sighed and shrugged. “... I suppose it’s not the worst, anyway. ‘It’s not you, it’s the tabloids.’ Probably frustrating, but not really insulting.”
“Yeah? What’s the worst?”
“Mm, I don’t suppose you’ve ever gotten ‘I don’t believe bisexuality is a real thing, it’s just internalized homophobia, and I can’t date a homophobe’?” Daken tilted his head and cast Johnny a raised eyebrow. “Or maybe it’s ‘Bisexuals are all insatiable, manipulative nymphomaniacs who cheat on and gaslight their lovers at the drop of a hat.’”
“Ew. Yeah, no, I guess I never lasted long enough to have those particular gems sold to me,” Johnny said, a cringe audible in his voice. He went quiet for a minute, his forehead still leaned against Daken’s. “... So...” he finally whispered, and Daken heard his heartbeat quicken just slightly.
“I mentioned that the whole socializing thing is bad spycraft, right?” Daken asked.
“Yeah. You did,” Johnny agreed, and then moved back in, kissing him again. Daken let it happen. Johnny was above the average skill level at this art.
The door opened. Their mouths pulled apart abruptly. Johnny leaned down and pressed his face against Daken’s shoulder, trying to muffle his breath, which probably sounded louder in his own ears than it did in the room. Daken just stared straight ahead at the wall and schooled himself to breath nigh-silently, listening to the man who was using the room for its intended purpose go about his business. This one washed his hands when he was finished. As soon as the door closed, Johnny’s mouth was on Daken’s again, with a soft vocalization in the back of his throat. He was getting too worked up. Because Daken had been sweating for a couple hours and Johnny was in Daken’s sway. Because nothing ever just was for him.
Daken pulled away, took half a step back, looked away. “This is a James Bond kink, right?” he whispered. “You think spy games are fun and sexy?”
“That’s not--”
“I have to get back to work.” Daken shook his head, then unlocked the stall and stepped out, glancing at the door then back at Johnny. “Stay in here for a few minutes,” he instructed, then strode quickly toward the door.
“You’re forgetting something.”
Daken glanced over his shoulder to where Johnny was standing a step out of the stall, looking back at him. He held up the fresh data stick. Daken bit his lip, annoyed that he’d gotten that distracted. He walked back over and took it silently.
“Club Eighty-Nine next week?”
“Sure.” Daken turned again and left.
000
The footage replaying on the news was mostly focused on Osborn’s speechifying and sightings of Cyclops running all over the place and knocking HAMMER mooks down. The footage on the screen playing MSNBC also included the bits where the HAMMER mooks kept tazing the hell out of bystanders and questioning whether Osborn’s declaration of martial law had been legal. The Fox screen kept replaying a shot of Cyclops flipping over an empty car to block the road behind him while the scrolling banner at the bottom dropped the word ‘terrorist’ over and over. Fake Ms. Marvel and Ares ate up most of CBS’s shots that weren’t dedicated to Osborn or Cyclops. Sue had muted everything but CNN while the split screen displayed the video from six major networks.
“Fact’t whatever Daken was doing there ain’t interesting enough for the news’s good, right?” Ben murmured, drinking his coffee and tensely watching the multiple feeds.
Johnny was digging through socials, a half eaten bowl of slowly disintegrating cereal on the end table next to him. He hadn’t showered or dressed yet, just pulled on a robe and stumbled to the family room when Sue rousted everybody at six in the morning freaking out about what went down on the west coast after they were all in bed last night. Daken had sent a text to the spy-phone two days ago: Work-Dad’s taking us on a road trip. Rain check? “Yeah, he’s being a lot more boring than the rest of them. Social media’s got some phone videos of him shoving protesters and yelling at them in a pretty good fake American accent, but no claws or fists. Looks like the fight never came to him last night, so he’s just shooing around non-powers who were breaking the curfew.”
“Maybe that’s deliberate,” Susan murmured. “I’m sure Osborn would have wanted him to be making himself ‘useful’ in one of the hot-zones, but he stayed away from the action, just yelling at the crowd?”
“It could have been Osborn’s decision,” Reed sighed, shaking his head. “To avoid media criticism of one of his operatives engaging in mutant-on-mutant violence.”
“Suzie! Suzie! NBC!” Ben exclaimed, and Johnny looked up to see flapping heads at a news desk with pictures of both Daken and Logan up behind them.
“-- pointed out physical differences in the Wolverine that appears on Norman Osborn’s iteration of the Avengers,” the male flapper was saying when Sue switched the audio feed over to NBC. “Many have noted that he appears to be taller, however we could also attribute that to him not being regularly pictured standing right next to The Thing. And Cyclops is well over six foot too!” Both flappers laughed.
“The most irrefutable difference is that his middle claw is turned the opposite direction from the better-known Wolverine’s, as was caught on camera during the young girl Hulk’s attack on New York,” the female flapper said chipperly, as the still image of Daken behind her switched to a video clip from that fight. “Now, after the accusations leveled against the new Avengers lineup by former Avenger Clint Barton, speculation across the web has run rampant about who might be under these masks. Researchers and fact-checkers at NBC have been scouring records going back a decade in our own archive and news coverage from other networks searching for a super criminal or mutant terrorist with claws like these.”
“And what have they found?” the man asked.
“Nothing!” his companion replied. “We’ve been unable to turn up any known super human with retractable claws in this particular configuration.”
“But to play devil’s advocate here, could the claws be an implanted augmentation?” the man pressed. “If there were any truth to Barton’s accusations, could Director of HAMMER Norman Osborn have had a super criminal without claws surgically modified to fit the role?”
“But if Director Osborn were simply going to modify conscripted criminals to fit whatever set of tights he wanted, wouldn’t it make more sense to choose an icon that had a longer history with the Avengers?” the woman countered. “And if he was modifying somebody to look like Wolverine, he would have gotten the claws right! No, we’re fairly certain those must be natural. But even if they weren’t, that tattoo on his left arm is pretty distinctive, isn’t it? So if there were a seasoned super criminal under that mask who had been given claws to play the role, we should be able to match that tattoo to a news report, right?”
“And you couldn’t find it?”
“Nothing!”
“This ain’t telling us nothing we didn’t already know,” Ben snorted, shaking his head.
“Give it a minute, they’re still flapping,” Johnny said.
“Now mutants do of course have a history of closely guarding their identities, keep in mind, and some might argue that this has been out of necessity, as there have been some legal actions targeting mutants in the past decade which were later found to be unconstitutional,” the woman kept going. “And lending support to the idea that he is, as advertised, a mutant, footage from last night’s riots seems to indicate that Wolverine did not come into conflict with any of the mutant protesters.”
“Do you think Director Osborn is concerned about his loyalty or about one of his Avengers being filmed engaged in mutant-on-mutant violence?”
“I can’t speculate yet, but this is a developing situation, and in the coming days, I’m not sure they’ll be able to avoid him taking a firm stance.”
“Okay, so the news confirms that Daken didn’t get into any brawls last night,” Sue sighed, crossing her arms and sitting down in the corner of the couch.
“Will it really matter if he does?” Johnny asked, glancing back to his phone as the flapping heads lost interest in Daken and moved on.
“Of course it matters!” Sue shot him a look.
“I mean, is there anything we can do about it, and does it... change anything?” Johnny clarified. “Are we going to cancel him if he slices an X-Man? Can we afford to?”
Sue sighed, looking down at the floor. “... I don’t know.”
000
“What the fuck is this about you staying here and getting your own fucking team?” Bullseye demanded, stomping up the hall toward Daken and trying to pretend he hadn’t been jogging before he rounded the corner.
Daken casually half-turned to look back over his shoulder. “Pretty sure it’s Frost’s team. Do you think she slept with him to get that deal?” he drawled.
Reaching him, Bullseye grabbed Daken by the arm, pulling him around, then slammed his back against the wall. “You think you’re fucking better than us now?” he hissed.
“Oh Lester, I’ve always been better than you,” Daken replied through a smirk.
Bullseye leaned, swiveled and rocked with the flawless balance of a prima ballerina, using his weight to swing and throw Daken down on the concrete floor in one fluid arc, then descend on him still in the same continuous motion, one hand grabbing an arrow from his quiver, twirling it into a dagger grip with an unparalleled natural ease, and bringing it to Daken’s cheek as he landed, knees on either side of Daken’s waist. Grace to put Anna Pavlova to shame. He really was an impressive specimen. “Always this fucking shit-eating grin,” he growled through his teeth.
“If you want a goodbye kiss, all you have to do is ask,” Daken simpered.
The arrow sliced into his cheek then pulled through the soft flesh until it met and severed the corner of Daken’s mouth, and Bullseye swung his arm wide in a flourish, flicking a line of blood droplets onto the wall. “Maybe you wanna grin a little wider, eh fucker?”
He moved to do the same to the other side, but Daken’s hand shot up and caught Bullseye’s wrist. “Youa jist essited t’see me in wed,” Daken slurred as his cheek stitched itself back together.
Confusion flickered over Bullseye’s face. “What?”
“I said.” Daken swallowed and licked his lips, the flesh of his right cheek still fragile and stinging. “You’re just excited to see me in red.” Bullseye looked no less nonplussed. “The suit?”
Bullseye’s eyes flicked down to Daken’s new ‘X-Men’ costume, and he frowned. “It’s darker,” he noted.
“It’s red.”
“So?”
Bullseye wasn’t dumb, and it wasn’t an especially oblique taunt, the subtext shouldn’t be too subtle for him. “You’re colorblind.”
Bullseye’s eyes narrowed into a glare again, and he repeated, “So?”
“So it’s not the new suit, it’s just me, hm?” Daken smirked up at him. “Gonna miss me, baby?”
Bullseye snarled and leaned more weight in, pushing his arrow closer to Daken’s face.
“You like straddling me, don’t you?”
“Wh-- You fucking thirsty bitch! That’s not--”
Daken used the sudden weakness brought about in Bullseye’s outraged fluster to throw him off, then kicked savagely at his ribs while he scrambled up. “We’ve just got a few hours before you fly away back home, right?” he noted, watching as Bullseye got his feet back under him too. “You want to spend them throwing this same old tantrum again? Or maybe you’d like to work out some of those urges that terrify you so much?”
Bullseye stared at him, frozen for a second too long. “... What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You are so deep into that closet and desperately trying to sublimate the lust you can’t admit to yourself,” Daken hissed.
“Shut up.”
“You want to fuck me so bad it’s making you crazier than usual.”
“Shut up.”
“This is what you do with men you want to fuck but know you can’t,” Daken continued in a low growl. “Try to get every blade you can into them. Phallic proxy, right?”
“You shut up!” Bullseye snarled, pulling the knife out of his belt as he lunged at Daken.
Daken let the knife sink in under his ribs, and grabbed Bullseye’s arms, locking him in and staring straight into his eyes. “One time offer, Lester. Throw out the metaphors and put what you really want into me? I’ll let you play if you can play nice.”
“SHUT UP!” Bullseye screamed, pulling the knife out and plunging it in twice more before Daken shoved and kicked him square in the chest, sending him across the hall.
“Offer expired,” Daken wheezed, then prepared for another kick as Bullseye took a run at him.
“HEY!” They both turned to see Osborn storming down the hall, glowering, with Bob wandering along after him like a lost puppy. “Knock it off,” he snarled. “I swear, the sooner I have you two idiots on opposite coasts, the better.”
“Leaving me to be bullied by Frost instead? Not an improvement,” Daken drawled, and walked briskly past, to put Osborn and Bob between himself and Bullseye. “I think she’s probably meaner.”
000
“Conventional media is split down it’s typical lines, although, with the exception of only the most leftist outlets, even the liberal news is taking Summers’ declaration with a grain of salt,” Hand said, voice calm but brow tight, tablet held in front of her but eyes evenly meeting Norman’s. “The footage of the battle itself was unflattering, fortunately the news cameras only caught a couple minutes of it. Sofen grabbed you as soon as she noticed them being teleported in, so most of what was caught on camera, aside from you blasting Cyclops, was two government sanctioned teams being brutalized by an overwhelming force of superior numbers.”
“... Did they hear what I said?” Norman asked grimly, his hands folded on the desk in front of him so tight they ached. Karla was right that nobody comes back from committing genocide on the six o’clock news, could he come back from only threatening it?
“No. The armor’s environment-adaptive software automatically dropped your external volume because of how close Sofen was standing,” Hand said, and some of the suffocating weight eased off of Norman. “It’s been a few hours and none of the networks have presented an audio-enhanced version, so our techs are speculating that the combination of the armor’s speakers and the camera’s mics likely created too many audio artifacts to get anything clear enough for credibility.”
“Good,” Norman said, letting out a tense breath. “... Social media?”
“Politically inclined social media is split and polarized into the expected camps,” Hand said. “And the less politically inclined social media got... distracted.”
“By?” Norman asked, noting a resisted eye-roll.
“Wolverine, or rather both. Besides a segment NBC ran the other day comparing them, the news crews last night caught both of them on camera at the same time in different colored costumes, definitively confirming that our Wolverine is not the Wolverine,” Hand explained, then took a deep breath before continuing. “Following coverage of the battle, Reddit users very quickly started referring to Daken as ‘HAMMERine’. Then, at eleven forty-five AM our time, a user posted a doodle with the caption ‘Hamsterine’. In the last three hours, multiple doodles and image manipulations of ‘Hamsterine’ have followed in that Reddit thread and across other social media platforms.” She looked down at her tablet, tapped on the screen a few times, and turned it around to show a bean-shaped and stubby-legged cartoon hamster wearing Daken’s mask. She handed the tablet across the desk to him.
Norman swiped slowly through a small collection of similar images, lingering on a doodle drawn in the same style but with ‘Hamsterine’ on his back and distressed while three smaller hamsters bit him. “... Damage?” he asked.
“To Daken’s dignity? Probably significant. But to public perception? Combining this with rescuing a baby from an exploding building, he’s turning into a darling,” Hand shrugged, shaking her head. “While the left-leaning news networks have paid particular attention to the blast you gave Summers, the right-leaning ones have been focusing on a shot of Daken on the ground, being kicked and stabbed by three powered teenaged girls... From the footage HAMMER’s own cameras logged, I can see that he gave as good as he got on the stabbing before getting overpowered, but the X-Men didn’t start teleporting reporters in until after he fell, so what America saw was three superhumans beating on one who was already downed and covered in his own blood.”
Norman smirked. “Good.”
000
Somebody was in the bathroom when Johnny got there; Johnny pulled out his phone and leaned against the wall, pretending to check his texts, as the other guy washed his hands and started to move toward the hand driers. In his peripheral vision, he caught the guy pause a couple feet away and do a double-take.
“H-Hey, aren’t you...?”
Johnny bit his lip and his eyes glanced sideways at him. “Um, nobody interesting? Completely boring and unknown nonentity?” he muttered cringingly, slipping his phone into his pocket.
“Can I get a selfie?” the guy asked.
“Dude. It’s a bathroom,” Johnny groaned, then pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head. “I’m sorry. Sorry. I’m just... Some girls out front, I said ‘sure why not’ an hour or two ago, and I guess they TikToked it, and maybe some of the banter was a little bit trashy, and apparently Sue saw it, so now I’ve got her blowing up my texts to lecture at me about how I’m setting a bad example for her kids, and when am I gonna get my life together and act like an adult...”
“What is she, your sister or your mom?”
“Right?”
“I’m sorry, man, that’s lame,” the guy was saying when the door opened and Daken walked into the room; he didn’t pause or react at all, just continued walking and casually made his way over to the urinals. “Forget about the selfie, you’re right, it’s a bathroom. Thanks for being real with me. And hey, you’re a fucking hero, you’ve saved a whole lot of people, if that don’t count as having your life together, fuck it.”
“Thanks man,” Johnny murmured, giving a nod as the guy left. He paused for a couple seconds, letting the door swing shut, then glanced up, finding Daken’s eyes; he was at a sink now, shaking the excess water off his hands. He started to walk to the hand driers, but Johnny caught him by the arm about halfway and dragged him to the back of the room.
“My hands are wet,” Daken griped as he was pulled into the last toilet stall.
“Wipe ’em on your jeans like everybody else,” Johnny shot back, reaching around him to lock them in, then pausing a moment before settling his own hands on the gentle dip of Daken’s waist. “So you didn’t stay in Cali with definitely-fake Xavier, off-model Beast and the are-those-even-mutants team?”
“Definitely-fake Xavier is Mystique. I don’t know where off-model Beast came from, but he’s not McCoy. Seemed like he was trying to kill McCoy,” Daken replied, wiping his hands against his thighs and shaking his head. “Me staying didn’t even seem to be a question after half the team defected with Frost, Osborn just told me to get in the plane. Probably worried they’d try to turn me if I got left behind.”
“Not a chance. You’re sooo loyal to the cause,” Johnny said with a smirk.
“‘Not a chance’ because they’ve already made it very clear they don’t want me,” Daken murmured, eyes askance. “Summers gives every mutant in the world amnesty except me... I’ve developed an aversion to authority, so I wouldn’t be a good little soldier. And I’m redundant, I add no value... I had to find a way to make myself valuable to anybody.”
“... By conning your way into the dragon’s den?”
“It worked. Now I’m valuable,” Daken said with a small shrug. Johnny circled his arms around Daken’s back and pulled him in; Daken’s eyes lifted to meet Johnny’s while his face stayed demured downward. “And you want me to play your little sexy spy-fantasy. That’s two things I have to offer then.” He tipped his head and leaned in for a kiss.
Johnny balked slightly, disconcerted by the comment. “W-Wait, what do you... mean exactly?”
Daken went still, hanging in place like he was just going to wait indefinitely for that kiss, eyes half-lidded. “I was trained to be a honeypot. It’s the confluence of assassin and whore,” he whispered. “I can be your fantasy. Tell me what you want, and I’ll be that perfectly.”
Johnny felt a hint of cold sickness seeping into his gut. “I... I thought...” He felt really really stupid.
Daken faded back a few inches, face lowering again. “... I never got to choose before,” he said softly. “After I worked out the most viable patsy, or if the target themself was viable, then that was all... There was never a decision, just a process.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Well, sometimes there might be two equally viable patsies. If that was the case, then I’d always choose the least likable. It made things easier.”
“The guy who hurt you isn’t calling the shots anymore though, right?” Johnny asked quietly. “So you can make choices.”
Daken leaned fully into Johnny, folding around his shoulders and leaning his face down right next to Johnny’s neck. He was quiet for a minute, before murmuring, “Your spy-fantasy is stupid and dangerous and carries a high risk of getting both of us disappeared... But you always smell so good... And you’re not just the mascot the media makes of you. I wasn’t prepared. You’re making me stupid.”
It was mixed signals, but Johnny decided it scanned like inner turmoil and not gaslighting, as he tightened his arms around him. Daken was scared, and he, probably rightly, thought this surreptitious flirtation was a bad idea. So then the turmoil, the conflict, must be that he didn’t really want to stop. “Hey,” Johnny whispered, and found himself nuzzling Daken’s ear without having planned or meant to. “If you’re scared, you’re probably right. You know all of this better than me, and I shouldn’t be screwing around with- with games or whatever... I’m sorry.”
Daken was quiet again, but he didn’t pull away. “... You’re playing a spy-fantasy,” he said softly after a while. “I think I’m playing a different fantasy. A much stupider one... Pretending this means anything to you.” He swallowed audibly. “Pretending you’re not going to get bored of me when the novelty wears off.”
“Nonononono,” Johnny murmured, shifting, pulling back for enough space to seek out Daken’s mouth and kiss him softly. “That’s not what’s happening here.”
“... I don’t think I can believe you,” Daken breathed with a hint of a whine. “I don’t think I’m capable of believing you... I don’t get to have these things.”
“I get it. I understand,” Johnny whispered, leaning their foreheads together. “I know that feeling. I don’t- I don’t know how to make you not feel that way, but this isn’t... It’s not like that. I can’t make you believe me, but it’s--”
He didn’t immediately understand why Daken moved suddenly, darting around him and scrambling up on top of the toilet, but then Johnny’s ears caught up to what Daken’s must have heard a couple seconds sooner. The door to the room opened. Somebody walked over to the urinals and used one, while Johnny stood silently and Daken crouched with his feet up on the seat of the toilet and out of view if the guy should happen to glance at the gap under the stalls. They listened to him finish up and leave, before Daken hopped back down to the floor and announced in a harsh whisper, “This is stupid.”
“Yeah, I--” Johnny reached for him.
“No.” Daken shoved his hand away and shook his head sharply. “I’m being stupid. You’re making me stupid. Give me the new drive.”
“... Okay,” Johnny said, pulling the empty data stick out of his pocket and exchanging it for the full one Daken had. “It’s- It’s not a game to me though.”
Daken didn’t meet his eyes. “Just because you don’t want to realize I’m nothing, that doesn’t make me something,” he said.
“Daken--”
“Just stop.” Daken shook his head again. “Next week? Which club?”
“... Is it too soon to hit the Noir again?” Johnny asked, not sure of any way to keep at the conversation without trampling Daken’s ‘no’.
“It’s fine. Never hitting the same club twice would be just as suspicious as hitting the same one too often,” Daken sighed, running a hand through his hair. “And we’ve run out of big enough ones anyway. But let’s avoid hitting them in the same order as the first round.”